Talk about determination. Hackers strung together zero-day vulnerabilities in Flash and Internet Explorer and then compromised Forbes.com so that the attacks would compromise financial services and defense contractor employees visiting the site, researchers said.
The November breach of Forbes compromised the
Thought of the Day page that is displayed briefly upon visiting the site. The page downloaded attack code exploiting a vulnerability in what then was a fully updated version of Adobe Flash. To bypass Address Space Layout Randomization—a mechanism built into Flash and many other applications to make drive-by attacks harder—the Forbes page downloaded a second attack. The latter attack exploited a then-zero-day vulnerability in IE that allowed the Flash exploit to successfully pierce the exploit mitigation defense. From start to finish, the attack took about seven seconds.
