Media Coverage

The FBI and Secret Service are investigating reports that the personal account of CIA Director John Brennan may have been hacked by a teenager. Tom Kellerman, former Commissioner on President Obama’s Cyber Security Commission and Dave Chronister, Founder of Parameter.

The CVE-2015-7645 vulnerability is actively exploited by the Pawn Storm group in attacks targeting several foreign affairs ministries from around the globe, security researchers from Trend Micro reported Tuesday.

Such hardening could be accomplished by attackers shifting their operations to using "no questions asked" bulletproof hosting services, says Tom Kellermann, chief cybersecurity officer at threat-intelligence firm Trend Micro. "I believe Evil Corp will be back in operation by month's end, [with] ... bulletproof hosting and the protection-racket state of Eastern Europe facilitating this," he says.

The newfound exploit was discovered by the security intelligence lab at Trend Micro. This site offers links to disable Flash in every web browser you have.

The email was descibed by researchers at Trend Micro as being as very well executed, saying it includes the PayPal logo, passable German, some basic clean design and some recipients were likely convinced into installing the app. Trend Micro reports that the malicious app is not currently on the Google Play Store and says that this is where the Android setting that disallows the installation of non-Market applications can really save users.