Targeted Contact Data: Freshly Made, 100% Pure

Handcrafted data specialise in providing you with 100% accurate and reliable data to your target audience requirements.  We faced the age old marketers’ problem of contact data quality.  Our hungry sales team constantly needed feeding with new, targeted leads and to provide them with these we needed contacts. And lots of them. 

Going out to buy a bunch of contact data struck us as the best option and, after consulting lots of data brokers, we realised that no matter how much, or how little we spent, the data was mostly terrible.  We came across IT Directors who had left years ago or were never IT Directors at all. 

After a while of this we realised that the only way to get the good quality, fresh contacts we needed was to find them ourselves.  Contact-by-contact, we manually entered their details into our CRM and soon we found we were getting really good at this. So good, that we decided to start offering this manual data crafting as a service for you. 

Whatever your unique target audience requirements, we can find and assemble quality contact information quickly.  We can also provide fully-tailored, lead-generating email campaigns to these fresh contacts.  Either feeding these leads directly to your sales team or pre-qualifying them first by our own experienced sales crew.  And, if your target audience should change week-to-week we can shift the focus of our search to accommodate this. 

We can guarantee that your data is up-to-date, of good quality and accurate.  We can guarantee that your data won’t bounce, be stagnant or be just plain crazy as it can be from a typical data broker.  

Why not learn a little more by visiting our micro-site: www.handcrafteddata.com

Cybercriminals exploit Flash zero-day flaw

Last Tuesday Adobe Systems released a patch for the Flash Player vulnerability, CVE-2015-3113.  However just four days later a malware researcher, who goes by Kafeine, spotted the Magnitude exploit kit being used for a drive-by download attack, exploiting the vulnerability. 

The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures database tracked the flaw known as CVE-2015-3113.  It turns out that CVE-2015-3113 had zero-day status and had been targeted for several weeks by a China-based cyberespionage group prior to the patch being released.  These attacks were targeted against organisations in a broad range of industries from aerospace, defence and technology to construction, transportation, engineering and telecommunications. 

The goal of the exploiters is to compromise sophisticated defence systems and to remain undetected for as long as possible.  For this reason it is not uncommon for Flash Player and other popular applications to be targeted in zero-day exploits. 

Despite this, incidents of non-selective, widespread attacks using zero-day exploits are uncommon; predominantly due to the value of zero-day vulnerabilities to the attackers.  Financially it is not sensible for such brash campaigns to be used as this draws attention to the vulnerability and makes it more likely for it to be discovered and patched quickly. 

Instead the exploiters usually prefer to integrate their exploits into already patched vulnerabilities, working on the principle that many users will not install patches speedily enough.  The creators of these exploit kits, however, are dramatically reducing the time they need to incorporate the attack.  As such, users are being left with a much shorter time frame to deploy the patch in before the exploits are integrated.  In the case of the CVE-2015-3113 vulnerability this was only 4 days.  This causes issues in organisations who typically install updates in schedules often separated by more than a week. 

Another Flash Player exploit occurred earlier this year by the Nuclear EK exploit kit.  This was integrated a mere week after the patch was released.  A decreasing trend in patch window size is emerging. 

Currently the Magnitude attacks on the CVE-2015-3113 vulnerability install the Cryptowall ransomware, if successful.  This could be changed at any time by the attackers.