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No doubt, Fortnite is currently the most popular game, it is a co-op sandbox survival game developed by Epic Games and People Can Fly., The game was released as a paid-for early access title for Microsoft Windows, macOS, PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on July 25, 2017, with a full free-to-play releases in 2018., The Fortnite game has now more than 125 million active users., The great success obtained by the Fortnite attracted cyber criminals that are attempting to exploit its popularity to target the fans., Unfortunately for Android users, Fortnite for Android devices is not available yet, it is currently under development while the iOS version was released in March by Epic Games., , The company announced that the Battle Royale game is planned to be released for Android devices this summer., In the recent weeks, crooks attempted to take advantage of Android users’ interest in an alleged version for their devices of the popular game., Surfing online it is quite easy to find blog posts and video tutorial with instructions to install fake Fortnite Android App., I spent an entire week to explain to my son and his friends the risks of installing APK from untrusted sources, believe me … it was the unique real battle royal of this story 🙂, Just searching for ‘Fortnite Android App’ on YouTube you will get an impressive number of videos on “How to install Fortnite on Android,” many of these videos were viewed millions of times also include links to actual Fortnite APK files., , A growing number of users is searching for Fortnite Android as reported by Google Trends:, trends.embed.renderExploreWidget("TIMESERIES", {"comparisonItem":{"keyword":"fortnite android","geo":"","time":"2018-01-01 2018-06-18"},"category":0,"property":""}, {"exploreQuery":"date=2018-01-01%202018-06-18&q=fortnite%20android","guestPath":" , Scammers are exploiting this interest to trick Android fans into downloading tainted version of the game that can compromise Android devices., Some video tutorials appeared online recommend Android users to “install a few other apps” to unlock the Android Fortnite game. These apps could hide any kind of code, from cryptocurrency miners to apps used to generate revenue for their developers., Millions of views on YouTube for fake "How to install Fortnite on Android" videos including links to actual APK files.Don't install #Fortnite for Android, it's all fake or malicious! Official app is not released yet.They mostly generate revenue for developers. pic.twitter.com/xpDcqbs3G2, — Lukas Stefanko (@LukasStefanko) June 12, 2018, , An impressive number of links purport to be official Fortnite app downloads, are used by crooks to deliver malicious applications., If you are a fan of the Fornite game you have to wait until next summer for the official Android version, meantime don’t install alleged beta versions of the popular game from third-party stores., People are willing to do and believe anything to play #Fortnite on Android. pic.twitter.com/e4TASictqW, — Lukas Stefanko (@LukasStefanko) June 12, 2018, , Even if you see the Fortnite Android version in the official Google Play store, do not download it, unfortunately, scammers are able to deploy fake apps also on the official store., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Fortnite Android, malware)
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This week the principal news agencies shared the news of the hack of the Bangladesh account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York., The Bangladesh’s Finance Minister Abul Maal Abdul Muhith accused the U.S. Federal Reserve of the theft of at least $81 million stolen from the Bangladesh’s account. The Government of the Bangladesh is threatening the US for a legal fight to retrieve the funds, explained Muhith in a press conference held in Dhaka on Tuesday., The central bank of Bangladesh declared the funds had been stolen from an account by hackers, the experts had traced some of the missing funds in the Philippines., In reality the hackers tried to steal much more, they tried to complete dozens of transfers for an overall amount of $850 million., The disaster was avoided by accident because the bank’s security systems and typos in some requests allowed the identification of the theft attempts, investigators discovered that hackers failed 35 transfer attempts., “$81 million was transferred from the Federal Reserve Bank to Filipino accounts while attempts to claim $850 million were foiled by the Federal Reserve Bank’s security system,” Razee Hassan, deputy governor of Bangladesh Bank, told AFP., “Attempts to transfer money to Sri Lanka by the hackers were foiled as their transfer requests contained typos,” he added., The hackers exploited gaps in communication between banks at weekends, the operation started on a Friday because the Bangladesh Bank is closed, on the following days, Saturday and Sunday, the Fed Bank in New York was being closed., , The choice of the Philippines as the landing country for the bank transfers was not casual, banks were also closed on the Monday due to the Chinese New Year., While the central bank of Bangladesh is blaming Chinese hackers, the Fed is denying the security breach of security took place., On Monday, a spokeswoman for the US Federal Reserve Bank of New York confirmed there was no evidence of a security breach, neither that the Bangladesh Bank account had been hacked., Currently, the US Fed and the Bangladesh Government are still investigating the incident., The Federal Reserve Bank of New York wrote still continues to deny any evidence of attempts to hack into the Federal Reserve systems:, The Federal Reserve Bank of New York wrote still continues to deny any evidence of attempts to hack into the Federal Reserve systems:, Regarding hacking reports, there is no evidence of attempts to penetrate Federal Reserve systems & no evidence Fed systems were compromised., — New York Fed News (@NYFed_News) 7 marzo 2016, , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Bangladesh, security breach)
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A new vulnerability that affects Apple’s iOS could be exploited by hackers to collect user passwords by using a single email., Jan Soucek (@jansoucek) , a forensic expert at Ernst and Young has developed a tool, the iOS 8.3 Mail.app inject kit, that could be used to create malicious iCloud password phishing emails. The expert explained that he exploits an unpatched bug affecting Apple iOS., “Ernst and Young forensic bod Jan Soucek has created a tool capable of generating slick iCloud password phishing emails he says exploits an unpatched bug affecting millions of Apple users.” states the Register., The iOS 8.3 Mail.app inject kit exploits a vulnerability in the Apple operating system’s native email client that allows and attacker to display a realistic pop-up., Soucek tried to contact the Apple, but he hasn’t received any reply from Cupertino since January., “Back in January 2015 I stumbled upon a bug in iOS’s mail client, resulting in HTML tags in email messages not being ignored,” Soucek says., Soucek discovered that Apple ignores a key line of code in incoming emails: <meta http-equiv=refresh>, this means that an attacker can remotely load arbitrary HTML content inside an email when victims open it on an iPhone, iPad or iPod., , “This bug allows remote HTML content to be loaded, replacing the content of the original email message. JavaScript is disabled in this UIWebView, but it is still possible to build a functional password ‘collector’ using simple HTML and CSS.” said the researcher., “It was filed under Radar #19479280 back in January, but the fix was not delivered in any of the iOS updates following 8.1.2.”, Attack scenario, The attacker sends a malicious email that looks like it’s from a legitimate source, but instead it propose a realistic input form used to steal victim’s password., Here’s a video PoC:
, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Apple iOS, hacking),
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“Unlike other instances he discovered in the past, this one was different. When he accessed the open server, instead of looking at the database’s content, a collection of tables, Gevers found only one table, named “WARNING”. ” reads a blog post published on bleepingcomputer.com., The attacker accessed the open MongoDB database, exported its content, and replaced all data with a table containing the following code:, { "_id" : ObjectId("5859a0370b8e49f123fcc7da"), "mail" : "[email protected]", "note" : "SEND 0.2 BTC TO THIS ADDRESS 13zaxGVjj9MNc2jyvDRhLyYpkCh323MsMq AND CONTACT THIS EMAIL WITH YOUR IP OF YOUR SERVER TO RECOVER YOUR DATABASE !" }
, “I was able to confirm this because the log files show clearly that the date at which it was exported first and then the new database with tablename WARNING was created,” Gevers told BleepingComputer. “Every action in the database servers was being logged.”, The expert notified victims their database were hacked:, “Criminals often target open databases to deploy their activities like data theft/ransom. But we also have seen cases were open servers like these are used for hosting malware (like ransomware), botnets and for hiding files in the GridFS,” he wrote in the notification letter sent to the victims. , In December 2015, the popular expert and Shodan creator John Matherly found over 650 terabytes of MongoDB data exposed on the Internet by vulnerable databases., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – databases , hacking)
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The Chinese expert Guang Gong from Qihoo 360 has demonstrated how to hijack an Android smartphone by exploiting a flaw in the Chrome browser. The researcher demonstrated the hack at the MobilePwn2Own at the PacSec conference in Tokyo, the compromised device was running the latest version of the Android OS and the hacker exploited a JavaScript v8 flaw through the Chrome browser., Gong hijacked a Google Project Fi Nexus 6 running the Android 6.0 Marshmallow and with all applications up-to-date gaining complete control of the smartphone., , The JavaScript v8 flaw allowed Gong to install an arbitrary application (he installed a BMX Bike game) on the targeted smartphone without requiring any user interaction. The attacker just needs to trick victims into visiting a bogus website he set up to compromise the device., “PacSec speaker Guang Gong from Qihoo 360 just pwned my Google Project Fi Nexus 6 (which was fresh out of the box and only updated to the latest OS and apps) by having the Chrome browser visit the web server he set up on his laptop. As soon as the phone accessed the website the JavaScript v8 vulnerability in Chrome was used to install an arbitrary application (in this case a BMX Bike game) without any user interaction to demonstrate complete control of the phone. Interestingly, this was a one shot exploit that did everything in one go instead of chaining multiple vulnerabilities.” wrote the PacSec organizer Dragos Ruiu in a post on Google+., The vulnerability did not reside in the Android OS but affects mobile devices running on the popular OS. Ruiu added that the exploit works also on some other mobile devices because it exploits the flaw in the JavaScript engine in Chrome this mean it could potentially affect all Android versions with the latest version of the Google browser installed., “Off line we also tested his exploit on some other phones and it looks like it works on many targets – so I guess the three months he put into developing it delivered results. Since we don’t have any lavish prizes for him, I’m bringing him to Canada next year for some skiing/snowboarding at CanSecWest.” said Ruiu., PWN2OWN Mobile: the information about the vulnerability in JavaScript v8 in latest Chrome is being given to Chrome security engineer here, — dragosr (@dragosr) 11 Novembre 2015, Gong hasn’t disclosed the technical details of the Chrome exploit but already reported it to Google that probably will reward it., Waiting for a fix, Android users can use alternative browsers., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Android, Chrome exploit), ,
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The fear of a terror attack is pushing every government and international law enforcement agencies in an additional effort to tackle the activity of the ISIS radical group online., The German government has announced the creation of a new cyber security unit that will be operational early next year. The new cyber unit will be composed of around 400 civil servants., This is one of the initiatives promoted by the German Government in response to the recent terror attacks., The German Government, like many others, fears to be vulnerable the terror attacks and it is aware that monitoring of online activity is crucial to support the investigations on terror cells active in the country., “The move is part of a list of measures to boost security in response to recent terror attacks that raised deep concerns about Germany’s vulnerability to Islamist violence.” reads a blog post published on the GlobalGovernmentForum.com., The news of the creation of the new cyber unit was confirmed last week by the federal interior minister Thomas de Maizière who is calling for a “technology offensive.”, The new cyber unit named the Central Office for Information in Security Sphere (‘Zentrale Stelle für Informationstechnik im Sicherheitsbereich (ZITiS)), will support German security agencies by developing “methods, products, and strategies to fight criminality and terrorism on the internet.”, The ZITiS will be also focused on the monitoring of the Dark Web, the staff of the new cyber units will include experts in the monitoring of “darknet.” The experts are concerned about the abuses of Darknets, terrorists could exploit them to cover communications or to acquire illegal weapons., , The German authorities are concerned about Germans with dual nationality that fight for militant Islamist groups. The German Government is evaluating new anti-terror legislation that will consider the act of “promoting terrorism” a criminal offense., De Maiziere announced the intention of the Government to speed up the deportation of foreign criminals. The Government of Berlin will keep an additional €2bn funding for the federal police between 2015 and 2020, it will also assign extra personnel, equipment and surveillance powers for the police., The German Government will likely adopt further measures, including the loose of the doctor-patient confidentiality, “In three major cases the perpetrators were found to have been mentally unstable: The Ansbach bomber who killed himself and wounded 15 others at a music festival last month; the gunman who killed nine people in a Munich shopping mall – also last month; and the Germanwings pilot who deliberately crashed an airliner in the French Alps in 2015.” reported globalgovernmentforum.com., “The duty of doctors to respect patient confidentiality is enshrined in the German constitution, and German privacy laws are very strict.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – German Government, ZITiS)
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The Morphus Labs warns this week about another major threat. Renato Marinho and Victor Pasknel treated a domain hijacking incident, a threat that can completely subvert your information security strategy. They give details in this article how the incident was handled and how we can prevent similar scenarios., It’s Saturday morning and you, the CSO of a huge company, start to receive messages from various sources, including press, informing that all of your organization Internet addresses are getting visitors to fake websites offering malicious content in form of fake security modules and/or updates., What appeared to be a website defacement attack, turned out to be something much worse. In examining more closely, you realize that cybercriminals did, in fact, the kidnapping of the entire organization domain and directed all addresses to fake websites aiming to steal information from your customers and spreading malicious code. The worst thing is that there was no action that depended exclusively on you to solve the problem immediately., In this article, we describe the incident response to the scenario described above and how this threat, being capable to subvert your entire strategy and security investment, can be mitigated with very simple actions., To better understanding what happened, it’s important to understand some basic DNS concepts. If you are familiar with this subject, just jump to section 3., DNS stands for Domain Name System and works as a foundation for the Internet . All addresses names we use daily to reach Websites and other Internet services have to be translated to IP (Internet Protocol); the translation or resolution process between an internet address name and IP address is the main role of DNS Servers., DNS Servers work as a hierarchy of sorts, where the resolution requests are passed through it to the right server that is in charge of resolving the names for a certain domain, is reached. The root of this hierarchy, that is the invisible domain dot (“.”) in the end of any Internet address, is controlled by a group of DNS Servers distributed in different places around the world. Those root DNS Servers have to know the IP address of the DNS Servers that are in charge of all Top Level Domains (TLD), like the “.com”. The “.com” DNS servers in turn, have to know the IP address of the DNS Servers that are in charge of your company’s domain name, like “yourdomain.com” and so on., For example, when someone asks for “www.yourdomain.com.”, the request reaches the root servers (“.”) that in turn, reaches the “.com” servers, that in turn, reach your company’s DNS servers, that finally resolves the address “www” and return the correct IP address., The TLDs are controlled and managed by registry operators, also called Network Information Center (NIC). The registry operators manage the registration of domain names within the domains for which they are responsible. So, the “.com” registry operator is the organization that will hold the configuration of the DNS Servers IP addresses that are in charge of resolving the IP address of a domain like “yourcompany.com”., , For you to register or manage a domain in any registry operator, you have to previously create an account (basically, username and password) on their web portal. This account will be used to manage the IP addresses of the DNS Servers that will point to the IP addresses of your website or e-mail servers., Note that the access credentials to the portal operator are extremely sensitive information. Someone malicious in possession of such information would be able to change any configuration of your domains, including IP addresses of the DNS servers. In short, could hijack the Internet Domain of your company and target websites and emails to any address he wanted., In the incident we treated at Morphus Labs, that’s exactly what happened. The bad actors stole the registry operator’s credentials and changed the primary and secondary DNS servers configuration pointing them to the criminals’ ones. After that, all the company’s customers were directed to a fake company website to download malicious content they were suggested by the fake content. We can imagine what the criminals’ strategy was had they had success spreading their malware., Needless to say, the crooks changed the password after gaining access to the portal. In other words, they hijacked the domain and made the recovery dependable of the registry operator. “Manual” account recover is usually not easy nor fast., Unlike the majority of cyber incidents, you have almost nothing to do in your infrastructure itself to revert the situation, like recovering backup or configurations. Like what happened in this incident, all servers were intact., Read the full article: And works as the foundation of the internet “ou” and works as a foundation for the internet., Please, revise if the meaning was kept., Bad actors? Is this expression clear to the reader?, About the Author:, Renato Marinho, Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Domain Hijacking, cybercrime)
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Bad news for gamers, the E-Sports Entertainment Association (ESEA), one of the largest competitive video gaming communities was hacked in December. The data breach exposed the profiles of more than 1.5 million players., The incident was also confirmed on Saturday by the breach notification service LeakedSource that reported 1,503,707 ESEA records were compromised., The records include username, first and last name, password bcrypt hash, email address, registration date, city, state (or province), last login, date of birth, zip code, phone number, website URL, Steam ID, Xbox ID, and PSN ID., As you can see the profiles are very detailed, the use of the bcrypt hash protect users’ passwords, anyway gamers are exposed to a wide range of malicious activities such as social engineering attacks and spear phishing attacks., ESEA shared the link to the following “Outage and Security Update” via Twitter., “Recently news has been made that ESEA’s user data has been leaked online. We expected something like this could happen but have not confirmed this is ESEA’s data. We notified the community on December 30th, 2016 about the possibility this could happen. The type of data and storage standards was disclosed. We have been working around the clock to further fortify security and will bring our website online shortly when that next round is complete. This possible user data leak is not connected to the current service outage.”, , ESEA Outage and Security Update, Read: — ESEA (@ESEA) 8 gennaio 2017, , The company was informed of the data breach on December 27 and issued a security warning on December 30, 2016. At the time I was writing, ESEA only confirmed the data leak, but still hasn’t admitted that profiles were accessed from its systems., The news of the ESEA data breach is circulating on the Internet, many players confirmed it on Reddit., .@BigSecurityNews confirmed my ESEA account info after they asked a couple ‘larger’ followed users to help verify, — Jimmy Whisenhunt (@jimmywhis) 8 gennaio 201, 7, , Salted HASH, quoting a LeakedSource spokesperson, reported that the ESEA data breach was part of a ransom scheme. Crooks demanded $50,000 in payment to avoid disclosing the hack., In response to the incident, the company reset passwords, multi-factor authentication tokens, and security questions., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – ESEA data breach, hacking)
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The security researcher Salvador Mendoza has discovered a flaw in the Samsung Pay system that could be exploited by hackers to remotely skim credit cards. The attackers can steal Samsung Pay tokens and use them in another device to make fraudulent transactions., Samsung Pay is a contactless payment system that comes standard in many modern Samsung smartphones. The system relies on tokens that have been designed to securely include credit card data, but evidently something goes wrong., The bug affects the tokenization process, it could allow attackers to predict the sequencing of the tokens., , Those tokens can be stolen by attackers and used in other hardware to make fraudulent transactions without any restrictions., As a proof-of-concept, Mendoza sent a token to one of his friends in Mexico who would use it with magnetic spoofing hardware to buy something., , Below a video PoC of the hack:, , Mendoza also explained that the theft of Samsung Pay can be very easy, said Mendoza., “Mendoza built a contraption that straps to his forearm and wirelessly steals magnetic secure transmission (known as an MST) when he picks up someone’s phone, which can then email the token to his inbox, so he can compile it into another phone.” Wrote Zack Whittaker for Zero Day., “Or, you can hide that hardware to a legitimate card-reading machine like you would with a traditional card skimmer.”, In his PoC Mendoza loaded a token into the MagSpoof device, that is a tiny device that can spoof/emulate any magnetic stripe or credit card. The MagSpoof device was designed by the popular hacker Samy Kamkar (@SamyKamkar), it can work wirelessly, even on standard magstripe/credit card readers., The tiny gadget dubbed MagSpoof is a credit card/magstripe spoofer and can be used also at non-wireless payment terminals, it is composed of a microcontroller, motor-driver, wire, a resistor, switch, LED, and a battery., Mendoza confirmed that every credit card, debit card or prepaid card is vulnerable to his attack, meanwhile, gift cards are not impacted because Samsung Pay relies on a scanned barcode rather than a transmitted signal., “Samsung Pay is built with the most advanced security features, assuring all payment credentials are encrypted and kept safe, coupled with the Samsung Knox security platform,” the Samsung spokesperson said., “If at any time there is a potential vulnerability, we will act promptly to investigate and resolve the issue,”, UPDATE from Samsung Pay August 8, 2016, Samsung Pay is considered safer than payment cards because it transmits one time use data at the vast majority of merchants that do not yet have EMV (smart payment) terminals. With Samsung Pay, users do not have to swipe a static magnetic stripe card.
Frequently asked questions on this statement may be found here., For additional information on Samsung Pay Security, please visit here., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Samsung Pay , hacking)
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The term Cybercrime-as-a-Service refers to the practice in the cybercriminal ecosystem to provide product and services for use by other criminals. In September 2014, a report from Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre (EC3), the 2014 Internet Organised Crime Threat Assessment (iOCTA) report, revealed the diffusion of the business model in the underground communities and highlighted that barriers to entry in cybercrime ring are being lowered even if criminal gangs have no specific technical skills., Criminals can rent a botnet of machines for their illegal activities, instead to infect thousands of machines worldwide. These malicious infrastructures are built with a few requirements that make them suitable for the criminals, including User-friendly Command and Control infrastructure and sophisticated evasion techniques., The botnets are very flexible and could be used for several purposes, including to serve malware or to send out spam emails. For example, the botnet’s computers can be configured to serve as proxies or even — once all the other usability has been sucked out of them — as spambots., An example of banking malware botnet is Vawtrak, also known as NeverQuest and Snifula. According to data provided by Sophos, Vawtrak was the second most popular malware distributed by malicious drive-by downloads in the period between September and November., Sophos published an interesting paper on the cybercrime-as-a-service model applied to the Vawtrak botnet, titled “Vawtrak – International Crimeware-as-a-Service“., “If you look at the client-side, the commands used, and the debugging code, suggests that it’s more user friendly than some of the other malware we look at,” said James Wyke, senior threat analyst at Sophos Ltd. “It’s almost certainly going to be a point-and-click Web-based interface. Simplicity is one of Vawtrak‘s positive points.”, Despite Wyke hasn’t personally evaluated the Vawtrak for leal and ethical reasons, Sophos was able to investigate the activities Vawtrak platform is being used for. The experts recognized a pattern in the “modus operandi” of the Vawtrak clients, which used the botnet to target banks and other financial institutions worldwide. The attackers are able to run sophisticated attacks in a methodical way, by-passing two-factor authentication mechanisms and implementing custom injection mechanism., The experts revealed that Vawtrak was used by criminal organizations inthe US to compromise both large banks (i.e. Bank of America and Citigroup) and smaller financial institutions (i.e. Bank of Oklahoma, Cincinnati’s Fifth Third Bank, the Columbus-based Huntington National Bank)., There are tens of thousands of computers already infected and in the network, Wyke said., , That makes it smaller than some of its competitors but, because of its business model, it might actually be more profitable., The cybercrime-as-a-service model developed for the Vawtrak botnet allows customers to choose specific types of infected machines, to customize the botnet to hit a specific target (i.e. banks, private firms) or to request specific types of stolen data., “If you want banking credentials for certain banks, or certain regions of the world, they can start campaigns targeting those banks or those countries,” said Wyke. “We’re moving away from the model where the cybercriminals write their own software, or sell you a kit and you go away and create your own botnet,” Wyke said., The availability of stolen data makes the model of sale Cybercrime-as-a-Service very attractive to criminals that can use them to run further attacks by having more information on the targets., The Vawtrak botnet provides also specific data hijacked by the botnet, including banking access credentials, that allows the criminals to deliver new strain of malware to the infected computers., “This is a flexible business model,” he said. “Once the machine starts sending out spam it becomes obvious that it’s infected with malware and it’s not going to be infected much longer,” he said., Experts at Sophos suggest to keep defense systems up-to-date and provide a free removal tool for the Vawtrak botnet on the company website., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Vawtrak botnet, cybercrime-as-a-Service)
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There is a recent report from Belgium focusing on the revised terms of use that have to do with Facebook. Due to its enormous popularity even apart from the fact that it’s blocked in some countries and being accessed by some tools (it shows everyone out there wants to get it, no matter how much effort it requires), Facebook has drawn attention universally and with the ongoing problems emerging thanks to vague statements in previous versions of the terms of use and policies the phenomenon has not calmed down. In order to be kept up to date with the latest version of Facebook’s policies, the report was issued raising awareness to everyone, even in a provisional manner., , In response to the revisions announced last December and performed a month later, the report is in accordance to what seems to be the case legally with Facebook to this date. According to the professionals, what has led them to proceed with the report was the following: “In December 2014, Facebook announced that it would revise, “In December 2014, Facebook announced that it would revise its Data Use Policy and Terms of Service. At the request of the Belgian Privacy Commission, ICRI/CIR (KU Leuven), in cooperation with iMinds-SMIT (Vrije Universiteit Brussel) conducted an extensive analysis of Facebook’s revised policies and terms.” So, you can see that there is great concern on behalf of some European governments and their commissions , the Belgian Privacy Commission) to shed light to the privacy and freedom concerns of Facebook., What seems to raise suspicions and a great deal of concern about the rights of Facebook and its extensive data process is the fact that there are some policies that are of questionable legality within the European Union (EU) and the respective legislation. To be more specific:, “Facebook’s data processing capabilities have increased both horizontally and vertically. By horizontal we refer to the increase of data gathered from different sources. Vertical refers to the deeper and more detailed view Facebook has on its users.”, This has been a result of the cooperation of Facebook with some other companies and services, such as Instagram or Whatsapp. Due to the purchase of these services by Facebook and due to the acknowledgement that a lot of plugins are used by them, it makes total sense why Facebook feels that it is high time it backed its legal rights up properly., According to the report, there are problems and potential red flags with the Unfair Contract Terms Directive. This Directive “introduces a notion of “good faith” in order to prevent significant imbalances in the rights and obligations of consumers on the one hand and sellers and suppliers on the other hand.”, So, you can see that there are several points that need to be discussed further towards outlining the vulnerabilities of the privacy policy of Facebook. It is crucial that all the users are thoroughly informed on what they agree to upon subscribing to Facebook., This can result in a much better handling of their privacy as a whole. So, reports like the one that we have referred to here are certainly moving towards the desired direction., 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 – Facebook, policies)
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The systems of the US Army Corps of Engineers’ National Inventory of Dams (NID) were hacked back in January by hackers probably having Chinese origin, the discovery has been made by U.S. Intelligence that tracked the intrusion into sensitive infrastructure database., Experts say the information contained in the breached database could be used in cyberattacks launched by terrorists or hostile states. The infrastructures of US Army Corps of Engineers’ National Inventory of Dams (NID) were hacked, the news has been reported by The Washington Free Beacon website and it is considered high concerning by security experts. The news has been revealed to the website by unnamed intelligence officials that blamed the Chinese government or Chinese hackers. The data stolen are high sensitive, the database hacked in fact contained information of vulnerabilities related to around 8100 major dams located the United States., , The spokesman for Corps of Engineers, Pete Pierce, confirmed the unauthorized access to US Army Corps of Engineers’ National Inventory of Dams, to respond to the incident the Corps of Engineers revoked the account compromised and has immediately to start on improving of security for database and network., “The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is aware that access to the National Inventory of Dams (NID), to include sensitive fields of information not generally available to the public, was given to an unauthorized individual in January 2013 who was subsequently determined to not to have proper level of access for the information,” “U.S. Army Corps of Engineers immediately revoked this user’s access to the database upon learning that the individual was not, in fact, authorized full access to the NID,”Pierce said., After the data breach on the official website of US Army Corps of Engineers’ National Inventory of Dams was published an announcement that informed that all user credentials had been reset for compliance to security policy., “December 2012 – All NID account usernames and passwords have changed to be compliant with recent security policy changes. All NID account usernames were changed to be the same as the e-mail address registered with the user account. All registered users should have received an automatic email notification with their new, temporary login information. You must log into the NID site using your e-mail address and the new password. When logging into the site with your new password for the first time, it is highly recommended that you copy/paste your password from the email you received rather than manually typing the password. Please remember: your password is case sensitive even though your username is not.” , The incident is critical, data acquired by hackers could be used to conduct a series of cyber attacks against National critical infrastructures, in different occasions US officials have alerted US Government of possible offensive against the country operated by state-sponsored hackers or cyber terrorists., The Washington Free Beacon reported the declaration of Michelle Van Cleave, the former National Counterintelligence Executive, a senior counterintelligence policymaker, that pointed out that the severity of the attack:, “In the wrong hands, the Army Corps of Engineers’ database could be a cyber attack roadmap for a hostile state or terrorist group to disrupt power grids or target dams in this country,” “You may ask yourself, why would anyone want to do that? You could ask the same question about why anyone would plant IEDs at the Boston Marathon.” “Alarm bells should be going off because we have next to no national security emergency preparedness planning in place to deal with contingencies like that,” she said., Security experts are convinced that the intrusion has the primary goal to collect “vulnerability and targeting data” for future cyber or military attacks., Recently Defense Science Board (DSB), a Federal Advisory Committee established to provide independent advice to the Secretary of Defense issued a report titled “Resilient Military Systems and the Advanced Cyber Threat” that presented an alarming scenario on the US nation’s military considered unprepared for a full-scale cyber-conflict. The 138-page report alerts Pentagon on the necessity to improve cyber capabilities to deal with such event, top-tier adversary represents a serious menace in case of cyber war, and in case of conflict critical infrastructures such as Dams represent a strategic target to preserve. The numerous initiatives conducted by the US Government to improve cyber capabilities are not sufficient to face with sophisticated cyber attacks by hostile countries, the report remarks that Defense Department “is not prepared to defend against these threats” and its effort leak of a proper coordination, the document also alerts central authorities on a “fragmented” dispersion of commitments. Lila Kee, board member of the North American Energy Standard Board (NAESB) and GlobalSign’s chief product and marketing officer commented the hack of the US Army Corps of Engineers’ National Inventory of Dams with the following words:, “This latest breach of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ National Inventory of Dams is another loud siren warning critical infrastructure (CI) companies as well as the government that cyber threats to the CI are real and that security standards must be established, followed and enforced to protect our country,” “The energy sector and its electric segment are particularly vulnerable to cyberattack, especially considering that technology is rapidly gaining a larger role in critical infrastructure operations,” “Everyday evidence of nation-state foul play in the security of our CI grows. With the Department of Energy making a push to generate 80 percent of the nation’s electricity utilizing existing dams, cybersecurity standards must be a serious concern for the government and regulators.”, Regardless of the true origin of the attacks the incident raises the need to ensure the protection of critical infrastructures, information systems used for their control and information managed by governmental entities such as the results of vulnerability assessments conducted to identify critical vulnerabilities exploitable by attackers., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Security)
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Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday updates for December 2018 address nearly 40 flaws, including a zero-day vulnerability affecting the Windows kernel., The flaw, tracked as CVE-2018-8611, is as a privilege escalation flaw caused by the failure of the Windows kernel to properly handle objects in memory., “An elevation of privilege vulnerability exists when the Windows kernel fails to properly handle objects in memory. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could run arbitrary code in kernel mode.” reads the security advisory published by Microsoft., “An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights. To exploit this vulnerability, an attacker would first have to log on to the system. An attacker could then run a specially crafted application to take control of an affected system.”, , The vulnerability was reported to Microsoft by researchers at Kaspersky Lab. Kudos to Kaspersky experts that in the last months reported other two Windows zero-days, CVE-2018-8453 and CVE-2018-8589, respectively exploited by FruityArmor and multiple threat actors in attacks mostly aimed at the Middle East., according to Kaspersky, the CVE-2018-8611 is a race condition that resides in the Kernel Transaction Manager, and most interesting, it could be used to escape the sandbox of the Chrome and Edge web browsers., “CVE-2018-8611 is a race condition that is present in the Kernel Transaction Manager due to improper processing of transacted file operations in kernel mode.” reads the analysis published by Kaspersky., “This vulnerability successfully bypasses modern process mitigation policies, such as Win32k System call Filtering that is used, among others, in the Microsoft Edge Sandbox and the Win32k Lockdown Policy employed in the Google Chrome Sandbox. Combined with a compromised renderer process, for example, this vulnerability can lead to a full Remote Command Execution exploit chain in the latest state-of-the-art web-browsers.”, Kaspersky has found several builds of the CVE-2018-8611 exploit, including one adapted for the latest versions of Windows., The flaw was exploited by known threat actors and a recently discovered group tracked as SandCat that appears to be active in the Middle East., SandCat was also using the FinFisher/FinSpy spyware and the CHAINSHOT malware,, According to Kaspersky, SandCat exploited the CVE-2018-8611 flaw in attacks aimed at entities in the Middle East and Africa. , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –SANDCAT, CVE-2018-8611)
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On the Dark Web is quite easy to find any kind of data, recent data breaches have literally flooded the principal black markets., Recently, colleagues at HackRead discovered a seller using the pseudonym of ‘DataDirect’ offering US voters’ registration records on the dark net marketplace “The Real Deal.” The seller offers US voters ’ records where for each state at 0.5 BTC (around USD 340). The seller claims to have access to US voters ’ records from all the US states., “US voter registration records. Selling the DB on a State-by-State basis. 0.5 BTC per state (you must tell me which State you want. Some people think it’s unfair to make each State cost the same amount because some States are much bigger than others. I think it’s just easier this way.” states the item description., , At the time, I was writing there is no news about the authenticity of the records, but DataDirect is a seller already known to the experts because it is the same that leaked online the Thomson Reuters World-Check terrorist database., The availability online of records belonging to US voters is not a novelty, in December 2015 the security expert Chris Vickery discovered 191 million records belonging to US voters online. The precious data were stored in an unprotected server exposed online., The database containing US voters ’ data was discovered on December 20th, Vickery provided all the details about his disconcerting discovery to DataBreaches.net. The archive includes over 191 Million Americans’ personal identifying information (PII)., Vickery also found his own information in the database containing 300GB of voters’ data., “My immediate reaction was disbelief,” Vickery said. “I needed to know if this was real, so I quickly located the Texas records and ran a search for my own name. I was outraged at the result. Sitting right in front of my eyes, in a strange, random database I had found on the Internet, were details that could lead anyone straight to me. How could someone with 191 million such records be so careless?”, It is not clear how DataDirect gained access to the precious archive, it is likely he has found the same archive discovered by Vickery, but we cannot exclude that he hacked other servers containing the same information, including a government server., DataDirect also shared two screenshots that show some records included in the archive, one image shows personal and voting details of a voter of the State of California., , , This kind of data could be used by threat actors in the wild to launch other attacks against the US voters. Data could be used in spear phishing attacks or any other scam scheme., In April 2016, Vickery discovered on Amazon’s AWS online a 132 GB database containing 93.4 million Mexican voter records. The archive went online for at least eight days after Vickery discovered it, the database was set for a public access since September 2015., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – US voters database, hacking)
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A new write-up made by a security researcher known as Benkow (@Benkow_) has been published, as ever on Sunday, and to be more precise on Sunday 8 April., It’s about the story of a malware coder from Russia who is developing and selling two kinds of malware (a password stealer and a miner) with a lot of features and a variegated commercial offer: this malware actor is targeting also Russian people with his malware but Mr. Freud would absolve him (form the psychological point of view) analysing his nickname. The nickname, in fact, is “Im Sorry” (1ms0rry) which maybe talks about his interior drama: nevertheless, looking at what he does in his life the drama and the sorrow are for the thousands of victims he makes cry with his work., The incredible side of this story is that the man has declared to not be worried to be recognized with his real name after Benkow crew has unmasked the real identity of this young criminal with a great page of investigative journalism., But let’s go with order., First of all we have to say that this time the post is written in cooperation with some Benkow’s (and this post author Odisseus) friends and the list of them is reported below in the same order can be found on the Benkow_ post: they are “.sS.!, coldshell, fumik0_, siri_urz, VxVault, Cybercrime-Tracker, MalwareMustDie, .sS.! (again)”., , Yes, at the beginning of the post there is this image showing there are no doubts that #MalwareMustDie team has also given a contribution in this post: interviewed by the author of this post, Odisseus, mr. @unixfreaxjp said that, of course, we have to expect more to come about malware and reversing from the #MMD team in the future., Going back to the post published by Benkow, we have a very interesting work about the malware analysis referring the features spotted in the wild of a password Stealer malware made by “1ms0rry”: everything starts from a post published on a Russian hacker forum at the URL of the ifud.ws site the 7th of September 2017. There, a Russian hacker called “1ms0rry” – on Twitter (@ims0rry_off) – has published a post about a “Stealer N0F1L3 + admin panel ims0rry” with many different features. But let’s give a look at the malware capabilities., First Malware: Starter Stealer N0F1L3 v1, Giving a closer look to his advertising page on the hack forum page as is possible to read in English – translated by Russian thanks to Google – the following detailed features of the malware are offered: the “Starter Stealer” is written in C# and is able to steal passwords from 7 internet browsers: the price is 20$ for the build version and 600$ for the source code., , But this is not all, the malware is able to do more:, The password stealer malware has also the following features:, The Benkow post reports that what is interesting how 1ms0rry stealer is able to attack also Russian browsers like Yandex., As is possible to see in the C&C logs provided by the Benkow post, many IP addresses are related to the Russian Federation:, , Regarding the C&C panels, they have some the vulnerabilities: it can be easy to change the password, Benkow reports how to, providing even detailed list of IOCs and Yara for the malware admin panel., First Malware, the Advanced version N0F1L3 v2, The malware offer list includes an advanced version of the password stealer which is named N0F1L3 v2 and is injected by this malware called “Paradox Crypter” almost recognized by most of Antivirus and having a good detection ratio on Virustotal (46/67), , The advanced version is written in C – C++ and now is able to steal password also from Firefox., Second Malware 1ms0rry Miner, The second malware is a made by a loader and a miner: the LoaderBot is developed in .NET and as Benkow says it reuses a lot of code by N0F1L3., The LoaderBot it is a process that kills itself in the Task Manager then is not visible and install itself in the following PATH: C:\users\%userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Windows\, The persistence of the LoaderBot is achieved by installing the adding an item in the Windows Registry hive called at the startup: HKCU\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run, As shown by Benkow the available feature are Update, Download and Execute, and the connection to the C&C is achieved using a Mozilla User-Agent defined like as “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:53.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/53.0”, This means that first the infection is carried on by the Loader then the attacker installs the Miner., The Miner is developed in C++, is able to hide itself, to detect a Wallet address in the clipboard and replace it: it runs RunPe using a known process hollowing procedure and the following System API CreateProcessA(Suspended)/SetThreadContext/WriteProcessMemoryResumeThread/ and the code is a copy paste from GitHub, For the details of C&C, vulnerabilities and attack vector they are widely provided in the Benkow research., What is interesting now is how has been correlated with the “1ms0rry” nickname with a very promising Russian student named Ацамаз Гацоев or Atsamaz Gatsoev., The core of the story: 1ms0rry identity has been unmasked, First of all the Russian guy has a Twitter account that is “Im Sorry” with the following URL: The account is still working at the moment, and the malware actor is answering till 17 hours ago at the moment we are writing., “Im Sorry” answered to the tweet where Benkow launched his post about him telling to be happy to have people talking about his work, because he doesn’t hide his identity, on the contrary, he is happy that his crimes are associated to him., , That probably explains why as a malware actor he didn’t try to hide himself arriving to answer to another security researcher who was highlighting the IP address of one of his C&C panel:, , At the beginning point, looking for “Im Sorry” have been found some accounts on different platforms: he has an account on Telegram, on GitHub and different mail addresses like:, with the following nicknames:, Then looking for [email protected] Benkow has found a mail.ru account at the following URL that give us a first name and a second name: Аца Гацоев (Atsa Gatsoev) enabling to find something more, for instance the information contained in this Weblancer profile: , Many interesting things are here, says Benkow:, Then the user is “gorno” as is possible to see in the video at second 6 that there is Thermida and a local path, again “gorno” C:\Users\gorno\Desktop\winhost.exe, , And again in another video it is possible to see “the viruscheckmate user” that is again “hypega”., , The name “hypega” give the opportunity to retrieve another 2 very interesting links:, This last one gives us the final proof that “1ms0rry” is Atsamaz Gatsoev., How a criminal is working for the office of Russian “Information technologies and communications” of North Ossetia, What is probably confusing, looking at his photographs, is that he has the “face” of the good boy: and this is confirmed from a very recent and amazing post by Alan Salbiev in the 2013 known as “head of the Information Department of the Ministry of Education and Science of North Ossetia” and from 2017 is at “Management of North Ossetia-Alania in information technologies and communications Local business Vladikavkaz, Russia”, , The 20th of March he writes the following Facebook post talking about “1ms0rry” as one who has done a great job in his office and more over he says that on “February 25, 2018 at competitions on sports hacking at the University ITMO our hero confidently walked rivals from Komsomolsk-on-Amur, Khanty-Mansiysk, Penza, Pyatigorsk, etc. As a result, a schoolboy from Vladikavkaz entered the top 15 in St. Petersburg., At Atsamaz there is a dream – to enter the University of ITMO. Our Office will provide every possible assistance to a talented guy”., Here the post:, , We don’t know how much Mr. Alan Salbiev knows about his “dream” if he knows if he is a criminal or if he thinks that as a CTF hacker he has to get his Gym to become a perfect champion in Russia hacking and illegally stealing password or cryptocurrency to people in Russian and around the world., For sure Europol or FBI now are hoping he is going to participate soon in competitions on sports hacking or some CTF competitions in Europe or USA., About the Author: Odisseus, Independent Security Researcher involved in Italy and worldwide in topics related to hacking, penetration testing and development., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Russia, Gatsoev), ,
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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
Email address: 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’ll offer the opportunity to:
• Insert banners of various sizes in all the posts on Security Affairs.
• Publish sponsored posts written by the customers that can include any kind of commercial reference.
• Arrange a monthly/quarterly/annual campaign (for big customers) to advertise customers’ activities and discoveries.
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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Almost 18 months ago, the security researcher Will Dormann of the CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC) has found a severe vulnerability in Microsoft Outlook (CVE-2018-0950), time is passed but Microsoft partially addressed it with the last Patch Tuesday updates.
The flaw in Microsoft Outlook ties the way Microsoft Outlook renders remotely-hosted OLE content when an RTF (Rich Text Format) an email is previewed and automatically initiates SMB connections., The CVE-2018-0950 flaw could be exploited by attackers to steal sensitive data such as Windows login credentials by tricking victims into preview an email with Microsoft Outlook,
“Outlook blocks remote web content due to the privacy risk of web bugs. But with a rich text email, the OLE object is loaded with no user interaction. Let’s look at the traffic in Wireshark to see what exactly is being leaked as the result of this automatic remote object loading.” wrote Dormann., The vulnerability, discovered by Will Dormann of the CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC), resides in the way Microsoft Outlook renders remotely-hosted OLE content when an RTF (Rich Text Format) email message is previewed and automatically initiates SMB connections., “Here we can see than an SMB connection is being automatically negotiated. The only action that triggers this negotiation is Outlook previewing an email that is sent to it.” The following screenshot shows that IP address, domain name, Username, hostname, SMB session key are being leaked., , “Microsoft Outlook will automatically retrieve remote OLE content when an RTF email is previewed. When remote OLE content is hosted on a SMB/CIFS server, the Windows client system will attempt to authenticate with the server using single sign-on (SSO).” states the CERT. “This may leak the user’s IP address, domain name, user name, host name, and password hash. If the user’s password is not complex enough, then an attacker may be able to crack the password in a short amount of time.”, Microsoft Outlook automatically renders OLE content, this means that it will initiate an automatic authentication with the attacker’s controlled remote server over SMB protocol using single sign-on (SSO). This will cause the leak of NTLMv2 hashed version of the password that could be cracked by the attacks with commercial tools and services., Microsoft attempted to address the flaw in the last security updates, but it only successfully fixed automatically SMB connections when it previews RTF emails, any other SMB attack is still feasible., “It is important to realize that even with this patch, a user is still a single click away from falling victim to the types of attacks described above,” Dormann added. “For example, if an email message has a UNC-style link that begins with “\\”, clicking the link initiates an SMB connection to the specified server.”, Summarizing, the installation of the Microsoft update for CVE-2018-0950 will not fully protect users from the exploitation of this issue., Users are advised to apply the following mitigations:, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – CVE-2018-0950, Microsoft Outook),
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It’s official, the GoToMyPC service operated by Citrix is the last victim of the hackers., GoToMyPC is remote desktop software that allows users to access and control their computers remotely by using a simple web browser., A number of users are experiencing problems during logging into GoToMyPC because Citrix experts have reset account passwords after unknown hackers reportedly attacked the service., , “Dear Valued Customer,
Unfortunately, the GoToMYPC service has been targeted by a very sophisticated password attack. To protect you, the security team recommended that we reset all customer passwords immediately.” states the security advisory published by GoToMyPC., “Effective immediately, you will be required to reset your GoToMYPC password before you can login again.
To reset your password please use your regular GoToMYPC login link., Recommendations for a strong password:, If you are having issues logging into your account, please visit our service status page for instructions ^GD, — Citrix GoToMyPC (@GoToMyPC) 18 giugno 2016, , The advisory doesn’t include details on the attack, it only describes it a “very sophisticated password attack.”, Now the problem is to understand if hackers breached the GoToMyPC severrs or if the attackers used passwords available online leveraging the bad habit of users in sharing same credentials among various services., The company is still investigating the case, meantime, let me suggest also to change the password for all those services for which you shared the same credentials., The incident reminds us the problem recently suffered by TeamViewer, recently many TeamViewer users reported that their systems were accessed by hackers via the popular support tool, but the company denies any incident., GoToMyPC is suggesting customers to enable two-step verification in order to improve the security of their accounts., Pierluigi Paganini, Security Affairs – (GoToMyPC, Security Breach)
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The Internet surveillance in India is reality thanks a project codenamed NETRA (Network Traffic Analysis), it is able to detect and automatically capture any voice traffic passing through software such as VoIP systems including Skype and Google Talk., In Hindi NETRA has means “eye”, an eloquent word to define a surveillance project considerable as the Indian version of PRISM., NETRA is currently under testing by the Indian Intelligence Bureau and Cabinet Secretariat, it was designed by the Centre for Artificial Intelligence and Robotics (CAIR) lab., NETRA has the principal purpose to allow the government to monitor the Internet and telephone communications, the news has been reported by the Economic Times and relaunched by my Indian friends at TheHackerNews.,
A hilarious note on the project NETRA, according to the first revelations it is defined to use only 300 GB of storage space for storing the intercepted Internet traffic … what’s wrong?, Sources at The Hacker News confirmed the news adding that NETRA “is a hardware device, and will be installed at ISP (Internet service provider) level on more than 1000 locations. Each location will be called as “Node”, with 300GB of storage space.”, “So, there are 1000 nodes x 300GB = 300,000GB of total space is initially decided to set up.”, The Indian government has to provide more information on the NETRA project, it has not cleared the final use of the architecture, does it deal with Computer Security Incidents and vulnerabilities?, “The ‘Netra’ deployment strategy was recently discussed by an apex inter-ministerial group headed by DoT’s member (technology) and included top officials of the Cabinet Secretariat, home ministry, DRDO, CAIR, Intelligence Bureau, C-DoT and Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In). The panel also deliberated on ways to respond to computer security incidents, track system vulnerabilities and promote effective IT security practices across the country. ” reported the Economic Times., Of course there is a great concern for Indian population’s privacy, surveillance activities are intrusive and could interfere with online communications., Unfortunately the Indian law framework in matters of privacy and confidentiality is very dated, inadequate to approach the contemporary debate on surveillance and risks of censorship., Privacy or Homeland security? This is the contemporary dilemma, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – NETRA, Surveillance)
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Security experts from Kaspersky Lab have discovered a sophisticated banking trojan targeting Brazilian users. The threat, codenamed Trojan-Proxy.PowerShell.Agent.a, leverages on the Microsoft’s PowerShell utility. It is considered one of the most complex Brazilian malware samples discovered since now., The malware was delivered via a phishing campaign, the malicious messages appear as sent from a mobile carrier. Threat actors used a malicious .PIF (Program Information File) attachment to compromise the victims. PIF files instruct MS-DOS applications how to run in Windows environments, they can include executables like BAT, COM or EXE that are automatically executed once the host file is running., The Trojan-Proxy.PowerShell.Agent.a observed by Kaspersky is able to modify proxy settings in Internet Explorer to hijack users to phishing pages for Brazilian banks., “After the file is executed it changes the proxy configuration in Internet Explorer to a malicious proxy server that redirects connections to phishing pages for Brazilian banks. It’s the same technique used by malicious PACs that we described in 2013, but this time, no PACs are used; the changes in the system are made using a PowerShell script.” wrote Fabio Assolini. , , The malware also works on Firefox and Chrome, it attempts to bypass PowerShell execution policies launching the “powershell.exe” process and the command line “-ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File %TEMP%\599D.tmp\599E.ps1”., The malware modifies the file prefs.js, changing proxy settings in this way users trying to access bank websites listed in the script they will be redirected to a phishing page hosted on the malicious proxy server., “The proxy domains used in the attack are listed below. All of them use dynamic DNS services and their goal is to redirect all traffic to a server located in the Netherlands (89.34.99.45), where there are several phishing pages for Brazilian banks:”, gbplugin.REMOVED.com.br
moduloseguro.REMOVED.com.br
x0x0.REMOVED.com.br
X1x1.REMOVED.com.br, The Brazilian underground is very prolific for banking malware development due to a large inclination of Brazilians in the use of online banking services., According to Kaspersky Lab, Brazil was the country with the highest number of banking trojan infections in Q1 2016., Below the mitigation strategy suggested by Kaspersky experts:, “To protect a network against malware that uses PowerShell, it is important to modify its execution, using administrative templates that only allow signed scripts. We are sure this is the first of many that Brazil’s bad guys will code.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Banking Trojan, PowerShell)
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Security experts have no doubts, IoT devices will be a privileged target for hackers, for this reason, security firm are designing solutions to mitigate cyber attacks against connected smart objects.Samsung is one of the company that is more investing in the security of IoT devices, a few days ago it presented GAIA, a Smart TV security solution., GAIA implements a three-layer security solution that will run on all Samsung 2016 Tizen-based Smart TVs. The solution is designed to protect services, software and hardware of Samsung Smart TV., Tizen is an operating system based on the Linux kernel and the GNU C Library implementing the Linux API, it is used by many IoT devices, including smartphones, smart TVs, and wearable devices., “Protecting consumers’ personal information is of the utmost importance to Samsung, both in terms of the company’s values and what’s needed for the continued growth and success of the IoT ecosystem,” said Hyun Suk Kim, President of Visual Display Business at Samsung Electronics. “GAIA is a security solution that will give Samsung customers security and peace of mind now and in the future.”, , GAIA aims to protect the personal data of consumers, and it can do it protecting core operations, data in input, and data in transit., Gaia implements a Secure Zone, a virtual barrier to protect the core service operations and a Secure Keypad that is used to allow users to submit data through a secure input mechanism seen on a TV. The Secure KeyPad is designed to protect consumers’ personal information, including login credentials and credit card data submitted through the Smart TV., Gaia also improves security at the hardware level by dividing the Tizen OS into two parts including the main and the security space, “Thirdly, Security level is also strengthened in terms of hardware. By dividing the Tizen OS into two parts including the main and the security space, data for each space is secured separately. Also, public key used for verifying personal information is included in the hardware chip.” states Samsung., GAIA also protects data exchanged by SmartTV and service providers by encrypting the information., Experts at Samsung also included in the security solution an anti-malware system which is able of detecting and blocking any malicious codes that could modify software components of the Smart Tv., The design of the GAIA solution is an important step in securing IoT devices from even more sophisticated cyber threats., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Samsung GAIA, Smart TV)
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Data breaches are a common problem also for bad actors, in many cases cyber criminals hack websites of competitors to damage their reputation and push out them from the business., Recently we discussed the hacks of nulled.io and Besa Mafia illegal services that caused serious damage to their business, and news of the day is that ShOping.su suffered a major data breach., The latest one is ShOping.su, also known as ShOping.net, is a crime forum in the darknet where criminals buy and sell stolen payment card data and stolen accounts., Unknowns hacked the ShOping.su service by stealing thousands of accounts and offering them for sale online. The hackers claim to have stolen data belonging to more than 16,000 ShOping.su registered accounts, they also claim the availability of 15,000 user accounts stolen from other sites that were stored on the same server and around 9000 credit card data., The data breach was discovered by the Hacked-DB company that reported it to the colleagues at the HackRead alongside with a detailed report that confirms the presence of 16,566 user accounts in the leaked data., “The dumped data contains 16,566 user accounts with email addresses and their encrypted passwords, 9,000 accounts from platforms like Uber, cPanel, WebMail, GoDaddy, Twitter, PayPal, Amazon and more. (The 9,000 accounts were available on ShOping.su for sale.)” reported HackRead., After the alleged data breach the ShOping.su platform went down for more than one day, now it is again up., , The leaked data contain personal and credit card data of 5,000 users including ID card numbers, social security numbers, credit card numbers, CVV codes, zip code, users’ date of births, name or the state and city, type of card, phone numbers, usernames, email addresses, price and date of purchased., “Hacked-DB has detected a data breach on ShOping.su website. The leaked data contains user account information and full credit card details, credit number, CVV, expiration date, holder name, credit type etc. the website was down for maintenance after the data breach but now it is back online,” reported a Hacked-DB spokesman., Stay tuned …, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – ShOping.su, data breach)
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Experts at Malwarebytes security firm discovered that cyber criminals are exploiting a number of popular websites to serve malicious advertisements designed to spread the Zemot malware. Online advertising networks are once again a target of cyber criminals, according to the experts, the criminals exploited the Google’s DoubleClick and popular Zedo advertising agency to deliver malicious advertisements to millions of Internet. The list of popular websites used to spread the malicious advertisements is long and includes The Jerusalem Post, The Times of Israel and the Last.fm music streaming website,, The Zemot malware was detected by Microsoft earlier this month, as explained by the experts of the company, this family of trojan downloaders is frequently used by malware with a number of different payloads. Zemot is usually distributed by several exploit kit, including the Nuclear exploit kit and the Magnitude exploit kit., Malvertising is a consolidated tactic in the underground ecosystem, recently experts at Fox-IT revealed in a blog post that the Internet firm AppNexus is the origin of a new “malvertising” campaign, which is based on the Angler Exploit Kit to redirect visitors to malicious websites serving the Asprox malware., According to Fox-It, the malvertising campaign targeted visitors of high ranked websites, including Java.com, eBay.ie, Deviantart.com, TMZ.com, Photobucket.com, IBTimes.com, Kapaza.be and TVgids.nl. Last week visitors of the above websites were infected with such technique., Experts at Malwarebytes sustain that the Malvertising campaign started in in late August reaching millions of Internet users, although only poorly protected computers were infected by the Zemot malware., Jerome Segura, a senior security researcher with Malwarebytes, wrote in a blog post that the malicious advertisements lead users to websites containing Nuclear exploit kit, which looks for an unpatched version of Adobe Flash Player or Internet Explorer. If a user’s machine is not updated, it downloads the Zemot malware, which then contact its C&C server to download many other malicious payloads., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Malvertising, cybercrime)
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A new batch of documents from Vault 7 leaks revealed details about a new implant, dubbed AngelFire that was used by CIA agents to infect systems running Windows OS., AngelFire was part of the CIA arsenal, the hacking tool was used to gain persistence on the infected systems., The documents describe the AngelFire framework implants as a persistent backdoor that infects the partition Boot Sector. According to the user manual leaked by WikiLeaks, AngelFire requires administrative privileges to compromise the target system., “Today, August 31st 2017, WikiLeaks publishes documents from the Angelfire project of the CIA. Angelfire is an implant comprised of five components: Solartime, Wolfcreek, Keystone (previously MagicWand), BadMFS, and the Windows Transitory File system.” reads Wikileaks., “Like previously published CIA projects (Grasshopper and AfterMidnight) in the Vault7 series, it is a persistent framework that can load and execute custom implants on target computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system (XP or Win7).”, , Below the details for the five components composing the AngelFire framework:, 1. Solartime — It is the component that modifies the partition boot sector to load and execute the Wolfcreek (kernel code) every time the system boots up., 2. Wolfcreek — It a self-loading driver (kernel code that Solartime executes) that loads other drivers and user-mode applications, 3. Keystone — It is part of the Wolfcreek implant that leveraged DLL injection to execute the malicious user applications directly into system memory without dropping them into the file system. It is responsible for starting malicious user applications., 4. BadMFS — It is a is a library used to create a covert file system at the end of the active partition (or in a file on disk in later versions). It is used as a repository for the drivers and implants that Wolfcreek will start. All files are both encrypted and obfuscated to avoid string or PE header scanning., 5. Windows Transitory File system — It is a new method of installing AngelFire, which allows the CIA operator to create transitory files for specific actions including installation, adding files to AngelFire, removing files from AngelFire, etc., According to the documents, the 32-bit version of the CIA implant works against Windows XP and Windows 7, while the 64-bit implant can be used to infect Server 2008 R2, Windows 7., Below the list of release published by Wikileaks since March:, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Wikileaks, hacking)
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The U.S. Computer Emergency Readiness Team(US-CERT) issued the Alert (TA16-144A) to warn of leaked WPAD queries could result in domain name collisions with internal network naming schemes. The WPAD queries are intended for resolution on private or enterprise DNS servers, A “domain name collision” bug could result in certain DNS queries to be resolved on public instead of private or enterprise servers, exposing organizations to Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks., Security experts explained observed Web Proxy Auto-Discovery (WPAD) Domain Name System (DNS) queries have been observed reaching public DNS., The collisions could be abused by threat actors to configure an external proxy for network traffic, opening the door to man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks., The attack scenario is simple, it is enough that an attacker registers a domain to answer leaked WPAD queries and configures a valid proxy. The Domain name collision bug is particularly dangerous for private organizations, their assets (i.e. laptop) become vulnerable when used outside an internal network (e.g. home networks, public Wi-Fi networks)., The problem is even more serious is serious if we consider DNS queries using the Web Proxy Auto-Discovery protocol (WPAD) in combination with newer, publicly registered generic top-level domains, that could trigger resolution through queries erroneously passed to a public server., Employees are particularly exposed when connecting a work computer to a home or external network, in this case, WPAD DNS queries may be made in error to public DNS servers., “WPAD is a protocol used to ensure all systems in an organization utilize the same web proxy configuration. Instead of individually modifying configurations on each device connected to a network, WPAD locates a proxy configuration file and applies the configuration automatically. The use of WPAD is enabled by default on all Microsoft Windows operating systems and Internet Explorer browsers.” states the Alert issued by the US CERT. “With the New gTLD program, previously undelegated gTLD strings are now being delegated for public domain name registration 3. These strings may be used by private or enterprise networks, and in certain circumstances, such as when a work computer is connected from a home or external network, WPAD DNS queries may be made in error to public DNS servers. Attackers may exploit such leaked WPAD queries by registering the leaked domain and setting up MitM proxy configuration files on the Internet.”, According to US-CERT, the WPAD is enabled by default in Windows and on Internet Explorer, and it is supported by the other OSs and browsers., Below the list of recommendations issued by the US-CERT:, , 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 – WPAD , MITM)
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This news is disconcerting and demonstrates the importance to carefiìully consider the technology in our lives. The Washington State Department of Corrections (DoC) launched an investigation after it early released 3,200 prisoners over the course of 13 years., It seems that a software bug present in the systems of the Department since 2002, caused errors in the calculation of time credits for the good behavior of individuals while imprisoned., The bugs led errors in the calculation of sentence reductions for the US prisoners that had a good behavior, the experts estimated that in a 13-year period, the average number of days of those released early from prison was 49 days before the correct release date., “This problem was allowed to continue for 13 years is deeply disappointing to me, totally unacceptable and, frankly, maddening,” is the comment of the Washington State Governor Jay Inslee. “I’ve many questions about how and why this happened, and I understand that members of the public will have those same queries.”, Gov. Jay Inslee today already ordered the Washington Department of Corrections to take the necessary actions to discover the bug that allowed criminals to leave the jail early., , The software bug was introduced in 2002, in that year the state’s supreme court introduced a change in the calculation of the “good time” credit system for all the prisoners in State Prisons and County jails,, Criteria for evaluating the good behavior of prisoners were introduced to allow guests of state prisons to reduce the period to be served., The DoCs released a new version of software that implemented the new rules, but it introduced also a bug, but it is important to highlight that the Department of Corrections (DoC) has been informed of the software bug at least 3 years ago. In December, 2012 in fact, the familiars of an assault victim reported the issue to the Department of Corrections., The US Department of Corrections accepted the claim and filed a request, ranking the error as “time sensitive.” This means that the US Department urged a solution as soon as possible, but something went wrong., “Between December 2012 and this month, the software fix “was repeatedly delayed,” according to a DOC timeline of events. The delays occurred despite the fact a DOC worker who filed the service request labeled the fix as time sensitive and “ASAP.” Reported the SeattleTimes. “Typically, IT fixes are put into a queue according to priority, said Brown. But, “What we know, I think, at a bare minimum, is the proper prioritization did not occur,” he said.”, Three years to fix a time sensitive bug that could have effects on people security. Simply absurd!, Now something seems to be changing, Inslee assured that the software bug will be fixed within the January 7th., Waiting for the fix, the US DOC has requested double checks before releasing any prisoner., “The governor ordered DOC to halt all releases of impacted offenders from prison until a hand calculation is done to ensure the offender is being released on the correct date. A broader software fix is expected to be in place by Jan. 7, 2016.” continues the official statement., “In addition, DOC is working swiftly to locate offenders who were released from prison prior to their actual earned release date and ensure they fulfill their sentences as required by law. In accordance with Supreme Court precedent, most of the offenders who were released early will be given with day for day credit for their time in the community. Depending on how much time they have left to serve, the offenders will go to work release or back to prison.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Department of Corrections, software bug)
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by Ron Kelson, Pierluigi Paganini, David Pace, In last week’s article, we explored the issue of today’s high-speed computers and why their inability to consistently meet software deadlines causes serious problems to automotive applications, industrial control systems, (nuclear) power generators and other computer systems that interact with the real world., In particular, we explored the observe-orient-decide-act (OODA) loop, a model developed by military strategist and former USAF Colonel John Boyd, which describes how humans and organisations interact with the physical world. To quote Boyd:, “In order to win at war, we should operate at a faster tempo or rhythm than our adversaries … Such activity will make us appear ambiguous (unpredictable) thereby generate confusion and disorder among our adversaries − since our adversaries will be unable to generate mental images or pictures that agree with the menacing as well as faster transient rhythm or patterns they are competing against.”, A similar type of confusion and disorder occurs when a cyber-physical system cannot complete its observation and orientation tasks regularly on time. In this case the system will no longer be able to generate an accurate picture of the world around it, and consequently it can no longer keep track of the effect of its actions on the real-world. Not surprisingly, cyber attacks against critical infrastructure are designed to disable or interfere the OODA loops of computers for the purpose of disabling or destroying the physical systems they control., What is particularly disconcerting is that this confusion and disorder can also occur in benign environments when inadequate engineering practices and technologies are used. Today’s fastest time predictable computers are now far too slow to meet the needs of modern cyber-physical applications., According to the EU PROARTIS Project:, “Industry demands new functionality and higher levels of performance, together with reduced cost, weight and power dissipation, which can only be delivered by advanced hardware features. However, the timing behaviour of systems using these advanced hardware features is very hard ed: and often impossible to deal with by current timing analysis techniques.”, The FP7 PROARTIS Project is creating new technologies to try and address this problem. Unfortunately, market forces are “compelling” industries to use modern processors that are currently extremely difficult to use safely and correctly in cyber-physical systems., Right now, the expert consensus is that civilian cyber-physical systems deployed today by many industries are frequently engineered using KNOWN UNSAFE practices. In this week’s article we look at the complex trends, dispositions, and behaviours, of organisations in the cyber-physical systems community today that limit the adoption of safety and security best practices. We will also explore the ICT Gozo Malta Project’s activities to overcome these barriers., In the safety industry (IEC 61508 standard), hazards are naturally categorised by consequences, ranging from “Negligible” through to “Catastrophic” involving “Multiple loss of life”. The greater the consequence of failure, the higher the level of engineering rigour and controls which should be put in place to manage that hazard., In industries like aviation and nuclear power, where a single catastrophic failure captures massive media attention, and could also damage those industries’ economic future, safety controls are taken extremely seriously. However, in industries where a catastrophic failures (multiple loss of lives) occur on a regular daily basis (e.g. car crashes), and those failures do not threaten those industries’ economic viability, safety controls may not be applied so diligently., Safety controls that can be sold as optional extras, such as anti-skid brake systems and airbags, are popular as they can provide a market differentiator to the manufacturer. Crumple zones in cars are highly visible to customers and can also be used effectively as a market differentiator. However, safety features that are less visible to the customer, which do not provide a clear ROI at the point of sale and could expose the manufacturer, are typically shunned due to perverse market incentives. We are advised that most computer control systems in cars have no third party independent assessment of their safety or correctness. Furthermore, most cars do not have a “black box recorder”, making it hard to identify if there was a software or hardware fault that contributed to a car crash. To make the situation worse, some car manufacturers ask chip vendors to eliminate traditional safety features to reduce component costs (for techies: they remove the memory management unit MMU used for safety and security operations). This magnifies the difficulty in identifying, and safely controlling, the effect of software faults., The authors have been advised that today many organisations developing real-time applications apply inadequate (“hand waving”) engineering practices to manage well-known timing problems in modern computer processors. A common approach is to use naive time measurement techniques (i.e. not using commercial testing and validation tools) and then add an arbitrary 20 per cent margin for measurement errors and hope that it’s enough. As we reported in our article last week, IBM has found that 50 per cent of the warranty costs in cars are related to electronics and their embedded software, and that 30 per cent of those costs are related to timing flaws., According to the article “This car runs on code” published in IEEE Spectrum online (2009), these instances of incorrect operation cost industry billions of euros annually. This issue affects many industries!, The problem with regard to software deadlines is particularly hard because:, To quote Dr Benoit Triquet of Airbus France: “One challenge for European safety-critical industries is to … gather sufficient momentum to influence the microprocessor market.” In fact, this is a worldwide problem in the safety-critical and information security-critical domains. We need to overcome the current inertia., So how do we achieve improved safety and security in cyber-physical systems with a win-win approach that is economically viable? We believe existing and emerging technical solutions must be synergistically combined in a way that creates a compelling computing platform that simultaneously addresses many pain points for different industries in the one convergent solution, whilst also being backward compatible as much as possible with existing software., This requires global canvassing and technical exploration with leading vendors and academic experts., The ICT Gozo Malta Project, part funded in 2011 by the Ministry for Gozo, is doing just that. This is very notable achievement when one considers that many vendors are fierce commercial competitors., One of the authors of this article, Benjamin Gittins, as CTO of Synaptic Laboratories and representing the ICT Gozo Malta project, was recently invited to attend the “closed-door” Industrial Advisory Board meeting of the EU FP7 PROARTIS project held in Barcelona. PROARTIS partners include organisations such as the Barcelona Supercomputing Centre, Rapita Systems Ltd UK, University of Padua Italy, Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et Automatique (INRIA) France, and Airbus France. The Industrial Advisory Board includes the following world-class organisations: AdaCore, BMW Group, European Space Agency, IBM Haifa Research Lab, Infineon, NXP, and SYSGO. In private meetings with the representatives of all those organisations, convergence was a recurring theme: in particular the convergence of real-time, safety, security and other performance requirements on computer chips. If done correctly, these chips could service both the aerospace and automotive industries., Through ongoing international collaboration on its new universal computer architecture proposal, Synaptic Labs and the ICT GM Project seek to address the inertia and momentum issue raised by Dr Triquet. Through collaboration with many different organisations with different “pain points”, we seek to ensure each pain point is addressed comprehensively and at the lowest overall cost. By addressing multiple pain points in one solution, we make it easier for organisations to increase their return on investment., The ICT Gozo Malta Project continues to put Malta-sourced cutting edge design and leadership on the world stage. It is the centre of collaboration with more than eight world-class real-time operating system vendors that have products deployed in several billions of devices, all the top vendors in the worst case execution timing tools market, several universities across Europe, the USA and other countries, and some of the most advanced semiconductor organisations in the world. Experts from several organisations currently involved with PROARTIS have expressed interest to participate as Industry Advisory Board members and are exploring further collaboration. This progress is all centred around Synaptic Labs’ designs., While progress is being made at this deeper level, with regard to your safety you can help today by placing pressure on manufacturers of cyber-physical systems at point of sale, by asking them: “Are you cutting corners in computer safety?” and “Has an expert third party safety organisation independently checked your computer system design and implementation for correctness and safety?” Be sure to let them know you are not interested in short cuts that put your personal safety and security at risk ANYWHERE in their shiny new product., Be sure to read our next article and join us in taking the next steps together to secure (y)our world!, , Co-author Pierluigi Paganini has 20+ years of security experience and many years of in-depth investigative cyber security journalism on important cyber events., ICT Gozo Malta is a joint collaboration between the Gozo Business Chamber and Synaptic Labs, part funded in 2011 by the Ministry for Gozo, Eco Gozo Project, and a prize winner in the 2012 Malta Government National Enterprise Innovation Awards. www.ictgozomalta.eu has links to free cyber awareness resources for all age groups., All our past articles in this cyber awareness series can be accessed on malta-independent.com.mt, ictgozomalta.eu, and securityaffairs.co ,which is rated one of the 10 best security blogs in the world, with an international viewing audience exceeding 40,000. To continue promoting Maltese ICT to the world, we encourage all ICT professionals to register on the ICT GM Skills Register to keep abreast of developments, both in Cyber Security and other ICT R&D initiatives in Malta and Gozo. For further details contact David Pace at [email protected] ., by Ron Kelson, Pierluigi Paganini, David Pace, Mr Kelson is Vice Chair of the ICT Gozo Malta Project and CEO of Synaptic Laboratories Limited., Mr Gittins is CTO of the ICT Gozo Malta Project and Synaptic Laboratories Limited., Sig. Paganini, Security Specialist CISO Bit4ID Srl, is a CEH − Certified Ethical Hacker, EC Council and founder of Security Affairs, Mr Pace is Project Manager of the ICT Gozo Malta Project and an IT consultant, , References , Part 1 of 2 – Serious safety and security problems in automotive, aviation, aerospace and other cyber-physical systems,
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Hackers target Ethereum-mining farms in the attempt to hijack the funds by replacing the user’s wallet with their one., The attacks were first spotted on Monday, threat actors attempted to change the default configuration of Ethereum miners., “Illicit digital currency mining, either directly in the browser or via maliciously-delivered miners, is nothing new, but our honeypot systems have started flagging a different type of attack against Ethereum-mining farms.” wrote Bitdefender threat analyst Bogdan Botezatu., “We detected the first attacks on Monday, when our SSH honeypots prompted us about a bot attempting to change the system configuration to hijack funds from Ethereum-mining operations.”, The attackers are specifically targeting EthOS, the operating system optimized for mining cryptocurrencies, including Ethereum, Zcash, and Monero. The operating system currently runs on more than 38,000 mining rigs across the world. It comes pre-loaded with the necessary tools, and a default username and password, the only effort requested to the user during the installation is the set up of a wallet address used as a recipient for mining fees and the change of default credentials., , The attacks were detected by a honeypot set up by Bitdefender, attackers scanned for the entire IPv4 range and look for Ethereum miners with open SSH connections., “The bot scans for the entire IPv4 range and looks for open SSH connections. If found, it attempts to log in using the default username and password to the EthOS operating system: ethos:live and root:live,” explained Botezatu., If the login succeeds, the attackers try to change the Ethereum wallet to hijack the mining process to the attacker’s Ethereum address. In the attacks observed by the researchers, threat actors used the wallet “0xb4ada014279d9049707e9A51F022313290Ca1276” that received 10 transactions over the past days worth a total of $611 in Ether., “So, if you are running an Ether Miner based on Ethereum OS, make sure you have changed the default login credentials. If you haven’t done so, now would be a good time to check whether the miner is sending money to you, not hackers,” concluded Botezatu., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Ethereum miners, hacking)
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The Dridex Banking Trojan is a part of a family of Trojans classified as “banking trojans“. An article describing the Dridex Trojan and some of its inner-workings were published by TrendMicro in November of 2014., However, I have recently been alerted of a phishing campaign targeting my organization in which multiple e-mails were intercepted, with ZIP archive attachments. These ZIP archives, as well as the overall e-mail, fit the description of a typical Dridex phishing e-mail; describing a financial issue, in this case, the failure of an ACH (Automated Clearing House) Payment. The ZIP archive was named to manipulate the user into believing that it contained information regarding this “failed transaction.”, , Within this ZIP archive was a single Microsoft Word document; while I did not bother to look for any actual content within the Word document, I did know that the document contained embedded Macros. Macros allow users to embed VisualBasic scripts within Microsoft Office documents. These can be used, and were of course intended to be used for legitimate purposes, but are commonly utilized by malware authors to trick unsuspecting users into launching nefarious code that performs actions that lead to the compromise of their device., As TrendMicro reported in their November 2014 article:, “The appearance of DRIDEX comes a couple of years after CRIDEX’s entry into the threat landscape. Both CRIDEX and DRIDEX steal personal information, specifically data related to online banking. DRIDEX is consider as the successor because it uses a new way to steal information–via HTML injections., However, there is a major difference between the two. CRIDEX malware is one of the payloads associated with exploit kit spam attacks. DRIDEX, on the other hand, relies on spam to deliver Microsoft Word documents containing malicious macro code. The macro code downloads DRIDEX onto the affected system.”, As evidenced by my analysis and the e-mail alone, this description remains accurate, at least in the case of DRIDEX’s primary method of infection., The detailed analysis is available in the following document:, Enjoy it!, About the Author Michael Fratello, Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Dridex, malware)
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The control of information is the main concern of Governments. More or less declared the major players of a precarious global economy have implemented digital surveillance systems, from India to China, passing Russia and USA., The crucial point is the legality of these actions conducted by Intelligence Agencies in the name of Nations Security abusing the rights of citizens. To this we must consider another significant issue , the corruption. Corruption has no Country and is a cross problem widely diffused., The dilemma is always the same … “who controls the controller?” Obvious who manage massive e-surveillance systems has a vantage point to gather confidential information and therefore make for a powerful private interests., Even more dangerous is the phenomenon of corruption, enslaved to the power that can give rise to intestine current whose sole purpose is to destabilize the current political Government. Approaching the problem more in detail, we have on the one hand impeccable initiatives undertaken for reasons of National Security , on the other hand there is a pervasive phenomenon of the human weakness to the money. During this days in Italy for example we are fighting with a corruption case that involve the Finmeccanica Firm, one of the top euro defense provider., Lets give a look to corruption perception report and related map., , , , It’s clear that all those States that are investing in e-Surveillance systems are the same governments that suffers majors corruptions problems. I believe that the combination of this two factors is dangerous at least like the phenomenon you want to fight, the cyber threat. Here you are some sample of monitoring system deployed in Country with high level of corruption:, , , Corruption is a phenomenon that exposes the internal organizations and governments to threats that are really difficult to detect., …. All this projects are intended to strengthen the e-surveillance capabilities of the government without any constitutional safeguards., Indian Government for example has forced telecom and internet service providers (ISPs) to install monitoring equipment for surveillance of internet traffic., Recently, the United Nations declared “Right to Access” to Internet as Human Right. This would have a positive impact upon many Human Rights in Cyberspace. For instance, Right to Speech and Expression, Right to Privacy, Right to Know, etc cannot be violated by any CMS Project. United Nations must expand Human Rights Protection to many more issues considering anyone of this violations., It has no sense to promote human freedom closing the eyes on corruptions events, on the direct correlation that there is between corruption and policy to implement detailed traffic filtering., Let me conclude with the hope that all the Governments that have introduced monitoring systems are confident about their actual usage and that they will fight corruption in the same way they have declared war to any cyber threat., Pierluigi Paganini, , Other References,
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, Communications connectivity September 1, 2000
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The recent disclosure of hundreds celebrity pictures has raised the discussion on the level of security offered by the Apple iCloud stored service. To improve the security offered by the iCloud service, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook has announced the imminent implementation of a two-factor authentication mechanism to protect the access to the iCloud service from a mobile device. The introduction of the two-factor authentication will be effective with the iOS 8.0., The login to iCloud service from iPhones and iPads will be allowed to users is possession of the couple Apple ID and password, plus the an authentication code sent to the device through SMS or generated at the time of sign-up., Tim Cook highlighted the great importance reserved by Apple to the user’s privacy, confirming that the company will do even more to protect user’s data., “When I step back from this terrible scenario that happened and say what more could we have done, I think about the awareness piece,” Tim Cook said. “I think we have a responsibility to ratchet that up. That’s not really an engineering thing.”, Apple confirmed that the recent incident was caused by unknown attackers which were able to access users’ iCloud accounts by getting their passwords through phishing attacks or social engineering attacks., In reality, Apple had already 2FA available for iTunes and Apple ID accounts since 2013, anyway the company doesn’t apply to iCloud authentication mechanism., , According to Tim Cook the two-factor authentication implemented by Apple will include the delivery of email and push notifications to users for the execution of specific operations on their accounts., Every data backup restoration for iCloud, every password change or logins from a new device will trigger a notification to the user, as explained by Tim Cook the notification services will start within a couple of weeks., Despite 2FA is not a definitive solution against any kind of attacks on the user’s account and its data, it represents a further element of difficulty for threat actors. To bypass the 2FA mechanism the attacker would need to have physical access to the victim’s device, or anyway need to compromise it with a malicious code that is able to steal the one-time password generated for the authentication process., Apple revealed a disconcerting truth, the majority of its users doesn’t use two-factor authentication, for this reason in the next months it will encourage customers to enable it on the new version of iOS., Experts at Apple are sure, if the celebrities had enabled the two-factor authentication , the cyber criminals wouldn’t have had access to their account., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – two-factor authentication , Tim Cook)
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The news was reported by officials this week, it confirms the strategic importance of Information warfare in the modern military. Cyber warriors will be engaged in the offensive against enemy computer networks., The Army is investing in cyber capabilities training a new generation of cyber soldiers at a huge center in southern California., , According to Colonel Robert Ryan, who commands a Hawaii-based combat team, while the Army’s mission is generally to “attack and destroy,” the cyber troops will have a different and crucial role in the battle., “Not everything is destroy. How can I influence by non-kinetic means? How can I reach up and create confusion and gain control?” he explained., The involvement of cyber troops in military operations is not a novelty, cyber warriors have been integrated for six months in infantry units. Colonel William Hartman of the Army’s Cyber Command added that they will tailor operations according to commanders’ needs., Hartman didn’t reveal details on cyber operations that will be assigned to cyber soldiers, he only referred that they would be involved in information gathering and intelligence., In August, President Donald Trump ordered the US Military to create a separate cyber warfare command tasked with cyber warfare operations., President was thinking of a separate command specialized on electronic and online offensive and defensive operations., “This new Unified Combatant Command will strengthen our cyberspace operations and create more opportunities to improve our nation’s defense,” Trump said in a statement., “The elevation of United States Cyber Command demonstrates our increased resolve against cyberspace threats and will help reassure our allies and partners and deter our adversaries.”, US cyber warriors have been involved also in counter-terrorism operations, according to the New York Times, CYBERCOM conducted missions to infiltrate and spy on Islamic State group networks. In some cases, the cyber troops alter commanders’ messages so they unwittingly direct ISIS militant to areas likely to be hit by drone or plane strikes., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – US Cyber Command, Information Warfare)
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An unnamed security researcher has found several vulnerabilities in the Linux command line tool Beep, including a severe flaw introduced by a patch for a privilege escalation vulnerability., Beep is a small open source utility used in the past by Linux developers to produce a beep with a computer’s internal speaker, it allows users to control the pitch, duration, and repetitions of the sound., The researcher discovered a race condition in the utility that could be exploited by an attacker to escalate privileges to root. Versions through 1.3.4 are affected by the flaw that was tracked as CVE-2018-0492., Further info on the flaw is available on the website holeybeep.ninja, , Is your system vulnerable? In order to discover if a system is vulnerable it is possible to run the following command:, curl | sudo bash, A vulnerable machine will beep., The Holey Beep website also provides a patch, but experts noticed that it actually introduces a potentially more serious vulnerability that could be exploited to execute an arbitrary code on the patched system., “The patch vulnerability seems more severe to me, as people apply patches all the time (they shouldn’t do it as root, but people are people),” reads a message published by Tony Hoyle on the Debian bug tracker. “It’s concerning that the holeybeep.ninja site exploited an unrelated fault for ‘fun’ without apparently telling anyone.”, Beep is also affected by other issues, including integer overflow vulnerabilities, and a flaw that can reveal information about the file on the system., Waiting for a code review of the utility, probably it is time to remove the utility from distros because PC speaker doesn’t exist in most modern systems., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Linux distros, hacking), ,
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The best news of the week with Security Affairs., Once again thank you!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Newsletter)
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De-anonymize Google users is the goal of different studies and a new research conducted by Andew Cantino, the vice president of engineering at Mavenlink, demonstrates that it is possible to demasking Google users with a Timing Attack under particular conditions. In the past Cantino had been awarded a bug bounty from Google three times., Google has confirmed the attack scenario, but told to Andrew Cantino it would not address the issue because the risk of exposure is ranked as low., “the risk here is fairly low, both in terms of impact and difficulty of exploiting this against a large population, and we don’t have an effective solution”. said Google., “I agree that this could be hard to fix, but it also could be used for very creepy purposes against targeted individuals,” “It goes to show how difficult it is to stay anonymous online.” commented Cantino., Cantino provided the details of the attack in a blogpost, an attacker can target a user or an organization share a Google document with one or more email addresses, but taking care to uncheck the option whereby Google sends the recipient a notification., “Now the attacking site can figure out when someone logged into any of the shared addresses visits their site.This is mostly useful for very targeted attacks, where an attacking site needs to behave differently based on who is viewing. This could be used for spear phishing, identification of government officials, demasking users of TOR, industrial mischief, etc.” said Cantino., Using the technique explained by Cantino, a threat actor could track victims when they logged into a shared address visits the attacker’s site, the experts remarked that the techniques could be adopted in spear phishing attack or to de-anonymize Tor users if they’re logged in to Google while using the Tor browser., The attacker can set up a malicious page that repeatedly instantiates an image whose source points at the URL of a Google Drive document. The time necessary to load the page will be greater if the document is not viewable. The onerror callback of the image is triggered in both cases, viewable or not viewable, because the result isn’t an image, but the attacker can record the time from the image instantiation to triggering of the onerror., , , , , Cantino revealed that during its tests the loading process took an average of 891ms when the document was available, meanwhile the loading time was 573ms when it was not. Of course, the time depends on the speed of the connection used, for this reason it makes sense to simultaneously test against a document that is always known to be inaccessible, then compare times with the probe document., A bad actor could use the attack to try to identify a user who’s on Tor if it is logged into his Google account, or anyway to allow the attacker to target the attack on specific users view malicious content., “What this sort of timing attack can allow is de-anonymizing of specifically targeted Google users as they browse the web. If you control a website and want to know when a specific user with a specific Gmail address visits your site, you could use this technique to identify them, even without setting a cookie,” “Imagine you want to build a page that behaves differently when a certain Google user views it, either because you’re conducting a spear phishing attack to gain their trust, or simply because you want to conclusively log that they visited your site. You could silently share a document with this user, then determine when they visit a website you control.”Cantino said., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Google users, Tor)
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The Cambridge Analytica case it raised the discussion about the power of social networks and the possibility of their abuse for the conditioning of political activities.
The non-professionals have discovered how important their digital experience is and how companies specialized in data analysis operate without their knowledge., Give a look at the translated version … and if you have friends at Wikipedia tell them that was an error to ban me, Back to the present, many of you probably still don’t know that if you have installed Facebook Messenger app on your Android device, there are chances that the social network giant had been collecting your data (the start time for each call, the duration, and the contact’s name), including contacts, SMS data but not the text, and call history data at least until late last year., The Facebook Messenger app logged phone call data only related to numbers saved in the phone’s address book. Facebook was collecting such kind of data, this is not a surprise for tech-savvy people because we have discussed it in the past., In January, the popular Italian expert Simone Margaritelli wrote a blog post (Italian) on Medium inviting users to uninstall Facebook and Whatsapp., The programmer Dylan McKay was able to find data, including logs of calls and SMS messages, in an archive he downloaded (as a ZIP file) from Facebook., Mat Johnson, a Professor at the University of Houston Creative Writing Program, also made the same disturbing discovery., Oh wow my deleted Facebook Zip file contains info on every single phone cellphone call and text I made for about a year- cool totally not creepy., — Mat Johnson (@mat_johnson) March 23, 2018, , The Cambridge Analytica case has is giving users another point of view regarding the collection of such kind of data made by Facebook and the real way they are using for., A Facebook spokesperson explained that the platform collects this data to improve the users’ experience., , “This above screen in the Messenger application offers to conveniently track all your calls and messages. But Facebook was already doing this surreptitiously on some Android devices until October 2017, exploiting the way an older Android API handled permissions.” wrote Sean Gallagher, Ars Technica’s IT and National Security Editor., “Facebook began explicitly asking permission from users of Messenger and Facebook Lite to access SMS and call data to “help friends find each other” after being publicly shamed in 2016 over the way it handled the “opt-in” for SMS services. That message mentioned nothing about retaining SMS and call data, but instead it offered an “OK” button to approve “keeping all of your SMS messages in one place.””, Facebook denied to collect call data surreptitiously with an official blog post, the social network giant highlighted that it never commercialized the data and that users are in total control of the data uploaded to the platform., “When you sign up for Messenger or Facebook Lite on Android, or log into Messenger on an Android device, you are given the option to continuously upload your contacts as well as your call and text history.” reads the blog post published by Facebook. “For Messenger, you can either turn it on, choose ‘learn more’ or ‘not now’. On Facebook Lite, the options are to turn it on or ‘skip’. If you chose to turn this feature on, we will begin to continuously log this information, which can be downloaded at any time using the Download Your Information tool.”, Users can check data collected by Facebook going to your Facebook Settings→Download a copy of your Facebook data→Start My Archive., , “Call and text history logging is part of an opt-in feature for people using Messenger or Facebook Lite on Android. This helps you find and stay connected with the people you care about, and provide you with a better experience across Facebook. People have to expressly agree to use this feature. If, at any time, they no longer wish to use this feature they can turn it off in settings, or here for Facebook Lite users, and all previously shared call and text history shared via that app is deleted. While we receive certain permissions from Android, uploading this information has always been opt-in only.” continues Facebook., If you want to stop Facebook from continuously upload your contacts to its server, you can turn off the uploading feature in the Messenger app. In this way, all previously uploaded contacts will be deleted., iOS users are not affected by this issue., Lesson leaned … every time we use an app it is essential to carefully read the documentation that details its work., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Facebook, privacy)
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According to National media that cited Wikileaks as the source, the NSA spied on French Economy Ministers and France enterprises. The French journal Liberation and Medialpart, earlier this week, revealed that the NSA had spied on some 100 French companies, “including almost all of the CAC 40.”, “New documents published by WikiLeaks, in partnership with Libération and Mediapart, reveal the scale of operations by US intelligence services against French interests. Five summary reports of the National Security Agency (NSA) show that officials and diplomats were spied between 2004 and 2012, including Pierre Moscovici and Baroin during their visit to Bercy.“, “Never evidence of a massive economic espionage from France, orchestrated at the highest levels of the US government, had been established as clearly.” wrote Liberation., , According to the document published by Wikileaks, Pierre Moscovici, former minister of the economy under French President Francois Hollande, and Francois Baroin, minister the economy under the Sarkozy’s administration, were reportedly subject to cyber espionage by the NSA., The US state-sponsored hackers mainly targeted French companies in telecommunications, energy and healthcare industries. Wikileaks also revealed that the US spies also monitored all deals valued at above $200 million., “An aggressive strategy that appears in a secret document setting out priority objectives of the United States in the economic field. Dubbed “France: economic developments” and dated 2012, this note is the NSA’s doctrine on the matter. It aims to collect all relevant information on French business practices, relations between Paris and the international financial institutions, the approach to issues in the G8 and G20, or large foreign contracts involving France. This last point, one of the most sensitive, is detailed in a subsection entitled “Contracts feasibility-negotiations of foreign education.“, The documents highlight that the information gathered were shared with key US administrations, including the Department of Homeland Security, Commerce, command of US forces in Europe., The last chapter of the NSA saga come after revelations from WikiLeaks last week that the NSA has wiretapped the last three French presidents (Hollande, Sarkozy and Jacques Chirac) between 2006 and 2012., France representative said that the Government “will not tolerate any acts that threaten its security.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –France, NSA)
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A few hours ago I received a tweet from the account Narcochaos (@N4rCochaos ) , which informed me and other illustrious colleagues that he has hacked the website of the popular security investigator Brian Krebs ( N4rCochaos has shared on Twitter the link to a page on PasteBin which contains the data related to an alleged dump of the database of the popular website, but the man has NEVER HACKER any website!, N4rCochaos is lying and I do not understand why, the data he has published aren’t records of the Brian Krebs’s website database, the man just republished a list of usernames and hashed passwords that Brian Krebs posted a year ago and that were taken from the ddos for hire site ragebooter., , , The records include the user name, password hash and the email address or the users., N4rCochaos claims to be a security expert, his Twitter account reveals that he runs the blog but there is no confirmation about the identity of the man that writes in Portuguese Language., , Brian Krebs, like other popular bloggers, is continuously under attack by hackers and cybercriminals., I contacted Brian that confirmed me the origin of data that doesn’t belong to his portal., I consider this episode a stupid act … at this point N4rCochaos let me suggest to close your account if you do not have a plausible justification for this nonsense., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Brian Krebs, hacking)
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The number of cyber threats against mobile users is in constant increase, on the other hand bad habits like the practice of jailbreak/root the devices and the lack of defense systems are favoring the diffusion of new families of malicious code., “This malware appears to have Chinese origin and comes as a library called Unflod.dylib that hooks into all running processes of jailbroken devices and listens for outgoing SSL connections. From these connections it tries to steal the device’s Apple-ID and corresponding password and sends them in plaintext to servers with IP addresses in control of US hosting companies for apparently Chinese customers. Users of reddit have made this malware available to the public, which allowed SektionEins to perform an analysis of this threat. However so far only the malware itself has been found and until now it is unknown how it ends up on jailbroken phones. Rumours that Chinese piracy repositories are involved are so far unverified” states a post published by SektionEins security firm which analyzed the malicious agent., The the signature date is the 14th of February of this year, probably the Unflod Baby Panda is being around without being discovered in the last months., , The researchers noted that it is possible to manually remove Unflod Baby Panda, “We therefore believe that the only safe way of removal is a full restore, which means the removal and loss of the jailbreak,” reported the researchers., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Unflod Baby Panda, iOS)
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Security experts at Bleeping Computer blog are reporting a new strain of ransomware dubbed LowLevel04 that is using an unusual infection mechanism, it is being spread via Remote Desktop and Terminal Service. The LowLevel04 ransomware encrypts local files by using the AES encryption and demands a fee of 4 Bitcoin ($1,000 USD) as ransom to unlock them., LowLevel04 was first spotted this month and a business owner on the Bleeping Computer support forum reported that his system has been infected by the ransomware. The malware included a ransom demand in the form of a text file (help recover files.txt) in each folder where a file was encrypted., , The file contains the instruction to get back the files and how to complete the payment of the ransomware, the bad actors are using the email addresses [email protected] and [email protected] to get in touch with victims., The attackers run brute force attacks on targeted machines running Remote Desktop or Terminal Services., Infections were observed in Greece and Bulgaria, the malware researcher Nathan Scott who analyzed the strain of LowLevel04 revealed that when it runs, it first scans all mapped drives, including removable ones, and network drives to encrypt files., “When the ransomware executable is run it will scan all mapped drives, including removable and network drives, for data files to encrypt. When it encounters a file that contains certain file extensions it will encrypt them using AES encryption and then add the oorr. string to the beginning of the file name.”, The format of the Encrypted Data File:, “When a file is encrypted it will be recreated so that it contains different layers of information that can be used by the decrypter to decrypt your files. The different layers of the newly encrypted file are the encrypted contents of the original file, the original file size, the encrypted encryption key, the key size, and finally a lowlevel04 string that identifies that this is a file was encrypted by this particular infection. These layers of data in an encrypted file are shown below.” states the blog post on the Bleeping Computer., The expert noticed that the only way to recover files is via backup, restoring the Shadow Volume Copies that fortunately this ransomware does not delete. This means that victims can try a recovery by using the Shadow Explorer program., For cloud services infected by LowLevel04, including Dropbox, victims are suggested to remove the oorr prefix from the encrypted files and revert back to a previous version., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Remote Desktop Ransomware, LowLevel04)
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Security researchers have analyzed the code of Petya ransomware in order to devise a method to allow victims to restore encrypted files. The experts have been able to develop a decryption tool that should allow victims to generate keys in a few seconds., The Twitter user @leostone announced to have elaborated a method to generate passwords in less than a minute. The user also developed a website to help victims generate keys for restoring encrypted files., Hurray!!! Its official, the found key is working!!!
I’ll update the github with the genetic version, keys will be found in less than a min:), — leostone (@leo_and_stone) 8 aprile 2016, , In order to generate a decryption key, the victim just needs to provide certain information on the infected drive. The researcher Fabian Wosar from Emisoft as developed an application that is able to automatize the process extracting data from infected Petya drives and generate the key for the data rescue., The security experts Lawrence Abrams, who contribute at BleepingComputer.com blog, has prepared a guide on how to use the tool., Abrams explained that the tool scans the infected drive searching for the Petya bootcode. Once detected the code, it selects it and allow users to simply copy both the sectors and nonce associated with it. These data (a Base64-encoded 512 bytes verification data and a Base64-encoded 8 bytes nonce) could be used to generate the password through the @leostone’s website., “An individual going by the twitter handle leostone was able to create an algorithm that can generate the password used to decrypt a Petya encrypted computer. In my test this, this algorithm was able to generate my key in 7 seconds.” wrote Abrams in a blog post., , To discover the password, the user has to physically remove the drive from the infected machine and attach it to either a Windows machine or a USB drive docking station and to launch the Wosar’s tool., “To use Leostone’s decryption tool you will need attach the Petya affected drive to another computer and extract specific data from it. The data that needs to be extracted is 512-bytes starting at sector 55 (0x37h) with an offset of 0 and the 8 byte nonce from sector 54 (0x36) offset: 33 (0x21). This data then needs to be converted to Base64 encoding and used on the site to generate the key.” continues Abrams., “Unfortunately, for many victims extracting this data is not an easy task. The good news is that Fabian Wosar created a special tool that can be used to easily extract this data. In order to use this tool, you need to take the encrypted drive from the affected computer and attach it to a Windows computer that is working properly. If your infected computer has multiple drives, you should only remove the drive that is the boot drive, or C:\ drive, for your computer.”, #petya #ransomware #defeated
Get your disks back here: — leostone (@leo_and_stone) 9 aprile 2016, , Once obtained the password, users should be able to reconnect their encrypted drive and enter it to restore the files encrypted by the Petya ransomware., The identity of @leostone is still a mystery, he only explained to have decided to work on his decryption method after his father in law was infected by the Petya ransomware., Unfortunately, it is likely that operators behind the Petya will soon improve their malware releasing a newer version with stronger encryption., Pierluigi Paganini , (Security Affairs – Petya Ransomware, cybercrime)
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Mozilla has launched the ‘Observatory,’ a tool developed by the Security Engineer April King that allows administrators and developer to test their websites., “Observatory is a simple tool that allows site operators to quickly assess not just if they are using these technologies, but also helps them identify how well they’re being used. It uses a simple grading system to provide near instant feedback on site improvements as they are made. To assist developers and administrators, Observatory also provides links to quality documentation that demonstrates how these technologies work.” King wrote in a blog post., “You may not have heard of many of them, and that’s because their documentation is spread across thousands of articles, hundreds of websites, and dozens of specifications,”, Mozilla has also published the source code of the Observatory tool on GitHub., The tool performs the following tests on websites:, Test, X-Frame-Options, Once assessed a website the Observatory tool calculates a score based on the level of implementation of the tested standards, it also provides recommendations to improve the overall security of the websites., , Mozilla has tested the Observatory assessing more than 1.3 million websites, and 91% of them failed the tests as reported in the following table., “When nine out of 10 websites receive a failing grade, it’s clear that this is a problem for everyone.” said King., “Observatory is currently a very developer-focused tool, and its grading is set very aggressively to promote best practices in web security. So if your site fails Observatory’s tests, don’t panic — just take a look at its recommendations and consider implementing them to make your site more secure,” King added., Only 30 percent of websites use the HTTPS protocol and less than 7 percent rely on the other security measures tested by the tool., King closes his blog post explaining that the results obtained from the Observatory tool might not be accurate for all websites because each site could have specific security needs., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Mozilla, Observatory Tool)
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The security expert Dylan Ayrey has devised a new attack technique dubbed Pastejacking attack that leverages on the victim’s clipboard., The possibility of manipulating clipboard without a victim noticing it a known for a long time, it is possible to do it by using HTML/CSS in a type of attack known as clipboard hijacking. Attackers can write malicious code in the clipboard and then fool victims into executing terminal commands., This type of attack is known as clipboard hijacking, and in most scenarios, it is useless, except when the user copies something inside their terminal., The new attack scenario sees victims receiving a phishing e-mail purporting to be from tech support could trick them into dropping a message into a terminal window and executing it. In reality, the attacker is exploiting the machine clipboard to launch the attack., “Browsers now allow developers to automatically add content to a user’s clipboard, following certain conditions. Namely, this can only be triggered on browser events. This post details how you can exploit this to trick a user into running commands they didn’t want to get ran, and gain code execution.” is the description of the Pastejacking attack published on GitHub by Ayrey. “It should also be noted, for some time similar attacks have been possible via html/css. What’s different about this is the text can be copied after an event, it can be copied on a short timer following an event, and it’s easier to copy in hex characters into the clipboard, which can be used to exploit VIM, all shown below.”, The expert published a proof-of-concept of the Pastjacking attack in which he asks users to copy the command echo “not evil” into the terminal, but the content stored in the clipboard is, echo “evil”\n., The newline character appended to command doesn’t offer the opportunity to the user to modify it when he will paste the content from the clipboard to the terminal., “If a user attempts to copy the text with keyboard shortcuts, i.e. ctrl+c or command+c, an 800ms timer gets set that will override the user’s clipboard with malicious code.” explained the expert., The experts also provided also more sophisticated payloads, like the following one that will create a file in the user’s home directory and clean the terminal., “This command will create an evil file in your home directory and clear the terminal out. The victim appears to have the command they intended to copy, nicely pasted into the terminal”, he explains., , JavaScript is much more efficient for clipboard hijacking attacks compared to CSS, for example while using a CSS exploit the user must copy-paste the entire malicious text, a JavaScript exploit is triggered by copy also a single character of the whole malicious text., This consideration opens the door to a dangerous attack scenario in which the attacker adds the Pastejacking JavaScript code to the entire page. At this point, it is sufficient that victims copy/paste anything inside the console to run unwanted commands., A possible countermeasure consist in verifying the contents of the clipboard before pasting into a terminal, but the researcher warns where you verify these commands. For example, pasting them into vim, vim macros may be used to exploit your machine., “An example of this can be seen in this demo and below, This demo echo evil when pasted in terminal, and it will cat the user’s /etc/passwd file when pasted into vim.”, , 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 – Pastjacking attack, phishing)
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Researchers Mat Powell and Natnael Samson discovered several vulnerabilities in WECON’s PI Studio HMI software, a software widely used in critical manufacturing, energy, metallurgy, chemical, and water and wastewater sectors., Both experts have reported the flaw under the Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative,, WECON specializes in human-machine interfaces (HMIs), programmable logic controllers (PLCs), and industrial PCs. The company’s products are used all around the world, particularly in the critical manufacturing, energy, and water and wastewater sectors., The list of flaws discovered by the experts includes a critical stack-based buffer overflow vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2018-14818, that could lead to remote code execution., Another flaw tracked as CVE-2018-14810 is a high severity out-of-bounds write bug which may allow code to be executed in the context of an administrator,, The remaining issues are two medium severity information disclosure flaws tracked as CVE-2018-17889 and CVE-2018-14814., “Successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities may allow remote code execution, execution of code in the context of an administrator, read past the end of an allocated object or allow an attacker to disclose sensitive information under the context of administrator.” reads the security advisory published by the ICS-CERT., WECON has confirmed the vulnerabilities, but it has not revealed when it will release security patches., , Below the list of mitigation provided by the ICS-CERT:, “WECON has verified the vulnerabilities but has not yet released an updated version.” continues the security advisory., “NCCIC recommends users take defensive measures to minimize the risk of exploitation of this vulnerability. Specifically, users should:, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – WECON, SCADA)
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Amazon confirmed that it is investigating allegations that its staff sold customer data and other confidential information to third-party firms, particularly in China, a practice that violated the company policy., The news was first reported by the Wall Street Journal, which discovered that the company staff sells customers data to merchants that are Amazon sellers., “Employees of Amazon, primarily with the aid of intermediaries, are offering internal data and other confidential information that can give an edge to independent merchants selling their products on the site, according to sellers who have been offered and purchased the data, as well as brokers who provide it and people familiar with internal investigations.” reads the report published by the WSJ., On Amazon, customers can buy products sold directly by the company along with goods from many other merchants., The Wall Street Journal said cited the cases of intermediaries in Shenzhen working for group employees and selling information on sales volumes for payments ranging from 80 to more than 2,000 dollars., “Amazon is conducting a thorough investigation of these claims.” Amazon spokesperson told AFP., “We have zero tolerance for abuse of our systems and if we find bad actors who have engaged in this behavior, we will take swift action against them, including terminating their selling accounts, deleting reviews, withholding funds, and taking legal action,” the statement said., , The company is concerned by fake reviews by purported customers, the company started the investigation months ago., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Retailer, data leak)
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The long string of data breach continues, while I’m writing about the intrusion in the systems of the technology provider DocuSign, another incident made the headlines, this time the victim is Bell Canada., The company admitted on Tuesday that 1.9 million customer account details were stolen by hackers, anyway Bell Canada confirmed that no financial data (i.e. payment card numbers) or passwords have been stolen., , Crooks are trying to blackmail the company and requested the payment of a ransom to avoid the full data leakage., “A demand for payment was made by the hacker, but it was not paid,” Bell spokesman Marc Choma said via email to the Reuters on Tuesday. “We did not reply to their demand.”, Bell Canada it the largest telco operator in the country with more than 21 million customers, the revenues of the company in the last fiscal quarter are $5.38bn CAD ($3.96bn USD)., it already notified the incident to the Canadian police who is investigating the case. Customer email addresses and phone numbers and names of another 1,700 people have been already leaked online., “Bell Canada today announced the illegal access of Bell customer information by an anonymous hacker. Bell has determined that the information obtained contains email addresses, customer names and/or telephone numbers.” reads the data breach notification issued by the company., “There is no indication that any financial, password or other sensitive personal information was accessed.”, This company clarified that the data breach isn’t linked to the recent global WannaCry malware attacks., At the time I was writing there is no news regarding the source of the stolen data or the technique used by attackers., The Canadian Privacy Commissioner’s office is also investigating the incident., “We are waiting for a fuller report sometime today,” Canadian Privacy Commissioner Daniel Therrien told Reuters in a telephone interview on Tuesday, when asked if Bell Canada had followed proper procedures in responding to the cyber attack., “We apologize to Bell customers for this situation and are contacting those affected directly,” continues the Bell Canada statement. “Bell took immediate steps to secure affected systems. The company has been working closely with the RCMP cyber crime unit in its investigation and has informed the Office of the Privacy Commissioner.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Bell Canada, data breach)
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Cisco has fixed a vulnerability in Cisco Prime License Manager that could be exploited by a remote unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary SQL queries., The flaw is caused by the lack of proper validation SQL queries provided in input by the users. The attacker could trigger the flaw by sending crafted HTTP POST requests containing malicious SQL statements to the vulnerable applications., “A vulnerability in the web framework code of Cisco Prime License Manager (PLM) could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute arbitrary SQL queries.” reads the advisory.” reads the advisory published by Cisco., “The vulnerability is due to a lack of proper validation of user-supplied input in SQL queries. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending crafted HTTP POST requests that contain malicious SQL statements to an affected application. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to modify and delete arbitrary data in the PLM database or gain shell access with the privileges of the postgres user.” , The flaw was reported by Suhail Alaskar from Saudi Information Technology Company. The flaw affects the Prime License Manager releases 11.0.1 and later, it impacts both standalone deployments of Cisco Prime License Manager and coresident deployments, where Prime License Manager is installed automatically as part of the installation of Cisco Unified Communications Manager and Cisco Unity Connection, are affected., Cisco Unified Communications Manager and Cisco Unity Connection Releases 12.0 and later are not affected by this flaw as Cisco Prime License Manager is no longer included in these releases., The are no workarounds to address the flaw, Cisco released the patch ciscocm.CSCvk30822_v1.0.k3.cop.sgn to address the flaw in Prime License Manager., “This vulnerability is fixed in Cisco Prime License Manager Release patch ciscocm.CSCvk30822_v1.0.k3.cop.sgn.” continues the company. “The same COP file can be used with standalone deployments of Cisco Prime License Manager as well as with coresident deployments as part of Cisco Unified Communications Manager and Cisco Unity Connection and with all affected versions.” , Cisco is not aware of attacks in the wild exploiting the flaw., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – CISCO, SQL Injection)
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It is emergency, every week security experts launch an alert on a new ransomware, the extortion practice is becoming a profitable business for criminal gangs worldwide. Recently the US and Canada issued a joint warning about the recent surge in ransomware infections. According to the Reuters, the FBI issued a confidential urgent “Flash” message to the businesses and organizations about the Samsam Ransomware, that targeted several hospitals. The law enforcement Agency also shared IoC for the Samsam threat to help organizations monitoring for infections., The law enforcement Agency also shared IoC for the Samsam threat to help organizations monitoring for infections., “The FBI is distributing these indicators to enable network defense activities and reduce the risk of similar attacks in the future,” the advisory said.” states the advisory.Among the victims of the Samsam Ransomware there is the MedStar non-profit group that manages 10 hospitals in the Baltimore and Washington area.The bad actors behind the attack on MedStar requested 45 Bitcoins (about US$18,500) for restoring the encrypted files., MedStar did not pay the Ransom because it has a backup of the encrypted information, a situation rare that advantage the attackers behind ransomware-based campaigns., The IT department of the MedStar Hospital detected the infection at an early stage and was able to stop the Samsam Ransomware from infecting internal systems., The MedStar incident demonstrates that a proper security posture, an early response and the implementation of effective best practices like data backup are necessary steps for a right approach to prevent damage from ransomware-based attacks., In the specific case, the Samsam ransomware is not a new threat, it has been around since last few years targeting businesses and organizations worldwide., Samsam is considered a very interesting threat by experts because it doesn’t require the victim’s interaction., Typical victims get a ransomware infection by clicking on a malicious link, by opening an attachment or through a malvertising, but the Samsam ransomware targets servers instead end-users., The threat first exploits unpatched vulnerabilities in JBoss application servers by using JexBoss, an open-source penetration testing tool. Once exploited the flaws, the attackers get remote shell access to the infected servers and install the Samsam ransomware onto the targeted Web application server., Once the server has been compromised, attackers use it to spread the ransomware client to Windows machines and encrypt their files., “The Samas infection chain diagram illustrates how Ransom:MSIL/Samas gets into the system. It starts with a pen-testing/attack server searching for potential vulnerable networks to exploit with the help of a publicly-available tool named reGeorg, which is used for tunnelling. Java-based vulnerabilities were also observed to have been utilized, such as Java-based vulnerabilities were also observed to have been utilized, such as CVE-2010-0738 related to outdated JBOSS server applications., It can use other information-stealing malware (Derusbi/Bladabindi) to gather login credentials as well. When it has done so, it will list the stolen credentials into a text file, for example, list.txt, and use this to deploy the malware and its components through a third party tool named psexec.exe through batch files that we detect as Trojan:BAT/Samas.B and Trojan:BAT/Samas.C.” states a blog post published by Microsoft on the threat.”, , , , Such kind of threat is particularly insidious for any organizations, especially the ones that works directly with the public, like transportation services and hospitals., The number of ransomware infections in the healthcare industry is rapidly increasing, the threats in many cases are able to cause the paralysis of the infrastructure with serious damages in the middle and long term., In February, two German hospitals were infected by a ransomware, in a similar way occurred recently at the US Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center. The Los Angeles hospital paid about $17,000 to the crooks for restoring patients’ files., Recently the systems at the Methodist Hospital in Kentucky that’s been infected. According to NewsChannel10, the Methodist Hospital in Henderson was hit my a ransomware that locked patients’ files and is demanding money for to regain access to them. Officials say that the hospital paid about $17,000 to those hackers for the access back to the patients’ files., , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – ransomware, security)
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Let me inform you that my new book, “Digging in the Deep Web” is online with a special deal, Kindle Edition, Paper Copy, Once again thank you!, Pierluigi Paganini, (SecurityAffairs – newsletter),
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Bitdefender researchers have identified a new spyware framework can be used to spy into Android applications, it is tracked as Triout and first appeared in the wild on May 15., The researcher revealed that the command and control (C&C) server has been running since May 2018 and at the time of the report it was still up and running., Triout was first submitted on May 15 to VirusTotal, although the first sample was uploaded from Russia, most of the other ones came from Israel., The malware was likely spread through third-party marketplaces or domains controlled by the attackers that host the malicious code., “Discovered by Bitdefender’s machine learning algorithms on 20.07.2018, the sample’s first appearance seems to be 15.05.2018, when it was uploaded to VirusTotal. The application seems to be a repackaged version of “com.xapps.SexGameForAdults” (MD5: 51df2597faa3fce38a4c5ae024f97b1c) and the tainted .apk fi le is named 208822308.apk.” reads the report published by Bitdefender., “The original app seems to have been available in Google Play in 2016, but it has since been removed. While it’s unclear how the tainted sample is being disseminated, third-party marketplaces or some other attacker-controlled domains are likely used to host the sample.”, Bitdefender pointed out that the analyzed sample was unobfuscated a circumstance that leads the experts into believing the framework may be a work-in-progress., “This could suggest the framework may be a work-in-progress, with developers testing features and compatibility with devices,” continues the report., The Triout spyware was discovered analyzing a tainted application that maintained all the original features. The sample analyzed by Bitdefender was a repackaged version of an adult application that was listed in Google Play in 2016, but was since removed. This means that attackers might have made it available through third-party channels., , Triout implements extensive surveillance capabilities, including:, Technical details are included in the report published by Bitdefender., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Triout spyware, Android malware)
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As declared several time Deep Web, thanks to the anonymity of its connection, provides to cyber criminals an ideal environment to grow up profitable business. We have mainly discussed of deep web such as a portion of cyber space mainly used to sell any kind of good, from malware agent to drugs and other criminal services, but the hidden world could also be used to give host to component of a malicious architecture used by cyber criminals., On September 2012 the German security firm G Data Software has detected a botnet with a particular feature, it is controlled from an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) server running as a hidden service of the Tor., , I discussed in past article of the advantage of this design choice, let’s think for example to how much difficult could be the localization of the command and control servers, due the encryption of the connections interior to the network and the unpredictability of the routing of the information., The security engineer Dennis Brown during the Defcon Conference in 2010 discussed the possibility of using the Tor network to host botnet command and control servers., The engineer explained the advantage to adopt an hidden service in a botnet architecture that is summarized in the following points:, The mechanism used by IDS is based on the detection of known signatures available for the principal botnet agents, this implies the analysis of the data transmitted by infected machines. In the specific case the traffic is routed is encrypted making hard the process of analysis, let’s remind that the hidden services inside the Tor network which can only be accessed from within the Tor network knowing the assigned .onion address., The model of botnet could be used for various scopes, in military as cyber weapon, in industry for cyber espionage, in cybercrime to steal sensible information such as banking credentials., Researchers use traffic analysis to detect botnet activities and to localize the control servers, typically Intrusion Detection Systems and network analyzers are adopted for the purpose., Once detected the botnet to decapitate it are used different methods such as:, The use of hidden services for a botnet setup is an interesting choice, an HTTP hidden service could operate behind network devices such as NAT or Firewalls without the need to expose services to the network. The preparation phase of a botnet is quite easy due the large availability of web server easy to setup as hidden service in the DeepWeb and the possibility to retrieve botnet components practically everywhere. Botnet infrastructure are increasing in complexity but are also equipped with friendly administration consoles that make easy their configuration., In the model proposed the traffic leaves the Tor network using Tor2Web proxy to redirect .onion web traffic, let remind that tor2web is a project to let Internet users access anonymous servers., Here’s how it works: Imagine you’ve got something that you want to publish anonymously, like the Federalist Papers orleaked documents from a whistleblower. You publish them via HTTP using a Tor hidden service; that way your anonymity is protected. Then people access those documents through tor2web; that way anyone with a Web browser can see them., The Scripts to run Command and Control happens via Tor2Web so that the bot have to connect to the hidden service passing through the proxy pointing to an address, In this way the traffic is redirect by the proxy to the Hidden Service identified by an .onion address, the Command & Control servers remain so hidden in the Tor network and are impossible to track down., The weaknesses aspects of a similar approach are that is normally easy to filter Tor2Web traffic, similar proxy must be managed by botmaster in order to avoid failure or logging from third parts and the entire infrastructures suffer of the considerable latencies of Tor network that make unresponsive a botnet build with this approach., “Proxy-aware Malware over Tor network”, The second scenario does not provide for Tor2Web, instead it make us of proxy-aware malware, agent that due the absence of Tor2Web have to run Tor on infected hosts. The main difference respect the first solution is in the requirements for the bot agents and their configuration, Bots need to have SOCKS5 support to be able to connect through Tor to .onion addresses loading Tor on the victims., This second approach is more secure because traffic isn’t routed through a proxy and is entirely within Tor network due the direct connection between Bots and C&C, avoiding the possibility to intercept data from exit nodes that are not used for this scenario., It’s clear that a similar approach is more complex from a Bot side, a bot needs SOCKS5 support and of course it need that Tor have to function properly to maintain the synchronization within the machines of the botnet. To presence of Tor traffic on a network may indicate the presence of a similar botnet architecture that can be so detected using network anomaly detection methods., G Data experts declared, “In other words: Tor tends to be slow and unreliable, and inherits these flaws to underlying botnets.”, My personal opinion is that today is not so difficult to build a bot net based on Tor networks and as declared by researchers the cons of this choice are mainly related to slowness of the network. As usual the best solution is represented by a compromise, similar solution represents a valid choice to maintain hidden the command and control servers making hard the investigations for security experts and law enforcement.
The solutions presented must represent an insight into the topic in order to develop appropriate countermeasures if we were to find us before such botnets., Pierluigi Paganini, ,
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In April, the Russian hacker Roman Seleznev, aka Track2, Bulba and Ncux, was sentenced to 27 years in prison, he was convicted of causing $170 million in damage by hacking into point-of-sale systems., The 33-year-old was previously sentenced by a U.S. court to 27 years in prison for 38 counts of wire fraud, hacking, identity theft, and payment card fraud., Seleznev was pleading guilty to racketeering and conspiracy to commit bank fraud charges on September 7, now he received further 14-year prison sentence for the first charge in Nevada and another 14 years for the second charge in Georgia., Seleznev must pay roughly $51 million in the Nevada case and more than $2.1 million in the Georgia case., The overall sentence is added to the previous 27-year sentence., Seleznev was one of the members of the criminal ring known as Carder.su focused on identity theft and credit card fraud. The hackers advertised his website on Carder.su offering stolen payment card data., According to the US prosecutors, activities conducted by members of Carder.su caused $50,893,166.35 losses, roughly the same amount that Seleznev has been ordered to pay., , Authorities conducted a massive operation against members of the Carder.su community, they charged 55 individuals and 33 of them have already been convicted., Seleznev admitted being a “casher” in the Georgia case, he withdrew cash using stolen bank account information. He was involved in a fraudulent activity against an Atlanta-based firm that processed credit and debit card transactions for financial institutions., Crooks stole more than 45 million payment cards from the financial firm, then they used them to withdraw over $9.4 million from 2,100 ATMs in 280 cities worldwide in less than 12 hours., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – carding, cybercrime),
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Security experts from ESET published a detailed analysis of a recently discovered threat actor tracked as GreyEnergy, its activity emerged in concurrence with BlackEnergy operations., ESET researchers have spotted a new strain of malware tracked as Exaramel that links the not Petya wiper to the Industroyer ICS malware., Experts from ESET speculate the BlackEnergy threat actor evolved into two separate APT groups, namely TeleBots and GreyEnergy., “Following this attack, the BlackEnergy group evolved into at least two subgroups:
TeleBots and GreyEnergy. ” reads the report., “The main goal of the TeleBots group is to perform cybersabotage attacks on Ukraine, which are achieved through computer network attack (CNA) operations.”, GreyEnergy conducted reconnaissance and cyber espionage activities in Ukraine and Poland, it focused its activities on energy and transportation industries, and other high-value targets., The APT group leverage the GreyEnergy malware, a malicious code that implements a modular architecture to extend its capabilities by adding the appropriate modules., “Like many complex threats, the GreyEnergy malware has a modular architecture. The functionality of the malware can be easily extended with additional modules. A GreyEnergy module is a DLL file that gets executed by calling the function with the first ordinal. Each module, including the main GreyEnergy module, accepts text commands with various parameters.” continues the analysis., The list of available modules includes components for file extraction, screenshot capturing, keylogging, password, and credential stealing, and of course a backdoor., Experts pointed out that they haven’t found modules that specifically target Industrial Control Systems software or devices. ESET pointed out that GreyEnergy operators have been strategically targeting ICS control workstations running SCADA software and servers., In one case, hackers used a disk-wiping component to disrupt operating processes on the target systems., GreyEnergy attackers in one case also used a valid digital certificate, likely stolen from Taiwanese company Advantech, to sign a sample., “One of the most intriguing details discovered during our research is that one of the GreyEnergy samples we found was signed with a valid digital certificate that had likely been stolen from a Taiwanese company that produces ICS equipment. In this respect, the GreyEnergy group has literally followed in Stuxnet’s footsteps.” states ESET., Attackers spread the malware by carryout both spear phishing campaigns and compromised self-hosted web services, in this latter case attackers hack into public-facing web services running on a server that is connected to an internal network. In this was attackers will attempt to compromise the server and make lateral movements in the internal network., GreyEnergy also used other backdoors, mostly PHP backdoors, and malware implementing several layers of obfuscation and encryption to hide the malicious code., The spear-phishing messages first drop a lightweight first-stage backdoor tracked as GreyEnergy mini (aka FELIXROOT) to gather information on the target network and gather admin credentials using tools such as Nmap and Mimikatz., The stolen credentials are used to deploy the main GreyEnergy malware into the target network with administrator privileges., The malware is written in C and compiled using Visual Studio, it is deployed two ways:, ESET experts also discovered a worm dubbed Moonraker Petya that is similar to NotPetya, they speculate it is a predecessor of the infamous wiper., , Moonraker Petya has limited spreading capabilities and like NotPetya it is able to make machines unbootable, the malware was used against a small number of organizations., Moonraker Petya may be the result of a collaboration between TeleBots and GreyEnergy APT groups., “GreyEnergy is an important part of the arsenal of one of the most dangerous APT groups that has been terrorizing Ukraine for the past several years. We consider it to be the successor of the BlackEnergy toolkit. The main reasons for this conclusion are the similar malware design, specific choice of targeted victims, and modus operandi,” ESET concludes., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – GreyEnergy, APT)
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This week, Cisco has rolled out new security patches for a critical vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2018-0101, in its CISCO ASA (Adaptive Security Appliance) software., This is the second the tech giant issued a security patch to fix the critical vulnerability in CISCO ASA, the first one released in January. The vulnerability could be exploited by a remote and unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code or trigger a denial-of-service (DoS) condition causing the reload of the system., The affected models are:, Now the company confirmed that attackers are trying to exploit the vulnerability CVE-2018-0101 in attacks in the wild., “The Cisco Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) is aware of public knowledge of the vulnerability that is described in this advisory,” reads the security advisory published by CISCO. the update states. “Cisco PSIRT is aware of attempted malicious use of the vulnerability described in this advisory.”, The vulnerability was discovered by Cedric Halbronn and received a CVSS base score of 10.0, the highest one., This week Halbronn presented its findings at the REcon conference in Brussels, in its speech titled ‘Robin Hood vs CISCO ASA Anyconnect.’ he highlighted that the vulnerability could be present up to seven years old because the AnyConnect Host Scan is available since 2011., The new attack scenario covered with the new update sees an attacker exploiting the vulnerability by sending specially crafted XML packets to a webvpn-configured interface., , A “Cisco ASA CVE-2018-0101 Crash PoC” was already published by some users on Pastebin., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – CISCO ASA, CVE-2018-0101)
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The story demonstrates the high interest of spy agencies in hacking communication systems., Once upon a time, the Australian satellite company was deeply hacked by cyber spies that completely corrupted its network. The company is not out of the business, its assets were sold off last year after it went into administration., According to a former staffer that has spoken on condition of anonymity to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, it was ‘the most corrupted’ network the nation’s intelligence had encountered., According to the ABC broadcast, the news of the hack was already reported in 2013, when the company reported the security breach to the Australian Signals Directorate. The Chinese nation-state hackers made the organization “the most corrupted network the Directorate had ever seen”, the ABC reports., Former Central Intelligence Agency Chief Michael Hayden declared that the China’s efforts against Australia aimed at “the theft of information, and really by and large the theft of information for commercial profit.”, According to the official hackers were interested in sensitive information such as the plans for a Lockheed Martin-designed satellite dubbed Jabiru-1., “Given we were up against China, state-sponsored, a lot of money behind them and a lot of resources and we were only a very small IT team, it certainly wasn’t a fair fight for us,” Newsat’s former IT manager Daryl Peter said., The issue had come to the headlines because the Newsat company was planning to install a restricted encryption tool to allows the NSA to spy on satellite communications, so it notified its intent to the ASD., The Australian Signals Directorate refused to release the encryption tool to Newsat until it was able to eradicate the intruders from its systems. intelligence officials replied to the company telling its networks were “the most corrupted” they had seen., Australian satellite company Newsat Ltd was forced to rebuild its entire network in secret. (Four Corners) , Intelligence officials who examined the Newsat infrastructure confirmed it was “the most corrupted” they had seen., “They actually said to us that we were the worst,” Mr Peter said., “What came out of that meeting was we had a serious breach on our network and it wasn’t just for a small period of time, they’d been inside our network for a long period, so maybe about two years. And the way it was described to us was they are so deep inside our network it’s like we had someone sitting over our shoulder for anything we did.”, According to the anonymous source that has revealed the story to the ABC, the Newsat network was completely rebuilt., Anyway the NewSat company installed an Australian Government communications interception system in its data centre, but the Australian Government had refused to deploy the restricted NSA encryption tool due to the security breach it discovered., “They (NewSat) had a lot of dealings with Middle East organisations,” the source said., Let me suggest reading a detailed analysis published by the ABC’s Four Corners that confirms Australian Government computer networks were breached by hackers., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Intelligence, cyber espionage)
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According to Ukrainian media, the Russian IT expert Pavel Lerner has been kidnapped in Kiev., Pavel Lerner (40) is a and managing director EXMO, one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges, and according to a Ukrainian media Strana.ua he stopped responding to phone calls on December 26., “According to the applicant in the case, Lerner was abducted near his workplace – an office center in Stepan Bandery Street (before renaming – Moscow Avenue). The programmer was dragged into the car of Mercedes-Benz Vito brand (state number AA 2063 MT) by unknown persons in dark clothes and balaclava, and taken away to an unknown destination.” states the Strana.ua., , Lerner has been kidnapped while he was leaving his office in Stepan Bandera Prospect in Kiev., The IT specialist led a number of startups, related to blockchain technology and cryptocurrency mining., Ukrainian police are investigating the case, at the time I was writing it is still unclear who and why kidnapped the man., EXMO confirmed the news of the kidnapping and clarified that company operations were not affected by what has happened. EXMO also added that Lerner did not have direct access to any cryptocurrency account or other personal data., “We are doing everything possible to speed up the search of Pavel Lerner. Any information regarding his whereabouts is very much appreciated,” PR-department of EXMO said., “Despite the situation, the exchange is working as usual. We also want to stress that nature of Pavel’s job at EXMO doesn’t assume access either to storages or any personal data of users. All users funds are absolutely safe.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Pavel Lerner, EXMO)
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A Facebook Open URL Redirection vulnerability is the last discovery of security expert Dan Melamed that reported it in a recent post., Dan is an old acquaintance of Security Affairs, he revealed in July a Critical Facebook vulnerability that allowed account hacking, in August he discovered 2 Facebook vulnerabilities related to the Fanpage Invite of the popular social network and a few weeks later he found a Critical Pinterest Exploit threatens the privacy of millions of users., An open URL Redirection flaw is generally used to convince a user to click on a trusted link which is specially crafted to take them to an arbitrary website, the target website could be used to serve a malware or for a phishing attack., , An Open URL Redirection url flaw in Facebook platform and third party applications also exposes the user’s access token at risk if that link is entered as the final destination in an Oauth dialog., The Facebook Open URL Redirection vulnerability is present in the way Facebook manages the “url” parameter, for example the following URL, , , always redirects to the Facebook homepage, but it is sufficient to manipulate the “url” parameter assigning a random string:, In reality the above URL generated a unique “h” variable and passed the url parameter to Facebook’s Linkshim (l.php):, Once noted the redirection process, Dan Melamed explored the way to exploit the mechanism to bypass the restrictions on redirection and load an arbitrary link. Dan discovered that simply removing the part of the target destination it was able to redirect a Facebook link elsewhere without any restrinction., The Facebook’s Linkshim (l.php) interprets the link target.com the same as making possible the redirection., Facebook informed Dan that because the redirection occurs through the l.php method, the social networking platform is able to apply a proper filter from redirecting using automatic spam and malware analysis., It is easy to understand that despite Facebook filters target url, it could not detect all malware/spam campaign addressed “and by the time a link is banned, an attacker would have already moved on to another link.”, Following a video Proof of Concept of the open URL Redirection flaw:, , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – open URL Redirection flaw, Facebook), ,
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The exploit analysis firm EdgeSpot recently discovered PDF exploit that was using steganography to hide malicious JavaScript code in images embedded in PDF files., “Shortly after last week’s discovery of a PDF exploit which used the method of this.getPageNumWords() & this.getPageNthWord() for obfuscation, we found another, but much more powerful exploit obfuscation technique in PDF exploits.” reads the analysis published by EdgeSpot. , “This technique uses a so-called “steganography” method to hide malicious Javascript code in images embedded in PDF files, it is so powerful as it could bypass almost all AV engines.The sample was detected as “exploit CVE-2013-3346” by our EdgeLogic engine, same as the previous one.”, Attackers can use specially crafted PDF documents that can bypass the detection of antimalware software. , Experts pointed out that the sample they analyzed was first seen in VirusTotal in October 2017, but last week its detection rate was still very low, only one anti-virus engine was able to detect it., The sample used two layers of obfuscation. The first one abusing the two methods this.getIcon() and util.iconStreamFromIcon() to read and execute the JavaScript that was hidden in an image named as “icon” in the PDF., The second one uses steganography to hide the code in stream-119. , Experts discovered that a “message” hidden in the icon’s stream was read and decoded, then it is executed as Javascript code, via “eval(msg)“. There are no suspicious data can be found inside the icon file because the malicious code data is heavily obfuscated. According to the researchers, the author of the sample exploited CVE-2013-3346 vulnerability, they speculate that the same individual created another document recently spotted by the firm., Searching on Google, EdgeSpot experts discovered that the attacker likely copied an open source project/technique called “steganography.js.” , The project was initially proposed to target browsers, but the author of the sample likely modified it to create the malicious PDF files., “The project was developed working on browsers. We believe the person behind the PDF samples made their innovation as they successfully leveraged the technique in PDF format.” continue the experts. , “We could not find any information mentioning such technique in PDF exploits before, so we believe this is the first time that the ‘steganography’ technique is used to hide PDF exploits,” , The researchers believe that this technique is very effective and were impressed by its efficiency, using it all streams appear as harmless. , “Just like the previous one, the “steganography” technique could not only be used to obfuscate this exploit (CVE-2013-3346) but also can be applied to many other PDF exploits including zero-days. We ask security defenders to pay close attention to it.” the experts conclude., Pierluigi Paganini, (SecurityAffairs – hacking, CVE-2013-3346),
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On February 28, 2018, the popular GitHub’s code hosting website was hit by the largest-ever distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack., The DDoS attack peaked at record 1.35 Tbps by abusing the memcached protocol to power so-called memcached DDoS attacks., Memcached is a free and open source, high-performance, distributed memory caching system designed to speed up dynamic web applications by alleviating database load., Clients communicate with memcached servers via TCP or UDP on port 11211., Researchers from Cloudflare, Arbor Networks and security firm Qihoo 360 discovered that recently attackers are abusing the memcached for DDoS amplification attacks., Chinese experts warned about abuses of memcached DDoS attacks in November., The abuse of memcached servers in DDoS Attacks is quite simple, the attacker sends a request to the targeted server on port 11211 spoofing the IP address of the victim. In a memcached DDoS attack, the request sent to the server is composed of a few bytes, while the response can be tens of thousands of times bigger, resulting in an amplification attack., Experts at Cloudflare dubbed this type of attack Memcrashed, according to the researcher the amplification technique could allow attackers to obtain an amplification factor of 51,200., , , The Github website is protected by the anti-DDoS service provided by the firm Akamai that confirmed the impressive magnitude of the attack that hit its client., “At 17:28 GMT, February 28th, Akamai experienced a 1.3 Tbps DDoS attack against one of our customers, a software development company, driven by memcached reflection. This attack was the largest attack seen to date by Akamai, more than twice the size of the September, 2016 attacks that announced the Mirai botnet and possibly the largest DDoS attack publicly disclosed.” reads the analysis published by Akamai., “Because of memcached reflection capabilities, it is highly likely that this record attack will not be the biggest for long.”, , According to GitHub, the attack was widespread, it originated from over a thousand different autonomous systems (ASNs) across tens of thousands of unique endpoints., “On Wednesday, February 28, 2018 GitHub.com was unavailable from 17:21 to 17:26 UTC and intermittently unavailable from 17:26 to 17:30 UTC due to a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.” states an advisory post published by GitHub., “Between 17:21 and 17:30 UTC on February 28th we identified and mitigated a significant volumetric DDoS attack. , The attack originated from over a thousand different autonomous systems (ASNs) across tens of thousands of unique endpoints. It was an amplification attack using the memcached-based approach described above that peaked at 1.35Tbps via 126.9 million packets per second.”, Github routed the traffic to Akamai service to mitigate the ongoing DDoS attack., “Given the increase in inbound transit bandwidth to over 100Gbps in one of our facilities, the decision was made to move traffic to Akamai, who could help provide additional edge network capacity. At 17:26 UTC the command was initiated via our ChatOps tooling to withdraw BGP announcements over transit providers and announce AS36459 exclusively over our links to Akamai.” continues Github., “Routes reconverged in the next few minutes and access control lists mitigated the attack at their border. Monitoring of transit bandwidth levels and load balancer response codes indicated a full recovery at 17:30 UTC. At 17:34 UTC routes to internet exchanges were withdrawn as a follow-up to shift an additional 40Gbps away from our edge.”, GitHub confirmed that the first portion of the attack peaked at 1.35Tbps, while a second part peaked 400Gbps after 18:00 UTC., , Github said it plans to expand its edge network and mitigate new attack vectors., Researchers believe that threat actors in the wild will abuse misconfigured Memcached servers in future attacks, unfortunately, many of them are still exposed on the Internet., Cloudflare recommends disabling UDP support unless it’s needed and isolating memcached servers from the Internet. Internet service providers have to fix vulnerable protocols and prevent IP spoofing., “Internet Service Providers – In order to defeat such attacks in future, we need to fix vulnerable protocols and also IP spoofing. As long as IP spoofing is permissible on the internet, we’ll be in trouble.” concluded Cloudflare., “Developers – Please please please: Stop using UDP. If you must, please don’t enable it by default. If you do not know what an amplification attack is I hereby forbid you from ever typing SOCK_DGRAM into your editor.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – memcached DDoS Attacks, Github)
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The UK Parliament has shut down external access to e-mail accounts on Saturday after a cyberattack., According to the authorities, the attack was “sustained and determined,” hackers launched a prolonged brute-force attack against the Parliament email system in the attempt to access accounts., “Parliament has suffered its biggest ever cyber attack as hackers launched a “sustained and determined” attempt to break into MPs email accounts.” reported The Telegraph., “The “brute force” assault lasted for more than 12 hours on Friday as unknown hackers repeatedly targeted “weak” passwords of politicians and aides.”, Cyber security attack on Westminster Parliamentary e.mails may not work remotely Text urgent messages @LibDemLords @LabourLordsUK @Torypeers, — Chris Rennard (@LordRennard) June 24, 2017, , “Earlier this morning we discovered unusual activity and evidence of an attempted cyberattack on our computer network,” wrote Rob Greig, director of the Parliamentary Digital Service., “Closer investigation by our team confirmed that hackers were carrying out a sustained and determined attack on all parliamentary user accounts.”, “We have been working closely with the National Cyber Security Centre to identify the method of the attack and have made changes to prevent the attackers gaining access.”, According to a spokeswoman from House of Commons, the officials had taken “the necessary steps to protect our systems, any external access to email accounts was suspended., “We have discovered unauthorised attempts to access accounts of parliamentary networks users and are investigating this ongoing incident, working closely with the National Cyber Security Centre.”, “Parliament has robust measures in place to protect all of our accounts and systems, and we are taking the necessary steps to protect and secure our network. As a precaution we have temporarily restricted remote access to the network.” added a parliamentary spokesperson., “As a result, some Members of Parliament and staff cannot access their email accounts outside of Westminster. IT services on the Parliamentary Estate are working normally. We will continue to keep Members of both Houses of Parliament and the public updated as the situation develops”., “Parliament has disabled remote access to protect the network.”, It is not clear if the cyber attack was linked to the recent discovery of the availability of UK politicians’ login credentials for sale on the dark web., , The National Crime Agency said it was “aware of a possible cyber incident affecting parliament”., We're aware of a possible cyber incident affecting parliament & are actively cooperating with @ncsc who're leading the operational response pic.twitter.com/YOvPwQvn37, — NationalCrimeAgency (@NCA_UK) June 24, 2017, , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – UK Parliament, hacking)
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Fourteen issues are listed as critical, 34 are rated as important, and only two of them are rated as moderate in severity., The list of critical vulnerability includes an information disclosure issue in the Edge browser, a remote code execution vulnerability in the Windows’ StructuredQuery component, a memory corruption in Outlook, and several memory corruptions flaws that reside into the scripting engines used by both Edge and Internet Explorer., One of the most severe vulnerabilities addressed by the Microsoft Patch Tuesday for February 2018 is a memory corruption flaw tracked as CVE-2018-0852 that affects Microsoft Outlook. The flaw could be exploited to achieve remote code execution on the targeted machines., “A remote code execution vulnerability exists in Microsoft Outlook when the software fails to properly handle objects in memory. An attacker who successfully exploited the vulnerability could run arbitrary code in the context of the current user.” reads the security advisory published by Microsoft. “If the current user is logged on with administrative user rights, an attacker could take control of the affected system. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights.”, In order to trigger the flaw, an attacker can trick the victim into opening a specifically crafted message attachment or viewing it in the Outlook Preview Pane … yes simply viewing an email in the Preview Pane could allow code execution., “Exploitation of the vulnerability requires that a user open a specially crafted file with an affected version of Microsoft Outlook software. In an email attack scenario, an attacker could exploit the vulnerability by sending the specially crafted file to the user and convincing the user to open the file. In a web-based attack scenario, an attacker could host a website (or leverage a compromised website that accepts or hosts user-provided content) that contains a specially crafted file designed to exploit the vulnerability.” continues the advisory., , Another vulnerability affecting Outlook and addressed with the Microsoft Patch Tuesday for February 2018 is a privileged escalation issue tracked as CVE-2018-0850. The vulnerability is rated as important and can be exploited by an attacker by sending a specially crafted email to an Outlook user. The exploitation doesn’t require user’s action, the flaw is triggered when the message is merely received., “An attacker who successfully exploited the vulnerability could attempt to force Outlook to load a local or remote message store (over SMB).” states the advisory published by Microsoft., “To exploit the vulnerability, the attacker could send a specially crafted email to a victim. Outlook would then attempt to open a pre-configured message store contained in the email upon receipt of the email.”, Another critical flaw fixed by Microsoft is an information disclosure vulnerability (CVE-2018-0763), that affects Microsoft Edge. The vulnerability ties to the way Microsoft Edge improperly handles objects in the memory., An attacker can trigger the flaw to obtain sensitive information to compromise the target machine, but in this case, it needs the user’s interaction., “An information disclosure vulnerability exists when Microsoft Edge improperly handles objects in memory. An attacker who successfully exploited the vulnerability could obtain information to further compromise the user’s system.” state the advisory published by Microsoft., “To exploit the vulnerability, in a web-based attack scenario, an attacker could host a website in an attempt to exploit the vulnerability. In addition, compromised websites and websites that accept or host user-provided content could contain specially crafted content that could exploit the vulnerability. However, in all cases an attacker would have no way to force a user to view the attacker-controlled content. Instead, an attacker would have to convince a user to take action.”, Let’s close with another issue fixed by Microsoft is the CVE-2018-0771 that affects Microsoft Edge, it was publicly known before by Microsoft., “A security feature bypass vulnerability exists when Microsoft Edge improperly handles requests of different origins. The vulnerability allows Microsoft Edge to bypass Same-Origin Policy (SOP) restrictions, and to allow requests that should otherwise be ignored. An attacker who successfully exploited the vulnerability could force the browser to send data that would otherwise be restricted.” states Microsoft., “In a web-based attack scenario, an attacker could host a specially crafted website that is designed to exploit the vulnerability through Microsoft Edge and then convince a user to view the website. The attacker could also take advantage of compromised websites, and websites that accept or host user-provided content or advertisements. These websites could contain specially crafted content that could exploit the vulnerability.”, Users have to apply security patches as soon as possible., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Microsoft Patch Tuesday for February 2018, hacking), ,
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Security researchers at Core Security have discovered a dozen flaws in Trend Micro Linux-based Email Encryption Gateway, some of them have been rated as critical and high severity. The flaws received the CVE identification numbers CVE-2018-6219 through CVE-2018-6230., The most severe flaw could be exploited by a local or remote attacker with access to the targeted system to execute arbitrary commands with root privileges., “Encryption for Email Gateway 1 is a Linux-based software solution providing the ability to perform the encryption and decryption of email at the corporate gateway, regardless of the email client, and the platform from which it originated. The encryption and decryption of email on the TMEEG client is controlled by a Policy Manager that enables an administrator to configure policies based on various parameters, such as sender and recipient email addresses,” states Core Security., “Multiple vulnerabilities were found in the Trend Micro Email Encryption Gateway web console that would allow a remote unauthenticated attacker to gain command execution as root.”, , The most serious vulnerability is CVE-2018-6223, it is related to missing authentication for appliance registration. Administrators can configure the virtual appliance running Email Encryption Gateway during the deployment process upon deployment via a registration endpoint., The researchers discovered that attackers can access the endpoint without authentication to set administrator credentials and make other changes to the configuration., “The registration endpoint is provided for system administrators to configure the virtual appliance upon deployment. However, this endpoint remains accessible without authentication even after the appliance is configured, which would allow attackers to set configuration parameters such as the administrator username and password.” continues the analysis., The experts also discovered two high severity cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities, an arbitrary file write issue that can lead to command execution, am arbitrary log file locations leading command execution, and unvalidated software updates., Remaining flaws discovered by the researchers include SQL and XML external entity (XXE) injections., Affected Packages are Trend Micro Email Encryption Gateway 5.5 (Build 1111.00) and earlier, Trend Micro addressed ten of the vulnerabilities with the version 5.5 build 1129., According to the report timeline, Trend Micro spent more than six months to issue the patches., Trend Micro confirmed that a medium severity CSRF issue and a low severity SQL injection vulnerability have not been patched due to the difficulties of implementing a fix., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Trend Micro Email Encryption Gateway, hacking)
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The Mirai botnet, this name is familiar to security experts due to the massive DDoS attack that it powered against the Dyn DNS service a few days ago., The Mirai malware was first spotted by the researcher MalwareMustDie that confirmed it was designed to hack into poorly configured and vulnerable IoT devices. Its source code was leaked on the popular criminal hacker forum Hackforum by a user with moniker “Anna-senpai” giving the opportunity to anyone to compile and customize its own version of the threat., Experts who reviewed the code have discovered a weakness that could be exploited to shut down the botnet stopping it from flooding the targets with HTTP requests, this means that it is possible to hack back the threat. The experts from Invincea discovered three vulnerabilities in the Mirai code, one of them, a stack buffer overflow, could be exploited to halt the DDoS attack powered by the botnet. The buffer overflow vulnerability affects the way Mirai parses responses from HTTP packets., “Perhaps the most significant finding is a stack buffer overflow vulnerability in the HTTP flood attack code. When exploited it will cause a segmentation fault (i.e. SIGSEV) to occur, crash the process, and therefore terminate the attack from that bot. The vulnerable code has to do with how Mirai processes the HTTP location header that may be part of the HTTP response sent from an HTTP flood request.” reported the analysis published by the security firm Invincea., , The researchers highlighted that their attack would not have helped in the DNS-based DDoS attack against provider Dyn, but it would halt the Layer 7 attack capabilities of the Mirai botnet implemented in the coded leaked online., The researchers at Invincea successfully tested a proof-of-concept exploit in a virtual environment setting up a debug instance of the Mirai bot, a command and control server and a target machine., “This simple “exploit” is an example of active defense against an IoT botnet that could be used by any DDoS mitigation service to defend against a Mirai-based HTTP flood attack in real-time. While it can’t be used to remove the bot from the IoT device, it can be used to halt the attack originating from that particular device. Unfortunately, it’s specific to the HTTP flood attack, so it would not help mitigate the recent DNS-based DDoS attack that rendered many websites inaccessible.” explained the Scott Tenaglia, Research Director in the cyber capabilities team at Invincea Labs., Tenaglia remarked that the method proposed by the company doesn’t clean the compromised devices, instead it could be effective against HTTP flooding powered by the Mirai Botnet., The method proposed by the researchers is a form of active defense that has important legal implications because anyway, who is defending its system from the attack power a response attack against the attacker’s infrastructure., Hacking back is illegal under the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act., Hacking a bot means to make an unauthorized access to a computer system and such kind of operations have to be authorized by a court order., Invincea has made an excellent work and isn’t suggesting the hacking back, but limited its analysis on the technical aspect of the Mirai botnet and its vulnerabilities., “It’s in the gray space of active defense,” Tenaglia told to ThreatPost. “In the defense world, this is a hotly contested issue. Say if your IoT is already compromised and bad code is already running, if I do something to the bad guy’s code, am I breaking law?”, “I would never comment on the legality of this,” Tenaglia said. “I think this gives us another point to discuss with regard to active defense. Is this something we think is ok? I don’t think it would hurt the system; it might help it. If a bot is degrading performance of the Internet connection because of the packets it’s sending out, and if this attack kills the process and the connection gets better, have we helped you? That’s why this is a gray area.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Linux Mirai malware, IoT)
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According to Symantec, threat actors have been using a data stealer Trojan dubbed Duuzer to target organizations mainly located in South Korea. The bad actors conducted targeted attacks against organizations in the manufacturing industry, they served Duuzer backdoor to gain complete control over infected machines., Duuzer allows attackers to collect system information, access local file system, change the time attributes of files, upload and download files, and of course, execute commands., According to the experts at Symantec, the Backdoor.Duuzer has been around since at least July 20 2015, the attackers are relying on spear phishing messages and watering hole attacks to spread it., “Duuzer is an ongoing threat that is being delivered in targeted attacks. While the exact distribution method is unknown, it’s likely that the malware is spreading through spear-phishing emails or watering-hole attacks.” states a blog post published by Symantec. , The malware researchers at Symantec collected evidence that bad actors behind the Duuzer campaign are also spreading two other malware, dubbed W32.Brambul and Backdoor.Joanap. The two malware were also used to target organizations in South Korea and serve extra payloads on the compromised machines., According to Symantec, Duuzer is linked to both malware, every computer infected by Brambul was also infected by Duuzer and shared the same command and control (C&C) servers., Duuzer is able to infect both 32-bit and 64-bit systems, it implements several methods to avoid detection, for example, it is able to checks for the presence of virtual machines and also rename the malware after an existing legitimate software runs on startup., , “The Duuzer attackers have been observed trying to disguise their malware on an infected computer. They do this by identifying what software is installed and runs on startup, then renaming their malware to a similar title of an existing, legitimate program.” continues the analysis., The researchers speculate the threat actors behind the Duuzer campaign have a significant knowledge about malware detection techniques., “The attackers appear to be manually running commands through the back door on affected computers. In one case, we observed the attackers creating a camouflaged version of their malware, and in another, we saw them attempting to, but failing to deactivate Symantec Endpoint Protection (SEP),” Symantec said in a blog post., The experts provided further information on both Brambul and Joanap threats, Brambul is a worm that spreads from one computer to another by relying on brute-force attacks aimed at the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol, once infected the host it creates a network share to provide the attackers access to the system drive., “The Brambul worm uses brute-force attacks to propagate. The threat connects to random IP addresses through the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol using a hardcoded list of user names and passwords. The passwords are quite common or easy to guess, such as “123123”, “abc123”, “computer,” “iloveyou,” ”login”, and “password”. states the post. “After Brambul compromises a computer, it creates a net share to give attackers access to the system drive (usually the C: drive). It sends a message with the computer’s details and login credentials to a hardcoded email address. Brambul’s variants may be able to drop additional threats.”, Joanap is a classic backdoor to gain control over the infected system., In order to prevent Duuzer infections Symantec recommends the following best practices:, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Duuzer , malware)
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On numerous occasion I remarked the need to carefully observe the evolution of the underground market to identify dangerous trends that can leave portend a new wave of cyber crimes. The increasing availability of free, commercial availability of mass Web site hacking tools, the lack of proper security configurations and the inefficiency of defense systems is allowing cybercrime to monetize the compromise process., Today cybercriminals could easily find vulnerable websites using commercial available DIY hacking tool based on Google Dorks and use many other tools to exploit known vulnerabilities in the targeted hosts. In the recent months security firms have detected numerous attacks on global scale against forum and blogging platforms., Once infected a host could be recruited as part of a botnet to conduct DDoS attacks or could be used to serve a malware, last discovery of Danchev is an iFramed based traffic E-shops and the offer of access to hijacked legitimate traffic to be later on converted to malware-infected hosts., There are numerous methods for monetizing managing a portion of hijacked Web traffic, through of blackhat SEO (search engine optimization), DNS cache poisoning, RFI (Remote File Inclusion) or spam/phishing campaigns tactics traffic is sold and resold to achieve criminals purposes., , , Using IFrame tag, the attackers inject malicious links (link to compromised host that serve malware) using Cross site Scripting in popular websites. Visiting a page containing the iFrame tag the user is redirected to a website that serve a malware., Using Iframe Injection hackers perform different operations, including the injection of advertisements inside any other websites, the insertion of malware infected site links and redirection to malware infected sites., In an IFrame Injection Attack hackers are able to include the webpage one pixel square (victim is not able to see it in webpage), they also obfuscate the JavaScript that will run automatically from that included page so that it looks something like %6C%20%66%72%61%6D%65%62%6F deceiving the victims., The iFramed based traffic E-shop offers 5000 visits for $15, 50,000 visits for $100 and 100,000 visits for $175 but very interesting is the possibility to acquire geolocated traffic consisting of American, French, British and Canadian visitors, a feature very attractive for cybercriminals., The iFramed based traffic E-shop according Danchev opens up two possibilities for abuse:, Curious that despite the iFramed based traffic E-shop is pitching itself as a “legitimate traffic service”, it’s also explicitly emphasizing on the fact that iFramed based traffic is perfectly suitable to be used for Web malware exploitation kits., The iFramed based traffic E-shop of course accepts Bitcoin as payment method., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – iFramed based traffic, cybercrime)
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Security experts at Zscaler discovered a trojanized and pirated version of the popular Assassin Creed application for Android platform., Assassin Creed is one of the most popular paid video games, available for almost every gaming platform, including Sony Playstation, Xbox, PC and mobile OSs like Android., The Android malware disguising itself as the Assassins Creed app will install a pirated version of the game that apparently works normally, but that is able to perform malicious activities in background., Once downloaded, the trojanized copy of the Assassin Creed application has the ability to send multipart text messages, harvest information (i.e. mobile number and Subscriber ID information) from victim devices and send stolen data to a remote command and control server, exactly as any other data stealer malware. The experts at Zscaler analyzing the malicious code discovered that the references to the C&C servers used by the authors are hard-coded into the applications, they are bnk7ihekqxp.net and googleapiserver.net., “We were able to locate phone numbers belonging to Russian bank Volga-Vyatka Bank of Sberbank of Russia in the malicious application code for which SMS messages are being intercepted to steal sensitive information,” Zscaler researchers wrote. “Another interesting feature we saw is the usage of AES encryption for all the C2 communication. It also harvests the mobile number and Subscriber ID information from the victim device for tracking purposes.”, The researchers highlighted the use of encryption for the protection of communications with the C&C servers., The trojanized version of Assassin Creed uses the AES encryption for all the C2 communication, in the image below is shown
the AES crypto library configurations used by the malware., “All the sensitive harvested data and C2 communication is encrypted and decrypted using this configuration.”, , , The malicious version of Assassin Creed requests a number of permissions, including the ability to access the Internet, access network state, get accounts, read/write and send SMS, manage outgoing calls, read and write external storage, read phone state, received boot completed, wake lock., The detection rate for the Assassin Creed Android malware (assassins_creed. apk) is still low, 12/56 according VirusTotal that provides also further information on malicious agent, including MD5 and SHA., As usual, my suggestion is to avoid the rotting of the mobile device and to download mobile apps only from the official Google Play store, pirated apps may hide a lot of threats for the users., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Android, Assassin Creed malicious app)
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The NSA director and commander of U.S. Cyber Command, Admiral Michael Rogers, told a Washington cybersecurity forum that legislators need the creation of a legal framework to regulate the operations conducted by law enforcement and intelligence-gathering organizations worldwide., Rogers urge to “come up with a legal framework that enables us within some quasi-process to address… valid concerns if I have indications to believe that this phone, that this path is being used for criminal, or in my case, foreign intelligence or national security issues.”Rogers said. “We fully comply with the law,” “We do that foreign intelligence mission operating within (a legal) framework.”, The Admiral Rogers explained that in order to contrast the numerous threats against the country, including the terrorism, the authorities need access to encrypted devices, and more in general, to break the encryption used to protect sensitive data., , Rogers shared concerns expressed by FBI Director James Comey about decision of IT giants like Apple and Google to implement data encryption by default in their solutions, including mobile devices., “Broadly, I share director Comey’s concern,” Rogers said. “Most of the debate I’ve seen is that it’s either all or nothing, that it’s either total encryption or no encryption at all.”, Roger remarked the importance of technology for our society and the necessity to address every threat that could abuse it., NSA Director Rogers explained that the US is losing between $100 billion and $400 billion worth of intellectual property to theft each year. The NSA director reported as an example the continuous attacks against Department of Defense contractors that are exposing also the military secret to risks of theft. The US Intelligence needs the cooperation of private companies to protect its citizens., “We have shown in other areas that through both technology and a legal framework and a social compact that we can take on tough issues, and I hope we can do the same thing here,” he said., The document disclosed by Edward Snowden raised the indignation of many Governments worldwide for the “aggressive” surveillance programs of the US intelligence, the leakage of the secret documents has a significant impact on the US intelligence and its activities., “Snowden has had a material impact on our ability to perform counterterror operations,” Rogers argued. “Anyone who says otherwise doesn’t know what they are talking about.”, The NSA director didn’t comment on the latest revelations made by Snowden related to the malware secretly spread by the Agency to compromise the hard drives of computers worldwide and the hack of the SIM cards manufacturer Germalto., During the discussion, the cryptographer Bruce Schneier explained that it is not possible to prevent the threat actors from accessing encrypted communications while allowing U.S. authorities to do so., Schneier also asked to Rogers how to assure Americans that U.S. tech products are safe, and the NSA provided the following reply:, “Thats why we need a framework,” said the NSA Director Rogers “This is a legitimate question. ‘What is the economic impact?’ With policy and laws we can get to a better place.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – NSA Director Rogers, Intelligence)
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On Friday, the Ukrainian central bank warned of new malware-based attack risk. According to the Reuters, the Ukrainian central bank warned state-owned and private lenders of the spreading of new infections like the NotPetya attack that hit the critical infrastructure of the country in June., “The Ukrainian central bank said on Friday it had warned state-owned and private lenders of the appearance of new malware as security services said Ukraine faced cyber attacks like those that knocked out global systems in June.” states post published by the Reuters., “The June 27 attack, dubbed NotPetya, took down many Ukrainian government agencies and businesses, before spreading rapidly through corporate networks of multinationals with operations or suppliers in eastern Europe.”, The Ukrainian central bank is closely working with the national CERT and local authorities to improve the resilience to cyber attacks of its critical infrastructures, especially the ones of the Ukrainian banking sector., “Therefore on Aug. 11…, the central bank promptly informed banks about the appearance of new malicious code, its features, compromise indicators and the need to implement precautionary measures to prevent infection,” the central bank told Reuters in emailed comments., The Reuters has seen the letter sent by the Ukrainian central bank to the national banks, the message warns of a new strain of malware is spread via phishing email using weaponized word documents., , The experts warn of a possible massive cyber attack on Ukrainian companies, the malicious code is currently able to evade antivirus solutions., “The nature of this malicious code, its mass distribution, and the fact that at the time of its distribution it was not detected by any anti-virus software, suggest that this attack is preparation for a mass cyber-attack on the corporate networks of Ukrainian businesses,” the letter said., Of course, the first suspect according to the experts is Russia that has many interests in the country, in many cases, Ukraine blamed the Kremlin for cyber attacks on its infrastructure, including the power grid and financial systems., The state cyber police and Security and Defence Council already warned of a potential imminent cyber attack against Ukraine. Authorities believe Ukraine could be targeted on Aug. 24 with a NotPetya-style massive attack aimed at destabilizing the country as it celebrates its 1991 independence from the Soviet Union., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – NotPetya, Ukrainian central bank)
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According to a new report issued by the cyber security firm iSIGHT Partners a group of Russian hackers has been exploiting a previously unknown flaw in Microsoft’s Windows operating system to spy on NATO, the Ukrainian government, a U.S. university researcher and many other entities. The researchers at ISight dubbed the hacking group SandWorm because of references discovered in its code to the science-fiction novel “Dune.”, The experts at iSIGHT Partners have worked in close collaboration with Microsoft during the investigation, the company announced the discovery of a zero-day vulnerability affecting all supported versions of Microsoft Windows and Windows Server 2008 and 2012. The vulnerability has been classified with the code CVE-2014-4114, and according the revelation made by iSIGHT is has been exploited in cyber espionage operation on a large scale by a Russia hacking team, the nature of the target and the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTP) adopted lead the experts to believe that this is the work of state-sponsored hackers., “This is consistent with espionage activity,” said iSight Senior Director Stephen Ward. “All indicators from a targeting and lures perspective would indicate espionage with Russian national interests.”, Microsoft is already working on a security update for the CVE-2014-4114 that will be available in the next patch updates on the October 14th., According to the report issued by iSIGHT, the APT has been active since at least 2009, Its targets in the recent campaign also included a Polish energy firm, a Western European government agency and also a French telecommunications firm., , The experts began the investigation in late 2013 when the NATO alliance was targeted by the SandWorm hacking team with exploits other than the zero-day, but they discovered the critical zero-day in August, when the group targeted the Ukrainian government, in the lead-up to the NATO summit in Wales., “In late August, while tracking the Sandworm Team, iSIGHT discovered a spear-phishing campaign targeting the Ukrainian government and at least one United States organization. Notably, these spear-phishing attacks coincided with the NATO summit on Ukraine held in Wales.” states the report published by iSIGHT., Security experts speculated that the intensification of the cyber dispute between Russian and Ukraine could have increased the likelihood to discover operations that went under the radar for so long., , Below chronological details provided by the researchers on the Sandworm activity:, The SandWorm hacking team sent spear-phishing emails with a malicious attachments to compromise the victim’s machine, the threat actors mentioned a global security forum on Russia and a purported list of Russian terrorists., Another element that suggests Russia is responsible for the cyber espionage campaign are codes discovered on the C&C server, located in Germany, that had not been properly secured and that contains Russian-language computer files that had been uploaded by the hackers., “They could have closed it off, and they didn’t,” he said of the server. “It was poor operational security.”, The investigators noticed that SandWorm apparently re-engineered malware previously by other APT probably to masquerade its campaigns., Read the full post for further information., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Sandworm, cyber espionage)
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Experts at the Sucuri firm have discovered that any WordPress Plugin or theme that leverages the genericons package is affected by a DOM-based Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability due to an insecure file included with genericons., The experts explained that among the vulnerable plugins there is the JetPack plugin, which have more than 1 million active installation, and the TwentyFifteen theme that comes by default., Due to the large number of affected websites, Sucuri has reported the flaw to the hosting providers., , Any plugin that makes use of the genericons package is potentially vulnerable if it includes the example.html file that is normally included with the flawed package., “We cannot forget one of the basic principles of security, in which we must maintain a pristine environment in production. This means we remove debug or test files before you move into production. In this case, Automattic and the WordPress team left a simple example.html file that had the vulnerability embedded,” states Sucuri., The researchers explained that in order to exploit the DOM-based XSS vulnerability, bad actors need to trick the victim into clicking on an exploit link. Unfortunately, threat actors are already exploiting the DOM-based XSS vulnerability worldwide., “What is interesting about this attack is that we detected it in the wild days before disclosure. We got a report about it and some of our clients were also getting reports saying they were vulnerable and pointing to:, In this proof of concept, the XSS printed a javascript alert, but could be used to execute javascript in your browser and take over the site if you are logged in as admin.” states a blog post published by Sucuri., The good news is that it is quite easy to fix the DOM-based XSS vulnerability, it is enough to remove the “example.html” or block access any access to the file., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – WordPress, DOM-based XSS vulnerability)
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The IoT search engine ZoomEye has cached login passwords for tens of thousands of Dahua DVRs, the discovery was made by security researcher Ankit Anubhav, Principal Researcher at NewSky Security., , Anubhav explained that the passwords are related to Dahua DVRs running very old firmware that is known to be affected by a five-year-old vulnerability tracked as CVE-2013-6117., Even if the vulnerability has been patched, many Dahua devices are still running ancient firmware., The CVE-2013-6117 was discovered by the security expert Jake Reynolds and affects Dahua DVR 2.608.0000.0 and 2.608.GV00.0. The flaw could be exploited by remote attackers to bypass authentication and obtain sensitive information including user credentials, change user passwords, clear log files, and perform other actions via a request to TCP port 37777., An attacker just needs to initiate a raw TCP connection on a vulnerable Dahua DVR on port 37777 to send the exploit code that triggers the issue., Once the Dahua device receives this code, it will respond with DDNS credentials for accessing the device, and other data, all in plaintext., Just to make things clear to weaponize the exploit, one needs to connect to port 37777 on raw TCP + send the following message to get the ddns creds, "xa3x00x00x00x00x00x00x00x63x6fx6ex66x69x67x00x00x8cx00x00x00x00x00x00x00x00x00x00x00x00x00x00x00" — Ankit Anubhav (@ankit_anubhav) July 13, 2018, , Wow and how did I miss this.13900+ of these devices have their password as "123456"Check here #security #fail, This specific case was brought to my attention by another known botnet operator. So again, RIP to these devices. — Ankit Anubhav (@ankit_anubhav) July 13, 2018, , Anubhav explained that ZoomEye scans port 37777 caching the output in plaintext, this means that everyone that with a ZoomEye account can scrap results to obtain the credentials of tens of thousands, Anubhav notified the issue to ZoomEye asking it to remove the passwords from its cached results, but the expert is still waiting for a reply., The expert explained that he discovered the issue after reading a post published by the author of the BrickerBot IoT malware that exploited the flaw to hacked hijack and brick Dahua DVRs in the past., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – IoT search engine ZoomEye, Dahua DVRs)
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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
THANK YOU!, Email address: 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’ll offer the opportunity to:
• Insert banners of various sizes in all the posts on Security Affairs.
• Publish sponsored posts written by the customers that can include any kind of commercial reference.
• Arrange a monthly/quarterly/annual campaign (for big customers) to advertise customers’ activities and discoveries.
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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Is your website popular? Great you are a privileged target for crooks, just yesterday I reported the last malvertising campaign that hit Forbes and today I decide to present a different kind of attack that is equally dangerous and insidious., Today we will speak about image boards web services that are very popular especially among youngsters, they are a sort of Internet forum that allows users to post images. Such kind of services is very popular targeting them it is possible to compromise large audience, now it has been reported that a serious vulnerability in the online image sharing community Imgur was exploited by hackers to hide malicious code in images, control visitors’ browsers, and take over the 4Chan and 8Chan image boards., Imgur has already fixed the hole preventing the upload of malicious images, but anyway it confirmed that threat actors have used compromised pages in targeted attacks. According to Imgur, the attack is limited to these pages and not involved the site’s main gallery page., “Yesterday a vulnerability was discovered that made it possible to inject malicious code into an image link on Imgur,” explained the Imgur community director Sarah Schaaf., “From our team’s analysis, it appears the exploit was targeted specifically to users of 4chan and 8chan via images shared to a specific sub-reddit on Reddit.com using Imgur’s image hosting and sharing tools.”, “The vulnerability was patched yesterday evening and we’re no longer serving affected images, but as a precaution we recommend that you clear your browsing data, cookies, and local storage.”, , Which is the attack scenario?, The attack injected a JavaScript in the victims’ local storage that sent a ping to the attacker’s command and control servers every time the target visits 8Chan., The images containing the malicious code were posted to 4Chan and a related Reddit subreddit page. It is not clear the intent of the attackers and according the information available the command and control servers weren’t used to send orders to the infected machines., Reddit users report JavaScript created an off-screen iframe and embedded a flash file that ran alongside Imgur’s other Flash components making the attack less suspicious., “This flash file injected more JavaScript into the page which looked like an innocuous Pikachu animation,” one Reddit user says., “This JavaScript was stored to the user’s localstorage which, since the iframe was pointing at 8chan, allowed the attacker to attach JavaScript to 8chan’s localstorage. It’s functionality is to issue a GET request to 8chan.pw and then decrypted the response. So far no one has been able to see a response from that web service, meaning it likely wasn’t activated yet or has already been deactivated. The outcome is that every time a user visited an 8chan page, it would phone home to check for instructions and then execute more JavaScript code.’, As reported by TheRegister, The attacks were described also on various 4Chan boards., The security team at Imgur has implemented more controls to allow the publication only of “valid” image files and blocked any JavaScript., As reported in the official announcement made by Imgur, users are invited to clear browsing data, cookies, and localstorage., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Imgur, targeted attack)
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OpenSSL Foundation has issued a security update as announced weeks ago. The patch just released fixes a mysterious security flaw affecting the OpenSSL code library, in the last weeks, the details of the vulnerability weren’t disclosed by the OpenSSL Foundation due to its severity., The high severity vulnerability affects OpenSSL versions 1.0.1n and 1.0.2b, it is a resolving a certificate forgery issue (CVE-2015-1793) and its exploitation could attackers to run man-in-the-middle attacks. The attackers could exploit the flaw to impersonate websites implementing HTTPs, or to run MITM attacks on VPNs and eavesdrop encrypted traffic., , “During certificate verification, OpenSSL (starting from version 1.0.1n and 1.0.2b) will attempt to find an alternative certificate chain if the first attempt to build such a chain fails. An error in the implementation of this logic can mean that an attacker could cause certain checks on untrusted certificates to be bypassed, such as the CA flag, enabling them to use a valid leaf certificate to act as a CA and “issue” an invalid certificate. ” states the advisory by OpenSSL., The flaw has a severe impact on any application that relies on digital certificates to validate user’s identity. Transport Layer Security (TLS) or Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or DTLS clients and SSL/TLS/DTLS servers using client authentication are affected by the vulnerability., The OpenSSL Foundation urges:, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – OpenSSL, hacking)
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The British Police in collaboration with the FBI has arrested a 18-year-old boy that is suspected to have participated to the DDoS attacks on the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live services., The law enforcement hasn’t disclosed the name of the youngster that has been arrested in Southport, he is suspected of computer crime and unauthorized access to computer material., “SEROCU, supported by the National Cyber Crime Unit (NCCU), worked closely with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on the operation which focused on the denial of service attack of Sony Playstation and Xbox systems in 2014 and ‘swatting’ offences.” reports a statement issued by the Cyber Crime Unit at South East Regional Organised Crime Unit (SEROCU)., Despite the law enforcement has declined to provide the name of the young guy, the amazing investigator Brian Krebs revealed that he is Jordan Cameron, also known as “Jordie”., “U.K. police declined to publicly name the individual arrested. But according to two sources close to the investigation, the 18-year-old is Jordan Cameron. Known online variously as “Jordie,” “EvilJordie” and “GDKJordie,” Cameron frequently adopts the persona of an African American gang member from Chicago, as evidenced in this (extremely explicit) interview he and other Lizard Squad members gave late last year. Jordie’s Twitter accountalso speaks volumes, although it hasn’t been saying much for the past 13 hours.” wrote Krebs in a blog post., Jordan Cameron is the third alleged member of the Lizard Squad arrested by law enforcement, the other two members were identified in late December., “Two other Lizard Squad members also have been rounded up by police since the initial Christmas Day attacks. In late December, U.K. police arrested 22-year-old Vincent “Vinnie” Omari, in connection with the investigation. Additionally, authorities in Finland questioned a 17-year-old named Julius “Ryan/Zeekill” Kivimäki, after he and Omari gave an interview to Sky News about the attacks. Sources say Kivimäki has been arrested and jailed several times in Finland on charges related to credit card theft, although he is currently not in custody.” continues Krebs., According to the UK authorities, the young man is also suspected of being involved in some unspecified swatting cases. Swatting is the act of tricking an emergency service into dispatching an emergency response based on the false report of an ongoing critical incident, the act is conducted with the primary intent to cause that victim is accidentally hurt or killed during an operation of a SWAT unit., “We are still at the early stages of the investigation and there is still much work to be done. We will continue to work closely with the FBI to identify those to who commit offences and hold them to account. Offences referred to as ‘swatting’ involve law enforcement forces in the United States receiving hoax calls via Skype for a major incident in which SWAT teams were dispatched,” states an official statement released by Craig Jones, Head of the Cyber Crime Unit at South East Regional Organised Crime Unit (SEROCU)., “We are pursuing cyber criminals using the latest technology and working with businesses and academia to further develop specialist investigative capabilities to protect and reduce the risk to the public.”, , Brian Krebs also confirmed linked the young man to same swatting cases reported to the FBI:, An individual using variations on the “Jordie” nickname was named in this FBI criminal complaint (PDF) from Sept. 2014 as one of three from the U.K. suspected in a string of swatting attacks and bomb threats to schools and universities across the United States in the past year. According to that affidavit, Jordie was a member of a group of males aged 16-18 who called themselves the “ISISGang.”, The agents at SEROCU have seized a several devices concurrently with the arrest., “This is a significant arrest by the South East regional Cyber Crime Unit, supported by North West policing colleagues, of a UK citizen suspected of engaging in serious and organised cyber crime on the national and international stage. The cyber crime investigative capability I am overseeing across the Regional Organised Crime Units increasingly allows policing to undertake such complex investigations as a networked specialist resource, and in collaboration with international law enforcement partners, as in this case the FBI.” said DCC Peter Goodman, National Policing Lead for Cyber Security at the Association of Police Officers (ACPO). , Last year Both Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network have been frequently targeted by hackers, including the DDoS attack run by Lizard Squad at Christmas., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Xbox Live and the PlayStation Network, UK Police)
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Researchers at Microsoft’s Malware Protection Center are warning of a new technique attackers are using to allow macro malware elude detection solutions., The experts first spotted the technique while analyzing a file containing VBA project scripts with a sample of the well-known TrojanDownloader:O97M/Donoff., The experts confirmed that it is the first time they have seen this obfuscation technique., The experts were initially deceived by the macro used by the threat actors., “We recently came across a file containing a VBA project that scripts a malicious macro.” reads a blog post from Microsoft. “However, there wasn’t an immediate, obvious identification that this file was actually malicious. It’s a Word file that contains seven VBA modules and a VBA user form with a few buttons (using the CommandButton elements).”, , The VBA modules appeared harmless, the experts haven’t found evidence of malicious code, except for a strange string in the Caption field for CommandButton3 in the user form., “However, after further investigation we noticed a strange string in the Caption field for CommandButton3 in the user form. It appeared to be some sort of encrypted string.” continues the post. “We went back and reviewed the other modules in the file, and sure enough – there’s something unusual going on in Module2. A macro there (UsariosConectados) decrypts the string in the Caption field for CommandButton3, which turns out to be a URL. It uses the deaultautoopen() macro to run the entire VBA project when the document is opened.”, The threat actors have hidden commands in the name of a macro button. When the macro is executed it decrypts the string in order to retrieve the URL from which to download a malicious payload., “The macro will connect to the URL (hxxp://clickcomunicacion.es/<uniqueid>) to download a payload which we detect as Ransom:Win32/Locky (SHA1: b91daa9b78720acb2f008048f5844d8f1649a5c4).”, This is the first time that threat actors used this technique in the wild., Exactly one year ago, experts from Microsoft launched an alert on macro attacks after observing a major spike in the volume of malware using macros since the beginning of the year., Microsoft suggests the reading of the threat intelligence report on macros for further information on preventing and recovering from macro attacks., 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 – malicious macros, malware)
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According to an online statement from the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) and the FBI, nearly 2,000 individuals were victims of a wire payment scam that was extended to 45 countries and led to an estimated loss of $215 million., In response to the wire payment scam law enforcement to issue a widespread warning about a large scale operation that is tricking employees at both small and large businesses, and for this reason called the Business Email Compromise., “The Business Email Compromise (BEC) is a sophisticated scam targeting businesses working with foreign suppliers and/or businesses that regularly perform wire transfer payments. Formerly known as the Man-in-the-E-mail Scam, the BEC was renamed to focus on the “business angle” of this scam and to avoid confusion with another unrelated scam.” reports the statement., According to the statement, the illegal activities run at least in a two-month period (From 10/01/2013 to 12/01/2014) during which cyber criminals posing as suppliers or business partners of a targeted firm and requested funds transferred to a fraudulent account in order to process an invoice or other form of payment., The Asian countries, China and Hong Kong above all, are the places where are located banks used as ending destination for these fraudulent transfers. The criminal crews behind the “Business Email Compromise” were asking fund transfers via an email or telephone call., , The official statistics regarding Business Email Compromise published by IC3 are reported below:, The fraud scheme is very simple, busy employees received a request to transfer funds by representatives of high management of their company., It is clear that businesses and personnel using open source e-mail are most targeted by Business Email Compromise, in many cases the criminals spoofed e-mails of individuals within enterprises who are entitled to submit such payment requests., Individuals responsible for handling wire transfers within a specific companies are privileged targets of criminals which compose well-worded e-mail requests for a wire transfer., The attacker behind Business Email Compromise scams shows a deep knowledge of their victims, their requests are proportional to the economic capabilities of the target and of the specific individual used as the sender of the request. The criminals sent e-mails concurrently with business travel dates for executives whose e-mails were spoofed., The statement reported three different versions of the Business Email Compromise based on complaints received since 2009:, Version 1
A business, which often has a long standing relationship with a supplier, is asked to wire funds for invoice payment to an alternate, fraudulent account. This particular version has also been referred to as “The Bogus Invoice Scheme,” “The Supplier Swindle,” and “Invoice Modification Scheme.”, Version 2
The e-mail accounts of high-level business executives (CFO, CTO, etc) are compromised. The account may be spoofed or hacked. A request for a wire transfer from the compromised account is made to a second employee within the company who is normally responsible for processing these requests. This particular version has also been referred to as “CEO Fraud,” “Business Executive Scam,” “Masquerading,” and “Financial Industry Wire Frauds.”, Version 3
An employee of a business has his/her personal e-mail hacked. Requests for invoice payments to fraudster-controlled bank accounts are sent from this employee’s personal e-mail to multiple vendors identified from this employee’s contact list. The business may not become aware of the fraudulent requests until they are contacted by their vendors to follow up on the status of their invoice payment., It is very important that business employees are informed about Business Email Compromise, I suggest you to carefully read the suggestions for protections reported in the online statement from the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) and the FBI., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Business Email Compromise, cybercrime)
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Malware researchers at CheckPoint firm have discovered a new stealth Mac malware dubbed DOK that affects almost ant Mac OS X version. At the time of its discovery, the DOK malware has zero detections on VirusTotal and researchers highlighted that the malicious code is “signed with a valid developer certificate (authenticated by Apple).”, The DOK malware is being distributed via phishing emails, the researchers added that this is the first major scale malware to target macOS users., “This new malware – dubbed OSX/Dok — affects all versions of OSX, has 0 detections on VirusTotal (as of the writing of these words), is signed with a valid developer certificate (authenticated by Apple), and is the first major scale malware to target OSX users via a coordinated email phishing campaign.” states the analysis published by CheckPoint., The DOK malware was used to target European users, in a case reported by the researchers, a German user received a phishing message regarding supposed inconsistencies in tax returns., The phishing messages trick victims into opening an attached malicious .zip file, which contains the malicious code., The use of a malicious code signed with a valid developer certificate allows it to bypass the Apple Gatekeeper defense mechanism., Once installed, the DOK malware copies itself to the /Users/Shared/ folder and then gain persistence by adding to “loginItem.” in this way it will be executed automatically every time the system reboots., At this point, the malicious code creates a window on top of all other windows, displaying a message claiming that a security problem has been detected in the operating system and an update is available, it requests victims to enter his password., When the victim installs the fake update, the DOK malware gains administrator privileges on the target and modifies system’s network settings in order to set up a proxy used for the outgoing traffic inspection., , “The victim is barred from accessing any windows or using their machine in any way until they relent, enter the password and allow the malware to finish installing. Once they do, the malware gains administrator privileges on the victim’s machine., Using those privileges, the malware will then install Tor, the latter is a low-level command-line utility that allows connection to the dark web.” continues the analysis., “The malware will then give the current user admin privileges immediately on demand without prompting for a password. This is done so that the malware won’t provoke constant admin password prompts when abusing its admin privileges with the sudo command. This is done by adding the following line to /etc/sudoers:, %USER_NAME_HERE% ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL”, At this point, the malware installs a new root certificate in the infected Mac, which allows the attacker to intercept the victim’s traffic using a man-in-the-middle (MiTM) attack., “As a result of all of the above actions, when attempting to surf the web, the user’s web browser will first ask the attacker web page on TOR for proxy settings,” the researchers say., “The user traffic is then redirected through a proxy controlled by the attacker, who carries out a Man-In-the-Middle attack and impersonates the various sites the user attempts to surf. The attacker is free to read the victim’s traffic and tamper with it in any way they please.”, Another aspect that makes the DOK malware hard of analyzing is that the malicious code deletes itself once it modifies proxy settings on the target machines., , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – DOK malware, hacking)
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The company started warning its users, every user who issued the “request system software” command with the “partition” option is affected by the issue. The failure of the system update leaves it in a state where root CLI login is allowed without a password. The problem affects any system upgraded from Junos OS prior to 12.1X46-D65. When the system upgrade fails, the system goes into a “safe mode” designed to allow a sysadmin to access it and solve the problem., This implies that a root login without a password is available., “Using the ‘request system software‘ command with the ‘partition‘ option on an SRX Series device upgrading from Junos OS releases prior to 12.1X46-D65 can leave the system in a state where root CLI login is allowed without a password due to the system reverting to a “safe mode” authentication triggered by the failed upgrade. Additionally, valid authentication credentials fail to work due to the same issue. Only root with no password will work.” reads a security advisory published by Juniper., , According to the security advisory published by Juniper, no other platform or version of Junos OS is affected by the vulnerability. It also confirmed that no other Juniper Networks products or platforms are affected., The experts highlighted that any other previously-valid authentication credential is wiped from the system., In order to definitively solve the problem, it is possible to upgrade the Juniper SRX Series device from an affected release to a fixed release., Juniper SIRT confirmed that it is not aware of any malicious exploitation of this vulnerability., “Avoid using the ‘partition‘ option when upgrading an SRX Series device to Junos OS 12.1X46 prior to 12.1X46-D65.” continues the advisory. “Note that the symptoms are immediately obvious after an affected upgrade and may be remediated by rebooting the device post-upgrade.”, This means that just rebooting the system the problem will be solved., The issue is tracked as CVE-2016-1278., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Juniper SRX firewalls, hacking)
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The WordPress development team has pushed the WordPress 4.7.2 version that fixed three security issues, including a cross-site scripting and a SQL injection vulnerability., The new update comes just two weeks after WordPress released its previous version. Two weeks ago WordPress released the WordPress 4.7.1, a security release for all previous versions that according to the release notes addressed eight security flaws and other 62 bugs., “WordPress 4.7.2 is now available. This is a security release for all previous versions and we strongly encourage you to update your sites immediately.” reads the official announcement published on the WordPress’ blog., , The SQL injection affected the WordPress’ WP_Query class that is used to access variables, checks, and functions coded into the WordPress core. The expert Mohammad Jangda discovered the class is vulnerable when passing unsafe data. The flaw didn’t affect the core of the WordPress CMS, but there was the risk that plugins and themes would cause further vulnerabilities., “WP_Query is vulnerable to a SQL injection (SQLi) when passing unsafe data. WordPress core is not directly vulnerable to this issue, but we’ve added hardening to prevent plugins and themes from accidentally causing a vulnerability. Reported by Mo Jangda (batmoo).” states the announcement published by WordPress., The cross-site scripting vulnerability fixed with this last update affected the class that manages the posts list table. The flaw was discovered by the member of WordPress’ Security Team Ian Dunn., The third flaw resided the Press This function that allows WordPress users to publish blog posts with a web browser bookmarklet., “The user interface for assigning taxonomy terms in Press This is shown to users who do not have permissions to use it. Reported by David Herrera of Alley Interactive.” states WordPress advisory., According to the WordPress team, the previous WordPress 4.7 release has been downloaded over 10 million times since its release on December 6, 2016., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – WordPress 4.7.2, hacking)
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On Sunday, the vBulletin official website has been hacked, according to DataBreaches.net, vBulletin, Foxit Software forums have been hacked by Coldzer0 that has stolen hundreds of thousands of users’ records., The hacker published screenshots that show he managed to upload a shell to the vBulletin forum website and accessed user personal information, including user IDs, names, email addresses, security questions and answers, and password salts)., In response to the attack, VBulletin Solutions has reset the passwords for over 300,000 accounts on the official website, and The vBulletin technical support has released an emergency security patch release for versions 5.1.4 through 5.1.9 of the vBulletin Internet forum software., “Very recently, our security team discovered a sophisticated attack on our network. Our investigation indicates that the attacker may have accessed customer IDs and encrypted passwords on our systems,” explained a vBulletin support manager., It’s not clear if the patches were released because the attacker exploited a zero-day flaw in the platform, the hacker in fact claimed to have compromised the vBulletin.com database exploiting an unknown vulnerability. On Monday, the hacker using the online moniker “Coldzer0” started offering for sale a zero-day vBulletin exploit (“vBulletin 5.x.x Remote Code Execution 0day Exploit”) on a website that specializes in the exploit trading., Tuesday, after vBulletin released the security patches, a the Twitter account @_cutz published the details of a remote code execution flaw in vBulletin. The experts speculate the existence of the flaw for the past three years., , The offer also includes a video POC of the vBulleting zero-day Exploit:, , , vBulletin is a very popular platform, it is used by more than 100,000 community websites, including some operated by Electronic Arts, Sony Pictures and Valve Corporation., VBulletin is urging all users to update their installations as soon as possible., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – vBulletin forum, hacking)
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The tool is based on the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program and the risk management mechanisms of NIST cybersecurity framework., The Baldrige Cybersecurity Excellence Builder was designed to help enterprises to measure the effectiveness of their implementation of the cybersecurity framework and improve the risk management., “The builder will strengthen the already powerful cybersecurity framework so that organizations can better manage their cybersecurity risks,” said Commerce Deputy Secretary Bruce Andrews that presented the tool at an Internet Security Alliance conference., The development of the draft of the Baldrige Cybersecurity Excellence Builder is the result of a the collaboration between NIST and the Office of Management and Budget(link is external)’s Office of Electronic Government and Information Technology(link is external), with input from private sector representatives., , The Baldrige Cybersecurity Excellence Builder tool was devised to help organizations ensure that their cybersecurity program (systems and processes) supports their activities and functions., “These decisions around cybersecurity are going to impact your organization and what it does and how it does it,” says Robert Fangmeyer, director of the Baldrige Performance Excellence Program. “If your cybersecurity operations and approaches aren’t integrated into your larger strategy, aren’t integrated into your workforce development efforts, aren’t integrated into the results of the things you track for your organization and overall performance, then they’re not likely to be effective.”, The NIST explained that the use of the Baldrige Cybersecurity Excellence Builder tool allows organizations of any size and type to:, The Builder guides users through a process that details their organization’s distinctive characteristics and strategic situations related to cybersecurity. Then, a series of questions helps define the organization’s current approaches to cybersecurity in the areas of leadership, strategy, customers, workforce and operations, as well as the results achieved with them., The approach behind the Baldrige Cybersecurity Excellence Builder is simple, the tool uses a series of questions that help the organizations assess their strategies tied to the cybersecurity. The areas assessed by the survey leadership, strategy, customers, workforce, and operations., As a last step of the assessment, a rubric lets users evaluating the cybersecurity maturity level of their organization., “The tool’s assessment rubric helps users determine whether their organization’s cybersecurity maturity level is reactive, early, mature or a role model, according to NIST. The completed evaluation can lead to an action plan for upgrading cybersecurity practices and management and implementing those improvements.” reads the announcement published by the NIST. “It also can measure the progress and effectiveness of the process. NIST recommends organizations use the builder periodically so they can maintain the highest level of cybersecurity readiness.”, Public comments on the draft will be accepted until Thursday, Dec. 15, 2016, via e-mail to [email protected](link sends e-mail)., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – NIST, hacking)
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The Iran-based security researcher Pouya Darabi received a $10,000 bounty from Facebook after reporting a critical vulnerability that could have been exploited to delete any photo from the social network., Early this month, the social network giant announced a new feature for posting polls that include images and GIF animations. Darabi analyzed the new feature and discovered that it is affected by a vulnerability easily exploitable., The expert analyzed the request sent to Facebook servers when a user creates a poll and discovered the presence of the identifiers of the image files added to the poll., , Replacing the image ID in the request with the ID of any photo on the social network it possible to set the image for the poll., Darabi then discovered once the user that created the poll has deleted the post, the image whose ID was added to the request would also get removed from the social network., “When this field value changes to any other images ID, that image will be shown in poll. After sending request with another user image ID, a poll containing that image would be created.” explained the researcher that published a video PoC., “At the end when we try to delete the poll, victim’s image would be deleted with it by facebook as a poll property.” , (function(d, s, id) { var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)0; if (d.getElementById(id)) return; js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id; js.src = ' fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);}(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));, Delete any image on facebook, Image removal vulnerability in Facebook polling feature Posted by Dynamic World on Dienstag, 21. November 2017, Darabi reported the flaw to Facebook on November 3, the company issued a temporary fix in the same day. The permanent fix was completed in November 5, and on November 8 the expert received a $10,000 Bounty award., Back in 2015, Darabi was awarded $15,000 for bypassing the Facebook cross-site request forgery (CSRF) protection systems, in 2016 he received another $7,500 award for a similar bug., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – polls, polling feature)
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The last weeks were very interesting for the security experts interested in the cyber security of modern connected cars. People is even more curious about the car hacking following the news about hacks of vehicles from several automakers., Cars are becoming more high-tech, there is no doubt about it, and the problem is that more cars will become high-tech the more they will be exposed to cyber attacks., Think about it, just years ago cars didn’t have any special technology, so for automakers security issues are something very recent and resulting from the massive introduction of technology in their vehicles. Basically, they don’t have many experience yet in cyber security and car hacking., A demonstration of this inexperience, security-wise, is that cars nowadays have sensors and controllers that require a connection to the Internet (using SIM cards), but these connections aren’t protected neither the data in transit are properly secured from prying eyes., To worse the situation the numerous vulnerabilities still present in the software running on the components of modern connected cars, these vulnerabilities in some cases aren’t easy to patch, and can force automakers to recall vehicles (like Fiat Chrysler has done with his models)., Other automakers, in order to prevent car hacking, are looking with increasing interest to the bounty programs. Tesla launched a bug bounty program paying around $10.000 per vulnerability, embracing the security community and improving its vehicles., Tesla represents a model to follow for many other automakers that in many cases are more interested in hiding the flaws in their connected cars., I will go in the detail of the car hacking, you can find a lot of interesting post in SecurityAffairs on the topic, but I desire to remark the dangers for car owners and the security risks of a cyber attack., , Automakers must adopt stringent security standards that could help them to design secure systems. This is principle behind the initiative “iamthecavalry.org,” at the annual DEF CON Security Conference, I Am The Cavalry published a Five Star Automotive Cyber Safety Framework (PDF download) and calls for Automotive Industry adoption. Media outlets from across the US and Europe praised the effort and joined in calling for automakers and security researchers to work together to ensure a safe future., Safety by Design, Do you have a published attestation of your Secure Software Development Lifecycle, summarizing your design, development, and adversarial resilience testing programs for your products and your supply chain?, The key Elements:, Third Party Collaboration, Do you have a published Coordinated Disclosure policy inviting the assistance of third-party researchers acting in good faith?, The key Elements:, Evidence Capture, Do your vehicle systems provide tamper evident, forensically-sound logging and evidence capture to facilitate safety investigations?, The key Elements:, Security Updates, Can your vehicles be securely updated in a prompt and agile manner?, The key Elements:, Segmentation and Isolation, Do you have a published attestation of the physical and logical isolation measures you have implemented to separate critical systems from non-critical systems?, The key Elements:, It will be important to apply these concepts to make car technology more secure, since it is becoming easier and easier to exploit cars vulnerabilities, especially after researchers release the notes about their research making them available to the world, making even a script kid a dangerous potential attacker., About the Author Elsio Pinto, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – car hacking, connected cars)
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Ransomware is becoming one of the most dreaded cyber threats for netizens, security experts noticed a surge in the number of cyber attacks aimed to spread malware like Cryptowall and TeslaCrypt. Exploit kits like the Nuclear EK and the Angler EK are the privileged vectors to serve this specific family of malware, cyber criminals constantly improve their code in order to compromise the largest possible number of victims., The security expert Kafeine has recently discovered that the authors of the Angler EK have added the code of a Silverlight exploit leveraging on the CVE-2016-0034 vulnerability., The flaw was fixed by Microsoft in January with the MS16-006 critical bulletin, an attacker can exploit it for remote code execution. The Silverlight flaw discovered by the experts in Kaspersky Lab as a result of an investigation on the Hacking Team arsenal disclosed in July 2015., According to Microsoft, the remote code execution vulnerability can be exploited by an attacker that set up a website to host a specially crafted Silverlight application., When Microsoft users will visit the bogus website, the exploit will allow an attacker to obtain the same permissions as the victim., On February 18, 2016, Kafeine noticed that the author behind Angler had added code for the Silverlight exploit, according to the expert the integration was completed on February 22., Anton Ivanov, a senior malware researcher at Kaspersky confirmed that an exploit for the Silverlight exploit has been integrated to the Angler EK., CVE-2016-0034 in Angler. Overriden GetChars method in decrypted Silverlight exploit. pic.twitter.com/nnFV8F7jBv, — Anton Ivanov (@antonivanovm) 22 Febbraio 2016, , Kafeine explained that the CVE-2016-003 exploit has been used to spread a variant of the TeslaCrypt ransomware, the attacks works only with Silverlight version previous the current one, Silverlight 5.1.41212.0., Angler EK dropping Teslacrypt via silverlight 5.1.41105.0 after the “EITest” redirect 2016-02-22 (Kafeine blog post), The experts at Ars Technica who analyzed the HAcking Team’s leaked emails noticed communications between a Russian developer named Vitaliy Toropov and the staff of the Hacking Team., The man sold an Adobe Flash Player exploit to the Hacking Team for $45,000 in 2013 and also offered a Silverlight exploit., “Now your discount on the next buy is -5k and -10k is for a third bug. I recommend you the fresh 0day for iOS 7/OS X Safari or my old Silverlight exploit which was written 2.5 years ago and has all chances to survive further in next years as well. ” Toropov wrote to Hacking Team member Giancarlo Russo., Experts at Kaspersky started analyzing Toropov’s exploits, including a Silverlight Microsoft Silverlight Invalid Typecast / Memory Disclosure that was dated back 2013 and that he had published., Kaspersky issued a YARA rule to detect the exploit in the wild, and on November 25th, the company detected the Toropov’s exploit on a user’s machine. Later another sample of the exploit was uploaded from Laos to a multiscanner service., “After implementing the detection, we waited, hoping that an APT group would use it. Since Vitaliy Toropov was offering it to Hacking Team, we also assumed that he sold it to other buyers, and what good is a zero-day if you don’t use it? Unfortunately, for several months, nothing happened. We had already forgotten about this until late November 2015.” Kaspersky researchers wrote in a blog post. “On November 25th, one of our generic detections for Toropov’s 2013 Silverlight exploit triggered for one of our users. Hours later, a sample was also uploaded to a multiscanner service from Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Laos).”, The analysis of the exploit revealed that the exploit was compiled on July 21, 2015, after the Hacking Team data was leaked online. Kaspersky immediately reported the existence of the exploit to Microsoft., It’s unclear if this Silverlight exploit is the same offered by Toropov in 2013,, “One of the biggest questions we have is whether this is Vitaliy Toropov’s Silverlight zero-day which he tried to sell to Hacking Team. Or is it a different one? Several things make us think it’s one of his exploits, such as the custom error strings. Of course, there is no way to be sure and there might be several Silverlight exploits out there. One thing is for sure though – the world is a bit safer with the discovery and patching of this one.” wrote Kaspersky researchers., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Silverlight exploit, Angler EK)
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Oracle issued an emergency patch for vulnerabilities affecting several of its products that rely on the proprietary Jolt protocol., The vulnerabilities were reported by experts at ERPScan who named the set of five vulnerabilities JoltandBleed., The most critical flaw was rated with the highest CVSS base score of 9.9 and even 10.0, according to the experts it may be exploited over a network without the need for a valid username and password., The JoltandBleed issues affect the Jolt server within Oracle Tuxedo that is used by numerous Oracle’s products, including Oracle PeopleSoft. An attacker can exploit the vulnerabilities to gain full access to all data stored in the following ERP systems:, Below the complete list of the JoltandBleed vulnerabilities discovered by the expert:, The flaw ties the way Jolt Handler (JSH) processes a command with opcode 0x32, “This error is originated with that how Jolt Handler processes a command with opcode 0x32. If the package structure is incorrect, a programmer has to provide a Jolt client with a certain Jolt response indicating there is an error in the communication process,” continues ERPScan., Oracle made the patches available Tuesday for Oracle Fusion Middleware, which address all vulnerabilities., , The vulnerability was caused by a coding mistake in a function call that was responsible for packing data to transmit., “The confusion was between 2 functions, jtohi and htoji. Consequently, packing of a constant package length that must be 0x40 bytes is actually 0x40000000,” said ERPScan., “Then a client initiates the transmission of 0x40000000 bytes of data. Manipulating the communication with the client, an attacker can achieve a stable work of a server side and sensitive data leakage. Initiating a mass of connections, the hacker passively collects the internal memory of the Jolt server,”, The vulnerability causes the leakage of credentials when a user enters them through the web interface of PeopleSoft systems., Technically, the flaw is a memory leakage vulnerability similar to HeartBleed so it can be used to retrieve a user password and other sensitive data., “One of the possible attacks besides an obvious theft of employees data is for students to hack Campus Solutions and modify or delete payment orders for their education or gain financial aid. This attack as well as other details was demonstrated today at the DeepSec Security conference in Vienna.” said ErpScan., Below the video PoC published by ErpScan:, , According to Oracle the CVE-2017-10272 memory disclosure vulnerability is easy to exploit and allows a low privileged attacker with network access via Jolt to compromise Oracle Tuxedo., “Vulnerability in the Oracle Tuxedo component of Oracle Fusion Middleware (subcomponent: Core). Supported versions that are affected are 11.1.1, 12.1.1, 12.1.3 and 12.2.2. Easily exploitable vulnerability allows low privileged attacker with network access via Jolt to compromise Oracle Tuxedo.” wrote Oracle. “While the vulnerability is in Oracle Tuxedo, attacks may significantly impact additional products. Successful attacks of this vulnerability can result in unauthorized creation, deletion or modification access to critical data or all Oracle Tuxedo accessible data as well as unauthorized access to critical data or complete access to all Oracle Tuxedo accessible data and unauthorized ability to cause a partial denial of service (partial DOS) of Oracle Tuxedo.”, Pierluigi Paganini , (Security Affairs – JoltandBleed, hacking)
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CrowdStrike security firm revealed that a group of hackers, suspected to be linked to the Chinese cyber army, began targeting PCs belonging to think thank firms which are analyzing the Iraqi situation. Experts at CrowdStrike believe that the bad actor behind the attacks is the same who for years targeted US experts on Asian geopolitical matters. Experts at CrowdStrike declined to identify the companies which were targeted by the hackers., The group, dubbed “Deep Panda”, is well known to the cyber security community, during the past years it has targeted defense, financial and other industries in the US. The group used for its attacks many exploits distributing through the execution of a “drive-by download exploit” different malware, including the popular Poison Ivy., In the past the hackers mainly targeted Intelligence experts working on Southeast Asian affairs, including government experts and former officials., CrowdStrike co-founder Dmitri Alperovitch declared that he has “great confidence” that bad actors are state-sponsored hackers, but he hasn’t provided further details on the investigation conducted by his team of experts., As explained in the blog post published by CrowdStrike, think tank companies aren’t adopting necessary countermeasures to mitigate cyber threats despite the high confidential information they manage., , “Despite this high threat level, these think tanks are organized as non-profits and often do not have the budgets of commercial organizations to afford cutting-edge security technologies that can help them effectively detect these threats.” reports CrowdStrike., Experts at CrowdStrike noted a surge of the activities of the group of hackers in concomitants of the attacks, occurred in June 18th, to the Iraq’s Baiji oil refinery by ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) militants. Alleged chinese hackers started a cyber espionage campaign which targeted PCs of US think tank experts who were experts on the Iraqi crisis., , The explanation of the great interest in the Iraqi crisis is that the country is one of the principal oil producers, it is “the fifth-largest source of crude for China, while China is the largest foreign investor in Iraq’s oil infrastructure” as reported by the Reuters agency., “This actor, who was engaged in targeting and collection of Southeast Asia policy information, suddenly began targeting individuals with a tie to Iraq/Middle East issues. This is undoubtedly related to the recent Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) takeover of major parts of Iraq and the potential disruption for major Chinese oil interests in that country. In fact, Iraq happens to be the fifth-largest source of crude oil imports for China and the country is the largest foreign investor in Iraq’s oil sector. ” said CrowdStrike., Local disorders could have a serious impact on the oil exports, for this reason Chinese Government is monitoring the evolution of the insurrection in the region. According to the experts of the security company the hacking group is one of the most sophisticated of the 30 it tracks in China, its cyber espionage campaigns are conducted with impressive efficiency making hard their detection and the attribution to state-sponsored hackers., The analysis provided by CrowdStrike is the demonstration that Governments are increasing the practice of state-sponsored hacking to collect sensitive information on events that could have a serious repercussion on the economy, the security and politics of a country. Hacking groups like Deep Panda represent a menace for every industry as explained by the experts., “DEEP PANDA presents a very serious threat not just to think tanks, but also multinational financial institutions, law firms, defense contractors, and government agencies. Due to their stellar operational security and reliance on anti-forensic and anti-IOC detection techniques, detecting and stopping them is very challenging” states the report., Pierluigi Paganini, Security Affairs – (CrowdStrike, Iraq, DEEP PANDA)0
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, The GandCrab was advertised in Russian hacking community, researchers noticed that authors leverage the RIG and GrandSoft exploit kits to distribute the malware., Partners are prohibited from targeting countries in the Commonwealth of Independent States (Azerbaijan, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Ukraine)., “As of today, a new decryption tool for victims of the GandCrab ransomware is available on www.nomoreransom.org. This tool has been released by the Romanian Police (IGPR) under the supervision of the General Prosecutor’s Office (DIICOT) and in collaboration with the internet security company Bitdefender and Europol.” reads the announcement published by the Europol.“First detected one month ago, GandCrab has already made 50 000 victims worldwide, a vast number of which in Europe, making it one of the most aggressive forms of ransomware so far this year.”, Victims of GandCrab ransomware thanks to Bitdefender and the European law enforcement can recover files without paying the ransom., “Ransomware has become a billion-dollar cash cow for malware authors, and GandCrab is one of the highest bidders,” Bitdefender’s Senior Director of the Investigation and Forensics Unit, Catalin Cosoi says. , “We are glad to provide our technical expertise in fighting cyber-crime as our long-standing mission is to protect the world’s Internet users and organizations. In the near future, we expect ransomware developers to migrate towards mining and stealing cryptocurrency”, , The tool is available on Bitdefender’s website here, and through No More Ransom here., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – GandCrab Ransomware, decryptor)
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This story reminds us that every time we download an app we are enlarging our surface of attack, in the majority of cases we are not aware of exact amount of data they collect and how they use them, A group of researchers at the Kromtech Security Center has discovered online a huge trove of personal data belonging to more than 31 million users of the popular virtual keyboard app, AI.type., The data was included in a MongoDB database that has been accidentally exposed online without any mechanism of protection., “The Kromtech Security Center has discovered a massive amount of customer files leaked online and publically available. Researchers were able to access the data and details of 31,293,959 users.” states the post published by Kromtech Security., “The misconfigured MongoDB database appears to belong to Ai.Type a Tel Aviv-based startup that designs and develops a personalized keyboard for mobile phones and tablets for both Android and iOS devices.”, The misconfigured MongoDB database exposed 577 GB of data online, the records include sensitive details on the users, and the worst thing is that such data was not even necessary for the app to work. Researchers highlighted the fact that the Ai.Type request “Full Access” to all data stored on the mobile devices., “When researchers installed Ai.Type they were shocked to discover that users must allow “Full Access” to all of their data stored on the testng iPhone, including all keyboard data past and present. It raises the question of why would a keyboard and emoji application need to gather the entire data of the user’s phone or tablet?” continues the post., “Based on the leaked database they appear to collect everything from contacts to keystrokes. This is a shocking amount of information on their users who assume they are getting a simple keyboard application.”, , The leaked data includes:, The researcher made another shocking discovery, the 6,435,813 records contained data collected by the app from users’ contact books. The leaked database included more than 373 million records scraped from registered users’ phones, which include all their contacts saved/synced on linked Google account., The archive also includes a range of statistics., “There was a range of other statistics like the most popular users’ Google queries for different regions. Data like average messages per day, words per message, the age of users, words_per_day’: 0.0, ‘word_per_session and a detailed look at their customers,” the researchers say., The real question is, “why would like a keyboard, and emoji application need to gather the entire data of the user’s phone or tablet?”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Google Unwanted Software Policy, privacy)
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Godless is a new strain of malware that uses multiple rooting exploit to compromise Android mobile devices., The mobile malware is a sort of hacking platform that includes an open-source rooting framework called android-rooting-tools., The availability of multiple exploits in the framework makes this threat very dangerous, among the known flaws exploited by the Godless there are the CVE-2015-3636 and CVE-2014-3153., The threat that can compromise devices running Android 5.1 (Lollipop) or earlier was spotted by experts from Trend Micro. Godless has already infected over 850,000 devices worldwide, bad actors delivered it through malicious applications deployed in legitimate app stores, including Google Play., , “We came across a family of mobile malware called Godless (detected as ANDROIDOS_GODLESS.HRX) that has a set of rooting exploits in its pockets.” states the post published by Trend Micro. “By having multiple exploits to use, Godless can target virtually any Android device running on Android 5.1 (Lollipop) or earlier. “, Once the malware has rooted the device it can make several operations through the installation of malicious apps, the experts highlighted that threat has evolved over the time and last variants are able to root the device remotely by downloading malicious payload from the C&C server., Researchers also observed that first samples of the malware were implementing a standalone Google Play client to steal users’ login credentials, meanwhile, the latest variant installs a backdoor with root access that allows attackers to completely control the device., “We have seen the evolution of this family. In earlier Godless versions, malicious apps contain a local exploit binary called libgodlikelib.so , which uses exploit code from android-rooting-tools.” states Trend Micro., “Recently, we came across a new Godless variant that is made to only fetch the exploit and the payload from a remote command and control (C&C) server, hxxp://market.moboplay.com/softs.ashx. We believe that this routine is done so that the malware can bypass security checks done by app stores, such as Google Play.”, The experts observed that several legitimate apps on Google Play have corresponding malicious versions in the wild and even share the same developer certificate., “The versions on Google Play do not have the malicious code. Thus, there is a potential risk that users with non-malicious apps will be upgraded to the malicious versions without them knowing about apps’ new malicious behavior,” Trend Micro says., Experts from Trend Micro suggest to carefully review the developer of the app that we are going to download. Don’t trust unknown developers with a low reputation and no background information. Of course always download the apps from trusted stores such as Google Play, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Godless , Android malware)
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Enjoy the interview., , , Hi Matteo, you are one of the most respected Italian experts on cyber security. Could you tell me which his your technical background and when you started hacking? , Thank you for the interview Pierluigi. I’m of ‘72, and as many of my current colleagues, I started programming BASIC with the Commodore VIC 20 in the early ‘80s. I started hacking for fun on TV screen in the first big supermarket in France that was controlled by a C-20… Then I studied Scientific High School with Informatics and Informatics Engineering at the University of Bologna to improve my technical background., What was your greatest hacking challenge? , From my perspective hacking and challenge are the same thing, so if I look behind me surely the challenge to start from scratch the new OWASP Testing Guide in 2005 represented for me the big project I ever did. In 3 months thanks to hundreds of people involved in the project, we wrote a new methodologies, that nowadays represent the standard de facto to perform a web application penetration testing What are the 3 tools that cannot be missed in the hacker’s arsenal and why? , The first great tool is our mind with all the mindset on to think out of the box, the second one is our eyes to identify the issues asap, third our hands to write tools to hack the specific scenario., Joke at part I suggest to use the following:, – OWASP Zap to navigate the web sites and find web vulnerabilities (see a basic example of how to find a very easy vulnerability in 2005 using an HTTP Proxy as Zap here: – Wifi Pineapple to show the weakness of the today wireless model (see here a demonstration I did at the last Festival of Journalism: – Finally, Kali Linux for sure is the best container of all the best hacking tools., Which are the most interesting hacking communities on the web today? , You know I’m involved in OWASP (The Open Web Application Security Project from 2001, so I see OWASP as one of the most interesting hacking communities world wide. Here you can find all the information, tools and methodologies to understand how to hack a web application and how to protect it., Which is the industry (healthcare, automotive, telecommunication, banking, and so on) most exposed to cyber attacks and why? , Nowadays all the industries are exposed to cyber attacks because they are part of the cyber space and anyone, from anywhere at any time can interact with their services. In the communities we are discussing about new attacking techniques, how to exploit new 0days but if we look at the last years we see a few very complex and innovative attacks to the industries; many attacks today rely on old techniques such as SQL injection, basic malware or the exploiting of old vulnerabilities that are not patched on critical systems. That said, we can affirm that the easiest way to attack a company nowadays it to send fake emails to exploit old vulnerabilities or hack the wifi network. The Companies are not ready to manage attacks with old techniques such as ransomware or pineapple wifi network: they do not understand they are under attack., What scares you more on the Internet? , I’m not scares of the Internet and no one should be scared about the freedom of the Net. I’m scared that many Companies are not ready to protect them from basic attacks that happens today. The key points are to have an internal team and processes in place capable of fixing the vulnerabilities as soon as possible , to manage the possible attacks and to and to raise the awareness about cyber attacks in the Company., We often hear about cyber weapons and cyber attacks against critical infrastructure. Do you believe concrete the risk of a major and lethal cyber attack against a critical infrastructure? Why and which are the most exposed CI?, Today it is very easy to hack networks that use old technologies: for example many companies are still using today Window XP and Internet Explorer 8. From an attacker point of view, there are a plethora of way to comprise successfully this scenario using old exploits that already work., CI represent a collections of old technologies and we can affirm that the maturity regarding cyber risk is very low comparing to the IT of TELCO, Finance companies. So they are very exposed to possible cyber attacks, it is only a question of opportunity for the cyber criminals and time maybe…, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Hacker, s1ege)
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Researchers from Trend Micro discovered that a targeted attack against a government agency in Taiwan was conducted using a variant of the PlugX remote access tool (RAT) which abuses the popular file hosting service Dropbox. Security experts have discovered in the last years, many malware based attacks exploiting the popular PlugX, it is very cheap and friendly for attackers that can arrange easily a malicious campaign making hard the attribution of responsibility because the large diffusion of the malicious agent., Experts at Trend Micro recently detected a variant of PlugX RAT communicating its command and control (C&C) settings from Dropbox, the trick was adopted by attackers to masquerade the malicious traffic and making hard the detection by law enforcement and security firms., Monitoring network traffic is one of the most used technique to determine if there is an ongoing targeted attack, security experts are able to identify traffic patterns related principal botnet and RATs (e.g. Gh0st, PoisonIvy, Hupigon and PlugX), communication with command-and-control (C&C) are quite easy to detect with this method., “Last May we encountered a targeted attack that hit a government agency in Taiwan. In the said attack, threat actors used PlugX RAT that abused Dropbox to download its C&C settings. The Dropbox abuse is no longer new since an attack before employed this platform to host the malware. However, this is the first instance we’ve seen this technique of using Dropbox to update its C&C settings in the cases we analyzed related to targeted attacks.” reports Trend Micro official post., Dropbox is used by personnel of many organizations and government entities, principal defense systems deployed by their security teams in charge of their protection might not flag communications between the PlugX RAT and DropBox folders as an indicator on compromise., , As explained by experts at Trend Micro, it is frequent to observe bad actors which abuse legitimate file sharing services, but this is the first time Dropbox has been used to store C&C settings as part of a targeted attack., The PlugX instances analyzed by by researchers at Trend Micro have, identified as BKDR_PLUGX.ZTBF-A and TROJ_PLUGX.ZTBF-A, implements classic features of any other RAT, it installs a backdoor with that allows an attacker the complete control of compromised machines., The two types of malware belong to different categories of PlugX, the second one (TROJ_PLUGX.ZTBF-A,) is considered a new version which implements incorporates anti-forensic techniques, an authentication mechanism of the attacker, a different encryption algorithm, extended configuration, and more protocols and functions., The attackers have used a particular PlugX RAT variant which includes a a triggering mechanism based on the system date to make much more hard malware detection., “This backdoor also connects to a certain URL for its C&C settings. The use of Dropbox aids in masking the malicious traffic in the network because this is a legitimate website for storing files and documents. We also found out that this malware has a trigger date of May 5, 2014, which means that it starts running from that date. This is probably done so that users won’t immediately suspect any malicious activities on their systems.” continues Trend Micro., Trend Micro notified Dropbox of the targeted attack, but security researchers highlight the fact that the bad actors are simply abusing of the file sharing service not exploiting any vulnerabilities in it., “Keep in mind, this isn’t a problem with Dropbox per se: it appears these cybercriminals have signed up for legitimate accounts but are using them for malicious ends. There are two takeaways from this. First, cybercriminals recognize the business benefits of cloud services and will likely continue to migrate from self-hosted (or compromised-server-hosted) attacks to cloud services. Second, for CISOs and security managers, it increasingly makes sense to block access to any cloud-based services where there is no legitimate business need.” said Christopher Budd, Trend Micro’s global manager of threat communications, , Let me close with a final consideration made by experts at Trend Micro on the necessity to use threat intelligence to interrupt the attack chain., “The publicly available information on indicators of compromise can determine if an enterprise is being hit by targeted attacks. This may be incorporated in their security solutions, thus, breaking the attack cycle and possible data exfiltration from the target enterprise or large organization.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – PlugX, malware)
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According to the Dutch news site Tweakers, the Taiwan-based networking equipment manufacturer D-Link accidently published its private code signing keys inside its open source firmware packages., One of the readers of the Dutch news site reported, “bartvbl,” reported the serious issues after he had bought a D-Link DCS-5020L security camera and downloaded the firmware from the official website of D-Link., D-Link open sources its firmware under the GPL license allowing anyone to analyze it. bartvbl has discovered four different private keys used for code signing., The reader also discovered other three private code signing keys that appear to be not valid and pass-phrases needed to sign the software., The disconcerting discovery was confirmed by the security expert Yonathan Klijnsma from security firm Fox-IT., “The code signing certificate is indeed a firmware package, firmware version 1.00b03, who’s source was released February 27 this year,” explained the expert., Why the access to the code signing keys is so important?, Malware creators use to steal valid code signing certificates to sign the source code of their malware and evade detection of security firms., , At the time I was writing, it is still unclear whether the code signing private keys have been used by threat actors to sign their malicious code signing certificate, and released a new version of the firmware that doesn’t contain any code signing keys., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – code signing keys, D-Link)
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In July, at least two individuals from New York have been charged with online child pornography crimes after visiting a hidden service on the Tor network. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had used a hacking tool to identify de-anonymize the suspects while surfing on the Tor network., Now we have more information on the operation conducted by the FBI, the law enforcement hacked over a thousand computers, according to court documents reviewed by Motherboard., It is the first time that the FBI conducted a so extended operation against Tor users., According to the court documents, the FBI monitored a bulletin board hidden service launched in August 2014, named Playpen, mainly used for “the advertisement and distribution of child pornography.”, The Playpen hidden service reached in one year over 200,000 users, with over 117,000 total posts mainly containing child pornography content. The law enforcement discovered nearly 1300 IP addresses belonging to the visitors., , According to Motherboard, the server running Playpen was seized by the FBI from a web host in North Carolina, then the law enforcement managed the computer to track its visitors. The agents used the a network investigative technique (NIT) to obtain the IP addresses of the Playpen users., It isn’t the first time that the FBI used the NIT to de-anonymize Tor users, on December 22nd, 2014 Mr. Joseph Gross retained the assistance of Dr. Ashley Podhradsky, Dr. Matt Miller, and Mr. Josh Stroschein to provide the testimony as the expert in the process against pedo’s on Tor.
The suspects were accused in federal court in Omaha of viewing and possessing of child pornography., The NIT was a Flash-based application that was developed by H.D.Moore and was released as part of Metasploit. The NIT, or more formally, Metasploit Decloaking Engine was designed to provide the real IP address of web users, regardless of proxy settings.” stated the forensic report., , According to the act of the process, the investigators were informed that there were three servers containing contraband images that the FBI found and took offline in November of 2012., Also in that case the authorities used the server as a bait for online pedos, then the Bureau placed the NIT on the servers and used them to de-anonymize TOR users accessing the illegal content. With this technique, the FBI identified the IP addresses of visitors., The NIT was also used in 2011, by agents running the “Operation Torpedo,” it was the first time that FBI deployed a tracking code broadly against every visitor to a website, instead of targeting a particular user., According to some clues emerged in the Playpen case, the version of NIT currently used by the FBI is different from the one used in the past during the Operation Torpedo., The legal counsel for one of the men accused speculates that the number of individuals charged with online child pornography crimes after visiting PlayPen may increase in the next months., “Fifteen-hundred or so of these cases are going to end up getting filed out of the same, underlying investigation,” Colin Fieman, a federal public defender handling several of the related cases, told Motherboard in a phone interview. Fieman, who is representing Jay Michaud, a Vancouver teacher arrested in July 2015, said his estimate comes from what “we’ve seen in terms of the discovery.”, “There will probably be an escalating stream of these cases in the next six months or so,” said Colin Fieman, the federal public defender of Jay Michaud in a phone interview with Motherboard. “There is going to be a lot in the pipeline.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – NIT, Tor users)
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In May, tech giants Intel, AMD, ARM, IBM, Microsoft and other tech firms teamed to disclose two new variants of both Meltdown and Spectre issues., The so-called Variant 4 (CVE-2018-3639) relies on a Speculative Store Bypass (SSB), while the Variant 3a (CVE-2018-3640) is a Rogue System Register., Both Variant 4 and Variant 3a could be exploited by a local attacker for this reason they have been rated “medium severity”, According to Oracle’s security advisory, Variant 4 affects Oracle Linux versions 6 and 7, and Oracle VM 3.4,, “Systems with microprocessors utilizing speculative execution and speculative execution of memory reads before the addresses of all prior memory writes are known may allow unauthorized disclosure of information to an attacker with local user access via a side-channel analysis, aka Speculative Store Bypass (SSB), Variant 4.” reads the security advisory published by Oracle., , Oracle has released software updates for the Oracle Linux distribution and Oracle VM virtualization products, along with the microcode updates provided by Intel., “Two new processor vulnerabilities were publicly disclosed on May 21, 2018. They are vulnerabilities CVE-2018-3640 ( “Spectre v3a” or “Rogue System Register Read”) and CVE-2018-3639 (“Spectre v4” or “Speculative Store Buffer Bypass”). Both vulnerabilities have received a CVSS Base Score of 4.3., Successful exploitation of vulnerability CVE-2018-3639 requires local access to the targeted system. Mitigating this vulnerability on affected systems will require both software and microcode updates.” states Oracle in a blog post, “Oracle will continue to release new microcode updates and firmware patches as production microcode becomes available from Intel,” , Oracle promptly addressed the initial Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities in January 2018 Critical Patch Update just after their disclosure., Since January, other side-channel attacks have been discovered, including BranchScope, SgxPectre, and the attacks against the System Management Mode (SMM) memory., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Oracle, Spectre and Meltdown attacks)
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Google website, like many other web services, is blocked by the Chinese Government, which operate a rugged censorship on the Internet content. But block a resource like Google is anachronistic and counterproductive, for this reason, China allows access to it through the The China Education and Research Network (CERNET)., Of course privacy and security experts fear that the Chinese Government is monitoring users accessing the Google service through the CERNET, the non-profit organization GreatFire revealed that starting on August 28th, CERNET users have been observing warning messages related to use of invalid SSL certificates accessing google.com and google.com.hk website. The circumstance is not new, in case like this there is the possibility that Chinese authorities are running a man-in-the-middle (MitM) attack to eavesdrop encrypted traffic between CERNET and Google., , The evidence, which we include later in this post, indicates that this was caused by a man-in-the-middle attack., “While the authorities have been blocking access to most things Google since June 4th, they have kept their hands off of CERNET, China’s nationwide education and research network. However, in the lead up to the new school year, the Chinese authorities launched a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack against Google.” “Instead of just outright blocking Google on CERNET, which would have raised the ire of students, educators and researchers across China, the authorities felt that a MITM attack would serve their purpose. By placing a man-in-the-middle, the authorities can continue to provide students and researchers access to Google while eavesdropping or blocking selective search queries and results,” GreatFire reported in a blog post., The thesis sustained by GreatFire has been refuted by software vendor Netresec which has analyzed two of the packets used in the attacks, confirming that there is the Chinese Government behind the MITM attack., “The Chinese are running a MITM attack on SSL encrypted traffic between Chinese universities and Google. We’ve performed technical analysis of the attack, on request from GreatFire.org, and can confirm that it is a real SSL MITM against www.google.com and that it is being performed from within China.”, “It’s difficult to say exactly how the MITM attack was carried out, but we can dismiss DNS spoofing as the used method. A more probable method would be IP hijacking; either through a BGP prefix hijacking or some form of packet injection. However, regardless of how they did it the attacker would be able to decrypt and inspect the traffic going to Google,” Netresec researchers noted in a blog post., , , The captured files contain pure IPv6 traffic, the CERNET use this protocol, both addresses appear legit, one from Peking University (netname PKU6-CERNET2) and the other from Chongqing University (CQU6-CERNET2)., “Both IP addresses belong to AS23910, named “China Next Generation Internet CERNET2”. states Netresec., The Chinese Government has already conducted similar attacks in the past, in January 2013, the users of GitHub service in China reported seeing warning messages about invalid certificates. At the time, experts believed that the attacks was run due to a petition asking that the creators of the “Great Firewall of China,” be denied entry to the United States. GitHub was chosen to disclose the list of the names of experts whowho supported the creation of the censorship system causing the reaction of the Chinese Government., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – MITM , Censorship)
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6605_71708
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Security experts at Kaspersky Lab ICS CERT have published a detailed analysis of the server compromised by the notorious Energetic Bear APT group (Dragonfly and Crouching Yeti) across the years., The Energetic Bear APT group has been active since at least 2010 most of the victims of the group are organizations in the energy and industrial sectors., In March 2018, the Department of Homeland Security and Federal Bureau of Investigation issued a joint technical alert to warn of attacks on US critical infrastructure powered by Russian threat actors. The US-CERT blamed the APT group tracked as Dragonfly, Crouching Yeti, and Energetic Bear., A week later, the US-CERT updated its alert by providing further info that and officially linking the above APT groups to the Kremlin., The Alert (TA18-074A) warns of “Russian Government Cyber Activity Targeting Energy and Other Critical Infrastructure Sectors,” it labels the attackers as “Russian government cyber actors.”, “This alert provides information on Russian government actions targeting U.S. Government entities as well as organizations in the energy, nuclear, commercial facilities, water, aviation, and critical manufacturing sectors.” reads the alert. , “It also contains indicators of compromise (IOCs) and technical details on the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) used by Russian government cyber actors on compromised victim networks.” , The analysis of indicators of compromise (IoCs) shows the Dragonfly threat actor is still very active and its attacks are ongoing., “DHS and FBI characterize this activity as a multi-stage intrusion campaign by Russian government cyber actors who targeted small commercial facilities’ networks where they staged malware, conducted spear phishing, and gained remote access into energy sector networks.” continues the alert. “After obtaining access, the Russian government cyber actors conducted network reconnaissance, moved laterally, and collected information pertaining to Industrial Control Systems (ICS).”, “The main tactics of the group include sending phishing emails with malicious documents and infecting various servers. The group uses some of the infected servers for auxiliary purposes – to host tools and logs. Others are deliberately infected to use them in waterhole attacks in order to reach the group’s main targets.” reads the report published by Kaspersky., Most of the compromised servers were used in waterhole attacks, the others were used to host hacking tools or as a repository for data exfiltrated from target machines., The servers analyzed by Kaspersky were located in several countries, including Russia, Ukraine, UK, Germany, Turkey, Greece, and the United States., Below the full list of compromised servers:, All the servers involved in waterhole attacks were infected following the same pattern, attackers injected a link into a web page or JS file with the following file scheme: file://IP/filename.png., , The injected link is used to request an image on a remote server over the SMB protocol, with this trick attackers are able to extract victims’ user IP, username, domain name, and NTLM hash of the user’s password., Experts observed the compromised servers were also used to conduct attacks on other resources by using several tools to scan websites and servers located in Russia, Ukraine, and Turkey, with Brazil, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Switzerland, U.S., France, and Vietnam., “Compromised servers are in some cases used to conduct attacks on other resources. In the process of analyzing infected servers, numerous websites and servers were identified that the attackers had scanned with various tools, such as nmap, dirsearch, sqlmap, etc. (tool descriptions are provided below).” continues the report., “The sites and servers on this list do not seem to have anything in common. Even though the scanned servers do not necessarily look like potential final victims, it is likely that the attackers scanned different resources to find a server that could be used to establish a foothold for hosting the attackers’ tools and, subsequently, to develop the attack., Part of the sites scanned may have been of interest to the attackers as candidates for hosting waterhole resources.”, The analysis of the server used by the Energetic Bear APT revealed that many of them were used to host open-source tools, including Nmap (network analysis), Dirsearch (brute forcing directories and files on websites), Sqlmap (SQL injection exploitation), Sublist3r (enumerates website subdomains), Wpscan (WordPress vulnerability scanner), Impacket, SMBTrap, Commix (vulnerability search and command injection), Subbrute (subdomain enumeration), and PHPMailer (mail sending)., On one server Kaspersky has found a Python script named ftpChecker.py that was used for checking FTP hosts from an incoming list., The server also contains a series of malicious php files in different directories in the nginx folder and in a working directory created by attackers on an infected web server. Experts also discovered a modified sshd with a preinstalled backdoor that is similar to a tool publicly available on GitHub that can be compiled on any OS., “As a result of replacing the original sshd file with a modified one on the infected server, an attacker can use a ‘master password’ to get authorized on the remote server, while leaving minimal traces (compared to an ordinary user connecting via ssh).” continues Kaspersky., “In addition, the modified sshd logs all legitimate ssh connections (this does not apply to the connection that uses the ‘master password’), including connection times, account names and passwords. The log is encrypted and is located at /var/tmp/.pipe.sock.”, According to Kaspersky, the use of publicly available tools makes hard the attribution of the infrastructure to a specific threat actor., “The diversity of victims may indicate the diversity of the attackers’ interests. It can be assumed with some degree of certainty that the group operates in the interests of or takes orders from customers that are external to it, performing initial data collection, the theft of authentication data and gaining persistence on resources that are suitable for the attack’s further development,” Kaspersky concludes., Pierluigi Paganini, Security Affairs – (Energetic Bear, APT)
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