state-sponsored attacks

Pierluigi Paganini September 17, 2013
Hacking – Give me 10 minutes to hack the Nasdaq

It is very easy to hack the Nasdaq according the security expert Kolochenko that reported numerous vulnerabilities in the official website of the exchange. Just 10 minutes could be sufficient for an attacker to hack the Nasdaq Stock Market, this is the alert provided by Ilia Kolochenko, head of Swiss information security company High-Tech Bridge.  The security expert […]

Pierluigi Paganini May 09, 2013
China vs US mutual accusations, the cyber cold war is begun

China and US governments continue to exchange accusations about the continuing incursions into the respective national networks. China and US governments continue to exchange accusations about the continuing incursions into the respective national networks, the cyber attacks are mainly motivated by sabotage and cyber espionage purposes and are increasing exponentially. US government and intelligence agencies […]

Pierluigi Paganini February 12, 2013
Adobe 0-days exploited for IEEE aerospace spearphishing attacks

Last week Adobe released a patch for Adobe Flash that fixed a zero day vulnerability, CVE-2013-0633, that is being exploited using Microsoft Office files with embedded flash content delivered via email. The vulnerability is not isolated, it is circulating the news of a new one coded CVE-2013-0634 being exploited trough web browsers such as Firefox and Safari […]

Pierluigi Paganini January 05, 2013
Confidential documents from Japanese politics stolen by malware

Last December Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency was hit again by malware  that stolen secret information on newest rockets from an internal computer, it was not first time for the Japanese agency that was already victim of a cyber attack having same purpose, cyber espionage to obtain information on another technological advanced project related to the […]

Pierluigi Paganini December 30, 2012
Hacktivism and web monitoring in 2013 for Security Affairs

The year is ending and it’s very easy to read forecast for next year, experts are sure that we will assist to a sensible increase of state-sponsored attacks and to the raise of sophisticated malware, both cyber threats will exploit large scale channels such as mobile and social networks. The majority of forecast are focused […]

Pierluigi Paganini November 12, 2012
Nation state sponsored attacks: the offensive of Governments in cyberspace

Article published on The Malta Indipendent on October 11th 2012 Pierluigi Paganini, David Pace, Publishers of mainstream ICT news are ablaze with articles on the evolution of the “Flame” malware targeting the Middle East region for cyber espionage purposes, and new menaces such as Gauss or Shamoon.  No longer the province of deviant black-hat hackers or […]

Pierluigi Paganini October 26, 2012
Cyber security landscape in Africa

Let me present you a very interesting study on cyber security landscape in Africa, conducted by IDG Connect, division of International Data Group (IDG), to which I gave my humble contribution. According the Economist data related to the first decade of this millennium shows that six of the world’s fastest growing economies were in sub-Saharan Africa. The […]

Pierluigi Paganini October 21, 2012
Wrong response to zero day attacks exposes to serious risks

Recent revelations on Flame case raise the question on the efficiency of “zero day vulnerabilities“, software bugs that hackers exploit to avoid security defenses of target systems. The real problem when we talk about zero-day is related to the duration of the period in which hackers exploit the vulnerability before world wide security community respond […]

Pierluigi Paganini October 17, 2012
Tens of zero day vulnerabilities, millions of users exposed

Every day we read about cyber threats, zero day vulnerabilities and new patch to apply so I decided to speak about a couple of vulnerabilities I believe potential dangerous for internet users. There is no peace for browsers, this category of application is considered a privileged target for hackers due their large diffusion. Once again […]

Pierluigi Paganini September 25, 2012
Expected new wave of cyber attacks against banking

In these days it has been discussed about a possible Iranian cyber offensive against US banks immediately denied by government of Teheran, the event raised the discussion on the real level of security of banking systems. Financial institutions are considerable privileged targets for a cyber attacks, banking system is a critical asset for a nation […]