Showing posts with label ConfickerWorm. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ConfickerWorm. Show all posts

Thursday, 11 February 2016

Russian Hospital Hacked Via Wifi And Old XP Flaw



A researcher has managed to hack a Russian hospital by a weak wifi password and a nearly 8-year-old vulnerability in Windows XP. The hack took place with the permission of the hospital in Moscow, let researcher Sergey Lozhkin know anti-virus company Kaspersky Lab.

He was using the Shodan search engine discovers a login portal of a CT scan machine hospital, which was only secured with a default password. Lozhkin had a friend who controlled the hospital and warned him. The hospital then agreed to an informal penetration test. The researcher decided to attack the hospital could do as a real attacker and began the Wi-Fi network of the hospital. He managed to retrieve the password through a brute force attack, let it faces Threat Post know.

After he had gained access to the wireless network he found a Windows XP machine that contained a vulnerability that Microsoft on October 23, 2008 had been patched. However, the update was not rolled out by the hospital. It was the vulnerability that also used the infamous Confickerworm to spread. Lozhkin then managed on the network to find the administrator panel of an MRI machine that was not password protected. Through the panel he had access to patient data and diagnoses were performed by the machine. According to the researcher shows his work that IT security too often forgotten by software developers, both in the medical industry and in other sectors.

Thursday, 6 August 2015

Illegal Software Hinders Cleaning Infected computers


Almost one million computers are still infected with the Confickerworm from 2008 mainly because of users of pirated software and ICT development in countries. Which enable researchers from the TU Delft , which their study next week at a conference presentation in Washington DC.

According to the researchers, the figures show that the removal of botnets slower than replacing Windows XP computers.Conficker was one of the largest botnets ever. The worm spread via a vulnerability in the Windows Server service which was patched in 2008 through an emergency patch from Microsoft. In addition, used the shared network folders and the Autorun feature. Six years ago, security companies and researchers knew the botnet to "sink holes", which infected computers do not connect to the servers of the cyber criminals behind the botnet.

Despite various measures to clean up infected computers, there are nearly one million computers infected with Conficker. It is in many cases illegal versions of Windows XP and Vista. According to the researchers enable users of pirated software, automatic updates, fearing updates which disables their illegal software, Microsoft has already said that it also provides illegal Windows versions of security updates.

To address the problems with clearing of botnets and cleaning up infected computers the researchers argue that in addition to helping countries with their ICT development, automatic updates and automatic cleanups are the main tools for the issue.Software developers should configure their software so that the installation of security updates is enabled by default and that all computers receive the updates, even if they are using a pirated version of the software.