You can install the industry’s strongest and most expensive firewall. You can educate employees about basic security procedures and the importance of choosing strong passwords. You can even lock-down the server room, but how do you protect a company from the threat of social engineering attacks?

For any of you that are involved in security awareness efforts, you know what I am talking about. It could happen tomorrow, it could happen today or it might already have happened.

In a recent disclosure posted by renowned hacker and developer DarkCoderSc (Jean-Pierre LESUEUR) explained that how one can easily Socially Engineer Microsoft Skype Support team to get access to any skype account.

From a social engineering perspective, employees are the weak link in the chain of security measures in place. He simply used the weakness of Skype password recovery system itself.

One simply need to request a new password to Skype support and asking to change the password. After the initial step one needs to proof the real ownership of the account requested. You must give 5 contacts accounts to the support desk.

“That’s easy because you just have to add 5 fake temporary accounts to the target account and its done. Another option is to simply ask the target what people he know on Skype. That option wasn’t that hard because I have over 1000 contacts.” he suggests the trick.

Within few seconds attacker can become owner of any victim account by proving very basic information to support team.

“Also Microsoft’s Support Team should make a serious effort to communicate better to their customers. At the moment they do not seem to care that much about their customers.“

In a blog post last Friday, Twitter’s Director of Information Security Bob Lord, said the company had discovered a major attack and shut it down almost immediately, but the attackers may have had access to user names, email addresses, session tokens and passwords for approximately 250,000 users.

Lord said that Twitter detected unusual access patterns that led to it identifying unauthorised access attempts to Twitter user data.

“We discovered one live attack and were able to shut it down in process moments later. As a precautionary security measure, we have reset passwords and revoked session tokens for these accounts. If your account was one of them, you will have recently received (or will shortly) an email from us at the address associated with your Twitter account notifying you that you will need to create a new password. Your old password will not work when you try to log in to Twitter.

Though only a very small percentage of our users were potentially affected by this attack, we encourage all users to take this opportunity to ensure that they are following good password hygiene, on Twitter and elsewhere on the Internet. Make sure you use a strong password – at least ten (but more is better) characters and a mixture of upper- and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols – that you are not using for any other accounts or sites.

Using the same password for multiple online accounts significantly increases your odds of being compromised. If you are not using good password hygiene, take a moment now to change your Twitter passwords. We also echo the advisory from the US Department of Homeland Security and security experts to encourage users to disable Java on their computers in their browsers”.

The attack follows hacks into a number of major media outlets, including The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. Unnamed sources quoted by the newspapers say they suspect Chinese hackers, possibly associated with the Chinese government, to be involved.

Twitter have not mention that how hackers were able to infiltrate Twitter’s systems, but Twitter’s blog post alluded that hackers had broken in through a zero-day vulnerability in Oracle’s Java software.

The home Trojan-banker known as Shylock has just been updated with new functions. According to the CSIS Security Group, during an investigation, researchers found that Shylock is now capable of spreading using the popular Voice over IP service and software application, Skype.

The program was discovered in 2011 that steals online banking credentials and other financial information from infected computers. Shylock, named after a character from Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice”.

Shylock is active in only a few parts of the world. The epicenter of infections is primarily located in the UK.

The Skype replication is implemented with a plugin called “msg.gsm”. This plugin allows the code to spread through Skype and adds the following functionality:

– Sending messages and transferring files
– Clean messages and transfers from Skype history (using sql-lite access to Skype%smain.db )
– Bypass Skype warning/restriction for connecting to Skype (using “findwindow” and “postmessage”)
– Sends request to server: https://a[removed]s.su/tool/skype.php?action=…

Besides from utilizing Skype it will also spread through local shares and removable drives. Basically, the C&C functions allow the attacker to:

– Execute files
– Get cookies
– Inject HTTP into a website
– Setup VNC
– Spread through removable drives
– Uninstall
– Update C&C server list
– Upload files

Shylock is one of the most advanced Trojan-banker currently being used in attacks against home banking systems. The code is constantly being updated and new features are added regularly.

As always for this type of Trojans antivirus detection is low.

A new Java 0-day vulnerability has been discovered, and is already being exploited in the wild. Currently, disabling the plugin is the only way to protect your computer.

Description:
The MBeanInstantiator in Oracle Java Runtime Environment (JRE) 1.7 in Java 7 Update 10 and earlier allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code via vectors related to unspecified classes that allow access to the class loader, as exploited in the wild in January 2013, as demonstrated by Blackhole and Nuclear Pack, and a different vulnerability than CVE-2012-4681.

Impact:
By convincing a user to visit a specially crafted HTML document, a remote attacker may be able to execute arbitrary code on a vulnerable system.

CVE Standard Vulnerability Entry: CVE-2013-0422

This actual vulnerability was later confirmed by security firm AlienVault Labs. With Kafeine’s help, the company reproduced the exploit on a new, fully-patched installation of Java, and used a malicious Java applet to remotely execute the Calculator application on Windows XP as shown in the below screen-shot:

Yahoo is investigating the claims of a hacker who is selling an exploit that apparently hijacks Yahoo mail accounts.

The exploit, being sold for $700 by an Egyptian hacker on an exclusive cybercrime forum, targets a cross-site scripting (XSS) weakness in yahoo.com that lets attackers steal cookies from Yahoo! Webmail users.

Such a flaw would let attackers send or read email from the victim’s account. In a typical XSS attack, an attacker sends a malicious link to an unsuspecting user; if the user clicks the link, the script is executed, and can access cookies, session tokens or other sensitive information retained by the browser and used with that site. These scripts can even rewrite the content of the HTML page.

Demonstrating an apparent flair for marketing, the hacker, under the alias “TheHell” also posted a video on YouTube, providing a demo for potential customers. He claims it works with all browsers and does not require a bypass of XSS filters in either Chrome or Internet Explorer. He also says the exploit will be sold only to trusted individuals who are not likely to turn it over to Yahoo, which would undoubtedly develop a patch that will foil the attack.

“TheHell” claims that his exploit attacks a “stored” XSS flaw. This type of attack injects a code that is permanently stored on targeted servers until it is found and deleted. The malicious code is then passed to the victim’s machine when that particular server is accessed for legitimate download.

A standard phishing attempt is used to access the user’s cookies, from which the attacker can access the person’s email, or take full control of the account.

As of Tuesday morning, Yahoo was in the process of trying to identify the infected URL. Once the identification is successful, the malicious portion of code will be deleted.