Over the weekend, AWeber was the target of a deliberate and successful attempt to mine email addresses.

On Saturday, October 16th, an unknown person gained unauthorized access to databases containing email subscriber information.

This incident appears to be part of a broader series of similar successful attacks on a number of email service providers (ESPs).

This happened 2009 December as well:

December 21, 2009

AWeber was recently the victim of an intentional attack to mine email addresses.

We’d like to take this opportunity to share what happened, what was (and was not) affected and what we’re doing as a result of this attack.

Apparently, the attackers found a zero-day vulnerability in AWeber’s systems, though they’re not saying exactly what that was:

On a daily basis, a few thousand attempts are made to attack AWeber. This sounds like a lot (and it is), but it’s no different at any other sizable web-based application.

We use a combination of in-house and third-party security solutions to scan our network for possible “holes” in security, and to monitor, block and analyze the many attempts made to gain unauthorized access to AWeber. On the whole, these solutions are very good at what they do and this approach serves us well. Unfortunately, both the in-house and third-party solutions failed to detect or stop this particular attack.

I’d sure like to know what those “third-party solutions” are so I can patch them if they exist on any of my clients’ systems!

Microsoft Security Bulletin Advance Notification for December 2008
Published: December 16, 2008

Microsoft Security Bulletin Advance Notification issued: December 16, 2008
Microsoft Security Bulletins to be issued: December 17, 2008

This is an advance notification of an out-of-band security bulletin that Microsoft is intending to release on December 17, 2008.

This bulletin advance notification will be replaced with the revised December bulletin summary on December 17, 2008. The revised bulletin summary will include the out-of-band security bulletin as well as the security bulletins already released on December 9, 2008.

I don’t have any statistics on how fast they’ve responded to zero-day flaws in the past, but this seems pretty quick to me.

The code exploits a bug in the way IE handles XML (Extensible Markup Language) and works on the browser about “one in three times,” Huang said in an instant message interview. For the attack to work, a victim must first visit a Web site that serves the malicious JavaScript code that takes advantage of the flaw. …

In attacks, the code drops a malicious program on the victim’s PC which then goes to download malicious software from various locations.

According to a blog post by Symantec:

The vulnerability is caused by a function that incorrectly frees a certain region of heap memory so that an attacker is able to control the EAX register with a specially crafted Unicode URL, which includes the magic “0x0A0A” value in it,” Elia Florio, a security researcher at Symantec, wrote….

Symantec released the antivirus signature Bloodhound.Exploit.219 and IPS signature 23241 – HTTP MSIE Malformed XML BO to protect users against this exploit.

I recommend that anyone using Symantec’s antivirus or IPS products, immediately perform an update. Furthermore, Symantec recommends blocking the following hosts which are apparently being used by the exploit to download and install other malware:

• wwwwyyyyy.cn
• sllwrnm5.cn
• baikec.cn
• oiuytr.net
• laoyang4.cn
• cc4y7.cn

In its security advisory 961051, Microsoft presents the following mitigating factors:

• Protected Mode in Internet Explorer 7 and Internet Explorer 8 in Windows Vista limits the impact of the vulnerability.

•By default, Internet Explorer on Windows Server 2003 and Windows Server 2008 runs in a restricted mode that is known as Enhanced Security Configuration. This mode sets the security level for the Internet zone to High. This is a mitigating factor for Web sites that you have not added to the Internet Explorer Trusted sites zone.

•An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain the same user rights as the local user. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less affected than users who operate with administrative user rights.

•Currently known attacks cannot exploit this issue automatically through e-mail.

Nevertheless, users should avoid using Internet Explorer and should instead use Firefox with the NoScript extension installed until Microsoft issues a patch. We may see an out-of-cycle patch on this one according to the security advisory:

We are actively investigating the vulnerability these attacks attempt to exploit. We will continue to monitor the threat environment and update this advisory if this situation changes. On completion of this investigation, Microsoft will take the appropriate action to protect our customers, which may include providing a solution through a service pack, our monthly security update release process, or an out-of-cycle security update, depending on customer needs.

Well, since I’m forced to use IE for certain applications in my job, this customer needs a patch as quickly as possible.

Among the bugs squashed in Opera 9.61 was a stored cross site scripting (XSS) vulnerability that allowed attackers to view victims’ browsing history. That attack is no longer possible, but now researchers have discovered an even more serious exploit that’s based on the same weakness.

Until Opera releases version 9.62, which should be “very, very soon” according to Opera spokesman Thomas Ford, your best bet is to disable iFrames and turn off scripting. Open opera:config and select Extensions|iFrames. Change the setting from “1″ to “0.” Similarly, change Extensions|Scripting from “1″ to “0.”

Bear in mind that the above temporary workaround is going to break a lot of sites that use scripting. It would be simpler if Opera had some way to designate “trusted sites” (or a plug-in like NoScript), but I’m not aware of any way to do this. Hit the comments and let me know if there’s a better workaround (I haven’t used Opera since my conversion to Firefox four years ago).