Attackers Leverage IT Tools As Cover

By Jai Vijayan
 
The line between attack and defense tools has blurred.
 The task of defending enterprises against malicious intruders could become even harder for security managers with attackers beginning to increasingly leverage commonly used IT tools and services to disguise their presence on compromised networks.
Security researchers have for some time observed attack groups using popular services like Dropbox and WordPress as cover for new advanced persistent threat attacks. The DNSCalc gang that attacked The New York Times last year, for instance, used DropBox to distribute their malware and WordPress as a command and control infrastructure for managing infected systems.
More recently, security researchers at Blue Coat Labs and Kaspersky Labs observed the group behind the Inception cyber espionage campaign using a free version of the CloudMe hosting service and a virtual private network to infiltrate systems and control them remotely.
 
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