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The FBI is alerting the healthcare industry companies on potential cyber attacks, the law enforcement are warning companies after the attack on U.S. hospital group Community Health Systems Inc that caused the theft of millions of patient records., “The FBI has observed malicious actors targeting healthcare related systems, perhaps for the purpose of obtaining Protected Healthcare Information (PHI) and/or Personally Identifiable Information (PII),” “These actors have also been seen targeting multiple companies in the healthcare and medical device industry typically targeting valuable intellectual property, such as medical device and equipment development data,” stated the FBI in a document obtained by Reuters agency., Community Health is the second U.S. publicly traded hospital operator, the company revealed that a cyber attack hit his systems early this weak, threat actors have stolen data included patient names, Social Security numbers, addresses and birth dates., , Despite the company hasn’t provided details on the attack, rumors says that hackers exploited a piece of networking equipment hosted in its network and that had not been patched to fix the “Heartbleed” vulnerability. If confirmed the attack is the first major case officially disclosed in which bad actors exploited the Heartblled flaw. According to David Kennedy, chief executive of TrustedSec LLC, the attackers have exploited a bug in a piece of Juniper Networks Inc equipment to obtain employee credentials and access the company’s network., Recent data on investigation shows that the hospital operator’s network had been plagued by malware infections for months. Of the 12,500 IP addresses associated with the CHS network, 10 were linked to malicious bots, such as Kelihos, Asprox, Gameover Zeus and Conficker, as explained by Jason Lewis, chief intelligence and collections officer at Lookingglass, in a blog post. But patches for Conficker were available since 2008, indicating that CHS machines were unpatched., The bots performed SQL injection attacks, data exfiltration, click fraud and banking credential theft from targeted PCs., The alert to healthcare industry doesn’t refer businesses targeted by cyber attacks and the agency hasn’t released any further comment on the document., The FBI and Department of Homeland Security have already issued similar alerts to the businesses operating in the healthcare industry, in April it issued another warning on low level of security offered by solutions used by the companies in the sector., Security experts believe that many other similar cases could be observed in the next months, the alert issued by authorities must be seriously considered to avoid dangerous consequences., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – healthcare, data breach)
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What happens if someone shuts down the Internet? Is it possible?, Our society heavily depends on technology and the Internet is the privileged vector of the information today. Blocking the Internet could paralyze countless services in almost any industry, from finance to transportation., Early September the popular cyber security expert Bruce Schneier published an interesting post titled “Someone Is Learning How to Take Down the Internet” that reveals an escalation of cyber attacks against service providers and companies responsible for the basic infrastructure of the Internet., We are referring to coordinated attacks that experts consider a sort of tests to evaluate the resilience of most critical nodes of the global Internet. The attacks experienced by the companies request a significant effort and huge resources, a circumstance that suggests the involvement of a persistent attacker like a government, and China is the first suspect., “Recently, some of the major companies that provide the basic infrastructure that makes the Internet work have seen an increase in DDoS attacks against them. Moreover, they have seen a certain profile of attacks. These attacks are significantly larger than the ones they’re used to seeing. They last longer. They’re more sophisticated. And they look like probing.” wrote Schneier., “I am unable to give details, because these companies spoke with me under a condition of anonymity. But this all is consistent with what Verisign is reporting. Verisign is the registrar for many popular top-level Internet domains, like .com and .net. If it goes down, there’s a global blackout of all websites and e-mail addresses in the most common top-level domains. Every quarter, Verisign publishes a DDoS trends report. While its publication doesn’t have the level of detail I heard from the companies I spoke with, the trends are the same: “in Q2 2016, attacks continued to become more frequent, persistent, and complex.”, It is clear that attackers aim to cause a global blackout of the most common top-level domains paralyzing a large portion of the Internet., Schneier, who has spoken with companies that faced the attacks, pointed out powerful DDoS attacks that attacks that stand out of the ordinary for their methodically escalating nature., The attacks start with a certain power that increases as time goes by forcing the victims to deploy all its countermeasures to mitigate the threat., The report mentioned by Schneier, titled “VERISIGN-OBSERVED DDoS ATTACK TRENDS: Q2 2016” confirms that companies are experiencing a wave of DDoS attacks even more sophisticated., , “DDoS Attacks Become More Sophisticated and Persistent DDoS attacks are a reality for today’s web-reliant organizations. In Q2 2016, DDoS attacks continued to become more frequent, persistent and complex.” states the report., Schneier also reported other types of attacks against the Internet infrastructure, such as numerous attempts to tamper with Internet addresses and routing., “One company told me about a variety of probing attacks in addition to the DDoS attacks: testing the ability to manipulate Internet addresses and routes, seeing how long it takes the defenders to respond, and so on. Someone is extensively testing the core defensive capabilities of the companies that provide critical Internet services.” continues Schneier., Who is behind the attacks?, Schneier believes that the attacks are launched by someone with cyber capabilities of a government, and he seems to exclude the efforts of hacktivists or cyber criminals, and I agree., “It doesn’t seem like something an activist, criminal, or researcher would do. Profiling core infrastructure is common practice in espionage and intelligence gathering. It’s not normal for companies to do that. Furthermore, the size and scale of these probes — and especially their persistence — points to state actors.” explains Schneier., The attribution of the attacks is very difficult by data suggests that China is behind them, let me add also that Russia has similar cyber abilities and is able to hide its operations online. Both countries are largely investing in building infrastructures that would be resilient to such kind of mass attacks., “We don’t know where the attacks come from. The data I see suggests China, an assessment shared by the people I spoke with. On the other hand, it’s possible to disguise the country of origin for these sorts of attacks.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Internet, Hacking)
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Adobe fixed two flaws including a critical use-after-free bug, tracked as CVE-2018-15982, exploited by an advanced persistent threat actor aimed at a healthcare organization associated with the Russian presidential administration., The flaw could be exploited by attackers to execute arbitrary code, Adobe addressed it with the release of Flash Player 32.0.0.101 for Windows, macOS, Linux, and Chrome OS., “Adobe has released security updates for Adobe Flash Player for Windows, macOS, Linux and Chrome OS. These updates address one critical vulnerability in Adobe Flash Player and one important vulnerability in Adobe Flash Player installer.” reads the security advisory published by Adobe., “Successful exploitation could lead to Arbitrary Code Execution and privilege escalation in the context of the current user respectively. , Adobe is aware of reports that an exploit for CVE-2018-15982 exists in the wild.”, Adobe confirmed that it is aware of attacks exploiting the flaw in the wild., Adobe has credited the following experts for reporting the CVE-2018-15982 flaw:, Attackers used decoy Word documents including Flash file with zero-day vulnerability. The Word document is included in a RAR archive with a JPG picture. When the Flash vulnerability is triggered, the malware extracts the RAT code embedded in the JPG picture., “The attack strategy is very clever: Flash file with 0day vulnerability is inserted into decoy Word document which is compressed into one RAR file with a JPG picture. When Flash 0day vulnerability is triggered, it will extract out RAT from that JPG picture. Such trick aims to avoid detection of most security software. This RAT has same digital signature as one RAT which is very likely written by Hacking Team, latter was found August 2018. We believe that the new RAT is an upgrade version of Hacking Team’s RAT.” reads the analysis published by 360 the Enterprise Security Group. , “This vulnerability and exploitation code could be reused by cybercriminals even other APT groups for large-scale attacks, we would suggest users to take necessary protection, like applying latest Adobe Flash patch.”, , Gigamon has also published a blog post describing the flaw and the attack, the experts pointed out that the decoy document in Russian language was submitted to VirusTotal from a Ukranian IP address. Qihoo 360 researchers observed the attack was launched just days after the Kerch Strait incident that occurred on November 25, when Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) border service coast guard boats fired upon and captured three Ukrainian Navy vessels that had attempted to pass from the Black Sea into the Sea of Azov through the Kerch Strait while on their way to the port of Mariupol., “The vulnerability (CVE-2018-15982) allows for a maliciously crafted Flash object to execute code on a victim’s computer, which enables an attacker to gain command line access to the system.” reads the post published by Gigamon., “The document was submitted to VirusTotal from a Ukranian IP address and contains a purported employment application for a Russian state healthcare clinic. “, Experts observed the exploitation of the Flash zero-day exploit in an attack aimed at the FSBI “Polyclinic No. 2” of the Administrative Directorate of the President of the Russian Federation., Once opened, the decoy document shows a questionnaire for personnel of the Moscow-based hospital, while the zero-day exploit is executed in the background., Qihoo 360 Core Security experts highlighted the similarities between this Flash zero-day with the CVE-2018-4878, which was first exploited by North Korea-linked APT group earlier 2018., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Flash zero-day, CVE-2018-15982)
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Rapid7 published the second report National Exposure Index that provides Internet service providers (ISPs) worldwide information about the global exposure of devices., , The researchers scanned the Internet for improperly configured services, such as the recently exploited Server Message Block (SMB) and Telnet that were respectively targeted in the WannaCry attack and attacks based on IoT botnets (i.e. Mirai, Persirai)., The experts counted 5.5 million machines with SMB port exposed, the data is alarming considering that prior May 2017, when WannaCry spread, the number of exposed devices was 4.7 million., According to Rapid7, 800,000 of endpoints exposing Microsoft file-sharing services (SMB, TCP port 445) are Windows systems., “Over 1 million endpoints were confirmed exposing Microsoft file-sharing services (SMB, TCP port 445), with 800,000 of them being confirmed Windows systems, spanning virtually the entire product and release version lineage of the company.” states the report. ““This made for a target-rich environment for WannaCry, a “ransomworm” that spreads in part through an SMB exploit made public in May of 2017. This vulnerability was also actively sought out in May 2017, with SMB port scan results increasing by 17% (4.7 million to 5.5 million nodes). Blocking port 445 would mitigate potential threats like this”, The analysis of devices with exposed telnet (port 23) revealed roughly 10 million devices exposed to attacks. In this case, the number of exposed devices is decreased from the 14.8 million exposed devices discovered last year, anyway the situation is still alarming., “Port scanning for telnet (port 23) in 2017 returned just under 10 million responsive nodes, compared to 2016’s scan results of over 14.8 million. This 33% drop in apparent telnet services can almost certainly be pinned to two developments: 1) ISP, 1) ISP actions, such as closing port 23 in response to the Mirai botnet, and 2) Mirai, BrickerBot, and other botnets knocking nodes offline.“” continues the report., The drop is likely caused by the action of ISPs that started closing port 23 following the botnet attacks., The researchers highlighted that other services exposed to the Internet cpild be exploited by hackers, including FTP (port 21), RDP (port 3389), PPTP (port 1723), rpcbind (port 111), MySQL (port 3306)., Rapid7’s estimated that over 90 million endpoints running these inappropriate services are exposed on the Internet., Zimbabwe, Hong Kong SAR, Samoa, Republic of the Congo, Tajikistan, Romania, Ireland, Lithuania, Australia, and Estonia are the most exposed countries., “The most exposed regions are Zimbabwe, Hong Kong SAR , Samoa, Republic of the Congo, Tajikistan, Romania, Ireland, Lithuania, Australia, and Estonia. No discussion of national exposure would be complete without reference to the three major cyber superpowers: the United States, China, and the Russian Federation. While both the Russian Federation and China are among the top 50 most exposed nations, the U.S. has relatively low exposure in relation to its enormous IPv4 address space” states the report., Experts at Rapid7 scan 30 service ports and also analyzed the exposure to two “canary” TCP ports, port 5 and port 61439. The experts discovered 3.2 million devices exposing services on these two ports, and more than 2.3 million IPs located in 133 countries exposed both ports at the same time., The study also revealed many services that aren’t encrypted, such as HTTP., Give a look at the report, it is full of interesting data on the global exposure, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – SMB, Internet)
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According to the experts at Heimdal Security, the fourth version of the infamous Teslacrypt ransomware has just been launched. Teslacrypt 4 implements new functionalities and is more stable of previous versions, stability, it also fixed various bugs, including one related to encryption of large data files. In the previous variants, files larger than 4 GB would get permanently damaged when the ransomware tried to encrypt them. , Teslacrypt 4 used RSA 4096 for data encryption, this makes impossible to recover data encrypted by the ransomware., “Consequently, the encrypted data will be impossible to recover, which can determine information loss if the victim doesn’t have a backup for the affected data.” states a report published by Heimdal Security., The bad news for the victims is that the TeslaDecoder tool used to rescue the files encrypted by the previous variants of the ransomware no longer works with Teslacrypt 4.0., Victims of the Teslacryt 4 ransomware have no possibility to recover information, they can only restore files from a previous backup or pay the ransom with no guarantee of success., Researchers spotted TeslaCrypt 4 in the wild, crooks used drive-by attacks to spread the ransomware leveraging on the Angler exloit kit., The researchers already blocked more than 600 domains hosting the Angler EK in just one day. It has been estimated that daily average of domain spreading Angler EK blocked by the security firsm will reach soon 1200 domains per day, on average., , Teslacrypt 4 could be also used by attackers to harvest user’s data, including the “MachineGuid”, “DigitalProductID” and “SystemBiosDate” ., Experts at Heimdal Security have published the following Indicators of Compromise for the Teslacrypt 4.0:, %UserProfile%\Desktop\RECOVER%5 random signs%.html
%UserProfile%\Desktop\RECOVER%5 random signs %.png
%UserProfile%\Desktop\RECOVER%5 random signs %.txt %UserProfile%\Documents\random file name.exe %UserProfile%\Documents\recover_file.txt, TeslaCrypt 4 also creates the following value in the registry:, HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\_random name C:\Windows\SYSTEM32\CMD.EXE /C START %user account%\Documents\random name.exe, The current list of Teslacrypt 4 Control & Command servers is the folowing:,
This new variant of TeslaCrypt demosntrates the rapid evolution of the threat that first appeared in March 2015, meanwhile the version 2.o appeared in the wild in July 2015 and the TeslaCrypt 3.0 in January 2016., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – TeslaCrypt , ransomware)
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A new wave of malware-based attacks is targeting media outlets and energy companies in Ukraines, the attackers rely on malicious code that is able to wipe hard drives of the infected systems. The security expert from ESET Anton Cherepanov explained that hackers are attacking a group of unnamed organisations in the country with the BlackEnergy trojan., BlackEnergy is a popular DDoS Trojan, gained notoriety in 2008 when it was reported to have been used during the conflict Russia-Georgia conflict, the malicious code was used to launch cyber attacks against the infrastructure of Georgia., The BlackEnergy malware was authored by a Russian hacker and originally used for DDoS attacks, bank frauds and spam distribution, but the new variant was used in targeted attacks on government entities and private companies across a range of industries., According to the report proposed by experts at ESET in 2014, the malware targeted more than 100 government and industry organizations in Poland and the Ukraine, F-Secure reported other attacks based on BlackEnergy which hit a target in Brussels., F-Secure security advisor Sean Sullivan speculated that BlackEnergy detected in Brussels has been used in a targeted attack on the European Parliament or European Commission., “A large number of state organizations and businesses from various industry fields in the Ukraine and Poland have been targeted in recent attacks. What would otherwise be a mundane scenario in today’s world of cybercrime is spiced up by the fact that the malware-spreading campaigns have leveraged the tense current geopolitical situation in Eastern Ukraine and the use of a malware family with a rich history. The most recent campaigns are dated August 2014.” states the blog post on VirusBulletin. , According to ESET the campaign targeted hundreds of victims mainly located in Eastern Europe., “We have observed more than 100 individual victims of these campaigns during our monitoring of the botnets,” Lipovsky said. “Approximately half of these victims are situated in Ukraine and half in Poland, and include several state organisations, various businesses, as well as targets which we were unable to identify.” , The same nations hit by BlackEnergy malware were already targeted by another cyber espionage campaign documented by F-Secure, dubbed CosmicDuke, which targeted dozens of computers at government agencies across Europe., Now experts at ESET discovered a new component in the BlackEnergy trojan, the KillDisk component, which is capable of destroying some 4000 different file types and rendering machines unbootable., The KillDisk component used to compromise the energy companies in Ukraine was slightly different from other versions, below the list of new features observed by the experts:, The BlackEnergy configuration example used in 2015 (ESET), The strain of malware detected by ESET in 2015 also uses a previously unknown SSH backdoor to access the infected systems, in addition to BlackEnergy backdoor., “ESET has recently discovered that the BlackEnergy trojan was recently used as a backdoor to deliver a destructive KillDisk component in attacks against Ukrainian news media companies and against the electrical power industry. ” states the blog post published by ESET., The experts at ESET highlighted the presence of Build IS numbers in the BlackEnergy code, these data could provide information useful for the attribution of the malicious code. In the specific case the build identity numbers suggest the possible involvement of Russian hackers, but ESET avoids confirming it., “Apart from a list of C&C servers, the BlackEnergy config contains a value called build_id. This value is a unique text string used to identify individual infections or infection attempts by the BlackEnergy malware operators. The combinations of letters and numbers used can sometimes reveal information about the campaign and targets.” states the post “We can speculate that some of them have a special meaning. For example 2015telsmi could contain the Russian acronym SMI – Sredstva Massovoj Informacii, 2015en could mean Energy, and there’s also the obvious “Kiev”.”, Give a look to the report published by ESET that also includes Indicators of Compromise (IoC)., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – BlackEnergy Trojan, cyber espionage)
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Two 14-year-old students, Matthew Hewlett and Caleb Turon, have hacked an ATM machine of the Bank of Montreal to test its level of security. The two students have discovered online an old ATM operator manual that details how to access the ATM into the machine’s operator mode. On Wednesday during their lunch time they tried to procedure over the BMO’s ATM at the Safeway on Grant Avenue, the boys had no particular expectations about the success of the procedure, is it so simple to hack an ATM? At first attempt an access code composed of 6 digits, then the students tried a default one … Ops, they were inside!, “We thought it would be fun to try it, but we were not expecting it to work,” “When it did, it asked for a password.” Hewlett declared. , It is amazing, the youngsters immediately went to the BMO Charleswood Centre branch on Grant Avenue to report the security violation. Hewlett and Turon explained to the staff the security problem with an ATM, but the employers assumed that the guys have stolen the PIN numbers instead to have hackers the ATM. , “I said, ‘No, no, no. We hacked your ATM. We got into the operator mode’,” “I asked them, ‘Is it alright for us to get proof?’ “He said, ‘Yeah, sure, but you’ll never be able to get anything out of it.” Hewlett said., The staff could not believe the two boys, for this reason the students went back to the crime scene to collect more evidences 😉 ., “So we both went back to the ATM and I got into the operator mode again. Then I started printing off documentation like how much money is currently in the machine, how many withdrawals have happened that day, how much it’s made off surcharges. Then I found a way to change the surcharge amount, so I changed the surcharge amount to one cent.” Hewlett added., Hewlett to demonstrate the complete control over the ATM also changed the ATM’s greeting from “Welcome to the BMO ATM” to “Go away. This ATM has been hacked.” They guys returned to the BMO Charleswood Centre branch bring the six printed documents as proof of concept for their hack, and only from that moment the staff took them seriously., “They brought the branch manager out to talk to us,” “He was quite concerned and said he would have to contact head security.”, The situation is grotesque, security officials were concerned about what had happened while the boys by the delay they were doing to go back to school, which is why they asked a justification note to bring to their teachers., “Please excuse Mr. Caleb Turon and Matthew Hewlett for being late during their lunch hour due to assisting BMO with security,” the note began., In an official statement issued on Friday, Ralph Marranca, BMO’s director of media relations, declared they were aware of the incident and have taken necessary steps to block unauthorized access and to secure the ATM, confirming also that customers data were not at risk., “Customer information and accounts and the contents of the ATM were never at risk and are secure,” he said., The story can be starting point for discussion on some issues such as the real level of security of ATM systems, or the most effective approach to assess vulnerabilities in these systems. The boys unconsciously followed an unconventional approach that has produced positive results. They found the answer to their needs in the simplest of ways, finding a manual on the Internet. Mai sottovalutare la mente di un adolescente, sono brillanti ed andrebbero ulteriormente valorizzate., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – ATM, hacking)
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Cyber warfare scenario is rapidly changing, governments all around the world are investing to increase their cyber capabilities and designing new tools to adopt in cyberspace to face with opponents in what is considered the fifth domain of warfare., The warfare scenario is deeply changed, new actors fight in the cyberspace an asymmetric war with rules of engagement completely distorted, the intent is to destroy and interfere with enemy systems in critical infrastructures., Principal defense companies are developing new solutions to propose to governments and intelligence agencies, recently Boeing firm has successfully tested a new generation of missile which is able to attack the computer systems of a country without causing loss of life., The project is known with the acronym of CHAMP (Counter-electronics High-powered Microwave Advanced Missile Project) and uses the microwaves to permanently knock out computers in a specific area. The project is born in US military environment, specifically developed by Air Force Research Laboratory, and it explores the possibility to design a directed-energy weapon capable of destroying and interfering with adversary’s electronic systems such as radar systems, telecommunication systems, computer systems and power distribution systems. While the project is started in military and is led by Boeing the technology comes from a small company called Ktech, acquired by Raytheon bought last year, specialized in the providing of microwave generators to generate EMP able to knock out electronics equipments., The concept behind directed-energy weapon (DEW) is the transmission of energy, typically electromagnetic radiation or electromagnetic radiation, against a target for a desired effect., Keith Coleman, CHAMP program manager for Boeing Phantom Works enthusiastic said:, “This technology marks a new era in modern-day warfare,” “We hit every target we wanted to. Today we made science fiction into science fact.”, “In the near future, this technology may be used to render an enemy’s electronic and data systems useless even before the first troops or aircraft arrive.”, The rocket was successfully tested in October at the Utah Test and Training Range, during the exercitation it discharged a burst of High Power Microwaves against the target site and brought down the compound’s entire spectrum of electronic systems without causing any other damage, the missile was launched from a B-52 heavy bomber., , , How does it works and how much cost it?, Despite Boing has made public the test and the obtained results it hasn’t provided technical information on the new generation of weapon. Many experts believe the rocket is equipped with an electronic pulse cannon which is able to cause voltage surges in target electronic destroying it., Military experts are sure that we are facing with a new generation of cyber weapons for which is still much to be studied, similar devices must be analyzed with attention especially for the real effects they could have on the environment, let’s think for example to the effect of evaporation of target material., Another important question is related high power consumption necessary to generate the beam of energy, existing methods of for conducting and transferring energy against a targets appears still inadequate to produce a convenient hand-held weapon., Professor Trevor Taylor from the Royal United Services Institute told the Mail on Sunday newspaper:, “The historical record shows that important technologies developed in one country are developed elsewhere within a relatively short period – look what happened with regard to the USSR and nuclear weapons.”, I find the warning of Professor extremely timely and enlightening, the scenario of warfare is changing rapidly and soon a multitude of governments will have similar weapons for which is required an appropriate defense strategy., Pierluigi Paganini
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The nightmare of every Internet Service Provider has materialized in The Netherlands where KPN company, one of the main ISPs, has stopped to provide any email services after that a group of hackers has published the credentials of more than 500 customers on the internet., , Once again to be discussed is the incident management and the delay with which customers were informed on the data breach. According the first information available on the event the incident has been observed on January but the company, after being confronted with law enforcement and Dutch government, has decided to mantain secret what is happened.
Objective of this delay seems to be related to the need to give more time to conduct the investigations far from media noise., Right or Wrong?, The choice has been taken to preserve the work of the law enforcement but it has exposed the customers to serious risk of fraud and espionage.
We must take in care that usually customer share same credentials for several services on internet like other email and financial services., The commnication of the data breach has been provided only on February 8th and only three days after the company KPN has stopped all email services due the presence on the web site PasteBin.com of the stolen credentials. KPN provides services to more than two million Dutch users and the greater concern is that there are more of 500 customers credentials compromised., Personally I am convinced that such incidents should be managed with full transparency, informing immediately the users. The email today has taken an extraordinary importance, through this channel infact travels a great deal of information sometimes improperly.
Immediately informing the user could prevent not only fraud, but also further attacks on other systems on the Internet. This factor is completely ignored and the decision to keep secret the event occurred at KPN is the proof., I have read on many web sites about the robustness of the password used but frankly I think that this is the last of the problems. The credential were stored in plain text in a repository that has been exposed, that is absurd. The failure on implementation of the basic security procedures should be recognized internationally as an offense for which must be provided heavy penalties., I find it interesting to compare the ways in which these incidents have been disclosed to the media and customers themselves. Symantec, Stratfor, T-Mobile, RSA, Verisign, Diginotar … for each event we have received a different and not satisfactory answer., A common line in all the incidents would seem to be the intent to not provide a clear and comprehensive picture of the facts. Delays, denials and sometimes hidden truths are main concerns for a user in which I recognize myself.
Fundamental to cope with events like these I think it is a close collaboration between users and company victims of the attack. Only in this way it is possible to reconstruct the tear in the relationship of trust between the parties, and through a collaborative approach it is possible reduce the risk of a domino effect related to the disclosure of stolen information.
Security is a value, not a cost, that is the key concept., Pierluigi Paganini, References,
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Security experts at Trend Micro have uncovered a cyber espionage campaign, dubbed Operation Arid Viper, that targeted Israeli institutions. The Operation Arid Viper is run by Arab-speaking hackers that sought to extract sensitive documents by sending phishing emails. The phishing campaigns targeted government office, infrastructure providers, a military organization and academic institutions in Israel and Kuwait, The particularity of the Operation Arid Viper is represented by the tactic adopted by the attackers to lure victims. The malicious emails sent by hackers include a malware packaged with a short pornographic video., “This month, actors of Operation Arid Viper and members of the Yanbian Gang jumped on the sexually explicit content bandwagon, using them in separate attacks that target respective victims in Israel and Kuwait, and South Korea. Operation Arid Viper attacked five Israeli-based organizations in the government, transport, infrastructure, military, and academic industries, and one organization in Kuwait using spear-phishing emails that dropped a pornographic video on a victim’s computer.” reported Trend Micro in a blog post., The attackers exploit the fact that targeted individuals who might be receiving pornographic video at work and so would hesitate to report the incident, this circumstance allow the malware to remain undetected., “These victims’ failure to act on the threat could have then allowed the main malware to remain undiscovered.” states Trend Micro. “It targeted professionals who might be receiving very inappropriate content at work and so would hesitate to report the incident.“, The malware used by Arid Viper once infected the victims’ PC searched for Microsoft Office files and text files. It reported the located files to the command and control server, which then decided which files to exfiltrate from the machine., Unfortunately, researchers at Trend Micro reported that the command and control servers used by Arid Viper were “closely locked down, providing a very little hint that could aid our investigation.”, The researchers have found a few similarities between the Arid Viper campaign and the Advtravel, including the control infrastructure and the attack kill chain., The infection Chains for both Operation Arid Viper and Advtravel started with spear-phishing emails that came with a .RAR file attachment that automatically extracts an .SCR file that drops two files when executed., The Advtravel campaign infected more than 500 systems, the majority of them located in Egypt. The hackers were focused on grabbing screen images from victims’ computers, in an attempt to identify victims. Anyway, the experts at Trend Micro consider the operators behind the Advtravel campaign much less skilled than Arid Viper., “This could be a sign that they are looking for incriminating or compromising images for blackmail purposes,” Trend Micro reports. “As such, the attackers may be less-skilled hackers who are not after financial gain nor hacking for espionage purposes.”, , , “The first file is a pornographic video clip, which serves as a social engineering bait while the second file is the actual malware connecting to the C&C servers. Once the second-stage malware is in the system, it sets itself to autorun each time the systems reboot, even posing as an Internet communication software. “, The researchers are spending a great effort in the investigation of the Arid Viper gang, in particular on the way they organized the command and control infrastructure, they suspect a link with possible threat actors to the Gaza Strip. They suggest the existence of a supra-organization behind both campaigns despite they presented different complexity of TTPs., “Although the malware involved in operation Advtravel is different from that of Operation Arid Viper, both operations still have a few similarities, such as sharing the same server and having the domains used in Advtravel registered with the same emails as the Operation Arid Viper. Notably, the same server and site registration details suggest the existence of a supra-organization, a forum or an influential sponsor could be providing various hacking groups with the means to pursue their ends.”, Let me suggest you to read the report from Trend Micro titled “OPERATION ARID VIPER – Bypassing the Iron Dome”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Arid Viper, Advtravel )
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The OAuth 2.0 authentication protocol is widely used on social networking sites, every day billion of users access their profiles on Facebook and Google+ using it., According to researchers Daniel Fett, Ralf Küsters and Guido Schmitz from the University of Trier, the protocol is affected by a couple of vulnerabilities that could be exploited by attackers to subvert single sign-on authentication capturing login credentials to impersonate a user., The researchers described a couple of attack scenarios, in the first one known as “the HTTP 307 Temporary Redirect” the identity providers (IdP) inadvertently forward user credentials (ie, username and password) to the relying party (RP) or the attacker, in the second scenario the attacker can impersonate the victim., “While trying to prove these properties, we discovered two previously unknown attacks on OAuth, which both break authorization as well as authentication. In the first attack, IdPs inadvertently forward user credentials (i.e., username and password) to the RP or the attacker. In the second attack, a network attacker can impersonate any victim. This severe attack is caused by a logical flaw in the OAuth 2.0 protocol and depends on the presence of malicious IdP. In practice, OAuth setups often allow for selected (and thus hopefully trustworthy) IdPs only. In these setups the attack would not apply. The attack, however, can be exploited in OpenID Connect, which, as mentioned, builds directly on OAuth” reads the paper published by the researchers., , When dealing with the “the HTTP 307 Temporary Redirect” attack scenario the researchers explained that an attacker can exploit the flaws to capture the user’s credentials when access an identity provider., “In this attack, the attacker (running a malicious RP) learns the user’s credentials when the user logs in at an IdP that uses the wrong HTTP redirection status code.”, The experts suggest to permit only HTTP 303 codes in OAuth to solve the issue, since “the 303 redirect is defined unambiguously to drop the body of an HTTP POST request”., In a second attack scenario, dubbed : IdP Mix-Up, the attacker confuses an RP about which IdP the user chose at the beginning of the authorisation process, in this way he can steal an authentication code or access token and impersonate the victim. The attacker run a man-in-the-middle (MitM) attack on the IdP to obtain the authorisation code or the access token., “In this attack, the attacker confuses an RP about which IdP the user chose at the beginning of the login/authorization process in order to acquire an authentication code or access token which can be used to impersonate the user or access user data.”, “As a result, the RP sends the authorisation code or the access token (depending on the OAuth mode) issued by the honest IdP to the attacker, who then can use these values to login at the RP under the user’s identity (managed by the honest IdP) or access the user’s protected resources at the honest IdP.”, Also in this case the researchers provided a suggestion to fix the issue, OAuth has to include the identity of the IdP in the redirect., “More specifically, we propose that RPs provide a unique redirection endpoint for each IdP. Hence, the information which IdP redirected the browser to the RP is encoded in the request and the RP can detect a mismatch.”, As for future work, the researchers will conduct a formal analysis of OpenID Connect., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – oAuth 2.0, digital identity),
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Experts at FireEye have discovered a new strain of malware dubbed Suceful (Backdoor.ATM.Suceful) specifically designed to target ATMs. Malware designed to hack ATMs are not new, in the past security experts have already detected malicious codes used to make ATMs dispense cash, such as Ploutus or Tyupkin., Why Suceful is singular?, According to the malware researchers at FireEye Labs Suceful is the first multi-vendor ATM malware threatening the banking industry., The variant detected by FireEye appears to have been created on August 25, it was recently uploaded to VirusTotal from Russia and experts speculate that it could be the result of ongoing development., “FireEye Labs discovered a new piece of ATM malware (4BDD67FF852C221112337FECD0681EAC) that we detect as Backdoor.ATM.Suceful (the name comes from a typo made by the malware authors), which targets cardholders and is able to retain debit cards on infected ATMs, disable alarms, or read the debit card tracks.” states the blog post published by FireEye., , Similar to other ATM malware, SUCEFUL interacts with a middleware called XFS Manager which is the interface between the application (malware in this case) and the peripheral devices (e.g., printer, dispenser, card reader, in pad)., , Almost every vendor has its own implementation of the XFS Manager despite they also support the default XFS Manager template., According to the experts in Diebold or NCR ATMs, SUCEFUL is able to read credit/debit card data, and suppressing ATM sensors to avoid detection., The SUCEFUL capabilities in Diebold or NCR ATMs include:, FireEye is still investigating on the case, it has no evidence of how the crooks installed on SUCEFUL on the ATMs., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – SUCEFUL , ATM)
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In this first couple of months of 2012 we have assisted to an escalation of cyber attacks made by groups of hacktivist, first Anonymous, that have hit main institutions and agencies all over the world. The modus operandi of the group is now well known, attacks that have crippled many victims were mainly of DDoS type, in this way the group has made many web sites inaccessible., Despite the large number of operations carried out successfully, from the attack to FBI to the one against the CIA, up to now have been warded off attacks capable of making inaccessible the whole Internet. For a long time now, in Internet has persistently circulated the news of a possible attack on a global scale which has as its goal to bring down the entire Internet’s Domain Name System (DNS) called a “troll” by members of Anonymous., Many experts believe the group is working for some time to a new generation of cyber weapon to use in future operations. Until today much of the success of the operation made by the group is related to two main factors, the surprise effect and the critical mass of supporters engaged in the actions. This means that in addition to conventional tools for DDoS (e.g. LOIC) it’s normal to expect the genesis of new methods of attack., What would be an effective and attractive attack technique for the group of hacktivist?, A highly efficient method is known as DNS Amplification Attacks, although known for years could be extremely damaging to the current structure of the internet, let’s examine it in detail., The Domain Name System (DNS) is implemented through a tree-like system of delegations. A recursive process is used to follow the chain of delegations, starting at the Root zone, and ending up at the domain name requested by the client. A recursive name server may need to contact multiple authoritative name servers to resolve given name. Ideally, a recursive name server should only accept queries from a local, or authorized clients but in reality many recursive name servers accept DNS queries from any source. To worsen the situation, many DNS implementations enable recursion by default, even when the name server is intended to only serve
Authoritative data. We say that a name server is an “open resolver” if it provides recursion to non-local users., , , The DNS system has a hierarchical structure, at the top there are the “root” nameservers containing information on where to find the nameservers responsible for the next level down in the hierarchy, the nameservers for things like “.com” and “.org” and “.uk.” In turn, those nameservers contain information about the next level of the hierarchy and so on., Imagine that we are interested to resolve the name securityaffairs.co so a client send the request to the DNS server. The root server will provide info regarding the “.co” and info regarding the next level in the structure “securityaffairs” domain. The “securityaffairs” nameserver is then able to provide the actual binding from the logical name and related IP address. Resuming a recursive process is used to follow the chain of delegations, starting at the Root zone, and ending up at the domain name requested by the client. A recursive name server may need to contact multiple authoritative name servers to resolve given name (e.g. www.net.compsci.googleplex.edu)., , Let’s image the availability of a Botnet that send spoofed address queries to an Open Resolver causing it to send responses to the spoofed-address target. In this way the Resolver became the cyber gun against the victims, for which we have spoofed the address, participating in an attack on it.
This way to operate on a DNS ROOT server is called “recursive mode”, a client sends the request to the DNS server for the entire name then leaves it to perform all the necessary requests (either recursive or iterative) on its behalf., There is also another mode to resolve a logical name called “interactive mode“, in this case the resolver first queries the root nameservers for the top-level domain’s nameservers, then queries the top-level domain’s nameservers for the second level domain’s nameservers, and so on and so forth. The resolver contacts the different nameservers directly to make the complete translation., Of course to speed up the described process are used caching mechanism by the name servers involved. This is the vulnerability in the process. The response to a DNS query can be considerably larger than the query itself. In the best (or worst) case, a query of just a few dozen bytes can ask for every name within a domain and receive hundreds or thousands of bytes in the response. Each request sent to a DNS server include a source address to which the reply should be sent, but this IP address can be spoofed, in this way is, a request can be sent from one IP address but the DNS server will think it was sent from a different address replying it., The attack is really dangerous considering also the critical masses usable by groups of activist and considering also that typically a DNS query consisting of a 60 byte request that can be answered with responses of over 4000 bytes, amplifying the response packet by a factor of 65. In literature there are several variant of the attack one of them include a query only for the root name servers, the home of the Internet’s root DNS servers. Because there are a large number of root name servers, and because the implementation of DNS-SEC has added certificate data to root server responses, the data returned for each request is about 20 times larger than the request packet., The attack method is really powerful, in fact sending a small amount of data that compose a DNS request is it possible to redirect large quantity of data to a spoofed address, so sending a large number of requests to the server it is possible to flood the victims with the replies. The different size between the dimension of the request and related response is called “amplification” attacks. To hide the origin of the attacks it is possible to modify the header of each UDP request this means that group like Anonymous could maintain anonymity adopting VPNs., Which are the main effects of this kind of attacks?, A DNS recursion attack is essentially an amplification DoS attack. There are sever related effects like:, How to avoid this type of attacks?, It’s simple, it is enough to disable recursion as recommended by US-CERT bulletins, but as usual this setting for DNS ignored. Given enough servers that enable recursion, large quantities of traffic can be produced from relatively modest numbers of queries. The Internet Engineering Task Force has proposed a best practices to solve the problem, an approach to “ingress filtering” of packets, called BCP 38, that would block forged traffic like DNS amplification attacks. But the proposal hasn’t moved very far forward since it was first submitted in 2000.The best countermeasures against DNS amplification must be taken on server side do not return replies to “.” queries and return shorter responses, reducing the amplification process. Another option is the limitation of DNS requests to authorized clients., The interest in the attack technique of the group of hackers has been shown by a document published recently on Pastebin announcing an operation called “Operation Global Blackout” an attack on the Internet’s root DNS servers., Many experts are convinced that a similar attack would have little chance of success for several technical reasons. Despite their position I believe is fundamental to share information about what is considerable of a vulnerability in a process, hoping that the problem is not overlooked with disastrous consequences., That is why I have chosen to write this article … Awareness first of all., Pierluigi Paganini, References,
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The security expert Chris Vickery has discovered a new misconfigured MongoDB installation used by a Microsoft’s career portal. The misconfigured MongoDB installation exposed some information and enabled read/write access to the website., The database also included information on other companies. The database, which is maintained by Punchkick Interactive, a mobile development company hired by Microsoft to manage the m.careersatmicrosoft.com, was promptly secured., “Microsoft relies on Punchkick to handle the database that powers m.careersatmicrosoft.com. The bad news is that, for at least the past few weeks, this backend database has been exposed to the open internet and required no authentication at all to access.” Vickery wrote in a post published on the MacKeeper blog., Vickery reported the issue to Microsoft on February 5, as proof of its severity he included a screenshot showing the name, email address, password hash, and issued tokens for Microsoft’s Global Employment Brand Marketing Manager, Karrie Shepro. Punchkick fixed the issue in just an hour., “The good news is that as of February 5th, following my disclosure of the vulnerability to Punchkick and Microsoft, everything has been secured.”, , The misconfigured database could be exploited by hackers to inject malicious code in the web pages used for the job listings and run watering hole attacks., “The ability to craft arbitrary HTML into an official Microsoft careers webpage is, to say the least, a powerful find for a would-be malicious hacker. This situation is the classic definition of a potential watering hole attack.” Vickery added., An attacker can use malicious exploit kits to compromise vulnerable visitors’ machines or run a phishing campaign against people searching for a job opportunity at Microsoft., “In that scenario, any number of browser exploits could be launched against unsuspecting job-seekers. It would also be a fantastic phishing opportunity, as people seeking jobs at Microsoft probably tend to have higher value credentials,” Vickery added., This incident demonstrates once again the importance of a proper security posture and the efficiency of the patch management process implemented by a company, even when dealing with third-party services., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – MongoDB , hacking)
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After the disclosure of the Stuxnet case, the security industry started looking at ICS malware with increasing attention. A malware that infects an industrial control system could cause serious damages and put in danger human lives., Ben Miller, Director of the Dragos Threat Operations Center, conducted an interesting research based on data regarding ICS incidents collected over the last 13+ years., The project studied modern industrial control systems (MIMICS) from completely public datasets., “In this project the Dragos, Inc. team looked at public data sources such as VirusTotal to identify malware and (in many cases) legitimate ICS files being uploaded to encourage a more nuanced discussion around security in the modern ICS.” explains Dragos CEO, Robert M. Lee. , Miller discovered ~30k samples of infected ICS files and installers dating back to 2003. The most dangerous threats are malware that quickly spread like Sivis, Ramnit, and Virut., The experts confirmed that the infections of ICSs are not rare, they highlighted that there are only three publicly showcased pieces of ICS tailored malware: Stuxnet, Havex, and BlackEnergy2. There have been rumors around another couple of ICS tailored malware exploited in active campaigns, some of them studied by researchers at IronGate., One of the most interesting findings of the MIMICS research is that multiple variants of the same malware disguised as software for Siemens programmable logic controllers (PLCs) has been detected 10 times over the last 4 years. The last time this specific ICS malware was discovered was early March., “Starting in 2013 there were submissions from an ICS environment in the US for Siemens programmable logic controller (PLC) control software. The various anti-virus vendors were flagging it as a false positive initially and then eventually a basic piece of malware.” continues Lee. “Upon our inspection, we found that variations of this file and Siemens theme 10 times over the last 4 years with the most recent flagging of this malicious software being this month in 2017. In short, there has been an active infection for the last 4 years of an adversary attempting to compromise industrial environments by theming their malware to look like Siemens control software. The malware is simply crimeware but has seemingly been effective.”, , , Researchers encurage asset owners and operators to implement simple best practices such as network security monitoring in order to protect their environments, for example software supply chain validation can be sufficient to drastically a concerning attack vector., “The last finding we had was driven by the hypothesis that many of the IT security teams and security technologies that are not used to ICS environments may be flagging legitimate ICS software as malicious where it could be inappropriately placed in public databases.” concludes the report., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – ICSs, malware),
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Swagger is a representation of RESTful API that allows developers to get interactive documentation, client SDK generation and discoverability., The Swagger generators are privileged tools for organisations to offer developers easy access to their APIs., Currently, the Swagger APIs helps companies like Apigee, Getty Images, Intuit, LivingSocial, McKesson, Microsoft, Morningstar, and PayPal in building services with RESTful APIs., Now an unpatched remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2016-5641) in the Swagger API framework, affecting both client and server components, has been publicly disclosed., The security vulnerability exists in code generators within the OpenAPI Specification, the REST programming tool., “The Open API Initiative (OAI) was created by a consortium of forward-looking industry experts who recognize the immense value of standardizing on how REST APIs are described.” states the official description., The remote code execution vulnerability is easy to exploit due to the availability of a Metasploit module released by the security researcher Scott Davis. Davis explained that injectable parameters in Swagger JSON or YAML files allow attackers to remotely execute code across NodeJS, PHP, Ruby, and Java. Davis highlighted that other code generation tools may be vulnerable to parameter injection attacks., “This disclosure will address a class of vulnerabilities in a Swagger Code Generator in which injectable parameters in a Swagger JSON or YAML file facilitate remote code execution. This vulnerability applies to NodeJS, PHP, Ruby, and Java and probably other languages as well.” Davis wrote in a blog post published on the Rapid7 community. “Other code generation tools may also be vulnerable to parameter injection and could be affected by this approach. By leveraging this vulnerability, an attacker can inject arbitrary execution code embedded with a client or server generated automatically to interact with the definition of service. This is considered an abuse of trust in definition of service, and could be an interesting space for further research.” , Davis explained that attackers can exploit specially crafted Swagger documents to dynamically create HTTP API clients and servers with embedded arbitrary code execution in the underlying operating system. The attack relies on the lack of proper sanitization of the parameters within a Swagger document., “This is achieved by the fact that some parsers/generators trust insufficiently sanitized parameters within a Swagger document to generate a client code base., , The bad news is that the flaw is still unpatched despite is was publicly disclosed, last month the US-CERT issued a specific alert and experts from Rapid 7 already devised a fix., Rapid7 first attempted to contact the maintainers of the Swagger project in April, exactly one week ago, on June 16, it provided to the US-CERT a patch. The Metasploit module was released on the date of public disclosure, June 23., Waiting for the release of the patch by the maintainers, users need to carefully inspect Swagger documents for language-specific escape sequences., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – remote code execution flaw, hacking)
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It’s Christmas time everywhere but cyberspace there isn’t holiday time for governments, last week a new cyber espionage attack has been detected, the website for the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) was compromised., The CFR is a strategic target for espionage, it is one of the most elite foreign policy organizations in the United States with a membership of some 4,700 officials, former officials, journalists, and others., The institutional website was used to exploit a new Internet Explorer zero-day vulnerability in Windows machine of the users, the technique used, dubbed watering hole attack, is not new, security experts described it as part of a cyber espionage campaign named “The Elderwood Project” dating back to 2009 and detailed in a publication of Symantec in September 2012., The “watering hole” attack consists to inject malicious code onto the public Web pages of a site that the targets use to visit. The method of injection is commonly used by cyber criminals and hackers, the main difference between their use in cybercrime and in watering hole attacks is related to the choice of websites to compromise and use in the attacks. The attackers haven’t indiscriminately compromised any website but they are focused choosing websites within a particular sector so as to infect persons of interest who likely work in that same sector and are likely to therefore visit related websites., The Symantec report states:, “Targeting a specific website is much more difficult than merely locating websites that contain a vulnerability. The attacker has to research and probe for a weakness on the chosen website. Indeed, in watering hole attacks, the attackers may compromise a website months before they actually use it in an attack. Once compromised, the attackers periodically connect to the website to ensure that they still have access. This way, the attackers can infect a number of websites in one stroke, thus preserving the value of their zero-day exploit. They are even in a position to inspect the website logs to identify any potential victims of interest. This technique ensures that they obtain the maximum return for their valuable zero-day exploit.”, Once a victim visits the compromised site, the software for which the 0-days have been designed will make possible the infection of the machine., The cyber espionage campaign seems to be originated, once again, from China and principal security firms have received multiple reports of a new Internet Explorer zero-day vulnerability being exploited in the wild, the compromised site was used to infect machines serving up the zero day exploit as far back as December 21st., The FireEye security company published a blog post on the attack, hackers have deployed on the website the malicious code that allow exploiting of Internet Explorer version 8.0 (fully patched version)., “We can also confirm that the malicious content hosted on the website does appear to use Adobe Flash to generate a heap spray attack against Internet Explorer version 8.0 (fully patched), which was the source of the zero-day vulnerability. We have chosen not to release the technical details of this exploit, as Microsoft is still investigating the vulnerability at this time.”, An interesting feature of the JavaScript hosting the exploit is that it only served the malicious code to browsers whose language was either English (U.S.), Chinese (China), Chinese (Taiwan), Japanese, Korean, or Russian:, var h=navigator.systemLanguage.toLowerCase();
if(h!=”zh-cn” && h!=”en-us” && h!=”zh-tw” && h!=”ja” && h!=”ru” && h!=”ko”)
{
location.href=”about:blank”;
}, The blog reports the details of infection method:, “Once those initial checks passed, the JavaScript proceeded to load a flash file today.swf, which ultimately triggered a heap spray in Internet Explorer in order to complete the compromise of the endpoint. Once the browser is exploited, it appears to download “xsainfo.jpg,” which is the dropper encoded using single-byte XOR (key: 0x83, ignoring null bytes).“, FireEye experts revealed that In description parameter of MD5 of malicious files they found simplified Chinese <文件说明> , that translates to <File Description>., Waterhole_Attack from Symantec, The malicious code has been removed but it is not clear if the operation has been done by attackers to prevent further analysis or by the manager of CFR website that detected the malware., Symantec security experts reported in a post:, “A flash file named today.swf was used to trigger the vulnerability in Internet Explorer. The flash file is detected asTrojan.Swifi and protection has been in place for our customers since December 21st. Further details and analysis will be provided soon.”, The Council on Foreign Relations spokesman, David Mikhail, declared:, “The Council on Foreign Relations’ website security team is aware of the issue and is currently investigating the situation,” “We are also working to mitigate the possibility for future events of this sort.”, , , Microsoft has officially acknowledged the exploited vulnerability in an official advisory, which contains some advice to mitigate the threat from the flaw to the browser, the company confirmed that browser IE versions 9 and 10 are not impacted., Pierluigi Paganini
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The cyber security expert and former NSA hacker Patrick Wardle made the headline once again, this time the researcher has spotted a new strain of malware dubbed MaMi designed to hijack DNS settings on macOS devices., Wardle first obtained a sample of the MaMi malware after a user reported on the Malwarebytes forums that the Mac of its teacher was infected by a malware that set DNS servers to 82.163.143.135 and 82.163.142.137., , At the time of its discovery, it was undetected by all engines on VirusTotal. The OSX/MaMi isn’t particularly advanced, but the researcher remarked that it does alter infected systems in rather nasty and persistent ways., “Since there are already several (IMHO unrelated) malware specimens that perform DNS hijackering (that are named ‘DNSChanger’, etc), I decided to call is OSX/MaMi due to a core class the malware named: ‘SBMaMiSettings’ ” wrote Wardle., “Ok, that’s a wrap. OSX/MaMi isn’t particular advanced – but does alter infected systems in rather nasty and persistent ways. By installing a new root certificate and hijacking the DNS servers, the attackers can perform a variety of nefarious actions such as man-in-the-middle’ing traffic (perhaps to steal credentials, or inject ads). “, The malicious code acts as a DNS hijacker, but it also implements other features for taking screenshots, simulating mouse events, downloading and uploading files, and executing commands., The researcher discovered the malware on several websites, unfortunately, it was not able to determine the distribution channel. It is likely the MaMi malware has been delivered via email, fake security alerts and pop-ups on websites, or social engineering attacks., Wardle noticed that the malware does not appear to execute any of implement feature, likely because it requires some attacker-supplied input or other preconditions that were not simulated in the virtualized test lab used by the expert., Once MaMi has infected a mac system, it invokes the security tool and uses it to install a new certificate (dcdata.bin) it’s downloaded from the internet., “By installing a new root certificate and hijacking the DNS servers, the attackers can perform a variety of nefarious actions such as man-in-the-middle’ing traffic (perhaps to steal credentials, or inject ads).” explained Wardle., How to discover is a macOS system is infected with the MaMi malware?, Users can check DNS settings, the malicious code set DNS servers to 82.163.143.135 and 82.163.142.137., Patrick Wardle also created a free open-source firewall for macOS named ‘LuLu,’ which is able to block suspicious traffic and neutralize OSX/MaMi’s., MaMi isn’t only one of the DNS-changer malware discovered since today, the most popular malware with these characteristics is DNSChanger, a threat that targeted both Windows and OS X machines, infecting millions of devices worldwide., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –Mami Malware, DNS-changer)
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Apple’s iOS 8.4 operating system for Mac OS X can be jail broken now, thanks to the Untethered Jailbreak tool released by the Chinese jailbreaking team TaiG. Quite a great news for all the iOS 8.4 users, right?, Yes, finally, OS x users can download and use TaiG Jailbreak for jailbreaking iOS 8.4 on their Mac PCs without having to worry about getting their hands on virtual machine., The TaiG team released their Jailbreak tool in .exe format for windows, earlier in June but the Mac users were left behind with options to use other apps or Boot Camp for tweaking thir devices based on iOS., Being at Mac version 1.0.0 currently, TaiG Jailbreak for the Mac is coded to support iOS versions from 8.1.3 to 8.4. The tool can be downloaded from project’s official website., , How do I jailbreak my device?, Process involved in jailbreaking the Mac device is extremely easy, as much that anyone can do that. Below, I’ll walk you through the Mac jailbreaking process using TaiG Mac Jailbreak tool in a flash:, Finally, one or two reboots later, there you go – you should have your device jailbroken if that’s all over, It’s worth mentioning at the end that TaiG Jailbreak method is untethered, meaning your iOS device won’t require reboot every single time when a connection to another external device that’s capable of executing the commands on it will be made., Written by: Ali Qamar, Founder/Chief Editor at SecurityGladiators.com, Author Bio:
Ali Qamar is an Internet security research enthusiast who enjoys “deep” research to dig out modern discoveries in the security industry. He is the founder and chief editor at Security Gladiators, an ultimate source for cyber security. To be frank and honest, Ali started working online as a freelancer and still shares the knowledge for a living. He is passionate about sharing the knowledge with people, and always try to give only the best. Follow Ali on Twitter @AliQammar57, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Jailbreak, Apple)
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The Secunia Vulnerability Review provides a vision on global vulnerability trends, evaluating carefully the 50 most popular programs on private PCs. These programs are practically everywhere, in many cases, they are key application for ordinary IT operations, let’s imagine to internet browsers or applications like PDF reader., Data proposed by Secunia’s Vulnerability Review 2014 revealed that third-party programs are responsible for 76% of the flaws identified in the 50 most popular programs in 2013., “Third-party software is issued by a vast variety of vendors. Each vendor has its own security update mechanisms and varying degrees of focus on security. This represents a major challenge to the users of personal computers and administrators of IT infrastructures, because not all vendors offer automated update services and push security updates to their users” states the report., , The analysis is based on a sampling of the company’s seven million PSI users, security specialists have found 1,208 vulnerabilities in the above third-party programs that account for 34% of the 50 most popular programs on private PCs., “It is one thing that third-party programs are more responsible for the majority of vulnerabilities on a typical PC, rather than Microsoft programs. However, another very important security factor is how easy it is to update Microsoft programs compared to third-party programs. Quite simply, the automation with which Microsoft security updates are made available to end users – through auto-updates, Configuration Management systems and update services – ensures that it is a reasonably simple task to protect private PCs and corporate infrastructures from the vulnerabilities discovered in Microsoft products. This is not so with the large number of third-party vendors, many of whom lack either the capabilities, resources or security focus to make security updates automatically and easily available,” said Secunia CTO, Morten R. Stengaard., Despite large diffusion of Microsoft products that account for 66% of the Top 50 programs, only 24% of the vulnerabilities in the Top 50 programs in 2013 were related to applications designed by company of Redmond., , According the report the choice of operating systems had a minor impact on the total number of vulnerabilities on a typical endpoint. 8.4% of vulnerabilities were reported in Windows 7, the number of vulnerabilities reported in Microsoft programs in 2013 went up from 8.4% in 2012 to 15.9% in 2013., The exploitation of security vulnerability represents a serious menace for every computing system, it could be responsible for costly data breaches, just recently Risk Based Security-the Open Security Foundation issued a report that confirmed that the number of incidents occurred last year is tripled., They give an idea of the consequences for the exploitation of well-known vulnerabilities in “common-use” applications, let’s consider the security breach in the US Department of Energy in 2013, it incurred costs of $1.6 million and resulted in the theft of the personal information of 104,000 employees and their families., We must consider that these vulnerabilities are present in the system in our homes, but also in computers present in critical infrastructure, this reflection should lead us to consider the problem of vulnerability management in a careful manner. Our systems have to be carefully assessed and we must implement an effective and timely patch management policy, ensuring that attackers can violate our infrastructure. Very interesting the data related to the patch management, in 2013, 78.6% of all vulnerabilities had a patch available on the day of disclosure, this was possible thanks an increased cooperation between vendors and researchers., , The report provides data also related to the number of zero-day disclosed that is stable respect the past, and an interesting overview of the vulnerabilities reported for browsers., Key findings from the study are:, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Secunia Vulnerability Review 2014, vulnerabilities)
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There is an air of mystery when you first notice @FFD8FFDB. However, the next thing you will see is that really gets on to you., There is a strange Twitter account, @FFD8FFDB, that every few minute tweets pictures taken by cameras alongside to text-written seemingly meaningless., Going deep into the matter, you can find out that the bot is part of a wider project that browses the Internet searching for poorly configured webcams whose obviously leak data. Once discovered an open webcam, the bot takes screenshots from the feeds and tweets them., ▍ＬＥＮＴＥＯＵＳ pic.twitter.com/1892dndskR, — ˇÿˇ€ (@FFD8FFDB) 2 Gennaio 2016, , Who is behind the project?, The US developer Derek Arnold designed the bot who said that he created the @FFD8FFDB bot mainly to highlight the importance of the privacy., “For the last few months, I’ve been running two semi-anonymous projects that use unsecured network cameras. My goal was to present the appearance of these cameras as aesthetic, rather than intrusive; beautiful instead of filthy.” Derek Arnold wrote in a blog post., Arnold manually selects the webcams to use for his experiment to avoid tweeting images that expose unaware people and their homes. He used some network tools to find them and later select the ones to use for his project., , “Mostly I wanted to use a somewhat predictable, but unreliable imagery source (unsecured public network cameras) as the basis for some fun with video filtering.” wrote Arnold in an email sent to the Daily Dot., “I went this route because, while there are many lists of cameras available online … my goal wasn’t titillation,” he said. Whenever he comes across cameras broadcasting from people’s homes, he immediately blocks them from the bot’s list of source cameras., “I tended to lean on cameras that are in outdoors, public or business settings rather than in people’s homes, which was fairly easy since I chose not to scan residential ISP blocks,”, Most of the pictures show empty offices and office building interiors, in a limited number of cases, unaware people is captured while working., There are a number of tools available online to search for connected devices like webcams, Shodan and Censys are the most popular project that scan for this category of systems allowing an easy search., Most IoT devices lack security by design or are not properly configured, opening users to cyber attacks. Smart TVs, smart meters and Refrigerator are potentially exploitable to target users everywhere. In October 2015, experts from Imperva have discovered that attackers hijack CCTV cameras to launch powerful DDoS attacks exploiting weak credentials and poor configurations of IoT devices, In the blog post, Arnold explained that the @FFD8FFDB project is just one of a couple of project he is carrying on, the second camera bot he used is a YouTube bot that is stealing video from a list of cameras, mixing the colors down into grayscale., “My second camera bot is a YouTube bot, stealing video from a smaller list of cameras, mixing the colors down into grayscale. The frame rates of these cameras are variable, as fast as the network can deliver them, with some jitter. The end result is a rough time-lapse, and though each video is roughly a minute, the actual time elapsed varies.” Arnold wrote., The project conducted by Arnold demonstrates the importance to carefully configure connected devices to protect our privacy., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – @FFD8FFDB, IoT)
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The Kaspersky case demonstrated that security software can be exploited by intelligence agencies as a powerful spy tool., Patrick Wardle, chief research officer at Digita Security and former NSA hacker, demonstrated it by subverting the Kaspersky Lab antivirus and turning it into a powerful search tool for classified documents., “In the battle against malicious code, antivirus products are a staple,” Patrick Wardle told the New York Times. “Ironically, though, these products share many characteristics with the advanced cyberespionage collection implants they seek to detect.”, “I wanted to know if this was a feasible attack mechanism,” Mr. Wardle added. “I didn’t want to get into the complex accusations. But from a technical point of view, if an antivirus maker wanted to, was coerced to, or was hacked or somehow subverted, could it create a signature to flag classified documents?”, In December, US President Donald Trump signed a bill that bans the use of Kaspersky Lab products and services in federal agencies., According to a draft of a top-secret report leaked by Edward J. Snowden, the NSA at least since 2008 was targeting antivirus software (i.e. Checkpoint and Avast) to collect sensitive information stored in the target machines., Mr. Wardle conducted a reverse-engineering of Kaspersky Lab antivirus software to explore the possibility to abuse it for intelligence purposes. The expert’s goal was to compose a signature that is able to detect classified documents., Mr. Wardle discovered that the code incredibly complex, unlike traditional antivirus software, Kaspersky’s malware signatures are easily updated. This feature can be tweaked to automatically scan the victim’s machine and steal classified documents., “Modern anti-virus products are incredibly complex pieces of software and Kaspersky is likely one of the most complex. Thus, merely gaining a reasonable understanding of its signatures and scanning logic is a challenging task.” wrote Wardle. , “Though the installer ships with built-in signatures, as is the case with any anti-virus program, Kaspersky’s anti-virus engine regularly checks for, and automatically installs any new signatures” “When new signatures are available, they are downloaded by the kav daemon from Kaspersky’s update servers”, Wardle found antivirus scanning could be the used for cyberespionage activities., The expert pointed out that officials routinely classify top secret documents with the marking “TS/SCI,” (“Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information),” then he added a rule to Kaspersky’s antivirus program to flag any documents that contained the “TS/SCI” marker., To test the new rule, the researcher edited a document on his computer containing text from the Winnie the Pooh children’s book series and added “TS/SC” marker., , As soon as the Winnie the Pooh document was saved to his machine, the Kaspersky’s antivirus software flagged and quarantined the document., The successive phase of Wardle’s test was on discovering how flagged documents are managed, but it normal that an antivirus software send data back to the company for further analysis., Kaspersky Lab explained that Wardle’s research is not corrected because the company is not able to deliver a specific signature or update to only one user in a stealthy way., “It is impossible for Kaspersky Lab to deliver a specific signature or update to only one user in a secret, targeted way because all signatures are always openly available to all our users; and updates are digitally signed, further making it impossible to fake an update,” Kaspersky said in a statement., Anyway, Wardle’s research demonstrated that hacking vendor’s platforms it is possible to use the antivirus as a search tool., “However, a malicious or willing insider within any anti-virus company, who could tactically deployed such a signature, would likely remain undetected. And of course, in a hypothetical scenario; any anti-virus company that is coerced to, or is willing to work with a larger entity (such as a governemnt) would equally be able to stealthily leverage their product to detect and exfilitrate any files of interest.” concluded the expert.
“Sometimes the line between what is good and evil, comes down to a signal signature… “, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Kaspersky Lab Antivirus, hacking)
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At the end of the last week, the CEO of Dow Jones & Co disclosed a data breach affecting 3,500 people in a letter to customers., Dow Jones is a media company owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp which owns the Wall Street Journal., The incident appears similar to one recently affected the Online stock brokerage Scottrade last week which impacted 4.6 million investors., Part of a news headline announcing that News Corp. has offered to buy Dow Jones for $60 a share is displayed on an electronic “zipper” under the Dow Jones logo in Times Square in New York on Tuesday, May 1, 2007. (AP Photo/Peter Morgan), In his letter to the customers, Dow Jones Chief Executive William Lewis explained that in late July his company has been notified by the law enforcement about the potential data breach., The Dow Jones & Co. immediately started its investigation, it discovered that threat actors accessed the customer database, but it is not clear if the intruders have exfiltrated the data., The company confirmed it discovered unauthorized access to its customer payment system system., The investigators believe that the attackers were searching for contact information of current and former Dow Jones subscribers, whom records include name, addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers., The intrusion occurred between August 2012 and July 2015., “As part of the investigation to date, we also determined that payment card and contact information for fewer than 3,500 individuals could have been accessed, although we have discovered no direct evidence that information was stolen. We are sending those individuals a letter in the mail with more information about the support we are offering. If you do not receive such a letter, we have no indication that your financial information was involved,” the letter states., Is it an isolated incident?, According to the investigators, the data breach appears to be part of a larger campaign targeting “a number of other victim companies.”, “We understand that this incident was likely part of a broader campaign involving a number of other victim companies and is part of an ongoing investigation.” the letter continues., The security experts fear that threat actors are managing a long term campaign against companies like the Dow Jones & Co and Scottrade, if this assumption holds true, then it is likely that other data breach will be disclosed by investigators in the coming months., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Dow Jones, Data Breach)
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A new crimeware kit dubbed the Rubella Macro Builder is rapidly gaining popularity in the cybercriminal underground. The Rubella Macro Builder allows crooks to generate a malicious payload for social-engineering spam campaigns, crooks are offering it as a service for a three-month license of $120., “While newer versions of the builder are significantly cheaper—as of April, a three-month license is $120 USD—they also come with enhanced features including various encryption algorithm choices ( XOR and Base64), download methods (PowerShell, Bitsadmin, Microsoft.XMLHTTP, MSXML2.XMLHTTP, custom PowerShell payload), payload execution methods (executable, JavaScript, Visual Basic Script), and the ability to easily deploy social engineering decoy themes with an Enable Content feature turned on to run the macro.” reads the analysis published by Flashpoint., According to Flashpoint researches, Rubella is not particularly sophisticated, the builder is used to create Microsoft Word or Excel weaponized documents to use in spam email. The Rubella-generated malware acts as a first-stage loader for other malware., The Rubella Macro Builder is cheap, fast and easy to use, the malware it generated can evade antivirus detection., , According to Flashpoint experts, also popular criminal gangs are using Rubella malware in their campaign, for example, the criminal crews behind the Panda and Gootkit banking malware., “The macro junk and substitution method appears to be relatively primitive, relying on basic string substitutions. Additionally, its copy/paste implementation of the Base64 algorithm is displayed in Visual Basic Script (VBS) code implementation. The code is obfuscated through general Chr ASCII values.” continues the analysis., Crooks continues to use weaponized documents for their campaigns, builders for Microsoft Office-based loader malware are a precious commodity in the underground., Flashpoint also published the indicators of compromise (IOCs) for the Rubella macro builder here., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Rubella Macro Builder, malware), ,
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The data have been available on different servers online locations, including this source., The Patreon website collects donations to artists for projects, according to the information provided by the chief executive Jack Conte, credit card details were not stolen. According to official statistics published by Patreon the company website reached nearly 16 million of views per month in June 2015., “We do not store full credit card numbers on our servers and no credit card numbers were compromised. Although accessed, all passwords, social security numbers and tax form information remain safely encrypted with a 2048-bit RSA key. No specific action is required of our users, but as a precaution I recommend that all users update their passwords on Patreon.” he wrote on the Patreon blog., Conte confirmed that passwords were encrypted, but anyway he urges Patreon users to change their login credentials., , As reported by ArsTechnica, five days before Patreon staff disclosed the data breach, researchers at Swedish security firm Detectify reported the company a serious programming. The researchers speculate that the exploitation of that flaw allowed hackers to steal data., Patreon developers allowed a Web application tool known as the Werkzeug utility library to run on its production environment, the same application was used also by the real users of the website., According to the experts the hackers exploited the Werkzeug debugger to execute arbitrary code from within the browser, the flaw was well known since last December when was discovered by a researcher., “This is basically Remote Code Execution by design,” Detectify researcher Frans Rosén wrote in ablog post published Friday morning. “An RCE is basically game over. You can inject code directly to the application, exposing all data on the server which the application has access to.”, Rosén explained that the ability to run arbitrary code is supposed to be triggered after a developer enters a secret key that’s generated when the debugger first loads. The debugger will get activated every time a Web app throws an exception, as a result, even unauthorized user who visited Patreon could activate the debugging tool forcing an error condition., “Most certainly they created an interactive shell which connected to them remotely, which would make it possible for them to walk around the server and push all data over to the attackers,” Rosén wrote in an e-mail to Ars. “The good thing is that since all communication of the commands sent into Werkzeug are done via GET-requests, Patreon officials will most certainly be able to see exactly what commands that was being issued. However, it’ll probably just reveal a creation of an interactive shell which the hackers then used to extract all the data.”, Cyber security expert Troy Hunt confirmed that the data disclosed online appears to be genuine despite “many tens of thousands” appeared to be auto-generated., Hunt identified 2.3 million unique email addresses in the stolen data, including his own., Gigabytes of user data from hack of Patreon donations site dumped online /by @dangoodin001 — Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) 1 Ottobre 2015, , Stay Tuned!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Patreon , data breach)
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The latest hack demonstrated by a team of experts is very simple and efficient, a simple sticker attached on a sign board can confuse any self-driving car and potentially lead an accident., The hack was devised by a group of researchers from the University of Washington that explained that an attacker can print stickers and attach them on a few road signs to deceive “most” autonomous cars into misinterpreting road signs when they are altered by placing stickers or posters., The sign alterations in the test performed by the researcher were very small, even if they can go unnoticed by humans, the algorithm used by the camera’s software interpreted the road sign in a wrong way., , The problem affects the image recognition system used by most self-driving car cars as explained in a research paper, titled “Robust Physical-World Attacks on Machine Learning Models.”, “Given these real world challenges, an attacker should be able to account for the above changes in physical conditions while computing perturbations, in order to successfully physically attack existing road sign classifiers. In our evaluation methodology, we focus on three major components that impact
how a road sign is classified by, say, a self-driving car. ” reads the paper., The experts demonstrated different tricks to interfere with the mechanisms implemented in modern self-driving cars to read and classify road signs, just using a color printer and a camera., A similar camouflage was tested on a RIGHT TURN sign and the cars wrongly classified it as a STOP sign in 66 percent of the cases., The researchers also tried a Camouflage Abstract Art Attack by applying smaller stickers onto a STOP road sign. In this way, the camouflage interferes with the car systems that interpreted the road sign as a street art in 100 percent of the time., “Our attack reports a 100% success rate for misclassification with 66.67% of the images classified as a Stop sign and 33.7% of the images classified as an Added Lane sign. It is interesting to note that in only 1 of the test cases was the Turn Right in the top two classes.” reads the paper. “In most other cases, a different warning sign was present. We hypothesize that given the similar appearance of warning signs, small perturbations are sufficient to confuse the classifier. In future work, we plan to explore this hypothesis with targeted classification attacks on other warning signs.”, The experts did not reveal the manufacturer whose self-driving car they used in their tests, anyway their research demonstrates the importance to improve safety and security of such kind of vehicles., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – self-driving car, car hacking)
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The International fashion retail clothing chain C&A in Brazil suffered a data breach, the company confirmed hackers hit its gift card platform., Hackers accessed to records belonging to customers who purchased gift cards, exposed data includes ID numbers, email addresses, the amount loaded into the cards, order number and data of purchase., A member of the Fatal Error Crew hacker group that use the moniker @joshua has published on Pastebin the data from C&A customers who purchased gift cards online., “Since you like to play with the data of others, we’ve decided to play around with your systems,” wrote hacker Joshua when he published the data., “We would like to point out that we do not have the list of Gift Cards C & A or any other list of personal information of the customer, we mapped the same through the ID and only posted some internal information for staff C & A confirms the invasion We will not distribute any personal information on the internet since we do not endorse financial crimes Customer data is secure, the few published GiftCards were in the return section, so they would be discarded – Fatal Error Crew “reads a statement published by The Fatal Error Crew. , According to the Brazilian website Tecmundo, data of about 36,000 customers have been exposed in the attack., “In a conversation with TecMundo, Joshua said that four million orders are exposed – Joshua says that “probably” there are data from two million different customers, considering more than one request per customer. Directly in the present card system, with their numbers, are exposed the data of 36 thousand.” reported TecMundo., , According to Brazilian newspaper ‘O Globo,’ the Public Ministry of the Federal District and Territories (MPDFT) has launched an investigation on the data breach fearing that data from 2 million customers of C&A were leaked online., The company confirmed to have detected the incident last week and immediately started the incident response procedures, it also reported the intrusion to the authorities., C&A highlighted that it doesn’t use personal data for any unauthorized purposes., “we reiterate our commitment to ethics and respect to the laws and that we work to offer the best possible experience to our customers, and that includes the online environment.” added C&A., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – C&A, data breach)
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The new Dell Annual Threat Report revealed that the number of attacks against supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems doubled in 2014 respect the previous year. Unfortunately, the majority of incidents occurred in SCADA systems is not reported. The experts confirmed that in the majority of cases the APT are politically motivated., “Attacks against SCADA systems are on the rise, and tend to be political in nature as they target operational capabilities within power plants, factories, and refineries,” the researchers explained. “We saw worldwide SCADA attacks increase from 91,676 in January 2012 to 163,228 in January 2013, and 675,186 in January 2014.”, The countries with the greatest number of attacks are the Finland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, where online SCADA systems are widespread., “In 2014, Dell saw 202,322 SCADA attacks in Finland, 69,656 in the UK, and 51,258 in the US” continues the report., The experts noticed that buffer overflow is the vulnerability in SCADA system most exploited by hackers (25%), among other key attack methods there are the lack of input validation (9%) and Information Exposure (9%)., , , Security experts speculate that the number of the attacks will continue to increase in the next years., “This lack of information sharing combined with the vulnerability of industrial machinery due to its advanced age means that we can likely expect more SCADA attacks to occur in the coming months and years.” states the report., , The data published by Dell are aligned with the findings included in a report recently published by the ICS-CERT. The CERT responded to 245 incidents in Fiscal Year 2014, more than half of the incidents reported by asset owners and industry partners involved sophisticated APT., Let’s closed with the suggestions provided by Dell experts to protect SCADA systems from attacks:, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – SCADA, SCADA attacks)
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The Iranian Government spends a significant effort for the Internet monitoring and control, its activities often lead to a concrete censorship. Last year the Government of Teheran has blocked Telegram and many other social networking companies due to their refusal in helping it to monitor its citizens., According to the Reuters, the Iranian authorities intend to tighter controls on all foreign messaging and social media apps that operate in Iran., The government is requesting to these companies to use servers in the country to store all data related to the Iranian citizens., May 29 Iran has given foreign messaging apps a year to move data they hold about Iranian users onto servers inside the country, prompting privacy and security concerns on social media.” reported the Reuters., “Foreign messaging companies active in the country are required to transfer all data and activity linked to Iranian citizens into the country in order to ensure their continued activity,” Iran’s Supreme Council of Cyberspace said in new regulations carried by state news agency IRNA on Sunday., , Foreign messaging and social media companies that operate in Iran would need to set up data centers in the country within one year. It is easy to imagine the repercussion on their affairs, many users will decide to leave their services., According to the Reuters, the decision of the Iranian authorities will have a significant impact of the popular messaging app Telegram that is very popular in the country. Media estimated Telegram has about 20 million users in Iran, roughly 25 percent of the total Iranian population., Even if the companies will accept to move the data into Iranian data centers, the Iranian government will not be able to access users data because these services implement end-to-end encryption., If you appreciate my effort in spreading cyber security awareness, please vote for Security Affairs as best European Security Blog. Vote SecurityAffairs in every section it is reported. I’m one of the finalists and I want to demonstrate that the Security Affairs community a great reality., Thank you, Pierluigi, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Iran, Internet monitoring)
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The New Your Times has recently published the news the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency was hit by a virus that stolen secret information on newest rockets from an internal computer. The precious information was stored from a computer in Tsukuba Space Center located in northeast area of Tokyo, where it has been detected a malware that was stealing information. The stolen data includes details on ongoing projects such as the Epsilon project, a solid-fuel rocket, this last feature is desirable for the attackers due the possible implication in military use., The Japanese Epsilon project, started two years ago, is very innovative, it’s new generation of rockets superior to the existing H-IIA rocket due to its reduced size that allow the shipment into orbit of satellite at a quarter of actual launch cost. But reduced dimension means also major capacity of manageability in military, solid-fuel rockets could in fact be used in military as intercontinental ballistic missiles., , The incident happened last November 21th , security experts detected a malicious agent inside the network of the agency that silently stolen data related to advanced projects of the agency. Immediately was started the procedure to sanitize the internal network and to conduct the necessary forensic analysis. It’s not clear the real intent of the offensive that appears to be a targeted attack to steal intellectual property., This is the second time during this year that Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency is hit by a cyber attack, last time a virus stole sensible information related another technological advanced project related to the design of an unmanned vessel that ferries cargo to the International Space Station, the “H-2 Transfer Vehicle”., The Epsilon rocket will be launched next autumn but as highlighted by New York Times it is a complex project with a meaningful technological component and innovative contents. We must consider that Japan industry has been victims of different attacks during last year that used different instances of known viruses hitting mainly defense companies., Following a shot list of known events :, , Some attacks were originated from China, the nation most active in cyber espionage, and it’s my opinion that we are facing with the tip of the iceberg, the Elderwood project is the demonstration that groups of hackers are exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities to steal sensible information and to exploit systems inside critical infrastructures., Similar events are on the agenda, some revealed, others rightly kept secret, the prevention is crucial, fundamental is the definition of protective and efficient countermeasures and the adoption and diffusion of security best practices., Pierluigi Paganini, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, malware)
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, The zero-day vulnerabilities dubbed PanelShock, found earlier this year by Eran Goldstein, CTO and Founder of CRITIFENCE, a leading Critical Infrastructure, SCADA and Industrial Control Systems cyber security firm. The PanelShock vulnerability was uncovered in collaboration with Check Point Software Technologies Ltd. CRITIFENCE released an advisory of the vulnerability., “PanelShock disclose a new type of vulnerabilities in Schneider Electric’s SCADA Human Machine Interface (HMI) device panels. A low skills attacker can freeze and disconnect an HMI panel devices from the SCADA network remotely by exploiting these vulnerabilities. HMI panel devices allows operators and process engineers to monitor and control manufacture processes and field equipment, such as valves, pumps, engines, turbines, centrifuges and more.” says Eran Goldstein., Schneider Electric are among the most common SCADA vendors in North America, Europe and worldwide. The vendor’s products are used in nearly every modern automated factory or processing plant. The vulnerabilities affects all firmware versions of Schneider Electric Magelis Advanced HMI Panel series including:, PanelShock vulnerabilities, CVE-2016-8367 (SVE-82003201) and CVE-2016-8374 (SVE-82003202) disclosed improper implementation of different HTTP request methods and improper implementation of resource consumption management mechanism, in the Web Gate web service of Magelis Advanced HMI panel’s series. By exploiting the PanelShock vulnerabilities, a malicious attacker can “freeze” the panel remotely and disconnect the HMI panel device from the SCADA network and prevent the panel from communicating with PLCs and other devices, which can cause the supervisor or operator to perform wrong actions, which may further damage the factory or plant operations., “Use of HMIs which are connecting to field installed PLCs must operate very reliable as the service engineer relies on the display for setting the operation parameters of PLCs which control the process. A security vulnerability in these devices might lead to a compound attack which can mask the view of on-site supervisors. During a malicious sabotage on the control system, the authorized and trained service person may perform a critical mistake and disruption of the control process”, says Daniel Ehrenreich, SCCE, SCADA-Cyber consultant, and trainer., , In addition, by exploiting the vulnerabilities the attacker can also trigger an unwanted behavior of the Harmony XVGU Tower Light device connected to the HMI Panel, such as starting an alarm or flashing red lights. As a result of the PanelShock attack, the target Schneider Electric Magelis GTO HMI has lost its network connectivity and requires a physical reboot to recover., , Proof of Concept (PoC) video of PanelShock Attack can be viewed here: “Cyber security vulnerabilities commonly survive much longer in SCADA and Industrial Control Systems than in typical IT Networks”, says Eran Goldstein, CTO and Founder of CRITIFENCE. “In most scenarios SCADA and ICS hardware installed on client’s facilities are used as part of a production environment. In many cases, the hardware is installed in harsh environments and hard to reach places. This results in a much lower physical availability than any other network device. In addition, since these devices are in a production environment, disabling the device for a software update could cause much larger scale complications. Another important reason is that managers of such plants and facilities do not like tampering with devices if it’s working without any issues, as the saying goes – if it works, don’t touch it. So in many occasions, security managers would rather isolate the SCADA and ICS networks, and hardening the networks leading to that environment, than tampering with the actual devices”., Following a disclosure, Schneider Electric have confirmed that the Magelis HMI Series products are vulnerable to the findings presented by CRITIFENCE and released an Important Security Bulletin (SEVD-2016-302-01) Once acknowledged the existence of the vulnerability, CRITIFENCE with a support from ICS-CERT (Department of Homeland Security, DHS) worked in collaboration with Schneider Electric to mitigate and remediate the vulnerabilities in order to create a security updates for all Schneider Electric Magelis Advanced HMI Panel series. ICS-CERT released an Advisory and Alert for PanelShock vulnerabilities. Schneider Electric are already working on a software update for the affected types of HMI panels., For more information: Important Security Bulletin (SEVD-2016-302-01), The major issue of a remediation process in Critical Infrastructure, SCADA systems, and OT Networks is not just to create the specific security patch or firmware update that will mitigate a cyber security zero-day vulnerability. “Fixing a vulnerable SCADA equipment such HMI or PLC require installing a software patch in most cases or in some situations even to reinstall the firmware on the affected hardware. This process might cause downtime of the system and require coordination of few teams/factors as well with a scheduled maintenance windows which are hardly allowed in SCADA systems” says Alexey Baltacov, Advisory Board Member at CRITIFENCE., As part of the disclosure CRITIFENCE Critical Infrastructure and SCADA/ICS Cyber Threats Research Group have released a free tool to active check specifically for PanelShock vulnerabilities – CRITIFENCE PanelShockVCT (Vulnerability Check Tool) that can be downloaded here: “The vast majority of SCADA and ICS devices are based on legacy hardware components, so many devices succumb to vulnerabilities that could be handled easily by more robust hardware. Feeble CPU’s, low memory hardware and outdated operating systems are not uncommon in the field of SCADA and ICS. Yet not many security researchers have access to this kind of devices. While anyone at home can download a web server software and try to find vulnerabilities, not that many people overall have access to a PLC which is not part of a production environment. The elevated security of many common network components is partly a result of the vendors’ work, and partly a result of self-assigned security researchers that find vulnerabilities. Since there’s a low exposure to SCADA and ICS devices to security researchers, the security level relies exclusively on vendors’ efforts”. Says Eyal Benderski, Manager of the Critical Infrastructure and SCADA/ICS Cyber Threats Research Group at CRITIFENCE., About the Authors, CRITIFENCE is a leading Critical Infrastructure, SCADA and Industrial Control Systems cyber security firm., The company developed and provides SCADAGate+ unique passive cyber security technology and solutions designed for Critical Infrastructure, SCADA and Industrial Control Systems visibility and vulnerability assessment, which allow to monitor, control and to analyze OT network cyber security events and vulnerabilities easily and entirely passively. CRITIFENCE development team and Critical Infrastructure and SCADA/ICS Cyber Threats Research Group combined from top experienced SCADA and cyber security experts and researchers of the IDF’s Technology & Intelligence Unit 8200 (Israel’s NSA)., For more information about CRITIFENCE refer to:
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, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Schneider Electric HMI, zero-day)
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Akamai’s Prolexic division has uncovered a new botnet dubbed IptabLes and IptabLex, which was used in a series of attacks targeting malware based on Linux servers. The experts revealed that the IptabLes and IptabLex botnet compromises misconfigured and poorly-maintained Linux servers, bad actors are using the malicious architecture to run large DDoS attacks targeting DNS and other infrastructure. The IptabLes and IptabLex botnet had been used to launch numerous DDoS attacks this year, one of them reached a peak of 119 Gbps, on entertainment websites. , “During Q2 2014, Akamai’s Prolexic Security Engineering and Research Team (PLXsert) detected and measured distributed denial of service (DDoS) campaigns driven by the execution of a binary that produces significant payloads by executing Domain Name System (DNS) and SYN flood attacks.” “The mass infestation seems to be driven by a large number of Linux-based web servers being compromised, mainly by exploits of Apache Struts, Tomcat, and Elasticsearch vulnerabilities. ” states the advisory from Akamai. , The IptabLes and IptabLex bot is able to infect versions of Apache Struts and Tomcat, but experts also detected instances that targeted Elasticsearch search servers that have not been patched., Once the malware infects the server it is able to escalate privileges and wait command from the C&C server. The experts at Prolexic analyzing the binary discovered that it includes two hardcoded IP addresses., The usage of Linux malware to compromise servers to involve in DDoS is a relatively new tactic, the experts are worried by the IptabLes and IptabLex botnet, even if this campaign appeared to be in its early stages., “This is a significant cybersecurity development because the Linux operating system has not typically been used in DDoS botnets. Linux admins need to know about this threat to take action to protect their servers.”said Akamai senior vice president and general manager, Security Business, Stuart Scholly., Akamai experts urge admins to patch and properly configure vulnerable Linux servers., Experts at Akamai believe that threat actors behind the IptabLes and IptabLex botnet will expand their campaign targeting a larger number of vulnerable Linux servers., Unfortunately, antivirus are not able to mitigate the cyber threat, Akamai experts revealed that the bot agent has a detection rate of 23 out of 52 despite the campaign started months ago., Prolexic has released a couple of bash commands to clean a system infected with the ELF IptabLes binary. Once executed the commands administrators must reboot the system and run a thorough system inspection., , Lesson learnt … keep your Linux servers updated and configure it properly, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – IptabLes and IptabLex botnet, malware)
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Welcome!
If you are curious, interested in the subject and looking for a place with a few clicks you canbe updated on what happens in the world … well you you’ve found it., I read news and comments from everywhere on the web and I decided to open this space toshare with you thoughts, words and advice regarding IT security., Now enough talking … let’s go. The journey is long.
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The best news of the week with Security Affairs., First of all, let me inform you that at the #infosec16 SecurityAffairs was awarded as The Best European Personal Security Blog
Once again thank you!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Newsletter)
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Sometimes old news came back threatening our cyber security, all because 3G/4G dongles keep in being as vulnerable as they were in the past., In the last report issued by the SCADA Strangelove team, the authors demonstrated that 3G/4G dongles are vulnerable to several attacks, including Remote Code Execution (RCE), Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) and integrity attacks., The experts tested a wide range of attacks against these devices, including SIM card cloning, data interception, subscriber location, device identification, code injection, PC infection, access to user accounts on the operator’s website, and APT attacks., The SCADA Strangelove team tested devices from various vendors, such as Huawei (two different modems and a router), Gemtek (a modem and a router), Quanta (two modems) and ZTE (one modem), The results are disconcerting, a significant number of vulnerabilities were found in this equipment:, , Researchers collected data in a week, the explained that is quite simple to verify them using Shodan and querying for “mini_httpd/1.19 19dec2003 /html/index.html“., , We will not enter in details of the attacks (or it would be a long article) for this reason I suggest you to read the report, instead I prefer to share with you the results of the tests:, In the next table are reported the attacks carried out by the experts:, , Summarizing, Huawei modems with the most recent firmware updates are the ones with a better layer of security … there is still much to do with 3G/4G dongles., About the Author Elsio Pinto, Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – hacking, modems)
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Microsoft has issued security patches that fixed also the zero-day vulnerability exploited by Russian hackers., One of the zero-days tracked as CVE-2016-7255 has been patched in the MS16-135 bulletin that also addresses two information disclosure and three privilege escalation vulnerabilities. The zero-day was exploited by attackers to gain administrator-level access by escaping the sandbox protection and execute malicious code., Google has chosen to public disclose the flaw just 10 days after privately reporting it to Microsoft, giving the company a very little time to issue security updates., According to Google, the reason for going public without waiting for a patch is that its experts have observed exploits for the flaw in the wild., Microsoft criticized the Google decision because the disclosure potentially puts customers at risk., “We believe in coordinated vulnerability disclosure, and today’s disclosure by Google puts customers at potential risk,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement. “Windows is the only platform with a customer commitment to investigate reported security issues and proactively update impacted devices as soon as possible. We recommend customers use Windows 10 and the Microsoft Edge browser for the best protection.”, According to Microsoft, the CVE-2016-7255 vulnerability had been exploited in a limited number of spear-phishing attacks powered by the Russian hacker group known as Pawn Storm, APT28, Fancy Bear, Sofacy, Sednit, and Tsar Team., , Russian hackers also exploited a zero-day flaw (CVE-2016-7855) in Flash Player that Adobe promptly patched by issuing and an emergency patch., According to the security advisory issued by Adobe, the CVE-2016-7855 has been exploited in targeted attacks. The vulnerability is a use-after-free issue that can be triggered by attackers for arbitrary code execution., , The last Microsoft Patch Tuesday include a critical security bulletin MS16-132 that addresses several issues related to the Windows Media Foundation, the Windows Animation Manager and OpenType fonts., The bulletin MS16-132 also fixed the remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2016-7256) that according to Microsoft has been exploited in the wild via specially crafted websites or documents that victims must open in order to trigger the exploit., The bulletin MS16-129 fixed other vulnerabilities, a browser information disclosure vulnerability (CVE-2016-7199) and the Edge spoofing flaw (CVE-2016-7209), The complete list of Microsoft Security Bulletins for November 2016 is available here:, Adobe also issued security patches for 9 Flash Player flaws reported via ZDI., The company has released security updates to address one vulnerability in Connect for Windows and nine arbitrary code execution flaws in the Flash Player product., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – CVE-2016-7255 , hacking)
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Both Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and its successor Transport Layer Security (TLS) cryptographic protocols rely on the Rivest Cipher 4 (RC4) algorithm to encrypt data transfers., The problem is that the RC4 is affected by several security issues, the last discovered in order of time, “Invariance Weakness,” was reported by Imperva that exploited it in an attack dubbed “Bar Mitzvah.”, The Invariance Weakness has been uncovered in the past 13 years, the experts demonstrated that the vulnerability could be exploited for plaintext recovery attacks allowing the attacker to extract partial data from protected communications., The Bar Mitzvah attack could allow hackers to access a portion of traffic containing sensitive data, card details, and session cookies., The attack, dubbed “Bar Mitzvah,” is similar to Browser Exploit Against SSL/TLS, aka BEAST attack., The experts explained that in order to run the Bar Mitzvah, the attackers need to intercept a large number of SSL/TLS connections that use RC4 with the intent to find a weak key. Once discovered the weak key, the attacker can use it to recover partial plain text data., The experts have estimated that to run an attack, it is necessary a number of attempts of 1 billion to discover a weak key out of every 16 million RC4 keys., , In order to reduce the complexity of the attack, an attacker can only target the first 100 bytes of protected data. The partial data could be used to improve a brute-force attacks on sensitive information (i.e. session cookies, sensitive data)., “Given that the Invariance Weakness is expressed only in the first 100 bytes of the keystream, it can be used only for the first 100 bytes of the protected upstream traffic and the first 100 bytes of the protected downstream traffic. Given that the first encrypted message in each direction is the SSL Handshake Finished message (36-bytes in typical usage of SSL), about 64 bytes of secret plaintext data are left for the attack.” states the report published by Imperva titled “Attacking SSL when using RC4: Breaking SSL with a 13-year old RC4 Weakness.” , The report also detailed another attack mode for the Bar Mitzvah, the Non-Targeted Passive Attack, in which the attacker exploit the Invariance Weakness to eavesdrop the traffic directed to a specific website. The attacker will be able to access one piece of sensitive information every 1 billion connections, but in this attack scenario it is impossible to discriminate the identity of a specific user. A variant of the Non-Targeted Passive Attack could obtain 1 billion connections from a group of victims, for example, launching a man-in-the-middle attack against multiple users through DNS poisoning., As a countermeasure for the Bar Mitzvah it is suggested to avoid the use of the RC4 algorithm., Despite the likelihood of being compromised by a Bar Mitzvah attack is low, the experts stress doesn’t underestimate it., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Bar Mitzvah, encryption, RC4)
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After mass shooting recently occurred in Germany the Dark Web monopolized the headlines. According to several German news outlets, the young man has bought the 9mm Glock 17 he used to kill nine innocents in Munich was a reactivated theater weapon purchased on a dark net. Many media outlets reported the ease with which everyone can purchase a weapon on the dark web., Apart the great confusion about the terms Deep web and Dark Web that many journalists are still using in improper way, readers could have a distorted perception of this hidden part of the web and about the risks for the homeland security of any government., In the dark web is it possible to find many black markets that offer illegal products and services, but there is a substantial difference between illegal goods., In the dark net it isn’t difficult to find sellers that offer weapons, but even if you pay for a gun or a rifle you will have no certainty about the shipment. Many articles I read highlights the availability of weapons in the Dark markets, but they don’t explain that receive a weapon in total anonymity is not easy. In many cases, sellers are simply scammers, of course, victims of such kind of scams will never report it to law enforcement., Of course, law enforcement and authorities must monitor black markets and any other crime forums in the dark nets. The tragic event in Munich raised the discussion about the monitoring of the dark web., The German police, such as other law enforcement agencies, will fight illegal activities in the Dark Web with new efforts and resources, the news was officialized on Wednesday by Holger Muench, head of Germany’s Federal Police (BKA)., “We see that the dark net is a growing trading place and therefore we need to prioritize our investigations here,” said Holger Muench while presenting the latest annual report on cyber crime., According to the report, the cybercrime cost Germany 40.5 million euros in 2015 (+2.8 percent compared to 2014), the German police is concerned about the increasing abuse of dark nets for crime activities., “The dark net, which is only accessible via special web browsers, is increasingly used to procure drugs, weapons, and counterfeit money, allowing users to trade anonymously and pay with digital currencies such as Bitcoin, the BKA said.” reported the Reuters., The officials from the BKA confirmed that the German police has shut down five market places in the dark web last year. The BKA will be committed to persecuting operators behind principal black markets to dismantle criminal rings behind them., The BKA’s document also reports more than 45,000 cases involved computer fraud, but the overall dimension of the criminal phenomena is much bigger., “If we look ahead we see little relief,” added Muench. “Cyber crime is still a growing phenomenon – you could say almost a growing business, even a growing industry.”, , At this point, it is essential for law enforcement to intensify their HUMINT activities. Regarding the dark web and weapons, to better understand if it is so easy to buy weapons in the black market I suggest to take the principal black markets trying to buy such kind of goods … you will be surprised by the results., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Dark Web, weapons)
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Security researchers have discovered misconfigured Django applications that are exposing sensitive information, including passwords, API keys, or AWS access tokens., Django is a very popular high-level Python Web framework that allows rapid development of Python-based web applications., The researcher Fábio Castro explained that installs expose data because developers forget to disable the debug mode for the Django app., 28,165 thousand django running servers are exposed on the internet, many are showing secret API keys, database passwords, amazon AWS keys. , A small line http GET –body | grep 'DATABASE_URL|Mysql|AWS'#Shodan #django #hacking #cybersecurity #infosec pic.twitter.com/SV8v8KBJB6, — Fábio Castro ? (@6IX7ine) March 27, 2018, , Castro found 28,165 apps querying Shodan for Django installs that have debug mode enabled., I made the same query a few hours later and I obtained 28,911 results., , Many servers with debug mode enabled expose very, the experts discovered server passwords and AWS access tokens that could be used by hackers to gain full control of the systems., “I found this as I was working with the Django framework on a small project,” Castro told Bleeping Computer “I noticed some error exception and then went searching on Shodan.”, “The main reason for all the exposures is the debug mode enabled,” Castro says. “This is not a failure from Django’s side. My recommendation is to disable debugging mode when deploying the application to production.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Django framework, hacking)
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Ransomware represents one of the most worrying cyber threats in the wild, vxers continue to improve their code making hard for victims to defend their systems., Now experts from Malwarebytes researchers are warning about a potential mass infection caused by the DMA Locker ransomware., DMA Locker was first spotted early this year, but experts noticed it was still incomplete and unstable, in same cases the threat was crashing after completing the encryption of the victims’ files. At the time of its discovery, the researchers noticed that the threat didn’t employ automated distribution. It was mainly distributed via hacked Remote Desktops., The first iteration of the DMA Locker ransomware was exposed to anti-malware analysis and experts discovered he called API functions via plain text. The presence of debug strings in the code also described the malware activities., “This ransomware is distributed without any packing and no defense against analysis has been observed. ” reads a blog post published by MalwareBytes., “Instead of a list of attacked extensions, this malware contains two blacklists. One for directories and another for file extensions”, , Researchers at MalwareBytes have recently spotted the DMA Locker version 4.0 that has been improved in a significant way by the authors. The new variant implements a new distribution technique and improved the encryption process., The threat actors are leveraging on the Neutrino exploit kit for distribution of the threats., “New release has been found distributed via exploit kit (Neutrino). This change is another step towards maturity of the malware, showing that now this threat will be spreading on a bigger scale.” states the analysis published by MalwareBytes., The DMA Locker appears with a PDF icon to trick victims into opening it, then it contacts the C&C servers to download the public RSA key and encrypts files, this means that the ransomware is able to work only con Internet connected machines., “After being run, it moves itself to the same location like it’s previous editions – C:\ProgramData under the name svchosd.exe” continues the post. “In addition to the main sample, we can see two additional files: select.bat and cryptinfo.txt. cryptinfo.txt is a ransom note, analogical to those that we know from the previous editions – only the content changed. Now it is much shorter and contains a link to the individual website for the victim. Script select.bat is used to display this note just in case if the original executable has been removed”, DMA Locker gains persistency by adding registry keys for persistency (Windows Firewall for svchosd.exe and Windows Update for select.bat), once the victims’ files are encrypted the malware displays the following message:, , The DMA Locker 4.0 doesn’t rely on the Tor network to host the payment service, it uses an individual AES key for each encrypted file., The experts have no doubts, the improvements discovered by the experts suggest that the product is preparing to be distributed on a massive scale., If you appreciate my effort in spreading cyber security awareness, please vote for Security Affairs as best European Security Blog. Vote SecurityAffairs in every section it is reported. I’m one of the finalists and I want to demonstrate that the Security Affairs community a great reality., Thank you, Pierluigi, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – DMA Locker, ransomware)
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“We had to disable Agora for now since they have gone offline, but as soon as they are back their listings will start showing up in the search results again.” said GramsAdmin., I have no doubt, search engines have an infinite power and I’m sure that the author of Grams will try to expand the capabilities of its platform including data from the other relevant black market. The author has also announced that the Grams will include advertising exactly like Google AdWords, reveling the business model behind the search engine., “Within the next two weeks Grams will have a system similar to google adwords where vendors can buy keywords and their listings will go to the top of the search results when those keywords are searched for. They will be bordered with an advertisement disclaimer so users know those are paid results.”, Grams is probably a little light that is trying to make inroads into the depths of the black market., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Grams, underground)
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Hadoop servers that are not securely configured expose vast amounts of data, according to an analysis conducted using the Internet search engine Shodan., A study conducted by Shodan revealed that nearly 4,500 servers with the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS) were found to expose 5,120 TB (5.12 PB) of data., The overall volume of data exposed by HDFS system is greater than the one related to MongoDB installs., “However, in terms of data volume it turns out that HDFS is the real juggernaut.” reads the analysis published by Shodan. “To give you a better idea here’s a quick comparison between MongoDB and HDFS:”, “Even though there are more MongoDB databases connected to the Internet without authentication in terms of data exposure it is dwarfed by HDFS clusters (25 TB vs 5 PB).”, Most of the servers with the Hadoop Distributed File System are located in the United States (1,900) and China (1,426), followed by Germany and South Korea with 129 and 115 servers, respectively., The majority of the HDFS install are hosted in the cloud, mainly Amazon (1,059 instances) and Alibaba (507)., In 2016, security experts observed ransom attacks aimed at unsecured MongoDB database installs exposed online., According to the researchers, the hackers were implementing an extortion mechanism copying and deleting data from vulnerable databases., Crooks requested the payment of a ransom in order to return data and help the company to fix the flaw they exploited., Similar ransom attacks later began targeting Elasticsearch, CouchDB and Hadoop servers, such kind of attacks still target Hadoop and MongoDB installations. and a majority of the Internet-exposed MongoDB servers appear to have already been compromised., According to Shodan founder John Matherly, a majority of the MongoDB servers exposed on the Internet have already been already compromised., First attacks observed by the experts targeting HDFS installs erased most directories and created a directory named “NODATA4U_SECUREYOURSHIT.” no ransom was asked to the victims., Querying Shodan for “NODATA4U_SECUREYOURSHIT” string, the popular search engine retrieves more than 200 Hadoop Distributed File System installs., , The blog post published by Shodan includes instructions on how to search Hadoop Distributed File System installs exposed online., , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Hadoop Distributed File System, hacking)
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Researchers have developed a tool that poses as GPS satellites to deceive nearby GPS receivers. The kit could be used to deceive receivers used by navigation systems and suggest drivers the wrong direction., “we explore the feasibility of a stealthy manipulation attack against road navigation systems. The goal is to trigger the fake turn-by-turn navigation to guide the victim to a wrong destination without being noticed.” reads the research paper published by the experts., “Our key idea is to slightly shift the GPS location so that the fake navigation route matches the shape of the actual roads and trigger physically possible instructions.”, The group of researchers is composed of three teams from Microsoft, Virginia Tech in the US, and the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China., The boffins were able to spoof packets transmitted by satellites to mobile devices and navigation systems used in the automotive industry., The tests conducted by experts allowed to remotely change the routes with up to 95 per cent accuracy. The researchers built a radio-transmitting device based on Raspberry Pi, they used just $223 of components., The radio transmitting device broadcasts fake location data and makes it impossible for the receivers to have the real positioning data from the satellite., In a Real attack scenario, the device could be used to deceive navigation systems in cars., , “We show that adversaries can build a portable spoofer with low costs (about $223), which can easily penetrate the car body to take control of the GPS navigation system.” continues the paper., “Our measurement shows that effective spoofing range is 40–50 meters and the target device can consistently latch onto the false signals without losing connections,” , In order to make the attack stealth the researchers experimented with stashing the spoofing device in the trunk of a car or under the back seat., They were able to add new route details via a cellular network connection without following the target., In a test in field conducted in a Chinese parking lot, the researchers deceived a navigation system in 48 seconds by hiding the device in the truck, while if it was under the seat, it took just 38 seconds., “Compared to spoofing a drone or a ship, there are unique challenges to manipulate the road navigation systems. First, road navigation attack has strict geographical constraints. It is far more challenging to perform GPS spoofing attacks in real-time while coping with road maps and vehicle speed limits.” continues the paper., “In addition, human drivers are in the loop of the attack, which makes a stealthy attack necessary.”, Experts highlighted that the spoofing attacks could be very effective, 40 volunteer drivers involved in a trial found that 95 per cent of the time the attackers were able to trick the targets into following the fake routes., Such kind of attacks could be particularly dangerous especially when dealing with self-driving cars and trucks., Researchers provided also countermeasures to prevent the attacks such as the use of encrypted data also for civilian GPS signals., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – GPS spoofing, navigation systems)
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The US Department of Defense Is evaluating the use of video games for finding software vulnerabilities with the collaboration of a network of volunteers. The idea is revolutionary, the support offered to DoD analyst could be theoretically unlimited according John Murray, a program director in SRI International’s computer science laboratory., Today only adults are allowed to participate in the program due strictly government regulations regarding volunteer participants., John Murray and his team worked in the creation one game specialized in the above task, the application called Xylem is the demonstration that is possible to exploit game players’ actions to find software vulnerabilities., The CircuitBot game involves users to link up a team of robots to carry out a mission, man while Flow Jam requires the user to analyze and adjust a cable network to maximize its throughput., , The principle is to correlate complex math problems onto puzzle games that would be fun to play., To achieve the goals of Crowd Sourced Formal Verification, DARPA designed the Verigames.com portal involving the elite designers, mathematicians, and developers and Topcoder’s community of over 500,000 registered global members., According Murray some types of vulnerabilities, including buffer overflows or flaws that result in privilege escalation, fit particularly well into the puzzle format., “We are able to take those small snippets of code that need further analysis and turn them into the parameters to generate a puzzle,” he said., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Crowd Sourced Formal Verification, DARPA, games)
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The flaw, tracked as CVE-2018-15454, affects the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) inspection engine of Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software and Firepower Threat Defense (FTD). The flaw could be exploited by a remote attacker to trigger a DoS condition on the vulnerable device., “A vulnerability in the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP) inspection engine of Cisco Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) Software and Cisco Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause an affected device to reload or trigger high CPU, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition.” reads the security advisory published by Cisco., “The vulnerability is due to improper handling of SIP traffic. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending SIP requests designed to specifically trigger this issue at a high rate across an affected device.”, Experts from Cisco discovered the vulnerability while resolving a Cisco TAC support case., The following products running ASA 9.4 and above, and FTD 6.0 and later, are affected by the vulnerability:, , At the time of the disclosure, there is no software update that addresses the flaw, anyway, the company provided several mitigation options., A possible mitigation consists in disabling the SIP inspection, but this solution is not feasible in many cases because it could interrupt SIP connections., To disable SIP inspection, configure the following:, Another option is to block the hosts by using an access control list (ACL) or in an alternative offending host can be shunned using the shun <ip_address> command in EXEC mode. In this latter case, users have to consider that shunning does not persist across reboot., Cisco also suggests filtering on traffic having ‘Sent-by Address’ header set to 0.0.0.0 that is associated with bad packets that could crash the security appliance., Last mitigation provided by the tech giant is to implement a rate limit on the SIP traffic via the Modular Policy Framework (MPF)., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – DoS, hacking)
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Experts at Cisco have disclosed the existence of a high-severity vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2016-6399, that can be exploited by remote unauthenticated attackers to trigger DoS conditions in some of Application Control Engine (ACE) products., The good news is that there is no evidence that the CVE-2016-6399 vulnerability has been exploited in the wild, the bad news is that some CISCO customers experienced problems after an Internet research project triggered the vulnerability., Researchers behind the research project had been scanning SSL/TLS servers on the Internet, including the CISCO customers., “A vulnerability in the SSL/TLS functions of the Cisco ACE30 Application Control Engine Module and the Cisco ACE 4700 Series Application Control Engine Appliances could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a denial of service (DoS) condition on the affected device.” reads the Cisco Security Advisory., The problem affects Cisco ACE 4710 Application Control Engine appliances and Cisco ACE30 Application Control Engine modules., The Cisco ACE 4710 Application Control Engine equipment is a protection solution designed to enhance application availability and performance and improve the resilience to cyber attacks., , The network appliances implement load-balancing and application delivery features. The root cause of the security issue is the insufficient input validation checks in SSL/TLS code that can be exploited remotely by an unauthenticated attacker to trigger devices to reload by sending them specially crafted SSL/TLS packets., “The vulnerability is due to incomplete input validation checks in the SSL/TLS code. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending specific SSL/TLS packets to the affected device. An exploit could allow the attacker to trigger a reload of the affected device.” continues the advisory., The flaw was discovered while the Cisco experts were handling customer support requests., The products affected by the CVE-2016-6399 vulnerability reached the end of life in July 2013, but CISCO is still offering support for them, the company plan to do it until January 2019. Cisco has promised to release software updates that address the issue., At the time I was writing there is no workaround, Cisco plan to release software updates as soon as possible., I suggest you give a look to the CISCO security advisory that included useful information on the flaw, including the indicators of compromise (IoC) that can help customers to avoid attackers to exploit the flaw., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – CISCO ACE, DoS flaw)
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Recently we have always thought to malware as dangerous agents used to steal information such as banking credentials or to be used in cyber espionage operation., This is one of the different ways to monetize the development of a malicious agent, virus creation to steal information which is associated with an economic value., But we also learned that malware could be developed for destructive purposes, that the case of state-sponsored project or cyber weapon such as Stuxnet, but the similar approach could be also persecuted by private companies against competitor business., The sabotage of business could be obtained also through the spread of virus and trojan designed to attacks specific targets, W32.Disttrack malware is a sample of this category of malware because it is able to wipe out data from victims hard disks., The sabotage could have various effects depending on the practices adopted by companies to respond to an incident, anyway, it represents a serious threat to the business., Symantec has published an interesting alert on a new agent named W32.Narilam that has been designed to damage corporate databases. Once again the geographic area most impacted is the Middle East., , , , W32.Narilam is a worm that attempts to spread by copying itself to all drives and certain shared folders on the compromised computer, the malware doesn’t include module to steal information from the victims., The malware is written in Delphi programming language and has a behavior similar to other malicious agent but what is considered “unusual” by security researchers is its capability to update a Microsoft SQL database if it is accessible by OLEDB., The worm is designed expressed to attack SQL databases, it searches for instances having the following names:, and in particular, it is able to access to database objects to updating/deleting them. The malware searches for objects having specific names, some of them having some of them belonging to the Arabic and Persian languages (e.g. Hesabjari than means “current account” in Arabic/Persian)., Analyzing the objects manipulated by the malware, and the type of database hit, the experts have deducted that it has been developed to target mainly corporations., Symantec revealed that the percentage of business users hit is of 97,1%, meanwhile, Nonbusiness users are at 2,9%., The Symantec report states:, “Unless appropriate backups are in place, the affected database will be difficult to restore. The affected organization will likely suffer significant disruption and even financial loss while restoring the database. As the malware is aimed at sabotaging the affected database and does not make a copy of the original database first, those affected by this threat will have a long road to recovery ahead of them.”, Fortunately, the threat assessment reveals that it is considerable a low-level menace due to the limited number of infections in a very restricted area. The agent is simple to eradicate despite once infected the victim it damages database irreparably., Once again the question is … who has developed the malware and why?, Pierluigi Paganini, , UPDATE 11/26/2012, Maher center announcement about the “narilam” malware, Recently Symantec reported the detection of a new malware called “win32.narilam”. regarding that report, there were numerous media coverage on the topic, and comparing the threat to the previously reported cyber-attacks on Iran’s infrastructure like Stuxnet, duqu and flame. The Iranian national Cert “Maher”, announces that the initial investigations show some misunderstanding about the recent malware., The malware called “narilam” by Symantec was an old malware, previously detected and reported online in 2010 by some other names. This malware has no sign of a major threat, nor a sophisticated piece of computer malware. The sample is not widespread and is only able to corrupt the database of some of the products by an Iranian software company, those products are accounting software for small businesses. The simple nature of the malware looks more like a try to harm the software company reputation among their customers., Anyway, this is not a threat for general users and need no special care. Only the customers of that accounting software could make backup of their database and scan their system by updated antivirus products, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Narilam, Malware)
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Great news for privacy advocates and WhatsApp users, the software now implements end-to-end encryption for all versions of the most popular messaging and voice calling application. On Tuesday, the company announced the significant improvement to its 1 billion users with a blog post and also published a white paper the technical details for its end-to-end encryption system., “WhatsApp has always prioritized making your data and communication as secure as possible. And today, we’re proud to announce that we’ve completed a technological development that makes WhatsApp a leader in protecting your private communication: full end-to-end encryption.” states the company blog post., The paper highlights that the encryption protocol implements by Whatsapp uses perfect forward secrecy, this means that “even if encryption keys from a user’s device are ever physically compromised, they cannot be used to go back in time to decrypt previously transmitted messages.”, It was a necessary improvement to improve the privacy and security of its users., “We live in a world where more of our data is digitized than ever before,” explained Jan Koum, a WhatsApp co-founder.”Every day we see stories about sensitive records being improperly accessed or stolen. And if nothing is done, more of people’s digital information and communication will be vulnerable to attack in the years to come. Fortunately, end-to-end encryption protects us from these vulnerabilities.”, WhatsApp uses the Axolotl protocol, aka known as Signal protocol or double ratchet that is a key management algorithm developed by Trevor Perrin with support from Moxie Marlinspike in 2013. The protocol is also used by the popular Signal encrypted messaging and voice app., “As of today, the integration is fully complete. Users running the most recent versions of WhatsApp on any platform now get full end to end encryption for every message they send and every WhatsApp call they make when communicating with each other. This includes all the benefits of the Signal Protocol — a modern, open source, forward secure, strong encryption protocolfor asynchronous messaging systems, designed to make end-to-end encrypted messaging as seamless as possible.” Moxie wrote on its blog., , From now every message, file, photo, video, and voice and chat message user sends, is end-to-end encrypted by default., In November 2014, WhatsApp implemented the encryption by default on Android OS with the collaboration of the Open Whisper company announcing the plan to extend it to all the other platforms, that is exactly what the company have done., The implementation was applauded by privacy advocates and civil libertarians, including the popular Christopher Soghoian of the American Civil Liberties Union., Our elected officials in Congress who authorized the millions in funding that paid for WhatsApp’s crypto did us all a favor. Thank you., — Christopher Soghoian (@csoghoian) 5 aprile 2016, , , , , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –WhatsApp, end-to-end encryption), ,
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, Flag of the People’s Republic of China — Image by © Royalty-Free/Corbis
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Last week, Apple released iOS 10.3, an important release of the popular operating system the fixed more than 100 bugs and implements security improvements., Apple opted to push an emergency patch update (iOS 10.3.1 version), that fixed some critical vulnerabilities, including one tracked as CVE-2017-6975. The flaw could be exploited by attackers within range to “execute arbitrary code on the Wi-Fi chip.”, The flaw was first discovered by the expert Gal Beniamini from the Google’s Project Zero team, the expert and his team did not disclose technical details on the flaw., “Impact: An attacker within range may be able to execute arbitrary code on the Wi-Fi chip, Description: A stack buffer overflow was addressed through improved input validation., , CVE-2017-6975: Gal Beniamini of Google Project Zero” reads the security note published by Apple for the iOS 10.3.1 release. , The CVE-2017-6975 affects iPhone 5 and later, iPad 4th generation and later, iPod touch 6th generation and later, iPhone 5S was not affected because it is the first model based on a 64-bit processor., Today Beniamini will publish a detailed technical analysis of the issue, including a detailed description of the attack scenario.The iOS 10.3.1 update can be downloaded via Settings → General → Software Update on your iOS device., Apple users already running the iOS 10.3 can download and install the iOS 10.3.1 release simply pressing on the “Download and Install” button to install the update., If you are the owner of an Apple iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch you must update your device as soon as possible.,
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, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Apple, iOS 10.3.1 )
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Once again, home routers are exposed to the risk of cyber attacks. This time the news is related to the Australian consumer broadband modems that resulted affected by the Poodle and Freak vulnerabilities. Many Australian households reported that ISPs are notifying them of possible malicious traffic without providing any other information regarding possible mitigation strategies. In the following image posted by, Many Australian households reported that ISPs are notifying them of possible malicious traffic without providing any other information regarding possible mitigation strategies. In the following image posted by The Register is illustrated a communication sent by the TPG service provider to its customer to inform him of the anomalous traffic., , As explained by The Register, Poodle and Freak still affect numerous home routers including DLink, Netcomm and FritzBox devices. Unfortunately, other configuration problems are threatening the Australian users, security experts are aware that many devices come with external admin enabled by default., The Australian Communications and Media Authority’s AISI Malware statistics page documents a worrying situation in Australia, more than 200,000 hosts result vulnerable., , “The “Other” chart on that page, first published on March 27, “includes” Freak and Poodle vulnerabilities, but The Register has reason to believe these two bugs represent nearly all of the “other” hosts.” states The Register., Among the vulnerable devices, there are also many un-patched hosts and several VoIP services, anyway the number of home routers vulnerable to Poodle/Freak remains greater than 100,000., The problem in a case like this is represented by the lack of awareness of users, the majority of which totally ignore the cyber threats and how to apply mitigation solutions, like a firmware update., , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – PODDLE, home routers)
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The Locky Ransomware is one of the most popular threats since its first detection in the wild early 2016. The ransomware has evolved over the time, crooks have improved it adding new evasion detection features and changing the distribution methods., Security experts observe the implementation of sophisticated sandbox evasion techniques, they documented a new strain of the malware that used a new extension (aka Zepto variant) for the encrypted files meanwhile another version was able to use of offline encryption., When it first appeared in the threat landscape, Locky was leveraging on documents for its distribution, later it used malicious macros, JavaScript attachments and also Windows script (WSF) files., Recently, experts from the security firm Cyren discovered a new variant that added a supplementary layer of obfuscation to its downloader script. The new strain of Locky is delivered via spam campaigns, each malicious email includes a ZIP-archived JavaScript., “The email being sent in this latest wave, as often before, uses business finance-related topics to lure users into opening its attachment, which is ZIP-archived JavaScript. Comparing this variant to the earlier variants, it has added another layer of obfuscation which decrypts and executes the real Locky downloader script.” states the analysis published by Cyren., , The downloader script works in a way similar to other strain of the Locky ransomware, the downloaded files are decrypted and saved in the Windows Temp directory, but differently from the past, the malicious payload is DLL file instead a .EXE. The DLL library is loaded using rundll32.exe, it leverages a custom packer to prevent anti-malware scanners from detecting it., Once it is executed, the new Locky ransomware searches for the affected system and network shares for files to encrypt, it uses the .zepto extension for locked file. When the encryption process has been completed, this variant of Locky ransomware drops and displays a ransom payment instruction page., Researchers noticed that the .onion address provided in the ransom note directs victims to the same Locky decryptor page that has been used in previous campaigns., “Clicking on the onion link directs the user to the same Locky Decryptor page we have seen in previous Locky waves.” closes the report., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Locky ransomware, malware)
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ESET researchers Robert Lipovsky and Anton Cherepanov have released a free tool for the analysis of ICS malware., The researchers developed an IDAPython script for IDA Pro that could be used by malware researchers and cyber security experts to reverse-engineer binaries that employ the OPC Data Access industrial communications protocol., “An IDAPython script for IDA Pro that helps reverse engineer binaries that are using the OPC Data Access protocol.” reads the description published on GitHub., “It can be used to analyse such malware families as Havex RAT and Win32/Industroyer., The script identifies CLSID, IID, and LIBID constants and creates structures and enumerations. Afterwards, these structures can be used to annotate COM method call parameters.”, The Havex malware has been used in several targeted attacks in the previous months; threat actors used it against different industry sectors., “If there are other future malware families like Industroyer or Havex, investigators will have an easier time” finding and analyzing them, Lipovsky says., “This tool helps you understand what the threat was designed to do,” he says. Detection is important, he says, “but if you want to understand what the attackers are up to, you need to dig in deeply.”, The availability of such kind of open-source tools allows experts to rapidly analyze ICS malware and implement automate defense systems., Lipovsky and Cherepanov highlighted the importance for ICS/SCADA operators of early detection of the threats., “A lot of people are downplaying these sorts of things as ‘not an attack.’ Spying is an attack,” said the expert. “These things are detectable.”, Lipovsky announced the tool during a session at the Black Hat hacking conference., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – (ICS malware, power outage)
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It’s arrived, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has presented a new Raspberry Pi model the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B.The Raspberry Pi 3 Model B in the successor of the Raspberry Pi 2 introduced exactly one year ago and comes after the presentation of a $5 Raspberry Pi Zero., The Raspberry Pi is a tiny computer that developed in England, it is versatile and its characteristics make it suitable for adoption in many projects.Raspberry Pi series is very cheap, it has been estimated that more than 8 Million units have been already sold., “In celebration of our fourth birthday, we thought it would be fun to release something new. Accordingly, Raspberry Pi 3 is now on sale for $35 (the same price as the existing Raspberry Pi 2)” wrote Eben Upton, CEO of Raspberry Pi., , The new Raspberry Pi 3 has a new heart, previous versions were based on a 32-bit architecture with a 900MHz quad-core ARM Cortex A7, meanwhile the new model is based on a 64-bit processor, with quad-core 1.2 GHz ARM Cortex-A53 CPU., The new Raspberry Pi 3 Model B has built-in Wi-Fi (802.11n) and Bluetooth 4.1 connectivity, meanwhile previous models needed USB adapters to add these functionalities., The new version of the Pi comes with four USB ports and according to its creators the new model reached 50-60% increase in performance thanks to a series of improvements., “Combining a 33% increase in clock speed with various architectural enhancements, this provides a 50-60% increase in performance in 32-bit mode versus Raspberry Pi 2, or roughly a factor of ten over the original Raspberry Pi.” continues Upton., , Another novelty of the Raspberry Pi 3 is the compliance with Windows 10 IoT obtained thanks to a collaboration between the Raspberry Pi Foundation and Microsoft., Below the technical details of the new Raspberry Pi 3:, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Microsoft Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit, Hacking)
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The best news of the week with Security Affairs, , , , Once again thank you!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Newsletter, SecurityAffairs)
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Last year it was disclosed the news of the 2014 Yahoo data breach that compromised over 500 million Yahoo user accounts., At the time of the public disclosure made by Yahoo, the representatives of the company added that security experts suspect the involvement of nation-state actors., “We have confirmed that a copy of certain user account information was stolen from the company’s network in late 2014 by what it believes is a state-sponsored actor. The account information may have included names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, hashed passwords (the vast majority with bcrypt) and, in some cases, encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers.” reads the security notice issued by Yahoo., “The ongoing investigation suggests that stolen information did not include unprotected passwords, payment card data, or bank account information; payment card data and bank account information are not stored in the system that the investigation has found to be affected. Based on the ongoing investigation, Yahoo believes that information associated with at least 500 million user accounts was stolen and the investigation has found no evidence that the state-sponsored actor is currently in Yahoo’s network. Yahoo is working closely with law enforcement on this matter.”, The US authorities have charged two Russian intelligence officers and two criminal hackers of have taken part in 2014 Yahoo hack., The four defendants are:, The members of the group are charged of:, “A grand jury in the Northern District of California has indicted four defendants, including two officers of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB), for computer hacking, economic espionage and other criminal offenses in connection with a conspiracy, beginning in January 2014, to access Yahoo’s network and the contents of webmail accounts.” the Department of Justice announced yesterday. , According to the prosecutors, the hackers accessed at least 30 million accounts as part of a spam campaign aimed to steal the email contents of thousands of people., , According to the indictment, Belan downloaded the Yahoo database, an archive containing usernames, recovery e-mail accounts, phone numbers as well as “certain information required to manually create, or “mint,” account authentication web browser “cookies” for more than 500 million Yahoo accounts.”, Once obtained the information, the hackers used it to gain unauthorized access to the contents of accounts at other webmail providers, including Google. Russian and American officials, Russian journalists, employees of financial services and other businesses were privileged targets of the gang., The United States authorities have requested extradition for all the suspects arrested in Russia, but it’s difficult due to the absence of extradition treaty with Russia.Let’s close with a note on the hackers, according to the Assistant Attorney General Mary McCord they were not involved in the DNC hack., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – 2014 Yahoo data breach, DoJ)
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Phishing is a very prolific business for cybercrime, bad actors are adopting even more sophisticated techniques like the one discovered recently which hit French-speaking computer users, in an attempt to steal their online banking credentials., The discovery was made by experts at Malcovery Security, this new attack scheme is not a classic direct phishing, which is based on malicious emails which contain links or attacked malware used to deceive victims, instead, the emails purport to be from an entity that isn’t the targeted bank and informs victims that due a billing mistake they have to be refunded to their account., The fraudsters refer limited quantity of money, as much as €95 or $127, and request victims to provide information on their bank account that will receive the transfer of refunded sums., A this point victims are redirected to a page where is asking them to provide the above information, the cyber criminals implemented a mechanism to verify the credentials to the third party before allowing the victim to proceed.Gary Warner from Malcovery Security explained that the third party entity used in this sophisticated phishing attack is SFR, a French telecommunications company that provides phone services (mobile and landline), along with Internet and IP TV products., “While there are several versions of the SFR phish, the most sophisticated that we have encountered so far can be seen on a British horse enthusiasts website (obviously hacked). What makes this one particularly compelling is that it begins by requiring the victim to be using their true SFR userid and password. On the originating screen, the user is told to “Connectez-vous” by entering his userid (Identifiant) and password (Mot de passe).” is reported in the blog post., The attack scheme is not new, its improvement is related to the SFR login verification process that is being performed., According to the researcher the Malcovery’s PhishIQ service has detected more than 1,000 SFR phish on more than 330 hacked servers so far this year, which demonstrate that the technique is largely used by fraudsters., , The SFR provided by the victims are passed to the legitimate SFR to verify if they are valid, in case of incorrect credentials a message is returned to the victims which are allowed no more of 5 attempts before their account would be blocked., This is pure social engineering to trick users into believe that the company which want to provide the refund is legitimate such as the entire process., When victims provide valid credentials it is requested them to select from a list of French banks which is their financial institutions, depending on the chosen bank the attackers request the appropriate additional verification information used by the specific bank. , “Depending on which bank they choose, they will be prompted for appropriate additional verification details used by that bank,” states the post., With this scheme the cyber criminals are collecting all the data required to access the bank account, as explained by the research this is one of the most complex schema seen since now because it involves different technologies and tricks., “one of the most sophisticated phish we’ve seen to date, employing ‘man-in-the-middle’ logins where SFR credentials are tested before the victim is allowed to proceed, and nearly a dozen customized bank security procedure questions being processed.” Warner said., Pierluigi Paganini, Security Affairs – (Phishing, cybercrime)
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The Duqu trojan main purpose is to obtain a remote access allowing an adversary to gather information from a compromised computer and of course to download and run arbitrary programs. Duqu malware spotted and identified by experts is based on the same Stuxnet code, however unlike Stuxnet, Duqu does not contain specific code related industrial control systems., The excellent group CrySyS has located an installer for the malware threat; the installer file is a Microsoft Word document (.doc) that exploits a previously unknown kernel vulnerability that allows code execution. Opening the file a malicious code is able to executes Duqu binaries code., From Symantec Corp. an interesting article related the malware and the exploit procedure found., From SecureWorks Counter Threat Unit Research Team more info regarding the threat and its features.,
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The deep web is the part of the world wide web not indexed by common search engines, it represents almost all of the content available on the Internet. Law enforcement, intelligence agencies and scientists are spending a great effort to try to index also this hidden part of the web. Recently the DARPA announced the Memex search engine, a program launched in the 2014 to design advanced search tools that could be also used to scan the deep web. Another project focused on the searchers in the deep web is Flashpoint, which is research tool focused on threats from the dark web, for example, every form of extremism., The Memex search engine was started to allow search of not indexed content, an operation that in the majority of cases is still run manually the by Intelligence Agencies., Today we discuss about a similar project conducted by a British cyber security firm, Digital Shadows, that has developed a search engine to search for content in the Tor network.., “Basically, it’s a Google for Tor,” explained Alistair Paterson, CEO of Digital Shadows., Mr Paterson explained that the search engine developed by his company is the most comprehensive to date., , During a demo, Mr Paterson searched the terms “Money Laundering” and “AK-47” retrieving thousands of results., Mr Paterson says the search engine “sucks in pages in real time and analyses them. We have some analysts direction. It’s helpful we have two Russian speakers as well. So the system is running all the time, but it’s directed by humans.” reported Tom Cheshire, Technology Correspondent for SkyNews., Digital Shadows developed the Deep Web search engine to offer its services to private firms to help them identifying cyber threats or any other illegal activity that could represent a threat., It’s clear that the Deep Web represents just one of the possible sources that a threat intelligence firm can scan for its investigation. Cyber threats are becoming even more sophisticated and cyber criminals exploit any technology in order to monetize their efforts, that’s why threat intelligence is becoming a fundamental discipline to prevent the menaces., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Deep Web, Threat Intelligence)
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Once again phishers exploited Google’s reputation running a phishing campaign aimed to steal user Google credentials and access to the multitude services offered by the company., The new phishing campaign was discovered by the security researcher Aditya K. Sood from Elastica Cloud Threat Labs. Also in this case phishers used phishing pages hosted on Google Drive that appear similar a Google log-in page and which was served over HTTPs. The use of HTTPS makes the web pages more realistic and less suspicious to victims., , This campaign has many similarities with a campaign discovered by experts at Symantec in March 2014, the malicious emails sent by the scammers presents the same subject “Document,” and the stolen credentials are hosted on a third-party server., “Elastica Cloud Threat Labs recently discovered a new Google Drive phishing campaign in which an attacker deployed phishing web pages on Google Drive. This is not the first time Google Drive has been used for phishing purposes. Last year, the security community encountered a similar type of Google Drive phishing attack.” states the blog post published by Elastica Cloud Threat Labs., The new campaign appeared to the experts as the evolution of the previous one, because the improved obfuscation techniques used to hide the phishing pages. The phishers used a JavaScript encoding mechanism to obfuscate the code in the phishing pages. The attack scheme is quite simple, victims receive the bogus email from a Gmail addresses that’s likely been compromised, they’re requested to click on the embedded link pointing to a page hosted in a Google Drive folder. The phishing page looks like a Google log-in form, then if the user enters his credentials they are transferred in clear to a remote compromised web server while the user is redirected to a PDF document hosted on another server in order to avoid raising suspicion ., The destination URL where the victim’s credentials are sent is hxxp://alarabia.my/images/Fresh/performact.php., “In this phishing campaign, we found some stealthy techniques used by the attacker to protect the phishing web page code. The attacker deployed a JavaScript encoding mechanism to obfuscate the code in the web pages so that they could not be read easily. Using Google Drive for hosting phishing web pages provides an attacker with the ability to exploit the established trust users have with Google. For example, in this campaign, the attacker used Gmail to distribute emails containing links to unauthorized web pages hosted on Google Drive.” states the post., The phishers were mainly interested in siphon Google credentials of their victims as explained in the post., “In an effort to maximize benefits, attackers targeted Google users specifically so as to gain access to the multitude of services associated with those accounts, since Google uses Single Sign On (SSO) procedures,” continues the post., The experts noticed that phishing emails are able to avoid Google’s built-in detection capabilities, likely because they’re sent from a Gmail account and the embedded link points to a legitimate googledrive.com domain., “When you open ‘drive.google.com,’ Google redirects the browser to ‘accounts.google.com’ which carries the message, ‘One Account. All of Google,’ whereas this web page highlights the message ‘Google Drive. One Storage,’ which is not legitimate,” Sood said. “However, users targeted in this campaign might not notice this.” explained Aditya K Sood from Elastica Cloud Threat Labs., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Google Drive, phishing)
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The best news of the week with Security Affairs., Hurry up, subscribe to the newsletter, next Sunday you will receive all the news directly in your inbox.I desire to inform you that Security Affairs is now open to sponsored content..I desire to inform you that Security Affairs is now open to sponsored content.
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• Insert banners of various sizes in all the posts on Security Affairs.
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For more info contact me at [email protected]
Thanks for supporting Security Affairs., mc4wp_form id=”42321″, , Once again thank you!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Newsletter)
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Security experts from PaloAlto Networks have uncovered a large-scale crypto-currency mining operation active for over 4 months. Experts believe the activity involved around 30 million systems worldwide to mine the Monero cryptocurrency using the open-source XMRig utility., The threat actors used VBS files and URL shortening services to deploy the mining tool, the most commonly hit countries are Thailand (3,545,437), Vietnam (1,830,065), and Turkey (665,058)., “Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 has observed a large-scale cryptocurrency mining operation that has been active for over 4 months. The operation attempts to mine the Monero cryptocurrency using the open-source XMRig utility,” states PaloAlto networks., “Based on publicly available telemetry data via bitly, we are able to estimate that the number of victims affected by this operation is roughly around 15 million people worldwide.”, The analysis of data from the Bit.ly URL shortening service revealed that at least 15 million people were impacted by the campaign., Hackers also used the Adf.ly URL shortening service that remunerates users when someone clicks on the link. When users clicked on these Adf.ly URLs, they were redirected and found themselves downloading the crypto-currency mining malware instead., The Monero cryptocurrency mining operation is huge, researchers detected over 250 unique Microsoft Windows PE files, most of them were downloaded from online cloud storage provider 4sync., The files have generic names and appear to originate from popular looking file-sharing services., The miner used in this Monero cryptocurrency mining operation execute XMRig mining software via VBS files, and leverages XMRig proxy services to hide the ultimate mining pool destination., Researchers also noticed that threat actors use the Nicehash marketplace to trade hashing processing power., According to the experts from PaloAlto the date October 20, 2017, was a milestone in this operation. Before October 20, 2017, the attackers were using the Windows built-in BITSAdmin tool to download the XMRig mining tool from a remote location. Apart from a few exceptions, the final payload was primarily installed with the filename ‘msvc.exe’., , After October 20, 2017, the experts observed attackers started using HTTP redirection services., , Since November 16, 2017, threat actors stopped using the SFX files and adopted executables compiled in Microsoft .NET Framework., “Beginning on November 16, 2017, the attackers yet again changed tactics regarding their malware. They no longer made use of SFX files, but instead transitioned to using an executable file compiled in Microsoft .NET Framework that would write a VBS file to disk and modify the victim’s Run registry key to ensure persistence.” continues the analysis., “The last changes we’ve seen took place in late December 2017, when the attackers yet again changed the dropper that was used to deploy the malware. Moving away from .NET, they instead create the necessary VBS file using a dropper compiled with Borland Delphi. Unlike the .NET droppers, this particular dropper will place the VBS file in the victim’s startup folder in order to obtain persistence. Otherwise, the flow of execution remains the same.”, The last samples that were using this dropper referenced a new IP address for XMRig communication( 5.23.48.207)., “Monero mining campaigns are certainly not a new development, as there have been various reported instances recently. However, it is less common to observe such a large-scale campaign go relatively unnoticed for such a long period of time. ” concluded Palo Alto., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Monero mining operation, hacking)
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Incapsula revealed in its annual Report of DDoS Threat-Landscape that there are two main offender archetypes responsible for the DDoS perpetrators, first being none other than professional criminals online, and so call booters (also known as stressers) being the second. In simple words, Booters mean providers of botnet-for-hire service online – and they are in large numbers now on the deep market., DDos-for-hire costs only about $38 an hour on average, you can consider it more like smashing a whole elephant with an ant – considering the cost and size of damage it can do to the victim. No surprise, almost 40% network-layered attacks among all that happen are backed by these botnets. These attacks are subscription based, just like any other typical service being offered online, and anybody can launch several DDoS attacks on their target for just a dozens of dollars each month., Now, this surely can be played out in a way that we can’t expect. Let’s take the 17 year old Idaho teen case where an attack on the state’s largest school (where teen studied, too) was launched. The attack continued for more than a week and of course, caused terrible issues to the concerning folks. The students working on school’s standard achievement tests, lost their work completely, it also prevented teachers to get paid as the payroll system was blocked., As being mentioned above, taking such attack’s technique into consideration, these attacks are short-lived, but that pretty much suggest the impact of DDoS-for-hire attacks if continued. Yet, it’s been reported that over 20% of network-layer attacks taking place online last for up to five days., Incapsula noted, “On one hand we observed long, complex, multiphase assaults that resemble advanced persistent threats (APT)”., “These employ different methods and can last days, weeks and even months at time. On the other hand, we also noted a preponderance of rudimentary single-vector attacks usually lasting no longer than 30 minutes.” he added. , Large scale attacks aren’t that much common, and 253 Gbps was the biggest network attack being mitigated by Incapsula all through this last quarter. The report found that more than 56% among all of the network layer threats are driven by UDP flood attacks. Interesting, 8% our of these are SSDP-DDoS attacks that get launched from IOT (Internet of Things) devices., , Another interesting thing worth noting here is, the use of search engine impersonator-bots has been abandoned by the botnet operators. It declined from 57% according to figures from year 2014 to only 0.9% currently., The report also suggests that attackers tend to hit back again and again onto the victims, and normally, an attack is launched again after 2 months. In almost 30% of the cases, the targets are hit even once every week. Overall, what we can learn from the research is the great threat that DDoS events are posing to the online businesses. Don’t go far, only an hour of downtime can be enough to stress out a working business we believe., Incapsula noted, “The real-world cost of an unmitigated attack is $40,000 per hour”. Adding further, “Implications reach far beyond lost revenues to include loss of consumer trust, data theft, intellectual property loss, and more., , Today, with a substantial percentage of attacks lasting for days, and half of all targets being repeatedly hit, a worst-case scenario entails losses of hundreds of thousands—if not millions—of dollars.”, Written by: Ali Qamar, Founder/Chief Editor at SecurityGladiators.com, Author Bio:
Ali Qamar is an Internet security research enthusiast who enjoys “deep” research to dig out modern discoveries in the security industry. He is the founder and chief editor at Security Gladiators, an ultimate source for cyber security. To be frank and honest, Ali started working online as a freelancer and still shares the knowledge for a living. He is passionate about sharing the knowledge with people, and always try to give only the best. Follow Ali on Twitter @AliQammar57, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – DDoS, cybercrime)
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A New malware dubbed dvmap for Android was found and removed from the official Google Play store, Kaspersky Lab had discovered the new malware that is capable of obtaining root access on Android devices and is capable of taking over the system library with the execution of a code injection attack., The malware named DVMAP was seen being distributed as a game called Colourblock and has a new feature in mobile malware., “In April 2017 we started observing new rooting malware being distributed through the Google Play Store. Unlike other rooting malware, this Trojan not only installs its modules into the system, it also injects malicious code into the system runtime libraries. Kaspersky Lab products detect it as Trojan.AndroidOS.Dvmap.a.” states Kaspersky Lab., , The ability to deploy code injection is a new capability unseen until now and represents a dangerous evolution on Android menaces., The malware tries to gain root access after the application installation and launches a file to verify the Android version and what library it will inject the code. Once successful the malware tries to connect to C&C server that keeps updating every process of the malware. DVMAP can also disable the user’s security settings to try gain root access over the device., The creators of the malware were able to bypass Play Store security mechanisms by embedding it with a game, in a two-phase infection method. First, a game was uploaded to the Play Store free of malware, and then the application was substituted with the malware itself bypassing this way the security mechanisms of Google. Before its removal, the malware was able to infect at least 50,000 devices that downloaded the game application., “This makes Dvmap the first Android malware that injects malicious code into the system libraries in runtime, and it has been downloaded from the Google Play Store more than 50,000 times. Kaspersky Lab reported the Trojan to Google, and it has now been removed from the store.” continues Kaspersky., DVMAP can disable runtime libraries depending which version of Android is in use, so it can install other payloads linked to third parties that could compromise sensitive data as banking accounts. One of these payloads is “com.qualcmm.timeservices” The malware can also work on 32 and 64 bits of Android., Until now there is no correction for the malware, but users can count on simple best practices of security do avoid or detain the infection. It is highly recommended that users download only from developer’s official site, maintain an up to date backup of data and always verify which privilege will be granted to the application that will be installed. A full factory reset also is highly recommended to users who have been infected and also maintaining up to date the definitions of antivirus., About the author Luis Nakamoto, Luis Nakamoto is a Computer Science student of Cryptology and an enthusiastic of information security having participated in groups like Comissão Especial de Direito Digital e-Compliance (OAB/SP) and CCBS (Consciência Cibernética Brasil) as a researcher in new technologies related to ethical hacking, forensics, and reverse engineering. Also, a prolific and compulsive writer participating as a Redactor to Portal Tic from Sebrae Nacional., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – DVMAP , Android)
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For years now we live with the confirmation of the importance of social networks and their impact on daily life. As with any other subject there are many and conflicting opinions on what is considered a social revolution. Millions, billions of people who daily exchange thoughts, opinions, images, emotions, anything that makes us feel alive and part of a community that filled our gaps. There are many theories behind social networks, in particular two are very fascinating, one who see social networks designed to be powerful tools for governments massive collection of information and monitoring of global sentiment, another who considers this platforms carriers of information but also manifest of social dissents, and for this to be kept under strict control., I personally prefer a hypothesis that is placed in the middle, that treats social networks as powerful communication tools capable of reaching vast audiences planetary instantaneously and therefore is not very easy to tighter controls on each communication. This is the real concern of governments, losing control of a situation that could explode at any time to grow up to become unpredictable and unstoppable. Precisely this concern led to the following effects:, But what happens when all these approaches fail in intent?
There will be the final weapon, the “kill switch“, the censorship of the twenty-second century. A kill switch, also known as an e-stop is a security mechanism used to shut off in an emergency situation in the devices in which it can not be shut down in the usual manner. In this case the mechanism is the network itself isolating, and acting in this way it is possible to separate one nations from the rest of the world.
“Divide et impera”, So far we have been concerned about the potential of social networks, but obviously there is a downside. Just the huge media exposure of these new media can be a source of problems far from negligible. Social networks have literally swallowed whole populations by exposing them to new threats. The cyber crime, but also threats by hostiles government. In the first case, countless criminal organizations have used the network for attacks of all kinds, for social engineering attacks or to spread malware to steal financial information to the users. In the second case are the same Governments that infiltrating social networks to perform intellicence operations or to spread viruses developed for strategic objectives., At this point one might wonder about the future of social networks. Will they grow with no brakes being able to exercise precise control of the masses, or we will it be less confidence on the trusting concept on which they are based?
In what direction society is moving?, Pierluigi Paganini
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I’m very happy to announce the publication of the annual ENISA Threat Landscape 2015 (ETL 2015), this is the fifth report issued by the European Agency. The ENISA Threat Landscape 2015 summarizes top cyber threats, experts have identified during the last 12 months., The document synthesizes the emerging trends in cyber security, it is a must reading for the experts in the industry and executives of any sector., In 2015, we have assisted a greater effort of law enforcement in the fight against criminal organizations that are becoming even more advanced., The experts at ENISA analyzed the Top 15 cyber-threats, identifying the threat trends, trends of threat agents and trends for emerging technologies, the report also includes for each cyber-threat a list of mitigation controls., Malware remains the principal cyber-threat in 2015, they have increased in the number of instances detected and the level of sophistication, albeit mobile malware may not have reached expected levels of growth., Web based attacks and web application attacks are in second and third place, no change has been observed respecting the previous report. Web based attacks include malicious URLs, compromised domains, browser exploits and drive-by attacks., The category of web application attacks includes classic techniques like cross-site scripting and SQL-injection (SQLi). In the fourth place there are the Botnets, these infrastructures an essential component for a large number of cyber attacks, but in the last year law enforcement has coordinated a significant number of takedowns against many malicious architectures., In 2015, the number of DDoS attacks continues to increase, the attacks increased with the volume and also their average duration has increased., Giving a look at the table below, we can verify that in 2015 the spam decreased once again, despite it still represents a valid vector to spread malware malicious links., “Spam is in a declining trend since some years now, its importance in the malicious arsenal remained at least almost equal: new methods of “weaponization” of this threat make it a serious threat. During the reporting period we have assessed that spam is an effective means for malware distribution. Ca. 6% of overall spam volume included malicious attachments or links” states the ENISA Threat Landscape 2015 report., , The overall situation is very concerning, cyber threats are influencing also new technologies and paradigms, as explained in a specific session of the report entitled “Emerging Threat Landscape.”, The emerging technology areas considered in this ETL are:, For each technology the report provides the Top 10 Emerging threats, but I don’t want to tell you more about the document, I invite you to carefully read the ENISA Threat Landscape 2015., Udo Helmbrecht, ENISA’s Executive Director provided the following comment on the project:, “Identification of threats and their dynamics in cyber-space is key in understanding asset exposure and risks. It is an important piece of knowledge that allows for understanding protection requirements, raising awareness and allowing for a better, yet more efficient assessment of risks. ENISA continues with providing strategic information in that area through its ENISA Threat Landscape. Together with the thematic landscapes, this work is a unique publicly available source providing both strategic and tactical intelligence on cyber-threats, tailored to the specific needs of a large amount of stakeholders.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Cyber Security, ENISA Threat Landscape 2015)
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Security researchers at IBM Security have discovered a new variant of the popular Ramnit Trojan. This year law enforcement agencies from several European countries coordinated by the Europol have taken over the botnet composed of over 3.2 Million computers worldwide, but now a new malicious infrastructure is in the wild., Ramnit was first spotted in 2010 as a worm, in 2011, its authors improved it starting from the leaked Zeus source code turning the malware into a banking Trojan. In 2014 it had the pinnacle of success, becoming the fourth largest botnet in the world., , The discovery represents the return of Ramnit after the law enforcement takedown., “According to IBM X-Force researchers, that may have officially changed in December 2015. Not even a year after Ramnit was taken down, we are seeing what appears to be the first real re-emergence of the banking Trojan botnet. ” Limor Kessem, cyber intelligence expert at IBM Trusteer, wrote in a blog post., The new Ramnit botnet uses a different command and control (C&C) infrastructure, the experts noticed that more than half of the infected machines are in Canada, followed by Australia, the US and Finland., What’s new?, The source code of new Ramnit variant spotted by IBM is quite similar to the predecessor by it uses shorter configuration files and implements web injections mechanisms like other threats (i.e. Dridex, Shifu). The researchers speculate that operators behind the Ramnit botnet have acquired the web injection mechanism from other cyber criminal groups, the experts noticed that the code injected into banking websites by the malware is obtained in real time from a remote server., “The only change in modus operandi is expressed in the web injections and the configuration file, which are both considered to be moving parts in the inner workings of any banking Trojan. Recent findings from IBM X-Force indicated that a number of other Trojans, like Shifu, Dridex and Neverquest, have been using the exact same web injections and remote servers, which can be indicative of gangs purchasing software-as-a-service (SaaS) from the same injection developers.” states the post., The experts noticed several infection vectors, including malvertising campaigns that rely on the popular Angler exploit kit, “The new server commands newly infected machines that are receiving Ramnit through the Angler exploit kit. It regularly updates them with configurations and executable file builds. The new Ramnit also operates with a real-time webinjection server, selectively pulling attack schemes on the fly when infected users browse to a few major banks in Canada”, The old Ramnit botnet was operated by a single criminal crew that has never sold the source code for the malicious agent., “From what we’ve learned so far, nothing seems to point to a notable change in terms of who is behind Ramnit. It is possible that a new gang has picked the project up, but attribution remains vague in this case,” added Kessem., What about the future?, Experts believe the cyber criminals will expand their operation to other countries., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – cybercrime, Ramnit botnet)
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Today I have published a blog post on the Army Vulnerability Response Program (AVRP), a sort of bug bounty program specific for the US military environment. The idea is to incentive the ethical disclosure of vulnerabilities in military systems., Such kind of initiatives is very important, every system, every software could be compromised, even in the military industry, for this reason, bug bounty programs are very important., News of the day is that the US military websites are protected using SHA-1 cipher, the researcher at Netcraft security Paul Mutton discovered that a number of US Department of Defence (DoD) agencies are issuing SHA-1 certificates., Security experts are warning the IT industry on the risks related the use of the vulnerable SHA-1 hashing algorithm, a couple of weeks ago a group of researchers has demonstrated that the cost of breaking the SHA-1 hash algorithm is lower than previously estimated., According to experts at Netcraft, the number of SHA-1 certificates issued this year is 120,000, but most worrying is that nearly a million of surveyed SSL certificates October SSL were signed with a process relying on the SHA-1., US military websites are among the website that use the vulnerable SHA-1 digital certificates despite US organizations such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) are long requesting the US government agencies to adopt more secure hashing algorithm., The experts at Netcraft published another interesting post reporting the United States Department of Defense is still issuing SHA-1 signed certificates for use by military agencies., “The Missile Defense Agency, the eventual successor to the “Star Wars” programme, uses one of these SHA-1 certificates on a Juniper Networks remote access device. The SHA-1 certificate was issued by the Department of Defense in February 2015, long after NIST declared this practice to be unacceptable.” states the post. , Some US military web services still support the outdated TLS 1.0 connections, even the Defense Logistics Agency only supports the TLS 1.0 protocol., “Several other U.S. military remote access services only support the obsolete TLS 1.0 protocol, including two used by the Defense Logistics Agency. Some other military sites, including one of the Navy’s VPN services do support TLS 1.2, but with obsolete cipher suites. These particular sites all use SHA-1 signed certificates that do not expire until 2017, and so are regarded as “affirmatively insecure” by Chrome.” continues the post. ,
, “As an example, the subscriber certificate issued to cec.navfac.navy.mil was signed on 19 March 2015 by the DoD CA-27 intermediate, which is signed by the DoD Root CA 2 trusted root,” he writes., “If any of these intermediate certificates were to be targeted to find a collision, it would be possible for an attacker to generate valid subscriber certificates for any domain. This would allow the attacker to convincingly impersonate US military sites and carry out man-in-the-middle attacks against browsers that trust the DoD root certificates.”, It is curious to note that the PKI infrastructure of The Department of Defence relies on two root certificate authorities (DoD Root CA 2 and DoD Root CA 3) that are not included in all browsers by default., The use of SHA-1 based certificates exposes government websites to state-sponsored attacks, in the specific case the cost of a migration to other hashing algorithms is negligible when compared to the benefits in terms of security., “The risk to the Department of Defense is further heightened by enemy governments being the most likely sources of attack. The projected cost of attacking SHA-1 is unlikely to be prohibitive, and some governments may already be in a position to find a hash collision faster than the most organised criminals.” states Netcraft., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – US DoD , SHA-1)
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IT community become familiar with the concept of zero-day vulnerability, no matter if it is related to SCADA system or mobile phone firmware, it could allow a hacker to silently interfere with user’s life, exposing it to serious risks., This time the product affected by the vulnerability is produced by Symantec, it is PGP Whole Disk Encryption and it “provides organizations with comprehensive, high performance full disk encryption for all data (user files, swap files, system files, hidden files, etc.) on desktops, laptops, and removable media.”, The Symantec page for the product reports:, “This full disk encryption software protects data from unauthorized access, providing strong security for intellectual property, customer and partner data. Protected systems can be centrally managed by PGP Universal Server simplifying deployment, policy creation and distribution and reporting.”, On December 25th @NTarakanov tweeted the news of the vulnerability in pgpwded.sys kernel driver distributed with Symantec PGP Desktop reporting a pastebin note that announced that the affected application is Symantec PGP Desktop 10.2.0 Build 2599 (up-to date) meanwhile the affected file is pgpwded.sys version 10.2.0.2599., , The post states:, “The pgpwded.sys kernel driver distributed with Symantec PGP Desktop contains an arbitrary memory overwrite vulnerability in the handling of IOCTL 0x80022058. Exploitation of this issue allows an attacker to execute arbitrary code within the kernel. An attacker would need local access to a vulnerable computer to exploit this vulnerability.”, The vulnerability affects only Windows XP/2k3, exploiting of METHO_BUFFERED with output_size == 0 not works for later Windows OSs., Effective the response of Symantec company that has analyzed immediately the problem also thanks the detailed provided in the post, the expert Kelvin Kwan in an official note confirmed the vulnerability sustaining that it very complicated to exploit because an attacker need to gain physical access to the system to compromise it., “Essentially, this vulnerability is limited to systems running Windows XP and Windows 2003 only. The attacker would need to be logged into the system to trigger the exploit. However, the exploit would be very difficult to trigger as it relies on the system entering an error condition first. Once in this error condition, the exploit could allow an attacker with lower privileges to run some arbitrary code with higher privileges. Later versions of Windows do not have this vulnerability.” , My opinion is that every software could be affected by a vulnerability, fundamental is the patch management once is it discovered, it is crucial to reduce the windows of exposure to avoid serious consequences, for this reason Symantec has declared to fix the dangerous bug with a maintenance pack that will be released early in February., Pierluigi Paganini
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The Yahoo hack occurred in 2013, the biggest known data breach suffered by a tech company, is bigger than originally stated., Verizon Communications, which acquired Yahoo for $4.48 billion in June, announced on Tuesday that the 2013 Yahoo hack affected all three billion of company user accounts., Last year, Yahoo declared that the incident affected one billion accounts, and it wasn’t the unique incident suffered by the company. In 2014, hackers accessed 500 million accounts in a separate security breach., Attackers accessed names, birth dates, phone numbers, security questions, backup email addresses and passwords of Yahoo, a gift for hackers that could use the same data to access any other account owned by Yahoo users that share same credentials. Unfortunately, the hashed passwords were protected with a weak algorithm that was very easy to crack., The 2013 Yahoo hack influenced the deal to acquire Yahoo in June and had a significant impact on the price of the acquisition., it’s very strange that the real extent of the incident was disclosed only now., “That investigators did not discover the full extent of the 2013 incident before Verizon closed the deal to acquire Yahoo in June was surprising to outside cybersecurity analysts.” reported The New York Time., According to Verizon, the support of outside forensic experts allowed it to discover that every single account was exposed in the 2013 Yahoo hack., “Subsequent to Yahoo’s acquisition by Verizon, and during integration, the company recently obtained new intelligence and now believes, following an investigation with the assistance of outside forensic experts, that all Yahoo user accounts were affected by the August 2013 theft. While this is not a new security issue, Yahoo is sending email notifications to the additional affected user accounts. The investigation indicates that the user account information that was stolen did not include passwords in clear text, payment card data, or bank account information. The company is continuing to work closely with law enforcement.” Verizon said in a statement issued on Tuesday., “Our investment in Yahoo is allowing that team to continue to take significant steps to enhance their security, as well as benefit from Verizon’s experience and resources,”, On August, a hacking collective based in Eastern Europe began offering Yahoo’s data for sale on the Dark Web. According to security firm InfoArmor, the Yahoo database was sold for $300,000 on the dark web., Unfortunately, at least three different buyers, including two “prominent spammers” paid the hacker to gain the entire database and likely use it in espionage activities., “But last August, a geographically dispersed hacking collective based in Eastern Europe quietly began offering the whole database for sale, according to Andrew Komarov, chief intelligence officer at InfoArmor, an Arizona cybersecurity firm, who monitors the dark corners of the internet inhabited by criminals, spies and spammers.” reported the New York Times. “Three buyers — two known spammers and an entity that appeared more interested in espionage — paid about $300,000 each for a complete copy of the database, he said.”, , Yahoo still considers the breaches in 2014 and 2013 as unrelated events., It is still unclear who is behind the attack, security experts attributed the 2013 Yahoo hack to a Russian APT group., “In March, the Department of Justice charged four men, including two Russian intelligence officers, with the 2014 breach. Investigators said the Russian government used stolen Yahoo data to spy on a range of targets in the United States, including White House and military officials, bank executives and even a gambling regulator in Nevada, according to anindictment.” added The New York Time., “The stolen data was also used to spy on Russian government officials and business executives, federal prosecutors said. What made that theft particularly egregious, Justice Department officials said, was that the two intelligence officers who were indicted had worked for an arm of Russia’s Federal Security Service, or F.S.B., that is charged with helping foreign intelligence agencies track cybercriminals.”, Once again let me suggest Yahoo users reset their passwords and change security questions as soon as possible on every website, including ones for which they used the same Yahoo credentials., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – 2013 Yahoo hack, data breach)
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The Mirai botnet was first spotted in august 2016 by the security researcher MalwareMustDie, it was specifically designed to compromise vulnerable or poorly protected IoT. Once Mirai malware compromises an IoT device it recruits it into a botnet primarily used for launching DDoS attacks, such as the one that hit Dyn DNS service., In October 2016, the Mirai source code was leaked and threat actors in the wild started customizing their Mirai botnet., The last variant of the Mirai botnet spotted in the wild by IBM researchers implements further capabilities, it includes a component for Bitcoin mining., It is not surprising, crooks always try to catch every opportunity and the value of the crypto-currency has doubled in price in the last months reaching more than $1,290 per unit a few weeks ago., “This new variant of ELF Linux/Mirai malware with the bitcoin mining component has us pondering, though.” reads the analysis published by IBM X-Force security researchers. “Attackers certainly have much to gain from having bitcoins in their pocket to facilitate their cybercriminal activities — bitcoin is the currency of choice for purchasing illegal commodities such as malware.”, The new Bitcoin mining-capable Mirai botnet was involved in a short-lived, high-volume campaign at the end of March., , The malware targeted Linux machines running BusyBox, most of them are DVR servers with default Telnet credentials., The new Mirai variant targets this specific category of IoT devices because it uses their computing power to mine Bitcoin., “The new ELF Linux/Mirai malware variant we discovered included another add-on: a bitcoin miner slave. This led us to question the effectiveness of a bitcoin miner running on a simple IoT device that lacks the power to create many bitcoins, if any at all. Given Mirai’s power to infect thousands of machines at a time, however, there is a possibility that the bitcoin miners could work together in tandem as one large miner consortium.” continues IBM. “We haven’t yet determined that capability, but we found it to be an interesting yet concerning possibility. It’s possible that while the Mirai bots are idle and awaiting further instructions, they could be leveraged to go into mining mode.” , The experts at IBM found the Mirai dropper in a web console and detected the site it was associated in a series of high-volume command injection attacks., The website was used by operators as a malware package archive repository, experts discovered that the file package also included a Dofloo backdoor and a Linux shell., Stay Tuned!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Mirai Botnet, Bitcoin)
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The Internet of Things refers all objects in daily life equipped with identifiers that allow their automatic inventory. Tagging of the Internet of Things could be achieved with various technologies such as the RFID, NFC, digital watermarking, QR code and muck more.
, The diffusion of paradigm of the Internet of Things is sustained by phenomena like the improvement of connectivity infrastructure and by the massive introduction of technology in the environment that surround us, from our house to the ambitious project of smart cities., IDC has given an economic estimation for the evolution of the market that is moving around the Internet of Things, technologies and services spending that generated global revenues of $4.8 trillion in 2012 and that will reach $8.9 trillion by 2020, growing at a compound annual rate (CAGR) of 7.9%., IDC expects the installed base of the Internet of Things will be nearly 212 billion “things” globally by the end of 2020, around 14% of them will be “connected (autonomous) things” mainly driven by intelligent systems that will be deployed and will collect data across both consumer and enterprise applications., This growth represents a serious challenge under the cyber security perspective, many researchers are evaluating the possibility to attack these objects or exploit them to compromise the surrounding environment., At the security conference DerbyCon 3.0 2013, researcher Daniel Buentello made an interesting presentation titled “Weaponizing your coffee pot” showing the consequences of an attack against high-tech objects, like a common coffee pot, connected to the Internet of Things., The computational capability of connected devices is comparable to the one of a minicomputers but with a substantial difference, in the majority of case these components aren’t protected by defense mechanisms., If one of these intelligent objects is infected by a malware it could be recruited in a botnet architecture, no matter if hackers control a coffee pot or a smartTV., Buentello highlighted that once a malware infected our domestic environment it could propagate itself trough Internet of Things, for example reaching the thermostat of our oven or our home server., The researcher described in his presentation the coffee pot product, dubbed FrigidMore, which is connected to the internet and run a “java” scripts to control the coffee taste and to push notifications to user’s smartphone when coffee is ready., Buentello analyzed the Nest thermostat that uses a WiFi interface for various operations such as the software updates., “The Nest Learning Thermostat automatically updates its software over Wi-Fi whenever an update is released.” , Cyber criminals could compromise the update process push out malware to all connected devices and recruit them a part of a botnet., , , Buentello gave a shorter 15-minute version of “weaponizing your coffee pot” also at ToorCon Seattle 2013., , , Internet of Things is considered a privileged target of cyber criminals, they will concentrate their efforts to attack so powerful objects. Home automation devices are easy to attack from hackers, search engine like Shodan are a mine of information to discover potential targets and gather info on their structure., “Today, I could scan for open ports on the Web used by a known control system, find them, get in and wreak havoc on somebody’s home. I could turn off lights, mess with HVAC systems, blow speakers, unlock doors, disarm alarm systems and worse.” CEDIA IT Task force member Bjorn Jensen said, Concepts like smart homes and smart cities are fascinating but could hide dangerous pitfalls, despite today Internet of Things is a reality and the number of “intelligent” devices is rapidly increasing, the majority of them is totally unprotected and security for “home automation” is still in the stage of evolution., Welcome progress, but remember that everything has its price, anything connected to the Internet is hackable., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Internet of Things, hacking)
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On Friday evening, the worldwide blog comment hosting service for web sites and online communities Disqus has confirmed a data breach that occurred back in 2012., In 2012, hackers have stolen details for at least 17.5 million Disqus user accounts., The popular cyber security expert Troy Hunt, who runs the data breach notification service haveibeenpwned.com, come into the possession of a copy of the stolen data., New breach: Disqus had a data breach in 2012 which exposed 17.5M accounts. 71% were already in @haveibeenpwned — Have I been pwned? (@haveibeenpwned) October 6, 2017, , Hunt reported the issue to Disqus staff on Friday afternoon., 23 hours and 42 minutes from initial private disclosure to @disqus to public notification and impacted accounts proactively protected pic.twitter.com/lctQEjHhiH, — Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) October 6, 2017, , Disqus has already started notifying users that were listed in the archive reported by Troy Hunt, the exposed records include email addresses, usernames, sign-up dates, and last login dates in plain text. The experts noticed that SHA-1 hashed passwords were only included for about 33% of all records., Disqus declared that at the end of 2012, it switched the password hashing algorithm from SHA1 to bcrypt., “Yesterday, on October 5th, we were alerted to a security breach that impacted a database from 2012. While we are still investigating the incident, we believe that it is best to share what we know now. We know that a snapshot of our user database from 2012, including information dating back to 2007, was exposed. The snapshot includes email addresses, Disqus user names, sign-up dates, and last login dates in plain text for 17.5mm users. Additionally, passwords (hashed using SHA1 with a salt; not in plain text) for about one-third of users are included.” states the breach notification puclished by Disqus., In response to the incident, the company started contacting users and resetting the passwords related to the users that had passwords included in the breach., “As a precautionary measure, we are forcing the reset of passwords for all affected users. We are contacting all of the users whose information was included to inform them of the situation.” continues the Disqus data breach notification., “We’ve taken action to protect the accounts that were included in the data snapshot. Right now, we don’t believe there is any threat to a user accounts. Since 2012, as part of normal security enhancements, we’ve made significant upgrades to our database and encryption in order to prevent breaches and increase password security. Specifically, at the end of 2012 we changed our password hashing algorithm from SHA1 to bcrypt.”, , According to Disqus, there is no evidence of unauthorized logins or any other abuses associated with the stolen data., The company is still investigating the incident., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Disqus data breach , hacking), ,
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ISIS members make professional use of social media for propaganda and to recruit new sympathizers, but intelligence agencies are trying to exploit every little mistake to track down the terrorist cells., Air Force General Hawk Carlisle, head of US Air Combat Command, told a conference that analysts at the 361st Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Group were able to locate a group of ISIS militant by analyzing metadata contained in a selfie snapped and posted online by an ISIS fighter standing outside a command-and-control building in the Middle East., , “The airmen are combing through social media and they see some moron standing at this command,” Carlisle said at the speech, Air Force Times reports. “And in some social media, open forum, bragging about command and control capabilities for Da’esh. And these guys go ‘ah, we got an in.'”, The intelligence analysts succeeded to locate the position of the building based on the metadata contained in the images posted online, and just 22 hours later the discovery of the position the Air Force bombed the area dropping three Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAM) used in surgical attacks., “Through social media. It was a post on social media. Bombs on target in 22 hours,” declared Carlisle, “It was incredible work, and incredible airmen doing this sort of thing.”, The events demonstrate the importance to monitor online activities of the ISIS militants, last week, US Congress’s House Homeland Security Committee heard that ISIS is overseeing social media platform reaching thousands of sympathizers., Michael Steinbach, assistant director in the FBI’s Counterterrorism Division, warned lawmakers there was no way to monitor encrypted online communications among sympathizers of the ISIS, it urges a law to give them more powers., According to Steinbach, the Bureau admitted its inability to monitor encrypted online conversations, these communications are ordinarily exploited by the ISIS for propaganda and to recruit new militants., Steinbach reported to the House Homeland Security Committee that encrypted communications allow the establishment of an “afforded a free zone by which to recruit, radicalize, plot and plan.”, Steinbach explained that law enforcement agencies did not know the volume of the hidden online messages., “We’re past going dark in certain instances. We are dark,” said Steinbach., The new generation of terrorists has great cyber capabilities, they mastered social media and the intelligence needs the instrument to fight them on the same battlefield, including the Dark Web., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – ISIS, propaganda)
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Cyber warfare is becoming the most progressive warfare domain after the Second World War. The progression of this concept brings us to the next milestone, to define which global actors benefit the most from this capability. The feasibility of offensive cyber warfare capability of the weaker states against states with stronger kinetic warfare capability grants them a strategic advantage and enables them to change the balance of power in their advantage. Offensive cyber warfare capability is a sound strategic balancing factor that potentially will be utilized by the rising/challenging hegemon against the hegemon. The attractiveness of cyber warfare for the weaker state is due to its low cost of development and deployment, its minimum visibility during development and mobilization as a weapon, attribution, globalization of information and global accessibility of technology and the fact that stronger states are more dependent on their critical cyber infrastructure., Understanding the effectiveness of the strategic culture and utilization of cyber warfare capability by the challenging/rising hegemon against the hegemon will have consequences on U.S. national security doctrine. United States as one of the most “wired” states in the world shows a potential vulnerability against cyber-attacks. Globalization -fueled by technological advancement and spread of cyber space in physical space- is a manifestation of new means through which power is exercised and distributed. On the same token such power comes with a vulnerability that states such as North Korea and China are trying to separate themselves from by keeping their critical infrastructure isolated from internet reach. Cyber Warfare is a unique case, the more you have invested and expanded on your capabilities in cyberspace more vulnerable you are., , The exponential growth of internet and dependence of our critical infrastructure to cyber space (i.e. power grids, emails, emergency systems, reconnaissance networks, military communication, weapons and etc.) begs the question; can cyber warfare be the dominant dimension for interstate conflicts in the future? Consequentially the next question that needs to be addressed is that in the context of international theory which group of states benefit the most strategically from offensive cyber warfare capability? This study argues that, considering the fact that a rising regional hegemon such as China does not have kinetic war (traditional weapons) capability that equates to the U.S. advanced military forces; offensive cyber warfare becomes a sound balancing factor against this asymmetric relationship., One may argue that there is still a significant “digital gap” between haves (having strong technological and cyber capabilities) and have-nots, attributing a stronger cyber warfare capability to states with stronger military and technological advantage. However the difference between developing a strong cyber warfare capability and nuclear capability is substantial. It takes less economic, human and geo-political resources to develop cyber-attack capability than nuclear capability. This becomes a fundamental assumption in comparing nuclear capability and cyber war potential. Realist scholars argue that nuclear capability is the absolute form of military power that provides security for proliferated states., Cyber war capability presents a different aspect of this argument, the strategic capability embedded in lack of attribution of the source of a cyber attack, secretive aspect of information operations and the fact that a large scale computer network attack (CNO) can be launched from a small facility with least amount of visibility allows for cyber warfare to be a viable front for challenging rising hegemons., To understand the effectiveness of cyber warfare especially for states with a smaller conventional arms forces and less technologically advanced military one should study the basics of the asymmetric warfare. Cyber warfare capability provides an important strategic advantage in an asymmetric warfare to the weaker party. Realistically the perfectly symmetric warfare does not exist, particularly when the United States is involved. However cyber warfare may be more asymmetric than other strategic weapons. The U.S. economy and society are heavily networked; so is its military. On the other hand the attacker, by contrast, may have no targets of consequence, either because it is not particularly “wired”, because its digital assets are not networked to the outside world, or because such assets are not terribly important to its government. In the case of North Korea and US the asymmetric characteristics of the cyber warfare has major significance.For instance, the strategic culture of North Korean military by nature will allow for cyber warfare to become a central ability of the arms forces, due to its low cost of deployment, covert nature of the weapon and attribution. Highly asymmetric outcomes are possible when cyber warfare is utilized. A weaker challenging state like North Korea may mobilize enough clever people to do serious damage to a state that is richer and more high-tech but that is taking into account that the attacked state is more dependent on its information infrastructure. In the case of U.S. it is arguable that this requirement is satisfied and U.S. is one of the advanced states in the world that is moving towards full cyber capability. Similar aggression in conventional warfare would lead to crushing defeat of the smaller state by the hegemon., One may argue that U.S. being a more wired state, and arguable the strongest state by far from its rivals in technology also holds a strong ground in cyber defense. But it is important to note that the inherent characteristic of the cyberspace favors the attacker, not the defender. Furthermore, unlike conventional or nuclear war, a cyber-attack is not always obvious. It may take years to identify an attack and by that time the source of attack may have been disappeared from the cyber space. Additionally, the responsibility for defending the nation against a cyber-attack spreads across many federal agencies and the private sector, which complicates congregating a coherent response to an attack. Internet has provided a uniform platform connecting public and private sector, making defense and deterrence a daunting task. Further, from a defensive perspective, it is difficult to imagine how to defend a space that has no boundaries. Also, based on its design, internet changes constantly, grants access to anyone, and exists virtually everywhere. Even so-called closed networks, such as those that are not connected to the Internet (i.e., air-gapped networks) are still at risk from the manual insertion of malware (by means of portable storage devices as in the case of Natanz Nuclear Plant in Iran); even wireless code insertion, transmitted over radio or radar frequencies, is easy to access and tamper with. Now that we have identified that defense is a complex algorithm that reduces its accuracy in cyber security let’s review the potential ramifications of a cyber-attack by a weaker state., What makes cyber warfare effective and viable for the weaker state? In the current anarchic international system of governance, considering the fact that U.S. has by far the strongest conventional military force, what strategies can be used by weaker states to keep the balance of power?, Cyber warfare capability as a strategic weapon for countries such as North Korea seems to be the most viable option. The low cost of entry (for example, a personal computer connected to the Internet), and the ability to operate anonymously, and the problem with attributing an attacker to a cyber-attack are factors that makes cyberspace attractive to adversaries who know they cannot challenge the United States in a symmetrical contest. Potential adversaries, such as Iran and North Korea, are reportedly developing capabilities to attack or degrade U.S. civilian and military networks. “Moonlight Maze” and “Titan Rain” are examples of successful attacks against non-classified military systems which DOD officials claim were directed by other governments. According to the Defense Department’s annual report to Congress on China’s military ability, the Chinese military alongside states such as Iran and North Korea are enhancing their information operations and cyber offense capabilities., In a kinetic warfare scenario, deterrence has an important role. Fear of retaliation makes the attacker to pause and think twice. In the case of cyber warfare deterrence has not been an effective strategy for the U.S. there are over 20 to 30 nations that have already established offensive cyber units so we apparently did not deter them. North Korea being one of these states has recently ramped up its investment on cyber warfare capability development. Also from a cost analysis standpoint the case for cyber deterrence generally rests on the assumption that cyber-attacks are cheap and that cyber-defense is expensive. As Martin Libick states:, “Just as nuclear era spawned policies of deterrence that, although elaborate, were successful or at least not challenged, today’s era needs a doctrine of cyber deterrence.”, The problem with deterrence is that countries are not equally vulnerable to cyber-attacks, thus cyber retaliations or balancing will not be the same as equalization of nuclear warfare capabilities. The aim of deterrence is to create disincentives for starting or carrying out further hostile action however in the case of cyber-attack this notion is hard to achieve. Deterrence also requires the adversary to be able to distinguish between being punished from not being punished. In most realms this is not a problem, however for cyber warfare this is a major problem. The raw calculus of deterrence is fairly straightforward: The lower the odds of getting caught, the higher the penalty required convincing potential attackers that what they might achieve is not worth the cost. Unfortunately, the higher the penalty for any one cyber-attack, the greater the odds that the punishment will be viewed as uneven, this by nature can be contributed to the attribution problem inherently embedded in the cyber warfare capability., Cyber warfare capability is a new arena in strategic studies and it surely requires thorough understanding of the technical and political elements of this phenomenon. Cyber space is not solely developed and defended by the sovereign states and many non-governmental stake holders are involved in deployment of this virtual world. It is imperative for the U.S. government and the international community to consider cyber warfare as a weapon for rogue states and those actors that need its capabilities to gain economic and political advantage against the dominant political structure., About the Author, Artin Amirian is an IT infrastructure engineer with extensive education in Computer Science, Economics and International Political Economy. His graduate research has focused on cyber security policies, globalization of information technology and the implications of CNOs on national security. He currently directs the engineering department of TeraBand Technologies, a California Based IT design/integration firm and continues his research on the effect of information technology on national security. The following is an abstract from his next effort that is expected to be published by December 2015., ,
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A couple of weeks ago, the popular security expert Samy Kamkar revealed a method to easily crack many Master padlock combinations in eight tries or less., , Unfortunately, it is not so complicated to crack a Master padlock with the right instruments, the right software could easily allow it and for this reason Kamkar decided to mechanize the process with a Combo Breaker device., The design of Combo Breaker is very simple as effective, it uses a stepper motor to rotate the Master Lock combination dial, a second servo motor that makes the attempt to open the mechanism, Arduino chip as controller on which the software designed by the expert run, and a 3D printer used to produce the parts composing the Combo Breaker device., “Combo Breaker is a motorized, battery powered, 3D printed, Arduino-based combination lock cracking device. It is portable, open source, 3D models provided, and exploits a new technique I’ve discovered for cracking combination locks in 8 attempts or less, but in an even more exciting, automated fashion.” wrote Kamkar in a blog post.,
, At this point you have all the necessary to crack the Master lock, just insert it in the Combo Breaker and run the software that will take about five minutes to discover the right the combination, but don’t worry a professional thief takes much less time 😉., The bad news is that the process could be drastically improved by finding the first digit of the combination, in this case the Combo Breaker can find the combination in 30 seconds or less., Kamkar explained that the Combo Breaker isn’t guaranteed to work on all Master Lock combination dial mechanisms, in some cases, in fact, the system was not able to crack the padlock., I’m a big fan of Samy, that’s why I desire to propose you also some of his works:, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Master padlock, Combo Breaker)
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, , , Once again thank you!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Newsletter, SecurityAffairs)
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Do you require to pass a card into a device to enter in your company’s office? Most probably you are using a card based on Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) technology to grant the access. Is this an effective security measure? Which are the possible flaws?, The problem with cards based on RFID, is that they are easy to hack, and now it became even easier, all thanks to a device developed by two security researchers that cost $10., The name of the device is BLEkey, it is a tiny device that needs to be embedded in a card reader., BLEkey exploits the vulnerability affecting the Wiegand communication protocol implemented in many of the RFID card readers, in this way it is able to clone RFID cards., , The researchers Mark Baseggio and Eric Evenchick are the researchers who developed the BLEkey device, and they will present their findings at Black Hat (next week in Las Vegas), when they will distribute the first 200 devices for $10 each., The purpose of BLEkey is to prove that HID proximity cards’s technologies based on the Wiegand protocol are outdated and should be replaced., By the details given by Mark Baseggio and Eric Evenchick, you should be able to install BLEkey in less than 2 minutes and BLEkey will have the capacity of storing 1500 RFID cards, this stored cards can after be downloaded to your mobile phone via Bluetooth., I see a lot of potential here, especially for crooks, since it allows crooks to “penetrate” in sensitive areas where control access it protected by systems using the RDI technology. Datacenter, finance department, CEO offices, storage, etc. are potentially exposed to criminals using the BLEkey device., One interesting feature of BLEkey is the capability of disabling the card reader for 2 minutes after the crook has opened the door with the cloned card., We sure will have more information after the talk at the Black Hat, I’m particularly interested by the device, for sure I will acquire it to perform some tests., It has been estimated that nearly 80% of office building are vulnerable to BLEkey. so to avoid problems in the short term, Baseggio suggested that companies should enable tamter switches to detect if anyone is messing with the card reads, and installing a camera in proximity of the access control systems as a deterrent., The hardware design of BLEkey and the source code will be released online after their talk at the Black Hat conference, and I sure hope we can have more news about it., Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – BLEkey, RFID)
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Satellite Communication Devices are vulnerable to cyber attacks due the presence of critical design flaws in the firmware of principal satellite terrestrial equipment. Different satellite systems manufactured by some of the world’s biggest government contractors are affected by severe vulnerabilities according Security experts at IOActive. The researchers have uncovered numerous vulnerabilities in software and ground-based satellite systems manufactured by British suppliers Cobham and Inmarsat. Hackers can hijack and disrupt communication links used in various industries including defense, aviation and communications with serious consequences for the population., “IOActive found that malicious actors could abuse all of the devices within the scope of this study. The vulnerabilities included what would appear to be backdoors, hardcoded credentials, undocumented and/or insecure protocols, and weak encryption algorithms. In addition to design flaws, IOActive also uncovered a number of features in the devices that clearly pose security risks. ” states the report from IOActive., Products commercialized by different manufactures, including Iridium, Harris Corporation, Hughes, Thuraya and Japan Radio Company, are also flawed according a study conducted by researchers., The vulnerable satellites equipments discovered by researchers at IOActive are Harris’ RF-7800-VU024 and RF-7800-DU024 terminals for Broadband Global Area Network (BGAN) services; Hughes 9201/9202/9450/9502 for BGAN and BGAN M2M services, Thuraya IP for BGAN services, Cobham Explorer and SAILOR 900 VSAT for VSAT services, Cobham AVIATOR 700 (E/D) for SwiftBroadband Classic Aero services, Cobham SAILOR FB 150/250/500 for Inmarsat FB services, Cobham SAILOR 6000 Series for Inmarsat C services, JRC JUE-250/500 FB for Inmarsat FB services, and Iridium Pilot/OpenPort for Iridium services., , “You could attack one of these devices with SMS, and trigger features to install new firmware or to compromise it,” “Attackers who compromise the database of an Inmarsat SIM/Terminals reseller can use this information to remotely compromise all those terminals,” says Ruben Santamarta, principal security consultant for IOActive., As explained by Santamarta, just an SMS text message could become a bullet in the hand of a cyber criminals, the researchers uncovered wrong design habit in the firmware of the device, hardcoded credentials, implementation of insecure protocols, presence of backdoors, and adoption of weak password reset processes are some sample of the flawed processed identified on the equipment., In my opinion the most alarming fact is that despite the researcher has reported the findings to the CERT Coordination Center, which promptly issued an alert to the vendors in January, but to date the reply is faint. Within the plethora of vendors, only Iridium has started to work for the development of the patches., “In most cases, attackers can completely compromise” “They could run their own code, install malicious firmware… and do anything they want with that device.” “They can spoof messages and trick the ship to follow a certain path, or to rescue another ship. They can disrupt communications… if a vessel can’t send a distress signal, that’s the worst scenario, if a ship can’t communicate.” the system, Santamarta says., The same would be true for an airplane, he says. And an attacker would not even need physical access to the satellite equipment to pull off a link hijack or spoof; in many cases, hackers could execute their attacks remotely., The researchers were able to discover various vulnerabilities simply reverse engineering the firmware of the satellite appliances, once discevered the flaws the unique problem for the attackers is to gain access to the systems through the Internet or any other kind of interface., “I wasn’t looking for memory or buffer overflow or other typical vulnerabilities. But design flaws found like backdoors or weak protocols are in a way more dangerous because you can reach the device” by using them., “But if you can reach the device, you can compromise it. You can access it through HTTP or some other kind of documented interfaces. In most cases, you can remotely exploit these flaws.”, The report issued by IOActive provides also some recommendations for users of these satellite equipment inviting to seriously consider the possibilities that attackers exploit these vulnerabilities., “Owners and providers should evaluate the network exposure of these devices, implement secure policies, enforce network segmentation, and apply restrictive traffic flow templates (TFT) when possible. Until patches are available, vendors should provide official workarounds in addition to recommended configurations in order to minimize the risk these vulnerabilities pose.”, The researchers at IOActive also recommend that SATCOM manufacturers and resellers immediately remove all publicly accessible copies of device firmware updates from their websites to avoid reverse engineering of the source code. , “If one of these affected devices can be compromised, the entire SATCOM infrastructure could be at risk. Ships, aircraft, military personnel, emergency services, media services, and industrial facilities (oil rigs, gas pipelines, water treatment plants, wind turbines, substations, etc.) could all be impacted by these vulnerabilities.
The results of IOActive’s research should be a wake-up call for both the vendors and users of the current generation of SATCOM technology.” is the statement used to closes the report., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Satellite equipment, cyber security)
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According to the experts at the Zscaler security firm, cybercriminals have compromised more than 2,600 WordPress websites over the past month and deployed malicious iframes on 4,200 distinct pages. The criminals exploited vulnerable versions of WordPress 4.2, and prior, to plant the iframes which are used to redirect users to domains hosting the Neutrino exploit kit., The Neutrino landing page is designed to exploit Flash Player vulnerabilities in order to serve the last variant of the popular ransomware CryptoWall 3.0. Also in this case the variant of the Neutrino exploit kit leveraged in the attack includes the Flash Player exploits leaked in the Hacking Team breach., “Neutrino reportedly incorporated the HackingTeam 0day (CVE-2015-5119), and in the past few days we’ve seen a massive uptick in the use of the kit. The cause for this uptick appears due to widespread WordPress site compromises. ThreatLabZ started seeing a new campaign where WordPress sites running version 4.2 and lower were compromised, and the image below illustrates the components involved in this campaign.” Zscaler said in a blog post., However, in the last weeks, Zscaler researchers noticed a spike in the use of Neutrino exploit kit., , After the arrest of the author of the Blackhole exploit kit, the Angler exploit kit have reached the maximum popularity, but the recent spike in the Neutrino Exploit Kit traffic demonstrated that also this Exploit Kit is considered a valid option in the criminal ecosystem., , Brad Duncan, a handler at the SANS Institute’s Internet Storm Center, confirmed the spike in the Neutrino Exploit Kit traffic., “Our preliminary analysis indicates the actor behind a significant amount of Angler EK during recent months switched to Neutrino EK sometime this week. We don’t have enough data to know if this change is permanent,” he explained in a blog post. “If this change indicates a trend, we might see a large amount of compromised websites pointing to Neutrino EK, along with a corresponding drop in Angler EK traffic. However, criminal groups using these EKs have quickly changed tactics in the past, and the situation may change by the time you read this,”., The report from the SANS Institute blames a cybercrime crew that had abandoned the Angler Exploit Kit and moved operations to the Neutrino exploit kit., Researchers from both organizations confirmed that the primary IP address for the Neutrino landing page is 185.44.105.7, registered to a “Max Vlapet” in Moscow., The exploitation of compromised instances of WordPress CMS is very common for cyber criminals, this campaign confirms that Neutrino Exploit Kit is still considered one of the most reliable exploit kit., “WordPress compromises are not new, but this campaign shows an interesting underground nexus starting with backdoored WordPress sites, a Neutrino Exploit Kit-controlled server, and the highly effective CryptoWall ransomware,”“This campaign also reconfirms that Neutrino Exploit Kit activity is on the rise and is still a major player in the exploit kit arena.” added Zscaler., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Neutrino Exploit Kit, cybercrime)
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Security researchers from the firm Zscaler have been monitoring a cyber espionage campaign dubbed ‘CNACOM‘ that was targeting government organization in Taiwan. According to the researchers, the hackers behind the CNACOM campaign are linked to China and exploited an IE vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2016-0189, patched by Microsoft early 2016., The CVE-2016-0189 had been exploited in targeted attacks against Windows users in South Korea before Microsoft fixed it., In order to trigger the vulnerability, victims have to visit a compromised website or open a spear-phishing email containing a malicious link., The threat actors used watering hole attacks to spread a malware, among the sites compromised by the hackers, there is a major public service organization in Taiwan., Experts from startup Theori have made a reverse engineering of the MS16-053 that fixed the CVE-2016-0189 flaw and published a PoC exploit for the vulnerability., The PoC code works on Internet Explorer 11 running on Windows 10, a great gift for fraudsters that included it in the Neutrino EK as confirmed by FireEye., Since researchers released the full proof of concept for the CVE-2016-0189 flaw, experts at Zscaler ThreatLabZ have been closely tracking its proliferation., The exploit code for the flaw was first spotted as part of the Sundown exploit kit (EK), later it was included in the Magnitude and the KaiXin EK., “This blog details CNACOM, a web-based campaign that appears to be related to a well-known nation-state actor more commonly associated with spear-phishing attacks.” reads the analysis published by Zscaler. “On November 7, we spotted a malicious injection on the registration page of a major Taiwanese public service website. An iframe was injected into the footer of the page, which then loaded a unique landing page containing the CVE-2016-0189 exploit code.”, , , The hackers behind the CNACOM campaign used the same PoC code, but they leveraged on another Internet Explorer privilege escalation flaw, tracked as CVE-2015-0016., The experts highlighted that that CNACOM campaign specifically targeted Taiwanese government entities. The exploit code collects information from the device, including its IP address. If the victim uses the IE and the IP address belongs to the Taiwanese government, the exploit delivers a strain of the Ixeshe malware., The Ixeshe malware has been around since at least 2009, in August 2013 security experts at FireEye observed a series of cyber attacks conducted by the Chinese APT group known as APT12 targeting the US media. The experts linked the threat actors to the campaign that targeted the New York Times in 2012., The variant of Ixeshe malware used in the CNACOM campaign is different from older ones., “Unlike many historical IXESHE samples, it appears that this variant doesn’t utilize campaign codes embedded in the malware itself. This may be due to a more centralized tracking system that only relies on the malware reporting a machine ID.” continues the analysis., Government agencies and private firms in Taiwan are often victims of cyber espionage likely launched by Chinese hackers, a few weeks ago the Tropic Trooper APT hit government Taiwanese organizations and companies in the energy sector., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Taiwan, CNACOM campaign),
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Recent studies of principal security firms revealed that phishing activities in the last years have increased exponentially, cybercrime is targeting every sector from industry to government institutions and of course private citizens. RSA’s October Online Fraud Report 2012 confirmed a large increase in phishing attacks, up 19% over the second half of 2011. The total loss for various organizations comes to $2.1 billion over the last 18 months, these are amazing figures that gives an in idea of the amplitude of phenomena. RSA declared that it detected around 33,000 phishing attacks each month worldwide in 2012, 60% of blocked attacks originated from U.S. servers, on the other side the countries most targeted are US hit by 26% percent of the global volume of phishing attacks followed by U.K. at 46%., Since the beginning of the year, security experts have noticed a slowing of the progression above, certainly due to the monitoring activities of the major security companies, but the data do not be fooled because we’re observing a significant number of phishing attacks against mobile platforms., Security firms have discovered an increasing number of web sites expressly deployed to target mobile users, targeting mainly e-banking and e-commerce services, Trend Micro revealed that in 2012 75 percent of mobile phishing URLs were rogue versions of popular financial and banking sites, only a small percentages (4%) were related to sites try to trick online shoppers and social network users (2%)., , The schema of attack is simple such as efficient is very simple, users in a misleading are hijacked on spoofed versions of legitimate sites, to trick them into disclosing sensitive information such as banking credentials, account details and other personal information that could be used in successive APT attacks., Trend Micro also provide a list of most targeted firms, PayPal users are at the top followed by other financial institutions such as Absa Internet Banking, Barclays and Wells Fargo., Company Name, Nature, PayPal, e-Commerce, Absa Internet Banking, Banking/Finance, Popular en linea, Banking/Finance, Mijn ICS (International Card Services), Banking/Finance, Barclays, Banking/Finance, Wells Fargo, Banking/Finance, eBay, e-Commerce, Bank of America, Banking/Finance, SFR (Societe Francaise du Radiotelephonie), Telecommunications, KBC Bank NV and Match.Com (tie), Banking/Finance, Online dating, , , Why mobile users are privileged targets of cybercriminals?, Bad habits (e.g. jailbreaking of mobile devices, downloading apps from third part store), absence of defense mechanisms and poor awareness on principal cyber threats, expose mobile users to serious risks, Trend Micro’s Gelo Abendan also added:, “This trend in launching phishing attacks on mobile devices can be attributed to certain limitations of the platform itself. This includes the small screen size in most mobile devices, which prevents users from fully inspecting websites for any anti-phishing security element,” “With majority of mobile devices using default browsers, it is also easier for cybercriminals to create schemes as they need only focus on one browser instead of many.”, In the following graph is proposed the list of principal mobile cyber threats and related distribution according Trend Micro., , Despite actually mobile phishing represents a small portion, less than 1% of overall phishing URLs, it is expected a rapid growth of criminal activities that will target mobile platforms so let suggest to install defense systems also on mibile devices, keep update installed apps, do not download from third part app stores, avoid jail braking operations and of course avoid clicking on links contained in unsolicited emails., Pierluigi Paganini
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AMD has finally acknowledged 13 critical vulnerabilities and exploitable backdoors in its Ryzen and EPYC processors that were first disclosed earlier March by the researchers at the security firm CTS Labs., The CTS Labs researchers did not disclose any technical details about the vulnerabilities to avoid abuses in the wild., The vendor plans to roll out firmware updates in the incoming weeks to address the flaws affecting millions of devices worldwide., The flaws could be potentially exploited to steal sensitive data, install malicious code on AMD-based systems, and gain full access to the compromised systems. The flaws expose servers, workstations, and laptops running vulnerable AMD Ryzen, Ryzen Pro, Ryzen Mobile or EPYC processors to attacks., CTS-Labs promptly reported the flaws to AMD, Microsoft and “a small number of companies that could produce patches and mitigations.”, The analysis conducted by the security experts revealed four classes (RYZENFALL, FALLOUT, CHIMERA, and MASTERKEY) of vulnerabilities affecting the AMD Zen architecture processors and chipsets that usually contain sensitive information such as passwords and encryption keys., The flaw could allow to bypass AMD’s Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) technology and also Microsoft Windows Credential Guard., , This week AMD published a press release trying to downplay the severity of the flaws., “It’s important to note that all the issues raised in the research require administrative access to the system, a type of access that effectively grants the user unrestricted access to the system and the right to delete, create or modify any of the folders or files on the computer, as well as change any settings.” reads the press release published by AMD. “Any attacker gaining unauthorized administrative access would have a wide range of attacks at their disposal well beyond the exploits identified in this research.” , Differently from what has happened for Meltdown and Spectre attacks, AMD sustains that the patches it is going to release are not expected to impact system performance., CTS Labs are skeptical about a rapid fix of the issues, they claimed that AMD could take several months to release patches for most of the flaws, even some of them could not be fixed., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – chip, hacking)
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A security vulnerability affects DSL router model from D-Link, the flaw could be exploited by a remote attacker to change device DNS settings and hijack users’ traffic. The Bulgarian security expert Todor Donev, member of the Ethical Hacker research team, explained that vulnerability is found in the ZynOS firmware, which is present in many other devices from other vendors, including D-Link, TP-Link, ZTE., At least one D-Link router is affected by the flaw, the D-Link’s DSL-2740R ADSL modem/wireless router, but every manufacturer using the same firmware is potentially exposed to remote hacking., Todor Donev published a proof-of-concept exploit for the D-Link DSL-2740R model, which has been already phased out, but might still receive support if covered by warranty., , By exploiting the flaw, the attacker can access the D-Link device’s Web administration interface without authentication. The attacker can then modify the DNS settings to redirect users to phishing websites or domain used to serve malware. Even if the Web administration, it’s not exposed on the Internet, the attacker can access the router’s interface from within the local area network with a cross-site request forgery (CSRF) technique., “If the administration interface is exposed to the Internet — routers are sometimes configured in this way for remote administration — the risk of exploitation is higher. But even if it’s only accessible from within the local area network, hackers can still use cross-site request forgery (CSRF) techniques to reach a router’s interface. CSRF attacks hijack users’ browsers to perform unauthorized actions when they visit compromised sites or click on malicious links. Rogue code loaded from a website can instruct a browser to send specially crafted HTTP requests to LAN IP addresses that are usually associated with routers. Large scale CSRF attacks against router owners that were designed to replace DNS servers configured on their devices with servers controlled by attackers were observed on the Internet in the past.” reported ComputerWord., Donev hasn’t notified D-Link of the vulnerability, but the availability of the exploit in the wild urges all vendors that adopt the flawed firmware to check if their products suffering the same security issue., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – D-Link, ZynOS firmware)
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The first vulnerability could be exploited by a remote attacker to execute arbitrary PHP code. The flaw resides in the phar stream wrapper implemented in PHP and is related to the way it handles untrusted phar:// URIs., “A remote code execution vulnerability exists in PHP’s built-in phar stream wrapper when performing file operations on an untrusted phar:// URI. ” reads the security advisory., “Some Drupal code (core, contrib, and custom) may be performing file operations on insufficiently validated user input, thereby being exposed to this vulnerability, This vulnerability is mitigated by the fact that such code paths typically require access to an administrative permission or an atypical configuration.”, The development team marked .phar as a potentially dangerous extension, this means that .phar files uploaded to a website running on the popular CMS will be automatically converted to .txt to prevent malicious execution.Note that the replacement stream wrapper is not compatible with PHP versions lower than 5.3.3., The development team has disabled the phar:// wrapper for Drupal 7 sites running a version of PHP earlier than 5.3.3., “Drupal 7 sites using PHP 5.2 (or PHP 5.3.0-5.3.2) that require phar support will need to re-enable the stream wrapper for it; however, note that re-enabling the stream wrapper will re-enable the insecure PHP behavior on those PHP versions.” continues the advisory. , The second flaw affects the PEAR Archive_Tar, a third-party library that handles .tar files in PHP. An attacker could use a specially crafted .tar file to delete arbitrary files on the system and possibly even execute remote code. , “Drupal core uses the third-party PEAR Archive_Tar library. This library has released a security update which impacts some Drupal configurations. Refer to CVE-2018-1000888 for details.” reads the security advisory., The development team behind the Archive_Tar have patched flaw and released the update it in the core of the CMS., Drupal 8.6.6, 8.5.9 and 7.62 patch both flaws, experts highlighted that Drupal 8 versions prior to 8.5.x will no longer receive security updates because they have reached the end of life., Pierluigi Paganini, (SecurityAffairs – hacking, RCE)
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Cybercriminals can hack ATM systems and force it to dispense the cash using a smartphone, in the specific case a Samsung Galaxy 4 phone., The model of smartphone is not important, the mobile devices are used only to send commands to the ATM remotely once the attacker has physically connected it to the machine., Poorly protected ATMs result more exposed to this type of attacker, hackers compromise their case in order to connect the mobile device., Security expert Brian Krebs has published an interesting post titled “Thieves Jackpot ATMs With ‘Black Box’ Attack” to describe this kind of attacks belonging to “a new class of skimming scams aimed at draining ATM cash deposits”., The “black box” ATM attack described by Brian Krebs relied on a smartphone and a USB-based circuit board., “At issue is a form of ATM fraud known as a “black box” attack. In a black box assault, the crooks gain physical access to the top of the cash machine. From there, the attackers are able to disconnect the ATM’s cash dispenser from the “core” (the computer and brains of the device), and then connect their own computer that can be used to issue commands forcing the dispenser to spit out cash.” states Krebs.,
Resuming, the criminal crews isolate the cash dispenser from the ATM PC and connected it a PC they control using the smartphone. Krebs reported that the “black box attacks,” have been conducted against ATMs made by the NCR vendor., “NCR says the crooks then attached a smart phone (a virgin, out-of-the-box Samsung Galaxy 4), which they used as a conduit through which to send commands to the cash dispenser remotely. According to Harrow, the mobile phone was set up to relay commands through a dynamic IP service.” said Krebs., In one case, the attacker used a circuit board with USB connection to hook it to the ATM controller in order to trick the computer into believing it was still connected to the cash dispenser. Krebs highlighted that anyway the supplementary circuit was unnecessary for the “black box” ATM attack., “They plugged into the controller a USB-based circuit board that NCR believes was designed to fool the ATM’s core into thinking it was still connected to the cash dispenser.” states the post., It’s not the first time that NCR ATMs have been targeted by hackers, in the past we discussed another attack technique that relies on a malware injected through a CD-ROM inserted the ATM core., In October 2014, criminal gangs in Eastern Europe conducted several attacks against ATM machines, not only tampering them with card skimmers which steal debit card data, but also using malware., The malicious code used by cyber criminals allows hackers to steal cash from the ATM without using cloned credit cards. The Interpol conducted a joint operation with experts at Kaspersky Lab, which allowed them to detect the Tyupkin malware on nearly 50 machines. As explained in a blog post on SecureList, Tyupkin submissions to Virus Total were mainly from Russia (20), but other samples (4) were reported also from the United States, India and China., At the moment, researchers at NCR was informed only about two black box attacks, for this reason the company issued a firmware update to its machine that improve the encryption for the communication between the cash dispenser and the core system. The update also includes a feature that block the possibility to roll-back the version of the firmware, the downgrade could be exploited by hackers to make the ATM vulnerable again., “The company also recently shipped a software update for its ATMs that strengthen the encryption used to manage communications between the cash dispenser and the ATM core. More importantly, the update changes the system so that the encryption key exchange between those two components is only done when the dispenser receives a specific authentication sequence.”, The experts at NCR confirmed that this kind of attack is very easy to organize and are very cheap., “All things considered, this is a pretty cheap attack,” said Charlie Harrow, solutions manager for global security at NCR. “If you know the right commands to send, it’s relatively simple to do. That’s why better authentication needs to be there,”, Another modification included in the update refers to blocking the possibility to roll-back the version of the firmware so that the machine becomes vulnerable again., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – ATM, cybercrime)
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The dating app Coffee Meets Bagel confirmed that hackers breached its systems on Valentine’s Day and may have obtained access to users’ account data., The company notified the incident to account holders, the intrusion was discovered after an archive containing user data was offered for sale on the dark web for roughly $20,000 worth of Bitcoin,, Early this week, the Register revealed in exclusive that some 617 million online account details stolen from 16 hacked websites are available for sale on the dark web. Coffee Meets Bagel learned of the incident on Feb. 11, 2019. , The advertising for the sale of the huge trove of data was published in the popular Dream Market black marketplace, data are available for less than $20,000 worth of Bitcoin., Data was collected from data breaches of popular websites including:, While some of the above websites are known to have been hacked (i.e. MyHeritage, MyFitnessPal) for some of them, including Coffee Meets Bagel, it is the first time that the security community was informed of their breaches., Journalists at The Register have analyzed account records and confirmed they appear to be legit. Spokespersons for MyHeritage and 500px confirmed the authenticity of the data., The Register report alleges that data belonging to 6.17 million Coffee Meets Bagel accounts (673 MB of data) were offered for sale. Data appears to be related to late 2017 and mid-2018. , “As always, we recommend you take extra caution against any unsolicited communications that ask you for your personal data or refer you to a web page asking for personal data,” reads the email sent to the users. “We also recommend avoiding clicking on links or downloading attachments from suspicious emails.” reads an email sent by the company to the users. , Coffee Meets Bagel decides to tell users it suffered a data breach…. on Valentine’s Day. 💔 pic.twitter.com/VRNFYlvEJE, Stolen records include name, email address, age, registration date, and gender, but data breach notification issued by Coffee Meets Bagel only reports that names and email addresses prior to May 2018 were exposed., According to the company, no financial data were exposed because the company doesn’t store it. , Coffee Meets Bagel hired a forensic firm to investigate the incident and assess its systems, at the time it is not clear how hackers have breached the company, it also started the audit of vendor and external systems., Pierluigi Paganini, (SecurityAffairs – Coffee Meets Bagel , hacking),
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As always support social networks are now the ideal carrier for an abnormal amount of information and this is the main reason why many governments have invested and are investing in sophisticated analysis tools that can implement intelligent search within an ocean seemingly unrelated data., An unit part of the CIA’s Open Source Center is responsible for monitoring the vast and various social networks, local and international news, radio, and television, Internet chat rooms, and pretty much anything from which they can procure intelligence., Their goal is to monitor every facet of the internet in every imaginable language, cross-referencing that information with local news reports and information gleaned in the more traditional, cloak-and-dagger, spy-type espionage. Much of the information,according to the AP, ends up in the hands of White House officials and even in President Obama’s daily intelligence briefings., One of the main problems that I was placed when we talked about systems analysis is themassive cost of these technologies and the relative maturity., On the second point I never had doubts, because the available technologies allow similaranalysis without problems, while there was some concern about funding availability., But when government agencies come into play even this threshold is exceeded in the lightof their budget., What are the plausible scenarios? Government agencies that monitor the sentimentshared by these powerful channels. We are really interested in preventive actions or do we want to indoctrinate new ideologies?
The dangers are real, we will continue monitoring action but be careful not to go further, the pace is really short., More details on Threat Post web site
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2947_41535
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Adobe has released a critical update to fix a vulnerability in the Shockwave player (CVE-2015-7649) that could be exploited by threat actors to compromise hundreds of millions of machines. The experts at Fortinet’s Fortiguard Labs have discovered the flaw in the Shockwave player and reported it to Adobe., Adobe confirmed that more that nearly 450 million users are running the vulnerable platform and urge a manual update through the Adobe website., , The flaw belongs to the category of memory corruption vulnerabilities, it could be triggered to compromise Windows and Mac machines and gain remote code execution., Adobe says Fortinet reported the hole, which is rated critical., “Adobe has released a security update for Adobe Shockwave Player. This update addresses a critical vulnerability that could potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system.” states the security advisory published by Adobe. “Adobe recommends users of Adobe Shockwave Player 12.2.0.162 and earlier versions update to Adobe Shockwave Player 12.2.1.171 by visiting the Adobe Shockwave Player Download Center. “, According to the Bulletin, every system running the latest version 12.2.0.162 and earlier is vulnerable, the problem affects Windows and Macintosh versions of the Shockwave player., This is not a good period for Adobe, the critical vulnerability in the Shockwave player has been discovered after the company has released a collection of security updates and an emergency patch for popular Flash software that are actively being exploited in-the-wild., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Shockwave player, hacking)
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Experts at cyber security firm LMNTRIX have discovered a new ransomware-as-a-service in the dark web dubbed GandCrab., , The GandCrab was advertised in Russian hacking community, researchers noticed that authors leverage the RIG and GrandSoft exploit kits to distribute the malware., “Over the last three days LMNTRIX Labs has been tracking an influx of GandCrab ransomware. The ransomware samples are being pushed by RIG Exploit delivery channels.” reads the analysis published by LMNTRIX., , As usually happen for Russian threat actors, members cannot use the ransomware to infect systems in countries in the former Soviet Republics that now comprise the Commonwealth of Independent States., Below some interesting points from the advertisement:, The operators behind the RaaS offer they platform maintaining 40% of the ransom, the percentage is reduced to 30% for large partners., Once infected, if the victim does not pay on time, he will have to pay a double ransom., Other specific features related to GandCrab RaaS is the that it allows payment using the cryptocurrency Dash and the service is provided by a server hosted on a .bit domain., The authors of the GandCrab RaaS also offers technical support and updates to its members, they also published a video tutorial that shows how the ransomware is able to avoid antivirus detection., , The RaaS implements a user-friendly admin console, which is accessible via Tor Network, to allow malware customization (i.e. ransom amount, individual bots and encryption masks), The experts shared the Indicators of Compromise in their blog post., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – GandCrab RaaS, cybercrime)
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Github alerts warn developers when including certain flawed software libraries in their projects and provide advice on how to address the issue., Last year GitHub first introduced the Dependency Graph, a feature that lists all the libraries used by a project. The feature supports JavaScript and Ruby, and the company also plans to add the support for Python this year., , The GitHub security alerts feature introduced in November is designed to alert developers when one of their project’s dependencies has known flaws. The Dependency graph and the security alerts feature have been automatically enabled for public repositories, but they are opt-in for private repositories., The availability of a dependency graph allows notifying the owners of the projects when it detects a known security vulnerability in one of the dependencies and suggests known fixes from the GitHub community., The new feature analyzes vulnerable Ruby gems and JavaScript NPM packages based on MITRE’s Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) list, every time a new vulnerability is discovered is added to this list and all repositories that use the affected version are identified and their maintainers informed., “Vulnerabilities that have CVE IDs (publicly disclosed vulnerabilities from the National Vulnerability Database) will be included in security alerts. However, not all vulnerabilities have CVE IDs—even many publicly disclosed vulnerabilities don’t have them.” states GitHub., “This is the next step in using the world’s largest collection of open source data to help you keep code safer and do your best work. The dependency graph and security alerts currently support Javascript and Ruby—with Python support coming in 2018.”, Github Users can choose to receive the alerts via the user interface or via email., An initial scan conducted by GitHub revealed more than 4 million vulnerabilities in more than 500,000 repositories. Github notified affected users by December 1, more than 450,000 of the vulnerabilities were addressed either by updating the affected library or removing it altogether., According to GitHub, vulnerabilities are in a vast majority of cases addressed within a week by active developers., “By December 1 and shortly after we launched, over 450,000 identified vulnerabilities were resolved by repository owners either removing the dependency or changing to a secure version.” GitHub said. “Additionally, 15 percent of alerts are dismissed within seven days—that means nearly half of all alerts are responded to within a week. Of the remaining alerts that are unaddressed or unresolved, the majority belong to repositories that have not had a contribution in the last 90 days.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – GitHub Security Alerts, hacking)
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The list of vulnerabilities addressed by 0patch include a denial-of-service (DoS) bug, a file read issue, and a code execution flaw., “While we’re busy ironing out the wrinkles before 0patch finally exits its adolescence (i.e., Beta) and becomes a fully responsible adult able to pay for its own rent, we did find some time to produce… not one, … not two, … but three 0day micropatches in the past few days.” reads the blog post published by 0patch. , “That’s right, at this very moment you can get three 0days on your Windows computer micropatched for free! “, One of the patches addressed a flaw publicly disclosed last month by the researcher known as SandboxEscaper, the vulnerability could be exploited by an attacker with low privileges to elevate them on the vulnerable system. The expert shared the PoC exploit code (deletebug.exe) to delete critical system files, an operation that requests admin level privileges.ù , Security experts noticed that the flaw only affects Windows 10 and recent versions of Windows Server editions because older versions of the Microsoft operating systems don’t implement the Microsoft Data Sharing service. , This vulnerability could be exploited to overwrites some important system file and cause a DoS condition., 0patch also released a patch for another flaw disclosed last month by SandboxEscaper, it is an arbitrary file read vulnerability that could be exploited by a low-privileged user or a malicious program to read the content of any file on a Windows system. , The Windows zero-day flaw affects the”MsiAdvertiseProduct” function that generates an advertise script or advertises a product to the computer. The MsiAdvertiseProduct function enables the installer to write to a script the registry and shortcut information used to assign or publish a product. The script can be written to be consistent with a specified platform by using MsiAdvertiseProductEx., According to the SandboxEscaper, the lack of proper validation could allow an attacker to force installer service into making a copy of any file as SYSTEM privileges and read its content., The third flaw addressed by 0patch was disclosed by the expert John Page via ZDI. , The security expert discovered a zero-day vulnerability in the processing of VCard files that could be exploited by a remote attacker, under certain conditions, to hack Windows PC. , An attacker can use create a specially crafted VCard file that contains in the contact’s website URL field that points to a local executable file. This second file can be sent within a zipped file as an email attachment or delivered via drive-by-download attacks., When the victim clicks that website URL, the Windows operating system would execute the malicious file without displaying any warning. John Page also published proof-of-concept exploit code for the vulnerability,, Further details on the patches released by 0patch experts, including their codes are available here:, Pierluigi Paganini, (SecurityAffairs – security patches, Microsoft),
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Researcher Graham Cluley is warning of bogus ‘WhatsApp subscription ending’ emails and texts., Internet users are receiving an email pretending to be from WhatsApp and warning them of the ending for an alleged WhatsApp subscription., Although the company stopped requesting any payment since January 2016, crooks are attempting to exploit the fact that in the past, WhatsApp used to ask users to pay a fee after they had been using the service for a year., Using this social engineering attack, crooks aim to trick users into clicking links including in the messages that might result in they handing their payment information over to attackers., “Have you received an email claiming to come from WhatsApp that warns that you have been using the service for more than one year and that it’s time to take out a subscription?”, “Beware! The emails are, of course, a scam designed to trick you into clicking links that might result in you handing your payment information over to fraudsters.” states the blog post published by Graham Cluley on the ESET blog., , , Below a portion of the malicious email:, Your subscription is ending soon, Please update your payment information now, UPDATE YOUR PAYMENT INFORMATION, Our records indicate that your WhatsApp trial service is exceeding the one year period. At the completion of your trial period your WhatsApp will no longer be able to send or receive message. To continue using WhatsApp without interruption, we need you to subscribe for any of our subscription periods., As usual, you should always be wary of unsolicited email messages and SMS text messages claiming to come from WhatsApp demanding payments or the verification of your account’s credentials., “You ultimately decide what links you click on, and whether you hand over your passwords and payment card details. Always think twice, because the wrong decision could prove costly.” concluded Graham Cluley., Pierluigi Paganini , (Security Affairs – WhatsApp scam, phishing)
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Android is once again in the storm, threat actors can install any malicious third-party app on mobile devices remotely even if the users explicitly refuse it., Security experts at mobile security firm Lookout have spotted Trojanized adware families that implement the ability to automatically install any mobile app on the devices by exploiting the Android accessibility features., These families root the infected device after being installed and gain persistence by embedding their code in the system partition. The root access allows attackers to gain unrestricted access to the mobile devices., “Last week we told you about three trojanized adware families: Shuanet, ShiftyBug, and Shedun. These families root the victim’s device after being installed and then embed themselves in the system partition in order to persist, even after factory reset, becoming nearly impossible to remove. We call it “trojanized adware,” because the end goal of this malware is to install secondary applications and serve aggressive advertising.” reads the blog post published by , The malware researchers highlighted the capabilities of the Shedun adware family that seem to be out of the ordinary because it doesn’t exploit any vulnerability to hijack an Android device, instead it relies on the service’s legitimate functionality., , During the installation, mobile apps from the Shedun adware family tricks users into granting them access to the Android Accessibility Service, this means they will be able to read the text on the phone screen, determine an app installation prompt, scroll through the permission list and press the install button on the behalf of the user., “Lookout observed Shedun abusing the Android Accessibility Service for its malicious means. Using the accessibility service toolset in the delivery of malware is pretty uncommon, so we took a deeper look.” states the post. “By gaining the permission to use the accessibility service, Shedun is able to read the text that appears on screen, determine if an application installation prompt is shown, scroll through the permission list, and finally, press the install button without any physical interaction from the user.”, The following video shows apps from the Shedun adware family gaining accessibility service privileges., , In this second video Shedun automatically install a Shedun automatically install a trojanized app that masquerades itself as an official app available in Google Play Store and then is pushed to third-party markets.Shedun automatically install a Shedun automatically install a trojanized app that masquerades itself as an official app available in Google Play Store and then is pushed to third-party markets., , It is important to note that the Android Accessibility Service is also used by legitimate applications, users are advised not to install applications from third-party app markets., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Android Accessibility Service, Shedun)
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Researchers at Bluebox Security have discovered a critical vulnerability in millions of Android devices that allow a malicious app to impersonate a trusted application in a stealthy way, allowing a bad actor an attacker to perform different malicious actions., An attacker exploiting the vulnerability could insert malicious code into a legitimate app or gain complete remote control or the targeted device, this is possible due to the way Android OS implements certificate validation through the certificate chain, the flaw is present in all versions of Android., The researchers explained in a blog post that all those Android mobile devices which run 3LM administration extension, like HTC, Pantech, Sharp, Sony Ericsson, and Motorola are particularly exposed to the risk of a hack, “Every Android application has its own unique identity, typically inherited from the corporate developer’s identity. The Bluebox Security research team, Bluebox Labs, recently discovered a new vulnerability in Android, which allows these identities to be copied and used for nefarious purposes.” said Jeff Forristal, CTO of Bluebox Labs.,
, , Each Android app is signed with digital certificates that allow the unique identification for its author, but the experts at Bluebox discovered that the Android app installer doesn’t properly validate the certificate. The attacker can create an app with a fake identity and impersonate an app with extensive privileges, let’s image, for example, that he target victims impersonating the Adobe plug-in, in this case the malicious app would have the ability to escape the sandbox and run malicious code inside another app., “Upon installation, the Android package installer will not verify the claim of the malicious identity certificate, and create a package signature that contains the both certificates. This, in turn, tricks the certificate-checking code in the webview plugin manager (who explicitly checks the chain for the Adobe certificate) and allows the application to be granted the special webview plugin privilege given to Adobe Systems – leading to a sandbox escape and insertion of malicious code, in the form of a webview plugin, into other applications.” states the blog post., Forristal will present the Android vulnerability in a speech at the next BlackHat conference in Las Vegas, he already have anticipated that it is possible to exploit the flow in many different ways., “You could use any app distribution mechanism, whether it’s a link in SMS or a legitimate app store. Look at other Android malware. You do it whatever it takes for the user to say, Yeah I want that app,” he said. “It’s certainly severe. It’s completely stealth and transparent to the user and it’s absolutely the stuff that malware is made of. It operates extremely consistently, so in that regard it’s going to be extremely attractive to malware.”, It is important to remark that the application’s signature establishes who can manage the application and its data. The mechanism is used by Android OS also to determine the permissions assigned specific apps, some permissions are granted only to applications that have the same signature as the permission creator. , In an another example provided in the blog post, the experts have examined the case of an application with the signature specified by the device’s nfc_access.xml file, typically the signature for the Google Wallet application. An attacker could create an app with this signature to access NFC hardware and access payment information made via Google Wallet., Bluebox has collaborated with Google to fix the flaw, a patch was released by Google to its partners in April, but the distribution of the updates to the end users is a carriers’ responsibility., Pierluigi Paganini, Security Affairs – (Android, digital certificate)
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Bad news for the Chinese users of the popular instant messaging app WhatsApp because the application has been widely blocked in mainland China by the Government. Users are not able to send text messages, photo and video sharing. It isn’t the first time that the Chinese Government blocked the popular app, WhatsApp had been blocked in July and for a few days., Now, the situation seems to be worst, the Chinese Government has widely blocked WhatsApp to tighten censorship as the country prepares for the 19th National Congress of the ruling Communist Party. in October., The Chinese Great Firewall implements a tighten control of the accesses to the Internet, it currently blocks several major websites, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Wikipedia, and many Google services in China., According to The New York Times. WhatsApp had been “broadly disrupted in China.”, “WhatsApp now appears to have been broadly disrupted in China, even for text messages, Nadim Kobeissi, an applied cryptographer at Symbolic Software, a Paris-based research start-up, said on Monday.” reported The New York Times. “The blocking of WhatsApp text messages suggests that China’s censors may have developed specialized software to interfere with such messages, which rely on an encryption technology that is used by few services other than WhatsApp, he said.”, , At the time it is not clear how long the ban will have effect, the messaging system was seeing severe disruptions as early as last Wednesday., ❌ Seems like #WhatsApp is #blocked or #down in #China right now. I've got a #ChinaMobile SIM card. Anyone still able to use it?, — Italian Vagabond (@italianvagabond) September 20, 2017, , WhatsApp is now accessible only via VPNs, but China made it mandatory for all VPN providers to have a license from the government to provide such services., WhatsApp is owned by Facebook, also the social media giant and Instagram have been already blocked in China., The intent of the Chinese Government is to force citizens in using other instant messaging services, that allows the authorities to access the citizens’ personal data., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – WhatsApp, Censorship)
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3747_47313
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We all make mistakes, sometime they are small, some other big. But what if the mistake is so important to indirectly affect one the biggest companies in the world? “Oooops!” This is what happened to an employee working on a benefits management service provider, a company Google has partnered with to provide its employee comprehensive benefits packaged, had discovered., On May 8th, 2016, Google Inc started notifying affected stakeholders of a breach of data that contain their personal sensitive information due to an email “fumble” —a mistake of email (recipient) identify where the email client auto-complete address resolver feature may have played a part., The disclosure came after a vendor, specializing in employee/staff benefits management services, realized that an email that contains sensitive private information on Google employees have been inadvertently sent to the “wrong person”. In a notice filed with the Attorney-General’s office in California, Teri Wisness, Benefits Director of United States at Google, said Google had been notified immediately of the data breach by the sender themselves and appreciates the efforts of disclosing this leak as quickly as possible., “We recently learned that a third-party vendor that provides Google with benefits management services mistakenly sent a document containing certain personal information of some of our Googlers to a benefits manager at another company. Promptly upon viewing the document, the benefits manager deleted it and notified Google’s vendor of the issue. After the vendor informed us of the issue, we conducted an investigation to determine the fact” reads the notice., , The email contains a document with an undisclosed number of Google’s staff names and US Social Security Numbers (SSN). Acknowledging the mishap, Google dispatched its incident responders to investigate and mitigate; however, from initial reports, no misuse, abuse or malicious intent was discovered. Also, logs from both parties indicate nobody else had viewed this document nor intentionally saved elsewhere locally or remotely or disclosed to another party. In fact, the unintended recipient simply deleted the email and its contents upon having it viewed once and contacted the sender., Google will offer a three-year credit monitoring and protection for the affected employees, and recommends its employees to producing a credit rating score report., Written by: Rami Shaath, Author Bio: With just under two decades of IT business-technology experience, Rami Shaath is a seasoned, accomplished professional with diverse background and talents spanning in technical, service delivery, and business-development disciplines in various roles and project lead across North America, Europe and the UAE. He shifted his focus and passion towards cyber security, digital forensics investigations, malware research, threat hunting and intelligence 10 years ago thriving on anything that runs on 1s and 0s., Follow @ramishaath
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, Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Google Data Breach, Privacy)
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Early this week the Tor Project released the new version of the Tor Browser, the Tor Browser 6.0 which is based on Firefox ESR 45., The new version of the popular browser comes with a series of important privacy and security enhancements. Tor 6.0 uses HTTPS-Everywhere 5.1.9 to preserve the privacy of its users on all platforms, including OS X., HTTPS Everywhere is a Firefox, Chrome, and Opera extension produced as a collaboration between The Tor Project and the Electronic Frontier Foundation, it encrypts communications with many major websites., , One of the most significant enhancement in the Tor Browser 6.0 is the ending of support for SHA1 certificates. Hashing algorithms are used to ensure the integrity of the certificate in the signing processes, a flawed algorithm could allow an attacker to forge fraudulent certificates., In the past collision attacks against the MD5 hash algorithm allowed threat actors to obtain fraudulent certificates, security experts want to avoid similar problems for SHA-1., The SHA-1 hash algorithm is vulnerable to collision attacks that will be soon possible, in 2012 experts demonstrated how breaking SHA1 is becoming feasible. IT giants have already deprecated the popular hashing algorithm, Mozilla, Google, Facebook, and CloudFlare., The Tor 6.0 uses the OpenSSL 1.0.1t library that was recently released to fix a number of vulnerabilities, including the high severity CVE-2016-2107., The CVE-2016-2107 flaw affecting the open-source cryptographic library could be exploited to launch a man-in-the-middle attack leveraging on the ‘Padding Oracle Attack’ that can decrypt HTTPS traffic if the connection uses AES-CBC cipher and the server supports AES-NI., According to the experts, the flaw affects the OpenSSL cryptographic library since 2013, when maintainers of the project fixed another Padding Oracle flaw called Lucky 13., According to the official announcement published by the Tor Project, the new release of the popular browser fixes a DLL hijacking vulnerability., The last release Tor Browser implements more efficient support of the HTML5 that is considered more secure and privacy-friendly of other web technologies., It resumed the update.xml hash check that was disabled in Firefox 43 and removed DNS lookup in lockfile code, but I suggest to give a close look to the changelog reveals that the update removes DNS lookup in lockfile code, disables libmdns support for desktop and mobile, disables, The Tor project is very active in the defense of the users’ privacy and security, just a few days ago it announced its success in the development of a distributed random number generator to include in the Next-gen Tor., If you appreciate my effort in spreading cyber security awareness, please vote for Security Affairs as best European Security Blog. Vote SecurityAffairs in every section it is reported. I’m one of the finalists and I want to demonstrate that the Security Affairs community a great reality., Thank you, Pierluigi, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Tor Browser 6.0, privacy)
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Security researcher Chris Moberly discovered a vulnerability in the REST API for Canonical’s snapd daemon that could allow attackers to gain root access on Linux machines., Canonical, the makers of Ubuntu Linux, promotes their “Snap” packages to roll all application dependencies into a single binary (similar to Windows applications)., The Snap environment includes an “app store” where developers can contribute and maintain ready-to-go packages., “Management of locally installed snaps and communication with this online store are partially handled by a systemd service called “snapd”.”, The flaw called ‘Dirty_Sock’ would affect affects several Linux servers, the expert successfully tested on Ubuntu and released PoCs to show how to elevate privileges. , “In January 2019, I discovered a privilege escalation vulnerability in default installations of Ubuntu Linux. This was due to a bug in the snapd API, a default service. Any local user could exploit this vulnerability to obtain immediate root access to the system.” wrote the expert., “Two working exploits are provided in the dirty_sock repository:, “Both are effective on default installations of Ubuntu.”, Canonical has already addressed the flaw, administrators need to install the snapd update to avoid the exploitation. , “Chris Moberly discovered that snapd versions 2.28 through 2.37 incorrectly validated and parsed the remote socket address when performing access controls on its UNIX socket.” reads the security advisory published by Canonical. , “A local attacker could use this to access privileged socket APIs and obtain administrator privileges. On Ubuntu systems with snaps installed, snapd typically will have already automatically refreshed itself to snapd 2.37.1 which is unaffected.”, Moberly discovered that the daemon leverages UNIX sockets to allow developers to communicate with it using a REST API., This UNIX socket runs under the security context of the root user, so the expert investigated the possibility to elevate his privileges by abusing API methods., The researcher discovered that it is possible to create a local user account using the daemon’s “POST /v2/create-user” API. This API command requires the program to have root permission to create a user., The analysis of snapd connections allowed the expert to discover that if a user has root permissions, it uses a string composed of the calling pid, uid of the program connected to the socket, the socket path, and the remoteAdd (i.e. “pid=5127;uid=1000;socket=/run/snapd.socket;@”)., Where the @ substring represents the RemoteAddr of the socket, or the socket name that is used to connect to the snapd socket. , Moberly created a socket containing ;uid=0; in its name in a way to trick the parser to overwrite the uid when the string is analyzed., Parsing a string containing the uid=0 is the last part will allow overwriting the previous uid and trick snapd into emulating a root user and allow a local user to be created., The expert published the “dirty_sockv1” PoC code for this attack, but he pointed out that the attack required an Internet connection and the creation of an account on the Ubuntu SSO and uploading an SSH public key to your profile. , The expert also devised a Dirty_Sock version 2 that sees sideloads a malicious snap using the ‘POST /v2/snaps’ API instead., “dirty_sockv2 instead uses the ‘POST /v2/snaps’ API to sideload a snap containing a bash script that will add a local user. This works on systems that do not have the SSH service running. It also works on newer Ubuntu versions with no Internet connection at all.” continues the expert., “HOWEVER, sideloading does require some core snap pieces to be there. If they are not there, this exploit may trigger an update of the snapd service.”, The Dirty_Sock version 2 requires no Internet connection or the use of SSH key., Canonical fixed the issue with the release of the 2.37.1. version that implements a stricter parser that removes user-controlled variable., Pierluigi Paganini, (SecurityAffairs – Snapd, Ubuntu),
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, SPONSORED BY RSA CONFERENCE 2014, , CYBER WARNINGS E-MAGAZINE: DECEMBER 2013, CYBER DEFENSE MAGAZINE: ANNUAL EDITION FOR 2013, CYBER WARNINGS E-MAGAZINE: DECEMBER 2013, CYBER DEFENSE MAGAZINE: ANNUAL EDITION FOR 2013, CYBER WARNINGS E-MAGAZINE: DECEMBER 2013, CYBER DEFENSE MAGAZINE: ANNUAL EDITION FOR 2013, We hope you enjoy this month’s edition…, Sincerely,, TEAM CDM, Cyber Defense Magazine, P.S. Don’t forget to Click Here to subscribe to Cyber Defense Magazine which comes out four times per year, if you haven’t already done so…you can keep on reading our monthly newsletters for free and get your hands on our magazine, electronically, at no charge to you and no strings attached. To our paid PRINT edition magazine subscribers, we thank you…your PRINT edition, should have arrived via US mail – let us know if you haven’t received your copy yet., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Cyber Security, CDM)
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