The threat landscape is very dynamic, and new threat vectors are exploiting vulnerabilities for fun and profit. The whitehat security community is having a race against time with their counterparts. And, often the companies are becoming a target to spear phishing, APT and bots. Some institutions like financial sector, insurance sector, defense etc. have strong regulations to protect the perimeter. But, often these sectors have people working on their modern laptops with different adaptors - Wifi and Bluetooth.

It’s 21st century, the year 2014 and we are still on ground zero talking about spam emails and attacks like spear phishing. No matter how stringent your controls are, how much you have invest in your “defense in depth” approach, a single human being of your firm clicking a link on an unsolicited email can crumble your empire. This is not at all melodramatic as it sounds. It is for real, is scary and sad.

Before you deep dive in the technical information, I wish to confirm that this vulnerability has been FIXED. Thanks to PAYTM for taking a quick action. Looking forward for such quick response on security concerns. Kudos! Don’t get this wrong. I wish to share a vulnerability that can be leveraged by attackers to perform/ initiate a spear phishing attack. The website in discussion is paytm.com. There is an information disclosure vulnerability in the main website, and an un-authenticated user can query for a mail address against a mobile number.

We come across so many links via social networking websites, and we unknowingly click many of these. The malicious links have catastrophic results and the system as well as yours privacy is either compromised or your data takes the hit. Here is one such analysis of a link dated 17.April.2012 that I came across via Twitter and LinkedIn. NOTE: All links have been appended with ‘non-clickable’ suffix hxxp:// to prevent mistaken clicks.

Vulnerabilities are increasing by leaps and bounds and any industry – technical or non-technical has to grow its security in sync or else, it is highly vulnerable and lucrative target. There is news of data loss, breaches every now and then. A rough estimate of the growth of vulnerabilities (as reported) over last decade (1995-2008) is shown in Figure 1. This accounts to vulnerabilities as reported, wherein there are hundreds of active (non-reported or un-patched) vulnerabilities floating underground which are in the hands of money driven and black hat profit driven attackers.