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300,000 Servers Still Vulnerable to Heartbleed Vulnerability After One Month | https://thehackernews.com/2014/05/300000-servers-still-vulnerable-to_9.html | It's more than a month since we all were warned of the critical OpenSSL Heartbleed vulnerability, but that doesn't mean it disappeared. The critical bug compromised many popular websites and after been discovered the problem was solved. But is that so?
No, not at all! A recent finding from the security researcher Robert David Graham claims that there are still more than 300,000 servers apparently remain vulnerable to the most critical OpenSSL bug, Heartbleed, which is admittedly down in numbers from the previous which resulted in over 600,000 systems a month ago.
Graham announced on the Errata Security blog that he arrived at the number through a recently done global internet scan (or at least the important bits: port 443 of IPv4 addresses), which reveals that exactly 318,239 systems are still vulnerable to the OpenSSL Heartbleed bug and over 1.5 million servers still support the vulnerable "heartbeat" feature of OpenSSL that allowed the critical bug.
"The numbers are a little strange. Last month, I found 28-million systems supporting SSL, but this month I found only 22-million. I suspect the reason is that this time, people detected my Heartbleed "attacks" and automatically firewalled me before the scan completed. Or, another problem is that I may have more traffic congestion at my ISP, which would reduce numbers. (I really need to do a better job detecting that)," Graham wrote in the blog post.
Heartbleed is a critical bug in the popular OpenSSL cryptographic software library that actually resides in the OpenSSL's implementation of the TLS (transport layer security protocols) and DTLS (Datagram TLS) heartbeat extension (RFC6520).
The count may be even larger as these mentioned number counts are only the confirmed cases. Graham may have escaped other systems either because of spam blocking or unorthodox OpenSSL setups. But it's really shocking that after availability of Heartbleed fixes, this number has come up.
"Last month, I found 1-million systems supporting the "heartbeat" feature (with one third patched). This time, I found 1.5-million systems supporting the "heartbeat" feature, with all but the 300k patched. This implies to me that the first response to the bug was to disable heartbeats, then later when people correctly patched the software, heartbeats were re-enabled. Note that only OpenSSL supports heartbeats, meaning that the vast majority of SSL-supporting servers are based on software other than OpenSSL," he wrote.
Now that the bug has been openly revealed and known to everybody, anyone can simply use it to carry out attacks against the still affected systems and 300,000 is really a troubling number. One can imagine the danger and damages caused by the bug if exploited.
Heartbleed is the encryption flaw that left large number of cryptographic keys and private data such as usernames, passwords, and credit card numbers, from the most important sites and services on the Internet open for hackers, forcing some security researchers to warn internet users against using even their everyday sites for the next few days until the problem is fully solved.
A large majority of services including many popular and major services patched their servers almost immediately, but this new global internet scan suggests that cyber criminals could still do plenty of damages against the unpopular and less technically efficient services as well. Once attackers identified the vulnerable server, they could exploit the Heartbleed vulnerability to steal sensitive data and private keys, eavesdrop on passwords in transit, or hijack a session entirely.
Software vulnerabilities may come and go, but this bug is more critical and probably the biggest Internet vulnerability in recent history as it left the contents of a server's memory, where the most sensitive data is stored exposed to the cyber attackers. This new scan was done only on port 443 and Graham said that he will try to scan for other well-known SSL ports, like SMTP and will post the results. Stay Tuned!
| Vulnerability |
Fake antivirus campaign on India's DNA e-newspaper website ! | https://thehackernews.com/2011/05/fake-antivirus-campaign-on-indias-dna-e.html | Fake antivirus campaign on India's DNA e-newspaper website !
DNA (Daily News and Analysis) is an Indian daily English language newspaper. According to Wikipedia, DNA ranks 8th among the top ten English dailies in India. Recently, the Zscaler solution was blocking access to this site, as it contained malicious content. Here is the homepage of this website:
The 'Today's E-newspaper' link (circled above) is an online version of the printed periodical. We discovered that one of the pages from this e-newspaper site was infected with malicious script. Here is the screenshot of that page:
The malicious script tag had been inserted in plain text as can be seen in this screenshot of page
source:
The malicious script tag directs the victim's browser to 'hxxp://vcvsta.com/ur.php'. This page then redirects the user to another malicious site ('hxxp://www4.to-gysave.byinter.net,), which will again redirect victim to random sites hosting fake antivirus campaigns. Here is the screenshot displaying a fake malware alert:
As usual, page employs social engineering tactics, which display fake warning messages and threat names to scare the victim into downloading a fake AV product. The VirusTotal result for the downloaded binary currently shows only 10/43 AV engines detecting this particular attack. Here we have yet another example of a legitimate and popular websites being infected so that the attacker(s) can impact a significant number of victims.
| Malware |
Exploit for most critical Android vulnerability publicly released | https://thehackernews.com/2013/07/android-hacking-vulnerability-exploit.html | What if hackers could take an existing legitimate app or update with a valid digital signature, and modify it in order to use it as a malicious Trojan to access everything on your Android phone or tablet?
Last week, researchers from Bluebox Security announced that the Android operating system has been vulnerable to hackers for the past four years, allowing them to modify or manipulate any legitimate application and enabling them to transform it into a Trojan programme.
The bug hasn't, so far, been spotted being exploited in the wild, but technical details and a proof-of-concept exploit have been published for a recently announced publicly by Pau Oliva Fora, a mobile security engineer at security firm ViaForensics.
Jeff Forristal of Bluebox security stated that the security hole as been around since at least Android 1.6, and it could affect all Android devices i.e. around 900 million devices could be affected by hackers.
CyanogenMod, a popular open source distribution of Android 4.1, has now included a patch for the vulnerability in its firmware code.
Today Google has also released a fix for this particular critical vulnerability, and released to original equipment manufacturers (OEM)s.
In the meantime, if you are running a device that may be vulnerable to this exploit, you should be advised to only install APKs from completely trusted sources, such as the Play Store.
| Vulnerability |
Critical VMware Cloud Director Flaw Lets Hackers Take Over Corporate Servers | https://thehackernews.com/2020/06/vmware-cloud-director-exploit.html | Cybersecurity researchers today disclosed details for a new vulnerability in VMware's Cloud Director platform that could potentially allow an attacker to gain access to sensitive information and control private clouds within an entire infrastructure.
Tracked as CVE-2020-3956, the code injection flaw stems from an improper input handling that could be abused by an authenticated attacker to send malicious traffic to Cloud Director, leading to the execution of arbitrary code.
It's rated 8.8 out of 10 on the CVSS v.3 vulnerability severity scale, making it a critical vulnerability.
VMware Cloud Director is a popular deployment, automation, and management software that's used to operate and manage cloud resources, allowing businesses to data centers distributed across different geographical locations into virtual data centers.
According to the company, the vulnerability can be exploited through the HTML5- and Flex-based UIs, the API Explorer interface, and API access.
The vulnerability impacts VMware Cloud Director versions 10.0.x before 10.0.0.2, 9.7.0.x before 9.7.0.5, 9.5.0.x before 9.5.0.6, and 9.1.0.x before 9.1.0.4.
The vulnerability was identified by a Prague-based ethical hacking firm Citadelo after it was hired earlier this year by an unnamed Fortune 500 enterprise customer to carry out a security audit of its cloud infrastructure.
It has also published a proof-of-concept to demonstrate the exploit's severity.
"Everything started with just a simple anomaly. When we entered ${7*7} as a hostname for the SMTP server in vCloud Director, we received the following error message: String value has an invalid format, value: [49]," Citadelo noted in its report. "It indicated some form of Expression Language injection, as we were able to evaluate simple arithmetic functions on the server-side."
Using this as an entry point, the researchers said they were able to access arbitrary Java classes (e.g. "java.io.BufferedReader") and instantiate them by passing malicious payloads.
Citadelo said it was able to perform the following the set of actions by exploiting the flaw:
View content of the internal system database, including password hashes of any customers allocated to this infrastructure.
Modify the system database to access foreign virtual machines (VM) assigned to different organizations within Cloud Director.
Escalate privileges from "Organization Administrator" to "System Administrator" with access to all cloud accounts by merely changing the password via an SQL query.
Modify the Cloud Director's login page, allowing the attacker to capture passwords of another customer in plaintext, including System Administrator accounts.
Read other sensitive data related to customers, like full names, email addresses, or IP addresses.
After Citadelo privately disclosed the findings to VMware on April 1, the company patched the flaws in a series of updates spanning versions 9.1.0.4, 9.5.0.6, 9.7.0.5, and 10.0.0.2.
VMware has also released a workaround to mitigate the risk of attacks exploiting the issue.
"In general, cloud infrastructure is considered relatively safe because different security layers are being implemented within its core, such as encryption, isolating of network traffic, or customer segmentations. However, security vulnerabilities can be found in any type of application, including the Cloud providers themselves," Tomas Zatko, CEO of Citadelo, said.
| Vulnerability |
WhatsApp vulnerability can be misused for Spreading Malware | https://thehackernews.com/2012/09/whatsapp-vulnerability-can-be-misused.html | A Cross site scripting (XSS) vulnerability in WhatsApp website reported to The Hacker News by Edgard Chammas. WhatsApp is one of the most famous cross-platform mobile messaging app for iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, Windows Phone and Nokia used to send text, video, images, audio b/w Whatsapp users.
Cross-site scripting (XSS) is a type of computer security vulnerability typically found in Web applications, such as web browsers through breaches of browser security, that enables attackers to inject client-side script into Web pages viewed by other users.
Reported vulnerability exist on payment procedure page as shown in above picture. The Sample code given below to demonstrate the vulnerability.
Recently, there has been an increase in web malware and spam activities and such vulnerabilities can be misused by attackers to spread Malwares and rogue applications.
Edgard also demonstrate that How this can be used to trick users to download a fake application (Malware - WhatsApp.apk) from other any evil domain (www.evilwebsite/WhatsApp.apk). in below given example, attacker just using a pop-up window to open fake application download link.
While the official binary is here https://www.whatsapp.com/android/current/WhatsApp.apk
According to reports in 2012 mobile malwares are 50 times increases than previous ever. We request Whatsapp team to fix the vulnerability as soon as possible.
| Malware |
Adobe Gets Hacked; Hackers Steal 2.9 million Adobe Customers accounts | https://thehackernews.com/2013/10/adobe-gets-hacked-hackers-steal-29.html | Hackers broke into Adobe Systems' internal network on Thursday, stealing personal information on 2.9 million customers and the source code for several of Adobe's most popular products. This an absolutely massive blow to Adobe, especially their reputation.
Adobe, which makes Photoshop and other programs, revealed that cyber attackers had access user information, including account IDs and encrypted passwords as well as credit and debit card numbers.
The company did not specify which users of its various software programs were hit. But Products compromised in this attack include Adobe Acrobat, ColdFusion, and ColdFusion Builder.
"We believe these attacks may be related. We are working diligently internally, as well as with external partners and law enforcement, to address the incident." the company said in a customer security alert.
Adobe's Arkin says the company is not aware of zero-day exploits or other specific threats to its customers due to the source code theft. Adobe is resetting the passwords on breached Adobe customer IDs, and users will receive an email if they are affected.
"We have notified the banks processing customer payments for Adobe, so that they can work with the payment card companies and card-issuing banks to help protect customers' accounts."
If you've given your Credit card details to Adobe through their site, it's now a good idea to keep an eye on your transactions.
Adobe has also promised to offer these customers with the option of enrolling in a one-year complimentary credit monitoring membership where available.
In November, 2012 - An Egyptian Hacker named ViruS_HimA also hacked into Adobe servers and leaked private data of 150,000 emails and hashed passwords of Adobe employees and customers/partner of the firm such as the US Military, USAF, Google, NASA DHL and many other companies.
| Cyber_Attack |
Android Malware Can Spy On You Even When Your Mobile Is Off | https://thehackernews.com/2015/02/poweroffhijack-android-malware.html | Security researchers have unearthed a new Android Trojan that tricks victims into believing they have switched their device off while it continues "spying" on the users' activities in the background. So, next time be very sure while you turn off your Android smartphones.
The new Android malware threat, dubbed PowerOffHijack, has been spotted and analyzed by the researchers at the security firm AVG. PowerOffHijack because the nasty malware has a very unique feature - it hijacks the shutdown process of user's mobile phone.
MALWARE WORKS AFTER SWITCHING OFF MOBILES
When users presses the power button on their device, a fake dialog box is shown. The malware mimics the shutdown animation and the device appears to be off, but actually remains on, giving the malicious program freedom to move around on the device and steal data.
"After pressing the power button, you will see the real shutdown animation, and the phone appears off. Although the screen is black, it is still on," AVG's mobile malware research team explained in a blog post. "While the phone is in this state, the malware can make outgoing calls, take pictures and perform many other tasks without notifying the user."
HOW DOES POWEROFFHIJACK MALWARE WORKS ?
Once installed, the malware asks for root-level permissions and tampers with the 'system_server' file of the operating system to affect the shutdown process. The malware particularly hijacks the mWindowManagerFuncs interface, so that it can display a fake shutdown dialog box and animation every time the victim presses the power button.
The nasty malware is apparently being propagated via third-party online app stores, but the researchers haven't mentioned the names of the the innocent-looking apps, also they haven't explained how the malware gains the root access of the device. The code shown by AVG appears to contact Chinese services.
USERS AND ANDROID VERSIONS INFECTED
According to the company, PowerOffHijack malware infects devices running Android versions below 5.0 (Lollipop) and requires root access to perform the tasks.
So far, PowerOffHijack malware has already infected more than 10,000 devices, mostly in China where the malware was first introduced and offered through the local, official app stores.
PowerOffHijack malware has ability to silently send lots of premium-rate text messages, make calls to expensive overseas numbers, take photos and perform many other tasks even if the phone is supposedly switched off.
EASY STEPS TO GET RID OF POWEROFFHIJACK
In order to get rid of PowerOffHijack malware, users are advised to take some simple steps:
To restart infected device manually just take out the battery.
Remove malicious, untrusted and useless apps from your Android device.
Do not install apps from 3rd Party app stores.
Make sure you have a good anti-virus installed and updated on your mobile devices. AVG antivirus product can detect PowerOffHijack malware.
| Malware |
Microsoft Issues Patch for Windows Zero-Day Flaw Under Active Attack | https://thehackernews.com/2018/12/microsoft-patch-updates.html | Microsoft today, on its year-end December Patch Tuesday, released security updates to patch a total 39 vulnerabilities its Windows operating systems and applications—10 of which are rated as critical and other important in severity.
One of the security vulnerabilities patched by the tech giant this month is listed as publicly known at the time of release, and one is a zero-day reported as being actively exploited in the wild by multiple hacking groups, including FruityArmor and SandCat APTs.
Discovered and reported by security researchers at Kaspersky, the zero-day attack exploits an elevation-of-privilege (EoP) bug in the Windows Kernel (ntoskrnl.exe) that could allow malicious programs to execute arbitrary code with higher privileges on the targeted systems.
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2018-8611 and classified important in severity, resides in the Kernel Transaction Manager, which occurs due to improper processing of transacted file operations in kernel mode.
The flaw affects almost all versions of Windows operating system—Windows 7 through Server 2019.
"This vulnerability successfully bypasses modern process mitigation policies, such as Win32k System call Filtering that is used, among others, in the Microsoft Edge Sandbox and the Win32k Lockdown Policy employed in the Google Chrome Sandbox," Kaspersky said.
"Combined with a compromised renderer process, for example, this vulnerability can lead to a full Remote Command Execution exploit chain in the latest state-of-the-art web-browsers."
This is the third zero-day vulnerability Microsoft has back-to-back patched in three consecutive months through its regular monthly patch update to address a Win32K elevation of privilege bug.
Another important bug is a publicly known vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2018-8517, which is a denial-of-service issue in web applications built with the .NET Framework that exists due to improper handling of special web requests.
"The vulnerability can be exploited remotely, without authentication. A remote unauthenticated attacker could exploit this vulnerability by issuing specially crafted requests to the .NET Framework application," Microsoft explains.
The flaw was publicly disclosed, but Microsoft found no evidence of active exploitation of this vulnerability.
In addition to the zero-day and publicly known vulnerabilities, Microsoft patched 10 critical and 29 important vulnerabilities impacting a range of its products, including Windows, Edge, Internet Explorer, ChackraCore, Office and Microsoft Office Services and Web Apps, and the .NET Framework.
Besides its own products, Microsoft's December 2018 Patch Tuesday also includes a security update for a recently-disclosed zero-day flaw in Adobe Flash Player, which was also actively being exploited by a state-sponsored cyber-espionage group.
Users and system administrators are strongly recommended to apply the latest security patches as soon as possible to keep hackers and cybercriminals away from taking control of their systems.
For installing the latest security patch updates, head on to Settings → Update & Security → Windows Update → Check for updates, on your computer system or you can install the updates manually.
| Vulnerability |
Researcher Charlie Miller kicked out from iOS dev program for Exploiting iOS security flaw | https://thehackernews.com/2011/11/researcher-charlie-miller-kicked-out.html | Researcher Charlie Miller kicked out from iOS dev program for Exploiting iOS security flaw
A major security flaw in Apple's iOS operating system that could allow hackers to remotely gain unauthorized access to an iPhone, iPod touch or iPad has been uncovered by a security expert "Charlie Miller ".
Charlie Miller gets a kick of out defeating Apple's security mechanisms, using his hacking skills to break into Macbooks and iPhones. Now, Apple has kicked the security researcher out of its iOS developer program after word got out that he built a proof-of-concept iPhone app to showcase a bypass of the code signing mechanism.
Hours before, a YouTube video that Miller released went viral. In it, he demonstrated how he hijacked an iPhone to run malicious code after installing his Instastock app, which was admitted into the App Store in September.
According to the report, Miller plans to reveal the issue in a presentation at the SysCan security conference in Taiwan next week. As part of his presentation, Miller created an app capable of exploiting the flaw, and uploaded it to the App Store. Though App Store staff discovered a few problem APIs in the app, they didn't notice Miller's use of a special memory area, which allows his app to run unsigned code.
The security expert's app has since been removed from the App Store and his developer account has been suspended. Miller's video follows below.
We've seen plenty of malware on Android, but that's mostly because the Android Market accepts virtually any app and later plucks out the bad weeds. This is a scary first on iOS.
Miller alerted Apple about the weakness three weeks ago. The company acknowledged it and asked how Miller should be credited in a security bulletin that accompanies most iOS release notes. "I'm sure it is something they will fix quickly," Miller noted, suggesting the fix would likely appear before his presentation in Taiwan. "That's what one would hope they would do. I'm sure they are also working on code fixes for the battery draining issue and stuff that they are going to release patch for."
| Vulnerability |
Boys Town Healthcare Data Breach Exposed Personal Details of Patients | https://thehackernews.com/2018/07/data-breach-healthcare.html | Another day, Another data breach!
This time-sensitive and personal data of hundreds of thousands of people at Boys Town National Research Hospital have been exposed in what appears to be the largest ever reported breach by a pediatric care provider or children's hospital.
According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights, the breach incident affected 105,309 individuals, including patients and employees, at the Omaha-based medical organization.
In a "Notice of Data Security Incident" published on its website, the Boys Town National Research Hospital admitted that the organization became aware of an abnormal behavior regarding one of its employees' email account on May 23, 2018.
After launching a forensic investigation, the hospital found that an unknown hacker managed to infiltrate into the employee's email account and stole personal information stored within the email account as a result of unauthorized access.
The hacker accessed the personal and medical data of more than 100,000 patients and employees, including:
Name
Date of birth
Social Security number
Diagnosis or treatment information
Medicare or Medicaid identification number
Medical record number
Billing/claims information
Health insurance information
Disability code
Birth or marriage certificate information
Employer Identification Number
Driver's license number
Passport information
Banking or financial account number
Username and password
With this extensive information in hand, it's most likely that hackers are already selling personal information of victims on the dark web or attempting to carry out further harm to them, particularly child patients at the hospital.
However, The Boys Town National Research Hospital says it has not received any reports of the misuse of the stolen information so far.
"Boys Town takes this incident and the security of personal information seriously. Upon learning of this incident, Boys Town moved quickly to confirm whether personal information may have been affected by this incident, to identify the individuals related to this personal information, to put in place resources to assist them, and to provide them with notice of this incident," the hospital says.
The hospital has also reported the incident to law enforcement and is notifying state and federal regulators, along with potentially affected individuals. Boys Town has also promised to offer affected individuals access to 12 months of free identity protection services.
Boys Town hospital is also reviewing its existing policies and procedures and is implementing some additional security measures to safeguard its users' information stored in its systems.
However, victims are highly recommended to monitor their accounts for any fraudulent transaction and should consider placing a credit freeze request. Here's how you can freeze credit report to protect yourself against identity theft.
For additional information related to the incident, you can call 1-855-686-9425 (toll-free), Monday through Saturday from 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. CT.
| Data_Breaches |
Polish Banks Hacked using Malware Planted on their own Government Site | https://thehackernews.com/2017/02/bank-hacking-malware.html | In what considered to be the largest system hack in the country's history and a massive attack on the financial sector, several banks in Poland have been infected with malware.
What's surprising? The source of the malware infection is their own financial regulator, the Polish Financial Supervision Authority (KNF) -- which, ironically, is meant to keep an eye out for the safety and security of financial systems in Poland.
During the past week, the security teams at several unnamed Polish banks discovered malicious executables on the workstations of several banks.
The KNF confirmed that their internal systems had been compromised by someone "from another country," although no specifications were provided.
After downloads of suspicious files that were infecting various banking systems had been discovered on the regulator's servers, the KNF decided to take down its entire system "in order to secure evidence."
Here's what happened:
An unknown attacker compromised the KNF's website for well over a week by modifying one of the site's JavaScript files, making visitors to the regulator's site load the malicious JavaScript file, which then downloaded the malicious payloads.
Once downloaded and executed, the malware connected to some foreign servers to perform various malicious tasks such as reconnaissance, data exfiltration, and post exploitation.
This particular malware appears to be a new strain of nasty software which has never seen before in live attacks and has a zero detection rate on VirusTotal.
In some cases, the attackers even managed to gain control over critical servers within the targeted bank's infrastructures.
Security blogger BadCyber spoke to several banks, and some 20 commercial banks across Poland have already confirmed being victims of a malware infection while other banks keep looking.
The affected banks discovered the encrypted executable files on several servers and unusual network traffic going to uncommon IP addresses situated in other foreign countries.
Both the KNF and the Polish government confirmed local Polish media that the investigation is ongoing and that there is no indication of people's money being affected in the attack and no operations were affected.
| Cyber_Attack |
Dissecting a mobile malware | https://thehackernews.com/2013/01/dissecting-mobile-malware.html | The capillary diffusion of mobile devices, the lack of security systems on these platforms and low level of awareness on principal cyber threats made them a privileged target for cybercrime. We have assisted in the recent year to an explosion of malware designed to hit principal mobile OSs, in a recent report Sophos security firm revealed that in Australia and the U.S. Android threat exposure rates exceeding those of PCs showing the urgency to implement proper countermeasures. The situation appears really critical that why I asked to the expert of Group-IB Forensics Lab to show me how these agents work with a really case study.
Several month ago Group-IB Forensics Lab detected mobile-banking malware through Google Play by Sberbank request (Russian leading national bank).
The File associated to the malware was named sber.apk, it was an Android Package having size of 225,905 bytes and digest md5: F27D43DFEEDFFAC2EC7E4A069B3C9516.
Analyzing the functionality of the agent is is possible to classify it as SMSStealer.APK designed to infect Android devices.
The first step is the decompression of the archive and subsequent conversion of the file with the name classes.dex from format dex to file format Jar, subsequently using Java Decompiler it is possible to convert files.
Evidence files after installation displays the following graphical user interface used to request user's authorization through a phone number verification process.
After entering the phone number and pressing the «Do authorization» the application send system information to a remote server URL https:// berstaska.com/m/fo125kepro
The data sent contains mobile phone number, the name and version of the operating system on a mobile phone, the name of the service provider, mobile country code and many others.
At this point the research was addressed to the malicious domain used to collect the info, "berstaska.com" and "lekerdeka.com" are known to security experts because they have been used in the past for placing Carberp malware.
The data related to the domains are:
Domain Name: BERSTASKA.COM
Registrant:
N/A
merab mekokayan ([email protected])
sk 8 box18
NY
,334777
US
Tel. +1.3049583484
Creation Date: 26-Oct-2012
Expiration Date: 26-Oct-2013
Domain servers in listed order:
dc1.nserver.ru
dc2.nserver.ru
Domain Name: LEKERDEKA.COM
Registrant:
N/A
Sergey Bezumov ([email protected])
PU BOX 81 l 92
NY
,325236
US
Tel. +1.33873847374
Creation Date: 26-Oct-2012
Expiration Date: 26-Oct-2013
Domain servers in listed order:
dc1.nserver.ru
dc2.nserver.ru
Both domain names were linked to nserver.ru NS-servers and registered anonymously, according to the MalwareURL database and Group-IB Bot-Trek™ product more than twenty Carberp C&C were linked through the DNS of this operator.
At the time of the study network address «berstaska.com» was unavailable.
The malware establishes the function for sending and receiving SMS-messages using the following event handler:
Received messages are processed and stored in the appropriate format in a file called messages.txt and can be sent to the above remote server. In this program makes logging investigated their actions in a file called alarms.txt.
The scam schema based on the interception of SMS used in the authentication process could be very useful to banking frauds. US and Canada banks, but also other financial institutions, use One Time Password token sent via SMS, clearly an attacker intercepting it could complete fraudulent transactions.
Many security firms such as Group-IB have observed that hackers begin to trade such kind of tools on black market customized for specific banks.
Group-IB has developed unique solution for proactive prevention fraud without integration specific hardware or software to the banking server-side so called Botnets Intelligence.
Group-IB Botnets Intelligence team does sink holing of botnet to collect the data from them, information that the expert provide to the bank for blocking the banking accounts victims of frauds notifying to the customer the incident.
Following some questions I made to the experts of Group-IB Lab
What information exactly sent by the app to the remote server? "system information, containing a mobile phone number, the name of the operating system on a mobile phone, the name of the service provider, mobile country code, etc"
Is the phone identifier sent? Android version number? any personal data? any information about other apps already installed on the device?
Information about IMEI, Android version, mobile service provider and extracted cellphone number from SIM-card for identifying the victims.
How often is messages.txt sent to the remote server? Is the messages.txt file created as soon as a SMS arrives, and then sent to the server? Or does the messages.txt created a file with multiple messages, and then send it at a specified time?
It sends intercepted SMS as soon as it was intercepted by the Trojan or it would be impossible to use such technique efficiently for banking theft, as you need to know the intercepted SMS and to login to the victims banking account. If you do it late, you need to wait for other chance.
Is the Trojan intercepting all SMS messages, or just bank-related?
Only bank related by special signatures from Sberbank (Russian national bank) and Alfabank (https://alfabank.ru) - one of the largest and leading private bank in Russian Federation.
I am not clear from the code snippet what is inside alarms.txt. Is it just logging when SMS are received and when messages.txt is transferred?
Yes, you are right, it is special files for information exchange about the new SMS was got and you don't need to send it once again to the hacker.
How different is this from what Zeus-in-the-mobile does?
It doesn't do any active actions with online-banking, as some of mobile banking trojans do. It only intercepts the information from SMS to do future theft from the remote computer of the hacker.
Did the two banking apps (for the different banks) all use the same remote server?
No, the same server was used to 2 banks, as it seems to be that it was targeted attack on them, and the same team of hackers were interested in both of them.
Let me conclude the article thanks the experts of Group-IB Forensics Lab and in particular to the Head of International projects Andrey Komarov.
| Malware |
Hacker threatens to sell data of 3.7 Million Israeli Bank Customers, demands extortion money in Bitcoin | https://thehackernews.com/2013/12/hacker-Israeli-Bank-botnet-malware-extortion-bitcoin.html | Data breaches and security incidents are a constant in the headlines these days. Hackers and cyber criminals are motivated by status or money and finding new innovative and more creative attacks to achieve this.
One of them are, Digital Bank robbery - where the thieves didn't need masks and guns to pull off the job, all they need are - Hacking Skills, a computer and the Internet. Another way is Cyber extortion - threat of attack against an enterprise or a bank, coupled with a demand for money to avert or stop the attack.
According to Haaretz news, A Hacker - who is the operator of a biggest botnet malware network in the Israel, has threatens 3 major Israeli banks, i.e. Israel Discount Bank, Bank Yahav and the First International Bank of Israel.
"Bank received an e-mail message threatening that unless they handed over a certain sum in Bitcoins by the end of next week, a list of customers' details would be given to hostile elements."
Banks database, network and websites were not breached in this case, rather the hacker claimed that he holds a huge financial trojan botnet network in Israel that have already infected millions of systems across the nation and collected a massive dump of stolen personal information, passwords, banking information and credit card numbers of 3.7 Million users.
The hacker has demanded the payoff in Bitcoin, a untraceable virtual currency, perfect for blackmailers and cyber criminals. Bitcoin is not backed by any central bank or government and can be transferred "peer to peer" between any two people anywhere.
Banks declined to comment on the report and immediately reported the threat to the Israel Police. According to the source, some of them do not see the threat as serious. Bank of Israel held a meeting on Tuesday on the issue, we will update you soon about their next step with a new article.
Cyber attacks are becoming more and more advanced and sophisticated, more or less any company in the world is on the list of targets to rob. You should keep updating your knowledge about the cyber world to Stay Safe from all threats.
| Data_Breaches |
New MacOS Malware linked to Russian Hackers Can Steal Passwords & iPhone Backups | https://thehackernews.com/2017/02/xagent-malware-apt28.html | Security researchers have discovered a new Mac malware allegedly developed by APT28 Russian cyber espionage group who is believed to be responsible for 2016 presidential election hacking scandal.
A new variant of the X-Agent spyware is now targeting Apple macOS system that has previously been used in cyber attacks against Windows, iOS, Android, and Linux devices.
The malware is designed to steal web browser passwords, take screenshots of the display, detect system configurations, execute files and exfiltrate iPhone backups stored on the computer.
The X-Agent malware is tied to Russian hacking group known as APT28 — also known as Fancy Bear, Sofacy, Sednit, and Pawn Storm — that has been operating since at least 2007 and is allegedly linked to the Russian government.
"Our past analysis of samples known to be linked to APT28 group shows a number of similarities between the Sofacy/APT28/Sednit Xagent component for Windows/Linux and the Mac OS binary that currently forms the object of our investigation," Bitdefender reported in a blog post published Tuesday.
"For once, there is the presence of similar modules, such as FileSystem, KeyLogger, and RemoteShell, as well as a similar network module called HttpChanel."
Like variants for other platforms, the Mac version of X-Agent spyware is also act as a backdoor with advanced cyber-espionage capabilities that can be customized depending on the objectives of an attack.
Moreover, X-Agent is being planted by exploiting a vulnerability in the MacKeeper software installed on the targeted computers and known malware dropper Komplex — a first-stage trojan that APT28 uses to infect machines.
Abovementioned evidence indicates that the newly discovered Mac version of X-Agent is also created by the same Russian hacking group.
Once successfully installed, the backdoor checks for the presence of a debugger and if it finds one, it terminates itself to prevent execution. But if not, the backdoor waits for an Internet connection to communicate with the command-and-control servers.
"After the communication has been established, the payload starts the modules. Our preliminary analysis shows most of the C&C URLs impersonate Apple domains," Bitdefender researchers said.
"Once connected to the C&C, the payload sends a HelloMessage, then spawns two communication threads running in infinite loops. The former uses POST requests to send information to the C&C, while the latter monitors GET requests for commands."
The Research is still ongoing and Bitdefender security researchers right now only have the Mac malware sample and not a full picture of how an attack works.
APT28 is one of the two Russian-linked cyber-espionage groups that have been accused of hacking into the U.S. Democratic National Committee's email server last year and interfering with the 2016 presidential election.
You can read BitDefender's previous analysis on the APT28 hacking group here [PDF].
| Malware |
Apple MacBooks Can Be Hacked Through The Battery | https://thehackernews.com/2011/07/apple-macbooks-can-be-hacked-through.html | Apple MacBooks Can Be Hacked Through The Battery
Security researcher Charlie Miller is quite well known for his works on Apple products. Today he has come up with a very interesting way to hack the MacBook using the battery. Laptop battery contains its own monitoring circuit which reports the status of the battery to the OS. It also ensure that the battery does not overcharge even when the laptop is turned off.
Miller has discovered that on the MacBooks, the batteries are shipped with the default password set on the chips. It means that if someone knows the default password, the firmware of the battery can be controlled to do many things from simply ruining the battery to installing a malware which reinstalls whenever the OS boots. Miller said that it might even be possible to overload the battery so that it catches fire.
This is what Miller said:
These batteries just aren't designed with the idea that people will mess with them. What I'm showing is that it's possible to use them to do something really bad.
You could put a whole hard drive in, reinstall the software, flash the BIOS, and every time it would reattack and screw you over. There would be no way to eradicate or detect it other than removing the battery.
This is a very real threat but such an attack is not likely to occur anytime soon. To successfully carry out the attack, the attacker has to analyze the 2009 software updates from Apple for the password, like Miller has done. If he is able to retrieve the password, he will have to find a vulnerability in the interface between the OS and the firmware. Miller believes that this will not be a difficult job as Apple probably never expected such kind of attack.
Miller will present his findings at the BlackHat security conference next month. At the conference, he also plans to release a tool which will change the password of the battery to a random string.
| Malware |
Google Chrome Silently Listening to Your Private Conversations | https://thehackernews.com/2015/06/google-chrome-spying.html | Google was under fire of downloading and installing a Chrome extension surreptitiously and subsequently listened to the conversations of Chromium users without consent.
After these accusations, a wave of criticism by privacy campaigners and open source developers has led Google to remove the extension from Chromium, the open-source version of the Chrome browser.
The extension in question is "Chrome Hotword," which was found to be responsible for offering the browser's famous "OK, Google" functionality.
'Ok, Google' is certainly a useful feature that allows users to search for things via their voice when they use Google as their default search engine, but its something that also enables eavesdropping of every single conversation made by a user.
Google Silently Listens to your Conversation
This issue came to light by Pirate Party founder Rick Falkvinge, who says Google has silently installed black box code into the open-source Chromium browser, meaning it contains pre-compiled code that users cannot see.
Exactly what this black box does is still unclear, but Falkvinge claimed that Google is listening to the conversations of Chromium users through this black box of code.
The 'black box' code enabled a feature that activates a search function on the browser when you say "Ok, Google," however the code enabled the microphone, as well as permitted to capture audios.
"Your computer has been stealth configured to send what was being said in your room to somebody else, to a private company in another country, without your consent or knowledge," says Falkvinge.
Google Responded to the Issue
Google since defended itself, arguing the ability to use "Ok Google" commands and enable the extension is an opt-in feature.
"First and foremost, while we do download the hotword module on startup, we do not activate it unless you opt into hotwording," Google wrote on its development forums.
"If you go into 'chrome://settings,' you will see a checkbox 'Enable 'Ok Google' to start a voice search. This should be unchecked by default, and if you do not check it, the hotword module will not be started."
Google also argued that Chrome is not open source and if any of the open source distributors such as Debian have any issue with it, they should disable the module themselves.
However, after receiving complaints about the "bug" that automatically installs the Chrome Hotword Shared Module without an opt-out configuration, Debian has fixed the issue by disabling the extension in their distribution of Chromium.
Google - We aren't Responsible for other browsers
Google doesn't deny installing the black box code into Chromium browser, but the company doesn't consider itself responsible for other web browsers that include the code.
"Our primary focus is getting the code ready for Google Chrome," says Google. "If a third-party (such as Debian) distributes it, it is their responsibility to enforce their own policy."
The key issue here is the inclusion of black box code into Chromium, which is supposed to be an open-source project that lets everyone audit the code.
However, Falkvinge says Chromium "had abused its position as trusted upstream to insert lines of source code that bypassed this audit-then-build process, and which downloaded and installed a black box of unverifiable executable code directly onto computers, essentially rendering them compromised."
This issue forced Google to make changes in Chromium 45 by disabling the Chrome Hotword extension, making it easier for third party distributors to disable hotwording.
| Malware |
High-Severity OpenSSL Vulnerability allows Hackers to Decrypt HTTPS Traffic | https://thehackernews.com/2016/05/openssl-vulnerability.html | OpenSSL has released a series of patches against six vulnerabilities, including a pair of high-severity flaws that could allow attackers to execute malicious code on a web server as well as decrypt HTTPS traffic.
OpenSSL is an open-source cryptographic library that is the most widely being used by a significant portion of the Internet services; to cryptographically protect their sensitive Web and e-mail traffic using the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) or Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol.
One of the high-severity flaws, CVE-2016-2107, allows a man-in-the-middle attacker to initiate a "Padding Oracle Attack" that can decrypt HTTPS traffic if the connection uses AES-CBC cipher and the server supports AES-NI.
A Padding Oracle flaw weakens the encryption protection by allowing attackers to repeatedly request plaintext data about an encrypted payload content.
The Padding Oracle flaw (exploit code) was discovered by Juraj Somorovsky using his own developed tool called TLS-Attacker, which allows developers to test their TLS servers with specific TLS messages.
The "OpenSSL Padding Oracle in AES-NI CBC MAC Check" exists in the cryptographic library since 2013, when OpenSSL patched another Padding Oracle flaw called Lucky 13 that compromised TLS cryptography.
"What we have learned from these bugs is that patching crypto libraries is a critical task and should be validated with positive as well as negative tests. For example, after rewriting parts of the CBC padding code, the TLS server must be tested for correct behaviour with invalid padding messages. I hope TLS-Attacker can once be used for such a task." Juraj said in a blog post.
The second high-severity bug, CVE-2016-2108, is a memory corruption flaw in the OpenSSL ASN.1standard for encoding, transmitting and decoding data that allows attackers to execute malicious code on the web server.
The vulnerability only affects OpenSSL versions prior to April 2015. Although the issue was fixed back in June 2015, the security impact of the update has now come to light.
According to OpenSSL, this flaw can potentially be exploited using maliciously-crafted digital certificates signed by trusted certificate authorities.
OpenSSL also patched four other low-severity vulnerabilities including two overflow vulnerabilities, one memory exhaustion issue and one low severity bug that resulted in arbitrary stack data being returned in the buffer.
You can find more technical details about the critical OpenSSL vulnerabilities on CloudFlare.
The security updates have been released for both OpenSSL versions 1.0.1 and 1.0.2 and administrators are advised to apply patches as soon as possible.
| Vulnerability |
ALERT: North Korean hackers targeting South Korea with RokRat Trojan | https://thehackernews.com/2021/01/alert-north-korean-hackers-targeting.html | A North Korean hacking group has been found deploying the RokRat Trojan in a new spear-phishing campaign targeting the South Korean government.
Attributing the attack to APT37 (aka Starcruft, Ricochet Chollima, or Reaper), Malwarebytes said it identified a malicious document last December that, when opened, executes a macro in memory to install the aforementioned remote access tool (RAT).
"The file contains an embedded macro that uses a VBA self decoding technique to decode itself within the memory spaces of Microsoft Office without writing to the disk. It then embeds a variant of the RokRat into Notepad," the researchers noted in a Wednesday analysis.
Believed to be active at least since 2012, the Reaper APT is known for its focus on public and private entities primarily in South Korea, such as chemicals, electronics, manufacturing, aerospace, automotive, and healthcare entities. Since then, their victimology has expanded beyond the Korean peninsula to include Japan, Vietnam, Russia, Nepal, China, India, Romania, Kuwait, and other parts of the Middle East.
While the previous attacks leveraged malware-laced Hangul Word Processor (HWP) documents, the use of self-decoding VBA Office files to deliver RokRat suggests a change in tactics for APT37, the researchers said.
The Microsoft VBA document uploaded to VirusTotal in December purported to be a meeting request dated January 23, 2020, implying that attacks took place almost a year ago.
Chief among the responsibilities of the macro embedded in the file is to inject shellcode to a Notepad.exe process that downloads the RokRat payload in encrypted format from a Google Drive URL.
RokRat — first publicly documented by Cisco Talos in 2017 — is a RAT of choice for APT37, with the group using it for a number of campaigns since 2016. A Windows-based backdoor distributed via trojanized documents, it's capable of capturing screenshots, logging keystrokes, evading analysis with anti-virtual machine detections, and leveraging cloud storage APIs such as Box, Dropbox, and Yandex.
In 2019, the cloud service-based RAT gained additional features to steal Bluetooth device information as part of an intelligence-gathering effort directed against investment and trading companies in Vietnam and Russia and a diplomatic agency in Hong Kong.
"The case we analyzed is one of the few where they did not use HWP files as their phish documents and instead used Microsoft Office documents weaponized with a self decode macro," the researchers concluded. "That technique is a clever choice that can bypass several static detection mechanisms and hide the main intent of a malicious document."
| Cyber_Attack |
Disqus Wordpress Plugin Flaw Leaves Millions of Blogs Vulnerable to Hackers | https://thehackernews.com/2014/06/disqus-wordpress-plugin-flaw-leaves.html | A Remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability has been discovered in the comment and discussion service, Disqus plugin for the most popular Blogging Platform Wordpress.
While there are more than 70 million websites on the Internet currently running WordPress, about 1.3 million of them use the 'Disqus Comment System' Plugin, making it one of the popular plugins of Wordpress for web comments and discussions.
The security team at the security firm Sucuri discovered a critical Remote Code Execution (RCE) flaw while analyzing some custom JSON parser of the Disqus plugin and found that the variable parsing function could allow anyone to execute commands on the server using insecurely coded PHP eval() function.
WHO ARE VULNERABLE
The Remote Code Execution (RCE) Vulnerability could be triggered by a remote attacker, only if it is using following application versions on the server/website.
PHP version 5.1.6 or earlier
WordPress 3.1.4 or earlier
Wordpress Plugin Disqus Comment System 2.75 or earlier
HOW TO EXPLOIT DISQUS
For successful exploitation an attacker can push its custom payload, for example {${phpinfo()}} as a comment on the targeted post/page and then he only need to open the following 'Comment Synchronization' url with the targeted post ID in order to take advantage of the vulnerability.
https://somesite.com/?cf_action=sync_comments&post_id=TARGET_POST_ID
"While the flaw itself is very dangerous" reads the blog post. "That's it, looks simple right? So if you are using an outdated version of WordPress/PHP, you need to update Disqus asap."
At the beginning of the month, the same security researchers' team at Sucuri, discovered a critical vulnerability in the content management platform, All in One SEO Pack, a plugin that optimizes WordPress for search engines, which potentially left millions of websites vulnerable to the attackers.
HOW TO PATCH VULNERABILITY
If left unpatched, the flaw could allow any potential attacker to do anything he wants with a vulnerable website. So, it is highly recommended to those using an outdated versions of WordPress, Disqus Comment Plugin 2.76 and PHP to upgrade to the latest version as soon as possible.
WordPress users should be able to update their Disqus plugin by signing into their WordPress administrative panel > Disqus Comment System plugin > drop-down at the top or bottom of the page > click "Update." Users can also manually update the plugin by overwriting the plugin files directly into the WordPress' plugin directory.
Also read: Zero-Day TimThumb WebShot Vulnerability leaves Thousands of Wordpress Blogs at Risk.
| Vulnerability |
HP LaserJet Security flaw allows remote data access | https://thehackernews.com/2013/03/hp-laserjet-security-flaw-allows-remote.html | A critical vulnerability discovered in certain LaserJet Pro printers that could give remote attackers access to sensitive data. Homeland Security's Computer Emergency Response Team recently issued a vulnerability note warning that HP LaserJet Professional printers contain a telnet debug shell which could allow a remote attacker to gain unauthorized access to data.
This flaw was discovered by a Germany security expert, Christoph von Wittich. He detected the vulnerability during a routine network scan of his company's corporate network.
He said the vulnerability could also be used for a denial-of-service attack. "As long as the printer is not connected to the Internet, this vulnerability should not cause much trouble for the end user,".
Marked as CVE-2012-5215 (VU#782451, SSRT101078), vulnerability affected 12 printer models including HP LaserJet Pro P1102w, P1102w, P1606dn, M1212nf MFP, M1213nf MFP, M1214nfh MFP, M1216nfh Multifunction Printer, M1217nfw Multifunction Printer, M1218nfs MFP, M1219nf MFP, CP1025nw, and CP1025nw.
Users are advised to download updated firmware for printers impacted by the bug from the company's Support Center site.
| Data_Breaches |
Two Million Cars Using Wireless Insurance Dongle Vulnerable to Hacking | https://thehackernews.com/2015/01/progressive-snapshot-device-hacking-car.html | 2015 will be a year more smarter than 2014 with smarter mobile devices, smarter home appliances, and yes Smarter Automobiles. Nowadays, there are a number of automobiles companies offering vehicles that run on a mostly drive-by-wire system, meaning that a majority of the controls are electronically controlled, from instrument cluster to steering, brakes, and accelerator as well.
No doubt these systems makes your driving experience better, but at the same time they also increase the risk of getting hacked.
According to a recent research, an electronic dongle used to plugged into the on-board diagnostic port of more than two million cars and trucks contains few security weaknesses that makes them vulnerable to wireless attacks, resulting in taking control of the entire vehicle.
Since 2008, US-based Progressive Insurance has used the SnapShot device in more than two million vehicles. The little device monitors and tracks users' driving behavior by collecting vehicle location and speed records, in order to help determine if they qualify for lower rates.
However, the security researcher Corey Thuen has revealed that the dongle is insecure and performs no validation or signing of firmware updates. It has no secure boot mechanism, no cellular communications authentication, and uses no secure communications protocols, possibly putting the lives of people inside the vehicle in danger.
"The firmware running on the dongle is minimal and insecure. It does no validation or signing of firmware updates, no secure boot, no cellular authentication, no secure communications or encryption, no data execution prevention or attack mitigation technologies ... basically it uses no security technologies whatsoever," Thuen told Forbes.
SnapShot plugs into the OBDII port of Thuen's 2013 Toyota Tundra pickup truck. Thuen said that an attack on the adjacent modem, which handles the connection between Progressive's servers and the dongle, was possible too, which could allow a potentially deadly takeover of the car's acceleration and braking.
"What happens if Progressive's servers are compromised? An attacker who controls that dongle has full control of the vehicle," he added.
"A skilled attacker could almost certainly compromise such dongles to gain remote control of a vehicle, or even an entire fleet of vehicles. Once compromised, the consequences range from privacy data loss to life and limb."
Mr. Thuen presented the detailed analysis of the research last week at the S4x15 Conference in Miami. The research highlighted the minimal protections included with many widely used car computer systems. While he focused on dongles from Progressive, he also warned that devices from other insurance companies could also be at risk.
Progressive officials has said they were confident SnapShot was secure and were not informed about the flaws by Mr Theun before he revealed them at a computer security conference. However the company said it welcomes input on identifying security weaknesses so that they could evaluate it and make any necessary improvements.
| Vulnerability |
23-Year-old Russian Hacker confessed to be original author of BlackPOS Malware | https://thehackernews.com/2014/01/23-year-old-russian-hacker-confessed-to.html | In the previous reports of Cyber Intelligence firm 'IntelCrawler' named Sergey Tarasov, a 17-year-old teenager behind the nickname "ree[4]", as the developer of BlackPOS malware.
BlackPOS also known as "reedum" or 'Kaptoxa' is an effective crimeware kit, used in the massive heist of possibly 110 million consumers' Credit-Debit cards, and personal information from the TARGET.
Later Researchers's investigation revealed that the original coder of BlackPOS Malware was actually a 23-year-old young hacker named Rinat Shabayev and the teen, Sergey Taraspov is the incharge for the technical support department.
In an interview with Russian channel 'LifeNews', Rinat Shabayev admitted that he had developed the BlackPOS crimeware kit. He clarified that the program developed by him was not meant for any kind of data theft, instead the program was written for the security testing.
He developed the malware with the help of another programmer with anonymous identity, whom he had met online. His original plan was just to sell the exploit, not to use it for malicious intent by himself.
His friend took the readymate codes from him and added more features to it. In addition to this information, he also confessed that the exploit can be used for malicious purposes too.
Researchers at IntelCrawler say that the same malware may have also been involved in the Neiman Marcus attack too.
Whatever be the intention of the programmer, but now more than 110 million people are suffering credit card theft because of his software. Even after knowing that the malware has ability to compile a massive financial theft, his justifications are not enough to be innocent.
| Data_Breaches |
HTC Android Vulnerability - Exposes Phone numbers, Gps, SMS, Emails etc | https://thehackernews.com/2011/10/htc-android-vulnerability-exposes-phone.html | HTC Android Vulnerability - Exposes Phone numbers, Gps, SMS, Emails etc
If you are running a HTC Android smartphone with the latest updates applied, chances are your personal data is freely accessible to any app you have given network access to in the form of full Internet permissions.This vulnerability isn't a backdoor or some inherent flaw in Android, it is instead HTC failing to lock down its data sharing policies used in the Tell HTC software users have to allow or disallow on their phone. The problem being, not only is your data vulnerable when Tell HTC is turned on, it's just as vulnerable when it is turned off.
In brief, any app on affected devices that requests a single android.permission.INTERNET (which is normal for any app that connects to the web or shows ads) can get its hands on:
the list of user accounts, including email addresses and sync status for each
last known network and GPS locations and a limited previous history of locations
phone numbers from the phone log
SMS data, including phone numbers and encoded text (not sure yet if it's possible to decode it, but very likely)
system logs (both kernel/dmesg and app/logcat), which includes everything your running apps do and is likely to include email addresses, phone numbers, and other private info
But that's not all. After looking at the huge amount of data (the log file was 3.5MB on my EVO 3D) that is vulnerable to apps exploiting this vulnerability all day, I found the following is also exposed:
active notifications in the notification bar, including notification text
build number, bootloader version, radio version, kernel version
network info, including IP addresses
full memory info
CPU info
file system info and free space on each partition
running processes
current snapshot/stacktrace of not only every running process but every running thread
list of installed apps, including permissions used, user ids, versions, and more
system properties/variables
currently active broadcast listeners and history of past broadcasts received
currently active content providers
battery info and status, including charging/wake lock history
and more
Quite simply put these are HUGE vulnerabilities that people need to be aware of. This problem is only effecting stock roms so if you are rooted you have no cause for alarm.
| Vulnerability |
Researchers Discover Raindrop — 4th Malware Linked to the SolarWinds Attack | https://thehackernews.com/2021/01/researchers-discover-raindrop-4th.html | Cybersecurity researchers have unearthed a fourth new malware strain—designed to spread the malware onto other computers in victims' networks—which was deployed as part of the SolarWinds supply chain attack disclosed late last year.
Dubbed "Raindrop" by Broadcom-owned Symantec, the malware joins the likes of other malicious implants such as Sunspot, Sunburst (or Solorigate), and Teardrop that were stealthily delivered to enterprise networks.
The latest finding comes amid a continued probe into the breach, suspected to be of Russian origin, that has claimed a number of U.S. government agencies and private sector companies.
"The discovery of Raindrop is a significant step in our investigation of the SolarWinds attacks as it provides further insights into post-compromise activity at organizations of interest to the attackers," Symantec researchers said.
The cybersecurity firm said it discovered only four samples of Raindrop to date that were used to deliver the Cobalt Strike Beacon — an in-memory backdoor capable of command execution, keylogging, file transfer, privilege escalation, port scanning, and lateral movement.
Symantec, last month, had uncovered more than 2,000 systems belonging to 100 customers that received the trojanized SolarWinds Orion updates, with select targets infected with a second-stage payload called Teardrop that's also used to install the Cobalt Strike Beacon.
"The way Teardrop is built, it could have dropped anything; in this case, it dropped Beacon, a payload included with Cobalt Strike," Check Point researchers said, noting that it was possibly done to "make attribution harder."
"While Teardrop was used on computers that had been infected by the original Sunburst Trojan, Raindrop appeared elsewhere on the network, being used by the attackers to move laterally and deploy payloads on other computers."
It's worth noting that the attackers used the Sunspot malware exclusively against SolarWinds in September 2019 to compromise its build environment and inject the Sunburst Trojan into its Orion network monitoring platform. The tainted software was then delivered to 18,000 of the company's customers.
Microsoft's analysis of the Solorigate modus operandi last month found that the operators carefully chose their targets, opting to escalate the attacks only in a handful of cases by deploying Teardrop based on intel amassed during an initial reconnaissance of the target environment for high-value accounts and assets.
Now Raindrop ("bproxy.dll") joins the mix. While both Teardrop and Raindrop act as a dropper for the Cobalt Strike Beacon, they also differ in a number of ways.
For a start, Teardrop is delivered directly by the initial Sunburst backdoor, whereas Raindrop seems to have been deployed with the goal of spreading across the victims' network. What's more, the malware shows up on networks where at least one computer has already been compromised by Sunburst, with no indication that Sunburst triggered its installation.
The two malware strains also use different packers and Cobalt Strike configurations.
Symantec did not identify the organizations impacted by Raindrop but said the samples were found in a victim system that was running computer access and management software and on a machine that was found to execute PowerShell commands to infect additional computers in the organization with the same malware.
| Cyber_Attack |
New Cryptocurrency Mining Malware Infected Over 500,000 PCs in Just Few Hours | https://thehackernews.com/2018/03/cryptocurrency-mining-malware.html | Two days ago, Microsoft encountered a rapidly spreading cryptocurrency-mining malware that infected almost 500,000 computers within just 12 hours and successfully blocked it to a large extent.
Dubbed Dofoil, aka Smoke Loader, the malware was found dropping a cryptocurrency miner program as payload on infected Windows computers that mines Electroneum coins, yet another cryptocurrency, for attackers using victims' CPUs.
On March 6, Windows Defender suddenly detected more than 80,000 instances of several variants of Dofoil that raised the alarm at Microsoft Windows Defender research department, and within the next 12 hours, over 400,000 instances were recorded.
The research team found that all these instances, rapidly spreading across Russia, Turkey, and Ukraine, were carrying a digital coin-mining payload, which masqueraded as a legitimate Windows binary to evade detection.
However, Microsoft has not mentioned how these instances were delivered to such a massive audience at the first place in this short period.
Dofoil uses a customized mining application that can mine different cryptocurrencies, but in this campaign, the malware was programmed to mine Electroneum coins only.
According to the researchers, Dofoil trojan uses an old code injection technique called 'process hollowing' that that involves spawning a new instance of a legitimate process with a malicious one so that the second code runs instead of the original, tricking process monitoring tools and antivirus into believing that the original process is running.
"The hollowed explorer.exe process then spins up a second malicious instance, which drops and runs a coin mining malware masquerading as a legitimate Windows binary, wuauclt.exe."
To stay persistence on an infected system for a long time to mine Electroneum coins using stolen computer resources, Dofoil trojan modifies the Windows registry.
"The hollowed explorer.exe process creates a copy of the original malware in the Roaming AppData folder and renames it to ditereah.exe," the researchers say. "It then creates a registry key or modifies an existing one to point to the newly created malware copy. In the sample we analyzed, the malware modified the OneDrive Run key."
Dofoil also connects to a remote command and control (C&C) server hosted on decentralized Namecoin network infrastructure and listens for new commands, including the installation of additional malware.
Microsoft says behavior monitoring and Artificial intelligence based machine learning techniques used by Windows Defender Antivirus have played an important role to detect and block this massive malware campaign.
| Malware |
Security updates for available for Adobe Flash Player and ColdFusion vulnerabilities | https://thehackernews.com/2013/11/Adobe-Flash-ColdFusion-vulnerabilities-exploit-Hacker-News.html | Adobe released critical security patches for its ColdFusion web application server and Adobe Flash Player for Mac, Windows and Linux. Adobe AIR and the AIR SDK and Compiler are also being updated.
These updates address vulnerabilities that could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system, dubbed as CVE-2013-5329, CVE-2013-5330.
The following software versions are affected and should be updated as soon as possible:
Adobe Flash Player 11.9.900.117 and earlier versions for Mac and Windows
Adobe Flash Player 11.2.202.310 and earlier versions for Linux
Adobe AIR 3.9.0.1030 and earlier versions for Windows and Macintosh
Adobe has also released a security hotfix for ColdFusion versions 10, 9.0.2, 9.0.1 and 9.0 for Windows, Macintosh and Linux, addresses two vulnerabilities:
Cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability (CVE-2013-5326)
Allow unauthorized remote read access (CVE-2013-5328)
Both products have been patched multiple times this year. In January four critical vulnerabilities (CVE-2013-0625, CVE-2013-0629, CVE-2013-0631 and CVE-2013-0632) were exploited by hackers to access and steal sensitive data stored on the servers.
In May, Hackers used these flaws to breach Washington state's Administrative Office of the Courts. In that hack hackers accessed as many as 160,000 Social Security numbers and up to one million drivers license number.
HotFix (APSB13-26) for Adobe Flash Player and (APSB13-27) for Adobe ColdFusion are available for Download. Install the appropriate Adobe patches immediately, or let the Adobe's updater do it for you.
| Vulnerability |
New Zoom Screen-Sharing Bug Lets Other Users Access Restricted Apps | https://thehackernews.com/2021/03/new-zoom-screen-sharing-bug-lets-other.html | A newly discovered glitch in Zoom's screen sharing feature can accidentally leak sensitive information to other attendees in a call, according to the latest findings.
Tracked as CVE-2021-28133, the unpatched security vulnerability makes it possible to reveal contents of applications that are not shared, but only briefly, thereby making it harder to exploit it in the wild.
It's worth pointing out that the screen sharing functionality in Zoom lets users share an entire desktop or phone screen, or limit sharing to one or more specific applications, or a portion of a screen. The issue stems from the fact that a second application that's overlayed on top of an already shared application can reveal its contents for a short period of time.
"When a Zoom user shares a specific application window via the 'share screen' functionality, other meeting participants can briefly see contents of other application windows which were not explicitly shared," SySS researchers Michael Strametz and Matthias Deeg noted. "The contents of not shared application windows can, for instance, be seen for a short period of time by other users when those windows overlay the shared application window and get into focus."
The flaw, which was tested on versions 5.4.3 and 5.5.4 across both Windows and Linux clients, is said to have been disclosed to the videoconferencing company on December 2, 2020. The lack of a fix even after three months could be attributed in part to the difficulty in exploiting the vulnerability.
But nonetheless, this could have serious consequences depending on the nature of the inadvertently shared data, the researchers warned, adding a malicious participant of a Zoom meeting can take advantage of the weakness by making use of a screen capture tool to record the meeting and playback the recording to view the private information.
When reached for a response, a Zoom spokesperson said it's working to address the issue. "Zoom takes all reports of security vulnerabilities seriously," the company told The Hacker News via email. "We are aware of this issue, and are working to resolve it."
| Data_Breaches |
#Blackhat Conference : Square Mobile Gadget allows to Hack Credit Cards | https://thehackernews.com/2011/08/blackhat-conference-square-mobile.html | #Blackhat Conference : Square Mobile Gadget allows to Hack Credit Cards
Researchers at the Black Hat security conference today revealed two ways the Square payment system, which turns any iPhone, iPad or Android into a point-of-sale credit card processor, could be used for fraud. Square a mobile gadget that enables Android, iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch users to accept credit card payments can be hacked to steal credit card data, with very little technical hardware required.
Adam Laurie and Zac Franken, directors of Aperture Labs, discovered that due to a lack of encryption in the current Square app and free dongle for swiping cards, the mobile payment system can be used to steal credit card information, without even having the physical credit card.Square works by converting credit card data into an audio file that is then transmitted to the credit card issuer for authorization.
"The dongle is a skimmer. It turns any iPhone into a skimmer," Laurie said. To clone a card, "now you need less technical hardware to do it and no technical skills at all."
Laurie and Franken's hack proves that the Square app cannot distinguish between a true swipe on the dongle and an audio file fed to the app without swiping. In theory, the team could buy stolen credit card data in underground online markets and start up a practically skill-free criminal shop.
The researchers, who are based in the United Kingdom, needed to have a U.S. bank account to test the system.
[Source]
| Vulnerability |
Linux Kernel Gets Patch For Years-Old Serious Vulnerability | https://thehackernews.com/2017/03/linux-kernel-vulnerability.html | Another dangerous vulnerability has been discovered in Linux kernel that dates back to 2009 and affects a large number of Linux distros, including Red Hat, Debian, Fedora, OpenSUSE, and Ubuntu.
The latest Linux kernel flaw (CVE-2017-2636), which existed in the Linux kernel for the past seven years, allows a local unprivileged user to gain root privileges on affected systems or cause a denial of service (system crash).
Positive Technologies researcher Alexander Popov discovered a race condition issue in the N_HLDC Linux kernel driver – which is responsible for dealing with High-Level Data Link Control (HDLC) data – that leads to double-free vulnerability.
"Double Free" is one of the most common memory corruption bug that occurs when the application releases same memory location twice by calling the free() function on the same allocated memory.
An unauthenticated attacker may leverage this vulnerability to inject and execute arbitrary code in the security context of currently logged in user.
The vulnerability affects the majority of popular Linux distributions including Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, 7, Fedora, SUSE, Debian, and Ubuntu.
Since the flaw dates back to June 2009, Linux enterprise servers and devices have been vulnerable for a long time, but according to Positive Technologies, it is hard to say whether this vulnerability has actively been exploited in the wild or not.
"The vulnerability is old, so it is widespread across Linux workstations and servers," says Popov. "To automatically load the flawed module, an attacker needs only unprivileged user rights. Additionally, the exploit doesn't require any special hardware."
The researcher detected the vulnerability during system calls testing with the syzkaller fuzzer, which is a security code auditing software developed by Google.
Popov then reported the flaw to kernel.org on February 28, 2017, along with the exploit prototype, as well as provided the patch to fix the issue.
The vulnerability has already been patched in the Linux kernel, and the security updates along with the vulnerability details were published on March 7.
So, users are encouraged to install the latest security updates as soon as possible, but if unable to apply the patch, the researcher advised blocking the flawed module (n_hdlc) manually to safeguard enterprise as well as home use of the operating system.
| Vulnerability |
Just a GIF Image Could Have Hacked Your Android Phone Using WhatsApp | https://thehackernews.com/2019/10/whatsapp-rce-vulnerability.html | A picture is worth a thousand words, but a GIF is worth a thousand pictures.
Today, the short looping clips, GIFs are everywhere—on your social media, on your message boards, on your chats, helping users perfectly express their emotions, making people laugh, and reliving a highlight.
But what if an innocent-looking GIF greeting with Good morning, Happy Birthday, or Merry Christmas message hacks your smartphone?
Well, not a theoretical idea anymore.
WhatsApp has recently patched a critical security vulnerability in its app for Android, which remained unpatched for at least 3 months after being discovered, and if exploited, could have allowed remote hackers to compromise Android devices and potentially steal files and chat messages.
WhatsApp Remote Code Execution Vulnerability
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2019-11932, is a double-free memory corruption bug that doesn't actually reside in the WhatsApp code itself, but in an open-source GIF image parsing library that WhatsApp uses.
Discovered by Vietnamese security researcher Pham Hong Nhat in May this year, the issue successfully leads to remote code execution attacks, enabling attackers to execute arbitrary code on targeted devices in the context of WhatsApp with the permissions the app has on the device.
"The payload is executed under WhatsApp context. Therefore it has the permission to read the SDCard and access the WhatsApp message database," the researcher told The Hacker News in an email interview.
"Malicious code will have all the permissions that WhatsApp has, including recording audio, accessing the camera, accessing the file system, as well as WhatsApp's sandbox storage that includes protected chat database and so on…"
How Does WhatsApp RCE Vulnerability Work?
WhatsApp uses the parsing library in question to generate a preview for GIF files when users open their device gallery before sending any media file to their friends or family.
Thus, to be noted, the vulnerability does not get triggered by sending a malicious GIF file to a victim; instead it gets executed when the victim itself simply opens the WhatsApp Gallery Picker while trying to send any media file to someone.
To exploit this issue, all an attacker needs to do is send a specially crafted malicious GIF file to a targeted Android user via any online communication channel and wait for the user to just open the image gallery in WhatsApp.
However, if attackers want to send the GIF file to victims via any messaging platform like WhatsApp or Messenger, they need to send it as a document file rather than media file attachments, because image compression used by these services distorts the malicious payload hidden in images.
As shown in a proof-of-concept video demonstration the researcher shared with The Hacker News, the vulnerability can also be exploited to simply pop-up a reverse shell remotely from the hacked device.
Vulnerable Apps, Devices and Available Patches
The issue affects WhatsApp versions 2.19.230 and older versions running on Android 8.1 and 9.0, but does not work for Android 8.0 and below.
"In the older Android versions, double-free could still be triggered. However, because of the malloc calls by the system after the double-free, the app just crashes before reaching to the point that we could control the PC register," the researcher writes.
Nhat told The Hacker News that he reported the vulnerability to Facebook, who owns WhatsApp, in late July this year, and the company included a security patch in WhatsApp version 2.19.244, released in September.
Therefore, to protect yourself against any exploit surrounding this vulnerability, you are recommended to update your WhatsApp to the latest version from the Google Play Store as soon as possible.
Besides this, since the flaw resides in an open-source library, it is also possible that any other Android app using the same affected library could also be vulnerable to similar attacks.
The developer of the affected GIF library, called Android GIF Drawable, has also released version 1.2.18 of the software to patch the double-free vulnerability.
WhatsApp for iOS is not affected by this vulnerability.
| Vulnerability |
Warning! Hackers Started Using "SambaCry Flaw" to Hack Linux Systems | https://thehackernews.com/2017/06/linux-samba-vulnerability.html | Remember SambaCry?
Two weeks ago we reported about a 7-year-old critical remote code execution vulnerability in Samba networking software (re-implementation of SMB networking protocol) that allows a remote hacker to take full control of a vulnerable Linux and Unix machines.
To know more about the SambaCry vulnerability (CVE-2017-7494) and how it works, you can read our previous article.
At that time, nearly 485,000 Samba-enabled computers were found to be exposed on the Internet, and researchers predicted that the SambaCry-based attacks also have potential to spread just like WannaCry ransomware widely.
The prediction came out to be quite accurate, as honeypots set up by the team of researchers from Kaspersky Lab have captured a malware campaign that is exploiting SambaCry vulnerability to infect Linux computers with cryptocurrency mining software.
Another security researcher, Omri Ben Bassat, independently discovered the same campaign and named it "EternalMiner."
According to the researchers, an unknown group of hackers has started hijacking Linux PCs just a week after the Samba flaw was disclosed publicly and installing an upgraded version of "CPUminer," a cryptocurrency mining software that mines "Monero" digital currency.
After compromising the vulnerable machines using SambaCry vulnerability, attackers execute two payloads on the targeted systems:
INAebsGB.so — A reverse-shell that provides remote access to the attackers.
cblRWuoCc.so — A backdoor that includes cryptocurrency mining utilities – CPUminer.
"Through the reverse-shell left in the system, the attackers can change the configuration of a miner already running or infect the victim's computer with other types of malware," Kaspersky researchers say.
Mining cryptocurrencies can be a costly investment as it requires an enormous amount of computing power, but such cryptocurrency-mining malware makes it easier for cybercriminals by allowing them to utilise computing resources of compromised systems to make the profit.
If you have been following The Hacker News regularly, you must be aware of Adylkuzz, a cryptocurrency-mining malware that was using Windows SMB vulnerability at least two weeks before the outbreak of WannaCry ransomware attacks.
The Adylkuzz malware was also mining Monero by utilizing the enormous amount of computing resources of the compromised Windows systems.
The attackers behind SambaCry-based CPUminer attack have already earned 98 XMR, which worth 5,380 today and this figure is continuously rising with the increase in the number of compromised Linux systems.
"During the first day they gained about 1 XMR (about $55 according to the currency exchange rate for 08.06.2017), but during the last week they gained about 5 XMR per day," the researchers say.
The maintainers of Samba has already patched the issue in their new Samba versions 4.6.4/4.5.10/4.4.14, and are urging those using a vulnerable version of Samba to install the patch as soon as possible.
| Malware |
Hackers Targeting Servers Running Database Services for Mining Cryptocurrency | https://thehackernews.com/2017/12/chinese-hacking-databases.html | Security researchers have discovered multiple attack campaigns conducted by an established Chinese criminal group that operates worldwide, targeting database servers for mining cryptocurrencies, exfiltrating sensitive data and building a DDoS botnet.
The researchers from security firm GuardiCore Labs have analyzed thousands of attacks launched in recent months and identified at least three attack variants—Hex, Hanako, and Taylor—targeting different MS SQL and MySQL servers for both Windows and Linux.
The goals of all the three variants are different—Hex installs cryptocurrency miners and remote access trojans (RATs) on infected machines, Taylor installs a keylogger and a backdoor, and Hanako uses infected devices to build a DDoS botnet.
So far, researchers have recorded hundreds of Hex and Hanako attacks and tens of thousands of Taylor attacks each month and found that most compromised machines are based in China, and some in Thailand, the United States, Japan and others.
To gain unauthorized access to the targeted database servers, the attackers use brute force attacks and then run a series of predefined SQL commands to gain persistent access and evade audit logs.
What's interesting? To launch the attacks against database servers and serve malicious files, attackers use a network of already compromised systems, making their attack infrastructure modular and preventing takedown of their malicious activities.
For achieving persistent access to the victim's database, all three variants (Hex, Hanko, and Taylor) create backdoor users in the database and open the Remote Desktop port, allowing attackers to remotely download and install their next stage attack—a cryptocurrency miner, Remote Access Trojan (RAT) or a DDoS bot.
"Later in the attack, the attacker stops or disables a variety of anti-virus and monitoring applications by running shell commands," the researchers wrote in their blog post published Tuesday.
"The anti-virus targeted is a mixture of well-known products such as Avira and Panda Security and niche software such as Quick Heal and BullGuard."
Finally, to cover their tracks, the attackers deletes any unnecessary Windows registry, file, and folder entry using pre-defined batch files and Visual Basic scripts.
Administrators should check for the existence of the following usernames in their database or systems in order to identify if they have been compromised by the Chinese criminal hackers.
hanako
kisadminnew1
401hk$
Guest
Huazhongdiguo110
To prevent compromise of your systems, researchers advised administrators to always follow the databases hardening guides (provided by both MySQL and Microsoft), rather than just having a strong password for your databases.
"While defending against this type of attacks may sound easy or trivial—'patch your servers and use strong passwords'—we know that 'in real life' things are much more complicated. The best way to minimize your exposure to campaigns targeting databases is to control the machines that have access to the database," the researchers advised.
"Routinely review the list of machines that have access to your databases, keep this list to a minimum and pay special attention to machines that are accessible directly from the internet. Every connection attempt from an IP or domain that does not belong to this list should be blocked and investigated."
| Cyber_Attack |
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.
| Data_Breaches |
Timehop Hacked — Hackers Stole Personal Data Of All 21 Million Users | https://thehackernews.com/2018/07/timehop-data-breach.html | And the hacks just keep on coming.
Timehop social media app has been hit by a major data breach on July 4th that compromised the personal data of its more than 21 million users.
Timehop is a simple social media app that collects your old photos and posts from your iPhone, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and Foursquare and acts as a digital time machine to help you find—what you were doing on this very day exactly a year ago.
The company revealed on Sunday that unknown attacker(s) managed to break into its Cloud Computing Environment and access the data of entire 21 million users, including their names, email addresses, and approximately 4.7 million phone numbers attached to their accounts.
"We learned of the breach while it was still in progress, and were able to interrupt it, but data was taken. Some data was breached," the company wrote in a security advisory posted on its website.
Social Media OAuth2 Tokens Also Compromised
Moreover, the attackers also got their hands on authorization tokens (keys) provided by other social networking sites to Timehop for gaining access to your social media posts and images.
With access to these tokens, hackers could view some of your posts on Facebook and other social networks without your permission.
However, Timehop claims that all the compromised tokens were deauthorized and made invalid within a "short time window" after the company detected the breach on its network on July 4th at 4:23 PM Eastern Time.
The stolen access tokens cannot be now used to gain access to any of your social media profiles, and the company also claims that there is "no evidence that this actually happened."
"In addition to our communications with local and federal law enforcement, we are also in contact with all our social media providers, and will update users as needed, but again: there are no credible reports, and there has been no evidence of, any unauthorized use of these access tokens," the company said.
It should also be noted that these authorization tokens do not give anyone, including the company itself, access to your private messages on Facebook Messenger, Direct Messages on Twitter and Instagram, and things that your friends post to your Facebook wall.
Timehop is also confident that the security breach did not affect your private/direct messages, financial data, social media and photo content, and other Timehop data including streaks and memories.
Timehop also pointed out that there was no evidence that any account was accessed without authorization.
Data Breach Aided By Lack of Two-Factor Authentication
"The breach occurred because an access credential to our cloud computing environment was compromised," Timehop said.
The same day Timehop identified the breach on its network, we reported about the Gentoo GitHub account hack that allowed intruders to replace the content of the project's repositories and pages with the malicious one, after guessing the account password.
The Gentoo breach was aided by the lack of two-factor authentication (2FA) for its Github account. The 2FA makes it mandatory for users to enter an additional passcode besides the password in order to gain access to the account.
The same happened with Timehop.
Since the company was not using two-factor authentication, the attacker(s) were able to gain access to its cloud computing environment by using compromised credential.
Timehop has now taken some new security measures that include system-wide multifactor authentication to secure its authorization and access controls on all accounts.
Timehop immediately logged out all of its users of the app after the company invalidated all API credentials, which means you will need to re-authenticate each of your social media accounts to the app when you log into your Timehop account to generate a new token.
The company is also working with security experts and incident response professionals, local and federal law enforcement officials, and its social media providers to minimize the impact of the breach on its users.
Since the new GDPR privacy law defines a breach as "likely to result in a risk to the rights and freedoms of the individuals," Timehop claims to have notified all of its affected European users and is working closely with GDPR experts to assist in the countermeasures.
To know more about the incident and how it happened, you can head on to the technical report published by Timehop, which provides a more detailed breakdown of the security incident.
| Data_Breaches |
Hacking PayPal Account with Just a Click | https://thehackernews.com/2014/12/hacking-paypal-account.html | The eBay owned popular digital payment and money transfer service, PayPal has been found to be vulnerable to a critical web application vulnerability that could allow an attacker to take control over users' PayPal account with just a click, affecting more than 156 millions PayPal users.
An Egyptian security researcher, Yasser H. Ali has discovered three critical vulnerabilities in PayPal website including CSRF, Auth token bypass and Resetting the security question, which could be used by cybercriminals in the targeted attacks.
Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF or XSRF) is a method of attacking a website in which an attacker need to convince the victim to click on a specially crafted HTML exploit page that will make a request to the vulnerable website on their behalf.
Mr.Yasser demonstrated the vulnerability step-by-step in the Proof-of-Concept (PoC) video using a single exploit that combines all the three vulnerabilities. According to the demo, using Paypal CSRF exploit an attacker is able to secretly associate a new secondary email ID (attacker's email) to the victim's account, and also reset the answers of the security questions from target account.
PayPal uses security Auth tokens for detecting the legitimate requests from the account holder, but Mr. Yasser successfully bypassed it to generate exploit code for targeted attacks, as shown in the video.
Yasser told The Hacker News, "I found out that the CSRF Auth is Reusable for that specific user email address or username, this means If an attacker found any of these CSRF Tokens, He can then make actions in the behave of any logged in user."
Once executed, the exploit will add attacker's email id to victim's account, which could be used to reset the account password using "Forgot Password" option from the Paypal website. But the attacker can not change the victim's password without answering the security questions configured by user while signing up.
Yasser found that another bug in PayPal allows him to reset the security questions and their answers of his choice, hence this facilitates him to bypass the PayPal security feature completely in order to reset the new password for the victim's account.
Paypal security team has patched the vulnerability following the Yasser's report via Bug Bounty Program. Three Month ago, Yasser found similar bug in eBay website that allowed hackers to hijack any eBay account in just 1 minute.
UPDATE
PayPal spokesperson released the following statement:
"One of our security researchers recently made us aware of a potential way to bypass PayPal's Cross-Site Request Forgery (CSRF) Protection Authorization System when logging onto PayPal.com. Through the PayPal Bug Bounty program, the researcher reported this to us first and our team worked quickly to fix this potential vulnerability before any of our customers were affected by this issue. We proactively work with security researchers to learn about and stay ahead of potential threats because the security of our customers' accounts is our top concern."
| Vulnerability |
DKFBootKit - First Android BootKit Malware | https://thehackernews.com/2012/03/dkfbootkit-first-android-bootkit.html | DKFBootKit - First Android BootKit Malware
NQ Mobile Security Research Center has recently uncovered a new malware DKFBootKit. This malware is identified when monitoring and analyzing the evolution of earlier DroidKungFu variants. What sets DKFBootKit apart from malware like DroidDream, is that DKFBootKit replaces certain boot processes and can begin running even before the system is completely booted up.
DKFBootKit repackages legitimate apps by enclosing its own malicious payloads in them. However, the victim apps it chooses to infect are utility apps which require the root privilege to work properly. NQ says the malicious code has already infected 1,657 Android devices in the past two weeks and has appeared on at least 50 different mobile apps.
These apps seem to have legitimate reasons to request root privilege for their own functionality. It is also reasonable to believe that users will likely grant the root privilege to these apps. DKFBootKit makes use of the granted root privilege for other malicious purposes, namely comprising the system integrity.
In order to avoid being infected by this beast, NQ recommends three commonsense steps:
First, don't download any apps from sketchy app stores.
Second, don't accept app permissions from unknown sources and always be sure to read the permissions an app is requesting.
Third, download a security app that can scan your apps for you to search for malicious code.
NQ Mobile Security for Android is available for download.
| Vulnerability |
Is China Behind the Massive Data Theft of 4 Million U.S. Officials? | https://thehackernews.com/2015/06/china-data-theft.html | The US federal agency has notified its 4 Million current and former government employees that their private data has been compromised in a massive data breach.
Hackers managed to break into US government computer systems in the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and steal records of Millions of employees, making it one of the largest known breaches of information ever on federal workers.
The stolen information includes birth dates, credit card data, banking records, security clearance information, and background checks dating back three decades, potentially affecting people across the spectrum of the federal agency.
The massive breach is believed to be carried out by the hackers based in China, the Obama administration announced on Thursday. The breach is believed to be an "attack against the (American) nation."
Biggest Data Breach in US History
However, China has denied any involvement in what could be the largest cyber-attack in US history by calling such claims "irresponsible".
"Cyber attacks are generally anonymous and conducted across borders, and their origins are hard to trace," said Hong Lei, a foreign ministry spokesman. "Not to carry out deep investigation and keep using words such as 'possible' is irresponsible and unscientific."
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has been working with OPM interagency partners to investigate the matter. Meanwhile, OPM assured its users that it is taking all potential threats seriously, and will hold accountable those who are behind the attack.
Malicious Activity
OPM said it became aware of the data breach in April this year when it detected new malicious activity affecting its cyber security systems.
However at the beginning of last month, the Department of Homeland Security concluded that the agency's personal data had been compromised in the 'massive breach', and about 4 million government officials may have been affected.
OPM said it would contact and inform all those individuals whose personal data may have been stolen to "monitor [their] financial account statements and immediately report any suspicious or unusual activity to financial institutions."
OPM is also offering 18 months of free credit monitoring and identity theft insurance to all those are affected by the breach.
According to many United States officials who requested anonymity, the criminal hackers were believed to have been based in China. However, it is yet unclear if there is any involvement of the Chinese government.
The FBI and the Department of Homeland Security are investigating the breach.
| Cyber_Attack |
RollJam — $30 Device That Unlocks Almost Any Car And Garage Door | https://thehackernews.com/2015/08/rolljam-unlock-car-garage.html | We have talked a lot about car hacking.
Recently researchers even demonstrated how hackers can remotely hijack Jeep Cherokee to control its steering, brakes and transmission.
Now, researchers have discovered another type of car hack that can be used to unlock almost every car or garage door.
You only need two radios, a microcontroller and a battery, costing barely under $30, to devise what's called RollJam capable to unlock any car or garage at the click of a button, making auto hacking cars so simple that anyone can do it.
The recent hack takes advantage of the same vulnerable wireless unlocking technology that is being used by the majority of cars manufacturers.
These wireless unlocking systems are Keyless entry systems that enable the car owner to unlock his car just by pressing a button sitting at his workplace remotely (within a range of 20 metres).
What RollJam does and How?
RollJam steals the secret codes, called Rolling Code, that is generated every time you press the unlock or lock button on your wireless key, and expires once they are used, according to Samy Kamkar, a white hat hacker behind RollJam.
The rolling code is basically a randomly generated pseudo code that is sent over a radio frequency to your car when you press the keyfob. The lock has a synchronized code generator that recognizes it and then destroys it so it can never be reused.
The key and the car then generate new code for the next time around, and the process repeats.
However, When a person presses the key fob to unlock his or her car, RollJam used its radio frequency in such a way that it first jams or blocks the signal and then covertly records it, forcing the car owner to press the button again.
Now, when the button is pressed the second time, the RollJam again jams the signal and record that second code, but also take the opportunity on the same signal to replay the first code it intercepted, unlocking the car.
So, when the victim parks his/her car, you can use that stolen signal to unlock the car. "Because I jammed two signals," Kamkar said, "I still have one that I can use in the future."
This process of RollJam has been tested on several makes of cars, and all were found vulnerable.
During a successful test, he found that RollJam works against a range of market-leading chips, including the High-Security Rolling Code Generator made by National Semiconductor and the KeeLoq access control system from Microchip Technology.
The $30 device was successful in unlocking electronic locks on cars, including Chrysler, Fiat, Honda, Toyota, Daewoo, GM, Volvo, Volkswagen Group, Clifford, Shurlok, and Jaguar.
Moreover, RollJam also works against some garage-door openers, including the Rolling Code Garage Door Opener manufactured by King Cobra.
RollJam is damaging the security because the rolling codes are invalidated only after it or a subsequent rolling code is received.
Devices like the RSA SecurID, by contrast, cause validation codes to expire after a specific amount of time. Therefore, Rolling Code in cars should also be associated with a period of time, researcher said.
Another way to mitigate hacks like RollJam is using a unique chip for every different car. Kamkar plans to present his creation at the hacker conference DefCon in Las Vegas.
| Vulnerability |
New Google Chrome Zero-Day Vulnerability Found Actively Exploited in the Wild | https://thehackernews.com/2019/03/update-google-chrome-hack.html | You must update your Google Chrome immediately to the latest version of the web browsing application.
Security researcher Clement Lecigne of Google's Threat Analysis Group discovered and reported a high severity vulnerability in Chrome late last month that could allow remote attackers to execute arbitrary code and take full control of the computers.
The vulnerability, assigned as CVE-2019-5786, affects the web browsing software for all major operating systems including Microsoft Windows, Apple macOS, and Linux.
Without revealing technical details of the vulnerability, the Chrome security team only says the issue is a use-after-free vulnerability in the FileReader component of the Chrome browser, which leads to remote code execution attacks.
What's more worrisome? Google warned that this zero-day RCE vulnerability is actively being exploited in the wild by attackers to target Chrome users.
"Access to bug details and links may be kept restricted until a majority of users are updated with a fix," the Chrome security team notes. "We will also retain restrictions if the bug exists in a third party library that other projects similarly depend on, but haven't yet fixed."
FileReader is a standard API that has been designed to allow web applications to asynchronously read the contents of files (or raw data buffers) stored on a user's computer, using 'File' or 'Blob' objects to specify the file or data to read.
The use-after-free vulnerability is a class of memory corruption bug that allows corruption or modification of data in memory, enabling an unprivileged user to escalate privileges on an affected system or software.
The use-after-free vulnerability in the FileReader component could enable unprivileged attackers to gain privileges on the Chrome web browser, allowing them to escape sandbox protections and run arbitrary code on the targeted system.
It appears to exploit this vulnerability, all an attacker needs to do is tricking victims into just opening, or redirecting them to, a specially-crafted webpage without requiring any further interaction.
The patch for the security vulnerability has already been rolled out to its users in a stable Chrome update 72.0.3626.121 for Windows, Mac, and Linux operating systems, which users may have already receive or will soon receive in coming days.
So, make sure your system is running the updated version of the Chrome web browser.
We will update the article, as soon as Google releases technical details of this vulnerability.
| Vulnerability |
Ministry of Justice of Qatar vulnerable to hackers | https://thehackernews.com/2012/12/ministry-of-justice-of-qatar-vulnerable.html | Hacker Going by name "human mind cracker" discovered SQL injection vulnerability in official website of Ministry of Justice of Qatar. He has successfully breached the database and dump it on internet.
Exploited Domain : https://www.justice.gov.qa
Hacker Mentioned no reason to hack this website in his note, neither any user information published. According to the note, he just expose the bug and exploit it using Boolean based blind injection to show Database structure including table names.
There are about 10 Database available on server of Ministry of Justice of Qatar, that can have sensitive information also. Site is not patched yet and vulnerable to hackers.
Pastebin Note : https://pastebin.com/7amjyaMk
| Vulnerability |
20 Famous websites vulnerable to Cross Site Scripting (XSS) Attack | https://thehackernews.com/2011/09/20-famous-websites-vulnerable-to-cross.html | 20 Famous websites vulnerable to Cross Site Scripting (XSS) Attack
Most of the biggest and Famous sites are found to be Vulnerable to XSS attack . Cross-site scripting (XSS) is a type of computer security vulnerability typically found in web applications which allow code injection by malicious web users into the web pages viewed by other users. Examples of such code include HTML code and client-side scripts. An exploited cross-site scripting vulnerability can be used by attackers to bypass access controls such as the same origin policy. Recently, vulnerabilities of this kind have been exploited to craft powerful phishing attacks and browser exploits. Cross-site scripting was originally referred to as CSS, although this usage has been largely discontinued.
Hacker with code name "Invectus" list some such famous sites with XSS vulnerability as listed below :
1.) https://video.state.gov/en/search/img-srchttp-i55tinypiccom-witu7dpng-height650-width1000/Ij48aW1nIHNyYz0iaHR0cDovL2k1NS50aW55cGljLmNvbS93aXR1N2QucG5nIiBoZWlnaHQ9IjY1MCIgd2lkdGg9IjEwMDAiPg%3D%3D
2.) https://www.telegraph.co.uk/search/?queryText=%22%3E%3Cimg%20src=%22https://i55.tinypic.com/witu7d.png%22%20height=%22650%22%20width=%221000%22%3E
3.) https://www.dsm.com/en_US/cworld/public/home/pages/searchResults.jsp?search-site=%22%3E%3Cimg+src%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fi55.tinypic.com%2Fwitu7d.png%22+height%3D%22650%22+width%3D%221000%22%3E&noMimimumKeywords=false
4.) https://www.schools.nsw.edu.au/psearch/ext/?refine=new&QueryText=%22%3E%3Cimg+src%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fi55.tinypic.com%2Fwitu7d.png%22+height%3D%22650%22+width%3D%221000%22%3E&Go.x=29&Go.y=25&Go=submit
5.) https://thetablet.co.uk/search.php?q=%22%3E%3Cimg%20src=%22https://i55.tinypic.com/witu7d.png%22%20height=%22650%22%20width=%221000%22%3E
6.) https://www.scstatehouse.gov/cgi-bin/query.exe?first=FIRST&querytext=&category=%22%3E%3Cimg%20src=%22https://i55.tinypic.com/witu7d.png%22%20height=%22650%22%20width=%221000%22%3E
7.) https://www.highered.tafensw.edu.au/vsearch/tafehigheredu/?QueryText=%22%3E%3Cimg%20src=%22https://i55.tinypic.com/witu7d.png%22%20height=%22650%22%20width=%221000%22%3E
8.) https://www.mcdonalds.com/content/us/en/search/search_results.html?queryText=%22%3E%3Cimg%20src=%22https://i55.tinypic.com/witu7d.png%22%20height=%22650%22%20width=%221000%22%3E
9.) https://www.watersportholland.nl/cgi-bin/watersportholland/zoeken.cgi?search=Vera&query=%22%3E%3Cimg+src%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fi55.tinypic.com%2Fwitu7d.png%22+height%3D%22650%22+width%3D%221000%22%3E
10.) https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/search/searchresults.action?st=%22%3E%3Cimg%20src=%22https://i55.tinypic.com/witu7d.png%22%20height=%22650%22%20width=%221000%22%3E
11.) https://www.networkcomputing.com/sitesearch?sort=publishDate+desc&queryText=%22%3E%3Cimg+src%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fi55.tinypic.com%2Fwitu7d.png%22+height%3D%22650%22+width%3D%221000%22%3E
12.) https://www.unc.edu/search/index.htm?q=%22%3E%3Cimg+src%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fi55.tinypic.com%2Fwitu7d.png%22+height%3D%22650%22+width%3D%221000%22%3E&cx=014532668884084418890%3Ajyc_iub1byy&cof=FORID%3A10&ie=UTF-8&hq=inurl%3Adevnet.unc.edu
13.) https://cugir.mannlib.cornell.edu/search?querytext=%22%3E%3Cimg%20src=%22https://i55.tinypic.com/witu7d.png%22%20height=%22650%22%20width=%221000%22%3E
14.) https://ieeexplore.ieee.org./search/freesearchresult.jsp?newsearch=true&queryText=.QT.%3E%3Cimg+src.EQ..QT.http%3A%2F%2Fi55.tinypic.com%2Fwitu7d.png.QT.+height.EQ..QT.650.QT.+width.EQ..QT.1000.QT.%3E&x=58&y=13
15.) https://vivo-vis.cns.iu.edu/vivo1/search?querytext=%22%3E%3Cimg+src%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fi55.tinypic.com%2Fwitu7d.png%22+height%3D%22650%22+width%3D%221000%22%3E
16.) https://google.nyu.edu/search?site=NYUWeb_Main&client=NYUWeb_Main&output=xml_no_dtd&proxyreload=1&proxystylesheet=stern_frontend&sitesearch=www.stern.nyu.edu&q=%22%3E%3Cimg+src%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fi55.tinypic.com%2Fwitu7d.png%22+height%3D%22650%22+width%3D%221000%22%3E&x=8&y=6
17.) https://ofa.fas.harvard.edu/cal/search.php?q=%22%3E%3Cimg%20src=%22https://i55.tinypic.com/witu7d.png%22%20height=%22650%22%20width=%221000%22%3E
18.) https://www.uidaho.edu/search?q=%22%3E%3Cscript%3EInvectus%3C/script%3E&cof=FORID:9&cref=https://www.uidaho.edu/search?xml=1&ticks=634508915004972966
19.) https://vivo.ufl.edu/search?flag1=1&querytext=%22%3E%3Cimg+src%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fi55.tinypic.com%2Fwitu7d.png%22+height%3D%22650%22+width%3D%221000%22%3E
20.) https://energy.gov/search/site/%22%3E%3Cimg%20src%3D%22http%3A//i55.tinypic.com/witu7d.png%22%20height%3D%22650%22%20width%3D%221000%22%3E
| Vulnerability |
Get paid up to $40,000 for finding ways to hack Facebook or Instagram accounts | https://thehackernews.com/2018/11/cybersecurity-bug-bounty.html | Here we have great news for all bug bounty hunters.
Now you can get paid up to $40,000 for finding and responsibly reporting critical vulnerabilities in the websites and mobile applications owned by Facebook that could allow cyber attackers to take over user accounts.
In the latest post published Tuesday on the Facebook page, the social networking giant announced that it has raised the monetary reward for account takeover vulnerabilities to encourage security researchers and bug bounty hunters in helping Facebook to fix high impact issues before nefarious hackers exploit them.
The announcement says:
Cybersecurity researchers who find security vulnerabilities in any products owned by Facebook, including Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus, that can lead to a full account takeover, including access tokens leakage or the ability to access users' valid sessions, will be rewarded an average bounty of:
$40,000 reward—if user interaction is not required at all
$25,000 reward—if minimum user interaction is required
"We encourage researchers to share their proof of concept reports with us without having to also discover bypasses for Facebook defense mechanisms," Facebook said.
"By increasing the award for account takeover vulnerabilities and decreasing the technical overhead necessary to be eligible for bug bounty, we hope to encourage an even larger number of high quality submissions from our existing and new white hat researchers to help us secure over 2 billion users."
In recent years Facebook has paid out millions of dollars to white hat hackers under its bug bounty program for reporting flaws in its services and helping the company fix them.
The move apparently comes in response to a recent massive data breach in Facebook that allowed attackers to gather personal information of around 30 million Facebook users using stolen access tokens by exploiting a zero-day vulnerability in its "View As" feature.
If you find any vulnerability in Facebook-owned platforms, report it to the company through its bug bounty program.
2018 has been quite a terrible year for Facebook with the most significant revelation being the Cambridge Analytic scandal that exposed personal data of 87 million Facebook users.
The social network also suffered its worst-ever security breach in September that exposed highly sensitive data of 14 million users.
In June, the company suffered another issue affecting 14 million users, wherein users' posts that were meant to be private became public.
These incidents came out to be a failure of the company in keeping the information of its 2.2 billion users protected while generating billions of dollars in revenue from the same information.
| Vulnerability |
Unfixed Reflection API vulnerability reported in Java | https://thehackernews.com/2013/04/unfixed-reflection-api-vulnerability.html | Founder and CEO of Security Explorations of Poland, Adam Gowdiak has reported a new unpatched security vulnerability in JAVA that affects all Java versions, including 7u21 released last Tuesday.
Gowdiak claims to have sent to Oracle a report about a reflection API vulnerability in the newly shipped Server Java Runtime Environment (JRE), notifying them of the new security weakness. "It can be used to achieve a complete Java security sandbox bypass on a target system,"
Vulnerability allows attackers to completely bypass the language's sandbox to access the underlying system. Gowdiak has not published any further details about the vulnerability in order to give Oracle time to patch the problem.
Last week's Oracle patch update repaired many issues plaguing the platform. Java 7 Update 21 contains 42 new security fixes for Oracle Java SE. A majority of these flaws are browse-to–a-hacked-site-and-get-infected vulnerabilities.
According to Oracle, "39 of these vulnerabilities may be remotely exploitable without authentication, i.e., may be exploited over a network without the need for a username and password"
He first reported vulnerabilities in the Reflection API a year ago, and he said that this vulnerability is present in the server versions of the Java Runtime Environment, as well as in the JRE Plugin and JDK software.
| Vulnerability |
New Malware Replaced Legit Android Apps With Fake Ones On 25 Million Devices | https://thehackernews.com/2019/07/whatsapp-android-malware.html | Are you sure the WhatsApp app you are using on your Android device is legitimate, even if it's working perfectly as intended?
...Or the JioTV, AppLock, HotStar, Flipkart, Opera Mini or Truecaller app—if you have installed any of these?
I'm asking this because cybersecurity researchers just yesterday revealed eye-opening details about a widespread Android malware campaign wherein attackers silently replaced installed legitimate apps with their malicious versions on nearly 25 million mobile phones.
Now the important question here is how they're doing it and why?
According to researchers at Check Point, attackers are distributing a new kind of Android malware that disguises itself as innocent-looking photo editing, adult entertainment, or gaming apps and available through widely used third-party app stores.
Dubbed Agent Smith, the malware takes advantage of multiple Android vulnerabilities, such as the Janus flaw and the Man-in-the-Disk flaw, and injects malicious code into the APK files of targeted apps installed on a compromised device and then automatically re-install/updates them without the victims' knowledge or interaction.
"It's not enough for this malware family to swap just one innocent application with an infected double. It does so for each and every app on the device as long as the package names are on its prey list," the researchers wrote in their report published Wednesday.
"Over time, this campaign will also infect the same device, repeatedly, with the latest malicious patches. This leads us to estimate there to be over 2.8 billion infections in total, on around 25 Million unique devices, meaning that on average, each victim would have suffered roughly 112 swaps of innocent applications."
The malware, which researchers believe is tied to a China-based firm, has been designed for financial gain by serving malicious advertisements to victims.
How Does Agent Smith Malware Work?
Upon installation of boobytrapped apps, the Agent Smith malware leverages a three-stage infection chain and contains different modules for each step, working of which are explained below:
1.) Loader Module — The initial app distributing the malware contains a module called Loader, whose only purpose is to decrypt, extract, and run the second stage module named Core.
2.) Core Module — Once executed, the Core module communicates with the attackers' C&C server to receive a list of popular apps that needs to be targeted.
If it finds a match installed on the victim's device, the Core module tries to infect the targeted APK using the Janus vulnerability or by simply recompiling the APK with a malicious payload.
Further, to automatically install the modified APK and replace its original version without users' consent, attackers utilize a series of 1-day vulnerabilities, including man-in-the-disk attack.
3.) Boot Module — This module is included in the malicious payload that was bundled with the original app and worked the same as the Loader module. It extracts and executes a malicious payload, called the Patch module when a victim runs the modified application.
4.) Patch Module — The patch module has been designed to prevent modified applications from getting legitimate updates, which if installed, would revert all malicious changes.
"While investing a lot of resources in the development of this malware, the actor behind Agent Smith does not want a real update to remove all of the changes made, so here is where the Patch module comes in to play"
"With the sole purpose of disabling automatic updates for the infected application, this module observes the update directory for the original application and removes the file once it appears."
6.) AdSDK Module — This is the actual payload that displays ads to the victims for financial gain and further also infects the device with other adware families.
However, the researchers warn that this modular malware could be easily adapted for far more intrusive and harmful purposes, such as stealing sensitive information—from private messages to banking credentials and much more.
Researchers initially encountered the Agent Smith malware in early 2019, which was primarily being found targeting Android devices in India (with 15 million infected devices) and other nearby Asian countries like Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, and Nepal.
However, the malware also affected a noticeable number of devices in the United States (more than 300,000 infected devices), Australia (over 140,000 infected devices) and the United Kingdom (over 135,000 infected devices).
Besides third-party app stores, researchers also found at least 11 infected apps on the Google Play Store in recent months containing malicious yet inactive Agent Smith components.
This clearly indicates that the threat actors behind this malware campaign are also trying to find a way in Google's mobile app download platform to spread their adware. Google has reportedly removed all the apps from its store.
Since Agent Smith has mostly infected users who downloaded apps from third-party app stores, users are highly recommended always to download apps from trusted app stores to mitigate the risk of infection. Also, download apps only from trusted developers.
Users are also advised to uninstall any apps they suspect may be malicious by heading on to Settings Menu, clicking Apps or Application Manager, and then Scroll to the suspected app and uninstall it.
Since the key vulnerability Agent Smith is exploiting dates back to 2017 and has already been patched, mobile app developers are recommended to implement the latest APK Signature Scheme V2 to prevent malicious apps from leveraging Android's Janus vulnerability against their apps.
| Vulnerability |
The Oak Ridge National Laboratory Hacked ! | https://thehackernews.com/2011/04/oak-ridge-national-laboratory-hacked.html | A top United States federal lab was the victim of a "silent" cyberattack earlier this month, news outlets are reporting
The Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee was the victim, according to Nextgov.com. The lab is an energy department laboratory that studies nuclear fusion, supercomputing, and other areas. Ironically, "one of the core competencies of the lab is cybersecurity research," according to a quote on Wired. The attack prompted a shutdown of e-mail and Internet access at the facility.
The attack vector used to break into Oak Ridge's network is known as an advanced persistent threat, or APT. Nextgov describes it thus: "APTs typically infiltrate a target by e-mailing its employees messages purportedly from legitimate associates that ask the employee to submit personal information, such as passwords, and then harvest this information to access the systems they are after. Once inside the network, the perpetrators often try to extract data -- perhaps proprietary designs or classified information."
Wired provides more details of the attack:
According to Zacharia, the intrusion came in the form of a spear-phishing email sent to lab employees on April 7. The e-mail, purportedly sent from the human resources department, discussed employee benefits and included a link to a malicious web page, where malware exploited the IE vulnerability to download additional code to users' machines.
The attackers cast their net wide in the company, but hooked only two computers in the phishing scheme, Zacharia said. About 530 employees received the e-mail — out of about 5,000 workers — but only 57 people clicked on the malicious link in the correspondence. Out of this, only two machines got infected with the malware.
The lab began to block the malicious emails soon after they began coming in, but it was already too late. On April 11, administrators discovered a server had been breached when data began leaving the network. Workers cleaned up the infected system, but early Friday evening "a number of other servers suddenly [went] active with the malware," Zacharia said. The malware had apparently laid dormant for a week before it awoke on those systems. That's when the lab blocked internet access.
Zacharia said the malware "masked itself" on systems and was designed to erase itself if it tried to compromise a system and was unsuccessful.
According to NetworkWorld, the attack was an attempt to steal data, although it is believed that no significant data has been lost thus far. The lab's director of communications is quoted in the article as stating that no one knows where the attacks originated. According to Knoxnews, the attack involved a zero-day exploit that took advantage of a vulnerability in Internet Explorer.
The news comes only a month after the highly publicized APT attack on security vendor RSA, and is further proof that no group or company is immune to these attacks.
| Malware |
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.
| Malware |
Cisco 'Knowingly' Sold Hackable Video Surveillance System to U.S. Government | https://thehackernews.com/2019/08/cisco-surveillance-technology.html | Cisco Systems has agreed to pay $8.6 million to settle a lawsuit that accused the company of knowingly selling video surveillance system containing severe security vulnerabilities to the U.S. federal and state government agencies.
It's believed to be the first payout on a 'False Claims Act' case over failure to meet cybersecurity standards.
The lawsuit began eight years ago, in the year 2011, when Cisco subcontractor turned whistleblower, James Glenn, accused Cisco of continue selling a video surveillance technology to federal agencies even after knowing that the software was vulnerable to multiple security flaws.
According to the court documents seen by The Hacker News, Glenn and one of his colleagues discovered multiple vulnerabilities in Cisco Video Surveillance Manager (VSM) suite in September 2008 and tried to report them to the company in October 2008.
Cisco Video Surveillance Manager (VSM) suite allows customers to manage multiple video cameras at different physical locations through a centralized server, which in turn, can be accessed remotely.
The vulnerabilities could have reportedly enabled remote hackers to gain unauthorized access to the video surveillance system permanently, eventually allowing them to gain access to all video feeds, all stored data on the system, modify or delete video feeds, and bypass security measures.
Apparently, Net Design, the Cisco contractor where Glenn was working at that time, fired him shortly after he reported Cisco's security violations, which the company officially described as a cost-cutting measure.
However, in 2010, when Glenn realized that Cisco never fixed those issues neither notified its customers, he informed the U.S. federal agency, who then launched a lawsuit claiming Cisco had defrauded U.S. federal, state and local governments who purchased the product.
Cisco, directly and indirectly, sold its VSM software suit to police departments, schools, courts, municipal offices and airports as we as to many government agencies including the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the Secret Service, the Navy, the Army, the Air Force, the Marine Corps and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
"Cisco has known of these critical security flaws for at least two and a half years; it has failed to notify the government entities that have purchased and continue to use VSM of the vulnerability," the lawsuit states.
"Thus, for example, an unauthorized user could effectively shut down an entire airport by taking control of all security cameras and turning them off. Alternately, such a hacker could access the video archives of a large entity to obscure or eliminate video evidence of theft or espionage."
After the lawsuit was filed, the company acknowledged the vulnerabilities (CVE-2013-3429, CVE-2013-3430, CVE-2013-3431) and released an updated version of its VSM software suit.
As part of the lawsuit, Cisco has finally agreed to pay $8.6 million in the settlement—of which Glenn and his lawyers will receive $1.6 million and the rest $7 million going to the federal government and the 16 states that purchased the affected product.
In response to the latest settlement, Cisco issued an official statement Wednesday saying it was "pleased to have resolved" the 2011 dispute and that "there was no allegation or evidence that any unauthorized access to customers' video occurred" as a result of its VSM suit's architecture.
However, the company added that video feeds could "theoretically have been subject to hacking," though the lawsuit has not claimed that anyone had exploited the vulnerabilities discovered by Glenn.
| Vulnerability |
Google releases Security Patch for Android Stagefright 2.0 Vulnerability | https://thehackernews.com/2015/10/Android-Stagefright.html | Google reportedly fixed the latest round of Stagefright vulnerabilities in Android, pushing its latest over-the-air (OTA) update to Nexus devices.
Last week, researchers warned of Stagefright 2.0 vulnerability that affected more than one Billion Android devices dating back to the latest versions of the Android operating system.
The Stagefright bugs allowed hackers to take control of affected Android devices by sending a malicious audio or video file.
In April, Zimperium researchers disclosed the first Stagefright vulnerability that allowed hackers to hijack any Android smartphones with just a simple text message (exploit code).
As promised, Google on Monday pushed a patch that fixes the holes in Stagefright media playback engine used by Android to process, record and play multimedia files such as PDFs.
The patch fixes 30 vulnerabilities in total, which includes:
14 critical vulnerabilities in Stagefright library
5 Remote Code Execution bugs
8 Elevation of Privilege bugs
2 Denial of Service Vulnerabilities in Mediaserver
Despite the disclosure of the vulnerabilities, Google said that the company had "no reports of active customer exploitation of these newly reported issues."
HTC devices will probably have to wait to receive the patch, as indicates a tweet by CEO Jason Mackenzie.
Nexus devices have already received the patch through OTA update, but it is still unclear how long it will take for Samsung and LG to release the patch for their respective flagships.
| Vulnerability |
Hacking Google Glass with QR Code to sniff user data | https://thehackernews.com/2013/07/Hacking-Google-Glass-QR-Code.html | Researchers at mobile security firm Lookout discovered a security flaw in Google Glass which allowed them to capture data without the user's knowledge, when the user merely took a photo that captured a malicious QR code.
Lookout was able to force Google Glass to silently connect to a Wi-Fi access point, which let the researchers view all of the data flowing to and from the device. When combined with an Android 4.0.4 web vulnerability, the hack apparently gave researchers full control of the Glass headset.
The problem was that Google Glass could be told to execute a QR code without the user having to give permission. Because of Glass's limited user interface, Google set up the device's camera to automatically process any QR code in a photograph.
In a video posted on YouTube, Lookout Security described the vulnerability:
"That access point in turn allowed us to spy on the connections Glass made, from web requests to images uploaded to the Cloud." said Marc Rogers, Lookout.
Lookout disclosed its findings to Google on 16 May. Google filed a bug report with the Glass development team and the issue was fixed by version XE6, released on 4 June.
| Malware |
Experian Breach: 15 Million T-Mobile Customers' Data Hacked | https://thehackernews.com/2015/10/experian-tmobile-hack.html | If you applied for financing from T-Mobile anytime between 1 September 2013 and 16 September 2015, you have been HACKED! – even if you never had T-Mobile service.
T-Mobile's credit application processor Experian was hacked, potentially exposing the highly personal information of more than 15 million people in the United States.
The stolen information includes names, addresses, phone numbers and – most unfortunately – Social Security numbers.
The massive data breach was first discovered in mid-September and has now been confirmed by T-Mobile CEO John Legere.
According to Legere, Hackers successfully obtained Millions of people's private information through Experian, one of the world's largest credit check companies that process T-Mobile's credit applications.
Both customers and people who submitted to a T-Mobile credit check (but either canceled or never activated their T-Mobile service) between September 1, 2013, and September 16, 2015, are most at risk.
Now, Hackers have their hands on two years worth of sensitive identifying information that T-Mobile uses to check credit ratings, which could possibly make the rounds on the black market.
The Stolen victims' data includes:
Residential addresses
Social Security numbers
Birth Dates
Driver's License number
Passport number
Military I.D. numbers
and more
Some of the pilfered data was encrypted, according to Experian, which is taking responsibility for the breach. However, T-Mobile claims that the "encryption may have been compromised."
The telecommunication giant said that no credit or debit card numbers of its customers were stolen in the breach. However, one could imagine that with this trove of stolen data, anyone can easily steal someone's identity without trying too terribly hard.
Why Losing a Social Security Number is more dangerous than Losing a Payment Card?
It sounds good to ears hearing that hackers did not access credit or debit card numbers during the data breach, but losing your Social Security number is actually worse than losing your payment cards.
If hackers make use of your credit or debit card, you have a good option to stop them – Report fraudulent purchases when you see your bill.
You hardly lose anything, as you'll get your money back as well as your financial institution will send you a new payment card.
But once your Social Security number stolen, Hackers can screw you up because, you can almost never change your Social Security number.
Identity thieves can apply for credit cards and run up debt in your name. They can ruin your credit score, even before you come to know that your information is stolen and is misused.
The more worrisome part is that there's not a whole lot victims can do to prevent further damage beyond one thing: Freeze your credit report.
This incident marks the latest high-profile data breach and adds itself to the list that includes OPM losing 4 million federal workers' personal data, health insurer Excellus losing 10 million health records exposed and last year's Target and Home Depot data breach.
T-Mobile is very Angry
Legere said he is reviewing T-Mobile's relationship with the company as a result of the massive breach.
"Obviously I am incredibly angry about this data breach, and we will institute a thorough review of our relationship with Experian, but right now my top concern and first focus is assisting any and all consumers affected."
T-Mobile and Experian are offering two years of free credit monitoring to their affected customers. Now, let's wait and watch how worse this hack goes.
| Cyber_Attack |
Incredible! Someone Just Hacked 10,000 Routers to Make them More Secure | https://thehackernews.com/2015/10/hack-wifi-router.html | Has anyone ever heard about a "Vigilante-style Hacker," who hacks every possible system to make them more Secure?
No. It's not funny, neither a movie story:
Reportedly, someone is hacking thousands unprotected Wi-Fi routers everywhere and apparently forcing owners to make them more Secure.
Security firm Symantec has discovered a new malware, dubbed "Linux.Wifatch" a.k.a "Ifwatch," infected more than 10,000 vulnerable 'Internet of Things' devices, and spreading quickly.
However, Linux.Wifatch not only removes malicious backdoor but also encourages users to update their weak passwords.
How Does Linux.Wifatch Work?
Once a device is infected, the Linux.Wifatch malware connects to a peer-to-peer network that is being used to distribute threat updates.
Linux.Wifatch's code does not deploy any payload for malicious activities, such as to carry out DDoS attacks, rather it detects and remediates the known families of malicious codes present on the compromised devices.
After Installation, whenever 'Linux.Wifatch' detects any malicious activity or malware on the vulnerable device; it asks the device owners to:
Change their default password,
Close potentially vulnerable Telnet port immediately
However, the malware does not appear to be used for malicious purposes yet, but researchers have found that the malware contains a number of backdoors that can be used by its developer to carry out malicious tasks remotely.
Linux.Wifatch, written in the Perl programming language, was first discovered in November last year by an independent malware researcher, who calls himself "Loot Myself."
The researcher shared complete details of the malware in a two-part series on his blog with the same name - "Loot Myself: Malware Analysis and Botnet tracking."
In 2014, the researcher sensed unwanted activities in his home router and for which he could not find the location as well.
This curiosity made him explore more, and while digging deeper he decoded the roots of the malware- THE SOURCE CODE, written in Perl.
After going through the source code, the researcher points out that the code is not obfuscated; it just uses compression and minification of the source code.
Further, the researcher mentions about an unusual activity:
"To any NSA and FBI agents reading this: please consider whether defending the U.S. Constitution against all enemies, foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example." he says in the blog post.
How to Secure Your Wireless Router?
Though the risk associated with Linux.Wifatch is low, the security researchers at Symantec are keeping an eye on its activities.
They say with such a "Malware-for-Good," it apparently creates a 'Benefit of the Doubt' as the author's intentions are unknown.
The case hasn't closed yet, as Symantec says, "It pays to be suspicious."
Essential Security Measures
Symantec had previously issued measures to get rid of this Malware. Here below you can read a few important recommendation in short:
Use a Firewall to block all incoming connections
Enforce a password policy
Make sure to offer the lowest level of privileges to programs
Disable AutoPlay
Turn off file sharing if not needed
How to Remove 'Linux.Wifatch' Malware?
If you have also detected such activity on your home routers, you can get rid of the risk associated with it by:
Resetting your device; as it will remove the Linux.Wifatch malware
Keeping your device's software and firmware up to date
Changing any default passwords that may be in use
Resetting your passwords routinely
More Ways to Protect your Network
Further, you can protect your Wireless network by following few measures, that assure your security, like:
Turning on your wireless router's encryption setting
Turn the Firewall On
Change Default Passwords
Change the default "SSID" (service set identifier) of your devic
Turn Network Name Broadcasting Off
Use the MAC Address Filter
| Malware |
Nasty Covert Redirect Vulnerability found in OAuth and OpenID | https://thehackernews.com/2014/05/nasty-covert-redirect-vulnerability.html | After Heartbleed bug, a security flaw in widely used open-source software OpenSSL that puts countless websites at risk, another vulnerability has been found in popular authentication software OpenID and authorization software OAuth.
Wang Jing, a Chinese mathematics Ph.D student at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, found that the OAuth and OpenID open source login tools are vulnerable to the "Covert Redirect" exploit.
The login tools 'OAuth' and 'OpenID' protocols are the commonly used open standard for authorization. OAuth designed as a way for users to sign in or sign up for other services using an existing identity of a site such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft or Twitter, whereas OpenID is a decentralized authentication system for the Internet that allows users to log in at websites across the internet with same digital identity.
The Covert Redirect vulnerability could affect those who use 'OAuth' and 'OpenID' protocols to 'login' to the websites such as Facebook, Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn, Microsoft, VK, Mail.Ru, PayPal, GitHub and many others.
WHAT MAKES IT EVEN MORE DANGEROUS?
The "Covert Redirect" flaw masquerade as a login popup from the affected sites that could allow an attacker to steal personal data from users and redirect them to a website of the attacker's choice, which could potentially further compromise the victim.
By clicking on a malicious phishing link will get a popup window in Facebook, asking them to authorize the app and to hoax the user into giving up their information instead on legitimate websites, the Covert Redirect flaw uses the real site address for authentication.
Once the user login, the attacker could get the personal data, which in the case of Facebook, could include the email address, birth date, contacts, work history, etc.
But, if in case "the token" has greater privilege, the attacker could obtain more sensitive information including the mailbox, friends list, online presence and most possibly even operate and control the user's account.
In a blog post yesterday Jing explained, for OAuth 2.0, the attacks could risk "the token" of the site users and whenever users authorize the login the attacker could then use that to access users' private information. In case of OpenID, the attacker could get users' information directly, as it's immediately transferred from the provider upon request.
However, this isn't the first time the issue has been raised and the root cause is a lack of token whitelisting in OAuth 2.0.
RESPONSE FROM INTERNET GIANTS
Facebook uses OAuth and something similar to OpenID. When he reported the Facebook about the vulnerability, Facebook said "they understand the risks associated with OAuth 2.0. However, short of forcing every single application on the platform to use a whitelist, [fixing the vulnerability] isn't something that can be accomplished in the short term."
Facebook isn't the only site affected, Jing reported the vulnerability to some more companies who use both OAuth and OpenID including Google, LinkedIn, Microsoft and Yahoo to discuss the problem.
Google uses OpenID and told Jing, "they are aware of the problem and are tracking it at the moment," whereas LinkedIn told they have acknowledged the problem back in march and "published a blog post on how [they] intend to address [the problem]."
Microsoft replied after they investigated the matter and concluded that the vulnerability exists in the domain of a third-party which is different from the one Jing reported and recommended him to report the issue to the third-party instead.
Yahoo did not reply months after he reported.
"They have little incentive to fix the problem," Jing wrote regarding the companies, "One concern is the cost and the other is that in their view, the host company is responsible for making the attacks appear more credible; therefore, it is not solely their problem."
HOW TO FIX COVERT REDIRECT VULNERABILITY
According to Jing, there is no speedy fix for the vulnerability. "In the real world, a large number of third-party applications do not do this due to various reasons. This makes the systems based on OAuth 2.0 or OpenID highly vulnerable," Jing wrote.
Wang believes it's unlikely that this flaw will be patched any time soon. He says neither the authentication companies such as Google, Microsoft, Facebook, nor the client companies are taking responsibility for fixing the issue.
However, to take advantage of Covert redirect vulnerability, it requires interaction from users i.e. Victim has to click on a link or visit a malicious website, and then they have to click on a Facebook login button and agree to authorize the login and release of information.
So far, the security experts hasn't labelled this vulnerability as a major security flaw as Heartbleed, but still it's a threat.
| Malware |
Vigilante Hackers Aim to Hijack 200,000 Routers to Make Them More Secure | https://thehackernews.com/2016/02/hacking-wireless-router.html | The same "Vigilante-style Hacker," who previously hacked more than 10,000 routers to make them more secure, has once again made headlines by compromising more than 70,000 home routers and apparently forcing their owners to make them secure against flaws and weak passwords.
Just like the infamous hacking group Lizard Squad, the group of white hat hackers, dubbed the White Team, is building up a sizeable botnet consisting of hundreds of thousands of home routers, but for a good purpose.
Lizard Squad, the same group responsible for Sony PlayStation Network and Microsoft Xbox Live outages, uses their botnets to launch DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks against target websites to flood them with traffic and knock them offline.
Hacking Routers to Make them More Secure
Challenged by Lizard Squad's maliocus work, the White Team of vigilante hackers built their own peer-to-peer botnet that infects routers to close off vulnerabilities, such as:
Weak default passwords
DNS poisoning
Unauthorised access (backdoor)
Disabled firewalls
Their malware, dubbed "Linux.Wifatch" a.k.a "Wifatch" that has been used by the team since last year continues to be updated and has been open-sourced on Github.
The malware, first discovered in November 2014 by an independent malware researcher "Loot Myself" and analysed by Symantec last year, now includes more programs to remove other malicious software and backdoors already on the system.
The White Team has access to around 70,000 devices, according to Symantec, who is continuously watching over the team's botnet.
Good Malware to Fight Bad Malware
Lizard Squad sizable botnet contained somewhere between 120,000 and 150,000 bots, a Lizard spokesperson told Forbes, claiming that their botnet includes not just home routers and PCs, but smart refrigerators, smart TVs and other smart home devices as well.
The White Team aims at hacking and protecting between 150,000 and 200,000 devices from Lizard Squad attacks, thereby removing the rogue gang from people's homes.
However, the team of vigilante hackers face some hurdles, especially when working with the Wifatch malware, which is often too big to install on smaller routers.
"The goal is to use (most) of the 60,000 nodes we have to connect to the hundreds of thousands of boxes that are too small for our normal disinfector and disinfect them remotely," the hacker collective told the publication over encrypted email.
Since there are so many vulnerable devices that can be hacked with little or no effort, these vigilante hackers aren't answer to this widespread problem. They can only help minimize the issue.
The White Team is not the only team of vigilante hackers trying to secure the Internet. Just last week, a hacker replaced a malware with antivirus software. An anonymous hacker was found replacing Dridex, the most active banking malware, with the copies of Avira security software.
| Vulnerability |
Update Your Chrome Browser to Patch Yet Another 0-Day Exploited in-the-Wild | https://thehackernews.com/2021/06/update-your-chrome-browser-to-patch-yet.html | Google has rolled out yet another update to Chrome browser for Windows, Mac, and Linux to fix four security vulnerabilities, including one zero-day flaw that's being exploited in the wild.
Tracked as CVE-2021-30554, the high severity flaw concerns a use after free vulnerability in WebGL (aka Web Graphics Library), a JavaScript API for rendering interactive 2D and 3D graphics within the browser.
Successful exploitation of the flaw could mean corruption of valid data, leading to a crash, and even execution of unauthorized code or commands.
The issue was reported to Google anonymously on June 15, Chrome technical program manager Srinivas Sista noted, adding the company is "aware that an exploit for CVE-2021-30554 exists in the wild."
While it's usually the norm to limit details of the vulnerability until a majority of users are updated with the fix, the development comes less than 10 days after Google addressed another zero-day vulnerability exploited in active attacks (CVE-2021-30551).
CVE-2021-30554 is also the eighth zero-day flaw patched by Google since the start of the year.
"I'm happy we are getting better at detecting these exploits and the great partnerships we have to get the vulnerabilities patched, but I remain concerned about how many are being discovered on an ongoing basis and the role of commercial providers," tweeted Shane Huntley, Director of Google's Threat Analysis Group, on June 8.
Chrome users are recommended to update to the latest version (91.0.4472.114) by heading to Settings > Help > 'About Google Chrome' to mitigate the risk associated with the flaw.
| Malware |
Creator of MegalodonHTTP DDoS Botnet Arrested | https://thehackernews.com/2016/01/MegalodonHTTP-DDoS-Botnet.html | Last month, the Norway police arrested five hackers accused of running the MegalodonHTTP Remote Access Trojan (RAT).
The arrests came as part of the joint operation between Norway's Kripos National Criminal Investigation Service and Europol, codenamed "OP Falling sTAR."
According to the United States security firm, all the five men, aged between 16 and 24 years and located in Romania, France, and Norway, were charged with possessing, using and selling malware.
One of those arrested also confessed to running his own web store where he sold malware, designed to take full control of target computers, harvesting passwords, and other personal data.
Moreover, the malware can be used to hijack webcams in real-time, and steal documents, images, and videos as well.
"Damballa's threat discovery center worked in cooperation with the Norway police over the last few months to track and identify the author of the malware dubbed MegalodonHTTP," threat researcher Loucif Kharouni wrote in a blog post.
"We are not at liberty to divulge the MegalodonHTTP author's real identity, but we can confirm that the person behind the handle Bin4ry is no longer active or doing business."
However, the researchers said MegalodonHTTP was not very powerful; in fact, it was "quite simple" and indicated the poor coding skills of its author, requiring .NET to be installed on infected systems.
MegalodonHTTP Remote Access Trojan
MegalodonHTTP included a number of features as listed below:
Binary downloading and executing
Distributed Denial of service (DDoS) attack methods
Remote shell
Antivirus Disabling
Crypto miner for Bitcoin, Litecoin, Omnicoin and Dogecoin
However, MegalodonHTTP is not an advanced malware, according to the researchers, and its author wanted to develop modular malware with a number of malicious features, but remained "as small as possible, around 20Kb."
This malware was sold on amateur hacker hangout HackForum as well as on the bin4ry[dot]com website. In fact, before his arrest last month, the hacker was still selling the malware.
Just last week, Europol in cooperation with Romanian law enforcement authorities arrested eight criminal hackers suspected of being part of an international criminal gang that pilfered cash from ATMs using malware.
| Malware |
Russian Hackers Targeted Ukraine Authorities With Supply-Chain Malware Attack | https://thehackernews.com/2021/02/russian-hackers-targeted-ukraine.html | Ukraine is formally pointing fingers at Russian hackers for hacking into one of its government systems and attempting to plant and distribute malicious documents that would install malware on target systems of public authorities.
"The purpose of the attack was the mass contamination of information resources of public authorities, as this system is used for the circulation of documents in most public authorities," the National Security and Defense Council of Ukraine (NSDC) said in a statement published on Wednesday.
The NSDC's National Coordination Center for Cybersecurity (NCCC) termed it a supply chain attack aimed at the System of Electronic Interaction of Executive Bodies (SEI EB), which is used to distribute documents to officials.
Calling it a work of threat actors with ties to Russia, the NSDC said the decoy documents came embedded with a macro that, when opened, stealthily downloaded malicious code to control the compromised system remotely.
"The methods and means of carrying out this cyberattack allow to connect it with one of the hacker spy groups from the Russian Federation," the agency said.
While the NSDC did not take any names, it's not immediately clear when the attack took place, how long the breach lasted, and if any of the infections were successful.
The development comes two days after the NSDC and NCCC warned of massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks singling out websites belonging to the security and defense sector, including that of the NSDC.
"It was revealed that addresses belonging to certain Russian traffic networks were the source of these coordinated attacks," the NSDC said, while stopping short of directly accusing the country.
The NCCC also stated the "attackers used a new mechanism of cyberattacks" that involved using a previously undocumented strain of malware that was planted on vulnerable Ukrainian government servers, and in the process, coopted the devices into an attacker-controlled botnet.
The infected systems were then used to carry out further DDoS attacks on other Ukrainian sites, the agency said.
| Cyber_Attack |
A Rust-based Buer Malware Variant Has Been Spotted in the Wild | https://thehackernews.com/2021/05/a-new-buer-malware-variant-has-been.html | Cybersecurity researchers on Monday disclosed a new malspam campaign distributing a fresh variant of a malware loader called "Buer" written in Rust, illustrating how adversaries are constantly honing their malware toolsets to evade analysis.
Dubbed "RustyBuer," the malware is propagated via emails masquerading as shipping notices from DHL Support, and is said to have affected no fewer than 200 organizations across more than 50 verticals since early April.
"The new Buer variant is written in Rust, an efficient and easy-to-use programming language that is becoming increasingly popular," Proofpoint researchers said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Rewriting the malware in Rust enables the threat actor to better evade existing Buer detection capabilities."
First introduced in August of 2019, Buer is a modular malware-as-a-service offering that's sold on underground forums and used as a first-stage downloader to deliver additional payloads, providing initial compromise of targets' Windows systems and allowing the attacker to establish a "digital beachhead'' for further malicious activity. A Proofpoint analysis in December 2019 characterized Buer as a malware coded entirely in C, using a control panel written in .NET Core.
In September 2020, the operators behind Ryuk ransomware were found using the Buer malware dropper as an initial access vector in a spam campaign directed against an unnamed victim. Then a phishing attack uncovered in February 2021 employed invoice-themed lures to entice users into opening Microsoft Excel documents that contain malicious macros, which download and execute the Buer dropper on the infected system.
Buer Loader initial POST request
The new maldoc campaign follows a similar modus operandi, using DHL-themed phishing emails to distribute weaponized Word or Excel documents that deliver the Rust variant of Buer loader. The "unusual" departure from the C programming language means Buer is now capable of circumventing detections that are based on features of the malware written in C.
"The rewritten malware, and the use of newer lures attempting to appear more legitimate, suggest threat actors leveraging RustyBuer are evolving techniques in multiple ways to both evade detection and attempt to increase successful click rates," the researchers said.
Given the fact that Buer acts as a first-stage loader for other kinds of malware, including Cobalt Strike and ransomware strains, Proofpoint researchers estimate that cyber attackers may be using the loader to gain a foothold into target networks and sell the access to other actors in what's an "access-as-a-service" scheme.
"When paired with the attempts by threat actors leveraging RustyBuer to further legitimize their lures, it is possible the attack chain may be more effective in obtaining access and persistence," the researchers concluded.
RustyBuer is the latest in a series of efforts aimed at adding an extra layer of opacity, as cybercriminals are paying increased attention to new programming languages in hopes that doing so will enable the attack code to slip past security defenses. Earlier this year, a malware called "NimzaLoader" was identified as written in Nim programming language, followed by a macOS adware named "Convuster" that was based on Rust.
| Malware |
Critical "Same Origin Policy" Bypass Flaw Found in Samsung Android Browser | https://thehackernews.com/2017/12/same-origin-policy-bypass.html | A critical vulnerability has been discovered in the browser app comes pre-installed on hundreds of millions of Samsung Android devices that could allow an attacker to steal data from browser tabs if the user visits an attacker-controlled site.
Identified as CVE-2017-17692, the vulnerability is Same Origin Policy (SOP) bypass issue that resides in the popular Samsung Internet Browser version 5.4.02.3 and earlier.
The Same Origin Policy or SOP is a security feature applied in modern browsers that is designed to make it possible for web pages from the same website to interact while preventing unrelated sites from interfering with each other.
In other words, the SOP makes sure that the JavaScript code from one origin should not be able to access the properties of a website on another origin.
The SOP bypass vulnerability in the Samsung Internet Browser, discovered by Dhiraj Mishra, could allow a malicious website to steal data, such as passwords or cookies, from the sites opened by the victim in different tabs.
"When the Samsung Internet browser opens a new tab in a given domain (say, google.com) through a Javascript action, that Javascript can come in after the fact and rewrite the contents of that page with whatever it wants," researchers from security firm Rapid7 explained.
"This is a no-no in browser design since it means that Javascript can violate the Same-Origin Policy, and can direct Javascript actions from one site (controlled by the attacker) to act in the context of another site (the one the attacker is interested in). Essentially, the attacker can insert custom Javascript into any domain, provided the victim user visits the attacker-controlled web page first."
Attackers can even snag a copy of your session cookie or hijack your session and read and write webmail on your behalf.
Mishra reported the vulnerability to Samsung, and the company replied that "the patch is already preloaded in our upcoming model Galaxy Note 8, and the application will be updated via Apps store update in October."
Meanwhile, Mishra, with the help of Tod Beardsley and Jeffrey Martin from Rapid7 team, also released an exploit for Metasploit Framework.
Rapid7 researchers have also published a video demonstrating the attack.
Since the Metasploit exploit code for the SOP bypass vulnerability in the Samsung Internet Browser is now publicly available, anyone with less technical knowledge can use and exploit the flaw on a large number of Samsung devices, most of which are still using the old Android Stock browser.
| Vulnerability |
cPanel and WHM Multiple Cross Site Scripting Vulnerabilities | https://thehackernews.com/2012/12/cpanel-and-whm-multiple-cross-site.html | cPanel is a Unix based fully featured popular web based hosting account control panel that helps webmasters to manage their domains through a web browser. The latest version of cPanel & WHM is 11.34, which is vulnerable to multiple cross site scripting.
During my bug hunting process, today I (Christy Philip Mathew) discovered some serious XSS vulnerabilities in official cPanel, WHM. It also impact on the latest version of software.
This week, Rafay Baloch (Pakistani white hat hacker) also discovered another reflective cross site scripting vulnerability in cPanel at manage.html.
The interesting part would be the whole demonstration I done with the Official cPanel Demo located at https://cpanel.net/demo/ location, can be accessed via demo user & password provided by cPanel website itself i.e. https://demo.cpanel.net:2086/login/?user=demo&pass=demo
These vulnerabilities actually affect the logged in users. Proof of Concept and screenshots are as shown below:
Cross Site scripting in Official WHM
Login to WHM via : https://demo.cpanel.net:2086/login/?user=demo&pass=demo
In left panel, click 'Server Configuration' and then 'Basic cPanel & WHM Setup' and new page will ask user to fill 4 Nameservers values regarding domain.
Enter alert JavaScript in any of these four text boxes, as shown below and Submit
Cross Site scripting in Official cPanel
Access the Official Cpanel Demo at https://x3demob.cpx3demo.com:2082/login/?user=x3demob&pass=x3demob
Once logged in , access Bandwidth Transfer Detail (detailbw.html), and inject JavaScript in parameter "domain" or one can access this URL.
Cross Site scripting in WebMail server
Similar way, access demo Webmail via URL : https://x3demob.cpx3demo.com:2082/xferwebmail/
Once logged in XSS Vulnerable URL is : Click Here
Here on page clientconf.html , the parameter "acct" is not filtered properly , as shown
More Details
Product: Cpanel & WHM
Security-Risk: High
Remote-Exploit: yes
Vendor-URL: https://www.cpanel.net
Affected Products: Cpanel's Latest Version
Solution: Proper input sanitisation.
Discovered by: Christy Philip Mathew, Security researcher @ The Hacker News
Mohit Kumar - Founder and Editor-in-Chief of 'The Hacker News'. Cyber Security Analyst, Information Security Researcher, Developer and Part-Time Hacker. (Google+ Profile)
| Vulnerability |
Critical ThroughTek SDK Bug Could Let Attackers Spy On Millions of IoT Devices | https://thehackernews.com/2021/08/critical-throughtek-sdk-bug-could-let.html | A security vulnerability has been found affecting several versions of ThroughTek Kalay P2P Software Development Kit (SDK), which could be abused by a remote attacker to take control of an affected device and potentially lead to remote code execution.
Tracked as CVE-2021-28372 (CVSS score: 9.6) and discovered by FireEye Mandiant in late 2020, the weakness concerns an improper access control flaw in ThroughTek point-to-point (P2P) products, successful exploitation of which could result in the "ability to listen to live audio, watch real time video data, and compromise device credentials for further attacks based on exposed device functionality."
"Successful exploitation of this vulnerability could permit remote code execution and unauthorized access to sensitive information, such as to camera audio/video feeds," the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) noted in an advisory.
There are believed to be 83 million active devices on the Kalay platform. The following versions of Kalay P2P SDK are impacted -
Versions 3.1.5 and prior
SDK versions with the nossl tag
Device firmware that does not use AuthKey for IOTC connection
Device firmware using the AVAPI module without enabling DTLS mechanism
Device firmware using P2PTunnel or RDT module
The Taiwanese company's Kalay platform is a P2P technology that allows IP cameras, light cameras, baby monitors, and other internet-enabled video surveillance products to handle secure transmission of large audio and video files at low latency. This is made possible through the SDK – an implementation of the Kalay protocol – that's integrated into mobile and desktop apps and networked IoT devices.
CVE-2021-28372 resides in the registration process between the devices and their mobile applications, specifically concerning how they access and join the Kalay network, enabling attackers to spoof a victim device's identifier (called UID) to maliciously register a device on the network with the same UID, causing the registration servers to overwrite the existing device and route the connections to be mistakenly routed to the rogue device.
"Once an attacker has maliciously registered a UID, any client connection attempts to access the victim UID will be directed to the attacker," the researchers said. "The attacker can then continue the connection process and obtain the authentication materials (a username and password) needed to access the device. With the compromised credentials, an attacker can use the Kalay network to remotely connect to the original device, access AV data, and execute RPC calls."
However, it's worth pointing out that an adversary would require "comprehensive knowledge" of the Kalay protocol, not to mention obtain the Kalay UIDs through social engineering or other vulnerabilities in APIs or services that could be taken advantage of to pull off the attacks.
To mitigate against any potential exploitation, it's recommended to upgrade the Kalay protocol to version 3.1.10 as well as enable DTLS and AuthKey to secure data in transit and add an additional layer of authentication during client connection.
The development marks the second time a similar vulnerability has been disclosed in ThroughTek's P2P SDK. In June 2021, CISA issued an alert warning of a critical flaw (CVE-2021-32934) that could be leveraged to access the camera audio and video feeds through improper means.
| Vulnerability |
Advance Phishing Attacks using HTML5 Fullscreen API | https://thehackernews.com/2012/10/advance-phishing-attacks-using-html5.html | Do your ever use YouTube Instant Search engine (a really fast way to search YouTube) ? That was developed by a 21 years old developer name - Feross Aboukhadijeh in 2012. Chad Hurley, CEO and co-founder of YouTube, was so impressed that he immediately offered him a job at YouTube. He a web developer, designer, computer security researcher.
Recently he has developed an attack concept that exploits the fullscreen application programming interface in HTML5 in order to carry out advance phishing attacks. The HTML5 "Fullscreen API" allow web developers to display web contents in full-screen mode, that is, filling-up the display screen completely.
Fullscreen API is perhaps known for its spoofing potential, leading to major browser vendors canvassing for the implementation of an overlay to notify users when full-screen is activated.
Feross demonstrated how the Fullscreen API can aid phishing attack portals appear rather innocuous to the end users, by utilizing the API to hide the interface elements of the users' browser, thereby preventing the user from knowing the URL of the actual website visited.
Unfortunately, Apple's Safari browser, version 6.01 and later, provides little or no sign that full-screen mode has been activated. Google Chrome, version 22 and later, offers some notice, though as Aboukhadijeh observes, the notification is "pretty subtle and easily missed." Mozilla Firefox, version 10 and later, alerts the user with a conspicuous notification.
Aboukhadijeh's attack depends on social engineering rather than flawed code. There are a variety of ways to deceive people online and the only way to mitigate that risk is constant vigilance. The demo's source code is also available on GitHub.
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| Vulnerability |
Apple : 0 | Flashback trojan : 1 , Apple admits malware defeat | https://thehackernews.com/2012/06/apple-0-flashback-trojan-1-apple-admits.html | Apple : 0 | Flashback trojan : 1 , Apple admits malware defeat
Apple has quietly removed a statement from its website that the Mac operating system isn't susceptible to viruses. Apple released a patch to a Java vulnerability that lead to the infection of roughly 600,000 Macs with the Flashback Trojan earlier this year, there were claims weeks later from security researchers that hundreds of thousands of Macs were still infected.
Apple is one of the single software companies that hasn't really faced the problem of viruses, for years claiming their operating system is the most secure among all.
The specific language about the operating system, "It doesn't get PC viruses" was replaced with "It's built to be safe." But now, Apple may be taking security threats more seriously.
Apple is introducing a new app security measure called Gatekeeper in the upcoming release of Mountain Lion, the latest version of Mac OS X. The majority of malware might still be floating around in the Windows world, but it's still important to remember that no OS is bulletproof once people start shooting at it. You can never be too careful.
| Malware |
Cryptolocker Malware learned to replicate itself through removable USB drives | https://thehackernews.com/2014/01/Cryptolocker-malware-usb-drive-worm.html | In the category of Ransomware Malware, a nasty piece of malware called CRYPTOLOCKER is on the top, that threatened most of the people around the world, effectively destroying important files of the victims.
Cryptolocker, which strongly encrypts victims' hard drives until a ransom is paid, is now again back in action to haunt your digital life with an additional feature.
Until now, CryptoLocker has been spread via spam email, with victims tempted to download an attachment or click on a link to a malicious website, but now it can spread itself as a worm through removable USB drives.
Security Researchers at Trend Micro have recently reported a new variant of Cryptolocker which is capable of spreading through removable USB drives.
As Previously reported by our Security experts at The Hacker News, Cryptolocker is a malware which locks your files and demand a ransom to release it. The files are encrypted so removing the malware from the system doesn't unlock your files. The only way to get your files decrypted is to pay a demanded ransom amount to the criminals.
This new cryptolocker's version is detected as WORM_CRILOCK. A, and can infect the computers by posing as key generator or activators for paid software like Adobe Photoshop, Microsoft Office on Torrent websites.
If CryptoLocker has already encrypted your files, then it will display a message demanding payment. Once installed on a system, it can replicate itself onto a USB drive and spread further and also if that infected system is connected to a network, the Cryptolocker work can look for other connected drives to infect them as well.
Other malware has employed similar tactics in the past, but CryptoLocker's encryption is much more secure and is currently not possible to crack. But the new Cryptolocker didn't use DGA (domain generation algorithm), but instead relied on hardcoded command & control center details.
Further analysis of WORM_CRILOCK reveals that it has a stark difference compared to previous variants. The malware has foregone domain generation algorithm (DGA). Instead, its command-and-control (C&C) servers are hardcoded into the malware. Hardcoding the URLs makes it easier to detect and block the related malicious URLs. DGA, on the other hand, may allow cybercriminals to evade detection as it uses a large number of potential domains. This could mean that the malware is still in the process of being refined and improved upon. Thus, we can expect latter variants to have the DGA capability.
Recommendations for users to defend against such threats:
Users should avoid using P2P i.e. Torrent sites to get pirated copies of software and stick with official or reputable sites.
Users should also be extremely careful about plugging USB drives into their computers. If you found one lying around, don't plug it in to see what may be on it.
| Malware |
Smart LED Lightbulbs Can be Hacked too; Vulnerability exposes Wi-Fi Passwords | https://thehackernews.com/2014/07/smart-led-lightbulbs-can-be-hacked-too.html | Until now, we have seen how different smart home appliances such as refrigerators, TVs and routers could expose our private data, but now you can add another worry to your list —LED light bulb. Don't laugh! It's true.
Researchers at UK security firm Context have formulated an attack against the Wi-Fi connected lightbulbs, which is available to buy in the UK, that exposes credentials of the Wi-Fi network, it relies on to operate, to anyone in accessibility to one of the LED devices.
Security vulnerabilities found in the LIFX Smart light bulbs, that can be controlled by the iOS-based and Android-based devices, could allow an attacker to gain access to a "master bulb" and with the help of that they could control all connected bulbs across that network, and help them expose user network configurations.
Along with other Internet of Things (IoTs) devices, the smart bulbs are part of a rising trend in which the manufacturers enclose computing and networking capabilities to their devices so that it can be easily controlled remotely by using a smartphone, computer, and other network-connected device. LIFX ran a popular fundraising campaign in 2012 on Kickstarter, raising more than $1.3 million (£760,000) which was more than 13 times the original goal of $100,000 (£59,000).
But before delivering the smart bulbs to home consumers, the company failed to properly encrypt all data in the wireless protocols it used when enrolling new bulbs on the network. The oversight allowed the researchers to craft messages to the networked bulbs within about 30 meters, forcing them to obtain security credentials used to secure the connected Wi-Fi network.
The WiFi network credentials are captured in specific packets by passing from one networked bulb to another over a mesh network powered by 6LoWPAN, a wireless specification built on top of the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. While the wifi details were encrypted by the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), the researchers were able to obtain the secret key shared between bulbs on the network, making it easy for the attacker to decipher the payload.
"Armed with knowledge of the encryption algorithm, key, initialisation vector, and an understanding of the mesh network protocol we could then inject packets into the mesh network, capture the Wi-Fi details, and decrypt the credentials, all without any prior authentication or alerting of our presence," researchers from security consultancy Context wrote.
"It should be noted, since this attack works on the 802.15.4 6LoWPAN wireless mesh network, an attacker would need to be within wireless range, ~30 meters, of a vulnerable LIFX bulb to perform this attack, severely limiting the practicality for exploitation on a large scale."
LIFX quickly responded to the Context findings and has now issued a firmware update to its smart bulb firmware, which encrypted all 6LoWPAN traffic and secured the process supporting new bulbs on the network.
The company said that it was unaware of any users being affected by the security issue and released LIFX security update.
"In rare circumstances the security issue could expose network configuration details on the mesh radio, requiring a person to dismantle a bulb, reverse engineer the debug connection and firmware, then be physically present with dedicated hardware within the bounds of your WiFi network (not from the internet). Eg. Someone hiding in your garden with complex technical equipment. No LIFX users have been affected that we are aware of, and as always we recommend that all users stay up to date with the latest firmware and app updates," the firm said in a blog post.
| Vulnerability |
Facebook Web Search Box May Be Dangerous | https://thehackernews.com/2011/03/facebook-web-search-box-may-be.html | Facebook users be warned: If you see a second search box at the top of your personal page, don't use it.
"We are not testing the placement of a separate Web search field and have no plans to do so," a Facebook representative told the blog Search Engine Land. An image of a Facebook page with two search boxes has been making its way around the Internet for the past few days.
In the image, the standard box that lets you search Facebook is visible at the top of the page, but just to the right of it is another search box reading "Search the Web."
Some tech news sites and blogs speculated that Facebook was testing out its own search engine, perhaps to challenge Google or to partner with a Google competitor such as Blekko or Microsoft's Bing.
The Facebook representative, however, said it's likely a hack.
"We believe the second search field or 'Search the Web' box appeared on people's accounts as the result of unknown actions by a third party targeting the browser (potentially a browser plugin or malware) unrelated to Facebook," he or she told Search Engine Land.
Or, as the TechCrunch blog said, it could just as easily be a Photoshop hoax.
| Malware |
APT Groups Return - Chinese Hackers Resume Cyber Espionage Operations | https://thehackernews.com/2014/04/apt-groups-return-chinese-hackers.html | Year back, one of the largest "Advanced Persistent Threat" (APT) hacking groups received widespread attention from the media and from the U.S. government. APT Groups are China's cyber espionage units and they won't stop their espionage operation, despite being exposed last year.
Yes, APT hacking groups, APT1 and APT12, are again making headlines. Without bothering that the world knows about its cyber hacking activities, the two of its major hacking groups have became once again active and have resumed their espionage operation, reports the security firm Mandiant.
A timeline of APT1 economic espionage conducted since 2006 and has systematically stolen confidential data from at least 141 organizations across multiple industries.
Mandiant, the FireEye owned company, announced in its M-Trend report that over the past year the firm has a close eye on the APT1 group, which it first exposed in February 2013.
It's also been monitoring the second Chinese hackers group, APT12 that apparently hacked the New York Times in January 2013 compromising its networks over the course of past four months.
Last year Mandiant provided the evidence linked APT1 group to UNIT 61398 of China's 2nd Bureau of the People's Liberation Army (PLA), but Beijing has always denied the accusations, remarking the report as "full of loopholes" and stated, "Chinese laws prohibit any action including hacking that damages Internet security," and added, "to accuse the Chinese military of launching cyber attacks without solid proof is unprofessional and baseless."
But the American computer security firm, Mandiant keep on following the groups' activities. The report reads, "Mandiant's continued observations of APT1 and APT12 activity, measured by command and control (C2) sessions, revealed a different response behind the scenes, suggesting a possible acknowledgement that both groups had been exposed."
But the accusations didn't able to stop both the groups from continuing the cyber attacks. Rather both the groups only changed their operational infrastructure and delayed their return.
"Based on comparisons between APT1 and APT12 activity during 2013 and the previous three years, Mandiant believes that these threat groups responded to their public exposure in two ways. First, both groups delayed their return to normal operations following the end of the Chinese New Year holidays in February. Second, both groups quickly shifted their operational infrastructure to continue their activities," the report reads.
Being following, Mandiant observed a longer period of inactivity but roughly 150 days after the article released in The New York Times, APT12 resumed its "pre-disclosure levels" of activity and APT1 resumed its consistent intrusion activity nearly 160 days after its exposure.
"We believe APT1 and APT12 changed their exposed operational architecture in an attempt to obscure their future data theft operations," said Mandiant.
It is believed that the intrusive cyber operations probably won't stop, as the PRC is continuously denying engaging in the state sponsored data theft activities and even after the disclosure of both the groups they have resumed their espionage operation.
| Cyber_Attack |
New PHP Code Execution Attack Puts WordPress Sites at Risk | https://thehackernews.com/2018/08/php-deserialization-wordpress.html | Sam Thomas, a security researcher from Secarma, has discovered a new exploitation technique that could make it easier for hackers to trigger critical deserialization vulnerabilities in PHP programming language using previously low-risk considered functions.
The new technique leaves hundreds of thousands of web applications open to remote code execution attacks, including websites powered by some popular content management systems like WordPress and Typo3.
PHP unserialization or object injection vulnerabilities were initially documented in 2009, which could allow an attacker to perform different kinds of attacks by supplying malicious inputs to the unserialize() PHP function.
If you are unaware, serialization is the process of converting data objects into a plain string, and unserialize function help program recreate an object back from a string.
Thomas found that an attacker can use low-risk functions against Phar archives to trigger deserialization attack without requiring the use of unserialize() function in a wide range of scenarios.
Phar files, an archive format in PHP, stores metadata in a serialized format, which gets unserialized whenever a file operation function (fopen, file_exists, file_get_contents, etc.) tries to access the archive file.
"This is true for both direct file operations (such as "file_exists") and indirect operations such as those that occur during external entity processing within XML (i.e., when an XXE vulnerability is being exploited)," Thomas said.
Exploiting PHP Deserialization Attack Against WordPress Sites
In a detailed paper released at Black Hat conference last week, Thomas demonstrated how this attack can be executed against Wordpress sites using an author account to take full control over the web server.
For successful exploitation of the flaw, all an attacker needs to do is upload a valid Phar archive containing the malicious payload object onto the target's local file system and make the file operation function access it using the "phar://" stream wrapper.
Thomas also revealed that an attacker can even exploit this vulnerability using a JPEG image, originally a Phar archive converted into valid JPEG by modifying its first 100 bytes.
"The way certain thumbnail functionality within the application [WordPress] works enables an attacker with the privileges to upload and modify media items to gain sufficient control of the parameter used in a "file_exists" call to cause unserialization to occur," the researcher said.
Once the crafted thumbnail uploaded on the targeted WordPress server, the attacker can use another function to call the same image file as a Phar archive using the "phar://" stream wrapper, eventually executing the arbitrary code when the program deserializes the metadata.
"The vulnerability exists due to insecure deserialization of data passed as an image file and then executed via the 'phar://' stream wrapper within the 'wp_get_attachment_thumb_file' function in '/wpincludes/post.php' script," an advisory reads.
"A remote authenticated attacker with the ability to create/edit posts can upload a malicious image and execute arbitrary PHP code on vulnerable system."
Thomas reported this vulnerability to the WordPress security team earlier last year, and the company acknowledged the issue. However, the patch released by the company did not address the problem completely.
Thomas also reported the vulnerability to Typo3 on 9th June 2018, and the vendor addressed the issue in versions 7.6.30, 8.7.17 and 9.3.
For more details about the vulnerability, you can head on to the detailed paper published by Secarma.
| Vulnerability |
Over 300 Million AdultFriendFinder Accounts Exposed in Massive Data Breach | https://thehackernews.com/2016/11/adult-friend-finder-hack.html | Adult Friend Finder, a casual dating website with the tagline "hookup, find sex or meet someone hot now," has suffered another massive data breach, but this time it is much worse than the last year.
Over 300 Million AdultFriendFinder accounts have reportedly been exposed in a massive data breach that hit adult dating and entertainment company Friend Finder Network.
Friend Finder Network is the world's largest sex and swinger community that has a number of assets and the hack reportedly exposed the information from more than 412 Million accounts across its corporate holdings, which include AdultFriendFinder, Cams, Penthouse, and Stripshow.
412,214,295 User's Accounts on SALE!
Breach notification site LeakedSource broke the story, reporting that nearly 339 Million accounts from sex hookup site AdultFriendFinder, over 60 Million accounts from Cams.com, 7 Million from Penthouse and a handful of accounts from Stripshow and iCams were compromised, for a total of 412,214,295 affected users.
"Over 400 million accounts representing 20 years of customer data was compromised, which makes it by far the largest breach we have ever seen," said LeakedSource.
Poor Or No Encryption for Passwords
According to the breach notification service, the database containing email addresses, easily crackable (or in some cases, unprotected) passwords, usernames, IP addresses and browser information, of over 412 Million users has been made available to online criminal marketplaces.
LeakedSource further reveals that Friend Finder Network did not properly encrypt its users' data. The company stored user passwords in plainly visible format, or with the very poor Secure Hash Algorithm 1 (SHA1) hash function, which is not regarded as secure.
Talking about passwords, here are some common passwords that were used by Friend Finder Network users to log in to the websites: 123456, 123456789, password, qwerty, and pussy, fuckme, fuckyou and iloveyou.
Millions Of Deleted User Accounts Also Exposed
What's worse? If you are feeling relieved and thanking God that you already deleted your account on the adult website in the past and you are on the safer side, I am sorry to say that you too are in great trouble.
The leaked database also includes details of over 15 Million users who already had "deleted" their accounts, as well as users for assets the company no longer owned, like Penthouse.
In terms of cheating partners, the hack, which took place last month, is not as bad as last year's data breach that exposed secret sexual fantasies of over 3.5 Million cheating people.
On the other hand, the Ashley Madison data breach exposed the previous year also more sensitive than the latest one because the breach exposed confidential information like sexual preferences, fantasies, fetishes and others such data of around 32 Million users.
Here's How the Adult Network possibly got Hacked:
According to CSO Online, a security researcher using the online moniker, Revolver discovered Local File Inclusion vulnerabilities on the AdultFriendFinder website last month. The researcher believed that the same flaw was exploited to hack the adult network.
Friend Finder Network said the company was aware of the security incident and was looking into the matter to determine whether or not the claims were valid.
"We are aware of reports of a security incident, and we are currently investigating to determine the validity of the reports," Diana Lynn Ballou, Friend Finder Network's Vice President and Senior Counsel of Corporate Compliance & Litigation told CSO Online. "If we confirm that a security incident did occur, we will work to address any issues and notify any customers that may be affected."
So, the company neither confirmed nor denied the hack against its network, though admitted the company had recently received several reports of security problems.
Friend Finder Network has yet to offer additional details on the hack and why the company was still storing information of user's accounts deleted long ago.
| Vulnerability |
Beware! Pre-Installed Android Malware Found On 36 High-end Smartphones | https://thehackernews.com/2017/03/android-malware-apps.html | Bought a brand new Android Smartphone? Do not expect it to be a clean slate.
At least 36 high-end smartphone models belonging to popular manufacturing companies such as Samsung, LG, Xiaomi, Asus, Nexus, Oppo, and Lenovo, which are being distributed by two unidentified companies have been found pre-loaded with malware programs.
These malware infected devices were identified after a Check Point malware scan was performed on Android devices. Two malware families were detected on the infected devices: Loki and SLocker.
According to a blog post published Friday by Check Point researchers, these malicious software apps were not part of the official ROM firmware supplied by the smartphone manufacturers but were installed later somewhere along the supply chain, before the handsets arrived at the two companies from the manufacturer's factory.
First seen in February 2016, Loki Trojan inject devices right inside core Android operating system processes to gain powerful root privileges. The trojan also includes spyware-like features, such as grabbing the list of current applications, browser history, contact list, call history, and location data.
On the other hand, SLocker is a mobile ransomware that locks victims devices for ransom and communicates through Tor in order to hide the identity of its operators.
List of Popular Smartphones Infected with Malware
Here's the list of infected smartphones:
Galaxy Note 2
LG G4
Galaxy S7
Galaxy S4
Galaxy Note 4
Galaxy Note 5
Xiaomi Mi 4i
Galaxy A5
ZTE x500
Galaxy Note 3
Galaxy Note Edge
Galaxy Tab S2
Galaxy Tab 2
Oppo N3
Vivo X6 plus
Nexus 5
Nexus 5X
Asus Zenfone 2
LenovoS90
OppoR7 plus
Xiaomi Redmi
Lenovo A850
The malware backdoor offers its operator unrestricted access to these infected devices, from downloading, installing and activating Android malicious apps, deleting user data, uninstalling security software and disabling system apps, to dialing premium phone numbers.
This incident underscores the dangers of untrusted supply chains, and experts are quite worried about the security of the supply chain with reports of over 20 incidents where rogue retailers have managed to pre-install malware on new Android handsets.
Here's How to Remove the Malware Infections:
Since the malware programs were installed to the device's ROM using system privileges, it's hard to get rid of the infections.
To remove the malware from the infected devices, either you can root your device and uninstall the malware apps easily, or you would need to completely reinstall the phone firmware/ROM via a process called "Flashing."
Flashing is a complex process, and it is recommended that users power off their device and approach a certified technician/mobile service provider.
It's not the first time when high-end smartphones have been shipped pre-installed with malicious apps that can covertly siphon sensitive user data.
In December last year, certain low-cost Android smartphones and tablets were found to be shipped with malicious firmware that covertly gathered data about the infected devices, displays ads on top of running apps and downloads unwanted APKs on the victim's devices.
In November, researchers discovered a hidden backdoor in the AdUps firmware of over 700 Million Android smartphones, which also covertly gathered data on phone owners and sent it to a Chinese server without the user's knowledge.
Meanwhile, a flaw in the Ragentek firmware used by certain low-cost Android devices was also discovered that allowed attackers to remotely execute malicious code with root privileges, turning over full control of the devices to hackers.
| Malware |
A Simple Tool Released to Protect Dasan GPON Routers from Remote Hacking | https://thehackernews.com/2018/05/protect-router-hacking.html | Since hackers have started exploiting two recently disclosed unpatched critical vulnerabilities found in GPON home routers, security researchers have now released an unofficial patch to help millions of affected users left vulnerable by their device manufacturer.
Last week, researchers at vpnMentor disclosed details of—an authentication bypass (CVE-2018-10561) and a root-remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2018-10562)—in many models of Gigabit-capable Passive Optical Network (GPON) routers manufacturer by South Korea-based DASAN Zhone Solutions.
If exploited, the first vulnerability lets an attacker easily bypass the login authentication page just by appending ?images/ to the URL in the browser's address bar.
However, when coupled with the second flaw that allows command injection, unauthenticated attackers can remotely execute malicious commands on the affected device and modified DNS settings, eventually allowing them to take full control of the device remotely.
Shortly after the details of the vulnerabilities went public, security researchers at Chinese IT security firm Qihoo 360 Netlab found that threat actors have started exploiting both the flaws to add the vulnerable routers into their botnet malware networks.
Moreover, a working proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit, written in python, for GPON router vulnerabilities has already been released on GitHub by an independent security researcher, eventually making exploitation easier for even unskilled hackers.
The researchers even published a video demonstration showing how the attack works.
Here's How to Secure Your GPON Wi-Fi Router
Researchers at vpnMentor already reported the issues to Dasan, but the company has not yet released any fix for the issue, and the researchers believe that the patch is not in development either.
What's worse? At the time of writing, almost a million vulnerable GPON routers are still exposed on the Internet and can be easily hijacked.
However, even if there is no official patch available, users can protect their devices by disabling remote administration and using a firewall to prevent outside access from the public Internet.
Making these changes to your vulnerable router would restrict access to the local network only, within the range of your Wi-Fi network, effectively reducing the attack surface by eliminating remote attackers.
If you are unsure about these settings, vpnMentor has done this job for you by providing an online "user-friendly" solution that automatically modifies your router settings on your behalf, keeping you away from remote attacks.
"It was created to help mitigate the vulnerabilities until an official patch is released," the researchers said. "This tool disables the web server in a way that is not easy to reverse, it can be done with another patch script, but if you are not comfortable with the command line we suggest firewalling your device until an official patch is released."
To use this tool, all you need open this web page, and scroll down to the input form asking for the IP address of your exposed GPON router (local LAN address, not WAN), a new password for SSH/Telnet on your router.
In a separate tab open your router's web interface using https in the URL and then press "Run Patch" on the vpnMentor to continue and apply changes.
You can apply the patch to secure your devices, but it should be noted that it is not an official patch from the manufacturer and we do not encourage users to run any third-party scripts or patches on their devices.
So, users should either wait for official fixes or apply changes manually, when possible.
| Vulnerability |
Hillary Clinton's Presidential Campaign also Hacked in Attack on Democratic Party | https://thehackernews.com/2016/07/hillary-clinton-hacked.html | There's a lot more to come from the DNC Hack.
The Associated Press confirmed yesterday that the computer systems used by Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign were hacked as part of the recent Democratic National Convention (DNC) hack.
Last week's email dump containing almost 20,000 emails from top DNC officials was just the beginning, which led DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz to resign as the group's leader, as WikiLeaks announced that it was part one of its new Hillary Leaks series.
This suggests WikiLeaks Founder Julian Assange has had his hands on more data from the DNC hack that, according to him, could eventually result in the arrest of Hillary Clinton.
Assange — Wikileaks' Next Leak will lead to Arrest of Hillary Clinton
In an interview with Robert Preston of ITV last month, Assange made it clear that he hopes to harm Hillary Clinton's chances from becoming president of the United States, opposing her candidacy on both policies as well as personal grounds.
Assange also stressed that he had "a lot more material" about Clinton's presidential campaign that could possibly provide enough evidence for the indictment of Hillary Clinton.
Now, when it has been reported that the computer systems used by Clinton's presidential campaign were breached as part of the DNC hack, one could guess this could be the next release in the Hillary Leaks series by Assange.
According to federal law enforcement officials and some cybersecurity experts, the DNC hack is believed to be an attempt by the Russian intelligence services to influence the presidential election.
U.S. intelligence agencies have reportedly concluded that the Russian government was behind the theft of the DNC emails and documents. Although, it's unclear whether the attack was fairly routine espionage or an effort to manipulate the presidential election.
DNC Hack Malware Based Upon Chinese Open-Source Tool
Even, security firm CrowdStrike, who first investigated the DNC hack, said that the group that hacked into the DNC servers in April 2016 was engaged in extensive political and economic espionage to benefit Russian government and closely linked to the Russia's powerful and highly capable intelligence services.
According to the firm, the Fancy Bear APT (also known as APT28 and Pawn Storm) used a piece of malware called X-Tunnel to steal data from the system without getting detected.
Most recently, security firm Invincea also released its own report, saying X-Tunnel was used to steal the data from the DNC servers, but since the malware appeared to be a repurposed open source tool from a Chinese company, the firm did not support or refute "the Russian origins of the XTunnel binary."
The F.B.I. said in a statement that it "is aware of media reporting on cyber intrusions involving multiple political entities, and is working to determine the accuracy, nature, and scope of these matters."
Democratic Party Hack Influences the Presidential Election
We still have to accept the fact that someone is attacking America's computer systems in an attempt to influence the presidential election.
So this kind of politically motivated attack can become even worse in November — at the time of voting.
Security expert Bruce Schneier stressed that since Clinton's computer systems can be targeted as part of DNC attack, it is possible that America's election systems and voting machines could also be vulnerable to a similar attack.
"We need to secure our election systems before autumn," says Schneier via the Washington Post. "If Putin's government has already used a cyber attack to attempt to help Trump win, there's no reason to believe he won't do it again — especially now that Trump is inviting the "help.""
Since more and more states have moved to electronic voting machines and Internet voting over the past years, it has made a way for hackers to manipulate these systems.
Schneier suggests the government to "create tiger teams to test the machines' and systems' resistance to attack, drastically increase their cyber-defenses" and if can not guarantee their security online, take them offline.
| Cyber_Attack |
Google detected Malware on PHP.net website; Flagged as 'Suspicious' site | https://thehackernews.com/2013/10/google-detected-malware-on-phpnet.html | If you are today trying to visit the php.net website, an official website of the PHP scripting language, you will likely see the above shown result, instead of the original website.
Chrome and Firefox is currently flagging the site as "suspicious" and contains malware that can harm your computer.
According to Google's Webmaster Tools, the script at https://static.php.net/www.php.net/userprefs.js was included as suspicious, and Google's Safe Browsing diagnostics for php.net do suggest that malware has been present on the site in the last 90 days:
"Of the 1513 pages we tested on the site over the past 90 days, 4 page(s) resulted in malicious software being downloaded and installed without user consent."
"Malicious software includes 4 trojan(s). Malicious software is hosted on 4 domain(s), including cobbcountybankruptcylawyer.com/, stephaniemari.com/, northgadui.com/ . 3 domain(s) appear to be functioning as intermediaries for distributing malware to visitors of this site, including stephaniemari.com/,northgadui.com/, satnavreviewed.co.uk/ ."
The obfuscated JavaScript "userprefs.js" inserts a hidden iframe into the webpage, which loads content from an external site known for distributing malware.
This suggests that the website may have been compromised recently. Well, Google's Safe Browsing team will be looking into the issue and we will update this article if we hear anything from Google or PHP site owner.
Update (1:42 PM Thursday, October 24, 2013 GMT): It seems that the issue has been resolved by admins and PHP.net is back as a normal clean website, after removing malicious scripts.
Update: After Security Audit, PHP team found that two servers were compromised for some unknown time. They said that their Git repository was not compromised, and it remains in read only mode as services are brought back up in full.
"As it's possible that the attackers may have accessed the private key of the php.net SSL certificate, we have revoked it immediately. We are in the process of getting a new certificate, and expect to restore access to php.net sites that require SSL (including bugs.php.net and wiki.php.net) in the next few hours." blog post said.
The team concludes that JavaScript malware was served to a small percentage of php.net users from the 22nd to the 24th of October 2013. Now all affected services have been migrated to new secure servers.
| Malware |
FBI used Anonymous and Lulzsec Hackers to attack foreign governments | https://thehackernews.com/2013/08/fbi-used-anonymous-and-lulzsec-hackers.html | Sentencing for former LulzSec leader Hector Xavier Monsegur, better known as "Sabu" , has again been delayed. Monsegur pleaded guilty to a dozen criminal counts two years prior and stands to face more a maximum sentence of more than 124 years.
Another Lulzsec Hacker Jeremy Hammond has claimed that the FBI used Sabu to coordinate attacks against foreign governments, by Anonymous hackers and Others.
The delays indicate that the FBI is not extracting information from Monsegur and this could mean that the hacker may be helping FBI with other covert operations as Jeremy Hammond claims.
Jeremy Hammond, released a statement on Thursday accusing the US government of asking Monsegur to encourage fellow hacktivists to infiltrate foreign government entities.
"What many do not know is that Sabu was also used by his handlers to facilitate the hacking of the targets of the government's choosing including numerous websites belonging to foreign governments", Hammond said.
"What the United States could not accomplish legally, it used Sabu, and by extension, me and my co-defendants, to accomplish illegally", Hammond added.
"Why was the US using us to infiltrate the private networks of foreign governments? What are they doing with the information we stole? And will anyone in our government ever be held accountable for these crimes?"
Hammond pleaded guilty in May to hacking private intelligence firm Stratfor to expose millions of revelatory emails. The Illinois native faces up to 10 years in prison when he is sentenced, scheduled for 15th November.
| Cyber_Attack |
Russian Hacker who was wanted by FBI arrested in Prague | https://thehackernews.com/2016/10/russian-hacker-fbi.html | UPDATE — It Turns out that the Russian Hacker arrested by the FBI is responsible for 2012 LinkedIn Data Breach. (Read latest update here)
Czech police, in cooperation with the FBI, has arrested a Russian citizen in Prague suspected of participating in conducting cyber-attacks against the United States.
Czech police announced the arrest on its official website Tuesday evening, without giving any further details about the man and for what he is wanted for.
Yevgeniy N, 29-year-old, alleged Russian Hacker, was arrested after Interpol issued a warrant.
Police detained the individual at a hotel in the city's center 12 hours after receiving the order. Officials say he was living in the country with his girlfriend and enjoying a lavish lifestyle, driving expensive cars.
Neither the Czech police nor the FBI has issued any details on the charges that led to the arrest of the suspect.
"Czech police carried out a successful joint operation with the US Federal Bureau of Investigation," the police said. "This time the objective of the police was a Russian national, suspected of committing hacker attacks on targets in the United States."
Soon after the hacker was arrested in the hotel in Prague, he fainted and lost consciousness. Police provided him first aid and later took him to a hospital.
The arrest took place a week after the Obama administration formally accused Russia of hacking US institutions in an attempt to influence the presidential election.
So, it has been suspected that the arrested man could be involved in hacking against the Democratic National Committee, or its presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, or other alleged cyber incursions of the voter databases in some states.
According to the authorities, the Czech judiciary will take the decision on the hacker's extradition to the United State, where he is facing charges for his hacking-related crimes.
The Hacker News will update the story as soon as the authorities disclose the name and other details about the arrested hacker. Stay Tune!
| Cyber_Attack |
In-Brief: Telegram Vulnerability, Malware in Nuclear Plant, Anti-Tor Malware and Hotpatching Exploit | https://thehackernews.com/2016/04/in-brief-news-2.html | Clickjacking Vulnerability in Telegram Web Client
The official Telegram web-client that allows its users to access messenger account over desktop's web browser is vulnerable to clickjacking web application vulnerability.
Egyptian security researcher Mohamed A. Baset told The Hacker News about a flaw in Telegram that could allow an attacker to change sensitive information of a Telegram user, including password and the recovery e-mail. [Watch Video Demo]
"Telegram web client is not protecting itself from clickjacking with the typical X-Frame-Options header but uses a JS frame busting technique to prevent the website to be iframed," Mohamed says.
However, by exploiting one of HTML5 Features, Mohamed was able to open the Telegram account's settings page with a sandboxed iframe to prevent redirecting to top window, which also allows him to execute cross-site request forgery (csrf) vulnerability on the web-client.
"I sent [bug report] it to them [Telegram team] but haven't got any reply or even an automated one (4 days ago)," Mohamed told The Hacker News.
German Nuclear Power Plant in Bavaria Infected with Malware
A German nuclear power plant has been found to be infected with several computer viruses that can steal login credentials, allowing a remote attacker to access the infected computers.
The viruses, identified as "W32.Ramnit" and "Conficker", were discovered on office computers and in a computer system used to control the movement of radioactive fuel rods, the station's operator said on Tuesday.
However, the infections appear not to have posed any threat to the nuclear facility's operations because the viruses could not activate, thanks to the computers that are made isolated from the Internet.
Former Tor Developer Created Malware for FBI to Hack Tor Users
Do you know who created malware for the FBI that allowed Feds to unmask Tor users?
It's an insider's job… A former Tor Project developer.
According to an investigation, Matthew J. Edman, a cyber security expert and former employee of the Tor Project, helped the FBI with Cornhusker a.k.a Torsploit malware to hack Tor users in several high-profile cases, including Operation Torpedo and Silk Road.
The Malware exploited vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash Player to reveal Tor users' actual IP address to an FBI servers outside the Tor network.
Child Porn Suspect Held in Jail for 7 Months On Refusing to Decrypt Hard Drives
A Philadelphia man has been in jail for seven months and counting after being refused to comply with a court order forcing him to decrypt two password-protected hard drives seized in connection with a child pornography investigation.
The suspect, Francis Rawls, who is a former Philadelphia Police Department sergeant, has yet not been charged with any child pornography crime because the required evidence is locked in his hard drives using Apple's FileVault encryption software.
Rawls failed to comply with the court order, as the passwords he entered in the initial days of the investigation didn't decrypt his hard drives, and was then taken into indefinite imprisonment by US Marshals on Sept. 30, 2015.
Hacking Group Hijacks Windows Hotpatching to Hide its Malware
The Microsoft's Windows Defender Advanced Threat Hunting team detected that a cyber espionage group of hackers, known as PLATINUM, has found a way to turn the Windows's Hotpatching technique to hide its malware from Antivirus products.
The Hotpatching feature allows system to upgrade applications or the operating system in the running system without having to reboot the computer by inserting the new, updated code into a server.
PLATINUM group has been active since 2009 and launching large-scale attacks against governmental organizations, intelligence agencies, defense institutes and telecommunication providers in South and Southeast Asia.
| Vulnerability |
Russian Pleads Guilty to Running 'CardPlanet' to Sell Stolen Credit Cards | https://thehackernews.com/2020/01/russian-credit-card-hacker.html | Image credit: Times of Israel.
Aleksei Burkov, a 29-year-old Russian hacker, on Thursday pleaded guilty to multiple criminal charges for running two illegal websites that helped cyber criminals commit more than $20 million in credit card fraud.
The first website Burkov operated was an online marketplace for buying and selling stolen credit card and debit card numbers—called Cardplanet—which roughly hosted 150,000 payment card details between the years 2009 and 2013.
Cardplanet marketplace offered stolen payment card details for anywhere between $2.50 and $10 a card, depending on the card type, country of origin, and the availability of card owner information.
The carding website even offered a paid service that allowed buyers to instantly verify if a stolen payment card were still valid.
"Many of the cards offered for sale belonged to U.S. citizens. The stolen credit card data from more than 150,000 compromised payment cards was allegedly sold on Burkov's site and has resulted in over $20 million in fraudulent purchases made on U.S. credit cards," the Department of Justice said in an old press release.
The majority of such stolen credit cards are obtained using illegal means such as phishing and the use of banking malware, malicious software implanted into cash registers at the stores, leaked databases, and hacked financial account passwords.
Besides Cardplanet, Burkov also masterminded a separate invite-only forum website for elite cybercriminals where they advertised stolen personal identity information, malicious software, and other illegal services, like money laundering and hacking services.
"To obtain membership in Burkov's cybercrime forum, prospective members needed three existing members to "vouch" for their good reputation among cybercriminals and to provide a sum of money, normally $5,000, as insurance," the Department of Justice said on Thursday.
"These measures were designed to keep law enforcement from accessing Burkov's cybercrime forum and to ensure that members of the forum honored any deals made while conducting business on the forum."
Burkov was arrested at Israel's Ben-Gurion Airport in late 2015 and extradited to the United States in November 2019 after he lost his appeal against extradition in the Israeli Supreme Court and the Israeli High Court of Justice.
According to local media, Russia last year offered Israel to release one of its citizens Naama Issachar, who was sentenced in Russia for drug offenses, in exchange for Burkov's release, but Israel turned down that offer and allowed his extradition to the United States.
On admitted charges of access device fraud and conspiracy to commit computer intrusion, identity theft, wire, and access device fraud and money laundering, Burkov is facing a prison sentence of up to 15 years, which will be announced by the federal court in Alexandria on 8th May 2020.
| Cyber_Attack |
New BlackEnergy Crimeware Enhanced to Target Linux Systems and Cisco Routers | https://thehackernews.com/2014/11/blackenergy-crimeware-router-linux.html | Security researchers at Kaspersky Lab have unearthed new capabilities in the BlackEnergy Crimeware weapon that has now ability to hacking routers, Linux systems and Windows, targeting industry through Cisco network devices.
The antivirus vendor's Global Research & Analysis Team released a report Monday detailing some of the new "relatively unknown" custom plug-in capabilities that the cyber espionage group has developed for BlackEnergy to attack Cisco networking devices and target ARM and MIPS platforms.
The malware was upgraded with custom plugins including Ciscoapi.tcl which targets The Borg's kit, and According to researchers, the upgraded version contained various wrappers over Cisco EXEC-commands and "a punchy message for Kaspersky," which reads, "F*uck U, Kaspersky!!! U never get a fresh B1ack En3rgy. So, thanks C1sco 1td for built-in backd00rs & 0-days."
BlackEnergy malware program was originally created and used by cybercriminals to launch Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks. The malware developer then added some custom plugins used to funnel banking information.
Most recently BlackEnergy malware was observed in alleged state-sponsored attacks targeting the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), Ukrainian and Polish government agencies, and a variety of sensitive European industries over the last year.
Now, the cyber espionage group has enhanced the malware program which also has the capabilities like port scanning, password stealing, system information gathering, digital certificate theft, remote desktop connectivity and even hard disk wiping and destroying.
In case if a victim knew of the BlackEnergy infection on their system, the attacker activates "dstr," the name of a plugin that destroys hard disks by overwriting them with random data. A second victim was compromised by using VPN credentials taken from the first victim.
Security researchers, Kurt Baumgartner and Maria Garnaeva, also came across BlackEnergy version that works on ARM and MIPS based systems and found that it has compromised networking devices manufactured by Cisco Systems.
However, the experts are not sure for the purpose of some plugins, including one that gathers device instance IDs and other information on connected USB drives and another that collects details on the BIOS (Basic Input/Output System), motherboard, and processor of infected systems.
"We are pretty sure that our list of [BlackEnergy] tools is not complete," the researchers wrote. "For example, we have yet to obtain the router access plugin, but we are confident that it exists. Evidence also supports the hypothesis that there is a decryption plugin for victim files."
Multiple unnamed victim companies in different countries were targeted with the latest BlackEnergy malware, including victims in Russia, Germany, Belgium, Turkey, Libya, Vietnam and several other countries.
Another Crimeware group, the Sandworm Team, believed to have used the BlackEnergy exclusively throughout 2014 at victim sites and included custom plugin and scripts of their own. Also last month, the Sandworm Team had targeted organizations across the world in an espionage campaign, and iSIGHT Partners revealed that the team used spear phishing as the major attack vector to victimize their targets.
| Malware |
Apache Tomcat Patches Important Remote Code Execution Flaw | https://thehackernews.com/2019/04/apache-tomcat-security-flaw.html | The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has released new versions of its Tomcat application server to address an important security vulnerability that could allow a remote attacker to execute malicious code and take control of an affected server.
Developed by ASF, Apache Tomcat is an open source web server and servlet system, which uses several Java EE specifications such as Java Servlet, JavaServer Pages (JSP), Expression Language, and WebSocket to provide a "pure Java" HTTP web server environment for Java concept to run in.
The remote code execution vulnerability (CVE-2019-0232) resides in the Common Gateway Interface (CGI) Servlet when running on Windows with enableCmdLineArguments enabled and occurs due to a bug in the way the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) passes command line arguments to Windows.
Since the CGI Servlet is disabled by default and its option enableCmdLineArguments is disabled by default in Tomcat 9.0.x, the remote code execution vulnerability has been rated as important and not critical.
In response to this vulnerability, the CGI Servlet enableCmdLineArguments option will now be disabled by default in all versions of Apache Tomcat.
Affected Tomcat Versions
Apache Tomcat 9.0.0.M1 to 9.0.17
Apache Tomcat 8.5.0 to 8.5.39
Apache Tomcat 7.0.0 to 7.0.93
Unaffected Tomcat Versions
Apache Tomcat 9.0.18 and later
Apache Tomcat 8.5.40 and later
Apache Tomcat 7.0.94 and later
Successful exploitation of this vulnerability could allow a remote attacker to execute an arbitrary command on a targeted Windows server running an affected version of Apache Tomcat, resulting in a full compromise.
The vulnerability was reported to the Apache Tomcat security team by researchers from Nightwatch Cybersecurity on 3rd March 2019 and was made public on 10 April 2019 after the ASF released the updated versions.
This Apache vulnerability has been addressed with the release of Tomcat version 9.0.19 (though the issue was fixed in Apache Tomcat 9.0.18, the release vote for the 9.0.18 release did not pass), version 8.5.40 and version 7.0.93.
So, administrators are strongly recommended to apply the software updates as soon as possible. If you are unable to apply the patches immediately, you should ensure the CGI Servlet initialisation parameter's default enableCmdLineArguments value is set to false.
| Vulnerability |
SRTT Vulnerability in BIND Software Puts DNS Protocol Security At Risk | https://thehackernews.com/2014/05/critical-vulnerability-in-bind-software.html | After the Heartbleed bug that exposed half of the Internet vulnerable to hackers thereby marking as one of the largest Internet vulnerability in recent history, the critical flaw in the implementation of the DNS protocol could also represent a serious menace to the Internet security.
A Serious security vulnerability has been discovered in the algorithms of DNS software – BIND by the two Israeli students 'Roee Hay' and 'Jonathan Kalechstein', who are working under a project out at the Laboratory of Computer Communication & Networking in the Faculty of Computer Science at the Technion, which was led by Dr. Gabi Nakibly from Rafael (Rafael Advanced Defense Systems Ltd.).
Although, Technion students have not provided any detail explanation about the vulnerability, but indicated that by exploiting the DNS protocol flaw an attacker could redirect the users who are trying to visit a legitimate website to a fake and bogus website which the attacker controls. The fake website could reflect the same name and look completely identical to the original one.
VULNERABILITY IN DNS PROTOCOL
The students have found a way to compel DNS servers to connect with a specific server controlled by the attacker that could respond with a false IP address. "This type of cyber attack gives hackers an advantage, by causing computers to 'talk' with network stations that they alone control without being able to detect the occurrence of the fraud," explains Dr. Gabi Nakibly.
The Domain Name System (DNS) is an essential component of the functionality of the Internet and the most common internet protocol which is responsible for navigating between global servers based on website addresses. It translates easily memorized domain names to the numerical IP addresses needed for the purpose of locating computer services and devices worldwide.
"The DNS protocol has been around for several years and has been investigated by researchers from all over the world. We knew in advance that the chances of finding a loophole in the software would be very small, but we like challenges," Roee Hay stated.
Since DNS is the leading protocol that is responsible to take users to the site they wanted to see, any weakness in its implementation could lead users to a bogus site controlled by the attackers or steal users' credentials by a classic phishing schema.
PATCHED VERSION COMING SOON
Fortunately the weakness discovered in the protocol is the result of a research conducted by the Students at Technion and till now security experts haven't noticed any such attacks exploiting the flaw. But, the impact of the vulnerability could be more terrific if exploited by the cyber criminals.
"We were very surprised to find a loophole in the protocol," said Kalechstein. "We reported it to the authorities responsible for its implementation, they responded that they were unaware of this problem, and added that they will replace the algorithms in the next software version release."
The discovery of the critical flaw has been reported to the authorities responsible for its implementation and they responded by saying that they were totally unaware of this loophole and that the algorithms will be replaced in the next software version release.
| Vulnerability |
Android Cookie-Stealing Malware Found Hijacking Facebook Accounts | https://thehackernews.com/2020/03/android-cookies-malware-hacking.html | A new simple but dangerous strain of Android malware has been found in the wild that steals users' authentication cookies from the web browsing and other apps, including Chrome and Facebook, installed on the compromised devices.
Dubbed "Cookiethief" by Kaspersky researchers, the Trojan works by acquiring superuser root rights on the target device, and subsequently, transfer stolen cookies to a remote command-and-control (C2) server operated by attackers.
"This abuse technique is possible not because of a vulnerability in the Facebook app or browser itself," Kaspersky researchers said. "Malware could steal cookie files of any website from other apps in the same way and achieve similar results."
Cookiethief: Hijacking Accounts Without Requiring Passwords
Cookies are small pieces of information that's often used by websites to differentiate one user from another, offer continuity around the web, track browsing sessions across different websites, serve personalized content, and strings related to targeted advertisements.
Given how cookies on a device allow users to stay logged in to a service without having to repeatedly sign in, Cookiethief aims to exploit this very behavior to let attackers gain unauthorized access to the victim accounts without knowing their actual online accounts passwords.
"This way, a cybercriminal armed with a cookie can pass himself off as the unsuspecting victim and use the latter's account for personal gain," the researchers said.
Kaspersky theorizes that there could be a number of ways the Trojan could land up on the device — including planting such malware in the device firmware before purchase, or by exploiting vulnerabilities in the operating system to download malicious applications.
Once the device is infected, the malware connects to a backdoor, dubbed 'Bood,' installed on the same smartphone to execute "superuser" commands that facilitate cookie theft.
How Do Attackers Bypass Multi-Level Protection Offered by Facebook?
Cookiethief malware doesn't have it all easy, though. Facebook has security measures in place to block any suspicious login attempts, such as from IP addresses, devices, and browsers that had never been used for logging into the platform before.
But the bad actors have worked around the problem by leveraging the second piece of malware app, named 'Youzicheng,' that creates a proxy server on the infected device to impersonate the account owner's geographic location to make the access requests legitimate.
"By combining these two attacks, cybercriminals can gain complete control over the victim's account and not raise suspicion from Facebook," the researchers noted.
It's not yet clear what the attackers are really after, but the researchers found a page found on the C2 server advertising services for distributing spam on social networks and messengers — leading them to the conclusion that the criminals could leverage Cookiethief to hijack users' social media accounts to spread malicious links or perpetuate phishing attacks.
While Kaspersky classified the attack as a new threat — with only about 1,000 individuals targeted in this manner — it warned that this number is "growing" considering the difficulty in detecting such intrusions.
To be safe from such attacks, it's recommended that users block third-party cookies on the phone's browser, clear the cookies on a regular basis, and visit websites using private browsing mode.
| Malware |
Hacker uses Evernote account as Command-and-Control Server | https://thehackernews.com/2013/03/hacker-uses-evernote-account-as-command.html | Cyber criminals are using popular note-taking app Evernote as Command-and-Control Server to give commands to the malware installed on infected PCs using botnets.
TrendMicro uncovered a malware detected as "BKDR_VERNOT.A" tried to communicate with Command-and-Control Server using Evernote.
Malware delivered via an executable file that installs the malware as a dynamic-link library. The installer then ties the DLL into a legitimate running process, hiding it from casual detection. Once installed, BKDR_VERNOT.A can perform several backdoor commands such as downloading, executing, and renaming files. It then gathers information from the infected system, including details about its OS, timezone, user name, computer name, registered owner and organization.
Researchers also pointed out that the backdoor may have also used Evernote as a location to upload stolen data. "Unfortunately, during our testing, it was not able to login using the credentials embedded in the malware. This is possibly a security measure imposed by Evernote following its recent hacking issue."
"Though this is a clever maneuver to avoid detection, this is not the first time that a legitimate service like Evernote was used as a method of evasion."
Like Evernote, Google Docs, Twitter and others have been misused in the past.
| Malware |
Anonymous Declares War On Donald Trump — #OpTrump | https://thehackernews.com/2015/12/anonymous-donald-trump.html | After targeting the Islamic State (ISIS) group in the wake of Deadly terror attacks in Paris, hacktivist group Anonymous has now turned its attention to controversial US presidential candidate Donald Trump.
The hacktivist group has declared war against Donald Trump following his recent radical speech stating he wanted to ban Muslims from entering the United States.
Anonymous vs. Donald Trump
On Wednesday, Anonymous slams Trump by posting a YouTube video in which a man in a Guy Fawkes mask says:
"Donald Trump, it has come to our attention that you wish to ban all muslims from entering the United States. Muslims and Islam are not the problem. This policy will have grave impact and will serve only to fuel the emotions that ISIS uses to recruit muslims. Certainly ISIS will use this to their advantage in their social media campaigns. Instead of focusing on the innocent, the focus should be set on ways to protect them from the radicalized individuals they flee. Donald Trump, think twice before you speak. This policy is one that cannot be accepted. Denying people of opportunity to escape hardship is not a solution of a future world leader. If anything, this solution will only bear more conflict. We cannot sit idle with the possibilty of detrimental consequences. Should this policy be pursued any further, we will have no choice but to take action."
Watch the Video:
Anonymous Takes Down Donald Trump Website
Moreover, the group started #OpTrump hacking campaign against Donald Trump on Wednesday night and took down the website for New York City's Trump Towers (www.trumptowerny.com) by hitting it with Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks.
The website was reportedly down for hours. However, it appears to be operational now.
While the online hacktivist group has yet to officially claim responsibility for the DDOS attack on Trump's website, Twitter users showed their full support to Anonymous and its #OpTrump campaign.
Also Read: Telegram Shuts Down 78 ISIS Channels
This is not the first time the group has targeted Trump. Few months ago, Anonymous broke into Trump.com in an effort to deliver Jon Stewart a message as he was about to leave The Daily Show.
As we await Anonymous's next move, the group has already declared Friday to be a day to troll ISIS, urging Twitter users to troll ISIS using the #Daeshbags hashtag.
This Hack Lets You Find Which of Your Facebook Friends Like Trump
Meanwhile, a website known as FriendsWhoLikeTrump.com has been created to show you which of your Facebook friends have "Liked" Donald J. Trump.
Clicking on the site will land you to a Facebook search feature that shows what your friends have liked, or you can achieve the same yourself by simply typing "My friends who like Donald J. Trump" in the Facebook search bar.
You will get a list of anyone in your Facebook network who has clicked "Like" on Trump's Facebook page.
| Cyber_Attack |
Blackhat – Upcoming Cyber Thriller Movie | https://thehackernews.com/2014/12/blackhat-hacker-movie-2015.html | "Hacking" is not just popular among cyber security experts and criminals, but also is a great interest for movies industries as well. Hollywood movies such as 1995 released Hackers and 2001 released Swordfish are examples of it, and now Chris Hemsworth's new flick Blackhat.
Blackhat – An upcoming cyber thriller, directed and co-written by Michael Mann (who also directed Tom Cruise' Collateral), in which actor Chris Hemsworth trades brawn for brains to save the world. The latest trailer for Blackhat has arrived online, and you can watch it below.
Hemsworth's character in the upcoming cyber thriller is a former Blackhat hacker, named Nicholas Hathaway, who is serving a 15-year sentence for cyber crimes. He was recruited straight from prison by a mixed team of American and Chinese law enforcement officials to stop high-level cybercrime network from Chicago to Los Angeles to Hong Kong to Jakarta and save the world from global hackers.
Hathaway agrees to help on a condition if the law enforcement officials commute his sentence, but as he get into the matter, he found that things were a lot more complicated than he thought.
The filmmaker of The Insider and Heat has spent years on researching material for Blackhat, explored the dependence of people on technology and security issues nowadays. Oscar nominee Viola Davis, Tang Wei and Leehom Wang are also star casts in the thriller.
Chris Hemsworth is dropping his Thor hammer and picking up a computer keyboard, sounds really interesting. Well, I will watch it for this very reason. Blackhat will hit the movie theaters in U.S. on January 16th, 2015 and in the UK on February 20th, 2015.[Yahoo Movies]
| Cyber_Attack |
Iranian Ajax Security Team targets US Defense Industry | https://thehackernews.com/2014/05/iranian-ajax-security-team-targets-us.html | The Iranian hacking group, which calls itself the "Ajax Security Team", was quite famous from last few years for websites defacement attacks, and then suddenly they went into dark since past few months. But that doesn't mean that the group was inactive, rather defacing the websites, the group was planning something bigger.
The Group of hackers at Ajax Security Team last defaced a website in December 2013 and after that it transitioned to sophisticated malware-based espionage campaigns in order to target U.S. defense organizations and Iranian dissidents, according to the report released by FireEye researchers.
"The transition from patriotic hacking to cyber espionage is not an uncommon phenomenon. It typically follows an increasing politicization within the hacking community, particularly around geopolitical events," researchers Nart Villeneuve, Ned Moran, Thoufique Haq and Mike Scott wrote in the report. "This is followed by increasing links between the hacking community and the state, particularly military and/or intelligence organizations."
The security firm has been tracking the activities of the hacking group on online forums and identified some of the group's prominent members by their screen names, "HUrr1c4nE!" and "Cair3x."
FireEye found that the Ajax Security Team appeared to be formed in 2010, have stopped the website defacement attacks and started more targeted attacks with the aim to retrieve the information from systems through their own custom designed malware.
The group dubbed the malware as 'Stealer,' which isn't particularly much advanced like the malwares are today, still very effective and sophisticated.
Stealer uses common techniques to steal credential data and is built into a CAB extractor. Once activated, the extractor drop a malware called IntelRS.exe, which adds a backdoor to the target system that communicates with command-and-control servers over FTP, keylogger and screenshot-grabbing tools.
The malware has capability to steal browser information such as bookmarks and history and also collects system information such as running processes, IP addresses and many more.
In the report titled "Operation Saffron Rose", the malware campaign disclosed that the team used email, inbox messages over various social networks, fake login pages and the propagation of anti-censorship software infected with malware to lure targets into installing malicious software and revealing credentials from their machines.
In one case, the group targeted the Western Defense companies, particularly those in the Aerospace industry, using a fake registration page impersonating the IEEE Aerospace conference. In order to do this, first the group registered the domain aeroconf2014[.]org, similar to the legitimate conference domain, and then sent out emails to companies in the field with a link to their fake site.
Once they visited the site and tries to register themselves for the conference, they would be prompted to install proxy software in order to access the website. But, the software was actually a Stealer malware, FireEye said.
In addition to it, the attackers also used phishing emails to grab credentials for a variety of online services such as Outlook Web Access and VPN logins.
"The increased politicization of the Ajax Security Team, and the transition from nuisance defacements to operations against internal dissidents and foreign targets, coincides with moves by Iran aimed at increasing offensive cyber capabilities," the security firm concluded. "While the relationship between actors such as the Ajax Security Team and the Iranian government remains unclear, their activities appear to align with Iranian government political objectives."
The researcher also discovered a command-and-control server used by the group to store victims' stolen data and recovered the data of 77 infected victims targeted by the group. Most of the victims had their computers set to Iran's time zone and Persian language. The firm also unearthed evidence the group targeted U.S. defense contractors.
FireEye states that the objectives of Ajax team are apparently consistent with the efforts of Iranian government to control political opposition and to expand its offensive cyber capabilities.
| Cyber_Attack |
You Can Crash Anyone's iPhone Or iPad With A Simple Emoji Text Message | https://thehackernews.com/2017/01/crash-iphone-emoji.html | A newly discovered bug in Apple's iOS mobile operating system is being exploited in a prank that lets anyone crash your iPhone or iPad by just sending an emoji-filled iMessage, according to several reports.
YouTube star EverythingApplePro published a video highlighting a sequence of characters that temporarily freeze and restart an iPhone, which people can send to their iPhone buddies to trouble them. You can watch the video demonstration below.
Here's the first troublesome text: A white Flag emoji, the digit "0" and a Rainbow emoji.
This simple numeric character, flag, and rainbow emojis confuse iOS 10 devices when it tries to combine them into a rainbow flag.
As soon as this text is received, the iPhone's software attempts to combine the emojis but fails, and the messaging app crashes and eventually reboots in a few minutes. The recipients do not even have to open or read the message.
Video Demonstration
Another iPhone-crashing method involves the same characters, but saving them as a contact file and then sending that file to an iMessage contact via iCloud's sharing feature.
This, in turn, will crash the target's device, even if the victim has not manually opened the file.
Both the methods mentioned above will crash and iPhone or iPad to varying degrees, although the simple text string sent via a standard iMessage appears to affect iPhones and iPads running iOS 10.1 or below.
However, the boobytrapped contact card affects all versions of iOS 10, including Apple's latest iOS 10.2 operating system.
There is nothing you can do to protect yourself against this issue, as these iPhone-crashing issues have the ability to crash and reboot your iPhone or iPad without your interaction.
So, we hope that Apple releases a patch quickly to plug the issues, though the company has declined to comment on the issue.
This is not the first time EverythingApplePro has shared iOS-crashing issues. The YouTuber has a long history of reporting on iPhone crash pranks.
| Vulnerability |
Top 30 Critical Security Vulnerabilities Most Exploited by Hackers | https://thehackernews.com/2021/07/top-30-critical-security.html | Intelligence agencies in Australia, the U.K., and the U.S. issued a joint advisory on Wednesday detailing the most exploited vulnerabilities in 2020 and 2021, once again demonstrating how threat actors are able to swiftly weaponize publicly disclosed flaws to their advantage.
"Cyber actors continue to exploit publicly known—and often dated—software vulnerabilities against broad target sets, including public and private sector organizations worldwide," the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC), the United Kingdom's National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), and the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) noted.
"However, entities worldwide can mitigate the vulnerabilities listed in this report by applying the available patches to their systems and implementing a centralized patch management system."
The top 30 vulnerabilities span a wide range of software, including remote work, virtual private networks (VPNs), and cloud-based technologies, that cover a broad spectrum of products from Microsoft, VMware, Pulse Secure, Fortinet, Accellion, Citrix, F5 Big IP, Atlassian, and Drupal.
The most routinely exploited flaws in 2020 are as follows -
CVE-2019-19781 (CVSS score: 9.8) - Citrix Application Delivery Controller (ADC) and Gateway directory traversal vulnerability
CVE-2019-11510 (CVSS score: 10.0) - Pulse Connect Secure arbitrary file reading vulnerability
CVE-2018-13379 (CVSS score: 9.8) - Fortinet FortiOS path traversal vulnerability leading to system file leak
CVE-2020-5902 (CVSS score: 9.8) - F5 BIG-IP remote code execution vulnerability
CVE-2020-15505 (CVSS score: 9.8) - MobileIron Core & Connector remote code execution vulnerability
CVE-2020-0688 (CVSS score: 8.8) - Microsoft Exchange memory corruption vulnerability
CVE-2019-3396 (CVSS score: 9.8) - Atlassian Confluence Server remote code execution vulnerability
CVE-2017-11882 (CVSS score: 7.8) - Microsoft Office memory corruption vulnerability
CVE-2019-11580 (CVSS score: 9.8) - Atlassian Crowd and Crowd Data Center remote code execution vulnerability
CVE-2018-7600 (CVSS score: 9.8) - Drupal remote code execution vulnerability
CVE-2019-18935 (CVSS score: 9.8) - Telerik .NET deserialization vulnerability resulting in remote code execution
CVE-2019-0604 (CVSS score: 9.8) - Microsoft SharePoint remote code execution vulnerability
CVE-2020-0787 (CVSS score: 7.8) - Windows Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS) elevation of privilege vulnerability
CVE-2020-1472 (CVSS score: 10.0) - Windows Netlogon elevation of privilege vulnerability
The list of vulnerabilities that have come under active attack thus far in 2021 are listed below -
Microsoft Exchange Server: CVE-2021-26855, CVE-2021-26857, CVE-2021-26858, and CVE-2021-27065 (aka "ProxyLogon")
Pulse Secure: CVE-2021-22893, CVE-2021-22894, CVE-2021-22899, and CVE-2021-22900
Accellion: CVE-2021-27101, CVE-2021-27102, CVE-2021-27103, and CVE-2021-27104
VMware: CVE-2021-21985
Fortinet: CVE-2018-13379, CVE-2020-12812, and CVE-2019-5591
The development also comes a week after MITRE published a list of top 25 "most dangerous" software errors that could lead to serious vulnerabilities that could be exploited by an adversary to take control of an affected system, obtain sensitive information, or cause a denial-of-service condition.
"The advisory [...] puts the power in every organisation's hands to fix the most common vulnerabilities, such as unpatched VPN gateway devices," NCSC Director for Operations, Paul Chichester, said, urging the need to prioritize patching to minimize the risk of being exploited by malicious actors.
| Cyber_Attack |
Popular Mobile Browsers Found Vulnerable To Address Bar Spoofing Attacks | https://thehackernews.com/2020/10/browser-address-spoofing-vulnerability.html | Graphic for illustration
Cybersecurity researchers on Tuesday disclosed details about an address bar spoofing vulnerability affecting multiple mobile browsers, such as Apple Safari and Opera Touch, leaving the door open for spear-phishing attacks and delivering malware.
Other impacted browsers include UCWeb, Yandex Browser, Bolt Browser, and RITS Browser.
The flaws were discovered by Pakistani security researcher Rafay Baloch in the summer of 2020 and jointly reported by Baloch and cybersecurity firm Rapid7 in August before they were addressed by the browser makers over the past few weeks.
UCWeb and Bolt Browser remain unpatched as yet, while Opera Mini is expected to receive a fix on November 11, 2020.
The issue stems from using malicious executable JavaScript code in an arbitrary website to force the browser to update the address bar while the page is still loading to another address of the attacker's choice.
Original PoC demo
"The vulnerability occurs due to Safari preserving address bar of the URL when requested over an arbitrary port, the set interval function reloads bing.com:8080 every 2 milliseconds and hence user is unable to recognize the redirection from the original URL to spoofed URL," Rafay Baloch said in technical analysis.
"What makes this vulnerability more effective in Safari by default does not reveal port number in URL unless and until focus is set via cursor."
Put differently; an attacker can set up a malicious website and lure the target into opening the link from a spoofed email or text message, thereby leading an unsuspecting recipient into downloading malware or risk getting their credentials stolen.
The research also found the macOS version of Safari to be vulnerable to the same bug, which according to Rapid7 has been addressed in a Big Sur macOS update released last week.
This is not the first time such vulnerability has been spotted in Safari. Back in 2018, Baloch disclosed a similar kind of address bar spoofing flaw that caused the browser to preserve the address bar and to load the content from the spoofed page through a JavaScript-induced timing delay.
"With ever growing sophistication of spear phishing attacks, exploitation of browser-based vulnerabilities such as address bar spoofing may exacerbate the success of spear-phishing attacks and hence prove to be very lethal," Baloch said.
"First and foremost, it is easy to persuade the victim into stealing credentials or distributing malware when the address bar points to a trusted website and giving no indicators forgery, secondly since the vulnerability exploits a specific feature in a browser, it can evade several anti-phishing schemes and solutions."
| Vulnerability |
NSA infected more than 50,000 computer networks with Malware | https://thehackernews.com/2013/11/nsa-infected-more-than-50000-computer.html | The NSA has the ability to trace "anyone, anywhere, anytime". In September we reported that how NSA and GCHQ planted malware via LinkedIn and Slashdot traffic to hack largest telecom company Belgacom's Engineers.
Yesterday, a Dutch newspaper has published a new secret NSA document provided by former intelligence employee Edward Snowden.
According to the newly exposed slide, NSA has infected more than 50,000 computer networks worldwide with software designed to steal sensitive information i.e. Malware.
The slide from the NSA's 2012 management presentation, shows a world map with more than 50,000 targeted locations, uses a procedure called 'Computer Network Exploitation' (CNE) that can secretly install malware in computer systems. The malware can be controlled remotely and be turned on and off at will.
From the NSA website we found that, CNE includes enabling actions and intelligence collection via computer networks that exploit data gathered from target or enemy information systems or networks.
"Cyberwar is a very real threat and could cause widespread problems. That is why the National Security Agency needs to be prepared by Computer Science professionals who are highly-skilled in Computer Network Operations." The website says.
To perform such offensive attacks via CNE operations, NSA has employed more than a thousand hackers under a special unit called TAO (Tailored Access Operations). Countries targeted by the CNE hackers unit includes China, Russia, Venezuela and Brazil.
Many Counties now have their own Cyber units - including China and Dutch, but their actions are prohibited by law. Officially they cannot perform operations as the NSA and GCHQ can do.
| Cyber_Attack |
Typeform, Popular Online Survey Software, Suffers Data Breach | https://thehackernews.com/2018/06/typeform-survey-software.html | Typeform, the popular Spanish-based online data collection company specializes in form building and online surveys for businesses worldwide, has today disclosed that the company has suffered a data breach that exposed partial data of its some users.
The company identified the breach on June 27th, and then quickly performed a full forensic investigation of the incident to identify the source of the breach.
According to the company, some unknown attackers managed to gain unauthorized access to its servers and downloaded a partial data backups for surveys conducted before May 3rd 2018.
Typeform confirmed that it patched the issue within just half an hour after identifying the intrusion, and emailed all the affected users, warning them to watch out for potential phishing scams, or spam emails.
The company did not disclose any details about the vulnerability that was exploited by hackers to gain access to its servers, though it assured its users that no payment card details or password information for the website had been exposed in the breach.
Also, if customers collected payments via Typeform's Stripe integration, all of their audience's payment details are safe.
One of its customers, Monzo, a digital mobile-only bank that had used Typeform's service to collect survey results in the past, also conducted an initial investigation of the incident and confirmed that "some personal data of about 20,000 people are likely to have been included in the breach."
"For the vast majority of people, this was just their email address. For a much smaller proportion of others, this may have included other data like their Twitter username or postcode. We've published a full breakdown at the bottom of this post," Monzo CEO Tom Blomfield wrote on its website.
Monzo is also sending out emails to its users affected by the data breach, informing that the breach likely included their email addresses and that the incident has not affected their user's Monzo accounts and their money is safe.
Popular sportswear company Adidas on Thursday also confirmed a potential data breach that affected millions of its U.S. customers, who may have compromised their usernames, password hashes and contact information.
Yesterday, Global entertainment ticketing service Ticketmaster also admitted that the company has suffered a security breach that exposed some of their customers personal and payment information to unknown hackers.
| Data_Breaches |
U.S. Charges Chinese Hacker For 2015 Anthem Data Breach | https://thehackernews.com/2019/05/chinese-hacker-anthem-breach.html | The United States Justice Department today announced charges against a Chinese hacker and his hacking team member for their alleged role in the 2015 massive data breach at health insurance giant Anthem and three other unnamed American companies.
Fujie Wang (王 福 杰) and another hacker named John Doe with three different aliases—Deniel Jack, Kim Young, and Zhou Zhihong—are charged with four counts of conspiracy to commit fraud, wire fraud, and damage to a protected computer, according to an indictment [pdf] unsealed today in federal court in Indianapolis.
In 2015, the hackers managed to breach Anthem, the country's second-largest health insurance company and stole personal information of over 80 Millions of its customers, including their Social Security Numbers, birthdates, email addresses, residential addresses, medical identification numbers, employment information, and income data.
The incident marked as one of the worst data breaches in history, with the company paying a record $115 million fine to settle U.S. lawsuits.
According to the indictment, the hackers used sophisticated techniques, including spearfishing, to hack into the computer networks of the targeted businesses and then installed malware on their computers to further compromise the networks and gain access to sensitive users' data and confidential business information.
"As part of this international computer hacking scheme, the indictment alleges that beginning in February 2014, the defendants used sophisticated techniques to hack into the computer networks of the victim businesses without authorization," the DoJ says.
"On multiple occasions in January 2015, the defendants accessed the computer network of Anthem, accessed Anthem's enterprise data warehouse, and transferred encrypted archive files containing PII from Anthem's enterprise data warehouse from the United States to China."
Besides Anthem, the defendants also breached three other U.S. companies—a company in the technology sector, a basic materials company, and a communication services company—but the indictment does not reveal their names.
Wang and Doe are both charged with a total of four federal counts:
one count of conspiracy to commit fraud and related activity in relation to computers and identity theft
one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud
two substantive counts of intentional damage to a protected computer
However, the above charges are just allegations for now, and the "defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law."
The case was investigated by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).
| Data_Breaches |
Bluetooth Hack Affects 20 Million Amazon Echo and Google Home Devices | https://thehackernews.com/2017/11/amazon-alexa-hacking-bluetooth.html | Remember BlueBorne?
A series of recently disclosed critical Bluetooth flaws that affect billions of Android, iOS, Windows and Linux devices have now been discovered in millions of AI-based voice-activated personal assistants, including Google Home and Amazon Echo.
As estimated during the discovery of this devastating threat, several IoT and smart devices whose operating systems are often updated less frequently than smartphones and desktops are also vulnerable to BlueBorne.
BlueBorne is the name given to the sophisticated attack exploiting a total of eight Bluetooth implementation vulnerabilities that allow attackers within the range of the targeted devices to run malicious code, steal sensitive information, take complete control, and launch man-in-the-middle attacks.
What's worse? Triggering the BlueBorne exploit doesn't require victims to click any link or open any file—all without requiring user interaction. Also, most security products would likely not be able to detect the attack.
What's even scarier is that once an attacker gains control of one Bluetooth-enabled device, he/she can infect any or all devices on the same network.
These Bluetooth vulnerabilities were patched by Google for Android in September, Microsoft for Windows in July, Apple for iOS one year before disclosure, and Linux distributions also shortly after disclosure.
However, many of these 5 billion devices are still unpatched and open to attacks via these flaws.
20 Million Amazon Echo & Google Home Devices Vulnerable to BlueBorne Attacks
IoT security firm Armis, who initially discovered this issue, has now disclosed that an estimated 20 million Amazon Echo and Google Home devices are also vulnerable to attacks leveraging the BlueBorne vulnerabilities.
If I split, around 15 million Amazon Echo and 5 million Google Home devices sold across the world are potentially at risk from BlueBorne.
Amazon Echo is affected by the following two vulnerabilities:
A remote code execution vulnerability in the Linux kernel (CVE-2017-1000251)
An information disclosure flaw in the SDP server (CVE-2017-1000250)
Since different Echo's variants use different operating systems, other Echo devices are affected by either the vulnerabilities found in Linux or Android.
Whereas, Google Home devices are affected by one vulnerability:
Information disclosure vulnerability in Android's Bluetooth stack (CVE-2017-0785)
This Android flaw can also be exploited to cause a denial-of-service (DoS) condition.
Since Bluetooth cannot be disabled on either of the voice-activated personal assistants, attackers within the range of the affected device can easily launch an attack.
Armis has also published a proof-of-concept (PoC) video showing how they were able to hack and manipulate an Amazon Echo device.
The security firm notified both Amazon and Google about its findings, and both companies have released patches and issued automatic updates for the Amazon Echo and Google Home that fixes the BlueBorne attacks.
Amazon Echo customers should confirm that their device is running v591448720 or later, while Google has not made any information regarding its version yet.
| Vulnerability |
This New Android Malware Can Physically Damage Your Phone | https://thehackernews.com/2017/12/phone-malware-battery.html | Due to the recent surge in cryptocurrency prices, not only hackers but also legitimate website administrators are increasingly using JavaScript-based cryptocurrency miners to monetize by levying the CPU power of your PC to mine Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies.
Just last week, researchers from AdGuard discovered that some popular video streaming and ripper sites including openload, Streamango, Rapidvideo, and OnlineVideoConverter hijacks CPU cycles from their over hundreds of millions of visitors for mining Monero cryptocurrency.
Now, researchers from Moscow-based cyber security firm Kaspersky Lab have uncovered a new strain of Android malware lurking in fake anti-virus and porn applications, which is capable of performing a plethora of nefarious activities—from mining cryptocurrencies to launching Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks.
Dubbed Loapi, the new Android Trojan can perform so many more malicious activities at a time that can exploit a handset to the extent that within just two days of infection it can cause the phone's battery to bulge out of its cover.
Described as a "jack-of-all-trades" by the researchers, Loapi has a modular architecture that lets it conduct a variety of malicious activities, including mining the Monero cryptocurrency, launching DDoS attacks, bombarding infected users with constant ads, redirecting web traffic, sending text messages, and downloading and installing other apps.
Loapi Destroyed An Android Phone In Just 2 Days
When analyzed a Loapi sample, Kaspersky's researchers discovered that the malware mines the Monero cryptocurrency so intensely that it destroyed an Android phone after two days of testing, causing the battery to bulge and deforming the phone cover.
According to researchers, the cybercriminals behind Loapi are the same responsible for the 2015 Android malware Podec. They are distributing the malware through third-party app stores and online advertisements that pose as apps for "popular antivirus solutions and even a famous porn site."
A screenshot in the Kaspersky blog suggests that Loapi impersonates as at least 20 variations of adult-content apps and legitimate antivirus software from AVG, Psafe DFNDR, Kaspersky Lab, Norton, Avira, Dr. Web and CM Security, among others.
Upon installation, Loapi forces the user to grant it 'device administrator' permissions by looping a pop-up until a victim clicks yes, which gives the malicious app the same power over your smartphone that you have.
This highest level privilege on a device would also make the Loapi malware ideal for user espionage, though this capability is not yet present in the malware, the Kaspersky researchers think this can be included in the future.
Loapi Malware Aggressively Fights to Protect Itself
Researchers also said the malware "aggressively fights any attempts to revoke device manager permissions" by locking the screen and closing phone windows by itself.
Loapi communicates with the module-specific command and control (C&C) servers, including advertisement module, SMS module and mining module, web crawler, and proxy module, for different functions to be performed on the infected device.
By connecting with one of the above-mentioned C&C servers, Loapi sends a list of legitimate antivirus apps that pose it danger and claims the real app as malware and urges the user to delete it by showing the pop-up in a loop until the user finally deletes the app.
"Loapi is an interesting representative from the world of malicious Android apps. It's creators have implemented almost the entire spectrum of techniques for attacking devices: the Trojan can subscribe users to paid services, send SMS messages to any number, generate traffic and make money from showing advertisements, use the computing power of a device to mine cryptocurrencies, as well as perform a variety of actions on the internet on behalf of the user/device," the researchers concluded.
Fortunately, Loapi failed to make its ways to Google Play Store, so users who stick to downloads from the official app store are not affected by the malware. But you are advised to remain vigilant even when downloading apps from Play Store as malware often makes its ways to infect Android users.
| Malware |
'BadNews' Android Malware downloaded up to 9 million times | https://thehackernews.com/2013/04/badnews-android-malware-downloaded-up.html | It appears as if another malware scare has come to Android. Lookout Security said on Friday that it has discovered a new family of malware called BadNews. Malware that avoided detection and made its way onto the Google Play store has been downloaded around 9 million times by users from all over the world.
The company uncovered the malware in 32 applications listed by four different developer accounts on Google Play. Google was notified and the company removed the affected apps and killed the developer accounts associated with them.
In their report, firm describes the malware: "BadNews masquerades as an innocent, if somewhat aggressive advertising network. This is one of the first times that we've seen a malicious distribution network clearly posing as an ad network. Because it's challenging to get malicious bad code into Google play, the authors of Badnews created a malicious advertising network, as a front, that would push malware out to infected devices at a later date in order to pass the app security. Badnews has the ability to send fake news messages, prompt users to install applications and sends sensitive information such as the phone number and device ID to its Command and Control (C&C) server. BadNews uses its ability to display fake news messages in order to push out other types of monetization malware and promote affiliated apps."
LookOut published the full list of known affected apps, with over half of them targeted at Russian users:
BadNews apps were also noted as using those fake news messages to promote affiliated apps and also push other types of monetization malware. One of the apps being pushed was AlphaSMS which is a premium rate SMS app.
Lookout has identified three control and command servers in Russia, Ukraine and Germany. All C&C servers are still currently live, but Lookout is working hard to bring them down as quickly as possible.
To be safe make sure the Android system setting 'unknown sources' is unchecked to prevent any dropped or drive-by-download app installs. Also, download a mobile security app that protects against malware and other virus threats.
| Malware |
4 New BlueKeep-like 'Wormable' Windows Remote Desktop Flaws Discovered | https://thehackernews.com/2019/08/windows-rdp-wormable-flaws.html | If you are using any supported version of the Windows operating system, stop everything and install the latest security updates from Microsoft immediately.
Windows operating system contains four new critical wormable, remote code execution vulnerabilities in Remote Desktop Services, similar to the recently patched 'BlueKeep' RDP vulnerability.
Discovered by Microsoft's security team itself, all four vulnerabilities, CVE-2019-1181, CVE-2019-1182, CVE-2019-1222, and CVE-2019-1226, can be exploited by unauthenticated, remote attackers to take control of an affected computer system without requiring any user interaction.
Just like BlueKeep RDP flaw, all four newly discovered vulnerabilities are also wormable and could be exploited by potential malware to propagate itself from one vulnerable computer to another automatically.
"An attacker can get code execution at the system level by sending a specially crafted pre-authentication RDP packet to an affected RDS server," Microsoft warned.
"The affected versions of Windows are Windows 7 SP1, Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1, Windows Server 2012, Windows 8.1, Windows Server 2012 R2, and all supported versions of Windows 10, including server versions."
Though the first two vulnerabilities affect all supported versions of the Windows operating system, the second set of flaws (1222 and 1226) only affects Windows 10 and Windows Server Editions.
The new vulnerabilities neither affect Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Server 2008 nor affect Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) itself that Microsoft developed for the Remote Desktop Services.
Instead, the vulnerabilities reside in Remote Desktop Services—formerly known as Terminal Services—could be exploited by unauthenticated, remote attackers by sending specially crafted requests over RDP protocol to a targeted system.
Besides this, Microsoft also says that the company has found "no evidence that these vulnerabilities were known to any third party," or being exploited in the wild.
"It is important that affected systems are patched as quickly as possible because of the elevated risks associated with wormable vulnerabilities like these," Microsoft strongly recommended.
If left unpatched, these security vulnerabilities could allow attackers to spread wormable malware in a similar way as the infamous WannaCry and NotPetya malware was spread across the globe in 2017.
Microsoft August 2019 Patch Tuesday Updates
Besides these four critical security flaws, Microsoft has also patched 89 vulnerabilities as part of the company's monthly batch of software security updates for August, 25 of which are rated critical and 64 important in severity.
The August 2019 Patch Tuesday security updates include patches for various supported versions of Windows and other Microsoft products, including Internet Explorer, Edge, Office, ChakraCore, Visual Studio, Online Services, and Active Directory Microsoft Dynamics.
All critical vulnerabilities listed this month impact various versions of Windows 10 operating system and Server editions and mostly reside in Chakra Scripting Engine, with some also reside in Windows Graphics Device Interface (GDI), Word, Outlook, Hyper-V, and VBScript Engine, LNK, and Windows DHCP Server.
Some important-rated vulnerabilities also lead to remote code execution attacks, while the majority of them allow elevation of privilege, denial of service, information disclosure, security bypass, spoofing, tampering, and cross-site scripting attacks.
Users and system administrators are highly recommended to apply the latest security patches as soon as possible to keep cybercriminals and hackers away from taking control of their computers.
For installing the latest security updates, you can head on to Settings → Update & Security → Windows Update → Check for updates on your computer, or you can install the updates manually.
| Vulnerability |
Millions of WordPress and Drupal Websites Vulnerable to DoS Attack | https://thehackernews.com/2014/08/millions-of-wordpress-and-drupal.html | Users running the website on a self-hosted WordPress or on Drupal are strongly recommended to update their websites to the latest version immediately.
A moderately critical vulnerability was discovered in the way Drupal and WordPress implement XMLRPC, which can lead an attacker to disable your website via a method known as Denial of Service (DoS).
VULNERABILITY RESULTS IN DoS ATTACK
The latest update of WordPress 3.9.2 mainly addresses an issue in the PHP's XML processor that could be exploited to trigger a DoS (denial of service) attack. The vulnerability affects all previous versions of WordPress.
The XML vulnerability was first reported by Nir Goldshlager, a security researcher from Salesforce.com's product security team, that impacts both the popular website platforms. The issue was later fixed by Michael Adams and Andrew Nacin of the WordPress security team and David Rothstein of the Drupal security team.
ATTACK MAKES YOUR WEBSITE COMPLETELY INACCESSIBLE
The vulnerability makes use of a well-known cyber attack, XML Quadratic Blowup Attack. When executed, it has the capability to take down the whole website or server almost instantly, with the use of only a single machine.
The XML vulnerability can cause complete CPU and memory exhaustion and the site's database to reach the maximum number of open connections, and as a result, the vulnerable site and server become unavailable for a period of time, hence affecting Availability of your website.
In short, when the vulnerability is exploited, your website and web server can become totally inaccessible.
WORDPRESS AND DRUPAL USED BY MILLIONS OF WEBSITES
The issue is actually serious because WordPress and Drupal is being used by millions of websites. The recent statistics from the World Wide Web Consortium (WC3) says that WordPress alone powers nearly 23% of the web, and over one million websites used by Drupal.
WordPress is a free and open source blogging tool and a content management system (CMS) with more than 30,000 plugins, each of which offers custom functions and features enabling users to tailor their sites to their specific needs, therefore it is easy to setup and use, that's why tens of millions of websites across the world opt it.
HOW EXPLOIT WORKS
As explained earlier, the XML vulnerability makes use of an XML Quadratic Blowup Attack, which is almost similar to a 'Billion Laughs attack' that allows a very small XML document to completely disrupt the services on machine in a matter of seconds.
The XML Quadratic Blowup Attack exploits the use of entity expansion, instead of using nested entities inside an XML document, it replicates one large entity with tens of thousands of characters over and over again.
In this type of attack, a medium-sized XML document of nearly two hundred kilobytes in size could require within the range of hundreds of megabytes to several gigabytes of memory. That if exploited by an attacker, could easily bring down an entire website or web server.
"If an attacker defines the entity "&x;" as 55,000 characters long, and refers to that entity 55,000 times inside the "DoS" element, the parser ends up with an XML Quadratic Blowup attack payload slightly over 200 KB in size that expands to 2.5 GB when parsed. This expansion is enough to take down the parsing process," Nir Goldshlager wrote in his blog.
VIDEO DEMONSTRATION
Goldshlager has also provided a video demonstration as a proof-of-concept to the WordPress Denial of Service attack.
UPDATE NOW
The XML vulnerability is present in WordPress versions 3.5 to 3.9.1 (the latest version) and works on the default installation. The same vulnerability affects Drupal versions 6.x to 7.x (the current version) and also works on the default installation.
Both WordPress and Drupal have released an update today to address this problem and all users should upgrade to the latest version as soon as possible.
WordPress 3.7 introduced automatic updates which allows security patches, such as this one, to get rolled out to users automatically.
| Cyber_Attack |
Cross-site scripting (XSS) Vulnerability reported on Paypal | https://thehackernews.com/2012/03/cross-site-scripting-xss-vulnerability.html | Cross-site scripting (XSS) Vulnerability reported on Paypal
Paypal is affected by an XSS vulnerability where it fails to validate input on URL shown in above image. PayPal fixed the vulnerability shortly after being notified that its publicly posted. XSS, in general is a vulnerability that allows hackers to inject client side script on webpages and can modify how a user sees the webpage
An attacker able to trick a user with a valid Paypal session into clicking a crafted version of the link below (wouldn't be hard, think a link on an eBay auction listing or a phishing e-mail for example) could hijack the user's session and initiate financial transactions on their behalf including money transfers. Alternatively this legitimate URL could be used to redirect the user to a spoofed PayPal web site designed to steal user credentials, which is a fairly common scam except in this case more effective as the user would see an actual PayPal URL to click on.
[Source]
| Vulnerability |
Pakistan-Linked Hackers Added New Windows Malware to Its Arsenal | https://thehackernews.com/2021/05/pakistan-linked-hackers-added-new.html | Cybercriminals with suspected ties to Pakistan continue to rely on social engineering as a crucial component of its operations as part of an evolving espionage campaign against Indian targets, according to new research.
The attacks have been linked to a group called Transparent Tribe, also known as Operation C-Major, APT36, and Mythic Leopard, which has created fraudulent domains mimicking legitimate Indian military and defense organizations, and other fake domains posing as file-sharing sites to host malicious artifacts.
"While military and defense personnel continue to be the group's primary targets, Transparent Tribe is increasingly targeting diplomatic entities, defense contractors, research organizations and conference attendees, indicating that the group is expanding its targeting," researchers from Cisco Talos said on Thursday.
These domains are used to deliver maldocs distributing CrimsonRAT, and ObliqueRAT, with the group incorporating new phishing, lures such as resume documents, conference agendas, and defense and diplomatic themes into its operational toolkit. It's worth noting that APT36 was previously linked to a malware campaign targeting organizations in South Asia to deploy ObliqueRAT on Windows systems under the guise of seemingly innocuous images hosted on infected websites.
ObliqueRAT infections also tend to deviate from those involving CrimsonRAT in that the malicious payloads are injected on compromised websites instead of embedding the malware in the documents themselves. In one instance identified by Talos researchers, the adversaries were found to use the Indian Industries Association's legitimate website to host ObliqueRAT malware, before setting up fake websites resembling those of legitimate entities in the Indian subcontinent by making use of an open-source website copier utility called HTTrack.
Another fake domain set up by the threat actor masquerades as an information portal for the 7th Central Pay Commission (7CPC) of India, urging victims to fill out a form and download a personal guide that, when opened, executes the CrimsonRAT upon enabling macros in the downloaded spreadsheet. In a similar vein, a third rogue domain registered by the attackers impersonates an Indian think tank called Center For Land Warfare Studies (CLAWS).
"Transparent Tribe relies heavily on the use of maldocs to spread their Windows implants," the researchers said. "While CrimsonRAT remains the group's staple Windows implant, their development and distribution of ObliqueRAT in early 2020 indicates they are rapidly expanding their Windows malware arsenal."
In expanding its victimology, switching up its malware arsenal, and designing convincing lures, the threat actor has exhibited a clear willingness to lend its operations a veneer of legitimacy in hopes that doing so would increase the likelihood of success.
"Transparent Tribe's tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) have remained largely unchanged since 2020, but the group continues to implement new lures into its operational toolkit," the researchers said. "The variety of maldoc lures Transparent Tribe employs indicates the group still relies on social engineering as a core component of its operations."
| Cyber_Attack |
New Linux Rootkit Attacks Internet Users | https://thehackernews.com/2012/12/new-linux-rootkit-attacks-internet-users.html | Security researchers have discovered what appears to be an experimental Linux rootkit designed to infect its highly select victims during a classic drive-by website attack. The malware allows hackers to inject code directly in any infected web page. The new malware, discovered on November 13 of this year, was written especially for servers that run Debian Squeeze and NGINX, on 64 bits.
About Rootkit : Rootkit.Linux.Snakso.a is designed to infect the Linux kernel version 2.6.32-5-amd64 and adds an iframe to all served web pages by the infected Linux server via the nginx proxy. Based on research, the rootkit may have been created by a Russia-based attacker.
The recently discovered malware is very dangerous because it does not infect a specific website. It infects the entire server and this can endanger all websites hosted on that server. Drive-by-downloads expose web surfers to malicious code that attempt to exploit unpatched software vulnerabilities in the web visitor's PC or handheld. Security holes in web browsers, Java and Flash plugins and the underlying operating system are typical targets.
Security researcher Georg Wicherski said that the code does not seem to be a variant of a publicly available rootkit, but a result of "contract work of an intermediate programmer with no extensive kernel experience". The malware is also likely to have been customized by the buyer, which introduced critical flaws.
The rootkit looks like a work in progress, and contains enough programming rough edges to mark it out as 'in development'. The malware''s relatively large binary size of 500k, and the inclusion of debug code, is another giveaway that this might be a work in progress.
| Malware |
SWAPGS Attack — New Speculative Execution Flaw Affects All Modern Intel CPUs | https://thehackernews.com/2019/08/swapgs-speculative-execution.html | A new variant of the Spectre (Variant 1) side-channel vulnerability has been discovered that affects all modern Intel CPUs, and probably some AMD processors as well, which leverage speculative execution for high performance, Microsoft and Red Hat warned.
Identified as CVE-2019-1125, the vulnerability could allow unprivileged local attackers to access sensitive information stored in the operating system privileged kernel memory, including passwords, tokens, and encryption keys, that would otherwise be inaccessible.
Speculative execution is a core component of modern microprocessor design that speculatively executes instructions based on assumptions that are considered likely to be true. If the assumptions come out to be valid, the execution continues, otherwise discarded.
Such speculative executions also have side effects that are not restored when the CPU state is unwound, leading to information disclosure, which can then be accessed using side-channel attacks.
Microsoft silently issued patches for the new speculative execution vulnerability in its July 2019 Patch Tuesday security update which was discovered and responsibly disclosed by researchers at security firm Bitdefender.
According to a security advisory released today by Red Hat, the attack relies on speculatively executing unexpected SWAPGS instructions after a branch gets mispredicted.
SWAPGS instruction is a privileged system instruction that swaps the values in the GS register with the MSR values and is only available on devices with x86-64 architecture.
"This is achieved by abusing the fact that SWAPGS instruction can be executed speculatively. An attacker can force arbitrary memory dereferences in kernel, which leaves traces within the data caches. These signals can be picked-up by the attacker to infer the value located at the given kernel address." researchers at Bitdefender say.
The SWAPGS attack breaks the Kernel Page-Table Isolation (KPTI) provided by modern CPUs and can be used to leak sensitive kernel memory from unprivileged user mode, Intel acknowledged.
"It is possible that these conditional branches in the Linux kernel entry code may mis-speculate into code that will not perform the SWAPGS, resulting in a window of speculative execution during which the wrong GS is used for dependent memory operations," RedHat says in its advisory.
According to Bitdefender researchers, the new attack bypasses all known mitigations implemented after the discovery of Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities in early 2018 that put practically every computer in the world at risk.
Though the Linux kernel also contains a gadget which may be exploited to target Linux systems in an attack, researchers believe exploiting Linux operating systems could slightly be tougher than Windows computers.
Since the attack can not be launched remotely, it is unlikely to cause mass malware infections, like EternalBlue was used for WannaCry; instead, it can be exploited as part of an extremely targeted attack.
Affected users can address this issue through a software update for their operating systems that would mitigate how the CPU speculatively accesses memory.
Meanwhile, Google has also prepared a patch to fix this vulnerability in its ChromeOS 4.19 with a soon-to-be-released update, describing the flaw as:
"An attacker can train the branch predictor to speculatively skip the swapgs path for an interrupt or exception. If they initialize the GS register to a user-space value, if the swapgs is speculatively skipped, subsequent GS-related percpu accesses in the speculation window will be done with the attacker-controlled GS value. This could cause privileged memory to be accessed and leaked."
In a statement AMD said:
"Based on external and internal analysis, AMD believes it is not vulnerable to the SWAPGS variant attacks because AMD products are designed not to speculate on the new GS value following a speculative SWAPGS. For the attack that is not a SWAPGS variant, the mitigation is to implement our existing recommendations for Spectre variant 1."
| Vulnerability |
Russian underground vSkimmer Botnet targeting payment world | https://thehackernews.com/2013/03/russian-underground-vskimmer-botnet-hit.html | A new botnet emerged from underground and is menacing payment world, the cyber threat dubbed vSkimmer come from Russia according revelation of McAfee security firm.
The security expert Chintan Shah wrote on a blog post that during monitoring of Russian underground forum found a discussion about a Trojan for sale that can steal credit card information from Windows PC for financial transactions and credit card payments.
vSkimmer agent is able to detect card readers on the victim's machine and gather all the information from the Windows machines sending it to a remote control server encrypting it (Base64).
The malware collects the following information from the infected machine and sends it to the control server:
Machine GUID from the Registry
Locale info
Username
Hostname
OS version
The vSkimmer malware indicated as the successor of the popular Dexter, a financial malware that targeted Point-of-Sale systems to grab card data as it transmitted during sales flow.
Dexter is responsible for the loss of nearly 80,000 credit card records and data breach of payment card data of Subway restaurants in 2012.
According security researchers at McAfee vSkimemr appeared in the underground forum since February and it could be an ongoing project.
vSkimmer appears more sophisticated of Dexter despite it is easier to use, vSkimmer is an advanced tool to steal credit card data from Windows hosts.
Exactly as its predecessor Dexter, vSkimmer is completely undetectable on the compromised host. vSkimmer waits for a named USB device to be attached to the compromised machine and once detected it the malware dumps the collected data to the removable device.
"vSkimmer can also grab the Track 2 data stored on the magnetic strip of the credit cards. This track stores all the card information including the card number."
To be precise on Track 2 was stored card number, three-digit CVV code, and expiration date are stored, all necessary to qualify card in payment processes.
On credit card information grabbing the post states:
"VSkimmer maintains the whitelisted process, which it skips while enumerating the running processes on the infected machine.Once vSkimmer finds any running process not in the whitelist, it runs OpenProcess and ReadProcessMemory to read the memory pages of the process and invokes the pattern-matching algorithm to match the regular expression "?[3-9]{1}[0-9]{12,19}[D=\\u0061][0-9]{10,30}\\??")" and extract the card info read by the payment devices. This is done recursively for every process running in the infected machine and not on the whitelist."
VSkimmer demonstrated the great interest of cyber crime in payments sector institutions have already been attacked in the past by malicious code such as Zeus and SpyEye and this case is just "another example of how financial fraud is actively evolving and how financial Trojans were developed and passed around in the underground community." This botnet is particularly interesting because it directly targets card-payment terminals running Windows," Shah explained in his post, I found really interesting the fact that the offer of similar malware in the underground is increasing and their model of sale is reaching level of excellence never seen first ... we face difficult times.
| Malware |
Subsets and Splits