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5520_61442 | What about hacking into Internet-connected car wash machines?, It is a scarring scenario, hackers from anywhere in the world could transform car washing machines into death traps., In a talk at the Black Hat 2017 conference in Las Vegas, the popular hacker Billy Rios, founder of security shop Whitescope, and Jonathan Butts, committee chair for the IFIP Working Group on Critical Infrastructure Protection, demonstrated how to compromise widely used control systems for car washing machines. The experts hacked: the Laserwash series manufactured by PDQ., The Laserwash systems can be remotely controlled via a web-based user interface:, , The control system is an embedded WindowsCE computer powered by an ARM-compatible processor., As you know, Microsoft no longer provides security updates for this specific OS, this means that hackers can exploit known vulnerabilities to remotely execute code on the system and fully compromise it., Another possibility for attackers consists in the exploitation of the lack of secure installs, for example, the security duo had found a suitable car wash exposed online with the default password 12345. Once logged in from their browser, they were given full control of the system with serious consequences., “Car washes are really just industrial control systems. The attitudes of ICS are still in there,” Rios said. “We’ve written an exploit to cause a car wash system to physically attack; it will strike anyone in the car wash. We think this is the first exploit that causes a connected device to attack someone.”, The duo presented to the audience how they managed to bypass the safety sensors on the car wash doors to close them on a car entering the washer. Of course, the hackers can conduct more destructive attacks controlling the entire car washing machine, the can control the bay doors and use them to either lock the vehicle in or strike it and its occupants. Hackers can also take control of the robotic washing arm and hit the vehicle and its occupants., “We controlled all the machinery inside the car wash and could shut down the safety systems,” he said. “You could set the roller arms to come down much lower and crush the top of the car, provided there was not mechanical barriers in place.”, The experts reported their findings to PDQ in February 2015, but they received a reply from the company only when their talk was accepted for Black Hat, then the manufacturer turned out that it wasn’t possible to patch against such kind of attacks., PDQ alerted its customers and urged them to change their default password or protect the car washing machines with network appliances that will filter incoming traffic., The ICS-CERT issued a security advisory on Thursday, warning of the presence of the vulnerabilities in several models of PDQ’s LaserWash, Laser Jet and ProTouch automatic car wash systems., “Successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities may allow a remote attacker to gain unauthorized access to the affected system and to issue unexpected commands to impact the intended operation of the system.” states the CERT., Below the list of recommendations for the users:, PDQ recommends that users apply the following controls:, NCCIC/ICS-CERT recommends that users take defensive measures to minimize the risk of exploitation of these vulnerabilities. Specifically, users should:, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – (car washing machines, hacking) |
6277_68569 | Security researcher Zhu WenZhe from Istury IOT discovered a critical stack-based buffer overflow vulnerability in the web server component of 3S-Smart Software Solutions’ CODESYS WebVisu product that allows users to view human-machine interfaces (HMIs) for programmable logic controllers (PLCs) in a web browser., The vulnerability is tracked as CVE-2018-5440 and it has been assigned a CVSS score of 9.8, and the worst news is that it is quite easy to exploit., The WebVisu product is currently used in 116 PLCs and HMIs from many vendors, including Schneider Electric, Hitachi, Advantech, Berghof Automation, Hans Turck, and NEXCOM., An attacker can remotely trigger the flaw to cause a denial-of-service (DoS) condition and under some conditions execute arbitrary code on the web server., “A crafted request may cause a buffer overflow and could therefore execute arbitrary code on the web server or lead to a denial-of-service condition due to a crash in the web server. ” reads the security advisory issued by CODESYS., According to CODESYS, there is no evidence that the flaw has been exploited in the wild., The flaw affects all Microsoft Windows (also WinCE) based CODESYS V2.3 web servers running stand-alone or as part of the CODESYS runtime system prior version V1.1.9.19., The company has released the CODESYS web server V.1.1.9.19 for CODESYS V2.3 to
address the flaw. This is also part of the CODESYS setup V2.3.9.56., The vendor also recommends organizations to restrict access to controllers, use firewalls to control the accesses and VPNs., In December 2017, security researchers at SEC Consult discovered a flaw in version 2.4.7.0 of the CODESYS runtime which is included on PFC200s with firmware version 02.07.07. The CODESYS runtime is commonly included on PLCs to allow for easy programming by users. 17 models of WAGO PFC200 Series PLC were found vulnerable to remote exploit., A PLC flaw can be a serious threat to production and critical infrastructure, Back to the present, querying the Shodan search engine for port 2455 used by CODESYS protocol we can find more than 5,600 systems are exposed online, most of them in the United States, Germany, Turkey, and China., , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – WannaMine , cryptocurrency miner) |
7012_75039 | Data breaches are extraordinarily costly for businesses that experience them, both concerning reputational damage and money spent to repair the issues associated with those fiascos. And, on the consumer side of things, the scary thing is hackers don’t just steal data for notoriety. They do it to profit, typically by selling the snatched details online., But, then, are other businesses aware of times when the data they just bought might have been stolen instead of legally obtained?, There was a time when venturing into the world of the online black market typically meant downloading encryption software that hid the identity of users. However, most black market transactions happen on the “open” web so that it’s possible to access the respective sites via browsers like Firefox and Chrome without downloading special software first., That means business representatives aren’t safe from coming across stolen data if they decide only to browse the internet normally. However, the kind of information advertised on the open web should be enough to raise eyebrows by itself. It often contains credit card information or sensitive medical details — not merely names, email addresses or phone numbers., Companies can reduce the chances of unknowingly benefiting from stolen data by not proceeding with purchases if they contain private, not readily obtainable details., Even when people seek to profit by peddling stolen data, their desire to make money typically isn’t stronger than their need to remain anonymous. Most criminals who deal with data from illegal sources don’t reveal their names even when seeking payment. They’ll often request money through means that allow keeping their identities secret, such as Bitcoin., If companies encounter data sellers that stay very secretive about how they get their data and whether it is in compliance with data protection and sharing standards, those are red flags., However, even when data providers do list information about how they obtain data, it’s a good idea to validate the data on your own. For example, if you get calling data from a third-party provider, you should always check it against current Do Not Call lists., As mentioned above, stolen data frequently works its way through the open web rather than the dark web. However, it’s still advisable for companies to utilize monitoring services that search the dark web for stolen data. The market for such information is lucrative, and some clients pay as much as $150,000 annually for such screening measures. If businesses provide data that comes up as originating from the dark web, that’s a strong indicator that it came from unethical sources., , It’s difficult to quantify how many reputable companies might be purchasing stolen data. If they do it knowingly, such a practice breaks the law. And, even if it happens without their knowledge, that’s still a poor reflection on those responsible. It means they didn’t carefully check data sources and sellers before going through with a purchase., Unfortunately, analysts believe it happens frequently. After data breaches occur, some of the affected companies discover their data being sold online and buy it back. When hackers realize even those who initially had the data seized will pay for it, they realize there’s a demand for their criminal actions., After suffering data breaches, some companies even ask their own employees to find stolen data and buy it back., Most use intermediary parties, though representatives at major companies, including PayPal, acknowledge that this process of compensating hackers for the data they took occurs regularly. They say it’s part of the various actions that happen to protect customers — or to prevent them from knowing breaches happened at all., If companies can find and recover their stolen data quickly enough, customers might never realize hackers had their details. That’s especially likely, since affected parties often don’t hear about breaches until months after companies do, giving those entities ample time to locate data and offer hackers a price for it., Plus, it’s important to remember that companies pay tens of thousands of dollars to recover their data after ransomware attacks, too., When companies buy data that’s new to them, they should engage in the preventative measures above to verify its sources and check that it’s not stolen. Also, although businesses justify buying compromised data back from hackers, they have to remember that by doing so, they are stimulating demand — and that makes them partially to blame., Instead of spending money to retrieve data that hackers take, those dollars would be better spent cracking down on the vulnerabilities that allow breaches to happen so frequently., Kayla Matthews is a technology and cybersecurity writer, and the owner of ProductivityBytes.com. To learn more about Kayla and her recent projects, visit her About Me page., , , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – stolan data, data breach) |
5333_60019 | Usually, I do use one of these two:, At this point, we need to solder back the wires in the USB HUB and connect WHID_Injector to it., , , , Here below I recorded a couple of PoCs about some useful payloads I was using during engagements. Enjoy!, You will see how WHID can easily help pen testers to exfiltrate domain credentials with both Phishing Technique and Mimikatz (FUDed) In-Memory., Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – hacking) |
765_18251 | “We have decided to install a monitor on our Illinois 1 node so as to locate the hacker. A few hours after we announced this move to our public, the hacker came to us to apologize. We then completely removed the Wireshark installation.”, “If you are the hacker, please stop your activities and leave our network. You are not welcome here. Our heaven is reserved for those who are not harmful to other human beings. If you do not leave, we will find you and report your activities to NGO and press officers. For all others, the heaven is still safe for you, dear ones. We will completely remove Wireshark after 7 days and restart the node so that everything is erased (RAM-switch). All other nodes are left unaffected by these actions. Update: Wireshark has now been removed/wiped.“, So how does the user know if he can trust his provider?, Sincerely user has no choice, he can only trust the answers they provided on privacy issues, I always suggest to carefully read the VPN service you sign up with, despite I’m conscious that there are no privacy guarantees., I could be useful to promote the constitution for an independent foundation to do regular audits security and privacy issues of VPN providers …would be an important step forward!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Proxy.sh, privacy, VPN) |
5272_59527 | The best news of the week with Security Affairs., Hurry up, subscribe to the newsletter, next Sunday you will receive all the news directly in your inbox.I desire to inform you that Security Affairs is now open to sponsored content.
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80_1698 | India, a nation technologically advanced, of which we have so much discussed in recent weeks. We have discussed about the interference of its government obsessed with desire to control private citizens, and every company operating in the domestic market. All is started with the Symantec case, the well-known manufacturer of security systems, victim of an attack to the Indian military systems that guarded the code of some of its products. Why Indian Forces possessed the source code of the Symantec popular products? The answer is simple, the government seems to have imposed an agreement to the company that would provide the opportunity to dispose and to inspect any component of the products, including sources code. The reasons are obviously related to national security requirements. However, as events have shown, to this government request has not been paid with a proper professionalism in the management of valuable information., , It is of course only the tip of the iceberg. A few days later, in internet were available some confidential documents of the Indian Government that confirm the invasive behavior against companies which are required to offer every kind of support for surveillance and monitoring activities. It is happened with the project RINOA in which it would seem that the Indian authorities have asked to the three giants RIM, Nokia and Apple to provide a backdoor for remote control of their devices.
This triggered some controversy for the uncompromising attitude of a government that seeks to ensure the safety of its citiziens with a fine-grained control of the population. But let’s not forget a crucial aspect, India suffers significantly corruption, and monitoring actions such as those we are discussing pose serious consideration about a possible censorship behaviour., Unfortunately, those stories are not isolated incidents but a deliberate policy of a government that can hardly be shared. Obviously, the same government came early in the friction with the main suppliers of technological services such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo. Initially they were asked, in the absence of national legislation, to provide all the tools to exercise detailed control of the major social media and search engines, after the indian government has decided to regulate, from a legislative point of view, the work of those companies.
What worries is that recently the Indian government granted its approval to criminally prosecute companies like Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Yahoo for publishing objectionable contents., The Delhi High Court has decided to procede against these companies, starting the criminal trial for diverse offenses under Indian laws. The indian law will oblige the central management of companies to appear at hearings. Now the Delhi Istitutions can also prosecute these parent companies after the sanction has been received., If the rappresentant of the companies do not appear there will be serious repercussions on the final assessment. The information technology amendment act 2008 (IT Act 2008) is the principal cyber law in India, but its inadequacy to legislate on this issues, and it is the basis of all misinterpretations made by the government., This mode of legislate demonstrates the inadequacy of a nation in addressing important issues such as regulation of social media. These forms of censorship may lead to a regression of the nation itself, the forms of communication are in fact an essential element for the development of the country and this government interference can only harm to social texture., From a strictly economic point of view, in spite of any tax benefits and the availability of highly qualified personnel at competitive costs, a policy so intrusive and oppressive is not an attraction for foreign capital and companies. At the same time just the intellectual heritage of the nation has an incentive to leave the nation in search of countries where freedom of expression is guaranteed.
If the Indian government will not change policy soon will face problems that are not prepared to resolve with catastrophic consequences., Pierluigi Paganini |
4449_52986 | On Oct. 31, the Google Threat Analysis Group publicly disclosed a vulnerability in the Windows kernel that is actively being exploited by threat actors in the wild., The zero-day could be exploited by attackers to gain administrator-level access by escaping the sandbox protection and execute malicious code., The reason for going public without waiting for a patch is that its experts have observed exploits for the flaw in the wild., According to Google disclosure timeline for vulnerability, when a flaw is exploited in the wild Google public disclosed the flaw after seven days., “On Friday, October 21st, we reported 0-day vulnerabilities — previously publicly-unknown vulnerabilities — to Adobe and Microsoft. Adobe updated Flash on October 26th to address CVE-2016-7855; this update is available via Adobe’s updater and Chrome auto-update.” reads a blog post published by Google., “After 7 days, per our published policy for actively exploited critical vulnerabilities, we are today disclosing the existence of a remaining critical vulnerability in Windows for which no advisory or fix has yet been released. This vulnerability is particularly serious because we know it is being actively exploited.”, On the other end, Microsoft criticized the Google decision because the disclosure potentially puts customers at risk., “We believe in coordinated vulnerability disclosure, and today’s disclosure by Google puts customers at potential risk,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement. “Windows is the only platform with a customer commitment to investigate reported security issues and proactively update impacted devices as soon as possible. We recommend customers use Windows 10 and the Microsoft Edge browser for the best protection.”, Terry Myerson, executive vice president of Microsoft’s Windows and Devices group, confirmed that the Windows kernel vulnerability was being exploited by an APT group in the wild, and the real surprise is that the hacker crew is the same that breached the Democratic National Committee and that targeted individuals involved in Clinton’s Presidential campaign., Microsoft identifies the APT group as STRONTIUM, Pawn-Storm, APT28, and Fancy Bear are more familiar for us. This means that another Tech Giant has recognized the APT has well founded and capable of high-sophisticated operations. Many security firms argue the Fancy Bear is linked to the Kremlin and detailed their investigation that lead the experts into believe that it is a Russian nation-state group., Myerson highlighted the importance of upgrading to Windows 10 for protection from further advanced threats while waiting for a patch for the Windows Kernel zero-day., “Recently, the activity group that Microsoft Threat Intelligence calls STRONTIUMconducted a low-volume spear-phishing campaign. Customers using Microsoft Edge on Windows 10 Anniversary Update are known to be protected from versions of this attack observed in the wild. This attack campaign, originally identified by Google’s Threat Analysis Group, used two zero-day vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash and the down-level Windows kernel to target a specific set of customers.” reads the security advisory published by Microsoft., , Microsoft customers using Windows 10 with Windows Defender Advanced Threat Detection are not exposed to the exploitation of the flaw., “Customers who have enabled Windows Defender Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) will detect STRONTIUM’s attempted attacks thanks to ATP’s generic behavior detection analytics and up-to-date threat intelligence.” continues the advisory., Fancy Bear was one of the two APT groups involved in the DNC hack, COZY BEAR and FANCY BEAR, it powered many other attacks, including the hacks of both Clinton campaign Chair John Podesta and the former Secretary of State Colin Powell., At the time I was writing there is no news about the possible use of the Windows Kernel zero-day as part of the above attacks., Stay Tuned!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Windows Kernel Zero-day, Fancy Bear) |
3914_48650 | People underestimate the risk related to the use of technology, a simple post on a social network or a harmless SMS could cause serious problems., Today I desire to share we you a very sad story occurred exactly one year ago, when Jeremy Cook, 18, from Brampton was killed in London after tracking his lost smartphone., The youngster lost his cell phone in a cab so he decided to track it with a mobile app. He localized the device but the persons who have found it killed him after an altercation. The authorities are still searching for three suspects in connection with the shooting., Location services could very useful to find lost devices, but do not do anything silly if someone who found it does not want to return it., , The Police warn against tracking stolen and lost devices, urging people to avoid confronting thieves themselves., “The end result of this whole scenario is definitely tragic. It’s very unfortunate, we never suggest anyone grabbing onto a moving vehicle, as that in-and-of-itself is very dangerous, but if there’s any concern whether it be of criminal nature, such as a stolen item or any concern for your safety we certainly encourage people to contact police,” said Const. Ken Steeves., “I don’t think anybody would have been able to predict that the end result in this scenario would have been the case under the circumstances. But if anyone has any information in relation to where their lost items may be, certainly there’s nothing wrong with inquiring, but if there’s any suspicion or any indication that there’s trouble or anything like that we certainly encourage people to contact police.”, Global news that shared the news requested a comment the tech expert Carmi Levy, who confirmed the risks for tracking stolen smartphones., “That’s the problem with these apps – they give us information that can put us into situations that can essentially be incredibly dangerous and in this case tragic,” Levy explained., “If you think back to a few years ago before we had access to these apps, once we lost our phones or once it was stolen that was it. We moved on, or we bought a new one and replaced it. Now we have the ability to reach out and know exactly where it is.” , Unfortunately, Smartphone theft is a profitable business, stolen devices could be used for criminal activities or simply resold in the criminal underground., Another worrisome aspect related to the trade of stolen smartphone is that according to the Police it is dramatically increasing the number of violent cellphone thefts., Another thing that you have to consider is that a stolen smartphone contains a huge quantity of sensitive information, and it could give hackers the opportunity to use it to bypass two-factor authentication process to access the victim’s online services that rely on a mobile device for 2FA., Some location services also give the victims to remotely wipe data on the device, and I suggest you to use this feature, but after you are confident to have the latest backups., “We seem to think our phones are our digital lives – we do everything on them,” he said. “But the truth of the matter is thanks to cloud services, all of your photos, all of your data, all of your information is already backed up online.” continues Levy., The authorities also suggest adding stolen smartphone to the cellphone blacklist to prevent abuses. In Canada, the mobile carriers refuse connections from mobile devices with IMEIs that are included in the blacklist., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – crime, stolen smartphone) |
1132_23920 | The Internet community was shocked by the disclosure of the Heartbleed flaw, the vulnerability affects OpenSSL library and allows an attacker to reveal up to 64kB of memory to a connected client or server., Hundreds of thousands websites and networking equipment on the Internet were vulnerable for years to Heartbleed bug, allowing target violation and passwords grabbing., Many experts speculated that the Heartbleed flaw was already exploited for cyber attacks in the recent months, the first suspects are related state-sponsored hackers, of course first thoughts goes to NSA and its TAO cyber unit., While the U.S. Department of Homeland Security issued a warning about Heartbleed, Bloomberg reported that the National Security Agency was one of the intelligence agencies aware of the Heartbleed flaw and it was actively exploiting the vulnerability for the last two years., “While there have not been any reported attacks or malicious incidents involving this particular vulnerability confirmed at this time, it is still possible that malicious actors in cyberspace could exploit un-patched systems. ” states the US DHS related to the possibility that bad actors could have exploited Heartbleed flaw., The NSA secret documents disclosed by Snowden revealed a global surveillance network that spied on everything, internal communications, allies and foreign companies., “The U.S. National Security Agency knew for at least two years about a flaw in the way that many websites send sensitive information, now dubbed the Heartbleed bug, and regularly used it to gather critical intelligence, two people familiar with the matter said.” reported Bloomberg on Heartbleed., On many occasions we have read about cyber capabilities of the NSA, and in particular of its abilities to break encryption processes, some experts also hypothesized the used of Quantum Computing, Just a few minutes ago the NSA in a tweet denied to have used the Hearthbleed flaw in the past., , , Waiting for another disturbing truth, all the website administrators are invited to apply the patch already available for OpenSSL library., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Heartbleed flaw, NSA) |
4410_52632 | “Are we ready to live in a world where all devices are exposed to cyber attacks?” , That is how I opened my presentation in QurtubaCON16 – cyber security event at Córdoba City (Spain) – and how I will open the next event: HoneyCON16 (Guadalajara, Spain) at November 11th. My intention is that every person takes their own conclusions about the risks that everybody assumes every time we connect our devices to the internet., Have you ever wondered happens in your home router and that threats lurk in the moment you press the power button?, In this article, I intend to analyze the attacks and the cybersecurity events I have received in my personal router in Spanish ISP. This information may lead you to become aware of the high risk of having these devices connected to the web, even when we expose our lives on social media., I have exposed my personal router to possible attacks because home routers haven’t been receiving the appropriate attention and, in some cases, people use to let them on during the entire year. People use to let these devices completely exposed and they don’t realize that sometimes administrator control panel is vulnerable and they are vulnerable to certain attacks or have different security flaws that have not been patched or by our Internet provider or by the device manufacturer., We recommend you to visiting to find more information about bugs and detected vulnerabilities in the last years to home routers and some recommendations., , In recent years, there has been news about vulnerabilities in routers distributed in Spain that show the seriousness of the matter:, What if an attacker gains access to the DNS settings of your router and modifies it?, It is not just about losing our privacy (because a cybercriminal could monitor your internet navigation); it is about letting an attacker to theft your identity, for example, in your personal bank or company website to obtain your credentials. This is just an example of what could really happen., , In many cases, the received attacks are automatic, so, if your router is in the cybercriminal range you could be a potential victim. The typical excuse “I am nobody” is not valid. You only need to be on the range – it doesn’t need to be an personal attack. The greater the number of potential victims greater the percentage of success., To recollect all this events and cyberattacks, I usually use a sensor to redirect all the traffic that goes to my public IP that corresponds to my own router. I monitor all incoming activity in TCP and UDP range. I also monitor ICMP packets. I consider as suspicious every traffic addressed to my IP and I follow any attempt of connection to my TCP port., Keep in mind that an IP address of a possible attacker by itself is not a relevant fact, since you can use different techniques to hide the real IP source or even the attacker can use a device already breached for his attack through him. At no time did I spread my IP address to receive attacks., Data collection occurred between Wednesday, October 6 at 6PM and Thursday, October 24 at 6PM., Once data collection time have finished, I present you the results:, , In 24 hours they produced a total of 20,070 events to my home router, which I consider as 4678 attacks. There has been a total of 92 different countries from which connections have received a total of 349 different ports., More than half of the events were received from Asia. Among the ports that have received more connections, we highlight the SSH, Telnet, 443, 2323, RDP, VNC, 8080 among other services. If I ever have published that my services were exposed, we could ask ourselves what they are looking for and how they found me. We can know it if we perform an analysis of everything that has occurred., , Among the origins of events, it is normal lately find Vietnam on top. The answer to this can be found in details in the following article: It happens due to a large number of infected IOT devices with MIRAI that have among their targets Spanish IP., , The graph above shows the traffic received from attacks (not all the events) during these 24 hours of analysis (Origin country, ASN, IP and port):, , Some highlights countries by the number of attacks carried out (A, IP, and Port):, , Most of the attacks have received European and Asian origin. We have also received a small share of attacks from Spain., , , Analyzing some of the IPs that have attacked my router I could find the following web administration panels corresponding to cameras and routers:, , , Some of them do not need credentials for access and others have default credentials. They have visited my router (or perhaps any team behind that network), are connected to my decoy ports have downloaded malware samples have tried to include me in their botnet, they have used my gateway for attacks, including other activities., There have been downloaded several samples of malware, including Mirai:, , But it has not been the only malware that has tried to download. You can see below the demonstration of the large number of downloads using Wget that have attempted:, Once all the data were observed, you should ask yourself if your home router could be attacked or not. Don’t ask if it was attacked or not: ask when it will be. Thinking about the information presented in this article, maybe you are a little more aware that it will happen to you soon or later. I hope this time you have not your router exposed, have your credentials too weak and have exposed more information than necessary. Maybe you’ve already been attacked and still don’t know., If you do not have these tips in mind, perhaps your IP address would appear on the next list., Best regards., These one and more articles are available at www.fwhibbit.es, My talk about honeypots:, , Twitter: @0fjrm0, About the author: Francisco J. Rodriguez, Member of the Spanish Cyber Security Institute, Cybersecurity and Cybercrime Research and collaborating with State security forces., Twitter @0fjrm0, , , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Home router, hacking) |
6658_72197 | After the installation of Windows 10 April Update I observed continuous freezes while using the Chrome browser with one of my PCs, in some cases, I was not able to reach the websites I wanted to visit, apparently for connection problems., I was reading some posts when I found a post written by Lawrence Abrams on Bleeping Computer that claims some Chrome users are reporting freezes and timeouts after the installation of the Windows 10 April Update., “When these freezes occur, it turns the screen black and Windows becomes completely unresponsive until the user reboots the computer or restarts their graphic driver.” wrote Abrams., The same problem was reported by many users that shared their experience in a Reddit post, some users have tried to update the video drivers or using differed Chrome versions without success., Personally, I forced the sleep mode by pressing the power button on my laptop, then turning on again., Lawrence explained that according to two tickets opened at Google, there are two distinct problems associated with the April 2018 Update (build 1803) and Chrome., The freezing problems are the result of the crash of video driver and the problem may be related to a site that needs hardware acceleration. According to a bug ticket the issue affects Chrome version 66.0.3359.139 running on Windows 10, disabling hardware acceleration would fix the problem., A second issue is associated with connections to SSL websites, according to a second ticket the problem could be a Registry permission problem with the Windows Cryptographic services (CryptoSvc)., , Microsoft has published a post to provide a temporary fix to the freezing problems., Upgraded my work laptop to Windows 10 1803 and, guess what? Totally unusable, just like my personal laptop. Desktop kept freezing randomly when closing/switching UWP apps. Tired of trying to raise awareness for this. To hell with it. #WindowsInsiders, — ˗ˏˋ Emanuel ˊˎ˗ (@emannxx) May 3, 2018, , In my case, uninstalling the video driver and installing it again apparently solved the issue., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Windows 10 April update, Chrome), , |
7445_78245 | Two men, Connor Allsopp, 21, and Matthew Hanley, 23, pleaded guilty to charges of hacking. Allsopp has been sentenced to 8 months in jail and Hanley to 12 months., In October 2015, TalkTalk Telecom Group plc publicly disclosed that four million subscribers have been impacted by a “sustained cyberattack” that hit its servers. The figures were downgraded later, the company revealed that only 156,959 customers were affected., Hackers accessed to names, addresses, dates of birth, email addresses and phone numbers of the company customers, they also accessed financial data for 15,000 users., Attackers also attempted to blackmail the telecoms TalkTalk CEO, Dido Harding., “We have been contacted by, I don’t know whether it is an individual or a group purporting to be the hacker,” Dido Harding said to the BBC. “It is a live criminal investigation. All I can say is I have personally received a contact from someone purporting as I say…to be the hacker looking for money.”, The security breach had a significant impact on the company, overall losses have been estimated at £77 million ($99 million)., The U.K. Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) handed a £400,000 ($510,000) record fine to TalkTalk for the data breach., , Other people, were arrested after the TalkTalk security breach, most of them were youngsters., In the weeks after the attack, the police arrested of a 15-year-old teen from Northern Ireland and a 16-year-old boy from Feltham., In November 2015, another young hacker from Norwich was arrested by the British police., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – TA505, tRat) |
6534_71109 | Another day another data breach, while media are reporting the security breach suffered Delta Air Lines and Sears Holdings due to the 247.ai a payment card breach, also Best Buy company confirmed to have been impacted by the incident., Best Buy offers chat services for customers via their phone or computer, while 247.ai provides online services to businesses in different industries, including Delta Air Lines and Sears Holdings, this means that other firm could have been impacted., Best Buy announced it will notify affected customers and offer free credit monitoring to them., At the time of writing there is new about the extent of payment card breach, Best Buy pointed out that only a small fraction of online customers could have been impacted by the 247.ai hack., “We, like many businesses, use a third-party for the technology behind this service and that company, 247.ai, told us recently that they were the victim of a cyber intrusion. Their information suggests that the dates for this illegal intrusion were between Sept. 27 and Oct. 12, 2017. 247.ai has indicated that customer payment information may have been compromised during that time and, if that were the case, then a number of Best Buy customers would have had their payment information compromised, as well.” reads the security advisory published by Best Buy., “As best we can tell, only a small fraction of our overall online customer population could have been caught up in this 247.ai incident, whether or not they used the chat function.”, , Delta published a security advisory to notify its customers, the airline speculates attackers infected 247.ai systems with a malware that was able to siphon payment card data entered on websites that use the 247.ai chat software. It seems that customers of the affected firms may be impacted even if they have not directly used the chat functionality., The intrusion occurred between September 26 and October 12, 2017., “We understand malware present in 247.ai’s software between Sept. 26 and Oct. 12, 2017, made unauthorized access possible for the following fields of information when manually completing a payment card purchase on any page of the delta.com desktop platform during the same timeframe: name, address, payment card number, CVV number, and expiration date.” reads the advisory published by Delta Airline., “No other customer personal information, such as passport, government ID, security or SkyMiles information was impacted.”, According to Delta, hundreds of thousands of customers may have been impacted by the payment card breach., Sears Holdings explained that the payment card breach has impacted the credit card information of less than 100,000 customers., Both Sears and Delta Airline were notified by 247.ai in mid March while the incident occurred in 2017., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – 247.ai, Best Buy), , |
2131_35618 | Some WordPress websites are being used to redirect users to a fake Pirate Bay that is being used to make the reader to push malware, says Malwarebytes., WordPress websites were injected with the same iframe during the last days, that is serving content from sites as thepiratebay(dot)in(dot)ua., , “THIS IS NOT AN OFFICIAL PIRATE BAY MIRROR.”, The fake Pirate Bay site is pushing “the Nuclear exploit kit with an iframe” infecting making vulnerable users., , The Nuclear exploit kit landing page is loaded trough the Flash exploit CVE-2015-0311 designed to push a banking Trojan, meaning that if the user has an outdated flash player he will get infected when visiting the site., “It’s possible this latest wave of attacks is somehow connected with the ‘SoakSoak’ campaign and its authors, although it is too early to tell at this point” wrote Jérôme Segura, from Malwarebytes, in a blog post. “To avoid getting their sites hacked, WordPress users need to check that they are running the latest WP install and that all their plug-ins are up to date.”, Security wise, as Jérôme said, it’s always important for you (if you own any website) to keep your software updated with the last releases to avoid this type of problems., The experts don’t exclude a link between this malware campaign with the “SoakSoak” campaign., About the Author Elsio Pinto, Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Pirate Bay, malware) |
1634_30148 | , Cybercrime turned cyber espionage |
5794_64016 | Forrester, one of the most influential research and advisory firms in the world, revealed on Friday to have suffered a security breach the past week., The attackers broke into the infrastructure hosting the Forrester.com website, that is also used to allow customers download market research documents according to their contracts., The advisory firm supports decision makers of its customers by providing trends, statistics, and other market research., According to company’s Chief Business Technology Officer, Steven Peltzman, crooks stole valid Forrester.com login credentials that allowed them to take over the website., “The hacker used that access to steal research reports made available to our clients,” Peltzman said., “There is no evidence that confidential client data, financial information, or confidential employee data was accessed or exposed as part of the incident,” , , Hackers did not access confidential client data, financial information, or confidential employee., Stolen data are anyway a precious commodity in the hands of cyber spies that can access sensitive information related to the customers’and projects., “We recognize that hackers will attack attractive targets — in this case, our research IP. We also understand there is a tradeoff between making it easy for our clients to access our research and security measures,” said George F. Colony, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Forrester. “We feel that we have taken a common-sense approach to those two priorities; however, we will continuously look at that balance to respond to changing cybersecurity risk.”, Forrester is the major financial and business organization that suffered a data breach in the past month, recent victims in order of time are Equifax, Deloitte, and the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – cybercrime, data breach) |
5479_61142 | A new strain of malware dubbed SHELLBIND exploits the recently patched CVE-2017-7494 Samba vulnerability in attacks against Internet of Things devices., SHELLBIND has infected most network-attached storage (NAS) appliances, it exploits the Samba vulnerability (also known as SambaCry and EternalRed) to upload a shared library to a writable share, and then cause the server to load that library., This trick allows a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on the targeted system., CVE-2017-7494 is a seven-year-old remote code execution vulnerability that affects all versions of the Samba software since 3.5.0. The flaw has been patched by the development team of the project., The CVE-2017-7494 flaw can be easily exploited, just a line of code could be used for the hack under specific conditions:, The Samba vulnerability affects the products of several major vendors, including NAS appliances., The Samba bug appears to be a network wormable issue that could be exploited by a malicious code to self-replicate from vulnerable machine to vulnerable machine without requiring user interaction., When SambaCry was discovered, nearly 485,000 Samba-enabled computers were found to be exposed on the Internet., In June, researchers at Kaspersky Lab set up honeypots to detect SambaCry attacks in the wild. The experts spotted a malware campaign that was exploiting the SambaCry vulnerability to infect Linux systems and install a cryptocurrency miner., “On May 30th our honeypots captured the first attack to make use of this particular vulnerability, but the payload in this exploit had nothing in common with the Trojan-Crypt that was EternalBlue and WannaCry. Surprisingly, it was a cryptocurrency mining utility!” reported Kaspersky., The independent security researcher Omri Ben Bassat also observed the same campaign that he dubbed “EternalMiner.” The expert confirmed threat actors started exploiting the SambaCry flaw just a week after its discovery to hijack Linux PCs and to install an upgraded version of “CPUminer,” a Monero miner., In early July, experts at Trend Micro uncovered a new type of attack involving SambaCry. Crooks have been exploiting the flaw in attacks targeting NAS devices used by small and medium-size businesses. The malicious code was designed to compromise almost any IoT architecture, including MIPS, ARM, and PowerPC., The attackers can easily find vulnerable devices using the Shodan Internet search engine then and write the malicious code to their public folders., Experts at Trend Micro discovered that the ELF_SHELLBIND.A is delivered as a SO file to Samba public folders, then the attacker load and execute it by exploiting the SambaCry vulnerability., “This more recent malware is detected as ELF_SHELLBIND.A and was found on July 3. Similar to the previous reports of SambaCry being used in the wild, it also opens a command shell on the target system. But ELF_SHELLBIND.A has marked differences that separate it from the earlier malware leveraging SambaCry. For one, it targets internet of things (IoT) devices—particularly the Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices favored by small to medium businesses.” reads the analysis published by Trend Micro. “ELF_SHELLBIND also targets different architectures, such as MIPS, ARM, and PowerPC. This is the first time we’ve seen SambaCry being exploited without the cryptocurrency miner as a payload.”, , Once the malware is executed, it connects a C&C server located in East Africa “169.239.128.123” over TCP, port 80. , To establish a connection, the malicious code modifies firewall rules, then the attacker will open a command shell on the target system., “Once the connection is successfully established and authentication is confirmed, then the attacker will have an open command shell in the infected systems where he can issue any number of system commands and essentially take control of the device,” continues Trend Micro., Sysadmins can protect their systems by updating their installs, if it is not possible for any reason a workaround can be implemented by the adding the line, to the Samba configuration file and restarting the network’s SMB daemon., The change will limit clients from accessing some network computers., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – CVE-2017-7494, SHELLBIND) |
593_14330 | The press is getting used to news of cyber attacks against companies and government agencies, to date, the trend of the representatives of the cybersecurity of these entities is to pursue a defensive approach in the face of threats., Law enforcement and private companies seem to desire to reverse the trend with a more aggressive approach to cybersecurity, their witnesses attending a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on proposal of taking the fight to the attackers., What does it mean an “offensive approach” to cybersecurity?, Many security experts are convinced that stay on defense waiting for the attackers it totally wrong, in many cases victims knows about the attacks many years after them with serious consequences, that’s way law enforcement and private companies are questioning on the possibility to adopt offensive techniques to mitigate cyber threats such as the use of intrusive malicious code to conduct “spear-phishing” attacks against those systems suspected to have originated the offensives., Early this year CrowdStrike company, one of the most talked-about security firms at RSA 2013, presented it offensive approach to cybersecurity, the firm conducted a live takedown of thousands of nodes of the famous Kelihos botnet. The company is exploring all possible legal methods of “getting stolen information back from hackers, or deleting it so the information cannot be used”., CrowdStrike officially launched its Falcon platform, a system that using Big Data is able to carry out a number of “active defense” operations, including “real-time detection of adversary activities, attribution of the threat actors, flexibility of response actions, and intelligence dissemination”., Stewart A. Baker, partner Steptoe & Johnson LLP, before the Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism discussed the paper “The Attribution Revolution: Raising the Costs for Hackers and Their Customers ”, Baker described the actual defensive approach of cybersecurity with following metaphor:, “We are not likely going to defend our way out of this problem”, “In short, we can’t defend our way out of this fix, any more than we could solve the problem of street crime by firing our police and making pedestrians buy better body armor every year.” “I’m not calling for vigilantism, I’m not calling for lynch mobs. But we need to find a way to give the firms doing these investigations authority to go beyond their network.”, “If we don’t do that we will never get to the bottom of most of these attacks,”, The theorized offensive approach has been debated for a long time, opponents argue that it represents a threat to civil liberties and to user’s privacy., Recently White House sources revealed to the New York Times it was closing a deal that would levy steep fines against any website or internet service, including those based in foreign countries, that refused to support the request of FBI to introduce a built-in wiretapping access within 30 days of receiving a court order., In discussion isn’t only the possibility to install backdoors into popular and commonly used services and application, much disputed, is the willingness of law enforcement to use malware to conduct investigations, conduct that constitutes a flagrant violation of citizens’ privacy., Mikko Hypponen, the chief research officer at F-Secure, commented the use of state-sponsored malware for investigative purposed with these words:, “It’s perfectly understandable why law enforcement wants to use malware,” “It’s an extension to what they’ve been doing with phone taps, internet taps, and using cell phone carriers to track your location — all with a court order.” “However, nothing is as intrusive as having government officials monitoring you through your own computer or smartphone,” “They see your files. They see where you surf. They can collect your passwords. They can watch what you do via your webcam.”, The hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee was also focused on foreign cyber threats, cyber attacks originated by hackers operating in foreign states represent a serious menace against which defensive approach has proved unsuccessful., , State sponsored hackers continue to conduct to hit US network and conduct cyber espionage campaign stealing intellectual property and sensitive information. Several of the witnesses, including Kevin Mandia CEO of the security firm Mandiant, blamed Chinese hackers for numerous cyber attacks against the US, Mandiant security experts published an interesting report on the topic in which demonstrated the involvement of Peoples Liberation Army hackers., Sen. Lindsey Graham on Chinese menace declared:, “Our Chinese friends seem to be hell-bent on stealing anything they can get their hands on here in America,” “We’re going to put nation-states on notice that if you continue to do this, you’ll pay a price.”, Rep. Mike Rodgers, known for debated CISPA act, demonstrated skepticism on the possibility to give to private sector offensive conducts., “I will guarantee you there will be lots of mistakes made, given the sophistication of nation-states in hiding their hand in activities,” “I get very, very concerned about an unleashed private sector doing active defense, because a lot of things are gonna go wrong, I think.” He declared in February., I personally think that an offensive approach may be necessary in some contexts but do not agree to adopt it especially in the private sector. The attribution of responsibility in the cyberspace is a very sensitive issue and we would run the risk that a disproportionate number of companies prejudicial to their peers in order to pursue a wrong approach to cybersecurity.
The same approach applied to law enforcement should be carefully weighed, the risk is that in the name of cybersecurity you are in an uncomfortable control that undermines civil rights and would represent a threat to freedom of expression.
The discussion is far from simple., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Cybersecurity) |
5147_58464 | In a first time, the authorities blamed a foreign state for the massive cyber espionage campaign against major Israeli institutions and government officials, now the Authority blames Iranian state-sponsored hackers for the cyber attack., The Israeli experts believe that attack was launched by the OilRig APT group (aka Helix Kitten, NewsBeef ), an Iran-linked APT that has been around since at least 2015., According to the Israeli Cyber Defense Authority, hackers targeted against some 250 individuals between April 19 and 24 in various sectors, including government agencies, high-tech companies, medical organizations, and educational institutions. including the renowned Ben-Gurion University., Hackers also targeted experts at the prestigious Ben-Gurion University, where researchers conduct advanced researchers. The threat actors leveraged stolen email accounts from Ben-Gurion to deliver malware to victims., “From April 19-24, 2017, a politically-motivated, targeted campaign was carried out against numerous Israeli organizations. Morphisec researchers began investigating the attacks on April 24 and continue to uncover more details. Initial reports of the attacks, published April 26 (in Hebrew) by the Israel National Cyber Event Readiness Team (CERT-IL) and The Marker, confirm that the attack was delivered through compromised email accounts at Ben-Gurion University and sent to multiple targets across Israel. Ironically, Ben-Gurion University is home to Israel’s Cyber Security Research Center.” reads the analysis shared by Morphisec. “Investigators put the origin of the attack as Iranian; Morphisec’s research supports this conclusion and attributes the attacks to the same infamous hacker group responsible for the OilRig malware campaigns.“, Hackers used weaponized Word documents triggering the recently-patched Microsoft RCE vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2017-0199., , The exploitation of this specific flaw demonstrates the technical evolution of the OilRig APT group. The attack doesn’t request user’s interaction like macro-enable attacks, the weaponized document contains an exploit via an embedded link packed with an HTML executable., “The attack was delivered via Microsoft Word documents that exploited a former zero-day vulnerability in Word, CVE-2017-0199, by actually reusing an existing PoC that have been published immediately after the patch release. Microsoft released the patch for the vulnerability on April 11 but many organizations have not yet deployed the update. The delivered documents installed a fileless variant of the Helminth Trojan agent.” continues the analysis., Experts at Morphisec discovered that hackers used a customized version of the open-source Mimikatz tool to gain access to user credentials in the Windows Local Security Authority Subsystem Service., “Morphisec identified few more samples of communication with different other C&C servers (“alenupdate.info” and “maralen.tk”) in which a more advanced customized version of Mimikatz has been sent to specific users and additional agent have been installed in “C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Idle\” directory:” states Morphisec., Early this year the OilRig APT was involved in a string of cyber attacks targeted several Israeli organizations, including IT vendors, the national postal service, and financial institutions., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – OilRig APT, Israel Authority) |
4913_56650 | The carder forum CVV2Finder claims to have more than 150 million logins, from several popular services, including Netflix and Uber. The operators in the forum are offering the precious commodity to the VIP members., According to the experts, the data were obtained by exploiting the recently discovered Cloudbleed, a flaw that was causing the leak of a wide range of sensitive information in the CloudFlare infrastructure, including authentication cookies and login credentials of numerous organizations using the popular service., The Cloudbleed security issue with Cloudflare servers has a significant impact on numerous major organizations, including Uber, Fitbit, 1Password, and OKCupid. Cloudbleed also affects mobile apps, because, they are developed using the same backends as browsers for content delivery and HTTPS (SSL/TLS) termination., The flaw was discovered by the popular researcher Tavis Ormandy from Google Project Zero Team., The Canadian researcher Phineas (@itsphin) published on GitHub a list of more than 4 million domains possibly affected by Cloudflare’s Cloudbleed HTTPS Traffic Leak., The list includes popular services such as 23andme, Coinbase, Patreon, Yelp, Fiverr, and Change.org., “Cloudflare has not provided an official list of affected domains, and likely will not due to privacy concerns. I’m compiling an unofficial list here so you know what passwords to change.”, If you’d like to quickly search through the Cloudflare directory; — Phineas ✪ (@itsphin) February 24, 2017, , Experts at Salted Hash received via email the following screenshot the CVV2Finder carder forum., , A messaged appeared on the CVV2Finder forum clearly refers the Cloudbleed case as the source of millions of fresh credentials for popular services., “Dear DeepWeb Users of cvv2finder, After the success of the latest attack (cloudbleed) to cloudflare servers, More than 150 Million Fresh Logins Avaliable for Uber , Netflix … and many more. After hours these data will be avaliable into a database and would sell it for 250k$. This offer only for VIP users.”, This means that the impact of CloudBleed was much larger than first thought with a serious impact for CloudFlare customers., Experts noticed that Netflix isn’t a CloudFlare customer, so the presence of the file in the list of accounts offered for sale is suspect., “CVV2Finder lists Netflix, Dominos, several “People Meet” dating websites, Tidal, CBS, Bitdefender, Origin, Dell, UPS, HBO Now, Spotify, and DirecTV accounts in their database as available to purchase.” reported Salted HAsh. “However, there are only 2,300 accounts, a far cry from the 150 million they are promising.”, Stay Tuned …, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Cloudbleed , hacking) |
1897_33059 | Security researcher and Head of Development at midpoints GmbH and IBM Champion René Winkelmeyer has published a blog post to warn about security issues in the newborn iOS Outlook app. According to the expert, the iOS Outlook app recently presented by Microsoft, allows the company to access corporate emails and server credentials without user’s knowledge., Winkelmeyer was analyzing how the iOS Outlook app mechanism deals with push notifications and notes when he has discovered that Microsoft could get and store user’s mail account credentials and server data archived in the cloud without notifying users., When the expert setup the app noticed that it asks users if they want to receive push notifications, so Winkelmeyer decided to test why the app was requesting to receive notification from remote server. Below the test he ran:, The expert speculated that Microsoft is using a central service that manage his credentials and to monitor his ActiveSync account, so he decided to make a second test:, This is the proof that Microsoft stores user credentials and server data in its cloud, without notifying it to the final user. They just scan. So they have in theory full access to my PIM data., “They just scan. So they have in theory full access to my PIM data.” added Winkelmeyer., The expert noticed also that the iOS Outlook app has always the same ID even if the app is installed by the user on multiple devices, a circumstance that will prevent administrators from distinguish which device is used for the access. Also the iOS Outlook app’s built-in connectors to OneDrive, Dropbox and Google Drive are data security nightmare., “It gets even more worse. Each ActiveSync client normally has a unique ID for data synchronization. That allows administrators to distinguish a users devices. Microsofts Outlook iOS apps doesn’t work that way. The app shares the same ID across all devices of a user. And it seems like one device!” states the post., The last element of concern related to the iOS Outlook app are built-in connectors to most popular cloud storage services, including Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive, that dramatically enlarge the surface of exposure of the mobile users., “The app has built-in connectors to OneDrive, Dropbox and Google Drive. That means a user can setup his personal account within the app and share all mail attachments using those services. Or use files from those services within his company mail account. That’s a data security nightmare.” continues Winkelmeyer., In a post update issued, the expert highlighted that Microsoft has bought Acompli company and just “re-branded” their iOS Outllok app inheriting its problems., These security issues come into the new iOS Outlook app after Microsoft bought mobile email app from Acompli less than two months ago and they have updated their privacy policy (updated on January 28, 2015) that says:, “We provide a service that indexes and accelerates delivery of your email to your device. That means that our service retrieves your incoming and outgoing email messages and securely pushes them to the app on your device.Similarly, the service retrieves the calendar data and address book contacts associated with your email account and securely pushes those to the app on your device. Those messages, calendar events, and contacts, along with their associated metadata, may be temporarily stored and indexed securely both in our servers and locally on the app on your device. If your emails have attachments and you request to open them in our app, the service retrieves them from the mail server, securely stores them temporarily on our servers, and delivers them to the app.”, ”If you decide to sign up to use the service, you will need to create an account. That requires that you provide the email address(es) that you want to access with our service. Some email accounts (ones that use Microsoft Exchange, for example) also require that you provide your email login credentials, including your username, password, server URL, and server domain. Other accounts (Google Gmail accounts, for example) use the OAuth authorization mechanism which does not require us to access or store your password.”, Winkelmeyer recommends all administrators to tell employees not to use the iOS Outlook app and block it from accessing their companies’ mail servers, until Microsoft will not fix the embarrassing issue., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – iOS Outlook,mobile) |
6938_74492 | After the meeting, Putin and Trump made a joint news conference and of course, the US President Trump confirmed its trust in the words of the ally Putin., “So I have great confidence in my intelligence people, but I will tell you that President Putin was extremely strong and powerful in his denial today,” Trump said., Special Counsel Robert Mueller has a different opinion about alleged Russia’s interference in the 2016 Presidential election, his investigation led to the indictment of 12 Russian intelligence officials working under the GRU of carrying out “large-scale cyber operations” to steal Democratic Party documents and emails., “I don’t see any reason” for Russia to interfere with the US presidential election, this is the Trump’s though., On Friday, director of national intelligence Daniel R. Coats warned of a devastating cyber threat to US infrastructure, he said that “warning lights are blinking red again.”, The Director of National Intelligence believes that Russia is the most aggressive threat actor and recent events demonstrate it., “Russia has been the most aggressive foreign actor, no question,” he said., There is a great difference between campaigns launched by China and Russian ones., According to Coats, China operates with the primary intent on stealing military and industrial secrets and had “capabilities, resources that perhaps Russia doesn’t have.” The Kremlin operated to undermine U.S. values and democratic institutions., “The role of the Intelligence Community is to provide the best information and fact-based assessments possible for the President and policymakers. We have been clear in our assessments of Russian meddling in the 2016 election and their ongoing, pervasive efforts to undermine our democracy, and we will continue to provide unvarnished and objective intelligence in support of our national security,” said Coats in a press statement released after the Trump-Putin press event., HELSINKI, FINLAND – JULY 16: U.S. President Donald Trump (L) and Russian President Vladimir Putin answer questions about the 2016 U.S Election collusion during a joint press conference after their summit on July 16, 2018 in Helsinki, Finland. The two leaders met one-on-one and discussed a range of issues including the 2016 U.S Election collusion. (Photo by Chris McGrath/Getty Images), Below the excerpt from the full transcript from the Helsinki press conference about alleged interference in 2016 Presidential election., “Once again, President Trump mentioned issue of so-called interference of Russia with the American elections. I had to reiterate things I said several times, including during our personal contacts, that the Russian state has never interfered and is not going to interfere in internal American affairs, including election process. Any specific material, if such things arise, we are ready to analyze together. For instance, we can analyze them through the joint working group on cyber security, the establishment of which we discussed during our previous contacts.” said Putin., “During today’s meeting, I addressed directly with President Putin the issue of Russian interference in our elections. I felt this was a message best delivered in person. Spent a great deal of time talking about it. And President Putin may very well want to address it and very strongly, because he feels strongly about it and he has an interesting idea. We also discussed one of the most critical challenges facing humanity, nuclear proliferation. I provided an update on my meeting last month with Chairman Kim on the denuclearization of North Korea. After today, I am very sure that President Putin and Russia want very much to end that problem. Going to work with us, and I appreciate that commitment.” said Trump., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Trump Putin, Presidential Election) |
15_162 | The title is borrowed from a presentation made by Francis Brown of Stach & Liu, Hacker Halted 2011 in Miami.
The presentation focus on two topics that are crucial in the modern scenario:, demonstrating the fact that the overall safety of complex systems can be impacted by incorrect implementation of the “cloud” paradigm. Through the knowledge of authentication mechanisms is relatively easy to retrieve access codes, passwords and secret keys necessary for access to data stored within a cloud as happened for Amazon’s EC3., Let me remind you the OSINT definition, “a form of intelligence collection management that involves finding, selecting, and acquiring information from publicly available, sources and analyzing it to produce actionable intelligence.”, LulzSec and Anonymous believed to use Google Hacking as a primary means of identifying vulnerable targets, it is camplete and updated source where is possible to retrieve info regarding, Application developers and system administrators who want to deploy their applications on cloud infrastructures should be aware that files can be subject to indexing of search engines through an ordinary Google search., Francis Brown of Stach & Liu LCC has proved this during the event … I invite all to the careful reading of the paper. That is incredible!, Pulpe Google Hacking, I conclude saying that the maturity of a paradigm like the cloud can be measured through the security processes implemented and through the level of knowledge of administrators and developers who intend to use it., Unfortunately today the scenario is still far from reassuring., |
6550_71236 | A massive cyber attack took offline the entire government infrastructure of the Caribbean island Sint Maarten. it is a constituent country of the Kingdom of the Netherlands., Government building remained closed after the attack., “The Ministry of General Affairs hereby informs the public that the recovery process of the Government of Sint Maarten ICT Network is progressing steadily and will continue throughout the upcoming weekend following the cyber-attack on Monday April 2nd” reported the media. , According to the local media, The Daily Herald a cyber attack hit the country on April 2nd, the good news is that yesterday the government services were resumed with the exception of the Civil Registry Department., , According to the authorities, this is the third attack in over a year, but at the time of writing, there are no public details on the assault., “The system was hacked on Easter Monday, the third such attack in over a year. No further details about the hacking have been made public by government.
The Ministry “thanked the people of St. Maarten for their patience during this period.” continues the announcement., Below the announcement made by the Government on Facebook., , The incident demonstrates the importance of a cyber strategy for any government, in this case, hacked shut down government networks but in other circumstances, they can hack into government systems to launch cyber attack against a third-party nation., It is essential a mutual support among stated to prevent such kind of incident., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Sint Maarten, cyber attack), , |
4893_56489 | At the RSA security conference in San Francisco, the experts at the Google Research team at the Google Research team have shared the results of an interesting study on cyber attacks against emails accounts., Corporate email addresses are 4.3 more likely to receive malicious codes compared to personal accounts, 6.2 times more likely to receive phishing lures, and 0.4 times less likely to receive spam messages., , The Google Research team analyzing more than one billion emails that passed through its Gmail service, the experts discovered that corporate inboxes are a privileged target for threat actors. The result is not surprising because corporate email accounts contain more valuable information for attackers. Cyber criminals can steal information and resell them on the Dark Web, meanwhile, nation-state actors could use them for espionage activities., Which is the most targeted industry?, This result is very interesting, organizations in the real estate sector were the most targeted with malicious codes, while spam emails proposing products and services mostly targeted companies in entertainment and IT industries., , Organizations in the financial sector are the privileged target of phishing campaigns, the experts at Google believe that phishing attacks will continue to increase in the future., Anyway, there is a good news for Gmail.users, as announced by Elie Bursztein, the head of Google’s anti-abuse research team, the company is going to implement the SMTP Strict Transport Security to the email service., The SMTP STS will provide a further security measure to protect Gmail users from man-in-the-middle attacks that leverage on rogue certificates. Google, Microsoft,, “Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Comcast are expected to adopt the standard this year, a draft of which was submitted to the IETF in March 2016.” wrote ThreatPost., Below the slides presented at the RSA Conference by Elie Bursztein., , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Corporate email addresses, Cybercriminal) |
5644_62508 | Unknown hackers have compromised the Instagram account owned by Selena Gomez and posted nude photographs of her ex-boyfriend Justin Bieber., Source Tribune.com, The hack doesn’t seem to be associated with the recent Fappening 2017 hack or previous Fappening cases that hit many celebrities., The Bieber nude images were clicked during a holiday in Bora Bora in 2015 and when the images were leaked online, The Selena’s Instagram account has more than 125 million followers, hackers hijacked it and posted three Bieber’s full-frontal shots of naked pictures., The hacker published the Bieber’s naked photos on the Selena Gomez official Instagram account with this message:, “LOOK AT THIS N***A LIL SHRIMPY.”, The account was taken down Monday night after the hack, the staff of the popular star restored the access to the Instagram account and deleted the Bieber naked photos., “The Bieber images were the same ones that were published after the pop star’s Bora Bora vacation in 2015. Gomez and Bieber used to be a couple, but are no longer together.” reported the outlet Variety., “Bieber has said that the publication of the images, originally in the New York Daily News censored (though the uncensored versions later made the rounds online), made him feel “super violated.” “Like, I feel like I can’t step outside and feel like I can go outside naked,” he told Access Hollywood in 2015. “Like, you should feel comfortable in your own space… especially that far away.””, It is still unclear how hackers have hijacked the Selena Gomez Instagram account, it is likely the staff of the pop star was the victim of phishing attack., A few days ago, private pictures of Anne Hathaway, Miley Cyrus, Stella Maxwell, Kristen Stewart, Tiger Woods and Lindsey Vonn have been posted online by a celebrity leak website., Hackers gained access to celebrities’ iCloud accounts and stole their private photos and videos., Dear star … force your staff enabling two-factor verification on your accounts, start adopting strong passwords, don’t share same credentials on different accounts, be vigilant on suspicious and unsolicited emails., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Selena Gomez, hacking) |
5006_57300 | A vendor with the online moniker “SunTzu583” is reportedly selling millions of login credentials for Gmail and Yahoo accounts on a black market in the dark web. Over 20 million Gmail accounts and 5 million Yahoo accounts are available for sale, the huge trove of data is the result of previous massive data breaches., SunTzu583 is known to security experts, he was specialized in the sale of stolen login credentials., A couple of weeks ago the colleagues at HackRead reported the sale of more than 1 million Gmail and Yahoo accounts by the same seller and a few days later, SunTzu583 started selling PlayStation accounts., , SunTzu583 offered 640,000 PlayStation accounts for USD 35.71 (0.0292 BTC), the dump includes emails and clear-text passwords., SunTzu583 confirmed that the archive was not directly stolen from PlayStation network, but it does contain unique accounts of PlayStation users. The seller added that even if the accounts may work for other web services they are first of all PlayStation accounts., Back to the present, the seller SunTzu583 is offering in separate listings millions of Gmail accounts., In three different listings, he is offering 4,928,888 accounts., “The total number of Gmail accounts being sold are 4,928,888 which have been divided into three different listings. All three listings contain 2,262,444 accounts including emails and their clear text passwords.” reports the analysis published by HackRead. “In the description of these listings, SunTzu583 has mentioned that “Not all these combinations work directly on Gmail, so don’t expect that all these email and passwords combinations work on Gmail.””, The researchers at HackRead who have compared the listings with Hacked-DB and Have I been pwned repositories confirmed that the sources of the data are past data breaches including LinkedIn (117 million accounts), Adobe (153 million accounts) and Bitcoin Security Forum (5 million Gmail passwords)., , The vendor SunTzu583 is offering also another separate listing including additional 21,800,969 Gmail accounts that go for USD 450.48 (BTC 0.4673). According to the seller, 75% accounts contain decrypted passwords while 25% passwords are hashed., Also in this case, HackRead confirmed that the origin of the data are various data breaches occurred in the past, including Nulled.cr breach in May 2016, MPGH.net breach, and Dropbox breach., The seller is also allegedly selling 5,741,802 Yahoo accounts for $250 (0.2532 Bitcoins)., , Most of the accounts listed were not active and the sources may be MySpace, Adobe and LinkedIn data breaches., The dark web vendor warns users that not all the login credentials work., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – dark web, Gmail) |
4953_56929 | Researchers at Kaspersky Lab have discovered further information about the dreaded Shamoon 2 malware. The experts spotted a new sophisticated strain of malware dubbed StoneDrill that is linked to Shamoon 2 and Charming Kitten (aka Newscaster and NewsBeef). StoneDrill can be used for both cyber espionage and sabotage, like Shamoon it wipes the infected computer., The malware was used by threat actors against entities in Saudi Arabia and at least one organization in Europe., “While investigating the Shamoon 2.0 attacks, Kaspersky Lab also discovered a previously unknown wiper malware which appears to be targeting organizations in Saudi Arabia. We’re calling this new wiper StoneDrill. StoneDrill has several “style” similarities to Shamoon, with multiple interesting factors and techniques to allow for the better evasion of detection.” reads the analysis shared by Kaspersky Lab. “In addition to suspected Saudi targets, one victim of StoneDrill was observed on the Kaspersky Security Network (KSN) in Europe. This makes us believe the threat actor behind StoneDrill is expanding its wiping operations from the Middle East to Europe.”, , At the time the report was published by Kaspersky, there are no reports of StoneDrill attacks that caused damage., The discovery of the new threat was causal, researchers were using a set of Yara rules developed to identify the Shamoon malware., Even if StoneDrill and Shamoon don’t share portions of code, the experts discovered many similarities between malware styles and malware components in Shamoon, StoneDrill, and NewsBeef., The researchers are still investigating the infection process, they confirmed that StoneDrill implements sophisticated techniques to evade security applications., While Shamoon uses drivers during deployment, StoneDrill implements memory injection mechanisms of the wiping module into the victim’s browser., The wiper feature has been implemented using a new technique., The wiper is able to target both physical and logical drives and reboots the system once the wipe process is completed., “Depending on the configuration, this module wipes with random data one of following possible targets:, The researchers at Kaspersky have detected a StoneDrill sample that was specifically designed to establish a backdoor on the infected system. The sample was likely developed for espionage purposes., The experts identified four C&C servers used in cyber espionage activities, this means that StoneDrill uses C&C communications to receive instructions from attackers., Researchers discovered that StoneDrill has many similarities (code, C&C naming conventions, backdoor commands and functionality, and Winmain signatures) to a strain of malware used by Charming Kitten., For this reason, it is considered an evolution of the Charming Kitten malware., , Is there the same threat behind StoneDrill and Shamoon threats?, According to the experts from Kaspersky, there are two separate groups behind the threat that anyway share the same objectives., “While Shamoon embeds Arabic-Yemen resource language sections, StoneDrill embeds mostly Persian resource language sections. Of course, we do not exclude the possibility of false flags.” reads the report., The last variant of the Shamoon malware that targeted organizations in Saudi Arabia also includes a newly discovered ransomware component., According to the experts, the ransomware component of Shamoon 2 has yet to be used in the wild., “Despite the widespread coverage of the resurgence of the Shamoon wiper, few have noted the new ransomware functionality. The wiper module of Shamoon 2.0 has been designed to run as either a wiper or an encryptor (ransomware). ” reads the Kaspersky’s analysis. “In the “encryption/ransomware” mode, a weak pseudo-random RC4 key is generated, which is further encrypted by the RSA public key and stored directly on the hard drive (at <\Device\Harddisk0\Partition0>) starting at offset 0x201, right after the master boot record”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Shamoon 2, hacking) |
6026_66305 | The best news of the week with Security Affairs., Once again thank you!, , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Newsletter) |
6830_73669 | HeroRat isn’t the first malware abusing Telegram protocol, past investigation reported similar threats like TeleRAT and IRRAT., The new RAT has been in the wild at least since August 2017 and in March 2018 its source code was released for free on Telegram hacking channels allowing various threat actors to create their own variant., HeroRat is born in this way, but it appears quite different from other variants that borrowed the source code. HeroRat is the first Telegram-based malware developed from scratch in C# using the Xamarin framework, previous ones were written in Java., The RAT leverages Telesharp library for creating Telegram bots with C#., “One of these variants is different from the rest – despite the freely available source code, it is offered for sale on a dedicated Telegram channel, marketed under the name HeroRat.” reads the analysis published by ESET. , “It is available in three pricing models according to functionality, and comes with a support video channel. It is unclear whether this variant was created from the leaked source code, or if it is the “original” whose source code was leaked.”, The malware is spread through different channels, it is spread third-party app stores through disguised as social media and messaging apps., Researchers observed the largest number of infection in Iran where malicious apps are offered promising free bitcoins, free internet connections, and additional followers on social media., , The apps analyzed by ESET shows a strange behavior, after the malware is installed and launched on the victim’s device, it displays a small popup claiming the application can’t run on the device and for this reason, it will be uninstalled., Once the uninstallation is seemingly completed, the icon associated with the app disappears, unfortunately, the attacker has already obtained the control of the victim’s device., The attacker leverages the Telegram bot functionality to control the infected device, the malware is able to execute a broad range of commands such as data exfiltration and audio/video recording., “The malware has a wide array of spying and file exfiltration capabilities, including intercepting text messages and contacts, sending text messages and making calls, audio and screen recording, obtaining device location, and controlling the device’s settings.“continues the analysis., The source code of the HeroRat is offered for sale for 650 USD, the authors offer three packages of the malware depending on the features implemented., bronze, silver, and gold that go for 25, 50, and 100 USD, respectively., The malware’s capabilities are accessible in the form of clickable buttons in the Telegram bot interface. Attackers can control victimized devices by simply tapping the buttons available in the version of the malware they are operating., , The availability of the source code online will push new versions, the best way to check if your mobile has been infected is to scan it using a reliable mobile security solution., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – HeroRat, Telegram) |
4587_54168 | In October, the security expert Phil Oester discovered a flaw in the Linux kernel, dubbed ‘Dirty COW‘ that could be exploited by a local attacker to escalate privileges., The name “Dirty COW” is due to the fact that it’s triggered by a race condition in the way the Linux kernel’s memory subsystem handles copy-on-write (COW) breakage of private read-only memory mappings., Now a security expert discovered a serious five-year-old privilege-escalation vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2016-8655, that affects every Linux distro, including Ubuntu, Red Hat, and Debian., “A race condition issue leading to a use-after-free flaw was found in the way the raw packet sockets implementation in the Linux kernel networking subsystem handled synchronization while creating the TPACKET_V3 ring buffer,” reads the security advisory issued Red Hat., “A local user able to open a raw packet socket (requires the CAP_NET_RAW capability) could use this flaw to elevate their privileges on the system.”, The flaw was disclosed today by the security researcher Philip Pettersson, it dates back to 2011., , The vulnerability could be exploited by an unprivileged local user to gain root privileges by exploiting a race condition in the af_packet implementation in the Linux kernel., “This is an announcement about CVE-2016-8655 which is a race-condition I found in Linux (net/packet/af_packet.c). It can be exploited to gain kernel code execution from unprivileged processes.” wrote Pettersson. ” The bug was introduced on Aug 19, 2011: The security expert created an exploit to gain a root shell on an Ubuntu 16.04 LTS system (Linux Kernel 4.4) and also defeated SMEP/SMAP (Supervisor Mode Execution Prevention/Supervisor Mode Access Prevention) protection to gain kernel code execution abilities., An attacker can use the Pettersson’s exploit to run arbitrary malicious code with administrative privileges on the targeted PC or cause a denial of service., “A race condition issue leading to a use-after-free flaw was found in the way the raw packet sockets implementation in the Linux kernel networking subsystem handled synchronization while creating the TPACKET_V3 ring buffer,” Red Hat security advisory explains., “A local user able to open a raw packet socket (requires the CAP_NET_RAW capability) could use this flaw to elevate their privileges on the system.”, “On Android, processes with gid=3004/AID_NET_RAW are able to create AF_PACKET sockets (mediaserver) and can trigger the bug,” added Pettersson., Below the Timeline for the CVE-2016-8655 bug that was fixed in the mainline kernel last week, Don’t waste time, update your Linux distro as soon as possible., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – CVE-2016-8655, Linux) |
257_6677 | In recent years we are assisting to a profoundly change in the nature of malware, it is increased the development for spy purposes, for its spread in both private and government sectors., The recent case of Flame malware has demonstrated the efficiency of a malicious agent as a gathering tool in a typical context of state-sponsored attack for cyber espionage., Event like this represent the tip of the iceberg, every day millions of malware instances infect pc in every place in the world causing serious damages related to the leak of sensible information., Specific viruses are developed to address particular sectors and information, that is the case for example of “ACAD/Medre.A”, a malware specialized in the theft of AutoCAD files. The virus has been developed to steal blueprints from private companies mostly based in Peru according the expert of the security firm ESET., , The virus is able to locate AutoCAD file on infected machines and to send them via e-mail to accounts provided by two Chinese internet firms, 163.com and qq.com., The malware detected is written in AutoLISP, an AutoCAD scripting language, ACAD/Medre for the shipment of stolen data creates a password protected RAR-file containing the blueprints and the requisite “acad.fas” file and a “.dxf” file and send it separately by e-mail. The .DXF file generated by ACAD/Medre contains a set of information that the recipient uses to the collecting of stolen files., The password used for the RAR file is just one character equals to “1”., , Once discovered the email accounts used to transfer the stolen data the group of researcher noticed that the InBox for each of them was full, they turned out all saturated by over 100,000 mails giving an idea of the dimension of the attack., The virus has been detected several months ago but only in the last weeks it has been observed an explosion of the number of infected systems., , The researcher Righard Zwienenberg researcher of ESET declared, “It represents a serious case of industrial espionage,”, “Every new design is sent automatically to the operator of this malware. Needless to say this can cost the legitimate owner of the intellectual property a lot of money as the cybercriminals have access to the designs even before they go into production.”, “They may even have the guts to apply for patents on the product before the inventor has registered it at the patent office.”, The malware not limits its action to steal Autocad projects, it also checks the presence of Outlook email client to steal the pst file containing contacts, calendar and emails, confirming its genesis of espionage tool., For completeness of information ESET provided a free stand-alone cleaner available for the ACAD/Medre.A worm., Every time we speak about of cyber espionage we could not think other that China, however the practice is really diffused and the fact that the accounts are related to Chinese accounts is clue but not a certainty., It’s clear that Chinese hackers are considered worldwide specialist in cyber espionage, the case of Nortel is considered a case study for the impact of cyber espionage on the business of private companies., The Chinese government, and not only, at least a decade sponsored espionage activities for stealing trade secrets, confidential information and intellectual property of various kinds. Many experts are convinced that thanks to their ability to spy they were able, through the theft and reverse engineering of products, to clear the technological gap with the western industry., This time the Chinese authorities have demonstrated a collaborative approach identifying and blocking the accounts used for theft. Tens of thousands of AutoCAD blueprints leaked, the team of ESET experts promptly contacted the Chinese authorities such us Tencent company, owners of the qq.com domain, and also the Chinese National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center, their collaboration was essential to access to the account blocking them., Another lesson learnt is an efficient fight to the cybercrime must be conducted with a total collaboration of all the involved actors. Only in this way it’s possible to conduct an efficient immunization., Pierluigi Paganini, |
7091_75662 | The best news of the week with Security Affairs., 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, (Security Affairs – Newsletter) |
1935_33487 | MongoDB is a cross-platform document-oriented database which uses JSON-like documents with dynamic schemas (BSON) improving the integration of data between different applications. MongoDB is very popular for scalability, performance and high availability, it represents a valid solution also for very complex architectures, in order to achieve high performance MongoDB leverage in-memory computing., Today MongoDB is used by many organizations, the bad news is that nearly 40,000 entities running MongoDB are exposed and vulnerable to risks of hacking attacks., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – MongoDB, Hacking) |
5018_57396 | The news was reported by The Wall Street Journal, prosecutors suspect the involvement of Chinese middlemen who helped the Government of Pyongyang to organize the cyber theft., In February 2016, unknown hackers transferred the funds from the Bangladesh’s account at the New York Federal Reserve Bank to accounts in the Philippines through the SWIFT system., In reality, the hackers attemted 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., A top police investigator in Dhaka told Reuters in December that some Bangladesh Bank officials deliberately exposed its computer systems allowing hackers to penetrate the systems., The Justice Department and the New York Fed declined to comment on the report., The suspect of the involvement of the North Korea behind the cyber heist is not a novelty, “The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation believes that North Korea is responsible for the heist, an official briefed on the probe told Reuters. Richard Ledgett, deputy director of the U.S. National Security Agency, publicly suggested on Tuesday that North Korea may be linked to the incident, while private firms have long pointed the finger at the reclusive state.” reported the Reuters Agency., Security experts at Symantec linked the attacks against banks worldwide to the Lazarus APT group which is believed to be a nation state actor., In June 2016, evidence collected by a senior security researcher from Anomali Labs linked the malware to the North Korean hacker crew known as Lazarus Group., The expert discovered that five additional strains of malware that suggested the involvement of the Lazarus Group in the cyber attacks that targeted the banks., The researchers at Symantec discovered that the hacking tools used by the gang share many similarities with the malicious code in the arsenal of the Lazarus APT., The activity of the Lazarus Group surged in 2014 and 2015, its members used mostly custom-tailored malware in their attacks and experts that investigated on the crew consider it highly sophisticated., “Symantec has found evidence that a bank in the Philippines has also been attacked by the group that stole US$81 million from the Bangladesh central bank and attempted to steal over $1 million from the Tien Phong Bank in Vietnam.” reads the analysis published by Symantec last year., The experts at Symantec have spotted at least three strains of malware, Backdoor.Fimlis, Backdoor.Fimlis.B, and Backdoor.Contopee, which have been used in targeted attacks against financial institutions., “Symantec has identified three pieces of malware which were being used in limited targeted attacks against the financial industry in South-East Asia: Backdoor.Fimlis, Backdoor.Fimlis.B, and Backdoor.Contopee.” states Symantec”At first, it was unclear what the motivation behind these attacks were, however code sharing between Trojan.Banswift (used in the Bangladesh attack used to manipulate SWIFT transactions) and early variants of Backdoor.Contopee provided a connection.”, The expert Aaron Shelmire from Anomali Labs supported this thesis with his investigation., “Five new additional pieces of malware code discovered that contain unique portions of code related to the SWIFT attacks. ” wrote Shelmire., The Anomali Labs team conducted deeper research into a very large malware data repository using a set of Yara signature below to search for the shared subroutines., , The experts discovered five additional pieces of malware containing portions of code shared by Lazarus Group’s strains of malware, including the one used in the several SWIFT attacks, according to Shelmire., Last week, SWIFT announced it planned to cut off the remaining North Korean banks still connected to its system as concerns about the North Korean nuclear program and missile tests conducted by Pyongyang., The U.S. Treasury is considering sanctions against the alleged Chinese middlemen who facilitated the cyber heist., The New York Fed and SWIFT declined to comment., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Bangladesh cyber heist, security breach) |
3685_46864 | The British intelligence agency GCHQ has disclosed more than 20 vulnerabilities affecting multiple software. The information was shared by a GCHQ spokesperson with the Motherboard., The flaws were discovered by the CESG (Communications-Electronics Security Group), which is considered the Information Security Arm of GCHQ., “So far in 2016 GCHQ/CESG has disclosed more than 20 vulnerabilities across a number of software products,” is the statement released by the GCHQ spokesperson to Motherboard., Among the vulnerabilities disclosed by the CESG this year, there is also a serious flaw in the Firefox Browser version 46, a kernel vulnerability in OS X El Captain v10.11.4, a couple of vulnerabilities in Squid, and two bugs in the iOS 9.3., , Some of the bugs allow attackers to execute arbitrary code on the vulnerable devices., “We are not always credited by vendors for bugs that we disclose. We ask companies for credit in bulletins that they may publish, but recognise that this is not always possible,” said a GCHQ spokesperson., The disclosure of security flaws affecting products on the market is unusual when dealing with intelligence agencies and law enforcement that use to exploit them for their hacking operations., In August 2014, the BBC reported that the executive director of the Tor Project revealed that both US and UK intelligence agencies share bugs anonymously with Tor developers., The information disclosed by Andrew Leman, in an interview with BBC confirm the existence of groups of experts inside the organizations that anonymously leak information about Tor vulnerabilities in order for the bugs to get patched., “There’s a lot of groundswell of support as to what is going on, but at the same time there’s the other half of the organization that is: ‘You know what? People shouldn’t have privacy,’ and ‘Let’s go out and attack these things,’”“So there is always a balance between those who protect our freedom and liberty and those who don’t want you to have it.” Lewman said. , Lewman confirmed that agency insiders ordinary used Tor’s mechanism for anonymous bug submissions which doesn’t request any information to the researchers which provide information on bugs in the Tor network., “There are plenty of people in both organizations who can anonymously leak data to us to say maybe you should look here, maybe you should look at this to fix this,” “And they have. Lewmansaid., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – GCHQ / CESG, hacking) |
3513_45453 | The NSHC have hacked the Swiss People’s Party to raise awareness about Switzerland’s lack of protection against cyber attacks., Representatives of the Swiss People’s Party confirmed to 20 Minuten daily that the systems of the party were hit by a cyber attack but., “Apparently it’s hackers succeeded in the database of svp.ch penetrate and gain access to various data, including e-mail addresses. A group that calls itself NSHC and understood as ‘Grey Hats’ has, the editors received from inside-channels.ch she wanted to show the attack, that Switzerland is not sufficiently protected against cyber attacks.” reported the website inside-it.ch. , According to the inside-it.ch website, the NSHC hacker group also launched DDoS against several Swiss online shops and the Swiss Federal Railways website (SBB) this week., “The Swiss Federal Railways website was hard to access on Monday afternoon for about an hour and in the evening for around one and a half hours due to a DDoS attack,” Swiss Federal Railways spokesman Daniele Pallecchi told to the Swiss news agency., According to Pascal Lamia, the head of the government’s Reporting and Analysis Center for Information Assurance (also known as MELANI), the attack on the Swiss People’s Party is not linked with cyber attacks recently observed against small enterprises and online shops., “There is no connection with the chopped SVP sites including the DDoS attacks on web shops,” said Lamia., The experts at MELANI confirmed to have no news about the NSHC group., MELANI suggests people and businesses to check whether their email addresses have been hacked though an online tool available at Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Swiss People’s Party, hacking) |
5947_65570 | Lately, I have been working on analyzing the PowerShell attacks in my clients’ environment. Based on the analysis and research, I have come up with a few indicators that will help to detect the potential PowerShell attacks in your environment using windows event logs. First, we will understand how PowerShell is weaponized in the attacks that are observed in the wild and then we will look at the detection mechanism., As all of us are aware that PowerShell is extremely powerful and we have seen that attackers are increasingly using PowerShell in their attack methods lately. PowerShell is a default package that comes with Microsoft Windows OS and hence it is readily available on the victim machines to exploit., “Powershell is Predominantly used as a downloader”, The most prominent use of PowerShell, that is observed in the attacks in-the-wild, is to download the malicious file from the remote locations to the victim machine and execute it using commands like Start-Porcess, Invoke-Item OR Invoke-Expression (-IEX) file OR downloading the content of the remote file directly in to the memory of the victim machine and execute it from there., Two methods of System.net.Webclient that are prevalent in the live attacks, (New-object System.net.webclient).DownlodFile(), The simplest example of this method to check how it works is shown in the snapshot below. (an experiment that one can perform to check the functionality of this method by setting up a http/s server using program like Xampp ), , In the example shown above, the file is downloaded to the disk as evilfile.txt at the path C:\Users\kirtar_oza\AppData\Roaming set by calling the environment variable $Appdata and then this file is executed using “Invoke-Item” command., Following is an example from one of the attacks in the wild, In above example, the remote file is downloaded using .downloadfile() method and dropped under users’ appdata directory using environment variable and “Start-Process” is used to execute the dropped binary., The following are some more examples of the PowerShell downloads and invocation that have been seen in the wild, (New-object System.net.Webclient).DownloadString(), DownloadString() does not download any file to the disk but it copies the content of the remote file directly to the memory of the victim machine. These files typically are malicious scripts which get executed directly into the memory using Powershell –Command argument. This technique is wildly used to create so-called file-less malware where the evil script is executed directly in the memory of the victim machine without dropping any file as such on the hard disk. This technique is used to bypass signature-based detection., The simplest example of this method to check how it works is as below, , Where cmd.js is a remote script that starts calc.exe process on the victim machine without any file on the disk – runs from memory. Note : just write calc.exe in a notepad file and save it as .js extension, The following snippet is from one of the attacks in the wild, In above example, both of the methods have been used together – downloadstring() is used to download some php code from the remote host., Attackers use a variety of options available in PowerShell to keep their operation as stealthy as possible. Following are the flags which are widely used in the attacks – and that could be used to build our list of Indicators of Compromise (IOC), –WindowStyle hidden / -w hidden: to make PowerShell operation stealth by making program window hidden from user, –Exec Bypass: to bypass/ignore the execution policy like Restricted which restricts the PowerShell scripts from running, – Command / -c : to execute any commands from PowerShell terminal, –EncodedCommand / -e / -Enc: to pass encoded parameters as command lines, –Nop / -Noprofile : to ignore the commands in the Profile file, Examples of the various flags , You can refer the example in the previous section to understand the use of flags – -nop -Exec Bypass –Command, The following are the examples of various flags used by the attackers in the wild, Now, I will talk about the indicators of compromise that helps u to detect any suspicious PowerShell activities in the environment., Typically, when we run PowerShell using windows start menu or from its location on the disk, it starts under explorer.exe – you can see parent-child relationship tree using Process Explorer OR Process Hacker on your system., It looks like as shown in left – Explorere.exe is the parent process to the Powershell.exe, Most of the times, in PowerShell attacks, PowerShell script / commands launched through command line process – therefore, we usually have observed that the parent process to the Powershell Process is cmd.exe in the attacks which are in the wild., Now, there are legit cases also where cmd.exe will be the parent process for PowerShell process – like administrator wants to fire some PowerShell script and he launches powershell form command prompt (cmd.exe), “Therefore, it is important to have a look at the Grandparent process as well like – who spawned the cmd.exe – that will give you an indication if this could be part of the attack.” , So, if the Grandparent process is winword.exe, mshta.exe, wscript.exe, wuapp.exe – then it is a fair indication that cmd.exe is spawned by a script and that script is worth to look at., “There are cases where we have observed PowerShell Process is directly spawned by windword.exe – that is a clear indication of a suspicious activity that we need to log and investigate.”, This kind of behavior typically seen in Phishing cases where user clicked/opened the word document which has embedded macro (vbscript) in it which spawns the PowerShell process to download the malicious content from the web., Therefore, log and pay attention to the PowerShell process if, -It is spawned by winword.exe ( its parent process is winword.exe), -It is spawned by cmd.exe (its parent process is cmd.exe) and if cmd.exe is spawned by, winword.exe (Grandparent of PowerShell is winword.exe), mshta.exe, wscript.exe, wuapp.exe, tasking.exe, -It is spawned by any of the above processes (Its Parent is any of above process – mshta,wscript, cscript, wuapp, tasking etc. ), Have a look at the following snippet from Process Monitor that shows Process Creation order after the sample script is executed – PowerShell is executed by Wscript.exe – that means Wscript.exe is a parent process for PowerShell and PowerShell is in-turn the Parent process for conshost.exe which spawns the calc.exe., , Sample Script is as below – copy these 2 lines of code in Notepad and save it as .js and run it, The indicators discussed above are indicative and by no means, it is a comprehensive set of relationships but this can be a good starting point form where we can start logging PowerShell execution in the environment and then focus on above IOCs to investigate them further for any suspicious activity., Many of the Powershell attacks can be detected by just monitoring command line parameters passed along with the PowerShell process. Moreover, it will help us to further investigate the incident by providing the cues on where to look next for further evidence. For example, if downlodFile() method is used – we will come to know the location on the hard disk where the malicious file might have dropped and the malicious site from where the malicious file is downloaded. We can take these clues and investigate further to assess the impact and behavior of the attack., There are multiple ways to enable logging for PowerShell based on the version of the PowerShell and operating system used., Today, I am going to talk about the windows event code that will help us to identify the IOCs described above. By just enabling and logging this event id, it is possible to effectively detect the PowerShell attacks., I am talking about windows security event id 4688 – Process Creation. Yes, it will generate hell lot of events but applying basic filtering techniques, we can log and monitor only the logs of interest. By default, Process Creation audit is disabled – so first and foremost, we need to enable this feature using GPO. You can read more on this here., In addition to that – it is important to log command line parameters which are passed at the time of process creation. Command line auditing feature is made available on Microsoft starting from Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2012 R2. We just need to enable this feature by enabling Include command line in process creation events at Administrative Templates\System\Audit Process Creation and you can roll this out using GPO. You can read more on this here., Microsoft has come up with the update to make this feature available on its other supported versions of Windows 7, Server 2008 and Server 2008 R2. You can read more on this here and here., Event ID 4688 will give us two key information based on which alerts can be created on the SIEM to detect such attacks., I would take an example of Splunk and explain how alerts can be created to detect the suspicious PowerShell activities in your environment. I will also mention caveats associated with the alert., First of all, we are interested in capturing Powershell attacks so we need to monitor the events where Powershell.exe is created or spawned. Typicall, 4688 Event ID looks like following – that includes the field called “New_Process_Name” – that gives information about which process is created., , So, we need to pick-up those events by following search, Next step is to review the command line arguments passed with Powershell Process initiation., Process_Command_Line gives information about the command line parameters that are passed to the newly created process – i.e. Powershell. We can create the alert based on the frequently used parameters like –e, -Encod, -windowstyle , Bypass , -c , -command etc., Better option is to create the input lookup list for the known suspicious command line arguments and lookup against that in your alert., Starting with Windows 10 and Windows Server 2016 – Microsoft has added a field called “Creator Process Name” in Event Id 4688 which gives the name of the Parent Process. This filed helps to create the alerts based on the suspicious parents., “Unfortunately, PowerShell commands / scripts are easy to obfuscate.”, There are many ways by which the PowerShell scripts can be obfuscated. Random variables or string concatenation can be introduced in the PowerShell that can easily fool static comparison between command lines with the input lookup (as shown above). The following are few obfuscation methods that can render our static comparison ineffective., Three is an excellent research article on PowerShell Attack Methods by Symantec THE INCREASED USE OF POWERSHELL IN ATTACKS which includes excellent examples of obfuscation taken from a Derbycon 2016 talk by Daniel Bohannon on Powershell obfuscation. Following are a few examples of obfuscation, out of many discussed in this paper, Example: (neW-oBjEct system.NeT.WeBclieNT). dOWNloadfiLe, Example: (New-Object Net.WebClient). DownloadString(“ht”+’tp://’+$url), Example: (new-object net. webclient).”d`o`wnl`oa`dstr`in`g”($url), Example: “-window 1” instead of “-window hidden”, However, it is important to monitor the PowerShell execution in your environment and if the command lines are obfuscated, the chances are very high that it is run as a part of the cyber-attack. Hence, it is imperative to log Event ID 4688 – you may apply filter to log only PowerShell process creation and monitor the command line arguments passed with each PowerShell process creation. , So till next time – KEEP CALM and STAY VIGILANT !!!, About the author: Kirtar Oza CISSP,CISA, MS, Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – PowerShell, Hacking) |
6488_70681 | Security researchers at Cisco Talos have discovered a new piece of malware dubbed GoScanSSH that was being used to compromise SSH servers exposed online., The malicious code was written in Go programming language, uncommon for malware development, and implements several interesting features, for example, it tries to avoid infecting devices on government and military networks., “Talos identified a new malware family that was being used to compromise SSH servers exposed to the internet. This malware, which we have named GoScanSSH, was written using the Go programming language, and exhibited several interesting characteristics.” reads the analysis published by Talos., The attacker created unique malware binaries for each infected system, researchers also reported that the GoScanSSH command and control (C2) infrastructure was leveraging the Tor2Web proxy service making hard the tracking of the C&C infrastructure and resilient to takedowns., GoScanSSH conducted brute-force attack against publicly accessible SSH servers that allowed password-based SSH authentication. The hackers are leveraging a word list containing more than 7,000 username/password combinations. When GoScanSSH discovered a valid credential set, a unique GoScanSSH malware binary is then created and uploaded to the compromised SSH server and executed., While scanning for vulnerable SSH servers, GoScanSSH randomly generates IP addresses, avoiding special-use addresses. the malware then compares each IP address to a list of CIDR blocks that the malicious code will not attempt to scan because they are network ranges primarily controlled by various government and military entities., The malware specifically avoids ranges assigned to the U.S. Department of Defense, experts also noticed that one of the network ranges in the list is assigned to an organization in South Korea., The researchers detected more than 70 unique malware samples associated with the GoScanSSH malware family, the experts observed samples that were compiled to support multiple system architectures including x86, x86_64, ARM and MIPS64., The experts also observed multiple versions (e.g, versions 1.2.2, 1.2.4, 1.3.0, etc.) of the malware in the wild, a circumstance that suggests the threat actors behind the malicious code is continuing to improve the malware., According to the researchers, threat actors are likely trying to compromise larger networks, experts believe attackers are well resourced and with significant skills., They are being active since June 2017 and already deployed 70 different versions of the GoScanSSH malware using over 250 distinct C&C servers., The analysis of passive DNS data related to all of the C2 domains collected from all of the samples Talos analyzed confirmed that the number of infected systems is low., “In analyzing passive DNS data related to all of the C2 domains collected from all of the samples Talos analyzed, resolution attempts were seen dating back to June 19, 2017, indicating that this attack campaign has been ongoing for at least nine months. Additionally, the C2 domain with the largest number of resolution requests had been seen 8,579 times.” states the analysis published by Talos., Further details on the GoScanSSH malware, including IoCs, are reported in the analysis published by Talos., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – GoScanSSH malware, hacking) |
522_12822 | The use of technologies to support censorship is deplorable and condemnable but it must be considered that is a sad reality that has sustained the growth of a billionaire market. Many IT companies around the world are specialized in the providing of solutions used by authoritarian regimes to monitor internet use and persecute the opponents., On March 12th, the World Day Against Cyber-Censorship, Reporters Without Borders released an interesting report titled “Era of the digital mercenaries” that denounce the increased surveillance practice committed by governments., Government authorities increasingly using technology to intercept communication and monitor online activities of journalists, citizen-journalists, and dissidents … a serious menace to human rights and liberty of expression. The report estimates that many people today are arrested and tortured for providing news and information online, the countries considered “Enemies of the Internet” are Syria, China, Iran, Bahrain, and Vietnam., “Online surveillance is a growing danger for journalists, bloggers, citizen-journalists and human rights defenders. The Spyfiles that WikiLeaks released in 2012 showed the extent of the surveillance market, its worth (more than 5 billion dollars) and the sophistication of its products.” report states., China has the most advanced censorship system, known as Great Firewall or Great Wall, but also Iran and Syria have acquired/implemented monitoring systems. Both nations addition to the availability of surveillance architecture, in many cases they have also used malware to track hacktivists and dissidents., In this states the governments systematic apply online surveillance that results in serious human rights violations, the actions of authorities is invasive due to the frequent use of malicious code and cyber attacks against a restricted circle of individuals opposed to the regimes., Who armed the hand of the executioner?, Reporters at Without Borders hasn’t compiled only a list of states considered likely to censorship but also public denounced five “Corporate Enemies of the Internet,”. The list include five private businesses that sell products used by authoritarian governments to commit violations of human rights and freedom of information., The companies are Gamma, Trovicor, Hacking Team, Amesys and Blue Coat, the report uses words of condemnation for these businesses that it defines as “digital era mercenaries”., The companies are accused to essentially provide two types of corporate products for monitoring and espionage, architectures for large-scale monitoring of Internet and spyware and other kinds of tools for targeted and invasive surveillance., Sophisticated malware designed and commercialized by Hacking Team and Gamma have been used by governments to spy on journalists and netizens, the malicious code is able to infect multi-platforms (e.g. desktop, mobile) and OSs, gathering remote control of victims machine and stealing documents and user’s credentials., Products such as FinSpy(Gamma) and DaVinci Code (Hacking Team) are infamous in the worldwide security community, Mikko Hypponen Chief Research Officer of F-Secure is one of the most popular voice that denounced the abused use of these applications., Again, Trovicor’s surveillance products have been deployed by Bahrain’s royal family to spy on bloggers and journalists and arrest them, a quite similar situation is in Syria, Government of Damascus deployed a DPI (Deep Packet Inspection) produced by Blue Coat., Amesys company provided Eagle products that were found in the offices of Muammar Gaddafi’s secret police., The report commented the event with following statemens:, “Their products have been or are being used to commit violations of human rights and freedom of information. If these companies decided to sell to authoritarian regimes, they must have known that their products could be used to spy on journalists, dissidents and netizens. If their digital surveillance products were sold to an authoritarian regime by an intermediary without their knowledge, their failure to keep track of the exports of their own software means they did not care if their technology was misused and did not care about the vulnerability of those who defend human rights.”, Reporters Without Borders calls for the introduction of controls on the commercialization of surveillance software and architectures to governments that persecute dissidents violating fundamental rights, it’s necessary a prompt action of Legislators., “The European Union and the United States have already banned the export of surveillance technology to Iran and Syria. This praiseworthy initiative should not be an isolated one. European governments need to take a harmonized approach to controlling the export of surveillance technology. “, Despite many organization are denouncing an intolerable situation under the eyes of all, many democratic countries also increased monitoring and surveillance activities in the name of homeland security, let’s remind for example debated bills such as the US FISAA and CISPA and the Communications Data Bill in Britain., Reporters Without Borders also propose a “digital survival kit” to offers practical tools, advice and techniques to censorship and monitoring activities, Let’s close the post with appropriate warning proposed in the report:, “This is a battle without bombs, prison bars or blank inserts in newspapers, but if care is not taken, the enemies of the truth may sweep the board.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Censorship), , |
6610_71752 | The NATO Cyber-Defence Centre has a new member, on Tuesday Portugal joined the organization., The NATO Cyber-Defence Centre is a multinational and interdisciplinary hub of cyber defence expertise, it was founded in 2008 in Tallin (Estonia)., The Centre attained the status of International Military Organisation on 28 October 2008. It is an International Military Organisation with a mission to enhance the capability, cooperation and information sharing among NATO members and partners in cyber defence., “We are facing adversaries who target our common values in cyberspace: freedom, truth, trust,” centre director Merle Maigre said at the ceremony., “To build resilience we need to come together. That is why I am glad to welcome Portugal as together we are stronger,”, In 2017, the centre was targeted by nation-state hackers, Estonia accused Russia for the cyber assault on its information networks., Portugal is the 21st country to join NATO’s cyber defence centre, other centre members are Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovakia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, the United Kingdom and the United States., Australia, Norway, and Japan will join the NATO Cyber-Defence Centre in the next future., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – NATO Cyber-Defence Centre, cybersecurity), , |
5496_61270 | The notorious hacker BestBuy, also known as Popopret, pleaded guilty in court on Friday to hijacking more than 900,000 routers from the network of Deutsche Telekom. The 29-year-old man, whom name wasn’t revealed by authorities. used a custom version of the Mirai IoT malware., , Earlier July the popular investigator Brian Krebs announced to have discovered the real BestBuy’s identity. according to the experts, the hacker is the Briton Daniel Kaye., BestBuy was also known as the author of the GovRAT malware, he offered the source code of the RAT, including a code-signing digital certificate, for nearly 4.5 Bitcoin on the TheRealDeal black market., German authorities referenced the man as Spiderman which is the name he used to register the domain names that the hacker used as C&C for his botnet., According to the German website FutureZone.de, Deutsche Telekom estimated that the losses caused by the cyber attack were more than two million euros., BestBuy targeted the routers in late November 2016 with the intent to recruit them in its botnet that was offered as a DDoS for hire service, but accidentally the malicious code variant he used triggered a DoS condition in the infected devices., “The hacker admitted in court that he never intended for the routers to cease functioning. He only wanted to silently control them so he can use them as pawns in a DDoS botnet. ” wrote Bleepingcomputer.com., Early December 2016, the man used another flawed version of Mirai that caused the same widespread problem in UK where more than 100,000 routers went offline. The routers belonged to Kcom, TalkTalk, a UK Postal Office, TalkTalk ISPs., BestBuy was arrested in late February 2017 by the UK police at the London airport, then he was extradited to Germany to face charges in a German court in Cologne., On July 21, the hacker BestBuy pleaded guilty, according to German media the man explained that he was hired by a Liberian ISP to carry out DDoS attacks on local competitors., The hacker said the Liberian ISP paid him $10,000 to hit its competitors., BestBuy’s sentencing hearing is scheduled July 28, the man faces up to ten years in the jail., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – (Mirai, Deutsche Telekom) |
4896_56517 | Researchers at Security firm CyberX have discovered a cyber espionage campaign that siphoned more than 600 gigabytes from about 70 targets in several industries, including critical infrastructure and news media., The list of targets includes:, The experts have dubbed this espionage campaign Operation BugDrop because attackers use the PC microphones to bug targets and capture the audio and other sensitive data., The threat actors used a sophisticated malware to exfiltrate sensitive data, capture screenshots. The attack chain starts with phishing emails using malicious Microsoft Word documents, once the target machine is infected, the malware uploads the stolen audio and data to Dropbox., To make the phishing email more effective the Word document included a graphic that looked like an official Microsoft notification, it displays the following message:, “Attention! The file was created in a newer version of Microsoft Office programs. You must enable macros to correctly display the contents of a document.”, , “Operation BugDrop is a well-organized operation that employs sophisticated malware and appears to be backed by an organization with substantial resources. In particular, the operation requires a massive back-end infrastructure to store, decrypt and analyze several GB per day of unstructured data that is being captured from its targets.” reads the analysis published by CyberX “A large team of human analysts is also required to manually sort through captured data and process it manually and/or with Big Data-like analytics.”, The vast majority of the targets are located in Ukraine, other countries affected included Saudi Arabia and Austria., The researchers haven’t found any evidence that links the Operation BugDrop to the string of attacks against the Ukrainian infrastructure that caused the massive power outage in the country., The attackers behind the BlackEnergy threat also targeted a broad range of industries in Ukraine leveraging on spear-phishing messages with weaponized Microsoft Word documents., The experts at CyberX also found similarities between the Operation BugDrop and the cyber espionage campaign tracked as Operation Groundbait that was discovered in May 2016., “Initially, CyberX saw similarities between Operation BugDrop and a previous cyber-surveillance operation discovered by ESET in May 2016 called Operation Groundbait. However, despite some similarities in the Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures (TTPs) used by the hackers in both operations, Operation BugDrop’s TTPs are significantly more sophisticated than those used in the earlier operation.” reads the analysis that also include the following example., The CyberX researchers speculate the involvement of a nation-state actor behind the Operation BugDrop., “Skilled hackers with substantial financial resources carried out Operation BugDrop,” reads the analysis. “Given the amount of data analysis that needed to be done on a daily basis, we believe BugDrop was heavily staffed. Given the sophistication of the code and how well the operation was executed, we have concluded that those carrying it out have previous field experience.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Operation BugDrop, Cyber Espionage) |
4668_54759 | A critical vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2016-10033, affects PHPMailer, one of the most popular open source PHP libraries used to send emails. It has been estimated that more than 9 Million users worldwide leverages on this library., Millions of websites using PHP and popular CMS, including WordPress, Drupal, and Joomla currently use the library for sending emails., The CVE-2016-10033 affects all versions of the library before the PHPMailer 5.2.18 release., , The flaw was discovered by the notorious security expert Dawid Golunski from Legal Hackers, it could be exploited by a remote unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code in the context of the web server and compromise the target web application., “An independent research uncovered a critical vulnerability in PHPMailer that could potentially be used by (unauthenticated) remote attackers to achieve remote arbitrary code execution in the context of the web server user and remotely compromise the target web application.” Golunski explained in a security advisory., “To exploit the vulnerability an attacker could target common website components such as contact/feedback forms, registration forms, password email resets and others that send out emails with the help of a vulnerable version of the PHPMailer class.” , The advisory provides a few details about the exploitation of the flaw to give users a chance to fix their PHPMailer class. The experts confirmed that the details of the CVE-2016-10033 vulnerability will be published shortly., Golunski reported the flaw to the developers who have promptly fixed it in the PHPMailer 5.2.18 release.
The researcher also plans to include in the advisory a proof-of-concept exploit code and video PoC of the attack., Administrators and developers must update to the patched release as soon as possible., Stay tuned, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – CVE-2016-10033, hacking) |
7516_78820 | , Google will close the consumer version of Google+ in April, four months earlier than planned. According to G Suite product management vice president David Thacker. the company will maintain only a version designed for businesses. Google will shut down the Application programming interface programs (APIs) used by developers to access Google+ data within 90 days, due to the discovery of a bug., “We’ve recently determined that some users were impacted by a software update introduced in November that contained a bug affecting a Google+ API.” wrote David Thacker. , “We discovered this bug as part of our standard and ongoing testing procedures and fixed it within a week of it being introduced. No third party compromised our systems, and we have no evidence that the app developers that inadvertently had this access for six days were aware of it or misused it in any way.”, The new flaw was introduced with a software update in November and it was discovered during routine testing and quickly fixed by the experts of the company., Thacker pointed out that the protection of Google users is a priority for the firm and for this reason all Google+ APIs will be shut-down soon., “With the discovery of this new bug, we have decided to expedite the shut-down of all Google+ APIs,” Thacker said., “While we recognize there are implications for developers, we want to ensure the protection of our users.”, According to Google, the vulnerability affected approximately 52.5 million users, allowing applications to see profile information such as name, occupation, age, and email address even if access was set to private., Google initially announced plans to shut down Google+ after discovered a bug that exposed private data in as many as 500,000 accounts, At the time, there was no evidence that developers had taken advantage of the flaw., Google is in the process of notifying any enterprise customers that were impacted by this flaw. , “A list of impacted users in those domains is being sent to system administrators, and we will reach out again if any additional impacted users or issues are discovered.” concludes Thacker. , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –Google+, social network) |
3245_43502 | Tavis Ormandy, a researcher with Google’s Project Zero vulnerability research team, publicly disclosed critical vulnerabilities in TrendMicro Antivirus that could be exploited to execute malicious code on the targeted system., Ormandy took only about 30 seconds to find the first code-execution vulnerability affecting the TrendMicro antivirus program., , An attacker could exploit the security flaws to access contents of a password manager built into the TrendMicro security solution. The attackers can view hashed passwords and the plaintext Internet domains they are used for., “The password manager product is primarily written in JavaScript with node.js, and opens multiple HTTP RPC ports for handling API requests. It took about 30 seconds to spot one that permits arbitrary command execution, openUrlInDefaultBrowser, which eventually maps to ShellExecute(). This means any website can launch arbitrary commands, like this:”, The expert highlighted that an attacker can exploit the flaws even if users never launch the password manager., “I don’t even know what to say—how could you enable this thing *by default* on all your customer machines without getting an audit from a competent security consultant?” explained Ormandy “You need to come up with a plan for fixing this right now. Frankly, it also looks like you’re exposing all the stored passwords to the internet, but let’s worry about that screw up after you get the remote code execution under control.”, The Google expert criticized TrendMicro for approaching in the wrong way the threat and fix the issues. Ormandy highlighted the serious risks for end-users inviting the company to disable the feature., “So this means, anyone on the internet can steal all of your passwords completely silently, as well as execute arbitrary code with zero user interaction. I really hope the gravity of this is clear to you, because I’m astonished about this.” Ormandy added. “In my opinion, you should temporarily disable this feature for users and apologise for the temporary disruption, then hire an external consultancy to audit the code. In my experience dealing with security vendors, users are quite forgiving of mistakes if vendors act quickly to protect them once informed of a problem, I think the worst thing you can do is leave users exposed while you clean this thing up. The choice is yours, of course.”, Despite TrendMicro released an emergency fix, according to Ormandy the password manager still represents an open door for hackers., “I’m still concerned that this component exposes nearly 70 API’s (!!!!) to the internet, most of which sound pretty scary. I tell them I’m not going to through them, but that they need to hire a professional security consultant to audit it urgently.“, Recently other security software have been found vulnerable to cyber attacks, including FireEye, McAfee, Kaspersky and AVG., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Antivirus, TrendMicro) |
860_20106 | Vodafone Iceland was hacked by the group of hackers Maxn3y (@AgentCoOfficial) who in the past has stolen data from airports’ systems, electronic giants and fast food company., The hackers announced via Twitter to have successfully compromised Vodafone Iceland server and defaced the official website (vodafone.is) and various other sub domains including the company mobile site., , The hackers disclosed a compressed 61.7MB rar file which is locked with password TURKISH and that contains a collection of files including one titled users.sql that appears to contain the 77,000 user accounts. The file includes user names, social security numbers, encrypted passwords as many other encrypted information., Another file, MySQL file greind.sql appears to contain a small log of sms history that is dated 2011 as well as a sms logger., , The portal CyberWarNews posted the list of files disclosed and provided information on their content., Vodafone Iceland website was rapidly restored, but at time I’m writing it is not reachable., , Following the complete list of files leaked., v2.sql, Multi media database, nothing critical, 400K of user tracking and logging with user agents, refers etc., greind.sql
sms history with what appears to be full text messages to a from numbers with timestamps, all dated 2011-08-19
SMS logger sender id, sms id, user ip, date.
900k rows of user contact details related to a SMS plan., users.sql
user names, ids, encrypted passwords, email addresses, social security numbers, dates, bank details (alot is incomplete)
77,25, sso_vodafone.sql
account managers details
full names, phone numbers, email addresses., sms_history.sql and signup.sql explained above., 6stodvar_signup.xls
kennitala (social security numbers), dates, ticket numbers, campaign ids(unknown campaign), email addresses
count: 23,494, 100mb_pakkar,xls
id, code(unknown), msisdn, sms, timestamp(ts)
count: 1001, aukalykill_signup.xls
id, full name (nafn), kennitala(ssn), pnr, confirmed, date, ticket, email, senda, recivier.
count: 4305, env_users.xls
id, ipaddresses, user name, encrypted passwords, email addresses, first name, last name, phone, fax, reg date, last active, user level, notes
count: 334, ev_users.xls
id, school. login. clear text passwords, names, isadmin, active
count: 18, gagnamaga_account.xls
id, timestamp, ip, session id, social security numbers, email addresses
count: 1491, registeration.xls
id, phone, social security numbers, email addresses, tickets id, registration status, date, ip
count: 1247, ris_site_users.xls
user names, clear text passwords, names, email addresses and permissions
count: 12, shop_order.xls
cart_id, names, social security numbers, post codes, email addresses, credit card names, nulled credit card numbers and dates, sale amounts.
count: 3086, signup_buika.xls
real name, email addresses, company’s, chairman name.
count: 31, survey_registration.xls
id, content, date, email addresses
count: 1929, um_clients.xls
usernames,clear text passwords, active, company’s, full addresses, contact numbers, websites, nulled locations.
count: 767, vodafonecup2010
user names, 5x full names, phone numbers, social security numbers
count: 71, ris_world_zones.xls
names, partner countrys, to iceland (nothing important)
count: 10, shop_cart.xls
session id and details encrypted, (nothing important)
count: 49, 468, shop_cart_items.xls
file name says all, nothing of importance here., shop_cart_plan
file name says all, nothing of importance here., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Vodafne Iceland, data breach)
, |
5470_61068 | The best news of the week with Security Affairs., Hurry up, subscribe to the newsletter, next Sunday you will receive all the news directly in your inbox.I desire to inform you that Security Affairs is now open to sponsored content..I desire to inform you that Security Affairs is now open to sponsored content.
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4353_52144 | Experts from Kaspersky Lab have published a detailed report on the cyber espionage activities conducted by the StrongPity APT. The group is very sophisticated, its operations leverage on watering holes attacks and malware to target users of software designed for encrypting data and communications., The StrongPity APT targeted users Europe, the Middle East, and Northern Africa., StrongPity set up the website ralrab.com aiming to mimic the legitimate rarlab.com website, the website was used as a landing domain to deliver poisoned installers of popular software. The group used to compromise the sites of certified distributors from Europe in an effort to redirect users to ralrab.com that was hosting the trojanized version of the legitimate application., StrongPity group set up a rogue TrueCrypt website hosted at true-crypt.com, it was used to redirect users from software downloads website Tamindir. Kaspersky reported that StrongPity started setting up TrueCrypt-themed watering hole attacks in late 2015, but the experts of the company noticed a peak in the number of attacks this summer. The majority of the users that were victims of this attack were located in Turkey and some in the Netherlands., Italian visitors of the legitimate distributor website winrar.it were redirected to trojanized WinRAR installers hosted from the winrar.it website itself., “Over the course of a little over a week, malware delivered from winrar.it appeared on over 600 systems throughout Europe and Northern Africa/Middle East. Likely, many more infections actually occurred. Accordingly, the country with the overwhelming number of detections was in Italy followed by Belgium and Algeria. The top countries with StrongPity malware from the winrar.it site from May 25th through the first few days of June are Italy, Belgium, Algeria, Cote D’Ivoire, Morroco, France, and Tunisia.” states the report., winrar.it StrongPity component geolocation distribution, In the arsenal of the StrongPity APT there are multiple components that allow attackers to gain complete control of the target system and effectively exfiltrate data from the machine. According to Kaspersky, the droppers used by the group were often signed with unusual digital certificates., “Because we are talking about StrongPity watering holes, let’s take a quick look at what is being delivered by the group from these sites.” continues the report reporting more than systems infected with a StrongPity malware., “When we count all systems from 2016 infected with any one of the StrongPity components or a dropper, we see a more expansive picture. This data includes over 1,000 systems infected with a StrongPity component. The top five countries include Italy, Turkey, Belgium, Algeria, and France.”, The group used a component that looks for encryption-supported software suites, including the SSH and telnet client Putty, the FTP tool FileZilla, remote connections manager mRemoteNG, Microsoft’s Mstsc remote desktop client, and the SFTP and FTP client WinSCP., “When visiting sites and downloading encryption-enabled software, it has become necessary to verify the validity of the distribution site and the integrity of the downloaded file itself. Download sites not using PGP or strong digital code signing certificates need to re-examine the necessity of doing so for their own customers,” states the report., According to Kurt Baumgartner, principal security researcher at Kaspersky Lab, the TTPs observed for the StrongPity APT are similar to the ones of another Russian threat actor known as Energetic Bear/ Crouching Yeti /Dragonfly)., In 2014, Kaspersky published an interesting analysis on the Crouching Yeti group that used a large network of hacked websites (219 domains) as command and control infrastructure. The vast majority of these websites were legitimate and were used to serve malware and instruct bot agents worldwide to collect information on target systems. Most of the 2,800 companies identified as victims of the attack were in the industrial/machinery market and hacker most-targeted countries like the United States, Spain, Japan, and Germany., ”They ran vulnerable content management systems or vulnerable web applications. None of the exploits used to compromise the servers were known to be zero-day. None of the client side exploits re-used from the open source metasploit framework were zero-day.” reports the report published by Kaspersky Lab., , The attackers used the following attack scheme to infect victims:, Pierluigi Paganini, Security Affairs – (StrongPity APT, hacking) |
3606_46252 | Months ago, the author of the dreaded Citadel malware was sentenced to prison, but in the same period, a new improved variant resurged in the wild. The new strain of Citadel malware, called Atmos, is now targeting banks in France and it was also served with the Teslacrypt ransomware., Atmos has been active since late 2015, but the experts have discovered it in the wild only recently., Citadel was first spotted in 2011, its authors used the code of the ZeuS Trojan code to create the new threat., “Dimitry Belorossov, a/k/a Rainerfox, has been sentenced to four years, six months in prison following his guilty plea for conspiring to commit computer fraud. Belorossov distributed and installed Citadel, a sophisticated malware that infected over 11 million computers worldwide, onto victim computers using a variety of infection methods.” stated the announcement issued by the FBI., “In 2012, Belorossov downloaded a version of Citadel, which he then used to operate a Citadel botnet primarily from Russia. Belorossov remotely controlled over 7,000 victim bots, including at least one infected computer system with an IP address resolving to the Northern District of Georgia. Belorossov’s Citadel botnet contained personal information from the infected victim computers, including online banking credentials for U.S.-based financial institutions with federally insured deposits, credit card information, and other personally identifying information.”, The Citadel malware is a powerful data stealer, it was mainly used in banking frauds, but it has the ability to carry out a large number of fraudulent operations., In the second half of 2012, security experts began to see Citadel variants designed to breach networks of government and private companies., On June 5 2013, the Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit announced that its experts were working with the FBI to shut down the Citadel botnet and to arrest its operators., , Today security experts at Heimdal security are issuing an alert on the Citadel successor, Atmos., The researchers discovered that the new Citadel variant was heavily modified respect its predecessors. It utilizes the same web injection mechanisms implemented by ZeuS, a circumstance that leads the experts into belief that it was designed with the same intent., The researchers confirmed that only a few sample was discovered in the wild targeting French banks., Giving a look at the technical details shared by the Heimdal Security, we note that C&C servers are located in Vietnam, Canada, Ukraine, Russia, the US and Turkey and the overall Atom botnet is already composed of more than 1000 machines., Below the list of Indicators of Compromise tied to the new Atmos Trojan:,
I invite you to read the Heimdal’s Alert, Atmos have to be considered a very dangerous threat, especially for the private industry., Pierluigi Paganini , (Security Affairs – Atmos trojan, Citadel) |
1862_32687 | The French security expert Kafeine has recently discovered an unpatched vulnerability (0day) in Flash Player is being exploited by Angler Exploit Kit., The new variant of the Angler exploit kit that exploit three different vulnerabilities in Flash Player, including the zero-day flaw (coded CVE-2015-0311) for the latest version of Flash (version 16.0.0.257) in several versions of Internet Explorer running on Windows 7 and Windows 8., Adobe recognized this flaw as a critical vulnerability and it immediately started the investigation on the new Angler exploit kit to develop a security update to secure its customers., The new Angler exploit kit includes also the code to exploit two known vulnerabilities, but security industry way scared by the presence of a zero-day in Flash that was being used in the wild to install a the Bedep malware., , , “A critical vulnerability (CVE-2015-0311) exists in Adobe Flash Player 16.0.0.287 and earlier versions for Windows and Macintosh. Successful exploitation could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system.” warned Adobe in an Adobe Security Bulletin., Security experts noticed that attackers that are exploiting the vulnerability in the wild via drive-by-download attacks are targeting systems running Internet Explorer and Firefox on Windows 8.1 and below., On January 24, Adobe has issued a security update that fixex the vulnerability, as explained by the company users who have enabled auto-update for the Flash Player desktop runtime will be receiving the update that fix also the CVE-2015-0311., Adobe also announced that the manual download for the update will be available during the week of January 26.Adobe is working with distribution partners to make the update available in Google Chrome and Internet Explorer 10 and 11., “This version includes a fix for CVE-2015-0311. Adobe expects to have an update available for manual download during the week of January 26, and we are working with our distribution partners to make the update available in Google Chrome and Internet Explorer 10 and 11. For more information on updating Flash Player please refer to this post. ” states the security advisory., If you have doubts about the Adobe Flash Player version installed on your machine, verify it by browsing the About Flash Player page., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Adobe Flash Player, zero day CVE-2015-0311) |
7101_75736 | The internet has been a blessing since its inception. The very concept of globalization has come into existence just because of the internet. The world that was previously unconnected soon became a global village with different cultures and traditions linking together via the information highway., The internet brought with it plenty of benefits, but accompanying these benefits came some evils that were previously not known of. These evils include hacking, identity theft, online surveillance, and cyberstalking., We all know the dangers associated with hacking, identity theft, and internet surveillance, thanks to Facebook and other social networking platforms. What we’re probably not aware of is cyberstalking, which is the most disgusting and dangerous of all these threats., Most of us are already aware of what cyber stalking is or have encountered real-world stalking at some point in our lives. Women tend to have had more experiences than men. Stalking in its traditional sense refers to a situation where someone is keeping an eye on you without your will or interest. While this is enough to make someone uncomfortable, stalkers do so to know more about their victim so that they can use the learnt information to blackmail their victims or take advantage from them., Cyberstalking is not too different, except that it’s more efficient than the traditional one. Because of the internet and all of its connectivity, stalkers do not need to follow you around the neighborhood. If you’re not too careful, they can learn everything there is to know about you, without even leaving their dimly lit basements., They do this by following you on the internet. Because of social media, it’s not too difficult to follow you around. You probably post most of your daily activities on your social media profile. You check into places, post pictures while you’re there, tell people about the movie you recently watched, and share your current mood and feelings., All the personal information which is nowadays easily available on the internet can become the source of pleasure for any random cyber stalker. He can learn all there is to know about anyone in just a few clicks., Most cyber stalkers are skilled hackers as well. They can hack into your social profiles and read your chats, and even post stuff from your profiles which can damage your reputation. Once an account gets compromised finding pictures from chats such as those that may have been shared with an intimate friend is cake walk., Similarly, these hackers can hack your devices too. This means that any private data saved on your phone can be seen and taken over by the hacker. They can even hack into your webcam and watch you live, without you knowing about it., Today, modern technology has made it much easier for hackers and other cybercriminals to hide their tracks. With a specialized cyber security tool such as a VPN, anyone can become completely anonymous and invisible online, making it impossible for anyone to detect your presence or activities., There are many other cybersecurity services that hackers and cyber criminals use for their unfair advantage. These include proxies and remote servers that allow hackers to keep bouncing their traffic on to different servers, thereby keeping them safe from getting detected., While cyberstalking is an issue for all genders, women are the most affected. When cyber stalkers get their desired info, they use it to blackmail the victim and force them to do special favors. Some demand money, others demand more heinous things. And there’s no end to all this blackmailing. Those who are affected even turn towards suicide just to bring an end to all this creepiness and blackmailing., According to some recent estimations, 94% of women who use the internet have faced cyberstalking at some point in their life. Moreover, 62% of all cyberstalking victims are young women between the age of 18 and 24., Over 20,000 cyberstalking cases get reported each year and this number keeps growing every next year. We also know that there may be an equal number of cases which never get reported due to the taboos and stigmas attached with being a victim of cyber stalking. What’s worse is that cyberstalking has been on the rise for many years. Psychologytoday.com says that, cyberstalking is the fastest growing crime and at least 1 million women are cyber-stalked in the US alone. According to a report by WHOA, 60% of all cyberstalking victims are women while 40% are teenage boys and adult males., The following are a few examples of cyberstalkers who like to prey on the innocents:, These are people who refuse to believe that their relationship no longer exists. Intimate partner stalkers are emotionally abusive who want to control their partner despite their breakup. They would continue to keep a constant eye on their separated partner and continue to make them feel extremely uncomfortable, violated, and scared., These are people who may suffer from major mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, manic-depression, or erotomania. They believe that the victim is in love with him/her and that they are in a relationship even though the victim has no clue about this imaginary relationship. Other delusional stalkers believe that if they pursue the person long enough, the victim would eventually give up and fall in love., These people are motivated by vengeance. Vengeful stalkers have a cause to be angry with their victims. Vengeful stalkers are often targeted by members of their university or college faculty/staff. Some of these are psychopaths, while others are delusional and believe that they are the victims even though they’re not. Vengeful stalkers stalk to get even., What’s worse about cyberstalking is that there is virtually no awareness on it. Those who are affected by this issue do not know how to deal with it. This is because most victims prefer to stay quiet to save their name and their reputation. Others can’t even find the right platforms to raise their voice and find the right kind of help., However, there are businesses and organizations that are standing up against cyberstalking and are using their resources and their knowledge to help the victims. Cyberstalking is a menace but it can be dealt with if proper precautions are followed. You can follow some important precautions mentioned here and stay safe from cyberstalking., , , About Author:, Anas Baig is a Cybersecurity & Tech Writer. He has been featured on major media outlets including TheGuardian, Lifehacker Australia, The Next Web, CSO, ITProPortal, Infosec Magazine, Tripwire and many others. He writes about online security and privacy, IoT, AI, and Big Data. If you’d like to get in touch, send an email to [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @anasbaigdm., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Cyberstalking, cybersecurity) |
4310_51803 | Cryptography is used for secure communication since ancient days for providing confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the information. Public key cryptography is a classification of cryptography having a pair of keys for encryption and decryption. Public key cryptography provides security and authentication using several algorithms., RSA algorithm is prominent since its inception and is widely used. Several modified schemes were introduced to increase security in RSA algorithm involving additional complexity. In this blog, we introduce a generalized algorithm over RSA which is advanced, adaptable and scalable in using the number of primes., Our algorithm uses 2k prime numbers with secure key generation involving additional complexity making it computationally infeasible to determine decryption key. A user can use 4, 8, 16, 32,.…(2k) prime numbers for generating public and private components securely. In our algorithm, public key and private key components are generated by making use of N, where N is a function of 2k prime numbers. When an attacker gets public key component n out of {E, n} by using factorization techniques such as GNFS or ECM, he can only get two initial prime numbers (since, n is product of first two prime numbers)., However, finding remaining prime numbers is computationally infeasible as no relevant information is available to the attacker. Hence, it is difficult for the attacker to determine the private key component D out of {D, n} knowing public key component {E, n}. Thus, it is practically impossible to break our system using brute force attack., When an attacker gets public key component n out of {E, n} by using factorization techniques such as GNFS or ECM, he can only get two initial prime numbers (since, n is product of first two prime numbers). However, finding remaining prime numbers is computationally infeasible as no relevant information is available to the attacker. Hence, it is difficult for the attacker to determine the private key component D out of {D, n} knowing public key component {E, n}. Thus, it is practically impossible to break our system using brute force attack., In GRSA-AA algorithm, we have resolved the problem of guessing the other prime numbers by making use of 2k prime numbers and thus making it almost impossible for an attacker to recover the keys and break the system. GRSA-AA is presented and discussed in detail in the following subsections., GRSA-AA Key Generation For 8 Prime Numbers, INPUT:, Eight prime numbers: p1, p2, p3, p4, p5, p6, p7, p8., OUTPUT:, Public key components {E, n}, Private key components {D, n}, PROCEDURE:, n ← p1 * p2, m ← p3 * p4, o ← p5 * p6, p ← p7 * p8, N1 ← n * m, N2 ← o * p, N ←N1* N2, /*Compute Euler phi values of n, m, o and p */, Φ(n) ← (p1-1) * (p2-1), Φ(m) ← (p3-1) * (p4-1), Φ(o) ← (p5-1) * (p5-1), Φ(p) ← (p7-1) * (p8-1), /*Compute Euler phi values of N */, Φ(N) ← Φ(n) * Φ(m) * Φ(o) * Φ(p), Find a random number e1, satisfying 1 < e1 < Φ(n) and gcd (e1, Φ(n)) =1, Find a random number e2, satisfying 1 < e2 < Φ(m) and gcd (e2, Φ(m)) =1, Find a random number e3, satisfying 1 < e3 < Φ(o) and gcd (e3, Φ(o)) =1, Find a random number e4, satisfying 1 < e4 < Φ(p) and gcd (e4, Φ(p)) =1, Compute A1 ← e1e2 mod N1, Compute A2 ← e3e4 mod N2, Compute E’ ← A1A2 mod N, Find a random number E, satisfying 1 < E < Φ(n) * E’ and gcd (E, Φ(n) * E’) = 1, Compute a random number D, such that,, D ← E-1mod(Φ(N) * E’), , Algorithm 2.3 GRSA-AA Encryption And Decryption, Input:, Plain text, Message (< n), Public Key Components {E, n}, Output:, Cipher Text, C, Procedure:, C ← MEmod n, GRSA-AA_Decrypt( ), Input:, Cipher Text Message, C, Private Key Components: {D, n}, Output:, P ← CDmod n, GRSA-AA is proved mathematically in the below subsection., Cipher Text is computed in the following way:, C = ME mod n (1), and plain text can be recovered in the following way:, M = CD mod n (2), where n = p1*p2, Therefore, Public key = (E, n) and Private key = (D, n), To retrieve plain text message M, from CD mod n, CD mod n = MED mod n (3), From our Algorithm 3.1, D = E-1 mod (Φ(N)*E’) (4), E.D = 1 mod (Φ(N)*E’), = 1 mod ((p1-1)*(p2-1)*(p3-1)*….*(pi-1) * E’), where, i=8, 16, 32… based on number primes, = 1+K ((p1-1)*(p2-1) (p3-1)*….*(pi-1)) * E’ (5), where, K is any positive integer 4, Substituting eq. (5) in eq. (4), CD mod n=M1+K ((p1-1)*(p2-1) (p3-1)*….*(pi-1)) * E’ mod n, = M*M K ((p1-1)*(p2-1) (p3-1)*….*(pi-1)) * E’ mod n, = M*(M (p1-1))K(p2-1) (p3-1)*….*(pi-1)) * E’ mod n, since Mp1-1=1 mod p1 , (Using Fermat Little Theorem5), = M * 1 K(p2-1) (p3-1)*….*(pi-1)) * E’ mod n, = M mod n (since M < n), = M, , In this section, we discuss example problem using GRSA-AA for key generation, encryption and decryption using 8 prime numbers., · Compute, n ← p1 * p2, m ←p3 * p4, o ← p5 * p6, p ← p7 * p8, Thus,, n=10403, m =11663 o =15707 and p =16637, · Compute N1 ← n * m, N2 ← o * p and N ← N1 * N2, Thus,, N1 =121330189, N2 =261317359 and N =31705684556450851, · / * Compute Euler phi values of n, m, o and p * /, Φ(n) ← (a-1) * (b-1), Φ(m) ← (c-1) * (d-1), Φ(o) ← (e-1) * (f-1), Φ(p) ← (g-1) * (h-1), Thus,, Φ(n) =10200, Φ(m) =11448, Φ(o) =16380, Φ(p)=15456, · / * Compute Euler phi values of N * /, Φ(N) ← Φ(n) * Φ(m) * Φ(o) * Φ(p), Φ(N)= 29562475557888000, · Find a random number e1, satisfying 1 < e1 < Φ(n) and gcd (e1, Φ(n)) =1, e1 =239, Find a random number e2, satisfying 1 < e2 < Φ(m) and gcd (e2, Φ(m)) =1, e2 =151, Find a random number e3, satisfying 1 <e3 < Φ(o) and gcd (e3, Φ(o)) =1, e3 =227, Find a random number e4, satisfying 1 < e4 < Φ(p) and gcd (e4, Φ(p)) =1, e4 =167, Compute A1 ← e1e2 mod N1, A1 =61150386, Compute A2 ← e3e4 mod N2, A2 =215986280, Compute E’ ← A1A2 mod N, , E’ =1581954508210176, Find a random number E, satisfying 1 < E < Φ(n) * E’ and gcd (E, Φ(n) * E’) =1, Value of E =239, Compute a random number D, such that,, D ← E-1mod(Φ(N) * E’), D =18393515478533395755916798406159, Input Message =786, Encryption, C ← MEmod n, C =9614, Decryption, P ← CDmod n, P = 786, Original RSA is vulnerable to various attacks including timing attack as shown in 6 and factorization attack. The time to break RSA system is equivalent to the time for factorizing public key n. This simply requires finding prime factors of n. For this purpose, elliptic curve factorization (ECM) and General Number Field Sieve (GNFS)., GNFS and ECM are the first and third fastest factoring methods respectively. ECM is commonly is used for small number factoring whereas GNFS is capable of factoring larger than 100 bits. However, the beauty of GRSA-AA lies in the fact that even if ECM or GNFS can be used to factor public key n, but this parameter is not sufficient to recover private key D (which is a function of N not only n) to break the system. The above factoring methods can be used to find prime numbers namely p, The above factoring methods can be used to find prime numbers namely p1 and p2 but other prime numbers (remaining 6 in the case of GRSA-AA using 8 primes and remaining 14 primes in the case of GRSA-AA 16) can be found only a brute force attack which is computationally infeasible for large prime numbers. Thus, time required to break the system is defined as:, tsystem = tp1,p2 + tbruteforce, tsystem = Time taken to break the system, tp1,p2 = Time taken to find p1 and p2 using GNFS or ECM, tbruteforce = Time taken for brute-force attack, Practically launching a brute force attack would be a difficult task with large prime numbers of 1024 bits or greater, so it is almost practically impossible to launch a brute force attack against such a system, and giving an unbreakable cryptographic system to its users., In this blog post, we presented a novel approach towards Generalized RSA scheme using 2k primes with secure key generation and named it GRSA-AA. GRSA-AA uses 2k large prime numbers thereby increasing the time required to find the private key components (D, n) in which D is a function of N. An attacker factorize the n to determine p1 and p2, however, the value of D depends on N (not n) which is a product of 2k prime numbers. We have presented an algorithm and mathematical proof of GRSA-AA in earlier sections. Examples are presented using 8 prime numbers and 16 prime numbers. Public key component E of (E, n) in GRSA-AA is computed using multiple iterative modular and Euler functions complying Fermat Little Theorem. Hence, it is computationally infeasible to determine the value of D based on the known factorization of n. Key generation time in GRSA-AA is comparatively higher than earlier related schemes which is, therefore more secure (computationally infeasible to determine D) and thus making GRSA-AA stronger than earlier related schemes. Processing complexity, including encryption and decryption time, depend on the key length and remains nearly same as in the earlier related scheme, hence, not burdening the system by processing overhead. It is computationally infeasible to determine all the prime numbers involved in the generation of N, the attacker using brute force cannot determine private key component D. Based on our results, and conclusion, GRSA-AA is best suited in security employing in a distributed computing environment. In today’s changing world, distributed computing is available everywhere, however, security is compromised for the processing and transmission capability. Our research can also become useful in providing stronger security in distributed computing environment., About the Author: Auqib Hamid Lone, Author Bio : I have done Bachelors in Information Technology and Engineering with distinction, post my B. Tech my interest and passion towards information security took me into master’s and I completed M. Tech in Information Security & Cyber Forensics from Jamia Hamdard University, New Delhi with Gold Medal. As a part of my thesis, I worked on RSA algorithm and generalize it to remove the factorization Problem. My areas of interest are Cryptography, Network Security, Web Application Security and Digital Forensics, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – RSA, Secure Key Generation), 1 A. Lone, “Generalized RSA Using 2k Prime Numbers with Secure Key Generation”, M. Tech, Jamia Hamdard (Hamdard University), 2016., 2 Stallings W. Cryptography and Network Security: Principles and Practice, 5th ed. Pearson Education, 2011., 3 Diffie, W.; Hellman, M. New directions in cryptography. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 22, 1976, pp. 644–654., 4 Rivest RL, Shamir A, Adleman LA. Method for obtaining digital signatures and public-key cryptosystems. Communincation ACM, 21(2), 1978, pp. 120-126., 5 Vanstone Menezes, Handbook of Applied Cryptography. pp. 286-287., 6 Ribenboim P. In: The New Book of Prime Number Records. 3rd ed., Vol. 49. Springer-Verlag, 1995, pp. 22-25., 7 Carl PA. Tale of two sieves. Notices American Mathematical Society, 43(12), 1996, pp. 1473-85. |
4971_57056 | According to the experts from security firm AppRiver, Danish-speaking users were hit by an unusual malware-based attack., The attack hit Denmark, Germany, and several surrounding Scandinavian countries on Wednesday morning., Danish-speaking users were infected by malware spread through Dropbox, but the company quickly adopted the countermeasures to stop the attack., The exploitation of Dropbox by crooks is not a novelty, an attacker can use spam messages containing links to cloud storage that points malicious files, they leverage on the fact that usually there are no restrictions on the Dropbox traffic., The researchers noticed that the attackers used a unique link for each malicious message on the hacking campaign, this circumstance suggests the attackers used an automated script to randomly create the Dropbox file shares., The researchers discovered that the attackers sent out messages claiming to provide shipping details and a fake invoice. The links included in the messages point to a .zip archive that contained a JavaScript file which contained a Trojan dropper., “Lately we have seen more email providers tighten restrictions on what type of files can be sent/received as an attachment. In response, malware distributors, whom are always looking for a weakness to exploit, have embraced file sharing as an alternative means to distribute those malicious files. We expect this trend to continue throughout the year.” continues the analysis., Troy Gill, security analyst at AppRiver, explained that Dropbox quickly replied to the attack, after two hours almost all the malicious links were disabled., “I would say that after about an hour, we saw a lot of the links disabled,” he said. “After two hours, I was hard press to find a link that wasn’t disabled.”, Crooks sent out hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of messages., How to protect companies from such kind of attacks?, Businesses can use spam filters, but a more aggressive approach implies the ban of emails embedding Dropbox links., “If you wanted to be aggressive, you could ban inbound Dropbox content links,” he said. “And if you decided that your organization wasn’t going to use it, you could easily make a change to your spam filter or your web filter to block access to Dropbox entirely.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – DropBox, spam) |
4414_52677 | Earlier last year, security researchers from Google’s Project Zero outlined a way to hijack the computers running Linux by abusing a design flaw in the memory and gaining higher kernel privileges on the system., Now, the same previously found designing weakness has been exploited to gain unfettered “root” access to millions of Android smartphones, allowing potentially anyone to take control of the affected devices., Experts from the VUSec Lab at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam have discovered a vulnerability that could be exploited to gain “root” access to millions of Android smartphones targeting the device’s dynamic random access memory (DRAM). using an attack called DRAMMER., The attack called Rowhammer, is not new, but this is the first time it was successfully used against target mobile devices., On March 2015, security researchers at Google’s Project Zero team demonstrated how to hijack the Intel-compatible PCs running Linux by exploiting the physical weaknesses in certain varieties of DDR DRAM (double data rate dynamic random-access memory) chips., By exploiting the rowhammer technique the hackers can obtain higher kernel privileges on the target system. Rowhammer is classified as a problem affecting some recent DRAM devices in which repeatedly accessing a row of memory can cause bit flips in adjacent rows, this means that theoretically an attacker can change any value of the bit in the memory., The Rowhammer attack for mobile device involves a malicious application that once in execution repeatedly accesses the same “row” of transistors on a memory chip in a tiny fraction of a second (Hammering process), Hammering a specific portion of memory can electrically interfere with neighboring row. This interference can cause the row to leak electricity into the next row, which eventually causes a bit to flip and consequent data modification., An attacker can exploit these modifications to execute its code and gain control of the device., In short, Rowhammer is an issue with new generation DRAM chips in which repeatedly accessing a row of memory can cause “bit flipping” in an adjacent row that could allow anyone to change the value of contents stored in the memory., The researchers created a proof-of-concept exploit, dubbed DRAMMER, to test mobile the Rowhammer attack on mobile devices., Details on the DRAMMER attack are included in a paper published by the experts and on this page., The hack could modify crucial bits of data allowing an attacker to root Android devices from major vendors, including Samsung, OnePlus, LG, and Motorola., The experts exploited the Android mechanism known as the ION memory allocator to give an app a direct access to the dynamic random access memory (DRAM). The ION memory allocator also allows the attackers to identify adjacent rows on the DRAM, which is essential to power the Rowhammer attack by generating bit flips., The ability allowed the researchers to achieve root access on the victim’s device, giving them full control of the mobile device., “On a high level, our technique works by exhausting available memory chunks of different sizes to drive the physical memory allocator into a state in which it has to start serving memory from regions that we can reliably predict,” states the paper.
“We then force the allocator to place the target security-sensitive data, i.e., a page table, at a position in physical memory which is vulnerable to bit flips and which we can hammer from adjacent parts of memory under our control.”, , “Drammer is a new attack that exploits the Rowhammer hardware vulnerability on Android devices. It allows attackers to take control over your mobile device by hiding it in a malicious app that requires no permissions. Practically all devices are possibly vulnerable and must wait for a fix from Google in order to be patched. Drammer has the potential to put millions of users at risk, especially when combined with existing attack vectors like Stagefright or BAndroid.” states a blog post published by the researchers., The experts successfully rooted Android handsets including Google’s Nexus 4 and Nexus 5; LG’s G4; Samsung Galaxy S4 and Galaxy S5, Motorola’s Moto G models from 2013 and 2014; and OnePlus One., , “Not only does our DRAMMER attack show that practical, deterministic Rowhammer attacks are a real threat to billions of mobile users, but it is also the first effort to show that Rowhammer is…(reliably exploitable) on any platform other than x86 and with a much more limited software feature set than existing solutions,” reads a paper published by the experts., The DRAMMER app is able to take over the victim’s mobile within minutes and doesn’t request user’s interaction., The researchers published two following proof-of-concept videos that demonstrate DRAMMER attack in action against an unrooted LG Nexus 5., In the first video, the phone is running Android 6.0.1 with security patches Google released on October 5, while in the second one the researchers show how the DRAMMER attack can be combined with Stagefright bug that is still unpatched in many older Android devices., , , The researchers have released on GitHub the source code of the DRAMMER app in order to allow users to test their mobile device and anonymously share their results., The experts reported the issue to Google in July, and the tech giant recognized it as a “critical” vulnerability and awarded the researchers $4,000 under its bug bounty program., The issue is expected to be partially solved with the upcoming November security bulletin, in this way it will be more difficult for an attacker to launch a DRAMMER attack., The problem is that some software features that DRAMMER exploits are so essential to any OS, it is not possible to remove or modify them without a significant impact on the overall design of the device., , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Rowhammer, DRAMMER attack), , |
5930_65391 | Malware researchers at Trend Micro have spotted the first known strain of malware that triggers the recently patched vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2017-0752, that ties with the Toast Overlay attacks., The vulnerability was discovered in September by security researchers with Palo Alto Networks Unit 42., The experts reported that it is possible to abuse Android’s toast notification, a feature that is used to provide feedback about an operation in a small short-lived pop up notification, to obtain admin rights on targeted phones and take over the device., The vulnerability affects all versions of the Android operating system prior to the latest Android 8.0, (Oreo), nearly all Android users., “What our researchers have found is a vulnerability that can be used to more easily enable an “overlay attack,” a type of attack that is already known on the Android platform. This type of attack is most likely to be used to get malicious software on the user’s Android device.” reads the analysis published by Palo Alto Networks. “This type of attack can also be used to give malicious software total control over the device. In a worst-case attack scenario, this vulnerability could be used to render the phone unusable (i.e., a “brick”) or to install any kind of malware including (but not limited to) ransomware or information stealers. In simplest terms, this vulnerability could be used to take control of devices, lock devices and steal information after it is attacked.”, The toast attack is exploitable for “overlay” attacks on Android phones, attackers use them to create a UI overlay to be displayed on top of legitimate Android applications and trick victims into providing sensitive information or clicking confirmation buttons., , , Google fixed the flaw in its monthly Android security updates., This week, Trend Micro experts reported seeing the first piece of malware exploiting the Toast overlay flaw, for this reason, it was dubbed TOASTAMIGO. The Android malware was disguised as apps named Smart AppLocker that had been available on Google Play, it has been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times before Google removed it., The TOASTAMIGO app claims to secure devices with a PIN code, but once the victim installed it, the app requests Accessibility permissions and inform the user that they need to scan the phone for unsecure apps. The malware uses the Toast exploit to display a progress screen for the “scan,” while it executes commands from the attackers in background and installs a second-stage malware named by Trend Micro AMIGOCLICKER., “The malware ironically pose as legitimate app lockers that supposedly secure the device’s applications with a PIN code. Upon installation, these apps will notify the user that they need to be granted Accessibility permissions for it to work. It’s all a ruse to sidestep Android’s countermeasure that requires apps to have explicit user permission.” states Trend Micro. “After granting permissions, the apps will launch a window to purportedly “analyze” the apps. Behind the scenes, however, the apps carry out actions or commands, including the installation of a second malware (since it already has the permissions).”, , TOASTAMIGO also implements features to prevent its removal by security software. AMIGOCLICKER is able to collect Google accounts and perform other actions, including click on buttons in system dialogs, click on Facebook ads, and give itself a five-star rating on Google Play., “The miscellany of the malware’s malicious functionalities, combined with a relatively unique attack vector, makes them credible threats. In fact, the aforementioned functionalities can actually be modified for further cyberattacks,” Trend Micro researchers said in a blog post. “Since TOASTAMIGO and AMIGOCLICKER can misuse Android’s Accessibility feature to virtually do anything, this malware can update itself when getting the remote server’s commands.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Toast Overlay attacks, Toastamigo app) |
6611_71760 | An international operation dubbed conducted by the European law enforcement agencies led by the UK’s National Crime Agency (NCA) and the Dutch Police, with the help of Europol, has taken down the world’s biggest DDoS-for-hire service., The operation dubbed Power Off allowed to shut down the biggest DDoS-for-hire service (webstresser.org) and arrest its administrators, according to the investigators the platform was involved in over 4 million attacks and arrested its administrators., The police arrested 6 members of the crime group behind the ‘webstresser.org‘ website in Scotland, Croatia, Canada, and Serbia on Tuesday., The Europol confirmed that Webstresser.org had 136,000 registered users and was used to target online services from banks, government institutions, police forces and the gaming world., “The administrators of the DDoS marketplace webstresser.org were arrested on 24 April 2018 as a result of Operation Power Off, a complex investigation led by the Dutch Police and the UK’s National Crime Agency with the support of Europol and a dozen law enforcement agencies from around the world.” reads the press release published by the Europol. , “Webstresser.org was considered the world’s biggest marketplace to hire Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) services, with over 136 000 registered users and 4 million attacks measured by April 2018.”, DDoS-for-hire service allows criminals without specific technical skills to launch powerful cyber attacks by renting their service., , “Stressed websites make powerful weapons in the hands of cybercriminals,” said Jaap van Oss, Dutch chairman of the Joint Cybercrime Action Taskforce., “International law enforcement will not tolerate these illegal services and will continue to pursue its admins and users,”, The service was shuttered and the police seized the hacking platform, the Europol announced “further measures” were also taken against the top users in the above four countries, as well as in Italy, Australia, Hong Kong and Spain., Registered user on Webstresser.org could access the DDoS-for-hire service an entry fee of €15 per month., “We have a trend where the sophistication of certain professional hackers to provide resources is allowing individuals – and not just experienced ones – to conduct DDoS attacks and other kind of malicious activities online”, said Steven Wilson, Head of Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre (EC3). “It’s a growing problem, and one we take very seriously. Criminals are very good at collaborating, victimising millions of users in a moment form anywhere in the world. We need to collaborate as good as them with our international partners to turn the table on these criminals and shut down their malicious cyberattacks.”, Abusing legitimate booter services or using a DDoS-for-hire service is a crime, the Europol remarked that penalties can be severe., “DDoS attacks are illegal. Many IT enthusiasts get involved in seemingly low-level fringe cybercrime activities, unaware of the consequences that such crimes carry. The penalties can be severe: if you conduct a DDoS attack, or make, supply or obtain stresser or booter services, you could receive a prison sentence, a fine or both.” concluded the Europol., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – DDoS-for-hire service, cybercrime), , |
6057_66554 | The best news of the week with Security Affairs., Once again thank you!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Newsletter) |
1474_28362 | “All I had to do is to change those two parameters to my other twitter account id and credit card id , then reply again the request and I suddenly found that credit card have been delete from the other twitter account without any required interaction,” Aboul-Ela wrote., “I thought it have the same effect of deleting, so I tried to add invalid credit card again and intercepted the request,” he said., Be aware, unlike the first flaw, the expert, just modified the credit card Id in the URL and body to his credit card Id from other twitter account and then replied the request., This means that it was possible to delete from the other twitter account the payment card with the specific Id., Below the video proof of concept sent by Aboul-Ela., , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Twitter security flaw, hacking) |
2463_38099 | Artificial Intelligence has been playing an important role to offer better and outstanding features in applications and a lot of computer giants and agencies have spent huge amount of money to acquire more and more. Facebook has created an AI research laboratory and hired NYU professor “Yann LeCun” as the head of artificial intelligence since 2013. This investment led to a successful experimental algorithm that uses other identifying clues such as hair style, clothing, and body shape in order to recognize people even if their faces are not clear., This Facebook algorithm is considered as the latest AI step in facial recognition called PIPER. The technology is able to identify people even when faces are obscured. PIPER has been examined by use of a dataset, consisting of over 60,000 instances of 2000 individuals collected from public Flickr photo albums with only about half of the person images containing a frontal face. The final result is quite astonishing and as Facebook said:, “it has the ability to identify individuals with 83% accuracy”., , The Pose Invariant Person Recognition (PIPER) method, accumulates the cues of poselet-level person recognizers trained by deep convolutional networks to discount for the pose variations, combined with a face recognizer and a global recognizer., Facial recognition use has been rapidly increasing both in commercial products, as well as by law enforcement lately. Facebook has used facial recognition technology to enable tag suggestion and for its new photo sharing application named Moments that was introduced on June 15, 2015.Facebook facial recognition software helps users tag photos by suggesting tags of their friends. This software uses an algorithm to calculate a unique number (“template”) based on someone’s facial features, like the distance between the eyes, nose and ears. This template is based on profile pictures and photos users have been tagged in on Facebook. Algorithms like this could help application such as Moments to provide better accuracy and higher user satisfaction., “If, even when you hide your face, you can be successfully linked to your identiy, that will certainly concern people,” said Ralph Gross at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. It goes without say that, the algorithm and its ability to identify someone even when they are not looking at the camera is very impressive, but it might bring some serious privacy issues to the fore., Also, these advanced facial recognition algorithms like PIPER bring limitless possibilities for solving crimes and putting an end to drawbacks of the traditional algorithms which relied on ‘face alignment’ based on locations of the two eyes and have difficulty to function correctly in situation person wearing sunglasses or face is occluded. It’s hoped these researches can be used to help the police act faster and more accurate in crime prevention., About the Author, Ali Taherian (@ali_taherian) is an enthusiastic information security Officer. He’s finished his education in information security and has recently been involved in banking software and payment security industry. Taherian is proud to be certified IBM Cloud Computing Solution Advisor and ECSA and enjoys sharing and tweeting about security advances and news., Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – facial recognition, Facebook) |
7332_77365 | Magecart cybercrime gang switches tactic, it is now targeting vulnerable Magento extensions. instead of compromising large websites or third-party services to steal credit card data., In previous campaigns, attackers customize the attack for each victim tailoring the code for each target site according to the information gathered through an initial reconnaissance phase. The avoid the detection, Magecart hackers injected only into specific pages., In the last months, the gang hit several major platforms, including British Airways, Newegg, Ticketmaster, and Feedify., The new attack was detailed by the researcher Willem de Groot, the hackers are now exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities in popular store extension software in order to inject skimmer scripts., “Online credit card theft has been all over the news: criminals inject hidden card stealers on legitimate checkout pages. But how are they are able to inject anything in the first place? As it turns out, thieves are massively exploiting unpublished security flaws (aka 0days) in popular store extension software.” continues the expert., “While the extensions differ, the attack method is the same: PHP Object Injection (POI). , Now attackers leverage PHP Object Injection (POI) by abusing PHP’s unserialize() function in order to compromise websites. With this attack method, they are able to modify the database or any JavaScript file., According to de Groot, many popular PHP applications continue to use unserialize(), but while Magento has replaced most of the vulnerable functions, many of its extensions are still flawed., “This attack vector abuses PHP’s unserialize() function to inject their own PHP code into the site.” continues the researcher., “With that, they are able to modify the database or any Javascript files. As of today, many popular PHP applications still use unserialize(). Magento replaced most of the vulnerable functions by json_decode() in patch 8788, but many of its popular extensions did not.”, The attackers have analyzed a large number of extensions and discovered numerous POI vulnerabilities, then they are scanning the Internet for Magento installs using these extensions., Once the attackers have found a vulnerable store they exploit the zero-day to insert a JavaScript payment overlay customized for the specific target site., “Once any of the probes above is successful, a malicious actor will come back and insert a customized Javascript payment overlay for the specific site. This works for sites that have external payments, or no credit card payments at all, because a fake credit card payment section is inserted.” states the researcher., “Once a user enters his CC details and clicks submit, the fake credit card form disappears and the unsuspecting (?) user will likely try again. The fake form will not show a second time, because a cookie is set to prevent that.”, Further details are included in the analysis published by the researcher., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Magecart, cybercrime), |
1301_26215 | The group of hacktivists Anonymous has announced a new campaign dubbed Operation NO2ISIS against some nations it accuses of funding or arming the radical Islamic terror group ISIS., In particular Anonymous will target three states suspected of offering support to the Islamic State of Syria and al-Sham (ISIS). This time Anonymous has invited all its members to raze the digital assets of its enemies., , Saudi Arabia will be one of the targets, it is suspected of supporting ISIS and terror groups, despite the Government has denied any involvement in the activities of the ISIS., , The ISIS is an unrecognized state and jihadist active militant group operating in Iraq and Syria which claims this territories. The ISIS also claims over other states in the areas including Jordan, Israel, Palestinian territories, Lebanon., , “The group in its original form was composed of and supported by a variety of insurgent groups, including its predecessor organizations, the Mujahideen Shura Council, the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI) and Al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), the insurgent groups Jaysh al-Fatiheen, Jund al-Sahaba, Katbiyan Ansar Al-Tawhid wal Sunnah and Jeish al-Taiifa al-Mansoura, and a number of Iraqi tribes that profess Sunni Islam.” states Wikipedia., Saudi Arabia isn’t the unique possible target of the cyber attacks, Kuwait and other nations in the Middle East are thought to have funded ISIS in the past., “We plan on sending a straightforward message to Turkey, Saudi Arabia Qatar and all other countries that evidently supply ISIS for their own gain,” “In the next few days we will begin defacing the government websites of these countries so that they understand this message clearly.” “We are unable to target ISIS because they predominately fight on the ground. But we can go after the people or states who fund them.” reported a member of Anonymous to Forbes journalist Jasper Hamill., The ISIS group is also very active in the cyberspace, despite it hasn’t yet demonstrated capabilities like the Syrian Electronic Army, it conducts an effective propaganda campaign through the principal social media., Last week the Twitter account @theanonmessage was hijacked by ISIS members to spread atrocious images of violence, Anonymous were disconcerted by the attack on its profile., “To be honest, we were taken off guard,” “We didn’t expect a bunch of ragtags to any damage. The ISIS hacking techniques were very similar to hacks done by the Syrian Electronic Army, so that’s pretty interesting.” said the hacktivist to Forbes. , Many cyber experts underestimate the numerous announcement made by Anonymous, they consider the them a method to gain notoriety:, “Public announcements by these groups are often used as a means to gain notoriety or media attention and can be of highly volatile credibility. These attacks are typically low scale consisting of DDoS activity against publicly accessible webservers, website defacement efforts, or data exploitation. Symantec does take these threats seriously and has detection in place.” is the opinion expressed by researchers at Symantec., Let’s see what will happen., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – ISIS, Anonymous) |
2406_37714 | A new powerful strain of Duqu malware, dubbed Duqu 2.0, appeared in the wild after going dark in 2012. Duqu 2.0 is a very sophisticated agent that exploited a number of zero-days vulnerabilities and malware researchers noticed that among its targets there were entities linked to the negotiations about Iran’s nuclear deal and IT security firms. Duqu 2.0 also targeted other entities in Western countries, in Asia and in the Middle East. Experts at Symantec also detected the new strain of malware and observed infection almost in every continent., Researchers at Kaspersky Lab speculate that Duqu 2.0 may have leveraged the following zero-days:, “Most notably, some of the new 2014-2015 infections are linked to the P5+1 events and venues related to the negotiations with Iran about a nuclear deal. The threat actor behind Duqu appears to have launched attacks at the venues for some of these high level talks. In addition to the P5+1 events, the Duqu 2.0 group has launched a similar attack in relation to the 3 70th anniversary event of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau.” states a report published by Kaspersky Lab., The experts at Kaspersky Lab confirmed that threat actors behind Duqu 2.0 was detected in an attempt of intrusion against its internal network. The discovery of the intrusion was casual, Kaspersky discovered Duqu 2.0 while testing a new technology designed to detect advanced persistent threats., The attack against Kaspersky likely began with a spear phishing attack against an employee in a smaller offices in the Asia-Pacific region., “In the case of Kaspersky Lab, the attack took advantage of a zero-day (CVE-2015-2360) in the WindowsKernel, patched by Microsoft on June 9 2015 and possibly up to two other, currently patched vulnerabilities, which were zero-day at that time” states Kaspersky confirming the intrusion., Once detected the intrusion the researchers started an internal audit that is still ongoing, anyway the company confirmed the high level of sophistication of the malware which is the most advanced ever seen. The experts confirmed that the sophistication of the attack is greater than the one observed for the Equation Group., Duqu 2.0 resides in memory making hard its detection and use a complex system to communicate with the control infrastructure., “It also doesn’t directly connect to a command-and-control server to receive instructions,” explained Kurt Baumgartner, principal security researcher at Kaspersky Lab. “Instead, the attackers infect network gateways and firewalls by installing malicious drivers that proxy all traffic from internal network to the attackers’ command and control servers. Combined, this made discovery very difficult.”, The new strain of Duqu has many similarities with the original variant spotted in 2011, bad actors behind Duqu 2.0 didn’t appear to work at all on Saturdays and compilation timestamps provided useful information to profile the attackers., , “During our analysis in 2011, we noticed that the logs collected from some of the proxies indicated the attackers appear to work less on Fridays and didn’t appear to work at all on Saturdays, with their regular work week starting on Sunday,” explained Baumgartner. “They also compiled binaries on January 1st, indicating it was probably a normal workday for them. The compilation timestamps in the binaries seemed to suggest a time zone of GMT+2 or GMT+3. Finally, their attacks would normally occur on Wednesdays, which was the reason we originally referred to them as the “Wednesday Gang”.”, Eugene Kaspersky, CEO of Kaspersky Lab is worried by the boldness of the authors of Duqu 2.0, “Spying on cybersecurity companies is a very dangerous tendency,” said Kaspersky. “Security software is the last frontier of protection for businesses and customers in the modern world”, Why attack the Kaspersky firm?, There are a number of good reasons to hit the popular company, first of all, to steal the secrets about its technologies, information that could be used to arrange new cyber espionage campaigns avoiding detection. Another good reasons could be the interest in investigations conducted by the company. Kaspersky provided Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) including MD5s and IPs from the command and control servers, which can be found, Kaspersky published the following reports that also include Indicators of compromise, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Duqu 2.0, state-sponsored hackers) |
670_16270 | Two security researchers announced that they have succeeded to transform Verizon mobile phones into spy tools to track Verizon’s users., The security experts revealed to the Reuters agency that it is possible to hack Verizon mobile phones for surveillance purpose, the researchers will present the discovery during the next hacking conferences this summer, the DEF CON and Black Hat., In particular that hackers could compromise the femtocell commercialized by Verizon Wireless a joint venture between Verizon Communications Inc and Vodafone Group Plc., According Wikipedia a femtocell is:, “In telecommunications, a femtocell is a small, low-power cellular base station, typically designed for use in a home or small business. A broader term which is more widespread in the industry is small cell, with femtocell as a subset. It connects to the service provider’s network via broadband (such as DSL or cable); current designs typically support two to four active mobile phones in a residential setting, and eight to 16 active mobile phones in enterprise settings. A femtocell allows service providers to extend service coverage indoors or at the cell edge, especially where access would otherwise be limited or unavailable. Although much attention is focused on WCDMA, the concept is applicable to all standards, including GSM, CDMA2000, TD-SCDMA, WiMAX and LTE solutions., For a mobile operator, the attractions of a femtocell are improvements to both coverage and capacity, especially indoors. Consumers benefit from improved coverage and potentially better voice quality and battery life. Depending on the carrier they may also be offered more attractive tariffs, e.g., discounted calls from home.”, , The news doesn’t surprise me, the massive introduction of technology in our life is increasing of digital exposure, mobile phones are excellent devices to spy on victims., Tom Ritter, a senior consultant with the security firm iSEC Partners and his colleague, Doug DePerry, demonstrated for Reuters how they can eavesdrop on text messages, photos and phone calls made with an Android phone and an iPhone that access to the network through a Verizon femtocell that they had previously hacked., The iSEC researchers aren’t the first to discover vulnerabilities in femtocells devices, but they claim to be the first to hack the femtocells of a US carrier and also the first running on a wireless standard known as CDMA., The two researchers announced that they don’t have intention to reveal the details of the hack to avoid emulation phenomena, they will merely propose to give more elaborate demonstrations during the popular hacking conferences planned for this summer., The discovery of the surveillance problem such as PRISM and Tempora should make us reflect on the risks connected to the abuse of technology to violate the user’s privacy, what is really concerning is the possibility that hackers and ordinary individuals could exploit the intelligence components within the objects that surround us., “This is not about how the NSA would attack ordinary people. This is about how ordinary people would attack ordinary people,” said Ritter., The good news is that Verizon company has already announced to have updated the software on its signal-boosting devices, also known as femtocells or network extenders, to avoid that hackers will adopt the technique of the two researchers., Verizon Wireless released a software update for the Linux distribution that equips its network extenders to avoid that hackers could compromise femtocells with technique described by Ritter and DePerry, as announced by Verizon spokesman David Samberg., “The Verizon Wireless Network Extender remains a very secure and effective solution for our customers,” said Samberg., According Verizon Wireless company no customer has been impacted since now, the Verizon Wireless spokesman remarked that every delivered product is carefully tested by a company security team that search for vulnerabilities during the entire product Lifecycle., The bad news is that the two experts declared to be still able to use the hacked femtocell to spy on Verizon mobile devices although Verizon Wireless released that software update, it seems in fact that the spying activity is still possible on the femtocell that researchers had modified before the company issued the software fix., The researchers built their “proof of concept” system that they will demonstrate in Las Vegas with femtocells manufactured by Samsung Electronics Co and a $50 antenna from Wilson Electronics Inc., Ritter and DePerry will demonstrate the hack during the next conference in Las Vegas with a “proof of concept” system and testing it with femtocells manufactured by Samsung Electronics Co and a $50 antenna from Wilson Electronics Inc., The evolution of the POC could be represented by a portable appliance, housed in a backpack, that could be used for a surveillance operation once located near a target, Verizon Wireless in fact sustains that the device has a 40-foot range that could be expanded by adding specialized antennas., According Reuters post other companies already warned on the possibility to attack femtocells:, “CTIA, a wireless industry group based in Washington, in February released a report that identified femtocells as a potential point of attack. John Marinho, CTIA’s vice president for cyber security and Technology, said that the group is more concerned about other potential cyber threats, such as malicious apps. He is not aware of any case where attacks were launched via femtocells., It’s clear that the telecom industry has to monitor carefully the security of infrastructures and the possibility to exploit vulnerability within them for sabotage and cyber espionage purposes., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Verizon Wireless, hacking, surveillance) |
4999_57249 | Here we are speaking again of Fappening, new nude pictures of celebrities have been leaked online., In 2014 for the first time, several lots of private photographs of celebrities were leaked online, the phenomenon was dubbed Fappening,, This time private photos of Emma Watson, Amanda Seyfried and others appeared online, for this reason, netizens called it “The Fappening 2.0.”, Emma Watson attends the ‘Beauty and the Beast’ New York screening at Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center on March 13, 2017 in New York City. | Verwendung weltweit, The private images are already circulating on the Internet, several users on Reddit and 4chan are sharing links to the pictures., The Watson’s images show the actress posing in various swimsuits in front of a mirror while a friend takes the pictures. The photos of Amanda Seyfried and Jillian Murray show the stars nude and some of them while they are doing sex., Data leak includes pictures and videos showing Emma Watson filming herself naked in the bathtub, while another showing her masturbating., The list of victims of the first Fappening wave includes major celebrities such as Jennifer Lawrence, Kim Kardashian, and Kate Upton. Hackers broke into their Apple’s iCloud accounts and stole the private images., The images belonging to the “The Fappening 2.0” were leaked online this week, they are selfies and explicitly sexual photos., The images shared on the original 4chan thread by unknown hackers announced more photos of celebrities will be leaked, including Kylie Jenner, Marisa Tomei, Jennifer Lawrence and several others., None of the affected celebrities commented the data leak, a representative for Emma Watson announced that her lawyers are already working on the case., “Photos from a clothes fitting Emma had with a stylist a couple of years ago have been stolen. They are not nude photographs. Lawyers have been instructed and we are not commenting further.” said Watson’s representatives., This is the beginning of The Fappening 2.0, it could be just the tip of the iceberg!, As usual, let me close with a few suggestions to protect your accounts from prying eyes., , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Fappening 2.0, data leak) |
6660_72226 | When it originally appeared on the scene, SynAck ransomware didn’t seem unique or outstanding. It was marginally effective, but it wasn’t going to force enterprises to radically change their existing anti-malware capabilities. However the developers have been busy, and the latest SynAck variant now includes a number of novel and complex anti-detection techniques, including one that was only made published by security researchers in December 2017., , From the very beginning, malware has been engaged in a battle of evolution. Every time a new attack technique is deployed, new defensive techniques are developed and the bad actors need to come up with new techniques. To get more longevity for their exploits, malware developers often add defensive techniques to identify when they are being scrutinized by anti-malware tools or obfuscate the true purpose of the code to encourage anti-malware tools to assume it is benign or target the attack to avoid police action in their home country. The SynAck ransomware deploys all of these “common” techniques and adds Process Doppelgänging for a new twist., , Process Doppelgänging was introduced to the world by enSilo security researchers, @Tal_Liberman and Eugene Kogan at Black Hat Europe 2017. The technique leverages a Microsoft Windows mechanism called NTFS Transactions which is standard on all versions of Windows. It is a big advantage to the malware authors when they can rely on processes already on the target system instead of having to bake it into their code. Even more so in this case, since the technique leverages a default Windows capability making it unlikely to be patched. The author’s description of process doppelgänging:, “In order to achieve this goal we leverage NTFS transactions. We overwrite a legitimate file in the context of a transaction. We then create a section from the modified file (in the context of the transaction) and create a process out of it. It appears that scanning the file while it’s in transaction is not possible by the vendors we checked so far (some even hang) and since we rollback the transaction, our activity leaves no trace behind.”, The key piece is that most anti-malware tools are watching for unexpected changes to the filesystem, or unexpected code running in memory that didn’t come from a program on the file system. By leveraging NTFS transactions SynAck ransomware is able to run in memory under the guise of a legitimate program stored on the disk without making changes to the file which would set off all the alarms. NTFS transactions are normal Windows events so everything appears normal to the system., In addition to the Process Doppelgänging, SynAck ransomware employs some other interesting techniques to avoid detection. The fundamental anti-malware technique is to look at a file and identify malicious characteristics. To bypass this inspection, malware authors often obfuscate their compiled code to make it difficult to assess what it is going to do. Anti-malware defenses are good at identifying the common code obfuscation techniques that are applied to already compiled code, but the SynAck ransomware developers went a step further and obfuscated the code before it has been compiled. (Securelist) Even this technique can be overcome, but it adds a lot of effort to the detection stage and that results in longer diagnosis times, and no one is in favor of slower security software., In addition to the novel techniques identified above, SynAck ransomware also employs the relatively common technique of identifying the directory it is being run from. If it is being executed from an unexpected directory, the malware assumes it is running inside a sandbox under the scrutiny of anti-malware tools and it doesn’t run. This might fool the anti-malware software into thinking the code is benign and letting it pass., SynAck ransomware also tests the keyboard language setting of the target system. The ransomware will not execute on a system with the default language set to Cyrillic., The primary attack vector for SynAck ransomware is via Windows Remote Desktop Protocol(RDP.) If you don’t need it, you should definitely turn it off. Beyond that, the normal protections against ransomware still apply. There have been no flaws found in the ransomware encryption so don’t count on the good guys providing the decryption keys for free on this one., , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – SynAck ransomware, hacking), , |
7729_80858 | Money,
botnet as service business and coding on the dark side of the life: “At this
point of my life… if it doesn’t make me money,
I don’t make time for it”, is stated in the picture below., Or
elsewhere the same threat actor pronounces a more blatantly made statement in a
sentence that sounds like “I am not scared by the death, I am scared more to
not live a pleasant life.”, This is the “new” motto of those youngsters-wannabe-hackers: botnet providers,
sellers, coders, “boaters” driving in the night with the laptop ever connected
aside. In the imaginary world of a teen the adults world becomes a violent
jungle dominated by the dark colors of the delirium of omnipotence. Botnet, packet flooding, bots, power of
attack: “I don’t care how many and what bots I have, all I care is only to have
stable stress power”., It is in this psychedelic context that the
Cayosin botnet has seen the light and for the first time has been reversed and
analyzed (the report is here)
by “unixfreaxjp” from the MalwareMustDie team.
, The analysis is sapient and clear: in the
reversed samples there are many traces of a collection of attacks that lead to
a collection of different source codes., One of them is the Layer 7 (HTTP) Attack reported in the picture below documenting how this kind of malware can evade the anti-DDoS solutions like Cloudfare., From the unixfreaxjp’s Cayosin botnet binary analysis we can understand that the core of the artifact is the “integration” of different botnet source codes, as it is also well documented by reading the now deleted Instagram profile of the 13 years old scriptbots/unholdable, who implemented this Botnet . STD attack, Tsunami, Christmas DDoS attacks were adapted from Kaiten botnet, along with more flood combination taken from Qbot/Lizkebab/Torlus/Gafgyt variants: multiple attack methods integrating multiple source code in the same artifact and provided a “As a Service” to other teens or threat actors and sold offhandedly on Instagram. From Mirai source code the Cayosin was taken the table scheme to hide strings used by the botnet to hack the login credential of the vulnerable telnet accounts for known IOT devices, along with other Mirai botnet functionalities. Obviously, the coder was not updating much feature of the C2 which explains how the base protocol of the botnet is still made by Qbot/Torlus basis., A ready-to-use botnet build to be sold for
$20 a month, “full options” on sale with an expiry token and functionalities
that were able to ban the users who didn’t renew the expired “licence”., The combination of more capabilities of the
botnet has been well documented also by PERCH Security Threat Report who made a
great analysis
on it, confirming the combination of these functionalities used in Cayosin
along with the deeper OSINT investigation of the threat source., PERCH report states: “Cayosin largely recycles exploits utilized by other botnets, like Mirai, though the injections reference”, like GPON attack that was documented on the Instagram profile of the crew, so clearly that an external observer could have easily view of the day by day findings of new exploits and methods then implemented in the malware to enrich the harmful capability of the new “product”. , They candidly state this in their Instagram
Stories: “New Methods, DM me if you want to know more.”, PERCH has understood it well, in fact
writes: “This is not the team’s first tool. They have created a few along the
way like Summit, Tragic, and about a dozen others. You
can learn more about these tools by following the various Instagram accounts of
the crew. They seem interested in building tools to DDoS and boast about taking
down services with OVH, Choopa, NFO – and if the hype is real, maybe even
Rocket League servers.”, At this point is not excluded that Cayosin
is only an evolution of many other botnets made always by the same threat actor
(or crew) and in particular of the botnet named Messiah. In the following is reported the advertising of the Messiah botnet with its features which
remember Cayosin botnet capabilities. Check the following exclusive image:, What we learn from the evolving of botnets is the adaptation of the source codes, once one bad actor coder starts to implement something different and other actor coders find it useful, they adapt the capability by merging source codes. Each of coders and botnet provider is racing with others to present their technology of their botnet is better, to attract the market: Youngster and Actors who interest to rent the best service.The conclusion is given by MalwareMustDie team, the group that we all know by of their struggle fighting along the years against botnet coders, through their public tweet in which is shown how this situation can be summarized by a simple fact: “Money”. The veteran DDoS botnet hackers are facilitating frameworks for surviving the DDoS ELF IoT botnet as the income engine: from coordination to each type of coders, linking DDoS-As-Service sites (known as Stressers or Bruters) to providing the botnet control via API, then supplying infrastructure, assisting the newbies with setups, with all this effort these veterans are urging and provoking green and young actors to do their own botnets. The money scheme is following in these processes by first taking these youngster “weekly allowance”, then getting merit the botnets used by the rented “boaters” , till making profits from cuts taken from case by case with the arrangement of API used for Bruters/Stressers platform for the attackers that pays the service for DDoS”In the end, this is all about the money circulation scheme that fuels the existence of the IoT botnet, their coders, their stressers behind them. The disrupting this money flow may give us a chance to disrupt this badness so strongly to force the scheme to the discontinuation., Additional glossary: *) boaters: they who uses the rented botnet *) herders: they who herd botnet *) stressers or bruters are the frontend of DDoS-As-Service sites , About the Author: , Odisseus – Independent Security Researcher involved in Italy and worldwide in topics related to hacking, penetration testing and development., unixfreaxjp team leader of the MalwareMustDie team. , Pierluigi Paganini, (SecurityAffairs – Cayosin Botnet, cybercrime), , , |
4530_53693 | Yesterday, the Madison Square Garden Company notified users that their payment card data may have been stolen by cybercriminals. According to the company, crooks have used a PoS malware on its payment processing system and have stolen payment card data used at the Madison Square Garden in the last year., Hackers have stolen payment card data, including credit card numbers, cardholder names, expiration dates, and internal verification codes., The Madison Square Garden company disclosed the security breach and clarified that only customers who physically used their card for food, drink or merchandise payments at its venues. According to the organization, online ticket and merchandise purchases did not expose customers., MSG disclosed information on the attack neither information on the number of affected users., The affected cards have been used between 9 November 2015 and 24 October 2016 at several Madison Square Garden venues, including the Theater at Madison Square Garden, Radio City Music Hall, Beacon Theater, and Chicago Theater., , Below the official statement released by the Madison Square Garden, “Findings from the investigation show external unauthorised access to MSG’s payment processing system and the installation of a program that looked for payment card data as that data was being routed through the system for authorisation,” reads the statement., “Data contained in the magnetic stripe on the back of payment cards swiped in person to purchase merchandise and food and beverage items at Madison Square Garden, the Theater at Madison Square Garden, Radio City Music Hall, Beacon Theater, and Chicago Theater between November 9, 2015 and October 24, 2016 may have been affected, including credit card numbers, cardholder names, expiration dates and internal verification codes. Not all cards used during this time frame were affected. This incident did not involve cards used on MSG websites, at the venues’ Box Offices, or on Ticketmaster.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Madison Square Garden, data breach) |
4005_49378 | In May of this year, security researcher Yotam Gottesam with enSilo, began unraveling a mystery that continues to unravel. First reported by FireF0X, a self-proclaimed “ex-malware analyst” located in the Russian Federation, the Furtim malware dropper, or “Stealth” in Latin, created a stir the security community over the lengths at which the creators of the malware went to avoid being detected. It’s not clear where FireF0X received the sample of malware and despite Yotam’s thorough investigation outlined in his original blog post, many questions about Furtim have gone unanswered until now., Joseph Landry and Udi Shamir, researchers with SentinelOne, have begun putting more pieces of the puzzle together. In a blog by the two that recently appeared on the SentinelOne website, Landry and Shamir outline a number of advanced capabilities built into the malware that makes the Furtim dropper a potent weapon against the energy sector. The two believe the malware is likely a dropper tool and is being used very selectively against those in the energy sector. The exploit itself appears to be effective against all variants of Microsoft Windows and bypasses antivirus solutions, next-generation firewalls, and endpoint solutions leveraging sandboxing techniques., Furtim ’s additional capabilities may give more insight on whose behind the malware and what their intentions are. In addition to exploiting the network, Furtim looks to see if it access control systems are present on the workstation, but not just any access control system, the ZKTeco’s ZKAccess software. If that specific piece of software is present, Furtim will cease to execute. The painstaking specifics of who and what to infect don’t end there!, Using cmd.exe, Furtim cleverly disguises itself as normal process on the system. Once started, the malware does an extensive reconnaissance of the machine, enumerating a wide variety of system parameters with an ability to terminate execution immediately if certain conditions exist., By exploiting CVE-2014-4113 and CVE-2015-1701, the payload bypasses Windows UAC to gain administrative privileges on its target. Now the malware’s heavy lifting begins., “This sample was written in a manner to evade static and behavioral detection. Many anti-sandboxing techniques are utilized. Analysts relying solely on sandbox solutions may miss the full functionality of the sample.” reported the analysis published by SentinelOne. “Two known exploits (CVE-2014-4113 and CVE-2015-1701) were found in the sample, as well as one UAC bypass.”, SentinelOne has outlined the exhaustive number of checks to obfuscate its presence on a host machine. You can read the full details here. The first check is for sandboxing and virtual machines to thwart the prying eyes of malware analysts. If those are found, the malware terminates and its .data section is encrypted. Antivirus is both enabled and disabled at appropriate times to further reduce the possibility of detection., , The malware has other interesting characteristics worth noting. For example, DLL hooking. DLL hooking is a common practice used by antivirus products to detect malicious behavior. Furtim will search for injected DLLs on the victims’ workstation. If an antivirus leveraging hooking is discovered, the result is stored for future use reference to suppress future functionality that may be introduced into the malware. The DLL vendor list is short and somewhat varied. BitDefender, BullGuard, COMODO, Agnitum, Qurb, and Emisoft make up that list. A second DLL hooking routine is also ran by the malware discovering software used in manual malware analysis. Additional checks also include hard disks for vendor specific virtualized hard disks such as VMware and BIOS checks for further virtualization identification., With all the specific exceptions that the Furtim dropper tool includes, it leads one to wonder if specific targeting can be derived from its attributes. SentinelOne has been reluctant to point fingers as to who is behind the malware. When pressed on the topic by SecurityWeek, SentinelOne would only describe Furtim ’s sophistication or methodology as “impressive.”, It is likely that the resources required to research, write, and perfect the Furtim dropper point to a nation state level threat actor group but with recent rumblings from the security community about attribution it may be wise to stick with the knowns and let the analysts decide., According to SentinelOne Furtim was discovered targeting at least one European energy company. This should come as no surprise considering attacks on the energy sector are becoming more and more prevalent across the industry. Interestingly, in the previous analysis performed by Yotam Gottesman revealed encrypted information about its target being sent to a Russian-domain whose domain resolves to a number of Ukrainian IP addresses. But as Yotam points out, you can never be certain that this is a true connection to any particular region or a ruse to throw off malware analysts., Written by: Rick Gamache, Rick Gamache is a freelance writer with 25 years’ experience in the cyber security field. His past work includes the Managing Director of Wapack Labs, CIO of the Red Sky Alliance, and lead FISMA auditor for the US Navy’s destroyer program. Rick has written several high-level cyber and general risk reports with an emphasis on the Nordic countries, India, Russia, and Ukraine and has traveled extensively, speaking on strategic cyber threat intelligence matters as they relate global supply chains., LinkedIn – Twitter – Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Furtim, nation-state malware) |
7677_80352 | The Cobalt hacking group has been using Google App Engine to distribute malware through PDF decoy documents. The group targeted more than 20 other government and financial institutions worldwide. , Cobalt crime gang is a Russian hacking crew that has been active since at least 2016, it targeted banks worldwide, the group leveraged spear-phishing emails to compromise target systems, spoofed emails from financial institutions or a financial supplier/partner., In August, security experts from Netscout’s ASERT uncovered a campaign carried out by the group that targeted the NS Bank in Russia and Carpatica/Patria in Romania., Recently that hacking crew leveraged URL redirection in PDF decoy documents to deliver malicious payloads to the victims. Threat actors used HTTPS URLs to point to Google App Engine, with this technique attackers attempt to trick the victim into believing they are accessing a resource from Google., Attackers used specially crafted PDF documents created with the Adobe Acrobat 18.0 that contained the malicious URLs in a compressed form., “Most of the PDF’s we observed were created using Adobe Acrobat 18.0. They contained the malicious URL in a compressed form in the PDF stream using Flat Decode (Filter/FlateDecode).” reads the analysis published by Netskope., “Similarly, all the decoys used HTTPS URLs for delivering the payload.”, This specific URL redirection case is classified as Unvalidated Redirects and Forwards as per the Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP). , “Once the URL is accessed, the user is logged out from appengine.google.com and a response status code ‘302’ is generated for URL redirection. As this action gets executed, the user is in turn redirected to google.com/url using the query “?continue=”. Using this redirection logic, the destination landing page is reached,” continues the analysis. , PDF readers prompt a security warning when the document connects to a website, but once “remember this action for this site” is checked for a domain, this warning will not be displayed. The possible scenarios are two:, Cobalt crime group used PDFs that downloaded a Microsoft Word document with obfuscated macro code. Once the victims will enable the macro another stage payload is downloaded. , “On enabling the option, the macro gets executed and downloads another stage payload from transef.biz/fr.txt. The stage payloads are often used by threat actors to ensure a smoother transition and to make an attack harder to detect, investigate and mitigate” continues the analysis., “fr.txt is detonated using Microsoft Connection Manager Profile Installer (csmtp.exe) from the location, %Appdata%\Roaming\Microsoft\26117.txt as an INF file”, The attack technique resembles the Squiblydoo method wherein malicious scriptlets are loaded using native Windows applications, it allows to bypass application whitelisting solutions like Windows Applocker. , “At the time of analysis, the next stage payload “fr.txt” was down and not serving any payload. Though the payload was down, we leveraged our Netskope Threat Intelligence to attribute these attacks to an infamous threat actor group named ‘Cobalt Strike’, ” concludes the analysis., Pierluigi Paganini, (SecurityAffairs – Cobalt, Google App Engine), , , |
2722_39861 | For someone working in the security area, it’s known that many companies have red teams to attack their own system, but this information is never recognized by the company., Barclays did exactly the opposite and confirmed that it has created a red team to attack the company systems in order to assess their resilience to cyber attacks., The red team thinks and operate like a group of hackers that target the Barclays systems, the purpose is to identify exploitable vulnerabilities and fix them before a real attacker do it., Troels Oerting joined Barclays in February as a CISO and the first thing he did, was creating his red team, just to refresh the reader’s memory, Oerting was the former head of Europol’s European Cybercrime Center., Troels Oerting is one of the leading experts in cyber security with a deep understanding of the criminal ecosystem, but mostly it is a forward-looking professional with an impressive skill., , “We emulate how criminals will try to get into the bank,” explained Troels Oerting “Then the red unit will do the same work, testing our ability to detect, to prevent, to resist.”, Security experts are aware of the importance to think as a criminal to prevent their attacks as confirmed by Mr. Oerting, and the constitution of a red team is a good step in this direction., “operate and think like cybercriminals” states Oerting., A red team needs to be independent of any other department and report directly the C-Level executive. The independence is one of the most important requirement to have an efficient a Red team., “They improve the ways to get in all the time”, “The reality is that there are actually more cases than you read in the press.”, This happens because companies fear damages to their reputation., Barclays is planning on spending more 20% in their new cyber-defense strategy, a significant effort for bank that is demonstrating that right skills and competent management could make the difference., Oerting will be supervising an internal team composed of 8 persons having in mind, “We want to keep our employees and our customers safe,”, “This is why it’s so important that we assess the threats, the controls and see if we have any gaps.”, Unfortunately, many banks have a different approach to cyber security that is not effective and in some cases. Instead actively preventing incident some financial institutions appear more interested in limiting the data exposure following a potential data breach., The trend is that big companies will invest more in cyber security, security experts and ethical hackers are among the professionals that most of all will make our banks more secure, and Barclay and its red team are aware of it., About the Author Elsio Pinto, Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Barclays, Red Team) |
3405_44661 | The Linux Mint website had been hacked, on Saturday 20th, February, intruders were able to compromise the website serving malicious ISO of Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon edition., The disconcerting announcement was made by Clement Lefebvre, the head of the Linux Mint project. Lefebvre explained that the webLinux Mint website had been compromised and that the hackers used it to distribute a malicious ISO of Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon edition., “I’m sorry I have to come with bad news. We were exposed to an intrusion today. It was brief and it shouldn’t impact many people, but if it impacts you, it’s very important you read the information below. What happened?, Beware of hacked ISOs if you downloaded Linux Mint on February 20th! — Linux Mint (@Linux_Mint) 21 Febbraio 2016, , What happened?, Hackers made a modified Linux Mint ISO, with a backdoor in it, and managed to hack our website to point to it.” wrote Clement Lefebvre., Users that downloaded the Linux Mint 17.3 Cinnamon edition prior to Saturday, or any other version/flavour (including Mint 17.3 Cinnamon via torrent or direct HTTP link), are not affected., The operators behind the website of the Linux distribution have sanitized it., , Lefebvre urges the users to check the MD5 digest of the downloaded ISOs in order to discover any modification to the legitimate software., “If you still have the ISO file, check its MD5 signature with the command “md5sum yourfile.iso” (where yourfile.iso is the name of the ISO).” continues the post., Below the list of valid signatures:, “If you still have the burnt DVD or USB stick, boot a computer or a virtual machine offline (turn off your router if in doubt) with it and let it load the live session., Once in the live session, if there is a file in /var/lib/man.cy, then this is an infected ISO.”, If you have an infected ISO delete it, trash discs used to burn the ISO, and format USB sticks where the ISO was burnt., If you have installed Linux Mint from an infected ISO follow these steps:, Who is behind the attack?, The hacked ISOs are hosted on a server with the IP 5.104.175.212 and the backdoor connects to the absentvodka.com domain., The IP and the domain used in the attack lead to 3 people located in Sofia, Bulgaria. It is not clear the roles in the attack.., “What we don’t know is the motivation behind this attack. If more efforts are made to attack our project and if the goal is to hurt us, we’ll get in touch with authorities and security firms to confront the people behind this.” added Clement Lefebvre., Stay Tuned!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Linux Mint, hacking) |
2985_41782 | The website of the Financial Reporting Council of Nigeria was used by cyber criminals in a phishing scam. According to the experts at Netcraft, the website of Financial Reporting Council of Nigeria is used to serve a webmail phishing site from the legitim site of the agency., The attack is not complex, crooks used a common phishing kit that allows easily to create customised phishing pages., “The phishing content is based on a ready-to-go phishing kit that is distributed as a zip file. It contains easily-customisable PHP scripts and images designed to trick victims into surrendering either their Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail or AOL passwords.” states the report., , The hackers likely have compromised the government website and they have deployed the phishing web page into an images directory on the Financial Reporting Council of Nigeria website. The experts noticed also that the website of the Financial Reporting Council of Nigeria runs an older version 2.5.28 of the Joomla CMS which is no more supported., The phishing page asks for user email credentials and the phone number used as backup login credentials for the Gmail service. When the victim has inserted the information they are transmitted via email directly to the cyber criminals. Then the phishing page redirects the victim’s browser to the Saatchi Art investment website at but experts clarified that it is not involved in the scam., “After a victim enters his or her email credentials into the phishing site, both the username and password are transmitted via email directly to the fraudster. These emails also contain the victim’s IP address, and a third-party web service is used to deduce which country the victim is in.” continues the post published by Netcraft., , The experts at Netcraft explained that this phishing scam is unusual because attackers seem to be more interested in collect users’ credentials shared among several web services, instead the victims’ banking account logins., Netcraft reported that the majority of Nigeria’s government websites, including the one operated by the Financial Reporting Council, are hosted in the United States. They speculate the attacker exploited a flaw in the Joomla! CMS to deploy the phishing kit., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –Financial Reporting Council of Nigeria, phishing, DDoS) |
3565_45875 | Security experts at Trend Micro have discovered a serious flaw in door controllers developed by the HID access control systems manufacturer that could be exploited by hackers to send one malicious UDP request to a door and automatically unlock it and/or deactivate the alarm if the door has that feature enabled., HID door controllers have the appearance of a black box that is located next to securitized doors. Users can swipe their card to open the door, once the door is unlocked the LED turns green., Some HID door controllers also offer the possibility to connect the devices to a local network in order to allow system administrators to manage them., The expert Ricky “HeadlessZeke” Lawshae from Trend Micro discovered that the models of door controllers VertX and Edge are affected by a design flaw in their management protocol., , The experts discovered that HID door controllers run a special daemon dubbed discoveryd, which listens on port 4070 for UDP packets that carry on instruction for the door controllers, “HID’s two flagship lines of door controllers are theirVertX and Edge platforms. In order for these controllers to be easily integrated into existing access control setups, they have a discoveryd service that responds to a particular UDP packet. ” states TrendMicro., “A remote management system can broadcast a “discover” probe to port 4070, and all the door controllers on the network will respond with information such as their mac address, device type, firmware version, and even a common name (like “North Exterior Door”).”, The expert also discovered another security issue related to the above service that also implements a debugging function that allows a remote administrator to instruct HID door controllers to blink its LED for a number of times., The admin can instruct a specific controller to blink by sending a “command_blink_on” command with the door’s ID. The researcher noticed that by appending a Linux command after the ID, wrapped in backticks, the device will execute it due to improper input sanitization., In response to a blink command, the Discoveryd service builds up a path to /mnt/apps/bin/blink and calls system() to run the blink program passing the number of blink as an argument., “A command injection vulnerability exists in this function due to a lack of any sanitization on the user-supplied input that is fed to the system() call. Instead of a number of times to blink the LED, if we send a Linux command wrapped in backticks, like `id`, it will get executed by the Linux shell on the device.”, The attacker can exploit The system() call, which runs with root privileges, to instruct the door controllers to execute a generic command with one single UDP packet., If you use the HID door controllers, you need to urgently download the latest firmware versions., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – HID door controllers, hacking) |
1852_32570 | ICS-SCADA systems are critical components of for our society, they are often vital system inside critical infrastructure, but we still continue to discover naive vulnerabilities in the software they run., The latest surprising discovery was made by security experts is the presence of two flaws in Schneider Electric’s ETG3000 FactoryCast HMI Gateway that could be exploited by an attacker to bypass authentication process and remote access to the system’s FTP server and configuration file., The affected versions are:, The security vulnerabilities affect different versions of the Schneider Electric gateway, which is widely used in many industries like manufacturing, energy and water. Basically the gateway implements a Web-based SCADA system., , Due to the impact of the vulnerability, the ICS-CERT has issued a security advisory to inform companies operating in the different industries., “Narendra Shinde of Qualys Security has identified multiple vulnerabilities in Schneider Electric’s ETG3000 FactoryCast HMI Gateway. Schneider Electric has produced a firmware update that mitigates part of these vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities could be exploited remotely.” states the advisory.”The vulnerabilities allow unauthorized remote access to the gateway’s files and FTP account.”., Schneider Electric has anyway issued an updated version of the firmware that fix the vulnerabilities. According to the advisory a hacker could remote access to a configuration file containing the device configuration (CVE-2014-9197)., “Access to the rde.jar file containing configuration details is accessible without authentication. This could allow an attacker access to information on the setup and configuration of the gateway,” reads the advisory., Another vulnerability, coded as CVE-2014-9198, affects the FTP server that runs on the Schneider Electric gateway and is related to hard-coded credentials., “The ftp server of the device has hard-coded credentials. This could allow the attacker to access the service without proper authentication,” the advisory says., The update issued by Schneider Electric fixes the FTP bug by giving users the ability to disable the FTP server, anyway it does not remove the hard-coded credentials for the FTP service., The experts at Schneider Electric recommend customers to change the default credentials for the config files to solve the the configuration file access issue., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Schneider Electric, ICS-SCADA) |
4447_52966 | Hacking back, or “active defence” as security experts prefer to call it, is becoming a high debated argument., While the number of cyber attacks continues to increase and attackers are using even more sophisticated techniques, many Governments are planning to hack back crooks and nation-state hackers that threaten their infrastructure., Recently a china’s cybersecurity draft law plans to hit back foreign hackers that power., The British government fears that “old legacy IT systems used by many organizations in the UK” are increasingly targeted by hackers who have no problem to compromise them., Britain will strike back against nation-state actors that will launch cyber attacks on the national critical infrastructure., Chancellor Philip Hammond promised retaliatory countermeasures in response to state-sponsored attacks, he also unveiled a £1.9bn package designed to boost Government defenses against cyber threats as part of a five-year national cyber security strategy., The strategy of the UK Government has a five-year plan and aims to “work to reduce the impact of cyber attacks and to drive up security standards across public and private sectors.”, Philip Hammond he reiterated that the measures are a question of national security., Source The telegraph, The most interesting part of the measures announced by Hammond, is the intention of the UK Government to adopt an active defence model which includes possible offensives against attackers. Hammond explained that hack back is the unique alternative to a conflict., “Speaking before the launch, Hammond said Britain must “keep up with the scale and pace of the threats we face” and insisted that the new funding will “allow us to take even greater steps to defend ourselves in cyberspace and to strike back when we are attacked”.” reported The Guardian, “The money – which almost doubles the amount set out for a similar strategy in 2011 – will be used to improve automated defences to safeguard citizens and businesses, support the cybersecurity industry and deter attacks from criminals and “hostile actors”.”, Hammond announced a new posture of the UK against the cyber threats, with a specific focus on the protection of the nation’s critical national infrastructure and business., “We will deter those who seek to steal from us, or harm our interests,” Hammond told at the Microsoft’s Future Decoded conference in London on Tuesday. “We will strengthen law enforcement to raise cost and reduce rewards,” he said of criminal attackers., This is just first step ahead in cyber security matter, he promised the UK would “continue to invest in cyber defense capabilities,” in particular in the technology that could allow the British cyber army to trace and hack back the state-sponsored hackers., “If we don’t have the ability to respond in cyberspace to attack that takes down power networks or air traffic control systems we would be left with the impossible choice of turning the other cheek or resorting to a military response – that’s a choice we don’t want to face.”, “No doubt the precursor to any state-on-state conflict would be a campaign of escalating cyber attack. We will not only defend ourselves in cyberspace but will strike back in kind when attacked.”, In the same day, Hammond, who chairs the Cabinet’s cross-department cyber-security committee, had listed high-profile cyber attacks against British critical infrastructure., The active defence model implemented by the UK Government includes a new generation software to detect and repel cyber attacks and also the creation of dedicated cyber units., Hammond pointed to the recent deployment of an application that was able to zero incidence of 50,000 fraudulent emails from crooks that pretend to be sent from Government offices., Hammond also referenced the TalkTalk data breach that exposed details of 156,959 customers and that lead the Information Commissioner to fine the company £400,000., “CEOs and boards must recognise they have responsibility to manage cybersecurity,” Hammond said., Hammond stressed the adoption of a proper security posture also for private businesses that are a privileged target of hackers., “Similarly, technology companies must take responsibility for incorporating the best possible security measures into the technology of their products. Getting this right will be crucial to keeping Britain at the forefront of digital security technology.” , No doubts, the active defence is the new approach of many governments in response to the growing cyber threats., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Active Defence , UK) |
867_20182 | The paper describes is very intriguing because it incorporates the Dragos Ruiu’s allegations, it remark the principle that is possible to infect a “disconnected system” exploiting a different channel for malware propagation., Michael Hanspach and Michael Goetz confirmed that there is no connection between their paper and badBIOS, Hanspach said their attack is feasible today because the utilized techniques are well documented., “If we were able to come up with this research with very few people, time and budget (and with good intentions), so would be larger groups (maybe with a different intention),” “Therefore, anyone working in a security critical context should be thinking about protection measures.” Hanspach said via email to the Threatpost., Let’s wait for a security solution, meantime security managers of critical computing systems are advised., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Malware, Inaudible Audio signals), |
1912_33223 | According to the exclusive information provided by the Greek security portal www.secnews.gr the hacktivist group Anonymous has taken over the official website of the German politician Martin Schulz., An unknown person contacted Secnew’s journalists (via anonymous email), providing evidence clearly indicating that Martin Schulz’s official website ( was hacked by the hacktivists., In Anonymous’s message explicitly refears the reasons of the cyber attack which are related to Greece political situation. Once again the effects of political and diplomatic instability, as usual, are also evident in the cyberspace., , Martin Schulz is President of the European Parliament since 2012 and he has recently visited Athens in occasion of a meeting with Greece’s Prime Minister., “Our greetings to Mr Martin Schulz that we are Anonymous as the Mr Martin Schulz has set a target to destroy Greece and then other countries, in any case the anonymous not support such policies from which they come from..those who follow such policies will confronting us .. Mr martin schulz was found on our target.” states the Anonymous mail., It seems that attackers run a SQL Injection attack against the Martin Schulz website, the hacktivists have stolen credentials and data from the back-end database and have defaced the website., By exploiting the vulnerability discovered, the hackers have stolen sensitive data including administrator passwords that were also disclosed in PasteBin., banner: ‘5.1.73’, * usrdb_martiib9_v7redsys, | vorname | varchar(50) |, The economic situation of the Greece is very complicated at the moment, the population is suffering economic hardships imposed by the European Union to allow the membership to the European community and avoid bankruptcy of the government., The hacktivists, revealing their power, chose to clearly show their support to Greece, as the country is going through difficult times, accepting pressures by European officials., Based on the evidence and data presented by Anonymous, security experts believe it’s possible for the hackers (under certain conditions) to deface the site – by receiving information and administrator passwords on the CMS – or spread malware through it., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Anonymous, Greece, Martin Schulz), SecNews is a specialized website in Greek language, which gives the opportunity to its visitors to be informed about the latest security news and trends in the IT industry. SecNews website is the primary information source for organizations,ministries,banks and individuals exclusively in Greece and Cyprus,presenting every day the latest attacks from the most reliable sources. |
1206_25013 | Security expert at IntelCrawler, a cyber threat intelligence firm based in Los Angeles, discovered a new private exploit-kit called “Infinity” in the underground. It isn’t a distribution on a large-scale, authors reserved it to a limited underground customer base due to security concerns., We explained the effect on the underground of the arrest of the author of “Blackhole” exploit-kit, Paunch, a growing number of malware authors started the sale of new malicious code., In the image below shows the advertisement of new private exploit-kit Infinity (“Load on Infinity”)., , According investigation done by InterCrawler, the author of the exploit-kit Infinity appears to be a person with nickname “iny” / “pickness”, which credited as reliable on several private underground forums., At the beginning of 2013 it seems the author “iny” has created a post where he invites various cybercriminals to join the new exploit-kit project. He also mentioned that he is buying new types of vulnerabilities for famous client-side software. This collaborative strategy was also used by “Paunch” to maximize his exploit-kit with new vulnerabilities to increase the infection rate.” reports the InterCrawler official post., The exploit is provided with model of sale know as malware-as-a-service, the first advertisements about the new exploit-kit Infinity offer it with the cost starting at 100 USD per day, the subscription includes also updates and technical support. The Exploit-Kit Infinity exploits vulnerabilities for IE11/10, Opera and Firefox., , , IntelCrawler threat intelligence team has already shared with the security community the appearance of the new exploit-kit Infinity in the underground., “According to IntelCrawler, the Exploit-Kit Infinity might be a new replacement of “Blackhole”, which was actively used for infections of banking customers.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Exploit-kit Infinity, malware) |
5472_61081 | Dating site for cheaters Ashley Madison has agreed to an $11.2 Million settlement for roughly 37 million users whose personal details were exposed in a massive data breach in 2015., The site was hacked in July 2015 and crooks dumped roughly 100 GB worth of sensitive data belonging to 37 million users., Leaked data includes usernames, first and last names, email addresses, passwords, credit card data information, street names, phone numbers, and transactions records., The data leak led to blackmails and even some suicides., , Ashley Madison and the sibling website “Established Men” are now part of a Canadian outfit called Ruby Corp which last Friday announced the settlement with a group of users., “Ruby Corp. and Ruby Life Inc. (ruby), and a proposed class of plaintiffs, co-led by Dowd & Dowd, P.C., The Driscoll Firm, P.C., and Heninger Garrison Davis, LLC, have reached a proposed settlement agreement resolving the class action lawsuits that were filed beginning July 2015 following a data breach of ruby’s computer network and subsequent release of certain personal information of customers of Ashley Madison, an online dating website owned and operated by Ruby Life Inc. (formerly Avid Dating Life Inc.)” states the announcement., Since the data breach July 2015, Ruby improved the cyber security of its system through the implementation of numerous countermeasures., The company also agreed to 20 years’ worth of the FTC overseeing its network security to ensure data protection. Security measures include:, “If the proposed settlement agreement is approved by the Court, ruby will contribute a total of $11.2 million USD to a settlement fund, which will provide, among other things, payments to settlement class members who submit valid claims for alleged losses resulting from the data breach and alleged misrepresentations as described further in the proposed settlement agreement.” continues the announcement., Watch out! Ruby warns that only “Valid claims” will be refunded, attackers may have intentionally inserted fake records in the database in order to be compensated after the disclosure of the incident., “Therefore, ruby wishes to clarify that merely because a person’s name or other information appears to have been released in the data breach does not mean that person actually was a member of Ashley Madison.” continues Ruby., If you were one of the Ashley Madison’s users you probably had little chance of a quick anything., Pierluigi Paganini , (Security Affairs – Ashley Madison, data breach) |
2003_34349 | Once again security experts have found security vulnerabilities in home routers, these devices are a privileged target of cyber criminals that exploit the flaws in the software they run for several purposes. This time the flawed routers are manufactured by D-Link and contain a security vulnerability that expose them to remote attacks., The attackers can get root access to the D-Link router by exploiting the flaw, this allows them to change setting to run various attacks like traffic redirection through DNS hijacking. Exactly one month ago, a similar flaw was discovered by the Bulgarian security expert Todor Donev, member of the Ethical Hacker research team in other devices. The expert discovered a critical vulnerability the ZynOS firmware, which is used by D-Link and many other devices from other vendors, including TP-Link and ZTE., This new vulnerability affecting a number of D-Link home routers was discovered by the security researcher Peter Adkins which reported it to the vendor in January without success., “Due to the nature of the the ping.ccp vulnerability, an attacker can gain root access, hijack DNS settings or execute arbitrary commands on these devices with the user simply visiting a webpage with a malicious HTTP form embedded (via CSRF),” Adkins said in a description of the issue on GitHub. , , According to the advisory published on the SecLists.org, the vulnerability was discovered also by the researcher Tiago Caetano Henriques of Swisscom in November, also in this case the researcher reported it to D-Link company.., “The D-Link DIR636L (possibly others) incorrectly filters input on the ‘ping’ tool which allows to inject arbitrary commands into the router. Secondly, authentication is not being performed correctly. This enables a remote attacker to gain full control of the router, for example to attack other networks in a DDoS style attack, or even expose computers behind these devices to the internet as you are able to change firewall/nat rules on this router,” states the description of the flaw from Swisscom., Adkins explained that other versions of D-Link routers and one router from TRENDnet are affected by the same vulnerability. The flawed version of D-Link routers are:, There are no patches available for the vulnerability right now. A, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – D-Link home routers, hacking) |
5488_61212 | It’s official, the Tor Project announced the launch of a public bug bounty program through the HackerOne platform, the initiative was possible with support from the Open Technology Fund., “With support from the Open Technology Fund, we’re launching our first public bug bounty with HackerOne. We’re specifically looking for your help to find bugs in Tor (the network daemon) and Tor Browser. A few of the vulnerabilities we’re looking for include local privilege escalation, unauthorized access of user data, attacks that cause the leakage of crypto material of relays or clients, and remote code execution.” states the official announcement., Hackers can earn thousands of dollars if they find serious vulnerabilities in the Tor network that could be exploited to track its users., This isn’t the first time the Tor Project announces the launch of a bounty program, the Tor Project first announced it in December 2015. The Tor Project launched a private program in January 2016 and bug hunters reported three denial-of-service (DoS) flaws, and four memory corruption issues., Back to the present, the Tor Project is looking for flaws in the Tor network daemon and Tor Browser., The experts at the organizations are interested in any kind of vulnerability that could be exploited to compromise Tor relays and the Tor browsers, this means that it is open the hunt for local privilege escalation, remote code execution, unauthorized access of user data, and other attack vectors., Bug hunters can earn between $2,000 and $4,000 for high severity vulnerabilities, while medium severity issues are worth between $500 and $2,000, while low severity issues go for at least $100. Even less severe problems will be rewarded with a t-shirt, stickers and a mention in Tor’s hall of fame. On its bug bounty page, the Tor Project provides examples for each category of vulnerabilities, including with CVE references., The organization will also reward issues with a t-shirt, stickers and a mention in Tor’s hall of fame., , The organization will reward also flaws discovered in third-party libraries used by Tor, hackers can earn between $500 and $2,000, if the flawed libraries aren’t covered by other bug bounty programs., “Tor users around the globe, including human rights defenders, activists, lawyers, and researchers, rely on the safety and security of our software to be anonymous online. Help us protect them and keep them safe from surveillance, tracking, and attacks,” continues the announcement., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Tor bug bounty program, hacking) |
6197_67807 | More than half million users may have been infected by four malicious Chrome extensions that were likely used to conduct click fraud or black search engine optimization., According to ICEBRG, the malicious extensions also impacted employees of major organizations, potentially allowing attackers to gain access to corporate networks., “Recently, ICEBRG detected a suspicious spike in outbound network traffic from a customer workstation which prompted an investigation that led to the discovery of four malicious extensions impacting a total of over half a million users, including workstations within major organizations globally.” states the analysis published by ICEBRG. “Although likely used to conduct click fraud and/or search engine optimization (SEO) manipulation, these extensions provided a foothold that the threat actors could leverage to gain access to corporate networks and user information.”, The researchers noticed an unusual spike in outbound traffic volume from a customer workstation to a European VPS provider. The analysis of the HTTP traffic revealed it was to the domain ‘change-request.info’ and was generated from a Chrome extension with ID ‘ppmibgfeefcglejjlpeihfdimbkfbbnm’ named Change HTTP Request Header that was available via Google’s Chrome Web Store., , The extension does not contain any malicious code, but the combination of “two items of concern that” could allow attackers to inject and execute an arbitrary JavaScript code via the extension., The experts highlighted that Chrome extensions are not allowed to retrieve JSON from an external source and execute JavaScript code they contain, but need to explicitly request its use via the Content Security Policy (CSP)., Once enable the ‘unsafe-eval’ (Figure 3) permission to retrieve the JSON from an external source the attacker can force the browser to execute malicious code., “When an extension does enable the ‘unsafe-eval’ (Figure 3) permission to perform such actions, it may retrieve and process JSON from an externally-controlled server.” “This creates a scenario in which the extension author could inject and execute arbitrary JavaScript code anytime the update server receives a request.” continues the analysis., The Change HTTP Request Header extension is able to download obfuscated JSON files from an external source (‘change-request.info’), by invoking the ‘update_presets()’ function., The Chrome extension implemented an anti-analysis technique to avoid detection., The extension checks the JavaScript for the presence of native Chrome debugging tools (chrome://inspect/ and chrome://net-internals/), and if detected, halts the injection of malicious code segment. The Chrome extension implemented an anti-analysis technique to avoid detection., Once injected the code, the JavaScript creates a WebSocket tunnel with ‘change-request.info’ and uses it to proxy browsing traffic via the victim’s browser., During the analysis, the experts observed that this feature was observed by threat actors for visiting advertising related domains likely to conduct click fraud scams., “The same capability could also be used by the threat actor to browse internal sites of victim networks, effectively bypassing perimeter controls that are meant to protect internal assets from external parties.” continues the analysis., The security experts discovered other Chrome extensions with a similar behavior and using the same C&C server., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –Malicious Chrome extensions, cybercrime) |
4900_56554 | On Tuesday Microsoft issued the security updates KB 4010250 that address flaws in Adobe Flash Player. The updates fix the vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer on Windows 8.1 and later, as well as Edge for Windows 10, but two already disclosed flaws remain unpatched., The bad news is that two already disclosed flaws still remain uncovered by the security updates and could be exploited by attackers in the wild.
A few days ago, Microsoft announced that the February patches would be delayed until March due to a last minute issue, in response Google Project Zero experts published the details of the Remote Code Execution vulnerability in Windows., Microsoft alerted its customers anticipating the incoming patches on Monday and urged them to update their systems as soon as possible., Now Microsoft released the security patches and the company confirmed that “No other security updates are scheduled for release until the next scheduled monthly update release on March 14, 2017.”, The Bulletin MS17-005 for Adobe Flash Player addresses critical remote code execution (RCE) affecting Windows systems., “Security Update for Adobe Flash Player (4010250) This security update resolves vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash Player when installed on all supported editions of Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows RT 8.1, Windows 10, and Windows Server 2016.” reads the security bulletin., , As anticipated, the two flaws will remain unpatched until 14th March, giving attackers the opportunity to target Windows systems., The first flaw is a Windows SMB (Server Message Block) vulnerability that affects Windows 8, Windows 10 and Windows Server. It is a memory corruption vulnerability in the SMBprotocol that can be exploited by a remote attacker, the proof-of-concept exploit code of the flaw was recently publicly released., The second flaw doesn’t address by the last security updates is the one recently disclosed by the Google Project Zero team that affects Windows operating systems ranging from Windows Vista Service Pack 2 to the latest Windows 10., Don’t waste time check for updates on your Windows PC and patch your system immediately to avoid the exploitation of the Flash Player software in your browser., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Windows zero-day, hacking) |
7335_77378 | Google continues the battle for securing devices of its users, this time making mandatory for device makers two years of Android security updates., One of the main problems with patch management is related to the distribution of security patches issued by Google for Android OS., Device manufacturers often delay the installation of these security patches exposing device owners to cyber attacks. Google is committed to solving this issue, during the Google I/O Developer Conference May 2018 announced it its plan to update its OEM agreements that would require Android device manufacturers to roll out at least security updates regularly., A Google spokesperson declared that the 90-day requirement is “a minimum security hygiene requirement” and that “the majority of the deployed devices for over 200 different Android models from over 30 Android device manufacturers are running a security update from the last 90 days.”, In case OEMs violate the contract, they will lose their Google certification for upcoming Android devices, they must roll out at least four security updates within one year of the phone’s launch., “A contract obtained by The Verge requires Android device makers to regularly install updates for any popular phone or tablet for at least two years. Google’s contract with Android partners stipulates that they must provide “at least four security updates” within one year of the phone’s launch.” states The Verge., “Security updates are mandated within the second year as well, though without a specified minimum number of releases.”, Android OEMs will be obliged to regularly provide security updates for popular devices that have been launched after January 31st, 2018 and that have more than 100,000 active users., Besides this, the contract also stipulates that the manufacturers must not delay patch updates for security vulnerabilities for more than 90 days., In other words, the minimum requirement of the contract is a security patch update every quarter., , The contract obtained by The Verge could have a massive impact for both OEMs and end-users, the overall level of security for Android device will increase in a significant way., “But because manufacturers rely on Google for its suite of apps, the company can also make outright demands for updates in its contract. This contractual commitment to patching devices goes much further and guarantees in many cases that devices will remain up to date.” concludes The Verge., ” As Android splits following the EU ruling, the contract also raises questions about how non-Google phones will receive security updates without the same contractual pressures.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – OEMs, Android security updates) |
6117_67108 | The Pelco VideoXpert solution is widely used in commercial facilities worldwide., The security researcher Gjoko Krstic has found two directory traversal bugs and an improper access control flaw that can be exploited by an attacker to trigger an arbitrary code execution., Both Schneider Electric and ICS-CERT published security advisories about the CVE-2017-9966, which could be exploited by an attacker to replace certain files and execute malicious code with system privileges., “By replacing certain files, an authorized user can obtain system privileges and the inserted code would execute at an elevated privilege level., CVE-2017-9966 has been assigned to this vulnerability. A CVSS v3 base score of 7.1 has been calculated;” reads the ICS-CERT., “Successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities may allow an authorized user to gain system privileges or an unauthorized user to view files.”, , Both directory traversal vulnerabilities (tracked as CVE-2017-9964 and CVE-2017-9965) have been classified as medium severity. The first flaw could be exploited by an attacker to bypass authentication or hijack sessions by “sniffing communications.”, The second directory traversal vulnerability can be exploited by an unauthorized user to access web server files that could contain sensitive information., These Pelco VideoXpert Enterprise vulnerabilities have been patched with the release of firmware version 2.1. All prior versions are affected., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Pelco VideoXpert Enterprise, Schneider Electric) |
5382_60412 | The best news of the week with Security Affairs., Hurry up, subscribe to the newsletter, next Sunday you will receive all the news directly in your inbox.I desire to inform you that Security Affairs is now open to sponsored content.
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7754_81144 | Phone scammers typically managed to steal between 450 and 4500 USD per victim, promising substantial compensation for their purchases of medicines, medical devices or dietary supplements. According to the investigation, in just 7 situations of fraudulent events in the investigation, the damage is estimated to be 150 000 USD, and the police believe that the number of victims is much higher., At the end of 2018, employees of the Moscow Department of Internal Affairs came across the trail of a group of telephone scammers who had long been involved in fraud, extracting large sums of money from Russian elderly people. The money was used to purchase real estate, cars, collectors’ coins, jewellery and securities. According to the investigation, the scheme was invented and conducted by a 35-year-old resident of Domodedovo originally from the Republic of Azerbaijan. In addition to the leader, the group was made up of “callers” who communicated with pensioners over the phone, “cashiers” who controlled transactions, “money mules” who withdrew cash from ATMs, and even a dedicated person responsible for the relevance and security of the database of phone numbers of potential victims., Where did the phone scammers get
this data from? They profited from a scam, popular some time before, which sold
“magic pills” — counterfeit drugs and dietary supplements purported
to cure even serious chronic diseases. This scam’s elderly victims spent
hundreds and thousands of dollars on the products, borrowing from friends and
taking loans. The database of these names, phone numbers and the cost of the
“drugs” ordered was in the hands of phone scammers. According to Group-IB
experts, the list held the names of about 1,500 pensioners, their phone
numbers, and the names and prices of the medicines they trustingly purchased.
Judging by the database, these potential victims were between the ages of 70
and 84, and were from Moscow, Rostov, Tomsk, Nizhny Novgorod, Leningrad,
Chelyabinsk, Orenburg and other regions. They had at different times bought
expensive drugs, including: “Weian capsules” (2287 USD), “Flollrode aqueous”
(1600 USD), “Miracle patches” (313 USD), applicators (170 USD), “Lun
Jiang” (157 USD), and “Black nut” (388 USD). , For those who were suspicious of
the compensation process, the “prosecutor of Moscow” offered to clarify the
information from the “head of the financial department of a bank” clarify the
information. After that, the victim was contacted by another person — “a
representative of a credit and financial organization” — who confirmed his
willingness to transfer compensation to the pensioner’s account or to transfer
the money in cash. When the victim agreed, “tax officers” entered
into negotiations and reported that the victim needed to make an advance
payment of 15% of the compensation as a tax. In addition, the scammers were
able to collect an “insurance premium” or “lawyer’s tax”.
For example, one of the pensioners, who was promised a compensation of 8660 USD,
was required to pay a tax of 747 USD. In another case, a request for
compensation of 448 USD was made for the receipt of 4480 USD. One of the
victims was a famous opera singer who paid the scammers about 4480 USD. The elderly
people transferred the money to the cards of cashiers — “drops” or
“money mules” — indicated by the attackers, who then withdrew the
money from ATMs. , “Despite the fact that vishing (voice phishing) is a rather old type of phone fraud, it maintains popular to the fact that attackers come up with new methods of deception, targeted at the most vulnerable segments of the population — pensioners, — highlights Sergey Lupanin, Head of the Group-IB Investigation Department. For years, deceived elderly people have repeatedly complained about telephone scams to the Russian Central Bank, the Ministry of Finance and the Prosecutor’s Office, and regulatory and law enforcement agencies have periodically issued warnings about these dangerous and very cynical fraudulent schemes, but the number of victims did not decrease. The scammers not only maintained secrecy but also improved their methods of social engineering: they quickly gained their victims’ trust, showed themselves to be intelligent and educated, and were persistent and aggressive. It’s rare for one of their victims to escape unscathed.”, However, as the result of a large-scale police operation, the organized criminal group was defeated: on 5 February, several detentions and searches were carried out at the criminals’ place of residence. A police search of the apartment of the scheme’s organizer turned up large sums of money in roubles and other currencies, bank cards, a traumatic gun, a hunting rifle and collectible coins. The scammer invested the money received in shares of Russian companies. In his stash inside a toilet, field investigators found database printouts with names of pensioners as well as extracts with phone numbers and names of victims that the criminal’s girlfriend had tried to flush. In a private house belonging to another detainee — the leader of the money mules — a police search turned up bank cards, databases of pensioners, accounting of criminal activity, money, and jewellery. A total of seven people were detained. According to the investigation, the damages from 7 episodes of fraud are estimated at 150 000 USD, but operatives believe that the number of victims is much higher — at least 30 people. An investigation is underway., About the author: Group-IB Group-IB is one of the leading providers of solutions aimed at detection and prevention of cyberattacks, online fraud, and IP protection., Pierluigi Paganini, (SecurityAffairs – phone scammers, cybercrime), |
355_8995 | Last Wednesday the web site of U.S. Bank has been hit by a DDoS attack, that caused its block, launched by a group of Islamic hacktivists who have claimed responsibility for event. The web site remained down for an hour, starting at around 3:30 Pacific, due the impossibility to serve the huge quantity of requests., The banking sector was subject to an escalation of offensive last week, Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Wells Fargo & Co were also attacked with similar modality. A spokeswoman of U.S. Bancorp, which operates as U.S. Bank apologized to the customers confirming the attack that generated a high traffic volume., “We apologize that some customers experienced intermittent delays today on our website. We have been working hard to restore full connectivity,” , “We are asking customers who are experiencing issues with our online or mobile sites and have an urgent banking need to please call us at 1-800-US-BANKS, or stop by one of our branches,”, “We are working closely with federal law enforcement officials to address the issue. In the meantime, we can assure customers that their data and funds are secure,”, What has made this attack unusual?, Usually a DDoS attack is launched using a large number of compromised machine composing a botnet, on the contrary the attack against the U.S. Bank has involved a network of volunteers that deliberately have hit the targets., The “weapon” used for the attack is an application that the attackers have downloaded from two file-sharing sites. The application is very simple and written using a scripting language with a friendly console, users had only to click the “start” button to participate to the offensive., While a classic botnet, although is very efficient, is quite simple to detect due the presence of anomalous traffic from/to the Command & Control servers in this case the presence of volunteers complicates the mitigation of the attack., Consider also that the involvement of volunteers launching attacks from their own machines makes hard to isolate malicious traffic and impossible to block it “beheading” the control servers., The group claimed the attack on Pastbin naming itself “Mrt. Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters”, it announced that it involvement in the organization of all the recent attacks from Wells Fargo to the ones against U.S. Bank and PNC Financial Services Group. The group has motivated the attack as revenge for the affront of the video denigrating the Prophet Muhammad., Despite DDoS attacks are usually not sophisticated they represent a serious cyber threat due the capability to interrupt the providing of a web servers. Banks, financial institutions and other companies that have as core business on line web services are prepared to these attacks but the dimension of offensive may also drop prepared defenses., According Atif Mushtaq, a security researcher at FireEye who has analyzed the attack, the dimension of the bank targeted and of its defensive capabilities let us think that the attacker have constituted a network of hundreds of thousands of computers., On the difficulty to manage incoming traffic from a network of volunteers Mushtaq said:, “There’s no way you can distinguish between the benign traffic and this DDoS traffic,”, “It’s simply mixed up.”, The singular modality of DDoS used is just one aspect of the story, on the other end there is U.S. government that blamed Iran for the offensive, finding several similitudes with past attacks against U.S. institutions and organizations., Difficult to discover the truth, we live in the era of misinformation, wars are made with cyber weapons and social media are used often to give a different perception of the reality., U.S. and Israel are aware that time is running out, soon Iran will have it’s atomic arsenal and will represent a serious dangerous for western countries. The time is right for an attack and many experts believe that a strike is really imminent, today Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu has drawn a red line on the drawing of a bomb that has been shown to ‘General Assembly of the United Nations” to explain that by next summer the “Iran will have reached the final stage in the production of uranium necessary for the realization of its first nuclear device”., “It’s not a question of whether Iran will get the bomb. The question is at what stage can we stop Iran from getting the bomb,”, “Who among you would feel safe in the Middle East? Who would be safe in Europe? Who would be safe in America? Who would be safe anywhere?”, “I ask, given this record of Iranian aggression without nuclear weapons, just imagine Iranian aggression with nuclear weapons,”, , , “As the prime minister said, the United States and Israel share the goal of preventing Iran from acquiring a nuclear weapon,” said spokesman Tommy Vietor of the National Security Council., The group of Izz ad-din Al qassam isn’t the only one engaged in offensive in retaliation for Innocence of Muslims, The Pakistan Cyber Army also conducted a protest campaign against many small businesses and also the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Bank of America, and New York Stock Exchange., After the defacing of the Persia Bank website they posted the following message:, “You Are Provoking The Anger Of PeaceFull Muslims! / Stop This / Otherwise You WOn’t Be Able To Stop Us.”, The question is, who really is behind these groups? Are they state-sponsored hackers?, It could be possible but in this case they are simply giving a pretext to western governments to blame Iran and other states. Which is the sense of these protests?, Netanyahu today also said to be “totally agree” with U.S. President Barack Obama, who declared that “an Iran with nuclear weapons is not a challenge that can be contained” and the U.S. will “that who must “to stop it., Are we really close to an attack?, Cyber attack or conventional offensive, that is the question., Do not forget, however, the crucial role of Iran in the world oil production, an attack could plunge financial markets and trigger a Economic 11/9 … which is the lesser evil?
Is world economy ready to contain the raise of oil price? Which will be the position of Russia on the attack against Iran?, Pierluigi Paganini |
1680_30641 | It’s the end of the year, a perfect time to look back at the numerous bugs and data breaches that have rocked the Tech world in the recent past. It’s hard to forget bugs such Heartbleed in 2013, the ShellShock and the Poodle bug which caused a shudder in Silicon Valley earlier this year. Well, Symantec security firms says 2015 won’t be any different either, warning users to get ready for more bugs and highly sophisticated attacks. “In 2015, we can expect attacks to get smarter and sharper,” projects Symantec., With the advancement of Internet of Things (IoT), attackers now have an array of attack vectors to propagate their heinous acts. More internet connecting devices, from Smartphones to plug and play devices such Smart TV, Smart Fridges and IP cameras, spells doom for the future of internet users., , Every additional device comes with a new vulnerability and a potential security risk., With every additional “connectivity, comes the potential for a whole new range of security risks,” says Symantec adding that the “battle between those who want to create new threats and exploit vulnerabilities and those looking to protect against them” will only get worse in 2015., Symantec projected that smartphones attacks will increase drastically in the coming year as criminals explore new ways of breaking private networks. With the advent of BYOD in the corporate landscape, organization will continually find it difficult to monitor the extent and scope on information making rounds in its employee’s devices. Most of these devices are poorly secured, making the soft targets for attackers., The penetration of mobile money banking is expected to give online fraudsters a new lifeline in the coming year. Users relying on poorly secured third party apps to access their bank accounts increase the threat level significantly. The increase in Trojan-bankers and other banking malwares will also continue in 2015. Recently, Brazilian mobile were on the receiving end of a Trojan banker malware masquerading as legitimate banking app on Google Play., “Mobile devices will become even more valuable as mobile carriers and retail stores transition to mobile payments,” says semantic adding the newly launched payment systems such as Apple will be a top target for cyber criminals trying to exploit Zero-day vulnerabilities. “Should Apple Pay take off as a payment method, attackers are likely to rigorously test the security in place around near-field communication (NFC) payments.”, Automation of home and office is another potential risk to watch out for in 2013. As every device become smart from TV’s, thermostats, car appliances, Baby monitors and surveillance cameras, hackers too become even smarter and more sophisticated. Some of designers of the appliances make little or no cyber security consideration while designing the products., “We won’t see any large-scale attacks leveraging IoT, but instead one-off attacks against connected devices like home routers, smart TVs and connected car apps, for example, for sensitive and private information,” said Symantec., Cloud storages and privacy violation will be a sticky issue in 2015. With security breaches such Apple’s iCloud hack still fresh in our minds, security talks in the coming year will revolve around Cloud storage., “The cloud in 2015 represents an infinite amount of personal information being hosted remotely and debate around the right to access, control, and protect private data in the cloud will continue to escalate,” said Symantec. With more personal data getting on the cloud so are the number of attacks expected to increase., 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 SecurityGladiators.com, an ultimate source for worldwide security awareness having supreme mission of making the internet more safe, secure, aware and reliable. Follow Ali on Twitter @AliQammar57, Pierluigi Paganini , (Security Affairs – hacking, IoT) |
810_19285 | We have discussed for a long on the Internet of thing referring the network of intelligent devices and their capability stay always online, we also remarked the possibility that cybercriminals could exploit them for illegal activities. But not only this category of object could be compromised by cybercriminals, devices apparently inanimate and devoid of intelligence like a blender or a flat iron can hide pitfalls., Cyber criminals are are to plant chips in practically every electrical device, recently it has been discovered that irons and kettles were modified with this technique to launch spam attacks. The fact has happened in Russia, the State-owned channel Rossiya 24 has showed the images of an iron included in a batch of Chinese imports where the operators find a chip used for spying the environment surround. The chips were equipped with “a little microphone” and according the correspondent the component were mostly being used to serve malware, the chips in fact are able to connect any computer within a 200m radius on unprotected Wi-Fi networks., , , News agency Rosbalt reports that while the last delivery of appliances was rejected by officials, but tens of devices had already been sent to retailers in St Petersburg. If you believe that these cases are isolated you are completely wrong, many other common-use products have found to have rogue chips, including gaming console, chargers, network devices, mobile phones and car dashboard cameras., The discovery is disturbing for many, but not for security experts, and it raises once again the necessity for hardware qualification in both military and civil sectors, I’ve detailed in various posts the possibility to hide malicious components in the software as in the hardware ., Hidden chips are used by cybercriminals and state-sponsored hackers to infiltrate company networks and organizations for various purposes, to send out spam or for cyber espionage., While in military sector similar incident have triggered a series of initiative to for hardware validation, in large consume products the problem is relevant and approach it is not so simple … events like this are the demonstration., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – backdoor, chips, cybercrime) |
1425_27776 | A new massive data breach hit more that 27 million people in South Korea, according to the authorities stolen data comes from the gaming industry., It isn’t the first time that Internet users in South Korea suffered a massive breach, in 2011, 35 million individuals had personal information exposed because hackers violated the database South Cyworld, a South Korean social network, and the search engine Nate., Early 2014, 20 million South Koreans suffered another data breach caused by an employee of the Korea Credit Bureau., South Korean law enforcement confirmed that information were stolen from databases for various games and online gambling promotions, movie ticketing and ringtones. The number of victims is amazing if we consider that more than 70 percent of the population aged between 15 and 65 was hit., ” South Korean authorities have unveiled a massive leak of personal information related to more than 70% of the population aged between 15 and 65 in the country. A hacker from China is one of the perpetrators, reports Duowei News, a news website operated by overseas Chinese., The main perpetrator, last name Kim, was arrested along with over a dozen others for stealing and selling over 220 million items of personal information from 27 million South Koreans aged between 15 and 65, which accounts for about 72% of that demographic range, according to the South Jeolla Provincial Police Agency on Aug. 21., The information had been stolen through hacking registrations on websites for online games, movie ticketing and ring tone downloads. A registration on any one of the websites can be used to trace registrations for the same person from other online service providers, the police said.” reported WantChinaTimes., The Kim Bong-Moon of Korea JoongAng Daily reports that 16 individuals were arrested and added:, “According to police, Kim reportedly received 220 million personal information items, including the names, resident registration numbers, account names and passwords, of the 27 million people from a Chinese hacker he met in an online game in 2011., The police suspect he used the personal information to steal online game currency by using a hacking tool known as an “extractor,” which automatically logs on to a user’s accounts once the login and password are entered. He is also thought to have sold those cyber items for profit., When passwords he received were wrong, he allegedly bought the personal information on the identification cards and their issue dates from a cellphone retailer in Daegu to change the passwords himself.”, As reported in the above statements, the South Jeolla Provincial Police Agency arrested a 24-year-old man named Kim along with 15 others, for allegedly stealing and selling 220 million records with personal information from 27 million South Korean., , First details on the investigation revealed that Kim obtained the data from a Chinese hacker he met online in 2011, stolen data includes names, account credentials and resident registration numbers. The investigation is still on-going, law enforcement is trying to track the complete network of persons which had access to the records, but it isn’t an easy job., Data stolen by hackers was used to seal in-game currency and other game-related items that could be commercialized, law enforcement is worried by the sale of the information to other gangs of criminals. Personal information is a valuable commodity in the underground market, groups of cyber criminals are always interested to acquire user’s data to arrange further cyber attacks and any other kind of scam., With a cost per record item ranged from a minimum of $0.001 to a maximum of $20, it seems that Kim have earned $390,919 USD by selling/using stolen records of 27 million Koreans., Stay tuned for further details on the investigation., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – 27 million people victims of a data breach, South Korea) |
5582_61972 | According to the expert Patrick Wardle, Director of Research at Synack, a new strain of Mac adware is threatening Mac users, once infected a machine the only way to remove it is to reinstall the macOS., The researcher and Mac expert Thomas Reed, speculate the new family of Mac adware dubbed Mughthesec is an improved version of the well known OperatorMac family., Thanks, Patrick sent me the hash too. Looks like a new variant of something we call OperatorMac (though that may be a bad name)., — Thomas Reed (@thomasareed) August 8, 2017, , Other malware experts claim the threat has been in the wild at least since six months, but the detection rate on VirusTotal is still low., Made it to blog post #32! ? Read: "WTF is Mughthesec!? Poking on a Piece of Undetected Adware" ?☠️? #adware #malware, — Objective-See (@objective_see) August 8, 2017, , The Mac Malware has been improved across the months, new features were implemented such as an MAC-address-based anti-VM detection system and components of Mughthesec are signed with a legitimate Apple developer certificate allowing it to bypass the Gatekeeper protection that normally prevents the installation of unsigned applications., “In a nutshell, I think the issue isn’t that anything here is incredible new or exciting; more that existing security/mitigation strategies are rather failing miserably,” Wardle explained. “So we’ve got Gatekeeper that’s designed to block unsigned code from the internet to prevent users from getting tricked into installing malware (e.g. fake flash updaters)….which is a great idea. But now most Mac adware/malware is just signed with certs. So gatekeeper is basically a moot point. Normal-everyday users are still going to go around infecting themselves…and things designed to protect them; Gatekeeper/AV etc, really don’t offer any help.”, The adware is currently delivered as a file called Player.dmg that installs a legitimate version of the Adobe Flash Player for Mac, but also an unwanted app named Advanced Mac Cleaner, and two Safari extensions named Safe Finder and Booking.com., “The PUPs are in my opinion, rather shady. I mean they automatically install browser plugins circumventing Apple’s security mechanisms in Safari,” Wardle said. “So sure, they ask for user permission to be installed during install, but then do things that generally the user probably doesn’t want. It’s that gray area between legit code and malware.”, , Patrick Wardle believes the malware is spread via malvertising campaigns or via malicious ads and popups on shady websites. “Either way, user-interaction is likely required for both the download and installation,” says Wardle., Either way, user-interaction is likely required. “, The malware, once installed, hijacks the victim’s browser for profit., “A common tactic of adware is to hijack the victim’s browser (homepage, inject ads, etc) for financial gain,” Wardle said. “Mughthesec (which is installed when the user ‘agrees’ to install ‘Safe Finder’) appears to conform to goal.”, “If we open Safari; indeed the home page has been hijacked–though in a seemingly innocuous way,” Wardle said, adding that he did not test the sample on Google’s Chrome browser. “It simply displays a rather ‘clean’ search page—though looking at the source, we can see the inclusion of several scripts ‘Safe Finder’ scripts.”, Wardle highlighted that other files dropped by the adware on infected hosts allow the malware operator to drop other malicious payloads., The presence of the Mughthesec infection must alert Mac users that will never know if other malware has been installed by crooks along with the adware, and for this reason, they should reinstall their Mac., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Mac malware, Mughthesec ) |
2885_41083 | Dridex malware is known to be the successor of another malware like Cridex, Feodo, Bugat, etc etc, and uses many techniques with the purpose of stealing users, normally related with personal and financial information, which can be used by crooks to commit fraud., In recent times, Dridex has been spread through spam campaigns relying on bogus Microsoft Word documents, and the majority of the victim are residents in the Unites States and the United Kingdom., , It has been estimated that losses caused by this malware ascend to $40 million ($10 million in the U.S. and $30 million in the U.K). The NCA has uncovered a series of cyber attacks based on a new strain of the Dridex banking trojan that allowed crooks to steal £20m in the UK alone., Talking about the Dridex botnet, it’s divided into many sub-botnets, and takes advantage of the peer-to-peer (P2P) network to be able to communicate, so because it’s a botnet and can communicate means that it’s very difficult to take it down., , Security vendors have been working together to try to take down botnets like Dridex with the support of the authorities but it is a hard challenge, and in the case of Dridex they face another issue, Dridy network is like a hybrid, a centralize and decentralize network, because peer list and config file are spread centrally by its backend servers., “Threat actors created botnets such as Dridex to fill the void left by the takedown of the Gameover Zeus botnet in May 2014 as part of Operation Tovar. Despite a significant overlap in tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), Dridex never rivaled the sophistication, size, and success of Gameover Zeus. This operation took advantage of weaknesses in Dridex’s hybrid P2P architecture to take over the botnet.” reported Dell SecureWorks., The good news is that FBI announced recently that a 30-year old Dridex administrator, Andrey Ghinkul also known as “Andrei Ghincul” and “Smilex,”, with Modovan nationality was arrested in Cyprus on 28 of August., Authorities are aiming for extradition to the United States, where Andrey Ghinkul have been charged with nine accusations, where is included:, Without sure yet, it’s said that Ghinkul was part of a criminal conspiracy, that was focused on stealing bank credentials, that would be used later for transfer money from victims’ accounts to the accounts of money mules., FBI teamed up with Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre (EC3), UK, Germany and Moldova authorities, to bring down Dridy bootnet, and the arrest of Ghinkul was the effort of all the group, also private organizations are helping the authorities, Fox-IT, S21sec, Abuse.ch, Spamhaus, the Shadowserver Foundation, and Trend Micro., About the Author Elsio Pinto, , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Dridex banking Trojan, malware), |
753_17975 | Bit9 experts discovered that hackers penetrated their network infecting machine with two variants of the HiKit rootkit., “One of these Hitkit samples connected to a command and control server at downloadmp3server.servemp3.com that resolved to 66.153.86.14. This same IP address also hosted www.yahooeast.net, a known malicious domain, between March 6, 2012 and April 22, 2012. The domain yahooeast.net was registered to [email protected]. This email address was also used to register blankchair.com – the domain that we see was pointed to the 180.150.228.102 IP, which is the callback associated with sample 58dc05118ef8b11dcb5f5c596ab772fd, and has been already correlated back to the attack leveraging the CVE-2013-3893 zero-day vulnerability.”, FireEye investigated on the attacks revealing that they targeted organizations in Japan, according evidences collected behind the Operation DeputyDog there is the same threat actor that compromised Bit9 in February 2013, when during the hack were stolen digital certificates used later in further attacks to sign malware. The payload used in these attacks on August 23th 2013 against entities in Japan was hosted on a server in Hong Kong with IP address equal to 210.176.3.130. Despite the payload is named img20130823.jpg in reality it is an executable, once run it writes a dll named “28542CC0.dll” in the following path:, C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\28542CC0.dll, To be able to execute the malware on every machine restarts the malicious agent also adds this registry key:, HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\28542CC0 rundll32.exe “C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\28542CC0.dll”,Launch, The malware connects to a host in South Korea (180.150.228.102), it is curious that callback traffic is not encrypted HTTP over port 443. The FireEye security experts identified the signature for the attacks that allowed the detection of at least 5 samples that were compiled on 2013-08-19, within 1 second of each other., The malicious domains identified are:, Campaign such as the Operation DeputyDog are the demonstration that groups of persistent collectors are very active and use sophisticated techniques for their attacks. The hackers exploited the knowledge of a zero-day during last attacks, circumstance that lets me think of the responsibility of state-sponsored hackers. Governments are primary entities that exploit zero-day flaws during their attack, cybercrime ecosystem in fact is more oriented in the sale of these exploits instead to use it for illegal activities. If you are interested to go deep in the technical analysis of the ATP read the following post published by FireEye., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – FireEye, Operation DeputyDog, cyberespionage) |
660_16014 | The hackers behind the recent attacks against South Korean infrastructure are professionals that designed also malicious code to steal military secrets to the South Korea and US military. Security experts at McAfee Labs revealed that the malware used during the attacks was expressly designed to find and steal secret information on US forces involved in joint exercises in South Korea., The wave of attacks malware based was dubbed by researchers Operation Troy due the numerous references into the code of the city, the malicious code used appears the same implanted into a social media website used by military personnel in South Korea in 2009., Ryan Sherstobitoff, a senior threat researcher at McAfee, provided to the The Associated Press a report that will be publicly issued later this week on the analysis of malware instances detected. Despite it is not clear the exact amount of information stolen, neither the exact networks penetrated by attackers, South Korean Government blamed North Korean state sponsored-hackers., , Researchers highlighted that there are various clues in the malicious code which lead to the North Korea, for example the password used to unlock encrypted files contains the number 38 probably linked to “38th parallel” that separates the North from South Korea., Sherstobitoff started the investigation after the malware based attacks occurred on March 20th, known as the Dark Seoul Incident, in which tens of thousands of hard drives belonging to television networks and banks in South Korea were wiped., “This goes deeper than anyone had understood to date, and it’s not just attacks: It’s military espionage,” Sherstobitoff said, McAfee researchers said that the malware used to wipe the disks during the recent attacks is different from the malicious code used for the cyber espionage campaign, but the presence of many similarities between the two codes led to believe they must be created by the same developers., On the Internet circulated the name of two distinct groups of hackers that claimed responsibility for the attacks, The “Whois Hacking Team” that posted pictures of skulls and a warning and the “NewRomanic Cyber Army Team” that announced it had leaked private information from Korean media and banking., Another element of interest is that the hackers behind the attacks have spread their spyware on domestic networks for months with specific intent to gather information on national cyber infrastructure and on the habit of Korean Internet users, data that could advantage successive attacks., What is interesting is that the South Korean cybersecurity researcher, Simon Choi, found instances of the malware dated early 2007, they were equipped with keyword-searching capabilities added in 2008 and for sure the same hackers were involved in cyber attacks launched in the past years against South Korea., , Choi, who works for a South Korean cybersecurity company, has conducted an investigation with researchers at IssueMakersLab, issued in the last months a report that revealed many search terms used by malware and that were not included in the McAfee report, including the English-language equivalents of Korean keywords., Sherstobitoff hypothesized that same code it is still operating to gain confidential information from South Korean, the researcher sustains that malware fingerprints were found on the anniversary of the start of the 1950-53 Korean War occurred on June 25th, when government websites including South Korea’s president and prime minister portal were attacked., On June 26th the US Government announced that personal information about thousands of U.S. troops in South Korea had been exposed online., The attackers infected victims with “spear phishing” attacks, the hackers also compromised about a dozen Korean-language religious, social and shopping websites to steal secret info from victims being undetected., The attackers have targeted government networks managing military information for at least four years, they used malicious code that automatically searched for military terms in Korean, including “U.S. Army,” ‘’secret,” ‘’Joint Chiefs of Staff” and “Operation Key Resolve,”., “These included names of individuals, base locations, weapons systems and assets,” revealed Sherstobitoff., South Korea’s Defense Ministry announced that it’s technically impossible to disclose classified reports from military networks because the networks of the Korean Intelligence aren’t connected to the Internet and that access to the Internet is made with different computers separated by the internal military infrastructure., , A hack of sensitive South Korean military computers from the Internet “cannot be done,” “It’s physically separated.” said the South Korean government representative., Kwon Seok-chul, chief executive officer of Seoul-based cyber security firm Cuvepia Inc., said that hackers may have the skills to penetrate into the internal networks of Korean and U.S. Military even if they are separated from the internet., “It takes time, but if you find the connection, you can still get into the internal server,” Kwon said., Despite a limited portion of the North Korean population has access to the Internet it must be considered that the country has the highest percentage of military personnel in relation to population than any other nation in the world. It has approximately 40 enlisted soldiers per 1000 people with a considerable impact on the economy of the country. A defector has declared that North Korea has increased its cyber warfare unit to staff 3,000 people and it is massive training its young prodigies to become professional hackers., According the revelation of Army General James Thurman, the commander of US Forces Korea, the government of Pyongyang is massive investing in cyber warfare capabilities, recruiting and forming a high skilled team of hackers. The groups will could be engaged in offensive cyber operation against hostile government and in cyber espionage activities., In spite of McAfee researchers haven’t indicated the origin of the attacks many security experts have no doubts about the nature of the offensive, North Korean state sponsored hackers appear as the main culprits., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – North Korea, South Korea) |
4358_52194 | Malware continues to evolve, the last threat in order of time that implemented a singular feature is the DXXD ransomware. The peculiarities of this threat is that it encrypts also file on network shares, even if they are, unmapped ( a feature already implemented by the Locky ransomware) and displays a legal notice., The DXXD ransomware appends the. dxxd extension to the encrypted files, then it leaves a ransom note onto the infected machine. The DXXD ransom note contains instructions for the victims that need to contact [email protected] or [email protected] the encrypted files, then it leaves a ransom note onto the infected machine. The DXXD ransom note contains instructions for the victims that need to contact [email protected] or [email protected]., Another interesting feature of the malware is its ability to configure a Windows Registry setting in order to display a sort of “legal notice” when people log into a computer. The VXers used this feature to allow a user who tries to login to the server to see the ransom note., The DXXD ransomware changes the HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\LegalNoticeCaption registry key and the HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Winlogon\LegalNoticeText to display the following note., “When you start Windows, Windows Defender works to help protect your PC by scanning for malicious or unwanted software.”, , It is still unclear the infection vector, Abrams speculate the threat is spread by abusing Remote Desktop Services., “Based on information discovered, I believe that the ransomware developer is hacking into servers using Remote Desktop Services and brute forcing passwords. If you have been affected by the DXXD Ransomware, you should reset all the passwords for the affected machine.” wrote Lawrence Abrams., According to Abrams, the author of the DXXD ransomware decided to taunt victims and experts who help victims by creating an account on BleepingComputer and claiming that a newer version of the threat it is more difficult to decrypt. The developer also claimed to have exploited a zero-day vulnerability to compromise servers and deliver the malware., , As usual, let me discourage from paying the ransomware because there is no guarantee that you will receive back your files. Don’t forget to back up your data frequently and use anti-malware solutions. In the specific case, it could be better to disable Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) and files running from AppData/LocalAppData folders., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – DXXD ransomware, malware) |
2380_37526 | It’s not new that Facebook it’s the perfect place to try to get precious information and financial gain since it aggregates many people, crossing all generations. The popular social network is very attractive for cyber criminals, and Facebook Scam are “on the agenda”., This time we are talking about one of the most recent Facebook scam that was uncovered by researchers at Malwarebytes.org., For what was observed this Facebook scam starts with a rogue account (can be a fake one or one that was stolen) sharing a shortened URL and the message is entitled “Facebook recovery” and should look like this:, Notification: Your Account will be Disabled!, Account FACEBOOK you have already been reported by others about the abuse of account, this is a violation of our, agreement and may result in your account is disabled. Please verify your email account to unblock and help us do more, for security and convenience for everyone., Immediately do recover your Facebook account, by clicking on the link below:, hxxp://jDOTmp/1HloHXd?help-facebook-recovery, “Attention”, If you ignore this message, we can not recover your account and your account will be permanently disabled., Sorry to interrupt your convenience., The Facebook Team, , When clicking on the shortened URL the user is sent to the page below:, , This so called ” Center Recovery Account” it’s just a bait for the user to enter his credentials, since nowadays users worry a lot about losing credentials, and ” Once a user entered the credentials asked and click Log In, data is posted to recovery.php, and then users are redirected to this payment page, which asks for his/her full name, credit card details, and billing address” :, , Keep in mind that never Facebook asks money for their users to do whatsoever, so it doesn’t make a lot of sense having a “Center Recovery Account” where they ask for some money., The majority of victims for this Facebook Scam is located in Asian countries and in the United States:, , I know that users are more careful than some years ago, but this kind of Facebook scams are still very popular. One of the reasons is the lack of awareness on cyber threats, so keep always an the eye open trying to identify suspicious situations like receiving “odd” messages, messages with broken English, and messages that ask for PII and financial information., About the Author Elsio Pinto, , Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Facebook Scam, cybercrime) |
5453_60944 | The notorious security expert Chris Vickery, UpGuard director of cyber risk research. as made another disconcerting discovery, more than 14 million US customers’ personal details have been exposed after the third-party vendor NICE left the sensitive records open on an unprotected AWS Server., NICE Systems is an Israeli firm that offers several solutions for intelligence agencies, including telephone voice recording, data security, and surveillance systems., Exposed data also revealed that NICE Systems has a partnership with Paris-based telecommunication company “Orange,” it seems that the third-party firm collects customer details across Europe and Africa., “The data repository, an Amazon Web Services S3 bucket administered by a NICE Systems engineer based at their Ra’anana, Israel headquarters, appears to have been created to log customer call data for unknown purposes;” reads a blog post published by Vickery. “Verizon, the nation’s largest wireless carrier, uses NICE Systems technology in its back-office and call center operations. In addition, French-language text files stored in the server show internal data from Paris-based telecommunications corporation Orange S.A.—another NICE Systems partner that services customers across Europe and Africa.”, , The exposed data are sensitive information of millions of customers, including names, phone numbers, and account PINs (personal identification numbers)., The huge trove of data is related to the customers’ calls to the Verizon’s customer services in the past 6 months., “Beyond the risks of exposed names, addresses, and account information being made accessible via the S3 bucket’s URL, the exposure of Verizon account PIN codes used to verify customers, listed alongside their associated phone numbers, is particularly concerning.” continues the expert, “Possession of these account PIN codes could allow scammers to successfully pose as customers in calls to Verizon, enabling them to gain access to accounts—an especially threatening prospect, given the increasing reliance upon mobile communications for purposes of two-factor authentication.”, The incident demonstrates the risks of third-party vendors handling sensitive data. UpGuard pointed out the long interval of time between the initial notification to Verizon by UpGuard (June 13th) to the closure of the breach (on June 22nd), “Finally, this exposure is a potent example of the risks of third-party vendors handling sensitive data,” reads the blog post from UpGuard., “NICE Systems’ history of supplying technology for use in intrusive, state-sponsored surveillance is an unsettling indicator of the severity of this breach of privacy.”, Chris Vickery discovered many other clamorous cases of open database exposed on the Internet. In December 2015 the security expert discovered 191 million records belonging to US voters online, in April 2016 he also discovered a 132 GB MongoDB database open online and containing 93.4 million Mexican voter records., In March 2016, Chris Vickery has discovered online the database of the Kinoptic iOS app, which was abandoned by developers, with details of over 198,000 users., In January 2017, the expert discovered online an open Rsync server hosting the personal details for at least 200,000 IndyCar racing fans., In March, he announced a 1.37 billion records data leak, in June 2017 Vickery revealed the DRA firm left 1.1 TB of data unsecured on an Amazon S3, 198 million US voter records exposed., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Verizon, data leak) |
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