TMCnews Featured Article

FireEye, and analysis and control technology engine reportedly succeeded in providing pre-emptive protection to enterprise, federal and higher education customers against the current Internet Explorer zero-day vulnerability.

 

FireEye (News - Alert), a provider of malware protection systems, enables organizations to protect critical infrastructure, intellectual property and networks against Web malware and botnet infiltration. The company protects customers without making any changes or content updates to the product.

 

For this security project, FireEye worked with customers to determine if they had been singled out and was able to confirm in several cases that their network had been targeted. The FireEye security technology could identify the IE malware attacks.

 

According to a release, FireEye and its customers established that there were attempts made to exploit the IE zero-day vulnerability at multiple production sites. The technology made it possible that real-time detections were made in the FACT engine without any new rules or post-mortem analysis. With this ability, content could be secured manually.

 

Company officials further explained how the process happened: within the FireEye virtual machine analysis environment, dropper malware was installed and subsequently downloaded a Hydraq Trojan payload. Once this was done, Hydraq established an outbound connection to command-and-control servers and this provided the cyber criminals behind the attack full administrative access to the end system. The authorities have documented the IE zero-day exploit and made it publicly available.

 

Marc Maiffret, chief security architect at FireEye noted that traditional network security and antivirus were widely deployed but still, ‘Operation Aurora’ was able to breach dozens of major corporate networks using sophisticated techniques.

 

Modern malware has made traditional security technologies obsolete and Maiffret said that FireEye’s real-time, multi-protocol content analysis within virtual machines is currently the only integrated defense that can accurately identify zero-day attacks.

 

“The reality is these cyber attacks are regular occurrences in today’s Internet threat landscape. However, ‘Operation Aurora’ represents a clear escalation of the use of custom, targeted malware against enterprises,” Ashar Aziz, founder and CEO of FireEye, said. “It is critical that company executives recognize the threat posed by highly sophisticated modern malware, whether you call them botnets, Trojans, worms, or viruses.”