What Is Script-Based Malware?

When you hear the word "script", you probably think of either a movie script, or JavaScript.Through most of us don't get to see movie scripts, JavaScript is a little more readily available, since it's one of the many scripting languages that are commonly used by programmers to enhance features of websites. Their popularity, unfortunately, is now be leveraged by the bad guys too, as scripting techniques are being used by cybercriminals to enhance the strength of their cyberattacks. In fact, now more than ever, hackers are creating script-based malware, as our researchers have stated in the McAfee labs September 2017 Quarterly Treats Report.Let's take a look as to why script based malware has dramatically increased over the past two years.

Evasion is probably the key reason behind the popularity of this attack tactic, since scripts are easy to obfuscate and therefore difficult to detect.Plus, scripting languages are generally easier to learn and faster to code in than other languages, making them an easy sell for eager hackers.

Specially, the scripting languages these crooks are using include: JavaScript, VBSdript, PHP, PowerShell, and others. Our McAfee labs team has been Bartallex, Kovter, Nemucod, and W97/Downloader, along with many other malwares, usning these scripts to deliver malicious payloads to victims devices.For instance, in 2016, Locky was spread by using multiple obfuscated layers of JavaScript.We have also seen the execution of fileless malware with the help of a PowerShell script.

Now,the next question is - what does this mean for you? And what can you do to protect your devices from script-based malware? The best way to protect your personal devices from script-based malware infections is to stop them before they happen.So be sure to remain wary of downloading and installing applications that you don't understand or trust, and always apply security updates and patches for applications and operating systems.Additionally, block cyberattacks before they happen with a comprehensive security solution such as McAfee LiveSafe, which is now new and improved.

McAfee Labs Threats Report Explores WannaCry

• Earlier in this year,Wannacry malware infected more than 300,000 computers in over 150 countries in less than 24 hours. Several weeks later, the malware Petya exploited the same operating systems flaw along with multiple other techniques to spread to other computers on the same network.These attacks exposed among other lessons the continued use of old and unsupported operating systems in critical areas and they laid bare the lax patch-update processes followed by some businesses.We explore ther timeline and background of the WannaCry attack and Petya.Its apparent follow-up; the vulnerabilities they exploited ; a technical analysis of their infiltration and propagation methods; and our thoughts on the motives for these attacks and what they might lead to.
• Threat hunting is a growing and evolving capability in cyber security.One with a broad definition and wide range of goals.nut it is generally seen as a proactive approach to finding attacks and compromised machines without waiting for alerts. Threat hunting enables security operations to study the behaviors of attackers and build more visibility into attack chains. This results in a more proactive stance for the security operations center, shifting the focus to erlier detection, faster reaction times, and enhanced risk mitigation.In May, McAfee surveyed more than 700 IT and security professionals around the world to better understand how treat hunting is used in organizations today and how they plan to enhance their treat hunting capabilities in the future.We offer detailed advice and recommendations for using certain types of indicators of compromise when hunting for treats.
• Cyber attackers often use scripting techniques in their assualts.Some attacks employ script-based malware at every stage,while others use it for a specific purpose.Script-based malware -written in the JavaScript, VBS, PHP, or PowerShell scripting languages has been on the upswing during the last two years for a very simple reason: evasion.Scripts are easy to obfuscate and thus are difficult for security techniques to detect. 

What is bio-metrics?

Various biometric authentication methods are found with the rapid development of the technology which has the main intention of securing data. Specially in portable devices like smart phones, people are tend to use biometric authentication because of the usability and reliability. Currently touch ID and face recognition takes major role in bio metric authentication techniques while many researches are going on implementing new biometric authentications on iris and ear biometrics. Most of these biometric authentications are under developing stage. They have advantages as well as disadvantages. Even though there are pros and cons, people like to use biometric authentication methods because of the reliability and it usability and it is hard to bypass these authentication mechanisms.

Introduction

Security of data and information has become one of the major concerns in these days. Attackers tries to break into computer systems and get sensitive information with the intention of threatening the owners’ of those information and get money from them. So protecting data is one of the serious issue that currently the world is facing. By controlling the access to data, system information and other sensitive data are protected. Different techniques are used to prevent the unauthorized access to data. Once the user is authorized to the system, user can have some privileges to read, write and execute to the system up to certain extent. But the problem is that only the real user should authorize to the system. For that, strong authentication mechanisms can be used.

Fingerprint

Fingerprint evidence is very successful mechanism to identify and authenticate a person. The Fingerprint is more reliable and acceptable evidence till date in the court of law. Present days fingerprint is a traditional biometric authentication mechanism.

The skin on our palms has a flow-like patterns of ridges and valleys, it’s called as friction ridges. The main reason for having this kind of friction ridges is to grasp objects. The main important uses of friction ridges is person authentication. This friction ridges are considered unique to person to person. The fingerprints of identical twins will also differ.

The use of inked fingerprint images, which are acquired by first applying ink to the subject’s fingertips and then rolling or pressing the finger on paper, thereby creating an impression of the fingerprint ridges on paper. Later, the computers coming on fingerprints was digitization.

For electronically processing fingerprints using image recognition algorithms, a fingerprint has to be scanned first. There are many fingerprint scanners are existing.eg:- capacitive, optical and thermal. All the scanners are built on different technologies.

There are different types of friction ridges are exist.

compares an input fingerprint to the “enrolled” fingerprint of a specific user to determine if they are from the same finger (1:1 match). In identification, the system compares an input fingerprint with the prints of all enrolled users in the database to determine if the person is already known under a duplicate or false identity (1:N match).

Advantages

• ·         Very high accuracy.
• ·         Most economical biometric PC user authentication technique.
• ·         Easy to use.
• ·         Small storage space required for the biometric template.
• ·         It’s standardized.

Disadvantages

• ·   It can make mistakes with the dryness or dirty of the finger’s skin, as well as with the age         (is not appropriate with children, because the size of their fingerprint changes quickly).
•    Remote authentication is not possible

Face recognition

Face recognition technology is mostly used in real time applications. Therefore reliability is very important. Face recognition is a task that humans perform routinely and effortlessly in our daily lives. Wide availability of powerful and low-cost desktop and embedded computing systems has created an enormous interest in automatic processing of digital images in a variety of applications, including biometric authentication, surveillance, human-computer interaction, and multimedia management. Research and development in automatic face recognition follows naturally.

Face recognition technology is now significantly advanced since the time when the Eigen face method was proposed. In the constrained situations, for example where lighting, pose, stand-off, facial wear, and facial expression can be controlled, automated face recognition can surpass human recognition performance, especially when the database (gallery) contains a large number of faces.1 However, automatic face recognition still faces many challenges when face images are acquired under unconstrained environments. In the following sections, we give a brief overview of the face recognition process, analyze technical challenges, propose possible solutions, and describe state-of-the-art performance. 

Advantages

•   No More Time Fraud

It’s impossible for buddy punching to occur, since everyone has to have their face scanned to clock in. 

• ·         Better Security

It’s easy to add new visitors and track them. Anyone that is not in the system will not be given access.

• ·         Automated System

It’s no need to having someone system nearby.

• ·         Easy Integration

Usually they will work with existing software that you have in place.

• ·         High Success Rate

             It’s very difficult to fool the system and tracking time, attendance while proving better security

Ear

There are several reasons to use ear as a biometric authentication system than other biometric authentication systems. Ear biometric is a passive biometric which means without the user’s active participation authentication can be done successfully. Ear does not change during human life as ascertained whereas face changes more significantly with age than any other part of human body. Cosmetics, facial hair and hair styling, emotions express different states of mind like sadness, happiness, fear or surprise. 

It is said that color distribution in ear is more uniform than other parts in human body like face, iris, retina which means there is less possibility to lose information.

Furthermore, ear images cannot be disturbed by glasses, beard or make-up.In order to use the ear as a biometric authentication, we have to prove that each and every person has unique ears. There is no absolute way of proving that humans have unique ears but the evidences from certain experiments are help to prove that the nature of the human ear doesn’t change with the time.Ear is thus considered as a valuable means for personal identification especially used in criminal investigation or in surveillance areas different means that can be used for biometric authentication are images of ear, thermo graphic images of ear and ear prints that are get by pressing ear against a flat paper.In a device like smart phone, when the user is in a call, the smartphone can silently take a photo of the ear and authenticate whether the user is the correct one. This provides authentication method to the smart phone without user’s knowledge.

Ear recognition mechanism is a classical pattern recognition system which uses 2D or 3D digital image of the ear and compares the features with the images that are already in the database.

Eye

When using the    eye as one of the biometrics to authenticate user, two methods are found. One is retinal scan and the other is iris scan.

In retinal scan infrared light rays are sent to analyze the characteristics of retinal blood vessel patterns. Blood vessels in the retina absorb infrared rays faster than the surrounding so that it is easy to analyze characteristics of blood vessels.This method is rarely used to due to user friendliness and expensiveness. The main drawback in this method is intrusiveness.

Iris scanning has claimed to be less intrusive and iris pattern is observed using a photo of the eye taken by special grey scale camera.Once the iris is identified in the eye, the software creates a net of curves covering the iris. Based on the darkness of the points, the software creates the iris code, which characterizes the iris.

When creating the iris code two factors are considered. First, the overall iris code darkness of the image is influenced by the lighting conditions so the darkness threshold used to decide whether a given point is dark or bright cannot be static, it must be dynamically computed according to the overall picture darkness. And second, the size of the iris dynamically changes as the size of the pupil changes. Before computing the iris code, a proper transformation must be done. In the decision process the matching software given 2 iris codes computes the Hamming distance based on the number of different bits.The Hamming distance is a score (within the range 0 – 1, where 0 means the same iris codes), which is then compared with the security threshold to make the final decision.

Computing the Hamming distance of two iris codes is very speed fast (it is in fact only counting the number of bits in the exclusive OR of the two iris codes).  It is said that the iris recognition was the fastest identification out of all the biometric systems we could work with. Discrimination rate of false acceptance have never encountered and the false rejection rate was low. The main  advantage of   the  iris  scans  is  the  ability  to  perform  them  from  a  distance  of   up to  three feet   and  short   time  of   scan  of   only  20  seconds  initially,   with  subsequent identification  requiring  only  two  seconds.  Glasses and contact lenses do not interfere with the scanning process and identification.

Even if the accuracy of the biometric techniques is not perfect yet, there are many mature biometric systems available now. Proper design and implementation of the biometric system can indeed increase the overall security, especially the smartcard based solutions seem to be very promising. Making a secure biometric systems is, however, not as easy as it might appear. The word biometrics is very often used as a synonym for the perfect security. This is a misleading view. There are numerous conditions that must be taken in account when designing a secure biometric system. First, it is necessary to realize that biometrics are not secrets. This implies that biometric measurements cannot be used as capability tokens and it is not secure to generate any cryptographic keys from them. Second, it is necessary to trust the input device and make the communication link secure. Third, the input device needs to check the liveners of the person being measured and the device itself should be verified for example by a challenge response protocol. 

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Google has removed 300 malicious apps from the Play Store

* Akamai has said that a botnet named WireX compromised Android devices
* It has joined Google, Cloudflare and other companies to combat it
* Google has removed 300 malicious apps from the Play Store

In the previous three months, we have seen a lot of dispersed refusal of administration (DDoS) assaults that have influenced the two companies and people. Web monster Google has been associated with the way toward keeping a mind such digital danger cases, and this time it has expelled around 300 noxious applications from Google Play store that could take control of Android gadgets to take part expansive scale DDoS assaults.

Analysts at Akamai in a blog entry have called attention to that a botnet named WireX adulterated different substance conveyance systems (CDNs) and other substance suppliers on August 17. The botnet contained Android gadgets that were running pernicious applications intended to make a DDoS assault. Akamai has held hands with significant organizations, for example, Google, Cloudflare, Flashpoint, Oracle Dyn, RiskIQ, and Team Cymru among others to battle this danger from spreading further.

In its blog, Akamai characterizes WireX botnet as "a volumetric DDoS assault at the application layer. The movement created by the assault hubs is essentially HTTP GET asks for, however a few variations seems, by all accounts, to be equipped for issuing POST asks." It notes assist that the contaminated applications, including capacity administrators, media/video players, ringtones, and different apparatuses, had "extra shrouded highlights" that initiated at dispatch. These highlights at that point influenced the Android to work or take an interest in a bigger DDoS assault as long as the gadget was fueled on. The quantity of abused Android gadgets is not clear yet but rather the specialists have announced it to be something around 7,000 to a Krebs On Security correspondent. 

"We distinguished roughly 300 applications related with the issue, blocked them from the Play Store, and we're expelling them from every single influenced gadget. The scientists' discoveries, joined with our own particular examination, have empowered us to better secure Android clients, all over the place," says Google while remarking in a reaction to Akamai's exploration, where it additionally specified that it is expelling up to 300 applications from the Play store. The cases of such applications were discovered when the scientists doled out to examine this issue followed back a few hubs to an assault that occurred on August 17 from an irregular APK document with a scattered up filename - 'twdlphqg_v1.3.5_apkpure.com.apk'. At that point, the scientists noticed that these applications could have more duplicates, copies, and cases straightforwardly identified with the DDoS assault. 


With the new organization together between the previously mentioned firms against the digital risk of DDoS assaults gradually infesting in the Android biological system, the organizations have likewise consented to share the measurements and information about the assaults. Google is likewise utilizing its machine learning capacities to guarantee better security for the Android stage, alongside the biological systems having a place with different partners.