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The German Government has confirmed that hackers who breached the Bundestag systems a couple of weeks ago have also stolen data from targeted network. A spokeswoman for the Bundestag, the Germany’s parliament, confirmed that unknown hackers have stolen data during the cyber attack, the investigators have uncovered several data leaks., “A spokeswoman for Germany’s lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, confirmed that hackers had managed to steal data during the cyber attack two weeks ago. She described the detection of several data leaks.” reported the Germany’s international broadcaster Deutsche Welle., Steffi Lemke, a representative of the the Greens party, explained that the discovery of data leaks confirms that “the impact of the cyber attack on the Bundestag is worse than previously thought.”, “This attack reveals the Interior Ministry has completely missed out on establishing a functioning cyber defense,” Lemke said., The authorities have provided further details on the alleged origin of the attack neither on the amount of data stolen by the attackers, which seems to have targeted so-called “scattered data outflows” originated from several Government offices. The hackers used a malware to gain access the internal servers of the Bundestag., , In time I’m writing there is no news regarding the type of information the attacker searched for, as explained by the spokeswoman., “The concerned agencies have been informed and countermeasures have been taken,” the spokeswoman said., German news agency Der Spiegel reported that Government IT staff IT had noticed suspicious activities that could be linked to the attack. The experts at the Bundestag detected two infected servers within the internal network that were trying to contact C&C servers located in Eastern Europe., The journalists at the Der Spiegel also speculate a possible involvement of a foreign government., They said the espionage attempts were first discovered in May, when two computers infected with malicious software tried to connect to a server in Eastern Europe., According to the Deutsche Welle, many other machines have also been infected., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Bundestag, data breach)

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In the June Kaspersky Lab has included in its products an Intrusion Detection System, which allowed the company to analyze  more information on going attacks on its clients. Kaspersky has issued the data related to RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) bruteforce attack attempts detected by its solutions, the number of these offensives is in constant growth. The Remote Desktop Protocol, aka RDP, is a Microsoft’s proprietary protocol is widely used by system administrators to control machines remotely through a graphical interface., “dozens of thousands victims, +1000 unique detects each day since June 3rd. A number of possible attackers had been identified already, but the investigation is ongoing. IDS detects this type of attack as Bruteforce.Generic.RDP.” reports a blog post from Kaspersky., Brute-force attacks are easy to arrange and can be effective when that attackers have a good computational capability and the targeted systems are protected by weak passwords. The cybercrime ecosystem can count on huge botnets that could be used to brute-force target systems in a short time. ., Hacking an RDP-connection is very profitable for cyber criminals which can gain in this way the control of servers or can sell the credentials of targeted systems as commodities in the underground. The black market offers many tools that could be used for cracking RDP credentials like ncrack and Fast RDP Brute., , The attackers in possession of RDS credentials could conduct different malicious activities with the server, including data exfiltration from targeted networks/systems and malware distribution., “He (or she) also can gain access to your company internal network, given that the “penetrated” workstation is connected to it, or attempt to check out all of the passwords in the browser installed on the affected system. Opportunities are multiple, and the consequences can be dire.”, The following image illustrates the geographic distribution of the RDP attacks, Russia and US are the countries which suffer the greatest number of attacks, followed by Turkey. Brazil and Western European countries are also under attack., As might be expected, according to the data collected by Kaspersky about 64% of the targeted machines are servers., , Kaspersky has also tried to explain the tactic behind the attacks, the attackers usually start launching a large-scale attack to collect information on as many systems as possible, then they sort by their potential value. The value for a server is profitable for hackers which sell data on the black market., “While both can be used to relay spam or launch DDoS-attacks, owning a server means getting much more computing resources and broader communications channels, as well as, potentially, a total control over all outgoing and incoming traffic. And that is something to go for in a case of a targeted attack on the business, to which this server belongs.”, To mitigate the attacks manage carefully your RDP credentials., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  RDP,  hacking)

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The World Cup 2014 is an excellent occasion for cyber criminals to trick users with social engineering techniques into downloading any kind of malicious content. Of course mobile users are a privileged target for cyber criminals, different World Cup-themed malicious apps have been detected by security experts in this period, Trend Micro recently warned users of the presence of fake versions of World Cup 2014 Apps. According to experts at Trend Micro more than 375 spurious apps are targeting Android users that are downloading them from third-party app stores., “We found these malicious apps lurking in unauthorized/third party app download stores, just waiting for users to install them on their mobile devices. Upon analysis, we found that the bulk of the malware in question are variants of prevalent mobile malware families,” reports a blog post by Trend Micro., The malware experts detected variants of Android trojan OpFake in the third-party app stores, the malicious code is currently adoèted in numerous scam schema, the researchers were principally concerned by malicious apps which were spreading “SMS Stealer” Android malware., Another malware family very popular within malicious apps discovered is ANDROIDOS_SMSSTEALER.HBT, the version detected was improved with remote control capabilities which allows the attackers to execute commands on the victim’s devices, including a block of incoming texts, sending SMS to other numbers, or installing additional malicious applications., ,  , Experts also discovered malicious World Cup apps with a new variant of malware dubbed ANDROIDOS_OPFAKE.HTG, a typical Premium Service Abuser which affected users find themselves charged with premium service fees that they never themselves purchased., Slot Game Swindling is another profitable activity for World Cup scammers, as explained by the experts at Trend Micro, malicious World Cup slot game apps were detected as ANDROIDOS_MASNU.HNT., The malicious apps implement filtering user payment confirmation messages, “so that users may not notice the real amount of money they’ve been paying when playing this game, and thus spend more without restraint.”, “Some football betting apps have also been found leaking information without user notification, as well as blatant security risks in their micropayment process. We advise users to be very careful with their financial and personal information when using these apps (or not to use them at all).” states the blog post., Trend Micro detected many other World Cup-themed malicious apps which implements various routines for data stealing and pushing ad notifications/unwanted app advertisements., Be aware, do not download applications from third-party app stores and adopt security solutions on their mobile devices., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  World Cup 2014, mobile)

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The Total Donations WordPress plugin was abandoned by its developers for this reason security experts are recommending to delete it after they discovered multiple zero-day flaws that were exploited by threat actors., The news was reported by security firm Wordfense that observed threat actors are exploiting the zero-day issued in the Total Donations WordPress plugin to gain administrative access to websites running the popular CMS., Experts attempted to contact the development team behind the plugin, but they did not receive any reply., “The Wordfence Threat Intelligence team recently identified multiple critical vulnerabilities in the commercial Total Donations plugin for WordPress. These vulnerabilities, present in all known versions of the plugin up to and including 2.0.5, are being exploited by malicious actors to gain administrative access to affected WordPress sites.” reads the security advisory published by Wordfence., “It is our recommendation that site owners using Total Donations delete–not just deactivate–the vulnerable plugin as soon as possible to secure their sites,” The zero-day flaws affect all known versions of the WordPress plugin up to and including 2.0.5. , The Total Donations WordPress plugin is currently used by many non-profit and political organizations to receive donations., Experts tracked the flaws as CVE-2019-6703, they discovered that Total Donations registers a total of 88 unique AJAX actions into WordPress, that can be accessed by unauthenticated users by querying the typical /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php endpoint., “We have determined that 49 of these 88 actions can be exploited by a malicious actor to access sensitive data, make unauthorized changes to a site’s content and configuration, or take over a vulnerable site entirely. ” continues the analysis. , The flaws could be exploited by an unauthenticated attacker to send requests to the AJAX event to call a specific action to update arbitrary WordPress option values and take over the website. This can be used to enable new user registration and set the default role for new users to Administrator., The attackers can perform many other malicious actions, including accessing mailing lists from Constant Contact and Mailchimp, that can also modify or delete of recurring Stripe payment plans because Total Donations can connect to Stripe as a payment processor., Attackers can send test emails to an arbitrary address, a malicious action that could be automated to trigger a Denial of Service (DoS) for outbound email, either by triggering a host’s outgoing mail relay limits, or by causing the victim site to be included on spam blacklists., The plugin is currently unavailable for purchase from Envato’s CodeCanyon, anyway, it displays a “Coming Soon” page since May 2018., “These security flaws are considered zero-day vulnerabilities due to their active exploitation and a lack of an available patch,” researchers explained. “Unfortunately, the process of making this contact revealed that a solution may not ever be coming.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (SecurityAffairs – Total Donations, WordPress plugin),

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Adobe released security updates that address two dozen vulnerabilities in Flash Player, Digital Editions, and the Campaigns marketing tool., Adobe has released security updates for Adobe Flash Player for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Chrome OS. The updates address critical vulnerabilities that could be exploited by an attacker to take control of the vulnerable system., Flash Player 24.0.0.221 addressed 13 critical code execution flaws, including type confusion, integer overflow, use-after-free, heap buffer overflow and other memory corruption issues., “Adobe has released security updates for Adobe Flash Player for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Chrome OS. These updates address critical vulnerabilities that could potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system.” reads the Adobe Security Advisory for the Flash product., The flaws were discovered by researchers at Google Project Zero, Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet’s FortiGuard Labs and CloverSec Labs who reported the security issued to Adobe., Nine flaws affecting the Digital Editions ebook reader were also fixed by Adobe with the release of version 4.5.4 for Windows, Mac, and Android., Adobe fixed several kinds of vulnerabilities including a critical heap-based buffer overflow that can be exploited for arbitrary code execution and several important buffer overflows that could lead to a memory leak., The flaws were discovered by the researcher Steven Seeley of Source Incite and Ke Liu of Tencent’s Xuanwu LAB., “Adobe has released a security update for Adobe Digital Editions for Windows, Macintosh and Android. This update resolves a critical heap buffer overflow vulnerability that could lead to code execution and important buffer overflow vulnerabilities that could lead to a memory leak.” reads the Adobe Security Advisory for the Digital Editions product., , The last set of flaws was affecting the Adobe Campaign product for Windows and Linux, the release of Adobe Campaign 6.11 addresses a moderate severity security bypass flaw affecting the client console. The flaws could be exploited by an authenticated attacker to upload and execute a malicious file, which could result in read/write access to the system., The experts also fixed another flaw in the latest version of Campaign, it is a moderate severity input validation issue that can be exploited for cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. The flaws were reported to Adobe by researcher Léa Nuel., “Adobe has released a security update for Adobe Campaign v6.11 for Windows and Linux.  This update resolves a moderate security bypass affecting the Adobe Campaign client console.  An authenticated user with access to the client console could upload and execute a malicious file, potentially resulting in read and write access to the system (CVE-2017-2968). This update also resolves a moderate input validation issue that could be used in cross-site scripting attacks (CVE-2017-2969).” reads the Adobe Security Advisory for the Adobe Campaign product., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Adobe, Flash Player)

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The FBI is warning actors in the private sector about a rapid diffusion of stealthy keystroke loggers disguised as USB phone chargers., The FBI issued a Private Industry Notification warning of the abuse of KeySweeper components that are able to sniff everything users type into wireless keyboards., I have written about KeySweeper around 15 months ago when the creator, the ingenious Samy Kamkar released the project., “KeySweeper is a covert device that resembles a functional Universal Serial Bus (USB) enabled device charger which conceals hardware capable of harvesting keystrokes from certain wireless keyboards”  reads the FBI’s alert.” If placed strategically in an office or other location where individuals might use wireless devices, a malicious cyber actor could potentially harvest personally identifiable information, intellectual property, trade secrets, passwords, or other sensitive information. Since the data is intercepted prior to reaching the CPU, security managers may not have insight into how sensitive information is being stolen.”, Samy Kamkar designed a cheap USB wall charger that can eavesdrop on almost any Microsoft wireless keyboard, KeySweeper is a stealthy Arduino-based device that works like a generic USB mobile charger, but he has the capability to sniff, decrypts and send back keystrokes from a Microsoft wireless keyboard in the vicinity. KeySweeper can send captured data back to the operator over the Internet or using an optional GSM chip., “KeySweeper is a stealthy Ardunio-based device camouflaged as a wall charger that wirelessly sniffs, decrypts, logs and reports-back all keystrokes from any Microsoft wireless keyboard in the vicinity,” explained Kamkar., Kamkar has also detailed the steps to build the KeySweeper USB wall charger explaining that it is easy and cheap to assemble the spying device, the unit cost ranges from $10 to $80 depending on functions included. The instructions on how to build the device are available online on GitHub., , , The KeySweeper also includes a web-based tool for live keystroke monitoring, it could be used by an attacker to send back SMS alerts triggered by specific typed keystrokes, like usernames or URLs. While the device is logging the keystrokes he is able to continue working, it will continue to sniff data also after it is unplugged because of its rechargeable built-in battery. KeySweeper is able to store the sniffed keystrokes both online and locally on the device.usernames or URLs. While the device is logging the keystrokes he is able to continue working, it will continue to sniff data also after it is unplugged because of its rechargeable built-in battery. KeySweeper is able to store the sniffed keystrokes both online and locally on the device. KeySweeper is able to store the sniffed keystrokes both online and locally on the device., , As explained by Kamkar, this kind of devices is very simple to assemble and are very cheap, the hardware necessary to build a KeySweeper is reported below:, The FBI’s notification makes no reference to specific cases where criminals used the sniffing device., Microsoft confirmed that sniffing attacks could be effective against any wireless device that doesn’t protect communication by encrypting data in transit, for this reason, any keyboards manufactured after 2011 is today protected by the use of the Advanced Encryption Standard., The FBI notification also includes precious suggestions of the defense of corporations, first of all, the restriction for the use of wireless keyboards., If the use of a wireless keyboard cannot be prevented, then be sure the device uses a strong encryption for the data transmission., “A keyboard using AES encryption makes it more difficult to read keystrokes as there are currently no known practical attacks to read AES encrypted data.” states the notification. “Keyboards using Bluetooth are also safe from KeySweeper as it listens on a different channel than that which Bluetooth transmits. However, Bluetooth keyboards must have encryption turned on and a strong pairing PIN to protect it from a similar type of data-harvesting attack.”, 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 – KeySweeper, FBI)

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In the last weeks, I wrote about a massive ransomware attack against computer systems in the City of Atlanta., The ransomware infection has caused the interruption of several city’s online services, including “various internal and customer-facing applications” used to pay bills or access court-related information., Investigators believe that hackers initially compromised a vulnerable server, then the ransomware began spreading to desktop computers throughout the City network. Crooks demanded a payment of 6 Bitcoin, around $51,000 at the current rate,, New Atlanta Chief Operating Officer Richard Cox said that several departments have been affected., No critical infrastructure and services seem to be affected, the departments responsible for public safety, water, and airport services are operating as normal, however., , How much cost this attack on the City of Atlanta?, According to Channel 2 Action News that investigated the incident, the ransomware attack cost the city at least $2.7 million., “They were probably not as protected as we probably thought they were,” Georgia State University cybersecurity researcher Don Hunt said., Channel 2 investigative reporter Aaron Diamant obtained new records that allowed the media outlet to estimate the overall cost of the attack., Coming up at 5…with few specifics from City of Atlanta leaders, the clues we found of the growing cost to taxpayers from last months crippling cyberattack on city networks. @wsbtvstorm pic.twitter.com/vRP434exiC, — Aaron Diamant (@AaronDiamantWSB) April 11, 2018, , The $2.7 million cost includes eight emergency contracts that were signed just after the malware compromised the city networks., “They’ve got some really big players on the team there, and they’re spending a lot of money, so the depth of the problems that they had are probably enormous,” Hunt said., The leaders of the City of Atlanta signed a $650,000 contract with cybersecurity firm SecureWorks that was involved in the incident response., Accessing the records the journalist discovered that the leaders signed other contracts as reported in the above image, a $600,000 contract with management consultant Ernst and Young for advisory services and another $730,000 to Firsoft., “That’s absolutely construction work. What they’re looking to do is not revamping the system, they’re starting from scratch and going from the ground up again,” Hunt added., “You’re talking about the possibility of privacy being violated. It could be an indicator that you’ve got a deeper problem inside or potentially a deeper problem that you want to get ahead of right away,” , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – City of Atlanta, ransomware), ,

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The flaw was discovered by experts at Siemens and could be exploited by remote attackers to hack some of Siemens industrial communications devices., The vulnerability affects SCALANCE X industrial Ethernet switches, and Ruggedcom switches and serial-to-ethernet devices running the Rugged Operating System (ROS)., , The flaw resides in the Ruggedcom Discovery Protocol (RCDP), which allows the Ruggedcom Explorer management tool to discover and configure ROS-based devices., According to Siemens, the RCDP is not configured properly after a device is commissioned, this allows an unauthenticated attacker who has access to the network to remotely perform administrative actions., “RUGGEDCOM switches and serial-to-Ethernet devices are used to connect devices that operate in harsh environments such as electric utility substations and traffic control cabinets. SCALANCE X switches are used to connect industrial components like Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) or Human Machine Interfaces (HMIs). ” states the security advisory published by Siemens., “After initial configuration, the RCDP is still able to write to the device under certain conditions, potentially allowing users located in the adjacent network of the targeted device to perform unauthorized administrative actions,” , Siemens has rolled out the release of ROS 5.0.1 to fix the issue in Ruggedcom RSL910 devices and the version 4.3.4 to address the flaw in other ROS-based devices., An update has also been rolled out for Ruggedcom Explorer., Siemens hasn’t released security updates for SCALANCE XB-200, XC-200, XP-200, XR300-WG, XR-500 and XM-400 switches, users can mitigate possible attacks by manually disabling RCDP., The ICS-CERT published a security advisory that includes NCCIC/ICS-CERT recommendations to minimize the risk of exploitation of the vulnerabilities., Specifically, users should:, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Siemens Industrial Switches, hacking)

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There is no peace for enterprises, in few weaks we have discovered how much vulnerable are giants of IT, one after another, fell the most renowned names from Facebook to Twitter, companies that we considered immune from thousands of attacks they receive each day., Until now Microsoft and Apple weren’t affected … but it’s news of these hours that the company from Cupertino has also been victim of an attack, hackers targeted some of its employees’ machines as part of the same wave of attacks against a meaningful number of companies all over the world., Apple today confirmed to Reuters press agency that it hit by cyber attacks as part of the series of hacking campaigns that targeted US news agencies and other enterprises., Unknown hackers have hit employee’s computers adopting same techniques implemented during the attacks to Facebook, Apple’s workers were infected when they visited a compromised website for software developers. The malware hosted on the infected website had been designed to attack Mac computers and exactly as happened during other attacks it exploited a flaw in a version of Oracle Corp’s Java software used as a plug-in on Web browsers., The article proposed by Reuters states:, “Security firm F-Secure wrote that the attackers might have been trying to get access to the code for apps on smartphones, seeking a way to infect millions of end-users. It urged developers to check their source code for unintended changes. Apple disclosed the breach as tensions are heating up over U.S. allegations that the Chinese military engages in cyber espionage on U.S. companies.”, The situation is critic, similar attacks could expose sensitive information of millions of users, the vulnerabilities related to Java software are representing a serious problem for IT security because they are most exploited during the attacks and don’t forget the Java platform is already installed on billions of machines, finally remind also that other popular software such as Adobe Systems Flash are targeted by cyber criminals and state sponsored hackers during the attacks., Returning to the Apple’s incident, of course also in this case the victim declared that “there was no evidence that any data left Apple”, it also confirmed that only “a small number of systems” were infected by the attack before being isolated, investigations into the breaches are ongoing., Following the advisory published by the company:, “Apple has identified malware which infected a limited number of Mac systems through a vulnerability in the Java plug-in for browsers. The malware was employed in an attack against Apple and other companies, and was spread through a website for software developers. We identified a small number of systems within Apple that were infected and isolated them from our network. There is no evidence that any data left Apple. We are working closely with law enforcement to find the source of the malware., Since OS X Lion, Macs have shipped without Java installed, and as an added security measure OS X automatically disables Java if it has been unused for 35 days. To protect Mac users that have installed Java, today we are releasing an updated Java malware removal tool that will check Mac systems and remove this malware if found.”, It’s not first time that Apple machines were hit by cyber attacks, last month it blocked Java from some of its Macs using its XProtect antimalware tool, fortunately Apple has immediately started the incident response procedures planning to release a security update later today., Security experts are convinced that attacks are originate from China, just today Mandiant published an interesting report on APT1 & China’s cyber espionage units accused to be the fist information collector of foreign governments and enterprises., The security expert Charlie Miller declared that the incident shows that attackers are investing more time studying the Mac OS X operating system, he remarked that hackers recently figured out a fairly sophisticated way to attack Macs by exploiting a flaw in Adobe Systems Flash software., “The only thing that was making it safe before is that nobody bothered to attack it. That goes away if somebody bothers to attack it,” Miller said., Keep up to date though our systems is an obligation for each of us but it may not be sufficient in some cases, in fact the attacks were carried out by exploiting 0-day vulnerabilities, so it is desirable to have appropriate  incident response procedure and an efficient patch management process., Big enterprises need a “preventative approach” and is necessary to implement a layered security model to evaluate a wide range of indicators that can provide indication on the presence of an attack in progress., Pierluigi Paganini, Update 2013/02/20, After publish disclosure of the hack Apple has provided a Java update to fix the vulnerability exploited during the attacks:, “Java for OS X 2013-001 delivers improved security, reliability, and compatibility for Java SE 6. Java for OS X 2013-001 supersedes all previous versions of Java for OS X.”, , Bloomberg has published an article that introduce the hypothesis that attackers are based in Russia or Eastern Europe., “Investigators suspect that the hackers are a criminal group based in Russia or Eastern Europe, and have tracked at least one server being used by the group to a hosting company in the Ukraine. Other evidence, including the malware used in the attack, also suggest it is the work of cyber criminals rather than state-sponsored espionage from China, two people familiar with the investigation said.”,  ,  ,  

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Recently, experts from the SentinelOne security firm spotted a sophisticated malware dubbedSFG, a spawn of Furtim malicious code, targeting at least one European energy company., Media speculated the existence of a powerful SFG malware, a sort of new Stuxnet, that was spread by an unknown government to target companies in the energy industry., Now experts from Damballa that have analyzed the SFG threat confirmed that is not so complex as initially speculates., Researchers from Damballa clarified that the SFG malware is a financial malware that doesn’t include the code to compromise SCADA systems in the energy industry., “This month, reports surfaced of a sophisticated malware threat found on computers of a European power generation and distribution company.  The malware was dubbed “SFG” and the reports linked it to a malware strain named “Furtim” by the security researchers who first recognized and analyzed it in May 2016.  Soon, the press was calling this “SCADA malware” and reports implied that a “nation-state” was using it to target the electric grid.” reads the analysis published by Damballa., Key findings of the Damballa analysis are:, , Damballa believes that the SFG malware is the result of a cyber criminal organization, instead of a nation-state actor., “SFG does not appear to be a nation-state operation, and there is no specific threat to any particular sector.”, SentinelOne agreed on the above affirmation, confirming that it does not have evidence that the malware was targeting SCADA systems., “There has been a number of stories published since the posting of this blog that have suggested this attack is specifically targeting SCADA energy management systems,” reads the update issued by the SentinelOnethe firm., “We want to emphasise that we do not have any evidence that this is in fact the case. The focus of our analysis was on the characteristics of the malware, not the attribution or target.”, Even if electric grids are no more at risk, researchers fromDamballa highlighted that the SFG malware is also sophisticated. The experts focused on the use of the new ‘fluxxy (aka “Dark Cloud”)’ botnet that was used by threat actors behind recent Pony and Gozi ISFB campaigns., The popular investigator Brian Krebs mentioned the botnet in a recent post on Carding Sites., This same botnet was used to spread populat threats, including Carberp, Gozi ISFB, Pony, TeslaCrypt, Rock Loader, Qakbot/Quakbot, GameOver ZeuS/Zbot, KINS, ICE IX, Zemot/Rerdom, Necurs, Tinba, and Rovnix campaigns., Now that we know this threat, we must prevent it will be improved to target SCADA systems., “Considering the total compromise this malware effects on systems, and how well it can operate below the radar, we should do our best to keep Furtim/SFG off the electric grid… and every other system.” closed the post published by Damballa., “We should focus our intelligence efforts on mapping this fast-flux infrastructure and working with authorities to disrupt, degrade, and destroy it.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – SFG malwre, energy)

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The RIG exploit kit is even more popular in the criminal ecosystem, a few days ago security experts at Heimdal Security warned of a spike in cyber attacks leveraging the popular Neutrino and RIG EKs., Now security experts from Heimdal Security are warning of a new campaign leveraging the RIG exploit kit that targets outdated versions of popular applications to distribute the Cerber ransomware., The attackers leverage an array of malicious domains to launch drive-by attacks against visitors trying to exploit flaws in outdated versions of popular applications such as Flash, Internet Explorer, or Microsoft Edge., “At the moment, cybercriminals are using a swarm of malicious domains to launch drive-by attacks against unsuspecting users.” states the analysis published by Heimdal Security., “The campaign works by injecting malicious scripts into insecure or compromised systems. Victims can get infected simply by browsing the compromised or infected websites, without clicking on anything. What exposes them to this attack are outdated versions of the following apps: Flash Player, Silverlight, Internet Explorer or Edge.”, The crooks compromise websites to inject malicious scripts that allow exploiting the flaws in the victim’s browser even without user interaction.  reports., , This new campaign leverages on a RIG exploit kit that attempts to exploit the following 8 vulnerabilities:, According to the experts from Heimdal security, this variant of the RIG exploit is the Empire Pack version (RIG-E). Cyber criminals also abused domains that are part of the so-called Pseudo-Darkleech gateway that was also exploited by cyber gangs in June 2016 to deliver the CryptXXX ransomware in several campaigns leveraging on the Neutrino Exploit Kit., It is important to highlight that the success of campaigns like this one is determined by the failure in applying security updates in popular software., “As you can see, cybercriminals often use vulnerabilities already patched by the software developer in their attacks, because they know that most users fail to apply updates when they’re released. In spite of the wave of attacks, many Internet users still choose to ignore updates, but we hope that alerts such as this one will change their mind and make them more aware of the key security layer that updates represent.” states the report., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – RIG Exploit Kit, cybercrime)

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A major obstacle that management must face in today’s world is the task of securing their organization’s assets.  While physical security is a huge component in ensuring that the residual risk level existing within the environment remains at an acceptable level, our reliance on the Internet as a primary resource introduces a new set of risks and threats that are evolving by the second.  There are various different pieces that must be taken into consideration and cooperate to build an efficient information security foundation for an organization.  These pieces are known as security controls, and there are multiple different categories of these controls.  From one standpoint, we can classify these security controls as physical, administrative and technical controls., Physical security controls are those that secure, as the classification states, physical assets.  These are implemented to protect the physical components of an organization; such as constructing high fences around an office building, data center, or other location to prevent intruders from easily gaining access to the building that houses critical data.  Ensuring that the area around the building is well-lit, that physical authentication, authentication, and accountability controls are implemented and enforced; you wouldn’t want just anybody walking into your data center that houses your organization’s critical infrastructure devices (i.e. servers that store confidential data, etc.) and doing whatever they please, right?  This category encompasses the security controls that prevent this from happening, such as mantraps and security guards., Technical security controls can be physical devices or logical devices that play a huge role in today’s world.  These controls are those that us in the information security and technology fields are most familiar with, and focus on.  These include simple devices such as routers that provide NAT (Network Address Translation) services to allow users to access the Internet, making each user’s Internet traffic appear to be sourced from the same static IP address, or firewalls that dictate which IP addresses or what traffic can enter and exit your network., As time passes, our technical security controls are those that are advancing in sophistication at an exponential rate, at a much faster pace than controls defined within the other categories.  We have gone from simple firewalls with limited filtering capabilities to next-generation firewalls that perform the functions of multiple devices all-in-one.  We have the capability to check end-user devices and infrastructure devices alike for specific configuration settings, patches, and other characteristics with such precise granularity that allow us to restrict access to an internal network, or place them in an entirely different network (i.e. a quarantine network managed by a NAC (Network Access Control) device) until the device meets the exact conditions that we set., Technical controls are extremely important, and can be further broken down into three subcategories: Detective, Preventive, and Corrective (or perhaps Reactive is a better term).  I will not go into the nuts and bolts of technical controls, but their importance must be stated.  A huge roadblock preventing organizations from acquiring and implementing technical controls, especially in the case of smaller organizations, are the financial implications associated with such activities.  These devices can be quite expensive, and the costs associated with not only purchasing the actual devices, but actually hiring qualified individuals to configure and manage these utilities can quickly drain a budget., Administrative security controls are those that are not physical devices nor can they necessarily be considered logical devices.  These are the fine-print that many employees seem to skim through, sign off on, and thereby embrace whatever the document says without having a true understanding of what is being presented to them.  We encounter administrative controls on a daily basis, perhaps without even realizing it.  When you download software, you often are required to read a large blob of text and click a checkbox that states that you have read and understand the terms outlined in the presented text.  Administrative controls encompass policies, procedures, guidelines and documentation of this nature.  While often overlooked, the administrative side of the fence severely impacts the state of an organization.  The foundation—the framework—of every organization must be the development of policies and procedures.  These documents govern every aspect of an organization, and lay out what is expected of employees of all levels, what the organization does, how it performs these actions, what to do in certain situations, and guidelines can aid the lesser-experienced and more well-versed employees of all levels with step-by-step instructions detailing how to successfully and correctly carry out a desired action.  I will not begin to list and go through the endless number of different administrative controls (or documents) that are in existence, but to focus on only a subset, that when not enforced or implemented properly can have an extremely detrimental impact on an organization., There are many different components that comprise the infrastructure of an organization that must be implemented and maintained in a manner that provides the highest level of protection, the best defense, as well as an efficient procedure to follow in the event that an incident occurs.  The desired level of protection as well as the goals and methods of achieving this level of protection are often declared within an overarching security policy, but various policies are required to perform in a supplementary fashion to best achieve this goal.  Common policies and procedures that will be found in most established organizations include an Acceptable Use Policy (AUP), a 3rd Party Device Policy, and On-boarding and Off-boarding Procedures to name a few.  This article was written to highlight a major area that most organizations are lacking, based on my experiences, where the deficiencies in these areas resulted primarily in the loss and/or destruction of data., While it is true that often times the compromise of devices and data through the threats I am about to mention are not quite as prevalent as the media makes them seem, the exponential growth and sophistication of malware delivery in particular through these exploitation methods is not to be taken lightly.  I am referring to the increasing number of exploit kits found in-the-wild today.  An exploit kit, as could be inferred by its name, is literally a kit of different scripts that are designed to exploit vulnerable software.  While they are primarily built with the goal of exploiting vulnerabilities that are known to exist in various versions of common software, of which both you as well as I likely have installed on our devices (albeit, a patched version, I hope)., Over the past few years, the number of unique as well as the sheer quantity of unique instances of exploit kits in-the-wild has grown rapidly.  While a phishing e-mail with a URL leading to an exploit kit landing page (the page of an exploit kit that actually performs the vulnerability checks and serves the exploits to vulnerable hosts) is still common, newer tactics such as the issue with malvertising campaigns (malicious advertisement campaigns in which advertisements displayed on even legitimate websites may redirect users to landing pages, and exploit the users without direct interaction with the malware author such as via a URL sent within an e-mail) has become a pain for security analysts globally.  Now this is not to say that the risk of infection via an exploit kit could be mitigated entirely by making sure that software is up-to-date; this year alone started off with the release of a number of zero-day exploits (exploits previously unknown to the developer and/or security community as a whole) in Adobe’s Flash Player application were leveraged by many exploit kits, potentially affecting even users with even the most up-to-date version of Flash Player at that time., The point is that the potential for compromise and overall risk level of an end-user device in particular can be greatly decreased through the enforcement of an efficient patch management policy., , A proper patch management policy should first categorize assets in terms of severity level, or the impact that such device(s) becoming compromised could have on the organization as a whole.  This allows for the prioritization of patch deployment, ensuring that the most critical devices are focused on first.  The prioritization allows for the allocation and development of set dates and times, whether daily or at regular intervals, that each device (or group of devices) will be patched.  Once these steps are complete, the “backbone” of the patch management policy can now be referenced when going into the specifics of the policy.  Where the patches will be retrieved from, whether on an OS level or individual device level basis, must be defined., It is important that patches are not first rolled out to the production network; a development-type network environment should be in existence where these patches are first tested to ensure that the production network is not negatively impacted by the roll-out of the new patches.  Once patches are obtained and tested, the scheduling of as well as the actual roll-out of these patches must be coordinated., Important: Change management and patch management go hand-in-hand.  Change management begins during the planning process and takes place throughout the full lifecycle of each managed device.  Roles and responsibilities must be defined, each stage and process of patch management must be tracked, and additional procedures must be put into place detailing the actions to be taken in the event that something goes wrong., What defines a successful patch deployment?  What defines a failed roll-out?  Criteria surrounding what constitutes as a success (as well as the opposite) must be clearly defined.  Additionally, time management plays a huge part; management must aim to have all patches rolled out and deployed in the least amount of time that will not negatively impact the efficiency of other phases (such as the testing phase), to minimize the inevitable window of non-compliance that assets awaiting patches will face., Whenever I am doing work within a client’s environment, whether it be product-related in terms of deployment or management or performing audit work (such as a vulnerability assessment or a gap analysis), I often encounter one of the applications that are a part of what I like to call “the big players” in terms of their use by an attacker as an infection vector., A common example is the deployment of an outdated version of Internet Explorer (whether IE 9 or versions as early or earlier than IE 7) as a standard operating procedure within an organization, with the outdated software being a part of the baseline image rolled out to all new devices.  While we all have our own personal browser preferences, Internet Explorer is known to contain a large quantity of vulnerabilities, especially in such outdated versions.  When I was performing some research on exploit kits, one in particular whose control panel’s screenshots were publicly available, revealed that the majority of successful exploitations performed by that particular affiliate’s exploit kit deployment (up to 85%) were through the exploitation of vulnerable versions of Internet Explorer., So why do we still see companies rolling out vulnerable versions of software to their end-users as part of a standardized procedure?  Often, this is because of compatibility issues between certain software utilized within the environment.  Many applications rely on outdated versions of browsers to function properly, and while I am tempted to refer to these applications as legacy applications, this is not always the case.  While some software may be easier to use, contain specific functionality that is desired, or whatever the case, if the deployment of said software will introduce various commonly exploited risks to the organization, the software should simply not be used.  Alternatives exist for virtually every type of software, and each have their own individual sets of pros and cons that must be weighed., Another administrative component of an organization that perhaps has the greatest effect on the organization’s security posture, is the organization’s users.  After all, no security tool can be efficiently used if the operator has no knowledge of how to correctly, efficiently do so.  The same goes for users that have no direct technical responsibilities, i.e. a sales department.  If your end-users are not aware of the threats that exist, especially those that they are more than likely to encounter, they will fail to successfully identify and prevent themselves from becoming victims.  An in-depth discussion on “securing layer 8” of an organization is reserved for another article, but it’s important to mention that policies must be implemented and enforced that mandate users to undergo security awareness training at regular intervals, regardless of whether such training is delivered in person or online.  It is unfortunate, but not quite shocking, that an enforced security awareness policy is essentially nonexistent within an otherwise established organization., Many organizations simply present employees with an Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) or set of guidelines during their initial on-boarding, that are often either skimmed through by the new hire or actually read but forgotten almost immediately.  The threat landscape that we face is constantly evolving, but in addition to new threats and methods of compromise, those that were “at large” and are thought to be rare and “outdated” are also often recycled.  Old phishing e-mails designed to scam the recipient, Microsoft Word documents with embedded-macros, and other attacks that we consider deprecated are emerging once again and still to this day manage to fool the unsuspecting user.  It is important that new hires are not the only ones that are mandated to undergo some form of security awareness training as part of their on-boarding process, but that all end-users within the organization are mandated to partake in such training sessions at regular intervals, as well as in response to a successful compromise or new threat being discovered., While I may have gotten carried away in the first few sections of the article, it is important to understand the following:, As security professionals, it is our job to protect our users; we are often the voice that gets heard when upper-management is looking to design a security architecture, or implement a security control.  We should not be exposing our users to an insecure environment; to the Internet, which is now a relatively dangerous place that comes with inherent risks.  Our job is to do whatever we possibly can with the resources we have on-hand to best ensure our users’ security; not throw them into the fire with a disadvantage that gives the attackers the upper hand., About the Author Michael Fratello, Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  security, threat prevention)

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In this period there is an intense debate on the wiretapping of every communication channel, governments are increasing the monitoring of internet, of social network platforms and VOIP conversations in many cases with supports of the companies that provide those services. In a recent post I discussed on the control ordered by Indian Governments that ,for homeland security, decided to control every user’s activity on-line exactly as many other authorities in the world., Skype is one of the most diffused VOIP client used by millions of persons for business such as in the free time, simple and efficiency it has catch a large piece of the market also because in the past it was considered a secure tool to speak avoiding law enforcement interception due its architecture. With the purchase of Skype made by Microsoft, every think is changed, from graphical layout of the application to the possibility of being intercepted also thanks to VOIP interception patent, dubbed Legal Intercept,  registered by Microsoft few days after the acquisition. In the hacker communities many voices sustain the Skype architecture has been modified to enable “lawful interception” of calls., Analyzing Skype’s privacy policy appears clear that the company is able spy on user communications communicating them to authorities under explicit request., Under Section 3 of the privacy policy, it is stated that, “Skype, Skype’s local partner, or the operator or company facilitating your communication may provide personal data, communications content and/or traffic data to an appropriate judicial, law enforcement or government authority lawfully requesting such information. Skype will provide all reasonable assistance and information to fulfill this request and you hereby consent to such disclosure..”, Under Section 12 it stated that, “Your instant messaging (IM) communications-content may be stored by Skype (a) to convey and synchronise your messages and (b) to enable you to retrieve the messages and history where possible. IM messages are currently stored for a maximum of 30 days unless otherwise permitted or required by law. Voicemail messages are currently stored for a maximum of 60 days unless otherwise permitted or required by law. Skype will at all times take appropriate technical and security measures to protect your information. By using this product, you consent to the storage of your IM communications as described above.”, With 663 million registered users, Skype represents a precious mine of information, a great concentrator of communications exposed to interception. But technology could reveal sensational surprises like the news that Skype could still be used to transfer information in secure way avoiding wiretapping., The popular VOIP client uses a 256-bit advanced encryption for is calls by default, but many researchers are studying the way to make more secure Skype,  Wojciech Mazurczyk professor at the Warsaw University of Technology seems have found the way to do it., “There are concerns that Skype calls can be intercepted and analysed,”, says Mazurczyk at the Institute of Telecommunications in Warsaw. The idea is very ingenious, the researcher has discovered that is possible to exploit the silence period during a common conversation to transfer secretly data., Wojciech Mazurczyk has demonstrated that is possible to insert data in 70-bit service packets that Skype sends by default when it’s detecting silence, when the user is mute rather than send no data between spoken words Skype sends 70-bit-long data packets instead of the 130-bit ones that normally carry user’s voice., The Mazurczyk team, that include the colleagues Maciej Karaś and Krzysztof Szczypiorski, has designed the SkypeHide system that allow users to hide extra non-chat messages during a call. The researchers have inserted encrypted message data into those packets noting that client in reception ignores the cyphered data., “The secret data is indistinguishable from silence-period traffic, so detection of SkypeHide is very difficult,” declared  Mazurczyk., The technique allows the transmission of text messages but also of video and audio at a rate of almost 1 kilobit per second alongside phone calls. The SkypeHide will be presented in June at a steganography conference in Montpellier, France., Steganography is certainly not a new concept, for decades researchers exploring new channels to convey information in a secure way and the study conducted on Skype protocol demonstrates that it is possible to use control data to hide the information, the technique discovered by the researchers could also be improved from the use of string cyphering mechanism for the data to transfer, of course the optimal solution is represented by the compromise between the level of security requested and the performance obtained., Pierluigi Paganini

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A fresh C93 phishing Scam targeting Microsoft’s Windows Outlook Users. Online scammers have unleashed a bogus “c93 virus” targeting Windows Outlook users in a wide phishing campaign aimed at stealing users’ login credentials, warns security researchers. It all starts with a phishing email allegedly from Windows Outlook warning users of a deadly C93 malware in their mailbox that ought to be flushed out using Norton antivirus., “Dear Outlook Member, A C93 Virus has been detected in your mailbox, You are required to apply the new Norton AV security anti-virus to scan and to remove all Trojan and viral bugs from your mailbox Account, Failure to apply the scan your mailbox will be De-Activated to avoid our database from being infected,” read the phishing email., To clean up the “Trojan and Viral bugs”  from the ‘infected account’, users are directed to follow a provided  web link and conduct a systems scan purportedly using Norton antivirus software or risk their mail box being deactivated., Clicking the web-link directs the user to a bogus page that resembles the Microsoft’s account login page but is directly linked to the fraudsters’ servers. Login credentials submitted on the pages go directly to the crooks and the page reverts to the real Microsoft page where the user is prompted to enter the credentials again., Meanwhile, C93 is not any known virus, it simply a virus scare used by scammers to dupe users into revealing their Microsoft login credentials. Furthermore, Microsoft and other email providers such as Google will never request customers to scan their systems for antiviruses or other malwares. In case of a security threat, the providers always release an official security advisory or patch up their systems without asking their clients., The latest attack on Microsoft’ Windows Outlook is similar to an earlier phishing scam targeting Hotmail and Windows Live users in January, raising suspicion that the same scammers could be involved.,  , , In the January scam, Hotmail users received a bogus email purportedly from Microsoft team warning that a malicious person had tried to access their account and prompting users to verify their login credentials or risk being suspended., “Attempts have been made to access your email in a suspicious manner. To prevent shutdown of your email for security reasons, click Show content on the yellow header in this message and click below to sign in your email from your home or work computer. After you sign in, your email will be verified and security will be upgraded,” read the phishing email targeted on Hotmail users., Like with the C93 scam, scammers provided a link that directed users to a fake Microsoft login page linked directly to their servers.  Submitting your Username and Password on the phishing site gave away your Hotmail account to the fraudsters., Scammers and their phishing antics is a sad reality in the tech world, the next phishing scam is just a click away. More importantly, users should be wary of emails, purportedly from their services providers asking for login credentials or banking details such as account number, pin numbers or credit/debit cards numbers. Always take emails from your bank or other service providers with a grain of salt. Meanwhile if you were duped into giving away your Microsoft login credentials, do a password reset as soon as humanly possible, otherwise call Microsoft team for further assistance., 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 SecurityGladiators.com, an ultimate source for worldwide security awareness having supreme mission of making the internet more safe, secure, aware and reliable. Follow Ali on Twitter @AliQammar57

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Adobe has issued the Flash Player 22.0.0.192, a release that fixes the Flash Player zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2016-4171) exploited by the APT group dubbed ScarCruft in attacks on high-profile targets., The Flash Player flaw CVE-2016-4171 affects versions 21.0.0.242 and earlier for Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome OS, according to Kaspersky a threat actor behind the “Operation Daybreak” used it in targeted attacks conducted March 2016., According to Kaspersky Lab, the ScarCruft APT group exploited the zero day in a series of attacks against high-profile targets against entities in Russia, Nepal, South Korea, China, Kuwait, India and Romania., “Currently, the group is engaged in two major operations: Operation Daybreak and Operation Erebus. The first of them, Operation Daybreak, appears to have been launched by ScarCruft in March 2016 and employs a previously unknown (0-day) Adobe Flash Player exploit, focusing on high profile victims.” explained Costin Raiu, director of Global Research and Analysis Team at Kaspersky Lab. “The other one, “Operation Erebus” employs an older exploit, for CVE-2016-4117 and leverages watering holes. It is also possible that the group deployed another zero day exploit, CVE-2016-0147, which was patched in April.”, The new release addressed a total of 36 flaws that could be exploited by hackers to run arbitrary code on the vulnerable systems and that could result in information disclosure., The flaws were reported to Adobe by security experts from Cisco, FireEye, Google, Kaspersky Lab, Microsoft, Pangu LAB, Qihoo 360, and Tencent., The list of flaws fixed includes use-after-free, directory search path, heap buffer overflow, and same-origin policy (SOP) bypass vulnerabilities., The ScarCruft APT exploited also another vulnerability (CVE-2016-0147) in Microsoft XML Core Services (MSXML) affecting Microsoft Windows. This second flaw can be exploited through Internet Explorer, Microsoft issued a security patch in April, but hackers exploited before the fix was released., The Flash Player flaw CVE-2016-4171 affects versions 21.0.0.242 and earlier for Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome OS, according to Kaspersky a threat actor behind the “Operation Daybreak” used it in targeted attacks conducted March 2016., “Currently, the group is engaged in two major operations: Operation Daybreak and Operation Erebus. The first of them, Operation Daybreak, appears to have been launched by ScarCruft in March 2016 and employs a previously unknown (0-day) Adobe Flash Player exploit, focusing on high profile victims.” explained Costin Raiu, director of Global Research and Analysis Team at Kaspersky Lab. “The other one, “Operation Erebus” employs an older exploit, for CVE-2016-4117 and leverages watering holes. It is also possible that the group deployed another zero day exploit, CVE-2016-0147, which was patched in April.”,  , , “It is not a secret that anti-malware systems trigger on special system functions that are called in the context of potential vulnerable applications to make a deeper analysis of API calls such as CreateProcess, WinExec or ShellExecute,” Ivanov and Raiu wrote in a blog post published on SecureList., “For instance, such defense technologies trigger if a potentially vulnerable application such as Adobe Flash starts other untrusted applications, scripts interpreters or even the command console,” the experts added. “To make execution of payload invisible for these defense systems, the threat actors used the Windows DDE interface in a very clever way.”, According to the experts from Kaspersky, the malicious code (HEUR:Trojan.Win32.ScarCruft.gen) used by threat actors in Operation Daybreak is “extremely rare” and likely used only for surgical attacks., Experts from Kaspersky explained that Flash Player exploits in the wild are becoming rare because they need to be coupled with a Sandbox bypass exploit, furthermore Adobe is spending a significant effort in implementing new mitigations to make exploitation of Flash Player more and more difficult.,  , Pierluigi Paganini, Security Affairs –  (CVE-2016-4171 Zero-Day, Adobe), ,

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It’s time to patch your systems, especially if you have installed Adobe Flash Player. Adobe has released Security updates to fix critical Flash vulnerabilities that affect any OS (Windows, Mac, Linux), including ChromeOS., The security vulnerabilities in flash could be exploited by attackers to gain the control over the vulnerable system as explained by Adobe in an executive summary:, “Adobe has released security updates for Adobe Flash Player for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and ChromeOS.  These updates address critical vulnerabilities that could potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system. ” reads the security advisory issued by Adobe., Users are urged to update their Flash Player to the version 23.0.0.162., , Not only Adobe users are under the fire, Microsoft has released the September 2016 Patch Update that includes 14 bulletins addressing a total of 50 vulnerabilities. Seven vulnerabilities addressed in the last patch update have been rated as “critical,” other seven as “important.”, One of the vulnerabilities fixed by the update is a zero-day flaw (CVE-2016-3351) in the Internet Explorer (IE) and Edge, tracked as MS16-104 and MS16-105., The CVE-2016-3351, so-called Microsoft Browser Information Disclosure Vulnerability, could be exploited by an attacker to remotely execute code by tricking a victim to visit a specially crafted webpage using Internet Explorer or Edge., Once the victims visit the webpage, the attacker would gain the same user rights as the current user and could take control of the vulnerable system., The vulnerability was first spotted by security experts at Proofpoint that worked with researchers from Trend Micro., “Proofpoint researchers recently uncovered a massive malvertising campaign with colleagues at Trend Micro 2. The actors, dubbed AdGholas, were notable for their use of steganography and careful targeting of the malicious ads for massive volumes of high-quality impressions – impressions that went to 1-5 million “average users” a day and specifically avoided researchers. Avoiding researchers and their virtual machines and sandboxes relied on exploiting an information disclosure zero-day in Microsoft Internet Explorer/Edge, among other techniques.” reads the analysis published by Proofpoint., The exploitation of the zero-day was first reported by TrendMicro that uncovered a massive malvertising campaign, dubbed AdGholas, actively exploiting it. The same vulnerability was also exploited by another threat actor in the wild, a hacking crew known as GooNky., “On September 13, 2016 Microsoft released a security bulletin 1 fixing the CVE-2016-3351 vulnerability, which included a patch for Internet Explorer and Edge browsers. This informational disclosure bug was first reported in 2015. During our work with Trend Micro on the AdGholas 2 campaign, we reported it again and it was assigned a CVE ID and patch. Briefly, this vulnerability is a MIME type check used to filter out systems that have certain shell extension associations, including .py, .pcap, and .saz. In some cases, certain extensions association including .doc, .mkv., .torrent, and .skype are required to trigger the next exploitation step.”, The Microsoft update also addresses another critical flaw in all the supported versions of the Exchange Server (MS16-108) widely adopted by organizations. In this case, attackers could exploit the bug using remote-code execution to get full control of the Exchange Server., The attack scenario is simple, the attackers just need to send a malicious file to its victims, the vulnerability is automatically triggered when the Exchange Server pre-parses file to find out the file type., As anticipated the Microsoft update addresses many other flaws, give a look at it., Let me close with an information regarding the traditional Microsoft monthly update, this is the last Windows Patch Tuesday., The future patch updates will bundle all patches together, this means that users will have to install the whole package of patches altogether., Don’t waste time, patch your system asap., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Microsoft, Adobe, security updates)

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Security experts at Trustwave have released Social Mapper, a new open-source tool that allows finding a person of interest across social media platform using facial recognition technology., The tool was developed to gather intelligence from social networks during penetration tests and are aimed at facilitating social engineering attacks., Social Mapper facial recognition tool automatically searches for targets across eight social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, VKontakte (The Russian Facebook), and Chinese Weibo and Douban., An individual could be searcher by providing a name and a picture, the tool allows to conduct an analysis “on a mass scale with hundreds or thousands of individuals” at once., “Performing intelligence gathering is a time-consuming process, it typically starts by attempting to find a person’s online presence on a variety of social media sites. While this is a easy task for a few, it can become incredibly tedious when done at scale.” Trustwave states in a blog post., “Introducing Social Mapper an open source intelligence tool that uses facial recognition to correlate social media profiles across a number of different sites on a large scale. Trustwave, which provides ethical hacking services, has successfully used the tool in a number of penetration tests and red teaming engagements on behalf of clients.”, , The Social Mapper search for specific profiles in three stages:, Stage 1—The tool creates a list of targets based on the input you give it. The list can be provided via links in a CSV file, images in a folder or via people registered to a company on LinkedIn., Stage 2—Once the targets are processed, the second stage of Social Mapper kicks in that automatically starts searching social media sites for the targets online., This stage can be time-consuming, the search could take over 15 hours for lists of 1,000 people and use a significant amount of bandwidth, for this reason, experts recommend running the tool overnight on a machine with a good internet connection., Stage 3—The Social Mapper starts generating a variety of output, including a CSV file with links to the profile pages of the target list and a visual HTML report., Of course, this intelligence-gathering tool could be abused by attackers to collect information to use in highly sophisticated spear- phishing campaigns., Experts from Trustwave warn of potential abuses of Social Mapper that are limited “only by your imagination.” Attackers can use the results obtained with the tool to:, If you want to start using the tool you can find it for free on GitHub., Trustwave researcher Jacob Wilkin will present Social Mapper at the Black Hat USA conference today., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Social Mapper, social network)

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“In my previous post on Yahoobleed #1 (YB1), we saw how an uninitialized memory vulnerability could lead to disclosure of private images belonging to other users. The resulting leaked memory bytes were subject to JPEG compression, which is not a problem for image theft, but is somewhat lacking if we wanted to steal memory content other than images.” states Chris Evans., “In this post, we explore an alternative *bleed class vulnerability in Yahoo! thumbnailing servers. Let’s call it Yahoobleed #2 (YB2). We’ll get around the (still present) JPEG compression issue to exfiltrate raw memory bytes. With subsequent usage of the elite cyberhacking tool “strings”, we discover many wonders., Yahoo! fixed YB2 at the same time as YB1, by retiring ImageMagick.”,  ,  ,  , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Yahoo, ImageMagick)

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Israeli Security Researchers at Tel Aviv University recently published an interesting paper titled “RSA Key Extraction via Low-Bandwidth Acoustic Cryptanalysis” to explain how they have successfully broken 4096-bit RSA analyzing Computer’s CPU Sound emitted during execution of decryption routines., The trio of scientists composed by Daniel Genkin, Eran Tromer and co-inventor of famous RSA Shamir have verified that results they first proposed a decade ago are valid, the researchers were able in fact to extract a 4096-bit RSA key from a laptop with an acoustic side-channel attack that enables the recording of noise coming from the device during decryption with using a smartphone placed nearby., The results are exciting, attackers are able to discover a long RSA key in less than one hour with the method dubbed “acoustic cryptanalysis attack”., “Here, we describe a new acoustic cryptanalysis key extraction attack, applicable to GnuPG’s current implementation of RSA. The attack can extract full 4096-bit RSA decryption keys from laptop computers (of various models), within an hour, using the sound generated by the computer during the decryption of some chosen ciphertexts. We experimentally demonstrate that such attacks can be carried out, using either a plain mobile phone placed next to the computer, or a more sensitive microphone placed 4 meters away.” states the paper summary., The paper explains that is realistic to perform a chosen-ciphertext attack on GnuPG, to do this the researchers exploited GnuPG automatic decryption ciphertexts chosen by the attacker using encrypted e-mail messages following the OpenPGP and PGP/MIME protocols. Common application including Thunderbird e-mail client plug-in automatically decrypts incoming e-mail using GnuPG., The attack scenario it intriguing, a hacker can send a suitably-crafted email messages to the victims, wait until they decrypted once reached the target computer. The attackers recorded the acoustic signature of their decryption thereby closing the adaptive attack loop., The scientists conducted several thousand repetitions of the algorithm’s operation discovering that there was sound leakage directly correlated to RSA key in use., “The noise produced during decryption is The acoustic signal of interest is generated by vibration of electronic components (capacitors and coils) in the voltage regulation circuit, as it struggles to supply constant voltage to the CPU despite the large fluctuations in power consumption caused by different patterns of CPU operations.”, Be aware the signal analyzed by researchers doesn’t include noise generated by mechanical components such as the fan or hard disk, nor by the laptop’s internal speaker., The security demonstrated that many other applications are susceptible to the same acoustic cryptanalysis attack., “We observe that GnuPG’s RSA signing (or decryption) operations are readily identified by their acoustic frequency spectrum. Moreover, the spectrum is often key-dependent, so that secret keys can be distinguished by the sound made when they are used. The same applies to ElGamal decryption.”, The researchers observed that the acoustic attack range surpassed 4 meters using a sensitive parabolic microphone, meanwhile without this kind of receiver they achieved a range of 1 meter., , , The vulnerability has been notified to GnuPG by the researchers , the three also recommended to protect users’s PC during decryption using sound dampening equipment, such as “sound-proof” boxes,, The attack is effective against a number of laptop models and information that is possible to leak depends on the specific hardware, experiments conducted  demonstrated that for every machine, it is possible to distinguish an idle CPU (x86 “HLT”) from a busy CPU and on many machines, it is possible to distinguish different patterns of CPU operations and different programs., Resuming using GnuPG on some machines it is possible to:, The attackers were able to implement an Acoustic Cryptanalysis attack using a mobile app running on a Smartphone located nearly the target machine, another possibility is using a malware specifically designed to exploit the device for the malicious purpose., The developers of GnuPG have already developed a patch to fix the vulnerability exploited by the trio in the Acoustic Cryptanalysis attack, the fix is included in version 1.4.16 of GnuPG., If you believe that the attack is limited to the proximity of the antenna to victim PC you are wrong, the researcher confirmed that it is possible to perform the attack from a greater distance using a parabolic microphone and it may also be conducted with a laser microphone or vibrometer., It is not the first time that acoustic signals are used as a vector of information in an attack scenario, recently we discussed also the opportunity to transfer a malicious payload via audio signals. Security measures must also be designed to secure systems in these innovative attack schema., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Acoustic Cryptanalysis attack, hacking)

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A new variant of the infamous APT28 Lojax (aka Double-Agent) has been discovered by the Cybaze ZLab – Yoroi team. It is the latest version of the well-known rootkit Double-Agent, previously analyzed by ESET researchers., The behavior of the Lojax sample seems to be similar to the previous versions and exploits the legitimate “Absolute Lojack” software to grant its persistence on the infected system. Lojack is an anti-theft and localization software developed by Absolute Software Corporation and it is pre-installed in the BIOS image of several Lenovo, HP, Dell, Fujitsu, Panasonic, Toshiba, and Asus machines. In the past, this software was known as “Computrace”., Despite its legitimate purposes, the Absolute Lojack software acts like a rootkit (more precisely as a bootkit): its BIOS component forces the writing of a small agent named “rpcnetp.exe” into the system folder. The agent periodically contacts the Absolute server and sends to it the current machine’s position., The control flow of the Lojack software is detailed in the following figure:, , Figure 1. Lojack control flow (Source:ESET),  , The size of the malicious artifact is the same as the legitimate one, so the only manipulation seems to the modification of the C2C address, in according with other firms that previously analyzed the malware., File size: 17 KB, When it starts, the malware copies itself into a new DLL: the final file is the same of the initial one except for some header flags. After this, Lojax searches some components belonging to the legitimate software that should be already installed into the machine, with whom tries to establish a connection via RPC channel. If the Absolute Lojack components are not found, the malware kills itself., File size: 17 KB, Through a static analysis of the sample, we have discovered a new C2 address, unknown to the community and to the threat intelligence platforms until now. This address, ciphered using XOR encryption with a single byte key 0xB5, was hidden in the section “.cdata”., After the decryption of the address, the result is “regvirt.com”, as shown in the below figure:, ,  , The domain has been registered on 10th Oct 2017 by “Tibor Kovacs” (tiborkovacsr@protonmail.com) and it’s handled by the “Shinjiru Technology Sdn Bhd” provider. The username part of the mailbox contains the same name and surname found in the Registrant name, with the addition of a terminal “r” tiborkovacsr,  its not clear if this letter could be a clue usable to focus the investigation to an hypothetical profile of the registrant., Registrant Organization:, Registrant Street: Vezer u 43, Registrant City: Budapest, Registrant State/Province: Budapest, Registrant Postal Code: 1141, Registrant Country: HU, Registrant Phone: +36.361578632154, Registrant Phone Ext:, Registrant Fax:, Registrant Fax Ext:, Registrant Email: tiborkovacsr@protonmail.com, The domain hosts have inactive subdomains, such as mail.regvirt.com pointing to the localhost address 127.0.0.1. Also, it has resolved to a different IP address 209.99.40.226 during the 16th Oct 16 07th Nov  time period, this address is related the Confluence Network ISP: that IP has been blacklisted for a limited time by abuse.ch, between 2017-09-18 and   2017-10-19, and have been reported as malicious by the abuseipdb on December 2017.  Other malicious activities related to the cybercrime threat actors have been reported through the ransomware tracker platform, where the IP is associated with several Locky ransomware distribution domains back in 2016. However, all the possible reported misuse of the ip address does not apparently  match the regvirt.com’s resolution time period.,  , The 46.21.147.71 ip address, instead, has been resolved since the first registration of the “regvirt.com” domain back in 2017. This network destination has been reported as command and control server of altered CompuTrace/Lojack’s software, part of the APT28 arsenal. The report published by the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre on October 2018 states this implant have been used to modify system memory and maintain persistence on compromised hosts in the long run.,  ,  , Despite the presence of the UEFI “Secure Boot”, this malware could execute itself because it replaces only the “rpcnetp.exe” component. Anyhow, the MalwareLab researchers advise to keep enabled the UEFI Secure Boot and keep always updated the Operative System and the anti-malware solution., C2:, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – APT28 Lojax, malware)

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The security researcher at Google Neel Mehta published a mysterious tweet using the #WannaCryptAttribution hashtag. What did he mean?, 9c7c7149387a1c79679a87dd1ba755bc @ 0x402560, 0x40F598ac21c8ad899727137c4b94458d7aa8d8 @ 0x10004ba0, 0x10012AA4#WannaCryptAttribution, — Neel Mehta (@neelmehta) May 15, 2017, , According to experts at Kaspersky, the string is a portion of code that Neel noticed in a very early variant of WannaCry ransomware found in February 2017 and in one of the malware used by the notorious Lazarus APT group dated back February 2015., , Similitude between #WannaCry and Contopee from Lazarus Group ! thx @neelmehta – Is DPRK behind #WannaCry ? pic.twitter.com/uJ7TVeATC5, — Matthieu Suiche (@msuiche) May 15, 2017, , What does it all mean?, 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., The experts at Symantec have spotted in the past at least three strains of malware used by the group, Backdoor.Fimlis, Backdoor.Fimlis.B, and Backdoor.Contopee, which have been used in targeted attacks against financial institutions., The attackers exploited “watering holes” in order to infect the machines of a specific audience with previously unknown malware., Researchers speculate the group was responsible for the last wave of attacks against banks worldwide, for the Sony hack, and the DarkSeoul operation., Is it possible that attackers behind the WannaCry have used a false flag?, Experts from Kaspersky believe that the theory of a false flag is improbable because the portion of shared code appears only in the early version of WannaCry, but was removed later., “For now, more research is required into older versions of Wannacry. We believe this might hold the key to solve some of the mysteries around this attack. One thing is for sure — Neel Mehta’s discovery is the most significant clue to date regarding the origins of WannaCry.” reads a blog post shared by Kaspersky Lab., The question is: is there a link between early February WannaCry variant and the sample used in the recent massive cyber attacks?, According to Kaspersky, the answer is “YES”.  The recent variant is able to target more file extension targets for encryption., “We strongly believe the February 2017 sample was compiled by the same people, or by people with access to the same sourc ecode as the May 2017 Wannacry encryptor used in the May 11th wave of attacks.” continues Kaspersky., Kaspersky shared the YARA rule used to find the WannaCry sample., Let me close with the analysis shared by Matthieu Suiche from Comae:, “The attribution to Lazarus Group would make sense regarding their narrative which in the past was dominated by infiltrating financial institutions in the goal of stealing money., If validated, this means the latest iteration of WannaCry would in fact be the first nation state powered ransomware., This would also mean that a foreign hostile nation would have leveraged lost offensive capabilities from Equation Group to create global chaos., In the meantime, a third kill switch appeared in the wild ayylmaotjhsstasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdfasdf.com — the fact it contains lmaowould mean, if the above attribution is correct, that the attacker is purposely sending multiple messages:, Stay tuned, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – WannaCry ransomware, cybercrime)

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Even the giants have their Achilles heel, the Google Apps administrator console is affected by a critical cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability that could be exploited by attackers to force a Google Apps admins to execute request on the  domain., The unknown flaw was first discovered by application security engineer Brett Buerhaus that reported it to Google on September 1st. Google promptly resolved the problem and fixed the flaw within 17 days. Buerhaus received by Google $5,000 as a reward under its bug bounty program., The Google Apps admin console is the instrument used by administrators to manage their corporate account, it allows to add new users, enable Google services the domain, configure permissions and manage security settings., The XSS flaw allowed attackers to force the admin to do the following actions:, Buerhaus explained that if users are not authorized to use a specific service they will be  presented with a “ServiceNotAllowed” page, the expert explained that this page could be exploited to switch between accounts in order to log in to the service., “The ServiceNotAllowed page appears when you are attempting to access a Google app service that has not been configured for your domain. It requires that you are logged into at least two accounts and will give you a form to switch accounts to continue to the service you were trying to load.” said Buerhaus in a blog post., When the user selects one of the accounts, a piece of JavaScript code was executed to redirect its Web browser, but the JavaScript code could be supplied by the user in the “continue” request parameter of the URL, which results vulnerable to XSS attacks., “When you select an account via the bullet on the page, it executes JavaScript to redirect your browser. The URL used in this JavaScript is supplied by the user in the continue request parameter.The continue request parameter is fairly common request variable in the Google login flow. This is the only page that I could find that did not validate the URL passed into it. This allowed you to craft Cross-Site Scripting attacks by using “javascript:” as part of the URL and it would execute when the browser location is redirected.” continues the post., , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Google XSS, Google Apps)

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Millions of voter records are available for sale on the Dark Web, experts from Anomali and Intel 471 discovered 35 million US voter records for sale in a hacking forum., Researchers have analyzed a sample of voter records and determined the data to be valid with a high degree of confidence., Records in the voter registration database include personal and voting history information of US residents., “Certain states require the seller to personally travel to locations in-state to receive the updated voter information.” reads the post published by Anomali., “This suggests the information disclosure is not necessarily a technical compromise but rather a likely targeted campaign by a threat actor redistributing possibly legitimately obtained voter data for malicious purposes on a cybercrime forum,” , The seller only provided the number of records for the lists of voters belonging to three states asking for prices between $1,300 and $12,500., , The seller also claims to have lists of voters for other states, including Montana, Iowa, Utah, Oregon, South Carolina, Wisconsin, Kansas, Georgia, New Mexico, Minnesota, Wyoming, Kentucky, Idaho, South Carolina, Tennessee, South Dakota, Mississippi, and West Virginia., According to the seller, voting lists are weekly updated with the help of people in the state governments., “Certain states require the seller to personally travel to locations in-state to receive the updated voter information.” reads a report published by Anomali Labs., “This suggests the information disclosure is not necessarily a technical compromise but rather a likely targeted campaign by a threat actor redistributing possibly legitimately obtained voter data for malicious purposes on a cybercrime forum,” , This kind of information it a precious commodity for threat actors, members of the forum already expressed their interest in the huge trove of data., “With the November 2018 midterm elections only four weeks away, the availability and currency of the voter records, if combined with other breached data, could be used by malicious actors to disrupt the electoral process or pursue large scale identity theft,” explained Hugh Njemanze, chief executive officer of Anomali. , The persistent access to voters records claimed by the seller represents a serious threat to US voters and for the US politics., “Given the illicit vendor claims of weekly updates of voter records and their high reputation on the hacker forum, we assess with moderate confidence that he or she may have persistent database access and/or contact with government officials from each state.” concludes., “These types of unauthorized information disclosures increasing the threat of possible disruptive attacks against the U.S. electoral process such as voter identity fraud and voter suppression.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – voter records, Dark Web)

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The Russian Government threatened to ban Telegram because it refused to comply data protection laws., “There is one demand, and it is simple: to fill in a form with information on the company that controls Telegram,” said Alexander Zharov, head of Roskomnadzor. , “And to officially send it to Roskomnadzor to include this data in the registry of organizers of dissemination of information. In case of refusal… Telegram shall be blocked in Russia until we receive the needed information.”, The Russian Personal Data Law was implemented since September 1st, 2015, it requests foreign tech companies to store the personal data of Russian citizens within the country. The Law was designed for protecting Russian citizens from surveillance activities of foreign agencies such as the NSA., , Since January 1, the new Russian Data Protection Laws request foreign tech companies to store past six months of the personal data of Russians and encryption keys within the country. The companies are obliged to provide the access to the retained data if requested by authorities., According to the FSB, the Russian intelligence agency, the terrorists who killed 15 people in Saint Petersburg in April were communicating through the Telegram encrypted messaging service., The Russian intelligence asked Telegram to share users’ chats and crypto keys on demand to allow government investigations on terrorists abusing the instant messaging app as a communication channel., The use of the popular encrypted messaging app is widespread among the militants of the terrorist organization in Russia and abroad, The use of Telegram has eclipsed the use of other social media platforms, including Twitter., Now the company has agreed to register with new Russian Data Protection Laws, but its founder Pavel Durov clarified that his company doesn’t intend to share users’ confidential data with Russian authorities. Telegram wouldn’t store citizens’ information on servers located in Russian., No, we won't ever comply with these laws, we only provided public data for registration. Full statement: — Pavel Durov (@durov) June 28, 2017, , The Roskomnadzor announced on Wednesday that company had finally presented all the requirements., Durov highlighted that Telegram takes care of the privacy of its users, the company will only share basic information as explained by the founder in a message published on VK.com., “We will not comply with unconstitutional and technically impossible Yarovaya Package laws—as well as with other laws incompatible with the protection of privacy and Telegram’s privacy policy,” Durov said., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – ISIS, instant messaging)

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D-Link ‘s DWR-932B LTE router and access point has been found vulnerable to a number of backdoors as well as a default WPS (Wi-Fi Protected Setup) PIN., Security researcher and blogger, Pierre Kim, has uncovered a number of security flaws in the device that even affect the latest version of its firmware., Kim had previously released a number of flaws that existed in the LTE QDH routers made by Quanta and it appears that they also appear in D-Link models., Among the various vulnerabilities the researcher discovered that two backdoor accounts which can be used to bypass HTTP authentication include the admin account with the username and password ‘admin’ as well as a root account using the password ‘1234’., The D-Link DWR-932 B also contains a default WPS PIN of 28296607 which is hard coded in the /bin/appmgr directory. It’s also located in the HostAP and HTTP API’s configurations., The /bin/appmgr program also allows malicious attackers to send a specific string via UDP which forces the device to start a telnet service which operates without authentication. This can occur even in the telnet service isn’t already running. If HELODBC is sent as a command to 0.0.0.0:39889 over UDP the router allows unauthenticated access using the root account., Both /etc/inadyn-mt.conf and /bin/qmiweb contain various vulnerabilities, the conf file contains a username with hardcoded password and the http daemon in qmiweb has multiple possible routes for exploit., , Kim also discovered that the credentials for using the FOTA (Firmware Over The Air) service contained hard-coded user credentials in the /sbin/fotad binary, there is an added degree of security with the daemon attempting to download the firmware over HTTPS, however the SSL certificate for this service has been invalid for over 18 months., It was also found that the security level of the UPNP program (miniupnp) in the router is lowered, thus allowing a LAN based attacker the ability to add Port forwarding from the Internet to other local clients, “There is no restriction about the UPnP permission rules in the configuration file, contrary to common usage in UPnP where it is advised to only allow redirection of port above 1024,” explained Kim., This would allow attackers to forward traffic from the outside onto the local network, including services such as mail, file transfer, and database, posing a huge number of vehicles as Advanced Persistent Threats., Kim informed D-Link of the issues in the D-Link DWR-932 devices back in June of this year but to date still hasn’t received any notification confirming that they have been resolved. Following 90 days of silence from D-Link, Kim has now chosen to publish an advisory revealing the bugs., D-Link patched a number of flaws in August following the discovery of a weakness in a number of DIR model routers after a D-Link Wi-Fi camera was found to be affected by a vulnerability that later proved to be present in over 120 of their products., Written by: Steven Boyd , , Steven is a security consultant, researcher, ethical hacker and freelance writer with over 16 years of experience in the industry. He has provided security consultancy to some of the world’s biggest banks, the private sector as well as public services and defense. He is the owner and creator of security blog www.CybrViews.com., Twitter: @CybrViews,  ,  ,  , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – D-Link DWR-932, Hacking)

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Swiss telco company Swisscom confirmed it has suffered a data breach that affected roughly 800,000 of its customers, roughly 10% of the Swiss population., According to Swisscom, unauthorized parties gained access to data in Autumn, the attackers accessed the customers’ records using a sales partner’s credentials., The security breach was discovered by Swisscom during a routine check, most of the exposed data are related to the mobile services subscribers., “In autumn of 2017, unknown parties misappropriated the access rights of a sales partner, gaining unauthorised access to customers’ name, address, telephone number and date of birth. Under data protection law this data is classed as “non-sensitive”.” reads the press release issued by the company. , “Prompted by this incident, Swisscom has now also tightened security for this customer information. The data accessed included the first and last names, home addresses, dates of birth and telephone numbers of Swisscom customers; contact details which, for the most part, are in the public domain or available from list brokers.”, , Exposed data includes names, physical addresses, phone numbers, and dates of birth, the telecom giant collects this type of data when customers subscribe an agreement., It is not clear how the hackers obtained the credentials, the good news is that sales partners are allowed to access only information for customers’ identification and to manage contracts., Swisscom highlighted that data accessed by the intruders are not considered sensitive under data protection laws, anyway, accessed info is a precious commodity in the criminal underground because crooks can use them to conduct phishing campaigns against the company’s customers., Swisscom has reported the data breach to the Swiss Federal Data Protection and Information Commissioner (FDPIC)., “Swisscom stresses that the system was not hacked and no sensitive data, such as passwords, conversation or payment data, was affected by the incident,” continues the press release.“Rigorous long-established security mechanisms are already in place in this case.”, After the Swisscom data breach, the company revoked the credentials used to access its systems and implemented tighter controls for partners., Swisscom implemented a number of changes to improve its security, including:, Customers are advised to report any suspicious calls or email., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Swisscom data breach, hacking)

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Last week the another alleged member of the popular Lizard Squad was arrested by UK authorities, the British Police in collaboration with the FBI identified a 18-year-old boy that is suspected to have participated to the to the DDoS attacks on the PlayStation Network and Xbox Live services., The Lizard Squad was advertising a DDoS hacking tool, Lizard Stresser, that the team was offering for rent to its customers. The Lizard Stresser tool is a powerful DDoS tool that draws on Internet bandwidth from hacked home Internet routers worldwide., Now is circulating on the Internet the database of customers for the Lizard Stresser, the entire archive containing the list of clients of the Lizard Squad. The experts believe that the DDoS-for-hire service has been breached, and bad actors leaked online details on more than 14,241 users.on more than 14,241 users., , The popular security experts Brian Krebs, who analyzed the archive, discovered that customers’ data were stored in plain text, and that clients have deposited nearly $11,000 in Bitcoins to run DDoS attacks on thousands of Internet addresses., “In an unrelated development, not long after this publication broke the news that the Lizard Squad’s attack infrastructure is built on a network of thousands of hacked home Internet routers, someone hacked LizardStresserdotsu, the Web site the group uses to coordinate attacks and sell subscriptions to its attacks-for-hire service. As I noted in a previous story, the attacks on Microsoft and Sony were merely meant to be commercials for this very “stresser” (a.k.a. “booter”) service, which allows paying customers to knock any Web site or individual offline for a small fee.” wrote Krebs., , Brian Krebs speculated that the attack on Sony PSN network and Xbox Live service allowed Lizard Squad to promote LizardStresser Stresser, but the data breach could have definitely compromised the business of the hacking crew., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  LizardStresser , data breach)

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Security experts at Blue Coat have spotted a new campaign spreading an Android Ransomware dubbed Dogspectus. The malicious code hijacks mobile advertisements to scam gift cards, it locks the device in a state that allows only victims to make payment., The malicious code demands the payment of a $200 fee in iTunes gift cards. The experts at Blue Coat Labs first spotted the threat after a tablet running CyanogenMod 10 / Android 4.2.2 viewed an advertisement that silently served malicious payloads without any user interaction., , The Exploit Kit used by crooks in this campaign relies on a previously leaked Hacking Team exploit (lbxslt) to serve the Android exploit known as Towelroot. The tool was released by the popular hacker George Hotz in 2014, it is able to root Android devices exploiting a known Linux flaw (CVE-2014-3153)., The attack is very sophisticated and represents an evolution of the classic malvertising attack, as explained by Andrew Brandt from Blue Coat., “This is the first time, to my knowledge; an exploit kit has been able to successfully install malicious apps on a mobile device without any user interaction on the part of the victim. During the attack, the device did not display the normal “application permissions” dialog box that typically precedes installation of an Android application.” wrote Brandt. “After consulting with analyst Joshua Drake of Zimperium, he was able to confirm that the Javascript used to initiate the attack contains an exploit against libxslt that was leaked during the Hacking Team breach.”, The operators behind the malware campaign used the Hacking Team exploit in conjunction with the Towelroot tool realizing a very stealth attack that is able to compromise almost every old device that has not been updated with the last release of the Google OS. Be careful, it does not matter if the mobile device is rooted or not to be compromised by the Dogspectus ransomware, bacause the Towelroot allows an attacker to escalate rivileged on the infected devices., “The commoditized implementation of the Hacking Team and Towelroot exploits to install malware onto Android mobile devices using an automated exploit kit has some serious consequences. The most important of these is that older devices, which have not been updated (nor are likely to be updated) with the latest version of Android, may remain susceptible to this type of attack in perpetuity.” continues the post., The experts determined that at least 224 unique device models running a range of Android versions between 4.0.3 and 4.4.4 (5.x or 6.x are not impacted) contected the command and control servers since February 22., The problem is serious if we consider that 59.6 percent of the Android devices are currently running version 4.4 or lower., , The samples analyzed by the researchers allow the connection of the infected device to a computer and copy all the files still unlocked from both the internal memory and any additional storage card. The experts also noticed that flashing over the operating system with a newer build of Android doesn’t eliminate the Dogspectus ransomware, meanwhile, a factory reset will eradicate it., In order to limit the effects of a ransomware infection, it is important to maintain an updated backup of any important data present on the device., “As with other ransomware, the best way to defeat the criminals is to keep a backup of those precious photos, videos, and other data files somewhere other than on your phone or tablet’s internal memory or memory card. That way, you can just perform a factory reset and not worry about losing anything other than the time it takes to reconfigure and reinstall your mobile device’s apps,” concludes Brandt., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Dogspectus ransomware, Android)

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It’s a very difficult period for security researchers that in the last months have discovered various cyber espionage campaigns that hit governments, private businesses and intelligence agencies all over the world., The situation is very concerning, silently cyber threats attacks the above institutions to steal sensitive information and intellectual properties causing damage comparable to those of a conflict, is not an understatement to consider many states involved by an ongoing cyber war., We have read about, various attacks against IT giants such as Microsoft and Apple, to continuous incursion within the networks of media company such the New Your Times and The Washington Post, but the list of victims is very long. Again recently we read about Mandiant report on the involvement of Chinese Government in many attacks against Western countries and few months ago another clamorous cyber operation, Red October, was revealed by the Kaspersky Lab team., Yesterday afternoon I was observing twitter message between @codelancer (aka Aleks Gostev Chief Security Expert, Global Research and Analysis Team at Kaspersky Lab), @craiu (aka Costin Raiu Director of Kaspersky Lab’s Global Research & Analysis Team) and the CrySys Lab team., This guys are making the IT security history, in the past I noted that they use to announce striking discoveries via the popular social media platforms, and yesterday the strange messages let portend a new “torpedo” and it and was launched,  , ,  , Kaspersky Lab and Hungary’s Laboratory of Cryptography and System Security, or CrySyS, discovered that unknown hackers targeted dozens of computers at government agencies across Europe in a series of cyber attacks that exploited a recently discovered security flaw in Adobe software., Analyzing the logs from the command servers security researches found 59 unique victims in the following  23 countries:, Belgium, Brazil, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Georgia, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Latvia, Lebanon, Lithuania, Montenegro, Portugal, Romania, Russian Federation, Slovenia, Spain, Turkey, Ukraine, United Kingdom and United States., The victims are various, some research institutes and other entities including an US think tank were attacked by a malware dubbed “MiniDuke”., “This is a unique, fresh and very different type of attack,” “The technical indicators show this is a new type of threat actor that hasn’t been reported on before.” Kurt Baumgartner, senior researcher at Kaspersky Lab declared., The researchers suspect that the malware was designed for espionage purpose, Boldizsár Bencsáth, a cyber security expert at CrySyS reported to Reuters agency that the NATO’s Computer Incident Response Capability has been informed on the attacks. The level of sophistication of the attacks and the nature of the targets chosen lead security experts to think that incidents are state-sponsored attacks, but no hypothesis has been formulated on the nationality of the attackers., The post on SecureList blog states:, “Once the infected system locates the C2, it receives encrypted backdoors that are obfuscated within GIF files and disguised as pictures that appear on a victim’s machine. Once they are downloaded to the machine, they can fetch a larger backdoor which carries out the cyber espionage activities, through functions such as copy file, move file, remove file, make directory, kill process and of course, download and execute new malware and lateral movement tools., The final stage backdoor connects to two servers, one in Panama and one in Turkey to receive the instructions from the attackers. The attackers left a small clue in the code, in the form of the number 666 (0x29A hex) before one of the decryption subroutines”, , Also this clue in the code was announced by Constin Raiu in his tweet, the backdoor coding style reminded to experts a malware writing group which is believed to be extinct: 29A. The value 29A in hex means 666, exactly the clue left in the code., “29A published their first malware magazine in December 1996 and were active until February 2008, when ‘Virusbuster’, the last standing man announced the group’s dismissal.”,  , , What is concerning is that victims were not aware of any cyber attacks against they systems, The Czech counterintelligence agency BIS declared to Reuters that they haven’t noted suspicious activities on Czech institutions from abroad recently., MiniDuke malware exploited recently discovered security vulnerabilities in Adobe’s Reader and Acrobat software, the schema of attack is consolidated, hackers sent to victims PDF documents tainted with malware.  In reality MiniDuke activities were reported for first time a couple of weeks ago by FireEye security firm that noted a malicious agent able to infecting machines by circulating compromised PDFs., Adobe has already released a software patch for its products that should protect customers from MiniDuke., Analyzing the malware researchers found that the control of the agents by attackers once infected victims was made using Tweets from specific Twitter accounts. The techniques is not new and it’s very efficient to the ability to hide “malicious traffic” to defense systems., , What is very interesting is that if MiniDuke is not able to receive Tweets it execute Google searches to receive orders from C&C servers., The post from Kaspersky team concludes with following unanswered questions:, “Perhaps one of the most important questions is: are these attacks related to the “Itaduke” attack that prompted the discovery of the PDF 0-day? Or is it a separate entity that purchased the attack kit from the same source, which has a different agenda? , Or, is it perhaps another threat actor which captured the 0-day exploit and modified it for other purposes? Unfortunately, there are still many unanswered questions.”, Only thing missing is the culprit …, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Cyber MiniDuke)

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Crooks continue to abuse unprotected Docker APIs to create new containers used for cryptojacking., Earlier this year Sysdig and Aqua Security researchers started observing cyber attacks targeting Kubernets and Docker instances aimed at mining Monero cryptocurrency., A container is a package that contains an application and all the dependencies that are required to its execution. Each Docker container runs on Docker Engine along with other containers. Experts pointed out that a Docker Engine is not properly secured could be exposed to remote attack through Docker Engine API., Miscreants can abuse Docker Engine API to deploy containers they have created with the specific intent of mining cryptocurrencies., , Experts from Trend Micro have recently observed threat actors scanning for exposed Docker Engine APIs (port 2375 and 2376), attackers aimed at abusing them to deploy containers that used for cryptojacking., “We recently observed cases of abuse of the systems running misconfigured Docker Engine-Community with Docker application program interface (API) ports exposed. We also noticed that the malicious activities were focused on scanning for open ports 2375/TCP and 2376/TCP, which are used by the Docker engine daemon (dockerd).” reads the analysis published by Trend Micro., “The intrusion attempts to deploy a cryptocurrency-mining malware (detected by Trend Micro as Coinminer.SH.MALXMR.ATNE) on the misconfigured systems.”, The auto.sh script deploys a Monero miner and also a port scanning software, which will scan for other vulnerable Docker Engine installs., Experts have seen attackers scanning all networks from the host with a scan rate of 50,000 packets per second for open ports 2375 and 2376 and save the result into local.txt file., The attackers conduct lateral movement by infecting or abusing other hosts identified in previous reconnaissance scans., Experts provided recommendations to secure Docker Engine installs, below best practices provided by Trend Micro:, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Docker APIs, hacking)

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Unknown hackers have breached the system of the German flag carrier Lufthansa, the news was reported first by the German magazine Der Spiegel., The attackers accessed individual passenger accounts on the company’s website LH.com as confirmed by the company on Friday., Lufthansa immediately started the operations to mitigate the risks of exposure in compliance to its incident response plan., , Lufthansa has taken prompt countermeasures, but it “had not been able to prevent illicit access to some customer files,” according to company’s representatives that confirmed that hackers may have accessed hundred customers, but highlighted that no data was exfiltrated from Lufthansa’s systems., “We had to lock several hundred customer pages,” a Lufthansa spokesman told DPA news agency. “We believe to have the problem generally under control,” he said., The attackers run a massive brute-force attack against the system of the company, rumors confirm the involvement of a botnet that was used by hackers to target Lufthansa., “This has been achieved through the use of so-called botnets: There was a large number of username and password combinations automatically tried until a Login succeeded.” reports the Der Spiegel magazine., Once accessed the company’s database, the attackers used frequent-flyer miles to obtain vouchers and redeem rewards, they focused their activity on vouchers that don’t need to be delivered by mail., In one case, the hackers have ordered watches and a tablet for a value of 2700 Euro, the destination address used by the attackers was London, meanwhile the billing address was in Berlin., Lufthansa confirmed that a “small, single-digit number” of Lufthansa’s top client accounts was the victims of the attack. These clients are called by the company “HON Circle” members, which are customers who have flown at least 600,000 HON miles in two years exclusively in the Business and First Class., Of course, the company restored the account miles following the cyber attack., Stay tuned …., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Lufthansa , hackers)

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In the last months, numerous IT companies suffered a major data breach, including Dropbox, LinkedIn, MySpace, VK.com, and Tumblr. The criminal underground is flooded by login credentials from the above services that offered for sales by hackers., These credentials could be used by hackers to target other services online and take over users’accounts, this is possible because users’ bad habit to share same usernames and passwords among different web services., , In response to the amazing string of data breaches, the music streaming service Spotify decided to force a password reset for a number of users. The company clarified that the measure was taken in response to the incident occurred to other firms and are not related to any problem occurred in its systems., “Hi Spotify User, To protect your Spotify account, we’ve reset your password. This is because we believe it may have been compromised during a leak on another service with which you use the same password.” states a message sent via email to its users on Wednesday reads., “Don’t worry! This is purely a preventative security measure. Nobody has accessed your Spotify account, and your data is secure,” , Spotify allows users to easily create a new password by simply clicking on a link., In April, hundreds of Spotify account credentials appeared online on the website Pastebin, the information includes emails, usernames, passwords, account type and other details., The popular Swedish streaming service denied any data breach and confirmed that its systems weren’t compromised by hackers. The company confirmed that it “has not been hacked” and its “user records are secure.”, “Spotify has not been hacked and our user records are secure. We monitor Pastebin and other sites regularly. When we find Spotify credentials, we first verify that they are authentic, and if they are, we immediately notify affected users to change their passwords.” states Spotify., According to the Techcrunch media agency, the company security team proactively resets hacked passwords, meanwhile, a number of users are also reported problems with their accounts., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – data breach, passwords)

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Microsoft Malware Protection Engine is the core component for malware detection and cleaning of several Microsoft anti-malware software. It is currently implemented in Windows Defender, Microsoft Security Essentials, Microsoft Endpoint Protection, Windows Intune Endpoint Protection, and Microsoft Forefront Endpoint Protection., The CVE-2018-0986 flaw could be exploited by attackers to execute malicious code on a Windows system with system privileges to gain the full control of the vulnerable machine., The CVE-2018-0986 vulnerability rated as ‘critical’ was discovered by Thomas Dullien, white hat hacker at the Google Project Zero., “A remote code execution vulnerability exists when the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine does not properly scan a specially crafted file, leading to memory corruption. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could execute arbitrary code in the security context of the LocalSystem account and take control of the system. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights.“reads  the security advisory published by Microsoft., “To exploit this vulnerability, a specially crafted file must be scanned by an affected version of the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine,” , According to the experts, it is quite easy to exploit the flaw, an attacker can deploy the malicious code inside JavaScript files hosted on the website then it needs to trick the victim into visiting it. Another attack scenario sees the hackers send the malicious code as attachment of an email sent to the victim, or via an instant messaging client., The attack doesn’t need user interaction because the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine automatically scans all incoming files., Experts pointed out that Windows Defender is enabled by default on Windows 10., Microsoft has addressed the flaw in MMPE version 1.1.14700.5, the security patch is going to be delivered without needing user interaction., , “For affected software, verify that the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine version is 1.1.14700.5 or later., If necessary, install the update Administrators of enterprise antimalware deployments should ensure that their update management software is configured to automatically approve and distribute engine updates and new malware definitions. Enterprise administrators should also verify that the latest version of the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine and definition updates are being actively downloaded, approved and deployed in their environment.” states Microsoft., “For end-users, the affected software provides built-in mechanisms for the automatic detection and deployment of this update. For these customers, the update will be applied within 48 hours of its availability. The exact time frame depends on the software used, Internet connection, and infrastructure configuration.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – CVE-2018-0986 vulnerability, Microsoft Malware Protection Engine), ,

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“Findings reveal that there is a clear lack of appropriate security measures to protect drivers against hackers who may be able to take control of a vehicle or against those who may wish to collect and use personal driver information” says a recent report by Senator Edward J. Markey, Every day, more and more new devices are connected to the internet. From the introduction of Internet enabled watches, wearable devices, IP enabled refrigerators, washing machines to biohacking implants, we are entering a new phase of technological development.  Connected cars are growing in number each year. Although these cars are well equipped with automatic notification of crashes, notification of speeding and safety alerts but reports suggest that they are prone to hacking, since not enough measures have been taken to adequately protect these connected cars from hackers.  Hackers have recognized the new attack surface because of which threat to connected cars will be on the rise. The connected car could make our cloud services, e-mail, text messages, contacts, and other personal, financial, and work data vulnerable to hackers. Burglars could determine vehicle location provided by the vehicle’s e-email, text messages, contacts, and other personal, financial, and work data vulnerable to hackers. Burglars could determine vehicle location provided by the vehicle’s GPS to monitor when a home’s occupants are miles away. Hackers can gain access to vehicle networks and wreak havoc on traffic and even threaten the safety of vehicle occupants., , Security Risks of Connected cars, Connected cars can share information for a C2C (car-to-car) or a C2I (Car-to-Infrastructure) connections in real-time. Cars are becoming part of IoT (Internet of Things). Experts predict that (car-to-car) or a C2I (Car-to-Infrastructure) connections in real-time. Experts predict that IOT risks are going to increase drastically this year. We should take an entirely different approach in implementing cyber security for these devices. Having a team of Brainy cyber security experts only during the development of these connected cars will not be sufficient to tackle the myriad possibilities of a cyber attack on these cars post production. How data is fetched from the internet or data requests that are going from the car should be analyzed and evaluated. So, the focus is going to be in the cloud., The U.S. Department of Transportation sees such potential that it’s enabling vehicle-to-vehicle, or V2V communication, ushering in a future where cars on the road will automatically swap data such as speed and direction, sending alerts to avoid crashes or traffic snarls. And with all the time we spend in where cars on the road will automatically swap data such as speed and direction, sending alerts to avoid crashes or traffic snarls. And with all the time we spend in our cars, it makes sense that they should become personalized digital assistants. Recently, German auto outfit announced it was sending an over-the-air update to cars featuring its SIM-based ConnectedDrive module. This allows drivers to remotely unlock their car, but the German automobile club ADAC had reverse-engineered the telematics software and warned BMW that a flaw made it possible for third parties to unlock vehicles. The update, which introduces HTTPS encryption to the car’s connection with BMW’s servers, is automatically downloaded as soon as the car module talks to that system., “No one wants to travel in a vehicle that can be hacked” – Martin Hunt, Senior Business Development Director, Automotive Global Industry Practice, Hackers were in theory able to dupe the car into unlocking by creating a fake mobile network, according to Reuters. There is no evidence that the flaw has been exploited, though it was present in up to 2.2 million BMWs, Minis and Rolls-Royces. Though the vulnerability was patched on time by the company, there is always a learning from such an event. The majority of automakers transmits data to third parties., “Drivers have come to rely on these new technologies, but unfortunately the automakers haven’t done their part to protect us from cyber-attacks or privacy invasions. Even as we are more connected than ever in our cars and trucks, our technology systems and data security remain largely unprotected,” Markey, a member of the Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee, said in a statement., The vulnerability in these connected cars can be proven by the event when a 14 year old boy was able to easily unlock and start a connected car by just spending 15$.  Such vehicles will inevitably become the norm in the coming years as people look for safer driving experiences with their cars connected to local infrastructure such as traffic signals and emergency services but security concerns only seem to get worse., Use of Cryptography and Encryption, BMW fixed the above mentioned vulnerability by increasing the security of data transmission in its vehicles, included encrypting data from the car via HTTPS. Now the question arises on, why the standard HTTPS communication was missed out when such encryption techniques were available for quite some time. Nearly 100% of cars on the market include wireless technologies that could pose vulnerabilities to hacking or privacy intrusions.          According to Frost & Sullivan, cars will have anywhere between 10 to100 Ethernet ports from 2020. The lower end will be typical of entry-level cars and luxury cars at the high end of the spectrum. Automakers are adopting Ethernet for two reasons. One, the economies of scale to be gained by adopting a standardized communications backbone, and, two, to accommodate the continually increasing connectivity and bandwidth needs in the connected car., Securing the connected cars – Hardening the vehicle, In a recent IBM Institute for Business Value study, “Driving Security: Cyber Assurance for Next-Generation Vehicle,” they have identified three areas for automakers and partners to focus on when creating connected car features:, 1. Design Secure Cars: Security starts with the car. The design process should be laser focused on security from get go. Which means outlining and testing the risks and threats each component, subsystem, and network that the connected vehicle will be exposed to once it leaves the car marker’s production line. Every software and hardware component and system has to be designed with security as a first order of business., 2. Create Safe Networks: In a system as far flung as connected cars will create, security has to be designed especially for and built into every component. Communications should be encrypted. All the organizations providing services that connect roadways, cars, and devices need to protect their networks and monitor transactions to detect suspicious activity., 3. Harden the vehicle: In the 1950s and ‘60s, it took a mechanical engineer to design vehicle control systems; now it takes a computer scientist. A typical luxury car contains around 100 million lines of software code, which are managed by between 70 to 100 electronic control units, or ECUs. These used to be closed systems that required a toolbox and a mechanic’s creeper dolly to be tampered with. But by opening them up through mobile networks, Bluetooth, USB ports, and even near-field communications (NFC) sensors, cars are now at risk of remote hacking. These connected cars should be security hardened at all levels:, Recently, Oracle developed a platform to develop an application for cars using JAVA. Similarly, Qualcomm, AT&T and others are bringing in new platforms exclusively for connected cars. With such great technologies, we are creating a vast new attack surface for the hackers. The future is going to depend on the way we are going to provide Security awareness and security development for these connected cars, Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  connected car, cyber security)

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Groups of hacktivist like Anonymous are the actual news of the global technology landscape, a new force with which and against which confront. As repeatedly stressed I consider the moment of confrontation with the group a moment of growth for the IT professional in many ways, on all:, Obviously we are talking about a group of hackers defined by some recent reports as the most dangerous phenomena cybercriminals in recent years, underestimate it or being overcome by emotional and ideological transport is extremely dangerous, The group follows a strategy, a trend that I consider interesting to analyze without ideological preconceptions, provided a cue of interest in the current IT scenario., The exploits of the team have a devastating media coverage, they are able to involve critical masses and to win the sympathies of many professionals for their ability to deal with issues otherwise intentionally concealed., Extremely interesting is the theme discussed by the group in recent weeks, in fact, the hackers have conducted a series of attacks and have promised new states against those governments guilty of extremely stringent political control and censorship., , , Specifically we discuss China and UK, and certainly disproportionate curious juxtaposition which nevertheless revives debate on how to operate properly control and monitor of the media for reasons of national security., What is the boundary between control and censorship?, Last week Anonymous China has attacked and defaced a number of Chinese government Web sites to protest the country’s censorship of the Internet., Anonymous China has announced on twitter the operations,, Curious note is that defaced web sites playing The Who’s classic song Baba O’Riley, the boys have good taste, all the statements on the front page were in english except a Chinese phrase that means “A friend in need is a friend indeed.”, The message to Chinese government reads, All these years, the Chinese Communist government has subjected its People to unfair laws and unhealthy processes. Dear Chinese government, you are not infallible, today websites are hacked, tomorrow it will be your vile regime that will fall. So expect us because we do not forgive, never. What you are doing today to your Great People, tomorrow will be inflicted to you., With no mercy., Nothing will stop us, nor your anger nor your weapons. You do not scare us, because you cannot afraid an idea., Message to Chinese People :, Each of you suffers from the tyranny of that regime which knows nothing about you. We are with you. With you here and now. But also tomorrow and the coming days so promising for your freedom. We will never give up. Don’t loose hope, the revolution begins in the heart. The silence of all other countries highlights the lack of democracy and justice in China. It’s unbearable. We must all fight for your freedom., The hacks have been completed inserting a link to an Anonymous Web page published on Chinese government’s Web site that contains instructions for Chinese citizens to bypass state censorship.  Others attacks made by Anonymous have also leaked the account passwords of government workers for meda.gov.cn., The Chinese web security is not so impenetrable., This is the biggest campaign of Anonymous targeting China despite its government is applying a fierce for a long time. Although in line with the group’s strategies sudden interest in the government of Beijing raises some doubts about the true origin of the attacks, but even more seriously the possibility that the vertices of the collective may have been ideologically conducted to attack an historic enemy, Anonymous used as a cyber weapon., Apart from these legitimate doubts about a group of which we know far too little, it should be noted that its attacks are not limited to China but Anonymous has promised an imminent action against the United Kingdom. A massive recruiting campaign is started on social media, a call to arm to protest the extradition of U.K. citizens to the United States. The Operation named “Operation Trial At Home,” fight the European Arrest Warrant (EAW) that could lead to the extradition of three accused criminals by the U.K.’s Home Office, the government department responsible for domestic security., , Anonymous has provided Home Office’s IP address in its announcement to the supporters, Scheduling for April 7 the a DDoS ( with denial-of-service) attacks. against the Home Office’s website., The faces of Anonymous’ anti-extradition campaign are Gary McKinnon, Christopher Harold Tappin and Richard O’Dwyer. McKinnon, a Scottish systems administrator, was arrested in 2002 for allegedly hacking into U.S. military and NASA computers in 2001 and 2002 and deleting files and copying data. Tappin, a retired British businessman, is accused by the U.S. government of exporting materials to Iran that can be used to build surface-to-air missiles. The owner of TVShack.net, O’Dwyer has been charged with hosting copyrighted materials on his site; the U.S. Justice Department has been seeking his extradition since last May., In reality I have another hypothesis regarding the announced attacks, Anonymous is studying British government infrastructures for other reason., During last days a controversial new British legislation has been discussed on the web, it could allow the UK’s electronics intelligence agency GCHQ access in real-time data of , emails, social networks, and Web traffic and phone calls by all UK citizens.  I believe that anonymous desire to attacks the country that is considered the most supervised in the world., The law is directly linked to the U.S.’ Patriot Act and both have the intent to ensure national security against cyber threats., Data collected would include the time a call, email, or website was visited, the duration of which, and which websites or phone numbers were called. Details of the sender and recipient of emails, such as IP addresses, would also be collected. Everything scrap of data will be stored by ISPs, but not all of this data will be made available to GCHQ without a court order or Home Secretary-sanctioned authority., Who can stop UK Government?, The European Commission or incursion of hacktivist?, UK Home Secretary Theresa May said, “Such data has been used in every security service terrorism investigation and 95 per cent of serious organized crime investigations over the last ten years,” she said. ”Only suspected terrorists, pedophiles or serious criminals will be investigated.”, My very personal guess is that in a coherent approach of protest, the collective can not tolerate such legislative proposals and therefore I believe it is preparing for demonstrative attacks, but Anonymous at this juncture seems to look elsewhere, it seems to advocate other causes, but why if the country in the crosshairs is always UK? It ‘possible that the group is using a strategy of diversion to cover operations to investigate and attack structures certainly less penetrable of a website poorly managed. Time will provide the answers to our questions … meantime we are being spied on., Pierluigi Paganini

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XKeyscore, NSA former technicians Edward Snowden revealed that the agency has another secret program to spy on user’s Internet experience tracking practically every his activity … PRISM isn’t an isolated surveillance program., The NSA tool collects ‘nearly everything a user does on the internet’, XKeyscore gives ‘widest-reaching’ collection of online data analyzing the content of emails, social media and browsing history., Snowden explained that a tool named DNI Presenter allows the NSA to read the content of stored emails and it also enables the intelligence analysts to track the user’s activities on Facebook through a system dubbed XKeyscore. , Once again The Guardian has published an exclusive report on the NSA surveillance program, in particular it issued several NSA training slides from the program. Facebook chats and private messages become accessible to the intelligence agents simply providing the Facebook user name and a date range for the investigation, XKeyscore in fact provides instruments necessary for the analysis that are conducted also without any legal authorization or a warrant., “A top secret National Security Agency program allows analysts to search with no prior authorization through vast databases containing emails, online chats and the browsing histories of millions of individuals, according to documents provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden.” The NSA boasts in training materials that the program, called XKeyscore, is its “widest-reaching” system for developing intelligence from theinternet., NSA agency justified its surveillance program with the following statements:, The NSA slides show that since 2008 the X-Keyscore platform was used to track activities related to 300 alleged terrorists around the world studying their habits and participations to various Internet forums., “Analysts are warned that searching the full database for content will yield too many results to sift through. Instead they are advised to use themetadata also stored in the databases to narrow down what to review. A slide entitled “plug-ins” in a December 2012 document describes the various fields of information that can be searched. It includes “every email address seen in a session by both username and domain”, “every phone number seen in a session (eg address book entries or signature block)” and user activity – “the webmail and chat activity to include username, buddylist, machine specific cookies etc“.”, The documents revealed that in 2012 more than 41 billion records were collected and stored in a single 30-day period by XKeyscore that analyzes real time more than 20 terabytes of information (e.g. Emails, chats, social media operations and browsing histories) every day., “The quantity of communications accessible through programs such as XKeyscore is staggeringly large. One NSA report from 2007 estimated that there were 850bn “call events” collected and stored in the NSA databases, and close to 150bn internet records. Each day, the document says, 1-2bn records were added.William Binney, a former NSA mathematician, said last year that the agency had “assembled on the order of 20tn transactions about US citizens with other US citizens”, an estimate, he said, that “only was involving phone calls and emails”. A 2010 Washington Post article reported that “every day, collection systems at the NSA intercept and store 1.7bn emails, phone calls and other type of communications.””

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European Union countries are planning to ban virtual currencies and any form of anonymous payments online, even through pre-paid cards. According to a draft document seen by journalists at the Reuters Agency, the initiative aims to tackle terrorism financing after the recent tragic Paris attacks., A crisis meeting will be held today in Brussels, EU interior and justice ministers will participate to discuss the measures to block any financing to the radical group ISIS., The draft document will urge the European Commission to propose measures to “strengthen controls of non-banking payment methods such as electronic/anonymous payments and virtual currencies and transfers of gold, precious metals, by pre-paid cards,”. reads the draft document.  EU ministers also plan “to curb more effectively the illicit trade in cultural goods,” , The Bitcoin is the most popular virtual currency, and authorities suspect that members of the ISIS could use it to rapidly transfer money to cells around the world., At the Foreign Affairs Forum on Cryptocurrency Policy in May, government officials and Bitcoin entrepreneurs discussed the future of the cryptocurrency. Law enforcement fear possible abuses of the popular crypto currency, Jennifer Shasky Calvery, head of the US Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN), which is charged with fighting money laundering and terrorist finance, explained that the virtual currency scheme could facilitate bad actors, including terrorists., “What keeps me up at night when I am thinking about digital currency…the real threats out there, these days we’re thinking a lot about ISIL,” Calvery declared. “How they’re moving their money, and how potential US-based individuals are becoming foreign fighters: Are they moving their money, can we identify them from the movement of their money? What does it mean if they start moving their money through bitcoin? We’ve started to see some public articles suggesting that has occurred.”, Intelligence agencies and security experts are aware that alleged members of terrorist groups, including the ISIS, are exploring different opportunities to transfer money to militants operating in Western countries., , A continuous flow of a small amount of money could be instantaneously transferred to numerous accounts used by ISIS members worldwide. Micro payments could exploit several channels, including systems like PayPal or virtual currencies like the Bitcoin., Online it is possible to find a PDF document written by a user with the pseudonymous pseudonym of Amreeki Witness titled: Bitcoin wa Sadaqat al­Jihad which translates to: “Bitcoin and the Charity of Violent Physical Struggle”.Bitcoin and the Charity of Violent Physical Struggle”. The pseudonym Amreeki authored the PDF under is Taqi’ul­Deen al­Munthir. That name translates to Righteous in Faith the-Warner., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Bitcoin, ISIS)

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Hacking Team has been hacked and its social media account hijacked, the news is shocking the IT security industry because privacy advocated have always accused the company to sell surveillance products and hacking tools to repressive regimes. The unknown attackers have exfiltrated some 400Gbs of data that have been uploaded to BitTorrent, the stolen information includes a huge number of directories containing source code, emails, list of clients (including the FBI), and also audio recordings., The Hacking Team restored the control of its Twitter account late on Monday morning, meanwhile the website is offline at the time I’m writing., The representative for the Hacking Team firm Christian Pozzi claims the leak of sensitive internal material contains a virus, inviting people to avoid downloading the disconcerting material that seems to prove the business relationship of the Italian firm with regimes and repressive governments worldwide., ,  , Pozzi of course has denied Hacking Team has never sold surveillance malware to “bad states”, instead it described its products as “custom software solutions”., “No, the torrent contains all of your viruses, which you sell, and which will get patched,” said John Adams, former security worker at Twitter., @christian_pozzi @dandyhighwayman @Viss No, the torrent contains all of your viruses, which you sell, and which will get patched., — John Adams (@netik) 6 Luglio 2015, A similar incidents occurred last year, when the hacking crew “PhineasFisher” hacked the controversial surveillance tech company Gamma International, the attackers claimed to have successfully infiltrated the network Gamma Internationa and leaked 40GB of internal data which includes details on the diffusion of the surveillance system FinFisher., The same hacker has now claimed responsibility for Hacking Team hack, according to MotherBoard. “On Sunday night, I reached out to the hacker while he was in control of Hacking Team’s Twitter account via a direct message to @hackingteam. Initially, PhineasFisher responded with sarcasm, saying he was willing to chat because “we got such good publicity from your last story!” referring to a recent story I wrote about the company’s CEO claiming to be able to crack the dark web. ” wrote Lorenzo Franceschi Bicchierai. “He then went on to reference the story publicly on Twitter, posting a screenshot of an internal email which included the link to my story. Afterwards, however, he also claimed that he was PhineasFisher. To prove it, he told me he would use the parody account he used last year to promote the FinFisher hack to claim responsibility.” , “I am the same person behind that hack,” he told me before coming out publicly.” , As reported by MotherBoard, the leak of 400GB of internal files contains “everything,” citing as a source a person close to the company, who has spoken on condition of anonymity. In this phase, the Hacking Team is trying to limit the damage and investigate how the hackers have breached the company. The Hacking Team company asked all its customers to shut down all the operations and don’t use its solution in this phase., “They’re in full on emergency mode,” reported a source of MotherBoard who has inside knowledge of Hacking Team’s operations. “Hacking Team notified all its customers on Monday morning with a “blast email,” requesting them to shut down all deployments of its Remote Control System software, also known as Galileo, according to multiple sources. The company also doesn’t have access to its email system as of Monday afternoon, a source said.” reported MotherBoard. , One of the leaked files described the “crisis procedure,” a process that include kill switch for malware operations remotely. The company has the ability to suspend its backdoors or shut it down remotely. , Well, @hackingteam can start following its “crisis procedure” any minute now. Perhaps when they wake up. pic.twitter.com/HPVSEG8vex, — Eva (@evacide) 6 Luglio 2015 , , Another embarrassing thing related to the hack is that every copy of Hacking Team’s Galileo software is watermarked, this means that the hackers that have stolen data can link every instance of the software to a specific account., “With access to this data it is possible to link a certain backdoor to a specific customer. Also there appears to be a backdoor in the way the anonymization proxies are managed that allows Hacking Team to shut them off independently from the customer and to retrieve the final IP address that they need to contact,” the source told Motherboard., Stay Tuned., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Hacking team, surveillance)

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Anton Cherepanov, security expert form ESET researcher, discovered two zero-days while analyzing a malicious PDF, according to the researcher the mysterious hacker(s) were still working on the exploits., The malicious PDF was discovered late in March 2018 (Two suspicious PDF samples zero-day 1, zero-day 2), the analysis of the document revealed it was exploiting two previously unknown vulnerabilities, a remote-code execution vulnerability in Adobe Reader and a Windows privilege escalation flaw., “The use of the combined vulnerabilities is extremely powerful, as it allows an attacker to execute arbitrary code with the highest possible privileges on the vulnerable target, and with only the most minimal of user interaction. APT groups regularly use such combinations to perform their attacks, such as in the Sednit campaign from last year.” reads the analysis published by ESET., “The sample does not contain a final payload, which may suggest that it was caught during its early development stages,” Cherepanov said., ESET shared its discovery with the Microsoft Security Response Center, Windows Defender ATP research team, and Adobe Product Security Incident Response Team as they fixed these bugs., The two zero-days were tracked as CVE-2018-4990, that affected Adobe Acrobat/Reader PDF viewer, and as CVE-2018-8120 that affected the Win32k component of Windows., By chaining the two vulnerabilities it was possible to escape the Adobe’s sandbox protection and execute arbitrary code inside Adobe Acrobat/Reader., “The malicious PDF sample embeds JavaScript code that controls the whole exploitation process. Once the PDF file is opened, the JavaScript code is executed,” states the report published by ESET., Below the steps composing the attack chain:, Even if the chain of the zero-days could be very dangerous, the developers allowed the security community to detect them by uploading it to a known virus scanning engine aiming to test its evasion capability., , Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – zero-days, hacking), ,

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Here I am, as promised, to continue the research started together regarding the cost of malware. Reading news of more or less aggressive viruses that cause many damages to public infrastructure to private citizens and sometimes endangering human life itself. But when we are dealing with someone that has different works and that has no IT knowledge are we able to explain how much effort is needed for the production of a malware? How many professionals and what figures should be involved and how much cost it? In doing so, the next time you hear about viruses and malware, we can truly understand how much effort intellectual is behind such a threat., Since the publication of the first part of the article I was able to speak with professionals and managers who operate in sectors such as healthcare and public administration, and I can tell you with certainty that they have no idea how much cost a malware. Common understanding is that behind the creation of malware, there are groups of fans, even very young, who cast begin to develop more concerned to test their ability. Nothing could be more wrong! Behind the production of a virus, there are professional organizations that act hired by the government or criminal associations to develop a “product” with all the adroitness of the case. The processes used are the same as followed by the main business software provider, valid professionals test themselves in the realization of projects with clear requirements and for which it is required a deep technical knowledge., But imagine having to make up our team and want to list the professionals we need., Starting from the analisys made by Charlie Miller in the the document “DEFCON-18-Miller-Cyberwar”, imagining to desire to compose a team for the development of malware, which professional figures will be needed?, All this resources have  cost that could be really expensive related to the project objective and the total duration of the development. Let’s make an exercise together trying to give a value for each resource ad defining the project duration and the phases that compose them. In the following table we can resume the annual effort needed to implement a malware, analizing for each figure the number of resources used and related cost., , Final results are amazing:, Consider that this is an average annual cost, it is a row estimation and usually project like this have a duration of several years. A new generation of malware has being developed, modular agents that are able to infect several target simply changing some component of their architecture. This means that the development phase is really complex and that the project must be considered on going work. The fight against this malware is really hard, most of them use a zero-days exploit discovered by expert researchers., Try telling this figure to those who believed that the production of malware is a NERD’s job (intelligent but socially awkward and obsessive person who spends time on unpopular or obscure pursuits). As you can imagine the amounts involved are certainly not for everyone and it is clear that the approach to the development of malicious agents is due exclusively to the two goals criminal associations who wish to profit by infecting systems primarily economic in nature governments or terrorist groups that intend to develop a cyber weapon., While the first point is shared by many today, there is great reluctance in admitting these expenditures by governments, most of whom do not have a cyber defense/offense strategy. Who is the father od Duqu and Stuxnet virus? Do you believe that a group of reseachers have developed it for fun? Which is the real value of their targets?, Let me conclude this second part leaving some questions that need to be food for thought on the numbers that we presented. Considering as large investments how many resources and which figures should be hired to deal with the looming threat?  The proposed data are enough to make us understand the enormous effort that daily the main groups of researchers producing against this threats?, Fully understanding how economically significant is the phenomenon, is it appropriate to provide this information to citizens so they understand fully the importance of a cyber defense strategy and related expenditures?,  … to be continued, Pierluigi Paganini,  , Let me say thank you to two great security specialists that have supported my research with their personal experience and sharing of precious and rare information., Niels Groeneveld (Threat Analyst at Royal Dutch Shell), Charlie Miller (Computer security researcher), and  thank you for the support to, Paolo Foti – Founder and researcher presso Cloud Security Alliance – Italy Chapter,  , Related Articles, How much cost malware production? Which are the processes for the production of virus? (Part.1),  

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A second bank was a victim of a malware-based attack, the news was recently confirmed by the SWIFT. The investigation conducted by the security researchers at BAE Systems are making the situation very intriguing because according to experts the cyberheist at the Bangladesh Bank, and at an unnamed commercial bank in Vietnam are linked could be linked to the clamorous Sony Pictures hack., At the time of the Sony hack, the US authorities blamed the North Korea for the attack, the Obama administration decided to exacerbate the economic sanctions against 10 senior North Korean officials and three entities of the country., At this point we have two options, the North Korea is targeting the global financial or we are in front of a false flag operation conducted by someone that is conducting a diversionary operation relying on the code used in the Sony hack., Security experts Sergei Shevchenko and Adrian Nish from BAE Systems have collected evidence of the link between the malware used in the recent cyber attacks against the financial institutions and the malicious code used to compromise Sony Pictures systems in 2014., The security duo has demonstrated that the malware used in the attacks against the banks relies on the same wiper component., “The implementation of this function is very unique – it involves complete filling of the file with the random data in order to occupy all associated disk sectors, before the file is deleted. The file-delete function itself is also unique – the file is first renamed into a temporary file with a random name, and that temporary file is also deleted.” states the analysis published by the experts., , Extending their analysis to previous malware samples with similar features, the duo has found one wiper component called msoutc.exe. The wiper component was compiled on Oct. 24, 2014 and first uploaded to the malware database on March 4, 2016, by a US users., The wiper-malware once executed checks if there is another instance of itself running on the infected system to prevent multiple copies of the same malware running on it., If it finds another running instance it runs a script to delete itself from the system., The experts also discovered that the malicious code encrypted its log file with a key:, y@s!11yid60u7f!07ou74n001, exactly the same key used by another destructive malware reported by PwC in 2015 and also described in the Alert TA14-353A issued by the US CERT in December 2014 following the Sony Pictures hack., Shevchenko and Nish confirmed that the script used by the malware to erase itself from the infected machine is the same reported in the analysis published by the Novetta security firm on a malware used by the Lazarus APT Group. That’s the group Novetta blamed for the Sony Pictures attack in its report “Operation Blockbuster.”, “Further details of this same toolkit were disclosed in the ‘Op Blockbuster’ report in February 2016. msoutc.exe matches the description of the ‘Sierra Charlie’ variants in their report. From their analysis this is described as a spreader type of malware, presumably used to gain a foothold on multiple devices within a target environment before launching further actions.” continues the report., Despite the revelations made by Shevchenko and Nish, it is possible that a threat actor reused the code of the Sony Pictures hack to make harder the attribution, but the duo seems to have a different opinion:, “The overlaps between these samples provide strong links for the same coder being behind the recent bank heist cases and a wider known campaign stretching back almost a decade,” they concluded., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Sony Pictures hack, Bangladesh attack)

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Signal is a free and open-source encrypted voice calling and instant messaging application for mobile devices. It runs on both iOS and Android and uses advanced end-to-end encryption protocols to protect communications from prying eyes., Signal has bean developed by Moxie Marlinspike, co-founded of the Open Whisper Systems firm. Today is circulating the news that the mobile app is now available also for desktop users., On Wednesday the company issued a beta version of the Signal Desktop that for now works only as a Chrome app and links only to Android devices., “Signal Desktop is a Chrome app which links with your phone, so all incoming and outgoing messages are displayed consistently on all your devices. Your contacts don’t have to guess where to message you, and when you switch devices the conversation you started will already be there.” states the official announcement from the company., “As always, everything is end-to-end encrypted and painstakingly engineered in order to keep your communication safe – allowing you to send high-quality private group, text, picture, and video messages for free,” , The popular hacker Marlinspike anticipated that Signal Desktop will be able to link also Apple devices “real soon now.”, The source code of the Signal app is free, open source, and available on GitHub, everyone can verify its implementation. Like other projects managed by the Open Whisper Systems, the development activities are supported through donations and grants., , Signal was a long debated, law enforcement claims the impossibility of investigating suspects who use it to protect communications., The FBI director James Comey has publicly expressed its concerns about the abuse of encryption calling to Silicon Valley to help law enforcement figure out the “Going Dark” issue., In the days following the Paris attacks intelligence agents and law enforcement raised the concerns about possible abuse of terrorists of encrypted apps, including Signal., The IT giants always refused to insert a backdoor in their products and authorities are powerless regarding this decision, “We’d like to bring the technical reality in line with people’s expectations and assumptions. People expect and assume that their correspondence is private, and are shocked and outraged when it is inevitably compromised,” explained Marlinspike. “Our hope is to fix that, so that when people feel like they’re corresponding privately, they really are.  Basically, we’d like to make mass surveillance impossible.”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Signal app, encryption)

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Researchers at Security Research Labs (SRL) that the problem also involves major vendors, including HTC, Huawei, and Motorola., In some cases, manufacturers roll out incomplete security patches leaving the devices vulnerable to cyber attacks., “Phones now receive monthly security updates. Installing patches every month is an important first step, but is still insufficient unless all relevant patches are included in those updates. Our large study of Android phones finds that most Android vendors regularly forget to include some patches, leaving parts of the ecosystem exposed to the underlying risks.” reads the blog post published by the SRL team. , The popular SRL experts Karsten Nohl and Jakob Lell presented the findings of the research at the Hack In The Box security conference in Amsterdam, the Netherlands., The experts pointed out that that, even if Google is able to install some security patched over-the-air without vendor interaction, in some cases the fixes affect low-level faulty software components, such as drivers and system libraries, and this process needs the involvement of manufacturers., The experts explained that some Android devices receive only half of the monthly updates, in some cases only from Google and none from the manufacturer., The following table shows the average number of missing Critical and High severity patches before the claimed patch date (Samples – Few: 5-9; Many: 10-49; Lots: 50) Experts clarified that some phones are included multiple times with different firmware releases., , Researchers at SRL explained that the only way to discover what is installed on your device is to take a look at what is included in the monthly fixes from Google verify that most important updates are present on the device., The good news for users is that the failure in patch management is some cases is not enough for an attacker to remotely compromise an Android device and bypass defense mechanisms like Android’s sandbox and ASLR., “Modern operating systems include several security barriers, for example, ASLR and sandboxing, all of which typically need to be breached to remotely hack a phone.” continues the researchers., “Owing to this complexity, a few missing patches are usually not enough for a hacker to remotely compromise an Android device. Instead, multiple bugs need to be chained together for a successful hack.”, I suggest you read the research paper for more details., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Android devices, security patches), ,

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Security experts from the MalwareHunterTeam have spotted a news train of ransomware, called KimcilWare, specifically designed to target Web servers, and more specifically Magento e-commerce platforms., “A new ransomware called KimcilWare has been discovered that appears to be targeting web sites using the Magento eCommerce solution.  It is currently unknown how these sites are being compromised, but victims will have their web site files encrypted using  a Rijndael block cipher and then ransomed for anywhere between $140 USD and $415 USD depending on the variant that infected them.  Unfortunately, at this time there is no way to decrypt the data for free.” states a blog post published on BleepingComputer., The KimcilWare ransomware encrypts the files of the Magento platform, it is easy to recognize because it appends the “.kimcilware” extension at the end of each file. rendering the store useless., “One script will encrypt all data on the web site and append the .kimcilware extension to all encrypted files.  It will also insert a index.html file that displays the ransom note shown above. The KimcilWare variant has a ransom amount of $140 USD. You can see an example of a folder encrypted with the KimcilWare script below. ” continues BleepingComputer., Source BleepingComputer, The malware also uses its index file in order to publish a black page that informs the victims that the server had been encrypted., , “Webserver Encrypted” states the message on the home page “Your webserver files has been encrypted with a unix algorithm encryptor. You must paw 140$ to decrypt your webserver files. Payment via Bitcoin only. For more information contact me at tuyuljahat@hotmail.com.”, Of course, the e-commerce becomes useless once the malware has encrypted all the files., The bad news is that it is still unknown the infection process, but fortunately, the number of infections is still limited., The KimcilWare ransomware was first reported on March 3 by the owner of a Magento store (version 1.9.1.0) on StackExchange. The administrator noticed that only one site on a server with multiple Magento instances was infected., A second case was reported a few days later on Magento’s official forum, from a store owner running version 1.9.2.4. The Magento admin speculates a security issue affecting the Helios Vimeo Video Gallery extension., Another ransomware having similar capabilities was discovered by the security researcher Jack (@Malwareforme). This second malware is called MireWare and uses the same tuyuljahat@hotmail.com email address in its ransom note included in the index page., Jack noticed that MireWare is a variant of the Hidden Tear open source ransomware published by the Turkish security researchers Utku Sen for educational purposes., The Hidden Tear was intentionally designed with security flaws and Bleeping Computer’s researchers Lawrence Abrams who analyzed MireWare confirmed that also this threat is currently broken due to the lack of a valid SSL certificate for its C&C server., Experts believe that the KimcilWare ransomware is in its early stages, but that it might rapidly evolve., If you administrate a Magento store update to the latest Magento store versions and use strong passwords for the admin accounts., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – KimcilWare ransomware, Magento)

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Last month hackers breached the popular adultery website Ashley Madison and leaked online a dump containing data belonging to 37 Million users, including 37 Million of encrypted password., News of the day is that a group of hackers which calls itself CynoSure Prime, has cracked more than 11 Million user hashed passwords just in the past 10 days., The hashed passwords were protected by the cryptographic algorithm Bcrypt, the algorithm implements “salting” of the hashed password to protect them against rainbow table attacks., How does the team crack the hashed passwords?, The team has analyzed the dump leaked online by the attackers and it has discovered a security issued in the login tokens used by the website., The flaw, which included users’ hashed passwords, the source code of the website and executive e-mails, is related to the use of the weak MD5 hashing algorithm., , Basically, the experts reviewed the code and identified a couple of functions that could be exploited to accelerate the cracking of the hashed password., “We identified two functions of interest and upon closer inspection, discovered that we could exploit these functions as helpers in accelerating the cracking of the bcrypt hashes.”, The idea behind the attack is to bruteforce the MD5 tokens of Ashley Madison accounts instead trying to crack the Bcrypt algorithm., Through the two insecure methods of $logkinkey generation observed in two different functions, we were able to gain enormous speed boosts in cracking the bcrypt hashed passwords. Instead of cracking the slow bcrypt hashes directly, which is the hot topic at the moment, we took a more efficient approach and simply attacked the md5(lc($username).”::”.lc($pass)) and md5(lc($username).”::”.lc($pass).”:”.lc($email).”:73@^bhhs&#@&^@8@*$”)  tokens instead. Having cracked the token, we simply then had to case correct it against its bcrypt counterpart. The $loginkey variable seemed to be used for automatic login, but we didn’t spend much time investigating further. It was generated upon user account creation and was re-generated when the user modified their account details including username, password and email address.”, By adopting this strategy, the Password Cracking team obtained 11.2 Million passwords in clear. As explained by the researchers, the process could be applied only for a portion of the accounts because the MD5 hashing algorithm was only introduced on June 2012., The experts estimated that nearly 15 million Ashley Madison accounts could be compromised with this technique., Ashley Madison users urge to change their password now, taking care to change it if they used the same login credentials on other websites., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Password craking, hacking)

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Security experts at Check Point discovered several issues in the popular online battle game Fortnite. One of the flaws is an OAuth account takeover vulnerability that could have allowed a remote attacker to takeover gamer accounts tricking players into clicking a specially crafted link., Remaining flaws discovered by the experts include a cross-site scripting flaw, a SQL injection, and a web application firewall bypass bug., The figures behind Fortnite are impressive, Fortnite has roughly 80 million monthly players, according to EpicFull, the game is responsible for almost half of their $5bn-$8bn estimated company value , Fortnite allows players log in to their accounts using Sign-On (SSO) implemented by third-party applications, such as Facebook, Google, Xbox, and PlayStation accounts., “Due to flaws found in Epic Games’ web infrastructure, though, our researchers were able to identify vulnerabilities with the token authentication process to steal the user’s access token and perform an account takeover. ” reads the analysis published by CheckPoint., The experts demonstrated that was possible to takeover a Fortnite account by chaining a cross-site scripting (XSS) flaw and a malicious redirect vulnerability on the Epic Games’ subdomains. , Researchers initially discovered a vulnerability in the Epic Games login page, accounts.epicgames.com. They noticed that the domain had not been validated and it was susceptible to a malicious redirect. The experts were able to redirect traffic to another Epic Games sub-domain that was not used. This sub-domain was also affected by multiple flaws, including an XSS bug that allowed them to load a JavaScript that would make a secondary request to the SSO provider. The SSO provider (i.e. Facebook or Google) in turn, resends the authentication token. By exploiting the redirect issue, the token sent by the SSO provider is hijacked to the sub-domain under the control of the attackers instead of the login page. The researchers used an injected JavaScript code to capture the token., “For the attack to be successful, all a victim needs to do is click on the malicious phishing link the attacker sends them. To increase the likelihood of a potential victim clicking on this link, for example, it could be sent with an enticement promising free game credits. Once clicked, with no need even for the user to enter any login credentials, their Fortnite authentication token would immediately be captured by the attacker. ” continues the analysis published by the experts., For the attack to be successful, all a victim needs to do is click on the malicious phishing link the attacker sends them. To increase the likelihood of a potential victim clicking on this link, for example, it could be sent with an enticement promising free game credits. Once clicked, with no need even for the user to enter any login credentials, their Fortnite authentication token would immediately be captured by the attacker., Once obtained the token, an attacker could impersonate the victim and act on his behalf (access personal information, buy more in-game currency at the user’s expense, listen in on and record conversations taking place during game play)., “Users could well see huge purchases of in-game currency made on their credit cards with the attacker funneling that virtual currency to be sold for cash in the real world,” continues Check Point., “After all, as mentioned above we have already seen similar scams operating on the back of Fortnite popularity.”, Checkpoint published a video PoC of the attack:, Check Point reported the flaws to Epic Games that fixed them in mid-December., Full technical analysis of the flaws is available on Check Point Research. , Pierluigi Paganini, (SecurityAffairs – hacking, Fortnite)

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Adobe on Tuesday has released July Patch Tuesday security updates that addressed more than 100 flaws in its products, including 105 vulnerabilities in Acrobat and Reader, two in Flash Player, three in Experience Manager, and three in Connect., Windows and macOS versions of Adobe Acrobat and Reader were affected by tens of critical memory corruption bugs that could be exploited by an attacker for remote code execution. The list of flaws includes double-free, heap overflow, use-after-free, out-of-bounds write, type confusion, untrusted pointer dereference, and buffer error vulnerabilities., “Adobe has released security updates for Adobe Acrobat and Reader for Windows and macOS. These updates address critical and important vulnerabilities.  Successful exploitation could lead to arbitrary code execution in the context of the current user.” reads the security advisory published by Adobe., The July Patch Tuesday security updates also addressed a critical privilege escalation and tens of important out-of-bounds read vulnerabilities., Many flaws fixed by Adobe were reported to the company through the Trend Micro’s Zero-Day Initiative (ZDI)., “Adobe has released security updates for Adobe Flash Player for Windows, macOS, Linux and Chrome OS. These updates address critical vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash Player 30.0.0.113 and earlier versions.  Successful exploitation could lead to arbitrary code execution in the context of the current user.” reads the advisory published by Adobe for Flash Player., , Adobe addressed three server-side request forgery (SSRF) vulnerabilities in Experience Manager that can lead to the exposure of sensitive information, fix authentication bypass and insecure library loading flaws in Adobe Connect. None of the flaws in Experience Manager and Adobe Connect was rated as critical., The good news for the Adobe customers is that the company is not aware of any attack in the wild that exploited one of the flaws addressed with the July Patch Tuesday security updates., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – July Patch Tuesday security updates,  hacking)

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A couple of years ago I published a post on Stingray Technology trying to explain how governments track cellular devices., A StingRay is an IMSI-catcher (International Mobile Subscriber Identity) designed and commercialized by the Harris Corporation. At the time of the article, the cellular surveillance system was costing as much as $400,000 in the basic configuration, and its price varied with add-ons ordered by the agency., The IMSI-catcher is a surveillance solution used by military and intelligence agencies for telephone eavesdropping. It allows for intercepting mobile phone traffic and tracking movements of mobile phone users. Essentially, an IMSI catcher operates as a bogus mobile cell tower that sits between the target mobile phone and the service provider’s real towers. The IMSI catcher runs a Man In the Middle (MITM) attack that could not be detected by the users without using specific products that secure communication on mobile devices., The use of the IMSI-catcher is raising a heated debate in the United States because devices like StingRay and other similar cellphone tracking solutions are being widely adopted by law enforcement agencies across the country., StingRay allows law enforcement to intercept calls and Internet traffic, send fake texts, inject malware on a mobile device, and to locate the targets., Now Curtis Waltman from Motherboard published an interesting blog post which provided further details on the cost of the StingRay phone surveillance tool., Waltman published data provided by the Rochester Police Department in New York that responded to the Cell Site Simulator Census, an initiative that census the cellphone surveillance equipment use and policy., “A mapping of police departments and agencies nationwide that are using IMSI catcher (Stingray) technology. Included in this mapping is a focus on the policies, procedure and contractual agreements that department’s are formulating as they adopt the controversial surveillance device.” states the description for the census., Data shared by Motherboard are very interesting and provides useful insights about their surveillance systems, their components, and prices. It a “completely unredacted quote list of Harris Corporation products”., Documents shared by the Rochester Police Department show clearly how Harris sells the Stingray equipment to law enforcement., According to the documents, devices are often sold in packages, like the StingRay II Vehicular System that is offered for sale with devices (i.e. Three different kinds of Harris’ Harpoon signal amplifiers) that allow its use for a patrol vehicle., How much cost a StingRay II Vehicular System?, The package includes a laptop, three kinds of software for accessing different types of cellular networks, and an AmberJack cellphone tracker goes for a grand total of $148,000., “The Amberjack is an important accessory for the surveillance systems like Stingray, Gossamer, and Kingfish. It is a direction-finding system antenna that is used for cellular device tracking. It costs nearly $35,015″ I wrote in a blog post published early this year., The prices for the AmberJack is quite similar I published early this year., , According to documents published by Motherboard, The KingFish package, Harris Corporations smaller, mobile version of the StingRay, is sold for $157,000., The single KingFish device is not so expensive as I have reported early this year., “Kingfish is a surveillance transceiver that is used by law enforcement and intelligence agencies to track cellular devices and exfiltrate information from mobile devices over a targeted area. It could be concealed in a briefcase and allows gathering of unique identity codes and shows connections between phones and numbers being dialed. Its cost is slightly higher than $25,000.” , , The Rochester PD expressed its interest for the entire KingFish, except the laptop., , The company is including in the surveillance packages also training activities that go for $12,000., “These packages also come with the option of a training package, costing $12,000, and a one year maintenance package that will cost $169,000 if your department decided to splurge for the whole line of Harris’ products (this was 2011 so the 4G network cell site simulator the HailStorm wasn’t released yet.) Training isn’t included interestingly enough, so police departments are more or less forced to pay for training on these complicated and powerful devices.” states the post published by Motherboard., The note at the end of the document provides also further details of the surveillance technology, including the specifications required to use the equipment in a real scenario., “The StingRay and Kingfish can be run out of a car’s cigarette lighter, while the StingRay II requires a 2000W power inverter. That is hungrier for power than almost any household appliance, save a dryer or oven.” continues the post., If you are interested in StingRay surveillance technology, give a look at the article “StingRay Technology: How Government Tracks Cellular Devices”, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – Surveillance, Law enforcement) 

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Googlebots crawl websites are the software used to index and rank the content of websites for the popular search engine. It’s not a mystery that the visits of Googlebots are not considered a possible indicator for activities related to cyber threats, for this reason principal defensive solutions don’t block this kind of traffic., Anyway cyber criminals are aware that Googlebots traffic is considered harmless, so they start using spoofed Googlebots to launch layer-7 (application-layer) distributed denial of service attacks (DDoS). Fake Googlebots could be also used for site scraping and spam campaigns., Researchers at security firm Incapsula have identified an increase in the exploitation of fake Googlebot visits to hit a targeted website with malicious traffic, it has been estimated that for every 25 Googlebot visits, companies are likely to be visited by a fake one. The experts observed over 400 million search engine visits to 10,000 sites, a total amount of nearly 2.19 billion page crawls over a 30 day period. Information about fake Googlebots comes from inspection of more than 50 million Googlebot impostor visits., Nearly the 25% of  spoofed Googlebots is used by hackers to run DDoS attacks, according to expert to Igal Zeifman, which explained that Incapsula’s technology protects its customers by identifying malicious Googlebots because Google crawlers come from a pre-determined IP address range., “Hackers are looking for a loophole. The more advanced mitigation tools are able to identify Googlebots, which is done by a cross-verification of IP addresses. But this also shows a low level of understanding by hackers of how modern DDoS protection works. They assume you can’t do IP cross verification.” said Zeifman., Application-layer attacks are today the most insidious DDoS attacks due to frequency and the volume of malicious traffic they generate, these attacks have grown dramatically in the last months as attackers exploit capabilities of huge botnets to overwhelm victim’s resources., “You don’t have to create a big flood to generate 5,000 visits per second,”“It’s easy to generate 5,000 per second. Layer 7 attacks are more common for sure than Layer 3 or 4 events. The reason is that it’s easier to execute and more dangerous, even in low volumes.”  Zeifman said. , Application-layer DDoS Attacks consume less bandwidth and are less noisy respect the volumetric attacks, however, they can have a dramatic impact to targeted services., , Typically website designers tend to over-provision for the number of visitors per interval of time, but an attacker could be able produce malicious traffic exploiting fake Googlebots., , Attackers can use a mixed attack strategy combining application-layer DDoS attacks to network-layerDDoS simultaneously, in this case the power of the attack could be very dangerous for victmins., Let’s close with a few interesting key findings from the study conducted by Incapsula processing over 210 million Googlebot sessions:, Pierluigi Paganini, Security Affairs –  (fake Googlebots, DDoS)

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What is the underground economy? Put simply, the underground economy is a collection of forums, chat rooms and custom-made websites that are all designed to facilitate, streamline and industrialize cybercrime. It’s within these communities that cybercriminals gather to trade tools, services and victims’ credentials., What’s their motivation? Making money, of course. Let’s take a look at how cybercriminals turn our personal information into cash, and how much that information is worth., The cashout, Identity theft “operations” are made up of two major parts:, There are various ways to obtain credentials. Some options are Phishing attacks, Trojan Horses and hacking into an online merchants’ databases. Credentials can also be obtained through real-world activities like credit card skimming or infecting point-of-sale devices with malware., The cashout method is based on the type of credential, which in turn is dictated by the way it was collected. If the credential is what hackers call a “dump” (the raw information on the magnetic strip), which was collected through real-world skimming, the cashout is performed by encoding the “dump” data onto a fake credit card and physically going to a store to make purchases. This is also known as carding. If the credential is associated with an online banking service, obtained either by Phishing or a Trojan horse, the cashout involves setting up a “mule account” that accepts a fraudulent money transfer from the compromised account., The value of our personal information, Identity thieves operate with one thing in mind, and that is to make money. Any account type that can be cashed out in order to rake in a profit for the fraudster is a legitimate target. As hackers are always on the lookout to generate new means of income, demand may rise in the underground for new accounts and new credentials over time, which puts users at a constant risk of being targeted., , About the Author Omri Toppol has been working with hi-tech startups for over 15 years. He is an entrepreneur with an extensive technical background and a passion for mobile., About LogDog The LogDog anti-hacking and privacy tool protects the most popular online account types including Gmail, Facebook, and Dropbox by detecting unusual access activity and alerting users so they can take control of their accounts before hackers do., Edited by Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Underground market, hackers)

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It is difficult to understand right now how true the news, but according to rumors circulating in the Internet the popular hacking collective Lizard Squad, responsible for the attacks against Sony PSN, XBox live and Tor network,  is working on a PlayStation 4 Jailbreak that could be released within the year., The availability of a new PlayStation 4 Jailbreak will allow gamers to Play Pirated Games And Go Online without PS Plus, if confirmed the circumstance indicates that members of the hacking group could include high profile experts with a deep knowledge of gaming environment., Another possibility is that Lizard Squad business for hacking services is proficuous and allowed the team to outsource the development of a PlayStation 4 Jailbreak to other hackers. Let’s remember that Lizard Squad was offering their DDoS attack service Lizard Stresser, a powerful tool that uses thousands of hacked home Internet routers to run the attack by drawing on Internet bandwidth from these devices worldwide., , “PS4 Jailbreak In Development And Will Be Available This 2015 Says Lizard Squad; Sony PlayStation 4 Hack Allegedly Allows Users To Play Pirated Games And Go Online Without PS Plus” states Kdramastars speculating that Lizard Squad have allegedly successfully developed the PlayStation 4 Jailbreack and now is going to public release it., According to Kdramastars, during the Lizard Squads DDoS attacks in the Christmas holidays, Cyberland confirmed that the hacking crew was reportedly able to exploit a security vulnerability in the latest version of firmware running on the PlayStation 4 console (ver. 2.03).  The alleged vulnerability could be exploited by hackers to run their arbitrary code., “It was then revealed by a member of the Lizard Squad on 4Chan that they chip they used to find the security flaw in the PS4 would be available for everyone to try this 2015. The member also said that they have included their Jailbreak hack method in the chip that allegedly allows the user to play pirated games and to go online without the need for PS Plus. A side effect of this hack allegedly allows the user update their games via PSN and be able to play cracked DLC content for a specific game.” reports Kdramastars., According to Cyberland, Lizard Squad team has designed the PlayStation 4 Jailbreak starting from the code of the previous PS4 jailbreak hack made by “Reckz0r”. In November 2013, The security expert Graham Cluley reported that Reckz0r has published a tutorial to to jailbreak the new PlayStation 4 and play pirated games. Reckz0r used the FreeBSD distro known as the Orbis., Let’s wait the comment from Lizard Squad, but personally I have many doubts about the events … but Lizard Squad has already surprised us with their capabilities., Stay Tuned …, Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – PlayStation 4 Jailbreak, hacking)

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Israeli Defense is another illustrious victim of spear phishing attack, just on Friday Microsoft suffered a similar attack and attackers breached the email accounts of its staff accessing to documents on law enforcement inquiries. Reuters agency reported that hackers penetrated into an Israeli defense ministry computer using a malicious email as a vector, according first via revelation on the attack it has been used an email with a malicious attachment that looked like it had been sent by the country’s Shin Bet secret security service., Aviv Raff, chief technology officer at Seculert, confirmed that the attackers have penetrated into the network of Israeli Defense accessing to 15 computers, one of them managed by the Israel’s Civil Administration that monitors Palestinians in Israeli-occupied territory. Be aware the Civil Administration is a unit of Israel’s defense ministry that control the passage of goods between Israel and the West Bank and Gaza Strip, it is clear that the information contained in the infected system represents a precious target for someone who intend to examine what and who is authorized to pass through the territories contested by Israelis and Palestinians., The office also manages entry permits to Palestinians who work in Israel, and this could be another motivation for the attack. The earliest evidence would seem to confirm that the attack was conducted by Palestinians hackers because there are many similarities with a precedent attack against Israeli systems conduced more than a year ago from a server in the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip., In time I’m writing Israeli Defense officials haven’t commented the discovery:, “We are not commenting on it, we don’t respond to such reports,” said one of the officials, Guy Inbar, a spokesman for the Civil Administration., Let me add that this is not a sufficient proof, we all know how much complicated is the attribution for an attack in the cyberspace, and many political actors could be interested to fuel the crisis between the two populations. Anyway security experts recognized the same hand behind the latest attack originated from a server in the US, the tactics adopted by hackers is identical and there are many similarities in the code used., According Securlet,  the attackers have used “Xtreme RAT“, back in November 2012 security experts from Norwegian antivirus and security firm Norman ASA  have discovered a cyber espionage campaign against Israeli institutions and law enforcement, forcing the government to shut down Internet access for its police and prohibiting the use of memory sticks and mobile storage to avoid the diffusion of the malicious agent., Raff declined to identify the other 14 systems that were compromised, Reuters reported that an anonymous Israeli source said these included companies involved in supplying Israeli defense infrastructure., If the news is confirmed, it is very concerning, let’s consider that the attack discovered could be just a first part of large operation that is targeting subcontractors to hit Israeli, it is very common that hackers target subcontractors to hit big enterprises and government offices due to the poor level of security they often offer., Aviv Raff revealed that the 15 computers were controlled by the hackers for several days after the January 15, when the malicious email is sent with an attachment about ex- Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon who had just died., The cyber espionage campaign was driven by a spamming activity of malicious emails that claim to be sent Benny Gantz, Commander-in-Chief of the Israel Defense Forces, and reporting on the subject the news of an IDF strike against opponents in the Gaza Strip. The message text anticipates the content of the attached .zip file that claims to contain reports and photos of the attack. According Trend Micro firm the initial target of that attack was the Israeli Customs agency., ,  , In fact the file attached to the email hides a known malware, the XtremeRat trojan, which was largely used in surveillance campaigns by many regimes such as Syrian government.  Xtreme Rat is a malware that belongs to the Remote Access Tool category really simple to retrieve online at a low price (Full version Price: €100 EUR). The malware is continuously improved, recent versions are Windows 8 compatible and have included the capabilities for audio and video capture and for password stealing from common browsers., Securlert hasn’t discovered what the hackers did after accessing to the system, it is not clear if the attackers have stolen some document or they have tried to manipulate some data., “All we know is at least one computer at the Civil Administration was in control of the attackers; what they did we don’t know.” said Raff said. , The incident is just the tip of the iceberg, has confirmed by media hacking activity in the Middle East is very intense, foreign governments and group of hacktivists like Anonymous have targeted the military, government offices, private companies and critical infrastructure., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  Israeli Defense, hacking)

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The Polish Computer Emergency Response Team has documented a series of cyber attacks observed in Poland involved cybercriminals hacking into home routers and changing their DNS settings so they can conduct MITM attacks on online banking connection. The techniques could be used to target also users from other countries and exploits several vulnerabilities in home routers, with this method the attackers configured routers to use a DNS server under their control to respond with rogue IP addresses to DNS queries for the domain names they have targeted., “The attack is possible due to several vulnerabilities in home routers that make DNS configuration susceptible to unauthorized remote modifications,”“In the resulting man-in-the-middle attack content of several e-banking websites was altered to include JavaScript injects that tricked users into giving up their usernames, passwords and TANs transaction authentication numbers. Effectively, money is stolen from users’ bank accounts.” reported the Polish CERT in a blog post. , The hackers used a DNS redirection to hijack users of five Polish banks to a server that acted as a proxy and allowed attackers to perform man-in-the-middle and manipulate the traffic between users and online banking websites., To by-pass HTTPS hackers adopted the SSL stripping, the attackers prevented the SSL connection from being established between victims and bank services, but kept the connection between the user and malicious proxy unencrypted., Note that during the attack the browser indicator used to inform users that they are using a secure SSL connection is missed, so attacker to deceive victims rewrote the URLs in their browser’s address bar adding “ssl-.” prefix before the domain name., , According Polish IT security outfit Niebezpiecznik.pl, the attackers probably exploited a flaw in the router firmware ZyNOS router firmware created by ZyXEL Communications and used in many router models from other manufacturers including TP-Link, ZTE, D-Link and AirLive.  , The attackers exploited the vulnerability in home routers to download a configuration file without authentication, the file allows the extraction of the password for the administrative interface of the device., Recently security experts have found numerous flaws that allow attackers to modify home routers setting, the alert provided by the CERT Polska is related to a first case of an attack on a large scale., , “There are many ways to modify DNS entries in home routers, some of them known for years,” “It is actually surprising that it’s the first time we see it exploited for profit on a mass scale.” said Przemyslaw Jaroszewski, the head of incident response at CERT Polska., Jaroszewski believes that DNS attacks like the one described will be used against online banking users in other countries in the future. , Follow a few suggestions to protect you from DNS hacking on your home router:, “In order to protect a home routers from the attack, any type of remote administration access from the Internet should be disabled,” “Default usernames and passwords should be changed to unique ones, not revealed publicly.” the Polish CERT reported., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  DNS Hacking, home routers)

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We all recognize the importance of the Tor network, an important instrument to protect users’ anonymity and avoid censorship. Today I desire to present you an interesting initiative launched by Tor passionates, the TorWorld, belonging to the CryptoWorld Foundation., The CryptoWorld Foundation groups several organizations that provide anonymity services. The TorWorld aims to build a community area for those people that desire to set up either a Tor Relay or a Tor Exit node., According to Bleepingcomputer.com, the project born out of a real necessity:, “The idea for ‘TorWorld’ came about four months ago,” Beard, one of TorWorld’s founding members told Bleeping Computer., “We originally ran a few Guard Relays for a little over a year privately,” Beard continued. “After we had an issue with our Guard nodes being removed by our ISP at the time because of a misunderstanding, we thought about possibly setting up a service dedicated to running Tor nodes, and educating people on Tor.”, “Eventually we started that idea, and at first we looked for automation scripts to make it easier for us to deploy multiple Tor servers in a fast and dynamic way,” Beard said. “To our surprise, we couldn’t find a single script.”, The team at the TorWorld published scripts simplify the set up of a Tor node, including Bash scripts for quickly deploying Tor guard (entry) nodes, Tor relay (middle) servers, Tor bridges (unlisted relays), and Tor exit nodes., , The project is ambitious and we can only wish the team great success, representatives from the TorWorld confirmed that the intention of the team to become a hosting provider for Tor servers and they are thinking to a sort of Tor-as-a-Service (TaaS)., Beard explained that the final goal it to allow users to create a Tor nodes on top of TorWorld’s server infrastructure in a single click thanks to a set of open-sourced Bash scripts., This is an important step, unfortunately, today the set up of a Tor node is not a simple operation for everyone despite it is very well documented on the official Tor Project website., “We’ll be adding more dynamic customization options for the FastRelay, and FastExit scripts,” Beard added., TorWorld will also offer a platform to manage abuse notices for Tor servers operated by its users. It will be a paid service because a TorWorld team will handle their abuse notifications., We all know that darknets represent a facilitator and aggregator for cyber criminal communities and the Tor network is one of the most popular anonymizing netwotk in the criminal underground., The TorWorld will not allow criminal uses of its infrastructure., Currently, there is no certainty about when and how the TorWorld TaaS service will be ready, anyway I’ll monitor its progress with a great interest and admiration., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs – TorWorld, Tor)

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We discussed several times about the opportunity to hack medical devices and the needs of security by design for these objects. In 2012 the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) published a report that highlighted the necessity to secure medical devices such as implantable cardioverter defibrillators or insulin pumps. The recommendation was directed to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and invited it to approach the problem seriously considering the risks of, News of the day is that a specific versions of Hospira’s Lifecare PCA3 Drug Infusion pumps are affected by a number of vulnerabilities that could be exploited by attackers remotely to completely take over the devices., , The researcher that discovered the vulnerabilities was disconcerted by the possible implication for the security of the patient., In October 2014, the US  ICS-CERT was assessing several products, including an infusion pump from Hospira Inc and implantable heart devices commercialized by Medtronic Inc and St Jude Medical Inc. Rumors referred that in one case was involved an alleged vulnerability in a type of infusion pump discovered by the security expert Billy Rios who declined to provide the name of the manufacturer., “Two people familiar with his research said the manufacturer was Hospira.” states the Reuters in a blog post., The vulnerability discovered by the researcher recently could be exploited to block the device, change the drug library they’re affiliated with, run commands and update its software., “I would personally be very concerned if this device was being attached to me,” wrote Jeremy Richards, a Software Security Engineer at the SAINT Corporation who discovered the vulnerabilities. “It is not only susceptible to attack, it is so poorly programmed it can be rendered a useless brick with a single typo.”, The expert discovered serious security issues in the pumps, the medical devices have the factory IP address 192.168.0.100, that could be used by an attacker to extract wireless encryption keys, which are stored in plain text on the medical device. If an attacker had physical access to the device, they could not only gain access to the keys and compromise the pump, but by extension, any drug pumps in the hospital connected to the same WiFi., “The WPA keys for the ‘super secure’ hospital wireless network sit on these machines unencrypted and plain text.  They are stored in ‘/ram/mnt/jffs2/config’ and can be accessed over Telnet and FTP.  Since these pumps are designed to stay attached to patients local access needs to be considered.  These devices are configured to exist on a medical device network.  This also needs to be considered by hospitals selling their old equipment.” Richards added., The problems are not limited to the single pump, if an attacker had physical access to the device, he can take over the pump and any other drug pumps in the hospital connected to its WiFi., Richards explained that a local physical attack could be easily carried out is a few seconds through the ethernet port by using a device like the Raspberry Pi. “This is a game-over vulnerability that allows an attacker with physical access to the device complete control over their own device,” Richards wrote., “This is a game-over vulnerability that allows an attacker with physical access to the device complete control over their own device,” Richards wrote., One of the vulnerabilities was coded as CVE-2015-3459, it is related to the lack of authentication for Telnet sessions for pumps running SW version 412. An attacker exploiting the flaw can remotely gain root privileges via TCP port 23., “Hospira Lifecare PCA infusion pump running “SW ver 412” does not require authentication for Telnet sessions, which allows remote attackers to gain root privileges via TCP port 23.” states the description proposed for the flaw in the National Vulnerability Database., There are many other security issues related to the medical devices, ill-intentioned could retrieve information related to hard coded accounts were found stored on the device. Despite this information are hashed it is quite easy to crack them by using bruteforce attacks,, Attackers can also glean information related to hard coded local accounts and on top of that, a server, AppWeb, that runs in tandem with the device suffers from its own separate vulnerabilities as well., The issue is complicated by the fact that even if there was authentication present on the Telnet port, it wouldn’t help, since there are several web services, exposed CGIs “linkparams” and “xmmucgi,” that don’t require authentication which an attacker could exploit to “change the drug library, update software and run commands.”, Richards also highlighed the presence of a vulnerable web server, AppWeb server running v1.0.2, and many other web services exposed CGIs “linkparams” and “xmmucgi,” that don’t require authentication and that could be easily hacked., Richards reported the issued to manufacturer Hospira, but it apparently has no plans to fix the issue., Pierluigi Paganini, (Security Affairs –  medical pumps, hacking)