Title
stringlengths 25
115
| Link
stringlengths 48
107
| Article
stringlengths 141
13.2k
| Label
stringclasses 4
values |
|---|---|---|---|
PyeongChang 2018 Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony Disrupted by Malware Attack | https://thehackernews.com/2018/02/pyeongchang-2018-winter-olympics.html | The Pyeongchang Winter Olympics taking place in South Korea was disrupted over the weekend following a malware attack before and during the opening ceremony on Friday.
The cyber attack coincided with 12 hours of downtime on the official website for the Winter Games, the collapse of Wi-Fi in the Pyeongchang Olympic stadium and the failure of televisions and internet at the main press center, leaving attendees unable to print their tickets for events or get venue information.
The Pyeongchang Winter Olympics organizing committee confirmed Sunday that a cyber attack hit its network helping run the event during the opening ceremony, which was fully restored on 8 am local time on Saturday—that's full 12 hours after the attack began.
Multiple cybersecurity firms published reports on Monday, suggesting that the cause of the disruption was "destructive" wiper malware that had been spread throughout the Winter Games' official network using stolen credentials.
Dubbed "Olympic Destroyer" by the researchers at Cisco Talos, the wiper malware majorly focuses on taking down networks and systems and wiping data, rather than stealing information.
The Talos researchers would not comment on attribution, but various security experts have already started attributing the Olympic Destroyer malware to hackers linked to either North Korea, China or Russia.
According to the analysis by Cisco Talos, the attacker had intimate knowledge of the Pyeongchang 2018 network's systems and knew a "lot of technical details of the Olympic Game infrastructure such as username, domain name, server name, and obviously password."
"The other factor to consider here is that by using the hard-coded credentials within this malware it's also possible the Olympic infrastructure was already compromised previously to allow the exfiltration of these credentials," researchers said.
The Olympic Destroyer malware drops two credential stealers, a browser credential stealer and a system stealer, to obtain required credentials and then spreads to other systems as well using PsExec and Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI), two legitimate Windows administration tools used by network admins to access and carry out actions on other PCs on a network.
The researchers noted that both built-in tools were also abused by the Bad Rabbit ransomware and NotPetya wiper malware last year.
Once installed, the malware then first deletes all possible "shadow" copies of files and Windows backup catalogs, turn off recovery mode and then deletes system logs to cover its tracks and making file recovery difficult.
"Wiping all available methods of recovery shows this attacker had no intention of leaving the machine useable. The sole purpose of this malware is to perform destruction of the host and leave the computer system offline," reads the Talos blog post.
It's difficult to accurately attribute this cyber attack to a specific group or nation-state hackers due to sparse of technical evidence to support such a conclusion as well as hackers often employing techniques to obfuscate their operations.
| Cyber_Attack |
Facebook strengthens security with AntiVirus Marketplace | https://thehackernews.com/2012/04/facebook-strengthens-security-with.html | Facebook strengthens security with AntiVirus Marketplace
Facebook has launched Anti-Virus Marketplace , a new portal to protect the social network's users.Members are being encouraged to download anti-malware programs which they can use at no cost for six months.
Facebook is strengthening its security controls in an attempt to protect its 900 million users from spam and malicious content.Facebook said Wednesday that it will work with Microsoft Corp. and with computer security firms Trend Micro Inc., Sophos, Symantec Corp. and Intel Corp.'s McAfee to provide safeguards on Facebook.
"The Antivirus Marketplace was developed with industry partners to enhance protection for people on Facebook," Facebook wrote in a blog post. "This program will help us provide even better protections to those using Facebook, no matter where they are on the web."
Facebook's security push comes as social networks become an increasingly popular target for spammers and hackers, as Sophos suggests in a report on the top countries responsible for spam.
Facebook also plans to incorporate the various security firms' URL blacklists into its own anti-spam efforts. The company says the current blacklist limits spam to just four percent of all content posted on Facebook.
| Malware |
Facebook Fined £500,000 for Cambridge Analytica Data Scandal | https://thehackernews.com/2018/10/facebook-cambridge-analytica.html | Facebook has finally been slapped with its first fine of £500,000 for allowing political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica to improperly gather and misuse data of 87 million users.
The fine has been imposed by the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) and was calculated using the UK's old Data Protection Act 1998 which can levy a maximum penalty of £500,000 — ironically that's equals to the amount Facebook earns every 18 minutes.
The news does not come as a surprise as the U.K.'s data privacy watchdog already notified the social network giant in July this year that the commission was intended to issue the maximum fine.
For those unaware, Facebook has been under scrutiny since earlier this year when it was revealed that the personal data of 87 million users was improperly gathered and misused by political consultancy firm Cambridge Analytica, who reportedly helped Donald Trump win the US presidency in 2016.
The ICO, who launched an investigation the Cambridge Analytica scandal in March, said that the data from at least 1 million British citizens was "unfairly processed," and that Facebook "failed to take appropriate technical and organisational measures" to prevent the data from falling into the wrong hands.
"The ICO's investigation found that between 2007 and 2014, Facebook processed the personal information of users unfairly by allowing application developers access to their information without sufficiently clear and informed consent, and allowing access even if users had not downloaded the app, but were simply 'friends' with people who had," the ICO said confirming the fine.
Besides this, the ICO also stressed that the social network also "failed to make suitable checks on apps and developers using its platform," which eventually expose the personal data of up to 87 million people worldwide, without their knowledge.
In response to the ICO announcement, Facebook noted that the company is reviewing the ICO decision, highlighting its previous admission that Facebook "should have done more" to investigate claims about Cambridge Analytica in 2015.
"We are grateful that the ICO has acknowledged our full co-operation throughout their investigation and have also confirmed they have found no evidence to suggest UK Facebook users' data was in fact shared with Cambridge Analytica," says a Facebook spokesperson in a statement.
"Now that their investigation is complete, we are hopeful that the ICO will now let us have access to CA servers so that we are able to audit the data they received."
However, the £500,000 fine is just a drop in the ocean for a company like Facebook that brought in £31.5 billion in global revenue last year.
The penalty could have been much larger had it fallen under EU's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), wherein a company could face a maximum fine of 20 million euros or 4% of its annual global revenue, whichever is higher, for such a privacy breach.
Facebook's annual revenue was nearly £31.5 billion in 2017, which could have resulted in a possible fine of £1.26 billion under the GDPR rules. But luckily for Facebook that GDPR came into force in May 2018 after the timing of the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Last month, the UK's data protection watchdog also issued the maximum allowed fine of £500,000 on credit reporting agency Equifax for its last year's massive data breach that exposed personal and financial data of hundreds of millions of its customers.
| Data_Breaches |
WordPress 4.2.3 Security Update Released, Patches Critical Vulnerability | https://thehackernews.com/2015/07/wordpress-security-update.html | WordPress has just released the new version of its content management system (CMS), WordPress version 4.2.3, to fix a critical security vulnerability that could have been exploited by hackers to take over websites, affecting the security of its Millions of sites.
WordPress version 4.2.3 resolves a Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) flaw that could allow any user with the Contributor or Author role to compromise a website, Gary Pendergast of the WordPress team wrote in a blog post on Thursday.
Cross-site scripting is actually a vulnerability in the Web applications' code that opens up the target website to attacks. The vulnerability is one of the most favorite and commonly used flaws by cyber criminals.
According to the company, the vulnerability could allow hackers to embed maliciously-crafted HTML, JavaScript, Flash, or other code to bypass WordPress's kses protection by fooling users into executing a malicious script on their computer system.
This, in turn, leads to the collection of users' sensitive data, including cookies stored on their systems.
It is still unknown exactly how websites could be compromised using the flaw, as more details about the vulnerability aren't yet made available by the company.
Update your WordPress CMS Now!
All versions of WordPress from 4.2.2 and earlier are affected by the flaw, but you need not worry about it if you have Automatic Security Updates enabled.
However, if not, you are strongly recommended to update your WordPress CMS to version 4.2.3 as soon as possible.
To Update WordPress, all you need to do is just go to the main WordPress "Dashboard", then "Updates" and click "Update Now." And you are done.
Stay Safe! Stay Tuned!
| Vulnerability |
PayPal will Pay Security Researchers for finding Vulnerabilities | https://thehackernews.com/2012/06/paypal-will-pay-security-researchers.html | PayPal will Pay Security Researchers for finding Vulnerabilities
Payment services provider PayPal will reward security researchers who discover vulnerabilities in its website with money, if they report their findings to the company in a responsible manner.
If you manage to find a security flaw in any of PayPal's products, you may be entitled to a cash reward. "I'm pleased to announce that we have updated our original bug reporting process into a paid 'bug bounty' program," PayPal's Chief Information Security Officer Michael Barrett said in a blog post on Thursday. While Barrett disclosed vulnerability categories, he did not say how much cash the firm will be offering.
PayPal plans to categorize reported bugs into one of four categories:
XSS (Cross Site Scripting),
CSRF (Cross Site Request Forgery),
SQL Injection or
Authentication Bypass
Researchers need to have a verified PayPal account in order to receive the monetary rewards.
"I originally had reservations about the idea of paying researchers for bug reports, but I am happy to admit that the data has shown me to be wrong - it's clearly an effective way to increase researchers' attention on Internet-based services and therefore find more potential issues."
Marius Gabriel Avram, a security engineer at U.K.-based security firm RandomStorm, looks for vulnerabilities in Web services operated by Google, Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft, eBay, PayPal and other companies that allow security researchers to do so, as long as they report their findings privately and don't cause any damage. It's like a challenge that helps security researchers improve their skills and, in some cases, earn some extra money, Avram said.
Avram found and reported over 10 security issues in PayPal's main and mobile websites during the past two weeks. Some of them were of high severity, he said, adding that PayPal's staff responded every time.
PayPal deserves congratulations for taking this step in the right direction.
| Vulnerability |
LINKUP - First Ransomware trojan that modifies DNS settings to mine Bitcoin forcefully | https://thehackernews.com/2014/02/linkup-first-ransomware-trojan-that.html | Till now we all have heard about the Ransomware malware that encrypts your files or lock down your computer and ask for a ransom amount to be paid in a specified duration of time to unlock it.
Emsisoft has detected a new piece of malware called "Linkup", dubbed as "Trojan-Ransom.Win32.Linkup" that doesn't lock your computer or encrypts files; rather it blocks your Internet access by modifying the DNS settings, with the ability to turn your computer into a Bitcoin mining robot. Sounds Interesting??
Once the Linkup Trojan is installed in your system, it makes a copy of itself and disables the selected Windows Security and Firewall services to facilitate the infection. Injected poisoned DNS Server will only allow the malware and Bitcoin miner to communicate with the internet.
It display a bogus notification on the victim's web browser, which is supposed to be from the Council of Europe, that accuses you of viewing "Child Pornography" and only returns the access of Internet back on the payment of a £0.01 (Euro) fine.
This is unconfirmed that after paying ransom money, the malware will restore the Internet access or not, "but most likely only a blatant lie". The Ransom amount is supposed to be paid by the Credit Card with the submission of your personal information, including your Name, DOB and City, as shown:
In addition to blocking your Internet access, Linkup malware also download and install other malware that connect your computer to a Bitcoin mining botnet forcefully, which can combine the computing power of multiple infected computers to earn Bitcoin for whoever is behind the attack.
Emsisoft has detail explanation of the working of malware on their site:
"This combination of ransomware and Bitcoin mining is a new and fascinating development. At this point, however, its functionality is still quite limited as the downloaded jhProtominer only works on 64-bit operating systems. In time, it will be interesting to see if Linkup is modified to download more flexible variants."
If your computer has been infected, you are advised not to pay ransom money or submit any personal information, rather you can install 'Emsisoft Anti-Malware' to remove the malware and restoring DNS settings to default.
| Malware |
Chinese Hackers Implant PlugX Variant on Compromised MS Exchange Servers | https://thehackernews.com/2021/07/chinese-hackers-implant-plugx-variant.html | A Chinese cyberespionage group known for targeting Southeast Asia leveraged flaws in the Microsoft Exchange Server that came to light earlier this March to deploy a previously undocumented variant of a remote access trojan (RAT) on compromised systems.
Attributing the intrusions to a threat actor named PKPLUG (aka Mustang Panda and HoneyMyte), Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42 threat intelligence team said it identified a new version of the modular PlugX malware, called Thor, that was delivered as a post-exploitation tool to one of the breached servers.
Dating back to as early as 2008, PlugX is a fully-featured second-stage implant with capabilities such as file upload, download, and modification, keystroke logging, webcam control, and access to a remote command shell.
"The variant observed [...] is unique in that it contains a change to its core source code: the replacement of its trademark word 'PLUG' to 'THOR,'" Unit 42 researchers Mike Harbison and Alex Hinchliffe noted in a technical write-up published Tuesday.
"The earliest THOR sample uncovered was from August 2019, and it is the earliest known instance of the rebranded code. New features were observed in this variant, including enhanced payload-delivery mechanisms and abuse of trusted binaries."
After Microsoft disclosed on March 2 that China-based hackers — codenamed Hafnium — were exploiting zero-day bugs in Exchange server collectively known as ProxyLogon to steal sensitive data from select targets, multiple threat actors, such as ransomware groups (DearCry and Black Kingdom) and crypto-mining gangs (LemonDuck), were also observed exploiting the flaws to hijack Exchange servers and install a web shell that granted code execution at the highest privilege level.
PKPLUG now joins the list, according to Unit 42 researchers, who found the attackers bypassing antivirus detection mechanisms to target Microsoft Exchange servers by leveraging legitimate executables such as BITSAdmin to retrieve a seemingly innocuous file ("Aro.dat") from an actor-controlled GitHub repository.
The file, which houses the encrypted and compressed PlugX payload, alludes to a freely available advanced repair and optimization tool that's designed to clean up and fix issues in the Windows Registry.
The latest sample of PlugX comes equipped with a variety of plug-ins that "provide attackers various capabilities to monitor, update and interact with the compromised system to fulfil their objectives," the researchers said. THOR's links to PKPLUG stem from piecing together the command-and-control infrastructure as well as overlaps in the malicious behaviors detected among other recently discovered PlugX artifacts.
Additional indicators of compromise associated with the attack can be accessed here. Unit 42 has also made available a Python script that can decrypt and unpack encrypted PlugX payloads without having the associated PlugX loaders.
| Cyber_Attack |
Facebook CEO Zuckerberg's Twitter, Pinterest accounts Hacked! And the Password was... | https://thehackernews.com/2016/06/facebook-zuck-hacked.html | The man who runs the biggest social network and continuously implements new security measures to boost its billion users security, himself failed to follow basics of Internet security for his own online accounts.
Yes, I'm talking about Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who had his Twitter and Pinterest accounts compromised on Sunday.
The hacker group from Saudi Arabia, dubbed OurMine, claimed responsibility for the hack and guess how the group did it?
Thanks to the LinkedIn data breach!
The hackers tweeted that they found Zuck's account credentials in the recent LinkedIn data breach, from which they took his SHA1-hashed password string and then broke it and tried on several social media accounts.
Also Read: Hacker Removed Zuckerberg's Facebook Cover Photo
The group, which has more than 40,000 Twitter followers, then successfully broke into Zuck's Twitter (@finkd) and Pinterest profile and defaced its banners with its logo as well as tweeted out some offensive posts.
Mr. Zuckerberg has not sent a tweet from the account since 2012.
Now, what's more surprising?
Zuckerberg's LinkedIn password was "dadada", which he also used for his other online accounts, the group tweeted.
So, this might be another alarm for those who haven't yet changed passwords for their LinkedIn as well as other online accounts that used the same credentials.
In tweets now deleted, the group also claimed to have gained accessed to Zuck's Instagram account, but Facebook confirmed that the group did not access his Instagram account.
"No Facebook systems or accounts were accessed," a Facebook spokesperson said. "The affected accounts have been re-secured."
Also Read: Palestinian Hacker hacks Zuckerberg's Facebook Timeline
More than 167 Million members' email and password combinations were hacked during a 2012 LinkedIn data breach and had just been posted online. The passwords were encrypted with the SHA1 algorithm with "no salt" that made it easier for hackers to crack them.
Like other data breaches, I suggest you change your password immediately, especially if you use the same password for other websites.
| Data_Breaches |
Binance KYC Data Leak — Crypto Exchange Sets $290,000 Bounty On Blackmailer | https://thehackernews.com/2019/08/binance-kyc-data-leak.html | Malta-based cryptocurrency exchange Binance has become a victim of a ransom demand from a scammer who claimed to have hacked the KYC (Know Your Customer) data of thousands of its customers.
The unknown attacker threatened the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange by volume to release KYC information of 10,000 users if the company did not pay 300 Bitcoins—that's equivalent to almost $3.5 million at today's exchange value.
Although the authenticity of the hack is not confirmed yet, several photos of individuals holding their identity cards, such as passports and voter IDs, have been circulating across different online channels.
In response to the incident, Binance just released an official statement today confirming that "an unidentified individual has threatened and harassed us, demanding 300 BTC in exchange for withholding 10,000 photos that bear similarity to Binance KYC data."
Binance said the company is still investigating the legitimacy of those images and has refused to pay the ransom and, as a result, the unidentified individual behind the demand began distributing the data online and to media outlets.
It seems like the attacker has created a Telegram group, which has already attracted over 10,000 people, and shared more than 400 images of people holding passports and identity documents from France, Turkey, the United States, Japan, Russia, and other nations around the world.
However, according to Binance, images posted to the attacker's Telegram group lacks the digital watermark the exchange uses for its internal information, adding doubts about its authenticity.
Binance also adds that its initial review of the leaked images shows they're all appeared to be dated from February of 2018 when the exchange "contracted a third-party vendor for KYC verification in order to handle the high volume of requests at that time."
"Currently, we are investigating with the third-party vendor for more information. We are continuing to investigate and will keep you informed," the company adds.
"The relevant law enforcement agencies have been contacted, and we will be working closely with them to pursue this person."
Additionally, the exchange is also offering a reward of 25 bitcoins—worth over $290,000—to anyone who provides information related to the identity of the blackmailer.
Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao has also issued a statement on Twitter urging users not to fall for the "KYC leak" FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt), saying that the company is currently looking into the matter and will update its users shortly.
| Data_Breaches |
12 Russian Intelligence Agents Indicted For Hacking DNC Emails | https://thehackernews.com/2018/07/russian-dnc-hack-trump.html | The US Justice Department has announced criminal indictments against 12 Russian intelligence officers tied to the hack of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) during the 2016 US presidential election campaign.
The charges were drawn up as part of the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election by Robert Mueller, the Special Counsel, and former FBI director.
The indictments against 12 Russian military officers were announced by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein during a DoJ press conference on Friday—just 3 days before the Russian leader Vladimir Putin is scheduled to meet with President Donald Trump.
All 12 Russian officers are members of the country's GRU military intelligence unit and are accused of carrying out "large-scale cyber operations" to hack into DNC network and steal Democrats' emails to influence the 2016 presidential election.
Here's the list of all 12 defendants:
Viktor Borisovich Netyksho
Boris Alekseyevich Antonov
Dmitriy Sergeyevich Badin
Ivan Sergeyevich Yermakov
Aleksey Viktorovich Lukashev
Sergey Aleksandrovich Morgachev
Nikolay Yuryevich Kozachek
Pavel Vyacheslavovich Yershov
Artem Andreyevich Malyshev
Aleksandr Vladimirovich Osadchuk
Aleksey Aleksandrovich Potemkin
Anatoliy Sergeyevich Kovalev
The indictments alleged that the election hacking targeted Hillary Clinton's campaign, DNC and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), with an intention to release that information online under the name DNCLeaks.
"The Internet allows foreign adversaries to attack America in new and unexpected ways. Free and fair elections are hard-fought and contentious," Rosenstein said. "There will always be adversaries who work to exacerbate domestic differences and try to confuse, divide, and conquer us."
However, Rosenstein said the indictments did not allege that the cyberattacks ultimately affected vote count or changed the outcome of the 2016 election.
According to the indictments, Guccifer 2.0, who posed as a lone hacker from Romania and released sensitive documents hacked from the DNC server, and a website that released records under the name DCLeaks was operated by a Russian hacking team known as "Unit 74455."
The team allegedly used Bitcoin to purchase purchasing servers (including the one in Malaysia to host the DCLeaks website), registering domains, and otherwise making payments in furtherance of hacking activity.
The indictments include 11 criminal counts:
One count for a criminal conspiracy to commit an offense against the U.S. through cyber operations by the GRU that involved the staged release of stolen documents to interfere with the 2016 presidential election.
Two counts through nine charge aggravated identity theft for using identification belonging to eight victims to further their computer fraud scheme.
Ten counts for conspiracy to launder money in which the defendants laundered the equivalent of over $95,000 by transferring the funds used to purchase servers and fund other costs related to their hacking activities through cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin.
Eleven counts for conspiracy to commit an offense against the U.S. by attempting to hack into the computers of state boards of elections, secretaries of state, and US companies that supplied software and other tech related to the administration of elections.
Although the defendants claimed to be "American hacktivists" on the DCLeaks website, the indictments note that no American was a knowing participant in any related activity or knew they were communicating with Russian intelligence officers.
| Cyber_Attack |
Proof It's Possible to Hack German Elections; Hackers Tamper with Voting-Software | https://thehackernews.com/2017/09/german-voting-software-hacking.html | Germany's democracy is in danger, as the upcoming federal elections in the country, where nearly 61.5 million citizens are going to vote on September 24th, could be hijacked.
Hackers have disclosed how to hack the German voting software to tamper with votes and alter the outcome of an election.
Yes, election hacking is no theory—it is happening.
A team of researchers from German hacking group Chaos Computer Club (CCC) has discovered several critical vulnerabilities in PC-Wahl—software used to capture, tabulate and transfer the votes from local polling centres to the state level during all parliamentary elections for decades.
According to the CCC analysis, vulnerabilities could lead to multiple practicable attack scenarios that eventually allow malicious agents in the electoral office to change total vote counts.
Critical Flaws Found In German Voting-Software
The hacker collective found that the automatic software update module of PC-Wahl downloads packages over insecure HTTP connection and does not perform any integrity check using digital signatures.
Moreover, the software uses an older encryption method with a single secret key hard-coded in the software, rather than asymmetrical encryption that offers better security by design.
The Software includes an FTP module that sends the voting results to a central password-protected FTP server, but the researchers believe the password for data sharing has been shared among electoral staff.
"The same access data has always been used for various polling stations and constituencies in Hesse for many years so that an attacker has been able to manipulate the results of all municipalities simultaneously and centrally," the research paper [PDF] (translated) reads.
The group has published the proof-of-concept attack tools against the PC-Wahl software with source codes on GitHub.
Software Company Denied Vulnerability Report
According to the German Spiegel magazine, the manufacturer of PC-Wahl had denied the allegations that its software was vulnerable to cyber attacks.
The CCC hacking collective has urged the German government and election commission to take necessary actions to tackle the issues in the election software in order to protect the September 24 election that the group fear could be subject to interference.
In response, German Federal Election Director Dieter Sarreither said he was familiar with the issues discovered by the CCC and had asked state officials and the software company to take necessary steps to address them, Reuters reported.
German federal cyber protection agency, BSI, said the agency had worked closely with election officials and the software manufacturer to improve the security of election results.
"In the future, only information technology based on BSI-certified software should be used for election processes," says BSI chief Arne Schoenbohm.
Hacking voting machine is not a new thing. Two months ago, several hackers managed to hack into multiple US voting machines in a short period—in some cases, within minutes—at Def Con.
Election hacking has become a major debate following the 2016 US presidential election, where it was reported that Russian hackers managed to access United States voting machines in 39 states in the run-up to the election. However, there is no evidence yet to justify the claims.
| Vulnerability |
Hacker Installed a Secret Backdoor On Facebook Server to Steal Passwords | https://thehackernews.com/2016/04/hack-facebook-account.html | How to Hack Facebook?
That's the most commonly asked question during this decade.
It's a hacker dream to hack Facebook website for earning bug bounty or for any malicious purpose.
Facebook security team recently found that someone, probably a blackhat hacker with malicious intent, has breached into its server and installed a backdoor that was configured to steal Facebook employees' login credentials.
Since the backdoor discovered in the Facebook's corporate server, not on its main server, Facebook user accounts are not affected by this incident.
Though the company would have never known about the backdoor if a whitehat hacker had never spotted the backdoor script while hunting for vulnerabilities.
Also Read: Ever Wondered How Facebook Decides, How much Bounty Should be Paid?
Security researcher Orange Tsai of Taiwanese security vendor DEVCORE accidentally came across a backdoor script on one of Facebook's corporate servers while finding bugs to earn cash reward from Facebook.
Tsai scanned Facebook's IP address space that led him to the files.fb.com domain that was hosting a vulnerable version of the Secure File Transfer application (FTA) made by Accellion and was used by Facebook employees for file sharing and collaboration.
Tsai analyzed the vulnerable FTA and discovered seven security flaws as he explained in his blog post:
3 Cross-site scripting (XSS) flaws,
2 Remote code execution flaws,
2 Local privilege escalation issues.
The researcher then used the vulnerabilities he found in the Accellion Secure FTA and gained access to Facebook's server.
After successfully achieving his goal, Tsai started analyzing logs information available on the Facebook's server for preparing his bug report, and that is exactly when he spotted a PHP-based backdoor, popularly known as a PHP Web shell, that had possibly been installed on the server by a malicious hacker.
Tsai then reported all of his findings to the Facebook security team, which rewarded him with $10,000 (€8,850) for his efforts and started its own forensics investigation that was completed this month, allowing the researcher to disclose the vulnerabilities responsibly.
| Vulnerability |
Masslogger Trojan Upgraded to Steal All Your Outlook, Chrome Credentials | https://thehackernews.com/2021/02/masslogger-trojan-upgraded-to-steal-all.html | A credential stealer infamous for targeting Windows systems has resurfaced in a new phishing campaign that aims to steal credentials from Microsoft Outlook, Google Chrome, and instant messenger apps.
Primarily directed against users in Turkey, Latvia, and Italy starting mid-January, the attacks involve the use of MassLogger — a .NET-based malware with capabilities to hinder static analysis — building on similar campaigns undertaken by the same actor against users in Bulgaria, Lithuania, Hungary, Estonia, Romania, and Spain in September, October, and November 2020.
MassLogger was first spotted in the wild last April, but the presence of a new variant implies malware authors are constantly retooling their arsenal to evade detection and monetize them.
"Although operations of the Masslogger trojan have been previously documented, we found the new campaign notable for using the compiled HTML file format to start the infection chain," researchers with Cisco Talos said on Wednesday.
Compiled HTML (or .CHM) is a proprietary online help format developed by Microsoft that's used to provide topic-based reference information.
The new wave of attacks commences with phishing messages containing "legitimate-looking" subject lines that appear to relate to a business.
One of the emails targeted at Turkish users had the subject "Domestic customer inquiry," with the body of the message referencing an attached quote. In September, October and November, the emails took the form of a "memorandum of understanding," urging the recipient to sign the document.
Regardless of the message theme, the attachments adhere to the same format: a RAR multi-volume filename extension (e.g., "70727_YK90054_Teknik_Cizimler.R09") in a bid to bypass attempts to block RAR attachments using its default filename extension ".RAR."
These attachments contain a single compiled HTML file that, when opened, displays the message "Customer service," but in fact comes embedded with obfuscated JavaScript code to create an HTML page, which in turn contains a PowerShell downloader to connect to a legitimate server and fetch the loader ultimately responsible for launching the MassLogger payload.
Aside from exfiltrating the amassed data via SMTP, FTP or HTTP, the latest version of MassLogger (version 3.0.7563.31381) features functionality to pilfer credentials from Pidgin messenger client, Discord, NordVPN, Outlook, Thunderbird, Firefox, QQ Browser, and Chromium-based browsers such as Chrome, Edge, Opera, and Brave.
"Masslogger can be configured as a keylogger, but in this case, the actor has disabled this functionality," the researchers noted, adding the threat actor installed a version of Masslogger control panel on the exfiltration server.
With the campaign almost entirely executed and present only in memory with the sole exception of the compiled HTML help file, the significance of conducting regular memory scans cannot be overstated enough.
"Users are advised to configure their systems for logging PowerShell events such as module loading and executed script blocks as they will show executed code in its deobfuscated format," the researchers concluded.
| Malware |
Activist Leaks 11,000 Private Messages from WikiLeaks' Twitter Chats | https://thehackernews.com/2018/07/wikileaks-twitter-chats.html | An activist has just leaked thousands of private messages of an organization that's been known to publishing others' secrets.
More than 11,000 direct messages from a Twitter group used by WikiLeaks and around 10 close supporters have been posted online by journalist and activist Emma Best, exposing private chats between 2015 and 2017.
The leaked chats have been referenced by American media outlets earlier this year, but for the very first time, all 11,000 messages have been published online, allowing anyone to scroll through and read messages themselves.
"The chat is presented nearly in its entirety, with less than a dozen redactions made to protect the privacy and personal information of innocent, third parties. The redactions don't include any information that's relevant to WikiLeaks or their activities," Best said.
The leaked DMs of the private Twitter chat group, dubbed "Wikileaks +10" by Best, show WikiLeak's strong Republican favoritism, as some portions of the previously leaked chats already showed WikiLeaks' criticism of Hillary Clinton and support for the GOP.
The leaked messages sent by WikiLeaks Twitter account likely believed to be controlled by WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange himself, called Democratic Party candidate Hillary Clinton a "bright, well-connected, sadistic sociopath" and said "it would be much better for the GOP to win," in November 2015.
During the 2016 presidential campaign, WikiLeaks made public stolen emails from officials of Democratic National Committee (DNC), including Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman John Podesta, as well as documents on CIA hacking tools.
Best, the freedom of information activist, posted the leaked conversations to her personal blog on Sunday, claiming many of the messages contained offensive material.
"At various points in the chat, there are examples of homophobia, transphobia, ableism, sexism, racism, antisemitism and other objectionable content and language," Best said.
"Some of these are couched as jokes, but are still likely to (and should) offend, as a racist or sexist jokes doesn't cease to be racist or sexist because of an expected or desired laugh."
In some instances, WikiLeaks helped direct lawsuits filed by third-parties and even encouraged criminal investigations against their opponents. In others, the chat showed a "mundane consistency with WikiLeaks' public stances," though a few were "provocative and confounding."
Besides Hillary, the leaked DMs also showed that WikiLeaks did not have much love for former U.S. President Barack Obama as well.
"Obama is just a centralizer. He's bad because representationally he does not look or act like that which he represents. Hillary has similar representation confusion, but she will actively lead the machine to a dark place," one of the messages sent by WikiLeaks on November 19, 2015, read.
In response to the Best's post, the official Twitter account of WikiLeaks claimed some tampering may have taken place, saying "the logs appear to have been modified as can be seen by conversational holes (e.g., search for 'Norton') but are useful in other ways."
WikiLeaks founder Assange remains in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, but last week reports indicated Ecuador's plans to withdraw its political asylum, and eject him from its London embassy—eventually turning him over to the British authorities.
| Data_Breaches |
Cloud-AI: Artificially Intelligent System Found 10 Security Bugs in LinkedIn | https://thehackernews.com/2017/01/artificial-Intelligence-cybersecurity.html | 2017 is the year of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.), Big Data, Virtual Reality (VR) and Cyber Security with major companies like Google, Facebook, Apple, IBM and Salesforce and technology pioneers like SpaceX founder Elon Musk investing in these hot technologies.
Since everyone seems to be talking about the hottest trend — artificial intelligence and machine learning — broadly, 62 percent of large enterprises will be using AI technologies by 2018, says a report from Narrative Science.
But why AI is considered to be the next big technology? Because it can enhance and change everything about the way we think, interact, manufacture and deliver.
Last year, we saw a significant number of high-profile hacks targeting big organizations, governments, small enterprises, and individuals — What's more worrisome?
It's going to get worse, and we need help.
No doubt, we, the human, can find vulnerabilities but can not analyze millions of programs with billions of lines of codes at once.
But what if we have an autonomous system that finds and fixes vulnerabilities in computer systems before cyber criminals exploit them, without even any involvement of human?
Cloud-AI System That Interacts With Web Just Like Humans
An Indian startup named Cloudsek, Infosec Risk assessment company, is working in the same direction, which aims at providing intelligence machine learning-based solutions to help organizations identify and tackle online threats in real-time.
The company has developed Cloud-AI technology, an artificial Intelligence system based on a semi-supervised learning model that can navigate and interact with the Internet just like an intelligent human being.
Cloud-AI is designed to learn on its own with an ability to automatically gather information about input boxes, buttons, and navigation links with minimal false positives.
"This is because humans have generated a vast amount of data on how they have interacted with the web," Rahul Sasi, Co-Founder and CTO of CloudSek said in its blog post published today.
"We use this data to train our models to achieve our tasks successfully. This method also helps us complete challenging tasks which otherwise is highly time-consuming for the many reinforcement Models."
Cloud-AI technology powers two of the company's product:
CloudMon – a system that monitors various Internet exposed infrastructures, including Cloud-based Applications and websites, for critical security issues.
x-Vigil – a system that monitors various Internet sources,underground/discussion forums, social media platforms, infiltrated data, along with uncovering a broad range of threats and providing real-time alerts without any manual intervention.
Besides this, the security researchers at Cloudsek are also working to up-skill its Cloud-AI technology with an ability to find new vulnerabilities much more quickly than people behind the keyboard.
Cloud-AI Finds Vulnerabilities Like Artificially Intelligent Hacker
Giving a successful demonstration of their Cloud-AI technology, the researchers discovered 10 "Insecure Direct Object Reference" vulnerabilities in the world's largest online professional network LinkedIn.
An Insecure direct object reference flaw occurs when any application frequently uses the actual name or key of an object while generating web pages, but doesn't always verify if the user is authorized for the target object.
The issues fixed in LinkedIn include:
Leak of any user's Email ID on LinkedIn
Leak of users email and phone number and resume
Deleting every user's LinkedIn request
Downloading every transcript to videos from Lynda
Downloading every Lynda exercise files without a premium membership
To detect such flaws, all an attacker needs to do is manipulate parameter values. But finding such an easily identifiable security flaw is impossible for an automated tool due to the difficulty in reaching the flawed endpoint, whereas manually doing the process is time-consuming.
"Cloud-AI system had to fill multiple forms and follow valid patterns to reach the vulnerable endpoints. These endpoints often get missed by existing automated tools as well as manual analysis," CloudSek explains.
Artificial Intelligence is good at breaking CAPTCHA codes, but I'm wondering, and even believe that this system might soon gain the ability to beat Google's latest reCAPTCHA system, which is also powered by a sophisticated artificial intelligence system to defend websites against bots.
How AI Technology Shaping the Future of CyberSecurity
Cyber security is among the biggest threats in today's world, and it is a known fact that there are not enough skilled cyber security professionals to tackle growing Internet threats.
The Internet has already been struggling to defend against organized crime, state-sponsored hackers, surveillance and, of course, terrorism – but experts believe AI technology can aid us in protecting sensitive data and critical infrastructure from attackers.
Either its Cloud-AI from CloudSec or OpenAI, backed by Tesla and Space X CEO Elon Musk, every player in this domain wants to build a technology that would eventually create digital intelligence in the way to benefit humanity as a whole.
"In near future, Cloud-AI would be upgraded to assist users while ordering anything on the Internet, as well can perform complex tasks to save precious time." Sasi told The Hacker News
Moreover, with the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) devices, the cyber-security threats have grown exponentially, so extensive research into prevention and detection schemes of these technologies is strongly being considered globally.
Since AI is a fundamental part of the concept of the Internet of Things, where machines and devices communicate with each other to get the work done, it's only AI and machine learning that will be incredibly useful to defend our network before anyone exploits them.
Last year, Security researchers at MIT also developed a new Artificial Intelligence-based cyber security platform, called 'AI2,' which has the ability to predict, detect, and stop 85% of Cyber Attacks with high accuracy.
Isn't it revolutionary idea for Internet Security?
At the same time, we should not forget that smarter technologies do not come without risks. While AI could provide organizations with a valuable weapon in their arsenal, the risk is that the technology would not fall into wrong hands.
| Vulnerability |
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.
| Malware |
Microsoft Warns of Data Stealing Malware That Pretends to Be Ransomware | https://thehackernews.com/2021/05/microsoft-warns-of-data-stealing.html | Microsoft on Thursday warned of a "massive email campaign" that's pushing a Java-based STRRAT malware to steal confidential data from infected systems while disguising itself as a ransomware infection.
"This RAT is infamous for its ransomware-like behavior of appending the file name extension .crimson to files without actually encrypting them," the Microsoft Security Intelligence team said in a series of tweets.
The new wave of attacks, which the company spotted last week, commences with spam emails sent from compromised email accounts with "Outgoing Payments" in the subject line, luring the recipients into opening malicious PDF documents that claim to be remittances, but in reality, connect to a rogue domain to download the STRRAT malware.
Besides establishing connections to a command-and-control server during execution, the malware comes with a range of features that allow it to collect browser passwords, log keystrokes, and run remote commands and PowerShell scripts.
STRRAT first emerged in the threat landscape in June 2020, with German cybersecurity firm G Data observing the Windows malware (version 1.2) in phishing emails containing malicious Jar (or Java Archive) attachments.
"The RAT has a focus on stealing credentials of browsers and email clients, and passwords via keylogging," G Data malware analyst Karsten Hahn detailed. "It supports the following browsers and email clients: Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, Foxmail, Outlook, Thunderbird."
Its ransomware capabilities are at best rudimentary in that the "encryption" stage only renames files by suffixing the ".crimson" extension. "If the extension is removed, the files can be opened as usual," Kahn added.
Microsoft also notes that version 1.5 is more obfuscated and modular than previous versions, suggesting that the attackers behind the operation are actively working to improvise their toolset. But the fact that the bogus encryption behavior remains unchanged signals that the group may be aiming to make quick money off unsuspecting users by means of extortion.
The indicators of compromise (IoCs) associated with the campaign can be accessed via GitHub here.
| Cyber_Attack |
ex-NSA Hacker Discloses macOS High Sierra Zero-Day Vulnerability | https://thehackernews.com/2018/08/macos-mouse-click-hack.html | Your Mac computer running the Apple's latest High Sierra operating system can be hacked by tweaking just two lines of code, a researcher demonstrated at the Def Con security conference on Sunday.
Patrick Wardle, an ex-NSA hacker and now Chief Research Officer of Digita Security, uncovered a critical zero-day vulnerability in the macOS operating system that could allow a malicious application installed in the targeted system to virtually "click" objects without any user interaction or consent.
To know, how dangerous it can go, Wardle explains: "Via a single click, countless security mechanisms may be completely bypassed. Run untrusted app? Click...allowed. Authorize keychain access? Click...allowed. Load 3rd-party kernel extension? Click...allowed. Authorize outgoing network connection? click ...allowed."
Wardle described his research into "synthetic" interactions with a user interface (UI) as "The Mouse is Mightier than the Sword," showcasing an attack that's capable of 'synthetic clicks'—programmatic and invisible mouse clicks that are generated by a software program rather than a human.
macOS code itself offers synthetic clicks as an accessibility feature for disabled people to interact with the system interface in non-traditional ways, but Apple has put some limitations to block malware from abusing these programmed clicks.
Wardle accidentally discovered that High Sierra incorrectly interprets two consecutive synthetic mouse "down" event as a legitimate click, allowing attackers to programmatically interact with security warnings as well that asks users to choose between "allow" or "deny" and access sensitive data or features.
"The user interface is that single point of failure," says Wardle. "If you have a way to synthetically interact with these alerts, you have a very powerful and generic way to bypass all these security mechanisms."
Although Wardle has not yet published technical details of the flaw, he says the vulnerability can potentially be exploited to dump all passwords from the keychain or load malicious kernel extensions by virtually clicking "allow" on the security prompt and gain full control of a target machine.
Wardle said that he found this loophole accidentally when copying and pasting the code and that just two lines of code are enough to completely break this security mechanism.
Unlike earlier findings, Wardle didn't report Apple about his latest research and choose to publicly reveal details of the zero-day bug at DefCon hacker conference.
"Of course OS vendors such as Apple are keenly aware of this 'attack' vector, and thus strive to design their UI in a manner that is resistant against synthetic events. Unfortunately, they failed," says Wardle.
However, the Apple's next version of macOS, Mojave, already has mitigated the threat by blocking all synthetic events, which eventually reduces the scope of accessibility features on applications that legitimately use this feature.
| Vulnerability |
Hackers Posed as Aerobics Instructors for Years to Target Aerospace Employees | https://thehackernews.com/2021/07/hackers-posed-as-aerobics-instructors.html | An Iranian cyberespionage group masqueraded as an aerobics instructor on Facebook in an attempt to infect the machine of an employee of an aerospace defense contractor with malware as part of a years-long social engineering and targeted malware campaign.
Enterprise security firm Proofpoint attributed the covert operation to a state-aligned threat actor it tracks as TA456, and by the wider cybersecurity community under the monikers Tortoiseshell and Imperial Kitten.
"Using the social media persona 'Marcella Flores,' TA456 built a relationship across corporate and personal communication platforms with an employee of a small subsidiary of an aerospace defense contractor," Proofpoint said in a report shared with The Hacker News. "In early June 2021, the threat actor attempted to capitalize on this relationship by sending the target malware via an ongoing email communication chain."
Earlier this month, Facebook revealed it took steps to dismantle a "sophisticated" cyber-espionage campaign undertaken by Tortoiseshell hackers targeting about 200 military personnel and companies in the defense and aerospace sectors in the U.S., U.K., and Europe using an extensive network of fake online personas on its platform. The threat actor is believed to be loosely aligned with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) via its association with the Iranian IT company Mahak Rayan Afraz (MRA).
Now according to Proofpoint, one such elaborate fake persona created by the TA456 threat actor involved in back-and-forth exchanges with the unnamed aerospace employee dating as far back as 2019, before culminating the delivery of a malware called LEMPO that's engineered to designed to establish persistence, perform reconnaissance, and exfiltrate sensitive information. The infection chain was triggered via an email message containing a OneDrive URL that claimed to be a diet survey — a macro-embedded Excel document — only to stealthily retrieve the reconnaissance tool by connecting to an attacker-controlled domain.
Facebook has since suspended the Flores account from its platform in a coordinated takedown of users linked to Iranian hacker activity.
"TA456 demonstrated a significant operational investment by cultivating a relationship with a target's employee over years in order to deploy LEMPO to conduct reconnaissance into a highly secured target environment within the defense industrial base," Proofpoint researchers said. "This campaign exemplifies the persistent nature of certain state aligned threats and the human engagement they are willing to conduct in support of espionage operations."
| Cyber_Attack |
Tor Vulnerable to Remote arbitrary code Execution | https://thehackernews.com/2012/01/tor-vulnerable-to-remote-arbitrary-code.html | Tor Vulnerable to Remote arbitrary code Execution
According to latest post of Gentoo Linux Security Advisory, There are multiple vulnerabilities have been found in TOR, the most severe ofwhich may allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code. TOR is an implementation of second generation Onion Routing, a connection-oriented anonymizing communication service.
Using this Vulnerability remote attacker could possibly execute arbitrary code or cause a Denial of Service. Furthermore, a remote relay the user is directly connected to may be able to disclose anonymous information about that user or enumerate bridges in the user's connection.
Advisory explain that , Affected Vulnerable packages are < 0.2.2.35 . Multiple vulnerabilities have been discovered in Tor are listed below:
* When configured as client or bridge, Tor uses the same TLS certificate chain for all outgoing connections (CVE-2011-2768).
* When configured as a bridge, Tor relays can distinguish incoming bridge connections from client connections (CVE-2011-2769).
* An error in or/buffers.c could result in a heap-based buffer overflow (CVE-2011-2778).
All Tor users should upgrade to the latest version.
| Vulnerability |
Two Critical Zero-Day Flaws Disclosed in Foxit PDF Reader | https://thehackernews.com/2017/08/two-critical-zero-day-flaws-disclosed.html | Are you using Foxit PDF Reader? If yes, then you need to watch your back.
Security researchers have discovered two critical zero-day security vulnerabilities in Foxit Reader software that could allow attackers to execute arbitrary code on a targeted computer, if not configured to open files in the Safe Reading Mode.
The first vulnerability (CVE-2017-10951) is a command injection bug discovered by researcher Ariele Caltabiano working with Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative (ZDI), while the second bug (CVE-2017-10952) is a file write issue found by Offensive Security researcher Steven Seeley.
An attacker can exploit these bugs by sending a specially crafted PDF file to a Foxit user and enticing them to open it.
Foxit refused to patch both the vulnerabilities because they would not work with the "safe reading mode" feature that fortunately comes enabled by default in Foxit Reader.
"Foxit Reader & PhantomPDF has a Safe Reading Mode which is enabled by default to control the running of JavaScript, which can effectively guard against potential vulnerabilities from unauthorized JavaScript actions," the company says.
However, researchers believe building a mitigation doesn't patch the vulnerabilities completely, which if remained unpatched, could be exploited if attackers find a way to bypass safe reading mode in the near future.
Both unpatched vulnerabilities can be triggered through the JavaScript API in Foxit Reader.
CVE-2017-10951: The command injection bug resides in an app.launchURL function that executes strings provided by attackers on the targeted system due to lack of proper validation, as demonstrated in the video given below.
CVE-2017-10952: This vulnerability exists within the "saveAs" JavaScript function that allows attackers to write an arbitrary file on a targeted system at any specific location, as demonstrated in the video given below.
"Steven exploited this vulnerability by embedding an HTA file in the document, then calling saveAS to write it to the startup folder, thus executing arbitrary VBScript code on startup," reads the advisory published by the ZDI.
If you are one of those using Foxit Reader and PhantomPDF, ensure you have the "Safe Reading Mode" feature enabled. Additionally, you can also uncheck the "Enable JavaScript Actions" from Foxit's Preferences menu, although this may break some functionality.
Users are also recommended always to be vigilant while opening any files they received via email. Just recently, we reported how opening a malicious PowerPoint file could compromise your computer with malware.
So, always beware of phishing emails, spams, and clicking the malicious attachment.
Update: Foxit Response
Foxit spokesperson has provided the following statement to The Hacker News via an Email:
"Foxit Software is deeply committed to delivering secure PDF products to its customers. Our track record is strong in responding quickly in fixing vulnerabilities. We are currently working to rapidly address the two vulnerabilities reported on the Zero Day Initiative blog and will quickly deliver software improvements. In the meantime, users can help protect themselves by using the Safe Reading Mode."
"We apologize for our initial miscommunication when contacted about these vulnerabilities and are making changes to our procedures to mitigate the probability of it occurring again."
| Vulnerability |
Researchers Uncover Stealthy Linux Malware That Went Undetected for 3 Years | https://thehackernews.com/2021/04/researchers-uncover-stealthy-linux.html | A previously undocumented Linux malware with backdoor capabilities has managed to stay under the radar for about three years, allowing the threat actor behind the operation to harvest and exfiltrate sensitive information from infected systems.
Dubbed "RotaJakiro" by researchers from Qihoo 360 NETLAB, the backdoor targets Linux X64 machines, and is so named after the fact that "the family uses rotate encryption and behaves differently for root/non-root accounts when executing."
The findings come from an analysis of a malware sample it detected on March 25, although early versions appear to have been uploaded to VirusTotal as early as May 2018. A total of four samples have been found to date on the database, all of which remain undetected by most anti-malware engines. As of writing, only seven security vendors flag the latest version of the malware as malicious.
"At the functional level, RotaJakiro first determines whether the user is root or non-root at run time, with different execution policies for different accounts, then decrypts the relevant sensitive resources using AES& ROTATE for subsequent persistence, process guarding and single instance use, and finally establishes communication with C2 and waits for the execution of commands issued by C2," the researchers explained.
RotaJakiro is designed with stealth in mind, relying on a mix of cryptographic algorithms to encrypt its communications with a command-and-control (C2) server, in addition to having support for 12 functions that take care of gathering device metadata, stealing sensitive information, carrying out file related operations, and downloading and executing plug-ins pulled from the C2 server.
But with no evidence to shed light on the nature of plugins, the true intent behind the malware campaign remains unclear. Interestingly, some of the C2 domains were registered dating all the way back to December 2015, with the researchers also observing overlaps between RotaJakiro and a botnet named Torii.
"From the perspective of reverse engineering, RotaJakiro and Torii share similar styles: the use of encryption algorithms to hide sensitive resources, the implementation of a rather old-school style of persistence, structured network traffic, etc.," the researchers said. "We don't exactly know the answer, but it seems that RotaJakiro and Torii have some connections."
| Malware |
Yahoo! PH Purple Hunt 2.0 Ad Compromised ! | https://thehackernews.com/2011/04/yahoo-ph-purple-hunt-20-ad-compromised.html | Yahoo! PH Purple Hunt 2.0 Ad Compromised !
Earlier the other day, I was browsing through the Yahoo! PH site and the Yahoo! Purple Hunt 2.0 ad caught my attention.
Curious as I am, I clicked on the ad and surprisingly my browser downloaded a suspicious file named com.com.
Apparently this ad redirected me to a randomly generated URL similar to the following which, unfortunately, led to the malicious download:
hxxp://want6.{BLOCKED}.com/se/3da19bea8f9c03e96c9b1acad9cce5a88a2244f0a34d69
c09b8d3198b2797726789be0228c0df3c762ed088a2327b07f4a183fa6fa753b0acfd7f0afc2d2b
13b801ba978269fcda413f53e/960b0a2a/com.com
hxxp://nose8.{BLOCKED}.com/se/3da19bea8f9c03e96c9b1acad9cce5a88a2244f0a34d69c
09b8d3198b2797726789be0228c0df3c762ed088a2327b07f4a183fa6fa753b0acfd7f0afc2d2b
13b801ba978269fcda413f53e/960b0a2a/com.com
hxxp://letter6.{BLOCKED}.com/se/3da19bea8f9c03e96c9b1acad9cce5a88a2244f0a34d69c0
9b8d3198b2797726789be0228c0f3c762ed088a2327b07f4a183fa6fa753b0acfd7f0afc2d2b13
b801ba978269fcda413f53e/785c08d8/com.com
Below is a screenshot of the file download dialog box:
The downloaded file is detected by Trend Micro as TSPY_PIRMINAY.A. Let's see how the download took place.
Firstly, the download only happens once per browser, which means that the malvertisement may have used an IP and user agent filtering of some sort to prevent multiple downloads which would make it suspicious to the end user.
To be able to replicate the malware download from the compromised ad, we used a browser extension which spoofs browser user agents, instead of installing different browsers.
It appears that the advertisement is first redirected to the malware download before it finally brings the browser to the real advertisement page. The redirection follows this format for the download link:
https://{varying string}{random number}.{varying domain}/se/{constant string or guid}/com.com
We'd like to thank the guys over at Yahoo! Ad Security Ops for acting swiftly on our initial report, taking down the malvertisement so it could no longer harm unsuspecting users.
Source
| Malware |
Tumblr Patches A Flaw That Could Have Exposed Users' Account Info | https://thehackernews.com/2018/10/tumblr-account-hacking.html | Tumblr today published a report admitting the presence of a security vulnerability in its website that could have allowed hackers to steal login credentials and other private information for users' accounts.
The affected information included users email addresses, protected (hashed and salted) account passwords, self-reported location (a feature no longer available), previously used email addresses, last login IP addresses, and names of the blog associated with every account.
According to the company, a security researcher discovered a critical vulnerability in the desktop version of its website and responsibly reported it to the Tumblr security team via its bug bounty program.
Though the company has not revealed the researcher's name or any technical details about the vulnerability, Tumblr has disclosed that the flaw resided in the "Recommended Blogs" feature of its website.
Recommended Blogs has been designed to display a short, rotating list of blogs of other users that may be of interest. The feature appears only for logged-in users.
Tumblr also says:
"If a blog appeared in the module, it was possible, using debugging software in a certain way, to view certain account information associated with the blog."
In short, your account could only be affected if it was recommended to some an attacker via the vulnerable feature.
The company fails to determine which specific accounts were recommended via the vulnerable feature, thus is unable to disclose the number of affected users, but it concludes that "the bug was rarely present."
Tumblr also assured that its internal investigation found no evidence of the bug being abused by an attacker.
"It's our mission to provide a safe space for people to express themselves freely and form communities around things they love," Tumblr says. "We feel that this bug could have affected that experience. We want to be transparent with you about it. In our view, it's simply the right thing to do."
Tumblr disclosure comes less than a week after Facebook announced its worst-ever security breach that allowed attackers to steal personal information, including secret access tokens, for 30 million users.
Also, over a week ago Google announced the shut down of its social media network Google+ following a massive data breach that exposed the private data of hundreds of thousands of Google Plus users to third-party developers.
Late last month, Twitter also revealed a similar security breach incident in which an API flaw inadvertently exposed direct messages (DMs) and protected tweets of more than 3 million people to unauthorized third-party app developers.
| Cyber_Attack |
Finland's Ministry of Foreign Affairs networks hit by sophisticated Malware attack | https://thehackernews.com/2013/11/Finland-Ministry-Foreign-Affairs-malware-espionage-red-october.html | Finnish commercial broadcaster MTV3 reports that the Finnish Ministry of Foreign Affair networks has been targeted in a four-year-long cyber espionage operation.
Finland's foreign minister said, "I can confirm there has been a severe and large hacking in the ministry's data network,"
A large scale spying attack targeted the communications between Finland and the European Union using a malware, similar to, and more sophisticated than Red October. The breach was uncovered during the early part of this year.
MTV3 also mentioned that the breach was not discovered by the Finns themselves, but from a foreign tip-off reported to CERT.FI. Further the Finnish authorities kept the information under wraps for continuing the forensics.
There are indications that information with the lowest level security classification has been compromised, he said.
In January, 2013, we had reported about Red October Cyber-espionage operation that targeted the computer networks of various international diplomatic service agencies. According security experts from Kaspersky Lab, the cyber-espionage campaign was started since 2007 and is still active.
It is possible that Red October has been just one campaign from the same actor, and there could be others that haven't been discovered yet.
According to experts, Red October's exploits appear to have Chinese origins, whereas the malware modules may have a Russian background. So if this Finnish malware attack somewhere linked to Red October, then Russia and China are suspected of responsibility for the snooping.
Red October malware was sent via a spear-phishing email and has been tempting its targets into letting it exploit a number of relatively minor security vulnerabilities in programs such as Microsoft's Excel and Word, as well as poisoned PDFs and Java exploits.
Besides Finland, other countries could be the victim of the same attack. The Finnish Security Intelligence Service is investigating the matter.
| Cyber_Attack |
Kathmandu Metropolitan City website database hacked by T34mT!g3R | https://thehackernews.com/2011/08/kathmandu-metropolitan-city-website.html | Kathmandu Metropolitan City website database hacked by T34mT!g3R
Hackers of Team "T34mT!g3R" today expose the SQL injection Vulnerability in Kathmandu Metropolitan City website and extract the database of site. Hacker post the Database info and Vulnerable Link at pastebin.
| Vulnerability |
Researchers Fingerprint Exploit Developers Who Help Several Malware Authors | https://thehackernews.com/2020/10/exploit-development.html | Writing advanced malware for a threat actor requires different groups of people with diverse technical expertise to put them all together. But can the code leave enough clues to reveal the person behind it?
To this effect, cybersecurity researchers on Friday detailed a new methodology to identify exploit authors that use their unique characteristics as a fingerprint to track down other exploits developed by them.
By deploying this technique, the researchers were able to link 16 Windows local privilege escalation (LPE) exploits to two zero-day sellers "Volodya" (previously called "BuggiCorp") and "PlayBit" (or "luxor2008").
"Instead of focusing on an entire malware and hunting for new samples of the malware family or actor, we wanted to offer another perspective and decided to concentrate on these few functions that were written by an exploit developer," Check Point Research's Itay Cohen and Eyal Itkin noted.
Fingerprinting an Exploit Writer's Characteristics
The idea, in a nutshell, is to fingerprint an exploit for specific artifacts that can uniquely tie it to a developer. It could be in using hard-coded values, string names, or even how the code is organized and certain functions are implemented.
Check Point said their analysis began in response to a "complicated attack" against one of its customers when they encountered a 64-bit malware executable that exploited CVE-2019-0859 to gain elevated privileges.
Noticing the fact that the exploit and the malware were written by two different sets of people, the researchers used the binary's properties as a unique hunting signature to find at least 11 other exploits developed by the same developer named "Volodya" (or "Volodimir").
"Finding a vulnerability, and reliably exploiting it, will most probably be done by specific teams or individuals who specialize in a particular role. The malware developers for their part don't really care how it works behind the scenes, they just want to integrate this [exploits] module and be done with it," the researchers said.
Interestingly, Volodya — likely of Ukrainian origin — has been previously linked to selling Windows zero-days to cyberespionage groups and crimeware gangs for anywhere between $85,000 to $200,000.
Chief among them was an LPE exploit that leveraged a memory corruption in "NtUserSetWindowLongPtr" (CVE-2016-7255), which has been widely used by ransomware operators like GandCrab, Cerber, and Magniber. It's now believed that Volodya advertised this LPE zero-day on the Exploit.in cybercrime forum in May 2016.
In all, five zero-day and six one-day exploits were identified as developed by Volodya over a period of 2015-2019. Subsequently, the same technique was employed to identify five more LPE exploits from another exploit writer known as PlayBit.
An Extensive Clientele
Stating the exploit samples shared code level similarities to grant SYSTEM privileges to the desired process, the researchers said, "both of our actors were very consistent in their respective exploitation routines, each sticking to their favorite way."
What's more, Volodya also appears to have switched up his tactics during the intervening years, with the developer shifting from selling the exploits as embeddable source code in the malware to an external utility that accepts a specific API.
Besides ransomware groups, Volodya has been found to cater to an extensive clientele, including the Ursnif banking trojan, and APT groups such as Turla, APT28, and Buhtrap.
"The APT customers, Turla, APT28, and Buhtrap, are all commonly attributed to Russia and it is interesting to find that even these advanced groups purchase exploits instead of developing them in-house," Check Point observed in its analysis. "This is another point which further strengthens our hypothesis that the written exploits can be treated as a separate and distinct part of the malware."
With cyberattacks expanding in scope, frequency, and magnitude, using an exploit developer's code signature as a means to track down bad actors could provide valuable insight into the black exploit market.
"When Check Point finds a vulnerability, we demonstrate its severity, report it to the appropriate vendor, and make sure it's patched, so it doesn't pose a threat," Cohen said. "However, for individuals trading these exploits, it's a completely different story. For them, finding the vulnerability is just the beginning. They need to reliably exploit it on as many versions as possible, in order to monetize it to a customer's satisfaction."
"This research provides insight into how that is achieved, and the buyers in this market, which often include nation-state actors. We believe that this research methodology can be used to identify additional exploit writers."
| Vulnerability |
Apple Patches 'Find My iPhone' Vulnerability Which May Caused Celebrities Photo Leak | https://thehackernews.com/2014/09/apple-patches-find-my-iphone.html | Apple has patched the security flaw in its Find My iPhone online service that may have allowed hackers to get access to a number of celebrities' private pictures leaked online.
OVER 100 CELEBRITIES AFFECTED
So far, I hope everybody have heard about probably the biggest digital exposure of personal nude photographs belonging to as many as 100 high-profile celebrities, including Jenny McCarthy, Kristin Dunst, Mary E Winstead, and the Oscar winning actress Jennifer Lawrence and Kate Upton.
Initial reports suggested that the privacy breach of the celebrities' iCloud accounts was made possible by a vulnerability in Find My iPhone feature that allowed hackers to allegedly take nude photographs of celebrities from their Apple iCloud backups.
Anonymous 4chan users who claims to have grabbed images, posted some of the images to the "b" forum on notorious bulletin-board 4chan, where the owners demanded Bitcoin in exchange for a peek of the images.
The anonymous 4chan user sparked the scandal on Sunday after dumping a large cache of female celebrities' alleged naked photographs onto the 4chan online forum, an online message board used for sharing pictures. As a result of the leak, the nude photographs and videos of female celebrities are apparently being widely circulated on the internet.
After the story broke by the mainstream media, the affected celebrities including Oscar winner Jennifer Lawrence and model Kate Upton came forward to react on the matter. Within 12 hours, the web has been awash with private and some very personal photographs of celebrities.
WHERE THE VULNERABILITY RESIDES
On August 30, just a day before the massive leak, proof-of-concept code for an AppleID password bruteforce was uploaded to the GitHub by a mobile security team HackApp. What a coincident! Isn't it?
The proof-of-concept code for the exploit is known as iBrute. The code exploited a vulnerability in Apple's Find My iPhone application sign in page. The flaw let hackers to flood the site with multiple number of password attempts without being locked out and by using brute-force techniques, hackers could guess the password used to protect those celebrities accounts. Apple patched the vulnerability early on September 1.
FINALLY APPLE REACTED
Apple has acknowledged the attack, but did not address the vulnerability discussed here. The company issued a press release stating that iCloud or Find my iPhone had not been responsible for the leak of several private and personal photos of celebrities.
Rather it said that the celebrities photo breach was a "very targeted attack on user names, passwords and security questions, a practice that has become all too common on the Internet. None of the cases we have investigated has resulted from any breach in any of Apple's systems including iCloud or Find my iPhone."
IS APPLE'S TWO FACTOR AUTHENTICATION EFFECTIVE
Apple is encouraging its users to make use of its two-factor authentication service in an effort to prevent security-question based attacks on their accounts.
There is no doubt that two-factor verification makes it more difficult for hackers to obtain a user's login credentials in the first place, thereby preventing many attacks. But an iCloud backup can be installed with just a user name and a password, making two-factor authentication process incomplete.
Unfortunately, Apple's two-factor authentication currently doesn't protect against the kind of attack that was used in this case. It does not cover many other iCloud services, including backups. As noted by TechCrunch, the only three things two-factor secures in iCloud are:
Signing in to My Apple ID to manage their Apple account
Making iTunes, App Store, or iBookstore purchases from a new device
Receiving Apple ID-related support from Apple
In fact, it doesn't make you enter a verification code if you restore a new device from an iCloud backup. And this security hole is what the hackers are taking advantage of.
Using an application like ElcomSoft's software to download an iPhone's backup successfully, one can circumvent two-factor verification mechanism, because of the fact that the two-factor authentication system does not cover iCloud backups or Photo Stream.
HOW TO PROTECT YOURSELF
For users to protect against upcoming threats, follow these advices:
Whatever be the case with two-factor verification process, you have to enabled it because doing this will definitely add an extra layer of security to your account.
Try using different passwords for different accounts so that if one breached, you are not all lost.
Use a complex password and do not share it with anyone.
Same applies in case of email, use a private email for your ID — one that you don't share with anyone.
Don't click on links provided in emails, visit the given website directly from web.
Don't share your personal information over social networks at any cost.
Most importantly, use completely incorrect or random answers to password reset questions, so that nobody could guess it right.
| Vulnerability |
Hackers behind Dyre Malware Busted in Police Raid | https://thehackernews.com/2016/02/hacking-dyre-malware.html | The world's most notorious financial hacking operation disrupted by Russian authorities in November, when they raided the offices associated with a Moscow-based film and production company named 25th Floor.
According to the Russian authorities, 25th Floor was allegedly involved in distributing the notorious password-stealing malware known as Dyre Banking Trojan.
Malware Costs Hundreds of $$$ Millions in Losses
The Dyre banking Trojan was typically distributed via spam campaigns and was responsible for over hundreds of millions of dollars in losses at banking and financial institutions, including Bank of America Corp, PayPal, and JPMorgan Chase & Co.
Dyre, also known as Dyreza, first appeared in July 2014 and updated to target Windows 10 systems and its newest Edge browser.
However, Dyre has not been in use since the November raid, according to cyber security experts, who said the raid represents Russia's biggest effort up to date in cracking down on cyber crime.
It is yet not known whether the Russian authorities anyone has arrested or charged anyone linked to the raid.
However, the sources familiar with the matter told Reuters that the Dyre investigation was aided by security firm Kaspersky Lab that would reveal details about the case at its annual conference for security experts starting Sunday.
The malware authors used a variety of techniques to deliver Dyre malware onto victim's web browser in an effort to alter the communication between customers and over 400 financial institutions.
They Producing Cyber-Crime Thriller Movie — BOTNET
The name came out from the November raid: 25th Floor that distributes movies and Television shows in Russia and other East European and near-east countries.
The company is currently busy in the production of a film called BOTNET – a cyber crime thriller based on a 2010 case in which 37 people from the United States and other countries were charged for a $3 Million scam.
25th Floor hired Moscow-based computer security company Group-IB to advise the Botnet director and writers on the detailed aspects of cybercrime, said Group-IB CEO Ilya Sachkov. He said he was initially approached by Nikolay Volchkov, the CEO of 25th Floor.
Then Sachkov got an urgent call from Volchkov last November, saying he needed to meet.
"He was afraid. His color was totally white," added Sachkov. "He knows there's an ongoing investigation about cybercrime."
To know how the Dyre banking malware works and how you can protect yourself against the malware, you can read this The Hacker News article.
| Malware |
Geek.com Hacked, Infects Visitors with Malware ! | https://thehackernews.com/2011/05/geekcom-hacked-infects-visitors-with_16.html | Geek.com Hacked, Infects Visitors with Malware !
Security researchers from cloud security provider Zscaler warn that technology website geek.com was compromised and many of its pages are executing drive-by download attacks against visitors.
Geek.com is one of the oldest technology news websites around, dating back to 1996, the dawn of the commercial World Wide Web.
Attackers have managed to inject rogue IFrames into different portions of the site, both within articles and the site's main pages like home, about us, etc.
According to Umesh Wanve, a senior security research engineer at Zscaler, there are multiple infections and the iframes take visitors to different malicious websites.
One example is the rogue code injected into a May 13 article about Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 details being leaked, which redirects visitors to an exploit kit.
These kits perform various checks to determine what versions of certain program users have installed on their computers and then serve exploits for vulnerabilities in those products.
The most commonly used applications like Java Runtime Environment, Flash Player, Adobe Reader or the browser itself are usually targeted.
"As this is first article is highlighted and 'Call of Duty' is a very popular game, one can assume that many people have fallen victim to this attack," Mr. Wanve says.
Drive-by download attacks are currently one of the main malware distribution channels on the Internet. They are very dangerous because in most cases they are completely transparent to victims.
"Unfortunately, we see hundreds of attacks such as this each and every day. Many legitimate websites are being compromised by taking advantages of poor coding practices in web applications," the Zscaler security researcher says.
Users can protect themselves by keeping all of they software up to date, including the operating system itself, and running antivirus products capable of scanning web traffic. Mozilla Firefox users can also use advanced extensions such as NoScript.
Source
| Malware |
AirAsia Indonesia Flight QZ 8501 : Cyber Criminals use missing Flight QZ 8501 mystery as Bait | https://thehackernews.com/2014/12/malaysian-airasia-flight-QZ8501.html | After the Mysterious Malaysian Airlines flight MH370 incident in March 2014 and the shooting of Malaysia Airline Flight MH17 by a ground-to-air missile in July 2014, yesterday AirAsia flight QZ 8501 with 162 people on board found missing by the time it flew from the Indonesian city of Surabaya to Singapore after losing contact with air traffic control due to weather, the airline company said Sunday.
Since, cybercriminals are known to take advantage of every major incident and any occasion that captures public attention – regardless of how sensitive – comes out to be an opportunity for spammers and hackers to snatch users' personal information and spread malware, and the tragedy of the Missing AirAsia flight QZ 8501 is no exception.
Cyber criminals are exploiting the disappearance of Indonesia AirAsia flight QZ 8501 by luring users to websites purporting to offer the latest news in order to steal their personal information.
Our team has spotted some posts on social media claiming that the "Missing AirAsia flight QZ850 has been found and that all its passengers are safe and alive". But once the user click on the news, the link redirects users to the malicious websites. It made me remind of the missing Malaysian Airlines flight MH370, a Boeing 777-200 aircraft incident which opened doors for many cybercriminals to infect online users.
Indonesia Flight QZ 8501 lost its contact with air traffic control at 7:24 a.m. local time over the Java Sea after taking off from Surabaya, Indonesia, according to a statement from AirAsia. AirAsia flight QZ 8501 was scheduled to land in Singapore about an hour later.
"AirAsia Indonesia regrets to confirm that QZ8501 from Surabaya to Singapore has lost contact at 07:24hrs this morning," AirAsia tweeted.
Missing AirAsia flight QZ 8501 was last tracked around the island of Belitung, at the coordinates 03°22'15" South and 109°41'28" East, before disappearing from radars. Due to night, search and rescue operations have been suspended, which the team will resume tomorrow.
According to AirAsia, Indonesia flight QZ8501 had seven crew members and 155 passengers, including 137 adults, 17 children and one infant. The aircraft was flying at 32,000 feet and had asked to go to 38,000 feet due cloudy weather in the area.
May be scammers and cyber crooks could exploit this tragic incident to target as many online users as they want. Because they know that users sitting over their online devices and operating social media accounts such as Facebook and Twitter, have had an eye on every news update related to the Missing AirAsia flight QZ8501.
Cyber criminals may also come up with fake news websites in order to distribute malware and infect a large number of online users. So you need to have an eye on that too.
WHAT AN ONLINE USER NEED TO KEEP IN MIND
Beware! Before clicking a link for any news related to the Missing AirAsia flight QZ8501 over social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter.
Always go for the genuine and reputed news site for any updates regarding the Missing AirAsia flight.
If any link claims you to show a video footage of the missing Indonesia flight QZ8501, please keep in your mind that their is no such video footage available yet. Beware of such fake videos and links that could spread in the wild across the various social media and other sites to abuse your network and system.
If you've already shared or "liked" any such link, it's probably best to delete malware post from your Facebook wall.
First the tragic incident of Malaysia Plane MH370 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 2014, then the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur on 17 July 2014, and now the Missing AirAsia flight QZ850 incident is really a matter of sorrow for all of us.
| Malware |
'SoakSoak' Malware Compromises 100,000 WordPress Websites | https://thehackernews.com/2014/12/SoakSoak-Wordpress-Malware.html | The users of WordPress, a free and open source blogging tool as well as content management system (CMS), are being informed of a widespread malware attack campaign that has already compromised more than 100,000 websites worldwide and still counting.
The news broke throughout the WordPress community earlier Sunday morning when Google blacklisted over 11,000 domains due to the latest malware campaign, that has been brought by SoakSoak.ru, thus being dubbed the 'SoakSoak Malware' epidemic.
While there are more than 70 million websites on the Internet currently running WordPress, so this malware campaign could be a great threat to those running their websites on WordPress.
Once infected, you may experience irregular website behavior including unexpected redirects to SoakSoak.ru web pages. You may also end up downloading malicious files onto your computer systems automatically without any knowledge.
The search engine giant has already been on top of this infection and has added over 11,000 websites to their blacklist that could have seriously affected the revenue potential of website owners, running those blacklisted websites.
The security team at the security firm Sucuri, which is actively investigating the potential vector of the malware, said that the infections are not targeted only at WordPress websites, but it appears that the impact seems to be affecting most hosts across the WordPress hosting spectrum.
SoakSoak malware modifies the file located at wp-includes/template-loader.php which causes wp-includes/js/swobject.js to be loaded on every page view on the website and this "swobject.js" file includes a malicious java encoded script malware.
If you run any website and are worried about the potential risk of the infection to your website, Sucuri has provided a Free SiteCheck scanner that will check your website for the malware. The exact method of intrusion has not been pointed out at this time, but numerous signals led to believe us all that many WordPress users could have fallen victim to this attack.
However, if you are behind the Website Firewall, CloudProxy, you are being protected from the SoakSoak malware campaign.
| Malware |
North Korean Hackers Steal thousands of Military files from S. Korea | https://thehackernews.com/2016/06/north-korean-hackers.html | Hackers aligned with North Korea have always been accused of attacking and targeting South Korean organizations, financial institutions, banks and media outlets.
Recent reports indicate that North Korean hackers have hacked into more than 140,000 computers of at least 160 South Korean government agencies and companies, and allegedly injected malware in the systems.
The cyber attack was designed to lay for a long term period against its rival, authorities in Seoul said.
The South Korean police were on high alert against cyberattacks by the North Korean hackers, especially after North Korea successfully tested a miniaturized hydrogen bomb in January and a long-range rocket launch in February, Reuters reports.
According to the police, the hacking attack began in 2014 but was detected only in February this year, after North Korea managed to steal information from two companies: the SK and Hanjin Group.
The documents stolen from the two companies included blueprints for the wings of F-15 fighter jets, an official at the South Korea cyber investigation unit confirmed.
The investigation unit said, "There is a high possibility that the North aimed to cause confusion on a national scale by launching a simultaneous attack after securing many targets of cyber terror, or intended to continuously steal industrial and military secrets."
More than 42,000 materials were stolen in the hack, of which more than 40,000 materials were defense-related.
Although a South Korean defense ministry official said that the stolen documents were not secret and that there wasn't any security breach, a spokesperson from SK Holdings stated that 4 group affiliates were affected by the cyber attack.
The cyber attack originated from an IP address traced down to the North Korea and was intended to target the network management software used by 160 companies and government agencies in South Korea.
The police declined to identify the malicious software, though the IP address from where the hack was originated was identical to one used in a 2013 cyberattack against banks and TV broadcasters in South Korea.
The South Korean police were then teamed up with companies and other government agencies to disable the malware and prevent the malicious code from further spreading, in what could lead to a massive cyber attack.
| Malware |
What does the Poetry with Citadel trojan ? | https://thehackernews.com/2013/02/what-does-poetry-with-citadel-trojan.html | Recently we published an article on the attacks against Japanese banks using a new variant of the popular Zeus, one of the most prolific malware of recent history, security experts in fact have detected various versions of the popular malicious code that hit also mobile and social networking platforms.
Due its flexibility the malware has been re-engineered several times by cyber criminals that adapted its structure to specific purposes and context, leaving unchanged its core capabilities of stealing banking credentials of victims.
Zeus has been a huge success in the criminal circles especially for the sales model, as malware as service, implemented by its authors on many underground sites, let's remind for example the Citadel Trojan one of the most popular on the crimeware market. Fortunately its author, known as Aquabox, has been banned from a large online forum that sells malware and other services to cyber criminals, but many security firms consider Citadel Trojan still very active threat that continues to infect many machines all over the world.
Security experts from McAfee Labs are sure that the agent will remain active for a long time, it also indicate that some groups of hackers are staring to use the malware for other purposes such as the cyber espionage. McAfee Global Threat Intelligence report indicates the "Poetry Group" is one of the most active in this sense, the collective compromised 27 Japanese government offices across three distinct campaigns and targeted around 43 government offices in Poland. The group was very aggressive in October 2012 when it conducted more than a half-dozen campaigns infecting victims in Poland, Denmark, Sweden, Spain, Netherlands, Estonia, Czech Republic, Switzerland, and Japan, compromising more than 1,000 victims worldwide.
The researchers from McAfee Labs were able to pinpoint the regions "and identify targets and victims spanning more than a half-dozen campaigns", the highest infection rate were registered in Denmark, Poland, Spain and Japan.
Curiously Japan is one of the most targeted countries by cyber espionage campaign, in many cases we have spoken about cyber attacks malware based that hit industry and government offices of the state.
The victims located in Poland appears to be all government offices and the exerts discovered that attackers conducted a targeted campaign on specific targets across the country from December 2012 to January 2013.
Nice the way the hackers used to "identify" their works, they in fact added strings of poetry in the malware binary, Ryan Sherstobitoff, a McAfee researcher declared: "We've found them making political statements against the groups they are targeting,"
McAfee analysts detected more that 300 unique Citadel Trojan samples, each of them included its sequence of poetry strings that aren't automatically generated , the specialists suspect that Poetry Group may be a byproduct of a for-hire data-gathering operation for a private clientele.
In the fight against malware such as Citadel it is fundamental a layered approach that was able to detect the cyber threats and also any suspect behavior within target networks. In many cases such malware are demonstrated to be able to elude common antivirus systems and their behavioral detection mode.
Unfortunately these agents are able to remain silently for a long period infiltrating internal systems and remaining undetected in the target networks for long time.
The adaptation of the Citadel malware for other uses is a scaring signal due the capabilities of the malicious agent, the Trojan make possible remote control of victims and is able to steal any kind of information, not only banking credentials from victims. Sherstobitoff added: "If they wanted to penetrate the entire network of a financial institution or some other organization, they could,"
Waiting for further updates on the operations of the Poetry Group lets keep update antivirus software and any other application that runs on our systems, because as Sherstobitoff added "These attacks result from not taking patch management seriously,".
| Malware |
Zero-Day Exploit released for Vulnerability in Novell ZENworks | https://thehackernews.com/2012/10/zero-day-exploit-released-for.html | Rapid7 researcher Juan Vazquez recently uncovered a zero-day security flaw in Novell ZENworks Asset Management 7.5. This Vulnerability (CVE-2012-4933) gives access to any files with system privileges and could also allow an attacker to grab configuration parameters, including the backend credentials in clear text.
ZENworks Asset Management provides a Web Console, where the user can access the data collected about network devices and edit some information. This web interface provides some maintenance calls, two of them accessible with hardcoded credentials, allowing a remote attacker to retrieve any file from the remote file system with SYSTEM privileges and to get configuration parameters from the ZENworks Asset Management including the backend credentials in clear text.
The vulnerability currently remains unpatched and US CERT recommends that users implement firewall rules that will restrict access to the web interface by unauthorised users.
Read here, more about exploitation of this vulnerability and find two auxiliary modules that will give Metasploit users the ability to test their ZENworks software.
| Vulnerability |
100k IEEE site Plain-Text Passwords found on Public FTP | https://thehackernews.com/2012/09/100k-ieee-site-plain-text-passwords.html | A Romanian researcher - Radu Drăgușin found that 100000 usernames and passwords of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) was stored in plaint-text on a publicly accessible FTP server.
According to him, on Sept. 18 he first discovered a log with usernames and passwords in plaintext, publicly available via IEEE's FTP server for at least a month. He informed them of his find yesterday, and evidently the organization is addressing the issue.
On the FTP server, according Dragusin were the logfiles for the offers and ieee.org spectrum.ieee.org - Total data to approximately 376 million HTTP requests. Including 411,308 log entries with login and password in plain text.
Among the users who's information was exposed are researchers at NASA, Stanford, IBM, Google, Apple, Oracle and Samsung. IEEE's membership of over 340,000 is roughly half American (49.8 percent as of 2011).
"IEEE suffered a data breach which I discovered on September 18. For a few days I was uncertain what to do with the information and the data. Yesterday I let them know, and they fixed (at least partially) the problem. The usernames and passwords kept in plaintext were publicly available on their FTP server for at least one month prior to my discovery. Among the almost 100.000 compromised users are Apple, Google, IBM, Oracle and Samsung employees, as well as researchers from NASA, Stanford and many other places. I did not and will not make the raw data available to anyone else." Message posted on researcher's site.
| Vulnerability |
Facebook Camera App Vulnerable to Man in The Middle Attack | https://thehackernews.com/2012/12/facebook-camera-app-vulnerable-to-man.html | Egypt-based security researcher reported that Facebook Camera App for mobiles are Vulnerable to Man in The Middle Attack, that allow an attacker to tap the network and hijack Camera users accounts and information like email addresses and passwords can be stolen.
Mohamed Ramadan trainer with Attack-Secure, who previously reported us about similar vulnerability in Etsy app for iPhone
Mohamed explains "The problem is that the app accepts any SSL certification from any source, even evil SSL certifications, and this enables any attacker to perform man in the middle attacks against anyone who uses the Facebook Camera app for IPhone. This means that the application doesn't warn the user if someone in the same (Wi-Fi network) is trying to hijack his or her Facebook account."
Facebook suggest users to upgrade the Camera application To Version 1.1.2. A statement released by the company says "We applaud the security researcher who brought this bug to our attention for responsibly reporting the bug to our White Hat Program. We worked with the team to make sure we understood the full scope of the bug, which allowed us to fix it and upgrade the Camera application without any evidence that this bug was exploited in the wild. Users are only vulnerable if they are using an unsecured or untrusted public wireless network and an older version of the application."
"As always, we remind all users to only connect to networks they trust. Users can protect themselves by downloading the latest version of the Camera app. Due to the responsible reporting of this issue to Facebook, no one within the security community has evidence of account compromise using this bug. We have provided a bounty to the researcher to thank them for their contribution to Facebook Security."
Facebook suggest users to upgrade the Camera application To Version 1.1.2.
| Vulnerability |
Researchers Uncover FIN8's New Backdoor Targeting Financial Institutions | https://thehackernews.com/2021/08/researchers-uncover-fin8s-new-backdoor.html | A financially motivated threat actor notorious for setting its sights on retail, hospitality, and entertainment industries has been observed deploying a completely new backdoor on infected systems, indicating the operators are continuously retooling their malware arsenal to avoid detection and stay under the radar.
The previously undocumented malware has been dubbed "Sardonic" by Romanian cybersecurity technology company Bitdefender, which it encountered during a forensic investigation in the wake of an unsuccessful attack carried out by FIN8 aimed at an unnamed financial institution located in the U.S.
Said to be under active development, "Sardonic backdoor is extremely potent and has a wide range of capabilities that help the threat actor leverage new malware on the fly without updating components," Bitdefender researchers Eduard Budaca and Victor Vrabie said in a report shared with The Hacker News.
Since emerging on the scene in January 2016, FIN8 has leveraged a multitude of techniques such as spear-phishing and malicious software such as PUNCHTRACK and BADHATCH to steal payment card data from point-of-sale (POS) systems.
The threat group, which is known for taking extended breaks in between campaigns to fine-tune its tactics and increase the success rate of its operations, conducts cyber incursions primarily through "living off the land" attacks, using built-in tools and interfaces like PowerShell as well as taking advantage of legitimate services like sslip.io to disguise their activity.
Earlier this March, Bitdefender revealed FIN8's return after a year-and-a-half hiatus to target insurance, retail, technology, and chemical industries in the U.S., Canada, South Africa, Puerto Rico, Panama, and Italy with a revamped version of the BADHATCH implant featuring upgraded capabilities, including screen capturing, proxy tunneling, credential theft, and fileless execution.
In the latest incident analyzed by the firm, the attackers are said to have infiltrated the target network to conduct detailed reconnaissance, before carrying out lateral movement and privilege escalation activities to deploy the malware payload. "There were multiple attempts to deploy the Sardonic backdoor on domain controllers in order to continue with privilege escalation and lateral movement, but the malicious command lines were blocked," the researchers said.
Written in C++, Sardonic not only takes steps to establish persistence on the compromised machine, but also comes equipped with capabilities that allow it to obtain system information, execute arbitrary commands, and load and execute additional plugins, the results of which are transmitted to a remote attacker-controlled server.
If anything, the latest development is yet another sign of FIN8's shift in tactics by strengthening its capabilities and malware delivery infrastructure. To mitigate the risk associated with financial malware, companies are recommended to separate their POS networks from those used by employees or guests, train employees to better spot phishing emails, and improve email security solutions to filter potentially suspicious attachments.
| Malware |
Critical Flaw in ESET Antivirus Exposes Mac Users to Remote Hacking | https://thehackernews.com/2017/02/eset-antivirus-mac.html | What could be more exciting for hackers than exploiting a vulnerability in a widely used software without having to struggle too much?
One such easy-to-exploit, but critical vulnerability has been discovered in ESET's antivirus software that could allow any unauthenticated attackers to remotely execute arbitrary code with root privileges on a Mac system.
The critical security flaw, tracked as CVE-2016-9892, in ESET Endpoint Antivirus 6 for macOS was discovered by Google Security Team's researchers Jason Geffner and Jan Bee at the beginning of November 2016.
As detailed in the full disclosure, all a hacker needs to get root-level remote code execution on a Mac computer is to intercept the ESET antivirus package's connection to its backend servers using a self-signed HTTPS certificate, put himself in as a man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacker, and exploit an XML library flaw.
The actual issue was related to a service named esets_daemon, which runs as root. The service is statically linked with an outdated version of the POCO XML parser library, version 1.4.6p1 released in March 2013.
This POCO version is based on a version of the Expat XML parser library version 2.0.1 from 2007, which is affected by a publicly known XML parsing vulnerability (CVE-2016-0718) that could allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code via malicious XML content.
Now, when esets_daemon sent a request to https://edf.eset.com/edf during activation of the ESET Endpoint Antivirus product, an MITM attacker can intercept the request to deliver a malformed XML document using a self-signed HTTPS certificate.
This event triggers the CVE-2016-0718 flaw that executes the malicious code with root privileges when esets_daemon parsed the XML content.
This attack was possible because the ESET antivirus did not validate the web server's certificate.
Here's what the duo explain:
"Vulnerable versions of ESET Endpoint Antivirus 6 are statically linked with an outdated XML parsing library and do not perform proper server authentication, allowing for remote unauthenticated attackers to perform arbitrary code execution as root on vulnerable clients."
Now since the hacker controls the connection, they can send malicious content to the Mac computer in order to hijack the XML parser and execute code as root.
The Google researchers have also released the proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code, which only shows how the ESET antivirus app can be used to cause a crash.
ESET addressed this vulnerability on February 21 by upgrading the POCO parsing library and by configuring its product to verify SSL certificates.
The patch is made available in the release of version 6.4.168.0 of ESET Endpoint Antivirus for macOS. So, make sure your antivirus package is patched up to date.
| Vulnerability |
Researcher Discloses 4 Zero-Day Bugs in IBM's Enterprise Security Software | https://thehackernews.com/2020/04/ibm-data-risk-manager-vulnerabilities.html | A cybersecurity researcher today publicly disclosed technical details and PoC for 4 unpatched zero-day vulnerabilities affecting an enterprise security software offered by IBM after the company refused to acknowledge the responsibly submitted disclosure.
The affected premium product in question is IBM Data Risk Manager (IDRM) that has been designed to analyze sensitive business information assets of an organization and determine associated risks.
According to Pedro Ribeiro from Agile Information Security firm, IBM Data Risk Manager contains three critical severity vulnerabilities and a high impact bug, all listed below, which can be exploited by an unauthenticated attacker reachable over the network, and when chained together could also lead to remote code execution as root.
Authentication Bypass
Command Injection
Insecure Default Password
Arbitrary File Download
Ribeiro successfully tested the flaws against IBM Data Risk Manager version 2.0.1 to 2.0.3, which is not the latest version of the software but believes they also work through 2.0.4 to the newest version 2.0.6 because "there is no mention of fixed vulnerabilities in any change log."
"IDRM is an enterprise security product that handles very sensitive information. A compromise of such a product might lead to a full-scale company compromise, as the tool has credentials to access other security tools, not to mention it contains information about critical vulnerabilities that affect the company," Ribeiro said.
Critical Zero-Day Vulnerabilities in IBM Data Risk Manager
In brief, the authentication bypass flaw exploits a logical error in the session ID feature to reset the password for any existing account, including the administrator.
The command injection flaw resides in the way IBM's enterprise security software lets users perform network scans using Nmap scripts, which apparently can be equipped with malicious commands when supplied by attackers.
According to the vulnerability disclosure, to SSH and run sudo commands, IDRM virtual appliance also has a built-in administrative user with username "a3user" and default password of "idrm," which if left unchanged, could let remote attackers take complete control over the targeted systems.
The last vulnerability resides in an API endpoint that allows authenticated users to download log files from the system. However, according to the researcher, one of the parameters to this endpoint suffers from a directory traversal flaw that could let malicious users download any file from the system.
Besides technical details, the researcher has also released two Metasploit modules for authentication bypass, remote code execution, and arbitrary file download issues.
Ribeiro claims to have reported this issue to IBM via CERT/CC and in response, the company refused to accept the vulnerability report, saying: " We have assessed this report and closed as being out of scope for our vulnerability disclosure program since this product is only for "enhanced" support paid for by our customers."
In response Ribeiro said, "In any case, I did not ask or expect a bounty since I do not have a HackerOne account and I don't agree with HackerOne's or IBM's disclosure terms there. I simply wanted to disclose these to IBM responsibly and let them fix it."
The Hacker News has reached out to IBM, and we will update the article as more information becomes available.
Update:
An IBM spokesperson told The Hacker News that "a process error resulted in an improper response to the researcher who reported this situation to IBM. We have been working on mitigation steps and they will be discussed in a security advisory to be issued."
| Data_Breaches |
Top 12 Security Flaws Russian Spy Hackers Are Exploiting in the Wild | https://thehackernews.com/2021/05/top-11-security-flaws-russian-spy.html | Cyber operatives affiliated with the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) have switched up their tactics in response to previous public disclosures of their attack methods, according to a new advisory jointly published by intelligence agencies from the U.K. and U.S. Friday.
"SVR cyber operators appear to have reacted [...] by changing their TTPs in an attempt to avoid further detection and remediation efforts by network defenders," the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) said.
These include the deployment of an open-source tool called Sliver to maintain their access to compromised victims as well as leveraging the ProxyLogon flaws in Microsoft Exchange servers to conduct post-exploitation activities.
The development follows the public attribution of SVR-linked actors to the SolarWinds supply-chain attack last month. The adversary is also tracked under different monikers, such as Advanced Persistent Threat 29 (APT29), the Dukes, CozyBear, and Yttrium.
The attribution was also accompanied by a technical report detailing five vulnerabilities that the SVR's APT29 group was using as initial access points to infiltrate U.S. and foreign entities.
CVE-2018-13379 - Fortinet FortiGate VPN
CVE-2019-9670 - Synacor Zimbra Collaboration Suite
CVE-2019-11510 - Pulse Secure Pulse Connect Secure VPN
CVE-2019-19781 - Citrix Application Delivery Controller and Gateway
CVE-2020-4006 - VMware Workspace ONE Access
"The SVR targets organisations that align with Russian foreign intelligence interests, including governmental, think-tank, policy and energy targets, as well as more time bound targeting, for example COVID-19 vaccine targeting in 2020," the NCSC said.
This was followed by a separate guidance on April 26 that shed more light on the techniques used by the group to orchestrate intrusions, counting password spraying, exploiting zero-day flaws against virtual private network appliances (e.g., CVE-2019-19781) to obtain network access, and deploying a Golang malware called WELLMESS to plunder intellectual property from multiple organizations involved in COVID-19 vaccine development.
Now according to the NCSC, seven more vulnerabilities have been added into the mix, while noting that APT29 is likely to "rapidly" weaponize recently released public vulnerabilities that could enable initial access to their targets.
CVE-2019-1653 - Cisco Small Business RV320 and RV325 Routers
CVE-2019-2725 - Oracle WebLogic Server
CVE-2019-7609 - Kibana
CVE-2020-5902 - F5 Big-IP
CVE-2020-14882 - Oracle WebLogic Server
CVE-2021-21972 - VMware vSphere
CVE-2021-26855 - Microsoft Exchange Server
"Network defenders should ensure that security patches are applied promptly following CVE announcements for products they manage," the agency said.
| Malware |
9 Android Apps On Google Play Caught Distributing AlienBot Banker and MRAT Malware | https://thehackernews.com/2021/03/9-android-apps-on-google-play-caught.html | Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new malware dropper contained in as many as 9 Android apps distributed via Google Play Store that deploys a second stage malware capable of gaining intrusive access to the financial accounts of victims as well as full control of their devices.
"This dropper, dubbed Clast82, utilizes a series of techniques to avoid detection by Google Play Protect detection, completes the evaluation period successfully, and changes the payload dropped from a non-malicious payload to the AlienBot Banker and MRAT," Check Point researchers Aviran Hazum, Bohdan Melnykov, and Israel Wernik said in a write-up published today.
The apps that were used for the campaign include Cake VPN, Pacific VPN, eVPN, BeatPlayer, QR/Barcode Scanner MAX, Music Player, tooltipnatorlibrary, and QRecorder. After the findings were reported to Google on January 28, the rogue apps were removed from the Play Store on February 9.
Malware authors have resorted to a variety of methods to bypass app store vetting mechanisms. Whether be it using encryption to hide strings from analysis engines, creating rogue versions of legitimate apps, or crafting fake reviews to lure users into downloading the apps, fraudsters have hit back at Google's attempts to secure the platform by constantly developing new techniques to slip through the net.
Equally popular are other methods like versioning, which refers to uploading a clean version of the app to the Play Store to build trust among users and then sneakily adding unwanted code at a later stage via app updates, and incorporating time-based delays to trigger the malicious functionality in an attempt to evade detection by Google.
Clast82 is no different in that it utilizes Firebase as a platform for command-and-control (C2) communication and makes use of GitHub to download the malicious payloads, in addition to leveraging legitimate and known open-source Android applications to insert the Dropper functionality.
"For each application, the actor created a new developer user for the Google Play store, along with a repository on the actor's GitHub account, thus allowing the actor to distribute different payloads to devices that were infected by each malicious application," the researchers noted.
For instance, the malicious Cake VPN app was found to be based on an open-sourced version of its namesake created by a Dhaka-based developer by the name of Syed Ashraf Ullah. But once the app is launched, it takes advantage of the Firebase real-time database to retrieve the payload path from GitHub, which is then installed on the target device.
In the event the option to install apps from unknown sources has been turned off, Clast82 repeatedly urges the user every five seconds with a fake "Google Play Services" prompt to enable the permission, ultimately using it to install AlienBot, an Android banking MaaS (malware-as-a-service) capable of stealing credentials and two-factor authentication codes from financial apps.
Last month, a popular barcode scanner app with over 10 million installations turned rogue with a single update after its ownership changed hands. In a similar development, a Chrome extension by the name of The Great Suspender was deactivated following reports that the add-on stealthily added features that could be exploited to execute arbitrary code from a remote server.
"The hacker behind Clast82 was able to bypass Google Play's protections using a creative, but concerning, methodology," Hazum said. "With a simple manipulation of readily available 3rd party resources — like a GitHub account, or a FireBase account — the hacker was able to leverage readily available resources to bypass Google Play Store's protections. The victims thought they were downloading an innocuous utility app from the official Android market, but what they were really getting was a dangerous trojan coming straight for their financial accounts."
| Malware |
TRITON Malware Targeting Critical Infrastructure Could Cause Physical Damage | https://thehackernews.com/2017/12/triton-ics-scada-malware.html | Security researchers have uncovered another nasty piece of malware designed specifically to target industrial control systems (ICS) with a potential to cause health and life-threatening accidents.
Dubbed Triton, also known as Trisis, the ICS malware has been designed to target Triconex Safety Instrumented System (SIS) controllers made by Schneider Electric—an autonomous control system that independently monitors the performance of critical systems and takes immediate actions automatically, if a dangerous state is detected.
Researchers from the Mandiant division of security firm FireEye published a report on Thursday, suggesting state-sponsored attackers used the Triton malware to cause physical damage to an organization.
Neither the targeted organization name has been disclosed by the researchers nor they have linked the attack to any known nation-state hacking group.
According to separate research conducted by ICS cybersecurity firm Dragos, which calls this malware "TRISIS," the attack was launched against an industrial organization in the Middle East.
Triton leverages the proprietary TriStation protocol, which is an engineering and maintenance tool used by Triconex SIS products and is not publicly documented, suggesting that the attackers reverse engineered it when creating their malware.
"The attacker gained remote access to an SIS engineering workstation and deployed the TRITON attack framework to reprogram the SIS controllers," FireEye researchers said.
The hackers deployed Triton on an SIS engineering workstation running Windows operating system by masquerading it as the legitimate Triconex Trilog application.
The current version of TRITON malware that researchers analyzed was built with many features, "including the ability to read and write programs, read and write individual functions and query the state of the SIS controller."
"During the incident, some SIS controllers entered a failed safe state, which automatically shut down the industrial process and prompted the asset owner to initiate an investigation," the researchers said.
Using TRITON, an attacker can typically reprogram the SIS logic to falsely shut down a process that is actuality in a safe state. Though such scenario would not cause any physical damage, organizations can face financial losses due to process downtime.
Besides this, attackers can also cause severe life-threatening damages by reprogramming the SIS logic to allow unsafe conditions to persist or by intentionally manipulating the processes to achieve unsafe state first.
"The attacker deployed TRITON shortly after gaining access to the SIS system, indicating that they had pre-built and tested the tool which would require access to hardware and software that is not widely available."
Researchers believe Triton is emerging as a severe threat to critical infrastructures, just like Stuxnet, IronGate, and Industroyer, because of its capabilities to cause physical damage or shut down operations.
Researchers at Symantec have also provided a brief analysis here.
| Malware |
Comodo Forums Hack Exposes 245,000 Users' Data — Recent vBulletin 0-day Used | https://thehackernews.com/2019/10/Comodo-vbulletin-hacked.html | If you have an account with the Comodo discussion board and support forums, also known as ITarian Forum, you should change your password immediately.
Cybersecurity company Comodo has become one of the major victims of a recently disclosed vBulletin 0-day vulnerability, exposing login account information of over nearly 245,000 users registered with the Comodo Forums websites.
In a brief security notice published earlier today, Comodo admitted the data breach, revealing that an unknown attacker exploited the vBulletin vulnerability (CVE-2019-16759) and potentially gained access to Comodo Forums database.
It's worth noting that Comodo forum was hacked on September 29, almost four days after vBulletin developers released a patch to let administrators address the vulnerability, but the company failed to apply the patches on time.
As The Hacker News broke the news last week, an anonymous hacker publicly disclosed details of a critical then-unpatched vulnerability in vBulletin—one of the widely used internet forum software—which could have allowed remote attackers to execute arbitrary commands on the web server.
However, Comodo has not specified which of the company's forums has been hacked out of the two separate forums it owns.
One the forums, "forums.comodo.com," is hosted at Comodo's own sub-domain and is powered by the different forum software, called Simple Machines Forum, and appears not to be impacted.
The second forum, which runs over the vBulletin software and has likely been hacked, is ITarian Forum hosted at "forum.itarian.com," a discussion board where the company offers technical assistance to the users of its products.
What Type of Information Was Accessed?
The breached database contains forum users' information, including:
Login username
Name
Email address
Hashed passwords
Last IP address used to access the forums
Some social media usernames in very limited situations.
The company became aware of the security breach over the weekend on September 29 morning, which suggests users registered on Comodo Forums until this Sunday are impacted by the breach.
"Very recently a new vulnerability in the vBulletin software, which is one of the most popular server applications for website comments including the Comodo Forums, was made public," the company says.
"Over the weekend at 4:57 am ET on Sunday, September 29, 2019, we became aware that this security flaw in the vBulletin software had become exploited resulting in a potential data breach on the Comodo Forums."
Immediately after detecting the security intrusion, the Comodo IT infrastructure team immediately took the forums offline in an attempt to mitigate the vBulletin exploit and applied the recommended security patches.
What Users Should Do Now?
If you have registered with Comodo Forums on or before September 29, you are highly recommended to immediately change the password for your forum account to a strong and unique one and for any other online account where you use the same credentials.
Although the account passwords were hashed in vBulletin for the Comodo Forum users, Comodo advises users to change their passwords as part of good password practices.
"We deeply regret any inconvenience or distress this vulnerability may have caused you, our users," the company says.
"As members of our community of Comodo Forum users, we want to reassure you that we have put in place measures to ensure that vulnerabilities in third-party software, such as vBulletin, will be patched immediately when patches become available."
Besides this, at the time of writing, the company has also temporarily disabled the registration for new users on the affected forums, The Hacker News confirmed.
| Data_Breaches |
Flaw Affecting Millions of Cisco Devices Let Attackers Implant Persistent Backdoor | https://thehackernews.com/2019/05/cisco-secure-boot-bypass.html | Researchers have discovered a severe vulnerability in Cisco products that could allow attackers to implant persistent backdoor on wide range devices used in enterprises and government networks, including routers, switches, and firewalls.
Dubbed Thrangrycat or 😾😾😾, the vulnerability, discovered by researchers from the security firm Red Balloon and identified as CVE-2019-1649, affects multiple Cisco products that support Trust Anchor module (TAm).
Trust Anchor module (TAm) is a hardware-based Secure Boot functionality implemented in almost all of Cisco enterprise devices since 2013 that ensures the firmware running on hardware platforms is authentic and unmodified.
However, researchers found a series of hardware design flaws that could allow an authenticated attacker to make the persistent modification to the Trust Anchor module via FPGA bitstream modification and load the malicious bootloader.
"An attacker with root privileges on the device can modify the contents of the FPGA anchor bitstream, which is stored unprotected in flash memory. Elements of this bitstream can be modified to disable critical functionality in the TAm," researchers said.
"Successful modification of the bitstream is persistent, and the Trust Anchor will be disabled in subsequent boot sequences. It is also possible to lock out any software updates to the TAm's bitstream."
Chaining With Remote Bugs: No Physical Access Required
Since the vulnerability exploitation requires root privileges, an advisory released by Cisco stressed that only a local attacker with physical access to the targeted system could write a modified firmware image to the component.
However, Red Balloon researchers explained that attackers could also exploit the Thrangrycat vulnerability remotely by chaining it together with other flaws that could allow them to gain root access or, at least, execute commands as root.
To demonstrated this attack, researchers revealed an RCE vulnerability (CVE-2019-1862) in the web-based user interface of Cisco's IOS operating system that allows a logged-in administrator to remotely execute arbitrary commands on the underlying Linux shell of an affected device with root privileges.
After gaining root access, the rogue administrator can then remotely bypass Trust Anchor module (TAm) on a targeted device using the Thrangrycat vulnerability and install a malicious backdoor.
Here's what makes this vulnerability more severe:
"By chaining the 😾😾😾 and remote command injection vulnerabilities, an attacker can remotely and persistently bypass Cisco's secure boot mechanism and lock out all future software updates to the TAm," researchers said.
"Since the flaws reside within the hardware design, it is unlikely that any software security patch will fully resolve the fundamental security vulnerability."
While researchers tested the vulnerabilities against Cisco ASR 1001-X routers, hundreds of millions of Cisco units running an FPGA-based TAm around the world—which includes everything from enterprise routers to network switches and firewalls—are vulnerable.
Red Balloon Security privately reported the issues to Cisco in November 2018 and only release some details to the public after Cisco issued firmware patches to address both flaws and listed all affected products.
Cisco said the company did not detect attacks exploiting any of these two vulnerabilities.
The full details of the vulnerabilities will be released at this year's Black Hat USA security conference in August.
| Malware |
The Snappening — Snapchat Hacker Threatens to Leak thousands of Images | https://thehackernews.com/2014/10/the-snappening-snapchat-hacker_10.html | The waves of celebrities photos have not yet stopped completely, and a new privacy threat has emerged exposing tens of thousands of private photographs and videos of innocent users are circulating over the Internet.
The personal image that are believed to be sent through Snapchat — the ephemeral messaging service that allows users to send pictures that should disappear after a few seconds — has been floating on the image based 4chan's notorious /b/ board since last night. The incident was result of a security breach in an unofficial third-party app for Snapchat.
Earlier this week, an anonymous 4chan user claimed to have obtained images on Snapchat and then the user warned of releasing thousands of videos and images sent using Snapchat soon in an event dubbed 'The Snappening'.
Previously, It was believed that the official SnapChat mobile app or its servers had been hacked by the hackers, and the third-party Snapchat client app has been collecting every photo and video file sent through the messaging service for years, giving hackers access to a 13GB private Snapchat files.
But Snapchat has denied that its service was ever compromised. Earlier today, Snapchat issued a statement about the "Snappening" and blamed its consumers for using unofficial and unauthorized third-party apps.
"We can confirm that Snapchat's servers were never breached and were not the source of these leaks,' a Snapchat representative said in a statement. "Snapchatters were victimised by their use of third-party apps to send and receive Snaps, a practice that we expressly prohibit in our Terms of Use precisely because they compromise our users' security. We vigilantly monitor the App Store and Google Play for illegal third-party apps and have succeeded in getting many of these removed."
The most worrying part for the users is that Snapchat was right. The personal data is supposed to be obtained from a website called SnapSaved.com — an external app used by a number of Snapchatters in order to save Snapchat photos without the sender knowing — which has been inactive for the past few months and is apparently independent of the official Snapchat service.
However, Business Insider has pointed to SnapSaved.com, a site which is no longer functional, and the SnapSave app as potential sources of the leak. Meanwhile, an assortment of photos has been traced back to SnapchatLeaked.com — site also posted personal and photos of Snapchat users, indicating that the photos could have been circulating for months.
"The Snappening" is named in reference to the recent celebrity photos leak that was called "The Fappening." The incident comes just weeks after thousands of celebrity images were leaked online through 4chan website, following a hack of Apple's iCloud.
Snapchat was first hacked in December 2013 when 4.6 million Snapchat users were exposed in a database breach. Later, the denial-of-service attack and CAPTCHA Security bypass vulnerabilities were discovered by the researchers at the beginning of this year.
| Data_Breaches |
New Android Exploit Could Force Factory Reset remotely | https://thehackernews.com/2012/09/new-android-exploit-could-force-factory.html | Clicking one wrong link can cause malicious code to execute, which could do anything from infecting your computer with malware to, apparently, wiping your phone data completely. At the Ekoparty security conference, researcher Ravi Borganokar demonstrated at the Ekoparty security conference in Argentina last week, that how a single line of HTML code could be used to run a factory reset or even clear the SIM card on certain Samsung phones.
Malicious hackers can hide a code in a web page that will trigger a full factory reset of Samsung's best-selling Galaxy S3 smartphone, deleting contacts, photographs, music, apps and other valuable data.
The devastating flaw lies in Samsung's dialling software, triggered by the tel protocol in a URL. It isn't applicable to all the company's Android handsets, but those that are vulnerable can have their PIN changed or be wiped completely just by visiting a web page or snapping a bad QR code, or even bonking up against the wrong wireless NFC tag. The tel protocol is generally used with phone numbers to provide clickable "call me" links on websites: tapping on the hyperlink in the handset's web browser opens up the dialling software and calls the number contained in the link.
Samsung is currently looking into the issue further, and details are still coming out about which devices are affected. For the time being, however, it appears that only Samsung phones running TouchWiz are susceptible (so not the Galaxy Nexus or any device running stock Android), and only if the malicious URL is loaded in the stock browser, rather than Chrome. The current fix for the issue is to disable automatic site loading in QR and NFC readers, and be careful about clicking potentially dodgy links.
| Vulnerability |
Hackers Breach Stack Overflow Q&A Site, Some Users' Data Exposed | https://thehackernews.com/2019/05/stack-overflow-databreach.html | Note: We have updated this story to reflect new information after Stack Overflow changed its original announcement and shared more details on the security incident.
Stack Overflow, one of the largest question and answer site for programmers, revealed today that unknown hackers managed to exploit a bug in its development tier and then almost a week after they gained unauthorized access to its production version.
Founded by Jeff Atwood and Joel Spolsky in 2008, Stack Overflow is the flagship site of the Stack Exchange Network. With 10 million registered users and over 50 million unique visitors every month, Stack Overflow is very popular among professional and enthusiast programmers.
In an older version of the announcement published by Mary Ferguson, VP of Engineering at Stack Overflow, the company confirmed the breach but said it did not find any evidence that hackers accessed customers' accounts or any user data.
However, the updated announcement now says that after sitting quiet for a week, hackers executed privileged web requests, but were able to gain access to a very small portion of data, including IP address, names, and email address—and that for only a small number of users.
"Between May 5 and May 11, the intruder contained their activities to exploration. On May 11, the intruder made a change to our system to grant themselves a privileged access on production. This change was quickly identified and we revoked their access network-wide, began investigating the intrusion, and began taking steps to remediate the intrusion."
"We can now confirm that our investigation suggests the requests in question affected approximately 250 public network users. Affected users will be notified by us," Ferguson said.
The company also revealed hackers exploited a bug that was introduced in a recently deployed built to the development tier for the Stack Overflow website.
Stack Overflow said the company is patching all known vulnerabilities.
"We discovered and investigated the extent of the access and are addressing all known vulnerabilities," Ferguson said.
"As part of our security procedures to protect sensitive customer data, we maintain separate infrastructure and networks for clients of our Teams, Business, and Enterprise products and we have found no evidence that those systems or customer data were accessed. Our Advertising and Talent businesses were also not impacted by this intrusion."
Late last year, another popular question and answer website Quora suffered a massive data breach with hackers gaining access to sensitive information of about 100 million of its users, including their names, email addresses, hashed password, and personal messages.
| Cyber_Attack |
Download Tortilla Tool - Anonymize everything through Tor | https://thehackernews.com/2013/07/Tortilla-Tool-download-TOR-anonymity.html | Recent disclosures by whistleblower Edward Snowden claiming that internet traffic is being intercepted and used by the Americans in their war on terror, force to re-think about the user's privacy and online anonymity.
It has been relatively common knowledge for years that wherever we go on the web, we leave clear tracks, so it shouldn't really have come as much of a surprise to discover this has been going on.
The best thing you can do to stay anonymous online is to hide your IP address. If someone knows your IP address, it is the easiest way to trace your online activity back to you and they can easily determine the geographic location of the server that hosts that address and get a rough idea of where you're located.
TOR is a network of virtual tunnels that allows people and groups to improve their privacy and security on the Internet. Browsing with TOR is a lot like simultaneously using hundreds of different proxies that are randomized periodically.
Tor Browser Bundle includes its own version of Firefox to preserve anonymity, but plugins such as Flash don't work with the bundle. For Malware analysts never want to disclose their IP address/Location while testing the Malware samples, or for analysis or communicating with command-and-control servers, TOR is not enough.
Tortilla creator Jason Geffner
CrowdStrike researcher Jason Geffner released an open source free new tool, called Tortilla, a new tool to securely, anonymously, and transparently route all TCP/IP and DNS traffic through Tor, regardless of the client software, and without relying on VPNs or additional hardware or virtual machines.
This new tool also supports Flash and other plug-ins, and doesn't require additional hardware or virtual machines. Jason released Tortilla at Black Hat Conference this year. Online Activists, Hackers and Bad people also love anonymity, which means the Tortilla Tool is ideal for those not wanting to be tracked or overheard.
Download Tortilla Tool
| Malware |
DDoS Attacker Who Ruined Gamers' Christmas Gets 27 Months in Prison | https://thehackernews.com/2019/07/christmas-ddos-attacks.html | A 23-year-old hacker from Utah who launched a series of DDoS attacks against multiple online services, websites, and online gaming companies between December 2013 and January 2014 has been sentenced to 27 months in prison.
Austin Thompson, a.k.a. "DerpTroll," pledged guilty back in November 2018 after he admitted to being a part of DerpTrolling, a hacker group that was behind DDoS attacks against several major online gaming platforms including Electronic Arts' Origin service, Sony PlayStation network, and Valve Software's Steam during Christmas.
"Thompson typically used the Twitter account @DerpTrolling to announce that an attack was imminent and then posted "scalps" (screenshots or other photos showing that victims' servers had been taken down) after the attack," the DoJ says.
According to a U.S. Department of Justice press release published Wednesday, Thompson's actions caused the victim companies at least $95,000 in damages. The defendant was arrested in summer last year.
In addition to the prison sentence, the DoJ has also ordered the defendant to pay $95,000 in restitution to Daybreak Games, formerly Sony Online Entertainment.
Thompson is currently free on bond and has been ordered to surrender to authorities on 23rd August 2019 in order to begin his sentence.
"Denial-of-service attacks cost businesses and individuals millions of dollars annually," US Attorney Robert Brewer said. "We are committed to prosecuting hackers who intentionally disrupt internet access."
However, it wasn't just DerpTrolling that created chaos in 2014 by disrupting online gaming servers owned by Sony, Microsoft, Riot Games, Nintendo, Valve, and Electronic Arts.
Lizard Squad, an infamous hacking group, also made headlines in year 2014 by launching DDoS attacks against Microsoft's Xbox Live and Sony's PlayStation Network and knocking them offline during the Christmas holidays.
Several teenagers have since been arrested and charged around the world for participating in the Lizard Squad 2014 DDoS attacks.
Julius Kivimaki, one of the Lizard Squad members who was arrested by Finnish authorities in late 2014, was convicted in Finland in July 2015, receiving a suspended prison sentence of two years for his actions.
| Cyber_Attack |
The Hottest Malware Hits of the Summer | https://thehackernews.com/2019/09/its-been-summer-of-ransomware-hold-ups.html | It's been a summer of ransomware hold-ups, supply chain attacks and fileless attacks flying under the radar of old-school security. With malware running amok while we were lying on the beach, here's a recap of the most burning strains and trends seen in the wild during the months of July and August 2019.
Malware Evolution Trends
The heat must have had an effect as this summer saw malware continuing to evolve, particularly around three core trends:
Evasion-by-design
Malware has been increasingly designed to bypass security controls leveraging a host of tactics, most notably by:
Changing hashes via file obfuscation to evade AVs.
Using encrypted communication with C2 servers to foil EDRs.
Using feature manipulation and tampering to trick AI, machine-learning engines, and sandboxes through the detection of such environments and the deliberate delay in execution.
Fileless Attacks and Living-Off-The-Land (LOTL)
Taking evasion techniques one step further, an increasing number of strains are leveraging PowerShell commands and masquerading as legitimate system tools, all while running completely from memory (RAM) to fly under the radar of traditional IoC-based solutions and requiring behavior-based analysis to detect.
(Jack-in-the-box)2 or Jack-in-the-box, Squared
No thanks to underground botnet-as-a-service businesses, whole botnets of compromised systems are rented out to hackers, through which they can leverage ready-made access to live and well systems to simultaneously unleash multiple malware strains at their disposal. For example, Emotet serving IcedID (Bokbot) followed by Trickbot or the Ryuk ransomware.
Deadliest Immediate Threats
What were this summer's most exotic and lethal malware strains? Here's a roundup.
Astaroth Malware Uses Living-Off-The-Land (LOTL) Techniques
Targeting European and Brazilian organizations, and posing an immediate threat to 76% of organizations who tested their resilience to it, according to the Cymulate Research Lab, the fileless Astaroth malware evades traditional IoC-based security controls, stealing user credentials, including PII, system and financial data.
Credit: Microsoft
At no point during the entire attack kill chain does Astaroth drop any executable files on disk, or use any file that is not a system tool, running its payload completely in memory (RAM).
Sodinokibi Exploits a CVE to Push Ransomware Via MSP websites
The Sodinokibi ("Sodi") ransomware is rare in its usage of a Windows vulnerability, namely CVE-2018-8453 patched by Microsoft last year, which enables gaining admin-level access. Suspected to be the successor of the GandCrab ransomware-as-a-service, Sodinokibi is disseminated through managed service providers' (MSP) websites, a form of supply chain attacks, where download links are replaced with the ransomware executable. Initially suspected as being offered as a service in the underground because of its 'master encryption key' approach, it has been confirmed that this is, in fact, the case.
#Sodinokibi #REvil Ransomware as a Service arrived in russian hacking forum. pic.twitter.com/inT5BYWDIN
— Damian (@Damian1338) August 28, 2019
The good news is that none of the organizations simulating this specific variant were found to be vulnerable; however, the exposure rate for other Sodi variants during this summer ranged between 60% and 77%, depending on the strain tested.
GermanWiper Ransomware Adds Insult to Injury
Targeting German-speaking countries, GermanWiper does not really encrypt files. Rather, it overwrites all the victim's content with zeroes, irreversibly destroying their data. The ransom note is therefore bogus, rendering any payments made useless, and making offline backups crucial for recovery.
Posing as a job application with a CV attachment, the malware is spread via email spam campaigns. 64% of organizations simulating GermanWiper appeared to be vulnerable when testing controls against it.
MegaCortex Ransomware Extorts US and EU-based Enterprises
Posing a threat to 70% of organizations, based on attack simulations performed, MegaCortex deliberately targets larger firms in a bid to extort larger sums of cash, ranging from $2M-$6M in bitcoin. The MegaCortex operators compromise servers critical to businesses and encrypt them and any other systems connected to the host.
This ransomware was originally executed using a payload encrypted with a password that was manually entered during a live infection. In its newer strain, this password is hardcoded along with other features that have been automated, such as security evasion techniques. The malware has also evolved to decrypt and run its payload from memory.
Silence APT Spreads Malware Targeting Banks Worldwide
The Russian-speaking advanced persistent threat (APT) group is one of the most sophisticated in the world and has recently updated its TTPs to encrypt critical strings, including commands issued to bots in order to evade detection. Initially sending recon emails to potential victims to identify the easy-clickers, after initial infection, the hackers now spread additional malware to victims either through their rewritten TrueBot loader or through a fileless loader called Ivoke, hiding C2 communications through DNS tunneling. Over the past year, the group has amassed an estimated $4 million.
84% of organizations are vulnerable to the strain released this summer, according to Cymulate data.
Turla Attacks Govt's using Hijacked Oilrig APT Group's Servers
Specifically targeting governments and international bodies, Turla was seen to hijack infrastructure belonging to the Iranian-linked Oilrig APT group. Using a combination of custom malware, modified versions of publicly-available hacking tools and legitimate admin software, the group has been moving towards LOTL techniques, and its victims include ministries, governments, and communications technology organizations in ten different countries.
70% of organizations were found vulnerable to this threat at the time of security testing.
Looking to assess your organization's security posture now that the summer is over? Explore how breach and attack simulation can provide you with the immediate, actionable insights you need.
| Malware |
Warning: Critical Tor Browser Vulnerability Leaks Users' Real IP Address—Update Now | https://thehackernews.com/2017/11/tor-browser-real-ip.html | If you follow us on Twitter, you must be aware that since yesterday we have been warning Mac and Linux users of the Tor anonymity browser about a critical vulnerability that could leak their real IP addresses to potential attackers when they visit certain types of web pages.
Discovered by Italian security researcher Filippo Cavallarin, the vulnerability resides in FireFox that eventually also affects Tor Browser, since the privacy-aware service that allows users to surf the web anonymously uses FireFox at its core.
Dubbed by the researcher as TorMoil, the vulnerability affects Tor browser for macOS and Linux and not for Windows, but keeping in mind the security and privacy of Tor users, details about this flaw has not been yet publicly revealed.
Cavallarin, CEO of the security firm We Are Segment, privately reported the security vulnerability to Tor developers on Thursday (October 26), and the Tor developers have rolled out an emergency update Tor version 7.0.8.
According to a short blog post published Tuesday by We Are Segment, the TorMoil vulnerability is due to a Firefox issue in "handling file:// URLs."
Important: Tor Browser 7.0.9 is released (Linux/MacOS users) - Fixes a critical security flaw that leaks IP address https://t.co/gITj8F7DnW
— The Hacker News (@TheHackersNews) November 3, 2017
TorMoil is triggered when users click on links that begin with file:// addresses, instead of the more common https:// and https:// addresses.
"Due to a Firefox bug in handling file:// URLs it is possible on both systems that users leak their IP address," the blog post reads.
"Once an affected user [running macOS or Linux system] navigates to a specially crafted web page, the operating system may directly connect to the remote host, bypassing Tor Browser."
The Tor Project has currently issued a temporary workaround to prevent the real IP leakage.
So, macOS and Linux users may found the updated versions of the Tor anonymity browser not behaving properly while navigating to file:// addresses, until a permanent patch becomes available.
"The fix we deployed is just a workaround stopping the leak. As a result of that navigating file:// URLs in the browser might not work as expected anymore. In particular entering file:// URLs in the URL bar and clicking on resulting links is broken," the Tor Project said in a blog post published Friday.
"Opening those in a new tab or new window does not work either. A workaround for those issues is dragging the link into the URL bar or on a tab instead. We track this follow-up regression in bug 24136."
According to the Tor Project, users of both the Windows versions of Tor, Tails and the sandboxed-tor-browser that's in alpha testing are not affected.
The Tor Project also said there's no evidence the TorMoil vulnerability has been actively exploited by hackers to obtain the IP addresses of Tor users.
However, lack of evidence does not prove the bug was not exploited by nation-state attackers and skilled hackers, given the high-demand of Tor zero-day exploit in the market, where Zerodium is ready to pay anyone $1 Million for its exploit.
In an attempt to keep its users' privacy protected, the Tor Project has recently announced the release of Tor 0.3.2.1-alpha that includes support for the next generation onion services, with the integration of new cutting-edge encryption and improvement of overall authentication into its web service.
| Vulnerability |
Beware of Fake Android Antivirus and Mobile Ransomware | https://thehackernews.com/2013/07/Android-Ransomware-malware-mohit-kumar-hacker.html | "Ransomware" may be a term you haven't heard before. This type of criminal malware, which spread around the world on PCs in 2012, encrypts some or all the files on a computer and holds them for ransom and Cyber thieves have already made millions through such methods.
Ransomware is no longer all about computers. It has evolved to now target mobile devices, specifically Androids platform. For a hacker, a pop up message is just one more way to steal money by sending fake alerts and serious warnings that scare a user into making a payment.
For example, in the case of PCs, we have encountered malware that encrypts crucial data on a user's hard disk, asking the victim to pay a sum to the attacker in order to recover his/her data.
Last year in November at many Hacking Conferences, Security Researcher Mohit Kumar (@Unix_Root) already demonstrated one the most sophisticated android malware called "Android Malware Engine", one of its kind yet , that includes the first Android malware Mobile Ransomware worm ever seen.
Last month Symantec had discovered bogus android antivirus software, dubbed Fakedefender.
The Fake Android Defender application displays a false malware detection in an effort to gain the victim's confidence and to con you into paying for software to remove the infection, while ransomware locks up your mobile device and prevents you from using it at all until the ransom is paid.
You won't be able to open any new apps, and ultimately will make your device unusable, until you pay for it. Ransom demands vary and can be anywhere between $30-$100. Cybercriminals have been found to earn up to $30,000 a day on scams such as these!
The key to staying protected against these threats is to ensure that you do not get them onto your device in the first place. Android is open and allows you to download and install apps from virtually anywhere, but those apps might not be vetted and often can't be trusted.
This year at 'The Hackers Conference', Mohit Kumar is going to talk about "RiskyDroid - Malicious and Spying backdoors in Popular Android applications". Their presentation will cover the demonstrations of amazing Surveillance, Malicious and Dangerous backdoors in top Rated popular Android applications. Android has something more important than a normal cell phone like email accounts, bank accounts, your personal pictures, your call recordings and many more and do you really think that your Droid is perfectly safe and all your personal information is in safe hand with Google, Facebook, WeChat, Whatsapp or Truecaller ? If yes, then you are in big trouble!
Make sure you are going to attend 'The Hackers Conference' 2013 this year in New Delhi on August 25th 2103 to understand that how genuine applications are Spying on you for Intelligence Information Gathering and stealing your Private Data, exploiting your Privacy.
| Malware |
Koler Android Ransomware Learns to Spread via SMS | https://thehackernews.com/2014/10/koler-android-ransomware-learns-to.html | Users of Android operating system are warned of a new variant of Android malware Koler that spreads itself via text message and holds the victim's infected mobile phone hostage until a ransom is paid.
Researchers observed the Koler Android ransomware Trojan, at the very first time, in May when the Trojan was distributed through certain pornographic websites under the guise of legitimate apps. It locks the victim's mobile screen and then demands money from users with fake notifications from law enforcement agencies accusing users of viewing and storing child pornography.
ANDROID SMS WORM
Recently, researchers from mobile security firm AdaptiveMobile has discovered a new variant of the rare piece of mobile malware – named Worm.Koler – that allows the malware to spread via text message spam and attempts to trick users into opening a shortened bit.ly URL, turning Koler into an SMS worm.
Once the device is infected by the Koler variant, it will first send an SMS message to all contacts in the device's address book with a text stating, "Someone made a profile named -[the contact's name]- and he uploaded some of your photos! is that you?" followed by a Bitly link, according to the security firm.
When a victim clicks on the Bitly link, he or she is then redirected to a Dropbox page with a download link for a 'PhotoViewer' app that, if installed, will push a ransom screen to pop up incessantly on the users' screen. The ransom message reads that the device has been locked up because of having illicit content and users must pay $300 via MoneyPak to 'wave the accusations.'
"The device appears to be completely locked down with the screen on the phone blocked, so the user won't be able to close the window, or deactivate the malware through the app manager," reads the blog post. "The victim is forced to buy a voucher as instructed on the blocking page, and send the voucher code to a malware author."
INFECTION SPREADING RAPIDLY
The Worm.Koler is capable of displaying localized ransomware messages to users from at least 30 countries, including the U.S., where three quarters of the latest Koler variant infections were seen by the firm, and smaller number of infections were also being detected in parts of the Middle East.
"Due to the Worm.Koler's SMS distribution mechanism, we are seeing a rapid spread of infected devices since the 19th of October, which we believe to be the original outbreak date," the blog post states. "During this short period, we have detected several hundred phones that exhibit signs of infection, across multiple US carriers. In addition to this, other mobile operators worldwide—predominantly in the Middle East, have been affected by this malware."
HOW TO PROTECT YOURSELF
If users suspect they are infected by the malware, they should never authorize any payment as it won't guarantee the unlocking of your device, as well as it will further encourage cyber criminals to carry out such ransomware practices again and again.
Koler does not encrypt files, according to the security firm, therefore it becomes easy for users to eliminate the threat from their infected devices by following two simple steps:
Reboot your phone in the "Safe Mode"
Remove the 'PhotoViewer' app using standard Android app uninstallation tool
In order to protect yourself from such threats in future, the best practice is to have the "Unknown Sources" option turned off in your Android device' security settings menu. Turning off of this option won't let users to install applications from unknown sources, but only from the official Google Play store.
| Malware |
Crowd-Funding site Kickstarter Hacked! It's time to change your Password | https://thehackernews.com/2014/02/Kickstarter-hacked-password-data-breach.html | If you have an account at the popular crowd funding site Kickstarter, it's time to change your account's password. Kickstarter's CEO Yancey Strickler says that the company has been hacked by an unknown hacker earlier this week.
Kickstarter said in a blog post that no credit card information was stolen in Data Breach, but users' personal information has been compromised and they also haven't found evidence of unauthorized activities on accounts.
Data accessed and stolen by hackers included usernames, email addresses, mailing addresses, phone numbers and encrypted passwords of the users. Facebook usernames and logins were not compromised for those who use that log-in system to get on Kickstarter.
According to a Kickstarter's team member, the older users' passwords were encrypted using salted SHA1 and newer users' passwords are encrypted with a stronger hashing algorithm called 'bcrypt'.
Hackers could attempt to crack the encrypted passwords, thus providing them access to a password that's linked to a specific user account. So users are recommended to change their passwords for Kickstarter website and also for any other accounts that using the same password. "To change your password, log in to your Kickstarter account and look for the banner at the top of the page to create a new, secure password."
Kickstarter did not say how many accounts were compromised, but the site has more than 5.9 million registered users.
"Upon learning this, we immediately closed the security breach and began strengthening security measures throughout the Kickstarter system." Yancey Strickler said.
| Data_Breaches |
Hackers Breach ZoneAlarm's Forum Site — Outdated vBulletin to Blame | https://thehackernews.com/2019/11/zonealarm-forum-data-breach.html | ZoneAlarm, an internet security software company owned by Israeli cybersecurity firm Check Point Technologies, has suffered a data breach exposing data of its discussion forum users, the company confirmed The Hacker News.
With nearly 100 million downloads, ZoneAlarm offers antivirus software, firewall, and additional virus protection solutions to home PC users, small businesses, and mobile phones worldwide.
Though neither ZoneAlarm or its parent company Check Point has yet publicly disclosed the security incident, the company quietly sent an alert via email to all affected users over this weekend, The Hacker News learned.
The email-based breach notification advised ZoneAlarm forum users to immediately change their forum account passwords, informing them hackers have unauthorizedly gained access to their names, email addresses, hashed passwords, and date of births.
Moreover, the company has also clarified that the security incident only affects users registered with the "forums.zonealarm.com" domain, which has a small number of subscribers, nearly 4,500.
"This [forum] is a separate website from any other website we have and used only by a small number of subscribers who registered to this specific forum," the email notification reads.
"The website became inactive in order to fix the problem and will resume as soon as it is fixed. You will be requested to reset your password once joining the forum."
Hackers Exploited Recent vBulletin 0-Day Flaw
Upon reaching out to the company, a spokesperson confirmed The Hacker News that attackers exploited a known critical RCE vulnerability (CVE-2019-16759) in the vBulletin forum software to compromise ZoneAlarm's website and gain unauthorized access.
For those unaware, this flaw affected vBulletin versions 5.0.0 up to the latest 5.5.4, for which the project maintainers later released patch updates, but only for recent versions 5.5.2, 5.5.3, and 5.5.4.
The Hacker News found that, surprisingly, the security company itself was running an outdated 5.4.4 version of the vBulletin software until last week that let attackers compromise the website easily.
It's the same then-zero-day vBulletin exploit that an anonymous hacker publicly disclosed in late September this year, which, if exploited, could allow remote attackers to take full control over unpatched vBulletin installations.
Moreover, a week after that, the same flaw was also exploited by unknown attackers to hack the Comodo forum website, which exposed login account information of over nearly 245,000 Comodo Forums users.
Though the ZoneAlarm team learned about the breach just late last week and immediately informed affected users, it's unclear exactly when the attackers breached the website.
"ZoneAlarm is conducting an investigation into the matter. We take pride in the fact that we took a proactive approach once this incident was detected and within 24 hours and alerted the forum members," the company's spokesperson told the Hacker News.
Since the ZoneAlarm forum website is down at the time of writing, users would not be able to change their account password on the forum at this moment.
But if you are one of the affected users, you are also recommended to change your passwords for any other online account where you use the same credentials, and do the same for the ZoneForum website as soon as the site goes live again.
| Data_Breaches |
US Postal Service Left 60 Million Users Data Exposed For Over a Year | https://thehackernews.com/2018/11/usps-data-breach.html | The United States Postal Service has patched a critical security vulnerability that exposed the data of more than 60 million customers to anyone who has an account at the USPS.com website.
The U.S.P.S. is an independent agency of the American federal government responsible for providing postal service in the United States and is one of the few government agencies explicitly authorized by the United States Constitution.
The vulnerability is tied to an authentication weakness in an application programming interface (API) for the USPS "Informed Visibility" program designed to help business customers track mail in real-time.
60 Million USPS Users' Data Exposed
According to the cybersecurity researcher, who has not disclosed his identity, the API was programmed to accept any number of "wildcard" search parameters, enabling anyone logged in to usps.com to query the system for account details belonging to any other user.
In other words, the attacker could have pulled off email addresses, usernames, user IDs, account numbers, street addresses, phone numbers, authorized users and mailing campaign data from as many as 60 million USPS customer accounts.
"APIs are turning out to be a double-edged sword when it comes to internet scale B2B connectivity and security. APIs, when insecure, break down the very premise of uber connectivity they have helped establish," Setu Kulkarni, VP of strategy and business development at WhiteHat Security told The Hacker News.
"To avoid similar flaws, government agencies and companies must be proactive, not just reactive, in regards to application security. Every business that handles consumer data needs to make security a consistent, top-of-mind concern with an obligation to perform the strictest security tests against vulnerable avenues: APIs, network connections, mobile apps, websites, and databases. Organizations that rely on digital platforms need to educate and empower developers to code using security best practices throughout the entire software lifecycle (SLC), with proper security training and certifications."
USPS Ignored Responsible Disclosure For Over a Year
What's More Worrisome?
The API authentication vulnerability also allowed any USPS user to request account changes for other users, such as their email addresses, phone numbers or other key details.
The worst part of the whole incident was the USPS handling of responsible vulnerability disclosure.
The unnamed researcher reportedly discovered and responsibly reported this vulnerability last year to the Postal Service, who ignored it and left its users' data exposed until last week when a journalist contacted USPS on behalf of the researcher.
And then, the Portal Service addressed the issue within just 48 hours, journalist Brian Krebs said.
"While we're not sure whether anyone actually took advantage of the vulnerability, it did reportedly exist for a whole year, so we should assume the worst," Paul Bischoff, privacy advocate with Comparitech told The Hacker News.
USPS Responds by Saying:
"We currently have no information that this vulnerability was leveraged to exploit customer records."
"Out of an abundance of caution, the Postal Service is further investigating to ensure that anyone who may have sought to access our systems inappropriately is pursued to the fullest extent of the law."
| Data_Breaches |
Zero-Day in Bugzilla Exposes Zero-Day Vulnerabilities to Hackers | https://thehackernews.com/2014/10/zero-day-in-bugzilla-exposes-zero-day_6.html | A critical zero-day vulnerability discovered in Mozilla's popular Bugzilla bug-tracking software used by hundreds of prominent software organizations, both private and open-source, could expose sensitive information and vulnerabilities of the software projects to the hackers.
The critical flaw allows an attacker to bypass email verification part when registering a new Bugzilla account, which clearly means that an attacker can register accounts using any email addresses of their choice without the need to access the actual inbox for validation purposes.
VALIDATION BYPASS AND PRIVILEGE ESCALATION BUG
Security firm Check Point Software Technologies disclosed the flaw (CVE-2014-1572) on Monday and said that it's the first time when a privilege-escalation vulnerability has been found in the Bugzilla project since 2002. The Mozilla foundation has also confirmed that this particular bug exists in all versions of Bugzilla going back to version 2.23.3 from 2006.
An analysis carried out by the researchers at Check Point revealed that the critical "bug enables unknown users to gain administrative privileges" as well as "by using these admin credentials, attackers can then view and edit private and undisclosed bug details."
Furthermore, a hacker exploiting the flaw could intervene to destroy bug information in an effort to slow down the process of fixing vulnerabilities in a particular piece of software.
"The successful exploitation of the vulnerability allows the manipulation of any (database) field at the user creation procedure, including the 'login_name' field," Netanel Rubin, a researcher with Check Point, wrote in the initial report to Bugzilla. "This breaks the e-mail validation process and allows an attacker to create accounts which match the group's regex policies, effectively becoming a privileged user."
BUGZILLA AND ITS REACH
Bugzilla is a Web-based general-purpose bugtracker and testing tool originally developed by the Mozilla Foundation, and has been used by a variety of organizations as a bug tracking system for free and open source software projects.
Among others, the software is used by the Mozilla Foundation, Apache, the Linux kernel, OpenSSH, Eclipse, KDE, Wikimedia Foundation, Wireshark, Novell, and GNOME as well as, many Linux distributions.
Nearly 150 large software developers and open-source projects use Mozilla's Bugzilla software to track the vulnerabilities in their products. The actual figure could be even higher since many of the organisations are private.
PATCH AVAILABLE
Check Point reported the vulnerability to the Mozilla Foundation on September 29 and on Monday, Bugzilla rushed to release a patch for the issue to the public and warned the prominent organizations about its availability.
New Bugzilla versions are offered for download: 4.0.15, 4.2.11, 4.4.6, and 4.5.6. "The overridden login name could be automatically added to groups based on the group's regular expression setting," the advisory says.
While Mozilla has already patched its own public Bugzilla server at bugzilla.mozilla.org, that installation was never configured to allow email-based privilege escalation.
| Vulnerability |
New Variant of Havex Malware Scans for OPC Servers at SCADA Systems | https://thehackernews.com/2014/07/new-variant-of-havex-malware-scans-for.html | At the beginning of the month, we have reported about the new surge of a Stuxnet-like malware "Havex", which was previously targeting organizations in the energy sector, had been used to carry out industrial espionage against a number of companies in Europe and compromised over 1,000 European and North American energy firms.
Recently, researchers at security firm FireEye have discovered a new variant of Havex remote access Trojan that has capability to actively scan OPC (Object linking and embedding for Process Control) servers, used for controlling SCADA (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems in critical infrastructure, energy, and manufacturing sectors.
OPC is a communications standard that allows interaction between Windows-based SCADA or other industrial control systems (ICS) applications and process control hardware. New Havex variant gathers system information and data stored on a compromised client or server using the OPC standard. OPC is pervasive and is one of the most common ICS protocols.
"Threat actors have leveraged Havex in attacks across the energy sector for over a year, but the full extent of industries and ICS systems affected by Havex is unknown," wrote the researchers from FireEye in a blog post. "We decided to examine the OPC scanning component of Havex more closely, to better understand what happens when it's executed and the possible implications."
Researchers set up a typical OPC server environment to conduct a real time test of the new variant's functionality. ICS or SCADA systems consist of OPC client software that interacts directly with an OPC server, which works in tandem with the PLC (Programmable Logic Controller) to control industrial hardware.
Once after getting into network, the Havex downloader calls the runDll export function and then starts scanning of OPC servers in the SCADA network.
To identify potential OPC server, the OPC Scanner module use the Windows networking (WNet) functions i.e. WNetOpenEnum and WNetEnumResources, that enumerates network resources or existing connections.
"The scanner builds a list of all servers that are globally accessible through Windows networking," researchers wrote. "The list of servers is then checked to determine if any of them host an interface to the Component Object Models (COM)."
Using OPC scan, the new Havex variant could gather any details about connected devices and sends them back to the command-and-control server for the attackers to analyze. It appears that this new variant is used as a tool for future intelligence gathering.
"This is the first "in the wild" sample using OPC scanning. It is possible that these attackers could have used this malware as a testing ground for future utilization, however," researchers wrote.
So far, researchers have not seen any attempt to control the connected hardware. The attack path, the developer and the intention behind the development of the malware is still not known, but researchers are investigating and trying to gather all the information about the new variant.
| Malware |
OPM Temporarily Shuts Down Background Check App to Fix Security Hole | https://thehackernews.com/2015/06/hacking-files.html | The web gateway used to render materials for Federal Background Investigations for employees and contractors has been shut down for several weeks after a vulnerability was detected, the Office of Personnel Management announced.
The agency announced the shut down citing the discovery of a vulnerability in its Electronic Questionnaires for Investigations Processing (E-QIP) system while conducting an internal review of the agency's security.
As a result, OPM has temporarily suspended the E-QIP system for four to six weeks, and OPM Director Katherine Archuleta said the system would remain offline "until stronger security enhancements are implemented."
In the Wake of Massive Breach
Although the agency stressed that it had not detected any malicious activity or evidence of hackers actually exploiting the flaw.
The internal review of the agency's information technology systems was ordered by Archuleta in the wake of massive cyber attacks on the OPM's systems that exposes personnel records of more than 4 Million current and former government employees.
The stolen information includes personal data range from date of birth and social security number to records of clearance adjudications and proceedings showing reasons why an individual's security clearance may have been removed.
Federal Employee's Sex Lives Exposed
More worrisome part of the breach was that in some cases, the data included information about workers' sex lives, drug and alcohol abuse, financial difficulties, and marital troubles, among other things that could be used by malicious minds to potentially blackmail federal employees or, even worse…
…pressurize the federal officials into potentially revealing classified information.
However, the recently discovered vulnerability in E-QIP is reportedly not linked to those cyber attacks on the OPM's systems. But, it is good that the agency is finally taking proactive measures to tighten the security of its system.
| Vulnerability |
Microsoft issues Security Patches for Windows 10 and Edge Browser | https://thehackernews.com/2015/08/windows-10-update-download.html | Updated your PCs to Windows 10? Now it's time to patch your Windows 10 software.
Microsoft has issued its monthly Patch Tuesday by releasing 14 security bulletins, nearly half of it address vulnerabilities in its latest operating system, Windows 10.
Four of them are marked critical, affecting Windows, .Net Framework, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Lync, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Silverlight and Edge Browser.
Yes, the critical update includes even Edge browser – Microsoft's newest and supposedly super-secure web browser.
Windows users are advised to patch their system as soon as possible because the security flaws can be remotely exploited to execute malicious code on vulnerable systems, allowing hackers to install malware and take full control of systems.
Most Critical Security Updates:
MS15-079 – The critical update fixes a total of 10 privately disclosed flaws in Internet Explorer. Most of these flaws allow a hacker to execute malicious code on victim's machine by exploiting a series of memory corruption flaw in the browser.
MS15-080 – The update fixes security flaws in Microsoft Lync, Silverlight, .NET Framework, Office, and Graphics Component for Microsoft Windows, which could allow hackers to run malicious code with full administrative rights by fooling a user into opening an untrusted web page that contains embedded TrueType or OpenType fonts. The update is marked critical for Windows Vista through Windows 10 and all supported versions of Windows Server.
MS15-081 – The update fixes a total of eight vulnerabilities in Office 2007-2016, including Office for Mac. The flaws could allow hackers to execute remotely malicious code with full admin privileges if a malicious file was opened by a victim.
MS15-091 – It is a cumulative security update for Windows 10's newest browser, Microsoft Edge. It includes fixes for four critical flaws that could allow an attacker to execute remotely malicious code on an affected system if a user visits a specially-crafted webpage.
Security Bulletins Rated as Important:
MS15-084 – The update patches information disclosure vulnerabilities in XML Core Services.
MS15-085 – The update patches an elevation of privilege vulnerability in Mount Manager that allows hackers to gain administrator-level access if they plug in an evil USB device.
MS15-086 – The update patches an elevation of privilege vulnerability in System Center Operations Manager.
MS15-087 – The update patches an elevation of privilege vulnerability in UDDI Services in Windows Server 2008 and Server Core Installation.
MS15-089 – The update patches an information disclosure flaw in WebDAV for Windows Vista through Windows 8.1 and Windows Server 2008 and Server 2012.
MS15-090 – The update patches elevation of privilege vulnerabilities in Windows that could allow a miscreant to gain admin-level access.
MS15-092 – The update patches elevation of privilege vulnerabilities in .NET Framework for Windows Vista through Windows 10 and Server Core Installation, allowing hackers to gain administrator-level access.
All the updates are necessary, and we advise Windows users and administrators to install the new updates as soon as possible.
| Vulnerability |
Linux Worm targets Internet-enabled Home appliances to Mine Cryptocurrencies | https://thehackernews.com/2014/03/linux-worm-targets-internet-enabled.html | Could a perfectly innocent looking device like router, TV set-top box or security cameras can mine Bitcoins? YES! Hackers will not going to spare the Smart Internet-enabled devices.
A Linux worm named Linux.Darlloz, earlier used to target Internet of Things (IoT) devices, i.e. Home Routers, Set-top boxes, Security Cameras, printers and Industrial control systems; now have been upgraded to mine Crypto Currencies like Bitcoin.
Security Researcher at Antivirus firm Symantec spotted the Darlloz Linux worm back in November and they have spotted the latest variant of the worm in mid-January this year.
Linux.Darlloz worm exploits a PHP vulnerability (CVE-2012-1823) to propagate and is capable to infect devices those run Linux on Intel's x86 chip architecture and other embedded device architectures such as PPC, MIPS and MIPSEL.
The latest variant of Linux.Darlloz equipped with an open source crypto currency mining tool called 'cpuminer', could be used to mine Mincoins, Dogecoins or Bitcoins.
Symantec Researchers scanned the entire address space of the Internet and found 31,716 devices infected with Darlloz. "By the end of February 2014, the attacker mined 42,438 Dogecoins (approximately US$46 at the time of writing) and 282 Mincoins (approximately US$150 at the time of writing). These amounts are relatively low for the average cybercrime activity so, we expect the attacker to continue to evolve their threat for increased monetization." Kaoru Hayashi, senior development manager and threat analyst with Symantec in Japan.
Major infected countries are China, the U.S., South Korea, Taiwan and India.
Crypto Currency typically requires more memory and a powerful CPUs, so the malware could be updated to target other IoT devices in the future, such as home automation devices and wearable technology.
A Few weeks back, Cisco has announced a global and industry-wide initiative to bring the Security community and Researchers together to contribute in securing the Internet of Things (IoT) and launched a contest called the "Internet of Things Grand Security Challenge", offering prizes of up to $300,000 for winners.
Users are advised to update firmware and apply security patches for all software installed on computers or Internet-enabled devices. Make sure, you are not using default username or password for all devices and block port 23 or 80 from outside if not required.
| Malware |
Man-in-the-Middle Remote Attack on Diebold Touch-screen Voting Machine | https://thehackernews.com/2011/09/man-in-middle-remote-attack-on-diebold.html | Man-in-the-Middle Remote Attack on Diebold Touch-screen Voting Machine
The Vulnerability Assessment Team (VAT) at the U.S. Dept. of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois has managed to hack a Diebold Accuvote touch-screen voting machine. Voting machines used by as many as a quarter of American voters heading to the polls in 2012 can be hacked with just $10.50 in parts and an 8th grade science education, according to computer science.
"This is a national security issue," VAT team leader Roger Johnston told me, echoing what I've been reporting other computer scientists and security experts telling me for years. "It should really be handled by the Department of Homeland Security." "The level of sophistication it took to develop the circuit board" used in the attack "was that of basically an 8th grade science shop," says Argonne's John Warner. "Anybody with an electronics workbench could put this together."
The Argonne team's demonstration of the attack on a Diebold Accuvote machine is seen in a short new video shared exclusively with the Brad Blog. The team successfully demonstrated a similar attack on a touch-screen system made by Sequoia Voting Systems in 2009.
Video Demonstration:
"The cost of the attack that you're going to see was $10.50 in retail quantities," explains Warner in the video. "If you want to use the RF [radio frequency] remote control to stop and start the attacks, that's another $15. So the total cost would be $26."
| Vulnerability |
DDoS Botnet Leverages Thousands of Insecure SOHO Routers | https://thehackernews.com/2015/05/ddos-botnet-router-hacking.html | Small office and home office (SOHO) routers are an increasingly common target for cybercriminals, not because of any vulnerability, but because most routers are loosely managed and often deployed with default administrator credentials.
A new report suggests that hackers are using large botnet of tens of thousands of insecure home and office-based routers to launch Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks.
Security researchers from DDoS protection firm Incapsula uncovered a router-based botnet, still largely active while investigating a series of DDoS attacks against its customers that have been underway since at least last December, 2014.
Over the past four months, researchers have recorded malicious traffic targeting 60 of its clients came from some 40,269 IP addresses belonging to 1,600 ISPs around the world.
Almost all of the infected routers that were part of the botnet appear to be ARM-based models from a California-based networking company Ubiquiti Networks, sold across the world.
This makes researchers believed that the cyber criminals were exploiting a firmware vulnerability in the routers.
What's revealed in the close inspection?
However, this assumption was proved wrong when inspected deeply, revealing that…
All of the compromised routers could be remotely accessible on the default ports (via HTTP and SSH)
Almost all of those accounts continued to make use of vendor-provided login credentials
This basically opens the door for an attacker to man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks, eavesdrop on all communication, cookie hijack, and allows hackers to gain access to other local network devices such as CCTV cameras.
Router makers design their devices in such a way that it can be easily connected, and therefore they give each user the same administrator credential, without giving any warning to change the default credentials. Moreover, instead of allowing users to turn on remote administration, the manufacturers make it on by default.
"Given how easy it is to hijack these devices, we expect to see them being exploited by additional perpetrators," researchers wrote. "Even as we conducted our research, the Incapsula security team documented numerous new malware types being added—each compounding the threat posed by the existence of these botnet devices."
A variety of DDoS malware involvement:
The security firm also discovered a variety of DDoS malware programs, including MrBlack, Dofloo, and Mayday, installed on the insecure devices in order to attempt other malicious tasks such as:
Redirect victims to malicious websites
Intercept victims' online banking sessions
Inject rogue and malicious advertisements into the victim's Web traffic
Steal login credentials for various online accounts
Perform other illegal activities
The question remains — Who is behind this botnet?
Researchers found some indirect evidence correlating the router-based botnet to a notorious hackers group called Lizard Squad, a group that has used compromised routers to launch DDoS attacks against Sony's PlayStation and Microsoft's Xbox networks.
Back in January, Lizard Squad set up a DDoS-for-hire service called Lizard Stresser that was using hacked home routers. However, Incapsula believes that it's not Lizard Stresser because it is powered by different malware programs.
The botnet comprises devices in 109 countries, with Thailand (64 percent), Brazil, and the United States being the top three most-affected nations. Also, the firm identified 60 command and control servers used by criminals to control the botnet, the majority of them were located in China and the U.S.
The bottom line:
Users should also keep in mind the safety of their devices by making sure that they:
Disable all remote access to the devices unless it's specifically needed
Change the default login credentials for their routers to prevent unauthorized access
Router firmware is up-to-date
Compromised routers are not at all new. Some manufacturers, including Linksys, Asus, D-Link, Micronet, Tenda, and TP-Link, have been known to be vulnerable. Incapsula has informed specific routers manufacturers and the relevant ISPs about the insecurity of the routers they market.
| Vulnerability |
Hacker Releases 'Unpatchable' Jailbreak For All iOS Devices, iPhone 4s to iPhone X | https://thehackernews.com/2019/09/bootrom-jailbreak-ios-exploit.html | An iOS hacker and cybersecurity researcher today publicly released what he claimed to be a "permanent unpatchable bootrom exploit," in other words, an epic jailbreak that works on all iOS devices ranging from iPhone 4s (A5 chip) to iPhone 8 and iPhone X (A11 chip).
Dubbed Checkm8, the exploit leverages unpatchable security weaknesses in Apple's Bootrom (SecureROM), the first significant code that runs on an iPhone while booting, which, if exploited, provides greater system-level access.
"EPIC JAILBREAK: Introducing checkm8 (read "checkmate"), a permanent unpatchable bootrom exploit for hundreds of millions of iOS devices," said axi0mX while announcing the publicly release of the exploit on Twitter.
The new exploit came exactly a month after Apple released an emergency patch for another critical jailbreak vulnerability that works on Apple devices including the iPhone XS, XS Max, and XR and the 2019 iPad Mini and iPad Air, running iOS 12.4 and iOS 12.2 or earlier.
Since the bootrom exploits are hardware-level issues and can not be patched without a hardware revision, a simple software update can't address the newly released bootrom exploit.
It should be noted that the Checkm8 exploit itself is not a full jailbreak with Cydia, instead, is just an exploit which researchers and jailbreak community can use to develop a fully working jailbreak tool.
Features the Checkm8 exploit allows include as mentioned below:
Jailbreak and downgrade iPhone 3GS (new bootrom) with alloc8 untethered bootrom exploit.
Pwned DFU Mode with steaks4uce exploit for S5L8720 devices.
Pwned DFU Mode with limera1n exploit for S5L8920/S5L8922 devices.
Pwned DFU Mode with SHAtter exploit for S5L8930 devices.
Dump SecureROM on S5L8920/S5L8922/S5L8930 devices.
Dump NOR on S5L8920 devices.
Flash NOR on S5L8920 devices.
Encrypt or decrypt hex data on a connected device in pwned DFU Mode using its GID or UID key.
"This is possibly the biggest news in the iOS jailbreak community in years. I am releasing my exploit for free for the benefit of iOS jailbreak and security research community," says axi0mX, who released the exploit on GitHub.
"Researchers and developers can use it to dump SecureROM, decrypt keybags with AES engine, and demote the device to enable JTAG. You still need additional hardware and software to use JTAG."
axi0mX says he discovered the underlying bootrom vulnerability while analyzing a security patch Apple released in 2018 to address a previously discovered critical use-after-free vulnerability in iBoot USB code.
axi0mX also notes that his exploit can not be performed remotely. Instead, it can only be triggered over USB and requires physical access.
The jailbreak only works on iPhones running Apple's A5 and A11 chipsets and does not work on the latest two chipsets, i.e., A12 and A13.
| Vulnerability |
Microsoft Issues Patches for In-the-Wild 0-day and 55 Others Windows Bugs | https://thehackernews.com/2021/02/microsoft-issues-patches-for-in-wild-0.html | Microsoft on Tuesday issued fixes for 56 flaws, including a critical vulnerability that's known to be actively exploited in the wild.
In all, 11 are listed as Critical, 43 are listed as Important, and two are listed as Moderate in severity — six of which are previously disclosed vulnerabilities.
The updates cover .NET Framework, Azure IoT, Microsoft Dynamics, Microsoft Edge for Android, Microsoft Exchange Server, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Windows Codecs Library, Skype for Business, Visual Studio, Windows Defender, and other core components such as Kernel, TCP/IP, Print Spooler, and Remote Procedure Call (RPC).
A Windows Win32k Privilege Escalation Vulnerability
The most critical of the flaws is a Windows Win32k privilege escalation vulnerability (CVE-2021-1732, CVSS score 7.8) that allows attackers with access to a target system to run malicious code with elevated permissions. Microsoft credited JinQuan, MaDongZe, TuXiaoYi, and LiHao of DBAPPSecurity for discovering and reporting the vulnerability.
In a separate technical write-up, the researchers said a zero-day exploit leveraging the flaw was detected in a "very limited number of attacks" against victims located in China by a threat actor named Bitter APT. The attacks were discovered in December 2020.
"This zero-day is a new vulnerability which caused by win32k callback, it could be used to escape the sandbox of Microsoft [Internet Explorer] browser or Adobe Reader on the latest Windows 10 version," DBAPPSecurity researchers said. "The vulnerability is high quality and the exploit is sophisticated."
It's worth noting that Adobe, as part of its February patch, addressed a critical buffer overflow flaw in Adobe Acrobat and Reader for Windows and macOS (CVE-2021-21017) that it said could lead to arbitrary code execution in the context of the current user.
The company also warned of active exploitation attempts against the bug in the wild in limited attacks targeting Adobe Reader users on Windows, mirroring aforementioned findings from DBAPPSecurity.
While neither Microsoft nor Adobe has provided additional details, the concurrent patching of the two flaws raises the possibility that the vulnerabilities are being chained to carry out the in-the-wild attacks.
Netlogon Enforcement Mode Goes Into Effect
Microsoft's Patch Tuesday update also resolves a number of remote code execution (RCE) flaws in Windows DNS Server (CVE-2021-24078), .NET Core, and Visual Studio (CVE-2021-26701), Microsoft Windows Codecs Library (CVE-2021-24081), and Fax Service (CVE-2021-1722 and CVE-2021-24077).
The RCE in Windows DNS server component is rated 9.8 for severity, making it a critical vulnerability that, if left unpatched, could permit an unauthorized adversary to execute arbitrary code and potentially redirect legitimate traffic to malicious servers.
Microsoft is also taking this month to push second round of fixes for the Zerologon flaw (CVE-2020-1472) that was originally resolved in August 2020, following which reports of active exploitation targeting unpatched systems emerged in September 2020.
Starting February 9, the domain controller "enforcement mode" will be enabled by default, thus blocking "vulnerable [Netlogon] connections from non-compliant devices."
In addition, the Patch Tuesday update rectifies two information disclosure bugs — one in Edge browser for Android (CVE-2021-24100) that could have revealed personally identifiable information and payment information of a user, and the other in Microsoft Teams for iOS (CVE-2021-24114) that could have exposed the Skype token value in the preview URL for images in the app.
RCE Flaws in Windows TCP/IP Stack
Lastly, the Windows maker released a set of fixes affecting its TCP/IP implementation — consisting of two RCE flaws (CVE-2021-24074 and CVE-2021-24094) and one denial of service vulnerability (CVE-2021-24086) — that it said could be exploited with a DoS attack.
"The DoS exploits for these CVEs would allow a remote attacker to cause a stop error," Microsoft said in an advisory. "Customers might receive a blue screen on any Windows system that is directly exposed to the internet with minimal network traffic. Thus, we recommend customers move quickly to apply Windows security updates this month."
The tech giant, however, noted that the complexity of the two TCP/IP RCE flaws would make it hard to develop functional exploits. But it expects attackers to create DoS exploits much more easily, turning the security weakness into an ideal candidate for exploitation in the wild.
To install the latest security updates, Windows users can head to Start > Settings > Update & Security > Windows Update or by selecting Check for Windows updates.
| Vulnerability |
Alleged BlackShades Malware Co-Author pleads not Guilty | https://thehackernews.com/2014/05/alleged-blackshades-malware-co-author.html | A Swedish man accused of being involved in the creation of the malicious software used to infect over half a million systems in more than dozens of countries, has pleaded not guilty in New York on Thursday to computer hacking charges brought against him.
Alex Yucel, 24, who is the co-author of the Blackshades Remote Access Trojan (RAT), owned and operate an organization called Blackshades, which sold the notorious software to the other people and hackers across the country for prices ranging from $40 to $50. This allowed the hackers to remotely control the victims' computers and to steal keystrokes, passwords and access to victims' private files, according to the authorities.
Blackshades malware is designed to steal victims' usernames and passwords for email and Web services, instant messaging applications, FTP clients and lots more. In worst cases, the malicious software program even allows hackers to take remote control of users' computer and webcam to take photos or videos without the knowledge of the computer owner.
Yucel a.k.a. "marjinz," a.k.a. "Victor Soltan," was arrested in November 2013 in Moldova, as part of an International crackdown on the malicious BlackShades RAT and during the same time the source code of the tool was also leaked on the Internet. He was extradited to the United States shortly after it. The accused developed the RAT along with the help of US citizen Michael Hogue, who has already pleaded guilty.
"Yucel ran his organization like a business—hiring and firing employees, paying salaries, and updating the malicious software in response to customers' requests. He employed several administrators to facilitate the operation of the organization, including a director of marketing, a website developer, a customer service manager, and a team of customer service representatives," the FBI said in a statement.
Alex Yucel faces two counts of computer hacking, one count of conspiring to commit access device fraud, one count of access device fraud and one count of aggravated identity theft. But, during Thursday's hearing in Manhattan federal court, Yucel told U.S. District Judge Kevin Castel that he pleaded not guilty to the charges brought against him that included conspiring to commit access device fraud and access to device fraud.
However, according to prosecutor Sarah Lai, their are several evidence against him, including a number of laptops, computers, tablets, e-mail accounts and BlackShades subscriber records as well, and if convicted, he faces up to 17 years in prison.
In mid-May, the law enforcement authorities in the United States and Europe announced a large-scale operation of International raids against individuals suspected of developing, selling and using the notorious BlackShades RAT.
The raids took place in more than 100 countries and the federal authorities have seized 1,900 command and control domains and arrested more than 100 people worldwide involved in the purchasing, selling or using of the Blackshades malware.
In 2012, the BlackShades RAT was also used to infect and Spy on Syrian activists, while a very serious and bloody internal war between the government and the opposition forces.
BlackShades tool was actually developed by an IT surveillance and security-based company, as a tool for parents to monitor their Children activities and for finding the cheating partners in relationship. But, as usual the cyber criminals have made it a favourite tool to carry out illicit activities.
| Malware |
Adobe Issues Emergency Patches for Critical Flaws in Photoshop CC | https://thehackernews.com/2018/08/adobe-photoshop-update.html | Adobe released an out-of-band security update earlier today to address two critical remote code execution vulnerabilities impacting Adobe Photoshop CC for Microsoft Windows and Apple macOS machines.
According to the security advisory published Wednesday by Adobe, its Photoshop CC software is vulnerable to two critical memory corruption vulnerabilities, which could allow a remote attacker to execute arbitrary code in the context of the targeted user.
The vulnerabilities, identified as CVE-2018-12810 and CVE-2018-12811, impact Adobe Photoshop CC 2018 version 19.1.5 and earlier 19.x versions, as well as Adobe Photoshop CC 2017 version 18.1.5 and earlier 18.x versions.
The critical security flaws were discovered and reported by Kushal Arvind Shah of Fortinet's FortiGuard Labs, and have now been addressed by Adobe with the release of Photoshop CC versions 19.1.6 and 18.1.6.
Also Read: Teen Arrested for Hacking into Apple's Network
It should be noted that these RCE vulnerabilities were not part of August 2018 security patch updates released by the company last week to address a total of 11 security flaws in its Flash Player, Acrobat and Reader, Experience Manager, and Creative Cloud.
However, only two of the security bugs patched in this month's update were deemed critical in severity, while none of the flaws have been exploited in the wild.
Although the newly patched RCE flaws have been assigned a "critical" severity rating, they have been given a priority rating of 3, which also suggests that the flaws have not been targeted by malicious actors in the wild.
More details about the critical RCE vulnerabilities are not available at the moment.
However, users and administrators using Adobe Photoshop CC software are strongly recommended to download and install the latest security patches as soon as possible.
| Vulnerability |
Chinese Hackers spied on European Diplomats during recent G20 meetings | https://thehackernews.com/2013/12/chinese-hackers-spied-on-european.html | Security firm FireEye has released a new report detailing cyber espionage attacks on European Ministries of Foreign Affairs (MFA) during recent G20 meetings by Chinese Hackers.
According to FireEye's researcher Nart Villeneuve, hackers infiltrated the computer networks of five European foreign ministries by sending emails containing malware files to staff and gained access to their systems to steal credentials and high-value information.
"We believe that the Ke3chang attackers are operating out of China and have been active since at least 2010,"
The cyber espionage campaign named as "Operation Ke3chang" and if the victim will download & open the malware file which disguised itself as files detailing a possible intervention in Syria (US_military_options_in_Syria.pdf.zip), it gets installed on the victim's computer with a backdoor.
"They have also leveraged a Java zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2012-4681), as well as older, reliable exploits for Microsoft Word (CVE-2010-3333) and Adobe PDF Reader (CVE-2010-2883)." report said.
Once a compromised system connects to the CnC server, the Ke3chang attackers follow a predetermined script to gather information about the local computer and the network to which it is connected.
There were almost 23 Command and Control servers used in the Ke3chang campaign, FireEye "gained visibility into one of 23 known command-and-control servers operated by the Ke3chang actor for about a week. During this time, we discovered 21 compromised machines connecting to the CnC server."
FireEye said:
"Large-scale cyber espionage campaigns have demonstrated that government agencies around the world, including embassies, are vulnerable to targeted cyber attacks."
Security firm FireEye had been following the hackers behind the Syria-related attack for several years. The complete FireEye report is available on their website, you can read it for detailed information.
| Cyber_Attack |
Trojanized BitTorrent Software Update Hijacked 400,000 PCs Last Week | https://thehackernews.com/2018/03/windows-malware-hacking.html | A massive malware outbreak that last week infected nearly half a million computers with cryptocurrency mining malware in just a few hours was caused by a backdoored version of popular BitTorrent client called MediaGet.
Dubbed Dofoil (also known as Smoke Loader), the malware was found dropping a cryptocurrency miner program as payload on infected Windows computers that mine Electroneum digital coins for attackers using victims' CPU cycles.
Dofoil campaign that hit PCs in Russia, Turkey, and Ukraine on 6th March was discovered by Microsoft Windows Defender research department and blocked the attack before it could have done any severe damages.
At the time when Windows Defender researchers detected this attack, they did not mention how the malware was delivered to such a massive audience in just 12 hours.
However, after investigation Microsoft today revealed that the attackers targeted the update mechanism of MediaGet BitTorrent software to push its trojanized version (mediaget.exe) to users' computers.
"A signed mediaget.exe downloads an update.exe program and runs it on the machine to install a new mediaget.exe. The new mediaget.exe program has the same functionality as the original but with additional backdoor capability," the researchers explain in a blog post published today.
Researchers believe MediaGet that signed update.exe is likely to be a victim of the supply chain attack, similar to CCleaner hack that infected over 2.3 million users with the backdoored version of the software in September 2017.
Also, in this case, the attackers signed the poisoned update.exe with a different certificate and successfully passed the validation required by the legitimate MediaGet.
"The dropped update.exe is a packaged InnoSetup SFX which has an embedded trojanized mediaget.exe, update.exe. When run, it drops a trojanized unsigned version of mediaget.exe."
Once updated, the malicious BitTorrent software with additional backdoor functionality randomly connects to one (out of four) of its command-and-control (C&C) servers hosted on decentralized Namecoin network infrastructure and listens for new commands.
It then immediately downloads CoinMiner component from its C&C server, and start using victims' computers mine cryptocurrencies for the attackers.
Using C&C servers, attackers can also command infected systems to download and install additional malware from a remote URL.
The researchers found that the trojanized BitTorrent client, detected by Windows Defender AV as Trojan:Win32/Modimer.A, has 98% similarity to the original MediaGet binary.
Microsoft says behavior monitoring and AI-based machine learning techniques used by its Windows Defender Antivirus software have played an important role to detect and block this massive malware campaign.
| Cyber_Attack |
Researchers Unveil New Linux Malware Linked to Chinese Hackers | https://thehackernews.com/2021/03/researchers-unveil-new-linux-malware.html | Cybersecurity researchers on Wednesday shed light on a new sophisticated backdoor targeting Linux endpoints and servers that's believed to be the work of Chinese nation-state actors.
Dubbed "RedXOR" by Intezer, the backdoor masquerades as a polkit daemon, with similarities found between the malware and those previously associated with the Winnti Umbrella (or Axiom) threat group such as PWNLNX, XOR.DDOS and Groundhog.
RedXOR's name comes from the fact that it encodes its network data with a scheme based on XOR, and that it's compiled with a legacy GCC compiler on an old release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, suggesting that the malware is deployed in targeted attacks against legacy Linux systems.
Intezer said two samples of the malware were uploaded from Indonesia and Taiwan around Feb. 23-24, both countries that are known to be singled out by China-based threat groups.
Aside from the overlaps in terms of the overall flow and functionalities and the use of XOR encoding between RedXOR and PWNLNX, the backdoor takes the form of an unstripped 64-bit ELF file ("po1kitd-update-k"), complete with a typosquatted name ("po1kitd" vs. "polkitd"), which, upon execution, proceeds to create a hidden directory to store files related to the malware, before installing itself on the machine.
Polkit (née PolicyKit) is a toolkit for defining and handling authorizations, and is used for allowing unprivileged processes to communicate with privileged processes.
Additionally, the malware comes with an encrypted configuration that houses the command-and-control (C2) IP address and port, and the password it needs to authenticate to the C2 server, before establishing connection over a TCP socket.
What's more, the communications are not only disguised as harmless HTTP traffic, but are also encoded both ways using an XOR encryption scheme, the results of which are decrypted to reveal the exact command to be run.
RedXOR supports a multitude of capabilities, including gathering system information (MAC address, username, distribution, clock speed, kernel version, etc.), performing file operations, executing commands with system privileges, running arbitrary shell commands, and even options to remotely update the malware.
Users victimized by RedXOR can take protective measures by killing the process and removing all files related to the malware.
If anything, the latest development points to an increase in the number of active campaigns targeting Linux systems, in part due to widespread adoption of the operating system for IoT devices, web servers, and cloud servers, leading attackers to port their existing Windows tools to Linux or develop new tools that support both platforms.
"Some of the most prominent nation-state actors are incorporating offensive Linux capabilities into their arsenal and it's expected that both the number and sophistication of such attacks will increase over time," Intezer researchers outlined in a 2020 report charting the last decade of Linux APT attacks.
| Malware |
Second Flash Player Zero-day Exploit found in 'Hacking Team' Dump | https://thehackernews.com/2015/07/hacking-flash-player-exploit.html | Another Flash zero-day exploit has emerged from the hundreds of gigabytes of data recently leaked from Hacking Team, an Italian surveillance software company that is long been accused of selling spying software to governments and intelligence agencies.
The critical zero-day vulnerability in Adobe Flash is a Use-After-Free() programming flaw (CVE-2015-5122) which is similar to the CVE-2015-5119 Flash vulnerability patched last week and allows an attacker to hijack vulnerable computers.
Adobe says the cyber criminals are apparently already exploiting this vulnerability for which no patch exists yet. However, it's second time in a single week when the company is working on a fix for the zero-day vulnerability in its Flash Player software.
Flash Zero-Day Flaw in the Wild
The Exploit code for this flaw is already available online, allowing an attacker to remotely execute malicious code on victims' computers and install malware, Adobe said in an advisory published late Friday.
"Successful exploitation [of CVE-2015-5122 flaw] could cause a crash and potentially allow an attacker to take control of the affected system," Adobe said.
The zero-day vulnerability is present in the latest Adobe Flash Player version 18.0.0.204 and earlier versions for Windows, Linux and OS X.
Adobe credited FireEye researcher Dhanesh Kizhakkinan for reporting the vulnerability documented in stolen data leaked from Hacking Team.
Therefore, once again we advise everyone with Flash installed to remove or disable the software until the company patches the critical security bug.
| Vulnerability |
New Adobe Reader Zero-Day Vulnerability spotted in the wild | https://thehackernews.com/2013/02/new-adobe-reader-zero-day-vulnerability_13.html | FireEye researchers recently came across a zero-day security flaw in Adobe Reader that's being actively exploited in the wild. The zero-day vulnerability is in Adobe PDF Reader 9.5.3, 10.1.5, 11.0.1 and earlier versions.
According to researchers, once malware takes advantage of the flaw, its payload drops two dynamic-link libraries, or DLLs, which are application extensions used by executable files to perform a task. In this case, they allow the infected computer to communicate with a hacker-owned server.
No additional details about the zero-day vulnerabilities have been publicly released, and but researchers with antivirus provider Kaspersky Lab have confirmed the exploit can successfully escape the Adobe sandbox.
"We have already submitted the sample to the Adobe security team. Before we get confirmation from Adobe and a mitigation plan is available, we suggest that you not open any unknown PDF files," said FireEye team.
But until the vulnerability gets patched, FireEye recommended that users avoid opening any PDF files of unknown origin. Instead of waiting for Adobe to act, you should probably switch to a different PDF reader. There are numerous free, open-source PDF readers.
Adobe's David Lenoe said in a post, "Adobe is aware of a report of a vulnerability in Adobe Reader and Acrobat XI (11.0.1) and earlier versions being exploited in the wild. We are currently investigating this report and assessing the risk to our customers. We will provide an update as soon as we have more information."
| Vulnerability |
Security in a Serious Way - The Hacker News Magazine September 2012 Edition | https://thehackernews.com/2012/09/security-in-serious-way-hacker-news.html | Hey faithful readers and people interested in Internet Security! Enjoy our - The Hacker News Magazine September 2012 Edition ,Issue #14 packed full of computer security issues and a great interview with a young hacker who defines the world of hacking and the future. Let us know what you think and many thanks for following our website!
| Malware |
Simple, but Critical vulnerability in Verizon Portal revealed users' SMS History | https://thehackernews.com/2013/10/critical-but-simple-vulnerability-in.html | A Security researcher discovered a critical privacy vulnerability on Verizon Wireless's Web-based customer portal that allows anyone to download user's SMS History and Numbers of other users he communicated with.
Back in August, researcher 'Cody Collier' found that a simple URL exploit could allow any subscriber to extract data using 'Download to SpreadSheet' function.
To exploit, an attacker only needs to modify the subscriber's phone number in the URL and this would give an attacker access to the SMS history to the targeted account.
https://wbillpay.verizonwireless.com/vzw/accountholder/unbilledusage/UnbilledMessaging.action?d-455677-e=2&1548506v4671=1&mtn=999999999
Where variable 'mtn' within the URL defines the mobile number and an attacker just need to modify this. "Message details consist of: Date, Time, To, From, and Direction an SMS or MMS took place. With no user interaction, all that was required was a subscriber's phone number." he explained.
There were no safeguards to ensure that the person downloading the spreadsheet owned that number, potentially exposing tens of millions of Verizon customer contact lists and texting habits.
As Verizon's site doesn't offer any direct contact info to report vulnerabilities, so he finds someone on LinkedIn who had forwarded his request to Verizon's corporate security.
Now Verizon has created a dedicated email contact, [email protected], to field these security issues.
We are also trying to reach Verizon for comment on this serious Privacy issue and will update should we hear back.
| Vulnerability |
Dark Nexus: A New Emerging IoT Botnet Malware Spotted in the Wild | https://thehackernews.com/2020/04/darknexus-iot-ddos-botnet.html | Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new emerging IoT botnet threat that leverages compromised smart devices to stage 'distributed denial-of-service' attacks, potentially triggered on-demand through platforms offering DDoS-for-hire services.
The botnet, named "dark_nexus" by Bitdefender researchers, works by employing credential stuffing attacks against a variety of devices, such as routers (from Dasan Zhone, Dlink, and ASUS), video recorders, and thermal cameras, to co-opt them into the botnet.
So far, dark_nexus comprises at least 1,372 bots, acting as a reverse proxy, spanning across various locations in China, South Korea, Thailand, Brazil, and Russia.
"While it might share some features with previously known IoT botnets, the way some of its modules have been developed makes it significantly more potent and robust," the researchers said. "For example, payloads are compiled for 12 different CPU architectures and dynamically delivered based on the victim's configuration."
Evidence gathered by Bitdefender points to greek.Helios as the individual behind the development of dark_nexus, who is a known botnet author infamous for selling DDoS services on social media platforms and using a YouTube channel to advertise its capabilities.
Inspired by known botnets Qbot and Mirai
Noting dark_nexus' similarities to Qbot banking malware and Mirai, Bitdefender researchers said its core modules are "mostly original" and that it's frequently updated, with over 30 versions released during the period from December 2019 to March 2020 (versions 4.0 through 8.6).
"The startup code of the bot resembles that of Qbot: it forks several times, blocks several signals, and detaches itself from the terminal," the researchers said.
"Then, in the vein of Mirai, it binds to a fixed port (7630), ensuring that a single instance of this bot can run on the device. The bot attempts to disguise itself by changing its name to '/bin/busybox.' Another feature borrowed from Mirai is the disabling of the watchdog by periodic ioctl calls on the virtual device."
The infrastructure consists of several command-and-control (C2) servers (switchnets[.]net:30047 amd thiccnigga[.]me:30047), which issue remote commands to the infected bots, and reporting servers to which bots share details about vulnerable services (e.g., devices protected by default passwords).
Once the brute-force attack succeeds, the bot registers to the C2 server identifying the device's CPU architecture so as to transmit custom infection payload via Telnet, download bot binaries, and other malware components from a hosting server (switchnets[.]net:80), and execute them.
In addition, some versions of the botnet (4.0 to 5.3) come with a reverse proxy feature that lets the victim act as a proxy for the hosting server, thereby directing the infected device to download and store the necessary executables locally instead of having to connect to the central hosting server.
That's not all. dark_nexus comes with persistence commands that prevent the device from getting rebooted by stopping the cron service and removing privileges to services that could be used to reboot said device in question.
"It also uses a technique meant to ensure 'supremacy' on the compromised device," Bitdefender observed.
"Uniquely, dark_nexus uses a scoring system based on weights and thresholds to assessing which processes might pose a risk. This involves maintaining a list of whitelisted processes and their PIDs, and killing every other process that crosses a threshold (greater or equal to 100) of suspicion."
Your IoT Devices Are Up for Hire
The Mirai botnet, since its discovery in 2016, has been linked to a number of large-scale DDoS attacks. Since then, numerous variants of Mirai have sprung up, in part due to the availability of its source code on the Internet.
Botnet authors, likewise, have staged brute-force attacks on WordPress sites to insert Qbot banking trojan and download additional malware.
The fact that dark_nexus is built on the foundations of Mirai and Qbot is proof of the evolving tactics of botnet operators and inexperienced hackers alike, allowing them to add new functionality by exploiting a variety of vulnerabilities in poorly secured IoT devices and amass modern botnet armies.
"Using YouTube videos demoing some of his past work and posting offerings on various cybercriminal forums, greek.Helios seems to have experience with IoT malware skills, honing them to the point of developing the new dark_nexus botnet," Bitdefender researchers concluded.
| Cyber_Attack |
Researchers Fingerprint Exploit Developers Who Help Several Malware Authors | https://thehackernews.com/2020/10/exploit-development.html | Writing advanced malware for a threat actor requires different groups of people with diverse technical expertise to put them all together. But can the code leave enough clues to reveal the person behind it?
To this effect, cybersecurity researchers on Friday detailed a new methodology to identify exploit authors that use their unique characteristics as a fingerprint to track down other exploits developed by them.
By deploying this technique, the researchers were able to link 16 Windows local privilege escalation (LPE) exploits to two zero-day sellers "Volodya" (previously called "BuggiCorp") and "PlayBit" (or "luxor2008").
"Instead of focusing on an entire malware and hunting for new samples of the malware family or actor, we wanted to offer another perspective and decided to concentrate on these few functions that were written by an exploit developer," Check Point Research's Itay Cohen and Eyal Itkin noted.
Fingerprinting an Exploit Writer's Characteristics
The idea, in a nutshell, is to fingerprint an exploit for specific artifacts that can uniquely tie it to a developer. It could be in using hard-coded values, string names, or even how the code is organized and certain functions are implemented.
Check Point said their analysis began in response to a "complicated attack" against one of its customers when they encountered a 64-bit malware executable that exploited CVE-2019-0859 to gain elevated privileges.
Noticing the fact that the exploit and the malware were written by two different sets of people, the researchers used the binary's properties as a unique hunting signature to find at least 11 other exploits developed by the same developer named "Volodya" (or "Volodimir").
"Finding a vulnerability, and reliably exploiting it, will most probably be done by specific teams or individuals who specialize in a particular role. The malware developers for their part don't really care how it works behind the scenes, they just want to integrate this [exploits] module and be done with it," the researchers said.
Interestingly, Volodya — likely of Ukrainian origin — has been previously linked to selling Windows zero-days to cyberespionage groups and crimeware gangs for anywhere between $85,000 to $200,000.
Chief among them was an LPE exploit that leveraged a memory corruption in "NtUserSetWindowLongPtr" (CVE-2016-7255), which has been widely used by ransomware operators like GandCrab, Cerber, and Magniber. It's now believed that Volodya advertised this LPE zero-day on the Exploit.in cybercrime forum in May 2016.
In all, five zero-day and six one-day exploits were identified as developed by Volodya over a period of 2015-2019. Subsequently, the same technique was employed to identify five more LPE exploits from another exploit writer known as PlayBit.
An Extensive Clientele
Stating the exploit samples shared code level similarities to grant SYSTEM privileges to the desired process, the researchers said, "both of our actors were very consistent in their respective exploitation routines, each sticking to their favorite way."
What's more, Volodya also appears to have switched up his tactics during the intervening years, with the developer shifting from selling the exploits as embeddable source code in the malware to an external utility that accepts a specific API.
Besides ransomware groups, Volodya has been found to cater to an extensive clientele, including the Ursnif banking trojan, and APT groups such as Turla, APT28, and Buhtrap.
"The APT customers, Turla, APT28, and Buhtrap, are all commonly attributed to Russia and it is interesting to find that even these advanced groups purchase exploits instead of developing them in-house," Check Point observed in its analysis. "This is another point which further strengthens our hypothesis that the written exploits can be treated as a separate and distinct part of the malware."
With cyberattacks expanding in scope, frequency, and magnitude, using an exploit developer's code signature as a means to track down bad actors could provide valuable insight into the black exploit market.
"When Check Point finds a vulnerability, we demonstrate its severity, report it to the appropriate vendor, and make sure it's patched, so it doesn't pose a threat," Cohen said. "However, for individuals trading these exploits, it's a completely different story. For them, finding the vulnerability is just the beginning. They need to reliably exploit it on as many versions as possible, in order to monetize it to a customer's satisfaction."
"This research provides insight into how that is achieved, and the buyers in this market, which often include nation-state actors. We believe that this research methodology can be used to identify additional exploit writers."
| Malware |
Android Malware and Corporate Networks Security | https://thehackernews.com/2012/05/android-malware-and-corporate-networks.html | Android Malware and Corporate Networks Security
A new Android Trojan dubbed "NotCompatible" is being spread through compromised Web sites. This may directly affect Android tablets and smartphones, along with being a potential risk hazard to corporate networks and their security.
Kevin Mahaffrey is co-founder and CTO of a San Francisco based firm called Lookout Security. The main focus of the company is Android and during their investigations it was found there was a new malware out there. Called "NotCompatible" the Android malware is, according to Mahaffrey, a risk to corporate networks.
According to their report, a hacked Web site would contain a hidden iFrame at the bottom of the page. When the Android browser loads the page, it will attempt to load the file in the hidden iFrame. Upon loading the file, the browser would transfer control to the app loader, which would display an application installation screen, with the header com.Security.Update. An unsuspecting user might install the app, and thus infect their Android device.
Fortunately, the malware isn't very stealthy. Mobile malware threats are not as widespread as those targeting PCs. Criminal hackers are experimenting with different business models for mobile devices, such as tricking users into subscribing to pay-text-message services that the criminals control.
Android app security holes have long been a concern because of the mobile operating system's more open architecture and the app market's less stringent standards for developers than others such as Apple's iOS or Research In Motion's BlackBerry OS.Earlier this year, Google said it was using a service called Bouncer that automatically polices its app market and takes down offenders before they strike.
Mahaffey, who studied Internet browsing data from Android gadgets to draw his conclusions, said an attacker could latch on to a business or government network if an employee whose Android device has been infected with NotCompatible accessed their corporate information via Wi-Fi.
With over 600 million Android devices in the world, the purveyors of malware will always be seeking ways to infect your Android device. The worst kind of update you can download to your machine is one that you didn't ask for and don't know where it comes from.
| Malware |
Your Android Phone is Spying On You, Use custom ROM To Protect your Privacy | https://thehackernews.com/2011/11/your-android-phone-is-spying-on-you-use.html | Your Android Phone is Spying On You, Use custom ROM To Protect your Privacy
In this digital age, privacy is more important than ever. Just because you "don't have anything to hide," does not mean that you shouldn't value your privacy or fight for it when companies do things like this, especially with something as personal as your cell phone.
An Android developer recently discovered a clandestine application called Carrier IQ built into most smartphones that doesn't just track your location; it secretly records your keystrokes, and there's nothing you can do about it. Is it time to put on a tinfoil hat? That depends on how you feel about privacy. In the nearly 20-minute video clip, Eckhart shows how software developed by mobile-device tracker Carrier IQ logs each keystroke and then sends them off to locations unknown. In addition, when Eckhart tried placing a call, Carrier IQ's software recorded each number before the call was even made.
What is Carrier IQ, exactly?
The software is hidden inside phones there is little you can do to detect that it's even installed, let alone remove it, and it tracks everything. Keystrokes, browsing and surfing habits, Google searches, and basically every single thing that you are doing on your phone and every button that you press is logged by this software. Jump to 9:00 in the YouTube video below for the proof this is basically a keylogger running on your phone that you didn't know about.
The company that's creating this software claims that the point of the software is to deliver "analytics" about devices to the carriers to help them provide better service to their users. But is recording every keystroke really necessary for that information? Does not telling the users about this and making it near-impossible to opt out seem a bit fishy to anybody else? This software is on almost all Android phones made by the big names (HTC, Samsung, Motorola), and is even on BlackBerries and Nokia devices, as well.
"Our action was misguided and we are deeply sorry for any concern or trouble that our letter may have caused Mr. Eckhart," the company said in response to the EFF's letter. "We sincerely appreciate and respect EFF's work on his behalf, and share their commitment to protecting free speech in a rapidly changing technological world."
But Eckhart's new video seems to refute at least some of those claims. In one part of the clip, he shows how an entire SMS message--"hello world"--was recorded by Carrier IQ's software. In another example, he demonstrates how a Google search, his location, and other key information is recorded by Carrier IQ's application, even though he was on Wi-Fi and a page secured by HTTPS.
HTTPS? Nothing Is Safe From Carrier IQ
For those unaware, the S in HTTPS stands for secure. It's what keep your passwords and other sensitive data safe when sent across the web. It's provides encryption for said information, so whilst it's traveling through the airwaves, it's safe and snuggly, away from the awful people who want to steal your info.
Just because a website is using a secure connection doesn't mean it's one-hundred percent safe from end-to-end, though. You see, some information, including usernames and passwords, can still be sent plain text. For example, the username and password can be used in the address of the site, like www.mysite.com?username=MYNAME&password=MYPASS (Trev's example). Sure, it's encrypted while going down the tunnel, but guess who gets to see the raw link? Did you guess Carrier IQ? If so, go get yourself a cookie. You earned it. [Source]
Carrier IQ says in this public statement that it is "not logging keystrokes or providing tracking tools" and that its software is used to track performance, but the video proves entirely otherwise: this app is sitting in between you and the Android OS and is making a note of everything you do. Secure websites don't help. Even using Wi-Fi doesn't help. Your phone use is being logged by this software, and there is no way to easily opt out.
Devices Without a Cellular Network Aren't Safe, Either
Let's think about the name of this thing for a minute - Carrier IQ. So, it's probably safe to say that this is all about the carriers, right? If that were true, then why would CIQ remain active once a device no longer has carrier service?
Let me back up for one second, CIQ claims that its services are stopped the second the SIM card is removed from the device, which is all fine and dandy... if you're on a GSM network. Those of us on CDMA networks aren't so lucky, though, because we don't use SIM cards. Thus, even when a device is deactivated from its network, it continues to send data back to the carrier, CIQ, and whoever else whenever you're on a Wi-Fi connection.
Ensure your Privacy : Use custom ROM To Protect your Privacy
Unfortunately, there is no easy way to protect yourself. There's no switch that you can turn off in the settings of your phone or software that appears in your app drawer that you can simply uninstall. As far as the GUI of your phone is concerned, Carrier IQ isn't even there. But it is there, hiding in the background, making sure that you don't even know it exists. And for many, that's just not cool. Your phone is a deeply personal device and contains lots of things (emails, photos, text messages) that many would consider totally private. Why should this company have access?
Best way, root your phone and there are many guides available for the different devices. The best place to look for information on rooting is the XDA Forum. Search on the page for your phone name and go to the "General" forum for the device. There, you should find threads with guides on how to root and get the phone ready to install custom ROMs. The process varies widely phone by phone, so we can't give you a definitive guide here, but XDA is generally on top of the best rooting processes for the major devices.The next step is to find a ROM that supports your device that does not have Carrier IQ installed on it. Your best bet is to look for "AOSP" or "Vanilla" ROMs. These are versions of Android that have built entirely from the open source code for Android that's released by Google each time a new version comes out. These ROMs will be free from carrier and device manufacturer tinkering, and won't have Carrier IQ hiding in the background.
Another great custom ROM solution is Cyanogenmod. Cyanogenmod has some nice additional tweaks and features above stock Android, and is definitely the most well respected and most frequently updated custom ROM out there. Additionally, it's available on most popular Android devices out there. The developers are even working hard on the next version, based on Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich.
A simple Guide : How To Install CyanogenMod 7 On Samsung Galaxy S II Using ROM Manager is Available here.
| Vulnerability |
[Video] Ukrainian Police Seize Servers of Software Firm Linked to NotPetya Cyberattack | https://thehackernews.com/2017/07/notpetya-ransomware-police-raid.html | Ukrainian National Police has released a video showing officers raiding company of M.E.Doc accounting software makers, whose systems have been linked to outbreak of Petya (NotPetya) ransomware that recently infected computers of several major companies worldwide.
On 4th July, masked police officers from Ukrainian anti-cybercrime unit — carrying shotguns and assault rifles — raided the software development firm "Intellect Service," in the capital city Kyiv and seized their servers, which were reportedly compromised by hackers to spread (ExPetr, PetrWrap, Petya, NotPetya) ransomware.
Researchers from ESET security firm have found a very stealthy malicious code in the M.E.Doc software update which was injected by an unknown hacker or group of hackers in mid-April by exploiting a vulnerability.
The malicious software upgrade, designed to install a backdoor and give unauthorized remote access to attackers, was then delivered as an update to nearly 1 million computers belonging to its client companies.
Researchers explain that the backdoor installed in endpoint computers was designed to allow hackers to execute various commands remotely and further install other malicious programs, eventually used to conduct WannaCry like global ransomware attack.
The software company previously denied its servers had been compromised, but several researchers and even Microsoft blamed the company for being "patient zero" for the NotPetya attack.
Ukrainian authority has also said that the company could face charges.
Moreover, the Petya investigation took interesting twist last week when researchers found that NotPetya is not a ransomware; instead, it's a destructive piece of "wiper" malware designed to destroy all records from the targeted systems, making organizations to shut down their operations.
Ukrainian authority has recommended M.E.Doc customers to stop using its accounting software until further notice. So, you are supposed to turn off your computers if it has the M.E.Doc software installed on and change your passwords.
Ukraine believes Russia is behind the NotPetya cyber attack that shut down the nation's critical operations, including the airport, local metro, hospitals, and government, but authorities are still investigating the case.
NotPetya Hacker Demands 100 Bitcoins for the Decryption Key
It was also reported today that the hackers connected to the NotPetya ransomware moved $10,000 worth of Bitcoins from the online wallet they were using to receive payments from victims to a different wallet.
After that someone claimed to be connected to NotPetya Posted an announcement on DeepPaste and Pastebin, asking for 100 Bitcoins (roughly $256,000) for the private key that supposedly decrypts any file encrypted with NotPetya.
| Cyber_Attack |
CISO Kit — Breach Protection in the Palm of Your Hand | https://thehackernews.com/2019/09/data-breach-protection.html | CISOs and CIOs need to know better than anyone the security pulse of their organizations. On the other hand, they cannot be flooded with every changing detail.
Finding the right balance that enables them to clearly grasp the big picture required in making sound decisions is a task many security executives find challenging. Threat actors do not acknowledge off-hours or weekends, introducing the need for constant vigilance.
Moreover, CIOs and CISOs are heavily dependent on their team for knowledge and often lack the immediate interaction with the events in real-time. This situation is also far from favorable – after all, who if not the security executive should have the ability to be in-the-know and initiate action at the heart of things?
Cynet rises to this challenge with the recently launched Cynet Dashboard application, which provides 24/7 insight into the overall security posture, real-time visibility into newly detected threats, and the ability to take rapid action if the need arises.
Moreover, any new Cynet customer receives a 'CISO Kit' of iPad and Apple Watch that runs this app, giving instant security on-the-go. (For more details, click here.)
"It's a problem every CIO and CISO comes to acknowledge sooner or later," said Eyal Gruner, co-Founder of Cynet. "You want to know at any given moment what's happening. What you have in your environment, whether there is something going on, if there any open incidents, and so on. On the other hand, you cannot spend your entire day in front of Cynet's screen."
"We think it's crucial that every security executive has that immediate visibility, wherever he is, and that's why we've decided to provide our new clients with an Apple Watch and iPad together with the Cynet Dashboard app."
The Need to Know
To address this need, Cynet built the Cynet Dashboard App which continuously gives CISOs a view into the number of assets in their environment, as well as how many open alerts there are at any given moment, rated by severity (low, medium, high or critical) and type (host, file, user or network).
"We've talked to hundreds of security stakeholders from organizations of all sizes, and it all converged into a common theme – they want to know what they have in their environment and what security events are currently taking place. Plain and simple," explained Gruner.
The Need to Report
On top of real-time knowledge into what's going on, the Cynet Dashboard App addresses the need for concise communication and reporting.
Not the fully blown PDFs with graphs and charts, but being able to casually say in a management meeting or over lunch, 'Yes, we had 3 incidents this week. Two were resolved the other day, and one is being handled now.'
The Need to Control
"When we founded Cynet, we knew that providing security expertise is not less important than providing the technology," said Gruner.
"So when prospects purchase Cynet, they also get CyOps – our team of expert security analysts and threat researchers that operate a 24/7 SOC to assist our customers with incident response, in-depth investigation and proactive threat hunting. This is one of the things our customers really love."
The Cynet Dashboard App enables CISOs to engage CyOps with a simple click, complementing the real-time knowledge and reporting with the ability to act and ensure that incidents get expert treatment.
Changing the CISO Experience
"This is the first time such an experience has been made available to cybersecurity management," said Gruner. "Our app enables the CISO to become truly autonomous. Know the core facts that matter, report to management, and take quick action if needed – all through his Apple Watch or iPad. It's all up to him to take control and determine what to do. It's literally having your security in the palm of your hand."
Click here to learn more about the Cynet Dashboard app and how you can get your own Cynet CISO Kit.
| Data_Breaches |
New 4G LTE Network Attacks Let Hackers Spy, Track, Spoof and Spam | https://thehackernews.com/2018/03/4g-lte-network-hacking.html | Security researchers have discovered a set of severe vulnerabilities in 4G LTE protocol that could be exploited to spy on user phone calls and text messages, send fake emergency alerts, spoof location of the device and even knock devices entirely offline.
A new research paper [PDF] recently published by researchers at Purdue University and the University of Iowa details 10 new cyber attacks against the 4G LTE wireless data communications technology for mobile devices and data terminals.
The attacks exploit design weaknesses in three key protocol procedures of the 4G LTE network known as attach, detach, and paging.
Unlike many previous research, these aren't just theoretical attacks. The researchers employed a systematic model-based adversarial testing approach, which they called LTEInspector, and were able to test 8 of the 10 attacks in a real testbed using SIM cards from four large US carriers.
Authentication Synchronization Failure Attack
Traceability Attack
Numb Attack
Authentication Relay Attack
Detach/Downgrade Attack
Paging Channel Hijacking Attack
Stealthy Kicking-off Attack
Panic Attack
Energy Depletion Attack
Linkability Attack
Among the above-listed attacks, researchers consider an authentication relay attack is particularly worrying, as it lets an attacker connect to a 4G LTE network by impersonating a victim's phone number without any legitimate credentials.
This attack could not only allow a hacker to compromise the cellular network to read incoming and outgoing messages of the victims but also frame someone else for the crime.
"Through this attack the adversary can poison the location of the victim device in the core networks, thus allowing setting up a false alibi or planting fake evidence during a criminal investigation," the report said.
Other notable attacks reported by the researchers could allow attackers to obtain victim's coarse-grained location information (linkability attack) and launch denial of service (DoS) attack against the device and take it offline (detach attack).
"Using LTEInspector, we obtained the intuition of an attack which enables an adversary to possibly hijack a cellular device's paging channel with which it can not only stop notifications (e.g., call, SMS) to reach the device but also can inject fabricated messages resulting in multiple implications including energy depletion and activity profiling," the paper reads.
Using panic attack, attackers can create artificial chaos by broadcasting fake emergency messages about life-threatening attacks or riots to a large number of users in an area.
What's interesting about these attacks is that many of these can be carried out for $1,300 to $3,900 using relatively low-cost USRP devices available in the market.
Researchers have no plans to release the proof-of-concept code for these attacks until the flaws are fixed.
Although there are some possible defenses against these observed attacks, the researchers refrained from discussing one.
The paper reads: "retrospectively adding security into an existing protocol without breaking backward compatibility often yields band-aid-like-solutions which do not hold up under extreme scrutiny."
"It is also not clear, especially, for the authentication relay attack whether a defense exists that does not require major infrastructural or protocol overhaul," it adds. "A possibility is to employ a distance-bounding protocol; realization of such protocol is, however, rare in practice."
The vulnerabilities are most worrying that once again raise concerns about the security of the cell standards in the real world, potentially having an industry-wide impact.
| Cyber_Attack |
Ransomware Attack Takes Down Bristol Airport's Flight Display Screens | https://thehackernews.com/2018/09/cyberattack-bristol-airport.html | Bristol Airport has blamed a ransomware attack for causing a blackout of flight information screens for two days over the weekend.
The airport said that the attack started Friday morning, taking out several computers over the airport network, including its in-house display screens which provide details about the arrival and departure information of flights.
The attack forced the airport officials to take down its systems and use whiteboards and paper posters to announce check-in and arrival information for flights going through the airport and luggage pickup points for all Friday, Saturday, and the subsequent night.
"We are currently experiencing technical problems with our flight information screens," a post on the Bristol Airport's official Twitter feed read on Friday.
"Flights are unaffected and details of check-in desks, boarding gates, and arrival/departure times will be made over the public address system. Additional staff are on hand to assist passengers."
The airport also urged passengers to arrive early and "allow extra time for check-in and boarding processes," though this two days technical meltdown caused delays in baggage handling, with customers needed to wait longer than one hour for their bags.
However, no flight delays were reportedly caused due to the cyber attack.
An airport spokesman said that the information screens went offline due to a so-called "ransomware" attack, though he confirmed that no "ransom" had been paid to get the airport systems working again.
Affected systems and flight information screens were finally restored on Sunday, officials said.
"We are grateful to passengers for their patience while we have been working to resolve issues with flight information this weekend. Digital screens are now live in arrivals and departures. Work will continue to restore complete site-wide coverage as soon as possible," the airport tweeted on Sunday.
At the moment, it is not clear how the ransomware got into the airport systems. Bristol is carrying out an investigation to find out what happened.
| Malware |
Hacker Breaches Dozens of Sites, Puts 127 Million New Records Up for Sale | https://thehackernews.com/2019/02/data-breach-website.html | A hacker who was selling details of nearly 620 million online accounts stolen from 16 popular websites has now put up a second batch of 127 million records originating from 8 other sites for sale on the dark web.
Last week, The Hacker News received an email from a Pakistani hacker who claims to have hacked dozens of popular websites (listed below) and selling their stolen databases online.
During an interview with The Hacker News, the hacker also claimed that many targeted companies have probably no idea that they have been compromised and that their customers' data have already been sold to multiple cyber criminal groups and individuals.
Package 1: Databases From 16 Compromised Websites On Sale
In the first round, the hacker who goes by online alias "gnosticplayers" was selling details of 617 million accounts belonging to the following 16 compromised websites for less than $20,000 in Bitcoin on dark web marketplace Dream Market:
Dubsmash — 162 million accounts
MyFitnessPal — 151 million accounts
MyHeritage — 92 million accounts
ShareThis — 41 million accounts
HauteLook — 28 million accounts
Animoto — 25 million accounts
EyeEm — 22 million accounts
8fit — 20 million accounts
Whitepages — 18 million accounts
Fotolog — 16 million accounts
500px — 15 million accounts
Armor Games — 11 million accounts
BookMate — 8 million accounts
CoffeeMeetsBagel — 6 million accounts
Artsy — 1 million accounts
DataCamp — 700,000 accounts
Out of these, the popular photo-sharing service 500px has confirmed that the company suffered a data breach in July last year and that personal data, including full names, usernames, email addresses, password hashes, location, birth date, and gender, for all the roughly 14.8 million users existed at the time was exposed online.
Just yesterday, Artsy, DataCamp and CoffeeMeetsBagel have also confirmed that the companies were victims of a breach last year and that personal and account details of their customers was stolen by an unauthorized attacker.
Diet tracking service MyFitnessPal, online genealogy platform MyHeritage and cloud-based video maker service Animoto had confirmed the data breaches last year.
In response to the news, video-sharing app Dubsmash also issued a notice informing its users that they have launched an investigation and contacted law enforcement to look into the matter.
Package 2: Hacked Databases From 8 More Websites On Sale
While putting the second round of the stolen accounts up for sale on the Dream Market—one of the largest dark web marketplaces for illegal narcotics and drug paraphernalia—the hacker removed the collection of the first round to avoid them from getting leaked and land on security initiatives like Google's new Password Checkup tool.
Gnosticplayers told The Hacker News in an email that the second round listed stolen data from 127 million accounts that belonged to the following 8 hacked websites, which was up for sale for $14,500 in bitcoin:
Houzz — 57 million accounts
YouNow — 40 million accounts
Ixigo — 18 million accounts
Stronghold Kingdoms — 5 million accounts
Roll20.net — 4 million accounts
Ge.tt — 1.83 million accounts
Petflow and Vbulletin forum — 1.5 million accounts
Coinmama (Cryptocurrency Exchange) — 420,000 accounts
Of the above-listed websites, only Houzz has confirmed the security breach earlier this month that compromised its customers' public information and certain internal account information.
Like the first round, the recent collection of 127 million stolen accounts has also been removed from the sale on the dark web.
Though some of the services are resetting users' passwords after confirming its data was stolen, if you are a user of any of the above-listed services, you should consider changing your passwords in the event you re-used the same password across different websites.
| Data_Breaches |
FireEye: Russian Research Lab Aided the Development of TRITON Industrial Malware | https://thehackernews.com/2018/10/russia-triton-ics-malware.html | Cybersecurity firm FireEye claims to have discovered evidence that proves the involvement of a Russian-owned research institute in the development of the TRITON malware that caused some industrial systems to unexpectedly shut down last year, including a petrochemical plant in Saudi Arabia.
TRITON, also known as Trisis, is a piece of ICS malware designed to target the Triconex Safety Instrumented System (SIS) controllers made by Schneider Electric which are often used in oil and gas facilities.
Triconex Safety Instrumented System is an autonomous control system that independently monitors the performance of critical systems and takes immediate actions automatically if a dangerous state is detected.
Since malware of such capabilities can't be created by a computer hacker without possessing necessary knowledge of Industrial Control Systems (ICS), researchers believe with "high confidence" that Moscow-based lab Central Scientific Research Institute of Chemistry and Mechanics (CNIIHM, a.k.a ЦНИИХМ) helped attackers, dubbed "TEMP.Veles," with institutional knowledge develop the TRITON framework and test its components in a targeted environment.
In a blog post published earlier today, FireEye uncovered various attribution clues that connect the development and testing activities of Triton malware to the Russian government, CNIIHM and a former professor at CNIIHM.
"An IP address [ 87.245.143.140] registered to CNIIHM has been employed by TEMP.Veles for multiple purposes, including monitoring open-source coverage of TRITON, network reconnaissance, and malicious activity in support of the TRITON intrusion," FireEye wrote while pointing out evidence.
Moreover, behavior patterns observed in the TEMP.Veles group activity are also consistent with the Moscow time zone, where the CNIIHM institute is located.
Though CNIIHM researchers possess experience in critical infrastructure and the development of weapons and military equipment, FireEye did not claim or has any evidence if the institute was also involved in deploying the Triton malware in the wild.
"Some possibility remains that one or more CNIIHM employees could have conducted the activity linking TEMP.Veles to CNIIHM without their employer's approval. However, this scenario is highly unlikely," FireEye researchers concluded.
Neither Russian government nor the CNIIHM institute has responded to the FireEye report, though we can predict Russia's response, as the country has repeatedly denied such allegations from private cybersecurity firms in the past.
What's concerning is that the hackers behind Triton remained an active threat to critical infrastructure across the globe, as the malware has the ability to cause severe, life-threatening damages to an organization or shut down its operations.
| Malware |
Drupal Releases Core CMS Updates to Patch Several Vulnerabilities | https://thehackernews.com/2019/04/drupal-security-update.html | Drupal, the popular open-source content management system, has released security updates to address multiple "moderately critical" vulnerabilities in Drupal Core that could allow remote attackers to compromise the security of hundreds of thousands of websites.
According to the advisories published today by the Drupal developers, all security vulnerabilities Drupal patched this month reside in third-party libraries that are included in Drupal 8.6, Drupal 8.5 or earlier and Drupal 7.
One of the security flaws is a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability that resides in a third-party plugin, called JQuery, the most popular JavaScript library that is being used by millions of websites and also comes pre-integrated in Drupal Core.
Last week, JQuery released its latest version jQuery 3.4.0 to patch the reported vulnerability, which has not yet assigned a CVE number, that affects all prior versions of the library to that date.
"jQuery 3.4.0 includes a fix for some unintended behavior when using jQuery.extend(true, {}, ...). If an unsanitized source object contained an enumerable __proto__ property, it could extend the native Object.prototype," the advisory explains.
"It's possible that this vulnerability is exploitable with some Drupal modules."
The rest three security vulnerabilities reside in Symfony PHP components used by Drupal Core that could result in cross-site scripting (CVE-2019-10909), remote code execution (CVE-2019-10910) and authentication bypass (CVE-2019-1091) attacks.
Considering the popularity of Drupal exploits among hackers, you are highly recommended to install the latest update of the CMS as soon as possible:
If you are using Drupal 8.6, update to Drupal 8.6.15.
If you are using Drupal 8.5 or earlier, update to Drupal 8.5.15.
If you are using Drupal 7, update to Drupal 7.66.
Almost two months ago, Drupal maintainers patched a critical RCE vulnerability in Drupal Core without releasing any technical details of the flaw that could have allowed remote attackers to hack its customers' website.
But despite that, the proof-of-concept (PoC) exploit code for the vulnerability was made publicly available on the Internet just two days after the team rolled out the patched version of its software.
And then, several individuals and groups of hackers started actively exploiting the flaw to install cryptocurrency miners on vulnerable Drupal websites that did not update their CMSes to the latest version.
Last year, attackers also targeted hundreds of thousands of Drupal websites in mass attacks using in the wild exploits leveraging two separate critical remote code execution vulnerabilities, which were dubbed Drupalgeddon2 and Drupalgeddon3.
In those case as well, the attacks started shortly after PoC exploit code for both the vulnerabilities was published on the Internet, which was then followed by large-scale Internet scanning and exploitation attempts.
Long story short—Patch your websites before it gets too late.
| Vulnerability |
Ashley Madison Hackers (with another 300GB Dump) – Wait, Cheaters! We haven't Yet Done | https://thehackernews.com/2015/08/ashley-madison-hacked.html | Over a month ago, a group of hackers breached the popular cheater's dating service Ashley Madison and its parent company Avid Life Media, affecting tens of Millions site customers private life and also dump the website's source code onto the dark web.
The hackers behind the Ashley Madison hack, who call themselves The Impact Team, leaked 10GB of its customers private data online on Tuesday, shortly followed by another 20GB of company's internal data on Thursday.
The second round of leak exposed a massive amount of e-mail from Ashley Madison parent company's Avid Life Media CEO Noel Biderman.
Now, the Impact Team also posted a third data dump on Friday.
Hackers Finally Break Their Silence
The hackers finally spoke out for the first time after the bombshell leaks.
In an interview with Motherboard, the hackers claimed to have 300GB of other data from Ashley Madison hack, which includes nude photographs and private, explicit chats between members.
However, the Impact Team said it would not release naked or explicit photos of Ashley Madison customers, but did not rule out making public private chats, and other photographs posted through the adultery website.
Large Trove of Data
The Impact Team claims to have a lot more data from Ashley Madison's servers:
300GB of employee emails and docs from internal network
Tens of thousands of Ashley Madison customers pictures
Ashley Madison users' chats and messages
1/3 of pictures are "Dick Pictures"
Other data includes employee e-mails and documents
According to Motherboard, the hackers sound legit, as they replied with a message signed with the same PGP key used in the Ashley Madison data dumps.
The Impact Team - "Nobody was Watching. No Security"
When asked about the cheaters website security, the team said, "Nobody was watching. No security" when it broke into Ashley Madison's servers repeatedly over the past few years. One hacker said, "[We] got in and found nothing to bypass."
The team of hackers had threatened to publish names, nude photos and sexual fantasies of its customers unless Avid Media closed down the site.
"They make $100,000,000 in fraud a year," said the Impact Team. "Not very surprised they didn't shut down. Maybe lawyers can shut them down now. They sound like politicians, cannot stop lying."
Security experts said data dumps released by the Impact Team on Tuesday and Thursday appeared to be genuine.
Tuesday's release included customer information belonging to U.S. government officials, British civil servants and high-level executives at European and North America corporations.
Meanwhile a heartbroken wife whose husband was appeared as a Ashley Madison customer has started the first divorce proceedings.
Representatives of Avid Life Media could not immediately be reached for comment.
| Data_Breaches |
Critical Auth Bypass Bug Affects VMware Carbon Black App Control | https://thehackernews.com/2021/06/critical-auth-bypass-bug-affects-vmware.html | VMware has rolled out security updates to resolve a critical flaw affecting Carbon Black App Control that could be exploited to bypass authentication and take control of vulnerable systems.
The vulnerability, identified as CVE-2021-21998, is rated 9.4 out of 10 in severity by the industry-standard Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) and affects App Control (AppC) versions 8.0.x, 8.1.x, 8.5.x, and 8.6.x.
Carbon Black App Control is a security solution designed to lock down critical systems and servers to prevent unauthorized changes in the face of cyber-attacks and ensure compliance with regulatory mandates such as PCI-DSS, HIPAA, GDPR, SOX, FISMA, and NERC.
"A malicious actor with network access to the VMware Carbon Black App Control management server might be able to obtain administrative access to the product without the need to authenticate," the California-based cloud computing and virtualization technology company said in an advisory.
CVE-2021-21998 is the second time VMware is addressing an authentication bypass issue in its Carbon Black endpoint security software. Earlier this April, the company fixed an incorrect URL handling vulnerability in the Carbon Black Cloud Workload appliance (CVE-2021-21982) that could be exploited to gain access to the administration API.
That's not all. VMware also patched a local privilege escalation bug affecting VMware Tools for Windows, VMware Remote Console for Windows (VMRC for Windows), and VMware App Volumes (CVE-2021-21999, CVSS score: 7.8) that could allow a bad actor to execute arbitrary code on affected systems.
"An attacker with normal access to a virtual machine may exploit this issue by placing a malicious file renamed as 'openssl.cnf' in an unrestricted directory which would allow code to be executed with elevated privileges," VMware noted.
VMware credited Zeeshan Shaikh (@bugzzzhunter) from NotSoSecure and Hou JingYi (@hjy79425575) of Qihoo 360 for reporting the flaw.
| Vulnerability |
What Does PCI 3.0 Mean to Security Practitioners? | https://thehackernews.com/2013/10/what-does-pci-30-mean-to-security_23.html | Cybercrime, identity theft, and frauds are on the rise; and in most cases, the data breaches are associated with credit cards and cardholder data. The impact of data breach not only affects your organization, but also your customers.
A common observation cites that organizations that are PCI compliant are 50% less likely to suffer a data breach. It is alarming to notice that most organizations have difficulty complying with the requirements necessary for processing cardholder data.
PCI makes the process smooth
Based on the feedback from the industry, PCI Security Council has introduced some changes in the compliance regulations and has come up with version 3.0 for PCI compliance whose final version is scheduled for release on November 7, 2013. And, it is expected to be effective from January 2014. So, how will the upgraded version of PCI Compliance impact your organization?
Awareness : Most security breaches happen due to lack of awareness in the following areas:
Payment security
Maintenance of PCI standards
Proper implementation methods
The 3.0 upgrade will also clarify the intent of the requirements and implementation methods.
Flexibility : The upgrade also adds more flexibility in terms of meeting PCI requirements and how organizations will address the requirements and mitigate risks.
Shared Responsibility : PCI 3.0 cites that securing cardholder data is a shared responsibility due to an increase in the number of access points for the cardholder data. The challenge posed by the upgrade is how well equipped you are to embrace PCI 3.0.
Factors considered for the revisions in PCI 3.0
Improvement of payment security
Global applicability
Cost of change for your infrastructure
Impact of the changes
What's new with PCI 3.0 and why the new version?
PCI Requirement No.
Current PCI DSS Standard
(as of October 2013)
Proposed PCI DSS Update for 3.0 on top of existing standards
Purpose
1
Install and maintain a firewall configuration to protect cardholder data.
Have a current diagram that shows cardholder data flows.
To clarify that documented cardholder data flows are an important component of network diagrams.
2
Do not use vendor-supplied defaults for system passwords and other security parameters.
Maintain an inventory of system components in scope for PCI DSS.
To support effective scoping practices.
3
Protect stored cardholder data.
No change from the existing version
4
Encrypt transmission of cardholder data across open, public networks.
No change from the existing version
5
Use and regularly update antivirus software.
Evaluate evolving malware threats for systems not commonly affected by malware.
To promote ongoing awareness and due diligence to protect systems from malware
6
Develop and maintain secure systems and applications.
Update list of common vulnerabilities in alignment with OWASP, NIST, and SANS for inclusion in secure coding practices.
To keep current with emerging threats.
7
Restrict access to cardholder data by business need-to-know.
No change from the existing version
8
Assign a unique ID to each person with computer access.
Security considerations for authentication mechanisms such as physical security tokens, smart cards, and certificates.
To address feedback about requirements for securing authentication methods, other than passwords, that need to be included.
9
Restrict physical access to cardholder data.
Protect POS terminals and devices from tampering or substitution.
To address the need for physical security of payment terminals.
10
Track and monitor all access to network resources and cardholder data.
No change from the existing version
11
Regularly test security systems and processes.
Implement a methodology for penetration testing, and perform penetration tests to verify that the segmentation methods are operational and effective.
To address requests for more details about penetration tests, and for more stringent scoping verification.
12
Maintain a policy that addresses information security.
Maintain information about which PCI DSS requirements are managed by service providers and which are managed by the entity.
Service providers need to accept responsibility for maintaining applicable PCI DSS requirements.
To address feedback from the 3rd-Party Security Assurance SIG.
So, what do these changes mean to you?
The changes in PCI 3.0 have been more structural in nature, which means they would make your organization more proactive in protecting cardholder data.
The upgrade includes the following improvements:
Elimination of the redundant sub-requirements
Clarification of the testing procedures for each requirement
Strengthens the requirements around penetration testing and validation of network segments
More flexibility around risk mitigation methods comprising password strength and complexity requirements.
After PCI 3.0 becomes functional, you should complete the following:
Provide policy guidance and operational procedures for each requirement
Maintain an inventory of all systems within your PCI scope
Keeping your Antivirus software up to date and regularly running virus scans is now more important in ensuring that you haven't been susceptible to vulnerabilities. You also need to start investing in the right security information & event management (SIEM) solution that will help you quickly uncover PCI DSS policy violations by identifying attacks, highlighting threats with real-time log analysis, and implementing powerful cross-device, cross-event correlation covering your entire IT infrastructure.
SolarWinds® Log & Event Manager (LEM) provides 300 pre-built "audit-proven" report templates that you can use to generate reports complying with PCI DSS and other federal compliance regulations, or customize them for internal requirements.
Have you started assessing and reporting your compliance adherence yet?
Yaagneshwaran Ganesh - Product Marketing Specialist at SolarWinds, with a primary focus on Information Security. Market Research, Managed Hosting services, etc.(Google+ Profile)
| Data_Breaches |
Warning! CCTV Cameras Sold on Amazon Come with Pre-Installed Malware | https://thehackernews.com/2016/04/home-security-system.html | Be careful while buying any off-brand electronics from Amazon, as they could end up infecting you.
Recently, independent security researcher Mike Olsen discovered that the CCTV surveillance devices sold on Amazon came with pre-installed malware.
Olsen discovered this nasty secret after he bought a set of outdoor CCTV surveillance cameras from Amazon for one of his friends.
He picked Sony Chip HD 6 Camera 1080P PoE IP CCTV surveillance camera kit sold by the Urban Security Group (USG) on Amazon, as it had good reviews and was a relatively cheap set of 6 cameras with all necessary equipment included.
While helping his friend set up the cameras, Olsen logged into the administrator panel to configure the surveillance system and found that the page hosted "no normal controls or settings."
Assuming that it might be bad programming, Olsen opened up the browser's developer tools and was surprised to discover a hidden iFrame loaded at the bottom of the body tag, retrieving content from Brenz.pl.
Surveillance Camera Comes Pre-Installed with Malware
A quick Google search revealed that the Brenz.pl domain was used in malware distribution campaigns, according to a blog post by cyber-security vendor Sucuri in 2011.
In short, this means that the newly bought surveillance camera kit could be infected with malware anytime, when the Brenz.pl operator decides to push malicious code to the DVR's backend through the hidden iFrame.
Once the CCTV camera's operator accessed that page, the malware would be downloaded and installed, potentially leading to unlawful spying and data theft.
Since the Breza.pl domain was already on the firmware, there might be other nasty malware included in the firmware as well, that does not provide the camera's owner to access the backend.
The malware distributed by the surveillance cameras can have the ability to hijack video feeds or make the customer's cameras part of a DDoS Botnet, something that happened last year.
So be careful what you buy. Check reviews of every product before buying, even if the product brand and the eCommerce platform is trusted.
| Malware |
7 New Meltdown and Spectre-type CPU Flaws Affect Intel, AMD, ARM CPUs | https://thehackernews.com/2018/11/meltdown-spectre-vulnerabilities.html | Disclosed earlier this year, potentially dangerous Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities that affected a large family of modern processors proven that speculative execution attacks can be exploited in a trivial way to access highly sensitive information.
Since then, several more variants of speculative execution attacks have been discovered, including Spectre-NG, SpectreRSB, Spectre 1.1, Spectre1.2, TLBleed, Lazy FP, NetSpectre and Foreshadow, patches for which were released by affected vendors time-to-time.
Speculative execution is a core component of modern processors design that speculatively executes instructions based on assumptions that are considered likely to be true. If the assumptions come out to be valid, the execution continues, otherwise discarded.
Now, the same team of cybersecurity researchers who discovered original Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities have uncovered 7 new transient execution attacks affecting 3 major processor vendors—Intel, AMD, ARM.
While some of the newly-discovered transient execution attacks are mitigated by existing mitigation techniques for Spectre and Meltdown, others are not.
"Transient execution attacks leak otherwise inaccessible information via the CPU's microarchitectural state from instructions which are never committed," the researchers say.
"We also systematically evaluated all defenses, discovering that some transient execution attacks are not successfully mitigated by the rolled out patches and others are not mitigated because they have been overlooked."
Out of 7 newly discovered attacks, as listed below, two are Meltdown variants, named as Meltdown-PK and Meltdown-BR, and other 5 are new Spectre mistraining strategies.
1. Meltdown-PK (Protection Key Bypass)—On Intel CPUs, an attacker with code execution ability in the containing process can bypass both read and write isolation guarantees enforced through memory-protection keys for userspace.
2. Meltdown-BR (Bounds Check Bypass)—Intel and AMD x86 processors that ship with Memory Protection eXtensions (MPX) or IA32 bound for efficient array bounds checking can be bypassed to encode out-of-bounds secrets that are never architecturally visible.
Spectre-PHT (Pattern History Table)
3. Spectre-PHT-CA-OP (Cross-Address-space Out of Place)—Performing previously disclosed Spectre-PHT attacks within an attacker-controlled address space at a congruent address to the victim branch.
4. Spectre-PHT-SA-IP (Same Address-space In Place)—Performing Spectre-PHT attacks within the same address space and the same branch location that is later on exploited.
5. Spectre-PHT-SA-OP (Same Address-space Out of Place)—Performing Spectre-PHT attacks within the same address space with a different branch.
Spectre-BTB (Branch Target Buffer)
6. Spectre-BTB-SA-IP (Same Address-space In Place)—Performing Spectre-BTB attacks within the same address space and the same branch location that is later on exploited.
7. Spectre-BTB-SA-OP (Same Address-space Out of Place)—Performing Spectre-BTB attacks within the same address space with a different branch.
Researchers demonstrate all of the above attacks in practical proof-of-concept attacks against processors from Intel, ARM, and AMD. For Spectre-PHT, all vendors have processors that are vulnerable to all four variants of mistraining, they say.
"We performed a vulnerability assessment for these new attack vectors on Intel, ARM, and AMD. For Intel, we tested our proofs-of-concept on a Skylake i5-6200U and a Haswell i7-4790. Our AMD test machines were a Ryzen 1950X and a Ryzen Threadripper 1920X. For experiments on ARM, a NVIDIA Jetson TX1 has been used," the researchers say.
Researchers responsibly disclosed their findings to Intel, ARM, and AMD, of which Intel and ARM acknowledged the report. The team also said since the vendors are working to address the issues, they decided to hold their proof-of-concept exploits for some time.
For in-depth details about the new attacks, you can head on to the research paper titled, "A Systematic Evaluation of Transient Execution Attacks and Defenses," published by the team of researchers today.
| Vulnerability |
Simple bug could lead to RCE flaw on apps built with Electron Framework | https://thehackernews.com/2018/05/electron-node-integration.html | A critical remote code execution vulnerability has been discovered in the popular Electron web application framework that could allow attackers to execute malicious code on victims' computers.
Electron is an open source app development framework that powers thousands of widely-used desktop applications including WhatsApp, Skype, Signal, Wordpress, Slack, GitHub Desktop, Atom, Visual Studio Code, and Discord.
Besides its own modules, Electron framework also allows developers to create hybrid desktop applications by integrating Chromium and Node.js framework through APIs.
Since Node.js is a robust framework for server-side applications, having access to its APIs indirectly gives Electron-based apps more control over the operating system installed on the server.
To prevent unauthorised or unnecessary access to Node.js APIs, Electron framework by default sets the value of "webviewTag" to false in its "webPreferences" configuration file, which then sets "nodeIngration" to false.
This configuration file with the hardcoded values of some parameters was introduced in the framework to prevent real-time modifications by malicious functions, i.e., by exploiting a security vulnerability like cross-site scripting (XSS).
Moreover, if an app developer skips or forgets to declare "webviewTag: false" in the configuration file, even then the framework by default considers the value of "nodeIntegration" as false, to take a preventive measure.
However, Trustwave researcher Brendan Scarvell has released proof-of-concept (PoC) code that attackers can inject into targeted applications running without "webviewTag" declared, by exploiting a cross-site scripting flaw, to achieve remote code execution.
The exploit re-enables "nodeIntegration" in runtime, allowing attackers to gain unauthorised control over the application server and execute arbitrary system commands.
It should be noted that the exploit would not work if the developer has also opted for one of the following options:
nativeWindowOption option enabled in its webPreferences.
Intercepting new-window events and overriding event.newGuest without using the supplied options tag.
The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2018-1000136, was reported to the Electron team by Scarvell earlier this year and affected all versions of Electron at the time of discovery.
Electron developers patched the vulnerability in March 2018 with the release of versions 1.7.13, 1.8.4, and 2.0.0-beta.4.
So, app developers should ensure their applications are patched, or at least not vulnerable to this issue.
For more technical details on the Electron vulnerability and PoC exploit code, you can head on to the Trustwave's blog post.
It should also be noted that the Electron bug has nothing to do with the recently discovered flaw in Signal app, which has also recently patched a critical cross-site scripting vulnerability that leads to remote code execution, whose full technical details are scheduled to be published exclusively on The Hacker News this evening. Stay Tuned!
| Vulnerability |
Ping.fm vulnerable to Clickjacking (Video Demonstration) | https://thehackernews.com/2012/01/pingfm-vulnerable-to-clickjacking-video.html | Ping.fm vulnerable to Clickjacking (Video Demonstration)
Two Indian Hackers Aditya Gupta(@adi1391) and Subho Halder (@sunnyrockzzs) have discovered Clickjacking vulnerability in one of the famous website "Ping.FM". Clickjacking is a malicious technique of tricking Web users into revealing confidential information or taking control of their computer while clicking on seemingly innocuous web pages.
This is based on a technique known as clickjacking ( or UI Redressing ) where an attacker could perform actions on the behalf of user by tricking the user to click on a button or perform some other action.
This vulnerability was earlier seen in Twitter where it allows the status to be loaded through the GET method, and an attacker could frame the twitter webpage and trick the user to click on the tweet button, with the user thinking that its a part of the attacker's webpage.
This can be disabled by setting the X-FRAME-ORIGIN method to SAME ORIGIN or DENYING the use of webpage inside a frame which have been adopted by google, facebook and many other famous websites.
Ping.fm is a online service which allows the user to connect to many social networks at once. However an attacker could use a technique known as Clickjacking to silently update the user's social networking status at Twitter, Facebook and all other connected accounts.In this technique, the user is tricked into clicking on a button on a webpage designed by the attacker,which silently updates the status of the user on the social netowrks status taking advantage of thePing.fm API and clickjacking technique.
Video Demonstration POC :
| Vulnerability |
Unpatched Windows Kernel Bug Could Help Malware Hinder Detection | https://thehackernews.com/2017/09/windows-kernel-malware.html | A 17-year-old programming error has been discovered in Microsoft's Windows kernel that could prevent some security software from detecting malware at runtime when loaded into system memory.
The security issue, described by enSilo security researcher Omri Misgav, resides in the kernel routine "PsSetLoadImageNotifyRoutine," which apparently impacts all versions of Windows operating systems since Windows 2000.
Windows has a built-in API, called PsSetLoadImageNotifyRoutine, that helps programs monitor if any new module has been loaded into memory. Once registered, the program receives notification each time a module is loaded into memory. This notification includes the path to the module on disk.
However, Misgav found that due to "caching behaviour, along with the way the file-system driver maintains the file name and a severe coding error," the function doesn't always return the correct path of the loaded modules.
What's bad? It seems like Microsoft has no plans to address this issue, as the software giant does not consider it as a security vulnerability.
"This bug could have security implications for those who aren't aware of its existence. We believe that if Microsoft does not plan on fixing this bug, they should at least explicitly warn developers about it in their documentation," says Tal Liberman, head of the research team at enSilo.
The researchers believe this "programmatic error" could theoretically be used by malware authors to bypass antivirus detection—especially those security products which rely on this API to check if any malicious code has been loaded into memory—using a "series of file operations" to mislead the scanning engine into looking at the wrong file.
So, if your endpoint detection and response products rely on this buggy API, you should either consider not using it or must implement the workaround introduced by the researcher to overcome the loophole.
In a separate blog post, Misgav advised software developers to use another Windows API (FltGetFileNameInformationUnsafe) to check the validity of the module's path using the file object parameter.
If the file exists, it is possible to verify that the file object being loaded into memory is indeed the same file that lies on disk.
For a more technical explanation, you can head on to enSilo's blog.
In separate news, security researchers from Check Point reported about a new attack technique, dubbed Bashware, which takes advantage of Windows built-in Linux subsystem to hide malware from the most security solutions.
| Malware |
Mirai Botnet Itself is Flawed; Hacking Back IoTs Could Mitigate DDoS Attacks | https://thehackernews.com/2016/10/mirai-botnet-iot-malware.html | The infamous botnet that was used in the recent massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks against the popular DNS provider Dyn, causing vast internet outage last Friday, itself is flawed.
Yes, Mirai malware, which has already enslaved millions of Internet of Things (IoT) devices across 164 countries, contains several vulnerabilities that might be used against it in order to destroy botnet's DDoS capabilities and mitigate future attacks.
Early October, the developer of the malware publically released the source code of Mirai, which is designed to scan for IoT devices – mostly routers, cameras, and DVRs – that are still using their default passwords and then enslaves them into a botnet, which is then used to launch DDoS attacks.
However, after a close look at the source code, a researcher discovered three vulnerabilities, one of which could be used to shut down Mirai's ability to flood targets with HTTP requests.
A stack buffer overflow vulnerability was found by Scott Tenaglia, a researcher at endpoint security firm Invincea, in the segment of the Mirai's code that carries out HTTP flood attacks.
However, if exploited, the vulnerability could crash the attack process, thereby terminating the attack from that bot (infected IoT device), but leaving that compromised device intact and running.
Tenaglia has publically released the exploit, saying his exploit would not have helped in the recent DNS-based DDoS attack against Dyn that rendered major websites inaccessible, but would also shut down Layer 7 attack capabilities present in Mirai.
That's because Mirai is capable of launching HTTP floods as well as various network DDoS attacks, including DNS floods, UDP floods, SYN and ACK floods, GRE IP and GRE ETH floods, STOMP (Simple Text Oriented Message Protocol) flood attacks.
"This simple 'exploit' is an example of active defense against an IoT botnet that could be used by any DDoS mitigation service to guard against a Mirai-based HTTP flood attack in real time," Tenaglia writes in a blog post. "Although it cannot be used to remove the bot from the IoT device, it can be used to halt the attack originating from that particular device."
Legal Concerns of Hacking Back:
However, exploiting this vulnerability is to hack back tens of hundreds of IoT devices, which is a controversial and illegit approach and could put defenders in a gray area.
Hacking back involves making changes to systems across various countries without permission from a device's owner, an ISP or its carrier, and Invincea adds a disclaimer on its research, saying it is not advocating a counterattack.
But since the flaw has the capability of thwarting the threat, white-hat vigilante hackers can silently use this vulnerability against the malware and take Mirai-infected devices away from the criminals.
As we have seen numerous court-ordered botnet takedowns in the past, the authorities can get a court order and hack back Mirai-compromised devices in order to shut down the infamous botnets.
The DDoS attack that hit French Internet service and hosting provider OVH with 1.1 Tbps of junk traffic, which is the largest DDoS attack known to date, also came from Mirai bots.
| Vulnerability |
New Group of Hackers Targeting Businesses with Financially Motivated Cyber Attacks | https://thehackernews.com/2019/11/financial-cyberattacks.html | Security researchers have tracked down activities of a new group of financially-motivated hackers that are targeting several businesses and organizations in Germany, Italy, and the United States in an attempt to infect them with backdoor, banking Trojan, or ransomware malware.
Though the new malware campaigns are not customized for each organization, the threat actors appear to be more interested in businesses, IT services, manufacturing, and healthcare industries who possess critical data and can likely afford high ransom payouts.
According to a report ProofPoint shared with The Hacker News, the newly discovered threat actors are sending out low-volume emails impersonating finance-related government entities with tax assessment and refund lured emails to targeted organizations.
"Tax-themed Email Campaigns Target 2019 Filers, finance-related lures have been used seasonally with upticks in tax-related malware and phishing campaigns leading up to the annual tax filing deadlines in different geographies," the researchers said.
New Malware Campaigns Spotted in the Wild
In almost all spear-phishing email campaigns researchers observed between October 16 and November 12 this year, the attackers used malicious Word document attachments as an initial vector to compromise the device.
Once opened, the malicious document executes a macro script to run malicious PowerShell commands, which then eventually downloads and installs one of the following payloads onto the victim's system:
Maze Ransomware,
IcedID Banking Trojan,
Cobalt Strike backdoor.
'Opening the Microsoft Word Document and enabling macros installs Maze ransomware on the user's system, encrypting all of their files, and saves a ransom note resembling the following in TXT format in every directory.'
Besides using social engineering, to make their spear-phishing emails more convincing, attackers are also using lookalike domains, verbiage, and stolen branding to impersonate:
Bundeszentralamt fur Steuern, the German Federal Ministry of Finance,
Agenzia Delle Entrate, the Italian Revenue Agency,
1&1 Internet AG, a German internet service provider,
USPS, the United States Postal Service.
"Similar campaigns leveraging local gov. agencies were also observed in Germany and Italy. These social-engineered lures indicate that cybercriminals overall are becoming more convincing and sophisticated in their attacks."
"Although these campaigns are small in volume, currently, they are significant for their abuse of trusted brands, including government agencies, and for their relatively rapid expansion across multiple geographies. To date, the group appears to have targeted organizations in Germany, Italy, and, most recently, the United States, delivering geo-targeted payloads with lures in local languages," Christopher Dawson, Threat Intelligence Lead at Proofpoint, told The Hacker News.
"We will be watching this new actor closely, given their apparent global aspirations, well-crafted social engineering, and steadily increasing scale."
How to Protect Email-Based Cyber Attacks?
Thought most of the tools and techniques used by this new group are neither new nor sophisticated; unfortunately, it's still one of the most successful ways criminals penetrate an organization.
The best ways to protect your computer against such attacks are as simple as following basic online cybersecurity practices, such as:
Disable macros from running in office files,
Always keep a regular backup of your important data,
Make sure you run one of the best antivirus software on your system,
Don't open email attachments from unknown or untrusted sources,
Don't click on the links from unknown sources.
| Cyber_Attack |
The 2020 State of Breach Protection Survey – Call for Participation | https://thehackernews.com/2019/12/breach-protection-survey.html | 2010-2019 decade will be remembered as the time in which cybersecurity became acknowledged as a critical concern for all organizations.
With rapidly growing security needs and respective budgets, it is now more essential than ever for security decision-makers to zoom out of the 'products' mindset and assess their security stack in light of the overall breach protection value that their investments return.
The 2020 State of Breach Protection Survey (click here to participate) attempts to map out for the first time how breach protection is practiced and maintained globally – what are the common products, services, concerns, and challenges that are most common amongst organizations.
Any security professional filling the anonymous salary survey questionnaire, organised by The Hacker News in partnership with Cynet, will get a free copy of the survey report once it is released in January 2020. You can complete the questionnaire here.
Why is that important? Because unlike 'endpoint protection,' or 'next-generation firewall,' breach protection is not a strictly defined category and most chances are that – again, unlike these previous two examples – there is no budget in your organization that's designated for 'breach protection,' even while this is the ultimate goal of all your cybersecurity investments.
Changing from security products to breach-protection oriented mindset is essential to break away from the comfort zone of the known and currently practiced security in an organization, pushing you to ask the really hard questions continuously.
The hard questions are not whether the SIEM operates adequately or whether the EPP was successfully deployed across all endpoints in your environment, but rather – is my environment truly secured despite the products, workforce, and service providers I engage? And if not, what can I do about it?
And the best place to start is to get firm and fact-based insights into what others are doing. We all face the same attacks and need to confront them within a pool of available resources. That makes crowd-sourcing this knowledge an extremely powerful tool.
Going straight to the point – what's in it for you by filling the survey? For the most part, you will be benchmarking your variation of breach protection with a comparison set which is far wider than your standard cycles. Let's assume that your interpretation of breach protection includes, for example, EDR on your endpoints, CASB for your SaaS apps with both streaming alerts to a cloud-based SIEM, and engaging a 3rd party MSSP for incident response and investigation.
Is that a common model? If not, what is and how might it impact your onward decision making? Gaining robust knowledge on how your role and industry peers handle challenges similar to yours can provide you with new perspectives.
From a different angle – what do you perceive as your greatest challenge? Is it recruiting a skilled security team? Or perhaps capturing the management mindset to approve the budgets for all the products and services your environment requires? The best supporting evidence to a budgetary claim is showing how the request is on par with the industry standards.
So it's a win-win. Complete the survey and do a valuable service, both to yourself and to the wider community of security decision-makers.
Participate in the 2020 State of Breach Protection Survey here.
| Data_Breaches |
LastPass Bug Lets Hackers Steal All Your Passwords | https://thehackernews.com/2016/07/lastpass-password-manager.html | A critical zero-day flaw has been discovered in the popular cloud password manager LastPass that could allow any remote attacker to compromise your account completely.
LastPass is one of the best password manager that also available as a browser extension that automatically fills credentials for you.
All you need is to remember one master password to unlock all other passwords of your different online accounts, making it much easier for you to use unique passwords for different sites.
However, the password manager isn't as secure as it promises.
Also Read: Popular Password Managers Are Not As Secure As You Think
Google Project Zero Hacker Tavis Ormandy discovered several security issues in the software that allowed him to steal passwords stored with LastPass.
"Are people really using this LastPass thing? I took a quick look and can see a bunch of obvious critical problems. I'll send a report asap," Ormandy revealed on Twitter.
Once compromise a victim's LastPass account, hackers would be able to access a treasure trove of passwords for victim's other online services.
Since LastPass is working on a fix to the zero-day vulnerability, technical details about the issues have not been disclosed by the researcher.
Also Read: Best Password Manager — For Windows, Linux, Mac, Android, iOS and Enterprise
Similar Old Bug in LastPass Password Manager:
Coincidentally, another security researcher Mathias Karlsson also announced that he had uncovered some issues in LastPass, that has already been patched by the company.
A specially crafted URL is enough to take complete control of its user's accounts.
As Karlsson explained in a blog post published today, an attacker could send a specially-crafted URL to the victim in order to steal passwords from his/her vault.
This specific vulnerability resided in the autofill functionality of the LastPass browser extension, where a faulty regular expression for parsing the URL was allowing an attacker to spoof the targeted domain.
"By browsing this URL: https://avlidienbrunn.se/@twitter.com/@hehe.php the browser would treat the current domain as avlidienbrunn.se while the extension would treat it as twitter.com," Karlsson explained.
Therefore, by abusing form auto-fill functionality, a hacker could steal victim's, let's say, Facebook password, by sending the POC URL containing facebook.com to the victim.
This particular flaw has already been patched by the company within a day, and Karlsson has even been awarded with a bug bounty of $1,000.
Also Read: Who's to Blame for Weak Passwords?
Well, the issues in password managers are really worrying, but this doesn't mean that you should stop using password managers. Password managers still encourage you to use unique and complex passwords for every single site.
In wake of the latest issue, users can avoid browser-based password managers and instead switch to offline versions, like KeePass.
Update: LastPass has quickly patched the vulnerability reported by Tavis Ormandy and pushed an update with fix for all Firefox users using LastPass 4.
"The recent report only affects Firefox users. If you are a Firefox user running LastPass 4.0 or later, an update will be pushed via your browser with the fix in version 4.1.21a." LastPass said in a blog post.
| Vulnerability |
Massive ATM Hack Hits 3.2 Million Indian Debit Cards — Change Your PIN Now! | https://thehackernews.com/2016/10/india-debit-card-hack.html | India is undergoing the biggest data breaches to date with as many as 3.2 Million debit card details reportedly stolen from multiple banks and financial platforms.
The massive financial breach has hit India's biggest banks including State Bank of India (SBI), HDFC Bank, Yes Bank, ICICI Bank and Axis, and customers are advised to change their ATM PIN immediately.
Hackers allegedly used malware to compromise the Hitachi Payment Services platform — which is used to power country's ATM, point-of-sale (PoS) machines and other financial transactions — and stole details of 3.2 Million debit cards, reports The Economic Times.
Of 3.2 Million debit cards, 2.6 Million are powered by Visa or Mastercard and rest 600,000 work on top of India's own RuPay platform.
Hacked Debit Cards Reportedly Used in China
It is not yet clear who is behind the cyber attack, but the report adds that a number of affected customers have observed unauthorized transactions made by their cards in various locations in China.
Some banks, including the country's biggest lender SBI, have announced that they'll replace compromised debit cards, while others banks, including HDFC Bank, have urged their customers to change their ATM PINs and avoid using ATMs of other banks.
The extent of damage due to breach also depends on the type of cards customers are using.
Cards which use Magnetic Stripe transmit your account number and secret PIN to merchants in a way that it could make easy for fraudsters to hack them, making these cards easier to clone.
Whereas, banks who are using EMV (Europay, MasterCard, and Visa) chip-equipped cards (better known as Chip-and-Pin cards) store your data in encrypted form and only transmit a unique code (one-time-use Token) for every transaction, making these cards more secure and lot harder to clone.
SBI Blocks and will Re-Issue 600,000 Debit Cards
SBI has blocked affected debit cards and will re-issue over 600,000 cards. Here's what SBI CTO Shiv Kumar Bhasin told the publication:
"It's a security breach, but not in our bank's systems. Many other banks also have this breach—right now and since a long time. A few ATMs have been affected by malware. When people use their card on infected switches or ATMs, there is a high probability that their data will be compromised."
Mastercard also denied that its systems were breached, issuing the following statement:
"We're aware of the data compromise event. To be clear, Mastercard's own systems have not been breached. At Mastercard, safety and security of payments are a top priority for us and we're working on the investigations with the regulators, issuers, acquirers, global and local law enforcement agencies and third party payment networks to assess the current situation."
Meanwhile, the Payments Council of India has ordered a forensic audit on the Indian bank servers to measure the damage and investigate the origin of the cyber attack. Bengaluru-based payment and security specialist SISA will conduct the forensic audit.
| Data_Breaches |
Windows 8 will be challenge for Malware writers | https://thehackernews.com/2012/06/windows-8-will-be-challenge-for-malware.html | Windows 8 will be challenge for Malware writers
Microsoft™s security researcher believe that upcoming operating system, Windows 8 is a step forward in security and Windows 8 will be far better at protecting against malware than it's predecessors.
Chris Valasek, a senior security research scientist at development testing firm Coverity, began examining the security features of Windows 8 last autumn, before the consumer previews of the upcoming revamp of the new Microsoft OS came out.
"There are always going to be vulnerabilities but you can make it difficult to leverage vulnerabilities to write exploits." One major change between Windows 7 and 8 is the addition of more exploit-mitigation technologies, however. Windows Memory Managers (specifically the Windows Heap Manager and Windows Kernel Pool Allocator) are designed to make it far harder for attackers to exploit buffer-overflow vulnerabilities and the like to push malware onto vulnerable systems.
The "security sandbox" for applications for Windows 8 will also be a great step forward. "These new Windows 8 Apps will be contained by a much more restrictive security sandbox, which is a mechanism to prevent programs from performing certain actions," Valasek explains.
"This new App Container provides the operating system with a way to make more fine-grained decisions on what actions certain applications can perform, instead of relying on the more broad 'Integrity Levels' that debuted in Windows Vista/7.
Windows 8 also comes with a new version of Internet Explorer, Microsoft's browser software. Internet Explorer 10 will come with a mode that disables support for third-party plug-ins such as Flash and Java.
| Malware |
Subsets and Splits