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A Reddit user with username being “moeburn” raised the likelihood of new malware flowing for Smart TVs, this week:, My sister got a virus on her TV. A VIRUS ON HER GODDAMN TV., It was an LG Smart TV with a built-in web browser, and she managed to get a DNS Hijacker that would say “Your computer is infected please send us money to fix it” any time she tried to do anything on the TV.iff, The Kaspersky Lab got the chance to work on the case attempting to conclude if this danger was focusing on all connected TVs particularly or whether this was just an inadvertent infection on that TV alone. Attempting to connect  with the website page said in the URL from the photograph doesn’t work — domain name didn’t resolve to any IP at the time when Kaspersky guys started their investigation., , Experts utilized their most loved web crawler and discovered numerous hits while searching for the area., “Besides the host “ciet8jk” (ciet8jk.maliciousdomain.com), 27 other hosts have been assigned to that domain name and pointed to same IP address.” states Kaspersky Lab., August 17, 2015 is the date when domain in question ***-browser-alert-error.com had been registered., The scam is believed to be up and running for only a couple of days, the guys at Kaspersky lab believe that the snapshot from TV is almost 4 (four) months old., Such assaults are just the same old thing, so Kaspersky began searching for a server which could be online to see what precisely the page attempts to achieve., Unfortunately, Kaspersky couldn’t locate a live web page from that source, however while looking for the ready message appeared in the photograph, they discovered comparable domains utilized for identical scams to this., There’s no answer from the server, whereas, still the last website recorded is online. All the site URLs specified have been hindered by Kaspersky “Web Protection” for a while., Interestingly, every IP is linked with Amazon’s cloud (54.186.x.x, 54.148.x.x, 52.24.x.x)., Despite the fact that they utilized distinctive suppliers to enlist the site, they chose to have the vindictive pages in the cloud. This might be on account of if provides another layer of the anonymization, in light of the fact that it’s less expensive than different suppliers or on the grounds that they were uncertain about the movement and required something more scalable., Still not able to locate a live web page, the Kaspersky continued hunting down parts of the message and a hit took them to HexDecoder from the ddecode.com. This is a website page that de-jumbles scripts or whole site pages. Shockingly, all past decodings were spared and are publically accessible., On July 29th 2015, JavaScript selecting telephone number was published on Pastebin and it incorporates every one of the remarks that were likewise available in the example Kaspersky got from HexDecoder. This’s another pointer this isn’t another risk., Kaspersky lab was able to get almost the same outcome later on (exactly what the user’s Smart TV screen had shown), by using the right sample., A pop-up dialogue appears as soon as a page gets open, and yes, any browsers work for loading the page. It works equally good on Windows XP, and even if one attempts to close the popup – it gets back right there again., Kaspersky team even got the very same result, when they ran the script on a LG Smart TV. Closing browser was possible, yet it didn’t change any DNS server or browser. Also, turning it on/off tackled the issue. It is conceivable that another malware was included for the situation described on Reddit, that changed the network or browser settings., Remember that you ought to never call those very same numbers! As you may get charged every moment or somebody on the other end may direct you to download/install much more malware onto your device., So in the specific situation, it’s not another sort of malware particularly focusing on Smart TVs, however, a typical risk to all web clients. There are additional reports this scam has hit clients on the Apple MacBooks; and as it keeps running in web browser, it can keep running on SmartTVs and even on the smartphones., These sorts of dangers frequently get consolidated with adventures and might exploit vulnerabilities in Flash play, Jave or browser. On the off chance they get fruitful, they might run extra malware on gadget or change the DNS settings of your framework or home router  which might prompt comparable manifestations., Such conduct couldn’t be seen for this situation since they pernicious pages being uprooted as of now already., Remember, there may be vulnerabilities in your TV software! Thusly it’s vital to inspect if your gadget is up-to-date. Ensure you implemented the most recent upgrades for your lovely Smart TV! A few merchants apply redesigns consequent, while others abandon it to the client to trigger upgrade manually., There’s malware that chips away at Smart TV, yet it’s not by any means “in the wild” right now. There are a few reasons why culprits concentrate on the PC and cell phone clients rather than Smart TVs., Be that as it may, recollect, for instance, that it’s conceivable to introduce an application from a USB stick. On the off chance that your TV runs Android, a malignant application intended for an Android cell phone may even work on your TV., More or less, this case isn’t malware particularly focusing on Smart TVs, yet know that such sites, as with phishing by and large, work/target at any OS you’re utilizing., Author Bio: Ali Qamar is an Internet security research enthusiast who enjoys “deep” research to dig out modern discoveries in the security industry. He is the founder and chief editor at Security Gladiators, an ultimate source for cyber security. To be frank and honest, Ali started working online as a freelancer and still shares the knowledge for a living. He is passionate about sharing the knowledge with people, and always try to give only the best. Follow Ali on Twitter @AliQammar57, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Smart Tv, malware)

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Researchers at Kaspersky Lab sustain to have identifies a group of cyber mercenaries called Icefog that is responsible for a huge cyber espionage campaign, occurred in 2011, against Japanese parliament and dozens of government agencies and strategic companies in Japan and South Korea., The cyber mercenaries are recruited by governments and private companies and according Kaspersky experts the group is composed by high skilled hackers able to conduct sophisticated attacks., “What we have here is the emergence of small groups of cyber-mercenaries available to perform targeted attacks,”  “We actually believe they have contracts, and they are interested in fulfilling whatever the contract requirements are,” declared Kaspersky’s research director, Costin Raiu, in an interview with Reuters., The name “Icefog” derived from a string used in the command-and-control server name found in one of the malware samples., The principal targets of Icefog group are governments and military institutions, Icefog is an advanced persistent threat conducted by independent entities that targeted high-profile victims and stealthily infiltrate their networks to steal sensitive data.  This APT represents a novelty because hackers do not belong, unlike when it happens in the most previous campaigns, to government cyber units. The Icefog group counts among its victims media companies, telecomoperators, satellite operators and defense contractors including Selectron Industrial Co. which supplies US-designed components for defense and industrial customers in Korea, Japan and elsewhere., Kaspersky released a detailed report on the Icefog operations, its researchers localized and analyzed the command and control servers used by the attackers describing the techniques adopted, identifying the victims of the attacks and the information gathered. Based on the list of IPs used to control the infrastructure the Kaspersky Lab specialists revealed that some of the attackers are either based in China, South Korea, Japan., Following the graphs related to the distribution of backdoor respectively for Windows-based machine and Mac PC., ,  ,  , ,  ,  , The Icefog group relies on spear-phishing and exploits for known vulnerabilities, as usual they used social engineering techniques to deceive victims.  The lure documents used in the attacks are specifically crafted for the victims proposing content of interest., The Icefog team is a persistent collector of sensitive information, it has stolen sensitive documents, company blueprints, e-mail account and corporate services. The Icefog team used its backdoor set, dubbed “Fucobha”, including exploits for both Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X., The Kaspersky experts highlighted the “hit and run” nature of the Icefog operations that appears unusual, different from almost APT campaigns in which victims remain infected for a long period, the attackers are processing victims rapidly and in a surgical manner, stealing only information of interest. The analysis of C&C revealed that Icefog hackers have a deep knowledge of the victims and the information they search for., “Once the desired information is obtained, they abandon the infection and move on.”, More victims than Japan and Korea are China, the U.S., Australia, Canada, the U.K., Italy, Germany, Austria, Singapore, Belarus and Malaysia, Kaspersky observed more than 4,000 uniquely infected IPs and several hundred victims., What do we expect from the next future?, “For the past few years, we’ve seen a number of APTs hitting pretty much all types of victims and sectors. In most cases, attackers maintain a foothold in corporate and governmental networks for years, smuggling out sensitive information,” The attack usually lasts for a few days or weeks and after obtaining what they are looking for, the attackers clean up and leave. In the future, we predict the number of small, focused ‘APT-to-hire’ groups to grow, specializing in hit-and-run operations; a kind of ‘cyber mercenary’ team for the modern world,” declared Raiu, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Icefog, cyber espionage, APT)

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Once again Tor network is under attack, the researcher Josh Pitts of Leviathan Security Group has identified a Tor exit node that was used to patch the binaries downloaded by the users, the threat actors were adding malware to the files dynamically., The Tor is a system that allows to anonymize users’ online experience, but as explained many times this is possible under specific conditions because the manipulation of scripts running on visited website or file downloaded from an untrusted repository could reveal Tor user’s identity., In this case we are faced with the danger of trusting files downloaded from unknown sources, but let’s consider anyway that an attacker could also use a similar technique compromising a legitimate website, and that compromising/setting an exit node to make the “dirty job” is always possible., Many binaries are hosted without any transport layer security encryption, only in some cases it is possible to find signed files to prevent on-fly modification., To mitigate suck kind of attacks encrypted download channels represents the best option  to avoid manipulation of the binaries., “SSL/TLSis the only way to prevent this from happening. End-users may want to consider installing HTTPS Everywhere or similar plugins for their browser to help ensure their traffic is always encrypted,” said Pitts., Pitts discovered the anomalous behavior of the Tor exit node while conducting a research on download servers that could be abused to patch binaries during download through a man-in-the middle attack., “After creating and using a new exitmap module, I found downloaded binaries being patched through a Tor exit node in Russia. ” said Pitts in the blog post., During that DerbyCon conference the researcher has presented how to run a MITM patching of binaries during download using BDFProxy. The Backdoor Factory framework (BDF) designed by the researcher allows him to patch executable binaries with shell code that the attacker could use to execute an arbitrary code without the user noticing any suspicious activity., Unfortunately, this attack could be conducted by anyone on the Internet, and as demonstrated by Pitts, it could be effective to hack Tor anonymity controlling one or more exit nodes., Internet users, consciously or not, download every day an impressive number of files, let’s think for example to software upgrades. If an attacker is able to control the download process for security updates he can infect a large number of machines simply injecting malware into the update channel., The update process is considered the most scaring scenario by security experts, because the download file in many cases is considered trusted by default. The attack chain could also be improved using a digital signature mechanism which abuses of fake digital certificates., Legitimate software vendors use to sign their binaries, any modification to the code will cause verification errors. This is the scenario observed by the research during his tests, an attacker running a MITM attack while the user is downloading a file can actively patch binaries with his own code., “I tested BDFProxy against a number of binaries and update processes, including Microsoft Windows Automatic updates.  The good news is that if an entity is actively patching Windows PE files for Windows Update, the update verification process detects it, and you will receive error code 0×80200053.” states Pitts., , The expert extended its analysis to Tor exit nodes discovering that a malicious node in Russia was actively patching any binaries he downloaded with a piece of malware. Fortunately, in time I’m writing the Tor exit node is the unique one running the attack., “To have the best chance of catching modified binaries in transit over the Internet, I needed as many exit points in as many countries as possible. Using Tor would give me this access, and thus the greatest chance of finding someone conducting this malicious MITM patching activity,” Pitts wrote., “After researching the available tools, I settled on exitmap.  Exitmap is Python-based and allows one to write modules to check exit nodes for various modifications of traffic.  Exitmap is the result of a research project called Spoiled Onions that was completed by both the PriSec group at Karlstad University and SBA Research in Austria. I wrote a module for exitmap, named patchingCheck.py, and have submitted a pull request to the official GitHub repository. Soon after building my module, I let exitmap run.  It did not take long, about an hour, to catch my first malicious exit node.”, Pitts downloaded several legitimate binaries from trusted sources, including Microsoft.com, and each of them came loaded with malware code that opens a port to listen for commands and starts sending HTTP requests to a C&C server., The researcher informed officials of the Tor Project, who flagged the Tor exit node as bad., “We’ve now set the BadExit flag on this relay, so others won’t accidentally run across it. We certainly do need more people thinking about more modules for the exitmap scanner. In general, it seems like a tough arms race to play,” wrote Roger Dingeldine, one of the original developers of Tor. , The attack scenario described by Pitts is very common, user should be wary of the repository referenced for software download, making sure that they are using encrypted channels (TLS/SSL), “The problem of modified binaries is not limited to Tor. We highlight the example because of some of the misconceptions people have about Tor providing increased safety. In general, users should be wary of where they download software and ensure they are using TLS/SSL. Sites not supporting TLS/SSL should be persuaded to do so,” Pitts said., Pierluigi Paganini, Security Affairs –  (Tor exit nodes, hacking)

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To news like this we are dangerously getting used, the scenarios change but the dynamics are often the same, viruses used such as cyber weapon that infect critical structures, causing loss of valuable information and that block system of target systems., The news has been announced  by the same “Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA)” that has discovered a malware last Jan 6th. The agent has been found on a computer that is usally accessed by its employees. The main problem is that the malware had accessed to sensible information leaking them outside. Actually the Agency is investigation on the event but it is clear that the malware was not there for a chance.  Who was behind the malware production and why? The event confirm in my opinion how could be dangerous new cyber threats and ho is difficult protect the overall infrastucture from them., , But which information has been leaked outside? Seem to be that information regarding unmanned robotic spacecraft used to transfer component to Space Station have bean stolen. Also other info have been exposed like email addresses login credentials. That isn’t the first time that the Agency is hit by a malware, it is already happened to the same computer last year, fortunately in that occasion no theft was registered, at least I hope., Consider that the aerospace industry is of strategic importance for every nation, because in it you can find information regarding the main technologic innovations of a Country, concepts tahat are likely to be used in subsequent years in the civil sphere. Offending the sector through virus has no doubt the sole intent of being in possession of information so valuable. The defense of the future of any nation today, more and more, go to the defense of its cyberspace., Pierluigi Paganini

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The terrorism is probably the first concern for the US Government, the Americans fears a possible and imminent attack on the US soil. In an interview with ABC News, Jeh Johnson, the current United States Secretary of Homeland Security, explained that the Islamic State represents a serious threat for the Homeland Security due to its ramification worldwide. The official express concerns for the activities of the IS far from its territories, Syria and Iraq., “We’re very definitely in a new environment, because of ISIL’s (IS’s) effective use of social media, the Internet, which has the ability to reach into the homeland and possibly inspire others,” Johnson said. “We’re very definitely in a new phase in the global terrorist threat, where the so-called lone wolf could strike at any moment.”, The ISIS organization demonstrates a mastery of new media that enables it to carry the war into the homes of Americans. Thanks to a massive propaganda on the Internet, the group brings its voice to thousands of sympathizers and followers across the ocean., FBI Director James Comey last week confirmed that the US Government is aware of the ISIS online propaganda activity that incites hatred against the West by inviting its members to attack “the uniformed military and law enforcement”., There are “hundreds, maybe thousands” of people in the United States who had received recruitment messages from the jihadists, Comey said., The US Government is alerting military and law enforcement on possible attacks that could be conducted by small cells of ISIS members or by lone wolves. The US military announced supplementary measures to improve security at bases across the USA., “Because of the use of the Internet, we could have little or no notice in advance of an independent actor attempting to strike. And so that’s why law enforcement at the local level needs to be ever more vigilant and we are constantly reminding them to do that,” continues Johnson. “It has to come from within the community. It has to come from Islamic leaders, who frankly can talk the language better than the federal government can,” Johnson said., The fear for the advancing troops of ISIS on the shores of the Mediterranean is worrying also Europen Governments, recently shaken by the attack on Charlie Hebdo. In response, the EU plans to introduce a new counter-terrorism unit., Gilles de Kerchove, the EU’s counter-terrorism chief, explained that the tragic events in Paris elevated the need to tackle extremism across the Union, with a specific reference to the online activities of cells of terrorists operating on the Internet., , In Europe, various states already have in place operative units that investigated on terrorism on the Internet, one of the most popular team in the British Counter Terrorism Internet Referral Unit (CTIRU)., The new counter-terrorism unit planned by European Governments will rely on a strong co-operation of different intelligence agencies and law enforcement., The new counter-terrorism unit will be expected to flag “terrorist and extremist online content”, the unit will provide the necessary support to the investigations by law enforcement agencies and will improve information sharing on the threat., The US Secretary of Homeland Security also invited the leaders of Islamic communities to fight any expression of extremism., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  ISIS, counter-terrorism unit)

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According to a final rule published in the Federal Register on the last day of 2015 (Dec. 31, 2015),  US can now apply economic sanctions in response to cyber attacks., The US Government assigned to the Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control the authorities to apply economic sanctions against foreign governments and individuals that launch a cyber attack against the infrastructure of the US Government., The rule titled “Cyber-Related Sanctions Regulations” implements the directives introduced in the Executive Order 13694 signed by the US President in 2015., “The Department of the Treasury’s Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) is issuing regulations to implement Executive Order 13694 of April 1, 2015 (“Blocking the Property of Certain Persons Engaging in Significant Malicious Cyber-Enabled Activities”). OFAC intends to supplement this part 578 with a more comprehensive set of regulations, which may include additional interpretive and definitional guidance and additional general licenses and statements of licensing policy.” states the rule., The President Barack Obama signed in April an executive order that uses economic restrictions to “control” anyone that is trying to attack any American interests., But what this exactly means? Every time the US authorities identify an entity (a person or a group) that is threatening the US infrastructure and which is responsible for a security breach, then they can freeze all its assets, including bank accounts if these assets are located in the US soil., “Starting today, we’re giving notice to those who pose significant threats to our security or economy by damaging our critical infrastructure, disrupting or hijacking our computer networks, or stealing the trade secrets of American companies or the personal information of American citizens for profit,” said the president Obama. “From now on, we have the power to freeze their assets, make it harder for them to do business with U.S. companies, and limit their ability to profit from their misdeeds.”, The Executive Order 13694 explicitly refers the following case regarding possible activities that represent a threat for the Homeland Security:, The Executive Order 13694 is efficient only if the alleged attackers have assets inside America, or do business with American companies., , The idea behind the executive order is aligned with previous orders signed Obama to punish hacking activities against US systems. President Obama already anticipated the use of economic sanctions as a deterrent against cyber attacks in the Sony Pictures case. in January 2015, Obama announced economic sanctions against North Korea in the wake of the hacks against Sony Pictures., The regulation posted to the Federal Register will be integrated with a further set of regulations that will likely cover “additional interpretive and definitional guidance, including regarding ‘cyber-enabled’ activities, and additional general licenses and statements of licensing policy,” said the notice., It it important to highlight that there isn’t a public comment period, which is usually required before the issuance of a final rule, a circumstance that demonstrates the approach and intention of the US Government., The members of the US Government were urging an action against the increasing cyber threats that hit the national systems,, In November, Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee John McCain (R-Ariz.) sent letters to several representatives of the Obama’s administration urging the adoption of economic sanctions against the Chinese government., McCain said “most would agree” that sanctions are a “more powerful tool than the symbolic steps this administration has taken to date,” to deter cyber espionage and hacking campaigns., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Executive Order 13694, Information Warfare)

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Goldshlager highlights the similitude of the XML quadratic blowup attack with the Billion Laughs attack, it basically exploits the use of entity expansion, this means that it replicates one large entity using a couple thousand characters repeatedly., “A medium-sized XML document of approximately two hundred kilobytes may require anywhere within the range of one hundred MB to several GB of memory. When the attack is combined with a particular level of nested expansion, an attacker is then able to achieve a higher ratio of success.”, In the following example provided by the expert, if the attacker defines the entity “&x;” as 55,000 characters long, and uses this entity 55,000 times inside the XML “DoS” element, the parser will expand to 2.5 GB the document causing the saturation of resources of targeted website., Following a video Proof of Concept of the attack on WordPress published by Goldshlager, while the PoC Exploit: (128MB Memory limit) is available at the address below, , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Drupal, WordPress, hacking)  

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In January, an unnamed man came into possession of the live.fi certificate after noticing that he was able to use hostmaster@live.fi as an alias for his normal e-mail address., The news was spread by Tivi.fi, the man discovered in this way that it was a highly privileged address that allowed him to automatically receive sensitive certificates from browser-trusted certificate authority Comodo., Despite the man made the worrying discovery in January, only now it seems that Microsoft has discovered and blacklisted the bogus SSL digital certificate that could be exploited to run man-in-the-middle attacks, the fraudulent certificate was issued for one of the company’s Windows Live Web addresses., “Microsoft is aware of an improperly issued SSL certificate for the domain “live.fi” that could be used in attempts to spoof content, perform phishing attacks, or perform man-in-the-middle attacks. It cannot be used to issue other certificates, impersonate other domains, or sign code. This issue affects all supported releases of Microsoft Windows. Microsoft is not currently aware of attacks related to this issue.” states the security advisory published by Microsoft., Microsoft confirmed that the bogus certificate for the domain “live.fi” could also by threat actors to spoof content or carry out phishing attacks, so the certificate authority Comodo that issued the digital certificate has revoked it promptly. In response, Microsoft is updating its Certificate Trust List (CTL) for all supported releases of Microsoft Windows to avoid the exploitation of the digital certificate., , In the next days, also Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox will block the bogus digital certificate to protect their users., An unauthorized entity was able to register an email account on the domain with a “privileged username,” and use it to request a bogus certificate for live.fi. For the majority of Windows systems that are using the automatic updater of revoked certificates, customers do not need to take any action., Microsoft warns that users who don’t run an automatic updater have to run the manual update KB2917500 to blacklist the certificate., Comodo assured its customers by claiming that all of its certificates must pass through Domain Control Validation (DCV) before they’re issued, but it seems that third party used an email (i.e. administrator@, admin@, etc.) to prove ownership of the domain and subsequently the certificate., Microsoft reported that the bogus SSL certificate was issued due to a misconfigured privileged email account on the live.fi domain., A disconcerting fact of this history is that the Finnish man who obtained the digital certificate said he warned both Microsoft and Finland authorities, but he hasn’t received any response., Unfortunately, this incident confirms concerns of security experts about a proper management of digital certificate life-cycle., The security researcher Moxie Marlinspike demonstrated in 2009 how to easily defeat the revocation lists used by common browsers to check the validity of TLS certificates., “That’s because the “online certificate status protocol” and an earlier database known as certificate revocation lists trigger what’s known as a “soft fail” rather than a more secure but also harder-to-tolerate “hard fail.” As a result, when an Internet outage makes a revocation list unavailable, most browsers will treat an unvalidated certificate as trusted. Attackers using a CA-issued counterfeit certificate to mount a man-in-the-middle attack can capitalize on this flaw by suppressing revocation response before it reaches a targeted end user. That means the only sure way to block an improperly issued certificate is for each browser maker to hard-code the revocation into an update. Windows 8 and 8.1 come with an automatic updater of revoked certificates.” reported a post published by  ArsTechnica on the issue., If you are interested to know more about possible abuses of digital certificates read the post “How Cybercrime Exploits Digital Certificates.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  digital certificate, SSL)

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Microsoft has a surprise for Chrome users in the Chrome Web Store, it’s the new Windows Defender Browser Protection extension that aims to protect them from online threats., The new extension will help users in avoiding phishing emails, as well as, websites delivering malware., links in phishing emails, as well as websites that trick users into downloading and installing malicious software., “The Windows Defender Browser Protection extension helps protect you against online threats, such as links in phishing emails and websites designed to trick you into downloading and installing malicious software that can harm your computer. ” reads the description provided by Google on its store for the Windows Defender Browser Protection extension., To protect Chrome users, Windows Defender Browser Protection checks the URL accessed against a list of malicious URLs, in the case it matches the list Windows Defender Browser Protection will show a red warning screen that informs users on the risks related to the malicious URL, The Chrome extension takes advantage of the same intelligence that powers Microsoft Edge’s protection capabilities, allowing users to add an extra layer of security when browsing online., , Microsoft aims to reach the level of security implemented with the Edge browser, according to the NSS Labs 2017 Web Browser Security Comparative Report while Edge blocked 99 percent of phishing attempts, Chrome blocked 87 percent and 70 percent in Firefox., The NSS Labs report also measured the level of protection for each browser against phishing attacks., According to NSS Labs, the Edge browser could block 92.3% of phishing URLs and 99.5% of the Socially Engineered Malware (SEM) samples, while Chrome was able to block 74.5% of phishing URLs 87.5% of SEM samples., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Windows Defender Browser Protection, Google Chrome), ,

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In these hours on the web is turning the news of a cyber attack performed by a group of Chinese hackers against some U.S. Government Agencies. Once again, the weapon used against the strategic objectives is a cyber weapon, in particular it has been used a new version of the trojan Sykipot., , Chinese hackers have deployed trojan that is aiming the Defense Department, the Department of Homeland Security, the State Department and potentially a other United States government agencies and businesses. The trojan is targeting smart card readers produced by the company ActivIdentity that provides authentication software., The attacks originate have been originated by Chinese servers and for sure they have targeted the defense sector to steal sensible information. The attack has been conceived to exploit the identity management processes used in governative environments for the physical and logical access management., What is really interesting is the process followed by the creator of the original trojan detected in December, the original versions of the Sykipot malware was a Trojan that opened a backdoor into the infected PCs to grab documents from high level offcials within target organizations and businesses.  This time the malware has been packaged to compromise smart card readers running ActivClient, the client application of ActivIdentity. ActivIdentity ActivClient is the market-leading security application that allows customers to use smart cards and USB tokens as identity management devices inside a smart card-based PKI authentication for Windows login, VPN, Web Login, Remote Sessions, as well as data security, digital signature and secure email. This solution is largely used at the DoD and in number of other US government agencies., We are dealing with a cyber weapon specifically packaged for a specific target and that makes use of modules available in instances of malware known to researchers. A trend, that does not differ in philosophy, observed in the case of Duqu and Stuxnet. This is the first report of Sykipot being used to compromise smart cards, the authentication devices privileged for identy management systems of the American militia. Hacker have used a version of Sykipot that dates back to March of last year already used for several attacks executed in the past year.The spreading vector is an email campaign addressed to specific targets. Let consider that the malware has appeared several times in combination with zero-day exploits and has been used to launch targeted attacks since 2007., The attacks compromise smart card readers running in Windows O.s, in partiulary the native x509 modules according what has been reported by US government., How does the trojan work? It uses a keylogger to steal PINs for the smartcards during their usage. When a card is inserted into the reader, the trojan acts, as authenticated user, is free to access sensitive and protected information. The stoled data are send back to the attacker that is able to drive remotely the operations., The event is undoubtedly of the utmost gravity and the attack with this method could compromise the whole PKI architecture on which are based the logical and physical access management.,  , Pierluigi Paganini

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A few days ago, the US Government announced the first attack conducted by the Cyber Command against members of the ISIS online. The US Cyber Command will run hacking operations and use cyber weapons to destroy computer systems used by the ISIL, destroy it functions (e.g. propaganda, economic support to militants) and to track its cyber hubs., At the recent meeting held in Hanover, Germany, the President Barack Obama discussed its cyber strategy to contrast the Islamic State online., Blocking all the online activities of the ISIS is very hard, on Monday a the United Cyber Caliphate (UCC), a pro-ISIS hacker collective, has published online a ‘Kill List’ containing the names of 43 of US Government employees working at the Pentagon, Department of Homeland Security, State Department, and other agencies. The information disclosed includes name, phone number, city and zip code of the targets., The members of the United Cyber Caliphate (UCC) have shared the Kill List through the encrypted messaging app Telegram, which still represents one of the privileged communication channels of the radical group., “Hackers with a pro-ISIS group calling themselves the United Cyber Caliphate distributed a “kill” list on Monday that appears to include dozens of U.S. government personnel, Vocativ discovered.” states the Vocative that first discovered the Kill List., “The list features 43 names of people linked to the State Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the departments of defense, energy, commerce and health and services. It also identifies the U.S. embassies in Santiago and Kathmandu—as well as the Department of the Navy in Gulfport, Mississippi—as targets. It includes someone who appears to have worked for Australia’s Department of Defence.”, , The list published by the United Cyber Caliphate also includes names of US employees working abroad, like personnel in the U.S. embassies in Santiago and Kathmandu., The United Cyber Caliphate is a new born group composed of hackers belonging to three hacking groups, including the popular Cyber Caliphate Army., The Vocativ also reported that members of the Cyber Caliphate Army released a Kill List including current and former U.S. government officials., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Islamic State, Kill List)

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Copies of the surveillance software “FinFisher” were made available for public scrutiny by WikiLeaks early this week. The international, online journalistic organization has decided to publish the public disclose the criticized software online to allow exponents of the security community to conduct a technical review of the spyware., The malware is for law enforcement and government use, but it seems to be  preferred for those regimes that desire to monitor representatives of the opposition. FinFisher is considered powerful cyber espionage malware developed by Gamma Group that is able to secretly spy on victim’s computers intercepting communications, recording every keystroke and taking the complete control of the machine., , WikiLeaks published the information online last Monday, the organization has the explicit intent to neutralize the menace represented by Finfisher and any other surveillance software., “Today, 15 September 2014, WikiLeaks releases previously unseen copies of weaponised German surveillance malware used by intelligence agencies around the world to spy on journalists, political dissidents and others., FinFisher (formerly part of the UK based Gamma Group International until late 2013) is a German company that produces and sells computer intrusion systems, software exploits and remote monitoring systems that are capable of intercepting communications and data from OS X, Windows and Linux computers as well as Android, iOS, BlackBerry, Symbian and Windows Mobile devices. FinFisher first came to public attention in December 2011 when WikiLeaks published documents detailing their products and business in the first SpyFiles release.”, WikiLeaks co-founder, Julian Assange, has criticized the German Government accusing the government to protect FinFisher while it is expressing concerns about privacy disappoint surveillance activities conducted by foreign government, including the US., “FinFisher continues to operate brazenly from Germany selling weaponised surveillance malware to some of the most abusive regimes in the world. The Merkel government pretends to be concerned about privacy, but its actions speak otherwise. Why does the Merkel government continue to protect FinFisher? This full data release will help the technical community build tools to protect people from FinFisher including by tracking down its command and control centers.” said Assange. , Wikileaks has published the FinFisher Relay and FinSpy Proxy components of the FinFisher architecture. These modules are used to collect data syphoned from victim machines and send them back to the command and control servers. A network of C&C servers is deployed worldwide and is used by FinFisher, such as by other similar software, to anonymize the traffic and hide the identity of the bad actors., Let me suggest to read a report published by the organization Citizen Lab, which revealed that capability of FinFisher to infect almost every mobile device., WikiLeaks has also published other material related to Finfisher, including files related to the recent FinFisher. The leaked document includes brochures and a database of the customer support website., “In order to make the data more easily accessible and consumable, all the new brochures, videos and manuals are now available organized under the related FinFisher product name. The database is represented in full, from which WikiLeaks compiled a list of customers, their eventual attribution, all the associated support tickets and acquired licenses, along with the estimated costs calculated from FinFisher’s price list. WikiLeaks conservatively estimates FinFisher’s revenue from these sales to amount to around €50,000,000. Within the full list of customers, it’s worth noticing that among the largest is Mongolia, which has been recently selected as new Chair of the Freedom Online Coalition.” reports the official announcement issued by Wikileaks., The scientific community is divided on the decision of WikiLeaks to publish copies of FinFisher. Some experts disagree with Assange and argue that the choice could paradoxically increase the spread of malware in an uncontrolled manner because bad actors may be able to use it for illegal activities.,  , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  FinFisher, Wikileaks )  

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The number of ransomware infections suffered by companies continues to increase and according to a new report published by the security firm Kaspersky Lab, it increased threefold from January to September., One in every five businesses worldwide has been victims of a ransomware and the rate of ransomware attacks increased from one every two minutes to one every 40 seconds., This alarming data confirm that the ransomware is one of the most dangerous threats in the current cyber security landscape., Ransomware could have a dramatic impact on companies, 67 percent of the firm that was affected lost part or all of their corporate data and 25% victims spent several weeks trying to decrypt the data., Experts from Kaspersky have detected 32,091 new ransomware variations in the third quarter, a significant increase compared to 2,900 variations discovered during the first quarter. According to the experts, 62 new ransomware families were observed in the wild this year., The situation is even more worrisome when dealing with consumers, in their case the infection data reached one attack every 10 seconds in September., In the criminal underground, such kind of threat is becoming even more popular, malware authors are developing new ransomware that presents sophisticated features and that are able to evade detection., Ransomware allows criminal organizations to rapidly cash out their efforts, despite the numerous recommendation to avoid paying the ransom still a large number of victims prefer to pay it to decrypt their documents., “Ransomware has completely dominated the current threat landscape,” explained Bharat Mistry, cyber-security consultant at Trend Micro., “During the first part of 2016, we blocked and detected almost 80 million ransomware threats and identified 79 new ransomware families – comparing to 29 in the whole of 2015. That’s a 179 percent increase. Quite a few of those were built with routines that are designed to attack enterprise machine and endpoints. It’s time companies take heed.”, The analysis conducted by Kaspersky confirmed that SMBs are mostly targeted by ransomware, 42 percent of them suffered a ransomware-based attack over the past 12 months. Of those, one in three paid up the ransom, but one in five never got their files back, despite paying., Giving a close look at the threats, CTB-Locker has represented one of the most dangerous threat. One of four ransomware victims was infected by the CTB-Locker. Other successful ransomware were Locky (7 percent) and TeslaCrypt (6.5 percent)., , The researchers observed that ransomware infections are the result of more targeted attacks leveraging on spear-phishing messages and social engineering attacks against specific organizations., Targeted attacks allow cyber criminals to maximize the likelihood victims will pay up the ransom., How to defeat the ransomware?, Kaspersky urges companies to increase awareness about the threat by training its employees and to back up sensitive data regularly., It is important to adopt security solutions and to maintain installed software up to date., Below key figures of the report:, , I suggest you read the report., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – ransomware, cybercrime)

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The WannaCry emergency could not be ended because the NSA dump leaked by the Shadow Brokers team included many other dangerous exploits., Last months the Shadow Brokers group released another batch of data containing exploit codes still unpatched by Microsoft such as the “EnglishmanDentist,” “EsteemAudit,” and “ExplodingCan.”, The availability of such exploits and hacking tools represents a serious problem, an attacker with technical knowledge can exploit them to compromise millions of Windows systems across the world., “Of the three remaining exploits, “EnglishmanDentist”, “EsteemAudit”, and “ExplodingCan”, none reproduces on supported platforms, which means that customers running Windows 7 and more recent versions of Windows or Exchange 2010 and newer versions of Exchange are not at risk.” continues Microsoft., Let’s start with the EsteemAudit exploit, it is a hacking tool that targets RDP service (port 3389) on machines running no longer supported Microsoft Windows Server 2003 / Windows XP., It has been estimated that over 24,000 systems remain vulnerable to the EsteemAudit exploit., “Even one infected machine opens your enterprise to greater exploitation,” explained the security researchers Omri Misgav and Tal Liberman who works for the Ensilo cyber security firm and that developed an unofficial patch for EsteemAudit exploit., “In the trove of stolen exploits published by the Shadow Group appears ESTEEMAUDIT, an RDP exploit which can allow malware to move laterally within the organization, similar to what we had seen with WannaCry.” reads a blog post from Ensilo., “enSilo is giving away its patch against ESTEEMAUDIT for free with the intention of helping organizations around the world to better improve their security posture in one easy, but critical step., It is important to note that patching this exploit will not make these XP systems fully secure. There are still many unpatched vulnerabilities in Windows XP, and we urge organizations to update their systems accordingly., Until that happens, we believe that in-the-wild critical exploits like ESTEEMAUDIT and ETERNALBLUE must be patched.”, , Experts warn of possible exploitation of EsteemAudit exploit in network wormable threats. threat actors in the wild can develop malware that is able to propagate itself in target’s networks without user’s interaction., “Years later, there continue to be hundreds of millions of machines relying on XP and Server 2003 operating systems in use around the world. Windows XP-based systems currently account for more than 7 percent of desktop operating systems still in use today and the cybersecurity industry estimates that more than 600,000 web-facing computers, which host upwards of 175 million websites, still run Windows Server 2003 accounting for roughly 18 percent of global market share.” continues the blog post from Ensilo., There are many malware in the wild that already infects systems using as attack vector the RDP protocol, (CrySiS, Dharma, and SamSam), the EsteemAudit exploit can potentially make these threats very aggressive and dangerous., Users and enterprises running the vulnerable systems are advised to upgrade them to the higher versions to secure themselves from EsteenAudit attacks., When it is impossible to upgrade the systems it is necessary to secure them, for example disabling RDP port or putting it behind the firewall., You can also deploy the unofficial patch developed by Ensilo to secure your systems., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – EsteemAudit ,  hacking)

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Google’s new API simplifies the reCAPTCHA experience, product manager Vinay Shet said., Google has provided a significant update to its reCAPTCHA authentication system with the intent to simplify the process. The CAPTCHA is a type of challenge-response test used to determine whether or not the entity that is requesting the access to a resource is human. CAPTCHA systems are used to protect websites from spam bots and web crawlers.  Google, rather than have users authenticating to an online service try to decipher blurred text, has simplified the process by simply asking its users whether they are a bot agent. Just one click allows users to be authenticated the requested service., , “On websites using this new API, a significant number of users will be able to securely and easily verify they’re human without actually having to solve a CAPTCHA,”product manager Vinay Shet said. “Instead, with just a single click, they’ll confirm they are not a robot.”, In reality, the improvement of the reCAPTCHA authentication system was driven by the need to improve the efficiency of the process, according Google in fact, bots have a success rate close to 100 percent in solving traditional CAPTCHA challenges., , Earlier this year, Google improved it reCAPTCHA process introducing an approach based on a risk analysis of the user as explained by the company:, “A few months ago, we announced an improved version of reCAPTCHA that uses advanced risk analysis techniques to distinguish humans from machines. This enabled us to relax the text distortions and show our users CAPTCHAs that adapt to their risk profiles. In other words, with a high likelihood, our valid human users would see CAPTCHAs that they would find easy to solve. Abusive traffic, on the other hand, would get CAPTCHAs designed to stop them in their tracks.”, In other words, the complexity of the challenge proposed to the user linked to the likelihood that a human is trying to be authenticated to a service. Google applied a similar algorithm to audio CAPTCHAs based on the risk reputation of the user. When the new reCAPTCHA process will not be able to evaluate the risk associated with the user, Google will continue to display a classic CAPTCHA image to solve. To improve the authentication experience of the mobile users, Google may present with a challenge image, and a grid of nine images and asks to select all those that match., “The new API is the next step in this steady evolution,” Shet added. “Now, humans can just check the box and in most cases, they’re through the challenge.”, Shet also commented the adoption of the new CAPTCHA made by some users in the last week revealing that it was a very positive experience in term of performance., “For example, in the last week, more than 60% of WordPress’ traffic and more than 80% of Humble Bundle’s traffic on reCAPTCHA encountered the No CAPTCHA experience—users got to these sites faster,” Shet said. “Humans, we’ll continue our work to keep the Internet safe and easy to use. Abusive bots and scripts, it’ll only get worse—sorry we’re (still) not sorry.”, Google confirmed that Snapchat, WordPress and Humble Bundle have already adopters the noCAPTCHA API., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Google, reCAPTCHA)

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The collective Anonymous has launched a DDoS attack that shut down the Website of the Japanese Narita International Airport on Friday night (at around 9:30 p.m) until Saturday (around 1 a.m). The attack has been confirmed by the Japanese authorities explaining that a series of DDoS attacks caused the block of the website, but that had no impact on the operation in the terminal., According to the Japan Times, Anonymous has launched the DDoS attacks against the Japanese Narita International Airport to protest against dolphin slaughter in the country forbidding the entry in the country of the actor and activist Ric O’Barry. The Anonymous’ operation goes under the name OpKillingBay., “Cyberattacks disrupted access to the official website of Narita airport from Friday night to Saturday, with the international hacker group Anonymous claiming responsibility, according to the airport’s operator. Narita International Airport Corp. said police confirmed the attacks were carried out by the group.” states the Japan Times. “No flight operations were affected.”, The Japanese government probably refused to let Barry enter the country due to his role in “The Cove,” an award-winning documentary about the annual dolphin slaughter in Japan., Anonymous posted a message through a Twitter account that claimed responsibility for the DDoS attacks and expressed support to Ric Obarry., , The hackers belonging the Anonymous collective are conducting a heated battle against the Japanese Government that has no intention to stop the slaughter of Dolphin., In September, the hacktivists took down the website of the town of Taiji in Wakayama Prefecture for the same reason, and a month later in October 2015 the Anonymous group launched the operation # OpKillingBay and they shut down Narita and Chubu International Airport websites against the slaughter of Dolphi,, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Anonymous # OpKillingBay, slaughter of Dolphin)

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SAP has issued a security patch for the SAP TREX search engine that addresses multiple vulnerabilities discovered by the experts in a 2015 patch released in December 2015., The SAP TREX search engine is used by many SAP products, including SAP HANA and itsNetWeaver application and integration platform., “SAP, the largest enterprise software maker, closed a critical vulnerability affecting SAP’s search engine TREX. The issue stayed exposed almost 2 years.” reads a blog post published by the company ERPScan that discovered the flaw. “The vulnerable component is included in the old SAP NetWeaver platform as well as in the new SAP HANA one, which makes it one of the most widespread and severe SAP server-side issues so far with CVSS score 9.4 out of 10. The vulnerability was identified by specialists at ERPScan,” “If exploited, the vulnerability would allow a remote attacker to get full control over the server without authorization.”, SAP was affected by a critical code injection vulnerability (SAP Security Note 2419592) that he company addressed with the 2015 patch, unfortunately the problem was not completely solved., , Mathieu Geli from ERPScan discovered that the TREXNet communication protocol implemented in the SAP TREX search engine did not implement an authentication mechanism., “Originally, the vulnerability was discovered in SAP HANA in 2015 and the corresponding SAP Security Note (2234226) was released in December 2015. The issue was dubbed a potential technical information disclosure and fixed by removing some critical functions.” continues the post. “Later on, Mathieu Geli from ERPScan conducted a further research and revealed that the vulnerability was still exploitable. He found out that TREXNet, an internal communication protocol used by TREX, did not provide an authentication procedure. “, The expert made a reverse engineering of a protocol for HANA and then for the SAP TREX search engine. Both share a common protocol, for this reason the exploit could be easily adapted. He highlighted that SAP fixed just some features related to the core protocol., “I reversed a protocol for HANA and then for the TREX search engine. As they share a common protocol, the exploit has been easily adapted. SAP fixed some features, but not everything affecting the core protocol. It was still possible to get full control on the server even with a patched TREX.” explained the expert., The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2017-7691, could be exploited by an attacker to read or create operating system files by sending a crafted request to TREXNet ports., The flaw was fized along with other bugs in SAP’s April security release., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  SAP TREX search engine, hacking)

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On Wednesday, hackers belonging to the OurMine group hijacked the Netflix’s US Twitter account (@Netflix)., OurMine took over the Twitter account to promote its website. The incident is very serious, considering that the Netflix US Twitter account has 2.5 million followers. An attacker could compromise the attack to deliver malicious links and infect a huge number of followers., OurMine is a very popular hacker group, it has hacked multiple high-profile Twitter accounts in the past. The list of victims is very long and includes Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter co-founder Evan Williams, David Guetta Daniel Ek, former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo, the CEO and founder of Spotify, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, and many others., Which is the motivation?, It seems that the OurMine group is linked to a Security Firm that is trying to obtain notoriety from the attacks and is offering its services to the targets, that evidently need them to avoid further incidents., , One of the messages posted by the group states:, “We are just testing people security (sic), we never change their passwords, we did it because there is other hackers can hack them and change everything.”, Back to the hack of the Netflix’s US Twitter account, the OurMice crew posted the following message to the hacked account:, “Don’t worry we are just testing your security,” states the post., , I strongly invite you to enable two-factor authentication for any platform that supports it., At the time I was writing this post, @Netflix was restored to normality., I’m trying to get in contact with the Ourmine crew for an interview … stay tuned!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Netflix, Ourmine)

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The massive cybar attack that compromised the corporate computer network at Sony Pictures Entertainment is having a serious impact on the organization and its employees. The GOP crew, aka the Guardians of Peace, that hacked Sony Picture accessed a huge quantity of company data, including staff’s PII, internal phone numbers, blueprints and much more. This data can fuel further attacks,  with unpredictable consequences., As part of the incident response, the company shut down the internal network to sanitize the infected machine and requested the employee to avoid accessing corporate email and VPN., The massive data breach at Sony Picture has also caused the exposure of more sensitive documents, in fact, the hacker leaked the US Social Security numbers of more than 47,000 celebrities, freelancers, and current and former Sony employees., , A week after the major attack, the hackers leaked online the five newest films distributed by Sony Pictures,  Annie, Still Alice, Fury, Still Alice, Mr. Turner and To Write Love on Her Arms during Black Friday., Several media agencies in these hours are spreading the news that Sony Pictures employees received e-mails from hackers threatening to harm them and their family members. The circumstance is very scary and has no precedents., Who is threatening the employees at Sony Pictures Entertainment and why?, According to the media agencies, employees at Sony Pictures Entertainment received threatening emails from the GOP team. The emails are written in English and includes the following text:, “Please sign your name to object the false (sic) of the company at the email address below, if you don’t want to suffer damage. If you don’t, not only you but your family will be in danger.”, The employees at the Sony Picture were requested to turn off their cell phones after receiving this email, meantime the company is supporting law enforcement in the investigation., It’s difficult in this phase discover the real identity of the GOP team despite many security experts speculated on the possible involvement of the North Korea. The retaliation is the payback for upcoming comedy film, “The Interview,” which narrates the story of two journalists who are recruited by the CIA to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong Un., At the moment, the unique certainly is related to the nature of the malware used in the attack, as reported by experts at TrendMicro the GOP used a Wiper malware to compromise the corporate network., “I am the head of GOP who made you worry. , Removing Sony Pictures on earth is a very tiny work for our group which is a worldwide organization. And what we have done so far is only a small part of our further plan. It’s your false if you if you think this crisis will be over after some time. All hope will leave you and Sony Pictures will collapse. This situation is only due to Sony Pictures. Sony Pictures is responsible for whatever the result is. Sony Pictues clings to what is good to nobody from the beginning. It’s silly to expect in Sony Pictures to take off us. Sony Pictures makes only useless efforts. One beside you can be our member. , Many things beyond imagination will happen at many places of the world. Our agents find themselves act in necessary places. Please sign your name to object the false of the company at the email address below if you don’t want to suffer damage. If you don’t, not only you but your family will be in danger., Nobody can prevent us, but the only way is to follow our demand. If you want to prevent us, make your company behave wisely.”  states the email sent by hackers to the Sony Pictures employee., Stay tuned., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Sony Pictures, GOP)

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Anonymous ha also posted the manifest of the Op Charlie Hebdo on Pastebin, below the translation of an excerpt from the message:, “It is our responsibility to react … Attacking freedom of speech is a direct hit to democracy. Expect a massive reaction from us, because this freedom is what we’ve been always fighting for.”, True to his declaration of war, Anonymous announced the # OpISIS in a video appeared on YouTube. The popular collective and the RedCult claimed to have carried out cyber attack against hundreds of Twitter and Facebook accounts used by the terrorists of the Islamic State., , According to the video, Operation OpISIS is managed by “Muslims, Christians, Jews”, a masked man explains the motivation of the attack that is conducted by ordinary people that together decided to join the forces against the ISIS., , We are “hackers, crackers, Hacktivist, phishers, agents, spies, or just the guy next door… students, administrators, workers, clerks, unemployed, rich, poor.” They are also “young, or old, gay or straight… from all races, countries, religions, and ethnicity. United as one, divided by zero.” the video explains., Anonymous released a list of more than hundred Twitter and Facebook accounts suspected to belong to ISIS members, they represent the target of the OpISIS. Anonymous released the following message to the ISIS supporters:, On the other side, the ISIS is demonstrating an excellent command of web technologies such as social networks, which uses daily to communicate with his followers., Recently it has been discovered a manual released by the ISIS to its members to avoid online surveillance during their web experience. Twitter has already suspended more than 1500 ISIS accounts and dozens of militant recruiting websites were shut down by ISP and by DDoS Attack run by Anonymous members., It isn’t the first time that Anonymous targets jihadist online communities, in June the group run a campaign dubbed Operation NO2ISIS against some states it accuses of supporting the Islamic terror group ISIS., (Security Affairs –  Anonymous, OpISIS, ISIS)

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A group of security and technology experts that fight for the respect of human rights experts have launched a new tool dubbed Detekt that allow the detection of the government surveillance malware on mobile devices and PCs. Amnesty in one the members of the Coalition Against Unlawful Surveillance Exports, the alliance that fights to avoid violation of human rights, Unfortunately, the massive surveillance technology is today sold by a growing number of companies. Surveillance is a profitable business, the Coalition Against Unlawful Surveillance Exports estimates the annual global trade in surveillance technologies is greater than £3bn and it is rapidly growing., Private firms sell off-the-shelf equipment that allows intelligence agencies and law enforcement to spy on millions of emails and phone calls., Government entities are increasingly using technology to intercept communications and monitor online activities of journalists, citizen-journalists and dissidents. This uncontrolled diffusion represents a serious threat to human rights and liberty of expression., “Online surveillance is a growing danger for journalists, bloggers, citizen-journalists and human rights defenders. The Spyfiles that WikiLeaks released in 2012 showed the extent of the surveillance market, its worth (more than 5 billion dollars) and the sophistication of its products.” report states., We must distinguish surveillance technology widely available on the internet from advanced technologies developed by private firms for law enforcement and intelligence agencies, both cases poses a serious menace to individuals living  in countries that persistently commit human rights violations. The sale of these solutions must be regulated, the alliance invites an international call for action from national governments and regional institutions to avoid the abuse of the technologies., “Governments need to begin regulating this trade by updating export laws, to encourage moral responsibility amongst private companies and to prevent their technologies from empowering dictatorships and oppressive regimes with powerful surveillance systems.” is reported in the website of the Coalition Against Unlawful Surveillance Exports., Amnesty will promote Detekt among their activists around the world, let me remind you that the software is free and open-source., “Detekt is a great tool which can help activists stay safe but ultimately the only way to prevent these technologies from being used to violate or abuse human rights is to establish and enforce strict controls on their use and trade.” said Marczynski.  “It represents a strike back against governments who are using information obtained through surveillance to arbitrarily detain, illegally arrest and even torture human rights defenders and journalists.”, Amnesty will promote the new software, which is free and open-source, among their activists around the world., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Detekt , government surveillance)

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Intel has released microcode to address the CVE-2017-5715 Spectre vulnerability for many of its chips, let’s this time the security updates will not cause further problems., The Spectre attack allows user-mode applications to extract information from other processes running on the same system. It can also be exploited to extract information from its own process via code, for example, a malicious JavaScript can be used to extract login cookies for other sites from the browser’s memory., The Spectre attack breaks the isolation between different applications, allowing to leak information from the kernel to user programs, as well as from virtualization hypervisors to guest systems., Problems such as frequent reboots were related to the fix for the CVE-2017-5715 Spectre flaw (Spectre Variant 2) and affected almost any platform, including systems running on Broadwell Haswell CPUs, as well as Ivy Bridge-, Sandy Bridge-, Skylake-, and Kaby Lake-based platforms., , A couple of weeks ago Intel released new microcode for its Skylake processors, now it has announced security updates for Kaby Lake, Coffee Lake and other CPUs., The microcode is now available for all 6th, 7th, and 8th generation Core processors and also X-series Intel Core products, as well as Xeon Scalable and Xeon D chips., Intel released the Spectre firmware security updates for the following products:, Anniedale/Moorefield, Apollo Lake, Avoton/Rangeley, Broxton, Cherry View, Coffee Lake, Cougar Mountain, Denverton, Gemini Lake, Kaby Lake, Knights Landing, Knights Mill, Skylake, SoFIA, Tangier, Valleyview/Bay Trail, and XGold., Intel released beta patches for Broadwell, Gladden, Haswell, some Ivy Bridge, Sandy Bridge, and Skylake Xeon E3 processors. The beta patches have been provided to OEMs for their final validation., The patches for the remaining chips are either in pre-beta or planning phase.,  , Both Intel and AMD confirmed are working on processors that will include protections against attacks such as Spectre and Meltdown., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Chips, Intel)

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Firefox browser is going to introduce a new security feature to make the users’ experience online more secure, it will warn users if they visit websites that have experienced data breaches., The news was revealed by the Mozilla developer Nihanth Subramany and it was confirmed by the presence of a recently-released GitHub repo titled “Breach Alerts Prototype.”, “This is an extension that I’m going to be using as a vehicle for prototyping basic UI and interaction flow for an upcoming feature in Firefox that notifies users when their credentials have possibly been leaked or stolen in a data breach.” states the description published on GitHub., The developer has teamed with haveibeenpwned.com as data source related for data breaches., The new feature is still not complete, the developer explained that in its current state it is in no way meant to represent actual production code, or how the feature will work or look like when it ships., He also listed the following basic goals for the new security feature:, , The developer also approached privacy concerns since the users would need to supply an email address to receive security notifications., “The third goal brings up some privacy concerns, since users would need to supply an email address to receive notifications. Who is the custodian of this data? Can we avoid sending user data to haveibeenpwned.com? Can we still offer useful functionality to users who opt out of subscribing their email address? While the project is still in infancy, the idea is to offer as much utility as possible while respecting the user’s privacy.” added the developer., The notifications will also include old data breaches such as the ones suffered by Adobe.com or LinkedIn.com several years ago., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – FireFox browser, data breach)

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In January the Israeli mobile phone data extraction company Cellebrite was hacked, the company went in the headlines in the dispute between Apple and the FBI in the case of the San Bernardino shooter’s iPhone., The main product of the company is the Universal Forensic Extraction Device (UFED), an equipment that can rip data (i.e. SMS messages, emails, call logs) from a huge number of different models of mobile phones., , The experts are still investigating the case, meantime Cellebrite has confirmed the security breach. The company confirmed that someone accessed its systems stealing roughly 900 Gb of data, a huge quantity of data mainly composed of log data from its end-user licensing system my.Cellebrite and other sensitive data. The archive includes also 350 Gb of offline world map backups, but attackers did not access “full passwords” or payment information.  have not been obtained – although it has admitted that some password hashes have been stolen., “Contrary to some erroneous reports, the attack did not impact any Cellebrite intellectual property related to the delivery of Cellebrite Forensic products and services, such as proprietary source code,” reads an announcement issued by the company.There is no increased risk to Cellebrite Forensic customers as a result of normal, ongoing use of Cellebrite UFED software and hardware, including routine software updates.”, According to the company, hackers accessed just some password hashes and information on closed technical support inquiries., The hacker decided anyway to publish not only information contained in the archive, but also exploits for Android, iOS, and BlackBerry mobile devices., According to Motherboard, the forensics expert Jonathan Zdziarski who analyzed the dump confiremed thay many of the exploits for iOS devices are widely available tools, for this reason he avoids to call them “exploits.”, The hacker promptly responded to Zdziarski via Pastebin, he confirmed that Apple tools are widely available, but also added that BlackBerry files are not publicly available., “The more discerning eye will notice that some of the Apple exploits bear a remarkable resemblance to those available to any teenager interested in the jailbreaking scene perhaps not all those tax dollars have been wasted, the Blackberry epr is still worth a look at.” states the hacker., “The files referenced here are part of the distribution package of our application and are available to our customers.  They do not include any source code.” wrote a spokesperson for Cellebrite in an email sent to Motherboard.  , “He added that the company monitors new research from academia and the information security community, including “newly published forensic methods, research tools and publicly documented issues, including “jailbreaks,” which enable platform research.”, The hacker plans to release a small sample of files retrieved via the weaponized Cellebrite update service deployed on MS Windows based devices and desktops (SYSTEM privs) within the customer infrastructure., “Analysis of the compression and obfuscation employed by Cellebrite on products supplied to British MOD juxtaposed with the protection free versions supplied to SOCOM and others is also included within.” added the hacker., The download links are:, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Cellebrite , data breach)

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The popular investigator Brian Krebs sustains to know the culprit of the Ashley Madison hack, which publicly leaked 37 million accounts belonging to the users of the adultery website., Brian Krebs disclosed the Twitter account, Deuszu, used by an individual close to the responsible for the Ashley Madison data breach., Avid Life Media, the company that owns the Ashley Madison is offering a $500,000 reward for information that could allow law enforcement to identify and arrest the hackers behind the recent data breach it suffered., Krebs downloaded all the tweets sent in five years from Deuszu (Thadeus Zu):, These are the clues analyzed by Krebs in his analysis:, , , “The day before, he’d compromised the Web site for the Australian Parliament, taunting lawmakers there with the tweet: “Parliament of Australia bit.ly/NPQdsP Oi! Oi! Oi!….T.N.T. Dynamite! Listen to ACDC here.” he tweeted., Krebs seems to have no doubts, Deuszu is directly involved in the Ashley Madison, even if it is an investigator who is following the case he certainly knows the identity of the culprit., “Deuszu — whoever and wherever he is in real life — may not have been directly involved in the Ashley Madison hack; he claims in several tweets that he was not part of the hack, but then in countless tweets he uses the royal ‘We’ when discussing the actions and motivations of the Impact Team,” wrote Krebs., “It is possible that Zu is instead a white hat security researcher or confidential informant who has infiltrated the Impact Team and is merely riding on their coattails or acting as their mouthpiece. But one thing is clear: If Zu wasn’t involved in the hack, he almost certainly knows who was.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Ashley Madison, Data Breach)

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Personal details of nearly 700,000 American Express (Amex India) India customers were exposed online via an unsecured MongoDB server., The huge trove of data was discovered by Bob Diachenko from cybersecurity firm Hacken, most of the records were encrypted, but 689,272 records were stored in plaintext., The expert located the database by using IoT search engines such as Shodan and BinaryEdge.io., “On 23rd October I discovered an unprotected Mongo DB which allowed millions of records to be viewed, edited and accessed by anybody who might have discovered this vulnerability.  The records appeared to be from an American Express branch in India.” states the blog post published by Diachenko., ,  , 689,272 plaintext records included personal details of Amex India customers’ phone numbers, names, email addresses, and ‘type of card’ description fields., The archive included 2,332,115 records containing encrypted data (i.e. names, addresses, Aadhaar numbers, PAN card numbers, and phone numbers., Seems like @AmexIndia exposed its #MongoDB for a while, with some really sensitive data (base64 encrypted). Now secured (just when I was preparing responsible disclosure), but question remains how long it was open. Found with @binaryedgeio engine. pic.twitter.com/3kbXaS4cIz, — Bob Diachenko (@MayhemDayOne) October 25, 2018, , “Upon closer examination, I am inclined to believe that the database was not managed by AmEx itself but instead by one their subcontractors who were responsible for SEO or lead generation. I came to this conclusion since many of the entries contained fields such as ‘campaignID’, ‘prequalstatus’ and ‘leadID’ etc.” added Diachenko., Diachenko promptly reported his findings to Amex India that immediately took down the server. At the time of writing is not clear how much time the server remained exposed online, Amex India that investigated the case declared that it did not discover any “evidence of unauthorized access.”, “We applaud AmEx’s rapid response to this issue, noting they immediately took down that server upon notification and began further investigations.” Diachenko concluded., “As we learned from this incident, one never knows when transient firewall rules may inadvertently expose your development machines to the public.  In this case, it appears to have only exposed some long-lost personal information of an unknown number of AmEx India customers, but for others, it could be critical intellectual property or even your entire subscriber base that is at risk of being exposed.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Amex India, data breach)

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Security experts involved in the investigation on the hack of France’s TV5Monde television channel revealed that behind the pseudonym of ISIS “Cyber Caliphate” there were Russian hackers., “Russian hackers posing as the ISIS “Cyber Caliphate” were likely behind the hack of France’s TV5Monde television channel, according to cybersecurity experts who have examined the attack.” states Sheera Frenkel from Buzzfeed that first disclosed the news., The hackers belonging to the Cyber Caliphate group shut down transmissions on the TV5Monde network on April 8 and spread pro-ISIS propaganda messages through the social media accounts (Facebook and Twitter) of the French Channel., , According to security experts at FireEye, the Russian ATP28 (also known as Pawn Storm, Tsar Team, Fancy Bear and Sednit) may have used the name of ISIS as a diversionary strategy, the experts noticed a number of similarities in the TTPs used by the Russian group and the one who breached the network at TV5Monde., “There are a number of data points here in common,” said Jen Weedon, manager of threat intelligence at FireEye. “The ‘Cyber Caliphate website,’ where they posted the data on the TV5Monde hack was hosted on an IP block which is the same IP block as other known APT28 infrastructure, and used the same server and registrar that APT28 used in the past.”, Weedon confirmed that at the time of the TV5Monde attack, other journalists were targeted by the APT28 group and the attacks were coordinated by the same hacking infrastructure used by the team., Experts at FireEye published a detailed report on ATP28 in October 2014, speculating that the group is composed by state-sponsored hackers that are managing a long-running cyber espionage campaign on US defense contractors, European security organizations and Eastern European government entities., The hackers also targeted the attendees of European defense exhibitions, including the EuroNaval 2014, EUROSATORY 2014, and the Counter Terror Expo and the Farnborough Airshow 2014., The majority of the files analyzed by FireEye were set to Russian-language settings, the experts confirmed “that a significant portion of APT28 malware was compiled in a Russian-language build environment consistently over the course of six years.”, As usually happens in these cases, in order to profile the attacker the researchers analyzed compile times and discovered that they were aligned with working hours in Moscow and St. Petersburg, another element that suggests the involvement of a Russia-based team. Nearly 96 percent of the malware was compiled between a Monday and Friday during an 8 AM to 6 PM workday in the Moscow time zone., “Russia has a long history of using information operations to sow disinformation and discord, and to confuse the situation in a way that could benefit them,” added Weedon. “In this case, it’s possible that the ISIS cyber caliphate could be a distraction. This could be a touch run to see if they could pull off a coordinated attack on a media outlet that resulted in stopping broadcasts, and stopping news dissemination.”, The Cyber Caliphate is also responsible for another cyber attack against a major target, in January, the group took credit for an attack that took over the social media accounts of the U.S. Central Command. The hackers posted several messages on the hacked account, including images of documents, which were allegedly stolen from hijacked mobile devices of the military personnel., Misinformation campaigns have been already in the past by Russian State-sponsored hackers that are also specialized in PSYOPS operations. Recently the New York Times revealed the existence of a secret organization known as the Internet Research Agency, which was involved in such kind of activities., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – APT28, Cyber Caliphate)

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Ghost Squad Hackers (GSH), a hacktivist group made public the identities of hackers affiliated with the ISIS cyber army called United Cyber Caliphate, including leader Mauritania Attacker., Facebook: pic.twitter.com/h7g4D1gQjd, — s1ege (@s1ege_) 7 luglio 2016, , Prior to this, Ghost Squad Hackers had also gone against a Jordan based bank in May 2016 as it laundered money for ISIS as part of Operation Icarus. Ghost Squad Hackers were also involved in Op ISIS. In collaboration with Anonymous and other groups, they took down the Twitter and Facebook accounts of ISIS sympathizers., Mauritania Attacker has been revealed to be Moulaye Ahmed Ould Ahmed Semane of Nouakchot, the capital city of Mauritania and his phone number (+22234656555) also disclosed. It might cut ISIS from all sources of propaganda as international press carries reports based on information from ISIS online channels., While one of them is named Harith Al-muhajir, the other calls himself Ansari Levantine or Romato and as per his Facebook account is from the Philippines., Just like Bangladesh attacks were by JMB and ISIS only took credit and did online propaganda, or Yemen or  Afghanistan, none of the networks outside of Iraq and Syria are of ISIS or IS. The media foolishly took the ISIS online propaganda outlet Amaq’s claims on Dhaka attack at face value and created panic., IS had similarly issued a hit list that also included names of 285 Indians, randomly picked up from social media! It is not a kill list but passwords picked by amateurs from dumps of mass password breaches like LinkedIn or MySpace ones., As ISIS loses ground in Syria and Iraq, it will try to move from ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq and Syria) to IS (Islamic State). But since it doesn’t have any network outside of Iraq and Syria, it will do a quid pro quo deal with Jihadi terrorist groups online. Swear allegiance to IS and IS does free online propaganda. Hence, IS might expand into cyberspace to create fear disproportional to, Hence, IS might expand into cyberspace to create fear disproportional to its on ground terror capabilities., , “We all know ISIS is not true Islam its fake and we are going to target every hacker inside of ISIS especially the ” United Cyber Caliphate’ which is a conjunction of hackers hacking for ISIS. They are trying to create a quote on quote ‘Cyber Caliphate’ and we intent to prevent that and stop them in their tracks thus we named the operation #OpReverseCaliphate.  Islam is not ISIS, ISIS is a gang attacking on Ramadan and they use drugs,  rape women and kill innocent children. Their victims are of all religions, in fact, most of their victims are Muslims in Syria & Iraq!”  added S1ege. , Ghost Squad Hackers split from the AnonGhost hacker group when Mauritania Attacker and a few others supported ISIS. Thus two groups were formed: Ghost Caliphate that joined forces with ISIS, and Ghost Squad Hackers that opposed it., Ghost Squad Hackers and prior to it, AnonGhost, were considered pro-Muslim hacking groups due to their support for Palestine. On being asked, S1ege replies: “Although we are Muslims Christians and Atheist we have no one religion and  we accept all. But (it’s true that) majority of us are Muslims and we believe in  true Islam not this fake ISIS shit.”, The war between good and bad Muslims seems to be culminating in the cyber world with indications of victory for the good ones. One hopes to see the war reach the same conclusion soon in Iraq and Syria as well., Written by: Aveek Sen, Aveek Sen is an electronics engineer and journalist covering cyber security, Afghanistan and parts of the Middle East. He tweets at @aveeksen,  ,  ,  , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –Ghost Squad, UCC)

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, , , Once again thank you!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Newsletter, SecurityAffairs)

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Just a week ago, the media agencies spread the news that US and British intelligence services have stolen encryption keys of the major SIM card maker Gemalto to spy on mobile voice and data communications worldwide., According to The Intercept, the National Security Agency and the British counterpart GCHQ obtained encryption keys of the global SIM manufacturer Gemalto, but the company was totally oblivious about the operation. According the documents leaked by NSA contractor Edward Snowden, the agencies hacked into the Gemalto systems in 2010 and 2011., , Gemalto confirmed the cyber attacks in the period indicated by Snowden, but denied that hackers have stolen encryption keys that allowed them to run a surveillance activity on a large-scale., “In 2010 and 2011, we detected two particularly sophisticated intrusions which could be related to the operation,” Gemalto said in an official statement. “During the same period, we also detected several attempts to access the PCs of Gemalto employees who had regular contact with customers,” “At the time we were unable to identify the perpetrators but we now think that they could be related to the NSA and GCHQ operation.”, Gemalto clarified that the attacks only impacted its office networks and systems that are not used to manage the SIM encryption keys. However the company confirmed that the attackers’ goal was to steal encryption keys as they were exchanged between Gemalto and its customers. The company confirmed that transfers of sensitive data ware operated through a secure channel., “The attacks against Gemalto only breached its office networks and could not have resulted in a massive theft of SIM encryption keys,” it added. “by 2010, Gemalto had already widely deployed a secure transfer system with its customers and only rare exceptions to this scheme could have led to theft.” “In the case of an eventual key theft, the intelligence services would only be able to spy on communications on second generation 2G mobile networks.””3G and 4G networks are not vulnerable to this type of attack.”, The revelations made by Edward Snowden are transforming the TTPs of US intelligence and its allies, for this reason the NSA director Admiral Rogers recently invited to a profitable collaboration with private companies, the NSA Chief requested them the support to avoid hacking attacks run by foreign governments, Russia and China first of all, and cyber criminals., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Great SIM Heist, NSA, intelligence, Gemalto)

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A critical vulnerability affecting Google Apps for Work allows attackers to send phishing emails. The vulnerability in Google Apps for Work could be exploited to send emails by abusing any website’s domain name and run phishing campaign on the victim’s behalf., Google Apps for Work is a suite of collaborative productivity apps that was designed to offer businesses a collection of professional tools, including email, shared calendars, online document editing and storage, video meetings, and much more., Every user that has a corporate email address, that appears like admin@yourdomain.com instead of myemail@gmail.com, can register an account with Google Apps for Work. To get a custom domain name based email service from Google, the user just needs to sign up like a normal Gmail account. Once created, the user can access his domain’s admin console panel on Google app interface, but he cannot be able to use any service until he will complete domain verification process adopted by Google., The cyber security researchers Patrik Fehrenbach and Behrouz Sadeghipour discovered  that an attacker can register any unused (not previously registered with Google apps service) domain, example: mynewco.com with Google apps for Work to open the ‘admin@mynewco.com‘ account., “Last month, we were able to report a vulnerability to Google where we were able to  email from any domain that has not been claimed by its owner previously. For example, using google itself as a victim, we were able to claim domains such as ytimg.com and gstatic.com.” states a blog post from published by the researchers., The account could be used only after that Google has verified the domain though the “Verify domain ownership” process:, “Before your organization can use Google services like Gmail with your company’s domain, you’ll need to verify that you own it. This ensures that no one else can use services or send email that appears to come from your company.” states Google, The two researchers explained to the The Hacker News that there is a page on Google apps that allows domain administrator to send ‘Sign in Instructions’ to the company users i.e. info@mynewco.com (must be created from panel before proceeding) by simply accessing following URL:, By using the online email editor, an attacker could send any kind of phishing email containing malicious links to the target users. The technique could be effective to steal sensitive information including web service credentials., In the example provided by the colleagues at TheHackerNews, before the vulnerability was fixed, the researchers obtained admin@vine.com and sent an email to the victim, reporting the following subject:, Welcome to Twitter, which can convince users into submitting their Twitter credentials to the given phishing pages.,  , After the duo reported the flaw in Google Apps for Work to Google, the company immediately patched it, anyway the experts explained that the fix is just partial. According to the two researchers, in fact, the attacker is still able to access ‘Send Sign in Instructions’ for unverified domains, but this time via apps-noreply@google.com, instead of the custom email address., “However you can still claim any domain and have access to the admin console through out the “validation process” and that is by design.” continues the post., This means that victims will receive email from apps-noreply, but evidently the measure is not satisfactory., “Google believes that showing the sender as apps-noreply is good enough.”  Behrouz told The Hacker News,, , It’s clear that by abusing of this Google Apps vulnerability, phishers could send phishing emails avoiding Google detection because the mail is sent by the servers of the company., , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Google Apps vulnerability, Google Apps for Work)

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Roaming Tiger is the name of a cyber espionage campaign targeting high profile organizations in Russia and former Soviet Union countries, including Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan., The Roaming Tiger campaign was discovered by experts at ESET in 2014, the researcher Anton Cherepanov presented the findings of their investigation at the 2014 ZeroNights security conference., According to the experts, the threat actors behind the Roaming Tiger relied on RTF exploits and the PlugX RAT, the analysis of the command and control (C&C) infrastructure suggests the involvement of Chinese hackers., This summer, experts at Palo Alto Networks uncovered another hacking campaign having many similarities with the Roaming Tiger. The attacks targeted organizations in the same counties, but instead of PlugX, the hackers used a new tool dubbed BBSRAT., ” Based on data collected from Palo Alto Networks AutoFocus threat intelligence, we discovered continued operations of activity very similar to the Roaming Tiger attack campaign that began in the August 2015 timeframe, with a concentration of attacks in late October and continuing into December.” states a blog post published by PaloAlto Networks., At least in one attack, the threat actors used spear phishing emails with a malicious Word document in attachment., ,  , The Word document designed to exploit an old Microsoft Office vulnerability (CVE-2012-0158) to deliver the BBSRAT malware., This flaw was also exploited in the attacks observed by ESET last year. Curiously the BBSRAT was using the same C&C architecture as in the Roaming Tiger campaign., The experts at Palo Alto analyzed a malicious message trying to compromise the Vigstar company that specializes in the development of special-purpose wireless devices and satellite communications systems used by Russian defense and many security agencies., Interestingly, experts pointed out that BBSRAT uses the same C&C domains as in the Roaming Tiger operation detailed by ESET. However, in the recent attacks, it appears the malicious actors deployed different malware variants and separate infrastructure for each of the targeted entities., Summarizing the characteristics of the Roaming tiger campaign are, Once again a threat actor is continuing to run espionage campaigns despite security researchers have discovered their tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) ., “As in many of the previous articles regarding espionage-motivated adversaries and possible nation-state campaigns, what is being observed in this attack campaign is a continued operation and evolution by the adversary even after its tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) have become public knowledge,” wrote Palo Alto Networks researchers in a blog post. “Despite the fact that the information about these attackers has been public for over a year, including a listing of many of the command and control servers, they continue to reuse much of their exposed playbook.”,  , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Roaming Tiger espionage campaign, Russia)

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The effects of the militarization of the cyberspace are dangerous and unpredictable. A malicious code developed by a government could create serious problems for the Internet users, the recent WannaCry massive attack demonstrates it that used the EternalBlue Exploit to spread., Now a new ransomware, dubbed UIWIX, was discovered to be using the NSA-linked EternalBlue exploit for distribution., UIWIX is a fileless malware discovered by experts at Heimdal security early this week while investigating on WannaCry., Like the WannaCry, UIWIX exploits the same vulnerability in Windows SMB protocol, but the new threat has the ability to run in the memory of the infected system after the exploiting of the EternalBlue., “As we feared in yesterday’s alert, another ransomware variant, known as Uiwix, has been spotted in the wild, exploiting the same vulnerability in Windows SMBv1 and SMBv2 as WannaCry used. Cyber criminals are quick to incorporate vulnerabilities, especially when they have the potential to infect a large number of targets like the EternalBlue exploit has.” reads the analysis published by Heimdal Security., Malware researchers at Trend Micro also investigated the UIWIX and confirmed that UIWIX is a stealthier threat that is hard to analyze, it doesn’t write files on the infected machine and it is also able to detect the presence of a virtual machine (VM) or sandbox., “So how is UIWIX different? It appears to be fileless: UIWIX is executed in memory after exploiting EternalBlue. Fileless infections don’t entail writing actual files/components to the computer’s disks, which greatly reduces its footprint and in turn makes detection trickier.” wrote Trend Micro., “UIWIX is also stealthier, opting to terminate itself if it detects the presence of a virtual machine (VM) or sandbox. Based on UIWIX’s code strings, it appears to have routines capable of gathering the infected system’s browser login, File Transfer Protocol (FTP), email, and messenger credentials.”, UIWIX is able to browser login, File Transfer Protocol (FTP), email, and messenger credentials from the infected system,, Unlike WannaCry, UIWIX leverages a Dynamic-link Library (DLL) to gain persistence., Below a summary of WannaCry and UIWIX’s notable features reported by Trend Micro:, ,  , Another interesting behavior observed by the researchers is that the malware terminates itself if the compromised computer is located in Russia, Kazakhstan, and Belarus., The network activity of the malware leverages mini-tor.dll to connect to .onion site, meanwhile, WannaCry was scanning the Internet for random IP addresses to check if it has an open port 445 and it was connecting to .onion site using the Tor browser., Most evident differences between WannaCry and UIWIX are:, Clearly, the WannaCry attack represents a great opportunity for cyber crime ecosystem, every time a new flaw was discovered cooks try to exploit is in the attack in the wild, for example including the exploit code in crimeware kits used in hacking campaigns., Recently we reported the case of the Adylkuzz botnet, another malware that exploited the EternalBlue exploit to spread a Monero miner., “It’s not a surprise that WannaCry’s massive impact turned the attention of other cybercriminals into using the same attack surface vulnerable systems and networks are exposed to. Apart from WannaCry and UIWIX, our sensors also detected a Trojan delivered using EternalBlue—Adylkuzz (TROJ_COINMINER.WN). This malware turns infected systems into zombies and steals its resources in order to mine for the cryptocurrency Monero.” Trend Micro concludes., “UIWIX, like many other threats that exploit security gaps, is a lesson on the real-life significance of patching.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – WannaCry, UIWIX)

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Security researchers at AVG have discovered a new strain of Android malware which is able to spy on mobile users even when their mobile is off., The malware could be used to control victim’s mobile device, the malicious software is able of making calls, sending out SMS and controlling cameras event when the phone is switched off., , The Android malware identified by the experts could operate even if the mobile device is off because it is able to hijack the shutting down process of the mobile device. In reality, the malware simulates the switch off deceiving the user, for this reason the experts called the malicious  PowerOffHijack., “This malware hijacks the shutting down process of your mobile, so when the user turns the power off button to shut down their mobile, it doesn’t really shut down. After pressing the power button, you will see the real shutdown animation, and the phone appears off. Although the screen is black, it is still on.” is reported in a blog post published by AVG., When the user presses the phone’s power button to switch off, the malware only makes it look like the device has stopped operating. PowerOffHijack is able to infect only mobile devices running Android versions below 5.0, the researchers estimated that nearly 10,000 devices have been already infected by the malware. The majority of PowerOffHijack infections was observed in China, where they started when the malware was distributed through the local official Android app stores., The only way to be 100 percent sure that a mobile phone was really switched off, users have to remove its battery., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Android, PowerOffHijack malware)

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The best news of the week with Security Affairs.,  , mc4wp_form id=”42321″, , Once again thank you!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Newsletter, SecurityAffairs)

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Here we go again to speak about the notorious Chinese hacking team Pangu, the group is time popular for his ability to jailbreak Apple devices. This time the experts presented a jailbreak for iOS 12 running on the latest iPhone XS., The last jailbreak for Apple iOS devised by the Pangu team was released in October 2015, when the expert published the untethered jailbreak tool for iOS 9., Below the Tweet shared by the researcher Min(Spark) Zheng on a Tweet that shows the successfully jailbreak on Apple iPhone XS with A12 Bionic chip announced by one of the Pangu researchers., The experts pointed out that the iOS 12 jailbreak bypass a functional PAC (Pointer authentication codes) mitigation implemented in the new Apple’s A12 Bionic chip., iOS 12 Jailbreak on iPhone XS by @PanguTeam ! Bypass PAC mitigation on the new A12 chip. That's amazing!!!👏👏👏 pic.twitter.com/PeVLb13EsJ, — Min(Spark) Zheng (@SparkZheng) September 27, 2018, , Experts believe the same jailbreak should work also on iPhone XS Max because of the hardware similarities., , The Pangu group still haven’t announced the jailbreak, but many users hope the team will release the iOS 12 jailbreak to the public., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Pangu iOS 12 jailbreak, hacking)

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The Data breach notification website LeakedSource has apparently been raided by feds. The service is one of the most important available online, it reported some of the largest data breaches last year and now is facing a serious problem., Among the data breaches reported by LeakedSource there are the ones that affected Last.fm, Rambler.ru, FriendFinder Networks, LinkedIn, and MySpace., According to a post on the marketplace ogflip.com, the owner of LeakedSource was raided earlier this week, it is still unclear the reason for the raid., At the time I was writing the service appears to have been shut down., “Leakedsource is down forever and won’t be coming back. Owner raided early this morning. Wasn’t arrested, but all SSD’s got taken, and Leakedsource servers got subpoena’d and placed under federal investigation. If somehow he recovers from this and launches LS again, then I’ll be wrong. But I am not wrong. (sic)” reads the message from OGF., , The data breach notification service was offering access to the full archive with the payment of a membership fee., LeakedSource indexed more than 3 billion records that were obtained through information sharing between a number of sources, including the hackers who broke in the compromise archives., The U.S. Department of Justice did not comment the news of an alleged investigation related to the data breach notification service., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – data breach notification service, law enforcement),  

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Another disconcerting aspect of the Stagefright flaw is that it potentially affects 95% of Android devices running version 2.2 to 5.1 of the Google OS (roughly 950 million smartphones ).  Experts at security firm Zimperium announced the Stagefright vulnerability as the worst Android flaw in the mobile OS history, and confirmed that they will reveal more details at the next BlackHat or DEFCON in Las Vegas this year., The Stagefright flaw affects a media library app that is used for by Android to process Stagefright media files. According to the experts at Zimperium the media library is affected by several vulnerabilities., Joshua Drake from Zimperium discovered seven critical vulnerabilities in the native media playback engine called Stagefright, the expert defined the Stagefright flaw the “Mother of all Android Vulnerabilities.”, The attackers can exploit the vulnerability by sending a single multimedia text message to an unpatched Android device, according to the security firm Google has already issued a patch and has sent out to it to the company’s partners. However, most manufacturers haven’t already distributed the patch to their customers exposing them to cyber attack, , Once the attackers have successfully exploited the vulnerability, they would be able to write code to the mobile device and steal user data, including audio or media files or photographs stored in the SD cards. The attackers can remotely control the device, accessing audio from microphone, reading emails, and exfiltrating sensitive data., The experts at Zimperium explain that, unlike spear-phishing attacks, where victims need to open a malicious file or click on a like to a domain used to serve a malware, the Stagefright vulnerability can be triggered even if victims are not using the smartphone., Once the exploit has been delivered, the attacker can delete the message before the user will notice it, making attacks very insidious and impossible to detect., “All devices should be assumed to be vulnerable,” Drake told Forbes. Drake says that only Android phones below version 2.2 are not affected by this particular vulnerability. “I’ve done a lot of testing on an Ice Cream Sandwich Galaxy Nexus… where the default MMS is the messaging application Messenger. That one does not trigger automatically but if you look at the MMS, it triggers, you don’t have to try to play the media or anything, you just have to look at it,” Drake added., Stay tuned …, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Stagefright vulnerability, Android)

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The best news of the week with Security Affairs., Hurry up, subscribe to the newsletter, next Sunday you will receive all the news directly in your inbox.I desire to inform you that Security Affairs is now open to sponsored content..I desire to inform you that Security Affairs is now open to sponsored content. I’ll offer the opportunity to: •    Insert banners of various sizes in all the posts on Security Affairs. •    Publish sponsored posts written by the customers that can include any kind of commercial reference. •    Arrange a monthly/quarterly/annual campaign (for big customers) to advertise customers’ activities and discoveries. For more info contact me at pierluigi.paganini@securityaffairs.co Thanks for supporting Security Affairs., mc4wp_form id=”42321″, , Once again thank you!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Newsletter)

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Any abuse of technology against children and youngster can have devastating effects social media them, their lives and their harmony of their families., Social media are among the paradigms that can be transformed to a deadly trap for teenagers, pedophilia, sexting, sextortion and cyberbullying are just a few samples of the threats for children and youngster that are left alone online., I strongly believe that it is important to share the knowledge of the principal threats and phenomena that can manage young individuals, for this reason I want to introduce you a dangerous game that is involving teenagers, the Game of 72 (#Gameof72)., According to the Vancouver police who launched the warning, the Game of 72 is a challenge among teenagers to vanish for 72 hours., “Essentially, children are daring each other to ‘go dark’ for 72 hours.””To kids, going dark for 72 hours means to make themselves go missing. Not just off social media, but missing from society for three days.” reported Walkingthesocialmediabeat.com., The rules of the Game of 72 are simple, the youngster who receives the message is not allowed to contact anyone for three days., “The greater the hysteria your disappearance causes the bigger you win.” reported the cknw.com., The social media expert, Jesse Miller highlighted the importance to dialog with children and informing them about the risks related to these popular platforms, in particular of the Game of 72., “Open up dialogue about where a story originated from. Ask the questions about whether or not their children have heard about it and whether or not their friends are talking about it on the internet.” said Miller., Miller explained that law enforcement observed numerous cases in the UK linked to the Game of 72, fortunately in all the cases where teenagers disappeared and appeared unharmed days later. It seems that that game was originated in France, according to the French website The Local., “The game was reportedly to blame for the disappearance of a 13-year-old girl the French press identified as Emma, who went missing for three days at the end of April before showing up at home unharmed and refusing to reveal to her parents or law enforcement where she’d been.” reported Yahoo. “After two girls in Britain went missing over the weekend, speculation arose that they, too, were playing the game, according to The Daily Express. Sammy Clarke and Siobhan Clarke, who are not related, were found safe on Monday. Police have not confirmed whether the girls were playing the game, though friends and neighbors told the papers they suspected it. Still, local authorities have arrested a 22-year-old man in connection with the incident, The Daily Express reported.”, It is clear that the so-called the Game of 72 could have dramatic consequences for its young players. Vancouver Constable Brian Montague explained that the game is dangerous and potentially criminal because it procures a false alarm in the police., “When you force the police into an investigation you potentially could be charged criminally. That’s always a possibility. We hope that it wouldn’t get to that.” explained the Vancouver Constable Brian Montague., In order to discourage the teenager in participating the Game of 72, Montague is also cautioning them that an investigation conducted by the law enforcement on their disappearance could cause the public disclosure for details of their personal life., The disconcerting Game of 72 is becoming viral, Revere Police in Massachusetts is warning parents of the absurd practice., , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Game of 72, social media)

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Security experts at MalwareHunterTeam have spotted a new ransomware dubbed ‘rensenWare’. The ransomware is very strange, rather than demanding money, it requires the victims to score “over 0.2 billion” playing “TH12 — Undefined Fantastic Object”., The RensenWare ransomware would scan a machine for certain file types and used the AES-256 to encrypt the files. When the malware encrypts a file it would append the .RENSENWARE extension to it., , When RensenWare ransomware completes the file encrytion, it displays a ransom note featuring Captain Minamitsu Murasa from the Touhou Project series of shooting games made by Team Shanghai Alice., The ransomware note tells the victims that they must score over .2 billion in the Lunatic level of a Touhou Project game called TH12 ~ Undefined Fantastic Object. If the victim does not reach that score or close the ransomware, he will not able to rescue the files forever., “That’s easy. You just play TH12 ~ Undefined Fantastic Object and score over 0.2 billion in LUNATIC level. this application will detect TH12 process and score automatically. DO NOT TRY CHEATING OR TEMRMINATE THIS APPLICATION IF YOU DON’T WANT TO BLOW UP THE ENCRYPTION KEY!” reads the ransom note., Found a surprising ransomware today: "rensenWare".Not asks for any money, but to play a game until you reach a score – and it's not a joke. pic.twitter.com/Pu53WZFALA, — MalwareHunterTeam (@malwrhunterteam) April 6, 2017, , “A new ransomware called RensenWare was discovered today by MalwareHunterTeam that makes a unique ransom demand;  score over 0.2 billion in the LUNATIC level of TH12 ~ Undefined Fantastic Object or kiss your files goodbye!” wrote Lawrence Abrams from BleepingComputers. “While I do not think this ransomware was ever meant to be distributed, it shows what a creative developer can do to torment their victims.”, The RensenWare ransomware will monitor the gaming progress of the victim by looking for a process called “th12.” The malware reads the processes memory to determine the current score and level of the game. When the victim reaches the Lunatic level and has scored over .2 billion points, the ransomware will save the key to the Desktop and initiate the decryption process., Lawrence Abrams excludes that the rensenWare ransomware was developed for criminal purposes, “this program was most likely created as a joke. Regardless of the reasons, it illustrates another new and innovative way that a ransomware can be developed.”, During the encryption operation, the malware doesn’t try to delete shadow volumes or make any other action to prevent a victim from restoring their files. This suggests the ransomware was created as a joke or to only disturb a specific group of people., The author of the ransomware Tvple Eraser explained its intent with a message shared on Twitter:, Hell, I'll NEVER make any malware or any similar thing. making was so fun, however as a result, it made me so exhausted, /w no foods all day, — Tvple Eraser (@0x00000Ff) April 7, 2017, , The rensenWare ransomware demonstrates the great creativity of the community of malware coders, the experts have no doubt, we will see many other ‘creative’ themes the future., This malware doesn’t represent a threat, but it has the potential to become it., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – RensenWare, ransomware)

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Hosting provider Namecheap announced that earlier this week that hackers compromised some of its users’ accounts, apparently using the “CyberVor” collection of 1.2 billion usernames and passwords compiled by Russian hackers.  “CyberVor” (“vor” means “thief” in Russian) is the name of the Russian criminal gang which collected more than one billion passwords and  nearly 542 million email addresses., The company Namecheap has published a blog post titled “Urgent Security Warning” to inform its customers that an abnormal load of login attempts was detected by its intrusion detection systems., , The company added that the majority of these login attempts have been unsuccessful, anyway some accounts have been compromised using the credentials belonging to the “CyberVor” collection., “Overnight, our intrusion detection systems alerted us to a much higher than normal load against our login systems. Upon investigation, we determined that the username and password data gathered from third party sites, likely the data identified by The Register (i.e. not Namecheap) is being used to try and gain access to Namecheap.com accounts.”, “The vast majority of these login attempts have been unsuccessful as the data is incorrect or old and passwords have been changed. As a precaution, we are aggressively blocking the IP addresses that appear to be logging in with the stolen password data. We are also logging these IP addresses and will be exporting blocking rules across our network to completely eliminate access to any Namecheap system or service, as well as making this data available to law enforcement.” state the post., The company is tracking all the IP addresses used in the cyber attack for the login attempts and are blocking them. The experts speculated that logins appeared to come from the record-breaking hoard of credentials collected by “CyberVor”., The company NameCheap remarked that its systems weren’t hacked and that it is just warning its customers on illicit activities dicscovered:, “I must reiterate this is not a security breach at Namecheap, nor a hack against us. The hackers are using usernames and passwords being used have been obtained from other sources. These have not been obtained from Namecheap. But these usernames and passwords that the hackers now have are being used to try and login to Namecheap accounts.”, According to the post, the threat actor used a fake browser software in the attack to emulate the login process with one of the popular browsers available on the market (Firefox/Safari/Chrome)., “The group behind this is using the stored usernames and passwords to simulate a web browser login through fake browser software. This software simulates the actual login process a user would use if they are using Firefox/Safari/Chrome to access their Namecheap account. The hackers are going through their username/password list and trying each and every one to try and get into Namecheap user accounts,” Namecheap reported., Namecheap has informed its customers that it is securing the affected accounts and it is contacting their owners requesting them improve the security., “If you receive an email alert from us stating that your account has temporarily been secured, don’t worry. We’ve proactively taken this step as a security measure to help defend you against this attack. We will need you to verify your identity to us and we will then issue you with new login credentials, including a new, stronger password.”, Namecheap also suggests to its customers to enable two-factor-authentication for users’ accounts., As usual, let me suggest to enable two-factor authentication for the web services that implement it, carefully protect your passwords and avoid reusing them on multiple websites., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Namecheap, cybercrime)

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As expected happened, just yesterday I wrote about a large scale cyber attack against North Korea that blocked internet activities of the country bringing down almost all of all websites, today South Korean authorities are facing with a hacking attack against an Internet provider that brought down the servers of three broadcasters and two major banks., Let’s step back, the attack that hit North Korea blocked popular propaganda web site such as the Rodong Sinmun and the Korean Central News Agency (KCNA)., “Internet servers operated by our republic have come under daily cyber attack(s) which are persistent and intensive”, The KCNA reported., The agency accused United States and South Korea for the attack, due possible reprisals by the government of Pyongyang South Korea raised the level of alert Infocon that reflects the current likelihood of an imminent cyber attack, the Infocon level passed from five to four due the tension in Korean area, a level defined by South Korea’s defense minister as a “general threat., It’s been a few days and a cyberattack hit South Korea, everything suggests a counter-offensive of North Korea, the network provided by LG UPlus Corp has been hacked by a group calling itself the “Whois Team”, unknown to date, the announced further operations., The offensives have hit also media and banking of the South Korea, television networks YTN, MBC and KBS and Shinhan Bank and NongHyup Bank, two major banks of the country, were attacked., “We sent down teams to all affected sites. We are now assessing the situation. This incident is pretty massive and will take a few days to collect evidence,” a representative of law enforcement., Government representative confirmed a malware based attack to South Korean news agency Yohap that infected computer networks., “Military tensions in the area is escalated dramatically after the North conducted its third nuclear test last month that has caused the immediate condemnation of the international community, Pyongyang responded to the subsequent UN sanctions menacing the use of nuclear weapons. Western intelligence agencies known the attention given by Korean cyber militias to governments considered hostile. There are countless cyber operations of cyber espionage and more generally of cyber warfare against the West and the historical opponents such as South Korea.”, Fortunately according South Korea’s military none of critical infrastructures of the country was affected, neither government networks, but concern is high.  Until now, the government of  Seoul has not speculated about the event, the situation is very complex and cyber attacks observed on this day may have been triggered by independent groups of hackers or by other states interested in exacerbating tensions in the area., The Korea Internet Security Agency reported  40,000 cases of cyber attacks in 2012, up from 24,000 in 2008, and according cyber security community North Korea in the past already hit the neighbors with powerful cyber-attacks targeting banks, newspapers and government institutions during ten long days in 2011 dubbed by firm McAfee “Ten Days of Rain”., South Korea has stepped up its information surveillance status following a cyber-attack , but the enemis appear aggressive., Let’s wait more information from investigation …, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Cyber warfare)

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Scammers are prolific and ingenious guys, this time they are targeting Mac pretending to be operators of the Apple Technical support., Technical support scammers are running aggressive malvertising also relying on legitimate ad networks., “These scams aren’t being done with cold calls, but by aggressive malvertising,” said Jerome Segura, a senior security researcher from Malwarebytes. , This last malvertising campaign is targeting Mac users who browse “lower-quality websites” used by Technical support scammers to host the attack code or malicious scripts that are able to exploit vulnerabilities in the browser to hijack the user’s traffic., With this tactic technical support scammers are able to display the victims bogus warnings that their computer is at risk, and, of course, these messages propose a telephone number to call for support., Experts at Malwarebytes noticed that websites controlled by crooks discriminate the browser user agent to serve the proper exploit depending on the victim’s OS.  If the browser is Safari, the scammers display victims the tech support message., “This particular case shows that tech support scammers are resorting to more elaborate ways to social engineer their victims. Perhaps Apple users are even more at risk because they may be less experienced at dealing with these kinds of “errors”.”states a blog post published by Malwarebytes., The experts highlighted the level of sophistication implemented by the technical support scammers for this campaign., The technical support scammers behind the campaign use a website with a URL almost identical to the one used by Apple for the legitimate technical support (ara-apple.com instead ara.apple.com) that allows its customers to share the screen for remote assistance., “The domain name is almost the same as the official screen sharing one from Apple,” Segura said., “These are definitely a threat to Mac users,” Segura added. “Mac users just aren’t as aware of the threat out there from support scams as are Windows users.”, , The researchers noticed that the fake domain was also used to process payments, but giving a look to the ‘Secure Payment’ page implemented by technical support scammers is possible to verify that the process uses the HTTP protocol instead HTTPs., Experts reported the malicious campaign to both the registrar GoDaddy and hosting provider Liquid Web to allow the shut down of the bogus websites., B always suspicious of alarming pop ups or websites that claim your computer may be infected!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Technical support scammers, cybercrime)

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Early 2015 security experts discovered a variant of banking malware dubbed Dridex that was spread through a phishing campaign using Microsoft Excel documents embedding malicious macro to infect victims’ machines., The Dridex malware implements features common to other financial trojans, it uses injection mechanisms to steal the user’s credentials for their online banking account., Dridex belong to the GameOver Zeus family and is considered a successor of Cridex banking malware. The previous Dridex campaign targeted UK banks with spam campaign, also in that case based on malicious attachments including malicious macros., , The practice to use macros to load malware into target system is very common despite  macros are disabled by default. In February security experts at TrendMicro observed significant improvements in VAWTRAK banking trojan which couples use malicious macros and Windows PowerShell., The attackers exploit social engineering techniques to lure victims into enable macros. For the Dridex campaign, the criminals are using XML files as a lure. The experts highlighted that it is the first time that a similar campaign relies on an XML document., According to Trustwave, cyber criminals sent several hundred messages over the past few days trying to deceive users’ trust in Office documents to enable macros. The malicious emails contain an XML files that pretend to be a legitimate “remittance advice,” or payment notifications., The experts highlighted that it is the first time that a similar campaign relies on an XML document as a lure., “XML files are the old binary format for Office docs and once you double click them to open, the file associated with Microsoft Word and opens,” said Karl Sigler, Trustwave threat intelligence manager. , In order to avoid detection of defense systems, the macro is compressed and Base64 encoded, another particularity of the attack is that criminals also included a pop-up with instructions for the user on how to enable macros., The instructions inform victims that they need to enable macros to view correctly the invoice or to ensure proper security., “Which is the exact opposite of what this does,” Sigler said. “It doesn’t seem to be all that sophisticated. They’re either trying to capitalize on a user’s trust in XML files, or the fact that a user may not be that familiar with what that extension is.”, Why the attackers switched in XML documents to lure victims?, The experts speculate that they are simply searching for new attack vector that could be effective for their malicious campaigns., “ It’s hard to say why these guys moved to XML. It could be that they’re looking for a new attack vector and they weren’t getting good click-through rates with the Excel documents. Maybe they were not getting people to enable macros the way they hoped and they’re looking for a way to better their success rate.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Dridex banking Trojan, macros)

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WhatsSpy Public is a web-based tool created by Maikel Zweerink that can trace the moves of a WhatsApp user. WhatsSpy is able to display user information in a friendly dashboard that includes events being displayed in a timeline., , The tool also allows experts to compare timelines of two users in order to conduct cross analysis. Zweerink has released the WhatsSpy Public tool on GitLab as a proof-of-concept that WhatsApp privacy is broken, he highlighted the application doesn’t rely on a specific hack or exploit., Maikel Zweerink explained that he has discovered that some of the events sent out by the messaging app could be intercepted by anyone. Among the data that could be eavesdropped, there is the current status (independently of privacy settings), change of profile pictures, message status and any modification of privacy settings., , By analyzing the WhatsSpy Public dashboard it is possible to discover the exact moment when users start to use WhatsApp and when they disconnect from the service., “WhatsSpy Public is an web-oriented application that tracks every move of whoever you like to follow. This application is setup as an Proof of Concept that Whatsapp is broken in terms of privacy. Once you’ve setup this application you can track users that you want to follow on Whatsapp. Once it’s running it keeps track of the following activities:”explained Zweerink  on the project page., “I made this project for you to realise how broken the privacy options actually are. It just started out as experimenting with Whatsapp to build an Bot, but I was stunned when I realised someone could abuse this ‘online’ feature of Whatsapp to track anyone,” , On the project page are reported the instructions for the installation of the WhatsSpy Public tool in Raspberry Pi, Server and VPS. The requirements includes:, There is no peace for Whatsapp users, recently the researcher Indrajeet Bhuyan discovered two privacy issues in Whatsapp web application and in the last months the same experts has discovered a way to crash the mobile application by sending specially crafted messages., (Security Affairs –  Whatsapp, WhatsSpy Public)

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It’s known that the Russian Government is applying a strict surveillance on the Internet within the country, the Kremlin has developed a system code named “SORM-2” to monitor Russian citizens., The Russian Government has obliged national ISPs to purchase and install the probes used by SORM-2 system that allows the Federal Security Service (FSB) to monitor Internet traffic including online communications., SORM-2 is a mass surveillance system that allows the Government of Moscow to track online activities of single individuals thanks to the support of Russian ISP., , Last week, Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev signed a decree (N743) that will extend the use of SORM-2 to the monitoring of social media platforms, including social network websites and any other services that allows to establish a communication between two users (e.g. chat, forums)., The new decree obliges companies like Facebook and Google to install SORM-2 probes that will allow the FSB to monitor Internet users. Russian companies are apparently surprised by the decree., “Once again, it’s unclear what we’re supposed to do, what the actual requirements are, and how much all this will cost,” said Anton Malginov, legal head of the Mail.ru, which owns the popular Russian social network Odnoklassniki.ru., A Yandex representative declared the company received no advanced notice of the change., The technical details of the improvements announced by Medvedev are not available and probably it will impossible to know them because the order prohibits websites from disclosing information on government’s surveillance., The decree is aligned with the controversial control operated by the Russian Government on blogs, let’s remember that the authorities have created an official registry for bloggers than imposed to the writers media-focused regulations., Practically the Government is applying a strict control on the content published by bloggers menacing repercussions in case it doesn’t meet Moscow’s regulations., Personally, I believe that SORM-2 was already installed at least by Russian social media, the decree will extend its capabilities to foreign companies that intend to operate in the country. Anyway don’t forget that the Russian Government could access to the traffic routed by national ISPs., After the August 1th, the “Law on Bloggers” obliges social networks to maintain data for six months and the company has to pay for additional storage costs., For sure SORM-s surveillance doesn’t threaten Internet users, but represents a serious menace for bloggers that write on sociopolitical issues, and for users that actively promote discussion on social networks on the same topics., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – SORM-2, Surveillence)  

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English version, Which could be a critical objective to choose if we evaluate media coverage of the event, complexity and effort necessary to the success of the attack, the audience involved, access to resources used in turn for further offenses? Personally, I have many doubts …  a gaming platform!  Yesterday on a national newspaper has been published an interesting article regarding the high profits made in the gaming market. To do dishes and number, the last chapter in the saga of Call of Duty sold in just 24 hours between the U.S. and England over 6.5 million copies grossing more than $ 400 million., A good question to ask is,  but these gentlemen are together honing their security processes? Are They able to protect their assets from attacks that could with relatively low effort gain access to computing platforms with a devastating offensive power? I would answer “Of course, it is obvious”, but what happened on several occasions to Sony is the demonstration that the reality is far from what aupicabile. Consider also that gaming market is one of the most critical in terms of security for the following reasons:, A study conducted about one year ago showed that 80% of organizations that provide gaming services not keep track of those who use game consoles in the workplace, thus making impossible to trace the activities related to the possible source of attack. After sony Event, something is changed.  According to the main security firm safety of users playing online console is exposed to significant risks more or less serious. For example, exposing a user’s online esposing their IP address, increasing the possibility that it may be the target of an attack of DDoS type, which can make the connection unusable by the organization., Who move this attacks? Unhappy Players with the service or criminals., Finally, we can consider the exposure to social engineering and phishing attacks,  whose purpose is to get information as usernames, passwords and other user sensible data via chat forums, email and in-game speech., It is easy to realize that the magnates of this thriving industry have a long road before to reach the goal, a security condition acceptable for both the provider and final users., (3L3V3N), Italian version, Quale obiettivo critico scegliere per un attacco informatico valutando esposizione mediatica dell’evento, complessità dell’attacco ed effort necessario al successo, platea coinvolta, accesso a risorse utilizzabile a loro volta per ulteriori offese. Personalmente non ho molti dubbi, una piattaforma di gaming. Prioprio ieri su un quotidiano nazionale è apparso il titolo “Anche Hollywood si arrende ora comandano i videogame” in cui si descrive l’ascesa economica senza pari degli incassi del mercato dei video giochi. Per fare qualche numero, l’ultimo capitolo della saga di Call of Duty in sole 24 ore ha venduto fra Usa e Inghilterra oltre 6.5 milioni di copie incassando più di 400 milioni di dollari. Avatar di James Cameron si era fermato a 77. Ecco come gli eredi di Lara Croft stanno surclassando Hollywood. Domanda lecita da porsi, ma questi signori stanno di pari passo affinando i loro processi di sicurezza? Sono in grado di proteggere i propri asset da attacchi che potrebbero con sforzo relativamente contenuto avere accesso a piattaforme di calcolo con potenza offensiva devastante se utilizzate a loro volta per muovere un offesa verso terzi? Vorrei rispondere “Certamente, è ovvio”, ma quanto accaduto a più riprese alla Sony è la dimostrazione che la realtà è ben lontana da quanto auspicabile. Consideriamo inoltre che proprio il settore gaming è tra quelli più critici sotto il profilo della sicurezza per i seguenti motivi:, Uno studio condotto circa un anno fa dimostrò che 80% delle organizzazioni che erogano servizi di gaming non mantenevano traccia di chi utilizza game console all’interno del workplace, rendendo di fatto impossibile tracciare le attività inerenti la possibile fonte di attacco. Dopo l’attacco alla Sony fortunatamente qualcosa è cambiato. Secondo le principali firme in materia sicurezza gli utenti delle console giocando online si espongono a notevoli rischi più o meno seri. Ad esempio un utente on line espone il proprio IP address, aumentando la possibilità che possa essere bersaglio di un attacco di tipo DDoS attacks., Questi tipi di attacchi potrebbero essere utilizzati da utenti scontenti del servizio o da veri e propri criminali che di fatto hanno come obiettivo quello di rendere non operativa l’infrastruttura. Si consideri infine l’esposizione ad attacchi di social engineering e phishing il cui scopo è quello di recuperare il maggior numero di informazioni come username, passwords ed altri dati sensibili dell’utente attraverso chat, forums, in-game speech ed email., Facile rendersi conto che i magnati di questa fiorente industria hanno dinanzi una lunga e tortuosa strada da percorrere prima di giungere alla meta, una condizione di sicurezza accettabile per chi eroga e chi fruisce dei servizi di piattaforme di gaming.,

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One of the most interesting company in security landscape is ReVuln, its researchers specialize in the security assessment and are the authors or various interesting studies on large scale applications and SCADA systems, few weeks ago I presented their work on vulnerability assessment on Gaming platforms., This time I desire to present another excellent analysis of the security experts at ReVuln that provided a cursory overview of iGaming, and Client Poker Software security, the study revealed some security vulnerabilities and design issues affecting some of the most widely platforms provided by different companies in various countries., The paper produced examined security of a set of online poker solutions, highlighting the current status of the florid gaming sector, Online Gaming (also known as Online Gambling and iGaming) is one of most remunerative market, in particular  Online Poker conveys around 30 billion US dollar attracting millions of players worldwide., The security of the Online Gaming Sector is crucial and gaming authorities were following objectives:, That could be reached only if security of any component of the platforms is ensured., The first consideration that must be done is that gaming platforms are composed of various components such as client and server side software, network infrastructure and games applications for online casino, in many cases this technology is provided by different providers with obvious repercussion on overall security., The software component assumes a central role in gaming platforms, the researchers highlighted that main difference between online poker and the rest of the iGaming products is that first group relies on client-side software which runs directly on the player’s computer., Client software has to manage real time data providing to the gamer a friendly environments fully customizable and multi-platform, from the attacker’s perspective they could represent the access doors to the entire infrastructure., The ReVuln researchers identified the surface of attack of client components, software updates are considered a very important aspects for gaming software, this software evolve continuously in their life cycle that’s why auto-update feature is crucial. But update mechanisms could also be exploited by attackers, in the initialization phase the software usually are executed the necessary operations to update the software, in this moment attackers can inject malicious code on the player’s system., The client software developed by B3W is used in many Skins, such as Yachting Poker and PKRaise, but update mechanism is performed over an insecure HTTP connection to b3w.fileburstcdn.net where the list of updates and the files are stored without signatures and the EXEs (which are digitally signed) are not verified before their execution. In this situation at least three types of issues were identified:, “c:\path\tmp_executable.exe” “c:\path\executable.exe” update, The attackers could benefit of various technologies and scenarios, injection could be conducted by malware that infected victims or could be caused by the use   of unsecure communication channels such as a public connection or a compromised connections. Lack of encrypted connections and poor authentication mechanisms  during the update process could advantage the attackers, sometimes even the updates are signed it is possible to abuse of digital signatures to submit malicious code., Interesting the case provided by The Microgaming software that is currently available on various important and well known Skins such as the popular  Unibet and Ladbrokes Poker, the application in fact is a great example of how update process despite uses signature mechanism is vulnerable due the presence of a security flaw., The vulnerability is related to way the software validate digital signature related to the updates, it is verified by the software using archived “digests” stored as a base64 string but the researchers discovered that  the function that decodes the password doesn’t make input validation on  the length of the output stack buffer resulting in a buffer-overflow that may be used to execute malicious code.,   , Playtech software and its iPoker network are other platforms widely used by many Skins such as Titan Poker and William Hill Poker. The software suffers injection attack as described in the paper:, “The software installation and the updates are handled all via HTTP, but the signatures of the signed EXEs and DLLs to install are verified. This is good only partially because all the other files (including HTML files) can be modified without any problems. For example to exploit security vulnerabilities in the software or redirecting the user on malicious websites. More interestingly is the presence of EXEs and DLLs that are not digitally signed located in the widgetbar folder. An attacker can use them to inject malicious code on the software. “, Another component exploitable to compromise client software is the installer, it is used to download modules from the Internet and this operation is considered high risk due to the possibility that attackers could hijack installable packages., The critical vulnerabilities in On-Line gaming exploitable by attackers are related the authentication  process and also encrypting files., The report states:, “All Poker software allows the password to be automatically saved on the player’s computer. Insecure implementation of this functionality may not be secure enough to prevent password leaking. The stored password is often just obfuscated or encrypted with fixed keys. Access to registry keys or the configuration file (even remote access is possible using directory traversal vulnerabilities in other software) allows attackers to steal stored passwords easily. It’s not easy to grant access to the network without effectively storing the password, but there are various levels of password security. “, From a security perspective it is very different obfuscate a password or encrypt it, use of asymmetric algorithms could grant a superior level of security, PokerStars company has adopted RSA tokens and PIN., A weak password protection has been found in B3W, the password is stored in the%APPDATA%\SKIN_NAME\settings.inifile as last_password and is simply obfuscated, and the following algorithm can be used to read it:, If you are interested in the details of investigation don’t miss the Revuln study and proof -of-concept video on the issues introduced., , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Security),

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Security experts have detected a new strain of the Destover malware that was used in the recent Sony Pictures Entertainment breaches characterized by a singular feature, the sample is signed by a legitimate certificate stolen from Sony. Destover was detected several times in the last years, one of the most clamorous attacks is DarkSeoul run by Whois team that in 2013 targeted media and banking of the the South Korea, and the television networks YTN, MBC and KBS and Shinhan Bank and NongHyup Bank, two major banks of the country, suffered serious outage., The Destover family of trojans it is known because once compromised the machine it is able to steal data and wipe all the information it stores., The new variant is identical to an earlier version of Destover that was not signed. The group that claimed credit for the attack against the Sony Pictures, the GOP,  has stolen a huge amount of data from the company, including corporate sensitive information, unreleased movies and evidently also digital certificates used to sign the Destover sample., The attackers are  gradually releasing large amounts of information stolen in the data breach and they are starting to use them to hit the company and its employees. Last week, Sony Pictures Employees received threatening emails sent by the GOP collective, now they using the stolen digital certificates to sign the malicious code., The new, signed version of Destover appears to have been compiled in July 2014 and was signed on last Dec. 5., “The signed sample has been previously observed in a non signed form, as MD5:6467c6df4ba4526c7f7a7bc950bd47eb and appears to have been compiled in July 2014. The new sample has the MD5 e904bf93403c0fb08b9683a9e858c73e and appears to have been signed on December 5th, 2014, just a few days ago.” states a blog post published on SecureList., ,  , The use of digitally signed code of an application has main purpose is to increase the trust in the development process, avoiding fraud and software alterations. The practice of digitally sign malicious code is very common with communities of malware coders, it allows to elude all controls and related alerts provided for the execution of software developed by non-accredited firms., “In all three cases: Shamoon, DarkSeoul and Destover, the groups claiming credit for their destructive impact across entire large networks had no history or real identity of their own,” said Kurt Baumgartner of Kaspersky Lab.  “All attempted to disappear following their act, did not make clear statements but did make bizarre and roundabout accusations of criminal conduct, and instigated their destructive acts immediately after a politically-charged event that was suggested as having been at the heart of the matter.”, As explained by the experts at Kaspersky there is the concrete risk that the stolen digital certificates used to sign the Destover malware could be used in other attacks., “The stolen Sony certificates (which were also leaked by the attackers) can be used to sign other malicious samples. In turn, these can be further used in other attacks. Because the Sony digital certificates are trusted by security solutions, this makes attacks more effective,” wrote Kaspersky researchers., Below the Stolen digital certificate serial number:, ‎01 e2 b4 f7 59 81 1c 64 37 9f ca 0b e7 6d 2d ce, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Destover malware, Sony Pictures, digital certificate)

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Jeremy Hammond, the popular Anonymous hacktivist considered the principal responsible for the disclosure of thousands of emails from the private intelligence firm Stratfor was sentenced on Friday to 10 years in federal prison., The judge Preska also imposed a further three-year period of probationary supervision once Hammond is released from jail that includes extraordinary restrictive measures to prevent him to hack again, his internet activity will be monitored, and of course his person, to avoid contact with groups of hacktivists and with the hacking community. The Guardian reported:, “Hammond’s 10-year sentence was the maximum available to the judge after he pleaded guilty to one count of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA) relating to his December 2011 breach of the website of the Austin, Texas-based private intelligence company Strategic Forecasting, Inc. Delivering the sentence, Preska dismissed the defendant’s explanation of his motivation as one of concern for social justice, saying that he had in fact intended to create “maximum mayhem”. “There is nothing high-minded and public-spirited about causing mayhem,” the judge said.” , But who are hacktivists like Sabu and Hammond? Let’s start from the consideration that these guys are cyber experts, they are hackers and for this reason are considered precious professionals especially for intelligence and government agencies … there is a unique big problem, they work on the wrong side and law enforcement has to do all the possible to convince them to the collaboration., Is it possible that FBI and US intelligence have tried to infiltrate Anonymous to influence its operations?, In August former LulzSec leader Sabu (Hector Xavier Monsegur) was accused by the hacker Jeremy Hammond to have incited state-sponsored attacks for the U.S. Government, Hammond also declared in a Manhattan court that he was directed by an FBI informant to break into the official websites of several governments around the world., The revelation is not surprising, why destroy a so powerful movement when it is possible to become its ally and take advantage of its offensive capabilities?, Jeremy Hammond revealed a federal court for the southern district of New York,  “Sabu” had requested him to target a list of websites, including those of many foreign countries, that were vulnerable to attack., Jeremy Hammond referred specifically Brazil, Iran and Turkey before being stopped by judge Loretta Preska that requested to secretate the deposition., “I broke into numerous sites and handed over passwords and backdoors that enabled Sabu – and by extension his FBI handlers – to control these targets,” told the court., Jeremy Hammond added that when he and Sabu attacked web sites belonging to foreign governments they provided detailed instruction on how to crack into the targets of one particular unidentified country to other members of the collective that supported the attack., “I don’t know how other information I provided to Sabu may have been used, but I think the government’s collection and use of this data needs to be investigated,” “The government celebrates my conviction and imprisonment, hoping that it will close the door on the full story. I took responsibility for my actions, by pleading guilty, but when will the government be made to answer for its crimes?”added to the court, The process revealed another uncomfortable truth on the borderline activities of the US Government, after the questionable surveillance program and the revelation of the hacking platform codenamed FOXACID, Jeremy Hammond has reported how the FBI has instrumented the offensive capabilities of groups of hacktivism like Anonymous., The situation is surreal, Jeremy Hammond was sentenced Friday to 10 years in prison for stealing internal emails from Stratfor while US authorities has used similar methods against government without being judged nor condemned it., , The Hammond’charges against FBI are heavy, it would be a very serious fact that the U.S. Government had used the hacktivists to hit other states, I understand the way US Government is trying to discourage hackers and whistleblowers for homeland security but I expect a yardstick fair., Let’s consider also that US retaliation strategy against hackers could trigger a war without winner that could really advantage foreign state-sponsored hackers., Jeremy Hammond declared he had been motivated to join Anonymous because of a goal to “continue the work of exposing and confronting corruption”. He had been “particularly moved by the heroic actions of Chelsea Manning, who had exposed the atrocities committed by US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. She took an enormous personal risk to leak this information – believing that the public had a right to know and hoping that her disclosures would be a positive step to end these abuses.”, As sustained by Hammond,  very questionable is also the role of unregulated private intelligence firms like Stratfor,  the young hacker has serious responsibility and he has to pay for this but in a proportional way, the intelligence has been operating for many years in an uncontrolled way and surveillance programs like PRISM are the demonstration., I afraid that this witch hunt will exacerbate the tones of a difficult dispute between the government and hacktivists, foreign governments could benefit of the attacks that will occur for sure in the next days, recent memo issued by the FBI demonstrates that Anonymous have the capabilities to infiltrate US networks, but consider also that state-sponsored hackers could do the same or can syphon data stolen by Anonymous., Margaret Kunstler, Hammond’s lead defense lawyer, commented the verdict with these statements:, maximum punishment was “not a great surprise”., I was not surprised too but I believe that the Hammond’s case could be the starting point of new dangerous cyber tensions, on a technical point of view IT community has lost a skilled professional for the next year, but as I always remark you cannot stop an ideology with arrests and convictions., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Anonymous, Jeremy Hammond),  ,  

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The Italian bank UniCredit admitted a series of security breaches occurred in the last year, personal data of 400,000 loan applicants have been exposed., The Italian bank confirmed that hackers compromised the systems of an unnamed third-party provider for exposing Italian customer data. – including International Bank Account Numbers (IBANs)., “UniCredit today announced it has been the victim of a  security breach in Italy due to unauthorised access through an Italian third party provider to Italian customer data related to personal loans only.” reads the statement published by Unicredit., “A first breach seems to have occurred in September and October 2016 and a second breach which has just been identified in June and  July 2017. Data of approximately 400,000 customers in Italy is assumed to have been impacted during these two periods. No data, such as passwords allowing access to customer accounts or allowing for unauthorised transactions, has been affected, whilst some other personal data and IBAN numbers might have been accessed.”, The financial institution confirmed that a first security breach occurred in late 2016, between September and October, while the second violation was detected between June and July 2017., Data of approximately 400,000 Italian customers might have been exposed, according to Unicredit it doesn’t include financial data or passwords., The company confirmed to have discovered and fixed the breach, an investigation is still ongoing., Italy’s largest bank UniCredit is pictured in downtown Milan September 12, 2013. REUTERS/Stefano Rellandini ( ITALY – Tags: BUSINESS) – RTX13ISW, UniCredit is one of the major Italian banks, as part of Transform 2019, the bank is investing  2.3 billion euro in upgrading and strengthening its IT systems., According to UniCredit, the breach at Italy’s biggest lender was detected 10 months after the initial compromise., As you know I’m Italian, and I can tell you that the first reaction of the Italian media outlets was to say that there is no risk for the Unicredit customers because login credentials were not exposed., This is not correct in my humble opinion and spread such kind of false sense of security is very dangerous., Even if crooks cannot use stolen data to access Unicredit customer accounts, users must be informed of frauds that can be conducted by cyber criminals to deceive them., It is easy to predict a spike in spear phishing attacks against Unicredit customers, and information stolen by hackers could make malicious messages hard to detect to common people, especially when the media outlets ensured them by saying that there is no risk., Spear phishing campaigns could also allow crooks to bypass security measures like two-factor authentication systems. Let’s think of a phishing message including a link to a clone of the legitimate bank website. The bogus website could trick victims into providing the login credentials and also the 2FA code, then the attacker can impersonate the victim and make transactions on his behalf., There is also the concrete risk that crooks will offer stolen data on black marketplaces allowing hackers to use them in many fraud scheme., Even if stolen data doesn’t include email addresses, it is quite easy for hackers to use retrieve them from data dumps from other data breaches once the name of a bank customer is exposed., Another disconcerting aspect of the UniCredit bank breach is the fact that the attack started several months ago and was disclosed only now?, This means that companies face severe difficulties in detecting fraudulent activities and raises the debate on the level of security for the entire supply chain. Once again, hackers targeted a subcontractor or a partner to violate the security of a biggest organization., Let me close suggesting Unicredit users stay vigilant on their bank accounts, reporting any suspicious activity. Be careful to any kind of unsolicited message from the bank., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  (UniCredit bank breach, data breach)

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 , An Iranian group of iPhone Geeks managing the blog i-Phone.ir defeated the very basic phenomenon of an iPhone Fingerprinting scanner, which allows them to unlock an iPhone device with multiple Fingerprints.  The news has been provided in exclusive by the colleagues at The Hackers News security portal that were contacted by the Iranian group., The new is embarrassing for Apple firm that known for the reliability of its products and the care of security issues., The new Apple‘s iPhone 5s was recently presented as a new device that includes a powerful feature, a biometrics-based security system called “Touch ID” that read the user’s fingerprint to unlock the phone., “Fingerprint is one of the best passcodes in the world. It’s always with you, and no two are exactly alike,” according to the Apple’s website., The feature was immediately criticized, many security experts and advocates consider it a violation of user’s privacy, but the troubles were just began. The TouchId features were soon compromised, Germany Hackers of Chaos Computer Club demonstrated how they were able to deceive Apple’s security feature into believing they’re someone they’re not, using a well-honed technique for creating a latex copy of someone’s fingerprint., The same fate befell the popular iOS 7 just released, the lockscreen feature in reality was not properly working allowing an attacker with physical access to the handset to make calls and access to the user’s data. Too much for a company like Apple!, The company promptly proposed an upgrade for its popular iOS 7, but while all the iPhone users are celebrating for the efficiency of Appleanother tile strikes on their heads., As remarked by THN post another interesting fact is that, Touch ID is not only designed to scan the fingerprints of your fingers, it works with various human body parts and appendages which are also not fingers., The concept behind the hack proposed by the Iranian group (Bashir Khoshnevis , Mohsen Lotfi , Shayan Khabazian and other members of i-Phone.ir support team) is that “No two Fingerprints are exactly alike”., In the following video a proof of concept provided to The Hacker News in which the Group set up a mixed Fingerprint scan of 5-6 people for an iPhone 5S handset that allowed all of them to unlock the device with their individual fingerprints.,  ,  , , The curious data is that Apple  officially declared that TouchID technology will misread 1 finger every 50,000, this is because Touch ID is designed to unlock the device with partial part of the scan, this means that providing a merged thumbscan of multiple users to the unlock settings of an iPhone it will be able to read at least some partial scan of an individual user., Does the newest iOS 7_0_2 firmware  fix the issue?, Apple released a couple of days ago the new iOS 7_0_2 firmware release to fix the security issues discussed, but the hack proposed by the Iranian Team works also on the iOS 7_0_2 as demonstrated by researchers at the THN  “Wang Wie” and “Jiten Jain“.  The researchers tested the hack procedure on iOS 7_0_2 firmware and it worked successfully., , Concluding, it is clear that Apple released too hastily the new patch for the security issues affected its new iOS 7, it is curious that bugs like this last one works on a system just patched. In the specific case it’s clear that Apple hasn’t implemented properly biometric authentication … meantime I suggest the use of old passcode to protect the user’s device., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Apple, iOS 7_0_2)

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The security expert David Longenecker reported security vulnerabilities affecting the popular broadband cable SURFboard modems produced by the ARRIS (formerly Motorola). The ARRIS  SB6141 model is available for sale for around $70 US, it is able to support over 150 megabit speeds and works with all almost every US Internet provider., Attackers can exploit the flaws in the ARRIS SURFboard modems to remotely knock out the device for a period of time that could reach 30 minutes, more than 135 million devices are at risk., The attackers can rebooting the SURFboard modems remotely without authentication due to the presence of cross-site request forgery vulnerability., “Rebooting one remotely is so easy, it doesn’t even require a password.” states Longenecker in a blog post. “Certain SURFboard modems have an unauthenticated cross site request forgery flaw. The modems have a static IP address that is not consumer-changeable, and the web UI does not require authentication – no username or password is required to access the administration web interface.” , , An unauthenticated attacker can access the user interface of the cable modems. A local attacker can access the administration web interface (192.168.100.1)  without being authenticated., “With access to a local network, it is a trivial matter to reboot the modem serving that network, causing a denial of service while the modem reboots. Granted the modem only takes about 3 minutes to reboot, but for those three minutes, Internet access is offline. Additionally, activity sensitive to network outages (long downloads or remote desktop sessions, for example) may abort. 192.168.100.1/reset.htm” added the expert., , This means that a local attacker is able to restart the device, same result is possible to obtain if he uses a social engineering trick to convince the victim into clicking the following link:, This reset of the cable modems is a time-consuming process that can take as long as a half hour and that in some cases could need the support of the internet service provider (ISP) to restore the normal operation., Longenecker discovered a second flaw, a cross site request forgery (CSRF), in the SURFboard modems that could be abused by attackers to launch the above command without using the device user interface., “In this case, the intended design is for a user to access the SURFboard administration interface, and then click a link to execute a reboot. The application though does not verify that the command was issued from the administration UI. When an application does not verify that a command was issued from within the application, the possibility of CSRF exists.”, “Did you know that a web browser doesn’t really care whether an “image” file is really an image? Causing a modem to reboot is as simple as including an “image” in any other webpage you might happen to open – which is exactly the approach taken on the RebootMyModem.net proof of concept:, <img src=” Of course it’s not a real image, but the web browser doesn’t know that until it requests the file from the modem IP address – which of course causes the modem to reboot. Imagine creating an advertisement with that line of code, and submitting it to a widely-used ad network…”, The good news is that the vulnerabilities are easy to patch, the vendor just needs to issue a firmware update that implements an authentication mechanism for the reboot and reset of the cable modems, and implement a mechanism to prevent CSRF attacks., The bad news is that cable modems could not be upgraded by the end-user, instead the patches have to be distributed by ISP once it is available … and we all know the problems related to patch management processes., “ARRIS recently addressed the reported GUI access issue with a firmware update. We are in the process of working with our Service Provider customers to make this release available to subscribers.  There is no risk of access to any user data, and we are unaware of any exploits. “, “According to the experts of the company, the active population of modems impacted by the issue is less than 10 percent of the initially reported 135M number”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Arris cable modems, hacking)

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The Pawn Storm APT group is once again in the headlines, this time the hackers targeted a significant number of Google accounts belonging to individuals in Russia, former Soviet Union countries, the United States, Europe., Security experts follow a long time the operations of the Russian-linked Pawn Storm cyber spies, aka APT 28, Sednit, Strontium, Sofacy, Fancy Bear and Threat Group-4127., In October 2014, security experts at Trend Micro spotted a cyber espionage operation targeting military, government and media agencies across the world., In May researchers at Trend Micro discovered that Pawn Storm threat actor targeted the political party of Chancellor Angela Merkel, the Christian Democratic Union., Now security experts at SecureWorks reported that Pawn Storm targeted more than 4,000 Gmail accounts between October 2015 and May 2016., Among the people targeted by the hackers there are also individuals working for or associated with the DNC and Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign., In June 2016, CTU experts  published a detailed analysis of a TG-4127 campaign that targeted email accounts linked to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and the U.S. Democrat National Committee. The researchers noticed many similarities with a 2015 spearphishing campaign that targeted more than 1,800 Google Accounts., , “The threat group used the Bitly URL-shortening service to hide the location of a spoofed Google login page. Many of the accounts in the 2015 campaign belonged to individuals in Russia and the former Soviet states, but some belonged to current and former military and government personnel in the U.S. and Europe, individuals working in the defense and government supply chain, and authors and journalists, particularly those with an interest in Russia.” states the report published by the SecureWorks., The experts believe that the Pawn Storm APT group was gathering intelligence from military personnel, authors and journalists, NGOs, and individuals involved in government and defense sectors and political activists., Most of the victims of this last campaign where people from the United States and NATO member countries., CTU researchers analyzed 4,396 phishing URLs sent to 1,881 Google Accounts between March and September 2015. The bad news is that 59% the recipients accessed the URL and opened the phishing page. We have no certainty that the Google Accounts were compromised., Most of the targeted accounts received multiple phishing URLs, 35% of the accounts that accessed the malicious links were not subject to additional attempts, a circumstance that suggests the accounts were successfully compromised., “Of the accounts that were targeted more than once, 57% of the recipients clicked the malicious link in the repeated attempts. These results likely encourage threat actors to make additional attempts if the initial phishing email is unsuccessful.” states the report., The Pawn Storm APT group exploited users’ bad habits to don’t check the full URL associated with URLs generated by a URL-shortening service., It is crucial for organizations to assume a proper security posture, educating users about the risks of spearphishing and shortened links., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Google Accounts , Pawn Storm APT),  

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The NSA is monopolizing the security landscape, The Washington Post reported that the U.S. Intelligence Agency spending a significant effort to develop a computer that could break the majority of encryption algorithms and applications that use them. The intent is to improve the surveillance capabilities of the agency, breaking principal encryption systems the NSA could spy on other foreign spying applications and banking platforms., Also in this case the revelations are based on document leaked by Edward Snowden, the report mention the development of a quantum computer that could be used to break encryption codes used to protect sensitive data all over the world., , “With such technology, all current forms of public key encryption would be broken, including those used on many secure Web sites as well as the type used to protect state secrets.”, “The application of quantum technologies to encryption algorithms threatens to dramatically impact the US government’s ability to both protect its communications and eavesdrop on the communications of foreign governments,” according to an internal document provided by Snowden.” stated The Washington Post., The effort is impressive, a quantum computer is a computation device that makes direct use of quantum-mechanical phenomena to perform calculation., “Quantum computers are different from digital computers based on transistors. Whereas digital computers require data to be encoded into binary digits (bits), quantum computation uses quantum properties to represent data and perform operations on these data”, The Washington Post revealed that a quantum computer could take years to develop, it’s use is not limited to cryptanalysis but could be extended in other sectors including industry and medicine. The newspaper doesn’t provides any information on the involvement of private companies for the designing of the supercomputer., The NSA development of a quantum computer is partially financed with funds belonging to research program codenamed “Penetrating Hard Targets” for which the Government reserved $79.7 million., “The geographic scope has narrowed from a global effort to a discrete focus on the European Union and Switzerland,” one NSA document states. , There is also the news of another secret project called “Owning the Net,” that is financing the research for the development of a quantum computer able to attack encryption algorithms like RSA., In time I’m writing the NSA declined to comment for the article., Let’s wait for the next revelation based on the document leaked by Snowden., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  NSA, quantum computer)

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We discussed several times the rule of the SS7 signaling protocol in mobile communications and how to exploit its flaws to track users., When mobile users travel between countries, their mobile devices connect to the infrastructure of a local operator that communicates with their operator back home. The SS7 protocol allows to implement roaming, but as explained it is also affected by many vulnerabilities that could be exploited for:, Diameter is considered the evolution of the SS7 protocol for modern Long-Term Evolution (LTE) networks, respect its predecessor it is more secure, isn’t it?, Anyway. experts discovered that Diameter is also affected by security issues, one if them, is the lack of mandatory implementation of the Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) protocol., According to researchers from Nokia Bell Labs and Aalto University in Finland, this means that Diameter could be hacked with the same techniques that are effective against SS7., The team of experts made several tests to evaluate attacks against users connected to the LTE network. They simulated the attacks on a test network set up by an unnamed global mobile operator. In the tests, they powered a cyber attack against UK subscribers from Finland and discovered several methods of disrupting service to users., The researchers were able to temporarily and permanently shut down users connections, they were also able to target entire regions., The team presented the results of tests at the Black Hat Europe security conference in London., In order to launch the attack against another operator’s systems or subscribers, the researchers need to access to the private interconnection network (IPX).The experts demonstrated that there are several ways to access IPX, for example, a persistent attacker like a government could oblige a local operator to gain access through it., Attackers could act as a virtual network operator and get access to the roaming network through an existing operator. They could also hack into one of the nodes run by an operator that is accessible from the internet. Let’s give a close look at LTE networks and their main components:, Great now the attacker has the info to start the attack!, At this point, the attacker masquerading as a partner’s HSS sends a Cancel Location Request (CLR) message to the victim’s MME causing the disconnection of the specific subscriber., The CLR messages are normally used inside the LTE network when subscribers switch from one MME to another because of a change in location., The researchers also highlighted another possible to exploit this mechanism to obtain a sort of amplification factor of the request. The researchers noticed that when the subscriber re-attaches, their device will send 20 different messages to the MME., , Imagine the case the attackers force the detachment of hundreds of subscribers at the same time, the MME will be flooded by ‘re-attach’ messages causing a DoS in large areas covered by Mobility Management Entities., There is also a second DoS attack scenario in which the attackers can impersonate an HSS and send an Insert Subscriber Data Request (IDR) to the victim’s MME with a special value that means no service. This will permanently detach the mobile user from the network because their subscription will be changed in the MME’s records., In this case, the only way to attach the network again is contacting the mobile operator., As you can see also LTE networks and Diameter are vulnerable to hacking attack, for this reason, the researchers highlighted the need for further security measures., For further information give a look at the slides (“Detach me not DoS attacks against 4G cellular users worldwide from your desk“) presented at the BlackHatEurope 2016., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – LTE Network, Hacking)

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On April 8th 2014 Microsoft officially ended the support for Windows XP, but there is still a wide audience of users that are using the oldest Microsoft OS., This portion of users is no more receiving security updates with serious consequences on cyber security perspective. Some organizations are still facing economic and technical problems to migrate the operating system’s running Windows XP to another operating system. Anyway, Microsoft is still providing support to customers that are paying it, this is the case of critical applications for which the migration request more time and it is not possible to leave the systems vulnerable, let’s thing to critical infrastructure and government environments., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Windows XP, Security Updates)

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Enjoy the interview!, , Could you tell me more about you? Could you tell me which his your technical background and when you started hacking? , I started hacking in 2013, but got better in 2015 when I started the development of 0-day exploits, developing custom programs and scripts, that’s why I use the name “NorthScripts,” North because I live in North America., What was your greatest hacking challenge? , My greatest hacking challenge was when I took down BBC News website with P.G.A and PhantomSquad., Which are your motivations?, I want to get the world free from racist., Which was your latest hack? Can you describe me it?, My latest hack was an attack against an the ISIS Government website., What are the 4 tools that cannot be missed in the hacker’s arsenal and why?, A botnet. Every hacker should know coding. Linux system (for example Backbox). Php shells. A VPN to protect anonymity online., Which are the most interesting hacking communities on the web today, why?, There are a lot of interesting communities on the web, but Hackforums is still the best.,  , Did you participate in hacking attacks against the IS propaganda online? When? How?, Yes, I have participated in several attacks, but not so much. I’m not the best on defacing websites I’m known for my DDoSing abilities, for developing DDoS scripts, proxies, doxxes and all the other things I sell. You can check my shop 🙂 You can find Isis Accounts on @tool_binary and @CtrlSec., 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?, Why not, security is just an illusion and a fucking shit. Thanks!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – NorthScripts, Hacking)

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Malware researchers from security firm Sophos have analyzed a new strain of malware detected as Mal/Miner-C that was designed to abuse resources of the infected machine to mine Monero (XMR) cryptocurrency., The experts discovered that the new malware leverages network-attached storage (NAS) devices as attack vector., The authors of Mal/Miner-C sued the NSIS (Nullsoft Scriptable Install System) scripting language to develop it., One of the most interesting features of the Mal/Miner-C malware is its ability to abuse FTP servers in an effort to spread itself., Some samples analyzed by the researcher included a module, called tftp.exe, which randomly generates IP addresses and attempts to connect to them using a predefined list of login credentials., If the threat is able to successfully connect to an FTP service, then it copies itself to that server and modifies the .html and .php files stored on it by injecting the code that generates an iframe referencing the malicious code uploaded to the server., “If the embedded credentials are able to successfully connect to an FTP service, it tries to copy itself to the server and modify an existing web-related file with the extension .htm or .php in an attempt to further infect visitors to the host system.” reads the analysis from Sophos. , “If a file with this extension is found, the threat injects source code that creates an iFrame referencing the files info.zip or Photo.scr. “, When an unaware user visits a website compromised by the malware, he is presented with a “save file” dialog that serves the malicious files, then is the victim downloads and open them will infect its PC with Mal/Miner-C., According to Sophos, more than 1.7 million infections were observed in the first half of 2016, but they were associated to only 3,150 unique IP addresses because the malware copies itself to every folder on a compromised FTP server., The experts focused their investigation on the search for vulnerable devices on the internet. A first scan with the Censys search engine identified just under 3 million FTP servers worldwide., Then the researchers tried to connect anonymously to the FTP services with a scanning script in order to find “Anonymous FTPs with write access”, The results were as follows:, , The malware targeted various types of FTP servers, but Sophos experts noticed it mostly targeted Seagate’s Central NAS product. This specific NAS provides a public folder that cannot be deleted or deactivated, the attackers use to upload the malware in the folder in hopes that they will be executed by users once they are discovered., Be careful, the malware is not able to infect the device but exploits to infect other to spread in the wild., The experts also analyzed the wallets used by the cybercriminals behind the campaign and determined that infected machines mined roughly $86,000 in Monero., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Mal/Miner-C,  malware)

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Hackers claim to have data about all citizens in Serbia, if the news is confirmed this is another clamorous data breach that could have serious repercussion on the Government., It seems that cyber criminals hacked the Serbian State’s network, accessed to the identities of almost all Serbians, which are now exposed to risks of frauds and identity theft.  Five hackers have claimed they hacked the internet backbone of the Serbian Identity system and stolen ID numbers of almost all citizens of Serbia.  Though the has not been confirmed by the Serbian authorities, the hackers have leaked a screenshot of what seems to be details of Serbian citizens., The crew of cybercriminals that claim for the attack on the State’s network of Serbia is composed of five hackers that claimed that they violated the internet backbone of the Serbian Identity system and stolen ID numbers of almost all citizens of the country. An the time I’m writing, the Government of Serbia hasn’t confirmed the data breach, meanwhile the hackers have leaked online a screenshot of the alleged list displaying data of Serbian citizens., The hackers have announced the data breach via email to the Serbian daily Blic, as reported also by the news portal InSerbia., “We have whole Serbia in our hand. We have almost all information about the Serbian citizens starting from ID numbers to what they do, where they work, live, their phone numbers”. is reported in the email. , The image reporting a table of the Serbian national archive was attached to the email, it contains data of Serbian citizens living in different cities of the country., , The hackers seem to be Serbians that protest against national cyber police because it is more interested in the persecution of national hackers instead Albanian cyber criminal crews., “We show this information in public for many reasons. The first and main reason is that our cyber police chases exclusively Serbian hackers while it ignores Albanian hackers. Now they will have more than specific reason to look for us, but they will waste their time,” states the email., The hackers have alleged also other motivations to the patriotic attack, they declared to have hit the national database also to demonstrate that the Serbian cyber system is vulnerable., “The third reason is that the state sees, and after multiple warnings realizes, that the security of the system is weak and that they should take more care about it,” the e-mail reads., If the data breach is confirmed, the possible consequences for the population are dramatic. Unaware people could be targeted by cyber criminals that could be used the stolen data for illegal activities. The economic impact is severe, something similar happened to South Korea, where national ID system was compromised, causing the exposure of as much as 80 per cent of the population., Modernizing the whole nation system will have a great economic impact, it would cost to the South Korea about $650m., Stay tuned for further info., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Serbia, cybercrime)

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We often discuss about warfare and cyberespionage, focusing on the usage of technology to steal intellectual property of foreign states. Of course the countries that have valuable technology skills are most exposed to targeted attacks that daily try to steal information regarding hi tech projects. Japan, US and European Countries are preferred target of many nations, China first, but also Russia, Iran and North Korea., Which are information they were looking for?, Patents, confidential information related to policies of private companies, government information, all these date are principal targets of hackers sponsored by foreign governments., Which are the main methods of cyberespionage?, The methods of cyber espionage are innumerable, the use of malware and hacking for infiltrating enemy networks are undoubtedly the most successful techniques. But don’t forget that we live in the era of globalization, US and Chinese companies operate everywhere in the world, however American law enforcement officials declared that giving in outsourcing critical services, such as telecom, could allow theft of intellectual property and cyberespionage. According to the FCC, 43.5% of the company is indirectly owned by foreign interests., , Of course the threat is not related to every foreign company but it’s specific for those businesses that are government-owned like some Chinese mobile phone giants. The specific case is related to the world’s largest mobile provider China Mobile applied in October for a license from the Federal Communications Commission to provide service between China and the United States and to build facilities on American soil. Of course the concerns of the intelligence services are high, providing similar projects foreign companies have access to communication infrastructures and network traffic making possible spying operations and the exposure of intellectual propriety and national secrets. The risks is concrete, in many occasion has been discussed about the continuous attacks of Chinese stated sponsor hackers against American networks. Officials from the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department’s national security division compose a special collective named “Team Telecom,” in charge of review FCC applications by foreign-owned companies. The problem is really critic, on one side we have valuable business opportunity, on the other hand there is the security of the nation, for this reasons the group have to define a proper agreement to preserve both needs. In discussion is the routing of traffic from US Carriers (e.g. Verizon Communications Inc. or AT&T Inc) on networks the management of which is licensed by China Mobile. The firm declined to address allegations about Chinese spying and is actually collaborating with US Government for the definition of a satisfactory agreement. In the past Chinese companies China Telecom and China Unicom have been already engaged to carry telecommunications services, but they were other times when no cyber strategy took into account the threat of cyberespionage. Similar agreements have required in the past to the manufacturer the classification and census of all equipment used as communication vector such as undersea cables used to carry traffic to and from the United States. Meanwhile in US is discussing the allocation of services to foreign companies the Reuters agency has confirmed that the ZTE Corp, the world’s No.4 handset vendor, reported that one of its mobile phone models sold in the US contains a vulnerability that could allow a remote control of the handset. The backdoor affects ZTE’s Score model based on Android operating system, it’s the first case reported on the platform and many expert are convinced that the event is not casual. Not to mention the rivers of charges read out against another Chinese company with state participation, the Huweai., Personally I feel very justified concerns of U.S. security experts, the risk of espionage is real must be managed with the utmost care to avoid catastrophic consequences., Pierluigi Paganini,  

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Sochi Olympics are starting, but Intelligence agencies of all participating governments fear the possibility of an terrorist attack or a cyber attack. The event is a great occasion for hackers, hacktivists and cyber criminals which could benefit of the attention of the media to run clamorous cyber attacks., As we have read in newspapers, the security countermeasures are high, but according security experts many infrastructures in Sochi are still unfinished, an ideal condition for an attacker that  intends to exploit a hole in the overall security., , According to NBC News, unprepared Olympics attendees are being hacked just the arrive in Sochi,  the NBC reporter Richard Engel demonstrated it conducting an experiment with the support of a cyber security expert. They configured two computers to verify see just how quickly he’d be attacked when accessing onto Russian networks. , The discovery was predictable, when the reporter and his collaborator went to a cafe accessing to the network, they were immediately attacked., “before we even finished our coffee” the bad actors had hit, downloading malware and “stealing my information and giving hackers the option to tap or even record my phone calls.” “less than 1 minute for hackers to pounce, and in less than 24 hours, they had broken into both of my computers.” Engel said., , Engel remarked that Kaspersky Lab is in charge to support the Sochi Olympic Committee for providing computer security,  athletes and other visitors to Sochi are “entering a minefield the instant they log on to the Internet.”, as confirmed by a Kaspersky representative everyone is subject to attack., Every single bit transmitted in via phone and Internet, is analyzed by the Russian System for Operational-Investigative Activities, according to the U.S. State Department’s Overseas Security Advisory Council that has warned American travelers. As explained in the document Russian Intelligence is using a system, known as SORM to access to communications in the country., “OSAC constituents traveling to Sochi should be aware that the Russian System for Operational-­-Investigative Activities (SORM) lawfully enables authorities to monitor, record, analyze, and retain all data that traverses Russian networks. Through SORM technologies, Russian authorities have access to any information transmitted via telephone and Internet networks, including all emails, telephone calls, Internet browsing sessions, text messages, and fax transmissions. By Russian law, all telecommunications companies and Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are required to install SORM devices on their networks. These devices allow for remote access and transmission of information to Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) offices. Telecommunications providers are denied access to the surveillance devices and, therefore, have no knowledge of any accessed or intercepted communications. Although the FSB technically requires a court order to intercept communications, there is no requirement to show it to anyone outside the agency.  SORM is enabled throughout Russia and is undergoing technological upgrades and modernization.  Since 2010, particular attention has been paid to Sochi in preparation for the Olympics. The system in Sochi is capable of capturing telephone (including mobile phone) communications; intercepting Internet (including wireless/Wi-Fi) traffic; and collecting and storing all user information and data (including actual recordings and locations). Deep packet inspection will allow Russian authorities to track users by filtering data for the use of particular words or phrases mentioned in emails, web chats, and on social media.”, Travellers are informed.

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In a report released today, by IOACTIVE, researchers’ advice that critical infrastructure mobile applications are being developed without secure coding compliance that could allow hackers to target Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition Industrial Control Systems., SCADA-ICS stands for Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition Industrial Control System, that represents the industrial automated systems operating on critical infrastructure. These systems are responsible for the control and operation of critical services like clean water and energy respectively. Researchers of IOACTIVE released a report analyzing the impact on the security of SCADA-ICS systems operating connected to the internet of things (IoT) and mobile applications., The report states that mobile applications are present in many ICS segments and can be divided into two groups, Local (Wi-Fi, Bluetooth) and remote applications (Internet, VPN), which are exposed to three types of attacks such as Unauthorized physical access to the device or “virtual” access to device data, Communication channel compromise (MiTM), Application compromise., , Considering these attacks mobile SCADA applications can lead to Directly/indirectly influencing an industrial process or industrial network infrastructure and compromising an operator to unwillingly perform a harmful action on the system., The research was conducted based on OWASP 2016 and analyzed 34 vendors that released the app on Google Play Store. The mobile app analyzed revealed that 147 security issues were identified related to secure coding programming that would allow code tampering., The researchers noticed that hackers could gain remote control to smartphones to further launch attacks on ICS vulnerable app used on hardware and software. Also, the researchers pointed out that there was an increase of 16 vulnerabilities per application., Regarding the vulnerabilities, researchers found out that insecure authorization was present with some apps failing to include any form of authentication. Other vulnerabilities live reverse engineering were present due to the absence of code obfuscation. insecure data storage and unintended data leakage were present which could allow hackers to access the app or data related to ‘Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition’ system., The security of society is at stake since these new vulnerabilities pose a great threat, even more than the damage caused by the 2016 Ukrainian attack. The report recommends to app developers to consider secure coding in the development planning due to the impacts on society that these flaws represent., About the author Luis Nakamoto, Luis Nakamoto is a Computer Science student of Cryptology and a enthusiastic of information security having participated in groups like Comissão Especial de Direito Digital e Compliance (OAB/SP) and CCBS (Consciência Cibernética Brasil) as a researcher in new technologies related to ethical hacking, forensics and reverse engineering. Also a prolific and compulsive writer participating as a Redactor to Portal Tic from Sebrae Nacional., Sources:, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition, hacking)

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VMware has released security updated to fix a critical arbitrary code execution vulnerability (CVE-2018-6974) in the SVGA virtual graphics card used by its ESXi, Workstation, and Fusion solutions., The issue in the VMware products is an out-of-bounds read vulnerability in the SVGA virtual graphics card that could be exploited by a local attacker with low privileges on the system to execute arbitrary code on the host., “VMware ESXi, Fusion and Workstation contain an out-of-bounds read vulnerability in SVGA device. This issue may allow a guest to execute code on the host.” reads the security advisory published by the company., VMware credited an anonymous researcher for reporting the flaw through Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI)., According to the ZDI’s own advisory, the vulnerability was reported to VMware in mid-June., “This vulnerability allows local attackers to execute arbitrary code on vulnerable installations of VMware Workstation. An attacker must first obtain the ability to execute low-privileged code on the guest system in order to exploit this vulnerability.” read the ZDI’s advisory., “The specific flaw exists within the handling of virtualized SVGA. The issue results from the lack of proper validation of user-supplied data, which can result in an overflow of a heap-based buffer. An attacker can leverage this in conjunction with other vulnerabilities to execute code in the context of the host OS.”, VMware classified the issue as “medium” severity and assigned it a CVSS score of 6.9., The same anonymous expert also reported an out-of-bounds write vulnerability in the e1000 virtual network adapter, tracked as CVE-2018-6973, used by Workstation and Fusion., The CVE-2018-6973 flaw could be exploited by a local attacker to execute arbitrary code, VMware addressed this flaw in September., This flaw is similar to the previous one, an attacker requires at low-privileged access to the exploit the issue on the target system., “This vulnerability allows local attackers to execute arbitrary code on vulnerable installations of VMware Workstation. An attacker must first obtain the ability to execute low-privileged code on the guest system in order to exploit this vulnerability.” states ZDI’s advisory,, “The specific flaw exists within the handling of the virtualized e1000 device. The issue results from the lack of proper validation of user-supplied data, which can result in a write past the end of an allocated buffer. An attacker can leverage this in conjunction with other vulnerabilities to execute code in the context of the host OS.”, The cloud computing and platform virtualization company classified also assigned this flaw a CVSS score of 6.9., In June, the company fixed a critical remote code execution vulnerability in the AirWatch Agent applications for Android and Windows Mobile., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – hacking, virtualization)

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Routers manufactured by the Taiwan-based vendor DrayTek are affected by a zero-day vulnerability that could be exploited by attackers to change DNS settings on some of its routers., DrayTek confirmed to be aware that hackers are attempting to exploit the zero-day vulnerability to compromise its routers., Many users reported on Twitter cyber attacks against its routers, in these cases, hackers have changed DNS settings of the routers to point to a server having the 38.134.121.95 IP address on the network of China Telecom., It is likely attackers are conducting a Man-in-the-Middle attack to redirect users to bogus clones of legitimate sites to steal their credentials., , DrayTek published a security advisory warning of the attacks and providing instructions on how to check and correct DNS settings., “In May 2018, we became aware of new attacks against web-enabled devices, which includes DrayTek routers. The recent attacks have attempted to change DNS settings of routers.” reads the security advisory. , ” If you have a router supporting multiple LAN subnets, check settings for each subnet.  Your DNS settings should be either blank, set to the correct DNS server addresses from your ISP or DNS server addresses of a server which you have deliberately set (e.g. Google 8.8.8.8). A known rogue DNS server is 38.134.121.95 – if you see that, your router has been changed.  “, The company is already working on a firmware updates to patch the issue., Initially, the company suspected that victims of the attacks were using DrayTek routers with default credentials, but one of them clarified that its device wasn’t using factory settings, a circumstance that confirms that attackers are in possession of a zero-day exploit., Reports coming in DrayTek routers are being mass hacked and DNS servers changed on them (allows traffic redirection and MITM attacks). — Kevin Beaumont (@GossiTheDog) May 18, 2018, , ? pic.twitter.com/xMXak22JNG, — Kevin Beaumont (@GossiTheDog) May 18, 2018, , The running theme so far is remote admin (WAN mgmt) is enabled (on by default) but password had been changed. Either going to be brute force or exploit., — Kevin Beaumont (@GossiTheDog) May 18, 2018, , , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – DrayTek routers, hacking), ,

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It was October 2010 when the FBI started an investigation on alleged malware-based cyber attacks against on Nasdaq, probably related to the operation of a state-sponsored group of hackers., After more than 12 months in which the FBI has worked with NSA, the US intelligence concluded that a major attack against the Nasgaq caused a significant danger., Nasdaq central servers were hit by a malicious code designed to sabotage trading activities., Cyber attacks on trading platforms are not a novelty, in April 2013 the security firm Group-IB has detected a new variant of malware that targets the popular Russian stock-trading platform QUIK (Quik Broker, Quik Dealer) provided by Russian software developers ARQA Technologies. The malware was  used during several attacks starting November 2012 with the purpose to gather detailed information on the respective owners of the accounts., But be aware, this time experts don’t speak of cyber espionage, they believe that the attackers operated with the specific intent to destroy the activities at Nasdaq., In the past, we saw only a few cyber attacks which caused serious consequences on the targeted systems, like Stuxnet case and the attack which destroyed the computers at Saudi Aramco., “One veteran U.S. official says that when it came to a digital weapon planted in a critical system inside the U.S., he’s seen it only once—in Nasdaq.” reports Bloomber Businessweek., Intelligence and law enforcement agencies were involved in five-month investigation, strongly committed by the Presindent, which aimed to discover cyber-response capabilities of the US critical infrastructure., “We’ve seen a nation-state gain access to at least one of our stock exchanges, I’ll put it that way, and it’s not crystal clear what their final objective is,” “The bad news of that equation is, I’m not sure you will really know until that final trigger is pulled. And you never want to get to that.” commented Republican House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers that anyway, hasn’t provided the details of the investigation that remain classified. , Fortunately the response team successfully identified the cyber attack and has mitigated it, but the incident is the demonstration of of the vulnerability of US critical infrastructure. To understand the cyber capabilities of the country, the Government has called at the NCCIC experts from the Defense, Treasury, Homeland Security departments, NSA and FBI., “The agents found little evidence of a broader attack. What they did find were systematic security failures riddling some of the most important U.S. financial institutions. It turned out that many on the list were vulnerable to the same attack that struck Nasdaq. They were spared only because the hackers hadn’t bothered to try.” adds Bloomber Businessweek., The team of experts consulted for the initial assessment on the cyber attack against Nasdaq systems confirmed the seriousness of the attack. The experts organized a conf call to share the first impressions on the attack with officials of the White House, from the Justice and State departments and the Central Intelligence Agency., , While the investigations go forward, the expert called by the group have to discover if the hackers were able to “manipulate or destabilize the trading platform” and if the cyber attack is just part of larger operation conducted by a foreign state to hit the U.S. financial infrastructure., The incident reminds us that digital 9/11 is not an impossible event, despite countries like the US, China and Russia are dominant in the physical world, new powers are threatening their stability from cyber space. A cyber attack against a critical system like the Nasdaq could be conducted by also minor countries, like North Korea, Iran, Syria, that are largely invested in the improvement of their cyber capabilities., Bloomberg summarized this concept this the following statement:, “The U.S. national security apparatus may be dominant in the physical world, but it’s far less prepared in the virtual one. The rules of cyberwarfare are still being written, and it may be that the deployment of attack code is an act of war as destructive as the disabling of any real infrastructure. And it’s an act of war that can be hard to trace: Almost four years after the initial Nasdaq intrusion, U.S. officials are still sorting out what happened. Although American military is an excellent deterrent, it doesn’t work if you don’t know whom to use it on.”, Pierluigi Paganini, Security Affairs –  (Nasdaq, cyberwarfare)

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Security experts at Mandiant intelligence firm have discovered a new intrusion into the network of The Washington Post, it is the third time in the last three years. In time I’m writing it is still not clear the extension of the attack neither an estimation of the losses. Mandiant reported the incident to The Washington Post this week, confirming that exposed data include employees’ credentials hash., “Hackers broke into The Washington Post’s servers and gained access to employee user names and passwords, marking at least the third intrusion over the past three years, company officials said Wednesday.” reported a post of the news agency., Early 2013 the New York Times has announced that during the previous months it was a victim of cyber espionage coordinated by Chinese hackers, similar attacks was conducted against principal Americans news agencies. The hackers have tried to compromise the email account of journalists to steal sensitive information, they tried to infiltrate the network of news agencies using several dozen instances of malware, as revealed by forensics analysis conducted by the Mandiant security firm. The attackers obtained password data for all of the Washington Post reporters and other employees., , Regarding this last attack there is no evidence that subscriber information such as credit card data or home addresses was stolen neither the information of which offices of the popular media agency were impacted (e.g. Publishing system, employee e-mail databases, HR database).  The hackers in many cases targeted server used by the paper’s foreign staff to extend their operation to the entire company infrastructure., Investigators believe the intrusion lasted at most a few days, but the news is very worrying considering that large international news organizations have become a privileged target for hacking campaigns. The Washington Post, NYT and Associated Press were subject to numerous attacks conducted by state-sponsored hackers including the popular group of hackers Syrian Electronic Army., Waiting for more detailed results of investigation officials planned to ask all employees to change their user names and passwords on the assumption that a large number of them may have been compromised., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  cyber espionage, The Washington Post)

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The number of cyber attacks against ATM involving so-called ‘insert skimmers’ is increasing. Insert Skimmers are wafer-thin fraud devices designed to fit invisibly inside the ATM card slot., Insert Skimmers are able to capture card data and store it on an embedded flash memory., The popular cyber security expert Brian Krebs reported in some cases the use of insert skimmers that are able to transmit stolen card data wirelessly via infrared., The infrared is a short-range communication technology, every day we use it when we change TV program with a television remote control., Krebs cited a case that has happened a few weeks ago in the Oklahoma City metropolitan area where at least four banks were victims of ATM attacks involving insert skimmers., The KFOR news channel quoted a local police detective saying “the skimmer contains an antenna which transmits your card information to a tiny camera hidden somewhere outside the ATM.”, An insert skimmer retrieved from a compromised cash machine in Oklahoma City. Image: KrebsOnSecurity.com., Krebs confirmed that financial industry sources tell him that preliminary analysis of the insert skimmers used in the ATM attacks confirms they were equipped with technology to transmit stolen card data wirelessly to the hidden camera using infrared., The insert skimmers used to compromise cash machines in Oklahoma City were equipped with the hidden that was used to record time-stamped videos of ATM users entering their PINs and to receive card data recorded and transmitted by the insert skimmer., This design helps crooks in reducing maintenance activities for the skimmers, for example when they need to substitute the internal battery, they could leave the device in the ATM slot and swap out the hidden camera., The skimmers are optimized to preserve battery, according to Krebs the insert skimmer also uses an embedded battery that is turned on only when someone inserts a card into the ATM slot., The spy cameras are deployed to remain hidden, crooks use tiny pinholes cut into false fascias that they install above or beside the PIN pad., “Thieves involved in skimming attacks have hidden spy cameras in some pretty ingenious places, such as a brochure rack to the side of the cash machine or a safety mirror affixed above the cash machine (some ATMs legitimately place these mirrors so that customers will be alerted if someone is standing behind them at the machine).” wrote Krebs., “More often than not, however, hidden cameras are placed behind tiny pinholes cut into false fascias that thieves install directly above or beside the PIN pad. Unfortunately, I don’t have a picture of a hidden camera used in the recent Oklahoma City insert skimming attacks.”, Let me suggest covering the pin pad with your hand when you enter it, in this case, the hidden camera will not be able to record it. Krebs also wars of non-video methods to obtain the PIN (such as PIN pad overlays), but he explains that these devices are rare and more expensive for fraudsters., If you are searching more information about Skimmers devices check out Brian Krebs’s series All About Skimmers., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – insert skimmers, cybercrime)

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Mobile is probably technology that is having the greatest growth, an increasing number of users execute any kind of application on their devices in mobility. The categories of applications are various, they are used at work and during leisure time and offer any kind of feature of various complexity., These applications, the technologies they use and their configurations have a great impact on the surface of exposure to various cyber threats, McAfee has proposed on the topic exposing principal risks using its extensive global threat intelligence network (GTI) to analyze mobile security data from the last three quarters., The security firm studied “sophisticated and complex risky apps containing multi-faceted scams, black market crimes, drive-by downloads and near-field communication threats” identifying new methods used by attackers to steal sensitive and personal information and realize complex cyber frauds., , Mobile are considered privileged targets for cyber criminals due the lack of awareness of users on principal cyber threats, according to IDC, mobile devices are surpassing PCs as preferred devices used to access the Internet and the number of mobile users will increase by 91 million over the next four years., “Cybercriminals are exhibiting greater levels of determination and sophistication leading to more destructive, multi-faceted hacks that are harder to spot, and thus warrant a greater degree of security and vigilance. Our goal in releasing this report is to help consumers understand the risks they face and learn ways they can stay safe and compute with confidence on all of their devices.” said Luis Blando, vice president of mobile product development at McAfee., The principal problems related mobile are the almost total absence of defense systems and risky behavior of users such as jailbreak practices and downloading apps from third party store., Recent Threat Report H2 2012 published by F-Secure revealed that mobile threat landscape continues to be focused mainly on two platforms, Android, which accounted for 79% of all new malware variants identified in 2012 and Symbian, with 19% of the remaining new variants.  In Q2 2012, China officially surpassed the United States as the world’s largest market for smartphone consumers. Android handsets accounted for 81% of that market and it’s therefore probably not surprising that many of the new malware families detected last year were targeted specifically to Android users in mainland China., In this context of uncontrolled growth is very difficult to mitigate the cyber threats that targeting users with an increasing level of sophistication., Following the key findings proposed by the study:, , Risky Apps Defined: Malware and Suspicious URLs, Risky apps are the primary channel used by cyber criminal to spread malware, hacker tools and links to compromised websites. Risky apps usually have the capability to compromise the victims installing bot agents, to steal sensitive information and implement fraud schema. Phishing on mobile is increasing at a fast pace, many risky apps may contain infected URLs lead to sites with drive-by downloads and around 25% of the risky apps that contain malware also contain suspicious URLs., “Most malware on a web page still needs to be “accepted” by the user, giving consumers the chance to back out. However, we saw our first mobile drive-by downloads in 2012 and expect more in 2013.”, McAfee Lab researchers found that 75% of the malware-infected apps downloaded, the infected apps were housed in the Google Play store but what is more concerning  is that the average user has a one in six chance of downloading a risky app. Nearly 25 percent of the risky apps that contain malware also contain suspicious URLs, and 40 percent of malware families misbehave in more than one way., Black market activity., Exactly as for any PC in the underground market it is possible to acquire various exploit kits that allow to criminals to recruit machines for botnet architectures or to organize prolific scam, typically premium SMS and click fraud. The casuistry is wide from spam distribution to the sale of malicious code for data theft or for stealing of banking credentials, many agents present a multi-feature profile that allow the implementation of these features in a single flexible malware., Near Field Communication, In 2013, and in the incoming year mobile platforms will be used for micro payments, due this reason experts from McAfee expect to see criminals abuse the tap-and-pay near field communications (NFC) technology used in payment processes., The Report states:, “This scam could involve worms that propagate through proximity, what we call “bump and infect.”  This distribution path could quickly spread malware through a trainload of passengers or a theme park. When the newly infected device is used to “tap and pay” for the next purchase, the scammer collects the details of the wallet account and secretly reuses these credentials to steal from the wallet.”, The data collected demonstrate the risk of exposure to cyber threats of mobile device user, cyber criminals are increasing their activities targeting mobile platforms, the future will see a further increase of menaces and what is more concerning is related level of sophistication that will be the same for ordinary PCs., Pierluigi Paganini

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Siemens is warning of the presence of six vulnerabilities in some of its SICLOCK central plant clocks that used to synchronize time in industrial environments., “In the event of failure or loss of reception from the primary time source, the central plant clock ensures stable continuation of the clock time, and tracking of the system time without time jumps as soon as reception is restored.” reads the Siemens official website. , The vulnerabilities have been assigned the CVE identifiers CVE-2018-4851 through CVE-2018-4856, three of them have been classified as critical., “SICLOCK TC devices are affected by multiple vulnerabilities that could allow an attacker to cause Denial-of-Service conditions, bypass the authentication, and modify the firmware of the device or the administrative client.” reads the security advisory., One of the critical vulnerabilities tracked as CVE-2018-4851 could be exploited by attackers with access to the network to cause the targeted device to enter a denial-of-service (DoS) condition and potentially reboot by sending it specially crafted packets., The successful exploitation of this flaw doesn’t require user interaction., “An attacker with network access to the device, could cause a Denial-of-Service condition by sending certain packets to the device, causing potential reboots of the device.” reads the security advisory., “The core functionality of the device could be impacted. The time serving functionality recovers when time synchronization with GPS devices or other NTP servers are completed. The vulnerability could impact the availability of the device, and could impact the integrity of the time service functionality of the device.”, The second critical vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2018-4853, can be exploited by an attacker with access to UDP port 69 to modify the firmware on a vulnerable device., The flaw could be exploited by an attacker to run his own code on the SICLOCK device., , The third critical issue tracked as CVE-2018-4854 can be exploited by an attacker with access to UDP port 69 to modify the administrative client stored on the device., “An attacker with network access to port 69/udp could modify the administrative client stored on the device.” continues the advisory., “If a legitimate user downloads and executes the modified client from the affected device, then he could obtain code execution on the client system.”, Siemens also reported a high severity vulnerability that could be exploited by a network attacker to bypass authentication., The other issues discovered by Siemens are a medium severity flaw that could be exploited to launch a man-in-the-middle (MitM) attack and intercept unencrypted passwords stored in client configuration files, and a low severity flaw that can be exploited by an attacker with admin access to the management interface to lock out legitimate users., Siemens says it’s not aware of any instances where these flaws have been exploited for malicious purposes., The flaws impacted the SICLOCK TC100 and SICLOCK TC400., Siemens did not release firmware updates for the products because they are in phase out, the industrial giant only provided workarounds and mitigations to mitigate the risk of attacks., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – SICLOCK, Central Plant Clocks)

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Experts from Kaspersky are solving a problem that disabled certificate validation for 400 million users. The problem was spotted by the notorious Google hacker Tavis Ormandy, the vulnerability affects the Kaspersky antivirus software and the way it used certificates to analyze encrypted traffic., The security firm is a trusted CA, the Kaspersky Anti-Virus Personal Root, and uses its digital certificate for the traffic inspection, in this way it is able to decrypt it and analyze scanning for malicious patterns., “In order to inspect encrypted data streams using SSL/TLS, Kasperky installs a WFP driver to intercept all outgoing HTTPS connections. They effectively proxy SSL connections, inserting their own certificate as a trusted authority in the system store and then replace all leaf certificates on-the-fly. This is why if you examine a certificate when using Kaspersky Antivirus, the issuer appears to be “Kaspersky Anti-Virus Personal Root”.” Ormandy wrote in a security advisory., The process implemented by Kaspersky for certificate interception has previously resulted in serious vulnerabilities. Now the experts discovered other issues such as the way leaf certificates are cached that leverages on an extremely naive fingerprinting technique., “Kaspersky cache recently generated certificates in memory in case the user agent initiates another connection. In order to do this, Kaspersky fetches the certificate chain and then checks if it’s already generated a matching leaf certificate in the cache. If it has, it just grabs the existing certificate and private key and then reuses it for the new connection.” explained the expert., “The cache is a binary tree, and as new leaf certificates and keys are generated, they’re inserted using the first 32 bits of MD5(serialNumber||issuer) as the key. If a match is found for a key, they just pull the previously generated certificate and key out of the binary tree and start using it to relay data to the user-agent.”, It is easy to understand that a 32bit key open to brute-forcing attacks to generate a collision in a few seconds. An attacker can produce a collision with other certificates., Ormandy also provided a description of the attack:, Ormandy also provided a proof of the bug forcing a collision between Hacker News and manchesterct.gov website., “You can reproduce this bug, by visiting  then  and observing that the content is signed by the wrong certificate.” he added. “So if you use Kaspersky Antivirus in Manchester, Connecticut and were wondering why Hacker News didn’t work sometimes, it’s because of a critical vulnerability that has effectively disabled SSL certificate validation for all 400 million Kaspersky users.”, , The expert also provided the C source code that it is possible to use to generate a colliding certificate for testing., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – digital certificates, Kaspersky)

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Blackmarket is proposing new exploit kits, like Atrax, that could be used to infect victims with the purpose to steal Bitcoin wallets or to abuse of the computational resources of the victims for Bitcoin mining., Recently security experts at Malwarebytes alerted the security community on the diffusion of Potentially Unwanted Programs (PUPs) including search agents and Toolbars, that are bundled with malware having mining capabilities., “This time, however, we are taking a look at a PuP that installs a Bitcoin miner on the user system, not just for a quick buck but actually written into the software’s EULA. This type of system hijacking is just another way for advertising based software to exploit a user into getting even more cash.” states the blog post on Malwarebytes website., The experts have discovered a malware instance that utilizes victims’ computing resources for Bitcoin mining, in particular it uses ‘jhProtominer’ a popular mining software that runs via the command line, to abuse the CPUs and GPUs of the infected machine., On November  22th researchers at Malwarebytes received a request for assistance from users about an anomalous behavior of a file, titled “jh1d.exe” that was taking up 50% of the system resources. The file in reality was the Bitcoin Miner “jhProtominer”. The experts also discovered that jhProtominer wasn’t the miner recreating its own file and executing but a parent process known as “monitor.exe”, Monitor.exe was created by a company known as Mutual Public, which is also known as We Build Toolbars, LLC or WBT., Upon further investigation Malwarebytes experts have found a link between WBT and Mutual Public thanks to an entry in the  Sarasota Business Observer., COMPUTER CALCULATIONS, SECURITY: as part of downloading a Mutual Public, your computer may do mathematical calculations for our affiliated networks to confirm transactions and increase security. Any rewards or fees collected by WBT or our affiliates are the sole property of WBT and our affiliates., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Bitcoin miner, malware)

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ICREACH is the name of a Google-like search engine designed by the National Security Agency (NSA) that provides metadata related to individuals living in US to more than two dozen US government agencies., The Intercept has revealed the existence of ICREACH,  a platform used to share data on more than 850 billion communications records detailing e-mails, phone calls, instant messages, and phone geolocation. The revelation is based on classified documents, dated 2006 and 2007 and disclosed by whistleblower Edward Snowden, which describe ICREACH as a “federated query” engine that would search “across all data sets for information relating to a target identifier.”,  , , “The National Security Agency is secretly providing data to nearly two dozen U.S. government agencies with a “Google-like” search engine built to share more than 850 billion records about phone calls, emails, cellphone locations, and internet chats, according to classified documents obtained by The Intercept.” states the Intercept., The ICREACH program was already mentioned by journalist Glenn Greenwald in his book “No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State”:,  , ,  , According to The Intercept the large-scale of ICREACH represents a serious threat to citizens’ privacy, it seems that also individuals not accused of illegal activities were monitored by the system., “Legal experts told The Intercept they were shocked to learn about the scale of the ICREACH system and are concerned that law enforcement authorities might use it for domestic investigations that are not related to terrorism.” reports The Intercept., “To me, this is extremely troublesome,” “The myth that metadata is just a bunch of numbers and is not as revealing as actual communications content was exploded long ago—this is a trove of incredibly sensitive information.” said Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the New York University School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice. , The mastermind of ICREACH program was recently retired NSA director Gen. Keith Alexander, the official in 2006 described, in a classified 2006 letter to the then-Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte, the search-engine as a system that would “allow unprecedented volumes of communications metadata to be shared and analyzed,” opening up a “vast, rich source of information” for other agencies to exploit., One year later the system had gone live as a pilot program, it would enable at least a 12-fold increase in the volume of metadata being shared between intelligence agencies., “The NSA described ICREACH as a “one-stop shopping tool” for analyzing communications. The system would enable at least a 12-fold increase in the volume of metadata being shared between intelligence community agencies, the documents stated. “, As reported in the following slide there was a significant increase in the volume of metadata collected by the NSA., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – ICREACH,  Intelligence)  

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It is becoming even easier to become a cyber-criminal thanks to the model of sale known as malware-as-a-service that offers off-the-shelf malware for rent or sale. Recently malware authors started to offer also Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS), in August security experts at McAfee discovered in the Deep Web a ransomware-construction kit, dubbed Tox ransomware platform that allows easy to build malware in just 3 steps, implementing this model of sale., Now experts at Sensecy are warning of a new RaaS platform dubbed titled ORX-Locker, it allows criminals to create their piece of malware to infect systems and request the payment of a fee to unlock the system., In RaaS model, when victims decide to pay, the malware redirects them through a service provider that keeps a percent of the fee and forwards the rest to the criminal., ORX implements a sophisticated AV evasion method and complex communication techniques, the researchers discovered that it uses universities and other platforms as control infrastructure., The First Appearance for the ORX ransomware is dated August 25, 2015, when a user dubbed orxteam announced the availability of a new RaaS service in a post., , The team ORX developed a hidden service to implement the RaaS, the experts highlight that the website requests a few details to new users., “To enter the site, new users just need to register. No email or other identifying details are required. Upon registration, users have the option to enter a referral username, which will earn them three percent from every payment made to the new user.” state the post that provides a detailed description of the ORX platform., In order to create a ransomware stub the users just need to add the ID number (5 digits max) and the ransom price (ORX put a minimum of $75), then they have to click the Build EXE button., The user can easily withdraw his earnings by transferring them to a Bitcoin address by using the Wallet function. The Orx ransomware platform also implements a friendly statistics on its users., The Orx Ransomware is a zip file containing the binary for the malware., The researchers at Sensecy have identified these addresses belonging the C&C infrastructure., The Orx ransomware encrypts the victim’s files and informs it about the infection by displaying a popup message, it also creates on the desktop a file containing the payment instruction., , The post published by the researchers at Sensecy includes also the Yara rule for the malware detection., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Orx ransomware platform, Tor Network)

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Security experts from the Heimdal security firm have discovered a new DIY financial crime kit offered for sale on a notorious malicious hacker forum on the dark web called Lampeduza., The new crime kit, dubbed Scylex malware kit, allows cyber criminals to roll their own ZeuS-like malware. The malware implements the features of common banking trojan, such as stealing online banking passwords, intercept web traffic and of course establish a backdoor on the infected Windows-based machine., , Experts form Heimdal security speculate that crook are trying to replicate the success of the infamous Zeus GameOver threat. Below the statement used by the creators of the Scylex malware kit to advertise their tool:, “The goal is to bring back to the scene what Zeus/SpyEye, Citadel, ZeroAccess left behind, and introduce a brand new solution as well.”, The authors are offering the Scylex malware kit for $7,500+ on the Lampeduza dark web forum, the same forum where card details of the 2014 Target data breach were recently offered for sale., For an additional $2,000, the buyer can receive the SOCKS5 (Socket Secure) support, which enables attackers to manipulate data transfers between a user’s PC and a specific server through a proxy., The authors are also offering a “premium” package of the Scylex malware kit that costs $10,000 and includes a HVNC (Hidden Virtual Network Computing) module., “Hidden VNC is probably one of the most complicated malware features to code and essentially requires coders to implement their own window manager, which is why there are very few unique implementations in the wild (most malware uses a single implementation unimaginatively named HVNC).” states the advertising., , “The cyber criminals behind Scylex also claim that they’re working on adding new elements to the brand-new financial malware. Here’s their “roadmap”:, Heimdal Security published the full ad, in a blog post., Is the Scylex Financial Crime Kit a real threat?, “So far, Scylex hasn’t been spotted in the wild, so the claims made in the advertisement posted on Lampeduza forum can’t be verified at the moment. However, both the video and the detailed description of what this new financial malware can do are strong evidence that the crime kit may indeed be real.” states the post published by Heimdal security., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Scylex malware kit, cybercrime)

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Today the principal channel for malware diffusion is considered internet, large diffusion of exploit kits and crimeware such as BlackHole, Cool Exploit and Incognito have automated the infection process over the network. Majority of attacks exploits vulnerabilities in large use applications, such as browsers, and the leak of responsive patch management expose users to serious risks., Unfortunately in some cases are exploited zero-day vulnerabilities rendering useless any defense system of the user, in this case the patch management process once discovered the flaw is determinant to mitigate the cyber threat., According the Threat Report related to H2 proposed by F-Secure the principal menaces that characterized the security landscape were botnets (e.g. ZeroAcess), exploits in particular against the Java development platform and banking trojans (e.g. Zeus)., , ZeroAccess is considered the most profitable botnet of 2012 but other notable botnets of 2012 are Zeus, Carberp, Dorkbot and the mobile botnet SpamSoldier. ZeroAccess botnet infected millions of machines globally in 2012, with up to 140,000 unique IPs in the US and Europe., Windows machines continues to be the main target for attacks despite an increasing number of cyber threats hit the Mac platform, F-Secure detected 121 new, unique variants in all of 2012, the majority of them backdoors, twice the previous year., While Java was  the main target for most of exploit-based attacks the banking sector has been mainly hit by Zeus botnet, F-Secure has also revealed an increase of multi-platform attacks, both desktop and mobile, conducted with multiple malware., “Rather than a single major event, perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of H2 2012 is the way that the various trends we saw emerging in the first two quarters of the year have continued to grow apace—that is, the growth of botnets, the ‘standardization’ of vulnerability exploitation and the increasing ‘establishment’ of exploit kits.”, One of the most interesting phenomena observed during second part of 2012 is the changing of techniques for cyber espionage campaigns, before, almost all recorded corporate espionage cases were based on using specially crafted documents containing a malware payload meanwhile in Q4 the attackers have started to exploit vulnerabilities in in web browsers and browser plugins., The consolidated technique known as ‘watering hole’ attack was the most efficient for cyber spies that were able to infecting every visitors of a particular website compromised for the campaign., “The rise of web-based attacks in corporate espionage raises two points: first, this trend means that any corporation with an online presence that serves such potentially ‘interesting‘ targets may be at risk of unwittingly serving as an attack conduit, and secondly; obviously, such organizations must now find a way to mitigate such a risk, in order to protect themselves and their clients.” , , Every company that manager online resources must be aware of this technique of attack, defending against watering hole attacks does not require additional defense systems except for attacks that exploit zero-day vulnerabilities against which is necessary a multi layered security approach., The report dedicates a very interesting sections to the principal vulnerabilities exploited by the toolkit available on the market providing interesting information of exploit kits and their geographic distribution., Of course it is impossible not to mention the mobile threat landscape that continues to be focused on two platforms, Android, which accounted for 79% of all new malware variants identified in 2012 and Symbian, with 19% of the remaining new variants.  In Q2 2012, China officially surpassed the United States as the world’s largest market for smartphone consumers. Android handsets accounted for 81% of that market and it’s therefore probably not surprising that many of the new malware families detected last year were targeted specifically to Android users in mainland China., , “Given its dominance, the Android platform has naturally become the main target for active malware development, with a total of 238 new, unique variants found on the platform during that period.The majority of these malware are distributed as trojanized apps, in which a legitimate program has been engineered to include a malicious component. Most of the new variants found are categorized as trojans or monitoring-tools, which are able to either compromise the user’s data or track the user’s movements and activities.”, The report is full of interesting info let close the post with an overview on banking trojan ecosystem:, …. The bank robberies are exploiting new channels, and malware are their passepartout., Pierluigi Paganini

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An unnamed man, on his way to the library, spotted a thumb drive on the sidewalk in Queen’s Park, West London. He pocketed the USB drive and continued on his way. He remembered the USB drive a few days later and returned to the library to view its contents. Recognizing the sensitive nature of the information, he then turned the USB drive over to The Sunday Mirror tabloid., , It is obvious how this information would benefit someone intent on disrupting the airport or causing harm to dignitaries or VIPs. Many documents were labeled as “confidential” or “restricted” highlighting their sensitive nature. In an interesting twist, these labels follow an older labeling scheme so there is a question of how up-to-date this information is. Even if the information is outdated, knowing former protocols and designs help a bad actor to anticipate the current solutions., According to a Heathrow Airport spokesperson’s comment to CNN, “Heathrow’s top priority is the safety and security of our passengers and colleagues. The UK and Heathrow have some of the most robust aviation ­security measures in the world and we remain vigilant to evolving threats by updating our procedures on a daily basis. We have reviewed all of our security plans and are confident that Heathrow remains secure. We have also launched an internal investigation to understand how this happened and are taking steps to prevent a similar occurrence in future.”,  ,  , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Heathrow Airport, security)

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Shad0w Security claimed responsibility for the data breach of the EJBCA – Open Source PKI Certificate Authority., Shad0w Security recently breached into a Switzerland Branch of EJBCA – Open Source PKI Certificate Authority and stole dozens of certificates and credential in clear text., “EJBCA® is a PKI Certificate Authority software, built using Java (JEE) technology. Robust, flexible, high performance, scalable, platform independent, and component based, EJBCA can be used stand-alone or integrated with other applications” states the description of the EJBCA., , The group’s message also mentions the politic of the US that is accused of persecuting people like Snowden, because he revealed the surveillance machine of the Government of Washington., “oh, and lets not forget the united nations a.k.a united states, do you really think the UN is some sort of peace keepers or guardians of some kind ? then you need to wake up.” continues the message. “you saw what happens to people who ask questions or fight for you and risk their selves, people like Snowden they were once part of the system but they woke up, they told us the truth, they showed us the way, why haven’t we woke up yet ? what’s more damaging is not what the governments are doing, but your silence is their power, and as long as they are in power you are not free.”, Gh0s7 provided me evidence of the hack by showing data leak that belongs to EJBCA certificate authority breached by his team., The leaked file with all the stolen certificates was published on paste.co, the hackers also published some usernames and passwords on  ., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Shad0wS3C , hacking), Update 28/9/2016, I was contacted by a representative of the PrimeKey Solutions, the company behind EJBCA who provided me further details on the incident

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Security experts from Symantec have spotted a new strain of mobile Trojan dubbed Android.Fakebank.B that prevents users from making outgoing calls to banks from their mobile devices., Android.Fakebank.B was first spotted in October 2013, it was able to intercept incoming calls to intercept SMS used by the banks for two-factor authentication., Earlier 2014, experts from Symantec discovered a variant of the Trojan.Droidpak that was used to install the Android.Fakebank.B banking trojan on mobile devices., The variant of Android.Fakebank.B used in those attacks was already implementing common features of mobile banking threats, including SMS interception and “MITM capabilities”., In March 2016, the Android.Fakebank.B was observed targeting mainly customers of Russian and South Korean banks., The analysis of the latest variant of the Fakebank.B Android Trojan revealed that the threat would register a BroadcastReceiver component that is used to monitor outgoing calls in order to block certain calls to customer service call centers of the target banks., The Android.Fakebank.B also cancels every evidence of the call he has intercepted., “Once installed, the new Android.Fakebank.B variants register a BroadcastReceiver component that gets triggered every time the user tries to make an outgoing call. If the dialed number belongs to any of the customer service call centers of the target banks, the malware programmatically cancels the call from being placed.” states the analysis published by Symantec., , The number blocked by the Banking Trojan:, The bank customers use the above numbers to cancel stolen payment cards and deny unauthorized transactions in a timely manner, but crooks block them to have more time for their illicit activities., The Android.Fakebank.B established a backdoor and steals information from the victim’s smartphone., Symantec issued the following recommendations to mitigate the threat:, In any cases, victims can contact the bank to report the fraudulent activities using alternative channels, including a landline, a different mobile device, or an email., In early 2016, researchers from Symantec spotted another mobile banking Trojan in the wild, the Bankosy trojan that steals passwords sent through voice calls generated by 2FA systems., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –Android.Fakebank.B , mobile)

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According to five former employees, hackers broke into the company vulnerabilities and bug reports database, but the news was never disclosed., The former employees explained that Microsoft addressed all the vulnerabilities listed in the compromised database within months so that the vulnerabilities would have limited exploitation against Microsoft systems in the wild., “Microsoft Corp’s secret internal database for tracking bugs in its own software was broken into by a highly sophisticated hacking group more than four years ago, according to five former employees, in only the second known breach of such a corporate database.” reported the Reuters., You can imagine the importance of the archive for intelligence agencies and hackers, the database contained details of unfixed vulnerabilities in some of the most popular software and operating systems in the world.Spies for governments around the globe and other hackers covet such information because it shows them how to create tools for electronic break-ins., The knowledge of such zero-day vulnerabilities would have been exploited in targeted attacks in the wild., The employees attributed the attack to a “highly sophisticated hacking group,” likely they were referring a nation-state actor., After the incident, Microsoft investigated every breach suffered by third-party companies in the following period to check if any of the vulnerabilities contained within the breached database were exploited in the attacks. The company declared that did not find any evidence of cyber attacks in the wild exploiting the information included in the hacked vulnerability database., “Sometime after learning of the attack, Microsoft went back and looked at breaches of other organizations around then, the five ex-employees said. It found no evidence that the stolen information had been used in those breaches.” continued the Reuters., The Reuters claims the threat actor behind the data breach is an APT group known Wild Neutron. (i.e. Morpho, Jripbot, Butterfly, ZeroWing, or Sphinx Moth). Wild Neutron is a financially motivated espionage group that targeted large enterprises, including Microsoft, Apple, Twitter, and Facebook., , According to the analysis published by Kaspersky Lab in 2015, the Morpho APT group is specialized in corporate espionage and has been active since at least 2011., The researchers speculate that the group is responsible for the attacks in 2013 on the IT giants Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Twitter., The above attacks were discovered in February 2013, a few weeks after, Microsoft admitted an attack, but it specified the attackers had limited access to its network., “As reported by Facebook and Apple, Microsoft can confirm that we also recently experienced a similar security intrusion,” the company said on Feb. 22, 2013., “We found a small number of computers, including some in our Mac business unit, that were infected by malicious software using techniques similar to those documented by other organizations. We have no evidence of customer data being affected, and our investigation is ongoing.”, Three of the five former employees declared that the vulnerability have been used in attacks in the wild., “They absolutely discovered that bugs had been taken,” said one. “Whether or not those bugs were in use, I don’t think they did a very thorough job of discovering.”, The Morpho team exploited a Flash Player and Java zero-day in its attacks and digitally signed its malicious code by using stolen Acer Incorporated digital certificates., The hackers exploited a Java zero-day, tracked as CVE-2013-0422, in the attacks against Twitter and Facebook. Hackers tricked Twitter and Facebook employees into visiting hacked forums hosting the Java zero-day exploit., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Microsoft, data breach)  

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The DDoS attacks continue to be a profitable business in the cyber criminal underground. Powering a DDoS attack against an organization is even cheaper, running an attack can cost as little as $7 an hour, while a targeted DDoS against a company can cost up to thousands or millions of dollars., , Kaspersky Lab has published an interesting analysis on the cost of DDoS attacks. The experts estimated that the cost to power a DDoS attack using a cloud-based botnet of 1,000 desktops is about $7 per hour. A DDoS attack service typically goes for $25 an hour, this means that the expected profit for crooks is around $25-$7=$18 per hour., Prices are highly variable, a DDoS attack can cost from $5 for a 300-second attack to $400 for 24 hours., “This means the actual cost of an attack using a botnet of 1000 workstations can amount to $7 per hour. The asking prices for the services we managed to find were, on average, $25 per hour, meaning the cybercriminals organizing DDoS attack are making a profit of about $18 for every hour of an attack.” reads the analysis published by Kaspersky., It is easy for criminals to pay for a DDoS attack service available in one of the numerous black markets. The services are easy to use and implement an efficient reporting system., The majority of booters implements useful dashboards that allow them to manage loyalty programs and allow customers to plan their DDoS attacks according to the availability of the attacking infrastructure., , The experts at Kaspersky explained that prices for DDoS attack services depend on their generation as well as the source of attack traffic. For example, DDoS attacks powered by IoT botnets are cheaper than the ones powered by a botnet of servers., “For example, a botnet of 1000 surveillance cameras may be cheaper in terms of organization than a botnet of 100 servers. This is because cameras and other IoT devices are currently less secure – a fact that is often ignored by their owners.” reads the report., Another factor that influences the final price for a DDoS attack service is the target and its characteristics. Some services could be used to hit also well-resourced websites, such as the site of a Government. Of course, these services are more expensive., “The cost of the service may also depend on the type of anti-DDoS protection the potential victim has: if the target uses traffic filtering systems to protect its resources, the cybercriminals have to come up with ways of bypassing them to ensure an effective attack, and this also means an increase in the price.” reads the report., To give an idea of the cost, a DDoS attack against an unprotected website ranges from $50 to $100, while an attack on a protected site can go for $400 or more., The cost of a cyber attack depends also on the location of targeted websites, DDoS attacks on English-language websites are usually more expensive than similar attacks on Russian-language sites., Crooks can power DDoS attacks for extortion, ransomware DDoS have already turned into a high-margin business, experts at Kaspersky explained that the profitability of one attack can exceed 95%., Victims of an ongoing DDoS attack are often willing to pay a ransom to stop the offensive., All the data presented suggests that the average cost of DDoS attacks in the near future will continue to drop, while their frequency will increase., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – DDoS attack service, cybercrime)

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Drones have created a new threat to people’s privacy. Anyone with a drone equipped with a video camera can potentially violate our privacy by streaming the subject in his/her private space over an encrypted first person view (FPV) channel., Experts suggested many methods to detect nearby drones, but they all suffer from the same shortcoming: they cannot identify exactly what is being captured, and therefore they fail to distinguish between the legitimate use of a drone (for example, to use a drone to film a selfie from the air) and illegitimate use that invades someone’s privacy (when the same operator uses the drone to stream the view into the window of his neighbor’s apartment), a distinction that in some cases depends on the orientation of the drone’s video camera rather than on the drone’s location., A group of Israeli researchers at Ben Gurion University in Beer Sheva (Ben Nassi, Raz Ben-Netanel, Adi Shamir, Yuval Elovici) have built a proof-of-concept system against surveillance operated with spying drones that is able to determine whether a certain person or object is under drone surveillance., The system first generates a recognizable pattern on whatever subject someone might want to guard spy on with aerial surveillance, then researchers remotely intercept a drone’s radio signals and scan the streaming video the drone sends to the operator scanning for that pattern., “In this paper, we shatter the commonly held belief that the use of encryption to secure an FPV channel prevents an interceptor from extracting the POI that is being streamed. We show methods that leverage physical stimuli to detect whether the drone’s camera is directed towards a target in real time.” wrote the researchers,, “We investigate the influence of changing pixels on the FPV channel (in a lab setup). Based on our observations we demonstrate how an interceptor can perform a side-channel attack to detect whether a target is being streamed by analyzing the encrypted FPV channel that is transmitted from a real drone (DJI Mavic) in two use cases: when the target is a private house and when the target is a subject.”, , The experts leverage the “delta frames” technique, instead of encoding video as a series of raw images, it’s compressed into a series of changes from the previous image in the video. A streaming video related to a still object contains fewer bytes of data compared with a streaming video of an object in motion or images that continuously change color., That compression feature can reveal key information about the content of the video to someone who’s intercepting the streaming data, the technique works even when data is encrypted., The Ben Gurion researchers used in the tests a “smart film” to toggle the opacity of several panes of a house’s windows. They used a DJI Mavic quadcopter to spy on the house, they demonstrated that the technique was able to detect the changing from opaque to transparent and back again of the panes. Then they used a parabolic antenna and a laptop to intercept the drone’s radio signals sent back to the operator and search the pattern in the encrypted data stream to detect if the UAV was used for aerial surveillance of the house., , “In another test, they put blinking LED lights on a test subject’s shirt, and then were able to pull out the binary code for “SOS” from an encrypted video focused on the person, showing that they could even potentially “watermark” a drone’s video feed to prove that it spied on a specific person or building.” reported Wired., But Nassi confirmed that their technique works at ranges where it’s very difficult to spot a surveillance drone in the sky, the researchers tested their technique from a range of about 150 feet. The range is scalable by using a more powerful antenna., Let me suggest reading the research paper., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –drone surveillance, privacy)

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The FBI has used once again the network investigative technique (NIT) for unmasking Tor users, this time the feds used it to arrest a suspected sextortionist. The man is accused of having tricked young girls into sharing nude pics of themselves and then blackmailed them., The network investigative technique (NIT) was used in the past to unmask Tor user, it allows feds to gather suspects’ real IP address, the MAC address and other pieces of information and sent them to the FBI servers., The FBI used a NIT involving a specially crafted video file that once opened causes the media player to contact an FBI-controlled server leaking the above information that can be used to identify the suspect’s ISP and, with a subpoena, the subscriber’s identity., Using this technique, the FBI arrested Buster Hernandez, 26, who was charged with multiple counts of sexual exploitation of a child, threats to use an explosive device, and threats to injure. The man was using Facebook to lure the young victims and extort them to send him pictures of themselves naked., “Terrorizing young victims through the use of social media and hiding behind the anonymity of the Internet will not be tolerated by this office,” said US Attorney Josh Minkler. “Those who think they can outwit law enforcement and are above being caught should think again. Mr Hernandez’s reign of terror is over.”, , The man was using the name “Brian Kil” while he was sending messages to blackmail the victims threatening them to reveal compromising pictures.  With this technique, he was asking more images to the young victims., “When Victim 1 refused to provide additional images as demanded, Hernandez is alleged to have made physical threats to Victim 1, stating “I am coming for you. I will slaughter your entire class and save you for last.” He further made threats to law enforcement saying, “I will add a dozen dead police to my tally…Try me pigs, I will finish you off as well.” continues the US Attorney., The FBI was involved in the investigation in December 2015, when it received FBI the request of help by the Brownsburg police, Indiana, where two of the victims lived. The police were not able to identify the man because he was using Tor., The threats caused two schools to be closed for an entire day., Hernandez is suspected to have “sextorted” a number of victims in at least 10 federal districts., “This was a unique and complex investigation that highlights the tenacity, perseverance, expertise and dedication of the FBI Indianapolis’ Crimes Against Children Task Force and was a top priority. Innovative techniques were utilized, solutions to roadblocks created and partnerships with key private sector partners were developed,” said W. Jay Abbott, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Indianapolis Division. “I stood in front of concerned parents and community members and told them we would find the person who had been victimizing these young girls and, with the tireless work of our agents and partners, we never gave up.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Network investigative technique (NIT), FBI)

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Security firm SecureWorks has uncovered a new phishing campaign carried out by COBALT DICKENS APT targeting universities worldwide, it involved sixteen domains hosting more than 300 spoofed websites for 76 universities in 14 countries, including Australia, Canada, China, Israel, Japan, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States., “SecureWorks Counter Threat Unit™ (CTU) researchers discovered a URL spoofing a login page for a university. Further research into the IP address hosting the spoofed page revealed a broader campaign to steal credentials.” reads the report published by SecureWorks., “Sixteen domains contained over 300 spoofed websites and login pages for 76 universities located in 14 countries, including Australia, Canada, China, Israel, Japan, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States”, , Universities are a privileged target for nation-state actors aimed at stealing intellectual property and cutting-edge projects., Most of the websites spoofed universities’ online library systems, the attackers were interested in accessing those resources and gather intelligence., The visitors were displayed login pages, once they have entered their credentials they were redirected to the legitimate websites where they were automatically logged into a valid session or were asked to enter their credentials again., Many of the domains used by COBALT DICKENS were registered between May and August 2018, most of them resolved to the same IP address and DNS name server., The attackers shared the same infrastructure used by the COBALT DICKENS group in a previous campaign., Iranian hacking activity is intensifying in the last years, security firms uncovered the activities of many Iran-linked APT groups., The US Department of Justice and Department of the Treasury in March announced charges against nine Iranians for alleged involvement in a massive state-sponsored hacking scheme, the hackers hit more than 300 universities and tens of companies in the US and abroad and stole “valuable intellectual property and data.”, According to the Treasury Department, since 2013, the Mabna Institute hit 144 US universities and 176 universities in 21 foreign countries., Geoffrey Berman, US Attorney for the Southern District of New York revealed that the spear phishing campaign targeted more than 100,000 university professors worldwide and about 8,000 accounts were compromised., The Iranian hackers exfiltrated 31 terabytes, roughly 15 billion pages of academic projects were stolen., The hackers also targeted the US Department of Labor, the US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, and many private and non-governmental organizations., The sanctions also hit the Mabna Institute, an Iran-based company, that had a critical role in coordinating the attacks on behalf of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards., “In March 2018, the U.S. Department of Justice indicted the Mabna Institute and nine Iranian nationals in connection with COBALT DICKENS activity occurring between 2013 and 2017.” concludes the report., “Many threat groups do not change their tactics despite public disclosures, and CTU analysis suggests that COBALT DICKENS may be responsible for the university targeting despite the indictments of some members.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – COBALT DICKENS, hacking)

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When speaking with someone new to ISO 27001, very often I encounter the same problem: this person thinks the standard will describe in detail everything they need to do – for example, how often they will need to perform backup, how distant their disaster recovery site should be, or even worse, which kind of technology they must use for network protection or how they have to configure the router., But, the fact is ISO 27001 does not prescribe these things; it works in a completely different way., Let’s imagine that the standard prescribes that you need to perform a backup every 24 hours – is this the right measure for you? It might be, but believe me, many companies nowadays will find this insufficient – the rate of change of their data is so quick that they need to do backup if not in real time, then at least every hour. On the other hand, there are still some companies that would find the once-a-day backup too often – their rate of change is still very slow, so performing backup so often would be overkill., The point is – if this standard is to fit any type of a company, then this prescriptive approach is not possible. So, it is simply impossible not only to define the backup frequency, but also which technology to use, how to configure each device, etc., By the way, this perception that ISO 27001 will prescribe everything is the biggest generator of myths about ISO 27001 – you’ll find these myths in this article: 5 greatest myths about ISO 27001., So, you might wonder, “Why would I need a standard that doesn’t tell me anything concretely?” Because ISO 27001 gives you a framework for you to decide on appropriate protection. The same way, e.g., you cannot copy a marketing campaign of another company to your own, this same principle is valid for information security – you need to tailor it to your specific needs., And, the way ISO 27001 tells you to achieve this tailor-made suit is to perform risk assessment and risk treatment. This is nothing but a systematic overview of the bad things that can happen to you (assessing the risks), and then deciding which safeguards to implement to prevent those bad things from happening (treating the risks). Learn more here: ISO 27001 risk assessment & treatment – 6 basic steps., The requirements of interested parties are a second crucial input when selecting the safeguards. As you’ll see in article How to identify interested parties, interested parties could be government agencies, your clients, partners, etc. – all of them probably expect you to protect the information, and this is reflected in the laws and contracts you have with them. Therefore, your safeguards have to comply with all these requirements as well., The whole idea here is that you should implement only those safeguards (controls) that are required because of the risks and requirements of interested parties, not those that someone thinks are fancy; but, this logic also means that you should implement all the controls that are required because of the risks or because of these requirements, and that you cannot exclude some simply because you don’t like them., If you work in the IT department, you are probably aware that most of the incidents are happening not because the computers broke down, but because the users from the business side of the organization are using the information systems in the wrong way., And, such wrongdoings cannot be prevented with technical safeguards only – what is also needed are clear policies and procedures, training and awareness, legal protection, discipline measures, etc. Real-life experience has proven that the more diverse safeguards are applied, the higher level of security is achieved., And, when you take into account that not all the sensitive information is in digital form (you probably still have papers with confidential information on them), the conclusion is that IT safeguards are not enough, and that the IT department, although very important in an information security project, cannot run this kind of project alone., This fact that IT security is not enough for implementing information security is recognized in ISO 27001 – this standard tells you how to run the information security implementation as a company-wide project where not only IT, but also the business side of the organization, must take part., About the Author: Dejan Košutić, Expert at 27001 Academy.  Author at 27001Academy, the leading online resource for ISO 27001 & ISO 22301/BS 25999 implementation., Consultant with focus on information security and business continuity management, with broad experience in financial and government sector, as well as with small and medium-sized businesses., As ISO 27001 Lead Auditor and Approved Tutor he has delivered certification audits and many courses (including the ISO 27001 Lead Auditor Course) throughout Europe., Specialties: ISO 27001 implementation, ISO 22301/BS 25999 implementation, risk assessment, risk treatment, business impact analysis, documentation writing, auditing, workshops, seminars, E-learning courses, webinars., , 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 – ISO 27001, security)

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Attackers carried out a spear-phishing campaign against entities in the industrial sector, the messages disguised as commercial offers where used by attackers to deliver a legitimate remote administration software on victims’ systems (TeamViewer or Remote Manipulator System/Remote Utilities (RMS))., Attackers personalized the content of each phishing email reflecting the activity of the target organization and the type of work performed by the employee to whom the email is sent., The campaign was discovered by experts from Kaspersky Lab who speculate the attackers are financially motivated., “Kaspersky Lab ICS CERT has identified a new wave of phishing emails with malicious attachments targeting primarily companies and organizations that are, in one way or another, associated with industrial production.” reads the blog post published by Kaspersky., “According to the data available, the attackers’ main goal is to steal money from victim organizations’ accounts,”, Once the attackers have gained access to the victim’s system they will search for any purchase documents, as well as the financial and accounting software. Then the crooks look for various ways in which they can monetize their effort, for example, by spoofing the bank details used to make payments., According to Kaspersky, there was a spike in the number of spear phishing messages in  November 2017 that targeted up to 400 industrial companies located in Russia., , The spear-phishing campaign is still ongoing, the messages purported to be invitations to tender from large industrial companies., The quality of the phishing messages suggests the attackers have spent a significant effort in the reconnaissance phase., “It is worth noting that the attackers addressed an employee of the company under attack by his or her full name,” state the researchers. “This indicates that the attack was carefully prepared and an individual email that included details relevant to the specific organization was created for each victim.”, The attackers used both malicious attachments and links to external resources that are used to download the malicious code., “Malicious files can be run either by an executable file attached to an email or by a specially crafted script for the Windows command interpreter.” states the researchers., “For example, the archive mentioned above contains an executable file, which has the same name and is a password-protected self-extracting archive. The archive extracts the files and runs a script that installs and launches the actual malware in the system.”, Regarding the legitimate software used by the attackers, TeamViewer or Remote Manipulator System/Remote Utilities (RMS), for both, the attackers performed a DLL injection attack by injecting the malicious code directly into the process by substituting a malicious library for system DLL., The malicious library includes the system file winspool.drv that is located in the system folder and is used to send documents to the printer., The winspool.drv decrypts the attackers’ configuration files, including software settings and the password for remotely controlling the target machine., In the case of RMS, one of the configuration files includes the email address used by the attacker to receive the information (i.e. computer name, username and the RMS machine’s internet ID) about the infected system., When the attackers use TeamViewer software to exfiltrate system information, a file in a malicious library contains various parameters, including the password used for remotely controlling the system and a URL of the attackers’ command-and-control server., Unlike RMS, Team Viewer also uses a built-in VPN to remotely control a computer located behind NAT., “After launching, the malicious library checks whether an internet connection is available by executing the command “ping 1.1.1.1” and then decrypts the malicious program’s configuration file tvr.cfg. The file contains various parameters, such as the password used for remotely controlling the system, URL of the attackers’ command-and-control server, parameters of the service under whose name TeamViewer will be installed, the User-Agent field of the HTTP header used in requests sent to the command-and-control server, VPN parameters for TeamViewer, etc.” continues the analysis., “Unlike RMS, Team Viewer uses a built-in VPN to remotely control a computer located behind NAT.”, Kaspersky highlighted that the industrial sector is becoming a privileged target for crooks, they are able to make profits even using simple techniques and known malware., The use of legitimate Remote administration software allows crooks to gain full control of compromised systems avoiding detection., “This choice on the part of the cybercriminals could be explained by the fact that the threat-awareness and cybersecurity culture in industrial companies is inferior to that in companies from other sectors of the economy (such as banks or IT companies),” Kaspersky concludes., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – industrial sector, cybercrime)

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The popular mobile messaging app WhatsApp is vulnerable to hijacking exposing hundreds of Millions of users vulnerable to attack. It could be quite easy to take over a WhatsApp account when the attacker has the phone number of the victim., even if it is locked, The attack also works in case the mobile device is locked, it doesn’t exploit any vulnerability in the popular messaging app, instead it relies on the way the account setup mechanism works are implemented by WhatsApp., , As reported by the colleagues by TheHackerNews I’m not encouraging users to hack others WhatsApp account, but the purpose of publishing this post is to warn its users about possible risks. It is a good practice not to leave it unattended the mobile device for longer durations., The trick could be exploited by the attacker to get full control over the victim’s account and works for every mobile platform., By choosing the right time, for example, when the victim goes away to do something (2 minutes it’s enough), the attacker just needs to perform the following actions:, Now you know the pin code, you can finish up the account creation and you will have access to your friend’s WhatsApp’s. Now assume that your victim has all his private conversations backup and you can restore all his/her chat history.  Great, right?, Using this known and simple trick your colleagues can hijack your WhatsApp Account easily., If the target uses an iPhone the hack is quite simple, especially when the owner has configured the iPhone with Siri authentication for the lock screen. In this case all the contact details are available to access the Siri’s settings, this means that an attacker can access them without the need for a PIN. In this case, the attacker can easily discover the victim’s phone number., “Thus, if you try to steal the account information of WhatsApp, without even having the phone number of the target user, you can just call your number from target’s phone using Siri.target’s phone using Siri.” states THN., Below the video PoC for the WhatsApp hack.,  , , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  WhatsApp, Hacking)

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The Ponemon Institute published a new study titled “The SQL Injection Threat Study“ to understand the reply of organizations to the SQL injection threat., The study is sponsored by DB Networks, its Chairman and CEO Brett Helm used the following words to describe the inpact of the SQL injection attacks:, “It’s well known that SQL injection attacks are rampant and have proven to be devastating to organization of all sizes. This study delves into both the scope and many of the root causes of SQL injection breaches,“, The analysis reveals that 65% of organizations suffered successfully SQL injection attacks in the last twelve months which were able to evade victims’ defenses., “We believe this is the first study to survey the risks and remedies regarding SQL injection attacks, and the results are very revealing,“ “It is commonly accepted that organizations believe they struggle with SQL injection vulnerabilities, and almost half of the respondents said the SQL injection threat facing their organization is very significant, but this study examines much deeper issues.” commented Dr. Larry Ponemon. , The worrying news is that despite about one-third of believe that their organization has the necessary technology to detect and mitigate the cyber threats, the success rate of SQL injection attacks is too high., , , According the Ponemon The SQL Injection Threat Study, 52% of respondents reported to have adopted third-party software to detect the attack but that they haven’t tested it., 49 percent of the respondents revealed that the SQL injection threat represents a serious problem for their company, SQL injection is considered one of the primary caused of data breach., Cybercrime is adopting techniques even more sophisticated but too many organizations are not aware of principal attack patterns and this consideration makes them more exposed to the cyber attacks., “Less than half of respondents (46 percent) are familiar with the term Web Application Firewalls (WAF) bypass. Only 39 percent of respondents are very familiar or familiar with the techniques cyber criminal use to get around WAF perimeter security devices.” states the report., The impact of SQL injection attacks on the organization is very serious, the threat is very insidious and it is hard to detect, breaches required in fact an average of nearly 140 days to discover with an additional 68 days on average needed to remediate., Reportes highlights are:, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Ponemon Institute, SQL injection)

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The Turkish authorities diffused the news of a cyber attack against the Istanbul Ataturk International Airport. Official sources revealed that the passport control system at the departure terminal of the Istanbul Ataturk Airport International was hit by a cyber attack last Friday, but concerning news is that also another airport in the same city was also victims of hackers., News agencies also reported in fact that the passport control system at the Sabiha Gokcen International Airport in Istanbul was down due to the malfunction of the Istanbul provincial security directorate’s Polnet data system., The Istanbul Ataturk International Airport went into the caos, the plane departures were delayed with corresponding impact on waiting times for passengers., , The cyberattack shut down passport control systems at two facilities, and authorities have restored the systems after the necessary recovery operation., Authorities are investigating on the incidents, security experts hypnotized that attackers used malware to steal user’s data. A data breach to system like the one deployed at Istanbul Ataturk International Airport could allow to hackers to gather sensitive information but it could be also used with sabotage purpose., Actually there is no information on the possible source of the attacks., The events raise again the discussion on the necessity to preserve critical infrastructures of a country, control systems, electric grids, telecommunication systems and many other vital infrastructures must be properly protected from cyber attacks. The number of incidents is destined to grow, it is essential to be prepared and to establish all necessary countermeasures to avoid serious repercussions., Unfortunately state-sponsored hackers, cyber criminals and hacktivists represent a serious menace for critical infrastructures of any country, it is necessary to invest in cyber security at any level before it will be too late., Population must be aware of the risks connected to a cyber attack, but in countries such as Italy people totally ignores what is possible to do with a malware, this is profoundly wrong., The concept of war is mutating and menace from cyber space could create serious damage, the recent events occurred due to the dispute between North Korea and South Korea are an excellent example to explain that cyber attacks could block banking system of a country or its media agencies., Time is running out, we live in a digital age and terrorists and governments are exploring new ways to hit the opponents., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – hacking, Istanbul Ataturk International Airport)

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Today I desire to share with you the results of a study of Trend Micro security firm focused on mobile threat incidents related to the first quarter of 2012. The large diffusion of mobile devices and the leak of awareness on the principal cyber threats have produced an increasing interest of the cybercrimein mobility sector, Android platform is the most one interested with more over 5000 new malicious apps. The study analyzes every kind of mobile devices like laptops, tablets and global positioning system (GPS) devices. Companies and governments must be aware on the risks related to a wrong usage of powerful instruments that could expose sensible information if the owners hot take necessary precautions. The true revolution in information technology world is the development and deployment of mobile systems, machines characterized by processing capacity equal to a common desktop. Why we believe the mobile systems are so precious? They are somehow an extension of our person, follow us everywhere, track our position, they know our contacts (email, phone numbers), manage our appointments, and when we surf on the web through these devices indirectly we provide them information on our customs and traditions. As announced, the study reveals that Android-based smartphones suffered from more cybercriminal attacks due the increasing of their exposition to cyber threats. Smartphones and tablets due to their convenience are becoming the preferred tools for browsing the Internet, the percentage of accesses to the network from these mobile devices has increased significantly, trend was evident in all countries, with the UK showing the largest increase in smartphone usage from 30 to 45% of the total populations., ,   We have observer an increasing attention of cybercrime in mobile sector, cyber criminals are often exploiting security vulnerabilities in legitimate mobile apps, making data extraction and information gathering easier. The purpose is to stole sensible information to the users like banking credentials but not only, cyber espionage is another phenomenon that is exploded, cyber criminals and government spies have discovered that is really comfortable to spy on an individual simply controlling its mobile. Malicious apps are able to control emails, sms messages, GPS location and voice communications. Another threat of serious concern is the rapid spread of botnet based on mobile devices, it is favored by the almost total absence of protection mechanisms so difficult to tackle and by the difficult to trace the agents composing the network. This cyber threats must alert private industry but especially institutional environment, the risk of data exposure is really high and due the young growth of the sector we are still too vulnerable. Cyber ​​criminals and government agencies are aware of the importance of information gained from our mobile and therefore are showing high interest in the field. Hacker groups like Anonymouswill pose a bigger threat to organizations that protect highly sensitive data, targeting companies and individuals for various political reasons. We have registered an exponential growth of malware designed to attack mobile systems and steal sensitive information, useful for the accomplishments of frauds, very impressed the banking sector. Don’t forget that hacktivism is considered one of the most serious threat by all the governments of the world., , The scenario of a mobile attack is always the same, the App stores that is the sites for software download and the mobile apps serve as programs users download onto our mobile devices. Users who download from app stores may downloading compromised app infected by malware. The number of application available on the store is increasing day by day especially for the open platforms like android.   Let’s consider also that there are also third-party stores that provide alternative apps for users, but downloading from these unofficial channels it’s very dangerous for final users. The main problem related alternative app stores are that they are not sufficiently controlled or that can be managed by cyber criminals to provide fake copy of legitimated application modified to realize the fraud. Due the different malware targeting the Android OS several companies have tried to categorized them depending on the fraud and attack schema implemented. Following the categorization proposed by Trend Micro.   As previously mentioned, Android Market has less restrictions when it comes to registering as a developer. The strategy is implemented to encourage app developers to adopt the platform, of course this also makes it is easier for cybercriminals to  upload their malicious apps or their Trojanized counterparts.  Following some of noteworthy incidents, listed by Trend Micro, that leveraged this loophole:, Cybercriminals have also created and distributed malware using the names of popular apps that are not yet available on the Android Market. Android users anticipating these games are the likely victims of this ruse. A recent example is a fake version of Temple Run we found in the Android Market. The reports alert mobile users regarding the extention of common threat to mobile environments like advanced persistent threats (APTs). For the implicit nature of the attacks they are considered “campaigns” rather than singular “incidents,”. The introduction of mobile devices has considerably incremented the attack surface making this attacks most frequent. Mobile are simple to infect trought any infected media., The report provides some interesting data related to the “Luckycat Campaign” linked to 90 attacks targeting several industries in Japan and India as well as Tibetan activists in 2011. The attacks exploited several vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office as well as Adobe Reader, Acrobat, and Flash Player via specially crafted email attachments., , But mobile is synonimous of social, the social networks are the application that most benefit of mobility revolutionizing the concept of privacy. The imperative are “be social” and “share”, two concepts that expose million of unsuspecting users to serious cyber threats. Exploiting with different techniques the “social” model its is possible to reveal personal data to other parties. This situation is most dangerous if we consider that the accesses are made via mobile devices. We have discovered a lot vulnerabilities related to this platforms and the application that run on it, let’s also considere the increment of malware developed with the specific intent to steal any kind of information from this instruments., As predicted cyber criminals are exploiting new vector to spread their attacks, the report end with some interesting data on email spam and ramsonware, two cyber threats in constant growing. Mobile phone spam is a form of spamming directed at the text messaging service of a mobile phone. It is described as mobile spamming, SMS spam, text spam or mspam. Through spam can ensnare a user into visiting infected or link to download a malicious application., The quick overview of the mobile universe has the purpose to spread awareness on emerging cyber threats, unfortunately today it is still low. The increased diffusion of mobile devices and the increasing processing capacity represent an high motive of interest on the part of cybercrime and even governments to spy on users. For now, the concept of security and mobility clashing and there is still much to do …, Pierluigi Paganini

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Apple is revealing a series of improvement for its new iOS 9, today we have discussed the content blocker announced by Apple, and the company now announced new measures to improve the security of its devices., The iOS9 will substitute the 4-digit passcodes to 6-digit passcodes increasing the number of possible combinations and making more difficult a brute-force attack., , iOS 9 also implements a two-factor authentication mechanism for users that log into their Apple account from their new device or browser. Apple sends them a verification code to their phone or displayed on their other Apple devices, with this 2FA scheme users can confirm their identity avoiding that hackers can try to access their account from an unknown device., This new two-factor authentication method is triggered every time a user attempts to log in from an unknown device., The iOS 9 users will also have the option “Don’t Allow” when receiving pop-up window appears or the text message., Apple will release iOS 9 in the last quarter of 2015., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Apple iOS 9, mobile)

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The security researcher David Montenegro discovered a new exploit kit dubbed Disdain that is offered for rent on underground hacking forums by a malware developer using the pseudonym of Cehceny., Disdain Exploit Kit – New Exploit Kit up for sale in Underground Forum – Copy && Paste .. ?.. Beps Exploit Kit .. ?.. $./I_love_weekends.py pic.twitter.com/bLXBwxvYTp, — David Montenegro (@CryptoInsane) August 9, 2017, , The Disdain exploit kit is available for rent on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis for prices of $80, $500, and $1,400 respectively., , After the Angler EK and Nuclear EK disappeared from the threat landscape, the Sundown EK conquered the criminal underground., With the Sundown EK has been inactive since early this year, the Terror EK is being very popular in the cybercriminal ecosystem. The Disdain exploit kit appears very cheap compared to other exploit kits such as Nebula EK, that goes for rent on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis for prices of $100, $600, and $2,000 respectively., According to security experts at Intsights that found an ad of the Disdain exploit kit on a Russian-speaking forum, its main features are:, When users visit a website hosting the Disdain exploit kit, it gathers info on the specific browser used by the visitor and attempts to use one of the exploits to deliver a malware on the victim’s machine., Even is the Disdain exploit kit includes a limited number of exploits because it is very young, most of them are newer exploits. Below is the full list of exploits advertise by the author Cehceny:, , According to the experts at Bleepingcomputer, currently, there is no malvertising campaign or botnet leveraging the Disdain exploit kit because Cehceny is considered a scammer on at least one major underground hacking forum., “The Disdain ad was first spotted last week. Currently, there is no malvertising campaign or botnet redirecting traffic to any Disdain “landing page,” according to a security researcher who spoke with Bleeping Computer about Disdain but did not want to reveal his name.” wrote Catalin Cimpanu., “One reason why we haven’t seen any active campaign might be that Disdain’s author — Cehceny — is currently banned and marked as a “ripper” (scammer) on at least one major underground hacking forum.”, Looking at exploit kit market we are assisting to a rapid decline due to the difficulty of finding exploitable flaws in modern browsers., Currently, most popular exploit kits are RIG, Rig-V, Terror, Magnitude, Kaixin, and Nebula., Stay tuned!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Disdain exploit kit, malware)

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Zeus malware never dies, it seems the title of a film, but the reality goes over the fiction, despite the recent success of law enforcement agencies in the takeover of Gameover Zeus and the recent proposal of  a written-from-scratch trojan being sold in the underground known as Pandemiya., Zeus malware is a versatile agent that was used for banking fraud and botnet recruiting in the past, a recent report on the Zeus trojan’s evolution by Prolexic shows that the popular malware being used to controlling botnets and launching distributed denial of service attacks., “Over the years, the Zeus framework has evolved from focusing on the harvesting of banking credentials to being used in the control of hosts (zombies) for many types of crime, including customized attacks to target specific platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) infrastructures of Fortune 500 enterprises.” , “The Zeus framework allows operators to place executables on the zombie systems they control. PLXSert has observed traffic in DDoS attack campaigns where the Zeus framework and the Dirt Jumper DDoS toolkit appear to be combined, specifically Zeus appears to be used to build the botnet and drop DDoS malware payloads such as Dirt Jumper onto them.” states a study from Prolexic security and engineering response team (PLXsert)., Cybercriminals are using Zeus malware to drop a malicious payload based on DDoS malicious code, recently shut down GameOver Zeus is an example of this type of use., “The powerful Zeus kit was available in the DDoS underground marketplace for a price that is said to have reached US$10,000. Recently, the use of the kit has expanded beyond the banking industry to other verticals and new features have been added. The Zeus toolkit now allows for the transfer of payloads and executables to infected machines, effectively expanding the use of its compromised hosts for other malicious purposes.”, Authors of malware are building their own version of Zeus, which deploy multiple payloads and exploit different attack vectors. These variants are able to targets cloud-based platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) infrastructures, early 2014 I wrote about a Zeus malware variant that implements a web-crawling feature to hit Software-as-a-service applications to obtain access to proprietary data or code. Many of the custom varieties seek login information for cloud services, PLXSert claims it has observed well-known cloud services vendors among the sources of many DDoS campaigns., “Attackers use the webinjects configuration to customize attacks for specific cloud-based applications,” “This feature is commercialized in the underground – malicious actors sell customized Zeus webinjects for these purposes. In the past, webinjects were customized specifically for banking sites. Webinjects are now being adapted to target specific web applications.” states the report., Webinjects are used to modify HTML webpages with maliciously customized fields displayed to the victims to trick them into providing personal information and any other kind of sensitive information., The capabilities of malware specialists and their effort to improve Zeus core functionalities are impressive, for example, many instances are able to detect the presence of other Zeus variant on the victim’s machine and disinfect them, other authors are more focused on the development of obfuscated payloads to make more difficult to detect and block the malicious agent., New variants of Zeus malware have been designed to be very user-friendly and requests a little effort to arrange also large-scale malicious campaigns, in many cases criminal organization propose the malware-as-a-service., The C&C panel includes all the necessary files functions to manage a botnet, the Zeus toolkit requires very little skill to operate, ” the Zeus operator simply runs the /install/index.php page and provides some basic information – a username, passwords for the panel and the MySQL database, and the encryption key to be used for bot communication with the control panel.”, , The Zeus panel also comes with a number of remote commands that can be executed on victims’ machines and a range from operating system administrative tasks and remote file execution to controlling the behavior of web browsers., , “Criminal demand will drive malicious actors to develop payloads and features, seeking distribution and monetization in the crime ecosystem. The popularity of Zeus crimeware will continue due to its ease of use, easy setup and versatility.”, As confirmed by experts at Prolexic, in the next future cyber criminal ecosystem will provide further enhancements of the Zeus malware toolkit, including new crimeware kits … Zeus is not dead!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  DDoS, Zeus)  

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According to the Guardian, the former British defence secretary Des Browne called on the British Prime Minister to assess the resilience to cyber attacks of the Trident nuclear weapons system., “The UK Trident programme encompasses the development, procurement and operation of the current generation of British nuclear weapons, and the means to deliver them.” states Wikipedia., The Britain’s Trident nuclear weapons system may be obsolete soon unless David Cameron can protect it from cyber attacks of nation-state actors., “The government … have an obligation to assure parliament that all of the systems of the nuclear deterrent have been assessed end-to-end against cyber attacks to understand possible weak spots and that those weak spots are protected against a high-tier cyber threat. If they are unable to do that then there is no guarantee that we will have a reliable deterrent or the prime minister will be able to use this system when he needs to reach for it.” states Browne., The UK’s former defense secretary is seeking assurance from the Prime Minister that the Trident nuclear weapons system is secured against attacks from hostile persistent threat actors, such as Russia and China., , According to a report issued by the US department of Defense on Resilient Military Systems, there is the concrete risk that the US and its allies could suffer a major attack on their military systems., “The United States cannot be confident that our critical Information Technology (IT) systems will work under attack from a sophisticated and well-resourced opponent utilizing cyber capabilities in combination with all of their military and intelligence capabilities (a “full spectrum” adversary).” states the report. “While this is also true for others (e.g. Allies, rivals, and public/private networks), this Task Force strongly believes the DoD needs to take the lead and build an effective response to measurably increase confidence in the IT systems we depend on (public and private) and at the same time decrease a would-be attacker’s confidence in the effectiveness of their capabilities to compromise DoD systems. “, For the protection of the Trident nuclear weapons system it is essential to assess the military components searching for possible weaknesses and fix them., According to the New Statesman, a spokesperson from the MoD explained that the Trident system is an air-gapped system, but we know that this is not sufficient to consider a system as security., Security experts at FireEye discovered a Chinese hacking crew, dubbed APT 30, that was focusing its cyber espionage operations on air-gapped networks. The APT30 has many other tools in its arsenal that includes backdoors, malware with the ability to compromise air-gapped networks, downloaders and many others. Some of these tools were used only by the APT30 operators., The British chancellor George Osborne last week to announce that the UK Government would allocate more than £3.2bn to cybersecurity over the next five years. Despite the significant effort, Browne expressed his skepticism on the protection of the Trident., “My instinct is to think that £3.2bn over five years, comes nowhere near the scale of the cyber-threat challenge, if it includes ensuring cybersecurity for the command and control of our nuclear weapons. Also, this is the environment to which Moore’s law applies. Consequently, we can expect cyber-capacity to have doubled and doubled again since the report was published and to continue to increase.” said Browne., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Trident nuclear weapons, Information Warfare)

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Today I wrote about the imminent announce of the Yahoo data breach related to an incident that resulted in the leakage of 200 million Yahoo account credentials this summer., The company has finally made the announce, the news related the Yahoo data breach is in the headlines. The IT giant confirmed that hackers have stolen at least 500 million user accounts in a data breach dating back to 2014., Yahoo also added that its security experts suspect the involvement of nation-state actors., “We have confirmed that a copy of certain user account information was stolen from the company’s network in late 2014 by what it believes is a state-sponsored actor. The account information may have included names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, hashed passwords (the vast majority with bcrypt) and, in some cases, encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers.” reads the security notice issued by Yahoo., “The ongoing investigation suggests that stolen information did not include unprotected passwords, payment card data, or bank account information; payment card data and bank account information are not stored in the system that the investigation has found to be affected. Based on the ongoing investigation, Yahoo believes that information associated with at least 500 million user accounts was stolen and the investigation has found no evidence that the state-sponsored actor is currently in Yahoo’s network. Yahoo is working closely with law enforcement on this matter.”, This summer the notorious hacker Peace advertised 200 Million Yahoo accounts on Dark Web, and the company was aware of the sale., Peace offered for sale the 200 million of Yahoo account credentials (from “2012 most likely,”) on The Real Deal black marketplace. Yahoo was informed of the events and launched an internal investigation avoiding public comment on the case. The hacker was offering the data leak for 3 bitcoins (roughly $1,800 at the time of the disclosure)., , The security notice informs users that the company is taking the necessary action to protect them. Below the list published by Yahoo:, We encourage our users to follow these security recommendations:, Yahoo is encouraging users to use the Yahoo Account Key in order to definitively eliminates the need to use a password., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Data Breach, Yahoo Data Breach)

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I desire to inform you that Security Affairs is now open to sponsored content. I’ll offer the opportunity to: •    Insert banners of various sizes in all the posts on Security Affairs. •    Publish sponsored posts written by the customers that can include any kind of commercial reference. •    Arrange a monthly/quarterly/annual campaign (for big customers) to advertise customers’ activities and discoveries. For more info contact me at pierluigi.paganini@securityaffairs.co Thanks for supporting Security Affairs., , , , Once again thank you!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Newsletter, SecurityAffairs)

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The researcher Nils Rodday presented at the annual RSA conference in San Francisco the findings of its study on hacking drones., Rodday, who currently at IBM, has conducted his research while working as a graduate researcher at the University of Twente in the Netherlands., Rodday focused its research on remote hijacking high-end drones commonly deployed by government agencies and law enforcement agencies. The expert explained how to exploit security holes in the drone’s radio connection to gain control on the UAV, an attack that just need a laptop and a cheap USB-connected chip., The expert hasn’t provided details on the specific drone model he has tested because he signed a non-disclosure agreement with its manufacturer of the UAV., , Rodday has found a way to exploit the lack of encryption for the communication between the drone and controller module. A rogue hacker can make a reverse engineering of the drones software components in order to discover which are command accepted by the UAV and send them to the navigation controls. block all commands from the real operator, or even crash it to the ground., , In a typical attack scenario, the hacker can isolate the drone from the controller, blocking all commands from the legitimate operator, send its commands resulting in drone hijacking., “If you think as an attacker, someone could do this only for fun, or also to cause harm or to make a mess out of a daily surveillance procedure,” Rodday told Wired. “You can send a command to the camera, to turn it to the wrong side so they don’t receive the desired information… or you can steal the drone, all the equipment attached to it, and its information.”, Rodday discovered two critical security vulnerabilities in the tested unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), such as the poorly encrypted Wi-Fi connections that open the vehicle to cyber attacks and makes it ‘crackable in seconds’., The security issues reside in a communication chip, the Xbee, that doesn’t implement strong encryption between the unmanned aerial device and the controller module ( ‘telemetry box’), opening to man-in-the-middle (MitM) attack., An attacker could intercept the traffic between the drone and the telemetry box injecting impersonating the legitimate control operator., Rodday explained that the drone he tested is used by the Dutch police for surveillance, the cost of the UAV is around €20,000 ($21,700). The model of drone tested by the expert is used in many other industries, including agriculture and protection of critical infrastructure., The most worrying part of the research is the scope of the discoveries made by Rodday, many other drones on the market could be affected by the same vulnerabilities., “I think this vulnerability exists in a lot of other set-ups. The impact of the whole thing is bigger than this manufacturer,” he explained., “Due to the fact that multiple UAV manufacturers are using the investigated technology, the impact of this research is high. This research will be shared with the manufacturers who are known to implement the investigated solutions and made publicly available.” wrote the expert., “There are presumably many more manufacturers using the vulnerable setup without revealing their hardware components to the public, leaving their setup prone to attacks. To encounter this issue, security awareness within the community of UAV manufacturers is important.”, I suggest you to read the interesting thesis published by Rodday on the topic., “Although the costs for professional UAVs are extensively higher compared to consumer UAVs, the security of the investigated model can be judged insufficient.” wrote Rodday., “It was possible to perform a MitM attack on the XBee communication channel. As no encryption and authentication are applied anywhere, packets were successfully injected into the compromised channel, making the UAV react to the attacker’s commands.” , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – hacking drones, hijacking)

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A unique targeted attack being underway for about two consecutive years exploits Windows file functions that look legitimate and a couple of homemade scripts – but not malware – in order to infiltrate firm in the gas & oil maritime transportation sector., The attack was initially discovered by Panda Labs’ security researcher in the beginning of last year that got escape from Antivirus software, and managed to hit almost 10 companies in the gas & oil industry ever since it was launched in 2013 (August). What attackers tend to do here is stealing oil cargo organizations’ information and then utilizing it to pretend as legitimate companies in scam traps against the targeted oil brokers., Panda Labs technical director, Luis Corrons says, “This is an innovative targeted attack” but not an APT (advance persistent threat) or cyber espionage., “They use no malware; I’m not sure if they’re not using malware because they don’t know how to … They were stealing credentials without malware.”, This attack campaign, named as Phantom Menace (by Panda), was initially spotted by the cyber security squad at UK based oil and gas transportation company.  It actually started with a promising spear-phishing emails containing a phony file in PDF format that when clicked/opened by the targeted user, was found to be empty., “It has a self-destructor file, and it creates a folder where it puts files inside. It runs one of the batch files and that’s it. There are no malicious” code tools, said Luis., Panda security managed to root-out the stolen information/files out of an FTP-server being used by the alleged attackers, and drill-down into the particular attack itself that turn out to be a brand new spin onto the Nigerian scam. Here’s how the attack works (in a nutshell): the alleged scammers contact targeted oil broker and offer them any amount from 1 to 2 million BLCO (Bonny Light Crude Oil ) barrels – at bargain able price right from Bonny (a Nigerian town) , which is known for the oil having lower sulfur content making it comparatively low corrosive grade product., Corrons says, “They have to show proof the product, quantity and quality of the oil, and they ask for $50- 100,000 in payment to close the agreement”. “They the broker goes there, and there is nothing,” no oil or supplier, he added., Most of the victim organizations were in Europe, including Spain, Germany, and Belgium. There also were victims in Asia, he says., “Our guess here is that they were interested in oil cargo transportation company user credentials so they can steal and copy real certificates from those companies” that they can use in the scam to pose as legitimate oil firms, says Corrons., The marching infiltration of victim systems as soon as the phony file (PDF format) is clicked/opened works such as: an executable (.exe) file having an Adobe Acrobat-Reader symbolic icon extracts itself, creates a folder, and then moves files (six in number) into that particular folder. A file series that was planted gets to run, and at last makes use of a .bat format file in order to modify Windows registry as such whenever computer gets started, it runs that (.bat format) file to get the usernames & passwords from the browser and mail client, and then ultimately save them in a .text file., , Some additional steps are needed to mask folders, which include disabling Windows firewall. At last, FTP is used to upload files (all those stolen ones) onto attacker’s FTP server., Corrons says, “Why would you bother to buy or build a Trojan,” which could be detected. Now obviously, the legitimate looking files tend to fly just under the radar., 865 is the number of total unique files (of stolen info) Corrons alongside his team discovered within the FTP server, and all of them were purely from oil and gas industry., Written by: Ali Qamar, Founder/Chief Editor at SecurityGladiators.com, Author Bio: Ali Qamar is an Internet security research enthusiast who enjoys “deep” research to dig out modern discoveries in the security industry. He is the founder and chief editor at Security Gladiators, an ultimate source for cyber security. To be frank and honest, Ali started working online as a freelancer and still shares the knowledge for a living. He is passionate about sharing the knowledge with people, and always try to give only the best. Follow Ali on Twitter @AliQammar57, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – oil and gas industry, cyber security)

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RubyMiner, was first spotted last week when a massive campaign targeted web servers worldwide, most of them in the United States, Germany, United Kingdom, Norway, and Sweden., The experts believe that a single lone attacker is behind the attacks, in just one day he attempted to compromise nearly one-third of networks globally., “In the last 24 hours, 30% of networks worldwide have experienced compromise attempts by a crypto-miner targeting web servers.” read the analysis from Check Point., “During that period, the lone attacker attempted to exploit 30% of all networks worldwide to find vulnerable web servers in order to mobilize them to his mining pool. Among the top countries targeted are the United States, Germany, United Kingdom, Norway and Sweden, though no country has gone unscathed.”, , The malware targets both Windows and Linux servers, attempting to exploit old vulnerabilities in PHP, Microsoft IIS, and Ruby on Rails to deploy the Monero miner., The Italian security firm Certego noticed the same attacks that began on January 10., “Our threat intelligence platform has been logging a huge spike in ruby http exploiting since yesterday (10 January) at 23:00.” states the report published by Certego., “The exploit has been trying to leverage a fairly old CVE (CVE-2013-0156) that allows remote code execution. The following public Emerging Threat signature cover the exploit:”, The attack doesn’t appear very sophisticated, the hacker did not attempt to conceal his operations, but it was focused on infecting the larger number of servers in the shortest time., “Surprisingly, by using old vulnerabilities published and patched in 2012 and 2013, it doesn’t seem that stealth was part of the attacker’s agenda either. Instead, the attacker chose to exploit multiple vulnerabilities in HTTP web servers, to distribute an open source Monero miner – XMRig.” continues the analysis., “In fact, XMRig usually sends a donation of 5% of the revenue gained from the mining process to the code’s author. However, even this amount was too much for the attacker to part with as that ‘donation element’ was deleted from the code, giving the enthusiast 100% of the profit.”, At the time of the report, only 700 servers worldwide have been successfully compromised in the first 24 hours of attacks., The experts from Certego observed the attacker exploiting the CVE-2013-0156 remote code execution flaw in Ruby on Rails., The attacker sends a base64 encoded payload inside a POST request in the attempt to trick the interpreter into executing it., The malicious payload is a bash script that adds a cronjob that runs every hour and downloads a robots.txt file containing a shell script, used to fetch and execute the cryptominer. The scheduler is being told to run the whole process, including downloading the file from the server every hour., “The cron is a UNIX based scheduler which allows running scheduled tasks at fixed times via its own syntax. Running the crontab command with the –r argument will remove all existing tasks in the existing crontab and allow for the miner to take full priority.” continues the analysis from Checkpoint., “Now the attacker can inject the new job to the clean crontab file using the “1 * * * *” which will tell the scheduler to run once an hour for one minute infinitely., The new job will download and execute the “robots.txt” file hosted on “internetresearch.is.” and the mining process can begin.”, Experts believe that the robots.txt file could be used also as a kill switch for RubyMiner,  modify the robots.txt file on the compromised webserver it is possible to deactivate the malware., “Within a minute, all the machines re-downloading the file will be receiving files without the crypto miners,” Check Point notes., The expert noticed that one of the domains used by the attacker, lochjol.com, was involved in an attack that abused the Ruby on Rails vulnerability in 2013., Check Point researchers also published the IoC related to RubyMiner., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –Monero Miner, RubyMiner)