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Black Hat 2014  Las Vegas, NV - The thought of a network breach or targeted attack is what keeps most systems admins up at night and constantly irritated to boot. The need to man the walls and make sure the moat is filled all the time is exhausting and nearly impossible in today’s moderns and increasingly distributed networks and business models. It makes the thought of a breach not a “what if”, but a “when”. This is becoming the new way of thinking about security. As we have talked about in the past people are no longer thinking they can keep everyone out, but are concentrating on quickly identifying and mitigating the inevitable breach.

Black Hat 2014 Las Vegas, NV – Today we had the chance to talk with Karl Sigler, Threat Intelligence Manager at Trustwave who walked us through the latest version of Backoff. For those of you that do not know Backoff is a new threat that targets POS systems through remote desktop or other remote access systems. The vector of attack is very simple, port scan for common RDP ports, perform a basic dictionary attack on any systems found, deposit the malware and cash in on the credit card information that flows through.

One of the biggest issues in security is not the number of bad guys out there or the number of zero day exploits that exist in the wild. Sadly it is that far too many companies and people do not update their devices and software. Now I know that it is a pain to run updates on every device you own, but in most cases these updates are important. This is the case we find with the recent brouhaha over a version of cryptolocker (SynoLocker) that appears to target Synology NAS devices with an older (and unpatched) version of Disk Station Manager (DSM).

Security should be a priority in any company, but it should be even more paramount in places where lives are at risk. So we have to wonder how someone ever allowed a security flaw in aircraft inflight systems that would allow for someone to compromise the aircraft. This is the claim of security researcher Ruben Santamarta has made and he plans to prove it at Black Hat 2014.