Security researcher shares blow-by-blow account of advanced persistent threat
Hackers are brazenly infiltrating corporate networks to steal valuable data for purposes of sharing it with other companies or nation-states -- and they're getting away with it, say security researchers sharing war stories at the Hacker Halted conference in Miami this week.
"Unfortunately, IDS [intrusion-detection systems] didn't detect them," said Gianni Gnesa, security researcher at Ptrace Security, based in Switzerland, who described a recent attack on a Swiss firm to steal important data.
It started by targeting an employee after he had placed an inquiry on Craigslist related to furniture. The email he got back redirected him to a dynamic-exploit delivery page created by an attacker, which successfully exploited Windows Internet Explorer on his Windows 7 machine to compromise it. This MS12-037 exploit, though not a zero-day attack then, did not have a patch available for it at the time, Gnesa said.
