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Code Spaces, a code-hosting and software collaboration platform, has been brought down by a serious cyber attack which has caused its out of business, the attackers have deleted the data and backups of the company in a cyber raid. The Code Spaces firm has published an official statement to explain the incident to its users, this is a sad story because the attackers succeeded to destroy company business, the message inform the users that it will spend its current resources helping customers recover whatever data may be left., “Code Spaces will not be able to operate beyond this point, the cost of resolving this issue to date and the expected cost of refunding customers who have been left without the service they paid for will put Code Spaces in an irreversible position both financially and in terms of ongoing credibility,”  “As such at this point in time we have no alternative but to cease trading and concentrate on supporting our affected customers in exporting any remaining data they have left with us.”, “In summary, most of our data, backups, machine configurations and offsite backups were either partially or completely deleted.”  states the statement., , As explained in the statement the cyber criminals initially started with DDoS attack, at the same time they gained the access into Code Spaces’ Amazon EC2 control panel, leaving the extortion demands to the Code Spaces company. They left a series of messages requesting to be contacted to a Hotmail address, “An unauthorised person who at this point who is still unknown (All we can say is that we have no reason to think its anyone who is or was employed with Code Spaces) had gained access to our Amazon EC2 control panel and had left a number of messages for us to contact them using a hotmail address“, Code Spaces firm has immediately started the investigation but as explained by the company it became clear that so far no machine access had been achieved due to the attacker not having their private keys, as containment measure it has changed the EC2 passwords. The story is not ended, the company quickly discovered that the attacker had created backup logins, so once the criminals noticed the password change they began deleting artifacts from the panel., “We finally managed to get our panel access back, but not before he had removed all EBS snapshots, S3 buckets, all AMI’s, some EBS instances and several machine instances,” “In summary, most of our data, backups, machine configurations and offsite backups were either partially or completely deleted.”Code Spaces said. , As remarked by Amazon, customers have the responsibility to preserve their credentials for Amazon Web Services, the company offers all the necessary solutions to protect them, including two-factor authentication. The AWS IAM enables control over user credentials, access role separation and least privilege., The criminals have taken 12 hours to delete all the svn repositories, backups and snapshots, leaving untouched just a few old svn nodes and one git node., “We finally managed to get our panel access back but not before he had removed all EBS snapshots, S3 buckets, all AMI’s, some EBS instances and several machine instances.” said the statement., It is a drama for the company that has permanently suspended its activities, it probably will face serious legal problems for the damages caused to its users considering also that it has always declared to implement a a full redundancy for the code through its duplication among data centers on three continents., “Backing up data is one thing, but it is meaningless without a recovery plan, not only that a recovery plan – and one that is well-practiced and proven to work time and time again,” “Code Spaces has a full recovery plan that has been proven to work and is, in fact, practiced.”Code Spaces said. , I consider this attack a case study on the potential effect on business of the cyber criminals, to mitigate the cyber threat it is crucial to put in place all the proper mitigation actions.

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Malware researchers from Trend Micro have spotted a new exploit kit, tracked as Underminer exploit kit, delivering a bootkit that infects the system’s boot sectors as well as a cryptocurrency miner dubbed Hidden Mellifera., “We discovered a new exploit kit we named Underminer that employs capabilities used by other exploit kits to deter researchers from tracking its activity or reverse engineering the payloads.” reads the analysis published by TrendMicro., “Underminer delivers a bootkit that infects the system’s boot sectors as well as a cryptocurrency-mining malware named Hidden Mellifera.”, Researchers first noticed the Underminer Exploit activity on July 17 while it was distributing the payloads mainly to Asian countries, mostly in Japan (69,75%) and Taiwan (10,52%)., Underminer transfers the malicious payloads via an encrypted transmission control protocol (TCP) tunnel and packages malicious files with a customized format similar to ROM file system format (romfs). According to the experts, this makes it difficult to analyze the malicious code., The Underminer exploit kit appears to have been created in November 2017 when it only included the code for the exploitation of Flash vulnerabilities and delivered fileless payloads to deliver and execute the malware., The Underminer EK includes functionalities also employed by other exploit kits, including:, The EK redirect visitors to a landing page that profile and detect the user’s Adobe Flash Player version and browser type via user-agent., In case the visitor’s profile does not match the one associated with a target of interest, the exploit kit will not deliver malicious content and redirect the visitor to a clean website., The Underminer exploit kit also sets a token to the browser cookie, with this trick if the victim already accessed the landing page, it only delivers an HTTP 404 error message instead of payloads., Researchers discovered that the Underminer exploit kit still includes a small number of exploits. The experts have spotted the code to trigger the following vulnerabilities:, All the above flaws have been exploited by other EKs in the past., Below the infection flow of Underminer’s exploits described by Trend Micro., “Like other exploits before it, we expect Underminer to hone their techniques to further obfuscate the ways they deliver their malicious content and exploit more vulnerabilities while deterring security researchers from looking into their activities. And given the nature of their operations, we also expect them to diversify their payloads.” concludes Trend Micro., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Underminer Exploit Kit, hacking)

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The new Lock Ransomware appends the same “.asasin” extension to the file names of encrypted documents as samples analyzed by security firm PhishMe in October., The malware authors attempt to trick the victims into double-clicking the envelope., “This new wave is being spread through Office Word documents, not only Microsoft but also other programs such as Libre Office, which look like the following image:”, “By doing so, this sets off a cascade of actions which will end in all valuable files being encrypted and the user getting the following message.” states the analysis published by Avira., Once the users double-click the image, a series of actions is triggered, ending with the encryption of the files on the infected machine., The analysis of the image included in the bait Word document revealed a LNK file (Windows shortcut), by pasting the command into a text editor, the researchers discovered it is meant to run a PowerShell script., “The script is in clear text and can easily be read. Its intent is to download another PowerShell script from a link embedded in the script and then run this script by using the Invoke-Expression function.” continues the analysis., The second script connects a server controlled by the operators and downloads a Windows executable file, which includes several stages of code obfuscation to confuse analysts and trick people into thinking it’s a clean file., The new strain of Locky ransomware collects information about the operating system and sends it, encrypted, to the command-and-control server that in turn replies with the encryption key., The rapid evolution of ransomware in the threat landscape is worrisome, and this case demonstrates it., Security experts are observing a rapid evolution of the Locky ransomware, recently they have seen it spreading via spam campaigns that rely on the Necurs botnet. A couple of weeks ago, operators behind Locky ransomware campaigns have switched to new attack techniques to evade detection., One of the new techniques adopted by the crooks is the use of the Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) protocol designed to allow data transferring between applications., Pierluigi Paganini , (Security Affairs – Locky ransomware, malware)

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Hackers belonging the Anonymous collective compromised the website of the World Trade Organization (WTO) and leaked its database containing personal data of its members., The stolen data are related to personnel of WTO sites located in various countries, including Brazil, China, France, India, Indonesia, Pakistan,  Russia, Santo Domingo, Saudi Arabia, Sri Lanka, United States and many others., , The colleagues at the HackRead web portal contacted members of Anonymous, which confirmed that they exploited a simple SQL injection vulnerability in order to access personal data of thousands of members from around the world. The hackers confirmed that the organization is aware of the attack and that the measures adopted to secure the systems were not effective, “THERE WERE OVER 53000 USERS NAMES, PHONES ETC. I HAVE HACKED AT FOR THE SECOND TIME TODAY AND THIS IS SECOND TIME WHEN THEY HAVE CHANGED THEIR SYSTEM BECAUSE OF MY HACK.” the hacker told to HackRead., The hackers targeted the ecampus.wto.org domain which is used by the WTO to provide online courses on international trade law and other trade-related matters., The Anonymous member, who requested to remain anonymous, breached the WTO database also hacked two Israeli arm dealers/importers and leaked thousands of client login data online under the #OpIsrael 2015., The experts at HackRead have analyzed the data leaked by the members of the Anonymous and confirmed that they are authentic and that they are not part of archive stolen in the past by other group of hackers., The material stolen from the WTO database includes:, It is clear that the information stolen in the data breach represents a serious threat for the security because it could open the door to spear phishing attacks., The links to the complete WTO archive stolen by hackers are available on PasteBin., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – WTO, hacking)

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Exim is a message transfer agent (MTA) developed at the University of Cambridge for use on Unix systems connected to the Internet, it is the most popular MTA on the Internet., The Internet mail message transfer agent warned of flaws through the public bug tracker, an unfortunate choice to disclose it because the notice could be ignored., According to the message published on the bug tracker, the first vulnerability, identified as CVE-2017-16943, is a use-after-free bug which could be exploited by an attacker to remotely execute arbitrary code in the SMTP server by crafting a sequence of BDAT commands., “A remote code execution vulnerability has been reported in Exim, with immediate public disclosure (we were given no private notice). A tentative patch exists but has not yet been confirmed., With immediate effect, please apply this workaround: if you are running Exim 4.88 or newer (4.89 is current, 4.90 is upcoming) then in the main section of your Exim configuration, set: , chunking_advertise_hosts = , That’s an empty value, nothing on the right of the equals. This disables advertising the ESMTP CHUNKING extension, making the BDAT verb unavailable and avoids letting an attacker apply the logic.”, Assigning the empty value to the chunking_advertise_hosts turns off the vulnerable function., , The advisory included a proof-of-concept code that cause the Exim crash because the function pointer, receive_getc is not reset., Below the announcement of a second DoS vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2017-16944, affecting the SMTP daemon in Exim 4.88 and 4.89., The flaw is caused by the improper checking for a ‘.’ character to signify the end of an email when parsing the BDAT data header., “The receive_msg function in receive.c in the SMTP daemon in Exim 4.88 and 4.89 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (infinite loop and stack exhaustion) via vectors involving BDAT commands and an improper check for a ‘.’ character signifying the end of the content, related to the bdat_getc function.” state the advisory published by the NIST., Sys admins are recommended to update their installs to the Exim version 4.90., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – MTA, hacking)

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A few days ago security a database containing 5 million alleged Google login and password has been leaked online on a Russian cyber security internet forum. Google immediately started its investigation and discovered that huge archive of Gmail credentials didn’t come from the security data breaches, rather the accounts’ data had been stolen by phishing attacks and other illegal practices, including social engineering attacks and malware based attacks., Recently it has been discovered a malware which infected hundreds of thousands of computers worldwide with the purpose to syphon users’ data. The malware based attack allowed bad actors to steal social and banking site credentials., A Greek security researcher discovered a new strain of malware spread via spam email infecting rapidly a huge number of machines. The expert detected the malware while it was attacking his corporate honeypot and conducted technical analyses posting its results on a blog post. The malware appears as a combination of software AutoIT (Automate day-to-day tasks on computers) and a commercial Keylogger named “Limitless Keylogger”. The researchers highlighted the use of Limitless Keylogger to intercept every keystrokes users press and send them back to the attackers via email, meanwhile AutoIT was adopted in order to evade detection by Antivirus programs., The use of Keylogger confirms the intention of attackers into users’ credentials for most popular web services, including Email accounts, Social Media accounts and Online Bank accounts., The researcher explained that malware is sent as mail attachment with a customized icon., “The mail attachment, contained this file. An executable with a custom icon. After a fast static analysis, it is recognised to be a WinRAR SFX executable with some dummy comments.”  states the researcher., The researcher discovered that originally the AutoIT Script size is 331MB, but once “deobfuscate” it appears as a tiny malicious code with only 55 kb in size., The threat actor dedicated great attention to evasion technique, he implemented several functionalities to keep hidden malware and its activities., The Greek researcher has analyzed the network traffic produced by the malware, in particular, he sniffed SMTP data, discovering that information collected from the keylogger was sent to a specific email, “ontherun4sales@yandex.ru”.,  , ,  , The researcher speculated that a group of Indonesian hackers is behind the spam campaign and the cyber criminals are targeting popular companies from different industries., The researcher closes the post with an interesting observation … it seems that cyber criminals forgot their keylogger logs in public!, , “If we de-base64 the traffic send by the Limitless Logger via mail, and search the pattern in google, you can find some interesting things.. “, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – AutoIT  malware, cybercrime)

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The UK-based Bitcoin exchange Bitstamp has temporarily suspended its service in wake of compromise. Bitstamp announced that its systems suffered a major cyber attack, which lead to the theft of “less than 19,000 BTC”., “We have temporarily suspended Bitstamp services. Bitstamp customers can rest assured that their bitcoins held with us prior to temporary suspension of services on January 5th (at 9am UTC) are completely safe and will be honored in full. On January 4th, some of Bitstamp’s operational wallets were compromised, resulting in a loss of less than 19,000 BTC.” states the official statement issued by company on its website. , As incident response, Bitstamp has immediately disclosed the news of the cyber attack  and as a security precaution it is informing the customers that they should no longer make deposits. While the investigation is going on, Bitstamp has frozen customers’ accounts and blocked any activity, including deposits and other every transaction., “Upon learning of the breach, we immediately notified all customers that they should no longer make deposits to previously issued bitcoin deposit addresses. To repeat, customers should NOT make any deposits to previously issued bitcoin deposit addresses. As an additional security measure, we suspended our systems while we fully investigate the incident and actively engage with law enforcement officials.”, The breach seems have impacted just a small fraction of Bitstamp’s total Bitcoin reserves, meanwhile the majority of the virtual coins the firm manages is held in secure offline cold storage systems., , “We would like to reassure all Bitstamp customers that their balances held prior to our temporary suspension of services will not be affected and will be honored in full.” notes Bitstamp., The Bitstamp ‘s CEO Nejc Kodric reassured its customers via Twitter, explaining that the Bitcoins are safe because are stored in offline systems, but customers fear a new Mt. Gox case., To restate: the bulk of our Bitcoin are in cold storage, and remain completely safe., — Nejc Kodrič (@nejc_kodric) 5 Gennaio 2015, , It is not the first time that the company is targeted by hacking crews, earlier this year Bitstamp has been hit by a DDoS attack. In time I’m writing the company hasn’t provided any detail on the cyber attack neither when it will resume the service., “We will return to service and amend our security measures as appropriate,” refers the company. “We appreciate customers’ patience during this disruption of services,” Bitstamp added in the notice. “We are working to transfer a secure backup of the Bitstamp site onto a new safe environment and will be bringing this online in the coming days.“, Bitstamp customers will be updated through the company website and social Twitter account (@Bitstamp). Every customer can also contact Bitstamp customer support at support@bitstamp.net., Stay Tuned …, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Bitstamp, Bitcoin)

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Security experts at Cyphort firm discovered a new malvertising campaign that hit numerous websites, including the Huffington Post and LA Weekly. The attackers exploited the AOL ad network to run the malicious campaign, Cyphort detected the attacks for the first time on Dec. 31 against the Canadian version of Huffington Post (huffingtonpost.ca), then on Huffingtonpost.com on Jan. 3. Cyphort notified AOL of the alarming discovery and the attacks stopped on Jan. 5.websites including Huffington Post and LA Weekly. The attackers exploited the AOL ad network to run the malicious campaign, Cyphort detected the attacks for the first time on Dec. 31 against the Canadian version of Huffington Post (huffingtonpost.ca), then on Huffingtonpost.com on Jan. 3. Cyphort notified AOL of the alarming discovery and the attacks stopped on Jan. 5.huffingtonpost.ca), then on Huffingtonpost.com on Jan. 3. Cyphort notified AOL of the alarming discovery and the attacks stopped on Jan. 5., “In this case all the malicious ads came via advertising networks that belong to AOL,” said Nick Bilogorskiy, director of security research at Cyphort. “We don’t know exactly how it got there. When we consulted our logs we… saw the issue started in late October. So, one possibility is that AOL itself has been breached. Another possibility is that attackers are submitting the malicious ads and have AOL approving these ads for use in the ad network.”, According to details provided by Cyphort on the infection, the ad redirected users through multiple hops. The landing page served an exploit kit which uses a Flash exploit  and a VB script that downloads the Kovter Trojan executable to %temp%., , The researchers suspect that the exploit kit served by the cyber criminals could be the Neutrino kit or the Sweet Orange kit., The experts at Cyphort considered parliculary interesting the use of HTTPs and HTTPS to masquerade the servers used by the attackers, which adopted a specific HTTPS redirector hosted on a Google App Engine page., “Interestingly attackers used a mix of HTTP and HTTPS redirects to hide the servers involved in this attack. The HTTPS redirector is hosted on a Google App Engine page. This makes analysis based on traffic PCAPs more difficult, because HTTPS traffic is encrypted.” states a blog post published by Cyphort., In addition to the advertising.com advertising network, the attackers have also used the “adtech.de” platform, both serviceservice, Different malicious scripts were executed with different ads from advertising.com., “When user opens the Huffington Post web site, several scripts are executed from the advertising network to show ads. One of these scripts loads an external function through HTTPS from Google AppSpot, and this function loads another redirect through HTTPS. And only then the user receives redirects to malware payload. It makes it harder to analyze the origin of attack because even if a security company has the recorded network traffic it is impossible to decrypt and reconstruct the origin of the malware redirect.” said Bilogorskiy. , The experts at Cyphort speculate that the hacking crew behind the attack has compromised several .pl domains in Poland, and it used related sub-domains to redirect the traffic., “The ad networks get millions of ads submitted to them and any one of those could be malvertising,” Bilogorskiy said. “They try to detect and filter malicious ads from their systems, but it is challenging. The potential damage is high, as ad networks have a very deep reach and can infect many people quickly.”, “The attackers are accustomed to tricking the networks by making “armored” malverts, where they use various techniques to appear legitimate to the analysts, but infect the users nonetheless,” he continued. “For instance they will enable the malicious payload after a delay of several days after the ad is approved. Another way is to only serve the exploits to every 10th user, or every 20th user who views the ad. Verifying user agents and IP addresses also is a common strategy to hide from analysts and automated malware detection.  The attackers can implement various targeting strategies for malware infection, which appear normal in the context of advertisement, but in effect evade certain security detection.”, Malversting campaigns rely on compromised machines, to mitigate the threat it is recommended the website administrators to carefully inspect their platforms searching for malicious code or evidence of any suspicious activity (i.e. Traffic redirection)., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  AOL, Malversting campaign)

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New problems for Ubuntu Linux distribution, the security expert Donncha O’Cearbhaill discovered a critical vulnerability that could be exploited by a remote attacker to compromise a target computer using a malicious file., The vulnerability, a CrashDB code injection flaw, affects the Apport crash reporting tool on Ubuntu and is present in default Ubuntu Linux installations versions 12.10 (Quantal) and later. According to the expert, the vulnerable code was introduced on 2012-08-22 in Apport revision 2464 and was initially included in release 2.6.1., According to O’Cearbhaill, the CrashDB code injection flaw could allow an attacker to remotely execute arbitrary code on a system running on vulnerable Ubuntu Linux. In order to exploit the flaw, the attacker has to trick the Ubuntu user into opening a maliciously booby-trapped crash file., Once the victim opens the file it will inject malicious code in Ubuntu crash file handler that parses the code and executes arbitrary Python code., “Problematically there is also code which loads the CrashDB configuration directly from the CrashDB field and not from a local file. The code first checks if the CrashDB field starts with { indicating the start of a Python dictionary. If found, Apport will call Python’s builtin eval()method with the value of the CrashDB field. eval() executes the passed data as a Python expression which leads to straight forward and reliable Python code execution.” wrote O’Cearbhaill in a blog post., , The researcher also published a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code on GitHub and a video PoC of the attack., “Ubuntu ships the Apport crash handling software with all of its recent Desktop releases. This repo contains an exploit for a bug in the Apport crash report parser which can provide reliable code execution upon opening an Apport crash file. The parsing bug results in Python code injection in the Apport process. Exploiting this issue does not involve any memory corruption and it is extremely reliable.” states O’Cearbhaill., The researcher has also shared a video demonstration, showing that it is possible to gain control over the targeted Ubuntu box system using this flaw with the help of a malicious file., In the video the expert opened the Gnome calculator with a simple Apport crash report file., Below and example of a minimal crash report file which exploits the CrashDB vulnerability in order to gain arbitrary code execution and launch the Gnome calculator:, The code could be saved with the .crash extension or with any other extension that’s not registered on Ubuntu., “Both of these issues were reported to the Apport maintainers and a fix was released on 2016-12-14. The CrashDB code injection issue can be tracked with CVE-2016-9949 and the path traversal bug with CVE-2016-9950. An additional problem where arbitrary commands can be called with the “Relaunch” action is tracked by CVE-2016-9951.” added the expert., , The researcher reported the CrashDB vulnerability to Ubuntu that promptly patched the flaw in Ubuntu. O’Cearbhaill received a $10,000 bounty., Ubuntu Linux users have to patch their systems asap., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – CrashDB vulnerability, Ubuntu)

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According to security experts from the computer forensics company Elcomsoft, Apple has weakened the backup security protection of its recently-issued iOS 10 skipping certain security checks. This means that hackers could easily crack password protection used to protect the backups of iOS devices that are stored on Macs and PCs., “We discovered a major security flaw in the iOS 10 backup protection mechanism. This security flaw allowed us developing a new attack that is able to bypass certain security checks when enumerating passwords protecting local (iTunes) backups made by iOS 10 devices.” reads a blog post published by Elcomsoft., , The researchers reported the presence of a security hole that opens the door for a new type of iOS brute-force password attack., “We looked into it, and found out that the new mechanism (in iOS 10) skips certain security checks, allowing us to try passwords approximately 2,500 times faster compared to the old mechanism used in iOS 9 and older,” continues the post., Apple has downgraded the hashing algorithm for iOS 10 from “PBKDF2 SHA-1 with 10,000 iterations” to“plain SHA256 with a single iteration.” With this premise, an attacker can brute-force the password via a standard desktop computer processor faster., PBKDF2 (Password-Based Key Derivation Function) leverages on a SHA-1 hash with thousands of password iterations, making it hard the password cracking., In iOS 9 and prior versions back to iOS 4, Apple was using the PBKDF2 function to generate the final crypto key using a pseudorandom function (PRF) 10,000 times (password iterations)., In a real attack scenario, hackers need to have a local or remote access to the machine where the Apple backup is stored, then crack it by running a brute-force attack., The experts explained that the new security checks implemented by Apple allow 2,500 times faster brute force attacks compared to the old one that was used in iOS 9 backups., Below data related to brute-force attacks reported by Elcomsoft:, Elcomsoft confirmed that the password hole could be exploited to gain access to Apple Keychain. iOS 10 backups allow a hacker to extract and decrypt Keychain data., “Keychain contains information such as saved passwords or authentication tokens to applications requesting secure storage for authentication credentials, Safari logins and passwords, credit card information, Wi-Fi network information, and any data that third-party app developer consider worthy of extra protection.” states the post about the Keychain., Users can download the Elcomsoft Phone Breaker 6.10 that comes with 6 million passwords per second (CPU only) for iOS 10 backups., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – iOS 10 Backup Encryption, mobile)

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VMware released security updates to address a vulnerability (CVE-2018-6983) that was recently discovered by Tianwen Tang of Qihoo 360’s Vulcan Team at the Tianfu Cup PWN competition., White hat hackers earned more than $1 million for zero-day exploits disclosed at the hacking contest that took place on November 16-17 in Chengdu., Tang received $100,000 for the successful exploitation of the flaw, the virtualization giant has quickly fixed the critical Workstation and Fusion vulnerability., “VMware Workstation and Fusion contain an integer overflow vulnerability in the virtual network devices. This issue may allow a guest to execute code on the host.” states the security advisory published by VMWare., “VMware would like to thank Tianwen Tang of Qihoo 360Vulcan Team  working with the Tianfu Cup 2018 International Pwn Contest for reporting this issue to us.”, The flaw is an integer overflow bug affecting virtual network devices, it could be exploited to execute code on the Workstation host from the guest., The flaw affects Workstation 14.x and 15.x on any platform, and Fusion 10.x and 11.x on macOS., “We wanted to post a quick acknowledgement that VMware has representatives in attendance at the Tianfu Cup PWN Contest in Chengdu, China to review any vulnerabilities that may be demonstrated during the contest.” added VMWware., “We would like to thank the organisers for inviting us to attend. Stay tuned for further updates.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Daniel’s Hosting, dark web)

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The security expert Miroslav Stampar, a member of the Croatian Government CERT, has discovered a new worm, dubbed EternalRocks, that exploits the EternalBlue flaw in the SMB protocol to spread itself like the popular WannaCry ransomware., Stampar discovered the EternalRocks after it infected his SMB honeypot, he called the malware ‘DoomsDayWorm.’, If I will be asked to choose a name, let it be a DoomsDayWorm 😀 c52f20a854efb013a0a1248fd84aaa95, — Miroslav Stampar (@stamparm) May 18, 2017, , Stampar discovered that the EternalRocks disguises itself as WannaCry, but instead of delivering a ransomware, it takes over the affected computer to power other attacks., The researcher decompiled an older sample (start of May) of EternalRocks and published it on Github., Just captured 406ac1595991ea7ca97bc908a6538131 and 5c9f450f2488140c21b6a0bd37db6a40 in MS17-010 honeypot. MSIL/.NET #WannaCry copycat(s) pic.twitter.com/VVMrAg0Gib, — Miroslav Stampar (@stamparm) May 17, 2017, , Info on (new) EternalRocks worm can be found on Will keep it updated, along with @_jsoo_, — Miroslav Stampar (@stamparm) May 18, 2017, , Unlike the WannaCry Ransomware that leverages the two NSA hacking tools EternalBlue and DoublePulsar, EternalRocks exploits seven exploits leaked by Shadow Brokers and its code doesn’t include a kill-switch., EternalRocks was developed to avoid detection and to remain undetectable on the target system, it uses the following NSA exploits:, EternalRocks downloads all the above SMB exploits to the infected computer, then it scans the internet for open SMB ports on other systems to compromise., , Giving a close look at the list we can find the SMB exploits EternalBlue, EternalChampion, EternalSynergy and EternalRomance., The DoublePulsar is the exploit used by malware to implement network worm capabilities, while the SMBTouch and ArchTouch are SMB reconnaissance tools, designed to scan for systems hacking open SMB ports exposed on the Internet., The EternalRocks works in two stages:, During the first stage, EternalRocks downloads the Tor web browser on the affected computers, then it uses the application to connect to the command-and-control (C&C) server located on the Tor network., After 24 hours, the second stage starts, the malware delays its action in the attempt to avoid sandboxing techniques., “First stage malware UpdateInstaller.exe (got through remote exploitation with second stage malware) downloads necessary .NET components (for later stages)TaskScheduler and SharpZLib from Internet, while dropping svchost.exe (e.g. sample) and taskhost.exe (e.g. sample). Component svchost.exe is used for downloading, unpacking and running Tor from archive.torproject.org along with C&C (ubgdgno5eswkhmpy.onion) communication requesting further instructions (e.g. installation of new components).” wrote the researcher., “Second stage malware taskhost.exe (Note: different than one from first stage) (e.g. sample) is being downloaded after a predefined period (24h) from and run. After initial run it drops the exploit pack shadowbrokers.zip and unpacks contained directories payloads/, configs/ and bins/. After that, starts a random scan of opened 445 (SMB) ports on Internet, while running contained exploits (inside directory bins/) and pushing the first stage malware through payloads (inside directory payloads/). Also, it expects running Tor process from first stage to get further instructions from C&C.“, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – EternalRocks, EternalBlue vulnerability)

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New legislation exempting police, GCHQ and other officers from intelligence department from prosecution in a connection to mobile and computer hacking by the said government guns, has been passed by the UK Government – quietly!, While normally controversial or major legislative changes in law tend to go through a parliamentary process like democratic debate, prior to getting passed, in this particular case the change in Computer Misuse Act had been made as secondary legislation right under the radar. As per Privacy International, it seems like that no commissioners or regulators are responsible in overseeing intelligence agencies, Information Commissioner Office, NGOs, industry or even the public were consulted or notified about this legislative change. No public debate is made!, The amendment to law is resulted from a complaint Privacy International filed last year, suggests Privacy International. Seven communications providers alongside Privacy International filed a complaint in May 2014 with the UK IPT (Investigatory Powers Tribunal), claiming that the GCHQ’s hacking practices were against the UK Computer Misuse Act., , On June 6th, right after a couple of weeks from the date complaint was filed, UK government implemented new legislation in the Serious Crime Bill, which would lawfully allow intelligence officers, police, and of course GCHQ to hack into computers and phones without any criminal liability. Same bill later got passed as a law on 3rd March (this year), and then on May 3 it became effective. Privacy International states no public debate was made before the law got enacted, with just a rather one sided set of the stakeholders who got consulted – the stakeholders include  Ministry of Justice, Scotland Office, Crown Prosecution Service, Northern Ireland Office, National Crime Agency, GCHQ and police., Legal experts at Privacy International remarked about the change to Computer Misuse Act as, “grants UK law enforcement new leeway to potentially conduct cyber attacks within the UK.”, Despite filing their complaint way back in year 2014, Privacy International folks were not informed about the Computer Misuse Act amendment until the last week; prior to new legislation becoming effective. Now, of course, the government in UK is pretty allowed to do so, but it is pretty undemocratic and underhanded than what everyone expects., Written by: Ali Qamar, Founder/Chief Editor at SecurityGladiators.com, Author Bio: Ali Qamar is an Internet security research enthusiast who enjoys “deep” research to dig out modern discoveries in the security industry. He is the founder and chief editor at Security Gladiators, an ultimate source for cyber security. To be frank and honest, Ali started working online as a freelancer and still shares the knowledge for a living. He is passionate about sharing the knowledge with people, and always try to give only the best. Follow Ali on Twitter @AliQammar57, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – UK Government, hacking)

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A hacker has stolen over 700,000 user accounts the from a popular law enforcement forum PoliceOne and is offering for sale the entire database., The PoliceOne forum is used by verified police officers and investigators to exchange information on techniques of investigation, training or other law enforcement centric discussions., “PoliceOne.com is the #1 resource for up-to-the-minute law enforcement information online. More than 500,000 police professionals nationwide are registered PoliceOne members and trust us to provide them with the most timely, accurate and useful information available anywhere.” reads the description of the website., The news was reported by Motherboard, the precious data was offered for sale by a hacker that goes online with the moniker of the Berkut., “We have confirmed the credibility of a purported breach of the PoliceOne forums in 2015 in which hackers were potentially able to obtain usernames, emails and hashed passwords for a portion of our members. While we have not yet verified the claim, we are taking immediate steps to secure user accounts and our forums, which are currently offline while we investigate and gather more information,” a spokesperson for PoliceOne told Motherboard in an email., “While we store only limited user data and no payment information, we take any breach of data extremely seriously and are working aggressively to resolve the matter. We will be notifying potentially-affected users as a matter of priority and requiring them to change their passwords,” he added., , “Emails from NSA, DHS, FBI and other law enforcement agencies as well as other US government agencies,” Berkut’s listing on the Tochka dark web market reads., Berkut is selling the full database which includes around 715,000 user accounts and dates from 2015, for $400. He used the Tochka dark web market to sell the data dump that contains emails from the main US intelligence agencies (NSA, DHS, FBI), the hacker also confirmed that he had already sold the archive also on other forums., Berkut provided Motherboard as proof of the hack several samples of the data, including user details (i.e. usernames, email addresses, subscription dates, MD5 hashed passwords). However, the passwords also included salts—random strings of characters used to make a hash more resilient., Let me remind you that MD5 hashed passwords are very easy to hack., “The files did indeed contain valid email addresses from the NSA and other US government agencies; one file allegedly contained over 3,000 account details for Homeland Security staffers.” reported the Motherboard., “To verify that emails in the dump were connected to real accounts on PoliceOne, Motherboard attempted to create new users with a random selection of email addresses. Out of 15 addresses, 14 were already registered on the site.” , How did Bekrut hack the PoliceOne website?, The PoliceOne was running on a flawed version of the popular vBulletin CMS (likely version 4.2.3), it was quite easy for the hacker to find an exploit online and breach it., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – vBulletin, data breach)

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The capillary diffusion of mobile devices, the lack of security systems on these platforms and low level of awareness on principal cyber threats made them a privileged target for cybercrime. We have assisted in the recent year to an explosion of malware designed to hit principal mobile OSs, in a recent report Sophos security firm revealed that in Australia and the U.S. Android threat exposure rates exceeding those of PCs showing the urgency to implement proper countermeasures. The situation appears really critical that why I asked to the expert of Group-IB Forensics Lab to show me how these agents work with a really case study., , Several month ago Group-IB Forensics Lab detected mobile-banking malware through Google Play by Sberbank request (Russian leading national bank). The File associated to the malware was named «sber.apk», it was an Android Package having size of 225,905 bytes and digest md5: F27D43DFEEDFFAC2EC7E4A069B3C9516)., Analyzing the functionalities of the agent is is possible to classify it as «SMSStealer.APK» designed to infect Android devices., The first step is the decompression of the archive and subsequent conversion of the file with the name «classes.dex» from format «dex» to file format «Jar», subsequently using «Java Decompiler» it is possible to convert files., ,  , Evidence files after installation displays the following graphical user interface used to request user’s authorization through a phone number verification process.,  , After entering the phone number and pressing the «Do authorization» the application send system information to a remote server URL « berstaska.com/m/fo125kepro »., The data sent contains mobile phone number, the name and version of the operating system on a mobile phone, the name of the service provider, mobile country code and many others., At this point the research was addressed to the malicious domain used to collect the info, “berstaska.com” and “lekerdeka.com” are known to security experts because they have been used in the past for placing Carberp malware., The data related to the domains are:,  , Both domain names were linked to nserver.ru NS-servers and registered anonymously, according to the MalwareURL database and Group-IB Bot-Trek™ product more than twenty Carberp C&C were linked through the DNS of this operator.,  , At the time of the study network address «berstaska.com» was unavailable.,  , The malware establishes the function for sending and receiving SMS-messages using the following event handler:, , Received messages are processed and stored in the appropriate format in a file called «messages.txt» and can be sent to the above remote server. In this program makes logging investigated their actions in a file called «alarms.txt»., , The scam schema based on the interception of SMS used in the authentication process could be very useful to banking frauds. US and Canada banks, but also other financial institutions,  use One Time Password token sent via SMS, clearly an attacker intercepting it could complete fraudulent transactions., Many security firms such as Group-IB have observed that hackers begin to trade such kind of tools on blackmarket customized for specific banks., Group-IB has developed unique solution for proactive prevention fraud without integration specific hardware or software to the banking server-side so called Botnets Intelligence., Group-IB Botnets Intelligence team does sinkholing of botnet to collect the data from them, information that the expert provide to the bank for blocking the banking accounts victims of frauds notifying to the customer the incident., Following some questions I made to the experts of Group-IB Lab, What information exactly sent by the app to the remote server?, “system information, containing a mobile phone number, the name of the operating system on a mobile phone, the name of the service provider, mobile country code, etc”, Is the phone identifier sent? Android version number? any personal data? any information about other apps already installed on the device?, Information about IMEI, Android version, mobile service provider and extracted cellphone number from SIM-card for identifying the victims., How often is messages.txt sent to the remote server? Is the messages.txt file created as soon as a SMS arrives, and then sent to the server? Or does the messages.txt created a file with multiple messages, and then send it at a specified time?, It sends intercepted SMS as soon as it was intercepted by the trojan or it would be impossible to use such technique efficiently for banking theft, as you need to know the intercepted SMS and to login to the victims banking account. If you do it late, you need to wait for other chance., Is the Trojan intercepting all SMS messages, or just bank-related?, Only bank related by special signatures from Sberbank (russian national bank) and Alfabank ( – one of the largest and leading private bank in Russian Federation., I am not clear from the code snippet what is inside alarms.txt. Is it just logging when SMS are received and when messages.txt is transferred?, Yes, you are right, it is special files for information exchange about the new SMS was got and you don’t need to send it once again to the hacker., How different is this from what Zeus-in-the-mobile does?, It doesn’t do any active actions with online-banking, as some of mobile banking trojans do. It only intercepts the information from SMS to do future theft from the remote computer of the hacker., Did the two banking apps (for the different banks) all use the same remote server?, No, the same server was used to 2 banks, as it seems to be that it was targeted attack on them, and the same team of hackers were interested in both of them., Let me conclude the article thanks the experts of Group-IB Forensics Lab and in particular to the Head of International projects Andrey Komarov., Pierluigi Paganini

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We are in the middle of a battle in the cyberspace, with the advent of Presidential elections experts observed an intensification of the hacking attacks., While hackers target parties and personnel involved in the Presidential campaigns, the US Government threatens Russia is blaming its cyber army for the attacks., There aren’t only nation state actors involved in the battle, there are also hacktivists and patriotic hackers that could power cyber attacks against the adversary., This week, hackers from NewWorldHackers crew and Anonymous targeted the Dyn DNS service to launch a message to Russia, and in the same hours, the notorious American cyber vigilante The Jester has defaced the website of the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, MID.ru., The hack was not so complicated for the expert hacker that has found a flaw in the website and exploited it to hack the Russian Government portal., The Jester targeted the website of the Russian Government in retaliation for attacks against the American entities., The popular hacker gained access to the Russian government ministry’s website and posted the following message:, “Stop attacking Americans.”, “Comrades! We interrupt regular scheduled Russian Foreign Affairs Website programming to bring you the following important message,” he wrote. “Knock it off. You may be able to push around nations around you, but this is America. Nobody is impressed.”, “His hacking of the website included this gag: Visitors are subjected to the ear-piercing sound of an American civil alert message — that shrieking dial tone that accompanies emergency weather broadcasts.” reported the CNNmoney., , The Jester sent a message to President Putin to blame him for lying about the involvement of Russian hackers in the recent attacks against the American organizations., “Let’s get real, I know it’s you, even if by-proxy, and you know it’s you,” he wrote. “Now, get to your room. Before I lose my temper.”, #ICYMI MSG ‘From Russia with Love’ – I’m Jester & I approve this message via the Russian Foreign Affairs Website >> — JΞSTΞR ✪ ΔCTUAL³³º¹ (@th3j35t3r) 22 ottobre 2016, , In the past, The Jester vigilante has conducted several operations against jihadist communities online. The popular hacker said the CNNMoney journalists he chose to attack the Russian Government Website in response to the massive DDoS against the Dyn DNS service that cut off a large portion of US netizens from the Internet., “I wanted to poke them in the eye and stop feeling like US is just taking it on the chin. Again,” he said. “I’m not gonna sit around watching these f—-rs laughing at us.”, “It’s 4 a.m. in Moscow right now and a weekend. I’m hoping they can’t fix the hole til Monday,” he said., “Think of this as a professional courtesy,” his public warning states. “Or if you prefer message from ‘USA with love.'”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – The Jester, hacktivism)

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The U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has filed a lawsuit against the Taiwanese firm D-Link, over failure to secure its IoT products, including IP cameras and routers., “Hackers are increasingly targeting consumer routers and IP cameras — and the consequences for consumers can include device compromise and exposure of their sensitive personal information,” said Jessica Rich, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “When manufacturers tell consumers that their equipment is secure, it’s critical that they take the necessary steps to make sure that’s true.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – D-Link, security)

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The move aims to replace the Intel processors running on its desktop and laptop systems like done for its own A-series custom chips that are used for iPhones and iPads., “Apple Inc. is planning to use its own chips in Mac computers beginning as early as 2020, replacing processors from Intel Corp., according to people familiar with the plans.” states a report published by Bloomberg., According to Bloomberg, the Apple’s initiative was codenamed ‘Kalamata’ that was launched with the primary goal to have a uniform architecture across all of its product., According to Bloomberg, the move is part of a larger initiative internally dubbed Marzipan to make Macs work more like iPhones and make iOS apps interoperable on Apple devices., , Currently, Apple shares 5% of its annual revenue with Intel and pay for exclusive deals to offer to its customers, the changeover would allow the company to improve performance for its systems and keep secret its projects., According to Bloomberg, the new models of Mac Pro laptops arriving next year will include a chip designed by Apple. After the publication of the Bloomberg report, Intel’s stock price took a hit and dropped by 9.2 percent., “Apple plans to add that chip to a new version of its Mac Pro, to be released by next year, and new Mac laptops this year, according to a person familiar with the matter.” added Bloomberg. , “Intel shares dropped as much as 9.2 percent, the biggest intraday drop in more than two years, on the news. They were down 6.4 percent at $48.75 at 3:30 p.m. in New York.”, Both companies, Apple and Intel, did not yet comment the Bloomberg report., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Project Kalamata, Intel), ,

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According to malware researchers at Symantec, the North Korean APT group Lazarus was likely behind a recent string of cyber attacks against organizations in 31 countries. According to Symantec, the Lazarus APT was behind high-profile attacks on Bangladesh Bank, Sony and South Korea,, 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., Experts at Symantec collected evidence demonstrating the Lazarus APT group was behind the campaign that leveraged on a “loader” software used to stage attacks by installing other malicious programs., “We are reasonably certain” Lazarus behind the attacks, Symantec researcher Eric Chien said in an interview with the Reuters Agency., Both US and South Korea governments are blaming Pyongyang for the attacks, but the North Korean government has denied allegations it was behind the hacks., Symantec did not identify the organizations that were targeted in the last wave of attacks, it is not clear is Lazarus APT group has stolen money from the victims., According to the experts from the security firm, there was a significant escalation of the Lazarus APT group, it used more sophisticated techniques targeting than in previous cyber attacks., Experts at Symantec analyzed the hacking campaign launched last month by the Lazarus Group. The investigations started after Polish banks had been infected with a sophisticated strain of malware., Polish banks confirmed their systems were infected with a malware after their staff visited the site of the Polish Financial Supervision Authority., In order to avoid spreading the malware, the authorities took the decision to shut down the entire network at the Polish Financial Supervision Authority (KNF) “in order to secure evidence.”, Both security firms BAE Systems and Symantec started their investigation on the attacks. According to Symantec, the threat actor behind the attack is the same that targeted financial organizations in 31 countries since at least October 2016., According to Symantec, the Polish website used to target the Polish banks delivered a strain of malware known to be part of the toolkit of the Lazarus Group., The attackers exploited “watering holes” in order to infect the machines of a specific audience with previously unknown malware., “Symantec has blocked attempts to infect customers in Poland, Mexico and Uruguay by the same exploit kit that infected the Polish banks. Since October, 14 attacks against computers in Mexico were blocked, 11 against computers in Uruguay, and two against computers in Poland.” reads the analysis published by Symantec., At the time, Symantec said it had “weak evidence” to blame the Lazarus APT, but now the data gathered by the experts confirm the involvement of the group., The malicious code was instructed to infect visitors whose IP address showed they were from 104 specific organizations in 31 countries., The largest number of victims were in Poland, followed by the United States, and Mexico., , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Lazarus APT, cybercrime)

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According to the security advisory published by Google Security Team’s Jason Geffner and Jan Bee on Seclists, it is possible to get remote root execution on Apple Mac systems via Man-In-The-Middle (MiTM) attacks. The attackers can get root-level remote code execution on a Mac by intercepting the ESET antivirus package’s connection to company backend servers. The attack is possible due to the presence of a buffer overflow vulnerability in the XML library tracked as CVE-2016-0718., “Vulnerable versions of ESET Endpoint Antivirus 6 are statically linked with an outdated XML parsing library and do not perform proper server authentication, allowing for remote unauthenticated attackers to perform arbitrary code execution as root on vulnerable clients.” reads the advisory., According to the experts, the attack is possible because the esets_daemon uses an old version of POCO’s XML parser library that is affected by the buffer overflow vulnerability., , The researchers discovered that the flawed library also handles license activation with a request to the following static address:, When the ESET Endpoint Antivirus tries to activate the license, the esets_daemon sends a request to the above address, but it doesn’t validate the web server’s certificate opening the door to a man-in-the-middle attack., An attacker can intercept the request and send to the ESET Endpoint Antivirus a self-signed HTTPS certificate, then the esets_daemon service parses the response as an XML document., In this phase, the attacker can pass a specifically XML document that can trigger the CVE-2016-0718 to achieve arbitrary code execution as root., “When ESET Endpoint Antivirus tries to activate its license, esets_daemon sends a request to  The esets_daemon service does not validate the web server’s certificate, so a man-in-the-middle can intercept the request and respond using a self-signed HTTPS certificate.” reads the security advisory. “The esets_daemon service parses the response as an XML document, thereby allowing the attacker to supply malformed content and exploit CVE-2016-0718 to achieve arbitrary code execution as root.”, The security duo has also published the Proof of Concept code to exploit the attack., ESET has promptly fixed the issue in ESET Endpoint Antivirus version  6.4.168.0., Update your system as soon as possible., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – CVE-2016-0718, ESET Endpoint Antivirus)

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Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) is a widely adopted protocol for remote administration, but it could dramatically enlarge the attack surface if it isn’t properly managed., The FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) and the DHS issued a joint alert to highlight the rise of RDP as an attack vector., Attackers are exploiting this feature to access systems to deploy malware such as the SamSam ransomware., “Malicious cyber actors have developed methods of identifying and exploiting vulnerable RDP sessions over the Internet to compromise identities, steal login credentials, and ransom other sensitive information.” reads the alert issued by IC3., “The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recommend businesses and private citizens review and understand what remote accesses their networks allow and take steps to reduce the likelihood of compromise, which may include disabling RDP if it is not needed.”, Attackers can “infiltrate the connection” between the local and the remote machines and inject malware into the remote system. Experts warn that attacks using the Remote Desktop Protocol do not require user input, this makes intrusions difficult to detect., The IC3 warns of the following vulnerabilities:, , The alert includes the audit of network for systems using RDP for remote communication, limiting the use of the Remote Desktop Protocol, keeping systems up to date, and implements multi-factor authentication wherever possible., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – IC3, hacking)

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Cyber technology could be a catalyst to equality in the labor market. Its power is seeded in the ability of everyone to gain skills without social entry barriers. To succeed in the cyber labor market, one has to have curiosity, creativity and the Patience to learn a computer language. In contrast to other skills, one can study everything from books or from the Internet. To be a hacker, Programmer, or any other profession in the ICT / Cyber labor market, one has to be an autodidact with passion. , The freedom to gain a skill can give any men or women the equal chance of social mobility in the cyber labor market, is due to the principles the cyber domain is based on – openness, information sharing and a liberal view that everyone can.  , Sadly, a look at the labor market at countries that have a developed cyber industry, such as Israel, will reveal the opposite. I will discuss the Israeli cyber market, but my argument is true for any other such as a country.  , In Israel, there is an advanced cyber security industry, based mostly on veterans from two intelligence units. When I say, “cyber security industry” I refer to entrepreneurs who drive the startup scene, or in its other name – Startup nation. In fact, in the Israeli cyber labor market, there is a new guild – the cyber guild. And this guild is composed of Those veterans who are the human infrastructure behind this industry. And it’s not theirs to blame.  , The Israeli cyber industry is based on the army. It’s not secret. And in the army, the intelligence units use the most advanced technology they can find or develop. The reason for that is lying in the pursuit of knowledge. If you want to be ahead of your enemy, you have to know his moves. And if you master the knowledge gathering process, fusion process and distribution process, you have the skills for the cyber labor market. With abstraction, it can be said that cyber defense or offense, is a game of knowledge.  , , After the veterans go to the civil market, they make a spin-off to the technologies they exposedto in their units. And there you have it – young people, fearless, with expertise they got in the army funding hundreds of startups that makes the industry monotonous, controlled by those people. That’s the guild. And as one, it maintains itself. Friend brings a friend. Although recently, there has been a shift because of a shortage of skilled workers, it hasn’t changed the core diversity in the cyber labor market.  , As mentioned before, the problem isn’t with the guild, but in the system that created it. If the system changes, the guild will dismantle. And the system is the government that regulates the labor market. Instead of encouraging the distortion in the cyber labor market, the government, through the education system and the army, has to establish a more ‘fair’ distribution system of cyber skills in the population, regardless of their military service. In this way, the distortion in the cyber labor market Will be reduced. , To summarize, the cyber era is a great opportunity for governments around the world to create a better society by reducing the inequality in the labor market. Most of the skills needed for jobs in the cyber labor market can be gained freely by old or young people. It’s true that not everybody will like to work as a programmer, hacker or IT staff, but the door should be open by default to those who want. And the responsibility for it lies with the government.   , Ami isAn Israeli-based writer, tech corresponded of the Israel Defense magazine. Covers the Israeli cyber industry, defense industries and the ICT scene. Passions include futuristic technologies, science and geopolitical aspect of technology. MA in political science with thesis in Cyber deterrence., Written by Ami Rojkes Dombe, Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Cyber security, Israel)

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The security experts Vulnerability Lab CEO Benjamin Kunz Mejri and Marco Onorati have discovered a number of SQL injection vulnerabilities in the websites of the European Parliament and the European Commission., The exploitation of the flaws in the websites of the European Parliament and the European Commission could result in the exposure of the databases used by the web services that contain sensitive user data., The researchers already reported them to CERT-EU in May through an ethical disclosure process, the flaw  will be fixed in a couple of weeks., “We reported the bugs by the responsible disclosure program and got acknowledged for the critical vulnerabilities in a fair way by the CERT-EU team,” Kunz Mejritold SecurityWeek that first reported the news., The SQL injection vulnerabilities affect websites hosted on the domain “europa.eu” belonging to the European Union., The SQL injection flaws were found in multiple various sections of the European Commission’s website (inspire.ec.europa.eu, ec.europa.eu/growth, ec.europa.eu/social). One of the flaws was discovered affecting one of the pages of the European Parliament website (europarl.europa.eu/sides/), , According to Kunz Mejri, the good news is that the vulnerabilities are difficult to exploit due to the defense measures implemented by the organization., Kunz Mejri and the Government Laboratory organizations have already spotted other serious vulnerabilities in the systems of government organizations worldwide., The experts will disclose the details of the vulnerabilities once they will be patched., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – European Union Websites, EMC Data Domain)

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A new study commissioned by the engineering firm Siemens revealed that oil and gas industry in the United States is largely unprepared to mitigate cybersecurity risks in operational technology (OT) environments., The survey was conducted by the Ponemon Institute and involved 377 individuals who are responsible for securing or overseeing cyber risk in the OT environment. Sixty-eight percent of respondents admitted having suffered at least one cyber incident in the past year that caused OT disruption or loss of confidential information., Only 41 percent of respondents admitted to continually monitor all infrastructure to prioritize threats and attacks. The worrying data emerged from the survey is that an average of 46 percent of all cyber attacks in the OT environment goes undetected, this means that organizations have to improve their security posture by adopting systems for threat detection., 20% one in five of respondents admitted that their organizations were compromised by a sophisticated strain of malware such as Duqu and Flame., Exploratory information and production information are the most vulnerable areas in the oil and gas value chain., “Exploratory information is the area most vulnerable in the oil and gas value chain to a cyber attack. When asked to identify the top seven areas of greatest risk, 72 percent of respondents say it is exploratory information and 60 percent of respondents say it is production information” reads the study., The majority of respondents rate their organization’s OT cyber readiness as low to medium cybersecurity readiness, only 35 percent believe they are resilient to cyber attacks, 67 percent believe cyber threats have had a significant impact on the risk to industrial control systems (ICS)., Sixty-nine percent of individuals who participated in the survey are concerned about the risks associated with third-parties in the supply chain., “Cyber risks, especially across the supply chain, are difficult to address. Sixty-nine percent of respondents believe their organization is at risk because of uncertainty about the cybersecurity practices of third parties in the supply chain and 61 percent say their organization has difficulty in mitigating cyber risks across the oil and gas value chain.” continues the report., , Negligent and malicious or criminal insiders are considered the principal threats to the U.S. oil and gas industry., “Together negligent and malicious or criminal insiders pose the most serious threat to critical operations. Sixty-five percent of respondents say the top cybersecurity threat is the negligent or careless insider and 15 percent of respondents say it is the malicious or criminal insider.”, Let’s close with a look at the factors that pose the major risks to the organizations. Roughly 60 percent of respondents pointed out outdated and aging control systems or vulnerable IT products used in production environments., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  operational technology,  security)

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Stolen email credentials from the largest US universities are a precious commodity in the dark web, crooks are offering them for a price ranging from $3.50 to $10 apiece., The researchers, supported by a research firm ID Agent, found 13,930,176 credentials from those big schools, mostly from the University of Michigan (122,556), Penn State (119,350), University of Minnesota (117,604), Michigan State (115,973), and Ohio State (114,032)., , The MIT is the institute with the highest ratio of stolen and spoofed email addresses to number of enrolled and staff, 2.81:1, followed by Carnegie Mellon University, 2.4:1, and the Cornell University, 2.39:1., “I’ve been scraping the Dark Web since 2009. There were 2.2 million .edu emails there back in 2015, 2.8 million in 2016, and now almost 14 million a year later. That’s a significant spike,” explained Brian Dunn, managing partner at ID Agent., According to the researchers, the huge amount of stolen records was obtained through third-party website breaches, and during 2016 the number of data breaches was very high., “There have been significant third-party breaches in 2016,” said Dunn. ID Agent observed a 547% increase in all types of stolen credentials offered for sale in the Dark Web over the past three years., According to the DCA, the report only analyzed credentials belonging to the major US universities, this means that there is the possibility that in the dark net sellers are offering credentials for other smaller universities., “The .edu domain is a generally valuable email domain just like .gov and .mil,” Dunn concluded., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Digital Citizens Alliance, DDoS)

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After a long investigation conducted by the Italian Competition Authority AGCM, the agency has fined Apple and Samsung a 5 million Euros ($5.8 Million) and 10 million Euros ($11.5 Million) for “planned obsolescence” of their mobile devices., Both companies are accused to have been slowing down their old devices with the intent of encouraging users to purchase new devices., In particular, Samsung was challenged for the update issued on May 2016 for Galaxy Note 4, while for Apple the AGCM questioned the update issued on September 2016 for the several devices supported at the time (i.e. iPhone 6 and 6s); Apple failed in providing the correct information of consumers about the effects of the updates that had an important impact on the performance and autonomy of the batteries., “As a result of two complex investigations, the Italian Competition Authority – AGCM has ascertained that companies of Samsung group and Apple group have carried out unfair commercial practices in violation of Articles 20, 21, 22 and 24 of the Consumer Code in relation to the release of some firmware updates for their mobile phones which caused serious malfunctions and significantly reduced their performance, in this way speeding up their replacement with more recent products.” ” AGCM said in a statement., “The two companies have induced consumers – by insistently proposing to proceed with the download and also because of the significant information asymmetry of consumers vis-a-vis the producers – to install software updates that are not adequately supported by their devices, without adequately informing them, nor providing them an effective way to recover the full functionality of their devices.”, Back in December 2017, Apple apologized for slowing down older iPhones, the company introduced features, that impacted the iPhone 6, 6S, 7 and SE, to cope with aging batteries., On the other end, In January Samsung announced that it “does not provide the software updates to reduce the product performance over the life cycle of the device.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – planned obsolescence, Apple, Samsung)

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FBI released the Internet Crime Compliant Center – IC3 report of 2015 last week. During the last calendar year, IC3 received 288,012 complaints and 44 percent of them reported financial loss equal to $1,070,711,522. Business Email Compromise (BEC), Email Account Compromise (EAC), and Ransomware are the hottest topics of 2015 report., , The annual report aims to promote the public awareness by aggregating and highlighting the data provided by the general public. IC3 has received 3,463,620 complaints since its establishment in May 2000. Over the last five years, 300,000 complaints have been received per year reporting millions of dollars’ losses., , BEC also called wire transfer phishing is a sophisticated scam that targets long-established relationship between businesses and foreign suppliers with regular wire transfer payments. Fraudsters compromise legitimate email accounts to instruct victims to redirect invoice remittance payments and conduct unauthorised fund transfer. The scam was first reported to the IC3 in 2010 but it has evolved and become more sophisticated since 2013. The report indicates 7,838 victims reported the loss of more than $263 million. EAC has a similar approach with BEC but targets individuals or individual professionals and 281 victims of this scam lost over $11 million., Ransomware targets individuals and organisations and costs 2,453 victims reported to the IC3 over $1.6 million. Ryan Kalember, SVP, Cybersecurity Strategy at Proofpoint stated ransomware is the biggest difference he has seen in cybercrime trends after 2015. Ransomware has been seen in 3 percent of sample emails in 2015 but a surprising increase of 27 percent in the first five months of 2016 has been observed in comparison with previous year., It is worth noting that these statistics address those victims who went to the authorities, but the scope of ransomware attack is more serious. David Emm, a principal security researcher at Kaspersky Lab said: “In 2015, 753,684 ransomware attacks were blocked on computers belonging to Kaspersky Lab customers”., The report indicates that the highest number of victims belongs to the age group of 50-59 in the male population and the age group of over 60 in female people. Almost similar to the last year, 52 percent of victims are male losing $637,112,290 in total., You can access the aforementioned IC3 report 2015 and all the previous years’ reports from the link below:, About the Author, Ali Taherian (@ali_taherian) is an enthusiastic information security Officer. He’s finished his education in information security and has recently been involved in banking software and payment security industry. Taherian is proud to be certified IBM Cloud Computing Solution Advisor and ECSA and enjoys sharing and tweeting about security advances and news., Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, If you appreciate my effort in spreading cyber security awareness, please vote for Security Affairs as best European Security Blog. Vote SecurityAffairs in every section it is reported. I’m one of the finalists and I want to demonstrate that the Security Affairs community a great reality., Thank you, Pierluigi, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – IC3 report, FBI)

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The Majority are aware of the impact cyber-attacks can have on Industrial Control Systems however, the reality in terms of mitigation techniques are shrouded with confusion and a reactive approach. Recent 0-day vulnerability dubbed as ‘Panel Shock’ found in Schneider Electric’s SCADA Human Machine Interface (HMI) device panels send ripples of fear and doubts in the industry; somehow dirty linen has been exposed again., The media generally refer to all Industrial Control Architectures as SCADA and to avoid autocratic debates with various security voice groups we will continue this trend. It is not difficult to map the behavior classification of SCADA attack patterns by observing recent campaigns such as Havex, Black Energy and Stuxnet etc. In these attacks, the malware was mostly distributed by Phishing attacks aimed at executives not on the ICS network and Watering hole attacks on ICS vendor software delivery websites., Assessing the Threat , No golden rules exist of how to assess the threat, however, the question that is queried most is ‘where do organizations initiate to assess the threat’? Within RSA Advanced Cyber Defence Practice we follow the domains/ framework to assess and formulate responses to ICS/SCADA threats., , In our forthcoming blog with Gareth Pritchard (Advanced Cyber Defence Consultant EMEA) and Peter Tran (Snr Director Advanced Cyber Defense at RSA blog site will be a detailed analysis on each domain., For today’s article, I want to focus on the element of ‘filtering the white noise ‘, One of the core failures of SCADA-based organizations is their inability to filter white noise by dissecting incidents through the combination of hunting, intelligence gathering, and incident attribution. They fail to build a ‘proactive’ customized Use Case library that is required to detect specific and tailored threats targeted at the company. One of the suggested strategies could be a hunt and response strategy i.e., , 1)        Develop: UseCase Development Strategy, Develop tailored metrics / reports to detect current threats based on real world network data., i)        Report 1: Critical Anomaly, 3) Hunt: Implement Hunting Development process., 4) Enhance: Review UseCase Library, Analyse reports number of times each UseCase has triggered alongside the appearance of indicators present in the logic of the UseCases. Determine if the UseCases are erroneous or no longer valid., Submit report to the Content management team to repair erroneous UseCases and archive UseCases which are no longer useful or relevant to the SOC., Conduct 6 monthly reviews to gage success, knowledge gaps and training requirements., Run 6 monthly and annual reports highlighting costs saved as a direct or indirect result of breach prevention and breach disruption. Use this data to qualify funding in order to enhance and Advance the SOC via analyst training, appliance upgrades and user awareness events., The above process is only one step towards the development of mitigation process for ICS environment. Organizations need to avoid siloes working compartment and not in my backyard mentality to develop a more robust holistic process. See RSA blog next week for framework analysis., Suggested Reading, INDUSTRIAL CONTROL SYSTEMS (ICS) AMBIGUITY? About the authors:, Azeem Aleem, Director  RSA Advanced Cyber Defence Practice  EMEA, An experienced information security executive with over 15 years of practitioner experience in cyber defence technologies, security operations, counter threat intelligence, data analytics and behavioural classification of cyber criminal., As a subject matter expert, he has made frequent appearance on regional television and radio programmes as an expert on cyber threats. A published book author and academic criminologist, he has also authored several periodical on advanced security threats in peer-reviewed journals and security magazines. He is an eminent plenary conference guest speaker both at the national and international level., Gareth is a consultant for the Advanced Cyber Defense Services Practice – EMEA. In this capacity Gareth is responsible for professional services engagement for Global Incident response/Discovery (IR/D), breach readiness, remediation, SOC/CIRC redesign., Gareth has over 10 years of experience in Information technology focusing on root cause analysis of infrastructure and cyber security related issues. This has led to a broad knowledge base of remediating problems and designing processes and procedures to assist in the prevention of issues arising in the future., Gareth has studied various technologies and has a broad wealth of experience in application scripting, web design, malware analysis, big data correlation, data mining and windows / Linux technologies. This knowledge has been paramount in learning more about the current threats and tactics used by cyber criminals in the cyber security threat landscape., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – SCADA, hacking)

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The Internet of Things is expected to lead to 50 billion connected devices by 2020 collecting and exchanging personal data about their users, their lives, their preferences and tastes.  This will lead not only to relevant data protection issues, but also to increased cybercrime related risks triggering the need to ensure a higher level of cyber security., I have already covered in this post the compliance measures to be put in place in order to face data protection issues affecting the Internet of Things.  However, as covered in this post from my friend Pierluigi Paganini, the Internet of Things is likely to create new opportunities for hackers able to go beyond security measures implemented in for instance wearable technologies or eHealth systems leading to cybercrimes., This issue has been recently addressed by the Italian Government that adopted the National Plan on Cyber Security whose purpose is, among others, to amend cybercrime provisions in order to be better tailored to new technologies which certainly include crimes involving the unauthorized access to BIG DATA and personal data collected through Internet of Things technologies., In addition to the above, a potential cybercrime deriving from access to personal data stored in a database including for instance health related data gathered by means of wearable technologies, but even data collected by companies such as manufactures of cars, home appliances, eHealth or telemedicine technologies and even banks can lead to liabilities also for the entities acting as controllers of such databases.  And in such circumstances, in accordance with the Italian privacy law, the burden of proof of having adopted all the possible security measures necessary to prevent the occurrence of the cybercrime will be on the data controller itself creating a scenario that in some cases can be defined of “probatio diabolica“., Also, in case of the so called data breach (i.e. a breach of security leading to the accidental, unlawful destruction, loss, alteration, unauthorized disclosure of, or access to, personal data in a database), the notification obligation to the Data Protection Supervisory Authority currently represents an obligation only on providers of electronic communication services.  However, it will become an obligation for any data controller i.e. any entity running a database of personal data as a consequence of the coming into force of new EU data protections regulation already approved by the European Parliament.  And this extension will be coupled with the increase of sanctions for breach of data protection regulations up to 5% of the global turnover of the data controller’s group., , Such obligations will raise concerns not only for European companies, but also for non-European companies such as American entities collecting personal data of European users because the new European data protection regulation will be applicable to any entity processing personal data of users located in the European Union., There were according to estimates 1,150 cybercrime attacks globally of which 35 in Italy in 2013 leading to annual damages between € 20 and € 40 billion in Italy.   And given such circumstances it is not surprising that insurance policies covering cybercrimes are becoming very popular.  The growth of the Internet of Things and the increased reliance of companies on BIG DATA and in general large databases leads to a risk against which companies are more and more deciding to get an insurance protection., Likewise, the fact that Italian law provides for corporate criminal liability in relation to cybercrime conducts pushes companies to adopt the so called internal corporate model of organization and management of the company outlined in this post in order to minimize liabilities in case of cybercrime leading to the loss, alteration or destruction of their customers’ data). This is not relevant only for gaming operators, but for companies acting in any sector., The issue above will become more and more relevant in the next years and as usual feel free to contact me, Giulio Coraggio to discuss. Also, if you want to receive my newsletter, please join my LinkedIn Group or my Facebook page. And follow me on Twitter, Google+ and become one of my friends on LinkedIn., Giulio Coraggio, Security Affairs –  (cybercrime,  Internet of Things)

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One of the sectors most targeted by cyber attacks and by malware is the banking, during the last months we have read several times of agents developed to steal credentials of accounts and to realize complex frauds. We all remember malicious applications such as Spyeye and Zeus, the second is considered for example one of the most prolific malware du to the great variety of agent isolated all around the world in the last period and that have affected different platforms., Financial institutions and banks need to take in serious consideration this cyber threats, that for the first time are creating great problems to the diffusion of the web-based service banking., Ransomware, malware and phishing are the most insidious menaces for the sector, they have registered an impressive growth in the last year and the trend is really frightening., Last week, due the increase of the number of infected pcs the FBI, has launched an alert titled “Citadel Malware Continues to Deliver Reveton Ransomware in Attempts to Extort Money ”, to explain that the IC3 has been made aware of a new Citadel malware platform used to deliver ransomware named Reveton., “The ransomware lures the victim to a drive-by download website, at which time the ransomware is installed on the user’s computer. Once installed, the computer freezes and a screen is displayed warning the user they have violated United States federal law. The message further declares the user’s IP address has been identified by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as visiting websites that feature child pornography and other illegal content.”, Of course to unlock the pc, the victim have to pay a fine to the U.S. Department of Justice using a prepaid money card service.,  , In the specific case, the victim is cheated several times, before by the ransomware and after by the Citadel malware that once infected the machine continues to commit online banking operations and steal sensible information., The level of complexity of these cyber threat is surprising as the model of sell implemented, in a past article I explained how much power is the concept of “malware ad service“, criminal organizations are able to customize the agents for the specific clients distributing them through anonymity channels such as the Deep Web., We are facing an impressive business and criminals know that risks are really limited., Citadel malware represents a powerful variant of Zeus agent, it is considered an ongoing project due to the model referred and it is evolution is interesting also new social media platforms and operating also on mobile devices., Experts believe that the new variant that includes a ransomware has been developed to with the specific intent to attack US banking sector where, differently from Europe, users have no experience with this fraud schema., As said, this time the evolution of Citadel is more dangerous due to the conjunction of more offensive malicious components inside the same agent, an information stealer and a ransomware and the forecast is that in next versions will be integrated more modules to circumvent users defenses. Zeus today represents the maximum expression of the malware evolution due to its diffusion and to the number of variants detected., Returning to the FBI alert, it suggests :,  Watch out, the enemy may have already infected your machine!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Citadel malware, cybercrime), ,

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According to documents obtained by The Intercept, the CIA is funding a new skincare line that can allow the agency to collect DNA., “SKINCENTIAL SCIENCES, a company with an innovative line of cosmetic products marketed as a way to erase blemishes and soften skin, has caught the attention of beauty bloggers on YouTube, Oprah’s lifestyle magazine, and celebrity skin care professionals. Documents obtained by The Intercept reveal that the firm has also attracted interest and funding from In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the Central Intelligence Agency.” states the Intercept., The CIA if particularly interested in the Clearista a product line that boasts a “formula so you can feel confident and beautiful in your skin’s most natural state.”, The CIA is interested in the ability of the Clearista product in removing a thin outer layer of skin that could allow investigators to obtain unique biomarkers that can be used for DNA collection., , The product is not invasive, it is able to remove the layer of skin just by using a special detergent and water., “Skincential Science’s noninvasive procedure, described on the Clearista website as “painless,” is said to require only water, a special detergent, and a few brushes against the skin, making it a convenient option for restoring the glow of a youthful complexion — and a novel technique for gathering information about a person’s biochemistry.”reports the Intercept., The CIA intends to use the skincare line for DNA extraction, as confirmed by the Russ Lebovitz, the chief executive of Skincential Science., “Our company is an outlier for In-Q-Tel,” said Lebovitz “If there’s something beneath the surface, that’s not part of our relationship and I’m not directly aware. They’re interested here in something that can get easy access to biomarkers.”, Lebovitz highlighted that the CIA is interested in easy methods for the DNA extraction, but he admitted having no idea of the CIA’s intent of the technology., It is likely the CIA would use the Clearista for DNA extraction directly on crime scenes., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – DNA extraction, CIA)

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The security researcher Stefan Winter from the Luxembourg’s high-speed academic network RESTENA has discovered a FreeRADIUS TLS resumption authentication bypass., FreeRADIUS is the world’s most popular RADIUS Server, “it is the basis for multiple commercial offerings. It supplies the AAA needs of many Fortune-500 companies and Tier 1 ISPs. It is also widely used for Enterprise Wi-Fi and IEEE 802.1X network security, particularly in the academic community, including eduroam.”, , The flaw, tracked as CVE-2017-9148, resides in the TTLS and PEAP implementations that skip inner authentication when handles a resumed TLS connection., “The implementation of TTLS and PEAP in FreeRADIUS skips inner authentication when it handles a resumed TLS connection. This is a feature but there is a critical catch: the server must never allow resumption of a TLS session until its initial connection gets to the point where inner authentication has been finished successfully. Unfortunately, affected versions of FreeRADIUS fail to reliably prevent resumption of unauthenticated sessions unless the TLS session cache is” reads the description published in the advisory states. “disabled completely and allow an attacker (e.g. a malicious supplicant) to elicit EAP Success without sending any valid credentials.”, Communications interruptions are very frequent, for example when a user on a TLS connection moves from one cell tower to another, and in due to the flaw it isn’t asked for a new login., The versions affected by the CVE-2017-9148 flaw are:, Sysadmins that works with FreeRADIUS installs need to upgrade to the version 3.0.14 that fixed the issue, temporary mitigation could be obtained by disabling the TLS session caching., The advisory suggested the following mitigation actions, Giving a look at the timeline of the flaw we can notice that is was also independently reported April 24, 2017, by the researchers Luboš Pavlíček from the University of Economics, Prague., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – CVE-2017-9148, FreeRADIUS)

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We have discussed several times regarding the intention of the FBI to create a special unit for internet monitoring and surveillance, a task force established to prevent and fight cyber crimes .In reality the Bureau already has different internal units that work with the same purpose and in the last years has promoted different projects for the development of tools and applications for the web monitoring., The FBI has recently created a secret surveillance unit to project and develop technologic tools and software for Internet and wireless communications monitoring., FBI is considered one of the most active agencies in this sense, in the last months it has publicly requested the design of a real time monitor for social networks that have to be able to identify suspect behaviors that could be interpreted as indicator of presence for an ongoing crime., The FBI has been lobbying top internet companies like Yahoo and Google to support a proposal that would force them to provide backdoors for government surveillance, according to CNET. The purpose of the collaboration between FBI and major IT companies and Internet services providers is tied to the will of the agency to arrive at the definition of legislation that allows law enforcement to have the controversial backdoor., FBI desires the collaboration of the major player of the IT sector to implement specific backdoor stubs inside their products with intent to make them wiretap-friendly, the request is related to all those communication platforms, social network, email providers, chats and instant messaging., The FBI has trying to maintain maximum reserve on the Unit called the Domestic Communications Assistance Center, for which the Senate committee has already allocated $54 million assigning to it the mission to create technologies for law enforcement to intercept and analyze communications data., The power conferred to the unit is wide, every single communication through social networks and over internet in general should be intercepted by the hardware platforms and software applications that the the unit have to implement., In February 2011, CNET reported that then-FBI general counsel Valerie Caproni was planning to warn Congress of what the bureau calls its “Going Dark” problem, illustrating how the wiretapping capabilities were being reduced with the progress of technology., Caproni singled out “Web-based e-mail, social-networking sites, and peer-to-peer communications” as problems that have left the FBI “increasingly unable” to conduct the same kind of wiretapping it could in the past., “Going Dark” is the FBI’s codename for its project to extend its ability to real time wiretap communications, it is born inside the bureau, employing 107 full-time expert starting from 2009., According the declaration of Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Kevin Bankston FBI already can intercept messages on social-networking sites and Web-based e-mail services, the system used is known as Carnivore, later renamed DCS1000. The interception is possible because Facebook messages and Gmail messages travel in plain text over those same broadband wires for which the FBI demanded wiretapping capability., The main problem is related to rapid technological evolution that make obsolescent surveillance systems in short time, due this reason the request of FBI to include a backdoor in any products that could be involved in communication, like social networking and also online games consoles., The Domestic Communications Assistance Center represents the technological factory of the “Going Dark” project for the internet wiretapping, the document, FY 2013 Performance Budget Congressional Submission refers to the recent establishment of DCAC:, While progress is expected through DEA’s participation in the recently established Department-wide Domestic Communications Assistance Center (DCAC) led by the FBI to address the growing technological gap between law enforcement’s electronic surveillance capabilities and the number and variety of communications devices available to the public, the foremost challenge confronting U.S. law enforcement is the diminishing ability to conduct lawful electronic intercepts on current and emerging communications technologies as communications providers continue to offer new and improved services and features to customers.  Addressing this issue is critical to maintain law enforcement’s ability to conduct lawful criminal intercepts., The position of the US authorities is worrying, they want to impose to every internet service provider to give full access to Government for surveillance purpose, according the amendment to CALEA, the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act., Contrary to what one might think about the news there is no noise, no political debate, confirming a will that seems a common intent., To confirm that the FBI is allocating new skilled personnel to the unit a job announcement for the DCAC has been published with a deadline of May 2. Analyzing the announcement we can have an idea on the technological skills requested, such as a meaningful experience with “electronic surveillance standards” including PacketCable, QChat and T1.678 (VoIP communications). One required skill for the position, which pays up to $136,771 a year, is evaluating “electronic surveillance solutions” for “emerging” technologies.,  , , Declan McCullagh, chief political correspondent for CNET, in an excellent article on the argument has reported:, The NDCAC will have the functionality to leverage the research and development efforts of federal, state, and local law enforcement with respect to electronic surveillance capabilities and facilitate the sharing of technology among law enforcement agencies. Technical personnel from other federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies will be able to obtain advice and guidance if they have difficulty in attempting to implement lawful electronic surveillance court orders., It is important to point out that the NDCAC will not be responsible for the actual execution of any electronic surveillance court orders and will not have any direct operational or investigative role in investigations. It will provide the technical knowledge and referrals in response to law enforcement’s requests for technical assistance., The project is really ambitious and without doubt it will involve all the main intelligence agencies of the country, such as Drug Enforcement Administration and National Security Agency., NSA also is massive investing in monitoring technology, a couple of months ago we have learned that the agency is building the country’s biggest Spy Center in the little known city of Bluffdale. The center, named Utah Data Center is under construction by contractors with top-secret clearances., Its purpose is to intercept, decipher, analyze every world’s communications under investigation using every kind of transmission.  The center will have a final cost of $2 billion and should be operative in September 2013. Its databases will be store all forms of communication, including the complete private emails, cell phone calls, search engine researches and every kind of digital data related to every individual. The imperative is to monitor everything!, , , It’s clear the dimension of the project that has the purpose to cover monitoring need of every type includind of course satellite communication, phone calls, computer data and geostationary satellite data.  , Once the Data Center it’s operational it will be fed data collected by the agency’s eavesdropping satellites, overseas listening posts, and secret monitoring rooms in telecom facilities throughout the US. All that data will then be accessible to the NSA’s code breakers, data-miners, China analysts, counterterrorism specialists, and others working at its Fort Meade headquarters and around the world., Someone has defined the project as the NSA monitoring cloud, The information I’m proposing should not deceive, in reality the country is already littered with centers for the analysis of data traffic and phone interception that make use of sophisticated software programs that conduct “deep packet inspection,” examining Internet traffic as it passes through the 10-gigabit-per-second cables at the speed of light., One of the main software has been developed by company called Narus and is controlled remotely from NSA headquarters at Fort Meade in Maryland. Any suspicion communication is automatically recorded and transmitted to the NSA for futher analysis., Also other agency are interested to monitoring and surveillance, let’s introduce project sponsorized by CIA, the intelligence agency is now interested to gather information from every intelligent devices that is surrounding us to spy on every US citizen. We have introduced months ago a spying project that has the intent to acquire information from gaming platform all over the world, a mine of data to collect and analyze., Let’s me conclude the article speaking of the most interesting part of the web, the one defind Deep Web, that every agency is infiltrating, a volume of data impressive if compared to the ordinary web. the Deep Web represent today a mine of information with high level of interest, this invisible portion of web is considered infact the homeland for cybercrime, intelligence agancies and hacktivists, due this reason it is considered fundamental to be able to control this controversial cyberscenario., In the Deep Web are hidden protected data, government communications and noncommercial file-sharing between trusted peers. , “The deep web contains government reports, databases, and other sources of information of high value to DOD and the intelligence community,” according to a 2010 Defense Science Board report. , “Alternative tools are needed to find and index data in the deep web … Stealing the classified secrets of a potential adversary is where the intelligence community is most comfortable.” , It ‘clear that the huge investments mentioned are a blatant invasion of privacy in the name of security, but the scope of the projects suggests that no law or constitution can oppose., What will invent the human intellect to escape this modern form of control?, Pierluigi Paganini,  ,

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Cisco patches a DoS vulnerability in IOE XE software that was introduced due to changes to its implementation of the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) over an Ethernet VPN., The Cisco IOS XE operating system automates network operations and manages wired and wireless networks., The vulnerability in the IOS XE, tracked as CVE-2017-12319, could be exploited remotely by an unauthenticated attacker to cause a DoS condition by crashing or corrupting the BGP routing table., The flaw is linked is to a change in the implementation of the BGP MPLS-based Ethernet VPN(RFC 7432)., “A vulnerability in the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) over an Ethernet Virtual Private Network (EVPN) for Cisco IOS XE Software could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause the device to reload, resulting in a denial of service (DoS) condition, or potentially corrupt the BGP routing table, which could result in network instability.” reads the Cisco security advisory., The implementation change happened between IOS XE releases, releases prior to 16.3 that support BGP over Ethernet VPN configurations are vulnerable., Cisco warned that only devices configured for an Ethernet VPN are vulnerable., “When the BGP Inclusive Multicast Ethernet Tag Route or BGP EVPN MAC/IP Advertisement Route update packet is received, it could be possible that the IP address length field is miscalculated,” continues the Cisco advisory. “An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted BGP packet to an affected device after the BGP session was established. An exploit could allow the attacker to cause the affected device to reload or corrupt the BGP routing table; either outcome would result in a DoS.”, , CISCO BGP implementation accepts packets only from defined peers, attackers must send malicious TCP packets spoofing the identity of a trusted BGP peer. An attacker could also inject malicious messages into the target BGP network., “This would require obtaining information about the BGP peers in the affected system’s trusted network,” Cisco added. “The vulnerability may be triggered when the router receives a crafted BGP message from a peer on an existing BGP session. At least one BGP neighbor session must be established for a router to be vulnerable.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – CISCO IOE XE, BGP)

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Today’s teens are in a world with major communication and productivity channels open to them and they don’t have the knowledge to defend themselves against the fraud, identity theft, privacy leaks and other attacks made against them just for using the Internet. This is the main reason for Hacker Highschool (HHS)., , The school is an ever-growing collection of lessons written to the teen audience and covering specific subjects that are timely, interesting, and important for teens. In Hacker Highschool you will find lessons on utilizing Internet resources safely such as web privacy, chat, mobile computing, and social networks. Each Hacker Highschool lesson is designed as self-contained learning, no teacher required. Why? Because hacking is about discovery and that needs to be learned, not taught. The lessons are all technically correct, promote good moral behavior, resourcefulness, technical know-how, and empathy. All lessons work with a free “live, Why? Because hacking is about discovery and that needs to be learned, not taught. The lessons are all technically correct, promote good moral behavior, resourcefulness, technical know-how, and empathy., All lessons work with a free “live linux” CD which will boot off any PC with a CD-rom drive to perform the lessons. HHS is a great supplement to student course work or as part of after-school and club activities., But what about the projects and the aim of it? I’ve been talking with Pete Herzog, who is the co-founder and Managing Director of ISECOM, a security research non-profit focused on innovation. In 2003, Mr. Herzog co-founded the Hacker Highschool project to create open source lessons in security awareness and the hacker spirit of resourcefulness and self-teaching to teens. Besides being the first cybersecurity curriculum for teens, it’s also the first to focus on the psychology of how teens think and learn to be most effective. Currently, HHS is in its second release cycle, can be found in many repositories across the Internet, and is downloaded about 250.000 times a month. Pete is also noted speaker and writer on trust, security, and hacking and provides security coaching for various types of clients to help them learn how to make their products, services, and lives more secure., A hacker is resourceful, curious, and always learning. Hacking is a method of problem solving that combines resourcefulness, logic, creativity, and study. Hacker Highschool helps teens learn hacking as a method to figure out how things work (such as with the Scientific Method) and to further learn by doing. Hacking is usefully applied in nearly all fields as it builds upon what is known to create new things, foods, designs, etc. When applied to computers and networks, it also teaches safety and security in a world quickly drowning in information where to be safer teens today need to know the facts from the fraud, the real from the fake, and the bad from the good., I have to say it’s SCARY how companies are abusing young children as part of the public that they encourage and trick into uploading more and more of their private lives to become part of the marketing and consumer machine. Combine that with online predators and criminals and you quickly see that kids are not using technology- they are being USED by it. And unfortunately, the parents and teachers who are to keep them safe are either in the same trouble or clueless what to do. So the only realistic way to handle this is to unleash the curiosity and daring that all teens have so they can protect themselves. And that is our mission. We started the school in 2003 when I realized that when teaching the OPST (www.opst.org) for a couple of years that college students did better than seasoned security professionals on the hands-on exams. We realized it was because college students didn’t have to unlearn many bad habits that the professionals had which gave them more time to practice. So we knew if we could reach young people before they could learn any bad security habits then they could really learn to protect themselves online. That’s how we knew Hacker Highschool had to be more than teaching cybersecurity, it had to make sure that young people had the right set of skills to take advantage of all that technology without themselves being used by it. It just so happens these are also skills needed today to be great cybersecurity professionals, ensuring them a safe future in whatever they do., There are too many parrots and not enough pirates in security. That means we need those willing to do the work to be secure and not the ones who will repeat what somebody else wrote on a checklist. This “parroting” happens because without the fundamentals, security seems really impossible. But since there’s a misunderstanding of what the fundamentals are in cyber security, people are just getting the wrong information. It’s not about what products you need to use or even what checklist you need to follow which, sadly, you can get a degree or certified on all levels for both of those. Because that won’t make you secure. People need to understand where security comes from, know how to analyze an attack surface and how to match the right security controls to the right interactions. Those are the fundamentals and will make you secure., Some industry groups have decided that cybersecurity was a specific profession which meant suddenly we could count the number of people graduating with cybersecurity degrees and getting specific cybersecurity certifications. Which also meant, since had hadn’t previously existed before, suddenly we don’t have enough of them! But is that really true or just how what we’re counting them? Ask yourself where did the first ones come from then, the ones who are teaching the cybersecurity professionals before we had anyone called cybersecurity professionals? They were people who learned IT and understood the security fundamentals. My point is that we don’t need more cybersecurity experts, just more experts who can apply the security fundamentals in their chosen field of expertise., Our organization ISECOM  was founded on open source and so for us it was an obvious choice to continue Hacker Highschool in this way. Information sharing is a cornerstone of education and progress, we assure that the information is always freely available for those who want to grab it and read it. Then in order to pay for the project we re-package the information in other ways like books, seminars, and videos which we then sell. This assures we can keep the project alive and improving while also assuring that the next generations we reach will be empowered to keep themselves and the rest of us safe. Currently, the lessons are written by a small, core group and edited by an even smaller group. Sometimes we get bodies of original security writing donated to us by the author who allows us to re-purpose it into the lessons. Translations are handled by volunteers and managed by the core group. We do not keep data on who are using the lessons or where. We have some anecdotal evidence from people who contact us and say they used it or they heard of it being used somewhere. What’s important is that people know it’s there, free, and open-source for anyone to use., Last year we came a few weeks away from shutting down the project due to lack of money and capable volunteers. But we really didn’t want it to close. So instead we re-invested heavily in it again from our own pockets to try to make it fully sustainable with www.isecomacademy.com which brings high-quality videos of the lessons to classrooms and home schoolers around the world., Thanks to Pete Herzog for the time dedicated and if you wanna follow him and his activities (I hope so) this is his twitter account @peteherzog , About the Author Emma Pietrafesa, Dr Emma Pietrafesa (Ph.D.) researcher and communicator. Postgraduate specializations in management and public communication, international relations and diplomatic studies. She has been working in the field of research and communication for over 12 years, focused on: ICT and social media, open source, cyber harassments, cyberbullying, international relations, gender issues, health and safety at work. She is Author for Italian digital magazines www.TechEconomy.it and www.girlgeeklife.com., Twitter: @EPietrafesa, Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Hacker HighSchool, Hacking)

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Christmas is approaching, and the experts are already at work, including the authors of PoS malware that at that time maximize their profits., The criminal group behind the FastPoS PoS malware have updated its malicious code to improve the efficiency of stealing credit card data from infected systems ahead of the festive season., FastPoS was first spotted in March last year and its author uses to issue pre-Christmas updates to target also newest PoS systems., In June security experts at Trend Micro noticed a new variant of the threat in the wild the was 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., Now the author of the FastPoS issued an update that has profoundly changed its behavior, preferring a quick exfiltration activity even if is noisier. The intent of the author is quick steal payment card data to have more time to use them before banks can suspend it., “Most point-of-sale (PoS) threats follow a common process: dump, scrape, store, exfiltrate. FastPOS (initially detected by Trend Micro as TSPY_FASTPOS.SMZTDA) was different with the way it removed a middleman and went straight from stealing credit card data to directly exfiltrating them to its command and control (C&C) servers.” reads a blog post from Trend Micro. , FastPOS PoS malware has a modular structure that includes a memory scraper component and a Key Logger., The components FastPOS’s new version is sporting are:, , When card data are captured on the infected system they are not locally stored, but they are directly transferred to command and control servers in clear text., The experts noticed that the author took about a month from registering the C&C domain (mid-August) to the launch of its new campaign., The new samples of the FastPoS PoS malware analyzed by TrendMicro store data in Windows temporary RAM files called “mailslots,” a mechanism that increases the speed of data exfiltration., “Stolen information is now stored in mailslots, a mechanism for applications to store and retrieve messages. The use of mailslots to evade AV detection isn’t new. ” continues the analysis published by Trend Micro., Operators in the retail industry are now aware of the new threat in the wild, likely many other PoS malware will be updated by their author in order to improve their efficiency., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – FastPOS, PoS malware)

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A resident in the Gaza strip pleads guilty for hacking into drones belonging to the Israeli Defense Force., An Israeli court accepted a guilty plea from Islamic Jihad master hacker Maagad Ben Juwad Oydeh for the alleged hack of Israeli drones while the UAVs were involved in reconnaissance activities over Gaza., The guilty plea was accepted by the Beersheba District Court based on charges filed in a March 2016 indictment., “An indictment filed by the Southern District Attorney’s Office in March 2016 also charged Oydeh with hacking into the IDF, the police and the transportation authority’s video cameras, enabling the terrorist group to study the location of civilians and IDF personnel in real-time, at a time during conflicts when it was firing rockets.” states The Jerusalem Post., Oydeh is a computer and electronics engineer and master hacker who joined Islamic Jihad in 2011. When the hacker joined the group worked as an engineer and a presenter for the group’s radio station, later he demonstrated his abilities in hacking into Israel’s transportation authority cameras., He first successfully hacked into the IDF drones as early as 2012., “Up until his arrest in 2016, Oydeh continued to repair and upgrade the organizations’ computers, video cameras and technology. He was also charged with spying, conspiracy, contact with enemy agents and membership in an illegal organization.” continues The Jerusalem Post., According to the indictment, Oydeh hacking activities allowed to monitor airport traffic at the Ben-Gurion Airport, the hackers tracked flights, passengers, and other info., , Hacking IDF drones, the Islamic Jihad militants were able to obtain the UAV’s video feed in realtime, while they were flying over Gaza., The hacked Maagad Ben Juwad Oydeh faces up to nine years in jail., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – drones,  Gaza)

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Meltdown and Spectre security updates made the headlines again, according to the security researcher Ulf Frisk some of them issued for Windows introduce a severe flaw., The Meltdown and Spectre security updates released by Microsoft in January and February for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 patch Meltdown are affected by a vulnerability that could be exploited by attackers to easily read from and write to memory., According to the expert, an attacker can exfiltrate gigabytes of data per second by exploiting the vulnerability., “Meet the Windows 7 Meltdown patch from January. It stopped Meltdown but opened up a vulnerability way worse … It allowed any process to read the complete memory contents at gigabytes per second, oh – it was possible to write to arbitrary memory as well.” wrote the expert. “No fancy exploits were needed. Windows 7 already did the hard work of mapping in the required memory into every running process. Exploitation was just a matter of read and write to already mapped in-process virtual memory. No fancy APIs or syscalls required – just standard read and write! ”, In a test conducted by the experts, he successfully accessed the memory at speeds of over 4 Gbps., The researcher pointed out that attacker doesn’t need sophisticated exploits because Windows 7 has already mapped the memory for each active process. The page tables are available to user mode code for each process, instead, “In short – the User/Supervisor permission bit was set to User in the PML4 self-referencing entry. This made the page tables available to user mode code in every process. The page tables should normally only be accessible by the kernel itself,” the researcher added. “, The PML4 is the base of the 4-level in-memory page table hierarchy that the CPU Memory Management Unit (MMU) uses to translate the virtual addresses of a process into physical memory addresses in RAM.”, Once the attacker obtained the access to the page tables it will gain full control over the memory and its content., “Once read/write access has been gained to the page tables it will be trivially easy to gain access to the complete physical memory, unless it is additionally protected by Extended Page Tables (EPTs) used for Virtualization. All one have to do is to write their own Page Table Entries (PTEs) into the page tables to access arbitrary physical memory,” he added., , Frisk developed an attack tool dubbed PCILeech to trigger the flaw., “PCILeech uses PCIe hardware devices to read and write from the target system memory. This is achieved by using DMA over PCIe. No drivers are needed on the target system.” reads the description of the tool., “PCILeech supports multiple memory acquisition devices. Primarily hardware based, but also dump files and software based techniques based on select security issues are supported. USB3380 based hardware is only able to read 4GB of memory natively, but is able to read all memory if a kernel module (KMD) is first inserted into the target system kernel. FPGA based hardware is able to read all memory.”, “PCILeech is capable of inserting a wide range of kernel implants into the targeted kernels – allowing for easy access to live ram and the file system via a “mounted drive”., The experts successfully tested the attack against systems running Windows 7 x64 or Windows Server 2008 R2 with the Microsoft patches from January or February installed. Windows 10 and Windows 8.1 are not affected by the issue., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Meltdown and Spectre, hacking)

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Many reports published by security firms warn of the increasing threat represented by Iranian hackers. US and Israeli organizations represent a privileged target for these hackers, last year they used stolen private pictures of IDF’s women soldiers to breach Israeli military server., According to a report published by the Israel’s Channel 10, hundreds of Israel’s current and former top security officials have been targeted by Iranian hackers., The report reveals that Iranian hackers compromised computers of 1800 key figures worldwide, most of them from Israel including a former Israeli Army chief-of-staff., The report speculated the involvement of the hackers belonging to the Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Experts at the Israeli security firm Check Point Software Technologies promptly identified and blocked the attacks., The  Israeli experts also identified one of the Iranian hackers, Yasser Balachi, that accidentally displayed his email ID. Check Point’s head of security services Ron Davidson, confirmed that the man is a member of an organized group., “Balachi said that he had not operated on his own initiative but for another cyber organization that commissioned the work,” said Ron Davidson., Yet it is unclear even now what was the actual extent of the damage and what kind of information did they steal., It is not clear which is the impact of the attack and which information was exposed., Iranian hackers are becoming even more aggressive, in November computers at the US State Department and other government employees were targeted by them. The experts linked the attackers with the Iranian Revolutionary Guard, according to investigators the Facebook and e-mail accounts of US State Department officials focused on Iran were compromised to gather data about US-Iranian dual citizens in Iran and about the arrest of an Iranian-American businessman in Tehran in October., The hackers have taken over social media accounts of junior State Department staff to launch a spear phishing campaign on the employees working in the State Department’s Office of Iranian Affairs and Bureau of Near Eastern Affairs and in the computers of some journalists., Check Point experts confirmed that the Iranian hackers launched spear phishing attacks against their targets with the intent to infect them with spyware., In December, a report published by Symantec revealed that Iranian hackers have been using malware to track individuals, including Iranian activists and dissidents., The researchers identified two groups of Iran-based hackers, dubbed Cadelle and Chafer, which were distributing data stealer malware since at least mid-2014. The experts uncovered the command-and-control servers explaining that registration details indicate the Iranian hackers may have been operating since 2011., There are a number of indicators that suggest both groups are based in Iran, the Cadelle and Chafer teams are most active during the day time within Iran’s time zone and primarily operate during Iran’s business week (Saturday through Thursday)., In June, experts at Clear Sky spotted a number of cyber-attacks launched from the Iran and targeting Israeli organizations and other entities in the Middle East., Security experts at ClearSky uncovered a cyber espionage campaign dubbed Thamar Reservoir due to the name of its target Thamar E. Gindin. The investigation led the experts to date the Thamar Reservoir campaign back to 2011, threat actors adopted several attack techniques finalized to the espionage., The majority of the victims of the Thamar Reservoir campaign was located in the Middle East (550) and belong to Middle East and Iranian diplomacy entities, defense and security industries, journalists and human rights organizations., ,  , Who is behind the Thamar Reservoir campaign?, According to the researchers at ClearSky, the evidence collected suggest the involvement of Iranian hackers. The experts noticed several similarities with other attacks in the same geographic area such as:, No doubts, Iranian hackers will continue to launch cyber espionage campaigns likely with most advanced malware., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  cyber espionage, Iranian hackers)

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There is another whistleblower inside the US Intelligence, according to the popular journalist Glenn Greenwald Edward Snowden was not alone as revealed in the new documentary about Edward Snowden that premiered in New York last week., The two-hour documentary was the highlight of the New York Film Festival, it was directed by filmmaker and journalist Laura Poitras, it describes the story about Edward Snowden and has revealed the existence of a second classified document leaker., “Towards the end of filmmaker Laura Poitras’s portrait of Snowden – titled Citizenfour, the label he used when he first contacted her – Greenwald is seen telling Snowden about a second source.” reports a blog post on The Guardian on the case., During a meeting in Moscow between the  journalist Greenwald and Edward Snowden, the whistleblower expressed his surprise for the level of information apparently coming from this second whistleblower., The second source provided high confidential data on the extension of the US surveillance activity and on the real number of the people on the US government’s watchlist, nearly 1.2 million individuals., The Intercept had provided the detailed the composition of the watch list in July, a few days after Greenwald sent a tweet that stated:,   “I think there’s a second leaker out there”, , Stay tuned for more information., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Intelligence, Snowden)

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According to the Guardian, the social network giant Facebook put the safety of its content moderators at risk after inadvertently exposing their personal details to suspected terrorist users on the social network., A bug in the software used by moderators to review and remove inappropriate content resulted in the disclosure of personal profiles of content moderators while they were reviewing the content from the platform., The bug in Facebook’s moderation application was discovered in 2016 and caused the personal profiles of content moderators to appear among activity notifications for online groups after moderators had removed the groups’ administrators for terms-of-service violations., “The security lapse affected more than 1,000 workers across 22 departments at Facebook who used the company’s moderation software to review and remove inappropriate content from the platform, including sexual material, hate speech and terrorist propaganda.” reported The Guardian., “A bug in the software, discovered late last year, resulted in the personal profiles of content moderators automatically appearing as notifications in the activity log of the Facebook groups, whose administrators were removed from the platform for breaching the terms of service. The personal details of Facebook moderators were then viewable to the remaining admins of the group.”, Facebook “inadvertently” exposed the personal details of over 1,000 Facebook employees, approximately 40 of them were from special counter-terrorism unit in Dublin, Ireland., For six workers the incident was “assessed to be ‘high priority,’ the risk now for the workers is that terrorists and lone wolves could insert them in a kill list., “Six of those were assessed to be “high priority” victims of the mistake after Facebook concluded their personal profiles were likely viewed by potential terrorists.” continues The Guardian. “The Guardian spoke to one of the six, who did not wish to be named out of concern for his and his family’s safety. The Iraqi-born Irish citizen, who is in his early twenties, fled Ireland and went into hiding after discovering that seven individuals associated with a suspected terrorist group he banned from Facebook – an Egypt-based group that backed Hamas and, he said, had members who were Islamic State sympathizers – had viewed his personal profile.”, , The employee is one of the numerous low-paid contractors, he confirmed that he’d relocated to eastern Europe for five months from fear of retaliation., “It was getting too dangerous to stay in Dublin,” the employee said. “The only reason we’re in Ireland was to escape terrorism and threats.”, “As soon as we learned about the issue, we fixed it and began a thorough investigation to learn as much as possible about what happened.” said a company spokesperson. , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Facebook, Terrorists)

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No doubt, the news of the beginning of the year is the alleged theft of the source of the Symantec antivirus. The news is sensational, “They stole everything to the police station!”, hilarious but very serious. Let’s try to resume the events. A group that calling itself the Lords of Dharmaraja has posted online a piece of the source code that declear is part of the internet security software., Immediately the manufacturer resize the event and its spokesman Cris Paden said “no source code was disclosed” in the post. The document proposed has been declared dated (12-year-old) and it no contains any source code., Later Symantec give a new announcement, confirming that they was victim of a successfully hack made by a group that has gained access to some of the security product’s source code., “Symantec can confirm that a segment of its source code has been accessed. Symantec’s own network was not breached, but rather that of a third party entity.We are still gathering information on the details and are not in a position to provide specifics on the third party involved.Presently, we have no indication that the code disclosure impacts the functionality or security of Symantec’s solutions. Furthermore, there are no indications that customer information has been impacted or exposed at this time.”, In the same hours on the web site PasteBin was published a portion of the stolen source code, which was promptly removed after a few hours. I was able to give a look at the proposed code, to be exact in the document were presented the “signatures” of some functions which are presumably part of the antivirus Symantec., But what is the source of the information and what is the proposed source code?, The information have been obtained hacking India’s military computer network. The Indian intelligence agencies were in possess of the source code thanks to an agreement with the company that provide the famous antivirus. The source code seems to be part of the Norton Antivirus version 2006, but we have no idea how much it is still considerable actual., Early Friday 6th morning the company has announced that the products in question are Symantec Endpoint Protection 11.0 and Symantec Antivirus 10.2, so this incident impact on all those products “Norton” branded. The Endpoint Protection product is now at version 12.0 and Symantec Antivirus 10.2 has been discontinued. The company was keen to point out that its systems had not been breached. “Symantec’s own network was not breached, but rather that of a third party entity”, How much could be useful the knowledge of the source code of an antivirus? Definitely not I think, as most of antivirus are based on attack signatures recognition and this is also well known to malware authors that during thei development continuously write code to avoid signature detection., As always I do not want to limit myself to watch the events, but I want to comment them with you. First, as I emphasized in an article on the hardware qualification, the only way to avoide the presence of a backdoor is to analyze the source code, and be able to do it, of course. In this case, Symantec had provided the source to the Indian authorities that have expressed, at least it would seem, the failure in its management. I find this aspect very seriously. You can not ask for guarantees to private companies unless you are not able to protect their business., My second reflection, in a digital world scenario we have verified that collaborations can be important in view of a war against cyber crime and against the threat of hostile governments. The downside is that, as in this case, the pedestrian work of a military could seriously compromise a cyber strategy. And this must be taken into due consideration. The weakest link in the chain, as always, can compromise the security of the entire system., Last point, What is the impact in terms of images related to events like this? No doubt they are destabilizing events that could give the final blow to companies in difficulty. It happened to DigiNotar, but the rule is not generalizable, because of incidents like these companies can show their ability to react to incidents increasing the customer account on their actual abilities … it is happened for example RSA., Pierluigi Paganini

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, When the gun first fired without authentication “I almost didn’t believe it had actually worked. I had to fire it again,” the researcher said. “And that’s how I found out for $15 (£11.50) of materials you can defeat the security of this $1,500 (£1,150) smart gun.” said Plore., Plore demonstrated that he was also able to jam the radio frequency band (916.5Mhz) used by the smart gun from ten feet away by using a cheap transmitter device $20 (£15)., The radio waves emitted by the transmitter device prevent the owner from firing the gun even when he is wearing the smartwatch., Plore also bypassed the security mechanism implemented for the smart gun by using a custom-built $20 RF amplifier to extend the range of the smartwatch. When the owner squeezes the trigger, the gun sends out a signal to check whether the watch is there or not., The researcher was able to intercept the signal sent by the smart gun to check for the presence of the watch when the owner was trying to fire. The custom device allows extending the range by up to 12 feet, an attacker could bypass the security measure wearing the watch distance., “When the shooter squeezes the gun’s handle, it sends out an RFID signal to check if the watch is present. But Plore showed he could place one of his radio devices near the watch to intercept the signal, and relay it to another gadget as far as 12 feet away. That means the gun doesn’t need to be next to the shooter’s wrist, as intended, but can instead be held by someone else, breaking its tight identity restrictions.” reported Wired., Evidently smart guns are not so smart., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – smart gun, hacking)

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The US President Donald Trump intends to extend by one year the Executive Order 13694 that gives the US Governments special powers to issue sanctions against people and organizations engaged in significant cyberattacks and cybercrime against the U.S., The Executive Order 13694 was introduced by former President Barack Obama on April 1, 2015, and was due to expire next Saturday. President Trump sent a letter to Congress yesterday informing it of his decision to keep it active the Order., “Significant malicious cyber-enabled activities originating from, or directed by persons located, in whole or in substantial part, outside the United States, continue to pose an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States,” Trump wrote in the letter. “Therefore, I have determined that it is necessary to continue the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13694 with respect to significant malicious cyber-enabled activities.”, The executive order gave the U.S. new powers to retaliate for hacking against the critical infrastructure, political institutions, and US organizations., Due to the attacks on the 2016 Presidential election, the US Government expanded the executive order in December 2016 to include voting systems and US political parties., In December, the Order was used to sanction Russian agents and organizations for their alleged role in the cyber attacks on the Presidential Election., The US ejected 35 Russian intelligence operatives from the United States and imposed sanctions on nine entities and individuals., The Russians individuals ejected by the US Government are working out of the Russia’s consulate in San Francisco and the Russian embassy in Washington., According to a White House fact sheet issued on the executive order, the individuals due to the “harassment of our diplomatic personnel in Russia by security personnel and police.”, , The US Government sanctioned the Russian intelligence services, the GRU (Russian Main Intelligence Directorate) and the FSB (Federal Security Service), four GRU officers, and three other organizations. The actions are the Obama administration’s response to a Russian hacking and disinformation campaign used to interfere in the American election process., The order was issued concurrently a report from US intelligence that confirms the cyber attacks against the 2015 Presidential election aimed to influence the results of the vote., The decision to extend the existing executive order is one of the first actions the Trump Administration has taken to approach cyber security issues., One of the issues explicitly requested in the order is a close collaboration between the Department of Commerce and Department of Defense aimed at the protection of the critical infrastructure., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Executive Order 13694, President Trump)

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According to experts from the firm Zimperium, multiple vulnerabilities in the Android remote management tool AirDroid could expose more than 50 million devices, The flaws could be exploited to abuse built-in features and use them against the application’s users., Experts highlight that AirDroid uses insecure communication channels allowing attackers to power Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks and other types of attacks., Researchers from Zimperium discovered that communication channels used to send authentication data to the statistics server are not properly protected because the encryption key is hardcoded inside the application., An attacker that shares the same network with the victim could run MitM attacks to capture authentication credentials from the first HTTP request the application performs, and use them to act on behalf of the user., “A malicious party could perform a MITM network attack and grab the device authentication information as shown in the “Details” section from the very first HTTP request the application performs.” reads the blog post published by Zimperium. “This HTTP request can be decrypted at runtime using the 890jklms key hardcoded inside the application and the authentication fields parsed from the resulting JSON. Having this information, the attacker can now impersonate the victim’s device and perform various HTTP or HTTPS requests on its behalf to the AirDroid API endpoints. For instance, a payload like the following ( encrypted in DES with the same exact key ) can be sent to the endpoint :”, Tha attacker could craft a payload encrypted in DES with the same key to trick the server into revealing user information, including the email and password hash., , The attacker could power a MitM attack alto to redirect HTTP traffic to a malicious transparent proxy that allows him to modify the response for the /phone/vncupgraderequest. In this way the attacker could inject a fake update or could execute malicious code remotely., “Moreover, an attacker performing a MITM attack and redirecting HTTP traffic to a malicious transparent proxy, could modify the response for the /phone/vncupgrade request which is normally used by the application to check for addons updates:, Injecting a new update, thus remotely executing custom code on the target device, is just a matter of modifying this response:”, In order to fix these issues, the AirDroid should use only secure communication channels (HTTPS), should implement key pinning to avoid SSL MitM, should use safe key exchange mechanisms, and should leverage and digital verify the update files., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – AirDroid, hacking)

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Hyatt Hotels revealed that 250 of its resorts have been involved in the data breach suffered last year. In December the Hyatt Hotels Corporation issued an official announcement to inform its users that unknown hackers used a malicious code to steal credit card information from customers, the company did not provide information on the number of affected resorts or customers that have been impacted., From July 13 and December 8 of last year, the malware has stolen users’ data including customer credit card numbers, names, expiration dates and verification codes., “We recently identified malware on computers that operate the payment processing systems for Hyatt-managed locations. As soon as we discovered the activity, we launched an investigation and engaged leading third-party cyber security experts.” states a message published on the company web site., “The investigation is ongoing, and updates will be posted here at www.hyatt.com/protectingourcustomers. We have taken steps to strengthen the security of our systems, and customers can feel confident using payment cards at Hyatt hotels worldwide.”, Hyatt informed that it has taken steps to improve the security of its systems., ,  , The Hyatt Hotels Corporation has now confirmed that locations in 50 countries were impacted by malicious code that was used by attackers to harvest payment card information from PoS terminals at Hyatt restaurants, spas, golf shops, parking lots and check-in desks., Users can check the impacted locations in this list, just need to select a country to view the affected resorts and date at risk., Hyatt representatives confirmed that the malware has been completely eradicated from its payment systems and the company installed additional safeguards to prevent future intrusion., “Protecting customer information is critically important to Hyatt, and we take the security of customer data very seriously,” said Hyatt global president of operations Chuck Floyd. “We have been working tirelessly to complete our investigation, and we now have more complete information that we want to share so that customers can take steps to protect themselves.”, The Luxury hotel chain is advising customers to monitor their bank statements and report any suspicious charges., The Hyatt Hotels Corporation is offering a free identity protection service to customers who stayed at the compromised hotels from August to December 2015., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Hyatt Hotels Corporation, data breach)

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Browsers have long been a hot target of numerous hacking-related incidents. They are the primary source of hacking incidents as we search, share, watch and download files from browsers. Moreover, various vulnerabilities exists in browsers, emphasizing the fact of using necessary tools to make your browser hacker-proof., Ensuring that browsers are secured with the essential protocols is important. After all, hackers are becoming exceedingly experienced, penetrating into numerous prominent companies and government agencies this year alone as witnessed from the WannaCry ransomware cyberattack., Although web browsers do a good job at ensuring security loopholes are rectified as early as possible, but more often than not, some updates arrive late and you can’t rely on them alone. It could be that your browser isn’t updating or you’ve got extensions and plugins installed that have potential security loopholes., To ensure your online safety, we’ve come up with four online security tips that will help keep your browser safe hackers., Keeping your browser updated is the easiest way to ensure the safety of your browser. Browser updates carry necessary patches which secure you against hacking incidents and make your browser hack-proof on the web., Google Chrome, Firefox and Opera come packed with default settings for automatic updates. You need to click the ‘install updates automatically’ option for uninterrupted and smooth connectivity., , Fortunately, most browsers these days are automatically updated. For instance, if you installed Microsoft’s new Windows 10 operating system, its default setting is to automatically update your software and issue patches, including for its Edge browser., No matter how secure your browser might get, third-party plug-ins can never be completely trusted as plug-ins can read, make changes and access the websites you visit., There are some plug-ins that come with the browser and might never be used. So, one way to give yourself an extra layer of protection is to delete unneeded plug-ins., There is a misconception regarding plug-ins and extensions. While plug-ins handle video or other content that the browser does not support, extensions are small programs that add new features to your browser and personalize your browsing experience., You can find numerous extensions on Google Chrome and Firefox which enhance your online browsing functionality. Having said that, extensions have their disadvantages. Some extensions need passwords so they can work to their full potential. That leaves an open door to hackers and other cyber criminals who install malware., While installing an extension, be mindful of the source – trustworthiness of the maker. You can read reviews for authenticity., When it comes to making your browser hack-proof, no other tool does it better than a VPN extension. This extension promises fast speed internet capability and does not maintain any logs of its users. In addition, you can evade censorship laws in any country by connecting to a server maintained in another country – all while being anonymous on the web., There are numerous extensions that provide strong features needed to make the browser hacker-proof such as blocking ads, dodging online trackers, safeguarding against malware & providing WebRTC leak protection. With a Chrome VPN extension, you get an encrypted connection which masks your physical IP with a virtual IP – maintaining your online secrecy., About Author: Anas Baig, Anas Baig is a Cyber Security Expert, a computer science graduate specializing in internet security, science, and technology. Also, a Security Professional with a passion for robots & IoT devices. Follow him on Twitter, Follow him on Twitter @anasbaigdm, or email him directly by clicking here.,  , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – browser hacker-proof, hacking)

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As most of you already know I have officially presented my new Co a couple of months ago, CybSec Enterprise is its name and we already started to work on strategic projects that we will reveal soon … meantime I apologize for the website that is still under construction., , We have already launched a malware Lab, let’s call it Z-Lab, composed of a group of skilled researchers and lead by Eng. Antonio Pirozzi., It’s a pleasure for me to share with you one of the first analysis that we have recently conducted on the NotPetya Ransomware., We have dissected the ransomware and discovered interesting details that are included in our report., Below the abstract, the detailed report is available for free on our website., Due to the lack of updates performed by users on their machines, many threats spread out exploiting well-known vulnerabilities. This is what happened with the propagation of the NotPetya Ransomware, which infected a lot of users mostly in East Europe. This malware uses a famous exploit developed by NSA, Eternalblue, allowed by a vulnerability (MS17-010; CVE-2017-0143) in the Windows implementation of SMB protocol. The above-mentioned exploit was leaked in April 2017 and was used the first time with another malware, WannaCry, which caused more damage than NotPetya., NotPetya’s could be confused with Petya ransomware (spread out in 2016) because of its behavior after the system reboot, but actually not because NotPetya is much more complex than the other one. In fact, Petya’s most known characteristic is the enciphering of the Windows MBR and MFT, instead, NotPetya propagates itself in the network as a worm., , In the above figure, we have a scheme of the malware’s behavior. We can see that the first phase is the searching of a file representing a kill-switch, to avoid infecting machines already compromised. Next steps are referred to the actual infection, synthesized below:, After the reboot, the next step is the fake CHKDSK routine, very similar to Petya, where the malware enciphers the MFT. After that, we no longer have the characteristic Petya skull, but directly the screen with the ransom note, including the e-mail address of the malware writer and the relative Bitcoin address for the ransom payment., You can download the full ZLAB Malware Analysis Report at the following URL:, About the author: Antonio Pirozzi, Principal Malware Scientist and Senior Threat Researcher for CSE CybSec Enterprise spa, , Actually, he holds more than 10 Infosec International Certification, from SANS, EC-Council and Department of Homeland Security. His experience goes beyond the classical Computer Security landscape, he worked on numerous projects on GSM Security, Critical Infrastructure Security,  Blockchain Malware, composition malware, malware evasion.,  ,  , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – NotPetya, malware)

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Apple fans, I have a bad news for you, just one specially-crafted message can expose your personal information, including your authentication credentials stored in the memory of your Apple device., This means that your Wi-Fi passwords, login credentials, and email logins, could be easily compromised in the attack. The CVE-2016-4631 flaw reminds us the dreaded Stagefright vulnerabilities that were affecting the Android OS, also in that case the attacker was able to spy on victims by using a specially-crafted text message., This critical vulnerability (CVE-2016-4631) resides in the ImageIO, the API used to handle image data in almost every Apple operating system, including Mac OS X, watchOS, and tvOS.The CVE-2016-4631 vulnerability in the ImageIO was reported by the Cisco Talos senior security researcher Tyler Bohan., The attack scenario is simple as efficient, the attacker just needs to send the malicious exploit code to the victim’s device via a multimedia message (MMS) or iMessage inside a Tagged Image File Format (TIFF)., When the victims will receive the malicious message, the exploit will be executed., The exploit code could also be delivered through Safari, in this attack scenario the victim have to visit a website containing the malicious code that will be handled by the browser and executed., In both attack scenarios, no explicit user interaction would be required because applications automatically handle the images when they are received by the targeted device., , The bad news is that such kind of attack is very difficult to detect for the victim., Bohan told Forbes that the issue in “an extremely critical bug, comparable to the Android Stagefright as far as exposure goes.” “The receiver of an MMS cannot prevent exploitation and MMS is a store and deliver mechanism, so I can send the exploit today and you will receive it whenever your phone is online,” he explained., iOS is protected from exploit codes by the sandbox mechanism, so an attacker needs a further iOS jailbreak or root exploit to take complete control of the mobile device., On Mac OS X the attack is easier because the OS doesn’t use a sandbox protection., According to the last Apple’s advisory, the critical flaw was already fixed in the last iOS version 9.3.3., Now that you know the flaw allows hacking Apple devices, don’t waste time, patch your device to avoid ugly surprises., Crooks will not take a long to find a way to exploit the CVE-2016-4631 vulnerability in the wild., “Exploitation wise, Talos estimates there is about a two-week effort to get from the information we disclosed publicly to a fully working exploit with a decent amount of reliability,” Bohan added., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – hacking Apple devices, CVE-2016-4631)

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Ransomware continues to represent one of the most insidious and aggressive cyber threats, a new campaign launched by threat actors in the wild is impersonating the telecom giant Telia., According to the experts at the Heimdal Security firm, millions of Telia’s customers are exposed to the risk of infection. Hackers have launched a sophisticated and surgical campaign that leverages on a mix of attack vectors., Most of the victims are located in Sweden, in a first stage of the attack the threat actors send victims message including a link to an invoice which appears to come from Telia., When the victims open the malicious message and click the link, they are redirected to a web page that displays them a Captcha code., , Only when the victims provide the code, a TorrentLocker payload is served to the victim’s machine. The malware is downloaded only if the victims’IP addresses are from Sweden, users from other countries are redirected to the Google page., “The Torrentlocker family is well known for its highly targeted spam email campaigns,” said Heimdal Security researcher Andra Zaharia, in an analysis. “Attackers carefully localize the emails, ransom notes and other elements tied to the campaign. The more targeted the attack, the higher the chances for it to be effective.” explained Andra Zaharia, Heimdal Security researcher, in a detailed analysis of the Telia campaign., The TorrentLocker encrypts all the data files available on the local drive and on connected network drives, then displays a ransom note to instruct victims on the payment procedure., When the ransomware infects the machines they connect to the C&C server in order to send back data including digital certificates from the infected device., “It will then register the infected computer and the data harvested from it, which includes certificates from the infected device. A new thing about this attack is that the ransomware will inject itself into the memory of the “explorer.exe” process (child process). It will then drop the main component with an arbitrary filename. Available contact details on the device will also be collected and sent to the aforementioned C&C server, certainly to be used in future spam campaigns.” reads the analysis published by Heimdal Security., The crooks request the payment of 1.15 Bitcoins (roughly 4099 SEK (441 EUR)), if the victims don’t pay within a deadline, the ransom value will double., At the time I was writing the campaign is detection only by 19 of 57 antivirus solutions according to VirusTotal., As usual, let me suggest to keep your software up to date and maintain a fresh backup of your data., If you appreciate my effort in spreading cyber security awareness, please vote for Security Affairs as best European Security Blog. Vote SecurityAffairs in every section it is reported. I’m one of the finalists and I want to demonstrate that the Security Affairs community a great reality., Thank you, Pierluigi, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Telia ransomware campaign, malware)

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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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Two days ago, reading the news that lawful interception malware FinFisher was discovered in the wild I thought …, “wow finally we have the evidence, probably we will debate for a long time regarding the use of this tool and of similar agents”, But as fate would have it the same day came the news that a new malware has hit the Middle East and the interesting items on Finfisher ended in oblivion., What is surprising is that the FinFisher spyware has been discovered on at least five continents., What is FinFisher?, It is a powerful cyber espionage agent developed by Gamma Group that is able to secretly spy on target’s computers intercepting communications, recording every keystroke and taking the complete control of the host., The spyware is for law enforcement and government use, but it seems to be  preferred for those regimes that desire to monitor representatives of the opposition., Bloomberg News reported on July 25 that security experts, led by security researcher Morgan Marquis-Boire, believe they identified instances of FinFisher during an investigation on malware e-mailed to Bahraini activists., , The malicious mails was obtained by Bloomberg News and are not the only evidence of spread of malware, another team led by Claudio Guarnieri of Boston-based security company Rapid7 has analyzed the lawful interception malware discovered in the wild explaining how they communicate with their command server., The study has revealed that instances of the malware have been detected also in Australia, U.S, Dubai, the Czech Republic, Indonesia, Latvia, Mongolia, Estonia, Qatar and Ethiopia., As Guarnieri clarified the discoveries don’t indicate that relative governments use Fisher, it is possible in fact that Gamma clients use the product in other nations., According the report published by Rapid7 “Analysis of the FinFisher Lawful Interception Malware“:, “They are simply the results of an active fingerprinting of a unique behavior associated with what is believed to be the FinFisher infrastructure,”, What really worried is the uncontrolled spread of these malware, evidence of a thriving market which nevertheless has many dark sides., As submitted by Guarnieri:, “Once any malware is used in the wild, it’s Typically only a matter of time before it gets used for nefarious purposes,”, “It’s impossible to keep this kind of thing under control in the long term.”, Gamma International GmbH managing director Martin J. Muench replied disregarding  results proposed by the researchers. He confirmed that the Gamma hasn’t sold its spyware to those countries and also added that samples used for investigations were stolen demonstration copies or were sold via a third party., Muench confirmed that Gamma complies with the current export regulations of the U.K., U.S. and Germany meanwhile the governments of the countries where the instances were detected have denied to use the spying product or have avoided to provide official explanations., There is a great debate on the use of spyware, they represents a serious threat to privacy and human rights, the fact that similar malware were detected all around the world is the demonstration of how much wide is its diffusion and what is scaring is how is possible that a tool intended for a limited number of categories of private business and governments has been found everywhere., According the Guarnieri’s study the malware has a very noisy presence in the system, it installs inline many user-mode hooks in several running processes. It’s not clear at this moment the entire list of functionalities of the agent but the researchers believe that it remains silent whenever it doesn’t have an active Internet connection.., The reports states:, According to CitizenLab’s research and WikiLeaks cables, following should be the supported features:, We believe that the Skype interception module is implemented tampering the circular sound buffer from Windows’ DirectSound interface., During the tracking of C&C servers the researchers noted an unexpected behavior, all the services binded on the ports the malware tries to exchange binary data with, respond in an unusual way whenever performing any, even malformed, HTTP request., For example, when connecting through telnet to 77.69.140.194:80 and sending “HEAD /”, the service responded the following way:, HTTP/1.1 200 OK, Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8, Content-Length:12, Hallo Steffi, Of course similar behavior sounds perfect for fingerprinting, that is how the experts have conducted a search of command servers worldwide displaying them on a map and providing related IPaddresses:, Concluding the researchers declared that their high interest on governmental malware but are worried by its wide use., The malware seems fairly complex and well protected/ obfuscated, but the infection chain is pretty weak and unsophisticated. The ability to fingerprint the C&C was frankly embarrassing, particularly for malware like this. Combined, these factors really don’t support the suggestion that thieves refactored the malware for black market use., It ‘a matter of time, but similar applications can certainly be used by evil-minded for unspeakable purposes,, What we can do is to diffuse knowledge on them and spread info on how to protect themselves from what is a serious attack on our privacy. ,  Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – cyber espionage),  , The guys at EmergingThreats helped us refine our Snort rules a little bit in order to lower the possibility of false positives., Following are the updated signatures, use them to detect FinSpy in your local networks:,  ,  , At the time of writing 8 out of the 12 servers are not responding anymore: all the ports originally used have been filtered or closed off after our analysis and the related news articles have been published., Even the ones that were actively responding until yesterday, like Latvia and Bahrain, are now inaccessible. A very odd timing, isn’t it?, In the last hours we read of many people questioning the validity of the “Hallo Steffi” pattern, saying that it could be completely unrelated to the FinFisher toolkit, as also Gamma’s Muench stated to Bloomberg. Fair enough, we also mentioned in this same blog post that there is no way we can guarantee a direct connection between that string and the malware, we only reported an anomaly on the Bahraini infrastructure and the discovery of the same anomaly in other locations., We believe that this unusual behavior could have actually been a deception technique adopted by the FinSpy Proxy to disguise the nature of the service, but that when they realized it was actively used for fingerprinting the C&C servers was promptly disabled to prevent further discoveries.,  , Every FinSpy sample is configured with a set of multiple ports that it can try to contact: it will start from the lower port (for example 20), attempt a connection 3 times and then move over to the next one., When running the Bahraini FinSpy sample, especially now that the server is not responding, it attempts the following connections:,  ,  , As you can see the last one is port 4111., We believe this is the standard FinSpy port and that all the other ones are probably just forwarded to 4111. The FinSpy “demo” sample contacted port 3111 totiger.gamma-international.de and ff-demo.blogdns.org, close enough.,  , Another interesting “coincidence” is that all the IP addresses that we observed responding with the “Hallo Steffi” banner also had/have port 4111 open, in fact if you check the only 4 servers currently up you can see:,  , The last one also shows port 9111, which we observed along with port 3111 being open fewer times as well., Is it more convincing now?

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The Juniper Networks company announced last week it would stop using a portion of code that security experts believe was developed by the National Security Agency in order for surveillance purposes., The code that relies on numbers generated by Dual Elliptic Curve technology could be exploited by the US intelligence to eavesdrop secure connections and access sensitive data., “We will replace Dual_EC and ANSI X9.31 in ScreenOS 6.3 with the same random number generation technology currently employed across our broad portfolio of Junos OS products. We intend to make these changes in a subsequent ScreenOS software release, which will be made available in the first half of 2016.” states the announcement published by Juniper Networks., Developers at Juniper Networks have designed a new version of the security software that will replace the suspicious code. those that rely on numbers generated by Dual Elliptic Curve technology., The announcement from Juniper Networks comes after a group of cryptographers who analyzed the code presented at a Stanford University conference the results of their research. The cryptographers discovered that the code in the Juniper appliances had been changed in multiple ways during 2008 to allow the intelligence eavesdropping on virtual private network sessions., The researchers discovered NetScreen used predictable outputs from Dual_EC_DRBG to bypass ANSI X.9.31. The researchers pointed out a separate code change made in 2008 that created the conditions to exploit the Dual_EC_DRBG weaknesses, A first modification to the code was introduced in the 2012 and included a change of a constant in Juniper Netscreen OS that allowed nation-state hackers to spy on customers., A second change was made in 2014 allowing anyone who knew a hard-coded password to eavesdrop on customers’ communications., “Juniper’s initial patch had gotten rid of that constant in Dual Elliptic Curve and replaced it with the version it had been using since 2008.” states the Reuters. “But the academics who studied the code said that while Juniper had not disavowed the 2008 code, it had not explained how that constant was picked or why it was using the widely faulted Dual Elliptic Curve at all.”, The cryptographers raised questions about Dual Elliptic Curve that have been manipulated by a persistent attacker, likely the NSA, that managed to insert the unauthorized code with the involvement, consciously or not, by Juniper employee., In December, Juniper announced to have found an unauthorized piece of code in the operating system for Juniper NetScreen firewalls. The “unauthorized code” that could allow an attacker to decrypt VPN traffic., “unauthorized code” “could allow a knowledgeable attacker to gain administrative access to NetScreen devices and to decrypt VPN connections.”, According to The Register, the presence of the unauthorized code could date back to 2008, the experts referred a 2008 notice issued by Juniper’s about a security issued that impacts ScreenOS 6.2.0r15 through 6.2.0r18 and 6.3.0r12 through 6.3.0r20. ScreenOS 6.2 was released. The Screen OS 6.3 was presented in 2009., “During a recent internal code review, Juniper discovered unauthorized code in ScreenOS that could allow a knowledgeable attacker to gain administrative access to NetScreen devices and to decrypt VPN connections,” Juniper Chief Information officer Bob Worrall wrote. “Once we identified these vulnerabilities, we launched an investigation into the matter, and worked to develop and issue patched releases for the latest versions of ScreenOS.” the advisory states., The experts explained that there are several releases with numerous versions of the Juniper products and the unauthorized code was only found in some of them., , A separate advisory issued by the company confirmed the presence of two separate vulnerabilities in its products, the first one allows unauthorized remote administrative access to an affected device over SSH or telnet, “The second issue may allow a knowledgeable attacker who can monitor VPN traffic to decrypt that traffic,” the advisory said. “It is independent of the first issue. There is no way to detect that this vulnerability was exploited.”, The Reuters reported the opinion of the researcher Hovav Shacham of the University of California who said that the “2014 back door was straightforward” and quite easy to exploit.,  , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – NSA, Juniper Networks)

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The hacker 0x2Taylor is claiming to have breached an Amazon server containing login credentials of Kindle users. As a proof the hack, the hacker leaked online more than 80,000 credentials belonging to Amazon users, he also explained that the company ignored his warnings about the existence of vulnerabilities in its servers., 0x2Taylor on Twitter, explained to the Daily Dot he had reported to Amazon the flaws three days ago, but without success., , The hacked server contained the 80,000 Amazon Kindle user data, including login credentials, city, state, ZIP code, phone number, and the IP address of the user’s last login., 0x2Taylor also confirmed to have verified the validity of the credentials, he also added that he asked $700 payment from Amazon, but the company doesn’t run a bounty program neither acknowledges the hacker’s attempts to contact the company., “They’re a big company and they should have enough money to have the proper security defenses,” he added. “I was trying to prove them privately but they were ignoring my warnings,” “At this point I don’t really want to help them,” he said. “I think I’ve done enough damage as it is.”, The hacker shared screenshot of the information on Twitter before to upload the full database to the Mega cloud storage service., 0x2Taylor is the same hacker who took credit for the data breach suffered by the Baton Rouge police department after the shooting of Alton Sterling., 0x2Taylor suggested users to update their passwords as soon as possible, inviting them to do it regularly., Let’s wait for a reply from Amazon. I personally consider useful for companies to operate a bounty program, a flaw reported by white hat hacker could allow any firm to save million of dollar losses resulting from a data breach.,  , UPDATE July 10th, 2016, I reached the Security Researcher at the Cylance SPEAR Team Brian Wallace (@botnet_hunter) for a comment:, “As a security researcher and an Amazon customer, I had a natural curiosity about the supposed breach. Upon inspecting the data, I found that the data did not match expectations of normal user data. The email addresses for the user accounts all appear to match the same format. The format consists of the first initial, then last name followed by a random sequence of letter and numbers. Additionally, all of the email addresses resided on only gmail.com, yahoo.com, or hotmail.com. Seeing that, I counted up the occurrences of each domain used, and found that of the three domains, each one showed up roughly one third of the time. This is not what one would expect to see in a data dump, but this is what one would expect to see if these three domains were picked at random 83,899 times. Given this evidence that the data was generated, I continued to look for further evidence that the information was not representative of legitimate users., The data provides values for the “last IP” of the user, presumably representing the IP address of the user the last time they logged in. Upon inspecting the IP addresses, I found that a large majority of the IP addresses belong to ColoCrossing, a company which provides datacenters as a service. While it is likely that some Amazon users may be connecting from datacenters, one would expect that these would be the vast minority, and not the majority., When inspecting the “user_agent” field, presumably the User Agent field provided by the web browser of the user the last time they logged in, I found this also did not represent legitimate user behavior. Similarly to the email domains, it appears that these user agents were picked from a short list at random, as the counts of each user agent were roughly equal. Normally, one would expect to some popular browsers, some unpopular browsers, and far more than 22 different user agents., The passwords listed in the data are also not representative of legitimate users. All passwords appear to consist of random upper case letters and numbers, with no words and no occurrences of popular passwords. One may assume that some users may randomly generate passwords, but it is exceedingly unlikely that all 83,899 users generated passwords in the same way., I have not tested any of these user accounts on Amazon.com as that could potentially incur legal risk., Based on this evidence, I believe the data released is not representative of actual Amazon users, but instead this information was generated. It is not clear whether this information was generated by the individual who released the information, or if it was generated by a third party, and that information was then obtained by the individual who released it.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – hacking, data breach),  

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Group-IB is one of the leading companies in fraud prevention, cybercrime and high-tech crime investigations, it is IMPACT-ITU member and one of most active firms in the analysis if cyber criminal phenomena., The firm reported that cyber criminals use personal and confidential data of senior management of different financial institutions and companies for targeted attacks, including fraud and online-banking theft., C Level executives are being targeted and drilled down on with specific attacks meanwhile HR managers are targeted due the sensitive information they manage., Why senior management?, The principal reason is that information related to personal details of senior management or key employees helps are used by attackers for recruiting of potential insiders, it is very actual in banks, online-trading companies and e-commerce nowadays., I contacted Andrey Komarov, the head of international projects of Group-IB, CERT-GIB CTO to have more information on the research, he told me:, «We have faced with internal fraud by bank employees in face of managers and top staff, recruited by cybercriminals absolutely remotely on the first stage, related to SWIFT MT 130 and SWIFT MT 760 operations on huge amounts of money. Of course, on the second stage, criminals involve such kind of employees to own criminal groups for further close cooperation», , SWIFT MT 130 and SWIFT MT 760 are very specific SWIFT operations, used for bank guarantees as well, and with the help of some corrupted employees it is possible to make some fraud in large amounts of money. In rare cases some of such operations are approved by insiders in face of senior management, especially who is connected with stocks and operational risks, as they have connections with all departments in the bank., One of the most referenced sources of information are social networks, in particular hacked accounts of the most popular platforms such as Facebook and Linkedin. The social networks are a mine of information, employees use to publish their private e-mails and other personal information used by hackers to gather design their profile and to design a map of contacts., In regard of targeted attacks, hackers are interested in the credentials of middleware employees and senior management for placing malware and getting more information about the network topology of potential victims, sometimes they spawn a specially crafted code for reverse connection to use the infected machine for cyber espionage., The specific targets of hackers are IT-administrators and IT-managers, as most of them have full access to the company’s infrastructure, which means that if they will be compromised, the attackers may gain access to different information resources, including corporate e-mails.,  , In the above image is reported a post from an underground forum that demonstrates the hacker’s interest to confidential data on CEO and top management of different well known brands, following the translation from Russian:, “Will buy information about the following companies: , – Linkedin, Verizon, GoDaddy, British American Tobaco, Dupont, Pepsi, Names.co.uk, Facebook (private companies) , – Commerzbank, Reiffeisen, RBS, Bank of America, Wells, Wachovia, Citibank + any russians, having online-banking, Interested in email + password, any stolen accounts of its employees in social networks (Facebook + Linkedin), will pay good, before selling need to have a garant and checking., Interested in hacked accounts and data on:, – sustem administrators;, – top managers (operational managers, heads of the departments), Reach me only through PM, confidential and in 1 hands, WIll talk only under OTR/NDC encryption in Jabber, don’t use ICQ “,  , Experts at Group-IB confirmed me that there is great market of confidential data trading, mostly it is used by competitive entities for intelligence in same segment of market, by big players on the market for struggling, and hackers as well., According to the statistics, the most valuable types of information well traded on the black market are:Annual accounting balances and financial reports;, Once again the observation of criminal underground is giving us precious information on the trends in the cyber criminal environment, this information is fundamental for the security departments of enterprises and governments, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Cybercrime)

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 , Today I desire to analyze with you the data proposed by FireEye in the 2013 Advanced Threat Report (ATR), the study provides a high-level overview of the computer network attacks discovered by the company during 2013. The 2013 Advanced Threat Report (ATR) is focused on the advanced persistent threat (APT) evolution, it provides data on means and methods of attackers giving particular attention to state-sponsored operations., The APT identified are responsible for long term campaigns of high complexity mainly oriented to intellectual property theft, large-scale cyber espionage, and attacks against critical infrastructures., The experts at FireEye collected data from the FireEye® Dynamic Threat Intelligence™ (DTI) cloud, key figures of the report are:, The experts discovered control server all over the world, a widespread offensive that caused 4,192 incidents. The top APT targets in 2013 includes of course US, South Korea and Canada, surprising is that Canada with US and Germany was hit by the highest number of unique malware families., , To improve the efficiency of their operations the attackers used zero-day exploits mainly targeting Java solutions and Internet Explorer (IE), during 2013 FireEye discovered eleven zero-day attacks. The attacks against the Microsoft browser were used in watering hole attacks against US government websites., , Education, Finance, and High-Tech were the top overall targets as you can note “Government” is not among the top, despite it was targeted by the highest number of unique malware families., , The APTs are adapting their strategy to the increased level of awareness on security, Web-based attacks, and social media were often preferred to spear phishing., As remarked in conclusion of the Advanced Threat Report (ATR), the landscape of cyber security is rapidly evolving and it’s hard to predict the evolution of cyber threats despite the following trends appear outlined:, Enjoy the reading!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  APT, 2013 Advanced Threat Report (ATR))

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The affected models are ThinkPad 10,  ThinkPad L460, ThinkPad P50s, ThinkPad T460, ThinkPad T460p, ThinkPad T460s, ThinkPad T560, ThinkPad X260 and ThinkPad Yoga 260., One of the flaws was discovered in June by Google that publicly disclosed it in September. Google also published a proof-of-concept exploit for a Wi-Fi firmware vulnerability affecting Broadcom chipsets in iOS 10 and earlier., The flaw tracked as CVE-2017-11120, is a memory corruption vulnerability that could be exploited by attackers to execute code and establish a backdoor on a targeted device. T, The flaw initially reported affecting specific Broadcom chipsets used in Apple iPhones, Apple TV, and Android devices was patched in the same month., The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2017-11120, is a memory corruption vulnerability, Apple addressed it in the security update for the release of iOS 11., Now Lenovo warns of the presence of the flaw in two dozen ThinkPad models that use Broadcom’s BCM4356 Wireless LAN Driver for Windows 10., The Broadcom Wi-Fi chipsets used by Lenovo ThinkPad devices are affected by the CVE-2017-11120 flaw and also by the CVE-2017-11121 vulnerability, both issue are rated as “critical” and received a CVSS 10 score., “Broadcom has issued an advisory for certain Broadcom WiFi controllers used by many computer and device makers, which contain buffer overflow vulnerabilities on the adapter (not the system CPU).“reads the security advisory.” Broadcom initially did not plan to remediate these issues, but when the WPA2 KRACK issue also emerged, Broadcom combined both fixes in to a single set of driver updates. Lenovo received the first of these near the end of 2017, and continues releasing fixes as integration and testing is completed.” , The flaws can be exploited by remote attackers to execute arbitrary code on the adapter (not the system’s CPU) of the target system., The CVE-2017-11121 vulnerability was also discovered by Google experts, it is a buffer overflow vulnerability caused by improper validation of Wi-Fi signals., “Properly crafted malicious over-the-air Fast Transition frames can potentially trigger internal Wi-Fi firmware heap and/or stack overflows, leading to denial of service or other effects,” reads the description for the flaw., Lenovo users urge to update the Wi-Fi driver for their ThinkPad models., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Lenovo Thinkpad, Broadcom Wi-Fi chipsets)

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The effort is necessary to fight against terrorism in a wake of the recent tragic Manchester attack., “The G7 calls for Communication Service Providers and social media companies to substantially increase their efforts to address terrorist content,” the G7 states said in a statement., “We encourage industry to act urgently in developing and sharing new technology and tools to improve the automatic detection of content promoting incitement to violence, and we commit to supporting industry efforts in this vein including the proposed industry-led forum for combating online extremism,” , Investigators believe that the Manchester bomber may have been radicalized online by Islamic State groups active on social media., “Make no mistake: the fight is moving from the battlefield to the internet,” Prime Minister Theresa May told her G7 colleagues while chairing a discussion on counter-terrorism in the Sicilian resort of Taormina., Another common objective of the G7 is the identification and the prosecution of foreign fighters involved in various conflicts various areas, such as the Syria and the Turkey., The G7 states are requesting the support from local authorities to prosecute the foreign fighters, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq are areas of high interested in the investigators., The investigators believe that the Manchester bomber had been to Syria after visiting his parents’ homeland of Libya., “It is vital we do more to cooperate with our partners in the region to step up returns and prosecutions of foreign fighters,” added May., “This means improving intelligence-sharing, evidence gathering and bolstering countries’ police and legal processes.”, (L-R): EU Council President Donald Tusk, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, US President Donald Trump, Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni, French President Emmanuel Macron, Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, British Prime Minister Theresa May and European Union Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker pose for a family photo on the first day of the G7 Summit at the Teatro Greco in Taormina, Italy, 26 May 2017. The G7 Summit will be held from 26 to 27 May 2017. ANSA/ETTORE FERRARI ANSA/ETTORE FERRARI, The G7 states have to improve information sharing processes on terrorism issued, law enforcements and intelligence agencies share results of the investigations and border security methods with countries where foreign fighters travel through or fight in., Every time a foreign fighter cross a border, specific actions must be triggered to track down them and their organizations., “When our allies find evidence, such as video or papers, of illegal activity involving foreign fighters, for example a Brit in a conflict zone, they should pass that to our authorities. It may help prosecute foreign fighters when they return.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – G7 Summit Taormina, Foreign fighters)

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Technology in modern warfare has assumed a crucial role, every government is developing new cyber capabilities to be able to contrast and prevent cyber threats the fifth domain of warfare, the cyberspace., Today the concept of warfare is profoundly changed, many states choose to attack foreign governments exploring new technological options, from state-sponsored cyber attacks to large use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) on the battle field for espionage and offensive purposes. Just drones are largely used for military purposes and many news have reported the possibility to hack their control system exactly as any other computer, this opportunity is the principal target of many researches conducted by cyber units all over the world., These sophisticated weapons seems to be affected by a “pervasive vulnerability”, according Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, that exposes them to the concrete risks of hijacking. The concept of “pervasive vulnerability” is widely discussed and it’s subject of deep study, the weakness affects also SCADA systems, vehicles, medical devices, Computer peripherals and communication devices., The patch management for this category of vulnerabilities, especially in military sector, is very complex, fix a bug present in the control system of a UAC is need in majority of cases the re-certifying for the entire aircraft. A patch need a long series of tests to avoid the introduction of further vulnerabilities in the system fixed., Which are the main cause for the presence of such critical vulnerabilities?, Dr. Kathleen Fisher, a Tufts University scientist and a program manager at the DARPA, is sure that the problem is related to the design of control algorithms that appears to be written in a fundamentally insecure manner. Fisher is conducting a project, dubbed High-Assurance Cyber Military Systems, or HACMS,  having a four-year effort and an estimated cost of $60 million with the purpose of define an innovative and secure practice of coding., The program is desribed on DARPA web site with following statements:, “The High-Assurance Cyber Military Systems (HACMS) program seeks to create technology for the construction of systems that are functionally correct and satisfy appropriate safety and security properties,” explained, Kathleen Fisher, DARPA program manager. “Our vision for HACMS is to adopt a clean-slate, formal method-based approach to enable semi-automated code synthesis from executable, formal specifications.”, In addition to generating code, HACMS seeks a synthesizer capable of producing a machine-checkable proof that the generated code satisfies functional specifications as well as security and safety policies. A key technical challenge is the development of techniques to ensure that such proofs are composable, allowing the construction of high-assurance systems out of high-assurance components., Drones control systems, SCADA systems and medical devices share the possibility to be victim of a cyber attacks such as a malware infection, event such as Stuxnet case and the various news on hijacking of drones remind us that hackers could exploit these complex systems to the leak of secure coding., Fisher during a presentation of her study declared:, “Many of these systems share a common structure: They have an insecure cyber perimeter, constructed from standard software components, surrounding control systems designed for safety but not for security,” , But it’s known, the perfect code it’s hard to realize, and need a long and complex work that involve high skilled personnel, to give an idea of the complexity for code validation and its analysis let’s remind that one group of researchers in Australia has checked the core of their “microkernel” composed by 8,000 lines of code with a workload of 11 persons for one year, it’s an amazing time if we consider the time to market of military devices and the overall complexity of any component of a vehicle., The overall project will have a duration of  4.5 years split into three 18-month phases and is composed of 5 Technical Areas (TAs),  ,  , ,  , Government is interested to the definition in military sector of  tools and formal methods-based techniques to develop secure control algorithms for the creation of secure defense vehicles. The final control algorithms will be tested on various defense vehicles such as Rockwell Collins drones, Boeing helicopters and Black-I-Robotics ground robots, but the project is more ambitious, it has as final goal the definition of “a software that can write near-flawless code on its own”., Reading the presentation of the HACMS program I was attracted by the Technical Area 5: Red Team (“Voice of the Offense”) that includes the static and dynamic assess security of the targeted vehicles. The phase also include a specific task on attacks based on injection of arbitrary code in the systems and the providing of  bogus values to the sensors of the vehicle. These were the most dangerous type of attacks observed until now, the program is also interested to preserve mission objectives from hacker attacks that could reveal sensible information during a conflict such as goal of the mission (e.g. reconnaissance or bombing), the locations of the troops on the territory and final targets of the attacks., The deliverables of HACMS will be a set of publicly available tools integrated into a high-assurance framework, which will be distributed for use in both the military and commercial software sectors, the purpose is to promote these tools to generate, high-assurance and open-source operating system and control system components.,  , ,  , If the project will works it could represents a turning point in history, we will be able to design drones not attacked by hackers, we are very close to creating the perfect machine, and in this case what are the ethical implications related to human control in the decision-making loop of these vehicles?, Is it really possible the hypothesized scenario, is this our real goal?, Pierluigi Paganini

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On Monday, the popular question-and-answer website Quora suffered a major data breach, unknown hackers breached its systems and accessed 100 million user data., The company is notifying the incident to the affected users and reset their passwords as a precautionary measure, it also reported it to law enforcement. Quora hired a forensics and security firm to assist in the investigation., Quora is still investigating the security breach, it discovered the intrusion on  November 30 and attributed it to a “malicious third party.”, “We recently discovered that some user data was compromised as a result of unauthorized access to one of our systems by a malicious third party. We are working rapidly to investigate the situation further and take the appropriate steps to prevent such incidents in the future.” reads the data breach notification., “On Friday we discovered that some user data was compromised by a third party who gained unauthorized access to one of our systems.”, Exposed data includes name, email address, hashed password, data imported from linked networks, public content and actions (e.g. questions, answers, comments, and upvotes), and non-public content and actions (e.g. answer requests, downvotes, and direct messages)., “While the passwords were encrypted (hashed with a salt that varies for each user), it is generally a best practice not to reuse the same password across multiple services, and we recommend that people change their passwords if they are doing so.” continues the company., , Data belonging to users who posted anonymously was not exposed, financial data and social security numbers are at risk because the Quora platform doesn’t use it., Quora has identified the root cause of the breach and has taken steps to address it, it did not disclose technical details on the incident., The company announced additional efforts to mitigate the effects of the incident and to avoid future security breaches., “Not all Quora users are affected, and some were impacted more than others.” states the FAQ page published by the company., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Quora, Data breach)

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The transportation industry is considered part of the critical infrastructure of a country, and according to the IBM’s X-Force security team is it a privileged target for hackers., The report, Security Trends in the Transportation Industry, published by IBM this week confirms that cybercriminals are targeting the systems used in the industry, this means that trains, planes, and automobiles are under incessant attacks., “According to the 2015 version of the “Transportation Systems Sector-Specific Plan,” the transportation sector is increasingly vulnerable to cyberthreats as a result of “the growing reliance on cyber-based control, navigation, tracking, positioning and communications systems, as well as the ease with which malicious actors can exploit cyber systems serving transportation.”” states the analysis published by IBM., Systems used in the transportation industry are used to manage a large volume of data that could be stolen by crooks that intend to resell them on the dark web. Another precious good in the dark web are for example the flier points., “We are seeing this industry emerging as high-value target right alongside healthcare, manufacturing, financial services and government,” said Michelle Alvarez, Threat Researcher and Editor at IBM Managed Security Services., Giving a close look to the techniques adopted by attackers we note that denial of service attacks and malicious attachments and links accounted for over 44 percent of the attacks targeting organization in the sector between March 1, 2015 and May 15, 2016., The practice of the extortion is very common, DDoS attacks above all but we cannot underestimate the ransomware threat., , IBM experts also warn about terrorism the threat, sabotage and the theft of data that could be used in terrorist attacks remain main concerns of the experts., “Risks to critical transportation infrastructure include natural disasters as well as manmade physical and cyber threats. Manmade threats include terrorism, vandalism, theft, technological failures, and accidents. Cyber threats to the Sector are of concern because of the growing reliance on cyberbased control, navigation, tracking, positioning, and communications systems, as well as the ease with which malicious actors can exploit cyber systems serving transportation. “states the report “Security Trends in the Transportation Industry,” , “Terrorist attacks, whether physical or cyber, can significantly disrupt vital transportation services and cause long-term sociological and economic consequences. “, When dealing with hacking in the transportation industry we cannon avoid to mention the demonstrative attacks against a Jeep Cherokee last year and the alleged hack of computer systems aboard a commercial flight., One of the most clamorous incidents occurred in June 2015 when the Polish national airline, LOT, announced that it has cancelled 10 flights due to a cyber attack against the airline’s ground computer systems at Warsaw’s Okecie airport., Back in 2014, the Chinese national train reservation system was targeted by hackers who stole customers’ personal data., Keep secure all the system in the transportation industry is challenging, many factors complicate the activity such as the numerous privatizations that are occurring in the sector., It is a responsibility of each operator to identify the threats and the risk of exposure and mitigate them by applying the recommendations shared by the Government for the protection of critical infrastructure., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – transportation industry, cyber security)

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In the most recent post of atxsec.com the owner of the blog talks about a flaw that he discovered after trying to pay his utility bill., To pay his utility bill he decided to use the web application of the utility company where the authentication is based on the client number. He did it, and once authenticated he should see his personal information (Address, Fisrt and Last name, Phone number), but his time he noticed something different:, “In my angry state of mind I tried to login as fast as I could, mashing the keys that consisted of my assigned account number as fast as possible so I can get the sting of another bill out of the way. Hitting the enter key displayed the usual page that I was used to, asking me to confirm my information, except something this time was very different. My name was not correct, it was someone else’s name that lives in the same state as me, and obviously uses the same utility company. Confirming my account number was correct I noticed that the last digit was the issue, it was exactly one digit above my account number. ” , When facing this issue he realized that “Typically this indicates that the account numbers are based on incremental values (more than likely auto_increment).”, Since he didn’t want to end up like the case of “Weev and AT&T” he did the second best thing possible, created a lab using virtual machines and using projects available on Github, to prove his point that the utility company website could be exploited., , “Upon hitting the ‘pay my bill’ button we are shown a page to confirm our account information, then proceed with adding payment methods at the next screen.” continues the post. ù, , “On this page we are confronted and instructed to confirm our personal information is correct, then proceed to elect a payment method. This is absolutely terrifying! A competitor could easily uncover this information and use it to poach customers of this company. Or someone could sell the information on the black market, all roads lead to nothing good.”, Going further in his investigation, he created a script to test the created website that simulates the company’s website:, ,  , “We simply just need to specify an account number to start with, then the script will ask for a range. This alters the range of account numbers that we would like to test.”, , Resuming,  if we would use the same method on the company’s website the most likely thing to happen would be that an attacker would harvest the entire customer database using a script with a simple algorithm., In my opinion the author of the blog acted in a very ethical way, not trying attack directly the website, but I hope that he has already informed the utility company. Someone could blame him in case of successful attack. As usual happen, the lack of security by design could cause serious problems to the end-users, how can you justify a company that implements such authentication mechanism?, Let’s hope the company will fix soon the issue by improving their authentication method., About the Author Elsio Pinto, Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – utility company, hacking)

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The tech giant has reported customers four critical vulnerabilities affecting the Policy Suite., The flaws tracked as CVE-2018-0374, CVE-2018-0375, CVE-2018-0376, and CVE-2018-0377 have been discovered during internal testing., Two of these flaws could be exploited by a remote unauthenticated attacker to access the Policy Builder interface and the Open Systems Gateway initiative (OSGi) interface., The access to the Policy Builder interface could allow an attacker to change to existing repositories and create new ones, while the access to the OSGi interface could allow an attacker to access or change any file accessible by the OSGi process., An unauthenticated attacker could also allow an attacker to modify any data contained in the Policy Builder database., “A vulnerability in the Policy Builder database of Cisco Policy Suite could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to connect directly to the Policy Builder database.” reads the security advisory published by Cisco., “The vulnerability is due to a lack of authentication. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by connecting directly to the Policy Builder database. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to access and change any data in the Policy Builder database.”, , Cisco also warned of the presence of the Cluster Manager in Policy Suite of a root account with default and static credentials. A remote attacker can exploit the vulnerabilities to access to the account and execute arbitrary commands with root privileges., Cisco also warned of the presence of seven flaws in the SD-WAN solution, one of them affects the Zero Touch Provisioning service and could be exploited by an unauthenticated attacker to trigger denial-of-service (DoS) condition., Other SD-WAN vulnerabilities could allow an authenticated attacker to overwrite arbitrary files on the underlying operating system, and execute arbitrary commands with vmanage or root privileges., Cisco also reported a high severity DoS vulnerability that affects Nexus 9000 series Fabric switches, the issue resides in the implementation of the DHCPv6 feature., Cisco fixed all the vulnerabilities and confirmed that none of them has been exploited in attacks in the wild., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Cisco Policy Suite, security)

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Internet of things devices are becoming a privileged target of cyber criminals, recently Akamai disclosed the existence of the Spike botnet which used by bad actors to run DDoS attacks through desktops and IoT devices. Another report issued by the same vendor explained that bad actors are exploiting vulnerable UPnP devices worldwide to run reflection and amplification DDoS attacks., The number of Internet of Things is growing at an exponential pace with the increase in smart devices deployed in several objects that we daily manage., Today we will discuss another interesting case occurred in Spain, millions of Network-connected electricity meters, also known as Smart meters, are susceptible to cyberattack due to lack of proper security controls according to studies carried out by the security researchers, Javier Vazquez Vidal and Alberto Garcia Illera., The researchers explained to the Reuters that they will manage the research ethically, avoiding to the public provide any information that could advantage threat actor in the organization of an attack. They will provide details of the research only when all the deployed smart meters will be secured by the Smart Vendor., , There are three major utility companies in Spain, Endesa, E.ON  and Iberdrola and the number of installed Smart meters is 8 million which corresponds to nearly 30 percent of households., “We are not releasing the exact details; we are not going to say how we did this,” said Garcia Illera”This issue has to be fixed.”, The researchers avoided disclosing also the name of smart meter manufacturer in time I’m writing., The circumstance is very concerning, bad actors, accessing to the smart meters, could a blackout or conduct fraudulent activities, including billing fraud. The researchers explained that poorly protected credentials stored in the devices could let attackers gain access of smart meters, they were able to take full control of any device, modify its unique ID to impersonate other customer or use the smart meter for launching attacks against the power network., Immediately the Spanish utility company that deployed the smart meters started the necessary actions to mitigate the risks and improve the security of the devices., The circumstance is very curious considering that the deployment on the national scale of the smart meters was decided by the Spanish Government to improve national energy efficiency, but apparently, no one had raised the issue of assessing the level of security offered by these devices., The duo decided to present at Black Hat Europe hacking conference in Amsterdam the results of their research, the two experts have reversed engineered the firmware running on the smart meters and discovered a way to control the device over the power line communications network., The researchers discovered a flaw that affects the code running on the smart meters, the vulnerability could be exploited remotely to shut down power supplies to individual households, access meter readings, transfer meter readings to other customers and also inject “network worms” that could cause serious problems to the overall network., The experts explained that the Smart meters deployed by the Spanish utility company use AES-128 encryption to protect data, but this encryption algorithm is not hard to crack with a brute-force attack., The attack scenario is disconcerting as explained by the experts, a bad actors could shut down an entire countries hacking the network of smart meters, “Oh wait? We can do this? We were really scared,” said Vazquez Vidal,”We started thinking about the impact this could have. What happens if someone wants to attack an entire country?” he said., Welcome to the Internet of Things era!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – smart energy meters, hacking)

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According to experts from Kaspersky Lab, a number of organizations in Asia have been targeted with InPage zero-day., InPage is a word processor widely used in Asia because is supports languages such as Urdu, Persian, Pashto and Arabic. Its user base includes academies, libraries, government organizations, and of course media companies., , Vulnerabilities in such kind of software could be useful to launch targeted attacks against specific groups of people. Something similar occurred last year when researchers from FireEye pointed out the North Korea for a number of attacks against the South Korea relying a 0day in the South most popular Word processor, the Hangul Word Processor (HWP)., The investigation started in September 2016, when the experts analyzing a new wave of attacks spotted an interesting target which appeared to constantly receive spear phishing messages., The malware researchers who investigated the attacks discovered that threat actors used a specific exploit file that had an InPage (.inp) extension. The file embedded a shellcode that was triggered on several InPage versions, the malicious code is able to decrypt itself and an EXE file contained in the decoy document., This is the first time that exploits for InPage have previously been mentioned in public., “Since no exploits for InPage have previously been mentioned in public, we took a closer look to see if the document was malicious or not. Further analysis indicated the file contained shellcode, which appeared to decrypt itself and further decrypt an EXE file embedded in the document.” explained Kaspersky researcher Denis Legezo., “InPage uses its own proprietary file format that is based on the Microsoft Compound File Format. The parser in the software’s main module ‘inpage.exe’ contains a vulnerability when parsing certain fields. By carefully setting such a field in the document, an attacker can control the instruction flow and achieve code execution,” , The attacks targeted various government and financial institutions in Asia and Africa, the experts noticed that hackers leveraged the InPage zero-day to deliver various backdoors and keyloggers., “So far, victims of these attacks have been observed in Myanmar, Sri-Lanka and Uganda. The sector for the victims include both financial and governmental institutions.” continues Legezo., Kaspersky tried to report the issue to InPage without success., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – InPage zero-day, hacking)

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Another week, another batch of CIA Vault7 leaks was published by Wikileaks. This time the documents provide details about the Project Protego, a CIA Secret Missile Control System., The Project Protego is a PIC-based missile control system that was developed by Raytheon, one of major U.S. defence contractors, and maintained between 2014 and 2015., The system is installed on-board a Pratt & Whitney aircraft (PWA) equipped with missile launch systems (air-to-air and/or air-to-ground)., According to the documents, it could be used to hit air-to-air and air-to-ground targets., Protego is composed of separate micro-controller units that exchange data and signals over encrypted and authenticated channels., The encrypted channels are:,  » On-board TWA are the ‘Master Processor’ (MP) and the ‘Deployment Box’. Both systems are layed-out with master/slave redundancy.,   » The missle system has micro-controllers for the missle itself (‘Missle Smart Switch’, MSS), the tube (‘Tube Smart Switch’, TSS) and the collar (which holds the missile before and at launch time)., , Leaked documents include the projects’ scheme, description, a guide on how to configure and build Protego images, and other related data., A missile could be launched only after the Master Processor (MP) receives three specific valid signals from a beacon (‘In Border,’ ‘Valid GPS,’ and ‘No End of Operational Period’)., “Similary safeguards are in place to auto-destruct encryption and authentication keys for various scenarios (like ‘leaving a target area of operation’ or ‘missing missle‘).” states Wikileaks., It is unclear if the project the Protego Protego was part of the Vault 7 dump, which mostly contains malware, hacking tools, and relevant documentation. According to Wikileaks, the project was maintained between 2014 and 2015., “The missile system has micro-controllers for the missile itself (‘Missile Smart Switch’, MSS), the tube (‘Tube Smart Switch’, TSS) and the collar (which holds the missile before and at launch time).” continues Wikileaks., Raytheon, who was also mentioned in a previous CIA leak, it was tasked by the US intelligence agency for analyzing TTPs used by threat actors in the wild., Likely the name Protego has been inspired from the magical Shield Charm used in Harry Potter movies, which creates a magical barrier to deflect physical entities and spells, in order to protect a certain person or area., This means that the project Protego was mainly designed for defensive purposes., Below the list of release published by Wikileaks since March:, , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Wikileaks, Project Protego)

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Researchers at security firm Radware have spotted a new IoT botnet, dubbed JenX, that exploits vulnerabilities triggered by the Satori botnet and is leveraging the Grand Theft Auto videogame community to infect devices., The activity of the Satori botnet has been observed in 2017 by researchers from Check Point security, it uses A Zero-Day vulnerability (CVE-2017-17215) in the Huawei home router HG532., JenX exploits the CVE-2014-8361 (Realtek SDK Miniigd UPnP SOAP command execution) and CVE-2017-17215 (Huawei Router HG532 arbitrary command execution). that affect Huawei and Realtek routers., “A new botnet recently started recruiting IoT devices. The botnet uses hosted servers to find and infect new victims leveraging one of two known vulnerabilities that have become popular in IoT botnets recently: , “Both exploit vectors are known from the Satori botnet and based on code that was part of a recent public Pastebin post by the “Janit0r,” author of “BrickerBot.”, JenX also implemented some techniques used by the recently discovered PureMasuta botnet., The command-and-control server is hosted at the site San Calvicie, which offers multiplayer mod support for Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, and also DDoS-for-hire service., JenX is a DDoS botnet, the DDoS  option offered by San Calvicie is called “Corriente Divina.”, The users of the website can rent a GTA San Andreas multiplayer modded server for $16 and a Teamspeak server goes for $9. Adding $20 it is possible to power massive DDoS attacks that can peak 290 and 300 Gbps., “The Corriente Divina (‘divine stream’) option is described as ‘God’s wrath will be employed against the IP that you provide us,” wrote Radware’s Cyber Security expert Pascal Geenens. “It provides a DDoS service with a guaranteed bandwidth of 90-100 Gbps and attack vectors including Valve Source Engine Query and 32 bytes floods, TS3 scripts and a ‘Down OVH’ option which most probably refers to attacks targeting the hosting service of OVH, a cloud hosting provider that also was a victim of the original Mirai attacks back in September 2016. OVH is well known for hosting multi-player gaming servers such as Minecraft, which was the target of the Mirai attacks at the time.”, , Differently from Satori and PureMasuta botnets, JenX has a centralized infrastructure, it uses a central server to perform the scanning of new hosts., “The drawback of the central approach is a less than linear growth with the number of deployed servers. Much slower compared to the exponential growth rate of and less aggressive than distributed scanning botnets,” continues the analysis., The presence of a central server that coordinates the activity makes it easy for law enforcement and security firms to take down the botnet. Of course, threat actors can deploy the control server to the Dark Web making hard take over from law enforcement., Even if the JenX is able to power massive DDoS attacks, for now, is doesn’t represent a  serious threat because it aims to disrupt services from competing for GTA SA multiplayer servers., “The botnet is supposed to serve a specific purpose and be used to disrupt services from competing GTA SA multiplayer servers. I do not believe that this will be the botnet that will take down the internet,” Geenens concluded., “But it does contain some interesting new evolutions and it adds to a list of IoT botnets that is growing longer and faster every month! That said, there is nothing that stops one from using the cheap $20 per target service to perform 290Gbps attacks on business targets and even government related targets. I cannot believe the San Calvicie group would oppose to it.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – JenX botnet, IoT)

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Symantec researchers have discovered a new android malware toolkit dubbed Dendroid, early 2014 the company also detected AndroRAT, an Android Remote admin tool which is believed to be the first malware APK binder., Thanks to the diffusion of the Google mobile OS, Android platform is considerable a privileged target for cybercriminal, it is increasing the offer in the criminal underground market for products and services to monetize illegal activities., Dendroid is an HTTP Remote Admin Tool that is completely invisible to the user and firmware interface, the toolkit implements an application APK binder package and has a sophisticated PHP panel., , Symantec researchers discovered a link between Dendroid and AndroRAT toolkit:, ” The APK binder used by Dendroid just so happens to share some links to the author of the original AndroRAT APK binder.” report the official post on Symantec blog., , Symantec experts  discovered advertising for Dendroid on underground forums, the toolkit it offered by a seller Dendroid known as “Soccer”, he offers a set of features never been seen before and a 24/7 customer support. The price for Dendroid toolkit is $300, buyers can pay it through principal virtual currency schema, including Bitcoin, LifeCoin, BTC-e., Some of the many features on offer include the following:, The evolution of remote access tools on the Android platform is considered by Symantec inevitable, the demand for this kind of toolkit is increasing and security experts believe that in 2014 the number of new malware families will increase. t., To stay protected install defensive application on your application, don’t jailbreak/root the device and always download applications from the official Stores., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Dendroid, mobile malware)

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The UK’s National Crime Agency is investigating on cyber attacks on British bank accounts that allowed the criminals to steal £20m from the victims. The attackers have used the notorious Dridex banking trojan to harvest victims’ online banking details and steal money from their accounts., “Global financial institutions and a variety of different payment systems have been particularly targeted,” claims the NCA in its alert.” states an alert issued by the NCA., The news doesn’t surprise the expert of the security industry, earlier October the experts at Palo Alto intelligence discovered a still ongoing large phishing campaign based on the Dridex Banking Malware., The phishing campaign is targeting victims mainly in the UK, the malicious messages include a Microsoft Word document that entices users to enable macros. The macros are used to enable the downloading of the Dridex banking malware from domains controlled by the attackers., , The phishing messages refer business or retail order and ask for payment, the malicious attachments pretend to be an invoice, but the victim is presented with a dialog box that asks them to enable macros in order to correctly view the document., The NCA, with the support of the FBI and other law enforcement, is hunting the cyber criminals behind the hacking campaign., One expert told the BBC the attackers had been particularly cunning to avoid being detected., “This is very sneaky software that relied on people not being vigilant with their online banking,” said Prof Alan Woodward, a cybersecurity expert who advises Europol. “If you imagine thieves making lots of little transactions, rather than one big one, it is more likely to go unnoticed.”, Once the The Dridex banking Trojan has infected machines it eavesdrops on people entering their bank account credentials and send data back to the command and control server. As explained by the Prof Woodward, crooks are able to operate without raising suspicion avoiding to match classic fraud patterns detected by banking systems., “Banks have software running constantly in the background looking for suspicious transactions, but criminals are adopting patterns that are not flagged up,” explained the Woodward. “With thousands of computers infected, they only need to take a small amount from each bank account and suddenly they’ve got millions.”, The British NCA is “sinkholing” the Trojan with the support of the internet service providers, basically the law has enforcement act to avoid that stolen data could reach the crooks, this is usually done by interfering with the communication between the Dridex banking trojan and the control server, or by seizing the C&C infrastructure in order to analyze the infection., “The NCA is conducting activity to ‘sinkhole’ the malware, stopping infected computers – known as a botnet – from communicating with the cyber criminals controlling them. This activity is in conjunction with a US sinkhole, currently being undertaken by the FBI. The agency’s National Cyber Crime Unit (NCCU) have rendered a large portion of the botnet harmless and are now initiating remediation activity to safeguard victims,” claims the alert., The authorities have already identified suspects, the US Department of Justice has already arrested in Cyprus this summer a Moldovan man, Andrey Ghinkul,  and it was seeking his extradition., “This is a particularly virulent form of malware and we have been working with our international law enforcement partners, as well as key partners from industry, to mitigate the damage it causes. Our investigation is ongoing and we expect further arrests to made.” said Mike Hulett, Head of Operations at the National Crime Agency’s National Cyber Crime Unit (NCCU)., As usual let me suggest to update your systems and software, install an antivirus solution, but most important is to assume a proper security posture. Be wary of unsolicited emails, especially from financial institutions, never open unexpected email attachments. Another good practice is to constantly check your bank account and report immediately any suspicious transactions., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Dridex banking Trojan, malware)

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

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In 2012, security researchers identified a bug in modern DRAM (dynamic random access memory) chips that could lead to memory corruption., In 2015, Google Project Zero researchers demonstrated “rowhammer“, a working exploit of this attack providing privilege escalation on vulnerable Linux and Windows systems. In 2016, researchers at VUSec published Drammer, demonstrating that the rowhammer technique could be used to gain root on Android devices. Google scrambled to fix the vulnerability in 2016, but this week researchers demonstrated that those fixes are incomplete and most Android phones released since 2012 are still vulnerable to the latest iteration of the attack, known as RAMpage. Since this is a hardware vulnerability, it is very difficult to retroactively “fix.”, The problem results from memory chips that leverage very small internal data paths to maximize “speed.” We may want to ensure that computer memory is free from corruption and consistent, the physics involved at the tiny memory scale have unintended consequences., As written in the original academic paper, “… as DRAM process technology scales down to smaller dimensions, it becomes more difficult to prevent DRAM cells from electrically interacting with each other. … By reading from the same row in DRAM, we show that it is possible to corrupt data in nearby addresses.” Flipping Bits in Memory Without Accessing Them: An Experimental Study of DRAM Disturbance Errors, (Yoongu Kim, Ross Daly, Jeremie Kim, Chris Fallin, Ji Hye Lee, Donghyuk Lee, Chris Wilkerson, Konrad Lai, Onur Mutlu.) In other words, by repeatedly and quickly reading memory contents in DRAM Row 2, it may be possible to cause individual bits in Rows 1 or 3 to change from a 1 to a 0 or vice versa., An interesting physical outcome and concerning, but it wasn’t until Google Zero Project researchers published a working exploit in 2015 that the risks became significant., , In the 2015 blog post, “Exploiting the DRAM rowhammer bug to gain kernel privileges”, Google security researchers explained that by using the rowhammer technique on two rows simultaneously (double-sided hammering), they were able to induce bit flips on a DRAM memory location between the two rows being read. Corrupting memory with electrical interference is a neat trick, but being able to change the memory bits to your choice is the start of a practical exploit and the researchers demonstrated an ability to gain privilege escalation on Windows and Linux systems. With privilege escalation, it may be possible to execute any malicious code on the target system. There are mitigations available to reduce the risks from rowhammer, but they require changes to hardware and some result in increased power consumption and reduced performance. Perhaps acceptable in desktop and server environments where security concerns override power consumption, but power is a prime concern in mobile devices — which were first shown to be vulnerable to rowhammer attacks in 2016., Security researchers from VUSec in Amsterdam published a blog posti n 2016 titled, “Drammer: Flip Feng Shui Goes Mobile.” In this post, they described how a rowhammer attack could be used against mobile devices running Android OS to gain “root access” to the devices. The attack can be launched “by hiding it in a malicious app that requires no permissions.” Once the attacker has root access, they have full control of your mobile device and the information on that device. A patch for the Android kernel ION subsystem was released in November of 2016 which addresses the Drammer attack. Unfortunately, the Android environments still suffer from fragmentation and distribution challenges so you can expect that many vulnerable devices have not yet received this patch. Of course, as we learned this week, even if you did receive the patch, you may still be vulnerable., An international team of system security researchers published the paper, “GuardION: Practical Mitigation of DMA-based Rowhammer Attacks on ARM” which describes an evolution of the rowhammer attack into the attack they dub, RAMPAGE. From the paper, RAMPAGE is described as, “a set of DMA-based Rowhammer attacks against the latest Android OS, consisting of (1) a root exploit, and (2) a series of app-to-app exploit scenarios that bypass all defenses.” Acknowledging that the patch released in 2016 did address the “double-sided hammer” vulnerability, these researchers determined that combining an attack that consumes all ION internal memory pools with their Flip Feng Shui exploit they were still able to gain root on the target Android device. As always, once the bad actors have root, they have access to everything on your phone., Since the theoretical proposal in 2012, we have seen the same memory vulnerability exploited repeatedly with greater impact and relative ease. In the RAMpage researchers’ own words, “Over the last two years, the Rowhammer bug transformed from a hard-to-exploit DRAM disturbance error into a fully weaponized attack vector.” Being hardware-based, memory attacks like these are notoriously difficult to defend against. And if there is a viable defence, it usually increases costs or reduces performance making it less likely to be deployed We have to recognize that mobile devices are as capable as desktop computers and accept that they require similar protections, vulnerability management procedures and upgrades., Do you consider your ability to patch and protect mobile systems when purchasing?, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – RAMPAGE, hacking)

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Medical devices are open to cyber attacks, many studies have demonstrated that a large number of medical systems could be affected by security flaws that could be exploited by hackers., A few weeks ago, a group of researchers reported that drug infusion pumps are affected by numerous remotely exploitable vulnerabilities that could open the doors to hackers, now we will discuss about “artificial pancreas” used to manage the administration of insulin to diabetics., The artificial pancreas could be vulnerable to cyber attacks that can alter the insulin level transmitted from a glucose monitor to the insulin pump., , According to a post published in the journal Diabetes, Technology and Therapeutics, the Dr. Yogish Kudva along with other colleagues analyzed the resilience of artificial pancreas to cyber attacks. Kudva highlighted the need to carefully evaluate the security of the devices and its components., “We wanted to make sure that this important aspect of the field was adequately addressed as we get ready at scaling up on our studies,” explained the Dr. Kudva., The mechanism behind the artificial pancreas is quite simple, the patient blood sugar is measured by a glucose meter that transmits the blood sugar value to the insulin pump which manages the insulin dose depending on it., Dr. Kudva explained that data must be encrypted to avoid tampering that could allow attackers to change the insulin level with serious repercussion on the health of the patient., “I think the most important issue to get security people more involved,” said Kudva. “I don’t think there is enough security expertise at this time.”, Despite the results of the test on the “artificial pancreas” aren’t yet available, security experts and medical staff agree on the need to implement security measures to protect the devices and introduce back up or warning mechanism to respond in case of attack., In the specific case, an alarm could be triggered when the artificial pancreas intends to inject anomalous quantities of insulin., The security implemented for medical devices is crucial, the new generation of medical equipment are always online and manages a huge quantity of sensitive data, for this reason  the security must be a pillar of their design., “I think that’s the next step,” Kudva said of the closed-loop “artificial pancreas” development., Let’s wait for the results of the test., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – artificial pancreas, hacking)

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According to COSCO a “local network breakdown” disrupted some systems in the United States., Media confirmed the incident was the result of a ransomware attack and quoted a company spokesman as the source., “The China Ocean Shipping Co. Terminal at the Port of Long Beach was hit by a cyberattack on Tuesday, July 24.” states local media., “A spokesman for the Shanghai-based company, which acknowledged the ransomware attack Tuesday, said that the company’s operations outside the United States were not affected.”, , The shipping company quickly isolates the systems to avoid propagation to other regions and started an internal investigation, the firm confirmed that the incident did not affect operations of the fleet., “Due to local network breakdown within our America regions, local email and network telephone cannot work properly at the moment. For safety precautions, we have shut down the connections with other regions for further investigations.” reads the security advisory published by COSCO., “So far, all vessels of our company are operating normally, and our main business operation systems are stable. We are glad to inform you that we have taken effective measures and aside from the Americas region, the business operation within all other regions will be recovered very soon. The business operations in the Americas are still being carried out, and we are trying our best to make a full and quick recovery,”, The Journal of Commerce, citing COSCO Vice President Howard Finkel, reported communications between the carrier’s U.S. operations and its customers has been slowed due to the cyber attack. Digital communications were disrupted and the communications were going on via telephone., Cosco responds to cyber attack on US operations #maritime #containers pic.twitter.com/0LhtBGm4Bl, — JOC.com (@JOC_Updates) July 24, 2018, , Port of Long Beach spokesman Lee Peterson confirmed the attack and added that it is monitoring the situation., According to the popular security expert Kevin Beaumont‏, the ransomware has infected a portion of the infrastructure that hosts the company website (cosco-usa.com), phone and email systems, and WAN and VPN gateways., Yes, it is only Cosco Americas Inc (CAI) impacted. Anything on this network: – includes their website their phone system, WAN and VPN gateways, email etc., — Kevin Beaumont (@GossiTheDog) July 25, 2018, , Cosco have put out a statement confirming the issue. I understand they’re now on their 4th day of downtime for CAI (Cosco Americas Inc) business unit. — Kevin Beaumont (@GossiTheDog) July 26, 2018, , At the time of writing the affected U.S. systems still appear to be offline., The good news is that the attack doesn’t appear severe as the NotPetya attack that hit shipping giant Maersk in August 2017., According to the second quarter earnings report, there were expecting losses between $200 million and $300 million due to “significant business interruption” because the company was forced to temporarily halt critical systems infected with the ransomware., Møller-Maersk chair Jim Hagemann Snabe during a speech at the World Economic Forum explained that the attack forced the IT staff to reinstall “4,000 new servers, 45,000 new PCs, and 2,500 applications,” practically “a complete infrastructure.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – COSCO,  Ransomware)

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According to the experts at the Cybereason security firm threat actors breached an unnamed organization network and maintained persistence for months via a webmail server., The victim was a midsize public services company based in the United States that contacted the Cybereason firm to investigate possible intrusions., Cybereason deployed its product on the victim’s 19,000 endpoints in an effort to identify the source of the attack and mitigate it., The investigation allowed Cybereason to discover a suspicious DLL file loaded into the organization’s Microsoft Outlook Web App (OWA) server., , The server was used by the organization to enable remote user access to Outlook., OWA is a webmail component of Microsoft Exchange Server starting with version 5.0 that allows users to access their Exchange Server mailbox by using any web browser. The attackers backdoored a web-accessible server in the demilitarized zone., “OWA is unique: it is a critical internal infrastructure that also faces the Internet, making it an intermediary between the internal, allegedly protected DMZ, and the web”  states the report issued by Cybereason. “This configuration of OWA created an ideal attack platform because the server was exposed both internally and externally. “, “Because OWA authentication is based on domain credentials, whoever gains access to the OWA server becomes the owner of the entire organization’s domain credentials,”, The experts at Cybereason discovered a suspicious DLL, the “OWAAUTH.dll,” having the same name as a legitimate OWA DLL used for the authentication mechanism. The experts noticed something of strange because the code of this DDL was unsigned and loaded from a different folder., “The hackers installed a backdoored malicious OWAAUTH.dll which was used by OWA as part of the authentication mechanism, and was responsible for authenticating users against the Active Directory (A/D) server used in the environment. In addition, the malicious OWAAUTH.DLL also installed an ISAPI filter into the IIS server, and was filtering HTTP requests.” states the report., This setting enabled the hackers to get all requests in clear text after SSL/TLS decryption and syphon users’ credentials, the threat actors installed the filter in the registry to ensure persistence of its infection, the malicious code is then loaded after every restart of the server., Syphoned authentication credentials are stored in an encrypted text file. The experts decrypted the file and discovered more than 11,000 credentials belonging to the hacked organization company., The malicious code provided full functional backdoor in the targeted system, it allows to manipulate files on the OWA server and execute commands and arbitrary code., “Almost by definition, OWA requires organizations to define a relatively lax set of restrictions; and in this case, OWA was configured in a way that allowed internet-facing access to the server. This enabled the hackers to establish persistent control over the entire organization’s environment without being detected for a period of several months,” continues the Cybereason report., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – OWA server, hacking)

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Security researchers at Morphisec discovered a discovered stealth attack technique dubbed CIGslip that could be exploited by attackers to bypass Microsoft Code Integrity Guard (CIG) and inject malicious libraries into protected processes., “Morphisec researchers Michael Gorelik and Andrey Diment have discovered CIGslip, a new method which can be exploited by attackers to bypass Microsoft’s Code Integrity Guard (CIG) and load malicious libraries into protected processes such as Microsoft Edge.” reads the analysis published by Morphisec., “The new attack vector manipulates the way CIG works to circumvent its controls without any in-memory unsigned image codepage injection, a technique with destructive potential if becomes popular.”, CIGslip has a very low footprint on the targeted system and it is currently able to bypass almost all security mechanisms., The researchers developed an attack POC that takes advantage of a non-CIG enabled process, that represents the majority of process on Windows, to enter a malicious code in any kind of DLL, including a malicious one., Morphisec reported the issue to Microsoft, but according to the tech giant software giant responded that the technique is outside the scope of the for Mitigation Bypass and Bounty for Defense Terms., According to Morphisec, the situation is dangerous for “Windows users that are vulnerable in multiple ways.”, “The attack POC takes advantage of a non-CIG enabled process, which is the most popular form of process on Windows, in order to sneak into a CIG-enabled target process, and uses it as an entry point to load any kind of DLL, including a malicious one,” continues the researchers., The researchers explained that to compromise a targeted process, the attacker would have to perform a reflective memory based injection, but Microsoft added that generally this kind of attack can be detected and for this reason, it is out of the scope of bounty programs., Researchers at Morphisec, however, are able to bypass Microsoft Code Integrity without any in-memory injection of unsigned image code pages, they demonstrated that it is possible to execute a non-protected CIG process that is used to inject back into the CIG protected process that launched it., “Morphisec researchers identified a much easier method that breaks the CIG concept without any need for in-memory injection of unsigned image codepages.” continues the analysis. “The basic assumption is that we have the ability to execute a non-protected CIG process on disk. This assumption holds since there is no feasible way to protect all processes with CIG (e.g. Outlook would not load). Moreover, a CIG protected process may execute a non-CIG protected process, which will do the backward injection back into the CIG protected process.”, This means that an attacker would attempt to bypass the CIG verification in the backward injection when the section is created in the target process., The attack is possible because section handlers that are managed by Kernel could be duplicated between processes., “Since section handles are global objects managed by Kernel, handles could be duplicated between processes. Therefore, a section that correlated to a non-signed dll could be created within the context of the malicious process and then duplicated into the target process.” concluded the researchers., “In-order to inject malicious dll (“non-signed”) into a target process, all we need to do is to hook the createsection method within the target process, so that it will not go down to Kernel and will return the duplicated section handle.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – CIGslip, Microsoft Code Integrity Guard)

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Messaging apps have been increasing rapidly in popularity. WhatsApp has gone over one billion users and Telegram claims to have over 350,000 people a day signing up for its services. So, it seems that there is a great need to cover communication freely and with some sort of encryption. Added security is always a wonderful asset for every app and especially when it comes to communication. But which is the best option of the two? Should you choose WhatsApp or Telegram for your chatting? Let’s have a look., , Telegram is the work of two Russian brothers and billionaires, Nikolai and Pavel Durov. They had previously created Vkontakte – an alternative to Facebook. However, they got in trouble over some Ukrainian personal data issue and fled to Berlin from Russia in 2014. WhatsApp is the work of Brian Acton and Jan Koum. With awesome messaging features, the app captured the attention of Facebook and Zuckerberg bought it in 2014. Now, which one offers the best option for you to consider?, First of all, you need to keep in mind that WhatsApp offers encryption to all the messages. On the other hand, Telegram allows you to choose whether you want a secret chat or not. Even though the encryption used by Telegram is pretty solid, it is not present to all chats and this makes it a bit controversial. There is an extra step that many people do not take. They either do not realize that this is important or they do not want to spend time in an extra thing. With WhatsApp, there is no such problem. Even with a unique key for each message, Telegram has to take this into account., Signup process on both apps is really easy, but they both require your phone number for authentication. Although this is standard procedure, one cannot help but wonder how this complies with encryption and online privacy. With Telegram, you can also use two-factor authentication. The apps of Telegram are all open source and this means that you can modify them, according to your needs. The main focus of WhatsApp is the mobile phones and therefore its apps are primarily moving in that direction. Telegram has a wide variety of apps., One important thing to consider is the fact that WhatsApp demands access to your address book. On Telegram, there is no similar demand for such access. Now, as far as special features are concerned, WhatsApp is definitely the winner. You can use group chats for up to 256 users and of course, this communication is always encrypted. Group chats of Telegram do not have encryption. On WhatsApp, you can also encrypt your Android and other phone calls., In a nutshell, both these messaging apps are popular and offer quality services to their users. In terms of encryption, WhatsApp is the big winner. In terms of features and flexibility, though, Telegram is the number one option. Author bio: Ali Qamar is an Internet security research and tech enthusiast who enjoys “deep” research to dig out modern discoveries in the tech and security industry. To be frank and honest, Ali started working online as a freelancer and still shares the knowledge for a living. He is passionate about sharing the knowledge with people, and always try to give only the best.,  , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Telegram , WhatsApp)

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A serious vulnerability found in the PwnedList could have been exploited by hackers to gain access to millions of account credentials collected by the service., The service PwnedList allow users to check if their accounts have been compromised, now a serious vulnerability could expose millions of account credentials collected by the service., The PwnedList was launched in 2011 and acquired by the InfoArmor firm in 2013, the company used it to offer a new monitoring service to its business clients., InfoArmor integrated the solution in the Vendor Security Monitoring platform., The security expert Bob Hodges discovered a serious flaw in the service, he was trying to monitor .edu and .com domains when discovered a security issue that allowed him to monitor any domain., Every time a user wants to monitor a new domain or a specific email address needs to insert it in platform watchlist and he has to wait for the approval of the service administrators., Hodges discovered that the lack of input validation could allow an attacker to manipulate a parameter to add any domain to the watchlist., The issue affects the two-step process implemented by the PwnedList service to add new elements to the watchlist. The expert discovered that the second step did not consider the information submitted in the first step, allowing an attacker to submit arbitrary data by tampering with the request., Hodges reported the issue to the popular security investigator Brian Krebs who confirmed the existence of the problem., “Last week, I learned about a vulnerability that exposed all 866 million account credentials harvested by pwnedlist.com, a service designed to help companies track public password breaches that may create security problems for their users.” wrote Krebs in his blog post., Krebs added the Apple.com domain to his watchlist and in just 12 hours he was able to access over 100,000 Apple account credentials., “Less than 12 hours after InfoArmor revived my dormant account, I received an automated email alert from the Pwnedlist telling me I had new results for Apple.com. In fact, the report I was then able to download included more than 100,000 usernames and passwords for accounts ending in apple.com. The data was available in plain text, and downloadable as a spreadsheet.”, , An attacker could abuse the service to gather information to target a specific organization and gather its account credentials., Krebs reported the issue to InfoArmor that after initial concerns it has admitted the problem., The operators of the PwnedList website temporary shut down the service in order to fix the problem., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – PwnedList, Data Leak)

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Which are the most active malware in the wild?, According to a research conducted by CheckPoint Security, a malware landscape was characterized by some interesting changed in this first part of 2017., The Kelihos botnet climbed to the top position, while the Conficker worm dropped to fourth on the chart of malware., With great surprise, the eight-year-old malware Conficker continues to be one of the most active malware families in 2016., In June 2016, researchers at CheckPoint described Conficker as “the most prominent family accounting for 14 percent of recognized attacks.” We remind the Conficker resurrection in 2015, when samples of the malware infected police body cameras., Below the January’s Top 10 ‘Most Wanted’ Malware published by CheckPoint Security, Recently the Kelihos malware was observed spreading via infected thumb drives. The third Most Wanted malware in January was CryptoWall, a well-known ransomware, the remaining positions in the Top 10 list are occupied by other botnets mainly involved in the distribution of the dreaded Locky ransomware., Checkpoint observed also chenges in the mobile threat landscape, the Android Triada modular backdoor remains the most advanced mobile malware on the Top 3 Most Wanted mobile threats. At the second place, there is the HummingBad, CERT-EU and other sources corroborated Check Point researchers’ findings which recently confirmed a new variant of the ad-fraud-big-money-making, HummingBad, is spreading rapidly on the Android marketplace Google Play., HummingBad was first seen and released almost a year ago in January/February 2016 by malware authors Yingmob, and racking upwards of approx. $300,000 USD per month for the better half of 2016.  Approximately 10 million Android devices were infected in the firm part of the last year., Now, dubbed by Check Point, “HummingWhale” is at large with better ad fraud capabilities and sophisticated techniques than HummingBad affecting several applications and has been downloaded several million times from the combined list of applications downloaded., , The third mobile malware threat is Hiddad, a strain of Android malware that repackages legitimate apps and then releases them to a third-party store., Below the Top 3 ‘Most Wanted’ mobile malware:, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Kelihos , mobile malware)

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Since Robert Tappan Morris in 1988 created the first worm, cyberspace started to change its virtual state in a critical cyberwar field.  Even if the first worm was an error, aimed at trying to calculate the vastness of the Internet, it became an inspiration for all the studies and cyber activities in the recent history., The most famous case is related the Stuxnet virus, the malware was discovered by VirusBlokAda in June 2010. The security community defined it as the first “cyber weapon” in the history because it was “used to attack” the nuclear central of Natanz in Iran with the intent to cause physical damages. The facts were confirmed by the popular whistleblower Edward Snowden, in 2013, which declared that the USA and Israel created Stuxnet to slow down the Iranian nuclear program. Stuxnet was programmed to take control of computers in the nuclear central and send specific commands to sabotage the rotation speed of turbines leading to their damage., This attack was one of the most important actions taken by “Operation Olympic Games”, started by G.W. Bush and continued by the Obama administration. This campaign was operated for the disruption of Iran’s nuclear program in order to avoid Israeli strikes on Iran using conventional weapons., A NSA’s document leaked by Snowden confirms the digital arm race of the US that aim to “dominate” the fifth element of warfare, the cyberspace., A newly disclosed secret report illustrates the tightening of cyber dispute between the United States and Iran , both for spying and sabotage. The document was written in April 2013 for Gen. Keith B. Alexander, director of the National Security Agency, and described how the Iranian Government discovered US plans to hit Iranian networks., Cyberspace is a new strategic war field and even if the diplomacy is trying to focus attention on nuclear weapons, it is principal battlefield for many ongoing disputes:, “Iran’s destructive cyber attack against Saudi Aramco in August 2012, during which data was destroyed on tens of thousands of computers, was the first such attack NSA has observed from this adversary. Iran, having been a victim of a similar cyber attack against its own oil industry in April 2012, has demonstrated a clear ability to learn from the capabilities and actions of others.”, The document reports about the Shamoon virus, which was used by the hacking crew called “The Cutting Sword of Justice” to infect systems at Saudi Aramco. Intelligence experts believe the hacking team comes from Iran and is backed by Government of Teheran. It also addresses another state-sponsored attack, the one conducted with the Flame malware. Flame was used to compromise computers especially in Middle East. This worm hit a huge number of Iranian computers especially in the Iranian Oil Ministry, as well as others. Flame compromised private organizations and government entities in many countries such as Sudan, Syria, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. As a nuclear bomb, it strikes not only the target but also civilians and all that is near the target., ,  “Iran continues to conduct  distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attacks against numerous U.S. financial institutions, and is currently in the third phase of a series of such attacks that began in August 2012. SIGINT indicates that these attacks are in retaliation to Western activities against Iran’s nuclear sector and that senior officials in the Iranian government are aware of these attacks.” continues the document., It refers to the DDoS attacks that hit systems at JP Morgan Chase and the Bank of America, which flooded their websites causing an interruption of service for their customers., The NSA document is clear about who attacked Saudi Aramco, but does not identify who created the Flame worm. On 19th June 2012, the Washington Post wrote that the Flame attack was carried out under the coordination of US and Israel. The day after the Washington Post article was published, Israel’s Ministry of Finance, Defense, Police, the main Intelligence Service, and the Prime Minister’s sites were unavailable., On 21st June 2012, Iran’s Intelligence Minister Heydar Moslehi said:, “Based on obtained information, America and the Zionist regime (Israel) along with the MI6 planned an operation to launch a massive cyber attack against Iran’s facilities following the meeting between Iran and the P5+1 in Moscow.” declared the Iran’s Intelligence Minister Heydar Moslehi on 21st June 2012., In my opinion, he refers to the Central Bank of Iran attack that occurred suddenly after the failure of negotiation between Iran and Moscow on country’s nuclear program the 19th of June. Just a month later, the “Cyber Warriors Team” from Iran compromised the SSL certificate of NSA., Again, the NSA documents that were disclosed online, revealed the collaboration between UK, Israel and USA:, “Emphasize that we have successfully worked multiple high-priority surges with GCHQ that have allowed us to refine maintaining mission continuity and seamless transition, and maximize our target coverage. ” , To be more specific:, “The respective NSA-ISNU and GCHQ-ISNU bilateral relationships had gotten to the point that each participant recognized the need for the trilateral engagement to advance this specific topic. ”, It’s clear that cyberspace is a battlefield for almost every country. The actions taken are clear and also the Disarmament and International Security committee (DISEC) detailed in its Background Guide (SurreyMUN 2015) two kinds of operations operated in information warfare context: espionage and sabotage., Referring to Sabotage it states:, “but just remember it means “do something” whereas espionage here means “learn something”. , The DISEC guide reported all the major cyber attacks from 2007 till 2013, including the DDoS on Estonia that took down banks, newspapers and governments websites, a planned attack the Israel’s Internet Infrastructure in 2009, the Stuxnet worm in 2010, the Red October in 2012, and the most recent NSA leak in 2013.  We can  easily remember the last actions made by the Cyber Caliphate on twitter accounts of  Albuquerque Journal and other minor attacks made in the name of Jihad or Islam around the globe, or the major attack on Sony which could have involved North Korea., As we can read in INSS-CSFI report of 15th February 2015, as a consequence of all the actions on cyberspace, made for offensive or defensive purposes, all the most important countries involved in those scenarios are organizing a team or a specific Bureau for cyber defence:, “Israel National Cyber Bureau (INCB), which will continue setting national policy, in building a pioneering technological force for the State of Israel as a global leader in the cyber field ”. , The  report notes that the USA is building a new agency that will drive all cyber warfare actions, leading actual agency such as FBI, CIA, NSA, DHS and military cyber commands.  Even the UK is building the 77th brigade that will operate against Islamist propaganda like ISIS. Last, but no less interesting, is that Der Spiegel said that Russia’s new military doctrine, signed at the end of 2014, declared that a cyber hazard will be qualified such as a military hazard., Why buy a weapon when I have a keyboard?   , Written by Alessandro Contini, Alessandro Contini operates as Cyber Security Consultant in national and international realities. Starting from a long experience and technical expertise on system architectures, in particular related to Critical Infrastructure. Alessandro collaborates as Cyber Intelligence specialist to find deeper information in Cyber Crime and Terrorism scenarios., Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Phishing kits, cybercrime)

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As I explained in the presentation the trend for mobile malware is the design of malicious code able to infect both desktop and mobile devices to steal password and intercept transaction authorization codes used in two-factor authentication processes., Hesperbot is one of most interesting malware detect recently, i, has keylogging capabilities, can take screenshots and hijack the phone’s camera to capture video, set up remote proxies, etc., and captures the victim’s phone number so that it could deliver the mobile Trojan component via a link in an SMS., Of course once the mobile version is installed it intercept text messages carrying authentication codes., The Antivirus vendor Malwarebytes reported a new hacking campaign hit Korean users, the new malicious code, Dubbed as ‘Android/Trojan.Bank.Wroba‘,  was distributed via file sharing websites and third party app stores alternative in the last months., The Trojans look to replace legitimate banking apps and it’s able to steal user’s data, Wroba disguises itself as the Google Play Store app and run as a service in the background to monitor events on the host device, catch incoming SMS, monitor installed apps and communicate with a remote server.,  , Very intriguing also the way to infect the host device, to the researcher revealed that Wroba just after the installation lookup for existence of targeted Banking applications on the victim’s mobile, remove them and download a malicious version to replace., “The malicious version will contain the exact Package Name and look very similar to the legitimate app, but contains malicious code with no banking functionality.”, In the following piece of source code it is easy to note the list of targeted apps (BK_ARRAY_LIST) to replace with malicious apps.,  , Wroba  malware is used to capture login credentials for bank account and banking information and other data to monetize the attack., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  cybercrime, Wroba, malware, )

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Security researchers at cloud security company Avanan have discovered a technique, dubbed baseStriker, used by threat actors in the wild to bypass the Safe Links security feature of Microsoft Office 365., The Safe Links feature is designed by Microsoft to protect Office users from malicious codes and phishing attacks, it is part of Microsoft’s Advanced Threat Protection (ATP)., Beginning in late October 2017, ATP Safe Links protection is being extended to apply to web addresses (URLs) in email as well as URLs in Office 365 ProPlus documents, such as Word, Excel, PowerPoint on Windows, iOS, and Android devices, and Visio files on Windows., The security feature works by replacing all URLs in an incoming email with Microsoft-owned secure URLs., When the user clicks on a link included in an incoming email, it first redirects the user to a domain operated by Microsoft to checks the original URL for anything suspicious. If the scan detect a suspicious activity, it then warns users, otherwise, the user is redirected to the original link., BaseStriker attack technique leverages the <base> URL tag in the header of an HTML email to split and disguise a malicious link., “The name baseStriker refers to the method hackers use to take advantage of this vulnerability: splitting and disguising a malicious link using a tag called the <base> URL tag.” reads the analysis published by Avanan., , The following image shows a traditional phishing link that is blocked by the filter because the URL is classified as malicious and a link that is split using the BaseStriker attack technique., Tests of the baseStriker attack technique demonstrated that Office 365 users are vulnerable., “We have tested the vulnerability on several configurations and found that anyone using Office 365 in any configuration is vulnerable. If you are using Gmail, you don’t have this issue. If you are protecting Office 365 with Mimecast you are secure. Proofpoint is also vulnerable – if you are using Proofpoint you also have this problem.” continues the post., Gmail users and users protecting their Office 365 with Mimecast are not vulnerable to the attack, meanwhile, Proofpoint is affected by the issue., Security experts confirmed that hackers are already using the baseStriker attack to conduct phishing campaigns, they warn the technique could be exploited to distribute  malware., Avanan reported the baseStriker attack technique to both Microsoft and Proofpoint last weekend, but currently, no patch is available., “As of the time of writing, there still is no fix so there’s no configuration you can make in your Office 365. We have notified Microsoft and Proofpoint and will update if we learn more.” concluded Avanan., “Because this vulnerability is already known to hackers, an immediate first step would be to notify your end-users and reinforce the risk of phishing attacks.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – baseStriker attack, hacking), ,

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In Chile NFC electronic payment is already a reality, “Tarjeta BIP!” is the name of the payment system used to pay for public transportation with users’ smartphones that support the standard. The adoption of NFC standards for NFC ticketing application is a reality worldwide, many companies enable NFC ticketing payments due to its numerous advantages. We all know that when a technology is in so rapid diffusion, security issues are unfortunately are neglected and cybercrime is always ready to exploit the lack of the implementation of security requirements., The news of the day is that according security expert Dmitry Bestuzhev cyber criminals have reversed the “Tarjeta BIP!” cards and discovered the mechanism to re-charge them for free. Someone has spread on the Internet an application, which allows users to re-charge their credits to use for NFC electronic payment with their Android devices., “So, on Oct. 16 the very first widely-available app for Android appeared, allowing users to load these transportation cards with 10k Chilean pesos, a sum  equal to approximately $17 USD.” reported Bestuzhev in a blog post published on SecureList portal with , The users just need to install the application on their NFC Android device, put the ticket in proximity of the smartphone and push the button “Cargar 10k”, the operation refill the card with 10,000 Chilean pesos., The experts that analyzed the Android app discovered from the metadata of the .dex file package that it was compiled on October 16th, 2014, it is a tiny app (884.5 kB size) which interacts directly with the NFC port:android.hardware.nfc. The authors of the fraud are also able to change the card identifier, called “número BIP”, a feature that makes hard for law enforcement to block illegally refilled BIP cards., The principal features implemented by the author of the application are:, “cambiar número BIP” – allowing the user to change the card number altogether., “número BIP” – to get the number of the card, “saldo BIP” – to get the available balance, , “Data carga” – to refill available balance and finally, maybe the most interesting is, Despite the original links available online to download the Android App were taken down, it is still possible to download a new application, that implements the same feature, from the new servers. The new application was compiled on October 17th, 2014, it is derived from the original one bit its size is greater due to the presence of an advertisement component., “Since both apps allow users to hack a legitimate application, they are now detected by Kaspersky as HEUR:HackTool.AndroidOS.Stip.a” explained Bestuzhev., As explained in the blog post, due to the high interest in the application in the country, cyber criminals could spread a malicious version of the app that is able to infect NFC Android mobile devices, in this way threat actors could run targeted attacks in Chile, compose a botnet or realize any other type of scam based on mobile technology (e.g. Premium SMS scam, premium call scam)., Dear Chilean friends, beware!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – NFC payments, hacking )

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Privacy advocates and rights groups are in revolt against the UK law enforcement that has purchased mobile phone snooping technology., The rights groups are protesting against the adoption of the IMSI-catcher technology that could be used for dragnet surveillance., The IMSI-catcher is a surveillance solution used for intercepting mobile phone traffic, calls, tracking movements of mobile phone users block phones from operating., An IMSI catcher runs a Man in the Middle (MITM) attack acting as a bogus mobile cell tower that sits between the target mobile phone and the service provider’s real towers., The UK police has purchased police this mobile phone snooping technology to track suspects’ devices and intercept their communications as part of their investigations., The problem is that devices such as the IMSI-catcher monitor indiscriminately monitor mobile devices in an area of up to 8km, representing a serious threat to users’ privacy., Rights groups are demanding for transparency from the police about the use of surveillance technology., According to the Bristol Cable the UK police is using the Stingray equipment for its operations. The law enforcement has reportedly purchased “covert communications data capture” equipment (CCDC) from a UK firm, the Cellxion., , “IMSI Covert Communications” that was earmarked £144,000. In the same budget the “CCDC” item was allocated at the same price, £144,000., “South Yorkshire police confirmed that ‘CCDC’ and ‘IMSI Covert Communications’ are the same budget item.”, The invoices obtained by the Cable, the local UK police paid Cellxion £169,575.00 for CCDC equipment, as well as other “communications and computing equipment.”, “Suspicions have been raised in the past that IMSI-catchers are in use in the UK. These suspicions, until now, have focused on the Metropolitan Police’s purchase and use of the technology. Now, the Cable can exclusively reveal that at least five other forces appear to have contracted for IMSI-catchers, including Avon and Somerset (A&S) Constabulary.” revealed The Bristol Cable “This revelation comes from decrypting for the first time the acronym – CCDC, standing for covert communications data capture – in use by police forces across the country to obscure their apparent purchase of IMSI-catchers, and identifying police contracts with Cellxion, a firm that manufactures them.”, Privacy International advocacy officer Matthew Rice condemned the lack of transparency in the use of IMSI catcher technology. Now that we now know the acronyms used by the police, it is important to reveal the real use of surveillance technology., “While journalists and activists have spent time requesting information about IMSI-catchers… the real question we should have been asking our police forces was about the term CCDC (covert communications data capture),” he says., “The longer the policy of denial of existence of these capabilities go on, the worse it is for police, citizens, and civil liberties in the United Kingdom,” he says., It is still unclear whether the UK police and intelligence agencies have used IMSI-catchers and in which kind of operations., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – surveillance, IMSI-catcher)

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The shipping giant Maersk was one of the companies that suffered the NotPetya massive attack, in August 2017 the company announced that it would incur hundreds of millions in U.S. dollar losses due to the ransomware massive attack., According to the second quarter earnings report, there were expecting losses between $200 million and $300 million due to “significant business interruption” because the company was forced to temporarily halt critical systems infected with the ransomware., , Now the Møller-Maersk chair Jim Hagemann Snabe has shared further details on the attack suffered by the company during a speech at the World Economic Forum this week., Snabe explained that the attack forced the IT staff to reinstall “4,000 new servers, 45,000 new PCs, and 2,500 applications,” practically “a complete infrastructure.”, , The IT staff worked hard for ten days to restore normal operations., “And that was done in a heroic effort over ten days,” Snabe said., “Normally – I come from the IT industry – you would say that would take six months. I can only thank the employees and partners we had doing that.”, Snabe defined the incident as a “very significant wake-up call,” a strong security posture for a company is essential for the development of its business., Snabe pointed out that Maersk was the victim of the militarization of a cyberspace, the damages were caused by a cyber weapon used by a foreign government to hit Ukraine., Maersk ship docks worldwide every 15 minutes, unloading between 10,000 to 20,000 containers. The effects of the attack were dramatic and only the heroic effort of the staff that manually restored the normal situation allowed to contain the damages., Snabe claimed only “a 20 per cent drop in volumes,” and described the efforts of its IT staff as “human resilience”., Snabe is aware of the risks for companies that operate on the Internet and urges an improvement of infrastructure., “There is a need for a radical improvement of infrastructure.” he said., Maersk chair also highlighted the importance of collaboration between companies, technology companies, and law enforcement., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – NotPetya ransomware, Maersk)

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Cyber security experts are warning of new attacks against U.S. government agencies, think tanks, and businesses., Threat actors carried out spear phishing attacks impersonating a State Department official to attempt compromising targets, the attacks are similar to the ones associated with Russia-linked group APT29  (aka The Dukes, Cozy Bear and Cozy Duke)., APT29 along with APT28 cyber espionage group was involved in the Democratic National Committee hack and the wave of attacks aimed at the 2016 US Presidential Elections., The spear phishing messages were spotted this week, they purported to come from a department public affairs official., Security researchers from CrowdStrike and FireEye are investigating the attacks in the attempt to attribute them to a specific threat actor., “The Department is aware of the recent malicious cyber event involving the spoofing (impersonation) of a Department employee reported by U.S. cybersecurity firm FireEye. No Department networks were compromised by this malicious cyber attempt.” reads the statement released by the State Department., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – APT29, cyberespionage)

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Tor network is even more used by cyber criminals to cover their illegal activities, the Tor community has observed, for example an alarming increase in the number of malware that abuse of the popular anonymizing network to hide their command and control infrastructures., Kaspersky security researcher Sergey Lozhkin published an interesting article on the topic, revealing that Tor network is currently being used to hide C&C server of nearly 900 botnet and other illegal hidden services., “There are also approximately 5,500 nodes in total and 1,000 exit nodes, but the possibility of creating an anonymous and abuse-free underground forum, market or malware C&C server is attracting more and more criminals to the Tor network.” states the post., Hiding C&C server is becoming a common practice of malware coders to make their botnet more resilient, difficult to trace and decapitate., Also Zeus malware is migrated in Tor network, at the end of last year security researchers at Kaspersky Lab have detected a 64-bit Zeus banking trojan version enhanced with communication capability on the Tor network., Early 2014 researchers at RSA discovered a new variant of Tor-based malware ChewBacca that is able to infect Point-of-Sale stealing Credit Card data. Recently it was discovered also the first Android malware abusing of Tor network.,  , The offer for carding includes also malware specifically designed to steal credit card data and botnet renting., A characteristic of the Tor network is the possibility to pay almost everything with bitcoin, but it is known that it is possible to link a wallet to its owner’ identity and track transactions related to the most valuable transactions made via bitcoin exchange services., As explained by Lozhkin, money laundering services are also expanding on Tor, the mechanism is simple, cybercriminals use to spread the amount of a single transaction in hundreds /thousands of money transfers through dozens of different wallets making hard to track them., , What about next months?, “A growing number of Tor hidden services and the ease with which they are can be deployed attracts more and more cybercriminals in the Darknet.”, In the next months the number of cyber criminals that will abuse Tor will increase as the number of services available on the anonymizing network., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Tor network, cybercrime)

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The organization that controls the development of the Bitcoin system, Bitcoin.org, has warned of possible cyber attacks coordinated by nation-state attackers., Bitcoin Core is the open source client for Bitcoin, the version Bitcoin Core 0.12.1 was released in April and a new one will be soon available (version 0.13.0)., This week, Bitcoin.org published a security notice to inform users that it is possible that the Bitcoin Core 0.13.0 version will be targeted by state-sponsored hackers., “Bitcoin.org has reason to suspect that the binaries for the upcoming Bitcoin Core release will likely be targeted by state-sponsored attackers.” states the security notice., “We ask the Bitcoin community, and in particular the Chinese Bitcoin community to be extra vigilant when downloading binaries from our website,” , The organization is warning is a specific way the Chinese Bitcoin community, inviting it to be vigilant and to adopt all the necessary measured to avoid security breaches., When dealing with a persistent attacker such as a nation-state actor in is necessary a supplementary effort of the entire community due to the abilities of the adversaries., “In such a situation, not being careful before you download binaries could cause you to lose all your coins. This malicious software might also cause your computer to participate in attacks against the Bitcoin network. We believe Chinese services such as pools and exchanges are most at risk here due to the origin of the attackers,” Bitcoin.org warned., The Bitcoin.org suggests checking the hashes of Bitcoin Core binaries that are cryptographically signed with a known tkey., “We strongly recommend that you download that key, which should have a fingerprint of 01EA5486DE18A882D4C2684590C8019E36C2E964. You should securely verify the signature and hashes before running any Bitcoin Core binaries. This is the safest and most secure way of being confident that the binaries you’re running are the same ones created by the Core Developers.”, In a thread on the news.ycombinator.com, experts discussed about the fact that bbitcoin.org does not implement HTTP Public Key Pinning (HPKP), this means that any government that controls a CA can generate its own cert for bitcoin.org, hijack the site’s IP and replace this page with their own fingerprint., , China controls the root CA China Internet Network Information Center (CNNIC) whom new certificates were banned last year by Mozilla and Google after one of its  intermediate certificates was used to issue fake Google certificates., Unfortunately, many threat actors are interested in launching cyber attacks against the Bitcoin users., Recently several Bitcoin exchanges have been hacked, clamorous the security breach suffered by the Asian Bitfinex that led the theft of 120,000 Bitcoin., The Bitcoin value significantly dropped after the discovery of the breach, it was observed a 20 percent decrease., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Bitcoin Core, state-sponsored hackers)

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It was a poor Patch Tuesday this month for Adobe that only addressed a moderate severity regression issue affecting Flash Player tracked as CVE-2017-11305., The vulnerability was described as a “business logic error,” that can cause the unintended reset of the global settings preference file., “Adobe has released a security update for Adobe Flash Player for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Chrome OS. This update addresses a regression that could lead to the unintended reset of the global settings preference file.” reads the Adobe Security Bulletin., , According to the company, there is no evidence of exploitation in the wild., The regression issue affects version 27.0.0.187 and earlier of Flash Player on Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome OS. Adobe patched the flaw with the release of version 28.0.0.126. Microsoft has also updated the Flash Player components used by its software in order to address this issue., In November, Adobe addressed a total of 80 vulnerabilities across 9 products, most of which for Acrobat and Reader, including dozens of RCE issues., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Adobe Adobe Flash, hacking)

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Security experts at Fortinet have uncovered a critical update proposed by criminal ecosystem for P2P Zeus Botnet., The first P2P Zeus variant was uncovered by Trusteer firm a couple of years ago, it was used in a series of attacks against principal internet service providers and targeting users of popular web services including Facebook, Hotmail,Yahoo and  Google Mail., Zeus has evolved since the leak of its source code in the underground, security experts have discovered different versions, including 64bit instances and variant able to exploit Tor network to hide their C&C., Zeus P2P, like others, is used mainly for banking fraud due its ability to steal banking credentials from victims, current variant supports both the UDP and TCP protocols., “Currently, P2P Zeus supports both the UDP and TCP protocols for its various communication tasks including peer list exchange, command-and-control (C&C) server registration, and malware binary updates.” reports the official post., Fortinet botnet monitoring system discovered that the malware author released a critical update to its P2P botnet. Since the experts started to monitor the Zeus P2P botnet traffic, they have observed that the version number reported in the encrypted update packets is passed from 0x38 (September 2013) to 0x3B (detected on April 8th 2014)., , , Every P2P Zeus code analyzes the version number from the update packet, and compares it with the one hardcoded in its code to evaluate the necessity to update itself., The experts at Fortined analyzed the new Zeus P2P critical update noting a few minor changes apart the abilities of the new binary to drop a rootkit driver file into the %SYSTEM32%\drivers folder., The rootkit was used by malware author to hide the presence of the P2P Zeus and prevents the deletion of its binary and its autorun registry entries., The discontinuation in the version number suggests to the expert that between the versions there were test versions occasionally appeared in the P2P network, “but they are not being pushed as an update to all peers“., The new P2P Zeus is more resilient thanks the use of  the rootkit, let’s wait for further improvement, the Zeus factory never stops., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  P2P Zeus, malware)

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The cloud-based development platform Wix.com is affected by a DOM-based cross-site scripting vulnerability that could be exploited by attackers to gain full control over any website running on the popular platform. Millions of websites hosted on Wix.com are potentially at risk., At the time I was writing the flaw is still present as confirmed by Matt Austin (@mattaustin), senior security research engineer with Contrast Security, who discovered the issue., “DOM Based XSS (or as it is called in some texts, “type-0 XSS”) is an XSS attack wherein the attack payload is executed as a result of modifying the DOM “environment” in the victim’s browser used by the original client side script, so that the client side code runs in an “unexpected” manner. That is, the page itself (the HTTP response that is) does not change, but the client side code contained in the page executes differently due to the malicious modifications that have occurred in the DOM environment.” reads the description published by the OWASP., DOM Based XSS is quite different from an XSS attack wherein the malicious payload is provided in the response page due to a server-side vulnerability., Below an excerpt from Austin’s blog post., “Wix.com has a severe DOM XSS vulnerability that allows an attacker complete control over any website hosted at Wix. Simply by adding a single parameter to any site created on Wix, the attacker can cause their JavaScript to be loaded and run as part of the target website., TL;DR:, Here’s an example exploit occurring, causing a reflected payload to occur:, Austin attempted several times to report the vulnerability to Wix.com without success, he said since early October., Wix.com declared that there are 86 million users currently adopting its platform., Austin detailed two differed attack scenarios, in one case a Wix website owner is lured by attackers into visiting a malicious URL loaded with a specially crafted JavaScript that can hijack the target’s browser session. The attacker can gain the victim’s browser session and act on his behalf with full control on the website., “Administrator control of a wix.com site could be used to widely distribute malware, create a dynamic, dsitributed, browser-based botnet, mine cryptocurrency, and otherwise generally control the content of the site as well as the users who use it.” wrote Austin., In a second attack scenario, a user is lured to a Wix website by a specially crafted URL that loads JavaScript into the targeted Wix.com site via a DOM-based XSS attack. A Wix.com-based website could be modified by the attacker for a specific browser session to serve malicious code., In both scenarios, attackers need to host malicious JavaScript on a server and point to it within a URL. (i.e. “ Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Wix.com, DOM XSS)

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Finally, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Wednesday commented the Cambridge Analytica case, he admitted that his company has failed in protecting its users, but he pointed out that the company has already adopted necessary measures to prevent future abuses., “we made mistakes” he said. “We have a responsibility to protect your data, and if we can’t then we don’t deserve to serve you,” reads a statement published by Zuckerberg on Facebook. , “I’ve been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn’t happen again. The good news is that the most important actions to prevent this from happening again today we have already taken years ago. But we also made mistakes, there’s more to do, and we need to step up and do it.”, A team of academics had collected a huge amount of user data and shared the information with Cambridge Analytica which is a commercial data analytics company that allegedly used it to target US voters in the 2016 Presidential election., The news was confirmed by Facebook over the weekend, the researchers used an app developed by the University of Cambridge psychology lecturer Dr. Aleksandr Kogan to collect user data., The app named “thisisyourdigitallife” is available to users since 2014, it was provided by Global Science Research (GSR) and asked users to take an online survey for $1 or $2. The app requested access to the user’s profile information, and over 270,000 users gave the app permission to use their personal details for academic research., The app is a powerful tool to profile users by harvesting information on their network of contacts, its code allowed to collect data from over 50 million users., Facebook confirmed to have “suspended” any business with Cambridge Analytica (CA) and its holding company., Facebook discovered the activity in 2015 thanks to claims from its users and adopted the necessary measures to force the involved parties in deleting the data from their servers., Zuckerberg highlighted that he was not aware of the activities conducted by Cambridge Analytica and that his company prompted interrupted business activities with the firm once discovered it has not deleted collected data., “Last week, we learned from The Guardian, The New York Times and Channel 4 that Cambridge Analytica may not have deleted the data as they had certified. We immediately banned them from using any of our services.”, , Mark Zuckerberg said he would take several measures to prevent threat actors from abusing Facebook users’ data., The company will assess all apps that had access to large amounts of information before 2014, when the social network giant took the most important steps to prevent bad actors from accessing people’s data., Facebook will restrict developers’ data access even further to prevent such kind of situation and it will show users a tool at the top of their News Feed to show the apps they used and revoke them permissions to access their data., The company will ban any developer that does not agree to a thorough audit., “We’ll require developers to not only get approval but also sign a contract in order to ask anyone for access to their posts or other private data. And we’ll have more changes to share in the next few days.” continues Zuckerberg while announcing more changes., Below the complete statement published by Zuckerberg.,  , , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Facebook,  Zuckerberg)

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A seven-year-old remote code execution vulnerability affects all versions of the Samba software since 3.5.0. The flaw has been patched by the development team of the project. An attacker can exploit the CVE-2017-7494 RCE to upload a shared library to a writable share, and then cause the server to load and execute it., The popular CVE-2017-7494 flaw can be easily exploited, just a line of code could be used for the hack under specific conditions:, Re: Samba bug, the metasploit one-liner to trigger is just: simple.create_pipe("/path/to/target.so"), — HD Moore (@hdmoore) May 24, 2017, , When those conditions are satisfied, remote attackers can upload any code of their choosing and cause the server to execute it, possibly with unfettered root privileges, depending on the vulnerable platform., “All versions of Samba from 3.5.0 onwards are vulnerable to a remote code execution vulnerability, allowing a malicious client to upload a shared library to a writable share, and then cause the server to load and execute it.” reads the security advisory issued by Samba., The announcement published by Samba informed users that a patch addressing this remote code execution vulnerability tracked as CVE-2017-7494 was available at the following URL:, Sysadmins have to patch their versions as soon as possible, if it is not possible for any reason a workaround can be implemented by the adding the line, to their Samba configuration file and restarting the network’s SMB daemon., The change will limit clients from accessing some network computers., “Additionally, Samba 4.6.4, 4.5.10 and 4.4.14 have been issued as security releases to correct the defect. Patches against older Samba versions are available at Samba vendors and administrators running affected versions are advised to upgrade or apply the patch as soon as possible.”, The Samba bug appears to be a network wormable issue that could be exploited by a malicious code to self-replicate from vulnerable machine to vulnerable machine without requiring user interaction., Hurry up, the exploit for the Samba bug is expected to be available in the days for the Metasploit framework., HD Moore, who is vice president of research and development at Atredis Partners, posted the following images showing successful exploits against Samba on a computer running Ubuntu and NAS device made by Synology., Examples of exploiting Samba CVE-2017-7494 on Ubuntu 16.04 and a Synology NAS. Metasploit module should be PRd sometime in the next 24 hours pic.twitter.com/rQSKnt2CIk, — HD Moore (@hdmoore) May 24, 2017, , , The first crack at a Metasploit PR for Samba CVE-2017-7494 already appeared on GitHub., First crack at a Metasploit PR for Samba CVE-2017-7494: — HD Moore (@hdmoore) May 25, 2017, , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – CVE-2017-7494, Samba bug)

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The US are among the most advanced countries in Information Warfare, Obama administration considers strategic the dominance of the country in the cyber space., The US Government established in 20o9 its military cyber command in order to defend the country from cyber attacks. Since the creation of the cyber army cyber threats have evolved in significant way and practically every government is investing its cyber capabilities., Information warfare is strategic for almost every government, North Korea, Russia, China, Danmark are among the countries that are more investing to improve their cyber capabilities, and of course, the governments belonging to the Five Eyes alliance., The US Department of Defense announced that it plans to hire 3,000 cyber experts that will support the US Cyber Command, the new units will be added by the end of 2015, doubling its resources by 2016., , Despite the huge effort of the US Government we cannot consider the infrastructure of the country totally secure and the risk of a major cyber attack is concrete., The military cyber command, created in 2009, lacks the means to lead an offensive campaign in a fast-moving digital conflict, said Eric Rosenbach, the Pentagon’s principal adviser on cyber security., Asked by Senator Bill Nelson if the US cyber command lacks the computer network infrastructure to carry out a cyber offensive “effectively,” the Pentagon’s principal adviser on cyber security Eric Rosenbach explained:, “Yes, they currently do not have a robust capability.”, I believe that the sentence should be analyzed with caution, the approach of the member of the US government is precautionary due to the difficulty to put in place all the necessary countermeasures against dynamic and complex cyber threats., According to Rosenbach the US Government has the necessary resources and funds for its cyber army, but the US still has technical and manpower problems to solve., The US Cyber command, according the Snowden‘s revelations, is continually improving its offensive capabilities that could target infrastructures of a foreign enemy, “but in a very precise and confined way” and respecting the legal framework in warfare matter., Pentagon chief Ashton Carter is reviewing a new cyber strategy for the military that is coming soon, he also declared that the Obama administration is ready to support more investment in cyber security for its Cyber Command as needed,, The cyber security is a primary goal for the US Government, despite budget cuts in the military expense, Washington it continuing to invest in cyber security., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  US Cyber Command, Information Warfare)

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Last month, the Tor Project announced that an internal investigation had confirmed the allegations of sexual misconduct against the notorious member Jacob Appelbaum., The allegations divided the internet privacy community, as a result of events the entire board of directors of the project was replaced., News of the day is that a few members of the community are calling for a ‘Tor general strike.’ They want to express their dissent on the way the investigation was handled., A message published on Twitter invites those who run parts of the Tor network infrastructure to shut down their machines, developers to stop working on Tor, and of course, users to stop using the anonymizing network., #torstrike calls for global sit in on September 1 pic.twitter.com/XtkZGLPam7, — Cryptome (@Cryptomeorg) 20 agosto 2016, , The members who are calling for a Tor General Strike are also opposed to the decision of the Tor Project to hire an ex-CIA official., “Tor can no longer be trusted after #jakegate / #torgate and hire of CIA,” states the Ghostbin post  that calls for the Tor Global Strike. “Its sinking credibility is putting people at risk. We hope it can be healed and regain trust with mass action. A short blackout may hurt in the short term, but save Tor in the long term. It will also allow dissenting voices to be heard.” , Joseph Cox from Motherboard reported a leaked chat log from an internal Tor Project IRC channel that demonstrated that part of the members of the Project did not agree on the move of hiring a supposed ex-CIA agent, “DaveC1”., Some internal members of the Tor Project were not aware of the past of DaveC1., , A Tor General Strike is probably the worst way to express the dissent, many individuals worldwide rely on the Tor network to avoid censorship and express their ideas without fearing for their life., “Journalists and activists use Tor in countries where people can be killed for the things they say,” Shari Steele, the Tor Project’s executive director told Motherboard. “Shutting down the Tor network would shut down their speech or, even more dangerous, could force them to use unsafe methods of communication.”, The call to the Tor General Strike includes 16 requests to the Tor Project, one of them invoke the sacking the co-founder Roger Dingledine., Many demands included in the call for the Tor General Strike are related to the internal investigation on Appelbaum’s conduct. They demand more details on the claims against Appelbaum to be made public., The news of the strike comes after the Tor relay operator Stephan Seitz shut down its node., “The situation how the affair about Jake was handled by the Tor project has made me feel very uneasy. After digging through several material (for example I find that I am no longer believing in this project or trust it. That’s why I’m shutting down my tor relay fsingtor now.“ Seitz wrote to a Tor Project., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Tor Project, Tor General Strike),  

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The MAC address is a unique and an hardcoded identifier assigned to a device’s network interface. This characteristic makes it an excellent tool for the tracking of the devices. A group of researchers from the U.S. Naval Academy has devised a new attack method that can be leveraged to track mobile devices that rely on Media Access Control (MAC) address randomization mechanism used to protect the users’ privacy., The MAC address randomization uses broadcasting a random Wi-Fi MAC address making difficult the monitoring of the MAC address., Starting from a previous research, the researchers have demonstrated that MAC address randomization is not sufficient to protect the users., The MAC address randomization was introduced by Google for Android devices in 2015 with the release of Android 6 Marshmallow., The experts discovered that many device manufacturers that use Android, including Samsung, have not enabled MAC address randomization., Apple introduced the feature in mid-2014 with the release of iOS 8, but experts found that iOS 10 makes it easy to identify and track devices regardless of their use of MAC address randomization., U.S. Naval Academy researchers identified serious flaws in a majority of the Android implementations of MAC randomization, allowing them to break the protection in the case of roughly 96 percent of mobile devices they have tested., “First, we show that devices commonly make improper use of randomization by sending wireless frames with the true, global address when they should be using a randomized address.” reads the paper published by the experts., “We move on to extend the passive identification techniques of Vanhoef et al. to effectively defeat randomization in ∼96% of Android phones. Finally, we show a method that can be used to track 100% of devices using randomization, regardless of manufacturer, by exploiting a previously unknown flaw in the way existing wireless chipsets handle low-level control frames.”, The experts also analyzed so-called Karma attacks, a method that leverages on rogue access points (EvilAP attack) that pose as known and trusted networks., They researchers devised a new method that relies on Request-to-Send (RTS) and Clear-to-Send (CTS) control frames to expose the global MAC address for any kind of device., According to the IEEE 802.11 specification, the RTS and CTS control frames are used to avoid collisions, basically every time a node using the channel to send data, it transmits also an RTS frame to inform other nodes that the channel should not be used in order to avoid collisions. time a node in using the channel to send data, it transmits also an RTS frame to inform other nodes that the channel should not be used in order to avoid collisions. time a node in. time a node in, The recipient node responds with a CTS frame when it is ready to receive data., The knowledge of this mechanism could be exploited by attackers that can send an RTS frame to IEEE 802.11 client devices, then analyzing the CTS response it can derive the global MAC address of the target. Once obtained the global MAC address, the attacker can use it to track the target device in the future by sending it RTS frames containing the global MAC., The group of expert successfully tested the technique on several models from multiple vendors, including iPhone 5s, iPhone 6s, iPad Air, Google Pixel, LG Nexus 5X, LG G4 and G5, Motorola Nexus 6, Moto Z Play and OnePlus 3., , Experts speculate RTS/CTS responses are managed within the 802.11 chipset, instead of the operating system, this means the only way to prevent the attacks is to develope a firmware patch that have to be distributed by manufactures., “There are multiple scenarios in which a motivated attacker could use this method to violate the privacy of an unsuspecting user. If the global MAC address for a user is ever known, it can then be added to a database for future tracking,” added the researchers. “Conceivably, an adversary with a sufficiently large database and advanced transmission capabilities could render randomization protections moot.”, The experts highlighted the importance to adopt a universal randomization policy with clear requirements for the implementation of the protection mechanism., “We propose the following best practices for MAC address randomization. Firstly, mandate a universal randomization policy to be used across the spectra of 802.11 client devices. We have illustrated that when vendors implement unique MAC address randomization schemes it becomes easier to identify and track those devices.” concluded the experts. “A universal policy must include at minimum, rules for randomized MAC address byte structure, 802.11 IE usage, and sequence number behavior,” , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – MAC address randomization, hacking)

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The security expert Andrea Micalizzi, also known as “rgod,”, has discovered a serious vulnerability in BitTorrent Sync (CVE-2015-2846) can be exploited by a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code. The severity of the vulnerability has been rated as “high, in order to exploit the flaw the attacker have to trick the victim into visiting a malicious page or opening a specially crafted file. BitTorrent Sync is a proprietary peer-to-peer file synchronization application developed by BitTorrent, Inc. firm, it allows users to sync files between local or remote devices using on P2P protocol., , In August 2014, BitTorrent reported that BitTorrent Sync had more than 10 million installations, in November of the same year Andrea Micalizzi reported the flaw to BitTorrent through the HP’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI)., “This vulnerability allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code on vulnerable installations of BitTorrent Sync. User interaction is required to exploit this vulnerability in that the target must visit a malicious page or open a malicious file. The vulnerability relates to how BitTorrent Sync handles URLs with the btsync protocol. By navigating the user to a specially formed link starting with btsync:, an attacker can inject arbitrary command line parameters that will be passed to BTSync.exe. An attacker can leverage this vulnerability to execute code under the context of the current user.” reported an advisory published by ZDI., BitTorrent has already issued a fix for the vulnerability in the BitTorrent Sync as reported at the following URL, It is important to highlight that issue was identified in November 2014 and that security experts at BitTorrent addressed and fixed the issue within the week. I reached one of the members of the team that fixed the flaw that confirmed me that security remains the top priority for the company., Numerous products are affected by the vulnerability in the BitTorrent Sync, including solutions from DELL, HP, IBM, Novell, IBM, Oracle, Rockwell Automation, Samsung, Schneider Electric and HP., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  BitTorrent Sync,  peer-to-peer)

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In 2014 an unknown hacker leaked online nude pictures of celebrities, including the popular and Kate Upton. We are speaking about the case known as The Fappening, the hacker took over a large number of Apple iCloud accounts, including those belonging to the US celebrities., News in the headline it the capture of the alleged culprit, a new court documents reveal the name of the suspect identified by the FBI, he is the hacker Ed Majerczyk., Last year, Gawker reported that the FBI had raided the Chicago home of Emilio Herrera, it was suspected of hacking thousands of private iCloud accounts, including the ones cited in the The Fappening saga., “Herrera’s alleged iCloud cracking went way beyond that narrow list of celebs: between May 31, 2013, and August 31, 2014, his IP address “was used to access approximately 572 unique iCloud accounts,” and “in total, the unique iCloud accounts were accessed 3,263 times.”” states Gawker., According to the documents obtained by Gawker, there is also another suspect in the security breaches, last October, the agents of the FBI raided the Ed Majerczyk’s home in Chicago, as reported in the following document., The authorities are charging the man with unauthorized access to the iCloud accounts. The man seems to have accessed the accounts for his home in Chicago, according to the FBI, Majerczyk violated 330 unique iCloud accounts a total of over 600 times in 2014. The hacker accessed the victim’s image gallery and uploaded it on 4chan., According to court documents obtained by Gawker, The law enforcement has found some sexual photos subtracted to Jennifer Lawrence., “In October of 2014, the FBI fingered Ed Majerczyk, another Chicago man with a similar laundry list of cloud-based invasions. Among his alleged social engineering exploits were sexual photos lifted from Jennifer Lawrence, who quickly became the face of  The Fappening:”, “The FBI says Majerczyk, through a series of bogus email accounts like “appleprivacysecurity@gmail.com,” created a phishing dragnet that duped very famous victims into providing him with their passwords through some pretty elementary tricks:”Gawker reported., , The hack of the account was a joke for the hacker, for example in the case of Jennifer Lawrence, the celebrity lost access to her iCloud account and then received a fake support email from appleprivacysecurity@gmail.com., “Your Apple ID was used to login into iCloud from an unrecognized device on Wednesday, August 20th, 2014. Operating System: iOS 5.4 Location: Moscow, Russia (IP=95.108.142.138) If this was you please disregard this message. If this wasn’t you for your protection, we recommend you change your password immediately. In order to make sure it is you changing the password, we have given you a one-time passcode, 0184737, to use when resetting your password at We apologize for the inconvenience and any concerns about your privacy. Apple Privacy Protection.” is the fake phishing message sent to Jennifer Lawrence.,  , The court documents reveal that Majerczyk run a phishing campaign relying on deceptive web domains and fake security warnings., The investigation is still ongoing, stay tuned!, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Fappening, celebrity nude photos leak)

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Syrian Electronic Army (SEA) is the group of hackers that most of all is threatening the giants of the IT industry and media, the list of victims is very long (Facebook, Microsoft, NYT, Twitter, Forbes, EBay and many others)., This time the Syrian Electronic Army has hit the U.S Central Command (CENTCOM), the group shared an image of the central repository of CENTCOM. The image is related to folders composing the repository of Army Knowledge Online (AKO) which provides web-based enterprise information services to the United States Army. The Army Knowledge Online is considered the “the world’s largest intranet”. , , The scaring aspect of this last clamorous attack is that the group has announced to have already successfully compromised other repositories of the US Military., “This is part of an on-going operation and we have already successfully penetrated many central repositories. #SEA” states a tweet from the official Twitter account of the group of hackers. , , If the announcement was true, there will be the concrete risk that the Syrian Electronic Army will expose hundreds of secret documents leaked in the last hack., “In the coming days we will update you with specific details and hundreds of documents that the #SEA has obtained.”, In time I’m writing, there are no news regarding the level of exposure of the CENTCOM network, it is still no clear if the hackers have compromised also CENTCOM central repository. The tweets from the Syrian Electronic Army explicitly refer mentioned the President Obama’s decision to conduct electronic warfare attacks against the Syria., , , In case of a cyber attack against Syrian Government the CENTCOM is directly involved, that’s why the Syrian Electronic Army has targeted the US Army. Following a short description of CENTOM Division:, “U.S.Central Command (CENTCOM) is one of nine unified commands in the United States military. Six of these commands, including CENTCOM, have an area of responsibility (AOR), which is a specific geographic region of the world where the combatant commanders may plan and conduct operations as defined under the Unified Command Plan.”, The attack has not occurred unexpectedly, The Syrian Electronic Army has given warning in advance on 28th February via a tweet that anticipated the offensive, “The next attack will prove that the entire US command structure was a house of cards from the start. #SEA #CENTCOM”., What documents were stolen? Who will be the next?, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Syrian Electronic Army, CENTCOM)