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5970_65777 | The Global Cyber Alliance (GCA) has launched the Quad9 DNS service (9.9.9.9), a new free Domain Name Service resolver that will check user’s requests against the IBM X-Force’s threat intelligence database., The Quad9 DNS service non only offer common resolution services implemented by DNSs but it will also add the security checks to avoid you will visit one of the the 40 billion malicious websites and images X-Force marked as dangerous., The Global Cyber Alliance (GCA) was co-founded by a partnership of law enforcement and research organizations (City of London Police, the District Attorney of New York County and the Center for Internet Security) focused on combating systemic cyber risk in real, measurable ways., GCA also coordinated the threat intelligence community to incorporate feeds from 18 other partners, “including Abuse.ch, the Anti-Phishing Working Group, Bambenek Consulting, F-Secure, mnemonic, 360Netlab, Hybrid Analysis GmbH, Proofpoint, RiskIQ, and ThreatSTOP.”, Back in 1988 some large /8 blocks of IPv4 addresses were assigned in whole to single organizations or related groups of organizations, either by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), through the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), or a regional Internet registry., Each /8 block contains 224 = 16,777,216 addresses, and IBM secured the 9.0.0.0/8 block which let the company dedicate 9.9.9.9 to the project., “IBM Security, Packet Clearing House (PCH) and The Global Cyber Alliance (GCA) today launched a free service that gives consumers and businesses added privacy and security as they access the internet. The new Quad9 Domain Name System (DNS) service protects users from accessing millions of malicious internet sites known to steal personal information, infect users with ransomware and malware, or conduct fraudulent activity.” reads the announcement published by the GCA., According to the GCA, Quad9 has no impact on the speed of the connections, it is leveraging the Packet Clearing House global assets around the world with 70 points of presence in 40 countries., The alliance believes that Quad9 points of presence will double over the next 18 months, further improving the speed, performance, privacy and security for users globally., , The organization is specifically committed to protect the users’ privacy, Quad9 service doesn’t retain request data., “Information about the websites consumers visit, where they live and what device they use are often captured by some DNS services and used for marketing or other purposes”, it said. , The Quad9 service aims to cover not only traditional PCs and laptops, but can also Internet of Things (IoT) devices such as smart thermostats and connected home appliances. These devices often do not receive important security updates and are also difficult to secure with traditional anti-virus tools, yet remain connected to the internet leaving them vulnerable to hackers., Full instructions on what a DNS service does and how to switch to Quad9 can be found here., Pierluigi Paganini , (Security Affairs – Quad9 DNS service, Internet) |
3032_42078 | Just days following the horrific Paris attacks carried out by the ISIS, Anonymous hackers wedged a full-fledged war against the Islamic radicals, knocking out several thousand pro-ISIS Twitter accounts. However, a French blogger has spoken out against the hacker collective’s recent actions under the #OpParis campaign, saying they are hindering law enforcement’s ability to monitor and keep up with ISIS., In a recent video published by Anonymous, the collective waged war against ISIS, saying “You should know that we will find you and we will not let you go under #OpISIS.” , , Olivier Laurelli, a French citizen and computer security blogger said Anonymous shutting down pro-ISIS accounts is a bad idea as it leaves authorities blind to tracking activities of pro-ISIS members., “To close those accounts is to leave police deaf and blind around some matters. It is important to know that one account is in France, another in Syria or in Iraq and if you see that someone who is connected to the attacks has a link to someone else, it’s important for police. Twitter has been quick to close down a large number of accounts, but I don’t know if it’s a good idea,” Laurelli told to AFP., According to the blogger, the collectives relentless work to unmask ISIS members is an embarrassment for the police as it’s their duty to monitor the accounts and see who is spreading pro-ISIS propaganda. It’s also their job to keep the accounts under control from rapid growth on social media, exactly what Anonymous is currently doing., Laurelli claims that the information Anonymous is destroying as part the #OpParis would have allowed law enforcement to properly counter the Paris attacks, in which 129 people lost their lives and 415 got injured., Anonymous has taken #OPISIS strongly to social media, trying to get everyone to work together and unmask ISIS members. However, Facebook wasn’t too fond of the idea and decided to block a few Anonymous groups on Facebook for revealing the identity of an alleged ISIS member., Laurelli’s comments come just after Anonymous published a list of more than 9,000 pro-ISIS twitter accounts that were promptly removed by Twitter., About the Author Brandon Stosh, (Security Affairs –#OpParis, Anonymous) |
7307_77207 | Colton Grubbs, 21, of Stanford, Kentucky, the author of the infamous LuminosityLink RAT, was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison,, In February, the Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre (EC3) along with the UK National Crime Agency (NCA) disclosed the details of an international law enforcement operation that targeted the criminal ecosystem around the Luminosity RAT (aka LuminosityLink)., According to the EC3, the joint operation was conducted in September 2017, it involved more than a dozen law enforcement agencies from Europe, the US, and Australia., The Luminosity RAT was first spotted in 2015 but it became very popular in 2016., The malware was offered for sale in the criminal underground for as little as $40, it allows attackers to take complete control over the infected system., The Luminosity RAT was one of the malicious code used in Business Email Compromise attacks and was also used Nigerian gangs in attacks aimed at industrial firms., , In September 2016, the UK law enforcement arrested Colton Grubbs, the man admitted to designing, marketing, and selling LuminosityLink., Grubbs offered for sale the malware for $39.99 to more than 6,000 customers, he also helped them to hack computers worldwide., “Grubbs previously admitted to designing, marketing, and selling a software, called
LuminosityLink, that Grubbs knew would be used by some customers to remotely access and control their victims’ computers without the victims’ knowledge or consent. Among other malicious features, LuminosityLink allowed Grubbs’ customers to record the keys that victims pressed on their keyboards, surveil victims using their computers’ cameras and microphones, view and download the computers’ files, and steal names and passwords used to access websites.” reads the DoJ’s sentence.
“Directly and indirectly, Grubbs offered assistance to his customers on how to use LuminosityLink for unauthorized computer intrusions through posts and group chats on websites such as HackForums.net. “, Grubbs will serve 85% of his prison sentence, then he will be released under supervision of the United States Probation Office for a term of three years., Grubbs must forfeit the proceeds of his crimes, including 114 Bitcoin that was seized by the Federal Bureau of Investigation., “Our modern society is dependent on computers, mobile devices, and the use of the internet. It is essential that we vigorously prosecute those who erode that confidence and illicitly gain access to computer systems and the electronic information of others. Everyone benefits when this deceitful conduct is discovered, investigated, and prosecuted,” Robert M. Duncan, Jr., United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Kentucky, said., The arrest triggered a new investigation that resulted in several arrests, search warrants, and cease and desist notifications across Europe, America, and Australia., Law enforcement agencies target both sellers and users of Luminosity Trojan. According to the NCA, a small crime ring in the UK distributed Luminosity RAT to more than 8,600 buyers across 78 countries., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Luminosity RAT, cybercrime) |
379_9650 | The future is now, I’ve often spoken about the enormous potentiality of gaming platforms and of the capabilities of young players, months ago I introduced a US project to develop an application to spy on gaming console all over the world gathering precious information on their owners., The control of a gaming console could be used to spy on victim’s environment, today the gaming platform are equipped with cameras that could be an eye on user’s domestic environment., But gaming console could be used also for recruiting purposes, Britain has recently announced a new spy recruitment program who wants to draw from the video game players, the term used to refer the world of video gamers is the “Xbox generation”., The typical profile requested is young guy, without a university education but with a great attitude in the use of new social media and computer game skills of course., Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) intelligence agency is looking for 100 new recruits to be involved in an apprenticeship program for the creation of a new generation of cyber spies. The announcement was made by Foreign Secretary William Hague during a conference at Bletchley Park., “We face constant and growing threats from crime and attacks in cyberspace,” , “We want to step up our efforts to find the most talented people to help sustain and secure the UK’s code-breaking and cyber expertise for the future.”, “It will be the young innovators of this generation who will help keep our country safe in years to come against threats which are every bit as serious as some of those confronted in the Second World War.” , The mode of recruiting is revolutionary for UK government, in the past the secret agencies mainly drew from principal universities selecting most promising pupils, the must was the obtaining of A-level qualifications with strong capability in science and mathematics., The campaign is clear opening to a new kind of professional, more oriented to the practice, a figure with a great familiarity with cyber tools that follow the trend already introduced by other countries such as China., No wonder if the particular qualities of that boys were taken to the creation of new legions of hackers trained using the most advanced methods and involved in cyber operations, this is the future, and thanks to the young talents governments intend to preside over the cyber space. These new skills are not taught at the university, the chosen ones will have to show great passion for the cyber security, high elasticity and mental aptitude to work for objectives … exactly as they do when they play with their console, passing level by level., Of course the recruiting program is intensive, recruits will spend two years at GCHQ studying cyber security and engineering, consider that UK has a primary role in the cyber space and it is considered one of the nation with major investments for the improvement of cyber capabilities., The training schedule includes a foundation degree course in communications, security and engineering at De Montfort University in Leicester and specific study for a level 4 diploma in IT specific for software, web and telecommunications professional competence., UK Government has established an extra investment to develop deterrents to hostile malware and hackers that amount to 650M £ in 2012., A foreign Office spokeswoman declared:, “If the UK is to maintain a leading role on cyber issues to enhance the UK’s economic growth, we must harness experts from the ‘Xbox generation’ who have grown up with a world of social media, global connectivity and interactive gaming,”, The way to conduct an attack is profoundly changed and also the simulation of conflict that appear similar to a video games, and youngsters are very familiar with them., Foreign Secretary William Hague declared that UK is victim of an escalation of cyber attacks of any type, from cyber espionage to offensives that aim to disrupt infrastructure, communications and satellite systems:, “not an hour goes by when a system in the UK is not being attacked”, he said, Hague is convinced that the majority of attacks are state-sponsored, organized groups hit strike government networks representing a serious cyber threat for UK’s security and economic competitiveness., Recently Pacific Command organized a series of exercise in war-games style on a 7-inch-high box with NATO and other international partners to verify the reliability of the communication channels during a cyber attack. The goal of this exercise is to ensure communication between entities in case of attacks., In other simulation dedicated appliances are intentionally infected to verify the response of an infrastructure to the diffusion of a malicious agent., We can describe dozen of similar exercises made all over the world made by different cyber units, in each of them a team acts as attackers and another as defender, in the middle we locate the entities representing population and vital services of a countries., Scope of the simulations is to evaluate the impact of cyber operations on the defense system and also on the “middle” entities trying to detect possible flaws in computer systems and response procedures., In this scenario it is simple to understand how much important is the introduction of youngsters experts of video games and simulations, how fundaments is the role of hackers in today cyber warfare, these figures are crucial to develop and test capabilities of a countries and also to conduct a cyber offensive …., UK Government … passed with flying colors for the initiative., Pierluigi Paganini |
6407_69853 | A group of researchers from the Ohio State University has discovered a new variation of the Spectre attack named SgxPectre., Intel Software Guard eXtensions (SGX) is a technology for application developers that allows protecting select code and data from disclosure or modification. The Intel SGX allows application code executing within an Intel SGX enclave, which are protected areas of execution in memory., We have a long debated both Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities in Intel processors and the way to exploit them., The Meltdown attack could allow attackers to read the entire physical memory of the target machines stealing credentials, personal information, and more., The Meltdown exploits the speculative execution to breach the isolation between user applications and the operating system, in this way any application can access all system memory., The Spectre attack allows user-mode applications to extract information from other processes running on the same system. It can also be exploited to extract information from its own process via code, for example, a malicious JavaScript can be used to extract login cookies for other sites from the browser’s memory., The Spectre attack breaks the isolation between different applications, allowing to leak information from the kernel to user programs, as well as from virtualization hypervisors to guest systems., While the exploitation of Meltdown or Spectre doesn’t allow attackers to extract data from SGX enclaves, the SgxPectre attack exploits the bugs in Intel CPU to reveal the content of the SGX enclave., “SGXPECTRE Attacks that exploit the recently disclosed CPU bugs to subvert the confidentiality of SGX enclaves. Particularly, we show that when branch prediction of the enclave code can be influenced by programs outside the enclave, the control flow of the enclave program can be temporarily altered to execute instructions that lead to observable cache-state changes.” reads the paper published by the researchers. , “An adversary observing such changes can learn secrets inside the enclave memory or its internal registers, thus completely defeating the confidentiality guarantee offered by SGX.”, According to the experts, almost any enclave program could be vulnerable to the SGXPECTRE attack., , The attack SgxPectre leverages on specific code patterns in software libraries that allow developers to add SGX support to their application. Desired code patterns are available in most SGX runtimes, including Intel SGX SDK, Rust-SGX, and Graphene-SGX., Basically, the SgxPectre is a cache side-channel attack against enclave programs., The researchers explained that their attack is based on the observation of the repetitive code execution patterns that the software development kits introduce in SGX enclaves and the associated variation in the cache size., “In particular, because vulnerable code patterns exist in most SGX runtime libraries (e.g., Intel SGX SDK, Rust-SGX, Graphene-SGX) and are difficult to be eliminated, the adversary could perform SGXPECTRE Attacks against any enclave programs.” continues the paper. , “We demonstrate end-to-end attacks to show that the adversary could learn the content of the enclave memory, as well as its register values in such attacks”, Intel plans to address SgxPectre with a security update for the Intel SGX SDK that will be released on March 16., Developers will need to update their application by using the new SDK version., The experts released a video PoC of the attack while the PoC code was published on GitHub., , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – SgxPectre, Intel SGX enclave) |
1533_29040 | The world of IT security was recently shocked by the Bash Bug vulnerability and I believe that none of the readers do need to explain the impact of this vulnerability. We are in almost the same situation as few months ago when the Heartbleed bug was discovered. What changed? Well, something, but nothing., We are all aware that not a single one system is perfect. There will be vulnerabilities we will not be aware of, and there will be vulnerabilities we are aware (patched or accepted the risk). Accepting the vulnerabilities with the low impact because also the risk is low or none is something that I usually see across many companies, starting from SMB up to the big enterprises. Despite the fact that the risk is here in various forms from a simple thing up to the most complex scenarios the companies start only now consider involving the security more into their organizations. For all of them one example, speaks: recent JP Morgan Chase leak. And (what sounds weird and scary) many still did not start yet., Bug in bash represents yet another big exclamation mark in the security industry that shows us that we are still at least 2 steps after the cybercrime scene. , The first step can be made by each one: we should be once again vigilant (do you remember when you entered the security industry? So many dreams, so full of energy) in responding the incidents, dealing with vulnerabilities and accept the risk as a last resort. We should not leave everything onto the researchers that spend nights and days in finding the cure to the vulnerabilities and then we simply… do not patch. The effort making this world secure can’t be put on the shoulders of the vendors; we have to be the active part as well. During the past months I’ve learned that not only the technology, but also the behavior matters. I am not talking about the countless security awareness sessions where we try to force the employees to not to do the bad things. I am talking about changing the decisions of using vulnerable solutions, simply because it just does not reach the desired security standard., Relaxed approach to the security can be seen worldwide; dozen of we-do-it-cheaper devices fighting with we-have-more-features devices are filling the Internet of Things because what matters is the sale. Of course, but will the struggle for a bigger sale kill the security? We already see the big warnings of what might come, and we are not ready for that, while IoT is not the only problem we will face., , The second step includes the vendors themselves. Bringing the security culture does not mean only bringing the latest patches. It means also to respond to the threats to the privacy. I am not accusing anyone of having placed a backdoor on purpose into their product because the government wants to fight the crime. But… Recently Wikipedia released the Finfisher files. I’ve put the files on VirusTotal and found the detection ratio 4/55. Here the story ends. I agree that using the tool that would be detected by the antivirus solution is not effective at all. On the other hand, the tool most likely exploits the security holes in the same way as the malware is doing now. The same approach is used for different purposes. Cybercrime is also using the set of the vulnerabilities in their products, assuring the quality of service. The same as the conditions of FinFisher are (if the published documents are true)., The second step is zero tolerance to the vulnerabilities and malware (be it cyber criminal or governmental) from the vendor side. I can hear now the readers arguing that this will cause losing the war against the criminals. And here we are back on the old track: there has to be a balance between the security and functionality. We have to start somewhere. First with the consideration: if we reduce the attack surface, will the risk remains the same? The answer is: let’s do the first step first., What would be the impacts of starting doing the things properly? Sure, we have to expect higher costs, not only in the enterprise sector, but mostly in the SMB part and of course also in the end user segment. Bigger enterprises can only estimate the RoI (Return of Investment), while it will take some time the small and medium businesses to understand the value of the higher security projected into the higher costs for more secure technologies they want to use. Moreover the RoI is not the argument here, we are about to lose one very important battle if not even the whole war because mitigation of the damage costs much more, if only it can be done. In the battle for more secure computing, one of the key roles can be taken for example by the ISPs and Telcos by adopting stronger countermeasures against those who do not comply with higher security standards when communicating. Another role can be taken for example by ICANN and other Internet authorities and we can go further and further. The industry has to understand that we have one common goal. We can’t fight the cybercrime at the front door of our houses while opening the backyard door widely., Boris Mutina , Boris Mutina is freelancer with more than a decade of experience in IT, security audits and advisory, education, cybercrime analysis and investigation. Among other projects he is currently developing with other freelancer the online brand protection and information leakage online detection tool., (Security Affairs – Infosec, security) |
6753_73069 | The SpamCannibal was born to blacklist IP address of malicious servers involved in spam campaigns and DoS attacks., SpamCannibal was using a continually updated database containing the IP addresses of spam or DoS servers and blocks their ability to connect using services on a computer system that purposely delays incoming connections (aka TCP/IP tarpit)., The blacklist service was offline since last summer, but someone hijacked it on Wednesday morning, attackers changed the DNS name server settings for the website overnight., , The news was first reported by El Reg that was informed of the strange resurrection by a reader who told them that SpamCannibal was “pumping out Blacklist notifications for some of our servers and then when you go to spamcannibal.org, you get spam.”, “Visiting the site earlier today flung fake Adobe Flash updates at our sandboxed browser, downloads no doubt riddled with malware, so beware.” reads a blog post published by El Reg., The DNS record for the blacklist service was changed to point at a rogue server controlled by attackers that likely used it to deliver malware and to alter the results of queries to the blacklist service., If anybody uses spamcannibal's RBL, the domain has been taken over and has a wildcard response – so it returns everything as status spam. — Kevin Beaumont ? (@GossiTheDog) May 30, 2018, , All the users that queried the service to check an IP address to see if it is blacklisted as a spam source received always a positive result with serious consequences., Researcher Martijn Grooten believes the attack wasn’t targeted., “This really looks like a standard domain takeover by some dodgy parking service. Doesn’t appear particularly targeted to Spamcannibal,” Grooten concluded., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – hacking, DNS hijacking) |
9_106 | Mac malware has been making some headlines in the last few months, as attackers have begun applying to OS X some of the tactics they’ve been using on Windows for decades., Security analysts have discovered several variants of the DevilRobber Mac OS X Trojan, the last one is also able to steal files, installs a Web proxy and steal the user’s Safari browsing history., Researchers at F-Secure say the some of the variants appear to be looking for specific pornographic files on infected Macs and steals passwords from the machine in order to access any files that may be protected. All of the variants of DevilRobber have the ability to take data from the machine and upload it to a remote server., The new variants were discovered in legitimate Mac applications that had been Trojaned and then shared on Pirate Bay., Apple is responding with the announcement that all apps submitted to the Mac App Store will have to have a sandbox by March 2012., F-Secure analysis, |
27_286 | It is clear that the question awaits an answer deterministic, but an assessment of the main factors that influence the “final expense”. My idea is to understand what is the magnitude of the phenomenon and the costs related to a not necessarily familiar audience . The goal is to raise awareness in the process of developing malware, and its costs., These are just few questions that we should ask ourselves approaching the topic., The purpose surely influence the final cost and it is directly proportional to the effort required to identify vulnerabilities and analysis of target systems., A zero-day attack is an attack that try to exploit computer application vulnerabilities that are unknown to others or to the developers. Obviously finding a vulnerability of this type the success is guarantee of success and certainly has a different cost from that is related to the exploit of a well-documented vulnerabilities for which a lot materia is available in the literature., The time factor is crucial for the eradication of virus. The spread should be to tight deadlines and in massive form., The distribution channel and the target are certainly crucial in the design phase of the malware. If the goal is a pandemic, it will seek to computer systems with a general circulation, such as Microsoft. If the intent is to exploit the mobile channel then probably u iPhone OS and Android OS systems will be under attack with obvious implications in the design phase., Just the design is the distinctive element of a malware. The greater its ability to change more effective will be its offense. How to implement these features? Basically implementing polymorphic malware that are able to avoid most of anrivirus, or developing the agent in a scalar mode. In this case the malware will be composed by several components that modulate its behavior., Final behaviour of the virus is the result of different modules, each with particular characteristics and built for a specific target., Onother important feature to qualify malware and related costs is the entity that commits investment for the production of malware. If there is a government commitment it is inclined to think the development of a “cyber weapon” whose cost is the result of business intelligence, analysis, research … so very high costs. Instead the criminal organizzations are similar to software factory, the latter sometimes better organized and more effective management of economic resources toward these goals. The basin from which it takes, is a IT underground of East Area, often with the financial resources to the east in the game is able to offer an offering worthy of the best centers of development. Finally, there are hacker communities, with very different goals that develop at a lower cost and with no means ignoble purposes ..In this case, the value added is the knowledge of professionals that compete in their own egos., For the first two cases there are malware factory who develop malware to order and manage them like any other real IT project., Let’s start analyzing some data to have a idea of the huge quantity of money invested, in this specific case in military scenarios:, Which are the main aspects of cyberwarfare?, In military scenarios the target is to dominate cyberspace, infiltrate key systems in and relying on research and intelligence gathering, using known exploits when possible, 0-days when necessary. In cyber crime scenario the target is to conquer a specific target, corrupting the systems with the specific intent to acquire high priviledges to collect, to steal, alter or destroy control system or enterprise system for business purpose. Make money is the primary needs!, Imagining to desire to compose a team for the development of malware, which professional figures will be needed?, All this resources have cost that could be really expensive related to the project objective and the total duration of the development. Next Time if you desire we can develope an exercize together trying to give a value for each resource ad defining the project duration and the phases that compose them., That is just the beginning …, to be continued … with your contribution, Pierluigi Paganini, Let me say thank you to two great security specialists that have supported my research with their personal experience and sharing of precious and rare information. , Niels Groeneveld (Threat Analyst at Royal Dutch Shell), Charlie Miller (Computer security researcher) |
5213_59057 | A Massive ransomware attack targets UK hospitals and Spanish banks, the news was confirmed by Telefónica that was one of the numerous victims of the malicious campaign., The newspaper El Pais reported the massive attack, experts at Telefónica confirmed the systems in its intranet have been infected, but also added that the situation is currently under control. The fixed and mobile telephony services provided by Telefónica have not been affected by the ransomware-based attack., The ransomware, dubbed WannaCry (aka Wcry, WanaCrypt, WannaCrypt), also spread among other businesses in Spain, among the victims the energy suppliers Iberdrola and the telco firm Vodafone. Spanish financial institutions confirmed the attacks by downplayed the threat., Source Arstechnica, At the time I was writing there is no news about the damage caused by the infections., The Spanish CERT issued an alert warning the organizations and confirming that the malware is rapidly spreading., The strain of ransomware at the centre of the outbreak is a variant of Wanna Decryptor aka Wcry aka WanaCrypt aka WannaCry. Spain’s CERT put out an alert saying that the outbreak had affected several organizations., 36,000 detections of #WannaCry (aka #WanaCypt0r aka #WCry) #ransomware so far. Russia, Ukraine, and Taiwan leading. This is huge. pic.twitter.com/EaZcaxPta4, — Jakub Kroustek (@JakubKroustek) May 12, 2017, , The Wanna Decryptor is exploiting the NSA EternalBlue / DoublePulsar exploit to infect other connected Windows systems on the same network., “The special criticality of this campaign is caused by exploiting the vulnerability described in bulletin MS17-010 using EternalBlue / DoublePulsar, which can infect other connected Windows systems on the same network that are not properly updated. Infection of a single computer can end up compromising the entire corporate network.” states the security alert issued by the CERT., “The ransomware, a variant of WannaCry, infects the machine by encrypting all its files and, using the vulnerability mentioned in the previous paragraph that allows the execution of remote commands through Samba (SMB) and is distributed to other Windows machines in That same network.”, The DOUBLEPULSAR backdoor allows attackers to inject and execute malicious code on a target system, it is installed by leveraging the ETERNALBLUE, an SMBv1 (Server Message Block 1.0) exploit that could trigger an RCE in older versions of Windows (Windows XP to Server 2008 R2)., The WannaCry is infecting systems in dozens of states, among the victims there is also the UK public health service., The network warm capabilities of the malware are allowing the rapid diffusion of the threat, The ransomware demands $300 to restore documents, without any other details of the code we can only speculate that the attack was powered by a criminal gang., The following aspects of the attack must be carefully analyzed:, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – WannaCry ransomware, cybercrime) |
89_1938 | If you were to ask me what is the most frightened nation in terms of cyber offense without a doubt I say it is China. The Beijing government has distinguished itself in recent years in the field of warfare demonstrating extraordinary abilities. It is among the first nations to have understood the importance of the cyber space and the effectiveness of cyber operations, this is why internet is overflowing with reports of Chinese hacking groups made more or less close to the government. In reality, right on hacking matter, is difficult to think that someone can escape in the asian underground to tight control of the government which, however, encourages and promotes the use and study of information technology for military actions., Interesting the network of relationships in cyber warfare that even China is tightening with some nations, first of all Iran and North Korea, countries with which it has established close technological collaboration.,
Why would a country so advanced co-operate with popolation so distant from the social and economic perspective? What are the advantages?
To a casual eye these relationships might look like an act of philanthropy to those countries oppressed by Western supremacy, but behind the partnerships there is a specific plan to build an impenetrable fortress around a central power, a series of ramparts technology to be used to to operate in a hidden manner against countries with which it does business.
Give me the parallels with the theory of networking, these collaborations with China are important alliances used to build its demilitarized zone (DMZ), a large region within the cyber space exposed to the enemy, from which to move offensive, but in any case far from the nerve center of its infrastructure. Do not forget also that China is among the nations that import oil from Iran. The report is therefore far from philanthropic., Let’s look more closely at the relationship between China and the Iranian government., Just in the last few months we observed a more aggressive policy of the government , of Teharan continuous skirmishes with the West to show to the world its new technological capacities. Hence the extreme events that have been advertised as the hijacking of U.S. drone and also millionaires technology investments for the acquisition of modern network infrastructure, provided by Chinese giant Huawei., China in recent years has made extensive use of cyber operations, with the purpose of information gathering and also with intent to be offensive. Cyber offensive to hit the key points of enemy countries, the information systems of banks and other institutions, no one can be considered safe. Obviously, however, so much media exposure does not benefit the business and therefore it is expected that those countries technologically close to Beijing can move similar offensives.
We will face with a new cyber escalation, attacks led to the strategic objectives as probably already happened, new attacks attributed to groups of Iranian and Notrh Korean hackers, or even to the ‘ “Iranian Cyber Army”. From my personal point of view I have no doubt regaring the fact that Iran Cyber Army’s constituent hacker groups is connected to the Iranian government, Cyber Army has proven to be always ready to attack every Ahmandinejad’s oppositor., Striking the Comodo hack case, no doubt that the Certification Authority was attacked with spy intention because its certificates are used in authentication mechanisms to some services of government agencies., Tehran certainly is not hiding, he understood how important it is propaganda to intimidate their opponents blocked by the need to have a unanimous international consensus to combat it. Iran has admitted that it was so was engaged in cyber warfare, and cyber attacks are part of their strategy.
During the last year several attacks have been launched from Iran against Voice of America Farsi, Dutch government-funded Radio Zamaneh, which also broadcasts in Farsi, and microblogging site Twitter. China has alse exported the concept of internet censorship implemented with Israeli technology. The Tehran government infact also blocks the majority of foreign news websites, accusing Western media of taking part in a plot by the United States, Israel and Britain-led Europe, Against the Islamic Republic., Tensions rose after the Iranian nuclear program has been threatened by the worm Stuxnet, the first cyber weapon, for the development of which they are accused the Americans and Israelis., The collaboration between China and Iran did not stop at just at warfare, anti-ship ballistic missiles have been projected with the collaboration of both governments., In February 2011, Iran demonstrated a short-range anti-ship ballistic missile named Khalij Fars ( English: Persian Gulf ), a missile based on the Fateh-110 which successfully hit a stationary target vessel. It has been also the deployment of a short ranged ballistic missile based on the Chinese missile Dongfeng 11 (English:”East Wind) operated by the People’s Republic of China., Do you think these collaborations are not really dangerous? Unfortunately the money folds all logic, while you decide for the total embargo to Iran new economic relationships are intertwined with the Chinese government, complying with the aggressive policy., Let us reflect for a moment, we are approaching the point of no return, total dependence on the Chinese market …, Pierluigi Paganini |
4760_55471 | ProtonMail is the world’s largest encrypted email provider with over 2 million users worldwide. Its popularity exploded just after the US presidential election, its users include journalists, activists, businesses, and normal people that want to protect their security and privacy. The service is a free and open source, featuring strong end-to-end encryption and protected by Swiss privacy laws., Implementing a Tor hidden service for ProtonMail Tor has numerous advantages for end-users, communications are protected by supplementary layers of encryption, user’ IP address is masqueraded by the anonymizing network, and such kind of service is able to bypass government censorship., “There are several reasons why you might want to use ProtonMail over Tor. First, routing your traffic to ProtonMail through the Tor network makes it difficult for an adversary wiretapping your internet connection to know that you are using ProtonMail. Tor applies extra encryption layers on top of your connection, making it more difficult for an advanced attacker to perform a man-in-the-middle attack on your connection to us. Tor also makes your connections to ProtonMail anonymous as we will not be able to see the true IP address of your connection to ProtonMail.” a onion site,” ProtonMail explained in a blog post., “Tor can also help with ProtonMail accessibility. If ProtonMail becomes blocked in your country, it may be possible to reach ProtonMail by going to our onion site. Furthermore, onion sites are “hidden” services in the sense that an adversary cannot easily determine their physical location. Thus, while protonmail.com could be attacked by DDoS attacks, protonirockerxow.onion cannot be attacked in the same way because an attacker will not be able to find a public IP address.”, The onion address for the ProtonMail Tor service:, Just for curiosity, the above address was generated by the company used spare CPU capacity to generate millions of encryption keys and then hashed them aiming to generate a more human readable hash. The address it can be easily remembered as:, proton i rocker xow, , ProtonMail published detailed instructions on how to setup Tor and how to access the service over Tor. For example, in order to use the ProtonMail hidden service is it necessary to enable Javascript.Tor Browser disables Javascript by default, but you will need it for our onion site. You can do this by clicking the “NoScript” button and selecting “Temporarily allow all this page”:, “Tor Browser disables Javascript by default, but you will need it for our onion site. You can do this by clicking the “NoScript” button and selecting “Temporarily allow all this page”” reads the ProtonMail page., The ProtonMail hidden service only accepts HTTPS connections, it uses a digital certificate issued by Digicert, the same CA used by Facebook for its Tor hidden service., The ProtonMail hidden service could be reached via a desktop web browser and both iOS and Android apps., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – ProtonMail, Tor) |
4429_52796 | Security experts from ENSILO have devised a method, called AtomBombing, to inject malicious code in Windows operating system that could not be detected by modern anti-malware tools., The Atom Tables are data structures used by the operating system to store strings with an identifier to access them, they could have a global or local scope., “An atom table is a system-defined table that stores strings and corresponding identifiers. An application places a string in an atom table and receives a 16-bit integer, called an atom, that can be used to access the string. A string that has been placed in an atom table is called an atom name.” reads a description published by Microsoft on the Atom Tables., “The system provides a number of atom tables. Each atom table serves a different purpose. For example, Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) applications use the global atom table to share item-name and topic-name strings with other applications.”, , The attackers can then write malicious code into an atom table and force a legitimate application to retrieve it from the table. Once the code is retrieved by the legitimate application, it is possible to manipulate it triggering the execution of the malicious code., “Our research team has uncovered a new way to leverage mechanisms of the underlying Windows operating system in order to inject malicious code. Threat actors can use this technique, which exists by design of the operating system, to bypass current security solutions that attempt to prevent infection. We named this technique AtomBombing based on the name of the underlying mechanism that this technique exploits.” states the analysis published by ENSILO., The researchers explained that the AtomBombing technique relies on tricking a user into running a malicious executable that could allow them to conduct several malicious activities including memory data snooping to grab passwords and other sensitive information., The experts highlighted that the AtomBombing method doesn’t exploit a flaw in the OS code, instead, it relies on a certain mechanism implemented by the Windows OS., “Unfortunately, this issue cannot be patched since it doesn’t rely on broken or flawed code – rather on how these operating system mechanisms are designed.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – AtomBombing , Windows hacking) |
7661_80200 | The abuse.ch project called URLhaus was launched in March 2018 to track websites used to spread malware, it involved 265 researchers worldwide. , In a 10-month period, 265 security researchers around the world have identified in average 300 malware sites each day. , “End of March 2018, abuse.ch launched it’s most recent project called URLhaus. The goal of URLhaus is to collect and share URLs that are being used for distributing malware.” read the post published by Abuse.ch., “The project is a huge success: with the help of the community, URLhaus was able to takedown almost 100,000 malware distribution sites within just 10 months! , The experts currently identify between 4,000 and 5,000 active malware distribution sites daily. The URLhaus is very important especially for hosting providers because helps them to identify and take over websites hosted in their network, , In average, a malware distribution site remains active for more than a week (8 days, 10 hours, 24 minutes) that is considered a sufficient time to infect thousands of device every day., The analysis of the top malware hosting networks revealed that 2 out of three of the malware URL are hosted in the US or China., One of the most disconcerting data emerged from the project is related to the takedown time of malware sites hosted in China, Chinese malware hosting networks are very slow in taking action against the abuses, they have an average abuse reaction time of more than a month. A large number of malware distribution websites tracked by URLhaus are related to Emotet (aka Heodo) that is propagated through spam, followed by the ones related to the Gozi malware and GandCrab ransomware., “The weight that Emotet has in the current threat landspace also becomes more clear when having a look at the identified malware families associated with the payloads URLhaus received from the tracked malware distribution sites.” continues the analysis published by Abuse.ch. “Across the 380,000 malware samples (payloads) that URLhaus has collected over the past 10 months, Emotet/Heodo is the top malware as the following chart documents.”, The experts pointed out that for the success of the URLhaus project it is crucial an active participation of the entire community., “URLhaus wouldn’t be successful without the help of the community. But we are not where we should be yet.” concludes the post published by abuse.ch., “There is still a long way to go with regards to response time of abuse desks. An average reaction time of more than a week is just too much and proves a bad internet hygiene.” , Pierluigi Paganini, (SecurityAffairs – Malware, Abuse.ch), , |
3566_45882 | Several days ago, I wrote about a new singular Ransomware dubbed Petya that captured the attention of security experts because it causes a blue screen of death (BSoD) by overwriting the MBR., Now security firm F-Secure has issued an alert on the Petya ransomware, sharing the results of its analysis about the threat., The malware encrypts the entire disk instead of encrypting files on the infected system like any other ransomware,, The Petya ransomware encrypts the filesystem’s master file table (MFT) making impossible for the operating system the access to any file and making the machine unusable., The MFT contains at least one entry for every file, including the MFT itself., ” Specifically, it will encrypt the filesystem’s master file table (MFT), which means the operating system is not able to locate files.” wrote Jarkko Turkulainen, F-Secure senior security researcher., “It installs itself to the disk’s master boot record (MBR) like a bootkit. But instead of covert actions, it displays a red screen with instructions on how to restore the system.”, Why encrypt the MFT?, Because the encryption of an MFT is less consuming than the encryption of all the files contained on the disk, and the result is the same., Even restoring the MBR with recovery system won’t help, because the MFT remains encrypted., The attack of a generic ransomware is very slow respect an attack based on the Petya ransomware, this means that victims aware of the threat could act to limit the effects of the malware., Petya is able to compromise the MFT in a few seconds, causing the system crash and forcing a restart, and according to F-Secure experts, in an enterprise environment there would be no time to take mitigation measures., Another effect of the Petya infection is that the victim would need to use a machine different from the infected computer to pay the ransom., Petya operates in two stages, in the first one is the main dropper that performs the following operations:, In the second phase, once infected the PC, the machine boots to MBR code, which:, The Petya ransomware implements a custom Elliptic Curve encryption scheme for file encryption, the dropper ships with a 192-bit public key and secp192k1 curve parameters hardcoded in the code., Wanting to make a critical to the authors, the Petya ransomware doesn’t implement a mechanism for paying the ransom, instead, it just share a URL with victims., , “Somewhat ironically, in making it harder for victims to pay a ransom, Petya’s authors may have also lowered their own chances of profiting from it” F-Secure security advisor Sean Sullivan explained to Dark Reading. “As a result, the likelihood of the same technique being used more widely will depend on the success malware authors have in monetizing Petya.”, It is important to notice that only the server can restore the encryption key used to encrypt the files with the EC algorithm., “The only way to restore the machine without the help of the server is to catch the salsa20 key inline of the infection process, using debuggers. Not a very attractive counter measure for the average computer user.” states F-Secure., Ransomware is a serious threat, this form of digital extortion is becoming a common and profitable practice in the criminal underground.In recent months, ransomware samples like, In recent months, many ransomware strains like TeslaCrypt, Locky and CryptoWall have infected a large number of victims worldwide., The U.S DHS issued an alert warning users of the threat. The alert, issued late Thursday, warned consumers and businesses about the “devastating” consequences of a ransomware attack., “In early 2016, destructive ransomware variants such as Locky and Samas were observed infecting computers belonging to individuals and businesses, which included healthcare facilities and hospitals worldwide. Ransomware is a type of malicious software that infects a computer and restricts users’ access to it until a ransom is paid to unlock it.” states the alert., “The United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS), in collaboration with Canadian Cyber Incident Response Centre (CCIRC), is releasing this Alert to provide further information on ransomware, specifically its main characteristics, its prevalence, variants that may be proliferating, and how users can prevent and mitigate against ransomware.” , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Petya ransomware , cybercrime) |
2858_40866 | A recent phenomenon tracked by IBM Security X-Force researchers is the CaaS (Certificates as a service). Cybercriminals would use the Dark Web for selling high-grade code certificates -which they have obtained from trusted certificate authorities- to anyone that is interested in purchasing them., Sales of code signing certificates have increased considerably over the past few months, according to X-Force researchers who have also provided some best practice guides on checking for trusted certificates., Talking about certificates, Why were certificates created? Their purpose is to generate trust and validation in software of code run on the machines. Using certificates, we can be safe about things like that a file has arrived from a valid source, it is not tampered with and its origin is open so we can validate its publisher., Who issues the certificates and to whom are they granted? They are issued by the certificate authorities (CAs) and are granted to companies that generate code, protocols or software so they can sign their code and indicate its legitimacy and originality., Talking about the importance of the certificates, Using code signing certificates is similar to the hologram seal used on software packages, assuring they are genuine and issued from a trusted publisher. Users would receive alerts in an attempt to install files that are not accompanied with a valid certificate., This is why cybercriminals aim to use certificates for legitimizing the malware code they make., Cybercriminals using signed malware, When cybercriminal create malicious code, their purpose is to make it appear as legitimate as possible. This is done by using signing certificates to sign their code., By stealing private keys of certificates using Trojan horses or by compromising the certificate key builder of software vendors, cybercriminals manage to get access to code signing certificates., Suspicious certificates, When the researchers discovered that fraudsters used valid certificated, the first thing that came to their mind is that they somehow manage to acquire them directly from the certificate’s issuer. What they did next is that they contacted the certificate owner, advised that it has been stolen and offered up to cybercriminals., It is quite possible that cybercriminals would use certificates to register dummy corporations and then issue bank accounts, checks etc. It can be rather difficult to separate legitimate from dummy companies and this is due to the fact that cybercriminals take all the required steps for making it appear as authentic., , Recommendations, New measures of verification that will keep intruders away and not block code from legitimate vendors are needed., Here’s what you can do:, Written by: Ali Qamar, Founder/Chief Editor at SecurityGladiators.com, Author Bio:
Ali Qamar is an Internet security research enthusiast who enjoys “deep” research to dig out modern discoveries in the security industry. He is the founder and chief editor at Security Gladiators, an ultimate source for cyber security. To be frank and honest, Ali started working online as a freelancer and still shares the knowledge for a living. He is passionate about sharing the knowledge with people, and always try to give only the best. Follow Ali on Twitter @AliQammar57, , Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – signing certificates , cybercrime) |
3221_43348 | Around 13:00 EST on Monday, The PlayStation Network suffered a major outage worldwide, Sony early confirmed that the network was “experiencing issues” and its status page showed that the problems were affecting all of its major services., Sony didn’t provide further explanation about the PlayStation Network outage., We’re aware that some users are having trouble accessing PSN. Thanks for your patience as we investigate. — Ask PlayStation (@AskPlayStation) 4 Gennaio 2016, , , The downtime lasted around ten hours before Sony restored its PlayStation Network., The Play Station Network also suffered technical issues over the Christmas period, some users reported difficulties in authenticating the online services., Now the hacking group Phantom Squad is claiming responsibility for a distributed denial of service attack that brought offline the entire Sony’s PlayStation Network on Monday. In a Tweet sent by the hackers they explicitly refer a problem affecting the PSN network., , “#psn #offline #off for some users. We are back for some action!” states a Tweet from the group., Sony still has not released an official statement on the incident, the company announced it would offer extensions for PlayStation Plus, PlayStation Now and video rentals.,
Thanks for your patience today – stay tuned for details on PS Plus, PS Now, and video rental extensions., — PlayStation (@PlayStation) 5 Gennaio 2016
, Gaming platform are a privileged target for hackers, last year the Lizard Squad hacking group took down at Christmas both Microsoft Xbox Live and PlayStation network (PSN) highlighting security issues affecting the services of Sony and Microsoft., , (Security Affairs – Sony PlayStation Network is down, Phantom Squad) |
953_21337 | The massive data breach at Target during the 2013 holiday shopping season which the retailer now admits affected 70 million customers used an inexpensive “off the shelf” malware known as BlackPOS. The same malware may have also been involved in the Neiman Marcus attack., Security researchers from IntelCrawler, a Los-Angeles based cyber intelligence company, announced that the age of BlackPOS malware author is close to 17 years old and the first sample of it was created in March 2013. The first report on this malware was done in the beginning of spring by Andrew Komarov, IntelCrawler CEO, when he was working in another forensics company., According to own sources of IntelCrawler the first infected Point-of-Sales environments by BlackPOS were in Australia, Canada and the US. The first name of the malware was “DUMP MEMORY GRABBER by Ree4”, but the title for C&C had string “BlackPOS”. During that time, “Ree4” (“ree4”) has sold more then 40 builds of BlackPOS to cybercriminals from Eastern Europe and other countries., The same dates the detailed information and reverse engineering report were shared with Visa and several major US banks, after which US LEA released internal notification for financial industry about that. The bad actor was pretty opened for trading this malware for 2 000 USD or by receiving 50% from selling of all intercepted credit cards by his customer through Liberty Reserve., , The first C&C server of BlackPOS was installed on “ree4.7ci.ru”, which was the personal host of its author with nickname “ree4”. Some other hosts were found on this domain name, as probably it was used as a hosting for all members of the same group: – onlyddos.7ci.ru; – merzavetz.7ci.ru; – reperckov41.7ci.ru. , Previously he has created several tools used in hacking community for brute force attacks, such as “Ree4 mail brute”, and also earned some first money with social networks accounts hacking and DDoS attacks trainings, as well as software development including malicious code., , According to operative information from IntelCrawler, the experts have already identified the person behind the nickname “ree4”, he is based in St.Petersburg and Nizhniy Novgorod (Russian Federation) and he is a very well-known programmer of malicious code in underground. I prefer to keep reserved the name of the hacker to not obstacle the investigation, but if you want to know it contact directly IntelCrawler., “He is still visible for us, but the real bad actors responsible for the past attacks on retailers such as Target and Neiman Marcus were just his customers”, comments Dan Clements, IntelCrawler President., Before both breaches IntelCrawler detected large-scale RDP brute-forcing attacks on Point-of-Sales terminals across the US, Australia and Canada started at the beginning of 2013 year in winter period with weak passwords such as:, February 9th, 2013, 14:30
URL: , IP Address: 71.138.234.81 Location: UNITED STATES, CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES Latitude & Longitude: 34.052230, -118.243680 Connection: 26 INTERNATIONAL INC Net Speed: (COMP) Company/T1 IDD & Area Code: 213/310/424/323 ZIP Code: 90001 Weather Station: LOS ANGELES (USCA0638), , IP Address: 63.138.49.238 Location: UNITED STATES, NEW YORK, FAIRPORT Latitude & Longitude: 43.088572, -77.432766 Connection: PAETEC COMMUNICATIONS INC. Domain: PAETEC.COM Net Speed: (DSL) Broadband/Cable IDD & Area Code: 585 ZIP Code: 14450 Weather Station: FAIRPORT (USNY0477), , IP Address: 168.215.163.98 Location:UNITED STATES, COLORADO, LONE TREE Latitude & Longitude: 39.546295, -104.896772 Connection: TW TELECOM HOLDINGS INC. Domain: TWTELECOM.NET Net Speed: (COMP) Company/T1 IDD & Area Code: 303 ZIP Code: 80124 Weather Station: PARKER (USCO0306), According to New York Times Neiman Marcus acknowledged that the time stamp on the first intrusion was in mid-July, which may have good correlation with found compromised Point-of-Sales.
July 19th, 2013
URL:
“EDC” – Electronic Draft Capture, also known as “EDC” or “Point Of Sale” (POS) allows you to capture and authorize a credit card., “Most of the victims are department stores. More BlackPOS infections, as well as new breaches can appear very soon, retailers and security community should be prepared for them”, commented Andrew Komarov, IntelCrawler CEO., About IntelCrawler, IntelCrawler.com is a multi-tier intelligence aggregator, which gathers information and cyber prints from a starting big data pool of over 3, 000, 000, 000 IPv4 and over 200, 000, 000 domain names, which are scanned for analytics and dissemination to drill down to a desired result. This finite pool of cyber prints is then narrowed further by comparing it to various databases and forum intelligence gathered from the underground and networked security company contacts. The final result could be the location of a particular keyboard or a computer housing the threat. |
5277_59565 | A couple of weeks ago, while security experts were debating about WannaCry ransomware and the NSA exploits it used, the Shadow Brokers group revealed its plan to sell off new exploits every month starting from June. Shadow Brokers plans to offer a data dump based on a monthly subscription model., The group claimed to have exploit codes for almost any technology available on the market, including “compromised network data from more SWIFT providers and Central banks.”, TheShadowBrokers Monthly Data Dump could be being:, Now as announced, the group will release new zero-days exploits and hacking tools for various platforms starting from June 2017., The hacker crew is back with more information on how to subscribe to the monthly subscription service to receive access to the future leaks., Shadows Brokers group has just released the following instruction to subscribe the service it called “Wine of Month Club.”, Welcome to TheShadowBrokers Monthly Dump Service – June 2017, Q: How do I subscribe and get the next theshadowbrokers’ dump (June 2017)?, #1 – Between 06/01/2017 and 06/30/2017 send 100 ZEC (Zcash) to this z_address:, zcaWeZ9j4DdBfZXQgHpBkyauHBtYKF7LnZvaYc4p86G7jGnVUq14KSxsnGmUp7Kh1Pgivcew1qZ64iEeG6vobt8wV2siJiq, #2 – Include a “delivery email address” in the “encrypted memo field” when sending Zcash payment, #3 – If #1 and #2 then a confirmation email will be sent to the “delivery email address” provided, #4 – Between 07/01/2017 and 07/17/2017 a “mass email” will be send to the “delivery email address” of all “confirmed subscribers” (#1, #2, #3), #5 – The “mass email” will contain a link and a password for the June 2017 dump, , Summarizing, experts who are interested in being members of the “wine of month club” would require to Send 100 ZEC (Zcash) (21,519 USD) and include a ‘delivery email address’ in the ‘encrypted memo field’., Once received the payment, the Shadow Brokers will send a payment confirmation email to “delivery email address” provided by the subscriber., The amount of money requested by hackers is very low, 21,000 USD for so precious information is a good affair for intelligence agencies and criminal syndicates., Between 07/01/2017 and 07/17/2017 the group plans to send a link and a personal password to the subscribers for the June 2017 data dump., Shadow Brokers still hasn’t decided the content of the June 2017 data dump, in its post, the notorious crew also expressed doubt about the total anonymity implemented by the Zcash cryptocurrency and the Tor network., “Zcash is having connections to USG (DARPA, DOD, John Hopkins) and Israel. Why USG is “sponsoring” privacy version of bitcoin? Who the fuck is knowing? In defense, TOR is originally being by similar parties. TheShadowBrokers not fully trusting TOR either,” the Shadow Brokers writes., Experts believe that the group will release authentic and legitimate exploits and hacking tools due to their past data leak., The data dump could have a dramatic impact on organizations and business worldwide., Stay tuned…, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Shadow Brokers, hacking) |
4985_57153 | Good news for macOS users who were infected by the FindZip ransomware, now a decryption tool was released online for free., The FindZip macOS ransomware was spotted last month by researchers at ESET, it is tracked as OSX/Filecoder.E., The ransomware, written in Swift, was distributed via BitTorrent distribution sites and calls itself “Patcher”, ostensibly an application for pirating popular software., The first release was not complete, the victims were not able to recover their files, even if they pay the ransom., For this reason, security experts were inviting victims of the ransomware to avoid paying the ransom., Due to coding errors, the malicious code was destroying the encryption key before sending them to the command and control server., FindZip was born after an update to Apple’s XProtect signatures started calling it FindZip soon after. The new threat masquerades itself as cracks for Adobe Premier Pro and Microsoft Office, and also feature signed certificates., The number of ransomware developed to target macOS user is low, FindZip is the second strain of malware designed with this purpose., The excellent news is that victims of the FindZip macOS ransomware now have the opportunity to recover their files for free thanks to the experts at the security firms Malwarebytes and Avast., A couple of weeks ago, experts from Malwarebytes Labs researchers published the instructions to restore data encrypted by the FindZip macOS ransomware., The procedure uses the following elements:, The process also requires a second account on the infected., The process has been automated later by experts from Avast who developed the FindZip decryption tool. Victims can decrypt their files on either a Mac or a Windows machine by using the tool., “MalwareByte already published a technical analysis of FindZip, as well as a description of the decryption process. However, because the instructions described by MalwareBytes may be complicated for some, we created a more user friendly decryption application.” reads a blog post published by AVAST., “The FindZip decryption tool is available on our free ransomware decryption tools page, along with all of our ransomware decryption tools.”, The tool was successfully tested on macOS 10.10 (Yosemite) and macOS 10.12 (Sierra)., Victims that decide to copy the encrypted files from their infected Mac to a Windows system, using the Avast decryptor should be straightforward and they don’t need to install any other software., The researchers explained that on Mac or Linux, the users need an emulation layer for Windows and the tool works with CrossOver and Wine. The researchers at Avast confirms that other emulation programs might work as well., Victims have to install a windowing system for Mac, such as XQuartz, which allows the execution of Wine for Mac., “Important note: If you already had Wine installed prior to being infected with the ransomware, the entire Wine configuration is probably encrypted. In that case, you need to delete the folder \Users\<YourUserName>\.wine before running the decryptor application.” continues the post., Enjoy the tool!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – FindZip macOS ransomware, malware) |
2753_40059 | Experts at Zimperium Mobile Security Labs (zLabs) recently discovered a critical flaw, dubbed Stagefright affecting the Android OS., The experts revealed that the Stagefright flaw (CVE-2015-1538) potentially affects 95% of Android devices running version 2.2 to 5.1 of the Google OS (roughly 950 million smartphones). The Zimperium firm consider the Stagefright vulnerability as the worst Android flaw in the mobile OS history, the vulnerability affects a media library app that is used for by Android to process Stagefright media files. According to the experts at Zimperium the media library is affected by several vulnerabilities., “We are pleased to finally make this code available to the general public so that security teams, administrators, and penetration testers alike may test whether or not systems remain vulnerable. What follows is a python script that generates an MP4 exploiting the ‘stsc’ vulnerability otherwise known as CVE-2015-1538 (#1).” states Zimperium., The experts released the Stagefright exploits to allow security experts to examine their systems against this vulnerability., , According to the US-CERT/CC advisory, the Android Stagefright contains multiple vulnerabilities including:, The experts released the slides for the Stagefright exploit presented at the last Black Hat and DEF CON conference. The full video of the presentation at the Black Hat is available on YouTube.
, The experts released the Stagefright exploit (Stagefright_CVE-2015-1538-1_Exploit.py)., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Stagefright exploit, Android) |
5745_63448 | Over the weekend, the websites of the CBS’s Showtime were found containing a JavaScript code that allowed someone to secretly mine cryptocurrency in viewers’ web browsers., The websites Showtime.com and iShowtimeAnytime.com silently injected in the visitors’ browser the code to abuse processor capabilities to mine Monero coins. The hidden code typically consumed as much as 60 percent of the overall CPU capacity on computers while visiting the sites., The scripts were written by Code Hive, an outfit that develops legitim JavaScript codes that could be added by webmasters to their sites in order to generate revenue as an alternative to serving advertising., The money mined by the scripts are managed by Code Hive and paid to the website owners., The CBS case appears very strange, it is unlikely that the entertainment corporation has placed the mining code onto its websites because it already charges subscribers to watch the TV shows online., It is possible that hackers compromised the website to deploy the mining JavaScript code and remove it before it was discovered, the script, in fact, worked during the weekend and disappeared on Monday., I sincerely found also this hypothesis very strange, in my humble opinion an attacker that succeed in compromising a site like the CBS one could be more interested in delivering malware to its visitors and cash out its effort in another way., The code was found between HTML comment tags used by the analytics firm New Relic, but it is unlikely the company would deliberately insert it., Below the scripts on showtime.com and Showtime Anytime observed by El Reg., , and, , New Relic told El Reg that the code was not deployed by its experts., “We take the security of our browser agent extremely seriously and have multiple controls in place to detect malicious or unauthorized modification of its script at various points along its development and deployment pipeline,” states the company., “Upon reviewing our products and code, the HTML comments shown in the screenshot that are referencing newrelic were not injected by New Relic’s agents. It appears they were added to the website by its developers.”, Of course, Code Hive knows who is behind the account linked to the mining code, but it doesn’t want to reveal it according to its privacy policy., “We can’t give out any specific information about the account owner as per our privacy terms,” the outfit informed us. “We don’t know much about these keys or the user they belong to anyway.”, Recently a similar case occurred at the Pirate Bay website., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – CBS, Monero mining) |
3314_44025 | Speaking about privacy and operating system, we are obliged to mention the popular Debian-based distribution Tails “The Amnesiac Incognito Live System.” Now the version 2.0 is available online! Tails is a popular live operating system specifically designed to protect user privacy and anonymity online., Tails 2.0 was upgraded to Debian 8.0, considered more stable and that fix a number of issues affecting the previous version of Debian., The live Tails distro can start on almost any computer from removable devices like a DVD, USB stick, and SD card leaving no trace of the user’activity., The Tails distribution is also famous because the famous whistleblower Edward Snowden is one the most important users., Tails offers better protection than just using the Tor browser alone on a typical operating system, is also includes a set of tools to protect the user anonymity, such as the Tor Browser and the I2P anonymizing software. The Tails live OS is designed to route all the user traffic over the Tor network to prevent applications from eavesdropping the user’s traffic., Tails 2.0 includes the latest version of the Tor Browser (5.5)., The most important improvement implemented in the Tails 2.0 is the addition of the Gnome Shell desktop environment in its Classic Mode, which makes very user-friendly the distribution, with classic places menu, and windows list., “Tails now uses the GNOME Shell desktop environment, in its Classic mode. GNOME Shell provides a modern, simple, and actively developed desktop environment. TheClassic mode keeps the traditional Applications, Places menu, and windows list. Accessibility and non-Latin input sources are also better integrated.” states the official post published by the TorProject., , Of course, Tails 2.0 is considered even more secure, the new version implements a sandboxing mechanism for a number of services to make them more resilient to exploits and other forms of attacks., Among the upgrades, the change to systemd as init system and use it to:, The new Tails 2.0 includes the update for most firmware packages which might improve hardware., Tails 2.0 includes a redesigned download and installation process, it is quite easy to install Tails safely such as its components, avoiding tampering of packages., Be aware, it is impossible to upgrade the existing Tails distro to the 2.0 version due to the improvement implemented., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Tor 2.0, privacy) |
1941_33565 | A group of cybercriminals used a malware to steal at least $300 million from banks and other financial institutions worldwide, according to a report published Saturday by The New York Times., The hackers have named the criminal crew “Carbanak cybergang” because of the name of the malware they used. The majority of victims were hit are in Russia, but the malware hit also banks in Japan, Europe and in the United States. The Kaspersky firm could not release the names of the banks because of nondisclosure agreements, but according the experts this malware based attacks could be one of the biggest bank thefts ever., Researchers at Kaspersky Lab that investigated the cyber attacks will provide a detailed report on their findings next Monday, the document was sent in preview to The New York Times., The experts discovered that the hackers hit more than 100 institutions in 30 countries, the attacks started in 2013 and may still be ongoing., “In late 2013, an A.T.M. in Kiev started dispensing cash at seemingly random times of day. No one had put in a card or touched a button. Cameras showed that the piles of money had been swept up by customers who appeared lucky to be there at the right moment.” reported the New York Times., Kaspersky has evidence of thefts accounting for $300 million, but experts speculate that the overall amount maybe three times in value. And the attacks may still be happening., “This is likely the most sophisticated attack the world has seen to date in terms of the tactics and methods that cybercriminals have used to remain covert.” Chris Doggett, managing director of the Kaspersky Lab North America market, explained the Times., Which is the attack scenario?, The infection started with a classic spear phishing attack that allowed Carbanak cybergang to compromise banks’ computer systems. The malicious emails included a link that once clicked triggered the download of the malware., The malicious code was used by the hackers of the Carbanak cybergang to gather information on the targeted bank, for example, to find employees who were in charge of cash transfer systems or ATMs. In a second phase of the attacks, the hackers installed a remote access tool (RAT) to control the machines of those employees. With this tactic the Carbanak cybergang collected imagines of victims’ screens and study what their daily activity in the bank. At this point the hackers were able to remotely control the ATMs to dispense money or transfer money to fake accounts., , “The bank’s internal computers, used by employees who process daily transfers and conduct bookkeeping, had been penetrated by malware that allowed cybercriminals to record their every move. The malicious software lurked for months, sending back video feeds and images that told a criminal group — including Russians, Chinese and Europeans — how the bank conducted its daily routines, according to the investigators., Then the group impersonated bank officers, not only turning on various cash machines, but also transferring millions of dollars from banks in Russia, Japan, Switzerland, the United States and the Netherlands into dummy accounts set up in other countries.” reported the New York Times, The managing director of the Kaspersky North America office in Boston, Chris Doggett, explained that the “Carbanak cybergang,” represents a significant increase in the sophistication of cyberattacks against financial organizations., “This is likely the most sophisticated attack the world has seen to date in terms of the tactics and methods that cybercriminals have used to remain covert,” Mr. Doggett said., The US authorities and Interpol with the support of the Kaspersky Lab are already coordinating their efforts in a joint investigation., “These attacks again underline the fact that criminals will exploit any vulnerability in any system,” said Sanjay Virmani, director of Interpol Digital Crime Center. “It also highlights the fact that no sector can consider itself immune to attack and must constantly address their security procedures.”, Waiting for public disclosure of the report, Stay Tuned …, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – bank hacking, Carbanak cybergang) |
1158_24305 | , “Anyone, including the service providers will be able to collect this information – and anyone that sets up a rogue AP, or any man-in-the middle attacks such as ARP poisoning will be able to capture this unencrypted traffic and view the images and videos received as well as the locations being sent or received by a phone.” said Professor Ibrahim Baggili and Jason Moore ., (Security Affairs – Viber, privacy) |
4902_56566 | A new privilege escalation vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2017-6074, has been discovered in the Linux kernel and the astonishing new is that it is an 11-year old flaw., The local privilege-escalation vulnerability, discovered by security researcher Andrey Konovalov, affects all the major Linux distro, including Debian, OpenSUSE, Redhat, and Ubuntu., The flaw discovered by Konovalov resides in the DCCP (Datagram Congestion Control Protocol) implementation using Syzkaller that is a kernel fuzzing tool released by Google., The Datagram Congestion Control Protocol (DCCP) is a message-oriented transport layer protocol that implements reliable connection setup, maintenance, and teardown, of an unreliable packet flow, and the congestion control of that packet flow., The flaw is a use-after-free vulnerability in the way the Linux kernel’s “DCCP protocol implementation freed SKB (socket buffer) resources for a DCCP_PKT_REQUEST packet when the IPV6_RECVPKTINFO option is set on the socket.”, “In the current DCCP implementation an skb for a DCCP_PKT_REQUEST
packet is forcibly freed via __kfree_skb in dccp_rcv_state_process if
dccp_v6_conn_request successfully returns 3.” reads the description of the flaw published on the full disclosure mailing list., “However, if IPV6_RECVPKTINFO is set on a socket, the address of the
skb is saved to ireq->pktopts and the ref count for skb is incremented
in dccp_v6_conn_request 4, so skb is still in use. Nevertheless, it
still gets freed in dccp_rcv_state_process.”, , An attacker can control an object and overwrite its content with a pointer to a execute arbitrary code in the Kernel., “An attacker can control what object that would be and overwrite its content with arbitrary data by using some of the kernel heap spraying techniques. If the overwritten object has any triggerable function pointers, an attacker gets to execute arbitrary code within the kernel,” full disclosure mailing list about the vulnerability reads., It is important to highlight that the CVE-2017-6074 flaw is a local issue that could not be exploited by a remote attacker. In order to exploit the flaw, an attacker needs to have a local account access on the system., The CVE-2017-6074 vulnerability has already been patched in the mainline kernel, users can apply the patch and rebuild the kernel of their OS or they can wait for the next kernel update from their Linux distro provider., In December 2016, security experts discovered another privilege-escalation vulnerability in Linux kernel, tracked as CVE-2016-8655, that dated back to 2011., The flaw was discovered by the security expert Phil Oester who dubbed it ‘Dirty COW.‘ The flaw 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., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – CVE-2017-6074, Linux) |
6788_73342 | A new piece of the KillDisk wiper was observed spotted earlier this year targeting financial organizations in Latin America, Trend Micro reports., The destructive malware was involved in the attacks against Ukraine’s grid in December 2015, the attack was attributed to a Russia-linked APT group tracked as BlackEnergy., In December 2016, researchers at security firm CyberX discovered a variant of the KillDisk malware that implemented ransomware features., In May, experts at Trend Micro observed a master boot record (MBR)-wiping malware in Latin America, the malicious code infected the systems of a bank with a severe impact on their operations., According to the experts, the hacker failed the attack because the real goal was obtaining the access to SWIFT network., “Last May, we uncovered a master boot record (MBR)-wiping malware in the same region. One of the affected organizations was a bank whose systems were rendered inoperable for several days, thereby disrupting operations for almost a week and limiting services to customers.” reads the analysis published by Trend Micro., “Our analysis indicates that the attack was used only as a distraction — the end goal was to access the systems connected to the bank’s local SWIFT network.”, The malware researchers determined that the malicious code was a strain of the dreaded Killdisk due to on the error message displayed by the affected systems., , The analysis of the payload makes it difficult to determine the motivation behind the attack., The experts analyzed a sample of that variant and discovered it was created with Nullsoft Scriptable Install System (NSIS), which is an open-source application used to create setup programs., The sample was named by the author as “MBR Killer,” the sample included a routine to wipe the first sector of the machine’s physical disk., The sample was protected by VMProtect, a tool used to prevent reverse engineering of the code in a virtualized environment., The analysis of the sample did not reveal any connection to a command-and-control (C&C) infrastructure neither the presence of ransomware-like routines., “We haven’t found any other new or notable routines in the sample we have. There is no evident command-and-control (C&C) infrastructure or communication, or ransomware-like routines coded into the sample. There are no indications of network-related behavior in this malware.” continues the analysis., The malware wipes all physical hard disks on the infected system, it retrieves the handle of the hard disk and overwrites the first sector of the disk (512 bytes) with “0x00”, then forces the machine to shut down., “The destructive capabilities of this malware, which can render the affected machine inoperable, underscore the significance of defense in depth: arraying security to cover each layer of the organization’s IT infrastructure, from gateways and endpoints to networks and servers,” concludes Trend Micro., The report also included Indicators of Compromises (IoCs), Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Killdisk, malware) |
7230_76682 | Estonian authorities sue the security firm Gemalto for 152 million euros following the security flaws in the citizen ID cards issued by the company that caused their recall in 2017., “Estonian police are seeking to recover 152 million euros ($178 mln) in a lawsuit filed on Thursday against digital security firm Gemalto, following a recall last year when security flaws were found in citizen ID cards produced by the firm.” reported the Reuters., “The vulnerabilities to hacker attacks found in government- issued ID cards supplied by the Franco-Dutch company marked an embarrassing setback for Estonia, which has billed itself as the world’s most digitalised “e-government”.”, In November 2017, Estonia announced that it would suspend security digital certificates for up to 760,000 state-issued electronic ID-cards that are using the buggy chips to mitigate the risk of identity theft., The decision comes after IT security researchers recently discovered a vulnerability in the chips used in the cards manufactured by the Gemalto-owned company Trub AG that open the doors to malware-based attacks., , At the time, Estonia had issued 1.3 million electronic ID cards offering citizens online access to a huge number of services through the “e-government” state portal. The Estonian electronic ID cards have been manufactured by the Swiss company Trub AG and its successor Gemalto AG since 2001., According to Estonia’s Police and Border Guard Board (PPA), Gemalto failed to protect private keys with card’s chip exposing the government IDs vulnerable to cyber attack., “It turned out that our partner had violated this principle for years, and we see this as a very serious breach of contract,” said PPA’s deputy director-general Krista Aas., Estonia replaced Gemalto and its predecessor for the supply of ID cards since 2002, with the company Idemia., “The PPA also said it planned to file separate claims for other breaches of the contract. Estonia had used Gemalto and its predecessor for its ID cards since 2002, but replaced the manufacturer with Idemia after it found serious security flaws last year.“continues the Reuters., Gemalto hasn’t yet commented the news., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – electronic ID-cards, Estonia) |
3323_44097 | VirusTotal has recently announced the launch of a new malware scanning service for firmware images. The intent is to allow users to identify malicious firmware images., Threat actors could exploit vulnerabilities in firmware to hack systems or inject malicious code. The revelation about the NSA catalog confirmed the existence of software implants used by the NSA for surveillance activities., BIOS is the firmware component most targeted by hackers, threat actors could exploit it to malicious to hide their malware, avoid detection and gain persistence on the infected machine., “Firmware malware has been a hot topic ever since Snowden’s leaks revealed NSA’s efforts to infect BIOS firmware. However, BIOS malware is no longer something exclusive to the NSA, Lenovo’s Service Engine or Hacking Team’s UEFI rootkit are examples of why the security industry should put some focus on this strain of badness.” Google-owned VirusTotal explains in a blog post., , Malware deployed in firmware can survive reboots and system wiping., “To all effects BIOS is a firmware which loads into memory at the beginning of the boot process, its code is on a flash memory chip soldered onto the mainboard. Since the BIOS boots a computer and helps load the operating system, by infecting it attackers can deploy malware that survives reboots, system wiping and reinstallations, and since antiviruses are not scanning this layer, the compromise can fly under the radar.”, Malware deployed in the firmware can survive reboots, system wiping and reinstallations, and avoids antivirus scanning, which leads to persistent compromise., The new service launched by VirusTotal performs the following tasks:, As explained in the blog post, users can extract the UEFI Portable Executables and use the service to analyze the image identifying potential Windows Executables used to inject malicious code., “What’s probably most interesting is the extraction of the UEFI Portable Executables that make up the image, since it is precisely executable code that could potentially be a source of badness. These executables are extracted and submitted individually to VirusTotal, such that the user can eventually see a report for each one of them and perhaps get a notion of whether there is something fishy in their BIOS image.”, Users can view details on the firmware they have submitted for scanning by clicking on the Additional information tab, which also has a new Source Details field. The File Detail tab will also provide various details on the characteristics of the submitted firmware image., Users are invited to remove any private information from BIOS dumps before uploading them to VirusTotal., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Virus total, firmware) |
6702_72624 | A few days ago security experts announced the first network-based remote Rowhammer attack, dubbed Throwhammer. The attack exploits a known vulnerability in DRAM through network cards using remote direct memory access (RDMA) channels., 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 issue has been known at least since 2012, the first attack was demonstrated in 2015 by white hat hackers at Google Project Zero team., To better understand the Rowhammer flaw, let’s remember that a DDR memory is arranged in an array of rows and columns. Blocks of memory are assigned to various services and applications. To avoid that an application accesses the memory space reserved by another application, it implements a “sandbox” protection mechanism., Bit flipping technique caused by the Rowhammer problems could be exploited to evade the sandbox., A separate group of security researchers has now demonstrated another network-based remote Rowhammer attack dubbed Nethammert, that leverages uncached memory or flush instruction while processing the network requests., “Nethammer is the first truly remote Rowhammer attack, without a single attacker-controlled line of code on the targeted system. Systems that use uncached memory or flush instructions while handling network requests, e.g., for interaction with the network device, can be attacked using Nethammer” reads the research paper published by the experts., The research team was composed of academics from the Graz University of Technology, the University of Michigan and Univ Rennes., The Nethammer technique can be exploited by attackers to execute arbitrary code on the targeted system by rapidly writing and rewriting memory used for packet processing., “We demonstrate that the frequency of the cache misses is in all three cases high enough to induce bit flips. We evaluated different bit flip scenarios.” continues the paper.
“Depending on the location, the bit flip compromises either the security and integrity of the system and the data of its users, or it can leave persistent damage on the system, i.e., persistent denial of service.”, Data corruption resulting from the operations can be exploited by the attackers to gain control over the victim’s system., “To mount a Rowhammer attack, memory accesses need to be directly served by the main memory. Thus, an attacker needs to make sure that the data is not stored in the cache.” continues the attacker.
“An attacker can use the unprivileged clflush instruction to invalidate the cache line or use uncached memory if available.” , The experts highlighted that caching makes the attack more difficult, so they devised some techniques to bypass the cache and direct access to the DRAM to cause the interference., The experts successfully demonstrated three different cache bypasses for Nethammer technique:, The experts observed a bit flip every 350 ms demonstrating that it is possible to hammer over the network if at least two memory accesses are served from main memory, they successfully induced the interference by sending a stream of UDP packets with up to 500 Mbit/s to the target system., The Nethammer attack technique does not require any attack code differently from the original Rowhammer attack., Unfortunately, any attack technique based on the Rowhammer attack is not possible to mitigate with software patched, to solve the issues, it is necessary to re-design the architecture of the flawed components, meantime threat actors can start exploiting the Rowhammer technique in the wild., Further details on the Rowhammer attack are reported in my post titled “The Rowhammer: the Evolution of a Dangerous Attack”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Nethammer, hacking) |
2421_37810 | Russia and China have hacked the secret cache of files stolen by the Edward Snowden, forcing the British intelligence to pull agents out of live operations., The British Sunday Times revealed that the UK Government believes Russia and China have hacked into Snowden files, endangering activities of US and British spies., According to the Washington Post, Snowden has stolen up to 1.77 million NSA secret documents while working for the US government as contractors., The British news agency quoted anonymous senior officials in both security services and the Home Office, in response the UK intelligence service plans to pull officers out of live operations in hostile countries., “Western intelligence agencies say they have been forced into the rescue operations after Moscow gained access to more than 1 million classified files,” state the Sunday Times., “Downing Street and the Home Office are being challenged to answer in public claims that Russia and China have broken into the secret cache of Edward Snowden files and that British agents have had to be withdrawn from live operations as a consequence.” reported the Guardian., The BBC quoted an anonymous senior government source, who confirmed that agents had to be moved because the Russian Government accessed to classified information that reveals intelligence operations in hostile countries., “We don’t comment on leaks.” The intelligence agencies said: “Our longstanding policy is not to comment on intelligence matters.” said a Downing Street spokeswoman. , A new surveillance bill is expected after the summer, the news is already rising controversy., Campaigners for privacy disagree with the information that are circulating, David Davis, he speculates that the use of an anonymous source to alarm population was a typical tactic of the government., The Conservative MP declared: “We have to treat all of these things with a pinch of salt.” “We have to treat all of these things with a pinch of salt.” “You can see they have been made nervous by Anderson. We have not been given any facts, just assertions,” , Anderson recommended that approval of surveillance warrants be shifted from the home and foreign secretaries to a new judicial body made up of serving and retired judges, which Davis supports but towards which the government appears to be lukewarm., The former NSA contractor Snowden now lives in Russia after that the US revoked his passport., “Putin didn’t give him asylum for nothing. His documents were encrypted but they weren’t completely secure and we have now seen our agents and assets being targeted.” stated a “senior Home Office source” quoted by the Sunday Times., He explained several times that he provided all the documents he stolen from the NSA to journalists in Hong Kong and he confirmed he has no longer has access to them., , How China or Russia accessed them?, The Sunday Times and BBC do not say where China or Russia allegedly gained access to the files, probably they have stolen it. On July 2013, Edward Snowden told former US Sen. Gordon Humphrey that “no intelligence service — not even our own — has the capacity to compromise the secrets I continue to protect. … I cannot be coerced into revealing that information, even under torture.”, It is possible the foreign spied have stolen the documents from journalists that supported Snowden. Snowden has given to the journalists Laura Poitras and Glen Greenwald allegedly included 58,000 “highly classified UK intelligence documents.” In August after the UK government detained the Glenn Greenwald’s partner, David Miranda, law enforcement confiscated electronic devices containing the encrypted documents., “Much of the material is encrypted. However, among the unencrypted documents … was a piece of paper that included the password for decrypting one of the encrypted files on the external hard drive recovered from the claimant,” the UK government stated to the court., “The fact that … the claimant was carrying on his person a handwritten piece of paper containing the password for one of the encrypted files … is a sign of very poor information security practice.”, Coming back to the news that Russia and China have hacked into Snowden’s files, the White House declined any comment on the UK government claims. The UK and US intelligence highlighted that the Snowden revelation had helped foreign intelligence and terrorists, costing GCHQ up to 30% of its capabilities., “Agents have had to be moved and that knowledge of how we operate has stopped us getting vital information.” states the Sunday Times., According to The Sunday Times, the “British intelligence source” confirmed that Russian and Chinese spies would be examining NSA documents for “years to come”., The unique certainly it that both US and UK have been deeply impacted by the Snowden’s revelations., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Edward Snowden, Russia) |
1025_22392 | Risk Based Security and the Open Security Foundation have conducted a study on 2,164 data loss incidents reported in 2013 producing an interesting report that could help us to better understand the causes and the dynamics for occurred data breaches. The first data that catches the eye is that the majority of that data breached involved outside attackers (72%) meanwhile the insiders are responsible only for 25 percent of the incidents mainly caused by accidents and human error., “Fraud/Social Engineering is overwhelmingly the mode of choice for inside malicious actor.”, The number of data loss incidents observed in 2013 is increased in an impressive way it’s, in fact, three times bigger than the number of data breaches in 2012, the number of records exposed in 2013 data breaches has reached 823 million., As expected businesses are the primary victims of the incidents, followed by government, medical and educational institutions, 45.5% of the data breaches hit entities based in the US., , Alarming also the second place occupied by South Korea in which data loss incidents caused the exposure of 140 million email addresses and identification numbers, security experts are confident that were compromised by North Korean cyber units that are very active against South Korea government and national businesses., , US organizations accounted for 66.5% of the compromised records, a deeper look within the US states reveals that the ranking is led by the California which accounted for 370 million records exposed., A cyber attack exploited the Adobe company drives the “Top 10 Incidents All Time“, the hack of company systems exposed customer names, IDs, encrypted passwords and debit/credit card numbers with expiration dates, source code and other information relating to customer orders 152 Million Adobe Systems., “Hacking stands out as a leading breach type in the multiple incident dataset.”, , The number of exposed records for the attacks occurred in 2013 is very high because many massive data breaches occurred, 51.1% of incidents exposed between 1 and 1,000 records and the number of exposed records was reported as “Unknown” in 26.4% of the 2013 incidents., 260 of the data breaches disclosed in 2013 were a direct consequence of previous incidents which impacted the organization, and sixty organizations reported multiple incidents during 2013., Following the key findings from the report:, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Data breaches 2013, security) |
1340_26718 | The effects of the conflict between Israel and Palestin are evident also in the cyberspace, group of hacktivists, including Anonymous, are targeting Israeli Government websites to protest against recent strikes that killed many innocent civilians., Recently the Facebook page of Domino’s Pizza in Israel was defaced by hackers who was threatening the Israeli Government., “Today will strike deep in Israel, Tel Aviv, Haifa, Jerusalem, Ashkelon, Ashdod more than 2000 rockets. We’ll start at 7. Counting back towards the end of Israel … Be warned!”, While TV broadcasters all over the world are spreading the images of cruel bombardments, a singular event has attracted the security community. Al-Qassam Brigades, the military wing of the Palestinian political organization Hamas, claimed responsibility for a cyber attack on the satellite Israeli TV Channel 10. The hackers were able to interrupt the scheduled programming and to transmit an unscheduled transmission calling for an end to Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, the hackers replaced media files with their own footage., , The hackers took over the satellite feed of Channel 10 for a few minutes, spreading images of injured Palestinian and Hamas militants accompanied by messages in Hebrew like this one:, “Your government chose to begin this campaign. If your government won’t agree to our terms then prepare yourselves for a drawn-out stay in bomb shelters.” states the Ynetnews agency., Below the video that was viewed by Israeli TV viewers:, , “If you don’t want your sons to be prisoners or to be killed then call them quickly to go back home.”, In time I’m writing, there are no details on the attack conducted by Hamas sympathizers, it is likely that hackers succeeded to compromise the servers at Channel 10, exploiting a wrong configuration of defense systems or targeting personnel at the TV station with a spear phishing attack., The hackers are trying to sensitize the public opinion on the dramatic events that are happening in Gaza and that according to Hamas are only killing innocent people., I will not discuss political motivations between the two opponents, but I would not want to see more innocent people who are crying their victims, I would not read most of the children who are killed by bombs.
Peace for everybody all!, Pierluigi Paganini, Security Affairs – (Hamas, hacking) |
7256_76878 | Apollo collects a lot of its information from public sources, including names, email addresses, and company contact information, it also gathers data by scraping Twitter and LinkedIn., The company already notified the security breach to its customers last week, the incident occurred on 23 Jul 2018., “On discovery, we took immediate steps to remediate our systems and confirmed the issue could not lead to any future unauthorized access,” co-founder and CEO Tim Zheng wrote. , “We can appreciate that this situation may cause you concern and frustration.”, The company, formerly known as ZenProspect, allows salespeople to connect with potential buyers using its database of 200 million contacts at 10 million companies., Affected customers received a data breach notification email, below a copy obtained by TechCrunch., The data breach notification said the breach was discovered weeks after system upgrades in July., “We have confirmed that the majority of exposed information came from our publicly gathered prospect database, which could include name, email address, company names, and other business contact information,” reads the data breach notification email sent to the customers., “Some client-imported data was also accessed without authorization,”, Exposed data includes email addresses, employers, geographic locations, job titles, names, phone numbers, salutations, social media profiles., The good news is that exposed data doesn’t include Social Security numbers, financial data or email addresses and passwords., , Apollo chief executive Tim Zheng confirmed the investigation is still ongoing, but he did not say if the company has informed state authorities of the security breach., Apollo co-founder and CTO Ray Li told WIRED that the company is investigating the breach and has reported it to law enforcement., Experts warn that the company may face sanctions under the European GDPR., Even if no sensitive data has been exposed, such kind of incident expose users to the risk of fraud, spam, or other even harmful actions., Troy Hunt has already included the record in its data breach tracking service HaveIBeenPwned., “It’s just a staggering amount of data. There were 125,929,660 unique email addresses in total. This will probably be the most email notifications HaveIBeenPwned has ever sent for one breach,” Hunt explained. “Clearly this is all about ‘data enrichment,’ creating comprehensive profiles of individuals that can then be used for commercial purposes. As such, the more data an organization like Apollo can collect, the more valuable their service becomes.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Apollo, data breach) |
5261_59443 | According to the experts at Check Point, hackers could exploit a new attack vector that uses malicious subtitles to compromise devices via their media players., Millions of users worldwide can be targeted due to security vulnerabilities in many popular streaming platforms, including VLC, Kodi (XBMC), Popcorn-Time, and stream.io., “Check Point researchers revealed a new attack vector which threatens millions of users worldwide – attack by subtitles.” states the analysis shared by Check Point. “By crafting malicious subtitle files, which are then downloaded by a victim’s media player, attackers can take complete control over any type of device via vulnerabilities found in many popular streaming platforms, including VLC, Kodi (XBMC), Popcorn-Time and strem.io. We estimate there are approximately 200 million video players and streamers that currently run the vulnerable software, making this one of the most widespread, easily accessed and zero-resistance vulnerability reported in recent years.”, The patch for these vulnerabilities are available for download, users should apply them immediately., According to the security firm, approximately 200 million video players and streamers are currently exposed to subtitle attack., “We estimate there are approximately 200 million video players and streamers that currently run the vulnerable software, making this one of the most widespread, easily accessed and zero-resistance vulnerability reported in recent years,” continues the analysis. “Hacked in Translation.”, The attackers can craft malicious subtitle files that once executed by a user media player can allow attackers to take complete control over any type of device (i,e, laptops, smart TVs, tablets, and smartphones)., Unlike other attack vectors well known to security firms, this hacking technique is very subtle because subtitles are perceived harmless text files and are not subject to the inspection of security solutions., , In subtitles hack, the subtitle can be manipulated by attackers for several malicious purposes., “This method requires little or no deliberate action on the part of the user, making it all the more dangerous,” states Check Point. , Check Point analyzed vulnerabilities in media players that allow a remote attacker to execute code and gain control full control of the targeted system., The researchers were able to exploit a flaw in the popular VLC player to trigger a memory corruption issue and to gain control of a PC. Similar successful tests allowed the researchers to demonstrate subtitles hack on other players., Check Point presented a proof of concept attack, says victims are persuaded to visit a malicious website that uses one of the streaming video players, or they are tricked into running a malicious subtitle file on their system that they intentionally downloaded for use with a video., “By conducting attacks through subtitles, hackers can take complete control over any device running them. From this point on, the attacker can do whatever he wants with the victim’s machine, whether it is a PC, a smart TV, or a mobile device. The potential damage the attacker can inflict is endless, ranging anywhere from stealing sensitive information, installing ransomware, mass Denial of Service attacks, and much more,” wrote Check Point., Check Point plans to disclose the technical details of the tests only when software updates will be provided to the users., Below the list of update currently available:, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Subtitles hack, hacking) |
3699_46955 | The British Britain will introduce in its fleet of armed surveillance drones a new generation of unmanned aircraft. The overall number of air crafts in the fleet will double, the new aerial vehicles will have significantly improved performance, they will be able to fly for nearly twice as long, equipped with new weaponry and advanced sensors. Protector will be able to stay airborne for more than 40 hours, much more of the actual 25 hours reached by the Reaper., The RAF will likely adopt from the end of this decade a new General Atomics Certifiable Predator B, aka Protector, for both surveillance and air strike missions., The UK Ministry of Defence made public details of the £415m contract signed with the Pentagon for the purchase of 20 new drones that will replace the RAF’s 10 existing MQ-9 Reapers., “The Unmanned Air Systems Team, part of the UK Ministry of Defence (“MoD”), intends to acquire the PROTECTOR Unmanned Aerial System through a Government -Government Foreign Military Sales (FMS) Contract with the US Department of Defence (US DoD).” states the announcement published by the MoD., Source The Telegraph, The new aircraft is certified to fly in European airspace, this means that Nato and other European organisations could use it for its operations., “The aircraft is much more capable than its predecessor. It has almost double the endurance of the Reaper so with a fleet of 20 aircraft, this represents an almost quadrupling of the capability, vital given the MoD’s range of commitments and its requirement to respond to emerging crises.” Liz Quintana, director of military sciences at the Royal United Services Institute, said to The Telegraph., The Protector drone was first announced by David Cameron during last year’s defence review, when the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom explained the importance of the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in the fight against the Islamic State., According to the Defence Secretary, the UK Government is also testing new high altitude surveillance drones that can stay aloft for weeks and could be used for intelligence activities., “will provide cutting edge intelligence gathering capability and help keep our country safe. They are a key part of our £178 billion equipment plan, backed by a defence budget that will increase every year from now until the end of the decade.” said a Ministry of Defence spokeswoman about the Protector drones., The Ministry of Defence will buy at least two Zephyr 8 aircraft paying them £10.6m, the surveillance drones are designed to fly at 65,000ft, twice as high as an airliner, but weighs only 66lb and is covered in solar panels to keep it charged., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Protector drone, surveillance drones) |
2002_34345 | , The new LG model BH100 dubbed ”Super Multi Blue” player which will play discs in the Blu-ray and HD DVD format, is shown during a news conference Sunday, Jan. 7, 2007 at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. (AP Photo/Las Vegas Review Journal, John Gurzinski) ** MAGS OUT, NO SALES ** |
7138_75986 | Schneider Electric has found a malicious code on the USB drives that have been shipped with Conext ComBox and Conext Battery Monitor products., Both products are part of the solar energy offering of the vendor. ComBox is a communications and monitoring device for installers and operators of Conext solar systems. Conext Battery Monitor indicates hours of battery based runtime and determines battery bank state of charge., The tainted drives have been shipped with all versions of Conext ComBox (sku 865-1058) and all versions of Conext Battery Monitor (sku 865-1080-01)., Schneider revealed that the USB drives were infected with a malware during manufacturing at a third-party supplier’s facility., “Schneider Electric is aware that USB removable media shipped with the Conext Combox and Conext Battery Monitor products may have been exposed to malware during manufacturing at a third-party supplier’s facility.” reads the security advisory published by the company., , The good news for customers is that the malware that was found on the USB drives was easy to detect for almost any anti-virus software, anyway the company is recommending customers to not to use them and “securely discard” the infected devices., “Schneider Electric has confirmed that the malware should be detected and blocked by all major anti-malware programs. Out of caution, Schneider Electric recommends that these USB removable media are not used.” continues the advisory., “These USB removable media contain user documentation and non-essential software utilities. They do not contain any operational software and are not required for the installation, commissioning, or operation of the products mentioned above. This issue has no impact on the operation or security of the Conext Combox or Conext Battery Monitor products,” , Users who believe they may have used the infected USB drives must scan their system for the presence of the malicious code., At the time it is not clear the extent of the incident, anyway, this case is just the latest in a series of supply chain attacks observed in the last years., We reported several cases of pre-installed malware and also cases quite similar to this one, like the one that involved last year IBM Storwize shipped with infected initialization USB drives., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – USB drives, malware) |
3320_44074 | The development team at the OpenSSL has issued a security patch to fix a flaw, coded as CVE-2016-0701, that could be exploited by hackers to decrypt secure traffic., The flaw was reported on January 12 by Antonio Sanso of Adobe who elaborated an attack method based on a key recovery method described in a paper published in 1997., The developers have patched two separate vulnerabilities in OpenSSL, the most severe affects the implementations of the Diffie-Hellman key exchange algorithm presents only in OpenSSL version 1.0.2., The OpenSSL 1.0.2 includes the support for generating X9.42 style parameter files as required in RFC 5114, unfortunately, the primes in these files may not be “safe,” which allows in certain circumstances attackers to obtain the key needed to decrypt traffic., Let me remind you that the OpenSSL Project doesn’t support the versions 0.9.8 and 1.0.0 since December 31, 2015, and they don’t receive security updates., OpenSSL is widely used in applications for secure data traffic, most websites use the library to enable the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or Transport Layer Security (TLS) encryption., , Connections that rely on TLS configured with parameters based on unsafe primes are open to eavesdropping because the attacker could obtain information to recover the private DH exponent., “If an application is using DH configured with parameters based on primes that are not“safe” or not Lim-Lee (as the one in RFC 5114) and either Static DH ciphersuites are used or DHE ciphersuites with the default OpenSSL configuration (in particular SSL_OP_SINGLE_DH_USE is not set) then is vulnerable to this attack.” states a blog post published by Sanso. , “It is believed that many popular applications (e.g. Apache mod_ssl) do set the SSL_OP_SINGLE_DH_USE option and would therefore not be at risk (for DHE ciphersuites), they still might be for Static DH ciphersuites.” , OpenSSL usually uses short-lived DH exponents in TLS, namely SSL_OP_SINGLE_DH_USE, that is not enabled by default,, There are various solutions to mitigate the risk, the developers of LibreSSL deprecated the use of the SSL_OP_SINGLE_DH_USE, meanwhile the developers at the OpenSSL Project added a check to detect attacks in the case of static ciphersuites and by enabling the SSL_OP_SINGLE_DH_USE option., This week OpenSSL also released the 1.0.1r version to fix a second low severity SSLv2 cipher issue coded as CVE-2015-3197., The new release also included other code developed to harden the systems against the Logjam attack., “Logjam vulnerability can be triggered through man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks to downgrade connections to 512-bit export-grade cryptography. Logjam could be exploited on the servers that support the “Diffie-Hellman key exchange” cryptographic algorithm, which is used by protocols like HTTPS, SSH, SMTPS, IPsec to negotiate a secret key and establish a secure connection.” states my previous blog post“, Once the attacker downgrades encrypted connections between a user and the web server to use weaker 512-bit keys which can be easily decrypted.”, Summarizing, if you still use OpenSSL version 1.0.2, upgrade to 1.0.2f, while if you are still using version 1.0.1 should install 1.0.1r., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – OpenSSL, encryption) |
7174_76239 | MageCart crime gang appears very active in this period, payment card data from customers of hundreds of e-commerce websites may have been stolen due to the compromise of the cloud service firm Feedify., Cloud service firm Feedify has over 4,000 customers, it is a cloud platform to engage customers’ clients with powerful tools that target them based on their behavior., Feedify leverages a JavaScript script that their customers add to their websites to use the service. MageCart hackers compromised the supply chain for the Feedify service. The script loads various resources from Feedify’s infrastructure, including a library named “feedbackembad-min-1.0.js,” which was compromised by MageCart., , Every time user visits a page of the e-commerce site of a Feedify customer will load the malicious script that allowed the crooks to siphon personal information and payment card data., They've been affected by Magecart since Friday, August 17 2018 @ 16:51:01 GMT as we recorded it. — Yonathan Klijnsma (@ydklijnsma) September 11, 2018, , The group has been active since at least 2015 and compromised many e-commerce websites to steal payment card and other sensitive data., The group injects a skimmer script in the target websites to siphon payment card data, once the attackers succeed in compromising a site, it will add an embedded piece of Javascript to the HTML template. Below an example script dubbed MagentoCore., This script records keystrokes from customers and sends them to a server controlled by the attacker., Typically hackers attempt to compromise third-party features that could allow them to access a large number of websites., According to the security firm RiskIQ, the MageCart group carried out a targeted attack against the British Airways and used a customized version of the script to remain under the radar., Using the same tactic, the MageCart compromised the website using the Feedify service by injecting their malicious code into a library the Feedify script served to customers’ websites., According to the experts from RiskIQ, MageCart hackers might have had access to the Feedify servers for nearly a month., Once notified Feedify the compromise, the company removed the malicious script:, Magecart on Feedify. A customer engagement tool. According to there website 4000+ website use there tooling/code. Fixed today after I notified them.@ydklijnsma @GossiTheDog pic.twitter.com/K2czXkUoHD, — Placebo (@Placebo52510486) September 11, 2018, , but apparently, the hackers re-infected the library., FYI: Feedify is re-infected with Magecart since about an hour ago, exact time of infection is: Wed, 12 Sep 2018 14:16:02 GMT., URL: hxxps://cdn.feedify.net/getjs/feedbackembad-min-1.0.js, /cc @Placebo52510486 @GossiTheDog @_feedify — Yonathan Klijnsma (@ydklijnsma) September 12, 2018, , The events demonstrate the ability of the MageCart crime gang in compromising the infrastructure of its victims., In August, security expert Willem de Groot discovered that the MagentoCore skimmer at the time already infected 7,339 Magento stores., At the time, querying the PublicWWW service it was possible to verify that the MagentoCore script was deployed on 5,214 domains, actually the number of compromised website id still high (4762) despite the awareness campaign., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – cybercrime, MageCart) |
4305_51758 | Once again cyber security experts warn of a new hacking campaign that this time is targeting Citizen Journalists reporting the crash of the flight MH17 of the Malaysian Airlines. According to the intelligence firm ThreatConnect, reporters from the Bellingcat agency have been targeted by spear phishing messages and suffered account takeover attempts for over a year., The Bellingcat agency is known for its uncomfortable investigations on strong powers of Governments and organizations worldwide., Yesterday the Reuters reported the news that the Malaysian flight MH17 was downed by Russian-made missile launched by pro-Russian rebels., “Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 was shot down by a missile fired from a launcher brought into Ukraine from Russia and located in a village held by pro-Russian rebels, international prosecutors said on Wednesday.” states the post published by the Reuters. “The conclusions were based on thousands of wiretaps, photographs, witness statements and forensic tests during more than two years of inquiries into an incident which led to a sharp rise in tensions between Russia and the West.”, ThreatConnect who investigated the attacks speculates that threat actors have strong ties to the Russian Government, they have targeted a group of citizen journalists for publishing articles critical of Government of Moscow., Data shared by the Bellingcat’s founder Eliot Higgins indicates the involvement of at least two Russian nation-state groups., Experts from ThreatConnect claim the involvement of the dreaded Fancy Bear APT group who in the headlines for the attacks against the systems and people involved in the US Presidential election., “Following our post on DCLeaks as a Russian influence operation, Bellingcat founder Eliot Higgins reached out to us. Bellingcat, a group of citizen investigative journalists, has published articles critical of Russia and has been a key contributor to the international investigation of the shootdown of Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) over Ukraine in 2014.” states the report published by ThreatConnect., “Higgins shared data with ThreatConnect that indicates Bellingcat has come under sustained targeting by Russian threat actors, which allowed us to identify a 2015 spearphishing campaign that is consistent with FANCY BEAR’s tactics, techniques, and procedures.”, According to the experts, the Bellingcat’s agency became a target of the Russian Fancy Bear APT after its reporters investigated the shooting down of the Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 (MH17) occurred in 2014., The second group behind the attacks is the CyberBerkut, a collective of Ukrainian hackers that are pro-Russia., The state-sponsored hackers targeted three Bellingcat researchers with a spear phishing campaign between February 2015 and July 2016 for intelligence purposes., , The attackers used messages themed as Gmail security notices in the attempt to trick victims into clicking on the embedded links, but according to ThreatConnect the attacks failed., “These spearphishing attempts consist of a variety of spoofed Gmail security notices alerting the target that suspicious activity was detected on their account. The target is prompted to click a URL resembling a legitimate Gmail security link to review the details of this suspicious activity.” continues the post., , The report also analyzes activities conducted by the CyberBerkut that defaced the Bellingcat’s website earlier this year and compromised the email account of the government opposition blogger, Ruslan Leviev., ThreatConnect speculates that Leviev’s email account hosted by the Russian service provider Yandex was compromised with the support of an employee of the company or by the Russian intelligence. In that case the attackers exploited a zero-day in the Yandex service., “Leviev published a compelling piece of citizen journalism on May 22, 2015 exploring the fate of Russian Spetsnaz soldiers believed to have been killed in combat operations within Ukraine earlier that month. According to Bellingcat founder Higgins, Leviev’s contributor account was compromised and used to post the CyberBerkut message. In an email interview, Leviev makes the following statement regarding the events that led to the compromise of his credentials and the defacement.” continues the analysis., “In my case, my old email account, which was located on Yandex servers, was hacked. The email account had a long, difficult password, not a word, from various letters, numbers, and special symbols. Plus there was a telephone number bound to the account for second factor authentication., Exactly how it was hacked — I don’t know., At the time I was writing it is still unclear the relationship between the Fancy Bear and CyberBerkut., This isn’t the first time that Russian hackers operated to gather sensitive information on the Flight MH17 Crash, in October 2015, according to Trend Micro, the Pawn Storm APT group (aka Fancy Bear) has targeted the Dutch Safety Board to gather information regarding the status of the investigation., The Dutch Safety Board (known as Onderzoeksraad) became a target of the cyber-espionage group before and after the safety board published their detailed report on the MH17 incident on October 13, 2015. We believe that a coordinated attack from several sides was launched to get unauthorized access to sensitive material of the investigation conducted by Dutch, Malaysian, Australian, Belgian, and Ukrainian authorities.” reported TrendMicro., Enjoy the analysis., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – MH17, Fancy Bear) |
2910_41265 | Some versions of self-encrypting hard drives manufactured by the Western Digital are affected by security flaws that could be exploited with physical access to access protected data, even without knowing the decryption password., A trio of researchers (Gunnar Alendal, Christian Kison and “modg”) discovered the security flaws and detailed its analysis s in the paper, titled got HW crypto? On the (in)security of a Self-Encrypting Drive series. The document details the various flaws affecting multiple versions of the My Passport and My Book models of external self-encrypting hard drives., Western Digital devices automatically encrypt data as it is written to the storage and decrypt the information as it is read back to the system. The self-encrypting hard drives use 256-bit AES encryption and can be protected with a password., “After researching the inner workings of some of the numerous models in the My Passport external hard drive series, several serious security vulnerabilities have been discovered, affecting both authentication and confidentiality of user data,” the researchers wrote. “We developed several different attacks to recover user data from these password protected and fully encrypted external hard disks. In addition to this, other security threats are discovered, such as easy modification of firmware and on-board software that is executed on the users PC, facilitating evil maid and badUSB attack scenarios, logging user credentials and spreading of malicious code.”, Most of the self-encrypting hard drives analyzed by the experts encrypt and decrypt data using a USB bridge that connects a computer to the external drive’s SATA interface. The interface is designed to prevent powerful cracking attacks, but a number of security issues could allow to crack the password., , The My Passport models using a JMicron JMS538S micro-controller adopt a pseudorandom number generator that is not cryptographically secure, the key was predictable., Drive models using a JMicron JMS569 controller (My Passport models) can be easily compromised by using commercial forensic tools that access the unencrypted system area of the drive, meanwhile devices using a Symwave 6316 controller store their encryption keys on the disk making data recovery trivial., In other cases, the researchers discovered that it was possible to extract the hash off the drive and load it onto a computer, an operation that could allow an attacker to run off-line cracking., In another case, the Western Digital self-encrypting hard drives ship with a default password and even if it has been changed by the user only once, the key corresponding to the default password remains stored on the device allowing the attacker to easily decrypt it. The workaround consists in the changing of the password for a second time., Which is the position of Western Digital?, “WD has been in a dialogue with independent security researchers relating to their security observations in certain models of our My Passport hard drives,” spokeswoman Heather Skinner told The Register in a statement. “We continue to evaluate the observations. We highly value and encourage this kind of responsible community engagement because it ultimately benefits our customers by making our products better. We encourage all security researchers to responsibly report potential security vulnerabilities or concerns to WD Customer Service and Support at The discoveries made by the trio of expert are disconcerting and raises serious questions about the level of security offered by devices designed to protect users’ data. Fortunately users have many other options to protect their information, for example by securing data with PGP Full Disk Encryption application., Enjoy the paper!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – self-encrypting hard drives, Western Digital) |
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Our Global Awards are annually given out at the IPEXPO EUROPE Conference as a global event in Europe every year, Q4. GLOBAL 2018 Awards – CLOSED! Winners will be announced in just a few days and our Global Print Edition will be out on the 3rd of October and we’ll release an electronic edition as well…, Our InfoSec awards are annually given out at the RSA Conference in the United States every year, Q1. USA 2019 Awards – OPENING SOON!, MAGAZINES TV AWARDS with our upcoming platform coming soon…., , We are all things Cyber Defense. Thank you to our amazing readership!, Don’t forget to visit www.cyberdefense.tv – watch, learn & grow., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – hacking, Cyber Defense Magazine) |
4976_57094 | This is the story of the mysterious death of Michael Hastings, an American journalist, who rose to prominence with his coverage of the Iraq War for Newsweek in the 2000s., But to better understand the figure, let’s remind that Hastings was one of the most critic people of the Obama administration and its interference on the US journalism. He was referring to the restrictions on the freedom of the press by the Obama administration as a “war” on journalism., His last work, “Why Democrats Love to Spy On Americans“, was published by BuzzFeed on June 7. Hastings died in a fiery high-speed automobile crash on June 18, 2013, in Los Angeles, California., , When the popular hackers Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek demonstrated that is possible to hack a connected car remotely, many experts and journalist started speculating that Hastings incident was caused by the US intelligence that had used some special tool to remotely control a vehicle. Sci-fi? Yet another conspiracy theory?, Last week Wikileaks released the “Vault 7,” a huge trove of CIA files that provided detailed information on the hacking capabilities of the US Central Intelligence Agency, including the ability to remotely hijack vehicles in order to conduct “undetectable assassinations.”, Curiously, according to the San Diego 6 News. Hastings had been investigating CIA Director John Brennan prior to the incident he had also contacted WikiLeaks lawyer Jennifer Robinson just a few hours before he died, confirming that feds investigating his work., Just coincidences, but some details on the incidents rose the suspicion among the journalists., “Several details regarding the crash itself also suggested the possibility that Hastings’ death was the result of foul play, despite official statements to the contrary. For instance, the car caused no damage to the median curb dividing the four-lane road where the crash occurred, nor were there any skid marks present – despite the fact that the car made a sudden 60-degree turn into a palm tree.” reported Mintpressnews.com., There is another strange particular about the incident, a worker at a business located near the site of the crash that assisted the incident told San Diego News 6 that the car was traveling too fast and that he heard explosions from within the vehicle shortly before the deadly impact., , The police confirmed that the fire inside the car was too intense for such kind of incident, the coroner had serious difficulties in analyzing the Hastings’ body., The car was never analyzed by independent experts, despite public rumors of foul play., The former U.S. National Coordinator for Security, Infrastructure Protection and Counterterrorism Richard A. Clarke, told the Huffington Post that the crash that killed Hastings was “consistent with a car cyber attack.”, “What has been revealed as a result of some research at universities is that it’s relatively easy to hack your way into the control system of a car, and to do such things as cause acceleration when the driver doesn’t want acceleration, to throw on the brakes when the driver doesn’t want the brakes on, to launch an air bag,” Clarke told The Huffington Post. “You can do some really highly destructive things now, through hacking a car, and it’s not that hard.”, “So if there were a cyber attack on the car — and I’m not saying there was,” Clarke added, “I think whoever did it would probably get away with it.”, “I’m not a conspiracy guy. In fact, I’ve spent most of my life knocking down conspiracy theories,” said Clarke, who ran afoul of the second Bush administration when he criticized the decision to invade Iraq after 9/11. “But my rule has always been you don’t knock down a conspiracy theory until you can prove it wrong. And in the case of Michael Hastings, what evidence is available publicly is consistent with a car cyber attack. And the problem with that is you can’t prove it.”, Back to the present, documents shared by Wikileaks contain details about the study of the CIA on the possibility to infect the vehicle control systems used by modern cars and trucks. The malicious code would permit the CIA to engage in nearly undetectable assassinations., “While the Wikileaks documents confirm that this technology existed in 2014, there is reason to believe that the CIA was capable of hacking vehicles as far back as the late 1990s. Gordon Duff, senior editor of Veterans Today, wrote in 2010 about what he termed the CIA’s “Boston Brakes” assassination technique.” continues the Mintpressnews., “In the article, Duff noted that the deaths of Chilcot Inquiry witness Richard Waddington, anti-Zionist Austrian politicians Jorg Haider and even Princess Diana all involved car crashes where the vehicle crashed into objects like concrete abutments but left no skid marks – not unlike the Hastings crash.”, According to a story published by WhoWhatWhy in 2013, Michael Hastings was investigating the use of the CIA of weaponized malware and surveillance tools., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Michael Hastings, hacking) |
2797_40388 | A new problem is worrying the Indian friends, the Government plans to release a new policy, National Encryption Policy’ that seems to presage disappointments for users., Among ugly and questionable issues of the policy, there is the will to criminalize cancellation of WhatsApp Messages or Emails received or sent before 90 days, and the punishment might be the imprisonment, The Indian colleagues at THEHACKERNEWS explain that with the aim to ‘provide confidentiality of information’ and ensure ‘protection of sensitive or proprietary information,’ the draft policy, proposed by a so-called ‘expert panel’ from the Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY), requires:, , The Minister of Communications and Information Ravi Shankar Prasad tried to explain that the draft law that aim to regulate cryptography would be rewritten., “Some of the expressions used in the draft are giving rise to uncalled-for misgivings,” said Prasad. “I have noted some of the concerns.”, This means that the National Encryption Policy will require those foreign companies who offer services in India to give the government access to the user data., “Encryption algorithms and key sizes will be prescribed by the Government,” states the Policy., Everyone can express its opinion about the National Encryption Policy by sending comments to [email protected] by October 16, 2015., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – National Encryption Policy, India) |
1913_33238 | We have discussed several times about the privacy and security issues related to the Internet of Things devices, Smart meters and Smart TV are intelligent devices that could be exploited by hackers to collect our sensitive information., Today we will speak about SmartTv, in particular of the last models produced by giant Samsung, this new generation of the device is able to watch and listen us to receive commands., The downside is that our images and audio could be transferred to third parties, but unfortunately the majority of end-users ignore it because every time makes a purchase never reads the booklet of instructions and information provided by manufacturers., Imagine, you are watching TV on your Samsung SmartTV talking with your girl or friend, or you are watching stock news from your office with your client, while the Smart TV is collecting audio and video to improve your experience by sending your words to third parties., , On Reddit news website was started a few days ago an interesting discussion titled “Samsung SmartTV Privacy Policy: “Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of Voice Recognition.”, The users were commenting the privacy policy that Samsung share with its customers for the use of the Voice Recognition system., Under the Voice Recognition section of the policy is reported:, “If you enable Voice Recognition, you can interact with your Smart TV using your voice. To provide you the Voice Recognition feature, some voice commands may be transmitted (along with information about your device, including device identifiers) to a third-party service that converts speech to text or to the extent necessary to provide the Voice Recognition features to you. In addition, Samsung may collect and your device may capture voice commands and associated texts so that we can provide you with Voice Recognition features and evaluate and improve the features. , Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party through your use of Voice Recognition. If you do not enable Voice Recognition, you will not be able to use interactive voice recognition features, although you may be able to control your TV using certain predefined voice commands. While Samsung will not collect your spoken word, Samsung may still collect associated texts and other usage data so that we can evaluate the performance of the feature and improve it.”, Samsung admits that its Voice Recognition, Gesture Controls and Facial Recognition technology, is collecting user’s voice data and images and it is sending it to a third party to improve its system., Don’t worry, Samsung gives users the right to opt out of these features, because it takes care of our privacy. The owner of Samsung SmartTV can disable these features at any time., Who are the third parties mentioned by Samsung and how they manage the collected data? Which are the respective Privacy Policy?, I stop here .. we can discuss for hours, but for situations like this the Samsung SmartTV we will find a thousand in the year to come. We have also to consider that hackers could exploit these features to hack our domestic network with serious consequences.
Let’s pay more attention to our privacy and the way the technology of the devices around us is using our data., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Samsung SmartTV, privacy) |
1866_32723 | Defending Against Spear Phishing, RAT Deployment and Email Tracking, In my 2015:Year of the RAT Threat Report (see: I described how I felt Sony Pictures Entertainment (SPE) was attacked by the Guardians of Peace aka #GOP. In this supplement, I would like to cover how Spear Phishing works as well as Email Tracking, even commercial tools that are freely available for trials or limited email sending, which allow the sender to collect very useful data on the recipient including that which hackers typically use to exploit a common vulnerability and exposure (CVE, see: of which I serve on the Board and its sister search engine site funded by the US Department of Homeland Security to allow you, for free, to track and find any vulnerabilities in your network equipment, computer, operating system and software that might be used to exploit you)., Finding and Exploiting Vulnerabilities, It works like this – first you need to find email servers with vulnerabilities (CVEs) and then exploit them to eavesdrop upon and track others emails. This will then allow you to build up a contact list and what kind of messages a person sends, receives and opens, thus allowing you to spoof a trusted party and attach a remote access Trojan (RAT). I’m not telling you this to recommend you commit crime – in fact, I’m 100% against you doing so. However, without understanding why and how you might become a victim of a Spear Phishing attack with an embedded RAT attachment, or even exploitation of vulnerabilities in your email client or web browser, how can you expect to defend yourself? Just watch and you’ll see loads of attacks against EMAIL SERVERS in the USA. Why? Because the first step in reconnaissance (RECON) for a spear phishing attack, is to break into a mail server, or find a recipient you can victimize so that you can later spoof an email to their important friend, boss or business associate that is your ultimate target., What is the difference between Spear Phishing and Email Tracking? , Typically Spear Phishing are very targeted attacks going after one individual. Usually, email tracking is used by marketeers to make sure you opened an email they sent you and to collect additional information about you. Lately, due to the proliferation of free email tracking offerings, anyone from a debt collector to your local dentist or attorney or even a jealous spouse might use email tracking services to ‘check up on you’ which includes GEOLOCATION technology, now., Email tracking generally will use a hidden cookie and a web bug (also known as a web beacon) to track the email. Spear Phishing will usually attach a RAT to the email hoping you will trust the spoofed sender and open the attachment, then causing a much more painful and deeper infection that may go unnoticed until it’s too late, as in the case of Sony Pictures Entertainment., Email tracking will tell the person tracking the email when an email was received, opened, and forwarded. It can tell when attachments or hyperlinks were opened and clicked. It can determine how long someone was reading the email. It can also collect information about the geolocation of where it was opened. In addition they can find out about your computer operating system and the email client or web browser you are using to read the email., Email tracking is used by individuals, email marketers, spammers, hackers, cyber criminals and phishers, to verify that emails are actually read by recipients, that email addresses are valid, and that the content of emails has made it past spam filters. When used maliciously, it can be used to collect confidential information about businesses and individuals and to create more effective phishing schemes. Most likely email tracking was employed with a spear phishing attack on Sony Pictures to learn what kind of environment they had inside their network and then to attack them with a Remote Access Trojan (RAT) through email., There are dozens of email tracking companies and software to choose from with leading companies including icontact, constant contact, didtheyreadit, getresponse, activecampaign, interspire, getnotify, mxhero, litmus to yesware and so many more. Now anyone can afford email tracking because most sites off either a limited free account or free trial. On the limited free accounts you can only send so many tracking emails each day but they are completely free. Others offer a trial period such as 7 day free trial., Is Email Tracking Creepware?, Email tracking can be considered #CREEPWARE because if you don’t inform the recipient of your privacy policy, they may not know they are a victim of being eavesdropped upon. On the other hand for business purposes the argument is that you don’t have to send a followup email and annoy someone to see if they opened your email or read it. The business argument is that you will learn how to better communicate with your customers., What other ways are we being tracked?, Email tracking is only a part of the tracking process. Most folks have smartphones with apps that track them in even creepier ways every day. Companies that want to track you will use your email and your apps on smartphones and tablets plus search engines and social media sites like facebook and others will continue to expand their invasive eavesdropping on our behavior. The fact that email tracking is free and easy for anyone to try out and use, means it will probably continue to grow as another tracking arrow in the marketing or creepware quiver., Beyond normal marketers, spammers, hackers, cyber criminals and phishers, some folks including spouses might use this method to make sure their spouse is where they say they are and some companies, including HP used it to make sure Board members weren’t leaking information to the press or wall street analysts. Even investigators, attorneys, skip tracers for debtor or fugitive tracking and collection companies are using this tool to track people down., Most people don’t realize how our emails are being tracked. They simply open their emails, read them, ignore them or delete them and move on to the next email. Most people don’t have antispam technology enabled and many of these emails get passed spam and antivirus filters. I think it’s creepy for folks to use email tracking, even if it passes legal muster, without at the bottom of each of these emails, informing the recipient and offering them an opt out option. Privacy is good for business and job seekers should also show they respect the privacy of the recipient, especially someone who might consider hiring them. This is alarming if a predator or stalker or spouse or x-spouse uses email to track you for their own creepy reason., While Spear Phishing is Illegal, is Email Tracking Legal?, It is legal to track email. There are rules about spam and there are rules about bugging and eavesdropping on conversations but not about email. It’s always best to disclose that you’re using tracking tools to make sure the email gets to the right recipient and so that you won’t have to bother them to see if they received and opened it., However, here’s where it gets real creepy. Imagine a stalker was trying to find out where you lived. If you opened their email, they could start to collect geolocation information on you as well as the ‘fingerprint’ of your computer and/or email client. This is the first part of a smarter attack known as spear phishing – they might use this to then find the right malware to attack your operating system or email or web client to install a RAT – a remote access Trojan, which is even more creepy software to watch you on your webcam and listen to you on your microphone., If you want to legally and legitimately use email tracking for marketing or other purposes, I recommend folks put together a very positive and honest privacy policy or privacy statement in the bottom of these tracking emails so the recipients don’t become victims., How can you tell it’s a Spear Phishing or Email Tracking Attack?, If it’s an email that doesn’t look like it contains a picture, usually the tracking cookie is an invisible picture – so by turning off ‘display images’ automatically, is the first hint. If you simply use TEXT only mode to read your emails instead of HTML, you’ll know right away. If there’s an attachment you were not expecting or if it seems ‘fishy’ it’s probably a Spear Phishing attack. If you find a tiny white graphic that’s one pixel in size, it’s usually an Email Tracking attack. However, Spear Phishing attacks may also use this technology but they haven’t in the past because it tips of the victim., Defending Against Both Spear Phishing and Email Tracking Attacks, What is the simplest thing you can do to defend against this kind of attack? Change your email client settings to only display TEXT instead of HTML emails. When the email arrives, it might not look as pretty but you can still read it. If the entire email is a picture you know it’s spam or email tracking. You won’t enjoy missing the pretty colors, HTML hyperlinks, graphics and attachments but simple TEXT ONLY email is the answer. You simply cannot be victimized if you only read the text portion of the email message. That means an email client or special plug-in that renders the email as text only. Good news on major email clients such as Microsoft ® Outlook – all you have to do is change your security settings and you can make sure all hyperlinks are turned into text, all emails are read as text only and attachments are rejected., This may start out making your day difficult, where you would then ask folks to send you attachments in a different fashion, but then you know it’s really from them. For example, unless and until DropBox, Filesanywhere, Box or similar services get hacked (which does happen from time to time…so be aware and stay vigilant), you can tell all your friends, coworkers and business associates you only accept attachments in a DropBox type service. I wouldn’t recommend using Apple iCloud, Amazon Cloud, Microsoft Cloud Drive or Google Cloud Drive as they are targeted by hackers daily. Look for a less known service that offers encryption and stronger guarantees. Then, when someone is going to send you a file, tell them – don’t use email, send it to this link (you provide them a way into your DropBox) and then before opening any of these attachments, you download them and then run them through your favorite antivirus scanner. If you are serious about security, run it through one of these:, It’s time we treat privacy respectfully. It’s good for people and for businesses to be respectful to others right to privacy. If you want to track an email tell the recipients you are using email tracking technology. Sure, it can be a 4 point font at the bottom of the email but at least you’re being honest about it. And for folks worried about their privacy, only receive emails in a TEXT viewing mode and you’ll be safe. Consider this one more lesson we’ve learned from the Sony Pictures Entertainment breach., Getting More Proactive and One Step Ahead of the Next Threat, As I said recently on BNN in Canada, see: entitled Go Phish: The Rise of Hacking – Part Three, the biggest threats we face this year are:, It’s time consumers, small offices – home offices (SOHOs) and small to medium sized businesses (SMBs) as well as large enterprises get more proactive and assume you already have vulnerabilities and malware. Start with:, If you’re an SMB or Enterprise, you should take the following steps right away before you become the next victim:, About The Author, , Gary Miliefsky is the CEO of SnoopWall and inventor of the company’s new Counterveillance technology. He has been extremely active in the INFOSEC arena, most recently as the Editor of Cyber Defense Magazine and the cover story author and regular contributor to Hakin9 Magazine. He also founded NetClarity, Inc., an internal intrusion defense company, based on a patented technology he invented. He is a member of ISC2.org, CISSP® and Advisory Board of the Center for the Study of Counter-Terrorism and Cyber Crime at Norwich University. He also advised the National Infrastructure Advisory Council (NIAC) which operates within the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, in their development of The National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace. Miliefsky is a Founding Member of the US Department of Homeland Security ( serves on the advisory board of MITRE on the CVE Program ( and is a founding Board member of the National Information Security Group ( Email him at: [email protected] |
5055_57702 | The Chrysaor Android spyware implements several features including:, The surveillance firm NSO Group Technologies produce the best surveillance technology to governments, law enforcement agencies worldwide, but privacy advocates and activists accuse the firm of selling its malware also to dictatorial regimes., “Although the applications were never available in Google Play, we immediately identified the scope of the problem by using Verify Apps,” reads a blog post published by Google., “We’ve contacted the potentially affected users, disabled the applications on affected devices, and implemented changes in Verify Apps to protect all users.”, “Pegasus for Android will remove itself from the phone if:, Chrysaor exploits a well-known Android-rooting exploit called Framaroot to root the device and gain full control over the mobile device., The experts noticed that the Chrysaor spyware back to 2014, this means that it is possible that NSO group might have discovered zero-day vulnerabilities in Android OS and has implemented the exploit code in the latest version of Chrysaor spyware., Lookout published a detailed analysis of the Chrysaor spyware titled “Pegasus for Android: Technical Analysis and Findings of Chrysaor.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Chrysaor spyware , surveillance) |
5225_59154 | In addition to government ministries and transportation infrastructure, the British National Health Service (NHS) was crippled, disrupting treatment and care for thousands of patients, and putting countless lives at risk., , The indiscriminate use of an NSA authored weapon on the general public is terrifying, and only made worse by the fact that the NSA could have largely prevented the attack. Instead, because the NSA stood by and did nothing, we have ended up in the scary world where American cyberweapons are being used to potentially kill British citizens in their hospital beds., , The WannaCry infection that caused global chaos on Friday relied upon a Windows exploit called EternalBlue which was originally written by the NSA. Instead of responsibly disclosing the vulnerability when it was discovered, the NSA instead weaponized it and sought to keep it secret, believing that this weapon could be safely kept hidden., Predictably, this was not the case, and in August 2016, the NSA was itself compromised, and their entire arsenal of illicit cyberweapons stolen. It’s rather ironic that the world’s largest surveillance agency believed that they would never be compromised., It has become abundantly clear over the past decade that the notion of keeping attackers out forever is fundamentally flawed. Compromises are not a matter of if, but a matter of when (in fact, this is why we designed ProtonMail to be the first email service that can protect data even in the event of a compromise). If there’s anybody that should know this, it should be the NSA., It’s clear that in weaponizing a vulnerability instead of responsibly disclosing it (so hospitals and transportation infrastructure can be protected), the NSA made a critical error in judgment that put millions of people at risk. However, one would think that after learning 10 months ago that their entire cyberweapon arsenal had been stolen and was now out “in the wild”, the NSA would have immediately taken action and responsibly disclosed the vulnerabilities so systems around the world could be patched., Unfortunately, there is no indication that they did so. If we read carefully the statement from Microsoft today, it appears the NSA deliberately withheld the information that would have allowed critical civilian infrastructure like hospitals to be protected. In our view, this is unforgivable and beyond irresponsible., Instead, the Windows engineering team was left to work by themselves to find the vulnerabilities, which they finally did in March 2017, 8 months after the NSA learned the exploits had been stolen. More critically, Microsoft only managed to patch the vulnerabilities 2 months before last Friday’s attacks, which is not nearly enough time for all enterprise machines to be updated., We think that US Congressman Ted Lieu is spot on when he wrote on Friday: “Today’s worldwide ransomware attack shows what can happen when the NSA or CIA write malware instead of disclosing the vulnerability to the software manufacturer.”, Friday’s attack is a clear demonstration of the damage that just a SINGLE exploit can do. If we have learned anything from the NSA hack, and the more recent CIA Vault7 leaks, it’s that potentially hundreds of additional exploits exist, many targeting other platforms, not just Microsoft Windows. Furthermore, many of these are probably already out “in the wild” and available to cyber criminals., At this point, the NSA and CIA have a moral obligation to responsibly disclose all additional vulnerabilities. We would say that this goes beyond just a moral obligation. When your own cyber weapons are used against your own country, there is a duty to protect and defend, and responsible disclosure is now the only way forward., Anybody working in online security will tell you that protecting against the bad guys is hard enough. The last thing we need is for the supposed “good guys” to be wreaking havoc. An undisclosed vulnerability is effectively a “back door” into supposedly secure computing environments, and as Friday’s attack aptly demonstrates, there is no such thing as a back door that only lets the good guys in., This is the same fundamental issue that makes calls for encryption backdoors counterproductive and irresponsible. Despite repeated warnings from security industry experts, government officials in both the US and the UK have repeatedly called for encryption backdoors, which could grant special access into end-to-end encrypted systems like ProtonMail., However, Friday’s WannaCry attacks clearly demonstrate that when it comes to security, there can be no middle ground. You either have security, or you don’t, and systems with backdoors in them are just fundamentally insecure. For this reason, we are unwilling to compromise on our position of no encryption backdoors, and we will continue to make our cryptography open source and auditable to ensure that there are no intentional or unintentional backdoors., We firmly believe this is the only way forward in a world where cyberattacks are becoming increasingly common and more and more damaging, both economically and as a threat to democracy itself., About the Author: Dr. Andy Yen, Andy is the Co-Founder and CEO of ProtonMail. He is a long-time advocate of privacy rights and has spoken at TED, SXSW, and the Asian Investigative Journalism Conference about online privacy issues. Previously, Andy was a research scientist at CERN and has a PhD in Particle Physics from Harvard University. You can watch his TED talk online to learn more about ProtonMail’s mission., You can get a free secure email account from ProtonMail here., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – WannaCry ransomware, cybercrime) |
5837_64481 | The Advanced Protection feature was designed to improve the security of users, who are at high risk of targeted attacks., “We took this unusual step because there is an overlooked minority of our users that are at particularly high risk of targeted online attacks. For example, these might be campaign staffers preparing for an upcoming election, journalists who need to protect the confidentiality of their sources, or people in abusive relationships seeking safety.” reads the blog post published by Google. , “Sometimes even the most careful and security-minded users are successfully attacked through phishing scams, especially if those phishing scams were individually targeted at the user in question.”, Even if the threat actor obtains the victim’s credentials via spear phishing messages, advanced or using a malware he will not be able to access the Google account., Users that want to enable the Google’s Advanced Protection feature need two physical security keys that work with FIDO Universal 2nd Factor (U2F)., U2F is an open authentication standard that allows users to securely access many online services, with one single device with no drivers, or client software needed., This hardware-based two-factor authentication does not require secret codes via SMS, apps or emails., , According to Google, the new feature implements the best protection against:, “They security devices use public-key cryptography and digital signatures to prove to Google that it’s really you,” the post reads. “An attacker who does not have your Security Key is automatically blocked, even if they have your password.” continues Google.Advanced Protection offer three features to keep your account safe:, The Google Advanced Protection program implements the following features:, Advanced Protection feature is not designed for everyone, but only for people, like journalists, government officials and activists, who are at a higher risk of being targeted by government or sophisticated hackers and ready to sacrifice some convenience for substantially increased e-mail protection., Currently, Google users can enroll in the Advanced Protection Program using Google Chrome that already supports the U2F standard for Security Keys, other browsers are expected to support the same technology., Users that want to use the Advanced Protection have to sign up at the following address:, Google also announced the partnership with security firm ESET for malware detection in the Chrome browser through the Chrome Cleanup feature., Chrome Cleanup now leverages the malware detection engine from ESET., “Under the hood, we upgraded the technology we use in Chrome Cleanup to detect and remove unwanted software. We worked with IT security company ESET to combine their detection engine with Chrome’s sandbox technology.” Google announced in a blog post. “We can now detect and remove more unwanted software than ever before, meaning more people can benefit from Chrome Cleanup. Note this new sandboxed engine is not a general-purpose antivirus—it only removes software that doesn’t comply with our unwanted software policy.”, Pierluigi Paganini , (Security Affairs – Google Advanced Protection, authentication) |
7625_79877 | Security expert Bob Diachenko discovered an unprotected MongoDB archive that has exposed personal and professional details of more than 202 million people., The huge trove of data belongs to job seekers in China, its records include personal information of individuals like names, height, weight, email IDs, marriage status, political leanings, skills and work experience, phone numbers, salary expectations, and driver licenses were exposed., The MongoDB archive contains 854GB of data related to the last three years, it is the largest data leak incident of ever occurred in China., “On December 28th, Bob Diachenko, Director of Cyber Risk Research at Hacken.io and bug bounty platform HackenProof, analyzed the data stream of BinaryEdge search engine and identified an open and unprotected MongoDB instance” reads the post published by Diachenko., “Upon closer inspection, an 854 GB sized MongoDB database was left unattended, with no password/login authentication needed to view and access the details of what appeared to be more than 200 million very detailed resumes of Chinese job seekers.”, The expert discovered the origin of the data when one of its Twitter followers pointed to a GitHub repository. , Data were collected by using a tool named “data-import” (created 3 years ago) that was scraping resumes from different Chinese classifieds, like bj.58.com. , 58.com’s representative explained that the records were by their platform and confirmed that a third-party has created it., At the time it is not clear how long such kind of data remained exposed online, Diachenko confirmed that the MongoDB log showed that the archive has been regularly accessed by someone, it included a dozen IPs. , The good news is that the database was secured just after the news of its discovery was published online., “As of the date of this publication, there is no official confirmation on the data owner. We have already covered the issue of web scraping here: ” concludes Diachenko ., In September 2018, another huge archive containing data of 130 Million hotel chain guests was offered for sale on the dark web for around $56,000 at that time worth of Bitcoin., Pierluigi Paganini, (SecurityAffairs – MongoDB archive, data leak) |
2345_37250 | A student from Cambridge, Aran Khanna, has developed a Chrome extension that allows tracking Facebook friends on map. The developer named the extension Marauder’s Map as the magical Marauder’s Map from the Harry Potter books that reveals all of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry., The Chrome extension allows tracking Facebook friends by grabbing location data from Facebook Messenger with location sharing enabled and displaying their locations on a map. As explained by the developer the accuracy of that data and easiness of extracting them from the popular social network allow everybody easily track user’s friends from the messaging service., , “I wrote a Chrome extension for the Facebook Messenger page ( that scrapes all this location data and plots it on a map. You can get this extension here and play around with it on your message data.” wrote the developer in a blog post., The Facebook mobile app for Facebook Messenger sends out the user’s location with all messages by default and let me add that that the precision of the coordinates is impressive., , Another factor to consider it that the popular social network encourages the users of the Messenger app to share their location by enabling location sharing feature by default in the installation phase., It is important to understand that in order to track position of a friend in Facebook it is necessary to have had a conversation with him over Messenger with location enabled., If someone is able to involve Facebook users, not necessarily friends, in a chat he will be able to track their location., “I found that I could even do this for people who I am not Facebook friends with. I am currently in a large active chat to organize poker games with some fellow students, many of whom I am not Facebook friends with. However, I can still track their locations extremely accurately from the messages they send the group.” said Khanna., Another interesting discovery made by the developer is that it is possible to aggregate information from chat of different users with the same target in order to track him., “This means that if a few people who I am chatting with separately collude and send each other the locations I share with them, they would be able to track me very accurately without me ever knowing.”, It is important to highlight that there is no flaw in Facebook Messenger because the developer has simply exploited a feature that allows users to share their locations with friends., The extension for Chrome is available on the Chrome web store, its source code is open and available on Github., To avoid being tracked by the extension keep your location data private by disabling location sharing feature in your Messenger. Another option is to disable Messenger location access from the phone settings., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Facebook Messanger, Chrome extension location tracking) |
1034_22545 | The nonprofit research team Citizen Lab has discovered the presence of a spyware developed by the Italian Hacking Team in 21 countries. The news doesn’t surprise security community, despite Hacking Team firm always denies any involvement in cyber espionage and surveillance campaigns conducted by authoritarist governments., “On the issue of repressive regimes, Hacking Team goes to great lengths to assure that our software is not sold to governments that are blacklisted by the EU, the US, NATO, and similar international organizations or any “repressive regime.”, “First, with respect to human rights, we have encountered a number of cases where bait content and other material are suggestive of targeting for political advantage, rather than legitimate law enforcement operations. Moreover, in an earlier post in this series, we identified the targeting of a US-based news organization. In other cases, however, the material did appear to be indicative of possible criminal investigations. Similarly, we have also found Hacking Team endpoints in regimes with both high and very low rankings in governance, rule of law, and freedom of expression.” states the post., , Nonprofit organizations sustain that there is a sensible increase in the use of surveillance tools operated by governments, another problem that must be seriously considered is that in many cases, these tools could be used for illicit purposes by private companies that intend to spy on employees and competitors., , “Hacking Team has made a number of statements that seem intended to reassure the public, as well as potential regulators, that they conduct effective due diligence and self-regulation regarding their clients, and the human rights impact of their products,” the Citizen Lab researchers report on Monday. “They also market their RCS product as untraceable. Our research suggests that both of these claims ring hollow.”, “Our research reveals that the RCS collection infrastructure uses a proxy-chaining technique, roughly analogous to that used by general-purpose anonymity solutions like Tor, in that multiple hops are used to anonymize the destination of information,” reads the report. “Despite this technique, we are still able to map out many of these chains and their endpoints using a specialized analysis.” Citizen Lab researchers explained., “If the Ethiopian government is not a Hacking Team customer, then I would sure like to know how their tools wound up being used to spy on Ethiopian journalists.”, The Hacking Team refuses any accusation and remarks its legal conduct that is also monitored by a panel of technical experts, We have established an outside panel of technical experts and legal advisors, unique in our industry, that reviews potential sales. This panel reports directly to the board of directors regarding proposed sales., The researchers at Citizen Lab remarked that they have found “Hacking Team endpoints in regimes with both high and very low rankings in governance, rule of law, and freedom of expression“., “It is equally reasonable, however, to conclude that some uses are abusive, partisan, or unaccountable. Our findings of the global proliferation of Hacking Team belies their claims of high-quality due diligence. While they claim to rely on an outside panel for guidance on potential sales, little information is available about its members, processes, or the grounds under which a sale might be rejected.”, In the following table, the list of endpoints traced., We cannot ignore that the market of spyware is very flourishing, and there are many companies that produce malware similar to RCS of the Hacking Team. I want to close this post with the same phrase used by researchers, which summarizes all my concerns, “In conclusion, the combination of global proliferation, as well as dubious promises about “stealth” feature points to the dangers-to-many stakeholders of an unregulated marketplace defined by lack of transparency and accountability.”, , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Hacking Team, Surveillance) |
56_947 | Today I will discuss with you about the news that I was very impressed regarding the sale of a internet traffic monitoring system sold by an Israeli company to the Iranian government. The sold system is the “NetEnforcer” and was sold through the intermediary of a Danish company RanTek A / S., , NetEnforcer bandwidth management devices provide the granular visibility and policy enforcement that network operators need to optimize the delivery, performance and profitability of WAN and broadband services. NetEnforcer devices are deployed in thousands of installations the world over, where they monitor, identify, classify, prioritize, and shape, network traffic per application and per user. But we know Israeli ban this king to commercial busisess with the government in Tehran. According to news agency Bloomberg, the company Allot Communications Ltd. Hod-Hasharon-based would be successful in sales, shipping the goods to RanTek A / S for transit, that after removing the original labels would in turn sent to Iran ., But why would the system was purchased? According to some former employees of Allot, Bloomberg source, the system is in use to monitor internet traffic to intercept any kind of communication, from email to SMS, and the second needs to edit the contents of expressing dissent. The purpose is to identify dissidents and Internet users allow their arrest., “Such technologies have been used to trace and torturing dissidents in countries like Iran, Bahrain, Syria and Tunisia,” recalls Bloomberg but without specifying who has purchased the product in Iran. The Allot declares itself alien to each other freed from any liability, arguing that the sale is one of many made to its distributors. Executive Director of the Allot company Rami Hadar, has declared that its systems would not be “designated for intrusive surveillance purposes,” but for “the optimization of Internet traffic.”, The authorities in Copenhagen would be in possession of evidence of transactions with Iran, creating irritation to the Israeli Minister of Defense decided to launch an investigation into the facts., Unfortunately, I can not hold me surprised by events like this, which shows how the business can be greedy dirt., This events are not isolated, consider for example what is happened in Syria during the repression. Let’s remember that case of Blue Coat Systems Inc., a Sunnyvale, California-based maker of Web security and filtering products that have been used for filterning operations like discovered by Telecomix, a group that fight for online freedom and that has uncovered computer logs that showed the Blue Coat Systems’s devices being used in Syria to filter Internet sites., Again, in Bahrain, authorities used European equipment to intercept phone calls and text messages of activists, who were confronted with details of their communications while being arrested and tortured. Amid Syria’s uprising, construction moved forward on a $17 million Internet surveillance system built with U.S., French, German and Italian technology., Personally, I add a further element of analysis that comes from my experience in the field. Appliances are ideal for many different uses and then it is not correct incriminate the producers for a sale, could be a serious mistake.
Crucial is in fact the step of customization of software distributions installed in to the devices. The real problem is to understand how much support give the companies during the tuning and deployment of these systems to the hostile populations. We will soon arrive at the paradoxical decision to apply or not a technological embargo because the total flexibility of these appliances allows the execution of a wide range of operations, including network monitoring., Which are the dimension of this dirty growing business? It has been estimated that the sales are at $3 billion to $5 billion, that is the price that we are giving to human dignity, all over the world, from Middle East to North Africa, It matters little if at stake there are human victims, but at this point is questionable whether or not to tolerate such attitudes of some companies that can avoid control and the international laws using what I define squalid scams to elude technological embargoes.
Do not entering into the merits of the single event, but considering the damages caused by those Western companies that make profit with governments officially considered hostiles., Many murderous regimes are using Western technologies for surveillance purpose demonstrating that current legislative framework for controlling this dirty trade is not working., What have we expect in the next future? We urgently need an official regulation of this trade, instructing severe penalties for those who do not comply with regulations. The European Union already restricted sales of the technology to Syria after Bloomberg News exposed the project in that country., I hope that Western Governments will fight this massive spy operation and will be more active to guarantee internet freedom and defending human rights … but I’m convinct that this is utopia., Pierluigi Paganini, References, |
3995_49319 | John McAfee is one of the spiritual father of modern cyber security, he developed the first commercial antivirus, but John is much more. He is the “artist” of security, a modern juggler of technology. Multi-talented and visionary, with an innate ability to look far, free from prejudice., Enjoy the interview!,
Hi John, first of all, thank you. You will never end to surprise me, I’m very happy and honored to make this interview.
Well, John, let me say that you are an ecliptic and ingenious professional, you have something in your DNA that makes you different. Today we are speaking about cyber security because professionals like you made it possible. Can you tell more about your technical background? When did you start thinking cyber security?, I learned computer programming from the companies that manufactured computers. In the 60’s and early 70’s universities did not have computer science programs, so the computer manufacturers were the only Avenue of training. My first job was in 1968 working with General Electric’s Process Automation Division. GE at the time was the world’s leader in building computers to automate industrial processes. I moved from GE to Univac in 1970. Univac at the time was the second largest computer manufacturer. At Univac I learned how to design and program operating systems. After Univac, I got a job with NASA’s Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan. It was there that I was introduced to cyber security. NASA was concerned that the Russians might steal information from its first satellites and I was assigned to the team attempting to protect the data returned by TIROS, the first weather mapping satellite. I have been involved with computer security ever since., Which are the most interesting hacking communities on the web today? What do you suggest to follow to a wannabe hacker?, Anonymous is the most active hacking group. If a person wants to be a hacker I would first suggest that they attend DeFcon in Las Vegas. It is the world’s largest hacking community and is held in August each year. This way you can connect with the world’s best hackers. The only way to truly learn hacking is from other hackers., What about the militarization of the cyberspace? What scares you the most in the Internet?, Militarization does not concern me. There will always be increasingly sophisticated weapons. What concerns me is the application of technology directed at infiltrating the privacy of citizens., I read one of your Tweets that states “Anyone who believes their real IP address can’t be tracked, even using TOR, is ignorant of the facts.” Tell me more. It the privacy a modern utopia?, TOR prides privacy only against lazy hackers. If a Hacker is dedicated and determined, he can peel back the layers in a matter of days., Anyone who believes their real IP address can’t be tracked, even using TOR, is ignorant of the facts. — John McAfee (@officialmcafee) 30 giugno 2016, , Did you observe a strain of malware or a cyber attack that has literally shocked you? Which one?, None gave shocked me. What has shocked me are the hacks that Hackers are capable of that have not yet happened. It’s like waiting for the other shoe to drop., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Hacker, John McAfee) |
5573_61898 | A mysterious company makes the headlines for offering up to $250,000 for virtual machine (VM) hacks. The “secret” bug bounty program was announced by the crowdsourced security testing platform Bugcrowd., At the time I was writing the unique information available on the target is that it is an unreleased product., The program is invitation-only, but anyone can apply for an invite, the organization will contact the final participants., “Bugcrowd has an exciting opportunity to participate in a private, invite-only program with an undisclosed client, against an unreleased product – with rewards up to $250,000!” reads the announcement published on Bugcrowd. , Candidates must have specific skills on virtual environments, kernel and device driver security, firmware security, and advanced application security., , The hackers must focus their activities in:, Participants can earn between $5,000 and $250,000 for each vulnerability they will report, the duration of the bug bounty program is roughly of 8 weeks, it will start in September., Bug bounty programs are becoming even more common in the IT security industry, VM hacks are among the issues considered more interesting by the experts. Last year, security experts earned $150,000 for or the hack of the VMware Workstation 12.5.1. reported at the hacking contest 2016 PwnFest held in South Korea at the 2016 Power Of Community (POC) security conference., This year, during the Pwn2Own contest, the researchers at the Tencent Security’s Team Sniper earned $100,000 for a VMware Workstation exploit that could be exploited by attackers used to escape VMs., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – bug bounty, VMware) |
4457_53054 | Mirai is the malware that a few weeks ago caused a massive Internet outage in the US. Mirai was first spotted this summer by the security expert MalwareMustDie, now media reported the use of the dreaded botnet against Liberia. with financially devastating results., The financial repercussions of the massive DDoS attack on the country are devastating., The massive DDoS attacks began a few days ago impacting some Liberian internet providers as explained the security researcher Kevin Beaumont., , Beaumont credited the Mirai botnet for the attacks that hit the African country, he called this botnet #14 “Shadows Kill”, based on the message they sent., Botnet #14 – DNS flood for 1 seconds
Targets
kevin.lies.in.fear (8.8.8.8/32), — Mirai Attacks (@MiraiAttacks) 2 novembre 2016, , “Over the past week we’ve seen continued short duration attacks on infrastructure in the nation of Liberia. Liberia has one internet cable, installed in 2011, which provides a single point of failure for internet access. From monitoring we can see websites hosted in country going offline during the attacks — additionally, a source in country at a Telco has confirmed to a journalist they are seeing intermittent internet connectivity, at times which directly match the attack. The attacks are extremely worrying because they suggest a Mirai operator who has enough capacity to seriously impact systems in a nation state.” Beaumont wrote in a blog post., The Botnet #14 was able to generate a volume of traffic greater than 500 Gbps, enough to cause a massive outage in a country like Liberia., “From monitoring, we can see websites hosted in country going offline during the attacks,” Beaumont added., Unfortunately, it is becoming quite easy to create or rent a botnet powered by the Mirai malware due to the availability of its source code leaked online by the alleged author., According to Flashpoint who scanned the Internet with the Shodan search engine for flawed IoT devices more than 500,000 vulnerable devices are in the wild. The countries with the highest number of vulnerable devices are Vietnam (80,000), Brazil (62,000) and Turkey (40,000)., , Large-scale DDoS attacks continue to represent a serious threat for web services across the world, and IoT devices represent a privileged attack vector due to the lack of security by design. IoT manufacturers are encouraged to seriously consider the approach at the security of their products., I reached MalwareMustDie for a comment on the real abilities of the Mirai Botnet., Q: Which are the capabilities of the Mirai Botnet?, A: Mirai botnet can make big damage as per several “demonstration” they did, included Liberia attack. The threat is seriously powerful, as per I firstly mentioned in the Security Affair interview. The way to stop it, are, either we push the effort to arrest ‘skiddes‘ who related to this botnet, and more strict in rule/policy for DDoS abuses, or, put down be more aggressive to take down infected IoT devices. Seriously, time is critical yet many ppl still not acting faster, if we let this happen with the current pace, in this Christmas or new year some countries and services can be shut down too … and they can do that., Q: Is it possible to use Mirai to shut down a country like the UK or France?, A: If they know which point to attack, YES. They caused a major Internet outage in the United States for some hours, and the US have the strongest internet backbone in this planet., It is my personal opinion that who released the code online was trying to rapidly increase the size of Mirai botnet. More smoking guns make harder the attribution and this could help crooks to keep lower their profile and nation-state hackers make impossible the attribution of the attacks even against a foreign country., It is clear that someone is using the Botnet #14 to test a large scale attack probably against some Government., We have no time, we need a new approach to cyber security, IoT devices need security by design., Pierluigi Paganini, (SecurityAffairs – Android, security patches), |
4552_53883 | The cURL (read “see URL”) is an open source command line tool and library designed for transferring data through various protocols., The cURL is included in a wide range of applications, including networking devices, printers, smartphones, IoT devices and even cars., Recently Daniel Stenberg, lead developer of cURL and Mozilla employee, requested a security audit of cURL from the Mozilla Secure Open Source (SOS) program., “I asked for, and we were granted a security audit of curl from the Mozilla Secure Open Source program a while ago. This was done by Mozilla getting a 3rd party company involved to do the job and footing the bill for it. The auditing company is called Cure53.” wrote Stenberg in a blog post. “I applied for the security audit because I feel that we’ve had some security related issues lately and I’ve had the feeling that we might be missing something so it would be really good to get some experts’ eyes on the code,”, Five experts at the security services provider Cure53 conducted an audit that lasted 20 days and revealed a total of 23 issues., The issued discovered by the experts include nine security flaws. Two security vulnerabilities were merged by the experts and one of them was classified as a “plain bug” because its exploitation is very hard in a real attack scenario., Four vulnerabilities have been rated “high severity” and four are considered “medium severity.”, “The assessment of the tool was performed by Cure53 as part of the Mozilla’s Secure Open Source track program. The results of the project encompass twenty-three security-relevant discoveries.” reads the Pentest-Report cURL 08.2016 published by Cure53.”As for the approach, the test was rooted in the public availability of the source code belonging to the cURL software and the investigation involved five testers of the Cure53 team. “, , The high severity flaws tracked as CVE-2016-8617, CVE-2016-8619, CVE-2016-8622, and CVE-2016-8623, are remote code execution vulnerabilities., The report states that “the overall impression of the state of security and robustness of the cURL library was positive.”, Anyway, don’t worry! A new version of the software component it available online. The new version 7.51.0 addresses a total of 11 vulnerabilities. The release fixes seven issues found by the Cure53’audit, while the remaining were reported by Luật Nguyễn, Christian Heimes and Fernando Muñoz., Stenberg highlighted that cURL is one of the most used software products, for this reason, this audit assumes an extraordinary importance for its users., “Also, as curl is one of the most used software components in the world a serious problem in curl could have a serious impact on tools, devices and applications everywhere. We don’t want that to happen.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – hacking, security audit) |
5553_61714 | On Wednesday some very interesting and seemly unrelated events happened in regards to Wannacry. First Marcus Hutchins (AKA @Malwaretech), the security researcher who discovered the kill switch and stopped the spread of Wannacry was arrested whilst returning to the UK from Las Vegas- on suspicion of creating malware (covered here)., But the second event which will be covered in the article related to an event that seemed to of passed most of Twitter and the internet by. The WannaCry wallets from the orchestrators behind the ransomware outbreak (that famously affected companies globally including the NHS), were emptied to the tune of $143,000. Interestingly the Bitcoin generated through ransom payments from the global attack had not been touched until Wednesday., A twitter bot created by Quartz, to monitor the wallets for payments during the original outbreak, first noticed the activity at 11:10pm ET, according to the twitter account a total of $70,000 was withdrawn from the following three transactions:, 7.34128314 BTC ($20,055.52 USD) has just been withdrawn from a bitcoin wallet tied to #wcry ransomware. — actual ransom (@actual_ransom) August 3, 2017, 8.73261636 BTC ($23,856.48 USD) has just been withdrawn from a bitcoin wallet tied to #wcry ransomware. — actual ransom (@actual_ransom) August 3, 2017, 9.67641378 BTC ($26,434.83 USD) has just been withdrawn from a bitcoin wallet tied to #wcry ransomware. — actual ransom (@actual_ransom) August 3, 2017, Source QZ.com, The twitter bot the reported only 15 minutes later that the remainder of the monies were moved from the Bitcoin wallets, it is highly likely that these were laundered using a mixing service making it very hard to track the source and destination of the payments through making a high volume of small transactions to a large number of wallets., , Given the orchestrators of the Wannacry outbreak is widely suspected to be the Lazarus Group which have connections to North Korea, the timing and motivation of the BTC exfiltration could be a dig towards Marcus Hutchins, who stopped the spread of the attack, or just a coincidence, at this juncture there is no evidence to call it either way., But it is also known that Lazarus, in particular, Bluenoroff are a financially motivated group, with the attacks on banks, financial, and trading companies in Bangladesh in 2014 and the now famous $81million Cyber-Heist of the Bangladesh central bank’s account at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York., In summary, with the attackers behind Wannacry and NotPetya thought by many not to be financially motivated, it seems that even they still could not resist the opportunity to silently move their ill-gotten gains, whist the internet was distracted by other events!, About the author: Stuart Peck, Head of Cyber Security Strategy, ZeroDayLab
From a background of threat intelligence, social engineering, and incident response, Stuart Pecks heads up Cyber Security Strategy for ZeroDayLab. Stuart regularly delivers threat briefings to FTSE-level executives and directors throughout the UK and Europe. Passionate about educating organizations on the latest attacker trends facing business today and how to combat them, Stuart’s key areas of expertise include: the dark web, social engineering, malware and ransomware analysis & trends, threat hunting, OSINT, HUMINT and attacker recon techniques., Enjoy Stuart’s talk at Security Scotland Meet Up, , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – WannaCry wallet, Bitcoin) |
7112_75793 | Security experts from Netscout’s ASERT uncovered a new campaign carried out by the Cobalt cybercrime group., The attacks were detected on August 13, 2018, experts revealed that the hackers targeted also the NS Bank in Russia and Carpatica/Patria in Romania., Cobalt crime gang has been active since at least 2016, it targeted banks worldwide., Cobalt hackers leverage spear-phishing emails to compromise target systems, messages spoof emails from financial institutions or a financial supplier/partner., The new campaign discovered by Netscout’s ASERT researchers presents a novelty, One one of the phishing emails sent by Cobalt contains two separate malicious URLs. A weaponized Word document and a binary with a .jpg extension., The experts also detected two malware samples used in the campaign, a JavaScript backdoor and another malicious code tracked as COOLPANTS, a reconnaissance backdoor associated with the group., COOLPANTS borrows the code from the Coblnt backdoor, 28 of the 57 functions matched using Diaphora, a tool that compares binaries., , The backdoor connects to hxxps://apstore.info, a domain already identified by researchers from Proofpoint as a command and control for Cobalt malware., Experts form ASERT detected on 13 August 2018, a new sample of COOLPANTS compiled on 1 August 2018. This sample connects to rietumu.me as C2, the analysis of the domain allowed the discovery of the email address [email protected] associated with other five new domains all created on 1 August 2018 (compass.plus; eucentalbank.com; europecentalbank.com; inter-kassa.com; and unibank.credit)., The domains were clearly used to target the financial institutions., “Hunting for samples associated with inter-kassa.com leads to a phishing email uploaded to VirusTotal, d3ac921038773c9b59fa6b229baa6469. At the time of analysis, VirusTotal scored the phishing email with a 0, indicating nothing malicious was identified by the anti-virus engines.” reads the report., “Most of the email content appears benign except for a link embedded in the message. The name “Interkassa” appears to be a payment processing system which makes it a prime masquerading target for attackers as noted in the tactics employed by the Cobalt Group for this ongoing campaign.”, The experts analyzed used the inter-kassa domain to search for associated malicious campaigns. They found only a spear-phishing email dated 2 August 2018 addressed to ns-bank bank and sent by “Interkassa.” The mail pretends to be sent from Denys Kyrychenko, co-owner and CTO of Interkassa., The phishing message includes two malicious links. one of them points to a weaponized Word document with an embedded VBA script. If the victim enables the macros, the script generates a cmd.exe command that launches cmstp.exe with an INF file. The INF file connects to the C2 to fetch a payload that is executed by cmstp.exe., The attackers used a JavaScript backdoor, tracked as ‘more_eggs,’ that is identical to a backdoor discovered by last year Trend Micro and attributed to Cobalt cybercrime gang., The backdoor supports the following commands that allow Cobalt to take over an infected system:, The second link in the spear-phishing email connects the C2 to download an executable rather than an image file. Unfortunately, at the time of analysis, the C2 was not responding., ASERT discovered also another campaign allegedly linked with Cobalt group targeting Romanian carpatica.ro by masquerading as Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA)., “ASERT believes Cobalt Group will continue targeting financial organizations in Eastern Europe and Russia based on the observables in this campaign and their normal modus operandi.” concludes ASERT., “ASERT also recommends that employees are trained to spot phishing emails and, where possible, closely inspect emails for look-alike domains that might contain malicious attachments or links.”, Further details, including IoCs are reported in the analysis published by the researchers., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Cobalt, Cybercrime), |
5864_64725 | After the disclosure of the KRACK and ROCA attacks, another attack scenario scares IT community. It is the DUHK vulnerability (Don’t Use Hard-coded Keys), it is the last cryptographic implementation vulnerability that could be exploited by attackers to recover encryption keys used to secure VPN connections and web browsing sessions., The DUHK vulnerability was reported by the cryptography researchers Shaanan Cohney, Nadia Heninger, and Matthew Green., The group researchers have published technical details about the attack on a dedicated website., “DUHK (Don’t Use Hard-coded Keys) is a vulnerability that affects devices using the ANSI X9.31 Random Number Generator (RNG) in conjunction with a hard-coded seed key.” wrote the researchers., “The ANSI X9.31 RNG is an algorithm that until recently was commonly used to generate cryptographic keys that secure VPN connections and web browsing sessions, preventing third parties from reading intercepted communications.” , The DUHK vulnerability affects a wide range of products from dozens of vendors, including CISCO, Fortinet, and TechGuard. The vulnerability affects every device the relies on the outdated pseudorandom number generation algorithm ANSI X9.31 RNG ‘in conjunction with a hard-coded seed key.’, The bad news is that the ANSI X9.31 RNG was included into several cryptographic standards over the last three decades until January 2016 when it was removed from the list of FIPS-approved pseudorandom number generation algorithms., The problem is related to the fact that Pseudorandom number generators are not able to generate random numbers and the knowledge of initial secret value (seed) could be used to determine the number generated by the algorithm., Unfortunately, some vendors store the seed value hard-coded into the source code of their solutions. An attacker can obtain the seed by a reverse-engineering of the source code of the products., The DUHK is described as ‘state recovery attack,’ an attacker with the knowledge of the seed value can power a man-in-the-middle attack to recover the current state value after observing some outputs., Attackers can then use the values to re-calculate the encryption keys and decrypt data potentially exposing sensitive data, including login credentials, credit card data, and other confidential information., “In order to demonstrate the practicality of this attack, we develop a full passive decryption attack against FortiGate VPN gateway products using FortiOS version 4.” researchers said., “Our scans found at least 23,000 devices with a publicly visible IPv4 address running a vulnerable version of FortiOS.”, Below a partial list of affected devices tested by the researchers:, , Further technical details are included in the paper “Practical state recovery attacks against legacy RNG implementations.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – DUHK attack, hacking) |
7590_79509 | Security expert Florian Kunushevci (19) discovered a vulnerability that allows an unauthenticated local attacker to view photos and contacts, and also to open links in the browser. , Next, the attacker would need to receive a Skype call and answer it to gather access to user data even if the device is locked., “Skype Android Authentication Bypass , -> View pictures & albums at the victim phone, -> View Contacts inside the phone (Numbers + Names) , -> Access Browser , A new vulnerability that I found on Skype has been fixed that affected millions of android devices around the world that uses Skype. Thew new update you will find from 23 December 2018. ” wrote the expert., The flaw was discovered by the expert in October that reported it to Microsoft. Microsoft addressed the flaw by releasing a new version of Skype on December 23. , A locked device should not allow a user to access to photos and contacts without authentication., The expert discovered that a code error in Skype for Android that allows an unauthenticated attacker with physical access to the device to view contacts, photos, and also send messages., The flaw also allows launching the browser on the Android device, the attacker only needs to send a Skype message containing a link and then click the link., The flaw seems to affect all Android devices running a vulnerable Skype version., Below a video PoC of the flaw that shows how to bypass the lockscreen:, Pierluigi Paganini, (SecurityAffairs – Skype, hacking), , |
154_3588 | For years, we have discussed the importance of appropriate cyber strategy and the necessity to preside over the main critical infrastructures to defend them from cyber threats of any kind and in our imagination we have always considered the US as a country at the forefront., While the cyber security experts analyze the progress made in countries like Russia and China and emerging realities like India and Iran, they alert us regarding the vulnerabilities of the main U.S. structures., This time to worry U.S. security experts is the state of its computer networks that have been penetrated by foreign spies several times exposing sensible information. The success of the cyber attacks, according the declarations of the network experts, is due the US infrastructure status that are protected by obsolete defense systems unable to fight against continuos incursions., Speaking before the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities the experts told the assembled Senators that the U.S. government needed to abandon the notion that it could keep outsiders off its computer networks., Very meaningful the worlds pronounced by Senator Rob Portman member of the Emerging Threats and Capabilities subcommittee:, “We can do things to make it more costly for them to hack into our systems…,”
“but you didn’t say we can stop them.”, A clear message that expresses the awareness of the threat and impossibility to defeat it in the short term. The only feasible goal right now is trying to mitigate the threat reducing the intrusions, the experts report that US are under a massive attack that day fails to penetrate defenses raised to the protection of the infrastructures., , What are the reasons of what can be considered a major failure in relation to huge government investment?, “The production of computer scientists is on the decline,” “We are not recruiting and retaining them… I am concerned also that the investments from the Congress and the people is almost all period of performance of one year or less. It’s to build tools. It’s to be a rapid deployment of capability. I rarely get the opportunity to think 3 years down the line even, in research. The money that comes to us has a very directed purpose… I feel the nation is frightened to think much beyond one or two years.”, The global scenario is very worrying, every day we read of attacks through computer systems that could have serious repercussions at any moment. Do not forget that an attack on critical infrastructure could result in the loss of many lives, and it is a matter of time, but sooner or later this will happen. Statement as those that prompted me to write this article are disarming, demonstrate that the investments were completely wrong. Attribute the success of the attacks by foreign governments to the fact that US are using obsolete systems is reductive, behind the failures there are innumerable poor choices and the application of non-functional models. America is advanced on cyber context, and his statement should give everyone idea about the real state of security of many countries of the world. Trigger a global conflict in cyber space could have an effect in the real world no less than that of a global nuclear conflict., Persist in offending the opponent, not being responsible for addressing a ready response, is very dangerous. Soon we will be invaded by cyber weapon escaped to the control of designers and adapted for other purposes by cyber criminals, hostile governments and hacktivists … and then how will defend ourselves?, Pierluigi Paganini |
7367_77629 | Crooks are offering for sale Criminals are selling the private messages of 81,000 hacked Facebook accounts for 10 cents per account., According to the BBC, crooks are offering for sale on underground criminal forums the private messages of 81,000 hacked Facebook accounts., “The perpetrators told the BBC Russian Service that they had details from a total of 120 million accounts, which they were attempting to sell, although there are reasons to be sceptical about that figure.” states the BBC., The BBC Russian Service investigated the alleged data breach along with cybersecurity firm Digital Shadows and determined they are authentic., Most of the 81,000 Facebook users whose data were offered for sale were from Ukraine and Russia., , The seller, who goes online with the moniker “FBSaler,” claims being in possession of information related to 120 million Facebook users and is offering the access to the private messages for 10 cents per account., FBSaler advertised the data on an underground hacking forum called BlackHatWorld and provided a link to a site named FBServer where sample data was posted., “We sell personal information of Facebook users. Our database includes 120 million accounts, with the ability to sample by specific countries. The cost of one profile is 10 cents.” Wrote FBSaler., “Data from a further 176,000 accounts was also made available, although some of the information – including email addresses and phone numbers – could have been scraped from members who had not hidden it,” continued the BBC report., Experts from Digital Shadows traced the advertisement to an IP address in Saint Petersburg, they also linked the IP address to a campaign spreading LokiBot password-stealing., Which is the data source?, Facebook analyzed the data and discovered that information offered by crooks has been harvested through malicious browser extensions., “We have contacted browser-makers to ensure that known malicious extensions are no longer available to download in their stores,” said Facebook executive Guy Rosen., “We have also contacted law enforcement and have worked with local authorities to remove the website that displayed information from Facebook accounts.”, Malicious browser extensions are a common mean for attackers to obtain the precious information., In September 2017 a malicious Chrome extension dubbed Browse-Secure that masqueraded as an extension that allows you to perform encrypted searches was used to steal information from Facebook accounts., Experts suggest avoiding using browser extensions that are installed by a limited number of users or that haven’t good ratings, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Facebook accounts, cybercrime), |
989_21874 | A recent update for Facebook Android raised a great concern for user’s privacy because it can read text messages on the smartphone. The climate of suspicion after the revelation on the PRISM program is fueling the debate on the abuse of privileges requested by many mobile applications., The update for the popular Android app demands access to SMS and MMS messages, the new version of the app was recently released, but the blogger Tony Calileo noted the unusual request from Facebook., Carlyle wrote a blog post criticizing the request made by the app to access “Your Message”, , “Like most people, I blindly clicked “accept” when prompted for new permissions on Facebook’s Android App update today (Jan 27). Something caught my eye, and after I cancelled the update, I look a screenshot.” said the blogger.” “This is just one of a bunch of new permissions the app is requesting for this update, but it’s probably the most alarming,”, The Android engineer at Facebook, Franci Penov, provided an explanation on Reddit, revealing that the application of the popular social network needs to read messages to implement automatic two-factor authentication., “As for the READ_SMS permission, we require that so we can automatically intercept login approvals SMS messages for people that have turned 2-factor authentication for their accounts, or for phone confirmation messages when you add a phone number to your Facebook account. Unfortunately, the Android permissions system does not allow us to specify that we would like to be able to read only SMS messages from a specific number.It’s also worth noting that we would love to be able to ask only for the permissions we need for the specific features particular users uses. For example if you don’t use Facebook events or you don’t want to see them in your device calendar we would prefer to not request theWRITE_CALENDAR calendar; or if you don’t have login approvals and don’t add a phone number, we don’t ask for READ_SMS. However, Android does not allow permission requests on demand; we have to request all permissions that cover each feature at install time, and the users can only grant or deny all of them and have no control over individual permissions.” said Penov., When a Facebook user logs in to the platform, it sends an SMS containing the approval code. The Android app captures the text message from the user’s Inbox and uses it to complete the authentication process., The Facebook Help Centre includes a page to explain which are the privileges requested by the Android app and why it needs it., The real problem is the compromise between usability and security, I agree with the need to improve the authentication mechanism with a two factor, but is it really necessary to do it automatically?, A two factor authentication is a further protection for users, so why, don’t ask them to manually submit the authentication code?, Mobile platforms are a privileged target for cyber criminals and state-sponsored hackers, security requirements are crucial, but privacy concern is high. , Recently, Facebook was also accused to violate the user’s privacy because it analyzes everything is typed and not publish (self-censorship content), the content users have intentionally chosen not to share., Users fear Government snooping more than frauds, there is a low perception of cyber threats, but a high attention on alleged technological abuses made by private companies and NSA in the name of the Homeland Security. |
7513_78800 | Jens ‘Atom’ Steube, the lead developer of the popular password-cracking tool Hashcat, has developed a new WiFi hacking technique that allows cracking WiFi passwords of most modern routers., Jens ‘Atom’ Steube, the lead developer of the popular password-cracking tool Hashcat, has developed a new WiFi hacking technique that allows cracking WiFi passwords of most modern routers., The attack technique
works against WPA/WPA2 wireless network protocols with Pairwise Master Key
Identifier (PMKID)-based roaming features enabled., Steube discovered the attack while
he was analyzing the WPA3
security standard., The technique allows an attacker to recover the Pre-shared Key (PSK) login passwords and use them to hack into your Wi-Fi network and eavesdrop on the Internet traffic., Unlike other WiFi hacking techniques, this attack doesn’t require the capture of a full 4-way authentication handshake of EAPOL., Instead, the new WiFi hack is
performed on the RSN IE (Robust Security Network Information Element) using a
single EAPOL (Extensible Authentication Protocol over LAN) frame after
requesting it from the access point., “This attack was discovered accidentally while looking
for new ways to attack the new WPA3 security standard. WPA3 will be much harder
to attack because of its modern key establishment protocol called
“Simultaneous Authentication of Equals” (SAE).”
“The main
difference from existing attacks is that in this attack, capture of a full
EAPOL 4-way handshake is not required. The new attack is performed on the RSN
IE (Robust Security Network Information Element) of a single EAPOL frame”, The Robust Security Network protocol allows establishing secure communications over an 802.11 wireless network. It uses the PMKID key to establish a connection between a client and an access point., Below the attack step by step:Step 1 — Run hcxdumptool to request the PMKID from the Access Point and to dump the received frame to a file (in pcapng format)., $ ./hcxdumptool -o test.pcapng -i wlp39s0f3u4u5
–enable_status, Step 2 — Run hcxpcaptool tool to convert the captured data from pcapng format to a hash format that is accepted by Hashcat., $ ./hcxpcaptool -z test.16800 test.pcapng, Step 3 — Launch the Hashcat (v4.2.0 or higher) password cracking tool and crack it. The hash-mode that we need to use is 16800., $ ./hashcat -m 16800 test.16800 -a 3 -w 3 ‘?l?l?l?l?l?lt!’, In this way it is possible to retrieve the password of the target WiFi networt., “At this time, we do not know for which vendors or for how many routers this technique will work, but we think it will work against all 802.11i/p/q/r networks with roaming functions enabled (most modern routers).” Steube concludes., “The main advantages of this attack are as follow:, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – WiFi hack, hacking) |
3505_45400 | New problems for Android users, security experts at software research firm NorthBit have developed an exploit for a Stagefright vulnerability affecting Google’s operating system., Millions of Android devices are open to hacking attacks due to the newly disclosed Android Stagefright Exploit that could allow attackers to hack a smartphone in 10 seconds., The attacker just needs to trick users into visiting a specifically crafted web page that includes a malicious multimedia file., The researchers at NorthBit have dubbed the Android Stagefright Exploit Metaphor, they published a detailed analysis of the attack in a paper entitled “Metaphor A (real) reallife Stagefright exploit.”, The researchers have published a proof-of-concept video that shows how they hacked an Android Nexus 5 device using their Metaphor exploit in just 10 seconds. They also demonstrated that the Android Stagefright Exploit Metaphor works against other mobile devices, including Samsung Galaxy S5, LG G3 and HTC One smartphones., , The Stagefright flaw affects a media library app that is used for by Android to process Stagefright media files. According to the experts at Zimperium the media library is affected by several vulnerabilities., Joshua Drake from Zimperium discovered seven critical vulnerabilities in the native media playback engine called Stagefright, the expert defined the Stagefright flaw the “Mother of all Android Vulnerabilities.”, The attackers can exploit the vulnerability by sending a single multimedia text message to an unpatched Android device. Despite Google has already issued a patch and has sent out to it to the company’s partners, but most manufacturers haven’t already distributed the patch to their customers exposing them to cyber attack., The researchers discovered two bugs that are triggered when processing specially crafted MP3 audio or MP4 video files., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Android Stagefright Exploit, Metaphor) |
5203_58958 | The news has shocked the media, President Donald Trump has fired the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, James Comey. The most popular opinion is that Comey was fired due to the FBI’s investigation into alleged links between Trump and Russia., Last Wednesday, Comey testified before Congress about the role of the Kremlin in influencing the 2016 US Presidential election with cyber attacks against the DNC., The way Comey was informed was absurd, he was making a speech in Los Angeles when he received the news., , According to The White House, Comey was fired on the “clear recommendation” of Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, officially because the official was no longer able to lead the bureau effectively., “While I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation, I nevertheless concur with the judgment of the Department of Justice that you are not able to effectively lead the Bureau,” Trump wrote in a termination letter to the FBI Director., BREAKING: Full letter from Trump to Comey says former FBI Director "not able to effectively lead the Bureau." pic.twitter.com/P7Y1nowqCF, — Peter Alexander (@PeterAlexander) May 9, 2017, , The US deputy attorney general Rod Rosenstein explained that Comey was fired due to the way the FBI investigated into the case related to the disclosure of the Hillary Clinton‘s emails., The US deputy attorney Rosenstein also blamed Comey for his decision to close this investigation without prosecution., The Rosenstein’s memo did not explicitly refer the investigation conducted by the FBI on the cyber attacks against US politicians during the 2016 US Presidential election., The Trump’s decision was criticized by the media and of course by the US Democrats, who defined the decision a “Nixonian” move., Democrats speculate that Comey’s firing is linked to alleged support offered by Russian APT groups., Tim Kaine, Senator from Virginia and former Democratic vice presidential nominee, said the Comey’s firing proved “how frightened the Admin is over Russia investigation,” arguing that the firing was “part of a growing pattern by White House to cover-up the truth.”, Trump firing Comey shows how frightened the Admin is over Russia investigation, — Senator Tim Kaine (@timkaine) May 9, 2017, ,
Below a Tweet shared by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU):, In America, no one is above the law. Firing people who question authority is done by dictators, not democratically-elected presidents. — ACLU National (@ACLU) May 10, 2017, , Below the opinion of the NSA whistleblower, Edward Snowden, who condemn the termination:, This FBI Director has sought for years to jail me on account of my political activities. If I can oppose his firing, so can you. — Edward Snowden (@Snowden) May 9, 2017, , Trump has appointed FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe to serve as an interim FBI director., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – FBI Director, James Comey) |
1358_26982 | Tor network is a system designed to anonymize user’s experience on the web, allowing the publishing of content in the part of web non indexed by search engines, dubbed DeepWeb., A few weeks ago, researchers from Carnegie Mellon University’s computer emergency response team (Cert), Alexander Volynkin and Michael McCord, announced that they are able to de-anonymise users Tor users and planned to reveal their discovery during the next Black Hat Conference in August., We were all waiting for the presentation when the organization of the BlackHat had been contacted by the university’s lawyers which informed it that the researchers will not participate in the event., “Unfortunately, Mr Volynkin will not be able to speak at the conference since the materials that he would be speaking about have not yet been approved by Carnegie Mellon University/Software Engineering Institute for public release,” states the message posted on the official website of the event., “I think I have a handle on what they did, and how to fix it. We’ve been trying to find delicate ways to explain that we think we know what they did, but also it sure would have been smoother if they’d opted to tell us everything. The main reason for trying to be delicate is that I don’t want to discourage future researchers from telling us about neat things that they find. I’m currently waiting for them to answer their mail so I can proceed.” “Based on our current plans, we’ll be putting out a fix that relays can apply that should close the particular bug they found. The bug is a nice bug, but it isn’t the end of the world.” he added., Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist with the American Civil Liberties Union, has speculated that the researchers might have feared to be sued by criminal prosecution for illegal monitoring of Tor exit traffic., “Monitoring Tor exit traffic is potentially a violation of several federal criminal statutes,” he added., , The reality is that law enforcement agencies and intelligence all over the world are trying to develop capabilities to track users in the deepweb, and in particular on Tor networks. Hacking Tor is a goal for many Intelligence agencies as demonstrated also by the collection of documents leaked by Edward Snowden, that explicitly refers to a project named ‘Tor Stinks’ which has the scope to track Tor users., Last year the FBI exploited a zero-day flaw in the Firefox browser to identify Tor users for its investigation on child-pornography. The exploit was based on a Javascript that is a tiny Windows executable hidden in a variable dubbed “Magneto”. Magneto code looks up the victim’s Windows hostname and MAC address and sends the information back to the FBI Virginia server exposing the victims’s real IP address. The script sends back the data with a standard HTTP web request outside the Tor Network., , The security expert and exploit developer Vlad Tsyrklevich analyzed the JavaScript code’s payload noting that it connects to a server to send back the user’s data., “Briefly, this payload connects to 65.222.202.54:80 and sends it an HTTP request that includes the host name (via gethostname()) and the MAC address of the local host (via calling SendARP on gethostbyname()->h_addr_list). After that it cleans up the state and appears to deliberately crash.“, The code is considered the first sample captured in the wild of the FBI’s “computer and internet protocol address verifier,” aka CIPAV, the law enforcement spyware first reported by WIRED in 2007., Recently German broadcaster ARD reported that NSA experts were monitoring two Tor directory servers in Germany to de-anonymize IP addressed of Tor users using them., What’s about Russians?, Russia’s Interior Ministry has posted a tender to recruit companies and organization which are interested to “study the possibility of obtaining technical information about users (user equipment) TOR anonymous network”., We will never know why these researchers have cancelled their participation to the BlackHat, but the unique certainty is that government are spending a huge effort to track users on anonymizing network and probably they have exploited and are exploiting zero-day flaws in these systems., Pierluigi Paganini, Security Affairs – (Tor, hacking) |
2353_37313 | Digital life and real existence increasingly overlap, cyber weapons are proof of that a threat originating from cyberspace can cause real and tangible damage as the loss of human lives., The BBC published an article based on the revelations of a North Korean defector, an alleged member of the dreaded elite cyber army established by the Government in Pyongyang., North Korea holds an impressive army of cyber warriors, with over 6,000 sophisticated professionals. According to the claims of people who have escaped to South Korea, their main target is none other than Western infrastructure of critical value. The cyber army is trained and operates in an isolated county called Bureau 121., “When it comes to cyber-attacks, few groups are as notorious as North Korea’s Bureau 121, which has operated since the late nineties. Most security researchers agree that the group operates out of China. Specifically, in the basement of a restaurant, rated highly on TripAdvisor for its tremendous Korean food.” reported the BBC., North Korea has the highest percentage of military personnel in relation to population, it has approximately 40 enlisted soldiers per 1000 people with a considerable impact on the budget of the country., In 2013, a defector declared that North Korea was increasing its cyber warfare unit to staff 3,000 people and it was massive training its young prodigies to become professional hackers., , Last year, new revelations on the cyber capabilities of North Korea confirmed that the government of Pyongyang doubled the number of the units of its cyber army. According a report issued by the news agency the number of cyber warriors of the North Korea now is 5,900 and the cyber army has also established overseas bases for hacking attacks., “The communist country operates a hacking unit under its General Bureau of Reconnaissance, which is home to some 1,200 professional hackers,” a military source was quoted as saying., The BBC confirmed the amazing investment of the North Korea that wants to demonstrate its cyber capabilities to the rest of the world. Prof Kim Heung-Kwang, which has regular contact with key figures within the country with a deep knowledge of the military cyber operation run by the Government provided the following information to the BBC:, “The size of the cyber-attack agency has increased significantly, and now has approximately 6,000 people,” he said. “He estimated that between 10% to 20% of the regime’s military budget is being spent on online operations.” “The reason North Korea has been harassing other countries is to demonstrate that North Korea has cyber war capacity,” “Their cyber-attacks could have similar impacts as military attacks, killing people and destroying cities.”, Professor Kim explicitly refers to a new generation of government-built malware like a Stuxnet that could be used to hit critical infrastructure of any government., “A Stuxnet-style attack designed to destroy a city has been prepared by North Korea and is a feasible threat,” Prof Kim said., According Intelligence agencies South Korean hackers are responsible for numerous cyber attacks worldwide, including the clamorous Sony hack and a targeted offensive on South Korea Hydro and Nuclear Power Plant., “Although the nuclear plant was not compromised by the attack, if the computer system controlling the nuclear reactor was compromised, the consequences could be unimaginably severe and cause extensive casualties,” Prof Kim said., Kim invited all the country to collect evidence of North Korea’s cyber terrorism and report them to the UN Human Rights Council and other UN agencies., “If North Korea continues to cause damage in this way, an organisation such as Icann should ban North Korea.” said Kim “The international community needs to pay attention to North Korea’s attempts to destroy the internet.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – North Korea, cyber weapons) |
2541_38643 | GamaPoS is the name of the last PoS malware used by criminal crews to steal credit card data from the memory of payment systems. Security experts at Trend Micro discovered which discovered the GamaPoS malware explained that it is distributed by a large botnet known as Andromeda, which has been around since 2011., “We discovered GamaPoS, a new breed of point-of-sale (PoS) threat currently spreading across the United States and Canada through the Andromeda botnet .” states Trend Micro in a blog post., The experts found systems infected in the US and Canada, the malware that targets Windows systems is written in Microsoft’s., , NET. Researchers explained that the choice of .Net is unusual for RAM scraping PoS malware., The experts noticed that hackers have chosen to spread the malware through a botnet instead by stealing or guessing remote access credentials in response to countermeasures implemented by many retailers. Many organizations, in fact, have improved the security of their systems protecting internal resources from remote attacks., Bad actors have used a botnet in order to infect machines worldwide, including machines inside the trusted internal networks of target organizations., Trend Micro reported that the attacks start with spam messages containing malicious emails purporting to include PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) compliance documents or software updates necessary to protect systems from the recently discovered MalumPs malware. The attachments contain malicious macros that install the backdoor on the infected PC that is used to serve the GamaPoS., “This means that it launches a spam campaign to distribute Andromeda backdoors, infects systems with PoS malware, and hopes to catch target PoS systems out of sheer volume. Rough estimates show us that GamaPOS may have only hit 3.8% of those affected by Andromeda.” continues the post., The experts also discovered that threat actors used the backdoor to download tools that can be used to to manually hack other systems from the networks of affected organizations and make lateral movements ., The experts detected infected systems in a number of industries, including home health care, online retail and consumer electronics., GamaPoS targets a range of cards, including Visa and Discover, their users are exposed to the risk of hack., “While the evaluated example does not do Luhn validation, GamaPoS does manually filter the data by evaluating the first few numbers of the scraped data., Finally, it would attempt to upload the collected data via the command-and-control server that has been selected during initial execution.” states the post., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – GamaPoS PoS malware, cybercrime) |
4215_50980 | Recently the European law enforcement agency EUROPOL announced the constitution of a cyber unit focused on fighting the online terrorist propaganda. The Agency now announced to have processed 1677 media content and social media accounts in 6 languages because containing terrorist and violent extremist propaganda., “1 677 media content and social media accounts in 6 languages containing terrorist and violent extremist propaganda have been processed for the purpose of referral. The content was hosted by 35 social media and online service providers,” Europol statement reads., The online terrorist propaganda was hosted by 35 social media and online service providers., , This is a very important operation against the online terrorist propaganda coordinated by the Europol, which involved experts from the Internet Referral Units (IRUs) from France, Germany, Slovenia and the United Kingdom., This is the first operation conducted by the Europol Internet Referral Unit that coordinated the efforts of IRUs to remove the online terrorist propaganda shared radical groups and sympathizers., The Europol Internet Referral Unit included cyber security specialists, analysts, translators and of course, The operation lasted 48-hours, the groups targeted accounts used by terrorist groups to “radicalise, recruit, direct terrorist activity and glorify their atrocities”., The announcement published by the Europol highlights that the removal of the extremist online content was a voluntary activity by the service providers, which were concerned by the threat represented by terrorist organizations. The service providers involved in the operation taken in reference to their own terms and conditions that were clearly violated by the online terrorist propaganda., The EU IRU was launched in July 2015, below the main tasks carried on by its experts:, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Europol, online terrorist propaganda) |
7451_78298 | US Postal Service has patched a critical bug that allowed anyone who has an account at usps.com to view and modify account details for other users, some 60 million users were affected., The news was first reported by the popular investigator Brian Krebs who was contacted by a researcher who discovered the issue., The researchers, who asked to remain anonymous, reported the flaw to the USPS more than a year ago, but the company ignored him. After the public disclosure of the issue, USPS fixed the issue., The problem resides in the USPS Informed Visibility API designed to to let businesses, advertisers and other bulk mail senders “make better business decisions by providing them with access to near real-time tracking data” about mail campaigns and packages., “In addition to exposing near real-time data about packages and mail being sent by USPS commercial customers, the flaw let any logged-in usps.com user query the system for account details belonging to any other users, such as email address, username, user ID, account number, street address, phone number, authorized users, mailing campaign data and other information.” reads the post on KrebsonSecurity blog., “Many of the API’s features accepted “wildcard” search parameters, meaning they could be made to return all records for a given data set without the need to search for specific terms.”, The researcher discovered that using the API to search for one specific data element (i.e. an address) it was possible to retrieve multiple accounts that shared the data., “For example, a search on the email addresses for readers who volunteered to help with this research turned up multiple accounts when those users had more than one user signed up at the same physical address.” continues Krebs., “This is not good,” said one anonymous reader who volunteered to help with this research, after viewing a cut-and-paste of his USPS account details looked up via his email address. “Especially since we moved due to being threatened by a neighbor.”, , USPS implemented a validation step to prevent unauthorized changes with some specific data fields., When a user attempt to modify the email address associated with a specific USPS account via the API it is prompted a confirmation message sent to the email address tied to that account., The good news is that it seems that API doesn’t expose USPS account passwords., “The API at issue resides here; a copy of the API prior to its modification on Nov. 20 by the USPS is available here as a text file.” continues Krebs., Such kind of flaws is very dangerous, spammers could abuse them to several malicious purposes, including phishing campaigns., Krebs also pointed out that a vulnerability assessment of Informed Visibility was published in October 2018 by the USPS’s Office of Inspector General (OIG)., Auditors discovered several authentication and encryption flaws that evidently were underestimated., “The USPS told the OIG it had addressed the authentication problems raised in the audit report, which appear to have been related to how data was encrypted in transit.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Hacking, US Postal Service) |
7066_75469 | The peculiarity of this malspam campaign is the unusual use of a Microsoft Office Publisher file to infect victims’ systems., Experts noticed an anomalous spike in the number of emails with a Microsoft Office Publisher file (a .pub attachment) and the subject line, “Payment Advice,” that was sent to domains belonging to banks., This campaign is very small but appears to be very focused on banks., The spam messages contained URLs that downloaded FlawedAmmyy remote-access trojan (RAT), a well-known backdoor., Another interesting aspect of the campaign is that It was powered by the Necurs botnet., “This campaign was unusual in the use of .pub files. It also appeared to originate from the Necurs botnet, a notorious botnet responsible for much mass malware distribution in the past,” reads the analysis published by Trustwave., “Unlike previous mass campaigns, this campaign was small and, interestingly, all of the To: addresses we saw targeted were domains belonging to banks, indicating a desire for the attackers to get a foothold within banks with the FlawedAmmyy RAT.”, , When the victims open the pub file, they are prompted to “Enable Macros,” earlier versions of Microsoft Publisher may display instructions to “Enable Editing” and “Enable Content”, When manually opening the Visual Basic Editor (VBA Editor) in Microsoft Publisher and clicking “ThisDocument” in Project Explorer, the VBScript executes a weaponized archive containing the RAT., “The macro script is triggered with the function Document_Open(). As the name implies, when the file is opened, the script will access a URL and execute a downloaded file.” continues the analysis., The malicious code leverages control objects in forms to hide the URL from which It downloads the RAT, the URL is stored in the Tag Property., , “By the time we examined the sample, the URL was not accessible anymore, but a little further research indicated this URL was used for downloading a self-extracting archive, which contained the FlawedAmmyy RAT,” researchers said., In July, Proofpoint uncovered another massive malspam campaign delivering the FlawedAmmyy RAT that was leveraging emails with weaponized PDF documents containing malicious SettingContent-ms files., The campaign was attributed to the financially motivated cybercriminal group TA505., “this campaign was unusual in the use of .pub files. It also appeared to originate from the Necurs botnet, a notorious botnet responsible for much mass malware distribution in the past (see here and here).” concludes Trustwave., “Unlike previous mass campaigns, this campaign was small and, interestingly, all of the To: addresses we saw targeted were domains belonging to banks, indicating a desire for the attackers to get a foothold within banks with the FlawedAmmyy RAT.” , Technical details, including the IoCs, are reported in the analysis published by the experts., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Malspam, Publisher) |
7015_75058 | The US cloud computing company Salesforce is warning marketing customers of a data leakage caused by an API error. The incident could potentially affect a large number of companies, including Aldo, Dunkin Donuts, GE, HauteLook, Nestle Waters, and Sony., The error was in production between June 4 to July 18, and potentially affected users of two modules within the broader Marketing Cloud offering, the Email Studio and Predictive Intelligence solutions., “On July 18, we became aware of an issue that impacted a subset of Marketing Cloud customers using Marketing Cloud Email Studio and Predictive Intelligence.” reads the notice published by Salesforce., “We resolved the issue on that same day, July 18. Customers who may have been impacted were notified. For additional details, please see the Email Studio and Predictive Intelligence REST API Issue article here: , The news was first reported by BankInfoSecurity that obtained a copy of the alert distributed by the company via email on Thursday., Salesforce states that the error involved the company’s REST application programming interface., “During a Marketing Cloud release between June 4, 2018, and July 7, a code change was introduced that, in rare cases, could have caused REST API calls to retrieve or write data from one customer’s account to another inadvertently,” reads the alert issued by Salesforce and published by BankInfoSecurity., “Where the issue occurred, the API call may have failed and generated an error message rather than writing or modifying data.” , The company also warns that some customers may have had their data corrupted, it has also posted a knowledge article on the issue., The bad news for the customers of the company. is that at the time it is not able to say if data was altered or is attackers maliciously tampered with., “We have no evidence of malicious behavior associated with this issue,” a Salesforce spokesman told ISMG., “We are unable to confirm if your data was viewed or modified by another customer,” Salesforce explained in its alert, noting that it was notifying all customers just to be on the safe side. “While Salesforce continues to conduct additional quality checks and testing in relation to this issue, we recommend that you monitor and review your data carefully to ensure the accuracy of your account.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Salesforce, data leak) |
4387_52443 | Hillary Clinton is over in the storm for the violation of its private email server, even Trump has used the case to attack the rival., The irony of fate, now we are here discussing because also Trump’s staff has some problems with his email servers. According to the security researcher Kevin Beaumont, the Trump Organization’s mail servers run on Microsoft Windows Server 2003 version with Internet Information Server 6 that is no more supported by the company. The researchers also discovered that servers are configured with minimal security., What does it mean?, Simple, they are an easy target of hackers that can access to the organization’s e-mails servers., Quick update on Trump corp email servers – all internet accessible, single factor auth, no MDM, Win2003, no security patching. pic.twitter.com/nIMTa9UmdL, — Kevin Beaumont (@GossiTheDog) 17 ottobre 2016, , Beaumont also discovered the Organization’s Web email access page, he explained that until yesterday morning, the Trump Organization allowed Outlook Web Access logins from webmail.trumporg.com., , According to Sean Gallagher of Ars, the e-mail access page webmail.trumporg.com displays the header for Microsoft Exchange Outlook Web Access (OWA). The analysis of the page HTML source code reveals that site is using an outdated application i.e. March 2015 build of Microsoft Exchange 2007 (SP3 RU16), which is a version known to be affected by many security issues. The login page reveals that the webmail site was running Microsoft Exchange 2007., , Beaumont pointed out that the email service doesn’t use two-factor authentication., Below the comment sent via email by a spokesperson for the Trump Organization to the Motherboard website, he seems to downplay the problem., “The Trump Organization deploys best in class firewall and anti-vulnerability technology with constant 24/7 monitoring. Our infrastructure is vast and leverages multiple platforms which are consistently monitored and upgraded using current cyber security best practices.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – e-mail servers, cyber security) |
2285_36786 | In a recent post, I talked about attacks targeting SCADA systems will increase, and our ports are among critical infrastructure that makes large use of such systems., Let’s consider that “almost 90% of the world’s goods are shipped on boats”, and I am sure that not everyone realizes that. These boats bring us our clothes, our electronics, food, etc., etc., Ports have a crucial role and related activities in our society., A newsletter provided by the maritime cybersecurity consulting firm CyberKeel includes some scaring statists, 37% of maritime companies using windows web servers that aren’t patched, leaving one-third vulnerable to denial of service attacks and unauthorized remote access., Do you remember Heartbleed, the announced in 2014? This vulnerability considered by many as “the worst vulnerability ever discovered”, counting that maritime company don’t patch their systems like they should do remaining them vulnerable to several attacks, including the popular Heartbleed that could expose customer data, the goods physical location and much more., Even if one of the companies in the maritime industry falls victim of a cyber attack, unfortunately, there is no interest in disclosing them since it will generate bad publicity., “The potential consequences of even a minimal disruption of the flow of goods in U.S. ports would be high. … Shelves at grocery stores and gas tanks at service stations would run empty.” was reported in report titled “maritime cybersecurity from Brookings explained” published in a 2013., CyberKeel co-founder Lars Jensen explained that “The thing that started to scare us a little bit was that some of things … where we said, ‘This is clearly Hollywood-scenario stuff’ had already happened.”, But the public didn’t know about these incidents… but there is more, in 2014 a U.S port ( it wasn’t disclosed which) had a seven-hour disruption in their GPS signal, affecting their operations., GPS is used in port cranes to define the crane’s position and to know to where the containers should move, without the GPS for seven hours, works were crippled. But the scariest part is that the GPS is used in navigation, so if someone is jamming the GPS signals, making the boat lost, they can perhaps ask for a ransom to unblock the GPS signals., , Another worrying incident occurred in 2012 when a malware was deployed in about three-quarters of Saudi Aramco’s files “across tens of thousands of PCs”., The attacked showed an American flag in the infects machine’s screen. The company was able to mitigate the attack but since we are talking about an Oil company, this means that if the impact was bigger, it would affect the maritime shipping, affecting hugely the company., “The threat is very real,”, “These intrusions and attacks are taking place every minute and every second of every day.” said Rear Adm. Marshall Lytle, the assistant commandant responsible for U.S. Coast Guard Cyber Command., Vice Adm. Charles Michel, talked about some of the Coast Guard’s plans for cybersecurity:, “Probably the most important part of the Coast Guard’s Cyber Strategy is in its key organizing principle: The strategy is all about embracing a policy framework that will allow our enterprise to begin to tackle these challenges.”, Cyber-security must be a pillar of every sector in today society, we must consider seriously warning like the ones provided in these post to avoid major problems in the future., About the Authors, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – maritime industry, cyber security) |
2963_41631 | The US Senate voted overwhelmingly to pass a version of the Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA), a bill that has been debated for a long because it will authorize government pervasive monitoring of citizens., Many politicians, tech giants, privacy advocates, and civil liberties groups are expressing their disappointment and consternation to the decision of the US Senate. The CISA bill passed with a final vote of 74 to 21, it requires companies to share information about potential threats with the government., , The exponents of the senate that voted the bill consider it a necessary a measure against the numerous data breaches suffered by the US companies, including Sony Pictures, JP Morgan Chase, Anthem and the Office of Personnel Management., The CISA is severely criticized because it will only advantage the Government Agencies to collect information about users, data that will be collected by the Department of Homeland Security and shared with the FBI and NSA., The privacy advocates and part of the security industry believe that the CISA bill doesn’t address the problems that caused the long series of data breaches., We’ll name the names of people who voted in favor afterwards. A vote for #CISA is a vote against the internet. — Edward Snowden (@Snowden) 27 Ottobre 2015, , “The bill is fundamentally flawed due to its broad immunity clauses, vague definitions, and aggressive spying authorities. The bill now moves to a conference committee despite its inability to address problems that caused recent highly publicized computer data breaches, like unencrypted files, poor computer architecture, un-updated servers, and employees (or contractors) clicking malware links.” states the EFF disappointing as CISA Passes Senate., The conference committee between the House of Representatives and the Senate will determine the bill’s final language, but experts are skeptical about the possibility to modify it to address the real cybersecurity problems in a correct way., The Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act is considered the reincarnation in a new guise of the CISPA that passed in the United States House of Representatives on April 18, 2013,but has been blocked by the Senate., While the CISPA was hampered by the Obama administration due to privacy concerns, the CISA has received the consensus of the President., “The passage of CISA reflects the misunderstanding many lawmakers have about technology and security,” continues the EFF. “With security breaches like T-mobile, Target, and OPM becoming the norm, Congress knows it needs to do something about cybersecurity. It chose to do the wrong thing. EFF will continue to fight against the bill by urging the conference committee to incorporate pro-privacy language.”, CISA requests sharing of “cyber threat indicators,” but doesn’t address privacy issues., The Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore) is one of the opponents of the CISA bill that he considers “flawed” and just “feel-good legislation.”He warned about the abuses that could result from the application of the CISA., “The fight to secure Americans’ private, personal data has just begun,” said Wyden. “Today’s vote is simply an early, flawed step in what is sure to be a long debate over how the U.S. can best defend itself against cyber threats.”, Prior to the final vote, the principal IT companies, including Apple, Google and Microsoft, also expressed their privacy concerns over the CISA and its request to share sensitive customer data to the US Agencies., “We don’t support the current CISA proposal. The trust of our customers means everything to us and we don’t believe security should come at the expense of their privacy.” said an Apple spokesperson before the final vote., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – CISA Bill, law) |
6818_73576 | The Syscoin clients allow users to mine Syscoin cryptocurrency or manage Syscoin funds., , The other versions in the v3.0.4.1 release were not replaced, this means that Mac and Linux clients were not replaced by the hackers., The tainted version of the Syscoin Windows client contained the Arkei data stealer (aka Trojan:Win32/Feury.B!cl), a malicious code used to steal passwords and wallet private keys., The Syscoin development team is warning users downloaded the Syscoin Windows client version 3.0.4.1 between June 09, 2018 10:14 PM UTC and June 13, 2018 10:23 PM UTC that their machines might be infected., “The Syscoin developers found that a malicious, unsigned copy of the Windows Syscoin 3.0.4.1 installer was made available via the Syscoin Github release page on June 9th, 2018 due to a compromised GitHub account. This installer contained malicious code. (Trojan:Win32/Feury.B!cl)” reads the security notice published by the development team., “The virustotal scan of the malicious file named “re.exe” that is saved to the local temp folder (C:\Users\user\AppData\Local\Temp) upon running the fake installer: The Syscoin team discovered the security breach after receiving a warning from users that Windows Defender SmartScreen, AVG and Kaspersky was marking downloads of the Syscoin Windows client as a virus., The affected executables are:, Syscoin team removed the malicious files and issued a security notice that includes the instructions to determine the installation date:, If the modified/installation date is between June 9th, 2018, and June 13th, 2018, the team suggests users taking the following actions:, The Syscoin team announced additional measures to protect its users and their assets such the usage of two-factor authentication (2FA) for its developers and routine (file signature) checks of the files available for download to detect any modification of the repository., “We are working with Github to improve the release page experience to provide information regarding the modifying account as well as the last modification date of a release. This would allow users to detect if certain binaries were updated for potentially malicious purposes.” concludes the notice., “All individuals responsible for Github releases should enable 2FA and ensure they have deterministic signature hashes for files on a regular basis.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Syscoin Windows client, cryptocurrency) |
290_7590 | We have discussed several time of the interference of governments inside our ordinary life, they try to control our network, to spy on our social network profiles, to access silently to our gaming console and every thing surround us., The nightmare experienced by the protagonist of the movie “Enemy of the State” is now a reality, we live in the digital era and every device around us could be used to track our habits, to spy on our movements., Government agencies have massively invested in programs to “violate” our privacy in the name of national security, world is changed from 11/9 and the risk of a new dramatic cyber attack is high., The government supervision is a must to grant homeland security and it’s normal the law enforcement and other secret agencies are working to increase the overall control on possible threats to our security., Among appliances that monitor our traffic and spiders that collect and correlate information on the network, what has invented by DARPA researchers to hack our networks?, Apparently it look like a surge protector, but it’s a powerful tool to infiltrate our networks allowing remote access to our machines. The new devices is called the Power Pwn, it’s the evolution of the devices that in the previous months has been presented as a little White Box to hack every network., , It’s an all in one solution that contains all necessary hacking tools used by security experts and pen-testerto exploit a network, the devices is also equipped with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth adapters and give the opportunity to an attacker to control it via the cellular network thanks to a “text-to-bash” feature that lets hacker to send commands to the device using SMS messages., , The device make possible to conduct a full and accurate penetration test that’s way the CEO of Pwnie Express, Dave Porcello, said:, It’s a device “you can just plug in and do a full-scale penetration test from start to finish,” Porcello says. “The enterprise can use stuff like this to do testing more often and more cheaply than they’re doing it right now.”, Following the full list of feature of the tool:, The device has a reasonable cost (e.g. it is available a version sold al 295$) and it can be used by corporates to conduct security audit also remotely, but what is interesting is that the main customers of the system work for federal government, around 90%., Power Pwn can be used to launch remotely-activated Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and Ethernet attacks searching for network weaknesses, it’s fully manageable via a Web interface, accessible through the unit’s built-in 3G radio, or directly to the device via text message … perform a network analysis has never been easier., But why I have mentioned DARPA in the beginning of the article?, Because the Power Pwn was developed with funds established by Darpa program called Cyber Fast Track that promotes and help the development of a new generation of cyber-defense tools., “It’s kind of taking the tools that the hackers are using and putting them in the hands of the people that need to defend against the hackers,” Porcello says., The Power Pwn is currently available for pre-order, but its estimated ship date is September 30, 2012., Similar tools certainly facilitate the task of those who oversee the security of networks, with similar devices is easier to continuously test the state of the network, however, such devices can also be used to attack networks. There are countless variations on the theme and the availability of low cost embedded devices makes it possible to create platforms of every shape and size for the intrusion into networks of others. The cyber espionage is largely diffused practiced, especially against small and medium business companies. It’s in this area that is difficult to fight cyber threats due reduced budged for security and in the same sector the effect of cyber attacks are really serious., The availability of such devices has to demonstrate us how technology can be invasive in our daily lives … in the future It could be possible to attack our home from the TV or our refrigerator … are we ready to prevent this?, Pierluigi Paganini |
411_10624 | Cyber security is considered a primary target for every governments, the increase of cyber criminal activities, state-sponsored operations and the raise of hacktivism requires the use of additional resources to counteract these phenomena., The European Commission has announced an increase to planned cyber security budget by 14% through 2020, a figure considered not sufficient by security experts to face with increasing cyber threats., The commission has allocated €350 million for cyber security research in the period 2007-2013 and established a further investment of €50 million to finance the activities until 2020. The total amount of money allocated will be not sufficient to cover the needs in cyber security area, it must be considered also that it will be reserved to realize different ambitious and costly projects., The Commission alerts on the products of cybercriminals activities, malware and botnets are infecting more than a million people every day, the worldwide cost of cybercrime is estimated at over €750 billion annually in wasted time, lost business opportunities and the expense of fixing problems., The reports states:, “In addition to developing wider cybersecurity strategies for Europe, the European Commission takes concrete actions to tackle cyber security risks (see MEMO/11/842 and MEMO/10/597), and pools resources with national governments, industry, universities and NGOs, to develop innovative technologies to improve cybersecurity.”, Following a short list of the project, The director of security research and communication at TrendMicro Rik Ferguson defined “paltry” the investment, not sufficient to prevent cyber threats, the manager declared:, “the commercial security industry is already pooling resources with not-for-profit organizations, and government has made much of the risk from cybercrime. It’s time to make the commensurate investment.”, The need for cyber security can only increase in the coming years due to the intensification of cyber threats, first individual nations and after supranational entities such as the European community must necessarily allocate more resources to deal with the menaces., Governments and private businesses are aware of risks connected to cyber attack and know the consequences of an offensive against critical infrastructures of a country but different is the perception of common people in EU that totally ignore concept such as cyber security and cyber warfare., According Special Eurobarometer 390-CYBER SECURITY-REPORT published on July 2012 a large part of internet users across the EU isn’t confident about its ability to use the internet for things like online banking or buying things online. The report demonstrated that EU citizens have no idea of security best practices, most EU citizens say they have seen or heard something about cybercrime in the last 12 months, most commonly from television, however, the majority do not feel very or at all well informed about the risks of cybercrime., , The report also states:, “More than a third of internet users across the EU say they have received a scam email, and other types of cybercrime have been experienced by a substantial number (albeit a minority) of internet users in the EU, including online fraud and identity theft. Internet users express high levels of concern about cyber security. The majority agree that the risk of becoming a victim of cybercrime has increased in the past year; that they are concerned that their online personal information is not kept secure by websites; and that they are concerned that information is not kept secure by public authorities. In addition, around half of respondents or more say they are concerned about experiencing various types of cybercrime, with the highest levels of concern expressed over identity theft.”, The scenarios is really concerning in my opinion, the figures discussed and allocated will not be enough to cover expenses related to the development of a European Community strategy, however I find support on research on Cyber security an extremely positive issues such as the fact that cyber security should be discussed at an international level to search for a point of agreement to ensure security of cyber space., Pierluigi Paganini, |
3684_46855 | This week I saw the trailer for new the Oliver Stone’s film on the Snowden‘s Story. Oliver Stone is one of my favorite filmmakers, it is the author of jewels like Scarface, JFK, and Platoon., , His last opera focus on the story of the popular whistleblower that revealed to the world the US surveillance machine., The film is the film adaptation of book “Snowden, the inside story of the world’s most wanted man”published by the Guardian journalist Luke Harding., The movie ‘‘Snowden’’ will be released on September 16th, 2016, but I desire to share with you the trailer which is very intriguing. Give a look at the scene of the Snowden’s Rubik’s Speed Cube., The scene showed Edward walking along with a Rubik’s Speed Cube, he removed the black rectangles on the sides of the center tile, then he used the cube to exfiltrate the data and bypass security measures adopted by the NSA. A curiosity, Snowden used a Rubik’s Cube to identify himself to Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald., Enjoy the trailer of the Snowden movie., , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Oliver Stone Snowden Film) |
54_890 | This 2011 was the year of the consecration of cyber weapons from a mediatic point of view. Awareness of the threat has been shared by all the major states of the world. This weapons could be been used in cyber attacks, claiming victims from cyberspace to the real world. Names like Stuxnet and Duqu have become familiar, malware projects known to experts in the field and that are considered case studies for specialists. Who has designed these deadly weapons? Which are the investments behind their production and what the real goals? Certainly, at least in the case of Stuxnet, we have found that malware had the objective of the SCADA system deployed inIranian atomic plants. Exactly Iran, more than any other nation is doing to discuss cyber security experts. Country considered at the forefront in cyber space, but that is confronting with many internal economic and policies difficulties and that is scaring the larger of the planet. So here we are talking about “Iran Cyber Power” dangerous adversary to fear in the cyber space, where giants and dwarfs are indistinguishable, a place where there seems to be more equilibrium., In this post I would like to bring to your attention the intervention of Nima Bagheri, Security Researcher & CEO of Security U0vd, at Malcon in 2011 titled “Hiding & Rootkits Stuxnet 3.0 features as possible.” Personally I find it interesting because it opens the door to the scenarios we have predicted, regarding the possible evolution of cyber weapons as Stuxnet. The appearance of Duqu has raised innumerable theories about the degree of kinship with Stuxnet., , They share code components and modules that have been isolated and examined by the reseacher. Stuxnet is designed to attack SCADA systems, Duqu with information gathering purpose. But do you remember their innovative feature? The scalability! Be expected that these projects are works in progress and they will be improved with components developed to attack strategic well identified targets. But then which are the features that we believe may be present in future versions of these dreaded malware. Ask ourself this question well in advance is crucial to guide the research for the malware prevention., The researcher Nima Bagheri has tried to simulate the behavior of the malware that could be construed as Stuxnet 3.0.
First, those who are working on future malware will try to operate silently hiding from the main anti rootkit. To do this it is expected that the starting point is really a reverse engineerof the methods used by rootkit software front for the analysis of suspicious behavior.
“Attackers Could hide from anti-rootkit Any resorces manipulating the results of their scan”, Which are the main steps to follow?, Simple considerations based on complex jobs, I think this is the right spirit to face a changing and dangerous threat.
Thanks Nima Bagheri, References, |
6849_73832 | The Supreme Court of the United States ruled this week that law enforcement must obtain a search warrant before obtaining cell phone location information from mobile carriers or third-party services., “When the government tracks the location of a cell phone it achieves near perfect surveillance, as if it had attached an ankle monitor to the phone’s user,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in the 5-4 opinion.” reported The Wall Street Journal., “Unlike the nosy neighbor who keeps an eye on comings and goings,” he wrote, the signal towers and processing centers that track cellphone users “are ever alert, and their memory is nearly infallible,” making analog-era precedents prosecutors cited to justify such warrantless searches all but obsolete.”, , The decision aims at preventing surveillance activities operated by the government and protecting the privacy of the citizens under the Fourth Amendment., The Supreme Court ruled that a warrant is also needed to access location data stored by mobile carriers and similar companies, this data allows to monitor almost any activity of citizens., “While individuals regularly leave their vehicles, they compulsively carry cell phones with them all the time. A cell phone faithfully follows its owner beyond public thoroughfares and into private residences, doctor’s offices, political headquarters, and other potentially revealing locales.” continues Chief Justice John Roberts., “Critically, because location information is continually logged for all of the 400 million
devices in the United States – not just those belonging to persons who might happen to come under investigation – this newfound tracking capacity runs against everyone.” , Of course, the authorities can operate without a warrant when there are situations of danger for life of citizens or when handling national security issues., The ruling came in the wake of Timothy Carpenter v. US case filed in 2011, when the US police arrested members of a gang who committed armed robberies at several stores., Gang members confessed the group was led by Timothy Carpenter, a version that was verified by the Police obtaining a court order for Carpenter’s cell phone location information and verifying the presence of the suspect near the robberies., Carpenter was condemned to more than 100 years in prison, but lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union that represented him at the high court defined the decision “a truly historic vindication of privacy rights.”, The lawyers argued that a court order should not have been enough to obtain access to the mobile’s location data of the suspect, and a search warrant should have been obtained instead., The Supreme Court ruling was praised by privacy advocated because it aims at defending the privacy of the citizens against any abuse., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – location data, Supreme Court) |
6832_73684 | Yesterday, the Department of Justice announced that Schulte has been charged with 13 count indictment., In middle May, both The New York Times and The Washington Post, revealed the name of the alleged source of the Vault 7 leak, the man who passed the secret documents to Wikileaks. According to his LinkedIn profile, Schulte worked for the NSA for five months in 2010 as a systems engineer, after this experience, he joined the CIA as a software engineer and he left the CIA in November 2016., Schulte was identified a few days after WikiLeaks started leaking the precious dumps., Schulte was arrested for possession of child pornography, he was charged on three counts of receipt, possession and transportation of child pornography in August 2017., The man was released in September 2017, but in December he was arrested again for violating the conditions of his release., “SCHULTE, 29, of New York, New York, is charged with one count each of (i) illegal gathering of national defense information, (ii) illegal transmission of lawfully possessed national defense information, (iii) illegal transmission of unlawfully possessed national defense information, (iv) unauthorized access to a computer to obtain classified information, (v) theft of Government property, (vi) unauthorized access of a computer to obtain information from a Department or Agency of the United States, (vii) causing transmission of a harmful computer program, information, code, or command, (viii) making material false statements to representatives of the FBI, (ix) obstruction of justice, (x) receipt of child pornography, (xi) possession of child pornography, (xii) transportation of child pornography, and (xiii) copyright infringement. ” reads the press release published by the DoJ., According to the DoJ, Schulte used his access to CIA’s networks while working for the intelligence agency., “Joshua Schulte, a former employee of the CIA, allegedly used his access at the agency to transmit classified material to an outside organization,” said Geoffrey S. Berman, US Attorney for the Southern District of New York. “During the course of this investigation, federal agents also discovered alleged child pornography in Schulte’s New York City residence. We and our law enforcement partners are committed to protecting national security information and ensuring that those trusted to handle it honor their important responsibilities. Unlawful disclosure of classified intelligence can pose a grave threat to our national security, potentially endangering the safety of Americans.”, , Schulte always denied the accusations for being involved in Vault 7 data leak, he believes that the authorities suspected him due to the fact that he had left the CIA a few months before the beginning of the data leak., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Vault 7, CIA) |
7430_78128 | Group-IB experts discovered another large set of compromised payment cards details that was put on sale on Joker’s Stash, one of the most popular underground hubs of stolen card data, on Nov. 13. The new set of dumps, unauthorized digital copies of the information contained in magnetic stripe of a bank card, came with the payment details of 177,878 cards from Pakistani and the other international banks., On November 13, Group-IB Threat Intelligence system detected an abnormal spike in Pakistani banks’ data offered for sale on one of the card shops: a new set of dumps was uploaded to Joker’s Stash. The file was initially put on sale under the name PAKISTAN-WORLD-EU-MIX-03 (fresh skimmeD EU base): PAKISTAN/WORLD/EU TR1+TR2, uploaded 2018.11.13 (NON-REFUNDABLE BASE). Slightly later the name of the database with dumps was changed to «PAKISTAN-WORLD-EU-MIX-03 (fresh skimmeD EU base): PAKISTAN/WORLD/EU TR1+TR2, uploaded 2018.11.13 (time for refunds: 3 hours)»., Presumably, originally, the seller did not want to allow refunding purchased cards, but he later decided to give its potential buyers some time to test the reliability and value of data on sale., “Card dumps are usually obtained by using skimming devices and through Trojans infecting workstations connected to POS terminals. The large part of compromised card data is sold in specialized card shops, such as Joker’s Stash. Group-IB Threat Intelligence continuously detects and analyses data uploaded to card shops all over the world,” – said Dmitry Shestakov, Head of Group-IB сybercrime research unit., According to Group-IB’s annual Hi-Tech Crime Trends 2018 report, on average, from June 2017 to August 2018, 1.8 million were uploaded to card shops monthly. Group-IB’s records indicate that card dumps account for 62% of total sets of card data sold, which means that POS Trojans represent the major method of compromising credit cards and might have caused this particular leak., The total amount of dumps that went on sale on Nov. 13 was amounted to 177,878: there were 150,632dumps of Pakistani banks, 16,227 cards of other regions’ banks and 11,019 dumps of undefined banks., , The banks affected by this breach included major Pakistani financial organizations such as, Habib Bank, MCB Bank Limited, Allied Bank Limited and many others. Habib Bank was affected most by the breach: roughly 20% of cards (30,034) in the uploaded database was issued by this bank. It is also worth noting, that there were no card dumps of BankIslami up for sale this time., “What is interesting about this particular leak is that the database that went on sale hadn’t been announced prior either in the news, on card shop or even on forums on the dark net – comments Dmitry Shestakov. The market value of this database is estimated at $19.9 million. The sale price for these card dumps ranges from $17 to $160. However, it is very rare, that Pakistani banks’ cards come on sale on the dark net card shops. In the past six months it was the only big sale of Pakistani banks’ data.”, Prior to this data leak, Group-IB experts detected two consecutive Pakistani banks’ compromised cards uploads to Joker’s Stash. The first one occurred on Oct. 26, when new dump identified as “PAKISTAN-WORLD-EU-MIX-01” went on sale on Joker’s Stash card shop. This dump database had 10,467 payment cards details, 8,704 of which belonged to Pakistani banks, including BankIslami. The breach might have caused the compromise of BankIslami account holders that took place on Oct. 27. The set of dumps was valued at $1.1 million with sale price ranging from $35 to $150. Another set under the name «PAKISTAN-WORLD-EU-MIX-02 (fresh skimmeD EU base) : PAKISTAN/WORLD/EU TR1+TR2» was published on Joker’s Stash on Oct. 31. This time, the database had data on 11,795 cards issued by the leading Pakistani and other regions’ banks: 710 dumps from undefined banks and 1,031 dumps from the banks outside of Pakistan. No BankIslami cards dumps were published in the set., About the author Group-IB, Group-IB is one the world’s leading providers of solutions aimed at detection and prevention of cyber attacks, fraud exposure and protection of intellectual property on the Internet. GIB Threat Intelligence cyber threats data collection system has been named one of the best in class by Gartner, Forrester, and IDC., Group-IB’s technological leadership is built on company’s fifteen years of hands-on experience in cybercrime investigations all over the world and 55 000 hours of cyber security incident response accumulated in the largest forensic laboratory in Eastern Europe and a round-the-clock centre providing a rapid response to cyber incidents—CERT-GIB., Group-IB is a partner of INTERPOL, Europol, and a cybersecurity solutions provider, recommended by SWIFT and OSCE., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Dark Web, Pakistani banks) |
2946_41528 | According to the threat researcher Rodrigo Bijou (@rodrigobijou), Iranian malware authors are focusing their efforts on mobile RATs, in particular, malicious codes designed to compromise Android devices., The security experts confirmed that Iranian VXers have made Android a priority for their malware-based attacks, they are in fact preferring AndroRAT and DroidJack over other popular remote access trojans like DarkComet and njRAT. Both Android RATs could be easily hidden in “legitimate-looking apps” to trick victims into installing it on their devices., “The two RATs in particular, AndroRAT and DroidJack, are likely popular among hacking forum members due to the same reasons as njRAT – open access to download or purchase, strong community support, and ease of use.”, The researchers highlighted that threats like njRAT was widespread use for numerous criminal activities and Syrian surveillance campaigns, while XtremeRAT has been in campaigns against Israeli, Egyptian, and Saudi Arabian targets by multiple actors., According to statistics provided by IDC, Android is the most popular mobile OS in the Middle East and Africa, where more than 80 percent of mobile devices run the Google OS. In this context, it is normal that threat actors targeting the Android users in the users in the area., , , Android is the most popular mobile OS in the Middle East and Africa, where it runs on more than 80 percent of devices according to number crunchers at IDC. All variants of Android RATs implement a large number of features, to spy on victims and gain control over the device., It is quite common observing the offer of Android RATs that have the ability to intercept SMS messages, call logs, browser history, contacts, and sensitive data including the user credentials., Bijou have monitored underground crime forums in a six-month period discovering the propension on Android RATs., “Looking at the last six months of activity on prominent Iranian hacking forums, discussions are dominated by interest in RATs that target Android devices,” states an interesting analysis published by Rodrigo Bijou on RecordedFuture. “The sustained Iranian interest in the older AndroRAT, despite its age and declining chatter from other sources, could be due to the easy download access, including GitHub repositories, and available community support for deploying the malware.”, The graphic representation provided in the analysis is eloquent, there is a small interest in njRAT (aka Bladabindi) and DarkComet, meanwhile several discussion were related to AndroRAT and DroidJack., , “Today, users can still find multiple for-purchase sites for both tools from basic search engines. Recorded Future research found samples available for open download across multiple hacking forums as recently as September 2015. Samples were also found on open download sites, including forked versions on GitHub.” states RecordedFuture., Has explained in the analysis, despite DroidJack and AndroRAT represent a minority of total RAT activity, they are very popular due to the low level of technical skill needed and the existence of large communities in the principal hacking forums., “With a low level of technical skill needed, open availability, and strong community support on hacker forums, DroidJack and AndroRAT are likely to remain popular choices for threat actors seeking to take advantage of Middle Eastern mobile systems.”, Bijou has no doubts, Android RATs will become even more popular among threat actors targeting users in the Middle East and Africa., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Android RATs, cybercrime) |
1070_23023 | As highlighted in the blog post, modern handsets come with two separate processors, a general-purpose application processor that runs the main operating system and another component in charge of communications with the mobile telephony network. Modem processor is usually targeted by attackers because it always runs a proprietary operating system, and the presence of a backdoor makes possible to remotely surveillance activities., Kocialkowski has discovered that a Samsung’s IPC protocol runs in the background in the communications processor and allows the modem component to remotely the user’s phone storage. Samsung IPC protocol allows to read, write, and delete files implementing a class of requests (RFS commands) to execute remote I/O operations on the phone’s storage., “we discovered that the proprietary program running on the applications processor in charge of handling the communication protocol with the modem actually implements a backdoor that lets the modem perform remote file I/O operations on the file system. This program is shipped with the Samsung Galaxy devices and makes it possible for the modem to read, write, and delete files on the phone’s storage. On several phone models, this program runs with sufficient rights to access and modify the user’s personal data. A technical description of the issue, as well as the list of known affected devices is available at the Replicant wiki.” states the blog post., We cannot demonstrate that the backdoor was specifically designed, neither that it might have been placed there wrongly, but in both cases user’s privacy is at risk., Replicant has published a patch ‘0001-modem_if-Inject-and-intercept-RFS-I-O-messages-to-pe.patch‘ for your Samsung Smartphone, which replace the legitimate Samsung-RIL library., Kocialkowski also encourage Samsung Galaxy owners to appeal publicly to SamsungMobile for an explanation., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Samsung, mobile) |
1199_24932 | A new collection of documents leaked by Edward Snowden claims the NSA intercepted US-made routers bound for export and to implant backdoor in their circuits., The allegations have been published by the journalist Glenn Greenwald, which has recently published the book No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State on the topic based on the huge quantity of documents in the Snowden’s archive., The document dated June 2010 from the head of the NSA’s Access and Target Development department reveals that the Intelligence Agency either receives or intercepts servers, network appliances and other devices for foreign customers., An article published in The Guardian reports the NSA tampers with US-made internet routers deploying covertly implanting interception tools in US servers heading overseas., , It’s curious that US Intelligence many times has accused Chinese technology manufacturers to implant secret backdoor in their products, it was the case of Huawei, ZTE and Lenovo., “The agency then implants backdoor surveillance tools, repackages the devices with a factory seal and sends them on. The NSA thus gains access to entire networks and all their users. The document gleefully observes that some “SIGINT tradecraft… is very hands-on (literally!)”., Eventually, the implanted device connects back to the NSA. The report continues: “In one recent case, after several months a beacon implanted through supply-chain interdiction called back to the NSA covert infrastructure. This call back provided us access to further exploit the device and survey the network.”, It is quite possible that Chinese firms are implanting surveillance mechanisms in their network devices. But the US is certainly doing the same.” writes Glenn Greenwald., The report could have a serious impact on US companies which export technology, Greenwald argues that the NSA has arranged a smear campaign on Chinese competitors to capture its market for US manufactures and to deploy spy implants on a large scale., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – NSA, routers, surveillance) |
5789_63957 | On Friday, the British teenager Kane Gamble (18) from Coalville, Leicester, admitted in a British court to have attempted to hack into the computers of top US officials, including former CIA chief John Brennan., , Kane Gamble pleaded guilty to ten charges related to the attempted intrusions occurred between late 2015 and early 2016., Gamble pleaded guilty to eight charges of performing a function with intent to gain unauthorized access, and two charges of unauthorized acts with intent to compromise the operation of a computer., The teenager targeted the US Department of Justice and many other senior American security officials from his home in the East Midlands region of England., The list of targeted officials is long and includes James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence under President Obama’s administration and the deputy director of the FBI Jeh Johnson., The teenager was released on conditional bail ahead of sentencing on December 15., The man was suspected to be the member the dreaded hacking crews ‘Crackas With Attitude‘ that targeted the US officials between October 2015 and February 2016., In September 2016, U.S. authorities arrested two alleged members of the Crackas With Attitude group involved in dumping details of officials with the FBI and the DHS., In September 2017, one of the two men arrested has been sentenced to five years in federal prison., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Cracka, CIA Chief hack) |
2563_38788 | German researcher Stefan Esser, founder of security audit company SektionEins, has discovered a local privilege escalation (LPE) vulnerability in the Mac OS X operating system that affects OS X 10.10.x. Esser decided to take the full disclosure the vulnerability without previously notifying it to Apple, but it seems that the company was already aware of the flaw in the Mac OS X system because it was reported months ago by the a South Korean researcher known as “beist.”, , The flaw resides in a feature introduced by Apple to the dynamic linker “dyld” with the release of OS X 10.10, the vulnerability is related to the environment variable DYLD_PRINT_TO_FILE, which enables error logging to arbitrary files., “When this variable was added the usual safeguards that are required when adding support for new environment variables to the dynamic linker have not been used. Therefore it is possible to use this new feature even with SUID root binaries. This is dangerous, because it allows to open or create arbitrary files owned by the root user anywhere in the file system. Furthermore the opened log file is never closed and therefore its file descriptor is leaked into processes spawned by SUID binaries. This means child processes of SUID root processes can write to arbitrary files owned by the root user anywhere in the filesystem. This allows for easy privilege escalation in OS X 10.10.x.” Esser reported in a blog post., Esser has published technical details of the security flaw describing the way to exploit it to gain full privileges on the target system. The researcher also provided a full Proof of Concept Exploit that gives the executing user a local root shell., The problem for Mac OS X users is that Apple only fixed the vulnerability in the beta versions of OS X El Capitan 10.11, the fix for another version, including the current OS X 10.10.4 or the beta version of OS X 10.10.5. OS X 10.11, is expected to be released by October., Esser has revealed that the local privilege escalation flaw also affects jailbroken iPhones running iOS 8.x., , Apple users can wait for the fix or install SUIDGuard, a kernel extension that adds mitigations to protect SUID/SGID binaries., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Bartalex, macro) |
4513_53553 | Bad news for the UK carrier Three Mobile, cyber criminals have broken into a company database containing customer personal details, details of possibly six million customers exposed., The news was reported by many media outlets that cited the National Crime Agency (NCA) and the Three Mobile company., “Three Mobile cyber hack: six million customers’ private information at risk after employee login used to access database ” reports The Telegraph., According to The Telegraph, Three Mobile admitted that hackers have accessed its customer upgrade database by using an employee login., “In order to commit this type of upgrade handset fraud, the perpetrators used authorised logins to Three’s upgrade system.” said a company spokesman. , “This upgrade system does not include any customer payment, card information or bank account information,” the spokesman said., “Sources familiar with the incident told the Telegraph that the private information of two thirds of the company’s nine million customers could be at risk” continues The Telegraph., , Fortunately, payment data (i.e. Credit card data, bank account data) were not exposed, but the hackers did have access to customer names, addresses, phone numbers, and dates of birth., Investigators believe the hackers have broken into the Three Mobile database to find customers eligible for handset updates and then place orders on their behalf for the new smartphones that were redirected to them and then resold in a parallel market., This kind of scam is increasing, crooks exploit handset upgrades being ordered in order to steal the mobile devices while in transit., A Three Mobile spokesman confirmed a significant increase in attempted phone fraud over the past four weeks, adding that that increase also includes burglaries of Three retail stores., The NCA has already arrested three men, two on computer misuse allegations and one on suspicion of attempting to pervert the course of justice., “The investigation is ongoing and we have taken a number of steps to further strengthen our controls,” added the company spokesman., The Three Mobile data breach follows the Talk Talk occurred in October 2015 when the details of more than 150,000 customers were stolen including the bank account details of around 15,000., The company suffered a significant impact, it lost 95,000 subscribers as a result of the attack, which cost it £60million., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Three Mobile, data breach) |
2111_35431 | Security experts at Germany’s Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-Bund) and Yonathan Klijnsma reveals that at least 3,000 websites have been compromised by attackers exploiting a known vulnerability in the Slider Revolution (RevSlider) plugin. Once again, a WordPress plugin is used hack into a website, this flaw was fixed silently by the developmet team in February 2014, but the existence of the vulnerability came to light in September 2014, when it was exploited worldwide by criminal crews. Cyber criminals exploiting the flaw in RevSlider plugin to hijack thousands of websites running the vulnerable version., In December 2014, experts at Sucuri firm reported that more than 100,000 WordPress websites had been compromised and used to serve the SoakSoak malware., “Our analysis is showing impacts in the order of 100’s of thousands of WordPress specific websites. We cannot confirm the exact vector, but preliminary analysis is showing correlation with the Revslider vulnerability we reported a few months back.” reported Sucuri. “The impact seems to be affecting most hosts across the WordPress hosting spectrum. Quick breakdown of the decoding process is available via our PH, Returning to the present day, the RevSlider vulnerability is being exploited once again by bad actors that have been injecting malicious iframes on vulnerable websites in an effort to redirect visitors to domains hosting exploit kits., Yonathan Klijnsma detailed the attack chain in a blog post, the cyber criminals compromised the websites by exploiting a local file inclusion (LFI) vulnerability. The exploitation of the LFI flaw allows attackers to access server file system, then the attackers create a new administrator account, upload a malicious script and complete the attack by installing backdoors to files associated with other WordPress plugins., Investigation on one of the compromised sites shows the attackers performed the following steps:, Typically, attackers redirected victims to websites hosting the popular Fiesta exploit kit, but Klijnsma explains that they also used the Angler exploit kit for the malicious campaign., The exploit kits are used several strain of malware, including the popualr Cryptowall 3.0 ransomware, financial trojans, and ad fraud malware., “It just depends who rents ‘loads’ on these instances,” explained Klijnsma., The attackers hosted the exploit kits through domains that are all hosted at dynamic DNS providers and have all been set to a short Timt To Live., The CERT-Bund collected precious information to profile the hacking campaign, over half of the compromised websites are .com and the majority of them is hosted in the United States. The campaign also involved websites in the Netherlands, Germany, France, Spain, the United Kingdom, Italy, Poland, Canada and Singapore., , Klijnsma suggests to administrators whose websites have been compromised to remove all accounts and create new ones with new passwords because the attackers have gained administrative access to the site compromising all the accounts the moment of the attack., “Check all PHP files for modifications by comparing them to files from the official WordPress website (or own local copies if you are 100% sure they are unaffected). Any modified files should be replaced with the normal ones,” suggested Klijnsma ., As mitigation action, it is suggested to update the RevSlider plugin to the latest version. Be careful because many themes include the popular plugin, this means that your website could be vulnerable without your knowledge, in this case use the patch for RevSlider available on the official WordPress website., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – RevSlider, WordPress), |
2993_41842 | , , , Once again thank you!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Newsletter, SecurityAffairs) |
1383_27336 | Security experts have detected a new Remote Administration Trojan dubbed IcoScript which is controlled by bad actors through Yahoo Mail and is able to elude detection systems by using seemingly benign domains for C&C., A researcher at the German security firm G-Data, Paul Rascagnères, has published an interesting analysis of the Remote Administration Trojan on Virus Bulletin, the malware syphons data from victims and transmits it connecting to a remote server over a specific port., , “This sample is a classic remote administration tool (RAT) but it has a particular way of communicating with its control server. It is very modular and it abuses popular web platforms (like Yahoo andGmail) for command and control communication.” reports the blog post., The instance of IcoScript analyzed by experts at G-Data was using a Yahoo Mail account to receive commands from the C&C, the malicious code is controlled by sending specially crafted emails containing coded instructions., “The attackers can use hundreds of different email accounts with names that are very similar to those of real users. It is very difficult to distinguish fake accounts from real ones.” “The step G is a crucial one. In addition to exfiltrating data, the malware checks available email in the mailbox (thanks to step E) and looks for the string pattern <<<<<<<< … >>>>>>>>. ” states the report., The experts added that the IcoScript RAT, that is going undetected since 2012, could be easily modified to use as communication channel also other popular webmail providers, including Gmail., “We imagine that the author(s) can also use social media platforms such as Facebook and LinkedIn.” said the researcher., The bad actors behind the IcoScript have chosen this mode to communicate with C&C because access to webmail services doesn’t trigger suspects for security teams of targeted organizations., IcoScript uses Component Object Model to implement a communication channel on Windows systems, it makes HTTP requests for remote services through Internet Explorer, in case the targeted system uses a proxy (with authentication), the RAT is able to reuse the proxy token stored in the user session., As explained by the researcher bad actors could improve IcoScript diversifying the sources of their command can control, making possible the malware accepting commands sent via any number of legitimate webmail providers, could storage services and social networking sites., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – IcoScript, RAT) |
3846_48114 | A team of experts from the UK security firm Pen Test Partners has demonstrated that it is possible to remotely control some feature of the popular SUV Mitsubishi Outlander plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV)., The hackers have found a number of vulnerabilities that affects the mobile applications designed to control some features of the Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV. Differently from other cars, the Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV allows mobile applications (Android and iOS) to control some features of the vehicles only through a Wi-Fi connection., “What’s really unusual is the method of connecting the mobile app to the car. Most remote control apps for locating the car, flashing the headlights, locking it remotely etc. work using a web service. The web service is hosted by the car manufacturer or their service provider. This then connects to the vehicle using GSM to a module on the car. As a result, one can communicate with the vehicle over mobile data from virtually anywhere.” states a blog post published by Pen Test Partners., Experts speculate that Mitsubishi has adopted this communication system because it is cheaper than a GSM / web service / mobile app based solution. With this implementation the car manufacturer cut the GSM contract fees, hosting fees, and reduced the development cost., The researchers focused their analysis on the way the mobile apps communicate with the vehicles. They discovered that the connectivity leverages on the Wi-Fi Protected Access Pre-Shared Key (WPA-PSK) security protocol. The experts spent less than four days to crack the communication, but they highlighted that it could be done almost instantly using $1,400 worth of cloud computing resources., , The hackers discovered that Pen Test Partners discovered that each Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV access point has a unique SSID, and all the SSIDs have a specific format. Ops … but this means that hackers can easily find the location of these SSIDs by using wireless network mapping services such as WiGLE., The experts analyzed the binary protocol used for the communication between the mobile apps and the vehicle, then they launched a man-in-the-middle (MitM) attack in order to control a number of features of the Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV., An attacker who is in the proximity of the SUV can control various functions, including the air conditioning, the lights, and even the alarm., , “Once unlocked, there is potential for many more attacks. The on board diagnostics port is accessible once the door is unlocked. Whilst we haven’t looked in detail at this, you may recall from a hack of some BMW vehicles which suggested that the OBD port could be used to code new keys for the car,” researchers explained. “We also haven’t looked at connections between the Wi-Fi module and the Wi-Fi module and the Controller Area Network (CAN). There is certainly access to the infotainment system from the Wi-Fi module.”, Waiting for a fix from the car vendor, users can unpair their mobile devices from the vehicle’s access point (Settings->Cancel VIN Registration). Then there are no mobile devices paired with the vehicle hot spot the Wi-Fi module goes to sleep and will only be re-enabled if the key remote is pressed ten times., “Once all paired devices are unpaired, the Wi-Fi module will effectively go to sleep. It cannot be powered up again until the car key remote is pressed ten times. A nice security feature., This has the side effect of rendering the mobile app useless, but at least it fixes the security problem.” continues the post., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Mitsubishi Outlander PHEV, car hacking) |
5828_64373 | Boffins have discovered several key management flaws in the core of Wi-Fi Protected Access II (WPA2) protocol that could be exploited by an attacker to hack into Wi-Fi network and eavesdrop on the Internet communications stealing sensitive information (i.e. credit card numbers, passwords, chat messages, emails, and pictures)., WPA2 standard has been compromised, the flaws, in fact, reside in the Wi-Fi standard itself, and not in the numerous implementations., The impact could be serious for both companies and home users, any working implementation of WPA2 is likely affected, the only limitation is that an attacker needs to be within the range of a victim to exploit the weaknesses., The researchers devised an attack method dubbed KRACK attack (Key Reinstallation Attack), it works against almost any WPA2 Wi-Fi network., The KRACK attack allows attackers to decrypt WiFi users’ data without cracking or knowing the password., According to the researchers, the KRACK attack works against:, Initially, the researchers discovered that the vulnerabilities affect Android, Linux, Apple, Windows, OpenBSD, MediaTek, Linksys., The vulnerabilities were found by the Belgian researcher Mathy Vanhoef of imec-DistriNet, KU Leuven., The KRACK attack works by exploiting a 4-way handshake of the WPA2 protocol that’s used to establish a key for encrypting traffic., “When the victim reinstalls the key, associated parameters such as the incremental transmit packet number (i.e. nonce) and receive packet number (i.e. replay counter) are reset to their initial value,” explained Vanhoef. “Essentially, to guarantee security, a key should only be installed and used once. Unfortunately, we found this is not guaranteed by the WPA2 protocol. By manipulating cryptographic handshakes, we can abuse this weakness in practice.”, , The attacker just needs to trick a victim into re-installing an already-in-use key, which is achieved by manipulating and replaying cryptographic handshake messages., The experts demonstrated how to execute the key reinstallation attack against an Android smartphone in order to decrypt a transmission over a protected WiFi., According to the experts, the attack is exceptionally effective against Linux and Android 6.0 or higher, because “Android and Linux can be tricked into (re)installing an all-zero encryption key (see below for more info).”, “Although websites or apps may use HTTPS as an additional layer of protection, we warn that this extra protection can (still) be bypassed in a worrying number of situations. ” added the expert., , “Adversaries can use this attack to decrypt packets sent by clients, allowing them to intercept sensitive information such as passwords or cookies.” the researcher say., “Decryption of packets is possible because a key reinstallation attack causes the transmit nonces (sometimes also called packet numbers or initialization vectors) to be reset to zero. As a result, the same encryption key is used with nonce values that have already been used in the past,” , Below the full list of WPA2 Vulnerabilities discovered in the WPA2 protocol., The experts discovered the flaws last year and notified several vendors on July 14, the US-CERT also issued an alert to hundreds of vendors on 28 August 2017., “US-CERT has become aware of several key management vulnerabilities in the 4-way handshake of the Wi-Fi Protected Access II (WPA2) security protocol. The impact of exploiting these vulnerabilities includes decryption, packet replay, TCP connection hijacking, HTTP content injection, and others. Note that as protocol-level issues, most or all correct implementations of the standard will be affected. The CERT/CC and the reporting researcher KU Leuven, will be publicly disclosing these vulnerabilities on 16 October 2017.” the US-CERT warned. , Users have to wait for firmware updates from their device vendors, security patches for Linux’s hostapd (Host access point daemon) and WPA Supplicant are already available., Further details on the KRACK attack are included in the research paper titled “Key Reinstallation Attacks: Forcing Nonce Reuse in WPA2”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – KRACK attack, hacking) |
5239_59256 | Last Friday, Wikileaks released the documentation for AfterMidnight and Assassin malware platforms, today the organization leaked a new batch of the CIA Vault 7 dump that includes the documentation related to a spyware framework dubbed Athena /Hera., The batch of CIA files includes a user manual of the Athena platform, an overview of the technology, and a demo on how to use the malware., Reading the documents it is possible to discover that any Windows systems could be infected by the two spyware, Athena works for XP through Windows 10 and Hera for Windows 8 through Windows 10., “The Athena System fulfills COG/NOD’s need for a remote beacon/loader. Table 2 shows the system components available in Athena/Hera v1.0. The target computer operating systems are Windows XP Pro SP3 32-bit (Athena only), Windows 7 32-bit/64-bit, Windows 8.1 32- bit/64-bit, Windows 2008 Enterprise Server, Windows 2012 Server, and Windows 10.” reads the system overview included in the user guide. “Ubuntu v14.04 is the validated Linux version. Apache 2.4 is the validated web server for the Listening Post.”, The Athena spyware was written in Python, is seems to be dated back August 2015, if confirmed it is worrying news because Microsoft released Windows 10 in July 2015., Athena is the result of a joint work of CIA developers and peers at cyber security firm Siege Technologies that is specialized in offensive cyber security., “Athena is a beacon loader developed with Siege Technologies. At the core it is a very simple implant application. It runs in user space and beacons from the srvhost process. The following diagram shows the concept of operation.” states the Athena Technology Overview., , The documents leaked by Wikileaks reveals that ability of the Athena spyware to modify its configuration in real time, customizing it to a specific operation., “Once installed, the malware provides a beaconing capability (including configuration and task handling), the memory loading/unloading of malicious payloads for specific tasks and the delivery and retrieval of files to/from a specified directory on the target system,” WikiLeaks claims., However, WikiLeaks has not provided any detail about the operations being conducted by the agency using Athena, but it is not hard to imagine how the intelligence agency would be using this program to spy on their targets., Below the list of the mail dumps leaked by WikiLeaks:, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Athena Spyware, hacking) |
4991_57192 | The Drupal development team has released the Drupal version 8.2.7 that addressed a number of vulnerabilities in the popular CMS. The list of flaws includes an access bypass issue, a cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerability, and a remote code execution flaw., An access bypass flaw, tracked as CVE-2017-6377, affecting the editor module is considered the most severe vulnerability, “When adding a private file via a configured text editor (like CKEditor), the editor will not correctly check access for the file being attached, resulting in an access bypass,” reads the description provided in the security advisory by Drupal., , Another moderately critical vulnerability is a CSRF flaw tracked as CVE-2017-6379, it is related to the lack of CSRF protection for some administrative paths. An attacker can exploit the issue to disable some blocks of a website by knowing their block ID., Going on in the list, we find also a remote code execution vulnerability, CVE-2017-6381, which has also been rated moderately critical. The RCE flaw CVE-2017-6381 affects a third-party development library and is related to development dependencies., The good news is that Drupal Composer dependencies are typically not installed, and by the default PHP execution protection in .htaccess., In order to improve the security of the Drupal installs, the last release Drupal 8.2.7 includes a security update for phpunit development dependencies. Basically, the Drupal core in the new release requires the most secure version of phpunit available., It is essential to update the Drupal version, CMS are privileged targets of hackers that try to exploit known vulnerabilities using exploit codes available online., Outdated versions expose websites that its users to the risk of cyber attacks., In September, the researchers at the SANS Institute’s Internet Storm Center reported seeing attempts to exploit a highly critical vulnerability in a third-party Drupal module, the RESTful Web Services (RESTWS) module., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Drupal version 8.2.7, Hacking) |
1993_34251 | Are you a user of the Uber service? There is a bad news for you! Uber also enters the long list of companies who are victims of a data breach., On Friday, the Uber firm has announced the incident with an official statement on its website, the note reports that expert of the company had identified a “one-time access of an Uber database” by an unauthorized third party in May 2014. The unauthorized access resulted in the disclosure of user data related to a “small percentage” of Uber driver partners., “A small percentage of current and former Uber driver partner names and driver’s license numbers were contained in the database,” the statement, posted by Katherine Tassi, Uber’s Managing Counsel of Data Privacy, wrote. “Immediately upon discovery we changed the access protocols for the database, removing the possibility of unauthorized access. We are notifying impacted drivers, but we have not received any reports of actual misuse of information as a result of this incident.”, As part of the incident response procedure the experts of the company notified the data breach to the authorities and they have changed the access protocols for the database, removing the possibility of unauthorized access., Of course, Uber is notifying impacted drivers, anyway the company declared that has not received any reports of actual misuse of the stolen data., , Below the timeline of the data breaches, according to Weber:, , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Uber data breach, hacking) |
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