Since its rise Windows was a natural habitat for all kinds of malware. Now the OS itself seems to have become one big trojan. Right after being installed it starts acting weird. The data flows in rivers to dozens of servers belonging to Microsoft and its partner companies. We will try to look into complaints of espionage manners of Windows 10 and find out what data it sneaks and where it sends it.
Code Injection is a process of injection code (often malicious) into third party application’s memory. A lot of software is using this technique: from malware to game bots. To show this approach, let’s try to execute third party application’s internal function with our own parameters, hacking simple application. Warning, C and debugger knowledge are required!
This was one of the most interesting attacks showed on Black Hat Las Vegas 2015. Let’s imagine the situation: there’s a large park of Windows computers in a large organization, and they all need to be updated. Obviously, getting all of them to download updates over the Internet is both pricy and uncomfortable. The common solution is a WSUS (Windows Server Update Services) server, which is used to manage updates. It downloads the updates and delivers them to all other computers.
The latest Nexus devices are normally the first to receive the newest Android versions. When a new firmware version is ready for release to general public, its full image is located at developers.google.com/android/nexus/images. Shortly after that, firmware starts to be distributed over the air. According to one of Google developers, Dan Morrill, (goo.gl/L85mSS), the first few OTA updates are sent to 1 % of devices. It happens at random, regardless of the location or point of sale of a phone/tablet. During this time, bugs are identified allowing the updating process to be put on hold if any critical errors are registered with a large number of users.
At first, GPUs could be used for a very narrow range of tasks (try to guess what), but they looked very attractive, and software developers decided to use their power for allocating a part of computing to graphics accelerators. Since GPU cannot be used in the same way as CPU, this required new tools that did not take long to appear. This is how originated CUDA, OpenCL and DirectCompute. The new wave was named ‘GPGPU’ (General-purpose graphics processing units) to designate the technique of using GPU for general purpose computing. As a result, people began to use a number of completely different microprocessors to solve some very common tasks. This gave rise to the term “heterogeneous parallelism”, which is actually the topic of our today’s discussion.
Open source tools for protection against DDoS (IPS), such as, Snort, are based on DPI, that is, they analyze the entire protocol stack. However, they cannot control the opening and closing of TCP connections, since they are too high in the network stack of Linux and represent neither server nor client side. This allows to bypass IPS data. Proxy servers are also involved in establishing the connection, but they cannot protect against major DDoS attacks, because they are relatively slow, as they work based on the same principle as the server. For them, it is desirable to use the equipment which, despite being not as good as the one for the back end, can withstand heavy loads.
According to Kaspersky Lab, the number of malicious programs targeting Apple products is nearing 1800. In the first eight months of 2014 alone, researchers have found some 25 new families of malware for OS X.
