Insiders suspected in Saudi cyber attack

Biggest Security Threat? Insiders?

One or more insiders with high-level access are suspected of assisting the hackers who damaged some 30,000 computers at Saudi Arabia’s national oil company last month, sources familiar with the company’s investigation say.

The attack using a computer virus known as Shamoon against Saudi Aramco – the world’s biggest oil company – is one of the most destructive cyber strikes conducted against a single business. Shamoon spread through the company’s network and wiped computers’ hard drives clean.

Saudi Aramco says damage was limited to office computers and did not affect systems software that might hurt technical operations. The hackers’ apparent access to a mole, willing to take personal risk to help, is an extraordinary development in a country where open dissent is banned.

“It was someone who had inside knowledge and inside privileges within the company,” said a source familiar with the ongoing forensic examination. 

Hackers from a group called “The Cutting Sword of Justice” claimed responsibility for the attack. They say the computer virus gave them access to documents from Aramco’s computers, and have threatened to release secrets. No documents have so far been published.

Reports of similar attacks on other oil and gas firms in the Middle East, including in neighboring Qatar, suggest there may be similar activity elsewhere in the region, although the attacks have not been linked. - Reuters

Security Training Video: Investigating DoS Attacks

Introduction to DoS Attacks and techniques

CareerAcademy.com is offering a free EC-Council training video to try out their training delivery platform.

The course offered is on Computer Hacking Forensics Investigator (CHFI): Investigating DoS Attacks, and is intended for IT security professionals. The course outline is below, along with a link to try it out.

Please feel free to forward to others in your organization who may be interested this type of training.

Link to sign up for the free training course:
http://www.careeracademy.com/download/freeCHFIm31.html

Course Description:

This free introductory online training course (Value at $195) will immerse the student in an interactive environment where they will be shown how to investigate DoS attacks. Students will be introduced to the types of DoS attacks, buffer overflow, DoS attack techniques, intrusion detection systems, live demonstrations of SYN Flooding, Smart Sniff, 3D Trace Routes, and many more critical concepts.

Use the link above to sign up, and or more information, visit www.careeracademy.com or contact CareerAcademy.com at 1-800-807-8839 x201 (US), 1-781-453-3900 x201 (International), email: info@careeracademy.com

This course is Module 31 of a 51 module EC-Council Computer Hacking Forensic Investigator CHFI Training CBT Boot Camp.

2011 Information Security Virtual Conference

Free conference worth attending

The conference sessions cover a wide variety of topics, including:

Building Trust in the Cloud – This session will look at how to turn the concept of a trusted cloud into reality.

Smart phones, apps, and crowd sourcing – This session will look at crowd sourcing, application security, and just what employees are – and should – be using their work smart phones for.

Malware: The Bad, the Ugly, and the Uglier – It has been predicted by industry experts for some time now that malware – botnet-type malware, in particular – will continue to become more sophisticated and more threatening. The word 'stuxnet' proves this to be true. In this session you will discover the anatomy of the virus and its attacks, and learn how to put defenses in place to stop a breach. This session will also take a look at what malware has in store for us in 2011.

How to educate your workforce – It is time to update awareness campaigns and make educational programs interesting, and dare we say it, enjoyable. This session will tell you how!

Getting Ready for Cyberwar: Protecting the CNI – This session hopes to answer these big, and very important, questions.

Forensic Analysis in the Cloud – This session will examine the questions you need to ask, and the agreements that should be in place, before you hand your infrastructure, platforms, and/or data over to a cloud provider.

Preventing Insider Data Leak - This session will offer advice on how to plug those holes which could lead to the loss of company data.

The death of endpoint security? – This session will examine exactly what a data-centric approach to security entails, and what the future holds for end point device security.

Full conference programme available here.