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More than 250 iOS Apps Caught Using Private APIs to Collect Users' Private Data | https://thehackernews.com/2015/10/apple-ios-malware-apps.html | Apple is cleaning up its iTunes App Store again – for the third time in two months – following another flood of iOS apps that secretly collect users' personal information.
Researchers discovered more than 250 iOS apps that were violating Apple's App Store privacy policy, gathering personal identifiable data from almost one Million users estimated to have downloaded those offending apps.
The offending iOS applications have been pulled out of the App Store after an analytics service SourceDNA reported the issue. After XcodeGhost, this is the second time when Apple is cleaning its App Store.
Malicious iOS Apps Stealing Users' Private Info
The malicious applications were developed using a third-party software development kit (SDK) provided by Youmi, a Chinese advertising company.
Once compiled and distributed on Apple's official App Store, those apps secretly accessed and stored users' personal information, including:
A list of apps installed on the victim's phone
Serial number of iPhones or iPads themselves when they run older versions of iOS
A list of hardware components on iPhones or iPads running newer versions of iOS along with the components' serial numbers
E-mail addresses associated with the users' Apple IDs
How iOS Malware Works?
Youmi's SDK makes use of private Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) to gather users' information that only Apple should be able to view.
The gathered information is then routed through Youmi's servers in China.
What's even More Bothersome?
The app developers who programmed those iOS applications aren't even aware of the fact that their apps are mining users' data.
Also Read: Popular Apple Store Apps Infected with Data-Theft Malware
The app makers that made use of Youmi's SDK may not have knowingly violated Apple's security and privacy guidelines.
"We believe the developers of these apps aren't aware of this since the SDK is delivered in binary form, obfuscated, and user info is uploaded to Youmi's server, not the app's," reads SourceDNA's blog post. "We recommend developers stop using this SDK until this code is removed."
Apple App Store Review Process Needs to be Stronger
However, the primary concern over here is that even after the discovery of XcodeGhost malware, Apple's App Store review process wasn't able to catch this malicious activity until being alerted by a third party.
It's still unclear how Youmi's SDK did not raise red flags at Apple.
Also Read: Apple Kicks Out some Malicious Ad-Blocker Apps from its Online Store
In an official statement Apple says all offended iOS apps relying on the Youmi's SDK have now been removed. The company is now working with its developers to ensure their applications is in compliance with the App Store guidelines:
We've identified a group of apps that are using a third-party advertising SDK, developed by Youmi, a mobile advertising provider, that uses private APIs to gather private information, such as user email addresses and device identifiers, and route data to its company server.
This is a violation of our security and privacy guidelines. The apps using Youmi's SDK have been removed from the App Store and any new apps submitted to the App Store using this SDK will be rejected. We are working closely with developers to help them get updated versions of their apps that are safe for customers and in compliance with our guidelines back in the App Store quickly.
| Malware |
Dridex Banking Trojan Gains 'AtomBombing' Code Injection Ability to Evade Detection | https://thehackernews.com/2017/03/dridex-atombombing-malware.html | Security researchers have discovered a new variant of Dridex – one of the most nefarious banking Trojans actively targeting financial sector – with a new, sophisticated code injection technique and evasive capabilities called "AtomBombing."
On Tuesday, Magal Baz, security researcher at Trusteer IBM disclosed new research, exposing the new Dridex version 4, which is the latest version of the infamous financial Trojan and its new capabilities.
Dridex is one of the most well-known Trojans that exhibits the typical behavior of monitoring a victim's traffic to bank sites by infiltrating victim PCs using macros embedded in Microsoft documents or via web injection attacks and then stealing online banking credentials and financial data.
However, by including AtomBombing capabilities, Dridex becomes the first ever malware sample to utilize such sophisticated code injection technique to evade detection.
What is "AtomBombing" Technique?
Code injection techniques by previous versions of Dridex Trojan have become too common and easy to spot by antivirus and other security solutions.
But since the AtomBombing technique is a different approach to code injection that does not rely on easy-to-detect API calls used by old Dridex versions, leveraging AtomBombing in the latest Dridex version made it difficult for antiviruses to detect.
Initially spotted in October by Tal Liberman from enSilo security firm, AtomBombing is a code injection technique that could allow attackers to inject malicious code on every version of Microsoft's Windows OS, even Windows 10, in a manner that no existing anti-malware tools can detect.
AtomBombing does not exploit any vulnerability but abuses the system-level Atom Tables, a feature of Windows that allows applications to store information on strings, objects, and other types of data to access on a regular basis.
An attacker can write malicious code into an atom table and trick legitimate applications into retrieving it from the table to execute malicious actions on nearly any Windows operating system released in the past 16 years.
Dridex Version 4 Discovered In the Wild
According to IBM X-Force researchers, the Dridex banking Trojan recently underwent a major version upgrade, now supporting AtomBombing.
But the malware author only went halfway which makes Dridex v4 different from other AtomBombing attacks — the attackers used "the AtomBombing technique for the writing of the payload, then used a different method to achieve execution permissions, and for the execution itself."
"The flow differs from the one described in the AtomBombing technique. To get the payload into an executable memory space, Dridex simply calls NtProtectVirtualMemory from the injecting process to change the memory where the payload is already written into RWX," X-Force researchers said.
Since using an APC call to the payload would have been very suspicious that could be detected and stopped, Dridex v4 uses "the same GlobalGetAtomW method to patch GlobalGetAtomA, hooking it to execute the payload."
Researchers said the new Dridex v4 is already in use in active campaigns against European banks, and it's only a matter of time before hackers begin targeting American financial institutions as well.
Antivirus software and security products can now implement their systems to track and prevent Dridex v4 attacks since the IBM's findings are available for all.
For a more detailed explanation and technical working of the latest version of Dridex Trojan, you can head on to IBM's blog post.
| Malware |
GM Bot (Android Malware) Source Code Leaked Online | https://thehackernews.com/2016/02/android-malware-source-code.html | The source code of a recently discovered Android banking Trojan that has the capability to gain administrator access on your smartphone and completely erase your phone's storage has been LEAKED online.
The banking Trojan family is known by several names; Security researchers from FireEye dubbed it SlemBunk, Symantec dubbed it Bankosy, and last week when Heimdal Security uncovered it, they dubbed it MazarBot.
All the above wave of Android banking Trojans originated from a common threat family, dubbed GM Bot, which IBM has been tracking since 2014.
GM Bot emerged on the Russian cybercrime underground forums, sold for $500 / €450, but it appears someone who bought the code leaked it on a forum in December 2015, the IBM X-Force team reported.
What is GM Bot and Why Should You Worry about it?
The recent version of GM Bot (dubbed MazarBOT) has the capability to display phishing pages on the top of mobile banking applications in an effort to trick Android users into handing over their financial credentials to the fraudsters.
Besides this, the banking trojan is also capable of forwarding phone calls and intercepting SMS messages to help fraudsters bypass an additional layer of bank security mechanisms, and locking a device's screen.
Cyber criminals could also use the malware to:
Spy on victims
Delete data from the infected device
Gain boot persistence to help survive device restart
Send and Read your SMS message
Make Calls to your contacts
Read the phone's state
Plague phone's control keys
Infect your Chrome browser
Change phone settings
Force the phone into sleep mode
Query the network status
Access the Internet
Wipe your device's storage (the most critical capabilities of the malware)
However, someone leaked the malware source code only to boost his/her reputation on an underground forum, according to the researchers.
GM Bot Android Malware Source Code for FREE
Yes, the source code for GM Bot and its control panel is now accessible to cybercriminals and fraudsters for FREE.
Here's the Cherry on the Top:
Besides the source code, the leader also posted a tutorial and instructions for server-side installation, which means cybercriminals can create their own versions of the malware strain to conduct online banking frauds.
Though the archive file containing the source code and its control panel is password protected, the leader is offering the password only to active forum members who is approaching him.
"Those who received the password, in turn, passed it on to other, unintended users, so the actual distribution of the code went well beyond that discussion board's member list," IBM cyber security evangelist Limor Kessem wrote in a blog post.
Online users had started sharing the password to the archive among their friends, and in no time, the GM Bot source code was all over the hacking underground forums.
GM Bot is one of the most dangerous banking trojan in the Android ecosystem and after its source code gets leaked, users are recommended to beware while banking online.
How to Protect Yourself?
As I previously mentioned, online users are advised to follow these steps in order to protect themselves against this kind of threat:
Never open attachments from unknown sources.
Never click on links in SMS or MMS messages sent to your phone.
Even if the email looks legit, go directly to the source website and verify any possible updates.
Go to Settings → Security → Turn OFF "Allow installation of apps from sources other than the Play Store" option.
Always keep an up-to-date Anti-virus app on your Android devices.
Avoid unknown and unsecured Wi-Fi hotspots and Keep your Wi-Fi turned OFF when not in use.
| Malware |
Reliance Jio Customers' Data Allegedly Hacked – Company Denies Breach | https://thehackernews.com/2017/07/reliance-jio-data-breach.html | Personal details of some 120 Million customers have been allegedly exposed on the Internet in probably the biggest breach of personal data ever in India.
Last night, an independent website named Magicapk.com went online, offering Reliance Jio customers to search for their identification data (Know Your Customer or KYC) just by typing in their Jio number.
Reliance set up the Jio 4G network across the length and breadth of India in September last year and gained more than 50 million subscribers within a span of just 83 days. The company gave seven months of free internet, unlimited calls, unlimited music to its subscribers.
Although the website that claimed to have hacked into Jio database is no longer accessible, many users confirmed their personal data showed up on the website, displaying their names, email addresses and most alarmingly, in some cases, Aadhaar numbers.
Aadhaar is a 12-digit unique identification number issued by the Indian government to every resident of India. This number is also used for enrolling for a SIM.
Company Denies Data Breach Before Investigation
In response to the breach, Reliance Jio released a statement, saying that the claims are unverified and that the leaked data appears to be "unauthentic."
"We have come across the unverified and unsubstantiated claims of the website and are investigating it. Prima facie, the data appears to be unauthentic," a spokesperson said.
"We want to assure our subscribers that their data is safe and maintained with highest security. Data is only shared with authorities as per their requirement."
The Jio spokesperson said the company has "informed law enforcement agencies about the claims of the website and will follow through to ensure strict action is taken."
Breach Appears to be Authentic! But Doesn't Affect All JIO Users
The Hacker News independently verified the leak for a few Jio numbers, and the data came out to be accurate for some Jio numbers, but not for all.
Therefore, the data on the website seems to be authentic, but luckily some customers are spared--probably those who have been issued Jio SIM after the breach.
For obvious reasons, we are not naming the customers we tested on the website and found their identity leaked just by typing their mobile number. The leaked information includes:
First Name
Middle Name
Last Name
Mobile Number
Email-Id
Circle-Id
SIM Activation Date and Time
Aadhaar Number, in some cases
Mobile numbers for other telecom operators in India, such as Vodafone and Airtel, did not work on the website.
Hackers Identity is Unknown Yet
The website was hosted by the web hosting company GoDaddy.com and was registered in May 2017, but so far it is not clear who owned the domain.
Also, it is not clear at this moment that how the hackers got access to sensitive data of Jio customers and was it Jio who got hacked or some third-party marketing company with whom the company shared its customer's data.
Though there is very little victims (especially those who have exposed their Aadhaar number) can do to protect themselves from future attacks. Hackers holding their Aadhaar number can disguise their identities to carry out several frauds.
All Jio customers are highly recommended to be vigilant to unrequested calls asking for their further details or account passwords. No company asks for these details over phone calls or emails.
Victims should also particularly be alert of the Phishing emails, which are usually the next step of cyber criminals after a large-scale hack at any telecoms company. Phishing tricks users into giving up further personal details like passwords.
| Data_Breaches |
Viacom Left Sensitive Data And Secret Access Key On Unsecured Amazon Server | https://thehackernews.com/2017/09/viacom-amazon-server.html | Viacom—the popular entertainment and media company that owns Paramount Pictures, Comedy Central, MTV, and hundreds of other properties—has exposed the keys to its kingdom on an unsecured Amazon S3 server.
A security researcher working for California-based cyber resiliency firm UpGuard has recently discovered a wide-open, public-facing misconfigured Amazon Web Server S3 cloud storage bucket containing roughly a gigabyte's worth of credentials and configuration files for the backend of dozens of Viacom properties.
These exposed credentials discovered by UpGuard researcher Chris Vickery would have been enough for hackers to take down Viacom's internal IT infrastructure and internet presence, allowing them to access cloud servers belonging to MTV, Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon.
Among the data exposed in the leak was Viacom's master key to its Amazon Web Services account, and the credentials required to build and maintain Viacom servers across its many subsidiaries and dozens of brands.
"Perhaps most damaging among the exposed data are Viacom's secret cloud keys, an exposure that, in the most damaging circumstances, could put the international media conglomerate's cloud-based servers in the hands of hackers," an UpGuard blog post says.
"Such a scenario could enable malicious actors to launch a host of damaging attacks, using the IT infrastructure of one of the world's largest broadcast and media companies."
In other words, the access key and secret key for the company's AWS account would have allowed hackers to compromise Viacom's servers, storage, and databases under the AWS account.
According to the analysis performed by UpGuard, a number of cloud instances used within the media company's IT toolchain, including Docker, Splunk, New Relic, and Jenkins, could have "thus been compromised in this manner."
In addition to these damaging leaks, the unprotected server also contained GPG decryption keys, which can be used to unlock sensitive data. However, the server did not contain any customer or employee information.
Although it is unclear whether hackers were able to exploit this information to access important files belonging to Viacom and the firms it owns, the media giant said there's no evidence anyone had abused its data.
"We have analyzed the data in question and determined there was no material impact," the company said in a statement.
"Once Viacom became aware that information on a server—including technical information, but no employee or customer information—was publicly accessible, we rectified the issue."
All the credentials have now been changed after UpGuard contacted Viacom executives privately, and the server was secured shortly afterwards.
This is not the first time when Vickery has discovered a company's sensitive information stored on an unprotected AWS C3 server.
Vickery has previously tracked down many exposed datasets on the Internet, including personal details of over 14 million Verizon customers, a cache of 60,000 documents from a US military, information of over 191 Million US voter records, and 13 Million MacKeeper users.
| Data_Breaches |
Microsoft Hacking Code leaked from security info-sharing program | https://thehackernews.com/2012/03/microsoft-hacking-code-leaked-from.html | Microsoft Hacking Code leaked from security info-sharing program
Microsoft on Friday confirmed that sample attack code created by the company had likely leaked to hackers from a program it runs with antivirus vendors. Code that was submitted to Microsoft last year to demonstrate a serious exploit in Windows has somehow made it into the wild, either through Redmond itself or one of its security partners. The exploit targets a vulnerability in Windows' remote desktop protocol, giving an attacker full control over a system and the ability to easily spread to other machines with remote desktop enabled.
Security researchers raised alarms when a working exploit for the flaw was spotted in China shortly after the release, leading many to believe that malware writers were able to breach the Microsoft Active Protections Program security platform.
"The details of the proof-of-concept code appear to match the vulnerability information shared with Microsoft Active Protections Program partners," said Yunsun Wee, Microsoft's director of its Trustworthy Computing effort.
The patches for the new hole were distributed on Tuesday, as part of Microsoft's regular monthly cycle for security fixes. The hole is a very serious one, because full exploitation would allow an attacker to control machines running Windows XP and later Windows versions that have Remote Desktop Protocol enabled, as long as the network doesn't demand authentication.
Microsoft launched MAPP in 2008. The program has 79 security firm partners, including AVG, Cisco, Kaspersky, McAfee, Trend Micro, and Symantec, as well as several Chinese antivirus companies. A full list of MAPP members can be found on this Microsoft Web page .
| Malware |
Malvertising Campaign On Google Distributed Trojanized AnyDesk Installer | https://thehackernews.com/2021/05/malvertising-campaign-on-google.html | Cybersecurity researchers on Wednesday publicized the disruption of a "clever" malvertising network targeting AnyDesk that delivered a weaponized installer of the remote desktop software via rogue Google ads that appeared in the search engine results pages.
The campaign, which is believed to have begun as early as April 21, 2021, involves a malicious file that masquerades as a setup executable for AnyDesk (AnyDeskSetup.exe), which, upon execution, downloads a PowerShell implant to amass and exfiltrate system information.
"The script had some obfuscation and multiple functions that resembled an implant as well as a hardcoded domain (zoomstatistic[.]com) to 'POST' reconnaissance information such as user name, hostname, operating system, IP address and the current process name," researchers from Crowdstrike said in an analysis.
AnyDesk's remote desktop access solution has been downloaded by more than 300 million users worldwide, according to the company's website. Although the cybersecurity firm did not attribute the cyber activity to a specific threat actor or nexus, it suspected it to be a "widespread campaign affecting a wide range of customers" given the large user base.
The PowerShell script may have all the hallmarks of a typical backdoor, but it's the intrusion route where the attack throws a curve, signaling that it's beyond a garden-variety data gathering operation — the AnyDesk installer is distributed through malicious Google ads placed by the threat actor, which are then served to unsuspecting people who are using Google to search for 'AnyDesk.'
The fraudulent ad result, when clicked, redirects users to a social engineering page that's a clone of the legitimate AnyDesk website, in addition to providing the individual with a link to the trojanized installer.
CrowdStrike estimates that 40% of clicks on the malicious ad turned into installations of the AnyDesk binary, and 20% of those installations included follow-on hands-on-keyboard activity. "While it is unknown what percentage of Google searches for AnyDesk resulted in clicks on the ad, a 40% Trojan installation rate from an ad click shows that this is an extremely successful method of gaining remote access across a wide range of potential targets," the researchers said.
The company also said it notified Google of its findings, which is said to have taken immediate action to pull the ad in question.
"This malicious use of Google Ads is an effective and clever way to get mass deployment of shells, as it provides the threat actor with the ability to freely pick and choose their target(s) of interest," the researchers concluded.
"Because of the nature of the Google advertising platform, it can provide a really good estimate of how many people will click on the ad. From that, the threat actor can adequately plan and budget based on this information. In addition to targeting tools like AnyDesk or other administrative tools, the threat actor can target privileged/administrative users in a unique way."
| Malware |
Google bans Facebook and other self updating Android apps | https://thehackernews.com/2013/04/google-bans-facebook-and-other-self.html | Google just released a new Play Store version 4.0.27 that, contains only very minor tweaks and Google has changed the rules of its Google Play Store to put an end to the practice of developers updating their apps through their own means rather than the official Google Play channel.
Shortly before the Facebook Home launch, some users noticed a new version of Facebook was available on their device, but it wasn't through the Play Store. Instead, the update came directly through the app, bypassing the Store altogether.
Under the "Dangerous Products" section of the Google Play developer policies, Google now states that "an app downloaded from Google Play may not modify, replace or update its own APK binary code using any method other than Google Play's update mechanism."
Essentially this means that once an app is downloaded by an Android user it cannot contact home base and auto-update its own operating code. Instead, it has to use the official Google approved channel.
Google says that its Play store is "trusted source for Android application downloads" and that it is "committed to providing a secure and consistent experience." Allowing apps to update themselves could possibly lead to some less-than-secure scenarios as the initial download from Google Play would be safe while the in-app updater installs malware.
| Malware |
LOL, Jar File Malware Just Goes Viral Through Facebook Messages | https://thehackernews.com/2014/05/lol-jar-file-malware-just-goes-viral.html | If you came across any suspicious Facebook message with 'LOL' text or a fake Image file send by any of your Facebook friend, avoid clicking it. A Trojan horse is currently circulating in wild through the Facebook social network that could steal your Facebook account data and Credentials.
Security researchers spotted this malware campaign first in the beginning of March this year, where the Trojan spreads itself through the Facebook's Messenger service (inbox) by messaging a victim pretending to be one of their friends saying "LOL" with a zip file attached, which appears to be a photo, named "IMG_xxxx.zip".
In Past two weeks, many of our readers informed us that they received similar ZIP files from their trusted Facebook friends. The Hacker News team also noticed that despite after several warnings in media, once again the malware campaign just goes viral like any other video scam, but this time directly through users' inbox-to-inbox.
HOW DOES TROJAN CAMPAIGN SPREADS
Facebook User receives a file directly into the inbox from one of the trusted friends, appears to be a photo, named 'IMG_xxxx.zip' with messages 'LOL', OMG,"Have a look at this" ,"I can't believe someone posted this"
The User downloads the file, assuming it to be from trusted friend and unzip it on desktop.
The Zip file contains a jar file called 'IMG_xxxx.jar' which executes when the user click it.
The Jar file itself is not a virus, but a malware agent, which actually download a file remotely from a pre-defined Dropbox account (as shown in the code).
Once downloaded, it installs the malware as a service on the victim's system.
Then it spread itself further to his Facebook Friends by sending similar malicious message automatically in the background.
To evade detection, the malware injects itself into legitimate processes currently running on the victims' system. This way the malware campaign is spreading like a chain reaction rapidly from last few weeks.
ARE YOU AFFECTED?
To check if you have fall a victim to this attack and have opened any such file sent by your trusted friend, scan your whole system using a reputed antivirus solution and just to be on a safer side change your Facebook account password.
Researchers found the malware as a variant of the Zusy Trojan, which operates by hooking into web browsers in order to steal credit card number or password and send it to the remote malware author.
HOW TO PROTECT?
Before opening any such file, ask the sender if the file is prior to download or not. If they deny, Simply DO NOT DOWNLOAD it.
Cyber criminals have discovered yet another method to utilize the world's most popular social networks for their own beneficial purposes, and because Facebook has become one of the most popular social networking website with more than one billion active users this year, it serves as a vast platform for scammers and cyber criminals to spread malware or virus infections. So, protect yourself from the threats - Stay Tuned to 'The Hacker News'.
| Malware |
Swedish authorities raid on PRQ prompts new cyber attack from Anonymous | https://thehackernews.com/2012/10/swedish-authorities-raid-on-prq-prompts.html | Computer hackers claiming to be from the Anonymous network took over the official website of Sweden's National Board of Health and Welfare. The attacks come just days after police on Monday raided a Stockholm-based webhosting company, PRQ, and a video was posted on YouTube - allegedly made on behalf of the hacker group Anonymous - warning Swedish authorities of repercussions.
Hacktivist network Anonymous has warned that Sweden's Riksbank will suffer a cyber-attack on Wednesday night. "It's come to our attention that Swedish government raided PRQ servers in order to shut down numerous file sharing and torrent websites,"
"This has gone too far. This is unacceptable. Anonymous says this stops right now. You don't fuck with The Internet… Today we hit their wallets hard." wrote the Anonymous group on 4chan.
The Riksbank is taking the threat seriously: "We recognize this as a public threat against websites and we are always trying to keep the web as safe as possible. We have people who are responsible for taking care of the web and IT security," said Charlotta Edler, spokesperson of the Riksbank.
PRQ Head Mikael Viborg says his company previously hosted servers for file-sharing site the Pirate Bay and still houses some servers for the secret-spilling website WikiLeaks.
"The raid on PRQ disabled many of our torrent sites. We see this as a crime against freedom to information," says a masked spokesperson in a video posted on YouTube by a user claiming ties to Anonymous. "Swedish government; you know our capabilities and what we want! The choice is yours."
| Cyber_Attack |
Malware threat to Opera users, Trojan signed with a stolen certificate | https://thehackernews.com/2013/06/malware-threat-to-opera-users-trojan.html | On June 19, Browser maker Opera admitted that, it discovered an attack on its internal network infrastructure and windows users may have been tricked into installing a Trojan signed with a stolen Opera certificate.
"On June 19th we uncovered, halted and contained a targeted attack on our internal network infrastructure. Our systems have been cleaned and there is no evidence of any user data being compromised."
"We are working with the relevant authorities to investigate its source and any potential further extent. We will let you know if there are any developments." said in a post on the Opera Security Blog.
Code signing certificates are used to cryptographically verify that a piece of software comes from its purported publisher. It is possible that a few thousand Windows users, who were using Opera between 01.00 and 01.36 UTC on June 19th, may automatically have received and installed the malicious software.
Opera plans to roll out a new version of its flagship browser which will use a new code signing certificate. The advisory also provides few details about the malware that was signed with Opera's official digital imprimatur, other than to link to this VirusTotal analysis.
| Malware |
Pakistani Hacker Arrested for Hacking Telecom Company Database | https://thehackernews.com/2014/04/pakistani-hacker-arrested-for-hacking_5.html | Pakistan's Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) has arrested a Pakistani Hacker allegedly involved in hacking into a telecom company and uploading their database on his website.
With the help of the National Response Center for Cyber Crime (NR3C) of Pakistan's Federal Investigation Agency, the local authorities were able to trace and arrest the hacker suspected of infiltrating into the systems of Warid Telecom, an Abu-Dhabi-based telecoms company that provides services in Congo, Pakistan and Uganda.
The suspect, Mubashar Shahzad, a resident of Kasur, is believed to have downloaded Warid Telecom's customer information from the company's databases and exposed it online, which was published on earlysms.com, a site hosted with HosterPK.
Investigation started after one of the senior manager of a cellular company filed a complaint saying the 'information of its consumers till 2006 had been exposed over the internet.'
"A technical/forensic analysis found that the website was being hosted by hosterpk. The FIA traced the IP address, email address and phone number of the suspect through the host company," Usman Anwar, the Director of FIA told The Express Tribune.
The suspects IP address was traced to a shop in Ghalla Mandi, Kasur, from where the authorities arrested the suspect Mubashar Shahzad. The Investigation Team also detected and seized Shahzad's computers which contained folders named 'Warid Data'. In addition to that, two desktop systems, hard drives and portable Hard drives were also seized by the authorities.
The website on which the stolen data was posted by the hacker has now been shut down.
| Data_Breaches |
Two Critical Flaws in Zoom Could've Let Attackers Hack Systems via Chat | https://thehackernews.com/2020/06/zoom-video-software-hacking.html | If you're using Zoom—especially during this challenging time to cope with your schooling, business, or social engagement—make sure you are running the latest version of the widely popular video conferencing software on your Windows, macOS, or Linux computers.
No, it's not about the arrival of the most-awaited "real" end-to-end encryption feature, which apparently, according to the latest news, would now only be available to paid users. Instead, this latest warning is about two newly discovered critical vulnerabilities.
Cybersecurity researchers from Cisco Talos unveiled today that it discovered two critical vulnerabilities in the Zoom software that could have allowed attackers to hack into the systems of group chat participants or an individual recipient remotely.
Both flaws in question are path traversal vulnerabilities that can be exploited to write or plant arbitrary files on the systems running vulnerable versions of the video conferencing software to execute malicious code.
According to the researchers, successful exploitation of both flaws requires no or very little interaction from targeted chat participants and can be executed just by sending specially crafted messages through the chat feature to an individual or a group.
The first security vulnerability (CVE-2020-6109) resided in the way Zoom leverages GIPHY service, recently bought by Facebook, to let its users search and exchange animated GIFs while chatting.
Researchers find that the Zoom application did not check whether a shared GIF is loading from Giphy service or not, allowing an attacker to embed GIFs from a third-party attacker-controlled server, which zoom by design cache/store on the recipients' system in a specific folder associated with the application.
Besides that, since the application was also not sanitizing the filenames, it could have allowed attackers to achieve directory traversal, tricking the application into saving malicious files disguised as GIFs to any location on the victim's system, for example, the startup folder.
The second remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2020-6110) resided in the way vulnerable versions of the Zoom application process code snippets shared through the chat.
"Zoom's chat functionality is built on top of XMPP standard with additional extensions to support the rich user experience. One of those extensions supports a feature of including source code snippets that have full syntax highlighting support. The feature to send code snippets requires the installation of an additional plugin but receiving them does not. This feature is implemented as an extension of file sharing support," the researchers said.
This feature creates a zip archive of the shared code snippet before sending and then automatically unzips it on the recipient's system.
According to the researchers, Zoom's zip file extraction feature does not validate the contents of the zip file before extracting it, allowing the attacker to plant arbitrary binaries on targeted computers.
"Additionally, a partial path traversal issue allows the specially crafted zip file to write files outside the intended randomly generated directory," the researchers said.
Cisco Talos researchers tested both flaws on version 4.6.10 of the Zoom client application and responsibly reported it to the company.
Released just last month, Zoom patched both critical vulnerabilities with the release of version 4.6.12 of its video conferencing software for Windows, macOS, or Linux computers.
| Vulnerability |
FBI Mapping 'Joanap Malware' Victims to Disrupt the North Korean Botnet | https://thehackernews.com/2019/01/north-korea-hacker.html | The United States Department of Justice (DoJ) announced Wednesday its effort to "map and further disrupt" a botnet tied to North Korea that has infected numerous Microsoft Windows computers across the globe over the last decade.
Dubbed Joanap, the botnet is believed to be part of "Hidden Cobra"—an Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) actors' group often known as Lazarus Group and Guardians of Peace and backed by the North Korean government.
Hidden Cobra is the same hacking group that has been allegedly associated with the WannaCry ransomware menace in 2016, the SWIFT Banking attack in 2016, as well as Sony Motion Pictures hack in 2014.
Dates back to 2009, Joanap is a remote access tool (RAT) that lands on a victim's system with the help an SMB worm called Brambul, which crawls from one computer to another by brute-forcing Windows Server Message Block (SMB) file-sharing services using a list of common passwords.
Once there, Brambul downloads Joanap on the infected Windows computers, effectively opening a backdoor for its masterminds and giving them remote control of the network of infected Windows computers.
If You Want to Beat Them, Then First Join Them
Interestingly, the computers infected by Joanap botnet don't take commands from a centralized command-and-control server; instead it relies on peer-to-peer (P2P) communications infrastructure, making every infected computer a part of its command and control system.
Even though Joanap is currently being detected by many malware protection systems, including Windows Defender, the malware's peer-to-peer (P2P) communications infrastructure still leaves large numbers of infected computers connected to the Internet.
So to identify infected hosts and take down the botnet, the FBI and the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) obtained legal search warrants that allowed the agencies to join the botnet by creating and running "intentionally infected" computers mimicking its peers to collect both technical and "limited" identifying information in an attempt to map them, the DoJ said in its press release.
"While the Joanap botnet was identified years ago and can be defeated with antivirus software, we identified numerous unprotected computers that hosted the malware underlying the botnet," said U.S. Attorney Nicola T. Hanna.
"The search warrants and court orders announced today as part of our efforts to eradicate this botnet are just one of the many tools we will use to prevent cybercriminals from using botnets to stage damaging computer intrusions."
The collected information about computers infected with the Joanap malware included IP addresses, port numbers, and connection timestamps which allowed the FBI and AFOSI to build a map of the current Joanap botnet.
The agencies are now notifying victims of the presence of Joanap on their infected computers through their Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and even sending personal notifications to people who don't have a router or firewall protecting their systems.
The US Justice Department and FBI will also coordinate the notification of overseas victims of the Joanap malware by sharing the data with the government of other countries.
The efforts to disrupt the Joanap botnet began after the United States unsealed charges against a North Korean computer programmer named Park Jin Hyok in September last year for his role in masterminding the Sony Pictures and WannaCry ransomware attacks.
Joanap and Brambul were also recovered from computers of the victims of the campaigns listed in the Hyok's September indictment, suggesting that he aided the development of the Joanap botnet.
| Cyber_Attack |
Critical Code Execution Flaw Found in CyberArk Enterprise Password Vault | https://thehackernews.com/2018/04/enterprise-password-vault.html | A critical remote code execution vulnerability has been discovered in CyberArk Enterprise Password Vault application that could allow an attacker to gain unauthorized access to the system with the privileges of the web application.
Enterprise password manager (EPV) solutions help organizations securely manage their sensitive passwords, controlling privileged accounts passwords across a wide range of client/server and mainframe operating systems, switches, databases, and keep them safe from external attackers, as well as malicious insiders.
Discovered by German cybersecurity firm RedTeam Pentesting GmbH, the vulnerability affects one of such Enterprise Password Vault apps designed by CyberArk—a password management and security tool that manages sensitive passwords and controls privileged accounts.
The vulnerability (CVE-2018-9843) resides in CyberArk Password Vault Web Access, a .NET web application created by the company to help its customers access their accounts remotely.
The flaw is due to the way web server unsafely handle deserialization operations, which could allow attackers to execute code on the server processing the deserialized data.
According to the researchers, when a user logs in into his account, the application uses REST API to send an authentication request to the server, which includes an authorization header containing a serialized .NET object encoded in base64.
This serialized .NET object holds the information about a user's session, but researchers found that the "integrity of the serialized data is not protected."
Since the server does not verify the integrity of the serialized data and unsafely handles the deserialization operations, attackers can merely manipulate authentication tokens to inject their malicious code into the authorization header, gaining "unauthenticated, remote code execution on the web server."
Researchers have also released a full proof-of-concept code to demonstrate the vulnerability using ysoserial.net, an open source tool for generating payloads for .NET applications performing unsafe deserialization of objects.
The technical details of the vulnerability and exploit code came only after RedTeam responsibly reported the vulnerability to CyberArk and the company rolled out patched versions of the CyberArk Password Vault Web Access.
Enterprises using CyberArk Password Vault Web Access are highly recommended to upgrade their software to version 9.9.5, 9.10 or 10.2.
In case you cannot immediately upgrade your software, the possible workaround to mitigate this vulnerability is disabling any access to the API at the route / PasswordVault / WebServices.
| Vulnerability |
DHS Warns Small Airplanes Vulnerable to Flight Data Manipulation Attacks | https://thehackernews.com/2019/07/airplane-can-bus-hacking.html | What could be more horrifying than knowing that a hacker can trick the plane's electronic systems into displaying false flight data to the pilot, which could eventually result in loss of control?
Of course, the attacker would never wish to be on the same flight, so in this article, we are going to talk about a potential loophole that could allow an attacker to exploit a vulnerability with some level of "unsupervised" physical access to a small aircraft before the plane takes off.
The United States Department of Homeland Security's (DHS) has issued an alert for the same, warning owners of small aircraft to be on guard against a vulnerability that could enable attackers to easily hack the plane's CAN bus and take control of key navigation systems.
The vulnerability, discovered by a cybersecurity researcher at Rapid 7, resides in the modern aircraft's implementation of CAN (Controller Area Network) bus—a popular vehicular networking standard used in automobiles and small aircraft that allows microcontrollers and devices to communicate with each other in applications without a host computer.
Rapid7 researcher Patrick Kiley demonstrated that a hacker with physical access to a small aircraft's wiring could attach a device—or co-opt an existing attached device—to the plane's avionics CAN bus to insert false data and communicate them to the pilot.
"Modern aircraft use a network of electronics to translate signals from the various sensors and place this data onto a network to be interpreted by the appropriate instruments and displayed to the pilot," Kiley said in a report published Tuesday.
The attacker can manipulate the following data:
Engine telemetry readings
Compass and attitude data
Altitude, airspeed, and angle of attack (AoA) data
"The researchers have further outlined that a pilot relying on instrument readings would be unable to distinguish between false and legitimate readings, which could result in loss of control of the affected aircraft," the DHS' cyber division warned Tuesday.
Kiley demonstrated the attack after investigating avionics systems—an electronic control and navigation system fitted in an aircraft—from two unnamed commercial aircraft manufacturers specialized in light aircraft.
Kiley found that the key problem with the avionics CAN bus is that it is integrated into the aircraft's other components without any firewalls or authentication, which means untrusted connections over a USB adapter attached to the plane can send unauthorized commands to its electronic systems.
"In avionics, these systems provide the foundation of control systems and sensor systems and collect data such as altitude, airspeed, and engine parameters such as fuel level and oil pressure, then display them to the pilot," the researcher said.
"CAN packets also do not have recipient addresses or any kind of built-in authentication mechanism. This is what makes the bus easy to implement, but it also removes any assurance that the sending device was the actual originator of the message."
Though the attack sounds scary, it is not easy to gain "unsupervised" physical access to a plane, given "current industry practices and regulations," nevertheless, the Rapid7 report is worth paying attention to.
The researcher also pointed out that the avionics sector is lagging behind the automotive industry when it comes to the CAN bus system.
The automotive industry has made advancements in implementing safeguards, such as CAN bus-specific filtering, whitelisting, and segregation, that prevent similar physical attacks to CAN bus systems. Aircraft makers should also implement these safeguards.
The DHS' CISA is urging aircraft manufacturers to consider network protections around the CAN bus system and make sure they restrict access to their planes to the best of their abilities.
| Vulnerability |
BrutPOS Botnet Compromises insecure RDP Servers at Point-of-Sale Systems | https://thehackernews.com/2014/07/brutpos-botnet-compromises-insecure-rdp.html | Cyber criminals are infecting thousands of computers around the world with malware and are utilizing those compromised machines to break into Point-of-Sale (PoS) terminals using brute-force techniques, and the attackers have already compromised 60 PoS terminals by brute-force attacks against poorly-secured connections to guess remote administration credentials, says researchers from FireEye.
The new botnet campaign, dubbed as BrutPOS, aims to steal payment card information from the POS systems and and other places where payment data is stored, by targeting Microsoft Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) servers that were disgracefully using poorly secured and simple passwords.
Due to the better track inventory and accuracy of records, the Point-of-sale (POS) machine is used worldwide and it can be easily set-up, depending on the nature of the business. But, Point-of-sale (POS) systems are critical components in any retail environment and the users are not aware of the emerging threats it poses in near future.
A group of three researchers from FireEye, named Nart Villeneuve, Joshua Homan and Kyle Wilhoit, found 51 out of 60 Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) servers located in the United States. It is really shamefull that the most common username used by the breached servers was "administrator" and the most common passwords were "pos" and "Password1".
Researchers at FireEye has uncovered five BrutPOS command-and-control (CnC) servers, three of which are now offline and two are active, both based in Russia, which were set up in late May and early June. Only a small fraction of the bots are active at any given time.
The campaign has been active since at least February this year. According to the latest count, cyber criminals are running 5,622 bots in 119 countries, majority of them appeared to be located in Eastern Europe given the language used in interfaces and logs, most likely Ukraine or Russia.
"The infected system begins to make connections to port 3389; if the port is open it adds the IP to a list of servers to be brute forced with the supplied credentials," FireEye researchers Nart Villeneuve, Josh Homan and Kyle Wilhoit wrote in a blog post. "If the infected system is able to successfully brute force an RDP server, it reports back with credentials."
Once the BrutPOS malware successfully guesses the remote access credentials of an RDP-enabled system, the attacker uses that information to install a malware program on the infected system and then extracts payment card information from the memory of applications running on it.
The malware also attempted to obtain debug permissions likely to identify POS configurations and if it succeeds in getting those permissions, it runs an executable. But if it failed, it copies itself to %WINDIR%\lsass.exe and installed itself as a service.
The FireEye researchers built a honeypot in an effort to understand the attacker's intentions. They set-up a fake POS software and left some fake credit card details on the desktop, and allow hackers to compromise it. They issued signals mimicking infection and watched as attackers popped its RDP login and crawled around the box attempting to open its installed PoS software before formatting the drive to erase evidence trails.
In past, we have seen many massive data breaches targeting POS machines such as TARGET data breach, the third-largest U.S. Retailer in which over 40 million Credit & Debit cards were stolen, and multiple retailers including Neiman Marcus, Michaels Store involving the heist of possibly 110 million Credit-Debit cards, and personal information.
| Data_Breaches |
Ransomware Hijacks Hotel Smart Keys to Lock Guests Out of their Rooms | https://thehackernews.com/2017/01/ransomware-hotel-smart-lock.html | What's the worst that could happen when a Ransomware hits a Hotel?
Recently, hundreds of guests of a luxurious hotel in Austria were locked in or out of their rooms when ransomware hit the hotel's IT system, and the hotel had no choice left except paying the attackers.
Today, we are living in a digital age that is creating a digital headache for people and organizations around the world with cyber attacks and data breaches on the rise.
Ransomware is one of them.
The threat has been around for a few years, but during 2016, it has turned into a noxious game of Hackers to get paid effortlessly by targeting hospitals, Universities, private businesses and even police departments and making hundreds of millions of dollars.
Now, the Romantik Seehotel Jäegerwirt 4-Star Superior Hotel has admitted it paid €1,500 (£1,275/$1,600) in Bitcoin ransom to cybercriminals who managed to break into their network and hack their electronic key card system that prevented its guests from entering or leaving their rooms.
The luxury hotel with a beautiful lakeside setting on the Alpine Turracher Hoehe Pass in Austria, like several other hotels in the industry, has a modern IT system that includes key cards for its hotel doors, which could not be programmed.
Also Read: This Tool Detects Never-Seen-Before Ransomware Before It Encrypts Your Data
According to the hotel management, the hotel has been hit multiple times by hackers, but this time they managed to take down the entire key system, preventing its guests to getting in or going out of their rooms, reported The Local.
Besides gaining control of the electronic key system, the hackers even gained control over the general computer system, shutting down all hotel computers, including the reservation system and the cash desk system.
Once the hotel made the payment, the system was completely restored that allowed the hotel staff to gain access to the network and hotel guests to enter and exit their rooms.
What's interesting? Even after the hotel fulfilled the hackers demand, the hackers left a backdoor to the hotel system in an attempt to conduct another cyber attack later.
Fortunately, the security standards of the hotel had been improved by its IT department, and critical networks had been separated to thwart the attack, giving attackers no chance to harm the hotel again.
Furious hotel managers decided to go public with the incident to warn others about the dangers of cyber attack, with Managing Director Christoph Brandstaetter said:
"The house was totally booked with 180 guests; we had no other choice. Neither police nor insurance helps you in this case.
The restoration of our system after the first attack in summer has cost us several thousand Euros. We did not get any money from the insurance so far because none of those to blame could be found.
Every euro that is paid to blackmailers hurts us. We know that other colleagues have been attacked, who have done similarly."
The Ransomware had stolen the nights of many businesses and organizations, as they would often be blamed to fight up to this nasty threat.
Ransomware criminals often demand the ransom in Bitcoin (BTC) for the surety of not getting caught, as Bitcoin transactions are non-trackable due to its decentralized nature.
The frequent payment to Ransomware encourages criminals to stash the cash and develop a more enticing framework for the next target. So, instead of paying or encouraging this scheme, keep your software and systems updated and avoid clicking suspicious links.
| Malware |
Android based Cars may pose various Security and Privacy Issues | https://thehackernews.com/2014/01/googles-upcoming-android-based-cars-may.html | After being an owner of Smartphones, now it's your turn to own a Smart Car. Wouldn't it sound great if you could use your favorite mobile apps on Car's dashboard display?
Yes! You heard right.. Google has tied-up with several Auto manufacturers with the goal to bring Android to Cars with built-in controls and hardware by the end of this year.
Google has announced at the CES technology trade show in Las Vegas, the Open Automotive Alliance (OAA) will achieve this with their partners i.e. General Motors, Honda, Audi, Hyundai and chipmaker Nvidia.
This new project is designed to accelerate innovation in the Automotive sector, with the customized version of most popular mobile platform 'Android' for Cars, that will bring Google Places, Maps, Voice, Earth and developer support to cars.
"This open development model and common platform will allow automakers to more easily bring cutting-edge technology to their drivers, and create new opportunities for developers to deliver powerful experiences for drivers and passengers in a safe and scalable way." Press release says.
Google is working with United States National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to ensure the safety of drivers using Android features in their cars. To Boost the processing power of the system, Nvidia's Tegra K1 quad-core processor will be deployed.
Android and Security issues: The Android Car will be a full fledged node in the Internet which will give enhanced flexibility and functionality of services but at the same time we will most probably face all the threats that are channeled through the internet.
Thousands of Road Accidents have occurred because of Mobile usage during driving, but now we have Mobile based Cars, so the security of the driver will now depend upon the smartness of the applications installed. The car's Android system can be hacked if it's linked to the owner's Smartphone. There will be no doubt if we will see something like "Rooting your Cars" soon.
Also Malware is another factor that can pose a serious security issue to life. According to various threat reports, Android is the majorly vulnerable to hackers and malware because of its own weak architecture. Also, it is already proven that an android device can be converted into a Spying bug using a simple malicious application, that can record the surrounding conversation via microphone to upload it to the hacker's server.
Another Major concern is that, Google is a U.S based Company and all FISA Secret orders are again applied on this project too. Will Google be able to stop National Security Agency (NSA) for backdooring our privacy and Security while driving.
So, Google should consider applying all available Security & Privacy measures on these future' Smart Cars to defend against cyber attacks and NSA.
| Malware |
Facebook Hacking - Student jailed for eight months | https://thehackernews.com/2012/02/facebook-hacking-student-jailed-for.html | Facebook Hacking - Student jailed for eight months
26-year-old Glenn Steven Mangham, a student in the UK, has been sentenced to eight months in prison for hacking into Facebook from his bedroom at his parents house. Facebook spent $200,000 (£126,400) dealing with Mangham's crime, which triggered a "concerted, time-consuming and costly investigation.
Glenn Mangham, 26, admitted to infiltrating the website between April and May of last year. Apparently no user details were taken, as he went straight for "invaluable" intellectual property instead. Facebook alerted the authorities last May after they discovered the breach. The FBI took care of the rest, tracing it all back to the UK address. He found his way in by hacking into the account of a Facebook employee.
Facebook operates a bug bounty program in which it pays ethical hackers up to $US 500 for quietly disclosing vulnerabilities. According to reports of Mangham's court appearances, the software development student claimed to have been an ethical hacker who had previously breached Yahoo's system as a service to that company. "It was to identify vulnerabilities in the system so I could compile a report that I could then bundle over to Facebook and show them what was wrong with their system," Mangham told Southwark Crown Court. The judge decided that this was not Mangham's intention at the time.
"You accessed the very heart of the system of an international business of massive size, so this was not just fiddling about in the business records of some tiny business of no great importance," the judge continued, noting that Mangham had at least risked "putting in danger the reputation of an innocent employee of Facebook".
| Vulnerability |
Satori IoT Botnet Exploits Zero-Day to Zombify Huawei Routers | https://thehackernews.com/2017/12/satori-mirai-iot-botnet.html | Although the original creators of the infamous IoT malware Mirai have already been arrested and sent to jail, the variants of the notorious botnet are still in the game due to the availability of its source code on the Internet.
Hackers have widely used the infamous IoT malware to quietly amass an army of unsecured internet-of-things devices, including home and office routers, that could be used at any time by hackers to launch Internet-paralyzing DDoS attacks.
Another variant of Mirai has hit once again, propagating rapidly by exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in a Huawei home router model.
Dubbed Satori (also known as Okiru), the Mirai variant has been targeting Huawei's router model HG532, as Check Point security researchers said they tracked hundreds of thousands of attempts to exploit a vulnerability in the router model in the wild.
Identified initially by Check Point researchers late November, Satori was found infecting more than 200,000 IP addresses in just 12 hours earlier this month, according to an analysis posted by Chinese security firm 360 Netlab on December 5.
Researchers suspected an unskilled hacker that goes by the name "Nexus Zeta" is exploiting a zero-day remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2017-17215) in Huawei HG532 devices, according to a new report published Thursday by Check Point.
The vulnerability is due to the fact that the implementation of the TR-064 (technical report standard), an application layer protocol for remote management, in the Huawei devices was exposed on the public Internet through Universal Plug and Play (UPnP) protocol at port 37215.
"TR-064 was designed and intended for local network configuration," the report reads. "For example, it allows an engineer to implement basic device configuration, firmware upgrades and more from within the internal network."
Since this vulnerability allowed remote attackers to execute arbitrary commands to the device, attackers were found exploiting this flaw to download and execute the malicious payload on the Huawei routers and upload Satori botnet.
In the Satori attack, each bot is instructed to flood targets with manually crafted UDP or TCP packets.
"The number of packets used for the flooding action and their corresponding parameters are transmitted from the C&C server," researchers said. "Also, the C&C server can pass an individual IP for attack or a subnet using a subnet address and a number of valuable bits."
Although the researchers observed a flurry of attacks worldwide against the Huawei HG532 devices, the most targeted countries include the United States, Italy, Germany, and Egypt.
Check Point researchers "discretely" disclosed the vulnerability to Huawei as soon as their findings were confirmed, and the company confirmed the vulnerability and issued an updated security notice to customers on Friday.
"An authenticated attacker could send malicious packets to port 37215 to launch attacks. Successful exploit could lead to the remote execution of arbitrary code," Huawei said in its security advisory.
The company also offered some mitigations that could circumvent or prevent the exploit, which included using the built-in firewall function, changing the default credentials of their devices, and deploying a firewall at the carrier side.
Users can also deploy Huawei NGFWs (Next Generation Firewall) or data center firewalls, and upgrade their IPS signature database to the latest IPS_H20011000_2017120100 version released on December 1, 2017, in order to detect and defend against this flaw.
| Cyber_Attack |
This Bug Could Allow Hackers to Delete Any Video On Facebook | https://thehackernews.com/2017/01/delete-facebook-video.html | A security researcher has discovered a critical vulnerability in Facebook that could allow attackers to delete any video of the social networking site shared by anyone on their wall.
The flaw has been discovered by security researcher Dan Melamed in June 2016, allowing him not only to remotely delete any video on Facebook shared by anyone without having any permission or authentication but also to disable commenting on the video of your choice.
Here's how to exploit this flaw:
In order to exploit this vulnerability, Melamed first created a public event on the Facebook page and uploaded a video on the Discussion part of the event.
While uploading the video, the researcher tampered the POST request using Fiddler and then replace the Video ID value of his video with Video ID value of any other video on the social media platform.
Although Facebook responded to this issue with a server error, i.e. "This content is no longer available," but the new video was successfully got posted and displayed just fine.
Once this task was accomplished, Melamed deleted his event post, which eventually deleted the attached video.
And guess what? This in turned removed the video from the social networking site and the wall of the victim.
"You will also notice in the drop down section that there is the option to "Turn off commenting." This allows you to disable commenting on the video of your choice," Melamed writes.
Video Demonstration
For more step by step details about the vulnerability and how it works, you can watch the proof-of-concept video demonstration above which shows the Facebook video deletion attack in action.
Melamed responsibly reported the vulnerability to the Facebook security team, which patched the vulnerability within two weeks at the beginning of this year.
Shortly after patching the flaw, the social media giant rewarded him $10,000 bug bounty for his efforts.
This is not the very first time when such vulnerability has been disclosed in Facebook that could have allowed attackers to delete any video from Facebook. Bug bounty hunters continuously find and report such bugs to keep the social media platform safe and secure.
| Vulnerability |
Hacking Smartphones Running on MediaTek Processors | https://thehackernews.com/2016/02/mediatek-hacking-mobile.html | A dangerous backdoor has been discovered in the MediaTek processor that could be exploited to hack Android devices remotely.
MediaTek is a Taiwan-based hardware company that manufacture hardware chips and processor used in the smartphones and tablets.
The backdoor was discovered by security researcher Justin Case, who already informed MediaTek about the security issue via Twitter, as the chipset manufacturer had no proper vulnerability reporting mechanism in place.
The vulnerability is apparently due to a debug tool that was opened up for carriers to test the device on their networks, but unfortunately, it was left open in the shipped devices, thus leaving the serious backdoor open to hackers.
If exploited, the debug feature could allow hackers to compromise personal data of an Android device, including user's private contacts, messages, photos, videos and other private data.
MediaTek acknowledged the issue, saying "We are aware of this issue, and it has been reviewed by MediaTek's security team. It was mainly found in devices running Android 4.4 KitKat, due to a debug feature created for telecommunication inter-operability testing in China."
The issue actually resides in MediaTek MT6582 processor, which worryingly is being used in many high profile Android devices.
So, if your smartphone is using this processor, the only thing you can do for now is to…
...Keep your Android device off the Internet in an effort to protect yourself.
The company also said that it has notified all OEMs of the potential loophole, so it's now up to the affected OEMs to issue a security patch to close the backdoor.
"While this issue affected certain manufacturers, it also only affected a portion of devices for those manufacturers. We have taken steps to alert all manufacturers and remind them of this important feature," MediaTek spokesperson released a statement.
| Vulnerability |
Sun Microsystems (Print) - Cross Site Scripting Vulnerabilities | https://thehackernews.com/2012/02/sun-microsystems-print-cross-site.html | Sun Microsystems (Print) - Cross Site Scripting Vulnerabilities
Today Ucha Gobejishvili ( longrifle0x ) a Pentester from Georgia reported 3 More important Cross Site Scripting Vulnerabilities in Sun Microsystem's and Java Printer Webpages.
Java's Vulnerable Link : Click Here
Sun's Vulnerable Link 1 : Click Here
Sun's Vulnerable Link 2 : Click Here
Cross-Site Scripting occurs when an attacker can send a malicious script to a different user by relaying the script from an otherwise trusted or innocuous server. These flaws are extensive on the Web and allow an attacker to place malicious code that can execute attacks against other users in the security context of the web servers of the trusted host.
Previous vulnerabilities reported by longrifle0x : Click here to Read or Mirrors.
| Vulnerability |
#Flame Malware - 21st Century Massive cyber attack on Iran | https://thehackernews.com/2012/05/flame-malware-21st-century-massive.html | Flame Malware - 21st Century Massive cyber attack on Iran
A massive, highly sophisticated piece of malware has been newly found infecting systems in Iran and elsewhere and is believed to be part of a well-coordinated, ongoing, state-run cyber-espionage operation.
The Flame computer virus not only stole large quantities of information from various Iranian government agencies, but apparently even disrupted its oil exports by shutting down oil terminals, information security firm Symantec Israel said yesterday.
The Flame virus recently found in Iran could be used to infect other countries, according to the International Telecommunications Union. As the United Nations agency charged with helping members protect their data networks, the ITU plans to issue a warning about the danger of Flame.
Iran's National Computer Emergency Response Team (Maher) said in a statement that the detection and clean-up tool was finished in early May and is now ready for distribution to organisations at risk of infection.Flame was discovered after the UN's International Telecommunications Union asked for help from security firms to find out what was wiping data from machines across the Middle East.An investigation uncovered the sophisticated malicious programme which, until then, had largely evaded detection.
The virus is about 20 times the size of Stuxnet, malware that targeted the controls of an Iranian nuclear facility. The largest concentration of infected machines is in Iran, followed by the Palestinian-controlled West Bank, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt.
According to the crysys report on sKyWIper (aka Flame):
sKyWIper has very advanced functionality to steal information and to propagate. Multiple exploits and propagation methods can be freely configured by the attackers. Information gathering from a large network of infected computers was never crafted as carefully as in sKyWIper. The malware is most likely capable to use all of the computers' functionalities for its goals. It covers all major possibilities to gather intelligence, including keyboard, screen, microphone, storage devices, network, wifi, Bluetooth, USB and system processes.
Flame is a Swiss Army Knife of malware in the sense that it can intercept everything imaginable, but it is not a pile of existing malware code thrown together. It is very cleverly crafted. Like Stuxnet, it has multiple propagation vectors – USB keys, printer sharing, and domain controller rights to name a few.
No security vendor has pointed out a single country or group as being responsible for Flame's creation.The central matter of contention at the moment is whether the malware was made by a private group or a nation state.
Bitdefender released a tool to find and remove the Flamer attack toolkit. Download the 32-bit or the 64-bit removal tools.
| Malware |
Experts Unveil Cyber Espionage Attacks by CopyKittens Hackers | https://thehackernews.com/2017/07/opykittens-cyber-espionage.html | Security researchers have discovered a new, massive cyber espionage campaign that mainly targets people working in government, defence and academic organisations in various countries.
The campaign is being conducted by an Iran-linked threat group, whose activities, attack methods, and targets have been released in a joint, detailed report published by researchers at Trend Micro and Israeli firm ClearSky.
Dubbed by researchers CopyKittens (aka Rocket Kittens), the cyber espionage group has been active since at least 2013 and has targeted organisations and individuals, including diplomats and researchers, in Israel, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United States, Jordan and Germany.
The targeted organisations include government institutions like Ministry of Foreign Affairs, defence companies, large IT companies, academic institutions, subcontractors of the Ministry of Defense, and municipal authorities, along with employees of the United Nations.
The latest report [PDF], dubbed "Operation Wilted Tulip," details an active espionage campaign conducted by the CopyKittens hackers, a vast range of tools and tactics they used, its command and control infrastructure, and the group's modus operandi.
How CopyKittens Infects Its Targets
The group used different tactics to infiltrate their targets, which includes watering hole attacks — wherein JavaScript code is inserted into compromised websites to distribute malicious exploits.
The news media and organisations whose websites were abused as watering hole attacks include The Jerusalem Post, for which even German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) issued an alert, Maariv news and IDF Disabled Veterans Organization.
Besides water hole attacks, CopyKittens also used other methods to deliver malware, including:
Emailed links to malicious websites controlled by attackers.
Weaponized Office documents exploiting recently discovered flaw (CVE-2017-0199).
Web servers exploitation using vulnerability scanner and SQLi tools like Havij, sqlmap, and Acunetix.
Fake social media entities to build trust with targets and potentially spread malicious links.
"The group uses a combination of these methods to persistently target the same victim over multiple platforms until they succeed in establishing an initial beachhead of infection – before pivoting to higher value targets on the network," Trend Micro writes in a blog post.
In order to infect its targets, CopyKittens makes use of its own custom malware tools in combination with existing, commercial tools, like Red Team software Cobalt Strike, Metasploit, post-exploitation agent Empire, TDTESS backdoor, and credential dumping tool Mimikatz.
Dubbed Matryoshka, the remote access trojan is the group's self-developed malware which uses DNS for command and control (C&C) communication and has the ability to steal passwords, capture screenshots, record keystrokes, collect and upload files, and give the attackers Meterpreter shell access.
"Matryoshka is spread through spear phishing with a document attached to it. The document has either a malicious macro that the victim is asked to enable or an embedded executable the victim is asked to open," Clear Sky says in a blog post.
The initial version of the malware was analysed in 2015 and seen in the wild from July 2016 until January 2017, though the group also developed and used Matryoshka version 2.
Users are recommended to enable two-factor authentication in order to protect their webmail accounts from being compromised, which is a treasure trove of information for hackers, and an "extremely strong initial beachhead" for pivoting into other targets.
| Malware |
Beware! Subtitle Files Can Hack Your Computer While You're Enjoying Movies | https://thehackernews.com/2017/05/movie-subtitles-malware.html | Do you watch movies with subtitles?
Just last night, I wanted to watch a French movie, so I searched for English subtitles and downloaded it to my computer.
Though that film was excellent, this morning a new research from Checkpoint scared me.
I was unaware that a little subtitle file could hand over full control of my computer to hackers, while I was enjoying the movie.
Yes, you heard that right.
A team of researchers at Check Point has discovered vulnerabilities in four of the most popular media player applications, which can be exploited by hackers to hijack "any type of device via vulnerabilities; whether it is a PC, a smart TV, or a mobile device" with malicious codes inserted into the subtitle files.
"We have now discovered malicious subtitles could be created and delivered to millions of devices automatically, bypassing security software and giving the attacker full control of the infected device and the data it holds," he added.
These four vulnerable media players (mentioned below) have been downloaded more than 220 million times:
VLC — Popular VideoLAN Media Player
Kodi (XBMC) — Open-Source Media Software
Popcorn Time — Software to watch Movies and TV shows instantly
Stremio — Video Streaming App for Videos, Movies, TV series and TV channels
The vulnerabilities reside in the way various media players process subtitle files and if exploited successfully, could put hundreds of millions of users at risk of getting hacked.
As soon as the media player parses those malicious subtitle files before displaying the actual subtitles on your screen, the hackers are granted full control of your computer or Smart TV on which you ran those files.
Proof-of-Concept Video
In the above video, the researchers demonstrated that how a maliciously crafted subtitle file for a movie added to Popcorn Time media player can hijack a Windows PC. On the right-hand side of the screen, an attacker, running Kali Linux, gained the remote access of the system as soon as the victim added the subtitle file.
Since text-based subtitles for movies and TV shows are created by writers and then uploaded to Internet stores, like OpenSubtitles and SubDB, hackers could also craft malicious text files for same TV shows and movies.
"Our researchers were also able to show that by manipulating the website's ranking algorithm, we could guarantee crafted malicious subtitles would be those automatically downloaded by the media player, allowing a hacker to take complete control over the entire subtitle supply chain, without resorting to a Man in the Middle attack or requiring user interaction," CheckPoint researchers said.
The researchers believe that similar security vulnerabilities also exist in other streaming media players.
How to Protect Your Computer from Hackers?
Check Point has already informed the developers of VLC, Kodi, Popcorn Time and Stremio applications about the recently discovered vulnerabilities.
"To allow the developers more time to address the vulnerabilities, we've decided not to publish any further technical details at this point," the researchers said.
All of them have patched the flaws, with Stremio and VLC releasing the patched versions of their software: Stremi 4.0 and VLC 2.2.5 that has been out for two weeks.
However, Kodi developer Martijn Kaijser said the official version 17.2 release would arrive later this week, while users could get a fixed version online. A patch for Popcorn Time is also available online.
So, users are advised to update their media player as soon as possible.
| Malware |
How to Avoid the Top Three Causes of Data Breaches in 2019 | https://thehackernews.com/2019/10/data-breach-protection.html | What's the price of unprotected IT infrastructure? Cybercrime Magazine says that global damages will surpass $6 billion as soon as 2021.
Here we'll go through some of the most frequent and emerging causes of data breaches in 2019 and see how to address them in a timely manner.
Misconfigured Cloud Storage
It's hard to find a day without a security incident involving unprotected AWS S3 storage, Elasticsearch, or MongoDB. A global study from Thales and the Ponemon Institute states that only 32% of organizations believe protecting their data in a cloud is their own responsibility. Worse, according to the same report, 51% of the organizations still do not use encryption or tokenization to protect sensitive data in the cloud.
McAfee confirms, claiming that 99% of cloud and IaaS misconfigurations fall into the realm of end users' control and remain unnoticed. Marco Rottigni, Chief Technical Security Officer EMEA at Qualys, explains the problem: "Some of the most common cloud database implementations ships with no security or access control as standard at the start. They have to be added on deliberately, which can be easily missed."
With a global average cost of $3.92 million per data breach in 2019, these findings are quite alarming. Sadly, many cybersecurity and IT professionals still candidly believe that cloud providers are responsible for protecting their data in the cloud. Unfortunately, most of their assumptions are not in accord with harsh legal reality.
Virtually all major cloud and IaaS providers have experienced law firms to draft an airtight contract you won't be able to alter or negate in a court. Black ink clauses expressly shift financial liability for most incidents on the clients' shoulders and establish limited liability for everything else, often reckoned in pennies.
Most SME companies don't even carefully read the terms, while in large organizations, they are reviewed by legal advisors who are often disconnected from the IT team. Though, one will hardly negotiate better conditions, as otherwise, cloud business will become so perilous and unprofitable that it will swiftly disappear. This means that you will be the sole entity to blame and punish for misconfigured or abandoned cloud storage and a resultant data breach.
Unprotected Code Repositories
Research by North Carolina State University (NCSU) found that over 100,000 GitHub repositories have been leaking secret API tokens and cryptographic keys, with thousands of new repositories exposing secrets on a daily basis. Canadian banking giant Scotiabank recently made news headlines by reportedly storing internal source code, login credentials, and access keys for months in publicly open and accessible GitHub repositories.
Third-parties, especially external software developers, are commonly the weakest link. Often their developers lack proper training and security awareness requisite to duly safeguard their code. Having several projects at once, tough deadlines, and impatient clients, they ignore or forget about the very fundamentals of security, letting their code in public domain.
Cybercriminals are well aware of this digital Ali Baba's cave. Cyber gangs specialized in OSINT data discovery meticulously crawl existing and new code repositories in a continuous mode, carefully scrapping the data. Once something of value is found, it's sold to cyber gangs focused on exploitation and offensive operations to get in.
Given that such intrusions rarely trigger any red flags in anomaly detection systems, they remain unnoticed or detected once it is already too late. Worse, the investigation of such intrusions is costly and almost perspectiveless. Many famous APT attacks involved password re-use attacks with credentials found in code repositories.
Vulnerable Open Source Software
The rapid proliferation of Open Source Software (OSS) in enterprise systems exacerbates the cyber-threat landscape by adding even more unknowns into the game. A recent report by ImmuniWeb found that 97 out of 100 largest banks are vulnerable and have poorly coded web and mobile apps, being riddled with outdated and vulnerable open source components, libraries, and frameworks. The oldest unpatched vulnerability found was known and publicly disclosed since 2011.
OSS does save a lot of time for developers and money for organizations but likewise provides a wide spectrum of concomitant and largely underestimated risks. Few organizations properly track and maintain an inventory of countless OSS and its components built into their enterprise software. Consequently, blinded with unknowingness, they fall victim to unknown unknowns when newly detected OSS security flaws are aggressively exploited in the wild.
Today, medium and large-sized organizations incrementally invest in application security, notably in the implementation of DevSecOps and Shift Left testing. Gartner urges the adoption of Shift Left software testing by incorporating security testing at the early stages of the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) before it becomes overly expensive and time-consuming to fix vulnerabilities. However, a holistic and up2date inventory of your OSS is indispensable to implement Shift Left testing; otherwise, you will just pour your money down the drain.
How to Prevent and Remediate
Follow these five recommendations to reduce your risks in a cost-efficient manner:
1. Maintain an up2date and holistic inventory of your digital assets
Software, hardware, data, users, and licenses should be continuously monitored, classified, and risk-scored. In the era of public cloud, containers, code repositories, file-sharing services, and outsourcing, it's not an easy task, but without it, you may ruin the integrity of your cybersecurity efforts and negate all previous cybersecurity investments. Remember, you cannot protect what you don't see.
2. Monitor your external attack surface and risk exposure
Many organizations spend money on auxiliary or even theoretical risks, ignoring their numerous outdated, abandoned, or simply unknown systems accessible from the Internet. These shadow assets are low-hanging fruit for cybercriminals. Attackers are smart and pragmatic; they won't assault your castle if they can silently get in via a forgotten underground tunnel. Therefore, ascertain that you have an ample and up2date view of your external attacks surface in a continuous manner.
3. Keep your software up2date, implement patch management and automated patching
Most of the successful attacks do not involve the usage of sophisticated and costly 0days but publicly disclosed vulnerabilities often available with a working exploit. Hackers will systematically search for the weakest link in your defense perimeter to get in, and even a tiny outdated JS library may be a windfall to get your crown jewels. Implement, test, and monitor a robust patch management system for all your systems and applications.
4. Prioritize your testing and remediation efforts based on risks and threats
Once you have crystal-clear visibility of your digital assets and a properly implemented patch management strategy, it's time to ensure that everything works as you expected. Deploy continuous security monitoring for all your external assets, conduct in-depth testing, including penetration testing of your business-critical web applications and APIs. Setup monitoring for any anomalies with rapid notifications.
5. Keep an eye on Dark Web and monitor data leaks
Most companies do not realize how many of their corporate accounts, exposed by hacked third-party websites and services, are being sold on the Dark Web. The emerging success of password reuse and brute-force attacks stem from it. Worse, even legitimate websites such as Pastebin often expose a great wealth of leaked, stolen, or lost data accessible to everyone. Continuous monitoring and analysis of these incidents may save millions of dollars and, most importantly, your reputation and goodwill.
Reducing Complexity and Costs
We came across an innovative offering from a Swiss company ImmuniWeb® to tackle these issues in a simple and cost-effective manner. We are truly impressed with its technical capabilities, consolidated approach, and accessible price.
ImmuniWeb Discovery provides you with superior visibility and control over your external attack surface and risk exposure.
Try ImmuniWeb® Discovery for:
Rapid discovery of your external digital assets, including APIs, cloud storage and IoT
Actionable, data-driven security ratings of your applications' Hackability and Attractiveness
Continuous monitoring of public code repositories for unprotected or leaked source code
Continuous monitoring of Dark Web for exposed credentials and other sensitive data
Production-safe Software Composition Analysis of your web and mobile applications
Instant alerts about expiring domain names and SSL certificates
Integration with SIEMs and other security systems via API
We hope you will avoid becoming a victim of a data breach in 2020!
| Data_Breaches |
5 Popular Web Hosting Services Found Vulnerable to Multiple Flaws | https://thehackernews.com/2019/01/web-hosting-server-security.html | A security researcher has discovered multiple one-click client-side vulnerabilities in the some of the world's most popular and widely-used web hosting companies that could have put millions of their customers as well as billions of their sites' visitors at risk of hacking.
Independent researcher and bug-hunter Paulos Yibelo, who shared his new research with The Hacker News, discovered roughly a dozen serious security vulnerabilities in Bluehost, Dreamhost, HostGator, OVH, and iPage, which amounts to roughly seven million domains.
Some of the vulnerabilities are so simple to execute as they require attackers to trick victims into clicking on a simple link or visiting a malicious website to easily take over the accounts of anyone using the affected web hosting providers.
Critical Flaws Reported in Popular Web Hosting Services
Yibelo tested all the below-listed vulnerabilities on all five web hosting platforms and found several account takeover, cross-scripting, and information disclosure vulnerabilities, which he documented on the Website Planet blog.
1. Bluehost—the company owned by Endurance which also owns Hostgator and iPage, and in total, the three hosting providers powers more than 2 million sites around the world. Bluehost was found vulnerable to:
Information leakage through cross-origin-resource-sharing (CORS) misconfigurations
Account takeover due to improper JSON request validation CSRF
A Man-in-the-middle attack can be performed due to improper validation of CORS scheme
Cross-site scripting flaw on my.bluehost.com allows account takeover (demonstrated in a proof-of-concept, below)
2. Dreamhost—the hosting provider that powers one million domains was found vulnerable to:
Account takeover using cross-site scripting (XSS) flaw
3. HostGator
Site-wide CSRF protection bypass allows complete control
Multiple CORS misconfigurations leading to information leak and CRLF
4. OVH Hosting—the company that alone powers four million domains around the world was found vulnerable to:
CSRF protection bypass
API misconfigurations
5. iPage Hosting
Account takeover flaw
Multiple Content Security Policy (CSP) bypasses
Video Demonstrations
Talking to The Hacker News, Yibelo said he took about an hour on each of the five web hosting platforms on an average to find at least one account takeover-related client-side vulnerability, mostly using the Burp Suite, a web application security testing tool, and Firefox browser plugins.
"They mostly focus on protecting the wrong assets, but most of them have medium security standards for their user profile portals and data exfiltration vulnerability classes. Most of their protections are easily bypassable using lesser-known tricks," Yibelo told The Hacker News.
Among the affected hosting companies, Yibelo found Bluehost, HostGator and iPage to be the easiest ones to hack into, though he told The Hacker News that HostGator included "multiple layers of security checks (that can be bypassed, but they are there, unlike the other sites)."
Yibelo reported his findings to the affected web hosting providers, all except OVH patched their services before the information went public yesterday. OVH has yet to confirm and response on the researcher's findings.
| Vulnerability |
Iranian Hackers Pose as Journalists to Trick Victims Into Installing Malware | https://thehackernews.com/2020/08/hackers-journalist-malware.html | An Iranian cyberespionage group known for targeting government, defense technology, military, and diplomacy sectors is now impersonating journalists to approach targets via LinkedIn and WhatsApp and infect their devices with malware.
Detailing the new tactics of the "Charming Kitten" APT group, Israeli firm Clearsky said, "starting July 2020, we have identified a new TTP of the group, impersonating 'Deutsche Welle' and the 'Jewish Journal' using emails alongside WhatsApp messages as their main platform to approach the target and convince them to open a malicious link."
This development is the first time the threat actor is said to have carried out a watering hole attack through WhatsApp and LinkedIn, which also includes making phone calls to victims, Clearsky noted in a Thursday analysis.
After the company alerted Deutsche Welle about the impersonation and the watering hole in their website, the German broadcaster confirmed, "the reporter which Charming Kitten impersonated did not send any emails to the victim nor any other academic researcher in Israel in the past few weeks."
Charming Kitten (also known by aliases APT35, Parastoo, NewsBeef, and Newscaster) has been previously linked to a series of covert campaigns at least since December 2017 with an aim to steal sensitive information from human rights activists, academic researchers, and media outlets.
The watering hole — in this case, a malicious link embedded in the compromised Deutsche Welle domain — delivered the info-stealer malware via WhatsApp, but not before the victims were first approached via tried-and-tested social engineering methods with an intention to lure the academics to speak at an online webinar.
"The correspondence began with an email sent to the target, initiating a conversation," Clearsky explained. "After a short conversation with the target, the Charming Kitten attacker requests to move the conversation to WhatsApp. If the target refuses to move to WhatsApp, the attacker will send a message via a fake LinkedIn profile."
In one scenario, the adversary even took the step of messaging and calling a victim to gain the target's trust and subsequently walk the person through the steps of connecting to the webinar using the malicious link earlier shared in the chat.
Although APT35 may have picked up a new ruse, this is not the first time the Iranian hackers have used social media channels to spy on personnel of interest.
In a three-year-long "Operation Newscaster" uncovered by iSIGHT Partners (now owned by FireEye) in 2014, the threat actor was found to have created false Facebook accounts and a fake news website to spy on military and political leaders in the U.S., Israel, and other countries.
"In this campaign, we observed a willingness of the attackers to speak on the phone directly with the victim, using WhatsApp calls, and a legitimate German phone number. This TTP is uncommon and jeopardizes the fake identity of the attackers," Clearsky researchers said.
| Cyber_Attack |
Symantec Connects 40 Cyber Attacks to CIA Hacking Tools Exposed by Wikileaks | https://thehackernews.com/2017/04/cia-longhorn-hacking.html | Security researchers have confirmed that the alleged CIA hacking tools recently exposed by WikiLeaks have been used against at least 40 governments and private organizations across 16 countries.
Since March, as part of its "Vault 7" series, Wikileaks has published over 8,761 documents and other confidential information that the whistleblower group claims came from the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Now, researchers at cybersecurity company Symantec reportedly managed to link those CIA hacking tools to numerous real cyber attacks in recent years that have been carried out against the government and private sectors across the world.
Those 40 cyber attacks were conducted by Longhorn — a North American hacking group that has been active since at least 2011 and has used backdoor trojans and zero-day attacks to target government, financial, energy, telecommunications, education, aerospace, and natural resources sectors.
Although the group's targets were all in the Middle East, Europe, Asia, and Africa, researchers said the group once infected a computer in the United States, but an uninstaller was launched within an hour, which indicates the "victim was infected unintentionally."
What's interesting is that Symantec linked some of CIA hacking tools and malware variants disclosed by Wikileaks in the Vault 7 files to Longhorn cyber espionage operations.
Fluxwire (Created by CIA) ≅ Corentry (Created by Longhorn)
Fluxwire, a cyber espionage malware allegedly created by the CIA and mentioned in the Vault 7 documents, contains a changelog of dates for when new features were added, which according to Symantec, closely resemble with the development cycle of "Corentry," a malware created by Longhorn hacking group.
"Early versions of Corentry seen by Symantec contained a reference to the file path for the Fluxwire program database (PDB) file," Symantec explains. "The Vault 7 document lists removal of the full path for the PDB as one of the changes implemented in Version 3.5.0."
"Up until 2014, versions of Corentry were compiled using GCC [GNU Compiler Collection]. According to the Vault 7 document, Fluxwire switched to an MSVC compiler for version 3.3.0 on February 25, 2015. This was reflected in samples of Corentry, where a version compiled on February 25, 2015, had used MSVC as a compiler."
Similar Malware Modules
Another Vault 7 document details 'Fire and Forget' specification of the payload and a malware module loader called Archangel, which Symantec claims, match almost perfectly with a Longhorn backdoor called Plexor.
"The specification of the payload and the interface used to load it was closely matched in another Longhorn tool called Backdoor.Plexor," says Symantec.
Use of Similar Cryptographic Protocol Practices
Another leaked CIA document outlined cryptographic protocols that should be used within malware tools, such as using AES encryption with a 32-bit key, inner cryptography within SSL to prevent man-in-the-middle attacks, and key exchanges once per connection.
One leaked CIA document also recommends using of in-memory string de-obfuscation and Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) for communicating with the command and control (C&C) servers.
According to Symantec, these cryptographic protocol and communication practices were also used by Longhorn group in all of its hacking tools.
More About LongHorn Hacking Group
Longhorn has been described as a well-resourced hacking group that works on a standard Monday to Friday working week — likely a behavior of a state-sponsored group — and operates in an American time zone.
Longhorn's advanced malware tools are specially designed for cyber espionage with detailed system fingerprinting, discovery, and exfiltration capabilities. The group uses extremely stealthy capabilities in its malware to avoid detection.
Symantec analysis of the group's activities also shows that Longhorn is from an English speaking North American country with code words used by it referring, the band The Police with code words REDLIGHT and ROXANNE, and colloquial terms like "scoobysnack."
Overall, the functionality described in the CIA documents and its links to the group activities leave "little doubt that Longhorn's activities and the Vault 7 documents are the work of the same group."
| Cyber_Attack |
16-Year-Old Security Bug Affects Millions of HP, Samsung, Xerox Printers | https://thehackernews.com/2021/07/16-year-old-security-bug-affects.html | Details have emerged about a high severity security vulnerability affecting a software driver used in HP, Xerox, and Samsung printers that has remained undetected since 2005.
Tracked as CVE-2021-3438 (CVSS score: 8.8), the issue concerns a buffer overflow in a print driver installer package named "SSPORT.SYS" that can enable remote privilege and arbitrary code execution. Hundreds of millions of printers have been released worldwide to date with the vulnerable driver in question.
However, there is no evidence that the flaw was abused in real-world attacks.
"A potential buffer overflow in the software drivers for certain HP LaserJet products and Samsung product printers could lead to an escalation of privilege," according to an advisory published in May.
The issue was reported to HP by threat intelligence researchers from SentinelLabs on February 18, 2021, following which remedies have been published for the affected printers as of May 19, 2021.
Specifically, the issue hinges on the fact that the printer driver doesn't sanitize the size of the user input, potentially allowing an unprivileged user to escalate privileges and run malicious code in kernel mode on systems that have the buggy driver installed. now
"The vulnerable function inside the driver accepts data sent from User Mode via IOCTL (Input/Output Control) without validating the size parameter," SentinelOne researcher Asaf Amir said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "This function copies a string from the user input using 'strncpy' with a size parameter that is controlled by the user. Essentially, this allows attackers to overrun the buffer used by the driver."
Interestingly, it appears that HP copied the driver's functionality from a near-identical Windows driver sample published by Microsoft, although the sample project in itself doesn't contain the vulnerability.
This is not the first time security flaws have been discovered in old software drivers. Earlier this May, SentinelOne revealed details about multiple critical privilege escalation vulnerabilities in Dell's firmware update driver named "dbutil_2_3.sys" that went undisclosed for more than 12 years.
| Vulnerability |
VeraCrypt Audit Reveals Critical Security Flaws — Update Now | https://thehackernews.com/2016/10/veracrypt-vulnerabilities_18.html | After TrueCrypt mysteriously discontinued its service, VeraCrypt became the most popular open source disk encryption software used by activists, journalists, as well as privacy conscious people.
First of all, there is no such thing as a perfect, bug-free software.
Even the most rigorously tested software, like the ones that operate SCADA Systems, medical devices, and aviation software, have flaws.
Vulnerabilities are an unfortunate reality for every software product, but there is always space for improvements.
Due to the enormous popularity of VeraCrypt, security researchers from the OSTIF (The Open Source Technology Improvement Fund) agreed to audit VeraCrypt independently and hired researchers from QuarksLab in August to lead the audit.
And it seems like VeraCrypt is not exactly flawless either.
Now after one month of the audit, researchers have discovered a number of security issues, including 8 critical, 3 medium, and 15 low-severity vulnerabilities in the popular encryption platform VeraCrypt.
Quarkslab senior security researcher Jean-Baptiste Bédrune and senior cryptographer Marion Videau analyzed the VeraCrypt version 1.18 and the DCS EFI Bootloader 1.18 (UEFI), mainly focusing on new features introduced since last year's TrueCrypt security audit.
VeraCrypt file encryption software has been derived from the TrueCrypt project, but with enhancements to further secure your data.
"VeraCrypt is a project hard to maintain," researchers said. "Deep knowledge of several operating systems, the Windows kernel, the system boot chain and good concepts in cryptography are required. The improvements made by IDRIX demonstrate the possession of these skills."
The researchers have detailed all the vulnerabilities in a 42-page audit report [PDF], which includes:
Critical bugs in the implementation of GOST 28147-89, a symmetric block cipher with a 64-bit block size, which they say must be removed completely due to unsafe implementation.
All compression libraries are considered outdated or "poorly-written," and must be replaced with modern and more secure zip libraries.
If the system is encrypted, the boot password in UEFI mode or its length can be determined.
The majority of flaws have been fixed in the latest VeraCrypt version 1.19 release, but a few of them including AES implementation have not yet been patched due to substantial modifications of the code or/and the architecture of the project.
So, according to the OSTIF, "VeraCrypt is much safer after this audit, and the fixes applied to the software mean that the world is safer when using this software."
You are recommended to download the latest VeraCrypt version 1.19.
| Vulnerability |
Petya Ransomware Spreading Rapidly Worldwide, Just Like WannaCry | https://thehackernews.com/2017/06/petya-ransomware-attack.html | Watch out, readers! It is ransomware, another WannaCry, another wide-spread attack.
The WannaCry ransomware is not dead yet and another large scale ransomware attack is making chaos worldwide, shutting down computers at corporates, power supplies, and banks across Russia, Ukraine, Spain, France, UK, India, and Europe and demanding $300 in bitcoins.
According to multiple sources, a new variant of Petya ransomware, also known as Petwrap, is spreading rapidly with the help of same Windows SMBv1 vulnerability that the WannaCry ransomware abused to infect 300,000 systems and servers worldwide in just 72 hours last month.
Apart from this, many victims have also informed that Petya ransomware has also infected their patch systems.
"Petya uses the NSA Eternalblue exploit but also spreads in internal networks with WMIC and PSEXEC. That's why patched systems can get hit." Mikko Hypponen confirms, Chief Research Officer at F-Secure.
Petya is a nasty piece of ransomware and works very differently from any other ransomware malware. Unlike other traditional ransomware, Petya does not encrypt files on a targeted system one by one.
Instead, Petya reboots victims computers and encrypts the hard drive's master file table (MFT) and renders the master boot record (MBR) inoperable, restricting access to the full system by seizing information about file names, sizes, and location on the physical disk.
Petya ransomware replaces the computer's MBR with its own malicious code that displays the ransom note and leaves computers unable to boot.
Don't Pay Ransom, You Wouldn't Get Your Files Back
Infected users are advised not to pay the ransom because hackers behind Petya ransomware can't get your emails anymore.
Posteo, the German email provider, has suspended the email address i.e. [email protected], which was behind used by the criminals to communicate with victims after getting the ransom to send the decryption keys.
At the time of writing, 23 victims have paid in Bitcoin to '1Mz7153HMuxXTuR2R1t78mGSdzaAtNbBWX' address for decrypting their files infected by Petya, which total roughly $6775.
Petya! Petya! Another Worldwide Ransomware Attack
Screenshots of the latest Petya infection, shared on Twitter, shows that the ransomware displays a text, demanding $300 worth of Bitcoins. Here's what the text read:
"If you see this text, then your files are no longer accessible, because they are encrypted. Perhaps you are busy looking for a way to recover your files, but don't waste your time. Nobody can recover your files without our decryption service."
According to a recent VirusTotal scan, currently, only 16 out of 61 anti-virus services are successfully detecting the Petya ransomware malware.
Petya Ransomware Hits Banks, Telecom, Businesses & Power Companies
Supermarket in Kharkiv, East Ukraine
Petya ransomware has already infected — Russian state-owned oil giant Rosneft, Ukrainian state electricity suppliers, "Kyivenergo" and "Ukrenergo," in past few hours.
"We were attacked. Two hours ago, we had to turn off all our computers. We are waiting for permission from Ukraine's Security Service (SBU) to switch them back on," Kyivenergo's press service said.
There are reports from several banks, including National Bank of Ukraine (NBU) and Oschadbank, as well as other companies confirming they have been hit by the Petya ransomware attacks.
Maersk, an international logistics company, has also confirmed on Twitter that the latest Petya ransomware attacks have shut down its IT systems at multiple locations and business units.
"We can confirm that Maersk IT systems are down across multiple sites and business units. We are currently asserting the situation. The safety of our employees, our operations and customers' business is our top priority. We will update when we have more information," the company said.
The ransomware also impacts multiple workstations at Ukrainian branch's mining company Evraz.
The most severe damages reported by Ukrainian businesses also include compromised systems at Ukraine's local metro and Kiev's Boryspil Airport.
Three Ukrainian telecommunication operators, Kyivstar, LifeCell, Ukrtelecom, are also affected in the latest Petya attack.
How Petya Ransomware Spreading So Fast?
Symantec, the cyber security company, has also confirmed that Petya ransomware is exploiting SMBv1 EternalBlue exploit, just like WannaCry, and taking advantage of unpatched Windows machines.
"Petya ransomware successful in spreading because it combines both a client-side attack (CVE-2017-0199) and a network based threat (MS17-010)," security researcher using Twitter handle HackerFantastic tweeted.
EternalBlue is a Windows SMB exploit leaked by the infamous hacking group Shadow Brokers in its April data dump, who claimed to have stolen it from the US intelligence agency NSA, along with other Windows exploits.
Microsoft has since patched the vulnerability for all versions of Windows operating systems, but many users remain vulnerable, and a string of malware variants are exploiting the flaw to deliver ransomware and mine cryptocurrency.
Just three days ago, we reported about the latest WannaCry attack that hit Honda Motor Company and around 55 speed and traffic light cameras in Japan and Australia, respectively.
Well, it is quite surprising that even after knowing about the WannaCry issue for quite a decent amount of time, big corporates and companies have not yet implemented proper security measures to defend against such threat.
How to Protect Yourself from Ransomware Attacks
What to do immediately? Go and apply those goddamn patches against EternalBlue (MS17-010) and disable the unsecured, 30-year-old SMBv1 file-sharing protocol on your Windows systems and servers.
Since Petya Ransomware is also taking advantage of WMIC and PSEXEC tools to infect fully-patched Windows computers, you are also advised to disable WMIC (Windows Management Instrumentation Command-line).
Prevent Infection & Petya Kill-Switch
Researcher finds Petya ransomware encrypt systems after rebooting the computer. So if your system is infected with Petya ransomware and it tries to restart, just do not power it back on.
"If machine reboots and you see this message, power off immediately! This is the encryption process. If you do not power on, files are fine." HackerFantastic tweeted. "Use a LiveCD or external machine to recover files"
PT Security, a UK-based cyber security company and Amit Serper from Cybereason, have discovered a Kill-Switch for Petya ransomware. According to a tweet, company has advised users to create a file i.e. "C:\Windows\perfc" to prevent ransomware infection.
To safeguard against any ransomware infection, you should always be suspicious of unwanted files and documents sent over an email and should never click on links inside them unless verifying the source.
To always have a tight grip on your valuable data, keep a good back-up routine in place that makes their copies to an external storage device that isn't always connected to your PC.
Moreover, make sure that you run a good and effective anti-virus security suite on your system, and keep it up-to-date. Most importantly, always browse the Internet safely.
| Cyber_Attack |
Beware! Facebook UnfriendAlert Software Steals Your Account Password | https://thehackernews.com/2015/06/facebook-password-hacking.html | Today everybody wants to know — Who visited my Facebook profile?, Who unfriended me from the Facebook Friend list?, Who saw my Facebook posts?, and many other features that isn't provided by Facebook by default.
So most Facebook users try to find out a software and fall victim to one that promises to accomplish their desired task. Hackers make use of this weakness and often design malicious programs in order to victimize broad audience.
Following I am going to disclose the realities behind one such software designed cleverly to trick Facebook users to make them believe it is genuine.
UnfriendAlert, a free application that notifies you whenever someone removes you from the Facebook friend list, has been found collecting its users' Facebook credentials.
UnfriendAlert Stealing your Facebook Credentials:
Security researchers at Malwarebytes have warned users of the UnfriendAlert app saying that the notorious app asks users to login with their Facebook credentials to activate unfriends monitoring and alert service for your Facebook profile.
Facebook has provided API OAuth login system for third party applications, where users don't need to provide their Facebook credentials to them. So you should never submit your Facebook password to any third party service or desktop software in any case.
Once you enter your login credentials, UnfriendAlert will send it to the website "yougotunfriended.com" owned by attackers.
Late last month, UnfriendAlert was also classified as potentially unwanted program (PUP) which often displays unwanted advertisements and deceptively installs other malicious software and free apps when visiting some web pages in your Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer, making you fail to block them.
Uninstall UnfriendAlert and Change your Password Now!
So users are recommended to uninstall UnfriendAlert App from your computer, and besides removing this, you are also advised to change your Facebook password as soon as possible. You can do this under "Settings —> Password —> Edit."
Always do some research before installing any third party application as your one single mistake could compromise your online security and privacy in various ways.
| Malware |
T-Mobile Wi-Fi Calling App vulnerable to Man-in-the-Middle attack | https://thehackernews.com/2013/03/t-mobile-wi-fi-calling-app-vulnerable.html | T-Mobile devices having a default Wi-Fi Calling feature that keeps you connected in areas with little or no coverage using Wi-Fi connection. But according to new finding by students Jethro Beekman and Christopher Thompson from University of California Berkeley, that this feature lets millions of Android users vulnerable to Man-in-the-Middle attack.
The simplest way to become a man-in-the-middle would be for the attacker to be on the same open wireless network as the victim, such as at a coffee shop or other public space.
In a technical analysis of the exploit, The flaw could potentially allow hackers to access and modify calls and messages made by T-Mobile users on certain Android smartphones. Beekman and Thompson informed T-Mobile, a division of Deutsche Telekom, of the flaw in December and on March 18 T-Mobile was able to resolve the issue for all affected phone models.
T-Mobile uses regular VoIP for Wi-Fi Calling instead of a connection that encrypted, something that aids in its vulnerability. The certificate validation had not been fully implemented, so without this proper verification, hackers could have created a fake certificate and pretend to be the T-Mobile server.
T-Mobile released a security update to its Android users on March 18 that resolved the issue. Other carriers around the world have similar features enabled on some smartphones, including Rogers Wireless in Canada and Orange in Britain.
| Vulnerability |
Researchers caught espionage malware mastermind on webcam | https://thehackernews.com/2012/10/researchers-caught-espionage-malware.html | In march 2011 CERT-Georgia has Discovered Cyber Espionage Attack Incident on country of Georgia. Advanced Malicious Software was Collecting Sensitive, Confidential Information about Georgian and American Security Documents and then uploading it to some of Command and Control Servers.
After a challenging investigating by CERT-Georgia researchers they found that this attack was linked Russian Official Security Agencies, Moreover investigators was able to turn on the webcam of mastermind behind the malware and they caught him on camera.
Hacker hack some Georgian news sites and inject "Georbot Botnet" behind that, after visiting that page most of the readers get infected and malware take control of their systems. Malware was able to send any file from the local hard drive to the remote server, Steal certificates, Record audio using the microphone and web cams, Scan the local network to identify other hosts on the same network. Malware was also using CVE-2010-0842, CVE-2006-3730, MS06-057 and other unknown vulnerabilities to infect networks.
But finally Researchers from CERT-Georgia trick the mastermind in his own trap by infecting their own PC from Lab, then gave Cyber Attacker Fake ZIP Archive with their own virus inside and the name "Georgian-Nato Agreement". Attacker stole that archive and executed malicious files provide by researchers. That sudden give access of mastermind's computer to investigators. They turn on his camera and took his picture shown below:
"We have obtained Russian Document, from e-mail, where he was giving someone instructions how to use this malicious software and how to infect targets. We have linked him with some of German and Russian hackers. Then we have obtained information about his destination city, Internet service provider, e-mail, and etc." Researchers said.
Most Georgian Infected computers were from our Governmental Agencies and Critical Information Infrastructures . Main targets of hacker was classified information from Georgia Ministries ,Parliament ,Critical Information Ifrastructures, Banks , NGO's.
During investigation they got the origin of hacker, which was Russian Ministry of Internal Affairs, Department of Logistics , according to google map its just next to "Federal Security Service of the Russian Federation (FSB)"
| Malware |
Beware of Windows/MacOS/Linux Virus Spreading Through Facebook Messenger | https://thehackernews.com/2017/08/facebook-virus-hacking.html | If you came across any Facebook message with a video link sent by anyone, even your friend — just don't click on it.
Security researchers at Kaspersky Lab have spotted an ongoing cross-platform campaign on Facebook Messenger, where users receive a video link that redirects them to a fake website, luring them to install malicious software.
Although it is still unclear how the malware spreads, researchers believe spammers are using compromised accounts, hijacked browsers, or clickjacking techniques to spread the malicious link.
The attackers make use of social engineering to trick users into clicking the video link, which purports to be from one of their Facebook friends, with the message that reads "< your friend name > Video" followed by a bit.ly link, as shown.
Here's How this Cross-Platform Malware Works:
The URL redirects victims to a Google doc that displays a dynamically generated video thumbnail, like a playable movie, based on the sender's images, which if clicked, further redirects users to another customised landing page depending upon their browser and operating system.
For example, Mozilla Firefox users on Windows are redirected to a website displaying a fake Flash Player Update notice, and then offered a Windows executable, which is flagged as adware software.
Google Chrome users are redirected to a website that masquerades as YouTube with similar YouTube logo, which displays a fake error message popup, tricking victims into downloading a malicious Chrome extension from the Google Web Store.
The extension actually is a downloader that downloads a file of attacker's choice to the victim's computer.
"At the time of writing, the file which should have been downloaded was not available," David Jacoby, a chief security researcher from Kaspersky Lab, writes in a blog post published today.
"One interesting finding is that the Chrome Extension has log files from the developers displaying usernames. It is unclear if this is related to the campaign, but it is still an amusing piece of information."
Users of Apple Mac OS X Safari ends up on a web page similar to when using Firefox, but it was customised for MacOS users with a fake update for Flash Media Player, which if clicked, downloads an OSX executable .dmg file, which is also adware.
Same in case of Linux, user redirects to another landing page designed for Linux users.
The attackers behind the campaign are not actually infecting users of all platform with any banking Trojan or exploit kits, but with adware to make a lot of money by generating revenue from ads.
Spam campaigns on Facebook are quite common. A few years ago, researchers found cyber criminals using boobytrapped .JPG image files to hide their malware in order to infect Facebook users with variants of the Locky ransomware, which encrypts all files on the infected PC until a ransom is paid.
To keep yourself safe, you are advised not to get curious to look at images or video links sent by anyone, even your friend, without verifying it with them, and always keep your antivirus software up-to-date.
| Malware |
First Hacker Convicted of 'SIM Swapping' Attack Gets 10 Years in Prison | https://thehackernews.com/2019/02/sim-swapping-hack.html | A 20-year-old college student who stole cryptocurrency worth more than $5 million by hijacking victims' phone numbers has pleaded guilty and accepted a sentence of 10 years in prison.
Ortiz was arrested last year on charges of siphoning millions of dollars in cryptocurrency from around 40 victims using a method commonly known as "SIM swapping," which typically involves fraudulently porting of the same number to a new SIM card belonging to the attacker.
In SIM swapping, attackers social engineer a victim's mobile phone provider by making a phony call posing as their target and claiming that their SIM card has been lost and that they would like to request a SIM swap.
The attackers attempt to convince the target's telecommunications company that they are the actual owner of the phone number they want to swap by providing required personal information on the target, like their SSNs and addresses, eventually tricking the telecoms to port the target's phone number over to a SIM card belonging to the attackers.
Once successful, the attackers essentially gained access to their target's mobile phone number using which they can obtain one-time passwords, verification codes, and two-factor authentication in order to reset passwords for and gain access to target's social media, email, bank, and cryptocurrency accounts.
SIM swapping has grown increasingly popular among cybercriminals over the past year and Joel Ortiz, a California man, is the first person to receive jail time for this crime, after pleading guilty to stealing more than $5 million in cryptocurrency from 40 victims, according to Motherboard.
Rather than facing trials and severe consequences imposed by the jury, Ortiz chose to accept a plea deal for 10 years last week, according to Deputy District Director Eric West of Santa Clara County, California.
However, the official sentencing of Ortiz is set to take place on March 14th.
There are more pending cases in court wherein defendants stole millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency using SIM swapping.
One of the defendants named Dawson Bakies, accused of stealing the identities of and funds from more than 50 victims in the United States through SIM swapping has been indicted by Manhattan's District Attorney (DA).
The 20-year-old Ohio man has been arrested and charged with identity theft, grand larceny, computer tampering and scheme to defraud, among other charges.
Over the past year, federal authorities around the world have begun a crackdown on cryptocurrency related crime. A year ago, feds arrested a group of nuclear engineers in Russia after they were caught using supercomputers to mine Bitcoin.
| Cyber_Attack |
United Airlines Hacked by Sophisticated Hacking Group | https://thehackernews.com/2015/07/united-airlines-hacked.html | A group of China-backed hackers believed to be responsible for high-profile data breaches, including the U.S. Office of Personnel Management and the insurance giant Anthem, has now hit another high-profile target – United Airlines.
United detected a cyber attack into its computer systems in May or early June; Bloomberg reported, citing some unnamed sources familiar with the matter.
The same sources say that the hackers responsible for the data breach in United's systems are the same group of China-backed hackers that successfully carried out several other large heists, including the United States' Office of Personnel Management and the health insurer Anthem Inc.
Dangerous Intentions: United Airlines Data Breach
The stolen data includes manifests, which contain information on flights' passengers and their origins and destinations, meaning that the hackers have "data on the movements of Millions of Americans."
Since United Airlines is the world's second-largest airline and major contractor for U.S. government travel, experts say that the vast cache of information could be used to track the movements of specific government or military officials.
Bloomberg also speculated that the combination of security-clearance records from OPM, insurance records from Anthem, and now travel records from United, could be used by hackers to blackmail Americans working in defense and intelligence.
United Airlines didn't immediately respond to the comment.
Although the recent data breach in United Airlines strongly suggests the company to improve its cyber security, United already launched a bug bounty program in May in an effort to find security holes in its products.
Two weeks ago, United paid two hackers more than 1 Million frequent-flyer miles each for finding multiple security vulnerabilities in the Airline's IT system.
| Data_Breaches |
5 Keys to Improve Your Cybersecurity | https://thehackernews.com/2019/06/improve-your-cybersecurity.html | Cybersecurity isn't easy. If there was a product or service you could buy that would just magically solve all of your cybersecurity problems, everyone would buy that thing, and we could all rest easy.
However, that is not the way it works. Technology continues to evolve. Cyber attackers adapt and develop new malicious tools and techniques, and cybersecurity vendors design creative new ways to detect and block those threats. Rinse and repeat.
Cybersecurity isn't easy, and there is no magic solution, but there are a handful of things you can do that will greatly reduce your exposure to risk and significantly improve your security posture.
The right platform, intelligence, and expertise can help you avoid the vast majority of threats, and help you detect and respond more quickly to the attacks that get through.
Challenges of Cybersecurity
Effective cybersecurity is challenging for a variety of reasons, but the changing perimeter and the confusing variety of solutions don't help.
Long ago, during a time that is all but a distant memory by tech standards, cybersecurity was built around a concept of inside vs. outside, and us vs. them. The servers, applications, users, and data inside the network were inherently trusted, and everything outside of the network was assumed to be a potential threat.
The advent of free public Wi-Fi, portable laptops, mobile devices, and cloud computing have eroded the idea that there is any sort of perimeter, and most attacks leverage valid credentials and appear to be legitimate users, so the old model of defending the perimeter is no longer valid.
Meanwhile, as new platforms and technologies are developed, cybersecurity vendors inevitably create targeted point solutions for each one.
The result is a confusing mix of tools and services that protect specific facets of the environment, but don't play well with each other and don't provide a holistic view of the whole infrastructure so you can understand your security posture as a whole.
The constantly expanding and evolving threat landscape doesn't make it any easier, either. Attacks are increasingly complex and harder to identify or detect—like fileless or "Living off the Land" (LotL) attacks.
The complexity of the IT infrastructure—particularly in a hybrid or multi-cloud environment—leads to misconfiguration and other human error that exposes the network to unnecessary risk. Attackers are also adopting machine learning and artificial intelligence to automate the process of developing customized attacks and evading detection.
Improve Your Cybersecurity
All of that sounds daunting—like cybersecurity is an exercise in futility—but there are things you can do. Keep in mind that your goal is not to be impervious to attack—there is no such thing as perfect cybersecurity.
The goal is to increase the level of difficulty for an attacker to succeed in compromising your network and to improve your chances of quickly detecting and stopping attacks that occur.
Here are 5 tips to help you do that:
Assess your business objectives and unique attack surface — Choose a threat detection method that can address your workloads. For instance, cloud servers spin up and spin down constantly. Your detection must follow the provision and deprovision actions of your cloud platform(s) and collect metadata to follow events as they traverse this dynamic environment. Most SIEMs cannot do this.
Eliminate vulnerabilities before they need threat detection — Use vulnerability assessments to identify and remove weaknesses before they become exploited. Assess your full application stack, including your code, third party code, and code configurations.
Align data from multiple sources to enhance your use cases and desired outcomes — Collect and inspect all three kinds of data for suspicious activity: web, log, and network. Each data type has unique strengths in identifying certain kinds of threats and together present a whole picture for greater accuracy and actionable context.
Use analytics to detect today's sophisticated attacks — ensure your threat detection methods look at both real-time events and patterns in historical events across time. Apply machine learning to find what you do not even know to look for. If you use SIEM, enlist machine learning to see what correlation missed and better tune your SIEM rules.
Align security objectives to your business demands — There is more than one way to improve your security posture and detect threats. While SIEMs are a traditional approach, they are most useful for organizations that have a well-staffed security program. A SIEM alone is not the best solution for security monitoring against today's web applications and cloud environments.
5 Recommendations to Strengthen Your Security Program
Jack Danahy, Senior Vice President, Security for Alert Logic, recently presented a webinar titled "Five Recommendations to Strengthen Your Security Program."
If you want to learn more about the challenges organizations, face today with cybersecurity, and what you can do to improve your security posture, check out the recording of the webinar.
| Cyber_Attack |
Hackers Can Exploit Samsung Pre-Installed Apps to Spy On Users | https://thehackernews.com/2021/06/hackers-can-exploit-samsung-pre.html | Multiple critical security flaws have been disclosed in Samsung's pre-installed Android apps, which, if successfully exploited, could have allowed adversaries access to personal data without users' consent and take control of the devices.
"The impact of these bugs could have allowed an attacker to access and edit the victim's contacts, calls, SMS/MMS, install arbitrary apps with device administrator rights, or read and write arbitrary files on behalf of a system user which could change the device's settings," Sergey Toshin, founder of mobile security startup Oversecured, said in an analysis published Thursday.
Toshin reported the flaws to Samsung in February 2021, following which patches were issued by the manufacturer as part of its monthly security updates for April and May. The list of the seven vulnerabilities is as follows -
CVE-2021-25356 - Third-party authentication bypass in Managed Provisioning
CVE-2021-25388 - Arbitrary app installation vulnerability in Knox Core
CVE-2021-25390 - Intent redirection in PhotoTable
CVE-2021-25391 - Intent redirection in Secure Folder
CVE-2021-25392 - Possible to access notification policy file of DeX
CVE-2021-25393 - Possible to read/write access to arbitrary files as a system user (affects the Settings app)
CVE-2021-25397 - Arbitrary file write in TelephonyUI
The impact of these flaws means they could be exploited to install arbitrary third-party apps, grant the device admin privileges to delete other installed applications or steal sensitive files, read or write arbitrary files as a system user, and even execute privileged actions.
In a proof-of-concept (PoC) demo, Oversecured established that it was possible to leverage the intent redirection flaws in PhotoTable and Secure Folder to hijack the apps' permissions to access the SD card and read contacts stored in the phone. Likewise, by exploiting CVE-2021-25397 and CVE-2021-25392, an attacker could overwrite the file storing SMS/MMS messages with malicious content and steal data from user notifications.
Samsung device owners are recommended to apply the latest firmware updates from the company to avoid any potential security risks.
| Malware |
Hackers Can Remotely Install Malware Apps to Your Android Device | https://thehackernews.com/2015/02/hackers-can-remotely-install-malware_12.html | Security researchers have warned of a pair of vulnerabilities in the Google Play Store that could allow cyber crooks to install and launch malicious applications remotely on Android devices.
Tod Beardsley, technical lead for the Metasploit Framework at Rapid7 warns that an X-Frame-Options (XFO) vulnerability – when combined with a recent Android WebView (Jelly Bean) flaw – creates a way for hackers to quietly install any arbitrary app from the Play store onto victims' device even without the users consent.
USERS AFFECTED
The vulnerability affects users running Android version 4.3 Jelly Bean and earlier versions of Android that no longer receive official security updates from Android security team for WebView, a core component used to render web pages on an Android device. Also, users who have installed third party browsers are affected.
According to the researcher, the web browser in Android 4.3 and prior that are vulnerable to a Universal Cross-Site Scripting (UXSS) attack, and Google Play Store is vulnerable to a Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) flaw.
UNIVERSAL CROSS-SITE SCRIPTING FLAW
In UXSS attacks, client-side vulnerabilities are exploited in a web browser or browser extensions to generate an XSS condition, which allows the malicious code to be executed, bypassing or disabling the security protection mechanisms in the web browser.
"Users of these platforms may also have installed vulnerable aftermarket browsers," Beardsley explains in a blog post on Tuesday. "Until the Google Play store XFO [X-Frame-Options] gap is mitigated, users of these web applications who habitually sign in to their Google Account will remain vulnerable."
At the beginning of this month, a Universal Cross Site Scripting (UXSS) flaw was discovered in all the latest versions of Internet Explorer that allows malicious hackers to inject malicious code into users' websites and steal cookies, session and login credentials.
The security researcher demonstrated the issue with JavaScript and Ruby code that response from the play.google.com domain can be generated without the appropriate XFO header.
METASPLOIT MODULE IS PUBLICLY AVAILABLE
A Metasploit module has been created and made public on Github in order to help enterprise security bods test corporate-issued smartphones for exposure to the vulnerability. According to the advisory, the remote code execution is achieved by leveraging two vulnerabilities on affected Android devices:
First, the module exploits a Universal Cross-Site Scripting (UXSS) vulnerability present in versions of Android's open source stock browser (the AOSP Browser) as well as some other browsers, prior to 4.4 (KitKat).
Second, the Google Play store's web interface fails to enforce a X-Frame-Options: DENY header on some error pages, and therefore, can be targeted for script injection. As a result, this leads to remote code execution through Google Play's remote installation feature, as any application available on the Google Play store can be installed and launched on the user's device.
HOW TO PREVENT BEING EXPOSED
Use a web browsers that are not susceptible to widely known UXSS vulnerabilities – such as Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox or Dolphin. This could help mitigate the lack of universal X-Frame-Options (XFO) for the play.google.com domain.
Another effective way is to simply logged out of the Google Play store account in order to avoid the vulnerability, although this practice is highly unlikely to be adopted by most of the users.
| Vulnerability |
Adobe is Finally Killing FLASH — At the End of 2020! | https://thehackernews.com/2017/07/kill-adobe-flash-player.html | Finally, Adobe is Killing FLASH — the software that helped make the Internet a better place with slick graphics, animation, games and applications and bring online video to the masses, but it has been hated for years by people and developers over its buggy nature.
But the end of an era for Adobe Flash is near. Adobe announced Tuesday that the company would stop providing updates and stop distributing Flash Player at the end of 2020.
The move has been applauded by many, as Adobe Flash has been infamous for frequent zero-day attacks, which is why it has long been one of the favourite tools for hackers and cyber criminals.
It's been two decades since Adobe Flash has ruled the Web Space Animation Arena, which was the de facto standard for playing the online videos, but hackers increasingly found ways to exploit security holes in the technology and hack into user's computers.
"We will stop updating and distributing the Flash Player at the end of 2020 and encourage content creators to migrate any existing Flash content to these new open formats," Adobe said on its website.
Until 2020, Adobe will still be partnered with Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Mozilla to offer security updates for Flash Player in their web browsers as well as support new versions of the software, but the company will not provide any new Flash feature.
In 2010, former Apple CEO Steve Jobs declared Flash Player obsolete. Earlier last year, Google also started banning Adobe Flash Player in Chrome 53 in favour of HTML5 by banning Flash banner from its Adwords Advertising platform.
To put a full stop on Flash, many major tech companies like Apple, Facebook, Youtube, Google Chrome, Firefox had been magnetised towards the new substitutor - HTML 5.
Microsoft just announced its plans to disable Flash Player by default in Edge and Internet Explorer in 2019, with a full removal from all supported versions of Windows by 2020.
Google will continue phasing out Flash over the next few years by blocking auto-playing of Flash ads by default on its browser.
In January last year, YouTube moved away from Flash for delivering videos.
Mozilla also blocked the Flash plugin entirely from Firefox and will allow Firefox Extended Support Release (ESR) users to keep using Flash until the end of 2020.
Apple's Safari currently requires explicit permission on each website even when Mac users opt to install Flash.
So, the date for the funeral of Adobe Flash Player is Dec. 31, 2020.
However, the company will provide best in class animation and video tools such as Adobe Animate CC — the company's Premier Web animation tool for developing HTML5 content.
Adobe Animate CC mostly looks like an update to the Flash Professional software – supports Adobe Flash (SWF) and AIR formats 'as first-class citizens,' along with other animation and video formats, including HTML5 canvas, 4K and WebGL output.
| Vulnerability |
Beware of Cryptocurrency Mining Virus Spreading Through Facebook Messenger | https://thehackernews.com/2017/12/cryptocurrency-hack-facebook.html | If you receive a video file (packed in zip archive) sent by someone (or your friends) on your Facebook messenger — just don't click on it.
Researchers from security firm Trend Micro are warning users of a new cryptocurrency mining bot which is spreading through Facebook Messenger and targeting Google Chrome desktop users to take advantage of the recent surge in cryptocurrency prices.
Dubbed Digmine, the Monero-cryptocurrency mining bot disguises as a non-embedded video file, under the name "video_xxxx.zip" (as shown in the screenshot), but is actually contains an AutoIt executable script.
Once clicked, the malware infects victim's computer and downloads its components and related configuration files from a remote command-and-control (C&C) server.
Digimine primarily installs a cryptocurrency miner, i.e. miner.exe—a modified version of an open-source Monero miner known as XMRig—which silently mines the Monero cryptocurrency in the background for hackers using the CPU power of the infected computers.
Besides the cryptocurrency miner, Digimine bot also installs an autostart mechanism and launch Chrome with a malicious extension that allows attackers to access the victims' Facebook profile and spread the same malware file to their friends' list via Messenger.
Since Chrome extensions can only be installed via official Chrome Web Store, "the attackers bypassed this by launching Chrome (loaded with the malicious extension) via command line."
"The extension will read its own configuration from the C&C server. It can instruct the extension to either proceed with logging in to Facebook or open a fake page that will play a video" Trend Micro researchers say.
"The decoy website that plays the video also serves as part of their C&C structure. This site pretends to be a video streaming site but also holds a lot of the configurations for the malware's components."
It's noteworthy that users opening the malicious video file through the Messenger app on their mobile devices are not affected.
Since the miner is controlled from a C&C server, the authors behind Digiminer can upgrade their malware to add different functionalities overnight.
Digmine was first spotted infecting users in South Korea and has since spread its activities to Vietnam, Azerbaijan, Ukraine, Philippines, Thailand, and Venezuela. But since Facebook Messenger is used worldwide, there are more chances of the bot being spread globally.
When notified by Researchers, Facebook told it had taken down most of the malware files from the social networking site.
Facebook Spam campaigns are quite common. So users are advised to be vigilant when clicking on links and files provided via the social media site platform.
| Malware |
YiSpecter — First iOS Malware that Attacks both: Non-jailbroken and Jailbroken Devices | https://thehackernews.com/2015/10/ios-malware-attack.html | Less than a month after Apple suffered one of its biggest malware attacks ever, security researchers have discovered another strain of malware that they claim targets both jailbroken as well as non-jailbroken iOS devices.
Last month, researchers identified more than 4,000 infected apps in Apple's official App Store, which was targeted by a malware attack in which some versions of software used by developers to build apps for iOS and OS X were infected with malware, named XcodeGhost.
And Now:
Researchers from a California-based network security firm Palo Alto Networks have discovered new malware that targets Apple's iOS users in China and Taiwan.
Capabilities of YiSpecter Malware
Dubbed YiSpecter, the malware infects iOS devices and once infected, YiSpecter can:
Install unwanted apps
Replace legitimate apps with ones it has downloaded
Force apps to display unwanted, full-screen ads
Change bookmarks as well as default search engines in Safari
Send user information back to its server
Automatically reappears even after a user manually deletes it from the iOS device
It is still unclear how many users have been or could be infected by YiSpecter, but according to the researchers, this first instance of iOS malware targeting and succeeding in infecting non-jailbroken iOS devices has been around since November 2014.
"Whether an iPhone is jailbroken or not, the malware can be successfully downloaded and installed," the researchers wrote in a blog post on Monday. "Even if you manually delete [YiSpecter], it will automatically re-appear."
YiSpecter targets jailbroken as well as non-jailbroken iOS devices by abusing private APIs to allow its four components that are signed with enterprise certificates to install from a centralized command and control server.
Three of the four malicious components can be used to hide their icons from iOS SpringBoard – the standard app that runs the home screen – and also disguise themselves with the same name and logos of system applications to escape detection from users.
Vectors of YiSpecter malware
According to researchers, YiSpecter malware has been targeting Apple's iOS devices for over 10 months, when it was first spread by disguising as an app that lets users watch free porn.
The app was advertised as a private version of a famous media player "QVOD" – a popular video streaming app developed by Kuaibo(快播) to share porn videos.
The malware then infected more devices through:
Hijacked Internet traffic from ISPs
A Windows worm that first attacked the Tencent's instant messaging service QQ
Online communities where people install third-party applications in exchange for promotion fees from app developers
Security researchers from Palo Alto Networks have already reported the latest YiSpecter malware to Apple, which says "they are investigating" the issue.
How to Remove YiSpecter from Your iOS Devices?
For iOS users who are potentially infected by YiSpecter should follow the below four-step process to remove the malware from your devices:
Head on to Settings –> General –> Profiles and remove all unknown or untrusted profiles.
Delete any installed apps with names 情涩播放器, 快播私密版 or 快播0.
You can use any third-party iOS management tool such as iFunBox on Windows or Mac OS X to connect with your iPhone or iPad
Then check for installed iOS apps like Phone, Weather, Game Center, Passbook, Notes, or Cydia and delete them. (Note: this will not affect original system apps but just delete the fake malware apps)
You can further visit Palo Alto Networks' blog post for more information on YiSpecter.
| Malware |
Yet another Android vulnerability Discovered; Affects 55% Users | https://thehackernews.com/2015/08/android-flaw-hacking.html | It seems like there isn't any end to Android security flaws. After the discovery of the Stagefright vulnerability that allowed hackers to infect Millions of Android devices with just a maliciously-crafted message…
Researchers have now warned of another critical security hole in Google's Android mobile operating system platform that impacts over 55 percent of all Android users.
Security researchers at IBM have discovered a new privilege escalation vulnerability in the Android platform that could allow "a malicious app with no privileges the ability to become a 'super app' and help the cybercriminals own the device."
Dubbed the Android serialization vulnerability, assigned CVE-2015-3825, affects Android versions 4.3 and above, including the latest build of Android M.
The vulnerability resides in a component of Android's platform called OpenSSLX509Certificate, which can be exploited by an Android app to compromise the system_server process and gain powerful system-level access on the Android device.
In a video, the researchers showed proof-of-concept attack, demonstrating how they were able to exploit the flaw using a malicious app and replace it with the real Facebook app to steal social networking login credentials.
Once the user runs that app with no apparent special privileges, it then download additional code to overwrite the existing app, loaded with an exploit used to escalate permissions using the vulnerability.
Besides Android serialization vulnerability, the security researchers also discovered other vulnerabilities in a series of third-party Android Software Development Kits (SDKs) that could allow hackers to execute remote code from apps that use these SDKs.
IBM notified Google's security team of the flaw well in advance of its presentation, and a patch has since been issued. However, most Android users will not receive the patch anytime soon.
You can find more details from the paper published.
This vulnerability is the latest in the list of recently discovered Android vulnerabilities.
Last week, researchers found a critical Certifi-Gate vulnerability in the pre-install Android's 'Remote Support Tool (mRST)' plugin that allowed malicious apps to gain illegitimate privileged access rights, even if the device is not rooted.
| Vulnerability |
'Tox' Offers Free build-your-own Ransomware Malware Toolkit | https://thehackernews.com/2015/05/ransomware-creator.html | "Ransomware" threat is on the rise, but the bad news is that Ransomware campaigns are easier to run, and now a Ransomware kit is being offered by hackers for free for anyone to download and distribute the threat.
Ransomware is a type of computer virus that infects a target computer, encrypts their sensitive documents and files, and locks the out until the victim pays a ransom amount, most often in Bitcoins.
Sometimes even the best security experts aren't able to unlock them and end up paying off ransom to crooks in order to get their important files back.
Tox — Free Ransomware Kit
Now, to spread this creepy threat more easily by even a non-tech user, one dark web hacker has released a ransomware-as-a-service kit, dubbed "Tox," for anyone to download and set up their own ransomware for free.
Yes, believe it or not, but Tox is completely free to use. The developers of the online software make money by taking a cut (20%) of any successful ransomware campaigns its users run.
Tox, which runs on TOR, requires not much technical skills to use and is designed in such a way that almost anyone can easily deploy ransomware in three simple steps, according to security researchers at McAfee who discovered the kit.
How to Setup your Custom Ransomware?
It takes only a few seconds to create and set up your custom ransomware. Just create an account on the Tox website, without the need to provide your email address or any other identifying information.
Once a user register with the site, follow these three simple steps to creating your own malware:
Type a desired ransom amount you want to ask victims for.
Provide an additional note in the "Cause", presumably the message that will alert victims that they are being held hostage to a piece of malware.
Finally, you are prompted to fill out a captcha, and click "Create".
"This process creates an executable of about 2MB that is disguised as a .scr file," McAfee explains. "Then the Tox [users] distribute and install as they see fit. The Tox site (runs on the TOR network) will track the installs and profit. To withdraw funds, you need only supply a receiving Bitcoin address."
Your Ransomware is now Ready to infect People:
Your custom ransomware, designed to work on Windows systems, is now ready and available to download and spread.
Once downloaded, you can target people by sending your virus in an email attachments, just like in the style of traditional phishing emails.
Once a victim accidentally opens up the offending .scr file provided in an email, the payload will encrypt all of the data on their system and only decrypts if a Bitcoin payment is made.
If target pays the ransom amount, the Bitcoin is then transferred to the user's Tox account from where Tox takes a 20 percent cut, and the rest can be withdrawn by the user.
Ransomware is a growing threat to the evolution of cyber criminals techniques, and many victims, including local police departments, do pay ransom to crooks in an attempt to get their important and personal files back.
How to Protect Yourself from Ransomware Threat?
Last week, I introduced you a Free Ransomware Decryption and Malware Removal ToolKit that could help you deal with different variants of ransomware malware and unlock encrypted files without paying off a single penny to the cyber crooks.
However, there are some necessary steps that should be taken to protect yourself from Ransomware attacks.
Remember always to keep regular backups of your important data.
Make sure that you run an active anti-virus security suite of tools on your machine.
Do not open any email attachments from unknown sources.
Finally, browse the Internet safely.
To keep yourself safe, we also have an excellent article on How to protect your computer from ransomware malware?
| Malware |
Beware of Windows/MacOS/Linux Virus Spreading Through Facebook Messenger | https://thehackernews.com/2017/08/facebook-virus-hacking.html | If you came across any Facebook message with a video link sent by anyone, even your friend — just don't click on it.
Security researchers at Kaspersky Lab have spotted an ongoing cross-platform campaign on Facebook Messenger, where users receive a video link that redirects them to a fake website, luring them to install malicious software.
Although it is still unclear how the malware spreads, researchers believe spammers are using compromised accounts, hijacked browsers, or clickjacking techniques to spread the malicious link.
The attackers make use of social engineering to trick users into clicking the video link, which purports to be from one of their Facebook friends, with the message that reads "< your friend name > Video" followed by a bit.ly link, as shown.
Here's How this Cross-Platform Malware Works:
The URL redirects victims to a Google doc that displays a dynamically generated video thumbnail, like a playable movie, based on the sender's images, which if clicked, further redirects users to another customised landing page depending upon their browser and operating system.
For example, Mozilla Firefox users on Windows are redirected to a website displaying a fake Flash Player Update notice, and then offered a Windows executable, which is flagged as adware software.
Google Chrome users are redirected to a website that masquerades as YouTube with similar YouTube logo, which displays a fake error message popup, tricking victims into downloading a malicious Chrome extension from the Google Web Store.
The extension actually is a downloader that downloads a file of attacker's choice to the victim's computer.
"At the time of writing, the file which should have been downloaded was not available," David Jacoby, a chief security researcher from Kaspersky Lab, writes in a blog post published today.
"One interesting finding is that the Chrome Extension has log files from the developers displaying usernames. It is unclear if this is related to the campaign, but it is still an amusing piece of information."
Users of Apple Mac OS X Safari ends up on a web page similar to when using Firefox, but it was customised for MacOS users with a fake update for Flash Media Player, which if clicked, downloads an OSX executable .dmg file, which is also adware.
Same in case of Linux, user redirects to another landing page designed for Linux users.
The attackers behind the campaign are not actually infecting users of all platform with any banking Trojan or exploit kits, but with adware to make a lot of money by generating revenue from ads.
Spam campaigns on Facebook are quite common. A few years ago, researchers found cyber criminals using boobytrapped .JPG image files to hide their malware in order to infect Facebook users with variants of the Locky ransomware, which encrypts all files on the infected PC until a ransom is paid.
To keep yourself safe, you are advised not to get curious to look at images or video links sent by anyone, even your friend, without verifying it with them, and always keep your antivirus software up-to-date.
| Cyber_Attack |
Adobe issues Emergency Flash Player update to patch critical zero-day threat | https://thehackernews.com/2014/02/adobe-issues-emergency-flash-player.html | Adobe is recommending that users update their Flash Players immediately. The company has published an emergency security bulletin today, that addresses vulnerabilities the Flash Player and released a patch to fix a vulnerability which is currently being exploited in a sophisticated cyber espionage campaign.
"Adobe is aware of reports that an exploit for this vulnerability exists in the wild, and recommends users apply the updates referenced in the security bulletin."
The vulnerability (CVE-2014-0497), allows an attacker to remotely take control of the targeted system hosting Flash. "These updates address a critical vulnerability that could potentially allow an attacker to remotely take control of the affected system" advisory said.
The security hole affects the version 12.0.0.43 and earlier for both Windows and Mac OSs and Adobe Flash Player 11.2.202.335 and earlier versions for Linux.
The vulnerability was discovered by two researchers at Kaspersky Lab, Alexander Polyakov and Anton Ivanov.
The story started some month ago, when the Kaspersky Team discovered a new sophisticated cyber espionage operation which has been going on at least since 2007. The operation dubbed "The Mask" hit systems in 27 countries leveraging high-end exploits, the attackers adopted an extremely sophisticated malware which includes a bootkit and rootkit.
The malicious code used is able to infect also Mac and Linux versions and included a customized attack against Kaspersky products.
"This is putting them above Duqu in terms of sophistication, making it one of the most advanced threats at the moment. Most interesting, the authors appear to be native in yet another language which has been observed very rarely in APT attacks. We will present more details about the "Mask" APT next week at the Kaspersky Security Analyst Summit 2014 (on Twitter, #TheSAS2014). " Reports a post on SecureList blog.
Kaspersky Lab provides technical analysis of the exploits and payload. They discovered a total of 11 exploits, using same vulnerability and all are unpacked SWF files in the following versions of Adobe Flash Player:
11.3.372.94
11.3.375.10
11.3.376.12
11.3.377.15
11.3.378.5
11.3.379.14
11.6.602.167
11.6.602.180
11.7.700.169
11.7.700.202
11.7.700.224
These exploits only work with Windows XP, Vista, 2003 R2, 2003, Windows 7, Windows 7x64, Windows 2008 R2, Windows 2008, 8, Windows 8x6, Mac OS 10.6.8.
Researchers discovered that these exploits had been detected on three different user machines, one of which worked under Mac OS 10.6.8 and the other two under Windows 7. They found that .docx document with the 0-day exploit was distributed via a targeted email mailing.
There are total three types of Shellcode:
First one is a primitive shellcode that reads an executable named a.exe from an SWF file and drops it to the hard drive. Only one of the 11 exploits in our possession included a payload.
The second type downloads and executes a file from a URL passed in the SWF file's parameters. The third shellcode type, which is only present in some of the files, is the most interesting.
Adobe was informed of the availability of an exploit in the wild used to hit systems running the Flash Player, it recommends users update product installations to the latest versions:
Users of Adobe Flash Player 12.0.0.43 and earlier versions for Windows and Macintosh should update to Adobe Flash Player 12.0.0.44.
Users of Adobe Flash Player 11.2.202.335 and earlier versions for Linux should update to Adobe Flash Player 11.2.202.336.
Adobe Flash Player 12.0.0.41 installed with Google Chrome will automatically be updated to the latest Google Chrome version, which will include Adobe Flash Player 12.0.0.44 for Windows, Macintosh and Linux.
Adobe Flash Player 12.0.0.38 installed with Internet Explorer 10 will automatically be updated to the latest Internet Explorer 10 version, which will include Adobe Flash Player 12.0.0.44 for Windows 8.0.
Adobe Flash Player 12.0.0.38 installed with Internet Explorer 11 will automatically be updated to the latest Internet Explorer 11 version, which will include Adobe Flash Player 12.0.0.44 for Windows 8.1.
Adobe flash player download
| Vulnerability |
Flickr vulnerable to SQL Injection and Remote Code Execution Flaws | https://thehackernews.com/2014/04/flickr-vulnerable-to-sql-injection-and.html | Yahoo-owned Flickr, one of the biggest online photo management and sharing website in the world was recently impacted by critical web application vulnerabilities, which left website's database and server vulnerable hackers.
Ibrahim Raafat, a security researcher from Egypt has found SQL injection vulnerabilities on Flickr Photo Books, new feature for printing custom photo books through Flickr that was launched 5 months ago.
He claimed to have found two parameters (page_id , items) vulnerable to Blind SQL injection and one (i.e. order_id) Direct SQL Injection that allowed him to query the Flickr database for its content by the injection of a SQL SELECT statements.
A Successful SQL exploitation could allow an attacker to steal the Database and MYSQL administrator password.
Furthermore, Flickr's SQL injection flaws also facilitate the attacker to exploit remote code execution on the server and using load_file("/etc/passwd") function he was successfully managed to read the content from the sensitive files on the Flickr server, as shown below:
In addition to this, Ibrahim was able to write new files on the server that let him upload a custom 'code execution shell'.
Video Demonstration:
He reported the vulnerability to Yahoo which have been patched.
Update: Yahoo awarded Ibrahim Raafat with biggest bug bounty payout ever. He received $15,000 for reporting Flickr SQL injection and Remote code execution vulnerability.
| Data_Breaches |
Hackers release Windows Phone 8 Malware - to be showcased at MalCon | https://thehackernews.com/2012/11/hackers-release-windows-phone-8-malware.html | It's be Just hours Windows Phone 8 has been released - and hackers have already dished out a malware prototype for the platform. Windows Phone 8 is the second generation of the Windows Phone mobile operating system.
Windows Phone 8 Microsoft's latest in mobile OS technology - comes in as a direct competition to rivals Apple and Google. The research firm Gartner indicates that by 2016 the increase in Windows Phone users will slightly fall below Apple`s iOS users.
To be showcased at the International Malware Conference, MalCon - on 24th November in India, the prototype has been created by Shantanu Gawde, who has previously created a malware that utilized the famed Xbox Kinect.
Windows Phone 8 replaces its previously Windows CE-based architecture with one based on the Windows NT kernel with many components shared with Windows 8, allowing applications to be easily ported between the two platforms.
While no further details of the malware are available at this point of time, it will be only time before attackers target the platform aggressively to invade users privacy. The research also stresses on that fact that enterprise adoption of mobile security solutions must be taken very seriously as it may have significant impact on business.
The prototype will be shared by the MalCon conference with Anti-virus vendors to help them mitigate similar attacks to an extent.
| Malware |
The Vulnerabilities of the Past Are the Vulnerabilities of the Future | https://thehackernews.com/2021/06/the-vulnerabilities-of-past-are.html | Major software vulnerabilities are a fact of life, as illustrated by the fact that Microsoft has patched between 55 and 110 vulnerabilities each month this year – with 7% to 17% of those vulnerabilities being critical.
May had the fewest vulnerabilities, with a total of 55 and only four considered critical. The problem is that the critical vulnerabilities are things we have seen for many years, like remote code execution and privilege escalation.
Microsoft isn't the only big name regularly patching major vulnerabilities: We see monthly security updates coming from Apple, Adobe, Google, Cisco, and others.
Everything old is new again
With major vulnerabilities in so many applications, is there any hope for a secure future? The answer is, of course, yes, but that does not mean there won't be challenges getting there.
The vulnerabilities being seen may not be new to those of us who have been defending against attackers for years or even decades, but the adversaries continually change their tactics.
It is not uncommon for them to use legitimate resources for nefarious purposes, and it may not always be possible to plan for this misuse when an application is being built.
It's your privilege
With 80% of security breaches involving privileged accounts, a major vulnerability we will increasingly see exploited is privilege escalation. A common tactic of ransomware operators and other threat actors is to achieve elevated privileges on a system to help legitimize their actions and gain access to sensitive data.
If an info stealer has the same access as the current user, the chances of exfiltrating sensitive data are significantly increased. Meanwhile, admin access nearly guarantees access to juicy data.
In addition to keeping software updated, this is where Zero Trust initiatives and data flow monitoring become critical. At a minimum, Zero Trust means that the principle of least privilege should be applied, and multi-factor authentication should be required wherever it is available.
Essentially, this ensures that anyone who does not need access to a system or file cannot access it – while those who do must prove that they are whom they say they are. Monitoring the flow of data can also help catch a breach early on, limiting the amount of data stolen.
Remote control
Remote code execution (RCE) is not going away any time soon. These attacks accounted for around 27% of the attacks in 2020, up from 7% the prior year. If an attacker can find a way to run arbitrary code on your system remotely, they have a lot more control than they would from just getting a user to run a piece of malware with predefined functions unwittingly.
If the attacker can run arbitrary code remotely, they gain the ability to move around the system and possibly the network – enabling them to change their goals and tactics based on what they find.
Behavioral monitoring is one of the best ways to detect RCE on your systems. If an application begins running commands and spinning up processes that are not a part of its normal behaviors, you can put a stop to an attack early on. The fact that RCE is so common also mandates that you keep security patches up-to-date to stop many of these attacks before they even start.
Who needs malware anyway?
Today, a favorite attack method is using legitimate processes and trusted applications to accomplish nefarious goals. These fileless, or living off the land, attacks can be difficult to detect because the malware does not need to be installed.
One of the most common applications to be exploited this way is PowerShell. This makes sense because PowerShell is a powerful application used to script and run system commands.
This is another instance where monitoring the behaviors of applications and processes can be vital in stopping an attack quickly. Does PowerShell really need to disable security features?
In most cases, probably not. Behaviors like this can be monitored, even from trusted applications like PowerShell. Combine this monitoring with advanced machine learning and AI, and you can begin fingerprinting normal behaviors on your network, with automated responses to unusual activity.
Go forth and repeat yourself
While the common types of attacks may not change much, any changes to application or code have the potential to introduce new vulnerabilities. This doesn't mean we should give up and just let the adversaries win – it means that now is the time to double down on our efforts to thwart their attempts.
Implement a patch management strategy, monitor the network, use behavioral detection, and avoid complacency. The fact that major software providers are regularly patching major vulnerabilities is actually a good thing because the attackers are not giving up, so neither should we.
| Vulnerability |
Dragonfly Russian Hackers Target 1000 Western Energy Firms | https://thehackernews.com/2014/07/dragonfly-russian-hackers-scada-havex.html | Gone are the days when cyber criminals focuses only on PCs to spread malwares and target people, whether it's ordinary or a high profile person. Nowadays, organizations in the energy sector have become an interesting target for cyber minds.
Few days ago, security researchers uncovered a Stuxnet-like malware, "Havex", which was also programmed to infect industrial control system software of SCADA systems, with the capability to possibly disable hydroelectric dams, overload nuclear power plants, and even shut down a country's power grid with a single keystroke.
RUSSIAN HACKERS HIT 1000 ENERGY FIRMS
Recently, a Russian group of hackers known as 'Energetic Bear' has compromised over 1,000 European and North American energy firms with a sophisticated cyber weapon, similar to Stuxnet, that gave hackers access to power plant control systems, said a security firm.
The group of hackers also known as 'Dragonfly', an eastern European collective that has been active since at least 2011 and has been using phishing sites and Trojans to target energy supplier organizations in the US and several other countries, since 2013.
"Its primary goal appears to be espionage," claimed Symantec. The group appears to have the resources, size and organization that no doubt suggest the involvement of government in the malware campaign, said the firm.
According to the blog post published yesterday by security firm Symantec, Dragonfly group mainly targeted petroleum pipeline operators, electricity generation firms and other Industrial Control Systems (ICS) equipment providers for the energy sector in several companies.
SABOTAGE OPERATION
Since 2013, Dragonfly has been targeting organizations that make use of Industrial Control Systems (ICS) to manage electrical, water, oil, gas and data systems, which affected almost 84 countries in a campaign spanning 18 months, although most of the victims were located in the United States, Spain, France, Italy, Germany, Turkey, and Poland.
"Dragonfly initially targeted defense and aviation companies in the US and Canada before shifting its focus mainly to US and European energy firms in early 2013," reads the blog post. "Dragonfly bears the hallmarks of a state-sponsored operation, displaying a high degree of technical capability."
ATTACK VECTORS
Dragonfly used different techniques to infect industrial software with Remote Access Trojan (RAT) in order to access computer systems, including attaching malware to emails, websites and third-party programs, giving it "the capability to mount sabotage operations that could have disrupted energy supplies across a number of European countries".
"The attackers, known to Symantec as Dragonfly, managed to compromise a number of strategically important organizations for spying purposes," Symantec said in a blog post. "If they had used the sabotage capabilities open to them, (they) could have caused damage or disruption to energy supplies in affected countries."
DRAGONFLY LINKED TO HAVEX, A STUXNET-LIKE WORM
Dragonfly used two hacking outfit, the first one is Backdoor.Oldrea which is used to gather system information, including the computers' Outlook address book and a list of files and programs installed, and the second one is Trojan.Karagany which is used to upload stolen data, download new files and run them on infected computers, the firm said.
The Oldrea backdoor is also known as Havex, about which we reported few days ago. In short, both Oldrea and Karagany malware families allow cyber criminals to gain backdoor access of the infected systems, as well as to exfiltrate confidential data and, download and install additional malware to the systems.
The first powerful malware of this family is the famous Stuxnet Worm, which made international headlines in 2010 and was designed to sabotage the Iranian nuclear project. It specifically targeted a uranium enrichment facility to make the centrifuges spin out of control and cause physical damage to the plant in Natanz, Iran and successfully disabled 1,000 centrifuges that the Iranians were using to enrich uranium.
| Malware |
Angry Birds and other Mobile Gaming apps leaking your private information to NSA | https://thehackernews.com/2014/01/angry-birds-and-other-mobile-gaming_27.html | Are you fond of playing games on your Smartphone like Angry Birds or Subway Surfer?? You should now stop wasting your time, because NSA is utilizing your gaming energy in the best possible way.
According to the latest documents leaked by former U.S. Government contractor Edward Snowden, Some of the world's most popular Smartphone applications are telling British (GCHQ) and American intelligence agencies (NSA) everything about you.
NSA is tapping communication across the Internet of all "leaky" apps (Unencrypted app, without SSL connection) to peek into the tremendous amounts of very personal data, including your age, location, sex and even sexual preferences. This is really unacceptable!
The Guardian claims that the NSA and its UK counterpart GCHQ have been developing capabilities to take advantage of these 'leaky' apps, collecting most sensitive information such as sexual orientation and "even sends specific sexual preferences such as whether or not the user may be a swinger." Now this is what which blows our minds.
Mobile photo uploading appear to be a particularly rich source of information for the spy agencies as well. One of the recently leaked Slide of NSA's May 2010 Presentation titled "Golden Nugget!", explained that how a vast amount of data and metadata, known as EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format) of mobile users are compromised by simply uploading photos to a social network, such as Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, and Twitter from a mobile device.
The document dated 2008 includes the basic effort by GCHQ (Government Communications Headquarters) and the NSA to build a geolocation database of every mobile phone in the world. So, Just by having the tower ID from the mobile, its location could be identified.
"The efforts effectively means that anyone using Google Maps on a Smartphone is working in support of a GCHQ system."
The Guardian also reported that the NSA has already spent more than $1 Billion in its phone targeting efforts, giving illogical reason that they are trying to defend the country from terrorist attacks and they are spying on only non-US citizens, but the NSA and GCHQ are collecting the info as part of their widespread global data collection effort.
'Uninhibited collection of consumers' personal data by governments hacking into apps is unacceptable,' said the App Developers Alliance President Jon Potter. 'Developers are surprised and disappointed to learn that the personal information entrusted to them by users has been secretly collecting and stored,'.
In a statement, Rovio (maker of Angry Birds game app) VP of marketing and communications, Saara Bergström, told the Guardian:
"Rovio doesn't have any previous knowledge of this matter, and have not been aware of such activity in 3rd party advertising networks. Nor do we have any involvement with the organizations you mentioned."
But that doesn't mean that developers are blameless. Developers can take more proactive measures to try and encrypt the data obtained from their apps.
Angry Birds is not alone in this, either; Facebook and Twitter were also named in these reports and Google Maps is apparently a major source of information for these agencies as well. The scale and the specifics of the data haul are not clear.
Two weeks back, we published about a secret NSA project DISHFIRE, that collects almost 200 million text messages per day from across the globe and is using them to extract data including location, contact networks and even credit card details.
| Data_Breaches |
Collection of 1.4 Billion Plain-Text Leaked Passwords Found Circulating Online | https://thehackernews.com/2017/12/data-breach-password-list.html | Hackers always first go for the weakest link to quickly gain access to your online accounts.
Online users habit of reusing the same password across multiple services gives hackers opportunity to use the credentials gathered from a data breach to break into their other online accounts.
Researchers from security firm 4iQ have now discovered a new collective database on the dark web (released on Torrent as well) that contains a whopping 1.4 billion usernames and passwords in clear text.
The aggregate database, found on 5 December in an underground community forum, has been said to be the largest ever aggregation of various leaks found in the dark web to date, 4iQ founder and chief technology officer Julio Casal noted in a blog post.
Though links to download the collection were already circulating online over dark-web sites from last few weeks, it took more exposure when someone posted it on Reddit a few days ago, from where we also downloaded a copy and can now verify its authenticity.
Researchers said the 41GB massive archive, as shown below, contains 1.4 billion usernames, email, and password combinations—properly fragmented and sorted into two and three level directories.
The archive had been last updated at the end of November and didn't come from a new breach—but from a collection of 252 previous data breaches and credential lists.
The collective database contains plain text credentials leaked from Bitcoin, Pastebin, LinkedIn, MySpace, Netflix, YouPorn, Last.FM, Zoosk, Badoo, RedBox, games like Minecraft and Runescape, and credential lists like Anti Public, Exploit.in.
"None of the passwords are encrypted, and what's scary is that we've tested a subset of these passwords and most of the have been verified to be true," Casal said. "The breach is almost two times larger than the previous largest credential exposure, the Exploit.in combo list that exposed 797 million records."
"This new breach adds 385 million new credential pairs, 318 million unique users, and 147 million passwords pertaining to those previous dumps."
The database has been neatly organized and indexed alphabetically, too, so that would-be hackers with basic knowledge can quickly search for passwords.
For example, a simple search for "admin," "administrator" and "root," returned 226,631 passwords used by administrators in a few seconds.
Although some of the breach incidents are quite old with stolen credentials circulating online for some time, the success ratio is still high for criminals, due to users lousy habit of re-using their passwords across different platforms and choosing easy-to-use passwords.
The most common yet worst passwords found in the database are "123456", "123456789", "qwerty," "password" and "111111."
It is still unclear who is responsible for uploading the database on the dark web, but whoever it is has included Bitcoin and Dogecoin wallets for any user who wants to donate.
To protect yourself, you are strongly advised to stop reusing passwords across multiple sites and always keep strong and complex passwords for your various online accounts.
If it's difficult for you to remember and create complex passwords for different services, you can make use of the best password manager. We have listed some good password managers that could help you understand the importance of such tool and choose one according to your requirement.
| Data_Breaches |
Train-switching system can be vulnerable to DDoS attack | https://thehackernews.com/2011/12/train-switching-system-can-be.html | Train-switching system can be vulnerable to DDoS attack
Hackers who have shut down websites by overwhelming them with web traffic could use the same approach to shut down the computers that control train switching systems, a security expert said at a hacking conference in Berlin.
Prof. Stefan Katzenbeisser, the man behind this shocking claim made the revelation during his speech at the Chaos Communication Congress hosted by the Berlin. Prof. Katzenbeisser explained that all hell will break lose in case the encryption keys are compromised in the system, used for switching trains from one line to another.
"Trains could not crash, but service could be disrupted for quite some time," Katzenbeisser told Reuters on the sidelines of the convention. "Denial of service" campaigns are one of the simplest forms of cyber attack: hackers recruit large numbers of computers to overwhelm the targeted system with Internet traffic.
Katzenbeisser said GSM-R, a mobile technology used for trains, is more secure than the usual GSM, used in phones, against which security experts showed a new attack at the convention."Probably we will be safe on that side in coming years. The main problem I see is a process of changing keys. This will be a big issue in the future, how to manage these keys safely," Katzenbeisser said.
Prof Katzenbeisser believes the system is relatively secure from hackers under normal circumstances. However, the computer science expert from Technische Universitat Darmstadt warns that encryption keys, used to protect the communications, could pose risks. It said the risk would occur if one of them fell into the wrong hands. This could allow hackers to mount a denial of service attack by overwhelming the signals system with traffic, forcing it to shut down.
The technology, on which the professor issued the advisory, is already in use in a number of countries in Europe, Africa as well as Asia. A group of manufacturers decided to switch to a single digital standard and developed GSM-Railway, a more secure version of the 2G wireless standard used by mobile phones.
[Source]
| Vulnerability |
Pre-Play Vulnerability Allows Chip-and-PIN Payment Card Cloning | https://thehackernews.com/2014/05/pre-play-vulnerability-allows-chip-and.html | In March this year, we reported that the major card distributor companies, VISA and Mastercard are migrating to EMV chip cards, also known as PIN-and-Chip cards. Unlike traditional magnetic stripe payment cards, EMV chip cards generates a unique code for every transaction, making it nearly* impossible for criminals to use the card for counterfeit fraud.
But Nothing is perfectly secure, even not the PIN-and-Chip based payment cards. All anti-cloning theories were already proven wrong, when a group of researchers found a way to hack the Credit and Debit cards based on the latest Chip-and-Pin technology.
Back in 2012, we reported about a research paper entitled "Chip and Skim: cloning EMV cards with the pre-play attack" published (old paper) by team of researchers from the University of Cambridge, UK, who demonstrated that Chip and PIN payment card systems are also vulnerable to Card Cloning.
The same team of researchers presented their EVM related research last Monday at the 2014 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in San Jose, California. But this time they include one more critical vulnerability to the research paper (new modified research paper).
The Group includes Mike Bond, Omar Choudary, Steven J. Murdoch, Sergei Skorobogatov and Ross Anderson from the Computer Science Department. In Total, they presented two critical vulnerabilities in the "Chip-and-PIN" smart card payment system that makes EVM vulnerable to "pre-play" attack.
PREDICTING SO-CALLED 'UNPREDICTABLE NUMBERS'
EMV devices generate the so-called "unpredictable numbers" (UNs) for every transaction, but the researchers claimed that automated teller machines (ATMs) and point-of-sale (POS) terminals fail to properly generate random numbers that are required by the EMV protocol to securely authenticate transaction requests.
Researchers claimed to have found the computation patterns that would allow them to predict the randomly generated numbers. 'EMV implementers have merely used counters, timestamps or home-grown algorithms to supply this nonce.'
The vulnerability could be exploited by the cybercriminals to clone the credit and debit cards in such a manner that even bank procedures won't differentiate between the legitimate and fraud transactions.
NO PIN REQUIRED
They also demonstrated the Proof-of-Concept of another critical vulnerability, known as 'no PIN', which lets criminals use stolen chip and PIN cards without knowing the PIN.
Using a Malware or by performing a man-in-the-middle attack on the communications between a pin terminal and a customer's card allows the hacker to read off sufficient information to create a cloned card.
"The flaw is that when you put a card into a terminal, a negotiation takes place about how the cardholder should be authenticated: using a PIN, using a signature or not at all. This particular subprotocol is not authenticated, so you can trick the card into thinking it's doing a chip-and-signature transaction while the terminal thinks it's chip-and-PIN. The upshot is that you can buy stuff using a stolen card and a PIN of 0000 (or anything you want). We did so, on camera, using various journalists' cards. The transactions went through fine and the receipts say 'Verified by PIN'." the researcher explained.
CRIMINALS ALREADY USING THIS EXPLOIT
The worst fact about the vulnerability is that, the trick is already known to cyber criminals and fraudsters from past many months and currently they are even equipped with crime-ware hardwares those allow them to clone Chin-and-PIN based cards easily.
The Chip-and-PIN system has a 700-odd page manual, but the researchers says it has so many security holes in it, the whole thing should be re-written.
The adoption of EVM payment system is in the response to the massive data breach in one of the U.S largest retailers 'Target', marked the largest card heists in the U.S. history in which financial credentials of more than 110 million customers were compromised.
The data heist in various US retailers have forced them to take some major steps towards more secure transactions and they move on to the new Chip-and-Pin technology. However, Chip-and-Pin payment system is considered to be a safer than the "card swipe" payment system, but that doesn't mean it is fully protected. Cyber Criminals are just behind you every time to fetch your money, so be alert.
| Malware |
FBI Hacked into 8,000 Computers in 120 Countries Using A Single Warrant | https://thehackernews.com/2016/11/fbi-hacker.html | The FBI hacked into more than 8,000 computers in 120 different countries with just a single warrant during an investigation into a dark web child pornography website, according to a newly published court filings.
This FBI's mass hacking campaign is related to the high-profile child pornography Playpen case and represents the largest law enforcement hacking campaign known to date.
The warrant was initially issued in February 2015 when the FBI seized the Playpen site and set up a sting operation on the dark web site, in which the agency deployed malware to obtain IP addresses from alleged site's visitors.
The piece of malware used by the FBI is known as a Network Investigative Technique (NIT). The malware was used for at least 13 days to break into the computer of users who visited certain threads on Playpen and then sent their IP addresses back to the bureau.
Earlier this year, court documents related to the Playpen case revealed that the FBI hacked over 1,000 alleged visitors of Playpen in the U.S. using a single warrant, along with computers in Australia, Chile, Colombia, Austria, Denmark, Greece, the UK, Turkey, and Norway during the investigation.
However, the new federal court hearing transcript from a related case reveals that the hack went much further farther and wider than previously believed and that the bureau actually hacked into more than 8,000 users' computers across 120 different countries.
"We have never, in our nation's history as far as I can tell, seen a warrant so utterly sweeping," federal public defender Colin Fieman said in a court hearing at the end of October, according to the transcript.
According to the transcript, the FBI also hacked what has been described as a "satellite provider." "So now we are into outer space as well," Fieman said.
"The fact that a single magistrate judge could authorise the FBI to hack 8,000 people in 120 countries is truly terrifying," Christopher Soghoian, a principal technologist at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), told Motherboard.
The major controversy surrounding the Playpen case has been that Virginia-based US Magistrate Judge Theresa C. Buchanan who signed the warrant did not have the authority to authorize such searches.
The fact is that the magistrate judges are a more junior type of judges who don't actually have jurisdiction to issue warrants outside their own districts. Only more senior federal judges, known as district judges, have the authority to issue such warrants under Rule 41.
However, this would likely change with the changes introduced to the Rule 41 of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure by the US Department of Justice.
Changes to Rule 41 will Further Expand FBI's Mass Hacking Capabilities
The changes to Rule 41 will grant the FBI much greater powers to hack into any computer within the country, and perhaps anywhere in the world, with just a single search warrant authorized by any US judge (even magistrate judges).
The changes in this rule are set to take effect on December 1, 2016.
"The US government wants to use an obscure procedure—amending a federal rule known as Rule 41— to radically expand their authority to hack," the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) said. "The changes to Rule 41 would make it easier for them to break into our computers, take data, and engage in remote surveillance."
However, the DoJ further defended the changes to Rule 41 in a Monday blog post.
"We believe technology shouldn't create a lawless zone merely because a procedural rule has not kept up with the times," writes Assistant Attorney General Leslie R. Caldwell of the Criminal Division.
If take into effect, privacy activists and cybersecurity experts believe that the US law enforcement will most likely use the changes to Rule 41 to further expand their capabilities of mass hacking techniques.
| Malware |
26 Android Phone Models Shipped with Pre-Installed Spyware | https://thehackernews.com/2015/09/android-smartphone-malware.html | Bought a brand new Android Smartphone? Don't expect it to be a clean slate.
A new report claims that some rogue retailers are selling brand-new Android smartphones loaded with pre-installed software.
Security firm G Data has uncovered more than two dozens of Android smartphones from popular smartphone manufacturers — including Xiaomi, Huawei and Lenovo — that have pre-installed spyware in the firmware.
G Data is a German security firm that disclosed last year the Star N9500 Smartphone's capability to spy on users, thereby comprising their personal data and conversations without any restrictions and users knowledge.
Removal of Spyware Not Possible
The pre-installed spyware, disguised in popular Android apps such as Facebook and Google Drive, can not be removed without unlocking the phone since it resides inside the phone's firmware.
"Over the past year, we have seen a significant [growth] in devices that are equipped with firmware-level [malware and spyware] out of the box which can take a wide range of unknown and unwanted actions," Product Manager Christian Geschkat from G Data said in a statement.
Spyware Capabilities
The spyware is capable of doing the following actions:
Listening in to telephone conversations
Accessing the Internet
Viewing and copy contacts
Installing unwanted apps
Asking for location data
Taking and copying images
Recording conversations using the microphone
Sending and reading SMS/MMS
Disabling Anti-Virus software
Listening in to chats via messaging services (Skype, Viber, WhatsApp, Facebook and Google+)
Reading the browser history
Third-Party Vendors or Intelligence Agency?
Unlike the Star devices, the security firm suspects third party vendors or middlemen (retailers) and not the manufacturers to be behind modifying the device firmware to steal user data and inject advertisements to earn money.
The possibilities may also include unintentional infection via compromised devices in the supply chain or intentional interference by government intelligence agencies.
Affected Brands
The affected Smartphone brands include Xiaomi, Huawei, Lenovo, Alps, ConCorde, DJC, Sesonn and Xido. Most of the suspected models are sold in Asia and Europe.
However, this isn't the first time Chinese handsets come with pre-installed spyware. Back in March, the mobile security firm Bluebox found pre-loaded malware on Xiaomi Mi4 LTE. To which Xiaomi said the compromised handsets were high-quality counterfeits.
Late last year, researchers from Palo Alto Networks discovered that the high-end devices from Coolpad came pre-installed with the backdoor, dubbed "CoolReaper," sold exclusively in China and Taiwan.
| Malware |
China's Cyberspies Targeting Southeast Asian Government Entities | https://thehackernews.com/2021/07/chinas-cyberspies-targeting-southeast.html | A sweeping and "highly active campaign" that originally set its sights on Myanmar has broadened its focus to strike a number of targets located in the Philippines, according to new research.
Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky, which first spotted the infections in October 2020, attributed them to a threat actor it tracks as "LuminousMoth," which it connected with medium to high confidence to a Chinese state-sponsored hacking group called HoneyMyte or Mustang Panda, given its observed victimology, tactics, and procedures.
About 100 affected victims have been identified in Myanmar, while the number of victims jumped to nearly 1,400 in the Philippines, although the researchers noted that the actual targets were only a fraction of the initial numbers, including government entities located both within the two countries and abroad.
The goal of the attacks is to affect a wide perimeter of targets with the aim of hitting a select few that are of strategic interest, researchers Mark Lechtik, Paul Rascagneres, and Aseel Kayal said. Put differently, the intrusions are simultaneously wide-ranging and narrow-focused, enabling the threat acor to siphon intelligence from high-profile targets.
The infection vector used in the campaign involves sending a spear-phishing email to the victim containing a Dropbox download link that, when clicked, leads to a RAR archive that's designed to mimic a Word document. The archive file, for its part, comes with two malicious DLL libraries ("version.dll" and "wwlib.dll") and two corresponding executable files that run the malware.
Upon successfully gaining a foothold, an alternative infection chain observed by Kaspersky leverages removable USB drives to propagate the malware to other hosts with the help of "version.dll". On the other hand, the purpose of "wwlib.dll" is to download a Cobalt Strike beacon on the compromised Windows system from a remote attacker-controlled domain.
In some instances, the attacks incorporated an extra step wherein the threat actor deployed a post-exploitation tool in the form of a signed-but-rogue version of Zoom video conferencing app, using it to hoover sensitive files to a command-and-control server. A valid digital certificate was used to sign the software in an effort to pass off the tool as benign. Also spotted on some infected machines was a second post-exploitation utility that steals cookies from Google Chrome browser.
LuminousMoth's malicious cyber operations and its possible ties to Mustang Panda APT may also be an attempt to shift tactics and update their defensive measures by re-tooling and developing new and unknown malware implants, Kaspersky noted, thus potentially obscuring any ties to their past activities and blurring their attribution to known groups.
"APT actors are known for the frequently targeted nature of their attacks. Typically, they will handpick a set of targets that in turn are handled with almost surgical precision, with infection vectors, malicious implants and payloads being tailored to the victims' identities or environment," Kaspersky researchers said.
"It's not often we observe a large-scale attack conducted by actors fitting this profile, usually due to such attacks being noisy, and thus putting the underlying operation at risk of being compromised by security products or researchers."
| Cyber_Attack |
Hey, Apple User! Check If You are also Affected by the Sparkle Vulnerability | https://thehackernews.com/2016/02/apple-security-vulnerability.html | A pair of new security vulnerabilities has been discovered in the framework used by a wide variety of Mac apps leaves them open to Man-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks.
The framework in question is Sparkle that a large number of third-party OS X apps, including Camtasia, uTorrent, Duet Display and Sketch, use to facilitate automatic updates in the background.
Sparkle is an open source software available on GitHub under the permissive MIT license by the Sparkle Project with the help of numerous of valuable contributors. The framework supports Mac OS X versions 10.7 through 10.11 and Xcode 5.0 through 7.0.
The Sparkle vulnerabilities, discovered by Radek, a security researcher, in late January and reported by Ars reporter, affect Apple Mac apps that use:
An outdated and vulnerable version of the Sparkle updater framework.
An unencrypted HTTP channel to receive info from update servers.
What's the Issue?
The first loophole is due to the improper implementation of Sparkle Updater framework by the app developers.
The app developers are using an unencrypted HTTP URL to check for new updates, rather than an SSL encrypted channel.
As a result, an attacker in the same network could perform MitM attacks and inject malicious code into the communication between the end user and the server, potentially allowing an attacker to gain full control of your computer.
Video Proof-of-Concept Attack
You can watch the proof-of-concept (PoC) attack video that shows a working attack conducted against a vulnerable version of the Sequel Pro app:
Another proof-of-concept attack was shared by fellow researcher Simone Margaritelli using an older version of VLC Media Player, which has now been updated to patch the vulnerability.
Margaritelli showed how he exploited the flaw on a fully patched Mac running a then-latest version of VLC media player using a technique that streamlines the attack by letting it work with the Metasploit exploit framework.
Another less severe bug in Sparkle has also been discovered by Radek that could be exploited against poorly configured update servers, potentially allowing an attacker to replace an update file with a malicious one.
The Sparkle vulnerabilities affected both Mac OS X Yosemite and the most recent version of OS X El Capitan.
Who's Affected?
The Sparkle vulnerabilities affects third-party apps outside of the Mac App Store, which is downloaded from the Internet manually by the user and uses an outdated version of the Sparkle.
Although the actual number of affected apps is not known, Radek estimated the number could be "huge."
Among the affected apps are uTorrent (version 1.8.7), Camtasia 2 (version 2.10.4), Sketch (version 3.5.1), and DuetDisplay (version 1.5.2.4).
Check if You're Affected
Check this list of apps that use Sparkle Updater framework. If you have installed any of these apps on your Apple Mac, you could probably be at risk of being hacked.
Note: Not all of the listed apps communicate over unencrypted HTTP channels or use an outdated version of the framework.
How to Protect Yourself against the Issues?
Although Sparkle has provided a fix for both the vulnerabilities in the newest version of the Sparkle Updater, it is not so easy to install the patch.
Radek warns in an email that the major problem is that developers who created their apps are required to update Sparkle framework inside their apps, which is not trivial.
As the update process requires a developer to:
Download the latest version of Sparkle Updater
Check if the latest version of Sparkle is compatible with their app
Create some test cases, verify update and others
Address this security issue and publish new version of their app
Once this completes, users can check for the app update and download the newest version of the particular app on their computers.
Until this is done, users who are not sure if an app on their computers is safe should avoid unsecured Wi-Fi networks or, alternatively, use a Virtual Private Network (VPN).
In the meanwhile, if you get a prompt for an app update, rather than updating the app via the update window itself, simply visit the app's official website and download the latest version from there, just to make sure that you're downloading what you actually intend to.
| Vulnerability |
New Ransomware Spreading Rapidly in China Infected Over 100,000 PCs | https://thehackernews.com/2018/12/china-ransomware-wechat.html | A new piece of ransomware is spreading rapidly across China that has already infected more than 100,000 computers in the last four days as a result of a supply-chain attack... and the number of infected users is continuously increasing every hour.
What's Interesting? Unlike almost every ransomware malware, the new virus doesn't demand ransom payments in Bitcoin.
Instead, the attacker is asking victims to pay 110 yuan (nearly USD 16) in ransom through WeChat Pay—the payment feature offered by China's most popular messaging app.
Ransomware + Password Stealer — Unlike WannaCry and NotPetya ransomware outbreaks that caused worldwide chaos last year, the new Chinese ransomware has been targeting only Chinese users.
It also includes an additional ability to steal users' account passwords for Alipay, NetEase 163 email service, Baidu Cloud Disk, Jingdong (JD.com), Taobao, Tmall , AliWangWang, and QQ websites.
A Supply Chain Attack — According to Chinese cybersecurity and anti-virus firm Velvet Security, attackers added malicious code into the "EasyLanguage" programming software used by a large number of application developers.
The maliciously modified programming software was designed to inject ransomware code into every application and software product compiled through it—another example of a software supply-chain attack to spread the virus rapidly.
More than 100,000 Chinese users who installed any of the above listed infected applications got their systems compromised. This ransomware encrypts all files on an infected system, except files with gif, exe, and tmp extensions.
Using Digital Signatures — To defend against Antivirus programs, the malware uses a program with valid signature to execute the virus code and also avoids encrypting data in some specific directories, like "Tencent Games, League of Legends, tmp, rtl, and program."
Once encrypted, the ransomware pops-up a note, asking users to pay 110 yuan to attackers' WeChat account within 3 days to receive the decryption key.
If not paid within displayed time, the malware threatens to delete the decryption key from its remote command-and-control server automatically.
Besides encrypting user files, the ransomware also silently steals users login credential for popular Chinese websites and social media accounts and send them to a remote server.
It also gathers system information including CPU model, screen resolution, network information and list of installed software.
Poor Ransomware Has Been Cracked — Chinese cybersecurity researchers found that the ransomware has poorly been programmed and attackers lied about the encryption process.
The ransomware note says users' files have been encrypted using DES encryption algorithm, but in reality, it encrypts data using a less secure XOR cipher and stores a copy of the decryption key locally on the victim's system itself in a folder at following location:
%user%\AppData\Roaming\unname_1989\dataFile\appCfg.cfg
Using this information, the Velvet security team created and released a free ransomware decryption tool that can easily unlock encrypted files for victims without requiring them to pay any ransom.
Researchers also managed to crack and access attackers' command-and-control and MySQL database servers, and found thousands of stolen credentials stored on them.
Who Is Behind This Ransomware Attack? — Using publicly available information, researchers have found a suspect, named "Luo," who is a software programmer by profession and developed applications like "lsy resource assistant" and "LSY classic alarm v1.1"
Lua's QQ account number, mobile number, Alipay ID and email IDs match with the information researchers collected by following the attacker's WeChat account.
After being notified of the threat, WeChat has also suspended the attackers account on its service that was being used to receive the ransom payments.
Velvet researchers have also informed Chinese law enforcement agencies with all available information for further investigation.
Chinese Hacker Behind WeChat Ransomware Arrested
UPDATE (06/12/2018) — Dongguan Police have arrested a 22-year-old Chinese man who has admitted his role in creating and spreading a new ransomware malware across China that has compromised over 100,000 computers in past five days, asking victims to pay ransom via WeChat payment service.
As explained in the article above, the hacker (whose name and identity was revealed by security researchers as Luo Moumou) didn't do much to clear his tracks, making it easier for authorities to track him down within 24 hours.
"After the trial, the suspect Luo Moumou confessed to the fact that he was making new ransomware to destroy the computer information system and using WeChat to pay for blackmail," Chinese media reported.
"According to his confession, in June 2018, Luo Moumou independently developed the virus 'cheat, which was used to steal the account password of others Alipay, and then steal funds through transfer."
Moumou was arrested on December 5th from Maoming, a city located in southwestern Guangdong, China.
| Malware |
NSA & CIA Analysts Watching Porn, A Lot of Porn, More Than You Could Ever | https://thehackernews.com/2015/04/nsa-watching-porn_6.html | U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) is infamous for conducting Global Mass Surveillance to snoop secretly on users' online communications, phone calls, private instant messages, and personal emails, but there is something shocking about it.
The Security Agency also asked its employees to watch Porn -- Yes! Porn and a lot of Porn.
The Analysts and Terrorism experts employed by U.S. Intelligence Agencies including the NSA and the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) are tasked to watch graphic videos all day long.
According to the recent report by Daily Beast, the Graphic video contents containing ISIS prisoner beheading, attacks on U.S. military forces, and sometimes sexual abuse of children are gathered from the computers and smartphones of captured or killed terrorists, and from websites frequented visited by jihadists.
WHY NSA IS WATCHING PORN?
Islamic State (Isis) and Al-Qaeda terrorists are using Reddit, eBay and pornography to send coded messages to their followers.
Israeli Intelligence Agency noticed that Terrorists are using steganography technique to hide secret messages or content within an image or video file in order to keep their plans hidden from law enforcement and Intelligence agencies.
However, the cyber security experts and data forensic teams sitting at NSA and CIA examine these graphical images and porn videos in an effort to gain clues that could help them track down the perpetrators, rescue hostages, or stop terrorist attacks on countries.
The graphic videos believes to be retrieved by the NSA's Tailored Access Office (TAO) secret hacking unit, which works with CIA and FBI to develop and spread sophisticated computer spy software and network spy software worldwide to conduct automatic surveillance.
TAO Unit reportedly infected more than 50,000 computer networks worldwide with malware designed to steal sensitive information and, last year it was revealed that the unit had intercepted Microsoft Windows crash error reports, which gave them all kinds of information about your system.
NSA's PORN ROOM: ANALYSTS, PSYCHOLOGISTS, THERAPISTS
According to the Wall Street Journal, Thirty million Americans regularly watch porn online, and NSA employees are proudly one of them.
"It's mostly porn," a former intelligence officer, who worked on counterterrorism operations, told The Daily Beast. "In another context, a dedicated 'porn room' might be the greatest office park imaginable. But watching hours of the stuff becomes monotonous."
Checking every image and watching every second of the graphic video for a whole day long actually becomes difficult for some analysts, as the work can take an "extraordinary toll" on their emotional state of mind. And to cope up with this issue, the Intelligence agencies have employed specialist psychologists and therapists.
AT THE TIME WHEN NSA ENJOYED WATCHING NUDE PICS
Especially when it comes to pornography, we know that NSA employees enjoy watching and passing nude photographs of people in "sexually compromising" situations among other employees, former NSA contractor Edward Snowden revealed last year.
Also last year, an operation dubbed "Optic Nerve" showed the ugly face of the Intelligence agencies that allegedly captured and stored nude images and other sensitive data from webcam chats of nearly 1.8 Millions of unsuspecting Yahoo users, which was the great assault on users' privacy.
At the agencies, watching porn videos and other graphical material to figure out the content behind it is a part of job for the analysts.
Obviously, the graphical content may or may not contain the clues about terrorists, but they have to watch all of them, and this is what they are getting paid for.
NSA CHIEF DEFENDED U.S. SURVEILLANCE
These efforts by the security agencies to leave no stone unturned is the reason why the Chief of NSA, General Keith Alexander defended US surveillance programs as part of a Noble Mission to protect the nation against terrorist attacks.
No doubt, the analysts sometimes feel oppressed and become angry, but the agency claims that it "deeply values the health and wellness of our [NSA & CIA] employees and provides a range of comprehensive services to address their needs."
"The NSA has long offered psychological consultation and intervention services to support our employees' important work against today's increasingly complex global threats," NSA spokesperson Vanee Vines said in a statement.
TERRORISTS STARTED ADOPTING STRONG ENCRYPTION
However, keeping in mind the out datedness of Steganography technology, I do not think that terrorists are still using the technology to communicate, when they have so many end-to-end encrypted messaging apps readily available out there.
Last year, we also reported that the infamous terrorist group, Al-Qaeda, had started using strongest encryption techniques in order to bypass the standard cryptographic protections in its various communications.
So, it is hard to believe that after the revelation of NSA's mass surveillance programs by the agency's cyber security specialist Snowden, terrorists communicate via an outdated technology.
JOHN OLIVER INTERVIEW WITH SNOWDEN:- ABOUT "DICK-PIC"
On Sunday's edition of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver interviewed NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in Moscow.
The conversation went half serious, half humorous when Snowden was asked, "Can the government secretly access Americans' naked selfies?"
Snowden said, Yes!
Oliver showed Snowden that when the New Yorkers were asked about Snowden and his work, they barely had an answer, which means most of the people in U.S. are actually not aware of NSA's surveillance program.
But, when the interviewer asked the New Yorkers about the government spying on their "Dick Pics," they were far more concerned. However, Snowden says, "The good news is there's no program named the Dick-Pic Program."
| Malware |
Windows 7 64 bit Memory Corruption Vulnerability | https://thehackernews.com/2011/12/windows-7-64-bit-memory-corruption.html | Windows 7 64 bit Memory Corruption Vulnerability
A person known by the alias of "w3bd3vil" on twitter released an HTML snippet that will cause the 64 bit version of Windows 7 to blue screen if viewed under Safari. The underlying vulnerability is however not a flaw in Safari but rather a flaw in the Windows kernel mode device driver, win32k.sys.
"A vulnerability has been discovered in Microsoft Windows, which can be exploited by malicious people to potentially compromise a user's system. The vulnerability is caused due to an error in win32k.sys and can be exploited to corrupt memory via e.g. a specially crafted web page containing an IFRAME with an overly large "height" attribute viewed using the Apple Safari browser. Successful exploitation may allow execution of arbitrary code with kernel-mode privileges," the Secunia advisory said.
The possibility that the vulnerability can be exploited by using means other than Safari cannot be ruled out. According to webDEViL, the source of the vulnerability is the function NtGdiDrawStream. This could evolve either into a local privilege escalation issue or a remote code execution as admin problem. In particular if triggered by more popular browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome).
| Vulnerability |
Mazafaka — Elite Hacking and Cybercrime Forum — Got Hacked! | https://thehackernews.com/2021/03/mazafaka-elite-hacking-and-cybercrime.html | In what's a case of hackers getting hacked, a prominent underground online criminal forum by the name of Maza has been compromised by unknown attackers, making it the fourth forum to have been breached since the start of the year.
The intrusion is said to have occurred on March 3, with information about the forum members — including usernames, email addresses, and hashed passwords — publicly disclosed on a breach notification page put up by the attackers, stating "Your data has been leaked" and "This forum has been hacked."
"The announcement was accompanied by a PDF file allegedly containing a portion of forum user data. The file comprised more than 3,000 rows, containing usernames, partially obfuscated password hashes, email addresses and other contact details," cybersecurity firm Intel 471 said.
Originally called Mazafaka, Maza is an elite, invite-only Russian-language cybercrime forum known to be operational as early as 2003, acting as an exclusive online space for exploit actors to trade ransomware-as-a-service tools and conduct other forms of illicit cyber operations.
The development comes close on the heels of successful breaches of other forums, including that of Verified, Crdclub, and Exploit.
Verified is said to have been breached on January 20, 2021, with the actor behind the attack claiming access to the entire database on another popular forum called Raid Forums, besides transferring $150,000 worth of cryptocurrency from Verified's bitcoin wallet to their own. The forum, however, staged a return last month on February 18 with a change in ownership, according to Flashpoint.
Then again, in February, a cybercrime forum known as Crdclub disclosed an attack that resulted in the compromise of an administrator account with the goal of defrauding its members. No other personal information appears to have been plundered.
"By doing so, the actor behind the attack was able to lure forum customers to use a money transfer service that was allegedly vouched for by the forum's admins," Intel 471 said. "That was a lie, and resulted in an unknown amount of money being diverted from the forum."
Lastly, earlier this week, the Exploit cybercrime forum sustained an attack that involved an apparent compromise of a proxy server used for safeguarding the forum from distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.
Details are fuzzy as to the perpetrators of the attacks, with forum members speculating that it could be the work of a government intelligence agency, while also distressing over the possibility that their real-world identities could be exposed in the wake of the leaks.
Flashpoint researchers noted that the Russian sentences on the Maza forum's notification page were possibly translated using an online translator, but added it's unclear if this implies the involvement of a non-Russian speaking actor or if it was deliberately used to mislead attribution.
"While Intel 471 isn't aware of anyone claiming responsibility for the breaches, whomever is behind the actions has indirectly given researchers an advantage," the company concluded. "Any information unearthed from the breaches aids in the fight against these criminals due to the added visibility it gives security teams who are tracking actors that populate these forums."
| Cyber_Attack |
Facebook Ticker partially Removed Due To Various Bugs | https://thehackernews.com/2011/12/facebook-ticker-partially-removed-due.html | Facebook Ticker partially Removed Due To Various Bugs
According to a Post on Facebook Known Issues Page, Facebook has removed the ticker apparently motivated the social network to call the phenomenon a bug that's undergoing a fix.
Facebook says that "Some people are seeing their ticker disappear. We are aware of this issue and are working to resolve it.". Comments explaining that people with less active accounts won't see the feature, Because when your friends aren't doing anything on the site, the ticker would only duplicate the news feed and not scroll, so there's no point in the feature taking up part of your screen.
Not even this, Last month a Brazilian (independent) Security and Behavior Research had analyzed a privacy issue in Facebook Ticker that allows any person chasing you without your knowledge or consent .How Facebook Ticker exposing your information and behavior without your knowledge. Meanwhile, the Known Issues on Facebook page posted that some people aren't seeing the ticker who should be, and that the site is working to fix this glitch and developers continues to refine the ticker, alternately testing labels for the feature along with shifting its location and size.
If you want to share more Ticker related Issues with us, Just Tweet us or Comment on Google+ Page.
| Vulnerability |
Airbus Suffers Data Breach, Some Employees' Data Exposed | https://thehackernews.com/2019/01/airbus-data-breach.html | European airplane maker Airbus admitted yesterday a data breach of its "Commercial Aircraft business" information systems that allowed intruders to gain access to some of its employees' personal information.
Though the company did not elaborate on the nature of the hack, it claimed that the security breach did not affect its commercial operations. So, there's no impact on aircraft production.
Airbus confirmed that the attackers unauthorized accessed some data earlier this month, which the plane manufacturer claimed was "mostly professional contact and IT identification details of some Airbus employees in Europe."
"Investigations are ongoing to understand if any specific data was targeted; however we do know some personal data was accessed," Airbus said in its press release published on Wednesday.
After detecting the security breach, the plan manufacturer started an investigation to determine the origin of the hack and to understand the full scope of the data breach and if any specific data was targeted.
The company has begun taking "immediate and appropriate actions to reinforce existing security measures," which were not enough to keep the hackers out of their systems, "and to mitigate its potential impact" so that it can prevent similar incidents from happening in the future.
The company has also instructed its employees to "take all necessary precautions going forward," to strengthen their security defenses.
Airbus also said it was in contact with the relevant regulatory authorities and the data protection authorities pursuant to the European Union's new GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) rules.
Airbus is the world's second-largest manufacturers of commercial airplanes, after Boeing which was also hit by a cyber attack (a variant of the infamous WannaCry ransomware) in March last year that "affected a small number of systems" with no impact on production.
| Cyber_Attack |
PoC Exploit For Unpatched Windows 10 Zero-Day Flaw Published Online | https://thehackernews.com/2019/05/windows-zero-day-vulnerability.html | An anonymous hacker with an online alias "SandboxEscaper" today released proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code for a new zero-day vulnerability affecting Windows 10 operating system—that's his/her 5th publicly disclosed Windows zero-day exploit [1, 2, 3] in less than a year.
Published on GitHub, the new Windows 10 zero-day vulnerability is a privilege escalation issue that could allow a local attacker or malware to gain and run code with administrative system privileges on the targeted machines, eventually allowing the attacker to gain full control of the machine.
The vulnerability resides in Task Scheduler, a utility that enables Windows users to schedule the launch of programs or scripts at a predefined time or after specified time intervals.
SandboxEscaper's exploit code makes use of SchRpcRegisterTask, a method in Task Scheduler to register tasks with the server, which doesn't properly check for permissions and can, therefore, be used to set an arbitrary DACL (discretionary access control list) permission.
"This will result in a call to the following RPC "_SchRpcRegisterTask," which is exposed by the task scheduler service," SandboxEscaper said.
A malicious program or a low-privileged attacker can run a malformed .job file to obtain SYSTEM privileges, eventually allowing the attacker to gain full access to the targeted system.
SandboxEscaper also shared a proof-of-concept video showing the new Windows zero-day exploit in action.
The vulnerability has been tested and confirmed to be successfully working on a fully patched and updated version of Windows 10, 32-bit and 64-bit, as well as Windows Server 2016 and 2019.
More Windows Zero-Day Exploits to Come
Besides this, the hacker also teased that he/she still has 4 more undisclosed zero-day bugs in Windows, three of which leads to local privilege escalation and fourth one lets attackers bypass sandbox security.
The details and exploit code for the new Windows zero-day came just a week after Microsoft monthly patch updates, which means no patch exists for this vulnerability at the current, allowing anyone to exploit and abuse.
Windows 10 users need to wait for a security fix for this vulnerability until Microsoft's next month security updates—unless the company comes up with an emergency update.
| Vulnerability |
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.
| Cyber_Attack |
Yahoo Ad Network abused to redirect users to malicious websites serving Magnitude Exploit Kit | https://thehackernews.com/2014/01/yahoo-ad-network-abused-to-redirect.html | Internet advertisement networks provide hackers with an effective venue for targeting wide range computers through malicious advertisements. Previously it was reported by some security researchers that Yahoo's online advertising Network is one of the top ad networks were being abused to spread malware by cyber criminals.
Recent report published by Fox-IT, Hackers are using Yahoo's advertising servers to distribute malware to hundreds of thousands of users since late last month that affecting thousands of users in various countries.
"Clients visiting yahoo.com received advertisements served by ads.yahoo.com. Some of the advertisements are malicious," the firm reported.
More than 300,000 users per hour were being redirected to malicious websites serving 'Magnitude Exploit Kit', that exploits vulnerabilities in Java and installs a variety of different malware i.e.
ZeuS
Andromeda
Dorkbot/Ngrbot
Advertisement clicking malware
Tinba/Zusy
Necurs
"It is unclear which specific group is behind this attack, but the attackers are clearly financially motivated,"
According to the researchers, approximate 9% users of total visits per hour i.e. 27,000 users per hour, were being infected.
Based on the same sample, the countries most affected by the exploit kit are Romania, Great Brittain and France. At this time it's unclear why those countries are most affected, it is likely due to the configuration of the malicious advertisements on Yahoo.
Mark Loman, a security researcher and developer of the Hitman Pro anti-malware software, also confirmed the issue on Twitter.
The Yahoo Security team also confirmed the presence of malware on its servers and said it had taken steps to combat the issue. "We recently identified an ad designed to spread malware to some of our users," Yahoo said in a statement. "We immediately removed it and will continue to monitor and block any ads being used for this activity."
To protect yourself, you can use "Adblock" extension for Firefox, Safari and Chrome browsers that can block advertisements on webpage.
| Malware |
Chinese Hackers Find Over a Dozen Vulnerabilities in BMW Cars | https://thehackernews.com/2018/05/bmw-smart-car-hacking.html | Chinese security researchers have discovered more than a dozen vulnerabilities in the onboard compute units of BMW cars, some of which can be exploited remotely to compromise a vehicle.
The security flaws have been discovered during a year-long security audit conducted by researchers from Keen Security Lab, a cybersecurity research unit of Chinese firm Tencent, between January 2017 and February 2018.
In March 2018, the team responsibly disclosed 14 different vulnerabilities directly to the BMW Group, which affects its vehicles since at least 2012.
These are the same group of researchers who have previously found multiple vulnerabilities in various in-car modules used by Tesla, that could have been exploited to achieve remote controls on a target car.
Now that BMW started rolling out patches for the vulnerabilities to car owners, the researchers have gone public with a 26-page technical report [PDF] describing their findings, though they avoided publishing some important technical details to prevent abuse.
The researchers said a full copy of their research is expected to appear sometime in early 2019, by which the BMW group entirely mitigates against the vulnerabilities.
The team of Chinese infosec researchers focused on three critical vehicular components—Infotainment System (or Head Unit), Telematics Control Unit (TCU or T-Box), and Central Gateway Module in several BMW models.
Here's the list of flaws uncovered by the researchers:
8 flaws impact the internet-connected Infotainment System that plays music and media
4 flaws affect the Telematics Control Unit (TCU) that provides telephony services, accident assistance services, and ability to lock/unlock the car doors remotely.
2 flaws affect the Central Gateway Module that has been designed to receive diagnostic messages from the TCU and the infotainment unit and then transfer them to other Electronic Control Units (ECUs) on different CAN buses.
Exploiting these vulnerabilities could allow attackers to send arbitrary diagnostic messages to the target vehicle's engine control unit (ECU), which control electrical functions of the car, and to the CAN bus, which is the spinal cord of the vehicle.
This would eventually allow miscreants to take complete control over the operation of the affected vehicle to some extent.
Four flaws require a physical USB access or access to the ODB (On-board diagnostics) port, which means attackers need to be inside your vehicle to exploit them by plugging a malware-laden gadget into the USB port.
Another four vulnerabilities require physical or "indirect" physical access to the car.
However, six vulnerabilities can be exploited remotely to compromise vehicle functions, including one conducted over a short range via Bluetooth or over long range via cellular networks, even when the vehicle is being driven.
The team confirmed that the vulnerabilities existed in Head Unit would affect several BMW models, including BMW i Series, BMW X Series, BMW 3 Series, BMW 5 Series, BMW 7 Series.
However, researchers said the vulnerabilities uncovered in Telematics Control Unit (TCB) would affect "BMW models which equipped with this module produced from the year 2012."
BMW has confirmed the findings and already started rolling out over-the-air updates to fix some bugs in the TCU, but other flaws will need patches through the dealers, which is why the researchers have scheduled their full technical report to March 2019.
BMW also rewarded Keen Security Lab researchers with the first winner of the BMW Group Digitalization and IT Research Award, describing their research "by far the most comprehensive and complex testing ever conducted on BMW Group vehicles by a third party."
| Vulnerability |
Brazil's Biggest Cosmetic Brand Natura Exposes Personal Details of Its Users | https://thehackernews.com/2020/05/natura-data-breach.html | Brazil's biggest cosmetics company Natura accidentally left hundreds of gigabytes of its customers' personal and payment-related information publicly accessible online that could have been accessed by anyone without authentication.
SafetyDetective researcher Anurag Sen last month discovered two unprotected Amazon-hosted servers—with 272GB and 1.3TB in size—belonging to Natura that consisted of more than 192 million records.
According to the report Anurag shared with The Hacker News, the exposed data includes personally identifiable information on 250,000 Natura customers, their account login cookies, along with the archives containing logs from the servers and users.
Worryingly, the leaked information also includes Moip payment account details with access tokens for nearly 40,000 wirecard.com.br users who integrated it with their Natura accounts.
"Around 90% of users were Brazilian customers, although other nationalities were also present, including customers from Peru," Anurag said.
"The compromised server contained website and mobile site API logs, thereby exposing all production server information. Furthermore, several 'Amazon bucket names' were mentioned in the leak, including PDF documents referring to formal agreements between various parties," Anurag said.
More precisely, the leaked sensitive personal information of customers includes their:
Full name
Mother's maiden name
Date of Birth
Nationality
Gender
Hashed login passwords with salts
Username and nickname
MOIP account details
API credentials with unencrypted passwords
Recent purchases
Telephone number
Email and physical addresses
Access token for wirecard.com.br
Besides this, the unprotected server also had a secret .pem certificate file that contains the key/password to the EC2 Amazon server where Natura website is hosted.
If exploited, the key to the server potentially could have allowed attackers to directly inject a digital skimmer directly into the company's official website to steal users' payment card details in real-time.
"Exposed details about the backend, as well as keys to servers, could be leveraged to conduct further attacks and allow deeper penetration into existing systems," the researcher warned.
SafetyDetective tried reporting its researcher's findings directly to the affected company last month but failed to receive any response on time, after which it contacted Amazon services, who then asked the company to secure both the servers immediately.
At the time of writing, it's unknown if the unprotected servers and the sensitive data stored on them were also accessed by a malicious actor before they went offline.
So, if you have an account with Natura, you are advised to stay vigilant against identity theft, change your account password and keep a close eye on your payment card transactions for signs of any suspicious activity.
"Instances of personally identifiable information being exposed could potentially lead to identity theft and fraud since they can be used by attackers for identification in various sites and locations," the researcher added. "The risk of phishing and phone scams is also raised by the Natura data leak."
| Data_Breaches |
Russian Hackers Made 'Tainted Leaks' a Thing — Phishing to Propaganda | https://thehackernews.com/2017/05/hackers-tainted-leaks.html | We came across so many revelations of sensitive government and corporate data on the Internet these days, but what's the accuracy of that information leaked by unknown actors?
Security researchers have discovered new evidence of one such sophisticated global espionage and disinformation campaign with suspected ties to the Russian government that's been aimed to discredit enemies of the state.
Although there is no definitive proof of Russian government's involvement in the campaign, there is "overlap" with previously reported cyber espionage activities tied to a Russia-backed hacking group well known as APT28.
APT28 — also known as Fancy Bear, Sofacy, Sednit, and Pawn Storm — is the same group which was responsible for the Democratic National Committee (DNC) breach. The group has been operating since at least 2007 and has alleged tied to the Russian government.
A new report, titled Tainted Leaks, published this week by the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto's Munk School of Global Affairs gives a new view on how Russian state-sponsored hackers targeted over 200 Gmail users, including journalists, activists critical of the Kremlin and those connected with the Ukrainian military to steal sensitive emails from their accounts.
The hackers then manipulate those stolen emails before being published on the Internet, planting disinformation alongside legitimate leaks.
"It provides evidence of how documents stolen from a prominent journalist and critic of Russia was tampered with and then "leaked" to achieve specific propaganda aims," the researchers wrote.
Citizen Lab researchers said that the hackers abused Google's own services and used phishing emails to steal Gmail credentials from 218 targets across 39 countries, including former US defense officials, a former Russian prime minister, and Ukrainian military official.
Researchers detected the campaign in October 2016, but the attacks were going on for several months before that.
Phishing Attack Abuses Google's Own Service
The attackers sent phishing emails that looked almost identical to the security warnings from Google, alerting victims that someone had obtained their passwords and that they should change it right away.
But, as soon as the victims visited the link and entered their login details, the hackers gained access to their accounts.
The phishing link was convincing to trick victims into handing over their credentials to the attackers because the campaign was abusing Google AMP's open redirect and short URL service in combination to hide their phishing pages.
https://www.google.com/amp/tiny.cc/(redacted)
Which redirects to:
hxxp://myaccount.google.com-changepassword-securitypagesettingmyaccountgooglepagelogin.id833[.]ga/security/signinoptions/password
The above landing URL looks like a Google's password-reset page, which captures users credentials as soon as it is entered.
"After highlighting the similarities between this campaign and those documented by previous research, we round out the picture on Russia-linked operations by showing how related campaigns that attracted recent media attention for operations during the 2016 United States presidential election also targeted journalists, opposition groups, and civil society," Citizen Lab wrote.
Citizen Lab researchers able to identify the campaign after analyzing two phishing emails sent to David Satter, an American journalist and Kremlin critic, and who has been banned from the country in 2014.
Connection with DNC and French President Leak
According to the security firm, the approach and techniques used in the campaign appear similar to the hacking attempts that hit Hillary Clinton presidential campaign chairman John Podesta last year and the recent one that targeted French President Emmanuel Macron.
"In the 2017 French presidential election, tainted leaks appear to have been used in an attempt to discredit the political party and candidate for election directly," the researchers said.
US intelligence officials have previously discovered that Russian government was behind the attacks on Podesta and other Democratic officials. Now, Citizen Lab said Russian government was behind the recent phishing campaign and subsequent manipulation of Satter's e-mail.
Besides Satter, the same phishing campaign also targeted 218 other individuals, including politicians and other government officials, members of cabinets from Europe and Eurasia, journalists, academics, CEOs of energy and mining companies, UN officials, and high-ranking military personnel from more than a dozen countries, including the United States and NATO.
Tainted Leaks: A New Threat
CyberBerkut, a self-described pro-Russian group, published some of the documents obtained from Satter email accounts, one of which was so much manipulated that it made Satter appeared to be paying Russian journalists and activists to post articles critical of the Russian government, which would subsequently be published by several media outlets.
"Tainted leaks are a growing and particularly troublesome addition to disinformation tactics, and in the current digital environment are likely to become more prevalent," the Citizen Lab researchers concluded.
"Tainted leaks—fakes in a forest of facts—test the limits of how media, citizen journalism, and social media users handle fact checking, and the amplification of enticing, but questionable information."
So next time, when you came across any widespread data leak, just do not trust it blindly before the authenticity of those leaked documents is not proved.
| Cyber_Attack |
CVE-2014-0322: Internet Explorer zero-day exploit targets US Military Intelligence | https://thehackernews.com/2014/02/cve-2014-0322-internet-explorer-zero.html | Hackers are using a zero day vulnerability in Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) web browser and targeting US military personnels in an active attack campaign, dubbed as 'Operation Snowman'.
FireEye Researchers have discovered that a U.S. veterans website was compromised to serve a zero day exploit, known as CVE-2014-0322, which typically involves the compromise of a specific website in order to target a group of visitors known to frequent it.
FireEye identified drive-by-download attack which has altered HTML code of the website and introduced JavaScript which creates malicious iFrame.
"A zero-day exploit (CVE-2014-0322) being served up from the U.S. Veterans of Foreign Wars' website (VFW[.]org). We believe the attack is a strategic Web compromise targeting American military personnel, amid a paralyzing snowstorm at the U.S."
According to FireEye, the zero day CVE-2014-0322 'vulnerability is a previously unknown use-after-free bug in Microsoft Internet Explorer 10. The vulnerability allows the attacker to modify one byte of memory at an arbitrary address.'
Dropped files are digitally signed making it look like a legitimate application and the vulnerability ultimately allowed them to bypass address space layout randomization (ASLR) by accessing the memory from Flash ActionScript.
But the exploitation can be migrated if the user is browsing with a different version of IE or has installed Microsoft's Experience Mitigation Toolkit (EMET).
"Based on the overlaps and trade craft similarities, it is believed that the actors behind the campaigns are associated with two previously identified campaigns, Operation Deputy Dog and Operation Ephermeral Hydra, which had previously targeted a number of different industries," FireEye said.
A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed - "Our initial investigation has revealed that Internet Explorer 9 and Internet Explorer 10 are affected".
| Vulnerability |
Vulnerability in WhatsApp allows decrypting user messages | https://thehackernews.com/2013/10/vulnerability-in-whatsapp-allows.html | A serious vulnerability in WhatsApp allows anyone who is able to eavesdrop on WhatsApp connection to decrypt users' messages.
Whatsapp, the mobile application for instant messaging platform has become one of the main communication tools of the present day and its popularity makes it attractive for security researchers and hackers.
This time it is debated in the protection of the messages exchanged through the application, thanks to a vulnerability in the crypto implementation they can be intercepted by an attacker.
Thijs Alkemade is a computer science student at Utrecht University in The Netherlands who works on the open source Adium instant messaging project, during its research activity he disclosed a serious issue in the encryption used to secure WhatsApp messages.
In the post titled "Piercing Through WhatsApp's Encryption" Alkemade remarked that Whatsapp has been plagued by numerous security issues recently, easily stolen passwords, unencrypted messages and even a website that can change anyone's status.
"You should assume that anyone who is able to eavesdrop on your WhatsApp connection is capable of decrypting your messages, given enough effort. You should consider all your previous WhatsApp conversations compromised. There is nothing a WhatsApp user can do about this but expect to stop using it until the developers can update it." states the researcher.
An attacker sniffing a WhatsApp conversation is able to recover most of the plaintext bytes sent, WhatsApp uses RC4 software stream cipher to generate a stream of bytes that are encrypted with the XOR additive cipher.
The mistakes are:
The same encryption key in both directions
The same HMAC key in both directions
Below the trick used by the researcher to reveal the messages sent with WhatsApp exploiting first issue:
WhatsApp adopts the same key for the incoming and the outgoing RC4 stream, "we know that ciphertext byte i on the incoming stream xored with ciphertext byte i on the outgoing stream will be equal to xoring plaintext byte i on the incoming stream with plaintext byte i of the outgoing stream. By xoring this with either of the plaintext bytes, we can uncover the other byte."
The technique doesn't directly reveal all bytes but works in many cases, another element that advantage the attacker is that messages follow the same structure and are easy to predict starting from the portion of plaintext that is disclosed.
The second issue related to the HMAC id more difficult to exploit, Alkemade said WhatsApp also uses the same HMAC key in both directions, another implementation error that puts messages at risk, but is more difficult to exploit.
The MAC is used to detect data alteration but it is not enough to detect all forms of tampering, the attacker potentially could manipulate any message.
"TLS counters this by including a sequence number in the plaintext of every message and by using a different key for the HMAC for messages from the server to the client and for messages from the client to the server. WhatsApp does not use such a sequence counter and it reuses the key used for RC4 for the HMAC."
Alkemade is very critical to the development team of the popular platform:
"There are many pitfalls when developing a streaming encryption protocol. Considering they don't know how to use a xor correctly, maybe the WhatsApp developers should stop trying to do this themselves and accept the solution that has been reviewed, updated and fixed for more than 15 years, like TLS," he said.
I agree with the thinking of the researcher, security for applications such as WhatsApp is crucial given its level of penetration, it is true that the interest of the scientific community and cybercrime will surely lead them to discover new vulnerabilities to which WhatsApp have to provide a quick solution.
Alkemade confirmed that there is no remediation for the flaw in this moment, that's why he suggest to stop using WhatsApp until developers produce a patch.
Beware ... This is a very serious risk to your privacy!
| Vulnerability |
Finally Google Chrome gets hacked at Pwn2Own | https://thehackernews.com/2012/03/finally-google-chrome-gets-hacked-at.html | Finally Google Chrome gets hacked at Pwn2Own
Vupen Security and Sergey Glazunov independently managed to penetrate Google Chrome's security defenses at the Pwn2Own and 'Pwnium' contests respectively. The annual competition, which invites ethical hackers from around the world to attempt hacking into the most popular web browsers and in the process expose vulnerabilities and loopholes in the browser's security, while grabbing a handsome reward.
At this year's competition, the co-founder and head of research of Vupen, Chaouki Bekrar and his team managed to break into Google Chrome in less than 5 minutes, in the process quashing talks about the browser's unquestionable security. They used "a pair of zero-day vulnerabilities to take complete control of a fully patched 64-bit Windows 7 (SP1) machine." For the successful break-in, Vupen has won itself 32 points.
Google Chrome security knew that the Flash Player plugin sandbox is significantly weaker and that an exploit against Chrome's Flash Player would have to go through a certain path.Having figured out that Vupen used that technique (from the May video), Google decided to add a specific protection for Flash. The hack qualifies him for one of the top $60,000 prizes that are part of Google's $1 million Pwnium challenge, and could be the launch of a new security career.
VUPEN co-founder Chaouki Bekrar, an outspoken exploit writer who insisted the team deliberately targeted Chrome to prove a point, was uncharacteristically coy when asked if the faulty Chrome code came from Adobe."It was a use-after-free vulnerability in the default installation of Chrome," he said. "Our exploit worked against the default installation so it really doesn't matter if it's third-party code anyway." Bekrar told, Zdnet reports.
IE 9 on Windows 7 was also hacked, again through a complicated hack that had to circumvent the browser's sandbox. Microsoft, however, may not respond so rapidly, as its quality testing procedure usually takes a few months to fix bugs like these.Safari on Mac OS X Snow Leopard, along with Firefox and IE 8 on Windows XP, was also hacked.
| Vulnerability |
What is Strictly Enforced Verified Boot in Android 7.0 Nougat? | https://thehackernews.com/2016/07/android-verified-boot.html | As far as security is concerned, Google is going very strict with the newest version of its mobile operating system.
Until now, Google has not done more than just alerting you of the potential threats when your Android device runs the check as part of the boot process.
Android Marshmallow 6.0 does nothing more than just warning you that your device has been compromised, though it continues to let your device boot up.
1. Android Nougat 7.0 Getting Strictly Enforced 'Verified Boot'
In Android Nougat, Google has taken the security of its Android operating system to the next level by strictly enforcing verified boot on devices.
Among multiple layers of security protection, Android uses verified boot - since Android version 4.4 KitKat - that improves its device's security by using cryptographic integrity checking to detect if your device has been tampered with.
Now, Android Nougat will strictly enforce the boot check, giving you far more than just a warning.
2. Android 7.0 Verified Boot Protects Device from Rootkits and Malware
Enforcing verified boot on a device is a good idea.
If any Android malware or rootkit made its way onto your Android device and made deep system changes to critical kernel files, your device will either start in a limited-use mode (presumably similar to safe mode) or refuse to start at all, protecting your data.
In addition to strict verified boot, Android Nougat also features forward error correction that is capable of repairing some errors on devices without any user input.
And, of course, Nexus devices will be the first to get these features.
This will prevent your Android device from becoming a playground for malware and viruses, at least after you restart it.
That sounds really great. Right?
3. If Modified, Corrupt or Tampered, It won't let your phone Boot
For most users the strict verified boot would be helpful, however, for some, it's bad news.
According to Google, some non-malicious corruption of data could cause Android devices to fail to boot up because verified boot process runs into issues that it can not correct.
This data corruption could be the result of some software flaws or hardware issues.
Here's what the Android Developer blog explains: "This means that a device with a corrupt boot image or verified partition will not boot or will boot in a limited capacity with user consent. Such strict checking, though, means that non-malicious data corruption, which previously would be less visible, could now start affecting process functionality more."
Since corrupted data may not always be malicious, even a single-byte error could prevent the device from booting.
However, Android Nougat brings additional code designed to protect against data corruption.
"In the changes we made to dm-verity for Android 7.0, we used a technique called interleaving to allow us to recover not only from a loss of an entire 4 KiB source block, reads the blog, "but several consecutive blocks, while significantly reducing the space overhead required to achieve usable error correction capabilities compared to the naive implementation."
4. Verified Boot Has Made It Harder to Root Android 7.0 Nougat
Like I said, data corruption could not always be due to malicious reasons.
Strictly enforcing verified boot could also make it tougher for you to tweak your Android Operating System (especially with locked bootloader) using custom ROMs, mods, and kernels.
Since this involves circumventing the locked bootloader, verified boot process will detect any changes, making it harder for users to play with their devices when Nougat rolls around.
The bottom line:
Enforcing strict verified boot in Android Nougat is a good idea, because most users root their devices with custom firmware but forget to take important security measures, which leaves their devices open to malicious software and rootkits.
What do you think of the additional security Google provides to the boot process in Android Nougat?
Let us know your views in the comments below!
| Malware |
Email Phishers Using New Way to Bypass Microsoft Office 365 Protections | https://thehackernews.com/2018/08/microsoft-office365-phishing.html | Phishing works no matter how hard a company tries to protect its customers or employees.
Security researchers have been warning of a new phishing attack that cybercriminals and email scammers are using in the wild to bypass the Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) mechanism implemented by widely used email services like Microsoft Office 365.
Microsoft Office 365 is an all-in-solution for users that offers several different online services, including Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Lync Online and other Office Web Apps, like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and OneNote.
On the top of these services, Microsoft also offers an artificial intelligence and machine learning powered security protection to help defend against potential phishing and other threats by going one level deep to scan the links in the email bodies to look for any blacklisted or suspicious domain.
But as I said, phishers always find a way to bypass security protections in order to victimize users.
Just over a month ago, the scammers were found using the ZeroFont technique to mimic a popular company and tricked users into giving away their personal and banking information.
In May 2018, cybercriminals had also been found splitting up the malicious URL in a way that the Safe Links security feature in Office 365 fails to identify and replace the partial hyperlink, eventually redirecting victims to the phishing site.
How SharePoint Phishing Attack Works?
These issues were then addressed by Microsoft at its end, but phishers have now been found using a new trick to bypass Office 365's built-in security protections and phish users—this time by inserting malicious links into SharePoint documents.
The same cloud security company Avanan, which discovered the two above-mentioned phishing attacks, uncovered a new phishing email campaign in the wild targeting Office 365 users, who are receiving emails from Microsoft containing a link to a SharePoint document.
The body of the email message looks identical to a standard SharePoint invitation from someone to collaborate. Once the user clicked the hyperlink in the email, the browser automatically opens a SharePoint file.
The content of the SharePoint file impersonates a standard access request to a OneDrive file, but an 'Access Document' button on the file is actually hyperlinked to a malicious URL, according to the researchers.
The malicious link then redirects the victim to a spoofed Office 365 login screen, asking the user to enter his/her login credentials, which are then harvested by hackers.
Microsoft scans the body of an email, including the links provided in it, but since the links in the latest email campaign lead to an actual SharePoint document, the company did not identify it as a threat.
"In order to identify this threat, Microsoft would have to scan links within shared documents for phishing URLs. This presents a clear vulnerability that hackers have taken advantage of to propagate phishing attacks," the researchers said.
"Even if Microsoft were to scan links within files, they would face another challenge: they could not blacklist the URL without blacklisting links to all SharePoint files. If they blacklisted the full URL of the Sharepoint file, the hackers could easily create a new URL."
Therefore no protection would be able to alert users of phishing, until and unless they are not trained enough to detect such phishing attempts.
According to the cloud security company, this new phishing attack was leveraged against 10 percent of its Office 365 customers over the past two weeks, and the firm believes the same percentage applies to Office 365 users globally.
So, in order to protect yourself, you should be suspicious of the URLs in the email body if it uses URGENT or ACTION REQUIRED in the subject line, even if you are receiving emails that appear safe.
When presented a login page, you are recommended to always check the address bar in the web browser to know whether the URL is actually hosted by the legitimate service or not.
Most importantly, always use two-factor authentication (2FA), so even if attackers gain access to your password, they still need to struggle for the second authentication step.
However, researchers noted that if this attack would have involved links to trigger a malware download rather than directing users to a phishing page, "the attack would have caused damage by the time the user clicked and investigated the URL."
| Cyber_Attack |
Backdoor in Baidu Android SDK Puts 100 Million Devices at Risk | https://thehackernews.com/2015/11/android-malware-backdoor.html | The China's Google-like Search Engine Baidu is offering a software development kit (SDK) that contains functionality that can be abused to give backdoor-like access to a user's device, potentially exposing around 100 Million Android users to malicious hackers.
The SDK in question is Moplus, which may not be directly available to the public but has already made its way into more than 14,000 Android apps, of which around 4,000 are actually created by Baidu.
Overall, more than 100 Million Android users, who have downloaded these apps on their smartphones, are in danger.
Security researchers from Trend Micro have discovered a vulnerability in the Moplus SDK, called Wormhole, that allows attackers to launch an unsecured and unauthenticated HTTP server connection on affected devices, which works silently in the background, without the user's knowledge.
Also Read: More than 26 Android Phone Models Shipped with Pre-Installed Spyware
This unsecured server does not use authentication and can accept requests from anyone on the Internet. Though the server is controlled by the attacker, who can send requests to a particular port of this hidden HTTP server to execute malicious commands.
Malicious Functionalities of Wormhole
Currently, the researchers have identified that the SDK is using the port 6259 or 40310 to perform malicious activities on affected Android devices, which includes:
Send SMS messages
Make phone calls
Get mobile phone details
Add new contacts
Get a list of local apps
Download files on the device
Upload files from the device
Silently install other apps (if the phone is rooted)
Push Web pages
Get phone's geo-location, and many more
Since the SDK automatically installs the Web server when a Moplus SDK app is opened, hackers just need to scan a mobile network for port 6259 or 40310, thereby finding vulnerable devices they can abuse.
Also Read: Android Malware Can Spy On You Even When Your Mobile Is Off
Wormhole is More Dangerous than Stagefright
The vulnerability, according to researchers, is potentially easier to exploit than the Stagefright flaw, as Wormhole doesn't require social engineering to infect an unsuspecting user.
Trend Micro has also found at least one malware strain (detected as ANDROIDOS_WORMHOLE.HRXA) in the wild that takes advantage of Wormhole in Moplus SDK.
Researchers informed both Baidu as well as Google of the vulnerability.
As a result, Baidu has just pushed a partial fix for the problem by releasing a new version of the SDK that removed some of the SDK's functionality, but not all. The HTTP server remains online and active; however, Baidu assured its users that no backdoor exists now.
Must Read: Stagefright Bug 2.0 — One Billion Android SmartPhones Vulnerable to Hacking
This isn't the first time a Chinese company has caught distributing malicious SDK. Just a few days ago, the Taomike SDK – one of the biggest mobile ad solutions in China – was caught secretly spying on users' SMS messages and uploading them to a server in China.
The same malicious functionality was also discovered two weeks back in another SDK developed by Youmi; that affected 256 iOS apps, which were caught using private APIs to collect users private data. However, Apple eventually banned those apps from its App Store.
| Malware |
Authentication Flaw in PayPal mobile API Allows Access to Blocked Accounts | https://thehackernews.com/2014/10/authentication-flaw-in-paypal-mobile.html | Payment services provider PayPal is vulnerable to an authentication restriction bypass vulnerability, which could allow an attacker to bypass a filter or restriction of the online-service to get unauthorized access to a blocked users' PayPal account.
The security vulnerability actually resides in the mobile API authentication procedure of the PayPal online-service, which doesn't check for the blocked and restricted PayPal accounts.
HOW THE VULNERABILITY WORKS
In case if a PayPal user enters a wrong username or password combination several times in an effort to access the account, then for the security reasons, PayPal will restrict the user from opening or accessing his/her account on a computer until the answers to a number of security questions is provided.
However, if the same user, at the same time switches to a mobile device and tries accessing the temporarily closed PayPal account with the right credentials via an official PayPal mobile app client through the API, the user will get access to the account without providing any additional security detail.
WHAT WENT WRONG
"The client API checks only if the account exists, the API does not check a part- or full blocking of the account. It is possible for the blocked user to get access to his PayPal account and is able to make transactions and he can send money from the account," states the vulnerability disclosure document.
For some other security reasons, such as for preventing a fraudster from reaching illicitly obtained funds, PayPal could temporarily denied users to access their PayPal account. In such cases, a remote attacker could "login through the mobile API with PayPal portal restriction to access account information or interact with the compromised account."
REPORTED OVER ONE YEAR BUT STILL NO PATCH AVAILABLE
The critical vulnerability in PayPal was discovered about a year ago by Benjamin Kunz Mejri from Vulnerability Laboratory, and as a responsible researcher, he reported the flaw to the PayPal's team, but the fix for the vulnerability is still not available. Also no bug bounty has been paid to him for the discovery and responsible disclosure of the bug.
According to the vulnerability disclosure document, the authentication restriction bypass vulnerability in PayPal online service has been assigned a high CVSS (Common Vulnerability Scoring System) base score of 6.2, but no identifier has been assigned to the bug.
VIDEO DEMONSTRATION
A video demonstration of the vulnerability has also been published by the researcher, showing how he intentionally enters the wrong username several times in order to have his PayPal account blocked. After account blocked, the online payment service requests him to answer some security question in order to validate the user.
But, despite answering those questions, the researcher used his iOS device and entered the correct combination of username and password, which easily granted him access to his blocked account, allowing him to initiate financial transactions.
PRODUCTS AFFECTED
The vulnerability affects the iOS mobile application for both iPhone and iPad, as it fails to check for the restriction flags that would not allow access to the blocked or temporarily blocked account. According to the researcher, the version 4.6.0 of the iOS app is affected, and the flaw is also working on the latest version 5.8.
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.
| Vulnerability |
Volatile Cedar — Global Cyber Espionage Campaign Discovered | https://thehackernews.com/2015/05/volatile-cedar-global-cyber-espionage_29.html | Security firm Check Point has uncovered what seems to be a successful, and long-running, cyber-surveillance campaign called "Volatile Cedar." Check Point found that targets of the attack included, but were not limited to, defense contractors, media companies, telecommunications, and educational institutions.
The attack is said to have originated in Lebanon and possibly has political ties in the region. According to an article in Techworld, previous cyber-campaigns originating from Lebanon have been either extremely unsophisticated or targeted at other countries in the region. However, Volatile Cedar is different.
According to the report, this campaign has been in operation since 2012 and has successfully penetrated a large number of targets across the globe. During this time it has allowed the attackers to steal data and monitor a large volume of victim's actions.
The actors involved in this campaign do not appear to be using flashy mechanisms like zero day attacks or complex malware but, instead, enter networks via vulnerable webservers. Once compromised, webservers are infected with a trojan called "Explosive" which allows them to carry out reconnaissance.
This custom-built piece of malware offers remote access, data exfiltration, key logging, as well as functionality to allow for lateral movements within the compromised network.
Another very interesting aspect of the Volatile Cedar campaign is how far the actors are willing to go to remain undetected, monitoring system resource consumption and antivirus detection results with the "Explosive" tool. It will even block external communications and obfuscate traffic to mask its activity.
How Volatile Cedar Impacts Your Organization
Attackers can take control of infected systems to steal data, log keystrokes, and even begin to move around in your network
The loss of data can lead to regulatory penalties, loss of business, litigation, etc.
Hosting malicious content could inadvertently associate your organization with criminal activity
How AlienVault Unified Security Management (USM) Can Help
AlienVault USM provides asset discovery, vulnerability assessment, threat detection (IDS), behavioral monitoring, SIEM, and threat intelligence from AlienVault Labs—all in a single console.
The AlienVault Labs team has already added several IDS signatures and a correlation rule to detect the C&C protocol generated by all the malware families used by the attackers behind Volatile Cedar:
System Compromise, Targeted Malware, Volatile Cedar
With AlienVault USM, you can scan your network to identify assets with the Volatile Cedar vulnerability, making it easy for you to identify systems that need to be patched and prioritize remediation.
Not only can AlienVault USM identify vulnerable systems, it can also help you detect attempted exploits of the vulnerability.
AlienVault USM also checks the IP information against the Open Threat Exchange (OTX), the largest crowd-sourced threat intelligence exchange. In the example below, you can see details from OTX on the reputation of an IP, including any malicious activities associated with it.
Learn more about AlienVault USM:
Download a free 30-day trial
Watch a demo on-demand
Play with USM in our product sandbox (no download required)
| Cyber_Attack |
Lulzsec hackers to be sentenced for cyber attacks on the CIA and Pentagon | https://thehackernews.com/2013/05/lulzsec-hackers-to-be-sentenced-for.html | Four men accused of launching online attacks under the banner of LulzSec appeared in a London courtroom Wednesday for sentencing. Ryan Ackroyd, Jake Davis, Mustafa al-Bassam and Ryan Cleary have all pleaded guilty to hacking offences.
The name Lulzsec is a combination of 'lulz' or 'lols', "LAUGHING AT YOUR SECURITY" meaning 'laugh out loud' and security, and was a direct descent of notorious hacking group Anonymous.
Working from their bedrooms in 2011, caused millions of pounds of damage with attacks on NHS, CIA and US military websites, they stole huge amounts of sensitive personal data including emails, online passwords and credit card details belonging to hundreds of thousands of people, Southwark Crown Court in London heard.
They also carried out distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on many institutions, crashing their websites. Ackroyd, 26, from Mexborough, South Yorkshire, has admitted stealing data from Sony.
To do it, they used a remotely controlled network of zombie computers, known as a "botnet", capable of being programmed to perform the attack. The botnet code was written by Cleary and the court heard it may have been using up to one million computers to carry out attacks via the Internet without their owners knowing about it.
The attacks led to sensitive personal information being leaked online, leaving victims open to fraud. They even attacked the US X Factor contestant data base.
Ackroyd had been expected to stand trial at Southwark Crown Court in April, but changed his plea to a key charge at the last minute. He is the last of four members of the online gang, whose victims included the Pentagon, the CIA, and the UK's Serious and Organised Crime Agency, to be convicted.
In addition to the hacking offences to which all four have pleaded guilty, Cleary alone has pleaded guilty to charges of downloading pornographic images of babies and children.
"It's clear from the evidence that they intended to achieve extensive national and international notoriety and publicity," said Prosecutor Sandip Patel.
Lulz only existed for a matter of months in 2011 but in that time it built up a huge international following, reaching 355,000 Twitter followers.
| Cyber_Attack |
XLoader Windows InfoStealer Malware Now Upgraded to Attack macOS Systems | https://thehackernews.com/2021/07/xloader-windows-infostealer-malware-now.html | A popular malware known for stealing sensitive information from Windows machines has evolved into a new strain capable of also targeting Apple's macOS operating system.
The upgraded malware, dubbed "XLoader," is a successor to another well-known Windows-based info stealer called Formbook that's known to vacuum credentials from various web browsers, capture screenshots, record keystrokes, and download and execute files from attacker-controlled domains.
"For as low as $49 on the Darknet, hackers can buy licenses for the new malware, enabling capabilities to harvest log-in credentials, collect screenshots, log keystrokes, and execute malicious files," cybersecurity firm Check Point said in a report shared with The Hacker News.
Distributed via spoofed emails containing malicious Microsoft Office documents, XLoader is estimated to infected victims spanning across 69 countries between December 1, 2020, and June 1, 2021, with 53% of the infections reported in the U.S. alone, followed by China's special administrative regions (SAR), Mexico, Germany, and France.
While the very first Formbook samples were detected in the wild in January 2016, sale of the malware on underground forums stopped in October 2017, only to be resurrected more than two years later in the form of XLoader in February 2020.
In October 2020, the latter was advertised for sale on the same forum which was used for selling Formbook, Check Point said. Both Formbook and its XLoader derivative are said to share the same codebase, with the new variant incorporating substantial changes that lend it new capabilities for compromising macOS systems.
According to statistics released by Check Point earlier this January, Formbook was third among the most prevalent malware families in December 2020, impacting 4% of organizations worldwide. It's worth noting that the newly discovered XLoader malware for PC and Mac is not the same as XLoader for Android, which was first detected in April 2019.
"[XLoader] is far more mature and sophisticated than its predecessors, supporting different operating systems, specifically macOS computers," said Yaniv Balmas, head of cyber research at Check Point. "Historically, macOS malware hasn't been that common. They usually fall into the category of 'spyware', not causing too much damage."
"While there might be a gap between Windows and MacOS malware, the gap is slowly closing over time. The truth is that macOS malware is becoming bigger and more dangerous," Balmas noted, adding the findings "are a perfect example and confirm this growing trend."
| Malware |
Corruption and Persistent Vulnerability in Skype 5.8 and 5.5 [Video POC] | https://thehackernews.com/2012/03/corruption-and-persistent-vulnerability.html | Corruption & Persistent Vulnerability in Skype 5.8 and 5.5
Ucha Gobejishvili ( longrifle0x ) Benjamin Kunz Mejri (Rem0ve)&Alexander Fuchs (f0x23), security Experts from The Vulnerability-Lab Team discovered a remote pointer corruption with persistent weakness on Skypes v5.8.0.156 Windows 7 & MacOS v5.5.2340. The security risk of the remote denial of service vulnerability via pointer corruption is estimated as high(-).
Skype is a software application that allows users to make voice and video calls and chats over the Internet. Calls to other users within theSkype service are free, while calls to both traditional landline telephones and mobile phones can be made for a fee using a debit-baseduser account system.
According to Expert, Vulnerability was reported to Vendor on 2012-02-24, and Vendor Fix/Patch by Check on 2012-03-20. Affected versions are Skype - Windows, MacOs & Linux v5.8.0.156, 5.5.0.2340, 2.2 Beta.
The exploitation method will work Remotely. A pointer corruption vulnerability is detected on the windows v5.6.59.10 & macos v5.5.2340 client of the skype software.The bug is located in the software when processing special crafted symbole messages via communication box. The vulnerabilityallows an attacker to freeze, block, crash or destroy the communication messagebox of the connected conference persons/teams.
The bug also has an persistent weakness vector which allows an remote attacker to implement the symbole string to the contactuser requests messagebox. The result is also a stable persistent error message and a client denial of service. Attackers canalso implement the test poc to the group labelname which results in a stable group error with different exceptions.
The facebook integration allows to sync the account with skype and can also redisplay the issue with the error via facebook module and wallposting.The callto function allows an attacker to implement the issue persistent on a victim user profile by using the symbole string as nickname.
Vulnerable Modules are MessageBox & Request Contact, Contact Request Messagebox - Add Skype User, Group Topic & Group Information Name and Facebook integration - Connect Account Wall Postings.
For more security, Please Update to Skype v5.8.0.158.
| Vulnerability |
WARNING: A New Android Zero-Day Vulnerability Is Under Active Attack | https://thehackernews.com/2021/03/warning-new-android-zero-day.html | Google has disclosed that a now-patched vulnerability affecting Android devices that use Qualcomm chipsets is being weaponized by adversaries to launch targeted attacks.
Tracked as CVE-2020-11261 (CVSS score 8.4), the flaw concerns an "improper input validation" issue in Qualcomm's Graphics component that could be exploited to trigger memory corruption when an attacker-engineered app requests access to a huge chunk of the device's memory.
"There are indications that CVE-2020-11261 may be under limited, targeted exploitation," the search giant said in an updated January security bulletin on March 18.
CVE-2020-11261 was discovered and reported to Qualcomm by Google's Android Security team on July 20, 2020, after which it was fixed in January 2021.
It's worth noting that the access vector for the vulnerability is "local," meaning that exploitation requires local access to the device. In other words, to launch a successful attack, the bad actor must either have physical access to the vulnerable smartphone or use other means - e.g., a watering hole - to deliver malicious code and set off the attack chain.
While specifics about the attacks, the identity of the attacker, and the targeted victims have not been released, it is not unusual for Google to withhold sharing such information to prevent other threat actors from taking advantage of the vulnerability.
If anything, the development once again underscores the need to promptly install monthly security updates as soon as they are available to prevent Android devices from being exploited. We've reached out to Google for comment and will update this article if we hear back.
| Cyber_Attack |
Hackers can compromise your network just by sending a Fax | https://thehackernews.com/2018/08/hack-printer-fax-machine.html | What maximum a remote attacker can do just by having your Fax machine number?
Believe it or not, but your fax number is literally enough for a hacker to gain complete control over the printer and possibly infiltrate the rest of the network connected to it.
Check Point researchers have revealed details of two critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerabilities they discovered in the communication protocols used in tens of millions of fax machines globally.
You might be thinking who uses Fax these days!
Well, Fax is not a thing of the past. With more than 300 million fax numbers and 45 million fax machines in use globally, Fax is still popular among several business organizations, regulators, lawyers, bankers, and real estate firms.
Since most fax machines are today integrated into all-in-one printers, connected to a WiFi network and PSTN phone line, a remote attacker can simply send a specially-crafted image file via fax to exploit the reported vulnerabilities and seize control of an enterprise or home network.
All the attacker needs to exploit these vulnerabilities is a Fax number, which can be easily found simply by browsing a corporate website or requesting it directly.
Faxploit Attack — Demonstration Video
Dubbed Faxploit, the attack involves two buffer overflow vulnerabilities—one triggers while parsing COM markers (CVE-2018-5925) and another stack-based issue occurs while parsing DHT markers (CVE-2018-5924), which leads to remote code execution.
To demonstrate the attack, Check Point Malware Research Team Lead Yaniv Balmas and security researcher Eyal Itkin used the popular HP Officejet Pro All-in-One fax printers—the HP Officejet Pro 6830 all-in-one printer and OfficeJet Pro 8720.
As shown in the above video, the researchers send an image file loaded with malicious payload through the phone line, and as soon as the fax machine receives it, the image is decoded and uploaded into the fax-printer's memory.
In their case, the researchers used NSA-developed EternalBlue and Double Pulsar exploits, which was leaked by the Shadow Brokers group and was behind the WannaCry ransomware global outcry last year, to take over the connected machine and further spread the malicious code through the network.
"Using nothing but a phone line, we were able to send a fax that could take full control over the printer, and later spread our payload inside the computer network accessible to the printer," the researcher said in a detailed blog post published today.
"We believe that this security risk should be given special attention by the community, changing the way that modern network architectures treat network printers and fax machines."
According to the Check Point researchers, attackers can code the image file with malware including ransomware, cryptocurrency miners, or surveillance tools, depending upon their targets of interest and motives.
Check Point researchers responsibly disclosed their findings to Hewlett Packard, which quickly fixed the flaws in its all-in-one printers and deployed firmware patches in response. A patch is available on HP's support page.
However, the researchers believe the same vulnerabilities could also impact most fax-based all-in-one printers sold by other manufacturers and other fax implementation, such as fax-to-mail services, standalone fax machines, and more.
| Cyber_Attack |
LogJam — This New Encryption Glitch Puts Internet Users at Risk | https://thehackernews.com/2015/05/logjan-ssl-vulnerability.html | After HeartBleed, POODLE and FREAK encryption flaws, a new encryption attack has been emerged over the Internet that allows attackers to read and modify the sensitive data passing through encrypted connections, potentially affecting hundreds of thousands of HTTPS-protected sites, mail servers, and other widely used Internet services.
A team of security researchers has discovered a new attack, dubbed Logjam, that allows a man-in-the-middle (MitM) to downgrade encrypted connections between a user and a Web or email server to use extremely weaker 512-bit keys which can be easily decrypted.
Johns Hopkins crypto researcher Matthew Green along with security experts from the University of Michigan and the French research institute Inria has discovered LogJam a few months ago and published a technical report that details the flaw.
Logjam — Cousin of FREAK
Logjam encryption flaw sounds just like FREAK vulnerability disclosed at the beginning of March.
The FREAK encryption-downgrade attack allows attackers to force SSL/TLS clients, including OpenSSL, to weaken ciphers over the web so that they can easily decrypt the intercepted HTTPS connections.
Freak is an implementation flaw, but Logjam is due to a flaw in the basic design of the transport layer security (TLS) protocol itself, making all web browsers and some mail servers that use TLS to establish secure connections with end-users vulnerable.
Logjam can be exploited on a subset of servers that support the widely used cryptographic algorithm called the "Diffie-Hellman key exchange," which allows protocols like HTTPS, SSH, SMTPS, IPsec to negotiate a secret key and create a secure connection.
Reasons to worry about Logjam vulnerability:
The flaw allows an attacker to trick a web browser into believing that it is using a regular key, not the export key version.
Many PCs reuse the same large numbers to generate the keys, which makes them easier for attackers to crack.
The flaw has been present for more than 20 years affecting HTTPS, SSH, IPsec, SMTPS, and other protocols that rely on TLS.
The flaw affects any server supporting DHE_EXPORT ciphers and all modern browsers. An estimated 8.4 percent of the top one Million sites and a significant percentage of mail servers are vulnerable to the new vulnerability because they support those export keys.
90s WEAK EXPORT-GRADE ENCRYPTION
Like Freak, Logjam is another exploit that takes advantage of legacy encryption standards imposed by the U.S. government in the 1990s-era on US developers who wanted their software products to be used abroad.
The regime was standardized by the Clinton administration so that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other US intelligence agencies like NSA (National Security Agency) could easily break the encryption used by foreign entities.
"To comply with 1990s-era U.S. export restrictions on cryptography, SSL 3.0 and TLS 1.0 supported reduced-strength DHE_EXPORT cipher suites that were restricted to primes no longer than 512 bits," reads the paper.
Let's revisit Snowden Leaks:
A large bunch of NSA confidential documents leaked by former NSA employee Edward Snowden revealed the Global mass surveillance programs, including the mass crypto attacks carried out by the agency but the documents didn't mention how they actually made it possible.
I think disclosure of Logjam attack made it somewhat clear that how the NSA with large amounts of computing power would have been able to break even the stronger encryption that uses the widely used algorithm.
"A close reading of published NSA leaks shows that the agency's attacks on VPNs are consistent with having achieved such a break," the paper notes.
Check Now! If Yor are Vulnerable to Logjam
You can check whether your browser is vulnerable by clicking here. At the time of writing, some major browsers are still vulnerable to the Logjam attack. However, Google security team is already working to increase the SSL requirement in Chrome to 1024 bit.
How to Protect Yourself?
Security researchers recommended all server administrators to disable support for the export-grade (DHE_EXPORT) cipher suites that allow Diffie-Hellman connections to be downgraded, and generate a new and unique 2048-bit Diffie-Hellman group.
The researchers who discovered the flaw have also provided a detailed guide with step-by-step instructions for securely deploying Diffie-Hellman for TLS, as well as more technical details of the vulnerability on their website.
Moreover, users are strongly encouraged to install browser and e-mail client upgrades as soon as they arrive. Also, developers should use the latest libraries and reject Diffie-Hellman groups shorter than 1024 bits.
| Vulnerability |
Hackers Can Now Steal Data Even From Faraday Cage Air-Gapped Computers | https://thehackernews.com/2018/02/airgap-computer-hacking.html | A team of security researchers—which majorly focuses on finding clever ways to get into air-gapped computers by exploiting little-noticed emissions of a computer's components like light, sound and heat—have published another research showcasing that they can steal data not only from an air gap computer but also from a computer inside a Faraday cage.
Air-gapped computers are those that are isolated from the Internet and local networks and so, are believed to be the most secure devices that are difficult to infiltrate.
Whereas, Faraday cages are metallic enclosures that even blocks all electromagnetic signals, such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, cellular and other wireless communications, making any device kept inside the cage, even more, isolate from outside networks.
However, Cybersecurity Research Center at Israel's Ben Gurion University, directed by 38-year-old Mordechai Guri, has developed two techniques that helped them exfiltrate data from computers placed inside a Faraday cage.
Dubbed MAGNETO [pdf] and ODINI [pdf], both the techniques make use of proof-of-concept (PoC) malware installed on an air-gapped computer inside the Faraday cage to control the "magnetic fields emanating from the computer by regulating workloads on the CPU cores" and use it to transmit data stealthily.
"Everyone was talking about breaking the air gap to get in, but no one was talking about getting the information out," Guri says. "That opened the gate to all this research, to break the paradigm that there's a hermetic seal around air-gapped networks."
According to the researcher, once a computer (no matter if it is air-gapped or inside a Faraday cage) has been infected, hackers can exfiltrate stolen data without needing to wait for another traditional connection to the infected machine.
How MAGNETO & ODINI Attacks Work:
Once a motivated attacker somehow succeeded in planting malware on an air-gapped computer, the malware then collects small pieces of information, like keylogging data, encryption keys, credential tokens, and passwords.
Also Read: CIA developed Malware for Hacking Air-Gapped Networks.
The PoC malware developed by the team then electrically generates a pattern of magnetic field frequencies by regulating CPU's workload, which can be achieved by overloading the CPU with calculations that increase power consumption and generate a stronger magnetic field.
These electromagnetic (acoustic, optical and thermal) emissions from the infected computer are powerful enough to carry a small stream of stolen data to a nearby device, a receiver planted by the hacker.
The process involves translating data first into binary, i.e. 0 and 1, and the transmitting it into morse-code-like patterns in accordance with electromagnetic emission.
"The transmitting program leaves only a small footprint in the memory, making its presence easier to hide from AVs. At the OS level, the transmitting program requires no special or elevated privileges (e.g., root or admin), and hence can be initiated from an ordinary userspace process," the paper reads.
"The transmitting code mainly consists of basic CPU operations such as busy loops, which do not expose malicious behaviors, making it highly evasive from automated analysis tools."
Also Read: Stealing Data from Air-Gapped Computers Using CCTV Cameras
While both MAGNETO and ODINI attacks are designed to exfiltrate data from a secured computer using electromagnetic emissions, the only difference between the two is:
MAGNETO is a short-distance attack where an Android app installed on the attacker's smartphone can receive stolen data with the help of phone's magnetometer— a magnetic sensor that can transmit data even if the smartphone is placed inside a Faraday bag or is set to airplane mode.
ODINI attack enables attackers to capture electromagnetic signals from a slightly longer range using a dedicated magnetic sensor.
In case of MAGNETO, the team managed to achieve only up to 5 bits/sec over a distance of up to 12.5 cm (5 inches), while ODINI is quite more efficient with a maximum transfer rate of 40 bits/sec over a range of 100 to 150 cm (3-5 feet).
Both ODINI and MAGNETO also work if the targeted air-gapped device is inside a Faraday cage, which is designed to block electromagnetic fields, including Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, cellular, and other wireless communications.
Researchers suggest three different approaches that can be used to prevent attackers from establishing a covert magnetic channel, i.e., shielding, jamming, and zoning.
Video Demonstration of MAGNETO And ODINI Attacks
The team published proof-of-concept video demonstrations for both MAGNETO and ODINI attacks, which shows both the attacks in action.
It's not the first time Ben-Gurion researchers came up with a covert technique to target air-gapped computers. Their previous research of hacking air-gap computers include:
aIR-Jumper attack that steals sensitive information from air-gapped computers with the help of infrared-equipped CCTV cameras that are used for night vision.
USBee attack that can be used steal data from air-gapped computers using radio frequency transmissions from USB connectors.
DiskFiltration attack that can steal data using sound signals emitted from the hard disk drive (HDD) of the targeted air-gapped computer;
BitWhisper that relies on heat exchange between two computer systems to stealthily siphon passwords or security keys;
AirHopper that turns a computer's video card into an FM transmitter to capture keystrokes;
Fansmitter technique that uses noise emitted by a computer fan to transmit data; and
GSMem attack that relies on cellular frequencies.
| Cyber_Attack |
Linux Ransomware targeting Servers and Threatening Webmasters to Pay | https://thehackernews.com/2015/11/linux-ransomware.html | Since past few years, Ransomware has emerged as one of the catastrophic malware programs that lets hacker encrypts all the contents of a victim's hard drive or/and server and demands ransom (typically to be paid in Bitcoin) in exchange for a key to decrypt it.
Until now cyber criminals were targeting computers, smartphones and tablets, but now it appears they are creating ransomware that makes the same impact but for Web Sites – specifically holding files, pages and images of the target website for Ransom.
Dubbed Linux.Encoder.1 by Russian antivirus firm Dr.Web, the new strain of ransomware targets Linux-powered websites and servers by encrypting MySQL, Apache, and home/root folders associated with the target site and asking for 1 Bitcoin (~ $300) to decrypt the files.
The ransomware threat is delivered to the target website through known vulnerabilities in website plugins or third-party software.
Must Read: FBI Suggests Ransomware Victims — 'Just Pay the Ransom Money'.
Once infected, the Linux.Encoder.1 malware encrypts all files in the Home directories on the system as well as Backup directories and the System Folders associated with Web site files, pages, images, code libraries and scripts.
Ransomware Uses AES Encryption
According to the security researchers, the ransomware in question needs root privileges to work. Additionally, when it launches, the malware starts downloading:
The Ransom Message containing the demands of fraudsters
A file containing the public RSA key
After that, the Ransomware starts as a daemon and deletes all of the original files. The RSA key is then used to store AES keys that are used by the ransomware to encrypt the local files on the infected computer.
The ransomware also adds the .encrypt extension to each file it encrypts and writes a ransom text message in every folder.
Also Read: FBI Offers $3 Million Reward For Arrest Of Russian Hacker behind CryptoLocker Ransomware.
Targeting Linux-Powered Websites and Servers
The malware specifically encrypts files in folders that are typically found in Linux Web server setups, including directories like home, root, MySQL, Apache, and any directory that includes terms such as git, svn, webapp, www, public_html, or backup.
Moreover, the ransomware looks for files that have extensions specific to Web development environments including .js, .css, .properties, .xml, .ruby, .php, .html, .gz, and .asp, as well as other file extensions like .rar, .7z, .xls, .pdf, .doc, .avi, .mov, .png, and .jpg.
Once the victim pays the ransom amount, the system receives a signal to pass over the directories again to decrypt the files.
Until security researchers create a decryption program, they recommend webmasters to backup all important data and keep all their files in place in case they are targeted.
Also Read: Anyone can Now Create their Own Ransomware using This Hacking ToolKit.
| Malware |
New Report Explains COVID-19's Impact on Cyber Security | https://thehackernews.com/2020/09/covid-cybersecurity-report.html | Most cybersecurity professionals fully anticipated that cybercriminals would leverage the fear and confusion surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic in their cyberattacks.
Of course, malicious emails would contain subjects relating to Covid-19, and malicious downloads would be Covid-19 related. This is how cybercriminals operate. Any opportunity to maximize effectiveness, no matter how contemptible, is taken.
While many have anecdotally suggested ways in which Covid-19 related cyberattacks would unfold, we have little data supporting the actual impact of Covid-19 on cybersecurity. Several have reported that the number of malicious emails with the subject related to Covid-19 has grown several hundred percent and that the majority of Covid-19 related emails are now malicious.
Beyond the anticipated increase in Covid-19 related malicious emails, videos, and an array of downloadable files, which we all anticipated, what else is going on behind the scenes?
Interestingly, cybersecurity company Cynet has just released a report (download here) detailing changes in cyberattacks they've observed across North America and Europe since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. The report shares several interesting data points and findings, such as the cyberattack volume change observed in various industry sectors, the increased use of spear-phishing as an initial attack vector, and the approaches being used to distribute malware in spear-phishing attacks.
The two more interesting findings follow.
Fighting Fire with Fire
Cynet found that cybercriminals are not just "sort of" leveraging the Covid-19 pandemic, they're going all in. Cybercriminals are pulling out their entire arsenal of new attack methods to ensure attack success best. This is like a sports team using all the new plays they've developed in one game rather than spreading them out across the season.
The report states that the percentage of attacks using new techniques has historically been around 20%. That is, 80% of attacks have used well-known techniques that are easily identified, assuming companies have updated preventative measures in place.
Since the Covid-19 pandemic, Cynet found that new attacks jumped to roughly 35% of all attacks. New attack techniques cannot be sufficiently detected by antivirus software alone and can only be effectively discovered using newer behavioral detection mechanisms. That is, the new detection approaches must be used to detect the new attack techniques being deployed.
Overburdened Security Staffs
Another interesting observation in the Cynet report is a huge spike in clients requesting expert assistance from their detection and response team (which Cynet calls CyOps). Client engagements increased a whopping 250% during the pandemic.
Beyond using advanced detection and response mechanisms, deep cybersecurity skills are required to detect and mitigate the sharp rise in the new attack techniques deployed during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The Cure?
Unfortunately, many companies do not yet have advanced detection and response technologies, such as Extended Detection and Response (XDR), or ongoing access to a 24x7 managed detection and response (MDR) team. When cyberattacks using new techniques spike as they are during this pandemic (or could do at any time), companies without these advanced protections are at higher risk.
We strongly recommend investigating both XDR and MDR solutions as a way to futureproof and immunize your cybersecurity stack.
And regardless of the security stack you have deployed, be wary of new malware attacks. Use threat hunting techniques to scour your systems to ensure new malware has not slipped through the cracks. The uptick in new malware means prevention and detection become trickier, and continuous threat hunting must become the norm.
Download the report here.
| Cyber_Attack |
Hacking Facebook Accounts Using Android 'Same Origin Policy' Vulnerability | https://thehackernews.com/2014/12/Hacking-Facebook-account.html | A serious security vulnerability has been discovered in the default web browser of the Android OS lower than 4.4 running on a large number of Android devices that allows an attacker to bypass the Same Origin Policy (SOP).
The Android Same Origin Policy (SOP) vulnerability (CVE-2014-6041) was first disclosed right at the beginning of September 2014 by an independent security researcher Rafay Baloch. He found that the AOSP (Android Open Source Platform) browser installed on Android 4.2.1 is vulnerable to Same Origin Policy (SOP) bypass bug that allows one website to steal data from another.
Security researchers at Trend micro in collaboration with Facebook have discovered many cases of Facebook users being targeted by cyber attacks that actively attempt to exploit this particular flaw in the web browser because the Metasploit exploit code is publicly available, which made the exploitation of the vulnerability much easier.
The Same Origin Policy is one of the guiding principles that seek to protect users' browsing experience. The SOP is actually designed to prevent pages from loading code that is not part of their own resource, ensuring that no third-party can inject code without the authorization of the owner of the website.
Unfortunately, the SOP has been the victim of Cross-Site scripting vulnerability in older versions of Android smartphones that helps attackers to serve the victims a malicious JavaScript file stored in a cloud storage account.
In this particular attack, a link will be served using a particular Facebook page that could lead Facebook users to a malicious website.
However, the "page contains obfuscated JavaScript code, which includes an attempt to load a Facebook URL in an inner frame. The user will only see a blank page as the page's HTML has been set not to display anything via its div tag, while the inner frame has a size of one pixel," Simon Huang, a mobile security engineer at Trend Micro, wrote in a blog post.
JavaScript code could allow an attacker to perform various tasks on the victim's Facebook account, on behalf of the legitimate account holder. According to the researcher, hackers can do almost anything with the hacked Facebook account using JavaScript code. Some of the activities are listed as follows:
Adding Friends
Like and Follow any Facebook page
Modify Subscriptions
Authorize Facebook apps to access the user's public profile, friends list, birthday information, likes.
To steal the victim's access tokens and upload them to their server.
Collect analytics data (such as victims' location, HTTP referrer, etc.) using the legitimate service.
Security researchers have observed that the cyber crooks behind this campaign rely on an official BlackBerry app maintained by BlackBerry in order to steal the access tokens and thus hacking Facebook accounts. Using the name of a trusted developer like BlackBerry, the attacker want the campaign to remain undetected. Trend Micro reported BlackBerry about their findings.
"The mobile malware using the Android SOP Exploit (Android Same Origin Policy Bypass Exploit) is designed to target Facebook users regardless of their mobile device platform," Blackberry told Trend Micro in a statement. "However, it attempts to take advantage of the trusted BlackBerry brand name by using our Facebook web app. BlackBerry is continuously working with Trend Micro and Facebook to detect and mitigate this attack. Note that the issue is not a result of an exploit to Blackberry's hardware, software, or network."
Trend Micro is working together with Facebook and BlackBerry in an attempt to detect the attack and prevent the attack from being carried out against new Android users.
All Android devices upto Android 4.4 KitKat are vulnerable to this SOP vulnerability. However, a patch was offered by Google back in September, but millions of Android smartphones users are still vulnerable to the attack because the manufacturer of the smartphone no longer pushes the update to its customers or the device itself does not support a newer edition of the operating system.
The SOP vulnerability resides in the browser of the Android devices, which can't be uninstalled because it's usually part of the operating system in-build feature. So, in order to protect yourself, just Disable the BROWSER from your Android devices by going to Settings > Apps > All and looking for its icon. By opening it, you'll find a DISABLE button, Select it and disable the Browser.
| Vulnerability |
Android 4.3 and Earlier versions Vulnerable to Critical Code-Execution Flaw | https://thehackernews.com/2014/06/android-43-and-earlier-versions.html | A critical code-execution vulnerability almost affecting everyone those are not running the most updated version of Google Android, i.e. Android version 4.4 also known as KitKat.
After nine months of vulnerability disclosure to the Android security team, researchers of the Application Security team at IBM have finally revealed all the possible details of a serious code-execution vulnerability that still affects the Android devices running versions 4.3 and earlier, which could allow attackers to exfiltrate sensitive information from the vulnerable devices.
"Considering Android's fragmented nature and the fact that this was a code-execution vulnerability, we decided to wait a bit with the public disclosure," said Roee Hay, a security research group leader at IBM.
The researchers found the stack buffer overflow vulnerability that resides in the Android's KeyStore storage service, which according to the Android developers' website is the service code running in Android responsible for storing and securing device's cryptographic keys.
CAUSE OF THE CRITICAL FLAW
According to the researchers, the vulnerability occurred due the absent bounds check for a stack buffer created by the "KeyStore::getKeyForName" method.
"This function has several callers, which are accessible by external applications using the Binder interface (e.g., 'android::KeyStoreProxy::get'). Therefore, the 'keyName' variable can be controllable with an arbitrary size by a malicious application," Hay said. "The 'encode_key' routine that is called by 'encode_key_for_uid' can overflow the 'filename' buffer, since bounds checking is absent."
ANDROID VULNERABILITY IMPACT
While IBM's researchers haven't seen this vulnerability being exploited in the wild yet. But if successfully exploited, would compromise a device completely allowing an attacker to execute malicious code of their choice under the keystore process.
Consequently, the attacker could gain access to the device's sensitive information such as device's lock-screen credentials, encrypted and decrypted master keys, data and hardware-backed key identifiers from the memory, as well as the ability to carry out cryptographic operations such as arbitrary signing of data on behalf of the users.
ATTACK VECTOR
While this could be accomplished only with the use of a malicious application, but there are a number of obstacles for the working exploit to overcome.
That means, a malicious application must have ability to bypass memory-based protections native to the operating system including Data Execution Prevention (DEP) and Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR).
DEP is an exploit mitigation that limits where code can be executed and helps prevent certain malicious exploits, but the attackers have had success using shellcode or Return Oriented Programming (ROP) attacks in order to bypass DEP.
While, ASLR specifically reduces buffer overflow attacks that exploit vulnerabilities like the one elaborated in this article. ASLR randomizes the memory locations used by system files and other programs, making it much harder for an attacker to correctly guess the location of a given process.
An attacker would also need to overcome the stack canaries present in Android, which is used to detect stack buffer overflow bugs such as this one before execution of malicious code can occur. Moreover, Android also makes use of encoding, which is also an obstacle for the attacker to overcome.
"However, the Android KeyStore is respawned every time it terminates," Hay cautions. "This behavior enables a probabilistic approach; moreover, the attacker may even theoretically abuse ASLR to defeat the encoding."
LATEST UPDATE - ANDROID 4.4.4
Currently Google is rolling out Android KitKat 4.4.4 with build number KTU84P (branch kitkat-mr2.1-release) to several Nexus devices, including Nexus 4, 5, 7, and 10. Latest update primarily addresses the OpenSSL CCS Injection Vulnerability (CVE-2014-0224), which was discovered in OpenSSL after the Heartbleed bug was uncovered.
So if you haven't updated your OS, this might be a good time to do it. Users can check to see if the update is available for their device by accessing Settings > About Phone > System Updates.
| Cyber_Attack |
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.
| Malware |
0-Days Found in iPhone X, Samsung Galaxy S9, Xiaomi Mi6 Phones | https://thehackernews.com/2018/11/mobile-hacking-exploits.html | At Pwn2Own 2018 mobile hacking competition held in Tokyo on November 13-14, white hat hackers once again demonstrated that even the fully patched smartphones running the latest version of software from popular smartphone manufacturers can be hacked.
Three major flagship smartphones—iPhone X, Samsung Galaxy S9, and Xiaomi Mi6—were among the devices that successfully got hacked at the annual mobile hacking contest organized by Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative (ZDI), earning white hat hackers a total of $325,000 in reward.
Teams of hackers participated from different countries or representing different cybersecurity companies disclosed a total of 18 zero-day vulnerabilities in mobile devices made by Apple, Samsung, and Xiaomi, as well as crafted exploits that allowed them to completely take over the targeted devices.
Apple iPhone X Running iOS 12.1 — GOT HACKED!
A team of two researchers, Richard Zhu and Amat Cama, who named themselves Fluoroacetate, discovered and managed to exploit a pair of vulnerabilities in a fully patched Apple iPhone X over Wi-Fi.
The duo combined a just-in-time (JIT) vulnerability in the iOS web browser (Safari) along with an out-of-bounds write bug for the sandbox escape and escalation to exfiltrate data from the iPhone running iOS 12.1.
For their demonstration, the pair chose to retrieve a photo that had recently been deleted from the target iPhone, which certainly came as a surprise to the person in the picture. The research earned them $50,000 in prize money.
Richard Zhu and Amat Cama (Team Fluoroacetate)
Fluoroacetate team also attempted to exploit the baseband on the iPhone X, but could not get their exploit working in the time allotted.
Another team of researchers from UK-based MWR Labs (a division of F-Secure), which included Georgi Geshev, Fabi Beterke, and Rob Miller, also targeted the iPhone X in the browser category but failed to get their exploit running within the time allotted.
ZDI said it will acquire those vulnerabilities through its general ZDI program.
Samsung Galaxy S9 — Also, GOT HACKED!
Besides iPhone X, Fluoroacetate team also hacked into the Samsung Galaxy S9 by exploiting a memory heap overflow vulnerability in the phone's baseband component and obtaining code execution. The team earned $50,000 in prize money for the issue.
"Baseband attacks are especially concerning since someone can choose not to join a Wi-Fi network, but they have no such control when connecting to baseband," Zero Day Initiative wrote in a blog post (Day 1).
Three more different vulnerabilities were discovered by the MWR team, who combined them to successfully exploit the Samsung Galaxy S9 over Wi-Fi by forcing the device to a captive portal without any user interaction.
Next, the team used an unsafe redirect and an unsafe application load in order to install their custom application on the target Samsung Galaxy S9 device. MWR Labs was rewarded $30,000 for their exploit.
Xiaomi Mi6 — Yes, This Too GOT HACKED!
Fluoroacetate did not stop there. The team also managed to successfully exploit the Xiaomi Mi6 handset via NFC (near-field communications).
"Using the touch-to-connect feature, they forced the phone to open the web browser and navigate to their specially crafted webpage," ZDI said.
"During the demonstration, we didn't even realize that action was occurring until it was too late. In other words, a user would have no chance to prevent this action from happening in the real world."
The vulnerability earned the Fluoroacetate team $30,000 in prize money.
On Day 2 of the competition, the Fluoroacetate team also successfully utilized an integer overflow vulnerability in the JavaScript engine of the web browser of the Xiaomi Mi6 smartphone that allowed them to exfiltrate a picture from the device.
The bug earned them another $25,000.
Georgi Geshev, Fabi Beterke, and Rob Miller (MWR Labs)
MWR Labs also tried its hands on the Xiaomi Mi6 smartphone and combined five different bugs to silently install a custom application via JavaScript, bypass the application whitelist, and automatically launch the app.
To achieve their goal, the white hat hackers first forced the Xiaomi Mi6 phone's default web browser to navigate to a malicious website, when the phone connected to a Wi-Fi server controlled by them.
The combination of vulnerabilities earned the MWR team $30,000.
On Day 2, the MWR team combined a download flaw along with a silent app installation to load their custom application and exfiltrate some pictures from the phone. This earned them another $25,000.
A separate researcher, Michael Contreras, managed to exploit a JavaScript type confusion vulnerability to obtain code execution on the Xiaomi Mi6 handset. He earned himself $25,000.
Fluoroacetate Won 'Master of Pwn' Title This Year
With the highest of 45 points and a total of $215,000 prize money, Fluoroacetate researchers Cama and Zhu earned the title 'Master of Pwn,' logging five out of six successful demonstrations of exploits against iPhone X, Galaxy S9, and Xiaomi Mi6.
Details of all the zero-day vulnerabilities discovered and exploited in the competition will be available in 90 days, as per the pwn2Own contest's protocol, which includes notifying vendors and OEM patch deployments.
The vulnerabilities will remain open until the affected vendors issue security patches to address them.
| Vulnerability |
This Malware Can Secretly Auto-Install any Android App to Your Phone | https://thehackernews.com/2015/11/android-malware-auto-install.html | Own an Android Smartphone?
Hackers can install any malicious third-party app on your smartphone remotely even if you have clearly tapped a reject button of the app.
Security researchers have uncovered a trojanized adware family that has the capability to automatically install any app on an Android device by abusing the operating system's accessibility features.
Michael Bentley, head of response at mobile security firm Lookout, warned in a blog post published Thursday that the team has found three adware families:
Shedun (GhostPush)
Kemoge (ShiftyBug)
Shuanet
Also Read: Android Malware Can Spy On You Even When Your Mobile Is Off
All the three adware families root-infect Android devices in order to prevent their removal and give attackers unrestricted access to the devices.
But, it seems that the Shedun adware family has capabilities that go beyond the reach of other adware families.
The Malware Doesn't Exploit Any Vulnerability
It is worth noting that the malware does not exploit any flaw in the service to hijack an Android device and instead relies on the service's legitimate functionality.
During the installation, apps from the Shedun adware family tricks users into granting them access to the Android Accessibility Service, which is meant to provide users alternative ways to interact with their smartphone devices.
Also Read: Kemoge: Latest Android Malware that Can Root Your Smartphone
By gaining access to the accessibility service, Shedun can:
Read the text that appears on the phone screen
Determine an app installation prompt
Scroll through the permission list
Finally, Press the install button without any physical interaction from the user
Video Demonstration:
You can watch the following video that shows the forced installation of an app in action.
The trojanized app actually masquerades itself as an official app available in Google Play Store and then is pushed to third-party markets.
The worrisome part is that Shedun apps can't be easily uninstalled, as the apps root the victim's device and then embed themselves in the system partition in an effort to persist even after factory reset.
Also Read: Android Bootkit Malware Infected Millions of Devices
Lookout categorized them as "Trojanized Adware" because the goal of this malware is to install third-party apps and serve aggressive advertising.
Legitimate applications also use the Android Accessibility Service for features like to grant expanded capability to phone tinkerers. So, users are, as always, advised to carefully make use of the third-party app markets.
| Malware |
Flickr Cross-Site Request Forgery Vulnerability Patched | https://thehackernews.com/2014/08/flickr-cross-site-request-forgery.html | Yahoo-owned Flickr, one of the biggest online photo management and sharing website in the world was recently impacted by a web application vulnerability, which could allow an attacker to modify users' profile image.
Flickr is one of the most popular photo sharing website with more than 87 million users, therefore some top major target for cybercriminals. The site was vulnerable to the most common vulnerability known as Cross-Site Request Forgery (XSRF or CSRF), which is very easy to exploit by attackers.
Cross-Site Request Forgery is a method of attacking a Web site in which an intruder masquerades as a legitimate and trusted user. All the attacker need to do is get the target browser to make a request to your website on their behalf. If they can either:
Convince your users to click on a HTML page they've constructed
Insert arbitrary HTML in a target website that your users visit
Not too difficult, is it?
Abdullah Hussam, a 17 years old programmer from Iraq found that just by modifying parameters value of a Flickr HTTP request, one can trick the web service to modify users' profiles.
When a user uploads a photo on Flickr, it will redirect the user to the page where they can add info on the photo like tags, description, and title. The request it make is as shown below:
edit_done=1&upload_ids=14401638983&just_photo_ids=&set_id=&magic_cookie=32e285e98bbef3aa6afd8c879891c01b&title_14401638983=XSRF+bug+POC1&description_14401638983=XSRF+bug+POC1&tags_14401638983=XSRF+POC1&tags_14401638983=XSRF+POC2&Submit=SAVE
According to Abdullah, the flaw resides in the "magic_cookie" parameter, which Flickr used to protect its website users from XSRF vulnerability.
In order to exploit Flickr XSRF vulnerability, an attacker can simply setup a webpage on his server with custom HTML form and custom parameter values, as shown. By keeping "magic_cookie" parameter value empty and changing Photo ID to the new image ID, the exploit will be able to bypass protection mechanism.
When the victim clicks a button on the web page, it generates a manipulated HTTP request to the server, which force the Flickr to replace victim's profile image with new image.
"The last thing I did it was delete the value of magic cookie, in the first try it failed but in the second it works!," Abdullah told The Hacker News. "The all value (title, description, tags) got change and I got redirected to my photos."
He has also provided a video demonstration as a Proof of Concept:
The teen reported the vulnerability to Yahoo! and it was fixed in less than 12 hours by the Yahoo! security team. He got the reply from Yahoo! after more than a month and is still waiting for his bounty.
| Vulnerability |
A Second Hacker Group May Have Also Breached SolarWinds, Microsoft Says | https://thehackernews.com/2020/12/a-second-hacker-group-may-have-also.html | As the probe into the SolarWinds supply chain attack continues, new digital forensic evidence has brought to light that a separate threat actor may have been abusing the IT infrastructure provider's Orion software to drop a similar persistent backdoor on target systems.
"The investigation of the whole SolarWinds compromise led to the discovery of an additional malware that also affects the SolarWinds Orion product but has been determined to be likely unrelated to this compromise and used by a different threat actor," Microsoft 365 research team said on Friday in a post detailing the Sunburst malware.
What makes the newly revealed malware, dubbed "Supernova," different is that unlike the Sunburst DLL, Supernova ("app_web_logoimagehandler.ashx.b6031896.dll") is not signed with a legitimate SolarWinds digital certificate, signaling that the compromise may be unrelated to the previously disclosed supply chain attack.
In a standalone write-up, researchers from Palo Alto Networks said the Supernova malware is compiled and executed in-memory, permitting the attacker to bypass endpoint detection and response (EDR) systems and "deploy full-featured – and presumably sophisticated – .NET programs in reconnaissance, lateral movement and other attack phases."
How the Sunburst Backdoor Operates
The discovery is yet another indication that in addition to being a lucrative infection vector for threat actors, the breach of SolarWinds — which cast a wide net of 18,000 companies and government agencies — had been executed with a far broader scope and extraordinary sophistication.
The adversaries used what's called a supply chain attack, exploiting SolarWinds Orion network management software updates the company distributed between March and June of this year to plant malicious code in a DLL file (aka Sunburst or Solorigate) on the targets' servers that's capable of stealthily gathering critical information, running remote commands, and exfiltrating the results to an attacker-controlled server.
Analysis of the Solorigate modus operandi has also revealed that the campaign chose to steal data only from a select few of thousands of victims, opting to escalate their attacks based on intel amassed during an initial reconnaissance of the target environment for high-value accounts and assets.
The escalation involves the predefined command-and-control (C2) server — a now-sinkholed domain called "avsvmcloud[.]com" — responding to the infected system with a second C2 server that allows the Sunburst backdoor to run specific commands for privilege escalation exploration, credential theft, and lateral movement.
The fact that the compromised DLL file is digitally signed implies a compromise of the company's software development or distribution pipeline, with evidence suggesting that the attackers have been conducting a dry run of the campaign as early as October 2019.
The October files did not have a backdoor embedded in them in the way that subsequent software updates SolarWinds Orion customers downloaded in the spring of 2020 did — rather, it was mainly used to test if the modifications showed up in the newly released updates as expected.
The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), in an alert last week, said it found evidence of initial infection vectors using flaws other than the SolarWinds software.
Cisco, VMware, and Deloitte Confirm Malicious Orion Installations
Cybersecurity firms Kaspersky and Symantec have said they each identified 100 customers who downloaded the trojanized package containing the Sunburst backdoor, with the latter finding traces of a second-stage payload called Teardrop in a small number of organizations.
The specific number of infected victims remains unknown at this time, but it has steadily increased since cybersecurity firm FireEye revealed it had been breached via SolarWinds's software early this month. So far, several US government agencies and private companies, including Microsoft, Cisco, Equifax, General Electric, Intel, NVIDIA, Deloitte, and VMware have reported finding the malware on its servers.
"Following the SolarWinds attack announcement, Cisco Security immediately began our established incident response processes," Cisco said in a statement to The Hacker News via email.
"We have isolated and removed Orion installations from a small number of lab environments and employee endpoints. At this time, there is no known impact to Cisco products, services, or to any customer data. We continue to investigate all aspects of this evolving situation with the highest priority."
FireEye was the first to expose the wide-ranging espionage campaign on December 8 after discovering that the threat actor had stolen its arsenal of Red Team penetration testing tools, making it so far the only instance where the attackers escalated access thus far. No foreign governments have announced compromises of their own systems.
Although media reports have cited it to be the work of APT29, Russia has denied involvement in the hacking campaign. Neither have cybersecurity companies and researchers from FireEye, Microsoft, and Volexity attributed these attacks to the threat actor.
| Malware |
KDE Linux Desktops Could Get Hacked Without Even Opening Malicious Files | https://thehackernews.com/2019/08/kde-desktop-linux-vulnerability.html | If you are running a KDE desktop environment on your Linux operating system, you need to be extra careful and avoid downloading any ".desktop" or ".directory" file for a while.
A cybersecurity researcher has disclosed an unpatched zero-day vulnerability in the KDE software framework that could allow maliciously crafted .desktop and .directory files to silently run arbitrary code on a user's computer—without even requiring the victim to actually open it.
KDE Plasma is one of the most popular open-source widget-based desktop environment for Linux users and comes as a default desktop environment on many Linux distributions, such as Manjaro, openSUSE, Kubuntu, and PCLinuxOS.
Security researcher Dominik Penner who discovered the vulnerability contacted The Hacker News, informing that there's a command injection vulnerability in KDE 4/5 Plasma desktop due to the way KDE handles .desktop and .directory files.
"When a .desktop or .directory file is instantiated, it unsafely evaluates environment variables and shell expansions using KConfigPrivate::expandString() via the KConfigGroup::readEntry() function," Penner said.
Exploiting this flaw, which affects KDE Frameworks package 5.60.0 and below, is simple and involves some social engineering as an attacker would need to trick KDE user into downloading an archive containing a malicious .desktop or .directory file.
"Using a specially crafted .desktop file a remote user could be compromised by simply downloading and viewing the file in their file manager, or by dragging and dropping a link of it into their documents or desktop," the researcher explained.
"Theoretically, if we can control config entries and trigger their reading, we can achieve command injection / RCE."
As a proof-of-concept, Penner also published exploit code for the vulnerability along with two videos that successfully demonstrate the attack scenarios exploiting the KDE KDesktopFile Command Injection vulnerability.
Apparently, the researcher did not report the vulnerability to the KDE developers before publishing the details and PoC exploits, said KDE Community while acknowledging the vulnerability and assuring users that a fix is on its way.
"Also, if you discover a similar vulnerability, it is best to send an email [email protected] before making it public. This will give us time to patch it and keep users safe before the bad guys try to exploit it," KDE Community said.
Meanwhile, the KDE developers recommended users to "avoid downloading .desktop or .directory files and extracting archives from untrusted sources," for a while until the vulnerability gets patched.
Update — KDE v5.61.0 Patches Command Injection Vulnerability
KDE developers have patched this vulnerability by removing the entire feature of supporting shell commands in the KConfig files, an intentional feature that KDE provides for flexible configuration.
According to the developers, KConfig could be abused by miscreants to make KDE users "install such files and get code executed even without intentional action by the user."
"A file manager trying to find out the icon for a file or directory could end up executing code, or any application using KConfig could end up executing malicious code during its startup phase for instance," KDE said in its security advisory released Wednesday.
"After careful consideration, the entire feature of supporting shell commands in KConfig entries has been removed, because we couldn't find an actual use case for it. If you do have an existing use for the feature, please contact us so that we can evaluate whether it would be possible to provide a secure solution."
Users are recommended to update to version 5.61.0 of KDE Frameworks 5, while users on kdelibs are advised to apply the patch for kdelibs 4.14 provided in the KDE Project advisory.
| Vulnerability |
Hackers Compromise Microsoft Support Agent to Access Outlook Email Accounts | https://thehackernews.com/2019/04/microsoft-outlook-email-hack.html | If you have an account with Microsoft Outlook email service, there is a possibility that your account information has been compromised by an unknown hacker or group of hackers, Microsoft confirmed The Hacker News.
Earlier this year, hackers managed to breach Microsoft's customer support portal and access information related to some email accounts registered with the company's Outlook service.
Yesterday, a user on Reddit publicly posted a screenshot of an email which he received from Microsoft warning that unknown attackers were able to access some information of his OutLook account between 1 January 2019 and 28 March 2019.
Another user on Reddit also confirmed that he/she too received the same email from Microsoft.
According to the incident notification email, as shown below, attackers were able to compromise credentials for one of Microsoft's customer support agents and used it to unauthorisedly access some information related to the affected accounts, but not the content of the emails or attachments.
The information that a Microsoft's customer support agent can view is limited to account email addresses, folder names, subject lines of emails, and the name of other email addresses you communicate with.
"Our data indicates that account-related information (but not the content of any e-mails) could have been viewed, but Microsoft has no indication why that information was viewed or how it may have been used," the company says in the email.
It should be noted that since attackers had an alternative window, i.e., access to customer support account, to partially look inside the affected email accounts without actually having to log into each account, even the two-factor authentication was not able to prevent users' accounts.
At this time, it is not clear how the attackers were able to compromise Microsoft employee, but the tech company confirmed that it has now revoked the stolen credentials and started notifying all affected customers.
In an email to The Hacker News, Microsoft verified the authenticity of the notification email and confirmed the breach saying:
"We addressed this scheme, which affected a limited subset of consumer accounts, by disabling the compromised credentials and blocking the perpetrators' access."
However, Microsoft did not disclose the total number of accounts affected by the incident.
Although the breach did not directly impact your email login credentials, Microsoft recommended users to still consider resetting passwords for their Microsoft accounts just to be on the safer side.
"Microsoft regrets any inconvenience caused by this issue," the company says. "Please be assured that Microsoft takes data protection very seriously and has engaged its internal security and privacy teams in the investigation and resolution of the issue, as well as. additional hardening of systems and processes to prevent such recurrence."
| Cyber_Attack |
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