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This Creepy App Captures Users' Private Moment Photos and Blackmails for Money | https://thehackernews.com/2015/09/hacker-blackmail.html | How difficult is for hackers to take over your personal photographs?
They just need to trick you to download an app, or may be a Porn app.
Yes, if you are one of those who can't resist watching porn then you could be an easy target for hackers who are distributing ransomware via malicious pornography app to run you out of your money.
A pornography application for Android called Adult Player that promises free pornographic videos has been caught taking photographs of users and then extorting them for ransom (Cyber Extortion).
Once installed, Adult Player gains administrator access to the victim's device, which then allows it to load malicious ransomware files.
When Hackers Turn to Blackmail: Demands $500 Ransom
When a user opens the app, Adult Player secretly takes photos of the user with the help of front-facing camera and then demands a $500 (£330) ransom in order to restore the device access and delete all photos stored on attackers server.
Before demanding ransom, the ransomware locks the victim's device to prevent access from regular use and displays a warning message until the payment is received through PayPal.
According to the researchers from the security firm Zscaler, which uncovered the creepy nature of Adult Player, the app isn't available on the official Google Play Store and is distributed through adult websites.
How to Get Rid of this Android Ransomware?
Adult Player takes complete control of your device using the administrator privileges that you grant the app before installing, therefore restarting your device won't cause the ransom page requesting $500 to disappear.
However, you can uninstall Adult Player by following these simple steps:
Boot your device into "Safe Mode," as it boots your device with default settings without running any third-party applications and allowing users to delete malicious software.
To uninstall the ransomware from your device, you need to first remove administrator privilege by going to Settings –> Security –> Device Administrator and then select ransomware app and deactivate it.
Once this is done, you can again go to Settings –> Apps –> Uninstall ransomware app.
The bottom line:
To avoid falling a victim to malicious apps like Adult Player, Android users are again reminded:
Don't install apps from outside of the Google Play Store
Don't grant administrator privileges to apps unless you truly trust them
Read More:
'Tox' Offers Free build-your-own Ransomware Malware Toolkit
Free Ransomware Decryption and Malware Removal ToolKit
| Malware |
TrickBot Botnet Found Deploying A New Ransomware Called Diavol | https://thehackernews.com/2021/07/trickbot-botnet-found-deploying-new.html | Threat actors behind the infamous TrickBot malware have been linked to a new ransomware strain named "Diavol," according to the latest research.
Diavol and Conti ransomware payloads were deployed on different systems in a case of an unsuccessful attack targeting one of its customers earlier this month, researchers from Fortinet's FortiGuard Labs said last week.
TrickBot, a banking Trojan first detected in 2016, has been traditionally a Windows-based crimeware solution, employing different modules to perform a wide range of malicious activities on target networks, including credential theft and conduct ransomware attacks.
Despite efforts by law enforcement to neutralize the bot network, the ever-evolving malware has proven to be a resilient threat, what with the Russia-based operators — dubbed "Wizard Spider" — quickly adapting new tools to carry out further attacks.
Diavol is said to have been deployed in the wild in one incident to date. The source of intrusion remains unknown as yet. What's clear, though, is that the payload's source code shares similarities with that of Conti, even as its ransom note has been found to reuse some language from Egregor ransomware.
"As part of a rather unique encryption procedure, Diavol operates using user-mode Asynchronous Procedure Calls (APCs) without a symmetric encryption algorithm," the researchers said. "Usually, ransomware authors aim to complete the encryption operation in the shortest amount of time. Asymmetric encryption algorithms are not the obvious choice as they [are] significantly slower than symmetric algorithms."
Another aspect of the ransomware that stands out is its reliance on an anti-analysis technique to obfuscate its code in the form of bitmap images, from where the routines are loaded into a buffer with execute permissions.
Prior to locking files and changing the desktop wallpaper with a ransom message, some of the major functions carried out by Diavol include registering the victim device with a remote server, terminating running processes, finding local drives and files in the system to encrypt, and preventing recovery by deleting shadow copies.
Wizard Spider's nascent ransomware effort also coincides with "new developments to the TrickBot webinject module," as detailed by Kryptos Logic Threat Intelligence team, indicating that the financially motivated cybercrime group is still actively retooling its malware arsenal.
"TrickBot has brought back their bank fraud module, which has been updated to support Zeus-style webinjects," cybersecurity researcher Marcus Hutchins tweeted. "This could suggest they are resuming their bank fraud operation, and plan to expand access to those unfamiliar with their internal webinject format."
| Malware |
Putin: Hackers Are Like Artists, Who Wake Up In A Good Mood & Start Painting | https://thehackernews.com/2017/06/putin-russian-hackers.html | Just control your laughter, while reading this article. I insist.
Talking to international media at the St Petersburg Economic Forum on Thursday, Russian President Vladimir Putin made a number of statement surrounding alleged Russia's involvement in hacking.
If you are not aware, Russia has been the focus of the U.S. investigations for its purported role in interfering with the 2016 US presidential election, which saw several major hacks, including Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign emails.
The US authorities and intelligence community concluded in January that Mr. Putin had personally directed cyber attacks against Democrats and the dissemination of false information in order to influence US election and help Mr. Trump win the election.
Putin: Russia Has Never Been Involved in Hacking
Today Mr. Putin denied all the allegations of Russian engagement in the U.S. election hacking, saying that the Russian state had never been involved in hacking.
I know you would take some time even to digest this statement, but trust me this one is nothing. You would start laughing after reading his other comments mentioned in this article.
"We don't engage in that at the state level," Mr. Putin said, according to the Associated Press.
"I'm deeply convinced that no hackers can radically influence another country's election campaign," Mr. Putin added. "No hackers can influence election campaigns in any country of Europe, Asia or America."
So, Putin, who limits the freedom of the press and is accused of killing political opponents and journalists to prevent them from reporting on topics that can anger the Kremlin, is saying that "no information will change the minds of the people or influence the outcome" of the election.
Putin: Patriotic Hackers May Have Targeted U.S. Election
Besides insisting that the Russian government has no involvement in such cyber attacks, Mr. Putin said that some individual "patriotic" hackers who love their country could mount such attacks against those who "speak negatively about" their country.
"If they are patriotically minded, they start making their contributions – which are right, from their point of view – to fight against those who say bad things about Russia," Mr. Putin said.
Is he just encouraging hackers to conduct cyber attacks against rival nations by making such comments?
As for his dealings with US President Donald Trump, Mr. Putin also said Moscow would wait for the current political storm in the United States to settle down before he attempts to forge constructive relations with Mr. Trump, whom he praised for being "straightforward" with "fresh set of eyes."
Putin: Hackers are Like Artists, Who Wake Up and Start Painting!
"Hackers are free people, just like artists who wake up in the morning in a good mood and start painting," Mr. Putin said.
"The hackers are the same, they would wake up, read about something going on in interstate relations and if they have patriotic leanings, they may try to add their contribution to the fight against those who speak badly about Russia."
So, Mr. Putin wants to say that hackers can contribute to their nation by attacking their country's rivals. WOW!
Describing hackers as free-spirited artists acting according to their moods, Mr. Putin said cyber attacks on DNC and Hillary Clinton presidential campaign could be made to look like they had come from Russia when they hadn't actually.
"I can imagine that some do it deliberately, staging a chain of attacks in such a way as to cast Russia as the origin of such an attack," Mr. Putin added. "Modern technologies allow that to be done quite easily."
Mr. Putin's remarks are similar to the ones from Mr. Trump, who has previously dismissed accusations of Russian involvement in the DNC hack and said that the hacks could be by "somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds."
While Mr. Putin may deny the hacking allegations, which he believes are "not based on facts," many cyber security and espionage experts have discovered that Russia has in the past "outsourced" its hacking efforts to state-sponsored criminal gangs.
| Cyber_Attack |
Hackers Found Using A New Code Injection Technique to Evade Detection | https://thehackernews.com/2018/04/early-bird-code-injection.html | 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.
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.
| Malware |
Emerging Ransomware Targets Dozens of Businesses Worldwide | https://thehackernews.com/2021/06/emerging-ransomware-targets-dozens-of.html | An emerging ransomware strain in the threat landscape claims to have breached 30 organizations in just four months since it went operational by riding on the coattails of a notorious ransomware syndicate.
First observed in February 2021, "Prometheus" is an offshoot of another well-known ransomware variant called Thanos, which was previously deployed against state-run organizations in the Middle East and North Africa last year.
The affected entities are believed to be government, financial services, manufacturing, logistics, consulting, agriculture, healthcare services, insurance agencies, energy and law firms in the U.S., U.K., and a dozen more countries in Asia, Europe, the Middle East, and South America, according to new research published by Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 threat intelligence team.
Like other ransomware gangs, Prometheus takes advantage of double-extortion tactics and hosts a dark web leak site, where it names and shames new victims and makes stolen data available for purchase, while managing to inject a veneer of professionalism into its criminal activities.
"Prometheus runs like a professional enterprise," Doel Santos, Unit 42 threat intelligence analyst, said. "It refers to its victims as 'customers,' communicates with them using a customer service ticketing system that warns them when payment deadlines are approaching and even uses a clock to count down the hours, minutes and seconds to a payment deadline."
However, only four of those 30 affected organizations opted to pay ransoms to date, the cybersecurity firm's analysis revealed, including a Peruvian agricultural company, a Brazilian healthcare services provider, and two transportation and logistics organizations in Austria and Singapore.
It's worth noting that despite Prometheus' strong links to Thanos, the gang professes to be a "group of REvil," one of the most prolific and infamous ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) cartels in recent years, which the researchers speculate could be an attempt to deflect attention from Thanos or a deliberate ploy to trick victims into paying up by piggybacking on an established operation.
While the ransomware's intrusion route remains unclear as yet, it's expected that the group purchased access to target networks or staged spear-phishing and brute-force attacks to gain initial access. Following a successful compromise, the Prometheus modus operandi involves terminating backup and security software-related processes on the system to lock the files behind encryption barriers.
"The Prometheus ransomware operators generate a unique payload per victim, which is used for their negotiation site to recover files," Santos said, adding the ransom demand ranges anywhere between $6,000 and $100,000 depending on the victim organization, a price that gets doubled if the victim fails to pay up within the designated time period.
The development also comes as cybercrime groups are increasingly targeting SonicWall devices to breach corporate networks and deploy ransomware. A report published by CrowdStrike this week found evidence of remote access vulnerabilities (CVE-2019-7481) in SonicWall SRA 4600 VPN appliances being exploited as an initial access vector for ransomware attacks targeting organizations worldwide.
| Malware |
Researcher Publishes 10 Million Usernames and Passwords from Data Breaches | https://thehackernews.com/2015/02/researcher-publishes-10-million_10.html | A security researcher has publicly released a set of 10 Million usernames and passwords, which he collected from multiple data breaches over the last decade for the purpose of his research.
These 10 million usernames and passwords are collective of leaked database dumps those were already available publicly on the Internet. However, Mark Burnett, a well-known security consultant who has developed a specialty collecting and researching passwords leaked online, marked his decision to publish the password dump as legally risky, but necessary to help security researchers.
WHY IS THE RESEARCHER WILLING TO SHARE PASSWORDS ?
The researcher says the released set of passwords and usernames is like a sample data, which is important for other researchers to analyze and provide great insight into user behavior and is valuable for encouraging password security.
Also, the researcher was frequently receiving lots of requests from students and other security researchers to submit a copy of his password research data for their own analysis.
WHAT PANICS HIM OF SHARING HIS RESEARCH ?
At the time, he typically decline to share the passwords because he was worried that if he do so, it might harm him legally given the recent five-year sentence handed to former Anonymous activist and journalist Barrett Brown, for sharing the hyperlink to an IRC (Internet Relay Chat) channel where Anonymous members were distributing stolen information from the hack.
However, at the same time, Burnett wanted to share his password research data with the world in order to study the way people choose pass phrases.
"I think this is completely absurd that I have to write an entire article justifying the release of this data out of fear of prosecution or legal harassment," he wrote in his blog post published Monday. "I had wanted to write an article about the data itself but I will have to do that later because I had to write this lame thing trying to convince the FBI not to raid me."
FROM WHERE DID THE CREDENTIALS COME ?
Burnett has collected the data from major data breaches at big companies including Adobe Data Breach and Stratfor hack, all of which have already been publicly available over the Internet, which could be easily found through Web searches.
According to the researcher, most of the leaked passwords were "dead," meaning they had been changed already, and he has scrubbed other information such as domain names to make it unusable for cyber criminals and malicious hackers. However, usernames or passwords found on the list that are still in use should be changed immediately.
Burnett also explains the fact that he is not supposed to be arrested by the law enforcement agencies.
A SHORT INTERVIEW WITH MARK BURNETT
In a quick Interview on an email chat, I personally asked Mark few questions about exposing usernames/passwords publicly, and his answers are as follows:
Q: Could exposing the passwords publicly cause any threat to Online users?
A: As I said, "If a hacker needs this list to hack someone, they probably aren't much of a threat." It is important to note that I didn't leak these passwords, they are already out there.
Q: Have any Law enforcement agencies approached you yet?
A: Not yet, but its still early.
Q: Are these Usernames/Passwords include data from Adobe and LinkedIn breaches?
A: I only included breaches where there was both a username and password so that I could combine data from multiple sites. This would exclude LinkedIn and a few others. I also did not release any passwords that were not already available publicly unencrypted so that would exclude Adobe. Other than that it includes a bit of everything.
Q: Is there any strong reason behind sharing passwords publicly?
A: The primary purpose is to get good, clean, and consistent data out in the world so others can find new ways to explore and gain knowledge from it. I am frequently asked for my data but I have always been hesitant to share it due to privacy issues. While not perfect, this is a consistent data set we can all use to help further security.
'WHY THE FBI SHOULDN'T ARREST ME'
"Although researchers typically only release passwords, I am releasing usernames with the passwords. Analysis of usernames with passwords is an area that has been greatly neglected and can provide as much insight as studying passwords alone," Burnett wrote.
"Most researchers are afraid to publish usernames and passwords together because combined they become an authentication feature. If simply linking to already released authentication features in a private IRC channel was considered trafficking, surely the FBI would consider releasing the actual data to the public a crime."
Almost 10 million passwords released by the researcher, for instance, could help other researchers to determine how often users include all or part of their usernames in their passwords. However, 10 Million is a very big number, but Burnett defended that all of the leaked data was already available online.
| Data_Breaches |
Sony Pictures Hack — 5 Things You Need To Know | https://thehackernews.com/2014/12/sony-pictures-hack.html | What a horrible start the holiday season in U.S. Over Thanksgiving weekend, Sony Pictures Entertainment suffered a massive data breach as "Guardians of Peace" hacked-into Sony Pictures' computer system that brought the studio's network to a screeching halt.
Following the hack, hackers leaked five unreleased Sony movies to Torrent file-sharing website during Black Friday. It's still not clear whether both the incident back to back with Sony Pictures belongs to same group of hackers or not, but here's what you need to know about the breach:
1. FBI MALWARE WARNING AFTER SONY PICTURES HACK
The U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) warned businesses that cyber criminals have used malicious software to launch destructive cyber-attacks in the United States, following the last week's massive data breach at Sony Pictures Entertainment, in which four unreleased films were stolen and pirate-shared.
In a five-page confidential 'flash' warning, FBI recommended users to strengthen the protection of their information systems and limit access to databases. But when asked if the same malicious software had been used against the Sony Pictures hack, FBI declined to comment.
This new "destructive" malware has capability to overwrite a victim host's master boot record and all data files. "The overwriting of the data files will make it extremely difficult and costly, if not impossible, to recover the data using standard forensic methods," according to Reuters who independently obtained the report.
2. IS NORTH KOREA BEHIND THE CYBER ATTACK ON SONY PICTURES ?
As we reported earlier, Sony Pictures is investigating the possibility that hackers working on behalf of North Korea were behind the hacking incident.
Sony hack is the payback for upcoming Kim Jong assassination comedy film. It is because the hack comes just a month before the scheduled release of Sony's upcoming comedy "The Interview," a comedy about two journalists who are recruited by the CIA to assassinate North Korean leader Kim Jong Un.
The film became a source of international controversy, and the Pyongyang government denounced the film as "undisguised sponsoring of terrorism, as well as an Act of War" in a letter to U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in June.
But pointing finger towards North Korea without any strong evidence would be wrong. So, we still won't confirm whether its cyber war by North Korea or some other unknown, sophisticated hacker.
3. FIVE MOVIE LEAKED LINKED TO SONY PICTURES
Following the last weeks cyber-attack on Sony Pictures Entertainment, high-quality versions of five newest films – Annie, Fury, Still Alice, Mr. Turner and To Write Love on Her Arms – distributed by Sony Pictures leaked online during Black Friday.
Four of the leaked films have yet to hit the big screen. The remake of the 1982 released "Annie" is Sony's next big film, schedule to hit theaters on Dec. 19 with new stars Quvenzhané Wallis, Cameron Diaz and Jamie Foxx.
Two other new films, "Mr. Turner" and "Still Alice" are also considered possible Oscar contenders for their lead actors Timothy Spall and Julianne Moore.
4. SONY HIRED FIREEYE FOR INVESTIGATION
Sony Pictures Entertainment has hired Mandiant incident response team of FireEye Inc to help clean-up the damage caused by the huge cyber attack on its network, which forced its employees to put pen to paper over the last few weeks.
In addition to the FireEye, FBI is also investigating the matter and is looking into the devastating leak of four of its upcoming movies, although it has not been confirmed that the leak of all the films came from the same data breach.
Mandiant is a well-known security incident response team of FireEye which deals in forensic analysis, repairs and network restoration. Mandiant is the same team that helped in the catastrophic security breach experienced by one of the world's largest retailer Target in 2013.
5. SONY PICTURES HACK IS NOT THE COMPANY'S FIRST TIME HACK
In August, Sony's PlayStation Network was completely taken down by a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, a common technique used by hackers to overwhelm a system with traffic and make the network temporarily inaccessible to users.
The gaming network also suffered a more severe hack in 2011, which led to the exposure of 77 million PlayStation and Qriocity accounts along with 25 million Sony Online Entertainment accounts, bringing the total to more than 100 million in one of the largest data breaches ever. The hack cost Sony 14 billion yen ($172 million), and it took the networks -- for downloading and playing games, movies, and music -- offline for about a month before bringing them back up.
| Cyber_Attack |
Forever 21 Confirms Security Breach Exposed Customer Credit Card Details | https://thehackernews.com/2018/01/credit-card-data-breach.html | 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.
| Data_Breaches |
Huge Flaws Affect Nearly Every Modern Device; Patch Could Hit CPU Performance | https://thehackernews.com/2018/01/intel-kernel-vulnerability.html | 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.
| Vulnerability |
Sim Card Cloning Hack affect 750 millions users around the world | https://thehackernews.com/2013/07/sim-card-cloning-hack-affect-750.html | SIM cards are among the most widely-deployed computing platforms with over 7 billion cards in active use. Cracking SIM cards has long been the Holy Grail of hackers because the tiny devices are located in phones and allow operators to identify and authenticate subscribers as they use networks.
A German cryptographer Karsten Nohl, the founder of Security Research Labs claims to have found encryption and software flaws that could affect millions of SIM cards, and allows hackers to remotely gain control of and also clone certain mobile SIM cards.
This is the first hack of its kind in a decade. Nohl will be presenting his findings at the Black Hat security conference this year. He and his team tested close to 1,000 SIM cards for vulnerabilities, exploited by simply sending a hidden SMS.
According to him, Hackers could use compromised SIMs to commit financial crimes or engage in espionage. Once a hacker copies a SIM, it can be used to make calls and send text messages impersonating the owner of the phone.
The exploit only works on SIMs that use an old encryption technology known as DES. DES is used in around three billion mobile SIMs worldwide, of which Nohl estimates 750 million are vulnerable to the attack.
GSMA, which represents nearly 800 mobile operators, will notify telecommunications regulators and other government agencies in nearly 200 countries about the potential threat and also reach out to hundreds of mobile companies, academics and other industry experts.
Nohl believes that cyber criminals have already found the bug. Now the theoretical details of the vulnerability is out, he expects it would take them at least six months to crack it, by which time the wireless industry will have implemented available fixes.
| Vulnerability |
300000 Android Devices infected by Premium SMS-Sending Malware | https://thehackernews.com/2014/02/android-Malware-subscription-premium-SMS-Services.html | Downloading various apps blindly from Google play store may bring you at risk in terms of money.
PandaLabs, the Cloud Security Company, has identified malicious Android apps on Google Play that can sign up users for premium SMS subscription services without their permission and so far it has infected at least 300,000 Android users, although the number of malicious downloads could have reached 4 times higher i.e. 1,200,000 users.
The four apps found free in the app store that came packaged with a premium SMS scam that dubbed as "Easy Hairdos", "Abs Diets", "Workout Routines" and "Cupcake Recipes" and are among the malicious apps available for free download on Google Play store.
From the above app, say if 'Abs Diet' has been installed on your phone and once the user has accepted the terms and conditions of the service, the app displays a series of tips to reduce abdominal fat and then without the user's knowledge, the app looks for the phone number of the mobile device, connects to a Web page and signs the victim up to a premium SMS subscription service.
"Without the user knowledge the app will get the phone number of the device, will go to a website and will register it to a premium SMS service. This service requires a confirmation to be activated, which means it sends an SMS to that number with a PIN code, which have to be entered back to end the process and start changing you money," states the blog post.
"This app waits for that specific message; once it arrives, it intercepts its arrival, parses it, takes the PIN number and confirms your interest in the service. Then it removes it, no notification is shown in the terminal and the SMS is not shown anywhere. Again, all this is done without the user knowledge."
But the question is from where this app acquired the telephone number?
In this case, the app steals your phone number from one of the most popular mobile apps in the world, WhatsApp. As you probably remember, the first time when you have installed WhatsApp on your phone, you were asked to provide your mobile phone number. The popular messaging app uses this number, among other things, as an identifier to synchronize with WhatsApp.
According to Google Play Store this app has between 50,000 and 100,000 downloads. So I think your math is enough to calculate the affected users' parameters.
The researchers at Panda Labs estimated that the average scammed user gets charged $20 by these apps and somewhere between 300,000 and 1,200,000 users downloaded them, so it is guessed that the scammers could have made between $6 million and $24 million from unsuspecting users.
It's not at all surprising that Google play store, that has a huge number of lists of apps, contains some malware affected apps, but this new surge of malware has hit the Google's play store which has infected over 300,000 Android users.
So, users are advised to always carefully read the permissions while installing every app to their phones and if any app that seeks to read SMS and want to connect to the Internet but accordingly such connection is not really needed, then Do Not Install It.
| Malware |
Remotely Exploitable Flaw Found In HP Enterprise Printers—Patch Now | https://thehackernews.com/2017/11/hp-printer-hacking.html | 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.
| Vulnerability |
XSS Vulnerability discovered on Paypal | https://thehackernews.com/2012/03/xss-vulnerability-discovered-on-paypal.html | XSS Vulnerability discovered on Paypal
Vansh and Vaibhuv two Indian Hacker found a XSS vulnerability in world famous site Paypal. Paypal is affected by an XSS vulnerability where it fails to validate input. One can add arbitrary javascript with no need for any filter evasion.
This is a serious security issue, with potential implications that are only starting to be understood. However, it is critical to realize that this problem does not expose any way to break into the server itself. What it allows is for malicious attackers to potentially take control of the interaction between a user and a website. It is likely that the most serious thing that an attacker can potentially do in this situation is change how a page appears to a particular user.
Also Read : Kevin Mitnick's website open to Cross-Site Scripting ( XSS ) vulnerability
| Vulnerability |
Tor-enabled Point-of-Sale malware 'ChewBacca' stole Credit Card data from 11 Countries | https://thehackernews.com/2014/01/tor-enabled-point-of-sale-malware.html | After the massive data breaches at U.S retailers Target and Neiman Marcus in which financial credentials of more than 110 million and 1.1 million customers were compromised respectively, shows that the Point of Sale (POS) system has become a new target for the cyber criminals.
Despite the BlackPOS malware of Point of Sale (POS) system that comes out as the major cause of these data breaches, malware writers are upgrading and developing more Trojans to target POS system.
In December, the security researchers at anti-virus firm Kaspersky Lab discovered a Tor-based banking trojan, dubbed "ChewBacca"_x0081_, that was initially categorized as a Financial trojan, but recently security researchers at RSA have uncovered that 'ChewBacca' is also capable of stealing credit card details from point of sale systems.
'ChewBacca', a relatively new and private Trojan, used in the 11 countries as a POS malware is behind the electronic theft. ChewBacca communicates with its C&C (Command and Control) server over the Tor network obscuring the IP addresses of parties.
ChewBacca steals data from the POS system in two ways:
Generic keylogger that captures all the keystrokes.
Memory scanner that reads process memory and dumps the credit card details.
The botnet has been collecting track 1 and track 2 data of payment card since October 25, according to RSA.
During installation, ChewBacca creates a copy of itself as a file named "spoolsv.exe"and place it in the windows Start > Startup folder, so that it can automatically start-up at the login time.
After installation, the keylogger program creates a log file called "system.log" inside the system %temp% folder that contains the keystroke events along with the window focus changes.
"The ChewBacca Trojan appears to be a simple piece of malware that, despite its lack of sophistication and defense mechanisms, succeeded in stealing payment card information from several dozen retailers around the world in a little more than two months."
Neither the RSA nor the Kaspersky descriptions explain how the ChewBacca bot is propagated, but the RSA investigation has observed it mostly in the US and also detected in 10 other countries, including Russia, Canada and Australia.
The RSA has provided the data to the FBI on the ChewBacca operation, including the location of a command-and-control server used by the hackers.
They advised retailers to increase staffing levels and develop leading-edge capabilities to detect and stop attackers (comprehensive monitoring and incident response), encrypt or tokenize data at the point of capture and ensure that it is not in plain text view on their networks, thereby shifting the risk and burden of protection to the card issuers and their payment processors.
| Data_Breaches |
U.S. Declares Emergency in 17 States Over Fuel Pipeline Cyber Attack | https://thehackernews.com/2021/05/us-declares-emergency-in-17-states-over.html | The ransomware attack against Colonial Pipeline's networks has prompted the U.S. Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration (FMCSA) to issue a regional emergency declaration in 17 states and the District of Columbia (D.C.).
The declaration provides a temporary exemption to Parts 390 through 399 of the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Regulations (FMCSRs), allowing alternate transportation of gasoline, diesel, and refined petroleum products to address supply shortages stemming from the attack.
"Such [an] emergency is in response to the unanticipated shutdown of the Colonial pipeline system due to network issues that affect the supply of gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, and other refined petroleum products throughout the Affected States," the directive said. "This Declaration addresses the emergency conditions creating a need for immediate transportation of gasoline, diesel, jet fuel, and other refined petroleum products and provides necessary relief."
The states and jurisdictions affected by the pipeline shut down and included in the Emergency Declaration are Alabama, Arkansas, District of Columbia, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maryland, Mississippi, New Jersey, New York, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia.
The exemptions, which aim to alleviate any supply disruptions that may arise as a result of Colonial halting its pipeline operations, are expected to be in effect until the end of the emergency or June 8, 2021, 11:59 p.m., whichever is earlier.
FBI Confirms DarkSide Ransomware
The development comes as the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) confirmed the shutdown of one of the country's largest pipelines over the weekend was orchestrated by Darkside ransomware. The cyberattack forced the company to shut down 5,500 miles of fuel pipeline from the Texas city of Houston to New York harbor, raising concerns about the vulnerability of the U.S. energy infrastructure to cyberattacks.
"Colonial Pipeline is continuing to work in partnership with third-party cybersecurity experts, law enforcement, and other federal agencies to restore pipeline operations quickly and safely," Colonial Pipeline said in a statement. "While this situation remains fluid and continues to evolve, the Colonial operations team is executing a plan that involves an incremental process that will facilitate a return to service in a phased approach."
While the U.S. government on Monday said there was no evidence to imply that Russia was involved in the Colonial Pipeline ransomware attack, the operators of the DarkSide ransomware issued a statement on their dark web extortion site, pledging it intends to vet the companies its affiliates are targeting going forward to "avoid social consequences in the future."
"We are apolitical, we do not participate in geopolitics, do not need to tie us with a defined government and look for other our motives," the cybercrime gang said, adding, "Our goal is to make money, and not creating problems for society."
DarkSide as Carbon Spider's Ransomware campaign
The adversary, which is alleged to have leaked data pertaining to at least 91 organizations since commencing operations in August 2020, functions as a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) scheme, in which partners are roped in to expand the criminal enterprise by breaching corporate networks and deploying the ransomware, while the core developers take charge of maintaining the malware and payment infrastructure. Affiliates typically receive 60% to 70% of the proceeds, and the developers earn the rest.
Among the victims whose internal data was published on the DarkSide's data leak site are other oil and gas companies such as Forbes Energy Services and Gyrodata, both of which are based in Texas. According to Crowdstrike, DarkSide is believed to be the handiwork of a financially-motivated threat actor called Carbon Spider (aka Anunak, Carbanak, or FIN7), whose high-level manager and systems administrator was recently sentenced to 10 years in prison in the U.S.
"The DarkSide group is a relatively new player in the game of ransomware. Despite being a new group, though, the DarkSide team has already built itself quite a reputation for making their operations more professional and organized," Cybereason researchers said last month. "The group has a phone number and even a help desk to facilitate negotiations with victims, and they are making a great effort at collecting information about their victims – not just technical information about their environment, but more general information about the company itself, like the organization's size and estimated revenue."
Stating that the RaaS variant is the latest product to join the growing trend of ransomware professionalization, cybersecurity firm Digital Shadows called out DarkSide's history of issuing corporate-style press releases on its Tor domain, labeling its business model a "ransomware-as-a-corporation" (RaaC).
The Colonial Pipeline incident is the latest cyberattack to confront the U.S. government in recent months, following the SolarWinds hacks by Russian intelligence operatives and the exploitation of Microsoft Exchange Server vulnerabilities by Chinese threat actors.
"To take down extensive operations like the Colonial pipeline reveals a sophisticated and well-designed cyberattack," Check Point's Head of Threat Intelligence, Lotem Finkelsteen, said. "This attack also requires a proper time frame to allow lateral movement and data exhilaration. The Darkside is known to be part of a trend of ransomware attacks that involve systems the cyber community rarely sees involved in the compromised network, like ESXi servers. This leads to suspicions that ICS network (critical infrastructure systems) were involved."
Update: Following the DarkSide ransomware attack that forced Colonial to stop the flow of fuel through its pipelines over the weekend, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Tuesday published a new advisory urging business to follow security best practices to prevent disruptions, including implementing robust network segmentation between IT and OT networks; regularly testing manual controls; and ensuring that backups are periodically taken and isolated from network connections.
"CISA and the FBI do not encourage paying a ransom to criminal actors," the agency said. "Paying a ransom may embolden adversaries to target additional organizations, encourage other criminal actors to engage in the distribution of ransomware, and/or may fund illicit activities. Paying the ransom also does not guarantee that a victim's files will be recovered."
| Cyber_Attack |
TalkTalk Hacked; 4 Million Credit Card Profiles may have been Stolen | https://thehackernews.com/2015/10/talktalk-data-breach.html | TalkTalk, one of the biggest UK-based phone and Internet service provider with more than 4 Million customers, has been hacked again, the company announced late Thursday.
TalkTalk is informing its 4 million customers that it has fallen victim to a "significant and sustained cyber attack" and it is possible that sensitive data including bank details have been stolen.
In February, TalkTalk suffered a major data breach in which its customer details were stolen and misused by scammers to access additional information as well as steal considerable amount of money.
What data might have been Exposed?
According to the company, potentially all of its 4 Million customers could be affected by the data breach.
However, TalkTalk hasn't specified exactly what kind of data was stolen from its servers, but says that the systems accessed by hackers contained information including:
Credit card details and/or bank details
Full names
Postal addresses
Dates of birth
Email addresses
Telephone numbers
TalkTalk accounts information
The company has admitted that "not all of the data was encrypted," which means that the hackers could easily access some of the user data — which also includes their bank details and email addresses.
In a statement, TalkTalk said the Metropolitan Cyber Crime Unit has launched a criminal investigation "following a significant and sustained cyber attack on [their] website."
What kind of attack was it, and when did it happen?
The cyber attack on its servers took place on Wednesday, and the telecom said it took all its website down when it noticed some unusual activities on its website.
TalkTalk website was unavailable last night, displaying a message: "Sorry we are currently facing technical issues, [and] our engineers are working hard to fix it. We apologise for any inconvenience this may cause."
The internet provider assured its customers that the company did so in an "effort to protect [its users] data".
BBC reported that TalkTalk's website was targeted by a distributed denial of service attack or DDoS attack — overwhelming servers with a flood of traffic.
However, DDoS on its own is not capable of handing over the hacker access to internal data.
What Should You Do Now?
All TalkTalk customers are highly recommended to change their passwords as soon as possible and keep an eye on their bank accounts over the next few months.
If you come across any fraudulent activity, report to their bank or Action Fraud, the UK's fraud reporting centre.
Customers should also be vigilant to unrequested calls asking for their personal details or account passwords, as the firm emphasises that it "never call customers and ask [them] to provide bank details."
Customers should also particularly be alert of the Phishing emails, which are usually the next step of cyber criminals after a large-scale hack at any telecoms company. Phishing is designed to trick users into giving up further personal details like passwords.
| Data_Breaches |
Critical Zero-day Vulnerability in Adobe Reader | https://thehackernews.com/2011/12/critical-zero-day-vulnerability-in.html | Critical Zero-day Vulnerability in Adobe Reader
Researchers at the Lockheed Martin Computer Incident Response Team (CRT) and members of the Defense Security Information Exchange informed Adobe that their products were being exploited by hackers.
The exploit affects all versions of Adobe Reader and Adobe Acrobat 9.x and higher, including Adobe Reader X and Adobe Acrobat X (10.1.1) for Windows, Macintosh, and UNIX.
"This U3D memory corruption vulnerability (CVE-2011-2462) could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system," wrote Adobe in their incident report, explaining that this essentially a memory-corruption and privilege escalation exploit. "There are reports that the vulnerability is being actively exploited in the wild in limited, targeted attacks against Adobe Reader 9.x on Windows. Adobe Reader X Protected Mode and Acrobat X Protected View mitigations would prevent an exploit of this kind from executing."
According to a blog post on the subject, Adobe has published that they are currently engineering a fix for the issue and expect to make it available for Windows version Adobe Reader 9.x and Acrobat 9.x no lager than December 12, 2011. Adobe Acrobat and Reader X have much more sufficient protected mode capabilities so Adobe believes that it is hardened enough to avoid the exploit, so a fix to that will not be coming until January 10, 2012.
Macintosh and UNIX will wait as they're much more difficult to exploit. However, the exploit has already been seen active in the wild and it is expected that it's being used by criminal and espionage organizations to attempt to infiltrate defense corporations and others.
| Vulnerability |
New Chrome 0-day Under Active Attacks – Update Your Browser Now | https://thehackernews.com/2020/10/chrome-zeroday-attacks.html | Attention readers, if you are using Google Chrome browser on your Windows, Mac, or Linux computers, you need to update your web browsing software immediately to the latest version Google released earlier today.
Google released Chrome version 86.0.4240.111 today to patch several security high-severity issues, including a zero-day vulnerability that has been exploited in the wild by attackers to hijack targeted computers.
Tracked as CVE-2020-15999, the actively exploited vulnerability is a type of memory-corruption flaw called heap buffer overflow in Freetype, a popular open source software development library for rendering fonts that comes packaged with Chrome.
The vulnerability was discovered and reported by security researcher Sergei Glazunov of Google Project Zero on October 19 and is subject to a seven-day public disclosure deadline due to the flaw being under active exploitation.
Glazunov also immediately reported the zero-day vulnerability to FreeType developers, who then developed an emergency patch to address the issue on October 20 with the release of FreeType 2.10.4.
Without revealing technical details of the vulnerability, the technical lead for Google's Project Zero Ben Hawkes warned on Twitter that while the team has only spotted an exploit targeting Chrome users, it's possible that other projects that use FreeType might also be vulnerable and are advised to deploy the fix included in FreeType version 2.10.4.
"While we only saw an exploit for Chrome, other users of freetype should adopt the fix discussed here: https://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/?59308 -- the fix is also in today's stable release of FreeType 2.10.4," Hawkes writes.
According to details shared by Glazunov, the vulnerability exists in the FreeType's function "Load_SBit_Png," which processes PNG images embedded into fonts. It can be exploited by attackers to execute arbitrary code just by using specifically crafted fonts with embedded PNG images.
"The issue is that libpng uses the original 32-bit values, which are saved in `png_struct`. Therefore, if the original width and/or height are greater than 65535, the allocated buffer won't be able to fit the bitmap," Glazunov explained.
Glazunov also published a font file with a proof-of-concept exploit.
Google released Chrome 86.0.4240.111 as Chrome's "stable" version, which is available to all users, not just to opted-in early adopters, saying that the company is aware of reports that "an exploit for CVE-2020-15999 exists in the wild," but did not reveal further details of the active attacks.
Besides the FreeType zero-day vulnerability, Google also patched four other flaws in the latest Chrome update, three of which are high-risk vulnerabilities—an inappropriate implementation bug in Blink, a use after free bug in Chrome's media, and use after free bug in PDFium—and one medium-risk use after free issue in browser's printing function.
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.
| Vulnerability |
AVG Antivirus Plans to Collect & Sell Your Personal Data to Advertisers | https://thehackernews.com/2015/09/avg-antivirus.html | We at The Hacker News are big fans of Security Software – The first thing we install while setting our Computers and Devices.
Thanks to Free Security Software that protects Internet users without paying for their security.
But, Remember: Nothing comes for FREE
"Free" is just a relative term, as one of the world's most popular anti-virus companies is now admitting.
Czech Republic-based antivirus company AVG has announced its privacy policy in which the company openly admits that it will collect and sell users' data to online advertisers for the purpose of making money from its free antivirus software.
This new policy, which will come into effect on October 15, clearly explains that AVG will be allowed to collect and sell users' "non-personal data" in order to "make money from our free offerings so we can keep them free."
Have a Look on Your Data AVG wants to Sell
Here's the list of, what AVG calls, "non-personal data" the company claims to collect from its customers and sell to interested third-parties, specifically online advertisers:
Browsing History,
Search History,
Meta-data,
Advertising ID associated with your device,
Internet Service Provider (ISP) or Mobile Network you use to connect to AVG products,
Information regarding other apps you have on your device.
Previous policies allowed the firm to only collect:
Data on "the words you search",
Information about any malware on the users' machine.
Collaborators will Get your Personal Data for Free
However, announcing its new policy, the firm has mentioned that it will not sell any personal data related to its customers, including name, email addresses, residential addresses, or credit card details (but these data might sometimes leak inside the browsing history).
At this point, AVG claims that the company will filter out users' personal details from the browsing history before selling it to the third-parties, but also adds that user's personally identifiable data like addresses, age, or IPs may sometimes be shared with collaborators.
The company has published a blog post along with the full privacy policy, so you can read it and decide by yourself if you want to use its services or not.
Let us know what you decided in the comment below.
| Data_Breaches |
Researchers unearth a huge botnet army of 500,000 hacked routers | https://thehackernews.com/2018/05/vpnfilter-router-hacking.html | 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.
| Malware |
Anonymous Hackers Launch #OpUSA against US Banking and Government Agencies | https://thehackernews.com/2013/05/anonymous-hackers-launch-opusa-against.html | #OpUSA campaign is officially started, the day has come, today May 7 as announced by Anonymous, a coordinated online attack will hit Banking and government websites. The announcement made by popular group of hacktivists is creating great concerns between US security experts in charge of defense the potential targets.
The message passed sent by Anonymous to US authorities is eloquent, "We Will Wipe You Off the Cyber Map"
A new wave of attacks, presumably distributed-denial-of-service attack, is expected to hit principal US financial institutions exactly as already happened in the last months.
The hacktivists participating to OpUSA campaign protest against the policy of the US Government blamed to have committed war crimes in foreign states and in its countries.
"Anonymous will make sure that's this May 7 will be a day to remember. On that day anonymous will start phase one of operation USA. America you have committed multiple war crimes in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and recently you have committed war crimes in your own country,"
It's second time that collective menace the central government of a "Big" state, in the last months was touched to Israel during #OpIsrael campaign.
Early May the DHS has issued an alert on the attacks announce OpUSA that will target US government and financial institutions, following the key findings of the warning:
"On 7 May 2013, a group of mostly Middle East- and North Africa-based criminal hackers are preparing to launch a cyber attack campaign known as "OpUSA" against websites of high-profile US Government agencies, financial institutions, and commercial entities. The attacks likely will result in limited disruptions and mostly consist of nuisance-level attacks against publicly accessible webpages and possibly data exploitation. Independent of the success of the attacks, the criminal hackers likely will leverage press coverage and social media to propagate an anti-US message."
According security experts the ongoing coordinated DDoS attacks against US organizations could have a greater impact respect the ones of the #OpIsrael campaign because the U.S. Internet infrastructure is much more dynamic, the Israeli Internet pipeline is much easier to control and close according Marc Gaffan, co-founder of online security provider Incapsula.
Ronen Kenig, researcher at security firm Radware announced that from online forum monitoring emerged that the groups involved in the attacks will be same that participated to #OpIsrael campaign.
"What we know from some of the information that has been shared in forums and other communication channels is that this is going to be very similar to what we saw in Operation Israel," "The same groups are involved."
The announcement of similar attacks gives to the security experts the opportunity to arrange a mitigation strategy to preserve the targets from the offensive, security teams are monitoring Internet traffic trying to identify anomalous traffic.
On April 24th Anonymous published a Pastebin post listing the possible targets of the #OpUSA campaign, including The White House website, at least 8 federal government websites and hundreds of U.S. Banking institutions.
Security experts are not underestimating #OpUSA to avoid to commit errors, the targeted organizations represent the financial backbone of the USA and have made meaningful investments in security to be prepared for the attacks.
Anonymous collective declared: "You cannot stop the Internet hate machine from doxes, DNS attacks, defaces, redirects, DDoS attacks, database leaks and admin takeovers."
The real problem is my opinion is that hacktivism is a phenomenon not negligible, the various collectives are improving the capability to coordinate their operations on global scale getting more organized and more unsettling
The principal problems related to #OpUSA are related to minor financial institutions that could be not prepared for the cyber attacks, and according many security experts also government offices could suffer similar offensives.
Within principal concerns of security expert it is the participation to the #OpUSA of the group of hackers dubbed Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters that's taken credit for the series of DDoS attacks against U.S. Banks in the past eight.
The hacktivists share the same ideology of Anonymous collective and the same anger smolder against the American policy.
Dan Holden, expert at DDoS-mitigation provider Arbor Networks, commented the possible involvement of Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters with the following words: "However, the one thing that does lead me to think it's possible would be the much larger impact the attack would have with their involvement,"
"I would say that if they do become involved, that the likelihood of the attacks being successful goes way up," Holden adds. "OpIsrael didn't seem to have a ton of impact, but the defensive capability outside of the banks is likely to be less, and therefore this could be used as an excuse by QCF [Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Cyber Fighters] to expand their efforts and realize a win, so to speak, given the dwindling effect many of their attacks have had lately."
Fortunately for the targets according to a statement published a few hours ago the hackers say they're pausing Operation Ababil and will not take part to #OpUSA this week.
"As was specified in the previous statements, al-Qassam Cyber Fighters's purpose of DDoS attacks to American banks is to convey the voice of objection of Muslims towards religious and Islamic sacrilege, to the politicians, statesmen and people of America and the world,"
"Our will is to remove the links which entails illegitimate attributions to prophet of Islam(pbuh) from the Internet. Whilst respecting nations, we ask all to preserve the limits of religious sanctities and divine religions," they added.
"Due to the simultaneity of OpUSA with Operation Ababil, and to abstain from ambiguity in the intentions of our operation, this week we will not run any attack and so Operation Ababil will be paused during May 7-9th."
What to expect from the operation OpUSA? According a post published by Radware in April the principal methods of attacks will include
Using common vulnerabilities to perform web site defacement and private information leakage from backend data sources.
Bandwidth saturation attacks using common Distributed Denial-Of-Service attack tools such asMobile LOIC, LOIC and HOIC.
Consumption of web server resources using "Low and Slow" attack tools such as Slowloris,Pyloris, R.U.D.Y – note that these attacks were shown to be using HTTPS as well as HTTP protocols.
If groups similar to Izz ad-Din al-Qassam cyber fighters join the attack campaign, we may also expect distributed attacks originating from dedicated attacking servers. These attacks could cause huge traffic peaks and will be harvesting the power of server based botnets such as Brobot (aka Itsoknoproblembro).
Following the first results:
60 American Websites Hacked By AnonGhost: https://pastebin.com/yb10T2q2
American Agent From The United States House of Representatives Hacked by Mauritania Attacker: https://pastie.org/7812604
Honolulu Police Department Hacked by X-Blackerz: https://pastebin.com/QFjuEbNR
American WebMail Server Hacked - 800 Emails Leaked by Mauritania Attacker: https://www.anonpaste.me/anonpaste2/index.php?cc2f7dd200b251a1#JIrXSFv8CCo5q2sHQKg653e/+runUxDqQLeiZOqa1Nk=
5000 Facebook Accounts Hacked By Mauritania Attacker: https://pastebin.com/NRvmnYFe
5 American Websites Hacked By X-Blackerz: https://pastie.org/7812607
We just have to wait for the storm to pass to analyze the offensive capability of Anonymous and the opposite response of the affected institutions ... of certain events such as these have a financial impact far from negligible regardless of the results of the attacks.
| Cyber_Attack |
Ransomware attacks on Hospitals put Patients at Risk | https://thehackernews.com/2016/04/hospital-ransomware.html | Just last week, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) issued an urgent "Flash" message to the businesses and organisations about the threat of Samsam Ransomware, but the ransomware has already wreaked havoc on some critical infrastructure.
MedStar, a non-profit group that runs 10 hospitals in the Baltimore and Washington area, was attacked with Samsam, also known as Samas and MSIL, last week, which encrypted sensitive data at the hospitals.
After compromising the MedStar Medical System, the operators of the ransomware offered a bulk deal: 45 Bitcoins (about US$18,500) for the decryption keys to unlock all the infected systems.
But unlike other businesses or hospitals, MedStar did not pay the Ransom to entertain the hackers.
So, you might be thinking that the hospitals lost all its important and critical data. Right?
But that was not the case in MedStar.
Here's How MetStar Successfully dealt with SAMSAM Ransomware
MetStar sets an example for all those businesses and organisations that pay ransom amount to attackers, motivating their criminal minds to spread the infection further.
The IT department of the MedStar Hospital was initially able to detect the intrusion in their servers and stop the Ransomware from spreading further in its internal network by shutting down most of its network operations.
Besides this, the IT engineers successfully restored three main clinical information systems from the backups (rest of the restoration process is in progress) – a practice that all organisation should follow.
This quick and active approach of hospital's IT department ultimately saved not only the hospital reputation but also the lives of admitted patients, said Ann Nickels, a spokeswoman for the nonprofit MedStar medical system.
Even though the prevention of Ransomware attack is complex, it is noticeable from the MedStar incident that the automatic backup is not an optional step but a must-follow step, to prevent these kinds of attacks.
What is Samsam and How Does it Work?
Ransomware has been around since last few years targeting businesses and organisations, but Samsam is yet the most interesting innovation of ransomware that requires no human interaction from the target.
Typical ransomware infects victim's machine by a malicious email link or attachment or a malicious advertisement. But Samsam ransomware doesn't target humans. It targets servers.
Samsam first exploits the unpatched vulnerabilities in both JBoss application servers by using JexBoss, an open-source penetration testing tool.
The hacker then uses these exploits to get remote shell access to the affected server and install Samsam onto the targeted Web application server.
Now, the hacker uses the infected server to spread the ransomware client to Windows machines and encrypt their files. Once the server is compromised, there is no communication with the command and control network.
You can find more detailed information about Samsam here.
Why Hospitals are Soft Target?
With the advent of Ransomware, we have seen an enormous growth in the malware business.
The countless transactions of Bitcoins into the dark web wallets had energized the Ransomware authors to spread and adopt new methods of infection for the higher successful rate.
Nowadays ransomware had been a soft target for both Corporates and Hospitals.
Since earlier this year, at least, a dozen hospitals have been affected by ransomware, enforcing them to pay the ransom as per the demand by freezing the central medical systems.
Technological advancement in the medical arena had digitalized patients data in the form of Electronic Medical Record (EMR) to save them into the hospital's central database.
Since the delay in patients treatment by temporary locking down their data could even result in the patient's death, the ransomware attackers seek 100% guarantee ransom by infecting hospitals.
Due to this reason, in most of the cases, hospitals generally agrees to pay the ransom amount to the attacker in order to obtain the decryption keys from the attackers.
Recently, Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Centre in Los Angeles paid US$17,000 to the ransomware attackers to (or "intending to") regaining access to their patient's data.
Followingly, many more hospitals like Methodist Hospital in Henderson and Kentucky, Chino Valley Medical Center and Desert Valley Hospital in California have been infected with Ransomware and became fresh victims of the ransomware attacks.
| Data_Breaches |
WannaCry Ransomware: Everything You Need To Know Immediately | https://thehackernews.com/2017/05/how-to-wannacry-ransomware.html | By now I am sure you have already heard something about the WannaCry ransomware, and are wondering what's going on, who is doing this, and whether your computer is secure from this insanely fast-spreading threat that has already hacked nearly 200,000 Windows PCs over the weekend.
The only positive thing about this attack is that — you are here — as after reading this easy-to-understandable awareness article, you would be so cautious that you can save yourself from WannaCry, as well as other similar cyber attacks in the future.
Also Read — Google Researcher Finds Link Between WannaCry Attacks and North Korea.
Since this widely spread ransomware attack is neither the first nor the last one to hit users worldwide, prevention is always the key to protect against such malware threats.
What is WannaCry? How to Protect your Computer from WannaCry Ransomware? Follow These Simple Steps.
TWEET THIS
In this article, we have provided some of the most important primary security tips that you should always follow and advised to share with everyone you care for.
What is Ransomware & Why WannaCry is More Dangerous?
(A simple video demonstrating of WannaCry Ransomware, showing how fast it spreads from system-to-system without any user Interaction)
For those unaware, Ransomware is a computer virus that usually spreads via spam emails and malicious download links; specially designed to lock up the files on a computer, until the victim pays the ransom demand, usually $300-$500 in Bitcoins.
But what makes WannaCry so unique and nasty is its ability to self-spread without even need to click any link or a file.
The WannaCry ransomware, also known as Wanna Decryptor, leverages a Windows SMB exploit, dubbed EternalBlue, that allows a remote hacker to hijack computers running on unpatched Microsoft Windows operating system.
Once infected, WannaCry also scans for other unpatched PCs connected to the same local network, as well as scans random hosts on the wider Internet, to spread itself quickly.
What Has Happened So Far
We have been covering this story since Friday when this malware was first emerged and hit several hospitals across the globe, eventually forcing them to shut down their entire IT systems over the weekend, hence rejecting patients appointments, and cancel operations.
Later this cyber attack brought down many organizations to their knees.
Instead of repeating same details again, read our previous articles dig deeper and know what has happened so far:
Day 1: OutCry — WannaCry targeted over 90,000 computers in 99 countries.
Day 2: The Patch Day — A security researcher successfully found a way to slow down the infection rate, and meanwhile, Microsoft releases emergency patch updates for unsupported versions of Windows.
Day 3: New Variants Arrives — Just yesterday, some new variants of WannaCry, with and without a kill-switch, were detected in the wild would be difficult to stop for at least next few weeks.
Isn't the Cyber Attack Over?
Absolutely not.
This is just beginning. As I reported yesterday, security researchers have detected some new versions of this ransomware, dubbed WannaCry 2.0, which couldn't be stopped by the kill switch.
What's even worse is that the new WannaCry variant believed to be created by someone else, and not the hackers behind the first WannaCry ransomware.
It has been speculated that now other organized cybercriminal gangs, as well as script-kiddies can get motivated by this incident to create and spread similar malicious ransomware.
How to Protect Yourself from WannaCry Ransomware?
Here are some simple tips you should always follow because most computer viruses make their ways into your systems due to lack of simple security practices:
1. Always Install Security Updates
If you are using any version of Windows, except Windows 10, with SMB protocol enabled, make sure your computer should always receive updates automatically from the Microsoft, and it's up-to-date always.
2. Patch SMB Vulnerability
Since WannaCry has been exploiting a critical SMB remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2017-0148) for which Microsoft has already released a patch (MS17-010) in the month of March, you are advised to ensure your system has installed those patches.
Moreover, Microsoft has been very generous to its users in this difficult time that the company has even released the SMB patches (download from here) for its unsupported versions of Windows as well, including Windows XP, Vista, 8, Server 2003 and 2008.
Note: If you are using Windows 10 Creators Update (1703), you are not vulnerable to SMB vulnerability.
3. Disable SMB
Even if you have installed the patches, you are advised to disable Server Message Block version 1 (SMBv1) protocol, which is enabled by default on Windows, to prevent against WannaCry ransomware attacks.
Here's the list of simple steps you can follow to disable SMBv1:
Go to Windows' Control Panel and open 'Programs.'
Open 'Features' under Programs and click 'Turn Windows Features on and off.'
Now, scroll down to find 'SMB 1.0/CIFS File Sharing Support' and uncheck it.
Then click OK, close the control Panel and restart the computer.
4. Enable Firewall & Block SMB Ports
Always keep your firewall enabled, and if you need to keep SMBv1 enabled, then just modify your firewall configurations to block access to SMB ports over the Internet. The protocol operates on TCP ports 137, 139, and 445, and over UDP ports 137 and 138.
5. Use an Antivirus Program
An evergreen solution to prevent against most threats is to use a good antivirus software from a reputable vendor and always keep it up-to-date.
Almost all antivirus vendors have already added detection capability to block WannaCry, as well as to prevent the secret installations from malicious applications in the background.
6. Be Suspicious of Emails, Websites, and Apps
Unlike WannaCry, most ransomware spread through phishing emails, malicious adverts on websites, and third-party apps and programs.
So, you should always exercise caution when opening uninvited documents sent over an email and clicking on links inside those documents unless verifying the source to safeguard against such ransomware infection.
Also, never download any app from third-party sources, and read reviews even before installing apps from official stores.
7. Regular Backup your Files:
To always have a tight grip on all your important documents and files, keep a good backup routine in place that makes their copies to an external storage device which is not always connected to your computer.
That way, if any ransomware infects you, it can not encrypt your backups.
8. Keep Your Knowledge Up-to-Date
There's not a single day that goes without any report on cyber attacks and vulnerabilities in popular software and services, such as Android, iOS, Windows, Linux and Mac Computers as well.
So, it's high time for users of any domain to follow day-to-day happening of the cyber world, which would not only help them to keep their knowledge up-to-date, but also prevent against even sophisticated cyber attacks.
What to do if WannaCry infects you?
Well, nothing.
If WannaCry ransomware has infected you, you can't decrypt your files until you pay a ransom money to the hackers and get a secret key to unlock your file.
Never Pay the Ransom:
It's up to the affected organizations and individuals to decide whether or not to pay the ransom, depending upon the importance of their files locked by the ransomware.
But before making any final decision, just keep in mind: there's no guarantee that even after paying the ransom, you would regain control of your files.
Moreover, paying ransom also encourages cyber criminals to come up with similar threats and extort money from the larger audience.
So, sure shot advice to all users is — Don't Pay the Ransom.
Who's Behind WannaCry & Why Would Someone Do This?
Update: Also Read — Google Researcher Finds Link Between WannaCry Attacks and North Korea.
While it's still not known who is behind WannaCry, such large-scale cyber attacks are often propagated by nation states, but this ongoing attack does not bear any link to foreign governments.
"The recent attack is at an unprecedented level and will require a complex international investigation to identify the culprits," said Europol, Europe's police agency.
Why are they hijacking hundreds of thousands of computers around the globe? Simple — to extort money by blackmailing infected users.
By looking at the infection rate, it seems like the criminals responsible for this absurd attack would have made lots and lots of dollars so far, but surprisingly they have made relatively little in the way of profits, according to @actual_ransom, a Twitter account that's tweeting details of every single transaction.
At the time of writing, the WannaCry attackers have received 171 payments totaling 27.96968763 BTC ($47,510.71 USD).
Who is responsible for WannaCry Attack?
— Is it Microsoft who created an operating system with so many vulnerabilities?
— Or is it the NSA, the intelligence agency of the United States, who found this critical SMB vulnerability and indirectly, facilitates WannaCry like attacks by not disclosing it to Microsoft?
— Or is it the Shadow Brokers, the hacking group, who managed to hack the NSA servers, but instead of reporting it to Microsoft, they decided to dump hacking tools and zero-day exploits in public?
— Or is it the Windows users themselves, who did not install the patches on their systems or are still using an unsupported version of Windows?
I do not know who can be blamed for this attack, but according to me, all of them shares equal responsibility.
Microsoft Blames NSA/CIA for WannaCry Cyber Attack
Microsoft has hit out at the US government for facilitating cyber attacks, like WannaCry, by not disclosing the software vulnerabilities to the respective vendors and holding them for their benefits, like global cyber espionage.
In a blog post on Sunday, Microsoft President Brad Smith condemned the US intelligence agencies' unethical practices, saying that the "widespread damage" caused by WannaCry happened due to the NSA, CIA and other intelligence agencies for holding zero-days and allowing them to be stolen by hackers.
"This is an emerging pattern in 2017. We have seen vulnerabilities stored by the CIA show up on WikiLeaks, and now this vulnerability stolen from the NSA has affected customers around the world," Smith said.
This statement also publicly confirms that the hacking tools and exploits leaked by the Shadow Brokers belong to Equation Group, an elite group of hackers from NSA.
"Repeatedly, exploits in the hands of governments have leaked into the public domain and caused widespread damage," Smith wrote.
Thank you. Stay tuned.
| Cyber_Attack |
New Pingback Malware Using ICMP Tunneling to Evade C&C Detection | https://thehackernews.com/2021/05/new-pingback-malware-using-icmp.html | Researchers on Tuesday disclosed a novel malware that uses a variety of tricks to stay under the radar and evade detection, while stealthily capable of executing arbitrary commands on infected systems.
Called 'Pingback,' the Windows malware leverages Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) tunneling for covert bot communications, allowing the adversary to utilize ICMP packets to piggyback attack code, according to an analysis published today by Trustwave.
Pingback ("oci.dll") achieves this by getting loaded through a legitimate service called MSDTC (Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator) — a component responsible for handling database operations that are distributed over multiple machines — by taking advantage of a method called DLL search order hijacking, which involves using a genuine application to preload a malicious DLL file.
Naming the malware as one of the plugins required for supporting Oracle ODBC interface in MSDTC is key to the attack, the researchers noted. While MSDTC isn't configured to run automatically on startup, a VirusTotal sample submitted in July 2020 was found to install the DLL file into the Windows System directory and start the MSDTC service to achieve persistence, raising the possibility that a separate executable is crucial to installing the malware.
Upon successful execution, Pingback resorts to using the ICMP protocol for its main communication. ICMP is a network layer protocol mainly used for sending error messages and operational information, say, a failure alert when another host becomes unreachable.
Specifically, Pingback takes advantage of an Echo request (ICMP message type 8), with the message sequence numbers 1234, 1235, and 1236 denoting the type of information contained in the packet — 1234 being a command or data, and 1235 and 1236 being the acknowledgment for receipt of data on the other end. Some of the commands supported by the malware include the capability to run arbitrary shell commands, download and upload files from and to the attacker's host, and execute malicious payloads on the infected machine.
An investigation into the malware's initial intrusion route is ongoing.
"ICMP tunneling is not new, but this particular sample piqued our interest as a real-world example of malware using this technique to evade detection," the researchers said. "ICMP is useful for diagnostics and performance of IP connections, [but] it can also be misused by malicious actors to scan and map a target's network environment. While we are not suggesting that ICMP should be disabled, we do suggest putting in place monitoring to help detect such covert communications over ICMP."
| Malware |
Hundreds of GPS Location Tracking Services Leaving User Data Open to Hackers | https://thehackernews.com/2018/01/gps-location-tracking.html | 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.
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.
| Vulnerability |
Bank of America Website under Cyber Attack from Islamic Hackers | https://thehackernews.com/2012/09/bank-of-america-website-under-cyber.html | Bank of America's website experienced periodic outages Tuesday due to cyber attacks launched in retaliation for "Innocence of Muslims," the amateurish film whose mocking portrait of the Prophet Muhammad has incited deadly riots throughout the Middle East.
"Cyber fighters of Izz ad-din Al qassam" said it would attack the Bank of America and the New York Stock Exchange as a "first step" in a campaign against properties of "American-Zionist Capitalists."
"After Successful attack to YouTube Servers in recent days made by Muslims around the world, many groups announce that they are ready to do similar attacks.When supporter of that sacrilegious movie try to punish the cast and crew, the publisher included, this story will end until that time these kinds of Cyber Attacks will be continued and the Cyber world will be an unsafe place for all of Enemies of Islam." Hackers posted on their blog.
People around the country reported on social media that they had problems accessing the site around midday and continuing into the evening. Some reported not being able to log in to online banking for hours.
"We are working to ensure full availability," Mark Pipitone, a bank spokesman told. Asked whether the bank was the target of a cyberattack, Pipitone said, "I can assure you we continuously take proactive measures to secure our systems."
The U.S. government has denounced the film repeatedly since a riot in Libya last week killed the U.S. ambassador to the country and three other Americans.
| Cyber_Attack |
GoDaddy Vulnerability Allows Domain Hijacking | https://thehackernews.com/2015/01/godaddy-vulnerability-allows-domain_20.html | An Internet domain registrar and web hosting company GoDaddy has patched a Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF or XSRF) vulnerability that allowed hackers and malicious actors to hijack websites registered with the domain registration company.
The vulnerability was reported to GoDaddy on Saturday by Dylan Saccomanni, a web application security researcher and penetration testing consultant in New York. Without any time delay, the company patched the bug in less than 24 hours after the blog was published.
While managing an old domain registered on GoDaddy, Saccomanni stumbled across the bug and noticed that there was absolutely no protection against CSRF vulnerability at all on many GoDaddy DNS management actions.
Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) is a method of attacking a website in which an attacker need to convince the victim to click on a specially crafted HTML exploit page that will make a request to the vulnerable website on their behalf.
This common but rather chronic web application vulnerability could have been used by attackers to manipulate domain settings on any sites or even hijack the entire domain without any knowledge to the victim (domain buyer).
"An attacker can leverage a CSRF vulnerability to take over domains registered with GoDaddy," Saccomanni wrote on his blog post.
According to the researcher, there was no CSRF token present in request body or headers, and no enforcement of Referrer, which leveraged hackers to post codes required to edit name-servers, turn off auto-renew features and edit the zone file.
All attackers need to do is leverage some sort of social engineering tactic in order to exploit the CSRF vulnerability.
"They don't need sensitive information about the victim's account, either – for auto-renew and nameservers, you don't need to know anything," Saccomanni said. "For DNS record management, all you need to know is the domain name of the DNS records."
GoDaddy was not immediately able to response on the issue or say if its users accounts had been compromised.
Saccomanni said he attempted to contact GoDaddy using many different email addresses associated with security and engineering, as well as customer support in order to report the flaw.
He received a word that there would be "no timeline" for a patch. However, yesterday he noticed that a CSRF protection was implemented on the place.
| Vulnerability |
U.S. Trade Group Hacked by Chinese Hackers ahead of Trump-Xi Trade Summit | https://thehackernews.com/2017/04/hacking-trump-xi-trade.html | Researchers have uncovered a Chinese cyber-espionage against the United States ahead of the trade summit on Thursday between US President Donald Trump and China's President Xi Jinping.
According to a new report published today by Fidelis Cybersecurity firm, the Chinese APT10 hacking group implanted a piece of malware on the "Events" page of the US National Foreign Trade Council (NFTC) website in February.
Dubbed 'Operation TradeSecret,' the attack against the NFTC site is seen as an attempt to conduct surveillance on the main industry players and lobbyists closely associated with U.S trade policy activities.
Researchers say hackers placed a malicious link on the NFTC website, inviting the organization's board of directors to register for a meeting in Washington DC on March 7. But clicking on the link deployed a spying tool called "Scanbox."
Dates back to 2014, Scanbox – previously used by nation-state threat actors associated with the Chinese government – has the ability to record the type and versions of software a victim is running and run keyloggers on compromised computers, said Fidelis researcher John Bambenek.
"This attack was really at its core a reconnaissance attack. Anyone who visited this calendar entry would expose their software versions and use a JavaScript keylogger that could expose their identity," said Bambenek.
"Traditionally these attacks are used to precisely identify targets and help them craft targeted phishing attacks using exploits they know the victim is vulnerable to."
The malicious link was active on the NFTC website between February 27 and March 1. The malware was already removed from the site by the time Fidelis contacted NFTC.
The NFTC's staff and board represent many influential people and companies -- from President Rufus Yerxa, the U.S. Ambassador to GATT to executives from major companies including Google, Amazon, eBay, IBM, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco, KPMG, Pfizer, Visa, Ford, Halliburton, and Walmart.
Although Fidelis detected no further attacks on NFTC board members, the security firm believed the hackers were after a full range of entities relevant to the trade negotiations due to take place Thursday between US and China.
This is the second time in a week when APT10 cyber espionage campaign has come to light. A report released this week by BAE Systems, and PwC also claimed that APT10 was targeting managed IT services providers (MSPs) and their customers across the globe to steal sensitive data.
| Malware |
iCloud Possibly Suffered A Privacy Breach Last Year That Apple Kept a Secret | https://thehackernews.com/2019/01/icloud-privacy-breach.html | 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.
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 [email protected]'s mobile number is 12345 and when I enter 12345 mobile number to my [email protected] 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.
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.
We'll update this story as we hear more.
| Vulnerability |
Targeted Phishing Attacks Strike High-Ranking Company Executives | https://thehackernews.com/2021/01/targeted-phishing-attacks-target-high.html | An evolving phishing campaign observed at least since May 2020 has been found to target high-ranking company executives across manufacturing, real estate, finance, government, and technological sectors with the goal of obtaining sensitive information.
The campaign hinges on a social engineering trick that involves sending emails to potential victims containing fake Office 365 password expiration notifications as lures. The messages also include an embedded link to retain the same password that, when clicked, redirects users to a phishing page for credential harvesting.
"The attackers target high profile employees who may not be as technically or cybersecurity savvy, and may be more likely to be deceived into clicking on malicious links," Trend Micro researchers said in a Monday analysis.
"By selectively targeting C-level employees, the attacker significantly increases the value of obtained credentials as they could lead to further access to sensitive personal and organizational information, and used in other attacks."
According to the researchers, the targeted email addresses were mostly collected from LinkedIn, while noting that the attackers could have purchased such target lists from marketing websites that offer CEO/CFO email and social media profile data.
The Office 365 phishing kit, currently in its fourth iteration (V4), is said to have been originally released in July 2019, with additional features added to detect bot scanning or crawling attempts and provide alternative content when bots are detected. Interestingly, the alleged developer behind the malware announced V4's availability on their "business" Facebook page in mid-2020.
Aside from selling the phishing kit, the actor has also been found to peddle account credentials of CEOs, chief financial officers (CFOs), finance department members, and other high-profile executives on social media pages.
What's more, Trend Micro's investigation unearthed a possible link to a user handle on underground forums that was spotted selling a credential harvester tool as well as stolen C-Level account passwords anywhere between $250 to $500, echoing previous reports late last year.
The researchers uncovered at least eight compromised phishing sites hosting the V4 phishing kit, raising the possibility that they were used by different actors for a wide range of phishing campaigns directed against CEOs, presidents, board members, and founders of companies located in the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Hungary, the Netherlands, and Israel.
"While organizations are aware and wary of the information they include in public-facing websites and platforms, their respective employees should be constantly reminded to be mindful of the details they disclose on personal pages," the researchers concluded. "These can be easily used against them for attacks using social engineering techniques."
| Cyber_Attack |
China: 'We are ready for International cooperation to deal with cyber security Challenges' | https://thehackernews.com/2013/11/china-we-are-ready-for-international.html | Yesterday at Stanford University in the United States, Cyber Security Experts and Leaders from more than 40 countries gathered to talk about the cyberspace security problems and cooperation among countries.
The need for international cooperation in cybersecurity is evident, due to the nature of cyberspace itself. Cyberspace or the Internet is "borderless" in nature.
Cai Mingzhao, Minister of the State Council Information Office of China said that China is keen to continue working with other countries to deal with cyber security Challenges.
Interesting! When China is itself the culprit in major Cyber Threats and attacks.
"To maintain cyber security, we need to strengthen international cooperation," and "We are ready to expand our cooperation with other countries and relevant international organizations on the basis of equality and mutual benefit," he said.
He said that the China is a victim of cyber security breaches, where more than 80% of Chinese internet users have felt the effects of online hacking. The case for international cooperation is even stronger, when criminals take advantage of countries' inability to coordinate, due to legal reasons or because authorities do not have the necessary technical expertise or resources to address the issue. Cybercrimes are not always clearly illegal in some jurisdictions.
"Between January to August this year, more than 20 thousand websites based in China were modified by hackers and more than 8 million servers, 14 percent more during the same period last year, were compromised and controlled by overseas computers via zombie and Trojan programs. These activities have caused severe damage to our economy and the everyday life of the people," Cai said.
or NSA is the real culprit ?
As cyber-threats and other information security and network security issues have become borderless, international cooperation should be based on partnership with organizations from other countries in areas such as information-sharing, early warning, monitoring and alert networks.
Due to the global nature of information networks, no policy on cybersecurity can be effective, if efforts are confined to national borders.
| Cyber_Attack |
Critical Bug in WordPress Theme Plugin Opens 200,000 Sites to Hackers | https://thehackernews.com/2020/02/themegrill-wordpress-plugin.html | 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.
"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.
| Vulnerability |
Turkmenistan Gmail, Microsoft, Youtube Domains Hijacked | https://thehackernews.com/2013/01/turkmenistan-gmail-microsoft-youtube.html | Iranian hackers deface multiple big companies Turkmenistan domains (.tm) yesterday using DNS poisoning attack. All hacked domains are registered by NIC at Turkmenistan. Hacker managed to find and exploit a SQL Injection vulnerability in NIC website in order to get database of the site.
Because the passwords was stored in plain text, that make more easy for those hacker to access the domain panels of each domain and changing the DNS entries to shift websites on a rouge server with defaced page. The defaced message as shown below:
Defaced domains :
www.youtube.tm
www.gmail.tm
www.msdn.tm
www.intel.tm
www.officexp.tm
www.xbox.tm
www.windowsvista.tm
www.orkut.tm
www.google.tm
Mirror of hacks are available at Zone-H.
| Vulnerability |
Password Security — Who's to Blame for Weak Passwords? Users, Really? | https://thehackernews.com/2016/01/password-security-manager.html | The majority of Internet users are vulnerable to cyber threats because of their own weaknesses in setting up a strong password. But, are end-users completely responsible for choosing weak passwords?
Give a thought.
Recently we wrote an article revealing the list of Worst Passwords of 2015 that proved most of us are still using bad passwords, like '123456' or 'password,' to secure our online accounts that when breached could result in critical information loss.
If the end-user is to blame for weak password security, then the solution is to educate each and every Internet user to follow the best password security practice.
But is that really possible? Practically, No.
Even after being aware of best password security measures, do we really set strong passwords for every website? I mean EVERY. Ask yourself.
Who's Responsible for allowing Users to Set a Weak Password?
It's the websites and their developers, who didn't enforce a strong password policy on their users and allow them to sign up with weak passwords.
So what should be the perfect solution, where every registered member of a website or service should have a strong password?
Most of the Internet users get annoyed while signing up with a website that tells them their password:
Must be at least 8 characters long
Must include both uppercase and lowercase
Must contain at least one special character
Must have at least one numeric character
Don't get annoyed of such website, because that website, at least, has its users' safety and security in mind.
Also Read: Best Password Manager — For Windows, Linux, Mac, Android, iOS and Enterprise
However, not every site provides a strong password setting mechanism, and this is why users are taking advantage of by relying on absolutely awful passwords.
"In this age, knowing all we know now, it's negligent of websites to allow users to choose "password" "1234567" and millions of known weak passwords," Dan Goodin, Security Editor at Ars Technica told THN.
"Security researchers have often talked about developing a means for allowing websites to blacklist a large body of weak passwords — say, every single password in the RockYou dump and other major password breach — but so far I'm not aware of any websites that use something like this. Until they do, passwords will continue to be cracked," he said.
After Data Breaches, the organizations tend to blame the end user for poor password security. However, they themselves forget to provide them one.
Even Google and Facebook allows users to set a weak password for their accounts, with just minimum 8 character condition, in order to target mass audience with better usability.
Microsoft MVP of developer security and creator of Have I Been Pwned, Troy Hunt agrees to this by saying:
"The problem is that website operators are faced with this paradox of security versus usability. If they enforced a minimum of 30 characters they'd be enormously secure... and have no customers."
"They're forced to dumb down requirements in order to make the system appealing to the vast majority of people who don't use password managers."
However, to be very clear, there is really no such thing as an unbreakable password. Yes, you heard me right…
...even Strong Passwords are Crackable.
Hackers Can Crack Every Single Password
Stealing password is one of the oldest moves in hackers' book. And before proceeding, you also need to know that how they are able to crack every password that you can ever think of.
There is a password brute-force technique, where a simple password-cracking tool can test or try every possible combination of letters, numbers, and symbols until it matches your secret or encrypted (hashed) password.
It requires a lot of computing power to do so, but for shorter passwords, it's a pretty reliable and faster technique.
However, if your password is strong (with uppercase, lowercase, special and numeric characters), it will be much harder for hackers to break it within reasonable time period — and, therefore, strong passwords are much safer.
The more complex your password is, the harder it is to guess and the more secure it is.
How to Create and Manage Strong Passwords
So, until every or most of the organizations make themselves strong enough to accept only strong passwords from their customers, you need to make a hobby of setting up strong passwords for your online safety.
Here's How to create strong passwords, which are easy to remember as well.
Beside this, always remember to create different passwords for different sites. So that if one website is breached, your other online accounts on other sites are secure enough from being hacked.
"Even when we see fairly stringent minimum requirements, they have no way of enforcing uniqueness, and inevitably many of the passwords they hold have been reused across other services," Hunt added.
I know this is a real pain to memorize 15+ uniquely random alphanumeric and special character strings like this, '$#%fa4$0', which is only 8 characters in length.
Can it really be done?
Yes, there is a solution, i.e. Password Manager, available to you that can significantly reduce the password memorizing problem, along with a cure for users' bad habit of setting weak passwords.
Best Password manager exist and have come a very long way in the past few years to help resolve this issue.
Why Some Websites Block 'Password Managers'?
Typically, Password Managers generate long, complex, and – most importantly – unique passwords for you, and then store them in encrypted form on either your computer or a remote service. All you need to do is remember one master password to enter all of your others.
However, the problem is, there are a number of websites, especially banking and financial, that intentionally block password managers, making it difficult for people to use stronger passwords more easily.
Those sites don't allow you to paste passwords into the login screens, instead forcing you to type the passwords by yourself.
"Some websites actively block users from creating credentials with password managers," Joseph Cox, freelance security journalist for Motherboard, told The Hacker News.
"This is because they stop users pasting passwords into the login page, sometimes making it a real hassle to use strong, and more importantly, unique passwords generated by managers. There are some workarounds, but when dealing with something as important as passwords, why to make it harder for users at all?"
So why do these companies stop users from copying and pasting their passwords?
These companies say that disabling the pasting of passwords is a security feature that prevents password phishing as well as brute force attacks.
Although the companies may give a reason that by doing so, they are helping their customers, preventing users from pasting passwords into the login page is pretty weak practice overall.
"Websites sometimes say they have disabled the pasting of passwords to stop certain types of malware, for example," Cox added. "But the fact is that re-using password is a much, much more common problem than password stealing malware."
Advanced Password Security Practices
Both weak and strong passwords are vulnerable to human error, so you need to keep some points in your mind in order to keep your data safe from hackers.
1 — Use Different Passwords On Different Accounts:
If you are using the same password twice, it is an invitation for hackers to double-dip into your data.
If you are reusing your passwords on multiple websites, and a hacker steals one of your passwords, they have got access to all other accounts that use the same password.
Therefore, mix things up to stay safe. Use different passwords on different websites and accounts.
Also, you are recommended to change your password every few months, which limits how long a stolen password is useful to a hacker.
2 — Use a Good Password Manager:
Password Manager is an excellent solution to your failure to keeping a strong password for different accounts. The issue is that today lots of people subscribe to a lot of different services, and it is usually hard to generate different passwords for every single account.
Password manager creates a random, different password strings for every website you visit, and then saves them for you, and in general, you only need to remember one master password to open your password manager or vault.
To do so, you need a good password management tool. Dashlane, KeePassX, and LastPass are some good options for password managers that are free, and you should try one.
3 — Use Two-Factor Authentication:
Two-Factor Authentication has always been a hurdle for hackers who managed to steal your account credentials.
"Instead of tackling the problem with minimum requirements, using approaches such as two-step verification and other fraud detection methods are a more palatable approach to increasing security without losing customers," says Hunt.
Many websites, like Google and Facebook, offer a mechanism known as Two-factor authentication that besides verifying your password, generates an OTP (One Time Password) verification code that is either sent to your mobile via SMS or phone call.
Even hackers with your passwords can not easily access your accounts if you are using two-factor authentication.
| Data_Breaches |
Beware — A New Wormable Android Malware Spreading Through WhatsApp | https://thehackernews.com/2021/01/beware-new-wormable-android-malware.html | A newly discovered Android malware has been found to propagate itself through WhatsApp messages to other contacts in order to expand what appears to be an adware campaign.
"This malware spreads via victim's WhatsApp by automatically replying to any received WhatsApp message notification with a link to [a] malicious Huawei Mobile app," ESET researcher Lukas Stefanko said.
The link to the fake Huawei Mobile app, upon clicking, redirects users to a lookalike Google Play Store website.
Once installed, the wormable app prompts victims to grant it notification access, which is then abused to carry out the wormable attack.
Specifically, it leverages WhatApp's quick reply feature — which is used to respond to incoming messages directly from the notifications — to send out a reply to a received message automatically.
Besides requesting permissions to read notifications, the app also requests intrusive access to run in the background as well as to draw over other apps, meaning the app can overlay any other application running on the device with its own window that can be used to steal credentials and additional sensitive information.
The functionality, according to Stefanko, is to trick users into falling for an adware or subscription scam.
Furthermore, in its current version, the malware code is capable of sending automatic replies only to WhatsApp contacts — a feature that could be potentially extended in a future update to other messaging apps that support Android's quick reply functionality.
While the message is sent only once per hour to the same contact, the contents of the message and the link to the app are fetched from a remote server, raising the possibility that the malware could be used to distribute other malicious websites and apps.
"I don't remember reading and analyzing any Android malware having such functionality to spread itself via whatsapp messages," Stefanko told The Hacker News.
Stefanko said the exact mechanism behind how it finds its way to the initial set of directly infected victims is not clear; however, it's to be noted the wormable malware can potentially expand from a few devices to many others incredibly quickly.
"I would say it could be via SMS, mail, social media, channels/chat groups etc," Stefanko said.
If anything, the development once again underscores the need to stick to trusted sources to download third-party apps, verify if an app is indeed built by a genuine developer, and carefully scrutinize app permissions before installation.
But the fact the campaign cleverly banks on the trust associated with WhatsApp contacts implies even these countermeasures may not be enough.
| Malware |
Vault 8: WikiLeaks Releases Source Code For Hive - CIA's Malware Control System | https://thehackernews.com/2017/11/cia-hive-malware-code.html | Almost two months after releasing details of 23 different secret CIA hacking tool projects under Vault 7 series, Wikileaks today announced a new Vault 8 series that will reveal source codes and information about the backend infrastructure developed by the CIA hackers.
Not just announcement, but the whistleblower organisation has also published its first batch of Vault 8 leak, releasing source code and development logs of Project Hive—a significant backend component the agency used to remotely control its malware covertly.
In April this year, WikiLeaks disclosed a brief information about Project Hive, revealing that the project is an advanced command-and-control server (malware control system) that communicates with malware to send commands to execute specific tasks on the targets and receive exfiltrated information from the target machines.
Hive is a multi-user all-in-one system that can be used by multiple CIA operators to remotely control multiple malware implants used in different operations.
Hive's infrastructure has been specially designed to prevent attribution, which includes a public facing fake website following multi-stage communication over a Virtual Private Network (VPN).
"Using Hive even if an implant is discovered on a target computer, attributing it to the CIA is difficult by just looking at the communication of the malware with other servers on the internet," WikiLeaks says.
As shown in the diagram, the malware implants directly communicate with a fake website, running over commercial VPS (Virtual Private Server), which looks innocent when opened directly into the web browser.
However, in the background, after authentication, the malware implant can communicate with the web server (hosting fake website), which then forwards malware-related traffic to a "hidden" CIA server called 'Blot' over a secure VPN connection.
The Blot server then forwards the traffic to an implant operator management gateway called 'Honeycomb.'
In order to evade detection by the network administrators, the malware implants use fake digital certificates for Kaspersky Lab.
"Digital certificates for the authentication of implants are generated by the CIA impersonating existing entities," WikiLeaks says.
"The three examples included in the source code build a fake certificate for the anti-virus company Kaspersky Laboratory, Moscow pretending to be signed by Thawte Premium Server CA, Cape Town."
The whistleblowing organisation has released the source code for Project Hive which is now available for anyone, including investigative journalists and forensic experts, to download and dig into its functionalities.
The source code published in the Vault 8 series only contains software designed to run on servers controlled by the CIA, while WikiLeaks assures that the organisation will not release any zero-day or similar security vulnerabilities which could be abused by others.
| Malware |
Indexeus — Search Engine Exposes Malicious Hackers and Data Breaches | https://thehackernews.com/2014/07/indexeus-search-engine-exposes_22.html | So far, we have seen the search engine for online underground Black Markets, named 'Grams' that lets anyone find illegal drugs and other contraband online in an easier way ever and is pretty much fast like Google Search Engine.
Now, a new search engine has been launched that primarily exposes all the available information of malicious hackers caught up in the very sort of data breaches — including the recent massive breaches at Adobe and Yahoo!
The search engine dubbed as "Indexeus", designed by 23-year-old Jason Relinquo of Portugal, boasts a searchable database of "over 200 million entries available to our customers". It specifically targeted hackers by listing huge amounts of their information such as email addresses, usernames, passwords, Internet address, physical addresses, birthdays and other information that may be associated with those accounts.
If in case, any hacker want to get their credentials removed or blacklisted from the search engine, it would cost $1per record that they wanted to conceal from public view.
As a disclaimer on the search engine website explained, "The purpose of Indexeus is not to provide private informations about someone [sic], but to protect them by creating awareness. Therefore we are not responsible for any misuse or malicious use of our content and service."
Most of the information this 23 year old boy gathered comes from data breaches and hacks of forums popular in the hacking community, which no doubt makes it one of the largest depositories of hackers' personal details ever made available publicly.
The search engine website says that its purpose is to make people more aware of their online security, which they sometimes undermine.
"This is a service which provides easy access to hundreds of databases, which is very useful if you don't want to bring your databases around or if you just don't have any," reads the website's FAQ page. "The goal is to make people realize that using the same information all over is stupid and will lead to you getting your information stolen, but also showing you how badly administrators keep your private data stored."
Apparently, you no longer have to pay for the removal of any record -- it's free now. Since being exposed by Brian Krebs, Relinquo recently modified his terms of service so that users don't have to pay any dollar to have their information removed or completely blacklisted from the search engine's site.
Obviously, due to the EU's "right to be forgotten;" he can not charge for a service that's supposed to be free of charge. However, it remains unclear how users would prove that they are the rightful owner of specific records indexed by the service.
"We're going through some reforms (free blacklisting, plus subscription based searches), due some legal complications that I don't want to escalate," Relinquo wrote in a chat session. "If [Indexeus users] want to keep the logs and pay for the blacklist, it's an option. We also state that in case of a minor, the removal is immediate."
If the availability of private information made Relinquo able to build the search engine, then you can imagine what amount of private informations of users breached in different hack attacks. It indicates that online privacy and security threats are real, since hackers may already have a user's information without even their knowledge.
However for now, Relinquo have made the removal of information for free, but if it is assumed that $1 per record had actually happened, it would have made him million dollars.
| Data_Breaches |
Beware of Zeus Banking Trojan Signed With Valid Digital Signature | https://thehackernews.com/2014/04/beware-of-zeus-banking-trojan-signed.html | A new dangerous variant of ZeuS Banking Trojan has been identified by Comodo AV labs which is signed by stolen Digital Certificate which belongs to Microsoft Developer to avoid detection from Web browsers and anti-virus systems.
Every Windows PC in the world is set to accept software "signed" with Microsoft's digital certificates of authenticity, an extremely sensitive cryptography seal.
Cyber Criminals somehow managed to hack valid Microsoft digital certificate, used it to trick users and admins into trusting the file. Since the executable is digitally signed by the Microsoft developer no antivirus tool could find it as malicious.
Digitally signed malware received a lot of media attention last year. Reportedly, more than 200,000 unique malware binaries were discovered in past two years signed with valid digital signatures.
A Comodo User submitted a sample of the malicious software that attempts to trick user by masquerading itself as file of Internet Explorer and having a valid signature issued to "isonet ag".
On execution, the malicious file get installed without any antivirus detection and also tried to download rootkit components from:
lovestogarden.com/images/general/TARGT.tpl
villaveronica.it/images/general/TARGT.tpl
Zeus is one of the oldest families of financial malware, but this new highly sophisticated variant of Zeus Trojan blessed with legitimate way to bypass security checks and launching attacks to obtain the Banking login credentials of victims and committing financial frauds.
The Comodo Team found over 200 unique hits for new variant of this Zeus distributed over mass computers via infected web pages or phishing mail attacks.
JUST BEHIND YOUR WEB BROWSER
Typically, Zeus malware triggers a Man-In-Browser (MitB) attack and allows the hacker to establish a remote session in order to intercept the actions performed by the victim.
"If the attack victim goes to an online banking site to perform a transaction, such as transferring funds, they see everything as occurring normally. The payment information they keyed will display as expected, but behind the scenes the hackers will alter the transaction and send it to another account with possibly a larger amount." researchers explained.
There are three components of Zeus to launch an attack:
Downloader: Once the malware will get installed via online vulnerability or as an attachment in a phishing email, it will download the rootkit and malware component of the attack.
Malware: It is a stealer that will steal valuable user data, login credentials, credit card info, etc.
Rootkit: This component will hide the installed malware via protecting it from detection and removal. The rootkit is installed by decrypting the downloaded file into the "Boot Bus Extender" so that it gets loads prior to any driver and this makes it hard to remove as well.
To protect malicious components and auto-run entries from being deleted by antivirus software 'After decrypting downloaded payload, the rootkit is installed within "Boot Bus Extender" to make sure it loads before other drivers.' researchers explained.
HOW TO KICK ZEUS ASS
We have noticed an increase in this trend of signed malware. Windows users are recommended to Install a best Internet Security Tool and Configure the firewall to maximize the security of their computer system. Don't open the links sent to you in mails from unknown sources.
| Malware |
Hijacking Virtual Machines with Crisis malware | https://thehackernews.com/2012/08/hijacking-virtual-machines-with-crisis.html | The Windows version of Crisis, a piece of malware discovered in July, is capable of infecting VMware virtual machine images, Windows Mobile devices and removable USB drives, according to researchers from antivirus vendor Symantec.The installer was actually a Java archive (JAR) file which had been digitally signed by VeriSign.
Crisis is distributed via social engineering attacks that trick users into running a malicious Java applet. The applet identifies the user's OS, Windows or Mac OS X and executes the corresponding installer.
"The threat uses three methods to spread itself: one is to copy itself and an autorun.inf file to a removable disk drive, another is to sneak onto a VMware virtual machine, and the final method is to drop modules onto a Windows Mobile device," Symantec explained in a blog post.
Malware authors are putting significant efforts into making sure that new variants of their Trojan programs are not detected by antivirus products when they are released. Also, the threat is capable of spreading to Windows Mobile devices by dropping modules onto devices connected to compromised Windows computers, but does not affect Android or iPhone devices.
However, the Symantec researchers don't know what these modules do yet. "We currently do not have copies of these modules and hence we are looking for them so we can analyze them in greater detail," Katsuki said.
"We currently do not have copies of these modules and hence we are looking for them so we can analyze them in greater detail," Katsuki wrote. If you are the intended target, it's very important that you have good security measures.
| Malware |
Venom Vulnerability Exposes Most Data Centers to Cyber Attacks | https://thehackernews.com/2015/05/venom-vulnerability.html | Just after a new security vulnerability surfaced Wednesday, many tech outlets started comparing it with HeartBleed, the serious security glitch uncovered last year that rendered communications with many well-known web services insecure, potentially exposing Millions of plain-text passwords.
But don't panic. Though the recent vulnerability has a more terrific name than HeartBleed, it is not going to cause as much danger as HeartBleed did.
Dubbed VENOM, stands for Virtualized Environment Neglected Operations Manipulation, is a virtual machine security flaw uncovered by security firm CrowdStrike that could expose most of the data centers to malware attacks, but in theory.
Yes, the risk of Venom vulnerability is theoretical as there is no real-time exploitation seen yet, while, on the other hand, last year's HeartBleed bug was practically exploited by hackers unknown number of times, leading to the theft of critical personal information.
Now let's know more about Venom:
Venom (CVE-2015-3456) resides in the virtual floppy drive code used by a several number of computer virtualization platforms that if exploited…
...could allow an attacker to escape from a guest 'virtual machine' (VM) and gain full control of the operating system hosting them, as well as any other guest VMs running on the same host machine.
According to CrowdStrike, this roughly decade-old bug was discovered in the open-source virtualization package QEMU, affecting its Virtual Floppy Disk Controller (FDC) that is being used in many modern virtualization platforms and appliances, including Xen, KVM, Oracle's VirtualBox, and the native QEMU client.
Jason Geffner, a senior security researcher at CrowdStrike who discovered the flaw, warned that the vulnerability affects all the versions of QEMU dated back to 2004, when the virtual floppy controller was introduced at the very first.
However, Geffner also added that so far, there is no known exploit that could successfully exploit the vulnerability. Venom is critical and disturbing enough to be considered a high-priority bug.
Successful exploitation of Venom required:
For successful exploitation, an attacker sitting on the guest virtual machine would need sufficient permissions to get access to the floppy disk controller I/O ports.
When considering on Linux guest machine, an attacker would need to have either root access or elevated privilege. However on Windows guest, practically anyone would have sufficient permissions to access the FDC.
However, comparing Venom with Heartbleed is something of no comparison. Where HeartBleed allowed hackers to probe Millions of systems, Venom bug simply would not be exploitable at the same scale.
Flaws like Venom are typically used in a highly targeted attack such as corporate espionage, cyber warfare or other targeted attacks of these kinds.
Did venom poison Clouds Services?
Potentially more concerning are most of the large cloud providers, including Amazon, Oracle, Citrix, and Rackspace, which rely heavily on QEMU-based virtualization are vulnerable to Venom.
However, the good news is that most of them have resolved the issue, assuring that their customers needn't worry.
"There is no risk to AWS customer data or instances," Amazon Web Services said in a statement.
Rackspace also said the flaw does affect a portion of its Cloud Servers, but assured its customers that it has "applied the appropriate patch to our infrastructure and are working with customers to remediate fully this vulnerability."
Azure cloud service by Microsoft, on the other hand, uses its homemade virtualization hypervisor technology, and, therefore, its customers are not affected by Venom bug.
Meanwhile, Google also assured that its Cloud Service Platform does not use the vulnerable software, thus was never vulnerable to Venom.
Patch Now! Prevent yourself
Both Xen and QEMU have rolled out patches for Venom. If you're running an earlier version of Xen or QEMU, upgrade and apply the patch.
Note: All versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which includes QEMU, are vulnerable to Venom. Red Hat recommend its users to update their system using the commands, "yum update" or "yum update qemu-kvm."
Once done, you must "power off" all your guests Virtual Machines for the update to take place, and then restart it to be on the safer side. But remember, only restarting without power off the guest operating system is not enough for the administrators because it would still use the old QEMU binary.
| Cyber_Attack |
Cybersecurity Firm FireEye Got Hacked; Red-Team Pentest Tools Stolen | https://thehackernews.com/2020/12/cybersecurity-firm-fireeye-got-hacked.html | FireEye, one of the largest cybersecurity firms in the world, said on Tuesday it became a victim of a state-sponsored attack by a "highly sophisticated threat actor" that stole its arsenal of Red Team penetration testing tools it uses to test the defenses of its customers.
The company said it's actively investigating the breach in coordination with the US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other key partners, including Microsoft.
It did not identify a specific culprit who might be behind the breach or disclose when the hack exactly took place.
However, The New York Times and The Washington Post reported that the FBI has turned over the investigation to its Russian specialists and that the attack is likely the work of APT29 (or Cozy Bear) — state-sponsored hackers affiliated with Russia's SVR Foreign Intelligence Service — citing unnamed sources.
As of writing, the hacking tools have not been exploited in the wild, nor do they contain zero-day exploits, although malicious actors in possession of these tools could abuse them to subvert security barriers and take control of targeted systems.
Red Team tools are often used by cybersecurity organizations to mimic those used in real-world attacks with the goal of assessing a company's detection and response capabilities and evaluating the security posture of enterprise systems.
The company said the adversary also accessed some internal systems and primarily sought information about government clients but added there's no evidence that the attacker exfiltrated customer information related to incident response or consulting engagements or the metadata collected by its security software.
"This attack is different from the tens of thousands of incidents we have responded to throughout the years," FireEye CEO Kevin Mandia wrote in a blog post.
"The attackers tailored their world-class capabilities specifically to target and attack FireEye. They are highly trained in operational security and executed with discipline and focus. They operated clandestinely, using methods that counter security tools and forensic examination. They used a novel combination of techniques not witnessed by us or our partners in the past."
The accessed Red Team tools run the gamut from scripts used for automating reconnaissance to entire frameworks that are similar to publicly available technologies such as CobaltStrike and Metasploit. A few others are modified versions of publicly available tools designed to evade basic security detection mechanisms, while the rest are proprietary attack utilities developed in-house.
To minimize the potential impact of the theft of these tools, the company has also released 300 countermeasures, including a list of 16 previously disclosed critical flaws that should be addressed to limit the effectiveness of the Red Team tools.
If anything, the development is yet another indication that no companies, counting cybersecurity firms, are immune to targeted attacks.
Major cybersecurity firms such as Kaspersky Lab, RSA Security, Avast, and Bit9 have previously fallen victims to damaging hacks over the past decade.
The incident also bears faint similarities to The Shadow Brokers' leak of offensive hacking tools used by the US National Security Agency in 2016, which also included the EternalBlue zero-day exploit that was later weaponized to distribute the WannaCry ransomware.
"Security companies are a prime target for nation-state operators for many reasons, but not least of all is [the] ability to gain valuable insights about how to bypass security controls within their ultimate targets," Crowdstrike's co-founder and former CTO Dmitri Alperovitch said.
The release of red team tools stolen by the adversary "will go a long way to mitigating the potential impact of this intrusion for organizations all over the world," he added.
| Data_Breaches |
Watch Out! Microsoft Spotted Spike in Astaroth Fileless Malware Attacks | https://thehackernews.com/2019/07/astaroth-fileless-malware.html | 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.
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.
| Cyber_Attack |
Russian Cyber Criminals selling hacked websites access in Underground stores | https://thehackernews.com/2013/08/russian-hackers-underground-hacking-websites.html | Underground sites more commonly offer access to networks of compromised machines or stolen credit card information. Webroot has uncovered a criminal underground store dedicated to selling access to more than tens of thousands of hacked legitimate websites.
Their customers can buy an administrator account or shell access in a hacked website, at cheap price i.e. $0.5 to $10 and then allows to perpetrate criminal activities from it, distribute malware, install a botnet command & control infrastructure, upload illegal content, send spam, and so on.
In Screenshots Researchers shows an underground market proposition, whose inventory is currently listing over 6000 compromised/hacked shells internationally. Sites are listed based on the price, page rank, age of the domain, Alexa ranking, language, and number of pages indexed by Google.
The site promised access to any number of the compromised websites and the store seems to be quite profitable. The website found to be in the Russian language and some software installed in the server was set to Russian language.
It's very difficult to crack down on cyber criminals because the Internet makes it easier for people to do things anonymously and from any location on the globe. Many computers used in cyber attacks have actually been hacked and are being controlled by someone far away.
The criminals running the store have made the most of basic vulnerabilities with a basic tool set. This is a good example of what can happen to a website if it is not properly protected, or has a weak password.
| Vulnerability |
On 4th August SAP systems will be hacked on internet in BlackHat USA 2011 | https://thehackernews.com/2011/08/on-4th-august-sap-systems-will-be.html | On 4th August SAP systems will be hacked on internet in BlackHat USA 2011
On the 4th of august at the world largest technical security conference - BlackHat USA 2011, which will take place in Las Vegas, SAP security expert and CTO of ERPScan Alexander Polyakov will show how any malicious attacker can get access to the systems running on SAP via Internet using new critical vulnerability.
SAP systems are used in more than 100 000 world companies to handle business-critical data and processes. Almost in each company from Forbes 500 system data are set for the handling of any process beginning from purchasing, human resources and financial reporting and ending with communication with other business systems. Thus receiving an access by the malicious attacker leads to complete control over the financial flow of the company, which can be used for espionage, sabotage and fraudful actions against hacked company.
The given attack is possible due to dangerous vulnerability of the new type, detected by Alexander in J2EE engine of SAP NetWeaver software, which allows bypassing authorization checks. For example it is possible to create a user and assign him to the administrators group using two unauthorized requests to the system. It is also dangerous because that attack is possible on systems, protected by the two-factor authentication systems, in which it is needed to know secret key and password to get access. To prove it researchers from ERPScan created a program, which detects SAP servers in the Internet with help of secret Google keyword and checks found servers on potential dangerous vulnerability. As the result, more than half of available servers could be hacked with help of found vulnerability.
"Danger is in that it is not only a new vulnerability, but a whole class of vulnerabilities that was theoretically described earlier but not popular in practice. During our research we only detected several examples in standard system configuration, and because each company customizes the system under its own business processes, new examples of vulnerabilities of the given class can be potentially detected at each company in the future. We have developed a free program which can detect unique vulnerabilities of such type in order to protect companies on time and it is also included in our professional product – ERPScan Security Scanner for SAP." — noted Alexander.
Source
| Vulnerability |
Energy Department networks hit by major Cyber Attack | https://thehackernews.com/2013/02/energy-department-networks-hit-by-major.html | The Computer networks of Energy Department were attacked by unknown hackers in a major cyber attack two weeks ago and personal information on several hundred employees was compromised.
The Washington Free Beacon reports that, FBI agents are investigating the attacks and 14 computer servers and 20 workstations reportedly were penetrated during the attack. Officials are working to determine the exact nature of the attack and the extent of potential damage.
"They believe the sophisticated penetration attack was not limited to stealing personal information. There are indications the attackers had other motives, possibly including plans to gain future access to classified and other sensitive information."
The security breach resulted in the unauthorized disclosure of employee and contractor Personally Identifiable Information (PII) of several hundred people.
Department is in the process of notifying employees whose information was stolen. However, Chinese hackers are likely suspects because the department is known to be a major target of China for both secrets and technology.
Last week, New York Times and Wall Street Journal also discloses that they were also hacked by Chinese Hackers and recently 250,000 Twitter accounts was also compromised in similar sophisticated cyber attack.
| Data_Breaches |
Two British Men Arrested For Hacking Microsoft | https://thehackernews.com/2017/06/hacker-arrested-for-hacking-microsoft.html | British police have arrested two men in the UK conspiring to hack into the computer networks of US tech giant Microsoft with plans to steal customers' data from the software giant.
The suspects — 22-year-old from Sleaford and a 25-year-old from Bracknell — were arrested by the detectives from the Britain's South East Regional Organised Crime Unit (SEROCU) Thursday morning (22 June 2017).
The UK authorities arrested them from their home in Lincolnshire and Bracknell and seized a number of devices after searching their home.
While it is still unclear what systems were targeted, SEROCU believes the suspects are part of a larger international group that involved breaking into the Microsoft's network between January 2017 and March 2017 to scoop up the customer information.
"This group is spread around the world and therefore the investigation is being coordinated with our various partners," Rob Bryant, detective sergeant SEROCU's Cyber Crime Unit said while announcing the arrest. "We have made two arrests in the UK this morning and have seized a number of devices."
"We're still in the early stages of this investigation and will work with our partners to ensure that cyber criminals have no place to hide. It's too early to speculate on what information the group has accessed, however, after speaking with Microsoft we can confirm they didn't gain access to customer information."
Both the suspects, whose identities have not yet revealed by the police, are currently in custody and have been charged under the Britain's Computer Misuse Act for conspiracy to gain "unauthorised access" to protected computers belonging to Microsoft.
In response to the arrests, Tom Burt, Microsoft VP and deputy general counsel of the Digital Crimes Unit released a statement to BBC, saying:
"Today's action by authorities in the UK represents an important step...Stronger internet security depends on the ability to identify and prosecute cybercriminals. This requires not only a strong technical capability but the willingness to acknowledge issues publicly and refer them to law enforcement."
"No company is immune from cybercrime. No customer data was accessed, and we're confident in the integrity of our software and systems. We have comprehensive measures in place to prevent, detect, and respond to attacks."
SEROCU officials said they are working with Europol, the NCA's National Cyber Crime Unit, the FBI, the East Midlands Special Operations Unit (EMSOU), and Microsoft's cyber team to investigate the intrusions and bring culprits to justice.
| Data_Breaches |
Adware Companies buying popular Chrome extensions to inject Ads and Malware | https://thehackernews.com/2014/01/adware-companies-buying-popular-chrome.html | Browser extensions are extra features and functionality that you can easily add to Google Chrome, Firefox and other popular Browsers, but they can be used to serve malicious adware, which automatically renders advertisements in order to generate revenue for its author.
Hackers are now taking their business rather more seriously than we thought. Even a single instance of malicious adware on your PC can inject bad ads or malware to your browser.
Ads are a legitimate way to monetize. However, creating and spreading a fresh add-on to get a large user base is always tough, but now adware companies found a new trick i.e. Buying trusted browser extensions with a large user-base and exploiting their auto-update status to push out adware.
Recently, the developer of 'Add to Feedly' Chrome extension with 30,000+ users, Amit Agarwal, was approached by some mysterious buyers. "It was a 4-figure offer for something that had taken an hour to create and I agreed to the deal," he said.
"I transferred the ownership of the extension to a particular Google Account. A month later, the new owners of the Feedly extension pushed an update to the Chrome store. No, the update didn't bring any new features to the table, nor contained any bug fixes. Instead, they incorporated advertising into the extension."
Google updates chrome extensions silently in the background, and majority of the users would not be able to notice the changes. But when Google Chrome is affected by adware, you may experience frequent pop-up ads and redirection to malicious domains.
"These aren't regular banner ads that you see on web pages, these are invisible ads that work the background and replace links on every website that you visit into affiliate links."
Ad injections are not in violation of the Chrome Web Store program policies, but it must be presented in the context of the extension or, when present within another page, ads must be outside the page's normal flow and clearly state which extension they are bundled with.
After reviewing Amit's extension, now Google has finally removed it from the Chrome web store. If your browser is also infected with Adware or any other type of malicious software, check your browser add-ons and extensions regularly, disabling those you don't use and those that look suspicious.
| Malware |
Mukashi: A New Mirai IoT Botnet Variant Targeting Zyxel NAS Devices | https://thehackernews.com/2020/03/zyxel-mukashi-mirai-iot-botnet.html | 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 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.
"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.
| Cyber_Attack |
AOL Hit by Massive Data Breach, Urges Users to Change Passwords | https://thehackernews.com/2014/04/aol-hit-by-massive-data-breach-urges.html | If you are a user of the American On-Line (AOL) mail service then you are advised to change your password as soon as possible.
AOL Inc. on Monday confirmed the company suffered a massive data breach that may have affected a "significant number" of email accounts.
The company has issued a warning to users that their personal information including email addresses, postal addresses, address books, encrypted passwords and the encrypted answers to security question-answers, has been stolen by attackers, the New York-based company said Monday.
"The ongoing investigation of this serious criminal activity is our top priority," AOL said in a blog post. "We are working closely with federal authorities to pursue this investigation to its resolution. Our security team has put enhanced protective measures in place, and we urge our users to take proactive steps to help ensure the security of their accounts."
AOL said it began investigating the matter after it noticed a spike in spoofed emails from AOL user accounts. The company believes that hackers used the contact information to send spoofed emails that appear to come from roughly 2 percent of its email accounts.
"Spoofed" emails are kind of phishing emails or messages that masquerade itself as if they have come from legitimate user accounts known to the recipient in order to trick the recipient into opening it, but in real are the links to malicious websites or malware.
The company believes that neither the financial data of users such as credit and debit cards number, nor the passwords or the answer to the security questions has been revealed as the hackers weren't be able to break the encryption.
"Importantly, we have no indication that the encryption on the passwords or the answers to security questions was broken," AOL wrote. "In addition, at this point in the investigation, there is no indication that this incident resulted in disclosure of users' financial information, including debit and credit cards, which is also fully encrypted."
Nevertheless, AOL suggests all its users to reset their passwords and also change their security questions and answers in order to protect themselves from such breaches.
"Although there is no indication that the encryption on the passwords or answers to security questions was broken, as a precautionary measure, we nevertheless strongly encourage our users and employees to reset their passwords used for any AOL service and, when doing so, also to change their security question and answer," AOL said.
In addition, it also provided some steps to protect its users from cyber threats:
Do not click on any suspicious links or attachments in the email you received.
When in doubt, contact the sender to confirm that he or she actually sent the email to you or not.
Never provide your personal or financial information through an email to someone you do not know.
AOL will never ask you for your password or any other sensitive personal information over an email.
If you found yourself a victim of spoofing, inform your friends that your emails may have been spoofed and warn them to avoid clicking the links in suspicious emails.
| Malware |
Anonymous Hackers Target Israeli Websites and Leak Credentials | https://thehackernews.com/2015/04/anonymous-cyber-attack-israel.html | The infamous hacking group Anonymous that vowed an 'Electronic Holocaust' against Israel and promised to 'erase Israel from cyberspace' on 7th April, managed to launch a cyber attack, beginning Tuesday morning.
In a spooky video "message to Israel" posted on YouTube March 4, Anonymous declared cyber attack against Israel on April 7 in response to what the group calls 'crimes in the Palestinian territories.'
Today we noticed a number of hacking incidents against Israeli cyberspace under #OpIsrael.
Anonymous conduct #OpIsrael attack against Israel every year on 7th April and this is the fourth annual cyber attack on Israel in order to protest against Israeli bombing on the Palestinian territory.
CYBER ATTACKS AGAINST ISRAEL
Today, Anonymous and Pro-Palestinian hackers targeted dozens of Israeli Government websites, including the Knesset portal (parliament), as well as websites related to the Israeli court system and the Education Ministry.
In Brief, Anonymous group claimed following cyber attacks:
At least 150,000 phone numbers, Facebook, Gmail and Hotmail Israel accounts have been hacked.
The official website of Israeli Singer Shalom Hanoch was hacked.
The website of the Israeli Center for Educational Excellence was also taken down.
The hacktivist group replaced the affected websites' homepages with photos of a Muslim holy site in Jerusalem and militants holding the Islamic State militant flag, with a message signed by "AnonGhost."
While many website owners have taken the threats seriously. However, Israel's Computer Emergency Response Team issued a statement saying that no major government sites were affected, as they were already aware of this and was ready to foil the attacks.
ANONYMOUS HACKER LEAKS LOGINS TO 6,000 ROUTERS
Anonymous published log-in credentials (usernames and passwords) for nearly 6,000 Israel Routers publicly.
However, router password dump doesn't damage the Israeli cyber-infrastructure instantly, but these sensitive credentials for Israel network could be used later by anyone, hackers or law enforcement, to penetrate into the affected modems.
In addition, the Israel Security Agency, Shin Bet and the National Cyber Defense Center -- a part of the Prime Minister's Office, are providing measures to civilian Internet websites on how to defend themselves against the cyber attack.
In April 2013, the Anonymous unit caused $3 Billion worth of damage to Israel, when the group targeted about 30,000 Israeli bank accounts, 100,000 websites, 5,000 Twitter accounts and over 40,000 Facebook pages under #OpIsrael.
During Operation OpIsrael, Anonymous hacking group published the personal data of 5,000 Israeli officials over the Internet, which included names, ID numbers and personal email addresses.
When we talk about the damage caused to Israeli websites, it is a temporary damage caused to the country that could be recovered in few hours or days. However, the damage caused by Israel in the Palestinian territories, including last summer's Gaza conflict, is something that could take years to recover.
| Cyber_Attack |
Warning: Malicious version of FTP Software FileZilla stealing users' Credentials | https://thehackernews.com/2014/01/warning-malicious-version-of-ftp.html | Malware code can be very small, and the impact can be very severe! The Antivirus firm AVAST spotted a malicious version of the open source FTP (File Transfer Protocol) software 'FileZilla' out in the wild.
The software is open source, but has been modified by the hackers that steal users' credentials, offered on various hacked sites for download with banner or text ads.
Once installed, the software's appearance and functionalities are equal to the original version, so a user cannot distinguish between the fake or real one, and the malware version of the ".exe" file is just slightly smaller than the real one.
"The installed malware FTP client looks like the official version and it is fully functional! You can't find any suspicious behavior, entries in the system registry, communication or changes in application GUI."
The only difference is that the malware version use 2.46.3-Unicode and the official installer use v2.45-Unicode, as shown:
"We found a hardcoded connection detail stealer after deeper analysis. Malware authors abuse open source code and add their own stealer function to the main code."
The modified version copies the login information of the user and sends it to a server that is apparently in Germany, and same IP address of the server hosts three other domains, which are also associated with malware and spam activities.
"Login details are sent to attackers from the ongoing FTP connection only once. Malware doesn't search bookmarks or send any other files or saved connections," Avast explains.
This malicious version has been compiled way back in September 2012, and is still detected by just a couple of Antivirus solutions. In the past, Cyber Criminals also used Google Adsense to promote malicious software or the modified open source softwares.
Be Careful when downloading the FileZilla FTP client, such malware could also be employed for spreading more malware. Users are recommended to downloaded the softwares from the official website only.
| Malware |
Researchers found Apache Server-Status Enabled Security Vulnerability in Popular sites | https://thehackernews.com/2012/10/researchers-found-apache-server-status.html | Researchers found Apache Server-Status Enabled on some popular site like php.net , cisco, nba.com, Cloudflare, Metacafe, Ford, yellow.com, and others.
For backgorund, there is a Module mod_status in Apache server which allows a server administrator to find out how well their server is performing. A HTML page is presented that gives the current server statistics in an easily readable form.
Basically, mod_status provides information on your apache server activity and performance. The main security risk of using this module is only Information disclosure which includes infomation such as Server uptime, Individual request-response statistics and CPU usage of the working processes, Current HTTP requests, client IP addresses, requested paths, processed virtual hosts. , that could give a potential attacker information about how to attack the web server.
Few popular brands showing their status online, discovered by Daniel Cid from Sucuri:
https://php.net/server-status/
https://cloudflare.com/server-status/ (Fixed now)
https://metacafe.com/server-status/
https://disney.go.com/server-status (Fixed now)
https://www.latimes.com/server-status/
https://www.staples.com/server-status/
https://tweetdeck.com/server-status/ (Fixed now)
https://www.nba.com/server-status/
https://www.ford.com/server-status/
Solution, Don't allow Apache Server mod_status Publicly Accessible and for that administrator need to just do few changes in the configuration file of apache (httpd.conf). Additionally it is recommended to comment out the section from Apache configuration file httpd.conf.
| Vulnerability |
Multiple DDoS Botnets Exploited 0-Day Flaws in LILIN DVR Surveillance Systems | https://thehackernews.com/2020/03/ddos-botnets-lilin-dvr.html | 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.
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.
| Malware |
DNSChanger Malware : Thousands May Lose Net Access On July 9th July | https://thehackernews.com/2012/07/dnschanger-malware-thousands-may-lose.html | Thousands May Lose Net Access On July 9th July
The warnings about the Internet problem have been splashed across Facebook and Google. Internet service providers have sent notices, and the FBI set up a special website.
Thousands of Canadians could be among the hundreds of thousands of people around the world who might lose Internet access on July 9.That's the day the FBI will shut down all the "clean servers" it set up to combat a massive hacking operation.
Last November the FBI arrested and charged six Estonian men behind the malware as part of Operation Ghost Click. These hackers were able to make a fortune off their project, raking in millions for ads placed on their fraudulent websites.On the eve of the arrests, the FBI hired Paul Vixie, chairman of the Internet Systems Consortium (ISC) to install two temporary Internet servers that would prevent infected users from losing access to the Internet once the DNSChanger botnet was shut down.
DNS (Domain Name System) is a core Internet technology used to convert human readable domain names suchasfacebook.com into an IP address such as 10.181.211.1, which a computer understands.
It's estimated that there is still around 277,00 infections worldwide, despite a massive clean up operation. If you're concerned about your own PC, or family members, then there's a DNS checker website or more information over at the DNS Changer Working Group.
Running the temporary servers for eight months has cost the FBI $87,000. Both Facebook and Google created their own warning messages that showed up if someone using either site appeared to have an infected computer. Facebook users would get a message that says, "Your computer or network might be infected," along with a link that users can click for more information.Google users got a similar message, displayed at the top of a Google search results page. It also provides information on correcting the problem.
Ensure that the DNS Servers are not within the following range of Internet Protocols (IPs):
- 85.255.112.0 through 85.255.127.255
- 67.210.0.0 through 67.210.15.255
- 93.188.160.0 through 93.188.167.255
- 77.67.83.0 through 77.67.83.255
- 213.109.64.0 through 213.109.79.255
- 64.28.176.0 through 64.28.191.255
If DNSChanger is detected, users may use software from McAfee, Kaspersky Labs, Microsoft, Norton, or Trend Micro to clean the infection.
| Malware |
Kaseya Supply-Chain Attack Hits Nearly 40 Service Providers With REvil Ransomware | https://thehackernews.com/2021/07/kaseya-revil-ransomware-attack.html | Threat actors behind the notorious REvil cybercrime operation appear to have pushed ransomware via an update for Kaseya's IT management software, hitting around 40 customers worldwide, in what's an instance of a widespread supply-chain ransomware attack.
"Beginning around mid-day (EST/US) on Friday, July 2, 2021, Kaseya's Incident Response team learned of a potential security incident involving our VSA software," the company's CEO Fred Voccola said in a statement shared late Friday.
Following the incident, the IT and security management services company said it took immediate steps to shut down its SaaS servers as a precautionary measure, in addition to notifying its on-premises customers to shut down their VSA servers to prevent them from being compromised.
Voccola also said the company has identified the source of the vulnerability and that it's readying a patch to mitigate the ongoing issues. In the interim, the company also noted it intends to keep all on-premise VSA servers, SaaS, and hosted VSA servers shut down until it's safe to resume operations.
According to Sophos Malware Analyst Mark Loman, the industry-wide supply-chain attack leverages Kaseya VSA to deploy a variant of the REvil ransomware into a victim's environment, with the malicious binary side-loaded via a fake Windows Defender app to encrypt files in return for a ransom demand of $5 million.
The attack chain also involves attempts to disable Microsoft Defender Real-Time Monitoring via PowerShell, Loman added. The trojanized software is being distributed in the form of a "Kaseya VSA Agent Hot-fix," Huntress Labs said in a Reddit post detailing the workings of the breach.
The researchers noted they had found eight managed service providers (MSPs), companies that provide IT services to other companies, that had been hit by the attack. About 200 businesses that are served by these MSPs have been locked out of parts of their network, Huntress Labs said.
As the ransomware crisis continues to spiral, MSPs have emerged as a lucrative target, mainly because a successful break-in opens up access to multiple clients, rendering them all vulnerable. With supply chain attacks becoming frequent in the wake of the sprawling SolarWinds campaign, a supply chain attack that targets MSPs to distribute ransomware has exponential consequences, enabling bad actors to strike hundreds of victims at once.
Update: In a revised advisory shared on Saturday, Kaseya said it had been the "victim of a sophisticated cyberattack," while warning customers to refrain from clicking on any links sent in communications with the ransomware operators. "They may be weaponized," the company cautioned.
Besides roping in cybersecurity firm FireEye Mandiant to identify the indicators of compromise (IoCs), the company is recommending businesses to keep all on-premises VSA servers offline until further notice and use a Compromise Detection Tool that it has made available to commence the recovery process.
Huntress Labs said it's tracking close to 30 MSPs across the U.S., Australia, European Union, EU, and Latin America, where Kaseya VSA was used to encrypt new fewer than 1,000 businesses.
"All of these VSA servers are on-premises and Huntress assesses with high confidence that cybercriminals exploited a vulnerability to gain access into these servers," Huntress Labs researcher John Hammond said.
This raises the possibility that REvil used a zero-day flaw in Kaseya VSA software to gain access to the systems, making it the first time a ransomware group has used a zero-day in attacks. Kaseya, for its part, noted that it had isolated and replicated the attack vector, and that it's working towards adding software remediations to address the security weakness.
| Malware |
Dell's Laptops are Infected with 'Superfish-Like' pre-installed Malware | https://thehackernews.com/2015/11/superfish-malware-dell.html | Similar to the Superfish malware that surrounded Lenovo laptops in February, another big computer manufacturer Dell spotted selling PCs and laptops pre-installed with a rogue SSL certificate that could allow attackers:
To impersonate as any HTTPS-protected website and spy on when banking or shopping online.
The rogue certificate, dubbed eDellRoot, was first discovered over the weekend by a software programmer named Joe Nord. The certificate is so creepy that it automatically re-installs itself even when removed from the Windows operating system.
Also Read: Lenovo Caught Using Rootkit to Secretly Install Unremovable Software
Superfish 2.0: Unkillable Zombie
The self-signed transport layer security (TLS) credential came pre-installed as a root certificate on Dell PCs and laptops that are signed with the same private cryptographic key, which is stored locally.
That means an attacker with moderate technical skills can extract the key and abuse it to sign forged version of TLS certificates for any HTTPS-protected site on the Internet, exposing users to all manner of SSL attacks.
The certificate key can be used to conduct man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks on Dell owners, silently stealing user names, passwords, session cookies, and other sensitive information when the affected Dell machines are connected to a malicious Wi-Fi hotspots in cafes, hospitals or airports.
The problem is similar to the scandal that hit Lenovo in February when the PC manufacturer was caught pre-installing an invasive adware program called Superfish with a similar self-signed cert to inject third-party advertisements into websites on browsers.
Must Read: Automatic Superfish Removal Tool
Although Dell's case is different as there is no indication that the certificate is being used to inject advertisements on the laptops, the resulting security issue is the same.
Affected PCs and Laptops
The self-signed certificate key was discovered to be pre-installed as a root certificate on at least three Dell laptop models:
Dell Inspiron 5000 series notebook
Dell XPS 15
Dell XPS 13
This indicates that the dangerous certificate may be present on a significant number of the Dell desktops and laptops currently on the market, specifically recent Dell Inspiron Desktop, XPS, and Precision M4800 and Latitude models.
To Check if Your Computer is Vulnerable
To discover the dangerous certificate:
Open up the Start menu
Select Run
Type in certmgr.msc – the Windows certificate manager – into the box and Hit Enter
Open up the Trusted Root Certification Authority folder on the left
Select Certificates
Search for eDellRoot
Once found, right-click over eDellRoot and hit "Remove." It appears to be gone, but actually it's not.
Reboot your computer and reopen certmgr.msc and search for the certificate "eDellRoot". Yeah, the removed root CA cert is back.
What Should You do? How to Remove?
It seems that even if the certificate is clearly fraudulent, Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer browsers always establish an encrypted Web session with no warnings.
But fortunately, Mozilla's Firefox web browser generates an alert warning that the certificate was not trusted.
So, Dell customers with new XPS, Precision, and Inspiron models are advised to use Firefox to browse the web.
To fix the issue completely, Dell users will need to manually revoke the certificate permissions, which is a complex and technically demanding task.
Moreover, security researcher Darren Kemp from Duo Security says that the problem may be even worse than what Nord suggested.
According to an analysis done by Kempa, a bundled plugin re-installs the root CA file when it is removed. So, to remove the eDellRoot certificate completely, you must:
First delete Dell.Foundation.Agent.Plugins.eDell.dll from your system
Then remove the eDellRoot root CA certificate
Dell's Response
In a statement, a Dell spokesperson said the company is investigating the report and looking into the certificate, but emphasized the company's policy of minimizing pre-loaded software for security reasons.
"Customer security and privacy is a top concern for Dell," the spokesperson said. "We've a team investigating the current [issue] and will update you as soon as we have more information."
| Malware |
Nasty Covert Redirect Vulnerability found in OAuth and OpenID | https://thehackernews.com/2014/05/nasty-covert-redirect-vulnerability.html | After Heartbleed bug, a security flaw in widely used open-source software OpenSSL that puts countless websites at risk, another vulnerability has been found in popular authentication software OpenID and authorization software OAuth.
Wang Jing, a Chinese mathematics Ph.D student at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, found that the OAuth and OpenID open source login tools are vulnerable to the "Covert Redirect" exploit.
The login tools 'OAuth' and 'OpenID' protocols are the commonly used open standard for authorization. OAuth designed as a way for users to sign in or sign up for other services using an existing identity of a site such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft or Twitter, whereas OpenID is a decentralized authentication system for the Internet that allows users to log in at websites across the internet with same digital identity.
The Covert Redirect vulnerability could affect those who use 'OAuth' and 'OpenID' protocols to 'login' to the websites such as Facebook, Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Microsoft, VK, Mail.Ru, PayPal, GitHub and many others.
WHAT MAKES IT EVEN MORE DANGEROUS?
The "Covert Redirect" flaw masquerade as a login popup from the affected sites that could allow an attacker to steal personal data from users and redirect them to a website of the attacker's choice, which could potentially further compromise the victim.
By clicking on a malicious phishing link will get a popup window in Facebook, asking them to authorize the app and to hoax the user into giving up their information instead on legitimate websites, the Covert Redirect flaw uses the real site address for authentication.
Once the user login, the attacker could get the personal data, which in the case of Facebook, could include the email address, birth date, contacts, work history, etc.
But, if in case "the token" has greater privilege, the attacker could obtain more sensitive information including the mailbox, friends list, online presence and most possibly even operate and control the user's account.
In a blog post yesterday Jing explained, for OAuth 2.0, the attacks could risk "the token" of the site users and whenever users authorize the login the attacker could then use that to access users' private information. In case of OpenID, the attacker could get users' information directly, as it's immediately transferred from the provider upon request.
However, this isn't the first time the issue has been raised and the root cause is a lack of token whitelisting in OAuth 2.0.
RESPONSE FROM INTERNET GIANTS
Facebook uses OAuth and something similar to OpenID. When he reported the Facebook about the vulnerability, Facebook said "they understand the risks associated with OAuth 2.0. However, short of forcing every single application on the platform to use a whitelist, [fixing the vulnerability] isn't something that can be accomplished in the short term."
Facebook isn't the only site affected, Jing reported the vulnerability to some more companies who use both OAuth and OpenID including Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft and Yahoo to discuss the problem.
Google uses OpenID and told Jing, "they are aware of the problem and are tracking it at the moment," whereas LinkedIn told they have acknowledged the problem back in march and "published a blog post on how [they] intend to address [the problem]."
Microsoft replied after they investigated the matter and concluded that the vulnerability exists in the domain of a third-party which is different from the one Jing reported and recommended him to report the issue to the third-party instead.
Yahoo did not reply months after he reported.
"They have little incentive to fix the problem," Jing wrote regarding the companies, "One concern is the cost and the other is that in their view, the host company is responsible for making the attacks appear more credible; therefore, it is not solely their problem."
HOW TO FIX COVERT REDIRECT VULNERABILITY
According to Jing, there is no speedy fix for the vulnerability. "In the real world, a large number of third-party applications do not do this due to various reasons. This makes the systems based on OAuth 2.0 or OpenID highly vulnerable," Jing wrote.
Wang believes it's unlikely that this flaw will be patched any time soon. He says neither the authentication companies such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook, nor the client companies are taking responsibility for fixing the issue.
However, to take advantage of Covert redirect vulnerability, it requires interaction from users i.e. Victim has to click on a link or visit a malicious website, and then they have to click on a Facebook login button and agree to authorize the login and release of information.
So far, the security experts hasn't labelled this vulnerability as a major security flaw as Heartbleed, but still it's a threat.
| Vulnerability |
Netflix Users Targeted by Microsoft Silverlight Exploits | https://thehackernews.com/2014/05/netflix-users-targeted-by-microsoft.html | Netflix, the world's largest Internet Video Subscription service with more than 35.7 million customers in U.S alone, that runs on the Microsoft Silverlight platform, has now become a popular target for cybercriminals, as public awareness of Java and Flash flaws is increasing.
Silverlight is a Microsoft's plug-in for streaming media on browsers, similar to Adobe Flash Player, that handles multimedia contents on Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X Web Browsers, and is popularly known for being used in Netflix's streaming video service.
But, Netflix isn't the only service that works on Silverlight, many other multimedia services supports Silverlight.
Malware and Exploit Kit developers are targeting Silverlight users as they aren't aware of the increasing proliferation of malware for the platform. Silverlight vulnerabilities are mostly exploited using drive-by download attacks to compromise victim's computers with malware, especially through malicious ads.
A recent Angler Exploit Campaign has been spotted by the Cisco researcher spiked since April 23, targeting Microsoft's Silverlight by imposing the exploits on the infected systems. The Exploit Kit in this campaign also hosts exploits for Flash and Java, but it doesn't trigger them, which at a time was one of the widely targeted platform by the exploit kits developers.
"Exploit kit owners are adding Silverlight to their update releases, and since 23 April we have observed substantial traffic - often from malvertising - being driven to Angler instances partially using Silverlight exploits," said Gundert, the lead threat researcher at Cisco.
The cyber criminals are infiltrating the Advertising Networks with malvertising to redirect victims to the hundreds of malicious websites hosting the Angler Exploit Kit, where the actual attack comes into play by silently launching Silverlight exploits against the infected system.
Till now, The Exploit Kit (EK) developers were targeting the vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash and Oracle Java, but as the public awareness and pathing efforts of both the two firms has increased, the malware developers have switched to the Microsoft's Silverlight.
"Java and Flash have been heavily exploited over the years, and vendors are getting good at writing engines that detect vulnerabilities in those libraries," said the Cisco researcher Craig Williams. "Silverlight has not been exploited much. There are some limited CVEs, but few are widespread. What we may be seeing here is a tipping point where Java exploits are being detected and what other formats can hackers take advantage of."
Levi Gundert , Technical lead at Cisco Threat Research observed that the Angler campaign exploits two known Silverlight vulnerabilities i.e.
CVE-2013-0074 - which gives attackers the ability to remotely execute malicious code
CVE-2013-3896 - it allows to bypass Data Execution Prevention (DEP), a security mitigation added to most Microsoft applications.
"We should expect these existing Silverlight exploits to proliferate through other exploit pack families in the near future as threat actors copy code from each other and release updates," Gundert wrote.
"Silverlight exploits are also ideal because Silverlight continues to gain rich Internet application market share, perhaps surpassing Java, and Microsoft's life cycle schedule suggests Silverlight 5 will be supported through October, 2021."
The security firm didn't expose the names of compromised websites serving the exploit kit. The Angler exploit kit managers were expected to be of the same group that was behind the infamous Reveton ransomware.
| Vulnerability |
Three Hackers Plead Guilty to Creating IoT-based Mirai DDoS Botnet | https://thehackernews.com/2017/12/hacker-ddos-mirai-botnet.html | The U.S. federal officials have arrested three hackers who have pleaded guilty to computer-crimes charges for creating and distributing Mirai botnet that crippled some of the world's biggest and most popular websites by launching the massive DDoS attacks last year.
According to the federal court documents unsealed Tuesday, Paras Jha (21-year-old from New Jersey), Josiah White (20-year-old Washington) and Dalton Norman (21-year-old from Louisiana) were indicted by an Alaska court last week on multiple charges for their role in massive cyber attacks conducted using Mirai botnet.
Mirai is a piece of nasty IoT malware that scans for insecure routers, cameras, DVRs, and other Internet of Things devices which are still using their default passwords and then add them into a botnet network, which is then used to launch DDoS attacks on websites and Internet infrastructure.
According to his plea agreement, Jha "conspired to conduct DDoS attacks against websites and web hosting companies located in the United States and abroad" by ensnaring over 300,000 IoT devices. He also demanded payment "in exchange for halting the attack."
Between September and October 2016, Jha advertised Mirai botnet on multiple dark web forums using the online monikers "Anna Senpai." He also admitted to securely wiping off the virtual machine used to run Mirai on his device and then posting the source code of Mirai online for free.
Since then, other cybercriminals have used the open-source code of the botnet to create their own Mirai variants in a variety of different cyber attacks against their targets.
Paras Jha (a.k.a Anna Senpai) and his business partner Josiah White (a.k.a Lightspeed and thegenius) are the same people who were outed by blogger Brian Krebs earlier this year after his blog was also knocked offline by a massive 620 Gbps of DDoS attack using Mirai botnet.
According to Jha's LinkedIn profile, he is a 21-year-old passionate programmer from Fanwood, U.S., who knows how to code in multiple programming languages and is positioned as president of a DDoS mitigation firm, ProTraf Solutions.
White admitted to creating the Mirai botnet's scanner to identify and hijack vulnerable internet-connected devices to enlist in the botnet, while Norman (a.k.a Drake) admitted to identifying private zero-day vulnerabilities and exploits to build into the massive botnet.
From December 2016 to February 2017, the trio successfully infected more than 100,000 computing devices to form another powerful botnet, called Clickfraud, which was designed to scam online ad networks by simulating clicks on ads for the purpose of artificially generating revenue.
A week after the massive DDoS attack, the source code of Mirai was released on the widely used hacker chat forum Hackforums by Jha who, under the name Anna-senpai, wrote he had "made their money...so it's time to GTFO."
"So today, I have an amazing release for you," he wrote. "With Mirai, I usually pull max 380k bots from telnet alone. However, after the Kreb [sic] DDoS, ISPs been slowly shutting down and cleaning up their act. Today, max pull is about 300k bots, and dropping."
Once Mirai source code was out, various cyber criminals started exploiting the IoT malware to launch powerful DDoS attacks against websites and Internet infrastructure, one of which was the popular DNS provider Dyn, which was DDoSed by a botnet of an around 100,000 Mirai malware-infected devices.
"The defendants' involvement with the original Mirai variant ended in the fall of 2016, when Jha posted the source code for Mirai on a criminal forum. Since then, other criminal actors have used Mirai variants in a variety of other attacks." DOJ said in a press release.
The trio faces a sentence of up to five years in prison.
This article has been updated to add comments from and information provided by the U.S. Justice of Department about the three defendants.
| Malware |
This Ransomware Malware Could Poison Your Water Supply If Not Paid | https://thehackernews.com/2017/02/scary-scada-ransomware.html | Ransomware has been around for a few years, but in last two years, it has become an albatross around everyone's neck, targeting businesses, hospitals, financial institutions and personal computers worldwide and extorting millions of dollars.
Ransomware is a type of malware that infects computers and encrypts their content with strong encryption algorithms, and then demands a ransom to decrypt that data.
It turned out to be a noxious game of Hackers to get paid effortlessly.
Initially, ransomware used to target regular internet users, but in past few months, we have already seen the threat targeting enterprises, educational facilities, and hospitals, hotels, and other businesses.
And now, the threat has gone Worse!
This PoC Ransomware Could Poison Water Supply!
Researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology (GIT) have demonstrated the capability of ransomware to take down the critical infrastructure our cities need to operate, causing havoc among people.
GIT researchers created a proof-of-concept ransomware that, in a simulated environment, was able to gain control of a water treatment plant and threaten to shut off the entire water supply or poison the city's water by increasing the amount of chlorine in it.
Dubbed LogicLocker, the ransomware, presented at the 2017 RSA Conference in San Francisco, allowed researchers to alter Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs) — the tiny computers that control critical Industrial Control Systems (ICS) and Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) infrastructure, like power plants or water treatment facilities.
This, in turn, gave them the ability to shut valves, control the amount of chlorine in the water, and display false readouts.
Sounds scary, Right?
Fortunately, this has not happened yet, but researchers say this is only a matter of time.
The simulated attack by researchers was created to highlight how attackers could disrupt vital services which cater to our critical needs, like water management utilities, energy providers, escalator controllers, HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) systems, and other mechanical systems.
Over 1500 PLC Systems Open To Ransomware Attack
LogicLocker targets three types of PLCs that are exposed online and infects them to reprogram the tiny computer with a new password, locking the legitimate owners out and demanding ransom while holding the utility hostage.
If the owners pay, they get their control over the PLC back. But if not, the hackers could malfunction water plant, or worse, dump life-threatening amounts of chlorine in water supplies that could potentially poison entire cities.
GIT researchers searched the internet for the two models of PLCs that they targeted during their experiment and found more than 1,500 PLCs that were exposed online.
"There are common misconceptions about what is connected to the internet," says researcher David Formby. "Operators may believe their systems are air-gapped and that there's no way to access the controllers, but these systems are often connected in some way."
Targeting industrial control and SCADA systems is not new, cybercriminals and nation-state actors are doing this for years, with programs like Stuxnet, Flame, and Duqu, but ransomware will soon add a financial element to these type of cyber attacks.
Therefore, it is inevitable that money-motivated criminals will soon target critical infrastructure directly. Additionally, the nation-state actors could also hide their intentions under ransomware operators.
So, it is high time for industrial control systems and SCADA operators to start adopting standard security practices like changing the PLCs default passwords, limiting their connections by placing them behind a firewall, scanning their networks for potential threats, and install intrusion monitoring systems.
| Malware |
Mystery of Duqu Programming Language Solved | https://thehackernews.com/2012/03/mystery-of-duqu-programming-language.html | Mystery of Duqu Programming Language Solved
An appeal for help from the programming community has allowed antivirus analysts to classify the unknown language used to develop key components of the Duqu Trojan. The sections responsible for downloading and executing additional modules in the Duqu Trojan, referred to by some as Stuxnet 2.0, were written in standard C++.
Kaspersky Lab experts now say with a high degree of certainty that the Duqu framework was written using a custom object-oriented extension to C, generally called "OO C" and compiled with Microsoft Visual Studio Compiler 2008 (MSVC 2008) with special options for optimizing code size and inline expansion.
Kaspersky's Igor Soumenkov wrote, "No matter which of these two variants is true, the implications are impressive. The Payload DLL contains 95 Kbytes of event-driven code written with OO C, a language that has no automatic memory management or safe pointers,".
Kaspersky's analysis now concludes:
The Duqu Framework consists of "C" code compiled with MSVC 2008 using the special options "/O1″ and "/Ob1″
The code was most likely written with a custom extension to C, generally called "OO C"
The event-driven architecture was developed as a part of the Duqu Framework or its OO C extension
The C&C code could have been reused from an already existing software project and integrated into the Duqu Trojan
The Duqu Framework may have been created by a different programming team, since it is unique to Duqu, unlike many parts of Duqu that seem to be directly borrowed from Stuxnet. It's believed that the developers are old school that don't trust C++ and that's probably why they relied on C. Another reason for using OO C is because back in the good old days it was more portable than C++.
Knowing the techniques used to develop the malware allows Kaspersky's researchers to make better guesses about who might be behind the code. Creating Duqu was a major project, so it's possible that an entirely different team was responsible for creating the Duqu Framework, while others worked on creating drivers and system infection exploits. In this scenario it's even possible that those who created the Duqu framework were ignorant of the real purpose of their work.
Duqu was first detected in September 2011, but Kaspersky Lab believes it has seen the first pieces of Duqu-related malware dating back to August 2007. The Russian security firm also notes Duqu, like Stuxnet before it, is highly targeted and related to Iran's nuclear program.
| Malware |
Facebook Accused of Giving Over 60 Device-Makers Deep Access to User Data | https://thehackernews.com/2018/06/facebook-data-privacy.html | 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, 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.
| Data_Breaches |
Your Android Phone Can Get Hacked Just By Playing This Video | https://thehackernews.com/2019/07/android-media-framework-hack.html | 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.
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.
| Malware |
360 Million Stolen Credential FOR SALE on Underground Black Market | https://thehackernews.com/2014/02/360-million-stolen-credential-for-sale_27.html | Your Financial Credentials are on SALE on the Underground Black Market without your Knowledge… sounds like a nightmare, but it's TRUE.
Cyber security firm, Hold Security, said it has traced over 360 million stolen account credentials that are available for Sale on Hacker's black market websites over past three weeks. The credentials include usernames, email addresses, and passwords that are in unencrypted in most cases, according to the report released on Tuesday.
It is not known till now from where these credentials exactly were stolen, but the security researchers estimated that these credentials are a result of multiple breaches. Since the banking credentials are one of the most 'valuable bounties' for the cyber criminals, and the ways to steal these credentials can be directly from the companies and from the services in which users entrust data as well.
According to Hold Security, in addition to the sale of 360 million credentials, the cyber criminals are selling about 1.25 billion email addresses, which would be of an interest to the spammers.
Alex Holden, chief information security officer at Hold Security, told Reuters, "E-mail addresses in the credentials are from all major services, including Gmail and Yahoo, and almost all Fortune 500 companies and nonprofit organizations," and that his company is working to discover where the credentials came from and what they can access.
The sale of this tremendous number of users' credentials in the underground market can risk consumers and companies, because these wide ranges of compromised users' credentials could access anything from online bank accounts to corporate networks.
"The sheer volume is overwhelming," Holden told Reuters, adding, "He believes the 360 million records were obtained in separate attacks, including one that yielded some 105 million records, which would make it the largest single credential breaches known to date."
Hold security is the one, which uncovered the ever big Adobe breach in October 2013, in which 153 million users' credentials, including user names and passwords were stolen from Adobe system, and a month later identified another large breach of 42 million plain-text password credentials from a niche dating service Cupid Media.
There is no way out to secure yourself from these types of attacks because cyber criminals are trying to heist your money every second of time and by using the same password for multiple accounts, you yourself give them an open invitation.
You can reduce the risk of these attacks by choosing different passwords for different accounts, as the risks are more for the users who choose the same password for multiple services they adopt, because once an attacker has your single account's email address and password, he can use those credentials to compromise your every other sites account that uses the same username and password.
Only the best practical way to do that is with a best password manager. If you aren't using a password manager, you need to start now, like LastPass, KeePass, RoboForm Desktop 7, PasswordBox, and Dashlane 2.0.
Stay Safe! Stay Secure! Stay Tuned!
| Data_Breaches |
16 Cybercriminals Behind Mekotio and Grandoreiro Banking Trojan Arrested in Spain | https://thehackernews.com/2021/07/16-cybercriminals-behind-mekotio-and.html | Spanish law enforcement agencies on Wednesday arrested 16 individuals belonging to a criminal network in connection with operating two banking trojans as part of a social engineering campaign targeting financial institutions in Europe.
The arrests were made in Ribeira (A Coruña), Madrid, Parla and Móstoles (Madrid), Seseña (Toledo), Villafranca de los barros (Badajoz), and Aranda de Duero (Burgos) following a year-long investigation codenamed "Aguas Vivas", the Civil Guard said in a statement.
"Through malicious software, installed on the victim's computer by the technique known as 'email spoofing', [the group] would have managed to divert large amounts of money to their accounts," authorities noted.
Computer equipment, mobile phones, and documents were confiscated, and more than 1,800 spam emails were analyzed, enabling law enforcement to block transfer attempts totaling €3.5 million successfully. The campaign is said to have netted the actors €276,470, of which €87,000 has been successfully recovered.
As part of an effort to lend credibility to their phishing attacks, the operators worked by sending emails under the guise of legitimate package delivery services and government entities such as the Treasury, urging the recipients to click on a link that stealthily downloaded malicious software onto the systems.
The malware — dubbed "Mekotio" and "Grandoreiro" — functioned by intercepting transactions on a banking website to unauthorizedly siphon funds to accounts under the attackers' control. At least 68 email accounts belonging to official bodies were infected to facilitate such fraudulent transfers.
"After that, the money was diversified by sending it to other accounts, or by withdrawing cash at ATMs, transfers by BIZUM, REVOLUT cards, etc., in order to hinder the possible police investigation," the Civil Guard said.
Grandoreiro and Mekotio (aka Melcoz) are both part of a "Tetrade" of Brazilian banking trojans as detailed by cybersecurity firm Kaspersky in July 2020, while the latter's evolving tactics were disclosed by ESET in August 2020, which involved displaying fake pop-up windows to its victims in an attempt to entice them into divulging sensitive information.
"These windows are carefully designed to target Latin American banks and other financial institutions," the Slovak cybersecurity company had noted.
Operational since at least 2016, Grandoreiro has a history of singling out Brazil, Mexico, Spain, Portugal, and Turkey, "with the attackers regularly improving techniques, striving to stay undetected and active for longer periods of time." Mekotio, on the other hand, has been observed in attacks targeting Brazil and dating back to 2018, before expanding to Chile, Mexico, and Spain.
"[Mekotio] steals passwords from browsers and from the device's memory, providing remote access to capture internet banking access," Kaspersky researchers explained in a report published Wednesday. "It also includes a Bitcoin wallet stealing module."
To avoid falling prey to such attacks, the agency is recommending that email and SMS recipients scrutinize messages carefully, particularly if it is about entities with urgent requests, promotions, or very attractive bargains, while also taking steps to be on the lookout for grammatical errors and ensure the authenticity of the sender of the message.
| Malware |
Millions of pcAnywhere users still Vulnerable to hijacking | https://thehackernews.com/2012/02/millions-of-pcanywhere-users-still.html | Millions of pcAnywhere users still Vulnerable to hijacking
3 weeks before we reported that Symantec releases patch to address pcAnywhere source code exposure, because attackers had obtained the remote access software's source code. But According to H.D. Moore, chief security officer at Rapid7, estimated 150,000 to 200,000 PCs are running an as-yet-unpatched copy of the Symantec software.
While Symantec said it had patched all the known vulnerabilities in pcAnywhere. Symantec has released new information and a patch to address the recent code exposure incident. According to Computerworld report, PCs connected to the Internet, including as many as 5,000 running point-of-sale programs that collect consumer credit card data, could be hijacked by hackers exploiting bugs in the troubled program.
Symantec released a patch that eliminates known vulnerabilities affecting pcAnywhere 12.0 and pcAnywhere 12.1.At this time, Symantec recommends that all customers upgrade to pcAnywhere 12.5, apply all relevant patches as they are released, and follow general security best practices.
Moore said, even though Symantec has patched some flaws. With the source code at their disposal and the software's problems highlighted in the media, researchers on both sides of the law will spend time looking for vulnerabilities.
| Vulnerability |
New PlunderVolt Attack Targets Intel SGX Enclaves by Tweaking CPU Voltage | https://thehackernews.com/2019/12/intel-sgx-voltage-attack.html | 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.
| Vulnerability |
iPhone Chip Supplier TSMC Stops Production After Computer Virus Attack | https://thehackernews.com/2018/08/tsmc-iphone-computer-virus.html | 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.
| Cyber_Attack |
ISPs Caught Injecting Cryptocurrency Miners and Spyware In Some Countries | https://thehackernews.com/2018/03/cryptocurrency-spyware-malware.html | 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.
"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
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.
| Malware |
New Citadel Trojan Targets Your Password Managers | https://thehackernews.com/2014/11/new-citadel-trojan-targets-your.html | Unless we are a human supercomputer, remembering password is not an easy task and that too, if you have a different password for every different site. But luckily to make the whole process easy, there is a growing market for password managers which provides an extra layer of protection. Wait! Wait! Seriously??
Security researchers have discovered a new variant of data-stealing Citadel Trojan program used by cybercriminals to slurp up users' master passwords for a number of password management applications and other authentication programs, which will let you think twice before using one.
Citadel Trojan malware program has typically been used to steal online banking credentials and other financial information by masquerading itself as legitimate banking sites when victims open it in their local browser, which is also known as a man-in-the-browser attack.
The malware has previously targeted users' credentials stored in the password management applications included in popular Web browsers, however, third-party best password managers have typically not been targeted by the attackers.
But, researchers at IBM Trusteer noted that the configuration file of the notorious malware had been modified to activate a keylogger when users opened either Password Safe or KeePass, two open-source password managers. Designed to steal the "Master Password" that protects access to the database of the end-user's passwords.
"Password management and authentication programs are important solutions that help secure access to applications and Web Services," Dana Tamir, director of enterprise security at Trusteer, wrote on IBM's Security Intelligence blog.
"If an adversary is able to steal the master password and gains access to the user/password database of a password management solution or compromise authentication technology, the attacker can gain unfettered access to sensitive systems and information."
In addition, the new Citadel variant also targets the enterprise authentication solution Nexus Personal Security Client used to secure financial transactions and other services that require heightened security, according to research from data-protection company IBM Trusteer.
Once the malware infected a computer, it waits until one of the configured process is launched. The malware then logs keystrokes to steal the master passwords, allowing cybercriminals complete control over the machine and victims' every online account protected by that password manager.
The Citadel Trojan has been in existence since 2011 that has already compromised millions of computers around the world. According to the security researchers, Citadel is "highly evasive and can bypass threat detection systems."
"[The Citadel variant] might be an opportunistic attack, where the attackers are trying to see which type of information they can expose through this configuration, or a more targeted attack in which the attackers know that the target is using these specific solutions," reads the blog.
In June last year, the tech giant Microsoft along with the FBI and financial services companies launched a "takedown" operation against Citadel botnets, which had stolen more than $500 million from bank accounts over the past 18 months. At the time, the group claimed it disrupted more than 90% of Citadel botnets.
| Malware |
Security holes in Android with apps Advertisements | https://thehackernews.com/2012/03/security-holes-in-android-with-apps.html | Security holes in Android with apps Advertisements
Researchers at North Carolina State University have found privacy and security holes in Android apps because of in-application advertisements. They study the popular Android platform and collect 100,000 apps from the official Android Market in March-May, 2011 and Then they identify the possible 52.1% apps using Advertisements and further developa system called AdRisk to systematically identify potentialrisks.
They explain that most of the ad libraries collect private information, some ofthem may be used for legitimate targeting purposes (i.e., the user'slocation) while others are hard to justify by invasively collectingthe information such as the user's call logs, phone number, browserbookmarks, or even the list of installed apps on the phone.
The researchers wrote in a paper to be presented at the 5th ACM Conference on Security and Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks in Tucson on April 17th, [Read Here]
As one host app may contain more than one ad library, it seems more than one third of apps (or more precisely 35, 991) contain one ad library and a small fraction ofapps (around 3%) include at least five ad libraries for monetization.
Such threats range from collecting unnecessarily intrusive user information to allowing third-party code of unknown provenance to execute within the hosting app. Since Android's permissions model cannot distinguish between actions performed by an ad library and those performed by its hosting app, the current Android system provides little indication of the existence of these threats within any given app, which necessitates a change in the way existingad libraries can be integrated into host apps.
| Vulnerability |
4 Dangerous Brazilian Banking Trojans Now Trying to Rob Users Worldwide | https://thehackernews.com/2020/07/brazilian-banking-trojan.html | 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.
"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 browsers, and information from clipboard and Bitcoin wallets by replacing the original wallet details 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.
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."
| Cyber_Attack |
FBI warning about Banking trojan "Gameover" | https://thehackernews.com/2012/01/fbi-warning-about-banking-trojan.html | FBI warning about Banking trojan "Gameover"
Organized crooks have begun launching debilitating cyber attacks against banks and their customers as part of a smoke screen to prevent victims from noticing simultaneous high-dollar cyber heists. On Friday the FBI issued a warning about a banking trojan named Gameover. It's a new variant of Zeus, a user credential stealing malware that targets online bank users. Zeus has been around for years, and every now and then a new version with a new twist pops up.
Gameover has also been implicated in Distributed-Denial-of-Service attacks that temporarily-disable bank websites to draw attention away from fraudulent transactions. Like another Zeus variant, Troj/BredoZp-GY, Gameover uses e-mail spam to propagate, and the safest way to keep Gameover away from your PC is to avoid links and file attachments that are contained in unfamiliar e-mail messages.
Experts warn that any interaction with this fake NACHA link can infect your PC with the Gameover banking Trojan, which will attempt to steal bank-related information while Gameover hides its own actions from site. Gameover Trojan it must be removed immediately to make your computer clean and safe.
How do you avoid bank trojans? - ( from Norman Blog )
Never, ever click on links (in email) that encourage you to "update your account information", "check if your account has been compromised" or similar.
Always, always login to your bank by typing the address in the browser url bar.
Make sure your browser and operating system are always updated. Never, ever click "Later" when your browser or OS prompts you about a new security update.
Keep you antivirus up to date. An advanced security solution will detect any harmful sites and block any malicious files, so that you don't have to.
Because Gameover and similar forms of banking Trojans are designed to conduct their attacks in a clandestine manner, you may not see much sign of Gameover on your PC, other than some anomalies in RAM usage or file processes. However, a successful Gameover infection can be the cause of :
Loss of account login data and other forms of information that are used in bank-related websites.
Loss of other forms of information that are gathered through keylogging (a broad form of spyware attack that monitors all types of keyboard input).
Fraudulent transactions from your bank account due to abuse of any information that was stolen in the above attacks.
DDoS (or Distributed-Denial-of-Service) attacks that crash your bank's website to limit your access and conceal these transactions.
Read Here the Method to Remove "Gameover" from infected computers.
| Malware |
Someone Stole Almost Half a BILLION Dollars from Japanese Cryptocurrency Exchange | https://thehackernews.com/2018/01/coincheck-cryptocurrency-heist.html | 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!
| Cyber_Attack |
North Korean Hackers Targeting Defense Firms with ThreatNeedle Malware | https://thehackernews.com/2021/02/north-korean-hackers-targeting-defense.html | A prolific North Korean state-sponsored hacking group has been tied to a new ongoing espionage campaign aimed at exfiltrating sensitive information from organizations in the defense industry.
Attributing the attacks with high confidence to the Lazarus Group, the new findings from Kaspersky signal an expansion of the APT actor's tactics by going beyond the usual gamut of financially-motivated crimes to fund the cash-strapped regime.
This broadening of its strategic interests happened in early 2020 by leveraging a tool called ThreatNeedle, researchers Vyacheslav Kopeytsev and Seongsu Park said in a Thursday write-up.
At a high level, the campaign takes advantage of a multi-step approach that begins with a carefully crafted spear-phishing attack leading eventually to the attackers gaining remote control over the devices.
ThreatNeedle is delivered to targets via COVID-themed emails with malicious Microsoft Word attachments as initial infection vectors that, when opened, run a macro containing malicious code designed to download and execute additional payloads on the infected system.
The next-stage malware functions by embedding its malicious capabilities inside a Windows backdoor that offers features for initial reconnaissance and deploying malware for lateral movement and data exfiltration.
"Once installed, ThreatNeedle is able to obtain full control of the victim's device, meaning it can do everything from manipulating files to executing received commands," Kaspersky security researchers said.
Kaspersky found overlaps between ThreatNeedle and another malware family called Manuscrypt that has been used by Lazarus Group in previous hacking campaigns against the cryptocurrency and mobile games industries, besides uncovering connections with other Lazarus clusters such as AppleJeus, DeathNote, and Bookcode.
Interestingly, Manuscrypt was also deployed in a Lazarus Group operation last month, which involved targeting the cybersecurity community with opportunities to collaborate on vulnerability research, only to infect victims with malware that could cause the theft of exploits developed by the researchers for possibly undisclosed vulnerabilities, thereby using them to stage further attacks on vulnerable targets of their choice.
Perhaps the most concerning of the development is a technique adopted by the attackers to bypass network segmentation protections in an unnamed enterprise network by "gaining access to an internal router machine and configuring it as a proxy server, allowing them to exfiltrate stolen data from the intranet network to their remote server."
The cybersecurity firm said organizations in more than a dozen countries have been affected to date.
At least one of the spear-phishing emails referenced in the report is written in Russian, while another message came with a malicious file attachment named "Boeing_AERO_GS.docx," possibly implying a U.S. target.
Earlier this month, three North Korean hackers associated with the military intelligence division of North Korea were indicted by the U.S. Justice Department for allegedly taking part in a criminal conspiracy that attempted to extort $1.3 billion in cryptocurrency and cash from banks and other organizations around the world.
"In recent years, the Lazarus group has focused on attacking financial institutions around the world," the researchers concluded. "However, beginning in early 2020, they focused on aggressively attacking the defense industry."
"While Lazarus has also previously utilized the ThreatNeedle malware used in this attack when targeting cryptocurrency businesses, it is currently being actively used in cyberespionage attacks."
| Cyber_Attack |
Dynamic Analysis tools for Android Fail to Detect Malware with Heuristic Evasion Techniques | https://thehackernews.com/2014/05/dynamic-analysis-tools-for-android-fail.html | We are quite aware of the Android malware scanner Google's Bouncer that tests the apps by running them in a virtualized environment i.e. a simulated phone created in software which automatically scans the apps to watch its real behaviour on users' devices, before approving them to the Play Store market.
To protect its users and their devices from harm, Google launched this apps scanning software tool, two year ago. Bouncer is a security feature for the Android Play store Market that is designed to protect the Android users to not to be a victim of any malicious Android malware app. But does the security tool go far enough?
Despite having protective shield factor, we have seen Google play store market is surrounded by many malicious apps which easily by-passes the Bouncer scan test and targets Android users.
Security Research from Columbia University have exploited weaknesses in Google's Bouncer service to sneak malicious apps on to the Android market. They published a new research paper, revealed that all such dynamic analysis tools and services are vulnerable to most of the evasion techniques they discovered.
Along with the Google bouncer, other Heuristic analysis (Dynamic) analysis tools detect malicious application based on previous knowledge of typical sequences of commands in code or of metadata (static analysis), or on behavior (dynamic analysis).
The research paper [pdf] titled "Rage Against the Virtual Machine: Hindering Dynamic Analysis of Android Malware" was conducted by the team of five researchers, Thanasis Petsas, Giannis Voyatzis, Elias Athanasopoulos, Michalis Polychronakis and Sotiris Ioannidis of the Institute of Computer Science from the Columbia University, USA.
They created some malware samples, those were able to hide themselves when analyzed in an emulated environment and hence developed the capability to bypass the heuristic-based dynamic and static analysis platforms, such as Andrubis, DroidBox, DroidScope, APK Analyzer, or APKScan.
"A malicious program can try to infer whether it runs in an emulated environment, and therefore evade detection by pausing all malicious activities." the researchers said. "Even trivial techniques, such as checking the value of the IMEI, are enough to evade some of the existing dynamic analysis frameworks."
The team modified some real-world Android Malware to include the bypass techniques for heuristic-based detection and tested them against a number of dynamic analysis tools. "To assess the effectiveness of our techniques, we incorporated them in real malware samples and submitted them to publicly available Android dynamic analysis systems, with alarming results," they added.
LAB TEST RESULTS
All analyses tools failed to beat the heuristic evasion techniques.
All analysis tools failed to correctly infer the malicious behavior of the repackaged malware samples.
Malware writers can fingerprint the most of the analysis services based on inferred information about their execution environment in order to develop more sophisticated and perfect evasion techniques.
Only one tool, called 'APK Analyzer' was able to detect that malware application is looking for the virtual machine status to hinder analysis.
"However Google's Bouncer would have the smarts to detect the slippery malware if it were upgraded with realistic sensor event simulation, more accurate binary translation and hybrid application execution." Register reported.
FAILURE IN DETECTION = THREAT TO USERS
Mobile malwares can pose a significant threat to the users. However, most of the evasion techniques are not new, but the paper shows that the malware authors are constantly evolving and can always find new ways to get around the security check.
So malware may not only fool automated analysis systems, but this failure also raise security threat against your innocent devices by compromising them with undetectable malware. End users are advised to be extra vigilant when install application from App Stores and have the "Unknown sources" Android system setting unchecked to prevent dropped or drive-by-download app installs.
| Malware |
Super 'Stuxnet' Malware development in progress to destroy Iran's nuclear program | https://thehackernews.com/2013/12/Stuxnet-2-Saudi-Arabia-Israel-Iran-nuclear-plant-virus.html | Saudi Arabia and Israel's Mossad intelligence division are reportedly collaborating to develop a computer worm more destructive than the Stuxnet malware to spy on and destroy the software structure of Iran's nuclear program.
The Iranian Fars news agency has reported:
"Saudi spy chief Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdulaziz Al Saud and director of Israel's Mossad intelligence agency Tamir Bardo sent their representatives to a meeting in Vienna on November 24 to increase the two sides' cooperation in intelligence and sabotage operations against Iran's nuclear program."
"One of the proposals raised in the meeting was the production of a malware worse than the Stuxnet to spy on and destroy the software structure of Iran's nuclear program,"
But Why ? The report claims that Saudi Arabia and Israel were not particularly happy with the deal between between Iran and the Group 5+1 (the US, Russia, China, France and Britain plus Germany) and Israel has dubbed the deal as "historic mistake" while Saudi Arabia has called it "West's treachery".
The report also adds that the two counties have agreed to a cost of around $1 million to develop this malware.
The Real Stuxnet - The original Stuxnet malware was uncovered targeting Iranian nuclear systems in 2010, most likely infected isolated systems by way of removable storage devices like USB flash drives and by exploiting vulnerabilities in Windows systems. The malware has since managed to spread outside of Iran and has affected several other power plants, some close to Europe.
NSA leaker Edward Snowden even confirmed that Stuxnet Malware was developed by the US and Israel Together. What Next ? Tehran is getting seriously worried about the Saudi-Israeli intelligence partnership and the prospect of them acting together for covert operations, including cyber warfare, against their nuclear projects.
Recently Stuxnet also infected the internal network of a Russian nuclear plant. But what if this new destructive malware did get into other computers what the effect would be?
| Malware |
Sify.com hacked with SQL Injection Vulnerability | https://thehackernews.com/2011/07/sifycom-hacked-with-sql-injection.html | Sify.com hacked with SQL Injection Vulnerability
Sify's website contain SQL injection Vulnerability and Hackers are able to Database Access, Database Dump, Possibility of shell uploading.
Sify is one of India's leading integrated Information Communications Technology companies. Sify was one of the first private sector player to offer internet access, when internet access was opened to private sector. It leased international bandwidth from global vendors, domestic connectivity from telecom players and set up last mile connectivity by multiple methods: wi-fi connections using roof top antennae, copper connections using phone lines or cable TV connections. Sify also started providing internet network connectivity for business enterprises in India. Sify set up a chain of franchised internet cafes (today a network of over 3,300+ cybercafes).
No data has been dumped by Hackers. Database has been accessed just to take screenshots so that we can make company believethat the vulnerability actually exist.
Source
| Vulnerability |
More than 600000 Macs system infected with Flashback Botnet | https://thehackernews.com/2012/04/more-than-600000-macs-system-infected.html | More than 600000 Macs system infected with Flashback Botnet
The computer security industry is buzzing with warnings that more than half a million Macintosh computers may have been infected with a virus targeting Apple machines.
Dr. Web originally reported Wednesday that 550,000 Macintosh computers were infected by the growing Mac botnet. But later in the day, Dr. Web malware analyst Sorokin Ivan announced on Twitter that the number of Macs infected with Flashback had increased to 600,000, with 274 of those based in Cupertino, Calif.
Dr. Web explained that a system gets infected with the Mac Flashback trojan "after a user is redirected to a bogus site from a compromised resource or via a traffic distribution system." A specific JavaScript code on the site that contains the virus is then used to load a Java applet, which is how the malware makes its way onto a user's computer.
This Trojan spreads via infected web pages and exploits Java vulnerabilities that have been known for some time, yet Apple didn't see fit to release a patch until this week (Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 7 and Java for OS X Lion 2012-001).
Macs have historically been an unappealing hacking target because of their low market share. Instead, criminals have attacked personal computers running Microsoft Corp.'s Windows software, seeking the biggest number of victims for illicit moneymaking schemes. Windows runs on more than 90 percent of the world's desktop computers, according to market researcher Net Applications.
'All the stuff the bad guys have learnt for doing attacks in the PC world is now starting to transition to the Mac world,' McAfee Labs director of threat intelligence Dave Marcus told.
Once installed, the Flashback will inject code into Web browsers and other applications like Skype to harvest passwords and other information from those program's users.Security company F-Secure has published instructions on how to determine whether a Mac is infected with Flashback.
'There has been a significant increase in Mac malware in the last several quarters, so what we've seen with the Flashback Trojan isn't particularly surprising,' Marcus said.'Cybercriminals will attack any operating system with valuable information, and as the popularity of Macs increase, so will attacks on the Mac platform.'
| Malware |
Cisco Releases Security Patches for Critical Flaws Affecting its Products | https://thehackernews.com/2021/02/cisco-releases-security-patches-for.html | Cisco has addressed a maximum severity vulnerability in its Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) Multi-Site Orchestrator (MSO) that could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to bypass authentication on vulnerable devices.
"An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted request to the affected API," the company said in an advisory published yesterday. "A successful exploit could allow the attacker to receive a token with administrator-level privileges that could be used to authenticate to the API on affected MSO and managed Cisco Application Policy Infrastructure Controller (APIC) devices."
The bug, tracked as CVE-2021-1388, ranks 10 (out of 10) on the CVSS vulnerability scoring system and stems from an improper token validation in an API endpoint of Cisco ACI MSO installed the Application Services Engine. It affects ACI MSO versions running a 3.0 release of the software.
The ACI Multi-Site Orchestrator lets customers monitor and manage application-access networking policies across Cisco APIC-based devices.
Separately, the company also patched multiple flaws in Cisco Application Services Engine (CVE-2021-1393 and CVE-2021-1396, CVSS score 9.8) that could grant a remote attacker to access a privileged service or specific APIs, resulting in capabilities to run containers or invoke host-level operations, and learn "device-specific information, create tech support files in an isolated volume, and make limited configuration changes."
Both the flaws were a result of insufficient access controls for an API running in the Data Network, Cisco noted.
The networking major said the aforementioned three weaknesses were discovered during internal security testing but added it detected no malicious attempts exploiting the vulnerabilities in the wild.
Lastly, Cisco fixed a vulnerability (CVE-2021-1361, CVSS score 9.8) in the implementation of an internal file management service for Cisco Nexus 3000 Series Switches and Cisco Nexus 9000 Series Switches running NX-OS, the company's network operating system used in its Nexus-branded Ethernet switches.
This could allow a bad actor to create, delete, or overwrite arbitrary files with root privileges on the device, the company cautioned, including permitting the attacker to add a user account without the device administrator's knowledge.
Cisco said Nexus 3000 and Nexus 9000 switches running Cisco NX-OS Software Release 9.3(5) or Release 9.3(6) are vulnerable by default.
"This vulnerability exists because TCP port 9075 is incorrectly configured to listen and respond to external connection requests," Cisco outlined in the adversary. "An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending crafted TCP packets to an IP address that is configured on a local interface on TCP port 9075."
The patches come weeks after Cisco rectified as many as 44 flaws in its Small Business routers that could potentially allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute arbitrary code as a root user and even cause a denial-of-service condition.
| Vulnerability |
19-Year-Old Hacker Arrested Over Making Hoax School and Flight Bomb Threats | https://thehackernews.com/2018/09/cohan-hoax-bomb-threats.html | 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.
| Cyber_Attack |
800,000 Customers' detail stolen in Data Breach at French Telecom 'Orange' | https://thehackernews.com/2014/02/800000-customer-details-stolen-in-data_2.html | One of the world's largest mobile operator 'Orange' has been hit by data breach.
The French multinational telecommunication company announced recently, it was targeted by unknown hackers on 16th January 2014, who allegedly gained access to the accounts of up to 800,000 customers of Orange website.
According to a report published on the PC INpact website, the company warned their customers in an email that their Client Area website orange.fr was hacked and personal data of 3% customers have been stolen, but the passwords are not affected.
The hacker has successfully stolen customers' names, mailing address, email, landline and mobile phone numbers.
The company warned, with the information lost in this attack, hackers can perform phishing attacks, allowing them to steal personal data, including bank account details and passwords by sending emails that look as if they have come from official sources.
Orange has confirmed the data breach, and after the discovery of the attack, they closed "My Account" page from the website quickly for a few hours as a precaution.
Orange customers should, of course, change their security details of the affected accounts.
| Data_Breaches |
Russia's Largest Portal HACKED; Nearly 100 Million Plaintext Passwords Leaked | https://thehackernews.com/2016/09/russias-largest-portal-hacked-nearly.html | Another data breach from 2012, and this time, it's Russia's biggest internet portal and email provider Rambler.ru.
Rambler.ru, also known as Russia's Yahoo, suffered a massive data breach in 2012 in which an unknown hacker or a group of hackers managed to steal nearly 100 Million user accounts, including their unencrypted plaintext passwords.
The copy of the hacked database obtained by the breach notification website LeakedSource contained details of 98,167,935 Rambler.ru users that were originally stolen on 17 February 2012, but went unreported.
The leaked user records in the database included usernames, email addresses, ICQ numbers (IM chat service), social account details, passwords and some internal data, the data breach indexing site said in a blog post.
The data breach was reported by the same hacker using the [email protected] Jabber ID who handed LeakedSource over 43.5 Million user records from another 2012 hack suffered by the Last.fm music streaming service.
According to LeakedSource, none of the passwords were hashed, meaning the company stored its user's password in an unencrypted plain text format that could allow the company as well as hackers to see passwords easily.
This is something similar to the VK.com breach, in which 171 Million users' accounts were taken from the Russian social networking site, where passwords were also stored in plaintext format, without any hashing or salting.
Again, as expected, the most common passwords used by Rambler.ru users, includes "asdasd," "123456," "000000," "654321," "123321," or "123123."
LeakedSource has added the data into its database; so Rambler.ru users can check if they have been compromised by searching their account at Leaked Source's search engine.
Rambler.ru is the latest victim to join the list of "Mega-Breaches" revealed in recent months, when hundreds of Millions of online credentials from years-old data breaches on popular services, including LinkedIn, MySpace, VK.com, Tumblr, and Dropbox, were exposed online.
Rambler has yet to respond to the incident.
The Bottom Line:
Users are advised to change their passwords for Rambler.ru account as well as other online accounts immediately, especially those using the same passwords.
Moreover, I always encourage users to make use of password managers that create strong and complex passwords for different websites as well as remember them on your behalf.
I have listed some of the best password managers that could help you understand the importance of password manager as well as choose one according to your requirement.
| Data_Breaches |
Gmail warning Myanmar Journalists about State-sponsored attacks | https://thehackernews.com/2013/02/gmail-warning-myanmar-journalists-about.html | Several Myanmar journalists have recently received warnings from Google that their Gmail accounts may have been targets of state-sponsored attacks. After they login to their Gmail accounts, warning message,"We believe state-sponsored attackers may be attempting to compromise your account or computer" was displayed on top as shown.
Google had begun the policy of notifying users of suspicious activity in June. "We are constantly on the lookout for malicious activity on our systems, in particular attempts by third parties to log into users' accounts unauthorized." Google said in a blog post.
"If you see this warning it does not necessarily mean that your account has been hijacked. It just means that we believe you may be a target, of phishing or malware for example, and that you should take immediate steps to secure your account."
The Voice Weekly Journal's editor Aung Soe, Aye Aye Win, a Myanmar correspondent for the Associated Press, and Myat Thura, a Myanmar correspondent for the Kyodo News Agency have also received warnings from Google about these attempted attacks.
Nytimes reported, The news media in Myanmar were highly censored and restricted during five decades of military rule, but the government has lifted many of those restrictions since President Thein Sein came to power nearly two years ago.
| Malware |
Iranian Hackers Using Remote Utilities Software to Spy On Its Targets | https://thehackernews.com/2021/03/iranian-hackers-using-remote-utilities.html | Hackers with suspected ties to Iran are actively targeting academia, government agencies, and tourism entities in the Middle East and neighboring regions as part of an espionage campaign aimed at data theft.
Dubbed "Earth Vetala" by Trend Micro, the latest finding expands on previous research published by Anomali last month, which found evidence of malicious activity aimed at UAE and Kuwait government agencies by exploiting ScreenConnect remote management tool.
The cybersecurity firm linked the ongoing attacks with moderate confidence to a threat actor widely tracked as MuddyWater, an Iranian hacker group known for its offensives primarily against Middle Eastern nations.
Earth Vetala is said to have leveraged spear-phishing emails containing embedded links to a popular file-sharing service called Onehub to distribute malware that ranged from password dumping utilities to custom backdoors, before initiating communications with a command-and-control (C2) server to execute obfuscated PowerShell scripts.
The links themselves direct victims to a .ZIP file that contains a legitimate remote administration software developed by RemoteUtilities, which is capable of downloading and uploading files, capturing screenshots, browsing files and directories, and executing and terminating processes.
Affected Countries
Noting that the tactics and techniques between the two campaigns that distribute RemoteUtilities and ScreenConnect are broadly similar, Trend Micro said the targets of the new wave of attacks are mainly organizations located in Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE.
In one particular instance involving a compromised host in Saudi Arabia, the researchers found that the adversary tried to unsuccessfully configure SharpChisel — a C# wrapper for a TCP/UDP tunneling tool called chisel — for C2 communications, before downloading a remote access tool, a credential stealer, and a PowerShell backdoor capable of executing arbitrary remote commands.
"Earth Vetala represents an interesting threat," Trend Micro said. "While it possesses remote access capabilities, the attackers seem to lack the expertise to use all of these tools correctly. This is unexpected since we believe this attack is connected to the MuddyWater threat actors — and in other connected campaigns, the attackers have shown higher levels of technical skill."
| Cyber_Attack |
WikiLeaks Reveals How CIA Malware Tracks Geo-Location of its Targeted | https://thehackernews.com/2017/06/wikileaks-cia-malware-geolocation.html | WikiLeaks has just published a new batch of the ongoing Vault 7 leak, and this time the whistleblowing website has unveiled a classified malware for that tracks geo-location of targeted PCs and laptops running the Microsoft Windows operating system.
In short, the malware does it by capturing the IDs of nearby public hotspots and then matching them with the global database of public Wi-Fi hotspots' locations.
Dubbed ELSA, the alleged CIA's project consists of two main elements: the processing component (Operator Terminal) and the implant (Windows Target) which is typically being deployed on a target Windows host.
Here's How the CIA's ELSA Malware Works
The Elsa system first installs the malware on a targeted WiFi-enabled machine using separate CIA exploits to gain persistent access on the device.
The malware then uses Wi-Fi hardware of the infected computer to scan nearby visible WiFi access points (AP) and records their ESSID – stands for Extended Service Set Identifier (IEEE 802.11 wireless networking), MAC address and signal strength at regular intervals.
In order to perform this data collection, the ELSA malware does not require the targeted computer to be connected to the Internet. Instead, it only requires the malware to be running on a device with Wi-Fi enabled.
"If [the target device] is connected to the internet, the malware automatically tries to use public geo-location databases from Google or Microsoft to resolve the position of the device and stores the longitude and latitude data along with the timestamp," WikiLeaks notes.
The collected information is then stored in encrypted form on the targeted device for later exfiltration.
The CIA malware itself doesn't beacon (transfer) this data to the agency's server, instead, the operator (CIA hacker) downloads the encrypted log files from the device using separate CIA exploits and backdoors.
The operator then decrypts the log files and performs further analysis on their target.
The ELSA project allows CIA hackers to customize or modify the implant depending upon the target environment and operational objectives such as "sampling interval, the maximum size of the log file and invocation/persistence method."
The CIA hacker (operator) then uses additional back-end software to match collected access point data from exfiltrated log files with public geolocation databases (from Google and Microsoft) and finds the exact location of their target.
Previous Vault 7 CIA Leaks
Last week, WikiLeaks dumped an alleged CIA tool suite for Microsoft Windows, dubbed Brutal Kangaroo, that targets closed networks or air-gapped computers within an organization or enterprise without requiring any direct access.
Since March, the whistleblowing group has published 12 batches of "Vault 7" series, which includes the latest and last week leaks, along with the following batches:
Cherry Blossom – a CIA's framework, basically a remotely controllable firmware-based implant, used for monitoring the Internet activity of the targeted systems by exploiting vulnerabilities in Wi-Fi devices.
Pandemic – a CIA's project that allowed the agency to turn Windows file servers into covert attack machines that can silently infect other computers of interest inside a targeted network.
Athena – A CIA's spyware framework that has been designed to take full control over the infected Windows PCs remotely, and works against every version of Microsoft's Windows operating systems, from Windows XP to Windows 10.
AfterMidnight and Assassin – Two apparent CIA malware frameworks for the Microsoft Windows platform that has been designed to monitor and report back actions on the infected remote host computer and execute malicious actions.
Archimedes – A man-in-the-middle attack tool allegedly developed by the agency to target computers inside a Local Area Network (LAN).
Scribbles – Software supposedly designed to embed 'web beacons' into confidential documents, allowing the CIA to track insiders and whistleblowers.
Grasshopper – A framework that allowed the CIA to easily create custom malware for breaking into Microsoft's Windows and bypassing antivirus protection.
Marble – Disclosed the source code of a secret anti-forensic framework used by the agency to hide the actual source of its malware.
Dark Matter – Hacking exploits the CIA designed to target iPhones and Macs.
Weeping Angel – Spying tool used by the spy agency to infiltrate smart TV's, transforming them into covert microphones.
Year Zero – CIA hacking exploits for popular hardware and software.
| Cyber_Attack |
Jobvite Recruitment Service Website Vulnerable to Hackers | https://thehackernews.com/2014/08/jobvite-recruitment-service-website_4.html | Jobvite, a recruiting platform for the social web, is found vulnerable to the most common, but critical web application vulnerabilities that could allow an attacker to compromise and steal the database of the company's website.
Jobvite is a Social recruiting and applicant tracking created for companies with the highest expectations of recruiting technology and candidate quality. Growing companies use Jobvite's social recruiting, sourcing and talent acquisition solutions to target the right talent and build the best teams.
An independent security researcher Mohamed M. Fouad from Egypt, has found two major flaws in Jobvite website that could be used by an attacker to comprise the company's web server. As a responsible security researcher, Fouad also reported the critical flaws three months ago to the Jobvite team, but the company didn't fix it till now.
According to Fouad, Jobvite is vulnerable to Boolean SQLi (SQL injection) and LFI (local file inclusion) vulnerabilities, which he found was one of the best security vulnerabilities he has ever discovered.
SQL INJECTION VULNERABILITY
SQLi or SQL injection is one of the many web attack mechanisms used by hackers to steal data from organizations. It is perhaps one of the most common application layer attack techniques used today. The attackers take advantage of improper coding of your web applications that allows them to inject SQL commands into, say, a login form to allow them to gain access to the data held within your database.
Mohamed told The Hacker News that SQLi vulnerability in the Jobvite website allows him to gain access to the company's website database which includes the confidential data of its admin users (jobvite employees) along with their emails, hashing salt and hashed passwords.
LFI VULNERABILITY
LFI or Local File Inclusion is a type of vulnerability most often found on websites that allows an attacker to include a local file, usually through a script on the web server, which occurs due to the use of user-supplied input without proper validation. This can lead to code execution on the web server or on the client-side such as JavaScript which can lead to other attacks such as cross site scripting (XSS), Denial of service (DoS) and Data theft or manipulation.
Using Jobvite LFI vulnerability an attacker can get access to the critically important files stored on the web server i.e. /etc/passwd or /etc/hosts. Fouad used the LFI flaw which allowed him to view all the company's LINUX server user accounts exists.
SQLi VULNERABILITY STILL GOES UN-PATCH
According to Fouad, the company has not given any acknowledgment regarding SQLi flaw, neither has fixed it yet, that left Jobvite CMS database vulnerable to hackers.
When The Hacker News asked Fouad about the fixes, he replied, "I think they fixed LFI because it's not working now but during my attack I got all LINUX USERS. But The site is still vulnerable to the SQLi vulnerability."
"I approached the company 6 times during the last 4 months but I got no reply specifically from "Mahesh," the security consultant, Jobvite security. I dont know what about their plan for SQLi fix but the last reply was 4 months ago," he added.
Fouad believes that this critical vulnerability may also impact Odesk website due to the integration between them but he is still investigating the issue.
UPDATE
Jobvite's CTO 'Adam Hyder', told The Hacker News that the website is using "SilverStripe" an open source CMS to hosts Jobvite marketing content only.
"Our corporate site does not contain any application or customer data. Jobvite application and customer data are completely secure." he said.
But SQL Injection vulnerability in the SilverStripe CMS exposes the jobvite login employee's credentials to an attacker.
UPDATE 2
SilverSprite told researcher that the SQLi vulnerability exists in the Jobvite's website because of their own custom codes, not originated from default CMS.
| Vulnerability |
Italy CERT Warns of a New Credential Stealing Android Malware | https://thehackernews.com/2021/01/italy-cert-warns-of-new-credential.html | Researchers have disclosed a new family of Android malware that abuses accessibility services in the device to hijack user credentials and record audio and video.
Dubbed "Oscorp" by Italy's CERT-AGID and spotted by AddressIntel, the malware "induce(s) the user to install an accessibility service with which [the attackers] can read what is present and what is typed on the screen."
So named because of the title of the login page of its command-and-control (C2) server, the malicious APK (called "Assistenzaclienti.apk" or "Customer Protection") is distributed via a domain named "supportoapp[.]com," which upon installation, requests intrusive permissions to enable the accessibility service and establishes communications with a C2 server to retrieve additional commands.
Furthermore, the malware repeatedly reopens the Settings screen every eight seconds until the user turns on permissions for accessibility and device usage statistics, thus pressurizing the user into granting the extra privileges.
Once the access is provisioned, the malware exploits the permissions to log keystrokes, uninstall apps on the device, make calls, send SMS messages, steal cryptocurrency by redirecting payments made via Blockchain.com Wallet app, and access two-factor authentication codes from Google Authenticator app.
The attacker-controlled wallet had $584 as of January 9, the researchers said.
In the final step, the malware exfiltrates the captured data — along with system information (e.g., apps installed, phone model, carrier) — to the C2 server, in addition to fetching commands from the server that allows it to launch the Google Authenticator app, steal SMS messages, uninstall apps, launch specific URLs, and record audio and video of the screen through WebRTC.
What's more, users opening the apps targeted by the malware are displayed a phishing page that asks for their username and password, CERT noted, adding the style of this screen varies from app to app and that it's designed with an intent to trick the victim into providing the information.
The exact kind of applications singled out by this malware remains unclear, but the researchers said it could be any app that deals with sensitive data, such as those for banking and messaging.
"Android protections prevent malware from doing any kind of damage until the user enables [accessibility] service," CERT-AGID concluded. "Once enabled, however, a 'dam' opens up. In fact, Android has always had a very permissive policy towards app developers, leaving the ultimate decision to trust an app or not to the end user."
| Cyber_Attack |
Snapchat app vulnerable to denial-of-service attack, allows remotely crash iPhone | https://thehackernews.com/2014/02/hack-Snapchat-denial-of-service-attack-vulnerability.html | SNAPCHAT, photo sharing app is the majority choice for variety of users. Recently, the company has faced data breach and Captcha bypass vulnerability, and just yesterday a new denial-of-service attack has been revealed which can crash an iPhone.
Jamie Sanchez, a security researcher has found the app vulnerable, which can enable a hacker to launch a denial-of-service attacks, resulting prompt the user to reset the mobile device.
The flaw into the Snapchat app allows someone to flood a user with thousands of messages in a measure of seconds, "By reusing old tokens, hackers can send massive amounts of messages using powerful computers. This method could be used by spammers to send messages in mass quantities to numerous users, or it could be used to launch a cyber attack on specific individuals" he said.
He demonstrated the vulnerability to LA Times reporter, bombarded his handset with thousands of messages within five seconds in a denial-of-service attack, which caused his iPhone to freeze until it restarted.
Snapchat's Android app is not much vulnerable to this denial-of-service attack, but it impacts on the performance of the phone and leave snapchat app useless until the attack is over. Jamie Sanchez declined to contact Snapchat with his findings as he believes the company has no respect for the cyber security research community after ignoring previous app vulnerability reports.
This is the third time in the past 10 weeks when snapchat has no prior information about the security flaws and reacted immediately after public disclosure of the vulnerability.
Update: Snapchat reacted, "We are working to resolve the issue and will be reaching out to the security researcher who publicized the attack to learn more.".
| Vulnerability |
Google+ to Shut Down Early After New API Flaw Hits 52.5 Million Users | https://thehackernews.com/2018/12/google-plus-hacking.html | Google today revealed that Google+ has suffered another massive data breach, forcing the tech giant to shut down its struggling social network four months earlier than its actual scheduled date, i.e., in April 2019 instead of August 2019.
Google said it discovered another critical security vulnerability in one of Google+'s People APIs that could have allowed developers to steal private information on 52.5 million users, including their name, email address, occupation, and age.
The vulnerable API in question is called "People: get" that has been designed to let developers request basic information associated with a user profile.
However, software update in November introduced the bug in the Google+ People API that allowed apps to view users' information even if a user profile was set to not-public.
Google engineers discovered the security issue during standard testing procedures and addressed it within a week of the issue being introduced.
The company said it found no evidence that the vulnerability was exploited or its users' data was misused by any third-party app developers.
"No third party compromised our systems, and we have no evidence that the app developers that inadvertently had this access for six days were aware of it or misused it in any way," Google said.
Google also assured its users that no passwords, financial data, national identification numbers or any other sensitive data were left exposed by this API bug.
Almost two months ago, Google disclosed a massive data breach that exposed private data of more than 500,000 Google+ users to third-party developers, and also announced to shut down Google+ for consumers by the end of August 2019 due to its failure in gaining broad adoption or significant traction with its consumers.
"Our review showed that Google+ is better suited as an enterprise product where co-workers can engage in internal discussions on a secure corporate social network," Google said in October.
However, following yet another security incident, Google said the company is going to shut down its social media network in April 2019 instead of August.
| Data_Breaches |
Social Engineering Skype Support team to hack any account instantly | https://thehackernews.com/2013/04/social-engineering-skype-support-team.html | You can install the industry's strongest and most expensive firewall. You can educate employees about basic security procedures and the importance of choosing strong passwords. You can even lock-down the server room, but how do you protect a company from the threat of social engineering attacks?
For any of you that are involved in security awareness efforts, you know what I am talking about. It could happen tomorrow, it could happen today or it might already have happened.
In a recent disclosure posted by renowned hacker and developer DarkCoderSc (Jean-Pierre LESUEUR) explained that how one can easily Socially Engineer Microsoft Skype Support team to get access to any skype account.
From a social engineering perspective, employees are the weak link in the chain of security measures in place. He simply used the weakness of Skype password recovery system itself.
One simply need to request a new password to Skype support and asking to change the password. After the initial step one needs to proof the real ownership of the account requested. You must give 5 contacts accounts to the support desk.
"That's easy because you just have to add 5 fake temporary accounts to the target account and its done. Another option is to simply ask the target what people he know on Skype. That option wasn't that hard because I have over 1000 contacts." he suggests the trick.
Within few seconds attacker can become owner of any victim account by proving very basic information to support team.
"Also Microsoft's Support Team should make a serious effort to communicate better to their customers. At the moment they do not seem to care that much about their customers."
Social engineering is the act of manipulating a person into gaining access or sensitive data by preying on basic human psychology. Still, There is no patch for human stupidity!
| Vulnerability |
Instagram Hacker Puts 6 Million Celebrities Personal Data Up For Sale On DoxaGram | https://thehackernews.com/2017/09/instagram-hack-doxagram.html | It's now official, Instagram has suffered a massive data breach, and reportedly an unknown hacker has stolen personal details of more than 6 million Instagram accounts.
Just yesterday, we reported that Instagram had patched a critical API vulnerability that allowed the attacker to access phone numbers and email addresses for high-profile verified accounts.
However, Instagram hack now appears to be more serious than initially reported.
Not just a few thousands of high-profile users—it's more than 6 million Instagram users, including politicians, sports stars, and media companies, who have had their Instagram profile information, including email addresses and phone numbers, available for sale on a website, called Doxagram.
The suspected Instagram hacker has launched Doxagram, an Instagram lookup service, where anyone can search for stolen information only for $10 per account.
A security researcher from Kaspersky Labs, who also found the same vulnerability and reported it to Instagram, told The Hacker News that the issue actually resided in the Instagram's mobile API, specifically in the password reset option, which apparently exposed mobile numbers and email addresses of the users in the JSON response—but not passwords.
Instagram has not confirmed the hacker's claims yet, but the company said Friday it is investigating the data breach.
The news comes three days after an unknown hacker hijacked most-followed-account on Instagram belonged to Selena Gomez—with over 125 Million followers—and posted her ex-boyfriend Justin Bieber's full-frontal nude photographs.
However, Instagram did not confirm if the recent data breach was related to Selena's hacked account.
The company had already notified all of its verified users of the issue via emails and also encouraged them to be cautious if they receive any suspicious or unrecognised phone call, text message, or email.
With email addresses and phone numbers in hand, the hacker's next step could be used the stolen info in tandem with social engineering techniques to gain access to verified Instagram accounts and post on their behalves in order to embarrass them.
Instagram users are also highly recommended to enable two-factor authentication on their accounts and always secure them with a robust and different password.
Additionally, avoid clicking on suspicious links and attachments you receive in an email and providing your personal or financial details without verifying the source properly.
| Data_Breaches |
Real Identity of Hacker Who Sold LinkedIn, Dropbox Databases Revealed | https://thehackernews.com/2018/11/tessa88-russian-hacker.html | 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"
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
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.
| Data_Breaches |
Microsoft's Social network Yammer vulnerable to OAuth Bypass hack | https://thehackernews.com/2013/08/microsofts-social-network-yammer.html | Yammer, is the Enterprise Social Network service that was launched in 2008 and sold to Microsoft in 2012. Yammer is a secure, private social network for your company. Yammer is used for private communication within organizations or between organizational members and pre-designated groups, making it an example of enterprise social software.
Ateeq Khan, Pakistani researcher from The Vulnerability Laboratory Research team has discovered multiple critical Vulnerabilities in the Microsoft Yammer Social Network.
An OAuth bypass session token web vulnerability is detected in the official Microsoft Yammer Social Network online-service application.
OAuth is an emerging authorization standard that is being adopted by a growing number of sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Google, Yahoo!, Netflix, Flickr, and several other Resource Providers and social networking sites.
According to the advisory, The vulnerability allows remote attackers to bypass the token protection to compromise the account Auth system of the web-application.
Due to insecure implementation of OAuth on the Yammer network, so through phishing or other exploits, user requests can be directed to a malicious Server where the User can receive malicious or misleading payloads and it is possible to steal other user profiles by simply requesting a leaked access token which can be acquired from publicly accessible search engine results.
Using the Google search engine, the researchers were able to find a particular link listed publicly in the results and upon requesting that link directly in the browser, the researcher was instantly logged in as the given user with full privileges to the profile. This way, The session gets authenticated without entering the login/password credentials.
As explained by Researchers to 'The Hacker News', The variable that is revealed publicly is located in the Yammer API module in the /api/v1/messages?access_token=[Valid Token Here] parameter.
This vulnerability results in a complete compromise of the affected accounts, user profile and the associated risk are critical. Exploitation of the vulnerability requires no user interaction and also no registered Yammer account is required. To capture the session the attacker can use a random empty session as a form to request.
Proof of Concept:
The remote Auth bypass vulnerability can be exploited by a remote attacker without a privileged application user account or user interaction. For demonstration or reproduce:
Use the following Google dork to find the valid access tokens listed publicly on the search engine cache results. Google Dork: site:yammer.com inurl:'access_token'
Open the POC link #1 in your browser , https://www.yammer.com/api/v1/messages?access_token=NPLpzPsWdtCeXaKxBGA (You will be directly authenticated as the affected user upon requesting the link)
Open another browser tab and visit the Yammer social network website (https://www.yammer.com)
You will now be redirected to the user profile with full access and privileges hence proving the existence of this vulnerability.
Video Demonstrations:
The issue has been patched one day ago by Yammer Team. According to researcher, TLS/SSL is the recommended approach to prevent any eavesdropping during the data exchange. Search Engine bots crawling should be restricted from capturing sensitive URL parameters from user sessions. Protecting the integrity of the Client Credentials and Token Credentials works fairly well when it comes to storing them on servers.
| Vulnerability |
Israel preparing Cyber Iron Dome Shield | https://thehackernews.com/2013/01/israel-preparing-cyber-iron-dome-shield.html | Israel's Prime Minister officially opened a new national program to train teenagers in the art of cyberwarfare. The program named "Magshimim Le'umit", is to prepare them for their future role in the military and intelligence community.
Israel Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said the country's computer systems are facing attacks from Iran and other countries, and such attacks are set to increase in the digital age.
The new program will accept outstanding pupils aged between 16 and 18 and train them to intercept malicious attacks through a three-year course. Cyber security has become a national priority in Israel, with significant resources being invested in protecting the military and civilian computing networks.
Benjamin Netanyahu revealed plans to create a "digital Iron Dome" to protect vital infrastructure from hackers and viruses like last November, Israeli was under heavy cyber attacks from hacktivist group Anonymous as the latte protested against the Israeli attacks on Gaza.
"We are one of the world's leaders in the field of cybernetics and we must maintain this position. We will continue to cultivate the generation of the future," said Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu. The Prime Minister told prospective students that they will be the "future interceptors for the state."
| Cyber_Attack |
Hacker dump database from US Government and Military websites | https://thehackernews.com/2012/10/hacker-dump-database-from-us-government.html | Internet Activist and collective hacker group "NullCrew" released a huge dump of 7,000 names-passwords database from US Government websites and 2000 names-passwords database from Military websites.
Hacker claimed to hack into five websites, including Montana's Official State Website, United Nations, Louisiana Department of Environmental Quality, Texas Juvenile Justice Department, Force Health Protection & Readiness, domains are - unescoetxea.org, www.mt.gov, www.la.gov, www.texas.gov and fhpr.osd.mil respectiverly.
Few days back two Nullcrew members, null and 0rbit_g1rl claimed to perform the hack into above sites using few vulnerabilities such as "Unproperly sanitized code, leading to disclosure of all files on a server and Boolean blind SQL injection" and they threatened to release the database soon.
Today in a announcement via Twitter, hacker leaked the Database including 2000 and more Military, Air Force and Army officials usernames, email ID;s and Password (Encrypted).
After analysing the paste uploaded by hackers, I found the linux server kernal information disclosure from unescoetxea.org -- "uname -a: Linux llgf010.servidoresdns.net 2.6.18-274.7.1.el5 #1 SMP Mon Oct 17 11:57:40 EDT 201" which actually includes the timestamp of the command execution, that means this hack was actually performed by them about 10 days before the release date.
Hackers also disclose a cross site scripting bug in United Nation website webtv.un.org, and screenshot as shown below:
Note from Hacker:
# We here at NullCrew believe in non-censorship, and have noticed something..
# We have noticed that the government will never change their ways, they simply refuse to.
# No matter how much violence they cause, no matter how many times they refuse to admit their wrongs.
# No matter how many times they have denied documents for being factual.
# Even better, they REFUSE TO LET THEIR PEOPLE BE FREE!
# America, you have been a primary target for activists, and hacktivists alike.
# The true freedom fighters whom prove you wrong, you censor us; lock us away in prisons.
# You take away our freedom of speech, if the world relied on things such as free-source..
# The world would be a less corrupt place.
# Sadly, that won't happen anytime soon; as long as people from the system are greedy!
# Everyone shout:
# Let us be free!
| Vulnerability |
How Heartbleed Bug Exposes Your Passwords to Hackers | https://thehackernews.com/2014/04/how-heartbleed-bug-exposes-your.html | Are you safe from the critical bug Heartbleed?? OpenSSL- the encryption technology used by millions of websites to encrypt the communication and is also used to protect our sensitive data such as e-mails, passwords or banking information.
But a tiny, but most critical flaw called "Heartbleed" in the widely used OpenSSL opened doors for the cyber criminals to extract sensitive data from the system memory.
WHAT IS HEARTBLEED?
SSL and TLS are known to provide communication security and privacy over the Internet for applications such as websites, email, instant messaging (IM), including some virtual private networks (VPNs).
Heartbleed is a critical bug (CVE-2014-0160) is in the popular OpenSSL cryptographic software library, that actually resides in the OpenSSL's implementation of the TLS (transport layer security protocols) and DTLS (Datagram TLS) heartbeat extension (RFC6520).
This bug was independently discovered by a team of security engineers (Riku, Antti and Matti) at Codenomicon, while improving the SafeGuard feature in Codenomicon's Defensics security testing tools, and Neel Mehta of Google Security, who first reported it to the OpenSSL team.
Software vulnerabilities may come and go, but this bug is more critical as it has left the large number of private keys and other secrets exposed to the Internet. The heartbleed bug can reveal the contents of a server's memory, where the most sensitive data is stored, including the private data such as usernames, passwords, and credit card numbers.
This could allow attackers to retrieve private keys and ultimately decrypt the server's encrypted traffic or even impersonate the server.
"The Heartbleed bug allows anyone on the Internet to read the memory of the systems protected by the vulnerable versions of the OpenSSL software. This compromises the secret keys used to identify the service providers and to encrypt the traffic, the names and passwords of the users and the actual content. This allows attackers to eavesdrop on communications, steal data directly from the services and users and to impersonate services and users."
HEARTBLEED WORLDWIDE IMPACT
OpenSSL is most widely used cryptographic library for Apache and nginx Web servers, which handles a service of Transport Layer Security (TLS) called Heartbeat, an extension added to TLS in 2012. The combined market share of just those two, Apache and nginx, out of the active sites on the Internet is over 66% according to Netcraft's April 2014 Web Server Survey.
Moreover, OpenSSL is used to protect email servers (SMTP, POP and IMAP protocols), chat servers (XMPP protocol), virtual private networks (SSL VPNs), network appliances and wide variety of client side software. Many large consumer sites are also saved by their conservative choice of SSL/TLS termination equipment and software. OpenSSL is also very popular in client software and somewhat popular in networked appliances which have most inertia in getting updates.
Security researcher 'Robert Graham' scanned the Internet and found that more than 600,000 servers are vulnerable to heartbleed flaw, including Yahoo.com, imgur.com, flickr.com, hidemyass.com. [List]
Because of Heartbleed bug, the Canada Revenue Agency was forced to shut down its electronic tax collection service yesterday and apparently, World's biggest audio platform SoundCloud also logged out its users for fixing this flaw.
Yahoo, which has more than 800 million users around the world, also has been exposed by the bug.
HOW HEARTBLEED WORKS?
It is not a problem with the TLS/SSL technologies that encrypt the Internet, neither with how OpenSSL works. It is just a dumb coding mistake.
Using Heartbeats extension two computers make sure the other is still alive by sending data back and forth to each other. The client (user) sends its heartbeat to the server (website), and the server hands it right back. If by chance anyone of them goes down during the transaction, the other one will know using heartbeat sync mechanism.
When that heartbeat is sent, a small amount of the server's short-term memory of about 64 kilobytes comes in reply from server and an attacker is supposed to grab it, that can leak sensitive data such as message contents, user credentials, session keys and server private keys. By sending heartbleed requests multiple times, an attacker is able to fetch more memory contents from the server.
This means, everything and anything in the memory such as SSL private keys, user keys used for your usernames and passwords, instant messages, emails and business critical documents and communication, and many more is vulnerable to cyber criminals. At this phase, you have to assume that it is all compromised.
About two-thirds of web servers rely on OpenSSL, means the information passing through hundreds of thousands of websites could be vulnerable.
So far, Security experts have found no direct evidence that anyone has managed to use the bug to steal information. The vulnerability has been fixed in OpenSSL v1.0.1g.
Major websites, including Gmail and YouTube, Facebook, Tumblr, Yahoo and Dropbox have fixed the problem, but there are still thousands of websites who are yet to fix the problem. Users are advised to change their passwords on only those affected websites, that tell you they've fixed the problem. READ MORE on how to protect yourself from Heartbleed bug.
Related Important Articles:
German Developer responsible for HeartBleed Bug in OpenSSL
How Heartbleed Bug Exposes Your Passwords to Hackers
How to Protect yourself from the 'Heartbleed' Bug
Heartbleed - OpenSSL Zero-day Bug leaves Millions of websites Vulnerable
| Vulnerability |
Microsoft Releases Emergency Out-of-Band Patch for Kerberos Bug MS14-068 | https://thehackernews.com/2014/11/microsoft-releases-emergency-out-of.html | Microsoft today released an "out-of-band" security updates to fix a critical vulnerability in all supported versions of its Windows Server software that cyber criminals are exploiting to compromise whole networks of computers.
The Emergency patch release comes just one week after Microsoft provided its monthly security patch updates. The November 2014 Patch Tuesday updates included 16 security patches, five of which were rated by Redmond as "critical."
The security update (MS14-068) addresses a vulnerability in the Windows component called Microsoft Windows Kerberos KBC, authentication system used by default in the operating system. The flaw allows an attacker to elevate domain user account privileges and access rights to that of a domain administrator account.
As a result, if users unknowingly or accidentally run a malicious software on their system, it could therefore be used to compromise the entire network, which could be more dangerous for those who are handling intranets.
"The attacker can impersonate any domain accounts, add themselves to any group, install programs, view\change\delete data, or create any new accounts they wish," Chris Goettl of IT management firm Shavlik told The Hacker News in an email. "This could allow the attacker to then compromise any computer in the domain, including domain controllers."
The problem poses a severe threat to organisations and is only rated critical for Windows Server systems. While client systems would not be considered a target for an attack, so Windows home users are not likely to be affected by the flaw.
According to Microsoft, the vulnerable component is present in all supported versions of Windows, from Windows Vista to Windows 8.1, and from Windows Server 2003 to Server 2012 R2.
The company has made the emergency patch available for users and urged Windows users to install the update as quickly as possible, noting that hackers already are exploiting the weaknesses to launch targeted attacks.
The software giant said it had received warnings of "limited, targeted attacks" exploiting the vulnerability. The company credited "the Qualcomm Information Security & Risk Management team" for reporting the vulnerability, with special recognition for Qualcomm cyber security engineer Tom Maddock for his help.
| Vulnerability |
'Karkoff' Is the New 'DNSpionage' With Selective Targeting Strategy | https://thehackernews.com/2019/04/karkoff-dnspionage-malware.html | 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.
| Cyber_Attack |
Researchers Developed Artificial Intelligence-Powered Stealthy Malware | https://thehackernews.com/2018/08/artificial-intelligence-malware.html | 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."
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.
| Cyber_Attack |
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