The NSA spying allied states and attacks on PHP and Adobe starring in October ESET October analyzed from a security perspective .

The month of October , from the point of view of safety , has been characterized again by the detailed information espionage cases conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA ) of the United States to allies . Although until now it was known that this spy was done to citizens around the world , the information published in recent weeks revealed that senior political officials or companies were also in the spotlight of this agency.

Chancellor Angela Merkel was the first to show their outrage to check that your mobile phone was monitored for ten years. At this protest followed others, mainly from European countries that the U.S. accused of spying on its allies. However, these accusations ended also affecting those countries that considered themselves victims , when found in another document leaked by Snowden these countries (which is Spain ) provide regular information to the NSA intercept all communications , including calls mobile or emails, among others.

" Honestly , all this controversy over espionage between countries is somewhat absurd after checking that everyone spies on other countries, whether allies or not ," says Josep Albors , laboratory director of ESET Spain . " Intelligence agencies are for. The problem is not that governments find spy . The problem is figuring out what spy : if , as they say, to ensure national security, or use this information to gain economic and political advantage over other countries. "

And with other information leaked last month , we met how the NSA and its British namesake , the GCHQ spying Google and Yahoo! also intercepting information sent between data centers that have these companies worldwide . This is possible because the synchronization between servers is done unencrypted , which greatly facilitates the work of spying on these communications.

Attacks on PHP and Adobe
Going back to the proper computer security , last October we have seen two major attacks occurred that affected the PHP website and Adobe. The attack on the PHP.net site caused considerable confusion at first when Google named him one infected site and many thought that it was a false positive. However, the administrators of the site conducted an investigation and found how, indeed , their website was serving malware.

The analysis revealed that an attacker had succeeded in bringing a Javascript exploit the PHP website to try and infect as many visitors as possible. The fact that this site has a high visitor numbers caused the number of potential victims who were exposed to infection was great.

For its part , the company Adobe also affected by a major attack on its servers. Earlier this month knew the news that an attacker had gained access to company servers and get data from three million users including their identifiers , encrypted passwords and credit card numbers . It also managed to steal the source code of several programs which include Adobe Acrobat , Cold Fusion and Cold Fusion Builder.

However, later this month met more details about this attack and found that it was much worse than it looked . The number of users affected now stands at 38 million and, in addition , the company admits that part of the Photoshop application code was stolen by the attackers. The source code theft is something that can involve threats directed at exploiting security flaws undiscovered in programs that use hundreds of millions of users worldwide , and it is something we should consider as serious.

For its part, Microsoft started releasing security patches month including the solution to the serious vulnerability discovered in September in the Internet Explorer browser . Recall that this security hole in versions 8 and 9 of the browser allowed remote code execution and had already begun to be used for attacks .

In addition , Microsoft surprised everyone by paying the not inconsiderable amount of $ 100,000 to a British researcher for reporting a security flaw in version " preview" of Windows 8.1. The high amount of money paid to suspect that the ruling was especially critical , but good to know that companies are willing to generously reward researchers who report on these failures to prevent their use by criminals .

ESET 's lab also held during the month of October to discuss several interesting threats . One was the bot Napolar , also known as Solarbot . Some of the interesting features of this malware are spread through Facebook , the techniques used to obstruct the analysis by researchers or openly promoting an elaborate promotional website .

Another malware sample analyzed during October was the Win32/KanKan . This malware is designed to mainly affect Chinese users and is peculiar to include Office plugin no use more than persist in the system, install Android applications transparently to the user and be signed by a Chinese company , known to develop one of the most popular bittorrent clients .

Again the routers were also protagonists in the section on hardware vulnerabilities . Various models of brands such as D -Link , Planex , Hitron or Tenda Technology presented several security flaws that allowed even get to take control of the device remotely . Being a device present in millions of homes and to which few users pay attention , is a very interesting target for attackers.

Privacy Policy renovated to Google and Facebook
Two Internet giants like Google and Facebook are almost simultaneously announced several changes to its privacy policies . These changes have not been received with enthusiasm precisely because, in the case of Facebook eliminates the option to keep our profile is indexed by search engines and also allows minors to be contacted by strangers in this network and not only by your friends or friends of friends.

Google also got rid of the controversy by announcing that , in a few weeks , used data from the Google Plus social network advertising. This way you can use, for example , scores made ​​by a user in a restaurant and add your comment and photograph the advertising displayed when someone look Local .

Also in October we learned the news of the arrest in Russia of the alleged perpetrator of the Blackhole exploit kit . This kit is one of the most currently used by criminals and the arrest of its creator can help your disappearance . However, there are many other exploit kits on the market so this fight against cybercrime needs to continue .