Datasets:

SinclairSchneider

/

security_affairs

like 0

1947_33637

Security experts at Kaspersky revealed the existence of a hacking group operating since 2001 that targeted practically every industry with  sophisticated zero-day malware., According to a new report from Kaspersky Lab, this group, dubbed the Equation Group, combined sophisticated and complex Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures. In the arsenal of the hacking crew there were sophisticated tools that according to the experts requested a significant effort term of development, Kaspersky sustains that the Equation Group has also interacted with operators behind Stuxnet and Flame. Based on the elements collected on the various cyber espionage campaigns over the years, the experts hypothesize that the National Security Agency (NSA) could be linked to the Equation Group., “There are solid links indicating that the Equation Group has interacted with other powerful groups, such as the Stuxnet and Flame operators—generally from a position of superiority,” states the report released at by Kaspersky during the company’s Security Analyst Summit in Cancun, Mexico on Monday., The researchers explained that the Equation Group is a “threat actor that surpasses anything known in terms of complexity and sophistication of techniques,”., It is singular that the Equation Group also had access to zero-days before they were used by operators behind Stuxnet and Flame campaign, the experts at Kaspersky Lab explained that on seven exploits used by the Equation group in their malicious codes, at least four of them were used as zero-days. A malware dubbed Fanny used in 2008 exploited two zero-days which were later introduced into Stuxnet variant detected in June 2009 and March 2010., “At least four of these were used as zero-days by the EQUATION group. In addition to these, we observed the use of unknown exploits, possibly zero-day, against Firefox 17, as used in the TOR Browser. An interesting case is the use of CVE-2013-3918, which was originally used by the APTgroup behind the 2009 Aurora attack. The EQUATION group captured their exploit and repurposed it to target government users in Afghanistan.”, According to Kaspersky team, the Equation Group has infected thousands, “even tens of thousands,” of victims worldwide, Kaspersky has collected evidence of the attacks in more than 30 countries, among the victims belong to the following categories:, , The Equation Group relies also on physical attacks on its victims, according to the reports the hackers in order to infect victims have sent them a malware-infected CD in the mail and intercepted a Cisco Systems router in the mail to implant Trojans in the firmware. The attack technique is known as “interdiction” and consists in the interception shipped goods and replacement with Trojanized versions., “The attacks that use physical media (CD-ROMs) are particularly interesting because they indicate the use of a technique known as “interdiction”, where the attackers intercept shipped goods and replace them with Trojanized versions.” continues the report., The Equation group relies on multiple attack techniques to compromise victims’ computers, including:, The Equation Group library includes a very sophisticated keylogger called “Grok,”, a name that is not new to the experts  and that was mentioned in the documents leaked by Snowden. Also other codes mentioned in the report, “STRAITACID” and “STRAITSHOOTER”, appears quite similar to “STRAITBIZARRE,”, the advanced hacking platform used by the NSA’s Tailored Access Operations unit., “The codename GROK appears in several documents published by Der Spiegel, where “a keylogger” is mentioned. Our analysis indicates EQUATIONGROUP’s GROK plugin is indeed a keylogger on steroids that can perform many other functions.” reads the report., The report includes the names of some the attack tools and malware the Equation group used, including EquationLaser, EquationDrug, DoubleFantasy, TripleFantasy, Fanny and GrayFish., The Fanny worm was considered one of the most interesting weapons in the hacking arsenal of the team, the malware was used by the hackers to map air-gapped networks. The worm was designed to map the topology of a targeted network and to execute commands to these isolated systems by exploiting compromised USB devices., ” For this, it used a unique USB-based command and control mechanism. When a USB stick is infected, Fanny creates a hidden storage area on the stick. If it infects a computer without an internet connection, it will collect basic system information and save it onto the hidden area of the stick. Later, when a stick containing hidden information is plugged into an internet-connected computer infected by Fanny, the data will be scooped up from the hidden area and sent to the C&C. If the attackers want to run commands on the air-gapped networks, they can save these commands in the hidden area of the USB stick. When the stick is plugged into the air-gapped computer, Fanny will recognize the commands and execute them”, , The experts at Kaspersky were able to recover two modules which allowed the group to reprogram hard drive firmware of more than a dozen of the popular hard disk drive brands, including Western Digital, Maxtor, Samsung, IBM, Micron, Toshiba, and Seagate. As explained by the researchers the malware was able to survive disk formatting and OS reinstallation., “It means that we are practically blind, and cannot detect hard drives that have been infected by this malware,” said Costin Raiu, Director of the Global Research and Analysis Team at Kaspersky Lab.  “It can resurrect itself forever,” ., I strongly suggest you to read the report , it is amazing and full of interesting information … I will go deep to discover further links with data disclosed previously., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  The Equation Group, ATP)

968_21589

Researchers at Symantec antivirus firm have discovered a malicious code that is able to infect Android mobile device with a banking malware during synchronization. The Android malware that was designed to hit Windows user could compromise user’s Smartphone during file transfer, device syncing and backup management operation., The file contains the information to download a malicious APK and storing it to the following location on the infected PC:, %Windir%\CrainingApkConfig\AV-cdk.apk, The Android malware detected by the analysts  seems to be specifically designed for the Korean population because the malicious APK searches for certain Korean online banking applications on the infected device., The communication between the mobile device and the compromised PC is realized by a software bridge called Android Debug Bridge (ADB), it is a command line tool that allows the malicious code to execute commands on Android Smartphone connected to the infected computer., , The Android Debug Bridge is a legitimate tool included in the Android software development kit (SDK), when victim connect an Android device having USB debugging Mode enabled, it launches installation process and infect the Smartphone dropping the Android Malware. Once the Android malware has infected the device, it installs an app that will appear as a Google App Store., , Android is the most targeted OS by cyber criminals because its large diffusion, numerous families of malware were created in 2013 to hit mobile users and an increasing number of hack tools was available in the underground to hack such powerful platform.,  , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Android Malware, Banking trojan)

937_21109

On January 2nd one of the eight computers in the control room at Monju Nuclear Power Plant was compromised. An IT administrator has discovered that the system in the reactor control room had been accessed over 30 times in the last five days after an employee updated a free application on one of the machines in the plant., First information available on the incident confirms that more than 42,000 e-mails and staff training reports were available on the compromised system at the nuclear power plant., Security experts that investigate on the incident concluded that it is a malware-based attack, a possible vector of the infection could be a software update on the compromised machine, the malicious code has stolen some data sending it to a Command & Control server located in South Korea according tp the network logs on out-bound traffic.,  , ,  , In November, Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority informed the Japan Atomic Energy Agency that anti-terrorism measures adopted  at the Monju Nuclear Power Plant were not adequate.  According to the Regulation Authority, the Japan Atomic Energy Agency is violating security guidelines and is not adopting best practices to ensure the protection of nuclear materials from terrorists and other attacks, including cyber offensives., The recent incident to the Japan Atomic Energy Agency is not an isolated event, in November of 2012 a computer at the JAEA headquarters at Tokaimura was also infected by a malware., The Japan Atomic Energy Agency has informed that it is still investigating on the attack, it is fundamental to discover the exact infection process and the nature and volume of the data stolen during the network intrusion., Nuclear power plants are critical infrastructure, their security is one of the main concerns for every government, consider also that protection of critical systems is a shared responsibility. An incident to a nuclear facility could have a significant environmental impact that affects the overall ecosystem of the planet., Security of critical infrastructure is a shared goal that could be achieved with a joint effort of governments, private entities and thr population itself. Security awareness, adoption of security best practices, implementation of proper security solutions and sharing of information on incidents are fundamental principles to reach a good compromise between security and cost to sustain to ensure the protection of infrastructures., Security is a must!, , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Monju Nuclear Power Plant, malware)

4670_54777

, You are a talented hacker that is very active online, could you tell me more about you. Could you tell me which his your technical background and when you started hacking?, I was beginning with programming plugins on the game @Minecraft then I started writing Python scripts and doing C# and C++ I was set upping in 2012 botnets like IRC / Telnets I made a self-made source working two years on that., Which are your motivations?, Helping people, and ask money for some actions like pen testing and scanning the websites., What was your greatest hacking challenge? Which was your latest hack? Can you describe me it?, My latest hack was I think the website of pewdiepie and DDoSing stream.me with @Poodlecorp aka @Xotehpoodle @shadowpoodle aka his new alias Darku I made yesterday the attack: PSN // XBOX // Steam // HackRead, What are the 4 tools that cannot be missed in the hacker’s arsenal and why?, I suggest everyone to make their own tools and scripts using Python, C# (Sharp) and C++., For my attacks I’m using: a IRC Botnet and my Core members Mirai CnC Phantom Zero, Which are the most interesting hacking communities on the web today, why?, It’s fine to use @Twitter, it is a great background for everyone., Did you participate in hacking attacks against the IS propaganda online? When? How? Where do you find IS people to hack?, I was targeting a website, but nothing more, How do you choose your targets?, I choose my targets by asking my friends, YouTubers, and my fans 🙂 Let me say this: Our fans we are one family #PhantomSquad. Go follow our new account @PhantomNations got suspended @zerotntsquad is our new account. When we will reach 10K followers we will hack @BlizzardCS through its Admin panel, 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?, I think so. The risk is high, but I cannot tell you more., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Hacker, PhantomSquad)

6237_68205

libcurl is a free and easy-to-use client-side URL transfer library, it builds and works identically on numerous platforms., According to a security advisory, libcurl is affected by a couple of issues, one of them might cause the leakage of authentication data to third parties., The problem is related to the way it handles custom headers in HTTP requests., “When asked to send custom headers in its HTTP requests, libcurl will send that set of headers first to the host in the initial URL but also, if asked to follow redirects and a 30X HTTP response code is returned, to the host mentioned in URL in the `Location:` response header value.” states the advisory., “Sending the same set of headers to subsequest hosts is in particular a problem for applications that pass on custom `Authorization:` headers, as this header often contains privacy sensitive information or data that could allow others to impersonate the libcurl-using client’s request. We are not aware of any exploit of this flaw.”, Applications that pass on custom authorization headers could leak credentials or information that could be abused by attackers to impersonate the libcurl-using client’s request., This vulnerability tracked as CVE-2018-1000007 has been present since before curl 6.0, back to before September 1999. Affected versions are libcurl 7.1 to and including 7.57.0, later versions (7.58.0) are not affected, the patch was published on GitHub., “In libcurl version 7.58.0, custom `Authorization:` headers will be limited the same way other such headers is controlled within libcurl: they will only be sent to the host used in the original URL unless libcurl is told that it is ok to pass on to others using the `CURLOPT_UNRESTRICTED_AUTH` option.” states the advisory., “this solution creates a slight change in behavior. Users who actually want to pass on the header to other hosts now need to give curl that specific permission. You do this with –location-trusted( with the curl command line tool.”, libcurl is also affected by an “HTTP/2 trailer out-of-bounds read” vulnerability tracked as CVE-2018-1000005., The issue is related to the code that creates HTTP/1-like headers from the HTTP/2 trailer data that appends a string like `”:”` to the target buffer (it was recently changed to `”: “` (a space was added after the colon) but the associated math wasn’t updated correspondingly., “When accessed, the data is read out of bounds and causes either a crash or that the (too large) data gets passed to the libcurl callback. This might lead to a denial-of-service situation or an information disclosure if someone has a service that echoes back or uses the trailers for something.” reads the advisory., , The second issue, CVE-2018-1000005, is described as an “HTTP/2 trailer out-of-bounds read”. The advisory says “reading an HTTP/2 trailer could mess up future trailers since the stored size was one byte less than required.”, “When accessed, the data is read out of bounds and causes either a crash or that the (too large) data gets passed to the libcurl callback. This might lead to a denial-of-service situation or an information disclosure if someone has a service that echoes back or uses the trailers for something.”, Affected versions are libcurl 7.49.0 to and including 7.57.0, experts are not aware of any exploit of this vulnerability in the wild., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – hacking)

4650_54641

The hacker Kapustkiy continues its string of hack, today he announced a news data breach, the victim is the Costa Rica Embassy in China., Kapustkiy accessed a database containing 280 login credentials, but just published online 50 of them as a proof of the attack. Just after the attack, the Costa Rica Embassy in China, costaricaembassycn.com,  was not reachable., ,  , The website has 280 user entries, it was running on a WordPress platform and after a few tests, the hacker discovered that it was affected by several SQL Injection flaws., “The first thing I did was to start the exploitation of a SQL vulnerability I have discovered.” said Kapustkiy. “Then I tried brute force and I got a huge list of users” “I have published around 50 users, the rest is private”, The hacker, who discovered 4 databases in the hack, leaked data belonging to Costa Rica Embassy in China at the following URL:,  , Leaked records include IDs, emails, and encrypted passwords. Kapustkiy confirmed me that he has reported the vulnerability to the CNCERT/CC and to the website administrator., The young hacker is very active, a few days ago he announced the data breach of the Slovak Chamber of Commerce (www.scci.sk) that affected more than 4,000 user records., Recently Kapustkiy targeted several organizations, including the Consular Department of the Embassy of the Russian Federation, the Argentinian Ministry of Industry, the National Assembly of Ecuador, the Venezuela Army, the High Commission of Ghana & Fiji in India, the India Regional Council as well as organizations and embassies across the world., He also broke into the ‘Dipartimento dellaFunzione Pubblica’ Office of the Italian Government, the Paraguay Embassy of Taiwan (www.embapartwroc.com.tw), and the Indian Embassies in Switzerland, Mali, Romania, Italy, Malawi, and Libya., A curiosity, in the manifesto published on PasteBin the hacker wrote, “A SQL Weapon is the most dangerous weapon on the Internet”, and the facts seem to confirm it., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Kapustkiy, Costa Rica Embassy in China.)

2253_36554

The best way to protect data from prying eyes is to destroy them, this is the thought of criminals when law enforcement is investigating on them., The best option for crooks it to completely wipe their electronic equipment, or make them not accessible, before law enforcement seize them to conduct a forensic analysis. The last idea of criminal crews is to use the USBKill to quickly clean their machines from any evidence that could bring them in the jail., “In case the police comes busting in, or steals your laptop from you when you are at a public library (as with Ross). The police will use a `mouse jiggler‘ 0 to keep the screensaver and sleep mode from activating. If this happens you would like your computer to shut down immediately. Additionally, you may use a cord to attach a usb key to your wrist. Then insert the key into your computer and start usbkill. If they then steal your computer, the usb will be removed and the computer shuts down immediately. Custom commands for when a usb change is observed will be implemented later. Make sure to use full disk encryption! Otherwise they will get in anyway.” explains the creator of USBKill “Hephaestos” (@h3phaestos) on github.com., , USBKill it’s basically a script that once put it in thumb drive, when plugged to a Pc forces the PC to shut down., “USBKill waits for a change on your USB ports, then immediately kills your computer”, “The police will use a mouse jiggler to keep the screensaver and sleep mode from activating, “If this happens you would like your computer to shut down immediately.” continues Hephaestos., The author also said that more command and capabilities will be added. Some users are testing this tool even on VM’s and for what it looks like, it works perfectly as well., Of course to protect data definitively it is necessary to enable full disk encryption on the machine and refuse to provide the password to law enforcement when asked it … an option that may aggravate your position., About the Author Elsio Pinto, Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – USBKill, forensic)

5761_63609

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) confirmed that a sophisticated spear-phishing campaign targeted the employees of Internet freedom NGOs “Free Press” and “Fight for the Future”, The EFF revealed that it is aware at least 70 attempts to steal the credentials of net neutrality activists between July 7 and August 8., Hackers attempted to gather credentials associated with online services, including Google, Dropbox, and LinkedIn, and at least in one case, they succeeded., The hackers compromised an account and used to launch spear-phishing attacks against other targets., According to the experts, the campaign was managed by a single threat actor, they pointed out that attackers did not use malware to targets victims., “This report describes “Phish For The Future,” an advanced persistent spearphishing campaign targeting digital civil liberties activists at Free Press and Fight For the Future. Between July 7th and August 8th of 2017 we observed almost 70 spearphishing attempts against employees of internet freedom NGOs Fight for the Future and Free Press, all coming from the same attackers.” reads the report published by EFF., The attackers used various social engineering technique to trick victims into providing their credentials., In some cases, attackers used fake LinkedIn notification messages containing links to Gmail phishing sites., , “Another attack pretended to be from a target’s husband, sharing family photos; the email was forged to include the husband’s name. ” continues the report., In another attempt, the attackers sent messages related to a YouTube aggressive and hateful comment for a real YouTube video that the target had uploaded., Who is behind the attack?, The EFF only pointed out that the threat actor appears to be working from an office, with Saturday and Sunday off, during working hours associated with the UTC+3 – UTC+5:30 timezones. This circumstance suggests that attackers may be located in Eastern Europe, Russia, part of the Middle East, or India, but Saturday and Sunday are not weekend days in many Middle Eastern countries., Unfortunately, the IP from which the one compromised account was accessed did not provide any clues as it was associated with a VPN service., “The sophistication of the targeting, the accuracy of the credential phishing pages, the working hours, and the persistent nature of the attacks seem to indicate that the attackers are professionals and had a budget for this campaign,” continues the analysis., Cyber criminals or state-sponsored hackers?, Researchers with the EFF don’t believe the spear-phishing campaign against Freedom Activists has been carried out by a nation-state actor., “Although this phishing campaign does not appear to have been carried out by a nation-state actor and does not involve malware, it serves as an important reminder that civil society is under attack. It is important for all activists, including those working on digital civil liberties issues in the United States, to be aware that they may be targeted by persistent actors who are well-informed about their targets’ personal and professional connections,” the EFF said., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Freedom Activists, spear-phishing)

3227_43389

Nearly 320,000 of the TV cable and Internet service provider Time Warner Cable customers urge to change their passwords for the email account. The measure has been requested by the company in response to alleged unauthorized accesses to the accounts., , The announcement is the response of the company to the information reported by the FBI to the company, the law enforcement notified the telecommunications provider that threat actors may have gained access to Time Warner Cable customer information., “The company is now working with the FBI, which first informed them of the stolen emails and passwords, all (at least all that were reported to TWC) belonging to the Roadrunner service.Customers with emails ending in “@rr.com” may be affected and should be receiving communications from TWC shortly with indications on how to reset passwords.” states a NBC News report” The TWC spokesperson indicated that data provided by the FBI was part of a wider disclosure including other ISPs. NBC News will update this story if more providers or services are found to have been affected”, It’s not clear how attackers have accessed customer information, the Time Warner Cable denied that its systems have been hacked., In a statement provided to NBC News, the TWC said “there are no indications that TWC’s systems were breached,”, The company speculates data have been accessed via phishing campaigns or collected through other data breaches of other companies., “The emails and passwords were likely previously stolen either through malware downloaded during phishing attacks or indirectly through data breaches of other companies that stored TWC customer information, including email addresses,” states the company., The Time Warner Cable is contacting the customers individually asking them to reset their passwords., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Time Warner Cable, data breach)

2567_38811

In this article we will go through an issue with a company that buys and sells exploits (Netragard) and the steps it was forced to take since one of their clients was attacked and various important information was leaked., The attack on the company named “HackingTeam” forced Netragard (a company that buys and sells exploits as previously stated) to terminate its exploit acquisition program. The leakage included information on Netragard’s business with an intrusion and surveillance software developer in Italy. The leaked documents and emails showed that HackingTeam was selling its products to customers associating with oppressive regimes like Egypt and Ethiopia while officially the company had denied any accusations of dealing with such customers., , Netragard’s company policy is to deal only with US customers and as they officially stated (when the documents became public), the deal with Hacking Team was just one exception to their policy, where they only sold just one exploit and after the breach took place, Netragard immediately terminated any relationship with HackingTeam., Furthermore, as an outcome of this breach, Netragard decided to end its exploit acquisition program “due to ethical and political issues it involves” as they officially stated. In more detail, Adriel Desautels (Netragard’s CEO) stated that the company’s motivation for terminating this program revolves around ethics, politics and the primary business focus. According to him and a blog post of his, the breach proved that the company couldn’t successfully vet the ethics and intentions of new buyers and he considers the event of the HackingTeam’s exposed customer list to be unacceptable as is the fact that they were apparently selling their technology to questionable parties (like parties known for human rights violations)., Companies that buy, sell and develop vulnerabilities and exploits (like Netragard) often receive criticism in regards to their morality as they sell such tools without being sure about how these tools will be used by their clients. These companies’ support that their business is legitimate, as long as the tools they are selling are used for defensive purposes or law enforcement operations., Desautels mentioned that his company will consider reviving the exploit acquisition program, if and when the 0-day market is correctly regulated and a framework is created that will hold end buyers accountable for the use of this technology. According to him, regulations should target specifically those who acquire and use 0-days. Furthermore, regarding to 0-days, we should keep in mind that it’s not hackers who create them but the vendors during the process of developing their software., 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 – Netragard, exploit)

6668_72298

Are you using the Python module ‘SSH Decorator’? You need to check the version number, because newer versions include a backdoor., The library was developed to handle SSH connections from Python code., Early this week, a developer noticed that multiple backdoored versions of the SSH Decorate module, the malicious code included in the library allowed to collect users’ SSH credentials and sent the data to a remote server controlled by the attackers., The remote server that received stolen data is accessible at the following address:, The following images were shared bleepingcomputer.com that first reported the news., , The Israeli developer Uri Goren, once notified to the problem, confirmed that backdoor was added by attackers., Initially, the developer has updated the password for the PyPI Python central repo hub and published a sanitized version of the package., “I have updated my PyPI password, and reposted the package under a new name ssh-decorator,” he said. , “I have also updated the readme of the repository, to make sure my users are also aware of this incident.” , “It has been brought to our attention, that previous versions of this module had been hijacked and uploaded to PyPi unlawfully. Make sure you look at the code of this package (or any other package that asks for your credentials) prior to using it.” reads the README file., The presence of the backdoor in the SSH Decorator module alerted many users on Reddit, many of them accused Goren that for this reason decided to take down the package from both GitHub and PyPI — the Python central repo hub., Developers that use the SH Decorator (ssh-decorate) module need to use the last safe version was 0.27, later version 0.28 through 0.31 were compromised., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – SSH Decorator, Python SSH Backdoor), ,

1410_27624

Symantec recently issued the “Threats to virtual environments” report to analyze principal menace for virtualized environments. The report is very actually and considers the rapid diffusion of the virtualization paradigm within enterprises., According to Forrester Research more than 70 percent of organizations are planning to use server virtualization by the end of 2015, but we cannot ignore that malware author are targeting also these environments that anyway manage real users’ data., “However, virtual machines and their hosting servers are not immune to attack. Introducing virtualization technology to a business creates new attack vectors that need to be addressed, such as monitoring the virtual networks between virtual machines. We have seen malware specifically designed to compromise virtual machines and have observed attackers directly targeting hosting servers.” states the report., According to Symantec one of the greatest errors of enterprises is to ignore the cyber threats to virtual machines, let’s consider, for example, the threat of some malware detected by the company that were specifically designed to compromise virtual machines., One of the worrying scenarios is if a malicious code from a virtual machine breaks out and infects the host machine, in these cases, malware escapes the layer or protection offered by a virtual environment and can gain access to the host network with serious consequences., “While enterprises may not think virtual machines are a security risk, from our analysis, 82 percent of the malware we tracked was able to run on virtual machines,” “In some rare cases, we also saw malware breakout of guest systems and infect the physical host.” Said Liam O’Murchu, a researcher with Symantec Security Response., The expert O’Murchu provided as an example the CVE-2014-0983; a “guest-to-host” breakout exploit for Vupen’s VirtualBox., But there is another scenario feared by IT administrators, when a malware once infected a host server is able to compromise any virtual environment running on it or creates and launches its own “malicious virtual machine,”. This is the case, for example observed with the discovery the Crisis malware that was able to compromise virtual machines., Another factor to consider is that virtual environments are often used for malware analysis, but nearly 18 percent of threats examined within 200,000 random strains of malware chosen by experts at Symantec, were able to detect virtual environments and abort their payload execution, “Malware can check its runtime environment for specific files, registry keys, MAC addresses and other artifacts to verify if it is running on a virtual system.” said O’Murchu., , The host server and the virtual environments running on it have to be properly protected in the same way, especially against malware., The principal countermeasures to prevent incidents to virtual environments are the implementation of an efficient access control management, disaster recovery and the adoption of a virtual network protection system. Of course, maintaining updated snapshots of virtual machines and logging could help enterprises to secure their systems., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Virtual machines, malware)  

3485_45279

Cisco just patched critical vulnerabilities in its cable modems, residential gateways and security appliances., The security updates released this week fix serious flaws in Cisco residential reported by Kyle Lovett, and Chris Watts from Tech Analysis firm., Kyle Lovett has found an information disclosure vulnerability (CVE-2016-1325) that allows a remote unauthenticated attacker to access sensitive data on vulnerable CISCO devices (Cisco DPC3941 Wireless Residential Gateway with Digital Voice and the DPC3939B Wireless Residential Voice Gateway)., “A vulnerability in the web-based administration interface of the Cisco Wireless Residential Gateway could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to access sensitive information on the affected device. ” states the CISCO advisory. “The vulnerability is caused by improper access restrictions implemented on the affected device. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted HTTP request to the affected device.”, Chris Watts discovered another a denial-of-service (DoS) flaw (CVE-2016-1326) affecting the Cisco DPQ3925 8×4 DOCSIS 3.0 Wireless Residential Gateway that could be exploited by a remote unauthenticated attacker to cause the device to become unresponsive., “A vulnerability in the web-based administration interface of Cisco Model DPQ3925 8×4 DOCSIS 3.0 Wireless Residential Gateway with EDVA could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause the device to become unresponsive and restart, creating a denial of service (DoS) condition.” states the Cadvisory., , Watts also discovered a second remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2016-1327) in Cable Modem with Digital Voice models DPC2203 and EPC2203 that can be exploited by a remote attacker to trigger a buffer overflow and run execute arbitrary code by sending a specially crafted HTTP request to vulnerable devices., “A vulnerability in the web server used in the Cisco Cable Modem with Digital Voice Model DPC2203 could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to exploit a buffer overflow and cause arbitrary code execution.” states the CAdvisory., “The vulnerability is due to improper input validation for HTTP requests. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted HTTP request to the affected device.”, CISCO warned its customers also about a DoS vulnerability (CVE-2016-1312) affecting the HTTPS inspection engine of the Cisco ASA Content Security and Control Security Services Module (CSC-SSM). The flaw affects the way the devices handle HTTPS packets, allows a remote unauthenticated attacker to reload affected devices by flooding it with HTTPS packets., “A vulnerability in the HTTPS inspection engine of the Cisco ASA Content Security and Control Security Services Module (CSC-SSM) could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause exhaustion of available memory, system instability, and a reload of the affected system. ” reports the advisory., “The vulnerability is due to improper handling of HTTPS packets transiting through the affected system. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending HTTPS packets through the affected system at high rate. “, If you or your organization uses one of the vulnerable devices affected by the vulnerabilities apply the security updates., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – cyber security, hacking)

4267_51434

Security experts from the cyber threat intelligence firm Blueliv have conducted a technical investigation on the banking Trojan Vawtrak v2 and activities of the cybercriminal groups behind the threat., Vawtrak is a threat that has been in the wild since 2014 when experts at Trend Micro spotted the threat that was targeting Japanese Internet users. The first variant of  BKDR_VAWTRAK abused a Windows feature called Software Restriction Policies (SRP) to prevent victims’ systems from running a wide range of security programs, We saw several versions of the malware over the years, the last variant of Vawtrak was discovered this summer  by experts from Fidelis firm. The new version of the Vawtrak banking Trojan included significant improvements such as the SSL pinning., Researchers from Blueliv now have conducted a reverse engineering of the Vawtrak banking Trojan that confirmed the presence of two clearly differentiated infrastructures. One infrastructure dedicated exclusively to malware distribution (primarily spam), and a second one used for maintenance, control and the reporting of stolen data., The analysis of the Vawtrak v2 revealed a complex infrastructure used to deliver the malware as well as other Trojans. Blueliv named the cybercriminal group behind this infrastructure Moskalvzapoe., Moskalvzapoe uses several servers hosting command and control (C2) for Vawtrak and other Trojans (i.e. Pony credential stealer). The threat is primary spread through spamming and drive-by download mechanisms that involved Exploit Kits (mostly Nuclear EK)., , The Moskalvzapoe infrastructure presents an unusual network topology in terms of the way crooks have set up C&C servers and how they rotate their domains and exposed IPs., “All these hosts forward all the incoming connections towards the back-end.” reads the analysis from BlueLiv. “The Trojans dropped by the loaders are usually found in compromised servers which share multiple characteristics including geolocation. Most of the compromised hosts can be found in Russia. Usually these hosts are compromised using security vulnerabilities found in commonly used software such as WordPress, Joombla, or Bitrix. Furthermore, the deployment of Pony Grabber, the credential-stealing malware, enables them access to other hosts and services.” , The Vawtrak V2 is able to implement further actions by using additional modules, significantly expanding its capabilities. These most common modules used by the banking Trojan are:, The largest number of Vawtrak v2 infections was observed US (69,010), followed by Canada (6,777) and UK (969), meanwhile, the impact on Europe was minimal., “The total amount of data exfiltrated by the botnet is more than 2,500,000 credentials. The fact that U.S. is the most affected country is also reflected in the most affected services.” reads the report published by BlueLiv., The analysis published by BlueLive revealed the use of large-scale communication networks that increased in a significant way the level of sophistication of the criminal infrastructures to support the distribution of Vawtrak V2 worldwide., The data emerged from the report shows the amazing abilities of cybercrime groups which have complex hierarchies and the availability of an efficient business model., I suggest the reading of the report titled “Chasing cybercrime: Network insights into Vawtrak v2” that is full of interesting data on the malware and the threat actors behind it., Blueliv also provided Indicators of Compromise (IOCs) that could be used by organizations to detect the threat., Enjoy the report., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Vawtrak v2, cybercrime)

1367_27129

Bad actors use digital certificates to eavesdrop on SSL/TLS traffic. Usually these attacks exploit the lack of strict controls by client applications when a server presents them with an SSL/TLS certificate signed by a trusted but unexpected Certification Authority., SSL certificates are the privileged mechanism for ensuring that secure websites really are who they say they are. Typically, when we access a secure website, a padlock is displayed in the address bar. Before the icon appears, the site first presents a digital certificate, signed by a trusted “root” authority, that attests to its identity and encryption keys., Unfortunately web browsers, due to improper design and lack of efficient verification processes, accept the certificates issued by the trusted CA, even if it is an unexpected one., An attacker that is able to obtain a fake certificate from any certification authority and present it to the client during the connection phase can impersonate every encrypted web site the victim visits., “Most browsers will happily (and silently) accept new certificates from any valid authority, even for web sites for which certificates had already been obtained. An eavesdropper with fake certificates and access to a target’s internet connection can thus quietly interpose itself as a ‘man-in-the-middle’, observing and recording all encrypted web traffic traffic, with the user none the wiser.”, , Another common cyber attack is based on malware signed with stolen code-signing certificates. The techniques allow attackers to improve avoidance techniques for their malicious codes. Once the private key associated with a trusted entity is compromised, it could be used to sign the malicious code of the malware. This trick allows an attacker to also install those software components (e.g. drivers, software updates) that require signed code for their installation/execution. One of the most popular cases was related to the data breach suffered by security firm Bit9. Attackers stole one of the company’s certs and used it to sign malware and serve it. The certificate was used to sign a malicious Java Applet that exploited a flaw in the browser of targeted browser., Attackers could use also malware to install illegitimate certificates to trust them, avoiding security warnings. Malicious code could for example operate as a local proxy for SSL/TLS traffic, and the installed illegitimate digital certificates could allow attackers to eavesdrop on traffic without triggering any warning. The installation of a fake root CA certificate on the compromised system could allow attackers to arrange a phishing campaign. The bad actor just needs to set up a fake domain that uses SSL/TLS and passes certificate validation steps. Recently, Trend Micro has published a report on a hacking campaign dubbed “Operation Emmental”, which targeted Swiss bank accounts with a multi-faceted attack that is able to bypass two factor authentication implemented by the organization to secure its customers. The attackers, in order to improve the efficiency of their phishing schema, used a malware that installs a new root Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificate, which prevents the browser from warning victims when they land on these websites., , Improper certificates are issued by the CAs and hackers use them for cyber attacks. In one of the most blatant cases, DigiCert mistakenly sold a certificate to a non-existent company. the digital certificate was then used to sign malware used in cyber attacks., Pierluigi Paganini, Security Affairs –  (Digital Certificates, cybercrime)

7566_79239

Group-IB Brand Protection team discovered a total of around 4,000 websites illegally selling alcohol. Criminals create entire networks from the “mirror–websites” of their online alcohol stores; if one site is blocked, they swiftly migrate to a backup resource., The intoxicating Internet, Active regulatory measures taken in 2018 and aimed at blocking websites that illegally sell alcohol online meant that the “alcohol kingpins” of the black market were forced to find new ways of doing business. In 2018, Group-IB Brand Protection experts discovered more than 4,000 websites selling counterfeit alcohol and bypassing the ban on sales of alcohol online, as well as around 3,000 web resources connected to them. Such schemes make it possible not only to create several “mirrors” of the main alcohol store, thereby attracting more customers, but also to swiftly migrate from one domain to another if a website is blocked. For example, until recently, the resource alcolavca.com included 45 connected websites, however most of the network has now been blocked., During the research, the largest group discovered by Brand Protection specialists included 86 connected domains. Such schemes are used by both resellers who sell alcohol online bought from major retailers as well as fraudsters who sell counterfeit products., Group-IB Brand Protection team analysed the illegal online sales of alcohol and concluded that, on average, 190 users per day visit websites that sell and deliver alcohol, i.e. 5,700 people per month. With a conversion rate of 0.7% and an average order amount of 16 USD, 4,000 online shops earn revenues starting at 2.5 million USD per month. As a result, criminals earned around 30 million USD in 2018, i.e.23% more than the year before., Advertising and promotions of online stores via Telegram channels (just one channel can have up to 3,000 subscribers) and dedicated groups on social networks play a significant role in this illegal business. According to Group-IB, in 2018 interest in online shopping of alcohol increased by more than 35%, as can be seen with the higher numbers of search queries for “buy alcohol”. Around 30% more people searched for alcohol including delivery (search queries for “alcohol delivery”) compared to the previous year., During pre-holiday periods, the number of search queries for online sales of alcohol increases by 28%. It is no coincidence that the first large-scale “wave” of domains registration for alcohol sales took place in the spring of 2018, on the eve of the May holidays, and continued throughout the summer during the FIFA World Cup. The second “wave” was detected in October, with a peak in registrations in December., “The blocking of resources by the regulator undoubtedly had a positive effect, and some of the major illegal alcohol networks were shut down; nevertheless, administrators of banned resources began actively fighting against website blocking not only by registering new websites and constantly moving from one domain to another, but also thanks to various loopholes in legislation,” commented Andrey Busargin, Director of Brand Protection at Group-IB. , “A widely used scheme is selling “souvenirs”—keychains, magnets, tobacco accessories—that include alcohol as a “free gift”. Criminals resort to more complex schemes as well, such as closed resources that use QR codes that then redirect users to hidden websites, which are not indexed by search engines and as a result cannot be automatically detected and blocked”., Do it yourself: from bottle to factory, When purchasing alcohol online, buyers often buy a “pig in a poke”. This makes the job considerably easier for criminals, who produce relatively crude fakes, the appearance of which sometimes has almost no resemblance to the original product: seal, cork (or illustrations thereon), label, excise stamp, brand colors on the packaging… not to mention the quality of the alcohol itself., Group-IB Brand Protection team discovered dozens of websites and online bulletin boards used to sell the essential components of so-called “alcohol do-it-yourself kits” for illegal production of strong spirits—fakes of famous brands. One such kit, which includes the bottle, the label, the cork, and the branded box, is available for just 0.5 USD. This means that the cost of producing one 0.5-litre bottle of whisky is a little more than 1 USD = 0.5 USD + 0.05 USD (excise stamp) + 0.3 USD (spirit) + 0 USD (water) + 0.17 USD (essence)., Criminals can assemble not only a bottle of a famous spirit, but the entire production line. For example, on Aliexpress, fraudsters can acquire all the components of an automated bottling system for vodka, whisky, wine, or beer. The cost of such a mini-factory starts at 7,280 USD. According to the Russian Federal Service for the Regulation of the Alcohol Market (FSRAR), between 2015 and 2018 more than 450 illegal alcohol manufacturing and storage sites were shut down in Russia., “While investigating the manufacture of counterfeit alcohol, we reached a disappointing conclusion: namely that buying a bottling or production line is no more complicated than ordering a book or a smartphone”, commented Andrey Busargin, Director of Brand Protection at Group-IB. “Although dozens of such clandestine mini-factories are closed down every year, there are always more daredevils willing to risk their freedom and other people’s health to make a quick buck”., About the Author: Group-IB, Group-IB is a leading provider of solutions aimed at detection and prevention of cyberattacks, online fraud, and IP protection. GIB Threat Intelligence system was named one of the best in class by Gartner, Forrester, and IDC. , Pierluigi Paganini, (SecurityAffairs – illegal market, cybercrime),

4677_54830

KillDisk is a malware that has been used in attacks against industrial control systems (ICS), it was developed to wipe the hard drives of the infected machine in order to make it inoperable., The new variant is able to encrypt the file with AES algorithm, the malware uses a unique key for each target and encrypt it with an RSA 1028 algorithm with a key stored in the body of the malware., The variant of the KillDisk malware is able to encrypt a large number of files from both local partitions and network folders are targeted., Victims are requested to pay 222 bitcoins ($206,000) to recover their files, a very exorbitant figure that suggests the intention of the author is to attack organizations with deep pockets., The experts believe the variant has been developed by the TeleBots group, a Russian cybercriminal gang that developed its Telebots malware starting from the BlackEnergy one. The group was recently observed by experts from ESET targeting Ukrainian banks., “This new variant of KillDisk was developed by the TeleBots gang, a group of Russian cybercriminals believed to have evolved from the Sandworm gang. The Sandworm gang is responsible for a string of attacks in the United States during 2014 that compromised industrial control system (ICS) and SCADA networks using a variant of the BlackEnergy malware” states the report published by the CyberX., The researchers speculate the malware is being distributed via malicious Office attachments, a close look at the contact email used in the instructions reveals that hackers used the Tor anonymous email service lelantos.org., The Bitcoin Wallet used by the hackers is still empty and there is no indication of past transactions., , CyberX noticed that the same RSA public key is used for all samples of malware it analyzed, this implies that it could be used to decrypt files for all victims., According to CyberX, the KillDisk malware first elevate its privileges and then registers itself as a service. The malicious code kills various processes, not critical system ones and processes associated with anti-malware applications, to avoid triggering detection., Stay Tuned,  ,  , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – TeleBots , KillDisk malware)

6542_71164

The malware is still under development and appears to have originated in Hong Kong, it has a smaller system footprint compared with similar threats., “Netskope Threat Research Labs has discovered a new ATM malware, “ATMJackpot.” The malware seems to have originated from Hong Kong and has a time stamp on the binary as 28th March 2018.” reads the analysis published by the experts at Netskope., “It is likely that this malware is still under development. Compared with previously-discovered malware, this malware has a smaller system footprint,”, The malware has a smaller system footprint, it has a simple graphical user interface that displays a limited number of information, including the hostname, the service provider information such as cash dispenser, PIN pad, and card reader information., , At the time, it is not clear that attack vector for the ATMJackpot malware, usually this kind of malware are manually installed via USB on ATMs, or downloaded from a compromised network., “ATM Malware propagates via physical access to the ATM using USB, and also via the network by downloading the malware on to already-compromised ATM machines using sophisticated techniques.” continues the analysis., ATMJackpot malware first registers the windows class name ‘Win’ with a procedure for the malware activity, then the malicious code creates the window, populates the options on the window, and initiates the connection with the XFS manager., The XFS manager implements API to access that allow controlling the ATM devices from different vendors. The malware opens a session with the service providers and registers to monitor events, then it opens a session with the cash dispenser, the card reader, and the PIN pad service providers., Once the session with service providers are opened, the malware is able to monitor events and issue commands., Experts believe authors of the malware will continue to improve it and they expect it will be soon detected in attacks in the wild., The number of ATM jackpot attacks is increasing in recent years, in January US Secret Service warned of cybercriminals are targeting ATM machines in the US forcing them to spit out hundreds of dollars with ‘jackpotting‘ attacks., In May 2017, Europol arrested 27 for jackpotting attacks on ATM across Europe, in September 2017 Europol warned that ATM attacks were increasing., Criminal organizations are targeting ATM machines through the banks’ networks, the operations involve squads of money mules for the cashout., “The malware being used has evolved significantly and the scope and scale of the attacks have grown proportionately,” said Steven Wilson, head of Europol’s EC3 cyber crime centre., A few weeks ago, the alleged head of the Carbanak group was arrested in Spain by the police, the gang is suspected of stealing about £870m (€1bn) in a bank cyberheist., Further information on ATM Malware and jackpotting are available here., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – ATMJackpot, jackpotting ), ,

6867_73953

The Thanatos ransomware first appeared in the threat landscape in February when it was discovered by researchers at the MalwareHunterTeam., The experts from Talos believe the malware is being actively developed, it was being distributed as attachments to chat messages sent via Discord., When the malware encrypts files it appends the .THANATOS extension to them. Once the encryption is completed, the malware connects to a specific URL to report the infection., The Thanatos ransomware is the first ransomware to accept Bitcoin Cash payments, along with Bitcoin and Ethereum., At the time of its discovery, experts from Talos discovered a series of issues with the encryption process that makes it impossible for attackers to successfully returning the data to the victim., The experts observed several variants of the malware, the first ones were using the same Bitcoin address for all the victims and the payment processing was manual after the victims were instructed to send an email to the crooks., , The next version implemented the support for more crypto-currencies for the payment processing and included a unique MachineID in the ransom note to distinguish each infection. Victims were instructed to send the MachineID to the attacker via email., The experts discovered at least one sample that they discovered was informing victims that the decryption was not available, likely because the malware was part of a sabotage., Once executed on the victim’s machine, the malicious code copies itself into a subdirectory within %APPDATA%/Roaming, then it scans the system for files to encrypt searching them in the Desktop, Documents, Downloads, Favourites, Music, OneDrive, Pictures, and Videos folders., The encryption keys are derived from the number of milliseconds since the system last booted, but experts noticed that the keys are 32 bits and can store up to 49.7 days’ worth of milliseconds., The researchers pointed out that  49.7 days is much higher than the average amount of uptime on many systems, this makes brute-force attack easier., “This value is a 32-bit number, meaning that the encryption key is effectively 32 bits as well. Additionally, the maximum number of milliseconds that can be stored in a 32-bit value is roughly 49.7 days’ worth, which is higher than the average amount of uptime on many systems due to patch installation, system reboots, and other factors.” states the analysis published by Cisco Talos. “This makes brute-forcing the key values significantly cheaper from a time perspective.”, “Another optimization can be made based on the fact that the system uptime is written to the Windows Event Log roughly once per day. Since Thanatos does not modify the file creation dates on encrypted files, the key search space can be further reduced to approximately the number of milliseconds within the 24-hour period leading up to the infection. At an average of 100,000 brute-force attempts per second (which was the baseline in a virtual machine used for testing), it would take roughly 14 minutes to successfully recover the encryption key in these conditions.”, Summarizing, the process of recovering the encryption key would take roughly 14 minutes., The tool released by Talos only works with versions 1 and 1.1 of the Thanatos ransomware and on all current samples of the ransomware analyzed by the experts., “Note: In order to decrypt files as quickly as possible, ThanatosDecryptor should be executed on the original machine that was infected and against the original encrypted files that the malware created.” concludes Talos., The ThanatosDecryptor could be downloaded here., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Thanatos ransomware, decryptor)

7319_77284

Monitoring of social media platforms is a crucial activity for intelligence agencies, almost any government is working to gather intelligence for these systems., According to the Haaretz, the Israel Defense Forces has bid to obtain spying systems that will allow monitoring of the private messages of social media users., “The Israel Defense Forces asked cybersecurity companies in 2016 to present proposals for creating a system that would monitor social media users’ personal correspondence.” states the Haaretz., The newspaper had obtained a document that shows that in 2016 the Israel Defense Forces asked the cyber companies to propose their solutions for the spying on users of the social networks., Haaretz revealed that the Israeli Defence Forces want to use the system to trace and monitor the activity of social media users, including all information posted or exchanged through the most popular platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube., , The monitoring system would also monitor posts and information exchanged in several languages, including Hebrew, Arabic and English., “The system in question would have to scan and store both private and public information from users of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google Plus, YouTube and so on.” continues the newspaper., “It does not specify who would be monitored; or Jewish citizens of Israel, or Palestinian residents of the Jerusalem – who for the most part do not hold Israeli citizenship – would be targeted; or any restrictions set by any outside entity would be imposed on the surveillance activities.“, The surveillance system have to allow government operators to spy on users by searching for targeted keywords, such as terror, resistance, nationality and religion., Of course, the IDF declared that the document obtained by the Haaretz was a draft of an invitation to submit bids that did not come to fruition., The Israeli Defense explained added that the bidding process was not carried out for both operational and technological reasons, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – social media, surveillance)

5626_62335

Ransomware continues to represent a serious threat to users and organizations., Unfortunately, it is easy for crooks arranging their own ransomware campaign by using numerous RaaS services offered online., Recently researchers at Symantec discovered a new Android ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) kit that allows creating a ransomware even without specific knowledge., The new Android apps have spotted by researchers at Symantec that noticed some advertisements on hacking forums and social networking messaging service popular in China., “Wannabe malware authors can start using TDKs by firstly downloading the free app. The apps are available from hacking forums and through advertisements on a social networking messaging service popular in China.” reads the post published by Symantec., “The app, which has an easy-to-use interface, is no different from any other Android app apart from the fact that it creates malware., To generate the malware, all the user needs to do is choose what customization they want by filling out the on-screen form.”, The Trojan Development Kits (TDKs) allows wannabe hacker to create their own ransomware with a few steps through an easy-to-use interface., , To create the ransomware, users can download one of such apps, install and open it. The app displays the following options to customize the ransomware:, Once provided the following info the user can create the ransomware pressing the “Create” button. The first time users create the malware, the app will prompt him a subscription form to fill and will start a chat with the author of the app to arrange one time-time payment., “Once all of the information has been filled in, the user hits the “create” button and, if they haven’t already done so, is asked to subscribe to the service. The app allows the user to start an online chat with the app’s developer where they can arrange a one-time payment. Once the user has subscribed, they can continue with the process, making as many ransomware variants as they desire.” continues the post., Once completed the payment, the ransomware is created and stored in the external storage in ready-to-ship condition., “It is then up to the user how they want to spread their newly created ransomware. Anyone unlucky enough to be tricked into installing the malware will end up with a locked device held to ransom. The malware created using this automation process follows the typical Lockdroid behavior of locking the device’s screen with a SYSTEM_ALERT_WINDOW and displaying a text field for the victim to enter the unlock code.”, The Lockdroid ransomware is able to lock the device, change the PINs, encrypt user data, and perform other operation including fully wiping data forcing a factory reset., Lockdroid is also able to prevent victims from uninstalling it, even through the command line interface., The Trojan Development Kits samples analyzed by Symantec are aimed at Chinese-speaking users it could be easily adapted for other languages, the experts believe that different language versions will soon be made available., “The emergence of easy to use malware development kits such as these lowers the bar for aspiring cyber criminals wanting to enter the ransomware game. Individuals with little technical knowledge can now create their very own customized Android ransomware.” concluded Symantec. “However, these apps are not just useful for aspiring and inexperienced cyber criminals as even hardened malware authors could find these easy-to-use kits an efficient alternative to putting the work in themselves. We expect to see an increase in mobile ransomware variants as these development kits become more widespread.”, Below the recommendation provided by Symantec to protect against this kind of threat on mobile devices:, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – RaaS, Trojan Development Kits)

4288_51610

, You are a talented hacker that has already participated in several hacking campaigns, could you tell me more about you. , Sure, I’ve been working with OPDdosISIS mainly against ISIS, taking sites down (2013-2015) also Im working on OPAnonHQ, which is against the huge amount of profit they make with the anonymous idea, since they need about 200.000 dollars a year to run the servers (confirmed stats below), OpWhales, OpKillingBay-EU, OpSeaWorld – For this operations, we provide network support via creating media and assisting and bringing sites offline., Op Gabon – To support Gabon population, by bringing websites offline and spreading awareness through the social media ., Op NoDapl – As AnonRising/Risingsquad we provided media mirrors and IRC support for this operation and shared awareness via other social media platforms., And many more OPS which are still going on., Could you tell me which his your technical background and when you started hacking?, I started hacking in 2012-2013, before that I was just playing around with computers and networks, my technical background is mainly based on the knowledge of programming techniques and languages (e.g. Perl, PHP and Python) which are growing day by day. Hacking server/site exploiting common vulnerabilities such as Sqli, RFI, XSS, using certain exploits, and learning other methods everyday :). Of course, I have a deep knowledge of DDoS/DoS mainly on layer 3/7, I sue  heavily modified scripts to launch the attack, one in particular, was developed by Korrupt. , Which are your motivations? , Stop online terrorism, and just learn more and more everyday. And just have fun doing what you do or learn , What was your greatest hacking challenge? , Every hack is a new challenge for me/us, you will always have to find other ways to evade detection of defensive measures, and mostly you can`t use the same hack/exploit twice. , Which was your latest hack? Can you describe me it? , It is still going on, against AnonHQ getting their direct IPs, and have fun with their servers, since nothing is 100% secure. , What are the 4 tools that cannot be missed in the hacker’s arsenal and why? , Metasploit is really awesome for the exploits and the options it comes with, Nmap/Zenmap which allows you to scan the WWW, the Burp suite to analyze received and send modified packets, and Hydra to launch brute-force attack and much more. , Which are the most interesting hacking communities on the web today, why? , Certain forums and IRC are really good to hang around, to learn new methods, or to checkout the newest exploits in the underground. Also are forums and IRC are great to keep in touch with other persons., Did you participate in hacking attacks against the IS propaganda online? When? How? , Yes, I did it from 2013-2015 with opddosisis taking their propaganda sites ofline and gather intel of their websites, and reporting their Twitter accounts to the group. It`s quiet amazing how company`s like Cloudflare protect online propaganda just for the money. , Where do you find IS people to hack? How do you choose your targets?, We mainly had a group for that that locate the websites and share them via Pastebin, it also provides details like IP addresses and open ports of the targets. Then we do the work , 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? , Since the world is even more technology dependent, then my answer is more clear. Yes, I think that the most human beings are not educated about computers and the Internet. They mostly don`t care about malware or hacking, which makes them an easy target. And as seen before, malware can hit a critical infrastructure causing a blackout, or a huge data leak of personal info. Security leverages on every single person., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Anonrising freesec, hacking)

4518_53600

Surveillance systems produced by Moxa SoftCMS and IP cameras manufactured by Vanderbilt are affected by serious vulnerabilities that can be exploited by remote attackers to obtain full control of flawed systems., The ICS-CERT has published a security advisory to describe three serious vulnerabilities in the central management software Moxa SoftCMS Webserver Application., , Zhou Yu working with Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative and Gu Ziqiang from Huawei Weiran Labs been credited for finding the security vulnerabilities in the Moxa SoftCMS., One of the flaw was rated with a 9.8 CVSS score, it is a SQL injection flaw tracked as CVE-2016-9333 that can be exploited by a remote attacker to access SoftCMS with administrator privileges., “The SoftCMS Application does not properly sanitize input that may allow a remote attacker access to SoftCMS with administrator’s privilege through specially crafted input.” reads the advisory., A second vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2016-8360, is a double free condition that could be exploited to cause a denial-of-service (DoS) and in some cases even execute arbitrary code., “A specially crafted URL request sent to the SoftCMS ASP Webserver can cause a double free condition on the server allowing an attacker to modify memory locations and possibly cause a denial of service or the execution of arbitrary code.” continues the advisory. , The third vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2016-9332, is an improper input validation issue that can lead to a crash of the application., “Moxa SoftCMS Webserver does not properly validate input. An attacker could provide unexpected values and cause the program to crash or excessive consumption of resources could result in a denial-of-service condition.” states the advisory., According to the ICS-CERT, Moxa fixed all the vulnerabilities in the latest SoftCMS 1.6 release, but the release notes suggest  that only the SQL Injection has been fixed., Similar problems also for the CCTV IP cameras manufactured by Vanderbilt., According to the ICS-CERT, a vulnerability (CVE-2016-9155) in the IP cameras could be exploited by attackers with network access to obtain administrative credentials using specially crafted requests., “An attacker with network access to the web server could obtain administrative credentials by sending certain requests.” reads the ICS-CERT advisory., Vanderbilt has already released security updates for all the affected products., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Moxa SoftCMS, Vanderbilt)

2560_38765

According to a poll done by Morning Consult firm, cyber attacks are just behind terrorism attacks on the list of biggest threats to the US, it has been estimated that the insurance industry could face losses of about $21 billion. That poll was conducted in the period between May 29 and May 31 by interviewing a national sample of 2,173 registered voters., Nearly 36 percent of voters consider acts of terrorism atop a list of major security threats, followed by cyber attacks at 32 percent., , According to the Lloyd’s of London, cyber attacks would have a significant impact on multiple types of insurance, As reported in the “Business Blackout“, a joint report by Lloyd’s and the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Risk Studies, the insurance implications of a cyber attack on the US power grid could have a catastrophic impact., The “Business Blackout” report tries to describe the impacts of a cyber attack on the national power grid, which causes an electrical blackout that plunges 15 US states and principal cities, including New York City and Washington DC, into darkness. Nearly 93 million people will remain without power in the scenario hypothesized by the study., The experts simulate a malware-based attack which is able to infect the imaginary ‘Erebos’ trojan electricity generation control rooms in several locations in the Northeastern United States. The attack will cause health and safety systems fail, disrupting water supplies as electric pumps fail. The chaos will reign causing the failure of main services, including transportation. The malware is able to infect the Internet and search and compromise 50 generators that it will destroy, causing prolonged outages in the region., The total of claims paid by the insurance industry is estimated to be included in the interval comprised between $21.4bn and $71.1bn, depending on the evolution of the scenarios designed by the researchers., In this scenario, the researchers estimated the economic losses could range from $243 million to $1 trillion, depending on the number of components in the power grid compromised by the attack., “Economic impacts include direct damage to assets and infrastructure, decline in sales revenue to electricity supply companies, loss of sales revenue to business and disruption to the supply chain. The total impact to the US economy is estimated at $243bn, rising to more than $1trn in the most extreme version of the scenario.” states the report., The researchers analyzed the “historical outages” estimating that currently the power interruptions, most of which last five minutes or less, already cost the US about $96 billion. The cost related to a prolonged outage is likely to be included in the range of $36 billion to $156 billion. The Commercial and industrial sectors are the sectors most impacted by the attack on the power grid due to their dependency on the electricity supply., “Evidence from historical outages and indicative modelling suggests that power interruptions already cost the US economy roughly $96bn8 annually.9 However, uncertainty and sensitivity analysis suggest this figure may range from $36bn to $156bn.” continues the report. “Currently over 95% of outage costs are borne by the commercial and industrial sectors due to the high dependence on electricity as an input factor of production.”, It is the first time that the insurance industry propose a similar report, the estimates provided are merely indicative due to the large number of factor that can influence the cost, anyway it is important to understand the hish risks of a cyber attack against a critical infrastructure like a power grid and the necessity to adopt an effective cyber strategy to improve their security., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Power Grid, critical infrastructure),  

5224_59149

The APT32 group, also known as OceanLotus Group, has been active since at least 2013, according to the experts it is a state-sponsored hacking group., The hackers targeting organizations across multiple industries and have also targeted foreign governments, dissidents, and journalists., Since at least 2014, experts at FireEye have observed APT32 targeting foreign corporations with an interest in Vietnam’s manufacturing, consumer products, and hospitality sectors. The APT32 is also targeting peripheral network security and technology infrastructure corporations, and security firms that may have connections with foreign investors., “APT32 leverages a unique suite of fully-featured malware, in conjunction with commercially-available tools, to conduct targeted operations that are aligned with Vietnamese state interests.” states the analysis published by FireEye., FireEye highlighted that currently, it is impossible to precisely link the group to the Vietnamese government even if the information gathered by the hackers would be of very little use to any other state., According to the experts, the cyber attacks seemed to be assessing the victims’ adherence to Vietnamese regulations but the Vietnamese government denies its involvement., “The government of Vietnam does not allow any form of cyber-attacks against organizations or individuals,” said foreign ministry spokeswoman Le Thi Thu Hang. “All cyber-attacks or threats to cybersecurity, must be condemned and severely punished in accordance with regulations and laws.”, Back to the last wave of attacks, the APT32 hackers use phishing emails containing a weaponized attachment. It is interesting to note that the attachment is not a Word document, instead, it is an ActiveMime file containing an OLE file containing malicious macros., Another element of innovation for this campaign is that attacker tracked the success of the phishing emails, using legitimate cloud-based email analytics. The phishing attachments contain an HTML image tags., “When a document with this feature is opened, Microsoft Word will attempt to download the external image, even if macros were disabled. In all phishing lures analyzed, the external images did not exist.” reads the analysis. “Mandiant consultants suspect that APT32 was monitoring web logs to track the public IP address used to request remote images. When combined with email tracking software, APT32 was able to closely track phishing delivery, success rate, and conduct further analysis about victim organizations while monitoring the interest of security firms.”, The embedded macros create two scheduled tasks to gain persistence for the backdoors used by the hackers., The first task executes the Squiblydoo application to enable the download of a backdoor from APT32 infrastructure. The second leads to a secondary backdoor delivered as a multi-stage PowerShell script configured to communicate with the domains blog.panggin.org, share.codehao.net, and yii.yiihao126.net., , APT32 threat actors regularly cleared select event log entries in order to conceal their operations, they also heavily obfuscated their PowerShell-based tools and shellcode loaders with Daniel Bohannon’s Invoke-Obfuscation framework., The arsenal of APT32 includes a custom suite of backdoors such as Windshield, Komprogo, Soundbite, Phoreal, and Beacon., FireEye warns of the increasing number of nation-state actors using cyber operations to gather intelligence., “FireEye assesses that APT32 is a cyber espionage group aligned with Vietnamese government interests,” Concluded FireEye. “As more countries utilize inexpensive and efficient cyber operations, there is a need for public awareness of these threats and renewed dialogue around emerging nation-state intrusions that go beyond public sector and intelligence targets.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – APT32, cyber espionage)

3124_42706

Security experts at Zscaler discovered a malware-based campaign relying on a new strain of Spy Banker banking malware., Spy Banker is an old threat, it was first detected in 2009, the new variant spreads over social media, primary through Facebook, and relies on social engineering to trick users into clicking shortened Bit.ly URLs over the promise of coupons, vouchers or premium software downloads., Zscaler experts also observed a number of victims were also compromised by drive-by downloads., According to the researchers, the Spy Banker banking malware has been targeting Portuguese-speaking victims in Brazil., “Zscaler ThreatLabZ has been closely monitoring a new Spy Banker Trojan campaign that has been targeting Portuguese-speaking users in Brazil. The malware authors are leveraging Google Cloud Servers to host the initial Spy Banker Downloader Trojan,which is responsible for downloading and installing Spy Banker Trojan Telax.” states the post published by Zscaler., The campaign, spotted by researchers at Zscaler, spreads primarily over social media—Facebook for the most part—and uses convincing social engineering to trick users into clicking shortened Bit.ly URLs over the promise of coupons, vouchers or premium software downloads. A number of victims were also compromised by drive-by downloads., The use of social media platforms to spread the malware is very effective, it exploits the user’s trust of messages coming from its network of contacts., The malicious URLs point to a server hosted on Google Cloud Servers which host the Spy Banker downloader that is dropped on the victim’s machine. The downloader then downloads the Spy Banker Trojan Telax, whose aim is to steal online banking credentials., , In sample analyzed by Zscaler, the short URL points to a PHP files that’s hosted on a Google Cloud server. The PHP file then does a 302 redirect to download the initial Spy Banker Downloader Trojan payload., In the attack illustrated by the experts, the executable file receitanet.com is posing to be Brazil’s federal revenue online tax returns service. In other cases observed by the researchers, the crooks used different themes offering discount vouchers and fake premium software applications., The researchers revealed that this specific short URL had been clicked more than 103,000 times, 102,000 of which come Facebook.,  , , Google has already cleaned up the cloud servers involved in the malicious campaign., “It is important to note that Google has already cleaned up the cloud servers being currently redirected by these two active sites and hence the infection cycle will fail with a 404 Not Found message,” Zscaler said., Zscaler published a detailed analysis of the new variant of the Spy Banker Trojan Telax … enjoy it!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Spy Banker Trojan, Cybercrime)

566_13715

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 has been used during various attacks staring in last November (2012) with the purpose to gather detailed information on the respective owners of the accounts., , , As revealed by security experts at Group-IB what is considered “anomalous ” is the interest of attackers in high profile banking accounts, traditionally hackers try to compromise private and corporate banking accounts to steal funds and Corporate accounts represents an ideal, but difficult target, due higher balances., All were started last year when Group-IB gathered information on numerous incident fraud on popular online trading and stock brokerages., On the other hand large scale banking fraud schema has exploited the capabilities of popular malware such as Spy Eye and Zeus that keystrokes and extract banking account information from victims., Fraudsters seem to have changed strategy beginning to use malware developed by black hat coders that developed a strain of malware specialized on QUIK trading platform and FOCUS IVonline from New York-based EGAR Technology., Both platforms are used by principal banks including Russian Alfa-Bank, Promsvyazbank and Sberbank and both are used for trading on Russian stock exchange MICEX that offers various financial services including placing and trading stocks, listing securities, and even the facility to set up initial public offerings (IPOs) or company flotations., The malware is a smart agent that once infected the victims verify the presence of the trading software to monitor the victim’s operation capturing screenshots and intercepting credentials which are sent back to the C&C server., “Some of such data was extracted by elite Group-IB specialists in handling the C&C servers, and then some monitoring by Group-IB Bot-Trek returns victim information.”, Andrey Komarov, the head of international projects at  Andrey Komarov of Group-IB confirmed that the malware use against the trading platforms is a variant of the Ranbyus spyware, a malicious code used against windows users to steal online banking credentials., “It has quite similar functions to Zeus, as it uses a VNC spawning module which helps the hacker to be connected to the infected PC absolutely remotely and to do fraud silently, that’s why it won’t be detected by anti-fraud filters, as the theft will happen from the same IP address,” Komarov explained., I directly contacted Andrey Komarov, following an excerpt of our conversation:, Did you face with such kind of threats before? Were the any known incidents on such cases?, Ranbyus spyware is not the only one cyber threat that menaced the “precious” platforms, QUIK has been attacked by the Trojan, Broker-J that instead of spy on user operations steals encryption keys from the application storage and transfers them to attackers., Vladimir Kurlyandchik, head of business development at ARQA Technologies recommended customers to install defense systems and keep them updated, he also invites the clients to alert the company in case of suspicious activities discovered:, “In case of any suspicions of unauthorized  access to an account the end user should immediately initiate the procedure of changing access keys. It is also our standard recommendation,”, Beware of cybercrime does not forgive oversights!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Cybercrime, Malware)

3437_44899

The security researchers at FireEye security Abdulellah Alsaheel and Raghav Pande have found a way to exploit the Microsoft security tool Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit to hack itself. The Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit was introduced by Microsoft to raise the cost of exploit development, it cannot be considered a solution that is able to protect systems from any malicious exploit., The experts elaborated a technique to disable the Microsoft Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit using the tool itself., , The Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit was designed to protect systems against attackers by identifying patterns of cyber attacks., “EMET anticipates the most common actions and techniques adversaries might use in compromising a computer, and helps protect by diverting, terminating, blocking, and invalidating those actions and techniques. EMET helps protect your computer systems even before new and undiscovered threats are formally addressed by security updates and antimalware software.” is the description provided by Microsoft for its tool., The Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit works by injecting anti-malware library in into applications in the attempt of early detect any suspicious activity by hooking process in execution and analyzing any calls in critical APIs ., “EMET injects emet.dll or emet64.dll (depending upon the architecture) into every protected process, which installs Windows API hooks (exported functions by DLLs such as kernel32.dll, ntdll.dll, and kernelbase.dll). These hooks provide EMET the ability to analyze any code calls in critical APIs and determine if they are legitimate. If code is deemed to be legitimate, EMET hooking code jumps back into the requested API. Otherwise it triggers an exception.” wrote the security duo., The researchers focused their efforts in disabling the Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit, this means that an attacker could include in his application the code that invokes a function within the tool that disable it., The exit “feature” is implemented in the emet.dll for cleanly exiting from a process., “However, there exists a portion of code within EMET that is responsible for unloading EMET. The code systematically disables EMET’s protections and returns the program to its previously unprotected state. One simply needs to locate and call this function to completely disable EMET. In EMET.dll v5.2.0.1, this function is located at offset 0x65813. Jumping to this function results in subsequent calls, which remove EMET’s installed hooks.”, The unique problem for the researchers was to retrieve the base address of emet.dll to invoke the function to arrest it. The experts used the GetModuleHandleW function that is not hooked by the Microsoft Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit to retrieve the address., This is not the first time that security experts find a way to bypass the Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit, but differently from the past, the technique proposed by the duo doesn’t rely on vulnerabilities or missing features., “This new technique uses EMET to unload EMET protections. It is reliable and significantly easier than any previously published EMET disabling or bypassing technique. The entire technique fits within a short, straightforward ROP chain. It only needs to leak the base address of a DLL importing GetModuleHandleW (such as mshtml.dll), instead of full read capabilities over the process space. Since the DllMain function of emet.dll is exported, the bypass does not require hard-coded version-specific offsets, and the technique works for all tested versions of EMET (4.1, 5.1, 5.2, 5.2.0.1).” explained the security duo. , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Microsoft Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit, Hacking)

1118_23715

Recently Cloud-based security service provider Incapsula detected an application layer DDoS attack conducted hijacking a huge volume of traffic to victims website. The website of Incapsula customer was flooded by a DDoS attack, over 20 million GET requests from the browsers of over 22,000 machines targeted the website. The attack was characterized by the exploitation of a persistent XSS vulnerability in one of the world’s largest and most popular high profile video content provider. According to Incapsula, attackers are using an Ajax-script based DDoS tool, that exploits the victim’s browser to run a DDoS request at the rate of one request per second.,  , “The DDoS attack was enabled by a Persistent XSS vulnerability that allowed the offender to inject JavaScript code into the <img> tag associated with the profile image. As a result, every time the image was used on one of the the site’s pages (e.g., in the comment section), the malicious code was also embedded inside, waiting to be executed by every future visitor to that page.” reports the official post by Incapsula., The scheme of attack is very interesting, The attacker  injected an ‘onload‘ call in the <img> tag, once a legitimate user visits any webpage on the vulnerable website (e.g., in the comment section) the JavaScript code injected in the attacker’s image is executed by the victim’s browser which in turn injected a hidden iframe with the address of the DDoSers C&C domain. To run the attack the hackers just need to post comments on the popular video pages, the DDoS attack could be improved if the publishing of comment is executed automatically by a large botnet which orders thousands of hijacked browsers., “Obviously one request per second is not a lot. However, when dealing with video content of 10, 20 and 30 minutes in length, and with thousands of views every minute, the attack can quickly become very large and extremely dangerous. Knowing this, the offender strategically posted comments on popular videos, effectively created a self-sustaining botnet comprising tens of thousands of hijacked browsers, operated by unsuspecting human visitors who were only there to watch a few funny cat videos.”, The duration of the involvement of victims in the DDoS attack is directly linked to the duration of the requested video as explained in the official blog post, The Javascript is “session long” but these can be 20 or even 30 min videos so the sessions are much longer than usual., “Obviously one request per second is not a lot. However, when dealing with video content of 10, 20 and 30 minutes in length and with thousands of views every minute, the attack can quickly become very large and extremely dangerous.” researchers explained., In time I’m writing Incapsula hasn’t revealed the name of vulnerable, it is only known that it allows its users to sign-up and sign-in with their own profiles., Resuming, to launch a large scale DDoS attack, attackers strategically post comments on the popular video pages, effectively created a self-sustaining botnet comprising tens of thousands of hijacked browsers, operated by unsuspecting human visitors who were only there to watch their favorite videos. The detection of the attack was possible due the behaviour-based security algorithms:, Last consideration on the attack is that experts believe that attackers are renting their DDoS attack as service due the following observation: , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – DDoS attack, Persistent XSS vulnerability)

2277_36735

One of the most known applications in Macs its Gatekeeper, but Patrick says that Gatekeeper can be easily misguided to run unsigned code, and according to him it is “easy to get around“ the Gatekeeper protections like XProtect anti-malware, sandboxing and kernel code-signing., As a former NSA staffer, Patrick Wardle worked closely with Apple security team and describes them as a responsible team that always worked to improve security of their OS. The expert highlighted that what could make Apple better in terms of security would be using the same “bug bounty” as Google is doing, paying people that discover vulnerabilities,, “Google products have themselves, become more secure because of bug bounties,” “Introducing them seems to be a no brainer.”, In his research, Wardle found out that the recent fix for the “rootpipe” vulnerability it’s easy to get around, and developing his own malware he understood that no third-party anti-malware was able to detect it., “The state of OS X malware is amateur, even basic,” “It relies on trivially detectable persistence mechanisms and generally relies on infecting users via social engineering tricks such as offering ‘free but infected copies of PhotoShop’.”, , For someone working in the malware research field, I am sure that you noticed by now that anti-virus for Macs don’t use heuristics and behavioral analysis like in Windows, translating that to common language, means that if Mac doesn’t know the signature of the virus will not try to block., “Until recently all Mac security software was downloaded over unencrypted http connections” trusting on Gatekeeper for the code verification, and yes Wardle found out a way to bypass it too., Concluding, Apple can’t rest on their laurels of the past, the company needs to invest in keep up with security, because that was one of the reasons people started to buy their products (besides being in fashion). The more people buy Macs, the more crooks will invest time to evade Apple’s OS., About the Author Elsio Pinto, Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Mac OS X, malware)

1384_27349

The malware analysts consider Poweliks a very complex code which use several code layers to hide itself from prying eyes, it is able to survive without any file creation and this circumstance makes it very insidious, he performs every operation in memory and maintain persistence through a smart use of the Windows registry., No doubts that we will see many other malware like Poweliks in the next future., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Poweliks, malware)  

4570_54036

A group of security researchers from the Newcastle University devised a method to hack VISA credit cards is just six seconds., The technique relies on a Distributed Guessing Attack in which online payment websites are used to discover the data on VISA credit cards. The attackers submit data to online payment websites and analyze the reply to the transaction to discover whether or not the data was correct., “Research published in the academic journal IEEE Security & Privacy, shows how the so-called Distributed Guessing Attack is able to circumvent all the security features put in place to protect online payments from fraud.” reads the press release. “, “By automatically and systematically generating different variations of the cards security data and firing it at multiple websites, within seconds hackers are able to get a ‘hit’ and verify all the necessary security data.”, , Below a video PoC of Distributed Guessing Attack:, , The investigators speculated the method is likely to have been used in the recent cyber attack against the Tesco bank that resulted in the theft of £2.5m., The researchers demonstrated that is is possible to launch a Distributed Guessing Attack to guess card numbers, expiry dates and security codes of any Visa credit or debit card.  The method is simple as effective, the experts discovered that online payment systems don’t detect multiple invalid payment requests from different websites. An attacker can try an unlimited amount of guesses on each card data field splitting the attempts os several websites. The attackers can make between 10 and 20 guesses on each website., “This sort of attack exploits two weaknesses that on their own are not too severe but when used together, present a serious risk to the whole payment system,” explains Mohammed Ali, a PhD student in Newcastle University’s School of Computing Science and lead author on the paper., “Firstly, the current online payment system does not detect multiple invalid payment requests from different websites. This allows unlimited guesses on each card data field, using up to the allowed number of attempts – typically 10 or 20 guesses – on each website., “Secondly, different websites ask for different variations in the card data fields to validate an online purchase. This means it’s quite easy to build up the information and piece it together like a jigsaw.”, Ali explained that attackers can gather the card information one field at a time making impossible for merchants to detect the fraudulent activity., “The unlimited guesses, when combined with the variations in the payment data fields make it frighteningly easy for attackers to generate all the card details one field at a time.”, The attacker can use each generated card field in succession to generate the next field and so on., “So even starting with no details at all other than the first six digits – which tell you the bank and card type and so are the same for every card from a single provider – a hacker can obtain the three essential pieces of information to make an online purchase within as little as six seconds.”, The researchers highlighted that only the VISA network was vulnerable to the Distributed Guessing Attack., The MasterCard network is centralized and is able to detect a Distributed Guessing Attack after less than 10 attempts, even when those payments were distributed across multiple networks., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Distributed Guessing Attack, VISA)

237_6205

It’s happened, today has been diffused the news that users’ passwords of the most famous business social network LinkedIn have been stolen and leaked on Internet. The company, through it blog, has confirmed the event declaring that more than six million passwords were compromised. Following the message published, We want to provide you with an update on this morning’s reports of stolen passwords. We can confirm that some of the passwords that were compromised correspond to LinkedIn accounts. We are continuing to investigate this situation and here is what we are pursuing as far as next steps for the compromised accounts:, The company also informed the clients that is currently investigating on the data breach doesn’t giving more information on the exact number of exposed accounts. LinkedIn is considered a mine of information related to business and government personnel that include a huge quantity of confidential data on more than 160 million members., The data breach has been made public when a user has posted on a Russian forum, specializes in hash cracking, a message that claims that he has hacked and uploaded almost 6.5 million LinkedIn passwords, according to The Verge., ,  , On Imperva Data security Blog have been published some interesting hypothesis that let us conclude that the real dimension of the data breach is bigger. The experts of Imperva noted that the file leaked doesn’t contains what they define “easy” passwords such as “123456” that are traditionally the most used. Maybe the hacker has only published the more complicated passwords. Another factor that induce to believe that the number of the stolen passwords is bigger is that passwords are typically listed only once, the list in fact doesn’t reveal how many times a password was used by the members. A single entry in this list can be used by more than one account., , On twitter many users are reporting in these hours that they have found the hash of their LinkedIn passwords on the list published on internet, meanwhile the company is informing the users that it is analyzing the data publishing in order to advise its customers. The digest for the LinkedIn passwords is calculated using the SHA-1 algorithm, despite is considered secure, it is relative simple to discover weakness passwords., To avoid any kind of problem is suggested to immediate change the passwords s a precaution especially if they are shared among different internet services and common to other account on other platforms., The hack related to LinkedIn is considerable really serious due the nature of the popular social network, mainly business oriented. LinkedIn members share information about their professions and assignments in private business and also in governments. This characteristic make the social network different from the other ones such as Facebook, exposing sensible information on the business or career relationships of the members., Accessing to a LinkedIn account is possible to acquire many information on the victims, its relations and it’s participation to events and discussions related to specific professional areas. It’s clear that the information could represent the basis for other type of attacks and for cyber espionage. Just last month a serious vulnerability was been found in the authentication process of the popular network LinkedIN, the news published on the Spanish blog of the security expert Fernando A. Lagos Berardi. The article published reported a vulnerability in LinkedIn that allowed obtaining user’s password., Analyzing the relationships of a victims it is possible to discover its actual engage, trace its past experiences and specialization, possibly utilizing its profile to enforce the reputation of fake accounts and members poisoning the network of professional., Starting from the assumption that Internet and in particular the social network lacks a coherent and safe management of digital identity, last year I introduced the concept of social network poisoning as the effect produced by the application of methods designed to make unreliable the knowledge related to a profile and its relationships. The application of this kind of attack on large-scale could lead to the collapse of Social Networking and could expose member to the risks of cyber espionage and other cyber crime such as identity theft., In the same way as the ”route poisoning” (affecting the telecommunications network), the “poisoning action” are conducted with the aim to pollute the contents of this social network profiles typically introducing artifacts and relationships exist between them and real ones thus making the information unreliable. The result is the consequent failure of the chain of trust which is based on all social networks, in order not to allow search engines specifically developed to retrieve information of any kind relating to a particular profile., The main tools currently poisoning hypothesize new and viable in a future scenario are: Replacement of identity, or the ability to impersonate another user to the wide variety of purposes intelligence social engineering., During this transition is suggested to consider carefully which profiles to add to our network for the possibility that some of them have been already compromised giving the possibility to cyber criminals or spies to access to information shared in the profile., Social network such as LinkedIn are also used by a lot of government officials all over the world, don’t forget for example the attacks made months ago against NATO’S most senior commander using  the Facebook platform. The intelligence and the West industry are still too vulnerable to all kinds of attacks, so it is absolutely necessary to define cyber strategies to deal with incidents like those described., In the last year it has been observed an impressive growth of state-sponsored attacks aimed at stealing information to give them an economic, political and military advantage., Many times we have spoken of Advanced persistent threat (APT) usually refers to a group, such as a foreign government, with both the capability and the intent to persistently and effectively target a specific entity. The term is commonly used to refer to cyber threats such as cyber espionage, but applies equally to other threats such as that of traditional espionage or engineering attack., Another real risk is the possibility that in these hours is launched a massive phishing campaign to invite the LinkedIn users to change their passwords, might provide additional information to criminal. Typically, such campaigns may be accompanied by strategic dissemination of malware for many different purposes, so the user receives an email with a link (although this hypothesis has been excluded by LI) which redirects him to the infected web site., I conclude by reiterating that similar events may have serious impacts if not properly managed, at this stage the awareness of the threat and timeliness of information are crucial., Following the detailed instruction for the change of the password:, Changing Your Password:,  , Pierluigi Paganini, References,

1271_25791

Google has recently made a significant change to the management process for permissions on Android devices, unfortunately security experts noticed that the change could advantage bad actors that intend to conduct attacks against the mobile platform., “When an app updates, it may need to use additional capabilities or information controlled by permissions. If you have automatic updates enabled, you won’t need to review or accept these permissions as long as they are included in a permissions group you already accepted for that app.If the app needs access to an additional permissions group, you’ll be asked to accept the update, even if you’ve set an app to update automatically. If you prefer to review each update manually, you can change your update settings.” states Google.,  , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Google, app permissions)

6787_73332

Cisco released security patches to address severe vulnerabilities in Prime Collaboration Provisioning (PCP) solution, one of the issues was rated as critical., The vulnerabilities have been found by Cisco during internal security testing and there is no evidence of attacks exploiting the flaws in the wild., The Prime Collaboration Provisioning is a web-based provisioning product that allows its customers to manage their communications services., The critical vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2018-0321, could be exploited by a remote and unauthenticated attacker to access the Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI) system and perform malicious actions that affect both the PCP and the devices connected to the solution., “A vulnerability in Cisco Prime Collaboration Provisioning (PCP) could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to access the Java Remote Method Invocation (RMI) system.” reads the security advisory published by Cisco., “The vulnerability is due to an open port in the Network Interface and Configuration Engine (NICE) service. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by accessing the open RMI system on an affected PCP instance. An exploit could allow the attacker to perform malicious actions that affect PCP and the devices that are connected to it.”, Cisco confirmed that there are no workarounds that address this vulnerability., Cisco also reported five high severity vulnerabilities in the Prime Collaboration Provisioning solution, two of which could be exploited by an unauthenticated attacker to reset the password on vulnerable products and gain admin-level privileges by sending a specially crafted password reset request., Another high severity vulnerability could be exploited by an unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary SQL queries. Cisco also fixed high severity access control vulnerabilities that could lead privileges escalation., Customers need to update their Prime Collaboration Provisioning products by updating them to version 12.3., The flaws have been identified by experts from Cisco during internal security testing., , Cisco also fixed an information disclosure bug in Meeting Server, and a DoS vulnerability that affects several products of the IT giant., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Cisco, Prime Collaboration Provisioning)

5638_62447

The US CERT is warning of Potential Hurricane Harvey phishing scams, the experts fear crooks may start using malicious emails purportedly tied to the storm., US-CERT is advising users to remain vigilant when receiving unsolicited emails with attachments or links purporting to be related to the Hurricane Harvey that recently hit the Texas killing at least five people and injuring a dozen of people over the weekend., US experts warn of phishing emails requesting donations from allegedly charity organizations, a tactic observed after other major disasters and incidents., Typically these messages used malicious attachments or embed links to websites hosting exploits or to phishing pages., A good practice to avoid scams is to contact the charity organizations by calling them directly., US-CERT encourages users and administrators to use caution receiving messages linked to the Hurricane Harvey and adopt the following best practices:, Cyber criminals have no scruples and often exploit any tragic event in their favor., In October, as the Hurricane Matthew was battering the South Carolina coast, authorities warned of a series of cyber attacks against residents., In the past crooks exploited the media interest in tragic events like the Boston Marathon attack and the crash of the flight MH17 of Malaysian Airline, they used the news as bait themes for massive spam attacks and spear phishing campaigns., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Hurricane Harvey, phishing)

3347_44265

Johannes Ullrich, security expert at the SANS Technology Institute, spotted an OS X scareware campaign that leverages fake Adobe Flash Player installers to trick users into downloading malicious software. The expert discovered the malicious campaign while analyzing Facebook clickbait scams., “They do not rely on a vulnerability in the operating system. Instead, the user is asked to willingly install them, by making them look like genuine Adobe Flash warnings (and we keep telling users to make sure Flash is up to date, so they are likely going to obey the warning and install the update).” states the blog post published by the SANS Technology Institute. “The “Installer” for the fake Flash update will install various scare ware (I observed a couple different varieties when re-running the installer), and it actually installs an up to date genuine version of Flash as well.”, The attackers used a simple and effective trick to deceive victims, the attack starts with a popup window alerting users that their Flash Player software is outdated and providing them the instruction to update it., , Ullrich suspects that the code used to display the popup is injected by an advertisement on the page visited by the victim. If users accept to install the bogus update they will receive a fake Flash Player installer., The bogus installer is able to bypass the Apple’s Gatekeeper security feature, it appears as a legitimate application and is signed with a valid Apple developer certificate issued to one Maksim Noskov., “Antivirus coverage was pretty bad yesterday when I came across this (4 out of 51 on Virustotal). On a brand new OS X 10.11 install, the “Installer” appears to install a genuine copy of Adobe Flash in addition to Scareware that asks for money after informing you of various system problems.” continues the post., The software installs a genuine Flash Player software and attempts to convince users to download applications apparently designed to fix problems on the victim’s machine., These applications attempt to trick users into calling a “support” line in order to receive instructions for fixing the alleged problems. The security experts published a small video showing what happens when victims install the “update” on a clean OS X 10.11 system:, , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Mac OS X scareware, cybercrime)

6774_73229

The huge trove of data was contained in a file named “,” according to the experts the information is authentic and comes from Myheritage., “Today, June 4, 2018 at approximately 1pm EST, MyHeritage’s Chief Information Security Officer received a message from a security researcher that he had found a file named “myheritage” containing email addresses and hashed passwords, on a private server outside of MyHeritage.” reads the data breach notification published by the company., “Our Information Security Team received the file from the security researcher, reviewed it, and confirmed that its contents originated from MyHeritage and included all the email addresses of users who signed up to MyHeritage up to October 26, 2017, and their hashed passwords.”, MyHeritage offers a service for the investigation of family history and the reconstruction of the family tree through the DNA analysis., , The expert who made the disconcerting discovery reported it to the company on June 4, 2018, the incident seems to have affected those users who signed up for the service before and including Oct. 26, 2017., The expert only found usernames and hashed passwords, no other info was discovered on the server hosting the file., The company pointed out that passwords were not stored in a plain text but did not explain the hashing mechanism used to protect them., MyHeritage handles billing information through third parties, while DNA data and other sensitive data are stored on segregated systems., At the time the company hasn’t observed any abuse of compromised data., “Since Oct 26, 2017 (the date of the breach) and the present we have not seen any activity indicating that any MyHeritage accounts had been compromised.” continues the notification., “We believe the intrusion is limited to the user email addresses. We have no reason to believe that any other MyHeritage systems were compromised.”, The company set up an Information Security Incident Response Team to investigate the security breach and is going to hire cybersecurity firm to conduct comprehensive forensic investigations., The company announced it is planning to introduce the two-factor authentication feature to provide a further protection to its users., “MyHeritage users who have questions or concerns about this incident can contact our security customer support team via email on privacy@myheritage.com or by phone via the toll-free number (USA) +1 888 672 2875, available 24/7.” concluded the company., “For all registered users of MyHeritage, we recommend that for maximum safety, they change their password on MyHeritage.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – privacy, data breach)

4623_54451

Security researchers have discovered two distinct APT groups, PROMETHIUM and NEODYMIUM, that exploited the same Flash Player zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2016-4117) in cyber espionage campaigns on Turkish citizens living in Turkey and various other European countries. Both groups exploited the flaw before its public disclosure and against the same type of targets., We have already read about the activities of the PROMETHIUM APT group in a report published by Kaspersky Lab that named it StrongPity. In October, Kaspersky published a report on cyber espionage activities conducted by StrongPity APT that most targeted Italians and Belgians with watering holes attacks., The experts noticed many similarities in the operation of both groups, a circumstance that suggests a possible link between them. The ATP groups used different infrastructure and malware, but there are some similarities that indicate a possible connection at a higher organizational level., The flaw was patched by Adobe on May 12, but according to the experts from the firm Recorded Future published a report on the most common vulnerabilities used by threat actors in the exploit kits., The PROMETHIUM APT has been active since at least 2012, the hackers used instant messaging applications as the attack vector and shared malicious links that pointed to documents to exploit the CVE-2016-4117 vulnerabilities. Microsoft observed that the attacker used a specific strain of malware dubbed Truvasys that was designed to compromise target devices with Turkish locale settings., “The attack itself began with certain individuals receiving links in instant messenger clients. These links led to malicious documents that invoked exploit code and eventually executed a piece of malware called Truvasys on unsuspecting victims’ computers” states the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report., The PROMETHIUM APT also used another malware dubbed Myntor in targeted attacks., The NEODYMIUM also exploited the CVE-2016-4117 flaw in targeted attacks in May via spear-phishing messages. This second APT leveraged a backdoor, dubbed Wingbird, that shows many similarities with surveillance software FinFisher., “NEODYMIUM used a backdoor detected by Windows Defender as Wingbird, whose characteristics closely match FinFisher, a government-grade commercial surveillance package. Data about Wingbird activity indicates that it is typically used to attack individuals and individual computers instead of networks” continues the Report., , The vast majority of the NEODYMIUM victims was located in Turkey (80%), but several infections were also detected in the U.S., Germany and the U.K., Let me suggest reading the Microsoft Security Intelligence Report to have more details on PROMETHIUM and NEODYMIUM, including indicators of compromise (IoC)., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – NEODYMIUM APT, PROMETHIUM APT)

4152_50462

I was surfing the Internet searching for interesting data about the ShadowBrokers group that leaked exploits and hacking tools belonging to the NSA Equation Group., I have found a very intriguing analysis of the popular security researcher krypt3ia that has analyzed the Bitcoin transactions linked to the #ShadowBrokers account. It seems that the account is receiving small amounts of money (at about $990.00 a couple of days ago), but the real surprise is that some of the payments are coming from the seized Silk Road bitcoins and account., , Hey, wait a moment, the Silk Road Bitcoin are under the control of the FBI after the seizure of the popular black market., krypt3ia decided to investigate the overall transactions and discovered that also the US Marshall service was involved in the transfers., “So, is this to say that these coins are still in the coffers of the feds and they are being sent to ShadowBrokers to chum the water here? Maybe get a conversation going? Maybe to get the bitcoins flying so others can trace some taint? Of course once you start to look at that address and the coins in and out there you get some other interesting hits. Suddenly you are seeing US Marshall service as well being in that loop. Which makes sense after the whole thing went down with the theft of coins and such by rogue agents of the USSS and DEA.” wrote krypt3ia in a blog post., Analyzing the transactions the expert noticed transactions of 0,001337 BTC for the for ShadowBrokers., , We are aware that Silk Road coins are in the hands of the US GOV, but someone is sending ShadowBrokers fractions of them., “What if, and you can see this once you start to dig around with Maltego, the coins being paid to the account so far also come from other accounts that are, shall we call them cutout accounts for the government?” added the experts., At this point, the researcher invited readers to analyze transactions involving all the accounts that passed money to Bitcoin Wallets used by the Government and that were used to transfer money to the ShadowBrokers., At the time I’m writing the ShadowBroker wallet was involved in 41 transactions for a total of 1.738 BTC, and the highest bidder is of 1.5 bitcoin, or around $850., Stay tuned., Update 14.19 GMT from ZDNET.com : Bitcoin experts have raised questions over the validity of krypt3ia’s claims., According to Jonathan Levin, CRO and co-founder of Bitcoin investigation company Chain Analysis, the issue is not clear-cut — and may not exist at all. Levin told ZDNet that the payments being made through the scrutinized wallet are also going the other way., The executive says the payment chain is likely due to spam, which means the US government may have nothing to do with the auction and this is simply the work of other individuals. Levin commented:, “In Bitcoin, people like to send small payments to addresses, sometimes with embedded messages, sometimes without. Any famous address attracts a lot of spam., The Silk Road seized coins and this auction are no exception. In this case, the same person who is spamming the Auction address is also spamming the seized coin address.”, At the time of writing, the Shadow Brokers’ auction has netted a total of 1.761 BTC, which equates to approximately $1,022., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Bitcoin, ShadowBrokers)

2951_41558

Data belonging to thousands of British Gas customers have been posted online, the company has already contacted 2,200 users to warn them about the data breach. The customers’ records leaked online include email addresses and account passwords, the account details were posted to online text-sharing service Pastebin., According to the BBC, the British Gas customers have received by the company an email message that reads as follows:, ““I can assure you there has been no breach of our secure data storage systems, so none of your payment data, such as bank account or credit card details, have been at risk. As you’d expect, we encrypt and store this information securely.””From our investigations, we are confident that the information which appeared online did not come from British Gas.”, The message doesn’t explain the source of the stolen data, but the company confirmed that the data had not come from British Gas systems., , Security experts speculate that account details belonging to the British Gas customers may have origin from other data breaches and someone has tested them also to access the company accounts. Unfortunately, the majority of Internet users for passwords share the same credentials across multiple accounts on the web, it is enough compromise one of them to steal their digital identities., This morning I’ve published another post that citing sources at the Financial Times, reveals that digital identities of tens of thousands of Britons are available for sale on the darkweb, including data belonging to the government personnel. Many experts speculate that the volume of data represents only the tip of the iceberg., Experts from Symantec firm told the FT that details on over 600,000 customers were stolen from UK companies in 2014, and a significant portion is already available for sale in the criminal ecosystem., It is a bad period for Britons, the incident follows the clamorous data breach at TalkTalk., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – British Gas, hacking)

7476_78483

British and Dutch data protection regulators have fined Uber with $1,170,892 for the 2016 security breach that exposed personal data of 57 million of its users., In November 2017, the Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi announced that hackers broke into the company database and accessed the personal data (names, email addresses and cellphone numbers) of 57 million of its users, the disconcerting revelation was that the company covered up the hack for more than a year., The attackers accessed also the names and driver’s license numbers of roughly 600,000 of its drivers in the United States., The hack happened in 2016, it was easy for hackers that according to a report published by Bloomberg, obtained credentials from a private GitHub site used by the company development team. The hackers tried to blackmail Uber and demanded $100,000 from the company in exchange for avoiding publish the stolen data., Rather than to notify the data breach to customers and law enforcement as is required by California’s data security breach notification law, the chief of information security Joe Sullivan ordered to pay the ransom and to cover the story destroying any evidence. The payout was disguised as a bug bounty prize complete with non-disclosure agreements signed., Now Britain’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) fined Uber 385,000 pounds ($491,102) for failing to protect the personal information of 3 million Britons., “The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has fined ride sharing company Uber £385,000 for failing to protect customers’ personal information during a cyber attack., A series of avoidable data security flaws allowed the personal details of around 2.7million UK customers to be accessed and downloaded by attackers from a cloud-based storage system operated by Uber’s US parent company. This included full names, email addresses and phone numbers.” states the ICO., “The records of almost 82,000 drivers based in the UK – which included details of journeys made and how much they were paid – were also taken during the incident in October and November 2016.”, ICO Director of Investigations Steve Eckersley declared:, “This was not only a serious failure of data security on Uber’s part, but a complete disregard for the customers and drivers whose personal information was stolen. At the time, no steps were taken to inform anyone affected by the breach, or to offer help and support. That left them vulnerable.”, “Paying the attackers and then keeping quiet about it afterwards was not, in our view, an appropriate response to the cyber attack.”, “Although there was no legal duty to report data breaches under the old legislation, Uber’s poor data protection practices and subsequent decisions and conduct were likely to have compounded the distress of those affected.”, The UK ICO confirmed that none of the affected customers were notified of the security breach., , The Dutch Data Protection Authority (Dutch DPA) fined the company 600,000 euro ($679,790)  for failing to protect the personal information of 174,000 Dutch citizens., “The Dutch Data Protection Authority (Dutch DPA) imposes a fine of €600.000 upon Uber B.V. and Uber Technologies, Inc (UTI) for violating the Dutch data breach regulation. ” states the Dutch DPA., “This data breach has affected 57 million Uber users worldwide, and concerns 174.000 Dutch citizens. Amongst the data were names, e-mail addresses and telephone numbers of customers and drivers.”, In an official statement, Uber announced that it is “pleased to close this chapter on the data incident from 2016.”, The company highlighted that it has introduced a number of technical improvements since the data breach., “We learn from our mistakes,” the company said., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – data protection, UK Parliament)

4483_53302

The OpenSSL Project has released an update for the 1.1.0 branch (OpenSSL 1.1.0c) to fix a number of vulnerabilities. One of the issues solved with the update is the high severity denial-of-service (DoS) flaw CVE-2016-7054 that was reported by Robert Święcki from the Google Security Team., The CVE-2016-7054 vulnerability is a heap-based buffer overflow related to TLS connections using *-CHACHA20-POLY1305 cipher suites., “TLS connections using *-CHACHA20-POLY1305 ciphersuites are susceptible to a DoS attack by corrupting larger payloads. This can result in an OpenSSL crash. This issue is not considered to be exploitable beyond a DoS.” reads the advisory published Openssl.org., The flaw could be triggered corrupting larger payloads, a circumstance that leads to a DoS condition due to the crash of OpenSSL., The OpenSSL Project confirmed the flaw does not affect versions prior to 1.1.0., , The OpenSSL 1.1.0c also patches the following vulnerabilities:, I remind you that that version 1.0.1 version will no longer be supported after December 31, 2016., “As per our previous announcements and our Release Strategy ( support for OpenSSL version 1.0.1 will cease on 31st December 2016. No security updates for that version will be provided after that date. Users of 1.0.1 are advised to upgrade.” continues the advisory. Support for versions 0.9.8 and 1.0.0 ended on 31st December 2015. Those versions are no longer receiving security updates.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – OpenSSL, CVE-2016-7054)

553_13485

The cybercrime industry knows no crisis, new services are offered in the underground and criminals operating in different sectors are increasing their interest in the possibility to adopt cyber tools to organize prolific scam and fraud., Underground offers everything necessary to commit a cyber crime, from tools for hacking services and in many cases all is supported by excellent customer care. The criminal market is continually expanding, from the daily collaboration between groups of cybercriminals new opportunities arise and very often they are operating in a very short time., Account/credential data are among the most requested products in the underground, instead of directly monetize the precious information cyber criminals prefer to sell them to a third party, a business that allow them high profits in relatively low risk., Acquisition of FTP credentials, PayPal and Steam accounts is the first step in the success of fraudulent and malicious campaigns, to further secure criminal operations are typically offered  anonymization services to avoid tracking down on security firms and law enforcement., Recently Dancho Danchev published an interesting post that revealed the existence of a cybercrime-friendly service that offers access to tens of thousands of compromised accounts, the case is not isolated and the popular security expert described the model of business of criminals., Once again the service is provided in the Russian underground, one of the most active, several thousands of Russian Vkontakte, LiveJournal Twitter, Mail.ru and Skype are offered for sale and what is really surprising is the warranty offered by seller on their validity., According the Danchev’s investigation  the individuals behind the service claims to have been in the possession of over 100 million accounting credentials, which have been obtained through “private methods”. The model of sale is consolidated, criminals offer the precious credentials to an attacker that could exploit them to conduct further attacks for various purposes., The possibility to acquire the information reduce drastically the time to spend to realize cyber frauds and concurs to the increase of number of crimes committed, the sale of this time of information  also sustains the demand related to pre-configured malicious infrastructures such as botnets. Serviced such as botnet renting and bullet proof hosting are also increasing fueling the profits of the relentless criminal enterprise. Following sample screenshot of the cybercrime-friendly service:, ,  , Credentials and credit card numbers aren’t the only products sold in the underground, a recent study proposed by  Solutionary’s Security Engineering Research Team (SERT) revealed large diffusion of  malware and exploit kits., The study demonstrated that the cyber threat represented by exploit kits is increasing the incidence and what is really surprising is their efficiency despite the use of well-known vulnerabilities, within the total amount of exploits sold in the underground, around 60% are more than two years old, and 70% the exploit kits analyzed (26)  were released or created in Russia., Most popular and pervasive exploit kit is BlackHole 2.0 that exploits fewer vulnerabilities than other kits do, meanwhile most versatile of these is Phoenix exploit kit that supports 16 % percent of all vulnerabilities being exploited. Over 18% of the malware instance detected were directly attributed to The BlackHole exploit kit that is a web application that exploit known vulnerabilities in most popular applications, frameworks and browsers such as Adobe Reader, Adobe Flash and Java., , The principal reason for the diffusion of the exploits is their efficiency motivated by the inadequacy of the patch management process of private businesses that don’t update their systems rapidly, in many cases entire infrastructures aren’t updated for long time for this reason there are still vulnerable to old exploit code dated back to 2004., The study states:, “With a large concentration of exploit kits focusing on client-side exploitation (targeting desktop and end-user applications), organizations must pay close attention to patch management and endpoint security controls. Although these controls alone will not stop all attacks, they will significantly decrease the attack surface and reduce the overall likelihood of compromise.”, The increased demand of exploiting kits observed in recent months demonstrates a market very active and prolific for the commercialization of 0-day vulnerabilities, in many cases dedicated exploit kits are sold directly in the underground market, once again the Russian underground is the most active in this sense., As revealed in the report, a large number of exploit kits focus on client-side exploitation (targeting browsers, desktop and end-user applications). For this reason alone, companies, organizations, and individual users, should pay close attention to keeping their security patches and antivirus software up to date., Who is behind these exploits?, The authors of the malicious kits are usually groups of skilled professionals that are able to equip their creation with code able to exploit the principal vulnerabilities, in some cases an intense work of research and development is conducted to find zero–day vulnerabilities and maximize the efficiency of the exploit, in these case typically state sponsored hackers are funded by governments typically for cyber espionage campaign or large scale attacks., Lets’ complete this short tour in the underground reporting the results of the investigation on the cybercrime tool known as The Phoenix Exploit Kit and available in the underground for a price between $2,000 and $2,500. The security expert Brian Krebs revealed on is blog that the author of Phoenix is a Russian individual that used the nickname AlexUdakov on various forums., , Krebs wrote that the criminal is also a member of a forum called Darkode, what is interesting is that an attack to the website occurred a few weeks ago exposed full profiles of its members and AlexUdakov was using the email address “nrew89@gmail.com”., Further investigation on the above email led the authorities to find a correspondence with a Russian guy Andrey Anatolevich Alexandrov, a 23-year-old male, born in 1889  May 20th that used the address to register his profile on the Russian social media site ‘Vkontakte’. Krebs also added localized Alexandrov that currently is living in a 365-square foot apartment with his family in Yoshkar-Ola., The Russian guy is a member of many other forums on various topics such as weapons and other hacker websites used to sell Phoenix Exploit Kit for many months until July 2012., The hacker behind the nickname of AlexUdakov remained silently for various moths, the hacker wrote in his last post the he was arrested by the Federal Security Service (FSB), the Russian agency for distributing malware and the illegal possession of firearms, “On _th of May FSB operative performed a controlled purchase, the money was transferred through WebMoney., 1_ th of July FSB operatives arrested me and conducted searches at the residence, registered address, in the cars that I was using. All computers and storage devices were taken except for… a Wi-Fi router., Is Andrey Anatolevich Alexandrov really the author of Phoenix exploiting Kit? At the moment the investigation still ongoing … anyway the events reported in this post demonstrated the great importance of the analysis of underground forums in the fight of cybercrime … only knowing your enemy you can fight it., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Cybercrime)

7119_75841

According to a report by the Centre for Cyber Security (Center for Cybersikkerhed), a department of military security agency FET (Forsvarets Efterretningstjeneste), the cyber threat against the Danish financial sector is very high., The centre monitors the attacks against Denmark and Danish businesses., “The threat posed to the Danish financial sector by cyber crime is very high,” reads the report published by the centre., The threat is “becoming increasingly advanced and complex, and cyber attacks can disrupt the access to Danish financial sector services,” , The centre warns of a specific threat with “capacity, intention, planning and possible implementation. Attack/damaging activity is very likely.”, The government experts believe that the cyber espionage represents one of the main threat for the country and its businesses., Digital espionage is also considered to be a high area of risk, according to the report., “It is likely that foreign states have both political and economic interest in conducting cyber espionage against the Danish financial sector,” continues the report., It is interesting to note that the Government centre classifies the threat of cyber terrorism to the financial industry as low., “But the report also found only a low threat of cyber terror, in which cyber attacks would aim to completely bring down financial systems in Denmark. states The Local news agency., Finans Danmark, a representative organisation for the financial sector, said it recognised the level of cyber threat described by the agency report.” , , Cybercriminal organizations focused on banks are intensifying their actions and their operations are becoming even more sophisticated. In the last years, security experts have monitored the activities of several threat actors specialized in attacks aimed at the financial sector and their customers., “As the systems at banks become stronger, so too do the methods used by cyber crimials become more advanced, and that requires us to constantly keep up,” Finans Danmark director of digitalisation Michael Busk-Jepsen wrote in a press statement., “There is no doubt that crime aimed at banks and bank customers via the internet is growing,” Busk-Jepsen added., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – cyber security, Danish financial sector)

2107_35386

Secunia has recently released its annual study of trends in software vulnerabilities, an interesting report that highlights the impact of the presence of flaws in common software and provide useful details on the way bad actors exploited it. According data provided by the Security firm Secunia, the number of  Web browser vulnerabilities and zero-day exploited by hackers worldwide in 2014 is increased in a significant way., Despite the prompt response of the security community and software vendors, which were able to early identify the threat and provide the necessary patch. Secunia revealed that more than 83 percent of 15,435 vulnerabilities present in 3,870 applications was fixed by vendors when a flaw was publicly disclosed, a positive trend that reveals a marked improvement compared to the past., “The absolute number of vulnerabilities detected was 15,435, discovered in 3,870 applications from 500 vendors. The number shows a 55% increase in the five year trend, and a 18% increase from 2013 to 2014. Since 2013, the number of vendors behind the vulnerable products has decreased by 11% and the amount of vulnerable products has increased by 22%.” states the report published by Secunia., , The number of Zero-day flaws exploited by threat actors worldwide stepped up from 14 in 2013 to 25 in 2015, a significant increase that worries security experts because the exploitation of this type of vulnerabilities resets the effectiveness of the main defense systems. Another concerning data is the number vulnerabilities affecting Web browser software that increased to 1,035 in 2014, up from 728 the prior year., The study confirmed the efficiency of the research community that succeeded into addressing the vulnerability limiting the exposure of users to the exploitation of the flaw., “The most likely explanation is that researchers are continuing to coordinate their vulnerability reports with vendors and their vulnerability programs, resulting in immediate availability of patches for the majority of cases,” continues the report., By analyzing data related to patch management, the experts discovered that if a patch wasn’t available on the day a flaw was publicly disclosed, the time for its release lengthens, the percentage of products that had a patch ready a month after a flaw was disclosed only rose to 84.3 percent., “30 days after day of disclosure, 84.3% of vulnerabilities have a patch available, indicating that if a patch is not available on the first day, the vendor does not prioritize patching the vulnerability” reads Secunia., Very interesting a detailed analysis of the exploitation of PDF reader software which is a very common attack method due to its diffusion. According to data presented in the report the number of vulnerabilities discovered in Adobe Reader in 2014 is 43., The report also analyzed the vulnerabilities discovered in open-source software that represented a serious security issue last year, we all have in mind the effects of the disclosure of the Heartbleed flaw. The use of open source applications and libraries is widespread, in the majority of cases they are bundled in a variety of commercial products and solutions, for this reason it must be carefully addressed., “Organizations should not presume to be able to predict which vendors are dependable and quick to react when vulnerabilities are discovered in products bundled with open-source libraries,” Secunia said., Let me suggest to read the report, I’m sure you will find it interesting., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Secunia,  vulnetabilities)

2915_41302

Bad news for network administrators, new attacks on Network Time Protocol can defeat HTTPS and create serious problems., The bugs exploited in the attacks was discovered by the experts at the Cisco’s Talos group that has been working on the code base of the time-synch daemon., “The Network Time Protocol daemon (ntpd) is an operating system program that maintains the system time in synchronization with time servers using the Network Time Protocol (NTP).”, The ntpd determines which other NTP daemons to peer according to the ntp.conf configuration file defined by the network administrator. The attack exploits a logic error in the Network Time Protocol daemon’s handling of certain crypto-NAK packets, the NTP symmetric association authentication bypass vulnerability., “Unauthenticated off-path attackers can force ntpd processes to peer with malicious time sources of the attacker’s choosing allowing the attacker to make arbitrary changes to system time. This attack leverages a logic error in ntpd’s handling of certain crypto-NAK packets. When a vulnerable ntpd receives an NTP symmetric active crypto-NAK packet, it will peer with the sender bypassing the authentication typically required to establish a peer association.” state a blog post published by Talos. , Basically, a threat actor can force someone’s ntpd process to peer with a “malicious time source” and interfere with their system clocks., The ntpd is also able to establish peer associations on the fly in response to specifically kind of incoming requests., “In most common configurations, if ntpd receives such a packet, it will set up an ephemeral association with the sender only if the packet is correctly authenticated under a key that ntpd trusts. For example, when ntpd receives a symmetric active (NTP mode 1) packet and there is no existing peer association with the sender, ntpd executes the following check to determine if the packet has been correctly authenticated before mobilizing a new ephemeral symmetric association.” continues Cisco Talos., Malicious changes ins the system time can have serious implications in several systems, the experts warned that the attackers may exploit them to:, , Who is impacted?, This flaw affects ntp version 4.2.8p3, as explained by Talos it has been introduced in ntp version 4.2.5p186 (late 2009)., “Therefore, all ntp-4 stable releases from 4.2.5p186 through 4.2.8p3 appear to be vulnerable. All ntp-4 development versions from 4.3.0 through, at least, 4.3.76 also appear to be vulnerable. Any product which integrates an ntpd version from the vulnerable range may also be affected. Because many vendors patch ntpd before packaging it for distribution in their products, the susceptibility of any specific product must be considered on a per-product basis.”, The experts of the Talos group also found the following bugs:, The NTP Project says users should immediately install ntp-4.2.8p4 to get the fix, and implement BCP 38 ingress and egress filtering., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Network Time Protocol, hacking)

2819_40559

Shopify is a multi-channel commerce platform that helps people sell online, in-store, and everywhere in between. The popular security researchers Davis Sopas at WebSegura has discovered a Reflected Filename Download vulnerability in the Shopify service. Sopas already sent a security report to Shopify explaining that it doesn’t need any authentication like access_token, api_key or even an account on Shopify., The Reflected Filename Download vulnerability affects the app.shopify.com service, the expert explained that browsing the following link on Internet Explorer 9 and 8 browsers, it will show a download dialog with a file named track.bat. If the user launches the batch file it will run Google Chrome with a malicious web page, in this specific case shop just displayed a text, but it is clear that a bad actor could exploit it to carry on malicious activities., , Sopas observed that on other browsers like Chrome, Opera, Firefox, Android Browser and Chrome for Android latest versions the user needs to visit a webpage that will force the download by using the HTML5 <A DOWNLOAD> attribute:, , “When the victim visits a specially crafted page with the code above and click the image it will show the download dialog and after downloading it will show that the file is coming from Shopify servers.” states Sopas in a blog post., The Reflected Filename Download attacks are very insidious because victims usually don’t suspect that have been targeted by hackers, the malicious file they receive appears as offered for download by a trusted source, in this case Shopify website site., , , Resuming a possible attack scenario is:, Sopas criticized the approach of the Shopify company that underestimated the security issue as visible in the timeline published by Sopas., “In my opinion this was the last time I’ll send anything to Shopify. We have different views on patching security reports. An example: Some of the bounties that they already paid on HackerOne are Self-XSS and Missing SPF. Both issues were awarded with the minimum amount – $500. I don’t know where or why these issues are more dangerous than my security report but it’s up to them. I was patient and gave them enough time to fix this issue – even sending them possible solutions. More than 6 months on a paid online store service and still unfixed seems to much. So beware of this issue because according to Shopify they don’t foresee that this issue will be fixed any time soon.” wrote Sopas., Timeline: 19-03-2015 Reported this security issue to Shopify 27-03-2015 No reply so I asked for a update 06-04-2015 First contact with Shopify which they reply that it’s being processed 15-04-2015 Shopify told me that this security issue is interesting and ask for more information 15-04-2015 I sent more information and new proof-of-concept 04-05-2015 I asked for a update (no reply) 15-06-2015 I asked for another update (no reply) 16-09-2015 I asked for another update 22-09-2015 Since April without any email from Shopify they replied that they were working on fixing more urgent issues and consider mine a low impact and low priority 23-09-2015 I told them that it’s not a social engineering issue but they still don’t understand it 23-09-2015 Shopify told me that their prioritization is not up for discussion and not patching any time soon., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Shopify,  hacking)

733_17577

The latest nightmare for US Administration is named Bullrun, another US program for massive surveillance. Snowden‘s revelations represented a heartquake for IT security, the image of NSA and US IT companies are seriously compromised such the trust of worldwide consumers., The extension of US surveillance activities seems to have no limits neither borderlines, every communication and data despite protected with sophisticated encryption mechanisms were accessible by US Intelligence and its partners like Britain’s GCHQ., The New York Times and The Guardian newspapers and the journalism non-profit ProPublica  revealed details of the new super secret program, codenamed Bullrun, sustained by the NSA to have the possibility to bypass encryption adopted worldwide by corporates, governments and institutions. The Bullrun program is considered the second choice of U.S. Government to the failure in place a backdoor, the so-called Clipper chip, into encryption that would have allowed it to eavesdrop on communications., Be aware we are not speaking of cracking algorithms, Snowden warned that NSA bypass encryption targeting end point of communications:, “Properly implemented strong crypto systems are one of the few things that you can rely on,” Snowden said to the Guardian., The Intelligence Agency has inducted vendors and manufactures to include backdoors in their products or to disclose related encryption keys  to allow the access data, this is the core of the Bullrun program. Snowden revelations are causing the collapse of many certainties, last in order of time is the integrity of encryption standards, according the popular newspapers NSA has worked to undermine the security of those standards., Following an image of classification guide to the NSA’s Bullrun decryption program, , The repercussions are critical, the diffusion of the defective encryption standard has exposed the same data accessed by NSA to the concrete risk of stealing operated by third party actors such as foreign state-sponsored hackers and cybercriminals., “The encryption technologies that the NSA has exploited to enable its secret dragnet surveillance are the same technologies that protect our most sensitive information, including medical records, financial transactions, and commercial secrets,” “Even as the NSA demands more powers to invade our privacy in the name of cybersecurity, it is making the internet less secure and exposing us to criminal hacking, foreign espionage, and unlawful surveillance. The NSA’s efforts to secretly defeat encryption are recklessly shortsighted and will further erode not only the United States’ reputation as a global champion of civil liberties and privacy but the economic competitiveness of its largest companies.”commented Christopher Soghoian, principal technologist of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project.”, Suddenly the IT world discovered that has perceived a false sense of security, the repercussion on the global security market are enormous, customers have put their trust in the wrong companies, too often they have been deceived by false myths and new paradigms (e.g. Cloud computing) designed to facilitate the surveillance operated by intelligence agencies., Bullrun program is the last revelation on a nefarious policy conducted by one of the major security agencies, ironically because of its willingness to supervise each and every date of the largest Internet has made it unsafe. Chasing the concept of security NSA has actually opened loopholes in the global information systems that could have benefited powers such as China or terrorist groups., The surveillance programs such as Prism and Bullrun are certainly questionable, as well as the conduct of major American companies that have gone along with his demands., NSA and other agencies siphoned data from land and undersea cables, just after the revelations on PRISM program intelligence has started a misinformation campaign sustaining that US authorities was working to find the way to crack encrypted traffic, in reality the agency has no reason to do it and the Bullrun program is the proof. Misinformation as a pure diversion to influence the global sentiment and keep the lights of the media far from the dirty collusions of governments and private companies., “None of methods used to access to encryption keys involve in cracking the algorithms and the math underlying the encryption, but rely upon circumventing and otherwise undermining encryption.”, The newspapers sustains that NSA maintains an internal database, dubbed “Key Provisioning Service”, of encryption keys for each commercial product. Using the Key Provisioning Service the NSA is able to automatically decode communications and access to encrypted data. Every time the agency needs a key for a new product it formalizes a request to obtain it, the request is so-called Key Recovery Service., Other news reported that in one circumstance the US government learned that a foreign intelligence had ordered new computer hardware and after pressure of NS A the US vendor agreed to insert a backdoor into the product before it was deployed., Keys are provided by vendors or obtained by the intelligence with hacking campaign against infrastructures of product providers., “How keys are acquired is shrouded in secrecy, but independent cryptographers say many are probably collected by hacking into companies’ computer servers, where they are stored,” “To keep such methods secret, the N.S.A. shares decrypted messages with other agencies only if the keys could have been acquired through legal means.” states NYT., The most disturbing revelation involves the NSA’s efforts to deliberately weaken international encryption standards developers use to make their encryption secure, according to a classified NSA memo obtained by NYT the fatal weakness discovered by two Microsoft cryptographers in 2007 in a 2006 standard was intentionally engineered by the NSA., “Basically, the NSA asks companies to subtly change their products in undetectable ways: making the random number generator less random, leaking the key somehow, adding a common exponent to a public-key exchange protocol, and so on,”“If the backdoor is discovered, it’s explained away as a mistake. And as we now know, the NSA has enjoyed enormous success from this program.” said cryptographer Bruce Schneier., “Some of the methods involved the deployment of custom-built, supercomputers to break codes in addition to collaborating with technology companies at home and abroad to include backdoors in their products. The Snowden documents don’t identify the companies that participated.”, The Bullrun program, according to the documents, “actively engages the U.S. and foreign IT industries to covertly influence and/or overtly leverage their commercial products’ designs” to make them “exploitable.” By this year, the Times reports, the program had found ways “inside some of the encryption chips that scramble information for businesses and governments, either by working with chipmakers to insert back doors or by surreptitiously exploiting existing security flaws.”, We are therefore assuming that the U.S. Government has deliberately prompted to enter bugs in software solutions sold worldwide, the knowledge of those flaws could then have been sold in the black market of zero-day vulnerabilities  about which so much has been discussed. At that point, probably the same U.S. Intelligence would offer big bucks to buy back the zero-day to cover traces of the shocking activities., Which are the targets of the NSA?, Everyone! The imperative is global monitoring, ISP, Internet phone call and text services and mobile operators are privileged targets according the paper, and I add social media platforms.  Of course now every internet users desire to stay far from prying eyes, the use of anonymizing network and secure messaging system is exploding, Tor metrics data revealed an incredible increase of total number of Tor users., The unique certainties are that the surveillance program will continue and the expense of monitoring activities will increase exponentially, there is another consideration to do related to the global commerce for security solutions. The global market will be seriously impacted, fall of trust in US security vendors could advantage other players, the equilibrium is jeopardized when trust is broken and open source software will live a new peak of popularity waiting for the next incident., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Bullrun, NSA, surveillance)

621_14953

Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Cyber espionage, NetTraveler)

7598_79583

A hacker breached the Australian Early Warning Network over the weekend and abused it to send out an alert via SMS, landline, and email to the subscribers of the Aeeris firm that provides the service., The Early Warning Network service provides a multi-channel alert system that leads the world in capability. The company Aeeris allows Australian authorities to send emergency alerts regarding natural disasters or incident responses., The message sent by the hacker unauthorized alerts stated that “EWN has been hacked. Your personal data is not safe.”, The incident was first reported by local media, such as the website Gladstoneobserver.com., “A hacker has been able to send messages via text, email, and landline to tens of thousands of people across Australia after an emergency warning alert service, used by councils, was hacked.” reported the ABC news., “The message sent from the Early Warning Network on Friday night warned “EWN has been hacked. Your personal data is not safe. Trying to fix the security issues”., The message included a link to a support email address and a website., According to the EWN, an attacker gained access to the company system on January 5th at 9:30PM EDT and sent out alerts to Queensland residents., The attacker used the credentials of an authorized person, at the time is not clear how it obtained them., When the company staff noticed the abuse turned off the system to stop the unauthorized messages. The messages were sent only to a portion of the subscribers at the service., “At around 930pm EDT 5th January, the EWN Alerting system was illegally accessed with a nuisance message sent to a part of EWNs database. This was sent out via email, text message and landline. EWN staff at the time were able to quickly identify the attack and shut off the system limiting the number of messages sent out. Unfortunately, a small proportion of our database received this alert. Our systems are back up and running providing ongoing alerts for severe weather and natural hazard events. Investigations are continuing with police involvement.” reported the warning published by the company., “Update 11am EDT 7th January: The unauthorized alert sent on Saturday night was undertaken by an unauthorized person using illicitly gained credentials to login and post a nuisance spam-notification to some of our customers. The link used in this alert were non-harmful and your personal information was not compromised in this event. Investigations are continuing with the Police and Australian Cyber Security Centre involved.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (SecurityAffairs – Early Warning Network , hacking),

6423_70036

A few days ago, researchers at Microsoft announced that Windows Defender Antivirus blocked more than 80,000 instances of several malicious code that exhibited advanced cross-process injection techniques, persistence mechanisms, and evasion methods., According to Microsoft, the malware were new variants of Dofoil (also known as Smoke Loader), a small application used to download other malicious codes, in these specific attacks a coin miner. The cryptocurrency miner payload was used to mine Electroneum coins., , The Dofoil trojan uses an old code injection technique called ‘process hollowing’ that was recently observed by researchers at CSE CybSec implemented in evolutive versions by another malware., “The trojans, which are new variants of Dofoil (also known as Smoke Loader), carry a coin miner payload. Within the next 12 hours, more than 400,000 instances were recorded, 73% of which were in Russia. Turkey accounted for 18% and Ukraine 4% of the global encounters.” reads the analysis published by Microsoft., “The Dofoil campaign we detected on March 6 started with a trojan that performs process hollowing on explorer.exe. Process hollowing is a code injection technique that involves spawning a new instance of legitimate process (in this case c:\windows\syswow64\explorer.exe) and then replacing the legitimate code with malware.”, The analysis of the Dofoil malware revealed it uses a customized mining application that supports NiceHash allowing infected systems to mine different cryptocurrencies even if the samples Microsoft analyzed mined Electroneum coins., The malware gain persistence on an infected system through the Windows registry, hollowed explorer.exe process creates a copy of the original malware in the Roaming AppData folder and renames it to ditereah.exe. The malicious code then creates/modifies a registry key to modify an existing one to point to the newly created malware copy., Threat actors behind the Dofoil campaign used a command and control (C&C) server hosted on decentralized Namecoin network infrastructure., “The C&C server commands the malware to connect or disconnect to an IP address; download a file from a certain URL and execute or terminate the specific file; or sleep for a period of time.” states Microsoft., Microsoft confirmed that its Windows Defender Antivirus is a crucial component for detecting and blocking advanced threats., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Dofoil, cryptocurrency miner)

378_9622

, Ron Kelson,, Pierluigi Paganini,, Fabian Martin,, David Pace,, Benjamin Gittins, Every day billions of people submit an unimaginable number of queries through Internet search engines.  These powerful instruments have profoundly changed the user’s perception of web content., Before  search engine popularity, “web portals”, like “DMOZ  Open Directory Project” ( and “Yahoo! Directory” ( competed for global dominance, manually indexing web content into a structured hierarchy of categories., Today, DMOZ indexes a massive 5 million sites into 1 million cross-linked categories!    Impressive as this is,  according to Netcraft, there are over 190 million active websites, and according to the WorldWideWebSize daily estimate, the Indexed Web contains at least 8.42 billion pages., It is humanly impossible to manually track and index the content of 8.42 billion pages!   Without third party search-engines, the chances are very low you will find the page you want without spending hours (or days) manually searching hard for it.   Most of us unconsciously trust the results from Google, Bing, and similar search engine services.  But do we know how their algorithms work?  Are we sure that the results are presented in the correct priority order?  And how important is that order?, Let’s start with the importance of Priority and the impact of Advertising.  Google never sells better ranking in their search results, but they present pay-per-click or pay-for-inclusion results before and beside their indexed web-traffic search results.  Google statisticians recently analysed over 5300 websites assessing the impact of Advertising to drive traffic to a website.  They found that ~8 out of 10 clicks to a website would never happen in the absence of related search ad campaigns.  Furthermore, if you ran an advertising campaign for a period of time, and then turned it off, 80 percent  of the visits to your website would be lost., , Position in web-search results matters.  Consequently US online advertising spend reached $26 billion in 2010, with search advertising accounting for 46% of the market.  Total US online spend is projected to reached $42 billion by 2013., Unless you’re one of the globally recognised names on the Internet (Facebook, CNN, …), no matter how good your product, if you don’t pay the search engines to promote your website, you simply won’t get that much traffic.  If your website is not indexed by a search engine, chances are you will have next to no visitors., The popular search engines employ complex algorithms.  For example,  Google claims that when a user enters a query, their machines search the index for matching pages and return the results Google believes are most relevant to that user.  Relevancy is determined by over 200 factors (not explicitly listed).  Independent researchers have identified that “relevancy” includes your previous web-surfing habits, geographic location, and so on.  Who guarantees that the proposed results are not deliberately manipulated?, For example, imagine an ill-intentioned party wishes to make your business disappear from web-search queries, dramatically reducing client traffic, and strangling your company’s income flow.   This can be achieved in practice by manipulating the search results generated by a few leading search engines., There are three different scenarios for manipulating search engines results:, Client side interference, Various methods of search engine attack are well known to malware developers. One of the most common uses of search engine manipulation is to drive traffic to their malicious websites.   Today, many forms of malware that infect computers can locally manipulate search engine results.  In this case, the search-engine sends you “clean” data, and the malware intercepts that data, “infects” it, and then displays the infected search engine results to you.  These infected search results often redirect you to websites containing more malware.  This is is a typical approach used by cyber criminals to recruit machines (like yours) into a botnet without your knowledge or consent., Injection of malicious websites pages into popular search engines, As discussed in our last article, search engines crawl the web to discover website pages through links.   The search engines then rank the discovered pages based on a variety of criteria, including which other website pages link back to them, and their content.  Unsurprisingly it is possible to distort reality, through web crawlers., Blackhat search engine optimization (SEO) techniques employ a process in which criminals (and others) trick search engines into ranking their (malicious) web pages high up in the search engine results. According to Sophos, the most popular techniques used by Black hats employ malware to create website pages on popular topics that “appear very attractive” to crawlers:, Direct manipulation of search engine databases, In this case, search engines vendors may choose, or be coerced, to manipulate their own results.  This may be done with the best intentions, such as to protect people from known fraudulent websites, or websites recently compromised by malware.  However, this is not always the case.  Search engine vendors may have no choice but to comply with censorship requests from local Governments.  In June, Google reported that, in the previous 6 months, it saw an “alarming” increase in requests (over 1,000) from Governments to censor Internet content, including removing items such as YouTube videos and search listings.  The company, which said it complied with more than half the requests, released a catalog of those requests as part of its biannual Global Transparency Report.  Google released this report to maximize transparency around the flow of information related to its tools and services. The document disclose the following info:, a) Real-time and historical traffic to Google services around the world; b) Numbers of removal requests received from copyright owners or governments; c) Numbers of user data requests received from government agencies and courts., “Unfortunately, what we’ve seen over the past couple years has been troubling, and today is no different,” Dorothy Chou, Google’s senior policy analyst, said in a blog post. “When we started releasing this data, in 2010, we noticed that government agencies from different countries would sometimes ask us to remove political content that our users had posted on our services. We hoped this was an aberration. But now we know it’s not.”, Google said it had received 461 court orders for the removal of 6,989 items, consenting to 68 percent of those orders. It also received 546 informal requests, complying with 46 percent of those requests., “Just like every other time, we’ve been asked to take down political speech,” Chou wrote. “It’s alarming not only because free expression is at risk, but because some of these requests come from countries you might not suspect — western democracies not typically associated with censorship.”, The company said it complied with the majority of requests from Thai authorities for the removal of 149 YouTube videos that allegedly insulted the monarchy, a violation of Thailand law.  The Web giant said it also granted U.K. police requests for removal of five YouTube accounts that allegedly promoted terrorism. Google also said it complied with 42 percent of U.S. requests for the removal of 187 pieces of content, most of which were related to harassment., This type of  interference is potentially the most dangerous cyber threat against search engines.  Search engine companies are increasingly obliged to operate under government imposed constraints, or else they may be banned in those countries., In particular, the Google study doesn’t reflect censorship activity from countries such as China and Iran, which block content without notifying Google.  In this case, we can assume that the censorship is even more rigorous, proactively  censoring political or religious material that is considered to be in any way offensive to the incumbent regime., Diving deeper into censorship, Those wanting to learn more about censorship by governments should visit the OpenNet Initiative ( which monitors restrictions imposed on the Internet.  The OpenNet portal contains data related to the “anomalies” in accessing the network using different axis of analysis, such as geographic location and type of intervention performed (e.g. political, social, conflict / security, Internet tools). The information is produced with detailed reporting, along with maps, making it an attractive graphical representation of the phenomena., Fortunately it appears that the influence of government on search engine results is only serious in few regions of the planet.  However, this trend could change as Governments seek to gain greater controls., What has been presented in this article is just a small taste of the complex theme of search engines, powerful tools that can lend themselves to numerous purposes that go beyond their undisputed indexing ability., I hope that the information provided may lead us to think whenever a search engine offers us a series of results based on our instructions., Why do you click on the first link a web-search engine provides you? Is this link really what I asked for? Why have I received these specific answers from the search engine? Has anyone influenced the results I see: be they private business or governments? Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes?, To search without google adverts use:   . Also try   for a web-server that claims to crawl it’s own web pages and deliberately avoids tracking/profiling it’s users., About the Authors: Pierluigi Paganin,  Deep web expert and Security Specialist CISO Bit4ID Srl, a CEH Certified Ethical Hacker, EC Council and Founder of Security Affairs ( ). Pierluigi Paganini is a co-author (with Richard Amores) of the soon to be published book – “The Deep Dark Web: The hidden world” which extensively covers all aspects of the Deep Web., David Pace is Project Manager of the ICT Gozo Malta Project, and a freelance IT Consultant, Prof. Fabian Martins, ( )  Banking security expert and Product Development Manager at Scopus Tecnologia, ) owned by Bradesco Bank Group., Ron Kelson is Vice Chair of the ICT Gozo Malta Project and CEO of Synaptic Laboratories Limited r.kelson@synaptic-labs.com ., Ben Gittins is CTO of Synaptic Laboratories Limited. cto@pqs.io, ICT Gozo Malta is a joint collaboration between the Gozo Business Chamber and Synaptic Labs, part funded in 2011 by the Malta Government, Ministry for Gozo, Eco Gozo Project, and a prize winner in the 2012 Malta Government National Enterprise Support Awards.   www.ictgozomalta.eu links to free cyber awareness resources for all age groups.   To promote Maltese ICT, we encourage all ICT Professionals to register on the ICT GM Skills Register and keep aware of developments, both in Cyber security and other ICT R&D initiatives in Malta and Gozo.   For further details contact David Pace at dave.pace@ictgozomalta.eu or phone +356 79630221 .

4338_52008

X.Org is a widely used open-source implementation of the X Windows System (aka X11 or X-Windows) that is the graphical windowing system adopted by Unix and Linux operating systems. A set of libraries implements the routines used within X-Windows applications,, The security researcher Tobias Stoeckmann from the OpenBSD Project discovered that many of the libraries that implement the routines used within X-Windows applications are affected by critical flaws., “Tobias Stoeckmann from the OpenBSD project has discovered a number of issues in the way various X client libraries handle the responses they receive from servers.” states the advisory published by the X.Org Foundation. “Most of these issues stem from the client libraries trusting the server to send correct protocol data, and not verifying that the values will not overflow or cause other damage. Most of the time X clients & servers are run by the same user, with the server more privileged than the clients, so this is not a problem, but there are scenarios in which a privileged client can be connected to an unprivileged server, for instance, connecting a setuid X client (such as a screen lock program) to a virtual X server (such as Xvfb or Xephyr) which the user has modified to return invalid data, potentially allowing the user to escalate their privileges.”, , The expert noticed that the X. Org client libraries don’t properly validate the server responses a circumstance that could be exploited by local and remote attackers to launch DoS attacks and make privilege escalation., A remote or local X server can supply specially crafted data to trigger the above vulnerabilities resulting in out-of-bounds memory read or write error, buffer underflow, and other. The impact depends on the specific application that uses the flawed X.Org libraries., Below the list of vulnerabilities that includes affected libraries and CVE codes used to track them:, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – X.Org libraries, Linux)

4934_56795

Journalists from the BBC, Reuters and New York Times were among those spied on by, The German foreign intelligence service spied on journalists from various media agencies, including the BBC, Reuters and the New York Times., , According to the German magazine Der Spiegel, the number of reporters spied by the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND) is at least 50 and the agencies is carrying out surveillance activities since 1999., “Germany’s foreign intelligence agency, the BND, apparently spied on large numbers of foreign journalists overseas over the course of several years, including employees of the BBC, Reuters and the New York Times. Critics see a massive violation of press freedoms.” reads the Der Spiegel., Der Spiegel obtained BND documents listing journalists’ emails, faxes, and telephone numbers., “The document reportedly showed more than a dozen BBC journalists were being monitored via numbers at the organisation’s London headquarters and in Afghanistan.” reported the Independent., The list also included several mobile and satellite phone numbers used by reporters at Reuters and a New York Times phone number.  Reuters news agency in Afghanistan,, The numbers of the Reuters news agency belongs to journalists in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nigeria, but according to the Der Spiegel, other organisations in Kuwait, Lebanon, India, Nepal, Indonesia, and Zimbabwe were targeted by the cyber spies., Of course, news Agency and broadcasters spied by the German foreign intelligence service expressed disappointment over the revelations., “We are disappointed to hear these claims,” a BBC spokesperson said., “The BBC’s mission is to bring accurate news and information to people around the world, and our journalists should be able to operate freely and safely, with full protection for their sources., “We call upon all governments to respect the operation of a free press.”, The BND has refused to comment the allegations anyway it clarified that every operative aspect of its activity will be discussed only with the German government and politicians on parliament’s intelligence oversight committee., The reports have been revealed while the Bundestag is investigating surveillance activities conducted by the US National Security Agency (NSA) and BND., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – German foreign intelligence service, BND)

3028_42054

The independent security researcher Varang Amin and the chief architect at Elastica’s Cloud Threat Labs Aditya Sood have discovered a vulnerability in the D-Link Switches belonging to the DGS-1210 Series Gigabit Smart Switches., The security experts revealed the existence of the flaw at the ToorCon security conference, but they avoided to disclose the details about the exploit to give the D-Link the necessary time to solve the issue., , This family of network devices allows the storage of backup files, including logs, firmware and configuration files, in the device’s flash memory or on a web server. Unfortunately, the system lacks of proper authorization and authentication mechanisms, allowing an attacker to access the stored backup files., The experts discovered that file stored in the flash memory can be accessed remotely by simply knowing the IP address of the D-Link Switches. The exposition of information contained in the configuration files could give the attackers precious information on the targeted network, the attackers could also control internal traffic by compromising the D-Link Switches., “Once the configuration file is accessed, all the details about the switch, including configuration, username, etc., can be obtained by the attacker. For example, the configuration can be uploaded on another switch (purchased from the market) to obtain the details. Log files reveal information about the clients that accessed the switch and other infrastructure-related information,” said Sood. “Compromising network switches can have disastrous consequences as the attacker can control the traffic flow.”, The duo of experts highlighted that also the root directory of the web server is easily accessible by hackers., “Usually, when the backup option is selected, the log files and configuration file are stored on the flash drive. Logs are enabled by default in many versions, but a majority of administrators have backup configured so downloading these files is easy,” explained Sood., Although the security vulnerability has been reported early October, D-Link hasn’t fixed it yet., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – D-Link Switches, hacking)

7390_77800

The U.S. Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM) is providing unclassified malware samples to VirusTotal intelligence service with the intent of sharing them with cybersecurity industry., The USCYBERCOM’s Cyber National Mission Force (CNMF) is going to share the unclassified malware samples on the CYBERCOM_Malware_Alert VirusTotal account., Researchers interested in the sample can follow the USCYBERCOM malware reporting handle on Twitter., “Today, the Cyber National Mission Force, a unit subordinate to U.S. Cyber Command, posted its first malware sample to the website VirusTotal. Recognizing the value of collaboration with the public sector, the CNMF has initiated an effort to share unclassified malware samples it has discovered that it believes will have the greatest impact on improving global cybersecurity.” USCYBERCOM stated., “Recognizing the value of collaboration with the public sector, the CNMF has initiated an effort to share unclassified malware samples it has discovered that it believes will have the greatest impact on improving global cybersecurity.” , CNMF was launched to improve information sharing on the cyber threats and allow early detection of the activities of malicious cyber actors., This Twitter account was created solely to provide alerts to the cybersecurity community that #CNMF has posted new malware to @virustotal. A log of our uploads can be found here: — USCYBERCOM Malware Alert (@CNMF_VirusAlert) November 5, 2018, , The first samples shared by CNMF on VirusTotal belong to the Lojack (LoJax) family, in May several LoJack agents were found to be connecting to servers that are believed to be controlled by the notorious Russia-linked  Fancy Bear APT group., The samples recently shared appears to be associated with the UEFI rootkit discovered in September by the malware researchers from ESET., Personally, I believe that this initiative of really important to rapidly profile threat actors and mitigate the spreading of malicious codes., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – USCYBERCOM, malware)

6958_74639

Security experts from Proofpoint have uncovered a massive malspam campaign, crooks sent hundreds of thousands of emails delivering weaponized PDF documents containing malicious SettingContent-ms files., Experts attributed the malspam campaign to the cybercriminal group tracked as TA505, the attackers are spreading the FlawedAmmyy RAT., The SettingContent-ms file format was implemented in Windows 10 to allows a user to create “shortcuts” to various Windows 10 setting pages., Thi file opens the Control Panel for the user control.exe, experts noticed that it includes the  <DeepLink> element in the schema., , This element takes any binary with parameters and executes it, this means that an attacker can substitute ‘control.exe’ with a malicious script that could execute any command, including cmd.exe and PowerShell, without user interaction., “After countless hours reading file specifications, I stumbled across the “.SettingContent-ms” file type. This format was introduced in Windows 10 and allows a user to create “shortcuts” to various Windows 10 setting pages. These files are simply XML and contain paths to various Windows 10 settings binaries.” wrote experts from Specterops., “The interesting aspect of this file is the <DeepLink> element in the schema. This element takes any binary with parameters and executes it. What happens if we simply substitute “control.exe” to something like “cmd.exe /c calc.exe”?”, Experts noticed that maliciously SettingContent-ms file can bypass Windows 10 security mechanisms such as Attack Surface Reduction (ASR) and detection of OLE-embedded dangerous file formats., In June experts from SpecterOps monitored several campaigns abusing the SettingContent-ms file format within Microsoft Word documents, but only a few days ago Proofpoint experts noticed threat actors leveraging PDF documents., “Colleagues at SpecterOps recently published research1 on abuse of the SettingContent-ms file format. Crafted SettingContent-ms files can be used to bypass certain Windows 10 defenses such as Attack Surface Reduction (ASR) and detection of OLE-embedded dangerous file formats.” reads the analysis published by Proofpoint., “We first observed an actor embedding SettingContent-ms inside a PDF on June 18. However, on July 16 we observed a particularly large campaign with hundreds of thousands of messages attempting to deliver PDF attachments with an embedded SettingContent-ms file.”, ,  , Once the victim has opened the PDF file, Adobe Reader will display a warning message asking the user if they want to open the file, since it is attempting to run the embedded “downl.SettingContent-ms” via JavaScript. Experts noticed that the warning message is displayed for any file format embedded within a PDF, not only for SettingContent-ms files., If the victim clicks the “OK” prompt, the PowerShell command included in the <DeepLink> element downloads and execute the FlawedAmmyy RAT., The FlawedAmmyy RAT has been active since 2016, it borrows the code of the Ammyy Admin remote access Trojan., FlawedAMMYY implements common backdoor features, it allows attackers to manage files, capture the screen, remote control the machine, establish RDP SessionsService, and much more., Experts attributed the malspam campaign to the TA505  threat actor based on email messages, as well as the payload., The TA505 operates on a large scale, it was behind other major campaigns leveraging the Necurs botnet to deliver other malware, including the Locky ransomware, the Jaff ransomware, and the Dridex banking Trojan., “Whether well established (like TA505) or newer to the space, attackers are quick to adopt new techniques and approaches when malware authors and researchers publish new proofs of concept. While not all new approaches gain traction, some may become regular elements through which threat actors rotate as they seek new means of distributing malware or stealing credentials for financial gain.” concludes Proofpoint researchers, “In this case, we see TA505 acting as an early adopter, adapting the abuse of SettingContent-ms files to a PDF-based attack delivered at significant scale.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – TA505 ,  SettingContent-ms file)

2700_39710

Lizard Squad is the popular hacking crew that brought the online gaming networks Sony PlayStation Network and Microsoft Xbox Live with major Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks., The hackers developed a tool dubbed Lizard Stresser that draws on Internet bandwidth from hacked home Internet routers worldwide., Lizard Stresser also proposed it with an attack-as-a-service model for sale., , News of the week is that six British teenagers linked to the Lizard Squad team have been identified and arrested by the National Crime Agency. The NCA hasn’t provided the name of the teenagers, the information shared by law enforcement is the age and the residence of the suspects., Other two teenagers arrested early this year are a 17-year-old from Cardiff and a 17-year-old from Northolt, north-west London., The investigators clarified that none of the teenagers are believed to be a member of the Lizard Squad, neither was involved in the attacks that hit Sony and Microsoft last year., “By paying a comparatively small fee, tools like Lizard Stresser can cripple businesses financially and deprive people of access to important information and public services. One of our key priorities is to engage with those on the fringes of cyber criminality, to help them understand the consequences of cyber crime and how they can channel their abilities into productive and lucrative legitimate careers.” explained Tony Adams, senior head of investigations for the NCA., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  NCA, Lizard Squad)

3250_43541

According to Motherboard, a hacker associated with the “Crackas With Attitude” group has accessed accounts belonging to the director of National Intelligence, James Clapper., Yes, you are right, Crackas With Attitude is the same teenager who took over the CIA director John Brennan’s personal email account in October 2015., The teen hackers reportedly controlled of Clapper’s personal email, his wife’s Yahoo email account, home telephone, and Internet. The situation is very serious, the young hacker has done much more forwarding all calls to the director’s home phone to Paul Larudee, the co-founder of the Free Palestine Movement., “One of the group’s hackers, who’s known as “Cracka,” contacted me on Monday, claiming to have broken into a series of accounts connected to Clapper, including his home telephone and internet, his personal email, and his wife’s Yahoo email. While in control of Clapper’s Verizon FiOS account, Cracka claimed to have changed the settings so that every call to his house number would get forwarded to the Free Palestine Movement. When they gained notoriety last year, Cracka and CWA claimed their actions were all in support of the Palestine cause.” wrote Lorenzo Bicchierai on Motherboard., , Cracka provided purported screenshots of Clapper’s email as a proof of the hack., “I’m pretty sure they don’t even know they’ve been hacked,” Cracka told me in an online chat., , It is not a joke, Brian Hale, a spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, confirmed the disconcerting hack to Motherboard., It seems that the hackers relied exclusively on social engineering techniques and information gathered from open source., The hacker shared with Lorenzo Bicchierai a list of call logs to Clapper’s home number. The senior staff writer verified the authenticity at least of one number in the list belonging to Vonna Heaton., “In the log, there was a number listed as belonging to Vonna Heaton, an executive at Ball Aerospace and a former senior executive at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. When I called that number, the woman who picked up identified as Vonna Heaton. When I told her who I was, she declined to answer any questions., “A journalist? Oh my gosh” she said, laughing uncomfortably. “I have somebody on the line, I’m sorry, I have no insight into that. But that’s really unfortunate, have a great day.”” wrote Bicchierai., Do you remember Clapper? Do you remember the case “American Civil Liberties Union v. James Clapper”? , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Cracka, James Clapper)

1833_32332

Every time there is a clamorous event cyber criminals try to take advantage of the people’s interest to run illegal activities, it is happened recently with the incident to the Air Asia Flight and is happening with the terroristic attack on the Charlie Hebdo., You have to consider that not only ordinary people search for this kind of info, also journalists and cyber experts like me constantly monitor social media and the web to search information that could be useful for investigation of specific cases and to track profile of the attackers., Security experts at Blue Coat have discovered that criminal criminals exploited the hashtag #JeSuisCharlie in order to spread malicious links that was distributing the popular DarkComet RAT. RAT malware like DarkComet are used by criminals and some government entities to take control of the victims’ machine., DarkComet was created by the French hacker Jean-Pierre Lesueur, also known as DarkcoderSc, which stopped development of the RAT in 2012 because he discovered that the Syrian Government was used it to persecute dissident., “The malware in question is the infamous DarkComet RAT (aka Fynloski), a freely available remote administration tool which also can double as a powerful backdoor trojan.”states Blue Coat in a Blog post. “The variant used in the present attack is obfuscated to make it less noticed by AV scanners. The DarkComet Delphi code is enveloped in a .NET wrapper, making the telltale signs of DarkComet hard to spot. Indeed, the AV detection rate of this executable is at the time of writing poor – only 2/53 scanners had detection on the VirusTotal online scanner service.” , , The criminals exploited the popular social media Twitter to share the malicious, the hashtag became was one of the top of the Internet in the wake of the 7 January attack on the Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris., Social Media experts estimated that it has been tweeted million times to date, an excellent opportunity for threat actors to spread malware, including the popular DarkComet RAT., The variant discovered by the researchers at Blue Coat drops a copy of itself with the name svchost.exe and displays the image of a new-born baby with a band carrying the name “Je suis Charlie”., , Malware authors tried to obfuscate the malicious code to evade detection mechanisms, Blue Coat reports that the sample it has analyzed are detected only by two of 53 AV used by the VirusTotalonline scanner service., At the moment, the researchers have identified a unique Command and Control server host is a subdomain under the no-ip dynamic DNS domain, the legitimate dynamic DNS service that is often used by malware authors., “The actual domain address is: snakes63.no-ip.org , This address currently resolves to an IP address located with the French service provider Orange. The French IP address and the error message in French reinforces the impression that this malware was targeted at French users, though we have no indication as to who the attackers are or what they are after. We have anyhow informed the French authorities about this malware.” state Blue Coat, Unfortunately, there is no indication of the extent of the malicious #JeSuisCharlie campaign based on DarkComet agent., It is likely that criminals will continue to exploit social media and phishing campaign to spread DarkComet and many other malware variants, be careful in your online experience adopting the best practices that every time I suggest you.,  , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – #JeSuisCharlie, DarkComet)

5116_58177

The IOActive senior security consultant Tao Sauvage and the independent security researcher Antide Petit have reported more than a dozen of unpatched security vulnerabilities affecting 25 different Linksys Smart Wi-Fi Routers models., Out of 10 security vulnerabilities, six issues can be exploited by remote unauthenticated attackers., All these products are widely by private users and by small businesses, for this reason, the impact of the discovery is huge. It has been estimated that over 7,000 routers that have their web-based administrative interfaces exposed to the Internet are exposed to attacks., The experts discovered determined that 11 percent of the 7,000 Linksys routers still used default credentials., “We performed a mass-scan of the ~7,000 devices to identify the affected models. In addition, we tweaked our scan to find how many devices would be vulnerable to the OS command injection that requires the attacker to be authenticated. We leveraged a router API to determine if the router was using default credentials without having to actually authenticate.” reads the blog post published by the two experts. “We found that 11% of the ~7000 exposed devices were using default credentials and therefore could be rooted by attackers.” , Most of the flawed Linksys routers (~69%) are located in the USA, followed by Canada (~10%), Hong Kong (~1.8%), Chile (~1.5%), and the Netherlands (~1.4%)., If we consider the possibility that a local attacker exploits the issues to target systems over a local area network, the number of devices at risk dramatically increases., The experts avoided to provided technical details about the flaw in the Linksys routers to avoid mass attacks against the vulnerable devices. The duo confirmed that two of the flaws could be exploited to trigger a denial-of-service condition on flawed routers, making them unusable or reboot by sending specifically crafted requests to a specific API., Other vulnerabilities affecting the web interfaces of the Linksys routers allow attackers to bypass authentication and access many CGI scripts that can reveal sensitive information about the flawed devices and their configurations. An attacker can exploit the issues to obtain the Wi-Fi Protected Setup (WPS) PIN and to access the wireless network for further lateral movement from within. An attacker can exploit the vulnerability to determine firmware and kernel versions of the vulnerable Linksys routers and obtain a list of running processes, information about computers connected to the routers, a list of USB devices and the configuration settings for the FTP and SMB file-sharing servers., The most severe flaw discovered by the experts could be exploited by attackers to inject and execute shell commands with root privileges on the affected routers. The flaw could be exploited to set up a backdoor administrative account that wouldn’t be listed in the web interface., “Finally, authenticated attackers can inject and execute commands on the operating system of the router with root privileges. One possible action for the attacker is to create backdoor accounts and gain persistent access to the router. Backdoor accounts would not be shown on the web admin interface and could not be removed using the Admin account.” states the post.The flaw requires authentication to be exploited, this means the attackers need to have access to an existing account., “It should be noted that we did not find a way to bypass the authentication protecting the vulnerable API; this authentication is different than the authentication protecting the CGI scripts.”,  , Linksys confirmed it is currently working on firmware updates to fix the vulnerabilities, meantime, as mitigation measures it suggests users disable the guest Wi-Fi network feature on their routers., “Linksys was recently notified of some vulnerabilities in our Linksys Smart Wi-Fi series of routers. As we work towards publishing firmware updates, as a temporary fix, we recommend that customers using Guest Networks on any of the affected products below temporarily disable this feature to avoid any attempts at malicious activity.” states the advisory. “We will be releasing firmware updates for all affected devices.”, The complete list of vulnerable Linksys routers is reported in the security advisory issued by the company., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Linksys routers, hacking)

1012_22218

The hypothesis that Edward Snowden has operated using a simple web-crawler is very curious, how is it possible that a lonely consultant had access to a so huge collection of documents from NSA archives? Why Does the NSA engage a so huge quantity of external consultant giving them secret documentation? In my opinion, it is an unforgivable mistake to report that disclosure of the leaked documents could endanger national security, when the chain of custody of those documents has been managed in an obscene manner. A consultant is not NSA personnel, and assign him visibility on some documents is absurd., How he could leak the documents without any help by colleagues?, New disturbing background were reported in an unclassified NSA memorandum disclosed by the NBC News, Snowden allegedly managed to access classified documentation by stealing one of his coworker’s passwords. In November, the Reuters agency already reported the involvement of coworkers, Snowden persuaded other NSA workers to give up passwords. It was reported that nearly 25 workers who shared their passwords had been identified, questioned, and removed from their assignments, but the NSA avoided to reveal their identities, Snowden has always denied the involvement of colleagues.,  , “Unbeknownst to the civilian, Mr. Snowden was able to capture the password, allowing him even greater access to classified information.”states the NSA memorandum., The unclassified NSA memorandum confirms the presence of three actors in the operations, one NSA’s civilian employee, an active duty member of the US Military and a contractor, they may have aided Snowden.  The NSA‘s civilian employee has resigned recently, he has admitted that he allowed Snowden to use his PKI certificate to access classified information from NSANet’, but he was not aware Snowden “intended to unlawfully disclose classified information,”, The NSA memorandum also reports other two actors has been obstructed from accessing National Security Agency (NSA) facilities, they are currently under review by the authorities. The document states Snowden has requested civilian NSA employees and coworkers to enter the password “onto Snowden’s computer terminal,” it is not clear how he was able to capture it, but we all know the effects., The civilian coworker sharing his PKI certificate and allowing Snowden to steal the password has advantaged the whistleblower,  as states the memo he “failed to comply with security obligations,”., Standing to the NSA memo human factor was exploited to carry out the most extended information leakage to an intelligence agency., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Snowden, NSA memorandum, PKI)

4889_56458

Psychological Operations are not a novelty in the military and Russia demonstrated a great ability in the adoption of such techniques., Top NATO General Petr Pavel confirmed that Russia was behind a false report of a rape by German soldiers in Lithuania, the operation aimed to undermine support for NATO’s new eastern force., a senior NATO general said on Saturday, warning Europe to expect more such “fake news”., The senior NATO general is warning Europe to expect more operation aimed to spread “fake news”., According to Pavel, an email making the claim that German-speaking men raped a 15-year-old girl last week in a Lithuanian was sent to the speaker of Lithuanian’s parliament., “It is clearly fake news and I believe we should expect more of this,” Pavel, told Reuters., Chairman of the Military Committee, General Petr Pavel during the joint press point with Supreme Allied Commander Europe, General Philip M. Breedlove and Supreme Allied Commander Transformation, General Denis Mercier following the 174th Military Committee in Chiefs of Defence Session, Moscow doesn’t accept the presence of the NATO troops closer to its border, for this reason, its military started a propaganda to influence the sentiment of the local population against the soldiers of the Alliance., The Russian propaganda machine is considered very effective and almost every government fears its activities., The Estonia’s Foreign Minister Sven Mikser also said he expected more “hostile propaganda” over the troop presence., “It will likely use legal means, such as propaganda and they will try to influence public opinion against the deployments,” he said. “It will get stronger … but we will be transparent, consistent.”, European intelligence agencies believe that Russia will launch cyber attacks against foreign countries in order to destabilize their governments., In January, Defense Minister Le Drian comments expressed concerns about cyber attacks against defense systems and warned of hacking campaigns on the upcoming elections., In February, the Dutch Government announced that all ballots in the election next month will be counted by hand in order to avoid any interference due to cyber attacks., “Reports in recent days about vulnerabilities in our systems raise the question of whether the results could be manipulated,” explained Interior Minister Ronald Plasterk in a statement on Wednesday. “No shadow of doubt can be permitted.”, The Minister fears cyber attacks from foreign states, including Russia that is one of the most dreaded threats., “Now there are indications that Russians could be interested, for the following elections we must fall back on good old pen and paper,” he added., The German Government also fears possible interference of the Russian hackers, for this reason the Chancellor would start an intense dialogue with Moscow., “German Chancellor Angela Merkel said on Saturday she would like to discuss the issue with Russia, but it was questionable whether the problem could be successfully addressed before European elections this year.” reported the Reuters., Back to the present, Pavel confirmed that NATO’s top commanders and their Russian counterparts could restart in the next few weeks, he doesn’t exclude a face-to-face meeting., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – NATO, Russian propaganda)

4610_54340

Some versions of Netgear routers remain affected by a security flaw that could be exploited by hackers to gain root access on the device and remotely run code. On Friday, a researcher who used the online moniker AceW0rm released a proof-of-concept code exploit because Netgear hasn’t replied to his ethical disclosure., AceW0rm privately disclosed the flaw to Netgear in August but he did not receive any response from the company., — Acew0rm (@Acew0rm1) 11 dicembre 2016, , In a first time, security experts warned of serious security issues in two Netgear routers, the Netgear R7000 and R6400 routers but the situation is worst., Netgear now as publicly admitted the vulnerability and informed its customer that it is aware of the issue., “NETGEAR is aware of the security issue #582384 that allows unauthenticated web pages to pass form input directly to the command-line interface. A remote attacker can potentially inject arbitrary commands which are then executed by the system.” reads the Security Advisory for VU 582384 published by Netgear., The company informed its customers that the following products are vulnerable:, The routers belong to Netgear’s Nighthawk line of home routers., The CERT/CC at the Software Engineering Institute at Carnegie Mellon University published an advisory to confirm that the vulnerability is quite easy to exploit and suggested to discontinue the use of the routers waiting for a patch., “Exploiting this vulnerability is trivial. Users who have the option of doing so should strongly consider discontinuing use of affected devices until a fix is made available.” reads the advisory published by the CERT., The exploitation of the flaw is quite simple, attackers just need victims info into visiting a website that contains specially crafted malicious code to trigger the vulnerability., “Netgear R7000, firmware version 1.0.7.2_1.1.93 and possibly earlier, and R6400, firmware version 1.0.1.6_1.0.4 and possibly earlier, contain an arbitrary command injection vulnerability.” reads the advisory issued by the CERT/CC.”By convincing a user to visit a specially crafted web site, a remote attacker may execute arbitrary commands with root privileges on affected routers. A LAN-based attacker may do the same by issuing a direct request., , The advisory states that in order to exploit the flaw, the victim could visit a website like:, then the malicious commands would execute automatically with root privileges., , Waiting for a fix, users have a unique option, disable the web server running on the vulnerable routers until the device is restarted by using the following command:, This command will disable the router’s web administration until the device is restarted, the advisory published by the CERT invites users to read Bas’ Blog for more details., In order to verify if you are vulnerable open your browser and visit the following address:, , Another simple method to verify if you are running a vulnerable router is to follow the procedure described in the Kalypto Pink’s blog post., UPDATE December 13, 2016, “NETGEAR is offering this beta firmware release as a temporary solution, but NETGEAR strongly recommends that all users download the production version of the firmware release as soon as it is available.” states the advisory from NETGEAR ., Beta firmware to fix security issue 582384 has been released. For more info, please visit — NETGEAR (@NETGEAR) 13 dicembre 2016, , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Netgear R7000 and R6400 routers, IoT)

3571_45930

Two of security researchers from the Weizmann Institute have shown how hackers can target connected lightbulbs to steal sensitive data from Air-Gapped networks., The two researchers are Adi Shamir, the popular co-inventor of the RSA algorithm, and PHD student Eyal Ronen., The experts highlighted that for both devices, the communications between the controllers and the lightbulbs were not encrypted allowing them to analyze communication protocol., The hacking technique relies on modulate light pulses in two commercial bulbs, a Philips Hue and a LimitlessLED, to transfer data up to 100 meters away., , If the attackers are able to access the network hosting connected lightbulbs they can hack into them exploiting the lack of authentication and generate light signals that are unobservable to the human eye., “All they needed was to subtly modulate light pulses in two bulbs on the market to convey data to a telescope up to 100 meters away, or have them create a strobe effect to bring on seizures. Both attacks were possible because authentication on the lightbulbs – a Philips Hue and a LimitlessLED – were found wanting, allowing anyone who could locate the devices to send commands.” wrote Thomas Fox-Brewster on Forbes., The two experts presented their work at the IEEE Privacy and Security Symposium in Germany last week. In the case of the LimitlessLED, hackers that successfully access them can sniff the traffic and syphon an unencrypted Wi-Fi password used to connect to the bulb., The Philips Hue lightbulbs are not affected by security bugs, but anyway hackers can exploit their abilities to manage the intensity of the light with 256 brightness levels., The hardware used to carry out the attack is composed of a laptop, a TAOS TC3200 Color light-to-frequency converter, an Arduino tiny computer and a telescope, the overall cost of the equipment is less than $1,000., , The experts deployed a controller, connected to a PC running a malware, where the lightbulb was installed., A telescope focused on the bulb was used to capture the rises and falls in the frequency of the light emitted from the lightbulbs and turn them to the Arduino., The laptop is used to process bulk information gathered from the Arduino, the researchers explained their technique could allow to leak more than 10KB per day  through the connected lightbulbs., The technique could be effective to exfiltrate private encryption keys and passwords from an “air-gapped” network., The experts also highlighted that hackers can control the light intensity to “create strobes in the most sensitive frequencies,” creating a shocking effect., “Such an attack could be directed at hospitals, schools and other public buildings using connected LEDs,” the paper read., The research conducted by the experts confirms the necessity of a “security by design” approach for all the devices belonging to the Internet of Things., “I think it’s a very big problem, not just with the specific attack we’ve shown with the lights. We should speak about how we do security in IoT,” Ronen said to Forbes. “The main issue in the lightbulbs is that there are not enough security measures.” , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – connected lightbulbs, hacking)

7648_80083

Few weeks ago I wrote about “How Data Breaches Happen“, where I shared some public available “pasties” within apparently (not tested) SQLi vulnerable websites. One of the most famous data breaches in the past few years is happening in these days. I am not saying that the two events are linked, but I have fun in thinking that events happen in bursts. Many magazines all around the world wrote about the data breach (Collection #1) published by Troy Hunt on 773 Millions of new Records (here). Today I’d like to write a quick partial analysis that I’ve been able to extract from those records (I grabbed data from public available pasties website). First of all, let me say that the work done has been super difficult (at least to me) since it required a huge amount of computational power and very high-speed internet access because of the humongous collected data. In order to make analysis over such a humongous data breach, I used a powerful Elastic Search Cloud instance and I wrote a tiny python script to import super dirty data into a common format. Some records were unable to load since the format type, the charset or whatever it had, so please consider a relative error about 4 to 5 % (circa) in the following data analyses., One of the first questions I wanted to answer was: “What are the most used passwords ?“. I am aware that many researches wrote about the most used passwords, but now I do have the opportunity to measure it. To get real used passwords and to evaluate the reality. So let’s see what are the most used passwords out there!, So far the most used passwords are: “123456”, “q1w2e3r4t5y6”, “123456789”, “1qaz2wsx3edc”, followed by most common passwords like “12345678” and “qwerty”. By observing the current graph and comparing it to common researches on frequently used passwords such as here, here, and here we might appreciate a significative difference: the pattern complexity! In fact, while years ago the most used passwords were about names, dates or simple patters such as “qwerty”, today we observe a significative increase in pattern complexity, but still too easy to be brute-forced., A second question came by looking at leaked emails. “What are the domain names of the most leaked emails ?” Those domains are not the most vulnerable domains but rather the most used ones. So I’m not saying that those domains are/or have been vulnerable or Pwned, but I am trying to find what are the most leaked email providers. In other words if you receive an email from “@gmail.com” what is the probability that it has been leaked and potentially compromised ? Again I cannot answer to such a question since I do not have the total amount of “@gmail.com” accounts all around the word, but I think it might be a nice indicator to find out what are the most leaked email domain names., The most leaked emails come from “yahoo.com”, “gmail.com”, “aol.com” and “hotmail.com”. This is quite interesting since we are mostly facing personal emails providers (domains) rather then professional emails providers (such as company.com). So apparently, attackers are mostly focused in targeting people rather then companies (maybe attacking not professional websites and/or distributing malware to people rather then companies domain names). Another interesting data to know is about the unique leaked email domain names: 4426, so far !, Finally, it would be great to know from what sources data is coming from ! At such a point I have no evidences of what I am going to write about, but I made some deductions from the data leaked structure. The following image shows collection-1 structure., Each folder holds .TXT files which have names that look like domain names. Some of those are really domain names (tested), some other are on-sale right now, and many other seem to just look like a domain, but I had no evidence of them. Anyway, I decided to assume that the file names looking like domain names are the domain from which the attacker leaked information. So, having such in mind we might deduce where the attacker extracted the data (username and passwords) and perform a personal evaluation about the leaked information., Are you interested in Marco Ramilli’ conclusions? Give a look at his post: , Pierluigi Paganini, (SecurityAffairs – hacking, collection #1), ,

6913_74317

Security experts from ESET discovered that an APT group tracked as BlackTech is using code-signing certificates stolen from Taiwanese-based tech firm D-Link and the security company Changing Information Technology Inc., According to the experts, the cyber espionage group is highly skilled and most of its victims are in the East Asia region, particularly Taiwan., The attackers used the certificates to sign the code of the Plead backdoor that has been in the wild since at least 2012., The Plead backdoor was used by threat actors to exfiltrate confidential documents from Taiwanese government agencies and private organizations., “We spotted this malware campaign when our systems marked several files as suspicious. Interestingly, the flagged files were digitally signed using a valid D-Link Corporation code-signing certificate.” reads the analysis published by ESET., “The exact same certificate had been used to sign non-malicious D-Link software; therefore, the certificate was likely stolen.”, , ESET reported the abuses to the D-Link that revoked two certificates on July 3 and informed its customers that most of them should not be affected by the revocation., “D-Link recently discovered that two of its code signing certificates were misappropriated. Upon discovery, we immediately decommissioned the certificates and investigated the issue.” reads the advisory published by D-Link., “Like several other companies in Asia, D-Link was victimized by a highly active cyber espionage group which has been using PLEAD Malware to steal confidential information from companies and organizations based in East Asia, particularly in Taiwan, Japan, and Hong Kong. The two affected D-Link certificates were revoked, effective July 3rd, 2018. New certificates have been issued to resolve this problem.”, Taiwan-based Changing Information Technology Inc. revoked the abused certificate on July 4, but according to ESET, the hackers continued to use it to spread the malware., ESET identified two different malware families that were abusing the stolen certificate, the Plead backdoor, and a related password stealer component that could gather saved passwords from Google Chrome, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Microsoft Outlook, and Mozilla Firefox., The signed Plead backdoor are highly obfuscated with junk code, it was used to download from a remote server or opens from the local disk a small encrypted binary blob. This blob includes an encrypted shellcode that downloads the final Plead backdoor module., Why do the attackers steal digital certificates?, Attackers use to sign the malicious code with digital certificates in the attempt to make the malware appearing like legitimate applications bypassing security measures., The most popular case of a malware abusing code-signing certificates was the Stuxnet worm, that misused digital certificates stolen from RealTek and JMicron., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – PLEAD Malware,  BlackTech)

1639_30225

A new strain of the BASHLITE malware was detected by experts at Trend Micro shortly after the public disclosure of the ShellShock bug., The malware, named ELF_BASHLITE.A (ELF_FLOODER.W), includes the payload of the ShellShock exploit code and it had been used by threat actors to run distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks., The new variant of the ELF_BASHLITE.A is able to infect devices were running BusyBox, a software that provides several Unix tools in a single executable file. BusyBox is specific embedded operating systems. Many routers and other network appliances run the software to advantage maintenance activities., “we observed that recent samples of BASHLITE (detected by Trend Micro as ELF_BASHLITE.SMB) scans the network for devices/machines running on BusyBox, and logs in using a set of usernames and passwords (see figure 4 below). Once a connection is established, it runs the command to download and run bin.sh and bin2.sh scripts, gaining control over the Busybox system.” Rhena Inocencio, threat response engineer at Trend Micro, wrote in a blog post, The new variant of the BASHLITE malware is able to identify systems running BusyBox software and hijack them. The attack scenario is very simple, the malicious code first scans the network searching for the application and attempts to access them by using a set of credentials from a predefined dictionary. The list of passwords includes “root,” “admin,” “12345,” “pass,” “password” and “123456.”, ,  , Once the malware has gained the access to the software, it runs the command to download and run a couple of scripts bin.sh and bin2.sh scripts, to gaining control over the Busybox system., “Once a connection is established, it runs the command to download and run bin.sh and bin2.sh scripts, gaining control over the Busybox system. BusyBox is built on top of the Linux kernel and used by small devices such as routers. Remote attackers can possibly maximize their control on affected devices by deploying other components or malicious software into the system depending on their motive.”, Trend Micro invites administrators to change the default settings for their network devices and disable remote shell, if possible, to avoid its exploitation., In October, experts at The Malware Must Die detected numerous attack worldwide exploiting the Bash Bug flaw to spread the Mayhem botnet., The experts sustain that attacks using the exploit could top 1 billion in a short time, for this reason principal IT firms started releasing software updates to patch their solution and avoid the exploitation of the ShellShock flaw., Unfortunately, there are many reasons that could hinder the patching of many systems that remain vulnerable to this kind of attack., Last illustrious victim in order of time was BrowserStack, the cross-browser testing service; one of its servers was compromised using a ShellShock exploit that allowed attackers to access customer data., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  ShellShock, BASHLITE)

417_10804

This time I desire to speak about an interesting initiative of Group-IB company, a resident of the Moscow-based Skolkovo Foundation, that has received a grant in the amount of 30m rubles (approximately $966,000) for the development of a global counter-cybercrime system., The funds is co-financed by the Skolkovo Foundation which has provided 21m rubles ($676,000), and LETA Group also the Group-IB’s controlling company., I’m following the company since the pubblication of an interesting report on cybercrime activities conduced by the Russian mafia and other criminal organizations, the numbers are impressive, the figures are doubled in 2011., The official estimates says that the global cyber crime market was worth $12.5 billion in 2011, $4,5 billion of the market are related to Russian speaking cybercrime market and $2.3 billion took place in Russia alone. Related to last years the grow is doubled., , The report provides a clear picture of the cybercrime market providing an interesting perspective on analysis, cybercrime studied as part of a local economies of a region., What is the system for crime prevention to be built?, The project, named The CyberCop system, is a set of tools that allow users to detect anomalous activities in cyber space and to neutralize the cyber threats which generated them. CyberCop requires for its realization around 1.5 years and it will support the crime detection and also cyber threats prevention thanks a sophisticated system of “early warning”., The system is not only oriented to Russian market, cybercrime doesn’t know boundaries, that’s why the company is orienting its offers to law enforcement, private companies and financial institutions., I have contacted Andrey Komarov, Head of International projects, at Group-IB submitting that explained me that the CyberCop system has a modular architecture that will be grant future evolution of the platforms to respond to incoming cyber threats., The modules that compose CyberCop are:, Following an abstract of my talk with Andrey Komarov:, Q: What are unique selling points (USP) of CyberCop? A: The most important part is botnets intelligence module and data-mining techniques for making correlation of potential fraud activities and cybercrime., Q: How do you plan to develop CyberCop in plan of global project? A: Group-IB plans to make flexible integration for e-commerce, banks, online-shops, dating web-sites, and etc., it will help to make CyberCop world known platform with deep filtering engine. The main idea of the project is to gather the data of different sources about new cyberthreats and challenges., Komarov also added:, “CyberCop has special botnets intelligence module, which helps us to agregiate the data about different security incidents. For now, we have prevented more then 2 000 thefts on online-banking of russian, EU banks and e-commerce. We are working on the integration for online-bankings of famous vendors.”, “We plan to provide special interfacie to LEA of different countries and make for them special secure zone, which will be independent from all the data we have to make their work secure and efficient.”, I find the project really interesting, technology gives great opportunities to crime but provide also the instruments to try to prevent and mitigate its menace … Group-IB is in the right direction., Pierluigi Paganini

6298_68785

Adobe has rolled out an emergency patch to address two Flash player vulnerabilities after North Korea’s APT group was spotted exploiting one of them in targeted attacks., Last week, South Korea’s Internet & Security Agency (KISA) warned of a Flash zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2018-4878) that has reportedly been exploited in attacks by North Korea’s hackers., , According to the alert published by the KISA, the vulnerability affects the latest Flash Player version 28.0.0.137 and earlier., The zero-day vulnerability could be exploited by an attack by tricking victims into opening a document, web page or email containing a specially crafted Flash file., “A zero-day vulnerability has been found in Adobe Flash Player. An attacker may be able to convince a user to open a Microsoft Office document, web page, or spam mail containing a Flash file,” reads the advisory published by the Korean CERT., According to the researcher Simon Choi the Flash Player zero-day has been exploited by North Korea since mid-November 2017. The attackers exploited the zero-day vulnerability in attacks aimed at South Korean individuals involved in research activity on North Korea., Hackers exploited the vulnerability to deliver a malware, in the image shared by Choi on Twitter shows that the exploit has been delivered via malicious Microsoft Excel files., Flash 0day vulnerability that made by North Korea used from mid-November 2017. They attacked South Koreans who mainly do research on North Korea. (no patch yet) pic.twitter.com/bbjg1CKmHh, — Simon Choi (@issuemakerslab) February 1, 2018, , Cisco and FireEye have both been investigating, and warn that a North Korean group that they have been following for a while are likely behind this latest attack. Called TEMP.Reaper by FireEye and Group 123 by Cisco, the group with ties to North Korea was very active in 2017., Adobe addressed the bug with an emergency patch that also fixed another remote code execution vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2018-4877, that was discovered by researchers at Qihoo 360 Vulcan Team., “Adobe has released security updates for Adobe Flash Player for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Chrome OS. These updates address critical vulnerabilities that could lead to remote code execution in Adobe Flash Player 28.0.0.137 and earlier versions.  Successful exploitation could potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system.”  reads the security advisory published by Adobe.  , “Adobe is aware of a report that an exploit for CVE-2018-4878 exists in the wild, and is being used in limited, targeted attacks against Windows users.  These attacks leverage Office documents with embedded malicious Flash content distributed via email.”, The two vulnerabilities are rated critical for all supported operating systems, the unique exception is the Linux build of Adobe Flash Player Desktop Runtime., There have been over 1,000 Adobe Flash vulnerabilities since it was released. Designed to make website development easier and providing additional features not supported by standard web browsers, it also adds complexity and a much broader attack surface. Web browsers no longer support Flash by default, but users often re-enable it for convenience. And just having it installed on your system may be enough for vulnerabilities like these ones to be exploited., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Adobe Flash Player, 8)

6134_67243

Researcher Ashutosh Barot has discovered a critical CSRF vulnerability in phpMyAdmin that could be exploited by attackers to perform malicious operations like drop tables and delete records., phpMyAdmin developers released the version 4.7.7 that addresses the CSRF vulnerability found by Barot., “By deceiving a user to click on a crafted URL, it is possible to perform harmful database operations such as deleting records, dropping/truncating tables etc.” reads the security advisory published by phpMyAdmin developers., An attacker could trick a database admin into performing database operations like DROP TABLE using CSRF with devastating consequences., “In this case, a CSRF vulnerability allows an attacker to send a crafted URL to the victim and if she (authenticated user) clicks it, the victim may perform a DROP TABLE query on her database. phpMyAdmin team considers this issue as critical vulnerability.” reads the analysis published by Ashutosh Barot., This means that an attacker can create a crafted URL and trick the victims having an active session into performing dangerous operations without their knowledge., The expert discovered a feature in phpMyAdmin that uses GET requests for Database operations such as DROP TABLE table_name, this means that it is possible for an attacker to trick a database admin into clicking a button and perform a database query of the attacker’s choice., ,  , Ashutosh Barot also discovered that the URL for performing database operations was being saved in the browser history, an attacker can access them to gain some information about the database., “Any query you execute by clicking insert, DROP, etc., button as shown in above image . The URL will contain database name and table name as GET request was used to perform DB Operations. URLs are stored at various places such as browser history, SIEM logs, Firewall Logs, ISP Logs, etc. this URL is always visible at client side, it can be a serious issue if you are not using SSL (some information about your previous queries were stored in someone’s logs!)” continues the analysis. , , The expert pointed out that the CSRF attack worked even when the user was authenticated in cPanel and phpMyAdmin was closed after use., The vulnerability is ranked as Medium severity because its exploitation needs the user interaction., Below a video PoC published by Barot: , All versions prior 4.7.7 are affected by the vulnerability, users must update their installations or apply the following patches:, The following commits have been made on the 4.7 branch to fix this issue:, The following commits have been made on the 4.8 branch to fix this issue:, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – phpMyAdmin, CSRF)

6420_70007

The investigation started in September 2015, after the group launched a DDoS attack on international online dating service AnastasiaDate demanding $10,000 for stopping the assault. The site of the company was taken down for hours., “Other attacks targeted online stores, payment systems, as well as websites offering betting, lottery and gaming services.” continues Group-IB., “In particular, the victims of the Ukrainian fraudsters included Stafford Associated, an American company leasing data center and hosting facilities, and PayOnline online payment service. The average ransom amount demanded by the criminals ranged from $1,000 to $10,000.”, , The cybersecurity experts at Group-IB identified the attackers and linked the group to another attack powered by two Ukrainian individuals, Gayk Grishkyan and Inna Yatsenko. According to the investigators the duo had also previously targeted American leasing company Stafford Associated and the PayOnline payment service., The two suspects later contacted the online dating service to demand ransom and threaten new DDoS attacks., “In March 2017, the hackers’ apartments and offices were searched, and their computers and mobile phones confiscated. The forensic analysis that the data stored on the confiscated devices constituted an irrefutable evidence of Yatsenko and Grishkyan’s involvement in the extortion cases of 2015 and 2016.” concluded the announcement., Now a court pleaded guilty to the crimes the two members of the DDoS crime gang and sentenced them to a five-year conditional sentence., “We are satisfied with the successful outcome of the prosecution and the blow we have struck against cybercrime in Ukraine. The collaboration with our security partners has guaranteed the integrity of our services and helped reinforce our defenses for the future.” said AnastasiaDate’s US-based director, Lewis Ferro., “It has been of the utmost importance to our international partners. It is another example of AnastasiaDate’s trustworthiness and diligence when it comes to member security, tackling fraud, and preventing criminal activity.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – DDoS crime gang, hacking)

3663_46708

According to the German BR24 News Agency, a computer virus was discovered at the Gundremmingen nuclear power plant in Germany., Based on the initial assessment conducted by the experts, the virus didn’t affect any critical parts of the power plant and wouldn’t pose any critical threat. The audit revealed that, unlike Stuxnet, the virus wasn’t created to target power plants but was a more commonly seen variant., “After the discovery of malicious software on a computer in Gundremmingen emphasizes the operator, the control of sensitive areas was not affected. A computerized expert hand warns of belittling: viruses could jeopardize the data security of the NPP.” states a post published by BR24., , One of the possible infection scenarios is that the virus may have been carried into the network at the Gundremmingen nuclear plant on a USB an employee used on his office computer, which would be the real source of the contamination., IT expert Thomas Wolf commented on the incident, saying that malware threats exist even in systems that are isolated from the Internet and that any process where data is exchanged can be an effective source of virus contagion. Wolf also pointed out that the virus could easily spread even in environments that have a “comprehensive virus protection and sophisticated security management”., In this incident, the virus was discovered in the system at the Gundremmingen nuclear plant that transported used reactor fuel to the warehouse., “Systems that control the nuclear process are analog thus isolated from cyber threats. These systems are designed with security features that protects them against manipulation.” Said Tobias Schmidt, spokesman for the Gundremmingen nuclear plant., Cyber attacks against nuclear power plants and industrial control systems are probably at the top of a long list of potential disasters that can be caused by hackers., Until now Stuxnet, which targeted nuclear power plants in Iran, was the most widely publicized threat against such systems. This incident shows however that threats against nuclear power plants are not limited to targeted attacks, but may also be caused by more common attacks. The malware was discovered in the part of the plant named “Blok B” which luckily was isolated from any radioactive functions., In December 2014 the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) reported an attack targeting a steel mill in Germany where resulted in physical damage to the furnace., The name of the steel mill wasn’t disclosed, but the incident clearly showed that attacks targeting industrial controls could have important results., Different from more open conflict-style cyber attacks such as the ones we have recently seen against Ukraine’s electricity infrastructure, these attacks seem to be the actions of smaller and possibly civilian threat actors. Yet, the threat is very real and based on the increasing number of incidents involving industrial control systems it looks like the current security approach of “computerized but isolated from the internet” is not enough., Industrial control systems that use computers usually are “protected” by a topology where they are not connected to the Internet., This approach seems effective at first, but both, Stuxnet and this incident, where systems that aren’t connected to the Internet were targeted show that additional measure are required., According to a recently released report, Germany is not adequately equipped to prevent terrorist attacks in its nuclear plants., According to the Deutsche Presse-Agentur (DPA) news agency, the report was presented by Oda Becker, an independent expert on nuclear plants., This is of course extremely distressing, especially in the light of the recent tragic events in Belgium with substantial casualties., The report was brought to public attention at the German Federation for the Environment and Nature Conservation (BUND) Congress, where concerns were expressed towards protecting citizens from the catastrophic consequences of another terrorist attack., Cyber attacks are one of the options for a terrorist plot, coordinates cyber attacks on nuclear plants would have dramatic repercussion on the Homeland security of any government that needs to address this risk in the national cyber stratgy., In April, in the light of the recent events with the terrorist attacks, the governments of the US and the UK to take measures, as well as try to prepare as best as they can. As part of this preparation, the two countries have decided to simulate cyber attacks on nuclear plants to test how safe this environment is proven to be., Written by:  Alper Başaran, About the Author: Alper Başaran is a Hacker and Penetration Tester – Buccaneer of the Interwebs, he owns the Turkish blog alperbasaran.com., Alper Basaran provides business process focused and goal oriented penetration testing services to his customers. Based in Turkey he has expanded his operations to the Middle East., , Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Gundremmingen nuclear plant, malware)

3817_47884

Vulnerable SCADA and industrial control systems represent the entry point in critical infrastructure for hacking attacks. In many cases, patch management of these systems is very complex and in some specific scenarios known flaws could not be fixed for various technical reasons., Recently and ‘unpatchable’ vulnerabilities have been discovered in an industrial control system (ICS) used in many power plants. The bad news is that the flaw has been publicly disclosed and the exploit code has been already released., The flaw could be exploited remotely and allow attackers to gain control of the target network, due to the risk related the exploitation the US Computer Emergency Response Team is planning to release a specific alert., The security researcher Maxim Rupp reported a flaw in the Environmental Systems Corporation 8832 data controller for versions 3.02 and older, it has been coded as CVE-2016-4502 and ranked as a high-severity vulnerability due to the impact on the targeted infrastructure., “Independent researcher Maxim Rupp has identified data controller vulnerabilities in the Environmental Systems Corporation (ESC) 8832 Data Controller. ESC acknowledged that Balazs Makany reported these vulnerabilities on February 18, 2015. ESC has stated the ESC 8832 Data Controller has no available code space to make any additional security patches; so, a firmware update is not possible.” reads the notice issued by the US-CERT. “ESC has released an advisory that identifies compensating controls to reduce risk of exploitation of the reported vulnerabilities., , The US-CERT is warning that an attacker with a low skill would be able to exploit these vulnerabilities as demonstrated in the PoC code published by Balazs Makany in the Exploit DataBase., As explained in the advisory the flaw could not be fixed so organizations using the flawed devices need to substitute it or have to restrict remote access monitoring the attack surface., Below the mitigation actions suggested by US-CERT:, “ESC’s recommendation for mitigation is to upgrade the device. Alternatively, block Port 80 with a firewall in front of the device. Another alternative is to educate operators and users to not use the web interface for device management, because there are other means to manage the device. A security advisory is available to ESC users on the ESC support web site (login required):”, www.envirosys.com(link is external)., 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 – ICS, SCADA)

7160_76134

Microsoft Patch Tuesday updates for September 2018 address 61 vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer (IE), Edge, ChakraCore, Azure, Hyper-V, Windows components, .NET Framework, SQL Server, and Microsoft Office and Office Services. Of the 62 CVEs., 17 flaws are rated as Critical, 43 are rated Important, and just one is rated as Moderate in severity., The Microsoft Patch Tuesday updates for September 2018 includes the zero-day flaw recently disclosed by a researcher via Twitter., The vulnerability was publicly disclosed on August 27 by the security expert “@SandboxEscaper,” the researcher also published the exploit code for the vulnerability., The expert did not report the vulnerability to Microsoft before the public disclosure forcing the tech giant to rapidly prepare a patch., The issue is a Windows zero-day privilege escalation vulnerability affecting Microsoft’s Windows Task Scheduler that could be exploited by a local attacker or malicious program to obtain system privileges on the vulnerable system., The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2018-8440, was exploited shortly after its public disclosure by a threat actor in attacks in the wild., The threat actor, tracked as PowerPool, leveraged the Windows zero-day exploit in targeted attacks against a small number of users located in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Ukraine, Chile, India, Russia, the Philippines, and Poland., According to ESET, attackers have modified the publicly available exploit source code and recompiled it., Microsoft Patch Tuesday updates for September 2018 also addressed three vulnerabilities that were made public before fixes were released, but differently from the CVE-2018-8440 flaw they were not exploited in attacks., The CVE-2018-8475 Windows Remote Code Execution flaw, rated as critical, exists because the operating system does not properly handle specially crafted image files. An attack could exploit the flaw to execute arbitrary code by tricking victims into downloading a specially crafted image file., “A remote code execution vulnerability exists when Windows does not properly handle specially crafted image files. An attacker who successfully exploited the vulnerability could execute arbitrary code.” reads the advisory published by Microsoft., “To exploit the vulnerability, an attacker would have to convince a user to download an image file. The update addresses the vulnerability by properly handling image files.”, The flaw is trivial to exploit, experts warn of possible exploitation in attacks in the next weeks., “This CVE could allow an attacker to execute code on a target system just by convincing someone to view an image. That’s all the user interaction needed. Open the wrong image – even through a web browser – and code executes, making this a browse-and-own scenario.”  reads a blog post published by Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI)., “Microsoft provides no information on where this is public, but given the severity of the issue and the relative ease of exploitation, expect this one to find its way into exploit kits quickly,”, Another issue previously disclosed and addressed by Microsoft Patch Tuesday updates for September 2018 is the CVE-2018-8457., The vulnerability affects Microsoft’s web browsers and could be exploited by an attacker to execute arbitrary code by tricking the victims into visiting a malicious website or opening a specially crafted Office document., “A remote code execution vulnerability exists in the way the scripting engine handles objects in memory in Microsoft browsers. The vulnerability could corrupt memory in such a way that an attacker could execute arbitrary code in the context of the current user. An attacker who successfully exploited the vulnerability could gain the same user rights as the current user. If the current user is logged on with administrative user rights, an attacker who successfully exploited the vulnerability could take control of an affected system. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights.” reads the advisory published by Microsoft., “In a web-based attack scenario, an attacker could host a specially crafted website designed to exploit the vulnerability through a Microsoft browser and then convince a user to view the website. An attacker could also embed an ActiveX control marked “safe for initialization” in an application or Microsoft Office document that hosts the browser rendering engine.”, The third publicly disclosed vulnerability is a denial-of-service (DoS) flaw (CVE-2018-8409) rated as an “important” that affects .NET Core, ASP.NET Core and the System.IO.Pipelines component., “A denial of service vulnerability exists when System.IO.Pipelines improperly handles requests. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could cause a denial of service against an application that is leveraging System.IO.Pipelines. The vulnerability can be exploited remotely, without authentication.” reads the advisory., “A remote unauthenticated attacker could exploit this vulnerability by providing specially crafted requests to the application.”, Microsoft also fixed the CVE-2018-0965 and CVE-2018-8439 flaws in the Windows Hyper-V, both could be exploited by an attacker with access to a guest virtual machine to execute code on the underlying operating system., Adobe also fixed 10 vulnerabilities in Flash Player and ColdFusion, the good news is that none is severe., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Microsoft Patch Tuesday, CVE-2018-8440)

5883_64958

Do you use an iPhone? If yes, there is probably something that you need to know about it!, The Austrian developer and Google engineer, Felix Krause, has discovered a serious privacy issue in Apple iPhone that could be exploited by iOS app developers to silently take your photos and record your live video by enabling both front and back camera., The iPhone users will never receive any notification from the device, technical details were shared by Krause in a blog post published Wednesday., “iOS users often grant camera access to an app soon after they download it (e.g., to add an avatar or send a photo). These apps, like a messaging app or any news-feed-based app, can easily track the users face, take pictures, or live stream the front and back camera, without the user’s consent.” wrote Krause., According to Krause, the issue is the direct consequence of the way Apple software handles camera access. Today almost any application, including WhatsApp, Facebook, and Snapchat, requests access to your camera to allow users to take a photo within the app., Once the users granted camera permission, a developer could perform the following operations:, , It is enough to enable camera access just one time when the app asks for permission to gain full access to the camera without requiring any LED light or notification, it is scaring., “All without indicating that your phone is recording you and your surrounding, no LEDs, no light or any other kind of indication.” continues the developer., Krause developed a proof-of-concept app only to demonstrate how a malicious app could silently abuse such permissions to take pictures every second or even live stream video of the surrounding environment., “This project is a proof of concept and should not be used in production. The goal is to highlight a privacy loophole that can be abused by iOS apps.” continues the developer., Below a video PoC of the issue, which shows how the demo app takes photographs of the users using it every second. The app developed by the expert uses a facial recognition system to detect the owner is using it., Krause urges Apple to introduce a way to mitigate the issue, for example by granting only temporary permissions to access the camera., Another way to mitigate the issue is the implementation a warning light or a mechanism to notify to the iPhone owner that their camera in currently used by an application., Waiting for a fix, Krause suggests to protect yourself by covering the camera, exactly like Mark Zuckerberg and former FBI Director James Comey do., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – iPhone, camera)

6815_73555

A new vulnerability tracked as LazyFP (CVE-2018-3665) involving side channel speculative execution affects Intel CPUs, like previous ones it could be exploited by hackers to access sensitive information from the affected system., The vulnerability was discovered by Julian Stecklina from Amazon Germany, Thomas Prescher from Cyberus Technology and Zdenek Sojka from SYSGO AG., The vulnerability resides in the floating point unit (FPU) that is used by the operating system when switching between processes. It is used to save the current context (state of the current process and registries) and restores the context of the new process., “System software may opt to utilize Lazy FP state restore instead of eager save and restore of the state upon a context switch. Lazy restored states are potentially vulnerable to exploits where one process may infer register values of other processes through a speculative execution side channel that infers their value,” reads the advisory published by Intel., There are two types of switching, Lazy FPU and Eager FPU, the former has better performance on older systems., Security researchers discovered recently that if the Lazy method if vulnerable to attacks that could expose FPU state data, which can contain sensitive information such as cryptographic keys., “The register state of the floating point unit (FPU), which consists of the AVX, MMX and SSE register sets, can be leaked across protection domain boundaries. This includes leaking across process- and virtual machine boundaries.” reads the analysis published by Thomas Prescher, Julian Stecklina, Jacek Galowicz, “The FPU state may contain sensitive information such as cryptographic keys.”, According to the expert, the CVE-2018-3665 vulnerability is similar to Meltdown  Variant 3a., Intel confirms the CVE-2018-3665 vulnerability affects Core processors, but it claims the issue has been addressed by operating system and hypervisor software developers for many years, Intel urges vendors that still haven’t fixed the issue to do it as soon as possible by releasing necessary security updates., Lazy FPU doesn’t affect systems using AMD or ARM processors, while Microsoft confirmed that “Lazy restore” is enabled by default in all versions of the operating system and cannot be disabled. Customers using the Azure platform are not affected by the problem., , Microsoft has yet to say exactly which versions of Windows are vulnerable, but the company noted that “Lazy restore” is enabled by default in all versions of the operating system and cannot be disabled. The tech giant assured customers that VMs running in Azure are not at risk., “Is Lazy restore enabled by default and can it be disabled?, Lazy restore is enabled by default in Windows and cannot be disabled.” reads the FAQs published by Microsoft., Recent versions of Linux kernel use Eager FPU this means that are not affected, while for older processors the flaw can be mitigated by enabling Eager FPU rebooting the kernel with the “eagerfpu=on” option., AWS told its customers that its infrastructure is not affected., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – LazyFP , Intel)

3707_47000

Last week pro-ISIS hacker group who is calling itself the Islamic State Hacking Division has published a “Kill list” of dozens of American military personnel purportedly involved in drone strikes against the IS in Syria and Iraq., , The hackers leaked online personal details of more than 70 US personnel., “Kill them wherever they are, knock on their doors and behead them, stab them, shoot them in the face or bomb them.”, The intelligence experts that analyzed the Kill list published by the Islamic State Hacking Division confirmed that its content has been gathered from publicly available sources and isn’t the result of any security breach., The hackers of the Islamic State Hacking Division claimed to have infiltrated a mole in Britain’s Ministry of Defence and threatened to publish “secret intelligence” information., “In our next leak we may even disclose secret intelligence the Islamic State has just received from a source the brothers in the UK have spent some time acquiring from the Ministry of Defence in London as we slowly and secretly infiltrate England and the USA online and off.” states a tweet published by the group., “While we don’t comment on cyber threats, Britain is a world leader in cyber security and we are investing more than ever before in the UK’s capabilities to protect our national interest. Our increasing defence budget means that we can stay ahead of our adversaries in cyberspace while also investing in conventional capabilities.” said a Ministry of Defence spokesperson. , A Pentagon spokesperson, the major Adrian Rankine-Galloway, explained that the US intelligence is adopting the necessary measures to protect its staff., “We are aware that Isil Isis and other terrorist organisations have periodically purported to release personal information on US service members and military members of our coalition partners involved in operations against Isil. We take proactive measures to protect our service members and their families and keep them apprised of changes to the security situation.” said major Adrian Rankine-Galloway. “We will not comment on the authenticity of the information in question, and this will have no effect on operations against Isil,”, According to the Sun, the Intelligence experts fear a possible attack against the UK, information circulating on the Internet reports the terror group could use Ireland as a base of operations to hit the Britain., Members of the ISIS could launch plots against Britain exploiting lax border controls in Ireland, The Telegraph cited the declaration of an unnamed minister that confirmed it is easy to cross the border from the Republic., Source The Mirror UK, “There is an issue to do with the open border because if you can get into southern Ireland you have got border-free access in to the UK.” explained the minister. “So someone could come from abroad or be radicalised in Ireland and move easily across the border in to the UK.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Islamic State Hacking Division, UK  Ministry of Defence)

2509_38446

Security experts have discovered and analyzed the activities of a financially motivated APT group, dubbed Morpho and Wild Neutron, that has targeted a large number of high profile companies worldwide., According to the analysis published by Kaspersky Lab, 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 focus of these attacks suggests this is not a nation-state sponsored actor. However, the use of zero-days, multi-platform malware as well as other techniques makes us believe it’s a powerful entity engaged in espionage, possibly for economic reasons,” said Kaspersky, The Morpho team exploited a Flash Player zero-day in its attacks and digitally signed its malicious code by using stolen Acer Incorporated digital certificates., The hackers were able to remain undetected within the targeted infrastructure for nearly a year., The criminal crew also targeted Bitcoin companies, law firms, real estate and investment companies, individual users, and numerous firm in the IT and healthcare industries., Kaspersky reported that the Morpho group infected organizations with its Wild Neutron backdoor in 11 countries, including France, Russia, Switzerland, Germany, Austria, Palestine, Slovenia, Kazakhstan, UAE, Algeria and the United States., “A powerful threat actor known as “Wild Neutron” (also known as “Jripbot” and “Morpho“) has been active since at least 2011, infecting high profile companies for several years by using a combination of exploits, watering holes and multi-platform malware.”, , According to Symantec the Morpho group infected systems in a larger number of countries, they have discovered a total of 49 victims spread across 20 countries since March 2012., “Morpho is a group of highly capable, professional attackers who perform corporate espionage with a laser-like focus on operational security. The team is a major threat to organizations that have large volumes of proprietary intellectual property, all of which is at risk of being stolen by this group for monetary gain.” states the report published by Symantec., The attackers were mainly focused on the theft of intellectual property of high-profile victims, Symantec believes that Morpho is financially motivated., There information collected by the experts at Symantec revealed that this group may be made up of native English speakers, which are familiar with Western culture, and it is likely they operate from an Eastern Standard Time (EST) time zone., Researchers at Kaspersky confirmed to have discovered a Romanian language string in some of the malware samples they have analyzed, and also a string that is the Latin transcription of a Russian word., The Morpho group used several hacking tools including custom-malware, the experts noticed a predilection for the backdoor Trojans Pintsized (the variant for OS X) and Jripbot (the variant for Windows)., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Morpho, hackers)

2320_37045

CryptoLocker, CoinVault, and TeslaCrypt are the names of some of the most dreaded ransomware that infected million of users worldwide. The extortion is a very common practice in the cyber criminal underground and ransomware are a powerful instrument for criminal crews to  rapidly cash-out their efforts., In several cases, victims opted to pay a fee to cyber criminals in order to restore their files., The good news in that a security researcher has compiled a ransomware removal and rescue kit that could help victims to sanitize their infected system and unlock encrypted files., The security professional Jada Cyrus has compiled a “Ransomware Rescue Kit“, also known as “Ransomware Removal Kit” and published it online. The Ransomware Removal Kit tool is free, the idea behind the application is to provide a unique instrument to support decryption tools for different strains of ransomware:, “I have compiled this kit to be used for security professionals and system administrators alike, in order to help streamline the process of responding to ransomware infections. Some of the information in this kit is obsolete due to the rapidly evolving nature of ransomware. I will do my best to keep it up to date with the help of the malware community at large.” wrote Cyrus., One of the most important suggestions to follow in case of ransomware infection it to avoid paying the ransom., “You should never pay the ransom,” Cyrus says. “This will only reinforce this type of attack. According to most security intelligence reports, criminal enterprises are already making large profits from ransomware.”, , The Ransomware Removal Kit includes abilities of the following ransomware removal tools:, The first response to a ransomware infection consists in the disconnection of the machine from the internal network to prevent the diffusion of the malicious agent. Be sure to create a copy of the disk that could be restored in case of problems with the ransomware removal kit., The second step is the identification of the strain of malware that caused the infection, then the user can try to decrypt files and remove the malicious agent., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Ransomware Removal kit, cybercrime)

172_4110

The Utah Department of Technology Services (DTS) has announced that the Utah Department of Health (UDOH) was victim of an hack. On Monday the server that hosts Medicaid was hacked, the news of the breach has been published on Wednesday. In a first time the entity of the data breach has been estimated in 181,604 records of Medicaid and Children’s Health Insurance Plan (CHIP), exposing personal information. Around 25,096 ot the total record stolen appear had their Social Security numbers (SSNs) compromised.  Immediately the response of the law enforcement,  including the FBI, that has started the investigation on the incident., Unfortunately, a review of the estimated scale of the breach showed a bleak landscape, the number of records has grown from 180.000 to 780.000, what is really serious is that approximately 500,000 victims had sensitive personal information stolen and 280,000 victims had their Social Security numbers (SSNs) compromised., The attack conduced on March 30, 2012 seems to be originated from Eastern Europe, the target was a server used as storage for client’s claims, each of them containing sensible information like client names, addresses, birth dates, SSNs, physician’s names, national provider identifiers, addresses, tax identification numbers, and procedure codes designed for billing purposes. The data related to customer’s claims have been exposed that a misconfiguration of the authentication process that allows attackers to access to the information., , DTS has discovered the branched server and has turned off the server. The incident response of the company has restored the correct configuration for the corrupted server and a global check has been done on the entire infrastructure., Who are the real victims of the hack?, The victims are likely to be customers who have visited a health care provider in the four months before the breach, some may be Medicaid or CHIP recipients,  others are individuals whose health care providers were unsure as to their status as Medicaid recipients., The situation is really critical, the UDOH must manage the internet before the damages will increase, preserving those clients whose personal information was stolen during the attack, giving priority to the customers whose SSNs were compromised.  The company is suggesting to the Medicaid clients to monitor their credit and bank accounts. Victims who had their SSNs stolen will receive one year of free credit monitoring services., “We understand clients are worried about who may have accessed their personal information, and that many of them feel violated by having their information compromised,”, UDOH Deputy Director Michael Hales said in a statement., “But we also hope they understand we are doing everything we can to protect them from further harm.”, As usual after incidents like the one we are discussing, the accounts exposed may be a victim of further attacks such as phishing-type attacks, for this reason the company has invited customers to be wary of all kinds of communication that could seems to be sent from the institutions affected. The users must be alerted signaling any suspect situation that could be observed in the days after the attack. DTS has started the process of identifying these additional victims, and the state will be sending letters directly to them as they are identified., Official communication of the organization on the web site says:, Possible victims should be aware that nobody from DTS or UDOH will be contacting them and asking for personal information over the phone or via e-email regarding this incident. Scammers may attempt to reach victims in this manner. We strongly recommend that people do not provide private information in response to telephone or e-mail contacts they have not initiated., Yesterday, April 10th the Utah Department of Health (UDOH) has established a new hotline for concerned citizens to call for information on the data breach that compromised peoples’ personal information. The experts believe that the number of 780,000 account compromised is just an estimation and only in the next days we will have more detailed info on the breach.  Events like this pose troubling questions about the effectiveness of measures to protect such critical information. A data breach can have a direct devastating impact on the company victim, but what is much more worrying is the damage done to the customer difficult to quantify, especially in critical fields such as medicine disclosure of information concerning the health of an individual may lead to discrimination irremediably compromising the experience of the patient., Despite knowing that nothing is safe, it must be said that unfortunately still many structures managing sensitive information in too shallow, I am of course referring to the specific case for which investigations are underway, but the real nature faced by sectors such as health. In Italy the problem is dramatic, we are in disarray and similar incidents could occur any day. The awareness of the threat is nothing, the economic crisis and an obtuse and arrogant ruling class have made the situation untenable, and the expense will be ordinary citizens., But how much does a data breach?, According The annual Ponemon Institute Cost of Data Breach Study for the first time in last seven years, the cost of data breach actually decreased. The average per capita cost of a data breach is decreased from $214 to  $194 per compromised record., , Another interesting signal is provided by total average cost of data breach trend that is decreased from $7.2 million to $5.5 million respect last year, this suggests that organizations are making significant improvements in how they prevent and respond to a data breach., , The cost reduction according the Study is related to the improving the response to the incident. The Study has addressed has most affected sector Communications, Pharmaceutical, Financial and Healthcare, negligent employees and malicious attacks are most often the cause of the data breach. Om the sample of 49 companies studied, thirty-nine percent of incidents involved a negligent employee or contractor, 37 percent concerned a malicious or criminal attack, and 24 percent involved system glitches including a combination of both IT and business process failures., , Analyzing the main causes related to criminals attacks we can note that the majority is related to the activities of malicious insider or the effect of any kind of malware (e.g. viruses, malware, worms, trojans )., In conclusion we can see a response from the institutions and organizations to incidents like the one discussed, however, the figures indicate that similar phenomena continue to play a significant role in the management of an enterprise. Positive signals from lower costs, a reduction that I hope is not temporary. The phenomena described are striking increasing due the cybercrime raising and the warfare operations conducted by foreign states against critical infrastructures. The road is the right one, but there is still much to do., Pierluigi Paganini

1486_28475

My readers know very well the Egyptian hacker Ebrahim Hegazy, he is a great security expert and a friend of mine, which disclosed numerous critical flaws in most popular web services, including Microsoft, Yahoo and Orange., Last discovery of the cyber security expert is a SQL Injection in a Yahoo service that could be exploited by an attacker to Remote Code Execution and Escalated to Root Privilege on one of Yahoo servers., As explained in his blog post, Ebrahim started his analysis from the domain: in particular while he was examining the HTTP POST requests he noticed something that could be exploited for SQL Injection attack:, After a few manual tests and with the use of SQLMap, the hacker confirmed the presence of a flaw in the Yahoo system:, It was a joke for the expert to read data stored in the database with SQL Injection attack, at this point Ebrahim once gathered the administrator credentials from the database he was able to decode them despite it was encoded as Base64., Ebrahim used the credentials to access the admin panel that he discovered, 1- Admin panel found on: 2- I found the Administrator Password stored in the database and it was encoded as Base64 , , Good, I’ve decoded the Administrator Password, Logged in to the Admin panel., , At this point the expert tried to trigger a Remote Code Executionuploading his content., “That said, I’ve found a upload page, but after uploading a file with “phpinfo();” function as a content, I found that my uploaded file was named as: page_d03b042780c5071521366edc01e52d3d.xrds+xml instead of being page_d03b042780c5071521366edc01e52d3d.php?!” states Hibrahim in the blog post., Inspecting the uploading request, the expert discovered the cause of the problem in the “Content-Type” Header!, , Renaming the “Content-Type” Header to be “application/php” the problems was solved., , Ebrahim demonstrated the possibility to exploit the flaw for a SQL Injection attack and a Remote code Execution, he closed his post explaining how to gain the Root access on the targeted server. The hacker discovered that the server kernel was updated last time on 2012, it is amazing. It was quite simple to gain Root privileges with a Local root exploit vulnerability due the presence of non-patched kernel., Below the Time-line of the vulnerability management:, 2014-09-05 Initial report to Yahoo, 2014-09-06 Yahoo confirmed the vulnerability, 2014-09-07 Yahoo Fixed the Vulnerability, 2014-09-19 Yahoo announced me that this vulnerability is not eligible for a reward!!!, Let me close with a polemic observation, how is it possible to discover a server non-patched since 2012? Why Yahoo did not pay a bounty for such critical bug even if it fall outside the scope? Does Yahoo consider a SQLI to RCE to Root Privilege not a critical bugs?, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Yahoo, Sql Injection)

1810_32036

The senior threat researcher with Trend Micro, Kyle Wilhoit, has recently discovered 13 different types of crimeware disguised as new versions for human machine interface (HMI) software for Siemens Simatic WinCC, GE Cimplicity, and Advantech device drivers., The news has been reported by the Dark Reading website, the expert explained that this new wave of attacks is very interesting because it reveals a new trend in the criminal ecosystem., Wilhoit first noticed the anomalous spike in the attacks last October, the attackers run spear-phishing campaigns and drive-by downloads to compromise victims’ machine. The attacker shares links to the fake HMI product uploader which serves the financial malware on the machine. In some cases, the visitor is redirected to a website that looks like the legitimate Siemens website to trick the users into downloading a SCADA software or any update., Wilhoit believes that these attacks are not carried out by state-sponsored hackers with for cyber espionage or sabotage. The attacks are conducted by criminal crews with traditional financial crimeware., , “It’s an interesting trend — traditional banking Trojans, not targeted attacks,” Wilhoit says., The attacks represent a serious menace for the industrial environment, despite ICS/SCADA systems have been targeted in the past by several vyber threats (i.e. Havex and BlackEnergy, and the most popular Stuxnet), the discovery demonstrates the incresing interest of criminal organizations in the hacking of industrial systems., “So to succeed in attacking SCADA, you don’t have to necessarily be targeted in nature… The ultimate end goal here is probably not industrialized espionage, but to get banking credentials” said Wilhoit referring that cyber criminals are interested to any kinf of financially lucrative information., The ICS/SCADA systems are an easy target for criminals because in many cases they run outdated software and they lack of proper security defenses. This happens because in the industry is always privileged the availability and the continuity of the processes instead the cyber security., “We are starting to see a migration of attackers starting to realize SCADA is a good attack vector… because it’s so insecure,” said the researcher. “A lot we are finding are caught no problem with up-to-date antivirus,”, Wilhoit says targeted attacks on critical infrastructure via Havex and BlackEnergy indeed remain a threat, but the Financial crimeware could have a serious impact on industrial systems, causing the disruption of the environment by breaching through vulnerable HMI software., “HMI systems are very finicky, so it doesn’t take much to make these things fall over. Financial information could be stolen, but what if an HMI box drops inadvertently?” he says., Wilhoit confirmed to have found 32 financial malware samples disguised as WinCC software, be aware the hackers haven’t compromised legitimate software, instead they are offering bogus software that infect the machine., “They have been using the WinCC naming convention and file structure, as malware,” he says. “The shift… is they attackers are utilizing valid applications, valid SCADA naming conventions, so the banking Trojan looks like SCADA software,””They’re not exploiting vulnerabilities in those products,”, Wilhoit will provide further data the attacks he uncovered next week at the S4 ICS/SCADA conference in Miami where he will also present a malware-based attack scenario of the targeted SCADA. The experts will focus on data exfiltration operated by financial malware used by the attackers., “I’m going to create malware targeting an ICS system and hiding its traffic on a valid ICS Modbus” network, he says. “I’m doing it to show how fast you can craft malware that’s not terribly advanced but will bypass AV or” other security measures, he says., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  SCADA, malware)

88_1911

The events of recent days from the closure of the Megaupload web site to the heavy offensive of the Anonymous group have distracted media attention from important cyber operations, in my opinion of military matrix, against Japan., Last week several Cyber attacks have been conducted against Japan institutions and corporates, the National Security of Japan has been also attcked. The first attack in the time line, in what is considerable as a real escalation, was conducted against the Japanese parliament from China according to official sources., , For the attack has been used a server located in China from which have been observed several attacks to the Japanese Lower House.   The intruders were able to have access to email and confidential documents of the room and this has made ​​necessary an extraordinary meeting of the executive to respond to that considered a real emergency. The number of cyber incidents is growing and despite the government’s attention on cyber defense you can not halt the offensive. During the attacks the servers of Japanese lower house lawmakers have been hit causing the theft of many credentials., Japan has tried out the management of earthquake damage in 2011 and the subsequent nuclear accident in Fukushima. To confirm that the attacks are in fact military operations are the other objectives targeted. Documents on military aircraft and nuclear power plants seems have been stolen in a series of cyberattacks on Japanese defence contractor Mitsubishi Heavy.  On more than one occasion, observed attacks have hit the company always with the intent to steal valuable information, the company denies any possible theft, but history has shown that often the reality is quite different.  Mitsubishi Heavy declared in fact that last month that 83 computers at 11 of its facilities had been hit by cyberattacks but no leakage of information on products and technologies had been confirmed, that is a clear demonstration of a targeted strategy., By analyzing the attacks some reflections are mandatory:, If there will not be a change in the policies of major governments on the above points we will can find having to deal with very dangerous situations and politically difficult to manage., Pierluigi Paganini, References ,

2330_37124

Car thieves are becoming even more technological, we have read many news regarding hackers that designed specific solutions to hack car through the internal CAN bus or simply to unlock car doors with a trivial hack., Modern cars suffer many types of attacks, today I desire to show you an attack occurred recently in the UK., Vehicles at the Manchester Fort Shopping Park, in north Manchester, had their locks jammed during the last weekend. On Sunday evening, all the clients at the Manchester Fort Shopping Park, were not able to lock the doors of their cars. The choice of day and time of the attack is not casual and gives to the attackers the greatest likelihood of success and allowed them to hit a large number of clients., The investigators discovered that the incident was caused by a criminal gang operating in that area., , The owners of the cars without manual locking had no choice, they left their car open exposed to thieves., Hi-tech car thieves were jamming the signal to every car in the Shopping Park with £30 jamming devices bought over the internet, people present shared a video clip on Facebook. The jamming devices are available for sale on the Internet, they have been the subject of recent police warnings via local paper the Manchester Evening News., “Hi-tech gadgets that allow villains to steal cars without breaking into them are for sale on the internet for as little as £30, the M.E.N. can reveal. The devices help criminals bypass car coding and reprogramme vehicles before driving off in them. Darron Tickle, GMP crime reduction specialist, says the gadgets are having an affect on both policing and insurance firms – with victims now struggling to prove their car has been broken into if there are no signs of damage.One method of stealing is ‘signal jamming’ where a thief sends a code on radio frequency as you lock your car with the remote fob to bar the signal. It means the car doesn’t actually lock.” reported the Manchester Evening News., The cars remained open leaving thieves free to plunder anything from the cars in Park. Law enforcement also warned that the same jamming devices allow cyber criminals to bypass car coding and re-program vehicles before steal them., “It was very eerie and there were so many confused people trying to lock their doors to no avail,” explained Autumn DePoe-Hughes who shared the video on Facebook. “Someone else had complete control over all of our cars for well over half an hour.” explained the woman. “We were there for at least a half an hour and according to people around us, it had been going on before we got there. It was continuing as we left, so I don’t know how long it continued on.The mall was closing up for the day and we had no way to secure the boot (trunk) of our car, so we left. We were unable to lock the car with the fobs throughout our time there and the same happened to those around us, including one very confused mother. I went around speaking to people and they all confirmed that they could not lock their cars and couldn’t figure out what was going on. They all thought their cars needed to be repaired.”, The experts also explained that this kind of thefts has serious implications for the victims that face difficulties claiming for their losses against car insurance because the car locks were left open., “We get incidents where on one street three car thefts have occurred overnight and there’s no sign of entry into the vehicle. In these cases, you can make the assumption that jamming is going on. But the only way we’d know is if we caught the offender with a device on them.” said Mr Tickle., “Some of the other new technology, like code grabbing – where an offender uses a device to steal the code used when you automatically lock the car – isn’t one I have a particular concern about because most cars have a rotating changing code. But signal jamming, though, is an issue. ”, Criminals using these jamming devices are targeting places where there are many vehicles, including car parks., Recently I published a report to explain the significant increase for keyless cars, in October 2014 according to a UK motoring industry group, criminal organizations are increasingly targeting high-end cars with keyless security systems.  The Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders (SMMT) confirmed that car thieves are using dedicated equipment to access the cars and circumvent security designed by manufacturers., Hi-tech car thieves are also using reprogramming device that could be used to steal cars by connecting them to the on-board diagnostics port., “They are little devices from Eastern European countries on ebay. You can reprogramme the computer of the car to recognise a different key or make it start without a key. Many members of the public aren’t aware of this.” Mr Tickle added., The suggestion for the car owners is to ensure their car is locked by checking the handle, look and listen for the lock to engage and the lights to flash., Pierluigi Paganini, Security Affairs –  (cars, cybercrime)

6511_70894

MITRE is going to offer a new service based on its ATT&CK (Adversarial Tactics, Techniques, and Common Knowledge) framework to evaluate products based on their ability in detecting advanced persistent threats., “MITRE’s Adversarial Tactics, Techniques, and Common Knowledge (ATT&CK™) is a curated knowledge base and model for cyber adversary behavior, reflecting the various phases of an adversary’s lifecycle and the platforms they are known to target.” reads the MITRE’s official page. “ATT&CK is useful for understanding security risk against known adversary behavior, for planning security improvements, and verifying defenses work as expected.”, , The MITRE ATT&CK evaluation service will evaluate endpoint detection and response products for their ability to detect advanced threats., “There are a lot of products on the market that try to detect adversary behavior, and we’re trying to figure out what they can do,” says Frank Duff, principle cybersecurity engineer at MITRE., Duff explained MITRE will adopt a transparent methodology and knowledge base that will make easy to interpret results obtained with its service., In my opinion, sharing information about attackers’ TTPs is essential and such kind of initiative is very important for cyber security community., Jessica Payne from Microsoft Windows Defender praised the MITRE ATT&CK service., The @MITREattack database lists the TTPs of various attacks and attackers. You should monitor these on your network: — Jessica Payne (@jepayneMSFT) July 21, 2017, , If you have ever wondered 'how does an APT do ___?' or wanted to emulate an actual adversary in a Red Team, this database is a great start., — Jessica Payne (@jepayneMSFT) July 21, 2017, , The knowledge base was initially collected as a tool to allow red team members to communicate more easily with blue team members and corporate executives, it comes from publicly available sources., “ATT&CK provides a common framework for evaluating post-breach capabilities,” said Duff. “We believe that objective and open testing based on ATT&CK will advance capabilities and help drive the entire endpoint detection and response market forward.”, According to Duff, internal MITRE information doesn’t contaminate the knowledge base., In this phase, MITRE intends to evaluate its service and its efficiency, the first case study will be based on APT3/Gothic Panda and will evaluate the ability of products in detecting this threat., “As part of their participation in MITRE’s impartial cyber evaluation, cybersecurity vendors will be provided clear articulation of their capabilities, as well as access to MITRE’s cyber experts’ feedback for improving their products.” reads the statement published by MITRE. “Details captured will include the ATT&CK technique tested, specific actions the assessors took to execute, and details on the product’s ability to detect the emulated adversary behavior.”, MITRE, for this first round, call for vendors to contribute until April 13, 2018., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – ATT&CK technique, MITRE)

3225_43373

In November  2015, the Russian antivirus firm Doctor Web reported the discovery of a new Linux ransomware dubbed Linux Encoder that was specifically designed to infect Linux systems. The Linux.Encoder1 ransomware encrypts files present on the systems, once a machine is infected it downloads the files containing attackers’ demands and a file containing the path to a public RSA key. The Linux ransomware is launched as a daemon and deletes the original files, subsequently, the RSA key is used to store AES keys used to encrypt files., The Linux Encoder, reportedly distributed via a vulnerability in eBay’s Magento e-commerce platform, demands the payment of one Bitcoin (roughly $380 at that time) in exchange for the key needed to recover the files., A week later, the researchers at Bitdefender discovered a flaw in the process for the generation of the AES key used by the ransomware., Reminder to everyone: srand(time()) is not cryptographically secure! You need to do srand(md5(time()))., — the grugq (@thegrugq) 11 Novembre 2015, , The flaw allowed the experts at Bitdefender to develop a decryption tool that automatically recovers files encrypted by the Linux Encoder. The company also provided a script and the procedure to follow to restore the encrypted files. Given the complexity of the procedure, Bitdefender provides free support to any user in need of assistance., , The response of the authors of ransomware not long in coming, they released the third version of the Linux Encoder ransomware that infected a nearly 600 servers worldwide., Also this time, the security researchers from Bitdefender have managed to find a way to unlock resources blocked by the ransomware. And also this time, they have succeeded for the third time!, What went wrong this time?, When BitDefender disclosed the process used by the malware authors for the generation of the initial values and keys in the previous versions, some security experts ridiculed the developers by suggesting how to improve the ransomware., “Apparently, the operators actually took note of these sarcastic recommendations; as a result, the IV (initialisation vector) is now generated from a hash of the file size and the filename – 32 bytes from rand() are hashed 8 times and used as the AES-256 key,” Caragea says.” , If you are one of the victims who got infected by this new variant of Linux.Encoder ransomware you don’t have to pay the ransom to rescue your files, just download the Bitdefender’s Linux.Encoder decryption tool to unlock them., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Linux Encoder, ransomware)

4819_55926

Cisco has released a security update for CISCO Prime Home remote management and provisioning solution to fix a flaw that could be exploited to authentication bypass. The experts at Cisco have discovered the critical authentication bypass flaw during an internal security testing., The Cisco Prime Home is a product used by Internet service providers (ISPs) to view customers’ home networks, it allows to make configuration changes and software upgrades, and could be used for the remote diagnostics., The flaw, tracked as CVE-2017-3791, resides in the web-based user interface of the Cisco Prime Home, it can be remotely exploited by an unauthenticated attacker to bypass authentication and execute any action with administrator privileges., “The vulnerability is due to a processing error in the role-based access control (RBAC) of URLs. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending API commands via HTTP to a particular URL without prior authentication.” states the Cisco advisory. “An exploit could allow the attacker to perform any actions in Cisco Prime Home with administrator privileges.”, , The flaw affects Cisco Prime Home versions 6.3, 6.4 and 6.5, versions 5.2 and earlier are not impacted. Cisco fixed the issue with the version 6.5.0.1, It is important to highlight the absence of a workaround., The experts at the Cisco Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) are not aware of any public announcements or exploitation of the flaw., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Prime Home, hacking)

2931_41428

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

2430_37871

More than 600 million Samsung smartphones could be opened to cyber attack due to the presence of a security flaw in the validation of the  Swiftkey language pack updates. The security flaw, coded as CVE-2015-2865, affects to the mechanism used for adding new languages and upgrading existing ones in the mobile devices of the popular vendor., The security issue affects several models of Samsung S mobile devices, including the Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini, S4, S5, and S6. According to the researchers at NowSecure, the update is sent to the smartphone via HTTP, but the transfer lack of any authentication mechanism allowing an attacker to run a man-in-the-middle (MitM) in order to replace the legitimate update with a malicious code. The attackers can inject their malicious payload whenever SwiftKey checks for a language pack update, a circumstance that occurs every few hours or on the device reboot., “Samsung Galaxy S phones, including the S4 Mini, S4, S5, and S6, are pre-installed with a version of Swiftkey keyboard that is signed by Samsung to operate with system privileges. By design, Swiftkey periodically checks for language pack updates over HTTP. By intercepting such requests and modifying the necessary fields, an attacker can write arbitrary data to vulnerable devices.” states the US CERT., The experts demonstrated that is possible to exploit the flaw to run an arbitrary on the target device without user interaction., , Another worrying consideration is related to the fact that updates are handled by the mobile OS with system privileges, this means that an attacker can exploit the flaw to acquire rights of a privileged user and install any kind of malicious apps without the user’s knowledge. The attackers can do much more, including eavesdropping on communications, access GPS data, steal sensitive information, access sensors data and of course control the camera and the microphone., The experts reported the flaw to Samsung in December 2014 and started providing a patch to mobile carriers in early 2015. As usually happens in these cases, the different mobile carriers have different patch management processes and we have no information on the number of them that have already delivered the update to their customers., According to the researchers, the giants Verizon and Sprint still haven’t pushed out the fix for the Samsung Galaxy S6 mobile phones, meanwhile AT&T hasn’t patched the Galaxy S4 Mini and T-Mobile hasn’t patched the Galaxy S5 devices., The experts depicted several attack scenarios in order to exploit the flaw in the Samsung mobile devices, they can set up a rogue Wi-Fi access points or gain access to the victim’s local network. The attacker could be very easy for persistent attackers that are able to run DNS hijacking attackers, or that can have the access level of an ISP., Actually the only way to mitigate the risk of exposure is to install a patch provided by the mobile carrier because the Swift keyboard is present in the mobile OS and cannot be disabled or uninstalled. Meantime, avoid using untrusted Wi-Fi networks., “The Swift keyboard comes pre-installed on Samsung devices and cannot be disabled or uninstalled. Even when it is not used as the default keyboard, it can still be exploited.” states the post., NowSecure has published a proof-of-concept (PoC) code to demonstrate the exploitation of the vulnerability, below the Video PoC of the attack:, , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Samsung, hacking)

4748_55369

Security experts discovered a new effective Gmail phishing attack that is able to deceive also tech-savvy people. Crooks leverage on specially crafted URLs to trick victims into providing their Gmail credentials on a phishing page., The malicious messages are sent from one of the victim’s contacts and pretend to carry a PDF document that can be previewed directly from Gmail. When the victim clicks on the “attachment” image included in the body of the message it is redirected to a Gmail phishing page., The URL to which the images of attachments point is crafted to appear legitimate:, “data:text/html, The web browser does not display any certificate warning, experts noticed that the apparently legitimate part of the URL is followed by white spaces, which prevent the victims from seeing suspicious strings and an obfuscated script that opens a Gmail phishing page in a new tab. A technical description of the Chrome/Gmail attack has been published on Github., , “You click on the image, expecting Gmail to give you a preview of the attachment. Instead, a new tab opens up and you are prompted by Gmail to sign in again. You glance at the location bar and you see accounts.google.com in there. It looks like this….” states a blog post published by WordFence. “Once you complete sign-in, your account has been compromised.”, This technique is not new, several victims reported similar attacks in July., One of the main characteristics of the attacks that have been recently detected by the experts is that crooks immediately accessed the compromised accounts and used them to send out phishing emails to all the victim’s contacts. It is still unclear if the attackers have found a way to automate the process., This is the closest I've ever come to falling for a Gmail phishing attack. If it hadn't been for my high-DPI screen making the image fuzzy… pic.twitter.com/MizEWYksBh, — Tom Scott (@tomscott) December 23, 2016, , As usual, let me suggest to enable two-factor authentication (2FA) on Gmail in order to avoid being victims of this powerful phishing scheme.  However, if the cyber criminals immediately access the compromised account they could also include in a phishing page the 2FA code., “2FA would make it harder to exploit, but phishing attacks are getting fancier. They capture the 2FA code you enter and immediately start a session elsewhere with your password and 2FA. Hardware 2FA, a security key, (such as a Yubikey) is the only likely way to prevent phishing (excluding targets of state actors)” wrote a user in a discussion on Hacker News., Google has been aware of this new phishing tactic at least March 2016, for this reason, the Chrome security team suggested introducing a “Not Secure” tag in the address bar for data:, blob: and other URLs that may be exploited by phishers in hacking campaigns., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – cybercrime, Gmail)

301_7827

Many experts are sure, the new horizons of intelligence are in the social media and in the ability to control them. Governments are more careful on the analysis of social media and the vast amount of information which they hold., Intelligence agencies have learned that Social networks and forums are exceptional instruments for information gathering and to measure the global sentiment on every kind of argument, political as social., Last Week the Intelligence community veterans said at a panel discussion on open-source intelligence hosted by Government Executive., “We take a large look at the world and see if there’s a surprise out there,”, said Patrick O’Neil, analytic director of the Open Source Center for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence., “We’re trying to avoid a surprise.”, O’Neil with his words highlights the great importance that intelligence community assigns to the social media and to the open source intelligence, they offer a vantage point of today’s society., The new way to make intelligence is considered in opposition with the previous methodologies, today intelligence is primary based on open source intelligence contrary to the past when the intelligence was based on clandestine sources., But is it true?, The social media are for sure a great component in today open source but if through complex method of analysis it is possible gather a huge quantity of data their elaboration is not so simple. We must consider that due the possibility of pollution of the sources by the same intelligence agencies the information could haven’t the proper level of reliability., Despite the high interest in social media some experts show very cautious, it’s the case of Craig Parisot, chief operating officer at Invertix a firm specialized in data mining innovations, that said:, “There are adopters of technology but that doesn’t mean they carry the voice of a nation or an entire populous,”, It has been estimated that only 20 percent of the world’s population uses social media, that produce a huge quantity of information that creates several problems for its analysis., The events have demonstrated the great importance of social media as communication vector, as expression of dissents, let’s think to their role in the organization of protest during the Arab spring. The social media could provide key indicators on the real situation in entire region of planet such as the Middle East., According DARPA’s representatives:, “Social media have evolved from a platform that provides infrastructure that supports maintaining connections between friends to a platform that supports recruiting, collaborating, organizing and competing for resources… Among these communities and teams are terrorist and other criminal organizations,”, “The impact of these teams on the social landscape, their interactions with other teams, the evolution of network state over time, and competition with other teams and communities has not been adequately researched. Due to the overwhelming deluge of data generated by users across social media platforms, this analysis cannot be done manually.”, “While collaborations in social media have been researched extensively, little attention has been paid to how the groups compete with each other for members and influence on opinions of other teams and communities,”, “Understanding what affects such online behavior is needed for trend forecasting.”, Analyzing the networks is possible to track detailed profile of any users, his relationships and his habits, the possibility to exercise the control of social networks is an actual form of power, the power of knowledge., FBI is one of the most active agency, in the last months it has publicly requested the design of a real time monitor for social network that have to be able to identify suspect behaviors that could be interpreted as indicator of presence for an ongoing crime, it seems that it is working to obtain a sort of backdoor in main social networks like Facebook and also in most used communication platforms such as Skype and Instant Messaging. The Federal Bureau of Investigation is interested to a backdoor for government surveillance, for this reason it is collaborating  with companies like Microsoft, Google and Yahoo., In February 2011, CNET reported that then-FBI general counsel Valerie Caproni was planning to warn Congress of what the bureau calls its “Going Dark” problem, illustrating how the wiretapping capabilities were being reduced with the progress of technology., Caproni singled out “Web-based e-mail, social-networking sites, and peer-to-peer communications” as problems that have left the FBI “increasingly unable” to conduct the same kind of wiretapping it could in the past., “Going Dark” is the FBI’s codename for a massive surveillance project to extend the ability of the agency to real time wiretap communications, it is born inside the bureau, employing 107 full-time expert starting from 2009., , Which are law enforcement today’s capabilities?, According the declaration of Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Kevin Bankston FBI already can intercept messages on social-networking sites and Web-based e-mail services, the system used is known as Carnivore, later renamed DCS1000., The FBI has trying to maintain maximum reserve on the Unit called the Domestic Communications Assistance Center, for which the Senate committee has already allocated $54 million assigning to it the mission to create technologies for law enforcement to intercept and analyze communications data., The power conferred to the unit is wide, every single communication through social networks and over internet in general should be intercepted by the hardware platforms and software applications that the unit have to implement., But Social Media could also be used to monitor dissents, government repressions as happened in Syria, and any kind of meaningful social event and their geographical location., “It doesn’t necessarily tell you what’s happening,” O’Neil said, “but it tells you where to look.”, NSA also is massive investing in monitoring technology, a couple of months ago we have learned that the agency is building the country’s biggest Spy Center in the little known city of Bluffdale. The center, named Utah Data Center is under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances., Its purpose is to intercept, decipher, analyze every world’s communications under investigation using every kind of transmission.  The center will have a final cost of $2 billion and should be operative in September 2013. Its databases will be store all forms of communication, including the complete private emails, cell phone calls, search engine researches and every kind of digital data related to every individual., The imperative is to monitor everything!, It’s clear the dimension of the project that has the purpose to cover monitoring need of every type includind of course satellite communication, phone calls, computer data and geostationary satellite data., Once the Data Center it’s operational it will be fed data collected by the agency’s eavesdropping satellites, overseas listening posts, and secret monitoring rooms in telecom facilities throughout the US. All that data will then be accessible to the NSA’s code breakers, data-miners, China analysts, counterterrorism specialists, and others working at its Fort Meade headquarters and around the world., The Defense Department is promoting the development of new generation of tools that will better track postings and interactions on social media for a “broad range of tactical as well as strategic military operations,”., According a communication provided by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the Pentagon is searching for software that will automatically sift social media platforms being able to collect and analyze the data posted by their customers., The great effort that US Government intend to spend is motivated by the failure of used methodologies since today in the tracking of social media, the agency are searching for applications that implements new sophisticated search engines able to identify data related to cyber terrorism and cybercrime., Another factor that must be considered is the great dynamism of the people that uses social media, each individual is usual to go round with several networks and with different profiles making harder the cross analysis., To make hard the analisys of social media is the increasing awareness of users in the monitoring activities. An incresing number of individual is searching for privacy or for else the way to avoid a control., Anonymity is the watchword!, For this reason network such as Tor and in the general the Deep Web have are seeing a growing interest, also in the hidden web in fact are growing new services similar to the one presents on the clear web, social network platforms and forums are populating also the dark side of internet., But the intelligence is aware of the trend to use anonymizer networks, due this reason they are also trying to massively infiltrate deep web. There are also many ongoing project that track the use of the network and some of the most famous hidden services provided with communication intent. Despite in the hidden web is much more harder to track a single individual, analyzing a huge quantity of conversations on the social media platforms is possible to perform intelligence researches on many critical topics., One of the main proble related to surveillance systems is the safekeeping of the collected data, let’s image their value and the great appeal they have for foreign governments and hackers., Who and how will manage the acquired data?, The line between monitoring and censorship is thin and we have observed in several countries questionable behavior approaching this kind of information., What would happen if a hostile government or group of cyber criminals could exploit this mine of data?, It would be an unprecedented disaster. The problem therefore lies in the ability to manage such a critical feature, this issue is extremely complex. Are we ready to address these issues? I’m afraid not, unfortunately, Are we willing to compromise in the name of security? We are ready to give up our privacy?, Do not worry … someone has already replied for you!, Pierluigi Paganini

2452_38032

The Dark Web is known to be “the place” for sites where it can be found drugs, child pornography, weapons, because these websites can live on without disclosing the server location what makes life difficult for law enforcement catching the people running them., But lately more and more flaws are coming out of the Dark Web, and one researcher in specific is trying to harvest information about these types of sites, and in some cases he even discovered the IP address, and he is able to get this information because the website administrators haven’t configured properly their sites., Thomas White is a Tor hidden server developer, and last week he published a post revealing that he found out the IP Address of “Kiss marketplace” ( a site that is dead for some time now)( a site that is dead for some time now)( a site that is dead for some time now), To give you a background, Kiss Market was shut down in May because it got hacked, and the site no longer exists., , For now the site is dead, he shared the IP Address of “Kiss Marketplace” (185.61.148.62), but he also told to motherboard.vice.com that he discovered the IP address of “Tor Carders Market V.2”, a place where stolen credit cards were sold, in January, but like “Kiss Marketplace” this site doesn’t exist anymore., White also claimed that he got information about 500 sites and from those ones, he got IPs about eight of these sites, and seven of them are yet active., In his interview for motherboard.vice.com Thomas White he shared his thoughts:, “It’s safe to say everything is under threat right now,” Scam sites, the “dark net” markets, fraud-type vendors, alleged hacker groups (probably scammers too), child porn sites, blogs, IRC servers.”, “Tor will help hide the location of the servers, but it is not a magic fix by any means, and lots of these hidden services, both legal and illegal, are not taking any measures to defend (their) system.”servers, but it is not a magic fix by any means, and lots of these hidden services, both legal and illegal, are not taking any measures to defend (their) system.”, Even with all this important information Thomas said that he will not be revealing this information to any government, neither exposing people, revealing these information to any government, neither exposing people, these information to any government, neither exposing people, “That is not to say they are safe though,” he added. “There are others out there like myself who could piece together my work and repeat it within days.”, The methods being used by Thomas White include:, “The fundamental problem is that the people behind these sites are not serious techies. There is a difference between protecting a system from a script kiddie, and from agencies like the FBI,”people behind these sites are not serious techies. There is a difference between protecting a system from a script kiddie, and from agencies like the FBI,”, I totally agree with Thomas White, and let’s not forget how the well-known “Skill Road” ended up being busted, with a misconfiguration of a CAPTCHA, and all this because the site administrator wasn’t careful enough., Of course, this gives an idea that even if someone is using Tor doesn’t mean he is fully protected, and yes, some sloppy administrator got busted, but others keep their business working, developing their security and getting a deeper level of security understanding., About the Author Elsio Pinto, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Dark Web,  Tor hacking)

2976_41718

We recently reported that CryptoWall 3.0 has allegedly caused over $325 million in annual damages. CryptoWall first emerged in April 2014. Its first major upgrade was dubbed CryptoWall 2.0, and first emerged in October 2014. CryptoWall 3.0 then emerged in January 2015 and terrorized organizations on a global scale. Now, in November 2015, CryptoWall 4.0 has emerged., New Features, New features such as the encryption of the names and extensions of affected files have emerged with the 4th member of the CryptoWall family. Additionally, CryptoWall 4.0 has changed the name of its ransom notes to HELP_YOUR_FILES.TXTand HELP_YOUR_FILES.HTML., The ransom note itself contains payment instructions and also mocks the infected user., , Spread Method, The initially reported sample, provided by an infected user on the Bleeping Computer forums, was spread via e-mail through phishing e-mails with ZIP archive attachments claiming to be resumes. The file within the ZIP archive is a JavaScript file, that is obfuscated and beautified that downloads the CryptoWall 4.0 payload from a hard-coded URL., , However, it’s likely that exploit kits will begin to deliver CW4 as a payload very soon, if they are not already (especially the Angler EK)., Technical Information, The C&C communication and behavioural activity of CryptoWall 4.0’s payload is quite similar to its earlier versions. The specific sample that I have analyzed performed the following actions, as can be evidenced by the below images., Contacted Domains, , Added Files, , Deleted Files, , Modified Files, , Added Registry Keys, , Process Tree,  , About the Author Michael Fratello, Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  CryptoWall 4.0, ransomware)

7267_76950

As a consequence of the data exposure, the company is going to shut down the social media network Google+., The root cause of the data breach is a security vulnerability affecting one of Google+ People APIs that allowed third-party developers to access data for more than 500,000 users., Exposed data include including usernames, email addresses, occupation, date of birth, profile photos, and gender-related information., The worse aspect of the story is that the company did not disclose the flaw in the Google+ when it first discovered the issue in this spring because it feared regulatory scrutiny and reputational damage., “Google exposed the private data of hundreds of thousands of users of the Google+ social network and then opted not to disclose the issue this past spring, in part because of fears that doing so would draw regulatory scrutiny and cause reputational damage, according to people briefed on the incident and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.” reported the Wall Street Journal., “As part of its response to the incident, the Alphabet Inc. unit on Monday announced a sweeping set of data privacy measures that include permanently shutting down all consumer functionality of Google+.”, Google declared that its experts immediately addressed this vulnerability in March 2018 and that they have found no evidence that any developer has exploited the flaw to access users data. The flaw was present in the Google+ People APIs since 2015., “We discovered and immediately patched this bug in March 2018. We believe it occurred after launch as a result of the API’s interaction with a subsequent Google+ code change.” reads a blog post published by Google., “We made Google+ with privacy in mind and therefore keep this API’s log data for only two weeks. That means we cannot confirm which users were impacted by this bug. However, we ran a detailed analysis over the two weeks prior to patching the bug, and from that analysis, the Profiles of up to 500,000 Google+ accounts were potentially affected. Our analysis showed that up to 438 applications may have used this API.”, , The choice of not disclosing the vulnerability was probably influenced by the Cambridge Analytica scandal that was occurring in the same period., “A memo reviewed by the Journal prepared by Google’s legal and policy staff and shared with senior executives warned that disclosing the incident would likely trigger “immediate regulatory interest” and invite comparisons to Facebook’s leak of user information to data firm Cambridge Analytica.” continues the WSJ., Experts believe that the vulnerability in Google+ is similar to the one recently discovered in Facebook API., Google will maintain Google+ only for Enterprise users starting from August 2019., Google also provided information about the Project Strobe program that has seen a privacy internal task force conducting a companywide audit of the company’s APIs in recent months., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Google Plus flaw, hacking)

854_20019

Atrax is the name of the last crimekit that is sold in the underground market, its particularity is the capability to exploit Tor networks to communicate with Command & Control infrastructure. Jonas Mønsted of the Danish security firm CSIS, published  a blog post that describes in depth the crimekit. The malware isn’t the first agent that adopted as communication channel the Tor network, we found in the past other botnets exploiting the same trick to high malicious traffic, recently Mevade was responsible for the spike in the Tor traffic, while going further back in time we can mention Skynet The Atrax crime kit is cheap, it is available for runs about $250, and appears very attractive due a series of features like Bitcoin mining, Litecoin mining, browser data extraction and a component to launch DDoS attacks. The DDoS module offer complete support for both Full IPv6 and IPv4 and implements principal attack techniques including UDP Flood,TCP Flood,TCP Connect Flood, HTTP Slowloris and many other methods. The recent explosion in Bitcoin value is attracting cybercrime, for this reason authors of Atrax included in the crimekit dedicated features including the capability to steal information from users’ Bitcoin wallets (such as Armory, Bitcoin-Qt, Electrum and Multibit)., , As many other crimekit, Atrax was designed with a modular structure, a series of add-ons implements the above functionalities and follow an efficient model of sale, a plugin stealer is sold for $110, the form grabber for $300 and an experimental add-on for coin mining at $140, surprising the fact that Atrax comes with free updates, bug fixes and support. Below a list of standard features present in the Atrax crimekit:, “Apparently the author admits that the main component, which has a fairly big size of ~1,2 MB is due to TOR integration and x64/x86 code. However a first stage free assembler web downloader ~2KB is also available making the infection process slighly lightweight.” has written Mønsted. , The plug-in stealer according the author is very efficient and implements a wealth of functionality:, It it so able to operate with principal browsers available on the market. No doubt, Atrax crimekit has all the characteristics to succeed in the underground criminal., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Atrax crimekit, Tor, malware)

1872_32791

A new critical vulnerability is threatening the Linux community, the flaw affects the glibc GNU C library. The vulnerability is present in all Linux systems dating back to 2000 and could be exploited by attackers to execute code and remotely gain control of Linux machines., The vulnerability was first discovered by researchers at Qualys and it affects glibc library from version 2.2 included in Linux systems since November 2000. However, at the moment there is no way to tell if cyber criminals or state-sponsored hackers have been exploiting this vulnerability in the wild., “During a code audit performed internally at Qualys, we discovered a buffer overflow in the __nss_hostname_digits_dots() function of the GNU C Library (glibc). This bug is reachable both locally and remotely via the gethostbyname*() functions, so we decided to analyze it — and its impact — thoroughly, and named this vulnerability “GHOST”.” states a blog post from Qualys., The flaw, coded as CVE-2015-0235, is a heap-based buffer overflow in the __nss_hostname_digits_dots() function implemented in the glibc library and invoked by the _gethostbyname and gethostbyname2 function calls., , The experts assigned the vulnerability the name GHOST because the involvement of the  _gethostbyname function., Experts at Qualys confirmed that have identified a mitigation for the GHOST flaw that is available since May 21, 2013 between the releases of glibc-2.17 and glibc-2.18., “Unfortunately, it was not recognized as a security threat; as a result, most stable and long-term-support distributions were left exposed (and still are): Debian 7 (wheezy), Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 & 7, CentOS 6 & 7, Ubuntu 12.04, for example,” said the advisory from Qualys., The impact of the GHOST flaw is anyway serious despite the update of the glibc is a quite easy operation., “In this instance, you just apply the glibc update, and restart any services that are vulnerable,” explained Josh Bressers, a member of the Red Hat security response team“It’s not confusing like Shellshock was.”, Qualys also provided the details about the exploitation of the Exim SMTP mail server, the advisory explains how to achieve remote code execution against the Exim SMTP mail server, bypassing the NX (No-eXecute) protection and glibc’s malloc hardening. Other Linux systems are exposed to the GHOST flaw, including MySQL servers, Apache, Cups, Dovecot, Secure Shell servers and other types of mail servers., “The bug affects virtually all Linux-based software that performs domain name resolution. As result, it most likely can be exploited not only against servers but also client applications.” reports ArsTechnica., The different Linux distributions will be releasing patches; Red Hat has released an update for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5. Novell has a list of SUSE Linux Enterprise Server builds affected by GHOST. Debian has already released an update of its software addressing the vulnerability., The US-CERT has also published an advisory on the GHOST vulnerability urging administrators to refer respective Linux or Unix-based OS vendors and start the patching process., “US-CERT recommends users and administrators refer to their respective Linux or Unix-based OS vendor(s) for an appropriate patch if affected. Patches are available from Ubuntu(link is external) and Red Hat(link is external). The GNU C Library versions 2.18 and later are also available for experienced users and administrators to implement.” states the US-CERT., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – GHOST, LINUX)

5684_62909

Crooks are abusing Facebook CDN (Content Delivery Network) servers to store malware and to deliver it evading detection exploiting the trust in the CDN network of the social network giant., Researchers from MalwareHunter team uncovered several campaigns leveraging Facebook CDN servers in the last two weeks, in the past, the same malware group used Dropbox and Google’s cloud storage services to store the same payloads., In July researchers at Palo Alto Networks published a detailed report on an ongoing malspam campaign targeting Brazil, in that circumstance the crooks used legitimate services like Google and Dropbox to deliver the malware., Back to the present, the use of Facebook CDN allows the cyber criminals to bypass security solutions because the domain is trusted by them and the related traffic is not blocked. The, Cybercriminals use to send spoofed emails that pose as official communications from local authorities. The messages include a link that leads to Facebook CDN. The link point to URL related to files uploaded by the gang in Facebook groups or other public section., Below one of the links used by the gang., and the related spam message, , Once the victim clicks on the link he will download an RAR or ZIP file containing a link file. The shortcut invokes a legitimate application installed on most windows PC (i.e. Command Prompt or PowerShell) to run an encoded PowerShell script. This technique is known as Squiblydoo, experts observed APT32 using it while targeting Vietnamese interests around the globe., The encoded PowerShell script downloads and runs another PowerShell script that execute a large number of operations., “The second PowerShell script downloads a loader DLL file, which in turn downloads a legitimate EXE file and a second DLL.” wrote Catalin Cimpanu from BleepingComputer., “The twisted maze of operations continues with the creation of another link (shortcut) file that points to a VBS script. The PowerShell script then invokes the shortcut file, which in turn invokes the VBS script, which in turn executes the legitimate EXE file, which in turn side-loads the second DLL file.”, Crooks are targeting only users in Brazil, the attack chain is interrupted by downloading an empty last-stage DLL file when the victim is from another country., The campaign is delivering the Banload malware downloader which is used to serve the Win32/Spy.Banker.ADYV banking trojan that targets Brazilian users only., Experts believe the threat actor is the same behind the Banload campaign that targeted Brazil in 2016 and spread the Escelar banking Trojan in 2015., Experts from MalwareHunter believe the malware group is very sophisticated and well-resourced., “a campaign MalwareHunter spotted on September 2 pushed out emails that were viewed by at least 200,000 Brazilian users. Two other campaigns also garnered between 70,000-80,000 views each.” continues Bleepingcomputers., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Facebook CDN server, malware)

4024_49532

Delilah is a strain of malware developed to extort victims into stealing insider data, it was first discovered on crime forums by the Israeli intelligence firm Diskin Advanced Technologies., Deliah is not distributed in open crimeware forums, instead, it is shared in among exclusive criminal communities., Delilah represents a novelty in the malware landscape, it relies on a combination of social engineering and extortion techniques., The Gartner security expert Avivah Litan explained that the trojan was specifically designed to target employees, it gathers information on the victims in order to use them in extortion schema., , “Delilah recruits targeted insiders via social engineering and/or extortion, sometimes using ransomware techniques. It remains a closely held Trojan not yet available on the common black market, and is only shared amongst closed hacker groups, according to threat intelligence firm Diskin Advanced Technologies (DAT).” Litan wrote in a blog post. , “Once installed the hidden bot gathers enough personal information from the victim so that the individual can later be manipulated or extorted. This includes information on the victim’s family and workplace. ” , “This will only add to the volume of insider threats caused by disgruntled employees selling their services on the Dark Web in order to harm their employers.”, The bot leverages on a component that allows spying on victims through their webcam., “The bot comes with a social engineering plug-in that connects to webcam operations so that the victim can be filmed without his or her knowledge.”, The experts from the Israeli company explained that criminals need sophisticated social engineering techniques in order to force the victims into committing insider theft., Delilah is delivered through gaming and adult sites, for this reason, it is suggested to organizations to prevent employees from visiting potentially malicious websites., Insider threats are very insidious and malicious codes like Delilah could easily allow crooks to recruit insiders., “With Trojans like Delilah, organizations should expect insider recruitment to escalate further and more rapidly.  This will only add to the volume of insider threats caused by disgruntled employees selling their services on the Dark Web in order to harm their employers.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Insider threat, hacking)